Complete first draft for Filmmaker Magazine.
Over the past eight years, Jon Bois has risen to become one of the key pioneers of documentaries made for the Internet. As the creative director of Secret Base, the YouTube channel of the sports blog network SB Nation, his work across three series — Pretty Good, Chart Party, and now Dorktown, which is co-written by Alex Rubenstein — takes often unconventional and lesser-known sports stories as a jumping off point for increasingly ambitious yet deftly handled portraits of some of Americana's most crucial mainstays. By focusing equally on the minutiae of statistics, the highs and lows of a game, and the many human dramas in sports teams and the cities that surround them, Bois and Rubenstein establish an aching and potent investment in the narratives that they craft, finding continuity and suspense in what might otherwise come across as the arbitrary nature of a career or season. Paired with this attention to narrative construction is Bois's facility as a director, crafting a distinct aesthetic through a combination of voiceover, Muzak, stock footage, and a form of animation generated by placing images and charts in Google Maps and virtually flying around them. These abstract spaces become loci of both familiarity and surprise, the emotional tenor of a moment often determined by a sudden appearance of a visual element that would be mundane in any other circumstance but whose meaning has been made clear by Bois and Rubenstein's pre-established context. While Bois and Rubenstein's work has been deservedly feted since at least his first major Dorktown series The History of the Seattle Mariners in 2020, it wasn't until the second half of 2022 that they began referring to their projects as films, with two features that vividly represent two extremes of their craft. The first was Section 1, a fleet 42-minute piece that covers the events of a single date, December 19, 1976, where loss of life due to a plane crash was avoided due to a lopsided Baltimore Colts-Pittsburgh Steelers game, which emphasized the urgency of the situation and the heroism/sports prowess of both teams. In contrast, The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts is a sprawling two-and-a-half-hour saga chronicling the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, the worst team in NBA history despite being owned by the one and only Michael Jordan, which unfolds in arguably the funniest and most absurd video that Bois has ever made. Both amply capture the peculiar, singular skill, joy, and pathos of one of the most exciting documentary filmmakers working today.
Complete first draft for In Review Online.
As the star of Hong Sang-soo has improbably grown, the traditional (and often erroneous) stereotypes lobbed against his films have stayed stuck in the mud. None of these are fair, strictly speaking, impressions largely drawn from loglines and ignoring the often-wild differences that arise between his films, especially those in this current period inaugurated sometime around 2018. in water [sic], which unusually (but fittingly) premiered in the Berlinale Encounters section rather than in his customary competition slot, provides a stellar example of how deceptively flexible his approach has become even as his recent concerns about inspiration and creation of art remain constant. At only 61 minutes, in water is Hong's shortest feature yet, and like his other mid-length film from just two years prior, 2021's Introduction (in the Berlinale competition), it stars Shin Seok-ho — the fresh-faced youth who has risen to provide a compelling contrast to past Hongian men — as Seoung-mo, an actor who seeks to direct a short film for the first time. In order to do so, he travels to the rocks of Jeju Island with his friends — Nam-hee, an actress (Kim Seung-yun), and Sang-guk, a former filmmaker (Ha Seong-guk) — in tow. Without a script, they intend to spend a week at a rented house, all paid for by Seoung-mo, as he searches for script material on the beach and in the alleys. Even more than other recent Hong films, its presentation is deceptively spare, with much of the on-screen conversation coming out of two people getting to know each other while the would-be director sits pensively, pondering the surroundings. Even more so than The Novelist's Film, in water explicitly takes Hong's way of artmaking as its raison d'être; he mentioned that he shot the film in a week himself, and his increasing shouldering of almost all production responsibilities mirrors the skeleton crew on display here. So, it's fascinating to see how, if not his mindset, then his process is imparted onto someone on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of life and experience; while Hong has worked at an unceasing pace, Seoung-mo describes himself as scared, only now finally breaking out of acting to pursue his own inspiration. This perspective does not feel like an imposition: unlike Introduction, there is no adult balance to counterbalance the faces of youth, but the continually adrift director, reflective beyond his years, carves out a world-weary niche all the same. Getting deep into a review of in water without mentioning the film's greatest gambit, shooting most of the film (every exterior and a majority of the interiors) out of focus, might seem foolish, but it does not (and should not) capture everything that distinguishes this film. But it is constantly beautiful, and purposefully inconsistent in the degree to which the shots are out of focus, a slight change in gradation that becomes especially noticeable as the characters are placed or move closer or farther away from the camera. There are certain "pay-offs," but the blur remains principally compelling in its reflection of Hong's own recent eye troubles, which have overlapped with his decision to lens all his films himself. It serves as a constant reminder of his presence, yet one that does not detract from the film in the slightest. Instead, it serves to further essentialize the nigh-archetypal nature of his three young people. At their core, specific characterization matters little in the face of what Hong is interested in exploring, and the depth of feeling, arising from questions relating to a belief in that which exists both within and apart of one's perception, is conveyed as masterfully as ever.
