Out of Focus

I just find that I can’t get overexcited about Prime, The Legend of Zorro or The Weather Man. A new Weekly Movie Guide is up at Gothamist, and I’ll make the same suggestion here that I made over there: you should go see Paradise Now, which I saw and briefly reviewed during the New York Film Festival. Maybe it’s a movie that a nice Jewish boy from a very pro-Israel family in San Francisco “shouldn’t” like, but I found it incredibly compelling and, in its own way, a wonderfully balanced argument as to how many — or maybe even most — Palestinians view the current situation. It’s also terrifying to watch these young Palestinian men calmly go through the process of preparing to blow-up themselves, how emotionally detached they must be on some level from those people they’re closest to in order to take such a drastic action for what they consider to be a greater cause. I still find the most fascinating element of the movie to be the inclusion of the only rational (to my mind, and therefore, peaceful) voice in the movie to belong to one of only two prominent female characters. Paradise Now is simply a fascinating examination of a culture and a struggle many of us can’t understand either due to our distance from it or our allegiance to one side or another.

Beyond that … it’s Halloween bitches! And kudos to the Two Boots Pioneer for their “All Night Vampire Movie Marathon.” Sadly, I’ll be packing and prepping my move otherwise I would seriously consider attending the 10-hour fang-fest, if only to catch Larry Fessenden’s Habit and Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, but the latter won’t screen until after 4 AM, and while I’ll likely be up, it will be because of my so-far-failing conscious effort to not still be packing when movers arrive next Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, I’d still love more feedback on the guides over at Gothamist. This week’s is about half-as-long as my previous ones, but apparently still more than they want, so things may be fundamentally different (and more along the lines of simple suggestions rather than any type of overall view of what’s out there) going forward, supplemented by other picks throughout the week. But again, let me know what you think … what works, what doesn’t. And feel free to comment on the Gothamist site too.

I found an apartment. Yay! I’ll write about that more in another post when I have a bit more time. Right now, I wanted to shine my TCM-loving light on a week of don’t-miss programming: TCM’s 39 film tribute to Alfred Hitchcock! Starting tonight through Sunday, TCM is handing over every night of its programming to the master of suspense, and they kick things off tonight with Vertigo, Psycho, Spellbound and Marnie. Actually, the programming starts at 8 PM with the Hitchcock installment of Richard Schickel’s great “The Men Who Made the Movies” series.

You want Notorious? Tomorrow night at 10. You want something earlier, like 1929’s Blackmail. Try Wednesday at 10. How about the fascinating stage-like, “one-shot” murder-thriller Rope? That will be on Friday at 12:30 AM. Of course, if you have (criminally) nevere seen North by Northwest, you have your choice between Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 6 as part their “Essentials” series. And for something a little different — a film you might otherwise not think of as classic Hitchcock — you should definitely check-out the original Mr. and Mrs. Smith. You’ll probably want to record it (it’s showing Sunday night at 4:15 AM, which in the real world not controlled by TCM’s schedule is actually Monday at 4:15 AM), and it has nothing to do with this summer’s Pitt-Jolie-Liman disappointment. Instead, it’s a light romantic comedy (that’s right!) featuring Carole Lombard‘s penultimate screen performance before tragically dying in a plane crash at the age of 33. (Shit, that’s younger than me!) It’s not an amazing film, but it’s interesting and funny and certainly different from anything else made by the great director.

Basically, if you’ve heard of it, TCM is likely showing it — with a few notable exceptions such as The 39 Steps and Dial M For Murder. But you can see both the 1956 and 1934 versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much back-to-back on Thursday starting at 8. TCM is always worth watching; this week, even more so.

