By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers. This conversation is the first half of a two-part discussion of Quentin Tarantino. This part discusses his career up to Death Proof, while Part 2 is an in-depth discussion of his latest feature, Inglourious Basterds.]

JASON BELLAMY: Ed, I am daunted. Let's get that out of the way. This is the last subject I ever expected us to cover—Quentin Tarantino. What a thoroughly thankless assignment! It's not that there isn't anything to say about the oeuvre of this 46-year-old filmmaker. Hardly. Since 1992, when his Reservoir Dogs became an indie sensation, Tarantino has inspired as much chatter as one encounters in his tongue-powered films. Diehard film fans from both sides of the aisle have dissected his influence and influences. They've celebrated his distinctive style or ridiculed it. They've called him the greatest filmmaker of his generation or a plagiarist, and sometimes both at the same time. They have suggested he is a heroic preservationist of film history, a filmmaking Indiana Jones, or they have suggested he is film history's archenemy, a Nazi-esque figure using others' masterpieces as kindling for his bonfires. I could go on. Tarantino's films may be original, brilliant, witty, exhilarating, hilarious, childish, nauseating, offensive, brazen, pathetically derivative, or some combination of the above, but they are always something. Everyone, it seems, is somehow affected by Tarantino. Everyone, it seems, has a take on Tarantino.

Against this wall of noise, what are two more opinions worth? Ed, we've never gone into one of these discussions with the attitude of creating the preeminent analysis of the subject in question (neither of us is that arrogant), but in this case I'm not sure we can even hope to produce the most illuminating two-person debate of Tarantino to appear at this blog. As longtime readers of The House Next Door already know, Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich set the bar extremely high with the transcription of their live QT debate in April 2007 that they called My Tarantino Problem, and Yours. It was that piece, incidentally, that made me leap at the chance to bring our conversations series here to the House. I've read it start to finish at least a half-dozen times, and it never ceases to engage me. And thus it's that piece that made me think that Tarantino wasn't a topic worth our time. Save for bringing to the table QT's seventh—depending on how you count—major directorial effort, Inglourious Basterds, which as of beginning this discussion we haven't seen, what more is there to say?

Yet, at the urging of our editor, here we are. I'm excited as usual, but, yes, I am daunted. I'd like to think that our conversation can tread lightly on some of those oh-so-familiar Tarantino battlegrounds in an attempt to find some mostly unexplored terrain, but, as simple as that sounds, I am doubtful. I am reminded that at the heart of every Tarantino discussion is a debate over Tarantino's depth, or lack thereof. And so I wonder: What if in trying to look beyond the surface of Tarantino's controversial reputation we find that there's nothing more there? Could it be that the most compelling element of Tarantino's filmmaking has become our inability to collectively define it?

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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Maybe it's only in America where a man can act like an unrepentant juvenile and become a multimillionaire megastar... and a master filmmaker. Moreso than Spielberg, Lucas or early Judd Apatow, Jerry Lewis takes the boy-in-a-man's-world ethos to heart, and it powers his moviemaking at every level: not just in his performance, but in the very way his films are constructed. Here his trademark nebbish cowers in a boarding house full of women; it's less a coherent story than a series of one-offs riffing on Lewis' klutzy gynophobia. While the results range from flat misfires to riotous genius, the relentless repetition of these set-ups amount to as much of a compulsive ritual as Wile E. Coyote's pursuit of the Road Runner, and just as captivating in its flurried variations.

But unlike the Coyote's Sisyphean purgatory of ambition-cum-self-torment, what Lewis enacts again and again is a spasmodic rebelliousness that champions the eternal wellspring of boy-like wonder. It's a world where adult concerns for structure and story give way to childlike free play with objects in a seemingly elastic space. Something as rudimentary as narrative is regarded like a rigid schoolmarm that both threatens and gives form to Lewis' playtime. And for all his undeniably male preoccupations with the terrifying spectre known as woman (in this instance, an entire house full of them), the fact that Lewis' legendary million-dollar set amounts to a super-sized dollhouse suggests a boy who likes to play with dolls. The libido on display isn't hurtling towards manhood; it's actively resisting the obligation to fall into the pigeonhole of masculinity.

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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Elise Nakhnikian

One of America's best living filmmakers, Spike Lee, is also one of its most versatile, equally comfortable making fiction films, documentaries, shorts, and TV movies. Every now and then, he even puts his talent and production team to work in the service of someone else's vision, creating a film that's more document than documentary.

He did that in Freak, a film of John Leguizamo's one-man show of the same name. And he's done it again with Passing Strange. "Don't fuck it up—that was really the motto," Lee says in an IFC interview about his latest movie, which records a rock musical that closed this year. "My nightmare was they'd say, 'I saw it at the Public, I saw it on Broadway, but that shit Spike did was fucked up!'"

