Notes on the NYFF Main Slate
Monday, August 19, 2013 at 11:46PM 
The full lineup of the New York Film Festival's Main Slate was released today. Though the film festival is famously curated and thus exclusionary (I still haven't forgiven them for thinking Rachel Getting Married, the best movie of 2008, was beneath us) this year's lineup is quite a bit larger than usual. Are their standards loosening or was there just too much quality to deny? In honor of the bigger than usual lineup, I thought I'd attempt 35 thoughts on the lineup but I ran out of time. Herewith 29 bullet points...
• Can The Wind Rises save this year's sure-to-be-dismal Best Animated Feature race that Oscars? It's been over ten years since the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki won the Oscar for Spirited Away (2001). His newest film is a biopic, excuse me a "visionary poem", about Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter.
• Some titles just roll off the tongue. Consider... When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, a film from the director of Police, Adjective, which is about the life of a film director when the cameras aren't rolling. Except, we hope, the camera filming this movie because staring a blank screen wouldn't do.
• They describe that one as "fascinatingly oblique" which could well be film festival speak for "__________" (that's for you to fill in in the comments)
Nobody's Daughter
• The NYFF adores South Korea's Hong Sang-Soo whose films are always represented but whose appeal is largely lost on me. And I typically love South Korean movies apart from his! This year's title is Nobody's Daughter Haewon about a young woman who "tries to define herself one encounter at a time". That sounds fascinatingly oblique!
Rachel beds Domnhall in "About Time"• I'm not sure why there's a Richard Curtis romantic comedy in the festival (the NYFF selection committee usually airs on the side of humorless sobriety) but there is and it's called About Time and stars Bill Nighy, Domnhall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams and Lindsay Duncan. The men in the family time travel.
• Lindsay Duncan also costars in Le Week-end a dramedy about a couple visiting Paris on holiday. Jim Broadbent is the husband and it's directed by Roger Michell (Hyde Park on Hudson, Venus)
• Provided it's good I really really hope that Cambodia submits The Missing Picture as its Oscar entry. The film sounds and looks (in stills) fascinating so I'll just cut and paste the NYFF description:
Rithy Panh’s brave new film revisits his memories of four years spent under the Khmer Rouge and the destruction of his family and his culture; without a single memento left behind, he creates his “missing images” with narration and painstakingly executed dioramas.
• NEW CLAIRE DENIS MOVIE! NEW CLAIRE DENIS MOVIE! It's called Bastards and its inspired by recent French sex ring scandals. They call it "daringly fragmented" but isn't that kind of her way in general?
My Name Is .... Hmmmm
• Aside from the Sang-Soo movie too few of the movies are about women. Actressexuals will have to make do with Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant, agnès B's debut film My Name is... Hmmmm about a young woman who runs away from her abusive home and takes up with a kind truck driver, Abuse of Weakness in which Isabelle Huppert muses for Catherine Breillat in her film about her stroke and self-destructive post-stroke romance and Gloria, a Chilean movie about a middle-aged woman whose new lover has difficulty with "old habits" whatever that might mean. I'll use my imagination.
• I cannot keep up with James Franco anymore. He makes so many movies and "installations" and many of them seem imaginary since they don't come out. I'm still waiting to see Interior. Leather Bar which I wish NYFF had scheduled but instead they're showing something called Child of God which is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel and which they describe as "not for the faint-hearted"
• It was only once Nebraska started hitting festivals and being written up that I realized the extent to which I did not like The Descendants. The previous Alexander Payne film just soured me on Alexander Payne films I guess. Which is weirdly tetchy of me because I love all his other ones.
• I like black and white movies so I wonder if Nebraska is the only one this year? They don't say in the writeups but they describe Nebraska, cheekily as having "multiple hues"
• While we're on the subject of Nebraska, you should know that there aren't a lot of Oscar contenders in the lineup (beyond possible Foreign Film submissions) because that isn't really NYFF's thing. That said we will have Captain Phillips, the Somali pirate/Tom Hanks movie and All is Lost the Robert Redford battles the stormy sea festival hit from JC Chandor (Margin Call).
• I've probably told you a million times that I have loved vampires my whole life and vampiric cinema is the only subgenre within horror that I regularly don't avoid. But I have to say that Hollywood has just drained (sorry) my enthusiasm for them. If anything can renew my enthusiasm it'll be Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, two of my favorite immortal creatures to stare at. They're starring as vampires with a long-distance relationship in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.
• The director of Paradise Now's new feature is called Omar and its described as a "tense gripping time clock thriller" so the running time of 96 minutes sounds perfect.
