The House Next Door

By Ed Howard

[You, the Living is now playing at Manhattan's Film Forum. Click here for screening information.]

You, the Living is Roy Andersson's follow-up to his remarkable 2000 film Songs From the Second Floor. Like its predecessor, You, the Living is a loose collection of absurdist vignettes set in a dull, gray city full of odd, depressive, quirky people. The film has no central narrative, it's simply a set of scenes, with characters whose lives occasionally overlap but still never really add up to a larger story. Instead, the stories are linked thematically, by Andersson's concern for the condition of people's lives in the modern era. His characters are beaten down, often terminally unhappy, trapped in dull routines and useless jobs. Andersson's vision is unsettling—dreary, absurd, shot through with dark, satirical humor—and yet not entirely bleak nor entirely hopeless. What this film is about, more than anything, is the possibility of finding some happiness in this life, some joy amidst all the ugliness, some pleasure to go with the pain. The film's central idea is the importance of living for the present, of enjoying oneself when death lingers unseen just around the bend, ready to strike at any moment. Andersson's characters are acutely aware of death and misery, and perhaps this primes them to also recognize the little moments of pleasure they are able to find at intervals.

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To read the rest of the article at Only the Cinema, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


In the nearly two decades that I've been writing film reviews, I can't recall another week that saw the release of three movies that are guaranteed to wind up on my year-end Ten Best list. The movies are vampire love story Thirst and the documentaries The Cove, about an aquatic conservationist's attempts to stop the slaughter of dolphins, and Severe Clear, an autobiographical account of one Marine's experiences in Iraq. Beyond their dramatic merits, all three demonstrate a front-and-center mastery of technique. They use image and sound not just for the usual, so-called "classical" purposes (to define the characters and advance the story) but to encourage the audience to think about filmmaking's ability to express states of mind.

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The founder of The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz is the guest critic for IFC.com this month. To read the rest of the article, click here.

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By Keith Uhlich

There's been a hole in the blogosphere for the past few weeks, though judging from a good number of the reactions at the IFC Daily (the second incarnation of the invaluable GreenCine Daily), not many people were aware that Daily curator David Hudson had continued publishing his link-collating passion project. So I've been told, most just thought that GreenCine (now a features, interviews and reviews site under the stewardship of Aaron Hillis) had changed its mission statement, and when they finally found out (too late) about Hudson's all-too-brief tenure at IFC, they were understandably distressed. Where else could cinephiles go to find out what was worth reading on an overcrowded World Wide Web? We have our answer today, and Hudson prepared us for it, dropping some hints in the final IFC Daily post about "dreaming up a new format and, if all goes according to plan,…rolling [it] out slowly in two phases at an entity that'll be named when that entity's good and ready." And now it's ready.

The venue is The Auteurs, specifically the Notebook section overseen by Daniel Kasman. Hudson's first entry is up in which he explains the new lay of the land. So head on over there and bookmark the hell out of it. Let's help make this third version a permanent Daily fixture. To David: Great to have you back, sir, and best of luck!

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By Andrew Schenker

[Lorna's Silence opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. Check local listings.]

By now the departures of Lorna’s Silence from the Dardennes Brothers template have been well-documented: The partial abandonment of the filmmakers’ trademark following shots, the switch from super-16 to 35mm film, the reliance on crime-drama plotting, even the introduction of a few seconds of extradiegetic music. Since its debut at Cannes last year, the Dardennes’ latest has seemed to get it from both sides, damned simultaneously both for the above-mentioned changes—particularly the heavier reliance on narrative, seen in some quarters as a move towards the middle—and for being yet another closely observed, tension-riven drama about a working-class character stuck in a set of precisely defined social circumstances and seeking some sort of redemption—in other words, another Dardennes Brothers film.

But since at their best—and the quality of the Belgian filmmaking duo’s output remains remarkably consistent—the Dardennes convey a sense of life lived at a higher level, an openness to the possibilities of existence in which even mundane gestures seem to carry more weight than the grand maneuvers of characters in other movies, any offering from the filmmakers is likely to be of particular value. Their films—through the happy confluence of observational detail, tough-minded camerawork and a series of remarkable performances—awaken us to the tensions, sorrows and desperate chances of life in a way that few other filmmakers achieve, so that even as their characters remain trapped in oppressively rigid circumstances, the feeling of fresh, if limited possibility, is always palpably present.

In their latest film, the approach is modified just enough to keep the Dardennes from falling into the trap of an unchanging and inhibiting personal style. The several unexpected plot twists serve to keep the viewer off balance, but they’re actually somewhat minimal and never shift focus away from Lorna’s behavior and reactions, while the less mobile camerawork—which often seems nearly static, but for the slight bob of the hand-held device—focuses attention more squarely on their central character. A young Albanian woman with a pixie cut and a wistful visage (played by the filmmakers’ latest discovery, Arta Dobroshi), Lorna has recently emigrated to Belgium to live out some version of the Western European dream, even if it involves marriage fraud—and possibly murder—to achieve it.

When the film begins, we find Lorna sharing an apartment in Liège with Claudy, a young junkie (Dardennes regular Jérémie Renier, expertly registering the tortured gestures of the addict), determined to go straight. They play cards; he asks for her help kicking the habit; she refuses. The next day she goes to work in a laundry, then meets with an Albanian mobster. Eventually, the arrangement becomes clear: She and Claudy are living out a fake marriage, the upshot being citizenship for Lorna and 5000 Euros for the junkie. But as arranged by the Albanian, the plan is to force Claudy to overdose, pocket his earnings and then marry off Lorna in another fake marriage to a Russian for further profit. The only problem is that Lorna warms toward her intended victim—taking him to the hospital when withdrawal pains prove to be too much, keeping his dealer away from the apartment in order to help him stay clean—and sets about obtaining a quickie divorce as a substitute for murder, a gesture that meets with predictable disapproval from the Albanian mob.

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Part of what makes a Dardennes Brothers film so dynamic is the directors’ ability to craft individual moments of overwhelming intensity, usually involving their characters in a moment of crisis. Few who’ve seen their 2005 offering, L’Enfant (The Child), for example, are likely to forget the moment where Jérémie Renier rubs the legs of his young partner-in-crime after a prolonged hideout in a frigid lake has resulted in temporary paralysis. Although nearly the entirety of Lorna is suffused with a tension born of the possibility that anything might conceivably happen to its characters—and plays out in ways such as Claudy’s near slip down the apartment building stairwell as Lorna helps him to the hospital—the film’s key sequence, in which the relationship between the two principal characters is definitively re-established, is so potent in its presentation and so shrewd in its understanding of the ways in which conflicting feelings between individuals often find sudden, and unexpected, expression that it stands at not only the center of the film’s achievement but, possibly, that of the filmmakers’ whole oeuvre.

Returning home from obtaining her divorce to find Claudy negotiating with his dealer, Lorna kicks out the unwelcome intruder and then locks the door. As her junk-sick ex-husband chases her around the apartment, attempting to wrest the keys from her grip, he tackles Lorna to the floor, before she breaks free from his grasp and throws the keys out the window. As Claudy cowers in the corner by the door, Lorna methodically removes her clothes and then runs over to him. DP Alain Marcoen follows her with a whip-pan, but she beats him to the spot and the effect is, as Michael Atkinson noted about the cinematography in The Naked Prey, that the camera just can’t keep up with the rapidity of the action. The two hold each other for a number of seconds and their mutual sighs of exhaustion gradually shade over into sighs of arousal, the instant of transition remaining impossible to identify. Thus a moment of intense activity of one kind becomes a moment of intense activity of quite another, as the false relationship finds true consummation, though only after its official point of termination.

