Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Clare Peploe, Film Director Who Jumbled Genres, Dies at 79

      by

      She contributed to the movies of her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, but occasionally made her own, including “Triumph of Love.”Clare Peploe, a director and screenwriter who liked to merge genres in her own films, and who also made significant contributions to some of the movies of her husband, the celebrated filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, died on June 24 in Rome. She was 79.The cause was cancer, said Alessandra Bracaglia, her assistant.As a director, Ms. Peploe made a quick impact with her first effort, a comic short called “Couples and Robbers,” about newlyweds who commit a robbery, which she wrote with Ernie Eban; it was nominated for the short-subject Oscar in 1981.“In this comedy-thriller she has demonstrated that in her very first film she is a talent to be reckoned with,” Richard Roud wrote in The Guardian Weekly when the film played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. “The casting and direction of actors is superb. If someone doesn’t finance a feature film by her, it will be a great shame.”Ms. Peploe, though, found financing to be a struggle, especially since her films defied easy categorization, and when she did set a project in motion, she worked at a deliberate pace. As a result, her oeuvre was limited. Her first feature, “High Season,” wasn’t released until 1987, and there would be only two others, “Rough Magic” in 1995 and “Triumph of Love” in 2001.She had a knack for attracting well-known actors to her projects. “High Season,” a comic indictment of gauche tourists, starred Jacqueline Bisset, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, among others. “Rough Magic” featured Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant on the run in Mexico and Russell Crowe as a man hired to track her down.“Triumph of Love,” her most well-received feature, was her take on an 18th-century stage comedy by Pierre de Marivaux and had a cast that included Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Rachael Stirling.Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in a scene from “Triumph of Love,” Ms. Peploe’s most well-received feature.Sundance ChannelAll these films were hard to pigeonhole. “High Season” was both a commentary on what tourism does to an ancient Greek village and a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-style romantic fantasy. “Rough Magic,” The Independent of Britain said, “veers from Saturday morning serial-style thrills to Buñuelian surrealism to light noir, with dashes of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks here and there.”“Clare Peploe’s films as director are distinguished by an uncommon combination of madcap narrative intricacy, sophisticated battles of the sexes, picturesque locations and artistic self-consciousness,” Susan Felleman, a professor of art history and film and media studies at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design, said by email. “They’re screwball comedies for the art-house set.”When she wasn’t directing films, Ms. Peploe was sometimes writing them. Her first film credit was as one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about rebellious American youths, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), although she played down her contribution, describing her role as “the umpteenth assistant” on the film.“I wasn’t really a writer on it, I was a researcher on it,” she said. (She was useful because she was fluent in English.) She shared screenwriting credit on Mr. Bertolucci’s films “Luna” in 1979 and “Besieged” in 1998.When she was directing, though, she generally banned her famous husband from the set.“He makes people nervous,” she told The Independent in 1996.Clare Frances Katherine Peploe was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in Tanga, in northeastern Tanzania. Her father, William, was a British civil servant who became an art dealer and director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, and her mother, Clotilde (Brewster) Peploe, was an artist.She had an exotic early life: growing up and attending schools in Kenya, London, Italy and Paris, picking up several languages and acquiring a worldly outlook. Living in a variety of cultures, she told The Record of New Jersey in 1997, “you learn to see everything — an historical event, a war, a wedding ceremony, whatever — in so many different ways.”Ms. Peploe in 2001 with her husband, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. She made significant contributions to a number of his movies.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe met Mr. Antonioni in the late 1960s and worked with him on “Zabriskie Point.” She first met Mr. Bertolucci in 1970 at a screening of his film “The Spider’s Stratagem,” and they met several times afterward, bonding over their shared love of Jean-Luc Godard. She served as a second assistant director on “1900,” Mr. Bertolucci’s 1976 drama of class struggle, and before the end of the decade they had married.Ms. Peploe said that, counterintuitively, being associated with her husband didn’t help her with the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her own filmmaking like obtaining financing.“In fact,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naïvely assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help — look who she’s married to.’”Creatively, however, they complemented each other, she said.“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with,” she said. “He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a filmmaker.”Mr. Bertolucci died in 2018. Ms. Peploe, who lived in Rome, is survived by a brother, Mark Peploe, who shared a screenwriting Oscar with Mr. Bertolucci for the 1987 film “The Last Emperor.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘First Date’ Review: Modern Action Romance Propelled by a ’65 Chrysler

