New Releases: Friday, October 18

A list of the new releases for Friday, October 18, 2013, in order of my personal anticipation.



12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave tells the true story of Solomon Northrup, a free man living in the antebellum North, who is abducted and forced into slavery. At the helm is Steve McQueen, celebrated director of Shame and Hunger. The film promises a superb cast, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead role with additonal parts played by Michael Fassbender, Quvenzhane Wallis, Brad Pitt, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Most are predicting this film to be a serious Oscar contender come February.

Kill Your Darlings

This film explores the obsessive friendship between Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) and Lucien Carr, as well as their interactions with other famous Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. When a murder is committed by Carr, the group is forced to reconcile with it, which perhaps draws them closer together. Daniel Radcliffe's role as Ginsberg ranks in one of the most interesting and challenging roles he has taken since the end of the Harry Potter franchise. The film seems to be a meditation on the circumstances and mentality of the New York Beat Generation writers which will hopefully rise beyond a simplistic crime drama.

The Fifth Estate

An account of the relationship between Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the founder of WikiLeaks, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl), his colleague. I haven't seen the film yet, but I am vehemently hoping that The Fifth Estate will take the opportunity to explore the dubious morality of the intentional leaking of classified documents. A.O. Scott's New York Times review suggests that it's been turned into a type of global thriller with a poorly contrived imitation of the The Social Network's portrait of the conflict between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin.

Carrie 

A remake of the classic Brian DePalma film, itself an adaptation of the seminal Stephen King novel (essentially, a remake of a remake). Early reviews indicate that there's nothing special going on in this film, as it continues a long tradition of taking classic horror films and bringing nothing new to the table. Also, no actress can eclipse the equally terrifying and heartbreaking performance Sissy Spacek brought to the film's titular character.

All is Lost

All is Lost features Robert Redford as a sailor who, after a collision at sea, finds himself forced to confront the possibility of death in order to survive. The film screened out of competition at Cannes in 2013, and has gotten fairly positive reviews. It appears to be a simplistic but well-executed story of survival with a fantastic performance given by Redford.

Escape Plan

If you want to see a prion escape film, watch Coolhand Luke on TCM. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and 50 Cent.

Watch the Brand New Trailer for Wes Anderson's Latest

The trailer for Wes Anderson's newest effort, The Grand Budapest Hotel, premiered today. The film is due for a March 2014 release. Watch it below:

The Grand Budapest Hotel follows the legendary hotel concierge Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes) and his plucky lobby boy Zero Mustafa (Tony Revolori) as they embark upon an adventure involving the theft of a famous Renaissance painting and the distribution of an immense family fortune played out against the backdrop of 1920s Europe.


The Grand Budapest Hotel promises Anderson's usual colorfully quirky characters, some played by Andersonian regulars and others portrayed by newcomers. Its cast includes Saiorse Ronan, Edward Norton, Willem Defoe, Jude Law, Owen Wilson, Lea Seydoux (who also stars in the controversial Blue is the Warmest Color), Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Wilkinson, Jason Schwartzman, and most importantly, Bill Murray. Because it wouldn't be a proper Wes Anderson feature without Bill Murray. Especially when he sports a moustache as fabulous as this one.

Here are two other Anderson regulars in their Grand Budapest roles:

And here is Edward Norton, playing what looks to be a very similar character to his noble Khaki scout leader Scout Master Ward.

The Grand Budapest Hotel promises to deliver many of Anderson's stalwart techniques: meticulous set decoration, whimsical pomposity, an obsession with old money, and plenty of nods to the French New Wave.

Watch Matt Zoller Seitz's video essays on Rushmore & Bottle Rocket

Matt Zoller Seitz, writer and film critic, released The Wes Andserson Collection, a book that details the life and films of the American writer/director Wes Anderson. According the book's website, it is an "in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The interview and images are woven together in a meticulously designed book that captures the spirit of his films: melancholy and playful, wise and childish—and thoroughly original."


Anderson's filmography includes the films Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and the upcoming The Grand Budapest Hotel, as well as several short films and a commercial for Prada.


Matt Zoller Seitz also made a few enlightening video essays on Wes Anderson's films in conjunction with the release of his book. Most of the essay is taken from the text itself, but definitely worth watching, especially if you do not plan to purchase the book (you should!).


Zoller Seitz's essay on Anderson's first feature film, Bottle Rocket:




And his discussion of Rushmore:






Anderson is a fairly important filmmaker to me. Rushmore was of the films I saw in middle school that sparked my investigation of other quirky independent features, and also inspired my interest and eventual passion for cinema of all kinds. I was also able to see the tenth anniversary Lincoln Center screening of The Royal Tenenbaums that occurred in conjunction with the New York Film Festival. After the screening, Anderson, his brother, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, and Gwyneth Paltrow spoke about the film, providing some interesting anecdotes about working with Gene Hackman and hinting about his new film (Moonrise Kingdom, released in 2012 and nominated for several Academy Awards). I believe that Anderson is truly one of the most creative filmmakers working today, and hope to see him working prolifically in the industry for a long time to come.