Coming at roughly the halfway point in the film, this sequence marks the essential turning point in the lead character’s orientation. Shortly after, the plot shifts dramatically and Lorna is faced with a fresh set of difficulties. For the rest of the film, she remains haunted by the memory of her one moment of transcendence and even though she still pursues her goal of financial and personal opportunity (she lovingly details the particulars of a property she intends to purchase while talking with her boyfriend via cell-phone), she can’t overcome a sense of the moral cost of such pursuits (the phone conversation ends with her collapsing on the stairwell of the property and having to go to the hospital). Eventually, Lorna retreats further and further into a fantasy world of her own creation, responding to her plight by concocting a better set of (fictional) circumstances and using physical force against those who would prevent their realization.

If anything, it’s the film’s final section—culminating in a heartrending scene of mock-domesticity in an isolated cabin in the woods—that represents the biggest departure for the Dardennes. The filmmakers have always allowed their characters some measure of redemption and this measure has always been consonant with the actual particulars of their social circumstances. Here, any measure of deliverance afforded to Lorna is achieved in denial of these circumstances. Forced to cling to a desperate memory, the recollection of the one figure in her life whose primary interest in her was not based on exploitation, her fevered brain concocts a way to keep him metaphorically alive, even as she faces an increasingly dubious future. It’s probably the Dardennes' least hopeful film, but in its rigorous investigation of a decidedly untenable situation, its attention to the behaviors of its lead character and its lyrical, if somber finale (beautifully punctuated by a few notes from Beethoven’s Sonata 34), it’s as powerfully effective as any of the filmmakers’ output, which is to say as any of contemporary cinema.
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Andrew Schenker is a freelance writer based in New York. His work can be accessed at The Cine File.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

South Korean director Park Chan-wook has demonstrated a knack for depicting extremes of human behavior—dentistry by hammer (Oldboy), underwater surgery on a character’s Achilles tendon (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), truly disturbing images of terrorized children and revenge-obsessed parents (Lady Vengeance). His latest feature, Thirst, shows that even without the vendetta obsessions, he’s far from mellowed out. Concerning an affair between a priest (Song Kang-ho) who receives a transfusion of infected blood and the meek married woman (Kim Ok-vin) who, thanks to the cleric, becomes a fellow creature of the night, this vampire romance is as bloody as his previous excursions into the dark side of humanity, and just as richly imagined. Very loosely based on Émile Zola’s 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, it’s an exploration of lost faith, as well as an oddly funny, sexually intense tale of two loners who find each other, evolve together, then grow apart: Annie Hall with fangs.

“I didn’t set out to make a vampire film,” Park says somewhat sheepishly, sitting in an uptown hotel suite with a translator in tow. “As a boy, I disliked horror films; they were too scary. Thirst isn’t really a monster movie; it’s a story about a hero falling into the most serious of dilemmas, where he’s doubting God and his own beliefs. Because he had no choice in becoming what he becomes, you have to wonder, Should what he’s doing be considered a sin?”

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To read the rest of the Time Out New York interview, click here.

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By Jeremiah Kipp

[Editor's Note: The following is the seventh in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]

Day Nine & Ten

The heart of the film is in the domestic scenes between the husband and wife. While I feel the point of view of God's Land is from the child, Ollie (Matthew Chiu), it’s the conflict between the parents that sets everything in motion. The father, Hou (Shing Ka), was a successful doctor and gave everything away to join this cult—which has relocated its members to suburban Garland, Texas—and his wife, Xiu (Jodi Lin), is a non-believer. The key scenes we are shooting over the weekend involve testing the marriage. One of the scenes involves the two of them in bed: The husband is trying to sleep, the wife wants to speak with him about the past, how they met, the time Hou met her father and felt so uncomfortable because he didn’t know what to say, and also to get him to talk about how she was the most beautiful woman in school, a beautiful flower in a sea of “frumpy bespectacled weeds.” It’s one of the scenes we used for the auditions, and I always found it to be incredibly poetic and beautiful, as well as tense—not to mention familiar. I think guys have a habit of rolling over and going to sleep when women want to talk. “Just go to sleep,” Hou mutters, “or at least let me sleep!”

But of course she doesn’t, and he rolls over and starts going through his own memories of her. It’s the scene where we see the past relationship, and what drew them to each other. But also it shows their incompatible desires about the future, where she discusses what her son might be doing ten years from now, how the father should teach him about girls, and Hou believes they will be “nowhere” by that time—in another dimension.

Watching Jodi Lin work has been one of the great pleasures of making God's Land. Like the best actors, she’s emotionally available, able to tap into resources of vulnerability or fierceness or tenderness with a rich inner life. But right from her audition, when she spoke about her mentor Robert Woodruff, one of the great American theater directors, or how she worked with the experimental, playful Charles Mee on his play Queens Boulevard, I also knew her to be very articulate, which is rare among American actors. If I had to compare her to someone, she reminds me of the subtle, nuanced Sam Neill—someone who builds a part. While I’ve never talked in depth with her about process, we’ve joked around about Polish para-theatrical guru Jerzy Grotowski and his exercises (the joke was not about his brilliant work, but how he said yoga is bad for actors—and I think a little humor is good when you’re discussing being in a rehearsal room walking around in circles holding your ankles). But our jokes make me think of icebergs, where you see the tip of it above the water and below are unimaginable depths.

Jodi has had a rich experience in the theater, and judging from her work she must be an interesting person—I believe you have to be interesting, in real life, if you are to be an interesting actor. But what I adore about her is that she carries that with her and doesn’t make a big deal out of it, or ever talk about it. In fact, she’s quite hilarious—her voice is soft and she’s often saying really funny things. Whenever I run into her by accident in Manhattan, she’s wearing round impish sunglasses and carrying around a canvas bag of fruit or something, and has such a cheery demeanor that implies she doesn’t take things, or herself, too seriously.

But when Preston calls action on a scene, it’s quite moving to me to see that transformation. She effortlessly goes into that zone, for lack of a better word, that you have to find when you’re playing a part. I think when you’re acting a role you’re really tapping into certain deep parts of yourself. And when Jodi reveals those sides of herself, I am drawn into her. I think this is what great acting can do. Somehow you find something familiar from life reflected back at you, and if it’s truthful acting, it has the paradoxical effect of bringing you, the viewer, closer to yourself. People always say they lose themselves when they listen to a great piece of music or see fantastic movies or theater or look at a wondrous piece of art, when in fact I think it’s the opposite.

So this bedroom scene takes place at night, and it’s frustrating because we’re shooting during the day and have to gel the windows with blue to simulate moonlight, but we’re filming during magic hour and the sun is rapidly going down, and the further it sinks the more we have to tear gel down off of the windows to get an exposure. It’s almost nauseating for me to have to do this distracting work while the actors are trying to carry on with the scene, but Preston (who is behind the camera for this bit) sees what the picture is doing, and knows what he needs. I duly comply with his every request with the bare minimum of bitching about it, and remain surprised by the atmosphere Preston creates on-set, which is so laid back that even as we’re rushing, the actors seem quietly comfortable and fully involved in their characters and the scene. When Preston does one particular close-up involving their two faces, he is amazed at how eerie the image has become in this tender scene, and he gasps, “It’s like Bergman’s Persona…”

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Jackson Ning, who plays Teacher Chen, is performing what, in the script, is a very brief scene of him in a small classroom of children. Xiu brings Ollie into the class, dropping him off, and the teacher introduces him to the class. On the page, it’s not much—more of a transitional beat—but since we’re talking about what actors can bring to a moment, it’s fair to say they can take something that seems insignificant and transform it into gold. Jackson improvises an entire classroom lecture where he is introducing the children not only to each other, but to a tall green plant that is standing in the corner—and then he starts getting the kids to chant a mantra about plant power, perhaps as a way of rejuvenating its dying leaves, saying that their very thoughts can bring the plant back to life. Jackson not only captures the enthusiasm of teaching, but also Teacher Chen’s surprising way with children. More than any other scene, it allows you to understand why these characters are following him in this cult—anyone who can break down the barriers with children, respecting them but also leading them, and able to keep a handful of kids entertained and involved, have some kind of charismatic power. Jackson found this revelatory quality in what seemed, on the page, like a minor scene. Preston is smiling behind the camera.

