In Memoriam . . .

I've always liked Ed Lauter. He is, or more appropriately, was a wonderful character actor, an inventive player who brought lots of nuance to any role he was handed. Plus his career coincided with my own salad days as a film critic.

So I'm seriously bummed that he has died at the age of 74. My friend and colleague Ira Hozinsky drew my attention to an excellent interview with Lauter, which you can read here

One small tidbit I have to add to Lauter's story about Robert Aldrich casting him in The Longest Yard, everything Lauter says about Aldrich's many accomplishments is true -- he was an Aldich as in the Rockefellers and the Aldrichs, and went to UVA -- but what Lauter either didn't know or had forgotten is that Aldrich played varsity football at Virginia, so he knew even more about football than Lauter lets on.

Washington Heights Film Class Has a New Website

We're back up!
Check out our fall schedule here:

www.wahifilmclass.com

Hope to see some of you tomorrow night for The Trip!
(No, not the Roger Corman, the Michael Winterbottom.)

Another NY Film Festival Story

You can read my next NYFF piece at Jewish Week. And I urge you to check out the Empire project's website. They now have both the Legacy and Cradle segments up and each is well worth your time.

 Is this a legacy of slavery? Ceremonies in Ghana in the Empire project videos

Saw the new James Gray, The Immigrant, and the new Claire Denis, Bastards, yesterday, and I'll have a bit to say about each later this weekend.

From Russia with Films

You can't keep track of everything that happens in New York City in film. Heaven knows I try, but it's simply not possible. So when I received an e-mail about the sixth annual Russian Documentary Film Festival in New York I was a bit surprised -- sixth? and I never heard about it before? Not to mention that the e-mail came the day before the event begins.

So let me pull your coat to what looks like an interesting group of films about one of the most complicated nations on earth. The focus is mostly on non-controversial works, including a 75th birthday tribute to Rudolf Nureyev, but there are some very appealing subjects on display, including a longitudinal study of young Russians, literally a Russian 28 Up, directed by Sergey Miroshnichenko. Not surprisingly, it's a Russian-British co-production.

The program takes place October 4-6 at the Tribeca Cinemas, DCTV and the Brooklyn Public Library and you can find the particulars here.

A Quick Update

Jewish Week has two new film stories of mine up on the website right now:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/search-trochenbrod

http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/jews-money-and-mythology

On a more serious note, let me draw your attention to the latest attack on an Iranian filmmaker, this one by the ostensibly more moderate new regime. I've written a bit about Muhammad Rasoulof's problems with the government before, and this comes as no great surprise. I guess Rowhani felt he had to let people at home know that the face he showed at the UN wasn't that of a "weak" leader.

http://www.screendaily.com/5061046.article

Back Again . . .

So I've been covering the New York Film Festival and other goodies for Jewish Week. Plus a bunch of things I want to pull your coat to.

First, my first Film Festival piece is here:http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/last-elder-terezin
I don't know when the Frederick Wiseman review will be posted, but here's what I said:

Frederick Wiseman is a documentarian whose work seldom touches directly on Jewish topics (although his brilliant essay in fiction film, “The Last Letter” does so with exceptional power), but his attitude and interests bespeak a personality steeped in Jewish ethics and values. His latest film, “At Berkeley,” a four-hour glimpse into the inner workings of the University of California at Berkeley, provides an excellent example. As in most of Wiseman’s work, the film pivots on the theme of the place of large public institutions in a democratic society, one that is pluralistic and wildly diverse. Berkeley, which has always grappled pretty openly with this issue in both its governance and its daily routines, is a terrific vehicle for Wiseman’s cinema-verite gaze.

Covering most of an academic year at the school, Wiseman’s primary focus is on the complex vectors of power that tug at the school on a daily basis – the state legislature in Sacramento, the impossibly complicated array of student groups and interests, California’s financial crunch, potential donors both personal and corporate, and so on – and his access was formidable. In the post-screening press conference he said that the only meetings to which he was not privy were discussions of tenure.

Strangely enough, therein lies the film’s central dilemma. If you can show nearly everything, how do you choose what to show? For much of the film’s running time, Wiseman’s choices are unerring as usual. The university’s leaders, particularly the handsome and soothing-voiced Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau (who retired this May), are not merely smart manipulators. One feels their genuine concern for the student body, beleaguered by continuously rising costs, and the faculty, and their commitment to the place of higher education in a democratic society. When the film is focusing on them, and on the staff, its footing is sure. But the choices of class time Wiseman has made frequently seem arbitrary, even perfunctory. Only towards the end of the film, when he devotes a long sequence to a remarkable group of older students, an on-campus  veterans’ support group, do we get some sense of the larger societal impact of a great public university.

