Tribeca ’25: Kundun

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner abjectly apologized for this film, calling it “s stupid mistake.” On bended knee, he groveled to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): “The bad news is the film was made; the good news is nobody watched it.” Disney saw to that. The film in question was directed by Martin Scorsese, who dedicated it to his recently deceased mother, Catherine. It was also nominated for four Academy Awards, including Philip Glass’s justly celebrated score. However, you can’t stream Scorsese’s cinematic biography of the 14^th (and according to him, last) Dalai Lama. Again, Disney made the conscious decision to keep it out of circulation. Hence any screening of Scorsese’s Kundun is a big deal, so its special screening to celebrate Scorsese’s birthday at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival is a huge event.

Born Lhamo Thondup, the Dalai Lama was a rather willful child, but also an intelligent one. Reting, the Regent of Tibet quickly realizes the bright little boy should be tested to determine whether he is the reincarnated spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, which indeed turns out to be the case.

As the recognized Dalai Lama studies at Potala Palace, he shows a keen curiosity regarding the outside world. That will be just as well, because the outside world soon barges into Tibet. Unfortunately, after the devastation of WWII, England and Europe are too exhausted to intervene when China invades and annexes Tibet. Likewise, the newly independent India is too disorganized and America is too far. Consequently, the Dalai Lama and his ministers agree to negotiate with Mao.

However, many of the senior Lamas realize they are really only stalling for time, even though the Dalai Lama still hopes for a more equitable and autonomous arrangement. Sadly, as the CCP starts razing monasteries, the Dalai Lama recognizes the CCP as the oppressors they always intended to be. Nevertheless, he resists seeking sanctuary in India, because he refuses to abandon his people when they need him the most.

It is easy to see why Kundun (the Tibetans’ term of reverence and affection for the Dalai Lama, meaning “the Presence”) angered the CCP. First of all, it is an excellent film, unlike the junky rom-coms and stilted propaganda movies the Chinese film industry now cranks out. It also forthrightly depicts the brutality and destruction of the CCP occupation. Yet, it is small but telling moments, like when the Dalai Lama bemoans the blaring bombastic Chinese propaganda music, lamenting: “they even took our silence,” that are especially devastating.

Indeed, Scorsese and screenwriter Melissa Mathison follow the historical record, depicting the Dalai Lama as neither a rebel nor a hot-head. He was a remains a man of non-violence, who was forced into a painful exile, as a means of preserving the Tibetan national soul.

Despite the tragedy it captures, Kundun is a gorgeous film, magnificently lensed by acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins. He and Scorsese use the colors and imagery of the Tibetan sand mandala to arresting effect. Glass’s score is hypnotic, but it also expresses a sense of awe. Just in terms of technical artistry, Kundun is unusually accomplished.

The Studio, on Apple TV+

In a way, you could say Continental Studios’ upcoming tent-pole is sort of a Marvel movie, because back in the 1980s, Marvel Comics released five promotional comics featuring the Kool-Aid Man. It was a little weird at the time, but a big-budget Kool-Aid Man movie is a daunting task for Matt Remick, but he had to feign enthusiasm to get promoted to run the studio. He wants to be Robert Evans, but his insecurities are only too obvious in writer-creators Seth Rogan, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez’s 10-episode The Studio, which premieres today on Apple TV+.

Remick loves movies, so he wants his talent to love him back. Instead, they usually blow him off, at least until sleazy CEO, Griffin Mill, promotes him to studio chief, replacing his mentor, Patty Leigh. However, Remick soon offers her a lucrative producing deal to keep her in the fold. He will have many challenges shepherding Kool-Aid, as well as the rest of his upcoming slate, including Ron Howard’s Alphabet City and a Sarah Polley art film.

Fortunately, his core staff remains more-or-less loyal to him, including his hard-drinking buddy Sal Saperstein, his freshly promoted former assistant Quinn Hackett, and the caustic head of marketing, Maya Mason.

