LFM in the News – Page 3 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Reviews Leviathan

By Joe Bendel. It is worth noting that Andrey Zvyagintsev originally hails from Siberia, the traditional banishing ground of Russian dissidents. Perhaps then it is not surprising that dissent is in his DNA. Up to now, his films have shown an affinity for the marginalized and the compromised in Russian society. However, his latest, Cannes award winning film boldly critiques the two greatest power centers in modern Russia, Putin’s government and the Orthodox Church. Rather shockingly, Russia selected Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as their official foreign language Oscar submission (one can imagine several film authority bureaucrats were transferred to Siberian radio for that one), but it stands a fair chance of being nominated, having just made the shortlist cut. Already a recognizable contemporary classic, Leviathan opens Christmas Day at Film Forum.

Kolya is not a sophisticated man, but he knows injustice for what it is. He lives next to his hardscrabble automotive garage with his somewhat younger second wife Lilya and Roma, his son from his first marriage. His house and surrounding land are all he owns, but the town’s corpulently corrupt Mayor Vadim Shelevyat covets it for his dodgy development scheme. Naturally, he is not inclined to pay Kolya a fair price, preferring instead to use the Russian equivalent of imminent domain.

Shelevyat expects that will be that, as it usually is when the machinery of the state is unleashed, but Kolya is made of unusually stern stuff. His old army buddy Dmitri also happens to be a hotshot attorney from Moscow, who owes Kolya a favor. Dmitri fully understands the law in such cases, but Shelevyat and his underlings refuse to acknowledge it. The advocate also has a dossier of embarrassing dirt on the Mayor, but getting into a hardball contest with Shelevyat is a dangerous proposition. As the provincial dictator turns up the heat, with the implied support of the local Orthodox bishop, tensions within Kolya’s family and Dmitri’s mixed motives threaten to fatally undermine the embattled mechanic.

There is no mistaking Leviathan’s political implications, especially when Putin’s ominous portrait stares down from Shelevyat’s wall as plans each successive abuse of power. However, the extent to which he calls out the Orthodox Church for abetting the current regime is jaw-droppingly gutsy (should you doubt it, simply review the fate of the Pussy Riot band-members after protesting the Church’s support for Putin). Yet, it would be wrong to mislabel Zvyagintsev as anti-Church, because there is at least one pious Orthodox clergyman in Leviathan, who appears uncomfortable with his leadership.

Zvyagintsev briefly unleashes Russia’s anarchic sensibilities when Kolya’s off-duty highway patrol officer buddies take him target-shooting using the portraits of the old Soviet masters. Not so coincidentally, they might be the healthiest characters in the film, but despite their unruliness, they are largely disenfranchised cogs in a state apparatus dominated by the likes of Shelevyat.

Clearly, Leviathan offers a withering assessment of the current state of Russian affairs, but Zvyagintsev’s critiques are fully integrated into the wider narrative whole. In fact, the former serve the latter, rather than vice versa. As a result, Leviathan has the form of a parable, the soul of a Russian tragedy, and the moral outrage of a J’accuse. Critically, it is also remarkably forceful when judged on purely cinematic terms. As Kolya, Aleksey Serebryakov is no mere symbolic everyman. His pain and rage hit the audience on a level that is honest and true. Likewise, Vladimir Vdovichenkov plays Dmitri and all his human failings with mature subtlety. Yet perhaps appropriately, Roman Madianov largely defines and personifies Leviathan as the buffoonish but ruthless Shelevyat.

Without question, Leviathan is an important cinematic statement that will reverberate beyond the short term awards season. It is like hydrogen peroxide in film form. It stings and it disinfects. Stylistically, it is somewhat uncompromising, but it still demands a wide audience. Highly recommended, it opens Thursday the 25th (ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas) at Film Forum in New York. Patrons in other cities should waste no time seeing it when it opens, in case the national exhibitors start pulling it for fear it will offend an oppressive foreign regime, since that’s what they apparently do these days, especially when they are released by a division of Sony.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on December 23rd, 2014 at 11:46am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

It’s the kind of thing you probably missed over Thanksgiving dinner, while gnawing on a turkey leg, bickering with your uncle, or falling asleep during a Detroit Lions game: the Miami Marlins just signed an outfielder to a $325 million deal, the largest contract in sports history.

