vulvaauteurism:

Vamps, Amy Heckerling, 2012.

Definitely one of my favourite shots from the film. So what is this all about? Well. I find that so much of the vulgar auteurism discourse is focused on male directors and gendered genres like action films and thrillers. This is my feminist response to that. It’s time to reclaim ’90s rom-coms. Enjoy and follow.

Opening the digipak for Oscilloscope’s sister set of Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’s Only the Young and Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s Tchoupitoulas reveals a striking pair of images. On the left, the three Zanders brothers from Tchoupitoulas are framed on the rocky shore near the Mississippi river, looking out at the body of water that physically prevents them from returning home after missing the last ferry. On the right are two of the three subjects in Only the Young, Garrison Saenz and Kevin Conway, relaxing on a rusty roof, framed by the desolate bushy plains surrounding them.

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What Richard Did has such a portentous title that its easygoing narrative setup feels initially deceptive. Lenny Abrahamson’s film follows Richard Carlsen (Jack Reynor), a good-natured, popular 18-year-old rugby player whose bright future is crushed when he inadvertently kills a teammate, Conor (Sam Keeley). Throughout its first half, the film carefully establishes Richard’s honorable qualities, though it never puts him through any particularly challenging moral tests. As a natural-born leader he’s wont to protect his friends, though sometimes being an alpha male means he plays as aggressively off the field as on it. These dual tendencies attract the attention of Lara (Róisín Murphy), who eventually leaves Conor for Richard, after which the two boys remain uneasy friends.

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Amy Seimetz’s debut feature Sun Don’t Shine conveys a brilliant mental space that is at once both familiar and unfamiliar. The film portrays the irritability brought on by inescapable summer heat, the heavy hazy air that makes everything seem hopeless and stupid and nasty, and a scientifically proven phenomenon that reportedly explains the rise in violent crime during the summer. Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley) are stuck in an overheating car on a road trip to the Everglades, but this isn’t an exhilarating couple’s getaway—these folks are on the run. Sure, the summer heat can make us do crazy things, but in the case of Crystal and Leo that also includes murder.

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As far as swan songs go, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic is a fascinatingly garbled tune that teems with formal inconsistencies and yet still manages to carry a pained melody. Closing his Alain Delon-starring trilogy of gangster films, which includes Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, Un Flic, released one year before Melville’s premature death, certainly doesn’t feel like it should be the final work of a director who was carving out a distinct aesthetic groove late in his career. The film asks more questions than it answers, challenging Parisian modernism, playing provocatively with Melville’s leitmotif of the criminal death wish, and carrying strong homophilic subtext.

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Intolerable Cruelty is by no means the least-liked Coen Brothers film; it’s not even their least-liked screwball comedy (that honor goes to the equally underrated The Hudsucker Proxy). The film received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release in 2003, but its timing was very pertinent with regard to the criticisms laid against it. Sandwiched between the generally well-liked and understated The Man Who Wasn’t There and the not-so-successful The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty felt like a frivolous exercise in witty gender one-upmanship, achieving neither the instant success of Fargo or O Brother, Where Art Thou?or the gradual cult appreciation of The Big Lebowski. The resounding success of No Country for Old Menremained an unimaginable four years away. By the early 2000s the Coens had garnered enough acclaim to merit intense scrutiny for each new work, and Intolerable Cruelty was deemed only a begrudgingly acceptable film, though its aspirations to be as monumental as the works of their influences (namely, Preston Sturges) faltered. Supposedly.

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One of the seminal works of the Iranian New Wave, Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Still Life is an eminently poignant exercise in existential temporality, framed with a neo-realist simplicity. The film follows the tedious life of Muhammad Sardari (Zadour Bonyadi), a railroad guard whose sole job is to align and realign the railroad tracks of a crossroad several times a day. He lives a simple life in a small box-like house with his wife (Zahra Yazdani), a carpet weaver. One day he is informed of his retirement, an event that displaces him not only of an income but also his home.

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It’s a Disaster is an unfortunate title that invites unimaginative jabs about being an apt description of the film itself, though this apocalyptic dramedy isn’t so much catastrophic as it is disappointing. Peppered with witty non sequiturs and snappy performances, the film flirts with big ideas about adult relationships, but fails to locate any gravitas about its characters’ existential or psychological crises.

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Wearing the worn conventions of yesteryear’s television-grade documentaries, No Place on Earth is a remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking. The doc opens with the discovery of a cave containing some not-so-ancient artifacts by talking head Chris Nicola, an American cave explorer who stumbled upon the objects while spelunking in Ukraine. For many years Nicola was unable to find an explanation for the finds, which couldn’t have dated back more than several decades; its secrets weren’t pre-history, but living history, in the words of Nicola.

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Like The Artist and Tabu, Blancanieves is part of a recent upward trend in silent cinema homage, reimagining the Brothers Grimm tale of Snow White in ‘20s Seville, following a young woman named Carmen born under tragic circumstances. However, Blancanievesjoins those two films in name only, not spirit, lacking their emotional and intellectual substance.

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