“Century of Birthing” is sort of like a twisted riff on “8 1/2,” were “8 1/2″ written by Hong Sang-soo and filtered through the relentless somnambulistic cinematography of Bela Tarr or Tsai Ming-Liang. Of course, that mishmash of name-dropping doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the singular style of Lav Diaz, but it’s a start. For a little more on his long-take low-budget style, feel free to go back and read my other post on Diaz, “Lav Goes Long.” In this post, I’ll be talking less about the style and more about the meat of the film itself, and what it meant to me. I spoil a lot of the plot, so beware.

“Century of Birthing” begins strikingly, with a baptism ritual. Several figures, all wearing white, stand in a stagnant body of water as a long-haired priest of some sort preaches about a House, Love, God, and the Universe. It develops into a song, sung in passionate histronics by all of the other cultists, with the repetitive refrain “We are all going to the Father’s House.”

The song re-emerges at least a half-dozen times throughout the film, and it becomes almost a running joke. Pretty much every time it is sung, the whole song is sung, in increasingly emotional renditions. Which could be bad, if it wasn’t so damn catchy. The first scene goes on for about six minutes in one interrupted take, and by the end, the girl has officially been baptized as a virgin of the House.

We are soon introduced to the parallel (and primary) plotline, the story of Filipino filmmaker Homer. This is where the movie starts to get meta. I’m not an expert on Diaz, but based on everything I do know and have seen in interviews and his films, Homer is a lot like him. Homer is uncompromising in his vision, unwilling to cut his long, black and white films despite outside pressures, talks a lot about the concept of cinema as though it were God/truth, has a poster of slow-cinema favorite Tsai Ming-Liang’s film “What Time is it There?” in his room, has long hair, etc. Not only that, but Homer’s unfinished film, “Woman of the Wind” (or alternatively, “Corporeal Histories”), is actually a real unfinished film by Lav Diaz. So they have more than a little bit in common.

The one thing that they don’t seem to share is work ethic. Homer is experiencing director’s block, unable to finish cutting his film even though all the footage has been shot. On the other hand, Diaz is one of the most prolific directors around, and has more success on the festival circuits than Homer seems to. Still, it is easy to see how very similar the two are, and there’s no doubt that he is a surrogate for Diaz on at least a basic level. Because of that, “Century of Birthing” feels very personal. Diaz is baring his artistic soul, and expressing some of his frustrations with the artistic process in the story of Homer, and with fundamentalism in the cult story. The tightrope act of the film is balancing these two stories, and bringing there themes closer and closer together until they finally collide at the end.

As this is Diaz’s film on what seems to be his favorite subject, cinema, he manages to cover a lot of ideological territory into the film’s brisk six hours. Of course, the story about Homer deals with the daily life of a filmmaker, the frustration, the stagnation, the triumphs, the losses. Homer’s friendship with a poet and call center manager provides the thrust for many of the film’s conversations about art, life, and subjectivity.

There is also a great segment in the middle of the film where Homer is being interviewed, and tackles the overuse of the word “pretentious” head on. As someone who has had many long conversations about that word, it had me laughing and nodding in agreement. This scene, among others where Homer waxes philosophical about cinema and subjectivity exhibit a reflexive self-awareness that I didn’t see in “Evolution of a Filipino Family”, pushing this film further into postmodern territory, but it also comes with the occasional bit of humor.

The story about the cult is more straightforward, and closer to what I would have expected from a Lav Diaz film. In short, it follows Sister Angela, the new inductee into the cult of Father Tiburcio mentioned earlier. The women in the cult, all virgins dressed in plain white clothes, mostly seem to sit around doing chores around the House and the surrounding natural area. They are visited one day by a photographer, who takes pictures and videos of them while they work.

The story shifts focus to the photographer for a while, as he engages in a lengthy conversation on art and photography with the only male member of the cult besides Father Tiburcio. The photographer ends up having sinister intentions, and rapes Sister Angela so that she is no longer a virgin, and thus can no longer be in the cult. It is a twisted moral logic that raises deep questions on the nature of observation and intervention.

The cult’s leader, Father Tiburcio, does not get a whole lot of screen time, but he is one of the film’s most intriguing characters. One of the most powerful moments appears mundane on the surface, as the Father is shown getting ready for his day at the bathroom mirror. It’s a great shot, showing him washing his hands and face and carefully putting on his long smooth wig, humanizing him, and in doing so, stripping him of the prophetic, God-like stature he has convinced the rest of the cult that he possesses. Shortly after banishing Sister Angela for no longer being a virgin, he kills himself by cutting his throat. It’s a visceral scene, and again hammers home the idea of him as being all-too-mortal, the weight of his own self-imposed grandeur seemingly becoming too much to bear.

This connection between corporal violence and religious spirituality extends to the film’s other narrative layer, “Woman of the Wind”. Although we don’t see the whole thing, we are treated to probably a good hour or so of Lav’s unfinished film. It seems just as polished and nuanced as any of his other films, so it’s a shame it never got finished. At its core, it follows the archetypal story of the ascetic who wants to experience life more fully. In this case, it is a nun who wants to have sex with a former convict, a scary-looking guy with a giant tattoo of Jesus on his chest. Not only does she want to have sex with him, but she wants to push her body to its absolute limits, which leads to a terrifying scene of genital mutilation later on. Although “Woman of the Wind”, and “Century of Birthing” on a whole, really, is filled with disturbing sequences like this one, there are also moments of great beauty. One of which is a young girl standing in a river, expounding Malick-y philosophical voice-over as ox-carts leisurely stroll by her.

It is an appealing shot in a gorgeous film. It is Diaz’s first shot in HD, and the upgrade in technology allows him to imbue his shots with a new sense of depth, with objects and landscapes obscuring often obscuring the field of vision. There is also an incredible shot of Sister Angela climbing up a hill, the camera following close behind her in one uninterrupted take. The fact that we can hear the cameraman breathing heavily somehow enhances the sense of realism, even if it is also kind of hilarious. If the cinematography has any weak point, there might be just one too many shots of people slowly walking up roads or paths towards the camera, but it’s a small gripe.

As it was in “Evolution”, the sound in the film is done in a very… unique style. Diaz chooses to leave in pretty much all ambient noises, including trains and airplanes, which sometimes makes the dialogue nearly impossible to hear (thank God for subtitles). For anyone else, I might call it lazy, but I think that Lav uses this to create the highest sense of realism possible and strip away the artifice of filmmaking, and for me it really works.

The film on a whole really works for me, and I think I prefer it to “Evolution of a Filipino Family”, but only by a little bit. Lav Diaz is really one of the most impressive and intelligent directors I’ve ever encountered, and I can’t wait to dive further into his work. The ending of the film, to me, felt like it signified a rebirth of inspiration, a new beginning borne of tragedy, and a demonstration of the maddening power of art. Bravo, Lav.

As is any self-respecting art form in the modern and post-modern era, film is often a self-reflexive medium. Whether it be in canonized classics like “Man with a Movie Camera” and “8 ½”, arthouse fare like “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” and “Ulysses Gaze”, or popular recent Oscar-winners like “The Artist” and “Argo”, filmmakers can’t seem to get enough of making stories that somehow revolve around the medium and industry of film.

Specifically in films about filmmakers, there are often characters who are surrogates from the filmmaker making the movie (post-modern as fuck!), as in the case of Guido Anselmi in “8 ½“ or Sandy Bates in Woody Allen’s riff “Stardust Memories”, or more literally, Charlie Kaufman in “Adaptation.” Of course, directors and writers constantly draw on their own experiences when making films, so it could be said that every character in a film has a little bit of its creator in them, and it also makes sense that at some point those creators make a film that deals directly with their profession. But perhaps no director has made more films that are so directly concerned with film and filmmakers than Hong Sang-Soo.

Hong Sang-soo is a key player in the recent Korean new wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, along with big players like Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, Kim Ki-Duk, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho. These filmmakers have made some of the best films of the 1990s and 2000s, and binging on their films was a turning point in my own level of interest in film as an art form. Being a teenager at the time, the films that intrigued me most were the dark, gritty, and often gruesome thrillers, which these directors do better than anyone else.

It wasn’t until this year that I saw my first film by Hong Sang-soo, and his work has much more in common with the talky, low-key relationship studies of Eric Rohmer than the crime thrillers of his contemporaries. Hong Sang-soo has a very particular style of filmmaking, that can be distilled into a few basic elements. All of them (at least from what I’ve seen, which is six of his films) are realistic relationship dramas, often with comedic elements, elliptical narratives, repetition of dialogue and situations, lots of recreational soju drinking, ex-lovers meeting up after long time apart and characters who are filmmakers, film professors or both. The more films I watch by him, the more threads I notice between them, and the more I feel like he is essentially making the same movie over and over again. But it’s a great movie, and his subtle tweaks to the formula make all the difference.

