MATTIAS FREY

Light show

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:12:47 GMT

Jagger and Scorsese start it up in Berlin
The biggest stars of this year’s Berlin Film Festival were neither actors nor directors.

Rock of ages: The Stones find satisfaction in Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light. By Peter Keough

The biggest stars of this year’s Berlin Film Festival were neither actors nor directors. Musicians were the main attraction during a week that featured documentaries about Patti Smith, Gorillaz, Neil Young, Baghdad’s heavy-metal scene, and German beatbox rappers. Madonna showed up to present her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Fisticuffs marred the press screening; grown film critics cried after failing to gain entrance to the packed theater.

The press conference for Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light was, by comparison, a love fest. The diminutive director appeared with the band whose music he has most consistently featured in his work.

“Shine a Light is the only Martin Scorsese movie that doesn’t have ‘Gimme Shelter’ in it,” Mick Jagger quipped to the overflow crowd of journalists.

But why does the Rolling Stones’ music fit so well in Scorsese films?

“The music was certainly part of my life throughout the ’60s,” revealed the director. “But I had never seen the Rolling Stones perform until the early ’70s. So for me the sound of the music — the chords, the vocals, the entire feel — inspired me greatly. It became a basis for most of the work I’ve done in my movies, from Mean Streets and Raging Bull through Casino to The Departed. It’s something that is timeless, very strong, and powerful. It created images in my mind.”

A Rolling Stones movie is hardly a new idea. The band had already attracted such prominent filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard, Nicolas Roeg, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and Albert and David Maysles. What makes an established figure like Scorsese want to portray the most-documented group in music history?

The director answered that question with a correction. “This is not a documentary film. It creates or captures a performance. But I always did [want to make a Stones film]. Back when I heard the songs, I said I want to get that on film one day. It took 40 years. It’s the obscure object of desire, you want to possess it. Making the film . . . rejuvenates me, it keeps the energy going for me creatively.”

A French reporter wondered whether a concert film doesn’t reveal the limits of cinema. No matter how many camera angles are on offer, isn’t the live performance always better?

Peaceful Warrior

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:33:47 GMT

Following the template by numbers
The wise-elder/insolent-apprentice story has been so durable in Hollywood that many scriptwriting manuals teach it as a paradigm. Watch the trailer for Peaceful Warrior (QuickTime)

Who Killed the Electric Car?

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:25:37 GMT

Ably marrying eco-documentary with murder mystery
In 1993, California passed a mandate that in 10 years 10 percent of cars sold in the state would have to produce zero emissions. Watch the trailer for Who Killed the Electric Car (QuickTime)

Our Brand is Crisis

MATTIAS FREY — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:49:44 GMT

Doc raises legitimate questions about the exporting of democracy
Boynton’s restrained vérité reveals the consultants’ video-game mentality — and the violent consequences of their meddling.

The Devil Wears Prada

MATTIAS FREY — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:50:38 GMT

Meryl Streep dominates
If Lauren Weisberger’s bestseller was a Starbucks espresso — overall bland, but hot and quick — then David Frankel’s adaptation is the decaf version. Watch the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada (QuickTime)

Drawing Restraint 9

MATTIAS FREY — Fri, 26 May 2006 13:54:21 GMT

Bloated yet intriguing work from Björk's husband
Oddball performance artist Matthew Barney’s new vanity project is misguided, derivative, and overstated but often arresting.

The home front

MATTIAS FREY — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:51:23 GMT

Justice and guilt at Jewishfilm.2006
Space and place, journeys and returns structure and punctuate Jewishfilm.2006.

Space and place, journeys and returns structure and punctuate Jewishfilm.2006, which will screen April 22-30 at Brandeis’s Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Goethe-Institut Boston. A number of the 15 features, documentaries, and shorts portray exile and diaspora — themes associated with the Jewish experience. However, the films are most preoccupied with establishing and protecting the home.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:58:50 GMT

Questionable methods, questionable subject
Daniel Johnston would seem to confirm Faust’s lesson that genius arises through demonic bargains.

Joyeux Noel

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 16:22:41 GMT

Euro pudding that doesn't taste half bad
On December 24, 1914, French, German, and Scottish infantry units laid down their arms, climbed out of their trenches, and celebrated a no-man’s-land Christmas together.

