Alex Descas and Claire Denis on the set of 35 Shots of Rum

After jotting down some initial impressions of Claire Denis' wonderful, warm-hearted new film, I sat down for a conversation with Denis in Toronto. As Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times recently, 35 Shots of Rum is "a movie of few words and little psychology that relies mostly on the physical vocabulary of faces and bodies to convey feelings too complex to be verbalized."

That's often true of Denis' films, and when I talked with her I found that this one has a very personal connection, as well. She spoke about the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, about her grandfather, and about the interplay of work and family that appears in Ozu's films, in her own film, and even in her band of regular collaborators.

35 Shots of Rum plays March 13 and 15 at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

Robert Davis: I saw your film yesterday for the first time, and I'm going to try to see it once more before I leave Toronto, just because I always feel like your films take a little bit of time. I like to figure out how to watch them. It's such a beautiful movie.

And what I discovered as I was watching is that it's an homage to Late Spring and Ozu!

Claire Denis: Yes. [smiles] I think I would not have been pushed or—

I've been dreaming for many years of making an homage to Ozu, and this particular film was possible for me to use as an homage to Ozu, because actually it's the story of my grandfather and my mother. She was raised by her father. And once I took her to see a retrospective of Ozu, and she really had a sort of shock to see that film [Late Spring]. That was like maybe ten, fifteen years ago, and I told her, "Maybe, once, I will try to make a film like that for you."

On the other hand I was a little bit afraid, and when I saw Hou Hsiao-hsien's film, the film he made in Japan—

RD: Café Lumière?

CD: Café Lumière, the homage, I thought maybe it's simpler to make an homage to Ozu. Maybe my shyness should be reconsidered. Maybe it's possible.

RD: What was the fear, do you think? Just that he's a master, that he—?

CD: No, my fear was that I'd be fulfilled with my love for his film and therefore not create a real relationship with my film. I realized this was a little bit stupid, because the minute I was in the film and with my characters and actors, I can't say I forgot Ozu, but on the other hand I was concerned by that story, those characters.

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Laika / Focus Features

• Neat: David Bordwell observes that the Coraline animators took an unusual approach to perspective and depth cues. (via Where the Stress Falls)
• Troubling: New Yorker Films is closing. The loss of this major DVD and theatrical distributor, whose roster is heavy with the work of international master filmmakers, could have a significant impact on what we can see in the States. Related: the history of New Yorker Films was discussed on The Leonard Lopate Show two years ago. (via Long Pauses)
• Uncertain: Paul Starr gives the difficult problem of newspaper viability a thorough, rigorous examination in The New Republic. Remember that Roger Ebert called the newspaper film critic a canary in this coal mine. But here's another point of view, about magazines, from Cathie Black.

Visit Daily Plastic tonight to follow and participate in our live commentary of the Oscar broadcast. We promise no remarks on fashion or hair, except in extreme circumstances.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927)

Cynics like me think of the Academy Awards less as a celebration of quality filmmaking than as a promotional tool, both for the nominated films, which coincidentally tend to come into the marketplace just at the time when "Awards Season" hype puts their titles on people's tongues, and for Hollywood as a whole. But it wasn't always so. Announced 80 years ago this week, the first-ever Academy Awards for the 1927-1928 business year were decided upon not by a large voting pool but a small cabal of judges in a smoke-filled room, handpicked by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founder (and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio chief) Louis B. Mayer. The surprising thing is that the winners really were some of the best cinematic achievements of the year.

Louis B. Mayer

Mayer had instigated the creation of the Academy as a means for staving off unionization efforts in Hollywood. As the story goes, his attempts to use MGM workers to construct his new Santa Monica beach house were foiled by a 1926 union contract which made studio laborers prohibitively expensive to employ for outside projects, even those strong-armed by the Big Boss. Mayer was outraged; he had been able to use MGM art director Cedric Gibbons to design his beach house because designers, as well as writers, directors, actors and producers, had not yet organized into guilds. By inviting prominent members of each profession into a fraternity (and it was mainly men at first; Mary Pickford was one of three women among the founding 36 members) known as A.M.P.A.S., Mayer staved off the further alphabet-souping of Hollywood talent into the S.A.G., D.G.A., W.G.A., etc. for several years.

