A Taste Of Things (2023) begins its qualifying run today

Food as life or as an expression of love.

For Eugenie and her boss Dodin their existence revolves around food. He is recognized as the supreme gourmet, she is his cook. While they have been together for over 20 years their romance has remained, at her insistence, only in the kitchen.

This is one of the great food films of all time. It is also one the greatest food porn films ever made. There is food pretty much in every scene and large chunks of this  film is people cooking. Almost everything happens around what happens in the kitchen or the dinner table (for example most of the first half hour of this film is simply people cooking).

If you love food this film is for you. This is a film that should only play in theaters where full meals are served because this film is going to make you hungry. I am notoriously picky eater and I wanted everything that was on screen. Your mouth won't water but  go into over drive.

Food aside, this is just a great drama/romance. Juliette Binoche shines as Eugenie and Benoit Magimel is magnificent as Dodin. The pair have a wonderful chemistry, no doubt enhanced by their once being an off screen couple. I was moved by their performances and I could physically feel their connection. There is a magic in the looks and gestures that adds volumes to the script. Frankly if the film works at all,it's because of the performances.

I loved this film. And while I know some may argue it is slight, there is a depth of feeling that make it one of the great treasures of 2023.

Highly recommended.

MENUS-PLAISIRS – LES TROISGROS (2023)

Frederick Wiseman's latest is a four hour investigation of the titled Michelin 3 star restaurant in France. It's a look at the the people and farms that help make it run.

Wiseman's films are not for everyone. Some people don't like the  observational style. People either turn off at the the lack of "action" or the fact that Wiseman doesn't judge, he just shows us life and lets us observe. You have to want to people watch and do so in "real" time. Recently Hubert Vigilla and myself had a discussion about Wiseman's films as to what ones worked and what didn't.

Here you need to have to want to see what goes into the running of a restaurant, beyond just cooking the meals, since this isn't about food any more than Wiseman's earlier CRAZY HORSE is about the nude female dancers.  

For me this is a middle of the road Wiseman film. While definitely up to the master's high standards, the film didn't quite click with me (hence the brevity of this review). Blame the fact that the film mirrors a good number of films on restaurants that I see each year. I've seen variations on this any number of time over the last few years so the wonder of seeing anything other than the specifics wasn't there, especially when it runs for so long.  Yes the film is good and yes it brings the best of other films' views together, but it never grabbed me because it was too familiar territory.  

Definitely worth a look if the subject or the filmmaker interests you, but your mileage may vary.

Nightcap 10/22/23: Globe Docs starts this week, random thoughts and random notes of the 2023 NYFF

Before I get to some  unvarnished notes that I made in my note book while covering this year’s New York Film Festival a couple of quick notes.

First up Globe Docs starts this week.  The Boston Globe Documentary festival is killer. It’s small but it has a lot of great films slotted.  I’m supposed to be covering the festival so expect some coverage of the films.

I’ve already covered PIGEON TUNNEL which is starting in select markets as well. If you are a fan of John LeCarre, it’s a must. Another must is BREAKING THE NEWS about the start up of a news service where the reporters are primarily women and members of the LGBTQ community.  Reviews can be found by clicking on the links in the titles.

I have seen THE STONES AND BRIAN JONES. If you are a fan of the Stones or the music of the late 60’s it’s a must see. A review will run later in the week.

The festival is running both in person and virtual so go to the website and get tickets.

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Just a reminder more coverage of the Brooklyn Horror Festival is coming. Reid Ramsey was going back and forth to Brooklyn so he hasn’t had any time to write up all of the films yet.

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New correspondent Wendy Feinberg will be dropping some thoughts on the Hamptons Film Festival. Wendy is great people and getting her is coup. I'll have more when her first pieces go up.

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I’ve started to  work on DOC NYC.  We will have multiple people covering the festival so get ready to be overwhelmed with coverage.

