[review] Carlos Reygadas: Batalla en el cielo (2005) (aka Battle in Heaven)

Battle In Heaven is a film that, as stated on it's theatrical poster, 'contains strong real sex'. Any audience expecting to be aroused may very well be disappointed: the fleshy carnality on display here is about as unsexy as it may also be familiar. How often do we go to a theater and see sex that we actually know about, the corpulent physicality making love, difficult emotions placed on the nightstand. The graphic sex in "The Brown Bunny" and "9 Songs" while being perhaps more clearly pornographic in content have only a fraction of Reygadas' explicitness in content. "Battle in Heaven" has it's characters exposed, fully exposed, to one another.

Reygadas is a filmmaker that employs what may be perceived as controversial imagery and subject matter to challenge a viewer's capacity to actually engage with discussions on sex, faith, and morality. He doesn’t shy away from showing Marcos and his obese wife going at it just as much as he has no problem allowing the camera to meditate on strong images like Marcos’ limp penis and Ana’s vagina. This is not an easy film to watch, but I would suggest that it can be rewarding.
Carlos Reygadas' mesmerizing films deserve to be seen by as wide an audience as possible, though this one will not be for everyone.

[review] Carlos Reygadas: Japón (2002)

Director & Producer Carlos Reygadas, born October 10, 1971, from Mexico City, has strung together a very particular body of work. Particularly ingenious, remarkably humane, expressly philosophic, artful. His pictures are framed within a magically real world of desires, bodies, ethics, and consequence.
Regadas comments, "After I make a film I psychoanalyze myself retroactively so that I can give explanations to journalists and film people. But I don't believe in those explanations myself."

With his first feature, Japón, Reygadas has attempted nothing less than a justified return to the art film. He works without, and beyond, the narrative conventions of most contemporary “independent” cinema. Keen and unpredictable, Reygadas’ films contain some of the most shocking, fascinating and deliriously beautiful imagery seen on screen.

Zelda Rubinstein - Dies, age 76

Zelda Rubinstein, best known for her role as Poltergeist's 4'3" psychic, has died in Los Angeles at 76.

She'll be best remembered as Tangina Barrons, the Freeling family's guide to the spirit world in the Poltergeist franchise. Writer and critic Pauline Kael observed that the character of Tangina "gives the movie new life, and she makes a large chunk of it work. . . . She emanates the eerie calm of someone who is used to dealing with tricky, deceiving ghosts." Rubinstein went on to reprise the role in "Poltergeist 2: The Other Side" and "Poltergeist 3." She also appeared in John Hughes' coming-of-age comedy classic Sixteen Candles. You will also find Ms. Rubinstein in "Teen Witch" and most recently "Southland Tales."

[review] WRAPPING 2009: BALLAST

This is a very small independent picture that did very well at two of the big festivals (Sundance & Berlin) but got little to no distribution. It's available for instant viewing on Netflix now. The story follows a Mississippi Delta family quietly
shattered by a personal tragedy as they move past the wrenching event to possible uplift. The characters seem real every second of the picture and the performances are delivered by all first time actors. Ranks with Silent Light as my favorite films for 2009. Both "Ballast" and "Silent Light" are best of the decade material.

WRAPPING 2009: A SERIOUS MAN

"Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism -- and intersections thereof -- A Serious Man is a film by Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel & Ethan Coen.
This movie is a cerebral black comedy kept upbeat, with a sort of uptempo pace of small twists and turns through a kind of "who done it" type of "what's happening to me." Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick are all superb.

WRAPPING 2009: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

"I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is," Herzog told Defamer. and his take on the Bad Lieutenant, with Nicolas Cage, ups the hysterics, and in place of the catholic moral anguish Herzog finds humor. It's fun. This picture is ecstatic. An excellent picture developed with great creative confidence.
No shortage of slapstick here. Whether it's the spectacle of Cage hacking through the thicket of the lower Ninth Ward, losing his bets, always betting his "dimes"—as well as a key witness—in a Biloxi casino, or hallucinating an iguana who sings like Tom Jones. Eva Mendes plays his a beautiful, if dim, coke-snorting call girl very well, not entirely unlike her role played with Joaquin Phoenix in James Gray's "We Own the Night".
Terence McDonagh: I'll kill all of you. To the break of dawn. To the break of dawn, baby.

