[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House 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.]
Jason Bellamy: For one of my younger brothers, 2010 was the summer of music. Approaching his junior year at the University of Oregon, he spent the past few months attending about every concert that came his way in the Pacific Northwest. The criteria seemed to be this: If the concert was within driving distance and featured loud (preferably metal) bands that hadn't had a big hit since before he was born, he was going. And so he rocked to Iron Maiden, Cinderella, the Scorpions, Billy Idol, and more. He rocked at large arenas and relatively intimate county fairs, sneaking up to the front of the stage when he could to snap pictures that he would eventually file along with similar snapshots of bands like AC/DC and KISS.
My brother loves music—if he's partial to rock and metal, he's rather indiscriminate within that genre (if you couldn't tell). But I think the biggest reason my brother attends concerts is because he loves the energy of the live events, where he doesn't just hear the music but feels it, too. Even when you're pressed shoulder to shoulder with other attendees, and even when the musicians are so far away that you need to rely on the video screens to see the musicians' expressions, there's something very intimate and magically visceral about concerts. You can know every note and lyric of a band's work from listening to their albums, but somehow seeing them live makes us feel as if we know them better, or know them for the first time.
Maybe that phenomenon is what inspires filmmakers to make concert documentaries in the first place: the challenge of simulating the feeling of being there. There are numerous films about musical artists—from A Hard Day's Night (1964) to Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970) to Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005) to This Is It (2009)—some of which go backstage, some of which play historian, some of which are hardly about music at all, and so there's no way we could have an all-encompassing discussion about that larger cinematic genre and its many sub-genres. Still, it's a genre worth tackling, and so in this discussion we're going to focus on five films—Woodstock (1970), Gimme Shelter (1970), Stop Making Sense (1984), Rattle and Hum (1988) and Instrument (2001)—that despite their incredible diversity have one thing in common: their chief aim seems to be to replicate the sensation of being there. And in the case of the first film, Woodstock, the music might be the least interesting part of that experience, am I right? Continue Reading »
"It's a surreal place, isn't it?" someone asked me about Abu Dhabi. The question made me think about my last night at the festival: Attending a gala, red-carpet, invite-only awards ceremony at the Emirates Palace, wondering what I was doing there, leaving 12 minutes in to catch another movie at the Abu Dhabi Theatre, falling asleep during it from too much sightseeing and partying, and waking up at the end to attend another party. I did these things rather than visit the labor camps about 20 minutes outside the city, where much of the working-class population lives. I told myself at the airport the next morning that I hadn't made the time.
That's Abu Dhabi for you—a city that paints a big smile for tourists, and one that exists where and as you care to see it. Wherever I went, though, I heard a voice screaming inside my head. At the Emirates Palace you can buy gold coins from a vending machine—and the voice went, but that's not reality! Next to the Abu Dhabi Theatre lies the Heritage Village, where you can see a wooden house built for your pleasure, a museum with myriad undated axes, fishing nets, and Korans, and a row of postcard-selling huts—and the voice cried, but that's not reality! A short bus ride, and you catch the Grand Mosque, a towering white dome that women must don abayat to enter, where a digital clock reads the six daily prayer times, and where seven enormous bejeweled chandeliers loom overhead. Large groups of people stream in and out to pray. Is this reality? Continue Reading »
House of Suh (Iris Shim, 2010). Much like John Kastner's masterful crime documentary Life With Murder, Iris Shim's House of Suh looks into the eyes of a young murderer and finds an evolving mystery yet to be solved. Both nonfiction films unfold like great thrillers, revealing key information slowly and deliberately at crucial parts of the story. But each consistently considers the layers of human trauma under investigation, exploring the hidden evil lurking just behind the memories and reflections of various talking heads. The title of the film refers to Andrew and his sister Catherine Suh, first generation Korean American siblings who were both convicted of planning and executing the murder of Catherine's boyfriend Robert O'Dubaine in Chicago on September 25, 1993. Shim begins the film with a brilliantly precise family tree of all parties comprised