Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: Sight and Sound Film Poll – Jonathan Rosenbaum on SATANTANGO

Press Play presents Sight and Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer.

From a personal standpoint, it is fitting that the second video of this series, following the opening tribute to Roger Ebert, features Jonathan Rosenbaum. It was through Ebert that I discovered Rosenbaum's writing 14 years ago, when his weekly reviews for The Chicago Reader made Ebert's list of "20 Essential Movie Websites." Since then, no writer has done more to expand my knowledge and develop my sensibilities on cinema. To explain why, let met me point to one of several possible examples: Rosenbaum's 1990 article "A Bluffer's Guide to Bela Tarr," one of the very first articles written in English on the Hungarian director. On a basic level, the article serves the essential function of film criticism: to introduce its readers to new and exciting work. But it goes a critical step further by identifying the inherent problems of encountering and understanding new films, especially from other parts of the world, and the uncomfortable reality of being confronted with one's ignorance of certain contextual realities (cultural, historical) that may have led to their creation and may be important to their appreciation. The title of the article implies that one can "bluff" their way to posing as an expert on such films, but what Rosenbaum does is the opposite: he systematically and transparently outlines his limited knowledge of Bela Tarr and Hungarian cinema; identifies the elements in Tarr's films that fascinate and confound him, employs sharp formal analysis to vividly describe what's happening on screen; and offers some interpretative possibilities while resisting reductive conclusions. It's an object lesson in how to actively engage with everything in cinema that is new and strange.

In the two decades since, Rosenbaum has become a leading authority on Bela Tarr's films, a progression that is all the more fascinating for the extent to which it is documented. One can get a sense of Rosenbaum's growing familiarity and evolving position with Tarr's films: from the 1990 "Bluffer's" piece to his 1994 review of Satantango, to his 1996 assessment of Tarr's opus coinciding with and the filmmaker's first career retrospective in Chicago, and a 2001 conversation with Tarr published in Cinemascope. Most of these articles are available on Rosenbaum's website. Later this year his commentary track will accompany the Cinema Guild DVD of The Turin Horse, reputed to be Tarr's final film. His interest now extends into investigating the literary work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai, author of the novel Satantango and co-writer of Tarr's last five films.

When we discussed the making of a video essay on Satantango, one idea was to juxtapose a scene from the film with Jonathan's reading of a passage from the Krasnahorkai novel describing the same scene. We recorded this footage, and while I wasn't able to bring it to a result that fully satisfied me, I am fascinated by the idea of comparing a cinematic work with its source text and hope to pursue this further. We settled on another idea by Jonathan that plays in its own way with the distinctive qualities of the film. – Kevin B. Lee

Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, He has published and edited numerous books, most recently Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010).

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

CANNES 2012: Lee Daniels’ THE PAPERBOY

In Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Lee Daniels deplorably used sizzling pigs' hooves, mommy issues, and incestuous rape to shed light (ineptly) on the difficulties of growing up black in a broken home. In The Paperboy, he alternatively sends up and embraces hick stereotypes while also mootly insisting that issues of race and sex are, like, complicated. So, when not switching between mocking and then sympathizing with his execrably two-tone characters, Daniels makes pat statements about passion and prejudice. Based on Peter Dexter’s novel by the same name, The Paperboy is so trite and rabidly campy that you often have to wonder what you should and shouldn't be laughing at.

Daniels loves to pick on and then half-assedly elevate soft targets as martyrs. High School Musical's Zac Efron plays Jack, a former collegiate swimmer and part-time journalist. Jack is also the subject of a true story Anita (Macy Gray) recounts, decades after the film's events have taken place. The time is 1965, and the place is Moat County, Florida, where the white folks are mostly racist and clueless. As newspaperman Jack joins his brother Ward (Matthew McConaughey), their nymphomaniacal collaborator Charlotte (a self-debasing Nicole Kidman), and Yardley (David Oyelowo), a black writer from London, to investigate the case of convicted death row prisoner Hillary (a deliriously on-point John Cusack), they inadvertently uncover just how obnoxious a Lee Daniels movie can get in the name of ostensibly self-aware humor and indefensibly trite humanism.

