The House Next Door

Archive: September, 2009

New York Film Festival Podcast, Ep. 1: "The All-Grass Podcast"

by on September 24th, 2009 at 6:00 am in Festivals, Film

By Glenn Kenny, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov and Keith Uhlich

This should make THE FUTURIST! exceedingly happy (maybe some of the rest of you as well). Our man in L.A., John Lichman, is back East Coast-side for NYFF, so we've returned to the hallowed fount of classic rock and flowing liquor that is Grassroots Tavern. First conversation treads two kinds of Grass: Sweet- and Wild-. The podcasts are now being hosted at John's place of employ, Current Movies. We hope to have a downloadable mp3 file for you at some point (will be added here, if so). In the meantime, take a listen to the two-part opener, embedded below. And, remember, if you see us at the bar...well, shouldn't you know that by now?

Part 1

Part 2

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Glenn Kenny just wrote up Antichrist.

'Bout time John Lichman got his ass back East.

Vadim Rizov bylines every which way but loose, any which way he can.

Keith Uhlich is having a helluva week.




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Link for the Day (September 24th, 2009): Compare-Kirktrast

by on September 23rd, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

Here are two videos currently making the rounds. Let's juxtapose:

Jim Emerson dissects further at Scanners.

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"Link for the Day": Each day the House editors post a link to an item that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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Rage Director Sally Potter on Movies, Mobile Content and World of Fashion

by on September 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 am in Film, Interviews

By Kenji Fujishima

[Published at The Wall Street Journal on September 21st, 2009.]

With the release of her latest film, Rage, which stars Jude Law, Steve Buscemi and Eddie Izzard, among others, British director Sally Potter is trying something no other filmmaker has yet attempted: She will be distributing a feature film for free on mobile phones.

Starting today, the monologue-heavy drama will be released gratis in seven parts, one part a day, through a free application for iPhones and iPods offered by Babelgum, a Web- and mobile-content platform. The only theatrical distribution planned for the film—which screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in February—is a red-carpet premiere at The Box theater in New York tonight, and the DVD will be released tomorrow.

A red-carpet premiere is also planned for Thursday, Sept. 24, in London, but with a major twist: both the premiere event and a Q&A session following the screening will be broadcast live in screens all across the U.K. and Ireland, as well as online. It will be interactive, as audience members from all over the world will be able to ask Potter and some of the actors questions through text messages and/or Skype.

The atypical release pattern for Rage befits the typically inventive Potter, whose last film, Yes, was a love story in which all the characters spoke in iambic pentameter. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Potter about her new film, the nature of its multi-platform release, and her thoughts on the future of cinema and new media.

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To read the interview at The Wall Street Journal, click here.




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Link for the Day (September 23rd, 2009): A Taste of Madison Avenue

by on September 22nd, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

Today's link will take you to Elusive Lucidity, where proprietor Zach Campbell gives his thoughts on Mad Men (having just finished the first season) in an entry titled "A Taste of Madison Avenue." Here's a sample:

"Who wouldn't, shouldn't grimace at this undignified gesture toward the enlightened viewer's very ... enlightenment? 'Ah, they were so sexist, so myopic, so unhealthy, so milquetoast, so closeted, so repressed, so hypocritical, so lacking in self-awareness.' And in 50 years the popular art of tomorrow will no doubt disparage us in ways that are unfair and self-congratulatory. C'est la vie (in an idiocracy). For one thing: Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems."

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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Understanding Screenwriting #32

by on September 21st, 2009 at 9:10 pm in Film, Television

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Flame & Citron, A Woman in Berlin, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, Sense and Sensibility, Mad Men, The Code, and Hollywood Under Siege (book), but first:

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FAN MAIL: There were a couple of comments that came in on US#30 after I had sent off #31, so let me respond to those now. "Manu" would like me to review a Hindi film or two. If I see one I want to write about, I certainly will. Keith gives me a lot of freedom to write about what I want to, which is one of the many reasons I love this gig. Olaf Barthel thought the problems with Public Enemies script were from the book. I have not read the book, but I think the script problems were more the doing of the screenwriters. After all, the job of the screenwriters is to make the book work as a screenplay. There is a great example of that later in this column.

