A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom
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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.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Directorama #20
911 (51). They Died With Their Boots On (1942, Raoul Walsh) (featuring Matt Zoller Seitz)
By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
George Armstrong Custer: courageous Civil War hero, honorable friend to Native Americans, steadfast lover and martyr to the sins of American avarice. One doesn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the inaccuracies and distortions presented by Raoul Walsh of one of the most dubious heroes of the American West. But if one is looking for the quintessential Walshian hero - rambunctious and goal-driven to the point of heedlessness, charmingly mischievous yet chivalrous and principled - one needn’t look further than here. A rare stab by the crime and action master at the prestige biopic, the film sustains energy throughout its two and a half hours thanks to energetic acting (especially by Flynn, in one of his best roles), a masterful shifting of moods (schoolboy comedy, tender romance, social drama, and of course action Western) that would make the likes of John Ford envious, and an awesome array of dynamic blocking, framing, camera movement and editing, most famously in the climactic enactment of the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of the landmark action scenes in Hollywood history, where the frame plays like an open hand closing into a fist, crushing the soldiers trapped within. On purely cinematic terms, the film is a masterpiece both on macro and micro levels, each scene captivating with lively, almost musical exchanges of dialogue and mise-en-scene, building to a story amounting to one man’s massive thrust into destiny.To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here. See after the break for two video essays on the film, featuring The House Next Door editor-in-chief Matt Zoller Seitz.
Introductory Video Essay, also accessible here.
Sequence Analysis, also accessible here. Read more!
Links for the Day (March 31st, 2008)
1. "African American filmmakers who seek to be next in line": A feature by Greg Braxton forthe L.A. Times on the perceived effects of Tyler Perry's movies.
["In fact, Perry's popularity -- and the images he has presented, particularly Madea, the gun-toting, trash-talking grandmother portrayed by Perry wearing a dress and heavy makeup -- has ignited a debate among participants and observers of the black film scene. If Lee laid the groundwork for a diverse army of black creators, then Perry has had the opposite effect, according to several experienced and aspiring African American filmmakers who want to tell dramatic, personal stories with complexity, and without bawdy humor, broad characters or facile resolutions. They contend they are all dressed up with no place to show, all but shut out by studios who have embraced the Perry formula, as well as comedies such as "Who's Your Caddy?" or the youth-oriented frolics "You Got Served," "Stomp the Yard" and "How She Move.""]
2. "Seeing Green": Sean Burns interviews David Gordon Green for Philadelphia Weekly, and finds he's something of a Seagalogist.
["”Dead serious. A friend and I just wrote this movie called One in the Chamber, which we want to use to start our own straight–to–DVD action franchise.” Though Green’s formidable art–cinema chops and close ties with Terence Malick give him the reputation of an aesthete, he’s got a not–so–secret love for cinematic junk food. In fact, when the mad genius Internet movie critic known only as Outlaw Vern self–published Seagalogy, a mind–blowingly comprehensive 327–page study of Steven Seagal’s films, David Gordon Green wrote the introduction. ”Huge fan,” he tells me. ”Okay, so I didn’t like Glimmer Man, and a couple of them aren’t my cup of tea, but I grew up watching B–Western serials with my dad, and it’s really the same kind of thing. You see the name, you know what you’re gonna get, you have a good time with it.” Yes, there’s even a One in the Chamber role he wrote with Seagal in mind. ”I might try to get him to be in it, just for the mythology of it. We’ll see what happens.”"]
3. "Dith Pran, Killing Fields survivor, dead at 65": From The Baltimore Sun. More from The New York Times and a recent interview with Pran at The Star-Ledger.
["Word comes today that Dith has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65. So he no longer walks among the living. It is sad that he is gone. But at least we are comforted by knowing that his death came not at the hands of the murderous Khmer Rouge but of nature's killing field."]
4. "'I smoke weed all the damn time': Keith Richards": Fuck yeah, Keith! Your father's ashes approve.
["Rolling Stones rocker Keith Richards refuses to steer clear of drugs completely, admitting that he still smokes marijuana "all the damn time". The guitarist was addicted to heroin at the height of the legendary band's 1970s glory days. However, Richards confessed that his bad experiences with drugs haven't dissuaded him from upholding one last illegal vice. "I smoke my head off. I smoke weed all the damn time. There, you've got it. But that's my benign weed. That's all I take, that's all I do. But I do smoke and I've got some really good hash," The Sun quoted him, as saying."]
5. "Over 100 Staffers Leave Newsweek": A Radar Online exclusive; among the writers leaving is senior film critic David Ansen.
["The staff of Newsweek will shrink dramatically, after 111 staffers on its news and business sides accepted a buyout last week. Among those leaving are some of the magazine's best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain, a former president of the magazine who moved over to sister publication Budget Travel at the beginning of this year, is also departing."]
Quote of the Day: William Hutton
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): For my father: travel guru Rick Steves stands in front of the island abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, which he writes about in this CNN article.
Clip of the Day: "The Worst Movie Scenes of All Time": Episode 1: On Deadly Ground
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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, March 30, 2008
Links for the Day (March 30th, 2008)
1. "Jones/Kael": The thread on Nathan Lee at The Reeler is visited by Kent Jones, offering a lengthy riposte to a commenter who took issue with several of his statements on criticism and Pauline Kael. Scroll down the page to see his entry.
["I never realized that I’d destroyed Pauline Kael’s cultural authority, let alone intended to do so. And just think: it was pointed out to me in a post about a writer who was just fired from his job, and who you wasted no time in denigrating. Do you really believe that I, or anyone else for that matter, is capable of lessening Pauline Kael’s cultural authority, let alone destroying it? Find me a film critic who is more widely cited in the mainstream press and I’ll send you all the money in my pocket. There are no entries on Andrew Sarris or Manny Farber in A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Louis Menand would never dream of writing a New Yorker piece on Stanley Kauffman. No one is quoted more frequently, and apart from James Agee no one else’s writings have been so lovingly and exhaustively collected. Almost seven years after her death, she remains a powerful cultural force."]
2. "No God for Anton Chigurh?": By Jim Emerson at Scanners.
["The "faith" that man had isn't in God, but in the future of his species right here on this earth. What do you think?"]
3. "Clinton Shouldn’t Feel Forced to Quit Race, Obama Says": From The New York Times. Related, from the Washington Post: "Clinton Seeks to Cash In on 'Drop Out' Talk".
["There's a silver lining in every dark cloud, or at least that's the approach Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign is taking when it comes to recent comments made by surrogates for Barack Obama that Clinton should drop from the Democratic presidential race. Just hours after Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) told Vermont Public Radio that there was "no way" Clinton could win enough delegates to claim the nomination and, therefore, "she ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," an e-mail entitled "The Pattern" arrived in The Fix's inbox. "Have you noticed the pattern?" Clinton asks in the message, adding: "Every time our campaign demonstrates its strength and resilience, people start to suggest we should end our pursuit of the Democratic nomination. "Those anxious to force us to the sidelines aren't doing it because they think we're going to lose the upcoming primaries. The fact is, they're reading the same polls we are, and they know we are in a position to win.""]
4. "Cities Switch Off Lights for Earth Hour": An Associated Press report.
["From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change. The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were. The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun."]
5. "Oldest Voice Recording, A French Folksong": From Information Week. Listen the audio here.
["A group of researchers has played what is thought to be the oldest recording of a human voice. The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris."]
Quote of the Day: Dr. Martin Henry Fischer
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Lead image for the story "Japan recovers oldest animation films"
Clip of the Day: Snow-covered windshield + telephone pole + rowdy teenagers =
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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, March 29, 2008
Links for the Day (March 29th, 2008)
1. "Oliver Stone to begin shooting Bush film ‘W.’": Stone! Bush! Brilliance!
["Like a bill being rapidly pushed through legislation, Oliver Stone’s film about President George W. Bush is expected to begin shooting within a month with a goal toward being released before the president leaves office next January. A person close to the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because plans were still being formalized, said Stone’s “W.” will begin filming in late April in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Academy Award-winning director only began shopping his script for financing in January, but has quickly captured the interest of investors and Hollywood. Stone has said that the film, which will focus on the life and presidency of Bush, won’t be an anti-Bush polemic, but, as he told Daily Variety, “a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?”"]
2. "Fabulous and Rich in Metaphor": House contributor N.P. Thompson on Opera Jawa, playing as part of the Global Lens series at the Seattle International Film Festival.
["The Indonesian “Opera Jawa” begins with the most quotable subtitle of any foreign film in many a moon: “In a pig’s liver, one can see an entire life.” The overweight troubadour who sings this line continues: “You can read anyone’s fate in it.” By his side, as if to demonstrate a liver’s reliability as an indicator of futures, a smiling trio lovingly admires a quivering organ. The beaming expressions on the faces of a husband, wife, and village elder suggest that they have a defective liver on their hands; for here, as in most operas, things are going to turn out badly. And despite writer-director Garin Nugroho’s surrealist bent, the opera he creates has more in common with the folk tragedy of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” than with the splashiness of a Bollywood musical."]
3. "Spoiling suspense": Jason Mittell on the issue of spoilers. (Hattip: David Bordwell)
["According to Hitchcock, suspense comes from being unable to intervene in the storyworld, a position that all viewers share regardless of their spoiled status. But there is another level as well here, as Hitchcock’s expertise was in how he revealed his story points, not the “facts” themselves - it seems that the elements that trigger suspense are found less in a narrative’s story, the series of events within the fictional world, but more in its telling (or what narratologists often call discourse), the expressive cues that elicit emotional reactions (such as music, camera angles, facial expressions, etc.)."]
4. "The Last Paid Picture Watchers?": Jason Bellamy ruminates on the changing landscape of film criticism.
["What I can’t imagine given the current state of things is the paid local critic rebounding according to the existing model, and that’s disheartening. I used to tell people that being a paid movie critic was a tough gig to get because it’s the kind of job you hold onto until you die. Now, sadly, the jobs are dying faster than the critics."]
5. "Cubans win OK to buy cellphones (cash only)": From the Los Angeles Times. More at The New York Times.
["Cuba announced Friday that it would allow ordinary citizens to purchase cellphones, which up until now have been set aside for Communist Party elite or those with connections. The move was seen as a sign of liberalization by the newly installed president, Raúl Castro. But even with the announcement, most Cubans earn only about $20 monthly in state salaries and will find it difficult to afford the phones without help from relatives off the island."]
Quote of the Day: Edward Albee, "Some Notes on Nonconformity" (1962)
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): And Jared Leto as Violet Beauregarde... Thank you ReverseBlog's Poster of the Week. See also our "Clip of the Day", inspired by the ReverseBlog comments section on this subject.
Clip of the Day: What happens when a weenie-eating leper judge meets a pre-Poetic Justice 2Pac? Nothing but trouble...
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Friday, March 28, 2008
House Movie Guide (March 28, 2008)
[Editor's Note: This is the inaugural installment of a new House feature compiling links to reviews of new and recent theatrical films playing in North America. It is intended as a sampling of critical opinion and not a guide to theaters because, hey, it's a big world. If we've left out any titles, or if you'd like to call our attention to a noteworthy review, feel free to leave a comment below.] 
ALEXANDRA. Manohla Dargis, New York Times: "Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra — a film of startling originality and beauty — feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here. Mr. Sokurov, a Russian director best known in America for Russian Ark, makes films so far removed from the usual commercial blather that it sometimes seems as if he’s working in a different medium. His work is serious, intense, at times opaque and so feverishly personal that it also feels as if you’re being invited into his head, not just another reality." J. Hoberman, Village Voice: "Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown. The star, octogenarian Galina Vishnevskaya, is an opera diva who never sings." 
AMERICAN ZOMBIE. Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: "Grace Lee's faux documentary takes one of horror cinema's enduring subjects -- the undead -- and crafts an amusing media satire on our fascination with/fear of marginalized cultures." Ben Sweet, LA Weekly: "Director Grace Lee plays an exaggerated version of herself in this mockumentary, which follows a pair of filmmakers as they shadow four zombies in an effort to infiltrate Los Angeles’ undead community...Computers don’t exist in their lives (a convenience-store slacker publishes a Xeroxed zine, not a blog); Live Dead, the zombies’ annual desert festival, is meant to be a Burning Man stand-in, but its dirty dreadlocked attendees and Ani DiFranco–esque balladeers are more reminiscent of Lollapalooza and Lilith Fair...The best zombie movies shock us into a realization about ourselves and the world in which we live, but how much can zombies teach us when their world so closely resembles 1995?" 
BACKSEAT. Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: "Only in America are adult men who refuse to grow up considered cute rather than developmentally disabled, and only in American movies is masculine immaturity celebrated with such regularity." Ed Gonzalez, Slant: "Essentially a hit-or-miss affair, Backseat features a character who only communicates via text message, an expression of the filmmakers' frustration for the sublimation of human relations that feels amusing but also weird for a film that suggests Sideways filtered through a hipster scrim."
BOARDING GATE. Manohla Dargis, New York Times: "I’m fairly certain one reason that the French director Olivier Assayas made Boarding Gate is that he wanted to watch the Italian actress Asia Argento strut around in black underwear and punishing heels. And why not? Ms. Argento looks delectable if somewhat demented in Boarding Gate, in which she comes across as a postmodern Pearl White, who starred in silent adventure serials like The Perils of Pauline. Ms. Argento seems to invite trouble, and Mr. Assayas, who has a way of capturing the seemingly ineffable, has a thing for troubled, troubling women." Glenn Kenny, Premiere: "This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller, and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith. There are some genuinely frisson-inducing twists, and he does wrap up the plot pretty neatly despite giving every indication that he's not going to. In the meantime, his mastery of the camera and his always innovative approach to setting are constant, knotty pleasures; the Paris of the film's first half is as alien to our perceived ideas of Paris as Godard's Alphaville was, while his Hong Kong is a crumbling labyrinth where the only clues about which corner to turn are provided by cell phone rings." David Edelstein, New York: "Boarding Gate was evidently made quickly and cheaply, and parts of it are fun. It’s too bad there’s no real viewer equivalent -- that you can’t watch a film quickly and cheaply." Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times: "The plot may be murky, but actress Asia Argento is a clear and commanding force throughout." 
CHAPTER 27. Nick Schager, Slant: "Jared Leto looks like he's eaten his 30 Seconds to Mars bandmates in Chapter 27, a daft, unrevealing based-on-real-events film in which the actor packs on the pounds, habitually fidgets, and indulges in the occasional spazzy freakout in order to embody John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman during the three days prior to his fateful December 1980 crime." Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters: "It’s established by now that Chapman, at the time of his crime, was full of contradictions, yearning to be like and pay tribute to Holden Caulfield, obsessed with and repelled by 'phonies,' seeking fame by killing the most famous man in the world. Confused and profoundly vulnerable, in J.P. Schaefer’s film he is also calculating and judgmental, determined to forge order out of his own psychic and emotional chaos. His resolve inspired by a fictional character, Chapman’s insanity is here plain and not quite harrowing: he rides into the city in a cab, his profile set in deep, dark close-up as he worries out loud about the ducks Holden worried about; in a cozy bookstore, he discovers the Wizard of Oz postcard he will leave so ominously in his hotel room dresser. Every moment, every look, every brief interaction is here weighted with intent and possible meaning."
THE COOL SCHOOL. Nick Schaeger, Slant: "In the '50s and '60s, Los Angeles transformed itself from an artistic wasteland into a burgeoning mecca of modern art, thereby confirming there was more to the world of painting, sculpture, and photography than what was happening in Paris and New York. With narration from Jeff Bridges, Morgan Neville's The Cool School details this vital period of creativity, in which a group of young artists championed by curator Walter Hopps at his famous Ferus gallery (1957 - 1966) made great strides in the areas of abstract expressionism and assemblage." Manohla Dargis, New York Times: "It’s an old story in some ways, a myth-making tale of a group of post-World War II aesthetic adventurers who, working together and alone, created an exciting American moment. Given the lingering prejudice of some East Coasters and the inferiority complex of select West Coasters, though, it’s also a story that deserves to be told often and as loudly as possible." Michael Joshua Rowin, IndieWire: "It's hard to avoid faint praise even when recommending Morgan Neville's I, which recounts Los Angeles' frequently overshadowed 1950s and 1960s art scene. As 'Scenes of Yesteryear' documentaries go it does right by its subject, providing an illuminating primer on a lesser-known strand of America's eruptive postwar art movement, even as it doesn't do much aesthetically to distinguish itself from the pack."
FLAWLESS. Scott Foundas, LA Weekly: "In director Michael Radford's latest, Demi Moore stars as the sole female executive at the fictional London Diamond Corporation, who, upon learning she’s about to get the boot, teams with a crafty cockney night janitor (Michael Caine) to empty the corporate vault of its 100-million-pound inventory. Rife with the lipstick traces of Inside Man, The League of Gentlemen (which it explicitly references) and countless other superior heist pictures, Flawless is the sort of movie that tends to get called “enjoyably old-fashioned,” except that there’s nothing enjoyable about it." Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "Caine--who, contrary to common critical opinion, is perfectly capable of giving a dull or misjudged performance--redeems this film almost wholesale." Desson Thomson, Washington Post: "Flawless makes an entertainingly nostalgic journey to old Britain -- that black-and-white world we remember from long-ago Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean movies." 
A FOUR LETTER WORD. Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: "With its breezy shots of male genitalia and characters nicknamed Long John and Tripod, A Four Letter Word is a surprisingly endearing romantic comedy that explores gay relationships with low-budget verve." Ed Gonzalez, The Village Voice: "Shot in and around New York City's queer hot spots (I see Vlada! I see Boys Room—the new one!), and brought to you in part by Manhunt, Andreas's pun-choked rom-com asks only for our passive identification, preening on the same wavelength as Jesse Archer's Luke, who sets out to prove that he is neither exception nor stereotype, only exceptional, after Stephen (Charlie David)—a hustler, professed top, and Luke's future boy toy—calls him 'a gay cliché.' 'All our world sees of our community is you,' says Stephen, almost as if he were describing the film." 
THE GRAND. Jim Ridley, Village Voice: "Great movies about gambling—Robert Altman's California Split, say, or Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels—concern almost everything but the rules of the game or even the outcome of the wager. What matters are faces, surroundings, sharp talk, and the behavior of people in the grip of fixation—people undaunted by losing, yet unappeased by winning. The Grand, a largely improvised comedy set at a Las Vegas poker championship, isn't as good or tough-minded as those movies. But it earns a seat at the table anyway, mostly because it's funny—sometimes very funny." Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters: "Werner Herzog plays The German. In another movie, this might be all you need to know. But in Zak Penn’s improvisational comedy, this delicious detail is slightly less meaningful. Though Herzog spends several minutes in mock-interview mode, describing how essential it is for him 'to kill something each day,' these are fleeting and generally overwhelmed by the rest of the movie’s awkward unfunniness." Philip Marchand, Toronto Star: "Just shy of being a first-rate comedy." Jan Stuart, Newsday: "Why don't mockumentaries ever go after targets worth the mocking?"
HATS OFF. Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: "A documentary tribute to the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, one of those people for whom the word 'individual' seems especially apt. Widowed at 65 by a husband who left only unpaid bills and fond memories, the indomitable Ms. Weddell saw an opportunity to follow her passion. 'I love illusion,' she says, describing an acting career that has paid her bills for almost three decades. From Law & Order to Sex and the City, from vampire movies to cheese commercials, this remarkable woman has compiled a résumé that defies the industry’s rampant ageism." Matthew Margini, Washington Square News: "That a 63-year-old woman could give birth caused comedian Patton Oswalt to dismiss science as being 'all about coulda, not shoulda.' Such words gnaw at Mimi Weddell, who treats her age as just a minor impediment to stardom, glamor and theatrical nobility. The new documentary Hats Off examines Weddell's mystique from a number of entertaining angles, but doesn't necessarily share (or preach) her unique perspective, which is at times stubbornly airy and self-obsessed." Nick Schager, Slant: "Quaint and slight, Hats Off revolves around Mimi Weddell, a 93-year-old model and actress (of stage and screen) whose boundless energy and indefatigable spirit are amazing…ly ho-hum." 
JUST ADD WATER. Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly: "There’s really only one reason to check out Just Add Water, and it’s Dylan Walsh’s wistful, smiling-through-the-melancholy performance as Ray, a man so defeated by life that he can no longer muster any resistance to the daily humiliations he suffers at home and at his blue-collar job. After discovering duplicity in his own home, Ray shakes off the doldrums, goes after the woman of his dreams and finally stands up to the Neanderthal teen bullies in his neighborhood. Unfortunately, bracketing Walsh’s thoughtful performance is a depiction of small-town, working-class life that swims in both formulaic indie-flick irony and Hollywood condescension." John Anderson, Variety: "Whimsy and the macabre are the operating systems in Just Add Water, and they're not always complementary." 
MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD. A.O. Scott, New York Times: "A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema." Ed Gonzalez, Slant: My Brother Is an Only Child -- whose title I've yet to completely wrap my mind around -- moves so playfully and briskly you may not notice its glibness, which may have been director Daniele Luchetti's intent." Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice: "The family as microcosm of a divided country: Two brothers 'come of age' in late-'60s Italy, as political strife reaches their provincial Latina (a city laid out by Mussolini's government)...If expectedly cynical about junior black-shirt hooliganism, Daniele Luchetti's film is also ambivalent about how piggishness takes the guise of 'free love' among the left, and deadpan funny with its 'de-fascisized' performance of 'Ode to Joy' at a student-occupied conservatory." David Edelstein, New York: "What makes My Brother Is an Only Child so alive and entertaining is how it dramatizes the endless tug-of-war between political conviction and personal experience—the way the lines twist and blur and finally implode." Armond White, New York Press: "Luchetti’s film continues the Italian tradition of movies that simultaneously explore family life and national politics...The broken-down house the boys grow up in (from which Accio eventually liberates them to better digs) is, of course, a symbol for Italy itself." 
PRICELESS. Ed Gonzalez, Slant: "Pierre Salvadori's re-imagining (read: vulgarization) of Breakfast at Tiffany's wears its contempt on its sleeve." Vadim Rizov, Village Voice: "Priceless begins as standard, unconvincing, assembly-line French farce and ends as a cop-out, feel-good rom-com. In between, it develops into something considerably more interesting." Raphaela Weissman, New York Press: "The American poster for the French comedy Priceless shows an elegantly dressed Audrey Tautou surrounded by four hands offering up expensive baubles. From this, we can glean the basic plot: The adorable pixie from Amélie plays a gold-digger. It’s not inaccurate, but it is misleading. While the publicity’s focus is on Tautou, an actress Americans immediately recognize (she also starred in an art-house flick called The Da Vinci Code), Priceless belongs to her co-star, Gad Elmaleh, who lends the film the bulk of its charm, originality and genuine humor." Stephen Holden, New York Times: "Because its shenanigans are so improbable, Priceless is too frivolous even to be called satire."
RUN, FAT BOY, RUN. Eric Kohn, New York Press: "Even Simon Pegg has repeatedly underutilized the distinct comedic appeal of Simon Pegg. Run, Fat Boy, Run, the directorial debut of David Schwimmer—inextricably identifiable as Ross from “Friends”—gives Pegg a screenplay credit, suggesting that he has written to his weaknesses. In both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright’s sly genre deconstructions, Pegg mimics the audience’s thrill of being adrift in fantastical conflict with wide-eyed incredulousness and a goofy demeanor. Akin to the underdog appeal of slapstick artists like Buster Keaton, the pathetic nature of Pegg’s characters hardens into a heroic streak. In Fat Boy, playing an out-of-shape security guard who runs a marathon to prove his worthiness to an ex-girlfriend, Pegg just seems pathetic." Matt Prigge, Philadelphia Weekly: "Did the guy who came up with hurling second-rate Prince records at zombies really dream up a gag about a volcanic foot boil being popped in some poor guy’s face?" David Edelstein, New York: "The director, David Schwimmer, underlines the jokes and adds exclamation points, but a softer touch probably wouldn’t have helped." Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times: "Run, Fat Boy, Run is the kind of movie that’s apt to be dismissed a goofy lark. It is that. But it’s also a rare comedy that believes in its own message, and that could inspire the depressed and the demoralized to grit their teeth and keep running."