of intricate animated etchings—connecting these characters on a superficial level only to reveal later on how fragile those links are in truth. Interviews with Andrew (now serving a 100-year sentence in federal prison), other Suh family members, O'Dubaine's brother Kevin Koran, and various lawyers from each side make up the core analysis of the film, and Shim's calculated layering of perspectives allows this seemingly open and closed case to grow more complex and insidious. "My identity is the one Catherine developed for me," Andrew states late in the film, confounding the audience's perception of his guilt even in the face of obvious misconduct. Despite all the procedural jargon and psychological analysis, House of Suh has a dark neo-noir heart pumping deception, betrayal, blackmail, and manipulation through the narrative with sly precision and unflinching honesty. It's a devastating example of the American dream hollowed out by the rot of tradition and expectation. Hilariously, the devastating true story was notoriously remade into an all-Anglo television movie, as if the crime itself was okay to represent but the fact that the perpetrators were Asian was off limits. Continue Reading »
Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is an exploration (in 3D!) of the Chauvet Caves, an area that Herzog identifies, romantically and poetically, as the place "where the modern human soul was awakened." It would seem like a typically Herzogian grandiose description, if not for its essential accuracy: These caves contain the oldest discovered pictorial depictions to emanate from the human hand. The caves are thus an obvious symbol for the birth of human creativity, for the development of the uniquely human urge to document one's world and to communicate about it. For an artist like Herzog, this is an irresistible conceit. At one point in this film, a scientist remarks that the difference between the Neanderthal and the more modern, more human successor, the Paleolithic man, was precisely this flowering of creativity in carved icons, cave paintings and even crude musical instruments, like a flute carved out of ivory. Herzog's film resulted from a rare opportunity to explore these caves, which are jealously protected and sealed off from casual inquiry; normally, only a select few scientists ever get to see the cave interior, and even then only in limited ways. Continue Reading »
With contributions from Nick Schager, Michelle Orange, and Sam Adams, among others, IFC reveals The 30 Greatest Drug Scenes of All Time, with a scene from Paul Morrissey's Trash awesomely making the top five.
James MacArthur, "Danno" from the TV series Hawaii Five-O and the adopted son of the great Helen Hayes, died yesterday at the age of 72 of natural causes.
The Associated Pressreports that "an internal Pentagon study has found that most U.S. troops and their families don't care whether gays are allowed to serve openly and think the policy of 'don't ask, don't tell' could be done away with, according to officials familiar with its findings."
And here is the latest music video from one of my favorite people in the universe:
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 ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Peter Scarlet is the Executive Director of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. This is his second year at the festival. He has also held head positions at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Cinémathèque Française, and the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Aaron Cutler: I came across an interesting quote from you. You said, "We're here not just to do a film festival, but to start a film culture." Could you elaborate?
Peter Scarlet: Here in Abu Dhabi, and I think in most of the UAE, when people want to go to the movies they go to the malls, and they have a choice between midrange Hollywood and Bollywood—or next week, for a change, there's midrange Bollywood and Hollywood. Every once in a while, maybe every month or two, just to liven things up there's an Egyptian film. Some of them may be perfectly fine. But the world of cinema's a lot broader than that, and a lot more diverse, and a lot older. So one of the things we're trying to do with this festival is show films from countries that never appear on screen here, show genres like documentaries and shorts and student work and experimental work, and show films from the past. Last year I had a wonderful screening of silent films, including some Chaplin and Keaton archival prints, [accompanist] Neil Brand came here from London, and it was like, "Wow, I'm showing silent movies for the first time in the whole country!" It was revolutionary. Continue Reading »
Leading up to the 2008 election, we posted a series of vintage Rock the Vote ads on the Slant blog. Unfortunately, they didn't survive the transition to the new House, but here's one of our favorites:
Christopher Nolan reveals title of third Batman film and says its villain won't be the Riddler. Sucks for Depp.
