1. ""Rediscovered"! Metropolis.": Major, major news, courtesy David Hudson at GreenCine.
["For film historians and cinephiles in general, this could easily be the story of the year. The ZEITmagazin has just posted at its site a preview of a piece running in tomorrow's edition that confirms the existence of the original version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. "The most important silent film in German history," they announce, "can, from this day forward, be considered rediscovered.""]
2. "Superhero agonistes": Godfrey Cheshire on the pleasures of Hancock. Also Roman de gare.
["Summer 2008, just now reaching its movie midpoint, is, however, in the singularly happy position of having produced not one but two rather exceptional superhero pictures, films that refresh and revivify the genre rather than running it further into the ground. Jon Favreau's clever, solidly crafted Iron Man, which kicked off the season in May, has already proved a durable, deserving favorite with audiences and critics alike. Peter Berg's Hancock, which opens in time for the Fourth of July, impresses me as similarly successful, but for very different reasons. Not surprisingly, both movies seem to start from the premise that the superhero is by now a bit of a cultural joke, and that something radical must be done to restore his appeal and relevance. Iron Man approaches the task by giving its hero a topical, satiric edge while also snazzing up a lot of the old genre essentials; smart and sly, it conjures a stylish tone and storyline that turn out to be models of well-executed consistency."]
3. "All Racist on the Western Coast": Nick's Flick Picks hosts the third episode of "Best Pictures from the Outside In," this time focusing on All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash.
["The bumper crop of early-30s antiwar films this one kicked off (many of them written by John Monk Saunders, who wrote Wings) weren't this realistic, and from what I remember of the early WW2 films that dealt with combat, they chose the "slight grimace, then fall over quietly" type of battle death. This scene also plays up Milestone's mastery of all the tools available to him as a filmmaker, and at times it's almost as if the creaky-early-talkie period didn't exist, that he was able to meld some of the impeccable technique of the late silents with all the possibilities of sound without losing anything from either side of that formerly impenetrable boundary between sound and silent. It's a legitimately great movie, one of the ten best winners of all time."]
4. "Sympathy for the Bedeviled": Dennis Cozzalio reviews The Free Will, just out on the Benten Films DVD label.
["The Free Will doesn’t take easy shots at the ubiquity of sexualized images in advertising and in the mall-culture fashion of young women. Theo is frequently seen framed with these images, but Glasner and Vogel are not so naïve as to suggest that Theo’s rage is an inevitable response to them. They exist simply as part of the fabric of reality with which he must integrate and respond to responsibly if he hopes to survive. A friend at a halfway house where he lands just out of detention suggests that the journey Theo is about to take will be difficult as hell, and he couldn’t be more right; Theo sublimates his energies, sexual and otherwise, into joyless exercise, endless repetitions of movement designed to keep his mind from going places it ought not venture, but he suspects, as do we, that another breakdown is inevitable. The suspense in The Free Will is less artful and more a looming sense of unshakeable dread—it’s just a matter of when and where, not if the rage will be loosed again."]
5. "New Zealand man sells his soul to 'Hell'": From CNN. And, yes, that is an actual "Hell Pizza" billboard.
["A New Zealand man has sold his soul to hell -- Hell Pizza, that is. The New Zealand pizza chain said Thursday it had struck a deal with Walter Scott, 24, to buy a deed to his soul, shortly after an online auction site that initially agreed to the sale withdrew it from the Internet because of complaints it was in bad taste. Scott offered his soul on the TradeMe site on Wednesday, saying he had not found it to be much use. "I can't see it, touch it or feel it, but I can sell it, so I'm going to palm it off to the highest bidder," Scott, 24, said on the sale site. The auction attracted more than 32,000 hits and over 100 bids before it was taken down."]
Quote of the Day: Susan Sontag
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The image from Michael Koresky's window, from his latest dispatch from Sweden's Bergman Festival. 
Clip of the Day: A Film 4 interview with Mike Leigh and Sally Hawkins on their latest collaboration, Happy-Go-Lucky. (Hattip: Paul Martin)
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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. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Links for the Day (July 3rd, 2008)
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2 comments:
Re: #5: This made me think of two things:
1. That Squirrel Nut Zippers song:
In the afterlife,
You could be headed for the serious strife.
Now you make the scene all day.
But tomorrow there'll be Hell to pay."
2. The Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse. What would make a great Twilight Zone episode: The guy sells his soul to Hell Pizza, and after they have it, they enslave him and force him to deliver pizzas for all eternity with no pay. "That'll teach ya!" says Peter Jackson as he chomps on his second delivered pie.
Re #2: I saw Hancock yesterday, and while it wasn't as awful as I was led to believe, it DID completely fall apart. I didn't buy the twist at all, and Hancock's back story was so sloppy I wish they'd just left things unexplained.
People keep saying "I don't want to spoil the twist," but truthfully, it needs to be spoiled because it's even more preposterous than M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Speaking of Mr. Giant Ego from Philly, Unbreakable was far from a classic, but it was a more interesting take on similar material.
Will Smith and Jason Bateman both deserve better than the movie they're in, giving performances above and beyond what the material deserves. Charlize Theron spends the first half of the movie playing that dramatic prairie dog from the Internet--all she does is stare at the camera with an overheated look on her face. (After the FOURTH time she does this, the audience started laughing at her.) Then she does something really stupid, which is the big SPOILER people keep trying to avoid telling you about but is blatantly there in the fucking trailer. All it does is raise questions that the film either can't answer or cheats to reconcile. Why didn't Hancock (the character) sense the big twist before? Why didn't Theron just leave if she felt she and Bateman were in danger? How did the villains, previously sodomized by Hancock (well, that's what it was, folks), know Hancock's weakness?
I originally thought that all the editing and paring down to get the PG-13 was the reason the movie was so lackluster, but I can't see them putting anything back into this movie that would make it work.
This doesn't even belong in the same sentence as Iron Man, as that film was thought out and didn't leave its fantastic lead performance flailing in the wind the way Hancock does. There are some very funny moments in Hancock, but it seems scripted by Charlie and Donald Kaufman. This is Adaptation redone as a superhero movie.
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