By Charles Taylor

The New Yorker used to be in the habit of sending someone to screenings along with their movie critics for the purposes of fact checking. Anthony Lane's latest piece of cocktail chat—it's Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces he's discussing between sips of his martini this week—suggests that tough times at Condé Nast may have led to an abandonment of the practice. How else to account for the falsification in Lane's review?

Here's Lane:

"[Penélope] Cruz is certainly more worshipped than ever by [Almodóvar's] camera, and you have to laugh when, fresh from intercourse, with mussed hair, she stares at the bathroom mirror, as bare as a baby, and declares, "I look awful." If you say so, dear."

What Lane doesn't bother to tell you is that, just before saying that line, Cruz's character has vomited. The reason? Continue Reading »

[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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What is it about Spanish cinema that just nails how people are possessed by dreams and stories? Of course I'm making an overgeneralization, and yet the three Spanish filmmakers that I know best, Bunuel, Almodovar and (sheepishly, based on watching two films) Berlanga, all share an uncommon fascination with the rapture of storytelling. Whether through a voiceover narration or one person telling a tale to another, these films traffic in the private fantasies and urges of characters and audience alike. It's true in Bunuel's earliest sound film L'Age D'Or, with its narrative framework disintegrating into a lucid stream of on-screen impulsive acts, or as recently as Almodovar's Broken Embraces, where much of the film's pleasure is in just watching characters being transfixed by each other's stories.

Within this hypothetical national subgenre, Bienvenido, Mister Marshall stands tall. A sleepy Castillan village tries to transform itself into an Andalusian postcard paradise upon hearing that American postwar funders may pass through. The voiceover sets it up like a fable ("There once was an old spanish Town"); the film is not only an allegory for a nation's collective submission to the utopian facades of Franco's Fascist Spain, but to the countermyth of America, which pervades the characters' dreams as well as fears.

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

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: An Education, Amelia, The Great Locomotive Chase, Bitter Victory, Ride the High Country, Mad Men, A CSI Trilogy, A Couple of New Series, but first:

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FAN MAIL: Well, here's an example of why I love doing this column: Matt Zoller Seitz's taking exception to my views of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Unlike some writers, I love to be challenged, especially by somebody as smart as Matt. He did not mind what I felt was the lack of enough plot. He liked it as an "absurdist spectacle," which it was certainly trying to be. It fits in with the type of film that the great film scholar Tom Gunning called the "Cinema of Attractions." He first used the term to describe very early, pre-storyline films, but the term has come to refer to those films that put the emphasis on spectacle, such as any recent sci-fi film. As a pro-writer fellow, I tend to prefer a little more plot, but there are certainly joys to be found as a viewer in a spectacle. Matt also picked up on something else when he said the filmmakers want to "fill up [the movie] with sight gags." As I have mentioned on other occasions, comedies live or die by the jokes, and if the jokes are funny can get along with less plot. You make us laugh and we will forgive you almost anything. Make us laugh and enjoy it and we will forgive you anything. And just to assure you that I am not a complete stick in the mud, one of my guilty pleasures is one of Matt's: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I agree with any criticism anybody has ever made about it, and I still love it.

"James" raised the question as to whether my teaching at a community college made me too close to the subject to find Community funny. He's right, although part of it is having heard community colleges traditionally dissed in our culture—I am a little tired of it. He mentioned that other shows have inaccuracies, including 30 Rock. I agree, and it bothers me on those shows as well, particularly the current story arc on 30 Rock about hiring a new performer. Surely if they were hiring a guy for a sketch comedy, somebody would have talked to him when he was not in his robot makeup.

A couple of things left over from my article "Talking Back to Documentaries." Todd Ford was "amazed" that I get students to talk, since he has found students reluctant to speak up. I have always had students who spoke up, especially at LACC, although I did have a bit of a problem the semester I taught at UCLA. I got the impression students there were afraid to speak up because they might be wrong. It took a little while to open them up. "Cranky" had an interesting look and noted that he/she found the younger students' comments "quite frustrating." They can be, but that's part of the game.