On to #31. Craig thought we did not get a precise view of Summer in (500) Days of Summer because we are getting Tom's view and he is an unreliable narrator. He may have a point, but I think it may just be the way the writers structured the script to give us a "true" insight into her at the end. "-bee" made a very good point that Leslie Mann in Funny People just does not have the "requisite charisma" to bring off the part. Since I whacked Apatow's kids in the film, I have no trouble whacking his wife as well. "DS" responded to my "Be careful what you wish for" as to my eventually reviewing one of his scripts by noting that if I did review it, it would mean it had been made. And he looked forward to learning from my comments. He added, "I want to keep on learning," which is exactly the attitude you have to bring to the table. For one of the great "keep on learning" stories, look up the anecdote from Nunnally Johnson at the end of the appendix in the third edition of my FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film. Continue Reading »




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Link for the Day (September 22nd, 2009): Contra Basterds

by on September 21st, 2009 at 9:01 pm in Links for the Day

Owing to increased workloads, general lethargy and, well, life as we know it, our regular Links for the Day feature has pretty much fizzled away the past few months. So as not to lose the column completely we've now retooled it to the singular. Each day the House editors will post a link to an item (a video, even) that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and reserve the right, due diligence be damned, to fall down on the job. We'll try to be good, though. Promise.

For this inaugural entry, head on over to frequent House commenter Steven Santos' site, The Fine Cut, where he has written an extensive, thought-provoking piece, contra Inglourious Basterds, entitled "Cinema Sampling, or How To Be Sergio Leone with a Few Easy Beats." Hattip for this selection goes to Craig Simpson.




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Toronto Film Festival 2009: Day Seven

by on September 21st, 2009 at 5:10 pm in Festivals, Film

Toronto Film Festival Day Seven

Micmacs: To judge from his films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn't tie his shoelaces without first devising a Rube Goldberg contraption of toothpaste, waffle makers, and jars full of bees to do so. Jerry-rigged doodads dominate the Gallic auteur's new clockwork confection, which retains some of the anti-militarism of A Very Long Engagement while scrambling to outdo the sugary excesses of Amélie. The prologue, with its collision of disobedient landmines, prison-like schools, and a video clerk (Dany Boon) with a bullet in his noggin while classic film noir plays on his telly is breathless in its one-idea-per-shot inventiveness. Unfortunately, it takes no time for the inventiveness to turn antic and oppressive as the hero sets out to take down a pair of nefarious ammunition magnates with the help of a gang of adorable junkyard dwellers, and an onslaught of balloon-thought puns, contortionist gamines, and lavishly wasteful camera movement is unleashed. The one clear feeling is that Jeunet hates the human damage of warmongers and that he hates parting with his goony gizmos even more. Continue Reading »




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5 For The Day: Robert Wise

by on September 20th, 2009 at 9:10 pm in Film

By Odienator

Robert Wise's oeuvre is a study in extreme contrasts, a retelling of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde impressed upon the history of the cinema. For every classic he crafted in the many genres he worked, there is an equally hideous companion piece that almost negates it. One could argue that this idea of good and evil was crafted only upon reflection of the director's full output, but Wise gave us an example of this aspect early in his 60-year career. As an editor at RKO, Wise spliced together a masterpiece called Citizen Kane, then turned his scissors and his viewfinder against its director's next picture, The Magnificent Ambersons. While Wise cannot take all the blame for Ambersons' butchering, and the picture that resulted isn't bad, this early dichotomy was eerily prescient of Wise's ultimate place in the annals of American film.

Wise's Robert Louis Stevenson-worthy transformations continued throughout his career. He crafted one of the scariest exercises in the horror subgenre of ghost stories, and one of the worst. He used both capoeira and ballet to depict racial tension. He created a landmark exercise in science fiction, and he rebooted a sci-fi TV franchise that, thirty years later, was again rebooted. He contributed to the end of the all-star disaster pictures of the '70s and, with Julie Andrews, he helped destroy the movie musical trend of the '60s despite getting two Oscars for directing them. He worked on Orson Welles' directorial debut, and on a certain Brat Packer-turned-director's first movie. Wise also had a knack for picking a good, scandalous or controversial story, but no distinct style in depicting it. Such a rich study in contrasts is prime material for a 5 for The Day.