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“One and done—Clint Eastwood style!” says assistant director Alex Gavin after we finish a shot of Xiu and Hou sitting on their couch during a climactic scene of the movie, where their conflict rises to the boiling point. “We have to talk about this as a family,” Xiu says in response to a crisis spreading throughout the cult, whereas Hou responds solemnly, “No, you have to choose for yourself what to do.” As I recall, we don’t rehearse the scene very much, though the actors run their lines exhaustively. We plan to cover it in a dynamic medium shot—which starts with Hou alone as his wife passes back and forth in front of him picking up the mess of their apartment, then sits next to him to fight for their marriage—followed by two close-ups.

We do a very basic, rudimentary blocking for camera. Then we roll camera and run the scene, which lasts for maybe five minutes.

And it’s one of those moments when time actually seems to stop. The blocking, the performances, the angle of the camera—somehow, it all comes together, but the main thing is the performances. Remember when I said earlier that great acting draws you in? Something in Shing Ka’s stoicism, his minimalist acting where he tries to hold himself back, really hurts in this scene—you can see him quavering underneath. And Jodi Lin expresses herself with her entire body, and when desperation takes hold we see her curling up all over the couch, practically wrapping herself around Shing, and as her character tries to stay strong, something breaks in me. I feel tears streaming down my face. And on set, I’ve defined myself as a hard-driving, intense, rigorous, sometimes playfully macho guy who’s always cracking the whip, pushing the machine forward, sometimes playing bad cop, always aggressive. But this scene in particular feels so close to home, I can’t help but cry my eyes out.

And Preston and our director of photography Arsenio Assin are similarly moved. I think Preston also wipes away a tear, and Arsenio is visibly shaken up.

Preston calls cut very softly, and then there’s a discussion as long as the scene itself about whether we should even bother doing any additional coverage, because all of the loaded emotional power was found within that shot. We decide to watch playback in order to make a decision, and while sitting there taking in the images, I cry again. You know, I never cry when I’m making a movie. Maybe I was feeling sensitive that day. But man, something in that scene clutched right at my very heart. And it affected Preston and Arsenio, too, and the actors, and everyone—and collectively we decided that we shouldn’t bother with the coverage, and frankly, why bother with take two? The actors went for it that time, and found something. To do it again would be, frankly, mechanical. It’s in the can, one and done, and we call it a night.

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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

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By Dan Callahan

[Repulsion streets tomorrow on DVD—The Criterion Collection #483. Click here for more information.]

It’s hard to know how to take Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) at this point, and not just because of the inescapable echoes and resonances it sets off relating to his own grotesque, tragic life. The film has often drawn comparisons to Hitchcock, and that’s apt, for its blond protagonist, Carole (Catherine Deneuve) is both object and subject as she slowly starts to lose her mind in a grotty London flat. There are several moments when Polanski’s camera stares voyeuristically at Deneuve in her see-through nightie, like a peeping tom, or like one of the men in the movie, both real and imaginary, who see her in purely sexual terms. Is Polanski implicating himself and his camera in the assorted violations that bring Carole to the brink? Not really. Suffice it to say that there are several curious visual choices that let us know he’s working mainly from his subconscious; in one of the scenes where Carole imagines a man raping her, Polanski’s camera pans down her nude body and finally comes to a stop on the sole of her foot, which looks as wrinkled as the faces of the women Carole serves as a manicurist.

Such instinctive visual choices abound in Repulsion, and some of them are clearer than others. There’s no doubt about the meaning, and power, of the image of Carole looking at a crack in the sidewalk and realizing that what’s happening in her mind can have exterior manifestations. We see a family photo of Carole early on that lets us know she has always been off in her own dream world, and the film ends on a close-up of her hard, frightened eyes in that old photo; the film begins with a Hitchcockian close-up of one of Carole’s eyes, and even at this level of magnification it looks cloudy, unhealthy, wiggling around like a small animal caught in a trap. Polanski borrows from Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955) when Carole slides her first murder victim into a bathtub, and he turns the arms holding candles in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) into a dirty joke; the gnarly hands coming out of the walls of her flat try to grope Carole, and one hand succeeds in getting a good squeeze of one of her breasts. (I’ve always wondered about that one hand and its owner. Was he paid to simply stand there behind the wall and grope Deneuve? How many takes did Polanski do? It’s safe to say that the owner of that hand had the best job in show business on that particular day.)

Watching the early scenes, I was surprised to see that Catherine Deneuve has freckles on her face. You would never know that in most of her French films, where she’s usually a fairy princess of some kind, an icon struggling to come alive from the deep freeze through the melting medium of brute sexuality. In Repulsion, you are never aware of Icon Deneuve, maybe because this is so early in her career and she’s working in such a radically different context. Deneuve stays faithful to her character, even at the risk of looking foolish toward the end, when she has descended to the level of a four-year-old. Carole has probably suffered some sexual abuse as a child, most likely from a family member; to her, any male sexuality is intrinsically threatening, so that she has to protect herself equally from a well-meaning but dim boyfriend and a rapacious landlord. We feel Carole’s suffering intermittently, but the film also stresses the excitement of completely losing control, or letting yourself go.

Repulsion refers to a lot of other movies, but its queasy black humor is entirely Polanski. Forty-seven minutes in, he springs one of the all-time great “gotcha!” moments when Carole looks into a mirror and sees a strange man there for a brief flash; even though I knew it was coming, the lulling rhythms leading up to it, the burst of shrieking music and the overall execution of the “gotcha” made me gasp in fear and pleasure. As a psychological thriller, there aren’t many films that can top Repulsion, but is it more than gripping and suspenseful? Are we meant to feel compassion for Carole, or is her ordeal sometimes just an exercise in style? Is she a female victim who briefly turns into a Ms. 45 of revenge, or just a helpless bird lost in an inhospitable country?

At the end, with Carole lying catatonic on the floor, a female neighbor says, “Please, someone help her,” in a well-meaning but impotent tone of voice, but there’s no help for Carole, just as there’s no help for anyone in Polanski’s universe. The sleazy boyfriend of Carole’s sister finally carries her out of this nightmare apartment, and Polanski makes sure that we register his twinge of lust at having such a supine beauty in his arms. Even after he has seen the gore left behind from the fatal misunderstanding between Carole and her men, this man would still like to lay her, right then and there; it’s a complex moment, because he obviously feels guilty for being turned on, yet the flesh is weak. It’s in those degrees of weakness and losing control that Polanski is most himself and most troubling.

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Image/Sound/Extras: Considering the number of godawful public domain prints of Repulsion that have been floating around for years, it’s a relief to see it looking and sounding so well. Polanski himself emphasizes the “shabby” aspect of its look on his audio commentary with Deneuve, recorded in 1994. Indeed, he’s quite critical of the film, outlining some of its faults in a sardonic, weary voice, while Deneuve regrets the Playboy shoot he talked her into to promote the film, and remembers that the extras playing the groping hands had to stay immobilized behind the apartment walls all day (she doesn’t mention the one hand that made contact, alas). A French television program shows Polanski on the set as an Ernst Lubitsch “act everything out for them” sort of director, and it also shows how lively and charming he could be at this relatively stress-free point in his life. How about Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1966) next, Criterion?
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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By Vadim Rizov

[A retrospective of Ulrich Seidl's work begins today at Anthology Film Archives.]