Possibly the most noticeable recurring element in his films is the motif of the filmmaker character. In literally every single one of his movies that I’ve seen, there is at least one (but often more) character(s) who is a director or film professor. It has become a sort of game to see when a character will announce in the movie that they are a director, and it almost seems to take on the air of a running joke, but that could be my projection. This trend is presented pretty strikingly in 2005’s “A Tale of Cinema”, a metafilm that deals with the disconnect between reality and film. The first half of the film is the story of a student tentatively rekindling a relationship with his ex-girlfriend. As this story ends, it turns out that it was a short film that was being watched by Tongsu, a filmmaker and former classmate of the director and star of the short film (Hong Sang-soo pulling a fast one by revealing that the character who we thought was a simple student was actually a writer and director. Classic.)

Things get more complicated when Tongsu meets the actress who plays the ex-girlfriend in the film, and proceeds to start a relationship through several scenes which eerily mirror the scenes of the short film he was obsessed with. The film is brilliant and has a lot to say about how we idealize people based on images we create of them and the role that film has to play in this dynamic, and it is just one of many examples of Hong Sang-soo using the medium of film as a window to explore broader themes by combining naturalistic acting and relationship dynamics with formalistic narrative structures.

But even in films like “The Day he Arrives” and “Our Sunhi”, films with no such narrative trickery, he still makes several of the characters directors and professors by trade. When asked in an interview about this, he flippantly answered, “I don’t think it’s that important, what kind of profession they have, is the biggest reason. I don’t know other people too much in other professions, so I just go for the profession I know.” Mystery solved.

Or is it? As much as his answer makes the trend seem like an afterthought, watching his films, especially those which deal directly with film as a medium like “A Tale of Cinema,” the recurrence of filmmaker characters creates a unique aesthetic and ideological experience. Film, by capturing and cementing a certain depiction of reality, has the unique power to create a fictional world that exists parallel to our own everyday reality. What I felt that “A Tale of Cinema” was getting at was that the world of film is almost always an idealized version of our own reality, and the real thing is always messier and more complicated than the neatness afforded by the medium of film. Hong Sang-soo’s movies are almost always a rejection of this idealization, and they are populated by characters who make mistakes, sleep with the wrong people, drink way much alcohol at strange times and have awkward encounters with friends and exes. In other words, real people.

Or at least closer to real people than most films get. The contrast of the realness of the characters and the idealizing, or “fantasizing”, aspect of many of these characters’ professions, seems to emphasize the disconnect in a really clever and thoughtful way. The way that Hong Sang-soo fills his movies with moments of embarrassment, bad behavior, and awkward relationships, and manages to find humor and pathos among all of these relatable situations, makes him one of the most exciting directors I’ve ever seen, despite his movies being essentially the same thing over and over again. The low-key, off-kilter worlds he creates are endlessly appealing and singular. His films use artifice to self-consciously dismantle the artifice of film, and do so in a highly pleasing and entertaining way. Of all the films made about film, Hong Sang-soo’s may be the best.

It’s been a while since I last posted, but that’s because I’ve been watching a lot of movies. Long movies. I’ve watched bunch of long movies this year overall, from the intimate 3-hour opus “Yi Yi”, to the 4-hour mindfuck “Love Exposure”, to the dense 4.5 hour “Historie(s) du Cinema”. But longest of all, and the single longest movie I’ve ever seen, was “Evolution of a Filipino Family,” Lav Diaz’s 10.5-hour epic.

I’m not sure exactly how to summarize the plot of a film like this, but it essentially follows the story of a clan of Filipino farmers in the politically turbulent 1970s and 80s. Its official runtime varies, but the version I saw was 630 minutes. I watched it in three different sessions, ranging from 2 to 5 hours. Not as ideal as watching it all in one go, but life got in the way.

When talking about long movies, especially one as long as this, it is easy to get hung up on the run-time. 10 hours! That’s nearly a full day gone, just for one single movie. It’s a lot to ask, and one might accuse director Lav Diaz of being presumptive that anyone would have the time to watch a black and white foreign film for 10 hours. 10 straight hours no less, as he often requests that his films be played at festivals all the way through, with only one ten minute intermission.

It’s certainly a criticism that many have leveled at him throughout his career, which is highlighted by films which generally run between 6 and 10 hours, are black and white, and include many, many long takes. Only a director with a track record like that would be accused of being a sellout for making his latest film, “Norte: The End of History”, in color and “only” four hours.

But these criticisms miss the point. Yes, admittedly, it is a lot to ask from viewers. His films check all of the boxes that the average moviegoer generally shies away from. But for those willing to put in the time and effort to appreciate them, the rewards are immense. Lav isn’t just making these films for the fun of it, he’s an artist with a vision, and that vision eschews any sense of commercialism or pandering.

He is making films about his culture, the Filipino culture, and all of the change and upheaval and struggle that comes along with it. He is passionate about the value of cinema as art, and art as a means of expression and solidarity. He makes his art on his own terms, and refuses to compromise, which has led to his style of digital, black and white, long-take, long films. But he would reject that statement, as he once said, “My films are not long. They are free.”

It seems kind of pretentious at first. Of course they’re long! Movies aren’t normally more than two hours, three at the most, but ten is nearly unheard of. But if you give the work a chance, it becomes clear what he means, and you really start to believe him. Not only was “Evolution of a Filipino Family” one of the fastest ten hours of my life, it also made me reconsider how time and editing functions with every movie I’ve seen since. Lav’s shots, often static, linger for minutes at a time, sometimes capturing exciting moments, sometimes mundane ones.

One shot near the end of the film consists of two characters squatting on the side of a dirt path, motionless and silent. It goes on for about four minutes. But somehow, it is not nearly as grating as that description makes it sound. Every movie I’ve watched since has seemed so… curtailed in comparison. Hour and a half movies seem like bite-sized TV episodes now. Even a three hour movie seems short. After seeing what is possible to achieve in ten hours, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back.

It may sound ridiculous, but “Evolution of a Filipino Family” goes into the category of things that must be seen to be believed. I could describe how the film’s lackadaisical pace, knowledge of the hours and hours to go, and scarcity of dialogue somehow lead to a meditative, almost hypnotic viewing experience, but it really is something one has to experience to understand. All I can say is, take my word for it, once it gets going, you’ll forget all about the runtime and just soak in unique atmosphere.

I say atmosphere because that’s the easiest entryway to discussing the movie critically. The plot is dense, non-chronological and takes place over such a long period of time that its pretty difficult to discuss, but the basic idea is that there is a family of farmers who are all connected by one boy, Reynaldo. Much like in last year’s “Boyhood”, Rey begins the movie as a young boy and ages in real time over the 10-year shoot, but unlike in “Boyhood”, the development and aging of the characters isn’t a central part of the film. It feels more natural and less gimmicky, and its hardly even noticeable most of the time. Visually, the story of Rey and the rest of the family is told mostly through wide and medium shots, often static, and often very still.

A typical shot would be of a field or something, held for about thirty seconds, until some characters walk in on the left of the screen, walk through the field to the right of the screen, then disappear. Cut. Much of the film follows in this fashion, which gives it a meditative quality and allows for some beautiful shots of the Philippine countryside. It also makes it all the more startling when the pattern is broken with moving shots or close ups, or most strikingly in the poetic dream sequences shot with 16 mm film. These moments may be few and far between, but they add some nice variety and are really well-done for what they are.

Whenever anyone writes about Lav Diaz, they always write about how long his movies are, and I didn’t want to just go on and on about length, but I did anyway. Now that I have that out of my system, maybe I’ll be able to write about the next film of his I see without mentioning its runtime. We’ll see. All I have left to say is that, as bad as I have been about explaining why, I believe “Evolution of a Filipino Family” is one of the best movies ever made. But it has left me a little drained, so while I recharge for another Diaz film, I’m going to watch something a little shorter. Maybe “Sátántangó”…

Ah, yes, another “Best _____ of 2014″ list. I’m a little late to the party, and unfortunately, while I haven’t yet seen all of the worthwhile releases of last year (the most glaring omissions being “Whiplash”, “Norte: The End of History”, “Winter Sleep”, “Leviathan”, “Hard to be a God”, “Goodbye to Language”, “The Raid 2″, and “Stray Dogs”, look for write-ups on those in the future once I see them), I have seen enough (29 so far) to put together a solid enough top 10 list. Here is the list, in countdown form (that is,  in order of least best to most best):

Honorable Mentions: “Snowpiercer,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” “The Wind Rises,” “The Immigrant,” “Under the Skin,” “The Lego Movie,” “Inherent Vice,” “Journey to the West.”

