Deus ex Sanguina: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day

By Jeremiah Kipp

Trouble Every Day aches with spiritual dread. Using the iconography of vampire films to illustrate religious fervor, co-writer/director Claire Denis also shows reverence to the medium of film, particularly to the purity of silent movies. There's almost no dialogue, and what little there is feels like it takes place within the half-heard context of a dream. An early scene on an airplane features Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) en route to Paris for his honeymoon, his comfort and security literally in midair. He politely excuses himself to the bathroom, stares blankly into the void, and remembers or envisions a murderess, or maybe a dying girl, covered in blood. There's no sense of shock to the image, but there's an unsettling fascination with the textures of wet skin and dried blood. The context isn't so much violence as repressed indulgence. Josh Hartnett may have gone 40 Days and 40 Nights without twenty-something sex or self-gratification, but Gallo's angst-ridden version of Lent is the perilous and hellish adult version.

Denis' bold poetic stance amid the arid sexual frustrations of Beau Travail and the urban alienation of I Can't Sleep gain further resonance within the loaded, oft-maligned context of the horror film. She uses and comments on the genre with playful decadence, having a blissfully ignorant American couple enacting silly vampire role-playing as they chase each other and embrace among the gargoyle statues of a cathedral tower. That's the Scream response to horror that was rampant throughout the 1990s—a tacky postmodern riff—but Denis harkens back to classic Universal horror titles, and further still to Vampyr and Nosferatu. One has to wonder, though, if her romancing newlyweds are preserving or bastardizing screen history. Maybe both.

The grisly denouement, graphic in its sexual bloodletting, takes a deeper plunge. A leather-clad male intruder achieves release by committing the taboo act of cannibalism, chewing away at human flesh. Though he tries to find a cure for nearly the entire film, the young protagonist of Trouble Every Day discovers his only release will come not through repentance but through sick hedonism. Catholic guilt is cast away, and male sexual hysteria gets unleashed as both rape fantasy and savage carnality. Cannibal lust is equated with giving in to primal impulses, a necessary act for our hungry vampire-marauder to undergo before he can return to his rational life of the marriage, the home, the successful job, and the time-honored American dream that seems to be sweeping over Denis' beloved Parisian culture.

Sporting a neatly trimmed moustache and combed-back hair, Gallo redirects his bad boy persona, externalized so forcefully as Billy Brown in Buffalo 66 and as Bud Clay in The Brown Bunny. Denis domesticates this wild beast of an actor and keeps him docile; Gallo’s thinly veiled maverick energy remains quietly predatory as he and his wife (played by the meek and pretty Tricia Vessey) follow a cute, sallow maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) down a labyrinthine hotel corridor. Gallo's hollow features and striking eyes, so prominent in the actor's fashion advertisements and performance art, are properly entombed within Denis' minimalist framework. She lingers on that face as Shane sits on the edge of a bed or grimly stares himself down in that airplane mirror. Even sitting still, he projects a dangerous allure under his scrubbed surface.

Ostensibly a medical researcher for a leading pharmaceutical company, Shane's honeymoon vacation is an elaborate ruse for him to track down the scientist responsible for his deviant fantasies. The subject of a covert test lab experiment gone wrong, an attempt to increase his sexual drive has transformed Shane into a ghoul hungry for devouring human flesh during intercourse. Needless to say, he's terrified of consummating his marriage. Standing over his nubile wife while she soaks in a bathtub, he whispers, "Are you afraid?" It's a vulnerable moment for him—he's fixated on and frightened by the mysteries of her naked flesh. When he violently masturbates later, his wife pounding on the door behind him, it's pure emasculated terror.

No answers are found with Shane's former colleague Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), the man who created the drug that aroused his gory, fetishistic dreams. In fact, Léo's own wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle, whose skeleton face and protruding teeth are used to chilling effect) is so far gone she's kept under lock and key in their rickety old house. She's first seen roving among modern society, luring truck drivers to their bloody deaths. If Gallo is Trouble Every Day's de-facto Dracula, the stoic and remote Descas is an impassive Dr. Frankenstein whose experiments have run amok. Like Mary Shelley's fictional creator, Léo is a self-made God without answers. That's not much of a stretch for a deeply religious film that questions religiosity, or rejects it. Shane and Coré, left alone, can only find respite by delving into the forbidden.

Smearing the blood of interlopers on her walls, Coré paces back and forth in front of her fingerpainted designs of tombstones and crosses. When Shane finally arrives at the secret old house at the end of his search, as he must, the first thing Coré does is ritualistically light a match and, in what a lesser film might use as its climactic battle, ignite a fire. Instead of ending with the destruction of the haunted laboratory, Denis builds towards a far more audacious and supremely grotesque finale set in the shadows of a hotel basement. It is grimly foreshadowed by an earlier scene where a foreign doctor attempts to convince Dr. Semeneau that he shouldn't involve himself in the unknown. "It's not kosher," he warns. Munching on the most private feminine spaces, the film makes good on its promise to have Shane eat his way through those fears.

Trouble Every Day is cinematically astonishing in ways that shame most films. It's a reminder of why we call them motion pictures: stories told through vivid, expressionistic images. By transposing her aesthetic to the horror genre, Denis has a built-in framework that may appeal to those who turned a blind eye to the poetic, experimental flourishes of Beau Travail. One would hope, anyway. But at the time of the film's American release, audiences were more interested in flocking to the prolonged music video Queen of the Damned.

Admittedly, it's an art film that will baffle a certain percentage of the horror crowd, and a horror film that will turn off the art crowd. Could be audiences at the film's Cannes premiere, repulsed by what they saw before them, thought it was too much to take in all at once. Yet the idea of what's represented is more disturbing than anything Denis actually shows. She and her longtime collaborator Agnès Godard photograph acts of rapacious bloodlust in ways that inspire contemplation, not revulsion. Those willing to place themselves into Denis' philosophical rhythms will find that what they're watching is representative of something deeper, as metaphors for our primal fears. In her final scene, Denis lingers on a single drop of blood trickling down a translucent shower curtain. The stains of guilt aren't so easily washed away. Neither is the disconcerting resonance of Trouble Every Day.

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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

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Links for the Day (January 31st, 2007)

1. "Belated Birthday Wishes P.C.!": How could we neglect Phil the Shill in yesterday's birthday wishes? Maxima mea culpa.

["This is the world we live in. Uh-ohhh-ohhh!"]

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2. "Timber shrine reveals Stonehenge secret": Funny, it doesn't look Druish.

["New excavations near Stonehenge could finally explain its reason for existence: as one half of a much larger temple built to celebrate the living and the dead. A dig less than two miles away has revealed the largest neolithic village in Britain. The similar dates and designs of the sites have convinced archaeologists that they were elements of a single religious complex. Stonehenge was designed as a permanent monument to the dead and constructed of rock to symbolise their enduring presence, the research suggests. The nearby settlement at Durrington Walls was a shrine to the transience of life. Its houses were made of wood, as was a timber circle mirroring the design of Stonehenge."]

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3. "Best-selling author Sidney Sheldon dies at 89": From MSNBC.

["Sidney Sheldon, who won awards in three careers — Broadway theater, movies, television — then at age 50 turned to writing best-selling novels about stalwart women who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men, has died. He was 89. Sheldon died Tuesday afternoon of complications from pneumonia at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, said Warren Cowan, his publicist of more than 25 years. His wife, Alexandra, and his daughter, author Mary Sheldon, were by his side. "I've lost a longtime and dear friend," Cowan said. "In all my years in this business, I've never heard an unkind word said about him."]

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4. "How an icon became a dial-a-diva": From The Sydney Morning Herald.

["Dietrich spent her last decade mostly bedridden in her apartment on the Avenue Montaigne, appearing rarely in public but becoming a prolific letter writer and telephone caller. According to Lerman, one of her correspondents was a man from the San Fernando Valley in California. "He told her how much he adored her, etc. When she saw, from his letterhead, that he was a doctor, she rang him. This began endless telephone exchanges, during which he became more and more enslaved," writes Lerman. When the doctor offered to fly to Paris to "rescue" her, Dietrich cut off communication for several weeks. When she rang him again, she discovered he was so depressed about losing touch with her that he was seeing a psychiatrist five times a week, at $US90 a session."]

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5. "Women Filmmaking Stats": From Anne Thompson's Risky Biz blog.

["The Philly Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey has come up with some provocative statistics about women in the film business:"]
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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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Arms open wide, and how. Fishing with David Lynch.

By Ryland Walker Knight

David Lynch's voice has a diminutive, nasal inflection. You can hear the Pacific Northwest’s gentility and echoes of a woodland youth. In his new book, Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, this calm is felt in each short, declarative sentence that makes up each short, welcoming chapter.

The book is slim. The 177 pages offer more blank, white spaces than text. Lynch doesn't really explicate his ideas: he distills them into succinct statements. But he's hardly condescending. Rather, the whole book is an invitation. When you open Lynch's book, he, in turn, opens his front door and invites you inside for a cup of coffee. And, perhaps, a twenty-minute meditation session.

"I'm not always good with words," he says. Being a painter first and foremost, this effort to express his abstractions verbally instead of visually bears the over-stitched scars of an artist slightly outside his usual medium. Lynch is swinging for the fences throughout the book, at times promoting (nearly propagandizing) the practice of Transcendental Meditation, while at other junctures explaining his distrust and disappointment with the film industry. Yet his prose is so simple (one cannot help but think throughout of Ordinary Language Philosophers) that the reader can relax with the book. Its main aim, it feels, is to engender peace and good will.

David Lynch has practiced Transcendental Meditation for thirty-three years. He regrets (and regrets to inform the reader) that his first response was flippant dismissal. Yet, once he decided to try, in earnest, he felt "as if [he was] in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss—pure bliss."

To transcend, he says, is to dive within and explore (or catch) your ideas. Lynch's use of "idea" is vague and fluid, and prevalent throughout. Chiefly, though, he wants to say that "ideas are everything." Water, then, runs through everything:

"Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful."

He goes on to explain his idea of an idea in a one-page chapter called, "Ideas":

"An idea is a thought. It's a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant, just as in life."

Catching The Big Fish reads just this side of a "How To" book, which is just this side of action: a "How To" book isn't the act of doing, but a helping hand, a match lit—an impetus for the doing. It takes two, babe. As stated before, Catching The Big Fish is an invitation, a plea, not a sermon, and for his part, Lynch never affects a tone of authority. There's a diary-spying element to the prose, but it is never cloying, only sincere.

And because it's brief, you can sit down and read Catching The Big Fish in less time than it takes to watch Lynch's newest film, INLAND EMPIRE: I read comparatively slowly and I finished the whole book in less than 90 minutes; INLAND EMPIRE runs 179 minutes. The book is like a coffee table companion-cum-summation for Lynch's multimedia career. You could have it lying around at a party and guests would be free to pick it up and, at random, choose an aphorism to share. The best one-liner comes a little past midway, in a chapter titled, "The Box and The Key":

"I don't have a clue what those are."

Its rival comes nearer the close in a clever, compact, and beguiling chapter, "Fire". It reads:

"Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights."

In five brief sentences Lynch explains everything he loves about (1) Fire (2) Life (3) Cinema (4) Modernity (5) his original Inland Empire, the Pacific Northwest: his woodland home which he has smote moot–and rendered past tense–with those words, "And smoke."

"Smoke" also recalls the Philadelphia of his art school days, which he chopped up, tossed around and flipped upside down in a fog of grotesquerie with his first film, Eraserhead. Eraserhead is a stark dream of hurt, cloudy & congested with that magical smoke. Lynch says as much in the chapter devoted to it and its genesis: "Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. ...it was a struggle. So I pulled out my Bible and started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. ...And I saw the thing as a whole." This embrace of spirituality is reflected in Lynch's devotion to–and new promotion of–Transcendental Meditation. It seems a natural evolution of his character.

To read this book is to see Lynch as nothing but a peaceful human being with a clear thought process. And for all we know, that could very well be true; this would be quite a charade if false. Plus, why not believe him? Why not take him at his word/s? Why is it so difficult to assume a man can be spiritually at peace in the world yet, in his art, create horrorshow wormholes? Precisely because the art is gussied up in ugly, I suppose. However, isn't art supposed to broaden our worlds? Doesn’t seeing another world illuminated in turn illuminate ours?

To wit:

"Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back out into the world."

All David Lynch is asking, at bottom, in the silt of the riverbed, is, Why not give it a shot? It worked for me. "It" being, of course, not only meditation, but peace. The final chapter is titled "Real Peace" and the final word of the text is a simple one-word paragraph that operates as a blessing, an appeal and a farewell.

"Peace."

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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 (January 30th, 2007)

1. "Happy Birthday, CB!": House fave Christian Bale turns 33 today. Roll dat boo-shit up!

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2. "What I learned during "An Evening with Kenneth Anger"": From Eric Henderson at When Canses Were Classeled.

["Pauline Kael is an overrated little film critic who wrote (poorly) over-effusive pieces celebrating second-rate talents like ... [And here I held my breath, expecting the next words to come from his mouth to be Brian De Palma.] ... Sam Peckinpah ... [Whew!]"]

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3. "Microsoft Vista: Should you buy now?": Peter Lewis of Fortune magazine test-drives the new Windows OS.

["What does Windows Vista have in common with the just-christened nuclear aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush? Answer: They are both powerful flagships of technology that took five years and billions of dollars to build. Also, while they'll both be in use for years to come, they're almost certainly the last of their respective kinds. The world now moves at Internet speed, and slow, complex behemoths - whether warships or software - are being forced to become smaller, faster and more maneuverable. Vista is anything but. After numerous well-publicized delays - two years of core coding had to be scrapped and rewritten to plug security holes - Vista will be launched on Jan. 30, backed by Microsoft's largest-ever marketing blitz."]

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4. "Bond's late arrival in China": From the BBC.

["After saying no to James Bond for the first 20 films, the Chinese government censor has now decided that the franchise is finally fit to be screened in this country. So, Casino Royale is being released uncut into Chinese cinemas. In the basement of a Beijing shopping centre, the series got its first premiere in this country."]

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5. "Kansai TV now accused of faking info in 1998": Thanks to Jeffrey Hill for the link.

["Kansai Telecasting Corp., already under fire for airing a program earlier this month with fabricated dietary data, used deceptive information in that show's predecessor in 1998, two university professors who appeared on the program said Sunday. Yoichi Nagamura, a professor of health and food studies at Chiba Institute of Science, and Makoto Tajima, a professor of nutrition studies at Jissen Women's University, said a producer of "Hakkutsu! Aruaru Daijiten" used their test data and comments dishonestly in a May 25, 1998, episode on the possible sleep-inducing effects of lettuce."]
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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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Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon: Theo Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Although I'd hoped to write a comprehensive new essay about Theo Angelopoulos' epic The Weeping Meadow as my entry in the month-long Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-thon -- sponsored by critic Harry Tuttle of Screenville -- various professional obligations, coupled with a nasty week-long bout of strep throat, made it impossible. As an under-the-wire stopgap, here's an expanded, illustrated version of a column that originally appeared in NYPress in 2005. Angelopoulos' film about displaced peasants coping with natural and manmade disaster was one of my Top 10 movies that year, ranked right after The New World, a film with which it would fit nicely on a double-bill. I think it fits Harry's loosely-defined criteria for a contemplative film. Its ideas are not just conveyed mainly through picture and sound, they're specifically elucidated through very, very long takes, often from "a great and detached distance" (the original headline of the review). The resultant sense of quasi-omniscient "real time" sweep is a director's analogy for history's cool scrutiny.

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Movies don't have to get physically close to their characters to draw you into their world; they can achieve a different kind of intimacy by standing back and reminding us of how small we are. Theo Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow demonstrates this principle. The first installment in a projected trilogy summing up the 20th Century, it's an epic film of a type that's rarely attempted. Like Barry Lyndon -- and Homer, whom the script and imagery invoke -- it prefers physical distance to closeness, and repeatedly places its main characters, the members of a refugee family, in the larger context of geography and history, following them through poverty, the rise and fall of fascism, and a horrendous series of disasters. It's probably the largest production of Angelopoulos' career, but the movie's relentless formal precision -- it's composed mainly in medium and long shots, with long takes whenever possible -- makes you think not about production values, but about the fragility of individuals caught up in the gears of history. It finds a cool-headed but empathetic visual analogy for the way we tend to envision history: as anecdotes about masses of unknown people moving from place to place, enduring unimaginable suffering, then shaking off the pain, reinventing themselves and moving on.

The movie begins with a longshot of a mass of people crossing a flooded plain -- Greeks escaping the Red Army's invasion of Odessa. They walk toward the camera -- toward us -- as an undifferentiated mass, mere black specks on the horizon. The camera cranes down to their level, gradually looking at them from shoulder-level rather than from above (a harbinger of how the scene will briefly personalize them without quite individualizing them). A narrator tells us of their plight as if describing migrating wildlife. Then an unseen spectator cries out -- from somewhere behind us -- "Hey! Who are you? Where are you from?" The refugees stop and face the camera with a particular family centered in the frame, and then one man effectively takes over narration duties and begins reciting his group's narrative while the entire assembly (like a tribe or congregation) looks right at us, some seemingly apprehensive of what we might think, others indifferent, still others staring in stone-faced defiance, as if daring us to pass judgment.

Then, even more surprisingly, the camera, which had been zooming in slowly -- implicitly promising to end in a closeup picking out a single character with which we can "identify" -- gracefully tilts down, focusing on the family's reflection in the water at their feet, then tilting further, until the people vanish from the frame and only their reflection remains. Then the camera slowly unfocuses so that even the family's reflections become indistinct -- impressionistic color blobs on the water -- before merging with the rippling water and dissolving to the film's opening credits sequence, a montage of historic photos. (For a frame-by-frame breakdown of this opening, scroll to the end of this article.)

Most movies operate under the the implied understanding that the camera represents "us," the viewer. Most commercial narratives adhere to a so-called "invisible" style that averts the film's own gaze from that knowledge. The director of the so-called "invisible" movie (the sort of director a meat-and-potatoes film critic would praise as "a craftsman") knows he's not supposed to break that fourth wall and remind us that we're watching a movie. It's like a gentleman's agreement between the movie and the viewer that a certain distance will be respected. But Angelopolous is no gentleman. Here, in the very first scene of an epic that's about as distanced from sentimentality as a movie can get, he commits a stylistic act of radical intimacy, flouting that implied understanding between viewer and movie. (The narrator says not that someone cried out to the refugees, but that it's "as if" someone cried out to them; it's "as if" the film itself asked them the question.) The director's form-conscious style declares that The Weeping Meadow's truest, deepest subject is not any particular character, or even a specific time and place, but the means by which we perceive history -- the angles and distances from which we see (or fail to see) it, and the inevitable process by which stories blur together to create group histories, then legends, ultimately to be forgotten save for one or two broad brush strokes.

As the tale unfolds, its characters -- orphaned refugee Eleni, or Helen (Alexandra Aidini), her adoptive brother and future husband Alexis (Nikos Poursadinis) and their children -- at first seem as tiny and contrived as figurines in a diorama, and Angelopoulos enforces that notion by composing virtually the entire movie as a series of immense tableaus. The family's house is swallowed by flood water and stays submerged for what feels like an eternity; the drowning house is often framed in extreme longshot, putting it in the context of other houses we never visit; meanwhile, rowboats drift through the frame. The abduction and torture of average citizens at the hands of fascist goons is conveyed in a meticulous, slow crane shot that looks down on police herding prisoners into unseen rooms on a dimly lit street. (It's like the way Roman Polanski filmed the ghetto rebellion in The Pianist, peering down from the hero's apartment window across the street.) A labor activist dies in a field of white sheets drying on laundry lines.

Adapt to Angelopoulos' stately rhythms—no small thing to ask, given the movie's three hour running time—and you'll be amazed by the movie's power, which builds very slowly as we watch these specks move through time, dancing and feasting and playing music, marrying and raising kids, enlisting in the army, scouring the countryside in search of missing loved ones and plotting a desperate, perhaps pointless escape to America.

The Weeping Meadow reminded me of poet and critic Vachel Lindsay's statement that characterization in movies isn't like characterization in novels or plays. We feel for movie characters as children feel for their dolls -- personalizing them by deciding to care, imprinting their featureless surfaces with our feelings and dreams. When they break, it hurts.



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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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Links for the Day (January 29th, 2007)

1. "2007 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Winners": The Last Little Miss King & Queen of Scotland.

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2. "The 5 Biggest Mismatches in Movie Fight History": With thanks to Patrick Walsh for pointing out the link.

["Action movies have a pretty simple formula when it comes to killing bad guys: you leave the toughest villain for last. It’s why at the end of Die Hard, that dead Russian guy jumps out of a body bag, somehow still armed with an automatic weapon. The filmmakers knew that, despite defying the laws that govern the physical universe, if they had ended the movie killing anyone else, it just wouldn’t have felt right. Leaving the toughest bad guy for last creates a sense of suspense as to whether or not the hero is going to be able to take him. So if the last bad guy is a total pussy, well, the audience is probably going to notice. Below, we count down the five most mismatched climactic fights in action movie history."]

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3. "Modern Martyrs": An interview with Aleksandr Sokurov's frequent screenwriter Yury Arabov.

["Until recently, Yury Arabov was primarily known to the general public as the screenwriter of several notable films by art-house director Alexander Sokurov, and, to a rather smaller audience, as a poet. In the past year, though, he gained visibility when NTV television broadcast two high-profile miniseries for which he wrote the scripts: adaptations of Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" and Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago." Now, Arabov has published a novel, "Flagellants," which is a lament for the death of the Russian intelligentsia -- and, according to the author, a reflection of his own conflicted feelings about being an artist in present-day Russia."]

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4. "New Yorkers Score Big at Sundance": The Reeler wraps up Sundance.

["When you looked at the odds, it all made sense in a way: With upwards of 50 films from New York programmed between the shorts, documentary and dramatic competitions at this year's Sundance Film Festival, nobody really could have been that surprised to see the New York contingent take home a suitcase worth of hardware -- including the Dramatic Audience Award (Grace is Gone) and both the Documentary (Manda Bala) and Dramatic (Padre Nuestro) Grand Jury Prizes -- at Saturday night's awards show. "Numb," said Padre Nuestro director Christopher Zalla, who told The Reeler about his reaction to juror Sarah Polley's announcement at the end of the ceremony."]

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5. "A long time ago...": Edward Copeland announces a Springtime Blog-a-thon.

["30 years ago, May 25 to be exact ... in theaters across the United States a little film called Star Wars opened and changed much of how Hollywood works, for both good and bad."]
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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 Mondays: Season 3, Ep. 13, "Taking a Break from All Your Worries"

By Todd VanDerWerff
When Battlestar Galactica began its run, if you had held a poll to see which character fans most expected to be portrayed as a Christ figure, James Callis’ Gaius Baltar probably would have ranked near the bottom of the list. But in "Taking a Break From All Your Worries," Baltar -- who, with his beard and mustache growth while in Cylon captivity, has been looking superficially Christlike -- died and was resurrected by a trio of Number Sixes (Tricia Helfer) posed like Raphael’s cherubs. Granted, this happened in a hallucination; the real Baltar died and was resurrected in a far more mundane way (via CPR, it would seem), waking up with his arms outstretched as though he had been crucified. From there, Baltar was strapped to a table and sent into a second hallucination in which death always hovered nearby (not unlike the Harrowing of Hell, but with water substituted for fire), then forced to submit to a series of God-like voices and betrayed by a close confidante (or at least that's how Baltar saw it).

It all begs one question: Does Galactica mean us to take these Baltar-as-Christ suggestions at face value (and these are hardly the first the show has dropped), or is the series just having fun at the expense of Baltar's tendency to hold his own interests above everyone else's, even during the End of All Things? Given how little patience the series has shown for Baltar’s sniveling self-regard in the past, the latter seems more likely -- but it’s also possible that Baltar’s utter failure as a leader and long captivity among the Cylons has sent him on some sort of redemption arc.

Last night’s episode blended the question of what to do with the deposed leader Baltar with the show’s ongoing soap opera plot about the failing marriages of lovers Apollo (Jamie Bamber) and Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff). As is often the case with Galactica, some elements didn't work as well as they should have. Nevertheless, this episode, which featured a strong script by Michael Taylor and excellent direction by series star Edward James Olmos, was one of the season’s best. On evidence of "Taking a Break" and the two preceding hours (“The Eye of Jupiter” and ""Rapture"), Galactica seems to have regained its footing after a string of early Season Three episodes that didn’t hit all of their marks.

Galactica has been known to restage famous news photos and works of art to give key shots a layer of subconscious resonance, but even by this show's standards, Olmos’ direction was notably iconic, packed with compositions modeled on religious iconography. Baltar’s hallucination of being drowned slowly in an endless sea was probably conceived as a way to do a dream sequence that reveals hidden secrets on the cheap; these sorts of plot cheats are used so frequently in genre fiction that I actually groaned the first time Olmos’ character, Admiral Adama, said the word “hallucinogens.” But the setup’s simplicity had the benefit of making an old plot device seem vital again: as Baltar treaded water on his back, a bright light (the eye of God?) shone down on him from above, guiding him toward the truth. The other portion of the hallucination -- Baltar coming to in a Cylon resurrection tank surrounded by Cylons done-up in makeup to made them seem ever-so-slightly off -- came as close as this series does to outright horror. Beyond visceral impact, the script used the dream/hallucination images to advance the plot (the other characters have now learned the depths of Baltar’s duplicity, and how he was occasionally an unwitting pawn in the Cylons’ game).

The season, so far, has given some of the show’s less-heralded players some good material to work with (Sackhoff and Bamber have been consistently strong this year), but this has come at the expense of sidelining some of the series’ more potent actors. Mary McDonnell’s President Laura Roslin and Olmos’ Adama have mostly been stranded (with the conspicuous exception of that one great scene in "Unfinished Business" where they toked up and talked about the future); since McDonnell and Olmos are capable of carrying the series’ weaker episodes by themselves, their recent under-employment has been discouraging. Taylor’s script, however, finally gave the duo something to play, with the added benefit of letting them share screen space with the equally-up-to-the-task Callis and Michael Hogan’s snarling Colonel Tigh. An early scene where Roslin interrogated Baltar -- trying to uncover his role was in the series-opening nuclear attacks and threatening to toss him out of an airlock -- might have seemed over-the-top in another drama, but because McDonnell’s portrayal is usually so reserved, it was quite effective. The scene also utilized the oft-recurring visual motif of the wall of photos of those who died in the attacks (recalling the 9/11 "missing" posters) intelligently, almost as a silent jury indicting Baltar. The device might have worked even better if it hadn’t been accompanied by too-obvious Roslin dialogue about the deaths Baltar helped cause.

