city of stars

Cairo-based Moseqar's version of "City of Stars" is delightfully bittersweet.

song to song shots

Even if the movie ends up being a "humiliating wreck," I still would like to see it for Fassy, Lubezki cinematography and of course... Ryan.

Thanks to Jason at My New Plaid Pants for directing me to this imagery.

someone in the crowd

A little featurette on the music in La La Land. Read my review of the film here.

la la land

It's difficult not to be dazzled by Damien Chazelle's musical La La Land. It has shades

of Minnelli and vintage-Hollywood romanticism but is placed in a modern-day, distinctive, if slightly highly-pitched, L.A. (Priuses, smoggy sunsets, traffic jams, crudely painted murals of dead stars); it also veers from being Xanadu camp (or far worse, "Glee") through the kineticism of Chazelle's direction, the bittersweet realism of the storyline and the film's two disarmingly funny and charming leads (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone). They've been paired before with dynamite results in Crazy, Stupid, Love. as one of that movie's few highlights, but here, they enter a territory that makes them an unforgettable cinematic duo. What makes them so great and appealing to my particular generation is that you can picture them wincing from that description and yet affably, accepting it. 

Stone plays a Warner lot barista struggling to get callbacks from auditions including one that's "Dangerous Minds meets The O.C." Gosling is a pianist with a feverish passion for jazz who longs to open his own club. What ends up happening to these two characters unravels through a blissful pastiche of song and dance with an indelible score of songs by Justin Hurwitz and organic, not overly flashy, choreography by Mandy Moore (not to be confused with the pop singer / actress). There are homages to the heyday of Warner Brothers and MGM as these two try to realize their dreams, but the film restrains itself from being both overly varnished (like Baz Luhrmann) and overly saccharine. There are shaky, flawed moments here and there (anything involving the supporting players fizzles),

including an oddly-mounted party scene where Gosling plays in an 80s cover band and Stone sips from a can of Mountain Dew but those quibbles are ameliorated by so many fine moments and a particular stride in a paradoxical, brilliant coda where melancholic ache arises out of a re-telling of events with old-school, slapsticky fanfare. By the time we reach the end, we've made a journey--a far cry from the opening, 90s Gap-ad-like sunshiny traffic jam dance tune, into something more sobering and yet uplifting at the same time. 

La La Land hits a sweet spot, I think, at the end of a long, draining year of American tumult and division when many of us aren't feeling that optimistic. So sometimes the arrival of an artistic crowdpleaser feels like one of our country's few miracles to hang on to. Here's to the mess these artists make. ****

-Jeffery Berg

city of stars

As the buzz for La La Land heats up, Stone and Gosling have released this swoony duet from the film.

10 perfect cinematic moments

So Fisti laid down his perfect cinematic moments. Here are 10 off the top of my head.



ANOTHER YEAR

Mary

Lesley Manville's painful, lost expression in the closing shot of the film slays me and leaves a lump in my throat. It also upends so much of the story.




THE BIRDS

Schoolhouse flock

Melanie has a tense smoke by the schoolhouse. The kids inside are singing "The Wee Copper of Fife." And quietly crows start landing on the jungle gym.




BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Shirts on a wire

The emotional accumulation in the slow pacing of Ennis's and Jack's first trysts at Brokeback and the fleeting passing of years thereafter makes this a devastating ending.




CARRIE

Bucket o'blood

Spacek's performance, the camera work, the lighting, the colors, Donaggio's eerie score, the editing all part of an operatic, iconic moment of splatter.






CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

Ballet

So much longing and beauty as the Gill Man swims beneath his white-suited unrequited love.






DRIVE

Opening Credits

In 2011 I went to see Drive half-heartedly thinking it was a typical race car flick. But then the opening credits began with that pink cursive font and "Nightcall" thumping and I was awestruck.




FRANCES HA

Modern Love

A spirited moment of exhilaration for hapless Frances set to Bowie.





THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Hairbrush & Dinner

The jig is up. And Annette Bening's expression is EVERYTHING.




PSYCHO

Mrs. Bates?

There's too many perfect moments in this movie to pick one. But the final reveal along with Herrmann's score still gives me the chills, no matter how many times I've seen it.





THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

The wrong house

In a masterful trickery of editing and Tak Fujimoto's dynamic camerawork, we watch the FBI descend on a house and then a door opens and we learn Clarice is all alone, face to face, with a killer.

ryan at cannes

Yes please!

fear of dawn

Aussie front Fear of Dawn delivers a decent (& free!) remix of Drake.








& here's some more...

Blurred lines...

Coma cat...

Get lucky...

A real hero...

take it off!

Intentional or not, the marketing of Drive made those hungering for another Fast & the Furious walk out of theaters.  But some, including myself, ended up being genuinely surprised how fun, riveting and stylish it was.  Just when I thought 1980s-nostalgia was played out, Drive created a world that was dark, violent, moody but blended with richly detailed, contrasting L.A. settings, and that hot pink title font and that catchy electropop soundscape.  Knowing in its humor, Drive embraced its tropes while purposefully being irrelevant compared to talky and loud action pics of the day.  Director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Ryan Gosling's follow-up Only God Forgives is a tepid and rather uninteresting neo-noir journey into a stylized version of Bangkok's criminal underworld.  This time the joke is on the Drive fans.  Those hoping for similar atmosphere, great music, and another quietly electric performance from Gosling, will likely find little here to get lost in.

Julian (Gosling) runs a boxing club that's a drug smuggling front.  His brother Billy (Tom Burke, in a dreadful, albeit thankfully brief turn) rapes and kills a young prostitute. Billy is arrested and killed. Frosty mother (an icy, unrecognizable and largely squandered Kristin Scott Thomas) comes to pay respects and see revenge on Billy's killers.

Only God Forgives is a melding of Western and Far Eastern revenge flicks, filmed quite nicely by Larry Smith.  Smith was the lighting cameraman on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which is what this movie sometimes reminded me of, with its stoic, nightmarish fairy tale quality.  Shooting in Bangkok (chronologically) gives the film a dingy, neon allure.  Cliff Martinez returns with another good score--the centerpiece being a spooling electro riff in the "Wanna fight?" sequence--one of the rare moments when the pic jolts to life.  Thomas is a compelling presence and a weird one, especially for movie buffs, since it's unlike anything she's done before.  Her scenes are the most arresting in the movie: her testy hotel arrival, moments between her and Julian with some Oedipal and Lady Macbethian shades, and when she gets to describe violent Julian's past (is she trustworthy or literally, with her long skinny cigarettes, just blowing smoke?).

Lacking in tension, this "Angel of Vengeance" tale seems to "try" to be offbeat though it ends up feeling a bit preciously-plotted and watered down.  Gone is a wide array of quirky, engaging characters (which is what we found in Drive and what is usually found in the movie's influences: film noir and Westerns) so there isn't much to be invested in except the style.  I'm an unabashed fan of Gosling as both an actor and a sex symbol but his dispassionate staring did little for me (maybe Refn's intention?).  Gosling called the script (by Refn) the "strangest thing" he's read. And it's also probably one of the easiest for him to remember, since he barely has any lines or emotional cues.  The high point for him is when he wails "take it off!" to his "woman" (Yayaying Ratha Phongam), which is what I was hoping she'd yell back at him.  **


- Jeffery Berg

don't look at me

It kills me.

ryan g.

I love him... & his t-shirts.

ryan

place behind the pines

I'm ready.