The House Next Door

By Matt Zoller Seitz

In this summer's most spectacular features—from CGI-driven live-action movies to 3-D animated fare—the real star has been the camera. It's as lively, confident and versatile as any lead actor, taking any opportunity to get into character for a particular shot or sequence, doing whatever it needs to do to sell a moment. Much of the epic run time of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is shot with a wobbly handheld camera, following its heroes through a series of burning, crumbling, exploding landscapes as giant robots scramble along in the background or duke it out like boxers; the action is framed and shot to suggest that we're seeing a documentary event—a catastrophic or miraculous occurrence that just happened to be captured for posterity. Ditto G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. When the cybernetically enhanced soldiers soar through the air, the camera shakes, and the backgrounds (and sometimes the combatants) blur out. In certain shots, the camera seems to be struggling to keep the participants in frame.

One can chalk this tendency up to the Bourne-era craze for jittery handheld camerawork, or merely to clever, purposeful filmmaking—to directors, cinematographers, editors and special effects technicians going the extra kilometer to add believability. But with cinema in the final stages of its digital evolution—the production process evolving from one that used to be entirely analog, with component pieces (film, tape) that one could literally hold in one's hand, to a digital process wherein almost every stage is created electronically, and the bits don't physically exist in quite the same way—it's worth asking where this craving for "believability" comes from and how it's being expressed via the camera. I think it has to do with the subliminal knowledge (on the part of filmmakers more so than the viewers) that reality is imperfect, and that to make a moment seem real, one must present it somewhat imprecisely, to counteract the meticulous, slightly inhuman slickness of CGI.


To read the rest of the article at IFC.com, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

I know: I can hardly believe the headline, either. John Hughes, whose slick, crowd-pleasing features made a fortune at the box office—and whose winsome but prickly teen comedy-romances raised the bar for youth-oriented movies in the '80s, and helped make life marginally more bearable for moviegoers who came of age during that crap-tastic decade—died yesterday in New York City of a heart attack during one of his regular morning walks. Details here.

There's too much to say on short notice, and bummed as I am by the news, I don't want to oversell Hughes' particular brand of inspiration. He directed classics or near-classics, but he also directed 1989's bludgeoning Uncle Buck and 1991's saccharine Curly Sue (and never directed again, sorry to say). Most of the time, Hughes wasn't deep and wasn't trying to be—and there was a conservative, even reactionary impulse lurking somewhere in his sensibility that sometimes rubbed me the wrong way; I never forgave him for that moment at the end of The Breakfast Club when preppy princess Molly Ringwald helps "clean up" Ally Sheedy's introverted freak chick, and everyone (the movie included—or so it seems) concurs that she looks much better now. But at his best, Hughes balanced a consummate entertainer's relentless pursuit of applause with an artist's appreciation for the diversity of the human carnival unfolding before our eyes—on screens and in life.

Most of all, the man was a born filmmaker. His movies moved. His comedic gifts were visual as well as verbal. Think of his riff on the opening shot of Star Wars in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with the parking attendants soaring over the camera in Cameron's precious automobile; it's my pick for the greatest Star Wars joke ever because it doesn't just spoof Lucas' pop culture re-aligning blockbuster, it demonstrates an un-ironic appreciation of the movie's appeal—the physical rush that its pictures and sounds evoked. And whether intimate or overscaled, Hughes' films were impeccably put together, with a uncanny ability to shift gears from one very different scene or sequence to another, without losing the audience. Even Hughes' supposedly lightweight teen flicks often seesawed between goofy slapstick that put a grin on your face and foursquare melodrama that wiped it off.

Speaking of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the first time I saw the movie, I was immediately struck by how Hughes dared to build its emotional climax around tightly-wound best buddy Cameron (John Ruck) confessing his idolization and resentment of his rich daddy, then lashing out against him by destroying the old man's car. The scene went on and on, like an outtake from Rebel Without a Cause dropped into the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. But it wasn't so much excessive as uncomfortably genuine; the young man's pain was real, and by showing it, Hughes subtly acknowledged that the rest of what he'd shown us was pure escapism—and that by seeking out such entertainment, we were trying to avoid thinking about our own miseries, which might not be identical to Cameron's in all the details, but were every bit as intense and alienating. Ditto the ending of 1988's Planes, Trains and Automobiles, when John Candy's irrepressibly needy traveling salesman is revealed to be homeless; that one bold stroke humanizes a character who's previously been depicted as just another fat, funny oaf—and indicts Steve Martin's character, the viewer's surrogate up to then, as a self-obsessed jerk who could only see his own unhappiness, not anyone else's.

When I think of Hughes, I also think of his musical sensibility. He had a gung-ho session player's knack for segueing between modes so deftly that you didn't realize until a particular scene was over that it had almost nothing in common, tonally, with the scene that preceded it (Cameron's monologue being the most obvious example). Yet somehow all the pieces just seemed to fit. I don't think it's incidental that some of the most memorable moments from Hughes' filmography are built around singing and dancing. Pauline Kael likened Martin Scorsese's direction of Goodfellas to a musician's performance. The comparison applies to Hughes more often than not. There was joy in his filmmaking—a rock star's delight in his ability to control, channel and direct the audience's emotions. He had a sung-through musical in him. Too bad we'll never see it.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Sixteen Candles (1984)




The Breakfast Club (1985)



Pretty in Pink (1987)

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A Brooklyn-based film editor and a former critic for The New York Times, The Star-Ledger and New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor emeritus of The House Next Door.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

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This is the third in a five-part 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. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Sacha Baron Cohen's improvisational prank film Brüno is a conceptual mess that's satisfying as a lowball, turn-your-brain-off snot comedy, but deeply problematic as social commentary. It's this last aspect, unfortunately, that made 2006's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (and the character's original TV incarnation) an object of debate. Did Borat's interactions with prototypical dumb-ass Americans, and his stoking of anti-Semitic tendencies, critique the Arab world's cultural prejudice and expose the country's latent prejudice and paranoia, or merely invite smug liberal laughter and an unearned sense of cultural superiority? Was Borat a Rorschach test, or an admittedly mesmerizing comedian's clever way of indulging stereotypes while pretending to challenge them? And in total, was the movie a stinging critique of a fat, happy nation engaged in two distant wars against countries filled with Borat-types, or just a put-on faking relevance, the movie equivalent of a rubber chicken wrapped in a New York Times Op-Ed section?

