Courtesy IFC Films

Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg in “Nights and Weekends.”

As I’ve opined recently, I have mixed feelings about the wave of ultra-low-budget realism found on the outer edges of American film these days. Still, as counterintuitive as it may seem, 2008 now feels to me like a watershed year, one that’s brought us intriguing new work from all kinds of nearly unknown directors. True, the moviegoing public has paid virtually no attention, but you can’t have everything.

This week the micro-indie object of my affection is “Nights and Weekends,” a high-intensity, high-nudity improvised relationship drama co-directed by Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, who also play the film’s central couple. (Swanberg is already known for the raunchy, no-holds-barred, semi-comic sex scenes in his other films, and this one won’t disappoint on that front.) “Nights and Weekends” knocked me out when I saw it last March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas; I wrote at the time that it offered exactly the “prickly, flawed, urgent SXSW experience I’d been waiting for.”

I’m not sure I can top the freshness or honesty of my first reaction — this is a movie that people will react to strongly, in both directions. Swanberg is a brave and ambitious young filmmaker who’s been taking chances, and taking his lumps, in public. I think “Nights and Weekends” is the movie where his talent, and his earnest Cassavetes-meets-Spike Lee-on-IM searching, begin to find a mature expression. Here’s what I wrote:

Swanberg is a young Chicago director associated with the so-called mumblecore movement, but maybe after ‘Nights and Weekends’ we can retire that term forever. This is a vastly leaner and more elliptical film than “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” the ambitious, self-conscious ensemble piece Swanberg premiered last year here — and for which he took a critical kicking after it became the first mumblecore film to find mainstream release.

Swanberg and Gerwig (the self-absorbed, serial-monogamist title character in “Hannah”) co-directed “Nights and Weekends” and appear together in every scene and almost every shot. In the first half of the film their characters, James and Mattie, go through the rapid meltdown of their long-distance New York-Chicago relationship. In the second they meet a year later, long after their breakup and discovering that the passionate push-pull dynamic between them hasn’t faded. Other people exist only as background or as fateful catalyst: In section two they meet James’ brother, sister-in-law and infant niece, representing a family life they’ll never have; in section two a photographer who’s shooting James assumes they’re a couple, and urges them into ever more intimate and affectionate poses.

If Swanberg’s “Hannah” was overloaded with confession and self-analysis (much of it purposefully specious), “Nights and Weekends” withholds much more than it gives up. Very little back story is explained, there’s not much intra-relationship yakking and we never see the breakup. Instead we watch James and Mattie thrown together and torn apart, thrown together and torn apart, in a sort of erotic molecular action. There’s an intimacy and a universality to these characters that feels a world away from the post-collegiate claustrophobia of “Hannah Takes the Stairs.”

Take away their cell phones and throw some different outfits on them, and James and Mattie could be characters from Cassavetes or the French New Wave or Bergman. (Whether accidentally or not, the film contains echoes of “Last Tango in Paris,” “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Une liaison pornographique,” to name a few.) They’re adults on the cusp of headlong transformation, and in the year they’re apart they become notably more self-assured and develop more expensive tastes. Their pathologies have also hardened; Mattie has become visibly crazier and more needy, while James’ insensitive-dick tendencies are no longer outweighed by his earnestness and intensity.

At the post-screening Q&A Swanberg and Gerwig — who despite all the rampant on-screen coupling are not romantically involved in real life — explained that making the film had drained them, and that they saw the end of James and Mattie’s relationship as a corollary to the end of their own working relationship. The two segments of “Nights and Weekends” really were separated by a year, which was an accidental result of their herky-jerk, no-budget production process but in this case a crucial one. This is a new-school independent film with old-school integrity, one where nakedness is more a matter of emotion than physique, one whose makers risked something more important than money. (Which they didn’t have in any case.)

At least two people I talked to afterwards absolutely hated “Nights and Weekends.” Four others, myself included, felt energized and exhilarated by it. Word spread after the screening that IFC has acquired the film for theatrical and video-on-demand release, so both of those reactions will be replicated on a larger scale. The thing is, there we were, standing around in the chilly Texas night outside the grim concrete slab of the Austin Convention Center, arguing about a movie that had moved us and unsettled us and pissed us off, instead of retreating, anesthetized, into our caves. That right there was enough to make my weekend.

“Nights and Weekends” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York; other cities may follow. It’s also available on-demand via IFC Festival Direct on many cable-TV systems.

“Lola Montès,” the last film made by German-French director Max Ophüls — European cinema’s greatest world-weary romantic — is one of those movies made legendary more by its mutilation and invisibility than by what it is or what it has to say. When it was made in 1955, “Lola Montès” was postwar Europe’s closest equivalent to a Hollywood spectacle, combining big stars, a beloved director, an international roster of rascally producers, a pseudo-historical setting complete with opulent sets and costumes, crowds of extras and expensive widescreen color film and cameras. Three different versions were made, in French, German and English. Production cost 8 million German marks, or around $2 million in 1950s money, an extraordinary sum for that time and place.

