1. A bit of in-House linkage. Man on Wire director James Marsh has responded to both Godfrey Cheshire's opinion piece on the film and Lauren Wissot's interview with him and Man on Wire subject Philippe Petit. His observations are taken from several e-mail conversations with Lauren and reprinted (with Mr. Marsh's permission) over two posts in both articles' comments sections. Click either link above to read the original pieces in full. Click here to read Mr. Marsh's first response, here to read his second.
["I have just discovered the blog – I think it's a very welcome oasis in the current desert and I'm glad to contribute to the discussion. However, I don't want to get into a protracted debate about Man On Wire – I think it's right to keep some separation between critics and film makers and I also think it is unseemly to whine about perceived critical slights. So, whilst I had no objections to [Godfrey] Cheshire's comments, I just wanted to correct some of the false assumptions he made about the process of making the film."]
2. Over at Signal Bleed, Josh Bell celebrates Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" by writing about a different shark film every day. Thus far: Introduction; Samuel Fuller's Shark; She Gods of Shark Reef; Deep Blue Sea; and Spring Break Shark Attack.
["There are a few wan attempts at humor, including an opening jab at Desperate Housewives, which I assume was on opposite this when it first premiered, but nothing connects. The camp factor is disappointingly low, and though the sharks look suitably fake, you barely ever get to see them. I will give credit to the one awesome shot in which some guy windsurfs right into the shark's mouth. Talk about your bad luck."]
3. On the latest installment of Back by Midnight, host Aaron Aradillas talks with filmmaker John Badham about the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD of WarGames.
4. "Cheech & Chong "light up" for new comedy tour": From Reuters.
["Two of the most famous pot smokers of the 1970s, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, unveiled plans on Wednesday for their first comedy tour in more than 25 years following their acrimonious split. "Cheech & Chong: Light Up America ..." will hit 22 cities in the United States starting with Philadelphia on September 12 and ending in Denver, Colorado, on December 20. In between they will play Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C. and other places. "This is a moment that I've been looking forward to for many, many years because we have such a legacy and history together that we couldn't escape it, even if we tried," Chong told reporters at a news conference to announce the tour."]
5. "Wash. governor forgets ID, can’t get into bar": Weird news from MSNBC.
["Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire is taking it as a compliment: She was turned away from a bar in the state capital because she couldn't prove she's of legal age to drink. The 61-year-old governor and her staff had served burgers at the annual Capital Lakefair last weekend and afterward went to a downtown Olympia bar called Hannah's to celebrate. Gregoire says the man checking identifications at the door told her she couldn't get in without ID, even when others pointed out she's Washington's governor. So she went home, but her husband, Mike, went in."]
Quote of the Day:
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): What's wrong with this picture? (Hattip: Maul of America)
Clip of the Day: The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Links for the Day (July 31st, 2008)
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Pulse: "Would You Like to Meet Ghosts?"
By Matt Zoller Seitz
[Although I wanted to create a new video essay as my contribution to The Kiyoshi Kurosawa Blog-a-thon at The Evening Class, I didn't have time thanks to another project. I hope to revisit Kurosawa's work in video podcast format at some point; for now, here's the text of my 2005 New York Press review of Pulse. ]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, about dead souls spilling through the Internet, isn't just scary, it's primally disturbing. Its deadpan chills surpass the usual don't-open-that-door genre clichés and tap into dream logic. Like Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, The Shining, The Innocents, The Tenant and similarly subdued, circumspect, psychologically oriented shockers, it's the kind of movie that is only intermittently scary while you're watching it (it's easy to make fun of), but gets scarier as you think about it later. Kurosawa dispenses with most of the clichéd elements we've come to expect from commercial horror (including the mandatory scene where a character explains the nature of the threat, a stock moment that's amusingly parodied here) and instead dips into horror's roiling emotional undercurrent: the dread that comes from contemplating death.
Completed in 2001, then bought and shelved by Miramax in preparation for an American remake that might never happen, Pulse unfolds in a technological context that's frankly a bit dated now. Coworkers at a rooftop nursery try to get ahold of a coworker named Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi) who has a floppy disk that they need; one of the workers, Michi (Kumiko Aso), visits Taguchi's apartment and finds him shell-shocked after going on the Internet. Then the poor man hangs himself and disappears, seeming to melt into the wall and leaving what looks like an oil stain in his wake. Kurosawa combines the greenhouse workers' fumbling attempts to figure out what happened to Taguchi and the computer education of a Luddite college kid named Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) who goes on the Internet for the first time and stumbles onto a site where ghostly figures congregate and a typed message asks visitors, "Would you like to meet ghosts?"
Pulse only gets weirder from here. Embracing the cool logic of a long, tangled, outwardly "realistic" nightmare, the narrative is built not around plot points, but creepy images: grainy Webcam shots of pixillated figures drifting across the screen; a hooded figure very slowly removing his hood; forbidden doorways sealed with red duct tape; a hidden room where a corporeal-looking, seemingly live woman scoots and shimmys like a broken doll being made to dance by a child's hand; a screen saver full of bright dots that attract or repel each other. (The latter symbolizes the uneasy coexistence of living and dead souls, and the inability of both types to ever really connect. The metaphor would be more effective if the filmmaker didn't explain it to us in dialogue, a rare instance of Pulse telling rather than showing.)
