By Ryland Walker Knight
Were The Mist about mist and not monsters, human or otherwise, it might have remained nervy and unsettling, instead of simply icky and unpleasant, for the bulk of its running time. Frank Darabont’s elephantine adaptation of a rather slim Stephen King novella, while well-acted and intriguingly shot, loses its footing, like a lot of films that should be fun, when it starts preaching. Not content (or strong enough?) to be a film about cloudy (foggy?) judgments, The Mist carves up the world into discrete factions meant to signify varying moral registers, or approaches to human life. Darabont’s film continues his almost-hapless devotion to humanism despite all the supernatural phenomena and religious fervor in the film: the cast's beat-your-brow-with-a-Bible zealots are far scarier than the demonic, slimy, tentacled insect-creatures crawling around them, out in the mist. And in the end, the bad CGI gives way, fully, in a gut-punch reveal to rival 28 Weeks Later as the biggest “Fuck you, stupid world” of the year. Neither is subtle. Yet where Fresnadillo’s coda was ferocious (and post-human), Darabont’s would be nearly laughable were it not for the sober fact that his film has no sense of humor, just pathetic, deadpan despair. 
But The Mist is not a complete waste thanks to its cast, which spends most of the film killing time, stranded (by the mist and its beasties) inside a rather theatrical supermarket. There are no marquee names in the picture, but if this film helps Thomas Jane (playing David Drayton, a local artist and steadfast father) become a bigger star, I’m for it; if Andre Braugher (playing Brent Norton, the haughty lawyer from New York) manages to continue to challenge his Hollywood typecasting, somehow, I’m for it; if somebody bright gets the idea to cast Marcia Gay Harden (playing the proselytizing, ingratiating Mrs. Carmody) in a tender role that softens her near-Formica features, I’m for it; if somebody besides Darabont gives Laurie Holden (playing an unfortunate victim of a bad name, and chance, Amanda Dumfries) a meaty, sexy role, I’m for it; if Toby Jones (playing the endearing, sharp-shooting Ollie) keeps getting solid roles with that devoutly non-Hollywood mug, I’m for it. 
What I’m not for is how The Mist broadcasts its objectives instead of exploiting its premise. The film is at its best when Darabont keeps the mist-shrouded monsters offscreen and isolates his cast against (or within) the bordering background. Braugher’s departure from the supermarket works not only because of his subtle acting but also because the character's choice dramatizes a keen understanding of skepticism, opening the film up to questions, unlike most of the rest of the picture. More simply: the mist, the mist’s creatures, Mrs. Carmody, and their relationships in the film make The Mist a picture explicitly about monsters — about how the world (man, nature, the unknown) is monstrous, always. Connecting the dots, as Darabont does here, only ever limits the scope of the work and leads to a nihilist outcome that surprises, given the humanist thrust of Darabont’s other pictures (which depict us as a majestic, redemptive species). What makes The Mist dispiriting is, oddly, its indecision: that is, how quickly it surrenders and rolls over, crying. Comparing it to its multiplex mate, the Coens’ recent No Country for Old Men, with qualitative judgments set aside, what strikes me most is that, for all the death and despair, and despite the law’s retirement, in No Country, the Coens' film winds up affirming one’s choice of how to live in the world. The Mist, on the other hand, casts a pall over its characters (and its world) only to negate their choices, to end their lives.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Deadpan despair: The Mist
It's a Miserable Life: Badland
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Badland, a melodrama by the writer and director Francesco Lucente, stands apart from the recent throng of post-9/11 dramas by posing a burning question we haven’t heard yet: Can a mentally ill Iraq war veteran who murdered his pregnant wife and two of his children learn how to love again?
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Haunted History: Oswald's Ghost
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Because the movie covers well-worn territory — and interviews the usual boldface names, including the assassination theorists Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein, the former CBS beat reporter Dan Rather and Norman Mailer — its existence raises a question: Why go here again?
To read the review, click here. Read more!
Links for the Day (November 30th, 2007)
1. "Hollywood's New Scapegoat: Strike Allows Some to Bail Out of Projects." By Anne Thompson of Variety. See also: "The Innocent Victims of the Writers Strike."
["During the best of times, movies heading toward production are fragile chemical equations. Add a writers' strike to that mix and things were bound to explode. 'It's tough enough to get things right,' says one senior agent. 'This difficult situation makes it even more difficult. If something is risky it's always the first casualty, whether there's a strike or anything else.' So it was no surprise when five volatile go-projects fell apart last week: Sony pulled the February start for Ron Howard's Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks; United Artists shut down Oliver Stone's November starter Pinkville, an investigation into the My Lai massacre starring Bruce Willis; Warner Bros. pushed back Mira Nair's Indian epic Shantaram, starring Johnny Depp; Weinstein Co. postponed Nine, Rob Marshall's screen adaptation of the Broadway musical inspired by Fellini's 8 ½; and when Brad Pitt pulled out of Kevin Macdonald's political thriller State of Play, Universal threatened to sue. Players involved in all five pics cited striking writers as a key factor in scuttling the projects. But while the strike certainly made things more vexing, there were also other forces at play. The strike offers studios, filmmakers and movie stars a smokescreen for doing just what they want to do, with a convenient scapegoat."]
2. "Bush urges Congress to approve war funding before Christmas." From CNN.com.
["President Bush on Thursday called on Congress to approve billions of dollars in additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before lawmakers leave for their Christmas break. President Bush wants Congress to approve his request for war spending before the holidays. He said the Army will have to shut down bases and start furloughing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilian workers by mid-February if Congress does not clear the funds. 'Pentagon officials have warned Congress that the continued delay in funding our troops will soon begin to have a damaging impact on the operations of this department,' Bush said Thursday. 'The warning has been laid out for the United States Congress to hear.'"]
3. "The CNN/YouTube Debate: Outsourcing Journalism." By James Poniewozik of "Tuned In," Time's TV blog. Related: "CNN Debate Under Fire."
["The real distinction of Debate 2.0, for better and worse, was that it allowed CNN to outsource the question-asking, giving themselves cover: 'Hey, we didn't ask that. Some guy on the Internet did.'"]
4. "Why Are the Iraq Movies Tanking?" By David Fellerath of The Independent Weekly.
["How incendiary can a film be if no one sees it?"]
5. "Writer who Sued over Da Vinci Code Dies." Hmmmm. By Jill Lawless of The Associated Press.
["Richard Leigh, a writer of alternative history who unsuccessfully sued for plagiarism over themes in Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, has died, his agent said Friday. He was 64. U.S.-born Leigh, who had lived in Britain for three decades, died in London on Nov. 21 of causes related to a heart condition, the Jonathan Clowes Agency said. Leigh was co-author of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, a work of speculative nonfiction that claimed Jesus Christ fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and that the bloodline continues to this day."]
Quote of the Day:
“The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keep us going.” -- Molly Haskell
Image of the Day (click to enlarge):
From an all-comics cover story in The Village Voice by Tom Tomorrow, titled, "Deep Inside Bill O'Reilly." To read the whole thing, click here.
Clip of the Day: Betty Boop, M.D..
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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.
How Unfortunate the Film With None: The Savages
By Keith Uhlich
There’s much more wrong than right with The Savages, an off-putting entry in the daddy’s-dyin’-who’s-got-the-will (the emotion, not the document) genre from Slums of Beverly Hills writer/director Tamara Jenkins. The strained magical-realist prologue, wherein numerous elder residents of the Sun City, Arizona retirement community emerge from behind perfectly trimmed shrubbery (shades of Edward Scissorhands) to the tinkle of a precious, quirk-infused score (for his work here, composer Stephen Trask should be violently beaten upside the head with his marimbas), is the first red-alert warning sign that we’re in for a long hour-fifty three. That the sequence concludes with the dementia-afflicted Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) writing “prick” on the bathroom wall with his own shit only deepens the sinking sensation finally hammered home by the answering machine greeting, crooned by All About Eve’s Margo Channing (Bette Davis), which taunts each and every caller to the run-down Manhattan abode of Lenny’s daughter Wendy (Laura Linney): “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Indeed.
Indeed, further: I can conceive of extended tortures more preferable to watching Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Wendy’s sad-sack professor brother Jon) play-act at sibling rivalry. Thrown together by their estranged father’s rapid descent into Alzheimer’s and his sudden need for a nursing home, Wendy and Jon navigate a turbulent and entirely contrived terrain of brother/sister antagonism. The primary instigator of their not-so-subdued resentment: Wendy’s unpublished semi-autobiographical plays and Jon’s long-gestating study on Bertolt Brecht, both of which force a perpetually vicious competition between the duo. Jenkins includes references to Brecht throughout: two appearances, herein, of Lotte Lenya’s cover of “Solomon’s Song”, its oft-repeated refrain (“How fortunate the man with none”) perhaps meant as an implicit, ironic counterpart to the father Savage’s memory-depleting crisis.
Despite his precursory shit-slinging, Bosco is exemplary as Lenny, whose loss-of-self forces a more primal reliance on moment-to-moment instinct (when his pants drop on a crowded airplane, revealing bulging adult diapers, Lenny’s blank, child-like stare speaks penetrating volumes). Bosco plays all the beats of Alzheimer’s and old age with a complete lack of tear-stained sentiment, which helps to undercut Jenkins’ oft-saccharine visual metaphors (one toe-curling doozy is plucked wholesale from The Wizard of Oz, and given something of a Nigerian folklore twist), though the writer/director does get the sad and sodden feel of nursing homes (whatever the social status of their clientele) just right.
But for every one of these diamonds in the rough there’s some equally or more misguided counterbalance, such as the movie night sequence (featuring a screening of that stalwart racial pariah The Jazz Singer), which reveals Jenkins’ tendency towards easy, intellectually shallow potshots: the mostly black nursing home staff, portrayed up to this point with an admirable level of complexity, suddenly become glowering symbols of white man’s burden -- all for a cheap laugh. And there’s no getting past the Actor’s Studio performances of Linney and Hoffman, both awful, both confusing actorly tics and mannered tears for the subtlety and insight of a blood-tied familial relationship.
Most embarrassing is a scene played with Hoffman hanging, red-faced and apple-cheeked, from a temporary neck brace, another shining example of that old writer’s chestnut -- the sideline-injury-as-excuse-for-a-heart-to-heart (if these two self-absorbed constructs can be said to have anything resembling vasculars and ventricles). Each undercuts the other with thinly veiled, eventually outright hostile insults about Guggenheim fellowships and Brechtian theater, yet their one-upsmanship is only skin-deep, a prop-laden acting exercise -- indicated rather than experienced -- passed off as harsh truth. Hoffman and Linney are never believable as brother and sister for a single, solitary moment, so it’s perhaps something of an unintended meta-comment when Lenny turns down his hearing aid to block out his progeny’s constant squabbling. Call them, per The Savages’ fest-approved origins, Bitch & Sundance.
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Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Shoot the Moon
By Dan Callahan
Late one rainy night, George Dunlap (Albert Finney), a successful writer, comes to give his oldest daughter, Sherry (Dana Hill), a birthday present. George and his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) have been separated for a short period, and they've tried to be "grown-up" about their broken marriage, even to the point of grudgingly accommodating younger lovers, Sandy (Karen Allen) and Frank (Peter Weller). Gradually, some tension builds between them; George is openly angry and clearly confused, while Faith is miserable when she's alone but puts on a subtly flirty, needling manner around her volatile husband. When Faith opens the door to George, her face is stiff with determined anger, and his face is puffy with suppressed temper. She's not going to let him in, and he's not going to go away. Director Alan Parker lights this impasse very harshly, and he uses a hand-held camera to capture the ensuing chaos, as George smashes his way through plate glass, forces Faith outside, knocks her down, and slams the door shut, blocking it with a chair. "How do you like it?" he howls. "How do you like being locked out of your own house?"
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To read the rest of the review at Slant, click here.
Nosferatu: The Ultimate DVD Edition
by Rob Humanick
Watching Nosferatu is like standing in the same room as death itself, a brooding chamber piece of gothic ruminations and occult imagery, of the flickering light of the world waging a losing battle against the overwhelming darkness. Tod Browning's Dracula may be the more immediately recognized of the two earliest vampire features but it is Murnau's silent masterpiece to which the entire genre—and then some—owes its existence. Modern vampire culture, driven in large part by Anne Rice fans and their routinely fetishistic attractions toward the creatures of the night, is more superficially sexy than soulful, with an emphasis on the opportunities afforded by an eternal life and the fine line between death and ecstasy. Although not without these qualities in at least an implicit fashion, Nosferatu strips away anything that might possibly romanticize its titular character or the events that surround him: It bears witness to the festering rot of the soul, lingering on that which emanates from the dark corners of the world.
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To read the rest of the review at Slant, click here.
Once Upon Another Time In the West
By Ryland Walker Knight
The fall season of 2007 has produced four films that challenge how we understand the genre of the Western. In September, we had James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Here in November we have the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. The end of the year will see the release of P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
The Mangold picture is perhaps the most earnest of the four, taking up the genre as something to be applied to a story: the genre as a cycle. Dominik’s picture, while rooted in the 19th century, attempts to inherit the genre as a medium for its recurring tropes and themes, but the film falters under its own weight and has less to say about Westerns than it does about celebrity culture. The Coens break from the 19th century in explicit terms—their film is set in 1980—but their inheritance of the tradition of “local color” writers (like Twain or Cooper) helps ground one’s understanding of No Country For Old Men as a Western. There Will Be Blood bridges the 19th and 20th centuries in its opening 10 minutes, eclipsing the reliance on the designated past one often (misguidedly) associates with the Western, but its obsessions with frontiers, isolation and the American myth of perfectionism may help us to better understand how I want to characterize what a Western is today -- or, how the Western genre may still be viable, and more alive than we think -- as best as time and space allow.
To read the rest of the review at The Daily Californian, click here. Read more!
Squaring a Circle: Kurt Cobain About a Son
By Ryland Walker Knight
The late, unwilled propagation continues. For all the earnest desire to offer a complicated picture of Kurt Cobain (and his plagued yet lucky life), A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain About a Son is gorgeous to look at but staid in tone; a valiant attempt to imagine filmmaking as a compiling of artifacts that falls short of piquant despite underplaying the poignant notes of Cobain’s story.
The film traces a relatively traditional narrative of Cobain’s life from his childhood in Aberdeen, Washington (near the coast of the Pacific, in the south of the state), up through Olympia (the “hippie” capital) to Seattle (“where the action was”) in three movements. Instead of talking heads, the film employs interviews Michael Azzerad taped with the singer to prepare his book, “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” as guides through the images, denying the audience Cobain’s face for most of the film.
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To read the rest of the review at The Daily Californian, click here.
"Indie 500": The Comas, The Clientele, Battles, Primal Scream
By Vadim Rizov
[Editor's Note: "Indie 500", a look at the music scene past and present, is published every other Thursday.]
As a freshman, I assumed that if I showed up and diligently scribbled every week for NYU's student paper, the job offers would come rolling in. Silly me: in the meantime, I honed my craft and, after embarking on a shaky semester-long tenure as music editor—during which time my style of cursing the entire room during meetings and awkwardly sweating beneath the eyes of much cooler contributing writers did little to endear me to anyone—conscientiously listened to a number of promos from bands I'd never heard of, convinced that undiscovered gems were mine for the reaping.
They weren't—most of the promos were sold to undiscriminating stores around the St. Marks' area. I've only come back to two bands: De Novo Dahl (a Tennessee combo with a knack for instantly infectious pop tunes whose self-titled debut shot itself in the foot by appending a second disk of jokey, lo-fi and stupid remixes of every last goddamn song) and The Comas. I obviously didn't know how to write about music when I listened to 2004's Conductor—the brave/masochistic can check out the review here, where I manage to use "synth(s)" three times in the opening paragraph—but I wasn't wrong to be enthused. It's a disk of dubious origins—lead singer/songwriter Andy Herod went through a bad break-up with Michelle Williams, then spent a lot of time getting stoned and watching Dark City every night, leading to a lot of vaguely futuristic lyrical bullshit—but solid rock nonetheless. It doesn't sound quite like anything else I own: a simple but reasonably accurate comparison might be the fuzz of Spiritualized with half the pretension and twice the chord changes or a far more pissed-off Grandaddy, a desire to present straightforward rock songs that somehow end up sounding endlessly fuzzed-out and overproduced.
The futuristic/psychedelic retreads are still around on Spells, another disk that seems destined to be slept on, this time with some justice. "She's got a telepathic aftertaste" goes "Hannah T.," which comes off like an unintentional early Beck pastiche. Better to focus on the disk's instant stand-out, girl companion "Sarah T.," a perfect example of everything the band can do right. The quiet guitar intro seems to be tapping into some Americana folk-song vibe. That's not completely misleading: the turbo-charged verse finally takes off with galloping-horse drum beats and an epic guitar that lands somewhere in the middle between a spaghetti western soundtrack and Young Guns. The band flawlessly negotiates the transition between that and the stomping, four-on-the-floor chorus, then ramps down the volume for the conclusion, all while somehow managing to sound consistently wistful. It's a very difficult song The Comas make sound easy and natural.
Spells is a mixed bag: "Red Microphones" are as simple and infectious as they get, but the band seems to be under the bizarre delusion that writing simple rockers isn't good enough. The less said about "New Wolf"—a shrill chorus where the same riff hysterically ascends an octave on a crappy-sounding synth while the band gets close to prog-rock with some ridiculous time signature—the better. What The Comas are searching for is a balance somewhere between rock immediacy and recognizable distance and sophistication without succumbing to emo yelping; still, a single like "Come My Sunshine" comes dangerously close to the latter territory. (It's really cool, however, to hear vocalist Nicole Gehweiler's increased vocal presence; the world needs more guy-girl duet bands.) A mixed bag from a band still stuck in "promising" rather than arrived territory.
It may seem like I'm about to go off on an obtuse tangent, but bear with me: immediacy is an overrated virtue in music. The Onion A.V. Club recently let one of their bloggers run amok with memories about The Joshua Tree. (I really don't get U2, but that's a discussion for another time.) Steve Hyden makes a point that seems contradictory, but it's not: on the one hand, for him, the album was the "first time, a lightning bolt in your brain that tells you, 'This is it. This is what it feels like to feel, to connect, to be changed forever.' " Ignore the hyperbole; the point is that it's also an album he only listened to the first three singles from, over and over, until he started listening to the whole album obsessively. In other words, the single "a-ha!" moment pretty much took a whole season. Lightning strikes slowly.
My point is two-fold: one, that I've always been fascinated by the listening rituals hardcore music nerds set for themselves (Hyden talks about only really listening to stuff when he was on his bike for an hour or so), and two, saying that an album is "immediate" is like saying some meals take less time to prepare than others. One of my favorite albums is The Wrens' The Meadowlands, which was a knockout the first time, an impenetrable slog the next three or four, and finally emerged as a masterpiece, like some kind of Magic Eye picture finally popping into focus. That's part of what I enjoy about pop music: it no longer being the 19th century, we're no longer required to sit in the concert hall and absorb the whole symphony at once. There's time to repeat listen to stuff over and over, until it sinks in or we confidently reject it. Immediacy is all well and good sometimes—there's a reason I'm a Fountains of Wayne fan—but why some people insist on everything hitting at once puzzles me. Where's the fun in that?
That said: The Clientele are really pushing it. Since we're getting close to end-of-year list-making season, this column may well get bogged down in remainders from way earlier in the year for a while; in the case of God Save The Clientele, though, we're talking about an album I listened to once over the summer and it nearly killed me, so I put aside repeat listens 'til recently. I remembered having the same problem with their last album, Strange Geometry: really delightful when you started off, increasingly same-y and tedious until you could no longer remember which string arrangement went with which song. Eventually I sorted them out—"Since K Got Over Me" was the well-done prototypical wistful Britpop, "K" was the one with the ethereal choir intro, "When I Came Home From The Party" was the one with a repeated string hook as insistent as any disco arrangement—and was content to have figured out half the disk. Because of my (somewhat muted) faith in The Clientele's Voyage Of Discovery, I let God Save The Clientele sit for six months or so, then tried it again.
Is it fair to beat up on a band if they want to write pop songs and end up writing mood music? This album plays best late at night, when I'm reluctantly still working; I've always been a sucker for music that sounds demoralized, especially after midnight, and this—their cheeriest album yet!—is still pretty cloistered and fragile. Still, I've managed to sort things out a bit: for starters, it's amazing that they have a song called "Isn't Life Strange" that manages to be winter-fireside cozy rather than cloyingly smug. They've also maintained their inexplicable devotion to spoken-word: the previous album's nostalgia-fest "Losing Haringey" has been supplanted by the inscrutable whispering of "The Dance of the Hours." (It has to be a joke that this, one of the fastest and loudest tracks—all things being relative—is also almost completely incomprehensible.)
And yet: tracks like "From Brighton Beach To Santa Monica" and "These Days Nothing But Sunshine" are indistinguishably lovely, except the latter has a slide guitar and the former doesn't. The exceptions pop into sharp relief: besides "The Dance Of The Hours," which distinguishes itself through vocal novelty, there's "Bookshop Casanova." I have no doubt The Clientele are being totally sincere when they link libidinous bookishness to white-boys playing endearingly textbook disco; still, Belle & Sebastian kicked off these sweepstakes a while ago with the infinitely superior "Your Cover's Blown" (not to mention Orange Juice et al.). After all this time, it's still unclear to me if The Clientele are much more than hipster dinner-music.
This may be a really inane thing to say, but I'm really digging Battles' Mirrored. I didn't listen to it for a long time because there were vague comparisons to prog rock, which always makes me reflexively embarrassed; at the tender age of 14, I committed a Dream Theater album (Scenes From A Memory: Metropolis Pt. 2 - yes, it's a rock opera) to memory; my subsequent disenchantment at a Dream Theater/Joe Satriani concert is something I'd rather not discuss.
There's a lot to be said for these guys, most of which has been said already. The basic thing I'd like to commend is how light-hearted it all is: they can play as fast as Dillinger Escape Plan or whoever your shredding heroes are, but the potential aggression has been Prozac-ed out. I enjoy the fact that there's constantly enough demented whistling to power Disney's inevitable Snow White movie. I enjoy that "Atlas" starts off like a piss-take on Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People" before introducing what sounds like a cheerful chorus of helium-abusing Munchkins. I like how "Tonto" sort of sounds like disco-punk, except the vocals are gibberish, kind of like how most disco-punk lyrics are gibberish except they're supposed to be meaningful words. I like how the chords and vocals on "Ddiamondd" sound like a madrigal 33rpm being spun at 45. (That said: indie bands? Pseudo-illiteracy is still not cute. That means you too, Spoon ["Don't You Evah"] and Blonde "Dr. Strangeluv" Redhead.)
Most of all, I like Battles because they don't make me feel hopelessly behind the curve. A lot of the It bands of indie rock the last few years have really puzzled me: Animal Collective makes me queasy, Joanna Newsom is shrill and annoying, I can't handle Antony's voice, etc. Battles made me feel right at home the first time I heard them; I didn't have to keep spinning to figure out if the problem was with me or them. Battles make music of the most immediate kind: repeated listens might pick up details, but you'll get a gut response right away. For once, I can see the point of that. And that's about all I have to say about that.
