Funny how quickly the world changes. This clip made me think of the first time I logged onto the Internet, around 1994, to look up information about The Simpsons for a TV class.
From the kids at Lawrence High School comes a new video—a punk update of Mack David's "Sunflower"—that is a celebration of Kansas (now 150 years young), the arts (a cut in funding has recently been proposed in the state), and the diversity of the state's youth:
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.
[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: The idea of the modern western as an art of deconstruction has become so engrained in today's film culture that it's disconcerting when a new western comes along that doesn't take a revisionist stance on the once-beloved Hollywood genre. Westerns don't get made very much these days, but when they are we expect them to be in the lineage of Peckinpah or Leone rather than the old Hollywood craftsmen who made the genre so ubiquitous in the 1940s and '50s. You see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. Although most film fans would expect a Coen brothers western to be a sardonic, revisionist take on the genre, True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen's first proper stab at a genre that has often haunted their work in spirit, is a good old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness western in the classical tradition.
This actually shouldn't be surprising. There are markers of western style in many other Coen films, notably O Brother Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men: the love of landscapes, the gruffly poetic language, the stark morality, even the fascination with hats that runs through Miller's Crossing, for in what other genre besides the western do hats mean so much? True Grit might be the Coens' first actual western, but it's such a natural fit for them because they've always kind of seemed like western filmmakers in a deeper sense. This is why the Old West milieu, sparsely populated as it is with oddballs and degenerates and criminals, feels like an extension of the Mexican border towns of No Country for Old Men, or the wasted Northwestern wilds of Fargo, or even the backwards suburban absurdity of Raising Arizona.
True Grit is an adaptation of a 1968 novel by Charles Portis, which was already made into a film in 1969 by director Henry Hathaway, starring John Wayne in the role that won him his only Oscar. Though the Coens' film differs from Hathaway's in several important ways and numerous smaller ones—apparently because the Coens follow the novel, which I haven't read, more faithfully than Hathaway did—the two films also share a good amount of common ground. What's ultimately most striking about the Coens' film is how traditional it is, how unshowy and subtle. It balances humor and darkness and action, and it does so within a wholly classical context. First and foremost, it's just a great story and a great western, and its humble artifice is very refreshing. Continue Reading »
If there was ever a year where we needed pop to do its exhilarating best, 2010 was it. Beyond escapism, pop music provided the brainpower, the emotional nuance, and most of all, the vision that the rest of the country, particularly in the political arena, lacked. Though we always count on pop music to give us what we want, the best pop is just as capable of giving us what we need. Listen to all 25 of Slant Magazine's Best Singles of 2010 on our new YouTube Channel! (Due to the fact that many record labels are loathe to actually promote their artists, we are unfortunately unable to embed the entire playlist here.)
[Editor's Note: B Role is an ongoing exploration of the films, artists, and genres shaping the dimly lit universe of the B movie.]
Film discovery isn't business; it's personal. It defines every chapter of a cinephile's life, mapping a unique process of spectatorship that grows and develops differently depending on the individual. This lifelong journey creates an expanding universe of preference and taste with constantly shifting borders, instilling salient reminders of nostalgia collected along the way. A small moment, an inspiring recommendation, a stellar review, or a mention in a textbook, becomes something equivalent to a first itch we spend a lifetime scratching. When the floodgates do open, the possibilities and processes swirling around in the sublime whirlpool of cinema threaten to overwhelm us. Whole subjects and genres are ripe for conquering, yet discovery is not about completion but evolution, developing an appreciation for nuances that ground films within a specific historical and social context. The only way to breath underneath so much material is by slowly, calmly addressing one film at a time, always with the understanding you won't see them all. So, like Mother said, choose wisely.
My own obsession started in familiarly bright corners, with rampant forays into the films of Spielberg, Kubrick, and Tarantino, paving the way for Sayles, Jarmusch, Lee, Rafelson, Penn, and Altman. After exhausting myself on American cinema, I pushed outward to the national cinemas of Iran, Italy, France, and beyond. As horizon's expanded, my viewing mimicked an inverted historiography class, constantly looking backward to see what historical elements influenced those I had just studied. Eventually, as it happens with most students of film, the muffled, haunting echoes of Hollywood's underbelly known as the "B movie" began calling my name, screaming out of the past with a pitch so edgy and piercing I couldn't resist. The writings of Sarris, Rosenbaum, and Hoberman provided names and faces for these daring filmmakers working on the fringes of mainstream Hollywood, men and women creating textured and scathing entertainment from whatever monetary breadcrumbs had fallen down the assembly line. It didn't take long for Fuller, Ray, Sirk, Lapino, Mann, Boetticher, and Lang to construct a special church of subversion, a place where substance and style took dead aim at those in power and pulled the trigger. These were the ciphers of American film history, and I was hooked on their mystery and danger. Continue Reading »
by staff on January 28th, 2011 at 12:02 pm in Music
[Editor's Note: House Playlist is a series dedicated to highlighting our favorite new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks. Found something we should hear? Let us know!]
