The House Next Door

Archive: November, 2008

Links for the Day (December 1st, 2008)

by on November 30th, 2008 at 10:01 pm in Links for the Day

1. "Still going ... Energizer Bunny to turn 20": Happy Birthday you sexy, shades-wearing pink thang!

["Turns out he really does just keep going and going. The Energizer Bunny, the symbol of battery maker Energizer Holdings Inc., debuted in commercials in 1989 and has, well, kept going ever since. Now entering his 20th year, the advertising icon has become famous enough that people who persevere beyond reasonable expectation are often referred to, or call themselves, the "Energizer Bunny." Among the many references from politicians:"] Continue Reading »




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Transporter 3

by on November 30th, 2008 at 2:10 pm in Film

[Transporter 3 is now playing in theaters.]

When XXX came out in 2002, a popular theme for entertainment journalism trend pieces was to note that—with the rapidly approaching end of the Schwarzenneger, Stallone and Seagal era—there was a gaping hole where a new generation of action star should be. Vin Diesel was supposed to take up the mantle, but, his career having subsequently gone too far in some direction or other, Jason Statham made for a plausible second contender. Cf. a far-seeing Manohla Dargis reviewing 2002's The Transporter: "the actor certainly seems equipped to develop into a mid-weight alternative to Vin Diesel." Continue Reading »




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935 (76). Scenes from Under Childhood (1967-1970, Stan Brakhage)

by on November 30th, 2008 at 1:35 pm in Film

[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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Stan Brakhage's approximation of what it's like to see as a child, drawn from years of footage of his own children, is nothing as crude as a literal re-enactment of a child's point of view, but something much more vivid and disturbing. The film opens with a series of red screens, suggesting light filtered through closed infant eyes, before launching into lightning flashes of white: a nascent gaze opening to the world and hardly able to take in its brilliance. This traumatic sensation is the underlying emotion that runs through the film's four chapters, and it's a marvel how Brakhage's panoply of images—progressing from the abstract to the very literal—can be such an emotionally affecting account of how children come to perceive the world. Mostly shot in handheld with the flickers and jumps one expects of Super 8, the film has been described as the greatest home movie ever made, with Children playing in a yard bathed in impossibly beautiful tree-dappled light or a close-up the upturned carcass of a dead wasp on a bathtub lip strike the heart of a uncanny left behind by adulthood. There's little nostalgic about this wonder though, as such images will be interspersed by recurring fades to a haunting, ghostlike formation of undulating crystals, suggesting human cells regenerating feverishly. At times the gaze is simply blank, looking at nothing or no one in particular, focusing more on negative spaces than objects, the indeterminate time of childhood with no purpose but to be. A soup of memory, liquid and light, churning with life.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.




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934 (75). La Kermesse héroïque aka Carnival in Flanders (1935, Jacques Feyder)

by on November 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pm in Film

[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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This lavish farce about a 17th century Belgian town whose women openly welcome Spanish invaders when their cowardly male counterparts go into hiding is a classic model of the ebullient pacing and jaunty eroticism that's long been associated with French comedic cinema. Feyder orchestrates his ensemble and witty dialogue with a lilting, musical efficiency, a quality that's also reflected in the camerawork, which moves sinuously across lavish sets inspired by Flemish paintings of the period. Feyder's fanciful farce envisions a marriage of pacifism and sexual equality yielding an idyllic society, which, despite strong critical support, rendered it anathema to contemporary politics. The Belgians saw it as a mockery of their leaders' ineffectuality during their occupation by the Germans during World War II; the Nazis eventually banned it when links between them and the film's invading Spaniards became apparent. It's utopian vision of international peace brokered by the fairer sex, while amounting to a feminist statement ahead of its time, seems downright naive in the immediate context of Petain and Chamberlain's appeasement policies to the Nazis (much in the way that the "we should have stayed in Iraq" argument underlying David O. Russell's Three Kings looks very different in the Bush era). But the film managed to place on many top ten lists in a poll conducted by the Belgian Cinematheque only a few years after the end of World War II, possibly attesting to the triumph of laughter and masterful filmmaking over one of the darkest moments of humankind.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.




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5 for the Day: Mia Farrow

by on November 27th, 2008 at 10:02 pm in Film

By Dan Callahan

"If I seem to be running, it's because I'm pursued..."

—Mia Farrow, 1968—

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HND@Grassroots: Season 2, Episode 10 (28), "Vadim's New Roomate"

by , and on November 27th, 2008 at 11:00 am in Film

By Odie "Odienator" Henderson, John Lichman, and Keith Uhlich

[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.]

