The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism - Daniel Kasman

Daniel Kasman

I must admit I saw more, much more, in something small due to the titanic vision of something almost too large. Cinema is so full of images it seems like history only remembers that which looms, towering; but perhaps the mysteries of the lesser things are those created by—if not existing on—those towers' shadows.

Contributed to: MUBI, Senses of Cinema, The Chiseler, La Furia Umana, LUMIÈRE, and Cinema Scope

Daniel Kasman (Born 1982) has been the editor at the MUBI Notebook through many changes to the site over many years and, along with Adam Cook, has kept the place a most vital destination for anyone looking for incisive and unique film criticism. He's been breaking down borders and questioning assumptions [look no further than his involvement in posthumously granting Tony Scott the respect he was denied in his lifetime] with grace and deftness since he first started writing criticism. He's a formally adventurous writer and curator, giving time to short form, image-based, long-form, epistolary and conversational criticism. In a given week he could post spare, minimalist entries in the Notebook, or long, winding diary entries about how his experiences of getting to and experiencing a festival can reflect the films on offer. I've mentioned before that his conversations with Fernando F. Croce are some of the most entertaining reads in any given year. Should one ever need a reminder that criticism is as beautiful diverse and nebulous an art form as the one it comments upon, Kasman is always up to the task of providing one. 

Take a look at this entry, a report from a trip to the 2014 Viennale:

It is a joy, of course, to see such grandiose films by Ford as How Green Was My Valley (1940) and The Searchers (1956) on vibrant 35mm prints. (The weak but comparatively experimental shaggy-dog cavalry film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949] positively radiated warmth from its immaculate color quality, restored by the UCLA Film & Televsion Archive.) But better still is that pleasure particular to large retrospectives full of accepted masterpieces to encounter the smaller, more inconsequential films made in-between. Such is certainly the case for 1925's Kentucky Pride, a tale narrated by a once-favorited racing horse (!) and not so much a drama as a quintessentially Fordian combination of sentiment and silliness. Likewise 1933's Will Rogers vehicle, Doctor Bull, one of my favorites and a film, like Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante (to pull another favorite), that's an example of a master filmmaker and an A-list actor collaborating on what feels merely a programmer between more ambitious and/or lucrative projects. Such movies have a humility to them that is utterly freeing.

"Freeing" is the keyword there because on top of being what he searches for from film culture, it's also the perfect way to sum up his approach to writing. Look, for instance at the range of entry points he provides, without slavishly sticking to one. They're not only entry points into the movies, but ways that the experience itself can impact him and the film. He's a gripping extra-textual documentarian. In this paragraph he comments first on the way the 35mm prints of the classics improves them, even a "comparatively" minor film like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon [the juxtaposition of "major" and "minor" is a pet theme], then on the way the way the program he attended presses films together in unconventional ways, allowing them to converse with each other. Then he moves onto the way reputations collide to create hybrid art, taking time to impart personal preference and speak openly about his place in the program as an audience member. Letting himself into the pieces and the films does not sap his razor-sharp focus one iota. He's one of the most refreshingly clear-eyed around. His attitude is never  that a film doesn't meet his standard, but rather that it doesn't meet the standard he knows cinema capable of. And on top of all that, his prose can be delightfully labyrinthine when he finds himself on a roll, a thing to behold. Kasman's understanding of the essence of a filmmaker makes his shorthand intensely satisfying. Look at the asides in this sentence from a review of Steven Soderbergh's Che: 

If The Argentine recalls Preminger and Exodus, the second part of Che, called Guerilla and detailing the man’s failed attempt to move the revolution to Bolivia, recalls Merrill’s Marauders (1962), though certainly not Samuel Fuller’s brute forcefulness as a filmmaker. A more accomplished film, though to a degree less interesting because less baffling than the indeterminate angle of attack that The Argentine takes, the second half of Soderbergh’s film grasps more firmly the physical sense of guerilla life.

His rhythm here, not to mention the "forcefulness," to use his own phrase, tonally communicate his feeling for the film as well as his individual points. His writing here and elsewhere at times recalls the style of Ghostface Killah, taking gamble after gamble on sentence structure and focus that most writers wouldn't dream of attempting, and getting it right every time. Indeed it's not hard to imagine his last sentence in one of Ghostface's verse's on the Wu-Tang Clan song "Gravel Pit." Kasman's created a safe space for exploration of every facet of film and criticism at the Notebook and his own writing has always led the charge toward ever more freedom of expression and form. 

On The Hole:
One thing I’ve found consistent in the handful of film festival experiences I’ve had is that by a certain point you’ve seen so much sloppiness that when a crafty movie comes along, one made with skilled deliberation and mature filmmaking, there is a danger of overrating its supreme comparative steadiness and experience.  At Toronto this year, Joe Dante’s The Hole is the embodiment of that phenomenon.  Its first act alone is made with such inspired knowhow of how to stage a dramatic scene, how to express and use space, and how to define in human terms genre-based characters—in short, are directed with such expressive expertise—that the relief at being in the hands of someone of obvious experienced talent was palpable, regardless of whether the film would stand as highly on its own.

The Hole suffers from a similar problem as Claire Denis’s White Material in being fundamentally rooted in its screenplay, an heavy-weighted anchor to the imagination.  Still, Dante is one of our foremost spirits of imagination, and let’s count our lucky stars that he’s still getting money to make feature films (his last was 2003’s Loony Tunes: Back in Action); unfortunately with The Hole he is hampered by the overbearing literalness of the Mark L. Smith’s script.  When a single mother (Teri Polo) and her two sons (Chris Massoglia and Nathan Gamble) arrive in a new town and the boys, along with their next door neighbor (Haley Bennett), discover a hole under their house that opens to an endless void, the potential for horror is beautifully evoked and modulated.  Dante keeps the scale of the idea in check and focuses on the various ways the kids explore their new found fantastical feature, how at first it treads the line between creating wonder and horror, and the regular, highly suburbanized ways the boys start and stop their investigations, hide their discovery from their mom, and otherwise integrate supreme weirdness into their every-days lives.  But once the titular void starts literalizing each child’s fears so that they may over come them, there’s little Dante’s directorial imagination can do to enliven a plodding series of supposedly fearful confrontations.