I could have really made this a top 20, but didn’t want to write that much. The first two of these films were some of the better action movies I’ve seen in a long time, with more intelligence, humor, and visual pleasure than I ever expected. With “Snowpiercer”, Bong Joon-ho made the most successful translation to English-language film of his Korean contemporaries like Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon, managing to make a movie with an international, diverse cast, relevant social commentary, and bizarre and stimulating action. Meanwhile, “Edge of Tomorrow” follows through on the premise of “Groundhog Day” as a sci-fi action movie in the vein of “Starship Troopers”, led by an amusingly slimy Tom Cruise. It’s just a very fun movie.

“The Wind Rises” is Miyazaki’s enchanting swansong, a beautifully-animated love letter to airplanes, young lovers, and dreams. James Gray’s “The Immigrant” is an impeccably acted character piece, which riffs on old Hollywood studio films in its majestic style, and “La Strada” in its character dynamics. They really don’t make sweeping epics like this anymore, and I’ll be damned if that final shot isn’t one of the best of the last decade. Jonathan Glazer’s spooky, spacey slow-burn “Under the Skin” is a triumph of mood and tone, with Mica Levi’s soundtrack as a perfect compliment to the queasy visuals and Scarlett Johansson’s impressively detached, curious, one might even say alien, performance.

“The Lego Movie” benefits from Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s approach of jam-packing their movies to the brim with jokes and visual gags, which lends itself perfectly to the world of Lego.  It’s also impressive that what could have been a soulless cash-grab of corporate product tie-ins turns out to be a celebration of creativity and individuality in the face of corporate blandness… while still being a product which made the Lego Corporation millions of dollars, but hey, at least it was a good movie. PT Anderson’s “Inherent Vice” is a drug-addled detective odyssey, told with great style, another great Joaquin Phoenix performance, and a killer soundtrack (and it would probably be in the actual list if I hadn’t spaced out and forgotten I had seen it).

“Journey to the West” would also probably be included on my list if it was more of an actual movie, but it’s closer to an art installation piece, following a red-robed monk walking ever-so-slowly through the streets of  Marseille, eventually being followed by the always-impressive Denis Lavant. Tsai Ming-Liang has recently been creeping up my list of favorite directors, and this one pushes his slow, long-take aesthetic to its extreme. It’s a mesmerizing experiment. Now begins my wait for his “Stray Dogs” to come out on DVD…

And here is the top 10 list:

10. “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”

As a die-hard fan of the band, there was no way I was not going to love this documentary about of Montreal. One of the most singular, creative groups of the decade, the band has produced over a dozen diverse albums which have provided the soundtrack to my life for the past few years. But as much as my bias inevitably colors my opinion, the film manages on its own merits to be an engaging history lesson and character study on an incredibly interesting band and the man behind it. Their live shows (two of which I have attended) are theatrical, psychedelic trips which go beyond the standard band gig and enter into the transcendental but elusive realm of “art”. The mastermind behind it all, the enigma known as Kevin Barnes, is an endlessly fascinating character, and the film successfully probes the depths of his personal ambitions, troubled marriage, and reluctant fatherhood for all they’re worth.

Right before watching this film, I watched the Archers’ 1948 classic “The Red Shoes,” and it made an interesting double feature, as throughout “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” I was reminded of the conflict between the addictive endorphin rush of artistic creativity, and the stability of a satisfying personal life. As Barnes says, “I think I almost always would choose art over human relationships.” The fallout and fruits of this choice make for compelling footage and even more compelling music. The film-ending quote from Barnes on making art may sum it up best: “It doesn’t matter if you’re destroying your legacy or whatever, you still have to do it. Because its, um, this insane compulsion that you can’t resist or deny. It doesn’t hurt anyone really. Except for the people close to you.”

Featuring guest appearances from Ariel Pink, Susan Saranadon, Solange Knowles and more, it’s a great inside look into one of the world’s most compelling bands. Like the music, it tackles issues like depression, anxiety, loss, and other personal troubles with a sense of energy and fun that makes the emotional fuck-ups of life a little bit easier to take. With my only complaint being that they didn’t focus on one of my favorite albums, “Paralytic Stalks,” the film does a great job exploring the depths of Kevin Barnes’s fucked up, fascinating life. If phrases like “A Pollinaire Rave”, “The Controllosphere,” or “Elephant 6″ mean anything to you, this film is required viewing, and for everyone else, it’s a nice look into the mind of one of the great troubled artists of our time.

9. “Frank”

Speaking of troubled artists, Lenny Abrahamson’s “Frank” is a deceptively enjoyable film which is actually dark as hell. The plot centers around Jon, played by Domnhall Gleeson (who appears in two films on my list, good job Domnhall!) a wannabe musician who inadvertently becomes the keyboardist of the unpronounceable band Soronprfbs. The band is led by Frank, a fake head-wearing weirdo/musical genius played by the always-great Michael Fassbender. Frank is equally charismatic and darkly mysterious, and as the movie progresses his problems become more apparent.

Partially based on the life of musician/entertainer Chris Sievey and his persona Frank Sidebottom, as well as outsider artists Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart, the film treads a delicate balance in its depiction of mental illness and its connection to artistic skill. It does so in a refreshingly knowing and sensitive way, and the end result is a film which is both darkly comic and harshly realistic. As the latter part of the film shifts into more serious territory, Abrahamson handles the material with a deft sense of understanding wisdom, and it always feels more empathetic than exploitative. In the end, it maintains its integrity and avoids sentimentalism, and for that alone it should be applauded. It also helps that it contains great acting, pleasant cinematography, and a kick-ass soundtrack.

8. “Birdman”

“Birdman” is an exceptionally entertaining film starring Michael Keaton and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu which is shot in a breathless one-take style by the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki where the preparation of Riggan’s play is given the crackling energy of the best of behind-the-scenes showbiz type films and exciting things happen at every turn because its all so fast and well-acted and witty and maybe a little bit pretentious but that’s also kind of the point and it’s also pretty self-aware and hits the nail on the head when it comes to superhero movies and the current state of Hollywood but is also tongue in cheek and aware of it’s own pretentions and it does all this while also being a pretty funny and sometimes sophomoric comedy which is a surprising left turn for Iñárritu but somehow it works and for all of its ambition its story is really pretty simple but it works really well because of the really really good performances by Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone and others who make the whole thing a surprising and exciting ride from start to finish all the while being carried by a relentlessly energetic pulsing drum soundtrack which ties it all together and makes it one of the best movies of the year.

7. “Two Days, One Night”

The latest from Belgian duo Luc and Jean Pierre Dardenne is my favorite I’ve seen by them. The story is almost mythical in its simplicity: the workplace of a woman returning from a leave of absence has created a ballot where the choices are to either get a hearty bonus check or have her keep her job, she goes to each co-worker individually to convince them to vote for her to keep her job. The woman is Sandra, played brilliantly by Marion Cotillard, and she is a wife and mother of two recovering from a nasty bout of depression. The job is a company which assembles solar panels. The co-workers are a diverse group of individuals, many of which have legitimate reasons that they want or need their bonus money.

The film’s structure, in which Sandra goes from person to person, is close to episodic, but it feels naturalistic and grounded in realism. Each encounter is different, and each feels authentic. The entire film has a palpable sense of empathy, and a deep feeling for the economic struggles that everyone faces in society. Sandra and most of her co-workers are by no means poor, but even at the middle-class level, financial reality takes a heavy toll on anyone participating in the system. Driven by Cotillard’s nuanced performance, the film is a masterclass in restrained storytelling, brimming with respect for its characters and its audience.

6. “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jim Jarmusch is one of my favorite directors, and “Only Lovers Left Alive” is one of his best recent films. His take on vampires as brooding, immortal hispters is classic Jarmusch, and the performances by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton (as Adam and Eve, respectively) really sell it. Adam is a mysterious musician who wants to remain as anonymous as possible to his fans, spending his days holed up in a house in Detroit playing awesome retro instruments. Eve, his wife (or girlfriend?) lives in Tangiers, and seems to spend most of her time reading. The couple both have an obsession with art and literature of the past, having lived among many of them throughout their long lifetimes, and the air of nostalgia hangs heavy over the film’s depiction of art and culture.

