"Matt Zoller Seitz's series of 10 video essays isn't just a countdown of the year's greatest scenes, though it is that. It also zeroes in on the DNA of movies—the shots and cuts, lines of dialogue and music cues that illustrate a film's personality and style—to show just what makes them so riveting." Click here for a link to the series.
Over at IFC.com, the year's most memorable critical dust-ups.
A heavily edited version of Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was broadcast on North Korean TV this week, a first for a Western film.
In Review Online's composite year-end lists—film and music—are now up. Kudos for acknowledging Four Tet, guys, but what's up with the Robyn diss?
Geraldine Doyle, the iconic face of Rosie the Riveter, died Sunday at age 86.
We're doomed: there's a newly discovered reason to avoid fast food…and a third of 9-month-olds are already obese or overweight.
Polar bears "playing" with spy video cameras:
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.
New York City streets remain an absolute nightmare and the New York Post is reporting that "selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts."
Anthony Kaufman (possibly even some other people at IFC, as the "we" in the article's title would lead us to believe) predicts the greatness of a bunch of 2011 movies. (Does he/they feel Terrence Malick's Tree of Life will suck?)
Former IFC Entertainment executive Courtney Ott has been named director of marketing and PR for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Yahoo! selects the best long-form media writing of 2010 and the winner is Chris Jones's February piece on Roger Ebert for Esquire.
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.
At long last, BBC America has bowed to the reality of the internet and broadcast the Doctor Who Christmas special within hours of its UK premiere. It's particularly fortunate that as many viewers as possible got to see this episode at the correct time of year, rather than weeks or months later, as "A Christmas Carol" is definitely the most Christmassy of all the Christmas specials so far. Previous specials have seen various trappings of Christmas given a Doctor Who twist (killer Christmas trees, robot Santas, and so on), but this is the first time the Christmas episode draws inspiration from one of the classic works of Christmas literature. Despite the title, though, this is not simply an adaptation of the famous original; such a thing would make no sense, since we already know that Charles Dickens exists in the Doctor's universe ("The Unquiet Dead"). Instead, writer Steven Moffat neatly engineers a situation where the Doctor deliberately chooses to act in a way that follows the basic structure of A Christmas Carol—just with time-travel, rather than ghosts. Continue Reading »
Here's a list many of us have been waiting for: Reverse Shot's Top 10 of 2010. The contributors this year were Matt Connolly, Michael Koresky, Benjamin Mercer, Adam Nayman, Jeff Reichert, Justin Stewart, Andrew Tracy, Elbert Ventura, Chris Wisniewski, and Genevieve Yue.
In Review Online has published a number of year-end lists by their contributors: Sam C. Mac (film and music); Luke Gorham (film); Jordon Cronk (music); Chris Nowling (music); A.A. Dowd (film); Kathie Smith and Cronk (home movies).
There's an angry ex-nerd over at Wired and he wants geek culture to wake up.
This is kind of old but still worth pondering: Did Usher rip off Homer Simpson?
What do scars say about male and female characters?
I wish someone had done this in Brooklyn:
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.
Amnesty International has gotten involved in protesting the 6-year prison sentence given to Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof.
Yahoo picks the best and worst movie posters of 2010. That Jackass 3D poster ain't bad, and the Inception one isn't that grand, but the rest of the designations are spot-on.
Over at The New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses narrative and the grace of God on the occasion of having seen Joel and Ethan Coen's fine True Grit.
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.
Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?
The middle has swallowed up the ends, ya'll. A.O. Scott scruitinizes Hollywood's class warfare.
Frank Rich on the death of Disneyland Dream filmmaker Robbins Barstow.
Rick James protégée Teena Marie, one of the few successful white performers of R&B, passed away yesterday at the age of 54. Her most famous song, "Ooo La La La," was sampled by the Fugees on their breakout single "Fu-Gee-La," but it was her superior "Behind the Groove" that made Slant's 100 Greatest Dance Songs list back in 2006. Her last album was Congo Square.
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.
No characteristic of the third-generation Holocaust novel is more readily distinctive than the well-these-seem-disparate-oh-wait-they-are-meaningfully-intersecting-storylines! structure (though, to be fair, typographical flourishes are a very close second). Think Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. Think Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. Where second-generation works—those written by the children of survivors—like Art Spiegleman's Maus worked through the trauma of the Holocaust by acknowledging its separateness from the experience of their authors, third-generation representations insist on reincorporating that history into the experience of the present, which otherwise threatens to slip into meaninglessness—insignificance apparently worse than chaos and horror and destruction.