Incomplete first draft for Sight & Sound.
Not my ten favorite films (that would be too easy), but instead ten sui generis masterpieces that I adore and admire deeply: each of these films stands — or deserves to stand — as a monumental work in both the history of film and my relation to the medium.
I had to establish some ground rules: only one film per director, only films I had seen more than once.
Five films from Greater China (one from the mainland, one from Hong Kong, three from Taiwan), four films from France, and one film from South Korea/the infinite worlds that Hong Sang-soo occupies, which all seems right.
No American/English-language-only films, partly by accident and partly on purpose: maybe they'll make a resurgence for me in the next ten years, but this feels exactly true to my interests at the moment.
Impossible to name *all* of the omissions, but indulgent homage must be paid to the films and filmmakers I had to leave out. Not all (or most) of these are masterpieces, but all of them keep me wondering still and I can't imagine my cinephilia without these; think of it as a cracked self-portrait, full of unity and contradictions, which is what obsessive listmaking boils down to. Not including the filmmakers who I have chosen for my top ten, with many films in very recent memory, and in no particular order and grouping:
Mulholland Dr. (my favorite film) and Twin Peaks: The Return and David Lynch generally, Platform and the work of Jia Zhangke aka the most important filmmaker alive, Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia), Ozu Yasujirō's Late Spring, Max Ophuls's Letter From an Unknown Woman, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and much of Fritz Lang, Paul Vecchiali's Femmes Femmes...
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Notorious, Lau Kar-leung's Dirty Ho and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Perceval le Gallois and all of Éric Rohmer, Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck, Sparrow among other choices from Johnnie To, Beijing Watermelon and so much of Ōbayashi Nobuhiko, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl, Guru Dutt's Pyaasa, Mariano Llinás's La Flor, Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort, Abel Gance's Napoléon, Peter Watkins' Punishment Park, Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, Bruce Baillie's All My Life, Li Han-hsiang's The Love Eterne, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, Todd Haynes's Carol, C.W. Winter and Anders Edström's The Works and Days, Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express and Anatahan...
Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, Christian Petzold's Transit, Peter Chan's Comrades: Almost a Love Story, Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town, Marie-Claude Treilhou's Simone Barbès or Virtue, Adam Curtis's The Trap, Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon, Kurosawa Akira's Seven Samurai and High and Low, Ōshima Nagisa's Death by Hanging, Zhu Shengze's Present.Perfect., Jerzy Skolimowski's Le Départ, Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Huang Weikai's Disorder, Patrick Tam's Nomad, Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and Like Someone in Love, Jon Bois's The Bob Emergency, Louis Feuillade's incomparably exciting Les Vampires and Tih-Minh, Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, Michael Snow's Wavelength, Nicolas Rey's differently Molussia, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, Pedro Costa's Horse Money...
Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap, Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness, Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues and Shanghai Blues, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's Manakamana, Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Serge Bozon's La France, Nadav Lapid's Synonyms, Miguel Gomes's Tabu, Mizoguchi Kenji's Sansho the Bailiff, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle, Satyajit Ray's Charulata, Jafar Panâhi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This Is Not a Film, Alexandre Koberidze's What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Pierre Léon's L'Idiot, Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Claire Denis's Beau Travail and 35 Shots of Rum, Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip and Her Smell, Roberto Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Marguerite Duras's India Song, Heat and Miami Vice and too much from Michael Mann, Eduardo Williams's The Human Surge, Naruse Mikio's Yearning, Anno Hideaki's Neon Genesis Evangelion finale...
François Truffaut's Two English Girls, Hal Hartley's Trust, Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, Wai Ka-fai's Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, Jordan Belson's Allures, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Cure, Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke's Asako I & II and Drive My Car, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud, along with the collective oeuvres of Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jacques Tourneur, Saïto Daïchi, Howard Hawks, Claude Chabrol, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, John Woo, Takahata Isao, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Miyazaki Hayao...
Complete first draft for Cinema Guild.
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon: You Can’t Go Home Again Sean and Evan, thank you so much for incorporating me into this trio of pieces. As you both know, your Hong correspondences for both Seattle Screen Scene and MUBI Notebook were incredibly influential to me in my understanding of Hong, and it’s a daunting task to try to find my place within this great dynamic. I’ve always been a sap, especially for Hong, whose extensive reuse of motifs, techniques, and actors makes his body of work immensely warm and comforting (while never predictable) to me; indeed, my favorites are generally the ones that end on a happier resolution, where the pursuit of cinematic and narrative experimentation and the rush of romance are totally linked. But all three of these films, especially the one that I’m writing about, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, end on more irresolute notes, where some form of miscomprehension or unfulfilled dream infuses the coda, even as they make grand use of his middle period humorousness. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, however, is something of an outlier compared to the other two films (though, notably, they are the only three films whose English titles mention a specific character). Those two are the key Jung Yumi works, using an ironclad structure and her innate expressiveness to convey comedy and convolutions alike, each pairing her with Lee Sunkyun and suggesting that Jung is a vivid projection of each character’s expectations and desires. But Haewon is played by the innately sad yet cagy Jung Eunchae —in her first of only a few Hong performances — and the film has perhaps the most amorphous structure that Hong has ever used, moving from encounter to encounter as Seongjoon, her past lover and the film’s other lead (played by Lee again), drifts in and out of the story. Apart from a series of Haewon’s diary entries that place the events of the film between March 21 and April 3, us Hongians are left free to sort out how the film operates. The opening of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon suggests a pivot for Hong: for seventeen minutes, it follows Haewon working through her relationship with her mother to an extent greater than any Hong protagonist thus far. This unfolds in two stages: a delightfully surreal dream where she essentially imagines that Jane Birkin (as herself) is her mother figure, and then an extended sequence where Haewon spends time with her actual mother before the latter moves to Canada. But while this unusual narrative element is firmly planted by the end of this section, the rest of the film barely invokes familial relationships, instead shifting back into the realm of fraught romance that the Jung films so thoroughly focus on. These relationships, however, aren’t nearly as clear as the love triangle of Oki’s Movie or the three suitors in Our Sunhi. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon instead moves in leaps in bounds: during the first section, Dongjoo, a bearded bookseller, attempts to flirt with her, then disappears from the film; Haewon and Seongjoon have several breakups and reunions; there is an entire section devoted to her quasi-meet-cute with Joongwon (Hong regular Kim Euisung), the strange professor from San Diego who is apparently rewriting a script for Martin Scorsese. The deeper the Hongian delves into Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, the stranger it becomes. The most obvious manifestation is the third dream sequence, the longest in any Hong film, which lasts more than thirty minutes and encompasses many of the above storylines. While the first and second function akin to those in other Hong films, as brief and absurd representations