[Author's Note: For more information or to browse earlier episodes, visit www.directorama.net.]
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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).
1. "Mockingbird Director Robert Mulligan Dies at 83": Richard Corliss eulogizes in TIME. Dave Kehr has an open comments thread here (lead image taken from there). GreenCine entry here. More from Glenn Kenny here. Please share your thoughts and remembrances below.
["Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83 of heart disease, had been Finch's gentle shepherd, and deserved at least a share of Peck's Oscar both for casting him and for eliciting the actor's best work. But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them. This theme occupied him from his first feature film to his last. The 1957 Fear Strikes Out gave Anthony Perkins his first lead role as Boston Red Sox star Jim Piersall, reduced to bipolar rage by a domineering parent (sort of a Psycho in Center Field). In The Man in the Moon, Mulligan's swan song in 1991, Reese Witherspoon made her film debut as a 14-year-old wracked with first love for a 17-year-old boy who covets her older sister."] Continue Reading »
[Immediate Impressions are same-day responses to first-ever viewings. Not to be taken as rounded critique or final word. More a first step on a journey. Comments and dialogue encouraged.]
[Doubt is now playing in limited release. Viewed on December 21st, 2008 on Miramax screener DVD.]
John Patrick Shanley's play struck me, in its initial run, as a superficial exploration of human foible, "entertaining" in a very debased sense of that term for the ways in which it simulated (rather than stimulated) thinking. Whether Father Brendan Flynn did indeed molest young, black, probably gay altar boy Donald Muller is the work's hot-button hook. The real sparks come from watching Flynn and the cold-as-ice principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier circle around each other like beasts of prey, the former maintaining his innocence, the latter convinced (despite lack of absolute evidence) of his guilt.
Shanley's choices are easy, too transparently dichotomous; even the blurring of the perspectival lines can be boiled down, with little cerebral effort, to "Did he?" or "Didn't he?". It's not unlike a particularly gory bout of Pay-Per-View boxing, except here the punches are verbal and the match ends in an ambigui-obvious draw. Shanley closes Doubt on a note of self-conscious uncertainty, satiating the intellectual bloodlust of the theatergoing intelligentsia in much the same way P.T. Barnum induced his paying customers to gaze goggle-eyed and gratified upon the non-existent Great Unknown. Pulitzer! Continue Reading »
A two-part video documenting The Castro Theater's "Tribute to Tony Curtis" on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008.
Chris Anthony Diaz is the creator of the blog CAD Pictures. He takes photographs, makes short films and writes about movies too.
Six months ago, Slate compiled a Venn-diagram of presidential offenses that laid out and color-coded the crimes for which members of the Bush administration could potentially be prosecuted. As an exercise in wishful thinking, the diagram had John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales hitting the criminal jackpot, racking up charges of clandestine wiretapping, illegal Justice Department hiring and firings, involvement in the CIA tapes scandal, and condoning coercive interrogation. On the lesser end of things, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice all kept their hands relatively clean, sanctioning only coercive interrogation, or as those of us unversed in Newspeak like to call it, torture. Looking at the diagram, the administration's ability to normalize the scope of their crimes comes off as nothing short of incredible. While the call to prosecute Bush often seems like a pipe dream promoted in liberal college towns and on blue-state car bumpers, as Scott Horton observed in his December 2008 Harper's cover story, "this administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself."
Last Friday, I was woken by an early morning call from my mother in D.C. vaguely instructing me to read the lead story of the day's newspaper. I pulled up the Times's website only to find articles about the newly uncovered Ponzi scandal splashed across the front page—not, I assumed, what she had called about. A visit to the Washington Post's site clarified matters. On the front page of the December 12th Post I found the article that had been quietly relegated to page A14 of the Times's print edition: "Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials." According to a report released by the Senate Armed Service Committee, a bipartisan panel of senators headed by none other than John McCain, top Bush officials had been found directly responsible for the illegal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay: a flat rejection of the administration's contention that "a few bad apples" had spoiled the bunch. "The report," its authors wrote, "is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics—that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true." Continue Reading »
Barack Obama—and America—has a preacher problem. First, of course, was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preaching from the pulpit with an almost gleeful hatred that, even if you empathized with the man and recognized the sources of his profound frustration and anger, felt alienating and counterproductive to the post-racial agenda Obama had so eloquently and sensitively put forward. Another preacher, evangelical pastor Rick Warren, is a man who, after inviting Obama to his church earlier this year for a nationally televised Q&A in a supposed effort to find common ground and then ambushing him with "gotcha" culture-war questions, compared abortion to genocide and Obama to a Holocaust denier. "Oh, I do," was the leader of Saddleback mega-church's hearty response when asked by The Wall Street Journal if he equates gay marriage with polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.
To hear some pundits' dismissive reactions to the outrage of Obama supporters in the hours following the announcement that Warren would be giving the inaugural invocation on January 20th, you'd think that the President-elect had invited Teddy Ruxpin to do it. Gay activists are apparently overreacting. They are evidently "looking for a fight" following the passage of Proposition 8 in California last month. In a video supporting the referendum, Warren said: "We should not let two percent of the population determine to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it's a humanitarian and human issue." And he was right. Civil rights is a "humanitarian" issue, the term being broadly defined as "having concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people." Continue Reading »
[Immediate Impressions are same-day responses to first-ever viewings. Not to be taken as rounded critique or final word. More a first step on a journey. Comments and dialogue encouraged.]
[Made in U.S.A. opens at Manhattan's Film Forum for a two-week run on January 9th, 2009. New 35mm 'Scope print. Click here for screening information. Viewed on December 18th, 2008 at 12pm Film Forum press screening. Lead image taken from Filmbrain's Like Anna Karina's Sweater.]