In the early '60s, Pauline Kael—fed up with the newly-ordained cinematic holy trinity of Last Year At Marienbad, La Dolce Vita and La Notte, refusing to recognize them as part of any zeitgeist she'd find relevant—wrote an essay mocking what she dubbed the "Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" genre. In Ulrich Seidl's Europe, the sick soul of the EU heads straight for the discotheque without bothering to get dressed up first. Antonioni said he focused on the rich simply because they had the most time and leisure to act out the problems he was interested in; for Seidl, it's the poor, dispossessed and unredeemable that have come to stand in for Europe, and the dance-floor is their commonest intersection point. 2001's Dog Days begins with a violent near-fight, as dumbass Mario (the appropriately named Rene Wanko) threatens to beat up anyone with the temerity to look at the stripper dance his girlfriend is performing; the eponymous subjects of 1999's Models spend most of their evenings writhing in the light, their faces captured in small spotlights, their pale eyes and faces as unnerving as any J-horror wraith; 2007's Import/Export has alienated thug Pauli (Paul Hofmann) catatonically dancing his ass off for no one in particular.

Import/Export is, unequivocally, a great film. As with In The City Of Sylvia, Birdsong et al., Anthology Film Archives is once more performing a public service by giving a critically acclaimed, commercially unviable film a week-long run, thereby qualifying it for end-of-year Top 10 lists—but non-critics should probably make the effort to see it as well. Seidl's gaze is unblinking in the face of real-world vileness, which automatically opens him up to charges of exploitation, since it's very clear there's no intervention about to happen. Import/Export sets Austrian Pauli wandering through Ukraine, peddling shoddy wares in decrepit locales while Ukrainian nurse Olga (Ekateryna Rak) tries to make economic headway in Austria. For Olga's section, Seidl filmed actual senile, babbling nursing home patients in full dementia. Which, sure, is "exploitative," insofar as it takes the images of people who can't have any control over themselves and projects them back on the world. But it's urgent and justified: Seidl's exposing Austrian health-care conditions while using patients too far gone to have any recognizance as his metaphor for dying Europe. On both counts, he's validated.

Import/Export is easily Seidl's best film; out of the four other films I watched in preparation for Anthology's Seidl series, nothing came close. (NB: This effectively amounts to the second half of his career.) Seidl's methods aren't always as justifiable; Import/Export is shining a light on disparate levels of exploitation, rot and misery in a way that's freakishly revelatory, but it's hard to say any of the other films have goals nearly as lofty. Presumably Seidl isn't a sociopath, just a guy with a steely gaze and too much commitment to witnessing debasement to bother with any distracting point of identification on-screen, but it's creepy that the closest you get to an explicit statement of purpose comes from one Lucky (Georg Friedrich) in Dog Days. "I enjoy seeing how people can treat each other" he announces, before going on to force people to sing "La Cucaracha" at gun point, extinguish cigarettes on each other, etc. He finds this funny, and Seidl seems to as well—and so, invariably, it kind of is. Transgression's always good for laughs, and there's something so consistently, unrelievedly vile about Import/Export and Dog Days that they both invite laughter. Like Rosemary's Baby and The Shining—but with zero metaphorical/fantastical distance—they're hilarious precisely when they should be most disturbing. You'll have to laugh or be horrified, which is certainly a possibility: I've heard from both admirers and detractors of Import/Export who never want to see it again.

Seidl's aesthetic—immaculate static compositions alternating with long handheld work that can be inelegant but never rushed—has been fully-formed from at least 1995's Animal Love onward, but the targets have gotten far worthier of his scorn. Animal Love itself garnered the attention and praise of Werner Herzog, and it plays a lot like Herzog's early effort Land Of Silence And Darkness: Long, barely edited scenes of freakish behavior without anything else. In this case, it's people way too devoted to their pets; it's less appalling than boring. There's no real revelation to watching socially inept squatter dudes read long instructional passages about clitoral stimulation while obviously processing it through a 12-year-old's sexuality; you get the feeling Seidl is just getting his kicks out of their weakness without building up any institutional indictment. As for Models, you get what you come for: Two hours of skinny freaks vomiting, snorting up and holding court in the club's bathroom. I'll give Seidl props for not wasting any time on specious guff in defense of "fashion," but the joke's hardly any more surprising or revelatory than Brüno, just harsher in the details. It's satisfying in its own particular way: If you want to see barrels of these particular fish shot, they do tend to flop around enjoyably, and the film ends with one of the loudest, most terrifyingly long laughs this side of John Huston. 2003's Jesus, You Know toys with empathy, though it's safe to say that this collection of tortured monologues—prayers to God, delivered straight to the camera, quickly curdling into the repressed and sociopathic—unsurprisingly doesn't follow through on the declaration made by one woman at the start: "We all made this film in honor of You." It's a safe guess Seidl wouldn't agree about his motivations there.

There's one chilling monologue at the end, though, from a woman summarizing her knowledge that the end of her life is fast approaching; she's recalling the deaths she's known, realizing she can only think of one that was swift and pleasant. And Import/Export also ends at death, the geriatrics muttering the word itself over and over. All Seidl's films are worth it if they led here. When I saw it, I was grimly amused and never once bored—at 135 minutes, it more than finds enough fresh forms of debasement—but wondered if there was anything more to it than novel shock value and formal skill. Then I went to see Revanche a year later, and a segment about the female protagonist's brothel duties had me distracted for reels; Seidl's depiction of the sex-trade had seared my memory so hard that nothing else could come close. Seidl's seemingly uninflected realism becomes stylized indelibility because of the gap between a formalistic perfection—an unwillingness to break mise-en-scene—and footage of atrocities that would've shaken someone less unfeeling into rougher footage; the results can sneak up and invade other movies that aren't really kin, the way David Lynch's creeping surrealism deranges archetypal set-ups. In the end, the nightmare power of their imagery is the same, at least for one film.

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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.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

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This is the fifth and final installment in a series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opened July 1. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. For links to more episodes, click here. To read MZS's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

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By Dan Callahan

Madeline Kahn was as close as you come to a universally loved performer, a unique comic one-off, like Beatrice Lillie, and her early death in 1999 brought forth a lot of collective mourning, not only for what was lost, but for what might have been. After starting off strongly in several films for Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, Kahn faltered with a series of disasters that derailed what should have been a major career. These weren’t any ordinary bad films, but notorious flops like Bogdanovich’s you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it At Long Last Love (1975) and atrocities like Slapstick (Of Another Kind) (1982) with Jerry Lewis. As a little kid, I can remember sneaking downstairs past my bedtime to watch her television sitcom, Oh Madeline, which lasted only a season; I must have been drawn to it because I had seen her singing with Grover on Sesame Street. She never gave less than her best, but her roles got smaller in films as she got older. Kahn turns up very briefly, and delightfully, as Martha Mitchell in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), but her bad luck with larger roles remained consistent; what can anyone do with a film as abjectly awful as Nora Ephron’s Mixed Nuts (1994)? Finally, before her death, she landed on a successful TV show with laidback Bill Cosby in which she played “the eccentric neighbor,” as if she was just a thinner version of Edie McClurg.

Kahn had more success on stage, winning a Tony for her archetypal Jewish American Princess of a certain age in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, but she seems to have had some personal issues that held her back even in the theater. Dixie Carter, who did comic revue work with Kahn in the late sixties, remembered her as “an odd person,” and Hal Prince was unusually uncharitable when he recalled directing her in On The Twentieth Century with Kevin Kline in the late seventies; she had trouble in rehearsals, then pulled together a brilliant performance on opening night. When the ecstatic Prince came backstage to see her, Kahn said, “I hope you don’t expect me to do that every night!” (she was later replaced by her understudy). A friend of mine told me about how his boss asked him to call Kahn and invite her to a party around the time of Twentieth Century; for a solid twenty minutes, she kept him engrossed with her antic indecision. “I don’t know, should I go to this party? If I did go, I could talk to what’s her name…but I don’t know what I should wear…if I was to go…do you think I should go to this party? If I did go…well, I really don’t know if I should…”

Such neuroticism suited the seventies, as did her deceptively casual comic timing; her trick was to pull back from us suddenly, going against the grain of a laugh line by retreating into glacial, nasal-voiced solipsism, then do some small, unexpected bit of physical or vocal business. Take her famous little 20-second aria of anger in Clue (1985); her face a hypnotized blank beneath her black wig, she says, “I…hated…her,” (making each word into a staccato jab), “so…much,” (she sings these words up like the soprano she was). Her eyes close slightly, as if she’s communing with this incandescent rage, and she stutters, “it…it…the feeling,” (like she’s trying to locate her emotion for a therapist). “Flames!” she cries, decisively, as if she’s found it, finally. “Flames!” she sings, “on the side of my face,” (now she might be explaining this to a policeman), “heaving,” (she’s lost it again), “breathless,” (where is it?), “heaving breaths…” and she trails off. At her best, she gave us little shocks of pleasure moment by moment, even in parodies so lowbrow that they make her films with Mel Brooks look like Congreve or Coward.

