1. "Youssef Chahine, 1926 - 2008": R.I.P. from GreenCine.
["Youssef Chahine, one of Egypt's most lauded movie directors whose films over nearly five decades often went on Fellini-esque flights of fancy and tackled social ills and Islamic fundamentalism, died Sunday in Cairo. He was 82 years old. His death comes about four weeks after he fell into a coma following a brain hemorrhage...."] Continue Reading »
[Man on Wire is now playing in select theaters. Check local listings. Click here to read Lauren Wissot's review of the film, originally reviewed at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.]
"I wish I'd known you were going to interview him—I'd love to learn if he's still in touch with my friend Barbara Remington who had the albino skunk." This was my original downtown bohemian pal Rose's reaction when she found out I'd just spent twenty minutes at the offices of Magnolia Pictures doing a beat-the-clock interview with Philippe Petit, the only person to ever dance across a high-wire between the Twin Towers, and filmmaker James Marsh, who profiled the legendary Frenchman and his "artistic crime of the century" in his appropriately uplifting documentary Man On Wire. Though we discussed everything from spirituality to positive con artistry to A Clockwork Orange, the subject of living in Chelsea with an albino skunk never came up. (Sorry, Rose.) Here's what did... Continue Reading »
Unemployed Superman Brandon Routh stars in the sixth episode of Fear Itself as a young husband and potential father who allows his wife's (Shiri Appleby) enthusiasm for a home in an odd private community to blind him to the fine print on the sales contract. You see, though The Commons seems like a great place to live and raise your kids, it's really a lot like Stepford, Connecticut or Kings Row where everyone hides behind painted smiles.
If you ever read any Ira Levin, Thomas Tryon, Shirley Jackson or Jack Finney, you'll be able to predict every beat of this episode scripted by Kelly Kennemer and directed by American Psycho's Mary Harron. This would not be a big deal were it ever really suspenseful, witty or scary but since it fails on all counts, we're left looking at the bland story and just waiting for the obvious "shock" ending to drop, right out of Tryon's Harvest Home but without the power of that novel's symbolic castration.
The storytelling desperation can be found right in the opening minutes: We're plunged into an inexplicable chase through the night woods with Clark Kent running from a mob armed with torches and a pack of barking dogs like the angry villagers from Frankenstein. We see that this is just a flash-forward, placed here so that we might stick out the utter boredom of the next hour in the hope that we'll understand just why he's being chased. But that becomes completely obvious when it's quickly revealed that everyone is being watched by security cameras and that community transgressions are punished through methods slightly medieval.
Harron brings nothing distinctive to the episode, which looks like the rough cut of a Lifetime Network Christmas special. The only thing that's missing is Gail O' Grady. Hopefully the next episode in the series will bring back some of the bite that Stuart Gordon put into Eater, still the best of the bunch.
1. "Critics in Crisis": Phillip Lopate weighs in on the current state of criticism. (Hattip: GreenCine)
["My own feeling, based on talking to young cinephiles around the country, is that there continues to be a passion for cinema and an impulse to articulate the experience of falling in love with a certain film, as well as to thrash out the pluses and minuses of any lesser picture. Those who need to think about movies on the page will continue to do so, and the best of these pieces will find their way into literary journals, self-published tracts, blogs and e-zines. I do think a two-track system will develop in web writing, such that concision, originality, erudition and literary sparkle will come to be prized on some sites. As to how these future, stubborn film critics will be able to support their families and pay off their mortgages and college loans, that's a question I must beg off answering. I will only repeat that American film criticism has, traditionally, never been a cushy vocation with a guaranteed income; it has always been nourished by the financial sacrifices of the vast majority of its finest practitioners."] Continue Reading »
[Baghead is now playing in New York City and Los Angeles.]
Baghead is the first mumblecore movie to fail from thematic overambition rather than excessive modesty; for that alone it deserves some kind of prize. Out of the core cluster of these filmmakers, the Duplass Brothers have always exhibited the sensibility most likely to attain commercial success (noted neutrally, neither praise nor pejorative). Perhaps non-coincidentally, Baghead is the first of these films to receive a national roll-out of sorts (in a weird strategy, it's opened in college towns first—I saw it in Austin a little over a month ago—and proceeded back to the big cities, presumably on a storm of buzz. Then it goes back out to the rest of the world.)
In The Puffy Chair, the Duplass' offered not just an obviously discernible character arc and honest-to-goodness resolution, they also had characters who could've popped out of a mainstream film—unlike Joe Swanberg's characters (too sexually aware for a H'wood film) or Andrew Bujalski's cloistered post-grads, they're red-blooded, jockish guys who say "dude" a lot. After watching The Puffy Chair, a friend of mine on the jockish side himself said, "That was like Mutual Appreciation for my people." Fair enough. It's also hilarious, and not in a subtle way. There is also a wall-to-wall soundtrack of indie rock used as a lazy transitional device rather than underpinning the action, but hey, you can't have everything. Continue Reading »
1. "Why So Pretentious?": Fernando F. Croce on The Dark Knight, The Edge of Heaven, and Mamma Mia!.