Like Howard Hawks and Alan Parker, Wise worked in almost every genre, though he skews closer to Parker than Hawks in terms of success ratio. Whether that is good or bad, and which films belong in which category, I leave to your discussion. I will state that when Wise was good, he was very, very good. And when he was bad, as the nursery rhyme goes, he was horrid. Herewith, five noteworthy Robert Wise films. I tried to pick a film from each genre, but history forces my hand on one entry: Predictably I must start with: Continue Reading »




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Toronto Film Festival 2009: Day Six

by on September 19th, 2009 at 8:15 pm in Festivals, Film

Toronto Film Festival Day Six

Mother: Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho. The mother (Kim Hye-ja) is a middle-aged, small-town store clerk running a little clandestine acupuncture on the side, the son (Won Bin) is a man-child who gets distracted by golf balls while seeking revenge on hit-and-run millionaires. Won is hauled off to jail after a schoolgirl is found murdered, and Kim, sure that her boy is innocent, turns amateur sleuth. Park Chan-wook would have wrung the Grand Guignol hell out of this premise, but Bong is less interested in shocks than in the synergy between vast Korean fields and the equally mysterious inner landscape of the dazed matriarch making her way across them. A welter of motifs and clues (a sluggish psyche's gradually unclogged remembrances, tell-tale snapshots in a promiscuous high schooler's cell phone, a key scene played from different angles) fused by superb filmmaking, it at times suggests a dark-humored lampoon of one of Naruse's odes to maternal diligence, but with a tarantula sting of its own. Continue Reading »




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INGLOURIOUS SNATCH

by on September 19th, 2009 at 5:00 am in Film

By Steven Boone

summer drek2009 is the year I quit film criticism for the fourth or fifth time. It was sort of like the local crazy homeless guy quitting his post as honorary mayor of the corner. Big whoop. I keep coming back to the block, hoping somebody heard my cry of doom and responded accordingly. The cry goes something like this: Cinema as a popular art form has lost the fundamentals that make its expensive products worth our time. Critics, content that a stubborn minority of classically trained filmmakers still endure at the arthouse and on the festival circuit, happily chalk up the disaster at the multiplex as Other People's Problem. In other words, caviar for us, scraps for the rabble. It's the blithe attitude of Whole Foods shoppers toward the Food Stamp set, and it's disgusting.

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[To read the full article, full of polemic and full of fire, click here to get your snatch on at Boone's baby, BIG MEDIA VANDALISM.]




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Necronomicon (1993)

by on September 19th, 2009 at 4:57 am in Film

By Simon Abrams

I'm not entirely sure that it's possible to make a successful film adaptation of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. His florid writing style does everything it can to prevent the reader from being able to visualize what's going on, which is a good part of the fun that any adaptation, film or otherwise, usually willfully ignores. I mean, let's face it, his most memorable creation is a space-alien-God thing with an unpronounceable name—Lovecraft's narrator makes a point that he can only approximate the name because it stems from a far coarser and more guttural language—and an unimaginably hideous chimera-like body. His monsters are intentionally unfathomable so it stands to reason that reproducing their images and the context within which they were created is a hard sell.

Necronomicon, an omnibus film of Lovecraft adaptations, is a valiant effort and serves up some intriguing mixed results. Its first segment, "The Drowned," directed by Christophe Gans, is the weakest of the four stories though it's also the only one to faithfully reproduce the atmosphere of Lovecraft's story. In it, a man comes home to his long-abandoned inheritance—a moldering mansion with shelves full of cob-web covered books and a waterlogged, sunken cellar. Gans' Byronic anti-hero lusts after a particular tome in the house that hearken back to the original owner's supernatural activities. That kind of gothic, single-minded quest for Faustian knowledge is key to Lovecraft's stories but Gans doesn't really make much of that solid foundation of atmosphere.

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To read the rest of the article at Extended Cut, click here.




