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INGMAR BERGMAN INTERVIEWS INGMAR BERGMAN once upon a time there was a Swedish publicity magazine called Filmnyheter, issued by production company Svensk Filmindustri to promote their pictures. when Ingmar Bergman’s Summer With Monika came out in 1953, the accompanying issue of Filmnyheter included an interview between Ingmar Bergman and… Ingmar Bergman. you can read the entire thing in the booklet that Criterion has included inside their Summer With Monika release, but i’ve included some of my favorite snippets below. Bergman’s droll sense of humor is evident throughout his work, but between all the doom and despair it can be easy to forget just how hilarious the dude really was. Bergman: What was it like making Summer With Monika? Bergman: I didn’t *make* Monika. [source novel author and co-screenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel! Bergman: From what I’ve heard, Summer With Monika includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming. Bergman: I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be. Bergman: So do you want to say anything with this film? Bergman: “Get out! But return!” Bergman: Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film? Bergman: As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We— Bergman: MAKE IT SHORT! Bergman: One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence — the summer of eternity. Bergman: And then what happened? Bergman: Nothing. That was it. 

INGMAR BERGMAN INTERVIEWS INGMAR BERGMAN

once upon a time there was a Swedish publicity magazine called Filmnyheter, issued by production company Svensk Filmindustri to promote their pictures. when Ingmar Bergman’s Summer With Monika came out in 1953, the accompanying issue of Filmnyheter included an interview between Ingmar Bergman and… Ingmar Bergman. you can read the entire thing in the booklet that Criterion has included inside their Summer With Monika release, but i’ve included some of my favorite snippets below. Bergman’s droll sense of humor is evident throughout his work, but between all the doom and despair it can be easy to forget just how hilarious the dude really was.

Bergman: What was it like making Summer With Monika?

Bergman: I didn’t *make* Monika. [source novel author and co-screenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!

Bergman: From what I’ve heard, Summer With Monika includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming.

Bergman: I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.

Bergman: So do you want to say anything with this film?

Bergman: “Get out! But return!”

Bergman: Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film?

Bergman: As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We—

Bergman: MAKE IT SHORT!

Bergman: One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence — the summer of eternity.

Bergman: And then what happened?

Bergman: Nothing. That was it. 

