Tag: amanda seyfried

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Paul Schrader's film "First Reformed," with Ethan Hawke as a priest standing in black and white garments, staring at the viewer, as reviewed and analyzed by poet and critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

His Barbed Vestments: Reviewing Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” (2017)

What would happen if you crossed Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light with Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest? What would that priest look like, if you mixed the latter’s tortured overtures toward spiritual purity with the bleak existential angst of the former?

Paul Schrader seeks to answer these hypotheticals with his First Reformed, the tale of Ernst Toller, a disillusioned, middle-aged reverend (played by Ethan Hawke) of a Continental-era Reformed church in New York who undergoes a profound and militant spiritual transformation after one of his parishioners, who is obsessed with the idea of the world’s inevitable environmental collapse, commits suicide.

I first saw this film when it came out in 2017, and found it to be far inferior to Bergman’s classic, and probably a little worse than Bresson’s, which is solid but likely not among his best. Watching it now, almost a decade later, I stand by that overall assessment, though there are positive elements I missed the first go-around, so put off was I by the writer-director’s brazen lifting of plot points from the older films. Those elements, however, are not enough to save First Reformed from its negative trajectory, as it undeniably bottoms out with a bizarre conclusion involving Hawke and co-star Amanda Seyfried deep-Frenching in the rectory while Schrader’s camera wheels around them to a rendition of the old hymnal “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A stylized photographic still from Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives" (2005), depicting a dinner party with champagne. Besides Amanda Seyfried (pictured), the film stars Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Robin Wright Penn, Aidan Quinn, K Callan, Dakota Fanning, Ian McShane, Mary Kay Place, Molly Parker, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Elpidia Carrillo, Jason Isaacs, Miguel Sandoval, and Joe Mantegna.

Dreams and Bones: Reviewing Rodrigo Garcia’s “Nine Lives” (2005)

The very first shot of Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives is of a bright corridor inside a jailhouse, straight down its length, with the cell doors to the side all unmistakably shut. This establishes two things: 1) the location of Garcia’s first of nine explored lives, Sandra (Elpidia Carillo), who is incarcerated in this very jail, and 2) the idea that, in critic Dan Schneider’s words, this film is about how “people…are their own jailers” and are enclosed not only by circumstances outside their control but by the consequences of their freely-willed choices.

This is a prevailing theme of Nine Lives, and perhaps its most subtle, but it is certainly not the only one. Also at play is the connectivity of community, how relationships proliferate beyond even the small(er) understanding of any one participant; as well as the human tendency to invent a grand(er) narrative that coheres events together in order to make better sense of them. […]