No wait, one last note about this immediacy thing, and then I'll let it go: back in high school, I was in Waterloo Records, sitting in a listening booth trying to make out with a girl. (I was a late bloomer.) Our ostensible excuse for being there was sampling Primal Scream's Screamadelica: I remembered liking it a lot, and patting myself on the back for liking something so "funky" and "non-indie." What did I know? 5 years later, I finally got around to trying it. And I'm shocked: it's a masterpiece.
There's tons of appreciative print on this album, so I won't waste too much of your time on that. Just a few things: for an album that occasionally sounds like Madchester-come-lately, this has aged shockingly well. Few bands associated with that period came out completely unscathed: if they weren't putting out bad second albums, they were getting My Bloody Valentine to end Loveless with a bad faux-Stone Roses track. How did Primal Scream get out so clean? At an hour, Screamadelica only has a few bum notes, most of them relating to technological progress: the first minute or so of "Slip Inside This House" could be replicated easily these days with a cheap keyboard with pre-programmed loops for the talentless. Also, subtitling a song "A Dub Symphony In 2 Parts" is a bad idea, but I suspect that was already obvious in 1991.
But it's telling that when Primal Scream showed up in 2004's 9 Songs, they played the 13-year-old "Movin' On Up": how do you top the best cross-over trend-of-the-moment single the Rolling Stones never wrote? Elsewhere: how do you top inventing a whole vein of music Air strip-mined on "Inner Flight," or a synth-pop tune as flawless as any Depeche Mode/Dandy Warhols dream collaboration you could think of? You can't. More to the point, over unexpectedly compulsive listening this weekend, I realized that the dated period trappings don't matter that much: in some ways, mentally editing out the most dated effects gives me a greater appreciation for what a miraculous hybrid this album is. Lesson learned: drug-addled music with epic, gospel pretensions doesn't always end up just being nostalgia listening for the old guard. Note to anyone my age or younger: you may think you don't need to hear this album, but you really do. It just took me 5 years. Without the cloud of "new" hanging over it, it sounds that much better; nearly timeless, really, and what's timely is endearingly dated.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
Links for the Day (November 29th, 2007)
1. "Out in All That Dark." Jim Emerson on the visual language of No Country for Old Men, and the words that critics use to describe it.
["Doors, ducts, drains, holes. Take these portals, passages, barriers, hiding places, out of the movie and it's about 20 minutes long. They're all about revealing evidence or disposing of it. What is behind the door? What does one see -- from either side -- when the door opens? One of the movie's signature shots is the Searchers-like figure silhouetted in the doorway, the outsider on the threshold between civilization (in the form of trailer or motel) and wilderness. Chigurh blows the deadbolt locks out of doors to get them open, using a slaughterhouse implement that leaves holes (in human heads, too) but no telltale shell or bullet behind. When Sheriff Bell returns to the scene of a crime and decides to face the incomprehensible, air sucks through a blown lock as if it were a puncture in the wall of hell. The Coens have always been plumbing experts, and here they use it exceptionally effectively. Cool, white porcelain fixtures contrast with swollen, bloody wounds. Flesh hurts."]
2. "What's Next in Pakistan?" Husain Haqqani of The Wall Street Journal on the implications of Pervez Musharraf resigning as his country's army chief and being sworn in as the nation's civilian president. See also: "For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President."
["Pervez Musharraf was sworn in as Pakistan's civilian president today after doing what opposition leaders in his country and the Bush administration have been asking him to do for some time -- resign as army chief. The move has helped clear the way for elections early next year. But those elections will be neither free nor fair unless Mr. Musharraf does much more to restore the rule of law, and repair the damage he's done to Pakistan's civil society and constitution."]
3. "Coming at Sundance: Personal Explorations and Stories of Survival." By David M. Halbfinger of The New York Times.
["Among the festival’s lineup of 64 narrative and documentary films in competition, there are 29 features from first-time directors in a diversity of voices and perspectives calling to mind that of the blogosphere. Organizers say the festival could provide a much-needed vitamin shot of surprise — if not necessarily of lucre — to an independent movie sector bummed out by largely dismal box office results this year. 'There’s something of a malaise in the independent arena right now,' said Geoffrey Gilmore, the longtime director of the festival, which runs from Jan. 17 to 27 in Park City, Utah. 'Maybe audiences are finding films that they’re exhausted by, or perhaps they find them too familiar — too much playing toward a sense of expectations. This is a festival that, regardless of where these films go in the broader marketplace, there’s a lot of films that you’d walk out of and go up to somebody and you’d want to tell them about.' That vitality came from the most unexpected places, he said. Sundance, both a pre-eminent showcase for American cinema and a freewheeling bazaar for movie executives, tries to cope with the annual deluge of films by tracking scores of potential submissions throughout the year. But more than half of the 2008 lineup emerged 'from the pile,' Mr. Gilmore said, meaning without the benefit of advance buzz from the festival’s network of talent and sales agents, established filmmakers and other scouts."]
4. "DNC cancels CBS presidential debate." By Matea Gold, for The Los Angeles Times' "Show Tracker" blog. See also: "Writers strike could cost $21.3 million a day." Related: "Broadway Stagehand Strike is Over," by Nikki Finke.
["The Democratic Party pulled the plug today on a CBS presidential candidate debate set to be held in Los Angeles on Dec. 10, citing the possibility of a strike by CBS News employees. 'Due to the uncertainty created by the ongoing labor dispute between CBS and the Writers Guild of America, the DNC has canceled the December 10th debate in Los Angeles,' Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney said in a statement. 'There are no plans to reschedule.'"]
5. "HBO's Don Rickles Doc; Hallmark's Pictures of Hollis Woods." LA Weekly television critic Robert Abele on the fragility of youth and the Merchant of Venom.
["Rickles is 81 now. He walks a little slower, the paunch is more considerable, and his head seems permanently tilted down. But it’s not the stoop of an old man; it’s surely the biological result of years of scanning the first few rows of the Stardust for ready-and-willing targets. Everything about the awesomely funny legend is still vigorous and laser-quick, as John Landis’ unshowy documentary Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project makes quite clear, from snippets of recent Las Vegas performances — where hoary World War II–era stereotypes still elicit gales of laughter — to the sit-down interview segments in which he recounts how he got into comedy, the Vegas heyday years playing the infamous Sahara lounge, and how he wooed his wife, Barbara ('Quit yelling,' she’d say to him on their first date). It’s essential viewing not only for fans of Rickles, but for all aficionados of the history of standup."]
Quote of the Day:
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion." -- Simone de Beauvoir
Photograph by Robert Bresson
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Eva Marie Saint, from a circa 1953 publicity photo. 
Clip of the Day: Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash and the Carter family at San Quentin. The man in black appears at the 3:40 mark. The audience reaction shots are as compelling as the performances.
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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.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Heroes: Season 2, Episode 33, “Truth and Consequences”
By David Sims
It was a depressingly mundane hour of Heroes this week, as the show’s massive fluctuations of quality week-to-week continued. As usual, it helps which characters you’re dealt in a certain episode: for example, there was far too much of the black oil misery twins Maya (Dania Ramirez) and Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz), with barely any sign of Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) or Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka). It wasn’t just the characters that were wrong with “Truth and Consequences”, though. Considering how late in the game things are (next week’s episode concludes the second ‘volume’ of the show and reportedly will serve as a season finale in this strike-shortened year), the various accelerating plots of the season slowed to a depressing crawl, content with providing a little bit of background info and setup for future episodes rather than actually telling a complete story.
Last week’s “Cautionary Tales” framed each of its strands around a different parent-child conflict, and the results were interesting, especially for a show this pulpy. “Truth and Consequences”, on the other hand, felt entirely aimless, to the point of confusion – a promising new character sprang up, but was killed by the end of the episode. Another recurring character’s death was barely noticed, and the internal logic systems of almost everyone involved seemed highly out of whack. Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy) being one of the best examples – his sudden undying belief in the Company, which he was trying to destroy from within only a few episodes ago, is based entirely on hearsay and some very inconsequential evidence from the impressively shady and ambiguous Bob (Steven Tobolowsky). Indeed, Mohinder seems untroubled by the fact that he shot Noah Bennet in the head only an episode ago (he revived his former partner not long after). Dr. Suresh has never been the smartest genetics professor in the world, but his abandonment of his moral compass on such shaky grounds is bizarre even by his standards. His brief scene with Noah, where he rejects Bennet’s information on the Company as ‘paranoid ramblings’, was infuriating because of how pointless the whole storyline feels.
Equally stupid this week was Maya, who is now completely under the thrall of serial killer Sylar (Zachary Quinto) despite the frequent protestations of her doomed brother Alejandro. This week’s story, where Alejandro found out that Sylar was wanted for murdering his own mother in America, was a little less infuriating, because Maya has been doe-eyed and moronically gullible since her introduction to the show. Even then, I cocked an eyebrow when Sylar murdered Alejandro in his motel room and then whisked Maya off to New York. True, the twins had argued with each other over Sylar teaching Maya to control her powers, but I find it hard to believe Maya wouldn’t ask where exactly her brother was before zipping into the city with her new best friend. The larger fault here, though, is that Maya and Alejandro have been a disastrous addition to the show – indeed, they’re two of the most boring and tiresome characters on any TV show right now. This week, Sylar taught Maya how to control her death power, but the relevance of this skill escapes me entirely. I get the impression the writers were trying to convey, through Maya’s powers, the paranoia and fear illegal immigrants are greeted with when they try to cross the border. Needless to say, they failed: any sympathy I might have for the twins has been vanished by week upon week of the exact same storyline, each go-round as terminally boring as the last. I’m sure Sylar and Maya will play some part in the next episode’s denouement, but it won’t have been worth it.
Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) is yet another character currently being mentored by a lunatic, although I similarly forgive his seduction by the immortal Adam Monroe (David Anders): for one, Anders is at giving a relatively charming performance, and for two, Peter’s never been too clever either. Still, all these alliances between heroes and villains, leading to infighting among the heroes themselves, has mostly proven tiresome. I’ve already mentioned Mohinder’s extremely weak motives for betraying Noah to the Company; at the end of “Truth and Consequences,” Hiro charged at Peter brandishing a samurai sword because Adam Monroe killed his father. It was a pointless cliffhanger (we the audience are well aware that Peter and Hiro are in no danger of being killed off anytime soon), and it was just as abrupt and unconvincing as Mohinder’s betrayal. Both Peter and Hiro’s plots this week centered on the Company’s origins, and the creation of the Shanti Virus. Hiro traveled to the past to see his father Kaito (played by a younger man doing an awful George Takei impression) lock Monroe up for planning to release the Shanti virus worldwide. Meanwhile, Peter and Adam interrogated Victoria Pratt, the final living founder of the Company, played by Joanna Cassidy, who has exiled herself to Maine. Cassidy is an able actress, and could be a nice contrast to Cristine Rose, who plays the Petrelli matriarch (and is Heroes’ current grande dame). Irritatingly, however, Adam shot and killed Victoria at the end of the episode, and while this does not write her off for good, it seems the writers had no interest in getting any dramatic mileage out of Cassidy. Both storylines were confused and uninteresting: we learned little that we did not already know, and all we were left with was the aforementioned unsatisfying cliffhanger.
The other two threads of “Truth and Consequences” were less bothersome, but they were (pardon the pun) fairly inconsequential, not even enough to prop up a C-story. Claire’s (Hayden Pannetiere) emotional goodbye to her presumed-dead father was competently acted but a total bore for the viewers, seeing as we all know he’s alive and well. Had the reveal of Noah’s survival been left until the end of this episode, it might have been vaguely interesting, but I have a feeling the writers knew that would be too big a cheat. Over in New Orleans, Micah (Noah Gray-Cabey) was reunited with his virus-plagued mother (Ali Larter), which aroused the sympathy of Monica (Dana Davis) enough for her to don a costume to try and get some missing comics of his back. This moment was mostly overlooked save for a line from Micah, but it is a watershed for Heroes: Monica’s cape thingy was the first time a hero has gotten costumed up to fight crime. Could this be the shape of things to come, or is it just a throwaway homage? Time will tell, I suppose.
All told, I’m still excited for the upcoming ‘finale’ of sorts, even though I’m sure the writers won’t be able to tie up half the dangling plots they’ve set up over the last few weeks. Despite Heroes’ inconsistency, it’s been compelling enough in the past few weeks to merit some enthusiasm. Nielsen ratings and critical buzz might suggest a major second season slump, but I’m hopeful that the show will find its groove again and has learned from the many mistakes it’s made recently. The second season has not been entirely without good ideas – Monica and Monroe are strong characters, and former duds like Matt are coming into their own – and even episodes as tepid as “Truth and Consequences” have shown moments of visual flair. Forgetting anything else, one can at least hope for an improvement on last year’s finale.
London-based writer David Sims is a contributor to South Dakota Dark.
Links for the Day (November 28th, 2007)
1. "Ebert Gets Gothamed": S.T. VanAirsdale reports on Rog's fête this evening. Many great links herein.
["For some unknown reason the good people at IFP didn't invite me back to the Gotham Awards this year, so don't look for any coverage here on Wednesday. Nevertheless, I can't help but direct you to a splendid pair of pieces -- both at Movie City News -- paying tribute to Roger Ebert, whom the Gothams will honor tonight with a special award recognizing his four decades of film criticism. First, a word with Ebert himself, who answered 10 questions via e-mail in advance of tonight's gala. Among them is a nice plug for one of my own favorite NYC locals:"]
2. "Jesus turns up in pancake, with added Mary": In the name of the father, the son, and the holy syrup. See also our Image of the Day.
["Jesus is a busy person. A woman believes she has found the image of Jesus and Mary in a pancake she was cooking for breakfast on a Sunday morning. Marilyn Smith, of Port St Lucie, Florida, decided to sell the pancake on eBay - after an earlier, cancelled sale in which the pancake reached £165 ($338)."]
3. "Sean Taylor's death leaves Redskins in mourning": From USA Today. More from The Associated Press and an editorial by Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post.
["Pro Bowl safety Sean Taylor died Tuesday after he was shot in his Florida home by an apparent intruder, leaving the Washington Redskins in mourning for a teammate who seemed to have reordered his life since becoming a father."]
4. "Antarctica gets its close-up": The story from ABC News. Click here to explore the mosaic itself.
["U.S. and British researchers unveiled a 1,000-image photo mosaic of Antarctica on Tuesday that they say will change how scientists -- and desktop travelers alike -- will explore and learn about the icy continent at the bottom of the world."]
5. "Bob Dylan movie leads indie Spirit Awards": From Reuters. Click here for a full list of nominees.
[""I'm Not There," an artful look at the life of singer Bob Dylan, claimed a leading five Spirit Award nominations for independent movies, including best film as Hollywood launched its annual award season on Tuesday."]
Quote of the Day: Jean Genet
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The Jesus pancake. 
Clip of the Day: Inseperable - A boy and his python
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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.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The camera takes over: Beowulf
By Matt Zoller Seitz
[Editor's warning: Spoilers abound.]
What is Robert Zemeckis up to, anyway? The mostly middling reviews of Beowulf have accused the director of getting wrapped up in a circuitous, self-defeating technological quest: motion-capturing flesh-and-blood actors (first in The Polar Express, now here) and turning them into photo-realistic yet still unreal-looking cartoons, in order to achieve...what? Surely nothing that couldn't be achieved by photographing those same actors and merging them into computer-generated backdrops, just like every other fantasy with a nine-figure budget. 
The linchpin of most negative reviews is that the Beowulf characters aren't as subtly expressive as real people, or as stylized as the wholly invented creations in CGI movies by Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks -- and that this is too bad, because the performers are formidable and their roles much grittier than the movie's PR campaign suggests. The decadent King Hrothgar (acted by Anthony Hopkins); his lovely, reticent queen, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn); Hrothgar's scheming, sadistic advisor, Unferth (John Malkovich); blustery Beowulf with his steely glare and six-pack abs (Ray Winstone, digitally youth-ified); Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson), the hero's loyal lieutenant and best friend; the grotesque monster Grendel (Crispin Glover); his slinky-buxom sea-beast mother (Angelina Jolie): all are more detailed and idiosyncratic than action epics usually allow. Every character is complicated and in some ways compromised -- especially Beowulf, a '70s movie hero -- a braggart, liar, trickster and lothario who once paused during a five-day-long swimming race to bang a sea siren and will do it again. (To quote Chris Rock: "It is damn near impossible for a man to turn down sex.") 
Would these characters and situations be enriched -- and wouldn't the movie be better -- if we got to see the actors, rather than seeing them once removed, acting through the CGI version of a rubber mask? Yes and no. Beowulf would be more subtly modulated, and certainly more acceptable to critics, if it were more conventional; its newness requires creative trade-offs that some may consider deal-breakers. But a more conventional Beowulf would surely lose the distinctiveness that's bound up in Zemeckis' process. The director's tools aren't new -- they're a high tech version of Rotoscoping, a hand-drawn technique that's been around since the 1930s. But Zemeckis' deployment of the process -- his personal aesthetic -- is new, and defiantly unique. It has elements of live action drama, cartoons, still photography, abstract art, representational painting and puppetry. Beowulf has many flaws -- a sentimental attitude toward warrior machismo; a rushed quality to the second half; an unconvincing sense of physical density and gravity; a few too many dick jokes, including elaborate attempts to shield a nude Beowulf's mighty sword that just become ridiculous. But Zemeckis' vision coheres. The film is primordially populist yet smart -- an old tale told with muscular grace.
Like Polar Express, Beowulf obliterates the distinction between foreground (actors) and background (special effects) that affects even the best live action-CG hybrids. It plays like a meticulously rendered storybook come to life -- but its tone is more varied, mixing (sometimes forced) bawdy humor, Playstation-like violence and solemn poetic touches. The characters move and talk like "real" people but retain a painted quality; this forcibly makes them emblematic rather than specific -- sculptures in motion. The film foregrounds this idea via a recurring visual grace note. When Grendel's mother rises from a pool in her cave lair, she's encased in what appears to be liqueified gold which slowly melts away as she approaches the hero (a striptease). When monsters die in the movie, their monstrous forms dissolve away. When Grendel's mother sidles up to Beowulf and caresses his sword (the movie's Freudian sight gags are blatant, knowing and funny), the weapon melts like a popsicle in a toaster oven. Zemeckis' CG Denmark is a tragically impermanent world where steel, wood, snow and flesh can melt away, or burn away, or simply decay over time.
This notion isn't auteurist whimsy. It originates in the script, which is credited to comics writer Neil Gaiman and writer-director Roger Avary. The story begins in Denmark a few centuries after Christ's birth, the old pagan ways are in decline and Christianity is ascendant (shades of Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins' 1981 fantasy Dragonslayer). The duo has revised the original poem for the blockbuster film/graphic novel/video game era and stirred in borderline-Monty Python jokes and self-aware philosophizing that might have been inspired by John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel. The story is broken into two halves -- phases of Beowulf's life before and after liberating Hrothgar's kingdom -- then jam-packed twinned or repeated situations, images and lines. The result is a visual echo chamber in which human (and monster) behavior keeps repeating itself. 
After Grendel's initial rampage, Unferth asks it's all right to pray to Christ as well as to the usual gods, and judging from the body count, neither effort helps. "The gods will do nothing for us that we will not do for ourselves," Hrothgar proclaims. In the film's final third, Unferth's son (also played by Malkovich) is a priest whose faith can't protect him against a dragon's rampage. Beowulf's body is cast adrift in a boat, its mast looming like a crucifix; when the boat is set ablaze, the cross burns and topples into the sea. ("The weak observe the rituals," says Gardner's Grendel, mocking man's practice of religion, "...take their hats off, put them on again, raise their arms, lower their arms, moan, intone, press their palms together.") In the movie's first half, Grendel and Grendel's mother lay waste to the pagan world; in the second half, Beowulf's son (spawned by his night with Grendel's mother) takes the form of a fire-breathing dragon and incinerates the newly Christian world. (The movie could have been called Achilles' Heels. Beowulf's is between his legs.) Grendel's shambling walk -- like that of a beaten, palsied slave -- is linked with the clubfooted gait of the servant boy Unferth abuses; the monster is tormented by the sounds of "merriment, joy and fornication" (Hrothgar's favorite nouns) coming from the mead hall, the architectural representation of a society that Grendel (like Unferth's slave boy) can't join. Glover's performance as Grendel is repulsive and heartbreaking -- Frankenstein's monster as played by a deformed and furious child, with a touch of the hunchback of Notre Dame (when Grendel hears happiness, he shrieks in pain). 
"It's all the same in the end," the monster mused in Gardner's Grendel. "Matter and motion, simple or complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, amen." These are some of the same themes explored by the Coen brothers in No Country for Old Men, and Zemeckis' direction is just as controlled and specific. But where the Coens' artistry is being taken seriously and argued about, Zemeckis' has gone largely unremarked upon, presumably because Beowulf is based on a poem that bored people in high school, packaged by its distributor as a gee-whiz 3-D spectacle, and described by critics as a successor to the more boisterous, aesthetically unsophisticated 300: a kick-ass cartoon by a director who doesn't care about people. Quite the contrary: while Beowulf's wild action choreography panders to videogame buffs, it's photographed by Zemeckis in a classical style (favoring longer takes, and "cutting" via camera movement whenever possible) that Alfred Hitchcock would have admired. And every shot, cut and transition feeds the story and burnishes its (yes) human themes. Like The Last of the Mohicans and Braveheart, Beowulf is a blood-and-guts action movie about being, nothingness and the urge to leave a permanent mark, whether through legendary deeds (after each heroic feat, Beowulf bellows his name so people will remember it), public works (Hrothgar's mead hall is his pride and joy) or procreation (Hrothgar wants an heir but shoots blanks with his queen; Grendel's mother wants another son to replace the one Beowulf slew; Beowulf later becomes king but fails to produce an heir with either his queen or his mistress). 
Verbally and visually, the movie depicts birth and death as portals to oblivion. When Grendel, his arm ripped off by Beowulf, staggers back to his home, his mother comforts him as he dies, and Zemeckis' camera slowly circles down on him from above as his life force ebbs; resting atop a rock immersed in water, his huge, malformed head eclipsing the shriveling remains of his body, he looks like a newborn infant being bathed in a sink. Beowulf vanquishes his bastard dragon-son by punching a hole through a valve in his throat and ripping his heart out; the pumping of the dragon's heart rhymes across the decades with Grendel's exposed, pulsating eardrum, which Beowulf punches and tears. Beowulf vanquishes Grendel by tearing off his arm; in the movie's climax, dangling from his dragon-son's body by a chain, Beowulf severs his own arm to allow himself a better shot at the creature's heart. The warrior dies in the surf beside beside the golden humanoid corpse of his son; like Grendel, the combatants expire partly immersed in water that enfolds them like amniotic fluid. "The sea is my mother!" Beowulf bellows in his introductory scene as his ship plows through storm-tossed waves evocative of the "wine-dark seas" in The Odyssey. "She'll never take me back to her murky womb." Eventually, of course, she does. Empires rise and fall; good and evil endlessly circle each other, merging in combat and coitus. Zemeckis makes this sentiment plain in the final exchange of shots between Grendel's mother -- floating near the site of her lover and son's deaths, her breasts bobbing on the surface -- and Beowulf's appointed heir, Wiglaf, who, despite his previously impeccable judgment, stares at the siren in fascination, then wades a wee bit further out to get a better look. (Cue Chris Rock.)
