By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Funny People, In the Loop, Julie & Julia, The Answer Man, Budd Schulberg and John Hughes: an appreciation, Middle Passage Summer Cable Season 2009, but first:

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FAN MAIL: Great collection of comments on US#30, folks. I always appreciate them.

Daniel Iffland raised a very good question as to why all the discussions about writers on serialized TV dramas in the mainstream media have not led to more writing about screenwriting in film. Part of the reason is historical: the tradition in writing about directors extends back beyond the development of the auteur theory. There is also the disdain of the East Coast Intellectual Establishment for screenwriters, which I discussed in US#1 as one of the reasons I was doing this column. From the beginning of television, especially in the Golden Age of live dramas in the fifties, there was a greater critical awareness of the writer. Another reason is that films are generally seen as a one-off event, whereas a series is a collection of stories with connecting elements. Once the series is set up, the creative function of the producer/showrunner is to feed the maw: a 22-episode season of a one-hour drama requires a LOT of story material. That's why showrunners are usually writers: they know how to deliver scripts. You can read more about all of this in my book Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing.

Welcome to new reader "AJ," who likes the writer's perspective the column gives. That's what I'm here for. Continue Reading »

By Kevin B. Lee and Brandon Soderberg

Lucifer Rising (1972) took Kenneth Anger a decade to make—and remake—after the Manson Family stole and destroyed the original print. What survives is an incantatory envisioning of a sacred rite that spans the world and traverses centuries of occult history. Despite having its copious array of montage and staging techniques pilfered by hundreds of music videos and commercials over the years, it retains a hypnotic spell untouched by its imitators.

The film opens with documentary footage of a seething volcano, paced so patiently that it threatens to lull the viewer into a passive spectacle of the picturesque. But that trance is swiftly dispatched by the stunning title sequence: the film's title in flames scrolling up over a body of water. When thinking of the influence Anger's films have had on music videos (a legacy so widely acknowledged that it's become something of a cliché), people are more likely to recall braggadocio flourishes like this title sequence than the more subdued footage that precedes it. But one cannot appreciate Anger's filmmaking in total without acknowledging its full range of modes and techniques in the service of a singular organic vision, something that most music videos could stand to learn from.

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To read the rest of the entry at Moving Image Source, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas

This is the first 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. (who also narrated the Oliver Stone videos that I did with Kevin B. Lee for for the Museum of the Moving Image). 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

[For a big screen dose of Mason, be sure to check out the Film Forum Monday night series Mason Most Noir, now running through September 14th.]

In Sheridan Morley's biography of James Mason, practically all of his co-stars described him as a quietly unhappy man, restless, ill at ease, indecisive, a skittish pacifist, and a classic loner. He could be driven to physical violence if provoked, and this aggressive streak was mined in the trashy Gainsborough costume films that first made him a star in Britain in the forties, where he played brutes who gave raven-haired Margaret Lockwood "a good thrashing." To quote Shaw's Henry Higgins, Mason had thick lips to kiss you with and thick boots to kick you with, and he could have relaxed into easy stardom in this mode, but he was ambitious for more meaningful work than he could find in the impoverished British cinema. He went to Hollywood in the late forties; always too opinionated for his own good, Mason never quite established himself as a star player, but he managed to make a large and varied impact on some of the finest films of his time. He generally brought a kind of heightened immediacy and intensity to his scenes, letting off flares of irritation, bitchery, anguish and menace that worked best in short-ish takes, so that unlike many actors of his country and generation he was not a man of the theater but totally a man of the cinema. Continue Reading »

By Kevin B. Lee, Michael Joshua Rowin and Keith Uhlich

OPENING REMARKS:

KU: I saw it at the Ziegfeld on opening night. I remember a Rex Reed quote pertaining to another film he saw, where he maintained, "I'm not affected by the audience." Well, when I saw A.I., it was the last 30 minutes or so when the hatred of the audience was palpable, I could feel the audience seething in dead silence, and it really affected me.

So I didn't like the movie when it first came out. But there was some discussion of it on the Brian De Palma Forum that was interesting.

So I saw it again on my own and this time it not only worked but it really turned Spielberg around for me. This film convinced me that Spielberg was worth my complete, devoted attention.