Kurosawa prizes ambiguity because not knowing is scary. We never find out what, exactly, is happening in this world, or why, or what it means. We know only that with each passing day, the bell tolls for more people, and that sooner or later it will toll for our protagonists (and for us). The film's last act, which unfolds against increasingly depopulated cities and highways, is not just knee-jerk scary, but beautiful and sad—less reminiscent of zombie pictures (the obvious comparison point) than The Birds, Weekend and the final leg of L'Eclisse. ¶
It would be a shame if moviegoers wrote off Pulse as another J-horror movie, because it actually predates many of the films that sparked the genre's global vogue, and is superior to all but a few. Kurosawa, the brilliant director of Cure and Bright Future, gave Pulse its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2001. In retrospect, it seems an astonishingly prescient movie, and not just for its rejection of reductive theological explanations and its oblique visual invocations of mass death by suicide, plague, war (the disappearing dead leave Hiroshima-like stains) and terrorism (a burning cargo plane crashes into a cityscape). Pulse chills us to the marrow by daring us to admit the unspeakable truth: that despite thousands of years' worth of religious and philosophical assurances, we still don't know if being dead is better than, equal to or worse than being alive, and we will never know until we're dead ourselves.
The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence: Seasons 3 & 4
Written and narrated by Andrew Dignan
Edited by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz
In conjunction with the Museum of the Moving Image's symposium on HBO's The Wire, the museum commissioned five video essays for its online magazine, Moving Image Source, breaking down the show's distinctive opening credits season by season. The essays are based on Andrew Dignan's 2006 article "The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence." Adapted and narrated by Dignan, and edited by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, the series of short films, titled Extra Credit, is now up and running at MOMI's website. Each installment also includes the text of Dignan's narration.
"Indie 500": Fleet Foxes, Girl Talk
By Vadim Rizov
Funny things happen on comment boards sometimes. Last week I weighed in on the new Dr. Dog over at the Onion A.V. Club, which is always fun: they have some of the most restless and inventive commenters around, and it's always interesting to watch people spin out weird tangents I couldn't have seen coming. Sometimes things are predictable: even before my Tapes 'N Tapes went up, it was a safe bet that the usual disgruntled fucktards would be up in arms at someone reviewing something "indie" and hence elitist, obscure, bloodless, etc. But something different happened with Dr. Dog—who, I want to make it absolutely clear, I quite like, despite some minor reservations about their latest. This is how I opened: "The market seems just about perfect for Dr. Dog's fifth album: Fate is logical kin to Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, Fleet Foxes, and other recent attempts to reboot slacker Americana for people who don't know or care about The Band." I meant this neutrally: you can listen to all this stuff and not really miss much if you don't care about The Band. And I don't; point in fact, they represent exactly the kind of plodding, humorless, strum-and-nod Americana bullshit I have no use for (at least if The Last Waltz is enough to go off of; probably isn't, but let's pretend it is). But that, apparently, isn't how it read. Sample outraged responses: "don't be calling me uneducated and shallow for listening to motherfucking Wilco." "i didn't know the av club shat on their readers." So apparently what happened is my sentiments came back around in weird karmic form: there's plenty of other people out there tired of being hectored about The Band who also like this stuff—i.e., the stuff without which you allegedly have no business listening to without a working knowledge of the Robbie Robertson back catalogue—and they thought I was doing it again.
Anyway. I have no idea why it's suddenly cool for bands to stretch out all folk-like, set up shop in some godforsaken shack and pretend they like to watch birds all day or brew moonshine or ride freight trains or whatever the hell, as long as they're inventive with it. Enter Fleet Foxes (and yes, I know this places me months behind; bite me), who may yet crack my top 10 on repeated spins. Then again, they may not, but I'd like to write about it now, because I want to blow through all the major summer releases I can in the next few columns before we enter the third quarter. (Hence, only two albums this week, but the same word count; sorry fans.) I was (and remain) underwhelmed by their Sun Giant EP, which struck me as fairly drab. Then I was sitting there, putting their full-length debut Ragged Wood through its initial spins, not really paying much attention. On the fifth track "Quiet Houses," with a little over a minute to go, Fleet Foxes suddenly break down into this perfect Brian Wilson imitation (probably far better than the man himself can manage at this late date, the outstanding, late-breaking completion of Smile notwithstanding), with wordless vocals over an ascending piano line that initially seems too fragile to soar as high as it wants, then does it anyway. That blend of grandeur and fragility gets at the essence of the Wilson project, and it's my favorite moment on the album.
When the album came out, Graeme Thomson put up a well-intentioned but fundamentally misguided blog post over at the Guardian: "what," he asked his British readers, "are the hallmarks of great American music?" Thomson gets off to a good start, disemboweling the hackneyed "obvious lyrical signifiers of America" so dear to teenaged Kerouac fans and clueless romantics: "turnpikes; boardwalks; state troopers; the Kokomo and the levee; a poignant recollection of some joyous yet profoundly painful coupling involving Mary in the summer of 66; sundry incomprehensible technical details about cars." Thomson then goes on to suggest—in a way that's both basic and evasive—that American music is about "exploring a sense of national identity," and that "intricate harmonies ... suggest wide-open spaces, vast reserves of loneliness and freedom, the capacity and imperative to travel, disparate parts fleetingly coming together. Harmonies both embrace and try to reconcile the confusing enormity of the place." Huh.
Part of me wants to propose an equally reductive history of British music, suggesting that there's little more going on there than a fundamental urge to escape the drabness of British life, whether through regressions to music halls past, frantic appropriations of American rock cliches, or getting E'd up beyond belief while thumping away, and that the Britpop movement was a cruel parody of lapsed British nationalism, presented straight-faced to a gullible nation by extremely cynical art-school students (except for the Gallagher brothers, who unfortunately weren't kidding). But that would be stupid and omit everything that contradicts my thesis, so let's skip it. There's a way to rework Thomson's propositions slightly so that they start to make sense, which is if you presume that these ideas conform to certain sentimental notions about what "America" should "mean" in music—which is, in a certain sense, a cop-out. With rare exceptions, Fleet Foxes' lyrics suggest that they've been living in the backwoods watching animals: this may be true, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that Fleet Foxes have found a kind of lyrical Walden haven that gets them going, and the results are worth it. (I'd suggest that e.g. the curiously insistent passive-aggression of Pavement is equally "American," but I'll hold off on that for now.) I can't tell if this album will grow on me or just remain kind of theoretically admirable: where Band acolytes think a certain head-nod solves all your problems, Fleet Foxes seem to think there's nothing a good dose of wordless three-part harmony (preferably acoustic) won't solve. I'm not sure this is true, but I like them well enough. More than the initial descriptions made me think I would anyway.