Obviously, The Studio takes a great deal of inspiration from Robert Altman’s The Player. It even pays homage to Tim Robbins’ character, the original Griffin Mill. It also features many real-life show business celebrities playing themselves, but some are considerably funnier than others. Frankly, the surprise scene-stealer is Dave Franco (as himself), who pokes fun at his image and career, while going for some big laughs. He even provides perhaps the funniest recap narration in TV history for the concluding episode, a two-part continuation.

Zoe Kravitz is also a very good sport. However, even though filmmaking legends Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese fully commit, their storylines are more cringy than humorous.

Indeed, the writing and execution varies wildly throughout the ten installments. The opener is an okay set-up, but episodes two, three, five, and six set-up excruciatingly uncomfortable situations that just keep piling on, rather than puncturing the tension. However, episode seven has some of the funniest TV/streaming writing of the 2020s that absolutely skewers Hollywood’s DEI mindset. Honestly, there is no way this episode could have been produced three or four years ago. Ice Cube is also savagely funny as himself.

The two-part conclusion, set during CinemaCon, is also vintage door-slamming farce that even pays tribute to Weekend at Bernie’s. It is mostly either feast or famine with The Studio, but episode four, “The Missing Reel,” is sort of an okay middle of the road offering, mostly because Zac Efron’s droll self-portrayal. It also somewhat amusingly uses elements of film noir.

Made in England, on TCM

Two decades before Merchant and Ivory started collaborating, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were the first great hyphenated filmmaking duo. They wrote, directed, and produced some of the best British films of all time—and then they largely disappeared. However, Martin Scorsese and several of his contemporaries (notably including Francis Ford Coppola) re-popularized their films with cineastes. Of course, Scorsese knows everything about every classic movie ever produced, but he also knew Powell personally. Technically, David Hinton is the director, but Scorsese’s voice dominates as the on-camera presenter-host of Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, which airs again on TCM this Saturday.

Powell started in the film business working on silent productions helmed by Rex Ingram, whose epic style Scorsese identifies as a formative influence on the director. He honed his skills churning out B-movies, but finally gained prominence when he started collaborating with Pressburger, an exiled German screenwriter.

With 49^th Parallel, they immediately demonstrated their affinity for wartime “propaganda” films. Yet, they spent much of their accumulated good will on the controversially satiric The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp soon thereafter. The output from their partnership followed a yo-yo pattern of ups and downs. However, many of the “downs,” such as The Red Shoes, are now considered classics, while some of the “ups,” like The Battle of the River Plate (a.k.a. Pursuit of the Graf Spee), which were hits upon their initial release, have been overshadowed by their grand spectacles.

Tellingly, Hinton quotes a Puritanical review of from The Daily Worker, dismissing Powell’s late-career solo masterpiece Peeping Tom, huffing: “I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standing befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense.” Evidently, the Communist newspaper’s cinematic judgement holds up just as well as its ill-informed economic analysis.

Val Lewton, the Man in the Shadows, on TCM

Val Lewton is one of the few film producers who is granted something akin to auteurist status. He “made” all of RKO’s classic horror films, including Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Seventh Victim. Known for their use of suggestive sound and imagery, they could be considered the first “elevated” horror films. One of Lewton’s most famous admirers, Martin Scorsese, helps chronicle his life and work, as narrator and producer of Kent Jones’ Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, which airs tomorrow night on TCM.

Lewton was a protégé of David O. Selznick. In that role, he made critical but mostly uncredited contributions to Gone with the Wind. When he came to RKO, he had no burning desire to make horror films, but that was what the studio wanted. They also mandated his first title, “Cat People,” but Lewton took the picture in a radically different direction than the monster movies Universal produced—at a much greater cost.

To stretch his stingy budgets, Lewton often relied on shadows and clever camera work to heighten the atmosphere and suspense. As a result, every clip Jones incorporates is strikingly stylish and vividly evoke the eerie, otherworldly vibe of Lewton’s films. Technically, Lewton never directed a narrative feature, but all his RKO horror films have a similar look and feel.

