Jezebel, Southern Sass Personified

By Jeffrey HillMiss Julie (Bette Davis) is a spoiled young lady who gets entirely too much satisfaction crushing every single taboo she can get her hands on. Not only does she arrive late to a party held in her honor, but then she rides her pony directly up to the hall and enters the ballroom in her riding clothes. Later she attends another ball in a devilish red dress instead of the customary white dress (thus offending 99% of the crowd, particularly the other women). She breaks the “men’s only” rule and enters a bank un-chaperoned. Just about everything that Miss Julie does flies in the face of genteel Southern customs – as if she stepped directly out of a Virginia Slims ad into the antebellum aristocracy. This gal is a hellcat.
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Jeffrey Hill is the art director of The House Next Door and the publisher of Liverputty, where the rest of this article can be read by clicking here.

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Links for the Day (November 30th, 2006)

1. "Another Study, Another Reason to Drink Red Wine": YES!

["Scientists have found another clue to explain why red wine may be good for you, identifying substances in vin rouge that appear to be associated with increased longevity in parts of France. Researchers have long been fascinated by the "French paradox" -- the fact that French people tend to have relatively few heart attacks despite a rich diet -- and many studies have suggested that a glass or two of red wine every day is beneficial."]

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2. "Critics' Poll(s) Revived, But Not at Voice": Good news from The Reeler blog.

["When it rains it pours on the Village Voice criticism beat -- or at least on the outskirts of that beat: Following the news that internal tumult had snuffed out the paper's annual critics' poll and that interim film editor Allison Benedikt had officially inherited Dennis Lim's old job comes word that Lim is working with indieWIRE to revive a comprehensive year-end survey. The style will evidently not be too different from the list-and-quote format that readers came to expect from the Voice polls; iW is said to have been working overtime for weeks to develop an electronic voting site for invitees, of which Lim said today via e-mail there are more than 100. No specific names were mentioned, but as you can probably assume from Lim's involvement -- to which most observers attribute the longevity and success of the Voice's previous "Take" polls -- the list will be deep and well-connected."]

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3. "DeVito Drunk During Interview?": I'd be drunk too (on red wine) if I had to promote Deck the Halls.

["Danny DeVito appeared on TV show The View yesterday morning still tipsy after a night of heavy partying with pal George Clooney. The star was promoting his new movie Deck The Halls on the show, and admitted he hadn't been to bed the night before. DeVito then cursed his seventh limoncello (a lemon liqueur) from the previous evening and launched into a boozy rant against President George W. Bush, much of which was bleeped out by network censors. The former Taxi star also revealed he and his wife Rhea Perlman made sure to "utilize every surface available" in the famous Lincoln Bedroom when they stayed at The White House as overnight guests of former President Bill Clinton."]

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4. "Make way for the 'Preacher'": The Passion of the Deutch.

["The series was created by Irish-born writer Garth Ennis and British artist Steve Dillon. Mark Steven Johnson, the writer-director behind comic adaptations "Daredevil" and the upcoming "Ghost Rider," is writing the pilot, while Howard Deutch is attached to direct. Johnson also wrote "Grumpier Old Men," which Deutch directed."]

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5. "Violent Video Games May Rev Up Teen Brain": Boy, nothing gets past Fox News. They must've had their red wine today.

["When teens play violent video games, they may get more emotionally revved up than if they play nonviolent video games. That’s according to research presented yesterday in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent -- but exciting -- game,” Vincent Mathews, MD, says in an RSNA news release."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 4

By Keith Uhlich

The Complete Jacques Rivette retrospective enters its fourth week at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) with screenings of three of the director's lesser-known 80's works as well as a reportedly seminal masterpiece from the late 1960s. An in-person case will be made for the latter film, L'amour fou (1968), by Chicago Reader critic and Rivette scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote in his capsule review:

"[L'Amour Fou] centers on rehearsals for a production of Racine's Andromaque and the doomed yet passionate relationship between the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier), who leaves the production at the beginning of the film and then festers in paranoid isolation. The rehearsals, filmed by Rivette (in 35-millimeter) and by TV documentarist Andre S. Labarthe (in 16), are real, and the relationship between Kalfon and Ogier is fictional, but this only begins to describe the powerful interfacing of life and art that takes place over the film's hypnotic, epic unfolding. In the rehearsal space Rivette cuts frequently between the 35- and 16-millimeter footage, juxtaposing two kinds of documentary reality; in the couple's apartment, filmed only in 35, the oscillation between love and madness, passion and mistrust, builds to several terrifying and awesome climaxes in which the distinctions between life and theater, reality and fiction, become virtually irrelevant. In many ways this is Ogier's richest, finest performance, and Kalfon keeps pace with her every step of the way. This film captures the dreams and desperation of the 60s like few others, and you emerge from it changed; it's a life experience as much as a film experience."

L'amour fou was the first of Rivette's features to make use of an extended running time (255 minutes); by comparison, the three other films screening this weekend are a walk in the park, none of them longer than 131 minutes (interesting to note that Rivette has never made a feature film under two hours--we must adjust our preconceptions and prejudices accordingly). I was able to preview the director's masterful adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1985), also called Hurlevent (which translates as "Howling Wind"). From my Slant Magazine review, contributed to the site's ongoing Rivette feature:

"[Hurlevent] is one of Rivette's most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film's tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating's haunted house melodrama played straight. Rivette's characters are often held captive by the stage (whether real or imagined), so when Catherine (Fabienne Babe) and her farmhand lover Roch (Lucas Belvaux) run through the fields adjacent to an imposing stone homestead (one of the film's two primary settings), there is a profound sense of meta liberation, of escape beyond the boundaries of narrative (the wind-strewn leaves of grass, counterpointed by the incantatory vocalizations of the Bulgarian choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, might very well be located in the empty margins of the Book of Life). Certain of Rivette's weaker films assume a window-dressed Christian pose (anxiety of influence, I think, from Hitchcock and Rossellini, among others), but here the spiritual inquiry is entirely genuine. The three dream sequences that near-invisibly signal Hurlevent's beginning, middle, and end are as much a holy trinity as they are a thematic backbone; the characters wake from these becalmed and psychologically penetrating visions into a nightmarish reality of Escher-like doorways and windows that lead them over a prolonged and circuitous path to destruction."

Acquarello of Strictly Film School has this to say about Le Pont du Nord (1981), which features the mother/daughter pairing (in service of a seemingly Quixotic quest) of Bulle and Pascale Ogier:

"Integrating the filmmaker's familiar elements of whimsical, quixotic adventure (Celine and Julie Go Boating), integrated - but unresolved - conspiracy (Gang of Four, Secret Defense, and The Story of Marie and Julien), and liberated bohemianism (La Belle noiseuse, La Religeuse), Le Pont du Nord is an effervescent, ingeniously constructed, and infectiously affectionate paean to the city of Paris. From Baptiste's (Pascale Ogier) hopeful sentiment of arrival after encircling the statue of the Belfort lion in Denfert-Rochereau (a symbol of French Resistance against the Germans) that is reflected in Marie's (Bulle Ogier) literal awakening at a random intersection, Jacques Rivette juxtaposes the theme of rebirth against images of Paris in perpetual state of demolition and construction (a state of constant flux and transition that is similarly captured in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her) that mirrors Marie's own existential state after being released from prison and an unresolved past of radicalism. Rivette further uses the recurring image of spirals - the serpentine form of a sculptured dragon, the weaving of spider webs (that also reinforces the deceptive, "non-mystery" quality to the film), the characters' labyrinthine pursuit of the contents of a mysterious briefcase carried by Marie's former lover, Julien (Pierre Clémenti), the district map of Paris (that Marie observes to resemble a children's board game) - to illustrate, not only the inextricability of destiny, but also the inherent impossibility of starting over."

The odd-man out among the group appears to be Love on the Ground (1984), a Jane Birkin/Geraldine Chaplin theater rehearsal riff that both Neil Young of Film Lounge and Pat Graham of the Chicago Reader find less than satiating. From Graham's capsule review:

"Another of Jacques Rivette's airy formal riddles (Celine and Julie Go Boating, Le pont du nord), involving role-playing artifice, Borges-like fantasy, and suggestions of the magical in a world that resists decoding. A trio of actors (Geraldine Chaplin, Jane Birkin, Facundo Bo) gather to perform a playwright's work in an old, exotic mansion (the wallpaper interiors suggest Larry Poons run riot), but soon find life and theatricality revising each other strangely. Much expressionist-inspired shadow playing here, with a shaggy story line that somehow hangs on the iconographic contrasts of the female leads: Birkin sinuous and wandering, an indefinable androgyne; Chaplin slight, gamin, and precious (it's not the first time Rivette's located narrative in the physical and feminine). Unfortunately, not enough of it comes together, and Rivette's playful openness occasionally results only in playful tedium."

And from Young's lambaste:

"Insufferably pretentious claptrap from the ever-erratic Rivette - whose last three films have been the sublime Secret Defense (1998), the so-so Va Savoir (2001) and the tedious Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003). Love on the Ground, in which a pair of actresses (Jane Birkin as Emily, Geraldine Chaplin as Charlotte) become entangled in the machinations of mansion-dwelling playwright Paul (Andre Dussollier), is cut from similarly shoddy cloth as Marie et Julien. Or, to be more precise, both are prime examples of what we should perhaps refer to as les habits neufs de l'Empereur: Rivette's status as a giant of modern cinema affords him the license to pass off any old tat safe in the knowledge that at least some critics will fall over themselves to hail the complexity of his genius. ... The final straw (for this viewer) arrives in a typically clunky scene which takes place after Emily and Charlotte have fallen out - or is it their characters within the play who have experienced the schism? Fuming at her rival/enemy Charlotte, Emily seizes an egg between her palms and squeezes hard, sending a jet of yolk spurting over her face - a waste of food amid a picture which is, sadly, a waste of everybody's time."

Of course, Rivette fanboy David Thomson was no less harsh on the director's post-Celine and Julie effort Duelle, which this viewer found to be a consummate and invigorating masterpiece. So perhaps with the benefit of some fresh eyes, Love on the Ground will find a little l'amour of its own.

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"Le Pont du Nord" screens Saturday, December 2nd at 2:00pm. "Love on the Ground" screens Saturday, December 2nd at 5:00pm. "Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent)" screens Saturday, December 2nd at 7:30pm. "L'amour fou" screens Sunday, December 3rd at 4:30pm, with an in-person introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum. The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is located at 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens County, New York. Click here for travel directions and here for the full Jacques Rivette retrospective screening schedule.

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Q: What was the first film that made you feel understood? A:

By Annie FrisbieIt happens in a moment. Her eyes flick down, she takes a quick peek, and I start laughing. My friend Brian is sitting next to me at the Angelika going, “What? What’s funny? What?” I don’t expect him to understand. It’s never happened to him, never will, the lucky bastard. Vivian Abromowitz has just gotten her period all over her father’s new girlfriend’s tapestry chairs.

There are so few movies that get it right about being a girl; Slums of Beverly Hills, starring Natasha Lyonne as Vivian, absolutely does. Her brothers are annoying, her romantic prospects dismal, and her body is totally freaking her out. As bad as things got for Molly Ringwald in the 80s, you never got the sense that she ever worried about smelling weird, or that she ever got razor burn from using an elderly disposable, or ran out of tampons and had to ask Ally Sheedy if she had one to spare. Since Molly was as close to a real girl as I ever saw on screen growing up, I didn’t stand a chance. My daily life was definitely so much ickier than Molly’s. My greatest fear was that Everybody Would Know how gross I was, even though I went to a school with all girls, who were presumably just as gross as me.

The only other period scene I’d ever encountered was the opening of Carrie, but the problem was that Sissy Spacek’s character was just too weird to relate to, girl to girl. I empathized deeply with her desire to be loved and understood, but in that opening scene I felt the same revulsion that the other characters felt towards her, and I believe this was Brian de Palma’s intent. I didn’t want to inhabit a body like Carrie’s, monstrous and alien. Nancy Allen and PJ Soles would never have something like that happen to them, because normal girls aren’t icky. I always did have the sense, however much I yearned for normal, for clean, that becoming a woman meant acknowledging that horror is intrinsic to life. St. Francis of Assisi called his body “Brother Ass,” which means almost the same thing, but adolescence for men, while fraught with its own perils, lends itself far more readily to comedy than to horror. There are humiliations, but there is no blood.

So it’s no wonder that the next time I felt understood by a movie was when I was watching Katherine Isabelle’s Ginger get her period after getting bitten by a werewolf in Ginger Snaps. In the bathroom stall, with blood running down her leg, she says to her sister, “I have these urges, and I think they’re for sex, but really I just want to tear things to fucking pieces.” Some realities are too hideous to deal with because they’re just so relentlessly inevitable, every 28 days bringing a new opportunity to horrify and disgust. It can make you want to lose your mind, like Fairuza Balk’s Nancy in The Craft, just open your mouth and scream and let people know that there’s nothing scarier than a teenage girl who won’t stop screaming, because there’s always something to scream about. Every 28 days.

But that’s no solution, is it? And that’s why Slums is the only one that truly understands. Vivian didn’t scream. She just dealt with it, even though dealing with it meant that Everybody Would Know that she had her period. Her brothers would make fun of her, her dad would not know what to say, the new girlfriend would be upset, but none of that would change the fact that she just needed to get cleaned up and get through the rest of dinner. Some girls can burn things down with their minds; the rest of us just have to live with the ick.
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By day, Annie Frisbie is Senior Editor of Zoom In Online. By night, she’s the Superfast Reader . This is her first piece for The House Next Door.

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Links for the Day (November 29th, 2006)

1. "Ayn Rand--Donahue Interview": In five parts on YouTube. Thanks to Alex Jackson of Film Freak Central.

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2. "Activists urge boycott of the 'N-word'": That's that lesbian series on Showtime, right? Please also read Steven Boone's take on the movement.

["Kennedy said that though the movement to end the use of the word is "well-intentioned," one would never hear the most dangerous and reactionary racists use the word. "There is something troublesome going on," Kennedy said, "when this amount of energy is targeted toward people and a phenomenon that in the overall scheme of things is probably marginal." Ironically, the publicity over Richards' tirade may help spur sales of "Seinfeld: Season 7" on DVD, which Jackson encouraged holiday shoppers to refrain from buying. After less than a week on the market, it had zoomed to the 11th most popular DVD selling on Amazon.com.]

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3. "X-Men illustrator dies in Superman pajamas": He better hope Wolverine isn't a pallbearer.

["Wearing Superman pajamas and covered with his Batman blanket, comic book illustrator Dave Cockrum died Sunday. The 63-year-old overhauled the X-Men comic and helped popularize the relatively obscure Marvel Comics in the 1970s. He helped turn the title into a publishing sensation and major film franchise. Cockrum died in his favorite chair at his home in Belton, South Carolina, after a long battle with diabetes and related complications, his wife Paty Cockrum said Tuesday. At Cockrum's request, there will be no public services and his body will be cremated, according to Cox Funeral Home. His ashes will be spread on his property. A family friend said he will be cremated in a Green Lantern shirt."]

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4. ""Sunshine", "Half Nelson" lead indie film nominees": The American art-house world's version of the Oscars, huh?

["The hit road comedy "Little Miss Sunshine" and the acclaimed drug-addiction drama "Half Nelson" led the list of contenders on Tuesday for the Independent Spirit Awards, the American art-house world's version of the Oscars."]

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5. "Let's add homewrecker to Borat's list of credits": Cultural Learnings of Anderson for Make Benefit Glorious Divorce from Kid Rock.

["After the screening, Anderson's friend told the Post, "Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself" by making the movie, and then, in front of the audience, called her a couple of names usually reserved for women you see walking the Tenderloin early in the morning. "It was very embarrassing," Pammy's friend added. "Ever since that night, it has been icicles between them. ... Bob is just a very unhappy and angry man. There are reasons why she never married him before. Those reasons disappeared while they were together on a boat in St. Tropez, but she knows now that they never went away.""]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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T.V. on TV: The Office, Veronica Mars, The Year Without a Santa Claus and One Punk Under God

By Todd VanDerWerffWhen it debuted in 2005, the U.S. version of The Office (Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. EST) was held up as an example of how to get a remake almost right. It wasn’t the instant failure of Coupling -- an NBC remake of a BBC series -- but it wasn’t a huge leap forward on par with All in the Family (based on the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part). Part of the problem was that NBC's The Office -- based on a British classic that put its pitch-perfect cast, headed up by Ricky Gervais, on the map-- was essentially a one-joke concept that brilliantly executed every possible variation on that joke; it ended after 12 episodes and two specials, and there wasn't a dud in the bunch. Thanks partly to the limitations imposed by the U.S. business model -- which requires 100 episodes for a viable syndication sale -- the NBC version seemed more fluid and less focused.

That has mostly changed. If the U.S. Office hasn’t yet bested its UK ancestor, it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with it; different from but equal to its inspiration, it takes elements from the British version that could be Americanized, discards the rest, and turns the format drawbacks of the U.S. model to its advantage.

For instance, in the UK Office, the background characters were just that. They got little character development, popping in to offer a funny line or crucial bit of exposition. The U.S. Office, however, has treated the insatiable demands of its production schedule (22 half-hour episodes per season) as an excuse to develop every character, no matter how seemingly marginal, into a finely honed little archetype. Some bit players have even moved beyond that, particularly Jim (John Krasinski), who epitomizes the American working stiff who holds onto a job he's ambivalent about because he does it well, and because a major career shakeup is too big a risk. Even the U.S. show's most minor character, Creed (Creed Bratton), sports a degree of shading that the more compressed UK Office could not permit. Plus, while the British series was more realistic (the more severe antics of Rainn Wilson’s Dwight wouldn’t have flown in Gervais’ version), the U.S. Office depicts a broader sweep of humanity.

The other way in which the U.S. Office has outstripped its forebear is in its portrayal of the show’s romantic heart -- the subdued flirtation between Jim and Pam (the alluringly dorky Jenna Fischer). The original offered us roughly the same storyline between Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis, now slumming in a terribly underwritten role on Studio 60), but the end point of that storyline was never in doubt -- Tim and Dawn were going to get together by series’ end, overcoming romantic foils in Dawn’s fiancee, Lee (Joel Beckett), and Tim’s briefly-courted girlfriend, Rachel (Stacy Roca).

The U.S. Office retained the basic setup until this season. Pam, who was engaged to a lout named Roy (David Denman), rebuffed Jim, who turned around met a new girl named Karen (Rashida Jones). But in contrast to the Tim-Dawn dynamic, these developments aren't minor bumps on the road to togetherness, much less pro forma gimmicks meant to prolong the standard will-they/won’t-they dynamic. When Dawn left Lee, we were given little reason to care about his feelings; Lee was simply a jerkish fiance who deserved his comeuppance and then got it. In contrast, while Roy was played as a jerk for the first two seasons of the U.S. Office, he's gained depth this year; he’s still the high school jock gone to seed, but he also seems genuinely committed to winning back Pam through random acts of kindness (like getting her out of insufferable meetings and bringing her lunch). The show also showed, in small details, how the cancellation of a wedding affected both characters, something most TV sitcoms with aborted nuptials can't be bothered to do. (For instance, they’re working their way through the meals they'd ordered for the reception, eating them one at a time.)

More interesting, though, is the burgeoning relationship between Jim and Karen, which has mostly been hinted at (the only physical contact we’ve seen has been Jim’s hand on Karen’s back) and played offscreen (in keeping with the show’s conceit of being a workplace documentary, even if the U.S. version’s longevity makes that conceit less credible by the week). In the UK series, Tim couldn't get serious about Rachel because his true passion was for Dawn (the U.S. version played out this arc in Season Two, with Amy Adams as a spectacularly bad match for Jim). Karen, in contrast, is a carefully constructed character who's meant to win viewers over rather than earning their hate. She plays video games with the guys, she's a bit nonplussed by Jim’s mugging for the camera, and when she wants him, she makes her feelings known with a directness Pam could never muster. She’s an incredibly reasonable alternative to the almost-too-sitcommy drama of the Jim/Pam pairing. Of course thwarted flirtations like the one between Jim and Pam exist in the real world; but how often do they lead to meaningful relationships beyond high school or college, especially when it’s impossible to directly express one’s feelings (as Jim finally did to Pam in the season two finale, leaving her speechless and driving him away)? The Jim/Karen relationship feels surprisingly adult -- a mutual understanding based on two people saying, “Here’s what I want.” If you doubt the the Jim/Karen matchup is richer and more durable, just imagine them groggily sharing coffee over the morning newspaper 10 years from now, then do the same with Jim and Pam. The former makes more sense every time.

This is not an attempt to declare a “side” in the series’ relationship wars (though, apparently, you can buy shirts), nor is it an attempt to make the whole show about its central relationship (the comedy the show turns out is consistently hilarious). Rather, it’s an attempt to get at what The Office really seems to be getting at. The original version was, really, a romance wrapped in a big faux-verite bow. Yes, your job sucks, and yes, your boss is an idiot, but at the end of the day, you’ll find love and realize one or two of your dreams and even that hated boss will find some measure of redemption. The new clash at the heart of the U.S. Office isn’t just between the Jim/Pam and Jim/Karen pairings -- it’s about gradually discarding gooey notions of romanticism that TV often sells us and replacing them with a more realistic ideal. Naturally, no one expects the series to end with Jim and Karen or Pam and Roy together, but for this season, at least, The Office's realism goes beyond its shaky camerawork.
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In its third season, the CW’s Veronica Mars (Tuesdays at 9 p.m. EST) has managed to reinvent itself as a show that’s easy for new viewers to jump into, yet it's still struggling to find viewers, even with the dream lead-in of Gilmore Girls. While I liked the convoluted gymnastics that fueled Season Two’s big mystery, I can see how the sheer volume of information might have driven away the uninitiated, and the show suffered as a result (it plays better on DVD). In response, creator Rob Thomas and his writers amped up the smaller mysteries that drive the individual episodes and created mini-mysteries to drive smaller arcs, the first of which ends tonight.

Unfortunately, the episodic mysteries have always been one of Mars' most uneven elements, and this season is no exception. While the episode with the sorority growing medical marijuana ranked with the series' best hours, the one where Veronica (the still prickly, still great Kristen Bell) fretted about her boyfriend Logan (Jason Dohring) and his mysterious ways was a yawn. The absence of key supporting players (who are used sparingly, as the show doesn’t have a big enough budget to feature them all in every episode) has led to a curiously disjointed feel; it's Veronica vs. the world. And the first mini-mystery -- Veronica trying to uncover the identity of a serial rapist -- has been a mixed bag. It's well-plotted, and original in its insistence that people who seem like college types, from dumb frat boys to militant feminists, are more complex than they seem. But there have been inexplicable lapses in logic, and the portrayal of the feminist group is troubling (why, exactly, did they fake some of the rapes?).

What Veronica Mars does better than almost any current series is give you a sense that it’s building to something big. Tonight’s episode, hopefully, will satisfy that craving by revealing the rapist's identity and shattering the Logan and Veronica relationship (which sounds fine -- Dohring and Bell are better at sparring than appearing to be in love). Despite its lapses, Thomas' series is a snarky triumph -- film noir filtered through 80s teen comedies, then pureed -- and you forgive a lot when it shows Veronica bonding with her father (Enrico Colantoni) or letting her guard down long enough to reveal the girl who wishes she could return to the time when her best friend was still alive.
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Ron Underwood, director of such films as Tremors and City Slickers, isn’t known for his strong visuals, but his B-movie credentials make NBC’s The Year Without a Santa Claus (Monday, Dec. 11, 9 p.m. EST) all the more inexplicable. Underwood and the network have inflated a story that was already too slim for a one-hour Rankin-Bass special into a two-hour movie that meanders through some of the cheapest production values you’re likely to see this year.

Somehow, this project attracted something approaching an all-star cast. John Goodman would seem to be a natural for Santa, but his St. Nicholas is uncomfortably reminiscent of the manic Santa from You Better Watch Out (a.k.a. Christmas Evil). His costars -- Delta Burke as Mrs. Claus, Eddie Griffin and Ethan Suplee as elves are underwritten, and the actors give pretty much the performances you'd expect based on their past work (though Griffin’s character has an odd affection for Dr. Laura, mostly so the producers could get Dr. Laura to cameo, I guess). Harvey Fierstein, Michael McKean and Carol Kane turn up as Heatmiser, Coldmiser and Mother Nature, respectively, and are even less intergral to the remake than they were to the original (they're probably in the movie so they can sing the song, which is the only thing most people remember about the first one). NBC missed the mark completely here; they would have been better off reviving the cartoon.
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Here’s an early heads-up on Sundance’s intriguing new documentary series, One Punk Under God, which debuts Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 9 p.m. EST. While this isn’t quite the revolution in televised documentary that Sundance’s The Staircase was, it’s a largely fascinating examination of religion in America through the eyes of Revolution Church minister Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the embattled PTL Club. The younger Bakker is trying to heal his still-fractured relationship with his mother and father while trying to fund his church (a task complicated by his mix of liberal and conservative politics, which alienates pretty much every source of money). Bakker's attempts to turn his church, which congregates weekly in a bar, into an instrument to spread his faith are largely fascinating; so are are his conflicts with established religious officials who bridle at his views and tattoos, and his relationship with his wife, who doesn't share his enthusiasm for the whole Jesus thing. In the first episode, when Bakker tromps around what remains of Heritage USA, the theme park/resort that was the focus of the scandal that destroyed his father, the sequence becomes a metaphor for a Christianity that dreamed big in the early 80s and found most of its leaders in shambles by the end of that decade. Surprisingly, though, One Punk Under God avoids the expected cheap shots at religious hypocrites. It's about the children of big Christianity trying to reconcile their views with a world their parents inoculated them against; while some have abandoned their faith, others, like Jay Bakker, have tried to incorporate that world into their faith, opening their hearts to the unconventional and odd, much like the man they say they follow.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Navel Gazing with Burns and Dignan: The Fountain, For Your Consideration, and Happy Feet

By Sean Burns and Andrew Dignan

Andrew Dignan: Hey Sean, how was your Thanksgiving? Even though I'm 3000 miles away from my family, I find the holiday still moves along with the same ebb and flow, encompassing the same old routines. The turkey's always dried out. The Detroit Lions always get blown away. The Black Friday sales seem a whole lot better when you're not fighting with a fat soccer mom for the last X-Box 360 (by the by--fat soccer mom: 1, Andrew: 0). And of course the studios release a slate of cuddly holiday films sure to be kicking around the mall movie theaters through the Christmas season. You know, like the one where a bald Hugh Jackman hurtles through the galaxy in a giant bubble doing yoga in-between snacking on tree bark.

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, which is perhaps the trippiest, most psychotropic, big-budget extravaganza since the Johnson administration is both impossible to dismiss outright and, unfortunately, equally difficult to take seriously. Coming six years after the filmmaker's Requiem for a Dream, which--depending on who you're talking to--either established Aronofsky as a pariah or a wunderkind, The Fountain has traveled a notoriously difficult path to make it onto screens in time for turkey day. As a result, I can't help but wonder how much my admiration for the director's past work and the sheer bravado of getting Time Warner to release something so doggedly personal and impenetrable is shading my feelings towards the film. Certainly the film has difficulty standing on its own merits. Set predominantly in the present where Jackman's brain surgeon buries himself in his research to save/avoid dealing with his dying wife (Aronofsky squeeze Rachel Weisz), the film's high-concept storylines set in 16th-century Central America and an indeterminate future feel woven in simply to expand upon the paper-thin characters. Employing something of a Junior High Goth's concept of both love and death, the film can be distilled down to "embrace the inevitability of your own demise and appreciate the time you have," which has been covered a time or two previously without the benefit of Mayan temples and exploding nebulas.

Aronofsky's aesthetic dynamics are still on display, specifically his use of repetition to bridge the three stories and a score by Clint Mansell that builds to a near Wagner-ian furor, but the heart of the film is the relationship between a husband and wife--two characters with roughly one-and-a-half personality traits each whose every line of dialogue can be tied directly into the film's overarching themes of death and rebirth. The director got away with using ciphers in Requiem because the subject was blunt and universal enough (drugs are really, really bad) that character dimension wasn't a large prerequisite. But in approaching something as intimate as this, simply alternating between obsession and resignation doesn't allow for the same sort of empathy by proxy. I doubt you'll see a more straight-faced, ambitious or earnest film this year, but ultimately the film works itself into such a frenzy to say very little. So Sean, as someone who's gone on record as loathing Aronofsky, what's your take?

Sean Burns: Holiday Greetings returned, Mr. Dignan. You might be 3000 miles away, but rest assured, everything's still exactly the same out here on the East Coast. I feel bloated and hung-over, most of my family seems to be angry with me for reasons I (perhaps fortunately) cannot quite recall, and working at a movie theater on Black Friday is a surefire way to sap even the most generous soul of any hope regarding the future of humanity itself. (I dearly look forward to seeing Children of Men this week, just so I may cheer on our inevitable extinction.) As for The Fountain, let me be polite for a change and say that I find it slightly less difficult to dismiss than you do. I'll agree that it's indeed a miracle Darren Aronofsky somehow got a major studio to fund such an audience unfriendly, unsatisfying, undisciplined, self-indulgent wank-off, but on the other hand, you can say the same thing about a lot of bad art, including our new favorite whipping boy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

You've called me out as an Aronofsky hater from way on back, so I guess that gives me license to recycle our usual Requiem argument, which I believe holds true once more for The Fountain. There's a very off-putting, posturing arrogance to this still-young filmmaker's work. He strikes me as having no real interest whatsoever in creating compelling characters or telling actual stories, instead working backwards from shallow, over-arching sophomoric "concepts", all of which are locked long beforehand into rigid geometric camera techniques (watch those cuneiform tracking shots in this outing) and overly-diagrammatic, repetitious editing patterns that all add up to... well they all... umm, okay fuck it--your guess is as good as mine.