Speaking of The Band and the AV Club: last year Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) did a Random Roles, a fascinating regular feature wherein musicians shuffle through their iPods and offer comments with varying levels of insight. When it came to "The Weight," Gillis offered a surprisingly naive appraisal: "I actually don't know anything about this other than they're kind of a '60s band." Take that, greatest American band ever! (Sample commenter backlash: "I honestly hate to sound like a cunt, but not knowing who the Band were is like not knowing who JFK was." They're never happy, are they?) Girl Talk, of course, is the super-awesome master of ADD mash-ups, where something new pops up every 7 seconds or else. Feed The Animals is the follow-up to his breakthrough with 2006's Night Ripper, and in many ways the formula's the same: incongruous, surprisingly successful juxtapositions of decidedly non-rap, mostly populist musical samples backing mostly hip-hop and R&B vocal lines, in ways that defy any kind of synthesized meaning. When he layers Young Gunz' decidedly vapid "Set If Off" over Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," I doubt he intends any kind of rote critique about the social relevance and critique of old-school hip-hop vs. modern lack of substance or something: he's just taking one hook and putting it on another. Girl Talk's basic project is to give you a head-rush in the least amount of time possible; more often than not, he gets it done.
He has no shame, which helps. On "What It's All About," there's no particular reason to follow-up The Jackson 5's soaring vocals for "ABC" over "Umbrella" 's high-hat with the gooey rush of young MJ over "Bohemian Rhapsody" except that you can get all the best parts together in one place really fast. Sometimes he takes that principal literally: when Flo Rida goes over the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning," suddenly the VU's hazy little hangover ode is twice as fast and way lusher than I remember it being. That kind of putative high/low divide is grist to Gillis, whose ultimate message, if any, seems to be that all pop music serves the exact same function. This gets us close to one of those inane arguments about when a cover is condescending, which tends to break down in pretty predictable ways. Reading Jonah Weiner's recent Slate piece, for example, it's hard not to notice that Jay-Z sarcastically covering "Wonderwall" is good (because he's a rapper and dealing with Noel Gallagher's stupid, near-racist claims that he shouldn't be headlining at Glastonbury) but bad when Pavement does it because it's "snobbish." In fact, it's always snobbish when someone lower-profile covers someone higher-profile: fer chrissakes, Weiner even claims that Travis' cover of "Hit Me One More Time" contains "a patronizing subtext," wherein someone "scrub[s] away the deadening Top 40 luster, and exhume[s] the fine song hidden beneath." The idea that Travis are patronizing about anything (given their own longstanding insecurity—they used to complain "'We got popular without the permission of cool people and we have never been forgiven") is pretty hilarious. People who are extremely defensive about the critical status of one of the most successful musical forms in America today (for reasons that kind of elude me) tend to lose all sense of perspective; what's great about Girl Talk is that he makes that debate irrelevant. Call it crass or thoughtless; he really doesn't see the difference. It's all party music.
When the inevitable oldies station for my generation comes along, we could all be saved the fuss and bother of listening to a lot of nostalgic but not all that great songs if they just played this stuff. That said, Feed The Animals isn't quite as great as Night Ripper. Maybe it's just the novelty factor wearing off, but Gillis has amped up the number of samples tremendously and there's less breathing room than before: less drum breaks, more excitable rappers. (Gillis appears to have just discovered Lil' Scrappy, god bless him. Btw: does it make me nervous that I know a few people who have no use for mainstream hip-hop but like this? A little, but I'll chalk it up to good faith rather than an inadvertent minstrel effect.) There's some stand-out moments, of course, where the songs become actual songs: the aforementioned Jackson 5 vs. Queen moment, for example, or the ending juxtaposition of "International Player's Anthem" with Journey. There's two ways to listen to it: you should listen to it blind the first time and marvel at what pops up, then cue up the Wikipedia track-listing and have the surprisingly academic experience of watching exactly how it all patches together. What I wonder—and this is something someone other than Gillis will have to figure out, given that his disks are basically prep for allegedly awesome live shows—is if there's a way to take this hyper mash-up style and make it express more than one emotion. Someone step up.
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Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.
Links for the Day (July 30th, 2008)
1. Two from the Times: Karen Durbin's profile of Melissa Leo (my girl!) and Dave Kehr's latest DVD column. Related: Andrew O'Hehir interviews Courtney Hunt, director of Frozen River (which stars Melissa Leo).
["Her independence has deep roots. When she was 9, she and her mother moved from the Lower East Side to Putney, Vt., and eventually to London, where, at 15, she remained on her own to study acting for two years before coming back to get her high school equivalency diploma and enroll at Purchase College. “My mom was a ’70s mom,” she said of her mother’s willingness to let her stay in London. “She paved a road that no one had yet walked. To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.” Ms. Leo, 47, has long lived in Ulster County, near Woodstock, N.Y., with her son by the actor John Heard, and now on her own. She’s a familiar presence at Woodstock’s indie-oriented film festival, and is part of the loose network of artists, performing and otherwise, who have gravitated there. She explains her résumé by saying, “I do the work that’s in front of me.”"]