How Do They Do That?: Split Focus Diopters

In order to understand cinema at a deeper and more meaningful level, one must be willing to investigate the technology that makes the artistry of a film possible. And as film is an extremely technical medium to work with, it is essential to learn, in as much detail as possible, about its many technological components. 

This post will consider the split focus diopter, a device used to achieve a very specific and unique visual effect.

The split diopter, pictured above, attaches to the lens of the camera. Half of the diopter is comprised of convex glass (in this example, the right half), while the other half is left empty. This allows the camera to capture two different planes in the frame, both clearly defined and acceptably focused. The diopter is able to focus on the foreground while the camera lens simultaneously focuses on the background.


Use of the diopter achieves a similar effect to that of the traditional deep focus, in which there is a very large depth of field, in which the foreground, middle ground, and background are all in focus. However, the split diopter causes one extremely unsubtle difference: the middle-ground appears blurry, lacking the continuous depth of focus that traditional deep focus offers.

Traditional deep focus in Citizen Kane

Split diopter in Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Notice the there is an out of focus line of demarcation between the foreground and background in the frame from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Use of the split diopter became popular after its invention in the 1970s, and was favored especially by director Brian DePalma. Editor Vashi Nedomansky compiled all 15 of the split diopter shots contained within DePalma's 1981 Blowout in this video

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In fact, DePalma still uses it today, as is evidenced by the still below, taken from his recent film Passion:

Split diopter in Passion

Quentin Tarantino used the visual effect in his 1992 debut  Reservoir Dogs:

Reservoir Dogs

Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage)

When Eyes Without a Face was released in 1960, French film critics had yet to embrace the horror genre as legitimate. The French New Wave was concertizing (Truffaut's The 400 Blows had been released the year before; Goddard's Breathless  was released alongside Eyes Without a Face). The explosion of art-house French cinema left many disdainful of films like Eyes Without a Face- where was the art in watching a woman have the skin of her face removed? What art could be found in a film which existed to terrify its audience?

Modern audiences, of course, recognize and even worship the horror genre as a way to explore some of the darkest avenues of human behavior. Fifty years ago, however, producing and releasing a horror movie was much more challenging. One of the most harrowing obstacles (besides dubious critics) was the censors.


Director Georges Franju essentially designed the film to evade censorship in Europe by carefully toeing the line- showing blood, but not an obscene amount; implying but not depicting the experimentation and torture of animals. In addition, Franju hired the extremely talented writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac to adapt the script from the original novel; the two had previously worked on Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Their work resulted in an important difference between the novel by Jean Redon and the film: Christiane, Dr. Genessier's daughter with an a disfigured face, became the center of the script. This shift is one of the most effective ways that Eyes Without a Face is elevated from a simplistic horror film to a serious work of art.


With Christiane, Eyes Without a Face presents its audience with a serious meditation on identity. Having been in a terrible car accident caused by her father, Christiane is left unrecognizable. Dr. Genessier, motivated by guilt and an egotistical desire to advance science, attempts multiple heterograft surgeries on Christiane, in an attempt to restore her beauty, her face, and with it, her identity.

In losing her face, Christiane also loses herself. Dr. Grenessier stages a faux funeral using the body of a previous donor who had died after an attempted facial transplant; thus, even her fiance Jacques believes her to be dead. She is forced by her father to wear a smooth white mask, hiding her deformities.

"My face frightens me," she says to her father, distraught. "My mask frightens me even more." This underscores the loss of identity which comprises the core of Eyes Without a Face. Christiane is thrown into existential anguish worthy of Sartre. Her life has been (figuratively, at least) taken from her; all that she loves has been taken from her; her face, the most discernibly human feature of the body, "is an open wound." What is Christiane, then? She is reduced to weakness and frailty; she is unable to act against her father's monstrous experiments despite her objection to them. Without her face, and her identity, she is nothing. She spends most of the film in misery and existential oblivion.


However, Christiane does eventually free herself, symbolically and otherwise. She kills Louise, her father's secretary and a sucessfull recipient of an heterograph. She releases the dogs and the doves that had been held captive with her, as well as her father's intended heterograft donor; all of these being victims of Dr. Grenessier's imprisonment. She walks out of her father's lab with a dove in her hand, freeing herself; the audience is filled with a sense of hope, perhaps imagining her reuniting with her fiance, who believes she is still alive.