So as many of you know, I’ve been doing this little “Weekly Movie Guide” over at Gothamist every Thursday for, I don’t know, five or six weeks now? since Labor Day! (I didn’t realize it had been that long!) I put a lot of effort into it and it takes a while, but I kind of like doing it. I personally try to make it comprehensive although certainly not complete. I try to explain why I’m including something or give a sentence (or a few sentences) of background. I’m trying to give it an editorial bent without it being simply a listing. However, right now, the powers that be at Gothamist want me to make it a bit shorter, which is understandable because the whole post has been coming in somewhere between 1800-2000 words. That’s a lot; I don’t dispute it.

Here’s the thing — this post should be for diehard cinephiles and casual movie fans who have more than a simple passing interest in movies alike. There is so much in NYC every week — and so much good stuff — that I like to include as much as I can without overdoing it and without being boring. I have no idea if I’ve been succeeding — I just know that it apparently needs to be shorter.

The way I can do this is to completely abandon some of the listings (most likely the new releases) or set a limit on really just a few highlights of the week. I’m curious what you would prefer, and for that matter, I’d be curious if you’ve been reading the current posts and what you think of them? Basically, any feedback you have about the “Weekly Movie Guide,” changes you’d like to see, things you like, don’t like — even down to my piss-poor writing — whatever. Let me know. The comments here are fine; so is an email. But any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Updated: Here are links to all the one’s I’ve written:

• 10/20/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 10/13/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 10/06/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 09/29/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 09/22/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 09/15/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 09/08/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide
• 09/01/05 Gothamist Weekly Movie Guide

NINETEEN new releases in New York this weekend. That is an absurd number. Seven of them come from the major studios. That’s really bad news for Domino and Elizabethtown, neither of which did so well last week. But really — what’s the point? With that many new films, both big and small movies simply get lost. And none of these new films are major standouts.

Anyway, visit Gothamist for the Weekly Movie Guide. No need for me to repeat myself here. The two films I have already seen opening tomorrow are North Country and Protocols of Zion. The latter was excellent and should be seen by everyone everywhere; the former was disappointing and nowhere near as interesting, complex or gripping as it should have been.

Hi there. Yeah. Here I am. Been gone for a few weeks, I know. It hasn’t been anything deliberate. It’s just been that I’ve been living in this mini-personal Hell, and I guess I’m at one of the lower circles because I’ve had a very hard part getting out. I’ve had plenty to write about the past couple weeks — James Bond/Daniel Craig, anyone? believe me I’ll get to it! — but I just haven’t been in the mood. I’ve had these ongoing responsibilities to Gothamist, so if you’ve been reading that site, you still would have seen the final bits of my New York Film Festival coverage plus I continue to do the Weekly Film Guide, of which there will be another one tomorrow afternoon.

Plus, yesterday I interviewed filmmaker Marc Levin whose fantastic new documentary Protocols of Zion opens on Friday in New York and LA, and tonight will screen at the Walter Reade Theater followed by a discussion. The interview is today’s Gothamist Interview and wow, does he have a lot to say, especially about how surprised and disappointed he is by the reaction of much of the mainstream organized Jewish community to his movie and their desire to actually suppress it.

I have definitive opinions at that subject being Jewish and growing up in a very pro-Israel and pro-Jewish family, but the simple fact is I can’t write about it right now. This apartment search has been all encompassing. I have now expressed interest in over half-a-dozen share situations for which I’ve been passed over. I can’t even tell you how many places I’ve actually seen in the past five or six weeks, and I mean I actually, literally can’t. I’d have to go over my calendar and count. This past weekend I saw 10 places — four on Saturday, six on Sunday. I caught a terrible cold in the process, which actually isn’t so abnormal for me since I always seem to get sick during the abrupt climate changes like the one we recently had here. Sunday was a particularly ridiculous exercise in futility as I went from my apartment on the Upper West Side to Williamsburg to Park Slope (which on the weekend when the subways are all fucked up is a three-transfer, four train adventure) to the East Village to Carroll Gardens to the Lower East Side and back to Gowanus, near Park Slope. If I wasn’t in an apartment, I was on the subway. There wasn’t really any down time. I got home nearly nine hours later.