CRITERION REVIEW: #612 CERTIFIED COPY (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) 2010 “Everything is true, and everything is invented.” - Juliette Binoche THE FILM (97 / 100) : Okay, so let’s just get the orgasmic platitudes out of the way up top: In my occasionally humble and typically perverse opinion,  Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is perhaps the best film of the last twenty years. Indeed, the last movie to so gracefully explode the limits of narrative power was Kiarostami’s 1990 masterpiece Close-up, another reflexive gut-punch that uses a heartbreaking story as a trojan horse to force the viewer into confrontation with the world as they’ve arranged it. As a Kiarostami apologist, the last ten years or so have afforded me plenty of opportunities to step up to the plate and defend the guy.  Arguably (and deservedly) the most famous Iranian filmmaker in the history of their national cinema, Abbas Kiarostami’s recent work has been atypically inaccessible, abandoning the harmony that his most revered films struck between pathos and semiotics in favor of baldly academic gamesmanship. Formative fare like The Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us explored their creator’s obsession with the performative nature of identity by using rich character work like a hot salve to open pores,  but post-millennial offerings such as Shirin and the lovely Five Dedicated to Ozu have used people only as points of omission. I’m not complaining, both of those examples are compelling films deserving of further study, but it’s been somewhat frustrating to watch a filmmaker so capable of moving me devoted to making films that are so implacably still.  It seems as though Kiarostami agreed that it was time for a change, and perhaps for a new challenge. After a career spent working within / obliquely terrorizing the oppressive Iranian film industry, Kiarostami decided to get out while he still could. So he packed up his stuff and headed straight for the rolling hills of rural Italy (he’d been there before to shoot a segment of the 2005 portmanteau film Tickets, and it’s not like he was gonna leave Tehran just to go to Detroit), where he continued to switch things up in a big way, deviating from his frequent use of non-professional actors in favor of casting the greatest actress in the world, Juliette Binoche (to be fair, her co-star is opera singer William Schimmel, seen here in his first film role).  The result is a love story, yes, but one less interested in celebrating love’s existence than dissecting how it works and why it dies. Though trying to recreate my initial impressions of the film seems thematically appropriate,  here’s how I described it for Reverse Shot’s “Best Films of 2011” countdown:  “With Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami has devised the rare masterwork born from humility. Refracting the real-time romanticism of Before Sunset through a hall of winking mirrors, Kiarostami makes fakers of us all, himself included. In a small Tuscan village, a woman whose name we never learn (Juliette Binoche as “She”) meets a man whose name we can’t forget (opera star William Shimmel as “James”). She serves as his guide for the afternoon, and prompted by the “misunderstanding” of a local restaurant owner, the couple begins to act as though they’ve been married for fifteen years. It seems simple enough, but then there are chinks in the armor of their ruse, small moments of dislocation that compel viewers to distrust their own interpretations. Are they strangers or merely estranged? Are they a legitimate couple, or a convincing forgery of a well-worn human relationship? Kiarostami wouldn’t presume to know the answer, but he’s fascinated by the difference. Curiosity is his ultimate muse, and it’s one he has no interest in satisfying. He’d rather play cartographer than detective, following his two bickering leads as they map the divide between originals and their copies, all roads leading into intersections. We ferret for clues as we watch Binoche and Shimmel go through the motions, the latter’s relative acting inexperience underscoring the layers of performative behavior at work. Art and life are conflated into infinity, as people themselves are reinterpreted as copies (James refers to her child as a “Copie conforme”), and a parade of identical brides reveals our rituals as forgeries of a lost ideal, doing so without discounting their value. Eventually, the question of legitimacy is overwhelmed by the massive emotional wallop of whatever it is that we’re watching, endless layers of mediation pierced by the sort of longing that can’t ever be entirely fake if it feels this real.” I’m not sure if my take on the film has evolved since then so much as it has saddened — every subsequent trip through Kiarostami’s romantic funhouse seems a bit more tragic than the last, the mysteries of what’s left unresolved swallowed by the certainty of what’s exposed. In an interview included inside Criterion’s release, Kiarostami pontificates: “When we understand each other, love ends. So in a sense, yes, love is the result of a misunderstanding. When we don’t understand someone, we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion. Fortunately we have this capacity, otherwise there’d only be one original, and everyone would fall in love with him or her.” Whereas something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is predicated upon the idea that love withered is still love shared, Certified Copy suggests that love is not thinking, it is thought (my humble apologies to Jean-Luc Godard). Kiarostami’s trademark tracking shots, his use of car windshields, his affinity for ritual and having his actors stare directly into the camera as if it were a mirror… Kiarostami presents myriad ways of seeing, his visions blocked and broken by surfaces and symbols to the point where the gap between romance and ritual is all but erased.  All of Kiarostami’s usual tricks collapse into a monumentally moving portrait of two people agreeing to be vessels for each others’ ideals. To them, love is destructive and flattening and unknowable because it requires people to be who they’re required — the best way to remain strangers is to fall in love.  That might sound cynical, and perhaps the film might play that way in the hands of another auteur, but Kiarostami’s cinema is predicated upon the idea that life performed is life lived, and that for a love story to be told, all of us have to do a little of the telling.  THE TRANSFER (100 / 100): For a film so recent, and one shot on the Red One camera, there is no excuse for it to look anything shy of perfect. Fortunately (if unsurprisingly), Criterion’s Certified Copy Blu-Ray is as beautiful a thing to look at as it is to watch. The transfer is flawless and consistent, and the colors are crisp without ever glossing over (everything you need to know can be seen between the dark of Binoche’s basement and the red of her lipstick). Note: Huge kudos to Criterion for finally providing an English-language subtitle track for a multi-lingual release, thus resolving an oversight that prevented hearing-impaired viewers from enjoying certain films.  THE EXTRAS (80 / 100): After Criterion honcho Peter Becker stated his opinion that Certified Copy is “Minor Kiarostami,” the fact that this disc even exists feels like something of a concession. With that in mind, it’s not particularly surprising that this isn’t exactly Criterion’s most loaded release when it comes to extras, but if they didn’t afford Kiarostami’s latest with the deluxe treatment, they certainly collected a generous and well-curated assortment of supplements for a film so new. The first thing you’ll want to check out is the surprisingly hefty making-of doc, “Let’s See ‘Copia Conforme,’” which has a lot more to offer than the usual E.P.K. junk you’d find on a non-boutique release. For one thing, the 52-minute doc opens with Kiarostami singing. From there, it hovers around the production with unusual transparency, and everyone interviewed is excitingly candid, from crew who discuss the unique challenges of Kiarostami’s style, to Juliette Binoche who offers her keenly observed insights into her character and how She was created. There’s also a nice 15-minute interview with Kiaorstami, in which the auteur (and the sunglasses that are apparently glued to his face) offers oodles of fun soundbites about his most mysterious film. It’s not a lot, but all of the extras carry their weight. THE BEST BIT: Of course, any shortage of extras is offset by the doozy that Criterion snuck into this release: Another Kiarostami feature. The awesome bonus of including 1977‘sReport, hardly feels random, as Kiarostami’s first feature informs and anticipates his latest. Presented here in sub-VHS quality (not a complaint), Report has all the hallmarks of a debut effort. It’s stylistically simple, chatty to the extreme, and about as subtle as the revolution that destroyed the film’s original print, Report is nevertheless an invaluable (and autobiographical) means to understand Kiarostami’s fascinations, and a prism through which his career can be seen as an asymptote inching towards the mysteries he knows can never be solved. The story concerns a beleaguered tax collector who struggles to reconcile his work life with his disintegrating marriage (his wife played by a young Shohreh Aghdashloo), but the beats are such bald prototypes of those furthered in Certified Copy that Kiarostami scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum regarded the more recent film as a “Much-improved remake.” Definitely worth checking out for Kiarostami fans, or anyone interested in auteurism.  Check out Aaron Cutler’s essay on the subject for some more perspective. THE ARTWORK (64 / 100): Well what have we here? Criterion’s cover art caused a bit of a stir (these things are relative) because it deviated from Certified Copy’s elegant promotional art in favor of something dull and blocky, a design that prioritizes an expression of the film’s themes above an immediate aesthetic appeal. The cover is meant to emulate James’ book, from which the film borrows its title, which is a cute idea in theory but a lifeless look in execution. Still, I respect the attempt, and it’s worth noting that the reflexive motif is subtly extended through the included booklet, which reflects images of the characters as buffers in between an essay so as to visually express the dueling truths behind the film’s central relationship. THE VERDICT: Criterion gives a modern landmark the home video treatment it deserves. There may be more deluxe versions of this film in the future as its esteem continues to snowball, but cinephiles and romantics alike shouldn’t hesitate to get in on the ground floor.91 / 100 (not an average). CROSS-POSTED FROM MOVIES.COM