"What is most troubling about Beowulf, aside from the obvious, is what it says about the career of Robert Zemeckis, who has gone from being a director of stories like Forrest Gump to an orchestrator of eye candy and a willing slave to technological advances," writes Los Angeles Times lead film critic Kenneth Turan. That's a questionable assertion, given how cartoonishly exaggerated -- even "unreal" -- his characters were in Used Cars, Romancing the Stone and the first Back to the Future. If indeed Zemeckis lost his way, he lost it in Reagan's first term. He's been on this quest -- applying technological innovation to mainstream commercial blockbusters -- for nearly two decades, starting with 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which employed motion-controlled cameras to let 'toons interact (often in elaborately choreographed long takes) with flesh-and-blood actors. Even then Zemeckis was accused of being too enamored with the mechanics of technology. From the Back to the Future sequels through Forrest Gump, Contact and What Lies Beneath, the gripes continued. (Only Cast Away escaped them.) The all-style-no-substance rap discounts the possibility that Beowulf's substance is embedded in its style. And it discounts the possibility that, in his determination to tell elemental stories with increasingly daring techniques, Zemeckis is one of the few true visionaries making studio blockbusters today.
It's unfortunate for Zemeckis that Beowulf's brains are in its images. That's a severe deterrent to critical respect. As Hitchcock complained to Francois Truffaut, most reviewers treat cinema as if it were illustrated stage drama or literature -- and despite its poetic pedigree, Beowulf downplays such values. It's the kind of movie that Hitchcock, referring to his own popular, critically maligned Psycho, described as "...the kind of picture in which the camera takes over." He meant that as praise. So do I.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
Links for the Day (November 27th, 2007)
1. "Welcome to My Cinematheque": James Wolcott links to a video blast from his past, accessible in the pullquote below or at his blog. We'll respect his wish to "say no more for the present," and will only thank him for the kind mention of us "thin slicers."
["So much is packed into this little film, presented exclusively at Vanity Fair. Yet I will say no more for the present so as not to burden the viewer with "preconceptions," thus allowing--freeing--him, her, you, to experience it afresh, before the thin slicers at The House Next Door explicate the damn thing to death and my enemies in the right blogosphere pick apart the performative qualities of my Brechtian approach to fake-crying and illustrating with my hands the eternal dance of sperm and egg."]
2. "Let the Viewer Decide": Jesse Walker interviews documentarian Frederick Wiseman for Reason Magazine.
["I’m not against the filmmaker appearing in a film. I think some of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen have been made by a filmmaker who’s present in the film. I don’t know if you’ve seen any movies by Marcel Ophuls—The Sorrow and the Pity or Hotel Terminus. Ophuls is a great filmmaker because he’s a great interviewer and he has a very sharp and analytical mind. In the case of Michael Moore, I don’t see any particular filmmaking skills, and I think his point of view is extremely simplistic and self-serving."]
3. "Bing!": Jonathan Potts of The Conversation discusses television's many opportunities for character actors. Who are some of your favorite character performers?
["It seems that one thing great television shows have in common these days is their ability to craft good roles for character actors like Tobolowsky, or for actors whose best days seemed long behind them. Tobolowsky himself had a nice turn on "Deadwood" as the weasely politician Hugo Jarry. "Deadwood" also featured Brad Dourif in arguably his most affecting role since "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", as well as Jeffrey Jones and Powers Boothe among others. "The Sopranos" had Robert Loggia and John Heard, who turned in an exquisitely fine-tuned performance as the corrupt and self-loathing Det. Vin Makazian during the show's first season."]
4. "Bee Movie: 'The X-Files: Fight The Future'": The Shamus revisits Mulder and Scully's 1998 opus. Per their new big-screen adventure (shooting starts December 10th for release in July 2008), I offer a level-headed response.
["Mulder and Scully. "Fight The Future" whets The Shamus' appetite for their new screen adventures."]
5. "Going Forward": The creator of Dilbert discusses his declining desire to blog.
["I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions."]
Quote of the Day: Manny Farber
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Best Rolling Stone cover ever...
Clip of the Day: Jessie Spano is so excited...
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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.
Monday, November 26, 2007
A Disney princess and the city: Enchanted
By Steven Boone
Although aimed squarely at little girls (both inner and actual), Enchanted is as much of an experimental film as Gus Van Sant's color replica of Psycho. The experiment: How to orchestrate classic Disney set pieces and musical numbers as live action? The results look something like an overscaled Muppet movie (which ain't such a bad thing in itself). Stereotypical New Yorkers flail, caper and fly diagonally across the frame. In the film's would-be show-stopper, Giselle leads what seems like all of Central Park in an Alan Menken-Stephen Schwartz ditty. Mariachis, color-coded Con Ed workers, Rollerbladers, Rastas and a whole rainbow of multicultural Manhattanites play background singers and dancers for Giselle. Tiring.
To read the rest of the Star-Ledger review, click here. 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. Read more!
Not Quite There: I'm Not There
By Lauren Wissot
Todd Haynes has always struck me as less filmmaker than conceptual artist -- a man with grand ideas whose mind works faster than 24 frames per second, the screen never quite able to contain the weight of his brain. He’s a man working in the wrong medium, like Tarantino striving to be an actor before thankfully realizing his talent lies elsewhere. Haynes’ spirit is simply not conducive to the formal requirements of film. But because Haynes doesn’t suck at moviemaking the way Tarantino sucked at acting, he’s unaware that he can scale to greater heights. If Haynes can demonstrate this level of artistic quality in his experimental-posing-as-accessible films, just imagine what he could do guest-directing a Wooster Group production, exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial. For Todd Haynes has a masterful eye for lush set design and sharp cinematography, for period costumes and jarring camera angles, all readily on display in I’m Not There, his tribute to the “many lives” of a fellow visionary, the legendary Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, what works for music -- or painting or poetry, or any of the abstract arts for that matter -- rarely works for the screen. After all, how does one shoot a concept?
Thus, instead of tackling Bob Dylan as subject head-on, Haynes films the paradox that haunted the American icon throughout his career, namely his needing to change in order to stay the same. Dylan knew that as an artist he had to evolve in order to remain the artist he was -- and he felt frustrated by those fans that wanted to stop him from being what they themselves expected him to be. Pretty heady stuff. And near impossible to tell in a literal manner, which is why Haynes divides his central character between six different actors (four of whom are non-American!), eschewing any sense of linear time and place. On paper it sounds like a brilliant move, but as the film chugs along on its 135-minute way, from the rail-riding vagabond kid named “Woody” to the dandy “Arthur Rimbaud” to Richard Gere in the guise of Billy (as in “The Kid”), you get the feeling Haynes has one too many balls (i.e., Richard Gere) in the air. That the film holds together as long as it does is a testament to Haynes’ formidable talent, but alas, the collision of the director and his subject is a train wreck waiting to happen.
But at least it’s a beautiful wreck, one worth rubbernecking for. As with Velvet Goldmine, Haynes is so in love with his fantastic visuals -- band members machine-gunning from the stage, a dwarf in yellow top hat -- that he loses control of the movie. The director’s ideas cannot last feature-length (though he’d be unrivaled if he stuck to shorts). The one thespian to emerge unscathed is, of course, Cate Blanchett, an actor so talented it’s scary. To Haynes’ credit, he assembles a worthy cast -- Heath Ledger and Christian Bale have never been known to disappoint -- but the movie belongs to Blanchett as Jude, Dylan at his speed-freak height of fame. Her gender bending notwithstanding, Blanchett is just at another level, period. She’d be mesmerizing even if Jude were played female. It’s like gathering the greatest ensemble around Vanessa Redgrave channeling a Mastroianni character.
But when all is said and done, I’m Not There merely adds up to a series of colorful set pieces. Julianne Moore’s former folk singer delivers talking-head commentary about Christian Bale’s coffeehouse Jack. Marcus Carl Franklin’s black Woody serenades two 1950s white couples in a living room straight out of Far From Heaven. Heath Ledger’s shade-wearing Robbie threatens a paparazzi in a park. And then there’s Blanchett’s Jude -- flying high above the crowd in black-and-white long shot, tethered to the earth like a breathing balloon. This is a glimpse of Haynes’ tiny masterpiece buried beneath all that distracting rubble. Another scene in which Jude is accosted by questioning reporters, the camera gliding along in close-up with the gorgeous grotesquerie, feels like a lost outtake from 8 1/2. Which makes one wonder why Haynes didn’t just assign all the roles to his newfound muse, especially since every one of Blanchett’s scenes are shot in this most loving nod to Fellini (who, like Dylan, knew how to place his concepts within an accessible context). What gives Fellini’s films their joyride thrill is that his passion always threatens to overflow the frame, his glass filled to the rim, not a single drop spilled. Haynes' cup continually runneth over. 
Dylan was a provocateur because he cared enough to force people to think for themselves. He understood that music is a visceral medium, became enraged when labels and definitions threatened to drain its lifeblood. Haynes, being a non-visceral filmmaker, his work passively cerebral, isn’t quite there. He’s too afraid to lose himself in his passion -- a requisite of all great artistry. Instead he enlists Blanchett, a visceral performer who thrives on tightropes, to do it for him. In fact, she’s the only visceral actor (save for 11-year-old Franklin -- keep an eye out for this kid in the coming years) in the film, the one thus able to elevate the material to the level of Dylan’s poetry. There’s a scene midway through in which Arthur lays out some rules, one of which is to speak so the person standing directly in front of you can understand. Dylan’s genius lay in this ability to take huge concepts and pare them down to a simple song. Haynes, conversely, takes a magnifying glass to even the most magnificent ideas.
Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.
Directorama #7
A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom
Click to enlarge: (To navigate previous episodes, click here.)
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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. His writing and graphic criticism can be found at Lost in Negative Space and 24LiesASecond.
Torchwood, Season One, Ep 12: "Captain Jack Harkness"
By Joan O’Connell Hedman
"Out of Time" writer Catherine Tregenna returns with the next chapter in the story of broken-hearted Owen (Burn Gorman). But "Captain Jack Harkness" is not just another story of love gone awry across a rift in time; it gives us a long-overdue glimpse into our Captain Jack's past.
Torchwood continues its obsession with World War II -- recall that Doctor Who introduced us to Jack during the Blitz -- when Jack (John Barrowman) and dressed-up Tosh (Naoko Mori) stop by an abandoned building to check out reports of old-style music coming from inside. The building, long disused, was once a dance hall; Jack admires the still-intact chandelier in the ballroom. Sharp-eyed fans of Doctor Who will notice the "Vote Saxon" posters plastered on doors and walls, along with "Bad Wolf" graffiti in a stairwell. Considering it was the Bad Wolf that got Jack into his current (immortal) situation, it was a bit odd for him to not even register that graffiti, but this was supposed to be quick. Tosh is on her way to her grandfather's 88th birthday party and doesn't want to be late.
Jack is charmed when they hear strains of big band music floating down the stairs; he determines they're just temporal echoes, audible now because of the Rift. He and Tosh are substantially less charmed when they realize the Rift has somehow opened and they've fallen through time, right into the night of a goodbye dance for a squadron of local flyboys who are heading out the next day.
Fortunately, Jack's long coat and Tosh's lovely dress provide some protective cover while they figure out what to do, but the two soon trip over a wholly unexpected coincidence when the real Captain Jack Harkness (the gorgeous Matt Rippy) introduces himself. Our Jack, thinking quickly, renames himself Captain James Harper, and no one seems to notice his discomposure. Except Tosh, of course, who simply wants to know why that man has Jack's name.
This episode features the largest chunk of exposition from Jack since the pilot, when he explained to Gwen that he can't die. Jack's story comes in bits and pieces, but he eventually conveys to Tosh that he's been through World War II before. At first he says he was on assignment, but then he confesses he was a conman (which squares with what he we learned in "The Empty Child".) And he never was "Jack Harkness," that's a name he acquired when its owner was killed in action -- the very next day after the goodbye dance. It was a convenient cover for Jack, and one he hadn't given much thought to, until confronted with the man himself. Jack, feeling too many things at once and trying to be glib, quips, "I took his name. I just didn't realize he was so hot."
They're not just idly hanging around, though; they're trying to figure out a way to navigate back through the Rift. Tosh quizzes an airman for coordinates, and completes some equations that could help Torchwood c.2007 open the Rift and get them back home. The problem is, how to get the data 60 years into the future, when pencil will fade and paper crumble? The creepy manager, Bilis Manger (Murray Melvin), gives Tosh one way -- take an instant photo. Tosh senses the anachronism of the early Polaroid-type camera but doesn't question it. Manger's sinister motives are revealed to us, at least, when we see him retrieve a file prominently labeled "Torchwood." 
Back in the present, Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) and Owen wonder what's happened to Jack and Tosh; they dispatch Gwen (Eve Myles) to follow up. She arrives, torch in hand, and runs into the very same Bilis Manger (the cravat's a dead giveaway). Gwen's cover story is flawless; she says her two friends were exploring the building because they had heard it was haunted. Manger of course knows exactly what's going on with both the building and her friends, but doesn't let on.
Ianto's the first to realize what's happened when he finds an archived photo of both Jacks, Tosh, and Manger from the 1941 dance. Owen pounces: they've fallen through the Rift, they're in the middle of the Cardiff Blitz, they should re-open the Rift and get them back. They know Tosh was working on the physics (meta-physics?) involved, but Owen finds only half the information they need to program the Rift Machine, something heretofore unmentioned, rather like an Elephant in the Room. Have you wondered what, exactly, the Core is? Well, it's that huge machine around which Torchwood makes its offices. It's sitting on the Rift and apparently it has some capacity to control it, somehow. Don't look for explanations, you won't find any, and that's probably just as well; we're into the territory of wibbly- wobbly timey-wimey stuff here, as The Doctor would say.
Owen's fervor to open the Rift is transparently not about Jack and Tosh, but about retrieving Diane (Louise Delamere, appearing in the "previously on" scenes this week). Ianto and Owen face off over the fates of their respective loves, and it seems that Owen scores points against Ianto, but in reality, Ianto wins. For all that Lisa was a psychotic murderer, she never left Ianto, whereas Diane chose to leave Owen. Owen can't accept that, and the struggles between these two men give us some of the most tension-laden scenes in the episode. Owen's attempt to open the Rift in spite of Ianto's objections fails, and both men notice it's missing a part. 
Once the boys at the Core realize they need both a key and more equations to open the Rift safely, they send Gwen, still at the site, on a scavenger hunt. She finds the photo Tosh hid, but they see -- and Tosh realizes -- that the photo did not capture all the equations. Tosh manages to find a permanent "ink" and copies out the rest of the equations, appending a melancholy "Tell my family I love them," and hides it in the bomb shelter. Manger finds it later, and scratches out some of the coordinates, then replaces it. Decades later, Gwen uncovers it. She knows it's the last message they'll find from Tosh, but notes that some of the information is missing. This should make them pause, but in the mad pace of this episode, there's no time to think it through: why would someone leave the hidden paper with most of the formulas intact? Why not just take or destroy the entire sheet? The logical conclusion would be that someone is manipulating them, but they don't see the trap because they're not bothering to look.
Owen, joining Gwen in the search for more information, finds the key to the Rift Machine in Manger's office. They've realized, of course, it's the same man in both times, but they don't pursue it. He seems harmless enough, but why would he have that key? Again, no one's taking a big picture approach, so no one questions why Manger would have that particular piece of technology lying around, and why he would permit them to find it.
Ianto and Owen continue their power struggle; Owen's contempt for Ianto is manifest in his scathing remarks. He persists even when Ianto pulls a gun on him to prevent him from opening the Rift. Ianto knows better than to screw around with something so dangerous, especially with incomplete data. Owen, obsessed, is all for letting the machine fill in the gaps. Ianto shoots Owen in the shoulder in a wonderful moment of bravado, but Owen manages to start up the machine anyway.
Back in the past, our Jack is undone; the real Captain is so handsome and brave, the genuine article versus Jack's cheap imitation. Our Jack knows the Captain will soon be dead, and advises him, carpe diem. The Captain's no idiot, and he realizes that Jack's warning is not just general advice. He doesn't question what Jack's saying, he just seems relieved to have found someone with whom he can let down his guard and be honest about his fears and dreams. 
The two men are bonding in a way that at first seems fraternal -- Jack understands the Captain's guilt over a fallen airman; he recounts an ambiguously-placed story about persuading his best friend to join up for the service with him, for the adventure. They were both captured by "the worst enemy imaginable," and his friend was tortured and ultimately killed. They let Jack go. How many years, decades ago in Jack's timeline did that happen? And how many centuries in the future will that event actually take place? We never find out, but shared survivor's guilt brings the two men even closer.
Jack sends the Captain to spend a last night with his local girl, but the Captain returns with the excuse that he should be with his men. Jack, for once not looking for sex, at last sees just how much he and the Captain are alike. The sexual tension between the two men is unmistakable, but it seems nothing can come of it, even though a temporary re-location to a bomb shelter might seem to provide an opportunity.
When the air raid ends and Manger re-opens the dance, Tregenna lapses into anachronism so absurd you just have to go with it: the Captain leads Jack onto the dance floor, and the dance is intensely intimate. For the two men, the rest of the world momentarily disappears, but then the Rift opens -- a wall of fuzzy light appears -- and Tosh calls Jack to come back through with her. Jack leaves the dance floor but then returns to share a rather amazing kiss with the Captain. The onlookers can scarcely believe what they're seeing, and neither can I. There's just no way an RAF officer would come out like that. Of course, the fact that Jack and Tosh literally disappeared afterwards would help the Captain deny or dismiss any accusations that might follow, not to mention the fact that his hours were numbered. 
That kiss is without a doubt among the most tender, sincere, smoking hot gay kisses ever filmed. I'm the type that rolls my eyes at most heterosexual PDA, including such passionate dance floor goodbye kisses. But I'm willing to give this one a pass, in spite of the anachronism. Both men were so tormented, but in the few hours they had, they created a real connection that wasn't about sex at all. It was the recognition of self in the other that each man felt, and the kiss perfectly expressed that recognition. I know I should be scoffing, but that moment plays as genuine, and so I'm willing to accept it.
Back in the present, Jack and Tosh pop through, apparently unscathed. Owen, tending to his own wounds, castigates Ianto for being a lousy shot; Ianto can't believe what an ass Owen is; of course he was aiming for his shoulder. Tosh says she knows it was wartime, but it was "beautiful," and Jack agrees, "There were angels dancing at the Ritz." Tosh tries to console Jack, telling him that the Captain would be proud that Jack had taken his name; here he is, saving the world. They close out the episode with a toast to the Captain.
But the Rift has been opened; can that be the end of it? We know it can't be, because Bilis Manger warned, "It's coming, out of the darkness," just as Suzie Costello warned Jack. But for this episode, we still don't have any idea what "it" is. Ianto tells us there's no sign of Bilis, and it remains unspoken whether or not they'll pursue that odd character.
The biggest, in fact the only, flaw in this episode is the dance and subsequent kiss between the two Captains. The whole thing looks spot-on; I'm continually impressed by the guest actor casting. Matt Rippy isn't just a pretty face, he has the look, the body language, of an RAF officer in the 1940s. The women's clothing, the men's haircuts, the shape and size of the glasses from which they drink, the music -- all the little details are in place. The regulars are mostly up to the task this week, as well. Eve Myles' Gwen has not much to do, which comes as something of a relief; she's been put through the wringer lately. This is the most we've seen of Naoki Mori's Tosh since "Greeks Bearing Gifts", and I found her irritatingly limited, her too-wide eyes often substituting for genuine expressions. But John Barrowman, often the weakest actor in a strong cast, does very well here, allowing vulnerability and guilt to seep through his usual facile expression. Most fun of all, Burn Gorman and Gareth David- Lloyd go toe-to-toe, with Owen descending to his prat-like worst, and Ianto holding fast to his faith in Jack and his internal moral compass. 
The note of suspended tension on which the episode ends is fed on several levels. Owen has, at this point, alienated the entire rest of the team; it's one thing to be an ass, it's another to cut to the quick, to insult with intent to damage on a regular basis as he has lately. No one knows what else will come out of the newly-opened Rift, and everyone's worried about that, too. There's no "to be continued" placard as the episode draws to a close, but it's certainly implied. Even so, "Captain Jack Harkness" can ably stand alone.
Links for the Day (November 26th, 2007)
1. "Busy weekend: Kindle and Facebook beatings": Dan Farber of ZDNet gathers articles of note on both Amazon's e-book reader and the increasingly popular online community.
["Robert Scoble spent the last week giving his new Amazon Kindle ebook reader a test drive, reading a couple of books and declaring the progeny of Jeff Bezos a failure. He thinks the usability and user interface suck and it lack features such as a touch screen, social networking and the capability to send electronic goods to others. He wants version 3.0 of the device."]
2. "Fashion tips for women from a guy who knows dick about fashion.": Ah, Maddox of The Best Page in the Universe. Certainly he doesn't mince words, and even this recent iPhone convert will gladly take the abuse.
["When I see people wearing Crocs, I know immediately that we have nothing in common, and that we could never be friends or have any meaningful kind of relationship. They come in every color imaginable yet look bad with every other article of clothing ever created. The only thing that goes with Crocs is social ostracism."]
3. House contributor N.P. Thompson sings the praises of I'm Not There.
["Miracles of miracles, Todd Haynes, whose previous films, from the poisonous Poison (1991) to the deplorable Safe (1995), I’ve found obstreperously detestable, has, with I’m Not There, made a euphoric, insightful, at times buoyantly despairing, surrealist pastiche on the different stages of and permutations within an artist’s career. Tossing away the shackles of a standard biopic, Haynes summons up moods and images from Fellini’s 8½ and The White Sheik to create a work that’s all the more astounding for being inspired by Bob Dylan, a musician for whom I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other. If the movie isn’t quite a masterpiece, it rises so perilously, joyously close that I have no choice but to fall at its feet in bedazzlement."]
4. "Lott to Resign by End of Year": An Associated Press report.
["Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate's No. 2 Republican, plans to resign his seat before the end of the year, congressional and White House officials said Monday."]
5. "A Ghost And A Dream: Notes on the final quarter of 'No Country For Old Men'": Glenn Kenny offers his thoughts.
["At Cannes in May, where I saw Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men for the first time, I called the film’s final scene, which corresponds very closely to the final passage of the Cormac McCarthy novel from which the film was adapted, the “Glass Key ending.” It seemed apt for reasons beyond the fact that both works end with the recounting of a dream. There was also the fact of the Coen Brothers’ sort-of adaptation of the Hammett novel (mashed up with Hammett’s Red Harvest) and the occasions Hammett’s work provided for the Coens to mix pulp with cinematic poetry…to go for effects that reach beyond telling a story, you could say."]
Quote of the Day: Susan Sontag
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From La vie en Rose (La Môme) (2007).
Clip of the Day: La Môme sings "Sophie".
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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.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Links for the Day (November 25th, 2007)
1. "MacGyver in Mesopotamia": The creative minds of the men and women overseas.