2. "Let's Step Outside": Dennis Lim traces the evolution of the movie fight scene for Slate. (Hattip: Glenn Kenny)
["At one point in Michael Ondaatje's book of interviews with Walter Murch, the venerable film editor reflects on how effective cutting keeps audiences grounded as one shot, often imperceptibly, becomes another. The trick is to determine where the viewer's attention is trained in a particular shot and to cut to a shot that contains a focal point in the same area of the frame. But there is at least one major exception to this rule: the fight scene. "You actually want an element of disorientation—that's what makes it exciting," Murch says of his approach to splicing together a fight. "So you put the focus of interest somewhere else, jarringly, and you cut at unexpected moments. You make a tossed salad of it, you abuse the audience's attention." ... The fight scene as it usually turns up in today's action spectacles—smeared, destabilized, fixated on chaos at the expense of clarity and precision—reflects the changing syntax, the all-around acceleration, of movies in general and Hollywood blockbusters in particular. The current vogue for chopped-up fights also raises the question: Are these hyperedited brawls any more successful than their more straightforward predecessors?"]
3. The Self-Styled Siren on Fanny (1961).
["Fanny, in the end, made the Siren take a look at how much emphasis she places on direction. On that score, you have to flunk the movie. Logan guided three very good performances and one so-so one, but in other respects it's badly directed, end of story. But the Siren can't lie and say she disliked Fanny, when in fact she enjoyed it very much. The delicate theme of romance down the years, children as the thread that binds us together, the beautiful south of France, the intensely lovable characters and most of all Jack Cardiff created a movie that the Siren was powerless to resist completely, Logan or no Logan. It is out in a new widescreen DVD that supposedly looks quite good, so check it out and tell me whether you, too, had to throw your reservations off the pier."]
4. "How Big Is Your World? Good Rap Songs": By Brandon Soderberg for No Trivia.
["B.O.M.B 'Over Here'": This song's just no bullshit. Under three-minutes, these really tight drums, and justB.O.M.B--"Baltimore On My Back"--rapping straight-forward stuff that's spare and direct and descriptive and nothing more or less. There's a good mix of influences here as well. Like so many smart thugs, he owes a great deal to 'Pac, but there's some golden-age New York influence in his delivery and the beat--especially those Primo-ish drums--but it's aware and internalizes more recent rap trends. The all-keyboard aspect of the beat, the purposefully simple and immediate lyrics, and the filling it all-out with ad-libs, show a relatively traditionalist rapper that didn't turn the radio off in 1998."]
5. John Kenneth Muir delves deep into The X-Files: I Want To Believe.
["Belief isn't easy to come by these days. But - despite most reviews - I still believe in The X-Files. Perhaps the biggest problem with this new film (sub-titled I Want to Believe) arises not from the stars (or the production itself), but from ourselves, and -- specifically -- our expectations. Based on the savage reviews proliferating on the web and in print, audiences and critics apparently desired a Wrath of Khan, when what they actually get is...The Search for Spock. In other words, X-Files: I Want to Believe is a more intimate, cerebral adventure than it is a "big event" summer movie. There are virtually no optical special effects in this movie. I could detect no (or very little) CGI. There are few action sequences. There is little violence of any kind, actually (I don't believe a single gun is fired...). Mulder and Scully never even carry fire-arms, as far as I can detect. And there are no explosions whatsoever. All the fireworks, rather...are purely human; emotional. Accordingly, the climax is one that relies on the specific nuances of human interaction and relationships, not fights, chases, or gun-fire. The film's success hinges on such old--fashioned elements as atmosphere and mood. A wintry, oppressive location -- West Virginia -- is practically a supporting character here, and the build-up of real suspense is generated through effective use of solid film techniques such as cross-cutting. This is good work, beautifully photographed; it's merely out-of-step with the kind of movies being offered in our cineplexes today. Honestly, I Want to Believe's greatest failing has nothing to do with what it is; but rather what it is not; what people apparently "wanted" to believe about the form it would take."]
Quote of the Day: Samuel Butler
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): Agents of CHAOS!!!!! Everywhere I look... (Hattip: Jonathan Pacheco)
Clip of the Day: "You're a Bush! Act like one!": The trailer for Oliver Stone's W.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Lichman & Rizov "Live" at Grassroots Tavern: Ep. 17, "Robert Rodriguez=Guy Maddin," with Adam Nayman & Andrew Tracy
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.]
Hello non-listeners! We've wound down and have enjoyed our new time off. Vadim's taken up sewing, Keith has found new ways to get sick, and I've become oddly fascinated by snake moves on the Sci-Fi Channel. Of course, before all that, we met up with Adam Nayman and Andrew Tracy who were in town for a Reverse Shot shindig.
We took the time to chat about Canadian director Guy Maddin, with both Vadim and Andrew giving us their thoughts on My Winnipeg. We also have a rather lively discussion on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Spielberg Wet Dreams (which goes off on many, many tangents). Plus, our favorite scenes from The Happening!
Our next episode will be the fabled "Season Finale," featuring Mike D'Angelo. So until then, enjoy, listen on (and on and on to our longest podcast ever), and if you see either Vadim or me at a bar, please buy us a drink! Especially at Enid's. That place is hella-spensive. (JL)
Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 1 hour, 6 minutes, 11 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. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.
Links for the Day (July 29th, 2008)
1. "All the Answers": In The New Yorker, Charles Van Doren addresses the quiz show scandals.
