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@delightful-mirth  @justsimplythebest @anewtry11

since you both love Pride and Prejudice, I advise you to watch this movie especially this video :)

#fanvidfeed #viddingisart #fireisland #noahwill #pridemonth #lovemelikeyoudo #gay #lesbian #pop #music #2020 #2022 

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Song: Love Me Like You Do 

Will Noah reviews David Chase's rock and roll period piece, now in theaters.

David Chase's first film suggests he hasn't totally grasped the unique demands of cinema--as opposed to TV, the format that delivered his masterpiece The Sopranos--but his novice status allows him to make some risky moves that more "correct" filmmakers would shy away from. Many critics have noted that the film feels like an entire season (if not series) of television crammed into two hours, collapsing the story into what may strike some as a muddle. Yet while some aspects of the story that might have flourished if given more breathing room--such as character development and scene-setting--suffer, the film's compression also results in some startlingly vivid rhythms. The overall effect is like if someone took a beautifully rendered history painting and crumpled the canvas up until it became an abstract composition. So yes, anyone who comes looking for the "storytelling" virtues of Chase's television work is bound to be disappointed. Those who dug The Sopranos for its stranger, often more frustrating aspects--the surrealism; the running musical commentary provided by Chase's song selections; the refusal to provide resolution, most famously in the show's blackout finale--are much more likely to groove on Chase's 60s-in-a-blender anti-bildungsroman.

Like any number of young people in the 1960s, Douglas (John Magaro) feels he is at the center of a unique cultural moment. This Chase surrogate joins a band with several of his teenage friends, hoping to catch the wave of sex, drugs, and rock and roll sweeping the nation. The band doesn’t go far, but Douglas’ Bob Dylan hair and lead singer status give him the confidence the date his high school crush Grace (Bella Heathcote). A sizable chunk of the film’s running time is spent on the couple’s individual family lives in subplots that are alternately heartwrenching (Douglas’ standoffish relationship with his father, played by James Gandolfini) and confused (the plight of Grace’s unstable sister). Eventually, it becomes clear that Douglas’ musical dreams are unlikely to come to fruition, and that his relationship with Grace may be just as fragile.

In our Yearbook series, Double Exposure contributors share lists and essays that attempt to define their year in film. Will Noah kicks off closing the book on 2012 with a list of his favorite films of the year.

This is a list of the best films of 2012, based on the indisputably objective grounds of because I said so. I’ve made my list free of any rules: it contains 2012 theatrical premieres, festival favorites that will be turning up in arthouses in 2013, undistributed films, and even one film I saw at a repertory screening. All that they share in common is an ability to speak to the world we inhabit now, whether that means challenging it, resisting it, mourning it, celebrating it, or merely reminding us what it looks like.

1. Leviathan

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s film may have been billed as a documentary on commercial fishing, but potential viewers should dispel any expectations of talking heads or tasteful B-roll. Leviathan skews closer to the avant-garde tradition, eschewing the quantified abstraction of statistics in favor of the formal abstraction of Stan Brakhage. While the average nature documentary might convey a few bullet point facts, Leviathan’s “sensory ethnography” plunges viewers headfirst into the environment it explores. Here we see where the wheels hit the pavement between man and fish; fish and boat; boat and sea; sea and sky; camera and reality. I’d be tempted to call it “experiential” if I had any real life experiences comparable to it. No other film this year opened my eyes to the world around me to the same degree.

2. Target

This criminally undistributed sci-fi epic views contemporary Russian society through the prism of a group of discontented bourgeois who take a trip to a strange site that grants its visitors the gift of youth. Director Alexander Zeldovich’s fast-paced visual grammar seems to owe more to Hollywood than any art house contemporaries, but his sense of provocation rivals that of Lars von Trier (he even tips his hat to Luis Buñuel). Equal parts scathing satire and deeply felt melodrama, Target is a kind of epic rarely attempted in the movies, a funhouse mirror that demonstrates how technology warps the human soul even as it sustains it.

3. The Master

In order to understand where we are now, we’ve got to look back at where we came from. This statement seems self-evident, but only Paul Thomas Anderson would think to dramatize the conflicts and tensions that defined the twentieth century in a parable about a mentally traumatized and sexually frustrated veteran and the cult leader who gives him a temporary sense of purpose. Through this seemingly obscure lens, Anderson conjures up a series of dreams, each more beautiful and fragile than the last. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Master offers a vision of human perfectibility that ignores the basic lusts, pains, and ecstasies of daily existence. The film’s ending charts a course that could extend for centuries, the mythical wanderer drawn back again and again by the erotic pull of the master he wasn’t made for.

