[The Daily] Cinema Scope and More

During this month’s Toronto International Film Festival, we began seeing reviews and interviews that would eventually make their way into the new issue of Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman’s conversation with Denis Côté about A Skin So Soft, for example, and Daniel Kasman and Christopher Small’s with Wang Bing about Mrs. Fang; Blake Williams’s excellent piece on Lucrecia Martel and Zama and Tom Charity’s review of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Soon we’ll be sampling Jordan Cronk’s interview with Narimane Mari and more pieces from Issue 72—Phil Coldiron on Ben Russell, Jesse Cumming on Ephraim Asili, and Celluloid Liberation Front on Travis Wilkerson—in entries appearing in the next days and weeks during the New York Film Festival.

What we haven’t yet seen and probably won’t see in any other context, though, is Michael Sicinski’s conversation with Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson, whose Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (image above) “is a domestic mini-epic capacious enough to include witches in the heartland, the painterly use of blood or blood substitutes, Chantal Akerman and Prince, the oral application of smooth stones, gardens and mesas, the draining of a sebaceous cyst, and the enthusiastic eating of pussy. It is very possibly the film of the year.”

In this issue’s “Global Discoveries on DVD” column, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about Mickey Rooney, François Truffaut, Karel Zeman, and much more. As a “DVD Bonus,” Lawrence Garcia writes about three films by Lino Brocka, Weighed But Found Wanting (1974), Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), and Insiang (1976). And Chuck Stephens writes about Bill Viola’s “feature-length 1986 masterpiece I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like,” a “constantly self-disrupting road movie over purposefully glitch-scarred surfaces of mind and soul.”

SOLLERS POINT

“Out of jail but not yet back in the swing of things—that in-between state has sparked countless movies, from genre thrillers to quiet character studies.” Writing for the Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden observes that, in Sollers Point, which has just premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, “Matthew Porterfield puts his distinctive stamp on this classic setup with the story of a young man who's caught between the impulse to slide back and the longing to leap forward. . . . A kind of urban pastoral, the well-cast, handsomely shot movie unfolds as a series of encounters, each one an attempt by the central character to find his footing in his hardscrabble working-class community, on the edges of the city near the waterfront.”

More from Jonathan Romney in Screen: “While stylistically and in spirit, it’s very much of a piece with his previous, loose-hanging ensemble pieces Putty Hill (2011) and I Used to Be Darker (2013), Sollers Point periodically shifts towards more conventionally focused crime drama. Porterfield’s achievement in this characteristically moody, downbeat essay is to hang back from expected narrative payoffs, while offering the appeal of a character study rooted in a specific American working-class milieu. This slight shift toward genre won’t make the film any more a commercial firework than Porterfield’s previous features, but a charismatic star in McCaul Lombardi—previously seen in American Honey and Patti Cake$—brings some iconic appeal.”

FANTASTIC FEST FALLOUT

“Being at Fantastic Fest as news broke about accusations against Ain’t It Cool News editor and longtime Alamo Drafthouse friend/Fantastic Fest co-founder Harry Knowles, as well the revelation of Drafthouse’s mishandling and brushing off of harassment complaints over the years, is the closest I will ever get to a Fyre Festival—except this is serious.” April Wolfe in the Village Voice: “And the victims of some well-known men’s predatory behavior have too long been ignored. And yet, all around me, I see staff and volunteers striving to make everyone feel comfortable and supported, while more women are introducing films and are front and center at events than I’d seen here last year.”

On another page, Wolfe writes about three of her favorite films at this year’s festival directed (or co-directed) by women, Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion, Issa López’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, and Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners.

Meantime, the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr presents a sort of primer on all that’s gone down in Austin over the past several weeks and offers a guide to some of the best female critics currently writing about cinema and television.

MORE READING

“Nathan Silver has made eight films in eight years,” writes Meredith Alloway, introducing her interview for Filmmaker. “I’m also just a caffeinated personality,” he tells her. His latest, Thirst Street, has been met with strong reviews, and you’ll find a sampling of the best of them at Critics Round Up.

