NYFF: 12 Years a Slave

The New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct 14) is in its last few days; here's JA's thoughts on Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave.

The free man turned slave Solomon Northrup's been sent on a trip to the grocer by the mistress of the plantation. He's to get something or other. He walks down the dirt path dutifully... until he doesn't - he darts into the woods, quickly, making pains to not be seen. His brow bursts with sweat. He dodges around trees, through vines, and he runs, and runs. We've been waiting for this moment, for his nerve to snap, for the surrounding wilderness to swallow him up and carry him back to his family up North.

If only freedom were that simple. No, simplicity belongs to the other side here. Evil comes easy. Around every corner, behind every hedgerow, a hangman. A crowd surrounding two black men, strung up. There is to be no escape - just a trip to the grocer, picking up something or other, or else. The two black men yank up into the air furiously, twitching to death, and so Solomon moves on, which is all he can do - that, or hang, twitching to death in the strange surrounding wilderness of this nowhere nothing place where he doesn't belong.

But then it's not quite a nowhere nothing place, though the plantations are all rendered as any muddy backyard anyplace, thick with moss and turned-soil stretching out - it's a specific time, and a specific place, and a specific horror where Solomon Northrup finds himself imprisoned. And to say he doesn't belong implies that anyone there does - that his birthright on one side of a line drawn on a map renders him different from the souls he now stands and suffers beside. 12 Years a Slave knows better and muddies up every distinction - freedom's just a word, its meaning rendered by the person who says it or doesn't say it, so easily snuffed out in a world built upon institutionalized indifference laid over bottomless cruelty. To say one man's a little bit better than another only seems to mean he'll push the problem, you being the problem, off on someone else - you're gonna hang either way.

To say that Steve McQueen's film renders the unfathomable brutality of this period in our history tangible in a way that I've never seen captured on-screen before is both an understatement (for one it makes the cavalier jokiness of Tarantino's Django Unchained seem terrifically misguided, to put it nicely, in retrospect) and a bit of a side-step - it does that but it somehow, miraculously, does so through inclusivity. This is not a film that pushes you away, even as it renders you breathless by its terror. We become one with Solomon. That's on Chiwetel Ejiofor's flawless and open performance of course, but also McQueen's direction and John Ridley's script, which never feel the need to force us any which way but to what's suddenly, inescapably, right in front of us. The commonness of the horror, the ease of it - it's all just so simple here, the way you can turn a corner and find freedom replaced by a sack over your head and your toes scratching at the mud, as you gasp for one last strangled breath.

The scars, by the way, never go away. The ghosts neither. We might crumple into the arms of the people who love us, or we might crumple into the dirt a battered rag doll of a person, but we're all gonna fall. It's as graceless as it is inevitable. It is what comes after that means to survive. And then, after that too. And always, the after, that's all there is, stretching scarred out towards infinity, and falling some more.

NYFF: 'Manakamana' and 'Costa da Morte'

The New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct 14) is in its last few days; here's Glenn's thoughts on Manakamana and Costa de Morte.

I admire the NYFF’s commitment to what they deem the “avant-garde”. Extensive programming in this sidebar make it a rarity amongst modern high profile festivals. NYFF features no “midnight madness” section for horror, and comedies were few and far between, but if you’re interested in movies that the general public consider “boring” and “strange” then NYFF is for you. I unfortunately did not get to catch more than a very small sampling, but what I did manage to see was enticing and illuminating.

Two of these that make a compelling double feature are Manakamana and Costa da Morte? Both are very sparingly shot examinations of a natural landscape that has likely never seen before by most western audiences. The former, isn't actually a part from the avant-garde showcase, although it really ought to be, comes from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, responsible for such daring and captivating cinema as Sweetgrass and this year’s Leviathan. From directors Stephanie Spay and Pacho Velez, Manakamana lacks the immediate gut-punch reaction that those other two had. It works more or less like an omnibus film, featuring eleven mini-films taken from within the cablecars that take worshippers to the titular mountaintop temple.

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The many faces of Tom Hanks

It’s Tim, here on the eve of Captain Phillips getting released for all the world to enjoy, to ponder the career of its star Tom Hanks. For this movie (and Saving Mr. Banks later in the year, to lesser degree) represents a kind of comeback, for a movie star that never seemed like he needed one; and yet the buzzy, well-received thriller is lining up to be the first largely successful vehicle that Hanks has had in years. Larry Crowne sank without a trace; Angels & Demons impressed nobody and was hardly a “Tom Hanks movie” in the first place. And that already puts us more than half a decade in the past. An odd fate for the man who seemed so unavoidable in the ‘90s and into the ‘00s.