Of course, Dr. Grenessier does not escape unharmed. In fact, he does not escape at all. The archetypal mad scientist is, in a violently poetic and endlessly satisfying scene, is ripped apart by his own test subjects: his dogs. He is killed and his face is mutilated, just as Christiane's is.

The artistry of the film doesn't stop at the elegant articulation of its themes, however. It is visually exciting throughout. Cinematographer Eugen Shufftan and Franju borrow from the previous German expressionists; they use strong lines, angles, and exaggerated shadows to give the film a feeling of psychological disturbance. This technique not only excites the audience into a high level of unease, but also allows us to experience how the world must feel for Christiane.


In Eyes Without a Face, Franju skillfully blends elements of fantasy with those of reality, elevating both the horrific and artistic elements of the film. Eyes Without a Face perfectly retains emotional realism, especially with its exploration of Christiane's identity crisis. At the same time, the fantastic (the Nino Rota-esque score that conjures images of a terrifying circus freak show, the exaggerated shadows, the mask that Christiane wears) inspires a deeper and more impactful level of fear than the emotional realism alone could affect.

 Eyes Without a Face is, in the end, a masterful film that successfully manages to balance its artistry and its terror. It thoroughly explores the questions of identity, morality, and the potential for evil in science, challenging its audience to experience fear while at the same time intellectually processing the material it presents. Its "fairytale realism" gave new insight into what a horror film could be. Eyes Without a Face is now considered a classic, proving the censure of French critics at the time of its release unfounded.

Oliver Stone Calls the Violence in Breaking Bad a "joke:" Why He's Wrong (and a Hypocrite)

In the process of promoting his documentary for Showtime, "The Untold History of the United States," Oliver Stone said this of the Breaking Bad finale:

"There’s too much violence in our movies – and it’s all unreal to me. I don’t know if you saw the denouement [of Breaking Bad], I happen to not watch the series very much, but I happened to tune in and I saw the most ridiculous 15 minutes of a movie -- it would be laughed off the screen. Nobody could park his car right then and there and could have a machine gun that could go off perfectly and kill all of the bad guys! It would be a joke. It’s only in the movies that you find this kind of fantasy violence. And that’s infected the American culture; you young people believe all of this shit! Batman and Superman, you’ve lost your minds, and you don ‘t even know it! At least respect violence. I’m not saying don’t show violence, but show it with authenticity."

Anyone who has seen Natural Born Killers might disagree. Or, for that matter, the recently released Savages. And  Brian De Palma's Scarface, for which he wrote the screenplay. By this evidence, Stone might be considered the master of gratuitous theatrical violence. 

Of course, as immersed as he is in his own egotism, Oliver Stone seems to have glossed over the point of the violence exhibited in Breaking Bad- it has consequences. In every case, violence has consequences. 


For example, Jesse is engulfed in a pit of his own existential torture after he must kill Gale. In addition to this self-imposed sense of guilt that will probably haunt him the rest of his life, he risks his own life and is ultimately pursued bu Gus as a result of his actions. Walter also faces the consequences of his actions: he loses his family and , ultimately, his soul, and he spends his last moments alive cradling the meth that has ruined his life, because it is the only thing that has not deserted him. He is alone and sad and pathetic and evil. That is a direct consequence of the violence he has encouraged and participated in. In this, Breaking Bad and its writer Vince Gilligan clearly respect the severity and immorality of violence. 

This is why it is important not to condemn the series finale as irreverent towards human life without seeing the entirety of the series. In fact, one could claim that same is true of Stone's Natural Born Killers. Take any fifteen minute chunk of the film and watch it out of context, and the viewer will be appalled at the level of fantastical, unrealistic, exaggerated violence the film luxuriates in. You would entirely miss its satirical elements (Note: Natural Born Killers is, in my opinion, a terrible example of satire. The film seems to operate on the basic theory that the best way to teach a person that violence is wrong is to beat them over the head with a baseball bat until they are bruised and bloody. Thus, it indulges in its own violence while simultaneously condemning it). 


And as far as authenticity is concerned, Natural Born Killers is absolutely unconcerned with honesty in its portrayal of violence. It is highly stylized and completely unconcerned with realism. Its two main characters also escape with no permanent consequences. In fact, Mickey and Mallory end the movie touring the country with their picturesque family, not dead, not in jail, feeling no remorse. 

However, I do understand that Stone is attempting to prevent his audience with a cautionary tale. Natural Born Killers proposes that if we continue to yield to the sensationalizing of violence in the media, this will be our fate: a world where serial killers are revered as celebrities. Where Natural Born Killers fails is its hypocrisy: how can we trust a film that is warning us against violence, yet displays so much fondness for self-indulgent cruelty? The truth is, we can't. Thankfully, Breaking Bad doesn't take the same missteps.


