Day: October 4, 2011

Libertas @ The NYFF: Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison Living in the Material World; Film Debuts on HBO Oct. 5th & 6th

By Joe Bendel. He was frequently dubbed “the Quiet Beatle,” but George Harrison could also be called the cineaste Beatle. One of his first solo projects was the original soundtrack for Joe Massot’s psychedelic Wonderwall, completed while the Fab Four were still together. After the band broke up, he eventually founded Handmade Films, providing a jolt of capitol for independent British filmmakers. Harrison himself gets a full 208 minutes of screen-time in Martin Scorsese’s definitive documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which screens this Tuesday at the 49th New York Film Festival, just ahead of its HBO premiere.

Yes, George Harrison was a lad from Liverpool. The youngest Beatle, he was initially recruited because he could actually play. The general gist of the Beatles story will be generally familiar to just about everybody: initially, Lennon and McCartney were front-and-center, carrying the songwriting load, but slowly Harrison asserted himself, introducing the sitars and tablas into their later, trippier recordings. Since Yoko Ono consented to an on-camera interview, their eventual break-up is presented solely in terms of the stress of working so closely together for such a long time. Still, it is hard not to get sucked into Scorsese’s Harrison-centric retelling of the Beatles mythos.

However, it is something of a surprise how eventful Harrison’s post-Beatle years were, despite his often deliberately low profile (essentially constituting the second half of Material). Of course, his spiritual quest continued, which is a major focus for his widow, co-producer Olivia Harrison. Those who saw the IFC Channel’s behind-the-scenes history of Monty Python will already be well aware of Harrison’s close personal relationship to the comedy troupe, but who knew he was a Formula One Racing fan? In fact, one of the most touching interview segments features his friend Jackie Stewart, the “Flying Scotsman.”

If Ono gets a pass, at least Eric Clapton is forthright enough to address on-camera the whole business of how he romanced Harrison’s first wife while they were still married, albeit rather gingerly. Yet, for personal drama, the events surrounding the violent home invasion Harrison survived late in life effectively serves as a rather stark climax.

Harrison’s friends and family make a compelling case he just might have been the most interesting Beatle. Scorsese calls in some major star power, including both surviving Beatles as well as fellow Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty. It is also a pleasure to see Jane Birkin (from Wonderwall) on-screen in any context, but it is just plain creepy when his one-time producer Phil Spector shows up.

Material is a very good rock doc, but the nearly three and a half hour running time is pushing the limit. According to IMDB, it is almost half an hour longer than Ken Burns’ Thomas Jefferson—and Jefferson was the first to do just about everything. Nonetheless, it is consistently more engaging than the Lennon documentary that screened at last year’s NYFF. As a further point in Material’s favor, Scorsese, Olivia Harrison, and their collaborators almost entirely avoid politics, focusing squarely on the musical, spiritual, and personal aspects of his life, essentially in that order of concentration. Informative and entertaining, Material screens this Tuesday (10/4) at Alice Tully Hall as a Main Slate selection of the 2011 New York Film Festival and airs on HBO in two parts this Wednesday and Thursday (10/5 & 10/6).

Posted on October 4th, 2011 at 2:00pm.

Libertas @ The 2011 New York Film Festival: Mud and Soldiers (Nikkatsu Centennial)

By Joe Bendel. It is sort of like being immersed in the flipside of Saving Private Ryan. You might feel like invading Manchuria after watching Tomotaka Tasaka’s 1939 Mud and Soldiers, because that is exactly what it was designed to do. Though the Nikkatsu studio is best known for its classic yakuza films, it clearly took a sojourn through militarism in the 1930’s. In celebration of Nikkatsu’s centennial, the 49th New York Film Festival has programmed a wildly diverse 37 film retrospective, including Tasaka’s wartime propaganda picture.

If nothing else, Mud constitutes truth in titling. It is not called “Romance and Comic Relief” for a very good reason. Rather, the film documents a successful incursion into China, made possible by the selfless dedication of the Imperial Army’s rank-and-file. By design, there is virtually no character development, because Mud explicitly extols the virtue of soldiers submerging their individuality into the collective core. Granted, all military forces depend on their soldiers acting as a cohesive unit, but Mud’s esprit de corps is almost Borg-like in its relentlessness. Even the practice of censoring their letters home is presented as an act of team-building.