And now, some movies: Continue Reading »

[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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Eric Rohmer's debut feature suggests that there were many Eric Rohmers vying for the man's artistic identity, informed by the cinephilic breadth of influences one would expect of a Cahiers du Cinema critic having his turn behind the camera. In this film, the approaches threaten to partition the movie like a post-war European city. The first part, where American expat Pierre throws a party celebrating his inheritance, dances around the room with dolly shots, snatching pieces of conversation in the tradition of Renoir/Ophuls. When Pierre's inheritance proves bogus and he's turned on the street, the film goes Neo-Realist, tracing his demise first in shades of DeSican social pathos before confronting a Rossellinian existential void. An 11th hour force majeure feels more like Preston Sturges than Robert Bresson, in terms of feeling less emotionally invested in the forces of transcendence and more like a self-reflexive act of writerly intervention that brings attention to mechanism of the plot. This is something Rohmer tries on more than once throughout the film, peppering it with seemingly incongruous digressive moments (a reporter's trip to Africa, a car wreck in the French countryside), only to tie them back into the main storyline. It's a film that, in more than one sense, is all over the map.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Veronika Ferdman

I love horror films; slashers, monsters, the occult, even the occasional torture porn installment—if there's screaming and stalking, I'm there. But as much as being a huge fan of the genre predisposes me to being more lenient in my unabashed love for all things bumping in the night, I remain a stickler for one thing: suspense. If there's no suspense, no breathless wonder at what's going to happen next, then really, no matter how virtuosic and grotesque the composition of mangled bodies may be, it's resoundingly dull. And it's this integral and seemingly simple element of suspense that is so thoroughly lacking in much of modern horror-fare.

Well, Ti West's The House of the Devil is so firmly rooted in suspense that even Hitchcock would be alternately proud/jealous. West doesn't go for cheap round-the-corner-peek-a-boo scares. He is able to maintain a feeling of unsettlement and utmost dread for nearly an hour, before any sort of visceral pay-off. It would be a great disservice to reveal any of the plot, so suffice to say that Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) desperately needs money to pay her rent and agrees to "baby-sit" for a superbly eerie couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ulman, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. (Greta Gerwig, of mumblecore fame, puts in an appearance as Samantha's plucky best friend, sporting a fantastically feathered '80s hairdo.) Continue Reading »

[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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One: Is it backhanded praise to say that One, Two, Three is a movie you don't even have to look at to enjoy? For the first half hour I just wanted to close my eyes and let the non-stop flow of dialogue carry me along. While Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond are known for their wit ("You will send papers to East Berlin with blond lady in triplicate." "You want the papers in triplicate, or the blond in triplicate?" "See what you can do.") it's the musicality of the banter that captivates me: the compulsive clicking of a subordinate's heels, Cagney's numerical method of dictating agendas to associates, and countless little moments where the words turned against their speakers, batted around like a beach ball.

That's not to say the film lacks for visual interest. Cagney's office is an expansive executive space over which looms a global map of Coca Cola conquest; it's stately and big enough to contain Cagney's booming voice, and eventually becomes a staging ground for one of the most breathless one-set slapstick routines of post-30s Hollywood.

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

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, whose cinematography would help change the look of American movies in the late 1960s and 1970s, first met in 1953 on a Budapest street corner near the Academy of Drama and Film, where both men were enrolled as cinematography students. Three years afterward—on Nov. 11, 1956, a week after Soviet troops poured into the city to crush the Hungarian uprising—they ran into each other again on the same corner.

"The Russian tanks were going up and down the street," recalled Mr. Zsigmond, 79, in a recent phone interview to promote the documentary "No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos," an account of their long friendship that will be broadcast Nov. 17 on "Independent Lens" on PBS. "I said, 'Laszlo, you know the Arriflex camera, you have it up in the film school in college.' He said, 'Yes, that's where I have it.' He knew what we were about to do."

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To read the rest of the New York Times article, click here.

By Ed Howard

Claude Chabrol has always been especially interested in the dynamics of class power, examining the nature of class with a dry, caustic wit. In La cérémonie, this examination plays out in a remote small town where the isolated lower-class maid Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is hired by the Lelievre family. They're a typical bourgeois family, aloof and condescending. The father, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), is an authoritarian Mozart lover, and his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) is a slightly bitchy control freak, while their kids Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet) are mostly just indifferent. These people aren't evil, they're just wrapped up in themselves, to the point that they virtually ignore Sophie once she's in their house. As Melinda says, they treat the maid like a "robot," but despite Melinda's enlightened pose, she's really no different than the rest of her family, elitist and snooty, at heart concerned only with her own problems.

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To read the rest of the article at Only the Cinema, click here.