You read that correctly: $325 million. That’s Hunger Games money, Transformers money. It’s the kind of figure you associate with World Bank loans or Rolling Stone comeback tours. Apple needs at least a day to make that kind of cash.

The young outfielder, named Giancarlo Stanton – no, I hadn’t heard of him, either – apparently hit .288 with 37 home runs last season. (Note to Marlins: those were roughly my numbers playing T-ball in 5th grade.) Stanton later celebrated his deal in a Miami nightclub with a $20,000 bottle of champagne coated in 22-carat gold leaf. I don’t know whether he kept the bottle.

It says something about baseball today that a guy you’ve never heard of – again, he plays for the Marlins – can be signed for $25 million per year over 13 years. Frankly, it’s probably a bad deal for the Marlins – especially if the names Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez or Josh Hamilton ring a bell. Players paid more than they’re worth – more than some national economies are worth – rarely stay motivated purely by love of the game.

Love of the game. That’s what sports are supposed to be about, isn’t it?

When you think about love of the game, you think of Lou Gehrig – the Iron Horse – playing in 2,130 straight games until his body gave out from ALS. Or Pete Rose, aka Charlie Hustle, barreling over Ray Fosse in the 1970 All Star game to secure a seemingly meaningless win. Or Kirk Gibson, gamely limping around the bases after hitting his clutch home run in the 1988 World Series.

And you should also think of the Portland Mavericks, the subject of a wonderful new documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball that premiered this past year at Sundance and is currently showing on Netflix.

My writing partner Govindini Murty and I caught Battered Bastards at Sundance and also at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. At the Sundance screening we had the chance to speak to Kurt Russell, who’s interviewed in the film, along with his nephews Chapman Way and Maclain Way, Battered Bastards‘ co-directors.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Kurt Russell at Sundance 2014.

The Mavericks – an independent, Class A minor league baseball team between 1973-77 – were the brainchild of Bing Russell, the actor best known for playing deputy sheriff Clem on TV’s Bonanza. A hugely colorful showman with a fast wit (“I played Clem for 13 years on Bonanza and never solved a case”), Russell appeared in countless film and TV westerns, and made a career of getting killed on camera – most notably in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers.

Of course, Russell is best known today as the father of Kurt Russell, who himself played for the Mavericks in 1973.

As Battered Bastards relates, Bing served as a bat boy for the mighty New York Yankees between 1936-41, when he got to know legends of the game like Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez and Lou Gehrig (who gave young Bing his bat after hitting the final home run of his storied career). Although Bing later tried his hand at pro baseball, an injury cut short his career – leading him to try an acting career in Hollywood.

His love of baseball never left him, however – so when his acting career stalled in the early 1970s, Russell jumped at the opportunity to bring pro baseball to Portland in 1973 after the prior team left town.

“Baseball was a big part of our family,” Maclain Way told us. “Kurt, our uncle, played professional baseball. Bing, himself, played professional baseball. We had cousins who played major league baseball, so baseball was a huge part of our life growing up. I played baseball in high school because of Bing – he taught me how to play.”

The upstart Mavericks would become a team like no one had seen before – totally unaffiliated with any big league franchise, and filled to the brim with misfits and rejects – a scrappy, real life Bad News Bears squad.

“He had a great eye for ball players,” Kurt Russell told us, speaking warmly of his father. “We knew we could put a competitive team together.”

Kurt Russell & LFM's Govindini Murty at Sundance 2014.

Managed by restaurant owner Frank “The Flake” Peters, the Mavericks’ roster of wild characters would include: a shaggy, 33 year-old high school English teacher named Larry Colton (who’d later be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); 38 year-old ex-Yankee Jim “Bulldog” Bouton (who’d been blackballed from baseball after writing a wild tell-all memoir); Joe Garza (aka “JoGarza”), a madman utility player who waved flaming brooms when the Mavericks swept opposing teams; Rob Nelson, who invented Big League Chew bubble gum in the Mavericks’ bullpen; star outfielder Reggie Thomas, who took a limo to games even though he lived only a block from the stadium; and fiery batboy Todd Field, who once got tossed from a game, and later became an Academy Award-nominated writer-director.

