By Kevin B. Lee

[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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I watched this film days after working on a lengthy essay on Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City, which keyed me to notice multiple parallels between the two films. Both films are politically conscious works made at a time when their directors were/are trying to make their work appeal to a wider audience. Both deal with depicting the plight of factory labor, with an intent to spark political or social consciousness in the viewer. Both attempt to utilize elements of mainstream filmmaking, most notably the casting of stars recognizable to their target audience (Jane Fonda, meet Joan Chen). At the same time, both films utilize arthouse cinema techniques, as well as documentary techniques like on-screen interviews, to challenge the viewer's engagement with mainstream cinema itself. And, perhaps most important of all, both films emphatically view politics and history in terms of performance: recollections and speech acts delivered for the camera, with a directorial emphasis on the act of representation. It was interesting to read contemporary reviews of both films that found them to be ultimately unsuccessful acts of compromise between commercial, political and art cinema.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Kevin B. Lee

[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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Among the many things that distinguish Anthony Mann's collaborations with Jimmy Stewart are their thorough revisioning of the rugged individualist ideal. The Far Country suffers for being a bit transparent and moralistic in this mission, especially compared to Mann-Stewart masterpieces like The Naked Spur or Bend of the River, where the critique of Western self-reliance is done more through actions than words. The soundtrack is a thicket of toughtalk among a rough-hewn ensemble of pioneers negotiating civilization out of a blood-soaked, greed-infested frontier.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Matt Maul

Actor and avid sailor Sterling Hayden once said that no film has ever really captured the true essence of sea travel. On the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it occurs to me that the same thing could be said about cinematic depictions of space travel. For the most part, movies set in space use it as a backdrop for stories about aliens or Earth threatening phenomenons (or Earth threatening aliens). Even if you discount schlock flicks about hot women on Venus or the Star Wars/Star Trek genre, it's hard to find a space movie that focuses on the mechanics of the journey itself. Continue Reading »

By Kevin B. Lee

[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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Ingmar Bergman stumbles out of the '60s, his most creatively expansive and emotionally exhausting period, with one final attempt to channel New Wave stylistic vitality into his foursquare obsessions with individual angst. As with the other entries in his "Island Trilogy" (including Shame and Hour of the Wolf), it's fractured, dissonant and despairing. The sensual glow of Sven Nykvist's cinematography (in their first color film) blazes into a vision of apocalypse, rife with animal slaughter, tortured fornication and a marriage verging on homicide.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Peet Gelderblom

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For more information on Out of Sync and its teaser trailer, click here. 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).

By Kim Morgan and Matt Zoller Seitz.

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An appreciation of Nicholas Ray's 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place, at Film Forum from Friday, July 17th to Thursday, July 23rd, kicking off their Ray retrospective. Editing by Matt Zoller Seitz, script and narration by Kim Morgan, adapted from a post on her blog Sunset Gun. Read Michael Joshua Rowin's L Mag review here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

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This is the fourth in a five-part series of Moving Image Source video essays on Michael Mann, whose new film, Public Enemies, opened July 1. To read a transcript of the video's narration, click here. For links to more episodes, click here. To read MZS's review of Public Enemies at IFC.com, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

From Bambi's mother's death to the destruction of Alderaan, every modern generation is cursed and blessed with its very own big-screen traumas. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the series based on J.K. Rowling's fantasy novels, contains a doozy; that millions of readers know it's coming won't dim its power in the least. Screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates and the familiar, still-sturdy cast play the grim moment and its aftermath for incredulous shock rather than raw sentiment, knowing viewers will supply the latter in spades.

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The Brooklyn-based filmmaker and founder of The House Next Door is IFC.com's guest critic for the month of July. You can read the rest of this week's column by clicking here.

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: The Hangover, The Brothers Bloom, The Taking of Pelham 123 (2), The White Sister, Ten Wanted Men, Night Train to Munich, Berlin Express, but first:

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FAN MAIL: Since there were as of this writing no comments on US#27, let me just throw in a promotion for any fans of the column who may be in or around Bloomington, Indiana on Saturday, August 1st. I will be doing a discussion and book signing that day from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Borders Bookstore in Bloomington. The address is 2634 E. Third Street. I would love to meet any of the column's readers who can drop by.

