After his last two brilliant and emotionally demanding feature-length fiction films, Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, it's nice to see Fatih Akin kick back and relax, but I suspect he enjoyed making Soul Kitchen more than I enjoyed watching it. Continue Reading »
"Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person," said Gary Shteyngart in a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine. "The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions." He's exaggerating for effect, I suppose, and writers who are frustrated because they don't have more readers aren't exactly unbiased reporters of cultural decline. Why should expressing your opinion make you care less about what other people have to say? Isn't it possible that oversharing is making us more sensitive to all the different perspectives out there? Continue Reading »
To quote directly from a recent CNN article, "a cinema in the West Bank city of Jenin will next week open for business for the first time in 23 years, following a remarkable chain of events that began with the death of a Palestinian boy."
Though we're not sure we agree with the order, Nerve.com has published a list of The Ten Most Iconic Crotches in Rock History.
Finally, this is clearly Taliban propaganda, but it's also perfect for when you want to masturbate in public:
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.
A video essay about the role of guns in film, presented by Capital and Matt Zoller Seitz.
Sitting in my in box is a press release about a Blu-Ray edition of The Last of the Mohicans that's being hyped as "an all-new director's definitive cut by acclaimed director Michael Mann."
The phrase "definitive cut" made me laugh. I like Mann's films a lot, but definitive he ain't. He's a serial recutter, and this is his third go-round with Mohicans. The first was the 1992 theatrical cut, which remained unchanged until 1999, when Mann released a second version on DVD that removed four minutes but added eight (mostly small moments of character development). I have no idea what this new version will contain, and frankly I'm in no hurry to find out, or buy the disc, for that matter. Why? Because I don't want to encourage Mann to continue tinkering with his movies—and because the entire phenomenon of director's cuts and definitive director's cuts and restored cuts and expanded cuts and alternate cuts has gotten out of hand and needs to stop.
Except, of course, when I like the result. I'm flighty that way.
Gangster movies usually come in one of three flavors. In the first kind, the filmmakers identify with their glamorized protagonists (think Coppola's Corleones or Michael Mann's Dillinger in Public Enemies), portraying them as admirable, even honorable men who abide by a strict moral code in an immoral world. The second show no love to their gangsters, thugs without remorse like the ugly brutes in last year's Gomorrah. The third—and probably most common—play it both ways, making their gangsters charismatic enough to appeal to our love of rebels without a cause (think Tony Soprano) while showing enough of the damage they inflict to remind us that bad-boy infatuations work best as fantasy. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Take Two is an occasional series about remakes, reboots, relaunches, ripoffs, and do-overs in every cinematic genre.]
Few four-word concepts would seem as predestined for American canonization as "Motown Wizard of Oz," and yet I can't recall anyone—critics, friends, fellow Hitsville and classic soul aficionados—ever recommending the film version of Charlie Smalls's 1975 Broadway musical The Wiz. If only by default, this movie should be remembered at least as a curio in the career of one of its many notable contributors—Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell, Lena Horne, Ashford and Simpson, Sidney Lumet, Quincy Jones, and Joel Schumacher among them.
I wish I could report that The Wiz deserves better than this cultural lacuna, but alas: This is a certifiable turkey, one of those doomed "star-studded" productions where a football team's worth of talent can't overcome the fact that nobody's doing what feels natural. Everyone, particularly Ross, who, by all accounts, was the project's true auteur, seems so amazed by the virtue and capital-I Importance of their undertaking that even the lighthearted numbers feel leaden. As Dorothy, a put-upon Harlem schoolteacher who's "never been below 125th St.," Ross plays her character as if she represented the dramatic and emotional summit of Western civilization. And a handful of other reliably joyful entertainers—most egregiously Jackson, Russell, and Pryor—follow her lead. This is The Wizard of Oz pitched midway between the first act of A Raisin in the Sun and the last scene of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and it lasts a mind-boggling 135 minutes. Continue Reading »
There's a contradiction at the heart of even the best of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies. When those two dance, or when Astaire sings (the rhythm that made him such a great dancer also makes him an excellent singer, although his voice was nothing special), they're as elegantly expressive as anything ever captured on film, and as perfectly suited to their medium as Shakespeare was to his. But when they're just acting, their movies go flat, as earthbound as the song and dance numbers are airy and uplifting. Continue Reading »
Many video game sequels have been accused of failing to push their respective series forward. Even the God of War and Madden franchises have been criticized for not evolving core design mechanics between iterations. Yet even with these criticisms, both series tend to be celebrated by critics and fans alike for their level of quality. And with the release of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, Blizzard Entertainment's seminal RTS has now firmly established itself as a series akin to the God of War and Madden franchises. By following the same template of the original Starcraft, the game excels in its execution, but it doesn't evolve the formula that it established more than a decade ago.
At its core, the Starcraft series boils down to three activities: gathering resources, building bases and units from those resources, and then seeing if your units can overtake your opponent. Using this template, Starcraft II presents two separate experiences: the single-player campaign and the multiplayer mode.
In single-player, you play as a rebel group of Terrans (the humans in the Starcraft universe), lead by the story's hero James Raynor, as you fight an oppressive empire. Overall, the story keeps the player engaged to Blizzard's well-crafted space opera with events like the resurfacing of the Zerg (an insect like creature that pillages planets) as well as having to allay with the Protoss (an ancient alien species).