***
1. What’s Up, Doc? (1972): “Howard! Howard Bannister!” Kahn cries, as the ultimate nag in her film debut, Bogdanovich’s tribute to thirties screwball comedy. Wearing white gloves, toothpaste colored dresses and a large red wig that looks like some mutant from the Patty Duke show, Kahn makes her whiny fiancée Eunice Burns into a recognizable and even likable person, all the while getting laughs in the most unlikely places. She can score a giggle just by rolling her eyes slightly, or by emphasizing a consonant at the end of a word, and it’s this subtle attention to detail that allows Kahn freedom to create on her own even when her material is crass or empty. She does her highly idiosyncratic bare minimum in the midst of the film’s raucous, cartoonish humor, and this gives her an elegance and a dignity that transcend everything else around her, even the ineptitude of her main scene partner, Ryan O’Neal.

***
2. Paper Moon (1973): Performing in some kind of carnival show called “Harem Slave,” it’s clear from the moment we see Kahn’s Miss Trixie Delight jiggling into view that she’s the complete opposite of Eunice Burns, for Trixie is a calculating, overly made-up, knocked-around five dollar hooker who puts on an exaggerated Southern accent to act the lady for a sucker (Ryan O’Neal again). Miss Trixie would like to forget about her checkered past, but it’s the Depression, times are tough and she’s willing to do anything to survive. In her big scene, where she levels with wise-ass kid Tatum O’Neal, Kahn slowly starts to blur Miss Trixie’s breathless affectations until we see the levels of desperation, bitterness and romantic disappointment that lay underneath her lacquered surface. It’s a classic “Oscar clip” monologue, and Kahn was indeed nominated for supporting actress (only to lose to Tatum, who’s really the film’s co-lead). She knows this scene is a large opportunity, but she doesn’t milk it; she stays true to the character, the real, strange person who is always alive somewhere even in Kahn’s most outrageous inventions.

***
3. Blazing Saddles (1974): This Mel Brooks western spoof is crude, scattershot, “offensive,” and not particularly funny most of the time, but Kahn’s Lily Von Shtupp is a hilarious, sexy parody of Marlene Dietrich. Give Brooks credit for her song, “I’m Tired,” which has lines like, “They start with Byron and Shelley and jump on your belly and bust your balloon!” You can see how conscious and precise a performer Kahn is because she does the random Dietrich growls then drops the Marlene mask and looks around, as if to say, “I’m sort of enjoying this nonsense, are you?” Before dropping into a chair to have a quick doze, she shouts, “Goddammit, I’m exhausted!” in a hoarse Borscht Belt voice, which alternates amusingly with her impassive German chanteuse warbling. “I’ve been with thousands of men,” she claims, “again and again…coming and going and going and coming…and always too soon! Right, girls?” she asks (what girls are in Lily’s audience?!). In this film, spoof became Kahn’s métier, and funny as she is within its strictures, it limited her later opportunities.

***
4. Young Frankenstein (1974): In what is indisputably Brooks’ funniest and most focused film, Kahn doesn’t have much screen time as another prickly fiancée, but she makes the most of it. In her second scene, wearing a large white turban and white fox furs, Kahn reacts to Marty Feldman’s coarse come-ons with her own bizarre brand of libidinal inwardness; she finds the exact way to play this sketch material, and of course it was her idea to start singing, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” when she finds sexual bliss in the monster’s arms. When he leaves her, she drops her '30s glamour girl act and brays, “Yah bettah keep yer mouth shut!” in the same Borscht Belt voice that overcame her Lily Von Shtupp. Kahn seems to be uninhibited and wild here, but her effects are carefully planned, and it’s the distance between these crazy effects and her technique that makes Kahn so exciting to watch.

***
5. Judy Berlin (1999): For her final movie, Eric Mendelsohn’s earnest portrait of a few lonely people in a Long Island town, Kahn opens up for the first and regrettably the last time and lets us see the purest feelings of fear, confusion and melancholy. As a housewife who has too much time on her hands and some unspecified mental problems, she enriches the basic material, as she always did, but Kahn is clearly personalizing her emotions here because she knows this is her last chance. She reveals all the depths that lay beneath her comic control until we see that this woman who made us laugh actually has a tragic face, a beautiful face, and suddenly we realize that she was our Beatrice Lillie, but she might have been a Jeanne Moreau, too. At the end, Kahn stands in the half-light of a solar eclipse and looks at her husband (Bob Dishy) with all kinds of hurt flickering behind her eyes. It feels like she’s accusing him of something, and it’s hard not to feel that Kahn is also accusing us of not fully appreciating her until it was too late. She takes stock of her life all through this movie and then dares to angrily stare her own death in the face. Kahn wants to leave us with a wound, and for those of us who loved her as a child, as I did, that wound is not likely to heal.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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By Zachary Oberzan

[Flooding with Love for The Kid screens tonight at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn. Click here for more information.]

Early this morning, David Morrell bought me breakfast. If you had told that ten-year-old child, opening First Blood and reading for the first time, “His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid…,” that in twenty-five years, the guy who wrote this magical, tragic work of fiction would be sitting across from him chatting about books, movies, theater, Polish politics, and airplanes, he most certainly would have believed you. Children believe in heroes, and they secretly believe in their deepest heart of hearts they will some day meet their hero. And maybe even become their hero.

If you happened to see Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Rambo Solo or my one-man film Flooding with Love for The Kid, you know of my admiration, well, maybe mania is a better word, when it comes to the novel First Blood. What I didn’t know, however, was that the guy who wrote this book would turn out to be a man of uncanny generosity and authenticity.

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To read the rest of the article at B(rick)log, click here.

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By Lauren Wissot

[Unraveling Michelle screens this evening at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. Click here for more information.]

What thrilled me most about the documentary Unraveling Michelle, which follows the ups, downs and in-betweens of MTF transsexual Michelle Ann Farrell as she transitions into her new life as a physically female being, has nothing to do with gender issues. No, the most subversive part of Michelle isn’t her tits, but her profession—indie filmmaker, her choice to turn the lens on herself merely an extension of her art form. Just as capable directing low-budget horror as she is reminding her cameraman to be sure to shoot wide during her surgery, Michelle’s most powerful statement is simply, “I want to be a female filmmaker.”

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To read the rest of the interview at Carnal San Francisco, click here.

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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?]

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Joseph Mankiewicz’ wittily scripted, innovatively structured survey of distaff marital life at the brink of the Eisenhower era pits three middle class wives against an impossible feminine ideal. Addie Ross, the omniscient, goddess-like narrator who opens the film with withering remarks about the lives of the desperate housewives she calls friends, is as much of a structuring absence as Citizen Kane’s Rosebud. She’s never seen, only talked about as some otherworldly feminine ideal who inspires men and terrorizes women. It’s her letter to the three wives, announcing that she’s run off with one of their husbands, that sets off a chain of collective flashback introspection; the wives are so awestruck that their response is to ruminate in their domestic failures rather than kick some adulterous ass. She’s a gimmick, but one that aptly grounds Mankiewicz’s suburban landscape as a projection screen of insecurities. Even domestic sounds like a ferry horn or a dripping faucet set loose vexing thoughts about infidelity and emptiness among the three wives.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


What is cinema? André Bazin published a book of essays that tried to answer that question. But if somebody asked me for the short answer, I'd advise them to visit EternalMoonwalk.com. Seriously.

