Director Park Chan-wook called Stoker, his first English-language movie, a turning point in his career. Through his on-set translator, he explained last night at a Museum of the Moving Image Q&A that he felt a chapter coming to an end as he finished work on Thirst, his excellent vampire movie from 2009. When reading the script for Stoker—supplied, trivia alert, by former Prison Break star Wentworth Miller—he "heard" a quiet film, one where the small creaks in floorboards would stand out. Stoker is and isn't that quiet movie: it's a bit like Brian De Palma riffing on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (a Hitch classic that never got the unofficial De Palma remake treatment during his 70s/80s run), fusing the former's lunatic bravado—some of Park's shots have laugh-out-loud audacity—with the latter's intense control. He twiddles the knobs further, turning up (by virtue of this being 2013) Hitchcock's perversity and turning down De Palma's feverish homage. Neither director's name came up in the Q&A, and it didn't seem like a dodge; Stoker fits neatly into Park's filmography.
Jack the Giant Slayer: The fire sale on fairy-tale adaptations greenlit in the wake of Alice in Wonderland, and shelved in the wake of the realization that a billion dollars' worth of people going to see a Tim Burton movie does not in fact indicate a bottomless appetite for big-budget fairy tales, continues: after Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters comes Bryan Singer's Jack and the Beanstalk riff that was, like Hansel, originally scheduled for a 2012 bow. Jack the Giant Slayer now occupies a release-date no man's land; Disney's return to Oz took the early-March Alice slot next weekend, and Warner Brothers has inexplicably decided to live with beating Disney to theaters by exactly one week, presumably assuming that because their movie technically grabbed the first weekend of March, it will emerge victorious. Or maybe they're just trying to spitefully wing Disney's movie on their way down.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 12:10 PM
Among the criticisms of Seth MacFarlane's Oscars—misogynist, anti-Semitic—there was also concern over the treatment of nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, who was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild. In a tweet soon taken down, The Onion called her a cunt, and the host made a joke about when she would be too old for George Clooney. Both are in questionable taste, but maybe rather than agonizing over the jokes themselves we should ask ourselves why we nominate children for Oscars anyway.
Gut Renovation, a new documentary by filmmaker Su Friedrich, opens March 6 at Film Forum and takes a hard look at the changes that Williamsburg has undergone since the implementation of new zoning laws in 2005. Friedrich, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1989, has meticulously recorded all the changes happening in her neighborhood, from each new development that went up to all the small businesses that closed. The project is not only a personal one, but also one that has a wider scope, serving as a warning that what happened in Williamsburg could—and quite possibly will—happen to all of Brooklyn, and New York City at large. I had the chance to talk to Friedrich about this film, and about what she sees for the future of development in New York, and whether or not that future is impossibly grim.
Whether you're super into it or bury your emotions in pharmaceuticals in order to cope with it, we are officially living in the future. Ipso facto, Twitter! People love to use that thing during big, relevant public events like the Academy Awards. It's like they don't know we all die alone regardless, or something!
Anyway, while some people correctly spent time complaining about Seth MacFarlane and others offering armchair commentary on dresses and things, lots of other people on Twitter got pretty weird. And weird in sort of unexpected ways! In all honesty, seeing people barrage social media with a bunch of inappropriate updates was one of the night's bigger highlights once the show got boring, which was early on. So, here is a slice of humanity in 2013. Make of it what you will.