Earlier this season, in "Collaborators," Galactica asked what a society should do with those who've worked with an occupying force. The episode was bracingly frank in its willingness to engage the issue, but the issue seemed to come out of nowhere; its appearance might have seemed more organic if the series had spent more time setting up the crew’s anger at the collaborators. Now, with Baltar, the series is asking what to do with a leader who sold out to occupying powers; because of our prior familiarity with Baltar, and the series taking its time reuniting him with the main cast, this seems a more effective recasting of the "Collaborators" storyline, coupled with some notably raised stakes. Plus, in suggesting that Baltar knew Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) was slipping information to the insurgency, the series is both asking how little we trust Baltar and to what extent “good” exists in the politics of war. If Baltar really did know what was going on, by allowing it to continue, did he actually do something moral on behalf of his species? The series, which is supposedly building toward a trial for Baltar in this season's final three episodes, seems willing to pose these questions more bluntly and honestly than it asked what should happen to civilians and rank-and-file soldiers who served the wrong side in a conflict.

The episode featured yet more instances of Starbuck and Apollo almost leaving their respective partners for each other, then choosing to stay put. These scenes are always well-acted, and tonight’s were intriguingly scripted as well, suggesting that Baltar's betrayal of humankind was different in degree, not kind, from a husband's betrayal of his wife (Galactica often seems to believe it's not the magnitude of the sin, but the act of sinning itself). Nevertheless, I hope the series is done with this plotline. The Starbuck/Apollo pairing is better when it’s in the background; for a series that tries so hard to engage the audience in considering both its genre and the political questions inherent in its storyline, Galactica has an unfortunate tendency to satisfy its serial narrative obligations with typical tales of forbidden love.

But these are comparatively small quibbles with an otherwise superb episode -- one that sent Galactica into the homestretch of Season Three operating from a position of strength.
____________________________________________
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 (January 28th, 2007)

1. "Lord of the Rings by George Lucas": A frightening what-if, Dr. Katz-style. Thanks to Jeffrey Hill for the link.

["I think Frodo is kind of a gritty, suburban nine-year old."]

***
2. "It's freezing, there's no pay -- is that Redford?": Sounds like a day job I once had.

["At 20, Clifford is technically a year younger than the minimum age for a festival volunteer. But, just as the film world is all about connections, so too is this festival; a Sundance board member who also is a member of the board of the Ivy Film Festival, which Clifford runs at Brown, got him the gig standing in 9-degree cold night after night. Believe it or not, that's a coveted slot."]

***
3. "YouTubers to get ad money share": Thanks to orchidthief from 24 Lies a Second for sending the link.

["People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue. YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would "reward creativity". The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film."]

***
4. "In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real": From The New York Times, with thanks to Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights After Dark for pointing out the link.

["The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes. Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs. They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes. Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies. Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming. “The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director."

***
5. "Wicker Men": Analyzing the two Wickers, from Metaphilm.

["Neil LaBute’s remake of this cherished cult classic has triggered a great deal of debate; a glimpse at the IMDB forum will reveal desultory outbursts of feeling both for and against, as well as the various shades of indifference, incredulity, and boredom that lie somewhere in-between. For some, its advent marks the limit of Hollywood’s imagination; for others, it undermines what little remains of a British cinematic tradition. Either way, it may be interesting to lay the films side-by-side, stripping away pretension and prejudice—after all, challenging prejudice was itself the originals film’s intention."]
_____________________________________________________
"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 (January 27th, 2007)

1. " Mega-marsupials once roamed Australia": And all I can think to say is, "Crikey!"

["Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia's outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday. The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves. Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert -- east of the west coast city of Perth -- in October 2002."]

***
2. "10-year-old filmmaker sues for creative control": Say hello to my little friend.

["Most 10-year-olds are happy with an allowance and some video games. Budding filmmaker Dominic Scott Kay wants creative control, along with a shot at the Sundance Film Festival. And, as often happens in the entertainment business, to get what he wants he's headed to court with one of Hollywood's top litigators in tow. The child actor, whose credits include Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and voicing Wilbur the pig in Paramount Pictures' recent "Charlotte's Web," is in a creative battle with Conroy Kanter, the financier of the short film Kay directed. The two met when Kay played with Kanter's son on a soccer team. "She wanted to make all the decisions and stuff," Kay said. "She wanted final cut and everything." Kay alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court that Kanter, his Malibu neighbor, is trying to wrestle away control of "Saving Angelo," starring actor Kevin Bacon, which she helped bankroll with $11,000."]

***
3. "Hollywood From the Fringes": Jonathan Rosenbaum on INLAND EMPIRE.

["Writing about Wild at Heart in 1990, I suggested that Lynch's career seemed to dispute William Butler Yeats's memorable formulation In dreams begin responsibilities. He seemed to be in determined denial about the implications of the violence he trafficked in, with a child's view of good and evil, a formalist attitude toward images and sounds, a solipsistic desire to remain politically disengaged, and a lack of interest in understanding or addressing how the grown-up world works. "To claim that Lynch is ideologically innocent and naive about his neofascist fun seems fair enough," I wrote. "But to claim that he's ideologically neutral is to succumb to that same innocence and naivete.""]

***
4. "Prince Charles Arrives In Philadelphia": Mothers lock up your daughters...

["Britain's Prince Charles and his wife arrived in Philadelphia on a commercial flight Friday afternoon, accompanied by a staff of 18. Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, were to be in the city until Sunday morning, when they are scheduled to leave on a private train for New York after church, KYW-TV reported. Their itinerary includes a visit to Independence Hall, where American independence from Britain was proclaimed."]

***
5. "Real Life Simpsons intro": Animation shmanimation!

["D'oh!"]
_____________________________________________________
"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: Wish List

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Lead illustration by Peet Gelderblom

These films are not in production, except in my imagination.

1. Moby Dick. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Starring Mel Gibson as Ahab, Ben Foster as Ishmael, Rudy Youngblood as Starbuck and Ian Holm as Father Mapple. Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. Edited by Anne V. Coates. Score by Eliot Goldenthal.

The reclusive director follows up his long-awaited Fountain of Youth project with the ultimate nautical adventure, and does not disappoint. Herman Melville's supposedly unfilmable novel -- which stymied John Huston, among other would-be adapters -- gets the cosmic, ruminative treatment in this three-hour CinemaScope epic, which alternates quicksilver, free-associative montages with the most surprisingly conventional and exciting action scenes Malick has ever directed. As Ahab -- arguably the role he was born to play -- Mel Gibson gives a surprisingly restrained performance, resisting the natural inclination to play the character as Long John Silver on crack. Gibson instead directs his intensity inward, a decision that lends Ahab a lordly detachment and icy, inscrutable anger reminiscent of mid-period Laurence Olivier; the performance is aided immeasurably by Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, which often hides Ahab's eyes in Rembrandt pools of torchlit blackness or, in daylight scenes, in the sliver of shadow cast by the brim of his cap. Throughout there are curious but distinctly Malickian changes -- including the casting of Apocalypto star Rudy Youngblood as a Starbuck who's actually a combination of the characters of Starbuck and Queequeg, with Maori tattoos and a habit of meditating on deck at the same time every day, even during storms.

But for the most part, Malick's Moby Dick incorporates more of the novel than anyone expected, with Ishmael's distinctive, first person-yet-omniscient ruminations put to especially good use. Although the film has but one narrator (a contrast to recent Malick films), the tone and style are similar to The Thin Red Line -- meditative, fascinated by rituals and social structures, and attuned to the moment-to-moment beauty of the sea and the infinite variety of creatures dwelling within it. (The movie begins with a woodcut-illustrated prologue about the history of whaling, set to scratchy 1920s-era, 78 rpm recordings of sea chanteys performed by Australian seamen, supposedly drawn from the director's record collection and played on his grandma's Victrola.) The movie's aesthetic high point is one of the largest seaborne action sequences ever filmed: a 20-minute section depicting the pursuit, slaughter and stripping of harpooned whales, a process shown in great detail while Ishamel recites passages from Melville's novel -- including an observation that doubles as the movie's tagline: "There's no savagery of beast that's not infinitely outdone by man."

2. Slaughterhouse Five. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring George Clooney as Billy Pilgrim and Scarlett Johansson as Montana Wildhack. Written by Lem Dobbs. Cinematography by Ed Lachman. Edited by Sarah Flack. Music by Cliff Martinez.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel was adapted once before -- in an effective but not quite transcendent 1972 version by George Roy Hill. For anyone considering an adaptation of this book, the sticking point is the question of how much one should literalize the idea that the main character -- optometrist, suburban drone and traumatized World War II conscientious objector Billy Pilgrim -- has "come unstuck in time." Soderbergh's version makes that idea quite metaphorical while maintaining plausible deniability. We're never entirely sure if the tale's intricate flashback/flash-forward structure is the result of Pilgrim's actual dislocation in time and space (indicated by his sojourn on the planet Trafalmador, where he's kept as a zoological specimen by aliens and made to mate -- and live a weirdly awkward facsimile of domestic life -- with Johansson's porn star Montana Wildhack) or if he's suffered brain damage as a result of a plane crash and is roaming through his actual past and fantasy life in sort of a mid-century, sci-fi inflected American version of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Reassembling all of his collaborators from his greatest film, The Limey -- which also had a nonlinear structure and a black comedic yet powerfully emotional feel -- Soderbergh creates a puzzle-box film that plays like a summation of everything he's seen, learned and made during two decades as a filmmaker and moviegoer. It's a model of daring storytelling, a period piece about middle-American malaise during the Vietnam era, a harrowing absurdist war movie (the Dresden bombing scenes rival Apocalypse Now in their epic craziness) and an intensely erotic yet unexpectedly charming sex farce. (The Trafalmador scenes feature extensive full frontal male and female nudity -- which, coupled with footage of burn victims in the Dresden sequence, guarantees Slaughterhouse an NC-17 rating; but Soderbergh, whose movie is already in profit thanks to worldwide presale agreements, gives the MPAA the finger and releases the picture unrated.) Ed Lachman's CinemaScope images are so fluid, varied and mind-bogglingly beautiful that upon the picture's release, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declares the cinematography category closed that year, and messengers the statuette directly to his house.

3. The Emperor Paul. Directed by Spike Lee. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Starring Terrence Howard as Paul Robeson. Cinematography by Ernest Dickerson. Edited by Barry Brown.

Lee's movies always seem to be on the verge of bursting into song; with The Emperor Paul, he scratches that itch at feature length for the first time since School Daze, but with a striking difference: the entire movie is sung-through from start to finish, gliding gracefully through different phases of Paul Robeson's life -- football player, opera and musical star, pioneering African-American movie star, temperamental diva, anti-racism activist and Communist pariah. Lee's selection of Sondheim to do the score and lyrics for a biopic of a politically incendiary African-American surprises many, given Lee's own past pronouncements on such matters. But the director's blunt explanation -- "He's the only musical theater figure alive today who's in Robeson's weight class, so it was a no-brainer" -- sets the issue to rest before production has even started. Shot on immense, defiantly "unreal" breakaway sets and lit like a Vincente Minnelli melodrama (by longtime Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson, going behind the camera for Lee for the first time since Malcolm X) the movie's an unclassifiable, politically and aesthetically divisive work that at times plays like a hybrid of Bob Fosse's Lenny and Jacques Tati's Playtime. But its sheer chutzpah earns respect even from those who find it pretentious, sanctimonious and borderline impenetrable. The film's visual and musical zenith is a seamless three-minute montage that shows Robeson on a whirlwind music tour of North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, singing his way through "All God's Chillun Got Wings" in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Swahili. Star Terrence Howard doesn't look much like Robeson -- but considering that he's credible as an intellectual, a musical genius, a bad boy and a tragic figure, and does all his own singing to boot, what's not to like?

4. Watership Down. Written and directed by Brad Bird. Featuring the voices of Clive Owen (as Hazel), Daniel Radcliffe (as Fiver), Richard E. Grant (as Dandelion), Cate Blanchett (as Clover), Emily Blunt (as Hyzenthlay), Ray Winstone (as General Woundwort) and Sacha Baron Cohen (as Kehaar). Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. Score by Rachel Portman.

The cartoon auteur behind The Iron Giant and The Incredibles pushes his art one step further in an adult direction, turning Richard Adams' 1972 novel into a dark allegorical epic that borrows equally from Spartacus, the New Testament and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Adams' narrative -- about a displaced warren of rabbits following the visionary Fiver to a promised land somewhere in the English countryside -- is played straight, including the often shocking scenes of rabbit-on-rabbit (and dog-on-rabbit) brutality that made both the novel and the previous, 1978 film adaptation such a shock to parents who'd expected a time-waster about cute widdle bunnies. Working for the first time as a director of photography on an animated feature, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who shot about half of Days of Heaven back in the day, fills Bird's widescreen canvases with an overwhelming variety of natural textures and colors, often employing a faux-deep focus technique that he says is modeled on the Technoscope cinematography in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. The movie is rated PG-13, but brushes with an R because of what the MPAA calls "graphic animal violence and situations so emotionally intense that they make Bambi look like Scooby-Doo."

5. A Looney Tunes Odyssey. Directed by Joe Dante. Screenplay by Dante, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Music and lyrics by Parker, Stone and Marc Shaiman.

The pop culture-savvy director of Gremlins, Matinee and Looney Tunes: Back in Action returns to the Warner Bros. stable and turns out this brisk, 72-minute comic epic based on Homer's The Odyssey, starring Elmer Fudd as the wandering Odysseus, Bugs Bunny (in drag, natch) as his beloved Penelope, and a constellation of costars in plum supporting parts (including the Tasmanian Devil as the Cyclops and Daffy Duck as Penelope's most persistent would-be suitor, Ducchus). South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and their preferred composer, Marc Shaiman contribute 14 original (and uncharacteristically squeaky-clean) tunes in a variety of styles, ranging from 1940s Bing Crosby-style torch song to Gilbert and Sullivan-style libretto that plays during the thrillingly absurd finale, which crosscuts between Odysseus/Elmer returning home and preparing to eliminate the suitors, and Penelope/Bugs preparing for a wedding that'll be aborted as soon as the cleric says, "Speak now or forever hold your piece," prompting Bugs and Daffy's most elaborate bit of absurdist wordplay since the "Shoot him now" exchange in "Rabbit Seasoning." In CinemaScope, of course.
________________________________________________
Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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Links for the Day (January 26th, 2007)

1. "Visionary Outlaw Mavericks on the Dark Edge; or, Indie Guignol": David Bordwell on the dark side of the "Indie."

["In an article originally called “Sundance Movies Are Bad for You!” but now more tamely titled “The Trouble with Sundance,” Richard Corliss complains that indie movies have become so predictable that they form a genre in themselves. They focus on relationships, especially those of a dysfunctional family or a fumbling love affair, and treat their principals with a dutiful mix of pathos and humor. Where, he asks, are the more imaginative narrative and stylistic maneuvers fostered by the Coen brothers, Jarmusch, Tarantino, and the like? That’s only half the story. True, indie films are often pallid comedies and melodramas. But just as often, and sometimes at the same time, they’re desperately sensationalistic. In these the formal conservativism to which Corliss objects is wedded to hot-button content. We call a bland Indie film quirky, but there are others we call dark. They’re Indie Guignol."]

***
2. "Rocky III": Sheila O'Malley on the still-potent pleasures of Clubber Lang & co.

["Watched it last night. So fun!!! I mean, come ON. Mr. T. With the feather earrings. And the furious eyeballs. And that BODY. Also the apparently bottomless checkbook - because he apparently can fly about the country (and the world) to sit in the stands at Rocky's various fights and glower menacingly. But still: what a great scowl. A great villain. When he yells up at Adrian, "WOMAN! HEY! Woman!"]

***
3. "Can't We All Not Get Along?": From LA Weekly.

["It dawns on us, as standup queen Sarah Silverman debuts her new “I-play-me” Comedy Central series at this point in her taboo-thrashing career, that, bizarrely, she’s no longer the most transgressive, racism-spotlighting, shit-stirring Jewish comedian in the entertainment world. That would be Sacha Baron Cohen, whose performance-art trek through bigoted America — a Sherman’s march of real-life comedy destruction — has generated massive box office, op-ed pieces and litigation. Meanwhile, Silverman, a raven-haired beauty who enjoys treating stereotypes and personal sexuality as the joke equivalent of Tinkertoys, has remained mostly an indie comedy phenomenon. And where Silverman’s humorous obsession with human genitalia finds its outlet in one-liners, Cohen notoriously shows us in his nude mano-a-mano hotel-room melee from Borat how physically close he’s willing to get to that topic."]

***
4. "Woman fights off mountain lion": Kim Bauer at 60.

["A 65-year-old woman fought off a mountain lion attack in Humboldt County on Wednesday -- using a ballpoint pen to stab the animal -- and in the process probably saved the life of her 70-year-old husband. Nell Hamm first saw the lion when it had her husband's head in its jaws. The lion pounced on Jim Hamm at the end of a 10-mile hike in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. He was trailing his wife when the big cat attacked, pinning him face down on the trail. Nell Hamm did all the right things. She approached and screamed at the lion. Then she grabbed a branch and began beating it on its back. "It wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I hit it," she said in an interview at Mad River Community Hospital Thursday, where her husband was in intensive care recovering from surgery. Jim Hamm, who was trying to tear at the face of the cat, told his wife to grab a pen from his pocket and stab the cat in the eyes. She did, but the pen broke."]

***
5. " Overzealous censor edits 'God' out of 'Queen'": Bloody 'ell!

["So much for God and country, at least during some in-flight showings of the Oscar-nominated movie "The Queen." That's because all mentions of God were bleeped out in a version of the film given to some commercial airlines.]
_____________________________________________________
"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: Rome, The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show, Friends of God, The Dresden Files and the NFL Network

By Todd VanDerWerff

HBO's Rome is good TV. It's not particularly deep, but it's fun to watch, and it's got great production values, cinematic direction and some fine performances. It's diminished, however, simply by virtue of the network it's on. If it appeared on a different channel, any channel, it would surely be considered one of its best shows. But on HBO, it has to compete with Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos and even young upstart Big Love. In comparison, Rome seems almost sophomoric -- a high gloss soap opera.

HBO's great series almost always take a worn-out genre and blow it up, following the template of The Sopranos, which hit familiar mob story plot points but did so more slowly and meticulously than other televised attempts at same. From there, HBO tackled Westerns and cop dramas and family soaps. Rome initially promised to be a nasty takeoff on swords-and-sandals epics, a chance to examine the lurid reality of Roman society around the time of Julius Caesar's reign, but the series has settled into a less ambitious groove; it seems content merely to exemplify its genre rather than reinvent it. Cecil B. DeMille movies made Bible stories more palatable by mixing in liberal doses of sex and violence; Rome just ups the ante a bit and shows them full-on. There's a vague and somewhat obligatory-seeming attempt to define the sex and violence as outgrowths of the era's politics (Polly Walker's Atia is constantly sleeping with men who will give her the greatest political boost), but for the most part, these elements serve the same function as in DeMille's films: Look at how much sex there was in ancient Rome! And how much violence!

None of this wantonness resonates as strongly as the filmmakers might wish because it's rooted in characters who are not often sketched beyond a handful of traits: loyal-to-a-fault Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), constantly scheming Atia, burgeoning-man-of-the-people Gaius Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the boy who would be Augustus Caesar). The characters scheme to get ahead and rise in their particular circles (or, in Pullo's case, to get the woman he wants), but we never feel that these motivations come from a distinct place for each character. Contrast this with Deadwood, where all of the characters (or most) are similarly scheming to land themselves the best place in their incipient civilization, but go about this through very different means and operate from very different motivations. Any given episode of Rome eventually devolves into a long series of betrayals and political tricks, briefly punctuated by sex or nicely choreographed mayhem (the gladiatorial combat in season one's penultimate episode juiced the storylines so effectively that it almost singlehandedly justified the entire season). This formula become more obvious in season two, where most of the characters are isolated from each other, aiming to put themselves in the best possible position after the murder of Caesar (Ciarán Hinds).

Caesar, while not the show's lead character by any means, acted as a hub for Rome's huge cast; all of the storylines intersected through him, and Hinds played the part with a benevolent arrogance that made it easy to believe that Caesar was both beloved by the people and an enemy of their freedoms. His murder became a grim necessity, but you were sad to see him go, simply because his scenes were often the most compelling thing in any given episode. Sure enough, Season Two suffers from not having that strong center. The show bounces manically from setting to setting; it's often hard to pin down just what one scene has to do with another. Again, contrast this with Deadwood where the cast was even more populous, but a handful of main locations and characters (particularly Al Swearengen) persisted throughout the series run, and gave viewers some narrative anchors.

Another problem is Rome's preference for compressing events that occured over years into a handful of episodes. Season One took place over seven years, but it felt if the story unfolded over a few weeks (three or four months at the most). There are cues to signify how much time has passed, but the series rarely makes a serious effort to show how the march of time has affected its characters (or simply can't, in the case of Pirkis and the other younger actors). Events are conflated so hilariously that Rome often seems like an afternoon soap with Gladiator-level production values. Cheating spouses! Hidden diseases! Betrayal and murder! There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach except that it makes the series' pretense of realism harder to buy.

Finally, the dialogue is too on-the-nose. There's some nice, poetic writing on occasion, but the characters rarely leave anything to subtext. They're always saying exactly what they think, or offering us exposition on what's happened in the months-long interim between episodes, or pointing out the obvious. (Reprimanding her son Octavian for alienating Mark Antony, Atia says, "Don't you see we're dependent on Antony now? Who will protect us if you drive him away from me?") On Deadwood or The Wire, characters usually say much less than you expect or else much more -- sometimes talking around the subject so as to define it without offending a social superior. Rome's characters feel more like human chess pieces given little speeches to read, then shoved around into place by the writers before the next plot point glides into view.

There's still a lot to like about Rome. It's got a refreshing lack of politically correct anachronism (the slaves are slaves and are treated as such, and the women have no hope of meting out their political will); this helps the series keep its winking asides to the modern day from becoming too overt or self-satisfied. The production design is among the best on television, and the direction (by such varied hands as Michael Apted and Alan Taylor) is vivid, often rising above the TV norm. Another, more recent positive development: the series also appears to be building to the rise of Augustus. If there's a figure in Roman history that could unite the numerous plotlines as effectively as the original Caesar, it's the new Caesar. But in spite of its oft-apparent potential, the series rarely rises above the pretty good. There's a brilliant show to be made about the hubris of a civilization that thinks it cannot fall; Rome isn't it.

***
The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show on Comedy Central is pretty dumb. As with all shows of this type (loosely connected sketches tied to a central monologue delivered by two characters), it's pretty uneven. But its deliberately low-fi sensibilities (at times it seems like a comic monologue surrounding a series of YouTube videos) make it oddly charming. It's very much a show finding its way, and more jokes miss than hit their marks, but Naked Trucker (Dave Allen) and T-Bones (David Koechner) are disarming enough to make this slyly enjoyable.

The conceit is that Trucker and T-Bones travel the country and tell us stories about their journeys. Hence the episode airing tonight involves a voyage to Vermont that features Andy Richter (in fake mustache and silly hat) as a mayor that gives T-Bones the key to his city (or maybe he's not the mayor after all...). The two also sing songs, recount their adventures with hitchhikers, and show us footage from the truck as they travel around. It's, as mentioned, dumb, and Koechner's whiny character can grate on the nerves if he's employed in anything beyond small doses, but there are enough solid jokes here to justify checking the show out once or twice, if only to see Koechner play the dash of the truck as a drum with paint sticks, all the while singing an impromptu song about "Paint Stickin." It's the sort of show where the live studio audience cheers loudly when pot smoking is mentioned.

***
Alexandra Pelosi (exactly who you think she is) brings her latest documentary, Friends of God, to HBO tonight at 9 p.m. Her last nonfiction feature, Journeys with George, made her a mini-celebrity, and she's spun that into a career of making movies she calls "road trips." In Friends of God, Pelosi spends an hour wandering the U.S. in search of evangelical Christians (the hot minority of the TV season, apparently) and what she finds is supposed to amuse us or scare us or... something. Pelosi is so busy jetting from one place to the next that we never get a sense of the people in her documentary as anything other than stereotypes. The Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp introduced a Christian boogey-man just to have a Christian boogey-man, but at least it followed the same characters throughout, letting us get a sense of how their beliefs affected their dealings with the wider world. Pelosi has just found the easiest targets for her camera in Friends of God -- including megachurch evangelist Ted Haggard, who, sometime during production, was revealed to have patronized a male prostitute, and forced out of his job.

Obviously, Pelosi had no say in Haggard's self-destruction, but he's far from the only camera subject whose presence could be described as grimly comical or off-putting. Without meaning to, the director betrays a condescending attitude toward her topic, inviting us to make fun of evangelicals or be frightened of them or just close our eyes until they leave the screen and are replaced by a fresh set of freaks. Yes, there are Christian wrestlers out there, and drive-through churches and the like, but they don't make up the majority of America's evangelicals. Pelosi seems tickled to meet these rubes, and her attitude can be patronizing. "We wouldn't believe you do this back in New York," she says ever so often, and you can almost picture her back home, telling a story about those crazy Christians at a dinner party. Certainly those of Pelosi's inclinations and politics (and I count myself among that number) would do well to figure out exactly what evangelicals believe and why, rather than bowing to received wisdom, but there's no way that's going to happen when evangelicals are made the butt of easy jokes.

***
Sci-Fi's Dresden Files (9 p.m. Sunday), the cable channel's latest original series, isn't up to the level of Battlestar Galactica or even last summer's uneven Northern Exposure/X-Files hybrid Eureka. But it feels like the sort of show that, given enough time, could grow into the sort of cult hit you find yourself watching a marathon of over Labor Day weekend. The premise is brilliant: Harry Dresden's a wizard who solves magical crimes and lives in our very real world (but advertises in the yellow pages). The cast is also quite good (particularly Paul Blackthorne as the title character and Terrence Mann as Bob the office ghost). But the show's attempts to blend scares and snark wander afield far too often. What's more, the show's episodes fall into the common genre trap of being too exposition-heavy; by the time the monster of the week's twists and turns are exposed, we just don't care anymore, no matter how many witty quips Dresden and Bob trade.

But there may be reason to hope for Dresden. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a similarly high-concept series) didn’t really take off until its second season, and Dresden, a show with a writing staff of people who’ve worked in good genre TV -- including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- seems like it might need a similar number of episodes to iron out its many kinks. Check out an episode or two, or wait for the inevitable marathon. It might all be worth it in the end.