On first glance, the site seems little more than a poignant goof: a tribute to the late Michael Jackson that draws its inspiration from the John F. Kennedy memorial in Washington, D.C., with its eternal flame -- but instead of a flame that never goes out, it's a video loop featuring variations on the Gloved One's signature move.

But it's more than that. In addition to being diabolically mesmerizing -- between the array of clips and the faintly "Billie Jean"-like backbeat, one tends to lose track of time staring at the damned thing -- Eternal Moonwalk is also an incidental tutorial in the basic properties of cinema. It returns motion pictures to their origin point, when the medium's core appeal was the chance to watch strangers performing, their bodies moving from Point A to Point B, their familiar or amusing actions serving as an emotional connection point, a reminder that we're members of the same species inhabiting the same small world.

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A Brooklyn-based filmmaker and the founder of The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz is IFC.com's guest critic for the month of July. You can read the rest of this column by clicking here.

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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?]

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I watched this film days after working on a lengthy essay on Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City, which keyed me to notice multiple parallels between the two films. Both films are politically conscious works made at a time when their directors were/are trying to make their work appeal to a wider audience. Both deal with depicting the plight of factory labor, with an intent to spark political or social consciousness in the viewer. Both attempt to utilize elements of mainstream filmmaking, most notably the casting of stars recognizable to their target audience (Jane Fonda, meet Joan Chen). At the same time, both films utilize arthouse cinema techniques, as well as documentary techniques like on-screen interviews, to challenge the viewer’s engagement with mainstream cinema itself. And, perhaps most important of all, both films emphatically view politics and history in terms of performance: recollections and speech acts delivered for the camera, with a directorial emphasis on the act of representation. It was interesting to read contemporary reviews of both films that found them to be ultimately unsuccessful acts of compromise between commercial, political and art cinema.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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By Vadim Rizov

The Rural Alberta Advantage, Hometowns: Emo for the masses! I am, generally speaking, not crazy about yelpy kids singing things like "All these things will pass and the good ones will last" and "I never want to feel this again," but The Rural Alberta Advantage are a very good band who've given my inner emo a reason to peek out; their craftsmanship and musical intelligence makes their endless teen summer a guiltlessly fun thing to soak in. I always hated Bright Eyes' quavery self-indulgences, so I'll take Nils Adenloff's generic nasal attack (Neutral Milk Hotel's 500th heir) any day as far as Saddle Creek stuff goes. Half of this is expert break-up stuff: "Don't Haunt This Place" and "Sleep All Day" prove there's nothing like a cello to make you feel especially justified in your lugubriousness. With no bass, the band gets its drive from drummer Paul Banwatt, who goes heavy on rapid high-hat attacks; whether aided by electronic beats (on opener "The Ballad Of The RAA") or not, the kit's got almost no dynamic range, just an artificially compressed range of forceful attack. (On "Drain The Blood," Banwatt seems to be going so fast he might as well be aided by Tilly And The Wall's tap dancers.) The band name's no joke: there's a pleasing geographical specificity to the lyrics, occasionally pulling them out of generic white 20something malaise and into the realm of melancholy Candian-ness (an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring). Prime example: "Frank, AB" is a histrionic love ballad ("I'll hold on to your touch 'til they find the bones of us" etc.), but it's also from the perspective of two people buried in the Frank Landslide of 1903, so it's indulgent without being overly indulgent. I dunno why liking this so much bothers me more than, say, the smooth sounds of Elizabeth And The Catapult (see below)—I fear reverting to my teen years, I guess—but I'm effectively sucked into the RAA's sad, mopey (well-crafted!) world as long as this album lasts.

***
Fol Chen, Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made: Most of the bands on Asthmatic Kitty tend to annoy me (it's like Sufjan Stevens wants to apologize for being so accessible by restoring the spazzy balance on his label. But then there's the slept-upon Fol Chen, who have yet to receive their moment in the Pitchfork spotlight. Fol Chen claim to sound like Prince, which actually means they sound a great deal like Of Montreal, with lots of crooning, high white voices attempting self-deprecating seduction over trebly drum loops over the usual deep kit. (There's much to be written on the idea that of all the indie rock groups of the last decade, Of Montreal was one of the only ones to seriously be influenced by Prince and black music in general. Their influence may be further than anyone realizes.) Fol Chen's biggest asset is knowing their way around a horn section, from the ominous opening plod of "The Believers" to the joyous trumpet solos on "The Idiot." Those are probably the two best songs: With curious woodwinds peeking out from behind a glitchy loop and theatrical, performative vocals judiciously alternating whispers ("Maybe it's all in my head") and near-yelps ("By god we're on out bended knees") in rising paranoia, "The Believers" sounds appropriately spooky and cultish; you could rescore part of Donnie Darko to it no problem. On the opposite tonal end, "The Idiot" is a simple enough love song: "Everybody here thinks I'm an idiot / Everybody here is laughing at me / How can that be true when I'm in love with you?"

Fol Chen prefers to keep their names anonymous, but whoever they are, they do a flawless three-part artificial falsetto without sounding like ironic jackasses; they actually come off as sweet and lovelorn, for which props. Sometimes they can go too far in this surprisingly ambitious album: Most of "You And Your Sister In Jericho" is almost entirely instrumental, the horns slowly deferring a laconic two-note guitar motif not that far off from Morricone until the whole thing is eaten alive by an increasingly distorted drum loop. I wish the band didn't have the most annoying press releases in the world, and sometimes they're a little too reliant on cheap keyboard sounds (it's certainly an aesthetic, but this music could easily be a little more expansive without losing impact), but yeah, they're being slept on.

***
The Horrors, Primary Colours: It's my second-hand understanding that at their inception The Horrors were enamored of the more esoteric corners of garage rock—one Screaming Lord Sutch in particular—which I suppose makes their decision to ape Joy Division for their sophomore album a relatively more commercial move. Unlike most bands who risk this hard-to-disguise/hard-to-live-up-to influence, they're actually quite good at it, although the resemblance is admittedly just in the doomy vocals and the flat, assaultive song structures, which seek to pummel you with a rhythm section (the drums are huge, reminiscent of Echo And The Bunnymen's Porcupine glory days) rather than any actual hooks. The best (and totally unrepresentative) track is "I Only Think Of You," a seven-minute drone which uses a wavery cello (I think) playing two thirds an octave apart as the surprisingly sturdy base for the entire running time; it's being run through god knows what, and between the natural bending and bowing (this is some sensitive playing) and techno frills, it's hypnotic. It's got more single-minded focus and discipline than anything else here. Opener "Mirror's Image" opens with gushy, warm Moby synths and a strict metronomic timebeat, adding some higher spangles and church bells, eventually threatening to briefly turn into a techno song before morphing—a minute and a half in—into a more traditional, if well done, shoegazer assault. The guitars are going crazy, whatever pedals they're hooked up to causing the dynamics to shift up and down in sudden shifts that are anything but linear. The vocalist is enough of an idiot to want to go by the name Farris Rotter and sing things like "Walk on into the night" for the chorus (get your hoodie out! Pull it over your head!), but the music's so forceful and well-executed it's hard to complain. Fun stuff, though the buzz doesn't survive too many listens, but fourteen times more interesting than whatever the Arctic Monkeys are up to.

