By: Henry J. Fromage –
My final dispatch from NYFF combines a few days of watching- but I made sure to get in some good ones by the end.
634. Magellan
This is Filipino maestro Lav Diaz’s first film in color, and first to clock in under three hours (usually significantly more than that). Suffice it to say, I haven’t seen a lot of his work, but will need to make some space to after this. Here he tells the story of Magellan, who would die in Cebu while attempting to circumnavigate the globe (a journey what remained of his crew would succeed in completing for the first time in history). That’s not really the point of this telling, though, as it’s largely told from the perspective of the native peoples Magellan and those around him spent their lives violently oppressing and enslaving. Full of long takes and post-battle scenes with the dead strewn everywhere, it’s a macabre look at what conquest actually is, and just how perverse its celebration really is. Two Beers.
635. Cover-Up
Laura Poitras returns again with this profile of legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke or helped break stories like the My Lai Massacre, Watergate, and Abu Ghraib among many others taking aim at cover-ups and bald-faced lies from the American Government and many other institutions of power. It hasn’t exactly made him popular or well-respected by all, but his ability to find the people with a remaining conscience in the face of evil and attempts at effacing or hiding it is unparalleled. He’s still very much alive and kicking today, with urgent work on Gaza being published now. Poitras shows through his life how essential an independent and adversarial press is to the free functioning of Democracy, and indeed to our hopes at having one at all. Two Beers.
636. Late Fame
Kent Jones returns with this New York-set story of a post office worker and one-time poet whose sole 1979 published book is found by a group of wealthy aspirational writers who then track him down and ply him with praise and wide-eyed respect. Willem Dafoe is great as a man who thought that part of his life is long-dead, but who blooms in the face of this attention, and perhaps resurrects or develops some prideful bad habits to boot. This is a very funny, affecting story of the sacrifices a life of art entails (Greta Lee is also great as an over-the-top working actress who also hangs with these rich boy poseurs), but the reasons many keep at it anyway. Two Beers.
637. Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes
A film being selected as a part of NYFF’s Currents section marks it as the kind of arthouse film that scares off most folks. Not that this interestingly titled Portuguese selection should- but it very much isn’t multiplex fare, either. It largely follows a group of young men who we meet trudging through a swamp, towards, we eventually learn, the ancient ruins of a semi-permanent Roman military encampment that happens to be next to a natural hot springs. They’re all obsessed with some kind of MMORPG set in ancient Greece, which starts to reflect back on their reality in dreamy ways, especially as they discuss their lives and where they might take them. Even that’s too straightforward a description for a film that drifts along at its own unique pace in such a striking (and at times stultifying) way. Three Beers.