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Now some very honest stray notes taken during this years NYFF:

Lots of newbies this year. Standing outside Alice Tully there were a lot of people asking where they had to go and how they could get tickets. It's a good sign that people were interested, though a lot of people wanted to walk up and buy tickets and they were disappointed at the sellouts.

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Sitting in the West Side Diner after THE BOY AND THE HERON when a big table of people arrived excited about going to the festival. Looking more toward the artier films they discussed the art house fare.

I was amused - though I smiled to myself as they excitedly discussed the new Hong Sang-soo film that was shot out of focus. They found the idea so brilliant, they couldn't understand why it hadn't been done before. I didn't have the heart to tell them it had been done, even recently by Sang-soo.

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Saddened that during the intro for JANET PLANET Dennis Lim said out loud the part they always kept silent, namely that they were not really interested in new  filmmakers but were going toward big names and returning filmmakers. 

It's a sad admission since it means that unless you can go elsewhere and get festival buzz there is no point in submitting to NYFF. It also explains why we've gotten 18 Hong Sang-soo films in 19 years and why so many other filmmakers return year after year.

I've discussed my suspicions before but I never expected them to be confirmed.

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The problem with just following directors is that you begin to assume that their films are good and mean something even if they don't.

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Related to that, too many films this year did not belong at the festival. I'm not talking "bad" films, I could make a case for a couple of the films I didn't like being there, but I'm talking about  films like JANET PLANET and FERRARI which weren't that good or ground breaking and only had a director's name attached.

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There were lots of rumors going around about why certain films were at the fest and others were not. For example much of the speculation (all unconfirmed) was focused in Netflix pumping cash into the festival and thus keeping the new Scorsese (KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON) out and only playing a premiere at David Geffen Hall days before the festival. It's also why there were fewer Amazon films at the fest. 

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There was a lot of talk during the MAESTRO press screening that it wasn't quite as packed as we expected because a lot of tickets were given to members of the press to fill out the undersold audience at the the expensive gala screening the night before.

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Because it was done in several films at the fest I found that I hate handheld camera work that seems to be POV but isn't

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I was left pondering outside of the Q&As why are we paying so much money to see the films at the festival when if we wait a week or two many of the films will be in theaters or streaming. I'm guilty of doing it too and I don't have a clear answer.

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Frequently during the festival I had the sense that this is going to end up being an in between year with big changes coming next year. I have no idea why, there was no indication or speculation, it just felt like a transition year.

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It was weird this year with so many people looking to go to the "BIG" films and willing to wait on blocks long standby lines when the odds are they would not get in. POOR THINGS, THE BOY AND THE HERON, ZONE OF INTEREST, THERE IS NO EVIL all had impossibly long standby lines

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I was not happy with the guy vaping weed at THE BOY AND THE HERON. 

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I was amused at several press screening watching young male writers trying to make time with beautiful non-American women in order to score their phone numbers

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NYFF 2023 Pictures Part 5- ORLANDO

 One last round of Photos

And it was at this point my camera crapped out and every photo taken after this was bad

NYFF 2023 Pictures Part 4 MAESTRO Q&A

 Pictures from the Maestro Q&A

Bernstein's daughter

NYFF 2023 Pictures Part 3

Still more pictures from this year's NYFF

 

Shooting Bernstein

NYFF 2023 Pictures Part 2 -POOR THINGS

 More Photos from this Year's NYFF

Yorgos Lanthimos on the red.. er black carpet before the first screening of POOR THINGS

How to spot a filmmaker from a long way away (back row of the balcony)

The crew of POOR THINGS

NYFF 2023 Pictures Part 1

 This is some pictures I took during the NYFF  this year. I'm posting them so that they don't get lost to the sands of time.

Waiting in the rain for my first press screening - THE BOY AND THE HERON

The press before a screening

Outside Alice Tully the morning after opening night

Errol Morris before PIGEON TUNNEL

Between Movies they swapped out posters

Dennis Lim's pre-film speech

Pedro talks about his movie

Talking with the audience

Ferrari (2023) NYFF 2023

Michael Mann's FERRARI is pretty okay.