Dark Skies: Last weekend, all the studios got super-excited about the prospect of mass moviegoing and put out a major action sequel, a name-brand romance, a computer-animated family movie, and a would-be fantasy franchise starter all at once. This weekend, everyone beats a hasty retreat—or just assumes, I guess, that A Good Day to Die Hard and Safe Haven and Oscar nominees will continue to dominate the box office. This weekend's wide releases are pure programmers, the kind of thing you'd expect to find in mid-January. This is because the second half of February is secretly the worst time of year for movies, possibly because everyone is distracted on last-minute Oscar advertising? I'm not sure. All I know is that the most interesting-looking movie out this weekend is from the writer-director behind Legion and Priest, only it co-stars Josh Hamilton instead of Paul Bettany. This is actually kind of awesome, because this is Kicking and Screaming star Hamilton's highest-profile role in a solid decade-plus, much higher-profile than, for example, his appearance as "hey is that Josh Hamilton?!" in Margaret, and "wait, Josh Hamilton is in this?!" in J. Edgar. He's matched with a fellow purveyor of 90s(ish) angst; current FX darling Keri Russell plays his wife in an alien-horror-thriller thing, and how much do you want to bet any conversations Russell has to promote this movie will be steered toward The Americans right quick? Unfortunately, Dark Skies also costars the insufferable little bastard from Real Steel. I'm pretty sure if this movie had come out any other weekend this year, I would not have seen it; I'm also pretty sure I'll wind up seeing this one on Friday night.
Usually my annual binge of Oscar-predicting—which includes being wrong at least a third of the time—is preceded by a period of dull confidence, during which it seems like the winners in most categories have already more or less been decided. This year, though, the Academy seems to have embraced, or at least shaken hands with, a wider spectrum of movies than it usually does. In recent years, with the Best Picture nominees expanded beyond the usual five, several movies (even sometimes the best ones in competition) inevitably felt like seat-fillers while voters coalesced around easy and disappointing choices like The King's Speech. This year, it's easier for me to picture fierce partisans of all nine major nominees—and even better, none of them represents an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close embarrassment. This makes my predictions enjoyably difficult; it even sort of makes my usual bitching about who got left out and what does the Academy know anyway a little trickier. Nonetheless, I encourage you all to bet everything you own on my pick in every category and see every single movie I mention as being missing from the proceedings.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:50 AM
Cynthia Wade is the director of "Mondays at Racine," a documentary that profiles a beauty salon on Long Island that once a month opens its doors to women receiving chemotherapy treatments. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Though Wade divides her time between New York and Massachusetts, she has a rich history with Brooklyn, and much of her crew lives and works here. We spoke to her about why so many producers and cinematographers live in the borough, and about what it's like to win an Oscar. (This is her second time being nominated!)
What neighborhood do you work in? "Mondays at Racine" was started while I lived and ran a production company in Park Slope. I originally moved to Park Slope in 1990, when my dad and stepmother were living there. I am no stranger to Brooklyn—my grandmother, the first child of Young & Rubicam's cofounder John Orr Young, was born in Brooklyn Hospital in 1918; my husband's grandfather Harold Syrett was born on President Street and in the late 1960s became President of Brooklyn College; my father was remarried and lived in Park Slope in the 80s and 90s. I currently have two brother-in-laws and a slew of nieces and nephews in the borough.
Posted
by Max Nelson
on Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 1:05 PM
Full disclosure: Max Nelson works as an intern for Film Comment, the magazine which curates this film series at Lincoln Center.
Sébastien Betbeder’s Nights with Theodore, which screens this month as part of the 13th annual Film Comment Selects series, opens with an unexpected history lesson. A female narrator muses on the legacy of Paris’ sprawling Parc des Buttes-Chaumont over a montage of archival prints, drawings, and film clips, her train of thought chugging from the park’s origin in the utopian dreams of Napoleon III to its sinister significance for modern-day occultists. It’s a left-field introduction for a film that seems then to veer into more conventional territory: young and attractive Parisians, Theodore and Anna, hit it off at a party and end up spending the night together in one of the park’s secluded sylvan getaways. They come back the next night and the night after that; the park starts to exert a strange hold on them, and the film veers off again—this time for good.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 11:10 AM
Get Reel Video in North Slope is closing for good, I found out this weekend when a friend texted me. It was one of the last holdouts in the borough, which just lost its last brick-and-mortar Blockbuster, and one of the last video stores in Park Slope, which two years ago still had four independent video stores and now has just one: Video Forum on Seventh Avenue. Of course, this has been the way of the video store for many years, but that's what was significant about Park Slope: long after all the video stores had shut up shop elsewhere across New York and America, they were still hanging on here. Was it only a matter of time, or is it Park Slope's that changed? "We still have a prepaid package," my friend told me. "We will have to get Netflix or something."
