My grandmother was not much of a moviegoer, but when I mentioned Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), her face lit up with recognition. "I saw that picture! At the end, doesn't he reach out for a butterfly?" Her hand reached out, and she mimed the famous last scene. I nodded. "I can't believe I remember that!" she said. "I can see it in my head, just what it looked like." A whole generation was haunted by Lew Ayres reaching out for that butterfly in the final scene of one of the worthier Best Picture Oscar winners, but Ayres himself suffered for taking the lesson of that anti-World War One movie to heart. At the onset of World War Two, Ayres declared himself a conscientious objector and suffered savage criticism from all sides. He served honorably in the war as a medic, but refused to put himself in any situation where he would have to kill another human being. Continue Reading »
["Hal Ashby's movies captured a messy, post-1960s America in alternately hilarious and poignant ways. Here, Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, and Jason Schwartzman talk about their favorites. ... Payne on The Landlord: I don't want to tell you much about it. Discover it the way I did: Just see it. It contains all the gentleness, eccentric rhythms, oddball humor, brilliant editing, and deep humanism that mark his other films, and like his other films, it's utterly unique. The performances are sensational—particularly by Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Louis Gossett, Jr., and the great Diana Sands. Add cinematography by Gordon Willis—his third film—in case you need more convincing. All right, it's a little uneven at times, but so what? It's wonderful to watch a great artist still searching for economy of style."] Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]
The travails of University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian make for a Kafkaesque example of the Bush administration's post-9/11 detention policies, which have incarcerated some 5,000 U.S.-residing "terrorist" suspects without a resulting conviction. Line Halvorsen's mix of vérité and talking heads presents a case history of a middle-aged Palestinian-rights activist and academic, arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night, with prosecutors promising that nine years of bugged family phone calls, seized books, connections to charities and alleged immigration-related chicanery would prove that he was a leading terror-cell mastermind. At the end of a six-month 2005 trial in Tampa, featuring Israeli survivors and witnesses of bus bombings to which the state made no link to Al-Arian, the computer-science professor and his three co-defendants were not convicted on any of 51 counts. (When asked what would've convinced him of Al-Arian's guilt, a juror deadpans, "Evidence.") Halvorsen gives a large share of screen time to Al-Arian's frequently distraught wife Nahla and their five children, and while the choice results in occasional redundancy (the photogenic sons playing video games in their Coldplay t-shirts are just reg'lar American dudes), it domesticates the nightmare of thousands. The film shies warily from many specifics of Al-Arian's verifiable activities, aside from a rally clip of him yelling, "Victory for Islam, death to Israel," to which he defensively responds, "I never meant individuals…" But when after his seeming legal victory his incarceration goes on and on, even after a reluctant plea bargain and promised deportation, one doesn't have to embrace Al-Arian's agenda to believe that the highly publicized vise he was placed in (beginning with an ostentatious press conference by Attorney General Ashcroft) was race-baiting political circus at its core, and as close to a show trial as Patriot Act-enabled jurisprudence can get.
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.
_________________________________________________ Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker and Editor Emeritus of The House Next Door.
[USA vs. Al-Arian premieres today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2008. Click here for screening information.]