But anyway, 2013 is shaping up to be a big year for the actor, so what better opportunity to look back over some of the best performances of an actor who, though he always seems to regress to an everyday nice fella stock type, has boasted a bit more shading and nuance than that. These are my picks for some of Hanks’s best work – and no, you won’t see either of his Oscar-winning roles here.

Early, wacky comedies
Having made his name in the world of TV sitcoms, it’s hardly shocking that virtually all of Hanks’s big screen roles in the 1980s were an extension of the broadly amusing, family-friendly material that he’d worked with there. The best of these roles, by far, is as the adult incarnation of Josh Baskin in Big, the iconic Penny Marshall film about a preteen who wishes to grow up and does so overnight. Concepts don’t come much higher, nor comedy much less edgy, than that, and yet the film hasn’t lost an ounce of its charm despite a quarter of a century in which its goofiness could have easily been reduced to kitsch.

Almost all of its success relies on Hanks, who happily resists from playing up the most obvious elements of the part (can you imagine circa-’88 Robin Williams in the part? Yeesh). Instead, he plays the part weirdly straight, keeping a childish sense of confusion just close enough to temper the childlike wonder, and finding comedy through being honest to the character, instead of mugging.

Romantic comedies
Two of the films that paired Hanks with Meg Ryan are generally regarded as, if not “classics”, appealing time-wasters. But it’s the first and most obscure, Joe Versus the Volcano from 1990, that gets my pick as the best, and even more as the best work Hanks himself did in the trio. It’s half black comedy, half cartoon, and extensively reliant on having a rock-steady everyman in the middle to anchor its whimsies. This may in fact be the first movie to extensively and successfully trade on Hanks’s “Heck, I’m just a middle American guy like everyone else” persona, and undoubtedly my favorite of all the roles where he played that aspect up. It’s not incredibly sophisticated or probing, but it’s exactly what the film requires, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

Earnest Oscarbait
Back-to-back Oscars couldn’t translate into a third consecutive nomination for Apollo 13, but compared to the breast-beating Importance of his work in Philadelphia (he’s not even my pick for best male lead of that film, let alone that year), and the aggressively corny hero of Forrest Gump, I absolutely find his portrayal of real-life astronaut Cmdr. James Lovell to be much more rewarding, if only because it is more human-sized. The trademark Hanks friendliness is in full bloom here, leavened by the character’s prickly military background, and both come out frequently in the more domestic early part of the film, but the most impressive acting all comes after the titular vessel has entered disaster movie territory, and Hanks has to play both mortal terror for the audience and the denial of mortal terror for the other actors, and a palpable sense of loss that underlines both. Apparently, playing regular folk stressing out about being adrift in space brings out the best in all sorts of actors.

Elder statesman
I think it was Saving Private Ryan – the first of three performances for Steven Spielberg – that pushed Hanks from affable leading man to beloved cottage industry, and the movies he made in its wake have a tendency to be a bit more idiosyncratic than the ones before. Though unlike many actors hitting their “interesting work for interesting directors” phase, Hanks never moved too terribly far away from crowd-pleasers (except for the Coen brothers film The Ladykillers, one of those movies for which the word “interesting” takes on an especially euphemistic tone). The showiest of these roles, but also the most accomplished, was as the anchor of Robert Zemeckis’s one-man show Cast Away, where Hanks not only had to keep our attention for two hours virtually alone, he had to suggest his character’s gradual descent into isolation-driven madness in a way that was still fun to watch. Because Hollywood dross or not, nobody wants to see a Zemeckis/Hanks picture with a serious depiction of madness. Plus, it’s due entirely to his efforts that a volleyball has one of the most heartbreaking death scenes of the 2000s, and if that’s not terrific movie star acting, I don’t know what to call it.

So those are mine – what are your favorite Tom Hanks performances? Share with us in comments!

Documentaries: Officially Too Much of a Good Thing?

Glenn here. After decades of trying to attain the same critical and cultural awareness as feature films, it appears documentaries are now suffering from a case of too much of a good thing. We’re in a day and age where documentaries are so common that it’s impossible for the Academy’s documentary branch to keep up. Apparently 151 docos have been submitted - an average of three a week! - for this year’s Oscars and just like Diane Keaton, something’s gotta give. 

Last year the Academy set up a secret online forum of sorts for documentary branchmembers so they could post recommendations of titles to help whittle down the number of contenders. “Nobody’s recommended that anthopological documentary about North Atlantic fishermen? Fine, I’ll just watch Blackfish.” I like the idea in concept, but Leviathan was highly acclaimed so what then? Admittedly, it would be nice if they devised a year-round system that didn't require voters to watch a glut of 150 films in just a few months. It certainly can't be doing the films any favours. And yet they’ve fought hard for docos to get cinema releases and to have a prominent place at the Oscars and in the general discussion of film so, really, maybe they shouldn’t be complaining?