["My first appearance on “Twenty-One” was on November 28, 1956. I must have put the whole thing out of my mind, but about a week after my conversation with Freedman I suddenly found myself in the studio, with the red light glowing above the camera, totally unaware that I was being watched by millions of people. Herb Stempel by then had been on the show for six straight weeks and had won some seventy thousand dollars. You can “quit right now,” Jack Barry was saying to Stempel, in a voice practiced in arousing suspense, “and a check will be waiting for you, or you can decide to continue playing.” Barry then introduced me: “He teaches music at Columbia University, and was a student at Cambridge University, in England . . . and his hobby is playing the piano in chamber-music groups.”"]
2. The lineup for the 65th Venice Film Festival. Highlights from GreenCine.
["Among the highlights reaped from a quick scan: New films by Darren Aronofsky, Hayao Miyazaki, Takeshi Kitano, Ferzan Ozpetek, Christian Petzold, Barbet Schroeder, Venice favorite Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Manoel de Oliveira, Agnès Varda, Ramin Bahrani, Lav Diaz and Ross McElwee."]
4. "House poised to apologize for slavery, Jim Crow": From CNN.
["The House of Representatives was poised Tuesday to pass a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the era of Jim Crow. The nonbinding resolution, which is expected to pass, was introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, a white lawmaker who represents a majority black district in Memphis, Tennessee. While many states have apologized for slavery, it will be first time a branch of the federal government will apologize for slavery if the resolution passes, an aide to Cohen said. By passing the resolution, the House would also acknowledge the "injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow," the period after slavery was abolished in which African-Americans were denied the right to vote and other civil liberties. The resolution states that "the vestiges of Jim Crow continue to this day.""]
5. "Arthur C. Clarke's last vision": On the author's final novel. More information here.
[""The Last Theorem," which grew from 100 pages of notes scribbled by Clarke, is more than a futuristic tale about a mathematician who discovers a proof to a centuries-old mathematical puzzle. The novel, due in bookstores August 5, represents a historic collaboration between two of the genre's most influential writers in the twilight of their careers. Clarke, best known for his 1968 work, "2001: A Space Odyssey," died in March at age 90; Pohl is 89."]
Quote of the Day: Voltaire
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): I'm shakin' Leo.
Clip of the Day: Every 5 second movie in 5 seconds (minutes, really, but why be picky).
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence: Seasons 1 & 2
Written and narrated by Andrew Dignan
Edited by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz
In conjunction with the Museum of the Moving Image's symposium on HBO's The Wire, the museum commissioned a series of video essays for its online magazine, Moving Image Source, breaking down the show's distinctive opening credits; the essays are based on Andrew Dignan's 2006 article The Wire and the Art of the Credits Sequence. Adapted and narrated by Dignan, and edited by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, the series of short films, titled Extra Credit, is now up and running at MOMI's website. The piece on the Season One credits is here; the Season Two essay is here. Each installment also includes the text of Dignan's narration. For information on Seasons Three and Four, click here.
Mad Men Mondays: Season 2, Episode 1, "For Those Who Think Young"
By Andrew Johnston
Welcome, friends, to The House Next Door's recap of the first episode of Mad Men's second season, "For Those Who Think Young." It's been a huge thrill to see the show come out of nowhere to become the buzz program of the past year (as well as a multi-Emmy nominee), but obviously not as big a thrill for the fans as for the cast and the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, who doesn't waste any time on recaps or self-congratulation, instead throwing viewers right into the deep end to the strains of Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" ("...like we did last summer"). In that spirit, let's get right down to business.
I don't think the length of the gap since Season One is ever specified in dialogue, but the broadcast date of Jackie Kennedy's famous TV tour of the White House (February 14, 1962) proves that about 15 months have passed since Betty blew off Don for Thanksgiving at the end of "The Wheel." I may be one of the few serious fans who never asked the question "Why the fuck doesn't Don have a lock on his office?" during Season One, and I got a huge laugh out of the scene up top in which one is installed. Just as overdue is Don's visit to the doctor, who, in a sign of the times, prescribes him the barbiturate Phenobarbital as an anti-anxiety medication. (Though still prescribed as an anti-seizure medication in other countries, it's now primarily used on dogs in the United States, though it remains popular as a suicide drug—it's what Abbie Hoffman O.D.'d on).
Although we're not told how Don and Betty reconciled after "The Wheel", the presence of a housekeeper at the Draper residence (and the scene of Betty at riding lessons, almost but not quite as much of a bored-housewife cliché as therapy—trust me, I spent my early years in a wealthy suburb in the early '70s) suggests that Don dealt with the situation in large part by opening his checkbook. He wasn't necessarily just being lazy: It's pretty evident throughout the episode that Don is distracted by some intense angst of his own. Unsurprisingly, his opaque personality and Jon Hamm's sublime poker face makes it impossible to determine its exact nature, though at this point fans know well Don more than well enough for us to have plenty of fodder for speculation—speculation that'll have to wait until after we cover the action at Sterling Cooper.
Considering his condition when we last saw Roger Sterling, it was pretty startling to see him carrying on as if nothing had happened to him, though I suspect he's not as strong as he's letting on—his banter with Joan implies that his sex life is now pretty vicarious and that, in a variation on the Breaking the Waves scenario, he's getting his jollies from her descriptions of her misadventures. Joan herself now seems more intensely focused than ever on "winning" via the acquisition of a powerful husband, which may in part be the cause of her increased bitchiness at SC vis-a-vis the new copier—it's possible she sees herself as being on a "farewell tour" and is letting the other gals in the steno pool get a last, vicious taste of her poison before she moves on to directing her ire at assorted housekeepers, babysitters, maids, doormen, etc. The arrival of Sterling Cooper's first copier—arguably the payoff of a joke Weiner set up back in the pilot—gives her a golden opportunity to once again make things hard for poor Peggy Olsen.
