Archive: February, 2006
For those of you who haven't clicked on the link on the right hand side of this page, Home is my first feature as a writer-director-editor. It's a peculiar microbudget movie with 60 speaking parts, all set at a party in two floors of a Brooklyn brownstone (actually my own apartment in downtown Brooklyn). It plays March 2-8 at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, an underground venue that proudly bills itself as New York City's smallest movie house. (To read the movie's IMDb entry, click here.)
Home was shot in 2002 and 2003, edited and sound-mixed in 2004, and made its theatrical debut last year at Cinequest 15 in San Jose. It has been on the festival circuit since then (check the front page of Brooklyn Schoolyard for selected venues) and after this it will play March 17 and 19 at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem North Carolina, and April 6-9 at the Syracuse International Film Festival. (For a 90-second trailer, click here).
I made the movie because I originally went to college to study filmmaking, got sidetracked into a long and satisfying career as a critic and reporter, but continued to think like a filmmaker whenever I watched movies or TV. My personal background explains why my criticism tends to be equally interested in form and content, often more the former than the latter. It also explains why Home is a elliptical movie, very realistic in certain respects and surreal in others, with kind of a hothouse atmosphere, a documentary approach to behavior, and a dry, admittedly strange sense of humor. The style is a mix of classical Hollywood compositions and camera moves and some fairly wild documentary stuff. The narrative blends scripted and improvised scenes, and the finale is open-ended and perhaps a bit ambiguous.
Home gave me a chance to visually express some of the aesthetic qualities I value as a moviegoer, which I guess makes it a continuation of criticism by other means. The movie also represents an admission that I am and have always been a filmmaker in addition to being a critic, and that I have no intention of choosing one pursuit at the expense of the other, and people on both sides of that line might as well get used to it. I am already in production on two short films that will be finished by the end of the year—both science fiction—and I'm just about done with a new feature script, an adaptation of a detective novel that was critically acclaimed in the United States and has acquired a cult following in France.
There does not seem to be any middleground with the critics. People who see the movie tend to either adore it and latch onto it and express a desire to see it again—they write me to ask for souvenir DVDs—or else it drives them crazy and they hate it. So far the reviews have run the gamut from rampant enthusiasm to "Don't quit your day job," with interpretations of my intent strewn throughout each critique. "An intriguing mix of vérité and fable, resulting in a film that is dreamy but doesn't sacrifice any intimacy or edge," said New York magazine. Filmmaking for the Poor said Home "…does not fit neatly into any one currently existing category of movies…I would classify it as an Experimental Romantic Drama."
This spectrum of responses seems about right, considering the often extreme positions I take in my reviews. And all in all, I think there's a certain karmic kick to the idea of criticizing a critic. To all the filmmakers whose work I've panned over the years: If you've ever thought to yourself, "I'd like to see that son of a bitch do better," well, here goes.
UPDATE: The New York Times is affectionately positive: "As dreams are interpreted, hearts are bruised and a loudmouth in a velour tracksuit gets undeservedly lucky, Home accumulates a blurry, on-the-fly atmosphere spiked with moments of unexpected sweetness." The New York Post's verdict is right there at the top of the story. For my money, it's one of the great Post headlines of all time.
UPDATE: Green Cine Daily surveys the critical response to Home and says The House Next Door is a good place to hang out.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
Tags: Cinequest, Home, RiverRun International Film Festival, Syracuse International Film Festival, Two Boots Pioneer Theater
56 Comments »
No original content today, I've got too much on my plate. Instead I'll just point you to my Star-Ledger appreciation of the late Dennis Weaver, and some miscellaneous movie, TV and pop culture stuff I've recently enjoyed reading.
Time magazine's James Poniewozik explains why American Idol is better than the Olympics. Meanwhile, over at The Advocate, the inimitable Dave White kicks off his regular Idol column by reviewing all the contestants individually, which for some strange reason reminds of a moment from The Larry Sanders Show where Scott Thompson's assistant Brian ranted about the jobs celebrity bosses made him do, the worst of which was digging through Great Dane poop looking for a ring.
Check out a couple of tight, opposed reviews of the Paul Walker action picture Running Scared. Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters concedes it's flashy and trashy, but admires its slick confidence. "It gives good surface," she writes. But those same qualities irritate the hell out of Slant Magazine's Nick Schager: "Hyperactively chopping up mundane scenes with paroxysmal edits (three cuts alone are needed for the sight of a cop's badge), jarring film stocks, and CG-amped zooms and pans, the director concocts a visual vocabulary with such attention-deficit disorder that every action, line, and second in the film conveys a sense of in-your-face stylistic aggression."