CRITERION REVIEW: #612 CERTIFIED COPY (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) 2010

“Everything is true, and everything is invented.” - Juliette Binoche

THE FILM (97 / 100) : Okay, so let’s just get the orgasmic platitudes out of the way up top: In my occasionally humble and typically perverse opinion,  Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is perhaps the best film of the last twenty years. Indeed, the last movie to so gracefully explode the limits of narrative power was Kiarostami’s 1990 masterpiece Close-up, another reflexive gut-punch that uses a heartbreaking story as a trojan horse to force the viewer into confrontation with the world as they’ve arranged it.

As a Kiarostami apologist, the last ten years or so have afforded me plenty of opportunities to step up to the plate and defend the guy.  Arguably (and deservedly) the most famous Iranian filmmaker in the history of their national cinema, Abbas Kiarostami’s recent work has been atypically inaccessible, abandoning the harmony that his most revered films struck between pathos and semiotics in favor of baldly academic gamesmanship. Formative fare like The Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us explored their creator’s obsession with the performative nature of identity by using rich character work like a hot salve to open pores,  but post-millennial offerings such as Shirin and the lovely Five Dedicated to Ozu have used people only as points of omission. I’m not complaining, both of those examples are compelling films deserving of further study, but it’s been somewhat frustrating to watch a filmmaker so capable of moving me devoted to making films that are so implacably still. 

It seems as though Kiarostami agreed that it was time for a change, and perhaps for a new challenge. After a career spent working within / obliquely terrorizing the oppressive Iranian film industry, Kiarostami decided to get out while he still could. So he packed up his stuff and headed straight for the rolling hills of rural Italy (he’d been there before to shoot a segment of the 2005 portmanteau film Tickets, and it’s not like he was gonna leave Tehran just to go to Detroit), where he continued to switch things up in a big way, deviating from his frequent use of non-professional actors in favor of casting the greatest actress in the world, Juliette Binoche (to be fair, her co-star is opera singer William Schimmel, seen here in his first film role).  The result is a love story, yes, but one less interested in celebrating love’s existence than dissecting how it works and why it dies. Though trying to recreate my initial impressions of the film seems thematically appropriate,  here’s how I described it for Reverse Shot’s “Best Films of 2011” countdown: 

“With Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami has devised the rare masterwork born from humility. Refracting the real-time romanticism of Before Sunset through a hall of winking mirrors, Kiarostami makes fakers of us all, himself included. In a small Tuscan village, a woman whose name we never learn (Juliette Binoche as “She”) meets a man whose name we can’t forget (opera star William Shimmel as “James”). She serves as his guide for the afternoon, and prompted by the “misunderstanding” of a local restaurant owner, the couple begins to act as though they’ve been married for fifteen years. It seems simple enough, but then there are chinks in the armor of their ruse, small moments of dislocation that compel viewers to distrust their own interpretations. Are they strangers or merely estranged? Are they a legitimate couple, or a convincing forgery of a well-worn human relationship? Kiarostami wouldn’t presume to know the answer, but he’s fascinated by the difference. Curiosity is his ultimate muse, and it’s one he has no interest in satisfying. He’d rather play cartographer than detective, following his two bickering leads as they map the divide between originals and their copies, all roads leading into intersections. We ferret for clues as we watch Binoche and Shimmel go through the motions, the latter’s relative acting inexperience underscoring the layers of performative behavior at work. Art and life are conflated into infinity, as people themselves are reinterpreted as copies (James refers to her child as a “Copie conforme”), and a parade of identical brides reveals our rituals as forgeries of a lost ideal, doing so without discounting their value. Eventually, the question of legitimacy is overwhelmed by the massive emotional wallop of whatever it is that we’re watching, endless layers of mediation pierced by the sort of longing that can’t ever be entirely fake if it feels this real.”