MJR: I was in college. I was a huge Kubrick-head. I had a professor at the time who was great, but he was going on about A.I. and how he would never see it because it was Kubrick's project but Spielberg took it over, and Spielberg just wasn't worthy. I was impressionable and thought the same, and frankly I hadn't liked Spielberg since I saw E.T. as a kid. His name to me meant schmaltz, big budget corporate spectacle. So I never saw it when it came out. I also heard from my brother and other people that they hated it.

And then, later on, when I was a little older I came across other people I respected and had an appreciation of Spielberg and really liked A.I. I came around and checked it out—it was just a couple years ago. And I was blown away in ways that were deeply emotional and philosophical. But I was also profoundly agitated by certain things that were going on that I felt were classic Spielberg manipulation.

Also, one thing I want to put out is that Spielberg is the Michael Jackson of cinema—someone who has an innate brilliance in putting together the elements of mass entertainment into something truly exceptional. I'll get into that more as we watch the movie.

KBL: I saw this opening night at the Sony Lincoln Square. I had read the reviews by A.O. Scott and Jonathan Rosenbaum which were highly favorable. Especially Rosenbaum's which actually argued against what many other critics were saying, that Spielberg doing Kubrick was a disaster. Instead he claimed that they compensated for each other, Spielberg's heart joined with Kubrick's brain, or something. Anyway I saw it in a packed theater and near the end, like with Keith's initial experience, the feeling among the audience was one of disbelief and ridicule. It was one of those rare weird experiences where you're on a completely different wavelength than the people around you, and in a way I kind of felt like David in this movie, just alienated. But I left feeling like my mind had been blown, that a Hollywood movie had presented a slew of ideas about the nature and the future of the human race I had never thought about before.

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Click here to read the liveblog at Shooting Down Pictures.

The House Next Door is proud to present the first trailer for Preston Miller's new feature film, God's Land. Preston and his producer, Jeremiah Kipp, have been keeping a behind-the-scenes journal that you can access here. More information about this and Preston's other projects can be found on his personal site, Vindaloo Philm-Wallah.

In the nearly fourteen years since it first released Toy Story, the first completely computer-animated film in history, Pixar has somehow gone from a well-liked animation studio to the last, best hope of the Hollywood studio system, the final piece of proof many critics can point to and say, "See? The old system can work if you know what you're doing." Since the release of Toy Story, Pixar has gone through A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up, and nearly all of these have die-hard defenders who proclaim their film of choice to be a modern classic (well, maybe not Cars). The release of each new Pixar film in the summer can be rather predictably greeted with a spate of critical hosannas, but with a few exceptions, reviews of Pixar's work often boil down to the following: "Pixar makes great films that both parents and their kids can enjoy!" And true though that may be, the studio has provoked surprisingly little solid critical discussion in mainstream outlets, outside of the annual attempts to rank Pixar's latest effort against their former films.

Enter Pixar Week at The House Next Door, running Oct. 4-10, 2009, to coincide with the re-release of Toy Story and its sequel in theaters on Oct. 2.

What sorts of pieces are we looking for? Follow us after the jump for more. Continue Reading »

By Simon Abrams

[Beeswax is now finishing up its run at Manhattan's Film Forum. Click here for screening details.]

Thanks to an inexplicable screener malfunction, I rewatched most of the first twenty minutes of Beeswax, "mumblecore" writer/director Andrew Bujalski's third film, with trepidation. Being already familiar with the set-up and characters, I was immediately drawn to Bujalski's decidedly more polished mise en scene and not his characteristically winsome beat-riddled dialogue. In Beeswax, Bujalski's camerawork is no more polished here than in either Funny Ha Ha or Mutual Appreciation, but it is assuredly less anthropocentric. Continue Reading »

By Keith Uhlich

As companion to the Tarantino piece below—and in the hopes of inspiring discussion—I'm here linking to Jonathan Rosenbaum's most recent post lambasting Inglourious Basterds. It's an angry, vital response to a movie I myself am loving more and more as I reflect on it, and it also makes reference to Daniel Mendelsohn's recent Newsweek article entitled "Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack", with which it should be read in concert. (Perhaps not so incidentally, Mendelsohn's Holocaust memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is the project that Jean-Luc Godard—whom Tarantino is frequently juxtaposed with, for good and for ill—is reportedly eyeing as his next directorial effort.)