The movie takes place entirely at night, and the ambiance of the scenes in Detroit and Morocco capture the tragic beauty of Adam and Eve’s nostalgic lifestyle. The soundtrack, done partially by Jarmusch’s band SQURL, is excellent drone-y shoegaze, and it perfectly fits Adam’s moody rocker vibes. Like several of the films on this list, it gets by more on tone than plot, but it also manages to effortlessly bounce between moods, being darkly comic at one moment and wistfully sad at the next. Like all of Jarmusch’s films, it has a detached “cool” vibe, but with Adam and Eve’s relationship at the center, it also has a bloody, beating heart.

5. “Our Sunhi”

Hong Sang-Soo is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors, and “Our Sunhi” put him on the map for me. All his films are similar riffs on the same themes, in the vein of Rohmer-esque relationship dramedies, but with a more modern, cynical, and Korean spin. “Our Sunhi,” is no exception, and it centers around the title character, an ambitious young film school graduate/hopeful director who wants to continue her film studies in the United States. She asks her old film professor for a recommendation, which sets off a series of events and encounters with three different men. Heavy drinking and conversations over meals ensue, as per usual in Hong’s films, and by the end, things aren’t much different than where they started.

Although the film is loose in its focus on characters, the enigmatic Sunhi is at the center of it all, as the is analyzed and deconstructed by the three men pursuing her. The film is heavily conversation driven, and the dialogue is often elliptical and repetitive (not in a bad way), and phrases like “reserved”, “artistic” and “smart” are stated at various times by each man to describe Sunhi to humorous effect. And yet, in all of their attempts to categorize and understand her, Sunhi remains out of their grasp, elusive and mysterious as ever. Book-ended by one of the catchiest songs in recent memory, it’s a very enjoyable film from an auteur at the top of his game.

4. “Ida”

Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is an incredibly subtle film, full of the restrained beauty and muted emotion of a good Bergman or Antonioni picture. The simple story follows Ida, a young nun-in-training, who learns about her family’s past through her aunt, an alcoholic retired judge. The film is shot in beautiful black and white, and it’s anachronistic 1.37 aspect ratio gives it the feeling of a classic from a bygone era. The compositions of the cinematography are absolutely beautiful, and the many geometrically off-center and interestingly-blocked shots give the film a sense of unease and imbalance which is matched by the characters and plot. Ida’s journey of self-discovery is achingly sad, and the film overall is pretty downbeat and cold. But it all rings emotionally true and avoids wallowing in either depression or sentimentality, and there is joy to be found in the small moments as Ida learns who her family was, who she is now, and who she wants to be.

3. “Listen Up Philip”

“Listen Up Philip” follows in the longstanding filmic tradition of neurotic East Coast intellectuals, a path well-trodden by Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and others. But writer/director Alex Ross Perry is not content to merely rehash the past, and his take on the New York bourgeoisie elite is decidedly more acidic and unforgiving than his predecessors. The titular Philip, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a novelist who lives in Manhattan with his girlfriend Ashley, played by Elizabeth Moss. As a writer, he is talented and successful, with a promising career ahead of him. As a person, he is a selfish egomaniacal asshole with very few redeeming qualities. The film charts his friendship with his writing mentor, Ike Zimmerman (played by a crackling Jonathan Pryce), his move out of the hustle and bustle of the city, and his deteriorating relationship with Ashley.

The events of the film are described in detail by an unseen narrator, and the effect is an uncanny exploration of each character’s personal feelings and motivations. It adds another layer of emotional complexity to a film already teeming with it. As Philip’s insatiable ego continues to isolate himself from everyone he cares about, the film lingers on the aftermath and treats every character with a sympathetic eye. The film is brutal in its depiction of interpersonal relationship dynamics, and at every turn Philip seems to be digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole of reclusive selfishness. That said, it is also an incredibly funny film, and Perry’s gifts as a writer of absurd and witty dialogue seem to have carried over from his previous film, “The Color Wheel”. Every actor in the film gives the best performance I’ve ever seen them give, and the film overall is a great unflinching and honest look into the isolating effects of egoism on relationships. Shot on 16mm film, it looks great as well.

2. “Boyhood”

I remember reading about “Boyhood” probably six or seven years ago, when it was still called “Richard Linklater 12 Year Project” on imdb. It sounded intriguing, but it was too far in the future to really get excited about it. I myself was probably only 13 years old at the time. As I was reading about the film, another 13 year-old boy was acting in it, as he did for 12 years in a row. This year, the promise of “Boyhood’s” premise was finally realized, and the results are one of the most impressive and resonant films for anyone who’s ever been a kid, especially a kid born in the mid-90s. Being essentially the same age as the actor Ellar Coltrane, and the character he plays, Mason, watching the film was an almost surreal experience because of how much of my own life I saw in the film. From details like Mason using the old bright plastic iMac G3 in grade school, to the midnight launch of the Harry Potter book and the election of Obama, the movie is full of cultural touchstones which I could recognize and connect to because I experienced them much in the same way as Mason.

I saw a lot of myself in the character, good and bad, as he grows into an artistically inclined, mildly pretentious college-bound young adult. He even went to a high school with the same name as mine. And the most incredible part is that because of the central “gimmick” of the film, all of the details are real, making the film feel at times almost documentary-like in its recording of Mason’s life and the world around him in real time. Even the parts of his life which I couldn’t directly relate to (divorced parents, moving cities, etc.) were things which I recognized in other people I know. Like the best of Linklater’s films, it feels authentic to life in a way that few other films do, and the subject matter and method of filming assured that I, being in the sweet spot of the target demographic audience, would connect to it on a deep level. But that’s just icing on the cake, because it would be hard to find anyone who didn’t see at least a little bit of themselves in the characters in the film. It may not be a perfect film, and it does carry some of the Linklaterian philosophizing and pretension that I find a little grating in his work, but it may be the best thing he’s ever done, and in my mind its one of the finest film achievements of the last decade, if not century.

1. “Calvary”

In a confessional booth, an honest Catholic priest is told he is going to be murdered by a troubled man who was molested by a priest in his youth and has a vendetta against the church. The priest has a week to get his affairs in order, and goes around checking in with various residents of his small town, talking to them and attempting to help with their problems. This is the premise of Irish filmmaker John Michael McDonagh’s latest film, “Calvary”. Like his previous film, 2011′s also excellent “The Guard”, it stars the imposing actor Brendan Gleeson, this time as Father James, a widower and former alcoholic who cleaned up his act and joined the clergy. The plot of the film is pretty straightforward, and most of the action consists of Father James interacting with the townsfolk, a colorful and lively cast of characters, many of whom have serious troubles and a disregard for the church or any sort of morality.

The film’s treatment of religion is unlike anything I’ve seen before, managing to acknowledge the shortcomings of the church and its practices, with many characters being non-believers, but also having at its core a belief in the virtues of humanity and the possibility of goodness. Not to say that it’s upbeat, because it’s one of the more brutal and unsettling movies I saw last year, but it balances this nastiness with an optimism, and for lack of a better word, faith, which is refreshing, and the no-punches-pulled approach gives a weight and validity to the glimpses of hope.

This rambling probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to someone who hasn’t seen the film, but I would encourage anyone and everyone to go see “Calvary”. Not only is it a complex exploration of faith and morality, it is also one of the best black comedies I’ve ever seen, with plenty of politically-incorrect humor to balance out the solemnity. The script also has several meta touches which are an interesting choice, and while the black humor and self-awareness may diminish its status as a “serious film”, it makes the whole thing a lot more watchable and entertaining than if the whole thing was played straight. Of all of the films I saw last year, or ever for that matter, “Calvary” may have the most sadness, honesty, faith, love, loss, and above all, humanity. It’s my favorite film of 2014.

Five men are stuck in a room, forced to watch hundreds of video documents and work together to determine the shared meaning between all of them. If they do not succeed at this task before the time is up, they will die. This is the premise of Ferdinand Khittl’s 1962 masterpiece “The Parallel Street,” an enigmatic, uncategorizable oddity of early New German Cinema.

The five men which appear in the film are told that they are one in a long line of groups to participate in this experiment. Many have tried before them, but none have succeeded. The futile struggle of these five subjects to uncover the meaning of the video documents provides the thrust of the film, but the real meat of it lies in the content of the video documents themselves.