As you noted, "drugs are really, really bad“ and if that's enough reason to make any sentient being sit there for two hours enduring the endless, blunt-force trauma of Requiem for a Dream then I'll see you one Kids and even raise you a Thirteen, as far as bullshit, empty alarmist cautionary tales go. The Fountain is indeed a very silly, spazzy film and I think we're all cutting it a little too much slack just because it's so weird and strange when going about its particular silly badness. This is an exquisitely awful movie: It is not so much a story as it is a premise, with Hugh Jackman fighting against Death and getting nowhere in multiple centuries, and the more Aronofsky pounds away on that same one note the less convinced I am that Jackman can actually act his way out of a paper bag--particularly when he's bald and levitating.

Weisz just doesn't register--it's one of those roles where you can tell the filmmaker is in love with her and thus thinks you are too. (Call this the "Ed Burns Casts His Girlfriends Syndrome.") But her "hey whaddaya know" American accent is disastrous, and she simply doesn't have enough presence to fill in the many, many blanks. Jackman is even emptier--it's tough even to tell that the longhaired swarthy conquistador is the same actor as the floating bald-headed Buddha guy, and that's not a compliment. So what exactly are we supposed to take away from all this? The overarching message struck me as the same banal Hollywood formula pieties we already fought over in Stranger Than Fiction. Like all three Darren Aronofsky movies I have seen thus far, everything onscreen--most especially the characters and their unfortunate situations--remain a distant second to the formal (cough) innovations and achievements of one Darren Aronofsky. He earned his rep quick-cut conning a generation that never heard of Bob Fosse, and now he's gone and made his own Solaris For Dummies. Nice to see nobody's buying it anymore.

AD: There are dozens of reasons people might be cutting The Fountain some slack: It could be a response to the immature catcalls at Venice or that the mainstream press has by and large hammered the film as pretentious and dull. I also think there's something of a "Led Zeppelin's lyrics" type of response where it's perceived that anything this mystical and ethereal must have something important to say deep down, so better to show restraint now than look out-of-touch down the road. But personally, I'm pleased simply by the idea of this film fighting for theater space with The Santa Clause 3 and I still want to encourage this sort of filmmaking-without-a-net even if The Fountain largely falls on its face.

We've butted heads over the relative merits of Aronofsky seemingly hundreds of times and this is the first time I find myself inching over to your side of the aisle vis-a-vis how little the man has to say and the energy he expels in saying it (although I'll still doggedly defend Requiem as one of the most effective pieces of subjective filmmaking I've ever seen). The Bob Fosse accusation is more a slam directed at cineastes who've let him slip into semi-obscurity than a slight against Aronofsky though. Considering half the people who visit this site are De Palma fanatics (you and I included) and the guy never met a Hitchcock set-piece he didn't pilfer wholesale, obviously what differentiates something as a rip-off versus an homage remains frustratingly elusive.

But back to The Fountain for a moment. If you look at every film Aronofsky has made, they all seem to address obsessive-compulsive (even when chemically enhanced) behavior and self-destruction, two conceits that don't lend themselves well to sentimentality and swooning romanticism. Much as Jackman's brain surgeon is trying to apply rigid, precision to solving his wife's sickness, I think the film itself is too caught up in its own head-space to work either as a romance that spans time or as a tragedy. We enter Tommy and Izzy's story after their tracks have diverged and we never get a sense of the great love that's dying with her (the film's attempt to bridge this gap comes in the form of Chris Nolan-style flashes of a vital Weisz running through their apartment); the film is so thematically focused that heartfelt conversations between the two invariably descend into lectures on Mayan folklore and astronomy. The film can't conceive of these two characters as anything other than chess pieces moving around the board to make some cosmic point when what they need to be is human beings at their most vulnerable.
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SB: Speaking of people with nothing to say, the new Christopher Guest movie, For Your Consideration, is truly awful. I've felt like the Guest troupe has been running on fumes for a while now, but this picture announces some sort of dark, nasty rock bottom. It's a snide little piece of mockery, one completely devoid of the humanity and specificity we saw in This Is Spinal Tap or Waiting For Guffman.

Catherine O'Hara stars as a has-been actress starring alongside never-was, hot-dog spokesman Harry Shearer in a dreadful looking indie called Home for Purim. (If that title makes you smile then you're in good hands here, as Guest seems to feel that Jewishness is, in and of itself, inherently hilarious.) When some random website predicts an Oscar-nomination for O'Hara, the hype machine takes over and this entire production spirals out of control.

Andrew, as you actually work in Hollywood, so I'll leave it to you to recount the thousands of ways this picture misses some very broad, very easy targets. Instead I'd like to stay with how sour the movie is, and how sad it made me feel. I've had mixed feelings about a lot of the Guest company's previous films, but I was still always rooting for his hapless, medium-talent characters until now. The folks in For Your Consideration are all empty, selfish assholes, and they deserve every bad break that comes their way. The very hint of awards recognition makes them completely insufferable and the film seems deliberately fixated on reveling in their every last ugly-close-up squirm when things don't work out according to plan. All these years after Guffman, Guest has finally made the movie his detractors wrongly accused him of making at the time: poking fun at nobodies for the awful crime of having dreams. It's telling that once The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm started to beat Christopher Guest at his own game, the best he could come up with in response is an 86-minute episode of The Comeback.

AD: Truly a mean-spirited, ugly little film. Not always a bad thing when it comes to comedy, but laziness certainly is. There is a sad little year-round cottage industry dedicated to tracking a film's Oscar chances from the moment a film is conceived (to wit: Dave Poland over at Movie City News has been crowing about Dreamgirls being a lock to win best picture since Eddie Murphy was cast last January), with quality largely removed from the equation. But Guest really has nothing to say about that, nor the long precession of meaningless kudos-fests that precede the Academy Awards, nor the hundreds of other asinine peculiarities that legitimately exist in the putrid dog and pony show that is Oscar season. Instead this is another go-around with his ever-expanding troop of oblivious losers who improv themselves into a lather hitting the same off-key note over and over again.

I read in this week's Entertainment Weekly that Guest doesn't watch award shows and hasn't read anything about the industry in fifteen-years, a premise that's unbelievable until you actually see For Your Consideration. Not only am I convinced of it now, I'm pretty sure he's never stepped foot on a film set either. Rife with backstage antics that were probably howlers when Desi Arnaz marched them out back in the 50s, the film is proudly anachronistic, going for cheap giggles about how none of these people know what the Internet is, know how to use cell phones or own televisions, and then watching them squirm as they're forced to mince about on TRL or whore themselves out on the talk show circuit. The film depicts its actors as principled babes in the wood until they become shrill harpies surrounded by sycophantic dullards. As you pointed out Sean, these are sad, over-the-hill artists whose great sin is they long for recognition after a lifetime of obscurity. Guest has made a career out of mining the failures and self-important grandeur of those on the fringe of showbiz but he's never invited outright scorn like this before.

The Jewish thing is just craven and indicative of the film's nature to go after the easiest target available. The jabs are delivered just softly enough that no one will really complain (lest they be seen as not having a sense of humor about themselves), but depict the religion as alien and grotesque enough that the middle of the country can work itself into gales of laughter over hearing labored Yiddish or watching a bunch of people in silly hats crank noise makers to block out Hamen's name (my God, has that ever happened outside of Hebrew school?) You want to impress me in the year 2006? Make it Home for Ramadan.
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AD: Playing at the other end of the multiplex, to no doubt a markedly different audience, is George Miller's Happy Feet, which has been cleaning up at the box office for the past two weekends, as cute, anthropomorphic-animal cartoons invariably do. I'm a 25-year old guy with no kids, so unless one of these animated films come with the Pixar or Aardman seal of approval I usually steer clear. But I'd been hearing a low rumble that the film was some sort of subversive masterstroke only pretending to be a kid's flick in the same vein as Miller's Babe 2: Beyond Thunderdome was, so I bit the bullet and endured a chorus of screaming small children to check the film out.

What I got was a shiny-new-penny of a CGI film that makes uneasy bedmates out of March of the Penguins and Moulin Rouge! while still operating under the same rusty conventions as when Dumbo flew. The film veers into terrifyingly morose territory in the final leg (I imagine it might be difficult to drag the little ones to the aquarium after this one) and contains a handful of kaleidoscopic, manic set pieces as our hoofin' hero dives down the face of glaciers and through a series of underwater crevices, but Happy Feet feels strictly from the "plush toys and soundtrack available for purchase in the lobby" school of filmmaking.

There are no doubt cultural parallels to our outsider striving for acceptance against rigid community leaders, but Christ, you could say the same thing about Footloose and that doesn't require you to sit through two Robin Williams ethnic voices or Brittany Murphy's singing. Also, am I nuts or are they just making this thing up as they go along? Everyone may have complained about how creaky Cars was, but those Pixar guys know how to structure a film. Happy Feet plods along from one unmotivated adventure to the next with little dictated by character or action. Everything may work out for our feathered-friends, but I have no idea how or why.

I suppose there are worse things to subject your children to than a small cuddly bird tap dancing to Stevie Wonder (with choreography by no less than Savion Glover), but as an unaccompanied adult forced to endure accusatory glares from parents and having your seatback kicked for 90-minutes, why is this film worth seeing as opposed to one of the other dozen animated films Hugh Jackman is currently doing a voice for?

SB: Well, you seem not to have noticed that this is absolutely the weirdest goddamn thing I've seen in ages, and that includes The Fountain. Say what you will about George Miller as a storyteller, but as in Thunderdome and Pig in the City, the man has a knack for creating fully thought-out, exceedingly bizarre worlds, ones in which the characters don't really stop to explain their odd customs or wacky alien syntax to the audience. Happy Feet made me wish I still smoked weed.

It's also loaded with weird signifiers and subtexts, as the little penguin who is born different and thus can't participate in his species mating rituals, but is a fabulous dancer (gay maybe) is ostracized by the stringent religious order and accused of causing the fish shortage by offending their God with his threatening, unnatural practices. After the little guy brings back actual empirical evidence regarding their environmental problems, the elder churchy folks still stubbornly refuse to believe him and just pray even louder and harder, thus setting up a nice critique of our current, depressing science vs. religion debate aimed at the pre-school through Kindergarten set. And yes, that aquarium sequence you mention is indeed chilling, complete with strange 2001 voices and creepy insertions of actual photography into the film's otherwise breathtaking CGI vistas. That said, I'll concede that the storytelling is on the shaky side. And no argument here: Robin Williams needs to go far, far away for a very, very long time.

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Links for the Day (November 28th, 2006)

1. "Biff's Question Song": Thomas F. Wilson of Back to the Future fame on all those pesky fan queries.

["What's Michael J. Fox like?/He's an alien./Stop asking me the question."]

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2. "Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD replacement program": From the Digital Bits news wrap-up. Thanks to Ross Ruediger.

["Bonus content was omitted from the Superman III Deluxe Edition in the 14-disc Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition. Furthermore, disc one of Superman: The Movie Four Disc Special Edition did not include the Dolby Digital 2.0 mix. Neither disc is known to be physically defective in any way. Warner Home Video wants to extend apologies to all of our loyal Superman fans who've waited so patiently for these great collections and has taken immediate steps to correct these errors with the intention of standing behind our product 100%. Replacement discs can be obtained by calling: 800-553-6937. The exchange program applies only to purchases of the Superman III Deluxe Edition in the Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition and to disc one of Superman: The Movie Four Disc Special Edition, available as a single title, as well as in The Christopher Reeve Superman Collection and in the Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition."]

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3. "Room to Dream": In which some of the peripheral characters from David Lynch's Inland Empire discuss...

["You're here, right?"]

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4. "Bollywood star guilty of weapons charges": From CNN's news page.

["Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt was convicted on Tuesday of weapons charges in connection with a series of 1993 bomb blasts in India's worst terror attack. At the same time, Dutt was found not guilty of the more serious conspiracy charges in the 1993 bombings that killed 257 in Mumbai and wounded hundreds more. The Bollywood star had been charged with conspiracy, illegal possession of arms and trying to destroy evidence connected with an attack which shook India's financial and film capital."]

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5. "Soderbergh Gets the Bronx Cheer": Well, he'll always have Paris.

["New Yorkers are a tough crowd -- at least when it comes to Steven Soderbergh's latest picture. The director got the Bronx cheer at a DGA New York screening of "The Good German" followed by a Q&A Saturday night. The people who showed up seemed either familiar with Paul Attanasio and his adaptation of the book and/or intrigued by the movie's theme that depicts the post World War II race to nab German scientists between Russia and the U.S. The negative reaction seemed to stem from the film's emulative stylization and the uneven acting."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (November 27th, 2006)

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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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The Wire Mondays: Season 4, Ep. 11, “A New Day”

By Barry Maupin"You're telling me how I can’t do it, not how I can," freshly minted Mayor Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) snaps at a city accountant who lists the impediments to giving the police a raise. Carcetti ambushes the offices of Baltimore's various public works departments (one lounging around to the sounds of Men At Work) and orders respective remedies for an abandoned car, a playground hazard, and a leaky hydrant without disclosing specific locations, sending panicked city employees scurrying in search of a problem. He shows up at a police roll call to personally announce a pay hike and the termination of meaningless monthly quotas for arrests and citations (unlike the other city workers, the beat cops remain undeterred by the mayor's eminence, pelting each other with verbal spitballs and sassing the new initiative's staying power). Col. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), tapped by Carcetti to make over the homicide division, joins his girlfriend, Assistant State's Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy), in addressing the detectives with the promise of "certain enhancements" and an ear for new ideas. "A new day," Sgt. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) muses with a twinkle of skepticism as his colleagues swarm the new bosses with congratulations. "They make a nice couple anyway."

Carcetti's momentum hits an early snag after a bad stop and search of a connected reverend by Sgt. "Herc" Hauk (Domenick Lombardozzi). Two factions of matching stature make the penance a lose-lose calculation: go soft and rankle the black church scene or fire Herc and lose the rank-and-file cop. "It’s a balancing act," Carcetti's chief of staff, Norman Wilson (Reg E. Cathey), interprets for Deputy Commissioner Rawls (John Doman), who shovels the chore to Daniels with an artful rendering of his own. "City Hall just wants someone to do the right thing, whatever that is." Daniels clicks his pen and digests the burden that grows with his rank.

Rawls does Carcetti's bidding on the mistaken notion that he's in line to succeed Commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie R. Faison). When Col. Stan Valchek (Al Brown) refers to Daniels, however, as "The anointed," Rawls' bewildered look sends Valchek into a fit of derisive laughter. Valchek may be the only one in the department who can read the tea leaves better than Rawls, who suffers a blind spot when it comes to his own liability. "It’s Baltimore," Valchek reminds him. "You ain't one of the natives, are you?" Daniels' verdict on Herc (sensitivity training and extra duty), on the other hand, won't generate much political suction with the ministers, an opening Burrell exploits in his play to hang on. He drops the police rulebook on Carcetti's desk and with it his own greatest strength: digging for dirt. Burrell suggests firing Herc for something other than the car stop to appease both parties and save Carcetti the fallout. "The man has worked narcotics for six years," he lays out, "and in narcotics, there are no virgins."

The quartet of eighth-grade boys at the center of The Wire have their own way of dealing with bad police. When Officer Walker (Jonnie Louis Brown) shoos the boys from the sidewalk where they're enjoying some Chinese food, the cumulative ill will from Walker's outlaw brand of justice inspires some like-minded retribution. Michael (Tristan Wilds) concocts a scheme to turn Walker's lust for the chase against him, and the boys gather to perpetrate it in a scene that charts the full range of the group dynamic. Randy (Maestro Harrell) stalls in his house, then encourages a silent Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) to bail on the plan to save himself the dishonor; Namond (Julito McCullum) taunts Randy's delay, cloaking his own fear in bluster; Dukie looks at the ground as they walk, speaking up only to defend Michael's judgment when Namond questions it. When the trio arrives at Michael's house, Namond casts a sideways look to see if one of the others will back out. Michael challenges Namond with a choice of masks and Namond grudgingly takes one as he did in school earlier in the day—a blind backward plunge standing in as an act of courage.

At the plan's climax, while Namond has Walker facedown in an alley at gunpoint and prepares to dump a bucket of paint on him, Michael improvises a further indignity, pulling the bandana from his face as he steals Walker's ring. Michael is the fifth person to come into possession of the ring this season, its forcible transfer less a function of its monetary value than as a declaration of the upper hand. For Michael, the theft—like the exposure of his face in the act—speaks to his growing sense of power to affect events in his favor in the aftermath of his abuser's violent death.

Michael rides the unbeatable vibe when he throws down with a group of boys tormenting Randy for snitching. As the fight erupts, Dukie races back into school to alert Prez (Jim True-Frost), their math teacher and the only authority he trusts. When Prez, a former cop, breaks up the fight, his disturbed look is for more than the blood on Randy; Prez knows he's the one who put Randy in this mess by getting him to tell the police what he knew of a murder. Randy is so defensive about the snitching charges that he thinks he needs to justify his actions even to Prez, who—beginning to sense the perilous atmosphere he helped create—tells Randy not to say another word. "Will that make it better?" Randy asks hopefully. Det. Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce), the lead on the murder investigation, comes to Prez when he discovers the root of Randy's silence and accuses Prez of siding with the criminals. "No," Prez shoots back, "I'm siding with my kids." Only the avuncular presence of Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) coaxes the necessary details out of Prez.

Lester once mentored Prez in the Major Crimes unit, which is now being reconstituted under the supervision of Daniels, who lures a bitter Lester back into the fold with the promise of carte blanche control. "Motherfucker, as far as I'm concerned, you are the Major Crimes unit," Daniels clarifies. Lester pays a late night visit to the empty building which houses the unit's current incarnation and studies the pictorial hierarchy of the drug organization of Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), the photo array and the investigation abandoned in place. In a back office he finds a box of returned subpoenas issued to prominent real estate developers for a case he spent months building. Lester puts his feet up on the lieutenant's desk and reads the names, an image intercut with shots of the same developers pitching and grinning with the mayor at a benefit. Lester grabs the box and leaves, shutting off the lights. He pauses for a moment, then flips the lights back on as a sly announcement of his return.

Meanwhile, Lester is helping Bunk pick through the mess of his case left by Herc, who debriefed Randy and discarded his testimony as useless before letting his identity slip out to the street. "The thing right now is for you to remember everything you did on this case," Lester prompts Herc. "From the beginning." Herc dreads the prospect—not just the idea of having to regurgitate all his blunders, but to Lester. Herc details a car stop of the suspects that yielded no weapon other than a nail gun, a triviality to Herc. Lester accompanies Bunk to the playground Prez mentioned from Randy's account, where he surveys the vacant buildings on all sides, their windows and doors boarded up with rusted fasteners. One door is sealed off with fresh spikes, sending Lester to fetch a crowbar with which to pry open the victim's tomb.

Lester isn't the only threat heading Marlo's way. Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) and his boyfriend Renaldo (Ramon A. Rodriguez), who specialize in robbing drug dealers, trail Slim Charles (Anwan Glover), trying to gauge his connection with Marlo after seeing the former adversaries together. They track Slim to the electronics shop of yet another big-name player in the drug trade, Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew), stirring Omar's concept of the pending caper's potential. Renaldo begs to abort the stakeout so he can use the bathroom, running afoul of Omar's disciplined methodology. Omar produces a roll of toilet paper and some philosophical advice: "Whether you squattin' down or sittin' on the porcelain throne, don't really change the moment now, do it?" Later, they follow Joe and Slim to the Holiday Inn conference room and a gathering of the "New Day Co-op," a coalition of Baltimore's major drug dealers. "Oh, do tell," Omar savors at the sight of Marlo coming up the sidewalk as well. "The world done came full circle." The target is still Marlo (a consequence of his framing Omar for a murder and then putting a jailhouse bounty on his head), so Omar and Renaldo sneak up on Joe at his shop with guns drawn and demand that Joe serve up his new partner. Joe's cooperation is cinched when Omar threatens to reveal that Joe once tipped him off to Marlo's lightly guarded poker game. Omar insists on a simple plot to better distill the network's exasperating complexity, so Joe proposes to apprise Omar of the time and place of a major delivery to Marlo, with his nephew, Cheese (Method Man), as go-between.

Halfway through the episode is a beautiful one-off scene in a fast food joint, a hymn to an old-school ethic. Officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) spots young street hustler Bodie Broadus (JD Williams) in a back booth at an off-brand eatery and veers over with his takeout for a seat. Bodie shrugs assent and admits to laying low from the heightened police presence. "Not a good day to be cross-eyed in West Baltimore," McNulty concurs. "Y’all behind in your quotas or some shit? What the fuck?" Bodie pries. McNulty explains a cop got jumped the night before. Bodie already knows about Walker. They share a stifled laugh. Like Bunk and Omar, McNulty and Bodie form an unlikely kinship; a chance encounter on a street corner early in the season ended with McNulty practically patting Bodie on the back for escaping the wrath of Hamsterdam with a plea of entrapment. McNulty gets a burglary call on the radio. "Don’t go making any furtive moves," he alerts. "No doubt," Bodie nods through a mouthful of fries. "Don’t break a pencil point." They part, a pair of refugees from another day.

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An outline of a heartbreaker: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Part sci-fi head trip, part swoony romance and part pop-philosophical manifesto, The Fountain is a gusher of poetic imagery, extravagant yet controlled. Hugh Jackman plays three incarnations of a hero: a conquistador trying to find the Fountain of Youth, a present-day cancer researcher who's in denial over his wife's impending death, and a 26th century astronaut piloting a translucent starship into a disintegrating nebula believed to be the gateway to the afterlife. But because the tales are not merely intercut, but densely interwoven -- with images from one section being quoted, alluded to or expanded upon in another -- The Fountain feels less like an anthology of thematically similar short stories than variations of the same narrative developed on parallel planes. When the movie cuts away from one period, you feel as though the story is still moving forward even though you're not there to see it. Every scene -- indeed, every shot -- has been composed, designed, blocked and lit for maximum aesthetic oomph. You can envision the storyboards pinned on a production office wall, each drawing accompanied by a typewritten sheet explaining why every creative touch, however seemingly small, is integral to the film's vision.

But the go-to lazy critic phrase "Every frame is a painting" won't do here, because it implies the possibility of absorbing what's in front of you while it's in front of you, and this film makes such perceptual spelunking impossible. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky's imagination apparently has just one mode, fast-forward; like his first two features, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain unreels like the longest and ripest of movie trailers; Aronofsky and his regular editor, Jay Rabinowitz, hold each image long enough to register, but rarely long enough to penetrate and astonish. Aronofsky's pedal-to-the-metal approach suited Pi, an enigmatic mathematical-philosophical puzzle, and Requiem for a Dream, which might be the greatest drug movie ever because its form is dictated by the character of addiction, which prizes the satisfaction of appetite over everything else. But The Fountain is, in theory, a much more introspective movie -- a romantic-philosophical-spiritual quest -- and as such, Aronofsky's approach seems as counterintuitive as zipping through St. Peter's Basilica on rollerblades. Though the film's 96-minute running time might sound like a plus, there were many points when I wished The Fountain wasn't in such a hurry. A film on themes this universal is entitled, even obligated, to linger -- not on every moment, but on moments that put allusions and foreshadowings and visual rhymes aside and concentrate on the hero's feelings at the moment he feels them.

But would a more relaxed, meditative approach have revealed greater depths? I doubt it. The Fountain isn't as conceptually rich or as philosophically complex as Solaris or 2001 or even The Life Aquatic (to name three movies that strain after cosmic significance). And it's not as achingly emotional as A Prairie Home Companion, All That Jazz or the dumb but powerful Somewhere in Time, to name three films about death, love and the limits of mortal control. The Fountain's express-train-to-profundity approach seems more like cover for a movie that's not as fully conceived or fully felt as it could be. I don't doubt it was a deeply personal project for Aronofsky; he spent six years struggling to get it made. But what's onscreen too often struck me as theoretical and not lived-in. Aronofsky's prismatic story is rooted in primal emotions and sutuations -- a man's grief over his wife's death, his guilt over not appreciating her in life, and his obsessive five-century quest to defeat death and find a way to reunite with her. On paper, that's one of the most imaginative illustrations of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' second stage of grief -- denial -- in movie history. Unfortunately, while The Fountain is dazzlingly constructed (dazzling in the sleight-of-hand sense; more on that in a moment) what's onscreen feels like a reconstructed version of a legendary movie that was lost or butchered. It's a movie comprised of indicators of emotions rather than actual emotions -- an outline of a heartbreaker.

No one can accuse the film of lacking ambition. The 26th century thread, which has the trippy majesty of a Heavy Metal story, finds the astronaut Tom (Jackman), a pale, bald dreamer, heading toward a dying nebula. His spaceship looks like a soap bubble but functions as a greenhouse; the bottom half of its interior is a hemisphere of earth and nutrients, providing sustenance for Thomas and a mystical gnarled tree whose significance will become clear as the movie unfolds. As he travels, he passes the time by meditating in zero gravity, air-kissing the tree bark (its tiny tendrils, charged by static electricity, straighten and reach for Tom's lips like neck hairs awakened by gooseflesh) and practicing tai-chi (a lovely image, with Tom's graceful figure silhouetted against a starfield that seems to be falling like snow behind him). Tom also cuts pieces of bark from the tree and cooks it down into a drug (the closeups suggest the smack preparation scenes in Requiem) and has conversations with a ghostly woman (Rachel Weisz) who keeps entreating him to "finish it." These rituals feel familiar, even warm, although we don't yet know their scientific or emotional significance. Aside from the ghost woman's appearances -- which despite their enigmatic presentation, have a thudding, Six Feet Under literalness -- you may feel a rush of anticipation.

This sense of promise can also be felt in the movie's 15th century Latin American sequences, which find Tomas (Jackman), a conquistador, searching for the source of immortality in order to save Queen Isabella (Weisz) from death at the hands of the self-flagellating, heretic-killing religious fanatics who've taken over Spain. Like all three sections, this one is conceived in the broad-stroke terms of a hallucination (or a silent movie). Tomas and his men penetrate the vine-choked base of a temple and enter a narrow stone passageway that proves to be a trap; natives surround and decimate them, leaving only brave Tomas to push forward, hacking his way through bushels of enemy soldiers until he reaches the base of a ziggurat's terraced side. If Matthew Libatique's voluptuously dark, grainy photography and Clint Mansell's pulsating synthesized score didn't clue you in that you're watching an allegory, the next sequence of shots leave no doubt: from Tomas' POV, the ziggurat seems to stretch upward forever, practically disappearing into starry sky, and when Aronofsky cuts to a long shot of Tomas' antlike figure climbing toward the structure's peak, toward a duel with a soldier guarding the fabled Tree of Life and its immortality-bestowing nectar, the image is so storybook that it earns a grin. It doesn't look real and it isn't supposed to. Like the analog special effects in Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Quay Brothers' films, with their forced perspectives and baroque textures, this sequence's effects are more emotionally than physically convincing. They're allegorical images, a simple and evocative as Tom's Glinda-Good-Witch-of-the-North spaceship and the shimmering galactic panoramas it traverses. The latter, created by English photographer Peter Parks, are not CGI images, but macro closeups of chemicals in a petri dish; versions of the starfield appear elsewhere in the movie, pulsing in the sky over the 15th century matte-painted jungles or writhing on a microscope slide. These handmade effects are both comforting and unnerving; they're dreamscapes.

The whole movie is a dreamscape -- or at least it strives to feel that way. Aronofsky segues from one version of the story to another so subtly that it takes you a minute to realize what period you're in. The present-tense narrative, which finds driven scientist Tommy (Jackman) running experiments on a monkey as a Hail Mary attempt to cure his brain cancer-stricken wife, Izzi (Weisz again), is photographed in smoky gold hues, as if Tommy's whole world is trapped in amber. The hero is running from the hard reality of his situation; his marriage is an hourglass, and while the sand is running out, he's taking wild risks in the lab, testing the patience of his by-the-book supervisor (Ellen Burstyn) and bossing around his mostly colorless subordinates. It's an obvious setup, very Hollywood Screenwriting 101, reminiscent of the early 90s subgenre of yuppie-prick-laid-low movies in which a workaholic who neglects his family is forced by tragedy to stop and smell the roses. Tommy is a Type A movie star hero -- a jerk whose dictatorial obliviousness is indulged because of his domestic tragedy, and because he's a handsome, sensitive genius. Would his wife Izzi's death have been any less of a tragedy if he'd been shown as someone who truly appreciated Izzi when she was healthy and spent quality time with her both before and after it became clear that she was a goner?

"Death is a disease just like any other," he announces. "There is a cure. I will find it." Talk like this should have word balloons around it. But though I wish I could make a case for Aronofsky as an auteur who's a better director than dialogue writer, there are too many touches in The Fountain that irritate for reasons that have nothing to do with the words coming out of the actors' mouths -- like having Izzi write a novel (unfinished) that we ultimately discover is the conquistador segment of The Fountain. When workaholic Tommy finally gets around to reading it, he's so moved by it that he completely changes his attutude toward Izzi's illness, and begins confronting it rather than evading it. But the story is so reductive that it's vaguely insulting to Tommy, and on top of that, it confuses the issue. In the Spanish sequence, the Queen specifically asks the Conquistador to leave her in order to go on a quest, but in the present-day sequence, Izzi just wants Tommy to be at her side, even though she's too much the nobly suffering spouse to come right out and say so. You have to wonder, did Izzi write this novel to let Tommy off the hook for spending all that time in the lab?

