The Films of 2014

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
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warren oates
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:16 pm

Re: The Films of 2014

#51 Post by warren oates » Thu Oct 02, 2014 12:47 pm

Boyhood aside, for me 2014 is the year that low-budget American genre films -- chiefly horror but also less classifiable fare like Blue Ruin and The Guest -- have eclipsed the more serious mainstream staples of American Independent cinema in nearly every dimension. I feel like I've been more surprised and impressed by quality of the filmmaking, the storytelling and maybe just the urgency (or freshness and invention) in films like Proxy, Oculus, Cheap Thrills, The Sacrament, The Guest and Blue Ruin than by any group of more high minded Indie comedies or dramas in a long time. Even within a heightened genre context, these films respect their characters and dramatize their problems with a kind of honesty that's increasingly rare. Cheap Thrills isn't exactly Chop Shop or The Bicycle Thief, but it certainly isn't laughing about its protagonist's dire financial straits. Blue Ruin begins with what's basically a homelessness procedural. The Guest deals with PTSD and, among other things, the burdens of expectation we all place on returning vets -- while managing to be a fun, funny, unpredictable ride and
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one of the better riffs I've seen on a Teorema-like interloper. And one that's far more compelling than the pretentious, undercooked import Borgman.
And for those, like me, who've been unimpressed by Ti West up till now, brace yourself for The Sacrament, which is definitely a worthy companion to a film like Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. What else is there for me to say about all these happy discoveries except that Joe Swanberg -- who represents everything I loathe about more mainstream Indie dramedy -- stars in two of these films without coming close to ruining them with his presence (or lack thereof)!

There's a seriousness to the level of craft here too. And in the way that so many of these emerging genre filmmakers manage to consistently impress me with how far they stretch their budgets. Sometimes its just a matter of having well chosen practical effects that I incorrectly imagine will be beyond the scope of a film of this size, as in Blue Ruin and more spectacularly in The Guest. (When you see something happen in a smaller film that looks or feels beyond its reach there is a quality of "Whoa, now anything can happen!" that carries over to the experience of the whole.) In the case of Oculus and Proxy, it's having a real symphonic score recorded by an actual orchestra, even if it happens to be one of the more obscure ensembles in Europe.

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acroyear
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Re: The Films of 2014

#52 Post by acroyear » Thu Oct 02, 2014 7:38 pm

Movie-Brat wrote:Tusk

Or as I like to call it, I should have went to see The Drop instead.

I mean, I actually supported the idea in day one and I still believe it's a good idea. But it's too bad it falls into the category of "good idea, horriblr execution." I mean there are legit good things I liked about it. I do indeed like the setup, it seemed like an accidental commentary on the YouTube generation before it delve into the scenes with Justin Long and Michael Parks where they sit and talk. However Smith as a filmmaker demonstrates how he can't set a mood or an atmosphere right. It's all over the place, it's a mess. And Johnny Depp, he was not only just a glorified cameo but he ended up being pretty pointless in the end.

I wanted to like it but it seemed like Smith didn't know what to do and really should handed the directing chair to Tobe Hooper or Darren Lynn Bousman. Hell, it was basically Smith trying to be Tobe Hooper and failing at it.
I believe Smith was also the editor of his own movie, which right there is a big problem. Didn't he have anyone to tell him how flat and excruciatingly unfunny Depp's dialogue and performance was?

I was totally on board with the first half of the film, which snowballed into an escalating feeling of dread the moment Long's character stepped into Parks' house. Any scene involving the interaction of those two throughout the film was intriguing for me (scary at times, funny at others), but I agree on how tonally inconsistent it was.

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Re: The Films of 2014

#53 Post by cdnchris » Fri Oct 03, 2014 10:56 am

Anybody catch A Walk Among the Tombstones? As I've admitted before I'm a sucker for murder/mysteries and detective films, so it doesn't take a lot to impress me, but I rather enjoyed it. It was nice to see more of a classic private detective film that didn't rely on action scenes and had a character rely on his own smarts (there's a rather good scene where Neeson faces off with a man with a knife that probably would have been a rather basic fight scene in someone's else's hands). It took its time, went through the process at a good pace, had a couple of neat reveals, decent dialogue and characters, and had a nice moody atmosphere, plus the best use of Donovan's "Atlantis" since Goodfellas.

My only disappointment is that it's kidnapping/ransom plot, though generally decent
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dissolves into more of a serial killer film and its conclusion, after a rather cool scene in a cemetery, doesn't fit the rest of the film
but I wouldn't consider that crippling.

