New York Stories

The (Rest of the) Best Films of 2011

2012-01-15T01:22:00.024-06:00

After listing The Ten Best Films of 2011 in an earlier post, I want to talk about the year's other great movies - and there were many. In fact, my second Top Ten are all films that would easily make the final ten in a weaker year. 2011 was a particularly strong year for movies, in my opinion, and all fifty-six of these titles are worth your time and consideration (and believe me - plenty of worthy films were left off the list entirely).

11. Shame (Steve McQueen)

Shame is an uncomfortably vivid and raw portrait of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a sex addict in New York City. Oh, but the film is about so much more, touching on our fear of emotional intimacy in the twenty-first century and examining addiction and self-abuse more profoundly than any film since Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995). Director Steve McQueen shoots most of the movie in long, unbroken takes that are extraordinarily uncomfortable and effective. Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, as Brandon’s sister, give two of the year’s best performances.

12. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

In the midst of an almost unbearable summer full of superhero garbage and brainless sequels, Woody Allen released Midnight in Paris only seven months after the release of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, his 2010 offering (which, although critically maligned, I found every bit as profound and affecting as Midnight in Paris). Owen Wilson gives one of his best performances as Gil (the ‘Woody’ character), an American writer visiting Paris with his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her unbearably uppity parents. Gil, bored with his status as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, yearns for the Paris of the 1920s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso walked the streets and tossed ideas around in cafes. And so it happens that, while Gil is walking alone through the city after midnight, Paris magically morphs into that era, and Gil quite literally hangs out with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the rest of the gang. Along the way, he falls in love with Picasso’s mistress Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, who perfectly embodies all of the beauty of Paris in any era. With the playful and fantastical premise, Allen is free to wrestle with large ideas in a very funny manner (not dissimilar to his work in 1985’s wonderful The Purple Rose of Cairo).

Along the way, Allen takes playful jabs at the current state of Hollywood screenwriting, Tea Party dimwits, and pseudo-intellectuals alike (Michael Sheen is perfect as that guy – you’ll know the character once you see him). More importantly, it’s a wonderful movie about nostalgia, a force so strong and bittersweet that Allen has devoted an entire film to the subject. Gradually, our protagonist learns that all people feel disillusioned with their own time and place, and secretly yearn to live in the idealized past, no matter the current era. It’s Gil’s (and Allen’s) own discovery of this truth that lends Midnight in Paris its poignant insight. For this particular Woody Allen fan who holds Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) close to my heart, I mean it when I say that Midnight in Paris is as wonderfully poetic, sad, touching and funny as anything Woody Allen has ever made.

13. Beginners (Mike Mills)

Beginners is one of the most heartfelt movies I’ve seen in a long time, and it features two of the most touching love stories of the year – the first, between Ewan McGregor and his dying father, Christopher Plummer; and the other, between McGregor and Melanie Laurent. In any other year, Beginners would have easily placed very high on my top ten list. Plummer is deservedly winning many of this year’s Best Supporting Actor accolades.

14. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)

Expertly directed by Bennett Miller and featuring brilliant performances from Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Moneyball opened exactly one year after the release of David Fincher's brilliant The Social Network - another talky, fact-based account of recent-year events written by Aaron Sorkin, who co-wrote Moneyball with Steve Zaillian. Both movies are relentlessly fascinating, and they serve as rare examples of high art and popular entertainment. If every major studio release were as smart and compelling as Moneyball, it would be a golden age for cinema. Pitt gives yet another outstanding performance (after his extraordinary work earlier this year in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life) as Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who, in 2002, changed the game of baseball by using new and radical methods to select players for the team. Moneyball works as just about everything - a rousing sports movie, a powerful character study, an involving look inside the politics behind baseball and, most notably, superb entertainment for all audiences - baseball fans or not.

15. Young Adult (Jason Reitman)

For some people, high school is easily forgettable, a simple opening chapter to a larger and better life. But in Mercury, Minnesota, high school is the life experience that defines everyone and follows them to the end of their lives. Mavis (Charlize Theron), the heroine of Jason Reitman’s incendiary and brilliant Young Adult, escaped Mercury and fled to the big city – Minneapolis – at a young age, becoming a somewhat successful author of young adult novels. Divorced, unhappy and a bitter alcoholic, Mavis returns to Mercury at the opening of Young Adult to win back her now-married high school boyfriend Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), who she believes is unhappy in his marriage. Yes, Mavis suffers from delusions, and yet the film doesn’t ignore the delusions and imperfections of the small town people, as well. At one point, Mavis tells her parents that she thinks she’s an alcoholic. Both her mother and her father laugh it off, and we immediately understand a bit of the genesis of her problem. But Young Adult isn’t afraid to embrace Mavis’ delusions and even bypass that whole redemption nonsense by the film’s end, opting for a startlingly honest and bold closing chapter.

This is a sad film with characters who reek of desperation, and the result is a little uncomfortable (it shares a number of similarities, in fact, with Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece The King of Comedy). Diablo Cody wrote the screenplay, and for my money, she eclipses the work she did in Juno (2007). The movie is harsh and oftentimes a little bleak – but the film – and Theron’s character – are also right on the money. The last thirty minutes of Young Adult are as biting, risky and audacious as anything I’ve seen in a mainstream comedy in years.

16. We Bought A Zoo (Cameron Crowe)

I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo brought tears to my eyes. A deeply personal filmmaker, Crowe ranks among my favorite directors, and his movies – from Jerry Maguire (1996) to Almost Famous (2000) – are full of heart, hope and absolute sincerity. We Bought A Zoo also features many perfect soundtrack moments (a signature of Crowe’s pictures) with Cat Stevens’ Don’t Be Shy, Bob Dylan’s Buckets of Rain and a powerful original score by Jonsi adding to the warm atmosphere. In the center of the picture is an honest and soulful lead performance from the endlessly talented Matt Damon that stands alongside the other moving portraits of single fathers this year (The Descendants, Moneyball). With a wonderful supporting cast (Thomas Haden Church! Peter Riegert! Scarlett Johansson!), We Bought A Zoo is a genuine movie about a family in grief moving forward. The human comedies of Cameron Crowe, Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman are the kind of pictures I want to make, and I'm overjoyed that all three of those filmmakers released new films this year.

17. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Ryan Gosling – who, if you recall, deserved last year’s Best Actor Academy Award for Blue Valentine (2010) – continues his streak of excellent performances with this thrilling neo-noir directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Drive is a rewarding, pulpy masterpiece – partially resembling both the Los Angeles noirs of Michael Mann and the 1980s romances of John Hughes (that Hughes comparison comes straight from Gosling himself, in fact). There’s nothing ironic about the film, though – it’s meant to be taken seriously, and it features one of the most fascinating and complex antiheroes of the year.

18. The Ides of March (George Clooney)

George Clooney’s The Ides of March is the sort of film that almost doesn’t exist anymore – a serious adult drama starring Hollywood’s finest working actors released by a major studio. Ryan Gosling undergoes a Michael Corleone-esque transformation as a naïve staff member for an inspiring presidential candidate (Clooney) battling to win the Ohio Democratic primary. It goes without saying that the performances from Gosling, Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are outstanding.

19. Warrior (Gavin O’Connor)

The personal drama among estranged brothers, Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton), and their alcoholic father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), paves the way for a rousing series of Mixed Martial Arts tournaments in Warrior. Brendan fights for his family’s survival (they are in desperate need of money), while war hero Tommy fights for the family of a fallen soldier. Paddy trains Tommy, while desperately seeking to regain the love of both of his sons. Warrior is a heart tugging, emotionally satisfying sports film that will easily resonate with audiences – I heard cheering and applause regularly in my theater during the second half of the movie. But while the film’s fighting scenes are wonderfully directed, it’s the human drama – the time that director Gavin O’Connor spends outside the ring with his characters – that makes Warrior such a powerhouse. Hardy and Edgerton, two excellent actors, are given the spotlight, and they are never anything less than brilliant. But Nolte’s performance is perhaps the best of his entire career. There’s an incredibly touching scene near the end of the picture in which Paddy has relapsed into his alcoholism, and Tommy finally breaks from his stone exterior and comforts his father. It’s more likely to make you weep than anything in the film’s stunning finale.

20. Rampart (Oren Moverman)

Woody Harrelson gives the performance of a lifetime as a corrupt Los Angeles police officer in Rampart, an outstanding film from Oren Moverman. “I’m not a racist,” Dave Brown (Harrelson) says. “I hate all people equally.” He may be telling the truth, and the most disturbing part of Rampart is watching Dave as he tries to do the right thing, in his own perverse and corrupt way. A decidedly different but equally powerful take on the Bad Lieutenant films, Rampart is its own modern-day Raging Bull (1980) or Taxi Driver (1976). Harrelson and Moverman previously collaborated on 2009's The Messenger, which established Moverman as one of the great new filmmakers.

21. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)

The Artist is a wonderfully charming film. Any hesitation on the part of audiences to see a silent, black-and-white film will hopefully be eradicated by the overwhelming critical praise the film has received since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

22. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)

Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender are absolutely wonderful in this involving and incredibly engaging film from director David Cronenberg. The deep focus shots are stunning.

23. Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog)

I saw Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss at its Opening Night Gala presentation at the DOC NYC Festival. I was particularly excited for this Herzog film, as it explores the story of a death row inmate in Huntsville, Texas convicted of murdering three people, and his accomplice, who is serving a jail sentence of forty years. The film, which studies the impact of the murders on the surrounding community, is astonishingly powerful, and Herzog allows us to see the humanity of everyone involved in this tragedy – the victims, their family members and even the murderers themselves. There is so much sadness and regret in the film, and yet Herzog shows us that beyond this horrible tragedy, there is still life and love among the survivors. It's rare that I see a movie where I feel so strongly for so many characters - or subjects, I should say – all of them so honest and so human. In the live discussion after the film, Herzog spoke about his stance on the death penalty and the process behind making the film. After the discussion, my friends and I talked briefly with Mr. Herzog about Texas and his Rogue Film School, which I'm hoping he brings back to New York City in the near future.

24. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

To quote Roger Ebert, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is "the first film I've seen that evokes what must have been the reality of wagon trains to the West." A gorgeously filmed, immersive mood piece starring Michelle Williams (the best actress of her generation), Meek's Cutoff is destined to become an art-house classic.

25. 50/50 (Jonathan Levine)

How much did I love 50/50? When Joseph Gordon-Levitt tells Anna Kendrick, "I wish you were my girlfriend," my heart melted a little bit.

26. Everything Must Go (Dan Rush)

When I say I wish I had made this film, I mean that wholeheartedly. Everything Must Go is a wonderful, moving portrait of an alcoholic, with a lead performance from Will Ferrell that should do for him what Punch-Drunk Love (2002) did for Adam Sandler.

27. Margin Call (J.C. Chandor)

Everything about J.C. Chandor's debut feature film Margin Call is absolutely first-rate, particularly its brilliant screenplay and outstanding performances from Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. When I saw the film at New York’s Angelika, Chandor spoke afterward about the challenges of making a movie about the “bad guys” on Wall Street. I eagerly anticipate his next work.

28. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

Sean Durkin's film Martha Marcy May Marlene is a major triumph not only for the filmmakers and stars Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes, but also for the Tisch School of the Arts, from which a wave of new talent has made its way into cinemas.

29. War Horse (Steven Spielberg)

After a three-year absence, it's nice to have Steven Spielberg back with a new directorial work. War Horse is a beautiful and crowd-pleasing picture, and the battle scenes are quite outstanding.

30. Carnage (Roman Polanski)

Roman Polanski's adaptation of God of Carnage is just as much fun as the Broadway stage version (performances from both are outstanding - I don't see a reason to compare). While the film lacks the immediacy of a live performance, we do get a claustrophobic sense of what house arrest must have been like for Polanski.

The Rest:

31. Another Earth (Mike Cahill)

32. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)

33. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)

34. Terri (Azazel Jacobs)

35. Submarine (Richard Ayoade)

36. Rango (Gore Verbinski)

37. Source Code (Duncan Jones)

38. The Guard (John Michael McDonagh)

39. Tabloid (Errol Morris)

40. The Beaver (Jodie Foster)

41. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird)

42. Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Glenn Ficarra)

43. My Week With Marilyn (Simon Curtis)

44. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

45. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)

46. Our Idiot Brother (Jesse Peretz)

47. Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times (Andrew Rossi)

48. Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)

49. Hanna (Joe Wright)

50. A Better Life (Chris Weitz)

51. The Muppets (James Bobin)

52. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)

53. The Future (Miranda July)

54. Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon)

55. The Conspirator (Robert Redford)

56. Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta)

My Semester with the Tisch Dean's Scholars

2012-01-07T01:50:00.016-06:00

During my Fall 2011 semester at New York University, I was once again very honored to participate in many exciting activities with the Tisch Dean's Scholars. I have written in previous posts about many of the amazing opportunities that this program has offered over the past three years - including the Scholars' private luncheon with Alec Baldwin, tours of nearly every department at Tisch, our invitations to Broadway performances (including Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and David Mamet's Race) and meeting and talking with the actors after the performances, including Robin Williams and Kerry Washington. In this post, I want to highlight some of the amazing opportunities we were given this fall.

The past semester opened with a Dean's Reception in the Dean's Conference Room at Tisch, where returning scholars, including my good friend and fellow film student Nicole Cobb, welcomed the Tisch Dean's Scholars Class of 2015 and met with our wonderful Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell. I was unfortunately unable to attend an early September weekend trip to Dia: Beacon (because of a mandatory weekend safety tech for my Intermediate Narrative course). But on Wednesday, September 14th, I joined the scholars for an extraordinary New York Mets game at Citi Field stadium in Queens. Not only did we have our own private suite (courtesy of the extremely generous Cohen family) and private box seats for the game, we were joined by Dean Campbell, Associate Dean Louis Scheeder, Associate Dean Robert Cameron and film professor Yemane Demissie (my advisor at Tisch) for the game. We were served a delicious dinner and watched a great game between the Mets and the Washington Nationals with the best possible seats in the stadium. Not only was this an extraordinary experience for the scholars to spend time together, but it was also a great opportunity to get to know these fantastic deans at Tisch. Dean Scheeder, for instance, is a brilliant director and professor (the founder and director of The Classical Studio, among many other accomplishments), but he also knows everything about baseball. Sitting next to him during the Mets game, I learned more about baseball than I could have ever imagined.

Later in September, the scholars were invited to a dinner at Cafe Espanol, a very famous Spanish restaurant on Bleeker Street. Aside from these amazing outings, the regular Dean's Scholars meetings are held in the Tisch Office of Student Affairs at 726 Broadway. In October, the upperclassmen scholars shared our work with the younger scholars. In my case, I screened two of my Sight and Sound: Film projects from my sophomore year. In November and December, we were given private tours of both the Tisch Dance department and the Drama department. On Thursday, November 10th, the scholars experienced an evening with NYU Photography professor Shelley Rice, where she "[led] a lively discussion [and] debate on social media and interactions through technology," as described by one of our fantastic and dedicated leaders, Professor Chris Chan Roberson.

On Thursday, November 17th, the scholars were invited to a dance performance by the amazing HT Chen and Company on Mulberry Street. We were served dinner at the historic Chen Dance Center, and before and after the performance, we were offered a chance to talk with Mr. Chen. During the actual performance, warm green tea and food were readily available on small tables next to our seats. It was an outstanding dance performance, and another incredible New York experience about which I wouldn't have known if it weren't for the Dean's Scholars program.

This is somewhat unrelated to the amazing opportunities provided by the Dean's Scholars program, but on Wednesday, November 2nd, my good friend Jeremy Keller invited me to the DOC NYC Festival's Opening Night Gala presentation of Into the Abyss, the latest documentary from legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The event was held at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, and Mr. Herzog, one of the greatest living filmmakers, participated in a discussion after the screening. I attended the premiere with Jeremy not only excited to see the powerful new movie from an iconic director, but also with the hope of meeting and talking with the man himself.

As Jeremy and I walked into Skirball, Mr. Herzog stood near the front of the lobby, talking with one of our friends who also attended the screening. Both before and after the movie, Mr. Herzog was an extremely approachable man and kindly fielded many questions from the admirers surrounding him. Jeremy and I arrived in time to grab some perfect seats in the auditorium, and as soon as Into the Abyss started, I was absorbed by the documentary. I was particularly excited for this particular Herzog film, as it explores the story of a death row inmate in Huntsville, Texas convicted of murdering three people, and his accomplice, who is serving a jail sentence of forty years. The film, which studies the impact of the murders on the surrounding community, is astonishingly powerful, and Herzog allows us to see the humanity of everyone involved in this tragedy - the victims, their family members and even the murderers themselves. There is so much sadness and regret in the film, and yet Herzog shows us that beyond this horrible tragedy, there is still life and love among the survivors. It's rare that I see a movie where I feel so strongly for so many characters - or subjects, I should say - all of them so honest and so human. In the live discussion after the film, Herzog spoke about his stance on the death penalty and the process behind making the film. After the discussion, my friends and I talked briefly with Mr. Herzog about Texas (Nicole, who attended the Opening Night Gala, is also from Texas) and his Rogue Film School, which I'm hoping he brings back to New York City in the near future.

I hope to write soon about some more of the amazing experiences from my Fall 2011 semester. I am grateful to the Tisch Dean's Scholars program for providing so many incredible opportunities every semester. By the way, if you're interested, here's my friend Shaun Kim's freshman year Frame and Sequence final project - an old relic from the spring of 2010, in which I appear. Take a look:

The Making of "The Wheels"

2011-12-29T02:44:00.025-06:00

Writing, directing and producing my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels was a long and fascinating process that began well over a year ago, in Professor Selma Thompson’s Fundamentals of Visual and Dramatic Writing class, where I first wrote the screenplay for The Wheels as a class assignment in the fall of 2010. Originally, the film took place almost entirely in a Ferris Wheel cage, but Professor Thompson and the class assisted me with creative changes that ultimately resulted in a final script with which I was very happy. Professor Thompson, knowing that this was a particularly personal piece and something that I hoped to shoot at New York University, specifically helped me refine the screenplay so that it could potentially get approval from the NYU insurance office. This meant rewriting the Ferris Wheel scene such that the Ferris Wheel never actually moves or operates in the film – for if we needed to shoot the movie in a moving Ferris Wheel, we would have a far more difficult time finding a location and receiving insurance certification from the university.

During the spring semester of my sophomore year, I wrote and directed a short film outside of class titled With Love, Marty. I asked most of my friends who had crewed on that picture to return to work on The Wheels the following semester – including my producer, Erica Rose; director of photography, Benjamin Dewey; and sound mixer and sound editor, Bobb Barito. Having assembled a large part of my crew over the summer, I spent time during July and August writing letters, making phone calls and contacting amusement parks in the Tri-State area – mostly in New Jersey, Brooklyn and upstate New York. On my birthday, I heard back from Dennis Vourderis, the owner and proprietor of Deno’s Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, offering me the opportunity to shoot at his location. This was perfect - Deno’s Wonder Wheel was my first choice as a location (as their Ferris Wheel cars are exactly what I had in mind).

The immediate difficulties were obvious – we needed to shoot at Deno’s Wonder Wheel before Columbus Day Weekend, the expected closing date of the Wonder Wheel for the fall. Mr. Vourderis and I settled on a shooting day of Monday, October 3rd – for a six-hour shoot. This meant shooting nearly six pages of material in six hours – which, at first, seemed nearly impossible. In addition, the shoot was scheduled so early in the semester that I quickly realized that I must have everything prepared long in advance during the month of September.

Still, even though I arrived to New York City in late August and hit the ground running with the pre-production process, I did not expect some of the many challenges that came immediately. After visiting Deno’s Wonder Wheel and taking extensive set photographs on Labor Day weekend, I attended the first day of my Intermediate Narrative production class to learn that students were not allowed to shoot their films until the weekend of Friday, October 21st per Tisch School of the Arts guidelines. Fortunately, having emailed the Executive Director of Production Studies, Gay Abel-Bey, over the summer and pre-approving my October 3rd shooting date, I was technically in the clear to move forward and shoot on that date. Thanks to the incredible generosity of Ms. Abel-Bey, my professor Josh Sternfeld, Production Supervisors Jeff Stolow and Ted Wachs, an arrangement was made so that I could have an early Safety Tech from Mr. Wachs before my first day of shooting. However, Professor Sternfeld warned me that if I was going to go ahead with my plan to shoot on October 3rd, I would have to move fast and furiously to ensure proper insurance approval, transportation, fundraising, casting, rehearsals and finding a way to shoot a large part of the film efficiently and quickly. Because the alternative meant finding another location (something that I didn’t particularly want to do), I decided to plow ahead. Benjamin Dewey and I met, and we prepared a shot list and style of shooting that would make it possible to shoot six pages in six hours. I created an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for The Wheels, shooting a Promo Video over the weekend and beginning the fundraising campaign twenty-six days before our first day of shooting. In those twenty-six days, I raised $1331.00 – almost double the amount of my $750.00 goal. Because I was shooting my film long before anyone else, not as many people were flooded with Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaign contribution requests for other films, which was a blessing.