Girls' Generation, "Hoot." This one may be a few months old in its native South Korea, but that doesn't keep "Hoot" from being one of the best discoveries of 2011 on this side of the Pacific. The best K-Pop singles take a truly fearless approach to appropriating different genres for fun and profit, and "Hoot" starts off as a bit of jagged guitar pop as forceful and catchy as any of Max Martin's productions for Kelly Clarkson. But the song shifts its focus to the dance floor once the multi-tracked percussion loops kick in. The layered rhythm arrangement works with the song's overall conceit, which finds the girls giving an overdue brushoff to an acid-tongued boyfriend. His poison-tipped arrows are the "trouble, trouble, trouble" of the simple-is-better hook, and the group's cheerleading-squad-as-girl-group structure gives their off-you-go message its own built-in support group. The choice of violent imagery belies the apparent sweetness of the group's nine members and the single's simply massive hooks, but it's a perfect fit with the James Bond guitar figure that runs throughout. As far as 007 motifs doubling as pop songs go, "Hoot" fully holds its own alongside Britney Spears's "Toxic." Jonathan Keefe
Murder of prominent gay activist David Kato sends chill in Uganda.
Guess what Lady Gaga's first perfume will smell like?
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster:
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.
"Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Wednesday left intensive care for the first time since she was shot in the head in Arizona more than two weeks ago, the latest big step in the long road to recovery." Read the full story at The Huffington Posthere.
The New York Review of Books on the truth about The King's Speech. Related: In Contention's Guy Lodge, one of the very few smart awards pundits out there, doesn't think Academy members are thinking too hard about this.
Brian De Palma's new one will be Passion, an adaptation of Alain Corneau's Crime d'Amour.
It would appear that Alejandro Jodorowsky has granted interviews to everyone except us. For The A.V. Club, Noel Murray chats with the cult director.
In more Sundance news, at least the kind that matters: Jury duty was was not an easy task for Kim Morgan, and James Franco explains how he will try and film what many consider the unfilmmable:
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.
According to Matt Zoller Seitz, FX's Lights Outthrows a knockout punch.
Don't forget her name:
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.
[Editor's Note: Fabcast is a new video series where Slant's music editor talks to gay social network Fab.com about which new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks they (and you) need to hear.]
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't always make him like Swedish indie-pop...
[Editor's Note: Take Two is an occasional series about remakes, reboots, relaunches, ripoffs, and do-overs in every cinematic genre.]
This past summer should have belonged to Joe Dante. Matinee, his 1993 masterpiece and his most seemingly personal film, finally made its way to DVD in the spring. Piranha, his shoestring 1978 debut, was then released on DVD on August 3, mere weeks before Miramax released a $20 million nominal remake, Piranha 3D, that did surprisingly good business. And all the while, Dante was sitting on a finished 3D feature of his own, The Hole, which had been positively received at the Venice Film Festival.
But anyone who's followed Dante's career could have seen the inevitable disappointments coming. Universal released the Matinee DVD almost silently, with not even a commentary track among its spare special features; Piranha 3D gave no credit to the earlier film's director, despite his clear creative imprint; and as of this writing, The Hole still languishes without an American distributor. The sole unblemished success of the bunch was the Piranha DVD, which came out as part of Shout! Factory's lovingly packaged "Corman Classics" series. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Tuesday Video Alert is a weekly column announcing "notable" titles fresh to DVD and/or Blu-ray, sometimes as reissues, and in every region under the sun.]
Essential:
Dogtooth [Kino International, DVD, Region 1]: "Though Yorgos Lanthimos has said that Dogtooth originally was created as a sci-fi story of sorts about how far a family will go to preserve its usefulness as a social unit, I maintain that the film's main thrust is about the process of assimilating information about the world and subsequently forming one's own identity." Simon Abrams
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Blu-ray, Region 1]: "Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is less meta than Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. but more reality-bending than your average Philip K. Dick sci-fi procedural." Jeremiah Kipp
Santa Sangre [Severin Films, DVD/Blu-ray, Region 1].
The nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards have been announced.
Yesterday, a suicide bomber attacked Moscow's busiest airport, killing dozens of people and injecting new pain into a country already split along ethnic lines.
Dan Callahan has a thing for Joan Bennett's outstretched legs.
Nice resource: MUBI is building an index to coverage of the Sundance 2011 coverage.
Matt Zoller Seitz wonders if David E. Kelley has finally run out of stream.