I’m not sure if my take on the film has evolved since then so much as it has saddened — every subsequent trip through Kiarostami’s romantic funhouse seems a bit more tragic than the last, the mysteries of what’s left unresolved swallowed by the certainty of what’s exposed. In an interview included inside Criterion’s release, Kiarostami pontificates: “When we understand each other, love ends. So in a sense, yes, love is the result of a misunderstanding. When we don’t understand someone, we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion. Fortunately we have this capacity, otherwise there’d only be one original, and everyone would fall in love with him or her.” Whereas something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is predicated upon the idea that love withered is still love shared, Certified Copy suggests that love is not thinking, it is thought (my humble apologies to Jean-Luc Godard). Kiarostami’s trademark tracking shots, his use of car windshields, his affinity for ritual and having his actors stare directly into the camera as if it were a mirror… Kiarostami presents myriad ways of seeing, his visions blocked and broken by surfaces and symbols to the point where the gap between romance and ritual is all but erased. 

All of Kiarostami’s usual tricks collapse into a monumentally moving portrait of two people agreeing to be vessels for each others’ ideals. To them, love is destructive and flattening and unknowable because it requires people to be who they’re required — the best way to remain strangers is to fall in love.  That might sound cynical, and perhaps the film might play that way in the hands of another auteur, but Kiarostami’s cinema is predicated upon the idea that life performed is life lived, and that for a love story to be told, all of us have to do a little of the telling. 

THE TRANSFER (100 / 100): For a film so recent, and one shot on the Red One camera, there is no excuse for it to look anything shy of perfect. Fortunately (if unsurprisingly), Criterion’s Certified Copy Blu-Ray is as beautiful a thing to look at as it is to watch. The transfer is flawless and consistent, and the colors are crisp without ever glossing over (everything you need to know can be seen between the dark of Binoche’s basement and the red of her lipstick).

Note: Huge kudos to Criterion for finally providing an English-language subtitle track for a multi-lingual release, thus resolving an oversight that prevented hearing-impaired viewers from enjoying certain films. 

THE EXTRAS (80 / 100): After Criterion honcho Peter Becker stated his opinion that Certified Copy is “Minor Kiarostami,” the fact that this disc even exists feels like something of a concession. With that in mind, it’s not particularly surprising that this isn’t exactly Criterion’s most loaded release when it comes to extras, but if they didn’t afford Kiarostami’s latest with the deluxe treatment, they certainly collected a generous and well-curated assortment of supplements for a film so new. The first thing you’ll want to check out is the surprisingly hefty making-of doc, “Let’s See ‘Copia Conforme,’” which has a lot more to offer than the usual E.P.K. junk you’d find on a non-boutique release. For one thing, the 52-minute doc opens with Kiarostami singing. From there, it hovers around the production with unusual transparency, and everyone interviewed is excitingly candid, from crew who discuss the unique challenges of Kiarostami’s style, to Juliette Binoche who offers her keenly observed insights into her character and how She was created. There’s also a nice 15-minute interview with Kiaorstami, in which the auteur (and the sunglasses that are apparently glued to his face) offers oodles of fun soundbites about his most mysterious film. It’s not a lot, but all of the extras carry their weight.

THE BEST BIT: Of course, any shortage of extras is offset by the doozy that Criterion snuck into this release: Another Kiarostami feature. The awesome bonus of including 1977‘sReport, hardly feels random, as Kiarostami’s first feature informs and anticipates his latest. Presented here in sub-VHS quality (not a complaint), Report has all the hallmarks of a debut effort. It’s stylistically simple, chatty to the extreme, and about as subtle as the revolution that destroyed the film’s original print, Report is nevertheless an invaluable (and autobiographical) means to understand Kiarostami’s fascinations, and a prism through which his career can be seen as an asymptote inching towards the mysteries he knows can never be solved. The story concerns a beleaguered tax collector who struggles to reconcile his work life with his disintegrating marriage (his wife played by a young Shohreh Aghdashloo), but the beats are such bald prototypes of those furthered in Certified Copy that Kiarostami scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum regarded the more recent film as a “Much-improved remake.” Definitely worth checking out for Kiarostami fans, or anyone interested in auteurism. 

Check out Aaron Cutler’s essay on the subject for some more perspective.