Passing Strange was conceived and written by Stew (a musician whose full name is Mark Stewart) and his musical partner Heidi Rodewald, both of whom also appear in the play and the movie. Loosely based on Stew's adolescence, it is the story of a middle-class black kid (the excellent Daniel Breaker), who leaves Los Angeles for Europe to search for "the real." A big part of that search involves breaking free of the stereotypes and expectations he chafed under back home—although, in one funny sequence, he winds up acting "ghetto" to win acceptance from the vaguely anarchic young artists he takes up with in Berlin. 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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The Sundance aesthetic was vindicated—at least in terms of awards and box office—by this Sundance Labs project that announced Brazilian cinema's resurgence in the late '90s (culminating in 2002's City of God). This story of the unlikely bond between selfish city dweller Fernanda Montenegro compelled to help lost child Vinicius de Oliveira find his father in the countryside becomes a parable for a nation in search of its soul. It's a journey that delivers its protagonists from a compressed cityscape of random violence, organ trafficking and overall nastiness to an expansive pastoral oasis decorated with familial empathy and spiritual exaltation. Central Station is a work of rehabilitation, for a nation's soul as well as its film industry.

Setting aside the film's significance to its nation's cinematic emergence, I can't say I can drum up much enthusiasm for this film beyond faint praise. As expected of a Sundance Labs project, it seems to do everything it sets out to do, checklist wise: unlikely cross-generational pairing of adorable child who unlocks a curmudgeon's redemptive maternal instincts; adrenalin-churning crime movie episode; picturesque countryside road trip; unassailable social consciousness agenda. Add to that some Oscar-worthy acting and impeccable lenswork and its as polished and audience-friendly as it can be.

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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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An early landmark in New York City's storied history of low-budget indie filmmaking, Blast of Silence may be most famous for its wall-to-wall second person voiceover narration ("You can depend on yourself, no one else. You learned the hard way... When people look at you, Baby Boy Frankie Bono, they see death." ). It's a neat trick that sets an otherwise mundane hitman plot over a dense interior landscape of self-loathing, paranoia and motivational self-talk. But it barely makes the top five things I love most about this film.

For one thing, Meyer Kupferman's multifaceted jazz score, moving deftly from vibraphone cool to trumpeting distress, does as much to express Frankie Bono's inner state. Mixing hard bop discord with symphonic lyricism, it foretells what Bernard Herrmann would do in Taxi Driver. The numerous authentic locations, from the storefronts on Fifth Avenue to the beatnik streets of the West Village, set the voiceover's raging sociopathy against a documentary sense of the real world, making its unease all the more pervasive (yet another of several cues Scorsese took from this film).

All of these elements come together less than 20 minutes into the film, in a stunning five minute sequence that has the anti-hero simply walking through an iconic Christmas-in-Rockefeller Center setting. The voiceover gets softer and more taciturn; the music settles into a Christmas choir followed by a pensive flute melody. Shadows grow long as day turns to night; the warm glow of toy store windows ironically cast him into a stark silhouette as he walks past, trying to recapture the seminal sensations of his childhood. The real-but-unreal storefront utopia of Fifth Avenue is transformed into a dreamscape of lostness. It's nothing less than the ultimate cinematic depiction of the Christmas blues.

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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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Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with a Dog" is arguably my all time favorite short story. It's so many beautiful things at once. Descriptions as light and delicate as snowflakes are combined with a hearty narration that's both impassive yet empathetic. In a half-hour's reading time you marvel in a symphony of moods: melancholy, sarcasm, infatuation, disdain, lust, hope, despair, and finally a sense of love that's as helpless as it's hopeful. Josef Heifetz made a masterful Soviet film adaptation 50 years ago, but I would love to see another version—possibly even set to contemporary times, since Chekhov's brilliant diagnosis of the social circumstances that breed love can be applied practically anyplace and anywhere. I'd certainly welcome such an effort over Nikita Mikhalkov's supersized and superficial international prestige parade, a film so bombastic and unsubtle that it's everything Chekhov isn't.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

This is the final installment in a five-part series about the evolution of the modern summer blockbuster, edited by yours truly, written by Aaron Aradillas and narrated by Dave Bunting, Jr. It concentrates on three films aimed at teens: Heathers, Dead Poets Society and Say Anything. The series, which ran this past week on The L Magazine's website, re-examined summer movies released in 1984 (Parts 1 and 2) and 1989 (Parts 3, 4 and 5), put them in context of the politics and popular culture that surrounded their release and tried to show how they led to the entertainment that dominates today. To watch the videos on The L's website, click here.