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THE HANGOVER (2009. Written by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore. 100 minutes): A thousand fathers...

As I have mentioned, I am not a fan of movies about men behaving like little boys, but I like the team of Lucas & Moore as writers. In addition, the first weekend exit polls were showing that a lot of women were going to see the film, and the weekday business was staying high. So off I went to see it on June 11th, the Thursday after it opened. Continue Reading »

By Elise Nakhnikian

I'm not usually moved by by celebrity deaths, but the news of Farrah Fawcett's passing stabbed me with a shard of that sorrow and pity you feel when someone dies before they had a chance to fulfill their potential.

Strange way to think about someone who got so much more than her share of fame and attention, I know: That poster of her with the corkscrew curls and piano-key grin apparently sold several hundred thousand copies a month at the peak of her popularity. But I think the attention she got for her looks was like the poison in Sleeping Beauty's apple, freezing her in time and keeping her from developing her potential as an artist.

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Read the rest of the tribute at Girls Can Play by clicking here.

By Jeremiah Kipp

Love, as defined by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, is a careening struggle of misplaced desire, a doomed loyalty that's trapped on a death march into the abyss, or a self-obliteration to let the person you care for go free. The love is epic in magnitude as characters throw themselves wholeheartedly into their doomed romantic mission. But in the world of Żuławski, we're not in the realm of sentimentality; love is violent and obsessive and all-encompassing. L'Important C'est D'Aimer stalks its characters with the director's endlessly roving handheld camera, lurching through their Parisian apartments lined with bookshelves and into restaurants where glasses of wine and cups of coffee are thrown to the floor. In other words, this is a fantastic date movie if you're with the right company, meaning intellectually rigorous and emotionally charged.

With Żuławski, frequently accused of being overwrought, there's never a dull moment. The love triangle between a brooding photographer (Fabio Testi), a struggling actress (the sublime Romy Schneider), and her ridiculous, cheerfully self-loathing husband (Jacques Dutronc) is set within an absurd world of pediatric gangsters, sleazy porn merchants, suicidal clowns, theater queens, and in a casting coup that fits perfectly within the milieu, madman Klaus Kinski as a debonair thespian raging his way through the on-stage role of Richard III, though this mercurial actor's most explosive moment happens off-stage in his response to a negative press review. He picks a fistfight with two smarmy bourgeois onlookers, smashing their faces into the walls and floor before absconding with their tart girlfriends for the night. "You're crazy," someone tells him a few scenes later, and Kinski's character delightfully responds, "No, I'm rich!"

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Read the rest of the review at Slant Magazine by clicking here.

By Simon Abrams

Inserts, writer/director John Byrum's pitch-black comedy and minor historical flop, is perhaps a little too mischievous and cunning for its own good. Its inevitable failure is naively credited with being the straw that broke the camel's back for major Hollywood studios interested in making X-rated pictures, as if there needed to be just one more and this was it. Who would've thought that that would happen, what with studio executives putting their expectations on a work this blisteringly bitter.

The most telling sign of why Byrum's ode to pantomime failed is that he does a little too much of a good job keeping us guessing whether what we're looking at is supposed to be funny or Dramatic. If you took the dramatic template of Sunset Boulevard and overlaid it with the cynicism of In a Lonely Place and liberally added the withering grotesque physical comedy of All That Jazz, you'd have something like Inserts.

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Read the rest of the piece at Extended Cut by clicking here.

By Simon Abrams

[Brüno is now playing in theaters.]

While watching Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest parody of American narcissism and bigotry, another cinematic prankster came to mind: Lars von Trier. Both Cohen and von Trier delight in mocking the abject intolerance of what they coyly identify as the American temperament. The obvious difference between von Trier's as yet unfinished "America" trilogy and Cohen's two acerbic films however is that von Trier does not let his audience into his confidence. Von Trier makes a point of telling us that the joke is on us while Cohen encourages us to laugh with him at his vulgar stunts. Continue Reading »