Also at PopMatters, Ryan Moore offers an observant review of D.C. Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore. "While a few stories are little more than filler—Moore had to pay his bills—almost all of them are notable for two things," Day writes. "First is a seemingly automatic grasp of what makes characters tick; whether it's Superman, Batman, the Joker or Green Arrow, Moore acts writes like he's been studying them for years, assembling the best attributes from the writers of decades past…Moore's second calling card is his use of new, unique, and occasionally bizarre ideas. In a medium where the only limitation is the imagination of the writer and artist, too many have relied on the standards and conventions laid down by those who came before. Moore breaks through many of the imagination barriers with numerous new takes on old concepts, exploring new ideas and corners of the DC universe."
Making like the plainspoken film history teacher most of us weren't lucky enough to have, Girish Shambu offers a thumbnail analysis of how formal choices in The Battle of Algiers reveal the director's political sympathies. Cinemarati's "This Week in Trailers" reviews the trailer for War, a microbudget visionary indie I can't wait to see. At LA Weekly, TV critic Robert Abele writes about Meet The Press as rhetorical theater.
And finally, one to keep away from the kids: a New York Times piece suggesting that TV watching has no effect on test scores.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
Tags: Alan Moore, American Idol, Cinemarati, Cynthia Fuchs, D.C. Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, Dave White, Dennis Weaver, Girish Shambu, James Poniewozik, LA Weekly, Nick Schager, Paul Walker, PopMatters, Robert Abele, Running Scared, Ryan Moore, Scott Thompson, Slant Magazine, The Advocate, The Battle of Algiers, The Larry Sanders Show, The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, Time, War
2 Comments »
There are whispers that Paul Haggis' Crash might take Best Picture from Ang Lee's gentle-spirited presumptive frontrunner Brokeback Mountain. I really hope it doesn't, because if it does, I'll be so angry that I'll have to retire my long-term posture of benign condescension towards the Oscars and start hating them on general principle.
I realize the Academy has been making lot of wafer-bland Best Picture choices since the '90s (American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago), honoring films that are slick and entertaining and perfunctorily "smart" but not the least bit resonant, films that don't hold a candle to at least 10 or 15 English language films from that same year that didn't win, and that certainly cannot stand proudly alongside such previous Best Picture winners as The Deer Hunter, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, Gone with the Wind, The Last Emperor, Amadeus, the first two Godfather movies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and even The Silence of the Lambs and on and on and on. But compared to Crash, the recent batch of Best Picture winners looks positively brilliant. If Haggis' movie wins, it won't just take home a statuette, it'll claim a new title: the most indefensible Best Picture winner since 1956's tax shelter spectacle Around the World in 80 Days. Continue Reading »
Tags: Academy Awards, Ang Lee, Brendan Fraser, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Don Cheadle, Larenz Tate, Ludacris, Matt Dillon, Michael Pena, Paul Haggis, Roger Ebert, Sandra Bullock, Spike Lee, Thandie Newton, Todd McCarthy
110 Comments »
[Author's Note: Andrew Sarris once ended a review of the Russell Crowe-Meg Ryan kidnap drama Proof of Life by telling his readers, "See it. It's better than you've heard." I felt the same way about two mostly maligned Hollywood movies that opened this month, Firewall and The Pink Panther. A review of both movies follows, somewhat expanded from the version that appeared in the last issue of NYPress.]
Firewall and The Pink Panther pose the same problem for critics: how to resist writing knee-jerk pans of movies that look an awful lot like Hollywood Product, and that star aging icons who haven't connected with audiences in years?
On paper, both films seem like tempting targets. The kidnap thriller Firewall expects us to believe that 63-year old Harrison Ford, arguably the most underachieving A-list star in the history of American movies, and very much an emblem of mid-twentieth-century macho, is believable as an early 21st-century computer security expert and a settled-yet-virile husband to Virginia Madsen, who's 20 years his junior. Added to that, Firewall is yet another example of what I call a Business Class Thriller, tailor made to engross upper-middle-class dads who spend lots of time on airplanes. The hero is usually, and not at all coincidentally, a married forty or fiftysomething suburban dad who spends most of his time filing paperwork but can still kick ass when the occasion warrants, a role tailored for Harrison Ford. The Pink Panther, meanwhile, asks us not just to accept an actor besides Peter Sellers in the role of bumbling French inspector Jacques Clouseau, but to believe that star Steve Martin, whose career took a sharp left turn into New Yorker country about 15 years ago, can still work magic in the type of deranged slapstick romp that hasn't been central to his career since the early '90s. Both films seem like the sorts of films for which critics can start composing their pans en route to the screening room.