I started working on the lengthy production insurance approval process, which meant creating a cast and crew contact sheet; drawing floor plans and finding maps of the location; visiting Deno’s Wonder Wheel again, taking more location photos and labeling them accordingly; finding maps to the hospital, police station and firehouse nearest to the location; creating a specific, shot-by-shot shooting schedule with my Assistant Director, the great Matt O’Brien; working out a specific, item-by-item budget with my producer; describing in detail what equipment I would use from the Intermediate Narrative allotment and where that equipment would be staged during the shoot; turning in an equipment Pick Sheet to the NYU Production Center; creating a Call Sheet for the first day of shooting; making a rental reservation for a moving truck from Budget Van Manhattan, with my driver and second Assistant Director Mike Cheslik; providing proof of one million dollars worth of liability insurance from Budget Van Manhattan; making a detailed pick-up and drop-off schedule for October 3rd; and detailing any red flags or potential production dangers in the script. All of this information needed to be documented and completed in about a two-week period, so that I could turn in the information to Professor Sternfeld, who in turn gave it to Mr. Stolow, who then officially cleared my production for approval a few days later. Only after Mr. Stolow approved the production could I file for insurance and send all of this information over to the NYU insurance office. Students are not allowed to shoot until they have received insurance certification from NYU – and, in my case, the insurance office emailed me questions about potential red flags before giving me approval. Generally, you should have your production checklist ready to submit to the insurance office a full two weeks before you shoot, although, at that time, my film was the only project that the NYU insurance office had to inspect.

I also began assembling a crew of students who were able to shoot on a Monday – this was a little difficult, as many students have class on that day. Furthermore, I was simultaneously planning my second day of shooting, which was to take place on the weekend of October 21st (when I would have normally shot my film if I did not have this extraordinary location and the permission to shoot early in the semester). A further complication was the availability of crew members for both days of shooting – for instance, I had promised to work on several of my friend’s films in other Intermediate Narrative classes, and it wasn’t until I had been assigned specific shooting weekends for my crew in class that I realized that Benjamin, Bobb and I, in particular, would have overlapping shooting days.

In the midst of this production process, I also had to focus on the most important aspect of the film – the casting. I held three days of auditions at the Todman Center for Film and Television, and after hearing many actors read for both roles, I ultimately cast Daniel Hasse, a nineteen year-old Tisch sophomore, as the ‘boy,’ Harry. Although Harry is written as a much younger character, I felt that a slightly older actor would be more capable of capturing and understanding Harry’s complex emotional arc in the film (not to mention the fact that, considering all of the other non-stop production concerns, it would have been a monumental challenge to cast a minor in the role, which would have resulted in even more paperwork and parental supervision on set). The actor I cast as John, the father, unfortunately dropped out of the film less than two weeks before we started shooting – on the evening of our first rehearsal, in fact. Luckily, it was a tough decision choosing between two different actors for the character of John, and once the first actor dropped out, I immediately called the other actor – Tom Corbisiero – and asked if he would be available to play the role. In the end, the first actor dropping out was a blessing in disguise – I couldn’t be happier with Tom’s commitment, professionalism and, most importantly, his wonderful performance. He signed on right away without hesitation, and he joined Dan and me for four rehearsals in the span of one week – and that’s a real commitment for an adult actor with a day job. The rehearsals were spectacular – these two actors worked very well together, and we had enough time to explore these scenes thoroughly.

In the midst of rehearsing with Tom and Dan (and assembling their costumes, as I knew I wanted Tom in a blue jean jacket and Dan wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap), Matt, Benjamin and I traveled back to Coney Island and scoped Deno’s Wonder Wheel, taking a last look at the location and addressing any shooting concerns. Mr. Vourderis and his son, who supervised my crew and me during the actual shoot, were incredibly kind and helpful throughout the entire process, particularly in regard to my requests for a specific Ferris Wheel car, the exact set-up of the water balloon game and the time it took to get them the insurance certification from New York University.

Meanwhile, Professor Sternfeld suggested particular shots and gave some fantastic notes about the script itself, which is an easy thing to forget about in the rush toward production. In short, I feel much of the success I had with this picture is attributable mostly to the pre-production period. It was a stressful September, but having secured the location over the summer was an excellent thing. Despite the last-minute replacement of an actor, I feel I succeeded most during this pre-production phase (especially with the help from the NYU administration – they made all of this possible).

The first day of shooting on Monday, October 3rd was very smooth. After so many rehearsals with the two actors, I was certain that the relationship at the center of this film, between a father and his son, would be wonderfully acted. However, during our last rehearsal, I asked one of my Assistant Directors, Mike Cheslik, to take notes. After that last rehearsal (which Benjamin filmed), Mike and I re-watched the recording of the rehearsal and made specific performance notes. Because Mike knew the specific things I was looking for in the performances, he was able to help me articulate and note what I loved versus what I didn’t love in the final rehearsal. On set, I asked him to keep the list of acting notes we made the previous night handy, and check in with me every once in a while to make sure the performances matched what I liked best during the rehearsals. Basically, I wanted Mike to work as an Assistant Director in the sense that he would actually be assisting with some of the directing – I thought this would be a good idea, as we had such limited time to shoot at Deno’s Wonder Wheel, and I didn’t want to sacrifice the great performances for the sake of time (it’s easy to plow forward during a shoot and assume that you have everything you want performance-wise – only to find that you needed that one more take in the editing room later). Mike’s position was kind of an experiment, but it wound up working wonderfully. He was honest with me when he thought that the actors didn’t quite have what I had wanted, and as a result, he helped me keep my priorities straight both on the first day of shooting and on Sunday, October 23rd – after all, I wanted more than anything to have rich, believable performances at the center of this film.

Now that some time has passed and The Wheels is well into the post-production period (I edited my own cut of the film, and then handed it over to my friend Jonah Greenstein, who is a much better editor than I am), I have been able to reflect about my experiences on set. In terms of my craft developing in the coming years, I hope to keep pushing myself technically in terms of my filmmaking. I come from an acting background, and so my primary concern will always be the quality and believability of the performances. Luckily, Benjamin Dewey is a brilliant cinematographer, and he is always giving me great ideas about how to film a particular scene. With The Wheels, I do think I conveyed early on to Benjamin what I wanted in terms of camerawork – a hand-held, gritty, realistic approach – but, as a director, I want to be equally interested in camera and performance. I do think I made progress in this department on The Wheels compared to my last movie, but I can do better.

If I can draw any lessons from this production experience, it would be that pre-production and rehearsals are the most important ingredients in making a successful movie. And, to be honest, there are still lessons I am learning with this particular movie – for instance, working with Jonah in the editing room was a fascinating experience. I was initially opposed to a major cut Jonah made in an early scene in the film – an entire exchange of dialogue was cut – and I had to determine if it actually worked better for the movie without the scene, or if the scene actually added something to the movie (in the end, Jonah was right - I was a little too attached to the footage, and it didn't particularly add anything to the story).

Overall, I learned so much about making a movie with the help of the Tisch School of the Arts and my wonderful crew, and I cannot thank Professor Sternfeld, Mr. Stolow, Mr. Wachs and Ms. Abel-Bey enough for their tremendous support and help throughout this process. I am very happy with The Wheels and the experience I had making the movie this semester – it was an incredible opportunity.

The Best Films of 2011

2011-12-27T15:40:00.027-06:00

Every year, when I compile my best-of-the-year list, people ask me, when did you find the time to see all of these films? The answer is, Thursday. Nearly every weekend this semester, I was working on a film shoot. Somehow, I ended up with a small window of time on Thursday afternoons, and so I carefully tried to take advantage of that time to catch up with the new releases. 2011 was an incredible year for films. For the first time in ages, I can honestly say that every single movie in my top twenty-five were considered at some point for the final top ten list.

1. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)

When watching Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo, it’s as if my love for Scorsese has come full circle. I first fell in love with him – in obsession with him, really – when I was eleven years old, when I watched VHS copies of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976) almost back-to-back. On a visceral and emotional level, I had never seen anything like these pictures. These first encounters with Scorsese occurred only a few months after the death of my father, and in a way, the events are forever linked in my mind. My eyes were opened to a different kind of world – a place where pain, obsession and guilt were always present, and the only way to express this pain was through cinema.

Although every one of Scorsese’s pictures is extremely personal – after all, that’s what’s so effective about his films – Hugo may be Scorsese’s most personal film of all. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a young boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station in the 1930s, discovers that an automaton left for him by his recently deceased father (Jude Law) may unlock the mystery behind George Méliès (Ben Kingsley), an unhappy elderly man who owns a toy shop in the train station. What Hugo and his newfound friend Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), Méliès’ goddaughter, gradually discover is that Méliès is one of the original pioneers of cinema, the director of over five hundred pictures and a revolutionary filmmaker. However, most of his films are believed to have been destroyed and melted at the rise of World War I, and Méliès, a broken machine without a purpose, resigns from life and fades into obscurity – until Hugo, who understands the pain of having one’s hopes and dreams disintegrate into flames – sets out to restore Méliès’ work.

Ah, film preservation – Scorsese’s most passionate cause, and the real subject of Hugo. The film is all about time, cruel time that batters away at celluloid. As the clocks tick-tock away in Hugo, the memories of our lives are slowly dying, the celluloid burning into ash and the preservation of our past decaying. But how can we let time destroy the magic and power of the cinema, of our memories?

The film gets you caught up in the magic of moviemaking, to the point where the audience gasps in astonishment at the beautiful remaining print of Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon (1902), screened by film scholar Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), who worships Méliès, but, like many, believes him to be dead – until Hugo and Isabelle prove otherwise. Watching Hugo with an audience, there were further gasps of awe when Méliès – in one of the most visually arresting and beautiful flashback sequences I have ever seen – splices together a cut in one of his early films. It had never occurred to me that so many people would not have known the process behind film editing, but there you go.

To say that Hugo is the finest use of 3D technology that I’ve ever seen doesn’t do justice to what Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson achieve with this picture. I don’t particularly like 3D, and yet the visual bravura of Hugo has convinced me that, when utilized by a master filmmaker and treated as an artistic device, it is a major cinematic innovation, on par with the innovations of Méliès and the Lumière Brothers.

This movie is so rich – not just visually, but emotionally – that even after four viewings I am still overwhelmed by it. The performances, from the brilliant and hilarious physical comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector, to Kingsley’s nuanced, powerful portrayal of Méliès, are superb. The editing, by the wonderful and loyal Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, is as crisp and exciting as ever.

But in the end, if Scorsese is Hugo, the film preservationist – the boy who restores the magic in a broken machine – then Méliès can be seen as a stand-in for any one of Scorsese’s filmmaking influences whose work he has restored through his Film Foundation, including Michael Powell, Elia Kazan, Luchino Visconti and, of course, Méliès himself. But surely Scorsese knows that, by the end of Hugo, when Méliès takes the stage and tearfully acknowledges Hugo before a screening of his restored work, that it’s impossible for someone like me to look at Méliès, the great innovator of cinema, without thinking of Scorsese, the wise master of filmmaking who influenced me.

This is the work of a master at the height of his cinematic powers. People who truly love film have, picture after picture, said this exact same thing about Scorsese many times. We said it when The Aviator (2004) soared as the most ambitious, energetic and entertaining Hollywood biopic in years. We said it when The Departed (2006) was no less than the great American tragedy of the 2000s, a masterful return to the gangster picture that held us captivated in our seats. And we’re saying it again for Hugo, a movie that has been surrounded by so much negativity from the first announcement that Scorsese would direct a 3D picture – as if the world’s finest filmmaker, who has never made anything short of a great film, wouldn’t find a way to discover the art in 3D technology and take it to an entirely new level – and not only that, but do it with his most passionate cause as his subject material.

My loyalty to Scorsese is boundless, and I’ve suffered through the lows – throwing things at the television when he unfairly lost Best Director Academy Awards for Gangs of New York and The Aviator to inferior films, listening to pseudo-intellectual hipsters knock on the brilliance of Shutter Island (2010) – and I’ve been with him through the highs. And let me tell you, there is nothing that feels as wonderful as watching the artist you love and defend your entire life receive the praise and admiration he so richly deserves, squashing the cynicism of those who feel his time has past. This is his time. George Méliès, step aside for another master of cinema. Martin Scorsese, take a bow.

2. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

The Descendants is as moving, funny and poignant a film as I've ever seen. It might be writer/director Alexander Payne's best movie, and that's high praise, considering his Sideways (2004) and About Schmidt (2002) are two of the reasons I want to be a filmmaker (with these three masterpieces, Payne has also found the beauty in the road trip movie). His films move so effortlessly from great tragedy to human comedy, and The Descendants is no exception. George Clooney gives the best performance of his career (topping his extraordinary work in 2009’s Up in the Air) as Matt King, a Hawaiian landowner left to look after his two daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller, both magnificent) and deal with his family after his wife falls into a coma.

Nick Pinkerton, in his interview with Payne in the Village Voice, best articulates the originality of Payne’s remarkably human and distinct voice as a filmmaker:

The viewer sees [his family and cousins] at first as King does: just more burden to bear. Eventually we come to realize, through Clooney’s artfully withholding reaction shots, that they are people with private fortitude and sadness all their own.

“To say something bad about someone, to caricaturize someone, but then to go, ‘Yeah, but God love ’em,’ that might be something particularly Midwestern,” Payne says. The harsh initial judgment, followed by the recall of the same judgment, is a signature of Payne’s films…

What makes The Descendants perfect isn’t simply the masterful screenplay, or the incredible ensemble acting from an inspired cast (including Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard and Judy Greer) – it’s Payne’s unmistakably Midwestern attitude toward the material and the characters. With subject matter ripe for easy laughs and easy tears, Payne opts for neither. In the best closing credit sequence of the year, he leaves us not with an emotional epiphany, nor with a heartwarming close-up – but with a picture of the banal, everyday life that the King family will face in the years to come.

3. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a miracle, a picture consumed by the wonder, amazement and beauty of life. Watching the film on opening night in Austin with a packed audience (many of whom worked in some capacity on the film, which was shot in Smithville), it was not unlike taking in the grand spectacle of The Lion King on Broadway for the first time as a young child. It is an overwhelmingly emotional experience.

How many people will see this film and watch in awe as memories of their own childhood flash before their eyes? I know I did. The story concerns Jack, an eleven year-old boy raised in Texas in the 1950s whose wondrous and carefree childhood slowly gives way to a more troubling, complicated understanding of human nature as he loses his innocence. You can see where I might find some similarities (as long as we’re swapping the 1950s for the 1990s). As he grows into a disillusioned adult (Sean Penn), he struggles to come to terms with the two ways through life: the way of human nature, fierce will and determination, epitomized by his father (Brad Pitt, in a hauntingly understated performance); and the way of love, compassion and grace, epitomized by his mother (Jessica Chastain).

But Malick’s movie extends back to the beginning of time, offering us beautiful sequences depicting the creation of the world that call to mind similar scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is a film that requires patience and respect for Malick’s vision. I left The Tree of Life full of hope – not just spiritual hope, or the hope of someday understanding all things – but hope for the future of cinema.

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)

The films of David Fincher have appeared near the front of my top ten lists in recent years. Last year, he released The Social Network, still the best movie of this new decade (not that the Academy rewarded Fincher with a deserved Best Director Oscar, mind you). His films are fascinating because they are the work of an obsessive. Zodiac (2007), Fincher’s finest film, was a story about three men whose lives were consumed by their obsession with the unsolved Zodiac murders in the late 1960s. Fincher now returns to the serial killer genre with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a masterful film with bold and fearless lead performances from Daniel Craig and especially recent NYU graduate Rooney Mara (Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend in The Social Network) as anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander.

You may have read the book by Stieg Larsson. I have not, but I did love the Swedish film adaptation of the novel released last year. However – although I think it’s unfair to label Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo a remake (it’s an English-language adaptation of the original novel) – this is a case where the ‘American version,’ as it were, is largely superior to the ‘original’ movie. In one of the most haunting scenes of the year, Fincher makes extraordinarily creepy use of Enya’s song Orinoco Flow (similar to his disturbing and brilliant use of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man in Zodiac).

There’s a bitter irony that the actress who represented the source of Mark Zuckerberg’s loneliness at the end of The Social Network – Erica Albright (Mara) – is on the receiving end of the rejection at the end of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, left alone in a man’s world. It’s a powerful and grim closing chapter to a new Fincher masterpiece.

5. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is a stunning masterpiece. I can't remember the last time I saw such a brilliant film go completely unnoticed by the film community (although, in recent weeks, a movement petitioning Fox Searchlight Pictures to screen the film for end-of-year awards consideration has started online). The film, shot in 2005, has been in legal battles for years, stemming from post-production clashes between the producers, the studio and Lonergan.

Lonergan, a master playwright and writer/director of the outstanding You Can Count On Me (2000), even solicited the help of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker to edit a final cut of the film (Lonergan co-wrote Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Scorsese was an executive producer on You Can Count on Me), which was rumored to be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, Fox Searchlight Pictures rejected the cut and ordered a maximum length of two-and-a-half hours. Six years after production on the film wrapped, the two-and-a-half hour Margaret was half-heartedly released in select cities for no more than two weeks, and then disappeared from the film scene. I count myself among the lucky few who caught Margaret in New York City before it vanished.

New York City teenager Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), having seen a horrible bus accident right before her eyes, is fighting against a world where she seems to be the only person willing to admit her culpability in the accident. But Margaret is not only the story of a teenager trying to make sense of a tragedy and assign blame accordingly – the movie is a passionate and raw portrait of New York City in the wake of 9/11.

This movie has so many ideas and burning questions, and Paquin’s extraordinary performance is full of the tumultuous adolescent anxiety so rarely explored honestly onscreen. The movie’s dramatic ambitions and scope exceed those of any recent film I can recall – even in this studio-cut version, decidedly not approved by Lonergan, the picture has a dramatic power missing from nearly all of today's cinema. Margaret is perhaps the most important film release of 2011 – even if it is six years too late.

6. We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

We Need To Talk About Kevin is as perfect as any movie I've seen this year. Director Lynne Ramsay asks audacious and challenging questions in this disturbing and powerful film. Eva (Tilda Swinton) raises the son from hell – a malicious, dark and cold piece of work named Kevin. Is the mother responsible for the cruel and sadistic behavior of her son? Is Eva an unfit mother, or is she simply cursed with a demonic child? And, perhaps most disturbingly, is she somehow complicit in the violent actions of her son? We Need To Talk About Kevin doesn’t give easy answers. Ramsay’s bold visual approach and her extraordinarily powerful use of music (both Jonny Greenwood's haunting score and pop music, ranging from Buddy Holly to The Beach Boys, create an atmosphere of dread) results in one of the year's best pictures. Swinton should be the frontrunner for the Best Actress Academy Award, and John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller are terrific in supporting roles.

7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)

The complexity of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Solder Spy demands that you see the film twice – not necessarily because the movie is tough to understand (although pay attention, because it is a bit of a labyrinth), but in order to fully appreciate the subtle and wonderful character work occurring throughout the film. Everything about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is remarkably subtle, from its depiction of loyalty among cold men who are forced to abandon their every attachment in sight, to the masterful lead performance by Gary Oldman as British Intelligence Agent George Smiley.

It’s also a story of revitalization – watching Smiley, fresh from retirement, slowly outsmart the current agents at the center of the Circus and, by the film’s rousing coda, take the seat at the head of British Intelligence is an exciting cinematic lesson in controlled, disciplined filmmaking. This is the sort of complex and moody thriller you would expect from the cinema of the 1970s. The pacing is perfect, the cinematography is breathtaking and Oldman is so damn good, that to not nominate the man for an Academy Award would be an egregious oversight.

8. George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese’s documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World runs just shy of four hours – but as far as I’m concerned, the film could have lasted another four hours and I wouldn't have budged. I sat in awe, enveloped and entranced, during its one-week run at the Village East Cinema. A fascinating and moving portrait of Harrison from his early days with The Beatles through the end of his life, Scorsese places great emphasis on the material world combating against the spiritual world – a struggle that resonated heavily with Harrison. It’s rare to see a complete portrait of such a fascinating human being. By the time All Things Must Pass plays over the last days of Harrison’s life, it’s hard to hold back the tears. George Harrison: Living in the Material World is every bit as compelling as Scorsese’s best music documentaries, including No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), The Last Waltz (1978) and Shine A Light (2008).

9. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)

Is Take Shelter an exploration of mental illness or a tale of modern-day anxiety as experienced by a common man? Either way, the film deals with its subject matter more maturely than any film I can recall. Michael Shannon is astounding as the tortured Curtis LaForche, a small-town family man in Ohio who builds a storm shelter in his backyard as an uneasy dread comes over him. This is a powerful and wrenching film, written and directed with such understanding by one of the great new filmmakers, Jeff Nichols. Take Shelter also features two of the year’s best performances from Shannon and Jessica Chastain, as Curtis’ wife – their scenes together represent the finest screen acting of the year.

10. J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood)

I can't remember the last time I've been at such odds with the major critics over a film as extraordinary as Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar – in my mind, it's the best work Eastwood has done since Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), every bit as great as his one-two punch of Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) - and this comes from someone who had endless adoration for Hereafter (2010), solid respect but some qualms with Invictus (2009), and just couldn't get on the Gran Torino (2008) train.

The cynicism of online bloggers and their passionate disdain for Eastwood be damned - J. Edgar is a great movie, shot in Eastwood's typically muted color palette and hauntingly staged in the deep shadows that so many of Eastwood's characters occupy. As Roger Ebert notes, "few films span seven decades this comfortably." It's true, and the transitions between the later years of J. Edgar Hoover's life and his glory days in the 1930s are seamless. If the first hour is a study in the evolution of fingerprint profiling (and other criminal investigation techniques revolutionized by Hoover), then the second hour concerns the personal repressions and demons that haunt Hoover for his entire life.