Izzi's saintly, crinkly-smiling character (or lack of character) is a major problem. In the present day story -- and in the Conquistador story as well, where she takes the form of Queen Isabella -- she's held up as a Feminine Ideal, not so much a woman as an emblem of warmth and decency, suffering nobly and waiting in vain for her genius-in-denial hubby to catch up with her on the emotional evolution scale. During the film's first half, I kept hoping that Tommy's idealization of Izzi would ultimately be accounted for -- that her illness would not simply pull Tommy closer, but force him to see her as a flesh-and-blood person rather than a distant ideal of the Good Wife and the Good Life. No such luck. She's a symbol rather than a person and she remains so throughout. (Weisz isn't distinctive enough to suggest depths that aren't there in the script; like costar Jackman, she's skillful and likable but not especially daring.) The abstract quality of the Tommy-Izzy relationship drains the lifeblood from the movie. It makes you think the worst -- that Aronofsky doesn't feel what he's showing us -- because no true romantic would write a love story so disconnected from life as it's actually lived.

The fulcrum of the present-day story is a scene where Izzi stops by the lab and asks Tommy to join her on a walk through the season's first snowfall. He refuses, of course, and we keep seeing his refusal replayed over and over throughout the picture; it's Aronofsky's version of the ferry boat monologue from Citizen Kane. But the specificity of this regret is unconnected to anything real; like the Izzi-Tommy relationship in general, it feels like a screenwriter's device. There's one shot in the present-day sequence that communicates the sense of love and grief and devotion Aronofsky seeks to conjure: a first-person POV shot of a smiling, healthy, flirty Izzi running away from the camera -- i.e., away from Tommy -- that's not tied into any specific event or situation. It's just an image in his mind, and it's nearly as powerful as some of the pastoral flashbacks in The Thin Red Line.

But think of how much more powerful it would have been if we'd been given more time to observe Tommy without Izzi. She's in the movie continuously as a symbol, a ghost and a plot device, which means we rarely sense her absence -- and that's a catastrophic mistake, because absence is the fuel of grief. There should have been more small, lonely moments in The Fountain -- moments where we saw Tommy looking around at situations where he was accustomed to seeing his wife and then having to accept that she wasn't there anymore, or perhaps discovering seemingly insignificant objects that drove the reality of his situation home. (As Billy Joel sings in "Souvenir," "A picture postcard/A folded stub/A program of the play...") The image of a man smelling his dead lover's shirt in Brokeback Mountain is no less blunt than anything in Aronofsky's film, but it's so honest and recognizable, so real, that you can't help connecting it to your own existence and being moved. The Fountain has moments like that, but because Izzi isn't merely an abstraction, but an abstraction who never stops hanging around in the story and giving the hero advice and instructions ("Finish it"), you don't get a chance to miss her, much less grasp a loss so great that it would spur Tommy to spend centuries trying to undo it.

As in Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky builds toward near-simultaneous, parallel climaxes, but only one of the three really resonates -- an O. Henry twist in the Conquistador sequence that has a hint of Old Testament perfection; it grants the hero's wish (in all three segments of the story) while thwarting it. Jackman's expression is just right -- it mixes rage, shock and astonishment, and finally, a sort of beatific acceptance of the fact that he's part of something larger than himself, indeed larger than his species. But the hard-edged rightness of this climax is effectively cancelled out by the soupy conclusion of the 26th century storyline, a straightforward wish fulfillment lacking the ironic undercurrent that makes the end of the Conquistador section so right. The film's intricate structure -- images echoing images, situations repeated like pop song refrains -- at first seems open-ended and mysterious, and therefore promising. But that promise ebbs as the fortune cookie profundities pile up ("Every shadow, no matter how deep, is threatened by morning light"; "Our bodies are prisons for our souls"). Soon enough you realize Aronofsky isn't just trying to stimulate questions about the great imponderables, he's actually playing guru and giving you the answers, and the movie you're watching is essentially a store-bought bereavement card blown up to bigscreen dimensions. Oh, well; it's the thought that counts.

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Links for the Day (November 26th, 2006)

1. "General Zod.net": Truth. Justice. Zod.

["Zod on "Easter": General Zod knows all about the eggs which the bunny is trying to hide from him!"]

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2. "The Cape Crusader": On this week's release of Superman II: The Richard Donner cut.

["Today's technology helped smooth out the re-edit, but there's only so much that could be done and there are a few clunky spots. And for a casual moviegoer who hasn't seen "Superman II" lately, they may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Aside from the gunplay scene and an opening sequence at the Daily Planet, plenty of the changes will fly right over the head of everyone except true believers. (A quick test: Does it make your heart beat faster to know that this time the bad guys destroy the Washington Monument, not Mt. Rushmore?)"]

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3. "How Americans Are Living Dangerously": Jeffrey Alter's Time Magazine cover story.

["To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain—of mouse and man—is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger—a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger—it's the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream."]

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4. "A Latino 'Spanking'": By Arian Campo-Flores for Newsweek.

["After making gains among Latino voters for three election cycles in a row, the GOP suffered a sobering reversal in this month's midterm elections. Exit polls show that Republican candidates won only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote—the fastest-growing segment of the electorate—while Democrats garnered 69 percent. Compare that with 2004, when President George W. Bush captured at least 40 percent of that vote. While Latinos were just as concerned about Iraq and the economy as the electorate generally, according to surveys, they were more driven than usual by immigration. A poll by Lake Research Partners found that half of Latino voters considered immigration important to their vote this year. Many Hispanics were clearly turned off by GOP congressional candidates like Randy Graf in Arizona, who vilified illegal immigrants. "Those candidates got the spanking they needed," says Lionel Sosa, Bush's longtime Latino ad man. "We as a party got the spanking we needed.""]

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5. "A Folly, Two Misses, One Huge Loss": The latest writings from Fernando F. Croce, a terrific West Coast-based critic.

["I am moved by follies. Artists leave themselves exposed when they go off the deep end, vulnerable to ridicule yet closer to emotional truth -- there is a feel of personal nakedness that makes pissing on a director's pet project to me akin to jeering at somebody's sallow daughter. The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky's sickly baby, complete with tumultuous pregnancy: origin as a Brad Pitt vehicle, reduced budget after studio cold-feet, delivery to festival divisiveness. People are either in awe or in stitches, I am told, and, whatever the faults, the film has the courage to offer itself frontally for the hosannas as well as the darts rather than seek the safety-net of crowd-pleasing pap. A Genesis quote segues into a glowing golden cross, then furry Hugh Jackman decked in conquistador regalia; jungle trekkers on a mission from Spain are skewered by native lances, a celestial orb glows in the sky as the hero climbs a Mayan pyramid to face a high-priest, who says "Death is the road to awe" before charging at him with a proto-flamethrower. Cut to Jackman, bald and in his jammies, orbiting through the cosmic void with the tree housing his beloved's soul. Cut (again) to Jackman as a modern-day scientific researcher whose wife (Rachel Weisz) gazes at dying nebulas and falls prey to the dreaded Ali McGraw Disease -- nothing short of a cure for death is sought as the doctor insists on the force of love and awakens to the way Things Are Connected. (Of course they are: Weisz also plays Queen Isabella and sudden intergalactic apparitions, the film's title is the same as the dying wife's book finished by futuristic Jackman, and Aronofsky stitches them together with rhyming images and associative angles.)"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Links for the Day (November 25th, 2006)

1. "Show dog disappearance creates urban legend": When a problem comes along, you must whippet.

["In the nine months since escaping her travel cage at Kennedy Airport, Vivi the wayward whippet has joined the Central Park coyote, high-rise tiger, Harlem Meer caiman and Molly the fugitive feline in New York's ever-growing pantheon of urban animal legends. She was reported dozens of times, roaming cemeteries with other dogs, or hanging around stores in the borough of Queens, in some cases miles from the tarmac where she disappeared while awaiting a flight home to California on February 15. A day earlier, she had won an Award of Merit at the annual Westminster Kennel Club show."]

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2. "Cruising with Camille": Mark Adnum interviews Camille Paglia for Bright Lights Film Journal.

["I was steadily annoyed by the over-stylish, absurdly clean and unwrinkled clothes of the two leads (they looked like Ralph Lauren catalog models) and by the sexist stereotyping of their betrayed and increasingly unattractive wives. Heath Ledger deserved his Oscar nomination, but (contrary to Annie Proulx’s assertion) it wasn’t really a major Oscar-winning performance. Ledger impressed me at first with his muted, strangled delivery, but he showed little development over time in his character and relied too often on a series of phlegmatic, shop-worn mannerisms borrowed from James Dean and Montgomery Clift."]

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3. "'Borat' comic nominated for Kazakh arts award": You give me award or I be execute.

["A leading Kazakh writer has nominated actor Sacha Baron Cohen for a national award for popularizing Kazakhstan. Novelist Sapabek Asip-uly called on the Kazakh Club of Art Patrons to give Cohen its annual award, according to a letter published by the Vremya newspaper Thursday."]

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4. "MY MOOOOOOP!!": I'm of the opinion that we should recall our pariahs in happier times.

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5. "Stowaway cat survives 17-day container voyage": Ah, Ziggy. Will you ever win?

["Emerging with a shock of white fur, a cat stunned cargo workers in England as it jumped out of a goods container after a 17-day sea voyage from Israel to Britain, a journey of more than 2,000 miles, an animal charity said Friday."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

Read more!

Links for the Day (November 24th, 2006)

1. "Hard-living jazz legend Anita O'Day dies at 87": An Associated Press obituary from CNN.

["Anita O'Day, whose sassy renditions of "Honeysuckle Rose," "Sweet Georgia Brown" and other song standards that made her one of the most respected jazz vocalists of the 1940s and '50s, has died. She was 87. O'Day died in her sleep early Thursday morning at a convalescent hospital in Los Angeles, California, where she was recovering from a bout with pneumonia, said her manager, Robbie Cavolina. "On Tuesday night, she said to me, 'Get me out of here,'" Cavolina said. "But it didn't happen.""]

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2. "Cinefantast-geek": Tim Lucas of Video WatchBlog on the demise of Cinefantastique magazine.

["Earlier this year, it was briefly rumored that the long-running CFQ (formerly CINEFANTASTIQUE) would be discontinued. The publishers denied this, but now, instead of receiving their expected latest issue of CFQ, subscribers have received the first issue of a new magazine called GEEK MONTHLY, with the following note from editor Jeff Bond attached: "CFQ has been hard at work for over 35 years providing incisive coverage of fantastic films & television, and now it's time for the mag to take a much-deserved rest. While we plan on bringing CFQ back in the near future on an irregular basis for in-depth spotlights & special issues, the regular magazine will be going on hiatus into 2007." As we all know, "hiatus" is a notoriously non-committal way for businesses to tacitly consign no-longer-viable properties to the necropolis."]

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3. "Robert Altman’s 7 Secret Wars": From the blog 10 Zen Monkeys, some examinations of lesser-known or misunderstood Altman works.

["When handed an unpublished John Grisham story, Altman gave the studios exactly what they didn’t want. Robert Duvall’s portrayal of a mentally challenged stalker fits Altman’s unsettling world view too well. Though the womanizing lawyer (Kenneth Brannagh) tries to do the right thing, in an Altman world there’s nothing but chaos — so the script’s final redeeming fight on a rainy night becomes just one more turmoil of emotions. Dissatisfied studio executives tried to re-edit the film, but when test audiences didn’t respond any better, they apparently decided to under-promote it. The move was so little-known that when Internet Movie database listed the film, they mistook its title for a series of children’s stories, and included this picture:"]

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4. "Altman, Schrader, and Richards": Over at Elusive Lucidity, Zach Campbell has his busiest posting day ever (11/21/2006).

["Let's assume that someone is looking up Schrader's canon online in order to have a nice checklist for the cinema. Perhaps Google or somebody else's website will direct them, in their search, to my blog? My criticism of Schrader's rhetoric and his choices is already up & available, so now what I want to do is propose a counter-canon."]

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5. 'Cinema Paradiso' Actor Philippe Noiret Dies at 76": From this morning's IMDB entertainment wrap-up.

["French actor Philippe Noiret died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. He was 76. The Cinema Paradiso star appeared in more than 125 films and also took to the stage in a string of plays"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

Read more!

Our Daily Bread in a Fast Food Nation

By Dan JardineWith the arrival of American filmmaker Richard Linklater’s warm but fractured version of Edward Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s coolly disturbing study of global agro-business, Our Daily Bread we are presented with two films on a similar subject matter which take near polar opposite approaches and achieve varying levels of success. And while I respect Linklater’s effort, I am much more impressed by Geyrhalter’s achievement.

I should begin with a confession. I’m a big fan of the more personal (non-Hollywood gun-for-hire) films of Richard Linklater. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are among my all-time personal favorites, while I also hold in high esteem Waking Life, Slacker and A Scanner Darkly, believing them to be among their respective year’s best films. There is a looseness and unwieldiness to his films that many find distracting, but which I contend is endearing. Driven by ideas and characters, they have only a secondary concern with plot. His best films are inhabited by society’s oddballs and fringe-dwellers who engage in wide-ranging conversations that sometimes have only the most tangential concern with providing their story’s with a narrative push. In fact, these films meander along at a leisurely place, arriving (if at all) at their critical moments almost as an afterthought. His latest certainly fits that description, but unfortunately fails to achieve the greatness of its forefathers, and the blame must be squarely laid at Linklater’s feet, as the weaknesses that others decried in his earlier films have come the fore in this sprawling multi-narrative expose of the fast food industry.

As mentioned above, Fast Food Nation is a fictionalized account of Eric Schlosser’s muckraking expose of the fast food industry. When looking for cinematic comps, Linklater’s film shares some of the characteristics of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, as it too attempts to look at a controversial issue from as many vantage points as possible, but it isn’t nearly as slick or professional-looking. This is a nod in Linklater’s favor, as the film’s overall griminess suits the subject matter better than Soderbergh’s high-gloss sheen. And while Bruce Willis and Avril Lavigne make, in order, amusing and distracting cameos, generally speaking FFN is not graced with a comparably distracting array of A-list movie stars. Linklater's film shows us the fast food industry from the point of view of a variety of folks, including illegal immigrant workers, disaffected front line employees, cattle ranchers, fast food executives, and socially conscious university students. Of all these various vantage points, the film proves most engaging and honest when its feet are on the ground, following the fates of Mexican immigrants as they slip across the border, tramp for days on end across a forbidding and foreboding desert landscape and once they reach the promised land, attempt to navigate through the challenging waters of illegal employment and the ruthless topography of uninsured health care. The only instantly recognizable face here, Wilmer Valderrama (That 70s Show), offers a solid performance here, but it is Catalina Sandino Moreno as Sylvia, so riveting as a drug mule in Maria Full of Grace, who roots this storyline. Moreno imbues Sylvia with a frankness and humanity that blazes off the screen, and if the gods are just, she will have her pick of the litter of great film roles for the next decade. She is that good, and that deserving. All of their grim stories’ arcs are told in a forthright manner, and end on an open-ended but powerfully downbeat note that feels both honest and earned. If only Linklater had been as successful in all of his film’s tales.

Unfortunately, and unlike Soderbergh, Linklater is not adept at maintaining multiple narratives and seeing them through to their various plausible conclusions. As with Linklater’s best films, FFN is akin to that gangly, big-boned and loose-limbed kid who tries really hard to impress us with his grace, who is plenty of fun to hang and chat with, but who proves unable to move smoothly in a straight line, or follow his arguments through to their logical conclusions. Usually I love this aspect of awkwardness and open-endedness about Linklater’s films, but in FFN, where narrative threads reinforce and strengthen the film’s themes, it proves a bit disastrous. The narrative fissures that see the disappearance of Greg Kinnear’s corporate boss character for nearly the entire second half of the film point to a certain laziness and lack of focus and purpose that acts to submarine many of the storylines. There are moments when the film regains focus, as when one of the characters, after noting how the Patriot Act makes actions against property a treasonous act, summons up the charge that he can think of nothing more patriotic than breaking the Patriot Act. Or later, near film’s end and Sylvia surveys the horrors of the meat packing plant’s killing floor, Linklater is attempting to re-establish his hold over the film’s various themes and stories, touching on a wound that opens to what poet Karl Shapiro called “our richest horror.” However, rather than coalescing his film, and urging it on to rise steadily to a crescendo of intrigue and outrage, these moments prove frustratingly fleet, as most of tales wither quietly away.

And now for something completely similar, and yet strikingly different, we have Our Daily Bread, a documentary out of the Netherlands directed by Austrian Nikolaus Geyrhalter, that gives us a bird’s eye view of the daily operations of a variety of agro-businesses, but does so without a single moment of voice-over narration. In fact, the only audible words are spoken by the laborers in these businesses, and are in a variety of European languages that I suspect most of us have at best a passing familiarity with. So, for all intents and purposes, Our Daily Bread is wordless, offering as its sole method of documentation a series of immaculately constructed shots that eerily reflect the efficient and precise nature of the businesses whose methods they are recording. And without uttering a single word, Our Daily Food expresses a more radical vision of contemporary food production than Linklater’s far more verbose and easily accessible film.

While Fast Food Nation only escapes its running dialogue on the evils of the fast food industry when it moves outside of its lower middle class setting, and takes us into the meat packing plant with the exploited illegal Mexican employees, thereby allowing us to see the meat industry from the inside out, Our Daily Bread takes this tack from the get-go, and is, in fact, little more than this. And the result is positively chilling. The film presents a series of stately and deceptively beautiful shots of small and seemingly mundane moments in a typical day of various agro-businesses. The cumulative effect of these portraits is, however, emotionally devastating.

Now let me clarify something. I try to be reasonably well-informed about important global issues. I know about the perils of global agro-business, as I’ve read Fast Food Nation, and with equal parts dread and fascination, I have checked out the Upton Sinclair-like exposes that have recently graced the pages of socially-conscious magazines like Harper’s. Yet nothing I read prepared me for the overwhelming sense of horror and disgust that settled upon me as I viewed Our Daily Bread. We can communicate in many ways the many terrible things that we are doing to this planet, but there is something about moving imagines that simply cannot be superseded for visceral impact. Reading about it has given me the intellectual ammunition to question the ways of our world, but it has not managed to get to my emotional core in the same way that the grim images in this film managed. In effect, Our Daily Bread is a series of tableaux, existential portraits of working people put through their paces on a standard day.

The filmmaker’s clinical approach mirrors that of the food processors. By bleeding the passion out of their approach, the filmmakers achieve something quite striking, as the cumulative effect of the images of bloodletting and dismemberment is even more striking and horrific. Further, these stately, symmetrical and sometimes even majestic shots of workers’ daily tedium provides a sort of cognitive dissonance, as we stand at a comfortable distance, but are asked to observe actions that will rattle all but the most cold-hearted among us. Leo Goldsmith (web site: Not Coming to a Theater Near You) astutely describes how Geyrhalter “[emphasizes] the vanishing point in every scene, heightening the sense of infinite space in each field, barn, or factory in the same manner that Kubrick underscores distance and depth in [2001: A Space Odyssey].” Pulling up the compositions of Kubrick as a reference might seem like heady stuff, but Geyrhalter earns the comps. And like Linklater, who builds up to the final reveal on the killing floor that nearly reveals all the fumbling that passed before, Geyrhalter’s film builds slowly but inevitably to this gruesome climax. And all the evidence is flushed away in an orgy of anti-septicism, as if we must, Pilate-like, cleanse ourselves so thoroughly of these deeds that not only will the blood be erased from our hands, but memory of the deed as well. It’s as if Lady Macbeth is running global agro-business. “What’s done is done. These deeds must not be thought/After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”

With an eye as cool and detached as Stan Brakhage’s autopsy footage, and with a pace as casual as a summer picnic, Geyrhalter states simply that this is what we’ve come to. This is how we choose to handle the earth. A seemingly barren wasteland is a precursor for images of harvest straight out of a science fiction imagination. A massive field of sunflowers, and the workers toiling row upon row, are drenched by a crop duster, then the plants harvested by workers garbed as if stationed to clean up duty in Chernobyl. This is the food we eat. These are the methods we use to maximize profit and guarantee the lowest possible price for the consumer. And yet Our Daily Bread is not a muckraking expose in the manner of Sinclair’s The Jungle so much as a dispassionate documentation of the way things are. Sometimes a film offers up explanation and analysis, other times it merely requires that we bear witness. Is the latter a cop out? It can be, particularly when the filmmakers attempt to take some sort of falsely “objective” vantage point on the proceedings. Yet, despite the seeming coldly surgical approach to the subject, it is pretty obvious that the filmmakers of Our Daily Bread clearly have a point of view, and it is found in the juxtaposition and layering of images. Observe the contrast between the scenes of mass processing of food products with the intimate shots of individual workers eating their lunches. Where does the food come from that they eat? The film also quickly settles into a gentle rhythm that is deceivingly unobtrusive. As we observe at a respectful distance, workers carry out their daily chores in calm and unquestioning obeisance, our concern transforms into terror, our disgust becomes revulsion. How, we wonder, can these people continue to toil at such work without feeling as we do?

The answer is relatively simple. The people at work pushing the chicks here and shoving the pigs there, spraying the crops and eviscerating the cattle are part of a larger metaphor, one which Linklater’s film taps into quite graphically in its final scenes. Just like the meat their turn into food products for our consumption, these laborers are being processed. They are being shoved down the chute and onto the killing floor with the same dreadful efficiency as the creatures they process. It is rather sobering to realize that the same mechanical, interchangeable, assembly-line production model that Chaplin mocked so brilliantly over seventy years ago in Modern Times lives on, and with a dreadful and horrifying level of efficiency that even Marx might have found striking. The repetitive nature of the work is soul-deadening, and turns the workers into objects toiling silently and efficiently who, like the goods they manufacture, will find their humanity chewed up by the machinery of production. The livestock are not the only things being processed.

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The voluptuous precision of Volver

By Ryland Walker Knight For all the expansion to be enjoyed in Pedro Almodóvar’s recent string of excellent films, his newest, Volver, is his narrowest effort since 1995’s rare misfire, The Flower of My Secret. After laboring with, and firmly executing, Bad Education’s labyrinthine noir (its convolutions span three decades of lies and betrayals and trannies and heroin) it’s fitting that Almodovar would scale down to a story that, at bottom, only needs five principal sets and five principal characters. Even his broadened, widescreen palate is compressed within the frame: certain close-ups of his luminous cast are shot with such long lenses that a minor movement by the actress fuzzies up her ears or her perfectly mangled coif like a distant spotlight straining to keep a stage actor lit. This technique reflects the precision one has come to expect, and take for granted, in each new joy Almodóvar gifts us.

This is a story of returns, just as the title tells us, but its chief subject is feminine (and provincial) rites, rituals and customs. Almodóvar’s allegiances have never been in doubt, and this is as bald a love letter as the nakedly titled All About My Mother. Yet Volver has no time for men, even if they’re trying to be women like the earlier film’s transvestite-hooker, Agrado. From the hilarious and poignant opening tracking shot across a wind-wrecked cemetery full of old maids tending and tidying faithful headstones, the screen is congested with women.

At the center is Penélope Cruz, delivering a stunning, full-bodied and nuanced performance, able to swoon teary-eyed on a dime or dig in and get dirty if need be, as the fiery Raimunda. Many have used Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce heroine as a shorthand comparison but it’s only apt in a typical Almodóvar fashion: he takes an archetypal character from a film he adores and throws it into his personal blender to twist the character into the form that suits his story best. Raimunda is Mildred as much as Ignacio-Angel from Bad Education is Madeline-Judy from Vertigo.

Raimunda and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo is one to watch) find themselves without husband and father Paco (Antonio de la Torre, effectively vulgar in his two brief scenes) after an ugly incident lands a steak knife in his stomach. Naturally, they clean the murder up and, to save time, store him in deep freeze next door at a neighbor’s newly-abandoned restaurant. This prevents the girls from accompanying Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas mouses her way to a rich epiphany), back home to La Mancha for the Aunt Paula’s wake (Chus Lampreave returns to Almodóvar in fine form, sporting raccoon gramma glasses and her singularly aloof comic timing), whom all three just visited at the film’s opening.

Back in La Mancha, Sole mourns with neighbor Augustina (Blanca Portillo, heartbroken and disintegrating), who kept a close eye on her aged neighbor. Augustina tells a crowded room of ladies (each eager to kiss the relative in a hilarious running gag) about the voice she heard at her door the night prior, alerting her to Aunt Paula’s death. This yields suspicion and intrigue but takes Sole into the kitchen to tell her to whom the voice belonged: Sole and Raimunda’s years-dead mother, Irene, played with fearless pluck by a former muse of Almodóvar, the great Carmen Maura.

This not so brief first act-outline might cast a dour image in the mind, but in Pedro’s hands, nothing could be further from the truth. Volver, despite its fear of (and a tendency to dwell on) death, is alive with color, music, ebullient smiles, an honest plea for community, fart jokes and ripe cleavage.

Almodovar said it first: “Penélope is at the height of her beauty. It's a cliché but in her case it's true. (Those eyes, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts!! Penélope has got one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema).” Then he filmed it. And I love it. There’s a shot early on, filmed from the ceiling, of Cruz’s Raimunda washing dishes that looks straight down her already low-cut shirt. This typifies Pedro’s adoration but, as always, reveals something else besides the voluptuous gift on the right half of the screen. After washing one dish, Raimunda picks up a steak knife and holds it phallus-style away from her stomach, pointing to the left of the screen. In this ten second cut Pedro shows off his star’s lusty vivacity and aligns himself with her at the same time, showing his affinity for both the actress he’s employed and the character he’s created.

Almodovar also said this film is entirely about (& altogether inspired by) his mother and in some respects yet more autobiographical than Bad Education’s flashbacks. The riverbed town in this film is his childhood town where the inhabitants still believe in the rebirth-ressurection-return of dead loved ones. As Almodóvar has made himself one with Raimunda (by way of steak knife), we can see in her character the apologies he still feels he owes his mother and a plea for reprieve from the ugliness of adolescence underneath the obvious longing for her presence. In the same confessional essay, Almodovar writes, “I have filled a vacuum, I have said goodbye to something (my youth?) to which I had not yet said goodbye and needed to, I don't know. There is nothing paranormal in all this. My mother hasn't appeared to me, although, as I said, I felt her presence closer than ever.”

What grounds these surreal elements, and keeps them from blowing up into telenovela-melodrama camp, is Almodóvar’s sure handed storytelling. While the early pictures in his career embraced a camp of the abject stance, over the 15 features he made leading up to Volver, his writing skills have only improved, project after project, to this new plateau. Prone to genre-bending from the beginning, with a gonzo comic sensibility flush with cum jokes and heavy breathing, his cinema has indeed matured into a layered paella that yields serving after serving of perfected yet playful construction. By whittling down his ingredients to the essentials, this film is rendered more intimate and heartfelt, each movement timed and calculated yet wholly natural. Volver isn’t as explosively inspired as his last three pictures (or as subversive in content, despite its ghost story shadows and cold blooded murder) yet its skill is undeniable.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.

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Links for the Day (November 23rd, 2006)

1. Because this picture is just so, so wrong. Happy Turkey Day!

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2. "Bush Pardons Thanksgiving Turkeys": Their stint in Gitmo was pretty fowl.

["Flyer and Fryer Turkey are not avian counterfeiters. Or international grain kingpins. The two white birds have committed no known crime against man or beast. Their only offense? Being turkeys the day before the Thanksgiving holiday when Americans traditionally eat turkey. But unlike millions of other less fortunate birds, Flyer and Fryer were spared the chopping block and won pardons from President Bush. President Bush, right, pets 'Flyer' after pardoning ceremony in Rose Garden, 22 Nov. 2006 "This morning I am granting a full presidential pardon so they can live out their lives as safe as can be," the president announced."]

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3. "Twenty Years of Korean History, One Trick at a Time": The ever-insightful Filmbrain writes on Korean director Im Kwon-taek's 1997 melodrama Chang.

["Like the "hostess films" that were popular in the 70s, Chang chronicles Young-eun's many vicissitudes, including several aborted attempts at marriage, and a brief stint as a brothel owner herself. It also follows her long-term friendship with Gil-young, a kind, selfless man she no doubt truly loves, but can never be with. If the film offered nothing more than this, it would be easy to dismiss it as just another formulaic melodrama, but fortunately Im brings much more to the proceedings."]

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4. "Jacques Rivette: Paris Belongs to Us": More Rivette coverage from Reverse Shot, courtesy Michael Joshua Rowin.

["To end at the beginning, then, comparing Paris Belongs to Us to New Wave debuts might seem unfair, but it ultimately vindicates its director. Those other films (and that’s not including Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Beau serge) immediately displayed their creator’s talent in what turned out to be—to borrow a phrase—instant classics, whereas Paris displayed Rivette’s arguably richer potential (and definitely his greater difficulty) at the expense of solidified “quality.” That’s the way it is sometimes. Artists develop in their own way, at their own rhythm and by their own logic. Fortunately, though, if Pericles is to Paris Belongs to Us as Gerard is to Rivette, then at least Rivette went on to master his craft—at least we can see and evaluate this fascinating disappointment with its future payoffs excitedly in mind."]

