NBC is considering giving Dwight Schrute an Office spinoff.
What it's really like working for Mark Zuckerberg.
Setting your film in New York City can't hurt when it comes to Oscar.
Salman Rushdie is back on trial.
Nintendo losses deepen...but the Wii U will change that come Christmas.
"Cleansing…but victorious" is how the lead protagonist of The Surrogate describes his first sexual experience. The former emotion comes close to describing the resonance of writer-director Ben Lewin's film about the libidinal awakening of Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), a real-life polio-afflicted poet and journalist. Thanks to Hawkes's fantastic performance as Mark and Lewin's clever, nuanced dialogue, The Surrogate is an accomplished portrait of a resilient man that, through sex therapy, was able to experience something new and extraordinary.
Mark, a Catholic with all kinds of stereotypical faith-based hang-ups about sex, first starts thinking about doing it after he develops a crush on Amanda (Annika Marks), a pretty young woman who briefly serves as his caretaker and assistant. Mark's temporarily crushed when Amanda doesn't reciprocate his feelings, but after he starts to research an article about how the handicapped have sex, repressed passions are suddenly aroused within him. So after talking candidly with Father Brendan (William H. Macy), a conflicted by empathetic Catholic priest, Mark agrees to meet with Cheryl Greene (a frequently naked Helen Hunt), a sexual surrogate that teaches Mark about his body and how to stimulate a woman's body too. Continue Reading »
Coming Up In This Column: Young Adult, A Dangerous Method, Like Crazy, The Palm Beach Story, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, but first…
Fan Mail: “stammitti90” wondered, as others have, about the title of the column being “Understanding Screenwriting,” since he thinks the column is just film reviews with a few references to screenwriters. There are of course more than a few references. Compare how many times I mention the writers in my reviews to any other reviewer. Or how much I talk about the script in my comments on Hugo in that column as opposed to how much David Ehrenstein talks about Scorsese in his comments on the item. Too often people writing about screenwriting seem to forget that screenwriting is part of the process of filmmaking. Rather than a generic (Three Acts, Hero’s Journey, et al) column about screenwriting, I am trying to give you a nuanced look at how the screenwriting elements of a film are part of the collaborative process of filmmaking. You will see an example of that below in the discussion about the script and Charlize Theron’s performance in Young Adult.
David E. was getting on me for “dissing” the visuals in Hugo, but the one time I mentioned the visuals it was to praise them for giving us reactions of Hugo watching the people in the station. I am not sure I agree with David that I have a “terribly literal idea of what cinematic narrative consists of,” unless by that I want the film to make sense in an interesting way. It can do that with dialogue and/or visuals, as I indicated a little farther down in that column in my comments on Sullivan’s Travels. By the way, David, thanks for the story on Vidal quoting Robert Grieg’s speech from Travels. It tickles my mind to think of Vidal doing that speech.
Young Adult (2011. Written by Diablo Cody. 94 minutes.)
Petting the dog: Hollywood studio development executives always insist that characters have to be “likable” and usually ask for a scene early in the script that shows it. This is known in the trade as the “petting the dog” scene, after the old silent film convention that the hero comes into town and pets the dog, while the villain comes in and kicks the dog. You even see it in documentary films. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will has two of the most brilliant cuts in her career: she cuts from Hitler in a car looking up to a pussycat looking down out of a window, and then cuts back to Hitler turning back from looking up. Uncle Adolph loves the pussycat and the pussycat loves Uncle Adolph. Needless to say, screenwriters resent this. When David Benioff was writing Troy (2004), he kept getting notes from Warners that Achilles had to be more likable. Benioff later told David S. Cohen, “He’s not likable. You’re not going to have a pet-the-dog scene with Achilles. It is something I had to resist.” Continue Reading »
Award-winning Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos was killed yesterday in a road accident.
The director's career in clips.
Lana Del Rey...can she live?
Related: And it begins.
How Victoria Jackson went from the big leagues of comedy to the rabid right of modern politics.
Why do we lock up so many people?
Sundance announces the jury prizes and honorable mentions in short filmmaking.
When it comes to Julie Delpy, the key question remains the old Barbra Streisand one. Namely, how much of her can you take in one sitting? A dedicated movie-polymath, effortlessly bilingual and scooping the best of both Old and New World, Delpy resembles a bizarre version of Miranda July: Instead of celebrating lonely quirks of a self-centered sensibility, she throws herself (and the viewer) into a comic vortex of agitated, super-busy scenes of noisy familial squabbles and cerebral lovers' quarrels, which seems a projection of her own coyly humane view of life.