That’s right, Daniels tries to be funny sometimes, a concept that totally undermines scenes in whixh he's trying to show sympathy for his characters. The scene of Charlotte and Hillary's first meeting is one such moment, in which Daniels mercilessly pokes fun at both characters for being uncouth, rednecks, and in heat. Hillary ignores the other men in the conjugal cell where he first meets Charlotte, demanding that Charlotte show him her panties and make an obscene face. She consents, and something more than the desired result is achieved. Daniels further mocks Charlotte later on by having her urinate on Jack after he’s stung by a flock of jellyfish—she even goes as far as to ward off other girls who try to whizz on him by screeching, “If anyone’s going to piss on him, it’s going to be me!”

But later, Charlotte’s character is given what she thinks she wants most: a chance to love Hillary. This predictably turns out to be not only not what she wants but also one of many crucial moments where Daniels self-seriously asserts that his film isn’t just, ahem, taking a piss with its characters. Late in the film, Charlotte reluctantly allows herself to be abused by Hillary, suggesting that Daniels thinks he’s meeting his film’s source material at its low-brow level, hence appropriately sending it up whenever necessary.

However, Daniels isn't Paul Verhoeven, and The Paperboy isn't high kitsch, just pompous, condescending trash. Even Verhoeven wouldn’t be brazen enough to ask his viewers to take seriously the unrequited romance between Anita and Jack, a tepid inter-racial romance that never becomes much more than a bathetic subplot. The two actors have no chemistry, fitting for a charmless, schizoid film like this. The best that can be said of The Paperboy is that it’s sometimes intentionally awful. More often than not, however, it’s just awful.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

CANNES 2012: Walter Salles’ ON THE ROAD

Walter Salles’s painfully literal-minded On the Road is a chore to watch. Unlike its source material, Jack Kerouac’s sui generis, fictional beatnik opus, Salles’s adaptation is flat-footed and monotonous. Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera counter-intuitively eschew Kerouac’s anecdotal and dizzyingly nimble style of stream-of-consciousness prose to attempt a straightforward, narrative-bound film of it.

The film's narrative is at its best when it veers into impressionistic territory showing us isolated images of an itinerant Sal Paradise’s (Sam Riley) feet or the symbolic road whizzing past him, echoing Kerouac’s immortal bohemian poetry. Unfortunately, Salles and Rivera rarely allow viewers to think for themselves or to appreciate the agony and ecstasy of the nomadic romantic lifestyle. Instead, they superimpose voice-over narration, often taken verbatim from Kerouac’s book, onto these beautifully spare images. Everything in Salles and Rivera’s On the Road is explicitly spelled out, nothing is left to the viewers’ imagination, and no one scene ever feels as alive as Kerouac’s novel.

Sal’s narrative begins and ends with his friendship with Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), the leader of a pack of vagabond writers. In Salles’s film, Dean is more of an emblematic personality than anyone else. While Dean’s mistreatment of his wife Camille (Kirsten Dunst) is ostensibly addressed at the film’s end, Salles and Rivera are ultimately more interested in making viewers pity Dean. By film’s end, Dean’s disillusionment speaks louder than anyone else’s feelings, making Salles and Rivera’s On the Road more of an artistic manifesto than a turbulent account of artistic self-fashioning. According to Salles and Rivera, the end of Sal and Dean’s story is the end of a boho dream.

Sal and Dean travel the country several times over with a couple of friends and lovers, stealing food, doing drugs, and having sex with each other whenever they can. These characters are in the process of creating a new life for themselves, ignoring the mandates of a square society that isn’t, as Sal puts it, as “mad” as Sal and Dean are for experiential pleasure. This makes squares like Galatea Dunkel (Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss), the wife of the dowdy and largely absent-minded Ed Dunkel (Danny Morgan), semi-sympathetic obstructions to Sal and Dean’s free-wheeling good times.

But Kerouac’s story should feel like a long and alternately wonderful and alienating trip, not a joy ride whose cheap thrills are sometimes hampered by the periodic jettisoning of human baggage. Therein lies the main problem with On the Road: Salles and Rivera indulge their protagonists, and then sometimes acknowledge the consequences of their actions, when in fact the book was less programmatic.

