Interlude: Bracket-idiocy

"[The Media] have less and less ambition and are demanding less and less of themselves as arbiters of what is actually important, of what our problems are and how we’re addressing them. The Wire was trying to say, at the end, 'Look, if anything in the first four seasons struck a nerve with you, don’t think for a moment that anyone’s going to address themselves to it—least of all the watchdogs of society—because their teeth have been taken out.' They’ve done it to themselves." -David Simon, Interview with Vice, December 2009.

"What if we actually did subject the key players of the Wire-verse to rigorous bracketological inquiry? If we played corner boys against dock workers, murder-polices against hoppers, and craven politicos against enigmatic not-actually-Greek human traffickers, in matchups as arbitrary and occasionally unjust as life and death on the mean streets of West Baltimore, would the king stay the king?" -Alex Pappademas, Grantland post announcing a bracket match featuring characters from The Wire, March 5th, 2012.

Screening Log: Laughing at the Apocalypse Edition

            One note before the screening log; for those of you who don’t follow every word about Russian art house cinema, you may not know that Geoff Dyer has published a book on Tarkovsky’s Stalker called Zona. I look forward to reading it soon, especially after J. Hoberman’s review this week. I am particularly excited that next week the New York Institute for the Humanities will be holding a special 4-hour event on Stalker. The film will be played in its entirety, but stopped every half hour for discussion. The panel not only includes Dyer, but the great film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate (a former professor of mine), and Walter Murch, one of the best film editors in the business (best known for his work with Francis Ford Coppola on he Godfather films and Apocalypse Now). There are some others as well, so it should be a unique and interesting event (despite the Twitter ramblings of Glenn Kenny on the inclusion of Dana Stevens). Onto the show:

-The Iron Curtain, 1948: Directed by William Wellman. 35mm Screening at Film Forum.

-The President Vanishes, 1934. Directed by William Wellman. 35mm Screening at Film Forum.

-Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Digital 2K Projection at Film Forum.

-Some Like it Hot, 1959. Directed by Billy Wilder. Viewed in HD on Turner Classic Movies.

But Is This Good? Film Forum’s "This Is DCP"

Not shown in the 4K Restoration, or anywhere for that matter.

            Last night, I had the pleasure of attending Film Forum’s “This is DCP,” their first ever repertory programming of films, all shown in digital. As I spoke about briefly last week in my screening log, digital projection for repertory isn’t just a warning, it’s pretty much here. Film Forum’s goal with this series is clear: prove to those who love 35mm that digital can look better than 35mm. So last night, they carted out Grover Crisp, who runs the restoration program for Sony Pictures to do a side-by-side comparison of their most recent work, Kubirck’s Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

            Because I’m a man of the people, and Film Forum’s small theater is too small for the number of people who probably would’ve liked to see this, I recorded all of Crisp’s talk, which you can listen to below. Sadly, I can’t provide video, but I think a number of people should find Crisp’s discussion worth debating.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO CRISP'S DISCUSSION AND DEMONSTRATION

While you can hear the audience gasping a few times at how much better the digital print looks than the 35mm, I had one major quibble myself. This was Sony’s attempt to recreate film grain. It may have been simply the job they did on Dr. Strangelove, but I found this extremely distracting. In any sequence where there was a large flat surface (an envelope, the sky, even some of the faces), I couldn’t help but watch the emulated film grain instead of the actual film. It’s not that 35mm doesn’t have film grain—the new print of Wellman’s The Iron Curtain  I saw earlier in the week certainly did—but it seems that Crisp and Sony went overboard. Watching the first thirty minutes of the film, I found myself distracted. I kept watching the grain instead of the objects, the negative space instead of the positive.

That being said, I believe this is only a minor hiccup in the process of making digital look just as wondrous as 35mm (The small clip from their upcoming Lawrence of Arabia 4K restoration did not have this issue, which makes me think this will only be an issue for black and white films). Although the film was projected in 2K instead of 4K (your standard Blu-Ray player runs in about 1K), the images were certainly clearer and more distinct, and as Crisp talks about, you can now see certain details that wouldn’t be possible in any of the current prints of 35mm.

And yet, I remain skeptic, because this process remains expensive and thus limits access only to film companies like Sony, Warner Bros., and so on. And do you think those companies plan to spend the money for their more obscure works to be restored in 4K? This Village Voice article from earlier this week addresses some of these concerns.

To be continued. If you felt nary about the film grain, or had any thoughts on the DCP series Film Forum is doing, please sound off in the comments.

Film Comment Selects: Giorgos Lanthimos's "Alps"

Alps

Directed By: Giorgos Lanthimos

Written By: Giorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Starring: Aggeliki Papoulia, Ariane Labed, Aris Servetalis, and Johnny Vekris.

Director of Photography: Christos Voudouris, Editor: Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Production Designer: Anna Georgiadou

Alps screened at part of Film Society’s Film Comment Selects program. Kino Lorber will release the film theatrically later this year.