I'm disappointed it's not doing better as I enjoyed Neeson in the role and thought it would have made a better franchise for him, in comparison to Taken anyways. But considering its box office I'm guessing that will be a no go.

Movie-Brat
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Re: The Films of 2014

#54 Post by Movie-Brat » Fri Oct 03, 2014 3:25 pm

I consider A Walk Among the Tombstones a very underrated film and it's not even the next year yet. I enjoyed it rather than I thought I would. I mean, Liam Neeson fits the role of Matthew Scudder perfectly and I like the dark, bleak tone of the film. I also argue that the choice of year to set it in gives the film plenty of personality as it makes for a nice addition.

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warren oates
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Re: The Films of 2014

#55 Post by warren oates » Wed Oct 08, 2014 12:03 pm

Remember when Harry Potter got that weird spell cast on him that made it impossible for other people not to disclose their darkest desires to him and compelled them to do whatever for them was the worst thing right in front of him? And how it also made him grow devil horns? Yeah, me neither, but that's largely the way the best moments of Horns -- the new Daniel Radcliffe film directed by Alexandre Aja by way of Joe (Stephen King the Younger) Hill's novel -- play out, as if they were the evil twin black comedy parodies that Harry Potter haters or twisted fanfic devotees wished they could have seen. It's pretty ingenious and effective stunt casting in that respect. I'm a fan of Aja in general, especially High Tension, the underrated surprisingly savage and gripping remake of The Hills Have Eyes (which I randomly caught on cable last night and could not stop watching) and Piranha 3D. Aja's films always look good but this new one, shot by Frederick Elmes, is gorgeous.

It's nice to see Aja doing more mainstream work as well as more material that allows him to display his knack for comedy. For me that is when Horns is at its most interesting, when Radcliffe is just wandering around the town, bumping into friends, acquaintances and random strangers who all confess horrible things to him and then act as if he's given them permission to do them. It's like a perverse inversion of a high concept feel-good Hollywood comedy like Liar, Liar.

It feels as if RADiUS-TWC is dumping Horns by debuting it on streaming services like iTunes this long before it opens on Halloween and I can sort of see why. It's a weird genre-bending hard to classify fantasy/dark comedy/teen relationship drama/murder mystery/horror story. All of the elements don't always gel and when they do it's sometimes annoyingly literal. Most of what I didn't like about the film is pretty clearly attributable to the source material; most of what's good about it to what Aja managed to do in spite of the limitations.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Films of 2014

#56 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Oct 27, 2014 2:31 pm

warren oates wrote:Remember when Harry Potter got that weird spell cast on him that made it impossible for other people not to disclose their darkest desires to him and compelled them to do whatever for them was the worst thing right in front of him? And how it also made him grow devil horns? Yeah, me neither, but that's largely the way the best moments of Horns -- the new Daniel Radcliffe film directed by Alexandre Aja by way of Joe (Stephen King the Younger) Hill's novel -- play out, as if they were the evil twin black comedy parodies that Harry Potter haters or twisted fanfic devotees wished they could have seen. It's pretty ingenious and effective stunt casting in that respect. I'm a fan of Aja in general, especially High Tension, the underrated surprisingly savage and gripping remake of The Hills Have Eyes (which I randomly caught on cable last night and could not stop watching) and Piranha 3D. Aja's films always look good but this new one, shot by Frederick Elmes, is gorgeous.
I had no idea this was an Alexandre Aja film, and I'm now immediately interested for the reasons you cited (particularly the fantastic High Tension). Appreciate the tip!

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Re: The Films of 2014

#57 Post by wllm995 » Sun Nov 02, 2014 11:39 pm

i haven't seen much discussion of Starred Up - a British film about a younger man who gets moved up to an adult prison because of his intractable attitude; and carries that same attitude with him, but now has to deal with a much more violent culture along with the presence of his father.

Extremely well acted and scripted - and has made my personal top ten list of 2014.

99% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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warren oates
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Re: The Films of 2014

#58 Post by warren oates » Fri Nov 14, 2014 3:00 am

The Better Angels will be criticized, perhaps somewhat justifiably, and perhaps equally unfairly* for borrowing too many stylistic tics from the director's mentor Terrence Malick. But what's worth admiring here aside from the obvious level of craft and poetry the film achieves is the rigor of its conceptual approach to the subject matter. Here's a biopic about a young Abraham Lincoln -- based on the recollections of a cousin with whom he grew up -- that's more concerned with the tone and texture, the places and the feel of his formative years, days and hours than any kind of narrative (and besides we've heard most of those stories before in other good books and films). The period props and architecture seem to have been painstakingly constructed with fastidious attention to detail, so that they don't just look right, but they work right too. And much of the action of the film is a kind of understated frontier labor procedural -- filmed elliptically of course -- where we get to see what farming was like at that time (quite literally a tough row to hoe), how to spruce up a log cabin with white wash or how to weave a dress from scratch on a loom. This is the sort of glancing approach to screen history and biography somebody like Sokurov has used repeatedly or that you see in a film like Andrei Rublev. Indeed, the sublime earthiness of the single remote location where most of the action takes place also recalls Tarkovsky, with a few shots seeming to directly reference films like Ivan's Childhood and The Mirror.

This is a very strong first film even if it is at times a little too much under the influence of Malick, a little too long and a tad repetitious. For an hour and a half it immerses you fully in the Lincoln family's frontier world in a way that more conventional narratives could not.

*The director does have a credit of "key artistic consultant" on The Tree of Life and he did edit To the Wonder, so he's at least helped co-create whatever he's "borrowing"

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Swift
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Re: The Films of 2014

#59 Post by Swift » Thu Nov 20, 2014 7:36 pm

Groove Is In The Heart is a lovely little short about memories and mixtapes, produced by the Guardian and the Royal Court Theatre as part of their Off the Page series of microplays.

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sir_luke
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Re: The Films of 2014

#60 Post by sir_luke » Sat Dec 13, 2014 12:40 pm

Tim Sutton's MEMPHIS, in a year of wonderfully ethereal and inscrutable films, is perhaps the most ethereal and inscrutable. I honestly can't tell what goes on here, but it seemed to me an earnest attempt at "great art" while also being acerbically self-parodical (Willis' whispery, Malick-esque monologue about how he'd like to be a tree is followed by a raucous bout of self-aware laughter). But while the film's purpose is often frustratingly obscure, it's difficult to deny that it has its own bizarro charm, which is more than a little due to the film's ability to evoke the spirit of Memphis (a city I dearly love) without featuring a highlight reel of its landmarks. Of course, the real highlight is the organic, subdued performance of blues artist Willis Earl Beal, whose drowsy daydreamer may very well be imagining all of the modestly surreal goings-on.

The main detriment of the film was how little music was actually featured, but what little there is is fantastic. Luckily, the end credits allow us to hear the haunting, off-kilter blues tune of which we hear torturously brief snippets throughout.

Overall, I left befuddled and moderately unsatisfied, but the aesthetic surety and eerie aura, combined with Beal's exceptional performance, were enough to make a pretty strong impression on me. This was actually one of my most highly anticipated films of the year, and I am very glad I had the chance to see it, despite my still-present indecisiveness on exactly how I feel about it.

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Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013)

#61 Post by AnamorphicWidescreen » Tue Dec 30, 2014 8:12 pm

Was impressed by K. Reichardt's Night Moves when I saw it a while back on Blu - great indy film, and I liked how the majestic Pacific Northwest setting/landscape was as much of a character in the film as John, Dena, and Harmon.

Dakota Fanning (Dena) was great as the rich girl hippie, who was estranged from her family - but still living on mommy & daddy's money...

I'm not sure if the film was supposed to generate sympathy for the three main characters or not -
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I myself didn't feel at all sympathetic towards them, given that they destroyed property which resulted in the death of an innocent bystander...
I was somewhat surprised at the ending, which I didn't see coming -
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i.e. when Josh eliminated Dena, then took off - supposedly to start a new life in a different town...

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Re: The Films of 2014

#62 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Dec 31, 2014 11:36 pm

Coherence is a trippy little thriller about 8 friends in some rather strange circumstances, whilst dealing with their own myriad personal issues and the mounting paranoia among each other and about their situation. The performances carry pretty much everything considering the miniscule budget (shot for 50 grand in a little under a week), and it does that job well enough. I don't quite consider it the best example of "less is more" but it's certainly at least a passable one, and good to see nowadays with indie filmmaking not the darling it used to be.