of the main characters’ desires, this one operates along thornier lines, and the correspondence of new characters — only Seongjoon and an old man (perennial Hong figure Gi Ju-bong) appear in the rest of the film — to Haewon’s state of mind is utterly ambiguous. Perhaps the clearest sign of this is the reappearance of Joongsik and Yeonjoo (repertory players Yoo Joonsang and Ye Jiwon, respectively), one of the main couples in Hong’s 2010 film Hahaha. Their situation, despite the breakthrough in their extramarital relationship in the denouement of that film, has mostly stayed the same: Joongsik still takes pills for depression and remains married, despite his vow to live with Yeonjoo. Their relationship is one of contentment, signaled by a conversation that, after briefly lapsing into disagreement, gently reconciles them, but it points to a certain sense of emotional stasis that Nobody’s Daughter Haewon embodies. In a sense, all three films share this trait: Oki’s Movie takes a retrospective view on the relationships and posits that artistic representation can only go so far; Our Sunhi offers literal liberation to its main character, but not her male suitors who wander in the shadow of her image. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, meanwhile, ends up with a much less apparent image of Haewon. It’s certainly not a coincidence that Joongsik and Yeonju’s conversation and an earlier, drunken dialogue between Seongjoon and his students at a Korean barbecue restaurant after Haewon has gone to the restroom, are two of only a handful of exchanges in Hong’s oeuvre that don’t involve the main protagonist. They both feature disagreements about the nature of her character, in direct contrast to the consensus formed in Our Sunhi. She is called aristocratic, and even her ethnicity — some characters say she’s mixed because of her taller stature — is called into question; these issues are not so much resolved as dropped in favor of other concerns. Haewon herself is only somewhat forthcoming. At the bookstore café that becomes one of the recurring settings across these odd sequences, she is told that she can pay as much as she’d like for the books. Her response is that “it’ll show who I am,” and in the second instance Joongwon responds that she should “pay enough not to show” herself. She nevertheless declines to do so, and that inability to communicate herself, even in situations that seem to demand it, manifests itself across her interactions. While she isn’t recessive in the manner of Yoo’s lead performances, she constantly deflects people’s attention to themselves or others, fatalistically noting to Seongjoon that “death resolves all” — she is seen reading Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, a bleakly funny sight gag in this context — and refraining from either confirming or denying the attributes that her screen partners ascribe to her. Her eyes, full of quiet determination, seem to indicate some sort of drive, but to what ends are kept inscrutable. The title of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, then, could be taken in numerous directions: as an expression of abandonment; as a self-proclaimed divestment from ownership; as a recognition that none of these people know who Haewon is, least of all herself. The inclusion of Joongsik and Yeonju seems to suggest that the only way to understand Haewon is by invoking other Hong films — she and Seongjoon reconcile in the dream after both this encounter and her meeting with the old man, three presences that hearken back to past (and future) Hong films. But even that has its limits, especially because of their firm ensconcement inside the dream with no indication that the couple exists except in Hahaha and in Haewon’s imagination. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon ends with one of the most mysterious lines Hong has written: “Waking up, I realized he was the nice, old man from before.” Who “he” is and who the “nice, old man” is are left up the viewer to decide. The natural inclination is to assume that the former is Seongjoon — since the preceding scene was her reconciliation with him — and the latter is Joongwon, or perhaps Gi’s character, but what the statement actually means, in either a narrative, metaphoric, or even dream logic context, leaves the viewer hanging, and Haewon back where she started. Since this concludes with the dream sequence, the development or change in mindset afforded to other Hong protagonists, including Haewon herself with the Jane Birkin dream, is not granted. Instead, the thinking passes to the Hongians, who interpret all these little beats into something at least a little more legible and less mysterious. In that conversation between Joongsik and Yeonjoo, as they look at a flag, the latter observes that it allows them to see the wind, an observation the former reacts to with endearing amazement. Mid-period Hong, which is my favorite as well, can be said to operate in this same way: the reasons for these occurrences, for these romantic entanglements, for this structure, are fundamentally as difficult to truly understand as the wind is to see. What Hong offers is a means of giving a container to it, each experiment another daring way to witness how these elements, untethered from normal narrative methodology, collide with each other. Especially with the hazy canvas that Haewon provides, he finds more pathways in order to get closer to the truth of the situation. But that might be ascribing way too much overt purpose to a director so free in his own methodology. Evan, what do you think?