On the Peggy tip, we soon learn that she vanished from the office for a couple of months after her kid was born, and that her unexplained absence is still a hot discussion topic among the junior execs (surprisingly so, given that she must have been back about a year by now). Peggy and the gang spend most of the day waiting around for Don to show up for a catered meeting; their long lunch (and mediocre pitches afterward) gives us a prolonged glimpse at the laziness and inertia in the SC ranks that Don is always bitching about, and which is one of the reasons why Weiner keeps reminding us in interviews that, despite the immense power of Bert Cooper and the wealth of Roger Sterling, Sterling Cooper remains a C-list agency.
SC’s status in the ad world is often explained by Weiner yet seldom reflected on the show. Duck Phillips represents an obvious attempt to do something about it. Last season, you may recall, Duck urged SC to enter big-money fields in which it had no clients—airlines, pharmaceuticals, etc. This year, Duck—clearly being set up as Don’s antagonist for the season (so what if Don brought him on board?)—is determined to get ahead of the baby boom (the oldest boomers are just turning 16 in 1962) by bringing younger talent into the agency. Other than Pete, Duck’s the only guy at SC with so much as an inkling of how the baby boom will change consumerism. Roger cheerfully goes along with Duck, suggesting that he hopes to play Don and Duck off each other from the outside; naturally, Duck is actually playing Roger and Don against each other, but Roger’s just too conceited to pick up on it. In classic Roger style, he goes to Don saying that Bert Cooper, not Duck, is interested in hiring younger folks. Don (who, unlike Roger and Duck, has never been afraid to tell clients what they don’t want to hear) sees right through it and has Roger deliver a reply to Duck. When the eagerly-sought newbies, one of Duck’s beloved writer-artist teams, present themselves for an interview, they’re eager to keep the visit from hitting the ad-world rumor mill, apparently for fear of having their reputation tarnished as a result of dealing with SC.
Betty’s post-Bryn Mawr, pre-marriage stint in the modeling world contributed to making her simultaneously worldly and naïve, qualities that converged with awkward results when she and Don encounter Juanita, her former roommate, at the restaurant where Don takes Betty for Valentine’s Day. Betty’s the only one oblivious to Juanita’s obvious status as an escort, or “party girl” as Don coyly puts it. As Francine’s evocation of BUtterfield 8 makes clear, this was one of those periodic times in which pop culture contrives to make the high-end sex trade seem like a glamorous way for bored women to fill their time (Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour was still five years away). Combine that fantasy with the overheated/underexercised libido of which Betty spoke last season, and I dare say you’re looking at a recipe for disaster. Her flirtation with the idea of trading sex for car help is the start of something that’s sure to turn ugly.
Weiner and co. cleverly use the famous Jackie Kennedy telecast as the jumping-off point for a montage that brings us up to date on a few more of our favorites: Paul ain’t the only one with a new beard, and Salvatore’s seems just as spunky as Lois but a lot better looking. We get a glimpse of Joan with her doctor boyfriend (in a vignette which lends fuel to my suspicion that she doesn’t really enjoy sex at all), while Pete, somewhat unsurprisingly, spends the night on the couch watching a science fiction movie. (His family ain’t as rich as they used to be, but surely he could do better by Trudy than a box of chocolates from Schrafft’s, the 1962 equivalent of one purchased at Duane Reade).
The source of Don’s quiet unease, as I said before, remains a mystery, but the onscreen evidence hints at intriguing possibilities. Although Dick Whitman succeeded in the business world on his own, he never got the education that the “real” Don Draper did. Last season, “our” Don often chafed when he was judged on his appearance; now, instead, after the bohemian type in the bar tells him he wouldn't understand Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, rather than make a bitter wisecrack, he goes out and buys a copy. Don’s sudden interest in contemporary poetry and his takedown of the guys who continue their lewd banter after a woman enters the elevator suggest an unspoken question: After all these years of playing the role of “Don Draper," has our protagonist realized he doesn’t particularly like his character and resolved on a course of self-improvement? And if so, will it distract him enough to make him vulnerable to the machinations of Duck Phillips? All we can do, is stay tuned.
Miscellaneous notes: The work of Frank O’Hara and the rest of the New York School poets is one of my literary blind spots, so I did a little reading up on O'Hara in an attempt to decode the significance of the poem used in tonight’s episode. The Harvard roommate of Edward Gorey, O’Hara, like Ayn Rand, is someone the Mad Men characters might conceivably cross paths with: O’Hara’s day job was as a curator at MoMA, which is about a 10 minute walk from the SC offices. Of course, if O’Hara or Rand actually showed up on Mad Men, it could be send the show careening down a slippery slope toward becoming The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a fate I’m sure Weiner wants to avoid. (Here’s a question for those who know more about the publishing world (or the publishing world in 1962) than I: If the standard info for Meditations in an Emergency is “Grove Press; 1957, 1967”, does that mean the paperback release trailed the hardcover by a decade (meaning the paperbacks we see in the episode are anachronisms), or does it mean the book went out of print at some point prior to 1967 and was reissued then? Inquiring minds want to know.)
Secondly, I want to put in a very strong endorsement for the Blu-ray edition of Mad Men’s first season, which I devoured in about five days before sitting down to watch the season two premiere. The war between Cablevision and Time Warner Cable kept most New Yorkers from being able to see the first season in HD when it was broadcast, and the difference is simply stunning. It ain’t just the rich colors and the level of visual detail: The clarity of the sound mix allowed me to catch lines of dialogue (sometimes entire brief speeches) in almost every episode which were inaudible the first time around. I’d seen every Season One episode at least three times before sitting down with the Blu-ray discs, via AMC screeners that occasionally had unfinished visual effects (Don and Rachel’s rooftop kiss in “Marriage of Figaro” took place in front of a green screen), it was great to see the episodes in finished form. The downside was that doing so revealed a number of embarrassing contradictions between the final product and my S1 recaps, largely because I assumed all the music on the AMC screeners had been cleared; the Decemberists' “The Infanta,” for example, doesn’t end “Shoot,” as I said in my column about the episode, nor does Hoyt Axton’s “Greenback Dollar” conclude “The Hobo Code." While I hope to be able to watch the show in advance this season as well, in cases where a music choice strikes me as notable enough to mention, I plan to check the screener against a digital video recording of the broadcast version before I post my recap in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Oh, and the person to whom Don mailed his copy of the O’Hara book? $5 says it’s Rachel Mencken.