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Toronto Film Festival 2009: Day Five

by on September 18th, 2009 at 7:32 pm in Festivals, Film

Toronto Film Festival Day Five

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: The other half of the Werner Herzog Nutty Procedural Double Feature, this David Lynch-produced thriller offers far more controlled absurdism than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but is easily the lesser work. One of the supporting actors playing straight man to Cage's cyclonic clowning in Lieutenant, Michael Shannon takes center stage here as a San Diego momma's boy who returns "different" from a trip to Peru and takes an unhealthy interest in playing the matricidal protagonist in a production of The Oresteia. The setting is a hostage negotiation between Shannon and police officer Willem Dafoe, with Chloe Sevigny, Brad Dourif, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and other kooks duly dropping by. Smooshing near-parodic versions of tropes by both Herzog (maddening jungles, incongruous animals) and Lynch (promiscuous coffee-drinking, tuxedoed dwarves), it's strenuously deadpan where the other film was organically hysterical. It works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists, not unlike Dali doing his own version of Millet's Angelus. Continue Reading »




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Toronto Film Festival 2009: Day Four

by on September 16th, 2009 at 11:05 pm in Festivals, Film

Toronto Film Festival Day Four

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: The title makes it sound less like a remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 masterpiece than a coming-this-fall-to-CBS cop show, yet Werner Herzog's dizzying comedy is its own unruly beast. It may have taken somebody who's wrangled Klaus Kinski five times before, but Nicholas Cage's bruise-purple twitchiness is employed fruitfully for the first time in ages: Playing the titular dope-snorting, high-gambling, granny-terrorizing homicide detective, Cage offers a deranged high-wire act that is unmistakably part of the director's singular world even as it keeps spilling over the edges of that world. By the time the lieutenant is lurching across the screen like a broken-backed Nosferatu, even seasoned weirdoes like Brad Dourif and Fairuza Balk are stepping out of the way. Herzog's New Orleans is even more aggressively eccentric than Tsai's Paris in Face: Visions of demented lyricism (an alligator's view of a roadside crash, a pair of iguanas seemingly breaking into a Big Easy aria) giddily punch through the film's hack-policier surface. Continue Reading »




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"I couldn't come up with an obituary this week," by Henry Gibson

by on September 16th, 2009 at 1:20 pm in Film, Television

But at least you can once again posit that burning question, "Marshall McLuhan, what are yuh doin'?" R.I.P. Haven Hamilton, Blues Brothers Nazi, Dr. Werner Klopek, Thurston Howell, et al. (From The Hollywood Reporter.)




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The Mundane Fantastic

by on September 15th, 2009 at 8:50 pm in Film

By Matt Zoller Seitz

In this summer's most spectacular features—from CGI-driven live-action movies to 3-D animated fare—the real star has been the camera. It's as lively, confident and versatile as any lead actor, taking any opportunity to get into character for a particular shot or sequence, doing whatever it needs to do to sell a moment. Much of the epic run time of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is shot with a wobbly handheld camera, following its heroes through a series of burning, crumbling, exploding landscapes as giant robots scramble along in the background or duke it out like boxers; the action is framed and shot to suggest that we're seeing a documentary event—a catastrophic or miraculous occurrence that just happened to be captured for posterity. Ditto G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. When the cybernetically enhanced soldiers soar through the air, the camera shakes, and the backgrounds (and sometimes the combatants) blur out. In certain shots, the camera seems to be struggling to keep the participants in frame.

One can chalk this tendency up to the Bourne-era craze for jittery handheld camerawork, or merely to clever, purposeful filmmaking—to directors, cinematographers, editors and special effects technicians going the extra kilometer to add believability. But with cinema in the final stages of its digital evolution—the production process evolving from one that used to be entirely analog, with component pieces (film, tape) that one could literally hold in one's hand, to a digital process wherein almost every stage is created electronically, and the bits don't physically exist in quite the same way—it's worth asking where this craving for "believability" comes from and how it's being expressed via the camera. I think it has to do with the subliminal knowledge (on the part of filmmakers more so than the viewers) that reality is imperfect, and that to make a moment seem real, one must present it somewhat imprecisely, to counteract the meticulous, slightly inhuman slickness of CGI.


To read the rest of the article at IFC.com, click here.




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