• ...but elsewhere the NYFF extra-stuffed main slate is experience severe bloat by way of running time. Relatively speaking the "short" movies in the festival are running at around 110-119 minutes and several are WAY over the two hour mark including Norte the End of History (250 minutes) a Pinoy film that rethinks "Crime and Punishment", At Berkeley (244 minutes) a university documentary from the legendary Frederick Wiseman, Burning Bush (234 minutes) from Agnieska Holland about the events that followed a selfimmolation protest after the Prague spring and The Last of the Unjust (218 minutes) from the director of Shoah.
• ...perhaps it's unsophisticated of me to say but I find excessive running times in art films just as hard to justify artistically as that extra 20 minutes tacked on to most Hollywood Hack blockbuster these days. Can no one edit themselves anymore? Today's filmmakers should watch classic Hollywood films to see how much you can squeeze into 90 minutes. You can say a lot in 90 minutes. My ass is already numb.
• Ralph Fiennes follows up his directorial debut Coriolanus with The Invisible Woman which is about the author Charles Dickens' (played by Fiennes) and his long affair with a younger woman (Felicity Jones). You know what's invisible in romantic drama movies? Women who are the same age as the men. I wouldn't mention this except that Ralph is reunited with his English Patient co-star Kristin Scott Thomas for this movie but instead he's sleeping with Felicity Jones? What is he thinking? Doesn't he remember his own scorching chemistry with Kristin... or that bathtub scene???
• The shortest movie in the festival is Jealousy (77 minutes) from Phillipe Garrel, the director father of ubiquitous wild haired Louis Garrel who stars (bien sur!). It's an autobiographical tale of actors trying to navigate their careers and love lives.
Stranger By the Lake
• The description of Stranger by the Lake is 52 words long and 4 of those words are "sexually explicit". The description of Blue is the Warmest Color is 47 words long and 4 of those words are "sexually explicit". So enticing they had to say it twice! Either they're trying to sell tickets or they're labelled thusly to warn people about THE GAY. Apparently heteros only have implied sex these days (poor things!) but our sex is in-your-face!
• I'm super excited to see Blue is the Warmest Color after my Lea Seydoux conversion, its Cannes win, and all the subsequent controversy but I'm so not looking forward to the 179 minute running time. Will no one have mercy on my ass?
• In addition to all the running time self-indulgence quite a few of the movies seem to be autobiographical in nature. Filmmakers like talking about themselves. At length.
• The movie I'm least excited about that I will probably like a lot is Inside Llewyn Davis from the Coen Bros about a folk singer (Oscar Isaac), his cat, his ex-girl (Carey Mulligan) and multiple folk standards. It's weird but I am almost never excited to see Coen Bros movies before I'm watching them despite liking the bulk of them. I also love musicals so I have no excuse or comprehension of why I don't care about this movie yet. I'll get excited eventually but it probably won't be until the movie's first great moment.
• I feel guilty that I haven't yet mentioned Ben Stiller's remake/rethink The Secret Life of Walter Mitty on this blog despite it looking surprisingly good so here's the trailer.
DONE. MENTIONED.
• Two documentaries that could be gripping: American Promise, a years in the making doc about school children from enrollment to high school graduation, and The Square a portrait of events at Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring
• Two films whose inclusion confuses me: Allan Patridge which is a movie starring Steve Coogan's TV comedy character (why is a tv-to-film thing in the lineup?), Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian with Benicio Del Toro that I thought wasn't that well liked at Cannes?
• There are several Asian films aside from the ones already mentioned that might be great like Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father Like Son, about families realizing their songs were switched at birth, Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs about a homeless family on the "ragged edges of the modern world" or Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin which traces overlapping stories about rage-filled denizens of modern-day China,
• The NYFF premiere I'm most excited to see is Spike Jonze's Her. We've already discussed the moody engaging trailer and then I saw this tweet from Darren Aronofsky.
ok so i saw a rough cut of the best film i've seen in a long time. spike jonze's her is exceptional. reminds me why i love film.
— darren aronofsky (@DarrenAronofsky) August 18, 2013
CAN'T WAIT!
• The NYFF begins on September 27th. We'll be on the scene covering it for you. Which movies are you most excited for?
Reader Comments (40)
Re: Jimmy P's inclusion.....the NYFF's Director of Programming (Kent Jones) is one of the co-writers for that film. Interpret that as you see fit.
