The Films of 2013

[Jeff]

The Kiarostami and Malick would have been at the top of the list if they hadn't been met with shrugs at their festival bows.

Don't count the Kiarostami out yet: that film burrows even deeper in misdirection than Certified Copy, and a lot of those first viewers didn't even seem to realise that there was a rug to pull out from under them.

Good to hear, zedz! I'm still very much looking forward to it.

[ianungstad]

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s THE ASSASSIN is definitely well into production and should be ready by Cannes/Venice. David Bordwell even posted about a set visit recently.

The film has had so many false starts it's nice to know it's finally in production.

Ghibli also announced the new Miyazaki and Takahata films for this summer.

I'm also really looking forward to the new Sylvain Chomet film Attila Marcel. His two animated films, The Triples of Belleville and The Illusionist were both great. It will be interesting to see how well he translates to live action.

Hirokazu Koreeda also has a new film already in post production, which is worth a mention.

[knives]

I'm also really looking forward to the new Sylvain Chomet film Attila Marcel. His two animated films, The Triples of Belleville and The Illusionist were both great. It will be interesting to see how well he translates to live action.

Badly based on his previous effort.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Illusionist wasn't a great idea and wound up being comically mawkish, but it was still gorgeous, and displayed immense and distinctive talent- and it'd take more than one shitty movie to cancel out Triplets of Belleville, which was one of the best animated movies of the 2000s. So I'm hopeful, though animation to live action is always a tricky transition.

[knives]

I thought The Illusionist was great actually. I was referring to his short in that Paris omnibus.

[zedz]

To be fair, the majority of the films in that Paris omnibus were terrible.

[Roger Ryan]

To be fair, the majority of the films in that Paris omnibus were terrible.

And, yet, most of them looked pretty good when compared to the ones in the New York omnibus film released three years later.

[John Cope]

The Kiarostami and Malick would have been at the top of the list if they hadn't been met with shrugs at their festival bows.

I wouldn't take festival shrugs (or acclaim) that seriously.

[swo17]

To be fair, the majority of the films in that Paris omnibus were terrible.

Hmmm...I remember liking several of them, though I don't entirely remember which ones. The Alexander Payne/Margo Martindale segment is maybe the best thing he's ever done.

[Roger Ryan]

To be fair, the majority of the films in that Paris omnibus were terrible.

Hmmm...I remember liking several of them, though I don't entirely remember which ones. The Alexander Payne/Margo Martindale segment is maybe the best thing he's ever done.

Yes, Payne's is superb...and I like Van Sant's, Salles', Assayas' and Coixet's a lot, plus the Coen's one is fun, too.
Here is a guide to all of them.

[zedz]

There were a handful of decent ones, I'll concede (and I'm no great fan of Payne's, so I'll have to take your word for that), but the problem was they were buried in an avalanche of mediocrity.

Most portmanteau films struggle to assemble three or four good segments. Here you've got eighteen, and the running times are so compressed that the content tends to be banal and simplistic.

[colinr0380]

Here you've got eighteen, and the running times are so compressed that the content tends to be banal and simplistic.

That reminds me a lot of my feelings towards that September 11 film (while I think the Samira Makhmalbaf film was excellent, even that falls into that territory as well)

[zedz]

If that's the film I'm thinking of, there's the great Imamura segment (his final film, too), a lot of middling stuff, and some godawful embarrassments (that Sean Penn one!)

Maybe we should initiate a 'cherry-picking the portmanteaus' thread, with recommendations for the really great segments of a problematic genre. I know this topic has come up before in various guises.

[knives]

Zedz you're right on every front. Awful movie, but it has one of the better swan songs in it sadly making it a must watch.

[colinr0380]

Sadly I thought that the Imamura was as disappointing as the rest of the film, and employed as much clunky allegory as Penn's film (or Nair's, or Innaritu's). Although Imamura is no stranger to that, it is handled (paced?) much better in his feature works.

Along with the Makhmalbaf the only real success for me was the Loach, which used blunt didactism/documentary/personal recollections to a powerful effect, making a great contrast against all of the more classically veiled manipulations (photographic, CGI and moral) going on elsewhere.

The great thing about portmanteaus though is that they both allow a filmmaker to work in something completely outside of their usual frame of reference (genre, location, running time etc), which is something that can be a liberation but also fascinatingly exposes some telling issues that might otherwise be buried and/or obscured in a filmmaker's feature works.

Pormanteaus are strange beasts. I wonder how much the idea of collective effort plays into a portmanteau. I guess it depends on a producer's brief or statement of intent to decide that. I don't really get the impression that individual filmmakers liaise with each other at all in these things (because they don't want to interfere, or be interfered with during their work? Or just because of logistics?), in which case we could class individual segments just as short films (as Criterion did when they split off Mira Nair's September 11 segment to put in the shorts section of Monsoon Wedding). Yet it seems that the whole point of the portmanteau film as a genre is that it should play and work as a whole, entire piece. Which is an almost impossible feat to achieve given the variability between segments. Though I appreciate the attempts!