4. Satantango

Bela Tarr’s 7+ hour 1994 masterpiece is too big to be contained by that or any other year. Satantango is so monumental that every other film on this list could be said to orbit around it.

5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Forget Zero Dark Thirty; this year’s most captivating procedural was a search for a body, not a man. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, perhaps the most masterful stylist working in digital cinema today, treats the frame with a painterly eye, assimilating the lessons of Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and Kiarostami into a cinematic approach that is completely his own. Over the course of two and a half hours, Anatolia tracks a procession through the Turkish countryside as a confessed murderer leads the police from one site to another in search of the body of the man he killed. Ceylan’s camera finds poetry, as well as despair, in the banality of the journey, weaving an epic worthy of the film’s title out of fleeting glimpses into lives of the searchers.

6. Two Years at Sea

Ben Rivers’ 16mm feature tracks the day to day life of a recluse, yet its tone is closer to magical realism than documentary (anyone who applied that term in a positive sense to Beasts of the Southern Wild should spend some time in Rivers’ world). Tracking one man’s solitary lifestyle in nature, Years depicts a near-total removal from society as a strange blend of rapturous serenity and pronounced longing.

7. Holy Motors/Cosmopolis

Two different white limousines move through two different cities over the course of two different days with two different passengers--each an agent of some mysterious force of modernity--inside. While Leos Carax’s elegiac romp (trust me, it’s not an oxymoron in such capable hands) through Paris provides a giddier high and a more poignant comedown, David Cronenberg’s traversal of a gridlocked rear-projected New York supplies the more challenging intellectual stimulant.

8. anders, Molussien

Nicolas Rey’s avant-garde feature will likely never be presented the same way twice, since its nine reels are projected in random order at every screening; yet this is itself the very type of probability exercise that Molussien undermines through its very form. As a response to fascism, Rey offers a cinematic form in which the basic structuring principles of time are pulled out from under the film, creating a new kind of temporality in the process.

9. In the Family

The year’s most impressive debut film, Patrick Wang’s In the Family, tells the story of a gay man in Tennessee who must fight for the custody of his son after his partner dies in an accident. Boasting a stunning combination of respectful distance and moral urgency, Wang’s film tempers the melodrama of its premise with an incredible eye for the rhythms of everyday life. In the Family skirts the edge of sentimentality, but never betrays the emotional honesty that it brings to matters of love, death, and empathy.

10. Keyhole

One would think that switching from film to digital might cripple Guy Maddin, robbing his cinematic ghosts of their spectral aura. In fact it does just the opposite--the format’s distance from the forms of the past gives Maddin’s images a frightening unreality that transcends pastiche.

11. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

12. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)

13. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis)

14. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)

15. Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

16. Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman)

17. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

18. The Deep Blue Sea (Terrence Davies)

19. The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry)

20. Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

21. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

22. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)

23. Zero Dark Thirty (Katherine Bigelow)

 24. Something In the Air (Olivier Assayas)

The end of days are upon us, or so we hear. This is the way the world ends: with Double Exposure munching popcorn and watching some of our favorite cinematic apocalypses.

4:44 Last Day on Earth

Abel Ferrara's latest plays like excerpts from its maker's diary—revealing, sincere, tone-deaf, often incredibly uncomfortable, occasionally revelatory. It's an unsatisfying film that asks a very good question: If the world were to end tomorrow, what would I do? -Max Nelson

Melancholia 

Melancholia begins with a set of images, set to Wagner's haunting "Tristan und Isold", that serves as a sort of prelude to the film, showing a dejected Kirsten Dunst, a panicked Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a beautifully rendered celestial collision. In these opening moments and throughout the film, Von Trier is able to depict total obliteration on vastly different scales: one within a depressive's psyche, one within a family's intimate drama, and another concerning the entire planet's demise. -Julia Selinger

Pulse

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 horror film unfolds in world not unlike our own, in which computers are slowly turning young people into ghosts. The apocalyptic vision of Pulse eschews bombast and destruction in favor of the terror and emptiness of solitude. This world ends not with a bang, but a prolonged, spectral whimper of loneliness. -Will Noah

The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan tackles the end-of-the-world genre with a minimalistic tale of couple's dysfunction in the midsts of mankind's extinction. It's honest and raw, answering the question of what matters to us and what we'd say to each other if we only had 5 minutes to live. It evokes Hitchcock (The Birds) and Wolf Rilla (Village of the Damned) but really it's pure Shyamalan. -Theo Zenou

Nowhere

The end of the world involves valley girls, deranged baywatch celebrities, and giant lizards from space in the dementedly funny final installment of Gregg Arakis "teenage apocalypse trilogy," which he describes as "an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 on acid." -Gus Reed

Robot Monster

Happy Hanukkah everyone! Whether he’s tweeting about cat farts or exposing the brutality and despair that lies beneath the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, Michael Haneke never fails to remind us why we love the holiday for which his name is a homophone. In honor of the Festival of Lights, Double Exposure suggests eight films by contemporary cinema’s most lovable director to watch while lighting the menorah.