Only Lovers Left Alive was shown at the NZ Film Fest direct from Cannes and I am so glad I saw it there as if I had watched it at home I probably would have given up. A slow-burning beautiful piece that needs rewatching for the sheer beauty of the thing to sink in and Wasikowska totally walks away with the show - dying to know your thoughts on that and Strangers by the Lake which is by far the most explicit, honest gay film I have ever seen - but loses it a little towards the end - I just didn't know what it wanted to be (and I don't think it did either)
And a side note: Can we just get an amen for Lindsay Duncan, this woman would have to be one of the most criminally underseen, underrated actresses - Her margaret thatcher beat Meryl's by a mile in my opinion and her performance on Rome deserved all the awards.
Super excited for all your coverage! Is The Past coming there by any chance? THAT was amazing. Bejo for ALL da awardz.
I'm not a fan, but "Alan Partridge" (the character and his television show) are very popular amongst those more likely to seek out more obscure comedy television. Well, in America anyway. In the UK he's quite popular in mainstream culture, too. With the rise in popularity of British fare like Doctor Who, it's hardly surprising to see the film in the line up. Especially since it'll likely only get a VOD release at some point and NYFF can guarantee themselves some money by scheduling it.
So many great-sounding titles that I can't even go through them all. Needless to say, I'm psyched.
A great, diverse lineup. I'm most excited for new work from Miyazaki, Kore-eda, the Coen Brothers, Jarmusch and Jonze - though how I'm going to afford the latter is beyond me, given how pricey NYFF Closing Night screenings usually are. I'm hoping I'll be able to see a lot of these titles in Toronto, but I will see 10-15 titles at NYFF, as usual.
The real bummer about the super long films in the lineup is that they all sound incredible. I might - might - be able to make it through one of them, but even that's stretching it, given how uncomfortable the seats at Alice Tully are.
I love that song from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty trailer. Can anyone tell me whose song and what title is it? Thanks.
"The movie I'm least excited about that I will probably like a lot is Inside Llewyn Davis from the Coen Bros about a folk singer (Oscar Isaac), his cat, his ex-girl (Carey Mulligan) and multiple folk standards'
But there's a cat in it. Wow, it's like we don't even know you anymore...
I think the festival inclusion that I'm most pleased about is weirdly About Time. Definitely not the movie I'm most excited to actually watch (Blue Is The Warmest Color! Her! Stranger By The Lake! Like Father Like Son!), but I am so ready for cinephiles to stop treating romantic comedies as the ghetto of movie genres. It's sexist and shortsighted, and it's beyond time to change that attitude.
Also bless your heart for those words on runtimes and the value of classic Hollywood filmmaking. It's so true!
Oh if you don't like Hong, "Haewon" will not convert you. I'm a moderate fan and this is by far my least favourite of the 8 or so films of his I've seen. And really, if you've seen a single one of his other films, you've seen "Haewon".
"Bastards" isn't all that daringly fragmented - if anything, by Denis standards, it's downright linear and commercial. I quite liked it, though it's far from her strongest work and I noticed a few of the Denis die-hards were quite cool on it.
Both "Like Father Like Son", "Gloria" and "Touch of Sin" are minor films - best to be approached with lowish expectations but thoroughly absorbing and satisfying in their own right. "Omar" is engaging enough but very (Very) schematic.
I am the world's most fanboyish Desplechin fanboy but "Jimmy P" even left me bored shitless. It's in there purely because of his name (and perhaps del Toro's) and in this context, it's odd that "The Past" didn't make it. It's a tad contrived, but still very involving.
But the real crime is that beside all the above-mentioned engaging but minor titles, something as staggering and expertly crafted as the Romanian "Child's Pose" didn't get in.
Oh and Stranger by the Lake is strange and rather excellent. And yes, pretty explicit. (Though nowhere near as explicit as I'd been led to believe/hope.)
I think Alan Partridge is a little different from most tv-to-film things.
I really love that there's this fictional character whose life and career we have been allowed to drop into in various formats and media for 20 years. A flawed, mediocre person- someone who's not a hero. I can't think of much like it! It's so wonderfully banal and recognisable and sad and funny and I think each part gains so much from knowing that it's all part of a life.
I probably wouldn't run to it if I wasn't familiar with the character but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Plus it comes from Armando Iannucci, the man behind one of the best tv-to-film movies, In the Loop.
I have no excuse or comprehension of why I don't care about [Inside Llewyn Davis] yet.
The presence of Justin Timberlake? He's certainly the reason I'm keeping that film at arm's length.
Please please please give Hong Sangsoo a second chance. I'm actually in love with his relaxed movies about the lives of movie people. His movies read to me like a Korean version of Eric Rohmer. LOVE THEM.
I think The Day He Arrives is his best movie, but why don't you satisfy your actressexual instincts with collaboration with Isabelle Huppert, In Another Country? It's so damn sweet!