WRAPPING 2009: MY SON MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE

MY SON MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE -Sabers and pickpocket ostriches! Michael Shannon is on a kind of roll in taking and handling with very lean efficiency these very bat maddie characters. In Revolutionary Road, Shannon's character John Givings tells Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), "Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness." In William Friedkin's 2006 film, "Bug" Shannon played a paranoiac drifter that introduces Ashley Judd's character Agnes to a claustrophobic nightmare of reality as a grand conspiracy of bugs begin to infest their lives.
My Son, My Son ... will be a lot of fun for many of us. Great loads of humor, very macabre, american gothic material fresh out of the pages of O'Connor and carried in a barrel to the ostrich farm by Werner Herzog.

WRAPPING 2009: THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

New movie from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Set in various visually striking landscapes of contemporary Spain (both urban and otherwise). De Bankole stars in the lead role marking he and Jarmusch's fourth collaboration in about twenty years, "Night on Earth," "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai," and "Coffee and Cigarettes." Cast includes Alex Descas, John Hurt, Youki Kudoh, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton; and actors new to his films, including Hiam Abbass, Gael García Bernal, Paz De La Huerta, Jean-François Stevenín, and Luis Tosar.
Synopsis: ""The Limits of Control" is the story of a mysterious loner (played by Mr. De Bankole), a stranger, whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged. His journey, paradoxically both intently focused and dreamlike, takes him not only across Spain but also through his own consciousness."

WRAPPING 2009: SIN NOMBRE

SIN NOMBRE, 2009 - Winner of the Directing Award as well as the Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance. Directed by first timeer Cary Joji Fukunaga, starring a bunch of unknowns. The story of three emigrating teenagers from Mexico to the United States. Some small buzz folowed this movie into New York when I first saw it in March. Enjoyed it enough to watch it twice last year. First in the theater and next on IFC On-Demand (an excellent if not socially dangerous cable service).

WRAPPING 2009: MOON

Duncan Jones' first film is a visual and existential trip with paranoia sun at cerebral heights like that of a Phillip K. Dick novel or short, eg. "The Electric Ant".
This picture is exquisite. Sam Rockwell, showing extraordinary talent here, and in 2007's "Snow Angels" by David Gordon Green, is a mentally-tormented astronaut leading a three-year mission on the moon by himself ... or so he thinks. When he discovers something he should not have, a series of revelations unravel his entire existence.

WRAPPING 2009: SILENT LIGHT

Carlos Reygadas is one of the most exciting directors working today.
"Sometimes we are helpless in the face of love, and it becomes a torment. It is a cruel master. We must act on it or suffer, and sometimes because we act, others suffer. "Silent Light" is a solemn and profound film about a man transfixed by love, which causes him to betray his good and faithful wife." - Roger Ebert / / March 18, 2009

WRAPPING 2009: HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

80s slasher horror, devil worshipping, occult, satanic horror movies. It's great. To me this film is a bit of inspiration really. Excellent in tone and technique. In fact I have a script I would love to personally put into Mr. West's hands. You may have heard that "House of the Devil" is reminiscent of Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby (1968)" but it also draws on Mario Bava's Giallo classic, "Tutti i colori del buio (1972)" (aka "All the Colors of Dark"). Eat all of this up with a spoon.

WRAPPING 2009: GOMORRAH

Winner of the Cannes' Grand Prix Matteo Garrone's GOMORRA is based on the highly acclaimed non-fiction account of the Camorra clan, also known as the "System", by Roberto Saviano With a cinema-verite treatment Garrone's story delves into drugs, reckless toxic waste disposal and the tailoring of couture clothing. This is a very localized film stripped of all big-picture pretensions where only at the very end Garrone let's us in on the fact that the Comorrah is a highly influential "black hand" organization globally. There is not a single crime-hero superman in this picture. In fact, you are made acutely aware of the gravity attached to every character's action, the mortality of every person populating the scene, and the gear like entrapment of situation. This film does not present crime as a romantic gateway to success but rather honestly as savage territory warfare wherein the strong prey on the weak. Very entertaining - a show of exceptional talent from a very promising director.

THE OUTRAGE (1964), with Paul Newman

THE OUTRAGE (1964) is a far better than average re-imaging of Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951). You will be surprised to immediately see William Shatner on the screen. Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, and Claire Bloom also star.

A trial is held to figure out who was responsible for the knifing of a colonel in a nearby forest. The conflicting stories about the event from those involved cause a preacher to doubt his calling. He tries to sort out the truth of the matter along a con man and a prospector who apparently holds certain missing pieces to the story.

Akira Kurosawa was heavily influenced by the western story structure as narrated in the Bible, Shakespeare, and six-shooter westerns. No surprise that several of his movies have been remade as westerns.