Monthly Archives: January, 2012

We liked, but didn't love Doremus' third feature (Like Crazy) - aside from the sugar-coatedness and scattered observational POV, we think a more fleshed out drama, Pearce and Amy Ryan supporting Felicity Jones in her second Doremus outing will provide more substantial results from the this untapped potential.

Six years since his breakout short film debut "The Aluminum Fowl," hit the festival circuit (Sundance, Rotterdam, Cannes), James Clauer's feature length debut in glorious 35mm is finally upon us and should make the immigrant experience samples as Sin Nombre feel like a Disney film. Backed by the Nomadic Independence clan, this Gotham in Progress selected project will surely be a fierce commentary about the unattainable and indoctrinated myth that has been going strong since 1931.

The pic above (Denis Lavant aiding an Eva Mendes from a manhole) tells us that Carax appears to have incorporated some narrative and film character elements from his portion of the Carax-Michel Gondry-Bong Joon-ho triptych Tokyo!. In it, Lavant plays some excruciatingly annoying Godzilla-like creature, which wouldn't be a selling point for this project as it was worst than fingernails on a chalkboard, but we're curious about how this "meta" film within a film formula might work out. Also worth noting: this is Carax's first feature film since 1999's Pola X.

Herzog likewise reduces cinema to its most basic expressive formula: using the medium of the camera to transform the literal, untouched reality before us into something estranging and miraculous. ‘Cave’ accomplishes what all great art strives to do: wrench us from out of the entrenched armor of our mundane solipsisms and give us a glimpse of the eternal. The mutated albino alligator writhing aimlessly in a vast, expensive simulation, its natural impulses irrelevant and forgotten, is the perfect symbol for contemporary humanity. Herzog ominously warns us all: “The site is expanding.”

Not only does the photography benefit from the color depth and added resolution from celluloid, but the 35mm format is but another of the film's sly anachronisms. The film posits that things change slowly, but - watching this on the last day of this year's digital-heavy Cannes festival - nothing has felt more rushed than the disappearance of film prints in our theatres.