Lyrical, beautiful, mysterious, these video documents are bite-sized pieces of pure cinema. Shot in beautiful foreign countries in a travelogue style, the twenty or so video documents are diverse in terms of geography, style, and subject matter. Unlike the black-and-white sequences of the experiment with the five men, the video documents are almost all in full color, and capture some beautiful images of exotic scenery from distant places. Nearly all of them are devoid of sound, other than the narration provided by the proctor of the experiment. The narration is poetic and mysterious, and covers big themes, like courage, beauty, subjectivity, life, work, imprisonment, ritual, religion, art, time, and most of all, death. The combination of the visuals and narration is mesmerizing, and brought to mind “Sans Soleil,” another fascinating travelogue/essay film which I’m absolutely sure was influenced by “The Parallel Street “.

“The Parallel Street” is a testament to the power of editing, on both a technical and conceptual level. The video documents are all edited with a very nice rhythm, and their ordered presentation is a sort of meta-editing by the proctor of the experiment. Documents are sometimes shuffled around and replayed at the behest of the five subjects, calling into question the purposefulness of the order. The self-consciousness of the editing raises questions about truth and subjectivity in art. In one sense, the video documents are all miniature documentaries. They are all shot on location, with real people engaged in their day to day lives. And yet, the way that they are edited creates associations and symbols which elevate the images beyond non-fiction, and into some sort of transcendent narrative realm.

The very first image of the film is the number 188 in big white letters in the center of the screen. We soon see that this format is the numbering of the video documents, so this first image implies that the entire film, “The Parallel Street,” is itself a video document. Whoa. This bit of self-reflexivity puts the viewer in the same position as the subjects, prepared to extract meaning from a series of documents which may or may not have any. The men are well into the process by the time we join them, and the first actual video document we see is number 189, which is a perfect demonstration of the film’s unconventional editing. The document shows the process of animals getting killed in meat factories, from live farm animals to bones in a desert. The catch is that it shows this all in reverse, the footage played backwards to give the illusion that the animals are being created by the workers at the factory. The meat factory becomes a “birth house”, and the proctor nonchalantly narrates how the animals are being assembled, while images of the workers doing their job backwards gives the segment a chilling Frankenstein-like vibe.

A later document, number 278, uses sunsets and color changes to explore the relentless passing of time and the manipulative power of color. The segment begins with a shot of a sun at the horizon of the ocean, as the narrator states “it’s an illusion. The sun isn’t rising.” Already the reality of the situation is called into question, and this concept is pushed further as the narrator begins to question color’s effects on perception. The footage of beautiful sunsets across the world starts to be altered by various colored gels and tinting, as the narrator muses that “colour distortion alters the romantic value, not the physical and factual.” If you replaced colour distortion with editing, that sentence could serve as a mission statement for the whole film, in which the physical, factual presentation of reality is there on the surface, but the romantic, human element imposes itself on it and overrides it through the editing and narration. On a broader scale, that concept is inherent to the medium of film itself. The camera captures reality exactly how it is, but the editing alters the reality and turns it into something new. Forgive the pretentiousness, but what Rilke gets at in Duino Elegies is true, and the role of the poet is to transfigure reality, then “The Parallel Street” is a perfect demonstration of film’s potential as a poetic, artistic medium. The images of the video documents are unforgettable, and their presentation, endlessly thought-provoking. The subjects’ attempts to find meaning seems futile, because the meaning is placed on the images by the editing and the viewer, not the images themselves. In the end, no answers are provided, no conclusions are drawn, and none of it really makes any sense.

Or does it? This is the question faced by both the viewer of The Parallel Street and the subjects viewing the video documents. Watching them make tenuous associations between the documents is nearly as fascinating as the documents themselves. They try to make thematic connections, or rearrange key words, or play documents over again, but never come to any conclusions. “The Parallel Street” as a document itself is similarly open-ended, and can be interpreted in any number of ways. Are the men surrogates for the modern (or postmodern?) subject, fractured and overwhelmed by the global interconnected world in which time and distance are erased? Is the proctor the personification of Death, leading these five men from purgatory into the afterlife? Is the film a parody of the very idea of film criticism, mocking the notion of objectivity in art? Is it a wide-eyed celebration of the incomprehensibility of the infinite diversity of human life on earth? Or the search for meaning where none exists? Is Fernand Khittl just pranking everyone by making a pointless film and watching people scramble to find meaning in it? Any of these interpretations could be true. Or false. Is there even such thing as truth? “The Parallel Street” will have you asking that question throughout, and I think that is one of the reasons it is so effective. Every viewer ultimately participates in the process of trying to deduce some kind of meaning from the film, and in doing so, falls into the film’s own trap. It’s one of the most fascinating films I’ve ever seen.

Japan has always had a rich cinematic history. It has produced some of the all time greatest and most influential directors, including the international cinema giants Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, and Yasujiro Ozu, and some of the all time great films as well, like “Sansho the Bailiff”, “Seven Samurai,” and “Late Spring”. And then of course there is the exciting Japanese New Wave, with Imamura and Oshima and all of the great films that have come out since then. I could go on and on about how great Japanese films are forever. But there are also a number of great films about Japan. Three of those films are Chris Marker’s 1983 film “Sans Soleil,” Wim Wenders’ 1985 film “Tokyo-Ga”, and Jessica Oreck’s 2012 film “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo”. The films focus on different things, but share a sense of reverent fascination for Japanese culture, and each offers a personal and unique outsider perspective.

I’ll start by discussing “Sans Soleil,” because it is sort of the outlier of the bunch. The film does not focus entirely on Japan, but is a sort of travelogue of letters from a fictional cameraman, Sandor Krasna (a surrogate for Chris Marker), read over the film by his friend as narration. The footage was all shot without audio equipment, so the sound and music in the movie is all extra-diagetic. It’s a strange construction for a film which is essentially non-fiction, although the meaning of that word is slippery. The images of the film are drawn from Krasna’s (read: Marker’s) travels to Japan, Africa and various other exotic locales, along with some stock footage interspersed from elsewhere. The unifying theme of the film is memory, and it is a very thoughtful piece of work, one of my favorite films of all.

The sections dealing with Japan make up the bulk of the film, and they are pretty magnificent. Marker’s camera feels like a child seeing the world for the first time, whether he is visiting a cat cemetery, watching a parade, or going to a weird animal sex museum. Marker has a humanist touch, and despite his position as a tourist, he never feels like he is exploiting his subjects. At one point, Marker visits Hayao Yamaneko, a Japanese video artist who takes old images and footage and using some sort of computer stuff colorizes the images to make them look kind of like infrared footage, but more colorized. I’m not sure exactly how to describe the technique, but it creates some really haunting images, and illustrates the central conceit of the film; that memory is an act of creation, and that our interactions with the past are never direct.

Japan serves as a great backdrop for these themes, especially with its rich and complicated history, although Japan is not really the focus of the film in the same way as these other two. Still, I think “Sans Soleil” is the most complete and perfect film out of all of them, and it’s the best documentary (or essay film) I’ve ever seen.

Wim Wenders’s “Tokyo-Ga” is in the same spirit of “Sans Soleil,” but more focused on Japan. The impetus for the film is Wenders going on a personal journey to Japan to search for the essence of truth he finds in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Clips of Ozu’s films begin and end the movie, and Wenders has immense reverence for his films. So while “Sans Soleil’s” unifying theme was memory, “Tokyo-Ga’s” is Ozu. The film is pleasantly meandering and tangential, with Herzog-esque voiceover narration by Wenders, but it always comes back to Ozu. Wenders’ attempts to rediscover the essence of Japan depicted in Ozu’s films at times calls to mind “San Soleil’s” questions of memory and subjectivity. Chris Marker even makes an appearance in Wenders’ film, at the “La Jetee” inspired bar in Tokyo, another Marker film which deals with similar themes.

Wenders also interviews various people who worked with Ozu, most notably Ozu’s cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta and actor Chishu Ryu. I was shocked to learn that Chishu Ryu was still alive 30 years after his turn as an elderly father figure in Ozu films like “Late Spring” and “Tokyo Story”, but apparently he was actually only in his 40s and wore old-man make-up. The interviews with these insiders are fascinating, but I found the film most interesting when it didn’t focus on Ozu, which luckily is a lot of it. Wenders’ camera is curious and inquisitive, and captures some great shots of subways, trains, pachinko parlors, and rain-drenched Tokyo streets at night. The ambient electronic soundtrack has a cool retro sound, and the synthesis of music and image gives the film an ethereal atmosphere, as though the viewer is sleepwalking through a Tokyo of dreams. At one point, Wenders wonders, “Perhaps I was searching for something which no longer existed.” And perhaps he was, but his search is fascinating to watch.

