On The X-Files, the cutting yin to Rob Bowman's sweeping yang. Producer, director—one of the guiding lights of a favorite work of art. For Die Hand die verletzt, Humbug, Home, Milagro, the mythology, The Truth and countless others, I am eternally grateful.
Google News wrap-up here. First read at Ain't It Cool News.
Just picked this up from Ed Copeland's blog. Anne Thompson (a frequent House linkee) has been let go from Variety. The second link will take you to her personal announcement at her blog Thompson On Hollywood, which she says will continue. In addition, she is fielding other offers and pursuing other interests. Best wishes to Anne in this time.
UPDATE: More news and thoughts from Karina Longworth and Matt Dentler. The layoffs are widespread...
The biggest complaint usually leveled against Big Love is that the scenes set at the Juniper Creek compound, focusing on the shenanigans of the United Effort Brotherhood, are just never as compelling as the scenes set among the Henricksons in their Salt Lake City-metro area compound. In the first two seasons, there was a real effort made to draw the various Henricksons into these storylines (mostly Bill, though Nicki would also get involved and the other two wives would stop by from time to time), and this mostly served to highlight how much weaker these storylines were when compared to anything going on with Bill, Barb, Nicki, Margie and the kids. This season, however, the two settings have so far remained completely separate, as though Big Love had randomly turned itself into one of those movies where a whole bunch of directors get together to make a variety of short films about a common subject (in this case, polygamy). This has served to make the Juniper Creek scenes glide by more easily than they did in the past. It's also served to highlight just where the disparity between the two storylines comes from. Continue Reading »
[Author's Note: For more information or to browse earlier episodes, visit www.directorama.net.]
Click to enlarge:
__________________________________________
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. Jonathan Rosenbaum revisits The Godfather, Parts 1 & 2. This is an advance publication of the article, which will appear in Filmkrant's special English-language newspaper at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in late January.
["Broadly speaking, the first Godfather is a generic gangster film with arthouse trimmings and the second is an arthouse film with generic gangster trimmings, but both blockbusters encompass masterful American adaptations and appropriations of recent Italian cinema. The first and best sequence in the first film, built around a wedding, is indebted to the remarkable, protracted ball in Visconti's The Leopard (1963) while the stylish, nostalgic handling of period décor in the second appears to owe something to Bertolucci's The Comformist (1971); and both would of course be diminished considerably without the catchy music drawn from Fellini's habitual composer. The outsized success of both Godfathers helped to mark the eclipse of foreign film distribution in the U.S. for the sake of glossy American art movies, a little bit before Woody Allen's (and Martin Scorsese's and Paul Schrader's) mining of similar fields started to take hold."] Continue Reading »
When it comes to the surreal cultural landscape of government power plays, few have been able to capture it with the vigor of John Frankenheimer. Best known for the 1962 head-trippy assassination thriller The Manchurian Candidate, he also presented a nightmarish coup in America in his 1964 follow-up Seven Days in May. With his wide-angle lens pushed right into the strained faces of politicians, and widescreen compositions that usually jam-packed the frame with characters intensely waiting for their turn to speak or locations that felt as lush with information as Chinese boxes, Frankenheimer was as strong a visual storyteller as Steven Spielberg, but with the healthy skepticism and downright paranoid distrust of authority you get from early John Carpenter movies.
The TNT television film George Wallace was made over 30 years after Frankenheimer's 1960s masterpieces, yet it feels of a piece with those films, and teems with all the boundless energy of a youthful filmmaker. The opening credits blaze across in rapid jump cuts of an American flag, stock footage of brutal conflict from the Civil Rights era, gouts of blood oddly retreating back into a wound, and letters that restlessly seem to splinter together and apart. George Wallace (Gary Sinise) is introduced shouting out a window before moseying over to his sexy young wife Cornelia (Angelina Jolie) and finding himself curled up on the bed with her, trying to talk his way out of a sexual encounter because, as governor of the great state of Alabama, he's got other things to do. The shot takes in both actors and their impatient tussle on the bed, and it's not until Frankenheimer cuts to Wallace ambiguously looking into a nearby mirror that we realize he's been holding on the master shot for several minutes, and during that time the camera has made a series of small movements to convey Wallace's bold confidence as a cover for jittery nerves he'd rather not explore.
It took me a while to pinpoint what it was about this episode that rubbed me the wrong way, but I finally did. Watching the events unfold in "Tami Knows Best," too much of it seemed contrived. The writers knew where they wanted to end up and they manufactured ways to get there. The problem is, instead of polishing and reworking those scenes, they just left them at that. The moments they did focus on were fantastic; they were emotionally genuine and true to each character. The journey it took to get there just felt wrong. Continue Reading »
"A Disquiet Follows My Soul" is probably going to piss off a lot of Battlestar Galactica fans, especially coming this late in the show's run. Many of the big plot developments occur offscreen and are only alluded to, the episode tries to shove us into the point-of-view of the members of the fleet instead of our heroes, and the whole thing is more of a grim mood piece about a species giving up without its leaders instead of the razzle-dazzle space opera we're used to. Continue Reading »
The executive orders President Barack Obama signed on Thursday are the beginning of a long battle by human rights defenders to reign in an executive branch bloated with power. In conducting his War on Terror, George W. Bush established a shadow network of spies and covert detention sites, one governed by its own secret laws promulgated largely through confidential memos. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was only the most visible part of this network. To thoroughly dismantle this terrible executive inheritance, Obama's legal team in the Department of Justice will need to do much more. And even though the Obama administration has taken the initiative here, it is unlikely that substantive reforms will occur without pressure from Congress.