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bottled spider
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Re: Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013)

#63 Post by bottled spider » Sat Jan 03, 2015 6:43 pm

AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Was impressed by K. Reichardt's Night Moves when I saw it a while back on Blu - great indy film, and I liked how the majestic Pacific Northwest setting/landscape was as much of a character in the film as John, Dena, and Harmon.
I saw this in the theatre, and liked it so much I went back the following night. And I'll watch it again sometime at home. The small audience from both nights, however, didn't seem impressed; they weren't attentive, and I didn't overhear any appreciative murmurings as we exited.
AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:I was somewhat surprised at the ending, which I didn't see coming -
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i.e. when Josh eliminated Dena, then took off - supposedly to start a new life in a different town...
There were a couple ways this was prepared for, though perhaps inadequately:
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i. near the beginning, Dena asks Josh to wait by the gate for her, but instead he slips inside, and startles her. It was natural enough that he should do so, because he was clearly uncomfortable with being able to see into the bathing area of the women's spa, but it still plays out faintly sinister. His invasion of the same office later in the film echoes the earlier scene. ii. There were several instances of Josh silencing Dena -- shushing her or telling her to shut up -- before silencing her finally.

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D50
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Re: Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013)

#64 Post by D50 » Sat Jan 03, 2015 9:09 pm

bottled spider wrote:I saw this in the theatre, and liked it so much I went back the following night. And I'll watch it again sometime at home. The small audience from both nights, however, didn't seem impressed; they weren't attentive, and I didn't overhear any appreciative murmurings as we exited.
I pretty much walked out alone as I stayed for the credits.

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Lemmy Caution
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Re: The Films of 2014

#65 Post by Lemmy Caution » Fri Jan 23, 2015 6:59 am

Stonehearst Asylum?
Brit film with a high-powered cast.
Was released in the US a week before Halloween.
Seems to have disappeared without a trace.
I only heard of it because a British friend recced it.
I couldn't find one mention of it using Search here.
Anyone aware of this film?

Edit: An American friend saw it and hated it, thought the cast was completely wasted.
That and the fact that it just dropped off the cultural map immediately tell me to stay away ...
Last edited by Lemmy Caution on Sat Feb 14, 2015 12:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: The Films of 2014

#66 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sat Feb 07, 2015 1:00 am

(This is a lot longer than the sort of thing normally found in this thread, but I’m reluctant to create a dedicated thread when it will likely be a number of months before this is out anywhere with subtitles. So I’m sticking this here for now.)

Jiang Wen’s Gone with the Bullets will be playing soon at the Berlinale. This is great news, because a good chunk of the elite film press corps will be going in cold and exposed to what they might well regard as the ravings of a madman. But as the saying goes, there’s a method to the madness, and if the film plays as you'd expect from a movie with nine screenwriters—including a famous playwright, a famous novelist, an up-and-coming novelist, and the PR director of Jiang's production company—it’s also indisputably Jiang’s film, and even more self-revelatory in its way than the semi-autobiographical In the Heat of the Sun. (Be warned that some of what's below could be considered spoilers, though I don’t consider any of them serious enough to warrant the spoiler tag. If you're the type who doesn’t want to read in advance about any plot developments past the first act, stop reading after the fifth paragraph.)

A key thing to keep in mind here is that this is Jiang’s first film as a director since Let the Bullets Fly in 2010. That got a decent amount of international attention, at least by the standards of Chinese films, but more important is how it was received in China. For some time it China’s highest-grossing domestic production of all time, and probably the only film to hold the title that really deserved it. It might be the closest thing China has to a consensus favorite, beloved by both critics and “ordinary” viewers. Everyone expected he would stay the course, and Jiang went from a popular actor who directed artsy, festival-oriented films to a creator of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Four years later, he ends up doing... this. It’s way too facile to say that Gone with the Bullets is a $50 million prank, but it might just be that Jiang’s mordant sense of humor also includes a perverse streak of self-sabotage. Gone has been received in some quarters as though Jiang were setting off stink bombs in theaters, and while Let the Bullets Fly broke records left and right, its follow-up won’t break even. He’s responded the way artists sometimes do in these situations, expressing regret that audiences didn’t “get it,” but he surely had some idea this was going to happen, and indeed the film itself occasionally suggests it.

Part of the issue might be that Gone isn’t much of a follow-up to Let the Bullets Fly. The title similarity exists only in English—they have totally different titles in Chinese, with Gone’s translating as “a step away”—but the PR still gave the impression that this was a more direct successor than it actually is. It turns out they don’t have much in common beyond the time period (1920s China) and certain themes, and for the purposes of watching Gone with the Bullets, it’s more important to know how Let the Bullets Fly was received than to have actually seen Let the Bullets Fly (though you should see it anyway because it’s great). The most overt similarity is the pairing of Jiang with fellow Beijingese star Ge You, as self-styled “adventurers” named Ma Zouri (Jiang) and Xiang Feitian (Ge). Wu Qi (Wen Zhang), a nouveau riche warlord’s son, hires the duo to enhance his reputation and “turn my new money into old money,” which for some reason involves sponsoring a beauty pageant for Shanghai courtesans.