Man in the Shadows was originally produced for TCM over a decade ago (prior to the release of Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut and Letters to Elia, his full-collaboration with Scorsese), so mercifully, there is no apologizing for the subject matter of Lewton’s Caribbean-set voodoo film, I Walked with a Zombie, or his late career western, Apache Drums. In fact, his depiction of zombies is one of the earliest appearances of the genre’s most enduring menaces. The same is arguably true of the Satanic cult in The Seventh Victim.

Silence: Scorsese Finally Adapts Endo

Shūsaku Endō’s classic 1966 novel was generally shaped by his Catholic faith and directly inspired by a visit to the monument for the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, who became canonized representatives of the hundreds of thousands who fell victim to 17^th Century Japanese Christian persecution. In the mid-1500s, there were thought to be upwards of 300,000 Japanese Christian converts, but most were ruthlessly exposed and subsequently forced to apostatize through torture during the early to mid-1600s. The missionary Father Cristóvão Ferreira really was among the Christians who was forced to renounce his faith.  The fragmentary news of Ferreira’s downfall is difficult for his young protégés to accept, so they follow their calling to Japan in Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited adaptation of Silence (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Portuguese Jesuits Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe naively assume news of Ferreira’s apostasy must be greatly exaggerated, but when they secretly arrive in Japan, the climate of fear and oppression is beyond their worst expectations. The Christian faith has been forced underground, much like the era of the Roman catacombs. Their guide will be Kichijiro, an apostatized Christian convert, who perhaps still believes. However, his frequent willingness to trample fumi-e, images of Christ and the Virgin expressly fashioned to smoke out secret Christians, makes him decidedly untrustworthy.

Desperate their perilous circumstances, the honesty and purity of the “hidden Christian” Kakure Kirishitan faith touches Rodrigues deeply. Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time before the priests are captured by the grand inquisitor, Inoue Masashige, who is confident breaking the last Jesuits in Japan will deal a decisive blow to the Kakure Kirishitan remnant. Father Rodrigues is a surprisingly tough nut to crack, even while undergoing an understandable crisis of faith, but Masashige has a nefarious trump card to play: the former Father Ferreira at his beck and call.

Scorsese’s Silence is easily one of the most challenging and uncompromising films about Christian faith produced in the last twenty years. Utterly free of triumphalism, it depicts the hair-raising brutality of martyrdom and forced conversion. Christianity is laid low over and over again, yet there is more concealed in the margins of this story. Much like Endō’s tonally dissimilar post-script, Scorsese’s long denouement holds the key to the entire epic tragedy. If you do not stay with it from start to finish, you will miss the whole point.

Scorsese’s rigorously austere aesthetic perfectly suits this harsh morality play. It is like nature itself serves witness to the atrocities meted out, thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s windswept vistas and co-composers Kathryn & Kim Allen Kluge’s naturally-derived ambient soundscapes.

Although he never really sounds Portuguese per se, Liam Neeson has the appropriately weighty presence for Ferreira. His sad eyes and slumped shoulders say everything he can no longer say. Sadly, Andrew Garfield is terribly miscast as Rodrigues. He just doesn’t seem capable of properly addressing the film’s profound questions. Adam Driver fares somewhat better (and looks more Portuguese) as the comparatively more dogmatic Garrpe. However, the real soul-searing devastation comes from Tetsuo auteur Shinya Tsukamoto’s visceral performance as Mokichi, a believer doomed to Masashige’s martyrdom. If you have anything left after his sacrifice, Nana Komatsu (from Bakuman and World of Kanako) will finish you off with her brief but devastating portrayal of naïve Kakure Kirishitan convert Haru (a.k.a. Monica).

