Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 7:00PM Mean Girls Week Begins! For the next seven days (betwixt the normal blogging) we'll be dropping in occasionally on the students of North Shore High to celebrate 10 years of Mean Girls which opened April 30th, 2004.
For now please to enjoy this very pink gallery with a lavender note from Damian...
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 3:00PM Episode 17 of 52 of Anne Marie's chronological look at Katharine Hepburn's career.
In which Tracy and Hepburn explode on screen in a dynamic maelstrom of celluloid chemistry.
What sparks great star chemistry? Katharine Hepburn, an actress who was all angles and independence, bottled that lightning not once, but twice, with two men who were polar opposites: Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy. Near the end of Bringing Up Baby, Grant’s character tells Katharine Hepburn “...in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments.” This stuttering sentence sums up the banter-based rapport between Hepburn and Grant that played through their four films together. Watching Grant and Hepburn is watching two master comedians play a scene - glamorous, theatrical, loud, and wonderful. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are the complete opposite: authentic, intimate, sexy, and sweet.
Woman of the Year, the first Tracy/Hepburn film, is full of those “moments of quiet” abolished from Bringing Up Baby. But, oh! how loud a quiet moment can be! The electricity crackling through those moments between Kate and Spencer isn’t born of perfect comedic timing or a well-written script. It is one of those undefinable energies, like the always elusive “star quality,” that you know as soon as it hits you like a bolt of lightning.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 1:00PM Tribeca Film Festival Coverage continues. Here's abstew on a Kevin Spacey doc
"That's why the film is called 'Now', it's not just the first word spoken at the beginning of the play, but it was meant to evoke that immediacy of live theatre. It's happening right now, in front of you," director Jeremy Whelehan said to a packed audience at the world premiere of his documentary film Now: In the Wings on a World Stage.
The film chronicles The Bridge Project, a transatlantic theatre company that was a collaboration of the British Old Vic (which for the past 10 years has had two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey at the helm as Artistic Director) and New York's BAM, and the last production the company performed, Richard III. The documentary (which Spacey also produced) goes behind the scenes of director Sam Mendes' production of the Shakespeare work about the deformed, power-hungry king and the year long, globe-spanning journey of its company of players. Spacey and the entire cast were on hand to introduce the film and stayed afterward for a discussion moderated by legendary anchorman Charlie Rose. [More...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 11:00AM 
The Chinese industrial revolution has been very good for a lot of people. It just so happens that many of them are not the laborers and villagers that personified the nation of one billion people for centuries. It’s perhaps ironic that this capitalist boom has been so good for the nation’s filmmakers – political upheaval being a common factor in many a nation’s cinematic resurgence – and the dichotomy between rich and poor has allowed filmmakers like Black Coal, Thin Ice’s Diao Yi’nan to prosper and foster global recognition. It’s this same reason than Jia Zhangke has risen to the stature that he has, frequently hailed as China’s greatest filmmaker, or certainly on his way to being so, after little more than a decade of festival and arthouse prominence.
The works of Jia Zhangke linger over the proceedings of the Berlin Golden Bear winner Black Coal, Thin Ice. That director’s ability to wrap engaging stories of human loneliness, loss and heartbreak in evocative political contexts and the themes of his home country is what has made him a mainstay on the festival circuit. When reviewing Jia’s last film, the exceptional A Touch of Sin, from the New York Film Festival I called him the “pre-eminent cinematic purveyor of modern day China”, and the noir-inspired anger that permeated that film is there again in Diao Yi’nan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice.
This film, shorter and likely more accessible than Zhangke’s most high profile titles, is imbued with a wicked sense of humor that allows its more dark and gruesome elements to never suffocate the viewer. While the murder investigation that kicks off immediately over the opening credits eventually leads to grotesque discoveries of body parts and personal revelations as well as an act one blood bath shootout in a hair salon, it’s actually much less dour and gruesome as one may expect. That sly humor continues throughout right up to the final sequence, a final sequence that will likely go down as the best film ending of the year with its swirl of fireworks (the film’s original title, Bai ri yan huo, translates as “daylight fireworks”) and comical firemen playing over the climax of a crime story.
The plot of Black Coal, Thin Ice is standard film-noir: there is a body, a boozing detective (Liao Fan), a femme fatale (Gwen Lun-Mei, whose working class looks will temporarily make you forget that in the 1930s she’d be played by someone in the Barbara Stanwyck school of dangerous beauties), a secret, a double-cross, and all sorts of other nastiness. Bathed in gorgeous greys and neon, this is a stunningly attractive movie with several sequences that made my eyes pop in particularly a transition from 1999 to 2004 in an underpass and a snow-covered freeway is novel and beautiful. Cinematographer Dong Jinsong’s work actually reminded me of Bruno Delbonnel’s work on Inside Llewyn Davis and Roger Deakins’ work on Fargo in the way he manipulates the snowy landscapes into a series of dark, yet beautiful tableaus.
Whatever it was that the Chinese censors saw (or, more aptly, didn’t see) in Black Coal, Thin Ice that allowed it the cinema release that Jia Zhangke wasn’t afforded with A Touch of Sin, I’m glad Chinese audiences have been able to watch yet another fine example of their ace film industry. It almost feels like a coup for the Tribeca Film Festival to get the chance to screen Diao’s film so soon after its double win at the Berlinale (it also won Best Actor for Liao) and audiences would be mad to not seek it out. And while you’re at it, make a bleak, but beautiful double feature with A Touch of Sin. They’re two peas in a pod with their mounting tension, impressive use of music and textural imagery to create mood, and refreshingly exciting looks at a modern day China.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 9:01AM Reporting again from Tribeca, here's Jason on the Tiger-winning Something Must Break from Swedish director Ester Martin Bergsmark.
Xavier Dolan directing a remake of Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons is what occurred to me about halfway into the Swedish transgender love-story-of-sorts Something Must Break, although I think I probably do director Ester Martin Bergsmark's film a disservice setting it up against the lofty cinema I excitedly imagine that project could be. (Somebody send Xavier a note, please.) As for what the film really is, while it's spiked with moments of aggression and punk (especially in the terrific final moments) it's more intent to drift on languid pauses, hushed tones, and Instagram filters - think Weekend on smack.
Something Must Break tells the tale of Sebastian turning into Ellie while simultaneously falling in love with Andreas, a boy whose outer Sid Vicious masks a more gooey James Dean trustafarian center. Simultaneously or maybe because of - the push and pull of Andreas' needs (which Andreas can't even seem to comprehend himself) seems to spark Sebastian to action, and the film's at its most interesting when his inner Ellie begins making herself known, most especially in moments of defiance. The film does nearly wring a tear or two out of Andreas' blind self-absorbtion and cruel confusion, and I did dig the way the process of Sebastian's transformation was more just a shift of perspective, as if light began hitting a diamond from a different angle.
But it's the sort of movie that feels like an extended first act - I was more interested in where Ellie was going than where I'd just watched her wander from. I wanted to see that diamond cut glass.
LGBT, Tribeca Film 