Does that variability place more emphasis on the initial linking idea by default though, such as September 11, or time passing in Ten Minutes Older, or Vietnam in Far From Vietnam, and so on? The brief describing the subject is often the most explicit, experimental and provocative part of the entire project, with many of the segments often becoming subordinate in idea terms to that one 'big' idea, as if afraid to challenge or overwhelm it (which I think could also be added as one partial explanation to zedz's criticism of blandness and obviousness within each segment). I also wonder if because none of the films have enough time to gain traction, and could often be contradicted by a film before or following it, that allows the producer/creative consultant/funding body/etc to retain the primacy of artistic control over the endeavour? (For some reason I'm thinking of The Five Obstructions again!)

Many portmanteau films might not work (and often only in segments, which is perhaps more the fault of the producers for not shaping something coherent from the disparate elements, and creating a sense of narrative progression, rather than the fault of individual directors) but, as with short films, even the biggest failures offer fascinating insights which are often valuable to an overall assessment of a filmmaker. Though this is getting into 'Tarantino wanting to retire before making terrible final films' territory again (which itself leads me to think: are the Grindhouse trailers a veiled kind of portmanteau film?)

EDIT: Although it would run the obvious risk of being samey, I would love to see the exact same material being made by different filmmakers, which would presumably lead to a variety of different approaches and results, and perhaps emphasise that the storyline is just one of the tools in a filmmaker's arsenal.

[beamish13]

Here's hoping that Peter Greenaway's GOLTZIUS AND THE PELICAN COMPANY gets a North American release. I don't think any of his films have gotten much theatrical attention Stateside since 8 1/2 WOMEN.

[ianungstad]

I totally forgot this movie was even made but Diablo Cody's directorial debut Paradise was picked up today at the Berlin film market by Image Entertainment. It's going straight to video. Ouch. Fairly high profile cast with Russell Brand, Octavia Spencer, Holly Hunter, Nick Offerman. Must be pretty awful.

[flyonthewall2983]

Stand Up Guys is okay. Worth at least a rental.

[mfunk9786]

Pull quote alert!

[The Narrator Returns]

Hey, it would be a better pull quote than "a bad-boy Bucket List."

[ianungstad]

Apparently Noah Baumbach went into production on his Frances Ha followup in December. The film is currently untitled. I assume it will debut in the fall.

http://thefilmstage.com/news/noah-baumb ... york-city/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ianungstad]

Guy Maddin's new film sounds pretty awesome:


Spiritismes

Director: Guy Maddin
Writer(s): Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Producer(s): Phyllis Laing
U.S. Distributor: Rights Available
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Amira Casar, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, Elina Löwensohn, Mathieu Demy, Jean-François Stévenin, André Wilms, Grégory Gadebois, Jacques Nolot

High set of profile actors join one crazy project which is best described by the avant-gardist himself – “Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it.”

Gist: Every day, Guy Maddin invites visitors of the Centre Pompidou to witness the making of a new film inspired by a long-lost movie. Summoning these wandering spirits of cinema in theatrical “séances”, Maddin and his actors inhabit their ghostly scenarios. Example: Maddin and his cohorts would “contact” the ghost of a lost film – William Wellman’s Ladies of the Mob, for example, or Mikio Naruse’s The Strength of a Moustache – and then recreate/reimagine it as if under the influence of the cosmic ectoplasm.”

Release Date: We’re not sure if this can be packaged as one 5-6 hour ode to lost films, (there are 100 short films in all) but I could see the Toronto Int. Film Festival attempting to package this for consumption.
- See more at: http://www.ioncinema.com/annual-top-fil ... t-anticipa" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;ted-films-of-2013-guy-maddin-spiritismes#sthash.mDQRmGw9.dpuf

[repeat]

Roger Ebert posted a three-and-a-half star review of Radu Jude's Everybody In Our Family (apparently written by his Polish correspondent Michał Oleszczyk), and apparently it's playing now or soon somewhere in the US as it's listed as being "in theaters"... Mandatory viewing for anyone interested in recent Romanian cinema, and either way one of the best films of 2012 - don't miss it!

[zedz]

I'd assumed that Spiritismes was more of an event / installation, but I'm glad the resulting films are going to be released in some form.

[Andrew_VB]

Roger Ebert posted a three-and-a-half star review of Radu Jude's Everybody In Our Family (apparently written by his Polish correspondent Michał Oleszczyk), and apparently it's playing now or soon somewhere in the US as it's listed as being "in theaters"... Mandatory viewing for anyone interested in recent Romanian cinema, and either way one of the best films of 2012 - don't miss it!

i really enjoyed that film. i think it says that (and is reviewed on the chicago sun times site) because it's playing a festival at the siskel center this weekend. i could be wrong, but i still think it is without a distributor in the us.