And, of course, there was Kurt Russell. “I got injured [playing minor league baseball in Texas], so I had the opportunity to go to Portland and help them get the ball club started,” Russell told us.

“It was just a time in my Dad’s life where I was really happy he was involving himself in something completely new,” says Russell. “It was a big part of our lives.” Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Music Made by People, not Algorithms: a DVD Review of Frank

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. We’re told that in our digital future music will be created by computer algorithms. But could an algorithm make music anywhere near as weird and wonderful as Frank? Frank is the titular character of Lenny Abrahamson’s touching and funny new black-comedy Frank, an ode to the irreplaceable nature of quirky, individual human creativity.

Coming out on DVD/Blu-ray December 9th, Frank premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to rave reviews. The movie is inspired by the true story of Chris Sievey, a British musician and comedian who performed wearing a large paper-mâché head under the pseudonym Frank Sidebottom.

If you’re seeking a cinematic antidote to our flattened-out, Big Data, crowd-sourced, mass conformist digital age, then take the time to see Frank. Frank is a paean to true creativity – the kind of creativity that can only come from an individual.

Frank stars Michael Fassbender as the eponymous musician – a mysterious, wildly talented singer-songwriter who wears a large paper-mâché head over his face at all times. Frank is supported in his musical efforts by a medley of eccentric band mates; these include nerdy keyboardist Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), surly theremin player Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and troubled band manager Don (Scoot McNairy).

The story is told from the point of view of Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a would-be keyboardist and song-writer who spends his days searching for poetic inspiration in his quiet seaside town, while posting random updates on social media about what sandwiches he’s eaten, his humdrum home life, and so forth.

One day while staring blankly out at the ocean, Jon witnesses a man being rescued from an attempted drowning. It turns out the man is the keyboardist for an avant-garde band with the unpronounceable name of “The Soronprfbs.” Jon meets the band’s manager Don (Scoot McNairy) and is invited to play with the band that night.

Jon is enthralled by the chaotic creativity of the band – so different from his own dull existence- and in particular by the manic, oddly compelling performance of Frank, a figure wearing a large, round head with blank, staring eyes and a goofy, painted-on smile. Jon seems to make the right impression on Frank, and so Frank invites Jon to join the band at a remote country house in Ireland to record their next album.

Jon is over the moon with joy, convinced that being in close proximity to musical genius will finally unleash his own creativity. However he soon learns that the other band members are suspicious of him – especially Clara – because they think that he’s a mediocrity only out to exploit Frank’s talent.

Unbeknownst to them, Jon is also secretly videotaping the band’s offbeat practice sessions (in which they find inspiration in things as diverse as bird calls, pouring water, and slamming doors) and uploading them to social media, gaining them an online following. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Music Made by People, not Algorithms: a DVD Review of Frank

LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Double and the Christmas Holidays

[Editor’s note: the post below appeared this weekend at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. Do you feel like you’re turning into a different person over the holidays? How about your fellow citizens – do they appear to be morphing into unrecognizable automata? The holidays can do that to you – especially in Los Angeles. It’s a time when people get consumed with travel schedules, holiday parties, frenzied “gifting,” and trying to keep up with the Kardashians – and forget to act like real human beings.

Just this past week we saw a grown man bark at a Starbucks barista because his eggnog latte wasn’t hot enough, soccer moms body-check each other grabbing at Target discount wreaths, and senior citizens hydroplane in a Mercedes while trying to grab a parking spot at a rainy mall.

Fellow citizens, enough is enough. Get some perspective – before you become ersatz human beings even your nearest and dearest wouldn’t recognize.

This is where indie cinema can offer some timely lessons on the perils of modern dehumanization. One of our favorite films at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year was The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg and written and directed by Richard Ayoade. Currently out on DVD and VOD, the film is one of the smartest adaptations yet of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, the seminal novella of modern alienation.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a meek office drone toiling away in a retro-futuristic dystopia of grimy office buildings and gray apartment flats. The bleak settings owe much to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and George Orwell’s 1984, while Simon’s character recalls Anthony Perkins’ persecuted office worker in Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial.