The answer to each question was "Both."

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To read the rest of the article at IFC.com, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

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This is the second in a five-part 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. To read the author's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

[The following is an excerpt from Part 4 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 1, on Bill Melendez, Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut is here. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, here. Part 3 (on Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby) is here; Part 5 (an annotated version of the prologue of The Royal Tenenbaums) will finish out the series April 13. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]

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One of Wes Anderson’s strongest influences is not cinematic but literary: J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and other touchstones. The filmmaker’s Salinger jones was apparent before his feature-filmmaking career had even properly begun. When I interviewed L.M. “Kit” Carson about the production of Anderson’s first feature, Bottle Rocket, he told me that when he read the script for the first time, he felt as though he were reading “The Catcher in the Rye as written by Holden Caulfield.”
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By Matt Zoller Seitz


[The following is an excerpt from Part 3 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 1, on Bill Melendez, Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut is here. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, here. Part 4 (on J.D. Salinger) will be published April 8; Part 5 (an annotated version of the prologue of The Royal Tenenbaums) will finish out the series April 10. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]

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In Wes Anderson’s pantheon of artistic heroes, Hal Ashby holds a special place. The former-editor-turned-director made most of his significant films in a 10-year period bracketed by two political satires, The Landlord (1970) and Being There (1979). In between, Ashby contributed some of the most unabashedly personal American films of an era that produced a disproportionate share of them, including The Last Detail (1973), about cynical sailors escorting a naive young military prisoner to jail; Bound for Glory (1976), a biography of leftist folksinger Woody Guthrie that demonstrated a palpable sense of time and place, and showcased the first-ever onscreen use of the Steadicam; Shampoo (1975), about a womanizing hairdresser screwing his way across Southern California and struggling to open his own place, set against the backdrop of the 1968 presidential election; and Coming Home (1978), a melodrama about a paraplegic antiwar vet, a hardline GI suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the nurse torn between them.

What did Anderson draw from Ashby exactly? At first it’s hard to say. In terms of content, Ashby’s movies are distinguished by a kind of matter-of-fact political engagement that Anderson, with a few conspicuous exceptions, could not care less about. No matter what story Ashby is telling or what era it’s set in, he never sees his characters as purely autonomous individuals; he and his screenwriters are forever aware—and do their best to make us aware—that our personalities, goals, desires, and opinions don’t bloom into existence like orchids.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


[The following is an excerpt from Part 2 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 1 is here. Part 3 (on Hal Ashby) is here; Part 4 (on J.D. Salinger) will be published April 8; Part 5 (an annotated version of the prologue of The Royal Tenenbaums) will finish out the series April 10. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]

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Martin Scorsese’s intellectualized sensuality and flamboyant kineticism are inscribed on Wes Anderson’s films. Scorsese has returned his disciple’s admiration, all but anointing Anderson his artistic heir and naming Anderson’s debut, Bottle Rocket, one of the best films of the ’90s. Orson Welles, François Truffaut, and animator Bill Melendez (A Charlie Brown Christmas, et al.) may have taught Anderson how to paint, but Scorsese taught him how to dance. Setting aside for a moment their very similar use of music, there are enough shared visual tells to make Scorsese and Anderson seem like a street-tough dad and his college-bound favorite son.

Exhibit A is their use of slow motion. Slo-mo became fashionable in the 1960s as a way to draw out violent action. But while Scorsese has used it for this purpose, he also deploys it for another reason: to italicize emotion. We can see Anderson drawing directly on Scorsese’s example in film after film. Johnny Boy’s slowed-down arrival at the bar in Mean Streets—walking forward toward the viewer as the camera dollies backward—finds a visual equivalent in Rushmore when hero Max Fischer makes his triumphant exit from a hotel room elevator after terrorizing romantic rival Max Blume with a swarm of bees. Think also of the memorable slow-motion close-up of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas smoking at the bar, his eyes lighting up malignantly as he contemplates whacking his cohorts in the Lufthansa heist, is echoed in the penultimate montage of Anderson’s Bottle Rocket in the shot of thief and playboy Mr. Henry puffing on a stogie after robbing Bob Mapplethorpe’s house.

Another shared signature is the God’s-eye-view insert shot, looking down at significant objects from an overhead position roughly parallel to the floor. Scorsese was by no means the first director to look at things from this angle—Alfred Hitchcock often employed the God’s-eye view shot to stunning effect, and it may be that Scorsese’s affinity for the angle comes from a close study of Hitchcock. But Scorsese personalized it by applying it to close-up inserts—often somewhat disruptive inserts placed within an otherwise conventionally edited dialogue scene. Think of the moment in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle, attempting to charm the campaign worker Betsy, sweeps his hand over her desk to indicate the “all this” that shouldn’t preoccupy her; Scorsese very briefly cuts to an almost-overhead shot of the tabletop, then cuts back to the conversation. There are numerous similar examples throughout Scorsese’s filmography, and Anderson’s own deployment of the overhead insert is strikingly Scorsese-esque, from the composition and lighting to the duration of the shot. Think, for instance, of the overhead shot in Rushmore of Miss Cross grading papers on her desk or the overhead shot of Etheline Tenenbaum’s desk in The Royal Tenenbaums displaying the Sunday Magazine section with a cover story about cowboy novelist Eli Cash.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


[The following is an excerpt from Part 1 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, is here. Part 3, on Hal Ashby, is here. Part 4, on J.D. Salinger, will be published April 8. Part 5, an annotated version of the prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums, will finish out the series April 10. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]

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With just five features in 13 years, Wes Anderson has established himself as the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation. Supremely confident in his knowledge of film history and technique, he's a classic example of the sort of filmmaker that the Cahiers du cinéma critics labeled an auteur -- an artist who imprints his personality and preoccupations on each work so strongly that, whatever the contributions of his collaborators, he deserves to be considered the primary author of the film. This series examines some of Anderson's many cinematic influences and his attempt to meld them into a striking, uniquely personal sensibility.