The weakest aspect of On The Road is the thoughtless way Sal and Dean are immortalized. Kerouac’s protagonists were never heroes, but rather people who experienced things that radically changed their points of view. Just because these characters periodically say that they want to do exactly what they wound up doing doesn’t necessarily make their actions good, valorous, or un-problematically romantic. Salles and Rivera love On the Road’s characters and world too much to know how to properly represent them.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago.He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Cluband is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal.His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

CANNES 2012: Leos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS

Where does one begin with Leos Carax’s insane Holy Motors? Maybe its incredible central performance(s) by Denis Lavant, who literally transforms into a different character in nearly every other scene, each one stranger than the next? Or perhaps its stark raving mad narrative that bends so far into the absurd, it threatens to break apart? There’s no easy answer, because Holy Motors evolves with each passing minute, both brilliantly human and purposefully silly, a prism of performance and death so different from other films that it seems to have been beamed down from another planet.

Whether you embrace or reject Holy Motors’s challenging approach (I’m still on the fence), it’s impossible to deny that Carax has created a singular mosaic, the rare film that doesn’t just crush the basic rules of storytelling but reinvents them. Lavant plays Oscar, a shape-shifting chameleon who travels around the dark streets of Paris in a white limousine driven by his advisor/chauffeur Céline (Edith Scob). Oscar hatches a new identity between each stop, as if constant metamorphosis were integral to his survival. The interior of his car is a dressing room, the outside world his stage. Oscar’s characters range from a bald assassin to an angry family man to his previous incarnation “Merde,” a raging man-beast who first appeared in the omnibus film Tokyo.

The scenarios following each transformation examine the dynamic power of cinema (with long tracking shots, detailed blocking, kinetic movement), but also the different emotions an actor can express mid-moment. Instant rage and tenderness co-exist in the Merde segment, in which the hunched-over psychotic roams a cemetery, eating flowers, capturing an American model (Eva Mendes), and subjecting her to one of the most bizarre ceremony scenes ever. Lust and instinct dominate the section in which Oscar wears a motion capture suit, grinding on another female actor in what Carax himself calls the “Coitus” dance. Their erotic physical movements lead to the animation of two mind-blowing dragon figures. A motif of mutual destruction runs throughout the film, especially in one sequence in which two identical characters stab each other in the throat, as if the very act of performance could destroy the humanity beneath the mask.

Like Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Holy Motors explores the way performance can transcend death, evoking a collective joy in direct contrast with the consistent physical ugliness on display. The film’s most rousing sequence is also its most random: Oscar leads a marching band of accordion players around a closed-off room, the camera tracking backward constantly, so it looks as if the camera is pursued by the musicians. If this sequence resonates with inspiration and joy, the musical number later in the film (with another time-traveling performer played by Kylie Minogue) is fraught with tragedy. As Oscar trails slowly behind, the woman walks through a gutted-out hotel, stepping over pieces of dismembered mannequins littering the floor. Carax's creation of dualities is endlessly fascinating.

Late in the film, Oscar confesses, “we’re having a ball in the back of beyond,” but the exhaustion on his face tells a different story. Sometimes living so deeply inside your profession is punishing to the point of madness, and with so many masks layered on top of each other, identity becomes fluid, random, even combustible. Holy Motors ends with a series of ridiculous revelations that really don’t reveal anything except more possibilities. Is Oscar an angel? Or a player in the devil’s most sadistic recess game? Like everything in Holy Motors, the answer is up for endless discussion.

VIDEO ESSAY: MEN IN BLACK: Three Reasons for Criterion Consideration

VIDEO ESSAY: Three Reasons: MEN IN BLACK

For this month’s Criterion Consideration, coming up with a suitable equivalent to Barry Sonnenfeld's latest film, Men in Black III, was a bit of a challenge. In many ways, the franchise can’t be compared to other films of the genre. How exactly would you categorize MIB? An odd couple buddy-cop sci-fi comedy? Immediately I thought of Ghostbusters, which has been threatening recently to corrupt its origins with an unnecessary sequel, but Ghostbusters had already had its day in the sun when Criterion was still pumping out laserdiscs. I could easily have tried to loosely tie a thousand different titles to MIB III, but really, the only reasonable association is the first film in the franchise. Like most things, the original is always the best, leaving its successors in the dust. It's been a decade since we all sat through the utterly intolerable MIB II, and no matter how fresh and shiny Sonnenfeld's latest effort may attempt to be, it will ultimately only remind us of the power of the original film.