But there's a problem with this stock response: both Firewall and The Pink Panther are entertaining, well crafted, somewhat eccentric Hollywood movies. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alan Arkin, Andrew Sarris, Anthony Mann, Beyoncé Knowles, Budd Boetticher, Emily Mortimer, Firewall, Harrison Ford, Jason Statham, Jean Reno, Joe Forte, Kevin Kline, Mary Lynn Raskjub, Paul Bettany, Peter Sellers, Proof of Life, Richard Loncraine, Robert Forster, Shawn Levy, Steve Martin, The Pink Panther, Virginia Madsen
15 Comments »
Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead." I wonder how much time gets spent on those loglines that describe movies in the little boxes on digital cable menu grids? I've become a bit of an aficionado of these bite-sized descriptions, and often find myself scrolling the menu not simply to see what's on but also to see what the logline writers said about it.
Descriptions generally don't exceed 25 words and often come in closer to 10. That's a tight window, so it's no wonder that logline writers would put functionality first. Yet the best still manage to suggest a point of view towards the material. War of the Roses, for instance, is described on my cable grid (Time Warner of Brooklyn) as, "Rich couple divorce, both get the house." The Turning Point is described as, "Aging ballerina and ex-rival bicker." The first description will tease a grin from anyone who knows what mayhem ensues after the Roses' divorce. The second description suggests thinly-veiled contempt, as if the writer is trying to warn potential viewers, "That's all there is to this movie."
The description of the 1955 western The Kentuckian—Burt Lancaster's directorial debut—invokes the only element that has stopped the movie from sliding off film history's radar screen, a notorious setpiece in which Walter Matthau's bad guy attacks an unarmed Lancaster with a whip. "A frontiersman heads for Texas with his son and meets two women and a guy with a bullwhip," says the logline. (Where's Gregg Araki when you need him?) A blasé description of The Outlaw Josey Wales plays up familiar Clint Eastwood tropes but doesn't begin to hint at the movie's quirky richness: "A Missouri farmer hunts down the Union soldiers who killed his family and left him for dead."
Sometimes, though, the logline writers hit one out of the park. My all-time favorite is a nine-word summary of A Place in the Sun: "Poor boy woos rich girl, takes poor girl boating."
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
Tags: A Place in the Sun, Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Mark Twain, Montgomery Clift, The Kentuckian, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Turning Point, Walter Matthau, War of the Roses
23 Comments »
The first "5 for the Day" in a while is a bit more loosely defined than previous ones, and more personal. This time I'm looking for movies or TV shows that contained scenes or images that branded themselves onto your imagination, disturbing or moving you and profoundly altering your view of entertainment and/or life. Interpret that however you wish. Continue Reading »
Tags: 5 for the Day, Benji, Emmanuelle in Bangkok, Holocaust, Superman: The Movie, The Exorcist
58 Comments »
Kevin Willmott's CSA: The Confederate States of America, an absurdist alternative history of the United States told in the form of a British TV documentary with commercial breaks, is the first great American film of the year—a work so original that all the usual labels slide right off. The word "mockumentary" doesn't begin to do it justice. CSA is fiction, nonfiction and meta-fiction, and sometimes film history and film criticism as well. It is academic and streetwise, sketch-comedy wacky and coldly deliberative, kaleidoscopic and controlled. It's like Jean-Luc Godard directing a screenplay by Dave Chappelle. It succeeds simultaneously as a comedy, a historical epic, an experimental feature, a send-up of PBS-cable documentary clichés, a dense and intricate work of speculative fiction, an inquiry into the terrifying arbitrariness of human events, a primer in how to achieve brilliance on a budget of nickels and dimes and a film editing achievement (by Sean Blake and David Bramley) in the same weight-class as Zelig, JFK and Fahrenheit 9/11, to name just three obvious stylistic influences. It's a multitiered wedding cake of a movie.
To read the rest of the NYPress review, click here.