After the release of his second film, Rushmore, in 1998, it became obvious that Anderson was, love him or hate him, an idiosyncratic filmmaker worth discussing. In the decade-plus since then, dissecting Anderson's influences, and Anderson's influence on others, has become a bit of a parlor sport among cinephiles. Sight and Sound and Film Comment have been particularly rich resources. More recently, the Onion A.V. Club contributed a couple of playful, astute lists. Anderson himself has gotten into the act by paying tribute to his heroes in interviews and magazine articles.

This series will take the process a step further, juxtaposing Anderson's cultural influences against his films onscreen, the better to show how he integrates a staggeringly diverse array of source material into a recognizable, and widely imitated, whole. It will examine some, but certainly not all, of Anderson's evident inspirations. Along the way, it may incidentally illuminate why Anderson-esque movies—from Garden State to Son of Rambow—can seem, no matter what their virtues or pleasures, a weak substitute for the real thing.
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By Matt Zoller Seitz

When the history of intellectual property law is written, January 12, 2009 should be marked as a decisive moment. It was the day that my friend, fellow House Next Door contributor and sometime filmmaking partner Kevin B. Lee saw his entire archive of critical video essays deleted by YouTube on grounds that his work violated copyright.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with Kevin's work. He's the New York-based publisher of Shooting Down Pictures, a film history and criticism website dedicated to watching and discussing each of the 1,000 feature films cited on They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? For years now, Kevin has been writing about each and every film on the list, starting out with a personal, critical essay, then segueing into a compilation of excerpts from various works of history and criticism. His goal was to give his audience a sense of a film's place in modern culture and collective memory.

Some of his entries were accompanied by freestanding video essays that used ripped scenes from DVDs and voice-over narration (by Kevin or a guest critic; I participated in two essays myself, on The Outlaw Josey Wales and They Died With Their Boots On). I can't point you to those pieces because they're gone. So is the rest of the approximately 300 minutes' worth of work Kevin posted to YouTube, working solo or in collaboration with fellow critics, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chris Fujiwara, Mike D'Angelo, Richard Brody and many House contributors.

Kevin's trailblazing example inspired me to give up print journalism last year and concentrate on filmmaking, and make video essays—criticism with moving pictures—a key part of my new life. I've been privileged to work with Kevin on video essays for The Museum of the Moving Image, which believed in the critical relevance and legal sturdiness of the format and asked us to do series on the films of Oliver Stone and the opening credits of HBO's The Wire. Many other critic-filmmakers have followed in Kevin's footsteps, including Jim Emerson, publisher of Scanners, who dove into the pool with a wordless video essay tied into The House's "Close-Up Blog-a-thon," and who recently uploaded a ripped DVD clip from Warner Bros' The Dark Knight to augment his recent series of articles attacking the film for narrative and visual sloppiness.

Can a critic argue without clips? Sure. Film criticism has largely done without external accompaniments for a century and can continue to do without them. But it's important to note that clips and still frames have been a central part of cinema studies since its inception. Anyone who's attended a film history or theory course knows how valuable they are. Clips often determine the difference between learning something and truly understanding it. They're quotes from the source text deployed to make a case. Take them away, and you're left with the critic saying, "Well, I can't show you exactly what I mean, so I'll describe it as best I can and hope you believe me."

This, in a nutshell, is the defining difference between criticism pre- and post-millennium. For the first time ever, when someone says to a critic, "Show me the evidence," the critic doesn't need to unlock a film archive vault or even haul out a DVD player to produce it. He can call it up online anytime, anywhere, for anybody.

The implications are astounding. The technology's potential has only begun to be tapped. And as you know, there's more to it than classroom-style argumentation. Digital editing software and DVD-ripping technology permits anybody with filmmaking skill and the right tools—say, Handbrake to rip discs, MPEG Streamclip to convert them to edit-able format, and iMovie or Final Cut to put the pieces together—to manipulate commercial media in all sorts of ways, then post the result on the Internet. Suddenly mass entertainment became as malleable as paper or clay. The combination of editing software, DVD- and CD-ripping technology and YouTube led to a kind of creative Wild West, with non-professionals mining, sharing, re-editing and posting copyrighted content with impunity. Some of the efforts were clearly fresh and vital: Kevin's pieces; cheeky mash-ups like Melbelinkie's "40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes"; the exuberant work of Goldentusk, whose copyright-flouting theme-song spectaculars have given me more pleasure than any stage or screen musical I've seen recently.

But of course, the vast majority of the copyright-flouting stuff on YouTube was just plain theft: people figuring out they could get something for nothing, then sharing it with strangers. There are entire YouTube channels consisting of ripped DVDs or the contents of somebody's record collection. There was so much of it, proliferating at such a terrifyingly rapid pace, that the Viacoms and Time-Warners of the world doubtless began to feel like store owners huddled behind a counter during a nonstop orgy of looting. Something had to be done.

And it finally was. As you read this, the west is about to be crisscrossed with fences and railroad tracks thanks to digital watermarking and steganography, processes that embed invisible codes in commercially reproduced audio and video. These practices allow copyright owners to detect when their products are reproduced and posted online (via automated software: nobody has the manpower or time to do it personally), then send emails to the publishing website demanding that the work be removed. The sites generally oblige, no questions asked, because (here we go again) there aren't enough hours or people to examine each new posted work and decide if it adheres to the principles of fair use—and even if the sites were bold enough to attempt such judgment calls, the media companies and artists' estates would sue the hell out of them until they relented and did as they were told. YouTube's current definition of "The Right Thing" is, "Whatever makes life easiest."

