“If you wanted to see Welcome to New York last year, you may have had a difficult time. While the film received a small run at some theaters, the film’s US distributor, IFC Films, gave it only a weekend in New York, technically making it Muriels ineligible. If you did manage to catch it in a theatre or on a VOD service, you were subjected to a bastardized 109 minute version that gave a very different set of accounts of this quasi-satire investigating the infamous Dominique Straus-Kahn affair. (For more specific information, Muriels voter Simon Abrams diligently explains this in his RogerEbert.com review).
“But if you did manage to see Abel Ferrara’s film by, ahem, ‘other means’ (which he himself endorsed), you got to experience a punch-in-the-gut takedown of capitalist enterprise in the post-recession era. For all their (relative) merits, both The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short are adrenaline fueled depictions of big business—they have a lot of fun both with and at their subjects, which has created some complications in their receptions. There’s energy in Ferrara’s vision as well, but the rhythms of Welcome to New York are closer to Bela Tarr. The film hits its first climatic moment during a late night indulgence of DSK stand in Devereaux and two buddies indulging in prostitutes. Closer to documentary than fiction, Ferrara’s long takes and garish lighting display their carnivalesque behavior somewhere between high parody and sobering awkwardness. Led by Gerard Depardieu’s commanding performance, how does one decide to hysterically laugh or quiver in shame after listening to his thundering grunts of sexual pleasure?
“All this is to set up what becomes a more daring critique of the relationship between the literal body and capital indulgence (pair it with Joel Potrykus’s equally great Buzzard for a flip side of the recession). The infamous rape (made into a subjective flashback in the idiotic edited cut) is shot in an unflashy series of high angled cameras like surveillance footage, the closest the film turns to an outside perspective. Then the film transforms into a Brechtian prison comedy, a brief moment of reprise where justice has its course, before course correcting to Devereaux wandering his Canal Street mansion, awaiting a decision (only glimpsed) and ruminating on the nature of his own power. Ferrara, one of the great American directors, might have a clear hatred for his protagonist, but his ability has always been to keep the roving camera focused directly at its subject with profound empathy. It’s a film brimming with contradictions, and thus fueled with a real anger about those who simply indulge in power, all because they can.” ~ Peter Labuza
“With a runtime of only 16 minutes, Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow was too short to qualify for the Muriels, but that doesn’t change the fact that the film is a masterpiece and one of the very best films of 2015. I suspect that the reason I was asked to write about the film was because I wasn’t alone in expressing that opinion when submitting my ballot.
“World of Tomorrow imagines a future in which humans have begun cloning themselves and uploading their memories to those clones in an attempt to live forever. The film begins with a 4-year old girl named Emily (Emily Prime) being contacted by her third generation clone from 227 years in the future. Using experimental time travel technology, Emily Prime is transported into ‘the Outernet,’ a neural network that is the future’s answer to our Internet. Inside the beautifully imagined Outernet, moments from the next couple centuries of Emily Prime’s life are revealed to her by her clone. Her journey through time, space, and memory takes us to fantastical landscapes that are imbued with a melancholy that is foreign to the 4-year old Emily Prime but familiar to anybody watching.
“We eventually learn that the world as we know it is soon coming to an end and humans are embarking on increasingly desperate attempts to preserve their lives and memories. This is explained to Emily Prime as the two of them are standing on a hill looking up at the night sky. The third generation Emily coldly explains that humanity is doomed while Emily Prime is busy gleefully counting dead bodies re-entering the atmosphere as brilliant streaks of light. Emily Prime is delighted while her clone concedes that ‘yes, it is very pretty.’
“Emotionally, World of Tomorrow navigates the waters between wistful and heartbreaking but Hertzfeldt’s humanity and trademark wicked sense of humor prevent the proceedings from becoming too heavy. Visually, the film is gorgeously rendered. The stick figure-like characters will look familiar to anybody who has seen Hertzfeldt’s previous work but this time around, using digital animation for the first time, Hertzfeldt has them inhabit sublime landscapes that are bursting with both color and imagination.
“For a film so densely packed with ideas and visual inventiveness, its 16 minute runtime is a virtue. The film is terrifically rewatchable. In half the time it takes Domino’s to deliver a pizza to your house, Hertzfeldt invites us to ponder the meaning of life, confront our own mortality, and cherish every memory while experiencing life to the fullest.” ~ Benjamin Lim
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