2013 NY Film Festival

[repeat]

Does anybody know the name of the film at the 38 second mark (the blue people) of the festival trailer? It's been driving me crazy.

Have no idea - I looked at the Main Slate and from what I can recall about all of them, none of them seem to match.

Could it be from Real though - anyone seen it yet? Not many other Asian surrealism-tinged films on the slate. (There's another clip from it on the trailer, but there are several from other films as well)

[OnOnt]

Does anybody know the name of the film at the 38 second mark (the blue people) of the festival trailer? It's been driving me crazy.

Looks like Butoh makeup and body movements, but cross-referencing that with the festival in a search brings up nothing.

[repeat]

Wouldn't be a first for KK (and wouldn't be the first dead forest either). To check for any similarities I just rewatched the trailer for Real - nothing there, but man I can hardly hold my horses for this one.

[Black Hat]

Yeah I went thru the main slate and thought it could be Real too but doesn't look like it. Plus there's a clip from Real right before the one that's nagging me so I doubt it. They're showing the trailer before every screening so it's been driving me crazy on a daily basis.

[Black Hat]

I have to say this year's festival has been fantastic. As an overall experience I'd go as far as to say the best in a few years. Will write more when I have a chance but so far for me the highlights have been Norte, La Jalousie & Bastards.

Have yet to figure out what film the blue Butoh people were in and it looks like I won't be able to attend Real today to find out if it was in there. I'm bummed out because I really wanted to see it, especially since it doesn't appear to have an American distributor. Along those same lines what's the film at the 46 second mark of the trailer with the panorama shot of the lady? I've been finding that to be striking as well.

Has anybody seen anything playing this week that's a must see?

I also have to give a shout to Kent Jones who could not have been a nicer, humble and most generous guy the few times I've had an opportunity to interact with him.

[repeat]

Bastards is amazing, isn't it? By the way, did the version screened over there begin with 10-15 seconds of close-up (slowed down?) rain, followed by 2-3 shots of Jacques in his apartment..? I'm under the impression that I've seen two different cuts and that bit keeps bothering me.

Haven't seen any of the rest of this week's films, but if I was there I wouldn't want to miss The Chase, the Mauvais Sang resto (I don't think you can get enough chances to see that scene on the big screen during one lifetime), and the James Gray talk. Did you (or anyone?) get to see The Immigrant?

I'm still holding out hope to see Real at either of the two festivals I'll still be able to attend. My local one deemed it unworthy of inclusion, and the reviews in general have been pretty unanimously negative, with all the familiar non-French Western critics' grievances (uneven tone, heavy-handed symbolism, meandering plot, disappointing ending, etc.) present and accounted for - but somehow they seem even more negative this time around than usual. Yet to unwrap my copy of Shokuzai, so no opinion yet on whether he's actually lost the plot or just finally outrun said critics for good - CdC review of Shokuzai was very positive so I'm still betting on / hoping for the latter case...

[FerdinandGriffon]

I thought Stray Dogs was incredible. Will write more when I have a chance.

Real was also excellent. Shokuzai was a major disappointment to me, and I was concerned that Real, as another novel adaptation, would be more of the same. Luckily, this is a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film through and through. You can kind of tell that the basic framework was someone else's, but it's been rewired into his personal universe so thoroughly that it hardly matters, as was the case with Tokyo Sonata. Though the premise and plot are sci-fi/thriller with echoes of Inception and Paprika, the film is aesthetically and thematically of a piece with Kurosawa's horror work, though this time around augmented and amplified by the move to digital. Now his ghosts distort as if they're part of a bad rip being played through VLC Media Player, and rapid punch-ins made in post render faces a sea of pixels. The tone was , if anything, less uneven than in most Kurosawa pictures (for the first two hours straight it's almost unbearably unsettling), the symbolism is always ambiguous or tongue-in-cheek, and I don't know how to answer anyone who finds

Spoiler

ten minutes of plesiosaur rampage through an abandoned warehouse

an unsatisfying ending. It's an affecting, disturbing, and formally audacious movie, and confirmation that Kurosawa is still one of the greatest risk-takers working in either arthouse or mainstream cinema today.

PS: Black Hat: Those butoh dancers were not from Real, though it did strongly remind me of Horrors of Malformed Men at points!

[Black Hat]

I am thrilled to report that the Mystery of The Butoh Dancers has been solved. I'm sitting in Walter Reade tonight half daydreaming, half watching agnès b.'s Je m'appelle Hmmm... and about half way through all of a sudden out of nowhere come the Butoh dancers.

As for the film, the story moved me perhaps more than any other film of the festival but it was a technical mess to the point of distraction and detraction. Having said that I appreciated its heavily Ozu influenced threads as it fit the tone of film wonderfully but it ultimately wandered far too much into the unfortunate faux modernist territory of Gaspar Noe. The use of different cameras, freeze framing, bizarre pointless editing served no purpose, nor was it the kind of thing where you can say it looked cool, not that creating such a feeling would have been appropriate. I do however respect what she was trying to do and would recommend that people see it, there's a lot to chew on.

