NYFF: Cannes Winner "A Touch of Sin"

TFE’s coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sep 27-Oct 14) has begun. Here are Glenn and Jose with their takes on Cannes winner A Touch of Sin. 

Glenn: For whatever reason, Asian cinema doesn’t get too much exposure in cinemas over this side of the ocean. The discrepancy between words written about the subject and people actually seeing them is entirely out of whack, don’t you think? We all seem to hear about these fabulous movies from around the region and yet outside of a film festival it appears all but impossible to catch them, which makes these festivals so vital. Seems like a massive missed opportunity if you ask me, but then I don’t propose to know anything about the movie-watching habits of mainstream or arthouse audiences. I doubt a film like Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin will attract more than middling crowds upon its October 4th release date (curiously during New York Film Festival, so they’re surely cutting into their modest box office expectations already), but that would be expected for any 135-minute, violent indictment of rapid capitalism. One as formally rigid and didactic as this even more so. However much I wish it weren't the case.

It’s not a coincidence that Jia’s rise to prominence as the pre-eminent cinematic purveyor of modern day China began right about the time China began its rise as a global super-power. He’s likely China's finest examiner of the country’s industrial transformation with films such as Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life, fellow Cannes competitor 24 City and observational documentary Useless. With A Touch of Sin he’s taken to his homeland’s obscene capitalism and he's not acting subtle. Hello, one scene features a woman get mistakenly for a prostitute and subsequently assaulted with thick wads of cash! Still, it’s a technical marvel and has a propulsive edge if you give in to its peculiar structure. Jose?

Jose: A Touch of Sin might be one of the angriest movies made in recent years. Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes awarded by none other than Steven Spielberg, it is a bleak saga in which characters are connected through their disappointment and eventual violent revenge. Knives, guns and explosives are used indiscriminately to show how China is sinking into an endless pit of corruption and violence and – eek – there seems to be no way of stopping it.

Zhao Tao, Jia Zhang-ke's wife and A Touch of Sin's finest performance

This film takes place in a country where miners are forced to deal with old horses with whips while their employers parade around in Audis and brand new jets. A country where shooting someone in the head over their designer purse or fellating tourists while dressed up like a train conductor are simply means of making a living. There is no hopeful outcome in the movie and watching it proves to be an experience as harrowing as it is terrifying. Jia cleverly populates it with moments of dark humor, only to then hold a mirror to our faces and ask us if we know how much we’re contributing to this decay. It’s rare to see cinema – or art for that matter – so furious and bleak.

Glenn: Agreed. A Touch of Sin is a film that has grown exponentially in my mind since viewing it just a couple of days ago. The way images of tranquillity and brutality are beautifully juxtaposed thanks to cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, the way Giong Lim’s music underscores the imagery with throbbing harmonies, the way its ratcheting suspense and cathartic release duel for supremacy… it’s a towering achievement and a new, even more uber-provocative side of the filmmaker that NPR hailed "the most important filmmaker working in the world today." It is a tough watch, and its structure could easily infuriate, but seeks to constantly rattle the audience to its message.

James Franco, Disembodied

TFE's coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sept 27-Oct 14) begins now. Here's JA on James Franco's press conference for Child of God...

He came at us as a disembodied voice, booming across the auditorium. There was no face to behold - only his words. His Word? Was it the voice of God? I suppose that depends on your definition. If your definition of God is broad in scope (like, that scope includes all of matter itself) then maybe you find room under the umbrella of godliness for actor slash art-provocateur James Franco. It's really not that big a stretch - he is now the man behind the curtain in Oz, after all. There were no bursting flames or rear projection here, but when you plunk down to watch A James Franco Movie (which I find myself spending an increasing amount of my life doing) the specter of Franco always looms large, even if hes not up on the screen. (Especially if he's not up there on the screen.) It's kind of impossible to watch A James Franco Movie not through Franco-colored glasses. We are all living in James Franco's world... well at least we are when we're looking at it from his perspective.

From our perspective here at the New York Film Festival, where we've just finished screening Child of God, Franco's adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy story about nubile young lady corpses and the hillbilly who loves them, we're just staring at a blank screen. You can follow James Franco on Twitter and Instagram and at Vice.com, but a room full of press people can't seem to Skype with him directly. [MORE]

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Notes on the NYFF Main Slate

The full lineup of the New York Film Festival's Main Slate was released today. Though the film festival is famously curated and thus exclusionary (I still haven't forgiven them for thinking Rachel Getting Married, the best movie of 2008, was beneath us) this year's lineup is quite a bit larger than usual. Are their standards loosening or was there just too much quality to deny? In honor of the bigger than usual lineup, I thought I'd attempt 35 thoughts on the lineup but I ran out of time. Herewith 29 bullet points...

• Can The Wind Rises save this year's sure-to-be-dismal Best Animated Feature race that Oscars? It's been over ten years since the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki won the Oscar for Spirited Away (2001). His newest film is a biopic, excuse me a "visionary poem", about Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter. 

• Some titles just roll off the tongue. Consider... When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, a film from the director of Police, Adjective, which is about the life of a film director when the cameras aren't rolling. Except, we hope, the camera filming this movie because staring a blank screen wouldn't do.

• They describe that one as "fascinatingly oblique" which could well be film festival speak for "__________" (that's for you to fill in in the comments)

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It's a Wrap. October Highlights

We're doing this month's look back a bit differently. Though we wish all readers were year-round TFE maniacs, traffic always spikes during Oscar season so we welcome our fairweather friends back to us as we all link arms and beginning following that yellow brick red carpet road to the Wonderful Word of Oscars. In October we've been busy with plentiful limited series posts so here were some highlights from those batches.