The second part of a spirited and charming conversation with Eran Riklis is up on the JWeek site here: http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/these-mean-streets-are-beirut 

Stephen Dorff in Time Out, One of His Bleaker Moments in Eran Riklis's Zaytoun

I cannot urge you strongly enough to see Alan Berliner's HBO film First Cousin Once Removed.  You can find information on screening times here: http://www.hbo.com/#/documentaries/first-cousin-once-removed

and my interview with Berliner is here:http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/filmmaker-grapples-family-and-memory

Ooh, Scary -- Alan Berliner in Pamplona, Hypnotizing the Spanish Audiences

As regular readers know, I've become an ardent advocate for the wider dissemination of literature in translation. In addition to the growing number of publishing houses that specialize in this area -- and I cannot overpraise Open Letter Books, Archipelago Press, New Vessel Publishing and countless others -- I want to draw your attention to a fascinating project (w/blog, of course) of a young woman reader in England. The very useful Publishing Perspectives website has a story on her here with links to her blog and her book list:

http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/09/one-year-reading-a-book-from-every-nation-in-the-world/

And you could do a lot worse than to check out Publishing Perspectives on a regular basis, particularly if you are a writer.

As we know, I won't make any promises about regular appearances in this space, but I'm hoping that the fall will bring more to write about.

C'mon Spurs, crush Chelsea!!!

Too-Blue Jasmine

This review was written for the Jewish Week but, for reasons unknown to me, has never appeared. I am sufficiently concerned to be on the record on the film to come out of hibernation to post it here. I hope that this means I'll be back in this space on a more regular basis this fall but I know better than to promise such a thing. In the meantime, my seemingly unending battle with Woody Allen's film-making career continues:

Every filmmaker has his or her comfort zone, a subject or genre or setting that is easy and comfortable to work in. And like the proverbial clown who longs to play Hamlet, most filmmakers yearn to do something different and, well, uncomfortable. Sometimes the results can be stunning, sometimes not. (Think of David Cronenberg’s most recent films, the brilliant “A Dangerous Method” and the tepid “Cosmpolis.”) Regardless of the end-product, it’s an admirable impulse for any artist to want to stretch.

Sometimes it can feel like a necessity. Woody Allen, to his credit, continues to turn out films every eight or ten months. But his last two offerings, “Midnight in Paris” and “To Rome With Love” felt attenuated and decidedly minor. As the song says, a change would do him good.

“Blue Jasmine,” his latest film, probably wasn’t the right answer. It certainly takes him outside his comfort zone: although a bit of the film is set in New York it eschews the Upper West Side for Park Avenue, and more of the film takes place in San Francisco than here. The culture clash at the heart of “Blue Jasmine,” a collision between the ultra-rich and the white working class, certainly is outside his usual beat as well. Allen has essayed drama before, albeit with rather less success than he has enjoyed even with his darker comedies, but this is probably his first writer-director credit on a film that attempts the daring double-act of a complicated flashback structure and an unreliable narrator who is not played for laughs. Perhaps it’s all a bit too much of a stretch.

The film tells the story of once-wealthy Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), whose husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) turns out to have been another Bernie Madoff-type financial scoundrel. Among the people he fleeced were Jasmine’s sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins in a replay of her performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy Go Lucky” that is the best thing in the film) and husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay). Now stripped of nearly everything – husband, son, home, money, possessions – Jasmine (nee Jeannette) turns to Ginger for shelter. She immediately clashes with Ginger’s new boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) and her tenuous grip on reality loosens dangerously.

Allen has never been particularly adept at working outside his own class milieu. On those occasions when he has visited people farther down the economic ladder successfully it has either been in a period setting (“Purple Rose of Cairo”) or on the fringes of show business (“Broadway Danny Rose”). In either case he can imagine a studio-era version of the working class with little reference to reality. “Blue Jasmine” is filled with downscale types (Hawkins, Clay and Cannavale foremost) but they are never remotely believable and Allen seems without a clue how these people live.  We never know what ethnicity they are, except for a rather cheap joke at Augie’s expense when he extols the virtues of a friend’s singing, then reveals the would-be vocalist’s baroque Italian-American surname. It wouldn’t matter if there was some other kind of specificity to replace the missing ethnicity, but all we have our relatively faceless blanks, delivering rather flavorless dialogue. Having cast a Jew (Clay), an Italian-Cuban (Cannavale) and an Englishwoman* playing something generic, Allen leaves us to fill in those blanks ourselves. But if the working-class milieu is lacking in texture (even the usually reliable Santo Loquasto lets us down with production design that is fussy but unforthcoming), then the culture clash at the center of the film is meaningless.