[Black Hat]

Repeat - Bastards was absolutely amazing. I'm not positive if I've recovered from the film let alone the madness of what the Tindersticks pulled off for its soundtrack. It was remarkable how much of a departure in style the film was for Denis as well as musically for the Tindersticks while remaining still so undeniably identifiable to each in both cases but moods are the fingerprint of every great artist isn't it?

Here's how great this film is

Spoiler

Marco being killed at the end was spoiled for me by Claire at the talk she gave the day before but I was still knocked on my ass by it.

I can't think of another film in recent memory that used close ups as effectively as Denis did here. You felt their skin with the totality of disgust and despair inside each character's desperation. The two sex scenes were carnal, empty upon empty, an expression of pain, searching for a moment's relief through a release of your own tension through another. Little bits of humor but nothing close to comedy. The kinds of laughs you find to stop yourself from crying. Strong statements on the place of women in society, the choices they are presented with by men, because of men, for men, after men. How behind every door for a woman is another man projecting his influence, willing his limits and ideals on to her that remain with the woman long after he departs. Behind it all, which is what makes Denis a most special filmmaker for me, is the acknowledgment that her characters are all too human.

As Denis herself said afterwards it's definitely influenced by Thief saying she wanted Lindon to be like Caan and for Tindersticks to put their take on Tangerine Dream.

To answer your question the version screened was exactly as you described. The rain bit followed by the close ups of Lindon really set the tone well and its beat remained consistent from then on.

[Forrest Taft]

Just when I thought I could not get more exited for the Denis. Too bad there is zero chance I'll get to see this on the big screen - not a single Denis feature has ever been picked up for distribution here in Norway. ](*,)

[hearthesilence]

They're now selling tickets to tonight's screening of Alexander Payne's Nebraska in Alice Tully Hall for $15. Not sure where the seats would be, but you have to buy the tickets at the box office, they're not selling them online. (Also, Payne and Dern will be there at the screening.)

FWIW, Blue is the Warmest Color and Bastards are both coming out via IFC on October 25, so if you miss them at the festival, they will be in theaters (or is it just one theater?) in a few weeks. A Touch of Sin is already in theaters right now, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC.

[repeat]

Just when I thought I could not get more exited for the Denis. Too bad there is zero chance I'll get to see this on the big screen - not a single Denis feature has ever been picked up for distribution here in Norway. ](*,)

Take an eastbound train on Nov 7th - it's playing with Denis in attendance on the Stockholm International Film Festival, where she will be presented with a lifetime achievement award. Apparently the Swedish (distribution?) title will be Svinen ("Pigs"), which really doesn't do justice to the tone of the film at all...

Behind it all, which is what makes Denis a most special filmmaker for me, is the acknowledgment that her characters are all too human.

Disturbingly so for some - in the extensive Cahiers interview (which I urge everyone with an interest in this film and some facility in French to seek out), the interviewers were trying hard to get her to point out who the title refers to, and she insisted in her typical way that there are none in the film, and that she understands all of the characters! Personally I didn't really begin to grasp the enormous moral complexity of the story before reading that piece (and also it took a while for the initial shock/indignation to subside).

Thanks for the verification re the cut - I suppose that will be the theatrical release then. I saw it first in a special festival screening in June and I could swear it was missing those first shots, and I think there were some minor differences. I also seemed to feel that the final scene had been toned down, but that might well be just some post-traumatic coloration of my recollections!

[hearthesilence]

If you're on Twitter, the NYFF has a tweet you can retweet to win a pair of tix to Jim Jarmusch's new movie tomorrow (with Jarmusch and Swinton in attendance). Also, $7 rush tix are available for Alphaville and Hail Mary tonight for the Godard retrospective running with the festival.

[Perkins Cobb]

Madonna texts throughout NYFF 12 Years a Slave premiere while sitting next to Jason Ritter and Michael K. Williams, ties it nicely into the content of the movie by hissing "It's for business ... ENSLAVER!" when someone complains.

[domino harvey]

I saw 12 Years a Slave last week at a screening supervised by two security guards armed with night vision specs trained at the audience of VIPs and there were still at least half-a-dozen people who had to be told by said guards throughout the film to put their goddamn cell phones away or be thrown out! People really have dependency issues with their phones nowadays

[repeat]

I thought Stray Dogs was incredible. Will write more when I have a chance.

Would love to hear your thoughts if you find time to jot something down! I fell victim to travel fatigue and dozed off three times, ending up so mystified that I had to put three question marks in my viewing diary where I would normally mark a spontaneous rating. I found a lot of it sort of impressive, but perhaps because of the three big holes I couldn't really engage with the film emotionally. (My friend, who stayed alert for the entire running time - and who, it must be added, as a huge Béla Tarr fan has generally no problems with very slow cinema - thought it was the worst piece of self-centered audience-baiting for its own sake they'd ever seen, which I couldn't comment on, but I must admit the words "poetic extremism" occurred to me too during the last two shots)

From the maybe eighty percent that I saw I thought it was a sort of a logical conclusion of Tsai's style and signature elements, which would be suitable if it indeed remains his last film. Would certainly be interested to see it again in its entirety, but don't know when a chance for that will come up.