Texts and images (ideologies) collide in Made in U.S.A., but this seems Godard's perpetual project. If resolution comes, it's through the emphasis of a particular object/subject's mysteriousness—in the way, say, Marianne Faithfull effectively resolves a roundabout discussion in a bar (paraphrase: "a door is more than a door": onward to and beyond infinity) by singing, a cappella, "As Tears Go By." The repeated progression: The literal meaning of a thing is called into question; Godard overthinks the problem, relishing its Fibonacci-esque nature; the camera (via Coutard) plumbs the depths of a face (or—as in the last, breathless sequence—a background landscape) in counterbalance/counterpoint, retaining and restating cinema's essential mystery of faith. Continue Reading »
By Peter Debruge, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Michael Joshua Rowin, Andrew Schenker, Keith Uhlich, S.T. VanAirsdale, and Lauren Wissot
[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. Recorded in conjunction with a research trip by Variety editor Peter Debruge for this article.]
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COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Four Christmases, Australia, Ugly Betty, 30 Rock, Boston Legal, CSI, and the Budd Boetticher DVD Box Set, but first:
FAN MAIL: "Tom" took exception to my comments in US#12 about Kim Novak's performance in Vertigo. He thinks it's "not bad," since the character is supposed to be cold and mysterious. He's got a point, but I think Novak, whom I love it a lot of other films, is more blank than mysterious. A lot of the problem is that the script gives her very little to play and Hitchcock seems happy with that. I have often suggested to my writing students (and to many others) that instead of pulling a Brian De Palma and remaking Vertigo endlessly from the man's point of view, how about doing a rip-off from the woman's point of view? What does she think about all this? She's having fun running around pretending to be the wife, knowing there's a guy looking out for her, but what does she do when she finds out it's part of a murder plot? Does she get revenge on the husband? Does she get revenge on the Jimmy Stewart character? So far nobody has taken me up on the challenge of doing that script, probably because, to use John Sayles's wonderful phrase, you could make the movie, but you couldn't get it made. What would happen is that, somewhere in the development process, some male executive, producer, or director would insist it be told from the man's point of view. Continue Reading »
Imperative to catch on the big screen, Stephen Kijak's Scott Walker: 30 Century Man opens today for one week only at the IFC Center in New York. There are other fleeting, theatrical engagements in the offing for early '09 before this documentary, long denied to American audiences though it did smashingly well in the UK, settles onto DVD. But having first seen it 18 months ago in a real movie theater and then again last week on my laptop, I can state with certainty that Kijak's collage-like approach to recreating 1960s pop music history, and tracing its influence through the subsequent decades, loses something in immediacy and intimacy on the small box. And the abstract visualizations that Kijak devises—soft-focused, delicately hallucinatory mosaics in orange and gold that feel all of a piece with Walker's era and sensibility—cry out for the widest panorama. Continue Reading »
[Mickey Rourke's latest film, The Wrestler, opens today in limited release.]
It hasn't been easy for Mickey Rourke fans over the last 15 years. He's given us much cause for complaint, and even despair. He has forced us to defend the indefensible, and say things to our scornful friends along the lines of, "I think there's a lot to like in Exit In Red." I have grasped at straws, I have seen terrible straight-to-video movies and soft-core porn, I even suffered through the abysmal Another 9 1/2 Weeks which actually caused me pain because of how tired and defeated he seemed. I have stuck up for him in the face of dwindling evidence of his genius, but I am not a fair-weather fan. Fifteen years of badness is difficult to withstand. His early promise was such that it galvanized an entire generation of young actors, making them want to do better, push harder, take more risks, and then, it felt like overnight, he left us. Where did he go? The details are coming out now, and much was obvious at the time as well. He flamed out publicly. He got involved in a crazy-making tabloid-frenzy marriage. He hated acting, became bored with it, so went back to being a boxer (his first love). Then followed the strange (and tragic, to me) morphing of his face into something unrecognizable. He had multiple operations on his face due to his boxing, but I think there was a little lip-and-cheek-plumping action going on before that. Something happened to him in the early 90s, and you can see it unfold if you watch his films in chronological order. It made me really sad at the time. Continue Reading »
By Matt Zoller Seitz & Hannah Seitz
Following in the footsteps of casas Coppola and Makhmalbaf, The House Next Door is proud to present a genuine family affair:
Continue Reading »
["Boston-based Amanda Palmer of the self-described "Brechtian punk cabaret" act The Dresden Dolls launched an ambitious multimedia project around her solo debut Who Killed Amanda Palmer, including an upcoming photo book with text by Neil Gaiman and a series of videos for six of the album's twelve tracks, all directed by Michael Pope. Ironically, the best video from the album thus far is not part of the series, and concerns "Oasis," what Pitchfork reviewer Joshua Klein deems the weakest track on the album: a "blithe, bubblegum, mostly obnoxious... rape and abortion ditty– ha!– that gives irony a bad name." Klein's opinion is no doubt informed by the song's tonal incongruity with what is otherwise a pensive, introverted concept album. Judged on its own, "Oasis" is a refreshingly frank account of a young woman's nonchalant dealings with unwanted pregnancy, backstabbing friendships and music idolatry, a brash affirmation and wry tweak of teen feminist self-determination."] Continue Reading »
By Dan Callahan
[Revolutionary Road opens December 26th in limited release; wide release in January.]
This is just too insanely awesome to not give its own entry. And perfect for a Monday. (Hattip: Ali Arikan.) Click here to go to the creator, MBelinkie's, YouTube channel; click here to go to his personal site.
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