Along with the expertly told story, there's a wide variety of mission types to keep the player engaged. Even though these mission types still revolve around Starcraft's basic formula, it's those objective-based tasks within every mission that keeps the single-player experience from becoming stale. Whether it's a train heist or gathering resources on a transforming planet, the game's biggest strength lies in how it plays with the traditional formula in the single-player campaign. Continue Reading »
Several of my closest relatives, including my father, have Asperger's syndrome. I'm sure that colored my reaction to Q&A, but then how many neurotypicals don't know and love at least one person who's wired differently than they are?
Q&A is the first in a series of animated shorts StoryCorps is creating from DIY interviews that have been collected since 2003. More than 60,000 people so far have contributed half that many stories, going in pairs to a StoryCorps booth (there are permanent ones in New York City, San Francisco and Atlanta and a van that travels around the rest of the country), where one person interviews the other about whatever they want to talk about. A number of animated StoryCorps movies began airing on PBS's POV series starting today. Continue Reading »
The early going of Mad Men's fourth season has given us a whole lot of Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his nonstop cycle of disintegration and reinvention. Which is largely expected, of course, but it's nonetheless refreshing that this week's episode, "The Rejected" (written by Keith Huff and Matthew Weiner, and directed by John Slattery) finally gives us a chance to catch up with Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss).
While the primary focus of the series has always been about plunging into the depths of Don Draper's character, Pete and Peggy have given us a glimpse into characters who began the series young and undefined, largely unaware of who they were themselves. The two have changed more than anyone, and after "The Rejected" it has become increasingly difficult to remember Peggy as the non-descript, largely repressed Catholic girl working Don's desk, or Pete as the entry-level accounts man hired for his family name, and who could barely open his mouth in a meeting with the big boys without making a fool of himself. Continue Reading »
Coming Up In This Column: Life During Wartime, Get Low, Flipped, Mademoiselle Chambon, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, Caprice but first…
Fan Mail: I trust you all marked it down on your calendars. In his comments on US#54, David Ehrenstein and I actually seem to be in agreement over something. In this case it was the handling of the Jules-Paul affair in The Kids Are All Right. In regard to Phil Dunne's comments on Jacques Tourneur, David returns with a quote from Fritz Lang from Contempt that "…on screen it's pictures. Moving pictures they call it." That's absolutely true, and it is indeed the director's job to find the pictures that will tell the story. Later on in this column you will get a nice demonstration of a director who doesn't quite handle it right. In one of the great Kevin Brownlow documentaries (I think it is Hollywood: The Pioneers) he has an interview with Byron Haskin, a cinematographer and later director. Haskin is making fun of Michael Curtiz, of whom Peter Ustinov said in his memoir Dear Me that he "never learned American, let alone English, and he had forgotten his Hungarian, which left him in a limbo of his own, both entertaining and wild." Haskin says that Curtiz used to walk around the set saying, "We visualize! We visualize!" Haskin thinks this is funny, but it struck me that it is the heart of directing. Continue Reading »
This has been a good summer for something we haven't seen much in the movies: the female midlife crisis. (Could this be the next wave of Baby Boomer self-analysis?) Here's what I wrote today for TimeOFF about two of the latest, Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time.
It seemed like a really "fun" conceit: Hemingway as a detective figure in a series of novels. I missed the first book in this series so I started cold. Good sign; Thomas Dunne, a good editor at St. Martin's, its sponsor. He has done some nice books. Then I read the book.
Let me start with a caveat. (You were expecting caviar canapes? Not in this economy!) I thought the writer of the tattooed lady trilogy, that dead Scandinavian fellow, was wretched. He had a great character (she of the tattoo), and yet he left her out of the first book for far too long a time, a time that nearly made me lose patience with the whole. And then he wrote far too long for the message he was carrying in his damaged psyche. But that is another story for another time. Needless to say, he laughed all the way to the grave, though his putative widow was buggered by the state. Back to our boy.
This book is a mess. Hemingway, had he the energy, and I doubt he would, given his disgust for life, would roll over in his grave, or urn, or whatever. First is the prose. Perhaps for you it is the story, but for good or bad, for me it is the prose. Continue Reading »
[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.]
Ed Howard: In all of his films, Todd Haynes takes elements of gaudy tabloid culture and warps them to his own purposes, because he sees—in the lurid stories about sexuality and decadence and violence that we like to tell ourselves, in the celebrity gossip rags and TV news and hyped-up movies—deeper truths about identity, gender, politics, entertainment and sexuality. Haynes finds, within the sensationalist and the melodramatic, a culture's vision of itself, distorted by a funhouse mirror but nevertheless evocative of the unvarnished truth. Or maybe the truth really is as strange as the mirror suggests: entertainers as plastic action figures, made to be manipulated and posed; sexuality as a plague, terrifying and mysterious; suburbia as a deadening cage for the emotions; the past as a manufactured façade, rendered superficially safe by the suppression (or ignorance) of all those impulses that go unchecked in the present; identity as malleable and fluid, the true self supplanted by endless masks and games. Haynes' appropriation of the language of media—the docudrama, the genre film, the educational documentary, all eras and styles collaged together in his cinematic blender—is an examination of the ways in which culture both disguises and probes the truths about individuals, their secret desires and fears and fantasies. Continue Reading »
Recent Comments:
The Conversations: Michael Haneke
by Ed Howard
Links for the Day: The Yankee Comandante, Dunces Maybe Finds Its Ignatius, Michael Haneke on Amour, The Great Gatsby Trailer, & More
by shootthecritic
February House Composer Gabriel Kahane and Book Writer Seth Bockley Talk Communal Music
by David Ehrenstein
A Movie a Day, Day 83: Andrei Rublev
by murtazaali
Critical Distance: The Artist
by DRush76