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By Matt Zoller Seitz on January 26, 2006 in Links for the Day Jump to Comments (0)

The Devil's Backbone

The unconventional thinkers over at 24LiesASecond have published two must-read articles: Robert C. Cumbow's thorough, respectful appraisal of Jonathan Glazer's Birth, a favorite of mine that a lot of people thought I was nuts for taking seriously; and David Greven's thinkpiece on Mexican horror/sci-fi ace Guillermo del Toro, a smashing pop artist who hasn't been admitted to the pantheon of notable contemporary auteurs yet because (a) he works in disreputable genres, and (b) with precious few exceptions, American criticism's current bunch of gatekeepers insists on restricting membership to Baby Boomers. (Oops, did I write that out loud?) For my 2001 rave review of Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (pictured above), click here.

Over at Philadelphia Weekly, critical pugilist Sean Burns bashes Caché ("dumb but chilling") but says The Time of the Wolf was the movie Spielberg's War of the Worlds didn't have the nerve to be.

My friend Alonso Duralde, arts editor for The Advocate, has been keeping a compulsively readable Sundance Diary. Watch this space for an interview with Alonso about his book 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. (No, you wiseasses, Top Gun is not in there; and yes, everyone he knows has asked why not.)

In New York Press, I pop Steven Soderbergh's Bubble, and Armond White surveys The New World revision and deems it pleasing (but gently disses the first cut along the way). Jennifer Merin speaks to Lars von Trier and asks him if he hates America.

Read, reflect, argue. And while you're at it, lift a glass or two or three in honor of Chris Penn, on whose career I will ruminate shortly.

No soy listo hacer una comisiï¿½n todavï¿½a, sino que estoy dispuesto a pronto.With Respect, Maria black and white fine art prints
Posted by Airplane Appraisal on 2006-02-06 07:54:00 Being a lover of all things Douglas Sirk, I got a kick out of Haynes' Far From Heaven. I am in full agreeement with you on Velvet Goldmine, and more importantly, on Drugstore Cowboy. Matt Dillon, whom I've been a fan of since My Bodyguard, has never been better or more compelling. His work in Crash is a mere afterthought compared to this.

I am quite familiar with the werewolf triumvirate of the early 80's: Wolfen, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, having snuck into all three of them back when they enforced the R-rating. Despite that fantastic transformation sequence (still unequaled, even in this day of bullshit CGI), and the amusing performance by a rotting Griffin Dunne, John Landis' film has a lousy ending and can't seem to decide what type of film it is. It does move faster than The Howling, but that movie has one of my favorite scenes in all of moviedom. Dee Wallace Stone's ultimate fate, and the TV viewers responses to it, is a hilarious commentary on the public's cynicism toward the news media. (Dante uses horror as a means of social commentary quite often--see his Masters of Horror episode on Showtime.)

An American Werewolf in London still has the scariest teaser trailer I've ever seen. It's a great piece of silent, impending doom and, for a trailer, incredibly bloody. It ends with a killer jump moment, and the voice of God says "From the director of Animal House, a different kind of animal." It was a lot scarier than the product it was advertising.

As for mixes of slapstick and horror, might I direct your attention, and your cast iron stomach, to Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and Re-Animator?

P.S. I'm going to rob that "Village Voice directors" phrase you coined!
Posted by odienator on 2006-01-27 16:01:00 There is definitely a high-fiber, low-sugar quality to Van Sant, and to Todd Haynes as well. They're what I call Village Voice directors: filmmakers whose work footnotes itself so critics won't have to. The Voice invariably gets behind these directors -- only the American and Canadian ones, though; their taste in foreign language films is pretty much impeccable -- and seems to vote for them in blocs at the end of each calendar year. And then 6 months later, the DVDs come out, and somehow the film buff community, such as it is, never musters the energy to rent them, probably because they're more fun to write about than they are to watch.

Which isn't to say van Sant and Haynes have never pleased me. Haynes' VELVET GOLDMINE had some stirring passages, and a lot of very good actors ripping up the screen while wearing fabulous clothes; it's worth seeing for the music, fashion and design alone, even though you get tired of it after 45 minutes and wonder why it was made.

And van Sant's DRUGSTORE COWBOY was a formative movie for me. I saw it at the Inwood Theater in Dallas maybe 10 times, and I've actually ripped off stylistic elements from it on occasion; and it has Matt Dillon's career best performance. I like MALE NOCHE and the non-Iambic parts of MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, particularly the campfire scene, which don't particularly ever want to watch again because it's so agonizing, and because I still miss River Phoenix. van Sant's shot-for-shot PSYCHO remake flat-out didn't work for me, but I love the fact that it exists; it's hifalutin yet deranged, like a semotic theory paper shot on 35mm. But I guess that defiantly academic quality is its Achilles Heel, and perhaps also an inadvertent summary of certain aspects of both filmmakers' careers.