      by

      The filmmakers Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp pack their debut, starring Tyson Brown and Shelby Duclos, with oddballs and left turns, but their script has heart.“First Date” is a boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-evade-goon-squad action romance from Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp, a debut filmmaking team putting their faith in Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim that “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” Hey, that cliché sold Quentin Tarantino’s first scripts, and this likable homage moves at a clip, as though the young writer-directors are impatient to introduce themselves to producers beyond their immediate families. Calculated? Absolutely. Yet, “First Date” endears itself to the genre by knowing when to lean into nostalgia (the heroine Kelsey, played by Shelby Duclos, adores surf rock eight-tracks) and when to veer off-course (she’s also a boxer).Kelsey’s fisticuffs come in handy when she makes a date with Mike (Tyson Brown), a wallflower who impulsively buys a busted-up 1965 Chrysler to impress his kitsch-obsessed crush. Mike’s new car is bad luck twice over. Not only was the Chrysler’s previous owner, a drug smuggler (Todd Goble), fatally shot by a gang of violent dimwits determined to get their hands on the keys, but the car itself is bait for two nosy cops (Nicole Berry and Samuel Ademola) certain there’s something suspicious about a Black teenager purchasing a rust bucket. As the deputy says, “That just don’t sound like sober decision making to me.”What follows is a barrage of gunfire, wah-wah guitars and a surprising amount of novelty and heart for a film that can feel as if it’s a road trip through the directors’ inspirations. Crosby, who also shot and helped edit the movie, manages to capture the vibe of David Lynch’s suburban surrealism, albeit hampered by a visibly lower budget. Crosby’s sly camera movements and pacing choices are funnier, however, than the dialogue — which isn’t hard when Mike is so passive, he barely speaks. When will filmmakers realize that there’s little thrill in a bland underdog eventually rising to the occasion if the character wastes much of the running time being flatter than a Kansas freeway? Kelsey, at least, lands a dozen zingers, telling one suitor she’ll see him “the second Tuesday of next week.”The script is so crammed with oddball characters that it threatens to become a clown car. There’s a fast-talking salesman, his strung-out wife and their deranged robot vacuum, which has a mind of its own. Plus the drug smuggler Tony’s bossy best friend, Brett (Josh Fesler); a Porsche-driving jock named, of course, Chet (Brandon Kraus); and a pair of sentimental retirees with their own claim to the Chrysler. It’s too cute by half that the pistol-waving heavies are also in a book club where they bicker over “Of Mice and Men.”Still, even in a film populated with cartoons, the carnage is never played for laughs. “First Date” pauses to give each death emotional weight, and that empathy — more than gags about “Titanic” VHS tapes and winking insertions of the Wilhelm scream — is reason to give Crosby and Knapp the green light to squire us on a second adventure.First DateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      In Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar,’ the Factory Floor Is Brutal