THE ARTWORK (64 / 100): Well what have we here? Criterion’s cover art caused a bit of a stir (these things are relative) because it deviated from Certified Copy’s elegant promotional art in favor of something dull and blocky, a design that prioritizes an expression of the film’s themes above an immediate aesthetic appeal. The cover is meant to emulate James’ book, from which the film borrows its title, which is a cute idea in theory but a lifeless look in execution. Still, I respect the attempt, and it’s worth noting that the reflexive motif is subtly extended through the included booklet, which reflects images of the characters as buffers in between an essay so as to visually express the dueling truths behind the film’s central relationship.

THE VERDICT: Criterion gives a modern landmark the home video treatment it deserves. There may be more deluxe versions of this film in the future as its esteem continues to snowball, but cinephiles and romantics alike shouldn’t hesitate to get in on the ground floor.91 / 100 (not an average).

CROSS-POSTED FROM MOVIES.COM

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Under the Covers: #613 SUMMER INTERLUDE / #614 SUMMER WITH MONIKA 

okay, so first things first: this particularly fetishistic segment of the blog will no longer be called “Up Close & Personal,” because that title was exceptionally stupid. it will now be called “Under the Covers” because that’s literally what this is, and also it makes you think of sex. which reminds me of a famous Ingmar Bergman quote: “always make them think of sex.” 

anyway, next week Criterion is set to release two of Ingmar Bergman’s most lustful and bucolic films, a nice change of pace for the cinema’s great “Heir of Despair” (note: no one actually calls him that). if both are considered to be minor Bergman, it’s only because of their comparative levity and breeziness, and each film is quite deserving of greater recognition. Criterion has packaged them as aesthetically twinned releases, with simple and handsome designs, and the Summer with Monika disc is absolutely loaded with goodies. check it out.

Criterion’s editions of Summer With Monika and Summer Interlude will hit stores on May 29, 2012.

“When we understand each other, love ends. So in a sense, yes, love is the result of a misunderstanding. When we don’t understand someone, we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion. Fortunately we have this capacity, otherwise there’d only be one original, and everyone would fall in love with him or her.”

Abbas Kiarostami, explaining his interpretation of CERTIFIED COPY.

You can find this quote along with a mess of other fun soundbites in the 15-minute Kiarostami interview that’s included as a supplement on Criterion’s Certified Copy dvd / blu-ray, which hits stores tomorrow. spoiler alert: the man rocks his dark sunglasses across the entire disc, even at night. 

Update: Criterion posted a video clip of Kiarostami saying this stuff.

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Michael Fassbender Talks Criterion in GQ

in his short career, Michael Fassbender already has two films in The Criterion Collection. Centurion isn’t one of them. unfortunately for Neil Marshall, Criterion is apparently (and appropriately) the benchmark by which Fassbender judges all of his work.

to be fair, no movie in which Olga Kurylenko plays a silent, bloodthirsty, and seriously eye-shadowed Brigante assassin deserves to be called “disastrous.” 

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Criterion Review #611: BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (dir. Spike Jonze) 1999    

THE FILM: For a film so possessed by matters of cyclicality — death, rebirth, and the transitive properties that bind them together — perhaps it’s fitting that Being John Malkovich feels like the end of one era of movies, and the beginning of another. I mean, I guess everymovie and / or thing that happened in the fall of 1999 felt like a millennial statement of some kind, but Spike Jonze’s first feature collapsed and confounded the world in a way that spoke to our fears of the future, understanding that personal identity can be the most isolating thing there is, especially as the very concept of what it means to be someone continues to evolve and fracture beyond our wildest dreams. 

The genius of Being John Malkovich begins with its title, which feels hyper-literal when the film begins, but sounds like a pure abstraction by the time you’re spit out the other side. When scraggly puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) first discovers a portal into the titular thespian’s mind, his fifteen minutes of brain could hardly be described as “Being” John Malkovich. Schwartz sees out of Malkovich’s eyes, but he can’t assert any control over the actor’s thoughts or functions. The experience is life-changing nevertheless, and Schwartz is hooked on the idea of being someone else — Malkovich adds a tonally ideal element to the film, but the particulars of his person are ultimately irrelevant (an idea underscored by the fact that no one can remember any of the movies in which he’s starred, referring instead to “That jewel thief movie” or “The one where you played that retard”). 