 In regards to Stone's comment that the machine gun "robot" rigged to the trunk of the car is a joke: Walter White is, in the context of the series, a kind of brilliant MacGyver; he is able to remove he and Jesse from life-threatening situations with ingenious contraptions and a kind of inventiveness which is effectively equivalent to scientific witchcraft. Examples of this include the "bombing" of Tuco's drug den with phosphine gas  and the dissolution of Emilio's body with hydroflouric acid. And that's only in Season One. So of course there is a small element of fantasy to Walt's inventions. A rotating machine gun robot arm does seem somewhat unrealistic, but those kinds of once-in-a-lifetime-maybe-this-will-work-this-is-a-long shot schemes is an important component of the character of Walter White.

Oliver Stone's ignorance, overriding sense of self-importance, and crippling hypocrisy seem to be in full display here. My advice to him: perhaps before criticizing Breaking Bad's integrity, you should watch the series. 

Understanding Gravity: The Selected Filmography of Alfonso Cuaron

Alfonso Cuaron's most recent directing effort, Gravity, was widely released on October 4 to critical praise and a box office that welcomed the film with open arms. It was previously screened at TIFF, and James Cameron has called it "...the best space film ever done" (in my opinion, an unforgivable snub to Solaris and 2001). In the wave of premature Oscar buzz for the film and Sandra Bullock's performance in the lead role, it is pertinent to examine some of Cuaron's previous works in order to fully grasp what the filmmaker might hope to accomplish with Gravity.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001):

This film follows two teenagers, Julio and Tenoch, as they embark on a weekend road trip across Mexico with a much older woman, Luisa. Her presence is an alluring one, and she allows the boys to assert and test the boundaries of their own sexuality. Y Tu Mama Tambien is concerned with more than just  the discovery of sexuality and adulthood, however. Its core is also a meaningful exploration of the intersection between life and death as a continuum, and the significance of love and sex and friendship along the constant progression of life. It is beautiful in its honesty and its unbiased realism. It uses Mexico as more than a setting; the country and its economic inequities become integral characters in the film, and essential to  understanding Julio, Tenoch, and Luisa. The many emotional complexities of the film can attributed to the sensitivity and fearlessness of Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay and directed the film. Born in Mexico, Cuaron clearly understands the intricacies of the country and the people which inhabit it; this allows Y Tu Mama Tambien to exhibit a kind of authenticity that only Cuaron can achieve.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004):

Although it is the lowest grossing film in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is also the most unique. Cuaron made directorial decisions which allowed Azkaban to focus on darker and more potent subject matter. It is in this film that Harry Potter begins his adolescence and starts to experience the first instances of angst which would severely affect him later in the series. It is also in this film that the presence of Voldemort begins to assert itself; later, it would  become oppressive. Cuaron is able to impeccably balance these darker elements with the fantastically playful world of Hogwarts.

 There is also a great gap between Azkaban and the first and second films, which manifest as slightly frivolous magical adventure films. Cuaron manages to create a great depth of emotion in the film, drawing deeper performances from Daniel Radcliffe and the other cast members than in the previous films. With Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Cuaron presented a product that managed to stay true to its beloved source material while also freely exhibiting a substantial degree of creative interpretation.

Children of Men (2006):

Children of Men is a masterfully realized standout in the genre of dystopian dramas (recent examples of which include this summer's Elysium and 2009's District 9). The film opens in 2027 London. Britain has become a war zone: bombings are common (by the government and by terrorists alike), illegal immigrants are abused and killed, and no child has been born on earth for over eighteen years. In the midst of this chaos,  Theo, an archetypal every man who is coerced into heroism, struggles to protect a woman who has miraculously become pregnant. This woman and her child are the hope which the world has been waiting for.

Children of Men is able to find beauty even in the starkest details of excessive destruction. Cuaron creates an intricate mood, constantly balancing despair and optimism. Action sequences are plentiful here, but they are so technically perfect that it is impossible not to find yourself holding your breath while watching. The cinematography is inextricably bound to the film's subject. It is shot in the documentary-style, while managing to abstain from the handheld camera which makes The Hunger Games and so many other action films almost unviewable. Each still might be a photograph taken from a headline about another car bombing in the Middle East, another uprising in Egypt. This level of realism can at times become terrifying.

Cuaron and his co-writers manage to masterfully adapt P.D. James's novel, creating an immersive storyline and well-developed characters. The film's conclusion may be expected, but it is competently executed and feels genuine despite its sentimentality. It manages to point our societal attention to issues that we are currently facing, and provides us with a simple warning for what may befall us if we do not correct them.

View more of Cuaron's projects at his IMDB page.