I mean that sincerely, it's a pretty okay film. I say this because  that was the thought I kept having all through the movie. 

The film is the story of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver)  over a several month period in 1957 ending in the tragic final running of the Mille Miglia. It also coincides with his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) discovering that he has a son with another woman.

This was a project that Michael Mann has been trying to put together for years. Mann was finally able to pull it together and the result is a film that is like the pet projects of many great filmmakers, a film that is only going to mean something to him. 

What I mean is that the filmmakers know so much about their subject that they forgot to put all of that on to the screen. With FERRARI the script leaves a great deal out concerning Laura. Reduced to an angry bitter woman, unhappy about the death of her son and the infidelities of her husband, we don't get to know what a kick ass woman she was who was truly in the trenches with her husband. As Mann said at the NYFF press screening she was doing more than bookkeeping and would, among other things, sleep with the tires for the race cars so no one messed with them.

All through the talk Mann and his actors mentioned things about the Ferrarris that they learned in doing research on the couple. Every time some detailed was mentioned I could hear people around me react audibly including wanting to know why he bit wasn't included. For me, each new revelation made me wonder why we weren't told that since it gives me a better understanding of what was happening. In relating the stories that were never in the script Enzo stopped being a walled off figure and Laura became more than a grief stricken mother. I kept thinking that if some of what Mann and the others had said after the film was included, even by of a line or two, the film would have been so much better. We would have had real people on screen and not two characters who are ciphers we can see anyway we want.

To be honest I don't know why the film has been a festival darling. While the film is far from bad, it is really unremarkable. It's so "okay" that I'm pretty certain that had Michael Mann not directed  no one would have paid any attention to it.

I think part of the reason the film is getting the attention is the racing sequences. They are spectacular. There is a visceral quality to them that, I, a life long race fan, responded to. The crash, when it occurs is shocking and produced a audible reaction in the people around me. I knew what was coming and it still rattled my cage. I wanted to hit rewind and see it again.

Racing sequences aside, Is this a bad film? No. It's a perfectly adequate one. It's enjoyable, but it isn't anything special.

(An aside- is this the moment that Adam Driver jumps the shark? His quiet brooding performance is nothing special and lacking all the character detail, except an Italian accent, of other films it seems like he is coasting. Could it be that he isn't that good an actor and has just been playing all his roles the same way and we never noticed? Seriously without the character ticks of other scripts there is nothing here. It's a performance emptier than his Ben Solo turn, which was kind of interesting due to the histrionics he performed with. It such a nothing role that it suddenly occurred to me this nothing is what he's been doing all along)

Planet Janet (2023) NYFF 2023

For me there are a number of problems with PLANET JANET. Some of them to do with Annie Baker's script and some of them to do with the film being a festival darling- which is due entirely to it being a film by Annie Baker and the mind set of big fests to program films with a name attached to them whether they deserve to be there or not.

The film is the episodic story of a mother and daughter over the course of several months as mom drifts in and out of relationships and her daughter just tries to get through life. Mom is a therapist working at home. She has a tendency to pick the wrong men. As the film opens she is in a relationship with Wayne a gruff guy who won't talk of his past, has a daughter and son he never sees. Lacy, Janet's daughter doesn't like him and he is dumped when Lacy insists on it. Next in the rotation is Regina, a friend of Janet's who comes to stay after leaving Avi and his group. Regina leaves and Avi becomes a suitor. Through it all Lacy is needy, occasionally sarcastic and a loner.

Though named for the mother, the film is kind of focused on both women but not really on either, though more on Lacy than Janet. If that seems like an odd statement it is because the film itself is rambling and oddly focused. We get moments of time. We get lots of silences and pieces of conversations but nothing connects. We are outsiders looking in but we never see anything that connects us to the women and what they are experiencing. There are moments in their lives but no sense of the whole. We get almost revelations but nothing concrete. The one moment where something might be an ah ha moment, a stoned discussion between Regina and Janet, goes off the rails because Janet's train of thought s lost. We are left on the outside looking in with only looks to fill in the blanks.