On Redbelt:
With a Mamet film, we can be propelled forward on the confident completeness with which the writer/director thinks he has crafted his characters. Whether or not they are whole, or even meaningful, they nevertheless exist and move like defined masses, whose only purpose is to exhibit their own definition, secureness, and resiliency by coming into volatile contact with other such masses. Lean little planets in orbit, they are dying for a galactic collision that will never come in a cinema so pre-determined. But at least in the best of Mamet there is a sense of melancholy recognition, the awareness that since everything has been set up from the beginning—in both senses, Mamet being a dialog writer above all else, and that so many of his films feature elaborate confidence games—a character should accept the sad fate of never exploding gloriously, never being truly tested for this philosophical wholeness Mamet's killer dialog encases everyone in. The over-determination eliminates the spectacular but it does provide a fast ride of confidence, stories and characters skating forward with believable momentum and weight on rails to the end of their films.

On Kinatay:
Dedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything.  Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay to the nocturnal drive of a group of policemen out of Manila to its suburbs, and another half hour of night awaits them at their destination, a police black site.  This rich vision of so much gloom, dim suspension, no action, no spectacle, no drama is a beautiful thing, something out of an avant-garde film dedicated to textures, subtle shifts in color, and spatial uncertainty of a sunless world.  There is a story of course, of a young police trainee just married (that very day!) taken along on an off -he-books mission to torture a drug addicted stripper, and for a long time Mendoza plays the story like Haneke’s Funny Games (or a Park film), building up the audience’s desire for his hero to act violently, here to lash out at his sadistic superiors.  And some of Kinatay is that tasteless, with its handholding music (riffing off of Kubrick’s synth scores for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket) and artless, didactic cutaways That Explain Motivation by showing the cops’ horrific acts, the home that must be thought of.  But, as with Mendoza’s previous film Serbis, the rest of the movie is given as a handheld dedication to space—there, a porno theater, here, a sinister, anonymous police van traveling great distances at night for the purpose of terrible things, and later a torture house.  But it is a space of obscurity, of uncertainty in a morally certain situation, and so the space, covered and run over again and again by the roving camera, takes on an abstraction nearly outside the story itself.   A palette of sleek grays makes a death grip on this film that started—again, didactically—in daylight with a marriage, and Kinatay’s immersion into nightfall stands strong, splendidly, as independent force. 

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Ben Sachs

Ben Sachs

...the ending of a life drags the entire movie to a halt, forcing the viewer to reflect on what an extraordinary object his or her body is...Of all the arts, cinema may provide the best vehicle for inspiring this sort of reflection, as the manipulation of time is such an important aspect of the medium.

Contributed to: The Chicago Reader, The Bleader, CINE-FILE, MUBI.

Noted champion of: Takashi Miike, Robert Mulligan, Alain Resnais, Johnny To, Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" trilogy, Leos Carax, Pedro Almodóvar.

Influences: "Lindsay Anderson, "What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin, Films and Feelings by Raymond Durgnat, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood, and every film critic who’s written for the Reader."

Ben Sachs (1983-) was born in Waukegan, IL and over the last four years has become one of the most consistent writers in the fertile Chicago critical scene. Sachs moved to Chicago in 2005 after graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. From his bio on the Chicago Reader website, where he's been a full-time critic and blogger since 2011: I started writing film criticism for the Reader in September 2010 with a capsule review of the wrestling movie Legendary; since December 2011 I've written daily posts for the Bleader. Before that, I had been a regular contributor to the local website CINE-FILE, for which I'd been writing since its conception in 2007....In other movie-related business, I've introduced screenings at Doc Films, taught classes at Facets Multimedia, and continue to volunteer regularly at Bucktown’s Odd Obsession Movies. Before he started contributing to CINE-FILE, Sachs wrote plays, drummed for a band, and worked odd jobs, all without a huge measure of success. CINE-FILE isn't only where he honed his critical chops, it's also where his wife Kathleen Sachs (née Keish) writes.  

That last is not included arbitrarily. Perhaps more than any other critic or blogger, Sachs' family defines and broadens his writing. Whether ecstatic or melancholy (one of the most endearing and engrossing modes he writes in), his writing is deepened by his understanding of what his family means to him and has given to him. Recently he wrote a brief, touching piece about his cousin Naomi entitled "The family member who most influenced me as a critic." His nakedness in front of memory and the impact of this very special person is overwhelming. As in his writing on films, he reaches for small, tactile details hiding in his recollection, trying to better understand his cousin, his relationship to her and who he is. How he fits into the world, starting with his home in Chicago. From a piece about watching the films of Alain Resnais: At the time, I was either unemployed or working part-time—I don't remember which, but I was in a position to go to the movies on weekday afternoons, and I did this often to save money. The small audiences often consisted of retirees, specifically old women who went in pairs and chatted through the films. I liked sharing the theater with them; they made the auditorium feel fuller than it was, and they made me think of my paternal grandmother, a lifelong moviegoer who, in her last days of spectatorship, would convince reclusive old women in her apartment building to accompany her to the show. This leads into a discussion of his grandparents, alive with little tidbits about their habits, the things they'd say, etc. Being at the movies with my grandparents the day before I went back to school, it felt somehow heavier than going at other times or with other people. In autumn and winter, the sky would be bright when we went in and dark when we came out—it only added to the feeling that I was hiding from my responsibilities when they indulged me this way. The memory give way to an unbearably sad final sentiment, after meeting an elderly woman who in no way reminds him of his grandparents after a screening of Private Fears in Public Places: the movie made us equals in loneliness. Whatever that feeling was on all those Sunday afternoons, this was its opposite, a quiet terror that I had nothing to return to after watching the film. Exquisitely upsetting. Sachs' blogposts at the Bleader often read like passages from a novel, one that I hope he some day finishes. 

