The peculiar current cinema

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• Kurzleg says:

  January 23, 2015 at 12:54 pm

  Props to you for the Couch Flambeau ref­er­ence in that “Little Accidents” review. I was frankly stunned to find that an East-coaster like your­self had even heard of them. I have an album of theirs lay­ing around some­where that I’ll have to dig up now.

• Chuck says:

  January 23, 2015 at 1:56 pm

  “Duke” is fussy, though I thought that made it even more mov­ing. Like Strickland’s self-conscious desire to emu­late European sex pic­tures mirrored Cynthia’s desire to be the right kind of dom­in­ant for her girl­friend. Maybe that’s silly, but I did love it.

• Paul says:

  January 24, 2015 at 12:21 am

  You were ter­ribly hard on “Mommy.” I think you missed the point. I did­n’t enjoy your review and can­’t pos­sibly under­stand how your ana­lys­is ended up on RogerEbert.com.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  January 24, 2015 at 8:42 am

  It’s a funny thing about the RogerEbert web­site, and it isn’t exclus­ive to me (I don’t want to sound like I’m com­plain­ing here): if a neg­at­ive review goes up that eli­cits some pain from a com­menter, the com­menter will say some­thing along the lines of “Roger Ebert would nev­er lower him­self to be so” etc. etc., or “this smug con­des­cend­ing review goes against the spir­it of Roger Ebert” and I have to won­der wheth­er these people know that Roger was the author of “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie” and “Your Movie Sucks.” Not to men­tion, you know, that review of “The Brown Bunny.”

• Petey says:

  January 24, 2015 at 10:18 am

  Very tan­gen­tial, but the funny thing is that while I gen­er­ally found Ebert to be a highly reli­able review­er, (in the con­sumer guid­ance sense), one thing I had to learn was that he had a pecu­li­arly where his ZERO STAR reviews gen­er­ally meant a bet­ter than 50/50 chance of the movie being highly worth seeing.
  Ebert had a par­tic­u­lar repug­nance for a cer­tain kind of nihil­ism or bru­tal­ity in movies that were highly effect­ive that made him go the zero star route on some quite fine flicks. You could rely on a one star movie to know you should stay away, but when he went the full zero star route, it was time to buy tickets…

• Steve says:

  January 24, 2015 at 3:23 pm

  I agree with you about MOMMY. I don’t under­stand how Dolan’s star has ris­en so quickly – his tal­ent for self-promotion far out­paces his tal­ent for filmmaking.

• lazarus says:

  January 24, 2015 at 3:28 pm

  I would­n’t say your review is unworthy of Roger Ebert’s web­site, but I think you’re being unne­ces­sar­ily dis­missive of Dolan, and hon­estly you’re com­ing off like a cur­mudgeon smack­ing down a young upstart. Even your acknow­ledge­ment about the qual­ity of the aes­thet­ics are qual­i­fied with a disin­genu­ous “…per­haps the abil­ity to hire…crew mem­bers of tech­nic­al facility”.
  I did­n’t see any men­tions of his pre­vi­ous work, and con­sid­er­ing he’s had four of his five films première at Cannes (the oth­er went to Venice) I think it’s fair to say he’s someone deserving of a closer look. And speak­ing of Godard, while Dolan’s Heartbeats (aka Les Amours Imaginaires) cer­tainly looks like it owes a great deal to the vet­er­an, let’s not for­get that JLG was a young upstart him­self. Personally I find some of his lauded works like Pierrot Le Fou to be shal­low, preen­ing exer­cises in style with little to say bey­ond their love for cer­tain Hollywood auteurs. Dolan should be applauded for and judged by not just his pop sens­ib­il­it­ies or his abil­ity to recall Almodovar, Wong Kar-Wai, Fassbinder, Godard, etc. but for the beat­ing, vul­ner­able, com­pas­sion­ate heart behind the writ­ing. Consider that he’s not a par­ent, or a woman, or middle-aged, or trans­gender and yet he’s writ­ten great char­ac­ters with these attrib­utes and shep­her­ded an assort­ment of impress­ive performances–the cred­it for all this should­n’t go solely to his tal­en­ted actors.
  While Sophia Coppola shares some of the same influ­ences, I don’t recall her get­ting this much shit. I know she has her detract­ors (I myself am a fan) but crit­ic­al darlings like Lost In Translation, Virgin Suicides, and Marie Antoinette could be described In the same ways people are using to cas­tig­ate Dolan. Personally, I find Laurence Anwyays to be not only leagues bey­ond any­thing Coppola’s done, but one of the best films of the past 5 years. I can­’t ima­gine someone see­ing that and say­ing Dolan has “very little sense of struc­ture or nar­rat­ive”; the final scenes of that film has been made by someone wise enough to under­stand regret and loss and jux­ta­pose it with the ever-present pos­sibies and optim­ism of new begin­nings . It’s as poignant as the con­clu­sion of An Affair To Remember, Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, you name it.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  January 24, 2015 at 4:18 pm