The line of thinking that Rosenbaum and Mendelsohn articulate has been little expressed in the pre-release hoopla/puffery, at least from the articles I've perused, and is very much worth considering. Also of note: Over at Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny posted a glowing review of IB that one of our frequent commenters and sometime contributors—who goes by the handle "That Fuzzy Bastard"—responded to with pre-viewing reservations comparable to Rosenbaum and Mendelsohn (see that discussion starting here).

How best to describe where I part company with my colleagues? Simply that I don't consider the film a revenge flick in any traditional sense, whatever the mass media persona known as "QT" may spout in his carnival barker's desire to get butts in seats. For me, always: Tarantino's public face says one thing, his movies say another. Basterds is, to my mind, about the sheer impossibility of revenge, how it razes and perverts everyone who succumbs to it or who find themselves in its path. If audiences cheer the film with the mass fervor that Rosenbaum and Mendelsohn predict (and I think that's a pretty dubious proposition), they've missed the point. The Tarantino "cool" (never flawless) is the conduit to something deeper, disturbing, moving and profound.

My review of the film for Time Out New York will be published in this week's issue, and I'll link it here when it's available online. I also hope, in the coming weeks, to write at greater length about Basterds for the House, so keep an eye out.

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Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich

As some readers may know, I'm not the world's most enthusiastic defender of Quentin Tarantino; I discussed my reservations about him a while back with my friend Keith Uhlich, the managing editor of The House Next Door, a Time Out New York film critic and an unabashed Tarantino booster. But because I do admire Tarantino's idiosyncratic style, and because some of Keith's arguments made me question my assumptions, I took another look at the director's work in advance of his latest feature, Inglourious Basterds.

Bottom line: unfair as it probably sounds, Tarantino's still not quite the director I'd personally like him to be—the Tarantino-influenced South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, whose movies are equally artificial but more emotionally engaging, is much more my speed. But while re-watching QT's films, I did find myself admiring elements that had previously bugged the hell out of me. Tops on the list: Tarantino's profane, rococo dialogue. It once struck me as wildly hit-or-miss—either brilliantly florid and theatrical (sometimes revelatory) or else redundant and navel-gazing, dragging the filmmaker's characters into a quagmire of telling when the films could have been showing instead (Tarantino is very, very good at showing). I'm taking the second part of that characterization back. More so than almost any arthouse favorite since Ingmar Bergman (and bear in mind the precise point of comparison here before you roll your eyes), Tarantino's talk is not just the fuel of his movies: it's the engine, the wheels and most of the frame. It's where the real dramatic and philosophical action takes place. The gunshots, car crashes and torture scenes are punctuation.

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To read the rest of the article and watch the accompanying video essay, click here.

By Matt Maul

Near the end of District 9, the main character, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), points to a wedding day photograph of his wife and wistfully comments on the halo effect created by her veil. I wondered if this was a not so subtle reference by director Neill Blomkamp to the fact that his new sci-fi drama was really a consolation prize for not helming the big screen version of Halo.

I can understand why for some the "shockumentary" approach used in The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, and Quarantine has become tired. But I must confess that I haven't yet gotten bored with it. Making excellent use of the faux documentary style, District 9's first forty minutes are strong and suggest that its storyline concerning maltreated alien refugees—a staple Star Trek plot—will be used as an intelligent allegory to explore bureaucratic ineptitude, greed (both corporate and individual) and xenophobia. However, try as it might, the film just can't find a way to keep all of those plates spinning at once and descends into the realm of garden variety action yarns. Continue Reading »

By Sheila O'Malley

Cary Grant said:

"To play yourself—your true self—is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They're playing themselves...but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.

"In my earlier career I patterned myself on a combination of Englishmen—AE Matthews, Noel Coward, and Jack Buchanan, who impressed me as a character actor. He always looked so natural. I tried to copy men I thought were sophisticated and well dressed like Douglas Fairbanks or Cole Porter. And Freddie Lonsdale, the British playwright, always had an engaging answer for everything.

"I cultivated raising one eyebrow and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser pocket with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn't get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration!

"I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me."

These are fascinating statements. He was box-office gold for decades, and the Cary Grant persona was a consciously created phenomenon. He did it. The studios didn't do it, the marketing folks didn't do it, the man didn't even have an agent, for God's sake. Grant, through a period of trial and error, tried things, kept those that worked, discarded those that didn't. The fact that he seemed so easy and commanding onscreen is just one of the many miracles of Cary Grant. Continue Reading »