***
Like football? Then The NFL Network is making the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl heaven for fans. The channel -- which unfortunately isn't yet available in most cable packages -- is airing old Super Bowls as they originally appeared (halftime shows intact). The broadcasts make interesting cultural artifacts. Ostentatious patriotism perceptibly rises as troops go to war in Vietnam or Iraq, and the halftime shows of the '70s and '80s prove to be every bit as bad as everyone says. More interesting is the NFL Films production America's Game: The Super Bowl Champions, which counts down the top 20 Super Bowl winners. The series has the usual NFL Films problems, chief among which is a tendency to greatly overstate football's importance in American history. (An episode on the 1983 Oakland Raiders has narrator Alec Baldwin comparing the team to the Soviets' "Red army"; one can imagine Baldwin between takes, ranting about the crap he has to read.) But enough time has passed in most of these episodes that the main players behind the teams profiled are willing to open up more about both their personal difficulties and their opinions of each other. It's amusing to see Lawrence Taylor of the Giants reveal that he thought Phil Simms, the quarterback who led the team to a Super Bowl win, was kind of a wimp, and finding out that former Raider Todd Christensen became an acclaimed tenor is the right kind of bizarre factoid for a "where are they now" segment. If you don't like football, you won't find much to entertain you in America's Game, but there's enough good stuff there for fans of the game (or even fair-weather fans who prefer baseball, like myself) that it should be just the thing to get ready for the big game.
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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 (January 25th, 2007)

1. "The End Of The Affair": House contributor Sarah Bunting drop-kicks Mr. Butts.

["I have told myself the same kinds of stories a hundred thousand times in the last six days, how much I miss smoking, how well smoking treated me, how getting back together with smoking would fix everything, how if I don't get back together with smoking, I can't go on. The first day, I lay in bed, and on the couch, and on the other couch, and on the floor, and in bed again, and I cried and cried and cried. I cried the whole day. I cried myself to sleep; I cried in my sleep; I woke up, tried to open my eyes, could barely force them ajar because the lids had gotten so puffy from the crying, and started crying again. I ate Tic-Tacs and Altoids and chewed gum, I cut drinking straws in half and "smoked" them, I gnawed on toothpicks and carrots and pens and cuticles, and while I did all these things, I cried. I couldn't stop crying, and so I cried even harder, drenched with shame."]

***
2. "The 10 worst Super Bowl ads of all time": And here are links to a Salon article on ad #3; a still from ad #9 (which is plenty, believe me); and video links to ads #8; #7; #5; #4; #2; and #1. And check this site for more.

["Large companies have found a lot of ways to throw away good money, but it’s hard to imagine a higher-profile failure than a catastrophic Super Bowl ad."]

***
3. "Method Men": Armond White on the Film Forum reissue of Becket.

["Charlize Theron, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench had better get in line at Film Forum and learn something."]

***
4. "Escaping From the Shadow of the 'Wall'": From MSNBC.

["Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 25 years ago—she's spent the time since then proving she's no one-hit wonder."]

***
5. " Translating the State of the Union": Edward Copeland reads between the lines.

["Madam Speaker (damn you), Vice President Cheney (master), Members of Congress (turncoats), distinguished guests and fellow citizens:
This rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour (immediately following American Idol) -- when decisions are hard and courage is tested. We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies -- and the wisdom to face them together (We're depending on him for wisdom? We're in trouble)."]
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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 (January 24th, 2007)

1. "Laugh, Cry, Believe: Spielbergization and Its Discontents": And J. Hoberman as Captain Hook.

["Something less than artist, Spielberg is also something more. He is the institution personified—the genius of the system, the whole Oscar Night shebang in one bearded, baseball-hat-wearing package. Spielberg is Hollywood’s most successful director and most powerful producer, as well as a nouveau mogul, cofounder of the DreamWorks studio (recently sold to Paramount). He is a presidential friend and the Hollywood equivalent of a public intellectual, called upon, in the afterglow of Schindler’s List, to furnish a Congressional investigating committee with expert testimony on the nature of hate crimes."]

***
2. "Tony vs. Paul": A popular and impressive YouTube offering.

["A stop motion battle between two friends turned enemies."]

***
3. "Cage Confirmed as Liberace Favorite": "Really gentlemen, I'm dismayed. Oh heavens, NOT THE BEES!!!"

["NICOLAS CAGE has been confirmed as the favourite to play camp showman LIBERACE in a new movie musical. The actor has been linked to the role for years, but now screenwriters JASON FRIEDBERG and AARON SELTZER have confirmed Cage is in talks to show off his musical skills as the late pianist. Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival, where the writers are promoting their new comedy EPIC MOVIE, Seltzer says, "We met with Nicolas Cage last year and he really wanted to star in it; he wanted to direct himself in it too.""]

***
4. "How "Japanese" is it?": From the Chicago Reader blog.

["Apparently the consensus regarding Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima--more than 11,000 Google hits for the critical rubric so far--is that he's given us a picture of the island's World War II invasion "from the Japanese point of view." Well, maybe he has and maybe he hasn't--and don't you love the defining article in either case?--but let's consider this: is there any significant Japanese director of the last 50 years who'd have filled the wide-screen frame with so many in-your-face, isolating close-ups and acres of empty space, who'd have gotten such fetishistic mileage out of glimmering swords and pistols and heavy-duty armaments in general, who'd have thrown you helter-skelter, without the slightest reticence or discretion, the gimlet-eyed withholding that an Ozu or a Naruse might bring, into the welter of sentimentality that defines the melodramatic line of action here? Utterly alien to anything I'd think of as Japanese, at least in terms of filmmaking--but maybe that's just me being stereotypical again."]

***
5. "Gender and the Pulpit": From Newsweek on MSNBC.

["At the time of her “transition,” Swenson did not resist the church’s questions nor blame its reluctance. “I had been in the closet for 30 years, learning to accept myself,” she says. “It is difficult for me to be angry at others for not accepting.” Married with two daughters before her transition, Swenson described her struggle, years later, in a sermon: “I had spent the better part of four decades wrestling secretly with the unreasonable and incorrigible desire to be female.” After almost three years of grueling questions and debate, the Presbytery finally agreed, 181-161, to sustain her ordination, making Swenson the first known Protestant minister to transition from male to female while remaining in office. Now 59, Swenson is tall and blond, with shoulder-length hair and an assertive manner. Erin, as she’s called, continues to work as a pastoral counselor and, she hopes, as an inspiration for others who find themselves living out, what may be, the last taboo in society, let alone organized religion."]
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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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A maleficent obsession: Shockproof

By Matt Zoller Seitz“You’ve got to change your brand of men.”

That’s what a parole officer, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde), tells a curvy, bottle-blond parolee, Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), at the start of the 1949 potboiler “Shockproof,” and it’s sound advice.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.

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The 79th Annual Academy Award Nominations

The noms:

Best Picture: "Babel," "The Departed," "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Queen."

Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio, "Blood Diamond"; Ryan Gosling, "Half Nelson"; Peter O'Toole, "Venus"; Will Smith, "The Pursuit of Happyness"; Forest Whitaker, "The Last King of Scotland."

Actress: Penelope Cruz, "Volver"; Judi Dench, "Notes on a Scandal"; Helen Mirren, "The Queen"; Meryl Streep, "The Devil Wears Prada"; Kate Winslet, "Little Children."

Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, "Little Miss Sunshine"; Jackie Earle Haley, "Little Children"; Djimon Hounsou, "Blood Diamond"; Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls"; Mark Wahlberg, "The Departed."

Supporting Actress: Adriana Barraza, "Babel"; Cate Blanchett, "Notes on a Scandal"; Abigail Breslin, "Little Miss Sunshine"; Jennifer Hudson, "Dreamgirls"; Rinko Kikuchi, "Babel."

Directing: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, "Babel"; Martin Scorsese, "The Departed"; Clint Eastwood, "Letters From Iwo Jima"; Stephen Frears, "The Queen"; Paul Greengrass, "United 93."

Foreign Language Film: "After the Wedding," Denmark; "Days of Glory (Indigenes)," Algeria; "The Lives of Others," Germany; "Pan's Labyrinth," Mexico; "Water," Canada.

Adapted Screenplay: Sacha Baron Cohen and Anthony Hines and Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer and Todd Phillips, "Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"; Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, "Children of Men"; William Monahan, "The Departed"; Todd Field and Tom Perrotta, "Little Children"; Patrick Marber, "Notes on a Scandal."

Original Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga, "Babel"; Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis, "Letters From Iwo Jima"; Michael Arndt, "Little Miss Sunshine"; Guillermo del Toro, "Pan's Labyrinth"; Peter Morgan, "The Queen."

Animated Feature Film: "Cars," "Happy Feet," "Monster House."

Art Direction: "Dreamgirls," "The Good Shepherd," "Pan's Labyrinth," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "The Prestige."

Cinematography: "The Black Dahlia," "Children of Men," "The Illusionist," "Pan's Labyrinth," "The Prestige."

Sound Mixing: "Apocalypto," "Blood Diamond," "Dreamgirls," "Flags of Our Fathers," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

Sound Editing: "Apocalypto," "Blood Diamond," "Flags of Our Fathers," "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

Original Score: "Babel," Gustavo Santaolalla; "The Good German," Thomas Newman; "Notes on a Scandal," Philip Glass; "Pan's Labyrinth," Javier Navarrete; "The Queen," Alexandre Desplat.

Original Song: "I Need to Wake Up" from "An Inconvenient Truth," Melissa Etheridge; "Listen" from "Dreamgirls," Henry Krieger, Scott Cutler and Anne Preven; "Love You I Do" from "Dreamgirls," Henry Krieger and Siedah Garrett; "Our Town" from "Cars," Randy Newman; "Patience" from "Dreamgirls," Henry Krieger and Willie Reale.

Costume: "Curse of the Golden Flower," "The Devil Wears Prada," "Dreamgirls," "Marie Antoinette," "The Queen."

Documentary Feature: "Deliver Us From Evil," "An Inconvenient Truth," "Iraq in Fragments," "Jesus Camp," "My Country, My Country."

Documentary (short subject): "The Blood of Yingzhou District," "Recycled Life," "Rehearsing a Dream," "Two Hands."

Film Editing: "Babel," "Blood Diamond," "Children of Men," "The Departed," "United 93."

Makeup: "Apocalypto," "Click," "Pan's Labyrinth."

Animated Short Film: "The Danish Poet," "Lifted," "The Little Matchgirl," "Maestro," "No Time for Nuts."

Live Action Short Film: "Binta and the Great Idea (Binta Y La Gran Idea)," "Eramos Pocos (One Too Many)," "Helmer & Son," "The Saviour," "West Bank Story."

Visual Effects: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Poseidon," "Superman Returns."

Academy Award winners previously announced this year:

HONORARY AWARD (Oscar statuette): Ennio Morricone

JEAN HERSHOLT HUMANITARIAN AWARD (Oscar statuette): Sherry Lansing

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Links for the Day (January 23rd, 2007)

1. "The 27th Annual Razzie Awards!: Oscars, schmoscars.

["Heading the dis-honor roll of Worst Achievements in Film this year are a lascivious murder mystery that turned out to be a laugh riot, and a comedy nearly as devoid of laughs as SCHINDLER'S LIST: Sharon Stone as a "femme fatale" The L.A. Times called "footloose and panty-free" in BASIC INSTINCT 2 and Shawn and Marlon Wayans in their brother Keenan Ivory Wayans' blatant knock-off of a 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon, LITTLE MAN. Each racked up 7 shots at the spray-painted gold statuettes no one in Hollywood really wants to "win." Joining these films in the final circle as Worst Picture nominees are M. Night Shyamalan's brain-dead bedtime story (and box office dud) LADY IN THE WATER, Oscar winner Nicolas Cage donning an unconvincing bear suit in the laugh-out-loud funny remake of the Australian thriller WICKER MAN, and a film helmed by the man many Internet users consider the worst director alive today, Uwe Boll's BLOODRAYNE."]

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2. "Roslindale Monogatari": The blogspot of cinephile extraordinaire Michael Kerpan.

["Asakusa no hi / Lights of Asakusa (Yasujiro Shimazu, 1937): An astonishing blend of East and West, just before the point when militant nationalism began frowning seriously on (non-German) Western influences. Heart throb (both as singer and actor) Ken Uehara is an opera singer in Tokyo, who models himself (offstage) on Gary Cooper (in dress - and in deed). He is loved by the young proprietress of a shooting gallery around the corner from the opera house (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) -- but is in love with one of his fellow singers (Mieko Takamine). When her wicked relatives connive at selling her off to a wealthy mob boss (with the aid of the opera company's prima donna, played by Haruko Sugimura), he and a friend (a foreign painter) go to her rescue."]

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3. "Rabbit Status: Still Uncaught": Glenn Kenny and Dakota Fanning in Hype, Interrupted.

["Between the howls of ignorant outrage on one side of the "controversy" and the genuflecting in the name of free artistic expression on the other lies the inconvenient fact that the object of this particular controversy (which has been chronicled in every major media outlet by now, although Premiere would appear to have gotten to it first) is about 90 minutes of earnest kitsch. Writer-director-producer Kampmeier's feature [Hounddog], starring young Dakota Fanning as an Elvis-obsessed abused child in some indeterminate Southern glade at some indeterminate time in the '50s, is too much a compendium of Southern Gothic cliches to be even vaguely engaging, let alone harrowing and heartbreaking."]

***
4. "Dinosaur aerodynamics touches off debate": Mr. Pilkington, I presume.

["Was it a bird? A biplane? Or a dragonfly? A newly published study opens a fresh chapter in the debate over how one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs used two sets of wings more than 125 million years ago. The study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lays out a detailed argument for the biplane scenario. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and his Canadian collaborator, R. Jack Templin, suggest that Microraptor gui used two upper wings as well as two lower wings in an aerodynamic design much like that seen in the biplanes of early aviation. Today, the biplane is widely considered an old-fashioned rarity. And the design is no longer seen in birds, though it’s not clear if it was a step on the way to modern birds or a dead end, tested by nature and discarded."]

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5. "Tayton Tuesdays": Walter Chaw on the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton box set. This week: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

["The similarities between Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Joseph Mankiewicz's Sleuth are more than cosmetic. Both are based on well-regarded plays designed for small casts eating one another in claustrophobic environments, both point to the fallacy that a good stage play needs to be expanded when transformed into feature film--that if the writing is caustic and vital enough, it can by itself open up limitless interiors. It doesn't hurt, of course, that Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is given screen life under the sure hand of cinematographer Haskell Wexler, the genius lenser fresh from lovely work with Tony Richardson, Elia Kazan, and Franklin Schaffner and just two years away from making his own generational statement with the reality-skewing Medium Cool. The picture loosened the old form of film censorship's hold on the motion picture industry (to pave the way for new censorship, natch), but its most enduring legacy could be the popularization of the cinematographer-as-voyeur. Of Albee's direct lineage, Patrick Marber's (Closer, Notes on a Scandal) scripts come closest to recreating the tableau morte of Virginia Woolf?, but looking at the way that both of Marber's pictures flag in the third act while most crucially failing to un-flesh the sympathetic humanity in his icy necropsies highlights the brilliance of Nichols' (an acclaimed theatre vet making his debut here, with his next stop The Graduate), merciless dissection of the intellectual's disease of ennui and gamesmanship."]
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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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Killer art: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a that rarity of rarities: a genuinely deviant work of art. It's the kind of film that could move Prince, Oliver Stone, Courtney Love, Tom Ford, Jenna Jameson, Roman Polanski and Charles Manson to tears, and send them home elated and wrung out, with the same thought rattling in their heads: "At long last, someone told my story!"

To clarify, when I say "deviant," I mean in the dictionary sense: "Departing from usual or accepted standards." Perfume doesn't acknowledge, much less replicate, the moral conventions and bourgeois attitudes that drive most big-budget movies (including the supposedly outre ones). Perfume views its main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) -- a poor, orphaned pariah with an uncanny sense of smell who becomes both an expert parfumeur and a serial killer -- with scientific fascination. It's the same attitude with which Jean-Baptiste contemplates his own talents and desires, an attitude conveyed in an early scene that finds Jean-Baptiste -- then an anonymous, emaciated tanner -- walking through an open-air market, identifying and deconstructing every smell that floats by. Each scent is identified by a macro closeup that flickers onscreen for an instant or two, like the snapshot prophecies that pop like Chinese firecrackers throughout Twyker's 1998 classic Run Lola Run. Jean-Baptiste doesn't classify any particular scent as "good" or "bad"; he's a budding aesthete, unleashed in a gallery of smells. "Everyday language proved inadequate for all the olfactory experiences accumulating within himself," notes John Hurt's sprightly narrator as Jean-Baptiste drifts through the marketplace, savoring everything from ripe produce to dead rats. The film's attitude toward its hero is indistinguishable from Jean-Baptiste's attitude toward the world: a scent is a scent.

Hurt's omniscient third-person account -- comprised of fat passages from Patrick Suskind's same-named bestseller -- is arguably the greatest bravura choice in a film with more than its share. In most movies, a third-person narration would suggest detachment from, even diminuition of, the hero; here it suggests complete identification. Jean-Baptiste is a savant artist who's so attuned to his senses that he has almost no sense of himself. He wants to create perfumes so powerful that they shock people into new states of perception. He's like a performer who doesn't feel alive unless he hears applause, or a lover who gets off on his partner's pleasure but never his own. His selfishness is so profound that it's almost indistinguishable from selflessness. He wants to give the greatest ecstasy to the greatest number of people. Unfortunately, he can't do that without killing and rendering the loveliest women in France.

This sounds like a summary of one of the most distasteful films ever made -- or at the very least, one of the campiest. Perfume is perpetually at risk of becoming either (or both). But it never entirely succumbs. Tykwer and his screenwriting collaborators, Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, give the story a dark fairy tale energy. Their ecstatic yet precise imagery feels like a third-person cinematic cousin of Humbert Humbert's first-person Lolita narration. Both Tykwer's film and Nabokov's novel are lit from within by a romantic spirit that's at once repellent and touching. "I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder," Humbert says, remembering his first experience with a nymphet. "I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid --a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing--and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note--and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another."

Jean-Baptiste isn't as knowing as Nabokov's nymphet-chaser. He's more of a socially dislocated uber-genius, and coldblooded though he is, he has his own Rosebud. In that same fecund marketplace, he became smitten with a gorgeous young red-haired peasant girl -- or maybe it was just the exquisite scent of her neck, mingled with the basket of lemons she spilled, and the excitement of those fireworks exploding in the night sky overhead (very D.H. Lawrence). In any case, Jean-Baptiste incidentally, almost reflexively, killed her (Frankenstein's monster's mistake) and then tried and failed to preserve her olfactory essence. This bit is the first of many that could have been pilfered from a Ken Russell movie like The Devils or Tommy; the obsessive tone is so extravagant it's almost funny. In the sequence where Jean-Baptiste stalks and observes the peasant girl, Tykwer's prowling SteadiCam shots recall the museum sequences in both Vertigo and Dressed to Kill, and the super-lush music -- credited to Tykwer, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek -- builds on a romantic/mystical melody that evokes John Williams' Close Encounters score (in particular, the cut titled "The Mountain"). It's an oblique homage, but perfect: Close Encounters, like Perfume, is a coded exploration of the artist's mentality, centered on characters afflicted by visions. Jean-Baptiste worships womens' beauty by trying to annihilate it -- literally trying to boil it down to its essence. His appreciation of that essence is deeper than anyone else's -- even that of his erstwhile trainer, the once-revered and now-irrelevant parfumeur Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman). But Jean-Baptiste isn't a better person than Baldini, just a clearly greater artist -- a goblin Mozart mentored by Baldini's schmuck Salieri.

Perfume's understanding of human nature recalls 13th century philosopher John Duns Scotus, who said humans are driven by two impulses, the affection for advantage (affectio commodi) and the affection for justice (affectio justitiae). The hero of Perfume has the first affection in spades -- he wants to be the best, most daring parfumeur who ever lived, even if it means rendering flesh in glass tanks designed to extract the scent from rose petals. But Jean-Baptiste has none of the affection for justice. He's never seen evidence that there is such a thing, so the word doesn't register. He was divorced from morality by his appalling birth (shat out of his peasant mother's womb and left to die in the bacteria-infested mud of an outdoor fish market) and his grim adolescence (as a brutalized tanner, practically a slave). The film freely admits that Jean-Baptiste is a defective person, but it's enthralled by his lifeforce and demands that you respect it. That lifeforce is signified by Jean-Baptiste's heartbeat, which debuts when his infant self is voided into the street. Soon after, that heartbeat becomes the score's rhythmic spine -- its biological click-track.

More importantly, he's an artist of scent. Jean-Baptiste spends every waking moment obsessing about how to extract existing smells and alchemize new ones. He's about chemistry and mathematics, hunting and gathering. But he's neither prideful nor humble about his obsessive, at times superhuman-seeming focus. He's just a genius doing his thing. His boundless curiosity and stamina could no more inspire conceit in Jean-Baptiste than a knack for sniffing out blood and sensing motion could inspire self-regard in a hammerhead shark. For this reason, other people's judgments don't matter to him. Jean-Baptiste doesn't reject morality, he's just got no use for it; it's simply not a factor in his life. The only thing that's real to Jean-Baptiste and the only thing that makes him happy are one and the same thing: the ability to cultivate and deepen his singular talent, the thing he was put on earth to do. This tendency to equate the fullfillment of destiny with the unfettered right to act on impulse is a trait shared by artists and killers.

Perfume is a creation myth for both. It is not interested in measuring its own conscience, only observing whether its characters have one or do not, then asking whether conscience brings anything tangible besides self-doubt, timidity and rage at life's unfairness -- impulses incarnated by Alan Rickman's Antoine Richis, who's desperate to solve the mysterious killings afflicting the countryside, and determined to protect his own daughter, Laura (Rached Hurd-Wood), who's killably lovely. Richis is so morally outraged that he overcomplicates his own struggle, underestimating Jean-Baptiste by overestimating him; he seems to think of him as a philosophical terrorist when in fact he's more like a wolf: a lithe carnivore driven by hunger. Like the child molester subplot in Todd Solondz's cheerfully cruel Happiness -- which at one point put viewers in the position of rooting for a young boy to eat a sandwich spiked with sleep medicine -- the drawn-out cat-and-mouse between Richis and the parfumier turns the viewer's sympathies inside-out, which is pretty much the film's agenda in a nutshell.

The film's propulsive, often decadent extravagance would seem to be at odds with its moral curiosity. But the two qualities sync up better than you might think. The year's sickest beautiful movie, Perfume isn't shy about flaunting its technique -- and why should it be? Extravagant virtuousity is the hero's raison d'etre, the thing that keeps his mind and heart racing.

Nabokov would approve. "I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase 'sincere and simple' — 'Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere' — under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry," he wrote in Strong Opinions. "When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: 'Art is simple, art is sincere.' Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex."
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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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The triumph of condescension: Miss Potter

By Travis Mackenzie HooverMiss Potter is the story of a woman (Beatrix Potter as played by Renee Zellweger) who stuck to her guns and forged a career at a time when such actions -- carried out well past marrying age -- raised eyebrows and ruffled feathers. That the film maintains a tone of sickly whimsy throughout tells you all you need to know about the seriousness of the enterprise, and reveals the condescension even genteel pictures bring to what used to be called “women’s issues.”

Even the movie's inflation of Potter’s work shows you that it doesn’t think it’s much to begin with -- that her achievements must be jacked up in order to be taken seriously. Potter’s books did not have epic scope. Her stock in trade was a gentle whimsy that was friendly and comforting, an ideal combination for parents reading to their children that, coupled with Potter's own richly detailed watercolours, has served generations of kids just fine. But clearly these were not grand enough achievements for director Chris Noonan (Babe) and writer Richard Maltby, Jr. They have to ascribe earth-shattering visionary status to her work -- anything else would be beneath their lofty standards. And so Potter is turned from a children’s author into what the filmmakers see as a visionary, which, in their maladroit hands, translates into a delusional psychotic. This Potter doesn’t just paint her pictures and tell her stories, she also talks to the finished products as if they were there, and occasionally sees them in genteel acid flashbacks while gazing out the window.

The cutesy condescension with which this is carried out infects most of the rest of the movie: Zellweger’s crinkle-faced bashfulness is marshaled in service of a character who's never quite given her due even when that’s the stated goal of the scene. The plot begins when Potter finally gets published by a firm that only forsees “a small profit”; it’s a family business that’s using the book to prove their bumbling brother Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor) unfit for work. Of course, the book -- about a certain Peter Rabbit -- takes off, and the two misfits find themselves in love. But the film keeps the upper hand; we don’t experience Potter’s success as identification. It's distanced, viewed through a glass darkly held by patronizing parents. Thus Potter and Warne aren’t triumphant in the face of adversity; they’re just adorable, like a child that lost its first tooth.

That paternal condescension extends to pretty much everything Potter does. She’s not a 32-year-old spinster clinging to a dream of a life outside of domesticity and subservience; she’s a precocious child in need of props from the “adult” filmmakers. The fatal casting of cute Zellweger is only the most visible example: worse is what happens when Potter falls in with Norman’s sister Millie (Emily Watson, who ought to have the lead). Herself an unmarried thirty-something, Millie offers Potter some sisterly advice on staying unmarried and leading one’s own life. That her single-woman’s discourse dissolves the minute Norman proposes to Potter isn’t the point; what is the point is that it’s handled with a saccharine sweetness that blunts the edge. Again, triumph is postponed for condescension.

This wouldn’t have been an egregious problem if it weren’t for the film’s apparent belief that it’s pushing a feminist agenda. Much, of course, is made of Potter's parents’ disapproval of her independent ways -- specifically her refusal to marry the raft of “suitable” males that her mother (Barbara Flynn) has gone to the trouble of selecting. (Father, of course, is more lenient, not only because of sympathy but because his own artistic ambitions were blighted by his parents’ expectations.) But time and time again, the movie softpedals Potter's feelings; the filmmakers cut and run from the messy emotions because don't want to alienate the "quality" market to which this film is designed to pander. One gets the impression that the filmmakers would rather be somewhere else, even as they limply mime the requisite you-go-girl motions in the interest of cashing in. But because the "quality" market is the last outpost of the women’s picture, the stakes are quite a bit higher here than in most January mediocrities. The Weinstein/Miramax subgenre is the only one where you can see women in roles of prominence on a regular basis; unfortunately, like Miss Potter, said depictions tend to be precious and risk-free. (Noonan's film is oddly reminiscent of Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat, another film that celebrates female agency with maximum smugness.)

