As a follow-up to The Yellow Sea and The Chaser, it should come as little surprise that Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing is a slippery beast to define, opening as one thing and ending as something completely different, while also becoming several very different things on the road there. It is a furiously weird and inventive film, and thanks to those qualities being stretched over a two-and-a-half-hour-plus runtime, it’s also something of an exhausting journey. But the bonkers ride is definitely worth it…
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Gimme Danger (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
Jim Jarmusch directing a film about The Stooges is one of those perfect matches of artist and subject. Though the resultant documentary, Gimme Danger, is, at the very least, good, there’s the persistent sense throughout that something’s missing…
Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny (Louis Black/Karen Bernstein, 2016)
A couple of years back, critic-turned-director Gabe Klinger made a film called Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater. Instead of a traditional documentary tour of the respective filmographies of his director subjects, Klinger instead presented a series of extended chats between Linklater and his (perhaps unexpected) friend Benning, the latter being an older filmmaker better known to fans of the experimental and avant-garde. It allowed you to get a sense of Linklater’s ideas as an artist through more laidback means, rather befitting of the nature of his films, as he goes about doing various activities with Benning, such as hiking or playing catch, offering anecdotes to the other artist, instead of delivering filmmaking mantras to camera in an interview set-up.
Flash forward to 2016 and now we have Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, a biographical portrait of Linklater alone that’s certainly much less innovative in terms of form, and ultimately feels less insightful. The personal connection isn’t lost, though. Dream Is Destiny is co-directed by Louis Black, a founder of the South By Southwest festival that has played host to many of Linklater’s films across his career. Occasional actor Black can also be found in Linklater’s breakthrough film Slacker, credited as Paranoid Paper Reader…
Read Write Hand 