Sachs is never less than honest about his own bias; just this week he wrote a piece about his slight re-evaluation of a documentary he reviewed earlier in the year. He allows himself hindsight and admits when he's made mistakes. He opens himself up to visions he doesn't connect with or understand, meets everyone halfway when he can. Sachs' first major coup as a critic was a series on the films of Takashi Miike for Mubi's Notebook. His writing here takes on the same darkly profound current that colours so much of the Japanese Auteur's work. His phrasing is bold and sticks in the brain with the power of Miike's best images. They make for a great entrée into both Miike and Sachs, and they introduce a concept that serves as something like an unspoken mantra to his criticism. The idea, appropriated from Miike, that he never left a room or walked out of a film because it was ugly or bad. "Even the most routine action film, he argued, will contain some moment of beauty; you just have to keep your eyes open and find it." And finding the beauty in the most unusual places is one of Sachs' strengths, whether in an obscure 70s film like Sometimes a Great Notion or a modern comedy like The To Do List. His optimism as a critic ultimately outweighs his melancholy, no matter how beautiful and engrossing the latter is. To quote a poem Sachs brought to my attention: ...we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live...To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth...

On Sometimes a Great Notion

"The human body wants to live," I remember a high school teacher saying, after explaining to our class how difficult it was to asphyxiate yourself. Once you lose consciousness, he told us, you can't apply pressure to whatever it is you're pushing to your mouth and nose, and air reenters your body. (He taught world history; I'm not sure how the subject came up.) In most cases it takes a long time before a body expires—even typically demure people discover unknown strength when violently attacked or pinned beneath a heavy object. This is why the climax of Sometimes a Great Notion is so devastating. As the scene goes on, the voice of instinct tells you that this victim must survive, no matter how terrible the situation gets. It's an instinct supported by countless narrative films, which train us to think that death happens quickly and that long, suspenseful sequences will resolve well.

On Robert Mulligan

Still, Mulligan's filmmaking was more powerful when he was working with less-straightforward material. As a case in point, check out his other feature of 1965, the movie-land drama Inside Daisy Clover. The script, by former film critic Gavin Lambert, is rife with allusions to Hollywood history (the movie takes place in the 1930s, though it invokes scandals that go back to the silent era) and contains several shocking plot twists. Mulligan's direction grounds the material, which might have become hysterical or overly cerebral in other hands, in a firm sense of character. Better yet, the straight-ahead presentation of the early scenes gives you no idea how dark the story will get in the second half—in this case, Mulligan's borderline squarishness proves an excellent poker face.

On Izo

Surprisingly, the film is most wearying when it’s at its most violent. Miike’s directed some of the most audacious scenes of violence in modern cinema, not to mention dozens of generic crime movies: It’s no secret he can shoot a decent action scene pretty much reflexively. In Izo, the swordfights generally occur in an unremarkable pattern of several-clashes-then-victorious-blow familiar to anyone who’s ever seen ten minutes of a samurai film.  There are also a lot of them. The fights’ maddening regularity is the main reason why the film is so difficult to watch, but not for the obvious explanation that they’re too graphic. (In fact, the violence here is relatively restrained for Miike.) The awful truth is that they’re boring. It’s by now a cliché to say the atrocities of the 20th century were the most inhumane that have yet been conceived. Less often said is what our responsibilities are, as inheritors of those atrocities, in the 21st century. For most people, the default response is a kind of paralysis. The information has been shoved down our throats, and we see enough violence on TV to know it isn’t pretty. (Izo reflects this numbing familiarity with sequences of stock footage that show up throughout the film. They show more familiar stuff: the Nuremberg rallies, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, et cetera. One of the movie’s great jokes is to insert benign images into these montages—people on amusement park rides, old advertisements—that further deny them any power.) Perhaps that cliché is ultimately comforting: If things were definitively bad in the last century, we don’t have to worry about them getting worse. And yet the impulse to cause others harm is never far from us.  Look at any news report about a terrorist attack or, more tellingly, the way ordinary people respond to them with calls for vengeance.  Again, this is nothing new; but how often do we think about the weight of past atrocities when impelled to violence ourselves? The great accomplishment of Izo is that it forces the viewer to do just that, over two hours of unrelenting focus analogous to prayer

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Adam Cook

Adam Cook

The cinema is, for me, a means of engaging with the world, coming to terms with it, and figuring out how to live within it.

Contributed to: Mubi Notebook, Cinema Scope, Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Cineaste, La Furia Umana, Indiewire, Cléo, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Grolsch Film Works, Fandor, De Filmkrant, Senses of Cinema. 

Known for: MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope, image-centric criticism.

Influences: David Bordwell, Serge Daney, Jonathan Rosenbaum, "the best critics right now are Kent Jones, Dennis Lim, R. Emmet Sweeney, and Daniel Kasman."

Noted Champion Of: Classical Hollywood ("Ford Ford Ford Ford"), James Gray, Johnnie To, reappraising Scorsese, "vulgar auteurism."

Born in Vancouver, BC, Adam Cook's (July 24th, 1989-) first language is film. Reading him is to open a travel guide to worlds most of us only ever dream of visiting. "As an only child, my obsessive movie-watching began very young as a familial substitute. It wasn't until my late teens that this unhealthy amount of viewing became anything productive. I had considered writing on movies as early as elementary school, but I finally put pen to paper at the tail end of high school when I started a blog. It wasn't long before I was writing for my university paper, and not long after that that i started pitching around and finding myself published in the outlets I was myself a dedicated reader of like the MUBI Notebook and Cinema Scope. Having a foot in the door at the Vancouver International Film Festival and MUBI (not as a critic, but an editor, and now a programmer) didn't hurt. I love writing about movies, and I hope I always can. But I always never want it to be all that I do. I mean, it's impossible to make a living from, of course, but not because of that. I get restless. I also don't want to force my writing. Programming is more rewarding. And I love working for MUBI."

At 24 as of this writing, Cook has a perspective and list of critical achievements many lifers would tip their hats to. And because he has a ton of editorial/creative freedom at the Notebook, he's been able to craft crticism his way, much of it integrating visual reference points. "It's interesting. We try to intellectualize cinema, but without that intuitive, emotional connection, what's the point of watching a movie? I definitely come at things from a visual angle. Cinema that ennobles cinema is at least more immediately impressive. I love movies of so many different kinds though, I don't think I could ever define my taste. I think I need to sense something human and honest behind the lens though. I think that's most important." His only rule is that he'll never back down from championing a film he loves, and is always willing to be proven wrong about a film he didn't. A negative Adam Cook review is a rare thing indeed. The heart-warming start to one of his capsules: "The first film in competition to stand out as fiercely unique is Denis Côté's Vic+Flo Saw a Bear, though the word spreading around Potsdamer Platz after its premiere was not one of bountiful praise, but let's ignore that." 

