Edited and Updated 2016
Robert Altman, among his many talents, was first and foremost the American master of nervous, human comedy. His films all have that special wink-and-a-nod approach to drama, that bittersweet, knowing approach to humor. MASH is usually considered his foremost and best comedy, but he expanded his horizons and explored the limits of gallows humor in his other more somber films as well. Even his quietest, most somber affair, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, reveals dry humor as early as its opening scene. Presenting a vision of a decrepit Pacific Northwest town all but destroyed by big business, the film’s hero, who we expect to save the day, rides in to town slowly, hunched over, and equally weathered with age. It’s an image shot through with bitter irony and acidic wit, one which gives us a Western town with no desert and a Western hero riding in but here looking mundane and even sickly.
Nashville, however, is perhaps his grand comic opus, and it too wastes no time revealing its caustic humor. Early on, we’re introduced to Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a longtime hero of America’s country-western music scene, performing a song written for the bicentennial with lyrics so hokey it’s impossible to take seriously. But he, and America, does. The lyrics belie a crushing self-seriousness to the grandiose performance that explicitly remind of the performative nature of this jingoistic conception of the American spirit. Continue reading
Edited June 2016
Edited
Arguably the finest example of the Italian neo-realist cinema movement during the mid-1940s, Bicycle Thieves is a fascinating and moving examination of faith, desperation, love, and society, all under the guise of a film about a man searching for his bicycle. It also re-wrote the textbook on the notion of story, emphasizing narrative feeling over plot event and exploring character and emotion in the mundane rendered dramatic through filmmaking prowess. It’s a remarkably simplistic, primal, elemental basic premise; essentially, the movie unfolds as a man and his son look for a bike that was stolen from them. It sounds like relatively light viewing initially, but Bicycle Thieves is among the most powerful explorations of the human experience essayed on film. Its seemingly simplistic nature exposes a powerful statement about post-war Italy and the heartbreaking portrayal of what desperation and fear can do to a person; it is both uniquely and earthily of its own time and location and a broadly human experience applicable to any situation. It emerges as a film of great desperation and fear, but also one of the cinema’s most profoundly humanist and even uplifting statements, all captured under Vittorio De Sica’s plaintive, mournfully poetic camera. 
Edited May 2016
Preface: Now that I’ve finally decided to go “old” with the blog, I’m doing it in style with not just a regular “old” film, but two, and two that have ripened with age. For this week’s Midnight Screenings, the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, and ’40s wouldn’t do. I’m taking it back to two of the granddaddy’s of filmmaking from the early ’30s, two of the earliest “talkies” and two supreme influences on Midnight Cinema from a time where films could be more openly playful and subversive as filmmakers were still trying to prod and poke at the medium to expose its limits and possibilities.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2011 Turkish drama Once Upon a Time in Anatolia seems like it was made for me. A glacially slow, wistfully poetic film about finding visual beauty in mundanity (or is it the other way around?) that primarily focuses on the formal elements of film, such as camerawork and editing, at the expense of a conventional narrative, it aims to fill big shoes set out by directors long-gone, but whose mark on the film world is undeniable: Tarkovsky and Antonioni to name the two most obvious. High praise, but if you’re expecting a “but” … you’d be wrong. Amazingly, Ceylan overcomes any burden placed on him through comparison to past master-directors here, not by creating something truly unique but by learning from the best (his Sight and Sound Magazine Top 10 films list plays like a who’s who of languid art-house auteurs) and essaying their strengths for a time period sorely lacking in such provocative, deeply felt filmmaking. 
Watching Prometheus provokes more of a shrug than anything, but it’s not an entirely hopeless shrug. It misses the mark, but it’s reasonably entertaining in doing so, has at least one terrifying scene, and ponders big questions about the nature of the world and the relationship between science and religion. Thankfully, it doesn’t give easy answers either, but that comes off more as a result of not addressing the questions as much as it could have.
Edited
The Long Take 