I am not fond of this theory thet movies should run under 2 hours. Every movie has its own time. Can you imagine somebody editing Gone With the Wind to 90 minutes because of somebody's ass?
Sometimes a movie MUST run three hours, or even four hours. We're all understanding when it comes to classics, but who says contemporary filmmakes sometimes don't need to take thier time?
Of course there are a lot of movies that are simply overlong, but mostly they belong to prestige fare and biopics that want Oscars, and not to this auteurist universe.
Since I am going to TIFF with a total prude, I may have to go down to NY to see Blue and Strangers. Blue seems easier just because I know it will have a select cities run but I am not so sure about Strangers beyond NYFF.
It should be noted that Kent Jones had some direct involvement with Jimmy P. I know some of the people involved in the selections liked it but even the movies some were just cool on (Amy Taubin, who is on the selection committee, is probably the biggest Blue critic after Manohla Dargis.... who has actually seen the movie) made it in anyway, mainly because those movies will be undeniable modern classics for others. I think The Past was not as well-received by the panel from Cannes though. Whatever, I'm seeing it at TIFF.
I also think that The Wolf of Wall Street is a foregone conclusion for the secret screening, right?
PJ - It's by Of Monsters and Men but I don't know the exact title. Their whole album is really good.
Nat, I'm with you on Llewyn Davis. Maybe it's because of its depressing color palette, or the rather blank-eyed, passive protagonist (at least in the trailer) or Carey Mulligan doing yet another sad girlfriend role? There's just no LIFE there, which is maybe the point but therefore also hard to get excited about.
Carey Mulligan is barely in the movie according to those who have seen it.
cal roth -- if every movie has its own time and directors are not abusing this why have running times been creeping up so much in both hollywood and art fare? I believe it is a big underdiscussed problem. Storytelling is just not tight anymore. Tarantino is a great example. His films get more and more bloated but that first one is so tight and well defined.
and also: being okay with several movies at the 2 1/2-4 hour mark suggests you've never tried to sit through one of them at Alice Tully Hall ;) My god. I probably wouldn't be able to walk afterwards. Thankfully critics screenings are in more comfortable seats at walter reade
Only Lovers Left Alive has had my interest since they said Swinton would be playing a vampire. I'm just going to assume Swinton is playing David Bowie in The Hunger until I'm told otherwise.
I think after 'In The Loop' that Armando Iannucci deserves carte blanche into any film festival he wants. I'm a big fan of all of his work and am really looking forward to this!
I agree storytelling is not tight anymore when it comes to Hollywood. Point taken. But we're talking about special movies and special sensibilities, and sometimes there are more important things than storytelling in these particular sensibilities.
Personally, there is nothing worse than a movie that feels rushed, and I think Tarantino is much better in long movies like Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, and Basterds than in his tight version of Reservoir Dogs. I love that he takes his time to let Bill and Beatrix talk with no rush, while he plays his flute, and things like that.
These are special directors! Can you imagine Lars von Trier cutting some chapters from Breaking the Waves of Dogville just to make them more tight?
it's funny though, because as so many Hollywood films are extended to far too long of a runtime, many low budget indie movies suffer from Missing Third Act Syndrome as if they ran out of money and just had to end the movie at the end of the second act.
"Can you imagine Lars von Trier cutting some chapters from Breaking the Waves of Dogville just to make them more tight?"
Yes. God, yes.
nathaniel, why are you so bothered by Ralph Fiennes sleeping with a much younger woman but not by "Blue is the warmest colour" having two super young, sexy and very pretty leads who so happen to engage in explicit and graphic sex for more than 20 minutes on screen????
Why is one sexist and not the other? Dont you think the director knew "explicit graphic scene between two hot girls" would bring a lot of buzz, media coverage and attention to his film?
Do you think the movie would have been so praised, glorified and well received if had he cast two super butch, masculine-looking lesbians? Two older, "late in life" lesbians? Two uber butch overweight women? or if it were, lets say, Rosie O´Donnell and Sarah Gilbert??? KD Lang and some gender studies scholar on her fifties??? Any of those though looking women on "dyke marchs"?
I havent seen BITWC yet, obviously, but it obviously cater to an old, cliched male fantasy and it could be discussed up to which point it isnt it a bit exploitative. And blatantly sexist.
I sense a double standard here.
PS= No idea who Felicity Jones is.
@Amanda--You know, I wish you could read your response through my eyes as a young gay woman. Because while the cinephile in me is excited to see a film by a director I admire that has been getting worldwide praise, the part of me that searches for myself when I watch movies cannot be unbiased. Every time I read a claim that it is sexist to show romance between young women, it cuts me.