While never bad, the film is kind of good on its own terms, I never connected. I'm not sure that many in the audience did either since out of the seven public screenings I have attended to at NYFF with Q&As, this one had the most people walking out before it started. Indeed Hubert and myself left as the lights were going up. We simply didn't need to know more.

The problem for me, and the thing that I keep coming back to is the feeling that this is the first film of a newbie director who is just learning to tell a story (cinematicly).  The huge problem with this is that Annie Baker is Pulitzer prize winning playwright who knows how to tell a story and build characters, I've seen and read her plays.  This should have had a better constructed script. Did all the connecting tissue go in editing?  I don't know, but something, a lot of things really, seem missing.

Quite honestly this film is no better than any number of small inde films I've seen this year. Additionally given a list of the too many films I've seen in the last year I could give at least ten better films on the same subject of mothers and daughters that would have been better choices for the festival.

There is no doubt that this film got into the NYFF because Annie Baker made it...and that is the problem NYFF and other festivals deal with. It's a problem they are very aware of because in the introduction to the film Dennis Lim said that the festival tends NOT to show the work of new filmmakers but leans on the work of known quantities. He said flat out Baker's name resulted in the selection. What an absolute shame.

I know why it's done, known directors are easier sells. They come with less hassles and assure that there will be some butts in seats. The problem is that in doing so the festival becomes a cult of personality (Godard, or Sang Soo anyone?). It's not a celebration of all films, rather it's a celebration of the big names.  NYFF, like the other major festivals, program the films from people who will get attention to their screenings, which explains why this year most screenings sold out.

The problem is that it often results in  films that in a more perfect world probably wouldn't get in on their merits. Too often over the last few years I have walked out of NYFF films thinking the film was good but not something that should be at one of the top festivals in the world. Never have I felt that more strangly than with PLANET JANET.

Again this is not a knock against PLANET JANET, which is fine for what it is, but more unhappiness that like in other areas of life, parentage does make a difference in a child's success. (Honestly festivals like NYFF and the other big ones should do a sidebar of films from  the inde world and up coming filmmakers that are programmed by people just looking for gems where ever they can be found)

Ultimately JANET PLANET is worth a look for the early work of a first time filmmaker who will hopefully get better with time.

Zone of Interest (2023) NYFF 2023

The banality of evil as seen in the daily life of the Hoss family, Rudolph, Hedwig and their children. He's the commandant of Auschwitz and she is the happy homemaker. We witness their daily life just outside the wall of the extermination camp.

My thoughts and feelings for this film have changed in the 24 plus hours since I first saw it. They have changed so much that the only thing that survives from the first attempt at writing this review is the first paragraph.

Jonathan Glazer's intellectually disturbing film is focused on showing that the perpetrators of evil are just like us, They have families, they love and have fights. The purpose is not to glorify them but to show them as they really are and as such show us that we have the potential of being them. 

The horror largely comes not from what we see, we are literally largely walled off from the horrors, but what what we know is on the other side of the wall. Indeed, other that one shot of Rudolph in the camp (shot from a low angle so he is silhouetted against the sky and smoke, we know where he is from the sound), all we see are the tops of buildings, smoke stakes and at night the fiery glow of the crematoria. The horror is added to by the sounds we hear the drone of the factory that is the camp, the occasional scream or dog bark. We are horrified because we know what is happening.

Or not.

What happened to me over the last 24 hours is I realized that this is not an emotional film but an intellectual one. This is a film that is, ultimately cold and calculating. As much as Glazer wants us to kind of connect to the Hoss', most of us never will. As much as he tries to show them as just another couple, albeit in Nazi regalia, we really can't disconnect because we know in real life they are monsters (though Hedwig insisted she didn't know anything). Somewhere in the last 24 hours I realized that as well made and intellectually engaging as the film is I never really felt anything.