A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth entry in the erratic Bruce Willis action-franchise, opens this weekend, so naturally I rewatched all four previous movies in anticipation to see if the original and its sequels are really as good—or as bad—as I remember.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:35 AM
Timothy Reckart is the writer and director of "Head Over Heels," one of five animated shorts to be nominated this year for an Academy Award. It's about a married couple who have grown apart: he lives on the floor, she lives on the ceiling. A Tucson native, the 26-year-old Reckart calls Brooklyn his home, and we caught up with him last month to talk about his movie, his borough, and who he'll thank if he wins.
What neighborhood do you live in? My neighborhood is the borderland between Crown Heights and Prospect Heights. You've got Golden Krust on one side of the street and hipster coffee houses on the other, which is perfect since my grandmother is Jamaican and I sometimes wear skinny jeans. I live near a lot of friends, and we play board games every other weekend. It's a great spot.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:00 PM
Who'd have thought I'd ever sympathize with Bush supporters over Brooklynites? But that's where I was at toward the end of this documentary about thirtysomething hipsters living in Greenpoint. Walter Baker is the film's star, son of conservative Texans with whom he struggles to get along, and he's like a Fred Armisen character in Portlandia dropped into the real world. He comes across as self-righteous, dippy, pretentious, unreasonably dramatic, interminably analytical, insufferably flighty; he plays his guitars and buys more of them, expensive vintage ones, even though he has tens of thousands of dollars in debt, no health insurance for his family, and no financial plan for the future, which makes his poet-wife increasingly anxious. He seems to make his living by selling off his family's furniture and other things they own—though he can barely manage to perform a task like mailing a package—and likes to shift the blame for his problems: it's not his fault he has outstanding student loans—it's the bank's! It's not his fault this cardboard box sucks—it's China's! By simply attending school, the Bakers's tweenage son seems more responsible than his parents.
Side Effects: Farewell, sweet Soderbergh. For some time, it seemed like Steven Soderbergh's supposed retirement from filmmaking belonged somewhere between rap retirement and classic-rock retirement on the truthiness spectrum, but that recent lengthy interview with New York suggests serious intent. If it feels prolonged already, that's just because Soderbergh works fast: he mentioned bowing out about a year ago, with one movie just out, another just months away, and two more, Side Effects and Behind the Candelabra, about to shoot. Candelabra will bypass theaters entirely, which leaves the thriller Side Effects as his final theatrical release, at least for now. He has no features in production.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:50 AM
Ralph Bakshi, the director of the Lord of the Rings cartoon from the 70s as well Fritz the Cat, Cool World and other classics, has long planned a movie called Last Days of Coney Island, set in the amusement district and populated by its colorful locals; still frames have been on the web for years. The Brownsville native has never been able to secure support for it, though, until, perhaps, now: he's taken to Kickstarter, where he hopes to raise $165,000. He's already about a fifth of the way there.
The new, biweekly Hammer to Nail Screening Series at Brooklyn Fire Proof East will feature American indies (with an emphasis on Brooklyn-based filmmakers) direct from the festival circuit—movies you might have missed, or that are coming out soon, or that you'll likely not have another chance to see. Features will be screened along with winners from Hammer to Nail's short-film contest. It kicks off February 10 with Nathan Silver's Exit Elena. We spoke to Brandon Harris, a Filmmaker magazine editor and Hammer to Nail contributor (and sometime L Mag contributor) who's curating the series, about the state of films on the festival circuit and the film scene in Brooklyn right now.