Based on the comics by Lowell Cunningham, the original film was an inventive reworking of the Men in Black mythology, a phenomenon that emerged in American pop culture shortly after that supposed UFO-crash incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Sonnenfeld took further inspiration from the resurgence of conspiracy theory permeating 1990's pop culture. The paranoid visions that pervade The X-Files are rendered to ridiculous extremes as Earth's resident aliens hide in plain sight. What makes Sonnenfeld's film work is the business-as-usual approach that the Men in Black take toward in their daily routine. The black-suited men of mystery are merely intergalactic immigration officers, content to anonymously survey all alien activity in the New York area. Contrary to the shameless marketing strategies that would befall the franchise, the film's offbeat deadpan sensibilities were a welcome break from those of the mainstream blockbusters of that time.

This perfect combination of elements made MIB exceptionally ambitious and artistically innovative. Sonnenfeld's experience behind the camera (notably with the Coen Brothers' early films) brought a subtle visual wit to an otherwise flashy elaborate blockbuster. The decision to cast underrated comedians in minor character roles also added class to seemingly minor scenes. Ed Solomon's writing provided some endlessly quotable one-liners, and helped reinforce the chemistry between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. The way they play off each other appears genuine, with Jones' straight-faced delivery pitted against Smith's posturing wisecracks. Rick Baker, the special effects wizard behind every notable sci-fi/horror film from the past thirty years, is allowed to let his imagination run wild, creating some remarkable alien life.

Oddly enough, the qualities that made the first MIB so engaging are exactly what killed its first sequel. The formula for its success became so immediately apparent that even the original risked losing its charm. Celebrities quietly suspected of being aliens were now given needless cameos, CGI took over most of the creature effects, and although the relationship between Agent K and J still works quite well, the rest of the film does not. Early reviews of MIB3 have been mixed, but overall the formula remains unchanged. Try as Sonnenfeld might to neurolize any trace of Men in Black II, his latest installment might very well be the long-awaited end to a nearly forgotten franchise.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. His designs can be found at Primolandia Productions. You can follow him on Twitter here.

CANNES 2012: Andrew Dominik’s KILLING THEM SOFTLY

It’s a testament to Australian director Andrew Dominik’s considerable story-telling abilities that a movie as nakedly cynical and aggressively repellent in its philosophy as Killing Them Softly is as satisfying as it is. Dominik adapted Killing Them Softly’s screenplay himself, from George V. Higgins’s novel of the same name, and it shows. The ambiguous, larger-than-life macho men in Dominik’s Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and now Killing Them Softly are all of a piece. They all have one foot in their own self-mythologizing headspaces and the other in the future they believe is just around the corner. But unlike those two earlier films, the macho-est man of all in Killing Them Softly knows exactly what the future holds—but he just doesn’t care.

The present of Dominik’s latest film is a dystopian version of contemporary America. Chest-thumping tough guys and hand-wringing power brokers abound, none as tough as they’d like others to think. This is especially true of Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), a hitman hired to knock off two bottom-feeding hoods who rob a group of well-connected gangsters at an illegal poker game. Since this is the second time the games have been robbed, confidence in these illegal card games is at an all-time low. Business needs to pick up and fast. Enter Cogan, introduced with a tongue-in-cheek song cue of Johnny Cash’s “When the Man Comes Around.” Yes, Brad Pitt is God and the Economic Apocalypse is upon Obamerica. Heavy-handed, sure, but consistently self-serious? Not so much.

That having been said, Killing Them Softly can just as easily be characterized as a plaintive howl of disaffection with, according to Dominik, President Obama’s failure to deliver on his 2008 campaign’s promise of “change” and bipartisan unity. This brazen and largely idiotic lament drones in the background of Killing Them Softly’s loud and hearty heist-and-doomed-getaway narrative until the film’s last scene. Throughout, Dominik inserts snippets from televised and radio addresses where both George W. Bush and Obama, still a senator at the time, talk rhetorically about what needs to be done to fix America’s ailing economy. At the end, Dominik effectively slaps his viewers in the face (back-handed!) and dares them to like it. But until then, Dominik masterfully develops his film’s ultimately untenable thesis.