  Much as I know your elo­quent defense of Dolan is entirely sin­cere, I can only counter that I don’t see a vul­ner­able, beat­ing heart in “Mommy,” which is my first XD. What I see is fake sen­ti­ment­al­ity, over­stated grand­stand­ing, spe­cial plead­ing, a weird bed­rock con­vic­tion that the more you break shit in a giv­en scene the “real­er” it gets, haphaz­ard emo­tion­al manip­u­la­tion, and an over­ween­ing desire to lord it over his view­ers. If “Laurence Anyways” turns me around I prom­ise to shout it from every rooftop, and admit I was wrong about Dolan over­all if not about “Mommy.” That’s my per­son­al guar­an­tee to you.

• george says:

  January 24, 2015 at 4:19 pm

  Ebert gave zero stars to MANDINGO, which some people (such as Quentin Tarantino) now regard as a classic.

• Petey says:

  January 24, 2015 at 4:36 pm

  “Ebert gave zero stars to MANDINGO, which some people (such as Quentin Tarantino) now regard as a classic.”
  Yeah. That was the thing about his zero star movies. He did­n’t use it for bor­ing movies. They all had some kind of real power to them, which is why those reviews were often recom­mend­a­tions for me.
  (If Ebert felt the way I feel about American Sniper, he’d most cer­tainly give it zero stars. I think the movie is INCREDIBLY and irre­deem­ably prob­lem­at­ic, and it indeed has power. But I cer­tainly would­n’t give it zero stars on that basis, were I review­ing under that kind of system.)

• lazarus says:

  January 24, 2015 at 4:54 pm

  Fair enough, Glenn. FWIW, des­pite how much I enjoy Mommy, I don’t think it’s any­where near as good as Laurence. Seems to me that a lot of people don’t want to appear late to get on the train, so they’re writ­ing as if Dolan had finally figured it out or some­thing. So it’s very pos­sible you’ll enjoy it/admire it more than his new­est release. Not that you’re ready to dive into all his works, but Tom at the Farm is a sig­ni­fivant depar­ture from the oth­er stuff in almost every way.

• Nathan Duke says:

  January 26, 2015 at 10:15 am

  I was look­ing for­ward to both “Mommy” and “The Duke of Burgundy,” based on the pre­vi­ous reviews I’d read (plus, I liked “Berberian Sound Studio,” even if I did­n’t quite love it) – but, I have to say, I found both to be dis­ap­point­ing. I did­n’t dis­like “Mommy” to the extent you did. I found some of the per­form­ances con­vin­cing, but I agree with what you wrote about Steve’s char­ac­ter and how, ulti­mately, we were sup­posed to find him “admir­able some­how,” des­pite that he was a racist xeno­phobe who attemp­ted to strangle his moth­er, burned a kid’s face and poked fun at his neigh­bor’s stut­ter. And the end­ing was a bit melo­dra­mat­ic. Also felt myself at a bit of a remove from “The Duke of Burgundy,” which looked great but did­n’t quite do it for me.

• Asher says:

  January 28, 2015 at 11:37 pm

  “Angel-faced but nev­er not mug­ging, not par­tic­u­larly intel­li­gent but always cap­able of a razor-sharp comeback to a per­ceived slight, Steve is an ideal of the anti-social. One gets the feel­ing that Dolan finds him admir­able some­how, which rubbed this crit­ic very much the wrong way.”
  You could have writ­ten this of Linklater and Mason in BOYHOOD and I would more or less agree, although I guess the spe­cif­ics aren’t applic­able, except for “angel-faced … not par­tic­u­larly intelligent.”

• Arizona says:

  January 29, 2015 at 10:39 am

  Haven’t seen MOMMY, but I cer­tainly don’t recall BOYHOOD being full of razor-sharp comebacks or mug­ging. I mean, maybe those are the non-applicable spe­cif­ics you’re talk­ing about, but I’m pretty sure those are key to the dia­gnos­is of “anti-social.”