By Steven Boone

[Still Walking is now playing at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza cinemas in Manhattan.]

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking could have been made in 1949 by Yasujiro Ozu. I guess we hear that about a lot of films. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere was a direct homage that really took Ozu's restraint to a certain (yawn) extreme. Directors as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Mike Leigh cite his influence. On the perverse deep end, Shinya Tsukamoto's Tokyo Fist inserted Ozu-style pillow shots into an urban fable that had more in common with Fight Club than with Tokyo Story. But Still Walking, more than any work I've come across, feels like something Ozu himself (dead forty-six years now) has directed. Kore-eda seems to replicate Ozu's post-war style and philosophy, tailoring it to a slightly more acidic, ironic temperament. The polite façade that Ozu loved to slowly, carefully dismantle gets the same delicately cruel treatment here. Continue Reading »

By Jordan Pedersen

British movies are getting the shaft.

The budding movie snob often simply overlooks the output of that island nation, with a few notable exceptions. Everyone sees Lawrence of Arabia, yeah, but might it get more press simply for being (among other things) so damn epic?

More notable is the discrepancy between American and British "greatest-ever" lists. Although the British Film Institute places Carol Reed's The Third Man, a perennial favorite with American critics, at the top of its list of the best 100 British films ever made, "Total Film" bestows the honor upon 1971's Get Carter. Carter's not so feted in the states. It didn't make either of the American Film Institute's top 100 lists (which, perplexingly, include some British movies and not others), and it clocked in at a nothing-to-scoff-at 570 on "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" (a terrifically maintained site which offers a list of the, that's right, 1000 greatest films ever made). That Carter is so fawned upon by some and so ignored by others illustrates the ocean dividing British critics from just about everybody else.

Our neophyte snob may, then, miss out on some of the real gems that Britain has to offer until much later in his cinematic education. They don't top the lists, so they fail to pique the attention.

So why no love for the British? Continue Reading »

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

This is the fourth installment in a five-part series about the evolution of the modern summer blockbuster, edited by yours truly, written by Aaron Aradillas and narrated by Dave Bunting, Jr. It explores the schizoid divide in summer of '89 between bubblegum blockbusters (Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) and dark visions Lethal Weapon 1, The Abyss, Batman). The series, which will continue throughout the week on The L Magazine's website, re-examines summer movies released in 1984 (Parts 1 and 2) and 1989 (Parts 3, 4 and 5), puts them in context of the politics and popular culture that surrounded their release and tries to show how they eventually led to the entertainment that dominates today. To watch the videos on The L's website, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

This is the third installment in a five-part series about the evolution of the modern summer blockbuster, edited by yours truly, written by Aaron Aradillas and narrated by Dave Bunting, Jr. It covers Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing, sex, lies and videotape and the influence of American independent movies on mainstream Hollywood. The series, which will continue throughout the week on The L Magazine's website, re-examines summer movies released in 1984 (Parts 1 and 2) and 1989 (Parts 3, 4 and 5), puts them in context of the politics and popular culture that surrounded their release and tries to show how they eventually led to the entertainment that dominates today. To watch the videos on The L's website, click here.

By Dan Callahan

In the mid-nineties, you couldn't escape Audrey Hepburn; her image was everywhere. She was ceaselessly written about as a fashion icon, a major movie star, and also as an icon of benevolence. Before her death in 1993, when she journeyed into the devastation in Somalia for UNICEF, we took her seriously because of who she was and who she had been to us; we're more skeptical now of such celebrity activism and its underlying motives, but even those who overdosed on Audrey worship can't possibly doubt her sincerity and the strength of her outrage, for it had its roots in her own childhood deprivation under the Nazis during World War II. During the worst days of the war, she survived on grass, turnips and tulip bulbs. For a month, she had to hide in a cellar with her mother, in the dark. Just imagine that for a moment and what it must have been like, then remember how sensitive she was on screen, and consider her capacity for expressing and creating outsized joy. Garbo could do joy like that, but with her it was slightly mannered, more abstract. With Audrey Hepburn, in her best work, her feelings were as pure as cold, clean water. Continue Reading »

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

This is the second installment in a five-part series about the evolution of the modern summer blockbuster, edited by yours truly, written by Aaron Aradillas and narrated by Dave Bunting, Jr. It covers Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Red Dawn, Dreamscape and the rise of the PG-13 rating. The series, which will continue throughout the week on The L Magazine's website, re-examines summer movies released in 1984 (Parts 1 and 2) and 1989 (Parts 3, 4 and 5), puts them in context of the politics and popular culture that surrounded their release and tries to show how they eventually led to the entertainment that dominates today. To watch the videos on The L's website, click here.