But if you want to understand why “Lola Montès” was included in this year’s New York Film Festival after previous appearances in 1963 and 1969 (no other film has ever played the festival more than once) and why this newly restored version from the Cinémathèque Française opens theatrically this week in New York and Los Angeles — again, the film’s third United States release — I think you have to look at what happened next. Premieres in Paris and Munich were disastrous, and Ophüls supervised a first, frantic round of editing and redubbing. Then the English-language version was butchered from 115 minutes down to 90 minutes, and finally to 75 minutes (running time of the 1959 U.S. release).

» Continued

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

Aldo Valletti in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò.”

A year or so before he was murdered in 1975, the Italian Marxist poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini declared that the time had come when “artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support … works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new state.” It sounds like a noble and/or foolhardy statement of artistic radicalism at first, and when you read it again it also presents an irresolvable contradiction. Broad-minded people must support works that even the broadest-minded people find unacceptable.

Between that public pronouncement and his death in a squalid Roman suburb — apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute — Pasolini put this impossible principle into practice in his final film, “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,” one of the most notorious works in the medium’s history. Certainly the European art-film tradition, with its tendency toward elegant, ironic, highly aestheticized appreciations of human life, has produced nothing so dry and bitter, so viciously sarcastic, so nihilistic, so beautifully made and so well-nigh unwatchable. “Salò” takes place in that art-film universe of country houses, beautiful gowns and modern art, of chamber music and fine furniture and daring philosophy. All of it, Pasolini suggests, is a cynical con, a thin veneer of culture that sets the powerful free to rape and torture and kill the powerless.

» Continued

Pixar

Doc Hudson, the “Cars” character voiced by Paul Newman.

Is that woman from Alaska still hanging around? I’m only sorry that cookie-and-pretzel impresario, sometime race-car driver and all-around masculine icon of our time Paul Newman won’t be around to see her banished back to her split-level igloo, the one from which she can see Vladimir Putin’s head rising, dirigible-like, over the distant Russian horizon. Well, I’m sorry about other things too, but I’m definitely sorry about that.

My unsupported and definitely unrequested political analysis, before we move on to the real news: If Barack Obama is indeed elected president, then Sarah Palin will indeed be the Republican nominee in 2012 — and will go down in a Goldwater-esque coast-to-coast wipeout. Will she, like Goldwater, be the sparkplug who fires an entire new generation of American nutso crusaders? I’ll get back to you on that one.

I don’t think I had completely grasped that Newman was gone, at the level of emotional reality, until I was sitting around with my 4-year-old twins on Saturday morning, watching “Cars” for about the 15th time, and came face-to-face with the fact that crusty Doc Hudson of Radiator Springs (aka Fabulous Hudson Hornet, the three-time Piston Cup winner) was his final role. Other people have remarked on this, I know, but what occurred to me while watching was that it’s a damn fine role to go out on. OK, so he’s playing a car and not a human being. But what a car it is — a vintage Newman car-acter, you might say — mistrustful, introspective and damaged, and beneath it all far more eager to give and receive love than he’d ever admit.

» Continued

Courtesy Red Bucket Films

Listen to the interview with Red Bucket Films

Subscribe to Conversations: iTunes RSS

It’s possible and even likely that “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” the debut feature from 24-year-old director Josh Safdie and his pals in the New York-based film collective called Red Bucket, has already had its big moment in the public eye. You’ve never even heard of it, you say? Welcome to the 21st century movie business, people.

You see, after premiering last spring at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas — where I and a lot of other people missed it — Safdie’s ultra-low-budget yarn about the adventures of a 20-something female sociopath leapt to sudden prominence as the closing-night film, and only American selection, in the Directors’ Fortnight festival at Cannes. This is the festival formed by the French directors’ society in 1969 in open rebellion against the Cannes main event; the festival that has helped launch the international careers of Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, Sofia Coppola, the Dardenne brothers and many more.

It’s a huge honor for any film to get that slot, not least a 71-minute overgrown short from an unknown American director who describes his budget as “way under $100,000,” a picture shot on 16 mm film, guerrilla-style, in New York public spaces, without any of the required permits or clearances. (Perhaps Safdie paid for this karmically, since he says $30,000 worth of fancy Russian-made lenses, not covered by insurance, were stolen out of his car during filming.) It’s notoriously difficult and expensive to shoot at the Central Park Zoo, for example, and I’m still not sure how Safdie managed an illegal scene there that featured two actors in cop uniforms and his star and co-writer, Eléonore Hendricks, in handcuffs. (Wait till you see the “special effect” in that scene. I’m saying nothing more.)

» Continued

Photo courtesy of Lionsgate

Bill Maher outside the Vatican City in “Religulous.”