For the last decade, Eastwood's films have taken a revolutionary approach to the subject of masculinity, and our understanding of Eastwood - the quintessential tough guy - has evolved with his meditations on the afterlife (Hereafter), racial barriers (Invictus), World War II from both an American viewpoint and from the perspective of the 'enemy' (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) and now on the most powerful (supposedly) homosexual man of the twentieth century with J. Edgar. What we see from Eastwood in these films is an enormous amount of compassion, a deeper understanding of the human experience and a total re-assessment of everything Eastwood has stood for in the minds of moviegoers for decades. The films work individually on their own, but they are even stronger taken in the context of Eastwood's larger body of work.

There are individual scenes with enormous power and sadness, with strong work from Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts and Judi Dench. But Leonardo DiCaprio is beyond outstanding as Hoover. In a career marked by outstanding performances (The Departed, The Aviator, Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island), this is one of his finest.

I will write about the other films I loved this year - The Best of the Rest, if you will - in an upcoming post. It was heartbreaking to leave so many extraordinary movies - including Midnight in Paris, Shame, Moneyball, Beginners, Young Adult and Drive - off of this top ten list. If I picked the winners of this year's awards, here's how I would vote:

Best Picture: Hugo

Runner-Ups: The Descendants, The Tree of Life, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Margaret, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Runner-Ups: Alexander Payne, The Descendants; Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life; Tomas Alfredson, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; David Fincher, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo; Kenneth Lonergan, Margaret; Lynne Ramsay, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Best Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants

Runner-Ups: Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life and Moneyball; Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar; Michael Shannon, Take Shelter; Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Michael Fassbender, Shame; Woody Harrelson, Rampart

Best Actress: Anna Paquin, Margaret

Runner-Ups: Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin; Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo; Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene; Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method; Charlize Theron, Young Adult; Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn and Meek's Cutoff

Best Supporting Actor: Ben Kingsley, Hugo

Runner-Ups: Christopher Plummer, Beginners; Nick Nolte, Warrior; Kevin Spacey, Margin Call; Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method; Albert Brooks, Drive

Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life and Take Shelter

Runner-Ups: Shailene Woodley, The Descendants; Berenice Bejo, The Artist; Carey Mulligan, Shame; Melanie Laurent, Beginners

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants

Runner-Ups: Hugo, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Original Screenplay: Midnight in Paris

Runner-Ups: Margaret, Margin Call, 50/50, The Tree of Life, Young Adult

Behind the Scenes of "The Wheels," Part Two

2011-12-22T23:34:00.010-06:00

For my Intermediate Narrative film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, I wrote and directed The Wheels, a very personal story about an alcoholic father and his young son, and a study of their strained relationship over the course of a long day at an amusement park. In order to raise money for this production, I created an IndieGoGo campaign in early September, where I received extremely kind contributions from friends, family and coworkers. In less than twenty-six days, the campaign raised $1,331.00, almost double the amount of my initial $750.00 goal. I sent the following update to the wonderful contributors after our second and final day of shooting on Sunday, October 23rd. Here is a link to the IndieGoGo campaign:

Dear Contributors,

Thank you all so much again for your incredibly kind contributions to my film The Wheels. As I said before, the production of this movie would not have been possible without your help, and the fact that you have successfully funded this project means the world to me.

After a long day of incredible work on Sunday, October 23rd, The Wheels is officially wrapped. From an artistic standpoint, I could not be happier with the results of this shoot. The two lead actors, Tom Corbisiero and Dan Hasse, gave searing and wonderfully moving performances, and I know that when it comes time for me to review their performances in the editing room (which will be quite shortly, in fact), it will be challenging to choose among the many extraordinary takes from each scene.

The cast and crew arrived in Coney Island early Sunday morning, and we began by shooting the opening scene of the film, which takes place on the Coney Island Boardwalk. At noon, we began shooting the final scene of the picture, which takes place on a sidewalk just outside of Deno's Wonder Wheel. After an equipment move back to Manhattan, we shot the days final scene in the bathroom of New York University's Todman Center for Film and Television, the only scene from the film not shot on location in Coney Island.

It is worth mentioning that the people who crewed on this film are not only my very talented peers and classmates at the Tisch School of the Arts, they are also my dearest and closest friends. Without their support of this project and dedication to their craft, this film would not exist. The crew consisted largely of the same people who worked on The Wheels on the first shooting day, with a few welcome additions: Producer Erica Rose, Art Director Madeline Wall, Assistant Cameraman Andrew Griego, Gaffers Jon Annunziata and Ryland Tews and Set Photographer/ Digital Imaging Technician Jeremy Keller. Returning veterans from the first day of The Wheels shoot included the extraordinary Ben Dewey (Director of Photography), Bobb Barito (Sound Mixer), Mattheau OBrien (Assistant Director), Mike Cheslik (Assistant Director) and Miki Benyamini (Boom Operator).

As The Wheels officially moves into post-production, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your contribution to this film. With your help, I was able to make an extremely personal film, with the best possible group of people, all in less than two months! Thank you so much.

Sincerely,

Jack Kyser

A Boy And His Dreams of the Cinema: Scorsese, Hugo and Me

2011-11-24T02:07:00.015-06:00

When watching Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo, it’s as if my love for Scorsese has come full circle. I first fell in love with him – in obsession with him, really – when I was eleven years old, when I watched VHS copies of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976) almost back-to-back. On a visceral and emotional level, I had never seen anything like these pictures. These first encounters with Scorsese occurred only a few months after the death of my father, and in a way, the events are forever linked in my mind. My eyes were opened to a different kind of world – a place where pain, obsession and guilt were always present, and the only way to express this pain was through cinema.

And it is in this way that I looked to Scorsese, really, as a sort of father figure – as a filmmaker who spoke to the fears and obsessions I harbored at a very young age, but also as a filmmaker who understood the excitement and thrilling rush of living. His films are experiential in a way that other movies are not, and I think I recognized early on that no other filmmaker was capable of communicating “an intensity onscreen that matches what [one] perceives/suffers in real life,” as eloquently stated by Chris Hodenfield in his article “You’ve Got to Love Something Enough to Kill It: The Art of Noncompromise.”

On December 20th, 2002, I was a twelve year-old boy sitting bright-eyed, entranced, exhilarated and moved by Gangs of New York on its opening day at the AMC Barton Creek Cinema in Austin, Texas – my first Scorsese film in theaters and a life-changing – yes, an absolutely life-changing – experience. And so with Hugo has Scorsese finally made a film about a twelve year-old boy enveloped by the cinema. And not just a twelve year-old boy, mind you, but a boy with a recently deceased father who seeks emotional satisfaction through the imagination and power of cinema. If there was ever a Scorsese film made just for me, surely this is the one.

My anticipation for a new Scorsese picture is unmatched; I await a new Scorsese movie the same way some anticipate a sort of religious experience. I don’t know if it's truly possible to count the ways Scorsese has influenced every single part of my everyday life, down to the music I listen to daily (The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison) to my beliefs about people, down to the way I experience things, every blink, cut and interpretation of events – not to mention my choice to attend New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Scorsese’s alma mater. His work is such a fundamentally important part of my life that there are times when I don’t know how much I originally found similarities between my personal demons and Scorsese’s work, and how much Scorsese’s work ultimately influenced my behavior.

“Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.” - Martin Scorsese

This movie is so rich – not just visually, but emotionally – that even after two viewings I am still overwhelmed by it. The performances, from the brilliant and hilarious physical comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector, to Kingsley’s nuanced, powerful portrayal of Méliès, are superb. The editing, by the wonderful and loyal Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, is as crisp and exciting as ever.

Behind the Scenes of "The Wheels"

2011-11-20T18:25:00.005-06:00

For my Intermediate Narrative film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, I wrote and directed The Wheels, a very personal story about an alcoholic father and his young son, and a study of their strained relationship over the course of a long day at an amusement park. In order to raise money for this production, I created an IndieGoGo campaign in early September, where I received extremely kind contributions from friends, family and coworkers. In less than twenty-six days, the campaign raised $1,331.00, almost double the amount of my initial $750.00 goal. I sent the following update to the wonderful contributors after our first day of shooting on Monday, October 3rd. In a series of upcoming posts, I will detail the extensive pre-production process for this picture, as well as other adventures from this great semester. Here is a link to the IndieGoGo campaign:

Dear Contributers,

Thank you all so much for your incredibly kind contributions to my film The Wheels. The production of this movie would not be possible without your help, and the fact that you have successfully funded this project means the world to me.

I want to provide you with an update regarding shooting. The first day of shooting was on Monday, October 3rd, and it could not have been smoother. We shot at Deno’s Wonder Wheel, one of the most famous landmarks in Coney Island that has been featured in countless films, for about seven hours straight. The owner arranged for my crew and me to have full access to the park on Monday, despite the fact that the Wonder Wheel is usually reserved for professional films (most recently, Men in Black 3 rented out the Wonder Wheel for two weeks of shooting).

We had great weather, terrific acting, an extraordinary crew of very talented Tisch School of the Arts students and an incredible location. We shot some of the film’s most important scenes and got the best possible performances from the actors. After many rehearsals with the two actors – the excellent Tom Corbisiero and Dan Hasse – I was certain that the relationship at the center of this film, between a father and his son, would be wonderfully acted. Fortunately, we were lucky and prepared enough to have more than great performances on Monday. Behind the camera, cinematographer Ben Dewey and assistant camerawoman Arina Blinova made the most of this visually stunning location; sound mixer Bobb Barito and boom operator Miki Benyamini recorded some excellent sound; Alex Fofonoff and Jesse Rosenberg gaffed and lit the scenes; script supervisor Julie Augustine kept an eye out for continuity; and assistant directors Matt O’Brien and Mike Cheslik kept me on schedule and assisted me with acting notes. I am very lucky to get to work with these professionals.

Of course, none of this would have been accomplishable without your generosity, which made it possible to feed the cast and crew, transport cast/crew members to Coney Island and back to Manhattan, pay for a Budget Van rental for the movement of equipment, purchase film equipment and account for additional production costs.

Our second day of shooting will be on October 23rd, and we are currently preparing for that shooting date. Thank you so much for your help with this film – I assure you that we are making an excellent, powerful project that I hope you will enjoy.

Sincerely,

Jack Kyser

Deno's Wonder Wheel - Monday, October 3rd

You May Say That We Ain't Free, But It Don't Worry Me

2011-06-28T21:08:00.002-05:00

Starting in July, I have an internship with Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas - the creative home of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who I have long admired (particularly because of his ability to not only write, direct and produce his movies, but also to edit, shoot and score many of them, as well). Until my internship starts, I have been wrapping up post-production work on With Love, Marty (my friend Jonah Greenstein is writing the score to the film), as well as working on a new film project with my friends Brian Schwartz and Catherine Schwartz, two extremely talented people with whom I went to Austin High School (Brian and I were in quite a few plays together as Red Dragon Players). I've also been reminiscing about some of my great New York City experiences this past semester that I've neglected to mention in my earlier blog posts.

I wrote in length about my immense love for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris in earlier posts - two films that I have no doubt will place very highly on my year-end top ten list (I'll add a third to that list - Mike Mills' wonderful Beginners, with Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Melanie Laurent giving memorable performances in a moving love story). In particular, The Tree of Life is a movie that continues to live with me - I mean it sincerely when I say that, watching the film, I felt inspired to someday attempt to make something as personal and philosophical as Malick's movie - that is, of course, if I have the benefit of being a filmmaker many years from now. The Tree of Life is such an artful piece of personal filmmaking, and it's the kind of movie that gives me the hope that, one day, I can make a film that furiously and passionately grasps at the lingering questions from my childhood, the death of my father and the story of my youth. Just don't expect a fraction of the cinematic poetry and grace that Malick brings to The Tree of Life.

As I'm slowly catching up with things after the whirlwind of last semester, I wanted to post some films made by my friends from over the past year. Below is a link to my good friend Alexander Fofonoff's third Sight and Sound: Film project The Sailor of Tomorrow, in which I appear as a disgruntled dock worker (Alex and I were in the same Sight and Sound: Film crew, which also included my great friends Jonah Greenstein and Benjamin Dewey). Here's the film:

In January, my roommate Bobb Barito and I saw Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore starring Olympia Dukakis on Broadway. This incredible production was directed by Michael Wilson, who, along with Tony-nominated actress Hallie Foote (daughter of the late playwright Horton Foote), will hopefully be speaking about the actor-director relationship at one of Tisch New Theatre's Master Classes in the fall (I have had the pleasure of getting to know Mrs. Foote over the years through my friend Bolton Eckert, starting back in 2006, when I attended Mr. Foote's 90th birthday party with Bolton and his family in New York City).

In March, my good friend and collaborator Benjamin Dewey and I saw the newly restored 35MM print of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) at New York's historic Film Forum, which was just a breathtaking experience. I've seen the film countless times (dating back to when I was eleven years old and just beginning my life-long obsession with Scorsese's work), but it's never looked as beautiful as it did at Film Forum. I've seen beautiful prints of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) before in theaters - not to mention seeing Scorsese's incredible output in the 2000s upon their original theatrical releases (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shine A Light, Shutter Island) - but never Taxi Driver. And, I'll tell you, there's a haunting power in watching that film and living in New York City. I look at the picture a little differently now - it takes on an entirely different meaning and context (not that the New York City of the 1970s resembles the New York City in which I live in 2011 at all, really - but still, there's an added resonance).

The past few months - both in New York and in Austin - I've been able to watch some great new releases worth seeking out in cinemas, including Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, a gorgeously filmed, immersive mood piece that seems destined to become an art-house classic; Dan Rush's Everything Must Go, a wonderful, moving portrait of an alcoholic, with a lead performance from Will Ferrell that should do for him what Punch-Drunk Love (2002) did for Adam Sandler; Submarine, a wonderful coming-of-age movie with the heart of Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971) and the style of a French New Wave classic; Joe Wright's strangely hypnotic Hanna, which features one-take action sequences that put the heavily-edited, incomprehensible action scenes from most Hollywood movies to shame; Jodie Foster's The Beaver, worth seeking out for Mel Gibson's extraordinary performance; J.J. Abrams' Super 8, a wonderful throwback to a better kind of summer blockbuster; and Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a fascinating, meditative documentary exploring the inside of the Chauvet Cave in France, which features prehistoric cave drawings more than 30,000 years old. Did I mention that the film is in 3D? Leave it to Werner Herzog to make extraordinary use of 3D technology.

Since I've been in Austin, I've been catching up on re-watching some old favorites and some films I've overlooked through the years, including Niehls Mueller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), a great film that proves that Sean Penn is unquestionably the best working actor today (together with his work in Mystic River and 21 Grams, his performance in this film represents the best output in the span of one year of any actor I can recall); Martin Scorsese's thrillingly entertaining The Color of Money (1986), where Paul Newman has never looked so cool; Robert Altman's revisionist western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), starring Warren Beatty as the kind of brash 1970s antihero that makes me love that decade's cinema so much; and Joel and Ethan Coen's debut film Blood Simple (1984), a movie that demonstrates that these brothers knew how to make a movie better than anyone else around right from the start.

I have to spotlight two recent Scorsese viewings that just left me floored. I re-watched his first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), which started out as his senior thesis film at New York University, and developed over the years until its theatrical release in 1969. The movie is full of the same raw energy and kinetic liveliness as Mean Streets (1973). Everything is here in his first feature - the thrilling use of pop music, the Catholicism, the guilt, the male awkwardness, the social discomfort, New York City, a wonderful performance from Harvey Keitel - in other words, it's the kind of movie I live for! It's full of the immediacy that has always drawn me to Scorsese - his uncontrollable need to tell you this story right now, because it's so personal, so close to his heart, and if he doesn't get it out there - well, then, how else can he get you to experience what he experiences?

The second Scorsese film is last year's documentary A Letter to Elia, Scorsese's loving tribute to Elia Kazan, the filmmaker who inspired Scorsese more than any other. The film is especially powerful because of Scorsese's close, personal connection to Kazan's pictures, if not Kazan the man. Watching the film, I couldn't help but recognize Scorsese's loving adoration and respect for Kazan as the same adoration and respect I feel so strongly for Scorsese. There are many quotes from the film that haunt me, particularly the following one, in which Scorsese describes his friendship with Kazan:

"There was a kind of understanding between us. I mean, I never tried to tell him how much his films meant to me -- I don't think it would've been fair. When somebody's work has touched you that deeply, you can never expect them to understand how much they mean to you. It had to stay between me and the pictures. Those pictures mean so much to me that I can't imagine where I'd be without them. And when the lights dimmed, I was standing in the wings and I looked at the images from his tribute reel. It was an overwhelming feeling. It was as if I was seeing layers of my own experience, my own life, unfolding right there up on the screen. So, Elia, it always had to stay between me and the movies, and the only way I could tell you how much you meant to me was by making movies.”

I may never know Martin Scorsese personally, but if I ever do have the chance to know him, I think I will feel the same way. Scorsese's work has touched me so deeply and defined every aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. I don't think he will ever understand how much he means to me - he is a sort-of father, a father I've never met, but one who understands me. And so, if I am lucky enough to make pictures for a living, it will be my way of telling Martin Scorsese how much he meant to me and how his films are like a piece of my own personal history, embedded in my mind like my own experiences. And perhaps, one day, I can make A Letter to Marty. But, you know, even an hour-long documentary of the sort couldn't ever really hint at how he's shaped my life and the way I look at the world.

In honor of Scorsese, here's my Vocalization sound project from my Fall 2009 Sound Image class at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts - in which I provide all of the voice work. After years of listening to Scorsese talk about his films, I've had time to work on a Scorsese impersonation:

And Now I Know Spanish Harlem Are Not Just Pretty Words To Say

2011-06-08T03:01:00.028-05:00

Why make With Love, Marty? During the second half of my spring semester at NYU, I was swamped with Sight and Sound: Studio projects, the Tisch New Theatre mainstage production of Last Exit No Toll and many other projects (not to mention classwork), and so naturally it seemed like an unwise decision to make an outside-of-class movie, especially considering that I wanted to not only direct the project, but also star in the film. The script was sixteen pages long, and to make the movie properly, it would involve shooting at a number of hard locations, including Columbia University and a crowded New York City bus stop. Ultimately, I chose to make the movie not only because I have long wanted to take advantage of the incredible camera equipment and facilities at Tisch, but particularly because I have the privilege of knowing people who were excited about the project and who were willing to do everything possible to make the film that I wanted to make. If I were anywhere else in the world other than the Tisch School of the Arts, I could not have possibly assembled such an incredible cast and crew, full of people so eager to collaborate that they gave up their time, talent, energy and sleep for the sake of the movie. There is something about the collaborative nature of film (and theatre, for that matter, too) that really inspires me. By the way, the poster above was created and designed by Benjamin Dewey, who was also my cinematographer on the film.

There were also, of course, the artistic reasons for making the film. I love writing about loners. I love stories about outsiders and people who are trying very hard to be a part of a social group. My scripts always reflect the way I feel about something, to a certain extent. As an actor, I also tend to write characters modeled, more or less, on myself, or at least characters that I think I could play well - and oftentimes, writing these stories and these characters help me understand myself better. Admitting this is a double-edged sword, though. When people watch With Love, Marty, I don't want them to think that this story is autobiographical, because it's not. And yet, I wouldn't have been so passionate about making the film if it didn't represent a certain aspect of my personality. I am not Marty by any means, but it might be fair to say that his behavior is a highly exaggerated example of how I have felt at times in the past.

I finished writing the screenplay for With Love, Marty shortly before my Spring Break, and during my break I reached out to my friends and classmates who I had worked with in the past to see if they would be interested in making this outside-of-class project. My cinematographer, the incredible Benjamin Dewey, was my loyal collaborator from the very beginning. Shortly after I returned from Spring Break, he and I met constantly to draw storyboards and make shot lists for every scene in the script (sometimes during our Monday night shifts at the Post-Production Center, where we both work as Teaching Assistants). He assisted me in purchasing the appropriate lighting equipment, and he also provided the EX1 camera, tripod and sound equipment necessary to shoot this film. My roommate Bobb Barito was also on board the project from the very beginning, both starring in the movie (as a character modeled on him, named Bobb) and agreeing to serve as Sound Mixer and Sound Editor for the film. During the shoot, there were scenes where Bobb was acting and therefore could not do sound, and my friends Andrew Griego, Adam Boese and Jeremy Keller graciously offered their sound-mixing and booming skills during that time.

For the opening interior apartment scene, I wanted to use the apartment of my good friend Mike Cheslik, whose apartment on 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue has become a sort of permanent film-set this past semester (it's almost a rite-of-passage to shoot something in his apartment at this point). Not only did I want to use his apartment, but I wanted to cast him in the film, along with our friends Jon Annunziata and Justin Levine, as versions of themselves (the characters are named Mike, Jon and Justin). They were all incredibly willing participants, bringing so many ideas to the table and showing off some incredible acting talent. Long before shooting the opening scene of the film - in which Bobb, Mike, Jon, Justin and I riff and make lewd jokes in the apartment - the five of us gathered together to go through the script and re-write that opening scene, essentially, with our improvisations. You can imagine that these were very fun screenwriting sessions - everybody was trying to be as hilarious as possible, and I included the funniest, most relevant bits in the final screenplay. I cannot thank Mike, Bobb, Jon and Justin enough for their hilarious work in both forming that scene in the final script, and for their eventually hilarious performances on set.