There was a time when you could go to see a Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minnelli or George Cukor film and expect a “womens’ picture” that treated emotions with world-historical importance; now we go to this sort of slop that treats emotions and social mores as if they’re nothing. What happened? How did it come to this? I suppose films like Miss Potter may be all we have to go on -- films that are content to offer cute condescension and a nod in the direction of (ill-defined) feminist goals. But we’re entitled to something a little more substantial and grand than Noonan’s self-regarding gestures in the direction of those aforementioned issues; in fact, we’re entitled to a throwback that reminds of how engaging a woman's story can be. Here’s hoping we get one before this genus of films curdles even further.
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House contributor Travis Mackenzie Hoover is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

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BSG Mondays: Season 3, Ep. 12, "Rapture"

By Todd VanDerWerff




Midway through its third season winter premiere, the Battlestar Galactica episode “Rapture” reached all the way back to the pilot miniseries to reveal just how much a character who shouldn’t be able to grow had grown. Caprica Six (Tricia Helfer), the Cylon who snapped a baby's neck of a baby in the miniseries’ opening minutes, was involved in a tense standoff with Boomer (Grace Park) and Sharon (also Grace Park) over the life of Sharon’s child, the human-Cylon hybrid Hera. The child, quite ill, wouldn’t stop crying and needed the care of a human doctor, something the other Cylons weren’t sure they were going to let Sharon seek out (some of the misdirected anger at the child made it seem as if the Cylons, as a race, were suffering from post-partum depression). Boomer put her hand around the child’s throat, threatening to snap her neck. Six’s next move was quick and decisive -- she knocked Boomer out, then snapped Boomer’s neck. This reversal of that moment from the miniseries highlighted just how far Six -- ostensibly an unchangeable, programmed robot -- and all of the other characters had evolved during the course of a miniseries and two-and-a-half full seasons.

“Rapture” itself was kind of frantic, cross-cutting endlessly between political intrigue on the Galactica, a dire rescue mission on a planet’s surface, betrayal on the Cylon basestar, pseudo-mysticism in a long-hidden temple, a small group of soldiers trying to hold off a superior force, and a few bits of family and relationship drama. And then a star went nova. The hour might have felt too dense if the third season of the show hadn't been, thus far, rather miserly in its willingness to advance the overarching plot. The thickly plotted “Rapture” and its equally substantial predecessor, the midseason-ender "The Eye of Jupiter," went a long way toward rectifying that.

One thing that is coming sharply into focus as the third season rolls on is the show's increasing focus on loyalty. Galactica started out as a rather simple “us vs. them” tale (with a bit of the apocalypse rolled in for good measure), but as the series has gone alone, it has resolutely blurred the lines between "us" and "them." Now the show's roster of fully developed characters includes deeply flawed humans, deeply flawed Cylons and one or two members of each race who don’t know where their true place is. In “Rapture,” every major character was forced to ask where, exactly, his or her loyalties lie, based on personal experience; the series' willingness to take its time exploring that experience partly explains the impact of the last two episodes. The last couple of seasons have aired some draggy hours, to be sure; but Six's quiet reversal described above -- and for that matter, the moment when Sharon goes back into the Cylon basestar and returns with her child but without betraying her new loyalties to her human commanders and husband -- would not have been possible if the series hadn't insisted on a somewhat leisurely approach toward teasing out its characters.

The Sharon and Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) storyline was responsible for at least two great shots in the episode, both of which flashed by quickly and engaged the episode’s themes of loyalty. Early in the episode, Sharon, seeking a way aboard the Cylon ship, asks her husband to shoot her so she might die and be downloaded on board the ship. He’s uncertain he wants to do it -- unsure of his capacity to pull the trigger, and perhaps also unsure of her loyalties to him and his race. In the end, though, he does it, and we see the act in longshot -- Helo embracing Sharon, the gun flash spattering her blood against the wall behind her, their whole tortured relationship summed up in a ghastly instant. Later, Helo is confronted by Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) and President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) and forced to defend his action. Helo is angry at Roslin for keeping Hera's survival from him. He turns on the president, looming large over the rather diminutive chief executive (who nevertheless holds her own); but then we see, in a shot framed by the doorway leading to the room the three are standing in, that a simple grip from Adama's hand prevents Helo from touching Roslin. Helo may not respect his president, but his commanding officer is another story.

The season’s most ambitious gambit is its attempt to get the viewers to shift their loyalties, ever so briefly, to the side of the Cylons -- or to at least try to understand the nature of the enemy. (The New Caprica arcs, which placed the main characters in the role of insurgents, had a similar impetus.) Throughout its run, Galactica has used the Cylons to examine certain aspects of fundamentalist religion, and “Rapture” dug into these questions again. The attempts by D’Anna (Lucy Lawless) to work with Baltar (James Callis) and uncover the nature of the five Cylon models no one knows about have irked the other Cylons, who aren't big on self-examination. After D’Anna is granted a brief audience with the final five (she seems to know one of them, though we aren't allowed to see who it is), she's taken aside by Cavil (Dean Stockwell) and informed that she and all others of her model are being placed in storage -- decomissioned because of their dangerously unorthodox ideas. The episode's final shot recalls the giant warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark -- showing a giant storeroom (of sorts) holding dozens upon dozens of models identical to D’Anna, all deactivated and lying in resurrection pods. The comparison of the Cylon hive-mind to the hive-mind of fundamentalist religion hasn’t always worked so well; but its deployment here -- to show how those who question and prod at faith are cleanly cut out of the fundamentalist body -- was well-done. All evidence to the contrary, here’s hoping Lawless, who gave a career-best performance in this episode, will turn up again sometime.

And all of the above doesn’t begin to touch on the multitudes of other things that happened in the episode, including some advancement on the love triangle front (Starbuck and Dee, who are in love with the same man, bonded as Dee rescued the injured and downed Starbuck) and some nicely staged shootout scenes between pinned- down humans and ever-increasing numbers of Cylons. And that’s to say nothing of both Baltar and Six ending up in the custody of the humans by episode’s end. Add to that a significant revelation about Starbuck (the paintings in her apartment, glimpsed in season two, seemed to foretell the significance of the star going nova -- does this mean she‘s a Cylon? That seems likely, though also too obvious for this series). This was a dangerously overstuffed episode, and a lot of elements got short shrift (the really impressive nova special effects were burned off in a rescue sequence that sped by in under 30 seconds). But “Rapture” was Galactica at its plot-heavy best, tossing its many characters together into various pairings to see where they might land.

* * *
This marks the first BSG review on a Monday, due to the show’s move to Sundays at 10 p.m. EST/PST. The series suffered declining ratings on Fridays when it went up against the fall premieres on the major broadcast networks; a fourth season may be contingent on the series getting more eyeballs on its new night.
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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 (January 22nd, 2007)

1. "Top 10 Best Best Actress winners" and "Top 10 Worst Best Actress winners": The results of Edward Copeland's Best & Worst Best Actress winners survey.

["Helen Mirren hasn't even received her expected Oscar for The Queen yet, and Brian Darr already was prepared to list her win as one of the worst. "The fact that she doesn't have an Oscar on her mantle already (is) merely a technicality. But why? A perfect example of coasting on star/celebrity persona and getting accolades for it. Give her the Jean Hersholt Award if you like her as a person so much," Darr wrote. Al Weisel wished he could pick Judy Holliday for both the best and worst lists: (Born Yesterday) is Judy Holliday's best performance and she might have deserved the award if she hadn't won it instead of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in All About Eve. Without further ado, the 10 performances that got the most negative votes – and No. 1 was a runaway choice."]

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2. "Extras - Bowie": Great scene from last night's Extras.

["Pathetic little fat man!/No one's bloody laughing!"]

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3. "Sundance Report: D'Angelo Defends Chicago 10": In praise of a Sundance pariah.

["Like poor beleaguered Leonard Shelby in Memento, festivalgoers tend to know who they are and where they’re going, but have only the haziest recollection of where they’ve just been. I’m writing these words roughly a day and a half into Sundance 2007, having seen or sampled nine films thus far, and already yesterday’s titles feel like ancient history – especially now that the blogosphere chews up and spits out pictures within scant hours of their world premiere. At this point, does anybody still care what I thought of the opening night film, Chicago 10, which has already (as reported here on Screengrab) been widely dismissed as interesting-but-flawed, a context-free rehash of well-trod historical ground?"]

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4. "Google to Digitize a Million Books With University": From SlipperyBrick.

["Google is partaking in a multi-year project in conjunction with University of Texas at Austin to digitize more than one million books from the universities libraries. This extends on a deal they had made starting in 2004 with five other libraries - the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library. This is a massive, massive job that Google is undertaking, but Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe stated an important fact at an invite-only event called ‘Unbound’ held recently at the New York public library, ‘The majority of information lies outside the Internet.’"]


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5. "Last House on the Left": From the Chicago Reader blog.

["Besides being generally mediocre to lousy movies, what do all these Hollywood features have in common: The Loved One, Nurse Betty, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Playing by Heart, Galaxy Quest, The Marrying Man, and, most recent of the bunch, Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies? Give up?--well c'mon, of course ya do! But the unequivocal "correct" answer--if only because I can't think of another that works as well--is: location, location, location ... since all were shot, at least in part, in and around Pierre Koenig's steel-and-glass residential masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills: Case Study House 22, or Stahl House, as it's more commonly called today."]
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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 (January 21st, 2007)

1. "Shot duck survives 2 days in refrigerator": Duck Dodgers in the 24th-and-a-half watt Frigidaire!

["Neither gunfire nor two days in a refrigerator could slay this duck. When the wife of the hunter who shot it opened the refrigerator door, the duck lifted its head, giving her a scare. The man’s wife “was going to check on the refrigerator because it hadn’t been working right and when she opened the door, it looked up at her,” said Laina Whipple, a receptionist at Killearn Animal Hospital. “She freaked out and told the daughter to take it to the hospital right then and there.” The 1-pound female ringneck ended up at Goose Creek Wildlife Sanctuary, where it has been treated since Tuesday for wounds to its wing and leg."]

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2. "The Reeler at Sundance": S.T. VanAirsdale's frequently updated Sundance Film Festival coverage.

["Did David Poland and I see the same shitty movie?"]

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3. "AFI to reprise its top-100 films list": Because a bad thing bears repeating. ToddVanDerWerff delves further.

["The 100 best movies of all time aren't what they were 10 years ago. So says the American Film Institute, which first compiled its "100 Years ... 100 Movies" list in 1998. That's why they are doing it again - and plan to repeat the process each decade, AFI president and chief executive Jean Picker Firstenberg said Thursday. "So much has changed in our country," she said. "Let's just hope there's not another 9/11, but clearly that shifted everything in our lives and shifted everything for anyone who chronicles the human condition.""]

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4. "Forbidden City mulls closing Starbucks": Farewell my corporate concubine.

["Beijing's Forbidden City palace is considering closing a Starbucks on its grounds after protests led by a state TV personality who says the American coffeehouse's presence is eroding Chinese culture, a news report said Thursday. "The museum is working with Starbucks to find a solution by this June in response to the protests," the Xinhua News Agency quoted a palace spokesman, Feng Nai'en, as saying."]

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5. "Silver Surfer's Got Nards!!": Cool, ain't it?

["Earlier this afternoon, a reader sent in an image highlighting what he claimed was the Silver Surfer's chromy nut sack. He said this screen grab came from the currently posted trailer for FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. Initially, I had my doubts -- who wouldn't? It HAD to be fake. I mean, the notion of Surfer cruising around with his metallic junk swinging in the wind just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Finally, curiosity got the best of me (it wasn't the homo-erotic kind of curiosity...not that there's anything wrong with that), so I jumped to the QuickTime HD version of the trailer and started frame-by-framing through the scene in question. And, sure enough, there it was...the Silver Surfer's shiny package!"]
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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 (January 20th, 2007)

1. "Flood unearths pictures of local movie stars": From Xinhua online.

["A flood in a decades-old photography store along Shanghai's Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall helped unearth thousands of photos of movie stars from the 1920s and 1930s. The photos are now on display at the Shanghai Wangkai Photo Studio. "We were amazed to find these photos, which had not been noticed by anyone before," said studio manager Sun Mengying, noting that many photos of stars from the golden age of Shanghai cinema were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)."]

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2. "Boyfriends and Girlfriends: Hong Sang-soo on Woman on the Beach": Kevin Lee interviews the acclaimed Korean director about his latest film.

["The protagonist of Hong Sang-soo’s new film Woman on the Beach is a director at a crossroads in his career. Could the same be said of Hong? It’s been ten years since his debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996); six features later, he is a regular on the international festival circuit (the ultra-exclusive New York Film Festival has programmed the newest Hong release each of the last three years). Ever since A Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) and Turning Gate (2002) startled festival-goers with their highly studied yet playful examination of sexual relationships, a small but intensely appreciative fan base has had high expectations for the day Hong—who’s sometimes billed as Korea’s answer to Eric Rohmer—becomes a household name."]

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3. "Mamas and Papas singer Doherty dead at 66": From MSNBC.

["Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for their soaring harmony on hits like “California Dreamin”’ and “Monday, Monday,” died Friday at 66."]

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4. "Andrew Niccol Signs Up Al Pacino for 'Dali & I'": GIMME ALL YA GOT!!!

["Academy Award, Emmy Award and Tony Award-winning actor "Al" Pacino, real name Alfredo James Pacino, is all set to star as surreal artist Salvador Dali in 'Dali & I: The Surreal story'. Directed by Andrew Niccol, the film will highlight Dali's later life when the artist began to focus more on surreal work."]

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5. "Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick": By Adrian Martin for Rouge.

["When making a film, Terrence Malick speaks to his collaborators in poetic images. To Martin Sheen in Badlands (1973), he said: ‘Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.’ To the post-production team (editors and sound mixers) on The Thin Red Line (1998), he advised: ‘It’s like moving down a river, and the picture should have the same kind of flow.’ And to Jörg Widmer, his Steadicam operator for The New World (2005), he whispered: ‘You have the quail at the wing when it’s about to fly.’ What kind of directions are these to give your actors and technicians? Malick does not talk to them about the usual, conventional things: the inner psychological or emotional states of characters; the themes or intentions of the story. He does not even talk about the composition of the shots or the editing pattern he envisages for them. Rather, in every case, he asks those who work with him to inhabit a state, a mood, a feeling that is captured in a precise physical image: the wand in the hand, the water in the stream, the bird at the wing."]
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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 Hitcher: Easy does it, the next stop is a killer

By Matt Zoller SeitzThe Hitcher isn’t shy about declaring its intentions. The opening image is of a jackrabbit crossing a desert highway and being pulped by a car. Soon after, the vacationing young hero, Jim (Zachary Knighton), asks his girlfriend, Grace (Sophia Bush), to hold the wheel of his 1970 Oldsmobile 442 so he can hang out of the driver’s side window and clean a splattered bug off the windshield. Message: Roadkill comes in all shapes and sizes.
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Sticking to the playbook: We Are Marshall

By Matt Zoller SeitzThe football movie is such a tight-assed genre that it makes the western and the gangster picture seem flexible in comparison. Nearly every example contains some or all of the following elements: An underqualified but scrappy team (or previously selfish hero) trains hard and learns life lessons, then either triumphs or walks away beaten but proud. Prayers are offered, anthems sung. Hardass and/or eccentric yet caring coaches rally demoralized players with vernacular St. Crispians' day speeches. Once-disapproving moms turn out to watch the gladiators and end up baying for blood. Leather-necked dads squeeze out a tear when they think no one's looking (and mom pretends not to see). Padded bodies crash into each other while the soundtrack plays popular music of the day. An important character gets injured, then (1) sucks it up and gets back on the field, (2) becomes a de facto mascot, cheering from the sidelines, or (3) dies tragically, inspiring his teammates to victory in his name. The values of faith and community are affirmed and guys spray beer on each other. Vary these elements even a tiny bit -- by, say, shifting the placement of the big game, or using the story to praise racial harmony (Remember the Titans), tweak high school nostalgia (The Best of Times) or deconstruct America's larger institutions (Any Given Sunday) -- and the result will seem radical, even though the rest of the movie is strictly pro forma.

At least that's what the makers of We Are Marshall seem to have been banking on -- that and the pall of real-life tragedy, which hangs over both the movie and its audience. The gist: in 1970, a chartered flight bearing Marshall University's football team, coaching staff and various students, alums and boosters crashed on the way home from an away game with East Carolina University, killing everyone on board and wiping out Marshall's entire program. The movie, directed by one-named Charlie's Angels auteur McG, starts with the away game and the crash, then follows the team and the surrounding community as it struggles to heal itself through football, overriding natural objections that it's too soon to be suiting up, and then limping through the next season courtesy of the student body's grit and heart, a rules exemption from the NCAA allowing freshman to suit up, and the eccentric energy of new coach Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey), who apparently was the 563rd choice of university president Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn), but turned out to be the right guy for the job. The movie ends on a note of triumph, but it's a self-effacing, Rocky 1 triumph; since the team's mere presence on the field constitutes a victory, everything else is gravy.

I gather from news stories that We Are Marshall sticks reasonably close to fact, compressing events and combining characters and embellishing a bit to make a more propulsive and commercial film without deforming the essence of what really happened. Still, fidelity to truth is no guarantee of excellence if history is conveyed via the usual football movie elements, and Marshall has more than its share -- Norman Rockwell nostalgia for bygone times; Life magazine color scheme, K-Tel soundtrack; the standard building-a-team plot points, conveyed via characters who are permitted one or two distinguishing traits and no rough edges. The team quarterback's fiancee, a cheerleader turned coffee shop waitress (Kate Mara), is defined by her morose demeanor and her refusal to take off her ring; player Nate Ruffin (Anthony Mackie of She Hate Me) and assistant coach Red Dawson (Matthew Fox of Lost) are defined solely by their guilt over not having been on that flight. It's understandable that We Are Marshall would organize itself around trauma -- the movie's about a community's response to death, so how could it be otherwise? -- but I still found myself reacting to many of the scenes with a disrepectfully raised eyebrow. The characters seem to have been honed to the point where they can slip right into preordained narrative slots, and their ephiphanies come right on schedule. You know the fiancee's story will culminate in deciding what to do about that ring. Ian McShane -- who plays Mara's should-have-been father-in-law, a local steel tycoon and team booster -- is likewise defined only by his suffering, and Strathairn's president is the sum total of his tremulous sensitivity as he flails about trying to do the right thing (first by cancelling the post-crash season, then by trying to rescue it).

Is this really the best way to honor the crash victims' memories and the town's collective spirit -- by making nearly every character into a moist-eyed sports film archetype, wandering around inside shimmering CinemaScope compositions illuminated by the holy, healing light of football, apple pie and Chevrolet? I'm all for honoring one's hometown and home team, but Jesus, come on -- between Shane Hurbut's sugar-glazed photography and Christophe Beck's Stations-of-the-Cross score (which pumps inspirational helium into every moment, no matter how outwardly incidental), Marshall plays like a puffed-up feature length cousin of the opening section of Born on the Fourth of July, minus the embittered radical follow-through. Where Oliver Stone indulged the cliched iconography of mid-century, middlebrow nostalgia in order to shatter it along with protagonist Ron Kovic's body, McG just dusts off the same iconography and presents it as-is, which tells the viewer, in effect: "Yes, life really is this simple, and people really are this warm and decent, and small-town America really is this terrific. And football? Don't get me started." Certain corny incidents might very well be true, but the Hollywood presentation makes you doubtful. On the night when Dedmon obtained the NCAA waiver, did the pivotal conversation really take place outdoors during a Biblical thunderstorm? The big trailer moment -- thousands of students and staffers instantly gathering below Dedmon's office and chanting "We are Marshall!" to stop the board of governors from killing the program -- seems absurd. I don't believe it happened, and if it did happen, I bet it didn't happen in quite that way.

The sheer niceness of the college and the town and everyone in it should send the Bullshit-O-Meter into the red zone. Were there no jerks or knaves or bums anywhere in Marshall? Surely so -- and if the filmmakers were worried they'd get sued for including them, they could have changed their names. Were there no otherwise good citizens who unthinkingly exploited the town's grief or used it as an excuse to withdraw or act out? There must have been. Is this truly the best of all possible worlds? McG seems to think so; I suspect that if he directed Candide, it'd be a drama -- and deadly earnest.) If I'd never seen the book Friday Night Lights, or watched the pretty good movie or the superb NBC series, I might have been more inclined to accept We Are Marshall's glossy but flat commemoration of misery, pluck and heart. The various incarnations of Lights honor the finer human qualities drawn out by nonprofessional athletics, and convey the infinite complexity of individuals, families, teams and towns and the intermingling of idealism and reality, decency and opportunism that defines sports at every level. In contrast, Marshall is so focused on its pain-by-numbers narrative that it rarely pauses to to delineate the town, the school or the individual team members, or to depict the physical/mathematical dynamics of football in a kinetic, visually comprehensible way. (The latter is something the otherwise pre-fab Remember the Titans did quite well, actually. It was one of the only football films in memory where the behind-the-scenes drama literally played out on the field, in shots that were held longer than the football movie norm; watching the coaches watch the players, you could tell which of their gambits was working.) Nor can Marshall be bothered to explore the grief process in anything but the most superficial, plot-point-driven way. The prologue with the away game and the subsequent crash is dread-inducing and powerful, and not as exploitive as you expect because it cuts away the instant the team feels a tremor -- but it's still counterproductive, since its placement requires us to mourn people we just met. (Marshall would have been very different movie -- and surely a less pushy one -- if it had started with Lengyel hearing about the crash, then let him be our guide into the post-tragedy world, unveiling the town and the survivors through his eyes.) The movie's square as can be, and it's a cheerleader for Oprah's belief in the magical healing power of closure, which translates as, "Decide to be over it, and you're over it." If not for McConaughey's surprisingly rich performance -- which combines Dennis Hopper's demented grin, Peter Falk-as-Columbo's hunched posture and surreal rhetorical questions, and the affable goofiness of his Dazed and Confused character, Wooderson -- you'd be hard pressed to name a character who resembles an actual human being. And that's just bizarre. It's as if McG and his collaborators decided to drain the lifeblood from the characters, the period and the whole storyline on purpose -- as if letting a wee bit of raggedy, spontaneous life creep into the film would disrespect the dead. We Are Marshall will bring a tear to your eye, but so will cutting an onion.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, a contributor to the The New York Times film section, and a former columnist for NYPress and The Star-Ledger.

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Lateral Sculpture: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó

By Ryland Walker Knight

Time is relevant, yes? Art is a distillation of a moment or series of moments. Film art is a capture: the camera takes in light and stores it for future projection—the captured light is time. Film, as an art, is a means to represent the relative passage of time. The filmmaker's job, then, is to assemble a work from the most essential building blocks of story/life/events; or to whittle it down, eliminating the excess. This is the crux of Andrei Tarkovsky's film theory, which he famously defined in his book "Sculpting in Time". The filmmaker is a sculptor, wielding his camera as a chisel. It's a convincing study, and an appealing set of guidelines & edicts to follow in any art. Form must always reflect content, as conscientiously as possible: if the content is hollow, the form is irrelevant. If ever there was a brand of cinema that academia was meant to swallow whole, this is it.

Béla Tarr's seven and a half hour opus Sátántangó (1994) practices many "Sculpting" maxims, first and foremost in the way it represents the slow and subjective passing of time. Despite their virtuoso control of image-music-text, both of these directors seek to understand our terrestrial conundrum through an aesthetic purity, rejecting—via a superficial minimalism—montage, standard coverage, a modern/typical score, etc. However, where Tarkovsky's world is a blend of agnostic mysticism & honest self-doubt, Tarr's world is a complex mix of sardonic humor and compassionate atheism.

What separates them further is how they move through their frames: Tarkovsky moves laterally, always panning or tracking from side to side, face to face, a kind of sideways stagnation. Tarr does something similar, but instead of focusing on his characters in a tracking shot, he pushes in and pulls out of scenes as a serpent, ever circling—his is a more active passivity of regard, searching around corners. The centerpiece to Sátántangó's only eruptive montage (mentioned below) is an endless dolly shot coiling around a woman. You never doubt, in Tarkovsky's films, that what is in front of you is exactly what needs to be seen at that specific moment, but in Sátántangó the viewer is tempted to scour the corners. And it works. Sátántangó is a skeptic's diatribe, angry and unrelenting, whereas something like Mirror, Tarkovsky's most active (& convoluted) film, is a precise distillation of memory, as if snatched straight from the brain and planted importunate—yet plaintive—onscreen.

* * *
About five hours into Sátántangó the screen splinters as we bear witness to what is, in essence, the film's first and only montage. A baroque hymnal/dirge underscores several close-ups of the rain-weary peasants whom we've followed from a mud-caked commune to a decrepit, empty mansion. Like many sequences in the film, it's an unfulfilled promise—the villagers were expecting a bountiful, hope-filled new life led by their "resurrected" neighbor and appointed leader, Irimias (Mihály Vig)—yet Tarr nonetheless exalts in and celebrates the faithful's naïve devotion. Despite the interminable length of the takes that comprise this four-shot montage, the moment (which concludes with a sideswipe lateral track to a man pissing into a bare concrete corner) feels a brief respite. After experiencing these villagers' lives, roughly and tangentially, through almost 300 minutes of parallel storytelling, we in the audience feel a part of their community. We've felt the incessant rain. We've danced all night on a bender. We've buried our youngest too early. Thus, we understand the hope illuminated by the tracking shot across their ravaged faces. Their illegitimate messiah has not met them at journey's end, but for this moment vigilance rules out and hope springs eternal. For a time, we are allowed to bask in the film's holy gaze at these wrecked, aimless people. But then they try to bed down and they can't shut up: they're too busy complaining. While they bicker and skeptically prognosticate off screen, we track down an endless hallway to a close-up of an owl who is neither impressed nor fazed by these simple humans. The owl is one of the many uninterested animals that populate the story; it shows a wide-ranging indifference for this ensemble that shrinks them inside the film's Petri dish. The commune's eventual demise and dispersal may be interpreted as a cautionary parable, but it remains in its own vacuum-tight space, imprisoned in a world prone to ignorance, myopia, greed, blind faith, alcoholism, rain and wind, and sealed off (as a tomb) by a hermit physician's chilling final gesture.

* * *
Satantango's iconic sequence, which features a possibly feebleminded—and definitely neglected—blank-faced girl named Estike (Erika Bók) torturing her cat, is a brutal piece of filmmaking, likely to make you wince, but the chapter-ending payoff is well worth the investment. Its repercussions ripple back on themselves and unwrap outwards to envelop—and color—the entire community (& the film (& you)). As the girl lays down one last time next to her poisoned cat, she imagines an angel watching over her, guiding her through to the beyond. Dramatically, the sequence works equally as a climax and an inciting incident, and given its placement at the heart of the narrative, just before the midway intermission, it's hard not to see it as both. The film's cyclical structure, within both halves, works as a mirror, much like the twelve-step tango itself: six steps forward mimicked and recast as six steps back. Thus, the audience is off kilter, reeling from either the repetitions of shot movements at crucial narrative intersections or the retelling of key interactions from oppositional points of view. It's a risky strategy that tests the audience’s patience and ability to keep up, but it is this rigor that pays the richest dividends and keeps us coming back to the wellspring.