For DVD-rippers of all sorts, the start of 2009 feels like the beginning of the last act of The Godfather—the point when all family business gets settled at once, spectacularly and in public. In the past few weeks, I've seen a few of my rip-dependent video essays (most of which I believe I could defend as fair use-exempted work) taken off YouTube or denied publication in the first place. For the the most part, attempts to appeal the decision appeared to have been round-filed by the company. I've heard similar war stories from Kevin, Jim Emerson and House contributor Steven Boone, whose mash-ups started vanishing from YouTube a few weeks back.

If you believe you've got a legitimate objection to a takedown notice, good luck pursuing it. YouTube makes it as difficult as possible for individuals to make their case. The company offers Google's main switchboard number as its only readily apparent public contact point (call it and you get a dead-end voicemail menu). When YouTube users try to dispute a takedown, the company typically responds with vague boilerplate emails that translate as, "Run along, kid, you bother me."

Even filmmmaker/rights holder disputes that seem to end well have ominous undertones. This past Friday, for instance, I uploaded a wordless video essay to YouTube that employed clips from past and present musicals to show the visual signature and influence of director-choreographer Busby Berkeley. Within hours of processing, I got emails informing me that the piece had been disabled due to copyright claims from NBC Universal (owners of The Big Lebowski, one of several modern films quoted in the piece) and the owners of the song "I Only Have Eyes for You," featured in the Berkeley-choreographed musical Dames. I disputed both claims. NBC Universal and the "Eyes" rights holders backed off, but only partway. The Berkeley piece was restored as of late last night, but the embedding function is currently disabled. My short documentary about the animator Bill Melendez ("A Little Love") was likewise flagged by the owners of "Peanuts." But rather than automatically block playback or disable the audio, the rights holders let it stay up (and be embedded elsewhere) while reserving the right to monitor viewing levels and add commercials later.

These seem like OK compromises until you consider the implications: the distributors of art and entertainment are, to greater or lesser degrees, being permitted to dictate the terms under which their products can be quoted, interpreted, parodied, examined or otherwise discussed.

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Kevin has copies of all his work, and I'm sure it will show up again somewhere, sometime. But the obliteration of YouTube as a global platform for his voice is a crime of greater magnitude than anything he did to create the video essays in the first place. YouTube is the town square of the 21st century—rather like a gigantic virtual mall that is, technically speaking, a private space, but which operates as a public sphere: a gathering spot, a cultural and political crossroads. By scourging Kevin's work from this crossroads and banning his video essays—and, potentially, all similar work—from YouTube, the company is allowing the powerful to muzzle the near-powerless. And it is endorsing the idea that in cases involving intellectual property law and the Internet, filmmakers can be deemed guilty, silenced, then made to plead for their right to speak.

There's also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who's likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network's onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged. Talk shows don't think twice about airing a rival network's news footage or clips from a popular or notorious TV program in order to spark a discussion or anchor a satirical montage. Infotainment shows compile film clips for use in movie star obituaries—not just electronic presskit snippets meant for PR purposes, but clips from older movies that predate EPKs and that might have originally aired on some corporate competitor's channel—and the movie's copyright holders don't object. The shows that feature such clips are routinely repurposed on the parent company's websites, often with ads and sometimes with embedding functions that allow the clip to be reproduced by bloggers, and there are not currently, to the best of my knowledge, any lawsuits seeking to stop the practice. Kings wink at each other. Peasants get the axe.

Kevin B. Lee is not Napster; he's not some guy uploading every frame of every Bette Davis movie for kicks; he's not even Goldentusk. He's a critic and scholar doing work that could be considered, at worst, compelling free ads for essential pop art. YouTube, by reflexively siding with whichever party has more money and power, has renounced its founding spirit.

There should be a way to distinguish between piracy-for-profit (or unauthorized, free redistribution) and creative, interpretive, critical or political work that happens to use copyrighted material. And there must be an alternative to unilateral takedowns. The issues aren't just legal, they're practical. History has demonstrated that there's no copyright protection that can't be defeated, no corporate edict that can't be subverted. And given the technological sophistication that permits digital watermarking, there ought to be a way to make sampling of any sort, authorized or not, scaled to suit the filmmakers' means, profitable for the rights holders, and as fully automated as the copyright-infringement-scouring that's currently happening all over the Internet.

Whatever the solutions, they should be something other than one-size-fits-all. Digital watermarking abusers are engaged in an unwinnable war—one that, in its present state, will only produce collateral damage and make them increasingly unsympathetic, and therefore more likely to be demonized and resisted. The entertainment industry's unwillingness to recognize the plain fact that people have complex, idiosyncratic and yes, possessive relationships to songs, films and TV shows—relationships that are qualitatively different from their relationships to cars, hats, shoes and beer—contributes to a culture of calcified mutual resentment, and a public mindset (manifested most vividly in generations that cannot remember life before the Internet) that sees big entertainment companies as lead-footed dopes—Elmer Fudd blasting every rabbit hole in sight hoping to hit Bugs Bunny.

The situation as it stands is immoral, untenable and, I believe, a violation of fundamental rights. Almost nobody taking part in the early phases of digital media has the money to fight the Googles and Viacoms of the world, and of course that's what the takedown gremlins are counting on; injustice not resisted eventually becomes tradition. I fervently hope some brave, knowledgeable lawyer will see that there's more at stake here than the ethics of ripping and posting scenes from movies, and make a test case of Kevin's unconscionable treatment. The circumstances may seem mundane, but the implications are grim as can be. When individuals and governments permit corporations to dictate the terms by which their culture may be examined, the First Amendment becomes just another pile of words.
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A Brooklyn-based film editor and a former critic for The New York Times, The Star-Ledger and New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor emeritus of The House Next Door. For now, at least, he posts videos on YouTube under the name InsomniacDad.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz & Hannah Seitz


Following in the footsteps of casas Coppola and Makhmalbaf, The House Next Door is proud to present a genuine family affair:


1) Richard & Nancy's Wedding (Photographs from the wedding of Matt Zoller Seitz's sister-in-law, Nancy Dawson Dastillung, and Matt's brother, Richard Seitz. Edited by MZS, from snapshots taken by Ella, Jack, James, Leo and Hannah, ages 4-11. For more examples of James Seitz' photographs, click here.)