Amour

As we entered Alice Tully Hall to see Amour at this year's New York Film Festival, I whispered to my companion, "Put on your yarmulke, it's time for Haneke."  Okay, so maybe I didn't say that, but it would've been wise given how much the film instills a fear of God in you.  You've already heard that iconic French thespians Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, starring as an aging couple bound to their Paris apartment, give performances as stunning as their pre-existing legacies. Haneke, too, with so many masterworks behind him, is at the height of his career. -Joseph Pomp

Caché

Caché is one of Haneke’s keenest excursions into contemporary French culture. Its pitiless observations on Algeria, surveillance, television, marriage, and national guilt stick in your throat like shards of broken matzo bread. -David Beal

Funny Games

This 1997 thriller starts with spilled eggs and ends with spilled blood.  When Georg, Anna, and their son Georgie take a trip to their lake house for a vacation, they meet two young men who take advantage of their hospitality and force them into a series of sadistic games in their own home. If you need an extra infusion of Haneke spirit, check out the 2007 American shot-for-shot remake starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as well. -Maya Rosmarin

The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert plays a sexually repressed piano instructor with mommy issues in this 2001 thriller. When she begins an affair with a young pupil, her lesson plan trades Schubert & Schumann for S&M. The Piano Teacher finds Haneke at his kinkiest, his camera punishing and withholding with a severity that mirrors that of the title character. -Will Noah

  Benny’s Video

"Don't forget to celebrate Hannukah with your kids" is the moral of this nightmarish 1992 film set in Vienna.  Benny's parents leave him at home for the weekend; a videophile, he heads to the local rental store, where he meets a girl, invites her up to his flat, shows her a video of a pig being killed, and then kills her.  What happens next?  You'll have to visit Netflix Instant to find out, although, as a Chinese waiter might say to a Jew asking about a spicy special on Christmas, unless you're a real masochist, this one's "not for you!" -Joseph Pomp

The White Ribbon

The children in a pre-World War I German village strike back against their elders, torturing those that have offended them and those who have molested their bodies and abused their minds—their parents and their priest. But the children are not blameless. 30 years later, these Aryan children become Nazis, linking their forefather's transgressions to genocide. -Ella Coon

Code Inconnu

This 2000 film, starring Juliette Binoche, is the best example of Haneke’s fondness for setting up parallel narratives in his movies. There are more stories and layers of meaning in Code Inconnu than there are nights in Hanukkah. -David Beal

Eight Crazy Nights

Will Noah on three films now playing in New York.

Red Hook Summer

Spike Lee's work has always been most successful when it has embraced dialectics: realism and stylization; personal and collective identity; Dr. King and Malcolm X. So it's great news that Red Hook Summer finds Lee at his most schizophrenic, engaging all opposing sides of his artistic persona. He seems to have attempted to forget everything he knows about filmmaking in this project, but of course he can't. The film consequently feels like a young man's film and an old man's film constantly doing battle with each other. Neither of the central characters, a preacher (Clarke Peters) and his grandson (Jules Brown), is sentimentalized or condemned; each one's voice is heard and measured with appropriate weight. Formally, Lee throws in everything and the kitchen sink, valuing spontaneity over polish. Not every idea works; the incongruous soundtrack flops as often as it drives a scene home. Still, the scenes where Lee’s experiments work pack a tremendous wallop, justifying those that fail to cohere. Red Hook Summer might not be a masterpiece, but its willingness to toss the director's handbook out the window in favor of crazed, dueling modes of expression qualifies it as a minor miracle.

Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg seems to have entered a new career phase in which text interpretation is the name of the game. In Cosmopolis, however, instead of A Dangerous Method’s secondhand Jung, he's got Don DeLillo's dialogue to work with, which turns out to be a considerable asset. The simple pleasure of hearing an all-star cast spouting DeLillo's pomo technospeak is reason enough to see the film. The performances are uniformly excellent, including Robert Pattinson, who supplies a surprising degree of varying shades to the robotic character of Eric Packer, a 28 year old stock trader making his way across New York City in a limo as his fortune (and western civilization) collapses around him.  The film is structured as a glacial series of dialogues between Packer and another character, culminating in a confrontation with Paul Giamatti's would-be assassin. Cronenberg cultivates an eerily chilling tone, and finds plenty of material in the text for his directorial trademarks, particularly the way that Packer's limo acts as a semi-permeable exoskeleton, letting in sexual partners and keeping out the reality of the power he exercises. Still, Cosmopolis doesn’t quite achieve the emotional arc it seems to be shooting for.  The film inches close to the dead-eyed sadness of Cronenberg’s Crash, but never quite reaches it. That said, there’s plenty to be overwhelmed by, and perhaps the overall design of the project would resolve into clarity on a second viewing.