For example, the film’s song cues and fetishistically detailed slow-motion scenes of violence (they’re not really action scenes) lend an air of ambivalence to the film’s otherwise dour proceedings. Cues from Depression-era standards like “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” are sandwiched between songs like “Heroin” and “Windmills of Your Mind,” creating a weird ahistorical context in which every confrontation seems simultaneously over-dramatic and self-deflating.

Thankfully, Dominik is a great meat-and-potatoes visual story-teller. He paces scenes composed entirely of conversations, framing them with ostentatious care and dyspeptic whimsy: Killing Them Softly ultimately suggests Zodiac as directed by Paolo Sorrentino.

Dominik also fleshes out his characters effectively, making them the human context for his film’s polemical and largely vague political posturing. The director draws striking parallels between Cogan’s character and his friend Mickey (James Gandolfini), a fellow hitman who’s gone to seed in just two years’ time, as well as with the two-bit robbers that Cogan is hired to kill. Killing Them Softly does fall apart completely in its last scene, in which Cogan venomously explains that America is “not a country: it’s a business,” smugly using the fact that Thomas Jefferson, the great unifier, owned and had sex with his slaves as proof. But until then, Dominik does a fantastic good job of selling curdled milk.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago.He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Cluband is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal.His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

VIDEO ESSAY – The Sight and Sound Film Poll: An International Tribute to Roger Ebert and His Favorite Films

This week Press Play introduces Sight and Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer.

To start off the Critics' Picks series, why not have the most famous film critic in the world? Roger Ebert needs no introduction, but his impact on film culture is something we have long taken for granted, and extends beyond his 45 years of film reviewing and television celebrity. His reach is felt even within the Sight and Sound Poll – as I wrote in Press Play's roundtable discussion of the poll, it was Ebert who first brought the poll to my attention as a teenager reading his Movie Home Companion, where he analyzed the 1982 poll results and shared his own top ten, distilled in a series of exquisitely crafted paragraphs. That book and those paragraphs initiated my own love of film criticism, and form the basis for this video essay.

The passages that serve as the video's narration cover the four films from Ebert's 1982 list that remain on his freshly minted top ten for the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. In its own way, the video reflects more significant developments in his life than his updated top ten list. When a fight with cancer left Ebert unable to speak, he took to the web to express himself, convening a international community of movie lovers around his website and blog. That in turn led to the creation of a special section on his website, Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents, featuring film reviews and articles from people around the world. The site celebrates movies as a global phenomenon bringing people together across languages and cultures.

To honor that vision, this video features many of the Far-Flung Correspondents speaking Ebert's words in their own language. The video also reunites the two hosts of Ebert Presents at the Movies, Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Vishnevetsky bringing a multilingual twist to his voiceover. Also taking part are contributors to Roger Ebert's Demanders, the section of his site reviewing video on-demand titles.

It was extremely fortuitous that the production of this video coincided with Ebertfest, Ebert's personally curated annual film festival held at his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Most of the participants of this video travelled to Ebertfest, making it the perfect opportunity to record them. Others recorded themselves remotely and sent their audio via email. All told, there are 20 contributors speaking ten languages, discussing four favorite films of one man whose writing proves that not only great films, but great film writing, can transcend humankind's boundaries. – Kevin B. Lee

Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents

Ali Arikan (Turkish)
Olivia Collette (Canadian French)
Wael Khairy (Arabic)
Scott Jordan Harris
Michael Mirasol (Tagalog)
Omer Mozaffar
Michal Oleszczyk (Polish)
Krishna Shenoi
Gerardo Valero (Spanish)
Pablo Villaça (Brazilian Portugese)
Grace Wang (Mandarin)

Roger Ebert's Demanders

Steven Boone
Jim Emerson
Odie Henderson
Kevin B. Lee
Donald Liebenson
Jana Monji
Jeff Shannon

Ebert Presents At the Movies

Christy Lemire
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Russian)

CANNES 2012: Abbas Kiarostami’s LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

Denial and delusion ripple the pristine visual surface of Like Someone in Love, Abbas Kiarostami’s masterful critique of social and emotional formality, set in Japan. The importance of perception cannot be understated here, since the film often buries its cutting ideology beneath a measured narrative pace interspersed with hypnotic silences. Whereas Certified Copy, Kiarostami’s previous cinematic riddle set outside his home country of Iran, splits the narrative midway through to accentuate the sudden fracturing of romantic love, Like Someone in Love waits until the bitter end to reveal its true nature. In this way, the film is far more disturbing and cagey than anything Kiarostami has done before, examining just how fragile public personas can be when pushed to the limits of control.