Garfield’s relative weakness is problematic, but it opens the door for Yôsuke Kubozuka, who becomes the film’s de facto [anti-]hero as the morally unclassifiable Kichijiro, easily the film’s most complex character. Yet, nobody better personifies the existential dilemmas faced by Edo-era Christians. Silence is also well stocked with memorable antagonists, like the smoothly sinister interpreter icily portrayed by Tadanobu Asano. However, everyone pales compared to the crafty old Masashige, played with to-the-hilt flamboyance by Issei Ogata that is apparently historically accurate.

Despite its casting issues, Silence is worth the wait, which is frequently not the case with long gestating passion projects. It is a bracing film that offers precious little consolation, but it is a deeply sincere statement of Christian faith. The fact that nobody has re-released Masahiro Shinoda’s 1971 adaptation represents a bafflingly lost opportunity, but Scorsese’s take will be challenging enough for many fans of his gangsterish films. Highly recommended, warts and all, Silence opens today (12/23) in New York, at the Regal Union Square downtown and the AMC Loews Lincoln Square uptown.

Campus Code: Getting Expelled from Reality

If you thought campus speech codes were restrictive, try living by the mysterious rules and regulations governing this liberal arts college. It is never named, but it might as be Matrix U. Campus security is unusually fit and they respond to violations with suspicious swiftness in Cathy Scorsese & Kenneth M. Waddell’s Campus Code (trailer here), which releases today on VOD from MarVista Entertainment.

Yes, Cathy Scorsese is the daughter of Martin, who pops up in a small role as the campus doctor, along Ray Liotta who appears as the responsible bartender. This is not Goodfellas 2 though. In fact, Campus Code (or Campus Life, as it was once known) was briefly rather notorious for the bizarre litigation it spawned. Still, Campus is strange enough to be considered on its own weird merits.

Regardless, Scorsese’s doctor does not inspire much confidence. Fortunately, Ari seems to be okay without his services. In the first twenty minutes, he will fall from a thirteen story building and have a large pane of glass impaled in his head, without suffering any adverse effects. Of course, it still rather alarms Becca, the Good Samaritan, who drags Ari down to the infirmary for Scorsese’s close-up. He sort of returns the favor by saving her from the creepy Elliot.

Ari already had a bone to pick with the preppy perv, for bootlegging the original t-shirts designed by his partner Arun. Everyone digs Arun’s art, but nobody more so than the desperately smitten Izzy. Arun is also into Izzy, but he has a secret in his closet preventing him from fully committing. She too has a deep dark secret, which the goth rabble rousing Griefers are holding over her. They are demanding her support for some sort of self-governing petition that never makes much sense, even when the big reveals start coming fast and furious. Into the mix comes Greta, a cool transfer student, who sets out to falsely befriend Izzy, in order to put the moves on Arun.

For some reason, these six students are somehow suddenly exempt from the laws of reality, while the rest of the student body appears blissfully unaware of all the disturbing madness exploding around them. There will be sufficient answers to explain who and what everyone really is. Some of it is even rather clever. The problem is Waddell and Michael Simon’s screenplay never establishes a baseline for reality, before upending it. Nor do they flesh out any characters before throwing them into the Matrix-esque maelstrom. Granted, they certainly do not waste any time on dry exposition, but it is hard to bring out the respective personas amid all the reality-problematizing noise.

Still, Hannah Hodson and Jesse McCartney are undeniably charismatic as Becca and Ari. They also benefit from their characters’ tougher, hipper attitudes. In contrast, Alice Kremelberg and Ritesh Rajan sort of blend into the background as the more passive Izzy and Arun. However, this is not a problem for Conor Leslie’s Greta, who turns out to be an engagingly forceful pseudo-femme fatale.

Code more-or-less makes sense when it is all said and done, but there are bushels of loose ends lying about. You have to wonder if considerable explanatory matter was cut for budgetary reasons. Yet, the legitimately twentysomething-looking cast is energetic to mostly sell the madness in the moment. It is all sort of grubbily entertaining for those who dig head tripping sf concept films. Recommended accordingly for the indulgent genre fan, Campus Code releases today (9/22) on VOD platforms like VUDU and iTunes, from MarVista Entertainment.