My producer, Erica Rose, was so incredibly helpful in getting this project off the ground, and not only did she keep me focused, help cast the film and set up auditions with actors, organize cast and crew members with daily call-sheets, gather extras for a large party scene and help me find filming locations, she also served as my Assistant Director on set, always keeping me on schedule (she acts in the film, too, in the small role of Rose). Erica recommended that I have an Art Director for the film, and the wonderful Madeline Wall came on board to help us. Madeline is responsible for all of the art, make-up and much of the costuming in the movie, particularly the interior scenes. She sent out specific instructions to our party extras on how to dress for the hipster party scene at Columbia University (her work with glitter and face paint stands out in this section of the film). She was present at all times during the shoot, also working as a Boom Operator, Gaffer and any other position we needed.

After having some production meetings with Erica and Ben - where we made shooting schedules, divided up responsibilities among the crew and assembled necessary equipment - it was time for me to cast and subsequently rehearse with my actors. The scenes featuring Bobb, Mike, Jon, Justin and me were easily rehearsed, not only because we are all good friends, but mainly because my character in the scene is mostly silent as everybody else is fraternizing, and so it was easier for me to forget about my performance in rehearsal and really focus on directing my friends. However, the more serious scenes in the picture - particularly the ones where my character is the most emotionally vulnerable - required a different kind of rehearsal.

Erica suggested that I audition an actress named Alexis Gay for the role of Kellie in the film, and from the moment she walked into the audition room, I knew she was perfect for the role. I rehearsed with her privately twice, and we discussed the complicated interaction in the film between Kellie and Marty. Our final scene together in the film - the most important part of the movie, really - is such a painful and discomforting scene that it was a difficult task for me to direct her and simultaneously perform in the scene as this anguished, slightly delusional character. Thankfully, Alexis was so naturally receptive to my direction and understood her character so well that it made the process considerably easier for me.

I had another separate, private rehearsal with Karen McFarlane, an actress who auditioned for the role of the elderly Lucille. Karen was brilliant. Lucille's scene in the movie is relatively short - she's only onscreen for about a minute and a half - but her role is critical. I'll admit, I was worried that Erica and I would not find a fantastic older actress who fit the part, even though Erica posted a casting call online weeks in advance. But when Erica brought Karen into the audition room and I read through the scene with her, I knew she was perfect. She was incredibly flexible with her schedule, too - we were scheduled to shoot her scene at 10:30 PM on the evening of April 24th at a bus stop near Union Square, and it started pouring down raining shortly before our call time. We had to reschedule to another date, and she could not have been more understanding (we ended up shooting the scene at 11:30 PM on a Friday night - and I'll tell you, we had to fight against some rowdy late-night crowds). It was a joy to work with Karen, and I think she's terrific in the picture.

An exact shooting schedule went something like this - on the evening of Saturday, April 23rd, we shot the Columbia hipster party scene in Erica's dorm room at Gramercy (doubling for the interior of a Columbia dorm room). Lee Gold and Jon Annunziata were on hand as Gaffers for the evening, and we had a great group of party extras who were extremely patient. The shoot took about three-and-a-half hours, mainly because Ben and I had planned a complicated tracking shot following Marty into the party and through the dancing crowd of hipsters. One of Ben's most beautiful shots is in this scene - a medium shot of Alexis, in full party attire, with her back to a window overlooking the nighttime traffic on Third Avenue.

The second night of filming involved shooting the scene between Karen and me at the bus stop, which ultimately took about two hours to capture. This was a difficult scene for Bobb (as the Sound Mixer), because the bus stop by Union Square was certainly not quiet at 11:30 PM on a Friday night. It certainly didn't help matters that we had, more or less, taken over a public bus stop in one of the most popular spots in Manhattan. Later that night, Ben and I wandered around the West Village and picked up some beautiful exterior shots.

The final day of shooting was the pressure cooker - we had to shoot about seventy-five percent of the movie in one day. We shot day-for-night in Mike's apartment from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, which included the opening scene of the film, the last scene of the film and a critical scene between Bobb and me that sets the story in motion. Then, after a short break, my crew and I met at Columbia University around 7:00 PM to shoot the scenes between Alexis and me, as well as all exterior Columbia University shots. The exterior Columbia scenes look absolutely beautiful, thanks to Ben's outstanding cinematography and a little help from C0lumbia's stunning campus. After that, we were more or less wrapped with the production, aside from a few smaller shots that required fewer people on set. It was an exhausting and rewarding day thanks to the incredible work of Ben, Bobb, Erica, Madeline, Alexis, Mike, Jon, Justin, Andrew and Jeremy - I could not have possibly asked for a better production experience or a better creative team.

For the post-production process, I edited the film using Final Cut Pro in the editing laboratories at Tisch during the last few weeks of the semester, seeking input constantly from other students. Shortly before he left to return to Colorado for the summer, Ben color-corrected my picture-locked cut of the movie in a suite at Tisch, and the movie looks incredible because of his talent and hard work. I have since handed over the picture-locked cut to Bobb, who is currently working on the sound design. My good friend Jonah Greenstein offered to write an original musical score for the movie, and I couldn't have been more thankful for his offer. I know he will do brilliant work.

Anyway, that's a fast breakdown of the production of With Love, Marty. I'm enormously excited to screen the final product for anybody who wants to see the picture, and I am so lucky to work with such dedicated and talented people at the Tisch School of the Arts. I love making movies, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have made this particular one.

Film Review - The Tree of Life

2011-06-05T18:10:00.006-05:00

The Tree of Life is a miracle, a picture consumed by the wonder, amazement and beauty of life that surely feels as personal to its creator, writer and director Terrence Malick, as it does to so many of the people who have left the theatre moved and haunted by its power.

Watching the film on opening night in Austin with a packed audience (many of whom worked in some capacity on the film, which was shot in Smithville), it was not unlike taking in the grand spectacle of The Lion King on Broadway for the first time as a young child. It is an overwhelmingly emotional experience.

But Malick’s movie extends back to the beginning of time, offering us beautiful sequences depicting the creation of the world that call to mind similar scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve often wondered how audiences would respond to 2001 if that film were released in theaters today. The answer has come. Our generation now has our own 2001 – a mystifying, extraordinarily ambitious epic that forgoes narrative filmmaking almost entirely. But as film critic Roger Ebert notes in his review of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey “[lacks] Malick’s fierce evocation of human feeling” present in The Tree of Life. Indeed, this is a film driven by small, powerful human moments. Pitt, Chastain and Penn’s performances are oftentimes completely wordless, but they linger in the mind days after having seen the picture. As much as I love Kubrick’s film, the same cannot be said for its characters.

This is a film that requires patience and respect for Malick’s vision. There were boos and hisses from some audiences when 2001 was first released in 1968, and The Tree of Life has received similar reactions (even at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or). But these are films that live beyond their audiences, masterpieces that aren’t easily digestible for the masses.

I’ve seen the film twice now, and both times the ending – a glimpse of everyone in Penn’s life coming together and journeying together to a sort of afterlife – is equal parts beguiling and soul-stirring. I left The Tree of Life full of hope – not just spiritual hope, or the hope of someday understanding all things – but hope for the future of cinema.

Film Review - Midnight in Paris

2011-06-02T20:21:00.007-05:00

Thank God for Woody Allen. In the midst of an almost unbearable summer full of 3D superhero garbage and brainless sequels, he has given us his latest film Midnight in Paris only seven months after the release of his last film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The middling critical reception to You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger bewildered me – of that film, I wrote: “Allen’s characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side.” Powerful stuff, but for some reason, American critics weren’t impressed. Perhaps it’s because Allen offers us, on average, one movie per year, and aside from Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), most of them aren’t nearly as good as his masterworks from the 1970s and 1980s.

Well, so what? A middling Woody Allen film is better than ninety-nine percent of everything else out in current release. Not that I would consider You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger a middling film in the least, mind you.

Fortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that Midnight in Paris is the funniest and most endearing movie you’ll see this year – critics and audiences alike are recognizing the film as Woody Allen’s finest work in years. Owen Wilson gives one of his best performances as Gil (the ‘Woody’ character), an American writer visiting Paris with his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her unbearably uppity parents (Allen’s depiction of McAdams’ conservative family would seem harsh if it wasn’t so, I don’t know, spot-on).

Gil, bored with his status as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, yearns for the Paris of the 1920s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso walked the streets and tossed ideas around in cafes. And so it happens that, while Gil is walking alone through the city after midnight, Paris magically morphs into that era, and Gil quite literally hangs out with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the rest of the gang. Along the way, he falls in love with Picasso’s mistress Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, who perfectly embodies all of the beauty of Paris in any era.

The joy of this film is discovering all of this for yourself, and so I’ll refrain from saying anything else, except that Allen’s work with the Surrealists (including Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali) is brilliantly absurd. With the playful and fantastical premise, Allen is free to wrestle with large ideas in a very funny manner (not dissimilar to his work in 1985’s wonderful The Purple Rose of Cairo).

Along the way, Allen takes playful jabs at the current state of Hollywood screenwriting, Tea Party dimwits, and pseudo-intellectuals alike (Michael Sheen is perfect as that guy – you’ll know the character once you see him). This is a film that assumes you’ll catch the joke about Luis Bunuel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), or the jokes about Hemingway’s speech pattern (he talks the way he writes). Allen doesn’t bother explaining them to you because he’s not interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator, and in today’s cinema of digestible fluff for the masses, that’s quite an achievement.

More importantly, it’s a wonderful movie about nostalgia, a force so strong and bittersweet that Allen has devoted an entire film to the subject. Gradually, our protagonist learns that all people feel disillusioned with their own time and place, and secretly yearn to live in the idealized past, no matter the current era. It’s Gil’s (and Allen’s) own discovery of this truth that lends Midnight in Paris its poignant insight.

For this particular Woody Allen fan who holds Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) close to my heart, I mean it when I say that Midnight in Paris is as wonderfully poetic, sad, touching and funny as anything Woody Allen has ever made.

I Sighed A Million Sighs, I Told A Million Lies To Myself...To Myself

2011-05-02T02:25:00.003-05:00

My Spring Semester at NYU has been the best, most productive period of my life. From acting in my friends' Sight and Sound: Studio and Film projects to meeting and receiving advice from writer/director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), it's been an incredible ride. The most rewarding part of my semester - writing, directing and starring in a personal project outside of class titled With Love, Marty - has just officially wrapped, and I am happy to say that the shoot was extremely successful, thanks to the hard work and help from my friends and collaborators (particularly my extraordinary cinematographer, Ben Dewey; my producer and assistant director, Erica Rose; my sound mixer and sound editor, Bobb Barito; and my art director, Madeline Wall). But before I discuss Marty, I want to write about some noteworthy moments from the semester.

On April 22nd, I directed my final Sight and Sound: Studio project – a scene from Martin McDonagh’s great play The Pillowman. I adapted the scene and first presented it to my class in mid-March, and after I returned from Spring Break, I held auditions at NYU’s Todman Center, and cast three very talented actors in the roles of Katurian, Tupolski and Ariel. I rehearsed diligently with the three actors for a few weeks before the shoot, and then, finally, on April 22nd, we shot the scene in a three-camera television studio on the 12th floor of the Tisch School of the Arts (the television studio more or less became home for all of the students this semester). My three actors - Hunter Rodgers, Danny Pudelek and Armen Armazza - gave wonderful performances during our two-hour shoot, where I managed to get three takes of the scene (which is pretty good, considering that set construction, lighting, and camera rehearsals take a significant amount of time). Here is my final project:

The Sight and Sound: Studio class was one of the most rewarding and fascinating classes I’ve taken at Tisch – it is every bit the compliment to my Sight and Sound: Film course. My professor, Alex Sichel, was a wonderful teacher, and she really prepared me as a director with my first three Studio exercises, which were entertaining but ultimately uneven. With her guidance and great criticism, I was prepared for a more ambitious, ultimately successful final project. My peers in the class were some of the finest people I have had the chance to work with, and everyone in the class formed a lasting bond together. I will miss them, but I look forward to working professionally with them in the years to come.

On April 11th, my friend Lucas Loredo stayed with me for a week in New York City before he traveled overseas for a semester abroad at Oxford University in England (Lucas is about to finish his third year at Stanford University). The trip marked Lucas’ first time in New York City, and I wanted to show him the best possible time while he was visiting. Among many other adventures, I got us tickets for live tapings of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It was fascinating to watch the behind-the-scenes production of these great shows, particularly as the television studios were not entirely different from the studios we use for our Sight and Sound: Studio production class. Before the taping, both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert greeted the audience and answered questions from the small crowd. Lucas, always one to rise to the occasion, conversed directly with Mr. Stewart and asked him some fascinating questions.

As Lucas and I reminisced about our glory days as Red Dragon Players at Austin High School (by my count, we were in six plays together under the direction of Mr. Billy Dragoo), I wanted to show him the best theatre that Broadway had to offer. We lucked into some fantastic seats for the infamous Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, which proved to be an enormously entertaining - if not entirely coherent - night of theatre. But the show that really floored us was Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherf**ker With The Hat, starring Bobby Cannavale, Chris Rock and Annabella Sciorra. Lucas and I landed front-row tickets to this extraordinary play, which recently received six Tony Award nominations, including Best Play, Best Director (Anna D. Shapiro) and Best Actor for the devastating performance from Cannavale (who I last saw in the Off-Broadway production of Trust last fall).

During his stay, we also had a chance to walk through Central Park, visit Rockefeller Center and NBC Studios, enjoy ourselves at Lincoln Square, explore Greenwich Village and the NYU area, and make our way through Times Square more than a few times. We saw an NYU student production of No Exit, a French play by Jean-Paul Sartre, which was directed by my good friend and fellow film student Erica Rose (she most recently served as Producer and Assistant Director for my new film, With Love, Marty). She's an incredible talent, and her play was impeccably directed, staged and acted. Lucas also had a chance to be an extra in my friend Morgan Ingari's final Sight and Sound: Studio project, which was a great chance for Lucas to see some of Tisch's great facilities.

The weekend before Lucas arrived, I had the honor of working as Assistant Director for my friend and roommate Bobb Barito's film Lead Me To The Clouds. For the film - a student production outside of class (very similar to my own film that I shot in late April) - Bobb assembled an incredible crew of Tisch students, and we successfully shot his movie over a three-day period at a variety of locations all over the city. Bobb is currently in the post-production stage with the film, simultaneously sound editing both his project and my movie (I am incredibly lucky to work - and live - with somebody who is so brilliant regarding the art of sound mixing and sound editing).

On March 23rd, the Dean’s Scholars were invited to see Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway, a brilliant new play by Rajiv Joseph, starring Robin Williams and directed by Moises Kaufman. After the play ended and the audience cleared the theatre, the Dean's Scholars were invited to come to the front of the stage and meet privately with Mr. Williams, who has been a huge supporter of the Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Williams could not have been more gracious and kind to our small group of scholars, particularly after giving such an arresting and exhaustive performance. The show itself is one of the finest shows I've seen on Broadway yet - a truly incredible piece that unfortunately did not pick up as many Tony nominations as I would have expected. Pictured above is my good friend and fellow Dean's Scholar, Nicole Cobb, and me with Mr. Williams after the show.

The Dean's Scholars program has led to amazing opportunities throughout the semester, and it's resulted in a great sense of community among the students. Professor Chris Chan Roberson and Anita Gupta, the leaders of the program, organized the first ever Dean's Scholars Collaborative Projects in March, where two scholars from different Tisch departments worked together on creative collaborations. This project was largely, to quote Roberson, "designed to capitalize on the interdepartmental tours and scholars meetings" that we have participated in during the school year. Kiah Victoria, a freshman in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and I collaborated on a short music video for her song Find Me. Kiah wrote and performed the song, and I filmed the movie, shooting footage of Kiah in Washington Square Park and incorporating one of my silent Sight and Sound: Film projects from last semester into the film. I have posted a link below to our video:

On Thursday, April 28th, I was invited as part of the Dean’s Scholars program to attend the Alec Baldwin Luncheon, where eleven Tisch scholars had an hour-and-a-half lunch with actor and Tisch alum Alec Baldwin in the office of Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell on the 12th Floor of the Tisch Building. Although every student prepared questions for Mr. Baldwin, he was very interested in talking to us about our backgrounds and our passions. Mr. Baldwin has always been a huge supporter of the Tisch School of the Arts, and his incredible career advice was so valuable. Although I asked him a serious question about his career, I also had to tell him that he absolutely owned Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) with only ten minutes of screen time. Mr. Baldwin, of course, modestly replied that nobody should ever try to 'own' a movie, but it's very true - his brilliant supporting roles in films such as Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006) are every bit as memorable as his leading roles (I will admit that I took particular pleasure in hearing Mr. Baldwin impersonate Scorsese, and also talking about his experience working with Robert De Niro on various projects, including 2006's The Good Shepherd). Overall, it was an absolutely wonderful experience to sit and have lunch with one of the most respected actors in the film business. Pictured above are the eleven scholars and Mr. Baldwin.

This semester, I produced the Tisch New Theatre mainstage show Last Exit No Toll with my friend and fellow Tisch New Theatre Executive Board Officer Alex Fofonoff. The play, written and directed by sophomore Rachel Music (who previously directed me in her short play Consciousness, for which I received my first Off-Broadway credit), premiered at the historic Kraine Theatre on Wednesday, April 27th and ran for five performances. We were able to use the Kraine Theatre before the nightly performances of the incredibly talented New York Neo-Futurists, who regularly perform their brilliant show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in the Kraine at 10:00 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. The company of Last Exit No Toll was thrilled to share a performance space with some of New York's most talented artists.

The rehearsal process began in early January, and it was an incredible experience to assist the director and performers with rehearsal space, assemble a technical crew and manage the concerns of the company as a whole as the play slowly came to life. I have to thank my friend and professional partner Alex Fofonoff, who helped me enormously as a first-time producer. In the end, our fundraising efforts (we raised over $1200 for the show with a Kickstarter campaign, from very generous donations from our supporters) and our successful production of the play made us both very proud. Working with the very talented cast and crew was an honor and a privilege. Here is a link to an article the Washington Square News wrote about the production of the play.

This semester has been incredibly productive - I've never felt more at home and surrounded by brilliant, amazing people. I have much more to report, and so I will continue my thoughts and anecdotes in another post in the very near future. In the meantime, I need to continue editing and fine-tuning my new film With Love, Marty - the production that will be the focus of my next entry.

Blame It On A Simple Twist Of Fate

2011-03-07T21:56:00.002-06:00

Note: In between the posts below, I have posted a link to each of my five Sight and Sound film projects from last semester - the films have just been transferred digitally at the Post-Production Center at Tisch.

It's hard to believe that the second semester of sophomore year is already half-way over. In early February, I worked on a short film titled "The Hanged Man" for The Tisch 48-Hour Film Festival. For this competition, Tisch students have to write, direct, produce and edit an original film in forty-eight hours. Teams were given a prop, a character and a line of dialogue at the start of the competition that had to be included in the movie - in this case, the prop was cards, the character was a drop-out, and the line of dialogue was "I'm still learning." I was lucky enough to work with a fantastic group of people, including Benjamin Dewey, Nicole Cobb, Bobb Barito, Zeshawn Ali and Celine Comolet, on this particular project.

This semester, I have an incredible variety of classes. My major production class is Sight and Sound: Studio, a television-production class that consists of shooting short scenes in a television studio environment. Shooting the scenes live with your actors and operating with a three-camera set-up is extremely exciting, and the class provides invaluable directing experience, as heavy emphasis is placed on the rehearsal process between the director and the actors (there is a separate class that accompanies Studio, called Rehearsal Techniques, that serves as an acting class for directors).

I am also taking Writing the Short Screenplay with the great professor Nick Tanis; an Italian Cinema course with writer, director, film critic, professor and cultural icon Antonio Monda (who appears in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as the Festival Director who asks Bill Murray about the scientific purpose of killing the shark); Pre-Production Colloquium with filmmaker Pete Chatmon, preparing screenplays for next semester's intermediate production classes; and The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, a fascinating history course taught by the brilliant professor David Engel. For Monda's course Hollywood Auteurs, he brought in screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader as a guest to speak about his film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). I had the pleasure of sitting in on the class and meeting Mr. Schrader, who is my all-time favorite screenwriter (among many other works, he wrote Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out The Dead). In short, it was the highlight of my week.

I am currently co-producing Tisch New Theatre's Spring Mainstage Show, Last Exit No Toll, written by sophomore Rachel Lewis, with my good friend and fellow TNT Officer Alex Fofonoff. The show is scheduled to open in late April at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, and I am incredibly excited to be a part of the production team for this great student work.

The 83rd annual Academy Awards were something of a disappointment, if only because the year's best film, David Fincher's The Social Network, did not walk away with the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars it so richly deserved. Perhaps I have been spoiled by the Oscars during the last four years, when daring and brilliant movies such as Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006), Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) all won the Best Picture Oscar - I figured the Academy would continue its relatively new tradition of actually awarding the best film. At any rate, The Social Network joins the list of Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Pulp Fiction (1994), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Taxi Driver (1976), Citizen Kane (1941), L.A. Confidential (1997), Fargo (1996) and The Aviator (2004) as one of the many masterpieces to have lost Best Picture to a lesser movie.