The pageant sequence runs a full 25 minutes, and while it serves some plot functions—mainly introducing the female leads, Wanyan Ying (Shu Qi, distractingly dubbed into a northern accent) and Wu Qi’s sister Wu Liu (Zhou Yun)—it’s really more of an extended teaser that encapsulates the film’s tone and structure. The sequence is an exhausting string of anachronistic, hypersexualized dance numbers broken up by crosstalk routines between Ma and Xiang; similarly, the film as a whole is divided between extravagant set pieces and long, loopy dialogues with Carrollesque wordplay and illogic. Let the Bullets Fly could be described this way as well, but while it was never strictly “naturalistic,” it took its good time building to the more ludicrous elements, like the townspeople covering every inch of their roads with silverware. Gone offers no similar grace period: when Ma and Xiang walk out onstage, they’re encased in giant soap bubbles, a stunt considerably less plausible than the usual kid-in-a-bubble tricks and one I’m confident has never been seen on an actual stage. The dancers move on- and off-stage with mysterious speed and set changes occur almost instantly between cuts. The rest of the film isn’t in quite the same breakneck mode, which is probably just as well, since in that case it would only be Moulin Rouge! Redux. But the level of stylization remains consistently high.

Case in point: when pageant-winner Wanyan reveals her love for Ma, they have a long conversation about marriage (with Ma’s amusing interpretation of the phrase “I do”), then embark on an opium binge that includes a joyride through an oversized CG rendition of the Bund, the Moon crashing into the Earth (no, really), and Wanyan’s accidental death. Ma stands accused of her murder and heads to the Wu family mansion, where he meets their somewhat addled patriarch (Liu Linian, who co-starred in Jiang’s ’86 debut Hibiscus Town) and his shrewish wife (Hung Huang, the “Chinese Oprah”); he also discovers Xiang Feitian in a compromising position, a delicate matter given that Xiang has a day job with the police. Ma can’t convince everyone of his innocence, not least because can’t remember the night in question, but he’s sufficiently charming that they allow him to walk away.

Here Jiang takes a page from an actual incident in 1920, when Shanghai went bonkers over a dissolute young man who murdered a concubine; perhaps the most notable outcome was China’s first docudrama. In that case, though, the accused’s guilt was apparently beyond doubt, and while his real-life model was speedily captured, Ma spends the next two years in hiding. But his notoriety only grows over time, and his plight isn’t so much that of the Wrong Man as the Reluctant Celebrity. More accurately, it's the plight of the celebrity who’d much rather be known for something else. But he’s stuck with being Ma the Murderer, largely because too many are invested in his public image as such. (His old pal Xiang, for example, has won fame as a hero cop hunting down a brutal killer.) So Ma must relive his claim to fame—Wanyan’s “murder”—through newspapers, a documentary, a stage play, and eventually a film starring... Ma himself.

The last three are crucial to what Jiang is doing here. The documentary is directed by Wu Liu, who sympathizes with Ma even as her film throws him under the bus. The play stars actor Wang Tianwang (Wang Zhiwen), who goes on to direct the later film-within-the-film. Jiang presents Wu Liu as an ideal capital-A Artist: though she initially accepts the idea of Ma as a killer, her film shows a genuine curiosity about the truth, and her filmmaking is born of a pure desire to create and invent. She hopes to be nothing less than “the Chinese Lumière,” and even builds a monkey-powered camera rig, something I doubt Auguste or Louis ever came up with. Her documentary would’ve been decidedly avant-garde in the actual 1920s, resembling nothing so much as a silent black-and-white Tony Scott flick. Wang is by contrast a pompous hack who sensationalizes an already sensationalized event, is motivated largely by careerism, and is given to pronouncements like “film is an art that can be understood by the whole world”—a comment Jiang almost surely intends as ironic, given its placement in this particular film.