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5. "Mac fans clamor for 'iPhone'": An Apple a day...

["Now, Chief Executive Steve Jobs and Apple are poised to roll out what has been dubbed the "iPhone," perhaps as soon as January next year at the Macworld conference that kicks off every new year, analysts say. "From a technical standpoint, the phone is pretty much done," said American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu. "It's a big endeavor and we believe it's beyond speculation." Speculation has simmered since even before the introduction of the ROKR phone from Motorola Inc. that uses a slimmed-down version of the iTunes digital music jukebox to play 100 songs. But sales were lackluster as users complained the phone did not hold more songs."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 3

By Keith Uhlich

The Museum of the Moving Image's complete Jacques Rivette retrospective moves into its third week with screenings of three more recent features: Up/Down/Fragile (1995), a musical homage to Stanley Donen's Give a Girl a Break; La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Rivette's four hour Cannes Grand Prize winner about the tempestuous relationship between a painter and his model; and Joan the Maid (1994), a two-part film, starring the great Sandrine Bonnaire, that deals with the rise and fall of Joan of Arc.

(Addendum 11/26/06: What follows was written before MOMI's screening of Joan the Maid, which I did not attend, where it was discovered--as curator David Schwartz mentions in this thread's comments section--that the UK distributor who imported the print mistakenly listed its running time at 237 minutes. What screened today was apparently the full version of Rivette's film. I leave the information as I wrote it here because a bastardized version does still exist, though it may only be in the form of the Facets DVD and/or a print that may still be in circulation.)

Joan the Maid is screening last of these three, but I'd like to bring it up first because of some distressing news regarding the print provided to MOMI. I was able to preview the film on a dual-tape screener ported over from the Facets DVD. In total, the two parts played at 228 minutes, 112 minutes for the first part (Joan the Maid: The Battles) and 116 minutes for the second (Joan the Maid: The Prisons). The print imported to MOMI from the UK totals 237 minutes for the two parts, a difference of 9 minutes that I attribute to the dread 4% PAL speedup, which occurs when a PAL to NTSC video transfer is not done progressively (this is unsurprisingly par for the course for Facets video releases). By this rationale, part one should run approximately 116-117 minutes; part two approximately 119-120 minutes.

Yet this is not the only issue. Further research, specifically my perusal of the Criterion Forum message boards, revealed that the UK distributors of Joan the Maid cut the film without Rivette's permission. I've since determined through the film's IMDB listings (see links above), that part one should run 160 minutes (a current loss, when the film is projected, of 44-45 minutes) and part two should run 176 minutes (a current loss, when the film is projected, of 55-56 minutes). I suspect that the cut print MOMI has acquired is possibly the only English subtitled print available (addendum 11/25/06: or perhaps not--thanks to Jim Flannery); because of the challenging nature of Rivette's work, not to mention his relative obscurity, the retrospective is understandably take-what-you-can-get in this regard. Thus far, the lesser known Rivette films--Duelle and Noroît in particular--have been shoddy, red-hued prints, drained near-completely of full color. An unfortunate trade-off, but I'm thankful that, to my knowledge, I've been able to see some representation of these films as Rivette intended.

So what, then, of Joan the Maid? I can report that I watched the screener tapes with no knowledge that they were cut and the two parts played beautifully. Even in this bowdlerized form, Sandrine Bonnaire's very mortal and earthly performance (quite wonderfully antithetical to the Saint Joan of movies' past) took hold, and I could understand why the film, in toto, is held in such high regard by those who have seen it. But I'm hesitant to review Joan the Maid in any further depth because of what I now know: that close to two hours of Rivette's epic have been mysteriously vanished without the creator's consent. Use this information as you will--at the very least, I figured it should be passed along to all prospective attendees. If anyone has any information to add, please do mention it in this article's comments section.

No worries, to that end, about La Belle Noiseuse (though Rivette did edit and approve a shorter version, entitled Divertimento, from alternate takes: this version will screen at the retro in a couple of weeks). I vividly recall Siskel & Ebert devoting a lengthy segment of their television series to the film, and I've longed to see it since, though when I finally did preview it I found it terribly disappointing, a clear case of much ado about very, very little. From my Slant Magazine review, posted in the site's ongoing Rivette feature:

"Jacques Rivette's much praised Cannes Grand Prize winner vacillates between genuine insight and didactic mystique-of-the-artist bullshit. It is most fascinating in its setups and silences; the delayed introduction of the painter Frenhoffer (Michel Piccoli) owes a clear debt to Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (a favorite, much deservingly so, of the Cahiers crowd) and the artist's sittings, especially the first, with the physically striking Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) are masterful disquisitions on the tempestuous relationship between creator and subject. Unwilling to settle for anything other than a masterpiece, Frenhoffer's every brushstroke cuts like a knife; the creation of the titular portrait is nothing less than a slow-burning and violent act of transference, the extraction of a soul to canvas—and one, fittingly, to which we never bear final witness. But it is all-too-clear, particularly in several on-the-nose expository moments, that La Belle Noiseuse began life as a joke, one extending from a character's monologue in Rivette's prior film Gang of Four."

Jeremy Heilman of MovieMartyr.com feels differently:

"By methodically examining the rigors and contemplation that go into creating great art, French New Wave master Jacques Rivette, has created something of a masterpiece himself in La Belle Noiseuse. The film begins unassumingly in a hotel courtyard where we see a young man stealthily sketching some seemingly oblivious English-speaking tourists. As Rivette’s camera continues to pan, however, we find that our casual artist is actually the subject of another’s art. A woman on the hotel’s balcony furtively snaps a photo of him, but is noticed by sketcher, who becomes visibly irate. As soon as he confronts her, though, it becomes immediately apparent to us that most of this incident was a ruse. The two artists are lovers, and their coyness was entirely put on. Spurned by the excitement of their charade, they retire to the bedroom. The stunt even continues a bit farther than planned when one of the tourists watching this amorous French drama unfold says to another in mock culture shock, “Well, what do you expect?” This seemingly frivolous episode resonates throughout the rest of the film, since it manages to say much about the relationship between an artist and subject, the secretive, similar natures of art and love, and the need to sometimes create an environment where ever-fleeting inspiration might strike. It’s these themes that come to the fore during rest of the long journey that La Belle Noiseuse takes."

I was not able to preview Up/Down/Fragile, though I am very curious to see Rivette try his hand at a musical, especially in light of Duelle and Noroît, which contain their fair share of stylized song-and-dance interludes. Rivette scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum reviewed the film on occasion of its Chicago release:

"A whole hour of Up/Down/Fragile passes before the first song-and-dance number. But during that hour Rivette takes a lot of steps--in metaphysical, stylistic, musical, directorial, and choreographic terms--tracing the passage between real life and musical numbers. The same sort of steps are taken throughout the remaining hour and a half of Up/Down/Fragile, sometimes leading up to or away from musical numbers, sometimes not. The metaphysical, stylistic, musical, and directorial steps Rivette takes have everything to do with his legacy as a film critic, despite the fact that he wrote and published criticism only between 1950 and 1969. As the most indefatigable moviegoer of all the Cahiers du Cinema critics who became directors--a distinguished group including Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, Andre Techine, and Francois Truffaut, among others--he knows MGM musicals like the back of his hand. But he doesn't express his knowledge in specific homages or references the way an American cinephile normally would. For Rivette this knowledge is precious because it enhances and poeticizes real life, not because it offers an alternative or escape. Consequently the movie has a documentary roughness--a respect for real durations, for moments that are empty as well as full--that would have been unthinkable in a 50s MGM musical. Moreover, none of the songs is especially memorable, either melodically or in terms of performance (it's no surprise that there isn't a sound track album), nor is any of the dancing up to snuff by Hollywood standards. Indeed, some European critics have dismissed Up/Down/Fragile for precisely these reasons, and I have little doubt many of their American counterparts would do the same. Tough luck for them."

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"Up/Down/Fragile" screens Friday, November 24th at 7:30pm and Saturday, November 25th at 6:30pm. "La Belle Noiseuse" screens Saturday, November 25th at 2:00pm and Sunday, November 26th at 6:30pm. "Joan the Maid" screens Sunday, November 26th at 2:00pm. The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is located at 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens County, New York. Click here for travel directions and here for the full Jacques Rivette retrospective screening schedule.

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The Crack of Noon: Baking Away with Tenacious D

By Matt Zoller SeitzI'm reluctant to describe Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny as a disappointment because to do so would play right into the filmmaker's hands. The movie doesn't just invite and exceed low expectations; its half-assedness is woven into the fabric of its screenplay which, one can only presume, was printed on hemp-based paper. Paying to see it is the moviegoing version of ordering Domino's when you're baked; just as the cost of a ticket won't yield a real movie, the late-night phone call won't deliver an actual pizza, merely a pizza-flavored circular object cut into triangles. Thanks to the instant grins earned by familiarity, it'll likely satiate most people who attended top-billed Jack Black and Kyle Gass' live stand up metal shows, loaded their knucklehead-banging music onto iPods or watched their limited-run HBO series (a gem that made my Star-Ledger Top 10 list, lest you discount my complaints as the grumblings of a latecomer). But even if you're predisposed to give the boys the benefit of the doubt, the thing still starts evaporating from the memory the minute your Timberlands touch pavement.

Granted, Black and Gass, who cowrote the script with director Liam Lynch, had to navigate a tricky commercial middleground, surprising the fan base while bringing newbies into the fold. But given the deadpan surreal source material (he typed, as if we're talking about Exterminating Angel here) and the obvious pride the performers take in their supposed goofball boldness, Black and Gass should've thrown caution to the wind more often. The D's super-serious Pollyanna striving is a put-on, but the creators' egos are the real deal, as evidenced by the film's upbeat but weirdly smug presskit, which has Gass declaring, "We began to think about [a movie] right after our HBO shows finished. Right then and there, we said, 'We're going to make a motion picture that's going to make you guys mad that you didn't give us more creative control on the show.'" I doubt the result will compel any tearful resignations at HBO, for the simple reason that the shows are more charmingly demented than the big screen version. Imagine a sketch-comedy-derived-movie quality scale that had, say, Monty Python and the Holy Grail on one end and Coneheads the other; Tenacious D would fall somewhere in the middle alongside Wayne's World, which it too often resembles.

The fatal flaw, if such a proudly lackadaisical picture can be said to have one, is that the gags never go as far as they could and should. The tarot card graphics between sections (also featured in the series) are charmingly grandiose; ditto the Book-of-Revelations-goes-to-the-Astrodome death metal score and the Joseph Campbell Comix storyline, which casts the odyssey of Jack Black and Kyle Gass (a.k.a. JB and KG) as an inspirational legend. From the musical prologue, which shows little JB breaking free of his Jesus-worshiping, rock-hating parents, to the mentor-pupil traning section, which has JB stalking Kyle's mom-supported Venice Beach guitar player and inhaling his wisdom like cheap ganja ("Your training begins tomorrow at the crack of noon," KG announces) to the legend of the title object (related by Ben Stiller, in a characteristically fussy and self-satisfied cameo as a guitar store guy) to the apocalyptic final showdown, which casts Dave Grohl as a gigantic goat-footed Satan in a death metal reimagining of the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," you're asked -- nay, implored -- to believe that what you're seeing is A Myth For Our Time, and perhaps For All Time. It's all a goof, of course. The only people who take The D seriously are The D and their first, most devoted and perhaps only fan, Lee (J.R. Reed, who from certain angles looks like the missing Affleck brother).

But even goofs should be fueled by passion, the more reckless the better. The Pick of Destiny is mostly content to be mildly amusing. Every 10 minutes there's a good line (KG instructing JB to practice his cock push-ups because "You never know when you're going to need to fuck your way out of a tight situation") or a smokin' sight gag (JB showing us, Scanners style, what it means to blow someone's mind with music), but there's also a lot of Wayne's World stoner-layabout filler.

The opening childhood section promises a crazier and more memorable movie than the filmmakers deliver; it's a sung-through rock opera seemingly modeled on Ken Russell's Tommy, with little JB (Troy Gentile) shocking his parents at dinnertime with a profanity-clogged declaration of intent to rock, then getting a musical earful from his daddy (a splendid cameo by Meatloaf, singing onscreen for the first time since The Rocky Horror Picture Show), then being comforted by a poster of Ronnie James Dio (as himself) that comes to life and exhorts JB to hit the road and meet his destiny. If the whole movie, or most of the movie, had attained this level of beguiling dementia, it might have been one of the year's most surprising comedies, but it rarely climbs to those heights. (Lynch kept threatening to turn his last outing, Jesus is Magic, into a sung-through thrill ride, but invariably crapped out; the man's a musical pricktease.)

Not only does The Pick of Destiny lack the nerve to embrace its boldest instincts and be the balls-out comedy-musical-fantasy Black is clearly raring to star in, it diminishes its most promising flights of fancy with comedic safety nets. For instance, when JB scarfs woodland mushrooms and hallucinates a psychedelic music video friendship with Bigfoot, what that stops the sequence from being a surreal modern classic on the order of the battle of the news teams in Anchorman are Lynch's frequent cutaways to JB in the "real" world, which reassure you that it's just a dream. The sequence would have been more daring if JB really was hanging out with Sasquatch; by way of comparison, what made the Anchorman rumble great, rather than merely diverting, was the aftermath, in which we found out that it wasn't a fantasy, that the anchor teams really did maim and kill each other in the street, and that apparently this sort of thing was commonplace in mid-'70s San Diego. (The aformentioned "mind blowing" gag is also couched in the context of a fantasy. The HBO series was less inclined to protect itself in this way; when something surreal happened, it fuckin' happened, dude, and you were supposed to just accept it.)

Black, Gass and Lynch keep protecting themselves in ways both small (the Syd Field-style "reveal" that KG's royalty checks are written by his mother; awwwww...) and large. Chief among the latter: the film's apparently sincere undertone of Capra-esque can-do spirit. In previous incarnations, Tenacious D's fanatical triviality and shallowness were never passed off as Holy Fool innocence. The gap between their belief in their own genius and the bombastic silliness of the songs was what made the whole thing funny. One eyebrow was raised at all times. Part of the point seemed to be to subtly mock pop culture products that pander to people like JB and KG by telling them that the main thing is to say "fuck you" to the naysayers and get out there and do your own thing, even if your own thing is derivative and dumb. That's not the case in this feature film, which, like so many films derived from sketch comedy, wants to be satirical and straight, knowing and innocent at the same time; it wants us to laugh at JB and KG's earnest mediocrity but also hold them up as examples of dreamers who refuse to take no for an answer. Gass apparently believes the HBO series had more creative limits, but from minute to minute, it felt looser, freer and more startling than all but a handful of sequences in The Pick of Destiny. The show jumped without warning from relatively straightforward concert sequences (with the wide-eyed, intense but hopelessly nerdy duo promising to rock the motherfucking house, then playing what sounded like an acoustic cover of late -stage Deep Purple with lyrics by a 13-year old Zeppelin fan) to karate fights on Hollywood Boulevard with crude wire stunts and green screen work to faux-melodramatic "crises" that were resolved with borderline rock-opera-inflected confessions-in-song ("Last week, Kyle quit the band/Now we're back together, uh/ Misunderstanding, didn't understand/ It doesn't matter, now we're back together again /A-la la la la la/Couldn't split up Kato and Nash. (that's true)/ Couldn't split up Tango and Cash/ That's also true!/ This is our song of exultant joy because/ We only came to kick some ass"). The boys clowned like they had nothing to lose. Now they're protecting an investment.

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Links for the Day (November 22nd, 2006)

In keeping with the spirit of the moment, today's links are dedicated entirely to Robert Altman-related essays.

1. 3 Women: By David Sterritt

["Altman stood with the bravest filmmakers of the pre-Reagan years, and 3 Women stands with Altman’s boldest achievements of that remarkable time. He received a green light from Twentieth Century Fox not only without a finished screenplay but with an expressed desire to make the entire movie without one. He had literally dreamed up the project during a restless night of tossing and turning as his wife lay seriously ill in a hospital bed. While his dreams that night didn’t provide the film’s story, they gave him the specific vision of making a film called 3 Women starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, set in the California desert, and centering on the theft of someone’s personality. He was raring to get started as soon as he woke up."]

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2. Secret Honor: By Michael Wilmington

["Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over his past, gazing at his own multiplied monochrome image in a bank of TV monitors . . . Nixon fulminating, raging, screaming at a portrait of the “whoremaster” Kissinger, dictating with somber resignation his own defense against history and disgrace into a tape recorder . . . Nixon drinking, defiant, dissolving into tears, Nixon Agonistes, Nixon bellowing every expletive you could imagine, then sinking to the floor in exhaustion . . . Nixon with the gun to his temple, the final gambol and endgame of the Old Prankster, Tricky Dick in the mirrored halls of memory and conscience."]

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3. Kansas City: By Rick Thompson

["Kansas City is a period recreation film, a version of Kansas City, Missouri in 1934 that is grim, nasty and nostalgic. Like other Robert Altman films, it is not simple; unlike his other films, it is a musical of sorts. Because Altman was born and raised in Kansas City, the film is sometimes seen as a sort of personal memory work looking back over a remarkable time: in 1934, Kansas City was the hub city of the large southwest region, like Chicago to the north, a national railroad interchange; the centre of a growing jazz movement, sending bands on tour from Texas to California to the Dakotas. Unlike nearly every other city in the country, in 1934 – one of the worst years of the great economic Depression – Kansas City was prosperous: it was in the hands of a canny political boss, Tom Pendergast, who finessed a political coalition of Anglo business and civic interests, Italian – read “Mafia” – newcomers, and a large black community. The Pendergast machine (which launched the career of President-to-be Harry S. Truman) achieved this by running (often ruthlessly) an open city: gambling, liquor, prostitution, whatever people wanted and would pay for was available around the clock. During the 1920s and 1930s, the larger southwest region produced a disproportionately high number of top professional jazz players and orchestras who knew that if times got tough, they could always get a job in Kansas City. Altman is at pains throughout the film to gently but constantly remind us of these things."]

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4. Dr. T and the Women: By Adrian Danks

["At the outset, it is probably most useful to place Dr T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000) within a couple of frameworks. First, it represents Robert Altman's latest excursion into the panoramic form, a fret-work of observations, plot-lines and characters that are situated within a particular social, cultural, political and/or geographical milieu. In Dr T this is the world of high society women reputedly found in Dallas, Texas, and who revolve around easy on the eye gynecologist, Richard Gere. Second, Dr T might be considered as part of the autumnal phase of Altman's career, a mode or period of filmmaking that is noticeably more languid, outwardly frivolous and less hard-edged (and sometimes off the mark) than what has come before. Dr T certainly fits this description, but it is also surprisingly sprightly and breezily entertaining. In this respect, the film can be said to resemble the work of some of classical Hollywood's great directors, such as Ford and Hawks, or that of a post-classical contemporary such as Clint Eastwood. In fact Eastwood's example sets up some useful comparisons to Altman's work, his background in television and the ways he uses specific actors and personas, in particular."]

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5. Quintet: By Nick Pinkerton

["What evidence exists of artistry comes through in its atmosphere. The film is shot, more-or-less throughout, with a lens that leaves the image foggy on all four sides, with only an oval in the middle of the frame in crisp focus—the effect is something like peering through a window pane rimmed with frost. Or maybe like looking in at figures frozen under ice—which is probably more appropriate, as the window implies warmth from within, maybe a blazing hearth. And there is so little that seems warm in this movie: the cast seems genuinely numb in the Quebec winter, breath rolling out in plumes; the score, by Tom Pierson, is full of shivery plucks, little slippery flutes. The movie is very, very slow, even—appropriately—glacial. It starts out trudging; it ends trudging. And in between it trudges—through a particularly lugubrious mystery, past a half-thawed romance, and into a final faceoff with a bellicose Vittorio Gassman (the movie’s casting screams “International Investment”) that plays a bit like the blizzard showdown at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But. Whiter. And. Slower."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Robert Altman (February 20th, 1925-November 20th, 2006)

By Keith Uhlich

"Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, you look like you're wearing a tuxedo. The second penguin says, what makes you think I'm not?"--Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion
"So by all means let's plant poles all across the country, festoon the cocksucker with wires, to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgements and motive ... Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough fuckin' imponderables?"--Al Swearengen, Deadwood
And so we face another imponderable with the news that director Robert Altman has passed away at age 81. The particulars of his death will no doubt surface in subsequent news reports (and I personally believe that Altman would prefer we focus on how he lived as opposed to how he died). But it's no surprise that the few obituaries I've read thus far do little more than reformulate and regurgitate the received wisdom on this great film artist, praising M*A*S*H for the umpteenth time; consigning most, if not all of his 80s work to a barren, forgotten wilderness; slapping him on the back for his 90s "resurgence" with The Player and Short Cuts; and finally remarking with thinly veiled, aw-shucks irony (and decontextualized supporting pull quote) that his swan song, A Prairie Home Companion, is all about "death."

Well yes, it is. But it's about meeting death with a smile and a song, as exemplified by the scene where Marylouise Burke discovers the body of L.Q. Jones and quickly overcomes her horrified gut reaction with the help of Virginia Madsen's becalmed and curious Grim Reaper. I like to think Altman did the same, looking his maker deep and direct in the eye, accepting mortality with a mischievous Cheshire Cat grin that I can only hope he flashed, in life, at the numerous financiers, industry insiders, clueless critics, and studio executives who worked overtime to quash and/or devalue his talents. I feel confident saying that Altman's is a body of work that will stand the test of time, successes (Images, Kansas City, the supremely underrated O.C. and Stiggs) and failures (Quintet, the game of life, I'm looking at you) both.

It's hard for me to write through shock--in some ways the death of a beloved artist hits me as deeply and profoundly as the loss of a close relative. In a more tempered frame of mind, I might be able to expound on the importance of Popeye and The Player to my own development as a writer and movie critic. Of the glories and frustrations, as a young college student, of seeing Kansas City in a near-empty theater where, to my retroactive delight, an elderly patron audibly told off Jennifer Jason Leigh (in one of her finest performances) every five minutes. Of the thrill of watching a restored print of Images with Altman himself in attendance--embodying contradiction, he hobbled up to the front of the auditorium (the outward stereotype of an old man), then let loose with a giddy and energetic series of recollections (a true conquistador, looking inward to discover the fountain of youth).

At the moment, I can only list these experiences and hope they convey--in microcosm, anyway--what Altman means to me. And besides, I'd rather not overstay my welcome on the eulogy pulpit. When it comes to death, I've got something of an Irish wake mentality: turn it into an outright celebration of a person who has now fully become a part of our hearts and minds. Below, I've listed a series of links, mimicking our "Links for the Day" format, that lead to writings on Altman and that will hopefully inspire discussion (please feel free to post additional links to pieces that I've, with no malicious intent, neglected to spotlight). Additionally, I'd ask that our House readers take the opportunity to comment, at their leisure and at whatever desired length, on the Altman films or experiences that mean the most to them.

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1. "Great Director's profile": Robert T. Self profiles Altman for Senses of Cinema.

["That career has consistently been marked by high critical acclaim and hostile popular reception. His refusal to tell straightforward stories, his apparent improvisation of script, his casting unusual actors and stars against type, his restless and obliquely motivated zoom shots, his multiply layered soundtracks – such qualities have regularly been seen as significant innovations in Hollywood story and style or as quirky irritations. Reactions to Gosford Park again are representative in their exuberant admiration and characteristic antagonism. The hyperbolic superlatives of the national film critics reflect the qualities of invention now generally ascribed to America's reigning auteur director: the film is everywhere described as “remarkable”, “brilliant” and “magisterial”. Like his other films which famously feature a large ensemble of actors – MASH, Nashville, A Wedding, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Player, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City, Dr. T and the Women (2000) – Gosford Park's numerous story lines are perceived as “engrossing”, “entrancing” and “amazing”. The film reflects the director's “astounding ability to orchestrate dozens of featured players into a coherent whole while allowing each actor individual shining moments.” Andrew Sarris praises Altman's “patented polyphonic virtuosity”. The director who has routinely described himself as a painter rather than a storyteller is compared to Rembrandt, the “greatest flow master in movie history.” Roger Ebert writes: “Here he is like Prospero, serenely the master of his art.”"]

2. "California Split": Peter Tonguette writes on Altman's 1974 "gambling movie."

["Too often, it seems to me, Robert Altman is valued for his riffs on genre – whether it be the war comedy (M*A*S*H [1970]), the Western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]), the detective story (The Long Goodbye [1973]), or the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery (Gosford Park [2001]) – and undervalued for his more direct and personal films, the ones which are least self-aware of other movies and most interactive with real life. I don't want to fall into the same trap as those who under-rate that side of Altman by underrating myself the titles I've just rattled off – each and every one of which I love – but simply make the point that to prioritise this strain of Altman above others is to cut oneself off from what may be the purest expressions of this great director's particular vision of life."]

3. "Blogathon No. 3: Robert Altman—An Appreciation": Michael Guillen reports on an on-stage Altman interview at a retrospective screening of Nashville.

["Also liked when someone asked how he was able to convince Julianne Moore to be naked from the waist down for five minutes. He praised the actress, said the role was originally for Madeline Stowe who chickened out by saying she would be happy to be naked for him in some other movie, but not that one. He'd seen Moore on Broadway in "Uncle Vanya" and was impressed. Phoned her to say he was going to offer her a film role but that first she needed to know right off that she would have to appear naked from the waist down for at least five minutes. Moore paused and then said, "I can do that." Altman was delighted, said he'd send over the script right away, and then Moore added, "Oh Robert, there's an extra treat." "Yes?" Altman inquired. "I'm a real redhead," Moore cooed. Moore's agent has asked Altman not to repeat that story so he asked all 2,000 of us in the audience to keep it to ourselves."]

4. "81 Candles for Robert Altman": Dennis Cozzalio takes an in-depth look at the Altman filmography.

["NOTE: This is part three of my personal retrospective on the films of Robert Altman, in honor of the director's 81st birthday and his upcoming honorary Oscar, to be presented during the telecast of the Academy Awards on March 5. You can access part 1 of this article by scrolling down this page or by clicking here. Part two of this article can also be found by scrolling down the page or by clicking here."]

5. "Altman and Me": Weepingsam of The Listening Ear on how Altman made him a...

["Robert Altman made me a movie geek. That’s basically true. In 1992, the Brattle Theater ran a series of his films, probably inspired by the release of The Player, and I went to most of them. It was the first film series I ever attended, at least the first time I'd seen more than one or two films in a series. It changed me. The simplest change, I suppose, was that it got me in the habit of going to films - going to series’ of films, new films, old films and so on. It’s a habit that took a while to develop, but it started there. When the Altman series ended, I didn't just start going to the next series at the Brattle - but I kept thinking about it. I read their schedules - I kicked myself for missing stuff. And eventually went to another one, and more after that, and so on. It took a couple years, but eventually it was a real habit."]

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Keith Uhlich is managing editor of The House Next Door, a staff critic for Slant Magazine, and a contributor to a variety of print and online publications.

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Links for the Day (November 21st, 2006)

1. ""Kramer's" Racist Tirade--Caught on Tape": And we thought the Soup Nazi had issues. With a late night, Lettermanned apology.

["The camera started rolling just as Richards began his attack, screaming at one of the men, "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass.""]

***
2. "A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon": Mistress Michiko Kakutani bores into Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Against the Day, which is released today. More articles here, here, and here.

["There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Dozens of characters are sent on mysterious (often half-baked) quests that intersect mysteriously with the mysterious quests of people they knew in another context, and dozens of portentous plot lines are portentously twined around even more portentous events: the appearance of a strange figure in the Arctic, a startling “heavenwide blast of light”, the hunt for something called a “Time-weapon” that might affect the fate of the globe."]

***
3. "You Wanna See a Real Horror Movie?": Why couldn't this happen at a Nora Ephron "comedy?"

["A bald guy a few rows behind Drunk Guy got annoyed, and repeatedly shushed him. Apparently Bald Guy expected the same quiet, focused screening conditions as for a viewing of the Essential Cinema at Anthology. Drunk Guy would have none of his shushing, telling Bald Guy off, and eventually standing up, turning around, and yelling at him. "Dude, this is a horror film festival," yelled Drunk Guy, excusing his behavior. He then threatened Bald Guy: "You wanna see a real horror movie?!," though his query included our favorite four-letter expletive. After a bit, Drunk Guy sat down, but that was just the tease. By now, the crowd knew the kill would come. And indeed another five or ten minutes later, after trading a few more yells and shushes with Bald Guy, Drunk Guy stood up again, about the time a pig was being slaughtered onscreen. Suddenly five to ten big guys were all standing up, and the non-belligerent fled the front few rows."]

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4. "O.J. Simpson’s Book and TV Special Are Canceled": Rupert, Rupert, Rupert.

["Bowing to intense pressure both outside and inside the company, the News Corporation today canceled its plans to publish a book and broadcast an interview with O. J. Simpson in which he was to give a hypothetical account of how he might have murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman."]

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5. "Image of the Day": Zach Campbell on William Drost's painting "Bathsheba."

["The roundness of the forms of this solitary woman, placed within an asymmetrical composition, makes for a very subtly unsettling image--as though balance has just been lost."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Navel Gazing with Burns and Dignan: Casino Royale, Let's Go To Prison, and Fast Food Nation

Andrew Dignan: Hey Burns, judging by the number of comments we've generated I think we've got worse ratings than Studio 60. How long you think before we get a mercy-kill cancellation or are put on the shelf till after sweeps? Maybe we just need to piggyback off of the almost child-like glow the new Bond film, Casino Royale seems to be evoking in people and hope that captures some attention.

