NYFF: The Florida Project

by Jason Adams

When I was eight years old my mother and I finally moved out of the room we had been renting since my parents had divorced into our own house. The house was so small the movers had to break our bed-frame in half to get it up the staircase, but it was ours. A house! A home. The day after we moved in the police showed up at our door and took my mother away - in order for us to get our own place she had stolen money from the laundromat she worked at. I went and lived with my grandmother for awhile after that.

I take films about poverty as a deeply serious business...

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NYFF: "Spielberg" the Documentary

by Jason Adams

Before there was Hitchcock, before there was Michael Haneke and Todd Solondz and the Davids Cronenberg and Lynch, before Almodovar and Assayas and Campion herself, there was Steven Spielberg. A Jewish kid from the suburbs of Arizona who threw a malfunctioning shark robot into the Pacific Ocean and changed the movie business, he was My Guy. I saw Jurassic Park twelve times in the theater in the Summer of 1993 - I read my first Pauline Kael review for him. Steven Spielberg changed the movie business and his movie business changed my life.

Spielberg the documentary, on the other hand, isn't changing any business any time soon...

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NYFF: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

Team Experience is at the New York Film Festival. Here's Manuel Betancourt on Noah Baumbach's new film, coming to Netflix on October 13th.

If the title hadn't clued you in just yet, Noah Baumbach's latest frames itself as a collection of short stories. Explaining this structure at a press screening during the New York Film Festival, the Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale director said it had helped him create these discrete "stories" that together would tell a larger narrative about this (you guessed it) dysfunctional family.

We first meet Danny (Adam Sandler in full Punch Drunk Love mode), a middle-aged man who can't help but get needlessly irritated at the parking situation in New York as he heads to visit his father with his college-bound daughter in tow (Grace Van Patten, a revelation). Harold (Dustin Hoffman), who now lives with Maureen (Emma Thompson, having a ball in a much broader comedy than the melancholy film around her), is a sculptor who's made a modest name for himself. Jaded by the world, full of himself, self-assured of his scathing opinions about other people's work, Harold is an oppressive force, the kind of man whose ego all but fills the room...

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NYFF: Norway's Oscar Submission "Thelma"

by Jason Adams

Sometimes a critic can't help but interject him or herself into a review, and Joaquim Trier's Thelma is one of those times for me. Thelma tells the story of a young woman from a cripplingly religious family who goes off to college and starts having epileptic seizures that coincide with an awakening of same-sex longings. Meanwhile I'm the homosexual son of an epileptic and was raised in a speak-in-tongues Pentecostal church. Needless to say I felt Thelma, you guys.

So much that it's hard to divorce myself critically to see the forest for the dead birds dropping down among the trees. Trier gets so many precise details so right that I know from my own specific, particular life experience - the warm waves of excitement and guilt at discovering drink and swear-words when you first leave home; the way an epileptic seizure can be a sudden horrific tearing open of reality itself's seams -  that I'm more than willing to go along with anything he does, even when it is sometimes a hint too austere for its own good.

It's hard to say something that features a woman deep-throating a python - but you know, in a sexy way - remains austere, but Trier manages. He is Norwegian, after all. Thelma is an ice pond of a film floating over fiery little volcanic eruptions - like its protagonist (an exquisitely conflicted Eili Harboe) Thelma is Fire & Ice, Passion & Repression, a Freudian phantasmagoria strapped into a cool silk blouse.

NYFF: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Before We Vanish"

by Jason Adams

I want you to close your eyes. I want you to close your eyes, and picture Love. Not Valentine's Day Heart Cards or little sugary candies that say Eat Me, and not the faces of the people you've held hands with on cold afternoon walks, although the latter will probably help you on your way of getting there. I want you to picture the entire concept of Love. The warmth and the palpable agony of it - the electricity of fingertips and further parts intertwining and entangling, and the aftershock of separation - the whole dang lot.

Now I want you to imagine the violence of all of that being torn out of your body...

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