By Matt Zoller Seitz

To read the ninth in a series of countdown essays written for Salon.com about the most important directors of the decade, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Links to the seventh and eighth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (and the Naturalists), click here. For the entry on the Coen Brothers (the Fabulists), click here.

By Steven Boone

The flicks below are the best things I got out to see in multiplexes and arthouses in 2009. That leaves out Wild Grass, the kooky Alain Resnais comedy I fell in love with at this year's New York Film Festival. Also excluded are the gunfights in Public Enemies; nude, pale Paz de la Huerta straddling brown, blue-suited Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control; the rolling box of Quaker Oats in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; the local color in 50 Cent's Before I Self-Destruct; the dewy, palpitating bathroom scale and human flesh in the beginning of Antichrist—all perfect fragments of movies that I simply did not dig overall.

It was an exhausted-feeling year. The new movies I came across generally seemed plum tuckered out, slumming through the end of a decade increasingly hostile to simple movie pleasures.

Except for these beauties: Continue Reading »

By N.P. Thompson

What makes Rob Marshall's Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We're incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are expected to take this on faith, but never once does Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) do or say anything even remotely intriguing. The movie has no real subject; it's proudly about nothing. Not the arid nothingness of a Van Sant movie, but a boring sort of Condé Nast nothingness. If the real-life Federico Fellini had been as dull and as mopey as his fictional counterpart Contini, no one would have ever staged a Broadway musical [loosely] inspired by the autobiographical 8-1/2 in the first place, which means we could have been spared this present debacle that masquerades as entertainment.

Day-Lewis gamely tries to personify a song-and-dance man, yet his integrity as a performer works against him in a Rob Marshall movie. When Day-Lewis, in his first solo number, climbs the spiraling soundstage staircase that rises into the dark, it ought to be an iconic moment, but there's magic neither in Marshall's airless staging nor in his unimaginative camera work.

But back to that nothingness: Continue Reading »

By Matt Zoller Seitz

"It's showtime, folks."

That's the mantra of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), the boozing, chain-smoking, pill-popping, womanizing, workaholic filmmaker-choreographer hero of the 1979 drama All That Jazz, a hopped-up American variant of Federico Fellini's navel-gazing fantasia 8 ½ (1963).

Those three words—recited by Gideon into the bathroom mirror each morning after downing a breakfast of Dexedrine and Alka-Seltzer and listening to Antonio Vivaldi's "Concerto Alla Rustica"—sum up both the character and his real-world counterpart, Bob Fosse, the choreographer, theater director and filmmaker, who died in 1987 at 60. He was a Gideon-level workaholic who ended All That Jazz, a self-written advance obituary, with a shot of his alter ego being zipped into a body bag while the soundtrack plays Ethel Merman's definitive version of "There's No Business Like Show Business."

But Gideon's mantra also summarizes that movie's significance within narrative film, a mode of storytelling that rarely dares venture beyond the linear for fear of confusing the viewer. Released 30 years ago this month, All That Jazz set a new standard for speed and complexity, its structure boasting as many temporal pirouettes as the headiest art house fare. Yet the film never feels labored. It's not homework. It's showtime.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Links to the fourth, fifth and sixth entries in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com. For the entry on Steven Soderbergh, click here. For the entry on Michael Moore, click here. For the entry on Steven Spielberg, click here.

By Jaime N. Christley

The phenomenon of the holiday makes it necessary for practically everyone to get into the spirit of things. Spin the globe, drop your finger, pick a holiday from where it lands, and that's what happens. That's why it's a holiday, not a personal day. On the one hand, this can be seen as a social necessity. Part of your acceptance in a social group or subgroup depends on your ability to play a role not only in day-to-day business, but also in rituals. Commemoration, observation, celebration—these are all rituals of a sort. For a little less than a third of the human race, Christmas is the largest and most concentrated matrix of rituals. A few key images tell the story: Decorations appear in advance of the two major holidays that precede Christmas. Theme music besieges the airwaves. Homes and trees are adorned with lights. Government offices, too. These days—at least in my neck of the woods, where Christian and non-Christian faiths share a large and more or less nonviolent space, where pretty much every possible reaction to Christmas is okay—you can celebrate it, piously or non-piously, you can hate it, or you can attempt to ignore it. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in London, in the middle of the nineteenth century, some ways of thinking about the holiday are okay, and some are not.

Which brings us to Ebenezer Scrooge, easily the best known anti-social in Western literature. He's also a miser, and Charles Dickens was shrewd enough to dovetail his money-hoarding with his misanthropy, instead of stacking the character with unlikable, yet unrelated, characteristics. As Dickens saw it, Christmas was a prominent, cultural fixture, but, politically speaking, it was also an impotent one. Social injustice was defined as the poor treatment of labor, a policy of zero tolerance to debtors, and brutal indifference toward the less fortunate. The character who personified this would not simply hate mankind, he would also hold its purse strings. The character arc of A Christmas Carol traces Ebenezer Scrooge's evolution from a very bad man to a very good one, the engine of his moral reeducation operated by no one other than the story's author. (You cannot otherwise explain the employment of spirits and surreal, malleable environments.) Continue Reading »