Compliance

Notes on The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan) by Will Noah

When Batman Begins, the first entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, was released in 2005, it seemed a minor miracle in the Hollywood landscape.  Here was a piece of blockbuster entertainment by a fiercely intelligent director, one who had directed one of the best American films of recent years (Memento) and seemed capable of bringing serious heft to a comic book franchise.  That film’s Gotham, a nightmare landscape reminiscent of Taxi Driver’s New York or Se7en’s unnamed metropolis, felt more tactile than most cinematic depictions of real urban locations.  Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight, expanded this setting to a dizzying scale, often resembling an epic crime saga more than a superhero thriller.  What this entry lacked in coherence it made up for in full with the presence of Heath Ledger’s Joker, a villain whose crazed nihilism transcended its genre surroundings.  The critical and commercial success of The Dark Knight, along with that of Nolan’s follow-up Inception, have positioned him in some moviegoers’ eyes as a minor deity, shooting anticipation for The Dark Knight rises through the roof.  Unfortunately, Nolan’s conclusion to the trilogy is the worst film he has made, an empty, tone-deaf, overstuffed spectacle that fails to build upon the strengths of the first two entries.

The film finds Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lurking around his manor eight years after the events of the last film.  He has retired the Batsuit, but is spurred into re-donning it about an hour into the film (it’s a long one, folks) thanks to convoluted series of events involving the following characters:

Bane (Tom Hardy), a sewer-dwelling baddie who may be connected to The League of Shadows (they want to destroy Gotham for reasons that people who re-watched Batman Begins again recently probably remember better than I).  At the beginning of the film, he is seen dispatching a plane of CIA agents lead by "The Wire"’s Tommy Carcetti in order to kidnap a Russian scientist whose role was surely meant for Stellan Skarsgard.

Miranda Tate (Marillon Cotillard), a philanthropic love interest with a mysterious past.

Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar with ambiguous allegiances and skin-tight body suits looking for a computer program called Clean Slate (the movie’s got a thing for literalized clichés).

Alfred (Michael Kane), Wayne/Batman’s loyal butler, who apparently at some point in the past eight years developed a mental condition that forces him to speak exclusively in parables.

Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) Gotham’s incorruptible police commissioner, and one of Batman’s few allies.

John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young cop who conveniently ties together dangling plot strands.

I haven’t even mentioned Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, or Ben Mendelsohn’s corporate sleazebag who plays some inscrutable role in Bane’s nefarious scheme.  Nolan spends the film’s first hour juggling these plot strands with no discernible result other than the balls mostly staying in the air; only Hathaway brings the films to life, and she has to fight through some pretty horrendous dialogue.  Things appear to heat up once Bane and his cronies take over the city via an explosion that traps most of the police force underground and hollows out a football stadium.  Though Nolan cripples this scene with a comically on-the-nose music choice, it serves as a reminder that the series has a real flair for staging theatrical acts of terrorism, an uneasy blessing if there ever was one.

Thereafter, the film’s ideological incoherence manages to one-up its narrative confusion by revealing Bane’s revolutionary rhetoric as a front for terrorism.  Part Occupy Wall Street, part French Revolution, the chaos that ensues in the wake of Bane’s upheaval resembles a conservative’s nightmare vision of the popular spirit.  Though many of the film’s early scenes invite us to vent some contempt for the rich, the second half finds us cowering behind a millionaire, cursing ourselves for daring to challenge the status quo.  Nolan’s dark vision of the modern American city felt dangerous and vital in the first two Batman films; here his fatalism comes across as irresponsible and out of touch.  In the midst of this conceptual clusterfuck, the character of Batman/Wayne is lost almost completely.  Nolan’s heroes have always specialized in a weirdly bloodless form of obsession without passion (the most important women in his films tend to be dead ones), but TDKR finds Batman so deeply submerged in the narrative—he literally spends a portion of the film trapped in a hole—that his arc seems perfunctory.  Wayne’s got his own deceased love to mourn, but the obsession that drives his narrative for most of the film is his zeal for the defense of a city.  At this point, it’s difficult to say what Gotham means for Wayne.  Some might say that this motivation was established in earlier films, but even Bale’s trademark intensity seems to scramble for an object throughout the lengthy running time.  One could easily extend the metaphor to Nolan: his franchise has grown to a civic size so overwhelming that he’s lost sight of what drew him to it in the first place.