Reverse Shot

...the flashbacks aren’t organized in a manner that develops a thesis about Jakob’s progress or creates any sort of meaning. What matters is that they are there, that there’s a past strangling the present as in all good Canadian narratives, that our hero suffers, and that he’s on a path to acceptance presented in simplistic and condescending terms.

Working with nonprofessional actors, he elicits good performances from his cast, something De Palma wasn’t able to do with his stage actors in Redacted, even when he tried to harness their inabilities into a sort of B-movie alienation effect. The important difference lies in the reductive Southern psychopaths De Palma pawns off as his villains and the young, impoverished, and naïve men—more like grown boys—Broomfield shows as unwitting participants of a game they don’t fully understand.

Suffice it to say that such a wide-awake actor in the sort of role that too often countenances somnolence (recall Brandon Routh’s sulky Superman) was a very good idea (just as it was back in 1989 when Michael Keaton stepped into the Batsuit). To a certain extent, Downey is simply relying on shtick—the tongue-in-cheek motormouth act he perfected in (the near-perfect) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang—but it’s good shtick, anyway, and tough to begrudge in this context.

Harmony, whose new film Mister Lonely is about celebrity impersonators, closely studied the second half of Herzog’s career, when the German director’s considerable talents were eclipsed by the self-mythologizing center-staging of his own folk heroic persona (Narcissus-like, Herzog seems to have fallen in love with his own image seeing the rushes of Burden of Dreams), and mystery gave way to Werner Herzog’s Believe it Or Not. As with Herzog, whose much self-referenced “madness” and deliberate naiveté always came with an element of Hamletian calculation, it’s always been difficult to extrapolate just how much what Korine said was so much class clowning.

A “bottomless” swimsuit party hosted by Harold and Kumar’s friend Raza puts acres of waxed female groin on display, and though the target of the joke was evidently supposed to be the cheery debauchery in which their Arab friend gets to wallow in Miami, I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s more oppressive for a society to cover women from head to toe or to leave their genitalia baldly on view. (In either case, the women clearly lose.)

The "film versus digital" hand-wringing, of the object (the tangible, analog, 35mm filmstrip) opposed to the algorithmic concept (the data file, an intangible string of digits) is a monster indigenous to Southern California. The apparent contest between them is an ahistoric myth. In the grand scheme, the romance of photochemistry in moving images ended long ago.

Part of the obsessive, almost stubborn linearity that Lynch employs in telling his Straight Story—what Alvin himself refers to as “a story as old as the Bible”—stems from the director's own former insistence on adhering to linear, film-based editing technologies. Rather like Alvin, who abjures walker and automobile alike in favor of his own mode of transport, Lynch was, at least as late as Lost Highway, editing his films on a flatbed Kem system, rather than with the by-then standard Avid nonlinear editing setup.

Like a paring down to the genre’s purest essence, it was only a matter of time before the sex comedy—fueled by libido, the sting of sexual humiliation—was reduced to this. Some might try and recoup this as an enlightened embracing of the homoerotic subtext within so much contemporary mainstream entertainment, as the naked male gets as much screen time as the female traditionally has; instead, the double standard has been magnified.

A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful experience, Hou’s latest is a film like no other—in the simplicity of its lines, colors, and framing, and in the complexity of how those elements compound and contextualize its emotional subject matter, Flight of the Red Balloon can, in my mind, be compared to the works of Matisse.

This was not some elaborate exercise in deconstructing cinema, but rather, an after-effect of my training as a projectionist. I learned how to thread 35mm with a great print of the Hitchcock film, and focus the lens on the deep black of the spiraling credits sequence. After that, my picture of the film narrowed rapidly, because I was staring fixedly at where my changeover cues would eventually come, the upper-right-hand corner. For the record, in the first three reels, they happen when Jimmy Stewart is driving his car.