What inspired you to start up this series? Well, Hammer to Nail is always looking for ways to get the films we like in front of audiences who may not know about them. We previously put together a screening series in 2009 with our friends at the Chinatown videostore Cinema Nolita, where we had a number of awesome screenings and guests, but that series died after the store went out of business following some frantic efforts to keep it afloat. But it's something we've always liked to do, and when I was approached by the people at Brooklyn Fire Proof it just seemed to make sense to give it another go. There are just no shortage of fascinating American indies, many of which don't have significant New York platforms beyond the burgeoning micro cinemas. And last year we started a short film contest on our site, so it seemed like a way to showcase some work we'd already been championing as well.
Bullet to the Head: You know how Marvel put out individual movies starring Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and Thor before uniting them in The Avengers? It seems like the Expendables franchise is doing that in reverse: first, Sylvester Stallone made two Expendables movies. Then, Arnold Schwarzenegger blazed the comeback trail for solo vehicle The Last Stand and another Jason Statham movie came out (to be fair, Statham movies come out approximately once quarterly); now Stallone goes solo for Bullet to the Head, and Bruce Willis will be back toting a machine gun in a fifth Die Hard movie a couple of weeks later. Then, this fall, Schwarzenegger and Stallone team up without Willis, Statham, Jet Li, Chuck Norris, or even Steven Seagal for The Tomb. It's either all leading up to Expendables 3, or all leading further away, and back toward the days where none of these people were actually movies stars anymore—to 2006 or so, in other words. Stallone's solo outing Bullet to the Head is directed by Walter Hill, one of those guys who gets infinite cred among certain segments of movie geeks for having once been a very successful action director (see: McTiernan, John). Teaming him up with Stallone makes sense; I just wish the old guy/old guy pairing happened on something that doesn't look like it could've been a straight to video release anytime during Stallone's most recent fallow period. As long as we're still making Die Hard movies, why not give one to Hill?
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters: To think that at this time last year, we lived in a world without two additional revisionist takes on the "Snow White legend"—and that by this time next year, we'll have been blessed with no fewer than three big-scale "reimaginings" of fairy-tale-type stories: we've got a big-budget Jack and the Beanstalk movie in March, followed a mere one week later by Sam Raimi's new Wizard of Oz prequel. But right now, it's January, so you'll have to make do with Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, the poor man's any of those movies, at least if studio treatment is any indication. Paramount bounced the movie out of last spring and all the way into the January graveyard—though, to be fair, they may have just realized that (a) plenty of movies have made money in January with less competition in their way, and (b) they have a Hansel and Gretel movie on their hands that more resembles the off-season Underworld or Resident Evil series than, say, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which is the clear reason for most of these movies existing. I don't want to get all contrarian before I've seen the movie (and I'm not convinced said movie screened for much of anyone before Thursday or so, if then), but if Hansel and Gretel really does take more of an irreverent, semi-fractured take on the story, hey, that'll put it above Snow White and the Huntsman almost by default. Then again, it could also basically be Van Helsing all over again; Gemma Arterton, who I like for reasons as arbitrary as my desire to see this movie, certainly seems to be gunning for Kate Beckinsale's old job.
Yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter, uh, Hollywood reported that the long-speculated-upon Bored to Death movie is really, truly happening. Alright! Good, maybe even great news for fans of detective stories and/or Jonathan Ames and/or any type of Brooklyn-related media. But what, precisely, will happen in this movie? Well, per the logline obtained by THR:
The Last Stand: Arnold Schwarzenegger was once the biggest movie star in the world. It seems quaint, now, in retrospect: first, that a biggest-movie-star-in-the-world title existed outside of the honorary (and default) status Will Smith has been rocking for well over a decade; and second, that an Austrian bodybuilder could ascend to worldwide superstardom on the strength of alternating science fiction/action extravanganzas (Total Recall; Terminator 2; True Lies) with goofy Ivan Reitman comedies spoofing his tough-guy image (Twins; Kindergarten Cop). But even with a couple of underperformers on his resume before his stint as governor of California, Schwarzenegger returns to the screen not as a cross-demo uniter, but as a niche object. He went out making movies for Warner Brothers, Universal, and Sony; he returns to the welcoming arms of Lionsgate, home of Jason Statham, Taylor Lautner, 3D horror, and the Expendables franchise.