      by

      His 1978 debut, which features quick-witted performances by Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, now has a short run at Film Forum.The robber baron Jay Gould supposedly bragged that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. That quote, likely apocryphal, is the essence of Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” a harshly garish morality play in which — squeezed between the Scylla of a factory’s exploitative management and the Charybdis of their corrupt union — three autoworkers go rogue.“Blue Collar” has been revived for a week at Film Forum in a 35-millimeter print. It was timely in 1978 and, in its expression of rust-belt alienation, prescient as well.Perhaps because it was Schrader’s first movie as a director, “Blue Collar” communicates the thrill of breaking new ground, albeit showing the influence of Martin Scorsese (for whom, a few years earlier, Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver”). It echoes both the prole-drama “Car Wash” (1976) and the mode’s classic example, “On the Waterfront” (1954).The most daringly uncommercial move in Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader, was constituting his larcenous trio as the so-called “Oreo Gang” — two Black workers, played by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto, and one white, Harvey Keitel. (The reverse would have been conventional Hollywood wisdom.) Schrader’s boldest strategy was to allow each then-hungry actor to believe himself the star. Call it a form of “method” direction. In his history of ’70s film, Peter Biskind describes the set as a “powder keg.”Thus, while Keitel and Kotto smolder with suppressed rage, Pryor (who, like Marlon Brando, rarely gave the same line-reading twice) is incandescent as a quick-minded trickster with a jittery strut and an answer for everything. In his mixed review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that, for the first time, Pryor had a role utilizing “the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”Pryor’s improvisations heighten the movie’s dialectic of oppressive reality and imaginary escape. While the factory scenes, shot at a Checker cab plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., have a documentary quality, fantasy is furnished by the Norman Lear TV sitcoms that punctuate the domestic scenes. The movie’s resident realist is the wily president of the union local. Nicknamed Eddie Knuckles, he’s embodied by Harry Bellaver, a veteran (and genuine) working-class actor who, no less than Pryor, gives the impression of conjuring his dialogue on the spot.“Blue Collar” has a few weak bits, notably one where, interrupting Pryor’s critique of “The Jeffersons,” an I.R.S. examiner pays an unexpected house call. And just as the Oreo Gang fail to think through their robbery, the movie glosses over a worse crime that could not have been committed without management collusion. Still, this portrait of frustration is powerfully framed. The opening credits — an assembly-line montage scored to the pounding first chords of the blues song “I’m a Man,” sung with new lyrics by Captain Beefheart — provide a brutal annunciation. And, following a gripping finale, Schrader redeems the cliché of ending on a freeze frame by returning the struggle to the factory floor.Interviewed by the leftist film journal Cineaste, Schrader asserted his apolitical intentions while congratulating himself as having come to “a very specific Marxist conclusion.” Be that as it may, “Blue Collar” is less Marxist than it is Hobbesian, as expressed by Kotto’s indictment of the powers that be: “They’ll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the Black against the white — everybody — to keep us in our place.”Collective action is futile.Blue CollarJuly 9-15 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Woman Who Ran’ Review: Conversations With Friends

      by

      Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a concise trilogy of awkward visits.“The Woman Who Ran,” Hong Sangsoo’s compact 24th feature — about an hour and a quarter from start to finish — consists of three visits. Gamhee (Kim Minhee, a fixture of the Hong cinematic universe) drops in on an old friend who is divorced, another who is single and a third whose marriage is a source of some awkwardness between them. Gamhee, who has been married for five years, tells each of her hosts that this is the first time she and her husband, who is away on a business trip, have been apart.The fact that she repeats this assertion introduces a sliver of uncertainty into what appears to be a tidy, quiet, symmetrical film. That uneasiness — the sense that everything is perfectly clear and utterly mysterious — is as much a directorial signature of Hong’s as smoking, drinking and sudden zooms in.You might wonder if the vignettes represent chronologically adjacent episodes on a single trip, or if each is an entirely different adventure. The title suggests flight, and it seems possible that Gamhee is running away from home, seeking refuge among women who might understand what she is going through without having to talk about it.The characters speak plainly and obliquely, chatting about food, weather, architecture and other safely banal topics, as well as about love and work. Gamhee eats a delicious home-cooked meal with Youngsoon (Seo Younghwa) and a not-so-good one with Suyoung (Song Seonmi), which she compliments anyway. With Woojin (Kim Saebyuk), who Gamhee meets in a cafe next to a movie theater, she drinks coffee and shares an apple.The apple is one of several motifs — another hallmark of Hong’s style — that loop through the movie, producing a sense of structure in the relative absence of a plot. More than once, an apple is peeled and sliced. More than once, Gamhee watches the interactions of other characters through an entranceway security video.Youngsoon, who lives with a roommate in a rural area, tells Gamhee about a neighbor’s rooster, who harasses the hens, jumping on their backs and pecking at their necks. He’s not trying to mate with them, she explains, “he’s just mean.” The men in “The Woman Who Ran” are like human avatars of that nasty bird, intruding on the leisure and intimacy of women to crow and scratch and ruffle feathers.One guy shows up to complain about the feral cats that Youngsoon and her roommate are in the habit of feeding. Another rings Suyoung’s doorbell to whine about how she humiliated and insulted him after they slept together. To say much about the third gentleman might count as something of a spoiler, though maybe that’s giving him — a former love of Gamhee’s and a writer besotted by his own celebrity — too much credit.Hong, a prolific miniaturist with an unmatched eye and ear for heterosexual romantic disappointment, is often compared to Eric Rohmer, the French writer-director who specialized in fables of wayward desire among the bourgeois-bohemian class. To me, he more closely resembles a short-story writer like Ann Beattie or Alice Munro, assembling an anthology of recognizably similar but always distinct approaches to a carefully selected set of characters and themes.Some of the individual tales may hit the emotions harder or stay in the mind longer, and some viewers may never acquire a taste for his talky, elliptical, melancholy style. For those of us who delight in his elegant explorations of drunkenness, regret, lust and ennui, he isan indispensable comedian of modern manners, good and bad, and his steady (or perhaps compulsive) productivity is a gift. “The Woman Who Ran” is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.The Woman Who RanNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Her Socialist Smile’ Review: Helen Keller, Radical