Jessica Oreck’s “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo” is kind of a spiritual successor to “Tokyo-Ga,” except instead of Ozu, its focus is bugs. Beetles, specifically. They are apparently a phenomenon in Japan, and there is a booming business of selling the beetles as pets. The film explores both sides of this, following some bug-catchers on trips through the forest and also the consumers who purchase the bugs in little glass boxes. There are also video games, statues, toys, and all kinds of other stuff devoted to beetles. It is a fascinating aspect of Japanese culture which I never knew about, and the movie comprehensively explores it.

But as with “Tokyo-Ga,” the film’s main subject isn’t necessarily its focus. The film is even more impressionistic than Wenders’, and Oreck takes the visuals to the next level. It’s a very good looking movie, and the rapid editing style and fluid camerawork put me in a trance. The music is great too, a throwback electronic score that sounds a lot like “Tokyo-Ga.” And it’s really no surprise that Oreck’s film is so similar to Wenders’, she cites it as one of the biggest inspirations for the project. It also has a similar philosophical bent, with voice-over and interviews which delve into questions beyond just bugs, exploring Japan’s relationship with nature and its own history. Above all, it’s another dream-like journey into a fascinating culture, and “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo” makes a nice companion piece with “Tokyo-Ga.” “Sans Soleil” may be the outlier because it doesn’t focus on Japan quite as much, but it’s still a fascinating film.

All three films are triumphs of the documentary form; they are informational, thoughtful, beautiful, and atmospheric, and discover universality through personal exploration. All of them focus on Japan to some extent, but each approaches it from a different perspective. Watched together, they give an impression of Japan as a rich cinematic landscape, one which will not soon be forgotten.

Shuji Terayama’s massive creativity far outweighs his recognition, at least in America. Born in 1935, he seemed to have limitless artistic energy, producing avant-garde poetry, drama, prose, photography, and film until his death in 1983. Naturally I’ve been most interested in his film work, so I can’t speak much to his other creative outlets. Nor can I speak much to his film oeuvre, because his work is incredibly difficult to track down. But in this post, I’m going to talk about a film of his which I did manage to see, and that film is “Pastoral: To Die in the Country”.

“Pastoral: To Die in the Country” begins with the recitation of a poem over a black screen, before fading into one of the coolest opening shots I’ve ever seen. In a sepia tone shot of a cemetery, a child faces towards the camera and covers his eyes. Behind him, several children run away from him and hide behind gravestones. The scene appears to just be children playing hide and seek, which explains why the film is sometimes called “Pastoral Hide and Seek”. When the boy uncovers his eyes, figures emerge from the gravestones, no longer children, but formally-dressed adults, ominously walking towards the boy. Following this are shots of family photographs, ripped and crudely stitched together.

This poetic prelude uses visual language to establish the major ideas of the film, namely the interaction between past and present and the attempts to reconstruct one’s fractured memories. The movie itself is largely a surreal, phantasmagorical autobiography of Terayama’s childhood. But it’s also more than that, and I’m using the term autobiography loosely, just as the film does. Before I get into too much detail, I should point out that it’s hard to talk about what the film is about without giving up a narrative turn it takes about 40 minutes in, so if you don’t want the movie spoiled, stop reading now and just go watch it!

Initially, “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” tells the story of a 15 year-old boy coming into his own in his rural hometown. In terms of structure, it’s close to a typical bildungsroman, with the boy being exposed to sex and death, having problems with his mom, and maybe running away with his pretty older neighbor. While the progression of the events is nothing new, the way they are told is pretty extraordinary. The film is a visual feast in every aspect, with lush costuming and exaggerated make-up for the characters, strange mise en scène like giant hammers littering the environment, adventurous editing, lovely shot compositions, balletic camera movements, and bright colors and filters to enhance the scenery.

The cast of characters is just as colorful, especially the strange carnival employees. Particularly at the carnival, and in other places as well, there is a strong current of sexuality running throughout the film, with orgies and kinky sex cropping up fairly often, but it never feels perverse. The carnival seems to represent the world of adulthood to the boy; intimidating, full of frightening debauchery, but also tentatively appealing and not lacking in beauty. The circus scenes are shot with a prismatic lighting gel that creates a similar effect as on his short film “Butterfly Dress Pledge,” another avant-garde exercise in kink and perverse beauty. Clocks, flowers, and fire are also frequently rendered as symbols of time, natural beauty, and the transformative act of the creation of art. The beautiful images all serve as a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike backdrop to the development of the pale-faced lead boy.

Then, at around 40 minutes in, the movie pulls the proverbial rug out from under the viewer’s feet, revealing the events which just transpired be part of a film that a director is making about his childhood. The director character, named “Me” in the credits, is a surrogate for Terayama himself, and the boy in the film-within-a-film, named “Me, as a Boy”, is Terayama as a youth. So the reveal complicates what appeared to be a straightforward (if surreal) coming of age story, and begins to delve into more complex ideological territory, raising questions about art’s relationship to the past and the past’s relationship to ourselves. “Me”/Terayama’s conception of his past goes beyond nostalgia, and he is aware of the inherent creativity and subjectivity that is ingrained in remembering, and recreating memories. Eventually “Me” joins the world of the film he is creating, and the film twists inward on itself again, perhaps positing Terayama’s recreation of his past as an outlet for his present anxieties, and art as a transcendent force of nature.

If that makes the film sound dense, that’s because it is, but the density is matched by sheer entertainment value. The hallucinatory atmosphere of the film-within a film is sumptuous, and full of striking symbolism and beautiful color images. Meanwhile, the scenes of “Me” in the modern day are shot in a crisp black and white which offers a nice contrast to the acid-tinged imagery of the film-within-a-film. Overall, it is really one of the most interesting looking films I’ve seen in a while, and the visuals compliment the story well. The soundtrack is also fantastic, sounding like a weird choral 60s prog-rock freak-out.

I felt strong similarities between the film’s subject matter and Alejandro Jodoroswky’s recent film “The Dance of Reality,” from the surreal images to the interaction between the present and childhood self. And from what I’ve seen of Jodorowsky’s older films (many of which came out before “Pastoral”), they seem to have similar psychedelic visual styles, so they may have influenced each other. Or they may have never heard of each other, who knows. But I feel like Tim Burton has probably seen “Pastoral”, because “Big Fish” seems to have a lot in common in terms of plot, especially the circus stuff and the ending. Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Regardless of what it influenced or was influenced by, “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” stands on its own as an impressive and introspective artistic achievement. Terayama’s act of self-mythologizing is as intimate  and personal as it is universal, and I’d be interested in reading his poetry on which the film is based (although I’m not how I’ll fare trying to track it down). It’s really a shame that Shuji Terayama isn’t more well known, because his films deserve to be seen. Here’s hoping.

After hearing so much positive buzz about Alex Ross Perry’s new film “Listen up Philip”, I decided to give his second film, “The Color Wheel”, a spin. I had the opportunity to watch the film a while ago, but passed it up, writing it off as just another mumblecore film about aimless twenty-somethings. And I’m so happy I was wrong. “The Color Wheel” is a pitch-black post-modern comedy that responds to the mumblecore tradition, but also exists outside of it, in a self-aware post-modern limbo. The thing that I liked the most about “The Color Wheel” is that it actually has ambition to be something, and it definitely marks Alex Ross Perry as a talent to watch.

Before I get into “The Color Wheel”, I should probably talk about mumblecore a little bit. The word mumblecore is an imaginary umbrella term devised by critics to describe a series of American independent films and filmmakers emerging in the early-to-mid 2000s and continuing on to now. Although mumblecore is a term invented by critics, and its not an actual defined movement, there are certain characteristics common to nearly all of the mumblecore films, and I will continue to use the term because it makes things easier. On the technical side, mumblecore films are micro-budget (often under $1 million, never more than $10 million), naturalistic (shot in the real world, little music and no special effects), generally feature non-professional or unknown actors (although this varies) and are almost always shot on cheap digital cameras.

Artistically speaking, the films are often comedies, often have low-key stories which focus on sex and relationships between twentysomethings, are very dialogue-heavy (often improvised, sometimes mumbled), and generally are very stark visually and free of stylization. The most prominent mumblecore filmmakers are Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, the Duplass brothers, Lynn Shelton, and depending on who you ask, Lena Dunham. The values of these filmmakers are influenced by the French New Wave, the Dogme 95 movement, and the films of the Dardenne brothers.