Most of all, though, “Blue Jasmine” lacks a coherent point of view. It’s fine to focus on a central figure who is becoming an increasingly unreliable narrator, and to hold back a key piece of information that would undermine her in the eyes of the audience until her most vulnerable moment. But Allen never really establishes his own attitude towards Jasmine in either the writing or direction of the film, and the character really has no center; Blanchett works through each scene point-to-point, using her considerable technical skills to keep us watching as she ostensibly gets crazier and crazier, but at her center Jasmine is a series of contradictions. Allen drops a few clues – both she and Ginger were adopted, but by whom and to what end – but he fails to elaborate.

As a result, the center of “Blue Jasmine” is a void.

*My good friend Deborah Beshaw-Farrell suggests that I have misidentified Blanchett, who is Australian. I believe that I was actually referring to Hawkins here. However, it does bring to mind another problem with both Hawkins and, to a lesser extent, Blanchett, which is the infamous middle-of-the-Atlantic American accent that British actors seem to inevitably produce when cast as Yanks. 

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Moving along to more appealing and useful topics, allow me to direct your attention to a valuable on-line research resource, the Media History Digital Library, which is located at  http://mediahistoryproject.org/.  Their focus is pretty much what the name suggests, providing a clearinghouse for media publications, including searchable collections from Variety, Photoplay, Motion Picture World and lesser-known trade mags like Business Screen. Highly recommended!

 

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Finally, one of the most interesting films of the summer is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing. Oppenheimer's approach to documentary is unconventional but surprisingly effective. I did an interview with him that I think you will find quite provocative. You can read it here 

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Tribeca Continued

My second Jewish Week piece on the festival is up on the website. This one is mainly about the new film from the directors of Rabies. It's pretty savage stuff, although with much of the humor that made their first film so much fun.

Two from Tribeca and a Book Recommendation

So I've already filed my second and final piece on this year's Tribeca Film Festival for Jewish Week, which means I can turn my attentions to the 98% of this year's offerings that don't have any Jewish content. And I must say that the first two films I caught up with were very nice examples of why I like this event.

Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton is a loving, frisky, almost giddy biographical documentary about the pioneering Bay Area poet and filmmaker, a celebration of one of the really funny and nice people in experimental film, directed by Stephen Silha and Eric Slade. How can you not love a man who advises, "When it doubt, twirl," and "Believe in the unbelievable?" Strangely enough, as the film makes clear, Broughton's joyousness was hard-won, a slap in the face at the depression that had dogged him into his thirties. "Making films saved my life," he says bluntly.

Big Joy is relentlessly honest, much to its subject's credit as well as its creators'. The film deals simply and fairly with Broughton's short-lived relationship to Pauline Kael, which resulted in a child and a sharp break. "They lived together, but they didn't think together," poet Jack Foley says simply. We hear Kael on the film's soundtrack discussing the break-up a bit more disingenuously and it's hard not to wonder how much of her infamous homophobia was the result of that event. By contrast, Broughton's second straight relationship, while incredibly complicated, seems to have been a bit more successful, but the real love of his life was Joel Singer, several decades younger than Broughton but fiercely loyal to the literal end.

James Broughton and Joel Singer

But the real centerpiece of Big Joy is the man hiimself, witty, goofy and superbly gifted. There are clips from the key films and some wonderful quotes from the poetry. The result is a film with a slightly baggy structure. It starts out using a one-man show by performance poet Keith Hennessy but somewhere in the middle that device is abandoned and simple chronology asserts itself. It almost doesn't matter; one suspects that this nod towards shapelessness would have tickled Broughton, and that is a good thing in itself.

What Richard Did is an understated Irish family melodrama about a golden boy who falls hard from grace. Richard (Jack Reynor) is enjoying the summer before university, hanging with his rugby teammates, flirting with the local girls and getting ready for the arduous double-act of playing rugby professionally while a college student. He's smart, good-looking and, from everything we see of his behavior in the film's first half-hour, a thoroughly admirable young man. With the emphasis on "young." He becomes involved a friend's girl, Lara (Roisin Murphy), and the tensions of jealousy threaten the summer idyll. Finally, something unthinkable happens and Richard must deal with the guilt surrounding his actions. Faced with the necessity to behave like an adult, he discovers that his equanimity isn't quite as impregnable as it seemed.

What Richard (Jack Reynor) Did with Lara (Roisin Murphy)

Director Lenny Abrahamson, for whom this is a third feature, has a certainty of tone and a nice eye for the comfortable ensemble. He gets lovely performances from his mostly young cast and creates one of those now all-too-familiar teen-worlds in which grown-ups are at best an awkward presence. Yet the film never falls into the post-'1950s cliches of misunderstood youth. What happens here is beyond the pale despite being rather typical, and the film is more reminiscent of American '60s suburban dramas than Rebel Without a Cause or its imitators. These kids aren't disaffected, just foolish. Unfortunately, Abrahamson, screenwriter Malcolm Campbell and novelist Kevin Power whose book is the source material for the film, seem ambivalent about their ending, and What Richard Did dissipates into the air rather than resolving itself. But before it fizzles, the film has some lovely moments, well worth a look.