The first chapter post-intermission is entitled "Irimias Delivers a Speech." Irimias was rumored dead for years and has now appeared (perhaps reborn?) to chastise his former neighbors, forcing them into submission. Irimias's undercutting admonition at Estike's wake is typical of Tarr's subversive set-up & pay off strategy. Another memorable and hilarious example (aside from the pissing-in-a-corner capper mentioned above) comes when Irimias, awed by a fog hanging over the ruins where Estike's dead body was found, drops reverently to his knees. After the cloud lifts and drifts away, as crumbling buildings reappear on the landscape, Irimias casually stands up to continue along the path. A few steps later his partner Petrina (Putyi Horváth) asks, "What? You've never seen fog before?", effectively deflating Irimias and the audience's reverie. It likewise reminds us of Estike's devastating, naïve epiphany: the question implied, Is her guardian angel indeed gazing down from on high?

* * *
Sátántangó's gloomy milieu may remind one of Underground, Emir Kusturica's ludicrous/fantastic travelogue through Yugoslavian history. Both films follow a troupe of holy fools who blindly accept the spoon-fed empty promises of an unreliable communist messiah, a false prophet who exploits their faith in the system for dubious gains. To an extent, both films doubt and look down on this devotion, but they hardly fault their characters, whose shortcomings endear them to us, much like a wayward child inspires sympathy. (If only they knew better.) However, Kusturica's film is the near-opposite of Sátántangó: instead of a decades-long three-ring circus satire, Tarr's film is an ugly and indolent three-day hell ride. Underground is a zoo while Sátántangó is a prison.

So why in the world would we need to endure seven and a half hours of this? Well, for one, Tarr shares with Kusturica a cutting sense of humor; for another, like an epic tale rich in nuance and motivational back story (the film is, in fact, based on a lengthy Hungarian novel by its co-screenwriter, and Tarr's frequent collaborator, Lázsló Krasznahorkai) Sátántangó uses its totemic length to better specify and explore its world. On the surface its foreignness appears impenetrable: as stated above, Tarr rejects many cinematic conventions, montage chief among them. David Bordwell has exhaustively detailed the film's editing—there are only 172 cuts in 434 minutes for an average shot length of roughly two-and-a-half minutes. As Bordwell has noted, however, this is somewhat misleading, as certain scenes are played in one uninterrupted shot while others employ standard visual logic (e.g.: Estike is seen watching something through a window, then we cut to her view of a bar full of drunken adults). Yet, despite its endless dolly shots and cramped compositions—practically a narcoleptic claustrophobe's worst nightmare—the film endures (& thrives) within its rigid framework. There are laughs in nearly every scene, even in the most dire, will-this-end? situations such as the Sisyphean sojourn of the heavyset, voyeuristic, alcoholic doctor (Peter Berling) to replenish his liquor supply, or the slowest marathon accordion dance sequence ever filmed.

* * *
American audiences are routinely berated for not embracing films identified as slow or dense or oblique or a tough nut to crack. The Reader’s Digest critical opinion is that popular homeland tastes veer towards earnest follies like Amélie or the snap-crackle-pop of Pedro Almodóvar's primary color palate. This ignores, though, that ardent art-house fandom still exists, however minor the hold on the market. Contemplative, deliberate filmmaking has an audience in America—even outside New York or Los Angeles. Patience is a virtue... With the right marketing support, Army of Shadows became a bona-fide art house hit despite its surgical pace and bleak conceit. On the flip side, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu enjoyed no support outside the glowing reviews it received and only made $80,000 in US theaters. More recently, David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE has broken house records at Manhattan’s IFC Theatre; but a lot of that can be attributed to the marquee American auteur—it was bound to make some dough. Sátántangó is far from broadly marketable, but its powers appeal to a bigger niche than any distributor would project. It won't rival INLAND EMPIRE's gross (it's more than twice as long, limiting the number of possible screenings), but with relatively little rally spirit, the Northwest Film Forum sold over half the house when I saw it in Seattle last December. UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive has recently purchased a new 35mm print struck from the original negative, straight from Hungary, and has programmed its first Bay Area screening for Saturday, February 17th, 2007. Tickets are disappearing. For those with neither the time nor the patience for an all-day screening, Facets Video has released a Region 1 DVD, available for stop-and-go home viewing.

* * *
By now, in an era of audience-active phenomena such as Lost or even Pulp Fiction, non-linear narrative should not be too tough to handle. But when employed by a seven and a half hour Hungarian movie, such trickery can feel heavier than anvils. At times I felt an ant, forced to carry myself and my ideas and the film and its characters across the gulf from projection booth to screen to my eyes to my brain all by myself. That dance sequence is so long you won't believe it. Honestly. You start to think it's reaching a zenith when the camera starts to move the first time, but rest assured, if you have to pee—go pee. Yet I didn't go pee. I watched the whole goddamn thing. And you know why? It made me laugh. A man balances a "cheese-stick" on his forehead and periodically crosses the dance floor. A bodacious woman fights her way through the dance with a desperate hanger-on, one minute smiling and twirling, the next punching and kicking. A drunk stumbles into the crowd and forces a few to move like him, jagged, before collapsing on a bench where he kicks, every now and then, at the continuing revelry. And then some more stuff happens. By the time the stuck-on-repeat klezmer quits and all on screen are staring stunned out at the audience you won't know whether to clap, yell, guffaw, shake your head or some combination of all.

Nearly every scene in Sátántangó plays against the audience's expectations, much like the narrative plays with the characters' hopes, twisting them inside-out into obsolescence. Yet the elliptical construction chisels its way to a brilliant epiphany in its final chapter, when we see the pieces nailed together in a most poetic way. Tarkovsky, again: "When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particlar way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life." Sátántangó has this awareness, despite the differences in approach/outlook to, say, Mirror. It brings together its disparate parts into a confounding collage of story, philosophy, and aesthetic criticism borne from the daily preposterous comedy called life. It's jumbled up going from a to c to d to b to e, but it's the perfect syllogism. Each sequence informs the next and reflects on the previous, notwithstanding the appearance of random-fire tangents. Sátántangó's narration places it in past tense, but it is hardly a memory: you walk through its paces every minute, watching the circle distend & meander into an oval—until, finally, you witness it closing.

To approach Sátántangó merely as a test of wills only ensures displeasure, discomfort, and plain dissatisfaction. One must surrender to its rhythm from the get-go or the whole endeavor is lost. You may yet feel weighted down by the mind-numbing aspects—it's a rough, lengthy road cleft with forks—but if you find yourself laughing at the opening scene of bulls and cows fleeing the village (ever slowly, all in one carefully executed & choreographed shot, with ample time for a mounting on the side), you're no doubt in tune with Tarr. You can relax and let the film come to you. If not, you may want to skip the copperplate migratory storytelling and slug's pacing for the above-mentioned Kusturica film, with its propulsive forward motion and breathless energy. If you stick with it, though, you will be delighted in parts, frustrated beyond belief in others (the dance sequence does end, don't worry), dozing often, but ultimately fulfilled by the final reel when key mysteries are answered (though, much as you'd expect from a labyrinth, narrative dead-ends abound) and the whole thing is boarded up with finality like a hardback tome falling shut on its featherweight pages.

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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 (January 19th, 2007)

1. "Are We There Yet?": From Filmmaker Magazine; Jamie Stuart explores the ever-evolving world of HD.

["The latest evolution in HD technology will be introduced to theaters shortly in the form of David Fincher’s long-anticipated Zodiac, about the San Francisco serial killings of the late 1960s. Photographed by Harris Savides, ASC, using the Viper, it boasts of being the first major Hollywood production that will exist as pure data from beginning to end. Having developed the Viper to his own specifications, Fincher bypassed tape for an S.two hard drive, and in the process captured the movie completely as 4:4:4 uncompressed HD, an impossibility with tape. The straight-talking Savides describes the situation bluntly: “Everybody who’s shooting this stuff is a guinea pig right now.""]

***
2. "Satirist Art Buchwald dies at 81": From The Boston Globe.

["With his trademark wit , Art Buchwald used his newspaper column to skewer politicians in the nation's capital, and over the decades millions of Americans began their morning by reading his unfolding chronicle of history writ small and satirical. At the end of his life ill health gave him a new subject, his impending death, and he wrote a series of poignant dispatches from a hospice center he later left after outliving his stay. Mr. Buchwald died in Washington on Wednesday evening, according to his son, Joel, with whom he lived. The columnist was 81 and had published a book last year, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," that celebrated the unexpected coda to his long life of achievement."]

***
3. "The dogs of war": Godfrey Cheshire reviews Letters from Iwo Jima and The Good German.

["Why is Warner Bros. opening two high-profile movies about the World War II era, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima and Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, in a single Triangle multiplex this weekend? If you know how to read the industry tea leaves, that one's not too hard to decode. Warners has important, longstanding relationships with Eastwood and Soderbergh, plus a sizable investment in each project, so they must open the movies somewhere. Yet they're not putting them into more theaters because they anticipate that viewers are going to treat the films like month-old popcorn. And they're right about that. Neither movie is going to draw flies at the box office, I suspect, and that's not because filmgoers can't deal with tough-minded, austere investigations of a period in history that Hollywood too often has turned into high-gloss myth. It's because both movies are turkeys--though of an interestingly similar sort."]

***
4. "I Likes 'Em Big - They Plops Better": From Pop Culture Gadabout.

["Let's dispense with the unabashed fannish gushing right away: the first volume of Fantagraphics' new Elzie Crisler Segar Popeye reprint – "I Yam What I Yam!" – is one of the coolest book repackagings ever. A tabloid-sized hardback printing six daily strips to a page, a thick die-cut cardboard cover featuring a magnified panel of the squinty ol' gob slugging a burly sparring partner and himself on the jaw: it's friggin' magnificent. Difficult to imagine a better showcase for the comic strip adventures of this larger-than-life American creation."]

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5. "'Ugly Betty' Star Saluted in Congress": So she'd better not run off with an Italian.

["Ugly Betty star America Ferrera has been praised in the US House of Representatives for her Golden Globe Award win and work raising the profile of Latinos. Congresswoman Hilda L. Solis from California took to the floor of the US House of Representatives on Wednesday to publicly salute the star. Solis said, "Madame Speaker, I rise today to congratulate American Ferrera for winning the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy for her work in ABC show Ugly Betty. Through her work, Ms. Ferrera is breaking down barriers for Latinos in prime-time television. I commend America and everyone involved in Ugly Betty for helping to break down stereotypes and provide a role model for young Latinas.""]
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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 (January 18th, 2007)

1. "Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant secret (1982)": Reprint of a Ciné journal article by the late film critic Serge Daney. Philippe Garrel's latest work, Les Amants réguliers (Regular Lovers) opens Friday, January 19th at Manhattan's Cinema Village. (Two takes on this latter film by Nick Pinkerton: at Reverse Shot and indieWIRE.)

["A man communicates that he has suffered. A filmmaker claims to be testifying for his generation. An experience struggles to become a story. A frozen narrative still burns. Is it a film? If so, then L’Enfant secret bears little resemblance to what passes today as French cinema. ‘Suffering’, ‘testimony’, ‘experience’, ‘narrative’ – ill-seen, ill said, old-fashioned words, words that frighten. Let’s start again."]

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2. "The Globes Ain't Saving America...": Nick Schager reminds us who America's real hero is.

["Get me Jack Bauer!"]

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3. "Senator Criticized Over Move to Restrict Alcohol in Church": "Take this, all of you, and drink from it. This is the cup of my Kool-Aid."

["A bid by a Nebraska lawmaker to expand underage drinking restrictions to include alcohol consumed in church has drawn criticism from Catholics who say it will infringe on religious rights. Democratic State Sen. Lowen Kruse has introduced a bill that would eliminate two provisions to Nebraska's underage drinking law which allow minors to drink alcohol in their own homes or at places of worship during religious ceremonies. While saying the primary goal of the bill was admirable, Catholic League President Bill Donahue worries about the implication for Mass. Catholics and some Protestant denominations use wine in their communion services."]

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4. "Surprise birth has chimp sanctuary checking vasectomies": The only response that suffices.

["A female chimpanzee at a sanctuary has given birth, despite the fact that the facility's entire male chimp population has had vasectomies. Now managers at Chimp Haven are planning a paternity test for the seven males who lived in a group with Teresa, a wild-born chimpanzee in her late 40s who had the baby girl last week. Workers have started collecting hair samples from the chimps for testing. Once they identify the father, it's back to the operating room for him."

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5. "Billy Crystal sings happy birthday to Ali": In lieu of My Giant 2...

["Muhammad Ali celebrated his 65th birthday Wednesday night watching his old friend Billy Crystal perform at Arizona State University. The former heavyweight champion joined the comedian on stage, receiving a minute-long standing ovation from the crowd and a cake from Crystal’s wife. “He’s been a truly great friend to me and a great friend to the world,” Crystal said. “Please join me in singing happy birthday to the greatest senior citizen of all time.”"]
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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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If I Were a Rich Man: Salesman

By Matt Zoller Seitz

"If a man's not a success, he's got no one to blame but himself."

Variations on that sentiment recur throughout Salesman, the 1968 documentary that screens Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Museum of the Moving Image. It's the myth of American self-determination boiled down to 14 words. Each time it's repeated, it becomes funnier and more ominious; filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin subtly contradict it simply by depicting the title profession, which was already in decline when the film was shot, and which consisted mainly of secularists or nonpracticing believers trying to sell middle- and working-class Americans religious texts they didn't want and probably couldn't afford anyway. Without narration -- and with only a handful of onscreen titles, most of them terse and dryly factual -- the filmmakers show just how casually materialistic postwar America had become.

From the snowy streets of Boston to the sun-blasted faux-Arabian suburbs of Miami-Dade, the film's men seem weighed down by work and by the people they work for. The women -- mostly stay-at-home moms, a.k.a. "housewives" -- betray a mix of delight (at the chance to have unplanned social contact with another adult) and the cool excitement of audience members critiquing a live performance. (They expect a killer pitch, and they won't reward a bad one.) No one seems to have any special feeling toward the Good Book itself -- only the illustrations, binding and other characteristics flogged by men trying to sell X number of copies by the end of the month.

The essence of every sales call is the same; only the details change. The salesmen either locate the customer's sweet spot or don't, and the customers either fall for the salesman's line of patter or don't. Empathy rarely enters the transaction. Here, as in any other sales job, the goal is to close the deal before the customer can come to his or her senses. Perception-wise, there seems to be no substantive difference between selling Bibles and selling shoes or vacuum cleaners. In the opening scene, which shows the movie's de facto protagonist Paul "The Badger" Brennan trying to sell a young mother a Bible while her yawning daughter looks on, Paul says, "The Bible is still the bestseller in the world." He's recontextualizing the founding document of western civilization as a marketplace phenomenon -- something with legs, a purchase that makes the customer feel as though he or she belongs.

Ethnicity, social class, living conditions and the customer's mood are X factors contributing to the success or failure of the call. The salesman duly notes each of these, adjusts his pitch accordingly, and succeeds based on the customer's judgement of whether he did a good job selling. Some salesmen are more resourceful and convincing than others. James "The Rabbit" Baker -- a slim younger man who looks like he could be Sam Waterston's kid brother -- is a top earner for a reason; he has an unerring, probably innate knack for sensing what the customer is feeling, then putting him or her at ease with just the right compliment, anecdote, question or observation. Paul the Badger is on the opposite end of the suave scale -- a smiling wiseacre who trudges through snowy Massachusetts singing, "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof and, in a transparent attempt at bonding, volunteers way more personal information than the customer wanted. And yet the banal essence of this type of social exchange is so clear to all involved that offense is rarely given, or taken. (In one sales call, Paul tries to make an illustrated Bible seem more enticing by telling a woman customer that he recently sold one to a female Ph.D. who adored it; then he adds, "I had a cum laude myself, from one of the colleges...Cum no more!") The ritual's insincerity is confirmed by the various salesmens' insistence that they're not just trying to sell something -- that in fact, something spontaneous and authentic is happening in these living rooms. "This is not the Irish blarney," Paul tells the woman he just assaulted with bad puns. "This comes right from the heart."

There's surprisingly little naivete in Salesman, and not a rube in sight. Customers and vendors have no evident illusions about what's really being bought and sold: a false sense of spiritual/social confidence, framed in materialist language that's blasphemous by definition. In Salesmen door-to-door Bible salesmen are doing God's work, all right, but it's not the God of the Old or New Testament. It's the God of money as enshrined in America's true gospel -- the assurance that ours is an egalitarian, capitalist meritocracy, a level playing field where the best man wins. The film's frank skepticism toward this cherished myth makes it one of American pop culture's greatest statements of doubt, on par with its spiritual forerunner, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and its descendant, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (the film version of which contains a scene quite similar to one in Salesman, in which a representative of the head office parachutes into a sales meeting to terrorize low earners).

With his weathered face, Chiclet teeth and hints of baseline depression, Paul the Badger is the film's foremost emblem of American malaise, a fortysomething Working Joe chewed up in the gears of consumerist expectations. His white shirt, dark tie and fedora incidentally evoke Arthur Miller's Willy Loman; his slump-shouldered desperation and sporadic bursts of sure-to-be-blunted enthusiasm anticipate Mamet's Glengarry schmuck Sheldon "The Machine" Levene, the Loman-esque character portrayed by the late Jack Lemmon. The thematic through-line joining all three works is their willingness to expose the lie of a level playing field. In 20th and 21st century America, as in every other civilization through history, those with advantages accrue more advantages without breaking much of a sweat; those without advantages find it harder to rise beyond their current station, professional or personal. The United States, alone among nations, believes itself exempt from this dynamic. The byproduct of this delusion is a populace whose individual members are inclined to think themselves failures when in fact they're doing about as well as could be expected (and whose guilt over "failure" makes them ripe for exploitation by salesman of various sorts).

Mamet illustrated this vicious cycle in Glengarry through the device of the "leads," which were doled out based on current sales figures, with the newest, richest, most promising leads going into the hands of the company's top earners. There seems to be a version of that dynamic at play in Salesman, with the slickest and most relentless salesmen doing (or appearing to do) the best and getting rewarded with the boss' respect, which boosts their morale, while guys like Paul get kicked up and down the East coast. (Paul's supervisor teases him for being a weak seller, and Paul grins and takes it -- what else can he do?)

Throughout the film, the Bible sellers find themselves face-to-face with other "failures" -- decent Americans who toil with a stiff upper lip and then, in the company of salesmen they'll never see again, casually let slip a statement implying just how deadening their work must be. "In my job, you have to have a sense of humor," a sanitation worker says. "If you don't, you go nuts." A leather-faced, chain-smoking mom says of her bespectacled teenaged daughter, who seems like one of the film's most upbeat, inquisitive characters, "She don't believe in what she's doing. She hates her supervisor." The most authentic and surprising personalities can't survive in bottom-line-driven jobs unless they alter or disguise their natures. Or as Albert Maysles told interviewer Chris Buck, "The guy that succeeds as a human being makes for a lousy salesman."

* * *
The movie is not just a social and political landmark, but a technical and aesthetic one as well. Shot with compact sync-sound cameras devised by pioneering nonfiction filmmaker Robert Drew, the father of so-called cinema verite, Salesman's embellishment of the genre's developing vocabulary pushed documentaries further away from the goal of simply recording life. More than any filmmakers working in the genre up till then, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin showed that it was possible, even desirable, to intepret and report simultaneously -- and that the result could bring nonfiction filmmaking closer to social criticism than it had ever gotten before. It was a revolutionary idea that dovetailed with similar and more widely remarked-upon developments in print journalism, where such writers as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Michael Herr shaped reported material with techniques borrowed from fiction and drama.

There are several examples of this in Salesman. Beyond certain technical tells -- including expository offscreen lines that were obviously dubbed in later -- the most notable are the film's travelling sequences, several of which feature Paul. An early Boston-area sequence shows Paul driving his route with some difficulty (he's prone to getting lost) while the radio plays a classical piece; the music plays continuously, but the view from the car gives way from day to night, suggesting the time-collapsing sameness of Paul's days. A subsequent sequence in Florida finds Paul driving through new territory in Opa-Locka, a suburb with street names and architecture modeled on a fairy tale mideast. Again the radio plays a song continuously over time-collapsing jump-cuts of Paul's progress, turning a simple drive into an ironic tour of a gaudy suburban America that feigns architectural eccentricity to compensate for its lack of real character. The song: a Muzak cover of "This Land is Your Land."

Most striking of all is the film's deployment of footage from meetings of the company's sales force, in which reps from the head office try to inspire and/or threaten the troops. In a film about Bible salesmen, these are the only scenes that evoke religious services. The motivator/frightener stands at a pulpit-like podium, declaiming the gospel of self-reliance and prosperity and pausing to let star employees stand up and testify as to how much money they expect to make in the coming year. Can-do slogans are lobbed like stone tablets: "All I can say to people who aren't making the money is, it's their fault!" "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired!" "If a man's not a success, he's got no one to blame but himself!"

A sequence in the movie's midsection has Paul being warned about an upcoming sales meeting in Chicago and then, while riding there on the train, seeming to worry in advance of it. As Paul stares out the train window, "hearing" a meeting that has not yet happened, the film cuts between the train ride and the meeting (where Paul is present) and bleeds their soundtracks together, so that the sales slogans play over closeups of Paul fretting on the train, and the meeting is backed by clackety-clack train noises. This sequence -- which ends with Paul walking along the Chicago station tracks, suitcase in hand -- is connected via hard cut to a sales meeting at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, a scene that leads to the movie's Florida section. Standing at the podium, the company's vice president redefines the profit motive as public service. ("I am confident that once you realize what you are doing for others, you in your own esteem will rise so high -- not with conceit, but in humility!") By intercutting picture and sound from Paul's worried train ride and the meeting he's worried about, Salesman pulls off a bolder, bigger version of effects it achieved via jump cuts in those driving sequences. It implies that all motivational meetings are basically the same; it also gets into one character's head and universalizes his distress by suggesting it's not unique to any time, place or profession, even though Americans are too proud to admit such a thing.
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Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor-in-chief and publisher of The House Next Door, will introduce a screening of Salesman this coming Saturday, January 20, at 3 p.m. at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, then moderate a Q & A with Albert Maysles afterward. For more information, click here.

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Lost in their own heads: The GoodTimesKid

By Matt Zoller SeitzAzazel Jacobs’s unexpectedly beguiling romantic comedy, The GoodTimesKid, opening today at the Anthology Film Archives, boasts a 77-minute running time that’s maybe 10 percent dialogue. The remainder is spent watching alienated characters — a young woman named Diaz; her boyfriend, Rodolfo; and another man who’s also named Rodolfo — drift through a deadpan-surreal city while remaining lost in their own heads.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.

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Alone With Her: The Long Lens of Obsession and Mad Love

By Matt Zoller SeitzFiendishly assured yet ultimately less than the sum of its parts, the writer and director Eric Nicholas’s latest film, Alone With Her, is a voyeuristic thriller about a young man named Doug (Colin Hanks of Roswell) who becomes smitten with a woman named Amy (Ana Claudia Talancón of The Crime of Father Amaro) and tries to insinuate himself into her life through high-tech means.
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To read the rest of the review, click here.

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Links for the Day (January 17th, 2007)

1. "Sesame Street Martians": And Yip-Yip Aliens Wednesday.

["OHHHHHHHHHH!!! Chicken... Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip...]

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2. "Naomi Campbell sentenced for attacking maid": OHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Cat... Cat... Cat. Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip-Yip... MeeeeeOOOOOWWWWWW!

["Supermodel Naomi Campbell has been sentenced to five days of menial work for throwing her cell phone at her former maid. On March 30, 2006, Campbell found a pair of designer jeans -- which she had been planning to wear on Oprah Winfrey's television show that day -- missing. She suspected her maid Ana Scolavino of stealing the jeans and threw her cell phone at her. Chilean-born Scolavino needed four stitches on her head."]

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3. "David Lynch Made a Man Out of Me": Transcendental meditationist pops film critic's cherry pie.

["Like every touchstone of my nascent cinephilia, I first encountered Eraserhead on crap VHS. It was the late 1980s, I was 15, and I didn't know what I'd seen, but it was love at first sight. Nerds in space. Mutant babies. Domestic derangement. Radiator ladies. Inexplicable seizures. Enigmatic orifices. Weird routines. The hardcore bizarre and ineffably beautiful. Totally. Like. Awesome. David Lynch became an instant culture hero. I all but draped myself in Blue Velvet (movie, soundtrack, poster) and was soon hosting Twin Peaks geekfests indulgently catered with cherry pie and strong black coffee. Along with Heathers, the Pixies, shoplifting Marlboros, and hatred of Orange County, Lynchian surrealism played a major role in defining my suburban artfag weltanschauung."]

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4. "Forgotten Films: Gone to Earth (aka The Wild Heart) (dir. Michael Powell, 1950)": By Bilge Ebiri for Screengrab.

["The legendary filmmaking team of director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, aka “The Archers,” made Gone to Earth at the height of their popularity – they had just come off iconic films like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus– but its somewhat catastrophic reception would mark the beginning of their career decline. (Subsequent films, such as Oh, Rosalinda! and Battle of the River Plate would not duplicate their earlier successes.) It didn’t help, of course, that the film never quite worked out production-wise: The project was a collaboration with the even-more-legendary producer David O. Selznick, who would later cut his own version of the film and release it in the US. (More on that later.) Any way you look at it, these troubles are a dispiriting legacy for such a beautiful and heart-wrenching film, featuring the most striking color cinematography since...well, since Powell and Pressburger's own The Red Shoes."]

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5. "Film Historian David Bordwell - Interview": House contributor Annie Frisbie interviews the cinema scholar for zoom in online.

["This week's guest is David Bordwell, professor of Film Studies at University of Wisconsin Madison, and author of a number of influential books in film history and theory. If you were wondering what a classic film historian thinks about You Tube, our conversation has the answers and so much more."]
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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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In The Realm of Work and Play: Claire Denis's Vers Mathilde

By Travis Mackenzie Hoover

A friend of mine and I once came up with a formulation: In terms of French cinema, Claire Denis is the synthesis of Bazinian realism and the cinema du look. She manages to combine the blank, observant camera of the respected former with the blatant formalism of the hated latter and create a sort of social-realist-fabulism. On the one hand, she is probing vital issues of the day, particularly post-colonial ones, and trying to represent them in as precise a manner as possible—yet she doesn’t blow off the play of forms or the sensual demands of the body in order to do so. In Denis's cinema, work and play are inevitably bound up together so that these two utterly irreconcilable concepts can find a common ground, each deepening the other’s representation of the world.