Anyway, I don’t want to sit here whining and moaning about all the intricacies of my search. Suffice it to say, it’s been awful and painful, and I have seen places I wanted but for one reason or another I haven’t gotten them. I basically spend all day reading Craigslist and responding to ads and going to see everything I can. Blogging, blog reading and even seeing movies has fallen by the wayside. In fact, I got so sick over the weekend that I had to cancel going to screenings of Prime and Stay. Not only that, I had to cancel doing an interview with Stay director Marc Forster, which would have been very interesting and challenging because I’m not really such a fan of his. I think he tends to overdirect his films, using a visual style and camera placement that gets in the way of the story rather than propelling it. I found Everything Put Together to be really dull, and I actually hated Monster’s Ball (with the exception of Halle Berry’s performance) with a passion. In fact, the people who saw it with me still make fun of exactly how agitated I was for blocks after that movie. Finding Neverland was better even if it was over-sentimental and blatantly manipulative, but even that film showed some of Forster’s unnecessary tendencies. (Always stuck in my head is the one dog’s eye view shot that served no purpose other than to create a — I suppose — cool-looking moment.) It’s always interesting to interview somebody and try to make it interesting without being overly challenging or antagonistic. And I don’t know — Stay could be awesome. But still, I was looking forward to an interesting conversation. But I basically couldn’t talk without suffering from major throat pain.

So I’m still here, and I’ll try to at least post a little notice when something goes up elsewhere, and hopefully if I can just find a new place to live soon, then I’ll be able to return my focus to other things, like, I don’t know … finding a new job again. (Sigh.) Until then, bear with me. Thanks.

At least it should be, and thank god. I’m exhausted. Not as much from covering the festival as from this ongoing painful apartment hunt. So painful that I can’t even talk about it right now. Maybe I’ll write another of those infrequent completely personal posts later. Or maybe not. All I know is I ran around Brooklyn yesterday, and although I saw only four places, by the time I got home around 5 PM, I was utterly wiped out and couldn’t write a thing.

So I sadly skipped today’s press screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and stayed home to write-up this Gothamist post with more NYFF reviews. Specifically, you can read some of my thoughts on Paradise Now, The President’s Last Bang and Who’s Camus Anyway?. I particularly enjoyed the last two of these, for different reasons, while Paradise Now was more thought-provoking than specifically entertaining, but all three are worth your time, especially if you’re looking for those NYFF films that won’t get big releases (if any) here in the States.

If you notice that my comments seem even more discombulated and incoherent than normal, I blame everything on my mental exhaustion form the apartment hunt and job search. But it’s all going to turn out alright, right? I mean, that’s what everyone keeps telling me, so it must be true.

This is why I go to movies.

I was supposed to be moving … well … today. That’s not happening. I might be moving next week; I will definitely be moving by the end of October. But either way, all that optimisim (not that there was so much of it) I expressed in my otherwise depressing birthday post pretty much got shot to hell between Monday (when I didn’t get an apartment I wanted) and today (when I found out I won’t be getting a job that I really wanted and have been trying to get for about four months). Yay, life!

In the mean time, I missed a few New York Film Festival press screenings of films I really wanted to see — especially Manderlay, Tale of Cinema and Three Times, but I did see the excellent third entry in Park Chan-wook‘s revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

In fact, there’s a new NYFF entry on Gothamist which discusses everything going on at Lincoln Center this weekend, and includes my thoughts on the aforementioned Sympathy for Lady Vengeance as well as Something Like Happiness and the latest film from Irish director Neil Jordan, Breakfast on Pluto.

Oh yeah, and if the NYFF isn’t your style, a new Weekly Movie Guide went up yesterday. In it, I mention how Friday at 6 PM, I just know I’ll be at MoMA to see Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmacher introduce a screening of one of my absolutely favorite films (definitely part of my top 5 list!) which I have mentioned here several times before, The Red Shoes. MoMA is presenting this screening in honor of what would have been British director Michael Powell‘s 100th birthday. But here it is, 5:30 PM, and there’s no way I’m getting there. Oh well. Just another thing that must be sacrificed to my apartment hunt, move, job search and all around crappy September!