Schwartz certainly appreciates Malkovich’s higher station in the world, but the real draw is the idea of becoming someone else — anyone else — and how that trip just explodes Schwartz’s understanding of the world around him, not to mention his place in it. Being / borrowing / visiting John Malkovich is a human Oz, offering the host a walloping shot of their ultimate desire. If Schwartz lusts for control, his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) uses the portal as a means to feel loved, her visits quickly assuming an erotic element as Schwartz’s sex-obsessed co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) arranges to get kinky with the actor whenever Maxine is inhabiting him. And then there’s old Doctor Lester (Orson Bean) and his pals, for whom Malkovich represents a reprieve from their own mortality, his body providing a ripe vessel through which they can extend their lives at the expense of their individual identities. (Spoiler alert) When they succeed and permanently become Malkovich, Malkovich himself is completely erased (and to this day I’d argue that good ol’ Doc Lester suppresses his pals and takes full control). “Being” John Malkovich, it seems, means different things to different people, all of whom are united by the isolation that separates us as people. 

Charlie Kaufman’s dizzyingly inventive script, hilarious and then heart-breaking, illustrates those divisions in both modes. Consider Dr. Lester, who loves his secretary but can’t communicate with her because of his crippling speech impediment, which happens to be totally non-existent (in truth, it’s his secretary who can’t properly comprehend words). His self-diagnosis makes for brilliantly silly character moments, but it also speaks to a man who, despite being, an immortal body-hopping spirit, defines himself only in relation to those he loves. Whereas Schwartz is seduced by the idea of expanding his persona in order to satisfy his own ego and shake the world (a drive petrified in the third act by his Malkovich’s hysterically quick rise to global fame as puppeteer), Lester understands that identity is so fluid that it can only acquire significant meaning through others, and by who we are for each other. Lester is a potentially sinister character, but it’s no accident that the film reserves its ultimate sweetness to resolve his love story.  The Craig / Lotte / Maxine triangle ends with an unshakeable bitterness, as our sympathy for Craig has withered and the hero has become the villain, trapped in their radiant daughter as a prisoner of his own selfishness (his fate is a Dante-level nightmare). Lotte and Maxine are happy, but Lester and his wife are perfect.

Even 13 years later it’s still galvanizing to follow Charlie Kaufman’s script as it playfully tackles these things without ever being overwhelmed by its high concept or self-satisfied by its craziness, but it would be a shame to overlook the role of Spike Jonze’s direction in holding this bag of nuts together. Jonze’s music videos could be flashy, but their aesthetics were always motivated by their concepts, and never the other way around. When he set about making Being John Malkovich, he adamantly insisted that the film maintain a hyper-organic look, downplaying the glitzy excess associated with music video directors in favor of dank, claustrophobic interiors from which his characters would have to transcend because they couldn’t escape (props to all-star DP Lance Acord). Jonze’s compositions are simple and direct, and the performances he teased from his actors are eccentric but never campy.  The script required an intense bit of tonal juggling, but Jonze never slipped up — an awed state of loneliness serves as the story’s North Star, and Carter Burwell’s enchanting score always helps the film to find its way back. 

It all coheres into a film that doesn’t represent a schism between two worlds of filmmaking so much as it does a bridge between them. Being John Malkovich felt like the film that the 1990s had been searching for all along, capitalizing on our collective fear of loneliness and the big tomorrow to reframe the opportunity for us to redefine ourselves as a chance to better see each other.

THE TRANSFER: A glorious HD transfer from the film’s original 35mm master, watching Criterion’s Being John Malkovitch Blu-ray is like seeing a fresh print of the film on opening weekend. Inside the booklet that comes with the disc, there’s a little note from Spike Jonze in which he writes that he wants to tell you about how this transfer captures the true colors of the film in a way that all previous home video editions couldn’t. But trust me, you’ll be able to see it for yourself. Pristine, filmic, and immaculately consistent. 

THE EXTRAS: Being John Malkovich might be a relatively recent film, so far as Criterion’s line-up is concerned, but they’ve treated it with the respect deserving of a classic. The disc is positively loaded with great features. First up is Lance Bangs’ 33-minute production doc All Non-Combatants Please Clear the Set, a hilarious and refreshingly candid glimpse of the cast & crew as they try to shoot the scenes on the 7 1/2 floor without decapitating themselves. There’s a video interview between Malkovich himself and humorist John Hodgman (he’s a PC), which does a pretty good job of communicating how terrifying it must be to interview John Malkovich. You also get the full orientation films as they’re seen in the feature, and an 8-minute Lance Bangs doc on puppeteering that addresses how Jonze and Kaufman were determined to treat the art with the respect it’s usually denied.

THE BEST BIT:  Instead of soliciting Spike Jonze for a commentary track, someone at Criterion had the genius idea of inviting the director’s good friend / arch-nemesis Michel Gondry to narrate the film. Legal shenanigans have reduced the full track to a 57-minute “selected-scene” commentary, but it’s still the best thing that ever has or ever will happen to you. Gondry’s unsparingly honest reactions and completely untethered imagination make this the most hilarious and provocative commentary track in ages. And the places it goes… from stories about how Gondry and Fincher used to commandeer the video sections at Best Buy stores to insisting that Jonze was secretly in love with Catherine Keener, this thing is essential listening. From now on, no Criterion release should be without a Gondry commentary.