As it turns out, work and play are at the heart of Denis's recent documentary Vers Mathilde, playing on Jan. 17 at the Cinematheque Ontario. The film deals with the choreography of Mathilde Monnier, whose job it is to bring the two concepts together in a furious but pleasurable ballet. And of course, Denis manages to match her in a star directorial performance that expands the boundaries of what a documentary can be. This defiantly linear genre largely professes to be a representation of reality, either through the representation (via voice-over, file photos and talking heads) of a process or history, or through the apparently “unmediated” camera of cinéma vérité, while Denis's approach is to combine, via a fractured chronology, the reality of vérité with the flourish of formalism.

Denis reports that it was like-at-first-sight when she met Monnier, who approached her at a dance festival about making a film (as the director has metaphorically asserted elsewhere: “if she wanted to work with me, she’d have to hire me as a dancer”) and the results suggest someone with a deep affinity for the component parts of the enterprise. Vers Mathilde is a work that takes pieces of an artist's process and creates something new with them: filmed at both Monnier’s Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier and at the dress rehearsal for Monnier’s then-latest opus, it combines both the exercises of the choreographer and her attempts to mount her production, without separating which is which. Denis refuses to fill in gaps as her subject’s activities continue in their supremely aesthetic manner, intensified by the startlingly beautiful Agnès Godard/Hélène Louvart cinematography, and further abstracted by the director's aforementioned experiments with chronology (courtesy editor Anne Souriau), which isolate movements instead of integrating them into a seamless whole.

The film opens with some preliminary efforts on behalf of the final production (testing sound equipment for the dancers to wear; exploring possible noises with the sound designer; considering the use of sheets of latex as props). A bare thread of sequential logic manages to keep the torrent of imagery from becoming completely incoherent: one is always dimly aware that a project is about to be completed and that its debut fast approaches. But one isn’t really aware of the process of making a show in the temporal sense—one is, instead, more aware of moments of choreography. Denis sees elements of the show (dancers taking positions and testing movements, one lone dancer in a vast innertube slowly negotiating his encumbrance) and traps them in space, appreciating them in their own right rather than as part of a synthesis.

To be sure, the film finds its own form of synthesis, but it’s more sensual than practical. Denis makes strange with all of the dancers' movements to establish their uniqueness, as if acknowledging the bizarreness of these individually beautiful positions (and sounds) being subordinated to a larger whole. It’s also a matter of negotiating the difference between stage and film: Denis is sharp enough to understand the differences between the cinema’s breaking up of objects and persons and the continuous motions of people milling about a proscenium arch. Wisely, the director has no interest in the impossible task of reproducing the theatrical dance experience, choosing instead to collaborate with the subject on something quite different. Monnier provides the movements and Denis contextualizes them (and, just as often, refuses to contextualize them).

There are, of course, occasional (and sparse) bits of interviewing with Monnier as she directs groups of dancers (students?) and tries to lead them through choreographic exploration. And, in a statement that befits the design of the whole production, she even admits to overdirecting, giving a group of her charges too much of an idea for an exercise—Monnier later complains that it had the effect of limiting what they felt they could do. Denis’ project is to counteract that tendency: one can’t get a fix on how to assimilate the many movements, actions and gestures that the director chooses to isolate. Even in the final dress rehearsal sequence, which ought to reconstitute the movements into Monnier’s whole, Denis instead relies mostly on the choreographer’s suggestions before settling onto one (again, isolated) dancer in a final splitscreen sequence.

Denis isn’t simply playing sensual games (though she is, quite gloriously)—she’s also redefining what a documentary can be. Shattering the idea of unmediated reality or unsubjective truth, she foregrounds her own highly specific interests in the various choreographic elements and defies us to follow suit. Denis’s sui generic work here throws entire schools of filmmaking out the window in order to examine its non-fiction terrain more closely, more felicitously, and less concretely. It’s the documentary as notebook rather than as thesis statement, and it deserves to inspire other filmmakers to their own vivid explorations of the trees that make up the forest of fact.

Though her interests—which include a typically Denisian bit of cultural leveling when she gets the highbrow dance maven to dance to some PJ Harvey—are unique to Denis's personality, she resists the urge to make them seem like the primary concern in Monnier's study. The director refuses to make herself the center of the discourse and, in turn, refuses to make anything else seem central as well. Her self-willed following of bliss frees us up to do the same, rather than nailing us down to a position we have to accept or reject. It shows us what we can do as opposed to telling us what we must.
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Travis Mackenzie Hoover is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

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Links for the Day (January 16th, 2007)

1. The House Next Door presents Manamana Tuesday, featuring Dr. Teeth, William Katt, the Olsen twins, racially questionable sock puppets, an underage participant from the Eyes Wide Shut orgy, and David Brent.

["Manamana/Doo-doo doodoodoo!"]

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2. "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe": In three parts (first part at the bottom of the page) on YouTube.

["You don't know where the United States are standing after a State of the Union address."]

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3. "Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad": Boys, don't be like me. Live clean. Use Klenzrite.

["Add this to the endangered list: blank spaces. Microsoft advertised Windows Mobile last spring on seatback dining trays on US Airways’ shuttle flights. Advertisers seem determined to fill every last one of them. Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes. Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines. But consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn."]

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4. "Saxophonist Michael Brecker dead at 57": From CNN.

["Michael Brecker, a versatile and influential tenor saxophonist who won 11 Grammys over a career that spanned more than three decades, died Saturday. He was 57. Brecker died in a hospital in New York City of leukemia, according to his longtime friend and manager, Darryl Pitt. In recent years, the saxophonist had struggled with myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells. The disease, known as MDS, often progresses to leukemia. Throughout his career, Brecker recorded and performed with numerous jazz and pop music leaders, including Herbie Hancock, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, according to his Web site. His most recently released recording, "Wide Angles," appeared on many top jazz lists and won two Grammys in 2004. With his brother, Randy, he formed the Brecker Brothers. The pair played on Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" album."]

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5. "'Hobbit' galaxies discovered around Milky Way": From MSNBC.

["A recent sky survey has turned up eight new members in our Local Group of galaxies, including a new class of ultra-faint "hobbit" galaxies and what might be the smallest galaxy ever discovered. The Local Group is a collection of about 40 galaxies, of which the Milky Way and Andromeda are the dominant members. The rest of the galaxies are mostly small satellites known as “dwarf galaxies” that are gravitationally bound to these two galaxies. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two of the Milky Way’s better known dwarf galaxies. The new galaxies were detected over the past two years as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and presented last week at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle."]
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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: Barbara Stanwyck

By Odienator

Barbara Stanwyck needed only a look to inform you of her less than noble intentions. With a raised eyebrow, a lowered eyelid or a bit lower lip, Stanwyck filled the screen with the promise of sex, a promise even the Hays Office couldn’t censor. The come-hither look was perfected by Stanwyck, and when I saw her onscreen, I knew the men she cast that gaze upon would toss better judgment and common sense to the wind to accept its invitation.

Men fantasized about Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Rita Hayworth, and while they were beautiful, they were the masculine idea of distant sexiness; a beauty that, even in their wildest dreams, was just out of reach of their horny, desperate grasp. Barbara Stanwyck was the opposite, a feminist idea of earthly hotness. She was sexy because she was attainable; not only was she within reach of your grasp, she'd grab you herself, slam you down on the bed and screw you unconscious. And then she would take your wallet.

Stanwyck played roles where you had to believe that no man, even the most devout, upstanding citizen, could resist doing her bidding. She had to be smart enough to get you to surrender body and soul. Once you slept with Monroe, you could carve that notch into your bedpost and move on; Stanwyck was a mindfuck that stayed with you long after the post-coital cigarette.

I could say that today's "5 for the Day" is a celebration of the versatility of Ms. Stanwyck, but that would be a lie. It was merely an excuse to spend time in the glow of her gaze, imagining what would happen if I could jump into the screen and answer it.

1. Baby Face (1931): Baby Face tells the story of Lily Powers (Stanwyck), a woman who sleeps her way to the top, leaving the destroyed lives of the men she seduces by the wayside. The screenplay blames Nietzsche for her actions, but Stanwyck was just following the adage made famous years later by James Brown: A woman got to use what she got to get just what she wants. This pre-Hays Code movie has plot points that would have killed the censor; Stanwyck was prostituted by her father from the age of 14, and more than one man puts his hands someplace they weren't allowed to on Kate Hepburn. Highlights include Stanwyck giving the come hither look to the luckiest heavy-set accountant in the world, and the scene where Stanwyck answers a man grabbing her breasts by smashing a beer bottle over his head. The nonchalant way she continues enjoying her beer afterwards is priceless.

2. Double Indemnity (1944): In Burt Prelutsky's 1996 interview with Billy Wilder, Prelutsky asks Wilder if Stanwyck has sex with Fred MacMurray when she first visits his apartment. "Of course," says Wilder, "and very good sex, or how could she persuade such a man to kill her husband?" For MacMurray, that sex was the highlight of his relationship with Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson, but for Phyllis, the orgasm occurs as she watches MacMurray strangle her husband. Watch for Wilder's close-up of Stanwyck's face while the murder is occurring—it is simultaneously sexy and terrifying. Very good sex indeed.

3. The Lady Eve (1941): Stanwyck has a "dual" role here, both as con artist Jean Harrington (note that last name…then see All About Eve) and Harrington's creation, the titular Lady Eve. Henry Fonda's Charlie is the object of both their affections, and he's a dead man walking. Preston Sturges, as he would with The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek a little later, gives the finger to the censor, most notably in two scenes showing Jean working her magic on poor Charlie. In one, she puts her stocking-clad leg damn close to Fonda's face, and in the other, she gets her body even damn closer to Charlie in the film's famous chaise lounge seduction scene, a 4-minute unbroken shot that zeroes in on Henry Fonda's paralyzed face and body—he's the visual interpretation of a boner. Sturges' in-jokes and visual cues about snakes add to the movie's phallic undercurrent: Watch how the cartoon snake goes through the O in Preston Sturges' name in the credits.

4. Forty Guns (1957): "She's a high-ridin' woman with a whip," sings Jidge Carroll about Stanwyck's Jessica Drummond, the rich rancher who controls the county in Sam Fuller's brutal western classic. Stanwyck's entrance in the film is thrilling; dressed in black atop a white horse, leading her "forty gun" posse, she speeds past a coach carrying marshall/love interest Barry Sullivan, scaring his horses and making her presence known. Though middle-aged by this time, Stanwyck proved she still had the gaze. When Sullivan interrupts dinnertime at her ranch in order to issue a warrant to her brother, Stanwyck bites her lip, lowers her eyes and mutters an amused "Hmmph." My knees went weak. Later in the film, 50-year old Stanwyck performs a spectacular stunt on a horse, and even takes a bullet like John Wayne. Fuller's camera lingers on these sequences; he refuses to disrespect his lead actress because she's a little older than Hollywood allows. Even her dialogue sounds like vintage Stanwyck: "I need a strong man to carry out my orders," she tells Sullivan. "And a weak man to take them," he replies. He knows the score.

5. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948): Just for variety, here's a picture where Stanwyck isn't in control. She spends most of the film in bed, a victim of a psychosomatic (or fake?) illness, while trying to figure out who the victim is in the murder plot she overheard on the phone. As she slowly pieces together that it might be her, she goes all Susan Hayward on us (though better than Hayward ever could). It's in the flashback sequence, where we discover how she snared hubby Burt Lancaster, that we see the hot Stanwyck of old; she literally snatches Lancaster from another woman. The "Sorry, wrong number" ending must have been a shocker in 1948, breaking the Hays Office rule that killers must be punished. Like I said, not even the censor could control Barbara Stanwyck.

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Links for the Day (January 15th, 2007)

1. "Letter From A Birmingham Jail": In memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

["My dear fellow clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms."]

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2. "Seen 'em Malle": An essay on the documentary films of Louis Malle, by Michael Koresky for the Criterion Collection "On Five" blog.

["I just got back from an around-the-world trip to Minnesota, India, and Paris, and I did it all in about seven days. I’m not proud to admit that all of that traveling was actually done from the shabby couch in my Brooklyn apartment, while staring at a 27-inch TV screen. The “vacation in your living room!” approach may be a cliché at this point, but it’s also a rather fitting introduction to a body of work that did indeed transport me: Louis Malle’s documentaries, which we’ll be releasing as the second Eclipse series this Spring, and which have been somewhat under the radar over the past forty-odd years, certainly in comparison to his fiction films. So there was a great sense of discovery for me, as well as there will undoubtedly be for many—both for these underseen films, and for the places they capture."]

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3. "‘Lost’ creators say show will have end date": Someday I'll write that in toto defense of The X-Files.

["Makers of the tropical island drama “Lost” say they’re talking with ABC executives about setting an end date for the series. There’s no sense the finale is coming anytime soon. But knowing they have a deadline will help writers of the convoluted drama lay out how they want the story to end, producers said Sunday in a meeting with TV critics here. “Once we figure out when that will be, a lot of the questions will go away,” said Carlton Cuse, an executive producer. “Lost” is in its third season. The producers, citing Fox’s “The X-Files,” said they didn’t want to wear out their welcome. “That was a great show that probably ran two seasons too long,” Cuse said. “That is a cautionary tale for us.”"]

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4. "God, Inc.": The afterlife is the ultimate bureaucracy.

["Could open up like a prom girl's legs."]

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5. "In The Company Of Glenn": A belated welcome to the blogosphere!

["The online hangout of Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny."]
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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 (January 14th, 2007)

1. "Rome and Extras return tonight. Links to some reviews: The Times Colonist, San Bernadino County Sun, The Orlando Sentinel, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times."

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2. "Benjamin Schwarz on David Thomson: A defense of Orson Welles": From the Chicago Reader On Film blog.

["I sent the following letter to the Atlantic last August. I'm not surprised it wasn't published. But I can't resist reproducing it now that Benjamin Schwarz, the magazine's literary editor and national editor, has shown further signs of his David Thomson idolotry while writing about Cary Grant in the current issue. This time Schwarz calls Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition, the "finest reference book on the movies." (He also offers some other debatable critical judgments, such as calling Sylvia Scarlett "a mess of a picture" rather than an exciting forerunner of the French New Wave in its daring mix of genres.) But before getting to his assertion about Thomson's book, let me reproduce my letter:"]

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3. "Celluloid Dreaming in 2006": Fernando F. Croce's wrap-up of movie year 2006.

["Critics keep saying 2006 was a weak year for cinema, but, with so much lying on the screens, why should I believe them? Really, this was the Year of Living Deceitfully: from the parallel undercover agents of The Departed and the institutionalized snitching of The Good Shepherd to The Illusionist's fancy-schmancy obfuscation and The Prestige's duel of conjurers, film in 2006 was an extended game of poker, played with back to the wall and cards close to the vest (a fitting climate, incidentally, for the belated theatrical release of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 masterpiece of existential bluffing, Army of Shadows). It is not hard to feel duped when the new Pirates of the Caribbean calamity makes off with box-office booty, but why this proliferation of liars? Reflections of a period when government frauds became more transparent than ever, perhaps, but then again, this was the year that Oliver Stone turned good soldier with World Trade Center while 9/11 was exploited without being illuminated in United 93. Documentaries soldiered to bring the war home, though The War Tapes and Iraq in Fragments, among others, first of all showed the fallacies of the genre's professed neutrality -- the camera lies 24 frames per second, said Brian De Palma, whose own search for truth in The Black Dahlia left middlebrow reviewers predictably befuddled. Speaking of poker, a master gambler has left us -- "The death of an old man is not a tragedy," it is said in Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, a line disproved then by the director's passing."]

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4. "Woman drinks so much water she dies": Agua Mala.

["A woman who competed in a radio station's contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday. Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead Friday in her suburban Rancho Cordova home hours after taking part in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest in which KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system for the winner. "She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad," said Laura Rios, one of Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. "She was crying, and that was the last that anyone had heard from her." It was not immediately known how much water Strange consumed."]

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5. "Man rides stationary bike for 85 hours": From CNN.

["George Hood may have pedaled his way into the Guinness Book of World Records on Saturday night. The 49-year-old Aurora resident began riding a stationary bike at the Five Seasons Sports Club in Burr Ridge at 4 a.m. Wednesday and surpassed the previous record of 82 hours by 8:28 p.m. Saturday. He stopped several minutes before midnight after completing his goal of 85 hours. "He's very grateful -- and very tired," said Matt Baron, a spokesman for Five Seasons. Baron said Hood was talking and thanking his supporters right up to the end, but was taken by paramedics to a hospital as a precaution after he got off the bike. "He'll be under observation for a while, and they're going to administer fluids," Baron said. The record of 82 hours was set last year by Brian Overkaer of Denmark."]
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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 (January 13th, 2007)

1. "Jackson vs. the Medicine Man": The fight of the century!

["The good news is Michael Jackson appears to be taking his meds, if not actually paying for them. On time, that is. A Beverly Hills pharmacy filed suit against the reclusive pop star Wednesday, claiming that Jackson was $101,926.66 behind on payments for prescriptions filled. On Friday, Jackson's rep, Raymone Bain, issued a statement saying the pharmacy "has been paid" and that the lawsuit was due to trouble the singer had with his former business managers, who he's now suing."]

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2. "New Perspectives": Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Letters from Iwo Jima and The Dead Girl.

["Having seen The Dead Girl only once, I'm not sure how well the strength of its performances and its unorthodox narrative structure would hold up after a second viewing, because the film's morbidity constantly hovers on the edge of overkill. At times Letters From Iwo Jima is similarly hampered by its didacticism. Still, both movies indirectly but cogently comment on our experiences of other movies. Having Japanese soldiers as heroes allows us to reconsider the didacticism we've been handed in the past, and seeing multiple responses to a sexually motivated murder allows us to reconsider our understanding of sex crimes."]

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3. "Move over, Halley, here's McNaught": From IOL.

["At dusk on Sunday South Africans will witness cosmic history when a comet expected to be brighter than Halley's Comet lights up skies below the equator. Comet McNaught has been gracing the northern hemisphere since August. Sunday will be the first time the comet can be seen in South Africa. It was first discovered by Australian Robert H McNaught, who has lent his name to more than 30 comets. But his latest discovery is expected to be among the brightest comets the world has seen in the past century, if Nasa's predictions are correct. Reports in the northern hemisphere cite Comet McNaught as being more than four times brighter than the brightest star in the sky."]

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4. "Spas soothe pain in the ‘tech neck’": For every malady, there is a cure.

["When massage therapist Grace Macnow first heard the term “BlackBerry thumb,” she didn’t know what it meant. Now, treating it is a new and booming part of her spa business. Therapies to treat workplace woes such as a sore thumb from tapping on a hand-held computer, the aches of “tech neck” from typing on a laptop or even skin irritation from chatting on a cell phone are the latest rage to hit high-end spas, where the weary can seek relief at the end of an arduous workday. “It’s huge,” said Cindy Barshop, the founder of Completely Bare salons in New York, who has introduced Purity Plus facials to help clean clogged pores and breakouts tied to cell phone use."]

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5. "Government blames Boy Scouts for wildfire": Those flaming Scouts!

["The federal government argued that Boy Scouts playing with fire caused a 14,200-acre wildfire and wants a judge to hold them responsible, allowing officials to seek damages. In court documents, the government said it would decide whether to seek damages after a ruling is made. It says the June 2002 wildfire in northeastern Utah cost more than $12 million to control. A Forest Service investigator pinpointed the fire's origin to an area where Scouts had stayed overnight, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Overby said in federal court Thursday. At the time of the blaze, a fire ban was in effect because of dry conditions. In court documents, the Scouts maintain they were not aware of a formal fire ban and thought small pit fires were allowed."]
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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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God Grew Tired of Us: A mild-mannered epic

By Steven BooneLet's start with the name of the movie. Like the title of Phil Gourevitch's book on the Rwanda massacres, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, it's a clinical, maddeningly serene way to encapsulate a horror. "God grew tired of us" is how one survivor of another African atrocity, the second Sudanese civil war, chooses to explain the years he and other so-called Lost Boys of Sudan came of age wandering the desert barefoot, menaced by wild animals, soldiers and starvation. The film is similarly plain and unassuming. Neatly packaged with warm celebrity narration by Nicole Kidman, animated maps and other staples of telejournalism, it could be any other National Geographic program on the subject (and N.G. is one of the producers).

But, as in Werner Herzog's Discovery Channel chronicle Grizzly Man, beauty, complexity and intensity emerge because filmmaker Christopher Quinn doesn't mistake indiscretion for intimacy. That takes heart. While the three protagonists cope with their surreal afterlife as adult refugees/working stiffs in America, we hardly get a glimpse of their rage or (apparently non-existent) sex lives. God Grew Tired of Us focuses on the men's dignity, survivor's guilt, profound loneliness and spirituality. But the film's politesse seems more for accessibility's sake than the usual emasculating media jive. These are not the neutered, Give-Us-Free Africans Djimon Hounsou and Chiwetel Ejiofor are probably already stripping down to portray in a fictional Ho'wood cash-in. These are men. Because of their bizarre histories -- which have made these articulate English-speakers inexperienced with electricity, TV or toilets -- they are also, in many ways, boys. Their U.S. government-subsidized three month initiation as American worker-consumers amounts to a second coming of age. Quinn's cameramen observe their initiation with affection and curiosity, not gawking condescension. If it sounds like I'm pinning medals on the filmmakers for simply doing their job, its probably because I'm kind of a shell-shocked refugee myself--of television that rarely plays it so straight with a loaded subject like African 'fugees.

Of the over 25,000 Lost Boys, God Grew Tired of Us settles on John Bul Dau, Daniel Abol Pach and Panther Blor, who the filmmakers met in 2001 at a UN refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. Quinn's crew was there to record the men's purgatorial yet rather harmonious existence at the camp just before the International Rescue committee selected them to settle in the United States. The most common traits between the three men are their natural leadership abilities; an ease with assimilating new experiences, and culture shock that comes from having survived far worse; and blinding smiles. It's the smiles, and the faces, that make God Grew Tired of Us good cinema rather than diverting TV. A simple closeup of Panther describing how much he aches to see his homeland again draws the kind of soul-searing empathy TV newsmagazine reports are often too tricked-out with sad sack piano cues and other Oprah-patented devices to inspire. Much of the film is captured in natural sunlight, with warm, full sound recording that adores the timbre and cadences of these men's musical speaking voices.

John Bul Dau, who settled in Syracuse, NY, emerges as the film's dramatic anchor, partly because he appears taller than the entire NBA, with a sculpted face and people skills to make Will Smith come off surly. He becomes an important organizer of Lost Boys conferences and reunions around the country. His story rounds out with a deeply affecting series of surprises. Filmed across four years, from the camps to Europe (briefly, at stops along the initial U.S.-bound flight) to various American cities, God Grew Tired of Us opens out into a mild-mannered epic.

How does America change these men? One of the most shocking revelations is how America's daily grind and relative prosperity and the coldness of strangers carve more tension into their faces than two decades of war and starvation. "In America, time.... is money," the mens' African advisor tells them when introducing them to the concept of an alarm clock. Again, the filmmakers don't poke around for a more graphic representation of this mounting despair. When a Lost Boy roommate of Daniel's and Panther's in Pittsburgh suffers a nervous breakdown (presumably from the strain of carrying too many traumas, upheavals and hopes in one young mind), Quinn doesn't go tracking him down at the mental ward. Despite access to hundreds of Lost Boys around the country, he keeps focused on his three chosen subjects.

Finally, despite the title, this a very funny, humanist fish-out-water comedy, with sublime pieces of observation: the sequence where the men get a crash course in how to use an apartment; devout Christian John Bul's introductions to Santa Claus ("What does this have to do with the birth of Christ?") and titillating/surreal daytime TV; a trippy ice-capade at the local skating rink; an expedition to a supermarket. Even though the vast mileage and time span necessitate some fast cutting on segments that might have had more resonance if they lingered, I feel as if I have befriended these guys, and I want things to work out for them. This film left me with a heavy heart and a wide smile.
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.

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Dumb and Wasted: Alpha Dog

By Steven BooneThe litmus test for macho actors and characters in Badass movies—a vast genre encompassing everything from Reservoir Dogs to that stupidfuck Longest Yard remake—is to imagine the badass in question sitting in on a Scared Straight session without peeing his pants. Harry Dean Stanton in Straight Time? Dry as a bone. Ryan Phillippe in The Way of the Gun? A tad moist.

In the new Badass flick Alpha Dog, the toughest tough guy is played by butter-soft Pop crooner Justin Timberlake. Amazingly, his drawers aren’t exactly a sopping mess. His character is an unflappable, down-for-whatever enforcer—the kind of thug sideman Robert De Niro made iconic in Goodfellas. He instigates fights; calls dudes fags and pussies without looking around to see if they’re drawing back to knock his ass out; dives right into the middle of the chaos when random gangfight shit goes down. Tattoos, muscle tone, dead eyes. It’s a startling transformation, and I didn’t buy it for a second. The trouble is in the eyes: Timberlake’s peepers sparkle, far, far from dead. Watching him mimic cackling heartlessness reminded me of nice guy Isaac Hayes attempting to portray meanass avenger Truck Turner. As Truck beat down random suckas with the advice, “Tell ‘em you got hit by a Truck,” his eyes apologized.

Alpha Dog itself has cloudy, astigmatic eyes, and its pants are filthy with piss, vomit and marijuana residue. It stumbles around cursing and hurling threats; recoils at the slightest hint of real trouble. Not to sound like one of the flick’s hysterical wigger palookas, but: Alpha Dog needs its ass beat.

And yet, as I drew my hand back to slap the shit out of this movie, I found I had to lower it in confounded surprise. Some kid I’d never heard of showed up to bring the flick some spine and brain. His name is Emile Hirsch. His character, Johnny Truelove, is based on Jesse James Hollywood, a real-life drug dealer who became rich at 20 by selling to affluent SoCal kids. But Hollywood’s flight after orchestrating one of the stupidest kidnappings on the books put him on the FBI's most wanted list; he was arrested in Brazil last year, after six years on the run. As I would later discover when a friend insisted I watch Hirsch in Lords of Dogtown, the kid can play any race or socio-economic background—so long as the character is a straightup badass. In Dogtown, he goes from goldenlocked skater punk to crewcut, lowriding vato loco. But his defiance and charisma are constant from frame one.

Alpha Dog sticks close to the facts provided to the production by the case's real-life D.A.: Writer-director Nick Cassavetes concludes from the evidence that the whole botched abduction transpired in clouds of weed smoke; that Truelove/Hollywood’s crew didn’t initially grasp the gravity of their crime, which was intended more as a stunt to intimidate a client clocker who was out to shake them down. They abducted the fiend’s sheltered 15-year old brother (played by Anton Yelchin) only to find themselves bonding and partying with the little bastard; paradoxically, when Truelove’s lawyer reminds him that kidnapping can result in a life sentence, it becomes clear that the kid must die.