Basically anything I thought I felt I don't think I really did, I just thought I did because I thought I should. Okay yes the night time orange glow over the camp is viscerally disturbing, as is the flash forward sequence toward the end since it is the one time it makes things real, but mostly there is no emotion only a purely intellectual exercise. 

Glazer has so carefully calculated the film he was making that he has made a perfect mechanical machine.  Other than in fleeting moments this film is colder than a piece of ice. To put it another way, he has made a film about the loss of humanity that kind of doesn't have any in it. The line that sticks in my head is it's a film about the banality of evil that is banal.

Does that make it a bad film? Maybe...? I mean outside of some fleeting moments I didn't feel anything more than I felt reading the synopsis in the festival guide. While the film serves an intellectual purpose I'm not certain it will live on past a certain point only in that there is not enough emotional about it to make you want to share it or experience it a second time

Evil Does Not Exist (2023) NYFF 2023

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi returns with a small story of a town that is about to change thanks to a corporation wanting to build a fancy camping site in their hamlet. The towns folk are just fine, but the corporation wants to do it, despite the fact their half-assed plans are going to result in pollution and destruction of their way of life.

Structured like a short story EVIL DOES NOT EXIST moves at it's own pace and goes through it's own turns. Running almost two hours it solidly fills the hours but it tells a narrative so light and fragile that you would think it would almost be a short - except that it needs the full run time to fully breath and set up it's story.

Certain to not click with some audiences, this is still going to thrill many. Hamaguchi knows this isn't a crowd pleaser and said so in his Q&A at NYFF, but he's okay with that. The reason, I think, that people won't warm to it is the short story like structure. What happens is something that you see in short stories or films but not in features. The ending is atypical for a feature (or novel).  If you can accept that you are good.

I really like Hamaguchi's films. While dealing with similar themes through out his films, more times than not are always different. Running whatever time they need and moving differently each time he is one of the few filmmakers today making films that reflect the story and not his personal style.

This is a small gentle gem of a film and while not as meaty as his other films it is still highly recommended.

The Delinquents (2023) NYFF 2023

Bank teller decides to rob his bank. Taking just over twice what he would have earned if he had worked 25 years Moran steals the money and and has co-worker Roman hide hide it. Moran turns himself in figuring he will get three and a half years and then be free. However complications occur.

This meandering crime drama/comedy is either going to thrill you or make you get up and walk out. Running 189 minutes the film takes it's time telling its story. Wandering here and there as it does pins out. Very much about life and how things don't always go as we planned the film expands roughly an hour of plot into three plus.  The result is an interesting story in puffed up packaging.

This is a film you either love or loath. While extremely well done, the pacing can seem glacial.  Things happen but often in slower than real time. Moments feel stretched. Director Rodrigo Moreno is doing so to upset our expectations, but that isn't a good thing since I found I was looking at the clock much too often. In reading on the film, I found reaction split everyone agreeing it's a good story but disagreeing with the pacing.

Personally, I could have lived with the pacing if the payoff was something more moving, but it wasn't, and the result is a film I liked but didn't love and was left to wonder if I ever will watch it again.

Worth a look for fans of slow cinema, all others are advised to research it before you go in.

MUSIC (2023) NYFF 2023

Angela Schanelec obtuse drama told in style that is either going to thrill you or make you want to throw things at the screen.

The film is told via tableau like segments of life where we see moments of a story but nothing that connects them up. We have to take the details and fit them together. Little if anything is said. Nothing is explained except what we can sus out. 

I’m all for working with a director, but there is a point where it becomes diminishing returns. The payoff isn’t there because the film requires us to bring too much to the table and the presentation is such we stop wanting to work with the film.

A big problem for me isn’t the fractured narrative but the artificiality of the bits we do see. People often don’t speak; they will be frozen staring for a long while before moving. Motions are mannered. It’s not watching a fractured narrative but watching one that seems to stutter along. I never cared because mannered way it's done adds too much dead time to it all.

I really disliked this.