Sami Al-Arian, the subject of Line Halvorsen's real-life, Kafkaesque nightmare doc USA vs. Al-Arian, is a highly regarded professor with a loving wife named Nahla, three daughters, and two sons, who happens to be an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights (unsurprisingly since he and Nahla were raised refugees, displaced when Israel came into being). He's also one of the many residents of the United States who found himself on the wrong side of the Patriot Act after 9/11, held for two and half years in maximum security, awaiting trial on flimsy, terrorism related charges. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
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Long considered a stately (read: mediocre) gender-reversing rehash of Jules and Jim (TSPDT #40), Francois Truffaut's second foray into the work of Henri Roche is in fact his most mature and fully realized work, and one of the very best films I've seen throughout the Shooting Down Pictures project. Instead of Jules and Jim's giddy, free-flying use of cinema to amplify the exuberance of its young lovers, here Truffaut's techniques soberly and masterfully emphasize a tactile, constricting sense of place and time against which the desires of this ill-fated threesome continually struggle, charging the film with a steadily accumulating sexual tension that is never fully satiated despite two lengthy sex scenes. Truffaut builds and expands on Jules and Jim's vision of love as a dark descent into obsessive ownership killing off the sense of free discovery from which it sprung, while being equally deft, less ostentatious and more judicious in his stylistic approach (characterized by finely choreographed long tracking shots) to emphasize the dramatic core of each scene. The narration is dominated by a voice-over that emphasizes the film's origins as a novel, but is by no means a reversion to the cinema du papa literary adaptation against which Truffaut made his name criticizing. Narration itself is the controlling theme of the film: it is both a behavior endemic to the film's highly literate post-Victorian milieu, and an actualization technique through which the three leads formulate their respective identities, though largely at the expense of their innocence and friendship. It is hard to think of many films that are as vigorous and heartfelt in their consideration of the two sexes' perilous relations as friends and lovers as this masterpiece, Truffaut's finest.
_____________________________________ To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
["Although they are far less in number than they were during their peak in the late '50s (in 1958, specifically, there were 4,058 drive-ins in operation across the nation), the drive-in movie theater still exists. The number of drive-ins still showing movies has remained at slightly above 400 over the last 10 years - the last precipitous drop occurred from 1998-1999, when 134 drive-ins closed during that single year. (Less than a year after we last visited with my daughter in 2000, the Foothill Drive-in closed. It has been dark for several seasons, its screen torn down, though its lavish marquee, a noted attraction along Route 66, remains standing.) But since 1999 the total number of drive-ins has stabilized; fewer have closed and disappeared. Going to the drive-in in 2008 is a rarified experience, to be sure - Californians in 1958 had 223 separate drive-ins in this state alone from which to choose. That number, as of 2007, was down to 19, and at this writing, on the 75th anniversary of the opening of the first drive-in back in 1933, it may be even lower than that."] Continue Reading »
Possibly the most poignant, profound, and artistically viable film you'll see at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this year is Georgi Lazarevski's This Way Up, a portrait of a senior citizens' home for Palestinians just east of Jerusalem. Outside Our Lady of Pains, the wall of separation approaches, cutting the residents of the home off from the world and posing a challenge to the relatives who wish to visit them. Lazarevski's genius is assessing a political situation through psychological portraiture: His focus is on the decay of the human body and the fear old people have of reaching life's dead end, and in the (sometimes forced) separation of the old from the world of the young they used to inhabit, Lazarevski finds a canny correlation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He lovingly observes the humor and sadness that fills the halls of Our Lady of Pains, often returning to an old woman who wishes God's wrath (among other things) on another for her perpetual singing. "May a disease take you away," she says, always threatening to strike the other woman, but that she never does suggests that she understands that she gripes for the same reason the other one sings—to bide time until death comes calling. Except for the care they receive from the home's kind staff and the few visits they get from relatives weary and scared from having to climb the wall of separation, these kindhearted old people live mostly alone—with their memories and regrets, and in the case of one gentleman, his frustration over not being able to give George W. Bush a piece of his mind. Their remove from the world will break your heart, just as one man's rather child-like understanding of the wall that he sees from his window—gripped by its size and width, he compares it to the Great Wall of China—puts the absurdity of the Israeli occupation into clearer perspective. (Preceding This Way Up is Claire Fowler's Open Heart, a depressing account of the struggles a Palestinian family faces when trying to jostle their young son through a series of Israeli checkpoints in order to get him to the hospital that will temper the risks of his congenital heart condition.)