["It took Marcelle Shriver nearly a year—and hundreds of donations—to pack up 80,000 cans of Silly String to send to her son in Iraq. This was no lighthearted care package: Todd and his fellow soldiers were using the foamy substance to detect trip-wired explosives by squirting the string across a room and watching how it fell. It was a creative response to an ever-changing war and, as it turns out, one of the many innovative tactics being used by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan."]
2. Our own Andrew Dignan takes stock of some recent releases, and tells MySpace to go harshly pleasure itself.
["Southland Tales (Richard Kelly) To crib from Burns: most filmmakers would be content for Domino to be the most retarded entry on their résumé… "]
3. Just across the border: "Suddenly, Connecticut Is Stem Cell Central". Also from Foodconsumer.org, a new study suggests stem cells can be made from skin, not embryos.
["Connecticut is in its first year of using state funds to support embryonic stem cell research, and Dr. Rowe is one of the $100 million program’s big beneficiaries. Scientists believe embryonic stem cells can develop into any type of body tissue, which could one day be used to replace or repair damaged cells and treat diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. If stem cells can help repair a debilitating bone fracture in a mouse, Dr. Rowe said, perhaps they could do the same for humans."]
4. "Go to Bed, Old Men: Dead Perfection Vs. Messy Aliveness": Fernando F. Croce reviews No Country for Old Men, Southland Tales, and Beowulf.
["On its way to becoming the decade's most overrated movie, No Country for Old Men has already been compared to everything from Greek tragedy to the Old Testament. There's no denying the Coens' concentration here, particularly after Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers: It is a spartan, sinewy work, possibly their most perfect so far, with Roger Deakins' photography evoking an ineffably expressive flatness and the filmmakers' penchant for derisive grotesquerie mostly staying out of the way of the story's implacable forward push (nothing is as disruptive as Jon Polito's tilted wig in The Man Who Wasn't There). Despite its adaptation status, this is practically a summarization of Coens conceits, and there lies its main problem: All theme and no life, the movie is like a skeleton without flesh, and it rattles around in the big canvas of ponderous Meaning it sets up for itself. The Chigurh character perfectly embodies this puffed-up ambition -- designed as one of the "signs and wonders" bemoaned by Bell, the Grim Reaper in a Beatles mop-top, he's really just some peevish bad-guy out of Diamonds are Forever asked to shoulder the weight of a pernicious metaphor. A stupendously crafted exercise, unquestionably, and one hopes the beginning of a whole new phase in the Coens oeuvre. Yet I can't help think that the people heralding it as just about the greatest film of all time are simply having their own bleak notions cannily fondled by the Coens' worldview, where goodness is often equated with stupidity and death (and, therefore, life) is random and meaningless. A masterpiece? If this really were the highest form of cinema possible, I sincerely wouldn't have loved the medium the way I have all these years."]
5. The Mystery Man on Film gets his hands on M. Night Shyamalan's latest script-tease. Spoilers within, though worth it just for the above picture.
["So now we’ve come full circle. It’s as if we’ve returned to the early days when Shyamalan was a nobody with two failures under his belt and he had to dig deep to come up with a story to wow people all over again. And we finally got to see what it would be. Last January, Boy Wonder came to Hollywood with his new script under his arm, which was called The Green Effect, the very draft I write about today. Every studio in Hollywood rejected it and sent him packing to Philadelphia."]
Quote of the Day: Sir Winston Churchill
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Raising Cain (1992).
Clip of the Day: The MacGyver theme, plus: Mac meets his conscience (Cuba Gooding, Jr. - shocking!).
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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.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Writer's Block: October Road - The Complete First Season
By Ross Ruediger
It’s easy to want to dislike “October Road” right off the bat. Its central character Nick Garrett (Bryan Greenberg, “Prime”) is the writer of a hugely successful debut novel with the annoying title Turtle on a Snare Drum. Nick has writer’s block, but avoids dealing with it via an invitation to speak at the college in his hometown. He hasn’t been there in 10 years, and in the interim has hardly spoken with his father (Tom Berenger), brother or his rag-tag band of high school buds.
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To read the rest of the review at Bullz-Eye, click here.
Links for the Day (November 23rd & 24th, 2007)
1. "Privacy Fears over Facebook Feature." By Richard Waters of Financial Times.
["A simmering unease about threats to privacy from a new feature on Facebook is threatening to come to the boil, presenting the fast-growing social network with the first test of its unusual plans for making money from its site. By automatically alerting a user's online network of friends to things bought on other websites, the feature can reveal highly personal information, critics say. Facebook, however, says its users can choose to keep their purchases secret, or to limit the number of online friends to whom their purchases are disclosed. "]
2. "Guns and the Constitution." The Wall Street Journal's staff editorial on the significance of District of Columbia v. Heller, a case set to be heard by the Supreme Court this session. At issue: whether the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution allows private citizens to keep guns in their homes, or applies only to the collective right of state militias. See also: The Christian Science Monitor. Related: "Thompson Hits Giuliani on NYC References."
["In March, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared unconstitutional the District's near-total ban on handgun possession. That 2-1 ruling, written by Judge Laurence Silberman, found that when the Second Amendment spoke of the "right of the people," it meant the right of 'individuals,' and not some 'collective right' held only by state governments or the National Guard. That stirring conclusion was enough to prompt the D.C. government to declare Judge Silberman outside 'the mainstream of American jurisprudence' in its petition to the Supreme Court. We've certainly come to an interesting legal place if asserting principles that appear nowhere in the Constitution is considered normal, but it's beyond the pale to interpret the words that are in the Constitution to mean what they say."]
3. "Sex and Sensibility." For Gay City News, Steve Erickson on the Lincoln Center retrospective of works by Pier Paolo Pasolini. See also: Pasolini at The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
["With the life and work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, it's best to start an overview from the end. He was murdered -- an act that many have theorized was a political assassination in response to his criticisms of the Italian government -- in 1975, shortly before the first public screenings of his final film, Salo. The timing of his death was obviously unintentional, yet it's hard to imagine how he could have followed up a work as terminal as Salo. An adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom set during Fascist Italy, it depicts a group of middle-aged men and women degrading teenagers sexually, forcing them to eat shit, and, in the film's final few minutes, torturing them to death. An indictment of fascism, capitalism, the director himself, and the audience, it's a repudiation of the more optimistic view of sexuality expressed in Pasolini's earlier works, especially the 'trilogy of life' comprising The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, and Arabian Nights."]
4. "Detroit band locks horns with 'Guitar Hero' over copycat recording." By Bryan McCollum of The Detroit Free Press.
["Imitation might be flattery, but that doesn’t make the Romantics any happier about it. The Detroit classic-rock band has sued the makers of the popular video game 'Guitar Hero,' claiming the game infringes the group’s rights by featuring a sound-alike recording of the hit 'What I Like About You.'"]
5. "Battlestar Galactica: Razor and the struggle for redemption." By Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times.
["Those of us left slack-jawed by the return of presumed-dead Starbuck in the final minutes of the third-season finale of Battlestar Galactica -- how could she be alive? Her ship exploded -- will have to wait until April, when Season 4 begins, for our answers. Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a two-hour movie designed to keep us happy in the interim, delves into the show's past to find, of course, foreshadowing and peril for the future. It tells the story of Kendra Shaw (Stephanie Jacobsen), who served on the crew of the Battlestar Pegasus under the command of both the formidable Adm. Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes) and later first-time commander Lee 'Apollo' Adama (Jamie Bamber). Shaw, we learn, joined the crew of the Pegasus mere moments before the Cylon attack that destroyed the 12 colonies. Razor goes back in time to explain what happened aboard the Pegasus before it met up with the Galactica in Season 2."]
6. "Grapefruit Dance." By Sheila O'Malley of The Sheila Variations.
["I did not contemplate or ponder. I just reached down into the net bag beside me, grabbed a grapefruit off of the pile of grapefruits, the grapefruits I had been told would be there, pulled one out - and then, as instructed, chucked it at him as hard as I could. He dodged it, and it went careening off into his room, smashing against a stone pillar. Damn, that fat man was agile."]
7. Roger Ebert on The Mist.
["If you have seen ads or trailers suggesting that horrible things pounce on people, and they make you think you want to see this movie, you will be correct. It is a competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People Movie. If you think Frank Darabont has equaled the Shawshank and Green Mile track record, you will be sadly mistaken."]
8. The Closing of the American Mind at 20. The New Criterion re-examines Allan Bloom's still-controversial 1987 bestseller. With articles by James Piereson, Roger Kimball and Heather MacDonald.
[Kimball: "It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. It sometimes grabs readers by the lapels and gives them a shake; at other times it assumes a dry, professorial tone as it delineates the genealogy of freedom, discriminates among diverse meanings of equality, or parses a choice passage from Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, or Nietzsche. Nevertheless, if parts of the book are reminiscent of the academic lecture hall, the overall effect is nothing short of electric. For all its loose-bagginess, The Closing of the American Mind is a book written with commanding passion, urgency, and conviction. Bloom himself described the book as a 'meditation on the state of our souls.'"]
9. "For Film Companies, a State of Flux." By David M. Halbfinger of The New York Times.
["When Brad Pitt dropped out of the political thriller State of Play at the 11th hour on Wednesday, he did more than throw a wrench into the works of one of the highest-profile movie productions under way in a Hollywood already overheated by strike-related contingency planning. He might have helped tip the balance of power between actors and studios, at least temporarily, in the employers’ favor."]
10. "The 'Blog' of 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks." [Hattip: Sheila O'Malley.]
["I want to know how something can be both real, and 'maple syrup'. Which is it?"]
Quote of the Day:
"After your death you will be what you were before your birth."--Arthur Schopenhauer
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Mother and child on the F train, June 2005. 
Clip of the Day: Evolution.
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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.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Heroes: Season 2, Episode 32, “Cautionary Tales”
By David Sims
It’s unfortunate that Heroes is starting to pick up real momentum just as its strike-shortened second season comes to an end. While last week’s backstory-heavy “Six Months Ago” was a bit of a dud, the previous episode “Out of Time” and this week’s “Cautionary Tales” are tying the season’s disparate, aimless threads together rather well, focusing on fewer characters and emphasizing more intimate storytelling. It’s a nice change of pace from the disappointingly ‘epic’ finale of Heroes’ first season, although of course it remains to be seen whether this tremendously inconsistent show can maintain this new rash of quality.
Like “Out of Time” and “Six Months Ago”, “Cautionary Tales” focuses on three stories linked only in general theme: Claire Bennet (Hayden Pannetiere) and her father Noah (Jack Coleman), who are being pursued by the misguided Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy), Company boss Bob (Steven Tobolowsky) and his daughter Elle (Kristen Bell); Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg), who is attempting to expand his mental powers to include coercion; and Hiro (Masi Oka), who is trying to prevent his father Kaito’s (George Takei) death by traveling through time. If it sounds complicated, it honestly isn’t: while the Bennet storyline is more plot-heavy, the other two are nicely self-contained pieces that wouldn’t be out of place as a single-issue story in a 20-page comic book. In this way the episode recalls season one’s undisputed height, “Company Man” , and while “Cautionary Tales” does not reach the heights of that wonderfully scripted (by Bryan Fuller) episode, that it bears comparison at all is an encouraging sign.
It is Matt Parkman’s story that is the most surprisingly good -- in fact, he can easily be declared the most improved character in the Heroes ensemble. He’s pretty much the only character who has been substantially more interesting this season, although his essential blandness still manages to shine through every so often. It’s a shame that Matt is written so woodenly, because Grunberg can be a very charming performer and the role of telepath is often crucial to a multi-character superhero tale. The unendingly uninteresting examinations of his turbulent marriage to an unfaithful wife in the first season made his scenes almost fatal to any episode he appeared in. In the second season, he’s ditched the wife, entered into a fairly ambiguous domestic arrangement with Mohinder and his young ward Molly (Aidair Tishler), and after confronting his similarly powered father, has begun further exploration of his powers.
Heroes has been looking into the ‘responsibility of power’ theme more frequently as of late, as well it should, and Matt’s abuse through psychic suggestions this week is just on the right side of creepy. The story is a little rushed, but I bought it: Matt starts out by telepathically nudging Molly into not using her abilities, so as to protect her, but by the end of the episode he invades Angela Petrelli’s (Cristine Rose) mind to pry out her most sacred secret, the identity of the final member of the 12 founders of the Company. The effect is driven home as Angela, usually a rather cold-hearted Lady Macbeth type, seems genuinely horrified at Matt’s intrusion into her mind and even has a nosebleed by the end of it. Ah, the nosebleed -- automatic network body horror! It drives home an altogether unsettling, but interesting turn of events for Parkman.
Hiro’s portion of the tale is far more warm-hearted, although it also looks at a father-son dynamic and the responsibility that comes with great power. I’ve never thought of Masi Oka and George Takei as the most talented performers on this show -- Oka’s exuberance is undoubtedly essential to Heroes’ energy, and Takei always supplies reliable weighty sci-fi gravitas, but they are taxed a little heavier than usual this episode and both rise admirably to the challenge. Admittedly it is broad-strokes, sentimental stuff, as Hiro, frustrated at returning back to the present in time for his father’s funeral, tries to convince Kaito to let him save his life. Pulling a mini-It’s a Wonderful Life, Hiro yanks Kaito back 17 years to the funeral of his wife, saying Hiro’s grief for his father in the present day mirrors Kaito’s for his wife. Kaito is having none of it, though, and rightly so -- he and the other founders of The Company clearly abused their abilities and made great moral sacrifices to do whatever it is that they did, and Kaito wants his son to avoid such a fate. After a conversation with himself as a child (the time-travel physics of this show are especially out of whack), Hiro realizes he has to be a man, and he bids goodbye to his father both at the scene of his death and in a eulogy at his funeral. The best moment of the story (and the episode) is when Kaito marvels to his son, “I’ve never been time traveling before.” It is a cute line, but delivered with the right balance of emotion and respect from a guy who’s always been very buttoned-down around his son. Hiro’s eulogy is equally well done -- it is nicely understated work from Oka and Takei all round.
(A sidenote: Hiro takes the time to check out just who it was that murdered his father, finding that it was Adam Monroe/Takezo Kensei (David Anders), the immortal warrior he stole a girlfriend from 400 years back. I figured most of you had guessed he was the culprit, but if that’s not the case, I’m noting it here.)
In the episode’s centerpiece story, the Bennet family takes a stand against the increasingly evil Company boss Bob and his sidekick (who is also apparently his daughter) Elle, with Mohinder trapped in the middle. I say trapped -- Mohinder is in fact very easily swayed to the side of murder by Bob, who manages to convince Dr. Suresh that assassinating his partner Noah is a great idea, just through vague evidence and conjecture. The stated goal of the Company is to use Claire’s healing blood to cure the Shanti virus -- it all quickly evolves into a vendetta against Noah, who abandoned the Company at the end of the aforementioned season 1 episode ‘Company Man’. That episode also cemented the unbreakable bond between father Noah and daughter Claire, a bond that has been slowly eroded this season as Claire finds out what exactly her father did while working for the Company. Thankfully they are united by the end of the episode, with Claire’s drippy boyfriend West (Nicholas D’Agosto) by their side.
On a less pleasant note, there is the matter of Isaac Mendez’s precognitive paintings, which I assume are the ‘cautionary tales’ of the title. One had predicted Noah’s death; a fate that he met after Mohinder blasted him in the face during a Mexican standoff with Bob and Elle. Thankfully, the Heroes crew knows not to whack their best character: before long Noah has woken up, thanks to Claire’s restorative blood, in what seems like a Company holding cell. Bad for Noah, but could be a good reversal storyline for us, as he used to be the man on the other side of the cell. What is most interesting about the Bennet storyline, however, are the differences in the Noah/Claire, Bob/Elle dynamics -- as Noah remarks to his daughter, he never exposed her to the Company because he didn’t want her to end up like Elle, institutionalized and insane. Bell is still not getting enough to do as Elle, her occasional quips not nearly as funny as the ones she made on Veronica Mars, but the scene where Noah tortures her and has her questioning the gaps in her memory at least give the impression that there could be a future to this character.
As I wrote earlier, it looks like Heroes will be ending early, probably around episode twelve, thanks to the writer’s strike. On the bright side, episode twelve is intended as the end of this “volume”, and mayhem and death are promised in the next couple of weeks. After a nicely emotional hour with some good set-pieces, I wouldn’t mind some out-and-out action on Heroes: however, “Cautionary Tales” is a far better example of how to get a Heroes episode right.
London-based writer David Sims is a contributor to South Dakota Dark.
Links for the Day (November 22nd, 2007)
1. The House editors wish all our staff and readers a Happy Turkey Day!
2. "King on walkoff: 'I have seen it all now'": And so I shall stop blurb-whoring movies.
["It was a moment tailor-made for live television: The plastic surgeon who operated on Kanye West's mother agrees to talk to Larry King but then walks off the set almost as soon as the interview starts."]
3. "Dennis Quaid twins recovering from medical overdose": And we wish 'em well.
["The two-week-old twins of actor Dennis Quaid were recovering in a Los Angeles hospital on Wednesday after mistakenly being given a massive overdose of a blood thinning drug."]
4. "Judge orders 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' back on stage": No doubt a boon for the Whos down in Whoville.
["Cindy-Lou Who isn't crying anymore now that a judge ruled "Dr Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas!" will reopen on Broadway Friday. ... "I think one Grinch in this town is enough," she quipped as she ordered the St. James Theatre to open its doors for an 11 a.m. performance tomorrow."]
5. "Humphrey Jennings: Anthology Film Archives, November 23-25": Dan Sallitt offers some alternative Thanksgiving plans.
["For those who are spending a lonely Thanksgiving in New York (I don't mean to presume that all of us film buffs are socially damaged; perhaps you are simply getting away from your extremely close-knit families for a few hours), think about seeing some of the Humphrey Jennings documentaries that Anthology Film Archives has programmed this Friday through Sunday."]
Quote of the Day: Jonathan Swift
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Too true.
Clip of the Day: Turkey Carving 101.
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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.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
A Woman’s Face: Bibi Andersson and Persona at BAM
By Dan Callahan
Bibi Andersson’s face hasn’t really changed. It has the natural lines of a woman in her seventies, but the wrinkles lie like intricate, soft cobwebs on her cheeks; her bone structure remains intact. Her slightly slanted eyes are wary, even wounded. As she waits to introduce her most famous film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, I notice her solid body in grandmotherly clothes, her still blond hair. She’s very Swedish, in every sense. When the audience applauds her, Andersson takes a small, theatrical bow, as if to say, “What’s the fuss?” The novelist Jonathan Lethem asks her a few questions about working with Bergman, and she starts to talk about him in the present tense, then corrects herself. “I have to remember that he’s gone,” she says, again, with no fuss, no sentimentality.
Andersson tries to get comfortable in a high-backed chair, but can’t seem to find a place to put her feet; Letham doesn’t seem to notice her unshowy but very funny dismay. For a time, she speaks about the genesis of Persona, how Bergman had been tired and wanted to improvise a bit on a script he wrote for her and Liv Ullmann. They worked like that for only a little while, then abandoned these methods, though Bergman let her modify her famous speech about an orgy on a beach so that she could deliver it more from a woman’s perspective. Andersson revealed that Bergman never touched liquor, then smiled to herself. “I’m not an alcoholic, of course,” she said to the audience, as if she first needed to clear her name. But Bergman noticed that her face was very pale, and she was about to do the great orgy speech. So he sent out for a bottle of red wine, and she did this scene, one of the sexiest in film history, half-drunk.
In her first films with Ingmar Bergman, fifties work like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, Andersson has small roles suited to her pretty, milkmaid-like, unformed character. She’s blond and sunny, in possession of a natural vitality that Bergman cannot use at the center of his films yet. She has one real Bergman lead before her breakthrough in Persona, an under-seen, enjoyable comedy called The Devil’s Eye, where the director gives her a real star turn, highlighting her eminently ravishable sexiness and childlike personality. When Bibi Andersson cries in an Ingmar Bergman film, it really seems to hurt her. This makes her different from the sneaky Liv Ullmann, the masochistic Ingrid Thulin, the hearty Harriet Andersson. This vulnerability makes Bibi Andersson the most touching of his women and the center of Persona, his finest film.
“I did ask him, ‘Why do you want me to play these naïve women?” Andersson remembered. “I wanted to be complex…sophisticated.” But Bergman knew her intimately. What Andersson didn’t mention at BAM was the unusual personal circumstances of the Persona shoot. She and Bergman had been a couple, and on the set, the director turned his attention to Ullmann. Andersson sees this in her own way. Discussing the main dynamic between her Nurse Alma and Ullmann’s mute actress Elizabeth Vogler, Andersson said, “He almost made it into something between a man and a woman! Whereas… with two women, there really isn’t that complication,” she insisted. (Naively?)
“Liv and I had worked together before and we were very close,” she continued. “He saw our friendship, and he wanted to get… inside of it. Involved.” Thus, the boy at the film’s beginning, touching a huge screen of their faces. Thus the famous, beckoning close-up of their faces merging, a defining image in twentieth century art. Andersson’s Alma is a simple woman, but she’s a simple woman laboring under a few small pretensions and bookish affectations; it’s in her wanting to rise above her own simplicity that she destroys a part of herself. Just turned thirty, adrift in uncertainty, a fan, a guilty explorer of sexual pleasure, Andersson’s Alma is all these things and much more. She is also Bibi Andersson confronting her own limitations and being stripped bare of all her former happiness and optimism. Bergman offers her an actresses’ triumph in return for this sacrifice. (Time usually does it, anyway, of course.)
Andersson played much darker roles for Bergman after Persona. “Have you seen how ugly I am?” she asks Max Von Sydow, in The Passion of Anna. “Have you ever had a more dreary love partner? Say I’m wrong,” she pleads, winningly. The last time we see her in that film, Bergman overexposes her face and slowly fades to white; his warm feelings for her essential beauty and humanity are clear. Off to the side in Scenes from a Marriage, Ullmann’s big showcase, Andersson does a brief Strindberg-number with her husband, all the while holding onto what must be the longest spiral of cigarette ash in all of cinema. And she continued to collaborate with Bergman in the theater, his true métier.
Letham asked Andersson about working with John Huston and Robert Altman, but there’s not much to say about The Kremlin Letter and Quintet, arguably the worst films those directors made. And the American cinema could only offer her the likes of The Concorde—Airport ’79. No matter. Bibi Andersson is Nurse Alma in Persona, a strong moral force rising out of ruined, Jamesian innocence and trusting good nature, a girl-woman whose disillusionment stands in for everyone who has ever been disappointed, i.e. everybody. I managed to thank Andersson briefly as she left the theater. She looked directly into my face with her kind but burned-out eyes, and she gave me the same dazed, rueful look she gives to Liv Ullmann’s Elizabeth when Alma is taking over the actresses’ wifely duties with Gunnar Björnstrand. Being so close to that great, sensitive face of hers made me feel like Elizabeth Vogler, or Bergman himself: confronted by its warmth and melancholy, there was truly nothing left to say.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
Links for the Day (November 21st, 2007)
1. "A Dark Day for Documentary as the Academy Changes Course, Fights the Future": AJ Schnack of All These Wonderful Things on AMPAS' regressive attitude towards documentaries.