Awards were an afterthought in the initial A.M.P.A.S. meetings, but they soon grew to become a crucial strategy of studio/employee relations. "I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them," Scott Eyman quotes Mayer in his biography of the mogul. "If I got them cups and awards they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created." This quote might help explain why that first year, the statuettes (also designed by Gibbons) were often given out for a body of work, not for a contribution to a particular film. For example, Janet Gaynor won the first Actress award for her work in three films: 7th Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel. German star Emil Jannings won the Actor statuette for two roles he played during his brief stint in Hollywood: The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, which is the only Academy-Award winning performance in what is now considered to be a "lost film" — if you find it please inform the Academy Film Archive!

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Laika / Focus Features

Henry Selick's Coraline

During the opening credits of Coraline, a thick sewing needle, manipulated by a vaguely sinister, vaguely mechanical praying mantis, pushed out of the screen at me as it zigged through the seams of stuffed dolls. Yes, I said, tapping the temple of my theater-issued, circularly polarized 3D glasses: these things are workin'.

But then a funny thing happened. Or didn't happen, actually. Once the mechanized seamstress passed the 3D test with flying colors, the movie rarely poked out at me again. Maybe the button-eyed character known as the Other Father reached his spring-loaded hands toward Coraline (and the camera, and me) a couple of times, but for the most part this is not the kind of 3D movie that tries to exceed the limits of the screen and get in your face. Instead, it does something I'd never seen before, something far more captivating: it maintains the consistent illusion that we're looking at a moving diorama just on the other side of the screen.

The in-your-face effects of many 3D films have a pretty narrow field of movement, approximately the size and shape of the old Tempest arcade game, a pyramid seen through the bottom whose edges will instantly jerk needles or fists or pistols back from your nose and flatten them into two dimensions whenever the hovering objects touch the illusion-destroying frame.

Tempest

It's a Good Life, third segment of Twlight Zone: The Movie, by Joe Dante

Instead of working to break out of the rectangle, artificially, Coraline establishes the frame as a window that looks into a three dimensional world, which frees the viewers' eyeballs to roam that space looking for details in the corners. Sometimes the screen is a window pane with raindrops running down its surface — between the audience and the moving figures — and sometimes the pane is lifted to give an unobstructed view. I suppose the roving camera and the edits themselves remind us that we're watching a movie, but within each shot it's easy enough to imagine that you're sticking your head into the box and moving it around, with the camera as your surrogate.

That world, by the way, is a dark and scary one that borrows a few ideas from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (and, I'm told, from MirrorMask, which is based on a book by the same author as Coraline, Neil Gaiman), but it finds horror on the other side rather than absurdity. Coraline is closer in spirit to that wonderful/terrible world in the Twilight Zone movie where the family is forced to watch cartoons and eat marshmallows around the clock, or else face the wrath of sweet, adorable Anthony. Here, understimulated, imaginative Coraline, left by her busy parents to explore her new house, opens a small plastered-over door that leads to an alternate universe. Everything is the same over there, but much better. Her parents are attentive, the food is delicious, the colors are warm and vibrant, and the neighbors are fabulous, bawdy entertainers. But the Other World has a dark side, too. For instance, you really shouldn't leave. And the Other Mother wants to eat the souls of children.

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Unmade Beds by Alexis Dos Santos

I've posted a final scorecard for this year's Sundance film festival over at Paste. I have a few more capsules to wrap-up the coverage, and then I'll be back here at Daily Plastic with a backlog of goodies. Just you wait.

Murray Close/Warner Bros. Pictures

Brendan Fraser and Eliza Hope Bennett in Inkheart

“Since the dawn of time, storytellers have enchanted,” a deep-voiced narrator tells us at the beginning. But rather than hearkening back to the dawn of time, Inkheart references The Wizard of Oz and especially Harry Potter. The Wizard of Oz references are explicit, as Brendan Fraser plays Silvertongue, a man who can make fictional characters appear in real life, just by reading a book. So he reads L. Frank Baum’s famous story, and a tornado and flying monkeys appear.

The problem is that Fraser’s “gift” also makes real people disappear into the book, which is what happened to his wife. So he, with a cutie tween daughter in tow (played by Eliza Hope Bennett), is searching for a copy of the novel that holds said wife imprisoned. But Fraser isn’t the only one looking for that book. Paul Bettany plays the morose Dustfinger, who was summoned by Fraser but desperately wants to get back into fiction-land so he can be reunited with his wife. And then there’s the villain Capricorn, who likes being in the real world and only wants to force Fraser to keep reading from various books, so as to get more wealth and power.