For a taste of what I’m talking about, check out the commentary’s 5 best quotes.

THE ARTWORK: Well… it’s definitely unexpected. I guess Criterion was unsatisfied with the motifs established by the film’s rather beloved promo art, because they went back to the drawing board with this trippy, minimalist approach. I’m still not entirely sold on it, but there’s something inclusive and tranquil about it that extends to the interior design of the package. 

THE ARBITRARY SCORE: 93 / 100. One of the year’s best releases, by anyone, for everyone. 

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CRITERION ANNOUNCES AUGUST 2012 RELEASES!!!

wooooows. for the past few years, it seems as if criterion has been on a mission to single-handedly save august from being the dog days of summer, and so it’s not too surprising that their line-up for this august is patently insane. but still… wooooows. 

#620 LA PROMESSE (dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) 1996

welcome to the Criterion Collection, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne! their breakthrough film is still among their best, the story of a boy coming of age while working for his father (the great Olivier Gourmet) as a human trafficker. a light release with just some interviews and new subs, but this is a film worth owning as best you can. spare, evocative cover art is pitch-perfect.

#621 ROSETTA (dir. Dardennes again!) 1998

and here we are 2 years later, as the Dardennes claimed their first Palme d’Or with this story of an impoverished young woman struggling to support herself and her alcoholic mother. if it sounds like dreary stuff, that’s because it totally is, but those Belgian brothers bring it to life with a rare immediacy and a poetic touch that confounds the limits of verité cinema. perfectly pitched cover art, just over the girl’s shoulder as it should be.

#622 WEEKEND (dir. Andrew Haigh) 2011

welllll, what have we here? i’m a bit surprised by this, it slipped under my radar as a potential Criterion release under the IFC partnership, but it is hugely deserving of a place in the Collection. this is the time to be horribly reductive, but come august Weekend can no longer be referred to as a gay Before Sunset, cause this beautifully observed film is so much more. Disc is pretty loaded with goodies (but no commentary. boo) and the cover is as pitch-perfect as it was inevitable.

#623 LONESOME (dir. Paul Fejos) 1928

in a month loaded with essentials, this might be the neatest release of all. a rarity / cinephile fetish object for years and years, this early-era talkie is a crazed, stylistically restless visit to Coney Island on the fourth of july, from an unsung filmmaker / anthropologist / doctor / legend. it’s like Scott Pilgrim for the pre-Depression set. and the disc is packed with two other Fejos films, visual essays, and a commentary track, all wrapped up in some of the most striking Criterion artwork of the year.

#624 QUADROPHENIA (dir. Franc Roddam) 1979

what better time to release the cinema’s most rocking rebel yell than right before the start of the new school year? the year was 1979, the band was The Who, and the songs were all anthems. this is an anti-authority classic, and a release that Criterion has been building towards for some time. and hey, is that… Sting? more Sting in the Collection is always a good thing. i mean, it’s definitely *a* thing, at the very least. you get some interviews and an audio commentary from director Franc Roddam, himself. and the art… i mean, it’s Quadrophenia!

#157 THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (dir. Wes Anderson) 2001

and so ends the dark age of The Royal Tenenbaums not being on blu-ray.

Eclipse Series 35: Maidstone and Other Films By Norman Mailer 

three films by everyone’s favorite dead curmudgeon: Maidstone (duh), Wild 90, and Beyond the Law. how Mailer’s episode of Gilmore Girls didn’t make the cut, we’ll never know.

“

Will you do me a favor? Can I come sleep over at your house tonight? I can tell you about how the color on this release matches what our original print looked like and how we were never able to get that when we put out the DVD before.


Good night.

”

Spike Jonze.

just a little note he included at the bottom of the “About the Transfer” section in the booklet that’s included with Criterion’s BEING JOHN MALKOVICH dvd / blu-ray.

i, out of the kindness of my heart, will now here offer my favor to him… spike, whenever you’re in the east village just give me a shout and we can put on your little picture show and have a nice chat about it. if it rains, we can make hot cocoa (with those little marshmallow cubes… those are the best)  