2) Leave It All To Us (The first film directed and edited by Hannah Seitz, age 11, starring her brother James, and her cousins Jack, Ella and Leo.)


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Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker and Editor Emeritus of The House Next Door.

Hannah Seitz, when asked about the novel she was working on, replied, "Which one?" Way to rub it in, girlfriend.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

In the films of Budd Boetticher, the hero is a man who does the right thing without making a fuss. His ideas about honor and ethics are reflected in the stories he chooses to tell, and the precision with which he tells them. Boetticher is best known for the B westerns he directed for Columbia with his favorite leading man, Randolph Scott—five of which are gathered in a new DVD box set (Sony Home Entertainment): Ride Lonesome, Decision at Sundown, The Tall T, Comanche Station, and Buchanan Rides Alone. They are marvels of economy and elegance—a tutorial in classical narrative cinema.
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To read the rest of the article at Moving Image Source, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

[Editor's note: This column is dedicated to the memory of House contributor, Time Out New York editor and regular Mad Men recapper Andrew Johnston, who passed away Sunday, Oct. 26 at age 40, following a long battle with cancer. Andrew's burial will take place Saturday, Nov. 1 at 2 p.m. at the Monticello Memory Gardens in Charlottesville, Virginia. There will also be a memorial Wednesday, October 29 at 5:30 p.m.; if you were a friend of Andrew's and would like to attend, email Matt at reeling@aol.com for details.]

During the first season of Mad Men and throughout the second, much critical discussion centered on the the show's depiction of advertising, domestic life and gender relations in the late '50s and early '60s, the immense cultural changes America was about to undergo, and what opinion series creator Matthew Weiner might have on it all. After watching the last three episodes, I believe those aspects are mere means to an end. Like the mob storylines on The Sopranos—a series on which Weiner served as a writer and producer—they exist to inform and amplify Mad Men's real interest: the continual struggle between what Sigmund Freud called the id and the superego, between the deep, authentic self inside us—the sum total of our desires, appetites, urges and fantasies—and what we might call the constructed self, a superstructure of social conditioning that cages the beast within and lashes it with guilt and shame when it gets too rowdy. The third major component of the personality, the ego, referees between the id, the superego and the external world; in a sense, the ego is the locus of drama, because it's the place where decisions happen. The struggle is apparent in any story worth watching, but it's foregrounded in Mad Men, a series in which—like The Sopranos—dramatic decisions often come down to a blunt cost-benefit analysis. A character in moral quandary tries to choose between what he or she wants, and what his or her conditioning—and the expectations of family, friends or society at large—will allow.

Don Draper/Dick Whitman is the most obvious example of this phenomenon because he's the main character, the guy whose problems and actions drive a lot of the drama—and he happens to be an impostor, somebody who took the identity of a dead soldier and, if the flashback material and California scenes are meant to be taken literally, stepped into the shoes of the soldier whose identity he stole and served as a sort of husband stand-in for the "real" Mrs. Draper (by which I mean the first Mrs. Draper, Anna). The Don-Anna relationship is fascinating because it seems, to quote Shakespeare, a marriage of true minds. Neither Don nor Anna seems beholden to traditional concepts of morality and decency. Anna calls Don out as a fake at the car lot, but rather than rat him out and have him punished, she engineers an arrangement whereby he'll serve as a stand-in for her late (missing) husband. And judging from that revealing flashback in the second-to-late episode, "The Mountain King," they both seem quite content with the arrangement. When Don is with Anna Draper, he seems more relaxed and open, more vulnerable—even somehow younger, smaller and thinner!—than he's seemed in the rest of the series. He seems—yes, indeed—like a different person: maybe the person he was meant to be.

Our mutual friend Alan Sepinwall wrote in his recap of "The Mountain King" that this material demonstrates the debt that Weiner's show owes to The Sopranos. Alan's recap begins by quoting a key passage of dialogue: "It means the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone," Anna Draper tells Don. "What if that's true?" Don asks. "Then you can change," Anna replies. "People don't change," Don counters. Alan goes on to write,

""People don't change" may as well have been the motto of Matthew Weiner's previous series. The Sopranos was an 86-hour argument against human beings' capacity for real personal growth. As Mad Men borrows so many other visual and thematic elements from its mobbed-up predecessor, it would be easy to assume that Weiner, like David Chase, doesn't believe change is possible. But "The Mountain King" makes it clear that, in the world of Mad Men, people can change—provided they have a partner to aid their transformation. If you think you're alone, then you're stuck ... The episode is filled with partnerships both old and new that enable major changes, some more welcome than others. Anna Draper, widow of the woman whose identity Dick Whitman stole, helped our Don step more concretely into his new identity. Betty, fearing that Don may never come home (or that she may never want him to), enlists her daughter as an ally for her potential new life as a divorcee. Pete breaks off his business relationship with his father-in-law rather than be forced to lose his role as dictator in his marriage. Roger wants to use the possible merger with Putnam, Powell & Lowe to pay for the transition into his new marriage, while Bert Cooper fears it will render him an irrelevant old man. And, in the episode's most horrifying moment, Joan discovers what her fiance really thinks of her and her career when he rapes her on the floor of Don's office."

In his notes at the end of the column, Alan adds:

"The scene where Don happens by the hot rod mechanics at first seemed out of place in the rest of the episode, but on watching it a second time, it became clear: just as Don succeeds through his partnership with Anna, the mechanics take parts of two different cars and meld them together into something that's greater as a new whole."

I think he's right on all of the particulars, but at the same time, and at the risk of seeming cynical, I think Alan's reading is too hopeful, and that the message of Mad Men in re: personal growth is, "People change their lives, but they can't change their essence," or maybe, "People change their lives, but maybe they shouldn't, because the change only hides the real problem, disguises it or delays the necessity of confronting it." Or maybe it's even simpler than that, and phrased as a question: "Would most personal unhappiness disappear if people were allowed to be true to their natures?"