Her new movie is a sequel to 2 Days in Paris, in which she played a fabulously promiscuous European chick to Adam Goldberg's perpetually shocked American straight man. Five years have passed, and Goldberg is no longer in the picture: Delpy's character, Marion, is now living in New York with a new partner, Mingus (Chris Rock), and two children—one of hers and one of his. As befits a typical New York couple, Mingus is a radio-show host (and a Village Voice reporter, no less), while Marion prepares to open a debut photo exhibition, frankly examining her previous sexual relationships and involving a public act of a (literal) "selling of her soul" to an anonymous buyer. Continue Reading »
The case-of-the-week A-plot of "Cut Ties," the second episode of Justified's third season, doesn't have much meat on it. It's another episode set mostly in Lexington and featuring a lot of characters we'll never see again, but it nonetheless manages to further complicate the power struggle brewing in Harlan. An old marshal friend of Art's (Nick Searcy) comes to town to check on his clients in witness protection, only to be tortured by one of them into giving up the location of another witness, and later executed. Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) teams up with Art, Rachel (Erica Tazel), and Assistant Director Goodall (Carla Gugino), a woman Raylan knows from Miami, to catch the killer and protect the compromised witness.
At first glance, Justified can seem a lot like any other action show, where expendable characters are introduced just to be shot, and the bad guys are killed without much consideration. To a certain extent, that's true, but the show also has a tendency to let the consequences of its various deaths fester, weighing the characters down until coming to the fore in unexpected ways. Most obvious is Raylan's killing of a Miami mobster in the series pilot, which plays out as a typical bad-ass TV lawman exacting justice, but the consequences of which have served as the setup for the entire series. We also saw Mags Bennett coldly dispatch Loretta's father in last season's premiere, an act ultimately mirrored by her suicide in the finale. Continue Reading »
There's such a world of difference between Ira Sachs's second and third features—Forty Shades of Blue is as beautifully delicate as Married Life is self-consciously smarmy—that I approached his new movie with anxious trepidation. I'm happy to report that Keep the Lights On is a major achievement that puts Sachs back where Forty Shades of Blue left him: as a supreme observer of the perils of shared intimacy. The paradox at the heart of his style seems to be that lyricism doesn't make him foggy-eyed; the grainy haze he bathes his scenes in doesn't blur the edges of the masterfully rendered personalities of his characters.
The new film shares some thematic concerns with Forty Shades of Blue, again focusing on a foreign-born character living in the U.S. and undergoing a severely confusing relationship, in which strong sexual connection goes hand in hand with self-destruction. But where Forty Shades of Blue told a story of marital infidelity, Keep the Lights On explores the ways in which one lover's drug abuse steadily undermines a couple's mutual trust. Continue Reading »
The 2012 Oscar nominations have been announced.
Beloved indie film veteran Bingham Ray died yesterday. He was 57.
That's right, bitches.
After Megaupload, storage sites shutter services.
As Newt Gingrich's fate rises, so does Barack Obama's.
New Fiona Apple music imminent.
It opens with a series of attentive glances thrown every few seconds toward an unseen object, which then proves to be a stuffed doe being sketched by a group of art students. Within that single opening scene, director Denis Côté both establishes his main theme and prescribes the viewer how to approach his film, since a hard, focused look is exactly what's required to appreciate Bestiaire's wordless, unlovely splendor.
As we start scrutinizing an unfamiliar space populated by a surprising variety of animal species (introduced in an ascending order of exoticness), we slowly realize we're inside zoo facilities. Contrary to, say, Frederick Wiseman, whose habitually mammoth 1993 documentary Zoo examined the practical ways the eponymous facility was run, Côté is so disinterested in the mundane aspects of the institution he portrays as to make it look positively abstract. Instead of a narrative of a specific place in time, what we get is a distillation of a place into a string of visions that can work both as documentary and as a free-associational ode to life and stillness alike. Continue Reading »
It takes a little time to get used to the sprawling scope and the blocky dialogue of Red Hook Summer, director Spike Lee and co-writer James McBride's follow-up to Lee's own Do the Right Thing. In Red Hook Summer, Lee and McBride take the dialectical mode of discourse that Lee employed so masterfully in Do the Right Thing and explode it in order to create a unkempt but invigorating and deeply moving daisy chain of opposing ideas. The thematic preoccupations—gentrification, religion, familial history, love—of Lee's breakthrough film are no longer phrased as an easy-to-delineate back-and-forth between two types of interlocutors; now the conversation is a mosaic. Lee's not just talking about condos vs. projects, but about faith, self-discovery, fear of change, and a generational inability to communicate with one another. Lee and McBride have created a new microcosm of uncertainty and shaky hopefulness and it's a shambling, wonderful mess. Continue Reading »
The Vulture's Worst Movie's Critics Poll, with a ballot from yours truly, is hot off the presses.