The A.V. Club's Todd VanDerWerff interviews Frank Darabont. The Walking Dead premieres this Halloween on AMC. Watch it: The first hour is, no lie, among the finest hours of television these eyes have seen in ages.
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 ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
On the heels of the Dancing with the Stars craze, as well as the continued trend of workout games like Wii Fit, it should be expected that a dancing game like last year's Just Dance would spawn a sequel. While the first one (which sold very well) met absolutely deflating reception, the second one's a big improvement, and is pretty fun to play—that is, if you're really, really self-assured. Or really wasted.
You see, unlike other games of this type, like the wildly popular Dance Dance Revolution series, in which you simply hopped up and down to a song's beat, Just Dance 2 requires you to actually dance. Well, what they call "dancing," anyway. In all honesty, you'll probably look like airport ground crew, trying to direct a plane while having a seizure on a moving treadmill. Some of the choreography is ridiculous, as are some of the graphics—specifically a few of the on-screen dancing avatars, whose moves you must mirror. (The Wii remote detects your motions. The more in sync your writhing is, the more points you'll get.) For example, if you select Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," you must shadow a doughy, mullet-sporting display of foppish androgyny in hot pants, who flails about as if Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is playing Whack-a-Mole. Continue Reading »
There's a sports melodrama unfolding in Los Angeles right now that's so epically sordid, so potentially monumental that I'm half surprised ESPN hasn't already rebranded its "30 for 30" series as "Thirtysomething for Thirtysomething" just to have the chance to chronicle it with a feature-length documentary. It's a story of greed, selfishness, corruption and the downfall of a once dominant superpower—the kind of thing that could be directed by Charles Ferguson and aptly titled Inside Job or No End In Sight. It's the story of the "Dodger Divorce"—the dissolution of the marriage between Frank and Jamie McCourt, for now the co-owners of the Dodgers, whose custody battle for the team has resulted in the public disclosure of their lavish spending at a time when they are also raising the ticket prices of lower-income fans. Fernando Nation, the latest actual entry in the ESPN Films documentary series, isn't about the "Dodger Divorce" in any specific respect, but in a way it's an unintentional prologue to it. Because in Cruz Angeles' profile of the influential career of Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, we witness the birth of the very fan base that might not survive the monetary demands of the current regime. To understand what might be lost in the decade ahead, you must understand what came to be three decades ago. You must understand "Fernandomania."
[Editor's Note: Take Two is an occasional series about remakes, reboots, relaunches, ripoffs, and do-overs in every cinematic genre.]
There are a hundred objections to The Searchers, none of which are as convincing as the film itself. It's an easy target for criticisms of Wayne and Ford's right-wing, chest-forward brand of American masculinity, and of pre-civil-rights Hollywood's maltreatment of minorities. Its climax—when the Debbie character, apropos of nothing, just decides with a "Yes!" to join her brother and leave the Comanches—is among the least satisfying dramatic resolutions in canonical cinema. And its spiritual lynchpin, a man whose self-destructive, obsessive quest eventually consumes him, is one of the most overplayed character archetypes in American storytelling; as the temporal and stylistic connective tissue between Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Star Wars, one might expect the movie's emotional impact to be dulled by familiarity.
These are fair points, though I have nothing but pity for the moviegoer who watches The Searchers and lets them overwhelm the sheer visual magnitude on the screen. There are shots in this movie that are so beautiful they make me gasp in gratitude even though I've seen them before. Some, like the reverse-silhouette doorway views that open and close the film, are rightfully famous. Others are seemingly inconsequential, like the seriatim appearance of each Edwards family member on the porch as Uncle Ethan makes his first approach across the desert. Or the long, plotless table scenes that unfold once Captain Clayton and his gang arrive in the first act. These are tiny masterpieces of framing and art direction, and they're essential to that iconic final image's resounding sadness as well. The Searchers builds up to that picture of wounded-looking Ethan pausing at the doorway and skulking off, uninvited—but it's so powerful precisely because the audience knows what communal warmth and stability he's deprived himself of. The ambivalence of this shot is no less extraordinary for being so endlessly analyzed: Ford leaves Ethan out in the stunning VistaVision wilderness, but the audience, having been guided through that same awesome scenery for the previous two hours, can only feel sorry for him as we retreat into the pitch black dining room. It's some of the warmest darkness in all of art history. Continue Reading »
For The Bygone Bureau, Kevin Nguyen asked a few of his favorite publications about their editorial process.