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
Doctor Who: Season 4, Ep. 12, "The Stolen Earth"
By Ross Ruediger
“The Stolen Earth” is a wonderful and sometimes frustrating episode. Wonderful because it skillfully brings together not only all three of the series in the Russell T. Davies Whoniverse, but also numerous other elements from his four seasons of Doctor Who. It also truly kicks off the big finish of Season Four and ends with a big ol’ insane cliffhanger. It’s maybe frustrating for all the same reasons, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a hell of a lot of fun.
The story begins immediately where “Turn Left” ended. The TARDIS materializes on Earth and the Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna (Catherine Tate) are expecting disaster. But instead, all is perfectly calm; indeed, it’s a Saturday. Regardless, the Doctor remains unnerved by Donna’s meeting Rose, which indicates to him that if she can travel from one parallel world to another, then the walls of the universe are breaking down. (If only he’d seen her earlier in the season!) They head back to the TARDIS and no sooner do the doors close then strange things begin happening on the Earth. The TARDIS interior shakes and the Doctor runs to the door, swings it open and before you can say Han Solo, the planet’s gone. The TARDIS hovers in the empty space where the Earth once was.
The words “Far Across the Universe” scroll across the screen. In New York, a UNIT base is in disarray and Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) is present. A co-worker tells her to look at the sky. In Cardiff at Torchwood, a similar scenario has occurred and Captain Jack (John Barrowman), Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) and Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd) assess the damage. Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Luke (Tommy Knight) are dealt the same hand in Ealing, as are Wilfred (Bernard Cribbens) and Sylvia (Jacqueline King) in Chiswick. The daylight is gone for planet Earth. It’s suddenly dark. Everyone stares up into the night seeing the same wondrous sight. Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) appears in the middle of a street, giant weapon in hand. She looks up and sees a night sky full of alien planets.Rose: “Right, now we’re in trouble. And it’s only just beginning.”
The various groups of the Doctor’s friends scurry around each trying to do their thing to figure out what the hell is going on, and why there are 26 new planets in the sky (while on TV, Richard Dawkins has quite reasonably figured out that the planet’s moved). They realize there’s a massive space station in the middle of all the planets, and of course we the viewer are really the only people who can reasonably guess who’s onboard the ship, because we know the show and we know it’s the end of the season and we know who we’ve not heard a peep from since the early part of Season Three. Unidentified spacecrafts fly towards Earth. The first person to hear the grating alien voice is Sarah Jane Smith, thanks to her supercomputer, Mr. Smith: Daleks! (Of course.) Fear spreads across her face as it does Jack's and Martha’s. Even though they’re all apart, they all feel the same kind of “We’re fucked” sensation. They descend on the planet and begin their reign of terror and the entire scenario is reminiscent of some great fifties alien invasion flick that was never made. It’s all really glorious and exciting and even if you’ve found yourself sick of Daleks over the past few years, this has the feel of “the moment it’s all been leading up to.”
Back in the TARDIS, on the other side of the universe, the Doctor, unable to find Earth anywhere, decides to go to the Shadow Proclamation (first mentioned way back in “Rose”), a sort of galactic police force run by albino women who use the Judoon as their muscle. They exist on some kind of space station of their own that’s another bit of gorgeous CGI, all steeples and turrets perhaps built onto the remnants of some long dead moon (the inside, however, looks a lot like what I’d suspect an empty office building in Cardiff to look like). When the Doctor tells the lead albino that the Earth’s missing, she becomes snotty and tells that actually 24 planets are missing (including Clom; the Doctor amusingly wonders, “Who’d want Clom?”). Donna also suggests the missing planets Pyrovillia and Adipose III (from “The Fires of Pompeii” and “Partners in Crime” respectively), and then there’s the Lost Moon of Poosh (mentioned in “Midnight”) and the Doctor realizes that some of the planets have been removed from time as well as space. He also deduces that they all fit together in a new formation to create a massive engine of some sort. But who could do this? He says that someone tried to move the Earth before, but that was a long time ago. (This actually happened in Earth’s future in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” but as far as the show’s concerned it was a long time ago; that story was made in 1964.)
On Earth, the secret Project Indigo is being activated, and Martha’s going to give it a test run. Turns out it’s a teleport technology developed from leftover Sontaran gadgetry. Just before she jumps, her superior gives her something called the Osterhagen Key, which certainly sounds ominous because it’s got a European name. On the Crucible (the name of the Dalek ship), much scheming is going on between the Supreme Dalek and another mysterious figure who any old school fan will immediately recognize as Davros, the Dalek creator. There’s a third Dalek of great importance that turns out to be none other than Caan, last seen initiating emergency temporal shift in Season Three. He’s gone batshit crazy and his upper casing’s been melted away so that the tentacled creature inside is exposed. Davros credits him as being the savior of them all, while the Supreme Dalek calls him “the abomination.”Caan: “He is coming. The three-fold man. He dances in the lonely places. Oh creator of us all, the Doctor is coming!”