Could the movie be totally unconcerned with the inner lives of these characters, and merely be interested in exploiting them? Yes absolutely. Does it look like this movie does that? No. Why is it so easy to accept that something like Strangers By The Lake is exploitative, despite its explicit content between attractive men, and so easy to dismiss all possible identification for Blue Is The Warmest Color as sexist exploitation?
Amanda if you are throwing out accusations about a movie you haven't seen and admitting you are, then you should probably stop. Don't use terms like blatant, sexist, and exploitative to a movie you have not seen.
"KD Lang and some gender studies scholar on her fifties???"
Okay, who is doing the cliched stereotypes now? Nathaniel sounds more grown up by not passing judgment. His Invisible Women comments were clearly about two actors who are in the same movie with a history but are not romantically linked. You just sound like you are teeing off and joining the Sasha Stone brigade or shoot first, see later approach in movie-viewing that is poisonous.
Lol I meant to say that we assume Stranger By The Lake is not exploitative. Oops.
Stranger By the Lake sounds like a nice title, intimating nothing too wild. Now if it was called On Golden Blonde...
Ugh, Amanda. Well, if nothing else, she provides a useful preview of what to expect when this movie comes up in conversation over the next few months. I love it when battle lines are drawn before 99% of the people commenting have even seen the movie. Oh wait, no, I hate it, that's right.
Just the photos of the guy with the 'pornstache' in Strangers by the Lake would give the general public vapors. Goodness. Supposedly the movie itself is off-beat and noir-y which sounds right up my alley but alas, I am with a group of prudes during my TIFF trip.
I read gay men saying that Top of the Lake IS a better movie than Blue ITWC but that it hasnt been as praised, beloved and hasnt generated as much buzz and excitement BECAUSE it shows men having sex and not two hot women
as much as i agree that we should use caution before drawing battle lines about divisive movies, the cinema really does this to itself with the constant agonizing waits for movies after their festival bows. the conversation could be much more organic and less predetermined if they'd just release movies without all the teasing.
"I read gay men saying that Top of the Lake IS a better movie than Blue ITWC but that it hasnt been as praised, beloved and hasnt generated as much buzz and excitement BECAUSE it shows men having sex and not two hot women."
I missed that cut of Top of the Lake. Jane Campion, what are you hiding from the public?!?!?!!?
I am not sure why the subject of gay men are up for this discussion even as I know plenty of gay men who raved about Blue is the Warmest Color because it is too rich beyond some sex scene. It's silly to discuss this without seeing it. It oddly feels like Zero Dark Thirty as 'torture porn' talk all over again.
Dargis and Taubin were critical but there were also plenty of women critics, some of whom actually were more familiar with Kechiche's work who loved it. Yet most of these women are straight and those who decided to make it a case against 'the male gaze' used a scene to frame what they perceive of Kechiche and their fellow colleagues for liking a movie. Again, I find this discussion useless without seeing the movie but I find some of the criticisms weirdly also coming off incredibly suspicious of the expression of sexuality of a particular, under-represented minority and to me that is troubling. Like TB said, this suggestion that any female-on-female sexuality is male-driven for strictly male stimulation actually is pretty hurtful to people who are presumably the people this whole movie concerns. Given I got the 411 on the plot from somebody who has seen it, this movie needs to be seen first and foremost. The end.
But I definitely realized the extent to which you did not like The Descendants!
Suzanne -- oh, good. Perhaps i'd just forgotten how much I did not likey ;)
I meant stranger by the Lake. My mistake
What do I want to see? Not telling!
I'm so excited about one film that I don't even want to tell anyone I'm interested in it, lest they get excited too and get the last tickets.
Evan -- don't hide your opinion-making light ! if you love something let it go if it comes back to y...
Also from the NZIFF, I actually found Only Lovers Left Alive insufferable, with a meandering, non-existent narrative that only seemed concerned with smugly congratulating itself (and its audience) for its faux-nihlism and 'intellect'. My queen Tilda seemed, sadly, to be there only to collect the cheque (it broke my heart!).
Gloria/i> and Like Father, Like Son/i> were both uneven, but utterly charming, and beautifully life-affirming. Stranger by the Lake/i> did seem a bit unsure of itself but I am still intrigued by it; I actually found the 'explicitness' to make one of its most potent points.
The Missing Picture/i> was a quiet builder, and would actually make a fascinating companion-piece to The Act of Killing/i> about the role of memory and interpretation in representing complete horror.
Gah, HTML fail. My apologies =)
Jarmusch movies are not really the most narrative-driven movies out there and I guess his movies are always primed to be labeled 'pseudo-intellectual' so it sounds like he made a Jim Jarmusch movie with vampires. In.