Bill Cunningham New York

Brilliant writer and great guy Les Phillips turned me on to Bill Cunningham New York, a film I otherwise wouldn't have seen, with this review.  I loved it, and I think you deserve a chance to have him talk you into seeing, it too.  With Les's permission, here's his review.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK (2011, directed by Richard Press).  The legendary photographer and dancer Editta Sherman, well into her nineties but quite frisky and saucy, looks straight at the camera:  "You want me to say something about Bill?"  There are many things to say about Bill, who is one of the most celebrated fashion photographers in the world.  Bill Cunningham goes to all the New York fashion shows and takes pictures; he goes to all the most important charity events in New York and takes pictures; but, very especially, he takes pictures of random women on the street.  I should not say "random" women; Bill prowls Manhattan looking for well dressed women, fashionable women in all modes of fashion, sometimes leaping off his bicycle and into a broken run, through Fifth Avenue traffic, to capture that perfect woman in her perfect clothes. 

Bill Cunningham is 82 years old, and his photographs have appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES forever and ever.  He is trim and energetic, and he has the face of a slightly mischievous 12-year-old -- full of joy verging on ecstasy, pure delight at his work, which he does all day and all evening. all the time.  For years he has traveled to Paris to photograph the new collections.  He says that he goes to Paris "to re-educate the eye." Bill is a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres!  He was the only member of the working press invited to Brooke Astor's 100th birthday party.  We see Anna Wintour, the real one, describing him as one of the most important people in the entire fashion industry.  Certainly he must be the least pretentious person in the fashion industry.  Until recently, he lived in a one-room studio over Carnegie Hall, no kitchen, no room to turn around, bathroom in the hallway.  ("What would I do with a bathroom or a kitchen?  I've never eaten in in my whole life!  More rooms to clean!").  His residence is crammed with filing cabinets and more filing cabinets; they contain the negatives of every photograph he has ever taken.  Cunningham has no wardrobe of his own to speak of, and no time for restaurant meals, in New York or Paris either; that would be time not spent working.  He loves stylish and beautiful people because they are stylish and beautiful, but is entirely unimpressed with celebrity itself; he passed up opportunities to photograph Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford because "they were not stylish."  He loves the philanthropist Mercedes Bass because he thinks she's kind, and because "in that dress, she looks like a John Singer Sargent portrait."  So Bill photographs her, and, indeed, when he's done, she sure does look like a John Singer Sargent portrait. 

Back to Editta Sherman, who lived down the hall from Cunningham for 40 years, in her own Carnegie Hall studio.  "Some people say I'm a legend," says Sherman.  "Other people say I'm a fixture.  I'm both!"  She talks about Warhol and Leonard Bernstein and the many other famous people she's photographed and worked with.  She worries about Bill.  What does she know about Bill Cunningham's personal life?  "Nothing!"   Bill himself reveals only that he's had no romantic relationships because he's been busy working, and casually brushes away questions about his sexuality.  When asked about his religious beliefs, he becomes uncommonly silent and closed, looks at the table, and mutters something about how Catholicism has always been of deep importance. Bill Cunningham goes to Mass every Sunday morning. 

Bill Cunningham's bicycle is a Schwinn Classic.  It's his 29th Schwinn Classic bicycle; the other 28 were stolen.  He dropped out of Harvard.  He used to design shoes.  He runs through city traffic like a war photographer.  Bill may have met more fabulously rich people than anyone living; he says that "money is the cheapest thing, the least important thing; freedom is what's expensive."  Go see this marvelous film.

The Best of 2010

WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I SAW - 2010

2010 has been another great year in movies.  Among the top three films on this year’s list, any one could have taken the top spot.  But #1 is so visionary, so refreshingly original, that I believe it is the best film of 2010.

#10:  Kick-Ass
   
Violent, vulgar, clever, and careful, Kick-Ass is an audacious and original take on the superhero genre.  You won’t see another film like it this year.
   
#9:  The Killer Inside Me
   
It takes great big stones to make a lurid, pulpy novel into a lurid, pulpy movie with world-class production values.  It takes even bigger stones to film its story in all its horror and expect an audience to stick with its antihero.  The Killer Inside Me gambles big and rakes in all the chips, delivering a compelling and disturbing story while establishing Casey Affleck as one of the most interesting young actors working in American film today.
   