["In one fell swoop, the Academy's decade-long campaign to repair its scandal-plagued 1990s reputation of nominating television-styled or extremely conventional films, was reversed. And, combined with the Academy's recent announcement that it will no longer require a theatrical rollout, made one wonder if the bad old days of Oscar are truly here again. ... We have come to a crossroads in documentary once again. Those of us who are the children of Morris and Moore and Zwigoff and Pennebaker and Maysles and Reggio have seen it happen to our elders and mentors, filmmakers whose best work was often ignored by their peer groups because it played with form or tackled less "important" topics. "]
2. "Variety's Strike Disinformation Campaign": Nikki Finke busts on the trade paper's slanted coverage of the writer's strike.
["When the strike is over, and one day far into the future that will be true, media critics may have a field day dissecting the slanted coverage and total fabrications which Variety is reporting in these early days of the strike. But for now, I'll do it."]
3. "Sweeping the Clouds Away": Brought to you by the letters N & C, and the number 17. (Hattip: Odie Henderson.)
["Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia. Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”"]
4. "Drawn into Grendel's Den": Kevin C. Murphy of Ghost in the Machine finds much of interest about Beowulf.
[""I am the ripper, the terror, the slasher. I am the teeth in the darkness! The talons in the night! My name is strength! And lust! And power! I AM BEOWULF!" Well, ok then. If Zack Snyder's 300 last spring only whetted your appetite for cartoonish sword-and-sandal epics featuring hyperstylized gore and naked men bellowing, you're in luck. For now arises Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, a rousing 3-D mo-capped glimpse into the future of filmmaking and the ancient past of storytelling."]
5. "Don't flame me, bro'": On the psychology of the online poster, from the New Scientist Technology Blog. (Hattip to Slashdot.)
["My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation – they don't necessarily expect to be taken seriously and the social rules are fairly relaxed. And yet, because comments appear in cold text without important cues like friendly body language, they can easily seem more offensive than if they would otherwise. As a result some people get annoyed, and the flaming and trolling begin. After being described a few weeks ago as "a self-lobotomised liberal who can't face the facts", I decided to look into the psychology of online behaviour a bit further. Much of the research on online communication has looked at email, but it seems that many of the results can be generalised to apply to chat rooms and forums too."]
Quote of the Day: George Orwell, from Down and Out in Paris and London.
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From One, Two, Three (1961).
Clip of the Day: I gotta get me some of this guy's moves.
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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.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Links for the Day (November 20th, 2007)
1. "A letter to Werner Herzog: In praise of rapturous truth": Roger Ebert, straight from the heart. Jim Emerson replies and posits the question: "What ecstatic truths have you seen through your window?."
[" Dear Werner, You have done me the astonishing honor of dedicating your new film, “Encounters at the End of the World,” to me. Since I have admired your work beyond measure for the almost 40 years since we first met, I do not need to explain how much this kindness means to me. When I saw the film at the Toronto Film Festival and wrote to thank you, I said I wondered if it would be a conflict of interest for me to review the film, even though of course you have made a film I could not possibly dislike. I said I thought perhaps the solution was to simply write you a letter. But I will review the film, my friend, when it arrives in theaters on its way to airing on the Discovery Channel. I will review it, and I will challenge anyone to describe my praise as inaccurate. I will review it because I love great films and must share my enthusiasm."]
2. "The Glover Model": The Reeler's Ben Gold on the madness and genius of Crispin Glover. Related: our own Editor-in-Chief's NYPress profile of Glover from 2002.
["You could easily confuse Crispin Glover with one of the many eccentric characters he is best known for. Tall, thin and dressed in black, his manner catches you off guard: serious at first, then slowly revealing his joviality, a smile always on the verge of cracking through his angular face -- more George McFly than Willard, for sure. He speaks carefully and deliberately about his latest directorial effort, It Is Fine. EVERYTHING IS FINE!, articulating every syllable and rarely using contractions. It's all calculated; a pretense, perhaps, but an essential one. It's the persona he's created to sell his films -- and himself."]
3. "No Country note": K. Bowen of Anti-dis-arts-and-entertainmentism on a fascinating coincidence surrounding the Coen Brothers' latest.
["I admire (although not worship) the Coen Brothers-Cormac McCarthy collaboration No Country for Old Men. While watching the movie, something unusual struck me. A weird coincidence. Or perhaps a non-coincidence. In fact, that is what's interesting about it."]
4. Now complete: The Queer Film Blog-a-thon, organized by Damion of Queering the Apparatus. (Hattip: GreenCine Daily.)
["I am of the opinion that gay film, in many ways, still seeks to operate within the margins of the system ... queer film, on the other hand, does not cooperate. In fact, it wants to pervert the system."]
5. House contributor N.P. Thompson reviews Southland Tales. As does Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot.
["Once upon a time, writer-director Richard Kelly gave us the fine and sensitive Donnie Darko , a work that succeeded not only by virtue of Jake Gyllenhaal’s bravura turn in the title role, but because Kelly created believable, empathetic characters, no small accomplishment in a sci-fi thriller. What’s more, Kelly managed to build eeriness and foreboding with minimal violence. Not so in Southland Tales , his sophomore (and sophomoric) effort, a movie that places Kelly squarely in the pantheon—the pantheon of Ed Wood."]
Quote of the Day: Nathan Lane
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Christopher Isherwood (Last Drawings) by Don Bachardy.
Clip of the Day: Weatherman vs. cockroach (guess who wins)
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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.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Friday Night Lights on Saturday: Episode 2.7, "Pantherama!"
By Andrew Johnston
“Pantherama!” is a perfectly servicable episode of Friday Night Lights, accompanied though it may be by a faint whiff of filler. On DVD, it’ll probably seamlessly bridge the episodes fore, and feel kind of like a transitional segment in a long novel, with the pace slowed a bit to let the audience exhale after Chad Clarke’s ominous torching of the car last week. And while it’s now clear that the saga of Landry/his dad/the killing/etc is going to cover two more episodes, those tired of it can take comfort in the emergence tonight of what I think has the potential to be one of FNL’s best-ever story arcs. I’ll get to that in due course; for now, lets’s go to the videotape.
Given Smash’s elevation to captain, his vital role in the MacGregorization of the Panther offense and his head-butting with Matt, he’s received surprisingly little screen time this season, so tonight’s focus on the running back was very much overdue. Certainly, we saw signs of the “old” Smash--the was he instinctively slides into horndog mode when the cheerlader shows up as he’s talking to the recruiter--but he’s obviously grown up a lot. He has a much better idea of what it means to provide for his family via football now--if he doesn’t want to go to the historically black school on an academic scholarship, it’s not because he covets the material perks of a big school or winces at the prospect of playing for a 2-9 team.
Smash is smart enough to know he’s not that smart: He’d have to bust his ass pretty hard to keep his grades high enough to hold onto that academic scholarship, and once he was done with school, his moneymaking opportunities wouldn’t be that hot--sure, he could still make it to the NFL. Lots of players from historically black colleges and universities do (the New York Giants’ Michael Strahan, for one) but they often have a hard time of it in the draft because the uneven competition in football at the HBCU level provides few opportunities for coaches to size up their skills in action against known Division I quantities. Material greed is influencing Smash to some degree here, make no mistake, but Smash knows what he has to do if he wants to provide for his mama—a woman who, on the other hand, seems so flattered by the academic recruiter’s pitch that she’s willfully blind to the potential downsides. The best things she could do in this situation, of course, is to enlist Coach Taylor’s help in sorting everything out, and his agreement to do promises to develop the coaching-as-surrogate-fatherhood aspect of football on the series, one of my favorite FNL elements and one that we haven’t had much of lately due to Matt’s increasing independence and the chaos surrounding the coaching transition.
This week’s episode made me do a lot of thinking about Matt. A hookup with Carlotta is something we could all see coming from a mile away (the same can be said of a number of things in the episode, come to think of it), and things with Lauren continue to move fast. It’s no surprise the ladies are taking more of an interest in him now that he’s the QB of the frakking defending state champions; what’s startling is that he isn’t more of a big deal. The people of Dillon continue to treat Smash and Riggins like rock stars, while Matt, for the most part, keeps being Matt. It’d be tiresome to see him face temptation in every episode, but what we’ve seen of Dillon’s football culture makes me think that the issue of his ego could be getting a little more play. If he’s not swaggering, he’s definitely a bit more confident--the laid back smile he flashes around both the girls, which they can’t see, is hugely winning. I can’t help wondering to a degree if the smile is more a reflection of Zach Gilford’s personality than it is of Matt’s. No matter what, it reminded me of the young Paul Newman in his less sulky roles and reminded me that Gilford has a particular kind of good looks/charisma combo more common to ‘60s/’70s leading men than to those of today, and it of course makes me eager to see him in some feature film roles (why can’t I help suspecting that in either 2008 or 2008, we’ll have a Sundance competition slate with FNL alumni in three quarters of the films?).
As to the inevitable question--Lauren vs. Carlotta--I’m with the latter all the way, and not just because their chemistry is more believable. Lauren’s automotive advice to Matt is spectacularly bad--I suspect there has never been a worse time than the present to buy an old Dodge Dart. I drove a ‘72 Dart for most of my college days in the late ’80s, which were not coincidentally the only time in my adult life when gas was consistently available at around $1 a gallon. After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, gas went through the roof and the Dart became one of the least appropriate cars a jobless college student could have. On his Alamo Freeze salary, and with no small amount of grandma-related expenses to cover, Matt would have been a hell of a lot better going for a 10-year-old Toyota in today's $3-a-gallon world. And if the guy with the bad dye job knocked $200 off the price because Matt’s QB1, you have to wonder what he was asking in the first place--in 1987, my Dart was just $600.
Julie was pretty annoying this week, leading me to believe that Matt’s definitely much better off without her. Her story with the new journalism teacher moved *way* too fast and should probably have been spread over a couple of episodes. Her article came together way too quickly, and weirdly came across as part op-ed, part feature--we really should have seen her do more reporting on it. Tami’s suspicion of the new teacher seemed a bit extreme at this early a point, causing me to wonder if he reminds her of a situation in her past. On the heel of the Swede situation, it seems a little soon to have Julie repeat another of her mom’s high school mistakes.
There was actually a lot to chuckle about in the journalism storyline. The 250-word movie review made me laugh, because it takes a lot of experience to write a good one at that length--it’s a lot smarter to teach kids how to write, period, before one starts teaching them to write short. As an alumnus of Columbia’s journalism program, Noah’s pride in having gone there gave me a healthy laugh, especially since few people still have an ego like his when they graduate from there (and if he did, a year of gruntwork at the Milwaukee paper would have robbed him of any remaining illusions). The shout-out to the Journal-Sentinel was a neat in-joke for Columbia grads, as j-school professor/Pulitzer Prizes head honcho Sig Gissler was formerly the editor of the Sentinel, one of two papers that merged in 1995 to form the MJ-C.
I really enjoyed all of Riggins’ scenes with Tyra, even if the situation that took him to her house--Billy’s relationship with the older woman--strikes me as wildly unbelievable--Billy’s just a little too crass and dumb, I think, to interest the woman we met last year--that is, unless Dillon is *really* short on eligible men. With the focus of the Santiago plot shifting to Buddy Garrity, the redemption-of-Riggins arc could get a little dissolute if the writers aren’t careful--but I like seeing Tim and Tyra interact as friendly exes, and I can easily see him influencing her toward the conclusion that Landry is the guy for her, regardless of what his dad says.
The Pantherama event itself was pretty dopey, especially since the Tyra and Lyla “let’s put on a show” sequence was dominated by generic background Panthers we’ve seldom seen before--it can be hard to swallow the need to put guys like Landry and Santiago on the team when so many previously-unseen players are capable of emerging from the woodwork on a moment’s notice (another puzzler--if Tami found out she was pregnant in December and gave birth to Gracie in August, she couldn’t have missed more than three weeks or so of school if we’re only two games into the season--so why does everyone act like she’s been gone for months?). Thankfully Matt and Smash were involved in the event itself; still, the amount of time devoted to it really did seem like an attempt to pad the episode (though it was all basically made worthwhile by Tami strongarming Lyla and Tyra into managing the entertainment, an absolutely classic Tami moment.
As to the potentially brilliant story arc I referred to at the top...it may be premature, but I think the plot with Buddy and Santiago could shape up to be one of FNL’s defining stories. Brad Leland is one of the show’s least-heralded good actors, chiefly because he’s so good at making Buddy so dislikable. He steps it up a notch in the scenes where he talks about what a great foster dad he’d make, making it transparent that in reality, Buddy’s approaching the situation as one might approach adopting a dog. He’s getting in way over his head here, and none of it would be half as interesting if the writers weren’t defying expectations with Santiago, making him a smart kid who got pretty good grades before his family situation got out of control rather than a mere Latino gang punk. The kid has a real nobility to him, and while the line about him never having had a real bed before was corny as hell, it sure worked. Add Tami and Coach’s vested interests in Santiago to the mix and you’ve got an arc that could run all season and provide god knows how much meaty material for the show’s two deepest and most beloved characters as well as one who could only benefit from more depth (Buddy) and a hugely promising newcomer (albeit more promising as a character than as a player at this point). Let’s just hope the writers’ strike doesn’t fuck it all up.
Although the preview over the end credits was for Episode 2.9, "Confession", the episode of December 7, there's still 2/8. "Seeing Other People" (I had to check to make sure it wasn't a rerun--for some reason that totally sounds like an S1 title) coming up on November 30. In the meantime, here’s wishing everyone a spectacular holiday meal with the people they most want to be with.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
Directorama #6
A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom
Click to enlarge: (To navigate previous episodes, click here.)
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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. His writing and graphic criticism can be found at Lost in Negative Space and 24LiesASecond.
Torchwood, Season One, Ep. 11: "Combat"
By Joan O’Connell Hedman
The intersection of the alien and the human is front and center in "Combat," as disaffected young men seek meaning, Fight Club-style. Our Torchwood team regulars struggle to deal with the accumulated consequences of actions we've seen over the course of the season, and Owen (Burn Gorman) becomes the nexus around which everything revolves.
Our first hint that this is an Owen episode comes from the opening credits sequence, with scenes from "Out of Time" spliced in; we even hear Diane's voice-over ("Love, you're always at its mercy"). It will take a moment before we check in on Owen, though. A Weevil, one of the bipedal aliens with piranha-like faces we met in the pilot episode, lopes through an industrial neighborhood, pursued by our Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman). Jack's back to his usual glib, confident self, but the Weevil attacks and eludes him; Jack notes that such things always happen when he has given the team the night off.
Elsewhere in Cardiff, Gwen (Eve Myles) is not exactly enjoying her night out with Rhys (Kai Owen). Her attention keeps wandering, and Rhys calls her on it; she's always wishing she was elsewhere. Rhys can feel her slipping away, and asks what's going on. Myles' expression of flustered guilt is perfect. Gwen's eyes are opened too wide in a simulation of honesty, but she isn't fooling anyone as she tries to figure out what excuse to make this time. Her reprieve comes as Jack dashes in, all apologies, needing Gwen's help to catch the runaway Weevil. Rhys, already upset, overplays it and rudely orders Gwen to sit back down. Gwen responds in the only healthy way possible: "Don't ever speak to me that way again." She heads off with Jack, but ultimately they fail. The Weevil is scooped up by unknown thugs, bundled into the back of a van as a ski-masked man confronts them with a sly grin before taking off.
Owen, abandoned, is in the depths of despair, out drinking alone; he's right that you're never more alone than when you're surrounded by a crowd of total strangers. The lovely barkeep's banter doesn't penetrate Owen's gloom, but it does draw the jealousy of her boyfriend, who unwisely attacks Owen and soon regrets it. But even beating down the two-bit thug doesn't do anything to lift Owen's spirits, who continues to ignore his ringing cell phone.
At Torchwood, Gwen's leaving her third message for Rhys, and her pleading seems sincere this time. Rhys listens to her message as she speaks, but deletes it instead of picking up the phone to talk to her. Jack has already reprimanded Gwen over letting her personal life fall apart. A big part of her appeal to Jack, and one of the reasons he wanted her on the team, is that she was "normal," and had a healthy outside relationship. But is Jack's command -- "Don't let it drift," -- just more evidence of Jack's fundamental disconnect with humanity? Is that a reasonable thing to demand of another person? On one level, we're apt to reply, "Well, it's not as if she wanted this to happen," but that's not exactly true, is it? Gwen did let it drift. She decided that Torchwood was more important than Rhys. When given the choice between work and Rhys, she keeps on choosing Torchwood.
Of course, Gwen also chose Owen, but that's not working out well, either. The Owen we saw very early in the series, the sarcastic bastard, is back in spades. When he finally comes back in to work, he insults Tosh (Naoko Mori) and is cold to Gwen. Provoked, she asks him why they're even continuing their affair, and he breaks it off with a crude insult, claiming boredom. This is such a stark contrast to the tenderness he showed her in "Countrycide" that Gwen is stung into answering his insult with one of her own: "You can be such a wanker sometimes." It's no consolation at all to Gwen that Owen agrees with her.
In the midst of all this personal drama, there's still the Weevil situation to sort out. Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) has noted an increase in strange and severe injuries in the local emergency rooms; the natural conclusion is that Weevil attacks are up, as well. Tosh and Jack investigate the warehouse where the captured Weevil was taken, and find a body, obviously the victim of a Weevil. They are warned to stay away from things that don't concern them via a call to the victim's cell phone. 
Since the only lead they have is the empty warehouse, Tosh and Jack decide to send Owen out to investigate the leasing agent. His cover story as a jellied eel distributor is just out-there enough to be believable; who knows anything about jellied eels? Check out Owen's cover, it's hysterical. And since Tosh is the one who dreamed up it all up, I think it's safe to interpret her choice of something slithery and slimy as a direct commentary on Owen himself.
Cover firmly in place, Owen meets with Mark Lynch (Alex Hassel), ostensibly to find a warehouse near the docks for his booming export business, but actually to give Torchwood access to his computer via some of the alien tech we saw in "Day One." Mark and Owen hit it off in a testosterone-laden way, and Mark's interest in Owen is cemented when they meet later for a drink, and Owen is confronted by the bartender's boyfriend again. This time he has brought a few friends, and Mark helps Owen handily dispatch them. Mark is obviously excited by the fight, and his respect for Owen has increased. Mark invites Owen back to his place for a drink, and normally, with this show, and Owen in particular, you'd expect them to be going for sex. But Owen is as disaffected as ever, and there's a feral quality to Mark's personality that's impossible to ignore. He's not trawling for Owen, he's recruiting him.
Mark responds to Owen as an equal: successful but aimless, rich but empty. Hassel's performance is a stand-out in a series that consistently features extraordinary guest actors, and he's able to sell his particular line of bullshit about the futility of ordinary life and the emptiness of success exceptionally well. The recurrent theme -- something's out there, in the dark, and it's coming -- is voiced again, but Mark doesn't care what it means for humanity, he only cares about what it means for himself. Mark has all the fervor of a true believer while disavowing faith in society, religion, and his own accomplishments. So where does he find his meaning?
Among the Weevils, of course. He has one chained up in his apartment, and he uses it as a punching bag. This brutality finally shakes Owen out of his apathy; he would no more punch a Weevil than he would kick a dog. But it's so much more than one Weevil chained up for one man's amusement. Mark scoffs when Owen accuses him of using the Weevil as the perfect murder weapon, and Owen sees how wrong he was when Mark takes him to yet another empty property, where scores of successful men have gathered to fight each other and, if they've got the cash and the nerve, go into the cage with a Weevil.
Mark blathers about stripping away everything to get down to their essential essence, but Owen isn't buying it. Mark explains that the dead man went into the cage and gave up, "He didn't want to live enough." None of Mark's philosophizing is enough to justify what they're doing, though, and Owen turns to leave. He only stops when Mark pulls a gun on him, and insists he get into the cage. Turning the situation on its head, Owen tells Mark to put the gun down, and promises to go in, if he does.
A neatly choreographed sequence of events has the rest of the team breaking into the fight club just as Owen has entered the cage. The Weevil seems to recognize him, and for the first time in the entire episode, Owen lets the tension run out of him, closing his eyes and exhaling. It seems as if the Weevil won't attack him, but it is startled by the sudden commotion surrounding Torchwood's arrival, and dives for Owen. Gwen screams for Owen, and Jack ends up shooting the Weevil in the arm to get it off the man. They get Owen out of there, but while Jack is issuing his cease-and-desist orders, Mark enters the cage with the now-wounded and frantic Weevil. Asked what he's doing, Mark laments, "It's over." Jack watches the scene in the cage for a moment, unreadable; he turns away as we hear Mark's shrieks.
Our coda begins with a pretty beat-up Owen, in hospital but on the mend; Jack comes in and tosses a bag of grapes on his table. Owen says he shouldn't have; he really hates grapes. But that's far from Owen's biggest problem with Jack; suicide by Weevil seemed like such a good idea at the time, in that tiny moment of peace he felt in the cage. Owen questions Jack's certainty that he's always doing the right thing; at least in this case, we can see that Jack is rather arbitrary in his decisions. Owen was saved, but if Mark Lynch wanted to die, that was OK by Jack. Perhaps Jack thought Mark's death by Weevil was appropriate payback for the torture that Mark inflicted on the Weevils he captured. 
Jack doesn't respond to Owen's challenge. His face hardens, though, and he leaves Owen with orders to return to work the next day. Taking us out of the episode, Ianto lets Owen into the cell block where the Weevils are now in residence; Ianto's worried, but Owen asks for just a minute alone. Owen's prior research had speculated they might have some kind of low-level telepathic connection, able to communicate primitive emotions. When the Weevils see Owen, they become aggressive, but when Owen hisses at them, they retreat into the shadows of their cells and begin their odd lowing. It's obvious they're terrified of him, and Owen's grin shows that he's satisfied with that.
All in all, "Combat" stacks up to be a terrific episode, with touches of humor nicely balancing the deeper and more painful scenes. I was delighted to see that it was written by Doctor Who regular Noel Clarke, aka "Mickey the Idiot," who wasn't, of course. Clarke provides some of the best character development we've had since the Russell T. Davies'-penned episodes, and he skillfully paces the separate plotlines, ultimately bringing them together for maximum effect.
Even better, everyone has at least one good line; Tosh and Ianto are both appalled at Jack's plan to release a Weevil so they can see where it ends up, and Tosh is even more distressed when she sees how the Weevil's captors treat it. Jack doesn't care, believing in their ability to protect the innocent of Cardiff from random Weevil attacks, and also to ultimately figure out what's going on. This is the Jack that's easy to like but hard to trust; since the ends justify the means for him, you'll always have to worry that his means may someday steamroll you, exactly as happened to Owen, who didn't want saving. Barrowman is blessedly comfortable in both modes, charming and grinning one moment, flinty-eyed steel the next. Every so often he has to remind this team that they have a boss, and he's it. They tend to wander when left to their own devices too long.
Eve Myles has a couple of fantastic scenes, one in which she confesses her affair to Rhys, knowing he won't remember any of it because she has given him Torchwood's amnesia drug, RetCon. Pre-Torchwood Gwen would never dream of anything like this kind of morally compromised idiocy, but now we see how corrupted Gwen has become. Her attempt to have it both ways fails, though. Her dosing is off, and Rhys passes out before she can get even a hint of absolution. With Rhys out for hours, Gwen drifts back to Torchwood, Jubilee Pizza in hand, just as in the pilot. But this time, there's no one there, and Gwen struggles to contain her emotional turmoil. Myles' use of hand gestures to ward off tears is classic. She teeters on the brink of a complete breakdown for a moment, but then is saved by the Weevil victim's cell phone, signaling a new text message.