Tags: CSA: The Confederate States of America, David Bramley, Kevin Willmott, Sean Blake
7 Comments »
After being egged on by the proprietors of girish and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule I'm calling for a blogathon on Robert Altman for March 3, in advance of his receiving an honorary Oscar on the evening of March 5. I am not 100 percent sure what I am going to write about yet, but I know in my bones that it would be a hell of a lot more fun, and way more Altmanesque, if other critical voices joined in on their own sites, creating a cacophony, so that critical monologues overlap and answer each other. (Sergio Leone's Altman celebration is already underway.)
Just pick a title or titles from Altman's filmography, or some other vaguely or tangentially Altmaesque topic, and weigh in. March 3 is the ideal deadline, to give people time to read and process what you've done. But the Altman spirit demands keeping things loose, so I'd say you could post as late as the evening of March 5, when the great man gets his statuette, finally. Just call it Altman Weekend.
As I said in posts on girish's blog, I realize this is very, very short notice and I totally understand if the suddenness precludes a lot of people from participating. But if there was every a time to honor a great American artist with some deep-dish lovin', this is it. So what the hell, let's do it.
I'll take care of the alerting-the-media part; if you want to participate, email me at reeling@aol.com and let me know what you're writing about and I'll add it to the master list of topics.
UPDATE: The second part of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule's Altman career retrospective is online, and worth a read.
UPDATE: And at 24LiesASecond, a marvelous Robert C. Cumbow piece on Altman and Coppola in the 70s.
UPDATE: The Wit of the Staircase on McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
UPDATE: The Evening Class recounts an Altman tribute in San Francisco.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
Tags: 24LiesASecond, girish, Robert Altman, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, The Evening Class, The Wit of the Staircase
35 Comments »
The House Next Door's 02/18/06 interview with former Salon critic Charles Taylor inspired some of the most heated reactions of any article yet published here. A number of comments centered on Taylor's defense of Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars, a sci-fi epic that has proved surprisingly divisive for such a gentle movie. To build on that discussion, I've culled a representative selection of reviews, arranged in a spectrum from pans to raves.
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon: "I'm something of an agnostic when it comes to De Palma, but he's unquestionably a director of consummate style and skill, one whose most popular films—from Carrie to Scarface to The Untouchables—have become tremendously influential in contemporary cinema. Sometimes his cannily constructed thrillers (like Dressed to Kill or Blow Out) have struck me as soulless, even sadistic, technical exercises, slavishly devoted to the gospel of Alfred Hitchcock. But one thing De Palma has never been, until now, is a crashing bore." Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew O'Hehir, Brian De Palma, Charles Taylor, David Edelstein, David Sterritt, Elvis Mitchell, Giuseppe Puccio, J. Hoberman, Margaret A. McGurk, Mission to Mars, Ray Greene, Ray Sawhill, Roger Ebert, Wesley Morris
33 Comments »
[Editor's Note: Today The House Next Door publishes its first piece by a guest contributor, Jeremiah Kipp, whose writing on movies has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications. Kipp interviewed Charles Taylor, an influential and compulsively readable film critic for Salon, after he was fired from the online magazine last year. He can now be read in the New York Times, the New York Observer and my home, the Star-Ledger, where he writes a monthly pop culture column called "High and Low." A transcript of their conversation follows.]
Charles Taylor was dismissed from his duties as a Salon critic in February, 2005. At the time, Salon editor Joan Walsh chalked up the decision to simple economics: their publication had just 22 editorial employees and could not justify employing three film critics. This was disappointing news for regular Salon subscribers and a harbinger of declining standards. Although Taylor's colleagues Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O'Hehir continue to offer insightful cultural analysis and film criticism, a casual perusal of Salon post-Taylor reveals feature articles that are elaborately disguised press releases pandering to the studios. Gossip, box office reports and hype don't address whether a film has merit as art or entertainment. The latter was Taylor's specialty; he called it like he saw it, often employing the sorts of provocative turns of phrase that spark arguments in parking lots. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew O'Hehir, Andrew Sarris, Bill Clinton, Brian De Palma, Charles Taylor, Clint Eastwood, David Talbot, Deeper Into Movies, Dwight Garner, Fahrenheit 9/11, Joan Walsh, Joyce Millman, Laura Miller, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Million Dollar Baby, Mission to Mars, Pauline Kael, Robert Altman, Salon, Stephanie Zacharek, Suzy Hansen, Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line, Tropical Malady
55 Comments »
Jonathan Demme's Heart of Gold, a concert film starring Neil Young, is not just a record of a performance, it's an example of great filmmaking at its most direct. It encourages you not just to contemplate Neil Young, the man and the musician, and connect his music with his life, but also to think about art and what it means to be an artist while admiring a brilliant movie's crystalline construction.