But there were some very deserving winners at the Oscars, including Christian Bale, who won Best Supporting Actor for his tour-de-force performance in David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Natalie Portman, who won Best Actress for her great work in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. The winner for Best Live Action Short, God of Love, was a particularly exciting win, as writer/director/star Luke Matheny was a graduate student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts last year, and God of Love was his graduate thesis film at NYU. I was also very happy to see Melissa Leo, Aaron Sorkin, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Wally Pfister, Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs walk away with Academy Awards.

Admittedly, I haven't had the time to see an overabundance of films theatrically this semester, but there are a few titles I can recommend. Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids is a disarmingly sweet and funny comedy, with great performances from John C. Reilly, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Ed Helms. Patrick Lussier's Drive Angry: Shot in 3D is every bit as ridiculous and joyously entertaining as it sounds, starring Nicolas Cage at the height of his campy powers. And although I seem to be in the minority, I enjoyed Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet. To be completely honest, most of the movies worth seeing in theaters are late award-season contenders from 2010 (including Mike Leigh's Another Year, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biuitful, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, George Hickenlooper's Casino Jack, Richard J. Lewis' Barney's Version and John Wells' The Company Men).

There is one new release, however, that stands above the rest. Rango is one of the funniest, most original and extraordinarily strange animated films I’ve seen in years. Gore Verbinski, the director of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, is responsible for the first great movie of 2011. After all, it’s not every animated film that features a villain largely inspired by John Huston’s corrupt character from Chinatown (1974), a trippy dream sequence with Clint Eastwood’s character from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), an action sequence paying homage to the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now (1979) and a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson. As Roger Ebert notes in his review of the film, “The more movies you’ve seen, the more you may like it."

But more than sending up and paying homage to the western genre (which it does brilliantly), Rango is simply more fun than any children's movie in recently memory. The energy is fueled by Johnny Depp's hilarious performance as Rango, a chameleon who dabbles in performance and playwriting. Rango is unexpectedly forced to protect an Old West town from a water shortage, and through his methods of improvisation, he convinces the town that he's a gunslinger from the West. The performance represents Depp's best work in years - he's genuinely lovable and wonderfully aloof. The supporting characters are incredibly detailed (not to mention very funny), and the animation rivals the aesthetic beauty of the best-looking animated films of all time. Rango is a family film that takes chances and isn't afraid to embrace the bizarre, and the result is incredibly rewarding.

The Best Films of 2010

2011-01-20T01:16:00.026-06:00

1. The Social Network (David Fincher)

"How does it feel to be

One of the beautiful people?"

David Fincher's The Social Network is the best film of the year. Although the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate who created the website Facebook and subsequently became the youngest billionaire in the world, doesn't sound like material worthy of comparison to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the comparison is more than justified. Fincher's astounding direction, Aaron Sorkin's brilliant and dense screenplay and the performances - particularly from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg - are all first-rate. The film brilliantly illustrates both Zuckerberg's apathy toward the Harvard social elite and his desire to somehow be a part of their social network - and in the process, the movie, with its kinetic energy and obsessive characters (one of the film's many resemblances to Fincher's finest film, 2007's Zodiac), chronicles the rise of the smartest man in the room and his ascension to power.

In the end, however, The Social Network is astonishingly powerful not simply because it brilliantly illustrates the twenty-first century rise of brains over brawn, but because it gives us a portrait of a talented young man who, despite having taken the entire social experience of college and put it online, will always remain on the outside looking in, strangely alienated from both the real, physical world (the college parties, normal relationships with other human beings) and the virtual world of his own creation. And it is in this way that we understand and empathize with Mark Zuckerberg. Because, by the end of the film, he's still reaching out for that one thing more unattainable than money, social status or five-hundred million online friends - his own personal Rosebud.

2. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

Blue Valentine is a film that tore my heart into pieces. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance worked for years to get this gritty, Cassavetes-inspired relationship drama made, and his passion for the project is evident in every frame.

Ryan Gosling, who gives the most fearless, heartbreaking performance of any actor this year, and Michelle Williams, who is equally incredible, play a young married couple whose once-thrilling relationship is now slowly disintegrating. And while certainly both characters have their virtues and faults, I must admit that I haven't connected so strongly or felt so deeply for a character in many years as I did with Gosling's Dean, a genuinely decent young man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Blue Valentine resonated strongly with me, and I have a feeling it's because I saw a lot of myself in Dean (there's one scene near the end, in particular, that frustrated me endlessly, as Dean visits his wife at work and is considered 'a threat' by her co-workers). Blue Valentine is the sort of film that feels ripped straight from personal experience - it's as raw and honest a portrait of young love as I've ever seen, and it's a tragedy that will resonate with anyone who has ever been where this film takes us.

3. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is a fascinating character drama, an exciting and almost experimental exploration of the human mind, a reinvention of the horror genre and a dynamic acting showcase for its star, the incredible and still very underrated Leonardo DiCaprio. Shutter Island is also an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated man haunted by his past. Add Teddy Daniels to the list of Scorsese’s tragic and multilayered antiheroes – Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan, Rupert Pupkin, Jesus Christ. The film also continues Scorsese's fascination with our understanding of violence (it should be noted that our perception of the lead character's violent actions changes dramatically when watching the film for a second time).

Shutter Island is eerie from the very beginning. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) steadily approach an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Hovering over every scene is a paranoid, post-war anxiety shared explicitly by our protagonist and thoroughly felt and realized by Scorsese. Tensions rise as Teddy recalls horrific memories from liberating a concentration camp during the war, and his suspicions of Nazism and conspiracy by the House of Un-American Activities on the island become our suspicions. The best Scorsese films force the audience to live inside the minds of moderately-to-severely delusional characters weighed down by an enormous and overwhelming guilt. Shutter Island does just that. DiCaprio’s performance is superlative and even more layered than one initially realizes. With this performance, I think it’s safe to say that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation.

The film is a brilliant melding of film noir, detective mystery and psychological horror, at its very core an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, disguised as a Hitchcockian thriller that works as both a homage to Scorsese’s favorite psychological thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s while simultaneously elevating itself into something larger and more complicated. When you watch Shutter Island, you're not just watching Scorsese's film – you're watching thousands of classic movies at once, assembled together in a picture conceived by a filmmaker whose encyclopedic knowledge of film history pours into every detail of every frame, so much so that an already-genuinely suspenseful scene of DiCaprio racing up a flight of winding stairs simultaneously serves as a homage to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). The ranking of Shutter Island behind The Social Network and Blue Valentine is arbitrary - in a year of great films, these three are the best.

4. The Fighter (David O. Russell)

The Fighter is one of the rare films that gives me hope that the gritty, character-driven dramas of the 1970s are not completely dead. Four terrific actors – Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo – are given powerful material and, with David O. Russell behind the camera, they are allowed to dynamically explore some intense and raw relationships in a boxing drama that wisely aims for the realism of Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) rather than the hokiness of the Rocky films. Bale gives the male performance of the year, in a brilliant, Method-driven portrayal that ranks alongside the best work of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. In fact, The Fighter is the kind of project that would have attracted the talents of De Niro and Pacino years ago. Unsurprisingly, it took Wahlberg five years to get the movie made in the current Hollywood climate.

There’s a scene between Bale and Leo where, in the midst of a tense confrontation, Bale starts singing The Bee Gees' I Started A Joke, and, slowly, leads Leo into singing along with him. It's the sort of uncomfortably honest scene that you don't see in movies anymore. The Fighter undoubtedly features the best ensemble cast of the year.

5. Biutiful (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

The films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu have regularly appeared near the top of my past ten-best lists. 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) were two of the decade's most powerful films, and in those films, Inarritu directed Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi in some of their finest performances to date. His latest film, Biutiful, stars Javier Bardem, whose performance is head and shoulders above every other male performance this year, with the exception of Ryan Gosling's work in Blue Valentine and Christian Bale's work in The Fighter. If every Academy member went out and saw this extraordinary film, Bardem would almost certainly win the Best Actor Oscar - he is astonishing. With Biutiful, both Bardem and Inarritu are doing the best work of their already impeccable careers.

6. True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Time just gets away from us.”

There's a moving and unexpectedly emotional resonance in True Grit that I didn't experience fully the first time I saw the film. Joel and Ethan Coen, the most consistently excellent of all American filmmakers, have made a western that stands in brilliant contrast to their nihilistic and grim masterpiece No Country for Old Men. If the latter film captured the disillusionment and brutality of the new West, then True Grit surely captures the heart and the sadness of the old West. Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon give three of the year's best performances, and the screenplay is as dryly hilarious and strangely poetic as the finest of the Coen's works. With the moving hymn Leaning On The Everlasting Arms by Iris DeMent closing the picture, Joel and Ethan Coen offer a softer but no less profound meditation on spirituality than their masterpiece from last year, A Serious Man.

7. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

I suspect the reason I love Darren Aronofsky so much is because, as Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly pointed out, his films remind me of the early work of Martin Scorsese. Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), the best film of that respective year, had a sort of gritty realism that recalled Mean Streets (1973). With Black Swan, Aronofsky once again calls upon an actor to go above and beyond the call of duty, and, just as Mickey Rourke bled for his artful performance in The Wrestler, so does Natalie Portman bleed and suffer here, in a role that should unquestionably win Portman the Best Actress Academy Award. The entire film is disturbingly visceral and haunting, and the supporting cast - particularly Barbara Hershey as a frighteningly possessive mother - is phenomenal. It's the best movie I've ever seen about performance anxiety. In a year of films dealing with psychological trauma, Black Swan may very well remain the finest.

8. Inception (Christopher Nolan)

This breathtakingly original and fascinating film is not a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie or the latest installment in a film franchise. Nolan, who brought gravitas to superhero films with 2005’s Batman Begins and especially 2008’s The Dark Knight, is one of very few commercial American filmmakers taking risks and exploring new territory with his films, and Inception may represent his finest accomplishment yet. The film is a complex and thrilling heist movie, a tragic romance, an exploration of the human psyche and Nolan’s own, seemingly personal commentary on what separates our dreams from our reality. As far as science-fiction thrillers are concerned, Inception is the best of its kind since Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

Leonardo DiCaprio, further cementing his status as the best actor of his generation, is Cobb, a ‘dream thief’ who specializes in extracting ideas from people’s minds while they are asleep. What distinguishes Inception from nearly every other big-budgeted action picture in recent memory (particularly James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems less impressive with each passing day) is the film’s sheer originality in concept and execution, and, most importantly, Nolan’s use of a dynamic ensemble of actors, including Marion Cotillard’s deeply felt and powerful performance as Mal, Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s sly and ingeniously underplayed point man Arthur, and Cillian Murphy’s troubled tycoon Fischer, a character so compelling that he deserves his own film. When was the last time a science-fiction action picture broke your heart and engaged your brain simultaneously? With Inception, Nolan has set the bar extremely high for summer entertainment.

9. 127 Hours (Danny Boyle)

Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. This is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

10. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

The Ghost Writer is one of the year's great surprises - a thrilling, shocking mystery that represents Roman Polanski's finest work in years. This film opened on the same weekend in New York City as Shutter Island, and it was amazing to sit back and watch as two legendary filmmakers, Scorsese and Polanski, showed their younger peers how to direct deliberately-paced and shocking thrillers. As grim as Chinatown (1974) and every bit as entertaining, The Ghost Writer is the sort of movie that would have made Alfred Hitchcock very proud. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson give fantastic performances.

There were more than ten excellent films this year, however. Here are fifty-one movies that deserve some recognition. Following the list, I've posted some personal awards.

1. The Social Network

2. Blue Valentine

3. Shutter Island

4. The Fighter

5. Biutiful

6. True Grit

7. Black Swan

8. Inception

9. 127 Hours

10. The Ghost Writer

11. Another Year

12. Hereafter

13. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

14. Greenberg

15. Animal Kingdom

16. The Town

17. Life During Wartime

18. The Kids Are All Right

19. Somewhere

20. Fair Game

21. I Love You Philip Morris

22. Rabbit Hole

23. Barney's Version

24. Solitary Man

25. Let Me In

26. Get Low

27. Never Let Me Go

28. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

29. Toy Story 3

30. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

31. The American

32. Inside Job

33. A Letter to Elia

34. Please Give

35. Cyrus

36. The King's Speech

37. Enter the Void

38. Winter’s Bone

39. Casino Jack

40. City Island

41. Stone

42. Leaves of Grass

43. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

44. Mother and Child

45. Green Zone

46. Farewell

47. I Am Love

48. The Killer Inside Me

49. Exit Through the Gift Shop

50. The Other Guys

51. Love and Other Drugs

52. Ondine

53. Harry Brown

54. Machete

Best Picture: The Social Network

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Shutter Island

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island

Runner-Up: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Actor: Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine and Javier Bardem, Biutiful

Runner-Up: Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island

Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Runner-Up: Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine and Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Matt Damon, True Grit

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Runner-Up: Amy Adams, The Fighter and Lesley Manville, Another Year

Best Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Inception

Runner-Up: Blue Valentine and Black Swan

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Runner-Up: Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit

I Just Had Coffee With McCauley...Half An Hour Ago!

2010-12-30T14:04:00.007-06:00

Before the new year begins and I finish compiling my Top Ten list of 2010’s best films, I almost certainly have to document the final few weeks of my extraordinary first semester of sophomore year at New York University. I must start by saying that I had the incredible honor of meeting one of my lifelong heroes in life and in art on December 2^nd, 2010 – Mr. Al Pacino. Let me preface this experience by saying that, when I first started my film criticism website when I was thirteen years old, I wrote a dedication on the front page that, to this day, reads as follows: “This website is dedicated to Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Al Pacino, my heroes, and the men who are responsible for my love of cinema, acting, filmmaking and writing.” This dedication will always remain true. When I was eleven years old and I started watching the visceral, forceful, brilliant performances by De Niro and Pacino and the passionate, emotionally devastating pictures by Scorsese, I knew that I wanted to be an actor, and I knew that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

Film after film, Pacino’s searing performances redefined my notion of what acting could be. There was a disturbing rawness, a pain, a wild, uncontrollable force in his performances that shook me to my very core. By the time I was twelve, his work as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Frank Serpico in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), Sonny in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Richard Roma in James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Lowell Bergman in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), Vincent Hanna in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and countless other movies was embedded in my brain, like a piece of personal history. When I wasn’t obsessively re-watching every Pacino, De Niro and Scorsese movie at home on VHS, I was seeking out their current work in theaters. My mom took me to see Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) when it was first released, and there I was, yet again, gaping in awe at the power and the intensity that Mr. Pacino brought to every role, every performance.

So when I say that I am a “fan” of Mr. Pacino’s work, I do not use the term “fan” lightly. He, along with De Niro and Scorsese, is responsible for my entire career as an artist. How choices have I made onstage as an actor that I simply borrowed from the endless library of Mr. Pacino’s brilliant performances that I more or less store away in the back of my mind? To come face-to-face with the man who I have been watching and idolizing for years in the dark of the cinema, is something I cannot really describe. It was not unlike first seeing Martin Scorsese speak last year at the Director’s Guild Theater – the man and his work are such an integral part of my very psychology and personal history, that it is surreal to see him, at last, in person.

Pacino is currently starring in the Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice at the Broadhurst Theatre, and I was very lucky to attend the play in early December (and, afterwards, I was able to meet Pacino at the stage door). It was a magnificent production, with Pacino giving a powerhouse performance as Shylock, and featured an excellent supporting cast, including Jesse L. Martin and Lily Rabe. That same weekend, I also had the pleasure of attending the Broadway revival of Driving Miss Daisy at the Golden Theatre, starring James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave and Boyd Gaines, which was a fantastic production, as well.

On Monday, December 6^th, I attended the 2010 Tisch School of the Arts Gala, also known as "The Face of Tisch" Gala, at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Lincoln Center as one of the Tisch Dean’s Scholars. The Gala, which is held every year and celebrates an outstanding alumnus of Tisch, this year honored actor/director Billy Crystal, Class of 1970 (BFA, Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television). At the Gala, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with NYU President John Sexton, and for the ceremony, the Dean's Scholars received front-row seats in the auditorium as Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Shaffer, Marcia Gay Harden, Jesse L. Martin, Sean Curran and many others came onstage to honor Mr. Crystal, who sat in the audience with his family. It was an one-of-a-kind experience, from laughing consistently at Mr. Williams' jokes to watching a spectacular dance number by students from the Tisch Dance department to hearing Mr. Crystal describe his NYU film classes in the late 1960s when a young Martin Scorsese was his demanding professor. After the ceremony, there was an incredible dinner for the guests where the Dean's Scholars received their own table. You can click on this link to view official pictures from the event, where you'll find a group picture of the Dean's Scholars (as well as great pictures of Mr. Crystal, Mr. Williams and many others). I am truly grateful for having been able to attend this ceremony.

The end of the semester meant saying goodbye to Sight and Sound: Film, my favorite class that I have ever taken, taught by the great professor Laszlo Santha. For my final Sight and Sound film, I had the honor of working with three great actors – fellow film student and actor Grant Rosenmeyer, who, among many other roles, played Ari Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); my friend Lizzie Logan from Columbia University, who was in my third Sight and Sound movie; and a very talented actor named Angelo Niakas, who also starred in several of my classmates’ films. All three actors did extraordinary work in my film, which was titled But When We Get To The End, He Wants To Start All Over Again, and my crew members Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff and Ben Dewey were so incredibly hard-working and dedicated.

I also had the great opportunity of acting in thirteen of my classmates’ movies over the course of the semester, and I hope to post some of those movies online once they are transferred digitally (because everything is shot on 16MM film, a proper digital transfer usually takes a little while). In the meantime, I have uploaded a rough recording of my first four films for Sight and Sound: Film. The video is a digital recording of the four films as they were screened on a 16MM projector in the Tisch Steenbeck lab, and so the quality is understandably murky. But until the films are transferred properly next semester, here are the first four films I wrote, directed and edited this semester.

I also crewed on a Tisch junior's Color Sync film in New Jersey during the weekend before finals began, which was great fun. The day after I returned to Austin for the holiday season, I saw one of my high school theatre directors, Mrs. Annie Dragoo, perform in The City Theatre's production of Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling. Mrs. Dragoo was fantastic in the production, and it was a great way to jump into the Austin arts scene for my winter break.

As for movies, I will post my Top Ten list of 2010's best films in the coming days. For now, I will simply say that 2010 was the best year for film, in my opinion, since 2007, when we saw the likes of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, David Fincher's Zodiac, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all seven of which remained among my favorite films of the 2000s decade.

Awake Again, I Can't Pretend, And I Know I'm Alone...And Close To The End

2010-11-24T12:59:00.002-06:00

On Friday, October 22nd, I had the opportunity to perform in the Off-Broadway production of my friend Rachel Lewis' play Consciousness at Theatre 80 at Saint Marks Place in New York City. The production was presented by The People's Theatre LAB as part of an all-night show called The People's Fest. In Rachel's play, I played two different characters - Dr. O'Hanlan and Reverend Jonas Haversham, both meaty roles, and I had the chance to perform alongside some incredibly talented actors, many of whom train at the Stella Adler Studio at New York University. As an actor, I was honored and thrilled to perform in this production, particularly considering that the play counted as an Off-Broadway credit. As an added bonus, I also appeared on the poster for The People's Fest, which I have posted to the right (granted, the picture on the poster is from four years ago, when I played Edward Teller in The Red Dragon Players' 2006 production of The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer).

In October, I was also elected to join Tisch New Theatre's Executive Board as an officer. It is an incredible honor to join the officers on this board, including my good friend Alexander Fofonoff. I have been involved with this incredible organization since last year, when Tisch New Theatre produced and performed my original one-act play The Certifiable for their Fall 2009 Staged Reading, and last spring when I first performed in Rachel Lewis' Consciousness for their Spring 2010 Staged Reading. Since on the Executive Board, I have helped organize the Fall 2010 Staged Reading, as well as planning a TNT Master Class with musical director Will Van Dyke, the current keyboardist for The Addams Family on Broadway. Shortly after being elected to the Executive Board, my fellow officers and I went to see The New York Neo-Futurists perform Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind at The Kraine Theater, a fascinating piece of performance art that, to quote Backstage, is "like the glory days of Saturday Night Live, only funnier and slightly surreal."

My roommate and good friend Bobb Barito recently had his short film The Pit, which he filmed this past summer, selected for the 7th Annual NYC Downtown Short Film Festival Audience Choice Screenings. He and I attended one of the Audience Choice screenings on Saturday, October 23rd at the Duo Theatre on East 4th Street. We were astounded to find that this theatre, which features beautiful paintings and artwork, was used by Francis Ford Coppola for the astounding operetta scene from The Godfather Part II (1974), where Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) first sees Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin). Bobb's film was received very well, and I very much hope The Pit is selected as an audience favorite for the festival.

In other news, my Sight and Sound: Film class, taught by the incredible professor Laszlo Santha, is quite simply the best class I've ever taken in my life, college or otherwise. Santha told our class at the beginning of the semester that this was the greatest class of all time, and I should have taken him at his word. After all, in what other class can you write, direct and shoot five of your own movies on 16MM film and crew on at least fifteen other films in one semester? So far this semester, I have written and directed four projects - The Hand Job, a short comedy thriller about a man searching for his severed hand; Relapse, a drama about a recovering alcoholic who falls back into old habits at a birthday party; Proper Behavior For Your Date, a Woody Allen-esque piece on an awkward man's struggle to find love and behave appropriately on dates; and Heart of Gold, a solemn drama about a Midwestern boy who follows a lost love to New York City. Several of my friends have acted in these films, including Bobb Barito, Mike Cheslik, Alex Casper, Jeremy Keller and Lizzie Logan, who I first met two years ago at the University of Southern California's Summer Screenwriting program (she is now a freshman at Columbia University). I'm enormously proud of all four films - particularly the latter two, as they are both rather personal projects.