NYFF
My single favorite moment of the NYFF is documented above. Shortly before The Paperboy screening for critics (with Nicole Kidman on hand afterwords to answer questions) the promo reel for the 50th anniversary of the festival froze on this image and stayed that way for minutes. I wasn't complaining. I like to look at her. As for the movies themselves, I was knocked out by three of the Best Foreign Language Films competing for Oscar: Austria's Amour, Chile's No and Bwakaw from the Philippines. Michael was dazzled by Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha with career best work from Greta Gerwig, and Denzel Washington's soon to be Oscar nominated performance in Flight. Meanwhile everyone was talking about Lincoln's Secret Debut "Secret" Debut including Team Experience on the Podcast.

007 Lists for 007 
Deborah has been getting us celebrating the 50th anniversary of the longest running film franchise with James Bond centric lists. Like her 007 favorite films or the *only* 007 femme fatales. And we're asking all of you to vote on your 007 favorites... LAST CHANCE. Voting ends tomorrow, November 1st.

Oscar Horrors
Team Experience was asked to choose from a list of every Oscar nomination bequeathed to the horror genre or thereabouts and write about it -- just one Oscar nomination per post. Pan's Labyrinth got you talking, Addams Family Values got us laughing again (I even watched it again because of the post), and we reminisced about creepy actressing in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Rebecca, The Spiral Staircase and Fatal Attraction to name just a handful of entries.

5 Random Favorite Posts
Which is Yummier?, "Lousy Lay", Guilt Trip Poster, Into the Woods reading and Monty meets Bernie

Happy November Everyone. Here's to the great (we hope) penultimate month of 2012 

NYFF: "Flight" & Denzel's Forthcoming 6th Oscar Nom

Michael C here having safely landed at the closing night of the New York Film Festival.

Nobody could have landed that plane like I did.”

That’s the mantra the Denzel Washington’s Captain Whip Whitaker repeats throughout Robert Zemeckis’ Flight to absolve himself of any guilt. He has a strong case to make. Nobody can deny that all ninety-six passengers on his plane would be dead were it not for his brilliant unorthodox piloting after the plane dropped into an uncontrolled dive without warning. But how does that heroism hold up when evidence begins to surface that Whitaker was not only several sheets to the wind that morning but also blasted on coke? Can he be both a national hero and a national disgrace? Does the former negate the latter? Would he have even attempted anything so crazy were he cold sober?

Understandably, Flight’s ad campaign focuses on the breathtaking crash material and on that score Zemeckis doesn’t disappoint. He delivers the most thrilling action sequence since the Dubai Tower scene in last year’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. What mass audiences may be surprised to discover is that the spectacle is only the opening act, the catalyst for a bruising character study. And despite some hiccups along the way it is an effective one. I don’t know screenwriter John Gatnis’s personal history but he has the addiction material down cold.

He's already got two but is a third on the way?I do not speak lightly when I say that this is one of Denzel Washington’s best performances. He elevates the material at every turn with a riveting, nuanced turn that is not the least bit concerned with whether or not we like this guy. Mostly we don't. There is a scene that should lock up Denzel’s sixth Oscar nod (and possibly his third win) where he mercilessly manipulates an attendant from the doomed flight into perjuring herself for his sake. I was going to write that his actions in the scene are shameless but actually it’s the opposite. The look on Whitaker’s eyes suggests the shame is eating him alive. 

Of course the other big headline here is that Flight marks Robert Zemekis’s first live action movie after a twelve-year stint as the premiere director of motion capture films for which the public was not clamoring. Surprisingly, his time away on the Island of Mocap Toys has actually appeared to increase his skill with small-scale human drama. It is tough to recall any dramatic moments from his previous films as powerful as the best moments in Flight. Maybe all those hours spent watching actors in lycra suits emote at ping pong balls on sticks left him hungry for the simple elegance of actors acting on a real live set. 

I would love to report that at all of Flight were as good as its best moments, but the film can't keep out of its own way. The screenplay saddles itself with a creaky subplot involving Whitaker’s relationship with a recovering addict he meets at the hospital (Kelly Reilly, fine in an ill-conceived part) so we can touch on a lot addiction cliches that were not going missed. The film would veer into melodrama more than once were it not for Washington's skill and restraint. On top of this a layer of clunky religious symbolism is piled on with all the subtlety of the plane crash sequence, literally so when the wing of the plane shears the steeple off a church on the way down. It’s almost as the filmmakers were worried they were being too smart for too long, and threw in some broad, obvious strokes so as not to leave the slower viewers behind. There is especially apparent in Flight's reliance on cringingly on-the-nose music cues throughout: John Goodman’s smarmy drug pusher is accompanied by “Sympathy for the Devil”, Washington pours booze down the sink to “Ain’t No Sunshine”, and so on. 

So Flight squanders some its impact with a few hamfisted moves. That is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Denzel's performance alone justifies a trip to the theater, and when you factor in the tiptop supporting cast, the thrilling crash sequence and story that rings true whenever it can find its groove and you’ve got what amounts to a compelling mixed bag. Just don’t expect smooth flying the whole way through. B-

More NYFF
Amour & No Two Strong Foreign Oscar Contenders
Holy Motors Must See Madhouse
Lincoln's Noisy "Secret" Debut
The Bay An Eco Conscious Slither
The Paperboy & the Power of Nicole Kidman's Crotch 
Room 237 The Cult of The Shining's Overlook Hotel  
Bwakaw is a Film Festival's Best Friend
Frances Ha, Dazzling Brooklyn Snapshot
Barbara Cold War Slow Burn
Our Children's Death March 
Hyde Park on Hudson Historical Fluff

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