Throughout Mud, there is a surfeit of marching and warfighting in the muck. It is so realistic, it even features a fair amount of the hurry-up-and-waiting that every veteran remembers with frustration. In fact, Mud was such an accurate depiction of the combat experience, the U.S. military reportedly re-cut a confiscated print to use as a training film, in effect censoring a film glorifying censorship. As befits the Imperial Army, none of the cast stands out, but to a man, they all blend into the frontline milieu.

To give due credit, Mud is well made, blowing up stuff nicely and portraying a private’s perspective on warfare with scrupulous honesty, including the frequent boredom. However, the agenda behind it is transparently obvious. Naturally, there is absolutely no hint of the Japanese atrocities committed in China, which makes programming Mud without a counterbalancing selection a bit of a tricky proposition. Still, at least in America, the Imperial Army’s conduct in places like Nanjing is a settled question.

Though one can take issue with Mud on a host of aesthetic and ideological grounds, it is unlikely New Yorkers will have an opportunity to see it on the big screen anytime soon beyond this Nikkatsu sidebar. A historically important but highly problematic film, Mud screens Tuesday and Wednesday (10/4 & 10/5) at the Howard Gillman Theater as part of the Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses Masterworks retrospective celebrating Japan’s oldest movie studio at the 2011 New York Film Festival.

Posted on October 4th, 2011 at 1:59pm.

Libertas @ The 2011 New York Film Festival: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

By Joe Bendel. If Beckett and Mamet collaborated on a Turkish police procedural, it might have been similar in tone to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest festival favorite. Yet the lush pastoral imagery is a distinct hallmark of the Turkish auteur’s style. Do not expect to be spoon-fed a conventional action-driven narrative. Ceylan makes viewers work for it in his obliquely focused Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (trailer here), which screens during the 49th New York Film Festival.

As the film opens, Kenan is trying to show Police Chief Naci and three carloads of officers where he buried the body of his former friend Yasar. Unfortunately he was drunk at the time and cannot remember the exact location. This will take a while—all night in fact. While they blunder across the deserted Anatolian steppe, Chief Naci, Dr. Cemal, and Prosecutor Nusret, banter about this and that, which might later prove to be more revealing than viewers first realize.

Eventually, Kenan finally finds the body, at which point Ceylan throws his first curve ball, taking the film on a detour into absurdist black comedy. Indeed, the film almost plays like a spoof of long slow pretentious art films, though one has to have a lot of long slow pretentious art films under their belt to really appreciate it as such.

Finally, the keystone kops get the body back to the station, where Ceylan shifts gears once again. We start to pick up clues the nature of the crime is not precisely what we were led to believe. We also learn (with as much certainty as Ceylan ever allows) about one character’s very painful private life.

Throughout Anatolia, truth is decidedly slippery. Ceylan provides clues to raise suspicions, but never enough to form rock-solid conclusions. It is hard to say what over two and a half hours of this elusiveness adds up to, but at least the audience has had a lovely driving tour of the Turkish countryside.

Mostly shot in long takes, framing the characters as tiny figures set against the verdant landscape, Anatolia is a film that really has to be broken down into manageable parts. The three leads who emerge from the ensemble are all excellent, each looking appropriately haggard and weathered. Yilmaz Erdoğan seems to be the standard issue tough cop, yet he hints at something unexpectedly compassionate in Naci. Conversely, Muhammet Uzuner’s Cemal seems like a reassuringly earnest provincial doctor, but he performs the film’s only true interrogation, one so riveting viewers do not realize it is happening until it is already over. However, it is Taner Birsel who really takes his character to unexpected places, exposing the torment beneath the prosecutor’s bluff and polish.

All three actors have some really fine moments in Anatolia, but you have to drive a long way to get to each one. Of course, compared to the three hour forced march of Cristi Puiu’s Aurora, which played at last year’s NYFF, Anatolia is a walk in the park that offers the additional added attraction of actually getting somewhere in the end. It is a hard film to fully wrap one’s head around, but it stays with you (particularly Birsel’s final scene), which certainly proves it works on some level. Often arresting to look at (through cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki’s artful lens) and occasionally wickedly droll, it is recommended for the highest of high-end cineastes. It screens this Saturday (10/8) at the Alice Tully Hall as a Main Slate selection of the 2011 New York Film Festival.

Posted on October 4th, 2011 at 1:58pm.