What if there was a religion, asks comedian Bill Maher, in which an all-powerful god from outer space decided to send his unborn son on a suicide mission to planet Earth? So this space-god impregnates a human female in some mystical, not-quite-physical fashion, and she gives birth to a baby who is both a human being and a divine incarnation, simultaneously the space-god’s spawn and the space-god himself. (Oh, space-god also has a third manifestation, one that’s totally invisible.) So space-god junior is born on earth destined to be killed, even though he’s a space-god and therefore immortal.

As you’ve picked up by now, the religion Maher is describing is not imaginary, and in various forms and guises is professed by most people in the United States, including every president we’ve ever had or are likely to have in the foreseeable future. (I’m sorry, that’s right — one of this year’s candidates is a Muslim.) In the acerbic late-night talk-show host’s new movie “Religulous,” made with “Borat” director Larry Charles, Maher keeps bludgeoning you with stories like these to make the point that the central story behind mainstream Christianity, when considered at face value and taken literally, sounds every bit as loony as the oft-derided tenets of Mormonism or Scientology.

» Continued

Lance Hammer’s film “Ballast,” a critical favorite earlier this year at Sundance, begins with a remarkable shot, one of those shots that stick with you long after the rest of the movie has become a jumbled memory. A boy or young man in a down coat, seen from the rear, walks through the weeds into a flat, horizontal field, probably one where corn or cotton or soybeans are grown. From the coat and the light and the empty field, it appears to be winter, although part of the seductive power of “Ballast” is that elemental questions like where and when go unanswered. As the boy advances, a flock of scavenging birds — likely a murder of crows — explodes out of the field, and this almost painterly composition abruptly becomes a chaotic whirlwind.

» Continued

Fox Searchlight/Jessica Miglio

Sam Rockwell in “Choke.”

Maybe the secret to adapting Chuck Palahniuk’s novels into movies is not to take them so damn seriously. If David Fincher’s “Fight Club” became a problematic monument in American film history by outdoing its source material in paranoid portentousness — and by overwhelming it with cinematic technique — then actor-turned-director Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Palahniuk’s “Choke” (which I covered briefly from Sundance last January) takes an entirely different approach. Pretty much dumping any effort at high-minded social satire, Gregg’s “Choke” is a fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Speaking as a reader who’s barely able to tolerate Palahniuk’s prose even at the Barnes & Noble page-browsing level, I think this is a terrific idea; the writer’s loyal fans may feel differently. One thing all parties can probably agree about: As Victor Mancini, the thoroughly unredeemed sex addict and con artist who is the roguish hero of “Choke,” Gregg has the perfect leading man in Sam Rockwell. There’s no American actor who does queasily-weaselly-lovable the way Rockwell does, and making this beyond-implausible script work demands a careful balancing act between Victor’s odious behavior and his evident charm.

» Continued

Courtesy New York Film Festival

Top row, from left: images from “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “Che,” and “Four Nights with Anna.” Bottom row, from left: images from “Changeling,” “Wendy and Lucy,” and “The Wrestler.”

Like any institution closely identified with New York City — the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children’s as well — the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes. A young freelancer for the New York Press just enlisted in this venerable tradition, expending thousands of words on an earnest, rambling article whose point seems to be that Lincoln Center’s annual September festival caters to a graying, affluent, high-culture audience that’s not relevant to younger filmgoers. In other breaking news, the sun turns out to be an enormous ball of flaming gases, 93 million miles away! And Francisco Franco is still dead!

Maybe it’s not fair to beat up an article in a struggling alt-weekly that bears no signs of having been edited or even read before publication (“The Film Society [of Lincoln Center] was founded in 1969 and nearly 20 years later, it continues to offer …”), but this rises well above spouting hoary cliché and reaches the realm of laboriously restating a universally accepted truth. Complaining about the NYFF’s hoity-toity atmosphere and superannuated customer base is a journalistic genre unto itself, and one to which I’ve made my own contribution.

» Continued

A scene from Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” — high on the list of embarrassing holes in my movie-watching résumé.

I’m back from vacation, I know you’re excited. I went tidepooling with my kids and pretty much had the computer turned off — was there some big news in the business pages or something? Maybe I shouldn’t have sold all those millions of Morgan and Lehman shares the day I left. What a big uproar!

I’m crazy-busy this next couple of weeks with the 46th edition of the New York Film Festival, that creakily lovable high-cultcha institution that kicks off the fall movie season in thoroughly anachronistic style. Full preview and loads of updates to come.

Just a few tidbits before I dash over to Lincoln Center: I have yet to weigh in on the new HD-ready “Coppola restoration” of the “Godfather” trilogy — possibly the most-anticipated DVD in the medium’s brief history — but blogger/critic Glenn Kenny has been busy studying it, and has multiple reports.

» Continued