The soundtrack, along with everything else for this episode, is a keeper. That text message chime is expertly worked into the soundtrack of that series of scenes, adding immeasurably to the atmosphere of building dread. The bar scenes are scored with electro-pop from Hot Chip, while the fight club features a song by prog-metal group Muse; both sets support the action without drawing attention to themselves.
This is such a solid episode, I can't even criticize Mark's deeply shallow philosophy. I never bought the nihilistic impulses at the center of the original Fight Club; pain hurts too much for repeated beatings to hold lasting appeal for anyone except masochists. But the aimlessness of men who've done everything they're supposed to do and still feel empty resonates anyway. Doesn't everyone want to escape his (or her) own life at some point? The trick is finding the meaning in the every day, and not everyone has the desire or means to do so. It's odd to be quoting philosophy from John Corbett's Northern Exposure disc jockey, but I think he nailed it: "Having things doesn't make us happy. Being a part of things makes us happy."
Why a typical fight club could provide a sense of belonging that, say, a bowling league couldn't, was always beyond me, but an alien fight club? That's something else altogether, a test beyond anything a typical man could anticipate. Owen's description of how the police would react -- their "minds would implode if they saw this" -- is what we could expect from the average Cardiff resident, as well. The fact that these men didn't freak out really is to their credit, though it could never be enough to make up for the torture they carried out or the bizarre rites they forced the Weevils into. Our impulse to attack and destroy The Unknowable Other remains as strong as it was in our most ancient ancestors, even when that Other is a simple beast. We should be happy that Owen is content with intimidation, for now.
Links for the Day (November 19th, 2007)
1. Visit the War on Photography blog for reports on how photographic rights (New York area, primarily) are being violated day in/day out.
["Just today a conductor stopped a railfan who had just taken [the above] picture. According to the railfan - the conductor accused him of being a terrorist and scoping out the system. Then he went on to insist that photography is illegal. This is outrageous - the MTA needs to retrain or FIRE those employees who LIE to and HARASS photographers. NYCRR 1050.9(c) clearly states photography is LEGAL!"]
2. "The Writers Strike & The Great Big Elephant in the Room": A new perspective on the writer's strike from Mystery Man on Film.
["I want to touch upon something no one else has written about yet, not even in the media, I don't believe. This problem honestly has nothing at all to do with the writers nor with any of the things the writers are asking for, especially when it comes to residuals. What the writers want in terms of percentages is so miniscule and would have such an inconsequential impact on the business as a whole that it’s stunning the AMPTP would even debate the subject. Our contract was 20 years old. What did they expect? It’s not our fault we’re asking for a revised (and still very reasonable) percentage of residuals, which should include internet downloads. The simple fact is, the fight against the writers is symptomatic of bigger industry-wide issues. Whether we ultimately do or don’t get what we asked for, this still won't solve the problem of the great big elephant in the room."]
3. "Wounded warriors face home-front battle with VA": The creak of the system.
["Ty Ziegel peers from beneath his Marine Corps baseball cap, his once boyish face burned beyond recognition by a suicide bomber's attack in Iraq just three days before Christmas 2004. He lost part of his skull in the blast and part of his brain was damaged. Half of his left arm was amputated and some of the fingers were blown off his right hand. Ziegel, a 25-year-old Marine sergeant, knew the dangers of war when he was deployed for his second tour in Iraq. But he didn't expect a new battle when he returned home as a wounded warrior: a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs."]
4. "Back from the five boroughs": House contributor Kevin B. Lee wraps up his New York Marathon experience. Congrats buddy! Also a note from Kevin on his recent work with New Yorker Films.
["I’ll just bullet point some highlights and reflections: First off, I beat most of my goals, which were a) to finish; b) to finish ahead of Diddy’s 4:14 finish time from 2003, as well as my friend Eric’s time of 4:04 from 2003, and the big mark of 4 hours. My final finish time was 3:56:26, not bad for a first timer. My roommate Ed made an even more impressive debut - 3:28, which beat his original goal of 3:30 (though he was aiming for the 3:10 which would have landed him an automatic entry in the Boston Marathon)."]
5. "A famed detective reaches the end": From Devil in a Blue Dress to Blonde Faith. See also Jabari Asim's New York Times review and Andrea Hoag's profile from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
["Time has taken an emotional and physical toll on Easy [Rawlins]. And [Walter] Mosley has decided it's time to say goodbye."]
Quote of the Day: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Human Statue of Liberty, circa World War I. (Hattip to my Aunt Joan Forino.)
Clip of the Day: They may look cute, but we know better: The cats of the world are plotting against us...
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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.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Links for the Day (November 18th, 2007)
1. "Peter Zinner, 1919 - 2007.": GreenCine Daily gathers several obituaries for the editor of the first two Godfathers, The Deer Hunter... and Mahogany!
["Film editor Peter Zinner, who worked on the first two Godfather movies with director Francis Ford Coppola, has died in California aged 88.... Coppola paid tribute to Zinner's "great contribution" to his mob drama. Zinner went on to win an Academy Award for his work on The Deer Hunter in 1978, which also won best picture. Coppola told the Associated Press that the music which accompanied the film's final baptism sequence was Zinner's idea."]
2. "Musharraf resists U.S. call to end decree": More timetables. More carnage.
["A senior U.S. envoy pressed President Pervez Musharraf on Saturday to lift a harsh emergency decree and move the country toward civilian rule, but the Pakistani leader balked at setting any firm timetables despite the high-level demand from his government's main patron."]
3. "Dolly scientist abandons cloning": Becomes country singer.
["The scientist who led the team that controversially created Dolly the sheep is abandoning the cloning of human embryos in stem cell research. Professor Ian Wilmut, of Edinburgh University, believes a rival method developed in Japan holds the key to curing serious medical conditions. The new method creates stem cells from fragments of skin and could remove the need to use human embryos. Pro-life groups opposed to the use of embryonic cells have welcomed the move. But Prof Wilmut said: "We've not made this decision because it's ethically better."]
4. "Ban on Nobel laureate's book spurs interest in Iran": From CNN.
["An Iranian government decision to forbid the second printing of a Persian translation of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel has spurred interest in the book, booksellers said Saturday. ... The novel, known as "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" in the West, was translated into Persian as "Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts.""]
5. "Rage, Fear and Revulsion: At War With the War": One of our E.I.C.'s favorite reviews of Redacted.
["Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” a prizewinner in Venice and a polarizing selection at film festivals in Telluride, Toronto and New York, is one of a slew of new American movies that try to deal with the war in Iraq and related matters. Their moods and methods vary widely — “Redacted” is furious and confrontational; Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” is pedagogical and talky; Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” is mournful and unsettled — but I find myself drawn, in each case, to more or less the same conclusion. I am glad the movie was made, and I wish it were better."]
Quote of the Day: Bertolt Brecht
Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): See the article "Hoboken Disbands SWAT Team After Hooters Photos".
Clip of the Day: A boss fight from the Wii's Super Mario Galaxy.
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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.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Links for the Day (November 17th, 2007)
1. "First coins were more than just currency": From MSNBC.
["More than 100 million $1 coins featuring the likeness of Thomas Jefferson were put into circulation in September, but few people plan to use them, or even know they exist. Only a quarter of U.S. residents have actually seen a Jefferson coin, or either of the other two Presidential $1 coins that are part of a series the United States Mint started to released earlier this year, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll. Americans are also attached to their paper bills, another poll found, and prefer using them instead even if it costs the government more money. It's a far cry from the social and political upheaval caused by the introduction of the first coins more than 2,500 years ago, said Tom Figueira, professor of Classics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. ... The world's first coins appeared around 600 B.C., jingling around in the pockets of the Lydians, a kingdom tied to ancient Greece and located in modern-day Turkey. They featured the stylized head of a lion and were made of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver."]
2. "Striking Hollywood writers, studios to resume talks": A brief update from Reuters. Any of our contributors/readers wish to weigh in with front-line reports?
["Striking U.S. screenwriters and major film and TV studios agreed on Friday to resume formal contract talks on Nov. 26 as the most serious Hollywood labor confrontation in 20 years dragged into its 12th day."]
3. "Infernal Affairs: Lumet's Ferocious Twilight, Redford's Sallow Pamphlet": Fernando F. Croce on Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Lions for Lambs, and Manda Bala.
["Roberto Rossellini once declared that cinema's primary purpose was to inform, educate, and lecture. Tag Gallagher, Rossellini's perceptive biographer, saw it as the sly joke that it was, but Robert Redford has no sense of humor and thus follows the great filmmaker's jibe to the letter in Lions for Lambs. Then again, the very title of this amazingly stilted, "relevant" discourse hinges on another misunderstanding of a quote: From what I recall in history class it was "jackasses," not "lambs," that stood for the misguided leaders sending brave warriors to the slaughter. (Surely Bush and company have earned the privilege of being called worse things than "lambs.") The anchor is Redford himself as a professor who sips from a bottomless Starbucks cup in his office at "a California university" (an unbilled cameo by Berkeley, in the film's one believable performance) while attempting to break through the cynical apathy of a student (Andrew Garfield). "Professors are salesmen," the grizzled veteran says; the same here goes for politicians, as elsewhere a rising right-wing senator (Tom Cruise doing a greasy Gordon Gekko impression) sells his "new Axis of Evil" doctrine to the liberal journalist (Meryl Streep) interviewing him."]
4. "Forgotten masterpiece: Hakuchi (The Idiot, Akira Kurosawa, 1951)": Noel Vera on Kurosawa's Dostoevsky adaptation at Critic After Dark.
["Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film Hakuchi (The Idiot), his adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, is pretty much forgotten now, or is rarely mentioned when talking about the filmmaker or his masterworks. The work is seriously flawed--about a hundred minutes were chopped off before the film was released, and you can see Kurosawa trying to make up for this with lengthy expository titles and voiceover narrations, trying to explain the characters' complex relationships in a few minutes of screen time. Critics who do get past the rushed, awkward beginning note the film's literalness, its director's apparent need to get as much of the novel as possible up on the big screen."]
5. "Cinema of the Future": Jonathan Rosenbaum on the films of Pedro Costa.
["The cinema of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is populated not so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences—souls, if you will. This is a trait he shares with other masters of portraiture, including Robert Bresson, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Demy, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tourneur. It’s not a religious predilection but rather a humanist, spiritual, and aesthetic tendency. What carries these mysterious souls, and us along with them, isn’t stories—though untold or partially told stories pervade all six of Costa’s features. It’s fully realized moments, secular epiphanies."]
Quote of the Day: Fred Allen
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): In (Dis)Honor of Beowulf. From Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997).
Clip of the Day: Kitty-cat mother love, or Doberman goes down
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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.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Theater of Pain: Frownland
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Frownland is a film whose synopsis screams, "Avoid at all costs": a picaresque New York indie about a socially inept, emotionally damaged, stuttering motormouth named Keith Sontag (an insanely ambitious, almost fully-realized performance by first-time movie actor Dore Mann). The hero endures a crap job selling coupon books door-to-door, muddles through a dysfunctional not-quite-relationship with a pathologically shy young woman named Laura (Mary Wall), all but stalks a co-worker (David Sandholm) that he wrongly considers a close friend, and fights with his roommate, Charles (Paul Grimstad), a musician-wannabe who mocks Keith's fractured speech patterns and performs Vangelis-with-a-head-injury soundscapes at top volume. In every surface aspect, it's a textbook New York underground indie (though shot on 16mm film rather than video), enamored with repellent details (Laura is introduced mid-crying jag, blasting a mucus strand from her nose and reflexively snorting it back in) and sporting just-get-it-done technical credits. 
Yet the movie's energy is so peculiar, its vision of socially maladjusted loners so scathingly funny and its creative choices so uncompromising that the result is not just memorable, but haunting. Brooklyn writer-director Ronald Bronstein's debut feature -- which is being shown Saturday, Nov. 17 and Monday, Nov. 19, as part of the Museum of Modern Art's mini-festival of noteworthy undistributed American indies -- announces its intent in an opening scene in which Keith stares at a televised clip of Frankenstein's monster clumsily crushing a violin, then clarifies it with voyeuristic, zoomed-in, hand-held pan shots of our inarticulate, socially inept, ostracized hero stalking around New York, pathetically trying to light a bent cigarette while the analog synth soundtrack plays distorted ooo-EEEEE-oooo riffs you'd expect to hear in a mid-'70s slasher picture. It's a horror film about everyday life in which characters who fail to recognize their own freakish aspects behave monstrously toward others: Marty by way of Eraserhead. 
Bronstein, a projectionist by trade, shot Frownland in sequence, and it shows. The first few minutes -- a meandering encounter between the distraught Laura and the frazzled Keith, who fakes empathy while angling to get laid -- are rough going. But the movie becomes more assured as it unreels. In a therapy scene deep into the movie, Keith stutters and grunts through an anecdote about how he always thought his dad had a lush, full head of hair until his mom revealed it was a toupee by yanking it off. The story is the sort of masochistic confession that made Albert Brooks' early comedies so striking, and the therapist's follow-ups take a straight razor to psychoanalytic cliche. (He asks Keith questions for which there are supposedly no wrong answers while steering him toward the only answer he'll accept.) But what raises the scene from amusing to exquisite is its staging. It's played in an unbroken close-up that creeps closer and closer to Keith. The therapist remains off-screen throughout, his questions muffled; he sounds like one of those unseen teachers that used to interrogate Charlie Brown. The cinematography (by documentary cameraman Sean Price Williams) likewise gets better and ballsier, too. Early on, the interiors of Keith and Charles' apartment are awkwardly shot, the lighting boringly harsh. Later, the place is lit and shot with more nuance -- and when Charles fails to pay the electric bill and the roommates bicker by candlelight, it's primordially lovely.
Frownland leavens grotesquerie with tenderness. At first there seem to be two kinds of characters, assholes and their maladjusted victims. But we eventually figure out that this movie's assholes are maladjusted victims, too; they're abused by the same status-mad, beauty-addled society that batters Keith. Keith is such a basket case that his main goal is to get through the next 10 minutes of his life without baffling or offending someone. He has adopted preemptive groveling as social insurance. (His signature phrase is, "I really appreciate this," usually spoken to someone who's treating him like dirt.) But Charles is not just Keith's tormentor. When he leaves the defining context of their apartment, hoping to find a job so Keith won't kick him out, he's revealed as a freak himself.
It's hard to say what's saddest: the waitstaff application that Charles can't fake his way through; the subsequent, brief shot of Charles in an arcade, lost in a game of Robotron (!); or the sequence where Charles takes the LSAT to earn a job as a test administrator. Probably the last one. Charles tries to bond with the only other person taking the test that day -- a curly-haired, agitated, smug fellow who listens patiently to Charles' complaints about the test's weird questions, then informs Charles that he had no trouble answering them himself and would like to know why a man who professes to see through the scam of standardized tests would seek a job administering them. Charles is a snot who poses as super-competent, then reveals flaws that make Keith seem comparatively functional. (At least Keith has a job and pays bills on time.) Yet in this scene, you still feel for him because, shades of Keith, he made a good faith effort to connect with a fellow human being and got used as a verbal punching bag. This is the way of the world in Frownland, a film in which power relationships turn on a dime. One scene's bully is another scene's schmuck.
Did I mention that the movie is as cuddly as a cactus, as charming as an eel? "Look, I've tried to listen to you month after month," Charles excoriates Keith, in a late scene where he really should be kissing Keith's ass, "and I've tried to decipher what you come to me with. But these are unmanageable jumblings that you come to me with, I mean, this mangled syntax, and frankly, I don't have the energy to continue to meet you four-fifths of the way just to try to figure out what you're attempting to communicate." You may feel the same way about Frownland, but it's a mangled rant worth hearing.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
Point Blank: No Country for Old Men
By Matt Zoller Seitz
[Editor's Note: Spoilers ahead.]
"What you got ain't nothing new," a retired lawman says in No Country for Old Men, counseling a colleague who's so traumatized by a recent mass murder case that he's thinking of quitting his job.
That's hard truth, and the fact that the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), is more introspective than some of his colleagues doesn't make it go down any easier. Bell's astonishment at the violence unleashed by his quarry, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) -- an assassin tailing a Vietnam vet (Josh Brolin) who filched a briefcase full of drug money -- is so deep that it spurs Bell to reconsider his life, his job, the nature of morality, the mind of God, the shifting cultural character of the border country he calls home, and the profound ways in which the United States changed between World War II and the Reagan era. Bell is one of many characters forced by Chigurh's rampage to consider his place in the universe: who he really is; what he stands for; whether he believes what he believes and behaves as he does by choice, predisposition or predestination; whether evil exists and whether God, if there is one, cares one way or the other.
All these elements and more come through in a movie packed with laconic lawmen and criminals that has very little exposition and almost no music. I haven't read the Coens' source material (a novel by Cormac McCarthy), which means I'm not sure whether virtues I attribute to the Coens are partly attributable to the novelist; in any event, No Country is an unsettlingly effective movie, different from, yet consistent with, everything the brothers have made till now. The film's leisurely ruthlessness -- picture a John Carpenter ghoul loping toward its prey -- is not just another demonstration of the Coens' eerie aesthetic assurance. The novel's title is drawn from William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium," but the Coens' film adaptation seems more aligned with another Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," with its warnings of a "blood-dimmed tide," a paralysis and decay in the face of seismic social upheaval. 
Perhaps because so many current theatrical films have tried to address the post-9/11 world in a boringly prosaic way, the terse period piece No Country has been framed by critics as an assessment of America's moral health circa 2007. To a limited extent, it is that; given the time and place in which it was produced, it couldn't be otherwise. But it would be a mistake to presume that the Coens' main intent is to render judgment on U.S. foreign policy (or domestic morality) post 9/11, or even post-Reagan (the film is set in 1980). The film actively discourages such a narrow reading.
No Country's message, such as it is (the Coens aren't message-y directors) is not about Where We Are Now. It's simpler and more encompassing, less reminiscent of reportage or the editorial page than the admonitions of a philosopher or court jester: Get over yourselves, Americans, and everyone else, too. Look beyond yourselves and the time you live in. What is happening to the United States and the world -- and every individual -- is a variant of a dynamic that recurs throughout personal and political history, as predictable as the end of one year and the start of the next. What you got ain't nothing new.
Bell narrates No Country for Old Men, or at least begins to. But pretty soon his narration all but disappears. This strikes me not as a mistake, but a telling aspect of the movie's vision. Because Bell is played by Tommy Lee Jones, a star who specializes in hard-bitten, smart-alecky, "rebel" authority figures, we're predisposed to view Bell as a voice of wisdom, an amiable patriarch, and in certain superficial ways, he is that. But in a grander sense, he doesn't know shit. He's the latest in a long family line of local sheriffs. He's proud to inhabit such a mythic post. But he also fantasizes (openly) about what it must have been like to do his job in an earlier, more exciting time, when the world supposedly held more possibilities for heroism. This is a nod to modern Western convention -- Bell is a lawman in a closed frontier -- but the character's wistful unease is universal. He could be a ballplayer wishing he could have tested himself against Babe Ruth, or a musical performer pining for a time when Broadway meant something. He's a representative of a settled, complacent mindset: a guardian of the dominant culture. Bell's belief that he lives in a time of fixed realities and diminished potential is indicative of the mentality that makes a dominant culture vulnerable to aggressive revisionists. To the people Bell hopes to stop, the future is a wide-open road. The status quo's defenders are speed bumps.
Bell has no idea that his circumscribed perspective as a sixty-something white Texas lawman hampers his ability to understand the forces at war in his territory: Mexican drug runners and Anglo-American bankers, strange bedfellows who have nothing in common but an implacable urge to make a quick fortune. The horrors Bell encounters expand his perceptions -- his sense of what's possible, for better or for worse (mostly for worse). But his evolution ends before it can really take root, and his final monologue has a defeated, even mournful tone. Bell gives his word that he'll find and save the Vet, Llewelyn Moss, before Chigurh (or other drug thugs) can kill him; but he arrives too late. (Shades of Fargo: Marge Gunderson's smart police work cracks the case, but when she arrives at the kidnappers' hideout, she finds a dead victim and a perp feeding his partner's corpse into a woodchipper.) Llewelyn's death is made more poignant by the Coens' decision to have it occur off-screen; likewise the sequence with Llewelyn's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), refusing Chiguhr's demand that she flip a coin to determine a fate that's ultimately settled behind the door Chighur shuts in the film's penultimate sequence.
The Coens' shift from up-close, graphic violence to obscured or elliptical violence cements the sense that we've been privy to a mysterious but fundamental change in the universe. We see bloodied flesh close-up when it's a new phenomenon; when it ceases to be noteworthy, the filmmakers stop showing it. A notable exception is the climactic car wreck that injures Chigurh. It has the hallmarks of a deus ex machina, but it occurs too late to prevent the assassin's campaign of terror and it doesn't so much end his rampage as interrupt its denouement. Chigurh enlists two teenage boys in his escape, paying one of them $100 for a shirt to use as a sling (echoing Llewelyn's furtive bribery of tourists on a U.S.-Mexico border bridge). It seems significant that the killer's escape is aided by kids who have no connection to, or stake in, the apocalyptic crime war we've been watching. The accident scene's whiff of cosmic retribution reminded me of the Coens' shooting gallery-like dispatching of the bad guys in The Ladykillers. But given the rest of the story, I doubt that's what was intended -- and did my eyes deceive me, or did Chigurh have the green light when his car got rammed?
Spiritual but not religious, the Coens are Stanley Kubrick-style secular theologians. Their awe of the unknown is comprised of equal parts humility and philosophical-scientific curiosity. Their films tease our suspicion that powerful, unseen forces move the universe -- moral and ethical forces that sometimes seem to be rendering judgment or sending a message.
But at the same time, the Coens insist that no man can verify if these forces actually exist or if we insist they do out of vanity -- in order to convince ourselves that our existence matters to anyone but us and our loved ones. The confluence of forces that suggests fate or justice might be evidence of a higher power (represented in the conversation between Bell and the old lawman about what God wants), chance (Anton Chigurh's tossed coin, which decides if a person lives or dies -- an intriguing hint that on some level, this stone-cold psychopath feels guilt and perhaps wishes to reassure himself that his bloody deeds were inevitable) or free will (a subject broached in the scene where Carla Jean declines the coin toss to force Chigurh to accept responsibility for his deeds). Or it could be the result of electrons colliding to produce a result that might have been different had a single electron bounced differently. This free will vs. destiny thread runs through all of the Coens' work, even their most maligned and dismissed movie, The Hudsucker Proxy -- a comedy in which the story's microcosmic society, the Hudsucker Corporation, persists no matter what executives, workers, stockholders and outside agitators do to influence it. That film's most revealing image is dolt hero Norville's blueprint of three ridiculously successful toys, all represented by the same drawing, a straight line (the side view: free will) and a circle (the overhead view: destiny).