Unpleasant as Wang is, Ma, Wu Liu, and the rest of their circle are obliged to include him in their plans. He becomes the philistine within; as Jiang puts it, “Wang Tianwang is in everyone.” I suspect Wang’s notions of film and art are echoed in studio boardrooms around the world, and Jiang probably heard it a lot in critiques of The Sun Also Rises, his similarly divisive and financially disappointing 2007 “comeback.” The the idea of art “for the people” also evokes a doctrinaire Communist attitude that might be making a comeback in China today. But where the official version defines “the people” as “the Chinese people,” for many in Chinese film, validation lies abroad. In this light, Gone’s frequent references to Western films, which James Marsh dismisses as simple pandering, feel like a playful rejoinder from an artist urged to shoot for the Moon after his last film: if these films are what I should aspire to, then I’ll give ’em to you one after another. (Rumors of a Robert De Niro cameo were nothing more than that, but Jiang makes up for it by literally shooting the Moon.) Jiang even features a crude sort of Francophilia when Ma recalls an old affair with a French student, perhaps referencing Jiang's failed marriage to a Frenchwoman. Later, Xiang coaches Ma on how to act before the authorities of the French Concession, like a producer offering notes. “The French like romance, but you can’t be too unrestrained”—clearly Jiang didn’t listen. Too bad this couldn’t play at Cannes instead of Berlin. If Jiang “panders” to foreign viewers with his nods to The Godfather, A Trip to the Moon, and L’Amant (!), it’s partly to mock the ambitions of China’s “culture industry,” for whom the approval of Cannes or the U.S. box office is the ultimate honor.

This is all a bit insider-baseball, but Gone with the Bullets links it to a broader sham cosmopolitanism. The “worldiness” of Old Shanghai is just a shiny façade for the same old greed and corruption, where a money-launderer can hold down a high-ranking police job and rule of law remains a bad joke. (“What difference does it make if he’s killed someone or not?”) That this isn’t entirely dissimilar to New Shanghai (read: New China) is no doubt part of the point. Meanwhile, newly-imported forms of mass media allow for manipulation of public opinion on a previously unimaginable scale, creating a feedback loop where opinion-makers justify their decisions with appeals to public sentiment. All this is bound up with the insecurities of a new elite no more legitimate than the old. The warlord Wu has an implied link to the Wuchang Uprising (which helped overthrow the ancien régime only to pave the way for local despots) and hits on a perfect way to turn his new money into old: he marries an exiled White Russian countess, in a Western-style wedding relayed through an interpreter. (The assorted references to Western weddings pay off spectacularly in the film’s nutso conclusion.) For this new ruling class, the trappings of the West are merely a shortcut to legitimacy. Plus ça change: today, the Communist Party fiercely denounces “Westernizing” influences to maintain its own despotism, even as it purports to uphold “scientific” Marxism-Leninism borrowed from the winning side of the Russian Civil War. The Party is never mentioned in Gone with the Bullets, but could Jiang’s interest in China’s first docudrama have been piqued in part because it was released in Shanghai on the same day the Party was founded in that very city? He’ll never tell.

Nearly a hundred years on, China is still grappling with its relationship to Western “modernity,” coexisting with an assertive nationalism that in its own way also seeks validation from abroad—something Ma and Co. cannily exploit, whipping up patriotic anger to get him extricated from the clutches of the French. It’s a stroke of genius or egotism—probably both—that Jiang sees his own post-Let the Bullets Fly predicament through roughly the same lens. Jiang can make movies for “the Chinese people,” or for overseas tastemakers and their local imitators, or maybe even for all of the above. The filmmaker himself is a disposable commodity in this framework, capable of being tossed aside and replaced with any number of others who might satisfy these demands. Gone with the Bullets resists this by taking the filmmaker’s self as its subject, breaking it down into its component influences, impulses, and temptations and examining where these came from. In short, it puts viewers inside a celebrity mind cracking beneath the weight of history and expectations. This was plainly a step too far for many of them, but I hope a lot more will take it anyway.
Last edited by The Fanciful Norwegian on Sun Feb 15, 2015 8:13 pm, edited 8 times in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Films of 2014

#67 Post by domino harvey » Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:00 pm

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Miguel Arteta) One of the biggest pleasant surprises in recent memory, this is a family film that actually has the gall to reinforce the structure of family in a positive manner without underlying cynicism or hostility. If a film of unsinkable optimism and underlying deeply conservative philosophy sounds like sheer torture and anathema to a contemporary comedy, you'd be wrong, at least in this particular example, as Alexander and the tl;dr made me laugh louder and harder than any film in a long, long time. The film is sharp and intelligent and yet never becomes too clever or superior to its premise or characters, as evidenced by its fierce defense and bolstering of all of its slightly flawed but fundamentally decent members of the unit, who reinforce the necessity of the nuclear family not in how they interact with the assorted broad calamities which befall them but in how they respond to and deal with them afterwards. My girlfriend and I have been watching Modern Family reruns lately and that show is so full of barely concealed rage and antagonism of every character by every other character that it's a chore to sit through, so maybe I was primed from the get-go for the kind of entertainments this film offers, but I was constantly pleasantly surprised and entertained far beyond what should be reasonable for what is ostensibly a lowkey and unambitious crowd pleaser that nevertheless left me more satisfied than most recent films of far loftier aims and means. Highly recommended, believe it or not.

