1. "When Nostalgia Works": Estevez vs. Altman via Rosenbaum
["After seeing this movie's premiere at the Venice film festival I defended its guts and intelligence to a French critic who described it as "sub-Altman." I see it as "sur-Altman," especially if compared to Nashville, another film with 20-odd characters that concludes with a cataclysmic and seemingly unmotivated assassination. Despite its reputation as an exuberant classic, Nashville knows zip and cares even less about country music or the city of Nashville (where it was shot) -- which doesn't prevent it from heaping scorn on both. It even ridicules a dowager who tearfully reminisces about John and Bobby Kennedy, and it shamelessly encourages viewers to share its contempt for the rubes. The relentless cynicism that Nashville brandishes as proof of its hipness ultimately gives way to glib, high-flown rhetoric in the climactic repeated shots of an American flag filling the screen while a nihilistic pseudocountry anthem, "It Don't Worry Me," builds to a crescendo, asserting the concert audience's unembarrassed cluelessness."]
2. "Rock Concert To Honor Princess Diana": Helen Mirren and Justin Timberlake will duet on SexyBack.
["British Princes William and Harry are planning a charity rock concert next year to honor the memory of their late mother, Princess Diana. The concert, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Diana's death, is being planned for the new Wembley Stadium, and could feature appearances by Madonna, Beyonce Knowles and Kylie Minogue, the Mail on Sunday reported. A tentative date of July 1 has been set. That's when construction of the nearly $1.5 billion London stadium is expected to be completed."]
3. "'Nativity Story' is First Feature Film to Premiere at Vatican": I hear the after-party was killer.
[""The Nativity Story" is the first feature film to premiere at the Vatican with some 7,000 people to screen it. The movie describes Virgin Mary's pregnancy and the trip she and Joseph undertake to Bethlehem, the town of Jesus Christ's birth. Current Pope Benedict XVI did not attend, but a number of cardinals did, along with local dignitaries."]
4. "South Korea to kill cats and dogs over bird flu fears": *sniff* ;-(
["South Korea plans to kill cats and dogs to try to prevent the spread of bird flu after an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 virus at a chicken farm last week, officials said today. Animal health experts, however, suggested it was “a bit of an extreme measure” when there was no definitive scientific evidence to suggest that cats or dogs could pass the virus to humans. Quarantine officials have already killed 125,000 chickens within a 1,650-foot radius of the outbreak site in Iksan, about 155 miles south of Seoul, the Agriculture Ministry said. Officials began slaughtering poultry yesterday, a day after they confirmed that the outbreak was caused by the H5N1 strain."]
5. "Spike Lee Boosts Sports Journalism With New School": From today's IMDB news wrap-up.
["Moviemaker Spike Lee has launched a new initiative at his former college in a bid to flood journalism with African-American sports writers. The sports fan is a member of the board of trustees Morehouse College in Georgia - a private, historically black liberal arts school - and used his weight to prompt a new journalism school and curriculum. Lee insists newspapers need more black sports writers to match the growing number of African-Americans playing professional sport."]
______________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Links for the Day (November 27th, 2006)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
10 comments:
Re: Item #5. Bravo to Spike for trying to do something rather than just complain. But the unanswered question is, is this effort just going to alter a percentage, or will there be a mandate to produce good sports journalists, rather than circus ringmasters or ass-kissing fanboys?
Re: Item #1: My knee-jerk reaction is to say that Rosenbaum's wildly misreading the finale of Altman's Nashville, and resuscitating the "cynical" label only makes me think he's missing the forest for the trees (and that complaint about the song being pseudo-country has a pretty long beard on it, and is not terribly germane to what the film is doing and saying). That said, I love that he's the only critic with any kind of a profile who's willing to go against the grain during a week when Altman was all but canonized. And to praise a movie by Emilio Estevez, yet! I think Altman would have appreciated that.
Haven't seen Bobby yet, so I can't vouch for its quality, but I do think Estevez is a better director than he's generally given credit for being.
Yeah, I'm fairly staggered that a critic as prominent as Rosenbaum could misunderstand Nashville as much as he is there, but God bless the stubborn.
