Salon.com > Jonathan Kiefer

Films of the decade: “Me and You and Everyone We Know”

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:28:00 +0000

Writer-director Miranda July's 2004 debut feature isn’t without flaws, but it is astonishing -- with such a disarming, sweetly ingenious presence of mind that it seems like a miracle. The array of July's thematic concerns -- our gropes for connectedness, sexual and technological curiosity, fine-art pretense, identity as a function of sought approval -- is vast, yet she shows great restraint in subordinating her satirical impulses to more humane ones.

Old men take longer

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 19:00:00 +0000

While Peter Gabriel works on his songs, the people most likely to listen to them graduate from high school and college, get married, change homes and careers and sometimes politics, lose parents, let old friends slip away and make new ones, have children, get divorced, remarry or not and otherwise do away with large chunks of their lifespans.

They wait for his next album to be released. Maybe once in a while they check the Internet to see how it's coming. If the chance arises, they ask him. Gabriel hedges. Apropos of his time-tested creative method, he experiments with various excuses: "Deadlines are things that we pass through on the way to finishing"; "We're intending to release in September ... you see I never specify the year"; "Speed is not my strength, diversions are." He tweaks and mixes and masters until finally he has achieved a polished, succinct quip: "Old men take a little longer to get Up."

Kieslowski’s “Three Colors”

Mon, 10 Jun 2002 20:00:00 +0000

In 1995, the Los Angeles Times asked Krzysztof Kieslowski how movies should participate in culture, and this was his reply: "Film is often just business -- I understand that and it's not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone."

Now those are words to make movies by, and Kieslowski certainly did. Nearing the end of the millennium, when even the best works of those other European giants, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, had started to seem fossilized, Kieslowski, their contemporary, found his stride. The great Polish filmmaker, who was raised in an economically impotent, foreign-dominated runt country and came of creative age in a climate of political censorship, had finally accumulated the resources he so clearly deserved: a literate and deep-feeling world audience, complete artistic freedom and plenty of Western money to fund his work.