The mumblecore movement seemed to have its peak in the late 2000s and early 2010s, with many of the prominent filmmakers churning out several acclaimed films. The movement has grown in stature mainstream acceptance, and over time as more and more actors and producers became aware of mumblecore, budgets began to steadily increase and professional actors got involved. At this point, the movies made by the mumblecore directors are hardly recognizable from the grainy, poorly lit films which defined the beginnings of their careers. There is a world of difference between Joe Swanberg’s third film, “Hannah Takes the Stairs” to his most recent, “Drinking Buddies”. The same can be said of the Duplass brothers’ low-key feature debut, “The Puffy Chair,” versus their Jason Segel-starring “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” But even with the glossier look, professional actors, and wider distribution, mumblecore films remain grounded in simple stories about young people navigating the ins and outs of friendships and relationships in the 21st century.

I’ve seen a handful of mumblecore films in my day, having gone through a brief phase where I watched probably around a dozen or so in a short amount of time. The Duplass brothers’ film “The Puffy Chair” was my gateway, and I was taken by the film’s low-key naturalism and down-to-earth plot, even if the production values were lacking. Probably the most appealing thing about them was that they felt like something I could make, something achievable. These were people who just grabbed a camera, some friends, and said “fuck it, let’s make a movie”, and I admired that do-it-yourself attitude. “The Puffy Chair” led me on a spree to watch the rest of the Duplass bros filmography, along with some Lynn Shelton, Aaron Katz, and Joe Swanberg films. I made it a conscious effort to watch as many mumblecore movies as possible, but my enthusiasm didn’t last long.

As I began to see the patterns emerging, the aimlessness went from refreshing to grating, the twenty-something characters and their dialogue went from relatable, vulnerable, and realistically flawed, to just plain whiny, and the seeming disregard for any sort of aesthetic beauty went from ugly to downright unwatchable. Of course, I don’t mean to be too harsh. There were quite a few films which I did enjoy, and I still respect the filmmakers’ willingness to go out an just make a damn movie, whether it’s good or not. It’s just a bit difficult to take in so many of these movies at once, and I’m sure I’ll watch more mumblecore films, past and present, pretty soon.

So where does “The Color Wheel” fit in to all this? On paper, the movie looks like a typical mumblecore. The premise is that aimless twenty-something Colin and his aspiring newscaster sister JR go on a road trip to move JR’s things out of her boyfriend’s house. Doesn’t sound like anything special. But from the first grainy, black and white 16 mm shot of the film, it’s clear something is different. For one thing, the fact that it was shot on film instead of digital is a clear aesthetic choice, and something that made me sit up and think, “Hm, maybe this film is actually trying to do something different.” The comparatively liberal use of music also sets it apart from other mumblecores. And as soon as the characters are introduced, it really becomes clear that the film has a lot more going on upstairs.

One of best parts of “The Color Wheel” is it’s raw, uncompromising, unconventional sense of humor. Colin and JR are nasty, morally reprehensible people, and their dialogue is filthy, profane, sometimes questionably racist, and above all, hilarious. The characters ooze irony and detachment, and every interaction with other characters paints Colin and JR as the ultimate outsiders and misfits. The first encounter that Colin and JR have on their trip is with a concierge at a dinky little Christian motel. Colin and JR want the cheapest room in the hotel, but it’s a single room, and the hotel policy is to not let “coeds to co-habitate unless they are married”. Colin and JR quickly switch their story from being brother and sister to pretending to be married, in a kind of reverse “Days of Heaven” scenario. The scene has a palpable sense of awkward tension, and something about the exaggerated acting (almost in a surreal, Tim & Eric-esque way) it feels incredibly fresh. The way that JR’s first line of dialogue as she walks into the room is “I have to pee,” the fact that the concierge casually stumbles over the word “sinful”, and the hand-drawn sign that reads “I need to see all married couples kiss.” Are all small touches that make the scene a winner.

The script and the deadpan delivery are what makes the movie really shine. Even if the deadpan delivery is reminiscent of mumblecore, the difference is that every line of dialogue in “The Color Wheel” was scripted. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell though, because the movie is full of mundane non-sequitur lines, including such gems as “I burned the roof of my mouth on a piece of toast, I didn’t even know that was possible,” “I don’t actually know what the clap is, it just sounds old timey and itchy,” and “Do I look barely legal in a mature way?” The conversations flow at a rapid back and forth pace, with Colin and JR bouncing laconic lines off of each other in a way that makes them feel real and hyper-real at the same time. Sometimes, their conversations are even interrupted by lines like “Oh my god, you just spit in my eye.” Writing it out in blog form doesn’t really do the hilarity of the film’s dialogue justice, it’s something that has to be seen (and heard) to be believed.

For all the low-key hijinks of the film, the focus is always primarily on the character dynamics of Colin and JR. At first glance, they seem to be the archetypal aimless twenty-somethings which populate most mumblecore films. But as the film goes on, they reveal themselves to be a sort of deconstruction of these very archetypes. Colin and JR are perpetually stuck in their adolescence, never moving forward towards the professional and personal goals they once held. When looking at herself in a mirror, JR declares, “I just feel like, I don’t know, without these, like, funky bangs, how are casting directors gonna know that I’m the type of girl who likes music and art and like cultural stuff, you know?” The humor in the self-aware shallowness of the line masks a greater sentiment about the defeatism of this generation. They’ve been crippled by the irony and detachment of post-modern life, and I noticed a lot of similarities with 2012’s “The Comedy”, another deconstruction of millennial ennui.

But “The Color Wheel” has more sympathy for its leads, despite their status as generally despicable people. The ending of the film feels both shocking and, in retrospect, inevitable, as it shows the logical conclusion of Colin and JR’s close-minded worldviews. Luckily, the socially-aware, post-modern bent of the film does nothing to diminish the genuinely hilarious comedy that pervades the film, and it in fact enhances it. The self-aware deconstruction of millennial irony and the crippling detachment it causes, which most mumblecore films seem to perpetuate rather than examine, is what ultimately makes “The Color Wheel” a “post-mumblecore” film. It’s really hard to describe what makes the film so great, but it really does feel like a breath of fresh air. With so many other millennial mumblecore directors making independent films that come and go without making any sort of impact, the acid of “The Color Wheel’s” sense of humor and sense of style will burn itself into your memory. Alex Ross Perry is an auteur to be watched, a film-literate director with a real voice and something to say with it. “Listen up Philip” can’t come soon enough.

I’ve been watching the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet lately. He’s best-known as the writer of Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad” but after “Marienbad” he went on to write and direct quite a few films of his own. I’ll be looking at three films by him in this post, which show an interesting progression from “Marienbad”-like seriousness and obtuse structure in “L’Immortelle”, to playful post-modern French New Wave parody in “Trans-Europ Express”, to full-on Godardian anarchism and insanity in “Eden and After”, all with a healthy dose of self-awareness and sadomasochism.

Robbe-Grillet first made his mark as an acclaimed cutting-edge writer in France before making his way to film. In 1961, he scripted “Last Year at Marienbad,” a film with a labyrinthine structure, elliptical plot and archetypal characters. It’s a puzzling film, a mystery with no answers, but it has a nice rhythm and beautiful cinematography.

Following that, he wrote and directed “L’Immortelle” in 1963, which is very much in the same vein. “L’Immortelle” tells the story of a man in Istanbul who meets up with a mysterious woman. The plot is difficult to follow, and like “Marienbad”, the focus is really on the characters, their interactions, and the ideas. “L’Immortelle” may have the leg up in terms of big ideas, exploring orientalism, gender dynamics and deceptive appearances. Both films have stark black and white cinematography, and feature some similar images and techniques (such as the use of still crowds and the repetition of certain scenes). They are also both populated with characters with letters for names (L, M, N; A, X, M) who are not very deeply characterized.

The film is an enigma, and it feels at times that one would need to be a cryptographer to make any sense of it. So in many ways, “L’Immortelle” feels disappointingly like a re-hash, proving that Robbe-Grillet is capable of making a good-looking film with a strong authorial voice, but not that that voice has anything new to say.

To answer that challenge, along came “Trans-Europ Express” three years later, a playful New-Wave farce that offers a nice departure from his previous self-serious work. Unlike the glacially-paced “L’Immortelle”,  “Trans-Europ Express” gets off to a brisk start, and its premise is established within a couple minutes. Three passengers on a train decide to come up with a movie plot about a dangerous drug dealer, and then their plot is acted out by Elias, a character played by Jean-Louis Trignant.