Shot in 2005 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, just five months after Young survived an operation to neutralize a potentially fatal brain anyeurism, Heart of Gold features Young, his backup band, his regular collaborator Emmylou Harris, a horn section, a string section and a gospel choir. The set list is broken cleanly in two. Part One is a live performance of Young's biographical concept album Prairie Wind, the third panel in a series of albums that also includes 1972's Harvest and his 20-years-later followup Harvest Moon. Part Two cherry picks songs from earlier in Young's career. The juxtaposition of older and new material prompts the viewer to realize, with delight, how much of Young's output seems to be told from the perspective of an older man looking back on life or a younger man looking forward to wisdom. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andy Keir, Crazy Horse, Danny Whitten, Ellen Kuras, Jonathan Demme, Keith Uhlich, Michael Zansky, Neil Young, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Stop Making Sense, Storefront Hitchcock, Swimming to Cambodia
15 Comments »
Whether or not you love it as a movie, the financial success of Brokeback Mountain undeniably represents a sea change in mainstream acceptance of homosexuality, as least as enacted on movie screens by handsome young stars in denim. But actor and comedian Jerome Cleary isn't too impressed with the accolades that have been heaped on costars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. In his editorial "Hollywood's Straight Jacket," posted on The Advocate's web site, Cleary expresses discomfort with the idea that we should applaud straight actors for convincingly playing gay people when homosexual actors playing straight have not only gone largely unrewarded over the decades, but have had to pull off their alchemy in secret, so as not to let a hostile public know they were gay in the first place. Cleary asks: Continue Reading »
Tags: Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jerome Cleary, Michelle Williams, The Advocate
18 Comments »
I've enjoyed David D'Arcy's GreenCine Daily dispatches from Berlinale, particularly today's entry, which included the following bit of gentlemanly pugnacity:
"The other French film that I enjoyed against all my expectations was Quatre Etoiles (Four Stars), a grifter farce by Christian Vincent that takes its title from its setting, the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. My friends sneered at me when I even mentioned the film. It's not the first time they've been wrong, and it won't be the last."
Tags: Berlinale, Christian Vincent, David D'Arcy, GreenCine Daily, Quatre Etoiles (Four Stars)
1 Comment »
Alan M. Levin didn't just make movies. He made careers.
The 79-year-old Maplewood, N.J. resident, who died in his sleep Monday at his home, was a documentary filmmaker whose long career was studded with milestones. These included the 1986 Frontline special "Inside the Jury Room," the first program to show jury deliberations; the WNET Channel 13 documentary series The 51st State; several HBO America Undercover documentaries made with his filmmaker son, Marc Levin, and a long collaboration with PBS' Bill Moyers.
But Mr. Levin was equally significant for mentoring generations of younger documentarians. Their ranks include Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary division; Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room); Hart Perry (Haiti: Killing the Dream); Barbara Kopple (American Dream; Wild Man Blues) and Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight).
To read the Star-Ledger obituary, click here.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door.
Tags: Alan M. Levin, Alex Gibney, Barbara Kopple, Eugene Jarecki, Hart Perry, R.I.P., Sheila Nevins
No Comments »
One of my favorite one-line kiss-offs came from Andrew Sarris, of all people. During the industry's late-'90s push to make Skeet Ulrich a big movie star, Sarris wrote that he just didn't see what the big deal was—that Ulrich was a capable actor but didn't offer any distinctive qualities that weren't already provided by other young stars, and on top of that, Sarris wrote, "He reminds me of half the waiters on Melrose Avenue."
Yee-ouch.
Not to kick Ulrich for no reason—I'm not sure what he's up to these days, and I never thought he was a bad actor, just that he never showed me anything that Johnny Depp didn't show me with more flair—but I've got the former Scream costar on the brain because MSNBC movie columnist Dave White name-checked him in a very funny column about the sudden ubiquity of certain hunky young leading men who land a succession of high-profile roles for reasons nobody can quite pinpoint. Even the ones with a bit of spiky charisma ultimately seem forgettable, safe, factory sealed. If they possess that All About Eve quality, fire and music, they rarely if every show it. They seem like understudies who weren't ready for their big breaks; players to be named later. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrew Sarris, Dave White, Harrison Ford, Johnny Depp, Kirsten Dunst, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Matthew McConaughey, MSNBC, Natalie Portman, Paul Walker, River Phoenix, Scream, Skeet Ulrich, Tyrese Gibson, Usher
33 Comments »
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