Cook brings a gonzo narrative to a lot of his writing. He invites readers into his circumstances of viewing, offers a shared mindset, rather than a simple relaying of an outcome. If his relationship to film is emotional and visual, then he seeks to welcome others into his consumption via the same means, his evocative prose allowing us at once into his world and that of the film. Cook's role as a programmer as well as his festival schedule have given him a new appreciation of what's paramount to good cinema. Cook seeks out rare, unusual and lasting pleasures, films and artists that break ground or raise the dead in new, honest ways. In his powerfully humane words, cinema is, quite literally, a matter of life or death. On Closed Curtain, Jafar Panahi's second film from under house arrest: "When the film touches on suicide, it becomes almost uncomfortably naked, and the notion that Panahi could "give up" is a disheartening one. But how could he? He's still a man with a movie camera, no matter what any authorities may think." The prose is empathetic and open. The familiarity of the first sentence suggests that he's writing a letter (and much of his writing has this kind of intimacy), and the rhetorical question further closes the gap between author, artist and reader/viewer. It's a human concern, not merely a cinematic one; film and life are one and the same. Cook knows the lines have been blurred between film, criticism, and everything that doesn't fall under that banner, and his writing often takes the form of a galvanizing search for a new language to describe it. If cinema is a place, Cook is an environmentalist, an ecstatic conservationist. The final sentence exposes his optimism, his willingness to believe that everything negatively affecting the creation and pursuit of good art can be changed for the better.

On watching Ken Jacobs:

As I assume is the case with most cinephiles—even the most well-viewed veterans—there always seems to be something to catch up on before a festival. A filmmaker has a new film premiering and a recommendation leads to a cram session of sorts in the days leading up to the festival, and even in that most undesired of all viewing spaces: the seat on the airplane. It is in this first unofficial screening room that my own programming began with a viewing of Ken Jacobs's Seeking the Monkey King (2011). Embarrassingly neglected in my viewing history, I was eager (and also obligated) to acquaint myself with the renowned avant-gardist before seeing his new feature-length The Guests (hopefully a subject of a future Berlinale dispatch). What ensued was one of the most memorable, and trippy, watches in my cinephile career. As those in my row slept beside me, I grew nervous of prompting an epileptic fit as an elderly woman across the aisle turned her head towards my MacBook on which Jacobs's twisting tinfoil masterpiece of anger and frustration pulsated with alternately blue and gold light, emanating (projecting?) a noticeable flashing in our darkened corner of the fuselage.  (This prompted me to pause the film and dim my screen whenever a flight attendant neared). This process of "seeking," a journey through this phantasmagorical shifting of dreamlike, chasmic space, is, I think, where the festival began for me. The opening selection of my personal Berlinale.

On On Death Row

Having once described all the characters in his films as somehow part of one family, I was afforded the opportunity at the Locarno Film Festival to ask about this idea and how the inmates on death row fit in. Herzog cited everyone from Woodcarver Steiner, Aguirre and onward as somehow being linked—though he advised me to be careful on "riding this donkey to its death". It isn't their similarities as people, however, that connect them, but their proximity to the abyss which darkly masks them in the same shadow. It is in these figures, somehow closer to the edge of existence than most, that Herzog finds a uniting humanness, qualities that articulate the core of being, while also allowing the specificity of every character to register on screen, complex, and fascinating in their existential solitude. 

On Computer Chess

One of cinema's great virtues is to take us into environments, settings, and contexts that we'd otherwise never explore. Sure, there are films like Lincoln that put monumental moments in history under the limelight, but the tiniest pockets of American mythology can be just as interesting. Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess finds such a tiny pocket, taking place mostly in a small hotel conference room and is about a group of computer chess nerds who face off their beloved chess programs in a tournament to determine the best designer. Exploiting his PortaPak-style aesthetics for comically expressive means, Bujalski creates an absurd mini-universe on the outskirts of computer culture's early days. However, for all its silliness, the philosophical questions at the film's core, mockingly presented though they may be, carry a real weight. If computers that could barely compete with humans set off alarms about artificial intelligence and the implications of its potential then, the film by implication magnifies the scale as it is now, in which technology's rapid progress is hardly accountable, maybe even unfathomable. Bujalski shows us a time not so far in our past that is easy to laugh at because it is so difficult to laugh at where we are now.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce

But what of the miracle (is there another word for it?) of the transcendental finale—another joke, or a sudden, romantic flash from a pugnacious modernist who could fill the screen with barrier after Brechtian barrier and still make us cry for the elderly cleaning lady by her lover's bedside and the battered transvestite baring his soul in the abbatoir?

Contributed to: Slant Magazine, Reverse Shot, Mubi, Film Comment, Fandor, Movie Mezzanine, Cinepassion.org.

Noted Champion of: Kenji Mizoguchi, Kill Bill, Robert Mitchum, José Mojica Marins, Scorpio Rising, Ann Dvorak, Powell & Pressburger, The Naked Kiss, Russ Meyer, Elaine May, Futurama, Georgina Spelvin, Larry Cohen.

Influences: Manny Farber "above all", Andrew Sarris, Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Jorge Luis Borges, J. Hoberman, Robin Wood, and, "for giving me my first taste of prose," João Carlos Marinho.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Fernando F. Croce (April 20, 1977-) is part critic, part poet. His critical life, in brief: I came to film writing during my college days, after years working at various video stores and unsuccessful stabs at poetry and painting (Perhaps that’s why Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma hit me so profoundly, and why I keep making insufferably pretentious references not just to other films, but to other art forms in reviews. I’m a bit obsessed about connections). My first article appeared at the San Jose State University newspaper, The Spartan Daily—a review of the 2000 werewolf thriller Ginger Snaps, which for some mysterious reason was identified in the headline as a vampire thriller. It was around that time that I became fiercely inspired by Manny Farber’s Negative Space, still my own personal Bible, and by the founding members of Slant Magazine, who were roughly my age and offering review after passionate review. I was honored to start writing for them in 2005, my official entry into film journalism. And since then I’ve been lucky to have appeared in publications like Film Comment, Mubi, Reverse Shot, Fandor, and Movie Mezzanine, as well as my own archaic blog Cinepassion.org.