The film’s fatal conceit is having its young actors play the dumb, wasted Truelove crew as Dumb and Wasted. It reminded me of the menagerie of talented black actors mimicking gangbangers in Dennis Hopper's exciting but ludicrous Colors. Their broad cooning amounted to a subtle mutiny right under Hopper’s nose. Likewise, the boys in Alpha Dog seem to be having too much fun acting out stupid machismo to connect this behavior to plausible adolescent fears and desires. Only Hirsch, Yelchin and Shawn Hatosy, who plays Truelove's slavish sidekick (and, intriguingly, possible lover?) pull from something real. Truelove’s cool intelligence just doesn’t jibe with such a foolish scheme or the imbecilic behavior of his other homeboys. Timberlake, meanwhile, keeps his slender muscles flexed and his nasal voice from cracking clear to the end of each scene he’s in. (Congrats.) Costars Harry Dean Stanton and Bruce Willis provide one or two of the Alpha Dog's rare intentional laughs as Johnny’s boorish/affectionate, vaguely mob-affiliated elders. They make Badass look easy and fun without tearing at the film's credibility.

Cassavetes strains to braid threads of menace and comical absurdity that blended so smoothly in the dumb crooks saga Fargo. But Cassavetes is no Coen brother. He’s no Cassavetes, either. John Cassavetes made arguably the leanest, most subtly subversive of all Badass movies, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. In that film, the ludicrous nature of gangsterism pirouetted around its terrifying implacability just from the way some killers calmly muttered a few orders to Ben Gazzara in a quiet diner. In Nick Cassavetes’s cinema, sincerity and intensity mean one thing: shouting. There’s so much yelling, shrieking, yelping and babbling in Alpha Dog, I started to wonder if the film was originally shot as motion capture or rotoscope footage for one a them animated flicks. Like, maybe all these bleating, hyperactive characters were conceived as literal cartoon “Dogs.” But how to explain Robert Fraisse’s (The Lover) simply gorgeous urban/suburban cinematography, which lends the film a mythic widescreen solidity it doesn’t deserve? Alpha Dog has so many moments and touches verging on directorial competence, I ultimately felt like the most blunted idjit in Truelove’s crew. Moment to moment, I was like, “Whoa, ‘fux goin on, man?" One minute, this flick’s sleek and dreamlike, somethin' like Illtown melting into The Outsiders. Next minute, it’s Cool as Ice directed by Jack Horner.

Two scenes threaten to make Alpha Dog an audience-participation standard to rival Showgirls. One is a delirious “fight” scene. The kidnap victim’s paranoid crackhead brother (Ben Foster) crashes and busts up a house party full of mellow college types he suspects had something to do with Zack’s disappearance. Using martial arts. The awkward, elaborately choreographed brutality he inflicts upon ordinary boys and girls in Old Navy is just staggering. It was like the astonishing long-take car chase in Children of Men, except that instead of a horrified scream, what got caught midway up my throat was an orgasm of laughter. The other scene I’m not sure whether I should applaud or seek some kind of counseling for having endured has Sharon Stone screaming and crying in an off-center psuedo-documentary closeup. In a fat suit. Sounds delicious, but in the film’s narrative context, this moment plays perfectly straight. She’s weeping for her murdered son.

Understand: At my brother’s wedding rehearsal, an organist who resembled Eddie Murphy as Klump in The Nutty Professor destroyed a piano bench just by sitting on it. It all happened in a kind of slow motion, as the spindly wooden legs bowed in and tilted sideways long before Klump realized what was happening and long after everybody with an eyeline toward him knew exactly what was coming and panicked—not for Klump, but at the immensity of the laughter we would have to hold in. That’s what the Stone atrocity, and Alpha Dog in general, does to you: It tickles your ribs relentlessly while whispering in your ear, “Dead children, cocaine, failure, depression, Martin Luther King…”
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.

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Links for the Day (January 12th, 2007)

1. "Best Scenes From "The Wicker Man"": With apologies to Reverse Shot for stealing their thunder, but this thing's gotta be posted everywhere.

["NOT THE BEES!!!"]

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2. "'Treasure the Crackpots': Makor Critics Panel Explores the Future of Lists": The wrap-up of The Reeler hosted critics panel featuring Stephanie Zacharek, Owen Gleiberman, and David Edelstein.

["I was wondering how far the three of you would be willing to go to help very small movies -- and I mean really small," he said. "Like if somebody put the best movie you've ever seen on YouTube -- would you put it on your Top 10 list?"]

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3. "Streep To Star in Film Version of 'Mamma Mia!'": Mamma mia/Here she goes... again?

["Academy Award winner Meryl Streep is putting her vocal talents to the test in the Hollywood adaptation of ABBA musical Mamma Mia! The Devil Wears Prada star, 57, is set to play Donna, whose daughter Sophie is due to be married when she embarks on a journey to discover the identity of her father. It will be Streep's first musical. The film's producer, Judy Craymer, says, "(Streep) was always at the top of our wish list.]

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4. "'The Geek' Joins the N-Bomb Club": "This information cannot leave this room. Ok? It would devastate my reputation as a dude."

["Brat packer Anthony Michael Hall used the N-word twice while signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans last night, and it all went down outside the Laugh Factory, of all places."]

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5. "Maude: Sony Announces Season 1": Don't you forget about Bea.

["Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced the first season of Maude for release on March 20th."]
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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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Worst Best Actress, and Best

By Matt Zoller Seitz

This isn't Oscar time. It's Ed time. Edward Copeland, that is.

Last year, the film blogger, House contributor and compulsive list-checker and poll-taker asked readers to submit their choices for the Worst Best Picture winner of all time; then, for karmic balance, he followed up with a poll of the Best Best Picture winners.

This time, Ed's running a dual poll of the Best Best Actress winners, and the Worst. He's asking for just five candidates in each category -- and to save you the trouble of Googling, he's helpfully supplied chronological winners lists right there in each post.

Ed's instructions:

"Rank both your best best actress and your worst best actress choices from 1-5, with 1 being the best, 5 the worst. Each No. 1 vote will get 5 points, No. 2 votes will get 4 points, etc. I will unveil the results on the eve of Oscar nominations, which this year will be Tuesday, Jan. 23, so the deadline for ballots will be midnight Friday, Jan. 19., central time. Send your ballots to copesurvey@yahoo.com Since I've heard some confusion, I want to clarify the ranking. Both the best and the worst lists' rankings work the same: Give your best best No. 1, give your worst worst No. 1. Keep going down with the slightly less good and slightly less bad for your top 5 in each category."

Here's my ballot, which I've already sent to Ed.

BEST BEST ACTRESS

1. Sissy Spacek, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). For degree of difficulty, Spacek's performance as Appalachian child bride turned country music superstar Loretta Lynn already deserves superlatives. Though she was 29 during shooting, she's equally credible as the skinny-legged girl who weds brusque good ole' boy and future manager Doolittle 'Mooney' Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) and as the late-30s/early '40s burnout who occupies the film's final leg. She also did her own singing, and it's more than a note-perfect impression; it's a reinterpretation, infused with Spacek's own unaffected enthusiasm. Over and above that, Spacek's performance has that ineffable something that you want from a lead movie actress -- that mix of availability and mystery that invites identification. She lets you see Lynn's desperation and heartbreak without special pleading. She's vulnerable as can be, yet never soppy. You sense what Lynn is feeling, but not always what she's thinking; Spacek gives you the dots and lets you join them up, leaving space onscreen for your own experiences. There are no false notes.

2. Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind (1939). The opposite of naturalism, Leigh's performance as Scarlett O'Hara is more like a stage performance writ huge. Everything is italicized, sometimes boldfaced. (When she exclaims, "Well, fiddle-dee-dee!", it's a knowing celebration of her own supreme entitlement -- she's daddy's girl, and daddy is the South.) Leigh's not just humping one note on a piano, though. Scarlett's girlish brio in the first quarter gives way to shock and desperation as Atlanta burns; then, in the film's underappreciated, much subtler second half, it hardens into masklike resolve. Leigh keeps the stubbornness but loses the vanity; the character grows up without losing her youthful fire. The performance is just right for this still-seductive, forever problematic antebellum fantasy.

3. Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday (1950). No, it's not the deepest performance, and certainly not the richest lead female performance to be nominated that year (I prefer Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.) But within the more constricting parameters of screwball romance, Holliday's ultimate "dumb blonde" performance is a thing of beauty. It's hard to say what's more impressive, her atomic clock timing or her emotional transparency. She's like Betty Hutton plus Barbara Stanwyck, with a slow-burn self-awareness that's uniquely Holliday. I also like this win because it's a rare instance of the academy honoring a funny woman. Comedy is hard, too -- especially when it's made to look easy.

4. Jessica Lange, Blue Sky (1994). At the time, Lange's win as mentally ill Army wife Carly Marshall in Tony Richardson's long-shelved final movie prompted grumbling about the Academy's tendency to give best actress statuettes to women who appeared in pictures nobody saw. But anyone who saw Blue Sky was hard-pressed to deny Lange's excellence; with repeat viewings, her performance doesn't just hold up, it deepens. Her depiction of the onset of mental illness is bold but precise, erring on the side of matter-of-factness. She doesn't make Carly a martyr to disease; like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, she makes sure you see the fixed, often flirty or combative personality beneath the disintegrating facade -- in this case, an aging bombshell who clings to her still-potent sexuality in order to compensate for (or forget about) her incremental loss of self-awareness and self-control. (Side note: as Carly's husband, Tommy Lee Jones is Lange's technical and emotional equal. Jones should work opposite strong women with equal screen time more often. He's less mannered and predictable with women than with men, and more life-sized; he brings out the best in them, and vice-versa.)

5. Frances McDormand, Fargo (1996). As pregnant policewoman Marge Gunderson, McDormand is a turtle with a badge and a Holden Caulfield hat, waddling around snowy vistas, calmly demanding that everyone she encounters -- from scumbag criminals to lovelorn ex-classmates -- be as honest, dignified and professional as she is. ("I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.") Yet McDormand's so warm, so idiosyncratic, that Marge never comes across as a kooky scold; she makes the woman's carved-from-marble personality traits seem an outgrowth of Marge's worldview rather than a grab-bag of eccentricities. The character's decency seems to have been self-constructed rather than inherited; that makes Marge's final condemnation of Peter Stormare's murderous felon less a moral-of-the-story monologue than a vindication of bourgeois values that modern Hollywood treats as slave chains. "There's more to life than a little money, you know," Marge says. "Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it." For Marge, goodness is freedom.

WORST BEST ACTRESS

1. Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich (2000). Yes, I know: the Academy is normally too pretentious and self-loathing to honor popular actors whose personas make us feel good (and make the studios lots of money), so we're supposed to put this one in the same "at long last" subcategory as John Wayne's Oscar for True Grit. Sorry, but I just can't. Except for a few marvelous small moments that play to director Steven Soderbergh's documentary instincts -- Erin eating pineapple out of a can late at night, hearing her baby stir, then waiting to see if the kid goes back to sleep before rushing to help -- it's the same Julia-versus-the-small-minded-world routine that we've seen over and over again. Yet again, Roberts' character is spunkier, sexier, wittier, more stubborn and more resourceful than everyone else -- more like a movie star, in other words -- and while she overreaches or makes tactical mistakes, she's never really wrong. She's an insufferable character, really, and Roberts is insufferable playing her. If you look past Roberts' veneer of faux-working class grit, and Soderbergh's easygoing verite flourishes, you see the same princessy entitlement that's also deployed, more honestly, in My Best Friend's Wedding, where at least the sight of the heroine condescending to working stiffs was viewed with raised-eyebrow disapproval. Here, Roberts' character insults coworkers who don't say "how high" when she asks them to jump, and we're supposed to cheer because she's Julia. Yes, the scene in the car where Erin hears her son say his first word is a two-hanky deluxe, but picture almost any other actress in Roberts' age group playing it; then name just one that wouldn't have been as affecting as Roberts, and less obvious.

2. Helen Hunt, As Good as it Gets (1997). Maybe the most boring Best Actress performance of all time, it redefines competence as excellence. I get sleepy just thinking about it.

3. Halle Berry, Monster's Ball (2001). A landmark win in a controversial movie, so yes, it's significant no matter what you think of the film. But I think Berry's wildly imprecise in it -- always a bit bigger than even the biggest scenes, and prone to equate scowling with hardness and histrionics with openness.

4. Elizabeth Taylor, BUtterfield 8 (1960). As dress model and man-eater Gloria Wandrous, Taylor gets to sashay, preen, sneer, vamp, trash-talk and otherwise creatively work out her resentment over having been stunt-cast in this very broad soap -- the studio's attempt to capitalize on Taylor's having run off with Debbie Reynolds' husband, Eddie Fisher, in the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston triangle of its day. Taylor came to play, no doubt; she commits and then some. But like every other performance in this shallow, obnoxious movie, it plays like a Carol Burnett Show parody. Six years later, Taylor won again for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which was just as big a performance, but more exquisitely detailed and humane, and occuring within a better written, better directed, far more memorable film.

5. Kathy Bates, Misery (1990). The movie's cartoon demonization of "Number One fan" Annie Wilkes is a hateful compression of Stephen King's already troublesome source novel, shorn of King's few empathetic touches -- and Bates, a character actor given a rare lead role, worked triple-overtime to sell it. Doughy 50-year old James Caan stifling a wince at the mere existence of a peppy fat chick is an inadvertent definition of the phrase "male privilege." Bates amplifies director Rob Reiner's straight-up misogyny by turning Annie's moments of vulnerability into gargoylish jokes on Annie, denying this one-note character even the possibility of audience identification (which is what separates a mere bad guy from a great villain). Nobody can see themselves in Annie -- not for one second -- and that makes Misery, for all its violence, a very safe film. Norman Bates in Psycho, Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, hell, even Hannibal Lecter were granted more humanity. Yes, Bates was just giving her boss what he wanted -- but since when is that a defense against complaints that you've abetted something despicable?
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Okay, now it's your turn. Post your picks in the comments section; names and movie titles will do, though of course remarks are welcome. But please do remember, this is for Ed, so be sure to email your picks directly to him at copesurvey@yahoo.com, otherwise they won't be counted.

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Links for the Day (January 11th, 2007)

1. "Re: Lists (+ THE NEW WORLD)": Some Malick news courtesy Adrian Martin.

["BTW, on Malick's THE NEW WORLD, an Italian company has produced a beautiful release that contains, as well as the 'official' release version, the original cut that has around 25 extra minutes of material, and is substantially different in places. All True Malickians, of course, are awaiting the 3 hour cut that (according to the producer and other sources) has indeed been prepared by Malick and his team for DVD release."

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2. "Black Snake Moan": In which Nathan Lee gets funky.

["Black Snake Moan is the heartwarming tale of how a white-trash crack whore confronts her demons with the help of a backwoods negro who chains her to his radiator. I intend neither sarcasm nor racism—and neither does Craig Brewer, who follows his affable if overrated Hustle & Flow with a hardcore exploitation flick that also happens to be the most impassioned spiritual parable in recent memory. The guy could’ve done anything; like most H&F skeptics, I figured he’d hustle his way into some big, dumb studio picture. Bankrolled by Paramount, starring Christina Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson, and teased into yahoo consciousness via the trailers before Snakes on a Plane, BSM isn’t exactly the quintessence of indie, but it takes bigger chances, make bolder moves, and goes deeper into hearts, minds, addiction, and redemption than any half-dozen Half Nelsons."]

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3. "Taken by the Tide": From the New York Times. Thanks to Ryland for the link.

["In one 24-hour period last week in New Orleans, now a small city of 200,000, six people were murdered. Last year’s total of 161 murders probably made New Orleans the deadliest city in the United States by a significant margin. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the violence touched my life directly. Last Thursday morning I received a call from my friend Kittee. “I have awful news,” she said, and then, very quickly: “Someone broke into Paul and Helen’s house. Helen was shot and killed. Paul was holding Baby Francis and was shot three times. He’s still alive. Francis is O.K.”]

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4. "Too Much of a Good Thing? Plenty to Choose From in 2006": Andrew Sarris wraps up film year 2006.

["The movie year of 2006 is far from over, despite what the calendar says—at least as far as this reviewer is concerned. Anywhere from 522 to 540 new feature films were exhibited locally this year, depending on who is doing the counting and compiling. Apparently, more big movies were released in the month of December than I can ever remember. Was it a good year or a bad year for movies—or, as is usually the case, something in between? At my present rate of optical and auditory consumption, I should have a definitive answer sometime in July, but I have already resigned myself to the prospect of never seeing Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto in my lifetime."]

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5. "The David Lynch Taste Test (and Cupcakes)": From Gothamist.

["David Lynch will be appearing at Barnes and Noble Union Square on Thursday, January 11th at 7 pm to talk about his new book, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.”"]
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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 (January 10th, 2007)

1. "Jobs unveils long-awaited iPhone, Apple TV."

["With a telephone and a television set-top box coming soon, it's a full-fledged consumer electronics company. Hence, from this day forward, Apple Computer has officially renamed itself Apple Inc. The revelation came Tuesday from CEO Steve Jobs at the annual Macworld Conference & Expo, where he unveiled the long-rumored iPhone and showed off the latest model of iTV, which the company has renamed Apple TV. The former, of course, is Apple's way of marrying its fabulously popular iPod music player with a cell phone, while the latter acts as a set-top box for enjoying iTunes content on television sets, as opposed to on computer monitors or tiny iPod screens, and positions Apple as a competitor, in some respects, to cable and satellite TV operators."

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2. "Idiocracy: Slouching towards a DVD cult?" Dennis Cozzalio on on Mike Judge's latest feature, which, like Office Space, had a brief theatrical release but seems to be finding success on home video. With links galore.

["If the cult of Idiocracy develops with any similarity to the one surrounding Office Space ('Yeah… That's great… Yeah...'), perhaps Fox (or someone else, like, say, Criterion) might pony up for a DVD that would make room for a Judge commentary or perhaps even a cut of the movie more to the director’s liking than the release version. But Fox, the corporation that found Turistas, Deck the Halls and Date Movie all suitable for big, splashy releases, is probably just as jittery as ever about putting too much money behind a movie that posits a future where Starbucks doubles as a blow-job parlor, Fuddruckers has finally been rechristened Buttfuckers, and the number-one movie in the country is a two-hour close-up of a titular Ass."]

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3. "Scooby-Doo creator dies." We would have broken this story, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!

["Iwao Takamoto was born in Los Angeles in 1925 to parents who had emigrated from Japan. During World War II, he and his family were sent to the Manzanar internment camp in California. It was there he learned basic illustration techniques from other internees. Following the war, he landed a job as an assistant animator at Walt Disney Studios. While there, he worked on such projects as Cinderella, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp. From there, he shifted to Hanna-Barbera Studios, where he fulfilled a number of duties including character animator. He created the popular sleuthing dog Scooby-Doo after consulting with a Great Dane breeder and then named him after the catchy song phrase in Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night."]

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4. "Thai Cowboys with Rockets." New York Magazine's David Edelstein on Tears of the Black Tiger.

[Tears of the Black Tiger is set in the age of...who knows? Men in wide-brimmed hats gallop around on horseback firing six-shooters, but sundry machine guns and rocket launchers suggest the director’s time frame is a tad loose. Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi), a beautiful young woman in a bright-magenta dress, awaits her true love in a blue-and-red sala (a Thai pergola) in a blue-lit drizzle in the middle of a golden field. While her heart aches, said true love, Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan), is blowing the brains out of a rat who double-crossed his outlaw boss. Most people who write “blowing the brains out” are indulging in hyperbole. That wouldn’t be me. (Later, as a bullet whizzes toward a man’s head, there’s even a split-second insert of a brain to contextualize the subsequent chunk-shower.)"]

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5. "Carlo Ponti, 1912-2007." Green Cine Daily on the late producer, who shepherded such landmark features as La Strada, Blow-Up and Dr. Zhivago, and married Sophia Loren.

["In addition, there were films by Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol, De Sica and Polanski - there were few major directors who did not work with Ponti."]
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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: 24 and American Idol

By Todd VanDerWerff

The first four hours of 24's sixth season premiere (Sunday and Monday, 8 to 10 p.m. ET) misplace what makes the series so effective, fixating on stilted policy debates and characters we've never met. Yet two moments at the tail end are so legitimately shocking that they seem to kick the whole season into gear. The first is a plot twist, arrived at via barely-motivated plot machinations but carried out with ruthless efficiency; the second is a moment of absolute terror, played with the requisite gravitas. Together, these incidents encapsulate what the series does best: kinetic melodrama and political exploitation. The two go hand-in-hand.

24 is one of the few series on television that is willing to engage in the things that frighten Americans most. Some of the show’s strongest hours came in its second and third seasons, when, respectively, it detonated a nuclear bomb (in the desert, far from people) and released a virus in a crowded hotel. Even the fourth season’s attack on Air Force One, conveyed almost entirely through the worried faces of the actors watching the plane come down at the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit offices, managed to hit that “Oh shit! Could that happen here?” button.

The show's immediate connection to post-Sept. 11 fears is the source of both its power and its crudeness. A friend describes the show as a “Republican wonderland,” and he’s not far off. The series often wanders close to pure fascism and never seems apologetic for doing so; the subliminal refrain is, “Sure there are badasses like Jack Bauer out there who have to torture and kill indiscriminately, but think of what would happen if there weren't!” The nadir of the show’s views in this regard also came in Season Four, when a liberal human rights lawyer had the nerve to intrude on CTU business (in a thoroughly unrealistic fashion) and demand that the rights of a terrorist suspect be respected. Who did he think he was?

24’s writers deploy politically charged elements in a very canny way. Like most macho action blockbusters, the show's heart is fascistic, but each season is likely to include elements that seem to criticize such tendencies. The fifth season, for instance, had the requisite torture action, but it also had a slimy, treacherous president who was more interested in protecting his own interests and legacy than in doing right by his country. Whether intentionally or not, the character -- played by Gregory Itzin, who will return sometime this season -- was a Nixon/Bush amalgam that juiced the show’s often boring White House plotlines (and may have contributed to its Emmy victory as best drama).

All of this leads into Season Six's first few episodes, which actually feature the characters in the White House (led by D.B. Woodside's President Wayne Palmer) taking the time to debate recurring War on Terror issues, from torture to Guantanamo-style prisons to the idea of rounding up all Muslim-Americans and putting them in camps. These point-counterpoints are assigned to strong actors (Peter MacNicol from the right and Regina King from the left), but they never integrate with anything around them; they're blandly declaimed, as though the cast spent the summer hiatus reading Opinion Journal and developing position papers. The "debate" is theoretical anyway. The left can't win on 24, which is set in a U.S. where terrorist attacks seem to occur almost daily. (“You’d think about rounding up Muslims then, wouldn’t you?” the show seems to be challenging.)

Other current dramas not only engage the audience on civil liberties issues (The Wire and Battlestar Galactica, for two), but manage to do it by showing rather than telling; in comparison, the first four hours of 24’s sixth season feel like a more conservative Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: dueling monologues and stacked decks. Regular viewers are used to this. Aside from Season Five, the straightforwardly political material has always been 24’s weakest link; but the action scenes, anchored in Kiefer Sutherland's lead performance, are so strong that they pulverize rational objections.

Sutherland plays lone wolf hero Jack Bauer as a barely restrained weapon that can go off at any time. The character’s emotions (aside from anger) are held in check; even in potentially deadly situations, his intelligence and cool seem boundless. He’s the perfect American soldier, ready at an instant to sacrifice himself for his country but also to willing to plot an escape when new information becomes available (the plan Jack hatches at the end of the season’s first hour is a moment of shocking catharsis -- brilliant and brutal). Last season ended with Jack shipped off to a Chinese prison; when he returns after years of being brutalized in captivity, he’s grown a long, hobo-esque beard and taken a vow of silence. (On a show where torture frequently garners important information, Jack never talked to his jailers.) Within minutes, however, he’s clean-shaven, discussing battle plans and ready to go. As played by Sutherland, Jack is every action hero ever, distilled to the basest essence of the archetype.

But Jack is one of the few returning characters to whom viewers have extensive allegiance. (Another is Mary Lynn Rajskub’s hilariously prickly computer expert Chloe, who saved the world on a hotel bar wi-fi connection last season.) Other faces are familiar from prior seasons (Woodside’s president; Eric Balfour’s middle manager Milo; Roger R. Cross’ dutiful CTU agent Curtis Manning), but they're not as compelling as former colleagues who have since been written out. Manning is a workhorse, but he's not as vivid as Carlos Bernard’s Tony Almeida, who was killed off last season after rising from dutiful peon to CTU head, then getting sent to prison when trying to save his wife's life. Manning doesn't have anywhere near as rich a history, so when 24 focuses on him, we just want to get back to Jack or Chloe. It's a predicament for which the writers can blame only themselves. Season Five was full of shocking plot twists (the body count of regular and recurring characters was probably the highest of any season of a regular series ever), but by killing off all of those interesting and vital people, TV's ultimate plot-driven series wrote itself into a corner. When we’re not with Jack, we have nowhere to go.

In some ways, it feels unfair to pick on 24 for some of these things -- barely sketched-in characters and hardly-suppressed fascism (and a concurrent belief in the sheer force of masculinity) are staples of the modern action movie, and 24 is stylish enough to reinvigorate them. The show's now-familar jittery editing and split screens still feel as fresh as they did when the show debuted in 2001; ditto the writers' eagerness to wallow in the worst fears of American citizens (and world citizens -- 24 is an international hit, too), then offer a tidy resolution before the world-changing worst can occur. It’s both a way to acknowledge our worst fears and deny them power. Nothing bad can happen as long as Jack’s around.
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Lots of shows are debuting or returning over the next two weeks, including HBO’s Rome and Extras, SciFi’s Dresden Files and Battlestar Galactica and the aforementioned 24. But the most significant event in the TV landscape (as it is year after year) is Fox’s American Idol, which returns one week from tonight. Every January, Idol lands with a ratings bang, sending time slot competitors scrambling through the spring, yet without ever shaking up its format all that much. It has a sort of lazy confidence -- and from a ratings standpoint, why shouldn't it? Idol is one of the few genuine pop phenomena left. More than 30 million viewers watch it every week; by comparison, in 2006 only a handful of films attracted more ticket buyers. If in fact we do still have a mass culture, last year American Idol, Pirates of the Caribbean and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” were pretty much it.

