Interview

You're probably watching the inauguration right now. But what's behind those innocent eyes, that confident voice, that immense popularity? With hope, change, and transcendence taking their places on the political stage today, some are already taking bets on when something will go terribly wrong. With that in mind I wanted to share some of my favorite Political Conspiracy films of all time:

Z (1969)

Part military-coup exposé, part cinema-vérité reenactment, part Nouvelle Vague-tinged political drama, Z is greater than the sum of its fairly interesting parts. This is Costa Gavras' definitive statement about repressive, power-hungry bureaucracy and his nostalgic memorial to the romantic failure of liberal do-gooders. In an unnamed country very much resembling Greece in the 1950s, a popular, intellectual, leftist candidate (Yves Montand playing Obama's ideological doppelganger) is about to rectify his country's wrongs. Only one thing stands in the way: the powers that control everything wrong. The ensuing assassination and the duel between investigation and cover-up is one of the great procedural-thriller experiences in cinema.

Two of the greats: Charles Denner, chased to the music of Mikis Theodorakis.

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Back in early 2007, with nary a thought of our inevitable economic doom, when the world was peachy keen and every night was a cabaret, a group of renegades under the leadership of director Ronnie Bronstein had the audacity to unleash a movie so negative, so frustrating, and so dismal that it engendered a unique form of hostility, the likes of which had not been seen from an audience since Alan Vega snarled and whipped his chain on stage in the early 70s. Frownland never got an official release in our sunny United States, and only played for a few weeks in Existentialist Paris. Tonight it screens at UCLA, free to the public, at a time when viewers may finally be ready for its utter bleakness.

There are a multitude of reasons to see Bronstein's debut film; unrivalled in its dedication to awkwardness and anxiety, the film follows a lowly New York man (maddeningly portrayed by Dore Mann) in his lowly New York existence. There's no point in saying too much; it is a character study, a mood piece, reality gone really bad. Like Wiseman meets Cassavetes meets Suicide meets barbiturates, Frownland shares some aesthetic features with the best parts of 1970s America, but as anyone who reads the newspaper will tell you, its suggestion that miscommunication and absolute failure are at the core of our country is definitely of the now.


Frownland plays at UCLA's Melnitz Hall at 7:30 PM tonight. If you don't live in the LA-area, the inevitable DVD release should not be ignored.

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Now recovered from the holiday, embrace a film that combines family life and psychosis, the pain of domesticity and the  subsequent suppression of primordial desires. Featured in a revival run at Film Forum, is Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), starring James Mason as Ed, a fragile schoolteacher and caring family man with chronic physical pain. Ed's cold and distant doctors believe the only cure is the "experimental" and dangerous drug Cortizone. (How far we've come!) Once Ed begins his medication, he finds that this miracle drug doesn't just cure "an extreme inflammation of the arteries" but also does away with symptoms like insecurity, adherence to social mores, and human empathy.


It's little surprise that this newfound freedom comes to conflict with some of the more idyllic aspects of 1950s Americana. But the film's tale of breakdown is so dismal that it's hard not to remain engaged. From low camera angles to restrained tracking shots, Ray's handling of the dramas and traumas creeping under the everyday is carefully composed to fashion intensity from the quotidian. And unlike the melodramatics of similar 50s cinema (Douglas Sirk, Elia Kazan) there is an admirable subtlety here. The 50s never seemed as subtly restrictive as they do here; liberation from family life ever seemed so disastrous. Ray's movies work in a truly emotional space, devoid of Sirk's knowing detachment or Kazan's condescending moral complexity.

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Interviewmagazine.com spent a decidedly non-denominational holiday, but we're back for Boxing Day.

The sun never sets on Boxing Day, the British-based holiday for acknowledging St. Stephen, and shopping. In America, less so—but we still have the day off. Apropos:

Raging Bull (1980): The best performances, the best camera moves, the best fight sequences, the best on-screen paranoia, the best cold water down the undershorts, the best joe pesci mustache. Raging Bull is king of the cinematic ring.

If you're still in excess of holiday cheer, see Rocky II (1979), which is far more depressing than it has any right to be. In contrast to the feel-good original, this installment focuses on Rocky's glaring inadequacies, offering the clearest distillation of his dyslexia, unemployable skill set, and poor money management. Talk about humbling: The champ ends up working at the meat factory where he once gloriously punched hanging meat racks to "Gonna Fly Now." Nonetheless, Sylvester Stallone's script is great, and simultaneously heart-wrenching and knowingly comical. If you're in for a marathon watch also Rocky IV (1985), which offers the best prediction of how American sticktoitiveness would topple the soulless Soviet Empire. As a refugee of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic myself, this could be my personal favorite. That communist android can obliterate a punch-measuring machine, but he can never defeat the land of the free.

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