***
Peter Bjorn & John, Living Thing: While it's generally misguided and stupid when a band is so freaked out by mainstream success they feel the need to alienate everyone with their follow-up, I don't think that's precisely what's happening with Living Thing. Sure, there's no "Young Folks," but this is a fine, itchy but catchily abrasive album whose component parts generally work, if only occasionally sparkle. "Living Thing" itself may be a snide rejoinder to ELO's song—they cop the "it's a living thing, it's a terrible thing to lose" line while sounding far upbeat about it—but the sliding, Looney Tunes bass-line that stands in for the hook works fine, as do the trap-drums. The album doesn't really hit its stride til a three-song stretch near the end. "Lay It Down"'s cheerfully bitchy chorus is "Hey, shut the fuck up boy / You are starting to piss me off" over the barest of percussive elements and buzzy-bee synths (this album's allergy to traditional drums is just one of the unobtrusive ways they're stretching); "Stay This Way" is the only thing on here that's actually a sincere ballad, and quite a good one at that; "Blue Period Picasso" takes its titular I Am Lonely metaphor and runs with it way further than you'd think possible (in the middle of a hallway in Barcelona! The other paintings don't understand me!), turning a potentially ruinous gimmick into a terrific, sustainable 4-minute metaphor. A curio, but not a step backwards, just sideways.

***
Elizabeth And The Catapult, Taller Children: An exceptionally assured and solid debut, strictly for middlebrows. (No Pitchfork review or mentions probably ever, but NPR is all up on it; that should tell you everything you need to know.) Elizabeth Ziman's voice has been pegged as "jazzy" by some writers, who then lazily describe the music itself as "jazzy," which is obviously stupid. (You might just as well call them a bossa nova tribute band, since "Right Next To You"'s opening thirty seconds of acoustic guitar trend that way.) It'd be much fairer to say this is the best Aimee Mann album since Bachelor No. 2, certainly a better Mann album than anything she's done herself from The Forgotten Arm onwards. Ziman's voice is a little louder and less calm, but the resemblance is still pretty eerie; as my friend Jason Overbeck points out, even the guitars on "Rainiest Day Of Summer" (i.e., how I sulk this season) sound like Jon Brion. Undoubtedly some credit for the album has to go to producer Mike Mogis, who's got a way with tasteful (but not boring; I don't mean "tasteful" pejoratively, which seems to be its default association in the post-Bosley Crowther world) strings, keyboards et al. applied in all the right contrapuntal places rather than as lazy "warm" sounds. Learning something from his time with Tilly And The Wall, Mogis gives the cover of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" an intro somewhere between tap-dancing and trap drums. The band themselves are no slouches in the bummed-out category; "Apathy" earns its title. (There's arguably too many ballads on here, though I enjoy all of them.) By contrast, "Race You" is the bounciest song here, and I like it too, but it's undeniably probably a little too peppy and annoying for most people. It's when Elizabeth get the bouncy to pissy ratio right that they're really onto something fresh, as on opener "Momma's Man" (spritely as it gets, but with Ziman telling the dude not to expect to be mothered in bed) or "The Hang Up," where she explains she'd rather be doing anything than spending another day in her dead-end relationship. So yeah, if the word "tasteful" doesn't bother you, you should probably be listening to this. You know who you are.

***
Spoon, Got Nuffin EP: Not many bands can make a three-tracks-plus-remix EP an event, but hey: New Spoon! Sounding like they've learned absolutely nothing this decade, Britt Daniel & co. regress to their old days as a minimalist combo for whom every overdub was anathema. Grimy, rockin'-but-not-necessarily-fun exercises are the order of the day here; Britt Daniel seems pissed off, and both "Got Nuffin" and "Stroke Their Brains" grind it out in minor keys, sounding less accommodating than ever. My friend Andrew Unterberger has made reference to their gradual mastery of "songcraft…so immaculate" that it's "almost creepy in its claustrophobic perfectionism," and I guess Daniel's been feeling the strain. From the title on down, everything indicates a band blowing off steam before buckling down once more to the hard work of perfect pop writing. Between the two rockers is "Tweakers," which has zero precedent in Spoon's back catalogue: 3+ minutes of dicked-around-with drums and slight keyboard notes looping around on each other. On the one hand, it makes sense: Jim Eno's minimalist drumming and the band's careful attention to the negative spaces in their songs makes them one of the smarter rhythmically-oriented bands around. Still, it's undeniably kind of slight and unexceptional, of virtually no interest to anyone except as an insight into a band stretching for something it can probably never reach. (The remix sounds like bad Beck, c. 1993.)
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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.

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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?]

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Among the many things that distinguish Anthony Mann’s collaborations with Jimmy Stewart are their thorough revisioning of the rugged individualist ideal. The Far Country suffers for being a bit transparent and moralistic in this mission, especially compared to Mann-Stewart masterpieces like The Naked Spur or Bend of the River, where the critique of Western self-reliance is done more through actions than words. The soundtrack is a thicket of toughtalk among a rough-hewn ensemble of pioneers negotiating civilization out of a blood-soaked, greed-infested frontier.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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By Matt Maul

Actor and avid sailor Sterling Hayden once said that no film has ever really captured the true essence of sea travel. On the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it occurs to me that the same thing could be said about cinematic depictions of space travel. For the most part, movies set in space use it as a backdrop for stories about aliens or Earth threatening phenomenons (or Earth threatening aliens). Even if you discount schlock flicks about hot women on Venus or the Star Wars/Star Trek genre, it’s hard to find a space movie that focuses on the mechanics of the journey itself.

When I was eight-years-old, my roster of heroes predictably included professional athletes such as pitcher Mickey Lolich, who led the Detroit Tigers to their 1968 World Series victory, or “Mr. Hockey,” Gordie Howe. But also prominently on that list was the crew of Apollo 11: Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

A grainy, Super 8 movie records my family's backyard barbecue on the afternoon of July 20, 1969. Aunts, uncles and older cousins freely consumed hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips and cigarettes. The women, with bee-hive coifs, wore either dresses or capris. The men, clad in striped shorts and sandals, had their hair closely cropped. This was a typical outing but for the fact that most of the guests had clustered around a black-and-white television set that my father, with the help of three extension cords, had placed in the middle of the patio. Its rabbit ear antennas creating an extra obstacle, the TV was balanced precariously on a wooden folding chair.

In 1969 all three of the existing national television networks provided wall-to-wall coverage of the Apollo 11 mission. With only hours to go before Armstrong and Aldrin would touch down on the moon, Walter Cronkite watched as Wally Schirra used small plastic models to demonstrate how the command module and lunar lander maneuvered in space. NBC ran the audio of astronauts talking to Mission Control under an animation simulating shots from space (a necessity due to the lack of a live video feed). ABC had a man suspended from elastic cords bouncing around the studio to show what walking on the moon might be like. By today’s standards, the production values were pretty lame, but everyone was riveted by all of it.

After the Eagle had landed, it would be another few hours before the astronauts actually left the craft to venture out onto the lunar surface. Bedtime rules were suspended so that my brother and I could stay up extra late to watch the first moonwalk. The broadcast was blurry, black-and-white and, for a few frustrating seconds, upside down. But it was live. As video recording equipment wasn’t yet readily available for the great unwashed, my father stationed himself in front of the TV with his movie camera. Years after the event, he would still be kicking himself for not noticing that someone behind him had turned on a lamp. Its reflection on the glass television screen appears in his homemade kinescope.

To be perfectly frank, there was nothing intrinsically exciting about what Armstrong and Aldrin did on their lunar excursion. They basically bounced around setting up various experiments. Sure, they did talk to President Nixon. But even the coach whose team wins the Super Bowl gets a phone call from the president. The fact that they were actually doing these seemingly mundane tasks on the moon is what made it so compelling.