The Coens' narrations often hint at, but rarely confirm, the existence of deliberate, supernatural forces. Their narrators purport to know the whole story, but mostly they know what they saw, heard or read. Blood Simple's narrator is dead; Hudsucker's is a corporate servant who seems to have gleaned much of what he knows from newspaper reports and the company grapevine; Lebowski's narrator is either a literary conceit or a figment of the hero's bong-addled imagination, and in any event, he's so self-satisfied and scatterbrained that he can barely follow his own train of thought. The most humble (and therefore trustworthy) narrator in the brothers' filmography is H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, whose after-the-fact account of a kidnapping gone awry mythologizes and caricatures what is, on its face, a rather sad little story, then accepts a few shreds of hope (a reconciliation with his wife; a coming-to-terms with adulthood; a dream of fertility and old age) as a truly happy ending.
In No Country, Bell's narration primes us to expect answers, but its true purpose is to spur admission of how much we don't know and steer us back to what we do know, or should know, based on a cursory study of history: The new order invariably overthrows the old, then gets comfortable, all the while nostalgically wishing it could have experienced what prior generations went through, back when the world was new and people were decent and there were rules or a code or somesuch nonsense. (It's no coincidence that once Baby Boomers took control of the media, we saw a wave of films and TV shows characterizing the '60s as the most important decade ever, followed by a wave of movies mythologizing the World War II generation.) Once the new order gets settled, it becomes the old order; then, like clockwork, new forces arise that seek to topple the current powers-that-be. These new forces terrify the establishment by behaving not merely as if its written-in-stone traditions were Etch-a-Sketch doodles (in a conversation with Bell, the El Paso sheriff lumps in hippies with the forces of darkness), but as if the establishment itself is merely a glorified obstruction that will be inevitably be toppled or abraded by time.
No Country reinforces this theme from start to finish, in ways both small and large. In a grand sense, Bell, his fellow lawmen and the white, working class Texans down near the Mexican border are representatives of the Powers that Be, forced to reckon with a threat that seems fresh (Mexican drug runners, their American enablers and their unseen customers). But the "fresh" threat is the latest incarnation of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The Coens' italicize this point by comparing (through compositions and editing) the murders Chigurh commits with an air-gun designed to kill livestock (and Chigurh's impulsive shooting at a pheasant on a bridge, a moment reminiscent of warthog-from-Hell Leonard Smalls' destruction of a lizard and a bunny in Raising Arizona), and the white Texans' subjugation of the land and its resources (acknowledged in the early scene where Llewelyn snipes at antelope from a distant ridge). Once a man has decided (as Chigurh has decided, and as Leonard Smalls and Johnny Caspar and the kidnappers in Fargo decided) that another person (or creature) is a valueless object, he can kill without remorse. In the Coen Brothers' universe, the abandonment of empathy (and the accompanying detachment from civilization's agreed-upon laws and traditions) is a dark key that unlocks the door to absolute and terrifying freedom, leading to existential rampage. No Country makes the key-and-door analogy explicit: Chigurh uses the same air gun to blast through door locks and attack his quarry. The projectile is almost exactly the same width as the lock, and its passage leaves such a clean hole that it's as if the lock never existed.
Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens' body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema. To some extent, all of their movies poses questions that supposedly deeper filmmakers have broached time and time again: if we cannot be certain of God's existence; if there is a possibility that no one's watching what we do; if, to reference Johnny Caspar in Miller's Crossing, "morality and ethics" are agreed-upon lies; if the evil can destroy the good with impunity, and if the wicked often die for reasons unrelated to a hero's good deeds (throughout the Coens' filmography, bad guys often destroy themselves through vanity or stupidity, or get snuffed out by coincidence or bad luck), then what's the point of being good? Just because. "There's more to life than a little money, you know," policewoman Marge Gunderson tells the dead-eyed killer in the backseat of her police car at the end of Fargo. "Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."
In Raising Arizona, Leonard Smalls is a manifestation of H.I.'s untamed id; he literally enters the film through the hero's nightmare. No Country visually quotes Arizona at several different points, notably in the sequence where Llewelyn discovers the wounded dog (the cutting between close-ups of his boots striding through the desert and the low-angled shot of his face as he walks exactly mirror shots of H.I. and Smalls in Arizona); in the aforementioned shooting at the pheasant; and in the overhead shot of Llewelyn lying awake next to his wife, thinking about the criminal adventure he's about to embark on. In Arizona it seemed as if H.I. dreamed up Smalls; in No Country, the stalker appears first, and Llewelyn's descent into criminal mayhem makes it seem as though he is an extension, or a would-be protege, of Chigurh. At times Bell, Llewelyn and Chigurh seem like aspects of one human soul, fixed on different spots in a moral continuum: the good (Bell), the evil (Chigurh) and evolving man (Llewellyn). Llewelyn initially suggests a younger version of Bell -- with his narrow eyes, walrus mustache and broad-shouldered confidence, Brolin looks like a young Nick Nolte -- but gradually, through manipulation, corruption and violence, he becomes more like Chigurh. When Chigurh tells Carla Jean that her husband is ultimately responsible for her impending death, he's being self-justifying -- but he's not wrong. Sometimes you reap what you sow -- and your loved ones do, too.
The Coens aren't nihilists. There may or may not be a God in their imagination -- the only Coen Brothers films that definitively confirms the existence of intelligent, purposeful, supernatural forces are Hudsucker and The Ladykillers, easily their dopiest, least consequential films -- but the lack of theological clarity doesn't necessarily mean that the Coens endorse their characters' decision to be indecent or cruel. Quite the contrary, the Coens' movies strongly endorse the notion that one should honor certain bedrock principles for their inherent rightness (or, barring that, for the benefits such a life might confer). Decency is the Coens' version of piety. It's not just a rock to cling to in hard times, but a quality worth cultivating for self-interested reasons, because it makes a character more likely to know love and comfort. The Fargo kidnappers live for the moment, and their existence is defined by cheap motor inns, bored hookers, an increased likelihood of getting shot in the face or stuffed into a woodchipper, and the impossibility of every truly trusting anyone. Straitlaced Marge, on the other hand, goes to sleep each night in a warm bed beside a man who loves her. In the Coens' world, acceding to certain customs and laws means sacrificing visceral liberties to gain deeper and more satisfying ones: freedom from fear of loneliness and the nagging suspicion your existence is meaningless. H.I. and Ed McDunnough and Florence and Nathan Arizona are cushioned against despair by their love for, and commitment to, their respective unions. Leonard Smalls in Arizona, like Chigurh in No Country, is utterly alone in the universe, connected to no culture, beloved by no person; if they weren't committed to the loner lifestyle, they could start a support group, and invite Visser in Blood Simple, Bernie Bernbaum from Miller's Crossing, and the Fargo kidnappers to join.
Chigurh's wraithlike presence makes him a Grim Reaper in a chili-bowl haircut. He's half man, half literary device. Bell likens him to a ghost, and he does have a touch of the horror movie stalker about him. He lopes after prey like Michael Myers or the Terminator, verbally toys with them like The Hitcher and Richard Ian Blaney in Frenzy, and has a Droopy-like ability to materialize in places that his victims chose as sanctuaries. But he's not a contented man. He only seems fully actualized when he's killing people barehanded -- as in the early scene where he strangles the deputy, his rapturous psycho grin photographed from overhead as if he's daring God to intervene. When Chigurh uses a gun, he's a Satanic cattleman putting down bipedal animals, like the (invented) farmer in the anecdote that Bell tells Carla Jean. Bardem's astounding performance -- he's the most terrifying yet multifacted psycho since Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet -- subtly hints at the fathomless despair that must fuel a man like Chigurh. Something in the way this murderer peers at his soon-to-be-victims suggests an internal, perhaps subconscious process of translation: a means of turning self-contempt into contempt. The apparent "code" that Bell attributes to Chigurh is the code of a fascist; to Chigurh, the wrong decision is one that goes against his wishes, and the penalty for resistance is death. He's the freest man in the movie, and he knows it; he carries himself like a self-created dark prince. Yet he enters the story in handcuffs and leaves it bloody and broken-boned, trudging through the suburbs on foot.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
This Week on Brothers and Sisters: Margot at the Wedding
By Keith Uhlich
The best scene of writer/director Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding occurs near its start, when estranged sisters Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) -- reunited in the latter's seaside home for her impromptu marriage to loser-with-a-capital-"L" Malcolm (Jack Black) -- begin reminiscing about their unhappy childhood.
Pauline's deadpan revelation of an embarrassing incident from Malcolm's past ("Go ahead and use that information however you like," he says with thinly veiled sarcasm) inspires the sisters to run down the litany of sins committed against them by the various men in their lives. It all comes back, per Freud and Electra, to Daddy, and as the sisters move closer to the symbolic heart of the matter, the incitements get increasingly outrageous and disgusting, even as the monotonous confessional tone remains the same. By the time incest is breached and superseded, it’s clear that Margot (a parasitic Manhattan author) and Pauline (a passive-aggressive exurban diva) have entered a purely fantastical headspace, incanting the most repulsive things they can think of as a means of catharsis. And then they laugh... uncontrollably and at length.
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To read the rest of the review at The Reeler, click here.
Links for the Day (November 16th, 2007)
1. Some face time for House contributor Sheila O'Malley and her blog, The Sheila Variations: Thoughts on The World According to Garp and her wonderful encounter with a beret-wearing Dickens fan at No Country for Old Men.
["She said, "I hope you don't mind my asking - but what Dickens is so engrossing you?" Her energy was so forthright, so ... so NICE ... that my normal urban reserve (especially in crowd situations) dissolved immediately. I said, "Bleak House." She gasped and put her hand over her heart. "Isn't it wonderful?" "You've actually caught me kind of crying right now ... it's SUCH a good book!" "Rather 'bleak', is it not?""]
2. "Michael Blodgett (1940-2007)": A brief remembrance by Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark. His IMDb page (writer of Rent-a-Cop, Turner and Hooch, AND the Patrick Dempsey/Kelly Preston vehicle Run! It's my happening, baby, and it freaks me out.)
["Writer/actor Michael Blodgett died [Wednesday] at the age of 67. Best known for playing hunky hedonist Lance Rocke in Russ Meyer's classic cult film, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS."]
3. "Savages Take Over": The latest fall-centric episode of S.T. VanAirsdale's ReelerTV.
["ReelerTV is on something of a break, but we couldn't help but bring it back this week to hear from Tamara Jenkins about her new film The Savages, which we caught in its acclaimed run earlier this fall in Toronto. In this week's episode, Jenkins tells us what she's been up to since her 1998 breakthrough Slums of Beverly Hills, and gives us the background on working with a bulletproof cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney and Philip Bosco. Cinecultist editor Karen Wilson also drops by as well to share her two cents about a pair of this week's new releases, Margot at the Wedding and Redacted."]
4. "Fabio calls George Clooney ‘low-class scumbag’": Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww shit!
["Nearly forgotten Fabio recently got the better of Hollywood heavyweight George Clooney, and he’s not about to let the world forget it."]
5. "Little Man, What Now?": Michael Atkinson responds to a heckler at his blog Zero for Conduct, filed under "Neo-Con whup-ass." Looks like things are getting heated.
["I’m addressing "David," the maniacal neo-con cretin who keeps commenting on my blog, even on entries that have nothing to do with his argument, as if he is imagining my half of the debate in his dreams; the first volley this time is a comment, must-reading, under "Crazed Fruit," below. Now I respond. First off, though I’m touched by your concern for my psyche, I want to make it clear that I do not hate myself, I hate you."]
Quote of the Day: Benjamin Stolberg
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
Clip of the Day: An Apple a day doesn't keep Kevin Costner away. (Hattip: Ryland Walker Knight.)
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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.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Criterion Collection #412: Sawdust and Tinsel
By Dan Callahan
Ingmar Bergman made eleven films before his breakthrough, Summer with Monika (1952), where he seemed to be stimulated by filming his lover at the time, Harriet Andersson, a bluntly carnal brunette. Andersson is also crucial to his next film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), marketed in the US as The Naked Night. There’s no real nudity in the movie, though Andersson’s breasts often threaten to burst out of her period clothing and, as always, her big, wet, striated lips are so central to the images that they should have their own special billing. In the famous flashback that comes at the beginning of the film, Alma (Gudrun Brost), a coarse, aging blond desperately trying to prove that she’s still attractive, cavorts nude in the sea with a regiment of soldiers. Her clown husband (Anders Ek) pulls her out of the water, covering her nakedness with his body. But there’s no covering the nakedness of his emotions under his heavy clown make-up, and no possible way to cover up his wife’s disgrace.
Sawdust and Tinsel is Bergman’s first film where the idea of humiliation, specifically sexual humiliation, becomes crucial to his conception. It was a theme that obsessed him throughout his career, and it has no more painful expression than in this flashback of the clown and his big Fellini-esque wife, which is shot in a deliberately over-exposed way, as if harsh light was pounding down on everyone and everything. This flashback evokes Murnau, Eisenstein and even Welles; at bottom, it is an homage and an intensification of a German silent film like E.A. Dupont’s Variety (1925), with its strobe-like effects. You can feel Bergman finally realizing the full possibility of what a camera can do and, even more importantly, what sound and its absence can convey. We don’t hear any words when the people talk or shout on the beach, only the soldier’s derisive laughter on the track, and unsettlingly hollow, phallic canon bursts at irregular intervals. Looking at this scene and the best scenes in Sawdust and Tinsel is a little like listening to the modernist music of Stravinsky, or Alban Berg (the score by Karl-Birger Blomdahl is aggressively modernist and tense). Bergman’s new, bursting talent for Expressionist editing and composition helps distract us from the fact that the basic situation between the clown and his wife is more than a little bit corny.
Bergman is not always successful in masking the trite aspects of his screenplay when the story proper kicks in, as we watch the bull-like circus owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) laid low in tried and true Emil Jannings fashion by Andersson’s petulant, teasing mistress. Andersson walks down a street like she just loves being good-looking and looked at; very rarely has a film actress been so brazen about her own beauty. Bergman attempts to take her down a notch in her dealings with an aging, pretty boy actor (Hasse Ekman), but not before she makes him get on his knees and bang his head on the floor at her feet. Later, they have an arm-wrestling contest that he just barely wins; there is some black humor in this literal battle of the sexes. Bergman once called the theater his faithful wife, while the cinema was his “costly, exacting mistress.” When we watch him watch his mistress Andersson, we can only be glad that he paid the price for such pleasure, cinematically speaking.
Harriet Andersson has always been an odd woman out in the Ingmar Bergman gallery of females; she’s clearly a little slutty, a little low-class, and in Sawdust he has her mock the “pale, flat-chested actresses” that Ekman’s actor (and Bergman himself) is used to working with. As is his wont, Bergman drops a heavy dollop of Strindberg into this bit of sexual autobiography. The actor debases Andersson as she has debased him (Ekman holds her down on the floor at one point: as she struggles, never has the unshaved hair under a woman’s arms looked more enticing). With his lined, sneering face, Ekman personifies one of Bergman’s keener insights: the emotional vampirism of actors. But Bergman abandons Ekman and his sadomasochistic contest with Andersson and throws the whole ending to Grönberg’s circus owner. It’s difficult to feel much of anything for this standard, Germanic brute, even when Ekman is kicking dust in his face in front of an excited audience. The ending is heavily symbolic and a bit pompous, with the clown longingly explicating a dream he had about curling up in his wife’s womb, but Sawdust and Tinsel is still a key early Bergman film that anticipates his major works of the sixties.
Image/Sound/Extras: Aside from two brief vertical lines, the 1.33:1 pictureboxed image is spotless, doing very well by the tricky overexposure in the nightmare flashback, and the mono sound is bracing. There’s a brief intro by Bergman where he speaks of his affection for this film, saying that he likes its “wildness,” and a solid audio commentary by Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, who reports Andersson’s latter-day tales of Bergman’s intense bouts of jealousy during the shoot. “I was bloody faithful!” Andersson insists. Maybe she was.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
"Indie 500": Radiohead, Vampire Weekend, and Saturday Looks Good To Me
By Vadim Rizov
[Editor's Note: "Indie 500", a look at the music scene past and present, is published every other Thursday.]
Radiohead is my favorite band I almost never listen to. Like clove cigarettes and emo hoodies, some things just go better with teen angst. The Bends was a benchmark album for me, like a lot of kids my age; Radiohead is my generation's The Smiths, except way more popular in the US and even more inscrutable. At the peak of my obsession, Hail To The Thief leaked months in advance in unmastered form; burned copies flooded my high school. I lay down on the ground during lunch, threw on my headphones, and kept them on for the next few months. When the mastered album came out, I actually went to Best Buy and repeated the process; I felt guilty about having all those free albums.
As a band, Radiohead are pretty impeccable, so good that even contrarians come around after a while: Sasha Frere-Jones went from derisively comparing them to Coldplay ("Add a whine here, subtract a major chord here, and nobody would know") to "Reassessing Radiohead." But Hail To The Thief was a letdown. It started and ended with two of their strongest tracks, and there wasn't anything particularly wrong in the middle I could put my finger on. Still, at 56 minutes, with more than half of the tracks running over 4:00, they seemed to be sprawling out for no good reason. Stereotypically flighty, Radiohead had gone from style to style on each album, but their much-hyped "return to rock" seemed to take their songwriting logic to its extreme, regardless of instrumentation. Ever since Kid A, Radiohead's structures are based on repetition and elaboration: listen to "How To Disappear Completely" and notice how virtually the entire song is underpinned by the same eight bass notes over and over. Strings and vocals swell out and amplify the song. Much of Hail lacked such developments; it was strong, but not strong enough. I stopped thinking about the band.
At a zippy 42 minutes, In Rainbows has a brevity and lightness that's, until now, been consciously exiled from Radiohead's work. Opener "15 Step" makes like Amnesiac rebooted, with tinny glitch programming and Thom Yorke's swaying voice seeming to threaten to piss off the rockists again. But then the guitars and real drums kick in, and it sounds like nothing so much as Talk Talk after they alienated the mainstream: jazzy guitar, swaying rhythms, on-the-go and energized. Until now, Radiohead has seemed to know only the extremes of crushingly heavy and ponderous rockers (all of The Bends and most of OK Computer), enervated balladry ("Motion Picture Soundtrack," most of Amnesiac), and the occasional excursion into frantic paranoia ("2+2=5," "Electioneering").
The ballads are lighter too. "Nude" is a gorgeous fan favorite that's been kicking around for a while. It's done here without trading energy for melancholy, as Radiohead frequently do: instead, a light intro of backwards-looped guitar notes swell into a silence puncutated only by a single bass note. The song eventually fills up, but it's never as full and dense as it might have been if recorded in time for, say, OK Computer. The best song is also the shortest: at 2:10, "Faust Arp" is little more than guitars, strings and voice that gets the melody out and then shuts up.
I'm not sure if In Rainbows as a whole is the stuff of classic status: the back half seems to be loaded with grinding jams ("Reckoner," "House of Cards") that, per Thief, go nowhere in particular very intelligently. Somewhere along the way they've forgotten how to sequence albums. Kid A is so perfectly assembled that Chuck Klosterman could synopsize it as a 9/11 Nostradamus-type parable without seeming completely absurd; In Rainbows tells no such stories, entertaining or not: it's a strong front half and a noodlier back one. But it got me to think about Radiohead as something besides a band which peaked my sophomore year of high school, and that's something at least.
How to write about the simply adorable Vampire Weekend? Columbia brats of the highest order, they're quite possibly the best thing to happen to trust-fund rock since The Strokes. (For all I know they're scholarship kids, but whatever.) What I have is the Blue CD-R, a demo-disk with nearly the same tracks (+2/-1) as their forthcoming January debut on XL. "Most of the songs have been tinkered with," the band wrote in to confirm. There are parts that have been re-mixed and re-recorded." But for a mere teaser, it's certainly prominent enough that I feel like a major dumbass for not having heard it earlier; when a blogger like Good Weather for Airstrikes can boast of having seen VW "like ten times now," it's like there's nothing left to say. They're both officially unreleased and overexposed, depending on your demographic. (It's almost like a replay of my high school Hail To The Thief conundrum; obsessive listening will happen in two segments again.)
Anyway, Vampire Weekend deserve pretty much all of their hype: they're the best up-and-comers I've heard in the fey-but-muscular vein since Voxtrot, even if their tactics are different. Voxtrot fill up every possible corner with guitars, strings, brass, etc. VW have their band instruments and little else: spaces are filled up with pleasing keyboard simulations (a raft of fake clarinets on opener "Mansard Roof") or, in particularly expansive moments, an actual cello ("Walcott") that gangs up with a thudding house beat. There's a lot of empty space, and no bass drum where you'd expect: if anything, they're more prone to giving the snare drum some nasty raps. "Mansard Roof" opens tentatively, with Ezra Koenig's voice floating out over Mellotron-ish sounds and four vicious snare hits: shortly thereafter, a frantic chug begins slowly increasing in tempo. "Oxford Comma" pulls the same slow tempo-increase trick.
None of this description helps; it gives the impression of a band interested in clever technicalities. What Vampire Weekend really are are a band who split the difference between their Afropop influence—noted in every single piece ever written about them—and the straight paradigm of stripped-down indie pop verse-chorus-verse songs. I hesitate to bring up the Afropop simply because it doesn't seem necessary to have any outside context to enjoy these songs, or have queasy issues about appropriation/theft issues: Vampire Weekend sound like an innovative band with novel songwriting structures recording around a budget. A token nod to a "genre" which really means the entire musical product of a continent seems kind of unnecessary, and possibly condescending.
"Oxford Comma" and "A-Punk" are a pretty unbeatable combination: the latter a slow, deliberate meditation on an unnecessary punctuation mark, the former an excitable combination of Ramones back-up vocals, Clash guitars, and general neutered-punk awesomeness. Throughout the album/demo/whatever, VW make with clever but not showy lyrics and hooks a-plenty. Sometimes they may verge a bit too precious—depending on how you feel about liberal arts majors, a line like "Campus"'s "then I see you/you're walkIng cross the campus/cruel professor/studyIng romances " [UPDATED: some of the lyrics are hard to sound out, and VW sent in corrections which I've posted here] is either dead-on or insufferable. Only about half of this album is essential, but VW wisely front- and back-ends it, leaving relative (but perfectly pleasant) filler of a more generic sort in the middle; they get from relative diffidence to snarky anthemics (the big closer is the nicely titled "The Kids Don't Stand A Chance") in half-an-hour. If the hype is correct, VW is about to become the closest thing twee-pop offers to famous; they certainly deserve it.
Fill Up The Room is a fine new album by the underrated Saturday Looks Good To Me that I have a little trouble getting 100% behind. Coming off 2004's Every Night, the Fred Thomas-led band has abandoned its retro-pastiche approach in favor of something closer to the present day: if every track on Every Night seemed not just in a different songwriting style but to have been mic'd and engineered with perverse specificity to approximate a different pop sub-genre's sound ('50s girl group, Belle & Sebastian rip-off, thin live recording, etc.), Fill Up The Room is all of one piece. One long piece. Formerly devoted to brevity, SLGTM have, paradoxically, started to sound more like their contemporaries; the less devoted they sound to their past influences, the less original they sound. Opener "Apple" goes for narcotized doo-wop; two tracks later, "When I Lose My Eyes" nearly hits seven minutes, inevitably making me think of the Decemberists. I know, I know: it's a shallow comparison. Thinly recorded real instruments (that is, when Barnes isn't indulging his thick-reverb fetish) are about the only trait they share in common, but I miss the band that pumped out compact homages without guilt. They wear the length without getting proggy, but what was great about their retro-fetishism was how good they were at approximating the sound: it was far more precise than most genre exercises, and the tension between the frequently antiquated-sounding melodies and sharp, contemporary lyrics was what made it work.