The name Steven Moffat has been the stamp of quality on Doctor Who scripts over the past three seasons, so it's easy to go into "Silence in the Library," the first of a two-part story, with high expectations. Further, since Moffat was recently named the series' new showrunner (beginning in 2010), viewer expectations are perhaps even a bit higher for this story. He certainly doesn't waste any time putting his dramatic flourishes on the piece. The story begins with a little girl (Eve Newton). She appears to be in therapy with a Dr. Moon (Colin Salmon) while her dad (Mark Dexter) lingers in the background. In her mind exists a fantastical library the size of a planet. She peacefully floats around the silent library, seemingly the only patron. The silence is suddenly broken by a loud banging from the other side of a pair of doors. The girl is alarmed. The Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna (Catherine Tate) bust through. Continue Reading »
["At a symposium on films and film criticism held last fall in Brookline, Massachusetts, the great critic and essayist Phillip Lopate, in the middle of an eloquent and inarguably correct disquisition against narcissistic '70s nostalgia and for a film history that privileges beauty and integrity over "edge," allowed that he now preferred films that had "something to do with humanity" to any other pictures. While fully respecting that perspective, the genre aesthete in me had to raise a hand in favor of putative genre formalists (I think Mario Bava came up). Which is not to say I object to pictures that have something to do with humanity. I just like films that offer something to do with humanity in ways I haven't seen. And it's true that such films can be found in all periods—but alas, these days, you're more likely to find the most eloquent and startling expressions and explorations of humanity in the films of the past. Such as, say, Toni, the Renoir picture released by Masters of Cinema and featuring a commentary by Phillip and Kent Jones, which I reviewed here."] Continue Reading »
[Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North premieres today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2008. Click here for screening information.]
Beginning with home movie footage of an Independence Day parade in Bristol, Rhode Island—the longest running in the U.S., so director Katrina Browne explains in voiceover—Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North explores, through a very personal lens, the sordid tale of the slave trade in the pious American north. In addition to being a first-time filmmaker, Browne is also a descendant of the prominent, revered DeWolf clan: New England royalty who amassed a fortune through the blood, sweat and tears of the estimated 10,000 Africans they tore from their homeland, the biggest traders in American history. After sending letters to 200 relatives with an invitation to join her on her quest to retrace the steps of the "triangle trade" from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba, Browne and nine of her kin (including active church members and an Episcopal priest) set off on their own truth and reconciliation journey. Continue Reading »
Critical Condition offers a salutary lesson in the difference in viewer response between the fiction and the nonfiction film. What we can comfortably deride as a self-conscious miserablism when it's mediated through the performances of well-paid actors is not so easy to dismiss when presented directly as the sufferings of real-life individuals. Unabashedly didactic and frequently overwhelming in its straightforward depiction of the more advanced stages of human agony, Roger Weisberg's film offers an outraged indictment of the American health care system by documenting the lives of four individuals, all facing serious medical problems and all no longer insured. Continue Reading »
1."Art of Surprise": From The American Scholar, a reprint of a 2006 lecture delivered by film and theater critic Steve Vineberg. (Hattip: N.P. Thompson)
["The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we're none of us pure of either mind or heart. It's the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov's stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare's King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter's Tale. It's the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by "unpredictable" isn't the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shyamalan's movies) but the turn you don't expect just because it's so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, "Of course.""] Continue Reading »
My grandmother was not much of a moviegoer, but when I mentioned Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), her face lit up with recognition. "I saw that picture! At the end, doesn't he reach out for a butterfly?" Her hand reached out, and she mimed the famous last scene. I nodded. "I can't believe I remember that!" she said. "I can see it in my head, just what it looked like." A whole generation was haunted by Lew Ayres reaching out for that butterfly in the final scene of one of the worthier Best Picture Oscar winners, but Ayres himself suffered for taking the lesson of that anti-World War One movie to heart. At the onset of World War Two, Ayres declared himself a conscientious objector and suffered savage criticism from all sides. He served honorably in the war as a medic, but refused to put himself in any situation where he would have to kill another human being. Continue Reading »
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