I always look forward to major festivals because it means the chance to read Croce's correspondences with fellow Mubi notebook contributor Daniel Kasman. He and Kasman have very different styles and reading their letters, their voices more like two-part harmonies than counterpoints, is endlessly rewarding. Their rapport goes down as easy as Canadian Club whiskey, and I've read many 'letter' based critical analyses that borrow heavily from their conversations. Elsewhere on the site, he, Calum Marsh and Joseph Jon Lanthier offer up Three Takes, where each spills a little ink on the same film. They're done all too infrequently (none have appeared since April 2013), but with each new installment, the three critics' voices are highlighted with ideal efficiency and perspicuousness. Croce's writing often reads like pointillism, tiny impressions of technique, theme or action that reveal the heart of the film and his personal relationship to cinema. Reading Croce, you'll get as much of the plot as you need to understand and a lustrous rendering of what makes it tick. This line from a review of Martin Scorsese's Hugo sees him firing on all cylinders: "The look on the bookish Isabelle’s face as she watches her first movie (Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!) crystallizes what Scorsese is after: The feeling of a virginal gaze being ravished by the harmonizing of the antique and the ultramodern." Splendid. However, he never lets his sense of beauty, his love of Borges, ever get in the way of his communion with any potential audience. His excellent shortform criticism allows little room for uncertainty and he never leaves the reader unsatisfied. 

On Dormant Beauty 
There are wayward daughters, suicidal addicts, hurried doctors, and close-ups of gorgeous women with their heads resting on giant pillows, at times blanched with suffering and at others posed like porcelain dolls. A very musical work (notice the aural swoops and drops of Bellocchio’s mise-en-scène), and a deeply humane one.

On Cape Fear
If this is to be a genre piece, fine—let the genre be the horror film. The sense of unease is all-pervasive: Freddie Francis’ camera slithers and snaps, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing shocks and jabs, vivid color more than once switches to X-ray negative. De Niro’s Max Cady is a convicted rapist who emerges from prison a pumped-up Übermensch, ready to settle scores with Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), the lawyer who originally defended him. Covered with Armageddon tattoos, driving an inferno-red convertible while wielding a foot-long phallic cigar, he’s such an uproarious cartoon of malevolence that when original Max Cady Robert Mitchum pops up, he can’t help commenting on the character’s semiotics: “Jeez, I don’t know whether to look at him or read him.” 

On Alps
Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of Dogtooth, Alps finds Lanthimos building on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration. Working with cinematographer Christos Voudouris, he composes his images (with characters frequently decapitated by off-center framing or liquefied into out-of-focus background forms) to conjure up an atmosphere of dread that hangs over even the most deceptively tranquil scenes. By swathing every relationship in layers of hierarchical pretense and distortion, Lanthimos envisions social order itself as a continuous performance, an existential variation of Shakespeare's dictum about the human race as players on the world's stage. For him, the roles people assign each other can weigh as much as the stone masks of ancient Greek theater. In that sense, it's telling that the nurse's crack-up scene (where she desperately spouts the lines she had previously memorized while being forcibly dragged into the street) is immediately followed by the gymnast's flawless big number: the former is frantic improvisation while the latter is perfectly rehearsed choreography, and the subtly devastating closing image asks which is more oppressive.


On Under the Skin
Dear Danny, funny you mention Casanova and Dracula, because that could easily be one way to describe the legitimately uncanny Under the Skin. Another would be Species directed by the Antonioni of Red Desert. From the opening shots—a staring retina emerges from a wandering dark orb, the cosmic unto the visceral—there’s a sense of ineffable dread making the images vibrate. It’s an otherworldly film, but the locations are scraggly, overcast, wintry, a Scotland very much like that of Ken Loach. Against this naturalism lies the most extreme stylization, patches of abstract blackness literally swallowing up young men as they march towards the beckoning heroine, a body-harvesting creature that happens to look exactly like Scarlett Johansson. Just as a human body can be evacuated of everything but its skin (one of several remarkable visions), so is an alien skin gradually filled with… what? Horror? Longing? Compassion? The film’s sustained feeling of discovery derives greatly from the way new, maybe unnamed emotions seem to be churning inside Johansson’s curvaceous visitor as she cuts a swath through Glasgow, whether she’s trying to keep a slice of chocolate cake down or finally contemplating her own tear-away visage. Danny, this is as strange as anything in the Wavelengths program. Who the hell is Jonathan Glazer? Commercials, a gangster thriller in Sexy Beast, a surreal drama in Birth, then poof! And now, almost a decade later, this. As a portrait of consumption in inner and outer spaces, Under the Skin is simultaneously direct in its metaphoric implications and as crazily prismatic as Holy Motors. It can be as trying as it is striking, but I don’t plan on forgetting it any time soon.

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: James Kang & Critics Round Up

James Kang & Critics Round Up

Noted Champion of: MUBI's Notebook, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, LOLA, Senses of Cinema, desistfilm, La Furia Umana.

Influences: "On my approach to aggregation: David Hudson, Tom Spurgeon. 
Formative influences on my taste in film: Roger Ebert, A. O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell. 
Current strongest influences on the way I interpret films: Richard Brody, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Michael Sicinski.
Favorite critics no longer with us: Manny Farber, James Agee, Jay Scott."

Critics Round Up is the brainchild of James Kang (1985-) who is very careful in maintaining his personal privacy, which is why fewer details about him are available. CRU is a vital, incredibly valuable resource for both casual and serious moviegoers. Those who have longed for a more discerning alternative to critic aggregates like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which don't question or interpret their sources, can rest easy that someone has finally made a site that cares about the nature of criticism. Kang trusts critics with reputations and serious cinephiles using the film diary website Letterboxd. 