Idol isn’t the world’s greatest television show, but it’s not as bad as its detractors claim, especially when it’s in competition mode. The singing is mostly imitation Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston, and every episode has so much padding that a viewer with a TiVo can catch the relevant bits in about 15 fast-forwarded minutes; but the show is competently staged and shot, and the individual singers' personalities are often appealing, if one-dimensional. The judges have fallen into too-easily-predictable roles over the years -- Paula Abdul is the eternal cheerleader, Randy Jackson is everybody’s best friend, Simon Cowell the needlessly bitter foreigner), but their banter is cornily charming (even if Cowell and host Ryan Seacrest’s sniping verges on homophobia more often than not). What’s more, Idol is one of a handful of hit series that's satisfying for whole families to watch together -- no small feat. Hell, it even works as a very basic introduction to democracy -- assuming, of course, that by the time today’s children are old enough to vote, said voting will be conducted by text messaging your favorite candidate's name to AT&T, over and over and over.

The worst thing about Idol, though, is its audition episodes. Perhaps reflecting our love of the perverse, these episodes often garner huge ratings. In the competition section, the singing may be varying degrees of bland, but there are reasonable discussions to be had about it -- one singer may be too “pitchy," another may have forgotten the words, while yet another might boast excellent stage presence. In contrast, the audition episodes delight in trotting out oddballs who turn up for nationwide open call auditions. Only a handful of competitors are let through the various screening processes to stand before Randy, Paula and Simon, and some were clearly invited only because of their awfulness. Since these bad singers are often deluded about their talent (William Hung being the foremost example), it's an exercise in cruelty. The judges and the audience are encouraged to sit in superior judgment of the hopeless crooners. “Yes,” we can say, “that’s very bad. I could do better. And if I were that bad, I would know.” At its best, American Idol is a silly celebration of the American dream -- anyone can be famous if they try hard enough and/or get on TV. At its worst, it's a sad celebration of the flipside of that dream -- kicking a poor bastard when he’s down.
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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 (January 9th, 2007)

1. "Does the name "Laurent Bouzereau" Mean Anything to You?": From Damian at Windmills of My Mind.

["If you are like me, you probably saw the headline to this post and said to yourself: "Wait a minute. I've seen that name somewhere before. Why does it look so familar?" Perhaps then you immediately looked at the photo below, before you even read this first paragraph, to see if you could possibly identify this guy (an endeavor which I am pretty confident didn't help you much). If, on the other hand, you immediately knew the answer to the above question, then you, my friend, are a better person than I am. Laurent Bouzereau is the unsung hero of "making of" documentaries."]

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2. "Win a Chance to Get "Killed" on Film": The seventh sign of the apocalypse is upon us... whoops, spoke too soon.

["While a set visit is fine and a small part in a movie is fun, playing out meeting your maker on-camera is something truly unique. The Rogue-sponsored “Win a Chance to Get Killed on Film” sweepstakes Grand Prize is for the winner to film a “death scene” in an upcoming Rogue production."]

["Veteran filmmaker Ken Russell flashed his genitalia at disgraced former Miss Great Britain Danielle Lloyd within hours of entering the British reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother last night (January 3)."]

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3. "Circling the City": S.T. VanAirsdale breaches the Circle.

["The Reeler made its way to the New York Film Critics Circle Awards event Sunday night at The Supper Club, a venue demotion of sorts from last year's digs at Cipriani 42nd Street, but about a nearly straight vertical shot upwards in terms of star power. The evening's only award winner who skipped the party was Best Actress winner Helen Mirren (don't think the critics didn't notice, either); her fellow awardees -- from Martin Scorsese to Forest Whitaker to Jennifer Hudson -- arrived with A-list presenters in tow (Leonardo DiCaprio, Jim Jarmusch and Bill Condon, respectively) and attitude and gratitude to spare."]

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4. "Tokyo Story": House writer Ryland Walker Knight's contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon.

["The everyday banality distances the viewer, at first, in Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 TOKYO STORY but its purity of expression, its contemplative rhythms and its observations culminate in an ending that evokes the best of Anton Chekhov & Andre Dubus: you learn how to live. Were we all so selfless as Setsuko Hara's Norika, we (humans) would, to say it simply, be better."]

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5. "Matthews To Rock 'House'": My college days are coming back to me. Help!

["Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter Dave Matthews will guest star as a musical prodigy on the hit US medical series House. The singer will play a savant and piano prodigy who comes under the care of Dr. Gregory House, played by British star Hugh Laurie. This isn't the first time Matthews has been linked to the show - his track Some Devil appeared in an episode in 2005. The 39-year-old has appeared in the feature film Because Of Winn-Dixie and will star in the upcoming movie Lake City with Oscar winner Sissy Spacek. Matthews' guest stint on House will air in March."]
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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 dying of the light: Peter O'Toole in Venus

By Travis Mackenzie HooverLooking at the poster for Venus, one could be forgiven for thinking that the end was near. Here is nothing but a full-on shot of Peter O’Toole’s head, carefully doctored to make him seem frail and desiccated: not only is there a yellowish tinge to the skin that I’ve never seen on a human being, but O’Toole himself looks stunned, confused, and ready to pack it all in. This is strange not merely from a publicity standpoint (who attracts customers with something like this?), but because it doesn’t do the film (or O’Toole) justice. Venus and its star are as lively as they come, raging against the dying of the light even as they have to acknowledge its approach. The star does his best to fulfill his preordained role as randy raconteur, raising hell in theatre’s name and never betraying the idea, hanging at the margins of the movie, that we all have to ring down the curtain sometime.

You couldn’t call Venus a great film. It’s one of those movies about an older “life-force” bonding with a younger person and having all sorts of lively frolic (see Harold and Maude -- or for that matter, 1982's My Favorite Year, which starred O'Toole). This time, the life-force is Maurice (O'Toole), a once-prominent, now-aged actor who counts the days -- loudly -- with his ever-excitable theater buddies Ian (Leslie Phillips) and Donald (a marginalized Richard Griffiths). His younger charge arrives with a big noise: she’s Ian’s grand-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), a sullen, anti-intellectual teenager arrived in London to pursue a modeling career and who instead alarms the deeply genteel relation to whom she’s elected to bunk. Not so Maurice: partly attracted to a mind to mold, partly aroused by her unformed beauty, he gravitates to the graceless girl and forges a friendship that she, knowing no-one else in the city, guardedly reciprocates.

The set-up is obvious, but it’s handled well by the filmmakers. Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi could perhaps be chided for retreating from his more engaged work in the '80s, but then, so could most of the British film industry; in any event, he’s crafted a script that doesn’t reach too high but doesn’t embarrass itself by pretending otherwise. Mostly, it’s a machine for providing O’Toole with grandiloquently clever lines, and perhaps trading on his reputation as a drunken hellraiser: not for nothing does it reference the wife he left behind (Vanessa Redgrave, killing with kindness in her single scene of indulgence) and frame the cost of living high and witty in terms of personal isolation. Wisely, Venus doesn’t do anything serious with the darkness at the edge of the frame: it just makes Maurice’s extroversion that much more piquant and noble, and lets O’Toole say “I ain’t dead yet,” to audience delight.

Of course, the wrong director could have thrown this out of balance, either pushing the gloom about the end of one’s life and career or blowing it off for bright, carefree, Sandy Dennis-worthy frivolity. But Roger Michell -- who, with Notting Hill, gave the hated British rom-com one of its few credible entries -- manages the various elements with, if not brilliance, then with a sense of proportion. He doesn't inflate the proceedings to world-historical importance; nor does he trivialize the main characters' emotions to get easy laughs. And while on that last score Kureshi almost obliges for him (the witticisms of Maurice and his colleagues get to be a bit much), the pair of them manage the two extremes into something light enough to enjoy but hefty enough to stick to your bones.

Take the character of Jessie. In one sense, she’s a caricature, a nightmare vision of shiftless commoner unresponsive to the calling of culture. Early scenes present her as a lump of sulking matter, a veritable immovable object open to a mockery that spills over on the aged relative who takes her in. But as the movie progresses, she becomes more of a person -- or rather, the film sees her as more of a person. Without shifting Whittaker’s excellent, dagger-eyed performance in the slightest, it manages to reframe how we understand it: how her sloth and touchiness are endemic of a greater personal hurt, and how vulnerable she feels all alone in the big city. When Maurice tries to open her up (as when he gets her a modeling gig…with a life-study art class), her defenses are put in context, and made less ridiculous in the process.

Of course, that life-study class raises the hobgoblin of sexism that also lurks at the edges of the film. Venus is seen largely from Maurice’s point of view -- and subsequently, from the objectifying gaze of a man with a serious hard-on. Much of his interest in his young charge could perhaps be described as condescending, if not leering; much of the film is based on Jessie fending off lecherous advances from the boy-can’t-help-it hands of her would-be mentor. And the film, through that art class, seems to be suggesting that for Jessie to be happy she has to make herself somewhat available -- an idea as hackneyed as it is dubious. It’s here that the film stays in agreeable-time-killer territory: it’s happy to lurk in the subgenre’s clichés rather than define its own dramatic terra firma.

But while it stays within those familiar confines, it deepens them to the point that they aren’t perceived as such. Such sleight of hand is what makes Venus the lovely bit of fluff that it is -- and in this traditionally slack movie month of January, likely your only new filmic option worth exercising. It knows that it isn’t aiming very high, but it senses why people aim at this level at all, and it tries to build a sensitive place where the constructs seem to add up to more than they normally would. O’Toole would be better served by a more attentive and joyful image than the strange, strange picture with which marketing has him saddled.
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Travis Mackenzie Hoover is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

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Links for the Day (January 8th, 2007)

1. "Scientist: NASA found life on Mars - and killed it": Figures, don't it?

["Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing. The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said. Dirk Schulze-Makuch presented his theory in a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. The paper was released Sunday."]

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2. "On Film": The official blog of the Chicago Reader where critics Pat Graham, J.R. Jones, and Jonathan Rosenbaum sound off on cinema happenings. (With special thanks to Jonathan for his posting on and links about Abbas Kiarostami's Five).

["Fans of Abbas Kiarostami who have been wondering when they'll be able to see Five (2003)—his 74-minute, five- part experimental film without dialogue, all shot on the seashore while he was scripting Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold—should know that it's recently come out in France on a well-produced DVD released by MK2 and readily available from French Amazon for just under 28 Euros. (Like other overseas DVDs, it's playable on any multiregional DVD player, which includes a surprising number of stateside computers.) Apparently part of the reason for the long delay was Kiarostami's slowness in producing a "making of" documentary, though what he's finally come up with—his hour-long About Five, completed in late 2005, available with English subtitles on the same DVD—is quite fascinating. Responding to pertinent questions put to him by English critic and programmer Geoff Andrew, he views his own work with a lot of refreshing as well as helpful candor."]

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3. "An Unfinished Cinema": Abbas Kiarostami's 1995 text for the Centenary of Cinema catalog. Reprinted from DVDBeaver.

["Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on the screen better. Then I looked a little closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats and saw that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and be alone. They were both with others and distant from them."]

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4. "Chevy Chase was inspired by Betty Ford": Which of course explains Vegas Vacation and Cops and Robbersons.

["Comedian Chevy Chase depicted the late Gerald Ford as a bumbling and accident-prone president 30 years ago on “Saturday Night Live,” but he says the two shared a more serious link. Former First Lady Betty Ford’s courageous decision to talk publicly about her problems with alcohol inspired him to get treated for his addiction to painkillers, Chase wrote in an essay published in Saturday’s editions of The New York Times."]

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5. "Hawking: I'm planning space flight": From CNN.

["Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says he wants to undertake a zero-gravity flight aboard an airplane this year as a precursor to a journey into space, a newspaper reported Monday. "This year I'm planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009," he was quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph newspaper."]
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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 (January 7th, 2007)

1. "Artist’s heavenly painting of Jolie draws notice": "...and whosoever was found purchasing the Blue Light Special at K-Mart was cast into the Lake of Fire."

["A North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line. Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given “Blessed Art Thou,” showing this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art. The painting has gotten much attention from celebrity web sites and blogs. Since the buzz started, the number of daily unique visitors to Kretz’s own blog has jumped from an average of 30 to 15,000 on Wednesday."]

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2. "National Society of Film Critics: 'Pan's Labyrinth' is best pic": "United" 55.

["The National Society of Film Critics returned to old form today by picking a foreign-language movie as the best of the year, which it commonly did back in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, all top-three vote-getters in the best-pic category didn't feature English dialog: Spanish-language "Pan's Labryinth" by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won with a score of 34 over "The Death of Mr. Lazurescu" by Romanian helmer Cristi Puiu (31) and Clint Eastwood's Japanese-language "Letters from Iwo Jima" (29). Otherwise, the vote results mirrored the outcome of most other top critics' groups, with the acting honors going to Helen Mirren ("The Queen") and Forest Whitaker ("Last King of Scotland")."]

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3. "U.S. Army sorry for asking deceased to re-enlist": I want YOU!

["The U.S. Army said Friday that it will apologize to the families of deceased and wounded officers that it mistakenly encouraged to re-enlist via letters sent out in late December. About 75 families of deceased officers and 200 families of wounded officers received such letters sent to more than 5,100 officers between Dec. 26 and 28, the Army said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the database used to address those letters contained names of officers who were killed in action or wounded," the Army said. "Army personnel officials are contacting those officers' families now to personally apologize for erroneously sending the letters." The names of these soldiers had been removed from the database, but an earlier version of the list was mistakenly used, the Army said. The Army said it is taking steps to ensure this mistake does not happen again."]

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4. "Cheerleaders' lifestyle is nothing to cheer about": 2, 4, 6, 8!

["With their neat white ankle socks and dazzling smiles, the cheerleaders of McKinney North High School in Dallas looked as though butter would not melt in their lip-glossed mouths. But behind the cheery chants and high kicks, the truth was rather less savoury. Five members of the squad have scandalised Middle America after revelations that they bullied their coaches, menaced teachers, played truant and generally thumbed their noses at authority. Even after they turned up intoxicated at a school dance and posed for bawdy photographs in a condom shop wearing their cheerleader uniforms, disciplinary action was still a long way off."]

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5. "'Tigger' accused of smacking young fan": After a hard night out with Pooh and Piglet.

[" A Walt Disney World employee dressed as the character Tigger was accused of hitting a child while posing for a photo, a spokeswoman for the theme park said Saturday. Park officials temporarily suspended Michael J. Fedelem while they investigate the accusations, Disney spokeswoman Zoraya Suarez said. "Naturally, physical altercations between cast members and guests are not tolerated," Suarez said."]
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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 (January 6th, 2007)

1. "Who needs body armor? I’m wearing a bra!": Some days it's just too easy: The Sequel.

["One woman discovered on New Year's Eve that her bra could do more than lift and support when the impact of a bullet was blunted by the bra strap on her left shoulder. Debbie Bingham, 46, an Atlanta resident visiting family in St. Petersburg, said her gold-colored bra slowed the bullet during the holiday celebrations. Her injury might have been much more severe had it not been for her bra strap, said George Kajtsa, spokesman for the St. Petersburg Police Department."]

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2. "Critics Choice: Great Documentaries": Members of the New York Film Critics Circle introduce personal favorites of the documentary form. Begins today at the Museum of the Moving Image. Our own Matt Zoller Seitz introduces the Maysles-Zwerin film Salesman on January 20th at 3pm.

["The New York Film Critics Circle is comprised of writers from New York-based newspapers and magazines. Each year, the Museum presents a series of films chosen and introduced by members of this prestigious group. For the 8th Annual NYFCC series, critics have selected nonfiction films that are as notable for their cinematic artistry as for their subject matter. Each film will be introduced by the critic who chose it, and in many cases, screenings will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers."]

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3. "2006: The Year in Film with New York Critics": Stu Van Airsdale of The Reeler hosts a critics panel on January 10th at Makor. Attending will be Stephanie Zacharek, Owen Gleiberman, and David Edelstein.

["Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz has aggregated 77 lists from the web that rank the films of 2006. With pros, amateurs, big studio lovers, indie aficionados, journalists and bloggers, just about everyone has a go at airing an opinion. On January 10 at Makor, Stu Van Airsdale of TheReeler.com assembles a top notch group of New York critics—David Edelstein of New York, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly and Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek—to hash out their highs and lows with film clips and audience Q&A. Come armed with your own lists..."]

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4. "Marilyn Manson Killed His Marriage": Sweet dreams are made of cheese.

["Given Manson’s lack of communication with his wife of one year, Dita Von Teese, she decided to file for divorce. Dita Von Teese, whose real name is Heather Sweet, filed the divorce papers on December 29 but they listed Christmas Eve as the official date of separation. Since then, she hasn’t been able to find Manson to serve him with the papers. The shocker rocker who turned 38 this Friday, is reportedly in a Los Angeles recording studio working on a new album. “He’s not been responsive. She loved him so much, but he has too many demons,” a friend of the couple told New York Post."]

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5. "Charlton Heston's neighbors suing him": And Mr. Heston's response.

["Neighbors who live down a hill from Charlton Heston's home are suing the actor, alleging that their property was damaged two years ago when heavy rain sent hillside debris pouring into their home. The lawsuit filed Wednesday by Jerome and Flora Heilweil alleges "slope failure" on Heston's property caused substantial damage to their home in January 2005, diminishing the market value of their property. The couple seeks at least $1.2 million, as well as punitive damages."]
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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 (January 5th, 2007)

1. "Hannah Launches Sex-Slave Crusade After Escaping Sick Trade": Some days it's just too easy. From IMDB.

["Kill Bill star Daryl Hannah narrowly avoided being sold as a sex slave in Las Vegas in the late 1970s and is now coming forward with her seedy secret to help others forced into prostitution. The actress, who has joined forces with international human rights groups to help free sex slaves, reveals she was studying theatre in Los Angeles when she leaped at the chance to model for an album cover in Sin City. The 46-year-old told crime show America's Most Wanted that she quickly realised the modeling trip was a scam and she was about to be forced into a sex-slave ring. Hannah told show host John Walsh she and another girl escaped out a window and fled back to Los Angeles, but she has always been haunted by the memory of how close she came to becoming forced into prostitution. And now the environmentalist and humanitarian is using her movie dollars to help those who weren't so lucky after learning there are more than 14,000 girls smuggled into America annually from Eastern Europe and Asia who become part of secret sex rings. She says, "The more I learn, the more I am moved to take action."]

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2. "This Week in Territorialism: Whose Tribeca is it Anyway?": From The Reeler blog, with thanks to Stu for all the recent mentions.

["I'm a little behind on this, but it's a bit underreported and the story certainly isn't going anywhere: You may have seen Page Six's heads-up Tuesday about an increasingly nasty domain-ownership dispute between Robert De Niro's lawyers and the owners of Tribeca.net. The actor insists it's a trademark violation (especially considering the site's short film and arts hosting), but fellow Tribecans, including site owner Chuck Harris, say De Niro is being little more than a "bully." They're probably both right to some degree; you can't go launching a de facto film site invoking the Tribeca name three years after De Niro and Co. did the heavy (i.e. expensive) lifting; even the Tribeca Underground Film Festival has all but changed its name since launching in '04, moving on to its more nondescript present-day BEfilm aegis. But De Niro doesn't actually own Tribeca, so naturally the lawyers will sort this out while locals take the NYC vs. Hollywood sides that seem so popular these days (more on that later, hopefully)."]

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3. "Japanese Cinema Outsells Hollywood at home": From Japundit.com; thanks to Jeffrey Hill for the link.

["Domestic films have overtaken Hollywood for the first time in 20 years at the Japanese box office in 2006 as subtle or sentimental stories pulled viewers away from Hollywood’s brasher fare.The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan estimated that revenue from Japanese movies outpaced Hollywood for the first time since 1985, when US monster movies “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins” swept the world."]

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4. 10 Best & 11 Offenses: Reverse Shot's year-end wrap-up, as published on indieWIRE.

["So, if you're like us, you've had enough, enough, ENOUGH of the Academy Award pundits predicting the same prizes since September, studio shills vomiting "Dreamgirls" spittle all over the place, and seeing about one-hundred-and-seventeen different websites predicting, with self-satisfied, out-on-a-limb bravery, that an "edgy" indie like "Babel" might make it into the top five come Oscar time. In any case, many of the films that reap awards at the end of the year, thanks to literal half-wits like Tom O'Neill and David Poland talking them up for about 75 percent of the previous twelve months, often before they're even released, are irredeemably awful. And we're not trying to be contrarians. There were at least a dozen films, moments, characters, or performances in 2006 that made our flesh crawl, turned our faces beet red, or made us shudder in disapproval. So, with the official Reverse Shot top ten up and running, it's time to return to that other annual celebration: The eleven most deeply offensive things we saw at the movies this year."]

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5. "Thinking Inside the Box": Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men.

["Genre seems to get in the way of [Cuaron's] best impulses, as it does in Children of Men, which steadily devolves as he moves from thoughtfully suggestive dystopian science fiction to relatively thoughtless and childish action-adventure to even more mindless war movie."]
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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 (January 4th, 2007)

1. "The Better-Than List": Armond White compares and contrasts film year 2006. And more from AW on Children of Men.

["Don't be fooled by the "10 Best Films" lists from critics who never even saw the year's most interesting films. They're merely corroborating the promotional campaigns of the most highly publicized movies and failing to seek out the best. This year more than ever, it's necessary to separate genuine achievement from pure hype, thus my alternative: "The Better-Than List."]

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2. "Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks for a Future": David Denby's Escape From L.A.

["The device was as elegant as an old cigarette case and not much larger than a child’s palm. I was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontier of a new digital age, a new platform for movies, a new convenience that will annihilate old paradigms. Last spring and summer, when I visited a number of executives and tech guys in big-studio Hollywood, I kept hearing disdain for the mall cinemas and the multiplexes—the theatres in which most Americans see movies. And I heard a new mantra: “Content on demand—when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it.” By the end of the summer, movies were beginning to flow into homes and portable devices through the Internet. In September, Apple began offering previously released Disney movies through its iTunes Store. I downloaded the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” onto my hard drive, then put it onto a video iPod. The screen was only two inches across."]

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3. "Re-fighting the Cold War": Edward Copeland revisits Reds.

["In many ways, Reds not only plays as a great film to me today in a way it didn't back in the 1980s, it also works as a far more relevant one as well. When you watch as the idealism of those who felt socialism was the answer to capitalism's wrongs inevitably gives way to cynicism as the communists in Russia begin using their power to deny the people rather than to give them a stronger voice, it's hard not to see the parallels. Ideology by necessity almost always gives way to disillusionment as true believers, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, realize that the people whom they've trusted and believed in to realize their ideal dreams either have something else in mind or lack the essential ability to implement their goals."]

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4. "Crafted From Memories": The Reeler's Paddy Johnson on Stan Douglas's exhibition Inconsolable Memories, now at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

["For the two remaining readers dying to do this much homework for the sake of understanding an art piece, I have good news: It's worth your trouble. Douglas's two-part exhibition of photographs and video uses Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 film Memories of Underdevelopment as a starting point to explore the socio-political history of Cuba, while employing his mastery of technology to investigate the role memory plays not only in the construction of timelines, but the medium itself; the result is a surprisingly complex portrait of sexual relationships, race and national identity. Intermittently narrated by the psychologically stunted but erudite protagonist Sergio Corrieri, Alea's original film relates a lack of social awareness on an individual level to that of the culture as a whole: Sergio loses his job as a journalist and eventually has his apartments confiscated in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis; while he occasionally seems to have the awareness that he should leave Cuba, he irrationally remains unwilling to do so. His relationships fall apart, and he likens the failures he sees in the women he partners with to those of the country."]

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5. "Mario Lopez hosting Miss America pageant": I have a weakness for A.C. Slater, so sue me. (And while we're doing initials: R.I.P. O.C.).

["Mario Lopez will host this year's Miss America pageant in Las Vegas, event organizers said Wednesday. "I'm honored. I think it's going to be great," Lopez told The Associated Press from Los Angeles prior to the announcement by Country Music Television Inc.'s officials in Nashville, Tennessee. The pageant will air January 29 from the Aladdin Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Having proved he can dance on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," the 33-year-old actor ("Saved by the Bell") said he didn't plan to sing the pageant's "There She Is, Miss America" theme made famous by longtime Miss America host Bert Parks. "I really don't sing," Lopez said. "I like to sing, but I don't sing well."]

["Once a white-hot TV phenomenon, teenage soap opera The OC has been axed."]
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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 (January 3rd, 2007)

1. "From Sex Trade to Vultures: Asia Outside In": House editor-in-chief Matt Zoller Seitz begins reviewing for The New York Times.

["Film Forum’s omnibus of work by the writer-director-cinematographer-editor Ellen Bruno covers a spectrum of Asian subjects. The 50-minute featurette “Sacrifice” depicts young Burmese girls conscripted into prostitution in Thailand; the bill also includes shorts about a village of Nepalese lepers and a Tibetan monastery where “body breakers” feed the stripped flesh and ground bones of the dead to giant vultures. But nonfiction doesn’t quite describe what Ms. Bruno does. Her work takes risks with form to imply that individual suffering and transcendence are but particles in a river of spiritual energy that dwarfs geography and time."]

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2. "Myth America": Reverse Shot's Nick Pinkerton takes on the Italian Stallion.

["Sylvester Stallone, whose path to celebrity was streamlined into the fairy tale of Seventies Hollywood, still remembers a thing or two about self-promotion. Rocky V was a relative box-office bust, his last significant hit was 1993’s Cliffhanger—so after the failed late-career makeover of 1997’s Copland, Stallone largely laid low, worked sparingly, kept fit, and patiently waited for the wheel of nostalgia to make another full rotation."]

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3. "Top 10 of 2006": Our colleagues over at Film Freak Central, including House contributor Travis Mackenzie Hoover, examine film year 2006.

["I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. "Books are always better than the movies based on them" and "They don't make good movies anymore" are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought--better yet is the carrying around of the cross of "You just don't like anything." The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock's films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn't mean I don't like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly."]

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4. "Best of 2006--Television": The Star Ledger and House contributor Alan Sepinwall on television year 2006.

["In 2006, television's best got better, and its new blood was more impressive than usual. So how's a TV critic supposed to fit all the goodness into one Top 10 list? Simple: two lists, one to celebrate the returning favorites, one for the rookies to have their turn in the spotlight."]

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5. "Children of [Wo]men": Carlos Rojas of The Naked Gaze on Children of Men.

["In short, through the use of Nativity and other Biblical iconography Cuarón performs a double inversion: sublating historical specificity in favor of quasi-ahistorical biblical iconography, but then taking that same iconography and reinvesting it with historically specific connotations from the recent past (thereby re-anchoring the film in contemporary political concerns inspired by not only the conflict in the Balkans, but also 9/11, the Iraq War, global immigration debates, etc.)."]
_____________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

Read more!