#8:  The Secret of Kells
   
In this animated feature, young Brendan is a monk in an abbey/fortress in medieval Ireland.  Torn between the abbot who’s driven to ready for the next Viking attack and the illuminator who unleashes his genius, Brendan finds a magical ally deep in the woods.  The Secret of Kells reflects its milieu with a daring 2-D animation style that reflects the illuminated manuscripts in which Brendan finds his inspiration and his calling.  This film is beautiful and imaginative and delightful.  See it even if you don’t have kids.
   
#7:  The Other Guys
   
It’s hard to make a big budget action-comedy that’s actually funny.  The Other Guys, however, is funny all the way through to the end credits and it delivers on the big action set pieces and it works in a Yojimbo joke.  How many wide-release comedies can you name that work in a Yojimbo joke?  Look for clever supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle.
   
   
#6: Shutter Island
   
I define a gadget movie as a film that’s as much a puzzle as anything else, and Shutter Island is a terrific gadget movie.  This challenging and puzzling film features a deeply compelling and disturbing premise, and it comes through on it.  Scorsese orchestrates, shepherding knockout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in a film that’s as gothic, creepy, compelling, and horrifying as anything I’ve seen this year. I need to see it again, and soon.
   
   
#5:  True Grit
   
True Grit is a no-nonsense, three act western featuring outstanding work from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin, and especially young Hailee Steinfeld, as the heroine Mattie Ross.  The film is full of little moments that define and develop its characters and its world, and we get the sense of a picture whose every detail was carefully designed and executed.  This is as professional as the professional western gets.  John Huston would be proud.
   
#4:  The American
   
George Clooney plays Alain Delon playing a very bad man in hiding from some other very bad men in a film that feels more like a late ‘50s – early ‘60s French or Italian production than a modern American one.  I like Goerge Clooney.  I like Alain Delon.  I like French and Italian movies from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  And I can’t stop thinking about the sense of world-weariness, fear, isolation, and dread that comes through in nearly every scene of this criminally underappreciated film.
   
#3:  Black Swan
   
I challenge you to name a Darren Aronofsky film that doesn’t rank among the best releases of its year.  Black Swan, the latest in a line of Aronofsky masterpieces, will baffle you and scare you and challenge you and elevate you.  It’s filmmaking about high art that is, itself, high art – a film about a dancer in ‘Swan Lake’ that is, itself, a production of ‘Swan Lake.’  The film enraptured me in the moment, and I think about the sound and imagery of its emotional climax several times a day.  I suspect it will become as much a part of my touchstones of great filmmaking as the sand Kyuko Kishida’s body in Woman in the Dunes or Hugh Jackman in the bubble in Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  You must see this film.
   
#2:  Winter’s Bone
   
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sprang from the same soil as Mattie Ross, and I think Mattie would see her as one of her own.  When Ree sets out to find her father in the moral and economic wasteland of meth-corrupted Arkansas, she’s in territory as strange and dangerous as the Indian country Mattie penetrates to find her fugitive.  While Mattie had help, however, Ree is alone.  She alone must find her father, dead or alive, so to save the pathetic home in which she’s raising her younger siblings.  She alone must brave the suspicion, the fear, the hostility she meets within her own family.  She must do it all, and Winter’s Bone takes us every step of the way, plunging us into the icy winter waters of its world and daring us to grab hold onto what we may find there.  Winter’s Bone is a perfectly executed, utterly horrifying film.  You must see it.
   
#1:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
   
Inventive, audacious, and infectiously fun, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best film of 2010.  The picture crosses from reality to fantasy and back again with delight and energy, immersing us in the mind of its hero so completely that we cease to care about the objectively real and happily ride along with him while he, well, while he works himself out.

Granted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn't the first film to explore boundaries between fantasy and reality; neither is it the first to exist almost entirely in the head of its protagonist. The film recalls Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, which gave us a man-child protagonist whose fantasy world so thoroughly informs his connection with the real world that we cannot understand one without the other.  While Gondry's man-child seems cloying and stunted, however, director Edgar Wright here gives us a man-teen so bursting with geeky enthusiasm, so ready to take the step into actual adulthood, that we root for him instead of just wait for him to grow up.

Scott Pilgrim does this by evoking the Big Three of nerd culture: comic books, video games, and alt-indie rock.  It doesn't do it by just throwing references out there and hoping for a few lightbulbs to come on.  It does it by borrowing graphic references from comic books, co-opting the look and feel of video games from their 16-bit arcade heyday to their modern, hyperrealistic incarnations, and overwhelming the audience both with music and with unique visual depictions of music.  Scott Pilgrim doesn't just reference this culture or remind you of this culture: it immerses you in this culture.  As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, "There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ... has the opposite effect." 

Bravo, Mr. Wright.  I can't wait to see what you do next.