From the sites statement of intent: Critics Round Up is the first movie review aggregator to select critics and publications based on merit instead of popularity. Merit, on this site, is defined as generally being friendly to arthouse and international cinema and resisting stagnant ways of thinking.

The purpose of CRU in a nutshell: "GOAL #1 To provide an alternative to the aggregated numbers of more popular sites....GOAL #2 To serve as a link archive." And on that score, Kang posts excerpts from and links to every review he includes, as well as news about new releases and the actors and directors orbiting them. Kang has a detailed set of guidelines for CRU which explain how the site works and what makes it different from other aggregators. 


source: email interview

The '68 Comeback Special: Black Jesus

There are naturally a few places where I split with popular opinion, at least with regard to relevant criticism. I love a bunch of things few others care about but more damningly I hate a few films that cinephiles really love. Hating A History Of Violence isn't the best way to let other critics know that you know what you're talking about. But hate it I do. Ok, maybe not hate, but it struck me as too intensely silly and ham-fisted (ye gods that music) to be taken seriously. I was missing something everyone else saw clear as day. Last year's darling Upstream Color did nothing for me, ditto Network, every Quentin Tarantino film after Jackie Brown, Fight Club, Amelie, Star Wars, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon, the films of Brian De Palma, and, finally the collected oeuvre of Sergio Leone. That last is of particular relevance to today's entry in the '68 Comeback Special, wherein David Cairns and I talk a little about every film that never got a shot at the Palme D'or after a protest cancalled the 1968 Film Festival. I admit up front that before I'd seen a foot of his distinctively styled films, my dad had cursed Leone's name up and down. He hated the man's films, didn't understand why everyone loved them, put up with the many half-truths and anachronisms or how haltingly dull they were. Now, as a kid I took it as gospel, as I did most everything he said, but I got older and curious and everybody else seemed to love them so I gave them a chance. I should have listened to my dad. Leone had an eye, sure, but he also had a way of making handsome people look like they'd been sculpted out of cow shit. He sucked the energy and life out of every single scene by making it last six or seven times as long as the stakes would reasonably allow. I got on bended knee and prayed for Once Upon A Time West and The Good, The Bad & The Ugly to please god end already how many times can we watch the same shit happen over and over again?!?! I didn't believe anything, I didn't care about anything, I didn't like anything. I didn't mind the bit in For A Few Dollars More where the villains go on a blue-hued drug trip, but that was about all I got out of the whole canon. To put it mildly, I'm not in the majority. 

I'd always been curious what it would look like if an editor went at a Leone with a chainsaw, cut all the extraneous horseshit, took out the Hanna-Barbera sound effects and gave them a sense of purpose beyond fanning the western genre with a palm frond while carrying it on your back like a princess through the streets of a backlot Arabian kingdom. I suspect it would look like Valerio Zurlini's morbid but moving Black Jesus (note: if you were to go the reverse direction and amp up the cartoon-style antics to break it out of its taxidermied sluggishness, you get Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger - win-win, either way). It's worth pointing out that it was David's review of Black Jesus as part of his series over at Mubi's Notebook, The Forgotten, that got the ball-rolling on this whole endeavor! I'm happy to give my two cents because I think the film's good enough to cover twice. Zurlini proves himself Leone's painterly equal, framing fore and background objects with the precision of a glassblower. He's much more influenced by war photographers, attaining a docu-realistic quality to a lot of the action, but he wasn't completely quit of the shadow of John Ford, which Leone wore like a bear skin cloak. After all, playing his Petrice Lemumba stand-in was the great Woody Strode, whom Ford loved dearly and had already turned into a christ figure in the unjustly forgotten Sergeant Rutledge, after a lifetime of playing supporting roles in classics. He's dubbed, unfortunately, but his face is pan-lingual and he's easily my favourite movie Jesus. The ironic thing is that he doesn't look a thing like the African extras that fill out the margins of the film. He looks a little divine, as David pointed out in his review, but he also has movie star charisma leaking out of his pores. There is no mistaking Woody Strode's cheekbones for the softer features of Petrice Lemumba. The ideal candidate to play him would have been Malcolm X, but a few factors, including his 1965 assassination, made that impossible. X easily could have been the subject of this film if Lemumba had managed to survive. Strode was however the best possible man for the job because he could stare into the middle distance and make you reconsider every mean thing you've ever said or done. That quality made him the quiet soul of many American films since the early 40s. In '68 audiences were given two opportunities to assess Strode's gifts and his place in cinema history. Refused leading man stature in the states he went to Italy and worked for both Zurlini and Leone. Only one of them gave him the spotlight. 

Leone killed Strode ten excruciating minutes into Once Upon A Time In The West, casting him because John Ford had done so first. He's not an actor, he's window dressing. Zurlini, on the other hand, saw that Strode had immense gifts as a performer and tried as hard as he could, through a language barrier, to allow him the space in which to deliver the performance of his career. Ultimately the Leones of the world would win and Strode would be reduced, like so many other American character actors, into rounding out the overstuffed cast lists of shitty Italian jungle movies, a prop used to raise money instead of an actor. But forget that for a minute, because his work here is commendable. So far that matter is Zurlini. He's a gifted image-maker, but what I loved most about it was the way he handles silence. There are long, aching stretches where no one speaks, but it's an organic, rather than a formalist boast as it is in Once Upon A Time. The story: a deposed leader is caught by white colonialist forces. They try him in an ad hoc court secreted away from the people who believe in him. Lemumba has little to say to his oppressors, knowing they have no right to judge him, and not wanting to give them the satisfaction of acting like the man they think he is. Jean Servais, his interrogator, does most of the talking. Meanwhile a few other criminals are brought to the cells along with him, and they'll be killed just for being confined to the same cell with him. The title of the film is a bit of a spoiler and Zurlini plays a diabolical waiting game. Servais and his men have all the power, so in prolonging his trial and imprisonment, they're toying with Strode, just as our director does with the audience. Every second of silence, every overheard scream from some other poor sap being tortured elsewhere in the building is a little reminder that bad men will alway wield all the power. The sound design makes it seem like you can hear every whisper for miles around.  Zurlini conjures a powerful atmosphere, and I like that he's not saying that Lemumba was specifically christ-like, but that as long as the wrong people are in charge, christ-figures are gonna keep coming out of the woodwork to combat them. One could easily make a film that turns Malcolm X into Jesus, and I'd pay good money to see it. The wrong guys with the right ideas always get killed because that's the dynamic we choose over and over again. The burial of Black Jesus after Cannes (possibly) prevented both Zurlini and Strode from being recognized. It's impossible to say if the film winning the Palme d'Or would have made a difference in either man's career, but the what-if makes me furious all the same, especially while Sergio Leone enjoys an untouchable reputation as one of our greatest artists. Now, that's hardly on par with wrongful crucifixion, but life's full of little trials like that. All we can do is be on the right side of history. 