The hapless, ineffectual Simon loves a fellow office worker, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), but he is completely unable to assert himself with her or with his co-workers – indeed, at times he is barely able to make it out of the office elevator. For this he is treated as if he is of little more consequence than the paint on the dingy office walls.

A wrench is thrown in the works one day when Simon is introduced to a new co-worker: a fellow named James Simon (also played by Eisenberg) who strangely enough, looks exactly like him. In personality, however, James is the opposite of Simon – smooth, assertive, full of charm and slick maneuvering. In short order, James takes credit for Simon’s work, double-crosses him with his boss, and starts putting moves on the lovely Hannah before Simon’s horrified eyes.

Making matters worse, no one seems to notice the striking similarity between Simon and James – something that infuriates poor Simon. James taunts Simon by stealing more and more of his life, eventually driving Simon to take desperate measures before a final, surreal denouement. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Double and the Christmas Holidays

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking With Director Steven Knight About His Innovative and Enthralling Film Locke

[Editor’s Note: the post below appeared this week at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Locke may just be one of the best films of 2014. Superbly written and directed by Steven Knight and featuring a dazzling performance by Tom Hardy, Locke is a must-see for anyone who believes that human character is still the most compelling subject of the cinema. I saw Locke earlier this year when it played to rave reviews at Sundance, and spoke with Knight about his innovative and deeply personal film which is expanding this week to theaters nationwide.

In the film, Tom Hardy plays construction engineer Ivan Locke, a man who takes as much pride in the firm foundations of his buildings as he does in his unshakeable code of personal responsibility. One night, Locke leaves a construction job to drive from Birmingham to London to fulfill a mysterious promise. Along the way, he makes and receives a series of wrenching phone calls that bring his sense of personal duty into conflict with everyone and everything he loves.

I’m a big fan of films that use new digital tools to experiment with the traditional structure of the movies. , Locke succeeds at being both formally inventive and emotionally gripping. The entire movie, with the brief exception of the opening and closing shots, takes place in the interior of a car and features only one actor on-screen, Tom Hardy. At the Sundance premiere of Locke, director Steven Knight told me that he and his talented team used Red digital cameras to shoot the film continuously from beginning to end each night, like a stage play.

Stripped down to the bare essentials as a result, Locke focuses on what matters most: character, emotion, and story. The film proves that even in the contemporary cinema, with its obsession with surface visual effects, movies can still delve below the surface and capture something essential about human nature in much the same way literature can.

In Locke this is largely done through the power of the close-up. In the best movies, the close-up serves to bring emotional transparency to a film, whereby the candor of an actor and the attentiveness of a director work together to draw out the inner life of a character onto the big screen. And it’s there on the big screen that the human face takes on mythic qualities, elevating specific human experiences into universal truths. On the big screen there’s no place to hide as an actor – but if one is as talented as Tom Hardy, one doesn’t need to. Hardy sensitively pulls off Ivan Locke’s volatile and heartbreaking mixture of machismo, passion, humor, anger, and doubt – depicting Locke like a bear trapped in a cage of his own making.

I spoke with Steven Knight (Academy Award nominated screenwriter for Dirty Pretty Things) at the Sundance premiere of Locke and asked him how he pulled off such a technically complicated and emotionally wrenching film. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: I’d like to ask you about the innovative way you made the film. Why did you choose to do such a tight character study and film it in these continuous takes? Tell me about your process.

SK: I just finished making a film with Jason Statham the conventional way [2013’s Redemption]. And two things occurred. One was: anything we shot from the car at night was beautiful, and I thought the thing to do would be to make an installation of that – make it as a piece of art with just the moving traffic patterns.