PS-- THE HOWLING is good, but if you're gonna talk lycanthropy, go with AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. It's got as much imagination as THE HOWLING, but it's a tighter, sharper, more propulsive film, and the mix of horror and slapstick has rarely been equalled.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2006-01-27 07:07:00 One of the hazards of graduate school, especially if you're my decrepit age, is that you lose patience wading through endless readings by writers who want "school cred." These articles are densely packed with terminology and theory, simmering in a condescending tone that makes me want to want to re-enact the tent scene from Brokeback Mountain with their authors as Jack Twist and my size 13 foot as Ennis Del Mar. Any potentially entertaining turn of phrase in academic writing (or the technical computer programming manuals I've lived in for the past 20 years) has to be bowdlerized. If it's fun to read, it can't be good for you.

Why do I get the sense that these "formerly indie" directors (Soderbergh and van Sant, to name two) think they have to produce something pedantic, dense and gimmicky to, as Brian put it "further their street cred?" It's as if they feel like they've sold out and are now trying to crawl back to the "daring" cinema they made pre-Hollywood. Instead, they turn out slop that looks pretentious and lacks what made their earlier works so interesting, even as failures. To quote Thomas Wolfe, you can never go indie again.

Excepting King of the Hill and The Limey, I like the Hollywoodish Soderbergh more than the indie guy. I felt like I'd been hit with a rusty BetaMax at sex, lies, and videotape and thought Solaris was Russian for Sominex. (Aside: Tarkovsky and I don't get along--I'm a sucker for Soviet comedies and Sokurov, though.)

Unlike van Sant, Soderbergh seems to be pulling a John Sayles/Cassavettes kind of dual identity. Cassavettes supposedly took acting roles so that he could finance his movies; Sayles supposedly took genre screenwriting and rewrite jobs (like the Howling, which is my favorite werewolf movie) so he could finance his own personal visions. It's a deal with the Devil wherein some good ekes out.

Soderbergh also has his hands in plenty of pies of all types. So I can give him credit for experimenting with digital ideas like Bubble. What I don't have to give him is my money.

van Sant, on the other hand, and for no reason, has been churning out works loved by critics who equate "a good movie" with sucking on a cod liver oil popsicle. It's supposed to be good for you, but the punishment of consuming it might kill you anyway.

What do these "formerly indie" directors have to prove, and what is wrong with doing a bang-up job on a mainstream movie, as Soderbergh did on Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich?
Posted by odienator on 2006-01-27 06:32:00 Wow. You're even more cynical about Soderbergh than I am.

Soderbergh was a hero of mine, right up through ERIN BROKOVICH (which was about as artful as a formulaic film could be) and TRAFFIC (the reverse, I'm sorry to say). He has earned a permanent place in the pantheon through four movies: sex, lies and videotape, KING OF THE HILL, OUT OF SIGHT and THE LIMEY. And I have a soft spot for his strange remake of SOLARIS, one of the few movies he's made where I feel like he's showing us his heart. And I give him and Clooney props for K STREET and UNSCRIPTED on HBO, imperfect but ballsy series that deliberately blurred the line between documentary and drama, just to see what would happen. I will always love and respect him even if he never makes another good movies, just as I will always love another brilliant but staggeringly inconsistent filmmaker, Spike Lee, for having made SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT, DO THE RIGHT THING, MALCOLM X and parts of CLOCKERS and THE 25th HOUR. An artist shouldn't have to prove himself forever. Once is enough, twice is a miracle. So believe me when I say I'm not heading toward "What have you done for me lately" territory.

That said, so much of Soderbergh's post-Oscar output feels like a lot of deadpan hepcat fucking around. OCEANS 11, OCEANS 12, FULL FRONTAL and now BUBBLE. Street cred seems too purposeful a motivation to me; I think he's just wandering through 21st Century Cinema's buffet table and loading up his tray.

I feel his love for filmmaking, for the process of filmmaking, but I'm just not feeling the art anymore, or even the mad passion that used to come through even in stuff like THE UNDERNEATH and SCHIZOPOLIS. His recent movies feel hip and slick and fun and even stylish, yet somehow sadly empty, superfluous. They're card tricks with celluloid. And his episode of the Antonioni trilogy EROS was a disgrace -- glib, shallow and not even funny. The negative should be buried at sea.

I fear that Soderbergh, having established himself as a top shelf Hollywood director and gained a measure of financial and artistic security, is now so in love with the physical act of making movies -- directing, shooting, editing, producing -- that he's not thinking anymore about why he does it. He's like a wine expert who became an alcoholic without even realizing it.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2006-01-27 01:42:00 I haven't seen Bubble yet and don't think I want to, especially given its status as a symbol of the increasingly blurred line between films made for theatrical and home viewing.

But I read your review, and was struck by the last sentence:

"Its contrived amateurishness ends up being an advertisement for professionalism, which surely couldnâ€™t have been the point."

My views on Soderbergh's career have grown ever more cynical to the point that I almost wonder if advertising professionalism isn't the point of a film like Bubble. I get the sense that Soderbergh's interest in making digital experiments doesn't really reach much further than "street cred" that might make people take his star-studded Hollywood projects more seriously than they deserve. It can't hurt his career in the biz for people to think of him as a maverick whose studio sell-out films are better than his funky little "indie" projects. Which seems to be a fairly commonly-held perception.
Posted by Brian on 2006-01-27 01:29:00

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