Andrew Winer's The Marriage Artist, the latest example of the proliferating genre, tells two traversing stories. The first of these involves Daniel Lichtmann, a New York art critic, whose wife Aleksandra suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide alongside Benjamin Wind, a young Native American sculptor who had been much championed by Daniel. Forced into examining a life he had preferred to understand as rather unremarkable, Daniel endlessly considers and reconsiders his relationship with Aleksandra, a photographer who had dedicated herself to documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "Jews and Arabs who had been wounded, handicapped, and otherwise adversely affected by suicide bombings," and whose "Russian-Jewishness…insubordinate wit…protean nature, the way she wore her burdens with either naked vulnerability or hard-bitten frankness that could be confused for callousness" first attract Daniel to her only to inevitably keep them sundered. What, Daniel wonders, drove her to Benjamin? What destroyed them? And what did Wind's ecstatic final show—three gallery chambers filled with "life-size figures paired off and joined by the holding of hands…each pair…sprayed in the air as if by some centrifugal force…in various states of ascendance"—have to do with both? Continue Reading »
Future Oscar-winner Christian Bale to star in new Zhang Yimou.
And some TRON-related humor:
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.
Coming Up in This Column:The King's Speech, Tangled, Get Him to the Greek, In Love and War, but first…
Fan Mail: Well, I spoke too soon, didn't I when I said the prospects of a "lively discussion" of the Hero's Journey "sort of fizzled." I am sorry it developed into a hissing contest between David Ehrenstein and "Juicer 243," but they both made some good points first. As you know, I am more in tune with David's view of the HJ than Juicer's. Juicer seems to think it can apply to any movie, but he picked the three I mentioned that might fit, while ignoring the longer list of ones where the HJ does not seem to apply. Juicer seemed to assume that the writers of Citizen Kane (1941), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Fellini's 8 ½ (1963) were all students of the HJ, but none of them probably had ever heard of it. They were simply trying to make the most entertaining films they could. They succeeded, of course.
Juicer is also upset that I used the term "doctrinaire" about the HJ and uses the three films mentioned above as showing how creative the writers can be while seeming to fit their work into the pattern. The problem I have with a lot of screenwriting advice is that it is given and, worse, accepted as doctrine. Having taught screenwriting for forty years, I cannot tell you the number of students I have had that insisted they had to follow either the HJ, or Syd Field's structure, or some other system. If the HJ helps you (and I was just talking this past week to a former student of mine who felt she learned a lot from Christopher Vogler's book about it), then fine, but let's not assume that is the only way to go.
While David and I agree about the HJ, we obviously disagree on Morocco (1930). He quotes the Fritz Lang line about how a screenplay is writing and a movie is pictures, as in, "Moving pictures they call them." Well, yeah, but they need something more than just pretty pictures that move. If it were enough that you have beautiful pictures nicely cut together, Ryan's Daughter (1970) would be the best movie of all time, hands down.
"Torontomovieguy" says he finds the column entertaining, "but I can't say I better understand a damn thing about screenwriting because of it." I suspect he is looking for the kind of truths the gurus like Field and Campbell et al provide, as in "The First Plot Point Should Be Between Pages 25 and 27." This homey don't do that. My approach is to see what we can tease out about screenwriting from watching films. So my tendency, as Juicer discovered, is not the Great Truths category but in looking at scripts and films with subtlety and nuance. I do agree with Toronto that the column, as all criticism is, is subjective. Guilty as charged on that one. Continue Reading »
Guess what film topped this year's Village Voice film poll?
More lists: TONY film critics David Fear, Joshua Rothkopf, and Keith Uhlich share their best and worst films of the year, and Sight & Soundgives us the dish on the year's best DVDs.
Larry David is feeling pretty, pretty good now that those Bush tax cuts have been extended.
David Bordwell on the sentencing of Jafar Panahi and the beauty of the director's films.
The montage-averse should steer away from this one. For The L Magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz compresses an entire year's worth of movies into 11 minutes.
Shocking and terrible news, indeed. Jafar Panahi, one of our greatest filmmakers, gets jailed for six years and is banned from making films and leaving Iran for 20.
A little late but…Kanye West's latest also tops Pitchfork's list of the Top 50 Albums of 2010.
And the very smart writers over at The AV Clubshare their favorite television shows of the year.
Steven Boone on Grand Illusion, Buñuel, and being down and out as a cinephille in NYC:
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.
'Tis the season for surreal culture shock. First it was the fried balls. Forget popcorn and potato chips; from bitterballen to oliebollen, unless it's round and fried, it ain't a snack here in Holland. Then it was Sinterklaas—or, more precisely, his helper Zwarte Piet (best explained by David Sedaris in an essay for Esquire a few years back). Suffice to say, the sight of towheaded tots trotting down the street in blackface can make even a seen-it-all New Yorker like me gawk. And now: Toneelgroep Amsterdam's production of Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine, a French play performed in Dutch with English surtitles projected perfectly center-stage above the action. (Interestingly, five days before I attended the show at the spectacular, castle-like Stadsschouwburg, Spike Lee held a discussion/book promotion at the theater. Alas, I heard he didn't have much to say about Zwarte Piet.)
But I have quite a bit to say about La Voix Humaine, a one-woman show starring the luminous Halina Reijn (who also stars in the company's Children of the Sun as the invalid Lisa) as an alternately determined and desperate mistress who is trying to break up once and for all with her lover over the phone. While Michael Shannon and his headset may have New York audiences in stitches in Mistakes Were Made, Ms. Reijn and her regular old receiver (or "terrible weapon" as she refers to it at one point) drag Amsterdam theatergoers through a nonstop, emotional tight-wire act for nearly an hour. Continue Reading »
Surprisingly, none of the Millennium Trilogy films made Roger Ebert's Top 10 of the year. (Related: House contributor Ali Arikan shares his own Top 10.)