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"Indie 500″: The Broken West, Prodigy, TV On The Radio, Grand Archives

by on November 26th, 2008 at 10:02 pm in Music

I know I keep coming up with constant excuses for this column's (to put it politely) somewhat irregular publishing schedule, but this one I need to make. Briefly: The Onion AV Club is in the thick of its year-end process, which meant I just couldn't pass up the chance to make a year-end top 10. I just couldn't; it's an addiction. So maybe my AV Club list and my list here will be markedly different; perhaps not (it's been a weak year and I don't imagine many more surprises cropping up). In any case, I've been cramming like a guilty high-school student on 2008 releases; notes below represent things I was thinking about intensely a month/month-and-a-half ago. Please accept the mental distance; soon enough I'll be catching up on everything that ostensibly matters musically about 2008.

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Here's the thing about The Broken West: they're one of the most derivative bands working today. They have no ideas of their own. They never met a Big Star track they didn't like, except for maybe "Holocaust." Am I being clear enough in explaining why I like them? Their 2007 debut I Can't Go On, I'll Go On was a huge guilty pleasure for me, ridiculous titular Beckett allusion and all. Back then, I shamefacedly wrote out my qualifications with more conviction than I felt, and they're all still true: "sneering lead singers who assert themselves like American Gallagher brothers ... no breathing room except for ballads ... don't have a whole lot on their mind besides, you know, girls and place-holder lyrics ... consciously anti-intellectual...They're not clever, but they're satisfying." This was an oblique (OK, trying to avoid chastisement for my taste) way of saying that I listened to their album way too many times, and I'm not real sure why. There's a lot of filler there: looking on the track-listing a little over a year later, I can't remember what half of it sounds like, and re-visiting tracks like "You Can Build An Island" or "Brass Ring" isn't really helping. Continue Reading »




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Milk—Take 3

by on November 26th, 2008 at 1:20 pm in Film

Like a good many film biographies, Milk reduces the struggles of its subject—gay-rights activist Harvey Milk (Sean Penn)—to a mostly inoffensive checklist. It's a dispassionate piece of work that I suspect will have the firebrand emotion it so sorely lacks foisted upon it by preached-to choirs and blubbering bleeding hearts stoked by the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk. Bad art serves no one, but the reach for significance is often enough to proffer a pat-on-the-back and an affirmative nod, as if 'attempt' and 'achievement' were suddenly synonymous terms of action.

There's a lot of attempting in Milk, from identifiably hetero actors giving their best gay to director Gus Van Sant going, um, straight after a few years wandering the Bela Tarr-derived arthouse hinterlands. The film is worst when Van Sant falls back on his hand-me-down instincts, shooting an entire conversation in a blood-covered whistle's reflective surface or Steadicam-tracking Milk's assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin) in a reprise of the simplistically troubling aesthetics of Elephant. Most problematic are Van Sant's parallels of Milk to the doomed heroine of Puccini's Tosca, especially during a howler of a death scene (featuring a rack focus of most unintentional hilarity, however geographically accurate) that forces an unearned sense of martyrdom onto the fictive puppet at the movie's center.
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To read the rest of the review at UnderGroundOnline, click here.




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Understanding Screenwriting #11

by on November 25th, 2008 at 10:02 pm in Film, Television

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Changeling, I've Loved You So Long, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, ER, 30 Rock, Some Quick Sweeps Updates, and Trailers, but first:

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FAN MAIL: I can appreciate theoldboy's disappointment that I did not deal with the opening monologue in Crash. I often have a similar reaction after I send off a column to Keith and suddenly think, hey, why I didn't I mention that.

I think Max Winter's take on Sidney in Rachel Getting Married is a very interesting one, and I know there are a lot of people who feel as theoldboy does that the energy of the actors and the music make that film more entertaining than a lot of what is around. So far it has not been all that great a year for films and we have to take our pleasures where we can find them. Continue Reading »




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It Does No-Body Good: Milk—Take 2

by on November 25th, 2008 at 3:50 am in Film

By Dan Callahan

[Milk opens in theaters on Wednesday, November 26th.]

Slain politician Harvey Milk was a gay pioneer and by all accounts a real mensch and role model, and his story was told in full for the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Now Gus Van Sant is trolling for awards with Milk, a paint-by numbers biopic of the tireless activist that wastes the efforts of some fine actors, most notably Sean Penn, who strives to play Milk as a three-dimensional person with idiosyncrasies and failings even as the "let's get from A to B" script by Dustin Lance Black boxes him into textbook sainthood. Penn manages to get some energy going in his public speeches, especially when he's riling up a crowd in the Castro, the gay area of San Francisco where Milk served as unofficial Mayor and then elected official, and he has nice moments of physical schtick that involve subtle, queeny eye flares and dainty hand gestures. Penn even reaches for Brando-esque tragedy in the last scenes, but the straightforward corniness of the script foils all his actorly nuances. Continue Reading »




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Beautiful Dreamer: Milk—Take 1

by on November 25th, 2008 at 12:00 am in Film

[Milk opens in theaters Wednesday, November 26th. Click here to read Lauren's Spout Blog coverage of the film's press conference.]