New York Magazine offers a guide to to the weirdest horror movie ever: Nobuhiko Obayashi's House, reviewed on the main site by Simon Abrams.
Related: Abrams gets his first byline in the Village Voice this week.
Below, a trailer for John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart:
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 ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
By crazy, I mean unhinged, unpredictable and inspired. Think Bob Clampett going full-tilt surreal in Porky in Wackyland. Or Chuck Jones starting out spoofing opera in What's Opera, Doc?, then building to a climax of thunderous spectacle and heartfelt emotion that wipes the smile off your face (until Bugs Bunny restores it with, "Well, what did you expect in an opera...a happy ending?") Think Frank Tashlin building a live-action cartoon around his already-cartoony leading man, Jerry Lewis. Or Bob Fosse directing an autobiographical musical fantasia while he was still alive, and structuring the entire thing as a deathbed flashback, and devoting the film's final third to musical hospital staff and equipment as bits of mise-en-scène. Think Alfred Hitchcock staging entire feature films in single locations (Lifeboat, Rope, Rear Widow), ending The Birds with an eerie, almost European-art-film-like anticlimax, and killing off his leading lady in Psycho 40 minutes into the film and turning his focus to her killer, and making you think he'd killed his leading lady in Vertigo only to have her show up again during the film's second half, by way of setting up an even darker, sicker, more moving story than the one you were already watching. Continue Reading »
City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009). Most war films depend on the physical movement of bodies, bullets, and explosions to expose the horrors of combat. But Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, a black-and-white nightmare about the notorious Rape of Nanking by the invading Japanese army in 1938, communicates the impact of both overt atrocities and interior heartbreaks entirely through facial expressions, specifically via the eyes of each main character. Throughout the opening battle scene between the last remaining Chinese soldiers and the better equipped Japanese army, there's an emphasis on perspective and point-of-view shots, a nonverbal back and forth between soldiers that reverts the filmmaking back to a more primal form of communication. Afterward, when the countless executions and rapes begin, dialogue remains minimally restrained to the necessary pleas for salvation and fair treatment. Instead of dialogue, Chuan advances the narrative through potent and piercing off-screen sound design, alluding to the exponential victims just beyond the frame. Continue Reading »
Given that the third season of Mad Men came, with much fanfare, to an apparently 'game-changing' conclusion, all eyes were on last week's season four finale, "Tomorrowland" (written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, and directed by Matthew Weiner), to one-up its predecessor. The episode turned out to be a much lower-profile affair; it confounded expectations by being shockingly not shocking. Fan predictions had ranged from the outright demise of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to Don (Jon Hamm) saving the firm at the eleventh hour by landing Disney as a client. Instead, Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Ken (Aaron Staton) work to keep the company chugging along by signing a significant but relatively small-time pantyhose company as a client, and Don proposes to his secretary Megan (Jessica Paré).
Season three's finale was exciting because it was the dissolution of the two institutions Mad Men had long centered on (Sterling Cooper and the Draper marriage), and the beginning of something new. We came into season four with endless expectations, not quite knowing what turns the show would take, but demanding that they be groundbreaking. When we were introduced in the season premiere to the new, modish, brightly saturated set, it was clear that things had changed, and excitement was bubbling. Continue Reading »
On the heels of the Dancing with the Stars craze, as well as the continued trend of workout games like Wii Fit, it should be expected that a dancing game like last year's Just Dance would spawn a sequel. While the first one (which sold very well) met absolutely deflating reception, the second one's a big improvement, and is pretty fun to play—that is, if you're really, really self-assured. Or really wasted.
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