Yes, it's true: for the first time in my lifetime, James Bond is cool. And not because he has the best toys or beds the most women or drives around in an invisible car (hard to believe someone ever signed-off on that one). This is one hundred percent attitude carrying an agreeably low-key espionage thriller. You got guns, you got girls, you got some truly brutal hand-to-hand combat; Bond feels primal and dangerous again after four over-produced, Pierce Brosnan smarm-fests. The film's success was not only unexpected, it flies in the face of common sense. As has been pointed out by many others, it's produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli who are as responsible as anyone for driving this franchise into the ground, the film is co-written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade who wrote the last two Bond films, and to direct they’ve brought back Martin Campbell, who is something of an agreeable hack.

So does that mean all of these winds-of-change laurels need to be thrown at the feet of new Bond Daniel Craig? I'll admit to having been skeptical of his casting (once I had my heart set on Clive Owen it was near-impossible to think of anyone else for the part), but my God is he glorious in this role. I suppose it's something I should have picked up upon years ago, but Bond is a complete sociopath, a niggling character trait that's been whitewashed by a steady stream of smirks and cheesy one-liners. But watching Craig, you get the sense that he genuinely enjoys hurting people. With those emotionless blue-eyes and the boxer's face, he really does come across as a thug with a license to kill. The only thing separating this version of Bond from the men he hunts is he's on the leash of queen and country (it was inevitable that Bond would begin to resemble his American-television counterpart, Jack Bauer). He's prone to get beat up or act impulsively or become distracted by a beautiful woman. In other words, he's a human being.

One of the real stand-out sequences for me in the film is an early, incredibly elaborate chase scene through a construction site, which is mostly a forum for Sebastien Foucan’s gravity defying Parkour display, but it's also the rarest of things: an action sequence that illustrates character through behavior. Time and again we see Bond's blunt-force-trauma approach in response to Foucan's graceful aerobatics: Foucan slides through a small window, Bond breaks through the wall. Foucan hops up walls, Bond shoots a ballast and zips up a cargo lift. It saddens me that for the next film we can probably expect a more polished version of 007, no doubt more at ease in the role as a debonair man of mystery. I for one prefer Bond with a few sharp corners.

I could point out that 144-minutes is far too much bloat for what is a fairly sparse plot and that much of the protracted third act rides upon a rather rickety romance between Craig and Eva Green's nowhere near world-weary enough Vesper Lynd (as anyone who's seen The Dreamers can attest, Green's greatest gifts are her naïve self-absorption and her breasts, neither of which are well-represented here), but I'm far too jazzed about this unanticipated turn of events that I really can’t complain.

Sean Burns: Well Andrew, I don't know what to do about our Studio 60 ratings besides proposing a designated week during which you and I can both stride purposefully down hallways and talk about nothing except the great and vital importance of what we're doing for the National Discourse, while at the same time taking thinly veiled cheap-shots at our ex-girlfriends. But since we both tend to spend too much time online bitching about our exes, I say we just get back to Bond.

And yeah, I fucking loved it... warts and all. I'm a bit older than you (ahem!) so I grew up renting the Connery Bond flicks on that antiquated VHS format while reading the Ian Fleming novels on my summer vacations and, as such, it was a great relief for me to see James Bond finally back to being a sadistic dickhead. By far the best actor who's ever donned the 007 tux (anybody see The Mother?) Craig is indeed what M would call "a blunt instrument," but I appreciated the way he layer-caked his performance, refining his way into the role until the final line that brings down the house. It's Batman Begins, for 007 fans.

The funny thing about this Bond series is that they're always trend-chasing and they're typically a year or two too late. If I remember correctly, For Your Eyes Only was originally scrapped to make way for Moonraker because in the wake of Star Wars, James Bond simply had to get into outer space if he wanted to keep up with the Skywalkers. It's interesting to me how all our recent prequel craze, plus 24 and Jason Bourne finally brought the series back down to earth and improbably back to the most faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel in many decades. What goes around comes around, I guess, and everything old eventually becomes new again.

I really dug how much the killings hurt in this picture. They're messy and bloody and they leave a mark... and that close-quarters stairwell machete beat-down is one of the most intense and visceral things I've seen in quite a long time.

Of course, the picture is at least a half-an-hour too long (as all Bond films are) and don't even get me started on the horrid Chris Cornel theme song, or the fact that the movie has such ass-backwards 2006 priorities that not only does James Bond show more skin than all his leading ladies put together, but there aren't even any of those undulating, shimmering naked chicks in the opening credit sequence! It's one thing to give a franchise a makeover, but some traditions should be preserved, dammit!
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SB: I'm really interested in talking with you about Let's Go To Prison, which was abandoned by its distributor with no press screenings and is already on it's way out the door in most markets, but I found it to be an uneven, though genuinely subversive piece of work. (Every gay man I know is over the moon about it already, and a couple claim it's even better than Brokeback Mountain!) For those who weren't lucky enough to see the trailer attached to Snakes On A Plane, this movie is about a layabout career criminal (played with great lackadasical charm by Dax Shepard) who tries to take revenge on the long-dead judge who first sentenced him to jail at the tender age of eight by framing the judge's son (Arrested Development's genius "illusionist" Will Arnett). The plot convolutions are rather annoying and frankly secondary to the healthy spirit of outrage that makes the audience squeamish and uncomfortable throughout this erratic, weird, ugly little picture. Like Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation (which we'll get to in a minute) the movie is largely a delivery system for alarming statistics and inconvenient truths, only here they're disguised behind a lot of excretory, ass-fucking humor. In fact, I'd wager 99 percent of this movie's jokes revolve around male panic regarding anal penetration.

But then a funny thing happens, as this film is the first mainstream Hollywood production I've ever seen that actually endorses an interracial same-sex union--and then shrugs like it's no big deal when these two giddy fellows live happily ever after. Don't get me wrong, Let's Go To Prison is a very sloppy comedy that misses more often than it hits. But I'll be damned if the genuine, improbably touching love story between Will Arnett and Chi McBride isn't just a little bit revolutionary. No wonder Universal dumped it!

AD: Was this film even released? Judging by the half-dozen stoners and confused elderly people populating the screening I was at, I think Universal's burial at sea tactic worked.

Let's Go to Prison bears the fingerprints of numerous historically funny people all operating well below their personal bests. The film was directed by Bob Odenkirk (who makes an unfunny cameo as Arnett's slimy lawyer) who co-created and co-starred in HBO's Mr. Show and the film was written by The State alumni Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Michael Patrick Jann who seem to be working through the litany of "I will cram (blank) up your ass" jokes they couldn't work past the censors. I had unrealistically high hopes for the film perhaps, but your assessment of the film being "hit or miss" is a charitable one. I'm not quite the card-carrying Dax Shepard fan you are; I always find him to be something of a dead-eyed, charisma-free vacuum from the Ashton Kutcher school of acting (not surprisingly, he got his start on Punk'd) and placing the narrative on his slacking shoulders pushes the film along at a crawl. Arnett's also done no favors by a thinly-conceived character who really only gets two modes to play: boorish and sniveling.

If there's a performer in the film who clearly understands the material it's Chi McBride, who not only gets most of the best lines, but appears to be having the time of his life playing top bitch to Arnett's sissy. There's a scene in a bathroom that segues from rape attempt ("Is that how you treat the people you love? By choking them?") to tender reconciliation--complete with guy in a nearby toilet mouthing "go to him"--to assault by the Aryan brotherhood that's as moving as anything in the aforementioned Ang Lee film. The film plays their relationship totally straight (no pun intended), never letting the snickering teenage boys in the audience off the hook with its in-your-face man-on-man love, which is some sort of accomplishment I suppose, but the film's never invested enough in its own premise to really be all that funny. I have no idea how the film will be remembered by queer theorists in years to come, but as a comedy it's fairly disposable.

SB: Well now, calling me a card-carrying Dax Shepard fan might be stretching things a bit, but between Let's Go To Prison and Jon Favreau's terribly underrated Zathura, I've really come around on his drawling, lazy performance style. Take for instance his causal non-reaction after fingering Will Arnett: "It happened," he shrugs.

It's also worth noting that the film is based on Jim Hogshire's non-fiction book, You Are Going To Prison, which would account for the countless unsettling factoids in Shepard's narration (knowledge he attributes to "being on a lot of weird mailing lists.") For a filthy little disposable comedy, this flick sure tells the audience a lot of things they don't want to hear about our broken-down penal system.
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SB: Which is just about as easy a segue as I can imagine into Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, another dramatic adaptation of a non-fiction tome that's chock full of stuff I never, ever wanted to know. It's also another movie I liked just enough to wish it was better. Linklater and co-screenwriter Eric Schlosser (who penned the book) zoom in on one sleepy little Colorado town as a microcosm for the strip-mall rot that's currently plaguing most of America. The rather transparently named Mickey's burger chain is having a little PR problem, as independent studies recently discovered there's there's an unacceptable level of fecal matter in their meat. (I love that it's not simply the presence of shit that raises worry--it's that there's just a little too much of it.) Greg Kinnear stars as a hotshot exec dispatched to investigate, but really he's just there to facilitate conversations amongst folks up and down the entire fast food chain.

To be honest, I found the filmmaking sub-par. The visuals were workmanlike at best, the lighting crappy, the script full of dramatic dead ends, and some of the acting suspect. Yet Fast Food Nation has stuck with me over the past few weeks in ways that more accomplished, less ambitious movies sure haven't. There's a larger discussion here worth having, one about the emptiness of our crap franchise culture and how every main drag in every American town now looks almost exactly identical, with interchangeable register jockeys slinging the same corporate office-approved scripted greetings like robots. I was quite taken with Ethan Hawke's small role as something of a self-styled conscientious objector and I appreciated the way he addressed the nagging question of what on Earth you're supposed to do with all this information after you've been shocked out of your stupor. It's telling that Kinnear simply throws up his hands and walks out of the movie somewhere around the halfway point, and his final interaction with that chirpy, blank hotel clerk hit a note of despair that's haunted me far more than any of the graphic slaughterhouse sequences. (Although I'd be lying if I said I could bear to eat a hamburger for couple days after seeing this flick.) Also, that Bruce Willis cameo is one for the ages.

AD: Man, I'm glad you found a unifying theme to all this unfocused muckraking as I'm still not certain of why the film was even made. My problems were less with the film's aesthetics than with the self-congratulatory tone that permeated much of the film's second half (when, as you pointed out, Greg Kinnear's storyline comes to an abrupt halt). Linklater's meandering, just shootin'-the-shit style of presenting half a dozen different storylines plays a lot better when all that's on the line is the squirm factor of how many microbes of cow excrement are in your hamburger meat or just how disgusting the oily-faced slacker kids behind the fry cooker really are. That Willis scene is as effective as it is because it lays out the situation in terms that are repulsively callous, but also a little pragmatic. Basically, it's always been this bad; the only difference is we just we know about it now. Watching Kinnear's character abandon his short-lived social consciousness to avoid making waves and go promote a new hamburger is the sort of commonplace, stinging defeat that keeps these corporations bringing in billions every year. The closer the film hews to this sort of death-by-a-thousand-pinpricks pessimism, the more effective it is.

But of course, this can't just simply be a film about how horrible fast food is for you (I think Morgan Spurlock covered that one already), so it casts a super-wide net around every troubling issue that Linklater's currently working his head around these days, including drug abuse by immigrant workers, unsafe conditions at the meat packing factory, the disappearance of the American rancher, and selling-out your beliefs. By the time we get to Catalina Sandino Moreno bartering with her body in order to get an extra shift at the meat factory you realize we're a long way from spores in the chuck. Employing documentary footage of a real slaughterhouse as a backdrop for the further indignities suffered by the film's illegal immigrant characters is exploitive and after-the-fact, a clumsy stab at sweeping relevance for a film that just doesn’t have the legs to support it. Fast Food Nation feels like it was made by Avril Lavigne and Lou Taylor Pucci's know-it-all, activist college students, wedded to the notion that flailing about in a misguided effort for change is the same thing as actually accomplishing something. This isn't filmmaking; it’s an op-ed column in an Alt-Weekly.

SB: You'll find no argument here on the Mexican laborer storyline, which felt so diagrammatic and forced that I could call every tragic event that was going to occur three scenes ahead of time. The only angle that really worked for me was the sadness of how tacky and empty their dream-vision of America was, culminating in a romantic night out at a lousy chain restaurant eating crummy frozen food.

But I did breathe a big sigh of relief at the Lavigne and Pucci sequences simply because these kids didn't, in fact, know it all… they only thought they did, in some terribly amusing ways. Was the "the most patriotic thing we can do right now is violate the Patriot Act" line actually supposed to be taken seriously? I doubt it. Remember, their grand dorm-room scheme to "liberate" the cattle provides the movie's most hilarious moment, as well as the kind of potent visual metaphor that sums up the picture: floundering helplessly before nation of cows who would prefer to remain in their pens.

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Casino Royale: It's not Moonraker

By Wagstaff"Reboot” is the word reviewers have been using to describe the latest Bond film, and it’s hard to avoid because that’s what Casino Royale is: a shakeup of the tired Bond formula that still uses much of the same programming. You get the sense of the filmmaker’s dilemma; how do you scrub away what’s built up during 44 years of the 007 franchise and still deliver what people expect? The results are mixed but welcome. This movie is not Moonraker. Casino Royale follows what Ian Fleming actually wrote more closely than any James Bond film since For Your Eyes Only.

The villainous Le Chiffre, a financer of international terrorism, makes money for his clients by betting on the stocks of companies that are about to be hit with terrorism. After 007 thwarts a terror attack in Miami, Le Chiffre needs desperately to recover the money that’s been lost. He owes it to a group of murderous African thugs, and they mean business. He intends to win back the money at a high stakes tournament of Texas Hold’em poker held at Casino Royale in Montenegro. Bond, being the best player in the service, is given the mission of stopping Le Chiffre at the poker table. Helping Bond is MI6’s Vesper Lynd, the beautiful accountant assigned to look after the large sum of Her Majesty's money that’s staking Bond’s hand, and Mathis, the local contact in Montenegro. Mathis is played by Giancarlo Giannini, whose main job it seems is to provide a running commentary on the action for us simpletons in the audience. “There’s 24 million in the pot already” or “If Bond loses this hand…” ect. It’s another in a long line of thankless supporting roles for the once great Giannini.

Eva Green makes a fine Bond girl – Vesper is both stunningly beautiful and smart for a change. Vesper Lynd and James Bond size each other up immediately and accurately when they first meet on a train to Montenegro. It’s one of several non-action scenes that work surprisingly well. The two share moments of tenderness and introspection that are rare in a Bond film. After James dispatches a couple of goons in a bloody, how-hard-it-is-to-kill-a-man fashion reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, Vesper is distraught and disgusted with their grisly work. James finds her fully clothed and weeping in the hotel room’s shower. With uncharacteristic sensitivity, Bond asks if she is cold, turns up the hot water, and joins her as the camera slowly pulls away from the humbled, prostrate couple as if they were Adam and Eve after the Fall. The movie’s last slow-moving act is a character-driven love story, and if you don’t know it by now, you should: any woman that Bond loves deeply is not long for this world.

Mads Mikkelson’s Le Chiffre finally does away with the traditional Bond super villain, a staple of 007 movies since day one. “World domination. Same old scheme, eh Dr. No?” the hero chides the bad doctor in the series' very first entry. Le Chiffre’s scheme is suitably evil but much smaller-scaled (by Bond standards that is; international terrorism is still big stuff). He’s also not the worst villain on the international stage. There are other meaner, more powerful players that can make him sweat; they even put his life in jeopardy and threaten to hack off his girl’s arm with a machete. Le Chiffre still has enough odd quirks that would make him feel at home in an Austin Powers movie, like an asthmatic inhaler and an eye that sheds tears of blood. “It’s nothing sinister," he explains. "Just an abnormality of the tear duct.”

Which brings us to James Bond himself. Daniel Craig gives the most interesting performance as Bond since George Lazenby in On Her Majesties Secret Service, and of course Sean Connery before him. (I’m omitting the 1954 television production of Casino Royale starring Barry Nelson, which I haven’t seen.) Craig is more thuggish than either Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore. He’s the kind of Bond that will strangle you with his bare hands and then hide your body, bloodying his suit in the process. But while the character's two-fisted animalism is played up, his debonair air is played down. Brosnan and Moore had the latter; Connery had both. One wonders if the filmmaker’s cognizance of Craig’s brutishness prompted them to delay putting Craig in a tux until halfway through the movie. He looks slightly uncomfortable in a monkey suit.

The out for Craig’s lack of suavity is that he’s in the process of becoming the Bond we all know; it’s baby steps for James as he dons his first dinner jacket or sips his first vodka martini. (With this last, he first has to realize that he likes martinis, then a certain kind, and finally he gives the drink a name: a Vesper.) Bond isn’t there yet, though. After one nasty fight scene he runs back to the gambling table and orders his soon-to-be-signature drink, and the bartender asks, “Shaken or stirred, Sir?” “Do I look like a man who gives a damn?” Bond growls. Casino Royale is a movie about identity – about becoming who you really are. As both Vesper and M tell Bond on different occasions, “I knew you would because you are you.”

Casino Royale has more beefcake than cheesecake. Craig’s muscular physique gets the spotlight; he’s buff and cut. Ursula Andress rose like Aphrodite from the sea in an iconic scene from Dr. No 44 years ago; the mirror is Craig rising from the waves today. When Le Chiffre and his henchmen torture 007 by strapping him naked to a bottomless wicker chair that leaves his nether regions exposed to a heavy knotted rope, and Le Chiffre remarks “You have taken very good care of your body, Mr. Bond,” I heard the woman in the seat beside me say, “Mmm hmm, yes you have.”

Overlong action sequences mar Casino Royale. Many of them feel tacked on; I could almost hear the producers over director Martin Campbell’s shoulder telling him that he needed X number of chases or shootouts. The extended opening chase around, through, and on top of a Ugandan construction site wreaks havoc and establishes 007’s superhuman strength and endurance, but it feels like a Jackie Chan movie without Jackie Chan; a truck chase across Miami International’s tarmac owes too much to Raiders of the Lost Ark; the climactic scuffle and shootout in a slowly sinking Venetian building only made me wonder about the depth of the water in Venice. The smaller action scenes work better and are more smoothly integrated into the main story, which is equally interested in mythologizing and humanizing the character. This Bond suffers. He gets kicked, beaten, poisoned and tortured and finally has to recover in a hospital. And of course, he falls in love.

In his review of Casino Royale, Sean Burns distinguishes between action scenes that are “ludicrous” and action scenes that are “implausible.” I’m with Burns in preferring the merely implausible, and wishing the filmmakers had nixed the most outlandish set pieces and focused even more on character and on smaller-scaled moments of suspense -- and perhaps even followed their retro preference to its logical but financially unwise end and made a period movie set in the 1950s. Still, this Bond is a step in the right direction, and for the first time since I was a kid, I’m looking forward to the next one.
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Wagstaff is a contributor to The House Next Door, Liverputty and Edward Copeland on Film.

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Links for the Day (November 20th, 2006)

1. "David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach!": The latest essay at 24 Lies a Second--Robert C. Cumbow on the career of David Lynch.

["The abundant traveling images in Lynch’s films operate as metaphors for and constant reminders of the director’s fascination with space-shifting. The hallmark of many a Lynch film is a subjective shot of a street or highway, usually at night, its centerline being lapped up by the forward vector of the camera (and whatever point of view it represents). Roads, road signs, and traffic signals abound. Wild at Heart and The Straight Story are variations on the great American Road Movie. But beyond this more conventional kind of travel, Lynch’s protagonists have a thirst for spatial adventuring—whether in another place or another body or another life. Dr. Treves intertwines his life with that of the Elephant Man John Merrick by walking around and discovering a London very different from the one he has known, and finding there both horrors and wonders. Special Agent Cooper enters Twin Peaks as an outsider, but takes to the place’s illusory serenity with a naïve enthusiasm unheard of in the protagonists of detective fiction. Duke Leto’s family moves from Caladan, planet of thundering seas, to the bleak and mysterious Arrakis. Alvin Straight undertakes a daunting interstate journey on a lawn tractor, appreciating the newness of everything he encounters en route. Diane’s alter-ego Betty moves from Canada to a strange and wondrous Hollywood that she drinks in with Cooperian innocence."]

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2. "Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk The Hobbit": The husband and wife team talk about their removal from the project by New Line Cinema.

["However last week, Mark Ordesky called Ken and told him that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on the Hobbit and the LOTR 'prequel'. This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker for both projects."]

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3. "Jacques Rivette: Introduction/Céline and Julie Go Boating": Reverse Shot's James Crawford covers the first week of the Museum of the Moving Image's Rivette retrospective.

["Like Godard, Rivette works like an analytical reverse engineer, picking apart the cinema and leaving its part strewn about. Godard’s weapon of choice is a grenade, which rents the mechanism asunder, leaving only charred, unrecognizable fragments behind, which are insanely difficult to reassemble, which he does with patchwork bits of homage, dialectic, and blatant formal transgressions, all colliding, ricocheting, and generally jostling for space. Rivette, by contrast, works with the delicate touch of a clockmaker, removing the cogs and springs of his medium such that, at a later point, they can be put back together in skewed configurations (with respect to the canon). Godard’s revelations, clear-eyed, and breathlessly dynamic, are immediate, if not immediately manifest, while Rivette makes one wait for enlightenment, the minutes do not so much pass by as aggregate, building one component on top of the next to create an ever-more complex and incredible machine. In Rivette there’s a sense, not just of watching or duration, both of which are passive ideas, but of actively being put through a process. More than arising out of Rivette’s congenital aversion to memory, that aura of trial and process is written into the formal matrix of his films."]

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4. "When a Woman Ascends the Stairs": Some great news from Criterion--Mikio Naruse's masterpiece (one of many) to be released on DVD in February.

["When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are normal for this format. This new high-definition digital transfer was created on a Spirit 2k Datacine from a new 35mm fine-grain print. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI Digital Restoration System. To maintain optimal image quality through the compression process, the picture on this dual-layer DVD-9 has been encoded at the highest-possible bit rate for the quantity of material included.""]

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5. "U.S. push for drink detectors in cars": This would've saved Mel a lot of trouble.

["Alcohol detectors may be fitted to all vehicles in the US after private and government experts agreed that the deterrence tactic used against drink-drivers for the past 20 years was no longer working."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Quiet miracle: James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is the future of the movies

By Steven Boone
From El Mariachi to Tarnation to Sky Captain (the short film), there have been plenty of recent D.I.Y. triumphs that filmmakers of lesser means could look to for inspiration —so many, in fact, that James Longley’s one-man-band war documentary Iraq in Fragments almost seems a mere feather in the cap. Actually, Longley's feature represents the true beginning of The Future of the Movies. But it takes a little historical perspective to understand why.

Video technology has made it possible for poor folks and/or cheapskates to make something like a movie for a good while now. The hitch has always been that the results never quite looked like film. Video has scan lines and moves at roughly 30 frames (60 interlaced fields) per second, while film is a seamless bed of chemicals on strips of translucent celluloid travelling at 24 rock solid frames per second. There are a lot of other factors that differentiate film from video (image resolution, depth of field, optics, contrast ratios ), but Iraq in Fragments proves that what counts most is the rather short gulf between 30 fragments of life and 24; between an image rendered like the teeth of two interlocking combs and an image as supple as an oil painting.

24p is the technology that allows digital video to fool us into thinking that it is film. It delivers video with no scan lines (the “p” is for “progressive scan” and the 24 is the frame rate). George Lucas used 24p on two Star Wars prequels, and indie films like Jackpot and Sex and Lucia got gorgeous imagery with it. The filmmakers shoot with High Definition 24p cameras, employing a whole raft of engineers and post-production wizards to massage a cold video signal into something you could call cinematic without stammering. The entire process costs millions of dollars.

In 2002, Panasonic introduced the first 24p prosumer mini-dv camcorder, the dvx-100. It was a miracle: For around $3,500, the price of pimping your ride or your patio, you could capture footage that had the dreamy characteristics of cinema. Like other camcorders in its class, the dvx has the manual controls filmmakers desire (aperture, focus, shutter speed, etc.), so low-budget shooters around the world started churning out films in 24p. But because the dvx records to mini-dv, a format with only a fraction of the resolution of HD, its best format for presentation was said to be DVD, not 35mm theatrical screenings. (The best short analogy for the uninitiated: It’s like when you scribble something on an uninflated balloon (dv), then watch the doodle stretch and become faint as you inflate the balloon (35mm blowup).) The mushy tape-to-film transfer of the early 24p indie film November doesn’t look much better than those of pre-dvx (yet still landmark) films Bamboozled and 28 Days Later. If you were serious about making films for the theater, the argument went, you had to invest a small fortune in HD.

Iraq in Fragments blows this argument out of the water. Shot in various regions of Iraq on a dvx-100, and later a 100a (the second generation upgrade), transferred to 35mm and projected on the big screen, it is as beautiful to behold as Days of Heaven. As I ogled this beauty recently at New York’s Film Forum, I found my hands clasped in front of my chin as if in prayer. I could not believe that I was watching the product of a camera Uncle Lou might use to document his vacation sexploits. The film has every ounce the intimacy and majesty of Malick at his greatest. From its strobo-kaleidoscopic opening to the rhythmic, ruminative sequence that shows how the Iraq invasion transformed men of reason and faith into violent muhajadeen to the hushed third act, which juxtaposes the weather-beaten faces of a Kurdish farm family with billowing black smoke as suggestive as any natural phenomenon in a Werner Herzog opus, this film dares you to call it anything but pure cinema.

In April, 2003, James Longley entered a freshly shocked and awed Baghdad with his dvx and a laptop loaded with Final Cut Pro, shooting handheld with a camera he calls “the best low-budget filmmaking tool around.” He recorded entirely in natural light, taking advantage of the warm diffuse sunshine bouncing off stone and mud; door frames and windows blown out from overexposure without the expected horrendous clipped whites; the tactile, revelatory quality of shooting with long lenses/shallow depth of field along with short lenses pushed close to the subject (see Amores Perros); the pulse-pounding effect of a high-speed shutter in scenes where the tension is otherwise subliminal.

Iraq in Fragments is the first camcorder movie with no excuses. It has arrived on 35mm film in theaters with the help of a transfer to HD, expert color correction and tape-to-film scan,but the fact remains that it was captured on a
camera most Americans above the poverty line could afford. A reasonably priced 24p HD camera now exists (the Panasonic AG-HVX200), but the HD propagandists downplay the associated costs of hardware and memory cards required to shoot and edit in that format. The industry pros tout HD as the medium for serious filmmakers. (Longley himself plans to shoot his next project in HD.) But Iraq in Fragments is the future because it can be projected onto a big screen without calling the average moviegoer’s attention to its format’s supposed limitations. This means that a no-budget 24p filmmaker can refer to Longley’s movie when hawking his own homemade, handmade masterpiece, and if said filmmaker has anything within miles of Longley’s Sundance-sweeping gift for storytelling, visual composition, editing and sound design, said distributors will listen up. Even though Longley benefited from the HBO Documentary Fund and other financing, his choice of camera gives the fabled “garage Kubricks” incentive to put down their grant applications and pick up a camera to shoot as they please, in the real world, on their own dime. This is what cheap turntables and faders did for restless Bronx youth in the late 1970’s. With their shoe store paychecks the kids upgraded to samplers, drum machines and mixing boards. Longley’s triumph fills me with hope that a fresh generation of Kids from Nowhere will grasp the connection between those 24 coveted frames and a public imagination that still gets its most vigorous workout in the darkened theater; that they will use the charisma and authority of cinema to sing in as confident a voice as aristocrat-auteurs like Mann, Scott, Scorsese and Spielberg, without having to set foot in their clubhouse. As it is, the dv kids are working wonders on DVD and the festival circuit.

The quiet miracle here isn’t that film is dead but that an authentic working class cinema has a shot at more than token, Focus/Weinstein-moderated access to mainstream audiences. Corporations deliver the technology and the crowds, sure, so they must be reckoned with. But isn’t it preferable to pitch to these behemoths a virtually complete, ready-to-exhibit, fully professional motion picture rather than a script or story that can be “developed” into dust?

Still, this miracle has a short life span; more are on the way when 24p HD goes bargain basement. What’s at stake for our media elite is the prevailing notion of filmmaking as the sport of kings. Rich people are supposed to make movies, poor people are supposed to watch. When the movie business finally gets it’s century-late shot of true democracy, nothing short of social upheaval should occur. Alright, now.
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Steven Boone is a New York-basic critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism. This is his first article for The House Next Door.

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The Wire Mondays: Season 4, Ep. 10, “Misgivings”

By Barry Maupin“What he gonna do, fire you?” State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) laughs when police commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie R. Faison) hesitates to reassert control over the department after his refusal to resign leads Mayor-elect Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) to strip Burrell’s de facto authority. “He just showed you he don’t have balls enough.” Carcetti fashions himself a reformer, but his weak play to get Burrell to leave on his own admits that his debt to Burrell’s backers—the city councilors who control the purse strings and the black ministers who control the vote—trumps his power to change the course. Davis ends the meeting by advising Burrell to burnish his credentials with a new initiative (“some kind of police shit”), assuring, “Just take care of your end and let your friends handle theirs.”