THE 5 BEST QUOTES FROM MICHEL GONDRY’S BEING JOHN MALKOVICH COMMENTARY someone at Criterion got the brilliant idea of getting Spike Jonze’s close friend / arch-nemesis Michel Gondry to record the commentary track on their Being John Malkovich release. some legal shenanigans have prevented Criterion from using the entire track, but the selected-scene commentary that’s included on the disc packs an absurd amount of genius into its 57 minutes. Gondry isn’t shy about his bitter rivalry with Jonze — most of the track is a hilarious meta-commentary on the perils of jealousy among artists, as Gondry, to put it generously, gets a *bit* distracted from the task at hand.  this is something that you should really experience for yourself, so all the quotes i’ve included below have been plucked exclusively from the first 15 minutes of the commentary. it only gets more amazing from here. trust.  (note: best read with a very thick French accent. all of Gondry’s imaginative sentence structure has been kept intact) Gondry on the opening credits: “What the fuck? I didn’t do this movie! I’ve been tricked.” Gondry discussing an encounter he and Spike Jonze had when they were struggling to get their first films into production: “We run into the guy who did Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo), and he said he’s gonna retire from movies and become a lawyer. And he’s such an asshole, talking to us who are struggling to have a movie made and he’s complaining cause he has too much work? I felt like he was, uh… just an arrogant bastard. So everyone hate him after this commentary.” Gondry on the introduction of Mr. Lester:  “I don’t know who this actor is, I bet he’s not alive anymore. It’s kinda gross to watch movies, everyone is dead… I remember watching the movie and thinking the shoes of the guy survived the guy, the guy was dead, but maybe his shoes were somewhere still functioning. Anyway, I’m supposed to be talking about this movie… who is this actor? [Gondry is told it’s Orson Bean] Is he still alive… [a few moments pass] Great news, Orson Bean is still alive.” Gondry on the Malkovich portal: “Charlie imagined more of a vagina, but Spike imagined more of an asshole, I guess it’s just a matter of taste.”  Gondry trying to get back on task: “Jealousy is a very ugly feeling, and i hate to have this feeling, so the best way to get rid of it is to say to everyone, and this is retarded because everyone thinks i’m a bitter person, which i don’t think i am. Oh, here he’s finding the portal.”

THE 5 BEST QUOTES FROM MICHEL GONDRY’S BEING JOHN MALKOVICH COMMENTARY

someone at Criterion got the brilliant idea of getting Spike Jonze’s close friend / arch-nemesis Michel Gondry to record the commentary track on their Being John Malkovich release. some legal shenanigans have prevented Criterion from using the entire track, but the selected-scene commentary that’s included on the disc packs an absurd amount of genius into its 57 minutes. Gondry isn’t shy about his bitter rivalry with Jonze — most of the track is a hilarious meta-commentary on the perils of jealousy among artists, as Gondry, to put it generously, gets a *bit* distracted from the task at hand. 

this is something that you should really experience for yourself, so all the quotes i’ve included below have been plucked exclusively from the first 15 minutes of the commentary. it only gets more amazing from here. trust. 

(note: best read with a very thick French accent. all of Gondry’s imaginative sentence structure has been kept intact)

Gondry on the opening credits:

“What the fuck? I didn’t do this movie! I’ve been tricked.”

Gondry discussing an encounter he and Spike Jonze had when they were struggling to get their first films into production:

“We run into the guy who did Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo), and he said he’s gonna retire from movies and become a lawyer. And he’s such an asshole, talking to us who are struggling to have a movie made and he’s complaining cause he has too much work? I felt like he was, uh… just an arrogant bastard. So everyone hate him after this commentary.”

Gondry on the introduction of Mr. Lester: 

“I don’t know who this actor is, I bet he’s not alive anymore. It’s kinda gross to watch movies, everyone is dead… I remember watching the movie and thinking the shoes of the guy survived the guy, the guy was dead, but maybe his shoes were somewhere still functioning. Anyway, I’m supposed to be talking about this movie… who is this actor? [Gondry is told it’s Orson Bean] Is he still alive… [a few moments pass] Great news, Orson Bean is still alive.”

Gondry on the Malkovich portal:

“Charlie imagined more of a vagina, but Spike imagined more of an asshole, I guess it’s just a matter of taste.” 

Gondry trying to get back on task:

“Jealousy is a very ugly feeling, and i hate to have this feeling, so the best way to get rid of it is to say to everyone, and this is retarded because everyone thinks i’m a bitter person, which i don’t think i am. Oh, here he’s finding the portal.”

JULES AND JIM Poster Painting over at Mubi, noted hero Adrian Curry has a wonderful profile on / interview with a man named Christian Broutin. you may not recognize the name, but his work… that’s another story. his poster for Truffaut Jules et Jim is certainly among the most iconic pieces of promotional art ever made for a film, not to mention one of my favorites. posted here is a hand-painted draft Broutin made as he developed the one-sheet’s design, and, um, just give it to me now and no one gets hurt, mmmkay?

JULES AND JIM Poster Painting

over at Mubi, noted hero Adrian Curry has a wonderful profile on / interview with a man named Christian Broutin. you may not recognize the name, but his work… that’s another story.

his poster for Truffaut Jules et Jim is certainly among the most iconic pieces of promotional art ever made for a film, not to mention one of my favorites. posted here is a hand-painted draft Broutin made as he developed the one-sheet’s design, and, um, just give it to me now and no one gets hurt, mmmkay?