No one mentions Harry Potter in the film, but that was clearly on the minds of its producers and screenwriters. Inkheart tries to summon the magic and utterly fails. Part of the problem is that the movie feels cheap, with substandard special effects, chintzy production design, and lots of scenes where people just stand around and talk. Not that dialogue is necessarily bad, but it is when it’s merely a way to move the story forward without having to conjure up a new set.

Fraser is apparently the Hollywood go-to guy for acting in front of a green screen, and he’s fine here. Bettany is largely wasted, but he doesn’t embarrass himself. Ditto for Helen Mirren. And while I’m sure Miss Bennett looks smashing on the commercials that air on Nickelodeon, someone will have to explain why Brendan Fraser’s daughter speaks with a British accent. Suffice it to say, I was not enchanted.

Stefana McClure

Don't Look Now: closed captions to a film by Nicolas Roeg, red transfer paper mounted on rag, 18.2 x 27 inches, 2004

I wrote this short column for Paste Magazine some time ago and then forgot about it for a while. It's about the unique and curious work of artist Stefana McClure, and I'm glad to see it resurface on the web. Ironically it was cut from the magazine in the great 21st century paper shortage with which we're now all familiar.

Laura Magruder/IFC Films

Demian Bichir and Benicio Del Toro in Che

Director Steven Soderbergh has often alternated between big-budget Hollywood flicks (Out of Sight, Ocean’s 11) and smaller, indie fare (Schizopolis, Bubble). Che, his newest film, has elements of both. It has a big star in Benicio del Toro, a sexy topic in the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and an epic scope as Che helps to overthrow the Batista government of Cuba. But it’s also a small movie, as Soderbergh intentionally limits the film’s scale and focuses on the difficulties of creating a revolutionary movement.

This is particularly true in the movie’s second half, which skips ahead to 1966 when Che went to Bolivia in the hopes of replicating the success he had in Cuba. But as Soderbergh methodically shows, the circumstances were different in Bolivia. While the Cuban leftist political parties banded together with Castro and Che’s military movement, the communist party in Bolivia was skeptical and refused to lend support. While the Batista government was largely incompetent in how it ignored the revolution fomenting in the mountains, the Bolivian government, with the help of the CIA, didn’t make the same mistake. And while Che was able to work with a wide variety of charismatic leaders in Cuba, he was largely alone in Bolivia and was never able to create the momentum or sense of inevitability that occurred in the Cuban countryside.

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I had a smile on my face the entire day yesterday. The entire day. I marveled at the sea of people on the Mall. Looking at the Lincoln Memorial, I pondered how far my country has come and how far it still has to go. I was filled with a strange joy watching Malia and Sasha and thinking how happy I’ll be to watch them grow up and smile over the next eight years. I chuckled at how the sight of Cheney in the wheelchair reminded me of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. That led me to think of the ways in which President Obama is strangely like George Bailey (stopping the run on the Savings & Loan, indeed). I smiled.

I was of course moved by Obama’s speech. Even if it wasn’t his finest, it was still a beautifully constructed, powerful statement of America’s democratic values and aspirations. I shouted “Amen” to the lines “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and “Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.” If nothing else, I felt inspired that my president is a man who can thoughtfully craft his own Inauguration speech and deliver it with such power. I kept smiling, and cried a bit, too.

Walking around Hyde Park, I tapped into the electricity that continues to buzz through my neighborhood even after our First Neighbors have departed for somewhat warmer climes. I sat down with two retired black women and talked about what this day meant to them. I thrilled at the sight of Barack and Michelle walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. I still can’t get over how much I love the sight of them together. I teared up as I listened to Jesse Jackson talk about the significance of this day. I even sat around and watched Obama and Joe Biden watch the parade. What does it say about me that I was watching someone else watch? It means I didn’t want the day to end. I was still smiling.

Of course, the day eventually passed. But I woke up this morning to look at photos, to relive the awesome and historically transformative occasion. I read newspaper accounts from around the world and reveled in how America’s status has been reborn. I pinched myself and called to mind that the long nightmare of the last eight years is finally over. That thought alone will have me smiling for weeks.

A friend from Egypt has been in town the last few days, and I was trying to explain how the economic events of the last several months have not only created a horribly difficult situation; they’ve caused a crisis of confidence, a fear that borders on despair. But yesterday, whether it’s rational or not, that mood of fear seemed to be swept away. I’m enough of a realist to know that one man can’t make that much of a difference, no matter how much power he has. And the difficulties confronting President Obama are so immense I’m not entirely confident he’ll succeed. But I can think of few people I would rather have sitting in the Oval Office. The fact that he’s there today has put another smile on my face.