“Change the course” often means more of the same, only more of it, as when Burrell sends down word to double arrests with a crackdown on “quality of life” violations. “Open container used to be sacrosanct in this town,” Officer Santangelo (Michael Salconi) grouses over the injustice. “Man’s beverage was his business.” Lt. Mello (Jay Landsman) gamely tries to respect both the chain of command and the hit to morale among the rank-and-file. “I mean, the election is fucking over, right?” he ponders to his boss. “Who are we doing this for?” Officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) reconciles his well-worn agony over his helpless role in the political gamesmanship in a speech to a young cop writing a ticket to please the bosses: “Let me tell you a little secret. A patrolling officer on his beat is the one true dictatorship in America. We can lock a guy up on a humble, we can lock him up for real, or we can say, ‘Fuck it,’ pull under the expressway and drink ourselves to death, and our side partners will cover it. So no one--and I mean no one--tells us how to waste our shift.”

If McNulty comes to his doctrine the long way, Bodie Broadus (JD Williams) is steeped in his from the start. The young captain of a corner drug crew, Bodie feels out the recent absence of his lieutenant, Little Kevin (Tyrell Baker), who explains that he was brought in and questioned about a suspected murder by their boss, Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), but kept silent. “Yeah, well, I ain’t the one you need to convince,” Bodie warns, advising Kevin to go to Marlo with what happened to prove he has nothing to hide. Later, Bodie hears that Kevin is killed after telling Marlo, and a wide shot of Bodie, alone on the corner, captures his first doubt about the game’s obligations. Bodie commiserates with Poot (Tray Chaney), who reminds him that they once had to kill their best friend, Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), under similar circumstances. Bodie concedes the logic of the Wallace hit but can’t accept the fate of Kevin, a guy Bodie knows didn’t flip. “Cold motherfucker,” Bodie declares of Marlo. Poot brings him back to their reality: “It’s a cold world, Bodie.”

Little Kevin dooms his future by farming out his role (tell Marlo’s intended victim to be somewhere at a certain time) to eighth-grader Randy and then overacting his denial that he let Randy in on the consequence. Randy (Maestro Harrell) knows too little to warrant like punishment but gets his due for highlighting the affair when Marlo tars him with the last brand anyone in this neighborhood would want: snitch. Marlo isn’t the first to tag Randy as such, only the most authoritative; Randy’s buddies have long suspected him. Namond (Julito McCullum) once lobbed a threat within earshot to beat whoever told on a friend for tagging walls, and Michael (Tristan Wilds) pried Randy on another occasion as to how he managed a reduced school suspension. A t-shirt worn by a small boy in a previous episode declared the non-negotiable pariah status of the snitch, its message in the design of a parking sign: “No Snitching Anytime.”

Bubbles (Andre Royo) is a snitch, of course. He once rationalized his actions as a confidential police informant to his disgusted running buddy, Johnny (Leo Fitzpatrick), as simply services rendered for a wage, like any other job; now, he swaps his street knowledge as a last resort to stop a predator. Even the cops disrespect the jeopardy the task carries. In the previous episode, Det. “Herc” Hauk (Domenick Lombardozzi) used Bubs to ID a suspect but failed to post for his end of the deal, hanging Bubs on the line with Randy. This time, Herc shows up at Bubs’ shed-like abode with chicken wings and a feeble excuse, then asks him to spread word of a bounty on a stolen surveillance camera to Bubs' growing suspicion. “So, it’s $500 for the camera and a chicken box for Bubs, huh?” When Herc again misses the call to nab Bubs’ nemesis, Bubs delivers some payback, fingering an impolite reverend as a drug courier in the act.

Herc stops and searches the pastor (Franklin Ojeda Smith) in his usual rabid fashion, one of several instances in this episode that showcase the outrage of Baltimore’s citizens over the war mentality of the police department. When the innocent man avows, “I’m gonna damn sure get your name and badge number,” he echoes the reaction of a woman whose car gets smashed by Officer Walker (Jonnie Louis Brown) in an ill-advised pursuit through crowded streets of an adolescent car thief. A riot breaks out when a squad of police attempts to arrest a group of men drinking and socializing on the sidewalk, and a voice rises from the melee: “I live here, man!”

Sgt. Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) gives more than due consideration to Namond, who he catches slinging again after extending a free pass. When Namond can’t raise his vacationing mother (“My moms don’t answer when she go to A.C.”), Carver senses his fear of juvenile detention and allows him to sleep on a bench at the station house until other arrangements can be made for him to be released to the care of a guardian. Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), Namond’s teacher and a former police major (Carver still calls him “boss”), steps forward and hosts Namond until his mother’s return. When Bunny escorts Namond home, his mother, De’Londa (Sandi McCree), waits angrily on the porch. “You afraid to go to baby booking? The fuck is wrong with you, boy?” she scolds. “Get in the damn house.”

Widespread bad parenting forces some hard choices on the boys. Michael raises his brother Bug in a home with a crack-addict mother and her just returned ex-con boyfriend (Cyrus Farmer), who Michael fears will sexually abuse Bug the way he did him. Michael trades in Marlo’s offer to join the team if they agree to eliminate the man, accompanying Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson) on a stealth mission to identify their prey. “The fuck he do to you?” Snoop inquires, and when Michael can’t bring himself to explain, a long close-up of Chris unearths a personal understanding. Chris and Snoop catch up with the man later and begin to walk him to the vacant row house where they plan to board him up when Chris turns mid-conversation and administers a beating so ferocious that Snoop can only stand dumbstruck. Chris usually works with a stoic dignity--a near soothing presence in his pending victims’ final moments--but here unleashes the internalized rage of the little boy, defacing the man and leaving him dead in the alley with Snoop holding the tools.

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Links for the Day (November 19th, 2006)

1. "Blockbuster signs deal to be exclusive renter for Weinsteins": I'd like you to meet Harvey... he make cinema.

["Blockbuster (BBI) said Wednesday it reached a four-year deal giving it exclusive U.S. rental rights to Weinstein films, allying itself with the independent movie studio as it battles for market share. The deal teams Blockbuster with movie industry veterans brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein as it tries to counter an expensive rivalry with Netflix (NFLX) over online rentals, as well as cooling store-based movie rentals."]

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2. "Fuck Blockbuster": Alex Jackson responds to the above (and inspires a lengthy comments section) over at the Film Freak Central blog.

["You could probably guess where I come down on all this. I really fucking hate Blockbuster. I usually think that people who complain about such things are way out of touch with reality, I mean there are several things that are worth getting really angry about and Blockbuster hiring people who don't know 8 1/2 from 9 1/2 Weeks, making filmmakers turn in R-rated cuts of their NC-17 films, requiring all returned DVDs to be rewound, masking late fees under their "no late fees promotion" as "restocking fees"; it's not on that level. Anybody who gets really mad at that or even places it on the same level as Congressmen cutting taxes while increasing military funding and cutting social spending while adding tighter restrictions on abortion is a pampered little shit. But maybe I'm wrong, this news somehow really infuriates me. The idea that I might have to walk into a Blockbuster to rent Grindhouse is so utterly degrading that it's vaguely sexual. I'd rather rent from McDonald's."]

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3. "'50s R&B star Ruth Brown dies at 78"

["Ruth Brown's recordings of "Teardrops in My Eyes" and "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" dominated the rhythm-and-blues charts in the 1950s and earned her the nickname "Miss Rhythm." But her other nickname might as well be "Miss Survivor" for persevering through the highs and lows of a career spanning six decades. Brown died Friday of complications from a stroke and heart attack at a Las Vegas-area hospital, said Lindajo Loftus, a publicist for the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, which Brown helped establish. She was 78."]

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4. "NASA adds its weight to waste in space": On the once-and-future methods of interplanetary waste management.

["NASA has often expressed concern over the growing problem of celestial jumble. Earth is ringed by hundreds of thousands of junk items, including old rockets, satellites, motors, nuts, bolts and spent instruments from defunct spacecraft. Its decision to relax its rules comes as a Russian cosmonaut, Mikhail Tyurin, prepares to add one more object to the sea of orbital debris. In an advertising stunt for a golf club manufacturer, which has paid the Russian space agency millions of dollars, Tyurin will launch the world's longest golf shot from outside the space station on Wednesday. NASA calculates that the ball will remain in orbit for three days before burning up in Earth's atmosphere, although Russian scientists claim that it could circle the planet for more than three years. If it were to hit the space station — impossible, say experts — the force would be equivalent to that of a 20-tonne truck speeding at 180 km/h."]

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5. "Hollywood hoopla ends in a wedding day": Well, why not. Congratulations you crazy, couch-jumping kids!

["It's no surprise Katie Holmes turned to Giorgio Armani to design her wedding dress. The Italian designer has been dressing Hollywood's stars since he provided Richard Gere's wardrobe for American Gigolo back in the 1980s. Holmes exchanged wedding vows with Tom Cruise, who also wore Armani, at a ceremony at a 15th-century castle in the Italian town of Bracciano at the weekend."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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BSG Saturdays: Season 3, Ep. 8, "Hero"

By Todd VanDerWeff
Battlestar Galactica episodes that don’t strongly tie into the show’s mythology often rank among the show's weakest, so it was a relief that the third season’s eighth episode, the stand-alone "Hero," was a mostly subdued hour -- a meditation on the nature of heroism that resisted the bombast that marks Galactica at its worst. While the story was slight, the ideas behind it weren’t, and the show's actors made it a master class in how to perform ridiculous material without looking ridiculous.

Carl Lumbly (most recently the stalwart Dixon on Alias) dropped in as the week’s big guest star, Bulldog, the focus of the episode. Lumbly has long been an underutilized actor even on series where he was a regular; his ability to project calm in the face of overwhelming odds suits these sorts of fantastic situations. He played easily off of Edward James Olmos (as Admiral Adama), Mary McDonnell (as President Laura Roslin) and Michael Hogan (as Saul Tigh). The quickly-forged chemistry between these actors made the show’s Very Television premise (the return of a character who was once very important to the main characters even though his existence was never mentioned) work rather well.

Scripted by the show’s other executive producer, David Eick (Ron Moore is usually the producer most associated with the success of the series, but he and Eick split the duties on the show fairly evenly), and directed by the show’s lead director, Michael Rymer, "Hero" was surprisingly quiet. It opened with a disconcerting closeup of Lumbly’s panicked, disoriented eyes, instantly presaging a storyline filled with trauma. The episode quickly cut to Roslin putting her ship's affairs back in order following the short reign of Baltar (James Callis, now among the Cylons, and apparently having threesomes with them). This continued the general feeling that the show is reorienting itself after the New Caprica arc that opened the season. But the setting quickly shifted to the CIC, where Adama was watching two Cylon raiders chasing a third raider, piloted by the newly escaped Bulldog. From there, "Hero" proceeded along fairly predictable lines. Bulldog reunited with Adama and Tigh, under whom he'd once served, only to learn that he'd been betrayed by them (Adama shot down Bulldog's craft to protect a covert operation behind Cylon lines at a time of tenuous peace between Cylons and humans). Of course there some question as to whether Bulldog escaped Cylon imprisonment on his own or with the help of his captors; it was ultimately revealed that the Cylons released him, hoping he would take his revenge on Adama when he found out the truth. Of everything in the episode, this resolution was the element of "Hero" that rang most hollow. The Cylons rely on their faith in their God, but their plan in this episode seemed overly dependent on happy coincidence and a level of knowledge they may not have possessed.

But all that was inconsequential in the face of the episode’s true reason for existence -- an inquiry into the idea of heroism, the often dark deeds that support it, and humanity’s need to sweep those deeds under the rug. The loss of Bulldog stung Adama and Tigh deeply both because he was a friend and because of the No Man Left Behind ethos of the Galactica universe’s military (and that of most Western militaries, for that matter). One of the most durable and powerful war film tropes is that of soldiers doing their best to save a comrade who's so badly injured that he's beyond saving. "Hero" neatly flipped that formula on its head, asking, "What if you had to leave that man behind? And what if he came back and learned the truth? Would that make what you did -- an understandable decision in the face of war -- wrong?"

The episode also subtly probed the idea of building up heroic myths around those who don’t really deserve them -- think of real-world analogues Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, who should already be considered heroic just for going into battle but found themselves the subjects of a vast legend-printing machine. Here, however, it's likely that only a handful of people will ever know the truth of what happened between Adama, Tigh and Bulldog behind enemy lines. Roslin suggests in her closing speech that maybe the true penance heroes pay is having those around them believe in their image without ever knowing what awful facts might lurk behind it. Both Adama and Bulldog are allowed to be held up as legendary figures, even though Adama arguably betrayed a friend and Bulldog’s escape was less than heroic (the Cylons left his cell door open). Adama may fear that he caused the Cylon-human war that occupies the series (though Roslin quickly disabuses him of this notion), but he can’t put those fears on public display. For the public, he must appear to be a calm and steady leader, something he’s never been behind closed doors.

On the mythology front, Galactica took a few tentative steps forward, mostly onboard the Cylon basestar, which retreated into the background after being prominently featured in recent weeks. D’Anna (Lucy Lawless) sent herself on an odd sort of spirit quest provoked by strange dreams and fueled by her death and download into a new model. Her dreams end with her reaching a door marked “End of the Line” and being gunned down by commandos. These dreams seem prophetic, but their true import isn’t immediately obvious. Along the way, an interesting subtext was introduced. The human-looking Cylon models to which we're most accustomed were built by their less-evolved, more robotic-looking Centurion ancestors. However, the new Cylons appear to have put the old Cylons under their control -- perhaps to prevent the old Cylons from rebelling, as the old Cylons did against the humans years ago. The Cylons still fear human control, but they have no compunctions about enslaving other sentient beings.

The episode ended with a reconciliation between Adama and Tigh. It was a long time coming. Tigh finally found a proper patch to cover the gaping hole where his eye used to be (a nice moment earlier in the episode had him testing his new field of vision by waving his hand in front of his face, trying to determine when it came into view). Thus "Hero" ended where it began: with the characters patching up wounds sustained over the course of this young season.

***
A note: There’s no new episode next week, as SciFi uses the Thanksgiving weekend to show movies. In the meantime, I’m indebted to Wally, who points out a few things about last week’s lackluster episode that I neglected to mention, and Bear McCreary’s site, where he talks about the score of Galactica in great detail. Both sites would make fine reading while you wait for the show to return.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (November 18th, 2006)

1. "Happy Returns": Nick Schager for NYFA Interactive on the films of Pedro Almodóvar.

["After 16 feature films full of female characters as vibrant, complex, and diverse as any director—male or female—has featured in recent memory, it goes without saying that Pedro Almodóvar is a keen student of the experiences, emotions, and predicaments of women. This isn’t to argue that the iconoclastic director has no use for men; Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), and Talk to Her (2002), to name just three, all prominently feature male protagonists. But as a filmmaker whose childhood in Franco’s repressive Spain sparked a lifelong interest in the celebration of outsider culture—and led to his ascendancy in his native country’s late-1970s/early-1980s transgressive counter-culture—Almodóvar has always gravitated to those marginalized by homogeneous society. Homosexuals, transvestites, and especially women are his favored protagonists, and he humanizes and empowers them with the strength, self-sufficiency, and three-dimensionality that directors traditionally reserve for male characters. A firebrand in the most vivacious, kitschy, genre-loving sense, Almodóvar’s cinema undermines stereotypes by flipping them on their heads. This act of subversion characterizes every film up to, and including, his latest gem Volver, a Mildred Pierce-referencing melodrama in which men are but plot devices used in the service of a tale about feminine friendship, modes of expression, and community."]

***
2. "Comedy, In Theory: The Good, Bad and Pitiable": The gallant Andrew Sarris on three recent comedies (Stranger Than Fiction, Borat, and For Your Consideration).

["Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was directed by Larry Charles, from a screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer, based on a story by Mr. Baron Cohen, Mr. Baynham, Mr. Hines and Todd Phillips, and a character created by Mr. Baron Cohen. I must confess that I was prepared to loathe Borat even before I saw it because of my previous exposure to the seemingly bumbling media star and provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G—supposedly the scourge of stuffed shirts on both sides of the Atlantic. Besides, so many details of Borat had been given away beforehand by the voluminous writings on this alleged new phenomenon that there was little left to discover for myself—which still doesn’t explain why I hate the very idea of Borat. I would be even angrier if the recent American elections hadn’t gone so well. Why? Because I would’ve had a harder time arguing convincingly that the people in the great American heartland aren’t as stupid as Borat insists they are, or as some (if not most) of his admirers imagine they are. Of course, I don’t consider myself provincial—though there are some people who consider New Yorkers to be the most provincial of all Americans. No matter: Borat is not really aiming at us, whoever or whatever we are, but at them out there—at least that small portion of them who didn’t wind up on the cutting-room floor for not signing their release form with Borat’s producer."]

***
3. "I Have Had It With These Motherfuckin' Snakes In This Motherfuckin' Garden!": A CNN report on a star-studded audio Bible.

["The 21-hour production, which lists for $49.99, features the voice talents of more than 250 singers, clergy and actors, including Denzel Washington, Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett and Alfre Woodard. Blair Underwood portrays Jesus, and Samuel L. Jackson, who played a Scripture-spouting hit man in "Pulp Fiction," is the voice of God."]

***
4. "China Abandons Wikipedia Censorship": An article on China's lifting of a year-long ban of the popular Internet encyclopedia.

["The Chinese likely lifted the ban on Wikipedia not to look more permissive in the eyes of the world, but to give its citizens access to more information that will give them an edge in business, said Julien Pain, who runs the Internet Freedom Desk at watchdog group Reporters Without Borders."]

***
5. "Consensual criteria for a good critic": From the Screenville blog. Thanks to Andrew Horbal for the link recommendation.

["Notes from La Critique de cinéma by René Prédal, 2004. What defines film criticism is to talk about films and ponder over the nature of cinema. The existence of criticism implies the artistic characteristics of cinema : dissociation of the artistic value from the movie budget, ambitions and commercial success. The critic is meant to ignore the public reception and speculate on the film's meaning in art history (its value in duration and immanence)."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Doctor Who, Season Two, Ep. 8: "The Impossible Planet"

By Ross RuedigerConsider the notion that three types of viewers partake in the new series of Doctor Who:

1) Classic series viewers who prefer safe, dramatic territory that doesn’t rock the nostalgia boat.
2) Classic series viewers who enjoy seeing Who’s boundaries pushed in as many different directions as possible.
3) Viewers who never watched the classic series and are only familiar with this version.

“The Impossible Planet” and its second half, “The Satan Pit”, satiates all three types with writer Matt Jones’ engaging concoction of science fiction, horror, religion, myth, chaos, H. P. Lovecraft, Alien, and several doses of classic Who itself. Yet the story feels anything but recycled--ideal fodder even for the uninitiated. Never seen Doctor Who? Tonight would be an excellent opportunity to dip your toe in the pool.

Structurally and dramatically the two-parter occupies the same space as “The Empty Child” two-parter did last season. It was touted as being the “first time in the new series the Doctor and Rose set foot on alien soil” (which isn’t entirely correct; they did just that in “New Earth”. Perhaps it was felt the “Earth” part was a cheat?). Given these factors, I went into the piece with some pretty lofty expectations. Obviously I won’t yet discuss Part Two, but despite a few minor criticisms, the story as a whole stands with “The Girl in the Fireplace” as an example of “how to get it right," despite it being a totally different type of story.

The Doctor: (looking at the TARDIS) “I don't know what's wrong with her. She's sort of queasy. Indigestion. Like she didn't want to land.”

From the moment the Doctor (David Tennant) and Rose (Billie Piper) arrive on Sanctuary Base 6 and see the words “Welcome to Hell” spray-painted above some “impossibly old” writing that even the TARDIS translators can’t decipher, events feel destined to spiral into darkness. And then the alien Ood enters, cornering the duo with a monotonous drone: “We must feed. We must feed. We must feed…”

Turns out the Ood aren’t so bad after all; in fact, they are a telepathic slave race that exists only to serve others. The others in this case being the human crew of SB6: Zachary Cross Flane (Shaun Parkes), Ida Scott (Claire Rushbrook), Toby Zed (Will Thorp), Mr. Jefferson (Danny Webb), Danny Bartock (Ronny Jhutti), and Scooti Manista (MyAnna Buring). SB6 is located on a dead planet orbiting a black hole and, by all laws of physics, the planet should be pulled in. And yet it isn’t. The crew is on a research expedition and is attempting to drill to the center of the planet to discover the power source keeping the planet stationary.

The Doctor: “To generate that gravity field and the funnel, you'd need a power source with an inverted self-extrapolating reflex of six to the power of six every six seconds.”

Rose: “That's all the sixes.”

The Doctor: “And it's impossible.”

Something that immediately grabbed me here is the crew greeting the Doctor and Rose with open arms. They’re bewildered and shocked by the time travelers’ sudden appearance, but there isn’t the paranoid reaction the Doctor typically encounters in these situations. Instead of fifteen minutes worth of the Doctor proving “we mean you no harm," the story moves on quickly to more pressing matters, such as the earthquake which destroys several sections of the base, including Storage 6, where the TARDIS is parked.

Once the Doctor and Rose realize they could very well be TARDIS-less for the rest of their lives, they engage in a wonderfully played, awkward heart-to-heart. He ponders the horror of having a mortgage and she proposes the possibility that they could live together--a notion that clearly makes him very uncomfortable. The chat is mercifully interrupted by Rose’s cell phone ringing. A deep voice on the other end speaks: “He is awake”.

Everything starts going impossibly wrong about halfway through the episode. The Ood’s behavior shifts for the worse. A Satanic figure briefly appears on a holographic display behind Zack. The dark voice speaks directly to Toby and the ancient writing inexplicably covers his hands and face. In a fit of what appears to be demonic possession, he kills Scooti by pulling her through a glass window and onto the planet's surface.

Mr. Jefferson: “For how shall man die better, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his father and the temples of his gods?”

There are at least a half a dozen perfect moments in “The Impossible Planet”, but topping the list must be the revelation of Scooti’s fate: the imagery of the lifeless body of a striking young woman, drifting in airless space toward the emptiness of a black hole is both beautiful and haunting. I’m sure I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the realm of filmed sci-fi and the fact that Scooti is only a year older than Rose adds to its resonance.

The now iconic “Don’t turn around” exchange between Toby and the Beast is chillingly executed, as is his subsequent possession. The Ood…well, the Ood. Everything about them just plain works. They appear gentle and harmless, but when they begin turning, their threat is immediately felt. The Bolero sequence rocks. Speaking of music--Murray Gold’s score! He’s composed some great themes for the new series and he’s also come up with some bombastic, thumping material that screams “TV!”; but he’s never done anything as ideally theatrical as the somber theme that recurs throughout this story. It’s sweet frosting atop an already perfectly baked cake.

Everything else aside, you know what most excited me upon viewing this episode? Rose Tyler was back. My Rose. The Rose I fell for last year has returned. Billie Piper is "on" here and for the first time in the season I didn’t have to try to care about her--I just did. And it’s as if she’s “Bonus” Rose, like everything she’s witnessed throughout her time with the Doctor has finally culminated into making her a better and stronger person. This isn’t the Rose of “Tooth and Claw”. She’s realizing this time travel business isn’t all fun, games and family reunions, and that while her place in the universe is no larger than she is, there’s still room to stretch and make important contributions and big differences.

NEXT WEEK: Nothing. No new Who the week of the show’s 43rd Anniversary! The Sci Fi Channel is taking the Thanksgiving weekend off from both Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. Tune in Dec. 1st and dive into “The Satan Pit”.

In the meantime, BBC America begins rerunning the Christopher Eccleston-starring Season One, beginning Tuesday, Nov. 21st, at 10PM (EST).

Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: “The Tomb of the Cybermen”, starring Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, and Deborah Watling.
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Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based critic and columnist, a contributor to The House Next Door, and publisher of The Rued Morgue. For more writing about the series, see "Dr. Who" in the sidebar at right.

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Links for the Day (November 17th, 2006)

1. "The High Hat, Issue #7": The latest edition of the pop culture magazine includes 12, count 'em, 12 articles on Robert Altman, including Short Cuts, California Split, Thieves Like Us, A Prairie Home Companion, Popeye and Secret Honor. Not to mention articles on "The Existential Paradox of Technical Death Metal," the rivalry between Marvel and DC Comics, and a piece on institutions as represented on HBO's The Wire and Deadwood, written by frequent House commenter Hayden Childs.

["Deadwood, for all its profanity and unflinching darkness, is the starry-eyed romantic, pointing to a bond over shared purpose and a growing sense of community within the world of liars, murderers, and hopelessly self-interested bastards. Their feet are stuck in the horseshit and muck that coats the thoroughfare, but the citizens of Deadwood are trying to rise above and become better people. On The Wire, on the other hand, everything is fucked from the top-down and bottom-up, and the guys in the middle — the loose affiliates, true believers, and stone professionals — get squeezed all the way. The community institutions that the citizens of Deadwood have fought and bled to create have become, in The Wire’s universe of perpetual corruption, the very institutions crumbling our civil society to dust."]

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2. "Forgotten Films: Leo the Last": At The ScreenGrab, Bilge Ebiri writes on an overlooked masterpiece from director John Boorman.

["If it wasn’t so damned cinematic, Leo the Last could have probably made for an insane stage musical. It’s built almost entirely of setpieces, some of which feel more like avant-garde dance works than anything else. A hilarious scene where Leo’s family doctor tries to get the household to relax through nude water therapy is filmed largely underwater, where Boorman’s camera can focus lovingly on the subjects’ naked, gelatinous, hypnotically undulating rear ends. The finale, in which Leo and Roscoe lead the poor of the neighborhood against the barricades of Leo’s own mansion, feels as much like a grand theatrical finale as it does a cinematic climax."]

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3. "Chicago 10 to open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival." Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez on the festival's decision to kick off with Brett Morgen's documentary about the Chicago Conspiracy Trial of 1968 -- only the second time that Sundance has programmed a nonfiction feature in this slot.

***
4. "For Your Consideration, take 1." In which Village Voice critic Nathan Lee considers Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration and deems it pleasing.

["For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the la-la lands of Entourage and Mulholland Dr. It's as weird and whimsical an invention as Guest's Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind."]

***
5. "For Your Consideration, Take 2": Wherein L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas breaks the other way.

["For Your Consideration...doesn’t risk ruffling any feathers, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with it: It’s less a satirical bite at the hand that feeds Guest than it is a toothless nibble, and it isn’t particularly funny."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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5 for the Day: Title Sequences

By WagstaffYou’ve gotten your popcorn and taken your seat. Your cell phone is turned OFF. You settle back as the house lights finally dim after 20 minutes of trailers. The production logos vanish and so the opening credits begin. Sometimes this is the best part of a movie. The mood is set – a world of possibility opens up and nothing has come afterwards yet to muck it up. The title sequence acts as a decompression chamber – a transitional portal to another time and place. Some of the best title sequences could work as short films in their own right.

Up until 1950 or so, there were no opening credit sequences per se. The backgrounds and lettering might change, but the format was by and large standard. Then, in 1955, something new happened. Otto Preminger hired New York graphic artist Saul Bass to design the titles for The Man with the Golden Arm. The animated cutouts that Bass set to Elmer Bernstein’s music were influential. Preminger instructed movie projectionists to open the curtains before the credits started, something they weren't in the habit of doing, and the results changed movies forever.

So, without further ado, let the curtains open for five of my favorites – and then on to yours.


1. The Age of Innocence (1993)

Saul Bass was the undisputed king of title design. A graphic designer from the world of New York advertising, he designed some of Alfred Hitchcock’s grandest titles: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho. He worked with directors as diverse as Otto Preminger, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kramer, and John Frankenheimer. Click here and scroll down to see some of his most famous corporate logos. Saul’s work with wife Elaine for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence ranks among his finest. More than just an intro, it’s an integral part of the film. The submerged passions of Edith Wharton’s novel are literalized up front. Through a veil of lace and Wharton’s handwriting, succeeding images of flowers are shown blooming in time-lapse, each one dissolving into the next. Set to Gounod’s music for Faust, red hibiscus blooms (representing delicate beauty and love, according to the Victorian language of flowers) give way to yellow hibiscus (dying love, platonic love, and infidelity). It’s beautiful and outrageously sexual – almost scandalous. The blooms increase in tempo, until the romantic rhythm reaches an orgasmic crescendo and we see a yellow flower open repeatedly, spreading its petals over and over and revealing its pistil. Finally, a volcanic eruption of red petals peels back and dissolves into the hemisphere of a dandelion (faithfulness, happiness, and wishes come true). It’s the most daring and sexually explicit scene in The Age of Innocence – a movie about Protestants made by a man with Catholic appetites.


2. Dr. No (1962)

A white dot moves from left to right across a black screen. It expands into a rifled gun barrel. We look down the barrel, taking aim at a well-dressed man walking left. We are about to pull the trigger, but he gets the jump on us, whirls and fires his Walther PPK. Blood cascades down before our eyes as the white dot begins to shimmy back and forth to Monty Norman’s jazzy “James Bond Theme”. What just happened here? It’s assassin vs. assassin. We went from voyeuristic aggressor to ecstatic victim in only a few seconds. The rest of Dr. No’s credits are a cacophony of flashing, dancing dots, and a riot of 60’s color that is reminiscent of the opening credits of TV’s Lost in Space. The dots give way to superimposed Jamaicans dancing the limbo, and then as the music segues into a calypso reworking of “Three Blind Mice," we see silhouettes of the three blind assassins with walking sticks tapping across a blue and red, purple and orange, nebulous void.