Meanwhile the sound of a beating heart seems to be reaching out to Donna from somewhere. One of the albinos sees that something was on Donna’s back and tells her she’s sorry for her loss. Thinking she means the loss of Earth, the woman corrects her: “I mean the loss that is yet to come.” The Doctor interrupts and asks Donna if she can remember any important happenings on Earth from before her travels with him. She suggest the missing bees, which he quickly hooks into. Turns out the bees (or at least some of them) were actually aliens who went back home to their home planet sensing danger (clearly an homage to Hitchhikers Guide’s dolphins). The Doctor follows their trail to the oft-mentioned Medusa Cascade, and yet there is nothing there. Again, another gorgeous shot of the TARDIS drifting through the cascade—there’s no end to the frequent beauty of this episode. He’s helpless and says it’s the end of the line. There’s nothing more he can do, despite Donna’s protests that they can’t give up.
Everywhere on Earth the Daleks have taken over. The planet has surrendered. In the midst of it all a lone voice cries out to the Doctor’s many companions. It is Harriet Jones (Penelope Wilton), former Prime Minister (you know who she is). She has constructed something called a “sub-wave network,” which is designed to seek out anyone and everyone who can help to contact the Doctor, and she contacts Torchwood, Sarah Jane, and Martha, while Rose is left as an observer since she’s hooked up with Wilf and Sylvia who don’t have a webcam. This entire sequence is actually quite charming, what with hope coming back to life and all, and it provides some much needed humor in the midst of all the seriousness. Then basically what happens is they all work together to place a super-turbocharged phone call to the Doctor. And it works, but at a price—Harriet’s life. The Doctor is able to locate Earth, as well as the other 26 planets, which have been shifted and exist in a tiny pocket of time out of sync with the rest of universe. He communicates with all his old friends through the sub-wave network—all but Rose, who still cannot be heard or seen. In the midst of the reunions, Davros (Julian Bleach) breaks through to the Doctor.Davros: “Your voice is different, and yet its arrogance is unchanged. Welcome to my new empire, Doctor.”
Davros reveals that it was Dalek Caan’s emergency temporal shift took him back into the time-locked time war and he saved Davros’ life, although it cost him his mind. Davros pulls back his smock to reveal a chest that’s been ripped apart through surgery. He literally gave his cells to create a new race of Daleks. The Doctor pulls a lever on the TARDIS console and materializes on Earth. On cue, Rose is waiting for him outside the TARDIS, and he runs toward her and she to him and it’s all sweetly romantic—right up until a Dalek appears out of nowhere and issues a bolt to his side. And then it looks like Sarah Jane is going to be exterminated. As are Gwen and Ianto at Torchwood. And then, just to top it all off, the Doctor begins to regenerate…
Sheesh! This is exactly the kind of episode that is a joy to watch but a bitch to recap. Events just happen with this, bam, bam, bam rapid fire sense of urgency and surely this entire piece was not as much fun to read as it was to watch the episode itself. The characters are what make this thing work, and of course the dozen or so that are utilized in this piece have been so well-defined over the past four years that there’s almost no way Davies could screw it up. On paper, you’d never think it could work, and yet it does. The science is as dodgy as you’d expect, but when TV’s this much fun, who really cares about the technobabble. Usually for me there’s a point where a I just start laughing along with all the bad science because I don’t think even Davies assumes we’re going to take it all that seriously. It’s all an excuse to put every single toy from the collection into one big sandbox and just see what happens. And what happens is exhilarating TV, although there’s every reason it should sink before it should sail. Thank goodness it doesn’t. _________________________________________
Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based writer. In addition to contributing to The House Next Door, he also publishes The Rued Morgue and writes for Bullz-Eye.
NEXT WEEK: Find out all about the Osterhagan Key in the 90-minute season finale, "Journey's End." (Make sure to set your TIVOs and DVRs accordingly!)
Classic Who DVD Recommendation of the Week: Take a gander at "Destiny of the Daleks." Not the greatest Dalek entry ever, but it's got Davros, and you gotta love the Movellans. Starring Tom Baker and Mrs. Richard Dawkins (and ex-Mrs. Tom Baker), Lalla Ward.
Generation Kill Mondays: Episode 3, "Screwby"—Take 2
By Jeremiah Kipp
I still don’t feel connected to Generation Kill, now almost halfway through its run on HBO. It has fallen into a rhythm of grunt soldiers trying to keep on keeping on while their superiors make foolhardy decisions based on opportunism or an absurd loyalty to the marine corps handbook. They’re still routinely scolded for their “grooming standards” and its effect on army behavior (“Our protective posture is weakened!”). Meanwhile, the marines are engaging in firefights with enemy personnel, firing at targets and being fired upon, and wondering whether some of the villagers they are laying siege to are legitimate targets. When children’s bodies are brought out for medical attention, it’s difficult to navigate the moral terrain because the superior officers don’t want to take any of their men out of the game on behalf of collateral damage while their tactical position is extremely precarious and they’re far behind enemy lines.
As air fire comes down on a civilian city, the marines seem relatively enthusiastic, pummeling the walls of town into so much dust. “Look at me,” one of them says, “I’m a man now! Just like you! Except I’m not a faggot who talks all educated.” It got me thinking about the title of the series, Generation Kill, and how the generation doing the killing has largely been raised on video games and action movies and gangsta rap music (with most of the rapping on this show, and the declaration of Ice Cube as the “great warrior poet,” done by square looking white guys). Then there’s heavy metal music, which teenagers would listen to and, in their gleeful daydreams, follow the philosophy of Megadeth: “My business is killing, and business is good.” Pulling a trigger is easy when there’s a mantra behind it, when an entire school of thought has gone into pulling that trigger.
Mom, Dad, apple pie and American folklore doesn’t enter into the marine psyche in Generation Kill, but pop culture cer