Tragic warning signs abound in Like Someone in Love, menacing clues hiding inside each polite glance and in the long conversations between subdued characters. In the film’s multi-layered opening shot, Akiko (Rin Takanashi) argues off-screen with her fiancé Noriaki (Ryo Kase) over the phone as patrons of a posh bar converse. Ambient sounds overlap with her words, blurring the lines of communication even further. The subject of the couple’s heated conversation is trust, or a lack thereof, and since we hear Akiko’s voice before we see her body, it’s clear Kiarostami is concerned with the patterns of verbal discourse and how they can hide our true intentions.

After Akiko hangs up the phone, her boss warns against being involved in such a volatile relationship, advising her to focus entirely on her job as a sex escort. Even though her profession is not necessarily reputable, the older man treats Akiko much like Noriaki does: as an object of formal pride he wants to entomb.

When Akiko is tasked with visiting a client outside of Tokyo, she debates whether or not she should to stop and see her grandmother, who’s left her phone messages while waiting all day for a visit.

Cruising the hyper-colored streets of Tokyo in a taxi, Akiko spots her grandmother underneath a statue outside the train station, her small frame dwarfed by the distance of the shot and the size of the monument. Akiko asks the driver to circle the roundabout once, then twice, obviously struggling to reconnect with her familial past. It’s a wonderfully staged sequence, in which POV advances her character, confirming that she is perpetually stifled by the requirements of formality.

When Akiko finally arrives at the quaint house of retired academic Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), she quickly becomes an emblem of formality for the respected man as well. One line of dialogue late in the film suggests that Takashi has suffered a terrible family trauma in the past, and his fatherly interactions with Akiko certainly suggest that he wants her to play the role of his surrogate daughter. This dynamic is eventually extended by Noriaki, a talented mechanic determined to make Akiko his wife. Noriaki’s obsession with formality is the most constricting of all, almost religious in nature.

Kiarostami plays with color and depth throughout, spraying green and blue hues across the urban frame, layering reflections so that many images feel infinitely realized. Even more so than Certified Copy, Kiarostami’s mise-en-scene attains a level of classiness that ultimately imbues the mostly subtext-laden set pieces with visual grace. The titular song adds an even richer dimension to the languishing and hazy mood in many interior scenes.

The characters of Like Someone In Love fortify their emotions by reinforcing the façades of love, independence, and family they so desperately want to protect. But one supporting character actually speaks truth. A former student of Takashi’s, whom he and Akiko meet while visiting Noriaki’s auto shop, confesses to his ex-teacher that “violence in society interests me.” The horrifying frankness of his statement, and the restrained way it is spoken, breaks Kiarostami’s mosaic of formality for a split second. No one takes these words seriously, and that becomes the key to unlocking Like Someone in Love’s core thesis.

Long dialogue-heavy car rides, sobering reflections, and protracted shot-reverse-shot segments comprise the film’s pulse, all vintage Kiarostami aesthetics that deflect the story’s subtle threads until the consequences of this collective refusal come crashing through the frame. Ultimately, Like Someone in Love assesses the way people (and societies) ignore their own destructive traditions over large gaps in time, bleeding the reserves of emotional infrastructure dry, one false-bottomed promise at a time.

Glenn Heath Jr. is a film critic for Slant Magazine, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, The L Magazine, and The House Next Door. Glenn is also a full-time Lecturer of Film Studies at Platt College and National University in San Diego, CA.

For the love of Yul, please re-cast the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN remake

For the love o

So apparently Tom Cruise is going to "star" in a remake of The Magnificent Seven, which itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

What does "star" mean? The Variety story doesn't say. But you have to wonder whose shoes Cruise he going to fill, or try to fill. Yul Brynner's? Steve McQueen's? Charles Bronson's? James Coburn's?