The person most significant in bringing our wayward executive branch under the rule of law will be incoming Attorney General Eric Holder. Alongside Dawn Johsen, the incoming head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and Obama himself, the heap of memos, executive orders, and other documents authorizing Bush's excesses will be his to confront. Holder will decide, for example, if Gitmo's closure becomes more than a symbolic victory. If his office declares that the enemy combatants detained by the Bush administration were entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions, Obama's defense and justice departments will have to radically revise the Bush strategy for holding and prosecuting enemy combatants. But that's unlikely. Obama's Department of Justice hasn't yet decided how to go about prosecuting these prisoners, as evidenced in their request that all habeus corpus hearings be delayed while a system is put into place. As to whether the detentions were illegal in the first place, Holder has already stated that he does not believe the prisoners in Gitmo were entitled to Geneva protections to begin with. Fighting to have Geneva applied to Gitmo's enemy combatants won't win Obama any further political favor, but having to recognize stricter due process standards for enemy detainees will create headaches for the Department of Justice later on—principally, by forcing the administration to accord enemy combatants the legal privileges and rights enjoyed by prisoners of war. Continue Reading »
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Slumdog Millionaire, Dodge City, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, His Nibs, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI, ER, but first:
FAN MAIL: Several interesting issues this time around. Both Andrew and Kevin H. raise the question of judging the script in comparison to the film and how fair that might be. Traditionally, criticism has dealt primarily with the art object (i.e., the final product), but more recently, criticism (particularly of the kind I do) has included an historical element of looking at the process as well as the object. We get exhibitions now in museums that look at the process leading up to the final object, such as a painter's sketches and small scale versions as well as the final work. There has been a growing awareness that art is a process as much as an object. As someone who writes about screenwriting, which is the beginning of the process of filmmaking, I always take an interest in the earlier steps. I think it is perfectly fair to look at the materials created in the process to see the ways the film did, and did not, end up. Continue Reading »
Hailing from Romania, Nemescu died, aged 27, while editing California Dreamin', so the title bears the parenthetical (Nesfarsit) or (Endless)—meant more in the sense of "unfinished" than "overlong." But as I wrote last year, "...what surprises and delights is how complete the work feels, finished in every way aesthetically and thematically, any longueurs or asides entirely part of Nemescu's indelible emotional tapestry."
Get thee hence, in other words. This one's unmissable. And then come back to this post and see after the break for three of Nemescu's short films (all with English subtitles), which paved the way to his, tragically, only feature. Continue Reading »
1. "Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account": Our own Kevin B. Lee catches us up on his video essay situation.
[""One thing I've learned from this though that rights don't mean jack unless you're in the position to uphold them." I wrote this to a friend the day after my account got pulled. I originally was referring to myself and my inability (or so I thought at the time) to defend my rights to fair use, but my friend's reply assumed that I was referring to YouTube/Google! Thinking about it further, he was onto something. I've received many emails, some from US copyright lawyers, that have yielded some pragmatic insights (I hope they don't mind if I share some of their comments anonymously, because I do think they are valuable):"] Continue Reading »
I suspect when all is said and done that the history of Lost will cleave it pretty neatly into two different shows. Continue Reading »
So Kay Howard's an Oscar nominee. Discuss!
By Dan Callahan
From January 23-29, Film Forum is playing Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a seminal film of its era, a feminist landmark and an epic meditation on the passage of time and the fact that nothing can remain the same for long, even if we map out the most structured daily routine. The film charts three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, a part-time prostitute and full-time martinet of the kitchen played by Delphine Seyrig in a phenomenally disciplined, pointillist-style performance. Seeing Jeanne Dielman on a big screen, during a Delphine Seyrig festival at the Museum of Modern Art, was one of the major cultural experiences of my life. That being said, at 201 minutes, you have to let yourself yield to this movie's rhythms and let yourself be seduced by it; if you resist Jeanne Dielman, you'll reach "the utmost limits of boredom," as Stevie Smith would say, after about ten minutes or so. It's a mysterious movie in some ways, so I leapt at the chance to send a few questions, via e-mail, to Chantal Akerman on the film itself and on working with Seyrig. Continue Reading »
Recent Comments:
The Conversations: Michael Haneke
by Ed Howard
Links for the Day: The Yankee Comandante, Dunces Maybe Finds Its Ignatius, Michael Haneke on Amour, The Great Gatsby Trailer, & More
by shootthecritic
February House Composer Gabriel Kahane and Book Writer Seth Bockley Talk Communal Music
by David Ehrenstein
A Movie a Day, Day 83: Andrei Rublev
by murtazaali
Critical Distance: The Artist
by DRush76