      by

      This new documentary is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.Helen Keller is one of the closest things the United States has to a secular saint. Born in 1880, she lost her hearing and her sight before she was 2 years old. With the help of her equally legendary teacher, Anne Sullivan, she learned to read, to write, to sign and to speak. Her writing was beautiful, opening to readers a window into her world.She lived a long life, dying in 1968 at the age of 87. And she spent much of that life espousing socialism. The new documentary “Her Socialist Smile,” written, directed and shot by John Gianvito, is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.Gianvito’s formal approach is a species of leftist avant-gardism. He begins the movie with a beautiful color view of a tree, its branches covered in snow. The image switches to black and white; the narrator, Carolyn Forché, fiddles with a music stand upon which she places the texts she’s going to read. Long passages of Keller’s writings appear onscreen, which the viewer reads in silence. When Forché narrates, the onscreen image is related to the natural world that so enchanted Keller. We learn of Keller’s high regard for “The Communist Manifesto” while watching a slug crawl on a mossy rock.The approach, which one supposes can be called “dialectical,” is not without wit; one piece of archival footage, detailing the American Legion’s destruction of leftist literature, is from an early iteration of “Fox News.” (The newsreel one.)Despite the movie’s sometimes haughty, preaching-to-the-choir approach, lay viewers should not be too deterred. Much of Keller’s thought is today echoed in progressive circles that are now more than peripheral to the mainstream, and it’s fascinating to consider.Her Socialist SmileNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Witches of the Orient’ Review: Symphony of a Sports Team

      by

      This experimental documentary shows the anime-worthy triumphs of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team.In the experimental documentary “The Witches of the Orient,” the women of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team recall their whirlwind rise to gold-medal glory. The former champions wryly and modestly narrate their own story in new interviews, while the movie uses chic archival footage to set up a mythic reconsideration of their triumphs.The team members met when they were workers at a textile factory in Kaizuka, Japan, where they were known as Nichibo Kaizuka, after the name of the company and the name of the town. To their European competitors, they were known by the racist moniker Oriental Witches. Some onlookers joked that their skills resulted from magic, but the film shows that their ability of course came from meticulous practices. Players somersaulted, dove and leapt for the ball, and their efforts were filmed by the Japanese Olympic Committee in 1964. That footage has now been recycled into this documentary.In these remarkable archival recordings, the team’s youthful faces glow against bright green, red or white uniforms, and they are shown to be as precise on the court as they are in the factory. When the director Julien Faraut begins to splice the sequences of the team’s practices with shots from a 1984 animated series that they inspired, the cuts from real events to illustrations appear seamless.Faraut filmed the members of the Nichibo Kaizuka in the present day, but he wisely centers the archival footage and the animation in his movie, building a collage from fragments of the past and present. Montages are set to a hip electronic score, complete with Portishead needle drops. If the team was derided by their prejudiced (and defeated) foes in the moment of their success, this documentary elegantly restores the glow of legend, saving the champions the trouble of having to explain their heroism in words.The Witches of the OrientNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Scales’ Review: A Sensual Fable With a Feminist Bent