I've been to Heaven, you've only read about it.

From the opening seconds of Quills, it's obvious that this is not the work of the Philip Kaufman his fans had come to love. It moves with the feverish pace of quickened breathe. The film has a sense of humour so dark you need first to excavate, sift and polish it, and this becomes evident within seconds. It has the same perplexing mix of murky color palette and silky lighting that characterizes the work of Aleksandr Sokurov and the immediacy and the youthful mobility of something shot on digital. The faces have the same chiseled strangeness and fill the frame with the same aggression as those of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Michael Powell before them. Some might call it a perverse experiment from a man who'd forgotten how to make the sturdy, contemplative genre exercise in favor of a style as garish as his subject, the Marquis De Sade. Another way of seeing it (and as I'm championing it, I'll call it the right way) is that Kaufman had conquered slow-burning eroticism and was after a thrill much more imperative. The camera feels rooted to the spot, like it had grown out of a tree, in much of the director's oeuvre. There's a preternatural stillness to his take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the camera and the man behind it apparently aware of something that eluded so many of his peers. And the camera moves with the confidence of a master fencing champion in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There is a studied quality in his work that until Quills had never given way to the excesses of his frenzied subject matter. Despite having traveled from inhibited bedrooms to the very edge of space, he was ever a patient and forgiving spectator, letting us in on the secrets of people we could only dream of becoming, and that most of us were quite content only to fantasize about. With Quills, he took on the characteristics of his subject, he aligned himself stylistically with the man who sits at its core. Having come off his first major assignment that truly watches like one (Rising Sun) he was as aware of the barb of the critic and apparently sought to lash out in full force, giving the despotic artist the most sympathy despite tyrannical moods no less pointlessly vindictive than Napoleon's. Kaufman stomps as angrily as the Marquis, letting a cacophonous Stephen Warbeck score leave us little doubt as to who's suffering we're meant to empathize with. The public may not understand him and he may be a bit of a shit, but he's an artist and Kaufman knows a thing or two about people comparing his work to Pornography (he's seen the business end of an NC-17 rating in his day - Henry & June's reception still stinging as if they were the lashes endured by Kate Winslet's laundry maid). The marquis' tormentor and Priestly minder are over his shoulder forbidding his work from taking shape unencumbered (or at all). They're the producer and the critic, waiting on either side of the finished product with reasons why and why not. There's even a scene dictating the journey from idea to script to screen, with all the hands the words pass through, likening those who purport to understand and help the process to jabbering, inarticulate lunatics. And his final statement: when the words of artists are not allowed to reach the ears of the public, all hell will truly break loose. Kaufman punishes those who believe that his work would do so much harm as to warrant keeping it out of the reach of children - the words of the Marquis whip the maniacs into a murderous frenzy that sets about destroying many lives. He's ready with a response to this, as well, cruel though it may seem when he hear it. The bible is just as fanciful, the same passion and violence and filth broiling beneath the pious surface. No, there is no keeping art from the masses, try as you might, it will out.

Why am I offering a defense of a mostly well regarded movie over ten years old? Well, first of all there's been a lot of attention circling Kaufman lately. Annette Insdorf just wrote a book about him, retrospectives are popping up all over the place and his new movie, Hemingway & Gelhorn, is going to play Cannes out of competition. The reason I find him so fascinating is because despite having one of the most mature and dependable bodies of work of any American filmmaker working today, critics are always guarded in their defense of him. The Right Stuff was the subject of a BFI Modern Classic, but then again so was goddamn Star Wars and The Matrix. I've never once read a defense of his early works, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often unjustly overlooked in favor of the original, The Criterion edition of Unbearable has gone out of print, I heard none of his titles mentioned in four years of film school, and he hasn't worked in almost ten years. Why the relative silence? Sex. Just as the works regarded as Kubrickian and Hitchcockian are the product of their namesakes' later work, the films most closely associated with Kaufman, what we might call Kaufmanesque, are those films of his that deal with sexuality in the frankest manner imaginable. Which for Americans, is too frank. Henry & June, Unbearable and Quills, too, are all about the many aspects of sexual attraction; glorifying its intricacies and removing the mystery, making sex plain for all to see. America has a hard time with this most European of attitudes. Perhaps why until lately, his latest works were studio commissions; Quills just happened to come form minds a little more creative than those who handed him the script for Twisted. Kaufman was handed Quills no doubt because he had uncovered all the angles of quiet eroticism. He explored sensuality with the careful eye the subject deserves. For the realm of pornography, he directed with the intensity of a man half his age, eager to get his message to the people with the irreverence and ferocity it deserved. And it's not as though the movie is a screed, either. It's riveting, funny, thrilling, incredibly sexy and terrifying in turn and unless you were someone as in tune with the endless push and pull between executives, filmmakers and critics as I like to keep myself, there's a good chance you could watch the film and simply admire the crazed battle of wits between three kinds of lunatic. In the process of crafting this, his most uncharacteristic movie, he also captured some of the best work his actors have ever done. Geoffrey Rush is of course marvelously out of control, using physicality in a way he doesn't always get to; the whole frame is utilized to accommodate his luxurious body language and never once does he seem overwrought. Michael Caine doesn't often play a villain and here he shows what a shame that is. Joaquin Phoenix is no slouch, but his intensity is especially electrifying. In the flurry of reviews that followed the 3D re-release of Titanic, a critic lamented that in his haste to distance himself from the film, Leonardo DiCaprio has since rarely used his gift as an actor to convey happiness. One could argue that Kate Winslet's been a victim of the same choices in the wake of her breakthrough (though I wouldn't argue that in either case their decision to get serious was a misstep); indeed she and DiCaprio seem to be competing for who can choose the most punishing, austere arthouse drama, which coalesced in their both appearing in the needlessly punishing and austere Revolutionary Road. Let me reiterate, I'm glad they've done this. Anyone sorry that we have The Aviator, Mildred Pierce, Inception, Shutter Island, Contagion and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't have cinema's best interest at heart. But Kaufman does something that I call fucking magic: he elicits the same girlish charm and gorgeous smile from Winslet that anyone will tell you Cameron did in the bigger budgeted movie, although in Quills it feels genuine. And furthermore it's wrapped in passion for two diametrically opposed ends, instead of one cartoonish evil and one cartoonish good; freedom of expression drives her laundry maid, but she cannot have both the words of the Marquis and the love of her priest. It's a tug of war you can see her struggling to grasp the depth of (and how beautiful that she manages to communicate that she is struggling with the implications of this knowledge!) and in the meantime she lets her whims run away with her, throwing herself into the pursuit of pleasure with gusto. It's a splendid performance and to cap it off she's rarely looked more beautiful.