            Alps includes one of the least believable fight between a couple I’ve ever seen on film. The man and woman give little emotion to their prescribed, inanely written lines. When she knocks over a lamp, it feels like a direction instead of a moment of true emotion. And when she apologies and they embrace, my initial reaction was to laugh instead of cry. But this is also how Giorgos Lanthimos, the director of the film, wants us to feel. These are the worst actors ever, so why do they do it?

            Lanthimos made a splash in certain circles two years ago with his formalist tale of allegorical power, Dogtooth, a film that I found often went for shocks than more complicated truths. Alps, which has a less bizarre premise than Dogtooth, is also a bit more restrained in its shocks. But by avoiding less graphic material, Lanthimos instead finds more profound material as well. Alps not only challenges our current push toward more apparent virtual living, but examines how it works just like an addiction.

Project X: Film For Your Right To Party

Project X

Directed By: Nima Nourizadeh

Written By: Michael Bacall and Matt Drake

Starring: Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Alexis Knapp, Dax Flame, and Kirby Bliss Blanton.

Director of Photography: Ken Seng, Editor: Jeff Groth, Production Designer: Bill Brzeski.

Rated: R for what you expect at a party, and a lot of what you wouldn’t expect.

            The epic party is a classic staple of many great comedies. We can think of Russell screaming “I’m a golden God” in Almost Famous before jumping into the pool. Or the moment Julia Stiles broke out of her shell while dancing to Notorious B.I.G. in 10 Things I Hate About You. Plus, the insanity of “Mtich-a-palooza” in Old School with both an appearance by Snoop Dogg and an old man having a heart attack by the end.

            The last one was directed by Todd Phillips, and it’s no surprise that he served as a producer for Project X, an over-the-top extravaganza about the craziest party in the history of mankind, all shot in a found footage style similar to Cloverfield and the recent Chronicle. Project X is certainly insane, to put it casually. It’s less of a movie—the narrative proper only accounts for maybe 15% of the finished product—than a collection of sequences of T&A without any sort of a trajectory except more.

This Is Not a Film: Defying a Ban by Questioning an Art Form

This Is Not A Film

An Experiment by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

            When the 2009 protests across Tehran failed to overthrow the political dictatorship that has dominated Iran for over 40 years, many were fearful of the consequences that would reverberate for those who fought, especially those in the arts. Despite what many general Americans might think, Iran’s filmmaking has flourished for decades. When taking a class with Richard Pena, he told an anecdotal story that when Abbas Kiarostami would bring scripts to the governmental approval board, they tried to make stylistic suggestions more than changes for content.

But not everyone has felt as open in today’s Iran since the protests. Abbas Kiarostami has left his native country to make films outside the state. Mohsen Makhmalbaf abandoned filmmaking to become a full time revolutionary. Asghar Farhadi may have won countless awards for his masterful film A Separation, but the government has used its Oscar win to stir up furthertensions with Israel. And Jafar Panahi, perhaps the most political filmmaker of the country, was banned from being a filmmaker for 20 years.

            Panahi, however, has attempted to protest the ban by asking what filmmaking is. Along with a conspirator, the documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, he has made a fascinating experiment in what might be called anti-cinema. Or is it actual cinema? That’s the point of This Is Not A Film, a direct allegory of cinema as political statement. Its mere existence might lead to Panahi’s immediate arrest, and while the fallout of the failed protests remains highly central to the work, the whole thing seems more theoretical in nature. What is film, anyways? Especially when it’s being shot with handheld camera and iPhones. 

Screening Log: Before #TeamMargaret Edition

         Another good week at the movies, cut short by a couple of issues. I must discuss one disappointment, however. On Thursday, I was excited to head down to Anthology Film Archives to see The Candidate, a classic 1970s political film with Robert Redford that has eluded me so far. That was until critic and film programmer C. Mason Welles posted to Twitter that Anthology had scraped the 35mm for a projected DVD. Not caring to pay to watch a projection of bad quality, I skipped out (the same thing happened to Kenji Fujishima in seeing Face to Face at Film Society this week). Next week, I’ll be discussing Film Forum’s “This is DCP” series, which is far different than just a projected DVD, but the increasing scarcity of 35mm is no longer an impending threat for the future. It’s here folks. 

Also worth reading: Andrew Welch, a fellow critic down in Dallas, wrote a small piece on why he doesn't like No Country for Old Men and thinks it's one where Oscar got it "wrong." I responded in the comments; both are worth a read.

If you wondering where any of my Oscar coverage is, I'll be tweeting throughout the night while drowning myself in wine. My one hope is that the dinosaurs from Tree of Life decide to go by the way of nature and smash Uggie's poor head in.

Anyways, onto the log, which includes one theatrical performance as well.

-You Can Count On Me, 2000: Directed By Kenneth Lonergan. Online Streaming Via Netflix Instant.

-Life is Sweet, 1990: Directed By Mike Leigh. 35mm Screening at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Track of the Cat, 1954: Directed By William Wellman. 35mm Screening at Film Forum.

-Westward the Women, 1951: Directed By William Wellman. 35mm Screening at Film Forum.

-Richard III, 2012: Directed By Sam Mendes and the Bridge Theater Project. Performed at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-The Tree of Life, 2011. Directed By Terrence Malick. Blu-Ray on HDTV.