Hi October … would you like to come out and play? Nicely, please?

For a long time I have extolled the virtues of CBS’s The Amazing Race, which had its new season premiere last night. Before anyone jumps on me to say how the show sucks, while I wouldn’t go that far, I found last night’s first episode of this new series which for the first time is a “family edition,” remarkably boring. I think they fucked up the entire dynamic, not just between teams but within teams too. There’s just something off: maybe it’s too many people; maybe it’s some teams being all adults, some have kids; maybe it’s the fact that everyone thinks that every other team is going to underestimate them, but they know better and are actually much smarter than the others — but I doubt that because that’s a common quality. Anyway, hopefully the season will pick-up once more teams get eliminated.

(Spolier to follow. If you’re intending on watching last night’s episode and haven’t yet, don’t read further.) However, boring or not, there was one absolutely fascinating thing about last night’s show. I haven’t had much time to read TWoP or other blogs so I don’t know — maybe this has been covered all over the world wide internets already — but one team in particular (and it so happened to be the team that was Philiminated kind of shocked me. That would be the Black Family.

Yeah, for those of you who didn’t see the show, I don’t just mean a family of African-Americans, nor do I just mean the family with the last name “Black.” I mean an actual black family with the last name Black, repeatedly called “the Black family” and appearing in the opening credits with the onscreen title “Black Family.” And by the way, out of 10 teams, they’re the only one that actually is a family of African-Americans. For that matter, they’re the only minority family participating.

Now look, obviously, that’s their name, and CBS, to its credit, apparently paid no attention in the family’s name when casting. But there’s something about the appearance of this lovely smiling family appearing on screen with the title “Black Family” among the Gaghans, the Schroeders, the Aiellos, etc. that is a bit disconcerting, and I have a hard time believing that somebody either at CBS or Jerry Bruckheimer Productions didn’t think that this was maybe not the best idea.

I mean, am I alone here? Making matters worse, the Blacks (see what I mean?), now having been eliminated, will remain in the opening credits, smiling as the “Black Family” but not appearing again until they have to stand and clap at the finish line some 2-1/2 to 3 months from now for whatever smiling, jubilant white family winds up running in first and claiming that big prize. And there they’ll be, the Gaghans, the Schroeders, the Aiellos, the Blacks…. I’m just saying …

The week has not particularly gotten any better. The apartment search is now running my life because the place that I wanted and thought I had a good chance of getting fell through, so I’m back to square one. Which sucks. A lot. In fact, because of needing to concentrate on finding a home, I’ve even had to skip some NYFF press screenings, including two movies I really wanted to see — Lars von Trier’s latest Manderlay and the latest from Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema.

But that’s all neither here nor there. We had one more Gothamist Interview this month, and it’s up today. Starting tonight is the very first New York Television Festival, running through Oct. 3. Today’s interview is with Terence Gray, the founder and executive director of the festival.

That’s the last interview for the month — thank god! I’m going to be doing more NYFF stuff still, but right now I really need to concentrate on finding a place to live. Oh well … back to Craigslist ….

I came home between press screenings because I had to do a phoner for an interview I’m running on Gothamist this Wednesday. Now I have to run back out to the Walter Reade for the afternoon screening. I’m not packed, and in fact, I still don’t have a new apartment. YAY!

But I do have a new set of reviews up at Gothamist for films screening at the NYFF this week. Among them is Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, which not only did I love but is also one of my favorite films of the year so far. (Reviews for Bubble and Capote are also up.)

Much of this year’s program is living up to its promise. I particularly enjoyed this morning’s press screening of the Japanese film Who’s Camus Anyway? but I’ll have to save the why’s for another time.