Wanna bet there will be at least one ad like this one to play during this year's Super Bowl?
Below, an ode to cinema's greatest slaps:
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.
Polly Jean Harvey likes to do things differently. So it's no surprise that she enlisted a documentary photographer with little video skills and no musical experience to direct the music videos for all 12 tracks from her upcoming album, Let England Shake. Seamus Murphy, a British photographer known primarily for his work in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, filmed all of the clips in various areas of England using available light, combining still photos and documentary-like video footage. The shots are both quietly naturalistic and eerily incongruous—a skeleton on display in a museum, Harvey performing in a bare room, the ebb and flow of the ocean tide—and they serve to comment on Harvey's own quietly eerie ode to her home country. They are also, like Harvey's music, decidedly unlike anything else going on in pop music right now. The next video, for the title track, is set to be released on the same day as the album, February 14 (February 15 in the U.S.). I talked to Murphy about what it's like to work with PJ, turning the camera on his homeland, his love of David Lynch, and the shot we should be looking for in "The Glorious Land." Continue Reading »
Coming Up in This Column:The Fighter, Somewhere, The Other Boleyn Girl, Pirate Radio, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Slave Ship, Two and a Half Men, but first…
Fan Mail:"Asher" raised a whole lot of very good, thought-provoking points on my comments about The Tourist and its relationship to Hitchcock. He is baffled that I seemed to think it was better than Rear Window (1954). I don't think it is, but I do think The Tourist makes its point about voyeurism a lot quicker than the Hitchcock film. I brought that up to show how the filmmakers are going beyond what Hitchcock did, which includes doing things more quickly than in earlier films. Like the Coens speeding up the opening of their new True Grit, filmmakers now use for their own purposes what has been done in the past. By the way, I think Rear Window is infinitely better than The Tourist, mainly because the script is better.
What provoked my thoughts most in Asher's comments was his standing up for Hitchcock dealing more with the emotions of the characters than I said he did. I do think that Hitch is not generally as interested in character as such directors as William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens, to name three of his contemporaries. Hitch is most interested in getting great scenes. John Grierson, the father of documentary and an early film critic, made this point about Alfred Hitchcock in the early '30s, before he became ALFRED HITCHCOCK. But Asher makes a very good point that in some films Hitchcock does get into some emotional depths. Asher mentions Vertigo (1958), which I wouldn't in this discussion, since while we do get Scottie's emotions, one of the great limitations of the film is that we get nothing about the emotional life of the girl. I have for years encouraged screenwriters to do a remake of Vertigo from the point of view of the girl. But Asher is right on the money about Notorious (1946), which is as much a character study as a suspense film. The same is true of Shadow of a Doubt (1943). I am not convinced about Marnie (1964), which never quite goes as deep as it thinks it's going. So thanks, Asher, for changing my mind, at least a little, about Charles Bennett's Fat Little English Friend.
The Fighter (2010. Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, story by Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson and Keith Dorrington. 115 minutes.)
If you are going to do this movie, this is the way to do it: I must admit I have never been a big fan of boxing or boxing movies. The sight of two sweaty guys in their satin underwear beating each other to a bloody pulp does not appeal to my brand of testosterone. Charlie Chaplin's 1915 Essanay two-reeler The Champion treats the subject of boxing will all the seriousness it should be treated with, which is to say, not much. The original Rocky (1976) is interesting less for its boxing than for how inventively Sylvester Stallone steals from On the Waterfront (1954) and Marty (1955). Raging Bull (1980) is repetitive and over-directed. On the other hand, the great 1996 documentary When We Were Kings is about a lot more than just boxing, and Million Dollar Baby (2004) is a wonderful character study (with a sweaty girl for me). The Fighter fits in that "on the other hand" category. Continue Reading »
David Lynch talks aboutBlue Velvet's deleted scenes.
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.
Polly Jean Harvey likes to do things differently. So it's no surprise that she enlisted a documentary photographer with little video skills and no musical experience to direct the music videos for all 12 tracks from her upcoming album, Let England Shake. Seamus Murphy, a British photographer known primarily for his work in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, filmed all of the clips in various areas of England using available light, combining still photos and documentary-like video footage. The shots are both quietly naturalistic and eerily incongruous—a skeleton on display in a museum, Harvey performing in a bare room, the ebb and flow of the ocean tide—and they serve to comment on Harvey's own quietly eerie ode to her home country. They are also, like Harvey's music, decidedly unlike anything else going on in pop music right now. The next video, for the title track, is set to be released on the same day as the album, February 14 (February 15 in the U.S.). I talked to Murphy about what it's like to work with PJ, turning the camera on his homeland, his love of David Lynch, and the shot we should be looking for in "The Glorious Land." 
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