In addition to working on these films, I have also starred in nine movies in my Sight and Sound class, ranging from slapstick comedy films to serious dramas. This has been an incredible opportunity to work with talented Sight and Sound crews other than my own and also a great opportunity to practice the difficult art of acting for film, which is an entirely different beast than acting for stage. I hope to post many of these movies once the semester has ended and we have turned in our 16MM films to be digitized by the Post-Production Center (although the movies will, quite simply, never look as good or as beautiful as they do when projected on a 16MM projector).

In the past month, there have been some astounding movies released in cinemas, including works from Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, two of my favorite filmmakers. Eastwood's Hereafter is a solemn, heartfelt meditation on the existence of a spiritual life after death. The movie, masterfully written by Peter Morgan, is full of the thoughtfulness that has come to be associated with Eastwood's incredible work as a director. The performances are superb, particularly from Matt Damon, as a retired psychic haunted by his gift, and from newcomers George and Frankie McLaren, as two young brothers in London who are faced with an unspeakable tragedy. Audiences should be so lucky that a master filmmaker like Eastwood is willing to maturely explore this material.

Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the filmmaker's best work since Match Point (2005), also reckons with death, albeit in a very different way. The picture is funny, yes, but it becomes increasingly devastating as we watch Allen's characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side. The movie hit me very powerfully, as the best Woody Allen films always have, and its middling critical reception is really bewildering to me. The ensemble cast is so uniformly excellent that it's hard to know where to start (although Anthony Hopkins in particular stands out).

But the best film I've seen since The Social Network is inarguably Danny Boyle's extraordinary 127 Hours, which is, quite simply, the most intense and gripping theatrical experience I've had in years. And yet the movie is also one of the most uplifting, life-affirming and joyous odes to the human spirit that I've seen since Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Boyle and his star, current Tisch School of the Arts student James Franco, have taken fascinating true-life material and elevated it to great art. I have no doubt that 127 Hours will stand as one of my favorite films of the year - it is masterful filmmaking and features a lead performance from Franco that will be talked about for years to come.

There are many other incredible movies that I've seen in the past month, including Doug Liman's Fair Game, an important movie for American audiences to see in order to relive the outrage regarding the Bush administration's handling of ousted CIA agent Valerie Plame, with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as fantastic and compulsively watchable as they've ever been; John Curran's Stone, with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton giving brilliant performances in a daring character-driven drama with no easy answers and no easy resolutions; Charles Ferguson's infuriating and fascinating documentary Inside Job, which relentlessly pursues the cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis; Matt Reeves' Let Me In, the film that Stephen King correctly named the best American horror film of the past twenty years; Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, a beautiful and disturbing drama starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley; and Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here, the 'documentary' about Joaquin Phoenix's descent into madness (the fact that this film is apparently a hoax does not diminish the power and the sadness of Phoenix's performance and downfall in the film).

I am extremely excited to announce that I will be attending The Face of Tisch Gala 2010 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center on Monday, December 6th. This annual Tisch Gala is an event that I have always wanted to attend, and this year the Tisch Dean's Scholars have been invited to attend the ceremony for free, where guests will include Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, James Franco, Whoopi Goldberg and Honorary Chair Martin Scorsese. I am incredibly honored to attend this event with my fellow Dean's Scholars, where I will hopefully meet many of these incredible talents.

On Tuesday, November 2nd, my wonderful and supportive screenwriting professor Selma Thompson hosted a screening of the great documentary Winnebago Man in Third North's Mini Theatre, and following the screening there was a Q&A with the film's producer, Joel Heller. Mr. Heller, Professor Thompson's former student at NYU, now lives and works primarily in Austin, and so it was fascinating to hear him speak about the film and the Austin filmmakers who made the movie. On Friday, November 5th, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Professor Thompson, Mr. Heller and a group of other students in the East Village, where I was able to ask him all about his filmmaking career. The next weekend, I served as Producer and Assistant Director on my friend Aaron Kodz's short film Moneyrollers, which we shot in Coral Tower with a very talented cast and crew (I will also work as a Co-Editor with Aaron on the movie, which is now in post-production).

Until my next post, I'll leave you with the above recently released image from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), one of my ten favorite films of all time.

And The Leaves That Are Green Turn To Brown

2010-10-04T16:34:00.020-05:00

It's hard to believe that it's been an entire month since I moved back to New York City - it really does seem just like yesterday when my mother, grandmother and I arrived in the city and I moved into my new room at NYU's Coral Tower. Labor Day weekend, the weekend before classes officially started, my family and I saw the Off-Broadway production of Paul Weitz's new play, Trust, starring Zach Braff, Sutton Foster, Bobby Cannavale and Ari Graynor, and the Barrow Street Theatre's revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Both productions were outstanding - Weitz's play was an actor's showcase for Braff and his costars, and Wilder's play was as devastating as ever in David Cromer's brilliantly minimalist production.

Labor Day weekend was also a chance to reunite with my friends from NYU. Luckily, I have been spending just as much time this year with these great people as I did last year. My buddy Bobb Barito and I share a room together at Coral Tower - and we've already played host to screenings of Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), among others - and my friend Morgan Block lives just a few minutes away near Union Square. I spend an extraordinary amount of time with my pals Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff and Ben Dewey, as we operate in a rotating crew for my Sight and Sound: Film class, which meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:50 P.M. For this production class, taught by the incredible instructor Laszlo Santha, our crew shoots a total of twenty short movies on 16MM black-and-white reversal film with an Arriflex 16S camera during the semester. Every student writes and directs five films, works as a crew member on all other projects, and edits their own films by hand in the Steenbeck lab at the Tisch School of the Arts. In other words, this course is the opportunity of a lifetime. Up until this year, my filmmaking experience has only been with digital cameras - thankfully, NYU still grants students the opportunity to work with actual film and shoot some very 'old-school-style' projects.

The process of shooting on actual film is relentlessly stressful, but it's also extremely rewarding. There is a beauty to the black-and-white reversal film that simply cannot be captured with a digital camera. My crew and I finished shooting my first project yesterday on Ninth Avenue and Ganesvoort Street, and this next week I will spend most of my time in the Steenbeck lab at Tisch, editing and splicing my film and preparing the final cut for the class screening next week. My assignment was to shoot a chase sequence, and, with the help of my friends and talented actors Bobb Barito and Mike Cheslik, shoot a chase sequence we certainly did.

Two weekends ago, I took a day trip with some friends to Port Washington, New York, a town on the North Shore of Long Island where my friend Morgan Block calls home. Morgan invited my friends and me to have lunch at her house (her mother made some delicious Challach French Toast for lunch) and celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Interestingly enough, Port Washington is the town where Daisy Buchanan lives in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - in fact, there is even a house in Port Washington that likely served as Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy's East Egg home.

In the past few weeks, there have also been a number of very exciting events I have attended on the NYU campus. On September 21st, my friend Jeremy Keller invited me to the Season Premiere of HBO's comedy series Bored to Death at NYU's Skirball Center. At the premiere, guests included series stars Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Oliver Platt, as well as series creator/ producer Jonathan Ames. After an introduction from Ames, Skirball screened the first two episodes of the new season - and although I had admittedly never watched the series before, I must admit that Bored to Death offers a great deal of laughs. On September 29th, Morgan and I attended the Global Poverty Project's 1.4 Billion Reasons presentation at the Skirball Center, hosted by actor Hugh Jackman. During the two-hour event, Jackman and Global Poverty Project founder Hugh Evans discussed numerous ways that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the globe. It was a fascinating presentation, and Jackman's presence drew the attention of a large crowd to this very important issue.

On September 22nd, I went on a tour of the Lower East Side Community Gardens with the Tisch Dean's Scholars group. Our tour guide, Mr. Howard Brandstein, gave us a fascinating history of the Community Gardens and joined us afterwards for some coffee and dessert. The Tisch Dean's Scholar group, led by the great Professor Chris Chan Roberson, has organized many fascinating events for the semester, and I am honored to spend time with my fellow scholars and the great professors who sponsor the activities. This Wednesday, the group is going on a tour of The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and I am very much looking forward to that experience.

The fall movie season has started off quite nicely with a series of outstanding features, both mainstream and independent, playing in theaters right now. Anton Corbijn's The American is a thriller so uniquely quiet, thoughtful and European that I am almost in disbelief that it is a mainstream Hollywood release. I have a feeling most American audiences simply don't know how to react to this picture, and it's a pity. In the 1970s, this sort of expertly crafted art thriller would have been the norm. Corbijn and star George Clooney deserve high praise for daring to even make The American - it's one of the riskier films I've seen this year, and one of the best. On the other side of the cinematic spectrum is Robert Rodriguez's explosively entertaining Machete, starring Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez and, my hero, Robert De Niro. I've been looking forward to seeing this radical, hilarious and unabashedly violent exploitation picture ever since my friend Steve White worked as the Location Manager on the film, and I'm happy to report that it's tremendous fun.

On September 18th, I caught a screening of Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton in a dual role as identical twins, one a college philosophy professor and the other a stoner criminal. Norton is better than ever, and Nelson has more on his mind - regarding philosophy, intellectualism and marijuana - than is initially apparent. Leaves of Grass is a funny and insightful piece of cinema that deserves more publicity and a much larger audience. After the screening at the Village East Cinema, both Norton and Nelson came out into the audience for a post-film Q&A. It was fascinating to hear Norton, one of the best actors of his generation, and Nelson, a fantastic actor - Minority Report (2002), Syriana (2005), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) - and filmmaker - The Grey Zone (2001) - discuss this independent project that was very close to both of their hearts.

The fall movie season officially exploded with the release of Ben Affleck's superb crime drama The Town. The writing, the direction and the performances - particularly from Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper and Affleck - are simply outstanding. On September 24th, one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Oliver Stone, released his latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I've heard various complaints about this picture (particularly regarding the ending), but perhaps I'm too biased in my favoritism for Stone to really agree with any of the criticism. There's something so unapologetically sincere, ambitious and absolutely nuts about Stone's filmmaking style that I can't help but admire each and every project he tackles, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is his finest work in the past ten years. It's relentlessly entertaining and surprisingly sentimental, and Manhattan has never looked better - or more corrupt - than in Stone's latest vision. Frank Langella, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and, of course, Michael Douglas stand out among the very talented ensemble.

The cinematic elephant in the room is David Fincher's The Social Network, which stands alongside Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island as the best film I've seen this year. Although the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate who created the website Facebook and subsequently became the youngest billionaire in the world doesn't sound like material worthy of comparison to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), the comparison is more than justified. Fincher's astounding direction, Aaron Sorkin's brilliant and dense screenplay and the performances - particularly from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg - are all first-rate.

On that note, I will depart for the evening. If you haven't yet checked out The American, Machete, Leaves of Grass, The Town, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and especially The Social Network, then I recommend you do so. Until next time, I'll leave you with a list of highly recommended movies I caught in cinemas over the summer in Austin. Here they are: Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, David Michod's Animal Kingdom, Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man, Aaron Schneider's Get Low, Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, Jay Duplass' Cyrus, Nicole Holofcener's Please Give, Raymond De Felitta's City Island, Christian Carion's Farewell, Ricki Stern's Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child, Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, Adam McKay's The Other Guys and Daniel Barber's Harry Brown.

Heading Out For The East Coast, Lord Knows I've Paid Some Dues Gettin' Through

2010-09-03T14:53:00.004-05:00

After many months of remaining inactive on this blog, I feel obliged to start writing and updating this online journal once more. Today - September 3rd, 2010 - seems like a fairly appropriate day, as I am currently flying from Austin to New York City for my second year at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I've had a terrific summer, but before I start reliving my summer activities, I need to revisit my spring semester at NYU. The spring semester, in short, was just as exciting and engaging as my first semester. I completed five courses - Digital Frame and Sequence, Writing the Essay: The World Through Art, Freshman Colloquium, The Language of Film and Introduction to Psychology - and I was extremely lucky to have absolutely terrific professors for these courses. For my Writing the Essay: The World Through Art course, I wrote two extensive essays - one on filmmaker Martin Scorsese and one on Ground Zero, both of which I posted on this blog.

For my Digital Frame and Sequence class - taught by professor Jennifer Rodewald - I wrote and directed several film projects, all of which were shot using still frames on a digital camera. Of the many short movies I made, my favorite of them all remains Homesick, an experimental film I photographed and edited featuring many of my friends. You can watch Homesick below - although I will warn you upfront that it contains some disturbing images.

Homesick - An Experimental Film by Jack Kyser from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

My other favorite film project from the spring semester was my final narrative movie, Vincent, a fifteen-minute drama starring my friends Bobb Barito, Alex Casper and Alexander Fofonoff, and the great composer and lyricist James Merillat (his original musical Radio Eyes premiered at Austin High School two years ago - I played the eccentric detective Inspector Riley). The film - which I wrote, directed and edited - follows a disturbed young man named Vincent (Barito) who is forced to commit violent crimes for his surrogate father (Merillat) in return for a kidney operation. You can watch Vincent below - although I should warn you that the film contains violent images and disturbing content.

Vincent: A Film by Jack Kyser from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

In April, my good friend Morgan Block and I volunteered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it was quite a rewarding experience. I worked my volunteer shifts at the Village East Theatre - just around the corner from my residence hall, Third Avenue North - and I enjoyed the volunteering immensely (although I never saw my hero - Festival Founder Robert De Niro - I did encounter Hope Davis, Aaron Eckhart and other celebrities at the Village East screenings). The festival screened many extraordinary films, including Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me and Nicole Holofcener's Please Give. Volunteers were offered many chances to attend particular screenings - during my time as a volunteer, I saw Neil Jordan's Ondine, John Carney's Zonad, J.B. Ghuman Jr.'s Spork and James Franco's documentary Saturday Night, the very last screening of the festival. Mr. Franco answered questions after the screening of his documentary, a fascinating backstage look at the week-long preparation for Saturday Night Live. The film, interestingly enough, started out as a student project for one of Franco's film classes at NYU, and then expanded into a feature-length documentary.

I was extremely fortunate to catch two plays on Broadway during my last few weeks in New York City - the revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, starring Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johannson, and Martin McDonagh's new play A Behanding in Spokane, starring Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan. The former is my favorite play of all time - a brilliant tragedy with Shakespearean power and allusions to Miller's relationship with director Elia Kazan. The Gregory Mosher-directed production at the Cort Theatre was simply outstanding. As Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, the tragic hero of A View from the Bridge, Liev Schreiber was astonishing - all quiet rage and brooding inner turmoil, a stage performance underacted to perfection (in a role that usually calls for grandiose, over-the-top theatrics). Scarlett Johannson was equally impressive as Catherine, Eddie's niece and object of desire. The latter play, A Behanding in Spokane, was written by one of my favorite playwrights, Martin McDonagh, who wrote the powerful The Pillowman and wrote and directed the great film In Bruges (2008). A dark comedy acted to perfection by its incredible cast, A Behanding in Spokane is a perfect entry in the McDonagh canon.

In April, I also performed in the Tisch New Theatre staged reading of Rachel Lewis' play Consciousness, directed by my friend Alexander Fofonoff. There were many superlative movies released during the spring, as well - my favorites remain Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. The celebrity sightings in New York City are incredible, too - from seeing Mickey Rourke in a West Village frozen yogurt shop to running into Ben Stiller two nights in a row at Broadway shows to shaking Bill Clinton's hand outside a Broadway theater (see picture above), New York City is the place where the stars are everywhere.

This summer, I received a paid internship as a Teaching Assistant at a three-week filmmaking camp at The University of Texas at Austin from the Digital Media Academy, a great organization formed several years ago at Stanford University. I also wrote, directed, edited and starred in Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, a forty-minute film starring my friends (and fellow Red Dragon Players) Haleigh Holt, David Walter, Cora Walters and Mitchell Stephens. Although the film was shot on a mini-DV camera and is noticeably low-budget, I'm still very proud of the work accomplished by my friends and me. There is a link to the first part of the movie below.

Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, Part One from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

To conclude my first blog post in several months, I'd like to leave you with my thoughts on what I consider the best movie of the summer, Christopher Nolan's Inception. This breathtakingly original and fascinating film is not a sequel, a remake, a superhero movie or the latest installment in a film franchise. Nolan, who brought gravitas to superhero films with 2005’s Batman Begins and especially 2008’s The Dark Knight, is one of very few commercial American filmmakers taking risks and exploring new territory with his films, and Inception may represent his finest accomplishment yet. The film is a complex and thrilling heist movie, a tragic romance, an exploration of the human psyche and Nolan’s own, seemingly personal commentary on what separates our dreams from our reality. As far as science-fiction thrillers are concerned, Inception is the best of its kind since Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).

Leonardo DiCaprio, further cementing his status as the best actor of his generation, inches even closer to this year’s Best Actor Oscar (following his heartbreaking performance in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island earlier this year) as Cobb, a ‘dream thief’ who specializes in extracting ideas from people’s minds while they are asleep. What distinguishes Inception from nearly every other big-budgeted action picture in recent memory (particularly James Cameron’s Avatar, which seems less impressive with each passing day) is the film’s sheer originality in concept and execution, and, most importantly, Nolan’s use of a dynamic ensemble of actors, including Marion Cotillard’s deeply felt and powerful performance as Mal, Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s sly and ingeniously underplayed point man Arthur, and Cillian Murphy’s troubled tycoon Fischer, a character so compelling that he deserves his own film. When was the last time a science-fiction action picture broke your heart and engaged your brain simultaneously? With Inception, Nolan has set the bar extremely high for summer entertainment.

Just When You Thought I'd Have Nothing More To Say On Scorsese...

2010-05-13T02:15:00.022-05:00

Note: The following piece is an essay I wrote for my fifth and final progression paper for my class Writing the Essay: Art and the World at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Thank you to my terrific professor, Ms. Olivia Birdsall.

In the climatic bloodbath of the film Taxi Driver (1976), deranged taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) enters a Manhattan whorehouse and murders three men in his attempt to save the twelve-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster). After first murdering the pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) on the steps of the apartment building, Travis ascends upstairs into the hellish apartment building and simultaneously descends into madness. The color in the frame is desaturated, lending a sickening, ethereal nature to the whorehouse. The rooms appear so grimy and filthy that the audience actually wants Travis to clean up the mess, despite the fact that Travis is acting on his own delusions. As an armed man shoots Travis from behind, our experience of the violence is heightened by extreme slow motion; we see the violence the same way Travis sees it. Finally, as Travis busts into the room where Iris is entertaining a client, Travis murders the client and exhaustedly collapses on the couch in the room. He puts his gun to his neck and pulls the trigger, but there aren’t any bullets left. As Travis drops the gun and lies back on the couch, bloodied and wounded and drenched in blood, the camera looks down upon him using the Priest’s Eye View angle – a camera angle more or less invented by director Martin Scorsese, the angle at which a priest would look down upon his congregation – and takes pity on Travis, a fallen antihero, in a scene that is very similar to boxer Jake La Motta’s Christ crucifixion pose upon his defeat in the boxing ring in Raging Bull (1980).

This oddly empathetic ending to Taxi Driver (1976), a film that many have deemed a dangerous and demented picture, defines the personal cinema of director Martin Scorsese, who sees deranged Vietnam veteran and New York City taxi driver Bickle not as a villain necessarily, but as a misunderstood antihero. Traditional Hollywood movies would have Travis die at the film’s end (although surely no traditional Hollywood filmmaker would tackle this subject matter). But Scorsese instead gives Travis a relatively happy ending – after the bloodbath, Travis is finally crowned as a ‘hero cabbie,’ a man who stood up against the filth and scum of the New York streets. Scorsese ends the film with a reconciliation between Travis and Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), the woman that he loves but from whom he has completely alienated himself (although it should be noted that many critics and theorists debate whether the ending represents Travis’ delusions of grandeur as he lays dying or whether the ending is meant to be taken literally).

The juxtaposition of religious imagery with the scum of New York City street life should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Scorsese’s youth; raised by working-class parents in the Bowery, Scorsese was surrounded as a child by Catholicism and, before deciding to enter film school at New York University, he considered becoming a priest in the Catholic Church. His encounters with both the church and the mean street life lends itself especially well to stories of guilt-ridden antiheroes paying penance for their behavior in an urban setting. In the case of Taxi Driver, Scorsese broke completely new ground with his story of a non-traditional antihero who walks a fine line between sanity and insanity because, unlike other filmmakers, Scorsese demanded that the viewer empathize and understand things from the antihero’s point-of-view. Many filmmakers before Scorsese had made films about psychotic human beings (Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho comes to mind), but no director had ever followed a delusional character so intimately and intensely as Scorsese. Scorsese’s cinema is a cinema of isolation and loneliness, films preoccupied with the mindset and behavior of God’s lonely man, as Travis Bickle refers to himself. There is nothing particularly heroic about Scorsese’s antiheroes other than that they are human beings and suffer from the human condition.