Tribeca ’12: Side By Side

Photochemical film is having its Buggles moment. It has been killed by digital video, but the death rattle is not quite over yet. While some holdouts still shoot the old school way, digital has steadily become the norm. The aesthetic and economic implications of this sea change in motion picture production are explored in Chris Kenneally’s Side By Side (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

If you think Martin Scorsese might have something to say about this moment in cinema history, you would be correct. He is one of small army of directors and cinematographers interviewed by co-producer and on-screen host Keanu Reeves. While Scorsese has mixed emotions, George Lucas is all in for digital, while Christopher Nolan stubbornly clings to his photochemical film. To oversimplify the debate, digital is cheaper and more easily manipulated, whereas film has more dynamic character, in much the same way vinyl favorably compares to digital music.

Side By Side gives a brisk and lucid overview of the development of digital technology and its rise from the domain of slacker indies to 3D tent-poles. Most of the interview subjects are exactly the sort of experts one would want to hear from, including David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Danny Boyle (whose Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire was a digital watershed), and both Wachowskis, as well as top flight cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond and Vittorio Storaro.

However, it is impossible to ignore the snickering that erupts whenever a filmmaking giant prefaces an answer with: “Well Keanu, I’ll tell you. . .” Poor Reeves. He actually seems like an okay guy when he explains some of the Matrix effects to a young extra on the set of his upcoming 47 Ronin. He just has a certain presence and persona at odds with his on-screen role here.

Kenneally, Reaves, and company demystify a lot of the technical process, without losing sight of cinema as a form of artistic (hopefully) storytelling. As one would expect, every point is generously illustrated with clips from classic films. Some traditionalists might regret a more spirited defense was not mounted on behalf of photochemical film. Still, as it stands, Side By Side is an informative and rather entertaining look at the state of movie-making, considerably superior to the recent National Film Registry documentary, These Amazing Shadows. Recommended for those who enjoy movies about movies, Side By Side screens this coming Tuesday (4/24), Thursday (4/26), Friday (4/27), and Saturday (4/28) as part of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival now running in New York.

NYFF ’11: George Harrison Living in the Material World

He was frequently dubbed “the Quiet Beatle,” but George Harrison could also be called the cineaste Beatle. One of his first solo projects was the original soundtrack for Joe Massot’s psychedelic Wonderwall, completed while the Fab Four were still together. After the band broke up, he eventually founded Handmade Films, providing a jolt of capitol for independent British filmmakers. Harrison himself gets a full 208 minutes of screen-time in Martin Scorsese’s definitive documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World (trailer here), which screens this Tuesday at the 49th New York Film Festival, just ahead of its HBO premiere.

Yes, George Harrison was a lad from Liverpool. The youngest Beatle, he was initially recruited because he could actually play. The general gist of the Beatles story will be generally familiar to just about everybody: initially, Lennon and McCartney were front-and-center, carrying the songwriting load, but slowly Harrison asserted himself, introducing the sitars and tablas into their later, trippier recordings. Since Yoko Ono consented to an on-camera interview, their eventual break-up is presented solely in terms of the stress of working so closely together for such a long time. Still, it is hard not to get sucked into Scorsese’s Harrison-centric retelling of the Beatles mythos.

However, it is something of a surprise how eventful Harrison’s post-Beatle years were, despite his often deliberately low profile (essentially constituting the second half of Material). Of course, his spiritual quest continued, which is a major focus for his widow, co-producer Olivia Harrison. Those who saw the IFC Channel’s behind-the-scenes history of Monty Python will already be well aware of Harrison’s close personal relationship to the comedy troupe, but who knew he was a Formula One Racing fan? In fact, one of the most touching interview segments features his friend Jackie Stewart, the “Flying Scotsman.”