Milk, Gus Van Sant's labor of love biopic about civil rights leader Harvey Milk (the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States and later gunned down, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, three decades ago this month), is mainstream filmmaking at its finest and a perfect wedding of subject matter to director. For Milk, like Van Sant, was a former "radical" who learned to work within—even to embrace—the system, stealthily turning it to his advantage. What Milk is to extremist activists like Larry Kramer, Van Sant is to fellow filmmaker Todd Haynes—no longer a director of experimental art in the moving picture medium, but a maverick of the mini majors.

Even comparing Van Sant to Haynes is like weighing apples against oranges: Van Sant is as much of a sly showman as his subject, who grasped the power of rallying crowds with catchy lines ("My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you," a play on Anita Bryant's scare tactic of gays "recruiting our children") and staged events (stepping on dog poop to promote a pooper-scooper law)—an insider working covertly within the system. Indeed, Van Sant understands the power of schmaltz above nuance. Whatever you need to do to make your message accessible and heard loud and clear—evidenced in the director's casting of straight marquee names (like Sean Penn as Milk, in an Oscar-worthy performance) in the lead roles at the expense of actual gay actors—is worth the creative price. Continue Reading »




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Links for the Day (November 25th, 2008)

by on November 24th, 2008 at 10:01 pm in Links for the Day

1. On the eve of Milk, a two-part remembrance by Marshall Fine of how he and one Ms. Anita Bryant memorably crossed paths. Part 1 here; Part 2 here.

["I argued then and would argue now that a critic's biases are what form his taste and his aesthetic. The professional critic, however, enters every event—be it concert, film, play, whatever—with a clean slate and reacts to what he sees, writing from the standpoint of that aesthetic. But this wasn't a discussion about the role of the critic. This was a firing fueled by social and economic pressure. I'd poked a finger in the eye of what would come to be known a few years later as the Christian Right. I had to go."] Continue Reading »




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933 (74). La Région centrale (1971, Michael Snow)

by on November 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am in Film

[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?]

[La Région centrale will screen Monday November 24 and Tuesday November 25 at the Anthology Film Archives]

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Arguably the first feature filmed by a robot, Michael Snow's three hour exploration of the possibilities of camera movement over a barren Arctic landscape suggests many things: sci-fi space probe footage more authentic than George Lucas; a rebuff to the romantic frontier landscapes of Hollywood Westerns; an avant-garde equivalent of an amusement park simulator ride. Lensed by a specially designed rotating camera mount pre-programmed to move with stunning variety, the film begins as a slow, soothing meditation on the otherworldly textures of the Canadian wilderness, but gradually morphs into a dizzying, terrifying freakout, a relentlessly spinning gaze that pummels the equilibrium of the human eye. The film pushes the boundaries not only of human sight but of the physical earth, destroying gravity and transforming a lifeless vista into a cosmic force of light and energy. Clinically scientific in its approach yet yielding an organic, even spiritual wonder, La Région centrale does not merely vindicate the oft-neglected genre of experimental film, but thrusts itself into the center of cinema at its most vital.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.




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David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach!…

by on November 24th, 2008 at 7:20 am in Film

By Robert C. Cumbow

[Publication Note: This article is being cross-published with Parallax View.]

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 11/16/2006, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

"The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its Navigators, whom the spice has mutated over four thousand years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space; that is, to travel to any part of the known universe without moving."

—Princess Irulan, in David Lynch's Dune

That's what David Lynch's Dune does: It gets us from place to place and from beginning to end without ever seeming to move—at least in the way that a more conventional science-fiction action thriller is expected to move. The unkindest viewers and critics have called it boring.

Even the film's action sequences sit in the memory more as tableaux than as moving images. "My movies are film-paintings," Lynch said, in a 1984 interview during post-production on Dune. What strikes us even as we watch the film, and comes back most in our recalling of it, is the composition more than the dynamic—posture more than gesture:

  • Paul with his hand in the box, his imagination conspiring with the mental powers of the Bene Gesserit to objectify a pain that exists only in the suggestible mind

  • Paul's mentors, Gurney Halleck, Thufir Hawat, and Wellington Yueh, introduced to us as a human triptych

  • Feyd Rautha in his futuristic g-string, posing as if for a beefcake photo

  • Alia, in a transport of ecstasy, holding aloft her crysknife as the Fremen overrun the imperial forces, a nightmarish composition by Lynch out of Bosch, all darkness, and a fully-formed witch who should be no more than a little girl, lit by fires and explosions, wrapped in Bene Gesserit robe and headpiece, with an expression on her face of triumph in slaughter that no little girl ever wore

This emphasis on the static over the kinetic is not so remarkable in an artist who, after all, began his career in—and remains committed to—the compositional rigors of painting, collage, and sculpture. But to see how it relates to folding space, we must further illuminate this concept of traveling without moving. Continue Reading »




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Directorama: "Enter Smithee"

by on November 24th, 2008 at 12:00 am in Comics, Film

[Author's Note: For more information, to browse earlier episodes, or to buy the book in time for Christmas, visit www.directorama.net.]

Click to enlarge:

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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).




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