Scorsese’s preoccupations and values come through in wildly different films in very different ways. In Bringing out the Dead (1999), the story of frazzled, sleep-deprived EMS driver Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), Scorsese uses the red cross of the hospital ambulances as symbolism for a holy cross that brings a religious weight to the roles of the paramedics, and therefore every time Pierce loses a patient in the back of his ambulance, he has failed to save his fellow man. Scorsese’s breakout feature, the semi-autobiographical film Mean Streets (1973), is the story of a young hoodlum, Charlie (Keitel) in Little Italy who struggles between his loyalties to the mob and the Catholic Church. Guilt and penance play similar roles in this film as in Bringing out the Dead, as Charlie repeatedly holds his hand over open flames as punishment for his sins – he must test the fires of Hell in order to make sure that he is ready to suffer when the appropriate time comes. Other films, such as The King of Comedy (1983) and the aforementioned Raging Bull and Taxi Driver are primarily concerned with deranged loners and their inability to make a lasting connection, particularly with women. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Scorsese’s works are intensely autobiographical in one sense or another. In the article “You’ve Got to Love Something Enough to Kill It: The Art of Noncompromise” by Chris Hodenfield, Hodenfield remarks that “Scorsese doesn’t mind putting his personal life up on the screen,” evident from the very early stages of his career, as “his first feature, an enhanced student project called Who’s That Knocking at my Door? (1968), was about an intensely religious guy and his struggle with a more worldly girlfriend” (48). Only fifteen years after Who’s That Knocking at my Door?, Scorsese directed the unsettling feature The King of Comedy, a film billed as a dark comedy, but in many ways actually a commentary on Scorsese’s failed relationships with people in general. In the 1983 interview “Martin Scorsese: Who the Hell Wants to Make Other Pictures If You Can’t Have a Relationship with a Woman?” by Roger Ebert, Scorsese observes that “the amount of rejection in [The King of Comedy] is horrifying” and that the movie was made “during a very painful period in [his] life” (56). Scorsese elaborates that “[he] was going through the Poor Me routine” while shooting the movie and now, upon its completion, “there are scenes [he] almost can’t look at” because of their extremely personal nature (56). Ebert asserts that Scorsese’s remark “gives an additional dimension to The King of Comedy, a movie about a man so desperately isolated that even his goals do not include a relationship with another human being,” an observation that holds equally true for Taxi Driver.

But Scorsese is a not merely a unique filmmaker because his movies are often preoccupied with his personal demons (guilt, loneliness, isolation and religious penance); rather, his aesthetic innovations that allow his films to resemble the landscape of the human mind are his most noteworthy achievement. Scorsese has an innate ability to approach tough subject matter and off-putting characters that most traditional filmmakers would villainize and, rather than taking the easy way out, grant his audience an unique perspective and understanding into the minds of his morally reprehensible characters through deliberate camera techniques and aesthetic decisions.

There is a scene in Raging Bull that reveals more about both Jake La Motta and Scorsese than any other scene in the film. La Motta (De Niro), on a losing streak, enters the boxing ring for his final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson (Scorsese refers to this scene as the most horrifying scene in the movie). At this point in the film, his state of mind is in a downward spiral of jealousy – he is convinced that his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), is cheating on him, and his animalistic behavior has alienated him from everyone he knows, including his best friend and brother Joey (Joe Pesci). Scorsese sets the match in a much larger boxing ring than many of the previous fights, in order to indicate the anxiety and anguish of our antihero and his inability to take control of his destiny. Smoke spreads across the ring, clouding La Motta’s vision and creating a foggy and uncertain atmosphere. La Motta knows, and we know, that he is going down in this fight. And as La Motta is brutally beaten and pummeled in the fight, Scorsese uses several sound cues to heighten the scene’s intensity (and I’m not just talking about the use of melons cracking substituting for the sound of actual punches). At one point in the fight, there are actual sounds of elephants and wild animals roaring and snarling at each other in order to accentuate the raw, animalistic qualities of the boxing. In the background, flashes of light bulbs recall the sound of machine-gun fire, further wounding our antihero in his last major fight.

But most importantly, Scorsese uses disturbing visual imagery late in the scene as Sugar Ray is pummeling La Motta repeatedly. Never falling down, La Motta hangs onto the ropes of the ring, his position recalling the image of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross. Scorsese’s obsession with Catholic repentance is apparent as we see Jake paying penance for his sins, not necessarily because he knows he has destroyed every meaningful relationship in his life, but rather because his self-hatred has consumed him. As he hangs from the ropes, defeated and broken, he shouts at Sugar Ray, “You never got me down, Ray.” Blood pouring from every pore of his face, La Motta is still standing, defiantly and pathetically, consumed by self-hatred but refusing to admit defeat. Scorsese looks down at him from his famous Priests-Eye View, and asks us not to like, but perhaps pity and even understand this violent, raging human being.

Scorsese uses these innovative aesthetic techniques to literally get inside the head of his leading characters because the ‘heroes’ of his films are so conflicted, flawed or sometimes outright unlikable (Raging Bull) or psychotic (Taxi Driver) that without literally putting the audience inside the mind of the character, we might not otherwise be willing to watch this particular antihero. Watching any of these men from afar would be extremely painful, but by placing the audience inside their heads, we understand the psychology behind why they do what they do, even if we end up disagreeing morally with their behavior. That is the key to Scorsese’s films – he doesn’t ask us to like Jake La Motta or Travis Bickle, but he does put the audience in a position where we can see how their mind works.

However, Scorsese is sometimes forced to provide some outside commentary on these semi-deranged characters, as a film completely from their point-of-view would somewhat limit the impact of their socially unacceptable actions. One of the most fascinating stylistic choices in Taxi Driver is Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s decision to frame the entire movie within the mind and perspective of Travis, with the exception of two very important scenes. That the actors loosely improvised the two scenes that do not feature Travis points to the fact that it was Scorsese, not Schrader, who wished to show scenes taking place outside of Travis’ mind. The first scene involves Betsy and Tom (Albert Brooks) flirting and chatting in Charles Palantine’s campaign office. The second scene shows twelve year-old prostitute Iris and her pimp Sport slow dancing and enjoying each other’s company in the whorehouse. These two scenes focus on the interaction, more or less, between normal couples, or at the very least couples that are comfortable with one another. This interaction is sharply contrasted by Travis’ awkward and socially unacceptable behavior that results in his inability to form a lasting connection with anybody. With this in mind, it seems that Scorsese somewhat concedes his vision of living inside Travis Bickle’s mind. By giving the audience an outside view of normal, functioning men and women (to some degree, anyway), Scorsese is asking us to contrast Travis’ interactions with Betsy and Iris with their interaction with other males. This is an example of Scorsese as storyteller providing the audience with a necessary juxtaposition that might not be apparent if the story were only to take place from Travis’ point-of-view. Although Scorsese is first and foremost determined to give the audience the experience of living inside Travis Bickle’s head, he sometimes has to step back and give in to standard narrative storytelling in order for us to understand the outside implications of Travis’ behavior.

Given that Scorsese’s films are so immensely personal and raw, it is important to consider his more commercial efforts and their relationship to the rest of the Scorsese canon. Although Raging Bull and Taxi Driver are two of the better-known Scorsese films (the movies that are most closely associated with the name Martin Scorsese), these films were not massive commercial successes at the box-office when first released. Scorsese has reached box-office and populist gold, however, with his “genre” films – the movies he has made with large budgets for major studios that, for the most part, speak to a larger audience than Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. These pictures include Cape Fear (1991), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and Shutter Island (2010), each of which was marketed successfully into a specific genre category – thriller, biopic, gangster and horror. Because Scorsese’s more personal films are not immediately as popular as these “genre” films, the question begs, does Scorsese compromise his artistic vision for these significantly more commercial films?

In order to properly answer this question, I will look at Scorsese’s latest film, the immensely popular Shutter Island. The movie opens in 1954 as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) steadily approaches an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Once on the island, Daniels investigates the disappearance of one of the island’s patients while simultaneously attempting to uncover the mystery behind the menacing institution itself. On paper, the material sounds generic enough; however, the ‘twist’ of Shutter Island is that Teddy himself is actually a patient on the island, and, rather than reckon with the fact that he murdered his wife after she drowned their three children, he spins elaborate detective mysteries in his head as a means of avoiding guilt. With this in mind, Shutter Island is actually an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated, insane man haunted by his past and an exploration of an emotionally disturbed human psyche, deceptively disguised as a run-of-the-mill horror film. In this sense, Scorsese does not compromise his vision at all for the sake of mainstream audiences – he simply uses the guise of a popular genre to further explore his obsessions and preoccupations. Shutter Island is an unlikely companion piece, then, to Raging Bull and Mean Streets, as all three films revolve around men who, unable to cope with an overwhelming guilt, force themselves into ritualistic behavior that frees them from their guilt but also traps them in a heightened state of insanity.

That Scorsese’s obsessions consume any work that he creates – be it a genre movie intended for the masses or an intensely personal and autobiographical story – indicates that Scorsese has a need to creatively manifest his inner demons into his work, almost as a means of emotional survival. As Hodenfield observes in his article, Scorsese’s immediate aesthetic goal in any particular scene is to “create an intensity on screen that matches what he perceives/ suffers in real life” (48). The implication in this article is that Scorsese can only communicate through film, as his communicative and social skills, while perhaps not as brazenly unacceptable as the behavior of Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta, are not sufficient means through which he can express himself and, most importantly, allow other people to understand him. As Ebert notes, Scorsese oftentimes finds himself so desperately alone and unable to make a lasting connection with another human being that he retreats to his studio and pours his loneliness into the only friend that has consistently comforted him from the very beginning – the medium of film. Scorsese’s movies, then, can be viewed as stories about men who aren’t lucky enough to have the medium of film at their immediate disposal through which they can channel their isolation and torment, instead of resorting to animalistic behavior.

The artistic process is commonly referred to as a form of therapy for the artist and creator, but for Scorsese, it’s something even more intense. In fact, his artistic process is not that much different from the ritualistic behavior of Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island. You’d think that after forty years of making movies, Scorsese would allow himself to take a break every once in a while, but, as Shutter Island proves, he is still out there, obsessively retelling his story in new and different ways, furiously searching for an answer that may only exist in the films themselves.

Which Would Be Worse, To Live As A Monster Or To Die As A Good Man?

2010-03-17T02:27:00.021-05:00

If Paramount Pictures had released Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island last year – the original release date was October 2nd, 2009 – I would have considered the film the best movie of the year. As it stands, the rest of 2010 has a long way to go in terms of matching the quality and effectiveness of Scorsese’s new picture. It’s a fascinating character drama, an exciting and almost experimental exploration of the human mind, a reinvention of the horror genre and a dynamic acting showcase for its star, the incredible and still very underrated Leonardo DiCaprio.

Shutter Island is also an incredibly appropriate entry in the Scorsese canon – it’s a film about an alienated man haunted by his past. Add Teddy Daniels to the list of Scorsese’s tragic and multilayered antiheroes – Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan, Rupert Pupkin, Jesus Christ. The film also continues Scorsese's fascination with our understanding of violence (it should be noted that our perception of the lead character's violent actions changes dramatically when watching the film for a second time).

It's hard to talk about the film without referring to its powerful and jarring ending, and therefore while I may not explicitly state any major spoilers in the next few paragraphs, I will be making an effort to describe the overarching themes of the movie, which aren’t even fully apparent until the brilliant closing line of the film. For the average moviegoer, Shutter Island is a film to see at least twice; for cineastes, Shutter Island will hold up to countless viewings, offering something new and unexpected with each screening.

Shutter Island is eerie from the very beginning. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) steadily approach an island off the coast of Massachusetts known as Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The year is 1954, and Scorsese and music supervisor Robbie Robertson of The Band (the subject of Scorsese's masterful concert documentary The Last Waltz) subtly incorporate vintage (and sometimes downright disturbing) 1950s music into the sound mix. Once on the island, Daniels and his partner meet with Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who explains to the Marshals that one of the island's patients has mysteriously disappeared overnight. The investigation that ensues is a fascinating exploration of insanity.

Hovering over every scene is a paranoid, post-war anxiety shared explicitly by our protagonist and thoroughly felt and realized by Scorsese. Tensions rise as Teddy recalls horrific memories from liberating a concentration camp during the war, and his suspicions of Nazism and conspiracy by the House of Un-American Activities on the island become our suspicions. The best Scorsese films force the audience to live inside the minds of moderately-to-severely delusional characters weighed down by an enormous and overwhelming guilt. Shutter Island does just that.

DiCaprio’s performance is superlative and even more layered than one initially realizes. With this performance, I think it’s safe to say that DiCaprio is the best actor of his generation. In the past six years, he should have easily won an Academy Award for his performance as Howard Hughes in Scorsese's The Aviator, or as doomed informant Billy Costigan in Scorsese's The Departed (if I had any say, I’d have given him both). His work in Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006) and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) proves that his great performances are not limited to Scorsese films.

Kingsley has an extremely complex role, having to simultaneously appear darkly sinister and trustworthy (it’s not unlike the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in 2008's Doubt). Kingsley brilliantly morphs Cawley into a character equal parts teddy bear and creepy doctor - we don't know whether to trust him or run from him. Ruffalo's performance is pitch-perfect, as well, in another tricky role.

Scorsese has once again gathered an extraordinary ensemble, rivaling the acting companies of his previous two non-documentary features (The Aviator and The Departed). Alongside DiCaprio, Ruffalo and Kingsley are some of the finest character actors working today: Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch and Elias Koteas. Each actor brings their own element of spookiness to the film; Lynch, for instance, is cemented in my mind as the likely Zodiac killer in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), and von Sydow is the center of several haunting Ingmar Bergman films, as well as The Exorcist (1973) and Minority Report (2002).

Shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson (who most recently worked his magic in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and deservedly won Academy Awards for his beautiful work on Scorsese’s The Aviator and Oliver Stone's JFK), the movie is impeccably shot and beautifully photographed. The art direction, in particular, creates a surrealistic, almost faux-looking world that is reminiscent of the greenscreen backdrops used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). It's not apparent why this stylistic choice is so remarkably effective until, as you may have guessed, the second viewing.

For all of the comparisons critics have made between Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Shutter Island, Vertigo is actually the film that Shutter Island most closely resembles. In fact, I think a case could be made that Teddy Daniels and Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) are very similar characters. There is an unease throughout the entire film, deliberate disturbances in continuity that some audiences might mistake for sloppy editing. That's simply Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker toying with the audience, making us question the reality we're watching and the reliability of our protagonist. But no matter how delusional our protagonist's vision may be, we still stay with him and him alone until the very end – no different from our immersion into the minds of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (1976) or Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Bringing out the Dead (1999).

And yet most of the details I've mentioned about Shutter Island are not the reasons mainstream audiences will revel in the film's fascinating glory. The movie is, quite simply, very entertaining. I think audiences know they're watching a good movie when they see a Scorsese film, but I suspect they don't know how good the movie really is.

Unfortunately, Shutter Island has come under attack from, as my good friend calls them, the pseudo-intellectual crowd. From what I can gather, the general complaint is that the movie takes itself too seriously dramatically, and that some of the dramatic shifts in the film are laughable. Perhaps this is because Scorsese refuses to compromise his vision by winking at the audience. When discussing The Best Films of the 1990s with Martin Scorsese in early 2000, film critic Roger Ebert notes that at some point in the 1990s, existentialism, "the idea of what we do with our lives," was "replaced by irony, so that everything has quotation marks around it." He then adds, however, that Scorsese's "films are not in quotation marks...they are meant."

And he's absolutely right. Scorsese can’t make an ironic film - a film too afraid to deal head-on with real, palpable human emotion, therefore putting the actions of its characters in huge quotation marks. My favorite films of the past few years don't have ironic quotation marks around their characters, either. I don’t buy movies that do that – it’s a cheap way of pleasing the cynical, highbrow crowd who only accept genuine human emotion in films if it comes from Pixar Animation or a foreign-language film. I love those movies, too, but I haven’t given up on serious American films that aim for high character drama and succeed. I’m talking about Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) and now, Shutter Island. These are films that take their characters and their plights seriously.

Every negative review I've read doesn't seem to consider how effective the film is on a visceral level, how strong and forceful the performances are from top to bottom and the powerful manner in which screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis keeps the story grounded in the deep emotional turmoil of its characters. Shutter Island is a real film, the kind they don't make anymore, exceeding the supposed limitations of its genre and offering its audience something challenging and psychologically fascinating. Scorsese doesn't have to make movies anymore - he's already made more masterpieces than any other living filmmaker - but we're lucky that he's still exploring his obsessions in new and inventive ways. Shutter Island should be met with applause, not simply because the film marks the latest work from our finest living filmmaker, but because it's also the best damn movie you'll see this year.

Grounds for Remembrance: An Essay by Jack Kyser

2010-02-28T00:14:00.000-06:00

Note: The following piece is an essay I wrote for my fourth progression paper for my class Writing the Essay: Art and the World at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

As strange as it sounds, I will always remember the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on September 11th, 2001 first and foremost as aesthetically powerful art pieces. Obviously, my view is a bit more complicated than that – the towers will always evoke painful memories of 9/11 for me. But ever since the age of five, I have been amazed and obsessed with the towers, as the architecture fascinated me, and the towers represented a larger and richer world than the one in which I lived. When I was seven years old, my mother and father took me to the top of one of the towers while we were visiting New York City, and I was even more amazed. From years seven to nine, I had an obsession with drawing and painting images of the towers – I simply loved them. I am someone who, when seeing images of the towers now, does not immediately think of September 11th, 2001. I think of my childhood and my memories, and I oftentimes forget that the World Trade Center towers became objects of terrorism on that horrible day. I prefer to remember them as art.

The Ground Zero site in downtown Manhattan today is a difficult site to comprehend and classify. After all, there is no historical marker setting a definite perimeter for the space, and therefore the nearby buildings and various unofficial memorials surrounding the site must be taken into consideration when attempting to fully understand this demanding space. For instance, does Ground Zero encompass simply the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers once stood, or might its limits be more far-reaching, extending into the neighborhood and district affected by that awful September day? Even blocks away from the site, American flags hang from buildings, some of them dusty and perhaps even still covered in ashes and debris from that horrible day in September of 2001. Outside of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, there is a 9/11 Memorial Cross dedicated to those who lost their lives in the attacks, but like many of the memorials near the site, this one does not seem to be an official memorial from the city, but rather the work of those who witnessed the attacks themselves.

The memorials are not difficult to identify; they include plaques from the Lawyers’ Association and several surrounding businesses, along with street signs that, every so often, present an image of the old towers when pointing toward Ground Zero. The space certainly welcomes travelers by asking them to preview the upcoming 9/11 Memorial Site and look at computed-generated photos of The Freedom Tower, which is due to be completed in 2013. Alongside the gated perimeter of Ground Zero, these photos illustrate the desired results of the current construction, and visitors are free to admire the pictures of the tower. And yet the space simultaneously expels travelers by asking them to step away from the site and keep their distance from the construction. Traffic guards direct pedestrians and visitors every which way, so that you can get close to the site, but not too close. Visitors wishing to catch a glimpse of the construction taking place inside the site will have a hard time finding a peephole through the fence, and attempts to enter the space itself are futile. The city wants the site to be embraced, and yet they are also protective of a wound that has not yet healed and perhaps never will heal.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of visiting Ground Zero is witnessing what seems to be a clash between those wishing to erase the memory of the old World Trade Center towers with the upcoming new tower and those clinging to the memory of the World Trade Center towers. On one hand, many small coffee shops and delis are decorated with large images of the World Trade Center towers standing in all their glory. There is also the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street, offering visitors the chance to remember that tragic day and its heroes – but even this tribute is in private, away from the mainstream view. In fact, there are many areas near the site where, if you had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, you might not know a major tragedy took place at all. The major construction that is in the mainstream view, however, is for the unfinished 9/11 Memorial Site, and pictures alongside the fenced-off areas of Ground Zero show images of the new tower and a calm, serene future against the Manhattan skyline. Images of the old towers are present but sparse, and nowhere to be seen are images from the haunting day of September 11, 2001.

Of course, tourists are far from being the only people who take in Ground Zero – in fact, citizens who work near Ground Zero are forced to reckon with the site and the tragedy that they very likely witnessed nearly every day. Interestingly enough, visitors vacationing in New York City often visit the site and snap pictures, but they leave rather quickly. Nobody lingers at Ground Zero the way that they linger at Central Park, or the Museum of Modern Art, or the Statue of Liberty. In fact, Ground Zero may be the only New York City tourist attraction that is not associated with fun and excitement. There is no community ice-skating rink or even a marvelous spectacle and awe as some might expect – there’s just a huge hole in the ground, and cranes constructing what might otherwise be just another new building. Many tourists I have observed seem to feel some sort of duty to visit the site, stay for a few minutes, and then quickly hop on the subway to get to that night’s Broadway show. Does this signify that a once-sacred memorial is now worth nothing more than a quick snapshot? If so, Ground Zero may become less and less of an attraction with each passing day.

Of course, this also has to do with the changing landscape and feel of Ground Zero. The area is very depressing, yes…and yet, it’s almost become just part of the landscape – you know, the giant hole that Wall Street bankers walk past every morning on their way to work. Maybe the public visits Ground Zero expecting grief and depression, but instead they see business as usual. As the years go by, I suspect Ground Zero will become less of a tourist and public attraction for this very reason.

Behind this conflict, of course, is my expectation that not only should the area memorialize the tragedy of 9/11 and the thousands of lives lost on that day, but also share my recognition of the former World Trade Center towers as art and memorialize their grandeur. A fear similar to mine about the original World Trade Center fading from the public consciousness is present in Jonathan Lethem’s essay “Speak, Hoyt Schermerhorn,” where he fears that the train station he loved and knew as a young man “[won’t] actually be able to be captured in depiction” and will be forgotten in the years to come (74). Just as he wonders “when…the last person to have purchased panty hose or a razor at Loeser’s [will] pass from the earth,” I, too, wonder when the last person who remembers the World Trade Center towers in all of their glory will pass from this earth (78).