Maurice Binder, who once partnered with Saul Bass, created the credits for 14 Bond films. His style, ranging across decades, is filled with brassy belly-dancers and silky nude silhouettes shot out of a gun; it is humorous and sexy at the same time, and instantly recognizable the world over. Binder took a break from the next two Bond pictures, but came back for Thunderball, but not before the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, initiated a new device that’s been copied by television shows ever after: the pre-credit sequence.


3. The Pink Panther (1963)

Cue Henry Mancini’s immortal “Pink Panther Theme” (dead ant, dead ant.) Enter the Pink Panther, not the titular diamond with a small flaw shaped like an animal that the movie is actually about, but Friz Freleng’s irrepressible creation, an animated panther that would frame the rest of the series and go on to have a cartoon career of his own, one that kept Freleng going after his years at Warner Brothers. This is the one that put cartoon credit sequences on the map. It’s my tribute to all those cartoon titles that were in vogue in the 60’s like Bell, Book, and Candle and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, as well as retro-60’s titles like the ones for Andrew Bergman’s Honeymoon in Vegas. The Pink Panther rearranges names from anagrams. He purrs up against Capucine’s name. He ogles Claudia Cardinale’s name. He wears a monocle and smokes a cigarette from a holder. He gives himself credit where credit isn’t due. He mocks and cajoles various technicians. He gets chased around by Inspector Clouseau (look up bumbling in the dictionary) and leaves pink paw prints everywhere. He entertains us while the names go flashing by. And all the while, Mancini’s music keeps playing…


4. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Last I heard, this 10 minute credit sequence for Leone’s epic western still held the record as the longest. In fact, everything about this masterpiece is long, even the title in Italian (C’era una Volta il West) isn’t much shorter. These credits take their time getting done. Welcome to the world of Sergio Leone, where the slightest action – a facial tic, a sideways look – is amplified and writ large. Leone took Fred Zinnemann’s classic opening for High Noon, turned it inside out, and then inflated it to near bursting.

Three gunslingers in long dusters descend on a quiet Arizona railway station in the middle of nowhere. There’s no Ennio Morricone score yet, just the symphonic, complexly orchestrated sound effects: a creaky door, wind, chalk on a board, a bird in a cage, a rooster and some chickens, and always, throughout, a squeaking windmill. After dispatching with the old stationmaster, and sending an Indian woman packing, they find out the train is two hours late. And so they wait. The three killers spread out across the deserted station, as the empty tracks spread out across the desert. Woody Strode (Stony) walks with slow, purposeful, spur-clinking steps across the rough hewn, impossibly immense loading platform to stand underneath a water tower. Al Mulock (Knuckles) dips his hand in a water trough. Jack Elam (Snaky) yanks out the wires of a clicking telegraph machine (killing the soundtrack momentarily) and then tries to take a nap. A drip of water lands on Stony’s bald head. He puts on his hat to catch the falling drops. Snaky’s nap is thwarted by a buzzing fly. Knuckles cracks his knuckles …loudly. Snaky catches the fly in the barrel of his gun. A train’s whistle is heard in the distance. The men listen. Stony slowly removes his hat, and drinks the water it has collected. The train approaches as Stony cocks his sawed-off repeating rifle, and the three bad men get ready for a confrontation.

All this happens without dialogue; in a western that somebody once described as an opera in which the arias weren’t sung, but stared. Leone’s genius for the tactile textures that film is sometimes capable of is evident throughout. Whiskey bottles look dank and dusty; guns look heavy; clothing appears thickly woven and layered; faces in closeup look as craggy and pockmarked as Monument Valley. The beginning credit sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West is the most self-consciously comical part of the movie, but it sets the immense stage for what follows: a complete triumph of style over content.

5. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Loving care” is the phrase that comes to mind when I think of this title sequence. I find it the most emotionally powerful scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. Elmer Bernstein’s music swells with retrospective innocence and helps things along as we watch the hands of a little girl (Scout’s) opening her cigar box of keepsakes and taking them out to play. Extreme closeups of the objects within make them look like architecture; it's as if title designer Stephen Frankfurt made a miniature camera and got a miniature crew to operate it. As Scout uses her crayons to draw and color a mockingbird, Russell Harlan's exquisite black-and-white photography, through slow loving pans and bittersweet dissolves, shows us a fountain pen, figures of a boy and a girl carved out of soap, a silver whistle, some pennies from 1900, a key, a harmonica, some jacks, one marble rolling up against another, a pair of spectacles, and, of course, Atticus’ watch and chain. Many of the credits are tied to appropriate objects; "music by Elmer Bernstein" is paired with the whistle, for instance. By the end, the girl completes her picture, then tears it. The sequence is suffused with nostalgia; we are already looking back on the story we are about to be told.
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Wagstaff is a contributor to The House Next Door, Liverputty and Edward Copeland on Film.

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Links for the Day (November 16th, 2006)

1. "Five From Rodgers and Hammerstein": Dave Kehr's weekly New York Times DVD column, with some great news for Fritz Lang fans.

["But the oddest gaffe is on the “Carousel” box, which promises an earlier version of the film. The informed DVD consumer would naturally assume this to be Frank Borzage’s rare and beautiful “Liliom” of 1930, based on the Molnar play and starring Charles Farrell as the abusive carnival barker. On the disc, however, a card appears expressing Fox’s profound regrets that the only print that could be found was a dubbed French-language one — at which point up pops Fritz Lang’s brilliant 1934 “Liliom,” made in France, as Lang was moving his base from Berlin to Hollywood, and starring Charles Boyer (whose French certainly had no need to be dubbed) as Molnar’s regretful thug, in what may be his finest performance.]

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2. "Block Quote: Miami Vice": From the blog Movie City Indie, an example of Michael Mann's, shall we say, unique script stylings. Scroll down to the November 14th entry.

["Writer-director Michael Mann's vivid scene descriptions are prodigious, knowing, often show-offy assemblies of terms-of-art, brands, place names, with the odd breathtakingly painterly description. From a 2004 draft, a scene not in the release version of Miami Vice."]

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3. "Busted: Andrew Sullivan": An excellent interview from BustedHalo.com with blogger Andrew Sullivan.

["It’s funny, on the tour I actually came back to the fact that on the cross itself Jesus’ last words were almost, because we are told that his last words are ‘it is accomplished’ or ‘it is finished’ depending on the translation, but even Jesus, at the very end, doubts, ‘My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?’ And even He, at the moment of greatest power and sacrifice in a way doubted that His father had abandoned him. So to think of Christianity as a religion that knows no doubt, that doesn’t find strength in doubt when we see our Lord Himself doubting all along. That’s His humanity. That’s what makes the Gospel so gripping. We’re not reading a story of God as such. We are reading a story of God made man which is what gives it tension. And that’s why the tension between faith and doubt in one’s own faith is itself the faith. The book is multi-layered. In a way, it’s a political book. But really, deep down, it’s a religious book. But at the same time I think the two are connected because I do think our politics have become connected with religion in the wrong way."]

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4. "DVDBeaver.com": Run by Gary W. Tooze, this site offers in-depth, frequently updated reviews of DVDs from all regions.

["DVDBeaver offers a variety of DVD information for the discerning cinema fan. Foreign, Independent and classic films - reviews, articles, comparisons covering all DVD Regions."]

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5. "The Cheapening of the Comics": Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson's 1989 essay on the problems of the modern comic strip.

["Part of the problem is that the very idea that cartoons could be art has been slow to take hold. I talked about Krazy Kat, Pogo, and Peanuts to show that the best cartoons have a serious purpose underneath the jokes and funny pictures. True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2

By Keith Uhlich

The Museum of the Moving Image's (MOMI) comprehensive Jacques Rivette retrospective continues this coming weekend (Saturday, November 18th and Sunday, November 19th) with single screenings of four of the director's features, one of Rivette's shorts, and a Claire Denis documentary on the New Wave maestro himself.

First up is Denis' film, an episode of the television series Cinéma, de notre temps entitled Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman, in which her mentor fields questions from the late French film critic Serge Daney. Screening the same day is Rivette's adaptation of Denis Diderot's novel La Religieuse, entitled The Nun (1966), which I was able to preview. From my Slant Magazine review, published in the website's ongoing Rivette feature:

"No bones about it, The Nun is a mess—a garish potboiler first and a harsh critique of religious institutions last. But it is never less than involving and is anchored by Anna Karina's simmer-to-boil-and-back-again lead performance as Suzanne, the bastard daughter of faded aristocrats who is effectively sacrificed to a corrupt, 18th-century religious hierarchy. More icon than actress, Karina bravely allows the constrictive period garb to engulf her natural vitality. When she lashes out at the cruel forces surrounding her, she is feral, possessed, but little more than a puppet fighting, with unhinged futility, against unbreakable strings."

The Nun will be preceded by Rivette's short Le Coup de Berger. From Frenchculture.org's entry on the director:

"In 1956, Rivette shot Le Coup du berger, his first short on 35mm, which was co-written and co-financed by [Claude] Chabrol, and featured performances by other New Wave directors. The story follows the fate of a mink coat, passed through a series of unfaithful lovers."

The Saturday screenings conclude with Rivette's 1975 film Duelle, which the New York Times harshly dismissed prior to its 1976 New York Film Festival screening:

"Duelle ... is about the struggle between a Sun spirit and a Moon spirit, in the course of which several ordinary people are badly chewed up. It is simply about itself, despite its contemporary references and setting. It spills over into nothing of ours but décor, and even the décor is an airless, garish, 1930's affair. The whole thing is filmed inside a Tiffany lamp. As the characters stand at the far end of significant perspectives, they resemble nothing so much as show-window mannequins draped portentiously in the foreground of some nonexistent intrigue—sheikhs seducers or beached Rolls-Royces in the background."

The estimable Dave Kehr offers a more positive take in his Chicago Reader capsule:

"The second installment of a four-part series that was never completed, Jacques Rivette's 1975 film is a haunting fantasy about two goddesses (Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto) who descend to contemporary Paris and battle for possession of a magic stone that will allow them to remain on earth. The plot decodes into a conflict between the magical and the realistic cinema--Lumiere versus Melies--and Rivette works out the implications of this contradiction in his mise-en-scene, which applies a long-take, realistic technique to enigmatic situations and mysterious characters. Darker and quieter in tone than Rivette's better-known Celine and Julie Go Boating, though just as inventive and cryptically intelligent."

The retrospective's Sunday screenings kick off with Rivette's 1966 episode of Cinéastes, de notre temps, which profiles the great director Jean Renoir. Entitled Jean Renoir, the Boss, this documentary had the distinction of being edited by Jean Eustache, director of the highly influential The Mother and the Whore. From Rivette scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum's Chicago Reader review:

"In 1966 Jacques Rivette made a three-part TV documentary titled Jean Renoir, the Boss, and its 90-minute centerpiece has rarely been seen since. "A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue," ... is a missing link that's key to understanding Rivette's work. It's a raw record of the after-dinner talk between one of the world's greatest directors and his greatest actor, both in their early 70s, punctuated by clips from the five films they worked on together -- Tire-au-Flanc (1928), On Purge Bébé (1931), La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), and Tosca (1941). It also includes occasional remarks by Rivette, the documentary's producers (Janine Bazin and Andre S. Labarthe), and the stills photographer (the distinguished Henri Cartier-Bresson). The joy Renoir and Simon clearly share at being reunited is complemented by Rivette's determination to exclude nothing, so that the "direction of actors" applies to him as much as to his two principals, each of whom can be said to be directing the other. For both Renoir and Rivette, direction requires a profound open-mindedness, alertness, and acceptance."

The final screening of the weekend is Noroît, Rivette's 1976 feature starring Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont, the second film in his projected, though never completed four-part series, Scenes from a Parallel Life. Rosenbaum again, from his Chicago Reader capsule:

"While the mise en scene and locations are often stunning, the film seems contrived to confound conventional emotional reactions of any sort. It's a movie where the casual slitting of someone's throat and the swishing sounds of Lafont's leather pants are made to seem equally relevant--a world apart from Rivette's ... La belle noiseuse. Yet Rivette's feeling for duration, immediacy, and moods of menace are fully present here, and days or weeks after you see this chilling conundrum of a movie, sounds and images may come back to haunt you. Rarely screened--the film never even had a commercial run in France--this monstrous work deserves to be seen as a uniquely disquieting experience."
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"Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman" screens Saturday, November 18th at 2pm. "The Nun", with "Le Coup de Berger" screens Saturday, November 18th at 4:30pm, and "Duelle" screens Saturday, November 18th at 7:30pm. "Jean Renoir, the Boss" screens Sunday, November 19th at 2pm and "Noroît" screens Sunday, November 19th at 4:30pm. The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is located at 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens County, New York. Click here for travel directions and here for the full Jacques Rivette retrospective screening schedule.

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Links for the Day (November 15th, 2006)

1. S.T. Van Airsdale on the future of the Village Voice's film section over at his blog, The Reeler.

["For everyone fretting about the changes sweeping the vaunted film section of The Village Voice, you can relax: Jim Hoberman is staying. There is that. The interim replacement for fired section editor Dennis Lim may have lasted only two days before giving his notice, the budget may roughly amount to just a third of its size prior to last winter's merger with the New Times chain, the popular year-end critics' poll may have been cancelled, a number of respected freelance critics and feature writers may have disappeared from its pages and its de-emphasis on local independent and repertory releases may end up alienating some of its advertisers, but at least you have that one institutional continuity to bank on. Everything else is anybody's guess."]

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2. "Adrienne Shelly Foundation Established": Not a link, but a release with details on a foundation dedicated to the memory of the late actress Adrienne Shelly.

["(New York – November 14th) The Adrienne Shelly Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the memory of Writer/Director/Actress Adrienne Shelly, is being founded by her husband, Andy Ostroy. Plans include a Womens’ Filmmaking Scholarship Fund, with a particular emphasis on awarding film school scholarships and helping women make the transition from acting to directing. “I know what Adrienne would want most would be to help women get a chance to pursue their dream,” says Ostroy. More initiatives from the foundation will be announced at a later date. Those wanting to contribute can send checks made out to THE ADRIENNE SHELLY FOUNDATION, via Belardi/Ostroy LLC, 16 West 22nd Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10010. Checks should be post-dated December 15th, until the legal status of the Foundation is finalized. Shelly, who first became known as an actor for her teamings with director Hal Hartley on 'The Unbelievable Truth' and 'Trust,' recently appeared in 'Factotum.' She wrote and directed three feature films in which she acted, 'Sudden Manhattan,' 'I’ll Take You There,' and the soon-to-be-seen 'Waitress.' She also appeared in over 20 other films."]

Press Contact: Reid Rosefelt 718-855-2804, 917-691-3312, rosefelt@nyct.net]

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3."What if George Bailey had vertigo?": Edward Copeland's contribution to the Alfred Hitchcock blog-a-thon.

["As a blizzard bears down on him, a despondent George Bailey stares off a bridge into a storm-tossed river, contemplating what it would be like if he'd never been born. Before he can take his final plunge though, another man slices through the air and into the water, prompting George to save the stranger's life, much as Scottie Ferguson would save Madeleine from the San Francisco drink 12 years later in a different film by a different director. George and Scottie were brought to screen life by the same actor, James Stewart, but the films in which these two characters debuted came courtesy of two very different directors -- Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock. Capra used Stewart first and,when examined, the director's development of an all-American, noble image for Stewart became the embodiment of the everyman Hitchcock needed to fully explore the average person's darker side."]

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4.Girish Shambu on Jacques Tati's Playtime.

["What Playtime shows us is the ridiculous reverence we display—silently, with hardly a thought—for the modern spaces in which we move about all day, every day. If we could somehow turn an eye on ourselves and see ourselves in these spaces, we’d see the unwittingly hilarious role each of us plays in that epic comedy, 'modern living.'"]

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5. "Dancing Fool": Slate's Seth Stevenson on Michael Jackson's music video collection Visionary.

["Visionary provides an excellent opportunity to analyze more than a quarter-century of Jacko on film. Through the course of these 20 clips, we can chart the evolution of Jackson's public persona. (And skin tone.) We can track the waning of his popularity. (And septum.) Jackson's growing isolation, his unchecked mania, his alleged pedophilia: all there in the videos, if you look closely enough.]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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You Must Change Your Life: The Films of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman

By Dan Callahan"My father was a genius," says Isabella Rossellini, in her searching Guy Maddin-directed short tribute to her father Roberto, My Dad is 100 Years Old, which marks his centenary. After this statement, she pauses briefly, then says, "I think." Her confusion is sweet and quite understandable. Rossellini has had passionate fans, especially the directors of the French New Wave like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Rohmer, all of whom wrote heady tributes to his difficult, ambiguous films. One can't imagine Breathless (1960) without Rossellini's example, and surely Antonioni was influenced, especially by Voyage in Italy (1953). Martin Scorsese devotes long passages to Rossellini's key early works in his documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage To Italy (1999), and there's an air of special pleading in his endorsement, particularly when he talks up Europa '51 (1952), as if he knows that many people won't give it a chance because of its out of synch soundtrack.

Rossellini was an artist serenely certain of his own intellectual and emotional depth, and he gave endless, detailed interviews describing what his work means or was meant to mean; sometimes the results did not quite match his intentions, for he was precise and sloppy in roughly equal measure. A full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art throughout December 2006 gave us all a chance to take stock of his uneven but seminal career. The festival is particularly valuable because it's showing many of the hard-to-see "educational" television movies of his later years, as well as his essential post-war trilogy, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947). If I were to pick Rossellini's best film, it would be The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), a mysterious and gently comic look at the saint and his followers. But anyone who feels that the cinema's chief glory lies in the collaboration of great directors with great actresses must check out the first three features Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman. In almost every way, personally and artistically, they were unsuited to each other, yet their mismatch led to movies that laid the groundwork for the burst of modernist filmmaking in the sixties and seventies.

Rossellini began life as something of a playboy and layabout whose main interests were chasing women and driving fast cars. These interests would persist, naturally, as he fell into moviemaking during the Fascist years in Italy, but he became a standard-bearer for Italian cinema after the war with Open City, which introduced the much-debated concept of neo-realism. This Italian movement for raw reality looks fairly contrived today, especially in the work of De Sica. But contrivance of any kind is never simple in Rossellini’s work: he perplexed his followers by jostling melodramatic, stylized characters and situations against on-the-fly, spontaneous elements. In his best films, these opposing elements feed and strengthen each other, so that Anna Magnani in Open City and the showcase film L'amore (1948) is like a larger-than-life apotheosis of a real woman captured documentary-style.

When she saw Open City and then Paisan, Ingrid Bergman was so impressed that she sent Rossellini a rather shameless fan letter. "If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only 'ti amo,' I am ready to come and make a film with you," she wrote. At that time, she was the biggest star in Hollywood, fervently beloved, especially for her sexy nun in Leo McCarey's The Bells of St. Marys (1945), which is actually somewhat close to Rossellini's hybrid of deep sentiment and patient, often aggressive observation.

Bergman thought she was fed up with the artificiality of studio filmmaking and seemed to long to be shot down in the streets as Magnani was in Open City, the tops of her stockings erotically exposed in death. Rossellini didn't know who Bergman was when he got her letter, but he had razor-sharp instincts, and he moved in on her with all the considerable charm at his disposal. With their first film, Stromboli (1950), Rossellini keyed into Bergman's guilt-ridden and torrential 1940's sexuality and touched off an international scandal when he won her away from her husband and child, then got her pregnant out of wedlock. This caused an enormous uproar in America, with Senator Edwin C. Johnson denouncing them from the Senate floor, calling Rossellini a "love pirate" and "degenerate."

Remarkably, Stromboli doesn't advocate the rejection of caution for passion; indeed, it is partly a film about how sexuality simply isn't enough to get by on (another influence for Antonioni's subsequent meditations on similar themes). Bergman plays Karin, a displaced woman who marries a simple fisherman (Mario Vitale) to get out of a refugee camp; he takes her to live on Stromboli, a rough, nearly deserted island dominated by an active volcano. We don't learn much about Karin's life before and during the war, but we do see that she can only relate to people sexually, whether it's her husband, a child in the street or a priest. This is not a likable woman. When Isabella Rossellini plays her mother in My Dad is 100 Years Old, she gives Bergman a kind of spacey ruthlessness that matches up with what we see of Karin on Stromboli. Isabella's Ingrid briefly ponders how she hurt Anna Magnani by stealing Rossellini away from her, then blithely and practically says, "Too bad." Bergman was a woman who famously said that happiness was "good health and a bad memory." But when she was with Rossellini, he made sure that Bergman never fell back on such winner-like evasiveness. Rossellini attacks narcissism relentlessly, which is why his films are especially necessary today, when self-involvement is a seldom-assailed cult.

In Stromboli, Bergman restlessly dramatizes boredom and unease, in much the way Monica Vitti would for Antonioni. Rossellini calls her on her opportunistic-actress sexuality, but he also celebrates her beauty, for the first and last time, lingering on her sensual mouth, her sexy long hair, and her juicy behind in tight slacks. It's as if he's considering this woman, his quarry, and he's not sure he likes what he sees (it took Von Sternberg six films with Dietrich before he could be as tough with himself as Rossellini is from the very beginning). "You are not modest," says a Stromboli crone, as Bergman's Karin tries to brighten up her drab house. Bergman's angry reaction to her condemnation seems extreme, as if her own frustration with this neo-realist venture is bleeding into her performance. Karin's attempted seduction of the local priest is as brazen as Bergman's initial letter to Rossellini, and the priest rebukes her with the director's cardinal exhortation: "Think!" (It is this same call for reflection that leads their daughter Isabella to doubts about her father's importance.)

Karin is a woman filled with vanity and pride—she has no faith in God, which means she has no faith in herself. "With me, God has never been merciful," she says, and later, to the priest, she insists, "Your God won't help!" The punishing life she is forced to lead on Stromboli is a metaphor for the unceasing hardships of existence, and also a living (puritan?) example of the need to reject complacency and creature comforts for tough-minded meditation. Karin's hedonistic strategies to distract herself from real life are seen as spiritually depleting, whether they are sexual, artistic or simply based in the assumptions of her class. We find out she comes from an upper class family, but she probably exaggerates her station, since Karin and Bergman are both prone to actressy embellishment. It might seem mistaken to conflate Karin and Bergman herself to such a degree, but Rossellini has no patience with artificial constructs.

Working knowledge of the circumstances behind the film's making add quite a lot to its layers of discourse, but its power lays well beyond the realm of gossip. Pregnant, Karin tries to escape the island by walking past the volcano, but harsh nature holds her back and leads her to thoughts of suicide. "I'll finish it!" she cries. "I haven't the courage!" She falls asleep in total despair, then wakes up in the morning transformed. "Oh God, oh God," she says, quietly, as she bathes in the purifying sun (a radiant close-up of Bergman's face opening up to love). "What mystery," she says. "What beauty." Karin reflects honestly about her life on Stromboli: "They were horrible. They don't know what they're doing. I'm even worse," she concludes, calmly.

In a moment of true religious salvation, she accepts blessed responsibility for the child inside her, just as Bergman and Rossellini decided not to abort their child, which would have saved them so much trouble. The (actual) child in her stomach is a miracle, but Karin doesn't know if she's up to the challenge. She ends the film shouting to God for the strength and courage to carry on, as Rossellini cuts to white birds flying free in the sky. Stromboli, also called Stromboli terra di dio (Land of God), embodies the uncanny invocation of the Rilke poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo," which ends with, "there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." Like so many of Rossellini's other movies, it is a stirring call to spiritual revolution.

In their next film, Europa '51, Bergman has shorter hair and seems much more matronly. The sexual interest we feel in Stromboli has ebbed away, but in its place is a loving celebration of this actress's stubborn will and her longing for a higher purpose, which is what led her to Rossellini in the first place. It's a generous gift of a film from a director to an actress and it has a stark, altruistic purity, for it seems clear that did not mesh well with Bergman on a personal level past their initial coming-together, though they did marry and have more children under the pressure of the world's outraged gaze. (For the full story of Rossellini’s life and work, see Tag Gallagher’s encyclopedic, monumental biography, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini.)

Bergman plays Irene, a flippant, rushed society woman who fatally ignores her young son. We see that their relationship was once too close, and that Irene is disturbed by the boy's lover-like clinging (she tells him to turn around as she dresses, and when he reaches for her, she swats him away like a bug). The boy throws himself off a steep staircase during a dinner party and is rushed to the hospital. When the smarmy Communist Andre (Ettore Giannini) tells Irene that he heard the boy talking in his hospital bed and that his jump was a suicide attempt, Bergman shoots him the exact scary, resentful glare she gives her monstrous daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). This was her last feature, her only good movie after her tenure in Italy, and Rossellini approved of it, glad that his former wife had escaped Hollywood lies one last time without him.

An authentic, self-regarding actress is almost always too selfish to be a good mother, and Rossellini confronts Bergman with this in these opening scenes of Europa '51, but then he gives her the time and space to develop an abstract maternal love that will encompass all of humanity. As the film goes on, Rossellini focuses increasingly on Bergman's extraordinary face, her eyes filled with sharp, conflicting ideas (the director-husband gives her this quality through the example of his own furious intellect and through very careful lighting, for Bergman was never known as the brightest candle on the piano). Her Irene is a prim woman, unlike Karin, but she learns to love and understand everyone, moving towards people who need her: the poor, prostitutes, even criminals. Her upper-class husband (Alexander Knox) doesn't understand this spiritual conversion, and he eventually places her in an insane asylum. Irene will continue to find herself through helping the mentally afflicted, just as Rossellini's St. Francis is transfigured when he embraces a leper.

Europa '51 has severe problems. A lot of its dialogue is didactic, Giannini's Communist is a cardboard figure, and Giulietta Masina's free-and-easy proletarian earth mother is grotesquely miscalculated both visually and aurally (her voice is dubbed by a woman with a heavy Bronx accent). As mentioned before, the dialogue usually doesn't synch up, and the political commentary is both dated and obvious. No matter. Through the concentration of Rossellini and Bergman, through the channel of his mind and her heart, Europa '51 works beautifully as an expression of longing for universal love in a ruinously self-centered modern world. "You're not alone," Irene tells a new inmate of the asylum. "Don't worry. I'm with you. I'll stay with you." Rossellini knows that everyone should be able to say this and hear this, in turn, and that it truly doesn't matter who you say it to in the end. The point of the film is that it should be said and heard, genuinely, as often as possible, and that the sickness of twentieth century egoism should never prevent us from loving others in the most promiscuous way.

Rossellini then made a short film with Bergman for the omnibus movie Siamo donne (1952), which was supposed to present scenes from the real lives of several actresses (such as Rossellini's scorned lover Anna Magnani). Their episode, called "The Chicken," features a somewhat tired-looking Bergman explaining a "silly" story about a bothersome fowl. It is indeed silly, and pointless, but it reveals another facet of how Rossellini viewed his wife. We see her sitting on her porch in sunglasses, reading, drinking and anxiously fuming, while her love child with Rossellini, Robertino, stands perilously close to some water. "No one pays attention to me!" Bergman shouts, as her child teeters on the brink of disaster. Bergman's physical awkwardness, inattention to her children, vague go-getter spirit and deep sense of shame are played for comedy, not too successfully, but in a way that let's us see Rossellini's growing disenchantment with her.

Voyage in Italy, their third movie together, is a key work in the history of film: thorny, alienated and alienating, it inaugurated the exquisite unease of the sixties art film (much to Rossellini's later dismay). "Noise and boredom," snipes George Sanders' Alex, as Bergman's Katherine drives them through the Italian countryside. They play the Joyces, an English couple on holiday, assaulted at every turn by the rude vitality of Naples. Katherine is a dreamy, over-lipsticked woman in a leopard-print coat, while Alex is a haughty man who uses sarcasm to hide his deepest feelings. During an uneasy would-be siesta in the glaring sun, Katherine recalls a young poet who loved her, telling Alex how he came to see her when he was at death's door. "How very poetic," he says. "Much more poetic than his verses." This put-down of her facile romanticism clues us in to how much Alex loves his wife, and also on how exhausted he is by their differences. The estrangement the Joyces feel from each other is so deep that it takes on a cosmic significance—this is a film about pure existential panic. Rossellini got what he wanted from Bergman and Sanders by keeping them off-balance, never giving them a set script or telling them what the film was about. He knew what the film was about: Bergman and Sanders not knowing what the film was about, their performer's anxiety standing in for the Joyces' dread, and the mistake of Rossellini's own marriage to a Hollywood star.

Roberto's brother Renzo composed the scores for most of his films, and Renzo's work adds subtle, but extreme emotion to the often pitiless intellectual rigor of his brother's movies. His ominous music follows Katherine as she tours many a museum and is assailed again and again by the taunting sensuality of the past. Heat and leisure strip this couple of every defense mechanism they had, and their sudden uncertainty leads them to question everything, as Mrs. Moore does in Forster's A Passage to India, wondering at the unfathomable emptiness of the universe, the dome beyond the dome beyond the dome. Bergman and Sanders are framed so that their faces are stuck uncomfortably off-center, as if they were butterflies pinned to a wall. She's a tight-ass, he's a smart-ass, and they step on each other's nerves until they impulsively agree to a divorce.