["To be fair, The Dark Knight did provide the most chilling moment I have had at the movies all summer. I giggled at the ridiculous growl Bale employed from under his Batman mask, and was readily met with death stares from my neighboring viewers: Holy Mass had been violated. Please. Dude dresses like a bat, and suddenly cinema at long last fulfills its potential? It's bad enough when rabid fanboys become so prissy about the film's "awesomeness" that they fuse into one huge, fat-assed Comic Book Guy declaring "Worst critic ever!" at any questioning review; it's doubly depressing when the critics themselves swallow the hype machine's baby food and call it caviar for the ages."] Continue Reading »
M*****core is dead; I'm calling it. With the release of the Duplass Bros.' Baghead, the unfortunate tag—convenient for journalists, torture for its alleged makers—will hopefully die away. Its practitioners would disown it because it was coined as a joke by Andrew (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) Bujalski's sound mixer, then introduced into wide circulation before anyone realized that the kind of joke/nickname you coin amongst friends late at night at a bar might just come back to haunt you. Yet from the outside, it seemed like a more-or-less apt term for a group of movies about young folks without the nerve to honestly communicate their romantic and social neuroses, let alone ones containing an honest-to-goodness traditional dramatic arc and/or the mise-en-scene to go along with it.
Baghead—with its over-ambitious dramatic structure and meta-moves—should put a stop to all that. In the meantime, since we missed the release date, now might be a good time to address Benten Films' double-disc release of Aaron Katz's first two features, Dance Party, USA and Quiet City. I prefer the former to the latter; add them up, however, and you get so far outside "m*****core" 's alleged ambitions (or alleged lack thereof) that you feel cleaner already. Continue Reading »
While elitist and panderer (well, at least one of those might be true) Barack Obama is canoodling with those cranky anti-war Germans, John McCain scheduled himself a nice little meet-cute with the press atop an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now approve of offshore drilling, and you can't blame them. But in another stroke of bad luck, the senator's campaign cancelled the photo-op this afternoon due to weather concerns. Hurricane Dolly is, of course, bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico, but as Ben Smith of Politico.com reported earlier today, the weather in New Orleans is lovely.
Perhaps the weather of concern is a different hurricane: Katrina. In their effort to sell the idea of offshore drilling, McCain, his surrogates and others in the Republican Party have outright lied about the impact of storms on oil rigs. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, rumored to be a possible running mate for his buddy McCain but denying any interest yesterday on FOX & Friends, was apparently unaware of the spills caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005: "One of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, [is that there were] no major spills," he told FOX. Two years ago, the U.S. Minerals Management Service reported that there were 124 spills amounting to over 17,500 barrels of oil. It was kind of hard to miss…even from space.
The mere thought of a nearby hurricane doing its thing while McCain poses for photos on an oil rig that was not one of the 113 destroyed by storms three years ago should probably have been enough to send up a red flag at McCain headquarters, but it was more likely the fact that over 419,000 gallons of oil is, as I write, mixing with water 29 miles off the Mississippi River in New Orleans courtesy of a barge and tanker collision. The accident has produced a 12-mile-long oil slick and a stench that some might describe as "our future."
1. Some X-Files: I Want To Believe reviews: my own at UGO (longer one to come at Reverse Shot); Jeremiah Kipp at Slant Magazine; Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com; Alonso Duralde at MSNBC; Andrea Chase at Killer Movie Reviews; Roger Ebert at The Chicago Sun-Times; Stephanie Zacharek at Salon; and Manohla Dargis in The New York Times.
["Think of Carter, then, as a reverse-Argento (a so-so director and a terrific writer, especially when it comes to structure) and of I Want To Believe as his Deep Red (a wintry-white Rorschach stained, occasionally, with crimson). The X-Files has always walked a fine line between the palatably corporate and the defiantly personal. This latest (and, I would hazard a guess, final) installment tends more toward the latter than to the former. It's merely functional as a thriller (it's scariest moment - a widescreen contemplation of the gulf separating J. Edgar Hoover from George W. Bush - is also its funniest), and the resonance of its numerous grace notes are often dependent on prior knowledge of events and happenings in the long-running television series that came before."] 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?]
