Trailers for Work #1 - The Art of Reinvention: Paul Thomas Anderson & His Influences

Those of you who know me personally are aware that I've been applying my cinema nerd powers for almost three years doing promotion and publicity at Portland's own Northwest Film Center. Over the past year, I've begun to cut trailers for some of our curated series content. Here's one that I made for our upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson + influences series, which I also collaboratively programmed with my co-worker Morgen Ruff.

Hope you enjoy it. It's the fifth trailer I've made so far for the Film Center and it feels like they're getting better with each successive attempt. And maybe you'll want to come out to the series, too, which I think is fairly awesome.

The Art of Reinvention: Paul Thomas Anderson & His Influences runs  Friday, July 24th through Sunday, September 6th at the Northwest Film Center.  More info available here.

 

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THE BEST OF 2012: THE TOP 5

#5 Holy Motors (dir. Leos Carax):

Wiry French character actor Denis Lavant has been on my radar ever since his impressive contribution to Claire Denis' masterpiece Beau Travail.  His work in Holy Motors, overseen by long time collaborator/director Leos Carax, has yielded one of his best performance to date, as well as what might be the oddest film since David Lynch last made a feature (count 'em, six long years ago).  Lavant plays Monsieur Oscar, an actor of sorts driven around Paris as he prepares to play various roles in the back of white limousine.  At the end of each stage of his journey, Oscar emerges an entirely different beast, ranging from a cold killer to a bag lady, a deranged caveman, and beyond.  

Throughout Holy Motors, there are clues and reflexive statements aligning the seemingly random journey to a larger commentary on film as a technologically-based medium going through what is either a growth spurt or the beginnings of a death rattle.  At the same time, one can easily read the same cues as a statement on identity.  Carax has designed a film that is open to competing interpretations and even enjoyable if no attempts at analysis are made at all.  Has there been a more interesting and weird use of motion capture technology this year (or ever)?  I think not.  To quote a woman who saw the same screening I attended: "can anybody explain to me what THAT was about?"

Holy Motors is currently still in theaters.  Hit up Mr. Movie Times for details of when and where.


#4 The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson):

Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't usually swim in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to story.  But with The Master, he's produced a film that barely seems interested in its own plot, choosing to devote excessive amounts of time to being present with its characters while slowly abandoning thread after thread of story they inhabit.  Luckily, Anderson's provided the audience with two of the more interesting characters he's ever drawn in Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  The static created between these two men says more about what The Master truly is than any piece of exposition or connect-the-dots plotting ever could.  They are the story.

Read my review of The Master here.

The Master is scheduled for release on DVD & Blu-ray on February 26th.


#3 Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold):

Here's the rare costume drama that never feels stodgy in the least.  Still, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights may test the patience of many viewers with its stubborn (or is it thrilling?) insistence on depicting a world without modern distractions.  However, those willing to wait it out 'til the bitter end will be amply rewarded with an exquisitely rendered take on timeless themes found both within and outside of the source material.  Wuthering Heights only furthers the suspicion that Arnold will eventually be counted as one of our greatest filmmakers.
 
Read my review of Wuthering Heights here.

Wuthering Heights is currently unavailable on DVD & Blu-ray in Region 1.  It will presumably be release on home video sometime in 2013 in the U.S.


#2 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi):

Back in April, I wrote that, "I don't think I've seen a more affecting documentary this year than Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi's 5 Broken Cameras."  It's still true.  There hasn't been a week all year that I haven't thought about this film at least once.  I could say a lot more about it, but, really, everyone should just watch it instead.

Read my review of 5 Broken Cameras here.

5 Broken Cameras is scheduled for release on DVD on January 15th.


#1 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan):

I viewed Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia just before it screened at last year's Portland International Film Festival.  I knew that night that there was little chance that I'd encounter another film that could top it in 2012, despite there being ten months left in the year.  When writing about it later, I hinted that the plot of the movie is a diversion from what the film is actually about.  Most films about a search for a body at night wouldn't stray far from the urgency of that charge.  Ceylan's film turns the floodlights directly on the men carrying out the search.   