Complete first draft for In Review Online's best of 2022 feature.
For an oeuvre so relentlessly dedicated to (and associated with) a commercial cinema, full of thrills and cheers, Steven Spielberg’s fantastical and earthly worlds have always carried an undercurrent of pain. His latest film, The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man, foregrounds this searing emotion across the two or three forces that have defined his mammoth shadow on the American film industry: his awe at the power of the moving image, his parents’ divorce, and his Jewish heritage. It’s certainly no mistake that The Fabelmans possesses only Spielberg’s fourth writing credit (shared with Tony Kushner), as his first three entries all rank among his most evidently personal and feed into their successor’s DNA: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about a man who forsakes his family for a spectacular adventure; Poltergeist, concerning the spectral histories menacing a suburban home; and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which brazenly mixes science-fiction fabulism with Oedipal reveries. A similar level of daring animates The Fabelmans, necessarily transforming what could be a nostalgic evocation of movie magic into something far knottier. Even something as simple as the trick that his stand-in Sammy Fabelman (an uncannily vivid Gabriel LaBelle) uses to simulate a grenade explosion is thrown into doubt by the discerning viewer, a question of whether the veteran director added a little something extra despite the air of amateurism. The opening scene, a recreation of Spielberg’s first experience in a movie theater — equal parts wonder and terror, more real than real — is followed by a scene of Sammy in bed, trying to calm himself with the dull thrum and green glow of an oscilloscope; much later, that sound and image will accompany the last moments of his grandmother, in sync with the pulse he can see in her veins immediately before she dies. Such privileged images and dramatically ironic touches help structure The Fabelmans, which could come across as neat were its gaze not so sprawling, were Spielberg not willing to dive down rabbit holes into his past (real or imagined). Case in point: two exhortations by near-mythic figures — in a film already dominated by Michelle Williams’s deliberately stylized performance as Sammy’s mercurial, otherworldly mother Mitzi — speak both in unison and at cross-purposes. Sammy’s lion tamer great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) stresses that the artist will be torn in two by art and family; John Ford (brilliantly embodied by David Lynch, in one of the greatest bits of stunt casting of the century) begins his abbreviated conversation with the budding director by exclaiming that the movie business will tear him in two. Two old hands, one justly described “the greatest film director who ever lived” (an appellation that movingly rings true for both the signifier and the signified) and the other a possibly real, possibly fictional perennial outsider; together they reach towards the balance of art and commerce that has provided Spielberg with some of his greatest successes and most vehement criticism. Boris’s warning becomes a test that gets applied to practically every scene to follow; Ford’s bitter reflection is left unaddressed but hangs in the air, even managing to render the jubilant ending and its sublime meta-joke with a slight foreboding, maybe even regret. Second-guessing and the unknown lie everywhere in The Fabelmans, so many little threads and insinuations that are ultimately unanswered. Burt Fabelman, as embodied by Paul Dano with ultimate poise, generosity, and sad fatalism as a counterbalance to Williams’s vivaciousness, is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. Sammy bases his greatest triumph, Escape to Nowhere, on his father’s war stories, something which the elder doesn’t comment on, instead choosing to throw himself headlong into his electronics and computers. In a relative paucity of screentime, Spielberg sketches out a storyline that comes within striking distance of The Magnificent Ambersons, capturing a genius ushering in the future which will have consequences both positive and negative. Sammy (and Spielberg) of course is no George Amberson Minafer, and there’s very little comeuppance that he deserves. But, despite the fact that Burt, not Mitzi, gets to bestow the final blessing on the genius in the making, it’s hard not to recall that his invention will one day help birth the systemic degradation of the industry his son has worked so hard to maintain. It is to The Fabelmans’s credit that such considerations are both text and subtext, that its ideas about creativity and the march of time are so hammered home amid an exhilarating and touching experience, that the most sobering and tragic ramifications appear only in hindsight, when looked upon from a distant vantage point. If that isn’t movie magic, what is?