SHELTER. Chuck Wilson, LA Weekly: "Zach (Trevor Wright) is a promising artist who turned down CalArts to stay in San Pedro and help his irresponsible older sister (played by the amazingly gifted L.A. actress Tina Holmes) care for her little boy. At the beach, Zach, who surfs as often as possible, reconnects with his best friend’s gay-novelist older brother, Shaun (Brad Rowe). The two start hanging out and eventually begin an affair, Zach’s first with a man. Like much of this impressive first film from writer-director Jonah Markowitz, Zach and Shaun’s relationship feels authentic and true; you can imagine them being together for a long time to come." Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: "The movie’s abundance of tanned bodies, rolling waves and golden sunsets create an aesthetic of inoffensive hedonism that perfectly matches the subject matter." Fernando F. Croce, Slant: "The first project of the here! gay television network's new movie initiative, Shelter regrettably plays closer to Lifetime fodder."
SHOTGUN STORIES. David Edelstein, New York: "The story is set in southeast Arkansas, against a landscape of isolated farms and dilapidated main streets, and the rhythms are languid; but the lines that pop out of these stuporous characters’ mouths have the bitter tang of real life." Steven Boone, The House Next Door: "Glorious Southern fried sloth, in epic widescreen." Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times. "Jeff Nichols’s drama about warring clans of brothers in small-town southern Arkansas defines the classic western phrase 'doing what a man’s got to do' as both a moral imperative and a biological compulsion. The movie is filled with unremarkable men who would rather die than appear weak."
STOP-LOSS. Alonso Duralde, MSNBC.com: "Even if you think the U.S. presence in Iraq is justified, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss provides a poignant and shattering portrait of what our soldiers have to endure in combat, at home, and from an army that sends its men and women back into battle over and over again." Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly: "Comprised of bitter, beautifully observed truths butting up uncomfortably against loads of hoary Hollywood hooey, writer/director Kimberly Peirce’s extremely well-meaning Stop-Loss attempts to battle the trend of audience indifference toward Iraq War dramas. But the movie’s real war is with itself." A.O. Scott, New York Times: "The sober, mournful piety that has characterized a lot of the other fictional features about Iraq — documentaries are another matter — is almost entirely missing from Stop-Loss, which is being distributed by Paramount’s youth-friendly label MTV Films. Not that the movie is unsentimental — far from it — but its messy, chaotic welter of feeling has a tang of authenticity. Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage." Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "This is a wrenching story of men at arms who cannot find peace outside the military circle, who return to civilian life on the horrific edge of violence and despair. In this Stop-Loss has a certain amount in common with Boys Don't Cry. Peirce again concerns herself with men and violence as well as with individuals conflicted over gender roles trying to work out what society demands of them." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: "Peirce makes her points, all right. She just doesn't trust us to get them."
21. Alonso Duralde, MSNBC.com: "One would expect a movie about high-stakes gambling in Las Vegas and young, attractive savants using their smarts to break the bank at blackjack to be sexy and thrilling. Unfortunately, 21 winds up being about as exciting as freshman calculus." Manohla Dargis, New York Times: "Greed is good and comes without a hint of conscience in 21, a feature-length bore about some smarty-pants who take Vegas for a ride." Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "21 isn't pretentious, exactly, but it's damn close, and in trying to whip up a melodramatic morality tale the film becomes an increasingly flabby slog." Robert Wilonsky, LA Weekly: "The big-screen version of Ben Mezrich’s book ain’t no gamble at all — it’s about as risky as playing the nickel slots with 10 cents in your pocket. It’s as though director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde, Monster-in-Law) and writers Peter Steinfeld (Be Cool, as if) and Allan Loeb adapted the book-jacket blurb rather than crack the spine." 
THE BANK JOB. Jim Emerson, Chicago Sun-Times: "A serviceable B-grade British heist movie, “The Bank Job” is no worse than its generic title. And no better." Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer: "Statham -- reduced to muttering guttural groans in various bombs that close on opening weekend (In the Name of the King, War) or get released directly to DVD (Chaos) or spawn inexplicable franchises (Transporter, Crank) -- at last proves himself a leading man who does more than lead with his head. It isn't till the film's end that he has to throw a few punches and land a few head-butts—contractually obligated, no doubt. But by then he's managed to negotiate a screenplay in which there are complete sentences—whole paragraphs, even—that he gives his all without breaking a sweat; even when he has to convince his missus he's a stand-up shitheel, Statham's totally believable. He might yet become Bruce Willis."
BE KIND REWIND. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: "Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind is whimsy with a capital W. No, it's WHIMSY in all caps. Make that all-caps italic boldface. Oh, never mind. I'm getting too whimsical. Maybe Gondry does, too. You'll have to decide for yourself. This is a movie that takes place in no possible world, which may be a shame, if not for the movie, then for possible worlds." Elbert Ventura, ReverseShot: "Be Kind Rewind contains reminders of the limits of this brilliant artist. That the movie still enthralls is a testament to the fact that Gondry’s starting point—an aesthetic in which each frame bears its maker’s sensibility—is miles ahead of where most filmmakers aspire to be."
CHICAGO 10. J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader: "Chicago 10, an electrifying new “mash-up documentary” by Brett Morgen, vividly reconstructs the battles on the street and in the courtroom, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune moment." Jim Emerson, Chicago Sun-Times: "Through the kaleidoscopic prism of Brett Morgen's uproarious Chicago 10, a zippy mixture of documentary footage and motion-capture animation, we see how the confrontations between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention played out as political theater."
CLOVERFIELD. Oily Richards, Empire: "Wise to the fact that the most frightening attack is the one without apparent reason, Cloverfield never chooses to explain its monster’s arrival. It’s suddenly there and, as one soldier notes, 'it’s winning'. It intends to scare, not educate. The constant air of panic is so pervasive that it’s easy to miss the skilful creation of the sequences, which include a rescue from a collapsing skyscraper and a tunnel sequence so butt-clenching you’ll crap diamonds for a week." Keith Phipps, Onion A/V Club: "It's absolutely terrifying, and it's all the more effective for the way it lets viewers spend time getting to know the terrified stars, and the emotions and regrets behind their seemingly futile efforts to survive. It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand." J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader: "[Producer J.J.] Abrams may be exploiting images of a national trauma, but politicians have been doing the same thing for years in pursuit of even less noble ends: the $10 you’ll spend on Cloverfield hardly compares with the estimated $487 billion spent to date on the war in Iraq." Richard Corliss, Time: "A horror/sf/disaster movie loses points every time you're forced to ask yourself, 'Why are they doing something so stupid?', and the answer is, 'Because they're in a horror/sf/disaster movie.' And if you thought that Abrams — the creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost, and the writer-director of the spiffy if underperforming Mission: Impossible III — would produce a horror movie that was not just high-concept but high-IQ — you misjudge his faithfulness to a genre requiring that, in extremis, people act in a manner that's way below their intelligence levels." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: "Is Cloverfield trying to be a 'fun' monster movie, or is it trying to say something about the way, post-9/11, we experience horrific events? I simply have no idea."
THE COUNTERFEITERS. Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: " For the prisoners in Blocks 18 and 19 of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, meals were served, beds provided, light opera floated from the speakers. There was even a ping-pong table to play on. But as writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky shows, powerfully, affectingly, in The Counterfeiters, the privileges experienced by this small team of Jews and criminals came at a price." David Denby, The New Yorker: "The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile." Adam Bernstein, Washington Post: "Based on a real-life Nazi operation, the film is a tense drama with performances that elevate the movie to the front rank of films set in concentration camps, from Gillo Pontecorvo's magnificent 1959 drama Kapo to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List of 1993." 
DIARY OF THE DEAD. Jim Emerson, The Chicago Sun-Times: "When young filmmakers gather to shoot cinema-verite video documentaries, watch out: Something really bad is going to happen. In The Blair Witch Project, it was...well, we don’t really know what it was, but it sure freaked out Heather. In Cloverfield, it was something large with an antipathy toward Manhattan landmarks. And in George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, as you have probably gathered by now, it is the meat-eating undead. These movies give the shaky-cam a reason to get shaky — but the kids try not to miss a shot." David Edelstein, New York: "Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew—to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats." J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader: "Diary of the Dead proceeds as if the events of the first four movies never happened, starting over in the present with a handful of film students whose no-budget shoot for a mummy thriller is interrupted by an outbreak of zombie violence. The premise allows Romero a second childhood of sorts, a chance to revisit the independent spirit of his first big hit even as he reflects on how much America has changed in the past 40 years." 
DOOMSDAY. Gideon Levy, UnderGroundOnline: "The most fun thing about Doomsday was watching a generic action flick run the gamut from near-future militarism to post-apoc tribal punkland to the Dark Ages without any boring plot twists to slow down the shoot & slash & run & kill. When they get to the souped-up sports car that appears out of nowhere, you're ready for the chase scene & big boom at the end. If only the action scenes - the only backbone holding together this otherwise paper-thin film - weren't so lazily and poorly edited, I could've really enjoyed this film that made no pretenses to being more than it was." Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times: "Doomsday has an appealing punk-rock sneer, but aside from a few clever music cues — including a Fine Young Cannibals song that accompanies a deranged bacchanal given by fine young cannibals — swagger is, unfortunately, its only notable quality." Gina Piccalo, San Francisco Chronicle: "There is no slow build in Doomsday. Geysers of blood, severed limbs and pustule-ravaged faces blanket the opening frames. Then Rhona Mitra's machete-wielding babe with the removable, bionic eyeball shows up to wreak her own pickax-to-the-face brand of havoc, decapitating her way through tribes of Thunderdome-ready cannibals. That's when things really get moving."
DRILLBIT TAYLOR. Keith Uhlich, UnderGroundOnline: "There are worse things, I suppose, than being below-waistline roundhoused by a Hollywood celebrity. Chief among such tortures would be experiencing the complete sense of desperation that marks Drillbit Taylor's each and every scene ." A.O. Scott, New York Times: "'You get what you pay for,' the tag line on the advertisement says. I saw it free, and I still feel cheated." Raphaela Weissman, New York Press: "Its comedy falls flat, and the film has a violent core where its heart should be." Xan Brooks, The Guardian: "The final bell can't come soon enough."
FROWNLAND. Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door: "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." Daniel Cockburn, ReverseShot: "Its 100%-celluloid material and Method-ish performances may be just more convention, but all these conventions counterbalance to create something new."
FUNNY GAMES. Fernando F. Croce, The House Next Door: "Michael Haneke is a clever guy. I promised myself I’d never revisit his 1997 film Funny Games, yet he’s tricked me into doing just that by remaking it, shot by agonizing shot...The plot is still The Desperate Hours rewritten by the Marquis De Sade." David Edelstein, New York: "Naomi Watts produced this remake, apparently concluding that she hadn’t yet been sufficiently violated onscreen. King Kong, after all, turned out to be a softy—now she’s in the hairy paw of a giant ape artiste."
THE HAMMER. Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times: "The synopsis of The Hammer makes it sound like a long-lost Billy Crystal movie: a smart-alecky, self-destructive Los Angeles handyman named Jerry Ferro (Adam Carolla) loses his job and his girlfriend, then reconnects with his past as a Golden Gloves boxer and tries to qualify for the United States Olympic team at 40. Mr. Carolla, an amateur boxer and cable television veteran, has a tendency to riff when he should be acting, and the whole project — written by Kevin Hench and directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (Kissing Jessica Stein) — is rambling and disorganized. At the same time, though, The Hammer also has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes." 
HORTON HEARS A WHO! A.O. Scott, New York Times: "What distinguishes Horton Hears a Who! from the other recent Dr. Seuss film adaptations — How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat, in case you need reminding — is that it is not one of the worst movies ever made." Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: "An inspired CGI comedy that honors the spirit of the good doctor’s story even as it expands upon it thematically." Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door: "The ratio of innocent enthusiasm to commercial cartoon formula is higher than I expected. Co-directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, scriptwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio and the animators from Blue Sky (the Ice Age studio) have managed to adapt Seuss without turning him out, which I guess counts as progress." 
IN BRUGES. Bilge Ebiri, Nerve: " Way more engaging than a bantering-hitman-with-a-heart picture released in 2008 has any right to be, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges might have made serious waves back in 1994. Today it feels like a mysterious creature from another age — devoid of grit or naturalism, and shot with a composed elegance largely missing from today's screens. In other words, it's a fairy tale with guns and exploding heads. That's its blessing and its curse." Lauren Wissot, The House Next Door: "Often it feels that McDonagh’s script is as adrift as one of the boats on the shimmering canals. The pace is too slow, at times lagging behind the adrenalin-packed story, the film relying heavily on Carter Burwell’s theatrical score. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about In Bruges is its predictable ending."
IRINA PALM: A.O. Scott, New York Times. "Irina Palm may be the work of a German-born Belgian director, but it belongs to a sturdy and very British genre: the naughty-granny comedy, in which an older woman is liberated and rejuvenated by an excursion into vice." Jim Ridley, LA Weekly: "Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of U.K., Belgian, French, German and Luxembourgian film financing represents a true coalition of the witless."
JAR CITY. A.O. Scott, New York Times: "The picture of Iceland that emerges in Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City is vivid and powerful but not something the country’s tourist board would be likely to endorse. The landscape has its austere poetry to be sure — mountains framing the apartment blocks of Reykjavik, spits of volcanic rock jutting into a churning sea — but a fog of damp unhappiness seems to pervade every face and conversation. And yet by the end of this film, based on a popular mystery novel by Arnaldur Indridason, it is hard not to feel a certain affection for the place." Lauren Wissot, The House Next Door: "This is not just a fictional story about a couple who lose their four-year-old girl to a brain tumor, nor just a tale about the search for a murderer and his motive, but an intriguing blend of the two, overlaid by a Big Brother that takes the form of the nonfiction, controversial deCODE Genetics Inc., a company specializing in genetic research that, several years ago, received access to all medical files in the Icelandic government’s database. Invasion of privacy or scientific necessity? As a government stand-in character argues near the beginning of the film, information isn’t 'personal' since it’s been passed on for generations. Rather, it belongs to society. But does society have a right to know about every disease, even those that can’t be cured?" 
JUNO. Fernando F. Croce, Slant: "Lke the titular character's accidental pregnancy, Juno has a fumbling start and an affecting delivery." Elbert Ventura, ReverseShot: "Juno is occasionally funny, rarely intelligent, and often annoying. A crowd-pleaser for people who like to think they’re above crowd-pleasers but are actually not." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: "Juno doesn't make judgments or pronouncements. Its great beauty lies in how generous it is toward all its characters." Richard Schickel, Time: "Juno is not a great movie; it does not have aspirations in that direction. But it is, in its little way, a truthful, engaging and welcome entertainment." Marcy Dermansky, About.com: "Though too precocious and polished, Juno manages to charm, with many lovely moments. In the tradition of maladjusted teen comedies, however, Juno doesn't rank among the recent greats." Lauren Wissot, The House Next Door: "Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody has described herself as a 'naked Margaret Mead,' a cultural anthropologist who for years studied the rites and rituals of the stripper tribe in lieu of the nine-to-five grind. It’s a great line and a quite telling one, for this writer’s scientific approach to life is precisely why Juno ultimately fails."
LOOK. Maureen M. Hart, Chicago Tribune: "According to the producers of Look, the average American is unwittingly photographed up to 200 times a day, thanks to the 30 million surveillance cameras at work in this country 24/7. With all this attention, are we any safer? What is the state of privacy rights if we're never really alone? For those answers, look elsewhere." Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times: "Between the likelihood of surveillance cameras capturing every dramatically significant moment (with crystal-clear sound) and the filmmaker’s deployment of ripped-from-the-tabloids ugliness to amp up viewer involvement, Look grows less compelling and believable as it unreels."
LOVE SONGS. David Edelstein, New York: "Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn’t upstage content—a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out." A.O. Scott, New York Times: "The Paris of Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs (Les Chansons d’Amour) belongs unmistakably to the present. Its residents talk on cellphones and drop the name of Nicolas Sarkozy (still an aspirant to the Élysée Palace rather than an occupant when the movie was being shot). But they also dwell, just as noticeably, in the Paris of classic French movies — in a vague, bracing atmosphere of good old Nouvelle Vague."
MARRIED LIFE. Bill Gibron, PopMatters: "Marriage might just be the perfect cinematic allegory. You can infer so many differing metaphoric elements in the dissection of why men and women marry - and sometimes separate - that the permutations appear endless. There’s the emotional facet, the sexual supposition, the commitment and loyalty facets, and of course, the scandal ridden and adulterous angles. Together with an equal array of stylistic approaches, we wind up with a veritable cornucopia of combinations, a wealth of possibilities linked invariably to the age old notion of vows taken and knots tied. So why is it that Ira Sachs' period piece drama Married Life is so downright flat?" Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door: "A deeply felt examination of the ties that bind." Desson Thomson, Washington Post: "How is it that the disastrous repercussions of an extramarital affair could be considered entertaining, and even comforting, viewing? By presenting it as a nail-biting, cautionary tale set in another era. Director Ira Sachs and co-writer Oren Moverman (who adapted the John Bingham Five Roundabouts to Heaven) take the basic ingredients of those old-time films noir, shake them in a postmodern martini mixer, then pour it into chilled glasses for our delectation." Chris Wisnieswki, ReverseShot: "Married Life falls somewhere between parodic pastiche and straightforward narrative. Like Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, it filters its period details through classical Hollywood genre while nevertheless striving for emotional resonance. Where Haynes pulled off this nearly impossible gambit, though, Sachs falls short on both counts."
NEVER BACK DOWN. Keith Uhlich, UnderGroundOnline: "As Never Back Down would have it, Orlando, Florida is a spoiled rich kid's haven, littered with cavernous million dollar mansions and inhabited by sun-baked, iPhone-toting teenagers prone to nightly Fight Club-like bouts of bloodletting. Parents and trailer trash are non-existent, but rock-hard abs are legion (for truth-in-advertising purposes the film might best be subtitled 'Chest Porn'). Into this sweat-drenched sea of masculine mammaries comes fresh-faced Iowan Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), whose stretch-lipped, teeth-grinding intensity suggests he's just graduated summa cum laude from the Tom Cruise Finishing School for Wanton Pretty Boys." 
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Jim Emerson, Scanners: "I've used the term 'existential thriller' (and/or 'epistemological thriller') to describe movies such as Chinatown and Caché. It's a useful term because it can be used across genres and it describes the nature of the "thrills" the movie has in store. Chinatown is also a period American detective noir and Caché is a modern French intellectual puzzle and No Country for Old Men is a contemporary Texas Western chase movie, but they're all inquiries into the nature of knowledge and existence. They all ask: 'What do we know and how do we know it?' Is there a more worthy or essential question?" Michael Koresky, ReverseShot: "The most rewarding thing about No Country is the way in which its narrative is set up as a singularly unstoppable force, a shark constantly moving forward (every scene seems to have a goal, every frame initially gives off the impression of tightly relaying crucial plot information), only to allow itself to purposefully break down, both in terms of resolution and traditional narrative payoffs." Sukhdev Sandu, Daily Telegraph: "Is it a masterpiece? Not even close." Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door: "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." Andrew Tracy, ReverseShot: "What they’re doing is so impressive within its limits that the only criticism one can level is that the Coens are clearly aiming for something far beyond those limits, and have not the skill or character to reach it." Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: "I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what use they think they’re putting that creativity and craft to." 
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL. Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: "The Other Boleyn Girl is the most sterile of bodice-rippers, a genteel soap opera in which the sex and intrigue are so muted, so tasteful, that they practically blow off the screen in a scattering of dust." David Edelstein, New York: "A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank." N.P. Thompson, Movies Into Film: "The Other Boleyn Girl, about two virtuous daughters who become rival whores for King Henry VIII, may reach its apex when Anne (Natalie Portman) takes her sibling Mary (Scarlett Johansson) by the hand, on the night before the latter beds the King for the first time, and exclaims, 'My little sis-tah! My golden sis-tah! My milk-and-honey sis-tah!'" 
PARANOID PARK. Vadim Rizov, The House Next Door: "If I were over 40 and/or French -- in other words, if I hadn't been to American public high school recently enough to still experience a little residual shudder thinking about it -- I might well be blown away by Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant's not-so-breathlessly awaited return to the semi-conventional narrative." Kevin B. Lee, The House Next Door: "Gus Van Sant finally crawls out from under his Bela Tarr-inspired long-take detachment and dares to explore an interior landscape in ways not seen since My Own Private Idaho. Indeed, the privacy of this film -- a reflection of its insular protagonist -- is what puts the shockingly violent death that haunts its sinuous narrative a league apart from those in Van Sant’s most recent work." Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: "Working with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, best known for his work with such Hong Kong directors as Wong Kar-Wai, Van Sant films Paranoid Park with dreamy, mesmerizing lassitude (those swooping skateboards), as well as the subversive brio of something caught on the fly; at one point, Doyle films Portland street scenes on Super-8 film, then bars the subjects' eyes out, tabloid style. At other moments, Van Sant derives his inspiration from silent films. One memorable scene features the face of young actress Taylor Momsen as she reacts to unwelcome news, her wide-eyed expression resembling a cross between Lillian Gish and a Bratz doll." Zachary Wigon, The House Next Door: "The awkwardness inherent in being a teenager is captured by one of the most rarely encountered cinematic techniques: a director intentionally using unintentionally bad acting."
SHUTTER. Andy Webster, The New York Times: "The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from Psycho, and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player. But the mandatory bump-offs — a gouging through a viewfinder, a compelled suicide — lack novelty." Rafer Guzman, Newsday: "Have you ever seen a horror film in which a character, against her better judgment, approaches a motionless body sitting in a chair facing the wall, then slowly turns it toward the camera? How about a horror film in which this happens more than once? How about three times?" John Hutchins, UnderGroundOnline: "With un-likeable, shallowly written characters populating a formulaically garbled storyline filled with plot contrivances, Shutter's redeeming qualities are few and far between."
SNOW ANGELS. Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly: "David Gordon Green’s fourth feature is both magnificently silly yet strangely gentle, at least until two gunshots echo in the distance. Like his previous film, the confused backwoods-chase picture Undertow, Snow Angels finds this wonderfully distinctive filmmaker suffering growing pains, trying to wrestle his meandering, oddball sensibilities into the requirements of conventional genre forms." Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters: "At its center, and much like David Gordon Green’s other movies, from the brilliant George Washington to Undertow, Snow Angels is about faith. More precisely, it’s about doubt and desire, the underpinnings of faith." 
THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: The Spiderwick Chronicles is a terrific entertainment for the whole family, except those below a certain age, who are likely to be scared out of their wits. What is that age? I dunno; they're your kids. But I do know the PG classification is insane, especially considering what happens right after a father says he loves his son." David Edelstein, New York: "The Spiderwick Chronicles boasts some of the ugliest animated creatures this side of Jar-Jar Binks, and the friendly ones are only marginally less repulsive than the lethal ones. (The obnoxious vocal stylings of Martin Short and Seth Rogen don’t help.)" 
SPUTNIK MANIA. Vadim Rizov, The House Next Door: "At times, the movie seems to be less about Sputnik and more of an Atomic Cafe redux." Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times: "David Hoffman's documentary treats 1950s America as an ancient time and place that can be scrutinized with archaeological detachment. Narrated by Liev Schreiber in wry, ominous tones, Sputnik Mania characterizes post-World War II America as a fat and happy society, secure in its belief that it ruled the globe and spooked by the ambitions of a despised and underestimated rival."
10,000 B.C.. Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters: "About an hour into 10,000 B.C., a young boy prisoner is being shipped away to a far-off desert. His captors are mean, tall, and swarthy, and one, called One Eye (Marco Khan) for obvious reason, is especially brutal, given to whipping and kicking his charges. Still, Baku (Nathanael Baring) is spunky and steadfast, certain that his savior will yet appear. And indeed, he is rewarded, for lo! upon a distant dune, Baku spots D’Leh (Steven Strait), hollering as the ship bearing the captives heads off downriver. Baku yells back and smiles broadly, even as his young companion wonders if D’Leh will actually follow and save them. Oh yes, nods Baku. D’Leh is in love with yet another captive, the beautiful, blue-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle), and to illustrate, the boy makes a kissy-face and writhes in exaggerated pleasure, before he grimaces at the mushy thought. It’s an unexpectedly light moment in this ponderous exercise. Baku’s quite charming, and his understanding of this tiresome plot is dead-on. The hero will save the girl he has loved since childhood, fulfill his destiny, and oh yes, in the process also wreak vengeance on the nasty slavers. Even as Baku comprehends his dire situation, he also mocks the cliché. Thank goodness for small amusements." Lauren Wissot, The House Next Door: "Perhaps this film is rated PG-13 because it’s not suitable for anyone with post-pubescent thinking skills?" 
THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Glenn Kenny, There Will Be Blood: "Is Plainview a personification of the excesses of capitalism? Could be. I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that this film invaded my consciousness (literally — I had a dream about it the first night I saw it, a very rare occurrence) and still has a tight, daunting grip on it." Jeff Reichert, ReverseShot: "A slow-moving whirlwind that suddenly, utterly spent, just finishes." Karina Longworth, SpoutBlog: "I confess: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has pretty much slain me." J. Hoberman, Village Voice: "From the deliberately dark and fragmented prologue to the wildly excessive denouement, this movie continually defamiliarizes what might sound like a Giant-style potboiler." Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door: "It isn't perfect or entirely satisfying, but it's so singular in its conception and execution that one can no more dismiss it than one can dismiss a volcanic eruption occurring in one's backyard." C. Jerry Kutner, Bright Lights After Dark: "It remains a story about aberrant individuals, setting us up for some great unexpected insight about community and our present-day world that it never delivers." Bilge Ebiri, Nerve: " An epic with a coal-black heart." Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: "Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth feature, a striking piece of American self-loathing loosely derived from Upton Sinclair's Oil!, is lively as bombastic period storytelling but limited as allegory." Armond White, New York Press: "“No!” is the first word spoken in There Will Be Blood, and it should be the last said in response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest pretend epic." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: "An austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness." N.P. Thompson, The House Next Door: "Minor virtues, welcome as they are, cannot begin to salvage There Will Be Blood."
TYLER PERRY'S MEET THE BROWNS. Alonso Duralde, MSNBC.com: "The good are rewarded and the wicked are punished. Perry keeps things moving at a brisk clip — aided by his editor, Robert Altman veteran Maysie Hoy — and the cast turns what might have been caricatures into interesting and fleshed-out characters." A.O. Scott, New York Times: "Madea, the vociferous, big-boned grandmother Mr. Perry played in that film (and then in Madea’s Family Reunion), makes a brief, raucous cameo near the end of Meet the Browns. Not for any reason having to do with the picture’s many story lines, but just as a kind of lagniappe, a gift of pure silliness for the loyal public." Armond White, New York Press: "Ruthlessly alternating pathos with broad, profane family satire, Perry exceeds the boundaries of chitlin’ circuit theater."
UNDER THE SAME MOON (LA MISMA LUNA). Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters: "'What are you going to do, call the police?' Hardworking, conscientious, and illegal, Rosario (Kate del Castillo) has no recourse when her employer (Jacqueline Voltaire) decides to 'let her go.' Taut-faced and designer-outfitted, the woman has no cause to fire her housekeeper, but so what? She’s unaccountable and besides, she’s a dismal stereotype. 'Oh for god’s sake,' she sniffs at Rosario, 'you’ll find something else, because you’re young.' No matter that Rosario is struggling to make enough money to bring her nine-year-old son across the border, that she hasn’t seen that son for four years, or that actually finding 'something else' will be an ordeal. The white lady—nicknamed 'Cruella de Vil' by Rosario’s best friend and fellow domestic—has had a bad day. Rosario’s determination and resilience ground the moral design of Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna)." Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: "Some tearjerkers are jerkier than others."
THE UNFORESEEN. 
Andrew Schenker, The House Next Door: "The Unforeseen neatly encapsulates the problems of the contemporary political non-fiction film: its importance as social document is everywhere countered by its poverty as cinema." Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "The Unforeseen has the title of a science fiction thriller, not a thoughtful documentary on the environment, but there's truth in that packaging. As directed by Laura Dunn, this unusual film unfolds like a mournful whodunit, with the Earth itself being the victim of the crime."
VANTAGE POINT. Talis Saule Archdeacon, Baltic Times: "The trouble with Vantage Point is that the movie – much like the terrorists it is about – is constantly shooting itself in the foot." David Denby, The New Yorker: "The movie is intended as an homage to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but, really, it’s quite different. In Rashomon, the varying accounts of a rape and murder are shaped by self-interest. Vantage Point is more literal; it shows what each person actually sees, not what he wants to see. In each depiction, we get a little closer to comprehension of the entire affair only to have the film-makers—in a rather cheap trick—cut away to still another character’s restricted view of things. Finally, they abandon the vantage-point experiment, shift to an impersonal view, and finish the story in a conventional way. Like so many other thrillers, this one ends in a series of car crashes and shootouts."
THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION. Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times: "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation gives us a boy's-eye view of a turbulent Brazil in 1970. Pele and soccer goals mean more than Che or slogans spray-painted on walls. For a 12-year-old, reuniting your family scores higher than overturning a repressive regime." John Anderson, Washington Post: "Call me a cynic, but it's plain to see why Brazil made The Year My Parents Went on Vacation its candidate for this year's foreign-film Oscar. Kids. Old people. Cuteness. Dire circumstances that don't interfere with the cuteness but imply gravity nonetheless -- the old Life Is Beautiful gambit." Adam Nayman, Eye Weekly: "Doesn’t so much draw you in as glide on by."
Lichman & Rizov "Live" at Grassroots Tavern (Episode 7: "Will Smith is a gay, Hitler-loving Scientologist"), with Jeremiah Kipp
By John Lichman & Vadim Rizov
[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]
This week's episode is a tad bittersweet, as later in recording we get onto the topic of independent cinema (well, indie cinema, not Indiewood) and how it is being covered less and less in mainstream publications. The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece last week detailing how "more and more indie films have flooded the market (up from 501 in 2006 to 530 last year), [and] they are overwhelming critics." Tack on the recent cut-backs at Tribune -- as we did last week -- and a discussion on the state of freelance vs. staff critic is born. (This was before news came Monday from The Reeler that Nathan Lee had been let go from The Village Voice due to "economic reasons.") Vadim and I do spar a bit on the topic, so you're warned. On the brighter side, that's after the ten minute mark, when we know you all stop listening and go to Defamer or GreenCine.
Also this week, fellow House contributor and Slant Magazine reviewer Jeremiah Kipp stops by to discuss the news that Peter Berg is being given the keys to the remake of Dune (so Mickey D's will probably be slinging "Spice Shakes" in 2010), the Noel Murray Stop-Clock makes another appearance, and Vadim says something extremely pretentious (and hilarious in hindsight) when it comes to how great "his industry" is going.
Joining us next week will be Kevin B. Lee (THND, Slant Magazine, Cinema Scope) and director Preston Miller (Jones). So if you happen to see Vadim or me at the bar, please buy us a drink. (JL)
Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here. (TRT: 28 minutes, 16 seconds)
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John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.
Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
909. La femme infidele/The Unfaithful Wife (1969) & 910. Le Boucher (1970) (Claude Chabrol)
By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: These are the latest entries in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
Perhaps I am willfully misreading through Bunuelian lenses, but I love how Claude Chabrol’s wicked and ultimately haunting account of a marriage saved by murder implodes the middle class domestic mindset with its own politely repressed logic and values. And yet there’s a line of thinking around this film that maintains the act of killing a wife’s lover in order to impress her back into her marriage is presented by Chabrol with sincerity as justifiable, redemptive, even heroic.
Arguably the most celebrated of Chabrol’s fifty-plus features is this romantic drama involving a rough but earnest butcher (Jean Yanne) and a lovely but aloof schoolmistress (Stephane Audran) amidst a series of unsolved murders afflicting their idyllic French village. I confess that I have fundamental reservations with a plot that has the viewer more concerned with the emotional claustrophobia of its two leads than with the innocent victims who serve as collateral damage for the unraveling of their relationship. But full credit goes to Chabrol for brilliantly employing a beguiling documentary realism that initiates the viewer in the comfortably unassuming atmosphere of the small town, shifting almost imperceptibly into a wildly expressive and emotional climax.To read the rest of the article on La femme infidel, click here. To read the rest of the article on La Boucher, click here. Click here to see Kevin's online dossier on Chabrol, and see after the break for his video essays on the two films, featuring contributions by writer and cinephile Dan Sallitt.
Video #1
Video #2
Video #3 Read more!
Links for the Day (March 28th, 2008)
1. "Out of Print": The New Yorker's Eric Alterman on the death and life of the American newspaper.
["Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass."]
2. "Half-Brothers Mired in Full-Blown Hate": House EIC Matt Zoller Seitz reviews Shotgun Stories for The New York Times.
["“Shotgun Stories” is as cool-headed as its characters are reckless. Not only are there no heart-rending flashbacks to Son, Kid and Boy’s childhoods, but we also never even see a photo of their father. Son’s back is covered with shotgun-pellet scars, but we get only a sketchy account of how he acquired them. The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture."]
3. "Paul Schrader Tribute Show": Movie Geeks United! celebrate the writer/director's career.
["Featuring special guests JEFF GOLDBLUM, WILLIAM FORSYTHE, DANA DELANY and THOMAS G. WAITES"]
4. "Italy is roiled by a cheese scare": What do you think, Ronny Graham?
["Tests by Italian officials recently showed higher-than-permitted levels of dioxin, a cancer-causing toxin, in cheese coming from 83 of the nearly 2,000 dairy farms in the Campania region around Naples that produce the top-line buffalo mozzarella. Japan and South Korea immediately suspended imports of Italian mozzarella. The European Union leadership demanded explanations and scolded Italian officials Thursday for failing to provide adequate information."]
5. "Struggle": From The Tisch Film Review, Half Nelson director Ryan Fleck's student short Struggle.
["Struggle was the Color Sync (intermediate-level) student film made by Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) during his time at Tisch. Working with particularly student film-y constraints (one location, two principal actors, very short script), Fleck is nevertheless able to turn what is essentially a scene into an insightful film; Struggle is a sharp critique of the exploitation (through art) of African-American “struggle” for the benefit of smug white pseudo-liberals everywhere."]
Quote of the Day: Terence, Andria
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Lucas Cranach the Elder's "Cupid Complaining to Venus", subject of this MSNBC news story.
Clip of the Day: I'm feeling in a particularly suave mood today
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
"Indie 500": Willie Nelson, No Kids, Band of Horses
By Vadim Rizov
[Editor's Note: "Indie 500", a look at the music scene past and present, is published every other Thursday, alternating with John Lichman's Japanese cinema/anime column, "Idiot Savant Japan."]
Until a week ago, I hated Willie Nelson. Please understand: from ages 6 to 18, I grew up in Austin, Texas. Austin is a lovely city, full of Tex-Mex food, a bastardized cuisine equal parts queso, spicy meats and Mexican staples whose equal I have yet to find in NYC. (Authentic Mexican, sure; the greasy, cheesy Texas version, not yet. Please advise.) It has the nicest weather in Texas, and since everyone has A/C, we get by, unlike New York's sweltering shit-heap apartments in the summer. It has pretty hipster boys and girls fighting for their turf across from aggrieved UT fratboys, and one of the most supportive scenes for film production in the country.
That said, Austin has, for a long time, been dominated by smug ex-hippies who want to make sure everyone knows what a lovely place it is. Cold brew, country music and cool weather: that's all us liberals in refuge from the rest of the state want, right? Growing up with public radio dominated by blandly earnest "rootsy" singer-songwriter fare (as if we were all 16-year-old girls, still automatically impressed by anyone who can play, sing and project sincerity simultaneously) began to feel like some weird, anomalous form of cultural fascism. Austin prides itself on its music scene—a scene which has plenty of awesome bands, but also plenty of middle-aged dullards peddling dowdy authenticity by the yard. I spent an ill-advised year on the rowing team, and every day we'd go past a bronze statue of Stevie Ray Vaughn.
This insistence on Austin's funkiness—musical conservatism disguised as integral part of a pleasant city—may have blinded me to how people in other states think about country music. It was new to me when Noel Murray announced in this week's (typically excellent) installment of his "Popless" project that "Even people who aren't that deeply into country music usually have a few country artists they like and respect. Johnny Cash is a perennial, and Willie Nelson." Well, Johnny Cash we all know about—this is what happens when you cover Nine Inch Nails, project deathly gravitas without even trying, and scare all the punks into respecting you. But Willie? Pigtailed, hippie-endorsed Willie?
So with some sheepishness, I take it all back: I may have been hating Willie Nelson because that's what you do when your Texas band of choice is Spoon. Still is, but I've spent the last week plowing through One Hell Of A Ride—(a Columbia/Legacy box set coming out next Tuesday). I got promo discs to give me some context for an upcoming Nelson bio I'm reviewing. And I got it: at four discs, 100 tracks and nearly five hours of music, One Hell Of A Ride—see, that Austinite self-congratulating smugness is even in the title!—is about as comprehensive a sweep of Nelson's career as you could wish for. (How did people listen to box sets before allmusic? Listening along, checking how many tracks were taken from which albums, how consensus ranks those albums—what am I supposed to do, trust the liner notes?) And, um, I'm pretty impressed.
Disc 1 begins with a fairly representative slice of '50s country; for all the talk about how Nelson plays behind the beat and messes with unfamiliar musicians, outside ears won't hear much different here. That changes rapidly: I was sold, oddly enough, by the relatively unheralded track "Good Times," which sounds like a frail, lost folk song—strip it of a name, and I don't hear the faintest hint of twang, just a Harry Nilsson demo. (Incidentally, his version of "Everybody's Talkin'" is less country than Nilsson's own—with its strings and sweetening, that sounds like the patented "Nashville Sound" applied to a folk song. Willie cranks up the sparse bongos and lets it go.) Not that I'm suggesting that things have to avoid regionalisms to win my favor: no less than four tracks from 1971's Yesterday's Wine are here. By all descriptions, this is a fearlessly loony country concept album of a man's reflections approaching death [!], but the sampling here makes me want it immediately, regardless of how goofy the framework is. Honky-tonk, lazy, shuffling: exactly right, regardless.
There's no need to go over Nelson's genre-hopping here: there's flawless takes on pure country, lite jazz, rockabilly and god knows what else. (The cynical, bitter indie kid in me wants to point out that Willie's genre-hopping ends sometimes roughly in the mid-70s, but whatever.) Disc 4 is the predictable weakling, a way too-generous sampling of the last two decades. Like most career artists, Nelson would have been better served by shooting all of his '80s producers rather than listening to them; a Julio Iglesias duet may have been a good idea commercially, but it holds up rather pathetically. My point here isn't to offer a detailed intro to Willie's career, just to acknowledge that it's far more essential than I realized or wanted to admit—something only I may have needed this long to concede.
No Kids released their debut Come Into My House a few months back to no fanfare: foolishly, after giving their promo a cursory listen, I instantly concluded they were the next big thing and enthusiastically pitched them to various overlords. No luck, so I must pimp these guys to you, my smaller but presumably more devoted readers. Try not to sigh in exasperation over this description: No Kids are a Canadian band specializing in genre-hopping mixed with electronics. They used to be 3/4ths of a band called P.ano. I know, I know.
But they're good. Really good. It's the kind of music that automatically gets dubbed "pallid": wispy-voiced white folks singing in hushed tones over lively, ornate arrangements, carefully avoiding either visceral impact or overwhelming sonics. They're Sufjan Stevens reconfigured as miniaturists: everything sounds naturally recorded and barely manipulated. "Great Escape" is as lovely and thoughtfully arranged an opener as I've heard this year, a delicate flurry of woodwinds and regret ("I've been driving, but it's been no great escape") that could be the comedown to Blur's sarcastic album of the same name. The woodwinds never leave—I haven't heard this many oboes and bassoons in god knows how long—but they're soon joined by Junior Boys' beat kit, pseudo-conga percussion, and even the occasional vocoder. No Kids are fascinated by hip-hop's icier moments—making dance songs where the vocalist appears totally uninvolved—and integrate it into their little chamber fantasies, offering up the occasional weird mash of synth-pop, low-rent percussion and distanced lyrics about wanting to dance, rather than dancing. When they do dance, it's "Dancing In The Stacks."
I'm not thrilled by No Kids' lyrical content—would-be story-telling about poor, lonely little Ivy Leaguers sad because their beach houses feel empty now that their loved one's gone, which is pretty much self-parody at this point. No Kids' musical omnivorousness can lead them to dead ends like "Four Freshmen Locked Out As The Sun Goes Down," a self-conscious doo-wop number over ambient sound that gets no further than the concept. At 41 resolutely non-aggressive moments, Come Into My House threatens to collapse all its fine songs into little more than mope mood music for grad students up too late at night. But they're approaching a neo-chamber sound from an angle seemingly reserved for the exclusive province of Mr. Stevens, and it seems a bit unfair to deny them the chance to play with it further. This is far from a perfect album, but it's distinctive and interesting enough that I'm kind of upset that it's been so roundly ignored; someone even frailer than me may just fall in love with it.
Finally got around to Band of Horses' sophomore album from last year, Cease To Begin, and I love it, which is almost as much of a shock as falling for Willie Nelson. Back around their first album, I was apparently a much cleverer writer: "the biggest rise Band of Horses can get out of me is a slow stoner head-nod; their music plods dutifully, making the band name sadly appropriate." I'm not sure why I gave them another chance—I saw an amiable live show, but that was about it—but I'm glad I did.
Trying to pin down why they're no longer stoner plodders is hard. The tempos are generally faster, the song structures are sharper (rather than relying on layers of slathered reverb for atmosphere). Attention is paid to sequencing: no longer an inelegant grouping of dirges and rockers, there's enough momentum to even sustain one of those under-a-minute ambient interludes bands used to do when people still listened to albums rather than buzz singles. The lyrics still are basically asinine ("no one's gonna love you more than I will"... yeah, whatever), but the music is compact, well-played and exciting. They had me at opener "Is There A Ghost?"—one guitar, one part interrogative vocals in incomplete circles ("When I lived alone...is there a ghost in my house?"), quickly turning into thrashing guitars without a hint of hesitation. Maybe it's the band's new-found confidence I'm responding to: no more weed, just decisive rock. The thing is, the shift from the first to second album is very minimal compared to, say, the difference between big-band swing and terrifying drone rock; why these micro-migrations affect me as much as they do is anyone's guess.
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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.
Nightmare on Mulberry Street: An Interview with Writer-Director Jim Mickle and Co-Writer-Actor Nick Damici
By Jeremiah Kipp
“It’s a neighborhood movie,” says Jim Mickle, director of Mulberry Street. This gritty NYC horror film, set in a rickety apartment building on the lower east side, places its emphasis on the diverse, resilient locals who live there. Some of them have been tenants all their lives, and they all form a funny, wisecracking community of oddballs. There’s Charlie (Larry Medich), the old guy who lives upstairs with his portable respirator, and Clutch (Nick Damici, who co-wrote the script with Mickle), a gruff but neighborly ex-boxer who has an unspoken affection for his upstairs neighbor, Kay (Bo Corre), a foreign woman who works at the bar down the street. Meanwhile, Clutch’s daughter (Kim Blair) just got back into the city and is making her way from Harlem to the downtown area. They aren’t caricatures, but lived-in, believable individuals—perhaps because they were based on some actual people that live upstairs from Dimici.
Gentrification is taking its toll on these working class New Yorkers, and eviction notices have gone around so the characters are already in a state of nervous anticipation. Mulberry Street allows us time to get to know these people and their daily struggles. When the monsters appear, it’s a lethal problem on top of everything else they have to deal with as hard-boiled urbanites. Set within a 24-hour period, Mulberry Street is unrelenting. A rapidly spreading infection is transforming humans into freaky rat creatures, and as the streets are taken over, our heroes hole up Night of the Living Dead style. But in much the same way the neighborhood is dying, the menace is breaking down the doorways and dragging their neighbors off into the night.
On an ultra-low budget, Mulberry Street has tremendous ingenuity suggesting a city under siege, with helicopters, police cars and barricades holding back the frightened masses. The monsters themselves are freaky-looking, slimy and matted in filthy hair, as jittery and quick as crack addicts. But the heart of the movie lies in its love for the denizens of the lower east side, a group that is rapidly disappearing from the Big Apple. The DVD of Mulberry Street has some fascinating extras (FX tests and storyboards drawn by Mickle), but no feature length commentary. The House Next Door wanted to catch a few stories from Damici and Mickle, and also hopefully inspire horror fans to seek out this creepy low budget gem.
JEREMIAH KIPP: Jim, before this, you’ve been a grip and electric, and a storyboard artist. Did you go to film school?
JIM MICKLE: I went to NYU and graduated in 2002. Even when I was in school, I got a ton of jobs as a storyboard artist to the point where I almost dropped off to do that. Luckily, I stayed on because September 11th happened right before I graduated and dried up every indie in the city. That was where I was making connections, but all of those movies were erased for two or three years. I became a PA for probably a year on a Jennifer Lopez movie, Spider-Man 2, so many movies, then I started getting grip work for a year. NYU sends you out the door with this feeling like, “Go make your first feature!” On graduation day, Marcia Gay Harden spoke, saying spread your wings, and then you have to go out an experience the frustration of the real world. The hard part is the transition. The minute you start taking on some other career, it’s over. Even if you’re completely broke you have to keep one foot in just to stay involved in the business.
Almost every movie I worked on before was a first time director. It’s the worst. They’re rich, they never went to film school, they never did anything and have no idea, just blowing their money on some vanity project. It was so frustrating being a grip on those films, because it was like sending a ship out to sea and the captain of the ship had never been out on a boat before. I still felt like, “What the fuck am I doing?” on Mulberry Street, but at least you have a sense of lighting, or why something is taking so long, or whether it is taking too long. All the things that usually trip people up got me too, but at least I could say, “All right, I’ve been in this situation before. Here’s how we can deal with it.”
JK: How did you guys meet, and what led to your collaboration on Mulberry Street?
NICK DAMICI: A friend of mine, this teacher at NYU, asked me if I’d be interested in doing a student thesis film called Mickey Lee in 2001. It was like an after-school special with me as a crazy school bus driver and thirty little kids. I went up to Connecticut and did that for two weeks. Jim was a friend of the director, and was working on it too. It was a great shoot—we’re staying in cabins, and every night we’d have drinks by the campfire. The guy who owned that property was crazy, which [got] Jim and I talking about doing a movie there. I wrote a script off that called The Phlebottomizer. We filmed a trailer for that with Victor Argo, but it never came to fruition. We kicked around other ideas over the years, until finally Jim called me up while working on a small, low-budget movie. He said, “Y’know, man, we can do this.”
JM: It was a film being made for very little money by a couple of people working at Manhattan Theater Source. They owned all the equipment. One of them was the sound guy, one was the director of photography, one was the director, and they were all actors. They said, “We already have everything. Let’s just make this movie ourselves.” They were having more fun than I had ever seen on a movie set, so instead of going for the big break and waiting for the big money to arrive, let’s just do something very simple, in one or two locations. I was on that shoot for a week, and by the time I came back Nick already had half the script written.
ND: I wrote a zombie script called Dead of Night, which we were gonna do as a back-to-the-roots throwback horror movie in Pennsylvania.
JM: It was all night exteriors, snow, zombies—and we were trying to figure out how we could even afford to bring people out there, putting them up in hotels. That alone came out to $40,000. On top of that is food and gas. We realized we didn’t have the budget. So I thought, “Well, there goes that idea.” Nick came back to me a week later, though, and said, “Y’know, we could still do it. But we shoot it right here.”
ND: My buddy Tim House, who plays the super in Mulberry Street and is our main producer, money-wise, said he thought he could come up with maybe ten grand. I said, “The only way we can do this is if we shoot the whole movie in my kitchen.” Literally, that was the original idea. These people are in their apartment, and crazy shit is happening out in the street. From there, it grew, and we ended up using the neighborhood. The brunt of it was using this building and the kitchen. We took that script and reworked it into Mulberry Street.
JM: It started off in the first couple drafts as a straightforward zombie movie, where a rat bite starts spreading the infection. At some point, it became obvious that we could make them into these rat zombies, rat creatures, rat-zoids—I’ve seen every description of these things online. It seemed a good twist, and allowed us to do our own thing.
ND: It was interesting how the creatures became less important. It became more about the story, and people surviving this disaster.
JM: It’s cool to see the reaction to that. Some people get that and embrace that, and some people refuse. “That’s not how I like my horror movies! Don’t even try it!” When we first finished Mulberry Street, we had seen it so many times that we didn’t know if it was good or bad. But regardless, I was glad that we were trying something different. I’m a horror fan and the thing I hate recently is that so many movies are remakes that do the same shit over and over again.
JK: Did the characters evolve along with the premise?