      by

      From Saudi Arabia, this dystopian tale is heavy on evocative visuals at the expense of a more satisfying story.In a craggy coastal village seemingly isolated from the rest of the world, a group of torch-wielding men prepare for a gruesome ritual: They must sacrifice their daughters to appease the mermaid-like creatures that roam the sea. Despite the pressure to follow community guidelines, so to speak, Muthana (Yagoub Alfarhan) saves his firstborn before she sinks too deep into the black waters.And thus begins the fable-esque story of Hayat (Basima Hajjar), a 12-year-old girl who comes to subvert the fearful, patriarchal customs that dictate the dystopian world of “Scales.” Written and directed by the Saudi Arabian filmmaker Shahad Ameen, this feature debut is aesthetically tantalizing, presented in eerily glistening monochrome. Just as Hayat fends off another round of sacrifice and proves herself by hunting down a sea creature, a scab on her foot grows larger and begins look an awful lot like fish scales. The movie hints at the possibility that the village’s lost girls are transformed into these mystical beings.Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact. She gestures at the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, also bound by archaic traditions, but her critique fails to penetrate the surface of this issue.Still, the film’s visual elements — Hayat’s cloud of unruly black hair, the bone-dry rocky cliffs hovering over the village — are palpable, bewilderingly engrossing and complemented by a spine-tingling sound design full of creaks, drips and scratches. By the end, the film feels more mysterious than ever, a frustrating conclusion that may very well be the point.ScalesNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Running Against the Wind’ Review: Love and Friendship in Addis Ababa

      by

      Two childhood best friends reunite in this unfocused yet uplifting sports drama by the filmmaker Jan Philipp Weyl.Following two childhood besties from a rural area in Ethiopia who reunite after a decade apart, “Running Against the Wind” is a lot of things: a sports drama, a coming-of-age story, a gangster flick. Cramming a flurry of events into its one hour-and-56-minute run time — to constant, ever-shifting pop tunes — the film is, at the very least, never boring.It’s also, despite a potentially compelling conceit, pretty ridiculous.In the opening scenes, the friends are still young: Abdi is a gifted runner while Solomon takes a liking to photography after a humanitarian worker takes the boys on an eye-opening trip to the bustling capital of Addis Ababa. But before too long, little Solomon nabs the worker’s fancy camera and runs away to the city, never to be seen again.Fast-forward to the present-day and Abdi (Ashenafi Nigusu) is a national running champion still searching for his lost pal. Turns out Solomon (Mikias Wolde) is alive, but he has gotten mixed up with a group of thugs who are vexed when the strait-laced Abdi comes on the scene and sets his friend up with an honest job working for his running coach — who eventually promotes Solomon to team photographer.The director, Jan Philipp Weyl (who also stars as Soloman’s photography mentor), injects his sprawling buddy story with a glossy, music video sensibility full of roller-coaster-like intrigue involving Abdi’s athletic rival, Solomon’s wife and baby, as well as his pugilistic friend.Instead of deepening our connection to the characters, these weak subplots distract from the bond at the film’s center, giving it a fragmented, episodic feel that makes even the most harrowing incidents seem inconsequential.At the very least, its light and uplifting mode is a welcome departure from the violent, overwhelmingly tragic course of most films set in Africa that are released in the United States. Sometimes happy endings do the trick.Running Against the WindNot rated. In Amharic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More