If Ono gets a pass, at least Eric Clapton is forthright enough to address on-camera the whole business of how he romanced Harrison’s first wife while they were still married, albeit rather gingerly. Yet, for personal drama, the events surrounding the violent home invasion Harrison survived late in life, effectively serves as a rather stark climax.

Harrison’s friends and family make a compelling case he just might have been the most interesting Beatle. Scorsese calls in some major star power, including both surviving Beatles as well as fellow Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty. It is also a pleasure to see Jane Birkin (from Wonderwall) on-screen in any context, but it is just plain creepy when his one-time producer Phil Spector shows up.

Material is a very good rock doc, but the nearly three and a half hour running time is pushing the limit. According to IMDB, it is almost half an hour longer than Ken Burns’ Thomas Jefferson—and Jefferson was the first to do just about everything. Nonetheless, it is consistently more engaging than the Lennon documentary that screened at last year’s NYFF. As a further point in Material’s favor, Scorsese, Olivia Harrison, and their collaborators almost entirely avoid politics, focusing squarely on the musical, spiritual, and personal aspects of his life, essentially in that order of concentration. Informative and entertaining, Material screens this Tuesday (10/4) at Alice Tully Hall as a Main Slate selection of the 2011 New York Film Festival and airs on HBO in two parts this Wednesday and Thursday (10/5 & 10/6).

NYFF ’10: Letter to Elia

No director portrayed the immigrant experience or the struggles of the common man with greater sensitivity than Elia Kazan, but to this day, he remains widely reviled on the left. Even a figure of Martin Scorsese’s stature took heat for presenting Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 71st Academy Awards. Yet for Scorsese, Kazan’s influence extended far beyond his early stylistic debt to the great filmmaker. Scorsese explains Kazan’s significant both to cinematic history in general and himself personally in Letter to Elia, an hour-long documentary he co-directed with Kent Jones, which screens with Kazan’s epic America, America at the 48th New York Film Festival.

Regardless of political controversies, Kazan’s reputation as an actor’s director is without peer. A co-founder of the Actor’s Studio, Kazan began his career on the boards before finding his calling as a theater director. Letter reminds us it was Kazan who helmed the Broadway premieres of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Of course, he would revisit Streetcar on film with original cast-member and frequent collaborator Marlon Brando, one of several legitimate masterpieces he crafted. However, for Scorsese, East of Eden stands out first and foremost in his consciousness, claiming to have “stalked” the film through second-run cinemas as a boy.

Looking straight into the camera, Scorsese forcefully and lucidly describes Kazan’s contributions to stage and screen, with the help of generous clips from the director’s filmography. While Eden and the best picture nominee America, America capture the most screen time, Scorsese and Jones duly include Kazan’s arguably single most famous scene, Brando’s “could have been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront, the classic tale of union corruption.

In contrast, they are clearly uncomfortable addressing Kazan’s testimony to the HUAC committee. Kazan was a former Communist who became disillusioned after the Stalin-Hitler (Molotov-Ribbentrop) non-aggression pact came to light. Considering Communism a severely flawed ideology, Kazan defended his decision in an op-ed piece, but Scorsese and Jones largely ignore his motivations, preferring to gloss over the incident with vague language of “difficult choices,” which does little to serve Kazan’s memory.

Of course, Scorsese is on solid ground when celebrating movie history. Letter is definitely an effective commercial for Kazan’s rich body of work, which really speaks for itself throughout the documentary. However, if any of his masterworks is under-represented, it would be Gentleman’s Agreement, a powerful examination of anti-Semitism that won Kazan his first Oscar.

Truly, Kazan is due for a critical renaissance, unblinkered by partisan score-settling. Letter is a well intentioned, mostly well executed effort to spur just that. Due to be included in a forthcoming Kazan boxset, Scorsese and Jones’ film screens this coming Monday (9/27) with a rare big screen presentation of America, America at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the 2010 NYFF.