Mongrel Media
MOVIE REVIEW
Winter Sleep (2014)
“Winter Sleep” crosses the tape at 196 minutes; long enough to watch all of “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and then revisit the first quarter of it all over again. Whether Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s recent running times are an indulgence, a tactic or a mistake — he himself says that he pays the matter no mind at all — it again allows him to divide a film into formidably gorgeous tectonic plates of narrative, grinding against each other at geological pace while the men and women traveling on them completely fail to understand each other.
Continue reading “Giant Steppes” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Memento Films
In the beginning, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” seems to signal a major departure for Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With its lush, warm colors and timeless fable-like quality, the film is at first glance nothing like Mr. Ceylan’s meditations on urban alienation. In a long shot, golden headlight beams sweep through the darkness and ignite the Anatolian steppe like comets in the night sky. A caravan of cars wriggles across the hilly countryside amid stops that are virtually indistinguishable from each other as if in an Abbas Kiarostami movie, carrying cops, a prosecutor, a doctor, a few gendarmes, some gravediggers and a pair of murder suspects searching in vain for a corpse. They argue, wax poetic and bond in the course of the twilight-zone journey. But once they unearth the body, it finally becomes apparent that Mr. Ceylan is treading familiar territory after all.
Continue reading “The Wind Will Tarry Us” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Three Monkeys (2008)
Pyramide International
If Nuri Bilge Ceylan had been born 100 years ago, he would have been a painter of some renown. No one has the ability to capture looming storm clouds the way he can. It’s easy to imagine the shots from the apartment rooftop becoming those large paintings which museums take such pride in displaying. Mr. Ceylan is also a photographer, and the composition of all of his shots is careful and considered, with the framing almost as important as what the image shows us. The pity is that this careful attention captures “Three Monkeys” in a bell jar.
Continue reading “Acknowledge No Evil” »