#Avowed by the moonlight movie

The movie asks whether Americans unable to share a country or a conviction can at least agree to share a symbol (whether it’s the Stars and Stripes or an unmerited military funeral), and even Linklater and Ponicsan seem divided and uncertain on the question. Fortunately the movie belongs mainly to its fine lead actors - Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne - playing buddies from the Vietnam war who reunite for a funeral in 2003 after one of them loses a son in Iraq. Having no desire to revisit the adolescent, macho-military hijinks of The Last Detail (1973) or read the Darryl Ponicsan novel on which it was based, I had some forebodings about this screen adaptation of Ponicsan’s 2005 sequel, even though the movie was cowritten and directed by the smart and resourceful Richard Linklater. What he actually broadened was his film vocabulary, especially his employments of long takes and camera movements.… Read more » LAST FLAG FLYINGįrom the Chicago Reader (October 12, 2017).

But Mysteries of Lisbon shows that he may have gained as much from these bigger budgets as he lost, and I’m not speaking about pocket change. This is why some of these latter films disappointed me, pointing towards what Ruiz himself frankly described to me in a 2002 interview as a “capitulation”. It was disconcerting to see a passage from a 1997 article of mine about Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) quoted in some of his mainstream obituaries: “Ruiz is the least neurotic of filmmakers he doesn’t even seem to care whether what he’s doing is good or not.” Not because this was false when I wrote it but because it related to my earliest encounters with his work and its seeming challenges to film commerce, not to his better known big-budget efforts such as Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999) and Klimt (2006). It seems like the gift of Ruiz never stops giving: a film cosigned by him and his widow Valeria Sarmiento suggestively called The Wandering Soap Opera turned up on a few South American ten best lists for 2017 as well as MUBI.

Written in October 2011 for the Blu-Ray released by Music Box Films. How much she and we privilege mind over matter and cinema over reality - or vice versa - has a lot of bearing on what’s derived from the encounter.… Read more » Raúl Ruiz’s Interactive Testament: MYSTERIES OF LISBON And if we factor in the implied definitions offered above by Akerman regarding what’s reality and what’s cinematic, what’s going on in people’s minds and what’s going on in front of a camera and microphone, then we have to acknowledge that what she chooses to compose represents a kind of uneasy truce between all four elements (or five elements, if we regard sound and image as separate). This is a term that needs to be understood in its plastic as well as its musical meanings: a visual object that has to be framed in space, a musical object that has to be composed in time. If I had to describe the art of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) in a single word, I think I’d opt for “composition”. But when you show what’s going on in people’s minds that’s very cinematic.” “When you try to show reality in cinema, most of the time it’s totally false. Written for Chantal Akerman : Four Films, a DVD box set released by Icarus Films on March 29, 2016.