ND: All of the characters pretty much changed. I’ve lived in this building for fifteen years now. The two brothers were based on these two old guys who lived upstairs. Charlie’s still up there and we see him every day. Frank was his brother. Died of emphysema. The hospital bed my father was in [playing the fictional Charlie in the film]—we borrowed it from [the real] Charlie. He still had it. [The character] Coco was based on this guy Tom who was here when I moved in—a transvestite and a crack addict, crazy out of his mind, bringing homeless guys to his place. Finally he got thrown out, then he died of a heart attack not long after. A lot of the characters were brought in from the reality of the apartment building.
JM: The archetypes stayed from the Pennsylvania script. That was more Night of the Living Dead, with the characters you expect to see in the zombie movie. Bringing it here, we found people in real life who made interesting characters in this situation.
ND: Kay was originally going to be a New York character, but I knew this actress Bo Corre [originally from Sweden]. This movie is such a New York piece, and there are so many foreigners here now. I ran into her one afternoon—she was working at a flower shop and I haven’t seen her in ages. We talked for a few minutes, and when I got back home I said to myself, “Woah, she could play Kay!” I ran right back out and said, “Hey Bo! Read this script!” The other actors are good friends of mine, like Timmy and Larry Fleischman, and we’ve done stuff together.
JM: Nick’s dad played the old guy, Charlie.
ND: That was a no-brainer for me. I didn’t know if he could do it physically, since in the past couple years he had two triple-bypasses. But I asked him and he said, “Yeah.”
JK: He had never acted in a movie before, but you must have known that he’s such a character.
ND: Oh yeah. 20 years as a bartender…I knew he’d be fine. He’s very photogenic, so I figured once he relaxed, he’d be fine. I thought he stole the movie.
JM: He caught on really quick. The first take or two he was nervous, but then he realized he should just be himself. By the end, he was rocking.
JK: How did you guys collaborate on the script? What was the back-and-forth between you both, and the different strengths you bring to it?
JM: That was all Nick. He did all the writing on Mulberry Street.
ND: No, no, we’ve developed a system. I used to write with Victor Argo all the time. He could never put anything down on paper, but I would write and it was like having an editor there, or whatever you want to call it. Jim and I have taken it a bit further than that. I have the ability to pound shit out, and I don’t have an ego about what’s on the page. If you want to change it, we change it. Bang, and then we keep going. We went through 45 drafts.
JK: How did you handle the horror element? When you have rat people scuttling around, how do you make it scary—not funny?
JM: For a long time, I was drawing sketches to figure out what these creatures look like. When you’re making a zombie movie, you have to find a way to make them look or seem different if you want to be relevant. I started sketching rat ears and noses on them, and at first they looked goofy. But if you darken them and do silhouettes, it becomes moody. My biggest gripe with Signs is that up until it showed the aliens, it was like a Hitchcock movie. The minute they showed it, all the tension was drained. I always hated that moment.
ND: Least scary aliens I’ve ever seen! Any alien I can beat to death with a baseball bat, hey—if that’s all I gotta do, we’re safe.
JM: We kept our monsters in the shadows, mostly suggested. Besides, if you have good actors who can really look scared you can play scenes off of their reaction more than trying to scare the audience with showing the monsters. Our main aesthetic throughout was keeping it realistic and character-driven.
JK: You got some amazing footage during the Fourth of July and a parade up in Harlem, where you create the illusion of a city under siege with all the barricades, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters and crowds. It gave you immediate production value, and with sound design it felt tense and scary. But I’d like to talk about some of your other footage in and around NYC. How much was serendipity and how much was planned?
JM: A lot of it was serendipity and patience. We shot almost 80 hours of footage, budgeting for four or five days with just me, a cameraman and the actors to get whatever else we needed. The inflatable rat you see in the beginning—we chased it all around the city. Q104.3 announces in the morning where the union rat is, and always by the time we showed up they had taken it down. We also have a lot of shots looking up, which is good for a horror movie anyway—but it helped us if we were shooting on a Friday night, which is so busy downtown with people everywhere. If the camera is looking up, the city seems empty. That, combined with some great sound design like creepy wind, goes a long way towards creating the illusion.
JK: You have scenes with Clutch’s daughter Casey (Kim Blair) walking through Central Park on her way downtown. I heard about how you got shots of the empty playground during the day, catching that right before it was about to rain. But it is always so busy there. How were you able to piece together that sequence?
JM: That was almost completely made up as we went along. We shot two days with Kim after principal photography. By that time, we were completely exhausted. I only had some loose storyboards and ideas, and knew we’d figure it out as we went along. We lucked out by going through the park and stealing pieces of footage. It’s the kind of thing where if you were able to look one inch to the right, you’d see people running around.
JK: Kim Blair perhaps has the most challenging role. Everyone else has a chance to play with dialogue and scenes, but she has to basically walk through the city and react to what’s happening. It’s amazing, because she’s probably the second most important character in the movie, and yet for three-quarters of the movie she has no dialogue. How did you find her?
JM: She was my first girlfriend in college. She’s great. When we did the trailer for The Phlebotomizer, we had a couple of other actresses lined up. They fell through, so I called Kim at the last minute, wondering if this was going to be weird. Literally, we were there with our cameras ready to go. I called her up and asked if she could come do this thing, and she said she was going to leave town, but we sounded desperate so she said yes. She’s so good in that, and her chemistry with Nick was amazing. So many actresses who are touted as the next big thing have no depth, no real understanding of anything, and here’s a girl with amazing presence. There’s no way to shoot her where she looks bad. Light always seems to hit her in the right way. She’s amazingly well trained, and has a background in the theater, so casting her was a no-brainer. We knew we had Kim, and these other great actors, and just figured out a way to write them into the script.
JK: Jim, as a grip and electric or even as a storyboard artist working on other people’s films, you’re able to make a living but nevertheless it’s tough to not work when you’re a freelancer. You’re not earning vacation pay or anything. Obviously commitment goes a long way but what enabled you to give three and a half weeks of your life to shoot Mulberry Street.
JM: Complete serendipity. I got a call to edit a commercial that paid decently and enabled me to purchase a G5, which is what we did everything for Mulberry Street on. I hooked up with a financial company that considered me their in-house video guy, so I’d shoot for them and use their DVX-100 for B-unit stuff. I lucked out, doing a couple of editing jobs for three months, saving up, and setting a deadline where we would absolutely be shooting by [a certain] date. That’s it. The money wasn’t much, but it got us to the wrap day, and it took us a year to edit. I’d literally spend time cutting a corporate video, hitting render, then skipping over to cut a scene on Mulberry Street, hitting render, and going back and forth. That’s what enabled me to keep making our film during that time. It was just luck. As soon as we finished the movie, they were like, “Oh, you made a movie? You don’t need us anymore!” They went away and I spent six months last year without getting a single job.
JK: Let’s talk about your director of photography, Ryan Samul. Many DP’s on low budget jobs can be really difficult. If they have a million dollars, or even one hundred thousand dollars, it’s not enough—and it’s never enough. You were working with much less to make Mulberry Street. What was the dynamic between you and Ryan, and was he cool with running and gunning?
JM: He had moments where, as anyone would have, he would get frustrated. In retrospect, you wonder how he wasn’t freaking out every day. We had worked with a guy named Jason Velez, the key grip, who owns his own lighting truck, and we were lucky enough to be able to come in and borrow a few lights from him. Those were the only movie lights we had. The style of the movie was built on what we were readily able to get: china balls and fluorescent lights from home depot that we could rig into a battery. This is the kind of movie we were going to make, it set the tone, and we embraced that.
JK: Those things have an integrity and beauty all their own. If you watch John Cassavetes films, they aren’t necessarily pretty, but there is an intense, scrappy, raw sense of reality to them. Mulberry Street is a beautifully shot film, and I think it’s because of that tone. Also, Ryan Samul has a good eye.
ND: One great story about Samul, among the many: There’s a scene where Charlie goes out into the hallway. “I can’t hear! I’m gonna go see what he wants!” Frank shouts not to go out in the hallway. Boom, he goes out and the rats are there, and he slams the door shut. The crew’s all there, looking to Samul, saying, “You’re the DP—where’s the camera gonna be?” He runs over to the door with duct tape, and tapes the camera to the door and walks away, saying, “There it is.” You see the result.
JM: I saw that shot on his reel.
ND: The other story is we wrapped shooting the apartment, second time in. We’d taken two weeks off, came back and shot here again. It’s all done, we are wrapped, done, over! I got the equipment in the front room. My apartment’s a fucking mess. “Let’s go to the bar and have a beer, man!” It’s a gorgeous summer night, and we’re crossing Houston Street. We see this beautiful full moon. Me, Jim and Samul stop in the middle of the street. I look up and say, “Ryan, look at that fuckin’ moon…!” I turn and see he’s running back towards the apartment to get the camera and shoot it. That’s total commitment, and the shot’s there in the film. But he’s crazy, too—running up and down that rickety fire escape for those shots at the end of the movie. He scared the shit out of me.
JK: But your actors were running up there, too.
ND: Anything we were doing, he did ten times more—with a camera in his hand! Jumping across to the other roof to get the shot. His instincts were great. We did shots in this alley, got thrown out, had no electricity, and Samul got it lit with truck lights and flash boards. He was always saying, “We can do that!” That’s what he really likes to do.
JM: Ryan and I worked on Trans-America together. At the end of the day, we’re doing a close-up of someone standing in the yard. The DP says, “All right, put up a 20x silk.” Just to give you an idea, this is the biggest pain in the ass to rig. It takes four or five people to put up. This was our last shot of the day, and did we really need to do this for this girl’s close-up? Ryan and I spent so many days together like that, griping, “You don’t need this. Why?” I think he has a good understanding of being on the other end of that, in terms of knowing what not to ask for. Half of the shoot on Mulberry Street, we had no grips. It was just Ryan running around doing lights and coming back to the camera. On the days he brought people on, he thought of the easiest ways to do it. When everybody’s working for free, you don’t want to kill anybody. Another thing he did that was brilliant was lighting for 360 degrees. We knew we’d never have the time to light Nick perfectly here, then light the other person perfectly for the next shot. We were able to move very fast. I remember Ron Brice, who played Coco, would finish his scene and walk off, but immediately we’d be back on him saying we’re ready again. He’d be like, “Are you kidding me?” He said later that sometimes it was moving so fast that he wasn’t used to it. But hats off to Samul for that. He’s the guy that should make it—he’s done a couple million-dollar films since then.
JK: What was your experience shooting at the bar where Kay works, Tom & Jerry’s? Filming in any bar in Manhattan is tough, because you have a limited amount of time.
ND: We shot sometimes when they were open, and stayed into the morning blocking out the sun when we’re shooting crazy stuff. It would be seven o’clock in the morning, broad daylight, when we’d shoot scenes with rats attacking people there.
JM: We’d come in at midnight or two shooting stuff on the side, or in the basement, and the minute the bar closed, we’d go to work. A couple of times we had extras, but that was the bane of the shoot. Twenty-five people would be scheduled to arrive, and six would show up. When we tried to use real bar patrons, after one shot, they’d be ready to go home. I’d be like, “No, we need you the whole night!” Every scene in the bar is desperately trying to shoot around the fact that nobody was there, and it was a constant struggle. I think the music and confusion of it makes it work.
ND: The bar stuff works for me, but mainly because we deliver with Big John (John Hoyt). He’s a real guy, works security at a strip club over on 11th Avenue, so he’s been around and knew what he had to do. When the rats are attacking and he comes in beating them down with the frying pan, wielding it like a ping-pong paddle, especially in that last shot where he backhands one of them.
JM: Originally, we had a bat with nails driven into it. Then I saw a really cool movie called Of Unknown Origin starring Peter Weller, where he’s going crazy thinking there’s a giant rat in his apartment, and he grabs a bat and starts driving nails into it, so it was already done. We looked around and found this special effects company out in Los Angeles, which sells you the real thing and a foam version of it. Like, you can buy a pipe wrench, or a frying pan…I was excited by all the things we could get. We were inspired the beginning of Irreversible, where they bash in the dude’s head with the fire extinguisher. It’s the sound of that blunt object hitting the face, and being able to see it and not cut away. So he’s smacking people in the face with a rubber frying pan, and we didn’t have to cut.
ND: The unsung heroes are the stunt guys, man. Adam Morrow and Steve Bodi.
JK: From the script stage, were you aware how downbeat and melancholy the movie would feel? This becomes very intense for the viewer, because you get attached to these characters and many of them don’t survive.
ND: From the very beginning,
JM: We had a moment where [a main character] gets ripped out of a car, and it’s such an unexpected moment. One of the best things about Nick as a writer is he’s not afraid to throw out the craziest ideas. Sometimes you’re like, “I don’t know, man.” But two-thirds of the time, it’s a great idea. Great films like Alien kill off major characters early, just when you think you know what direction the movie’s going.
ND: We said right from the very beginning, “Everybody dies.” Some people make it, because I didn’t want to have the cliché where every single person gets killed. But we made a choice. It’s not a happy movie.
JK: One of the things I loved about the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland are all these great scenes, like when he tells the joke about General Rommel, or chopping vegetables in the kitchen with Brooke Adams. You see these very human moments that will be taken away from us when the pod people take over. Mulberry Street also has its characters living through what we associate with New York, and a certain lifestyle of the Lower East Side, where everyone living in the same apartment building, they know and take care of each other. When everyone is dying, it got me reflecting on what is actually being lost in our city nowadays. Was this something you hoped to achieve, or did it naturally happen while making the movie?
ND: It was essentially planned. We knew things would not work out okay, and the heroes were not going to win. Night of the Living Dead wouldn’t have the same impact if the hero lived. That’s our future, if we don’t change something. This world is gone, though. We were cheating by saying that way of life still exists now. I remember the real Charlie and Frank. I’d carry that old guy up the stairs when he was sick; he weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. He’d make jokes about feeling like a baby, and he’d make me stay in his apartment and have a shot of vodka with him. We had to nail it to those real estate motherfuckers, to say they’re killing the entire character of the city.
JM: We wanted to capture that inevitable sense of New York right now. The neighborhood is changing.
JK: Is that one of the reasons you called the film Mulberry Street and not Attack of the Rat Monsters?
JM: We had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to that title. Lions Gate didn’t want to change it, but when we were sending it to festivals, our reps kept telling us this wouldn’t fly and nobody would be into it. They didn’t think we were capitalizing on the heat around horror movies.
ND: You have to deliver on a title like Rat Zombies on Mulberry Street, but it wasn’t that movie.
JM: Ultimately, more than a horror movie, it’s a neighborhood movie.
ND: The death of a neighborhood, slowly but surely…
JK: You had an excellent festival run showing at Fant-Asia in Montreal, Sitges, South by Southwest and Tribeca—and then you had a nationwide theatrical run through After Dark Horrorfest. How did that come about?
JM: I have no idea! (laughs) We had our world premiere in Stockholm, then South by Southwest where everyone almost unanimously turned us down and had nasty things to say about it.
ND: Our sound was fucked at that festival because of some technical bullshit.
JM: Ti West’s movie Trigger Man has the same problem, where something was wrong with the speakers. We wondered if our film would never see the light of day, but in European horror festivals, people were eating it up. During Tribeca, supposedly Lions Gate saw it again. We were able to sell to Lions Gate, and weren’t sure how they negotiated it with After Dark Horrorfest, but I never knew anything about that until I randomly went to the Fangoria Web site. While we weren’t involved in that process at all, certainly we embraced it. Our little $60,000 DV-movie would be on 350 screens, a theatrical release, and a big push.
ND: I remember taking my father to the theater, seeing the premiere on 42nd Street. The guy’s never acted before, he’s 78 years old, and here he is sitting there watching Mulberry Street on the big screen, larger than life. That was the best part for me.
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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.
Links for the Day (March 27th, 2007)
1. Richard Widmark, 1914-2008. Obituaries and appreciations by Ed Copeland, Kim Morgan, House of Mirth and Movies, New York Times, Richard Corliss, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Hollywood Reporter, Vince Keenan, Cinebeats, Screengrab.
[Corliss:"The gentleman was a goon....In the 1947 Kiss of Death, [Widmark] played the psychopathic Tommy Udo, maniacally giggling as he pushed a wheelchair-bound old lady down the cellar stairs to her death. This sort of violence, explosive and explicit, was startling in early postwar films, as were the insane delight glinting in the killer's eye, the sexual thrill in his catarrhal voice. But that was just acting — glorious acting — for Widmark was a well-liked, well-mannered, essentially private star, a gentleman of the old school."]
2. "Lost Highway: Into the Dark Heart of David Lynch." Ivan Hewett of The Telegraph reports on an operatic adaptation of Lynch's 1996 feature.
["There are many films that seem to cry out for operatic treatment. Brief Encounter would make a good two-hander, or, if you wanted a grand love story with a chorus, Captain Corelli's Mandolin might do the trick. But, if there's one film director whose work defies the lyric stage point-blank, it must surely be David Lynch. There seems to be no purchase in his world of cold uncanny menace and weird obsessions for the warmth of the singing voice. But that's not how it seems to Olga Neuwirth, whose musical version of Lost Highway has its British premiere in a joint English National Opera/Young Vic production next month. 'I've always loved David Lynch's films, ever since The Elephant Man, she says, 'but there was something really special about Lost Highway."]
3. Three pieces by Ted Pigeon of The Cinematic Art: Brian DePalma's Redacted ; "On the Cinema of Music," and "Canonized Auteurs and Contrarianism." 
["One recent example of how the critics turn against their once-darling filmmakers is Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited return to directing. I remember eagerly anticipating this film when I read about it last year. I was disheartened, however, to learn that most critics ripped the film -- it scored a poor 28 percent on the Tomatometer -- and its maker for being overly pretentious, heavy-handed, and condescending. Francis Ford Coppola, it seems, has fallen from grace with the critics who championed him as the wonderboy of cinema 35 years ago. Amazingly, much of the criticism of the film echoed the same rhetoric about other supposedly 'once great' auteurs, namely Woody Allen, whose recent films are unfairly simplified and situated within the 'What Happened to Woody?' narrative to a sickening degree. Although Youth Without Youth is the first movie to be subject to such negative judgment, I fear that Coppola may be doomed to the same fate with critics, many of whom are so baffled that a filmmaker dares to offer something different from her/his previous work that they choose to deride the art. In trying to be contrarian and cutting edge -- like most critics are painted -- critics actually draw themselves as the boring community of homogenized writing styles they so adamantly reject."]
4. "Big Phat Liar." The Smoking Gun refutes last week's bombshell Los Angeles Times story alleging that a 1994 attack on Tupac Shakur was carried out by associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs. Apparently the Times reporter was duped "by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs's trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion 'Suge' Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud." See also: New York Magazine; New York Times; Los Angeles Times.
["The con man, James Sabatino, 31, has long sought to insinuate himself, after the fact, in a series of important hip-hop events, from Shakur's shooting to the murder of The Notorious B.I.G.. In fact, however, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as "a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.""]
5. "A Widow Roaming the Chechen Front, with Curiosity and History in Tow." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times on Alexander Sokurov’s latest feature, Alexandra.
["Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra — a film of startling originality and beauty — feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here. Mr. Sokurov, a Russian director best known in America for Russian Ark (2002), makes films so far removed from the usual commercial blather that it sometimes seems as if he’s working in a different medium. His work is serious, intense, at times opaque and so feverishly personal that it also feels as if you’re being invited into his head, not just another reality."]
Quote of the Day:
“The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.” -- Tupac Shakur
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The cover The Best of Tupac, Part II: Life.
Clip of the Day: Thanks to Eric Spiegelman at Bus Your Own Tray, here's the last known film project by John Ford, Vietnam! Vietnam!, a Ford-produced, Charlton Heston-narrated, government-bankrolled propaganda film supporting U.S. involvement in the war. Ford began working on it shortly after the Tet Offensive, but didn't finish it until 1971, at which point his sponsors buried it, believing that antiwar sentiment was too entrenched for such efforts to make much difference. For background on the film's production, notes on how Spiegelman found it, and a link to a PDF of the original shooting script, visit Bus Your Own Tray via the link above.
Vietnam! Vietnam! from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
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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, March 26, 2008
New Directors/New Films 2008
By Steven Boone, Vadim Rizov, Andrew Schenker, Keith Uhlich, Zachary Wigon and Lauren Wissot
Introduction
Now in its 37th year, the annual New Directors/New Films series kicks off tonight with a screening of the Sundance Film Festival prizewinner Frozen River. The schedule for the following week-and-a-half (closing night: Sunday, April 6th) is an outwardly eclectic mix of subjects, though whispers from several festival-fatigued colleagues suggest there’s a lot of same-ol’-same-ol’ chaff among the needle-in-the-haystack wheat—a par for the course reaction as far as these things go, helpful only in pointing up the ease with which cinephilic passion becomes masochistic drudgery. I attended only three press screenings (one of these was for a film I had seen several times before), but that was enough to glean something of a linking theme: the symbolic weight of one’s home/homeland, literally evident via the plantations that figure as central locales in Eat, for This Is My Body and Moving Midway, and more figuratively explored via the cluttered downtown Manhattan loft (a repository for several characters’ perpetually resonant memories and inescapably present-tense hang-ups) in Momma’s Man. Such an observation runs the risk of reducing the New Directors series to some kind of singular, bastardized essence. No doubt the many writers who contributed to this festival preview (heroes all of ‘em) would beg to add their own perspective, and that they have done in the entries below (all told, eleven of the series' twenty-six features are reviewed). Consider the result less a consumer’s guide than a signpost marking a moment—use our collected observations to journey where you will. (Keith Uhlich)
Review List (with author):
Manipulative Naturalism: Ballast
[Screening Saturday, March 29th, 8:00pm at MoMA & Sunday, March 30th, 3:00pm at The Walter Reade Theater. Click here for more information.]
When a film's aesthetic is not far removed from a recognizable trope, it is terribly easy for said film's style to feel unearned. During the first third of Ballast, I was consistently distracted by the way in which the film appeared to fit into a veritable matrix of aesthetic signposts: the barren, desolate southern landscapes of David Gordon Green; the shaky handheld camerawork of Charles Burnett or the Dardenne brothers; the observant naturalism of the latters' work. (Much has been made of Ballast's debt to the Dardennes; one colleague observed that the critical community will probably champion Ballast simply because it's such a European art-film depiction of a strongly American setting.) It was these qualities that kept nagging at me—until the film proved its sincerity, I found it tough to allow it the credit to employ such obviously manipulative aesthetic tropes. However, while that handheld, shaky camerawork and those dingy landscapes might initially feel manipulative, one emerges from Ballast with a sense that it deserves these elements, for the most part.
Writer/director Lance Hammer explains in his director's statement that he wanted the film's narrative to remain "minimal and unobtrusive." Save for a few scenes that feel out of place (one where two of the characters are pulled out of their car and attacked comes to mind), Hammer's intent is successfully realized. The storyline is never so important that it gets in the way of Hammer's tonal/stylistic work, which is clearly the film's primary pursuit. Ballast is a narrative film insofar as it is about people and the things that they do, but it examines these people and their actions from a point of observation too distant to be traditionally "dramatic." However, the point of view is not so distant as to be termed anthropological; Ballast operates on a strange middle ground, like a silent family member at Thanksgiving dinner who's content to sit at the table and watch everyone argue, but won't join in. He won't get up and leave, either.
Ballast tells the tale of three people in a small Mississippi Delta township: James (JimMyron Ross), a 12-year-old kid who associates with some small-time drug dealers; Marlee (Tarra Riggs), James' mother; and Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Sr.), the brother of James' father/Marlee's ex-husband. The relationships between these three characters are tested after James' brother commits suicide. To start, Lawrence shoots himself, but lives. Then James starts robbing Lawrence at gunpoint to impress his drug-dealer friends. Then said drug-dealer friends end up turning on James. This is just the beginning. The film may sound a bit excessive or stereotypical in its portrayal of these events, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, one of Ballast's triumphs is its consistently maintained tone of understatement, which helps to reel in its seemingly melodramatic story. I have nothing against melodrama personally, but melodrama of this ilk can easily come across as a bit tired. Hammer's command of the medium is strong enough that Ballast avoids this potential issue.
In the press notes, much is made of the fact that Ballast's cast is comprised of amateurs. This is another potential minefield—the story of the lo-fi independent film made on a shoestring budget with nonprofessional actors is as played-out as they come. Nevertheless, Hammer's actors never come across with tired, cliche "naturalism." As the extremely introverted Lawrence, Smith Sr. is merely adequate. (The great thing about introverted characters is that—while it's very hard to play one really well—it's not so difficult to play one adequately; looking somber and speaking quietly is often all that's needed.) Ross and Riggs are both solid, although there are moments when the tenor of Riggs' performance as the Concerned Mother Of A Child Caught Up With The Wrong Kids reaches a too sentimental pitch for my taste. Ross' performance, perhaps the most difficult of the three, is the one that strikes the fewest false notes.