More Top 10s over at The New York Times: In praise of David Fincher, Manohla Dargis says the revolution is being shot on video, and Stephen Holden instructs that the economic catastrophe we faced in 2008 has "left behind a reservoir of dread and cynicism that have speed into every corner of American life, even the movies."
Peter Bogdanovich on the passing of Blake Edwards.
Olivier Assayas's Carlos tops Film Comment's "annual end-of-the-year survey of notable film critics, journalists, film section editors, and past and present contributors that don't include any writers from Slant Magazine."
House contributor Edward Copeland on the 30th anniversary (yesterday) of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the scenes every film fan should see.
Photographer Seamus Murphy has made a series of short films to accompany PJ Harvey's new album Let England Shake. The first one, set to the tune "The Last Living Rose," premiered today on Polly Jean's official site:
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 staff on December 19th, 2010 at 7:47 pm in Music
[Editor's Note: House Playlist is a new series dedicated to highlighting our favorite new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks. Found something we should hear? Let us know!]
Basement Jaxx, "Dracula." "Dracula," Basement Jaxx's lopsided, Schaffel return to form, may very well have been commissioned by Audi to sell their A7 Sportback. Whatever it takes to get their motor revving again is fine by me, even if in this case I could never possibly afford the object of inception. Never mind. The gloriousness of the gears grinding in this mean little snit of a choon (the refrain: "Wanna bite you up like Dracula") would sound good in the beaten-down '93 Ford Escort I still burned rubber in up until just a few years ago. Felix and Simon's first two LPs, Remedy and Rooty, balanced songcraft with hot temper, both elements that have sadly been lacking in their most recent work. "Dracula" only finds them recovering the latter, but there's no denying its lean velocity. It actually may be their most straightforward, stripped-down release since "Get Me Off." Eric Henderson
The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.
By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as "don't ask, don't tell," a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay and lesbian troops as second-class citizens.
Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban. "As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best led and best trained fighting force the world has ever known," Mr. Obama said in a statement after the Senate, on a 63-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block a final vote on the repeal bill.
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.
No characteristic of the third-generation Holocaust novel is more readily distinctive than the well-these-seem-disparate-oh-wait-they-are-meaningfully-intersecting-storylines! structure (though, to be fair, typographical flourishes are a very close second). Think Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. Think Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. Where second-generation works—those written by the children of survivors—like Art Spiegleman's Maus worked through the trauma of the Holocaust by acknowledging its separateness from the experience of their authors, third-generation representations insist on reincorporating that history into the experience of the present, which otherwise threatens to slip into meaninglessness—insignificance apparently worse than chaos and horror and destruction.
Links for the Day: Best Books of 2010, Bogdanovich Remembers Edwards, Film Comment Poll, Lost Odyssey Footage, New PJ Harvey Videos, & More
by Ed Gonzalez on December 20th, 2010 at 10:32 am in Links for the Day
Christmas is here, meaning many of us will be stuck in airports across the country with nothing to read. Rather than pick out something by Stieg Larson from the nearest bookrack, let these fine lists guide you toward some more fruitful holiday reading: The Millions; The Daily Beast; Galleycat; The Guardian; The New York Times (Michiko Kakutani's personal Top 20 can be found here); The Huffington Post; O; Laura Miller at Salon (see also: why people like bad books, according to Miller); and Slate. (Many thanks to Richard "No Doubt Distantly Related to Stieg" Larson for compiling this list for us.)
Surprisingly, none of the Millennium Trilogy films made Roger Ebert's Top 10 of the year. (Related: House contributor Ali Arikan shares his own Top 10.)
More Top 10s over at The New York Times: In praise of David Fincher, Manohla Dargis says the revolution is being shot on video, and Stephen Holden instructs that the economic catastrophe we faced in 2008 has "left behind a reservoir of dread and cynicism that have speed into every corner of American life, even the movies."
Peter Bogdanovich on the passing of Blake Edwards.
Olivier Assayas's Carlos tops Film Comment's "annual end-of-the-year survey of notable film critics, journalists, film section editors, and past and present contributors
that don't include any writers from Slant Magazine."Some lost 2001: A Space Odyssey footage has been found.
FOX News viewers believe the darndest things.
House contributor Edward Copeland on the 30th anniversary (yesterday) of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the scenes every film fan should see.
Photographer Seamus Murphy has made a series of short films to accompany PJ Harvey's new album Let England Shake. The first one, set to the tune "The Last Living Rose," premiered today on Polly Jean's official site:
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.
Tags: Ali Arikan, Blake Edwards, Carlos, Edward Copeland, Film Comment, FOX News, Let England Shake, Manohla Dargis, Martin Scorsese, Matt Zoller Seitz, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, PJ Harvey, Raging Bull, Roger Ebert, Seamus Murphy, Stephen Holden, The Last Living Rose, The New York Times
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