the Better Angels (AJ Edwards) As warren oates notes earlier, this is pretty clearly cut from Malick's particular swirly-woven cloth, but as far as love letters to Malick go, this has to be the best I've ever seen, and indeed I liked it more than I like most actual Malick films. Edwards confronts us with the realities of frontier life in a visceral yet solidly presentational manner that makes them all the more alien and beautiful in their simplicity. Indeed, the film finds so much of interest in the small wooded area in which Abraham Lincoln spent his childhood that it's only in reflection after the film is over that one realizes just how claustrophobic the film's setting actually is. Some fine performances here, especially from Jason Clarke as Lincoln's stern but not unloving father.

the Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini) Turns out Gone Girl wasn't the only successful noir update of 2014, as for most of the running time this Patricia Highsmith adaptation is a superior treat of wrong place wrong time, mixed signals, and accidental murders. A lot of the reviews seem more apt to compare it to Hitchcock, but despite its respectable eyecandy tourist notions this is a pretty dirty little film far more befitting a b-list programmer than a glossy postcard pic, with a strong trio of central performances by Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst, and especially Viggo Mortensen. Unfortunately the last ten minutes or so have all the bad aftertaste of a weak Hays Code mandate, but the overall experience is still by far a positive one.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Films of 2014

#68 Post by domino harvey » Tue Feb 17, 2015 3:14 am

Laggies (Lynn Shelton) I greatly admired Shelton's Touchy Feely from the year before as a superior example of a kind of film increasingly difficult to find made well anymore, the indie dramedy, and now she's made an even better film in another drought arena, the romantic comedy. This telling of the unlikely and yet wholly plausible friendship between Keira Knightley's 28 year old and Chloe Grace Moretz' high schooler and the resultant romance that inevitably develops between Knightley and Moretz' dad, the never better Sam Rockwell, sounds like pretty rote stuff from the outside looking in, and the wheel is not reinvented here to be sure. But Shelton's film is filled with such warmth of characters interacting with each other on a fundamentally interesting fashion that I felt like I was watching a rediscovered James L Brooks flick from his prime. There are no weak links here but if you are a fan of Rockwell (rhetorical question given that the man's a living god), this needs to be moved to the top of your viewing priorities, as he's never been funnier or more charming. But he's in good company, and like the best Brooks film or classic comedy from the studio era, the film's greatest strength is one so rarely appreciated anymore: for a hundred minutes I spent time with a group of characters I just plain liked and enjoyed the experience of watching them relate to each other as the plot played out in an almost secondary fashion. I'm not sure why no one really talked much about this when it came out or why it failed to connect with audiences, because it's one of the most innately likable (and immensely relatable if you're a couple years on either side of Knightley's age bracket) movies I've seen in some time, and one I already look forward to revisiting. Highly recommended.

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Re: The Films of 2014

#69 Post by lacritfan » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:16 pm

I was very impressed by The Skeleton Twins. Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader can act, especially Wiig. Writing was very good, you've seen all the characters and plot points a million times but it felt real and fresh here. Tone was very much like Little Miss Sunshine, the film is mostly a drama but there are funny parts that don't feel real forced. Lots of depressing things in it but I almost wouldn't call it a depressing movie at all.

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The Films of 2014

#70 Post by Red Screamer » Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:55 am

Kevin B. Lee's Transformers: The Premake is a "desktop documentary", a compilation of videos, articles, and text taking place on a computer screen. Lee, who's one of the best film critics and video essayists around, uses investigation and juxtaposition to form hundreds of sources into commentary on the blockbuster industry and culture as well as what cinema means in an age where everyone has a camera and how these two worlds relate. The form it takes is perfect as it allows the film to converse with these subjects on their own terms and to show the process of Lee thinking.

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Re: The Films of 2014

#71 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Mar 19, 2015 3:11 pm

Transformers: the Premake is an amazing concoction. (More active than a "compilation" -- not sure just what to call it, a "confection" might work, but that seems to imply pastry or the like).

