At Eternity’s Gate (Julian Schnabel)

November 18, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Julian Schnabel, At Eternity's Gate

Dry vine, old trees, night crows
Small bridge, running creek, cottage huts
Old path, west wind, lean horse
Evening sun setting west
A hearts torn man wanders at the edge of the world

Of the two previous films I’ve seen by Julian Schnabel, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the prevailing quality to his brand of cinema is in how he captures movement. His camera recklessly careens through the visual space, often capturing fragments at such a rapid clip that it constitutes something close to an assault. There’s a claustrophobia that comes with his formalism, where Schnabel will frequently tighten his focus on an actor’s face, only for the camera to discombobulate out of orbit and drift a moment or two longer than you’d expect before he cuts to the next scene. The result produces a feeling of anxious vitality. Uneasiness quickly mounts and, for this viewer, it caused me to grip the cushion of my armrest. At least that was the case for his new film, At Eternity’s Gate, with its fragmented passages reminding me a bit of the Ma Zhiyuan poem “Autumn Thoughts” cited above. This is a film built on shifting particles and wispy gestures intended to arouse a purely sensory, ephemeral experience. To state the obvious, At Eternity’s Gate is transporting and utterly sublime when Schnabel is successful, though one’s endurance to survive this exceedingly uncompromising exercise makes the journey less than pleasant.

The Front Runner (Jason Reitman)

November 16, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, The Front Runner, Jason Reitman, Review

The Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) of Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner hands a Washington Post reporter a copy of an undisclosed Tolstoy novel on board a flight. The reporter, recovering from a panic attack after a patch of turbulence, has been conflicted about bringing up Hart’s past infidelities and unconventional marriage, aware that any mention of gossip gravely annoys the 1988 presidential candidate. To bring up the issue would be uncouth, particularly given that Hart’s protocol regarding interviews saw him maintain a rigid divide between his private and personal life. He holds off on a line of questioning that would make the two of them uncomfortable, partly because Hart is so damn likeable. But back to that Tolstoy: Hart hands the reporter the novel as a means of understanding their Russian enemy, in the belief that hostilities between the two countries could be mitigated by knowledge of one another’s culture. It’s a rare moment of insight from a political figure that would suggest a measure of enlightenment, with Reitman frequently aligning our perspective with Hart; it’s the media and our insatiable American culture’s thirst for smut that turned a potentially life-altering figure away from the politics.

Wildlife (Paul Dano)

November 05, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Paul Dano, Wildlife, Recommended

I never felt an agony so hostile to life than when I found out my mom was cheating on my dad. Gosh, what an absolutely silly sentence to type out. What I’m doing now is retrospectively reliving conversations and events that only now seem vital. It was during the summer between high school and college, where I had moved to a new apartment in Edgewater, while my parents along with my younger brother relocated to a suburban respite. Imagine the incalculable endurance required to move from the center of Chicago to its most northern neighborhood and, on that same afternoon, to a western enclave on the city’s outskirts. But with the literal distance that came with my parents no longer being within arms reach came an incomprehensible, emotionally crippling despair. Coping with loneliness requires a tremendous amount of work and the increasing distance that both my mother and father placed between us made it all the more difficult. Sometimes I think I barely survived, other times I think it made me stronger. Or I need to tell myself that, because in reality only one of those statements is true.

Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman)

October 30, 2018 by Daniel Nava in Frederick Wiseman, 2018, Review, Monrovia Indiana, Recommended

Monrovia, Indiana, the location of Frederick Wiseman’s latest institutional case study, is the sort of township that’s hard to remember by name unless you’ve heard it a couple of times. Those who pass through this Midwestern enclave are likely to forge through without much thought, its flatland, sights, and sounds uniformly demonstrating an active disinterest in capturing a tourist’s attention. But as Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest utters “but hey, I’m living here every day.” And so, Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana examines this township of a little over a thousand, a community that, like so many like it, serves as a sort of cautionary reminder of what it means to live, actually live and subsequently die, in America.

Mid90s (Jonah Hill)

October 22, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Mid90s, Jonah Hill, Highly Recommended

I recognize the kids of Mid90s. I wasn’t one of them, but we orbited the same space frequently. With a harsh Eastern European upbringing, afternoons, let alone nights, out with friends were a rare occurrence that demanded an endless series of planning, coordination, and lies. On those rare instances we were able to get together, it was like stumbling across a secret society, a meeting of all those faces that you saw passing in the hallways of your elementary school. We wasted away the afternoon before the night bled into the sky. The crowd thinned out but it was always the same handful of kids who stuck around, typically older boys, playing basketball. If they weren’t older, they seemed it. That was the allure of it, I suppose. You’re a kid sifting through a paradoxically endless and limited series of options that you can’t help but idealize those who seem so inherently confident, as if they figured out the great human game of life by simply opting out of it.