Maybe if it had a scene where Ronee Blakely blamed her fainting spells on being disconnected from the means of production, he would have liked it more.
Nowadays, the words "Sports journalism" are about as oxymoronic as they come. Not only are the athletes managed and handled and programmed to deliver the same answers over and over, so too are the reporters who ask the same lame-ass shit of them day after day.
How do these cats do this, day after day after day, without losing their freakin' minds?
Mick LaSalle wrote a similar review of BOBBY in the SF Chronicle. I cannot believe it. But, I haven't seen the movie.
As for NASHVILLE...I need to give it another spin.
As for Spike's new venture: who's ready for Jon Miller and Joe Morgan to take over the World Series?
LaSalle's piece does make similar points, and in an altogether more persuasive way, I think.
Sigh. Guess I have to move this title up from the "maybe" list to the "gotta have an opinion on it" list. So many movies...
Oh dear. When Mick LaSalle is more persuasive than Jonathan Rosenbaum, that is a sad day for American film criticism indeed!
I like contrariness as much as anyone, but not when it's purely reactionary and myopic. Dismissing "Nashville" as "cynical" is a tired old knee-jerk response that's been around as long as the movie has -- but it may have been more understandable in the seventies, when Altman's sensibility was more novel and shocking to mainstream sensibilities. This smear reminds me of those who lashed out at "Do the Right Thing" for being hateful and cynical (and the colors weren't anything like the REAL Bed-Stuy!). What's missing is an appreciation for the exuberance, the openness and joy of the movie (and the moviemaking), and the appreciation of conflicted human characters who don't fit anybody's formulaic idea of "sympathetic."
Besides using "Bobby" to bash "Nashville" is like using "Neil Simon's California Suite" to belittle "Short Cuts." (Or "The Towering Inferno" to trash "Playtime" -- just a coupla movies about architecture, right?) To quote Bob Mould: Makes no sense at all.
BTW, Matt -- Your review of "The Fountain" is fantastic (in the very best sense[s] of the word), the most thorough and eloquent assessment of the movie I've seen.
Amen about Nashville. I thought I was the only lunatic around who saw through that flick's cartoon canvas. Not to pile on a dead man, but there's a fair amount of cynicism and hatred in a lot of Altman's crowded tapestries. If his compositions were as immaculate and rigid as, say, Wes Anderson's, this would be easier to see. Doll houses. Altman's people-as-wildlife zoom lens photography and overlapping dialogue pushed an illusion of verite authenticity to beef up some pretty thin ideas about AMERICA.
Everybody is talking about Nashville and nobody is talking about Bobby. The latter is quite spectacularly about nothing- it gets a whole bunch of people together at the assassination for reasons only God and Emilio Estevez know for sure. It's not merely bad, but it's pointless- and Rosenbaum's championing it puts him in the winner's circle with Armond White in terms of curmudgeonly insanity.
Andrew Sarris once wrote something that's been ringing my ears ever since I read it: "Cynicism and sophistication, relatively rare in movies at any time, are apt to be seized upon as indicators of the full register of a director's personality." He was writing about the critical tendency to distrust sentiment when it comes from the likes of Billy Wilder or Richard Lester; I think it applies to some of Altman's more suspect work, too. Of course Nashville is cynical--but that's certainly not all it is. As Pauline Kael pointed out, if you watch carefully, you notice that the most misanthropic character (Haven Hamilton) turns out to be the only stand-up guy when push comes to shove. For me, the film is pure anthropology, and maybe a bit of a Rorschach test.
Jeff: "Maybe if [NASHVILLE] had a scene where Ronee Blakely blamed her fainting spells on being disconnected from the means of production, [Rosenbaum] would have liked it more."
On the one hand, that's funny enough to justify Rosenbaum's critique (though I agree with Matt's hats-off to Rosenbaum's, and Steven Boone's, unapologetic contrariness).
On the other, isn't that pretty much Blakely's complaint during her onstage meltdown at the riverboat concert?
Post a Comment