Disclaimer -- Kevin is a long-time pal.

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Re: The Films of 2014

#72 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Mar 19, 2015 4:43 pm

How about a 'curation'?

I knew the Transformers films were good for something! If only for the way that just following the filming can branch off into so many tangential issues. Particularly the contrast between official and unofficial information on a project, and the way that 'authorised' information is just a click away from 'subversive' information, and so on. It just takes a massive amount of dedication towards following the clues and piecing tiny fragments of imagery together into a coherent narrative.

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Re: The Films of 2014

#73 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Aug 26, 2015 11:08 pm

Song of the Sea (Moore 2014) -- An Irish (plus Danish, Belgian and Luxembourgeois) film based on the same sort of folk material as Secret of Roan Inish -- namely marriage of selkies and humans. Has little touches of lots of other films -- but unique -- and visually gorgeous. Yet more proof that 2-D animation has not run out of material worth doing.

Image

Trailer at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgbXWt8kM5Q" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Satori
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Re: The Films of 2014

#74 Post by Satori » Sun Aug 30, 2015 9:20 am

Monika Treut's 2014 film Of Girls and Horses has just recently been made available on Netflix streaming, and while the cover makes it look like something from this post in the worst DVD covers thread, the film itself fits in well with Treut's other work and is well worth watching.

It does initially seems like an odd project coming from Treut, primarily because of the setting. Treut’s works are always about cities—especially San Francisco—while this film almost entirely takes place on a farm in the German countryside. The opening shot establishes a massive expanse of wide grassy hills populated by horses that will recur throughout the film. The film is about a troubled young woman named Alex who has been sent to work on the farm by her mother. We learn little about Alex’s past, but the wounds on her arms reveal a history of self-harm. While initially resistant to the farm, Alex’s love for horses helps her overcome this resistance and, helped by Nina, the woman who runs the farm, she eventually fits into this space quite well. She also develops a relationship with a wealthy girl named Kathy who is visiting the farm to improve her horseback riding.

Much of this narrative and thematic content—the cross-class romance, the troubled teen on the mend, the importance of animal/human relationships—places the film squarely within the genre of the “family film,” with Free Willy being a paradigmatic example. The family film genre (and there might be a better name for this) does give the film’s narrative a safety net: it allows the girls to “mess up” a couple times without much consequence. And I think the key to understanding the film is Treut’s use of these genre conventions to develop some of the ideas she has always been interested in. Like Treut’s other work, Of Girls and Horses is fundamentally about the intersection of place and identity—or, more specifically, the way in which certain spaces allow for the transformation of identity. For instance, the dungeon in Seduction: A Cruel Woman, or San Francisco in Virgin Machine or Gendernauts. Here, Alex is able to refashion her identity through her encounter with the farm and the relationships enabled by this location: with the horses, Kathy, and Nina. There are also other subtle shifts in identity occasioned by changes in space throughout the film: for instance, Kathy loosens up a bit and becomes more open to Alex after the pair dance together at a nightclub they visit in a nearby town.

Indeed, the idea of identity always being in flux appears in this film’s narrative movements between the country and the city. Nina, while spending much of her time running the farm, also lives in Hamburg with her partner Christine, who is a writer. Towards the end of the film she visits Christine for a weekend, leaving the two girls in charge of the farm. Nina is thus able to shift between these two different spaces, holding these parts of her identity together in a productive and ultimately fulfilling tension. So too with the end of the film,
SpoilerShow
in which Alex and Kathy make plans to go to Berlin together where Kathy lives.
While these happy romantic couplings feel a bit out of step with Treut’s previous work—especially Seduction and Virgin Machine, two great anti-romance films—these relationships are portrayed as growing and changing through spatial transformations, thus still allowing for the constant recreation of identity. And that seems to me to be the ultimate Treut theme, allowing Of Girls and Horses to slot nicely into her oeuvre.

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Black Sea (Kevin Macdonald, 2014)

#75 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sun Sep 20, 2015 6:09 am

This film seemed to come and go without making much of a splash (sorry!). Directed by MacDonald, it's written by Dennis Kelly, who's a brilliant playwright and created and wrote the C4 drama 'Utopia'. Jude Law leads a motley crew of Russians and Brits to salvage millions of dollars worth of gold that was on a submarine that sunk during WW2, financed by a shady organisation. Typically for Kelly, it's extremely tense, has moments of sudden violence and levels upon levels of conspiracy. For those who've caught Utopia this is well worth catching up with.

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