The House Next Door

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.

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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?

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To read the review, click here.

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By Matt Zoller SeitzBecause 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?

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To read the review, click here.

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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."]

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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.'"]

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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.'"]

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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?"]

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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."]

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Quote of the Day:

“The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keep us going.” -- Molly Haskell

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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To read the rest of the review at The Daily Californian, click here.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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.'"]

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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."]

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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

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Eva Marie Saint, from a circa 1953 publicity photo.


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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.

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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.

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London-based writer David Sims is a contributor to South Dakota Dark.

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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:"]

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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)."]

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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."]

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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."]

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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."]

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Quote of the Day: Jean Genet

"A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness."

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Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The Jesus pancake.



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Clip of the Day: Inseperable - A boy and his python

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

Read more!

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 the sculptures-in-motion 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 Beowulf, dangling from his dragon-son's body by a chain, cuts off his own arm to give himself a better shot at the creature's heart. The hero dies in the surf beside beside the golden humanoid corpse of his son; the combatants expire (like Grendel before them) 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.

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