Ballast is a testament to the ability of production design and location to create tone. Oftentimes one feels like the landscapes and locations are so earthy and decrepit, so worn-down and washed-out, that anyone pointing a camera at them could create something beautiful. Perhaps I'm sounding hesitant in my praise of the film, but I do keep asking myself if Ballast is the output of a skilled artist who put an enormous amount of genuine effort into something, or whether it is the work of an intelligent opportunist who realized that certain tried-and-true filmic elements, when combined with one another, would form a great film (like instant macaroni or something). That's probably unfair: many great artists are great because they make it look easy, but my lingering doubts remain. The film's restrained, observant qualities, combined with its effective aestheticism, make for a rewarding experience; but in the back of my mind, I still question whether Ballast manipulates its audience in all the wrong, but still expertly executed ways. (Zachary Wigon)
Savage Grace: Eat, for This Is My Body
[Screening Thursday, March 27th, 9:00pm at MoMA & Saturday, March 29th, 3:30pm at The Walter Reade Theater. Click here for more information.]
The opening sequence of Eat, for This Is My Body is a simple stunner: two gliding helicopter tracking shots—the first moving across a pristine blue ocean and the rundown Haitian shantytown at its banks, the second traveling through the same locale’s mountainous inner regions—that captivate the mind and the soul, and which also act as the make-or-break entryway into writer/director Michelange Quay’s heavily symbolic colonialist parable. Take note of the soundtrack, too, which moves from a cacophonous world music beat to more primal, guttural cries as Quay’s camera probes further inland. If I describe it as a regression, it’s only in the sense of Mesmer: a true, unadulterated trip into a most unique subconscious. From what I gather, Quay’s surrealism is a sledgehammer to some, and it is true that his aural/visual interplay errs on the literal side of black/white dichotomies. Yet it is this very approach that, for me, gives Eat, For This Is My Body its unshakeable power.
The title alone sets up a potent parallel between Christian liturgy and “uncivilized” savagery, though Quay’s characters and situations never play as hollow, representational cardboard. The bed-ridden old Mother (Catherine Samie), overlord of the plantation that acts as the primary setting, speaks the film’s themes in an early monologue-to-camera, but her frail passion (devilish smile, streaming tears) complicates her brutal, comically frank racism. Quay puts the most obvious meanings front-and-center (I don’t mean it as a slight when I say that the film’s juxtapositions come off, at times, like those old Warner Bros. cartoons where planes fly into black-colored/block-lettered “deepest, darkest Africa”) as if to call forth a mysterious, underlying spirit—cinema as incantation for and exegesis of both the self and the masses. At the extremes of Quay’s frame are Mother and the group of Haitian children who provide her nourishment (the trade-off is simple: “Eat of the goddess, and ye shall be eaten”); caught in-between are Mother’s daughter Madame (Sylvie Testud) and the shape-shifting butler Patrick (Hans Dacosta St-Val), each of whom have an unspoken desire to move beyond their prescribed servile functions. At times a document (as in an extended fireside party sequence), at others a passion play (as when the Haitian children shoot each other “dead” with toy rifles), at still others a languorous dance (though music and movement, tellingly, do not always sync), Eat, For This Is My Body is an especial highlight of this year’s New Directors/New Films series. (Keith Uhlich)
Not Turning Japanese: Japan Japan
[Screening Friday, March 28th, 8:45pm at MoMA & Sunday, March 30th, 8pm at The Walter Reade Theater. Click here for more information.]
Lior Shamriz’s Japan Japan follows a small-town boy adrift in the big city, in this case a fresh from the army 19-year-old named Imri (Imri Kahn), who has left his hometown for the bright lights of Tel Aviv. He moves in with an insane young woman who uses her hand as a phone and throws soirees for invisible friends (even makes out on the couch with one), works at a party store with a boss who wears cat ears while she instructs him on the proper restocking of candy jars, chills in wigs with his NYC-bound best childhood friend, and cruises the Internet for gay porn in his large chunk of spare time. He also jacks off, dreams of moving to Japan, takes Japanese lessons, eats sushi, loses his job and begs his mom for money, picks up a trick who rhapsodizes to the music of a Turkish protest singer (then storms out because the man’s “pathetic”), has sex with another guy his age after which he declares, “Cinema is dead.” All of this told nonlinearly and often with the use of multiple frames, fast motion, shakily handheld shots with excessive zooms, and some photo stills. Sprinkle in pounding techno beats and opera during a rave scene and you’ve got a visual stew resembling a high-adrenaline, art school thesis project.
I’ll admit it. I’m not a fan of restless camera syndrome, nor of movies that roll the credits twice—both times in the middle of the film (in case I didn’t get that the lead character was constructing his own life/movie, I guess). I don’t understand why the best friend emails footage of herself dressed like a Mott Street restaurant hostess and singing, “I’m a Chinese girl in New York City! I’m a Chinese girl in New York City!” down by the World Trade Center site. (I also don’t know why this and all the other English-language scenes are subtitled.) But then I’m one of those philistines who doesn’t immediately think “Ah, art!” when I see a piece of string hanging from the ceiling at the Whitney. I also never knew cinema was dead.
What I do know is that Japan Japan, like its lead character, seems in an awful hurry to go nowhere. Director Shamriz has been attending the Institute for Time-Based Media in Berlin since 2006, and Japan Japan is more an experiment, an excuse to dice and frame interesting shots above all else. Which would be fine except for the fact that Shamriz also wants to tell a story—of a young man trying to discover his place in the world—and his cinematography and editing tricks are senseless and distracting, not connected to any greater purpose. The story instead becomes self-conscious, inorganic, forced—as disjointed as the bits of graphic porn thrown in every once in awhile to stir things up. This is too bad because there is a deeper foundation buried beneath all this nonstop movement. Imri is a lost soul longing for Tokyo while his best friend has already fulfilled her dream of moving to the Big Apple. Imri can’t bear to return to his small town while his friend has only happy memories there. “It doesn’t make a difference where you are. Only what you do with yourself,” she advises him at an outdoor cafe during a rare moment of stillness. But no sooner have the words left her mouth than the camera jumps to the two madly dancing on the beach, lip-synching to Abba’s “SOS,” the director once again as adrift as his lead. (Lauren Wissot)
Butterfly Kisses: La Zona
[Screening Friday, April 4th, 9:00pm at MoMA & Sunday, April 6th, 2pm at The Walter Reade Theater. Click here for more information.]
La Zona tells you what it's going to be about in the opening credits, as a butterfly flits through a middle class neighborhood on up to a forbidding wall that separates the gated community from a Mexican slum. The butterfly touches some electrified wire at the top of the wall and disintegrates. Zztzzt—What Price Security? Not since the meandering feather in Forrest Gump have CGI poetics been put to such criminal use. La Zona manages to live down that butterfly, keeping the crude metaphors mostly at bay while telling a cautionary Homeland Security parable fit to tangle with M. Night Shyamalan's underrated The Village.
La Zona (The Zone) is a suburban enclave that somehow manages to police itself with minimal outside interference. Private security keeps watch over the entire community through a network of surveillance cameras. When a lightning strike sends a billboard crashing into a section of the wall one stormy night, lights and cameras go dead. Kids from the other side of the tracks seize this opportunity to go looting in The Zone. Before the night is over, two of the robbers, an old woman and a Zone security guard are dead. According to surveillance tapes, one of the boys must still be hiding out somewhere in the neighborhood. The residents vote to leave the police out of it. Time for revenge.
La Zona works a gang of tangled subplots, but the main ones are a vigilante manhunt, a cover-up and, most interestingly, the moral awakening of a 16-year-old middle class brat. Alejandro (Daniel Tovar), curly-haired son of the lead vigilante (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), looks like a Mexican rendition of Shia LaBeouf in Disturbia, but he chooses a path more befitting the wayward son in La Promesse: He secretly harbors Miguel (Alan Chavez), the fugitive kid, in his parents' basement and gets his side of the story. With the Alejandro/Miguel thread, co-screenwriter-director Rodrigo Plá finds his real wings, and they've got nothing to do with that stupid butterfly. The boys' increasingly desperate cat-'n'-mouse game builds to a passionately overblown, operatic chase that finds Miguel fleeing a lynch mob of furious soccer moms and dads to his only hope, a carload of corrupt cops turning a blind eye. Damn. The film's concluding passages are worthy of Luis Buñuel, who had the heart, in Los Olvidados, to show a Mexican slum kid like Miguel ending up in a landfill, just another piece of trash. Plá goes there and further, to a place of humane meditation and even hope. Hard to believe the same guy came up with that butterfly. (Steven Boone)
Sweet and Simple and Irritating: Megane
[Screening Monday, March 31st, 9:00pm at The Walter Reade Theater & Wednesday, April 2nd, 6:15pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
Megane is sweet and simple and irritating at times. It's basically the story of one extremely uptight Japanese career woman's uneventful vacation on a oceanside resort. Not much happens, really. She gets annoyed at being hounded to join the host and the resort's only other guest at meals; at waking up to silly music from the beach every morning. When she's had enough, she goes down the road to another inn where guests are forced to work in a field, like it's some kind of crazy plantation. So she goes back to the first resort and learns to like it.
That's about it. This film's comedy is so soft-spoken and slight, it makes Bill Forsyth seem like Tyler Perry. I suspect it works only if your blood pressure is settled in that sweet spot between sleepy and caffeinated. Writer-director Naoko Ogigami seems to savor every moment of your exasperation: It sort of proves that she's got you hooked. Outrage over this film's lack of "story" only calls into question what constitutes narrative. What does it take to get your investment, to keep you watching? Ogigami bets that all you need for a story is a simple human need and a series of obstructions on the way to fulfilling it. Also, a dash of ambiguity. We are never sure why Taeko (Satomi Kobayashi) has come to the resort or from where, nor is the relationship between any two people here ever defined. Is the resort owner the son, lover, soulmate or disciple of the saintly old woman who spends her summers here selling shaved ice? Is she a ghost? Who is the young man that's followed Taeko to this hideaway and why does he call her "professor"? When any character is asked to clarify his or her relationship with another, the coy evasions are frustrating/adorable.
Ogigami's world is chaste, immaculate and serene, a maddening utopia, but her control of the frame is sensual, ironic and alive. She can make an insert shot of bacon and eggs tickle the ribs. Scenes of pleasurable eating and drinking will make you groan with envy. The minuscule tensions she manipulates between her actors are on a scale that ranges from bliss to mild irritation to gentle concern, but the notes are piercingly accurate. Though comparisons to Yasujiro Ozu are sort of apt, Ogigami's characters aren't roiling with pain or deep longing under the smiles. What's weirder are their strange rituals, which Taeko rejects at first but eventually grows to love, like the pastime called "twilighting." Nobody tells her exactly what twilighting is, just that one must have a talent for it. When Taeko accidentally finds herself twilighting, she glows as if sliding into a warm bath. I was right there with her.
Megane gets weirder, more coy and protracted toward the end, with lyrical longueurs that sent my eye rolling off the screen. Ogigami might be aiming for a vision of heaven, but the endless beach exercise scene set to what sounds like kindergarten music is sheer hell. (Steven Boone)
Variations on Emotions: Momma's Man
[Screening Friday, March 28th, 6:15pm at MoMA & Saturday, March 29th, 1pm at The Walter Reade Theater. Click here for more information.]
Momma's Man might look like it's coming out of nowhere, but there's a dense frame of references and connections surrounding it: it's Azazel Jacobs' third feature, but only his first to get any real traction. His last film—2005's The GoodTimesKid—was pegged as an amiable Jarmusch knockoff, and I skipped it. I started regretting that when I realized that the co-writer and one of the actors was Gerardo Naranjo, whose Drama/Mex (self-consciously lurid melodrama done right) unfairly died a quick death at the IFC Center last summer. Other connections place Jacobs not just as one of the hip new kids saving Sundance from itself, but grounded in the boho NYC tradition that came before: Richard Edson (Eddie from Stranger Than Paradise) has a small, eccentric part, paying tribute to Jacobs' forebears through casting. The film itself takes place in Tribeca, but a part of Tribeca so stubbornly, persistently down-to-earth and shabby as to be positively repugnant to anyone from American Express who'd consider shooting a "My New York" commercial there. (Here's hoping the recession brings it back.)
And then there are Jacobs' parents: avant-garde pioneer/strobe terrorist Ken, painter Flo. As "themselves"—or versions of themselves that are parents to the fictional Mikey (Matt Boren), but who still live in the real Jacobs loft, watch the real Jacobs' movies, etc.—Ken & Flo provide the anchor for this portrait of stasis and self-paralyzing nostalgia. The film begins with Mikey riding the A train to JFK but not getting out; back home, he lies and says there were mechanical problems, allowing him to stay a few more days with his parents. Mechanical delays turn to a wish to hang out a few more days—allegedly sanctioned by Mikey's wife (Dana Varon), whose phone calls go answered—to naked emotional dysfunction.
Momma's Man is basically a series of variations on two related emotions, dread and indecision; there's no real development, only increasing paralysis. At first, Mikey makes a few trips out: to catch up with old friend Dante (Piero Arcilesi). "Mom, Mikey's not a virgin anymore!" Dante blurts out—which might function as a clue of sorts to the kind of traumas that are paralyzing Mikey, but I don't think so. Mikey's blank malaise allows for audience projection of whatever you want: "the general panic of a generation that knows it won't be better off than its parents," suggests Scott Foundas, which sounds more like a rehash of Douglas Coupland's Generation X than the movie I saw. Mikey's symptoms include playing awful songs with high school journal lyrics ("Fuck fuck fuck you/I hope you die too") and playing with his leftover '80s toys (the Garbage Pail Kids make an appearance), which, all in all, sounds like an average evening of VH1. Mikey's symptoms just peg his generational status; his deeper malaise is harder to pin down.
Momma's Man eventually gives us some extended comic sequences; Flo interrogating Mikey as to whether or not she can get him anything ("Some tea? Some coffee? Some tea? Some coffee?") is a nightmare of near Philip Roth-esque maternal intervention. Ken reveals himself as the avant-garde's Clint Eastwood, staring sternly and saying little; at one point, he's discovered lying cozily in bed, reading the cheerily titled American Fascists to lull himself to sleep. Momma's Man makes itself at home in the loft's clutter, going through iterations on the same theme over and over. I found it kind of hypnotic, if ultimately minor, and I'm worried that the advance hype team will try to dub this a masterpiece, a title it can't possibly live up to; here, at least (as opposed to the insipid Ballast, a ND/NF companion also from Sundance), is a solid minor film. I wish it were a little less invested in modesty for its own sake or a little less oriented towards showing a character who's living purely in the moment, with no distance, but it's still reverbing in my head a few weeks later, which is good enough. (Vadim Rizov)
It's a Start: Moving Midway
[Screening Saturday, March 29th, 8:30pm at The Walter Reade Theater & Sunday, March 30th, 4:45pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway features the largest object actually being moved on-screen since Fitzcarraldo: an entire plantation house, uprooted from its site and relocated away from Raleigh's suburban sprawl. Cheshire (full disclosure: an excellent critic I know in passing) arrived in Raleigh in 2004 to find that his cousin Charlie Hinton Silver was planning on moving the house—there since 1848—because the verdant green surrounding it was being rapidly displaced by miles of traffic and strip malls. The house itself wasn't enough as a repository of meaning; surrounded by urbanity, it was just another old house.
So Cheshire documents the awe-inspiring mechanics of moving an entire plantation house; in between, he does something even more interesting. As a critic, Cheshire wants to examine the image of the plantation in American cultural mythology: from self-consciously racist emblem of a bygone way of life (The Birth Of A Nation) to willfully naive dreamland of the same (Gone With The Wind) to a more complex signifier (Roots finally undermining the whole thing). Cheshire's eloquent history is abetted by two different interview types: presumably disoriented historians (Bruce Chadwick, author of The Reel Civil War) and relatives still on the ground. The non-interrogative latter interviews allow revealing statements to slip out without challenge, as when Cheshire's mother demurs "I'm sure there are plenty of nice Yankees" or a cousin blusters about how he once spent a night sleeping in the same bed as the niggers and feels mighty progressive about that.
As a counterbalance, Cheshire discovers Robert Hinton, an Africana professor at NYU whose relationship to the Cheshires and Silvers is probably not genetic (along the way, though, Cheshire discovers up to 150 possible cousins, fathered by an old relationship between a plantation patriarch and a slave), but whose background gives him a different stake in Midway: while he can appreciate the family's mixed emotions about moving the house, Hinton can't help but express a little glee that a site once made rich by slaves he was probably related to will soon be paved over with indifferent concrete, never to grow anything again. (Here's the upside to the environmental destruction presented in Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen.) Hinton is the documentary's auto-correct: Cheshire is too ambivalent about seeing his childhood refuge uprooted to fully commit to politically cheering it on. Between an amazingly composed Hinton (whose anger only comes out in small but potent doses) and Cheshire, a balance emerges.
Moving Midway is open and engaging, finding its own balance between lived experience and academic distance. If anything, it's not academic enough: I get the feeling that Cheshire is holding back sometimes, offering some readings of the plantation but not wanting to lose anyone in the audience. It's still scintillating viewing, and one of the more honest films about how the past's racial legacy spreads into the present (in light of Obama's speech, it may be more timely than ever); every encounter between Cheshire, his cousins and their new branch of the family is fraught with potential disaster. You're unlikely to see a more heartwarming scene this year than Godfrey's mother bonding with her new relative Abraham Hinton: not over race, but because they're old enough to have the same sense of manners. It's a start anyway. (Vadim Rizov)
A "Now" of the Now: Sleep Dealer
[Screening Friday, March 28th, 9pm at The Walter Reade Theater & Saturday, March 29th, 5:30pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
Hegel once remarked that a good portrait looks more like the person it represents than the person itself, and Slavoj Žižek rightly applied this aphorism to Children of Men. CoM was a great film because it wasn't set in the future so much as it was a more prescient version of the present, a more "now" portrait of the now. Most of the elements of the film that were meant to be apocalyptic are in fact already in place—detainment camps that suspend habeas corpus, a sense of class warfare towards illegal immigrants, and a wielding of the fear of terrorism in order to increase what is essentially martial law.
The same could be said for the intent of Sleep Dealer, the debut feature that Alex Rivera has been working on for years. As he points out in his director's statement, many of the elements of the film's futuristic world—violent reality shows (COPS), private military contractors (Blackwater), the global water crisis (Bolivia), and outsourced labor (India) already exist. However, while Children of Men was greater than the sum of its political references and polemics, Sleep Dealer feels like a hodgepodge of political criticisms that play better in theory than in practice.
Theory is indeed central to the film, with its central concept derived out of a capitalist fantasy that reads like Marx's description of labor on overdrive. In the future, people in Mexico can work in the United States without ever having to cross the border. This is due to "nodes," electronic circuits that connect the bodies of laborers to machines situated in various locations throughout the States. The concept is brilliant; here, the one commodity the laborer has to offer—his labor—is isolated from all complications, extracted from his body and sent to the place of work, while he himself remains in his own country. It's the sort of thing that's both extremely dehumanizing and equally cost-efficient in the way only capitalist inventions can be; if Rivera doesn't have a future as a filmmaker, he could move into the business sector with ease.
Our protagonist is Memo (Luis Fernando Pena), who leaves his water-deprived village (a massive dam has been built by the Government) for Tijuana after his father is killed by a bombing drone. Memo, who is interested in technology, was using an old radio to intercept frequencies, and the Government dispatched the drone believing they were eliminating an "Aqua-Terrorist" cell. It plays more than a bit hammy, and a bit too direct as well.
Memo, on the way to Tijuana, meets a beautiful woman named Luz (Leonor Varela) who he befriends. Luz ends up installing nodes into Memo, and well, you know what they say about girls who install nodes on the first date. It turns out that Luz has been prompted to continue seeing Memo by a client who has been purchasing her "memories" of him from her website. Unsurprisingly, this client is Rudy Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), the pilot who was operating the drone (via nodes) that killed Memo's father. Luz and Memo grow closer and become romantically involved, and Memo begins working at a labor factory; over these proceedings hangs an obvious plot point—that Rudy will come to Tijuana for some reason. When he does, the film's climactic events are sent into motion.
Sleep Dealer is a perplexing work because it's not really about what it wants to be about. It wants to be about governmental exploitation of the working class, the frenzied state of xenophobia the United States has entered, and romantic connection as the only solace from all of the above. There's a moment in the film where Memo tells Luz, in reference to his nodes, "I'm only connected when I'm with you." Nodes can serve to connect a worker to a machine, but they can also serve to connect two people to each other, to heighten a sexual experience. The problem is that the poignancy of a relationship in the face of all else is never really exploited; the relationship between Memo and Luz fails to reach a significant level of believable intimacy, and, through a meandering middle section, we can't help but wonder what exactly the film has turned into.
If Sleep Dealer's political points were utilized in a more effective manner (read: more insightful and less direct), then the political background could have served to enhance the relationship, making it a bit more tolerable. Instead, the film's political analysis reads like that of Southland Tales, minus the self-awareness. Indeed, Sleep Dealer is like something of a cross between Children of Men and Southland: it has the self-seriousness of the former, and the polemicism of the latter. Of course, Southland Tales was able to make that polemicism artful, by employing a self-aware mockery of the apocalyptic political film genre; in Sleep Dealer, Rivera seems to be completely unaware of just how absurd the tone of his political critique is. His points are all right-on, but his delivery is way off.
The film shares another connection with Southland—the production design. Like Southland Tales, Sleep Dealer's production design smacks of that (seemingly growing) niche of futuristic-cheesy: the neon panels, the oversaturated color scheme. The photography of Sleep Dealer also contributes to that impression, as the film has a sort of digitized-film look that makes one think lo-budget sci-fi. Again, these are all qualities that were present in Southland Tales, but they were present in a self-critical fashion; not the case here. To Rivera's credit, the world of Sleep Dealer is not as aggressively futuristic as it could have been (perhaps this owes as much to budget constraints as to the director's vision), and this scaling-back of what might be expected contributes to the sense of Sleep Dealer as a portrait of the present.
Rivera has made a film that comes out firing on many fronts—it's observant of the world around us and is certainly the work of an intelligent man. But the failure of Sleep Dealer illustrates the pitfalls of making a political work of art. Politics and art are so diametrically opposed as to make any significant conjoining of the two almost impossible. Where art is subtle, politics is overt. Where art is ambiguous, politics is clear. For a work of art to represent an intense political situation without becoming overwhelmed by it is a rare and impressive thing—Half Nelson is an example that comes to mind. I have no doubt that Mr. Rivera's films will continue to grow in their political consciousness; I can only hope that they will grow in their artistry as well. (Zachary Wigon)
DAM It All: Slingshot Hip Hop
[Screening Saturday, April 5th, 9pm at The Walter Reade Theater & Sunday, April 6th, 4:30pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
After exposure to bootleg rap CD's from Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur, "how could they not expect us to love hip hop?" cries Tamer Nafar, leader of the first ever Palestinian rap group, DAM (Da Arabian MC's). Descriptions of the pain and injustice inside American ghettos lost little in translation for Tamer and his homies in Lyd, Israel. Slingshot Hip Hop documents how DAM formed as clueless teenagers, became politicized in the wake of the second Intifada and inspired a hip hop movement across the Palestinian territories.
Director-producer-editor Jackie Reem Salloum initially tells the tale in the style of a rap promo DVD, with the expected fast cuts, graffiti-style graphics and upbeat rise-to-fame narrative. As an advertisement for global hip hop culture in the 00's, it belongs on a double bill with the recently released Planet B-Boy. But unlike Benson Lee's international breakdancing saga, it profiles a hip hop scene that is, shockingly but appropriately, more about camaraderie than competition. The handful of rappers in Lyd, Gaza City and the West Bank focus their rage not on each other but on the walls that separate and permanently ghettoize them.
Whenever Salloum samples some of the real tragedy and desperation of this situation, Slingshot Hip Hop becomes something more than a promo. DAM's unauthorized visit to a refugee camp, where Tamer and crew teach some eager teenage boys the fundamentals of rap, leads to the boys' imprisonment. The official reason for their arrest, we're told, is their participation in a demonstration months earlier. Whatever the case, it is devastating to hear Tamer's phone conversation with the jailed kids as they talk of being tortured and terrorized. We want to know more about them, but Salloum moves on quickly.