I’ve seldom gotten that same feeling from big screen efforts. 2001: A Space Odyssey, arguably the most influential film set in space, beautifully stages its extraterrestrial maneuvers as high-tech ballets. While I love the movie (I really do), there’s an element of fantasy to the film that makes it somewhat remote from any personal reference point. I’m sure this was Stanley Kubrick’s intention, but, as such, it didn’t resonate with me in quite the same way as that poor quality moonwalk broadcast did. And then, of course, the storyline includes aliens and their influence on the origin and future of mankind.

Silent Running (1972), which featured a crew of space gripers seven years before Alien, was really an ecological message film that gave director Douglas Trumbull an excuse to show off some whiz-bang technical effects. Space Cowboys has its heart in the right place. But a crew of AARP members saving the earth from an orbiting Soviet missle platform? Please.

With that in mind, I’ve listed, in order of preference, what I think are five good examples of films that take a more grounded approach to space travel (if you pardon the oxymoron).

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1. Destination Moon (1950): Sure, it’s dated and most, if not all, of the production design is laughable. For instance, the crew wears ridiculous looking magnetic boots to stay on deck in zero gravity (to be fair, Kubrick had his space travelers wearing velcro shoes for the same purpose). But as the first film to attempt a serious look at space travel, it’s required viewing. I’d even point out a scene showing the pilot of the descending ship hurriedly trying to find a smooth landing spot on the moon's surface while running dangerously low on fuel. This dilemma was actually faced by Armstrong and Aldrin in real life.

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2. Countdown (1968): It’s amazing to consider that James Caan has been in three science fiction films: Countdown, Rollerball and Alien Nation (four if you count Eraser). This early Robert Altman drama starring Caan and Robert Duvall displays none of the style that would characterize the director’s subsequent work such as MASH or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But it is a serious take on the topic. In a last ditch effort to beat the Soviets to the moon, NASA hastily carries out a mission using a converted Gemini capsule as a lunar lander. Shot on a low budget, the cheap looking sets are a bit of distraction. And while to me the conflict between Caan and Duvall was interestingly staged, many find Countdown’s matter-of-fact approach boring. This probably explains why so many other filmmakers infuse more exotic elements into their space outings.

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3. The Right Stuff (1983): This one is a mixed bag for me. I found the Tom Wolfe book superior to Philip Kaufman’s film adaptation. While the attempts at humor often seem out of place, the movie certainly captures the drama of those early Mercury missions. And the shot of the original seven astronauts walking toward the camera in their pressure suits is unquestionably part of our cultural mythology. However, while assembling a valentine to Chuck Yeager and the virtually unknown X-15 program, Kaufman engages in the sort of hype and hero worship that he simultaneously criticizes in depicting NASA’s shameless promotion of the Mercury team. That said, a Chris Matthews “thrill” does run down my leg every time I see Sam Shepard walking out of the desert alone, a plume of smoke from the wreckage of his aircraft visible in the distance.

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4. Apollo 13 (1995): These last two will probably get me in trouble. I think Apollo 13 is a fine film, but to me, 1969's similarly plotted, yet fictional, Marooned is superior.

Based on Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell’s Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, Ron Howard couldn’t have asked for a better story to tell. The fact that it really happened frees him from worrying about the audience suspending their disbelief. The production values are impeccable and Howard’s use of sets built inside of a “vomit comet” to simulate weightlessness is inspired. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but even though most people know how it’s going to turn out, Apollo 13 still manages to be a nailbiter until the very end.

My biggest complaint is that despite having great source material, Howard can't resist the temptation to guild the lily by baking in a dramatic irony that never occurred. In Howard’s version, astronaut Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) is grounded after being exposed to the measles and replaced by Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon). After all hell breaks loose, Mattingly is shown playing a lead role on the ground in solving Apollo 13’s critical energy consumption problem. Thus, he ends up being the hero despite not quite having the “right stuff.” In point of fact, the person who actually devised the procedure to address the electrical issue was John Arron (Loran Dean). I’m not saying Howard didn’t have the right to exercise some dramatic license in this regard. I just think that the truth—a slide rule welding nerd saved the day—is more compelling than Mattingly’s fictional vindication.

My other complaint is Howard’s incredibly unfair depiction of the Grumman corporation, the contractor which delivered the lunar lander. In Apollo 13, whenever he’s asked about the prospects of a given LEM maneuver, the Grumman rep (Kenneth White) repeatedly covers his ass by nervously explaining that the ship was never tested for that sort of use. Actually, Grumman had anticipated a situation where the lunar landed might have to be used to tow a disabled command module. Their research into that possibility before Apollo 13 even launched and their participation with Mission Control during the crisis itself contributed greatly to the successful outcome. Sure, ever since the Reagan administration, government contractors have been viewed as self-serving opportunists (and not entirely without good reason). In the 1990's, even then Vice President Al Gore was making the rounds on talk shows NOT to discuss the horrors of global climate change, but instead deriding wasteful government spending as evidenced by Pentagon invoices for $500 hammers. Also, the role of aerospace contractor Morton Thiokol’s faulty O-rings in causing the Challenger disaster was still fresh in people's minds. So, I can see how Grumman was tailor-made for a “villain.” Of course, one might ask why Howard didn't pick on Rockwell? After all, it was their command module that failed. But I digress. I’ll just reiterate that while Howard wasn’t obligated to stick only to the true history, I found the facts surrounding Grumman's actual participation in the Apollo 13 mission a more interesting part of the story than the punch line they were reduced to for the film.

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5. Marooned (1969): An even bigger injustice than those mentioned earlier occurred when Mystery Science Theater 3000 devoted an episode to Marooned. Just as the three-mile island crisis made The China Syndrome a box-office hit, had Marooned came out when the real Apollo 13 incident occurred a year later, it probably would have been a much more financially successful film. Sigh.

Attempting to return home after a five-month stint on an orbital space station, a three-man NASA crew (Richard Crenna, James Franciscus, and Gene Hackman) is stranded in orbit when the retro rockets on their Apollo style craft fail to fire. With no solution to the problem forthcoming, and the capsule’s oxygen running out, NASA Flight Director Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) makes a coldly calculated decision to not risk additional lives by trying to launch a foolhardy rescue attempt. His major concern is devising a suitable public response to the specter of the crew slowing dying in space. The President, with his own PR concerns about the future of the space program, vetoes Keith's decision and orders him to do something. The remainder the film, implausible as it may be, involves NASA’s efforts to quickly adapt an Air Force test spacecraft (which really did exist) for a rescue.

Implausibility aside, Marooned, directed by John Sturges, strikes me as having a more mature sensibility than Apollo 13. The ensemble cast is strong. Gene Hackman is especially good as the ship's pilot who undergoes a breakdown as the situation steadily deteriorates. There’s also an incredible scene where Keith communicates with Commander Pruett (Crenna) on a secure line to inform him in a roundabout way that there isn’t enough oxygen left in the capsule to sustain three men until the rescue ship arrives, but there is enough for two. Keith’s implication is clear. One of them has to go. Sturges seems to try to give the film a semblance of reality by not saving all of the crew.

In addition to the improbability of such a rescue and an encounter with a helpful Russian cosmonaut that seems thrown in at the last minute, many found Sturges's pacing too slow. I mostly disagree with that. But then again, I watched Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing around for two hours straight. There are also some who nitpick the film's technical accuracy by citing things like the capsule’s stabilizer rockets making noise in the vacuum of space (which, I argue, could be what the astronauts hear from inside). But Marooned gets most of the space stuff right. And except for a few clumsy matte shots, the special effects are top notch. Sturges also deliberately lets microphones on the astronauts pick up their breathing. This simple but neat sound trick adds a subtle dimension to their characterization. In a different way, I found myself pulled into Sturges's version of space flight just as strongly as Kubrick’s.

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Honorable Mention—Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964): Though it devolves into a standard sci-fi epic complete with laser firing space ships, the first half of this updated version of the classic Daniel Defoe novel is priceless for any space geek.
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Matt Maul is author of the blog Maul of America.

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