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia tells us more about those men than anything related to the crime being investigated.  A completely original, utterly patient, and truly satisfying tale.  It's a stone-cold masterpiece; one for the ages.

 

Read my review of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia here. 

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is currently available on DVD & Blu-ray and can be streamed via Netflix.

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THE MASTER: TWO MEN, LOST AT SEA

A transcendent image of a glassy blue and roiling sea appears before us three times during Paul Thomas Anderson's latest and most-challenging picture, The Master.  On each occasion, it offers to swallow us whole, dragging us into its chaos, perhaps joining our turbidity with its own swirling, constantly shifting mass.  This vision ends up painting a perfect analogue for the film's two chief characters, both of which have the potential for casting themselves wildly into the abyss, driven by something dark at the center of their being.

Forget what you've heard: The Master isn't (necessarily) about Scientology.  Yes, the character of Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) absolutely takes its inspiration from the figure of L. Ron Hubbard and there are many similarities between Hubbard's organization and Dodd's The Cause scattered throughout the film.

The real story being told here is about the uneasy connection formed between an alcoholic drifter named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Hoffman's Dodd.  Without these two halves of the same soul, there is no film, something which Anderson goes to great lengths to ensure, fragmenting and suppressing most every nod to conventional or sustained storytelling in order to reduce the film down to a basic stew comprised of these men, their similarities, and the different directions in which they are headed.

The aptly named Quell is a World War II naval veteran cast adrift after his experiences in the war.  He's drinking too much (concocting potions out of fuel, paint thinner, or whatever he can lay his hands upon) and running from the consequences of having poisoned a man with his home brewed liquor; he tells Dodd that you have to know how to "drink it smart."  The truth is that Freddie is recklessly careening through life when he drunkenly stumbles onto a seagoing vessel containing Dodd, his wife (Amy Adams) and family, and a boatload of his followers.

Upon regaining consciousness, Freddie becomes drawn into Dodd's orbit, undergoing the questionable manipulations of his "screenings," and becoming an unpredictable and volatile protector against anyone who dares to defy the older man's quasi-religious rhetoric.  There's little indication that Freddie believes or even understands what The Cause stands for and so, since it is mostly through his eyes which we view the film, neither do we.  In fact, if the film passes judgment at all on the charismatic Dodd's belief system, it's when his son Val (Jesse Plemons) asks if Freddie can see that his father is "making it all up as he goes along," an accusation that Freddie later lays at Dodd's doorstep.

For reasons not entirely pronounced by the film, Dodd takes this reckless heap of a man, blind animal-like behaviors and all, under his wing, trying to cure him while simultaneously delighting in some of Freddie's "magic potions;" a weakness that Dodd's wife discourages with a shockingly commanding sexual act.

It's within this contradiction that we're able to locate the duality expressed by these two characters; Dodd could clearly inhabit Freddie's position in life and jealously guards this truth compounded with the basic deception at the core of his trade, while Freddie hopelessly attempts to mask his disease and pain-even if it's plainly apparent to all who look upon him-expecting that no one should be able to question his path.  There's a shared essence of self-determination binding these men; as before, two halves of the same soul.

Where many viewers will have difficulty is with the pacing of the piece, as well as Anderson's resolve to allow the performances to trump the plotting of his film.  At nearly 2 1/2 hours long, The Master contains about an hour's worth of focused, conventional storytelling.  During those moments explored in Boogie Nights, since both films share observations on small sects performing transgressive social experiments way outside the mainstream.  But visually and, especially, in terms of its atmospherics, The Master is very much in tune with P.T.A.'s There Will Be Blood, albeit a far less immediate and darkly charming version of that 2007 piece.

This is an incredibly well made, slowly drawn out film that will likely bloom further on subsequent viewings.  One suspects that the experience will benefit the second time around, much as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life did, from being freed of the burden of trying to harmonize what's onscreen into an easily digestible story.  For now, though, the lack of moorage within the tale speaks volumes about the principal characters in this drama, articulating just how lost they are in their own private whirlwinds.

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