Slingshot Hip Hop also profiles PR (Palestinian Rapperz), a trio that idolizes DAM but has a lot more street cred when it comes to facing Israeli bullets. Salloum throws in stock footage of Israeli military attacks on school children—images that haven't lost their horror despite familiarity from TV news and docs like Gaza Strip. Members Mohammed, Kan'aan and Mezo rap about friends killed in attacks; tour strafed buildings, rubble and fields stripped of every last tree; rage at separation walls and checkpoints. Their and most Palestinian rappers' favorite anthem is DAM's "Who's The Terrorist?" (a title after Public Enemy's own heart).
The emergence of female performers, particularly DAM collaborator Sabreena Da Witch (Abeer Alzinaty), raises an issue that Slingshot Hip Hop skims even more lightly than the imprisonment incident: What do the Muslim fundamentalists have to say about all this? How does a young Middle Eastern woman take to the stage in hip-hugging Western getup without causing a furor somewhere? The narrator (Tamer's younger brother and DAM member Suhell) informs us that Sabreena's cousins warned her to stop performing with DAM, or else. Temporarily, she does, sitting out a crucial TV appearance with the group. But a bit later, she's back singing hooks for DAM and other acts, with the vague explanation that she's never one to back down from a challenge? Huh? What happened? What changed? Why don't we see or hear from these testy cousins?
Slingshot Hip Hop doesn't really want to go there—to show what other authoritarian bully Palestinian youth culture might be up against, the one residing in its own community. The elders we do glimpse are supportive and fairly liberal. They see vocalists like Tamer as budding political leaders, with lyrics performing the same function as speeches. This is deadly ground. Groups like DAM are preaching resistance, not terrorism. They rap about women's rights. Somewhere along the line, the Islamists who find such concepts threatening may put as much pressure on these kids as the Israeli government. Salloum should be there to capture it for a more austere, focused Part Two. (Steven Boone)
A Constantly Changing Body: Water Lilies
[Screening Friday, March 28th, 6:15pm at The Walter Reade Theater & Sunday, March 30th, 2pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
Three fifteen-year old girls, three body types, three angles of entry into the perplexities of adolescent life. Water Lilies, Céline Sciamma's precisely observed coming-of-age tale, splits its burden of teenage anomie between a trio of young women, fitting its catalogue of anxieties to the unique physical attributes of each of its leads. What distinguishes the film from others of its type is precisely this keen understanding of the ways in which the specific complications of female teenage life are tied to the circumstances of the individual’s body. Set against a backdrop of competitive synchronized swimming, a sport demanding an absolute physical precision, there is little room for the characters to hide from the demanding glare of observers, but Sciamma offsets the potential cruelty of a too insistent gaze with a fine-tuned sensitivity to her characters' emotional orientation.
The wide developmental gaps that puberty often leaves between teens of the same age allow Sciamma to present her leads as three contrasting physical types: Marie (Pauline Acquart), stuck at an early stage of development, seems at least several years younger than the others. Her sense of bodily inferiority leads her to find in the perfectly developed Floriane (Adele Haenel), captain of the synchronized swimming team, an idealized counterpart, for whom hero worship soon gives way to a budding romantic attachment. Floriane, for her part, has to contend with the burdensome demands of insistent male attention (which often finds expression in explicit sexual aggression) as well as the pressure to conform to people's expectations about what “kind” of girl she is. The third teen, Anne (Louise Blachère), is the most conventionally situated of the three, treading the familiar ground of trying to reconcile self-image and a moderate obesity.
The film may be insistently physical, but it wisely avoids an overly sensual orientation. (And it's positively chaste in its depictions of sexuality.) Even the swimming sequences, while undeniably graceful, are shot with a certain matter-of-fact detachment, refusing the lure of overly-prettified image-making. But the film's physicality is exactly detailed, attuned to Marie's gangly legs and long toes, Anne's oversized breasts and the synchronous thrusts of muscular legs as seen from an underwater vantage point. Matching her observational sensitivity with a certain formal restraint, Sciamma gets down both the awkwardness of adolescent physicality and the occasional flowerings of physical beauty that emerge amidst the less glamorous stages of teenage development.
But for all the film's insistence on grounding its characters' emotional orientation in precise physical circumstances, the two come perfectly together exactly once. In preparation for sleeping with a particularly insistent suitor, Floriane asks Marie to break her hymen, preventing a potentially embarrassing situation when the man realizes that her affectation of sexual experience was nothing more than a piece of adolescent theater. Sciamma films the scene in two fixed long takes, a medium shot and a close-up, which shift the focus from the purely physical act (in the first shot) to the emotions behind it (the close-up is particularly attentive to facial expression). For Floriane, the act may register as little more than a practical necessity, but for her adoring lover it's the culmination of this specific sexual attraction. As Marie reaches under a carefully placed sheet, the film offers a rare instance of genuine physical intimacy, even if there's a fundamental disparity between the two participants' motives.
If Marie never gets closer to the object of her desire, then too Sciamma never quite achieves the same concentration of purpose. Abandoning the formal elegance of the rest of the film, she unwisely attempts a bravura final sequence, bringing the characters together for a party amidst a flurry of slow-mo stagings, cross-cutting and trick lighting effects. But the scene feels aesthetically asynchronous with what's gone before and the stylistic excesses go some way towards nullifying the cumulative effect Sciamma's been building towards throughout the film. Even the inevitable kiss between Marie and Floriane fails to build on the intimacy established in the earlier scene. Still, until this final misstep, Sciamma manages to get down much of what marks adolescence as a particularly demanding (if fascinating) stage of human development: the misdirected yearning, the awkward self-consciousness and, above all, the insistent physical anxiety that comes with the burden of a constantly changing body. (Andrew Schenker)
Best Laid Plans: XXY
[Screening Friday, April 4th, 6:15pm at Walter Reade & Sunday, April 6th, 2:00pm at MoMA. Click here for more information.]
Like doctors who operate on inter-sex newborns for the “good” of the child, director Lucía Puenzo, whose film XXY follows the story of one such “genitally ambiguous” individual raised as a girl and now facing puberty, sets out with the best intentions of trying to “fix” society’s perceptions of who these people are. And like those well meaning surgeons, her efforts at healing do more harm than good. The daughter of Argentinean director Luis Puenzo and a three-time novelist in her own right, Puenzo has a secure grasp on both words and cinematography, how to match bluish lighting with the beauty of a South American beach, how to frame her lead Alex (played by Inés Efron, as lithe and androgynous as a glossy magazine model) naked in front of a mirror, genitalia obscured in the shadows, while her adolescent crush Alvaro (a convincingly awkward and gangly Martín Piroyansky) stands watching shirtless in the downpour outside. Alvaro also happens to be the son of a Buenos Aires couple, old friends invited to Alex’s home in Uruguay by her mother—lending an insidious air to the visit is that Alvaro's father is a reconstructive surgeon.
This is all a wonderful setup for what could have been a masterful film. Unfortunately, in Puenzo’s rush to get so many important ideas into her script, based on the short story “Cinismo” by Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio, she loses sight of her characters as flesh-and-blood beings. What we get instead is a series of melodramatic scenes that don’t ring true to any sort of reality and heavy-handed visuals that virtually hit us over the head. We see genitally ambiguous dolls with “Alex” name-tagged to them in her room, Alvaro discovering Alex’s gender-related notebook drawings, the surgeon reading a book on “origins of inter-sex” as he sits at the steering wheel of a car stuck in traffic, Alex herself reading a book that describes how all vertebrates are originally female while her pet iguana crawls up her leg—images as direct and unsubtle as Alex’s asking Alvaro for sex by way of introduction.
When Alvaro finds a rare species of bug, Alex snaps, “What do you know about the species in my house?” before smashing it. Her father is a biologist bent on rescuing an “endangered species,” the idea of castration/surgery paralleled with both the dead turtles he cuts up (“Female,” he notes, the first words in the film) and Alvaro’s surgeon father, looking like a smug asshole Mel Gibson, forever dicing up food. (“Stay away from my daughter!” Alex’s father yells at a bully at the end before turning to the surgeon and shouting, “Stay away from my son!”) When Alex finally does get to fulfill her sexual desire it culminates in her fucking the (straight?) teen in the ass—and her father catches them in the act! Alvaro escapes to the woods where he jerks off as he sobs. Cut to Alex curled up in bed sobbing. Cut to father pulling out newspaper clippings of an inter-sex child who chose to live as a man (followed by him going to the gas station where the guy works and getting his windshield wiped clean—father can see clearly now). Does it get any more reductive than this?
No, but just as I was ready to give up on XXY, Puenzo found her voice about an hour in. It had been there all along, buried beneath the mountain of ideas, and it centered on the simple story of a father learning to let go of a child. Alex’s father Kraken is played by Ricardo Darín, who did similarly excellent work in Nine Queens, and the relationship between he and Alex is the heart and soul of XXY (his is a performance more layered and nuanced than the film itself). There’s a horrific scene straight out of Boys Don’t Cry that is nearly unbearable to watch because—finally!—Alex becomes a real human being rather than a concept. Puenzo’s story begins here. Kimberly Peirce was able to bring Hilary Swank’s Brandon Teena to life in Boys Don’t Cry because Brandon wasn’t a stand-in for all gender nonconforming teenagers. Brandon was specific, functioned in environments that any other “normal” adolescent functions in. Every scene was not an excuse for the audience to be made aware of Brandon’s “otherness.” By mostly eschewing the holistic approach that Peirce so eloquently took, Puenzo has actually done inter-sex individuals a disservice, transforming them into “ideas” (which is as insulting as separating “right” bodies from “wrong”).
Of course, this isn’t completely Puenzo’s fault. She did an inordinate amount of research on her subject matter—perhaps too much—but no amount of study in the world could change the fact that Puenzo had to approach her film from an outsider’s viewpoint. Puenzo is like Darín's Kraken, someone trying to figure out what’s best for Alex rather than someone able to empathize with an inter-sex individual. She missed a prime opportunity to universalize her story from the first frame by focusing on her father’s search for answers. “Making her afraid of her own body is the worst thing you can do to your child,” the inter-sex gas station attendant advises to a heart-wrenchingly confused Kraken. At the end, Kraken says he’ll look after Alex until she’s ready to choose what she will become. “What if there’s no decision to make?” she responds. Trying to explain why they opted against surgery at birth, Kraken tells the surgeon, “From the moment I laid eyes on her. She was perfect.” These lines are more profound than any thorough investigation of the “genitally ambiguous” could ever be, a story flowing beautifully into a grander idea. This is a father telling another father (who incidentally has nothing but contempt for his own son) that he unwaveringly believes in his child regardless of what others think. (Lauren Wissot)
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Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.
Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
Andrew Schenker is a freelance writer based in New York. His work can be accessed at The Cine File.
Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
Zachary Wigon studies Film Production and Comparative Literature at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he is the editor of the film studies publication, the Tisch Film Review. In addition to writing and directing short films, he also writes film criticism for FilmCatcher and maintains a cultural theory blog, Between Fear & Commitment.
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.
Pause. Crickets.: Shotgun Stories
By Steven Boone
[Shotgun Stories opens today at Manhattan's IFC Center. Click here for screening details.]
In Shotgun Stories, a mother comes to her son's doorstep at night to tell him that his father is dead. Pause. Crickets. Son responds, stone-faced, "When's the funeral?" Pause. Crickets. Mom: "You look in the paper." Pause. "You goin'?" "No." Shotgun Stories goes on like that for a mesmerizing 90 minutes. Glorious Southern fried sloth, in epic widescreen.
Dad's death sets off a feud between the family he neglected and the one he was there for. At the funeral, the stone-faced son, named Son Hayes (Michael Shannon), literally spits on his father's grave and curses his name. It's all downhill from there. Son's middle class brothers from another mother don't take kindly to the offense, and a series of tense confrontations begins right there over the casket.
Writer-director Jeff Nichols plays everything at half speed, passing the time in a style similar to films directed by his producer, David Gordon Green. Flicks like Green's All the Real Girls and the recent Snow Angels take their time savoring the eccentrics and beautiful losers who mill about in a tiny shit town. Before all the ruckus, Son and his two brothers cap off their blue collar days with beer, movie trivia and bizarre projects, like Boy's (Douglas Ligon) attempt to outfit his filthy van with a huge home air conditioner. Also, some mild woman trouble: Kid (Barlow Jacobs) is bursting to marry his sweetheart (Natalie Canerday), despite being so poor he has to pitch a tent in Son's backyard; Son is trying to patch things up with his wife (Glenda Pannell).
Nichols clearly loves Son and the boys more than the other, relatively prosperous Hayes clan, but his writing shows equal understanding of both. Nobody wants war here, but the dead Hayes patriarch has created such animosity on one side and insecurity on the other that war is inevitable. Beating the war drums is Nichol's most outlandish creation, the oily troublemaker Shampoo Douglas (G. Allan Wilkins). Greasy-haired, covered in mysterious bandages fixed with duct tape and an eye patch under his plastic glasses, Shampoo occasionally rolls up in his hooptie to instigate fights between the two Hayes families. Along with Peter Lorre, Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs and Chamberlain in The Dark Crystal, Shampoo is one of those iconic screen snakes whose slithering maneuvers you can only grin at in astonishment.
Between Shampoo's duct tape, Son's permascowl, yard dogs at magic hour and pastures shrouded by bulging storm clouds, cinematographer Adam Stone has a lot to play with. His anamorphic images feel just heavy and humid enough for this story's slow roast. Ultimately, Stone is the star, above Shannon, above even Nichol's textured, downright charismatic screenplay.
Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.
Torchwood, Season 2, Ep. 9: "Something Borrowed"
By Joan O'Connell Hedman
One of the sweetest scenes of the season-opening Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was Gwen (Eve Myles), wide-eyed, explaining to Jack (John Barrowman) that the ring she was wearing was an engagement ring. Rhys (Kai Owen) had asked, and she'd said yes, because "Nobody else will have me." Throughout the season the writing team has done a good job of referring to the wedding without making too big a deal of it, which was a very good thing. Anyone who has ever been married or planned a wedding knows how the process can take over your life; the problem is, the details you're obsessing over are deathly boring to the rest of the world. "Something Borrowed," a wedding episode, Torchwood-style, avoids both the precious and the obnoxious, with shape-shifting aliens, tons of snappy dialog, and terrific action set-pieces; in the end, love and a really, really big gun conquer all.
It's the night before Gwen's wedding, and she's chasing down an alien in the streets of Cardiff. She's also running late for her "hen do," a bachelorette party with her girlfriends, waiting at a local pub, wearing pink marabou-trimmed cowboy hats. The cross-cutting between the scenes highlights the delicious absurdity of each. Gwen shoots the alien, who conveniently leaves a trail of black blood; along the way Gwen notes that he can change form. She calls for backup, as she eventually corners the alien. He attacks her, biting the arm she throws up defensively. Jack arrives in time to blast the alien just as Gwen throws him off. Jack's concerned for the arm, but Gwen insists it's nothing, and heads out for her party.
From that zippy beginning, "Something Borrowed" continues spinning at least two, sometimes three, intertwining story lines, all cleverly interweaved and equally interesting. The "hen do" looks like a blast, even as Gwen frets that she's crazy to be out drinking when she's getting married in 13 hours.
Gwen wakes up bleary-eyed and alone the next morning; Rhys has spent the night at his best man's flat. Gwen squints across the room to see her wedding dress hanging outside the wardrobe, she gives an adorable clap of delight; today's her wedding day. She's not feeling her best though, and we immediately think, "hangover," but that's not it at all. The reveal here is awesome, as Gwen leans over to look into her mirror for confirmation of what she's already seen. She stands up and finally, we can see what's freaking her out: overnight, she's gone from svelte to eight months pregnant. Her "Oh," is so loaded with mixed emotions it would be difficult to list them all, taking us into the credits.
Then she's in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of water and, true to cliché, eating pickles straight out of the jar as Jack explains how this could have happened. "Eggs passed in the bite," he explains. Owen insists that Gwen will be fine, if there were any major incompatibilities, she'd be dead already. How comforting. Owen further technobabbles that she'll have to undergo some procedures in a big machine and then be off her feet for a few days -- and Gwen stops him right there: she refuses to postpone the wedding. Jack tries to talk her out of it, but she won't be swayed, and agrees to the procedure only after the ceremony.
Jack and Owen head back to the Hub. Owen has another go at the dead alien's body to see if he can find anything else. Jack dispatches Tosh to keep an eye on Gwen at the wedding, and sends Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) to get Gwen a new - bigger - wedding dress. Ianto takes it in stride when the shop clerk assumes he's actually buying the dress for himself.
Gwen immediately calls Rhys, who's dead asleep on the sofa, still dressed in yesterday's clothes. Rhys covers like a pro, though, and launches into a spiel about how Banana (Jonathon Lewis Owen) is on the phone even now, confirming the flowers. Gwen doesn't care about that, of course, and insists on seeing Rhys, bad luck be damned.
Given the circumstances, Rhys deals quite well. His reactions: 1) Bastard Torchwood 2) you're pregnant 3) are you going to be all right? I think that's just about right, actually. When Rhys gets all pissed that Jack sent Gwen out last night, Gwen gets right into his face and shouts, reminding him, "It's my job!" Rhys wants to postpone the wedding, but Gwen, in a very sweet speech, convinces him that all she wants to do is marry him, today. Rhys agrees.
Tosh cajoles Owen into joining them at the wedding, and the two of them have their most comfortable scene, ever. Owen even promises to dig out his dancing shoes, after the obligatory "dead can't dance" reference.
One of the highlights of this episode is meeting Gwen's and Rhys's parents. Gwen's parents' reaction to her pregnancy is awesome, particularly her mum's glee when she contemplates how Rhys's mother will take it. The dynamic between the two mums is characterized by poisonous charm; if they're speaking to each other, they're trading insults, usually veiled as compliments. It's delightful when they drop the pretense and let the claws be seen. When Rhys's mother, Brenda (Nerys Hughs), complains she wasn't late for her own wedding, Gwen's mum, Mary (Sharon Morgan), can't resist replying that she couldn't dare, otherwise her husband might've got away.
Since Gwen is pregnant with an alien, the rest of the plot revolves around getting her un-pregnant again. There are two possibilities: Owen does his techno-magic, or she's ripped apart by the alien's mate. It seems the males carry the fertilized eggs and transfer them through the bite, while the female waits around until the proper time, and then tears open the host to deliver the offspring. Tosh spots the female alien quickly; she'd just picked up the DJ in the bar. Unfortunately, Tosh is too late to save the poor guy, and the idiotic Banana Boat stumbles in just as she's about to take the alien down. Tosh and Banana end up bound together in black webbing, unable to move much, but able to speak just fine. Tosh had already told this guy off at least three times, but he just doesn't get it, and she ends up threatening to turn him into a castrati if he doesn't behave himself. You can see why Tosh doesn't get many dates, at least not with the kind of men she'd actually want to go out with, but I love her in these scenes anyway. She is who she is, and she's not going to change a bit just because a handsome blond guy offers to buy her a drink.
Tosh is out of commission and Gwen has no clue she's being stalked, so Jack, Owen, and Ianto take off for the wedding in the SUV. Jack notices that Owen's packed the hit-or-miss singularity scalpel, first seen in "Reset," and Owen launches into a reasonable sounding defense of its use to get that alien out of Gwen. Ianto agrees with Owen, leading to one of my favorite exchanges (of many). Jack asks, "What is with you? Ever since Owen died, you always agree with him." Ianto replies, "I was taught never to speak ill of the dead, even if they're still doing most of their own talking." The whole Owen-is-dead situation has become blessedly routine, and I was surprised at how I was able to enjoy the references to it throughout this episode.
Gwen, looking as lovely as an extremely gravid bride can look, breaks down and confesses to her father that the baby isn't Rhys's. Her dad, quite reasonably, thinks she's talking about another man, but Gwen spills the whole Torchwood/space-time rift/alien baby story. Dad thinks it's just the stress of the wedding that's got to her, and dismisses the whole thing. Rhys's father, on the other hand, thinks he can still talk his son out of marrying this crazy woman, but Rhys matches Gwen's earlier fervent passion in insisting that he loves her and is going to marry her.
Finally, here's Gwen walking down the aisle on her dad's arm, with her attendants following, contrary to the American tradition. The minister begins the ceremony by asking the official "Are there any objections?" And wouldn't you know it, just at that moment, Jack comes running in, yelling for them to stop.
Of course Rhys is livid, and Gwen only slightly less upset, but they listen to Jack's explanation. Meanwhile, Ianto and Owen locate Tosh by her comm signal, and free Tosh and the best man. They dash down to the chapel, and Tosh recognizes the female alien. The all open fire on her, but she jumps through the window and takes off.
Whether its maternal drive or just a hardier constitution by nature, this alien is impossible to kill. The team keeps pumping it full of bullets but it just doesn't stop. It's also incredibly smart in its choice of individuals to copy, first choosing Rhys's mum; Gwen saves her by recognizing her "god-awful" perfume. But then they realize, if this is the real Brenda, who's out there in the garden with Mary? Gwen has two incredible scenes with the shape-shifter, and this is the first, where she appears to be sacrificing herself to save her mother. Luckily, she was hiding her gun behind her bouquet, and emptied a clip into the alien before it could hurt anyone.
Later, she's alone in her room while Owen trains Rhys on the singularity scalpel, citing his broken hand and noting it would be better for someone with two good hands to use it. The creature is Jack this time, and it is so restrained, and so perfectly mimics Jack that for the majority of the scene, we can't be sure who it really is. It's only when it reveals its teeth and claws that we see it isn't the real Jack. We have to wonder if Gwen knew all along, because the conversation was more intimate than any we've ever seen them share. Barrowman must have had a blast in the monster make-up, which gave him a legitimate excuse for an over-the-top performance.
Owen remarks on how much ordinance they've put into the alien, and the fact that she's still standing. Jack remarks they're going to need a bigger gun, and we get a brief scene of them assembling a very large weapon out of three separate cases from the back of the SUV. "Torchwood is ready," the season two opening voice-over remarks; are they ever.
There's a bit of running around, but not too much, and Gwen notes that running in a wedding dress with what feels like a keg of lager stuffed up her skirt is less than ideal. She ends up with Rhys in the stable, pursued by the creature that has once again assumed the form of his mother. Rhys manages to operate the singularity scalpel perfectly on only the second try; of course we knew he wouldn't blow up Gwen, although he did cause a small explosion with his first attempt. With the alien offspring gone, you'd think its mother would give up, but no; she breaks down the door and demands her child.
Rhys grabs a chainsaw and starts it up, prepared to hack the alien to bits, after telling it off quite thoroughly: "I have had a gutful of you. You get my girlfriend pregnant, you impersonate my mum, and you ruin my wedding day." He lifts the chainsaw, and it sputters off. "Fuck," he stammers. The alien, a grotesque of his mother, drawls, "Rhys, you're a bad boy." Her voice rises, "and you know what bad boys get?" Blown to bits by Captain Jack and that really big gun, that's what. Black goo flies everywhere. Jack's all swagger, complimenting Rhys on his Evil Dead look, and picking up Gwen from the hay and giving her a hug that lasts about a second too long. He confirms that she's OK, and joins her hand to Rhys's: "The hero always gets the girl." Rhys still can't quite believe what just happened. He knows that there is a love between Gwen and Jack, but that Gwen chose him; now he knows that Jack is acknowledging that fact as well.
The happy couple finally get through their vows, and we cut to the reception. Rhys and Gwen are dancing, and Owen asks Tosh out onto the floor as well. Jack cuts in on the newlyweds, and he and Gwen do that "talking about things not related to the words we're speaking" thing; he's going to miss her while she's away on her honeymoon, but he'll be busy with Ianto, pizza, and saving the world a few times. Ianto cuts in and, as required, he doesn't want to dance with Gwen, but with Jack.
And now they're all back at a table. Gwen notes the events of the day have been too much for the parents, who are all passed out at the head table. Brenda and her mum are leaning against each other, holding each other upright. Both Gwen and Rhys are surprised to see that. Glancing around, the couple realize that everyone is passed out; turns out, that's what level 6 Retcon will do when it's mixed with champagne. "You drugged our families?" Gwen asks. Jack nods, and suggests they might want to forget the whole thing themselves, sliding two innocent-looking glasses of champagne towards them. They decline -- no more secrets! And they head off to their honeymoon, not worrying about how everything will sort itself out.