Previewing the 54th Chicago International Film Festival

October 10, 2018 by Daniel Nava in Festival

Write about this festival long enough and you run out of things to say. I complain every year about the Chicago International Film Festival and there’s plenty to complain about (Asako I & II, Burning, La Flor, Her Smell, High Life, Hong Sang-soo, 3 Faces, etc. are all immediately felt absences in a line-up filled with a lot of, to say it diplomatically, filler). Blasé inclusions aside (The Front Runner is your Closing Film? And why is our After Dark programming year in, year out always so terribly sparse?), I’m going to try to stay positive.

I’m glad that Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind are screening in, you know, a theater. I’m happy that Oliver Assayas’ new film, Non-Fiction, is screening. Same for the new Christian Petzold, Jia Zhangke, and Dominga Sotomayor. And the stuff that I’m going to see before the end of the year (staying positive), like Steve McQueen’s Widows and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite should benefit from a festival crowd. I don’t know what’s going on with their “Masters” programming, which is a hodgepodge of puzzling inclusions and equally perplexing exclusions (where’s the new Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jean-Luc Godard, or Frederick Wiseman?). But it does feature the new Hirokazu Kore-eda and Pawel Pawlikowski, so – positive.

Look, I won’t pretend like I know the economics or the web of complex relationships required to manage and maintain a festival. I don’t have the constitution to even consider all the handshaking and endless series of emails required to get so-and-so film to screen, or the logistics necessary to get this or that filmmaker in attendance. All I know is that New York City and Toronto and Telluride have those resources and Chicago does not. But what I guess I want to know is… why not?

The 54th Chicago International Film Festival runs from October 10 to October 21. For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, refer to the Chicago International Film Festival website here.

[Censored]

Diane

Sofia

Too Late to Die Young

Transit

United Skates

First Man (Damien Chazelle)

October 08, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Damien Chazelle, First Man

The Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) of Damien Chazelle’s First Man doesn’t utter the line “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” out of humanity or loyalty to his country. He says it out of defeat. A litany of children, men, and women that came within orbit of Armstrong have passed, and in them a crater-sized lesion has all but eaten away at the astronaut. From Armstrong’s vantage point, the tentativeness of life takes on a whole different meaning when you’ve lost, and continue to lose, everyone that means anything to you. The fleeting image of Armstrong running his fingers through the hair of his now dead daughter haunts him, and when asked during his job interview with NASA if her recent death will affect him, Armstrong firmly remarks that it obviously will. Later in the film, while going for a walk with NASA colleague Edward Higgins White (Jason Clarke), White suggests how lonely it must be on the moon. Armstrong, stoic and despondent, doesn’t so much reply as simply mention how they’ve passed by a swing that reminded him of his daughter. It’s the first time he’s mentioned her to anyone since her passing. And it’s the last time we see Armstrong and White talk – the shadow cast by his daughter’s death consuming everything around him.

A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper)

October 01, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born, Recommended

Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born is a convenience store chocolate bar: an immediately, immensely satisfying distraction, a rush to the head that settles into to the bloodstream before crashing into a lull. It’s a mindful distraction that’s positively transparent in its intentions and so free of irony that it suggests something almost pathologically indifferent to criticism. It’s a series of contradictions: muscular and ephemeral, expressionistic and literal. And it somehow possesses the gift of being interesting while telling an essential but trite narrative. It’s an achievement in polarity; familiar but transgressive enough.

The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)

September 24, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Jacques Audiard, The Sisters Brothers

The Oregon Territory, 1851. Where helping one another remained as unfashionable and primitive as it does now, we find the Sisters siblings, Eli and Charlie (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) in a gunfight with shadows under the veil of darkness. The blasts from their pistols briefly illuminate the pitch-black landscape before light surrenders again. The exchange ends quickly, Eli and Charlie surviving another job in their limitless mercenary journeywork, when they realize the adjacent ranch has caught ablaze. Eli, the sentimental, unabashedly optimistic one, attempts to save the barn’s stable of horses before the structure collapses. Charlie stands aside, berating his brother for wasting their time as the two return to their keeper, The Commodore (Rutger Hauer). They ride off, the burning wreckage of their work behind them. It’s a moment that recalls Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, where the writer suggests that “death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape”. In Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers, death is unavoidable, unarrangable, and inconvenient, though attempts to find some measure of solace in a landscape that incinerates the spirit is positively vital, lest you thin away into oblivion.

Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)

August 27, 2018 by Daniel Nava in 2018, Review, Aneesh Chaganty, Searching

To distinguish itself immediately from the Unfriended series, Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching opens with a sequence that compresses a decade’s worth of Margot Kim’s (Michelle La) childhood. The exposition dump depicts the trauma of Margot losing her mother to cancer and her entry into high school; her father David (John Cho) sticking by her side. It’s an intriguing move, a notably swift, exquisitely edited example of narrative economy that also summons some rather uncomfortable feelings about Chaganty’s manipulative use of saccharine musical cues and blasé plotting. Those two qualities become more pronounced as Searching screeches at numerous points before stumbling upon its dunderheaded conclusion. It’s baffling, really, that anyone could suggest that Searching’s narrative trajectory is any less insipid or dumb as what we get from the Unfriended films. At least those films resist the banalities that we get from Searching.