When I watched the car scene, I had a thought similar to Alan's but came to a different conclusion: that the mechanic's strategy works on automobiles but can't work with couples. People aren't machines; you can't change their essence with a new coat of paint or even a meticulously rebuilt engine; the essence of the person—particularly that insatiable id, always seeking visceral satisfaction and comfort—stays the same. The conflicts within the couple are the conflicts of the individual squared: unless the two participants in a relationship want similar things—unless they're on the same page, so to speak—the relationship is doomed. Whether the conflict within the marriage is between an id and a superego (as seems to be the case with Don and Betty, the husband continually straying in one form or another and then slinking back home to his wife and presenting his bare back for a lashing), whether they stay together "for the sake of the kids" or pull the plug on the partnership, it's a no-win situation, a car that barely runs and that probably never should have been taken from the showroom.

Thinking about the probable messages of Mad Men and The Sopranos, I suspect that The Sopranos, as hard-edged and pessimistic about human nature as it was, ultimately seemed moralistic in a backhanded way. It presented the hypocrisies of its characters (and the various emotional and physical savageries they justified) as a blight on happiness, actions that departed from the accepted norms of daily life and that brought grief and pain to those who abide by the rules, the norms. (Think of all the subplots and individual scenes depicting the misery inflicted by the mob characters on "civilians.") The tone of Mad Men is different, I think—more of a lament.

The show presents social compacts (marriage, family, full-time employment in an office—all institutions that Don neglects or abandons when it suits him) as shackles on the freedom of those who are predisposed to do without them. It's a subtle critique of traditional bourgeois morality of the Father Knows Best, two kids-and-a-mortgage variety. It treats the very concept as an illusion, a useful fiction built atop the reality of human need—a superego-style overlay, a construct, a set of goals that we're conditioned by family, society and other forces to want, to need, regardless of whether it matches up with our own deep-seated, possibly unrecognized, maybe repressed true desires. (Peggy, for personal and self-interested reasons, is the least judgmental of the show's major characters, responding to Pete's irritation over Don's little L.A. holiday by saying she's sure he had his reasons for going AWOL. Is it just me or, at that moment, does Peggy seem to speak for the show?)

It's here, I think, that advertising's significance to Mad Men becomes clear. What's the purpose of advertising? As articulated by Don—the show's emblem and sometime philosophical mouthpiece—it's to stoke desires that were repressed; or (more daringly—the Holy Grail for any ambitious ad man) to create or instill a desire that wasn't there before -- maybe even a desire that's of no use, perhaps antithetical, to the consumer who's suddenly feeling it. Don's Season One "carousel" speech crystallizes this objective and ironically applies it to Don himself (in ways that remain largely invisible to the other characters). It's half auto-critique, half confession, and a brilliant illustration of Don's (and Peggy's) belief that the most effective advertising is that which connects on a personal, emotional, very deep level, and that necessarily draws on autobiographical sources, on the ad man (or woman's) own sense of reality, of human nature. Peggy manages the same feat, more humorously, when she draws on her Christian (Catholic) upbringing to devise the "sharing" campaign for Popsicles; Don wishes he could feel the nostalgic feelings he outlines in the carousel speech, but (to his shame) he can't. So he uses those feelings in his work, to land a client, effectively finding a new way to pass on the desires that have ensnared him, desires that don't really match up with who Don is.

In the final episode of Season Two, Mad Men juxtaposes individual fealty to the mid-century social norm against the looming threat of nuclear Armageddon (represented by the Cuban Missile Crisis the characters follow in news reports throughout the finale); the possibility of mass extinction is just an amped-up version of the anxiety each person faces when contemplating the certainty of his or her own death and wondering, "What's the point of playing by the rules, of doing what society expects, when I'm just going to end up as worm food anyway?" (Don, predictably, is the character least threatened by this eventuality, responding to Joan's request to brief the staff on emergency preparedness by indicating that if the missiles start flying, such knowledge will be useless and pointless.)

Don Draper/Dick Whitman is clearly a man uncomfortable with the responsibilities he's saddled with. He's ill-suited to marriage (and perhaps somewhat suited to fatherhood, though his track record there is spotty, too). He's the sort of man who gets drunk while building a child's playhouse—self-medicating his depression and alienation from the person he's pretending to be. A shot late in the Season Two finale dollies slowly away from the Draper family reunited, reassembled, in their living room, a Saturday Evening Post cover image of domestic perfection, Eisenhower-standard. But we've seen the turmoil roiling beneath that placid image, so the effect is ironic and unsettling rather than reassuring.

To me, the scenes between Don and Anna—and the scenes in the preceding episode where Don hooks up with the Europeans in what seems like a jet-set predecessor to a hippie commune where traditional social roles are downplayed or obliterated, and a father can have a perfectly ordinary conversation with his daughter while she's lying in bed post-coitus with her much older lover—were designed to show Don in his true element, living in a world where he doesn't have to be burdened by the expectations he's shouldering for propriety's sake.

Both the Anna scenes and the LA commune scenes give us glimpses of a secret world where selfish people—meaning people who put their own happiness first and don't lose sleep over what society expects of them—can live without anxiety, without guilt. The last three episodes of Season Two often showcased Don in situations that amounted to a holiday from the usual pressures afflicting a man of his social stature; I was reminded of the plot of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (referenced in Season One), an uber-libertarian tract in which the truly exceptional people get tired of having to suck up to the "mealy-mouthed" commies and hypocritical, guilt-dealing parasites and go on strike, watching society collapse from the safety and comfort of a secret hideout that's essentially Shangri-La for intellectual supermen.