One day, Rossellini set up his camera as an excavation was being done; he did not know that a dead couple would be revealed under the dust. When this happened, he knew he had the ending of his movie. Katherine cries out when she sees the bodies, and the Joyces wander away together, Renzo Rossellini's music expressing a bottomless sense of desolation. "Life is so short," Katharine says, the deepest thought this limited woman can come up with to meet the ultimate revelation of her own mortality. "That's why one should make the best of it," replies Alex, in an English public school get-on-with it tone that is pierced by an awareness of the wholly inadequate quality of such a response. This is a man who is much smarter than his wife, though he's still an emotional coward, and Sanders, one of the most overlooked of all great film actors, plays all these levels with unerring instinctual marksmanship. When Alex hears his own tone of voice, the message he gets couldn't be clearer: you must change your life, not by divorcing your wife but by trying to love her honestly. Rossellini uses a crane shot, unusual for him, to express the miracle of their coming back together during a parade. The ending suggests that marital compromise is a kind of salvation. The Joyces pledge to stay with each other. Rossellini and Bergman headed closer to separation.

Their next collaboration was a movie of the Paul Claudel/Arthur Honegger oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake (1954), which they had toured extensively throughout Europe. It's an almost purely joyous film and stands as Rossellini's final gift to his wife, who had earned the right to play Joan the saint with her steady commitment to her husband's difficult vision. It begins with Joan ascending to heaven amid a blurred kaleidoscope of angels (Rossellini's visual influence for Joan was Méliès). In the Cinecittà print shown at Moma, Bergman speaks her role in Italian, and this language really brings out her passion; her mature beauty, even in stage-white make-up, verges on the awe-inspiring. Many of her scenes are played in long shot against a backdrop of stars, as if Rossellini was finally allowing that Bergman is a star too, and a special one.

A gross Commedia dell’arte court (including sheep and a sprightly pig) condemn Joan—Rossellini preaches the value of total humility and is fiercely against all forms of power, especially kings and governing bodies. The whole film describes how Joan conquers her fears and stays true to herself, and the stirring climax comes when she flings up her arms and shouts, "I'll burn up like a candle!" She accepts her martyrdom blissfully, though in the end, at the actual stake, some of her doubts return (just as Bergman both believed in and doubted her husband's artistic methods). The Honegger music is drug-like in its ability to produce euphoria, the mise en scène is simple and affecting, and Bergman reaches her Rossellini-era apotheosis as she cries, "Hope is triumphant! Faith is triumphant! God is triumphant!" This fourth major Rossellini-Bergman film is barely ever screened, and it should be made more widely available (there is also a version dubbed in French that doesn't use Bergman's voice, but the Italian version is superior).

Their last film together, Fear (1954), is a dark-hued failure, a plot-driven tale of blackmail and forced emotional torment that doesn't seem to interest Rossellini all that much. He observes the rote agony of his wife with a rather contemptuous eye, especially her bizarrely sensual climactic profession of love to a husband who has spent the whole film torturing her. ("Ah Ingrid," Hitchcock often sighed, at parties. "She'd do it with doorknobs.") After this, they divorced and she went back to Hollywood, appearing in a succession of lousy commercial movies, while he moved away from narrative into documentary and strange, uninflected historical re-creations for television. But the first three films Rossellini made with Bergman are essential viewing and open to many new interpretations. Life is too short to plumb all their meanings, but, as Alex Joyce sadly says, we should make the best of it, watch them as often and as closely we can, and let them strip us of our vanity until we lay like Karin on the volcano, alive to the light of a new day within ourselves.
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Dan Callahan is a contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine, and various other online and print publications. The Museum of Modern Art is located at 11 West 53rd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan. Click here for more information on the Roberto Rossellini retrospective.

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Hardly Novel: Stranger Than Fiction

By Ryland Walker KnightWill Ferrell is Harold Crick, an IRS auditor with an OCD-like daily use for his knack for mathematics. Emma Thompson is Karen Eiffel, a neurotic and depressive writer who cannot finish her newest novel. Harold Crick is the protagonist of Karen Eiffel’s newest novel – supposedly an unassuming everyman, living his everyday life in an anytown, unaware of his fate. But he is fully aware, because he’s been hearing Eiffel narrate his day-to-day torpor and she’s spot on with every minute detail, like the sound of folders pulled across one another mimicking soft ocean waves cresting on a beach. Her novel is moot if Crick is aware of his “imminent death” because that hideous phrase “little did he know” is simply wrong: he knows. Stranger Than Fiction is a movie, confused about its intent and clumsily executed at that. Zach Helm is a screenwriter, clever and witty and myopic. Marc Foster is a director, quick to telegraph the screenplay in an effort to streamline the story while undermining his cast’s roundly good performances with borrowed tricks and a meticulous art direction that serves only to distract.

The aggravation sets in right up front with a visual gimmick that is lifted wholesale from Fight Club’s Ikea catalogue sequence: Harold Crick’s precision (counting brushstrokes, tying a half-Windsor, the speed of his gait as he tries to catch the bus) is animated onscreen with little white numbers ticking up and diagrams unfolding just off the central action. We’re supposed to see this as an inroad into Harold’s mind: that he works up calculations for co-workers instantaneously proves he’s boxed in by his undeniable squaredom. The action is described by that obnoxious, third-person omniscient narrator Eiffel (Thompson) with buzz words like “innocuous” and the aforementioned “imminent”.

It might all be unwatchable if it weren’t for Ferrell. He built his name on broad comedy from the beginning but, in fact, he’s a real actor with an enviable skill set, able to subvert the gimmicky hucksterism of Ricky Bobby and Ron Burgundy when needed. His gift for infusing subtle comedy into a straight man role recalls those of his logical predecessor, Bill Murray’s, in one of his best and least-seen performances, The Razor’s Edge. Unfortunately, at every turn, Forster rears his misguided hand to bitch slap the movie, and Farrell’s Crick, into submission. Consider the scene where Crick breaks down, unable to endure Eiffel's incessant narration, and tears apart his apartment. Thompson’s voice is absent, and Ferrell narrates the scene himself, yelling at his toothbrush and bed lamp and closet. It’s hilarious, really, how he throws himself into this by-the-numbers scene -- but halfway through, Forster slips in a string section to tell us this is poignant, completely shifting the tone for no reason, rendering the flailing awkward instead of funny. This abrupt tonal shift maneuver is used again and again, and it never works.

After striking out with a shrink (a wasted Linda Hunt), Harold turns to the caffeine-addled literary theory Professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman with the manic runoff from his I [Heart} Huckabees performance. Harold hopes that the professor might help him figure out whether he can stop his imminent death, or maybe identify his omniscient narrator; needless to say, this leads to quirky banter, with plenty of laughs earned by both actors. It’s here that Helm tries his hand at appropriating some of Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks from Adaptation. No surprise, they don’t translate. These scenes succeed because of the inherent charm of both actors, not because they offer a well-reasoned deconstruction of narrative. It’s textbook literary theory: anybody can think this way if they took the right course.

Thompson’s Karen Eiffel, like this film, is a mess. Here we have an Oscar-winning actress playing a reclusive Pynchonesque writer whose prose sounds no more brilliant than what you'd find in the innumerable pulp paperbacks littering the globe. She seems like the film’s worst creation until Queen Latifah shows up in as an assistant sent by the publisher to ensure the completion of Eiffel’s novel. Latifah’s mainly a mouthpiece for a litany of “Less smoking, more writing” inanities. Thompson, however, rises above the material and delivers a well wrought portrait of a woman struggling with more than words, even if the screenplay doesn’t call for it; this more or less relegates Latifah to the cinematic dunce corner, where she does even less for the movie. Their scenes are at once both intermittently rewarding and pointlessly maddening: at one point Eiffel is doing “research” on death (and how to kill Harold Crick) in an ER, and when she realizes those gurneyed past her will likely survive, she asks a nurse where the people who won’t live are located. But the scene ends with a broad “You crazy missus” one-liner rather than the embedded black humor.

Farrell’s deft timing is the film’s most rewarding element. He’s able to sell Harold’s transformation from closed-in cipher to exuberant lover/liver despite all the hurdles the screenplay and the director place in his path There’s no logical reason he and Maggie Gyllenhaal -- playing a local baker he's sent to audit -- should have any chemistry at all, much less that which they cook up in their improbable romance. There are at least two too many movies fighting inside Stranger Than Fiction, and they all remind the viewer of better movies they’ve seen before. If the film had hewed close to Harold Crick as long as possible, and stayed away from Karen Eiffel in that space, it may have succeeded in balancing its meta-movie tangents with the warmth of the romance. Ferrell’s charisma can almost make me believe that, no matter how blatantly Marc Forster illustrates the ideas.
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Ryland Walker Knight is a Seattle-based critic and the publisher of the blog Vinyl is Heavy. This is his first article for The House Next Door.

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5 for the Day: 180 Degrees

By Dan JardineI am not of the Pauline Kael School of film criticism that argues that your initial impression of a film is the only one that matters, and to revisit and reevaluate a film is a fool’s errand fraught with the potential for emotional and intellectual dishonesty. Indeed, I can think of plenty of legitimate reasons to take stock of a film anew. What if there were mitigating environmental factors -- such as problems with the projector or the sound, or even with the audience itself -- that hampered your ability to enjoy the film? What of format issues? I mean, what if, like me, your first experience with Lawrence of Arabia was on television, in full screen format and interrupted by commercials? Or what if you were in the wrong head space after a fight with your partner or a bad day at work and weren’t able to give the film the attention and scrutiny it deserved?

More importantly, and more to the point of this piece, what if you just aren’t ready for the film? What if you are too raw, too young, simply too damned inexperienced to appreciate the qualities of the film in question? Would you not have an obligation to assess these films again, once you had put the necessary miles on your odometer? Such has been the case many times over the course of my lifetime as a film viewer and reviewer, and it has occasionally led me to startling revelations. As I am limited to discussing five films on which my opinion has done a complete 180 degree turn, I have arbitrarily chosen to look at films I first saw I when was not yet ready to fully appreciate their wonders.

1. Too Cinematically Inexperienced: Citizen Kane. It’s a cliché to be among the hordes who confess to being confounded by all the praise heaped on this movie. It seemed to me merely a mildly engaging character study of an overly ambitious man. I’m just glad I stuck with it, watched a truckload of good movies from the era, and did my homework by reading my fair share of film analysis, then gave the film another chance when I could better appreciate why it is not simply a cinematic milestone, but also a reel blast. Kane is, as Roger Ebert ably notes, “a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound,” but if anything, he soft sells Welles' accomplishments. Remember, Kane's debued when films were still in their infancy -- barely half a century old -- and just as Cervantes brought together many of the elements of the novel and through some sort of artistic alchemical experimentation managed to create Don Quixote, so too did Welles draw on all his knowledge and that of brilliant collaborators like Gregg Toland, to craft a film of rare influence and importance. As such, it is understandable how today an inexperienced viewer might miss out on things like Welles’ theatrical use of set designs and lighting and his innovative use of deep focus photography to suggest the inner workings of his main character (check out the expressionistic horror of Xanadu once Kane has lost all that is dear to him, or the insightful manipulation of same to convey the implosion of Kane’s world). Further, it was only after I’d spent time with James Joyce that I could appreciate what Welles was up to with the stream-of-consciousness-inspired, a-chronological narrative dance that marks the structure of this film. And while Kane represents the pinnacle of cinematic achievement for its day, an accumulation of all that film could do up until that point, it is equally clear that the film’s legacy -- the ever-lengthening shadow it cast over moviegoers and moviemakers -- continues to grow. However, if I’d been content with my first impression, I would never have had the chance to find myself resting in its shade.

2. Too Emotionally Inexperienced: Ikiru. Here is where you will begin to see some overlap in the explanations accompanying these choices. When I first saw Ikiru, I was also too cinematically inexperienced, with few foreign films under my belt. Furthermore, I was also in the wrong headspace because at that point, my experience of director Akira Kurosawa consisted solely of Seven Samurai, and I was childishly hoping for more of the same (see Dr. Strangelove for more of the same phenomenon at work.) But getting to the nut of it, I just wasn’t ready to be confronted by a story about a mousy old man whose life is filled with regret and fear. However, after years of struggling with the social forces of conformity, as well as awakening to the dawning realization that our bureaucratic world is filled with a seemingly incessant demand to compromise our personal dreams -- and not to mention my time spent with the existentialists (see The Conversation below for more on same) -- I was finally able to appreciate what Kurosawa had accomplished. And the iconic scene of Watanabe (the peerless Takashi Shimura) singing and swinging in the playground during a snowstorm certainly resonates more with those who know personally the terrible suffering associated with such loss.

3.and 4. (a tie) Too Intellectually Inexperienced (aka “Dumb & Dumber"): Dr. Strangelove and The Conversation. Again, you will note some category overlap. With both films I had only seen one film by each director at that point. With Kubrick, it was 2001, which I saw in the theatres at the tender age of 10. I was gobsmacked: I was equal parts fascinated and flabbergasted by Kubrick’s vision, and I went to see Dr. Strangelove hoping for more of the same. Unfamiliar with the entire canon of Kubrick, who never repeated himself, I was decidedly unimpressed by the results. With Strangelove, at least 75% of the jokes were lost on me (what can I say? I was a teenage rube from the sticks) and it wasn’t until years later that I realized that Peter Sellers (a) played 3 (and was penciled in for 4, until he broke his ankle) roles (b) was a comic genius. With The Conversation, all I knew of Coppola was The Godfather, which, as an early teen, I had to fight my parents to see, and which threw me for a loop. Literary and cinematic inexperience played a large part in my inability to appreciate Coppola’s vision—I knew nothing of existentialism or the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, nor would I for at least another decade. However, once I found them, and to some degree myself, I was able to give The Conversation the benefit of my more experienced participation, meeting the film part way, and wrapping my head and heart round the uncertain life of one of cinema's great everymen, Harry Caul.

5. Victim of (anti-) hype and the Terrible Weight of Expectations: Heaven’s
Gate. Who hadn’t heard all the tales of Michael Cimino’s cinematic Waterloo months before the film’s release? As one who had been devastated by his previous film, The Deer Hunter, I was anxiously and excitedly awaiting the release of Heaven’s Gate. That is, until the stories started to circulate about how the film was months over-schedule and tens of millions over budget. And while Cimino was spending money recklessly, he apparently did not have a coherent narrative to show for it. I admit to being swayed by these reports, and my hopes for the film dropped precipitously. And it probably didn’t help that when I did get to see the film, it was not Cimino’s cut, but the studio-orchestrated version; United Artists excised nearly half of the film’s original running time (in the interest of narrative coherence, if studio hacks are to be believed). This shortened version was a crushing disappointment, leaden-paced and consistently confusing. It was going to be years before I saw Cimino’s original version (which I will not call the director’s cut, because even this version was not Cimino’s final cut, but rather a rush job forced on him by a studio that wanted to meet the release date at year’s end). The difference between the two cuts is startling, but I shamefully admit to having been unable to see just how great the longer version of the film was until I revisited it a second time only a few years ago. I clearly needed all that time away from the “scandal” associated with the making of the film to fully appreciate the work of art before me. I’m now convinced that, despite its flaws, Heaven's Gate is a messy, bloody and profound masterpiece, an anti-epic exposing the callousness and cruelty of what passes for Truth, Justice and The American Way. Like Welles, that other great American iconoclast who spent almost the entirety of his career outside the studio system, Cimino found the followup to his greatest triumph ripped from his hands and hacked to pieces for theatrical release. In many ways, Heaven's Gate is Cimino's The Magnificent Ambersons, only with Cimino we're lucky enough to have something approximating a director's cut to look at.

So, what are the lessons we can take away from the errors of my misspent youth? Most obviously, one would be well-served by ignoring the propaganda of studio publicity machines. And one would do well to keep inexperienced teenagers away from movies of substance. Nothing will ruin a great movie quicker than being exposed to it at a too-tender age. Of course, that leads inevitably to a Catch-22. How does one get experience, unless someone gives it to ‘em, so to speak? I really don’t know. However, being able to recognize when you are ready for a film is among a cinephile’s greatest responsibilities and most important skills. To meet an artist halfway and participate as fully as possible in the artistic experience requires time, patience, experience, education and a whole lotta living. So, excuse me while I go work on all of these just a little more. I’ve got some Ozu to watch later, and I wanna be ready for it.
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Dan Jardine is a contributor to The House Next Door, the publisher of Cinemania, and a contributor to Cinemarati.

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TV on T.V.: Prison Break, 3 Lbs., and Keith Olbermann

By Todd VanDerWerffFox’s Prison Break (Mondays at 8 EST) started last year as a completely insane blend of MacGyver and 1930s prison movies. While its obvious forebear 24 often ignores its obvious plot holes, Prison Break cheerfully made the most of them. It was all testosterone and no brain, buoyed along by a superb central performance by Wentworth Miller (who could do wonders with a more fully-developed role) as Michael Scofield, who was emotionally unavailable, incredibly good-looking and, apparently, the smartest man on Earth. It was also helped by an interesting structure that broke its serialized story into episode-sized pieces. In every episode, Michael put together another piece of the giant puzzle tattoed on his body, inching closer to his season-ending escape attempt; this gave the series a feeling of forward progress, even when nothing, really, was happening. Michael and seven other convicts broke out at the end of the first season, and the second season has been, at various intervals, about their attempts to commandeer the mini-fortune D.B. Cooper absconded with in the 1970s, their attempts to resume their normal lives and their effort to expose a massive government conspiracy (a topic that’s currently en vogue for TV producers on seemingly every network). But if the first season of Prison Break was a mostly enjoyable guilty pleasure, its second season has been, by turns, uninteresting, unbelievable and unwatchable.

One of the series’ two aces is still firmly in hand -- Miller is still turning in a greatly agreeable performance, but it’s just less interesting to watch his MacGyver antics on the outside, and on occasion, Michael's seemed kind of stupid too, as when he spent an entire episode trying to move a log pinning his friend’s foot to the bed of a river, only to realize (at the appropriate moment in the episode) that, yes, there was a rope dangling from a tree off to the side of the river, and perhaps he could use said rope (combined with a motorcycle, of course) to budge the log just enough to free his friend. Michael’s powers of perception have been played up as well-nigh extrasensory so often that his not seeing a rope just made him seem dumb. I could have come up with that solution -- it’s not on par with using a drawing of the devil to create a handful of tiny holes that would destroy an entire section of wall, as he did during Prison Break's first season.

But the series has fallen apart on another level as well: it has come to believe that its characters are interesting to the viewer as human beings, rather than as vehicles to advance the plot. When the show started, it took the various “types” familiar to anyone who’s seen any prison movie ever (the old codger who knows the lay of the land, the guy who can get things, the mobster, the sadistic warden) and threw every single one of them into the mix with Michael, who was the closest thing the show had to an original character (though, as mentioned, he’s basically MacGyver crossed with Jack Bauer). Throughout, it was obvious that these characters didn’t have much meat on their bones (an attempt at a flashback episode in season one, which showed us how all of them got to be in prison, was one of the worst hours of television of last season), but you sort of went with it, as they fit their milieu. Sure, they were spouting awful dialogue, but it felt true to the material's B-movie roots.

Now that these characters are out among the general populace, though, their actions and thought processes feel completely alien to the world we’re living in. In another recent episode, C-Note (Rockmond Dunbar) reunited with his family by setting up a convoluted system of switch-offs that any police officer should have been able to see coming a mile away. The whole completely unrealistic sequence felt like needless busywork intended mainly to fill out an episode. An even worse series of twists has been visited on the race for the money. The series’ big cliffhanger (before it went away for a baseball-induced hiatus) was that reliable, loyal Sucre (Amaury Nolesco) apparently snapped and took the money for himself after pointing a gun at the other convicts. In the real world, would any of these people have bought Sucre’s sudden change of personality at all? Of course, it turned out to be part of Michael’s scheme (he united with Sucre later), but the characters’ failure to even be surprised by Sucre’s behavior spoke to their need to do so to keep the plot chugging along.

Even worse than the characters we’re asked to believe in as something approaching real human beings is the show’s one completely amoral character, T-Bag (Robert Knepper). Knepper’s portrayal of T-Bag is harrowingly well-done; the character's lack of a moral compass combined with Knepper’s odd charisma made him interesting enough in Season One. But now that the pedophile/murderer has rejoined the outside world, the actions that seemed agreeably villainous behind bars now seem over-the-top and morally repellent. This might be all right if T-Bag were played as an out-and-out villain, but the writers of the show know that Knepper has won the audience over, and they write T-Bag’s various killings (of a veterinarian and a man whose car he needed) as moments they almost seem to want the audience to cheer. T-Bag’s rapscallion nature and ability to finagle his way out of any situation make him seem an almost charming con man (think of Lost’s Sawyer), but the man is a murderer and a pedophile! We’re never asked to consider T-Bag’s repugnance, only to cheer him on as he absconds with the money, pity him as he’s taped to a toilet and fed various laxatives (no, really) and enjoy his zany quips and his attempts to avenge his imprisonment. If T-Bag existed in our world, he would be one of the most abhorrent individuals alive. On Prison Break, though, he’s just another misunderstood escapee.

Finally, the show treats its many, many characters as chess pieces, nothing more, even as it tries to deepen and expand them to no avail. On Lost and 24, a character’s death may be treated as a big shocker, designed to goose ratings, but they are also granted a certain amount of gravity; Jack Bauer will take a moment to mourn a fallen colleague or the Lost-ies will hold a funeral. On Prison Break, the characters are gunned down in a hail of bullets, little attention paid to them afterward. Obviously, when the characters are such stereotypical ciphers, it’s hard to add depth that isn’t there, even in death; but the character deaths on Prison Break are treated as shocks and nothing else (the episode featuring the first death was actually titled “One Down”). We’re expected to see these various plot machinations as proof of the producers' bravery (they’ll actually kill off their characters!), but they seem like little more than attempts to get our blood racing; they lack emotional or moral context, and therefore can't give us much beyond a visceral thrill.

There’s stuff that still works on Prison Break (I’m still fond of the storyline about Haywire, played by Silas Weir Mitchell, a mentally ill escapee who appears to be setting sail for the Netherlands with a big floppy hat, recently acquired dog at his side -- but mostly because it’s so utterly ridiculous), and Miller’s performance can gloss over a lot of sins (as can the recent cast addition William Fichtner, as a sort of shadow Michael), but this is a show that has stopped trying to make sense (how, exactly, was Sarah, played by Sarah Wayne Callies, able to figure out a code that the government’s best took days to crack with its best cryptography experts and computers?), and enjoying it on any level other than so-bad-its-good seems, well, criminal.
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Hey. How much do you like House? CBS hopes you like it so much that you’re willing to sit through a virtual carbon copy right afterward. Its latest new drama, 3 Lbs, a midseason replacement rushed up to November sweeps after Smith underperformed, airs at 10 p.m. EST on Tuesdays, right after House ends on Fox, and it’s obvious that CBS is hoping that show’s fans will change channels. Starring Stanley Tucci as the embattled, bitter doctor that Hugh Laurie plays brilliantly on House, 3 Lbs. is, well, House clumsily cross-bred with ER and stuck in a neurosurgery lab. What’s more, the show steals one of the best elements of St. Elsewhere -- the idea that the hospital it takes place in is rundown and past its prime (even if the neurology lab is state-of-the-art). The only significant medical shows of the past 20 years that this show doesn’t seem heavily influenced by are Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy.

House succeeds in its procedural format largely because its medical mysteries are still interesting. The show has the whole human body to play with, and it makes use of as many misdirects as it can find. Laurie’s performance keeps the show humming along, and the other actors are well-cast to be perfect types for Laurie to bounce off of. What’s more, the dialogue is crisp, the put-downs are withering, and the scripts occasionally engage in bargain-rate philosophy that seems deeper than it is thanks to the solid performances. 3 Lbs is about as exact a copy of this formula as you’re likely to see, and Tucci is always a fun actor to watch, but there’s little here that raises to any level beyond pure TV pulp. While the idea of showing the patients of the week struggling within their mind to overcome the mental disorder of the week is interesting (an image of a girl literally trying in vain to reach the words she wants to use in the pilot is particularly well-conceived), it’s not enough to overcome an already rigorous format (somebody gets a tumor in their brain, and that tumor makes them perceive the world in an odd way). How long, exactly, can a premise this limited keep up, especially when the series looks poised to burn off three storylines per episode, like an extremely specific ER?

What’s more, the show has generally uninteresting performances from the players around Tucci (a rivalry between Tucci and another neurosurgeon is a snooze) and a penchant for cringe-inducing concepts and dialogue that will make the viewer cringe (a character wakes up at 9:11 and regards this as a bad omen; another character says he wants to get to know the soul he’ll be digging around in during surgery). You’ve seen this played so much better on House that you might as well just watch the real thing.
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Keith Olbermann’s ratings are surging, largely because of a series of special comments he’s been doing at the end of Countdown with Keith Olbermann (8 p.m. ET weeknights, MSNBC). The special comments have popped up on YouTube and other Internet sites (like the left-leaning Crooks & Liars), and their largely Bush-administration-bashing content have had their transcripts posted to Internet forums hither and yon. While I have largely agreed with what Olbermann has said in content, the performance of his special comments leaves a little to be desired. They obscure the rest of his program, which is often a snidely funny look at the events of the day -- The Daily Show with more serious news content. But they’re also delivered in a real attempt to capture the deeply serious intonations of Edward R. Murrow, one of Olbermann’s heroes. This self-seriousness does not suit Olbermann well. Being stentorian just doesn’t fit him very well, and his real attempts to tie in his comments to a larger body of broadcast journalism (to wit, ending a commentary with “Good night and good luck,” as Murrow did) often feel forced and self-serving.

Make no mistake: Olbermann can write and write well. His pieces are artfully conceived to destroy pieces of logic from the administration that he finds galling, and they function well as mini-debates. Delivered by someone else, they might be as powerful as they read on the page. But Olbermann is too much the rake. One of his strongest suits is his impish smile, cultivated when he was still on SportsCenter (during its finest years) and honed to perfection on Countdown. When he drops the wryness, the show seems to run out of gas. The special comments work against the rest of the show, and they work against what we know of Olbermann’s persona. I don’t think Olbermann should stop delivering them, as he’s one of the few speaking in such unvarnished terms in the cable TV news world, but his delivery could use a bit more of that sardonic persona and a bit less of the glum.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.

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Links for the Day (November 14th, 2006)

1. "The Simpsons Movie Trailer": Let's call this one a shout-out to Matt's Springfield-obsessed daughter Hannah.

["This film is not yet rated."]

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2. "Family Guy - Gregory Peck's kids": Whatever your opinion of Family Guy (to many the anti-Simpsons, and not in a good way), your humble "Links" editor nonetheless hopes you'll find some funny in this clip.

["I will come back there and, so help me God, I will hit you with my ring hand."]

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3. "Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King": Over at Film Freak Central, Walter Chaw reviews the latest film adaptations of Stephen King stories, and posits that the author has much in common, for better and for worse, with another cinema fabulist.

["I'd be the first to defend King's place in American letters--the first to talk about The Shining as a tremendous treatise on the toll of alcohol and abuse on the family dynamic; to say that Desperation deserves to be taught in modern American fiction classes alongside stuff like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian; or to note that the man's influence in popular culture is as pervasive, for good or for ill, as that of another populist demigod, Steven Spielberg. They rose up during roughly the same period of time, too, as it happens, with King's fiction referencing the similarity itself a time or two (most notably in It and its self-described "Steven Spielberg ending") and this series underscoring the King/Spielberg kinship in its mimesis to Spielberg's short-lived but fondly-remembered "Amazing Stories". There's no one better than King (and Spielberg) at whatever it is that they do--but as their influence increases, their reserve has decreased, leaving their legacies tarnished by moments of genius swimming around in oceans of bloat and self-parody. If either ever finds an ending, they should retire."]

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4. "Errol Morris Helming Abu Ghraib Prison Doc": News on the great documentarian's next project.

["Tentatively titled S.O.P. (a military acronym for "Standard Operating Procedure"), the film will examine the unintended consequences of the Iraqi war with a focus on events at Abu Ghraib prison, notorious for the shocking photos which began to appear in global media in 2004. It is the story of soldiers who believed they were defending democracy but found themselves plunged into an unimagined nightmare."]

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5. "Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, "I Can’t Sleep"": A fascinating essay by film scholar Robin Wood on Claire Denis.

["I should explain that when I write about a film I carefully avoid reading what anyone else has said about it, and therefore scrupulously avoided that chapter. What fascinates me (and constitutes my own personal view of criticism) is the relationship between the critic and the work, and the task of defining that relationship; I want no intermediaries. Writing about a film (or any work of art) is therefore a deeply personal matter, and I set aside anything that might intrude upon it. (I am also very easily intimidated – if I read someone else’s account of a film that differs from my own I habitually assume that I must be wrong, and if they say more or less what I was going to say they render me superfluous)."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

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Navel Gazing with Burns and Dignan: Babel, Stranger Than Fiction, and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

This ongoing Monday column, the appropriately titled "Navel Gazing," features House contributors Sean Burns and Andrew Dignan kicking around a few recent releases. Feel free to join them in the comments section.
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Andrew Dignan: Alright, the first column seems to have gone fairly well. An observation though: not enough conflict. We're in agreement on far too much. Let's get this week’s piece started on a more contentious note then: How about Babel, which is already one of the most divisive films of the fall. A few years ago I was put-off by Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams, finding its game of narrative hopscotch a rather arbitrary stylistic tick meant to energize a tedious and gloomy melodrama never about much beyond its own self-imposed misery. Expecting more of the same from Babel, I was stunned at how unexpectedly hopeful—or if it's not quite hope, then at least isolating a problem and splaying it out in a way where change seems possible—I found the film.