Why American Idol's audition rounds seem crueler than ever.
Press Play announces the winners of its Vertigoed contest.
Citizen Kane gets inside the castle.
The 40 best films of 2011 accorting to PopMatters.
I hate Star Wars, but apparently this fan remake is the bee's knees.
So Yong Kim's latest feature, For Ellen, while certainly not an abject failure, is a disappointment nevertheless, and may cause concern to all those to whom the director's 2006 debut, In Between Days, was as dear as it remains to this writer. The story concerns a no-good, conspicuously disheveled rock singer, Joby (Paul Dano), who redeems his longstanding neglect of his five-year-old daughter by bonding with her on the eve of divorcing her mom. Joby's hectic, self-centered lifestyle is rendered in a succession of predominantly shallow-focused long takes of observational persistence as daring as it is tiresome.
Kim's deliberate diluting of dramatic elements of the plot to the point of its near-obliteration, so highly effective in the case of In Between Days, yields rather emaciated results in For Ellen. The reason is that there's a barely concealed generic mechanism at play here, built upon a trite premise of a prodigal father slowly winning back the affection of a cute neglected child by means of spontaneously shared fun. Even if Kim may wince at the comparison, she's not that far from mushy Kramer vs. Kramer territory when Dano wells up at the sight of his cute lil' girl banging out a garbled version of Für Elise on her electric piano. Continue Reading »
The Shins, "Simple Song." Contrary to what James Mercer sings during its first verse, "Simple Song" isn't really all that simple. Decked out with surprise key changes and expertly layered vocals, not to mention characteristically perceptive lyrics from Mercer, this is power pop with brains and guts, exactly like we've come to expect from the Shins. True, Mercer intended the song to serve a fairly uncomplicated purpose (telling a girl how she's made him feel), but in fulfilling that purpose he ends up recounting an imagined rendezvous on a football field, a capsized boat, the ocean being warmed by the sun, and a fateful nighttime walk during which a "fumbling play for [her] heart" turned out to be exactly the right move. Matthew Cole
Anyone who's invested in the preposterous hoopla of Oscarology has suffered at least one headache while poring over the Academy's explanation-resistant math. So to ensure you needn't have the Excedrin within reach, let's keep the voting blather to a minimum and focus on what seem to be the most pivotal factors in this year's top race. First of all, as was the case in the past two years, a solid, conventional roster of five movies has emerged, despite a field that welcomes additional contenders (for the headache-free unwashed, those five are The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris). No pundit in the game will tell you those huggable favorites aren't done deals, so best to nudge them aside and hurry along.
Adjusted rules allow anywhere from five to 10 nominees to fight it out for Best Picture, and to test the new system, the Academy held mock recounts for every race over the past decade. Results were scattered, and many years produced more than five finalists, but none were able to pack the entire slate (ergo, fewer sore thumbs like The Blind Side dirtying up the ballot, to say the least). It's conceivable, then, that this year won't go 10-wide either, and the recounts help to justify an eight-nominee total that's felt just right for weeks. There are those who'll tell you the ironclad quintet is as far as the field will go, just as there are those who'll say preferential voting isn't all that different than it's always been. But if one is to accept conventional wisdom that first-place rankings are especially crucial, and that movies have to battle especially hard to join the elite pack, then predictions come down to which films seem believable as voters' picks for 2011's tip-top. Continue Reading »
In Roberto Bolaño's riotous compendium of fictional pan-American writers, Nazi Literature in the Americas, we read of an Argentinean author who "had been dandled by the Führer" and who "treasured the famous photo of her baby self in Hitler's arms." If her house was on fire and she could save only one possession it would be this picture, "even over her own unpublished manuscripts." Earlier, in another fictional entry, we hear of another Argentinean writer who "financed the magazine The Fourth Reich in Argentina and, subsequently, the publishing house of the same name." There's yet another, a successful sci-fi writer, who's creator of something called the Fourth Reich saga.
Such writing manages to incorporate several of Bolaño's themes—violence, evil, Nazism, the value of literature—while showcasing his in-built trademark style and tone: blackly humorous, bitingly satirical, and so weirdly inventive that we don't question any blurring between the real and the absurd. The Third Reich, his latest novel to be translated into English, doesn't take us into a Fourth Reich, rather it deals with ways or "variants" to reimagine the Third. It was probably the first novel Bolaño wrote (it has been dated as late '80s) and consequently those themes and styles, though undeniably present, are only nascent, and would not be developed and perfected until the later exuberant masterpieces, The Savage Detectives and 2666. This debut is decidedly slight in comparison and yet there is still much to enjoy. Continue Reading »
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