Don's soujourn with the jet set and the scenes between him and Anna had a Shangri-La feel. They were visions of homegrown paradise, of places where a man uncomfortable with his constructed self could reestablish contact with his deep self, his true self. There's nothing condemnatory in any of this material save a closeup of a young boy in the swinger's compound regarding Don and his young lover in the pool; in retrospect that shot might be the image that starts Don back down the road toward his day job and family, toward embracing his constructed self. He has to start being that other guy again for the sake of his kids. In a sense, that's why we obey all sorts of rules—for the sake of the kids. Not literally our kids (some of us don't have any and don't want any) but for the sake of future generations. Middle-class morality exists (so we're told) to perpetuate society, to keep the machine humming along. Damage it or even question it (as the social revolutions of the '60s did in real life, and as they'll do on Mad Men if it keeps getting renewed by AMC) and you risk tearing down the status quo and replacing a somewhat restrictive but functioning paradigm with pure chaos, pure selfishness. (It occurs to me that one of Ayn Rand's key philosophical tomes was titled The Virtue of Selfishness.)
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There's a marvelous moment in the jet set compound when a relaxed Don slumps on a couch. The shot is framed from behind: Don's arm is draped along the top of the couch. It's a mirror image of the shot that closes the show's credits—the period at the end of a sequence that shows the ad man entering his workspace, dropping his briefcase, leaping out of a window and plummeting through concrete canyons as, all around him, manufactured images of bliss fall apart.

That image of Don seen from behind communicates a sense of stillness and utter mystery (we can't see his face), but the intent is different. In the credits, the shot represents the falsely calm and centered Don, a man who, on the inside, is moments away from leaping through a window and exposing the illusory nature of what passes for happiness in his world. But when we see the same shot in the European compound, I think we're seeing an image of, not true contentment, exactly, but something closer to it than what Don experiences back home.

The jet set compound scenes and the Don Draper-Anna Draper scenes also reminded me oddly of the bits in Season Six of The Sopranos dealing with Tony's alienation from the man he had to be—the scenes where he escaped temporarily into Coma World, or to Las Vegas, and got a chance to meditate on the basic material of which he's built, to sort of peer into his own soul. After that, the question for Tony became, "Now what do I do about it?," and we know the answer was, "Nothing, really." I think Weiner believes on some level that, as Alan puts it, "People don't change" -- or that they can only change with unstinting support from like-minded people. But I think Weiner is paying even more nuanced (and empathetic) attention than Chase did to the stuff outside the self that makes it so hard to change—the expectations that we be a certain way, live a certain way. And he's mourning the loss, or burial, of the authentic self, the id, the little death that comes with accepting a restricted life, a life of fewer freedoms, less autonomy; and he's perhaps conceding, and being saddened by, the inevitability of such compromise.

It seems not at all coincidental that Don is visually defined by that broad-shouldered suit and the hat that shades his eyes. That's not who he is; it's his uniform, the armor he dons, the disguise in which he drapes himself before entering a world hostile to his essence.

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A Brooklyn-based filmmaker and a former critic for The New York Times, The Star-Ledger and New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor emeritus of The House Next Door. He posts videos on YouTube under the name InsomniacDad.

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By Kevin B. Lee

This is the fourth and final installment in "Oliver Stone: The Official Story," a series of articles and video essays on Stone's films commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. The series includes considerations of Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Nixon.

Looking at Oliver Stone's filmography, one can trace a gradual shift—away from the struggles of those dispossessed by authority (like Ron Kovic and Jim Garrison) and toward those who have held the seat of power, like Richard Nixon and Alexander the Great. And if Nixon is about how one man tried and failed to impose his will upon history, Alexander is also a story of a failure. But in the words of Ptolemy, "His failure towered over other men's successes." Using Ptolemy's dictation of his memoirs as a framing device, the narration is tinged with Ptolemy's impending mortality, his yearning to revisit the promise of his generation in its glorious youth, and his desire to commemorate the past in a glow of mythic grandeur. After so many attempts to cast aspersions on the mythmaking machine, Alexander is about examining a myth that truly inspires.

Like in Born on the Fourth of July, we see a boy raised in a culture steeped heavily in myth. Alexander's estranged mother and father invoke mythical origins. They hold the myths over Alexander's head, vying for custody over his mind and programming him to aspire to greatness. The movie suggests that Alexander's ambition to conquer and unify the world stems from a sublimated desire to reconcile the conflict between his Macedonian father and barbarian mother, which he re-enacts by taking a Bactrian princess as his queen.

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To read the rest of the article, or to watch Kevin B. Lee's video essay on Alexander, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


“There is only this; all else is unreal.”

The explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell) has spoken that line in all three versions of Terrence Malick’s The New World: the original, 150-minute 2005 theatrical cut (not available on DVD); the 135-minute theatrical recut (New Line, $14.98), and the latest incarnation, Malick’s 172-minute extended cut. Each time Smith utters the line, it resonates differently, thanks to the changes wrought by the filmmaker—the length of certain scenes and shots, the rhythm and structure that Malick and his editors impose upon the material, and the transitions between sections (this release breaks the film into titled chapters).

In the first cut, which focused mainly on the effect of war and cultural change on individual lives, the pronoun this seemed to refer to the continent being disrupted and ultimately altered by English settlers: Paradise before the fall. In the second, which zeroed in on the personal evolution of Smith’s great love, the Powhatan princess Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), this seemed synonymous with the affair itself: a paradise within Paradise. But in the latest iteration -- which gives formerly marginal characters little visual arias of behavior, and lets existing scenes play out at much greater length, favoring ambient noise over music -- Smith’s this means the present tense, to whatever he or the other characters are experiencing in the moment. Or, as Smith intones in another scene: “What else is life but living?”

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

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By Matt Zoller Seitz


This is the second installment of "Oliver Stone: The Official Story," a series of articles and video essays on Stone's films commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. The series also includes considerations of Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Alexander.