Jan Wahl was not much older than the fictional Richard when he accepted an invitation to watch Carl Theodor Dreyer direct his 1955 masterpiece Ordet (The Word). Although it's a bit unclear how Wahl rated such a treat, the book he wrote about the experience, Carl Theodor Dreyer and 'Ordet' -- My Summer With the Danish Filmmaker (University Press of Kentucky), suggests that the opportunity wasn't wasted. Wahl's prose is as straightforward and unadorned as the book's title, but his recollections of Dreyer are warm and informative. It becomes evident from the outset that Dreyer didn't fit the image of the stern taskmaster and martinet that is so frequently associated with filmmakers of genius. (Think Ford or Preminger for example). On the contrary, he seems both genteel and gentle, a soft-spoken, almost introverted perfectionist who reserves his harshest words for himself. My favorite anecdote from the book concerns the use of a local newspaper to line the drawers of a dresser; Dreyer sends Wahl in search of a correct period paper from 1925 even though the only person who will see it is one of the actors. "He'll be distracted" if the date is incorrect, Dreyer explains. A charming book that is a reminder of a great film and its creator.

Glee and Joy at Film Forum/Hot Items from Israel

One of my favorite films from last year's New York Film Festival is finally getting its theatrical release at Film Forum, here in NYC. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay will be running through April 30 and I can't urge you strongly enough to run and see it. When it played the Festival last fall, I wrote this for Jewish Week:

Once the walls of the ghetto came down, Jews began to face a similar range of career opportunities to non-Jews. Even with the burdens of anti-Semitic quota systems the Jewish people have made an impact in the physics, medicine, government, literature, the visual arts and magic.

Magic, you say? Well, there was Harry Houdini, born Erich Weiss, a rabbi’s son but . . . .

Yes, there was Houdini, but he was only the most prominent of many Jewish practitioners of the mysteries of prestidigitation.

Consider the new documentary playing at one of the sidebars in this year’s New York Film Festival, “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” directed by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein. Jay, who was born Ricky Potash, was first inducted into the world of magic by his grandfather, Max Katz, an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Katz played an important role in shaping his grandson’s by-now legendary performing skills and introduced him to a generation of geniuses of card manipulation, billiard ball sleight-of-hand and other dazzling, if arcane, skills.

“The way to learn [magic] is personally,” Jay says early in the film. It’s an insight that is repeated frequently and illustrated both by footage of the masters with whom Jay studied and the words and artistry of Jay himself. At one point he likens the process of transmitting such knowledge to the relationship between a rebbe and his hasidim, and given the oddly quotidian nature of the tools of his trade – coins, handkerchiefs, a deck of ordinary playing cards – one cannot help but think of the hasid who said he wanted to learn how the rebbe tied his shoes.

More than that, the magicians skills are passed generationally, l’dor-va-dor, although in Jay’s case, a generation was skipped. He left home at 17 because, as he says tersely, “My parent’s didn’t ‘get’ me.” Still, he admits, they did one good thing for him; at his bar mitzvah the entertainment was the great magician Al Flosso, the “Coney Island Fakir.” It is, he says rather darkly, the only nice memory I have of them.

“Deceptive Practice,” on the other hand, is filled with better-than-nice memories. There is a great deal of the sheer fun of watching him grow up from little Ricky Potash, a 7-year-old performer of surprising poise (although his grown-up self dismisses the tricks as poor), to a shoulder-length-haired hippie in a three-piece suit working the daytime talk shows with gusto, to the wry elder statesman of today. Jay’s memories of Flosso and other mentors like Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller, Cardini, Slydini and his grandpa Max are warm, charming and instructive. The glimpses we get of his relationship with his own younger colleagues are no less satisfying. It’s safe to say that for the foreseeable future the fate of the magic arts are in safe – frequently Jewish – hands. And “Deceptive Practice” is one of the only films I’ve seen this year that I wish had gone on much longer.

Meanwhile, back at the Israeli lemonade stand, the Israel Film Center at the JCC in Manhattan is in the midst of its first film festival, and the array of films on display highlights the dazzling variety coming out of the Jewish State. There is a full slate of programs, including a selection of recent short films, all over town this evening. The closing night screening of Fill the Void is a particular must, although the film will be playing at Film Forum later this year. I'd still check it out; it's a densely worked piece that will reward repeated viewings. In addition, the festival includes two bonus screenings tomorrow night at the Cinema Village. By Summer's End is a first feature from Noa Aharoni, who was an assistant on Saint Clara (which is beginning to look like an important meeting ground for a lot of current Israeli filmmakers). The World Is Funny is the lastest film from Shemi Zarhin, director of Aviva, My Love, a personal favorite of mine. You can buy tickets for any or all of these goodies here.