Far be it from me to complain about progress, though: Barnes has retained his wit ("posing his problems, pretending they're poems," he sketches out a whiny artist on "Come With Your Arms") and gained an almost problem-solving approach to certain songs (closer "Whitey Hands" builds itself around an unusual marimba-sounding loop). A first half with lengthier songs ends up pandering to me in the second half: Betty Marie Barnes, flat-intonation vocalist extraodinaire, pops in on "Hands In The Snow" to announce that "By the time you read these words I will be gone," which gets us back to the endearingly, self-consciously maudlin girl-group tone of "Since You Stole My Heart," the song that got me hooked in the first place. Fill Up The Room is a perfectly fine album that, for once, makes me feel like one of those whiny fans who complain that the old stuff was better. Well, but it was.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
"It's Impolite to Stare": Brian De Palma and Redacted
By Adam Nayman
Late in Brian De Palma’s harrowing new drama Redacted, two American soldiers sit in their barracks in Samarra, shooting a video eulogy for a fellow squad member. His murder by Iraqi insurgents had come as retribution for a home invasion in which a local teenager was raped and then killed along with her family—a crime perpetrated by this same pair. In lieu of any remorse, hollow-eyed private Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) unravels a strange, rambling story about his late older brother, gazing a hole into the camera before shifting his intense attentions to his comrade. When the other soldier nervously asks what he’s looking at, Flake offers this non sequitur: “my momma told me it’s impolite to stare.”
This seemingly throwaway remark proves crucial to understanding Redacted. It may also be the last word on De Palma’s career.
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To read the rest of the article at Eye Weekly, click here.
Links for the Day (November 15th, 2007)
1. "Are You An Extra In Your Own Life?": Jim Emerson ponders and hopes you'll answer -- Dennis Cozzalio did.
["Do not file this post in the self-help section. (For one thing, there isn't one.) A while ago, I published a frame-grab from David Mamet's "House of Games," in which I can be glimpsed as an extra. That got me to thinking about other people I know who have appeared (however briefly or peripherally) as extras, and how (or if) such experiences have affected their lives and/or their relationships to the movies."]
2. "A Canterbury Tale; Beware of a Holy Whore; Act of Violence": Just one of the many treasures at Ed Howard's online film viewing diary, Only the Cinema.
["Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore is, essentially, one big in-joke, a feature-length parody of his own filmmaking process, in which he casts almost his entire stock company. It's a very nasty, acerbically funny film, with Fassbinder fearlessly turning his sharp tongue on his own image and the sexual complications that constantly surrounded him."]
3. "Bloomberg Unveils Coney Redevelopment Plan": From the Village Voice.
["Locked in a stalemate with a developer over the future of Coney Island, city officials unveiled a new vision for the area that seemingly solves the problem: Make the disputed land into parkland. The parcel of Coney that includes the much-beloved Astroland would keep its current amusement zoning but it would be expanded to include music venues, an Imax theater and restaurants, according to the long-awaited Coney Island Development Corporation plan unveiled today."]
4. "Borders Adds TV Watching to Its Bookstores’ Entertainment": From the New York Times. (Hattip to Lance Mannion.)
["Borders bookstores — with their cafes, toys and games and large displays of movies and music — have never exactly been confused with, say, university libraries. A new strategy at Borders will reinforce the message that its stores are not just about books: the company has been installing 37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather."]
5. "Original Star Trek Scribe Gets Mad Over New Movie": Time for another spot-on Ellison Wonder-rant.
["Thank you, and thank Peter David, who just called to alert me, as have you, Mark, to yet another gimmegimme grab by Paramount and the Star trek francchise that makes billions, but withholds recognition or recompense to the artists who labored in that vein."]
Quote of the Day: H.P. Lovecraft
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Repeated from our first link, "Portrait of Dad," by Dennis Cozzalio's daughter.
Clip of the Day: Sonic the hedgehog's really let himself go.
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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.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
"On the Circuit": Brian De Palma Interview
By Keith Uhlich
The House Next Door is proud to present the ongoing podcast/review series, "On the Circuit", a joint production with Zoom In Online. "On the Circuit" podcasts feature conversations with various personalities in the world of film and television. In this segment (accessible both after the break and at Zoom In Online), I speak with director Brian De Palma about his latest work, Redacted, and offer some of my own thoughts on the film, which has generated a fair share of controversy at its numerous film festival showings. Redacted debuts in U.S. theaters this Friday, November 16th. See my original review here.
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Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
Malaysia in the Movies: After This Our Exile, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, and The Elephant and the Sea
By Andrew Chan
When I moved back to the 
Less than ten years after Entrapment, the landscape has changed faster than I could have ever expected. Following the continued rise of Western interest in Southeast Asia, and the arrival of internationally recognized filmmakers from the region such as 
As a multiethnic society, 
The first, a father-son saga called After This Our Exile, played at the New York Asian Film Festival in June and the Asian American International Film Festival in July, and marked Hong Kong New Wave pioneer Patrick Tam's first directorial effort since 1989. A big winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards and Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Festival, it is Malaysian only in the broadest sense, and is perhaps better described as a pan-Chinese prestige picture; as with many contemporary Chinese-language films, Exile's cast, crew, and funding represent a multinational effort, a fact given away particularly by the clash of various non-Malaysian Cantonese accents among the actors. A valentine to his students in both 
While the change of location from his native
Writer and film programmer Roger Garcia has given the movie its most eye-catching blurb, calling it "the first masterpiece of Hong Kong cinema of the 21st century"—a statement which may have more to do with a current resistance to the "internationalism" of Hong Kong's art-house hits than it does with the actual film. Tam's career has long been overshadowed in the West by his protégé Wong Kar-wai (for whom he edited Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time), and this may not be without legitimate reason—if his shrill satire, Nomad (1982), and uninspired gangster flick, Final Victory (1987), can be said to represent his best work. In Exile, Tam's much-acclaimed editing draws too much attention to itself, and his once-groundbreaking sexuality feels labored. The pitch of the melodrama falls short of the exquisite heights it promises, at times veering inelegantly from low-key earnestness to overblown theatricality.
One revelation, though, is Kwok, who loomed large in my childhood as the studliest of '90s Cantopop idols. Here, this perennial lightweight is startlingly, convincingly haggard, and though his performance is too uneven to be a complete triumph, his transformation from youthful spunkiness to world-weariness could be said to echo Tam's own career. For all its missteps, the film—at its most powerful—hints at emotional depths not seen in the director's earlier, more conspicuously innovative works. As the father and son drift from house to hotel to streets and back alleys, Tam strikes upon brief moments that precisely evoke their rootlessness—a feeling at odds with the vivid sense of place the film maintains from the beginning. Underneath the palm trees, in the tropical heat, severed from any trace of Confucian family values, and attached to blind hopes of immigration to the West, these characters find themselves exiles in their own country.
More widely distributed this summer was the latest from Tsai Ming-liang, a director usually regarded as the youngest of the New Taiwanese Cinema's most significant members. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone marks a return not only to his native 
As in What Time Is It There?, Tsai plays tricks with physical and emotional distances, as well as with the porous boundaries of the self. By casting its star in two different roles (as Tam did with Aaron Kwok), and dividing him across two plot strands, the film interrogates the forms of separation nature presents alongside those which society constructs. The language barrier between the homeless Lee and a Bangladeshi worker who cares for him is juxtaposed with the divide between consciousness and unconsciousness embodied by the comatose Lee. Ethnicity is also called into question, most pointedly in an early scene in which a gang of hustlers cannot figure out whether Lee is Malay, Chinese, or Indian. Tsai is attracted to all that is alienating and sinister about urban life, and in Kuala Lumpur,
It may be that Tsai's great contribution to the Taiwanese New Wave was to adapt Hou Hsiao-hsien's style of long shots and long takes to his own personal, absurdist vision. In his work, stylistic choices usually associated with realism or objectivity are turned inside out; refusing to turn away from scenes of urination, masturbation, and hilariously uncomfortable sex, his gaze can be so blank and brutal it cuts through to the nightmare-logic that reality often possesses. I can't agree with the critics who were bored by the film's surface similarities to Tsai's previous seven features; to me, the director's self-conscious use of cinematic time and space remains as exquisite as we have come to expect. But, more importantly, the film is exciting because it introduces an essential element to our appreciation of Tsai as one of our greatest and bravest contemporary directors. At last, in this film, we can see how his mischievous aesthetic derives as much from the unholy cultural and ethnic transgressions of Malaysian life as it does from Buñuel's surrealism, Antonioni's disaffection, and Bertolucci's eroticism. The wonderful, painful absurdities that arise from social interaction across cultures are revealed as vital sources for Tsai's unnerving sense of humor. As a result, we get a film that is both disturbing and strangely optimistic, mainly because Tsai can't help but see 
By comparison, Woo Ming Jin's The Elephant and the Sea—one of two Malaysian entries at this year's Asian American International Film Festival—can sometimes seem a bit like Tsai-lite. Many of the trademarks are there: the resolutely static camera; minimal dialogue and music; the disaffected and practically mute male lead; obsession with sexual longing and dissatisfaction; and tension between an ascetic style and narrative unpredictability. The film stands as a testament to Tsai's sizable influence on current filmmakers and to the attractiveness of an aesthetic that can accommodate both the real and the grotesque. But it also demonstrates that Woo has learned well, particularly in his consistently intelligent camerawork, instinct for ellipsis, and hypnotic pacing. In this, his second feature, the young director speaks to our apocalyptic moment even more directly than I Don't Want to Sleep Alone does, as well as to the anxieties of disaster-prone 
Like much of Tsai's work, Woo's film is an exercise in modern-day ennui, punctuated by moments, images, and details of comic and emotional resonance. And, as also seen in Tsai's films (for example, in Lee Kang-sheng's infection in The River), water is charged with symbolism and seems to actually be taking a measurement of the society's moral decay. Woo distinguishes himself, in this otherwise faithful imitation, by smoothing away most of the shock value that scared viewers off from films like Vive L'Amour and The River; his two protagonists here are not necessarily sympathetic, but they somehow manage to maintain a non-threatening appearance of innocence, naïveté, even stupidity that Tsai used to withhold from his earlier, more sinister characters. Where many of the lonely people in Tsai's films (with the notable exception of those in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone) seem so far gone as to be unredeemable by love, Woo's antiheroes seem to want nothing but love—an animal pursuit that Elephant largely avoids dressing up in moral judgment or detailed characterization. Though it might be difficult to recognize from the arm's length at which the film holds you, there is a soft-heartedness here that can humanize the difficulty of Tsai's style for a whole new audience.
While the three films I've discussed are not ethnographic, sociological, or political in nature, they inevitably will be (and should be) viewed as windows into a part of the world that was, not too long ago, rarely ever covered in the news, much less seen in the movies. Interpreted as societal diagnoses, the portrait they form together might seem overwhelmingly bleak: out of this selection of thematically disparate films, the characterization that emerges is one of a community divided as much as enriched by its linguistic and ethnic diversity, a society undone by the apocalyptic mood of our times and a decaying sense of family responsibility, and a culture in which crime and self-exploitation are accepted features of a large, neglected underclass. Indeed, when my dad finished watching After This Our Exile (which, as a melodrama, is probably the least acidic of the three in its social critique), he immediately expressed concern that Tam had portrayed
Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.
Heroes: Season 2, Episode 31, "Four Months Ago"
By David Sims
After the promising strides of last week’s episode, Heroes takes a turn for the dull again with a wrenchingly uninteresting super-flashback, imaginatively titled “Four Months Ago”. Written by showrunner/creator Tim Kring and directed by Greg Beeman, the episode has been hyped as the answer to unresolved mysteries and a jump-off point to reboot the increasingly derided second season. Sadly, the only answers “Four Months Ago” provides are those that the audience had either guessed or didn’t care enough about to guess. Building a flashback narrative into one-hour dramas has been a popular television conceit since the success of Lost, but “Four Months Ago” is a flashback for flashback’s sake -- there is very little here that the audience shouldn’t have just seen in the season two premiere.
It seems the reason for the looped structure of the season so far is to sustain some of the weakest plots and to preserve the surprise of the easily-guessed twists that come out of them. I’m thinking of Peter’s (Milo Ventimiglia) long sojurn as an amnesiac in Ireland, and Hiro’s (Masi Oka, not present this week) adventures with drunken swordsman Kensei (David Anders) in feudal Japan. This week, we find out that both storylines are related (sort of), in that the immortal Kensei, now called Adam Monroe, shared a cell wall with Peter in a hero-prison and persuaded Peter to free him. The bleary months Peter spent in Ireland were an unfortunate hitch caused by the memory-wiping Haitian (Jimmy Jean-Louis), and all is righted in this episode. Which officially means the whole memory loss stuff was a waste of the audience’s time -- all it got Peter was a dippy love interest who’s already vanished, with every other mystery about his character being resolved in this episode, information we could have known ages ago. How did he survive his nuclear explosion? Well, he just…did, using his healing powers. What’s his connection to the sultry Elle (Kristen Bell, still struggling to define a very underwritten role) and the ambiguous Bob (Stephen Tobolowsky)? They were his jailors, although their motives in keeping Peter locked up are questionable. And just how did Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) survive all this? Why, Peter and Adam healed him with Adam’s magical blood! I highly doubt any viewers had been desperate for two months to get that information. It all ties together perfectly well, it’s just the presentation that’s so wanting.
Some of Heroes’ smaller plot devices are really starting to bother me as well. The Haitian is a prime example -- as a power inhibitor and a memory-wiper, he’s obviously useful for the show to have around, especially as Peter is incredibly powerful and impossible to imprison without him. Nonetheless, having him show up all over the place whenever he’s needed has stopped being ambiguous and started to be annoying. Wasn’t he sick and dying of the hero-plague in Haiti at the start of this season? Didn’t he break ranks with the Company at some point? I’m probably forgetting something, but it’s still symptomatic of the hasty clean-up jobs Heroes does on its storylines every so often. The resolution of the Nathan/Peter incident in the season one finale was even sloppier -- I still don’t really buy that Nathan needed to fly Peter at all, or that Peter wouldn’t pursue information about his brother’s fate more vociferously. Bob’s game of back-and-forth on the release of the hero virus (he seems to change his mind about three times per episode) long ago ceased being intriguing and is now just infuriating as well as confusing.
Perhaps the sloppiest storytelling comes in another revisit of the miserable black-oil twins, Maya (Dania Ramirez) and Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz). “Four Months Ago” is their ‘backstory’ episode, as season one’s equally well-titled “Six Months Ago” had sketched out the backstory of most of the original cast. Problem being, the backstory of Maya and Alejandro is a literal replay of the same story we’ve seen five times from them -- Maya gets angry, Maya kills people by mistake, Maya is horrified, Alejandro fixes it, they keep running. All that is different about this episode’s pass at it is that it is the first time it happens -- to them. Not to the poor audience though, who surely were unanimously snoozing during these interludes. Tim Kring has warned that some of his unpopular new characters will be killed off because they haven’t taken with the audience -- Maya and Alejandro are surely top of the list, especially as they’re stuck in a car with psycho Sylar (Zachary Quinto). Although axing them would be the right move, it would just further drive home the wayward pointlessness of these episodes.
For all its revelations, “Four Months Ago” is actually a relatively sparse episode, focusing mainly on Peter’s interactions with Elle and Adam as well as answering another hardly urgent question: just how did Niki’s (Ali Larter) intangible husband D.L. (Leonard Roberts) die? Although he’d never been a major fan favorite, I have been surprised at the hardly-mourned departure of his character, so much so that I assumed he was still alive somewhere. It appears not though, as “Four Months Ago” functions as a sort of coda for the level-headed, if significantly boring, hero -- by making him a literal hero, no less, albeit briefly. D.L. is motivated to inspire his son with genuine heroism, becoming a do-gooder firefighter who taps his powers to rescue people from burning buildings. It’s probably the closest the show has ever come to the classic, Golden Age standard of superheroism -- with D.L.’s firefighting gear the only real ‘costume’ the show’s ever displayed, as well. Of course, D.L.’s continual devotion to his schizophrenic wife bites him in the ass once again, as he is whacked by some lowlife in an L.A. club when he tries to track down Niki after another psychotic break. It is a pretty grim conclusion for the character, as well as a little inconsistent (I get that he was shot at point-blank range, but we’ve seen his body phase instinctively to gunshots before -- why not now?). My guess is that D.L. was dispatched because he never caught the audience’s imagination, but being lumbered with Niki was always gonna be his biggest character issue.
I hold out hope for Heroes, if only because last week’s episode was a lot of fun and “Four Months Ago” did nothing to sabotage the narrative wheels that have finally been set in motion. Still, “Four Months Ago” really pushed home the inherent weaknesses in Heroes that the second season has laid bare. Here’s hoping that things can moderately pick up in the final few weeks of the season (unless the strike ends quicker than expected). Otherwise I fear Heroes could be truly doomed.
London-based writer David Sims is a contributor to South Dakota Dark.
Links for the Day (November 14th, 2007)
1. "McDonald’s expands coffee, breakfast choices": Time for a dance number! (Lead image from Animal Friends Croatia.)
["McDonald's Corp. laid the foundation to perk up its beverage and breakfast offerings Tuesday with plans to add upscale coffee drinks, chicken biscuit sandwiches and breakfast burritos to its U.S. restaurants in the coming weeks."]
2. A roundup of new Redacted reviews: J. Hoberman in the Village Voice; Armond White in the New York Press; Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International; and a conversation/podcast with Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. My own podcast interview with De Palma is now up at Zoom In Online. Look for its publication on The House later today.
["Hoberman: De Palma is consistent in this fractured multimedia methodology, as well as in his cinematic jouissance—at one point fabricating an arty French doc, replete with symphonic music and Wild Bunch homage, to show Sally and his unit administering a checkpoint. This "professional" movie enables De Palma to establish that of the 2,000 Iraqi civilians killed at coalition checkpoints, only 60 were ever ID'd as insurgents. (Those French will say anything...)"]
3. "Bush vetoes spending bill, tells Congress to cut the pork": Follow Ronald McDonald's example.
["President Bush vetoed a $600 billion spending bill Tuesday, accusing Democratic leaders of wasting money and plotting tax increases, then took his budget fight with Congress on the road. "The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far, it's acting like a teenager with a new credit card," he said in a speech in New Albany, Indiana."]
4. "Norman Mailer and Me": An appreciation by Steven Simunic of Neon Hustle.
["Norman Mailer died Saturday of renal failure at the age of 84, and the world yawned. It's hard to overstate just how sad that is."]
5. "Ira Levin, of ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ Dies at 78": From the New York Times. More at the New York Sun.
["Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps — and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “The Boys From Brazil” — died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78."]
Quote of the Day: Ira Levin
Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): A few pictures from House contributor Peet Gelderblom of his recent trip to Uganda and Kenya.
Clip of the Day: The Many Kills of Paul Kersey... in twenty-one minutes.
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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.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Southland Tales: 2007, 2008, Moby, Mulholland, and Mushroom Clouds
By Dan Callahan
A pre-/post-apocalyptic mash-up of epic proportions, Richard Kelly’s likably self-indulgent Southland Tales is a midnight movie to be reckoned with, even if it winds up being sharper about the surreal effect of junky pop culture symbols than about anything relating to politics, the beleaguered earth, or the time travel tropes that he treated more fully in his first feature, Donnie Darko. In that cult classic debut, set in a lovingly re-created 1988, upsetting feelings of teen loneliness and rage amid suburban comfort were burnished by cannily selected sightings of forgotten pop icons. Kelly explored Donnie’s pain and took in piercing glances at the more adult pain of the ensemble cast, but his film was really about seeing how great Katharine Ross looked at age sixty, and about laughing at the mere sight of Patrick Swayze. It was about a sinuous tracking shot set to Tears for Fears’s “Head Over Heels.” Like so many first films, it was about the joy of making a movie.
Southland Tales leaves behind the humanism of Donnie Darko and amps up the weird celebrity signage. After getting booed at Cannes, Kelly spent fourteen months re-editing it, taking out about twenty minutes; it moves swiftly and buoyantly now, creating its own world with its own inner logic. Kelly has called the film a comedy, but it’s never particularly funny; the plot, heavy with conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, is deliberately labyrinthine and teasing and finally irrelevant to the film’s sensual pleasures and so-bad-it’s-good style. This is a cartoon movie with a cartoon cast, all of whom, to their credit, act as if they know exactly what’s going on. If Southland Tales has an emblematic performer, it would have to be Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays Krysta Now, a blond porn actress turned reality show hostess. Gellar finds just the right note of deadly absurdity; she could be playing Ionesco. Her Krysta has a luscious visual weightlessness (she’s all blond hair and toned, tan bod) and her cheerful, thoughtless endorsement of sex is fairly irresistible. Krysta Now defines Bad TV: diverting, addictive, soul-destroying.
What is Southland Tales about? It’s about Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and nuclear bombs. It’s about how Gellar’s hair turns brown for a climactic dance with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It’s about Wallace Shawn squawking, “Preposterous!” in lieu of his trademark, “Inconceivable!” It’s about the creepy little lady from Poltergeist (Zelda Rubinstein) teamed up for earth-shaking experiments with that guy from Moonlighting (Curtis Armstrong). It’s about Miranda Richardson, the only card-carrying Thespian in the cast, presiding glacially over a vast Internet-filtering system. It’s about Justin Timberlake drunkenly lip-synching to the camera as Busby Berkeley-style female dancers mechanically offer themselves up to him (a ghastly parody of Timberlake’s recent HBO concert). It’s about munching on Cheetos all day. It’s about the seedy beauty of the Santa Monica Pier. And in the end, it’s about how even when the world is collapsing, rich people will still be swilling champagne at a swank party while others fight in the streets.
Southland Tales has its peculiarities. What, for example, are we supposed to make of the constant references to dick and sucking dick and fucking dick, etc., almost all of which is spewed by the women in the cast? (I guess if you’re going to make a movie as personal as this, you should probably send your id to the dry cleaners beforehand to wipe out unseemly, distracting stains.) There are long scenes with Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler of Saturday Night Live that go nowhere, and Oteri has a rather large role that she inhabits uncomfortably. The hyper-ironic Saturday Night Live style of humor has no real place here: this is not a film that can accommodate a burlesque scene of Jon Lovitz propositioning Cheri Oteri. On the other hand, a scene where Nora Dunn and John Larroquette square off about terrorism in an outdoor café gathers a surprising amount of heat because these are the last two people on earth you’d expect to see making any kind of political point on any screen.
J. Hoberman has compared Southland Tales to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. It’s nowhere near as good as that masterpiece, mainly because it lacks heart and emotional specificity. However, as a cool condemnation of our culture of divisiveness, war and hypocrisy, it hits more than a few bulls-eyes, which cannot be said for the lame “Let’s talk about Iraq” movies that have piled up this year. K