I can’t imagine this year’s mystery Oscar forum ignoring the likes of Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (already shipped to voters), Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish, music docos like Morgan Neville's Twenty Feet from Stardom (the year's highest grossing non-comedy/pop concert doc) and Greg Camalier's Muscle Shoals, Joshua Oppenheimer's controversial The Act of Killing, Teller's Tim's Vermeer, American Promise by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson (reviewed at NYFF), Martha Shane & Lana Wilson's After Tiller, Alex Gibney's The Armstrong Lie, Eroll Morris' The Unknown Known, Rick Rowley's Dirty Wars, Zachary Heinzerling's Cutie and the Boxer and Roger Ross Williams' God Loves Uganda to name a bunch. It is too much to ask they check out the four-hour At Berkeley? See how great this category is nowadays? This branch has the exact opposite problem to the animated film category!

It's easy to assume certain titles they won't pay attention to at all, but which audiences should be adviced to seek out. They're rarely attracted to cinematic figure fronted docs like Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, Jeffrey Schwarz's I Am Divine or Rodney Ascher's Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.. Nor do they care for the many niche fashion docos that are released every year like Matthew Miele's Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's or Fabien Constant's Mademoiselle C. How about festival hits, the eligibility of which remains in limbo with us until a formal list is announced. There's Stephen Silha, Eric Slade & Dawn Logsdon's Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton, Jehane Noujaim's The Sqaure (reviewed at NYFF) and Rathy Panh's astonishing The Missing Picture, which will also compete for Cambodia in the foreign language category. 

I could go on and on. These were just the high profile titles. Then there are the small titles that inevitably weasel their way into the category based on the strength of their filmmaking. Remember the Weinstein’s won for Undefeated despite it making little impact at the box office. Are you looking forward to this year's documentary race? I think it's always going to be exciting when there are so many high profile, high quality efforts. I expect the critics prizes are going to go fairly evenly between Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing, but what are your favourites of 2013 so far?

Furthermore, the Academy have announced the eight documentary shorts that will compete at next year's awards. They are:

• CaveDigger, Karoffilms
• Facing Fear, Jason Cohen Productions, LLC
• Jujitsu-ing Reality, Sobini Films
• Karama Has No Walls, Hot Spot Films
• The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, Reed Entertainment
• Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall, Prison Terminal LLC
• Recollections, notrac productions
• SLOMO, Big Young Films and Runaway Films

Any eagle-eyed readers seen either of them?

Link Flood

Slant Gravity, IMAX, and the horrors of front row seating
The Guardian a Carrie promotion stunt here in NYC. Imagine seeing this in real life.
The Verge the original teaser trailer to Star Wars is curiously light on Han Solo
Variety Destin Cretton, hot off the empathetic and special Short Term 12 may direct Glass Castle based on the bestseller with Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role
Deejay Italia Cher on Italian television calls Madonna a "magic bitch"

My New Plaid Pants Bubble Boy and Prisoners? Twins!
Boy Culture Josh Hutcherson is "mostly" straight
CHUD undeterred by those Prometheus reviews, Ridley Scott is moving ahead with Blade Runner 2 and may bring Harrison Ford along with him
/Film Darren Aronofsky promises huge complicated visual effects for his biblical epic Noah ... does that mean Matthew Libatique can finally win a cinematography Oscar? (that question is inspired by this recent divisive post on Gravity)
/Variety Toni Collette romantic comedy Lucky Them gets a distributor. This is how massive the TIFF selection  is each year. I did not even know that Toni, one of my very favorite actors, even had a movie playing there!

Finally, /Film shares the shortlists for the new Fantastic Four cast. The weird thing is that though I like nearly every actor and actress mentioned I think most of them are pretty terrible choices for those roles. Except for maybe Margo Robbie as Sue Storm. Interesting that her career is suddenly hot after a failed tv show (Pan Am). It's gotta be buzz about her sexcapades in The Wolf of Wall Street, right? I think my problem in picturing a successful Fantastic Four movie is that that comic book property has, like Wonder Woman, a retro feel. I don't mean that as a bad thing but Hollywood definitely does and they're always worry about how to young down that type of property. But that doesn't work. Some things are just "square" you know, to use an antiquated term. They need to think more along the lines of that bang-up job Marvel did interpreting Captain America for the 21st century by rooting him first so boldly in the early 20th century where he feels so natural.