They don't have to, of course; the rest of the team is still there, and it's their job to clean up this huge mess. We haven't heard anything about implanting memories, but we know they can fake all sorts of things. There's nothing they can do for the poor dead DJ, but they'll concoct a cover story for his death, and they'll somehow leave everyone with the impression that the wedding was both "drop-dead gorgeous" and "class on toast." They're Torchwood, and that's what they do.
If you've any doubts by this point, "Something Borrowed" is the high point of the season so far. The guest cast was uniformly fantastic, friends and families, all. The creature effects were a bit over-the-top, but it all worked marvelously. My highest compliments to freshman writer Phil Ford, who kept our characters in character, while filling in backstory we had no way of imagining, all while delivering drama, action, and laughs. Last, I have to mention how beautiful the locale was. Both the interior and exterior sets were, indeed, "drop dead gorgeous," and it was delightful to see everyone so dressed up for a change. It's all these little things that combine to make it so perfect, as Ianto says, "That's what I love about Torchwood. By day, you're chasing the scum of the universe. Come midnight, you're the wedding fairy."
We close on a tiny scene with Jack, back alone at the Hub. He blows a handful of confetti into the air with a relaxed smile on his face, then goes to his desk to retrieve something. He chuckles softly as he leafs through the old photographs he takes out of a battered box, finally pausing over one: his wedding picture, from long ago. The camera pulls back as we watch Jack get lost in his memories. It's a lovely moment, and helps us to understand, perhaps, why Jack is happy to let Gwen marry Rhys.
Links for the Day (March 26th, 2008)
1. "Eric Rohmer - father of the New Wave": Kaleem Aftab interviews my favorite New Waver. (Hattip: GreenCine)
["Knocking on the door of Rohmer's office in a Paris apartment building, I hardly know what to expect, having been granted the interview on the proviso that it could be cancelled if the film-maker's ill health demanded. I need not have worried. Despite being gaunt and having skeletal features, he is in good health. Sporting a cravat and a blue pullover, he looks the archetypal French artist. He ushers me into his main office-space. The detritus of more than six decades of work seems to be dispersed everywhere. Folders, books, papers and journals are crammed on every surface, except the chairs where we station ourselves either side of his small wooden desk, positioned far from the window of the oblong room."]
2. "New Directors/New Films Brings the New Class": We'll take Nathan any way we can get him. His coverage (for the decidedly non-Vox populi Village Voice) of the New Directors/New Films series. Related: A discussion is brewing about the latest buyouts/layoffs at Dave Kehr's blog.
["Once again, New Directors/New Films, "the premiere festival for works that break or recast the cinematic mold," if they do say so themselves, "handpicked" by a team of curators from the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. There is, as ever, much old hat, plenty of promise, and one or two outright sensations, though in the case of this unusually strong 37th edition, that number climbs up to three or four. My pick of the pick favors a pair of defiantly queer debuts positing genuine new directions/new cinemas."]
3. "Giant Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses": From National Geographic -- more writing on the wall.
["New satellite images reveal what scientists call the "runaway" collapse of an enormous ice shelf in Antarctica as the result of global warming. The chunk of coastal ice was some 160 square miles (415 square kilometers) in area—about seven times the size of Manhattan."]
4. Belated birthday wishes to Ms. Crawford: The Self-Styled Siren and Sheila O'Malley celebrate.
["This renewed interest is good news for those of us who love Joan, who find great pleasure in her movies and don't want to hear about the goddamn wire hangers anymore."]
5. "Hey!": Gimme back my nuts! (One step closer to Idiocracy, ay Vadim? Oh wait... two steps closer: "Demi Moore turns to leeches for good health")
["Tens of thousands of vehicles—or vee-hick-uls in this case—across this great land are sporting low-hanging, lifelike bull testicles in all the colors of the rainbow from their rear hitches. There are brass ones and rubber ones and chrome ones. They come in small, medium and "monster." (For you discreet drivers trying to blend in, they even come in "camo.") Some of them light up. The numerous Web sites that sell these things insist they're incredibly "lifelike." But if your family bull is lighting up down there, it might be time to bring him on in to the vet."]
Quote of the Day: Ludwig Wittgenstein
(One of twenty quotations provided by House contributor Ryland Walker Knight in a recent post at his blog Vinyl is Heavy.)
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Lead image to the Defamer story "The Filipino Prison Peeps Perform 'Thriller'".
Clip of the Day: "Recovering Reality: A Conversation with Errol Morris" for the Columbia Journalism Review. (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
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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, March 25, 2008
Links for the Day (March 25th, 2007)
1. Village Voice critic Nathan Lee fired for 'economic reasons.' The former New York Sun and New York Times contributor, who was hired as a staff critic by The Village Voice just 18 months ago, was axed yesterday by the newspaper's parent company, New Times. In an email sent to friends and colleagues -- including House contributors -- last night, Lee wrote:
["In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."]
2. "A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly." By Dan Barry of The New York Times. Related: "Fear the Geek," a classic -- some might say notorious -- column by Dan Savage.
["It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up. Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School. Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth. Things got worse. At Woodland Junior High School, some boys in a wood shop class goaded a bigger boy into believing that Billy had been talking trash about his mother. Billy, busy building a miniature house, didn’t see it coming: the boy hit him so hard in the left cheek that he briefly lost consciousness. Ms. Wolfe remembers the family dentist sewing up the inside of Billy’s cheek, and a school official refusing to call the police, saying it looked like Billy got what he deserved. Most of all, she remembers the sight of her son. 'He kept spitting blood out,' she says, the memory strong enough still to break her voice."]
3. "Detroit Mayor Charged with Perjury." By Corey Williams of The Associated Press. See also: "Detroit mayor, ex-aide to be arraigned today" ; "Resignation alone not enough to spare mayor." 
["Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a one-time rising star and Detroit's youngest elected leader, was charged Monday with perjury and other counts after sexually explicit text messages contradicted his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also charged the popular yet polarizing 37-year-old mayor with obstruction of justice and misconduct in office. Kilpatrick, who was to be arraigned Tuesday afternoon, could face up to 15 years in prison and be expelled from office if convicted. 'Some have suggested that the issues in this case are personal or private," Worthy said. "Our investigation has clearly shown that public dollars were used, people's lives were ruined, the justice system severely mocked and the public trust trampled on. ... This case is about as far from being a private matter as one can get.'"]
4. "High Schoolers Create a Car That Gets 1,693 Miles-per-Gallon." By Peter Mychalcewycz for Switched.
["Warning: This article may cause serious arousal in environmentally-conscious individuals and/or anyone distraught at the current price of gasoline."]
5. "Fox refuses to pay indecency fine; FCC objects to sexual nature of 'America'." By William Triplett of Variety.
["Fox Television is refusing to pay a $91,000 broadcast indecency fine that the Federal Communications Commission slapped on the network for a 2003 episode of its Married by America reality show. In a statement released Monday -- the deadline by which Fox had to respond to the FCC's official notice of forfeiture -- the net said it will instead file a request for the FCC to reconsider the fine. In 2004, the FCC initially fined 169 Fox stations $7,000 each -- a total of $1.2 million -- for the episode, which included images of contestants licking whipped cream off strippers. Recently, however, the agency reduced the number of stations to 13 and thus the fine to $91,000, saying it would fine stations only in markets from which it had received complaints. Fox has argued that the material was not statutorily indecent but rather was integral to the storyline."]
Quote of the Day: 
"One day people will look back at this moment in history and say, 'Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve,' because they laid the foundation for peace for generations to come." -- President George W. Bush, speaking to reporters during a March 25, 2008 briefing at the State Department on the occasion of the 4,000th reported U.S. combat death in Iraq. For more, click here. Related: Iraq's Sadr threatens 'civil revolt'."
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): "Afghan Star" contestant Lima Sahar sings during a rehearsal at the Tolo TV office in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 12, 2008. Photo by Rafiq Maqboo, The Associated Press. For more, see "Afghan Idol: A Subversive TV Hit," by Aryn Baker of Time.
Clip of the Day: "Down in the part of town where if you hit a red light you don't stop..."
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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.
Audio Podcast: Duel-ing Banjos
By Kevin B. Lee, Steven Boone, Andrew "Filmbrain" Grant, and Keith Uhlich
As part of House contributor Kevin Lee's endeavor to watch the 1000 greatest films of all time (as calculated by the website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?), a screening of Steven Spielberg's Duel (ranked 820 on the TSPDT list and the 908th film from the list Kevin has seen) was organized last week, with Kevin, House Next Door editor Keith Uhlich, House contributor Steven Boone of the blog Big Media Vandalism, and Andrew "Filmbrain" Grant of the blog Like Anna Karina's Sweater. The screening was held at an especially apt venue, the DRV-IN at Grand Opening, currently the only drive in theater in Manhattan. DRV-IN will close its doors at the end of March but will reopen at a larger venue later in the year. Special thanks to Cindi Rowell for recording the audio. (Podcast is accessible after the break. Any problems, it can also be found here.)
Podcast Topic Index (time is viewable by downloading the audio to your desktop and opening via iTunes, iPod or other media player):
0:00 - Introduction
0:50 - Spielberg then and now
5:40 - Spielberg's sensualism
7:20 - The subjective Everyman
9:25 - Comparing cinematographers: Kaminski, Daviau, Slocombe
14:40 - About "ornaments"
16:40 - "Making you feel it"
19:15 - Dennis Weaver vs. Tom Cruise
20:20 - Spielberg Hearts Rivette?!?
22:00 - Spielberg and his peers - who's lost the least?
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Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.
908. Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg)
By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
Steven Spielberg’s first feature production, in which a seemingly driverless Peterbilt truck terrorizes Dennis Weaver’s salesman on a California highway, is an object lesson in narrative efficiency and resourceful filmmaking, having been shot in only 16 days with a minuscule budget and edited in only three weeks for TV broadcast. The result was so wildly successful that the film was released theatrically in Europe with an additional 20 minutes of footage. The extra scenes, which include a telephone conversation with Weaver’s wife and Weaver’s internal monologue gratuitously expressing his anxieties, mostly detract from the brilliant simplicity of sci-fi legend Richard Matheson’s script. While Weaver’s David Mann fends for his life against several tons of metal on wheels, this machine is not nearly as relentless as the cinematic apparatus as employed by Spielberg, cutting across a panoply of angles and camera movements from which the truck is regarded every which way, such that its menace is amplified, even fetishized. To produce such claustrophobic suspense across miles of open road is no mean feat, a triumph of cinema applied to a minimal scenario. The visceral has always been Spielberg’s primary domain, try as he has in recent years to apply it to lofty themes (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) or even to subvert its immediacy (A.I., Munich). Here, for better or worse, it’s as pure as it can be.To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here. See after the break for Kevin's video essay on the film, featuring Steven Boone, Andrew "Filmbrain" Grant, and Keith Uhlich.
Read more!
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Criterion Collection #391: if...
By Jeremiah Kipp
“One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place,” proclaims Mick Travis, the boarding school rebel who spearheads a revolution in Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic social satire if…. Malcolm McDowell plays the role, three years before he starred as the nihilistic Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and his international celebrity exploded. While the two parts share some similarities—a smiling, cocksure refusal to play by societal rules or toady up to authority figures—their motivation to destroy is quite different. Alex sees the world as a decadent playground for his entertainment, whereas Mick Travis dreams of something better and commits to the idea of burning down the old establishment to make way for the new order. As for what that new order is, he never clarifies, but it will certainly be a reaction against the oppressive, class-conscious regime of pompous, condescending headmasters and the sadistic, smug, paddle-wielding gang of senior classmates called The Whips.
if... opens with the arrival of students after their summer break. Ground rules are laid out: there are the oppressors and the oppressed, with the younger children (labeled “Scum”) attending to the beck and call of their elders. At its most lenient, this involves running back and forth to bring toast and jam during tea time, but if the rules of politesse are not followed to the letter, heads are dunked in toilet bowls or flunkies are instructed to stand under ice cold showers for two-minute intervals. Mick Travis and his handful of bright, idealistic friends are among the seemingly powerless, and they find their strength through cunning subversion. On the first day of the semester, Mick arrives wearing a black hat and scarf covering his entire face, and when he reveals himself he has a neatly trimmed moustache as an act of minor rebellion—a gentle “fuck you” to the powers that be. Mick promptly shaves it off, but not before complaining, “When do we live? That’s what I want to know.” As said by McDowell, with the boyish insouciance that became his trademark, it doesn’t sound sanctimonious. 
Played with that deadpan quality we come to expect from highbrow, stiff upper lip British comedy, if… is told with rigorous control, with unobtrusive camerawork and naturalistic, unpretentious sound design. In seemingly arbitrary fashion, the film stock jumps back and forth between black and white and color (with black and white lending a more dreamlike or delicate quality to certain passages). It’s not kitchen sink social realism as seen in the films of Ken Loach (whose Poor Cow also touched a nerve in the late 1960s), since the performances are slightly heightened—even borderline caricature. While Mick’s moustache isn’t weird in and of itself, and there’s nothing radically out of the ordinary in his listening to a beautiful African chant with accompanying drumbeat on his record player, and it’s perfectly befitting that he would have photographs of guerrillas on his wall, these images and ideas build up a cumulative power so that when if… ventures into more overt surrealism, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. When Mick steals a motorcycle, slips away from school and has a spontaneous romance with a good looking waitress (Christine Noonan), their courtship involves a slap, snarling at each other like wild animals, and finally rolling around on the floor—clothed and naked in a series of jump cuts.
This surreal quality is playful and often anachronistic (one of the characters who dies suddenly reappears in the headmaster’s study, popping out of a cabinet to say a line of dialogue before lying back, corpse-like, as the drawer is shut upon him). The prefect’s wife takes off her clothes and roams freely through the empty hallways while everyone else is caught up in an occasion of pomp and circumstance. Mick and his friends have an elaborate fencing match, play-acting their way through it like the Three Musketeers until they are entranced by the appearance of “blood…real blood!” It all feels like part of existentialist shrink R.D. Laing’s once-popular belief that madness is the only sane response to an insane world.
All that mania seems like a necessary release from repressive school life, which can stand in as allegory for whatever you like: the routine humiliations of working in an office, the government crushing individualism under its thumb, the necessary catharsis of art and expression in an increasingly corporate landscape, or even a nostalgic trip down memory lane as we realize that the rules laid down in school are often the same ones set forth in life. Reality grows especially harsh as the dictatorial Whips close in on our heroes and dole out a series of brutal beatings—culminating in an after-school paddling in the gymnasium that both hobbles Mick and strengthens his resolve.
While the paddling doesn’t have the blood and spittle of The Passion of the Christ, it plays just as rough. Tension builds when Mick has to wait outside the gym and listen to the beating of two other boys, and then when he takes his twenty lashes we cut away to younger schoolchildren listening in fear as he has to take his lumps. The scene has incredible dramatic power as Mick wipes away a single tear and is called upon to thank his oppressors. This turning point in the film leads to the grand finale, where Mick and his revolutionaries utter no more spoken dialogue and somehow come across a cache of guns and hand grenades that they lethally break out when the parents visit the school on Founders’ Day. It is pure Guy Hawkes-style mayhem, again with a surrealist bent. (One of the villains gets shot in the head and immediately bursts into flame.)
Anderson was well known as a provocateur, both abrasive and caustically funny. He gleefully poked mocking holes into all sorts of cultural institutions—yet he too was repressed in his own way. Quiet about being gay, he never allows the homosexuality in if… to move beyond suggestion. However, if the gymnasium hazing and the climactic shootout are the most iconic sequences, the gay subtext leads to the most striking visual poetry. Young Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster) shyly watches from a balcony as Mick’s handsome pal Wallace (Richard Warwick) does graceful acrobatics and somersaults on a balance beam. Slow motion transforms Wallace into a moving sculpture, and as Bobby regards him with silent adoration, it becomes homoeroticism at its most transcendent. While not as spirited and confrontational as the rest of if… (it's almost timid in its mildness), it provides a gentle and touching counterpoint to the sharply drawn ironies that abound throughout.
if… was wildly popular in Great Britain, a parallel reaction to the counterculture youth movement’s rage against the conservative regime, but it was equally embraced in countries that suffered under corrupt totalitarian governments. Nowadays, where global culture grows increasingly homogenized, we associate survival with conformity, and it’s refreshing to look back at this late-60s time capsule when young people violently disagreed with that notion. Naughty behavior and a taste for the ridiculous can be, in and of themselves, revolutionary—a refusal to adapt to constructed norms. Mick pushes it to the limit and, as reason and logic take a reprieve, the fantastic and the absurd take over.
Image/Sound/Extras: The Hi-Def transfer of if…, presented in anamorphic 1.66:1, is first rate, with incredible clarity in the image. It is approved by director of photography Miroslav Ondricek, who outdoes himself with beautifully vivid black and white contrasting nicely with evenly lit color sequences. The audio track is likewise restored, and the Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono is clean and clear, with no noticeable hiss. Supplemental materials on the two-disc set are generous, including a feature length commentary by Malcolm McDowell and film historian David Robinson. McDowell’s anecdotes are both informative and funny, and always reverential towards the director who discovered him. Robinson makes an excellent foil, particularly in their lively exchanges about Anderson’s directorial choices. “It was completely arbitrary,” McDowell howls, even as Robinson points out the clever cross-cutting between the Whips, shot in vivid color as they laze about their study playing games of one-upsmanship, and the Scums, in black-and-white as they cheerily make do with a humble meal of pork and beans. The ever-lively, charismatic McDowell adds a personal touch when discussing his first audition for Anderson, as well as some of his shrewd directorial advice and one-liners, and Robinson too seems to have a clear understanding of the director’s character as well as his aesthetics. “His indifference to being liked was matched by his need to be loved.”
Disc Two contains a brief but lively interview with actor Graham Crowden, who plays the whimsical history teacher in if… and discusses Anderson’s paternal, supportive approach to actors. Anderson’s short, Academy Award winning documentary, Thursday's Children, about a school for deaf children, is a fascinating and humanitarian social document. An episode of BBC Scotland’s Cast & Crew has several crew members and Anderson’s protégé Stephen Frears discussing the long shadow if… has cast over the years—and a pre-taped Malcolm McDowell shares even more anecdotes, including the one where he asked Anderson if he could roll around on the floor naked with his co-star Christine Noonan, and his gleeful delight when the director agreed—o lucky man, indeed!
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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.
Directorama #19
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.
Links for the Day (March 24th, 2008)
1. "The Return of the Paranoid Style": Ross Douthat of The Atlantic explores how the Iraq War and George W. Bush sent the movie industry back to its favorite era—the 1970s. See also our Clip of the Day. (Hattip: Herschel Nachlis)
["But it wasn’t just the reassertion of America’s usual frivolity that caused the 9/11 moment to be stillborn; it was the swiftness with which the Iraq War replaced the fall of the Twin Towers as this decade’s cultural touchstone. It’s Halliburton, Abu Ghraib, and the missing WMDs that have summoned up a cultural moment in which bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek punch line for a zombie movie and the film industry’s typical take on geopolitics traces all the world’s evils to the machinations of a White Male enemy at home."]
2. "Cinephile Accounting: Old vs. New": Girish Shambu's latest entry at his blog. Take some time to consider the questions he poses.
["Do you feel a similar tug-of-war between the desire or need to see older films versus new films? What guides your decision-making on what to see from day to day? What are the personal objectives that might underpin your decision-making on these matters? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these or any other related issues."]
3. "Roadside bomb takes American death toll in Iraq to 4,000": A sad milestone from The Times Online.
["The number of US troops to die in Iraq since the invasion began five years ago hit 4,000 last night after a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four soldiers."]
4. "Phenom Director Goes to War": A New York Times profile of Kimberly Peirce on the eve of release of her new film, Stop-Loss.
["“Yes, I should have made a movie sooner,” she said with a deep laugh. “Yes, I should be a lot richer than I am. Mea culpa.”"]
5. "Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Saint Joan'": Caveat emptor from Glenn Kenny.
["Alas, though, for the first time in the history of the Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD report, I must issue a caveat emptor. The Spain-issued DVD of Saint Joan, on a label called Manga Films, is not even close to being an ideal video vehicle for a reassessment of Preminger's film. The above screen cap tells the whole story: Georges Perinal's silkily gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is here rendered with all the detail and contrast of a 16mm print that's been gnawed on by beavers after being washed through a mud bath."]
Quote of the Day: Catherine the Great
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Vale Abraão, by Manoel de Oliveira
Clip of the Day: "Hollywood's Vietnam Moment": Related to Link #1, Ross Douthat takes a critical look at the film industry's response to the Iraq War. (Hattip: Herschel Nachlis)
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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, March 23, 2008
Links for the Day (March 23rd, 2008)
1. "Barack Obama: A Story of Race and Politics": One from the heart by Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine's blog. Just awesome.
["I post this not only as an example of how profoundly and compassionately Barack Obama grapples with racial identity but as a reminder of how people of color see race (mis)represented in art and, more selfishly, the estrangement I sometimes feel as a film critic of mixed-race heritage. "I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me." Those are Obama's words, about his mother and the crowd at the revival theater, but they could just as easily be mine, describing what I often feel whenever I see predominantly white audiences swoon for obscene films like Crash, Blood Diamond, and Under the Same Moon, wishing they could see how those films pander to white prejudices by condescending to non-white experience, and how that's a symbiotic relationship worth affronting."]
2. "Investor: Disney shelved 9/11 film": By Christian Toto for The Washington Times. (Hattip: Christian Hamaker)
["Tom Borelli is so sure the Walt Disney Co. is suppressing the DVD release of the 2006 miniseries "The Path to 9/11" for political reasons that he is ready to put up money to prove the point. Mr. Borelli, a Disney shareholder, accused Disney CEO Robert Iger at a March 6 shareholders' meeting of blocking the release of "Path" in order to protect Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the legacy of her husband's administration. Mr. Iger countered at the time that the decision not to release the miniseries on DVD was motivated by business considerations, not political ones."]
3. "Borders Considers Putting Itself Up for Sale": By Michael J. de la Merced for The New York Times.
["Struggling against both online and big-box retailers, the Borders Group, the bookseller, said Thursday that it had hired two investment banks to advise it on a potential sale and had turned to its largest shareholder for additional money. Borders said that it would take other measures to shore up its capital, including suspending its quarterly dividend."]
4. "From hell": Joe Queenan goes in search of the worst movie of all time. (Hattip: Jim Emerson)
["A generically appalling film like The Hottie and the Nottie is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness. A monstrously bad movie is like the Medusa: those who gaze on its hideous countenance are doomed, but who can resist taking a gander?"]
5. "Cuban music icon 'Cachao' dies at 89": From MSNBC.
["Cuban bassist and composer Israel "Cachao" Lopez, who is credited with pioneering the mambo style of music, died Saturday at age 89, a family spokesman said. Known simply as Cachao, the Grammy-winning musician had fallen ill in the past week and died surrounded by family members at Coral Gables Hospital, spokesman Nelson Albareda said. Cachao left communist Cuba and came to the United States in the early 1960s. He continued to perform into his late 80s, including a performance after the death of trombonist Generoso Jimenez in September 2007."]
Quote of the Day: Douglas Adams
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The lead image for the Newsweek story "The War at Home" 
Clip of the Day: The Boston Dynamics "Big Dog" Robot. Freaky. (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
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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, March 22, 2008
Links for the Day (March 22nd, 2008)
1. "When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind": Paul Clark revisits Errol Morris' 1991 effort starring the inimitable Lou Diamond Phillips. Related: Ed Gonzalez blogs about Morris' latest film Standard Operating Procedure.
["Of course, some of the blame for the film's failure should be laid at the feet of executive producer Robert Redford. Supposedly Morris had such a difficult time working with Redford that he left the project before it was completed. Some of the film's flaws can probably be chalked up to Redford's involvement, such as its ambling pacing. Other problems were mostly likely an attempt on Redford's part to salvage the project. I hope for Morris' sake that the awful voiceover was Redford's idea. "]
2. "Famed musician, 90, doesn't have time to be old": From CNN.
["Marian McPartland celebrated her 90th birthday in a style befitting the "Grande Dame of Piano Jazz" with a little help from friends like Norah Jones and Wynton Marsalis at Jazz at Lincoln Center. "Getting up here is really a job," quipped McPartland, who has been slowed by arthritis in her legs and is recovering from a fractured pelvis, after being assisted onstage. But the years fell away once her hands touched the keyboard."]
3. "Pumping Iron on Two Sides of Haiti’s Class Divide": Marc Lacey reports for The New York Times.