One of the seminal works of 20th century musical theatre gets a lavish cinematic reworking by G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box). Perhaps more than Bertolt Brecht's infamous libretto or Kurt Weill's song score, the standouts of this production are Andrej Andrejew's lush, atmospheric Victorian production design and Fritz Arlo Wagner's masterful camerawork, featuring some of the most elaborate and expressive tracking shots attempted in early sound cinema. But the majority of Weill's music is regrettably omitted to accommodate expository scenes whose poorly recorded sound deadens the proceedings, despite Pabst and Wagner's envelope-pushing efforts to add cinematic movement to dialogue. Pabst's blending of naturalistic period detail with expressionist shadows creates a seductive subterranean reality, lays the groundwork for film noir, but its allure runs counter to the disconcerting, confrontational unreality of the Brecthian aesthetic. The one element that runs counter to the proceedings is Lotte Lenya as Jenny, whose aloof presence injects a disruptive counterrythm to the Pabst's clockwork choreography of the frame. She singlehandedly offers a Brechtian rebuttal to the impeccable prestige picture trappings that surround her.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
By Dan Callahan
Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited is still an accepted classic, and so is the famous TV miniseries from the early '80s, with its heavyweight star cast (the father figures were played by no less than Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud). It actually takes longer to watch the whole miniseries than to read the book, and PBS viewers were as overcome as Jeremy Irons's besotted, middle-class Charles Ryder at the sight of all the decadent glamour of the sprawling Brideshead mansion and the ambiguous Catholic deathtrap which lay waiting within it. In the miniseries, Anthony Andrews made the teddy bear-hugging rich boy Sebastian into a woefully lovable and then tragic figure, drowning his sorrows in drink. Sebastian is gay, and Charles is pretty willing to bend, but Waugh is too fastidious to bring this up in any direct manner; consequently, many fans of Brideshead Revisited aren't quite sure if Charles and Sebastian are ever lovers, and the miniseries is no help in this regard. Irons looks at Andrews with highly convincing love in his eyes, and even speaks of how he loves Sebastian during his endless, soothing voiceovers, which always seem to begin, "Ahhhh....those languid days at Brideshead....with Sebastian...which can never be again." It's the first few hours of college-boy love between Charles and Sebastian that give the miniseries of Brideshead its powerful romantic charge; in comparison, the last few hours where Charles tries to love Sebastian's sister Julia are cryptic, dreary and depressingly unconvincing.
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To read the rest of the review at Slant Magazine, click here.
Politicians must always choose their words wisely. Words, even more so than images, help brand a politician and sell his or her agenda. It's a clever bit of marketing that goes as far back as Aristotle, who explained that trust and wisdom are key components of persuasion, and it's employed every day on Madison Avenue. Even apolitical entities like the military use fancy words like "redeployment" to disguise the reality of retreat and defeat. When words are used to intentionally confuse, manipulate or mislead people, however, that's when choosing your words carefully quickly turns into propaganda.
The Bush administration has been especially crafty in choosing words and constructing phrases to further its agenda. The word "surge" was introduced into the public lexicon early last year when George W. Bush attempted to sell his escalation of the war in Iraq to a skeptical and war-fatigued nation. Last week, Mr. Bush—who has been utterly opposed to setting any kind of timetable for withdrawal from Iraq—finally agreed to such a timetable after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made it clear that the time for U.S. forces to exit was nearing. Of course, he didn't use the words timetable or timeframe; he used the painstakingly chosen phrase "time horizon." Continue Reading »
A couple of weeks ago I went to a press screening of James Marsh's Man on Wire. I'd heard a lot of good things about the British doc, and indeed it has a fascinating subject in recounting the early career of French aerialist/conceptual artist Philippe Petit, especially his daring walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
But watching the film was not a happy experience. Try as I might to concentrate on its narrative, I couldn't. After 45 minutes I walked out. Continue Reading »
1. "I Am Jack's Manic-Depression": Jim Emerson, straight-up at Scanners.
["If you've ever suffered from clinical depression, you know the experience is impossible to convey to someone who hasn't also gone through it. It doesn't make sense. It's like trying to describe why you love somebody. How do you explain a lack of feeling, or interest, or pleasure, that is both numbing and excruciatingly painful? How do you account for a disconnection with the past and any conception of a future? It's not "living in the moment"—it's being stuck in a moment from which you can't imagine any escape—not just the feeling that this asphyxiating near-deadness will go on forever, but that you can't imagine ever having felt any other way (even though, logically, you know that is not possible). You can remember feeling pleasure—no, make that "having felt pleasure"—but you have no memory of what it actually felt like. One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I've ever seen (though Laurent Cantet's "Time Out" and Eric Steel's "The Bridge" delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time. I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror. I recognized myself in the movie, relished the psychological acuteness of what I was seeing, felt its black absurdity resonate in my poor, chemically imbalanced noggin."] Continue Reading »
*sniff* Ma... (some clips after the break). Continue Reading »
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