Eternity, Tran Anh Hung’s first film in French, stars Audrey Tautou and Melanie Laurent and opens in Japan tomorrow. Kaori Shoji talks with the director for the Japan Times: “The point in my films is to give the actors dialogue and emotions that they can savor like delicious food. I want the cast to feel nourished and sensual, like they’re part of a carefully orchestrated banquet. That kind of crafted sensuality is so hard to depict on screen. Some people say that my films are not natural, but to me when a character is being nothing but natural, they lose all charm. I mean, if I wanted natural, I would sooner just go talk to my neighbor.”

“One of the reasons the unexpected re-discovery of Raoul Walsh's The King and Four Queens is a great surprise, is that you can see tiredness in it,” wrote Serge Daney for Libération in 1989. “In 1956, Walsh had been making films for forty-three years and [Clark] Gable for thirty-two. . . . Stripped down, minimal, and very refined: a real ‘lesson’ in mise-en-scène. That being said, the film was never considered a great one. It’s perhaps inferior to the other film Walsh directed in 1956, the little known The Revolt of Mamie Stover with Jane Russell, which the author of these lines must confess he secretly worships.”

“So what happens when, for whatever reason, we move to another country, lose the use of our mother tongue and start to live in a new language?” Nele Wohlatz introduces her film, The Future Perfect, in the Notebook.

VIDEO

Via the Playlist’s Kevin Jagernauth, a peek at the remastered edition of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom (1994–1997)

“When Martin Scorsese adapted Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in 1993, he judged the result to be the most violent film he’d ever made, though it contains not a single burst of gunfire, and with one jarring exception the characters speak in hushed, polite tones.” Writing for Film Comment, Steven Mears revisits one of Scorsese’s best films.

Five critics for the Guardian have each chosen a favorite film of the 1990s to write about: Peter Bradshaw on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Ellen E. Jones on Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Xan Brooks on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Danny Leigh on Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), and Steve Rose on Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999).

IN THE WORKS

“Marion Cotillard is set to star in Gueule d’ange, a French drama which will mark the feature debut of Vanessa Filho,” reports Elsa Keslassy for Variety. “The drama follows a single mother who abandons her eight-year old daughter after meeting someone in a night club.”

Empire’s James White confirms that Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) has "just started shooting The Kid Who Would Be King, and the cast now includes Patrick Stewart and Rebecca Ferguson." At the Playlist, Oliver Lyttelton notes that the film has "a sort of Goonies meets Game of Thrones vibe, with the film focused on Alex, a twelve-year-old British schoolboy who discovers the legendary sword Excalibur and must stop the medieval villainess Morgana from destroying the world."

“Amazon is dramatically ramping up its production for next year, moving forward with three new high-concept series,” reports Debra Birnbaum for Variety:

• In Lazarus, based on Greg Rucka’s comic, “the world has been divided among sixteen rival families,” each of which has “a Lazarus: a one-person kill squad.”
• Snow Crash, based on Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, will be executive produced by the afore-mentioned Cornish and Frank Marshall (Back to the Future).
• Ringworld “is based on Larry Niven’s sci-fi book series from the 70s.”

Birnbaum then runs down the rest of Amazon’s slate, which includes Wong Kar-Wai’s Tong Wars; Barry Jenkins’s Underground Railroad; Matt Weiner’s The Romanoffs, with Isabelle Hupert, Christina Hendricks, and Aaron Eckhardt; David O. Russell’s untitled project; J.J. Abrams’s The Nix with Meryl Streep; John Singleton’s Black Power; Whit Stillman’s The Cosmopolitans; and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die.

“Melina Matsoukas, chief director of the HBO series Insecure, is tackling an adaptation of the award-winning Marlon James novel A Brief History of Seven Killings for Amazon,” adds the Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit. The novel “begins with the attempted assassination of reggae icon Bob Marley and explores its aftermath, looking at one vital day in multiple time periods. The novel looked at Jamaican politics, poverty, race, class and the volatile relationship between the U.S. and the Caribbean, and traced the connection between CIA efforts to destabilize a left-wing Jamaican government in the 1970s to the brutal realities of gang wars in the Kingston ghettos and their spread to New York in the 1980s.”

“Monica Bellucci will join Ben O’Toole and Tess Haubrich to star in the sci-fi horror film Nekromancer directed Australian filmmaker brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner [Wyrmwood],” reports Greg Evans for Deadline.

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