["The grunts are no different. The clang of the weights sounds pretty much the same as well. And sweat drips off bodies at both the high-end Gold’s Gym in Port-au-Prince’s priciest suburb and at the far more humble open-air workout joint farther down the hill, known by regulars as the Temple of Pain. But these two gyms might as well be in different worlds, situated as they are on opposite sides of the class divide that has long been such an entrenched part of Haiti."]
4. "Woman Charged With 'Line Rage' Beating at Disney World": Mad for the Mad Tea Cups.
["“She came from behind just screaming,” Krause told MyFOXOrlando. “Next thing I knew she kicked me in my left leg, threw me to the ground and at that point I was pinned between the teacup and the saucer and she continued to beat up on my body.”"]
5. "Stephen Chow gets sweet in ‘CJ7’": By Bill White for Northwest Asian Weekly. (Hattip N.P. Thompson)
["Unlike many actor/directors, Jackie Chan being one of the worst offenders, who build their films around their own personas and hog most of the scenes, Chow is generous to his supporting players, taking delight in the performances he draws from them."]
Quote of the Day: Bernard Bailey
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): An antiwar march in front of the White House; lead image to The New York Times story "On Invasion’s Anniversary, Protests and Pessimism".
Clip of the Day: "Chocolate Rain" by Tay Zonday, voted Best YouTube Music Video
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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, March 21, 2008
'D' is for 'Desperation': Drillbit Taylor
By Keith Uhlich
Straight D's across the board for Drillbit Taylor, which narrowly avoids a full-on failing grade for its forthright truth-in-advertising: "You get what you pay for" goes the poster art tagline (true dat: apparently, we're coughing up our hard-earned cash for a swift kick to the 'nads by "deserves better" star Owen Wilson). There are worse things, I suppose, than being below-waistline roundhoused by a Hollywood celebrity. Chief among such tortures would be experiencing the complete sense of desperation that marks Drillbit Taylor's each and every scene -- "slumming it" is too kind a descriptor for House of Apatow screenwriters Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen, dusting off a twenty-years prior treatment by John Hughes (here credited under his Dumas-derived pseudonym Edmond Dantes). To put it as horrifically as possible, imagine Curly Sue, but McLovin-ized.
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To read the rest of the review at Underground Online (UGO), click here. And see after the break for a special international Easter Egg.
Loose AltaVista translation: A man for all accidents: Paid is still too expensive
A Brutal, Dazzling World War: Planet B-Boy
By Steven Boone
[Planet B-Boy opens today at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan. Click here for screening information.]
Hip hop music may be dead at the hands of corporate thug rap, but the culture lives on, worldwide, says Planet B-Boy. With MTV-ready impatience, some aerobic camerawork and a classic tournament sports movie structure, the film makes the b-boy lifestyle seem alive and fresh for '08. Here, breakdancing is back as a combination art form/extreme sport. In some ways, Benson Lee's documentary plays like an account of life after a happy divorce, told from the long-suffering wife's (the culture's) perspective -- the abusive husband (the music) long gone. Yes, there are a few head-bobbing beats in Planet B-Boy, but most of the stuff sounds like programmatic, royalty-free rap muzak. Still, it gets the job done, proving some of the performers' point that a true b-boy needs only a beat and a flat surface to conjure up the spirit of hip hop.
This is good TV, but it benefits from a big screen presentation, too, because, well, the bigger the windmill or head spin, the better. Similarly, Lee's sense of pacing may be straight out of an ESPN highlight reel, but his dramatic scope is novelistic. The film shows five breakdancing crews preparing for the international Battle of the Year championship in Germany: France, USA, Japan and South Korea (represented by two teams, last year's returning champs and the new national finalists). The rivalries are easy to anticipate: The arrogant, graceful French trade trans-Atlantic glares with the flashy, arrogant Americans. The daredevil Koreans hope to settle historical scores with the innovative Japanese. A lot of good-natured boasts and tough talk pass as the boys train round the the clock in their respective time zones. The Americans focus on showmanship and a clever hook; the French go for musical dance flourishes; the Koreans attempt outrageously complex choreography; the Japanese emphasize personality and passion.
It's hard not to break out in a warm grin at the boyish bravado on display here especially if, like me, you were around for the first wave of of breaking in the '80s. Some of those old-timers appear in Planet B-Boy to provide a brief history of the form; some of the breakers they inspired are the judges and organizers of the Battle of the Year. There's talk of having rushed out to see Flashdance in '83, just for the iconic scene of The Rock Steady Crew stopping pedestrian traffic. Lee plays that clip and re-creates its ground-level telephoto shot in scenes of the competitors practicing in their hometowns. Cute, corny, dazzling, stirring.
There's some bouncy Michel Gondry/Jonathan Demme multi-culti human interest peeking through this film's slick surface, and it works small wonders at times. The French crew, a team of stocky, mostly black young men, has adopted a spindly little white boy as one of its star performers. The boy's mom carefully describes her initial trepidation and "racism" when she met her son's new playmates. In a priceless two-shot, the kid sits next to Mom during this confession, staring off and muttering, "get over it." Love, bewilderment, embarrassment and reconciliation in a frame. It's one of several such child/parent compositions in the film that tell a story fit for a whole 'nother documentary. In the Korean and Japanese segments, these two-shots challenge stereotype. The conservative moms and dads are baffled by this strange dance, yes, but they're doing their best to bend a little, despite rigid ideas of what constitutes a legitimate career. Perhaps the folks bite their tongues because the Battle of the Year offers not just prize money but the potential for a lucrative career of touring shows, endorsements and TV appearances.
Ah, the corporate specter. Early on, the film draws a B.C./A.D. line between the death of true hip hop music at the dawn of the '90s and the resurgence of grassroots b-boy culture from its ashes in subsequent years, in unlikely corners of the earth. Now that breaking is back on the big media radar, is b-boy next to be strip-mined? Is a Fox network breakdance competition series in the works? Planet B-Boy doesn't bother with all that. This film's long third act is all about the suspense and spectacle of non-lethal combat. The kids all convene in Germany as wary enemies, housed in a Tower of Babel school building-turned-makeshift hostel; they part a few days later mostly as newfound friends, still a little buzzed from the post-competition beer and laughter. In between, there's a brutal, dazzling world war.
Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of Big Media Vandalism.
Links for the Day (March 21st, 2008)
1. "Angela Bassett honored with Walk of Fame star": You go, girl! Related: Bassett on working with Tyler Perry.
["Angela Bassett has had good days — becoming a mother to twins, winning a Golden Globe, being nominated for an Academy Award. Then there was Thursday. “Do you ever have one of those days? I woke up and the sun wasn’t really shining but then it burst through the clouds and it was glorious. Hallelujah!” Bassett exclaimed to the crowd at the ceremony for the 2,358th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bassett, 49, was joined by husband Courtney B. Vance, their children and guests Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne and Rick Fox, her co-star in the new film “Meet the Browns,” out Friday."]
2. House contributor Kevin B. Lee live-blogged the recent NYU Film Criticism Workshop, featuring Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, in five parts: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. Girish Shambu was there as well.
["Quoting Daney: “I want to militate cinema for cinema.” - cinema activism on behalf of cinema itself as a political or social movement, as opposed to being a function of political or social purposes."]
3. "There Will Be Vader": Deserves a link all its own, this one. (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
4. "Gate Way: An(other) Interview with Olivier Assayas": Nick Pinkerton sits down with the Boarding Gate director for a chat.
["Assayas: "I don’t know if it makes sense, but I was struck by a friend of mine, Nicolas Saada, who used to be a writer for Cahiers and now is a filmmaker, and when he saw the film, his reaction was: “You have made a movie about addiction, which is demonlover, then you made a movie, Clean, which is about going clean, and now you’ve made a movie that’s about both things at the same time.” Which was, you know, told as a joke, but somehow it kind of stuck with me, and I thought it was not a bad way of looking at it.""]
5. "Jumping eagle ray kills boater off Florida Keys": From The National Post.
["An eagle ray leaped onto a boat off the Florida Keys Thursday and stabbed a woman with its barb, knocking her to the deck and killing her, a Florida wildlife investigator said. "It's a bizarre accident," said Jorge Pino, an agent with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission."]
Quote of the Day: John Waters
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Time for another Reverse Blog "Poster of the Week"!
Clip(s) of the Day: The Fatal Farm Alternate TV openings tend towards the hilariously disturbing. Here are my faves:
The (Pun Heavy) Facts of Life
The (Totally Baked) Golden Girls
Cheers (Jihad edition)
Knight Rider (WTF?!!)
Designing Women (Eye Roll Edition)
DuckTales (To Catch a Predator Edition)
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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, March 20, 2008
"Idiot Savant Japan": Digital Greed Is Good, Damn It.
By John Lichman
[Editor's Note: "Idiot Savant Japan," an in-depth look at Japanese cinema, with emphasis on anime, is published every other Thursday, alternating with Vadim Rizov's music column, "Indie 500."]
Gordon Gecko would love Salaryman Kintaro's practices, but not his ethics.
"The problem with Japanese animation is that it's too darn popular," claims the opening to the last in a series of essays on Animation Insider about the state of the industry (h/t: AICN Anime). The essay goes on to claim that the rise in popularity is destroying the very studios, artists, creators and general talent that are rushing to provide for the fans.
Oh, and no one's buying. That's a big point too that Aaron Bynum glosses over, but he's exploring the industry end more so than the financial. (His full series can be found here.) Anime is easily overtaking the global market and has nicely transitioned from being inherently Japanese to something of a worldwide, accepted art style. And how ever did it do so?
Part of the cause can be found in the doujinshi concept so prevalent in manga -- i.e. I will draw a ten page story of Naruto fighting Son Goku, often tracing artwork straight from the source, and sell it or give it away for free. But no one will ever crack down on me. The various Manga publishing companies have an uneasy alliance with this crowd. But the key comes from the fact that they aren't republishing comics for free. Which is where we come into a very disturbing and extremely beneficial (for fans) service:
Online Streaming Video. Prowling on Thursday, Friday and Saturday you'll find the latest episodes for Naruto and Bleach subbed by other fans and uploaded by completely different people. In a 2007 open letter from GBH -- the American arm for Studio GONZO -- President Arthur Smith claims a 50 percent sales loss since 2005. Many have decried this practice as similar to "sharing" a taped episode. Smith is quick (and correct) in disproving that:"Setting aside the fact that we are referring to a program which has not yet been released in the U.S. (so it couldn't be taped/DVRed), let me concentrate on the main issue. I have two words for this commentator: DIGITAL and INTERNET.
"Firstly, the fact that files are now stored and transferred digitally and the existence of the Internet means that a fan sub is NOT seen by "a friend." It is seen by 10,000+ "friends" (because these fansubs will end up on all the major file sharing networks within one week of creation. In examples that we looked at, we would see fan subs in 10+ languages within the first month after broadcast in Japan).
"Secondly, because it is digital, those 10,000 "friends" can give it to their friends too with no loss of quality (and they can then fansub it into new languages). So, the analogy would not be that you watch a show which a friend has taped, but that your friend gives you a copy of the video AND gives a copy to his 10,000+ other friends AND some of them speak foreign languages so they alter the video to subtitle it in another language and give them to 10,000+ of their friends!
"FYI: the reason why I use 10,000+ is that for the typical show we have researched there will be around 10+ copies of the show (i.e. 10 different fansubs) and at least 100,000 people will download, and that is for smaller shows, not Naruto, Bleach, etc. This data comes from direct observation of view numbers on YouTube and other video sharing sites and from successful download counts and stat reports from major BitTorrent tracker sites, so anyone can verify the size of the downloads for themselves if they feel the need."
So why do it? Because I've seen the episode currently airing on Adult Swim. I advocate and stand firmly behind showing these fan-subs because it would be insane to ignore the show until it was officially licensed and distributed -- while it already is being done so in Japan! A number of shows and OVAs were never able to cross the ocean before, but now do thanks to the acceptance that anime has found. Still, I doubt you'll ever see Bartender on Adult Swim. And my other alternative is to purchase the foreign box-sets, which are DV-R rips a majority of the time anyway.
Fan-subbing is done as a labor of love and respect for a show, being shown for free and making no money compared to the old days when VHS tapes were loaded up with 10 to 15 episodes and sold for $25 at comic shops. On the other hand, a majority of these subs now operate within 24 hours of a show being aired in Japan, completing the theory that you're watching a taped show -- even if it is you and 9,999 of your closest friends.
Fan-subbers tend to torrent their wares, causing anime companies to now attack P2P networks. But let's go back to the YouTube example. Clearly before they were tamed by Google's sweet, sweet money it was like the wild west on there. Since then, they've removed anime and fan-sub clips as fast as they appear, causing many to flee for Veoh or aggregator ZOMG Anime. Which is great, but still presents the whole "stealing content" aspect. But this still isn't addressing how to handle the subbers -- especially when Smith's statements are now overshadowed by news that U.S. anime sales are up 60 percent ($500 million.)
Crunchyroll may be the best answer. Despite having BANDAI and FUNimation Entertainment threatening legal action, CR is being scouted by GONZO and others. The site is part user forum but also has incredible indexes of manga, anime and Asian film. All streaming, all subtitled and all hosted on-site. And it's free.
A while ago it was run on a rather ingenious Chris Anderson model: the free streaming videos are low-quality. Before, you had to become a donator for $6 to $24 in order to view high quality, hi-def and multiple clips. Recently, CR has found more sponsors including GONZO, which is the best news. If distributors gave us the right to stream free low-quality with the option to upgrade for donation, it would be the ideal solution to the problems of seeing films and anime that would likely take months to transfer overseas.
Downside: this could cripple the U.S. industry. There'd be no need for Media Blasters -- who are awesome despite their massive Hentai selection at trade shows -- or FUNimation. No need for American voice actors or editors. In fact, this entire change would force the Japanese companies to make an immediate retreat.
Now, I am being extremely vague because the numbers and logistics are mind-boggling for a lowly blogger like myself. The U.S. industry could still function, and likely would -- while keeping a bunch of files on my hard drive are fun, I still own the complete Robotech DVD set. Crunchyroll's system is perfect for rare and older out-of-print titles, like Robot Carnival, or Devilman OVAs. But also if I just feel like watching the last 10 minutes of Wild Zero, which has no U.S. distribution outside of bootleg DVDs.
So I understand the industry's plight, but I'm way too comfortable with this new streaming selection to give a damn. My advice: partner with Crunchyroll-like sites and conform with the New Flesh.
On that note:
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John Lichman is a freelance writer who contributes to The Reeler, Primetime A&E [print only] and anyone with cash. He works odd jobs to afford his vices, sleeps on couches and can drink Vadim Rizov under a table.
Links for the Day (March 20th, 2008)
1. "Oscar-winner Scofield dies of leukemia": From CNN. Edward Copeland has an appreciation.
["Paul Scofield, the towering British stage actor who won international fame and an Academy Award for the film "A Man for All Seasons," has died. He was 86. Scofield died Wednesday in a hospital near his home in southern England, agent Rosalind Chatto said. He had been suffering from leukemia."]
2. "Deniable torture and viable fetuses in Taxi and 4 Months": Godfrey Cheshire reviews Taxi to the Dark Side & 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
["This is one of those abundance-of-riches weeks for Triangle filmgoers, since it will see the arrival of two of the year's most important films, one the winner of 2008's Best Documentary Oscar, the other the recipient of the 2007 Palme d'Or at Cannes. I wish I could devote a full column to each of these films. I urge you to see both."]
3. "So, please" Horton said, "as a favor to me, try not to disturb them. Just please let them be.": Tim Brayton hears a Who at Antagony & Ecstasy.
["There's also a whole lot of narration, delivered by CBS News figure Charles Osgood, and this is objectionable: it's in Seuss's customary meter, and in Seuss's customary rhyming couplets, and the great majority of it is not written by Seuss. This is the equivalent of a Shakespearean film in freshly composed blank verse - "Oh God, you are so sexy, Juliet / I'm gonna bone you right here on the floor" - and it's horrifying in a moral sense, to say nothing of the aesthetics."]
4. "Bush Defends Iraq War in Speech": The punchline to yesterday's setup.
["“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.”"]
5. "Japan appoints cartoon ambassador": Take it away, Lichman!
["Japan has created an unusual government post to promote animation, and named a perfect figure Wednesday to the position: a popular cartoon robot cat named Doraemon. Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura appointed the cat an "anime ambassador," handing a human-sized Doraemon doll an official certificate at an inauguration ceremony, along with dozens of "dorayaki" red bean pancakes — his favorite dessert — piled on a huge plate. Komura told the doll, with an unidentified person inside, that he hoped he would widely promote Japanese animated cartoons, or "anime.""]
Quote of the Day: Voltaire
Image(s) of the Day (click to enlarge): Two by me -- the juxtapositions were just priceless
Clip of the Day: Follow the bouncing puck... 197 feet to... GOAL!!!
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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, March 19, 2008
Pedro Costa at PFA, Day 4: In Vanda's Room
By Ryland Walker Knight
[Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa runs from March 1st, 2008 through April 12th, 2008 at BAM/PFA on the UC Berkeley campus. Click here for screening information.]
I’m going to start by jumping ahead a day. During Pedro Costa’s Regents’ Lecture (on Sunday, March 9, 2008), he spoke of his film project in Fountaínhas as akin to James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Costa sees Vanda Duarte and her family (her neighborhood, her blood) as, if not equivalent, similar heroes to those three tenant families that Agee and Evans found, and lived with, in the cotton belt of Alabama. To those familiar with both works this rings as a perfect analogy; I, for one, see how Costa’s films inherit the burden of Agee’s words opening his “Book Two” volume:
1. The Great Ball on Which We Live
The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters. . . .
Costa echoed this sentiment after our viewing of In Vanda’s Room when, describing the familial dynamic of Fountaínhas, he said, “a lot of things are mixed there, not just blood. There are a lot of sordid stories—a lot of secrets that everybody knows. But I will not tell them.” Given the intimacy of In Vanda’s Room, it’s hard to imagine what Costa withheld when building his film. For this is a document of substance, despite the physical disintegration (of buildings, of bodies) within its unclean, collapsing boundaries. If Ossos and Casa de Lava show us the decay neglect engenders, In Vanda’s Room records an in-progress dissolution and the daily contest carried on in its face.
In Vanda’s Room is a film of faces, a portrait, however much it hides faces (in the dark, behind walls, under hats and sheets, off screen) in its oblique compositions. It gives face, with much tenderness, to abjection. Vanda’s face, as you have seen above, is marked by her drug use. She sports a frown and lesions, an infrequent smile; she complains, often, that she is dirty. However, she seems to be the highest functioning addict in the film. Her using inhibits her life but not her will. She cannot be silenced. The film is named after Vanda for a reason. Vanda works to make her world work. As she tells her childhood friend (and occasional lover?), Nhurro, late in the film, “This is the life we choose.” Vanda refuses unaccountability. It’s her great strength. Not that Vanda is without fault: we watch her sit in bed smoking junk with her sister throughout the film, yell at her family about trivialities and, on occasion, shy from work in a smack-stupor. Gone now is any trace of O Sangue’s Romantic flow, or Ossos’ Bressonian “realism,” because In Vanda’s Room, like its chief heroine, is stubborn, habitual, dirty, angry, rooted, a block of space and time.
The film begins (of course) in Vanda’s room, Costa’s stationary digital camera positioned close to the bed where Vanda and Zita free base. They trade the tin foil and share a cigarette, a lazy back and forth. The daze is almost comfortable, were it not for Vanda’s signature hacking cough or Zita’s not-there eyeballs and limbs. Both girls are alarmingly thin, but Zita looks like bones wrapped in skin, not human; later the sisters talk about Zita’s stay in a hospital where all she could do was lay in bed and cry because she was too weak to walk anywhere and she could not smoke any smack. But the girls are far better off than the boys (the film’s biggest rift is the segregation of the sexes), who shoot junk into themselves, instead of inhaling, continually moving, “living in ghost houses other people left empty.” We first meet their leader, Nhurro, bathing in a house being torn apart around him: as he suds and rinses, standing nude in near darkness (save a beam of flecked light from behind), we hear bulldozers crunch and jackhammers thump an odd musique concrète rhythm around him. This carries over as the film return’s to Vanda’s room, seeming to continue the trajectory of the opening “scene,” and Vanda is quick to notice, “This noise is bugging me.”
Again: it’s the sound design in later Costa films that dictates the space, that colors the image, that roots the film in the tactile present. The camera aids this collapse, surely, as even the wide shots look like close-ups, every angle looking in (on rooms, on Fountaínhas), every stubborn edit thrusting the picture down a trajectory at once askew from and congruent with what preceded it. It echoes itself. It chronicles a destruction both corporeal and architectural. One might argue for the film as a “dispersal” of space, with its bifurcated alleyway structure that parallels the boys and girls without much intersection, but I see In Vanda’s Room described better as what Manny Farber coined “shallow-boxed space” in “Kitchen without Kitsch.” A true termite work, Costa's film niggles its way forward, without ever appearing to move, eclipsing its path with new echoes—new faces, new spaces—of everything seen before. The final shot, like all the shots, is rather plain: an alleyway, half demolished, with a stalagmite of a wall’s remains centered in the frame, the sounds of the neighborhood plodding on as usual (conversations, bulldozing, birds), and a man walking, with a brief stop to rest his hand on the lone spear of rubble, before exiting the frame and the cut to black. But the sound keeps going. The present tense fades and extends. The world keeps growing in spite of the wreckage we humans amass and perpetuate. As I said to a friend after the film, this is the kind of humanism I want to see more often—the kind that keeps us in check, that shows the world is bigger than us, that reminds us this is the life we choose and to choose wisely. Maybe I don’t want humanism so much as a humanism in relief, in relation to the world. Maybe I want to see the world, the one I know and the one I do not know, so long as it is new.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent editor of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy. He will be graduating college, finally, in 2008: he's excited.
Links for the Day (March 19th, 2008)
1. An obit kind of morning: "Anthony Minghella, 54; director won Oscar for 'English Patient'" & "Sci-fi guru Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90". Related: Robbie Freeling's Reverse Blog remembrance of Minghella.
["Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his adopted home in the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka. He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving — which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space. “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said. Clarke was married in 1953 and was divorced in 1964. He had no children, but kept in touch with friends and fans around the world via computer. He spent each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet. On the occasion of his 90th birthday last December, Clarke delivered a speech to a small gathering during which he passed along three wishes: for ethnically divided Sri Lanka to find a lasting peace, for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, and for extraterrestrial beings to "call us or give us a sign.""]
2. "Better Than Free": Kevin Kelly of The Technium offers some technologic.
["[T]he previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies? I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus: When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?"]
3. "The Wire's Final Season and the Story Everyone Missed": David Simon addresses the reaction to his HBO series' final season at The Huffington Post. New York Magazine's Culture Vulture rebuts. (Hattip: Ross Douthat)
["I'm actually rigorous about letting criticism of the show stand without arguing back. I'll rant a bit about journalism, or the drug war or any other issue that I rub up against. But if you didn't enjoy The Wire this season, then let's concede for purposes of this little note that you are correct. We sucked. The writing was a train wreck, the characterization limp, the acting and plotting, shameful and shameless both. Jumped that shark in high-topped Nikes, we did. Okay, I don't actually agree, but neither would I argue. We said what we wanted to say and now everyone else is entitled to talk back without some counterbitch finding them. So let's happily concede that all criticism stands and get to the real fun."]
4. "Bush to hail prospect of Iraq "strategic victory"": Been hailin' prospects for a while now, haven't we Georgie?
["President George W. Bush will acknowledge on Wednesday the Iraq war has been fought at a high cost but will insist a U.S. troop buildup has opened the door to a "major strategic victory" against Islamic militants. "The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable," Bush will say in an upbeat assessment of the U.S.-led campaign in a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war, according to excerpts released on Tuesday. With less than 11 months left in office and his approval ratings near the lows of his presidency, Bush is trying to shore up support for the unpopular war, which has damaged U.S. credibility abroad and is sure to define his legacy."]
5. "Wine taster’s nose insured for millions": Don't sniff at this sommelier's schnozz.
["[Ilja Gort], 47, said his nose is essential for him to produce top quality wines at his Chateau de la Garde vineyard in the famous Bordeaux region of France, so he got it insured."]
Quote of the Day: Dick Cavett
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Hey, Tony Montana, did you know "Cocaine May Cause Heart Attack Symptoms"?
Clip of the Day: That rabbit's dynamite!
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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.