Music From the Inside Out

MATTIAS FREY — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 17:14:30 GMT

Classical gets its Behind the Music
Through a series of individual and group interviews, Paul Anker explores the head, heart, and bowels of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Banana republic

MATTIAS FREY — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:40:35 GMT

East (Germany) meets least in ‘Rebels with a Cause’
East Germany graced international screens most recently in the Euro-blockbuster Good Bye, Lenin! (2003).

East Germany graced international screens most recently in the Euro-blockbuster Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Iconic of millennial German Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old East Germany), the film cast rising star Daniel Brühl as a TV technician who dupes his frail, socialist mother into believing that the German Democratic Republic still exists. The comedy is predicated on the son’s quest to procure the provincial pickles and unfashionable clothes vanishing as the two Germanys prepare to unite.

Whether one views Good Bye, Lenin! as a serious contribution to post-Communist memory or simply a slick attempt to market Ostalgie, it does correctly analyze the East German condition as a function of material culture and generational tension. The remarkable selection of oppositional and banned GDR films that will screen over the next two weeks at the Harvard Film Archive confirms that the downfall of real, existing Communism in Germany came about more because of bananas and blue jeans — and the resulting discord between children and their parents — than from ideological shortcomings.

DEFA, the state film company, was itself riddled with generational imbalance. Filmmakers in the GDR, often 40 before being allowed to direct their first feature, usually had to cut their teeth on the so-called anti-fascist film, a state-sanctioned genre of historical films that depicted Communist victimhood at the hands of the Nazis, often at the expense of ignoring the Jewish Holocaust. Although many of these films were routine exercises, two examples stand out for the way in which they deploy a modernist æsthetic drawing on international cinematic traditions.

A rare film shown in a beautiful new print, Das zweite Gleis|The Second Track (1962; February 19 at 9 pm) might have been Sam Fuller’s first feature had he grown up in Dresden or Rostock. Station inspector Brock witnesses a robbery but fails to report the culprit; instead he requests a transfer to another post. His daughter grows suspicious and begins to investigate her family’s past. Joachim Kunert’s film is a landmark for its frank portrayal of East German complicity in Nazi crimes, but also for canted shots used for psychological effect. Uncanny touches, such as lightly suggested incest, borrow from the vernacular of Hollywood’s subversive Europeans: Sirk, Preminger, Wilder.

Marebito

MATTIAS FREY — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:50:22 GMT

Rating: 2 stars
With a nubile female vampire, a sci-fi subplot, and a critique of today’s surveillance society, how could the director of Ju-on go wrong?

Zozo

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:04:22 GMT

Rating: 2.5 stars
With Lukas Moodysson in a tailspin of gloomy cynicism ( Lilya 4-Ever , The Hole in My Heart ), Josef Fares has emerged as the savior of mainstream Swedish film.

Wheel of Time

MATTIAS FREY — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 05:55:31 GMT

Rating: 3.5 stars
Werner Herzog’s hypnotic documentary attends to the Kalachakra initiation for Tibetan Buddhist monks in 2002 in Bodh Gaya, India.

Through the Forest | À travers la forêtà

MATTIAS FREY — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:26:46 GMT

This zippy dream of love and loss spins a bare thread of a narrative in 10 kinetic single-take scenes.

Some Kind of Funny Porto Ricans?

MATTIAS FREY — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:10:44 GMT

Claire Andrade-Watkins’s indie documentary portrays the fate of the Cape Verdean community from the Providence neighborhood Fox Point.

The Syrian Bride

MATTIAS FREY — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:01:48 GMT

The iconic image from Eran Riklis’s nuptial allegory is title character Mona crouched alone in a wedding dress, legally unable to move from the small patch of land between the Golan Heights and Syria.

Transamerica

MATTIAS FREY — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:03:09 GMT

Duncan Tucker’s debut feature stars Desperate Housewives ’ Felicity Huffman as the pre-operative transsexual Bree.

Naked In Ashes

MATTIAS FREY — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:45:10 GMT

Thirteen million yogis provide a dramatically alternative example in the face of an increasingly materialistic and technologized India.