In a meta twist, the passengers are played by Robbe-Grillet, his wife, and the producer of the film. So they are both making the actual movie and concocting the movie-within-a-movie. It’s all just the kind of self-conscious metafiction that one would expect from Robbe-Grillet, but this time done with a wink and a smile. The movie-within-a-movie follows Elias’s plight as a cocaine smuggler, as he attempts to transport cocaine from Paris to Antwerp. Aside from a few twists and turns, the plot of the movie-within-a-movie is fairly straightforward.

The real mind games are embedded within the meta-narrative of the train passengers, and they have some interesting interactions with their story throughout the film. The film also marks the appearance of Robbe-Grillet’s fascination with sadomasochism, which will appear even more graphically in his later work. In the movie-within-a-movie, Elias has several kinky S&M meetups with prostitute Eva. There’s nothing too graphic, but it is a bit more risque than was typical for the time.

The film comes on the tail end of the French New Wave, and the movie-within-a-movie seems to parody a lot of the trappings of the earlier gangster-inspired pictures like “Shoot the Piano Player” or “Band of Outsiders”. But “Trans-Europe-Express”, because of its structure, has a higher degree of awareness than these films, exploring authorship, acting, and cinema from various angles, and comes out in the end as a pastiche of New Wave cliches. But a goofy, self-aware one at that. I liked it, and it was breezy, pretty funny and well-shot. At this point, Robbe-Grillet seems to have been more comfortable in the director’s chair, before maybe getting a little to comfortable with “Eden and After”.

1970′s “Eden and After” is Robbe-Grillet’s fourth film (I haven’t seen his third, “The Man Who Lies”, but I should), and his first in color. If his earlier work could be described as a bit cold, “Eden and After” is just the opposite. The film begins in a cafe called Eden where a group of intellectual university students experiment with sex and drugs. One day a strange man comes into the cafe, offers Violette (played by Catherine Jourdan) a drug called fear powder, which sets her off on a hallucinogenic odyssey which eventually takes her to Tunisia. The cafe, Eden, is a maze of mirrors and artwork, and I saw it as a metaphor for filmmaking (and maybe even the French New Wave specifically), as a space for wild experimentation and the flourishing of new ideas.

It almost seems like an exaggerated version of the salons that Godard and his pals undoubtedly had in the 1950s. And speaking of Godard, this movie is dripping with his influence, especially his late 1960s work on the tail end of the New Wave, like “Pierrot Le Fou” and “Week End”. The film explores imperialism, freedom, fear, death, dopplegängers, the self, power, and a load of other lofty concepts.

It’s an orgy of big ideas, sometimes literally. Robbe-Grillet ratchets up the sadomasochism to another level in this one, and there is even more rape, chains, submissive women, and all the other hallmarks of S&M. On one hand, it is kind of distracting and ideologically troubling that he puts so much of his own personal fetishes on screen, especially because of their implications of violence towards women. On the other, it really is something that is not often depicted in mainstream cinema, at least until “50 Shades of Grey” comes out, so these scenes at least offer something unique.

And speaking of uniqueness, if you’re willing to buy into my Eden cafe as film metaphor, then Violette’s hallucinatory journey to Africa may be Robbe-Grillet metaphorically pushing cinema to new levels. Arguably, he sort of succeeds. The sheer insanity of the film’s second half really does offer an experience different than most other films of the time, even if he is riding Godard’s coattails to some extent. The film was shot without a script, and its unhinged insanity feels like a genuine act of creation, even if the results are not always satisfying. At the very least, I appreciate Robbe-Grillet’s attempts to do something different, and it really does stand out from his other films (which is helped by the eye-popping color imagery).

If I had to choose a favorite work of Robbe-Grillet’s work so far, it would probably be “Trans-Europ Express”, but his work has my interest piqued enough that I will probably check out more of his stuff in the future. I may choose to write some more on him later; unfortunately, I can’t ever really talk about him because his name is so damn hard to pronounce…

I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies lately in anticipation of Halloween. One that stood out was “Berberian Sound Studio”, an independent British film from 2012. Directed by Peter Strickland, it tells the story of a shy sound engineer named Gilderoy and his slow descent into madness while he mixes the sound for a Gothic Italian Horror film. It’s light on plot and relies primarily on visuals and sound to drive the movie forward, which gives the film a very atmospheric, moody vibe.

Although the visuals and music carry most of the film, the human side of the movie is driven by the nuanced performance of Toby Jones. With his baby face and nervous mannerisms, Jone’s Gilderoy is a cautious man of simple pleasures. He lives in the English countryside with his mum, doing sound work primarily for children’s programs and nature documentaries. His skills got him the attention of Italian auteur Giancarlo Santini, whose film “The Equestrian Vortex” is much different from anything Gilderoy had previously worked on.

Other than a cool retro title sequence, film-within-a-film is never shown, but the audience gets an idea from its content from watching the process of recording its sound. The voice dubbing is primarily the female actors screaming, as well as a man playing Goblin obscenely raving. But the majority of film is spent in observance of the foley work. “The Equestrian Vortex”, for all of Santini’s philosophical and historical justifications, mostly seems to consist of horrible acts of violence against women.

We hear women having their hair ripped out, women being stabbed, drowned, tortured, chopped to bits, pushed out of windows, and several even more grisly fates. Because the acts are never shown on screen, we as an audience experience them through the sound, which all happens to be made by vegetables. By the end of the film, lettuce, radishes, squash, and watermelons take on a sinister tone as they stand-in for brutalized flesh. We never see the violence being committed, but hearing it becomes almost as bad.

Throughout the film, many a slow pan over rotting, gnarled vegetables become unsettling by their association with violence. During all of this, we see Gilderoy react to the violence, and we also see him participating in it vicariously, which all leads to his mental deterioration. But the interesting tension in the film comes from what is shown and not shown, what is seen and what is heard. And by subverting film’s tendency to be a show-not-tell medium, “Berberian Sound Studio” really becomes an interesting experiment.

The choices of what is heard but not shown leads to a transfiguration of common associations of slasher films and films in general. Because of its self-referential construction and Strickland’s clear reverence for film as a medium, “Berberian Sound Studio” explores the nature and expectations of film as a medium in both a literal and meta sense. The film itself is about the behind the scenes aspects of filmmaking, and the merging of the worlds of the film and real life. Many seemingly innocuous situations are imbued with creeping dread from the soundtrack and Gilderoy’s increasing paranoia and alienation. The darkened studio where most of the film takes place is unfamiliar territory to him, and he is surrounded by hostile employers and employees who speak a different language and share different values than him. His brief moments of calm come when he reads letters from his mum while listening to recorded sounds of his rural home. But even that ritual is soiled eventually, as the last half hour of the film descends into pure madness.

The film is stocked full of images of circles and loops, which carries over into the narrative and soundtrack as well. The analog fetishism places the film clearly in the 1970s, and also offers a tangible visual connection with the film’s structure. Circular objects like tapes, film canisters, knobs, mics, and blenders are shown recurrently. The analog fetishism places the film clearly in the 1970s, and also offers a tangible visual connection with the film’s structure. The structure is full of repeating images and themes which loop back on themselves as the world between the film and real life becomes increasingly blurred.

The violence against women in “The Equestrian Vortex”, exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness, is brought back to the context of modern misogyny when one of the actresses reveals that Santini had been sexually harassing her. Gilderoy’s mention of work on nature documentaries is eventually followed through on by an intercutting of footage of an English countryside which may very well be from one of those documentaries. And towards the end, as Gilderoy’s voice begins to be dubbed over in Italian and his own life plays out on the screen, the loop of his own life and the film he is working on begin to converge in interesting ways.

The soundtrack itself also contains a lot of loops and recurring motifs. Interestingly enough, all of the sound and music in the film is diegetic, which further contributes to the sense that Gilderoy’s world is slowly melding with the world of the giallo film. The film’s end verges on incomprehensibility, but it remains interesting and provoking throughout.

The focus on sound, atmosphere, and colliding worlds makes the film a very immersive sensory experience. It would be a disservice to call the film a music video, but the fusion of visuals and sound works so well that the rhythm of the film makes watching the film akin listening to a really well put together piece of music. And though it is not particularly scary, and calling it a horror film would be a stretch, it does have a suitably paranoid and chilling atmosphere. I didn’t really talk about it much here, but it also has a fair bit of subtle but effective comedy, which shifts the tone of the film in a really appealing way. It all has me looking forward to Peter Strickland’s next film, “The Duke of Burgundy”, which purportedly does for erotic melodramas what “Berberian Sound Studio” does for horror films.

“Berberian Sound Studio” is available to stream on Netflix, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a more thoughtful and atmospheric take on the horror genre.