And then, I also asked the question of myself: the basic task here is to get a lot of people into a room, turn the lights off, and get them to look at a screen for 90 minutes. That’s the basic job you’re doing. [But] are there other ways of doing it? So I thought that maybe that beautiful frame of the moving road could be the theater. And … it would need to be one man, and if you’re going to get one man, it better be Tom Hardy. So I approached him and I said I want you to do a play, effectively. I want to shoot it as a play, but in the environment of a car. He was really keen, read the script and the next weekend we were shooting it. The whole point all the way through was to shoot it in sequence so that it’s an actor’s performance. Don’t split it up, don’t turn it into a conventional way of shooting it. And I think the rewards are immense, because the actors feel like they are in control of their own performances. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking With Director Steven Knight About His Innovative and Enthralling Film Locke

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Ultimate Southern California Movie: Criterion Restores It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to Its Full Glory

[Editor’s note: the post below appeared yesterday at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo. Sunny southern California rarely gets its due at the movies. Ever since the 1940s, when film noir classics like Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep depicted Los Angeles as a dark urban labyrinth, you might get the feeling that southern California has remained in a permanent Blade Runner nightfall of neon signs, wet streets and detectives pulling fedoras down over their eyes. A world of call girls and corrupt police, of murder and car crashes; a bleak landscape of paparazzi and Black Dahlias, of washed-up actresses and sleazy district attorneys who wear too much aftershave.

It’s a shadowy, sexy and malevolent vision — except that it’s not really the day-to-day SoCal that longtime residents know and (mostly) love. Actually, the place is a lot brighter and more cheerful than that. And a lot goofier.

For one thing, southern California is actually huge, wide-open and flat — with endless horizons, whether of the Palm Springs or Redondo Beach variety — instead of the cramped, angular spaces you typically find in crime thrillers. And it’s got color — lots of color, from the saturated blues of the ocean and sky, to the lurid red-and-gold Fatburger signs on Pacific Coast Highway. Whoever dreamt up southern California was clearly dreaming it in 65mm Ultra Panavision Technicolor.

And contrary to popular belief, most people in southern California don’t pack guns or talk like they just stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel, diverting as that would be. Most SoCal residents are sedate, middle-class people with just a hint of craziness to them — that quiet spark that drove them long ago to pack up and leave the East Coast/Midwest/Deep South to pursue their pot of gold right here in the Golden State.

And this brings us to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

The wonderful folks at Criterion, who are forever saving our cinematic heritage from the ravages of time and neglect, have recently outdone themselves in producing a five-disc set (two Blu-rays + three DVDs) of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, all built around a pristine 4K transfer of the film and a newly restored 197-minute ‘roadshow’ version of the movie not seen in 50 years. (See a video on the restoration at the bottom of this post.)

And this new, authoritative version of director Stanley Kramer’s beloved epic comedy makes one thing abundantly clear: that It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is the ultimate southern California movie.

For those unfamiliar with the film, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World depicts a pack of otherwise unremarkable southern Californians unleashed in a frenzy of greed when they learn that a stash of $350,000 in stolen money is waiting for them, ready to be dug-up in a park at Santa Rosita Beach (in real life, Portuguese Bend in Rancho Palos Verdes). Unable to come up with an equitable way of sharing the loot, the group breaks up into separate teams, frantically racing toward their hidden treasure by land and air — comedian Jonathan Winters even rides a girl’s bicycle for a while — all while the Santa Rosita Police, led by Spencer Tracy, tracks their progress.

So it’s off to the races, as airplanes smash through billboards (and even a restaurant at one point), cars roar off cliffs and bridges, an entire gas station is demolished, cast members are flung through the air by an out-of-control fire ladder, and every major speed law in southern California is broken. And although the wild conclusion of the film — a Hitchcockian visual effects extravaganza filmed in downtown Long Beach — leaves none of the avaricious group satisfied with their financial arrangement, it does leave everyone with smiles on their faces. (You’ll have to see the movie to find out what that means.)

And that’s really it. The premise of Mad, Mad World — greed — couldn’t be simpler, but it’s enough to power a non-stop, three-plus-hour chase from Yucca Valley to Santa Clarita to Malibu, all filled with dangerous stunts and comic gags performed by the greatest comedians of their time: Milton Berle, the recently passed Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Ethel Merman, Peter Falk and Jim Backus, just to name a few. Mad, Mad World also features spot cameos from the likes of Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Jerry Lewis, Carl Reiner, The Three Stooges and more comedy talent than you can shake a stick at. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: The Ultimate Southern California Movie: Criterion Restores It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to Its Full Glory

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