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The opening scene of Oliver Stone's Nixon finds the Watergate burglars preparing for their mission while watching a training film about how to be a good salesman. Though seemingly random, it hints at what's to come: an epic biography about a man of substance who was uncomfortable in his own skin, enslaved by influences and impulses that his repressive conditioning wouldn't permit him to investigate. A sprawling amalgam of Death of a Salesman, Citizen Kane, Freudian psychoanalysis, and 50 years' worth of headlines and transcripts, Nixon feels less like a biography than an autobiography, colored by Nixon's paranoia and self-loathing.

It was assumed that Stone, a counterculture provocateur whose Vietnam service coincided with Nixon's rise to the presidency, would skewer the man as a panderer to red-state reactionaries, a man who pursued power for power's sake, and an enabler and exemplar of the military-industrial complex whose presence hovers over so much of Stone's filmography. Yet the movie is no hit job, as evidenced by the sequence that follows Nixon's strangely psychoanalytical China trip with a harshly editorializing account of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi that no early '70s broadcast news outlet would ever have allowed. This newscast, like all the newscasts in the movie -- indeed, like the whole of Nixon -- isn't supposed to be taken as a straight recreation of reality. This isn't the news. It's the naysaying chorus Nixon hears in his head. The media that intrude upon the film's narrative are colored by Nixon's self-perception. When he reads a newspaper or watches TV, he, and we, aren't seeing what the world thinks of Nixon, but what Nixon thinks the world thinks of Nixon.
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To read the rest of the article on Nixon, or to watch Matt Zoller Seitz's video essay, click here.

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By Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz


This is the first installment of "Oliver Stone: The Official Story," a series of articles and video essays on Stone's films commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 1 deals with Born on the Fourth of July (1989). The series also includes considerations of JFK, Nixon and Alexander.

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Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic W., opening October 17, is his latest foray in a genre that has yielded some of his most memorable work: the political biography. The four Stone films examined in this series of video essays -- Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, and Alexander -- dramatize conflicted relationships between highly driven individuals, their heroic ideals, and their service to the nation-state. They amount to cinematic battlefields where sophisticated ideas and recreated events are intensified (or at times, blown away) by expressive camerawork and editing schemes. To bring histrionics into history may seem a dubious project, but in Stone's hands, it brings an urgency and vitality to his subjects that few filmmakers can match.

Stone built his reputation as a screenwriter of overheated melodramas with a political bite, including 1978's Turkish prison picture Midnight Express (which won Stone a Best Original Screenplay Oscar) and Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Scarface, which transformed the original's Italian hero into a transplanted Cuban criminal whose voracious appetite was a sick parody of the archetypal immigrant success story. Stone's most notable early films as a director-- Salvador (1986), Platoon (1986, loosely based on his own experience as a Marine in Vietnam), Wall Street (1987), and Talk Radio (1988) -- were classically constructed, broad-brushstroke entertainments with a muckraking sensibility.

But with the antiwar polemic Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone began to take stylistic risks that separated him from previous masters of the "message" picture. His restless experimentation with film stock, disruptive editing, interpolated documentary material, and cultural iconography defined what now seems the most urgent and fruitful period of his career, and marked Stone as one of the most distinctive and commanding directorial voices in American cinema: a popular artist whose work had to be reckoned with, even if one disagreed with his politics and loathed his worldview.

These films all grapple, to some extent, with the idea of an "official" narrative. Stone's filmmaking defines this as a story presented by authorities in order to perpetuate ideology, strengthen received wisdom, reinforce a nation's identity, and keep society's economic, political, and military engines chugging along. Stone reiterates the "official" narrative in order to question it, annihilate it, or simply call the viewer's attention to the manner in which such narratives are built, and to the mentality and agenda of the parties that concoct them, unleash them on the world, and defend them against attacks by the likes of Oliver Stone.
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To read the rest of the article on Born on the Fourth of July, or to watch Matt Zoller Seitz's video essay, click here.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz



This is a short documentary about the Peanuts animator -- his artistic roots, his directorial style, and his influence on the films of Wes Anderson. -- MZS

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A Brooklyn-based filmmaker and a former critic for The New York Times, The Star-Ledger and New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor emeritus of The House Next Door. He posts videos on YouTube under the name InsomniacDad.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

Sharky's Machine is the story of Tom Sharky, an Atlanta narcotics officer demoted to the vice squad after accidentally getting a civilian shot during a bust gone bad. The character is a veteran cop on his way down. The movie is the pet project of a star at the peak of his fame. Adapted by Gerald DiPego from the debut novel by William Diehl, and directed by Reynolds, Sharky's Machine was released in December, 1981, when Reynolds was coming off a string of box office hits. The film was only a modest success, and in retrospect one can see why. Aside from Reynolds' cocky charisma, it barely trades on his established persona. It combines the gallows humor of Joseph Wambaugh's cop novels, the bleak brutality of The French Connection and The Getaway, and a strong undercurrent of film noir, with Sharky as an errant knight brawling and shooting his way through the Atlanta underworld.


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Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker and Editor Emeritus of The House Next Door.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

“The biggest and most important thing is, I believe and always believed and always will believe that no one should die alone,” says pastor Carroll Pickett, who for 15 years ministered to death-row inmates at the “Walls” prison unit in Huntsville, Texas. “Somebody should be with them who cares for them as people.”

Starting in 1979, three years after the Supreme Court reversed itself and declared capital punishment legal, the soft-spoken Pickett was present for 95 executions, before leaving the prison system and becoming an anti-death-penalty activist in 2004. Now 73, he’s the ostensible subject of At the Death House Door, a documentary by Hoop Dreams directors Steve James and Peter Gilbert that debuts Thursday 29 on the Independent Film Channel. But the movie, like Pickett, proves more complex than its placid surface suggests: As terse and subdued as Hoop Dreams was expansive and exuberant, Death House slowly and subtly reveals itself to be about far more than one pastor’s life. It’s about the politics and ethics of the death penalty, the human flaws that prevent it from being carried out equitably and consistently, and the moral calculus that those involved must go through to be able to sleep at night.

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To read an interview with Carroll and the filmmakers, Steve James and Peter Gilbert, go to the Time Out New York feature here. To watch my video podcast review of the movie, see below or click here.

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