Despite this assumption on my part, though, the question still begs answering – why has Ground Zero become just part of the landscape? One answer to my question may be found in the historical space surrounding the site. City Hall, only minutes away from Ground Zero, is the former home of Boss Tweed and the Tweed Courthouse, and the system of corruption that thrived during his reign (a corruption, perhaps, that made it’s way down to Wall Street and the entire Financial District). When taking into consideration the history of greed and capitalism that runs through the Financial District, from Wall Street to the buildings surrounding Ground Zero, it is important to remember that the World Trade Center towers were a part of the functioning city economy (and very possibly an extension of Wall Street greed). But how, you may ask, will the city feel about building a new business building on Ground Zero and allowing said building to become a functional part of the greedy Wall Street culture? Although I have a hard time believing that businessmen will so easily capitalize on the failings of others while working on a site that represents so much grief to the American people, it is very possible that the new towers that replace the World Trade Center towers will soon become associated with the same greed and larceny with which Wall Street is now associated.

The idea of Ground Zero going through corporatization is not unthinkable. In "Hybrid Place: The Experience of the Local and the Remote," Andrew J. Blum quotes Ted Relph as speculating that “‘in a world of multi-national corporations, universal planning practices and instantaneous global communications, we have to take seriously the argument that sense of place is just another form of nostalgia and that places are obsolete’” (1993, p. 25). If this is true, the public may at some point lose its sense of nostalgia for the old towers, and, as Blum puts it, “dismiss the idea of place altogether when faced with the absence of its more romantic characteristics” (7). This loss of nostalgia matters because it renders the original World Trade Center towers as symbols without meaning, abstract buildings familiar only in photographs but not in memory, the towers that once stood for the ambition and scope of New York City relegated to a distant memory and associated with an event that most people would prefer to forget.

There is another possibility as to why Ground Zero may have become just part of the landscape. In the article “The Synthetic Sublime,” Cynthia Ozick considers New York City to be a city that consistently destroys and rebuilds itself to the point where, in one hundred years, we wouldn’t be able to recognize or identify the city anymore. She claims that “our New York too will melt away, and a renewed and clarified city will lift out of the breathing breast of the one we know” (224-225). This will happen sooner than we know it with Ground Zero – not just in a physical transformation, but in the public perception, as well. I am in a unique position – fifty years from now, when new towers stand where the World Trade Center towers once stood, I will be able to say that I stood on top of the World Trade Center towers as a boy, only to watch them fall down and a new building to sprout up several years later. In New York’s historic custom of tearing buildings down and rebuilding them, will we soon forget that the cause of a new tower replacing the World Trade Center towers was an act of terrorism? Will the World Trade Center site just become another New York City building in the public consciousness to be torn down and then rebuilt again? It’s hard to fathom now, as so many people have the memories of 9/11 haunting their lives. But one hundred years from now, that will not be true. Are the current memorials enough to keep this horrible event part of New York’s collective history?

In general, sites and spaces that serve as public memorials seem to exist at first as solely a memorial. However, after some time, society demands that these memorials must also function as part of the place’s economy. Once the space begins functioning on that practical level, does it somehow cease functioning as a memorial? Can a space do both at the same time? Or does one annihilate the other? There is certainly an implied conflict between the surrounding space and the site itself, as if the city feels pressure for Ground Zero to function on a practical level similar to the buildings and offices surrounding the site. After all, memorials do not play a role in the city’s economy, and although the Ground Zero site is a sacred place that played host to a devastating tragedy, the construction suggests that the space must be used to the city’s economic advantage. If the new tower can simultaneously serve as a memorial to the victims of 9/11, then that is even better for the city; however, the tower cannot serve solely as a memorial (which may explain why most of the current memorials near Ground Zero are unofficial, almost makeshift ones). But with the rise of the new tower impending, the question arises: will the memorial aspect be preserved?

In order to attempt to understand how future generations will perceive Ground Zero and the building that is eventually constructed in its space, I am going to look at the city of Hiroshima in Japan, as both Hiroshima and Ground Zero are areas affected by warfare and destruction, by circumstance and tragedy. Although Hiroshima is a far more expansive area than Ground Zero (after all, Hiroshima is an entire city and Ground Zero is just a hole in the ground), I believe we can look at the Ground Zero site today as a microcosm of the city of Hiroshima in the years after the end of World War II. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, effectively ending the Second World War. The atomic blast killed around 90,000 to 140,000 people, accounting for radiation and other chaos after the blast. In the years following its destruction, Hiroshima was rebuilt and reconstructed, and the Genbaku Dome (Atomic Dome) was opened as part of the city’s effort to memorialize the tragedy. Although many other memorials were built in reference to the devastating effects of the atomic bomb (including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum), today Hiroshima is rebuilt and, for the most part, is a healthy and functioning city. Much like Ground Zero, Hiroshima is not so much a public memorial anymore as it is a functional part of the country of Japan. I am not suggesting that the Japanese do not remember and/or grieve the tragedy that took place in 1945, but I do believe that, more or less, business is back to normal in Hiroshima. If the memorials weren’t present in Hiroshima, would today’s youth immediately recognize that this city was almost completely destroyed sixty-five years ago? It’s hard to say. Years from now, I believe Ground Zero will still be recognized as a public memorial and a place of grievance – but, for the most part, it will function much like the rest of the city functions – for practical purposes.

The purpose of memorializing tragedy is to remind and inform the public of a horrendous event and honor those who suffered in the tragedy. The difficulty of such memorializing is that events as painful and raw as those that occurred on September 11th, 2001 are not comforting to the public, and therefore there is a reluctance to relive and remember the suffering of that day. This reluctance conflicts with the need to inform future generations of this tragedy, and the compromised result may produce a memorial in name only.

Because of the public memorials and art surrounding the space, I would hope that the public never will forget the original towers and the terrible tragedy on September 11th, 2001. Ozick ends her article by musing about our future generations and “what thoughts [they will] think” and if “[they will] think our outworn thoughts, or imaginings we cannot imagine” (225). Nobody knows the answer to those questions, but I can say this for sure: the public that is receiving the Ground Zero site at this moment will not be the same public as the one that receives it tomorrow, or the next day, or one hundred years from now. With each passing day, September 11th, 2001 fades from the public consciousness, becoming less of a memory and more of an abstraction. And as it goes, so do the World Trade Center towers.

Don't Ever Tell Anybody Anything. If You Do, You Start Missing Everybody.

2010-01-28T22:06:00.002-06:00

And so begins the second semester of my freshman year at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Looking back on the fall semester, I really could not have asked for a better start to my college education. In November, my original play The Certifiable was produced and staged by Tisch New Theatre. Later that month, I placed second in the annual Third North Ultra Violet Live (UVL) talent competition, performing contrasting monologues from Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business. I was also selected to join a small NYU improvisation/ sketch comedy group called The Spork in the Road, which creates comedic scenes and short films for the public.

But more than anything, I am most proud of the work I accomplished in my classes. In my Storytelling Strategies screenwriting class, Tisch professors Michael Stern and Ezra Sacks (writer of 1980's A Small Circle of Friends and 1986's Wildcats) guided me to completing the first twenty pages of a feature script that I have been preparing for some time. In my Performance Strategies acting and directing course, acting professors Keith L. Davis (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Law and Order) and Peggy Gormley (The Last Temptation of Christ, The Squid and the Whale, Bad Lieutenant) observed as I directed fellow students in a short scene, while also performing in other short scenes for directors.

Most excitingly, I directed professional voice actors for the radio drama production of My Jackie. The script, which I originally wrote during my stay at the University of Southern California at their four-week Summer Screenwriting Seminar in 2008, was chosen by my Sound Image class to be produced as a Radio Drama. My good friends Morgan Block, Andrew Griego and Shaun Kim served as the Producer, Head Editor and Foley Technician on the project, respectively, while I directed the voice actors in the recording booth and revised my script accordingly. My entire group is incredibly proud of the final product, which I will post on this blog as soon as I discover the proper way to embed an audio file. Our wonderful professor, sound guru Florence Barrau-Adams, was very impressed, as well.

After a very relaxing holiday break in Austin, I returned last week and immediately launched into my new classes, all of which are extraordinary. First and foremost, my Frame and Sequence class (which serves as a complement class to last semester's Sound Image) mandates that I take endless amounts of still photography shots around New York City, which has proved to be great fun for my friends and me on the weekends. I have several other fascinating classes, including a Introduction to Psychology course taught by Professor Edgar Coons, who is a major celebrity in the science world for investigating hypothalamic stimulation in rats at Yale University in the 1960s, and a film criticism and studies class called The Language of Film, taught by brilliant Tisch professor Rick Litvin.

As a Cohen Scholarship recipient, this past Tuesday evening I had the privilege of joining Tisch School of the Arts Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, along with eleven other scholarship recipients, to a free performance of the new play written by David Mamet, Race, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. I was extremely honored to receive this invitation, as Mamet is quite possibly my favorite living American playwright, and the opportunity to spend the evening with Dean Campbell - a major voice in the film and theatre communities - was a dream come true. Race is a fascinating entry in the Mamet canon, with stars James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington and Richard Thomas in top form. After the play, Dean Campbell took the scholarship recipients to the front of the stage to have a discussion with two of the play's stars, Kerry Washington and David Alan Grier. Both actors had extraordinary things to say about working with Mamet, who also directed the production, and their own personal acting process. This was truly a memorable evening of theatre and a fantastic way to spend time with my peers, esteemed Tisch professors and two acting giants.

Last Friday evening, my good friends Morgan Block, Bobb Barito and I ventured to the historic Film Forum theatre to catch a screening of Michael Haneke's haunting and brilliant The White Ribbon. I had already seen the film once over the winter break in Austin, with my friend and fellow film buff David Walter, and I knew I needed to watch the picture again to absorb its disturbing resonance. The story of a small German village spiraling into chaos a few months before the outbreak of World War I, The White Ribbon is a beautiful black-and-white ode to the finest work of Ingmar Bergman, and deserves every Best Foreign Film accolade it has received thus far this awards season. After watching the film again, I immediately updated my Top Ten Films of 2009 list. Haneke's film continues to haunt me - it is undoubtedly one of 2009's best movies.

On Sunday afternoon, I volunteered to play one of the lead characters in a reading of a new play by Gallatin playwright Lucia Diaz-French called "The Danderforth Phenomenon." The play reading was hosted by playwright, screenwriter and Tisch Professor Selma Thompson in her apartment, which is just across the hall from my dorm room. The play is a beautiful new work about two siblings caught in the destructive aftermath of their parents' deaths. The reading was an incredible two-hour experience, allowing the other readers and me the opportunity to stretch our acting muscles, and simultaneously Ms. Diaz-French the opportunity to hear her work performed aloud by strangers, as she is still workshopping the play. The performance was followed with a Q&A with the playwright, and I was extremely grateful for the chance to interpret and perform her work, made possible by my always-hospitable neighbor Professor Thompson.

Beginning next week, I will start volunteering at the Tisch Talent Guild on Fridays in the mornings and afternoons. The TTG is the calling center for both cast and crew members for NYU student film productions, and it should be a great environment to meet aspiring filmmakers and other students.

I should mention that I am truly lucky to have such a terrific and supportive group of friends at NYU. Morgan Block, Bobb Barito, Jeremy Keller, Mike Cheslik, Jonah Greenstein, Alex Fofonoff, Jennifer Kim, John Anunziata - just to name a few - are some of the finest people I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Morgan, for her genuine kindness and being one of the most understanding friends I've ever had; Bobb, for his dry and seemingly effortless sense of humor (alongside the fact that he's just a damn good guy); Jeremy, for not murdering me after I voiced complaints aboutAvatar and excluded the film from my 100 Best Movies of the Decade list...I could go on. But these are truly extraordinary and talented people. And I am lucky to spend time with them and learn from them, even if we are just cooking smores on a Saturday night while watching the Screen Actor's Guild awards.

Speaking of the SAG awards, last weekend's major awards ceremonies - the Producer's Guild of America and the SAGs - were a breath of fresh cinematic air after the previous week's Golden Globe awards, an appalling celebration of mediocrity. After watching the Globes, I angrily wrote that "it's a sad day when great films like Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker and (500) Days of Summer lose to the likes of James Cameron and The Hangover." Thankfully, the SAG award for Best Ensemble was handed to Inglourious Basterds last Saturday night, and on Sunday the PGA honored The Hurt Locker as 2009's Best Picture. Hopefully, the Academy Awards will lean more in that direction - I don't think I'll be able to not throw something at the television if James Cameron were to defeat Kathryn Bigelow for the Best Director Oscar. (My other hope? Give the Best Actress Oscar to Meryl Streep for Julia and Julia or Carey Mulligan for An Education - I am simply dumbfounded that Sandra Bullock has won what she has for The Blind Side).

Today - January 28th, 2010 - has been a particularly sad day in the art community. First and most importantly, legendary author J.D. Salinger died today at the age of ninety-one. Salinger is best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, one of my favorite books of all time. Famously reclusive, Salinger has long held tight to his belief that Catcher should not be adapted for the screen - even director Steven Spielberg was unable to secure the rights. It was exactly two years ago that a friend and I wrote a letter to Salinger, explaining to him (in thorough detail) why we were the people who should adapt Catcher from page to screen. In the letter, we noted that if the adaptation was written and directed by people around the same age as the novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield - we were seventeen at the time, just about the right age - then the production would avoid the Hollywood 'phoniness' that might otherwise come with an adaptation of Catcher.

Of course, he didn't respond - in fact, the letter probably didn't even reach the right address, as Salinger likely had his real address hidden from the public - but at least I can say I made an effort to adapt and honor the single most influential piece of literature I've ever read. In fact, everything I've written in the past two years owes something substantial to The Catcher and the Rye, sometimes very explicitly (in my original play, The Certifiable, the lead character is a modern-day version of Holden Caulfield, and the book itself is discussed in great length by many of the characters in my play).

In retrospect, however, I think Salinger made the correct decision by refusing to let The Catcher in the Rye become a mainstream film, or a film at all. Some books are cinematic by nature. Others aren't. One reason why The Catcher in the Rye is such an effective novel is that there's nothing else like it - there are pale imitations, sure, but nothing comes close to the brilliance of what Salinger did with that novel. And I think that's what a Catcher film adaptation would be - a pale imitation of something far greater and far more meaningful. Let the book simply remain as the book. I don't see how a film adaptation could expand on any of Salinger's ideas or offer anything more powerful than what the book already contains.

Salinger was a genius, and it's a testament to the power of his writing that The Catcher in the Rye is as popular and widely read today as when it was first published. I hope this very talented, influential and personal hero of mine rests peacefully in the afterlife. Thank you, Mr. Salinger.

The second piece of sad news today was the announcement that Miramax Films, which has been responsible for much of the independent film movement for twenty years, is being closed by Disney. Films released under Miramax include the incredible Pulp Fiction (1994; Quentin Tarantino), Gangs of New York (2002; Martin Scorsese), The English Patient (1996; Anthony Minghella), The Aviator (2004; Martin Scorsese), My Left Foot (1989; Jim Sheridan), Sling Blade (1996; Billy Bob Thornton) and The Piano (1993; Jane Campion). It's true that ever since the Weinstein brothers left Miramax, the studio hasn't exactly been the center of great filmmaking, but even still, it's closing today marks another blow to the great world of independent filmmaking.

The Top 100 Movies of the Decade

2010-01-04T03:22:00.036-06:00

I’ve seen many movies in the past decade – an almost embarrassing number, actually – and now, at the end of the decade, I have compiled what I believe are the 100 best movies, in preferential order. Of course, the rankings are fairly trivial – I can’t really argue that #36 is superior to #37 – but the list gives you an idea, anyway, of the movies that resonate with me, the ones that have made an impact on my life.

This is my list. Some people may laugh at some of the choices, but no matter – I believe in the greatness of these films and, in one way or another, each of the movies on the list has changed me. Inevitably, this list will change in the years to come, as I will certainly come to appreciate some films in a different way, and my opinions of others will fall.

But for today, at the very least, here are the 100 best movies of the decade, 2000-2009. By Jack Kyser.

1. The Departed (2006; Martin Scorsese)

2. Mystic River (2003; Clint Eastwood)

3. No Country for Old Men (2007; Joel and Ethan Coen)

4. The Aviator (2004; Martin Scorsese)

5. Lost in Translation (2003; Sofia Coppola)

6. Gangs of New York (2002; Martin Scorsese)

7. There Will Be Blood (2007; Paul Thomas Anderson)

8. Minority Report (2002; Steven Spielberg)

9. Brokeback Mountain (2005; Ang Lee)

10. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001; Wes Anderson)

11. Adaptation (2002; Spike Jonze)

12. About Schmidt (2002; Alexander Payne)

13. Zodiac (2007; David Fincher)

14. Munich (2005; Steven Spielberg)

15. Almost Famous (2000; Cameron Crowe)

16. Wonder Boys (2000; Curtis Hanson)

17. Into the Wild (2007; Sean Penn)

18. I’m Not There (2007; Todd Haynes)

19. The Wrestler (2008; Darren Aronofsky)

20. A Serious Man (2009; Joel and Ethan Coen)

21. Million Dollar Baby (2004; Clint Eastwood)

22. Sideways (2004; Alexander Payne)

23. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004; Michel Gondry)

24. Inglourious Basterds (2009; Quentin Tarantino)

25. 21 Grams (2003; Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu)

26. Milk (2008; Gus Van Sant)

27. Memento (2001; Christopher Nolan)

28. City of God (2002; Fernando Meirelles)

29. The Dark Knight (2008; Christopher Nolan)

30. Children of Men (2006; Alfonso Cuaron)

31. Up in the Air (2009; Jason Reitman)

32. Collateral (2004; Michael Mann)

33. Mulholland Drive (2001; David Lynch)

34. Slumdog Millionaire (2008; Danny Boyle)

35. 25th Hour (2002; Spike Lee)

36. Michael Clayton (2007; Tony Gilroy)

37. Capote (2005; Bennett Miller)

38. Syriana (2005; Stephen Gaghan)

39. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006; Clint Eastwood)

40. Babel (2006; Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu)

41. Synecdoche, New York (2008; Charlie Kaufman)

42. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007; Andrew Dominik)

43. The Good Shepherd (2006; Robert De Niro)

44. Black Hawk Down (2001; Ridley Scott)

45. American Splendor (2003; Robert and Sheri Springer Bergman)

46. Crazy Heart (2009; Scott Cooper)

47. Revolutionary Road (2008; Sam Mendes)

48. The Hurt Locker (2009; Kathryn Bigelow)

49. Road to Perdition (2002; Sam Mendes)

50. House of Sand and Fog (2003; Vadim Perelman)

51. Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004; Quentin Tarantino)

52. Traffic (2000; Steven Soderbergh)

53. Shattered Glass (2003; Billy Ray)

54. Far From Heaven (2002; Todd Haynes)

55. Little Children (2006; Todd Field)

56. United 93 (2006; Paul Greengrass)

57. Before Sunset (2004; Richard Linklater)

58. Match Point (2005; Woody Allen)

59. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007; Sidney Lumet)

60. Monster (2003; Patty Jenkins)

61. The Quiet American (2002; Philip Noyce)

62. The Pianist (2002; Roman Polanski)

63. Matchstick Men (2003; Ridley Scott)

64. Little Miss Sunshine (2006; Jonathan Davis and Valerie Faris)

65. Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005; George Clooney)

66. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008; David Fincher)

67. Walk the Line (2005; James Mangold)

68. Rachel Getting Married (2008; Jonathan Demme)

69. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000; Joel and Ethan Coen)

70. Ghost World (2001; Terry Zwigoff)

71. The White Ribbon (2009; Michael Haneke)

72. Passing Strange: The Movie (2009; Spike Lee)

73. Gosford Park (2001; Robert Altman)

74. Precious (2009; Lee Daniels)

75. A Beautiful Mind (2001; Ron Howard)

76. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003; Peter Weir)

77. Punch Drunk Love (2002; Paul Thomas Anderson)

78. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006; Tommy Lee Jones)

79. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009; Wes Anderson)

80. Finding Neverland (2004; Marc Forster)

81. The Fog of War (2003; Errol Morris)

82. Hotel Rwanda (2004; Terry George)

83. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001; Joel and Ethan Coen)

84. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007; Julian Schnabel)

85. Frost/ Nixon (2008; Ron Howard)

86. Sin City (2005; Robert Rodriguez)

87. American Gangster (2007; Ridley Scott)

88. This is England (2007; Shane Meadows)

89. The Squid and the Whale (2005; Noah Baumbach)

90. The Pledge (2001; Sean Penn)

91. (500) Days of Summer (2009; Marc Webb)

92. Shine a Light (2008; Martin Scorsese)

93. A Single Man (2009; Tom Ford)

94. About a Boy (2002; Paul Weitz)

95. Public Enemies (2009; Michael Mann)

96. Insomnia (2002; Christopher Nolan)

97. Burn After Reading (2008; Joel and Ethan Coen)

98. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005; Shane Black)

99. The Last King of Scotland (2006; Kevin MacDonald)

100. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004; Wes Anderson)