I can't get my mind around any of those possibilities — not just because John Sturges' first remake is still vivid in my mind, but because Cruise basically played man-boys until he was pushing 40, and it wasn't until very recently that I got used to the idea of him playing a character with any gravitas at all. But what the hell, let's play the casting game. Let's pretend Cruise isn't attached (unless you want him!) and that you run the studio bankrolling the picture.

Me? I'd prefer Bruce Willis/Brynner and Woody Harrelson/McQueen. True Blood's Chris Bauer in the Bronson role. Joel Kinnaman from The Killing in the Coburn role — or for a splash of color, Chiwetel Ejiofor. Cruise might be effective as Robert Vaughn's dandy of a gunman; the pathos inherent in that part might catch people by surprise. George Clooney would be fun, too; Mag Seven newbies might be so thrown by his star wattage that they'd be, er, taken aback by the arc of his character, he said, treading lightly around spoilers for a 52-year old movie. Any plausibly Latin newcomer could play the Horst Buchholz part, and would surely do more with it than Buchholz did. Brad Dexter's character should be played by somebody as big (or big-seeming) as Dexter, I think. I rather liked seeing Dolph Lundgren in The Expendables — he's a better actor than his typecasting as stony-faced killers indicates — so maybe he's the right guy. The hammy bandit Calvera is henceforth marked "property of Benecio Del Toro," who would be even harder to understand than usual with all those shreds of scenery lodged in his teeth. Now it's your turn.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the TV critic for New York Magazine and publisher of Press Play.

CANNES 2012: Hong Sang-soo’s IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

CANNES 2012: Hong Sangsoo’s IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

The screenwriting process produces a kind of sandbox cinema in Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country, the Korean director’s latest jazz riff on human interconnection. The film’s beach side location may be consistent with earlier films, but its unique characterizations traverse freely outside the logic of conventional storytelling. Made up of three separate pieces, each revolving around a different character played by French actress Isabelle Huppert, the film addresses the overlapping ripple effect of miscommunication, and how a world can be expanded or quantified by simply noticing (or remembering) the details of your surroundings.

From its beginning, In Another Country somersaults forward, spinning and turning on a dime whenever it pleases. The opening scene finds a woman writing a script in her beachside villa, passing the time by flexing her creative muscles, to avoid dealing with the uncertainties of life. Hong then dives inside her imagination, showing us the film's succeeding stories in chronological order and connecting each divergent thread through recurring dialogue and characters. A product of the hazy desire to experiment with time and space, much of In Another Country feels lovingly improvised, light as the persistent whisper of raindrops in its background. There’s very little rush to the character’s actions, in keeping with the island feel of the mainland coastal setting.

Hong is fascinated with the way people interact during awkward situations, focusing organically on the random channels of human movement and speech in times of momentary duress. The first section of In Another Country, in which Huppert’s famous actress visits a Korean director at his vacation home by the sea, is hilarious because it frames controlled confusion in a loving manner. The climax of Huppert’s indoctrination into the natural rhythm of this particular Korean community occurs when she interacts with a local lifeguard (Yu Junsang) who seems hell bent on pleasing her, no matter the cost. Their respectful banter is something special, in which two people cross paths and can’t quite figure out how to connect.

Like virtually all of Hong’s films, In Another Country is made up of diverging narrative tracks unfolding inside the same universe. Props, lines of dialogue, and character expressions all show up multiple times, but always within a different context. As a result, similar situations and motivations that repeat under similar circumstances are given unique qualities specific to the moment they occur. Hong has played with temporal bridging so many times, most wonderfully in last year’s Un Certain Regard entry The Day He Arrives. But In Another Country feels wonderfully lost at times, almost lovingly so, as if to evade anyone attempting to put a label on its freeform verses. Time really doesn’t matter here.

By the end of In Another Country, Huppert’s performing triptych reveals a surprising balance of tones, whisking comedy and tragedy together to establish a level of nuance that connects the three women as unknown kindred spirits. Taken in context, this is exactly what makes Hong’s films so indelible: the spacious and formative revelations people experience during everyday conversations that sneak up suddenly, and then quietly change your life.

Glenn Heath Jr. is a film critic for Slant Magazine, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, The L Magazine, and The House Next Door. Glenn is also a full-time Lecturer of Film Studies at Platt College and National University in San Diego, CA.