"Yes, yes," I hear you saying "you've stood on your goddamn soapbox for X directed by Y in the past." Yes, I know, quite enough of that. My reasons, finally: I do all this not simply because I adore Quills and its director, but because I do firmly believe that no one can judge the work of a filmmaker until you have seen everything they have ever done. Just as a plant is never simply a seed, evolution, growth, development, all of these are beautiful and necessary steps to witness. And is there anything more exciting than discovering something in progress, a life not yet at its potential, about to reach it? Ti West is currently one of the most incredible talents working today, but I don't think I'd appreciate that quite so much if I didn't join him on the climb up. The Roost had rough edges, but it was more than enough fun for me to look past them. Triggerman could have used a touch more weight, but I was gripped the whole time and thrilled that West had done so much with so little. If we go chronilogically we then see his first studio assignment, Cabin Fever 2, a movie taken from him in post. The Kaufman Kinship begins. It's far from good, but it's also far from the movie West envisioned. Years ago, I fear he would have been written off for a misstep such as this, despite it being out of his control. Fortunately he got to the history books first and released The House of the Devil and there stood an artist in such breathtaking control of his form that nothing can now undo his legacy. A film three times as mangled as Cabin Fever 2 would not unseat him; he's in the filmmaking unconscious. He's an auteur. And then, despite some middling reviews, came The Innkeepers, a film that is at once terrifying and heartbreaking, and once again shows growth, as if he's started climbing again. He's even had time to examine his career by playing himself in Joe Swanberg's fantastic arthouse faux-Roman à clef Silver Bullets. And he does it with humility and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Good god! Just imagine what he'll make once he reaches the next peak! This is my point. The Philip Kaufman who released Invasion of the Body Snatchers was, outwardly, simply a man inordinately (I would say overly if I didn't so enjoy these films) qualified to direct genre films. Two unconventional westerns, two widgety low-budget comedies of form and one of the best sci-fi films of all time. Nothing in that, on paper, said that he'd produce such staggering works as The Right Stuff, Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry & June or Quills. I've seen people written off, I see it everyday in the MUBI daily round-up. A retrospective here or there, an article or dissertation on some filmmaker that was forgotten, unappreciated or hated in their time. It's a goddamned tragedy. Manohla Dargis shouldn't be the only person going to bat for Shirley Clarke, especially because she seems to miss the point of her films. We need to appreciate every corner of our artform - how many millions of dollars would we save every year if we didn't need to restore films long thought lost, or worse, unworthy of keeping. But more to the point, who could have watched the work Luis Buñuel did in Mexico and guessed at the surrealist heights he'd once again reach when he returned to France in the 60s? David Fincher's career could have ended with the botched studio cut of Alien³. We'd be quite a few Best Picture nominees short, wouldn't we? It took this long for Kaufman to be thought of (at least so far as I can see from my admittedly limited vantage point) as an auteur to be considered as thoughtfully as Welles or Fellini, and that's goddamned criminal because I have the full story in my head. I see now that he shines a light on the things we hide in darkness, the parts of ourselves too weird and dirty to show off in polite company; he holds them up to the light for us to reconsider, whether we want to or not. To him our sexual 'depravity' is effervescent and rare and should be revered as much as a passionate kiss or a triumph of justice in the storytelling toolkit. Sex is one thing we don't need society to enjoy, and yet we allow the one to intrude upon and make shameful the other. Kaufman does everything in his power to undo this thinking, to pull our puritanical urges away from us like so many garments until we stand naked and see how splendid we are without them. The human body and the sexual acts his characters engage in is more beautiful than any line of dialogue. And there's a heartbreaking conviction that runs through Quills underlining this point: take away the Marquis' pen and he'll write in blood or wine or shit. He needs to write just as he needs us to feel everything we're capable of. When the Marquis weeps upon hearing that a close friend died a virgin, crying over everything she never got to experience, I was reminded of a story I was recently told that may just have been apocryphal; when missionaries explained to South American Indians about heaven, they wept on the christians behalf. They could get to 'heaven' everyday through hallucinogenic drugs and meditation. How sad that we close ourselves off from it as a society. Kaufman is that proverbial native, his characters attempting to never let the confines of society prevent them from achieving their own heaven even if their place in the 'real' one is taken away. The artist must create and Kaufman's work is a testament to this devotion. Missteps or not, the man has made too many irreplaceable works of art, films that show complete command of the form, films well ahead of their time, to have been left off the cultural radar for as long as he has. It's easier to summarize, to write off, to turn the movie off before it's over and get on with our lives. Nothing makes me sadder than great artists being written off while they still have life in them, still have stories left to tell. If for no other reason than you simply have no authority to judge their work with any maturity or comprehension beyond the standalone artifact without having seen all that surrounds it, without understanding where they've come from, see everything because there's something beautiful in all of them - the journey from the start to the finish.