A video essay by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz

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To view the video at The L's website, click here. To read a transcript of Rowin's narration, click here.

Shocking news: David Carradine, the versatile actor, blunt-spoken raconteur and indelible cult figure best known for playing Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, the pilgrim Caine on TV's Kung Fu, and the magnetically terrifying title character in Kill Bill, was found hanged in a Thai hotel room. He was 72. Share your thoughts and remembrances below. We'll miss you, grasshopper.

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A video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz

"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the characters being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog.
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To read the rest of the introductory essay, visit The L Magazine.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is currently showing a series of films starring Steve McQueen. This essay for The L compares McQueen's screen persona to that of other movie tough guys, past and present. You can watch the video below, or at the magazine's web site. For a text version, click here.

A video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz

The following is the text of a video essay on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of The Museum of the Moving Image.

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David Fincher's seventh feature, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man struggling to hold onto his love for a woman named Daisy while aging backwards from old age to infancy, is by any reckoning a film too huge to ignore. It has a heavyweight cast, including Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and a massive $150,000 budget that required the collaboration of two studios, Paramount and Warner Bros.; it was released at the end of 2008 at the height of awards season and eventually garnered 13 Academy award nominations, including nods for Fincher's direction and for Pitt's performance in the title role. Yet the film, just released on DVD through Paramount/the Criterion Collection, was not an unqualified popular or critical success, earning less at the box office than its budget, and dividing reviewers. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern called it "a one of a kind meditation on mortality, time's inexorable passage and the fleeting sweetness of love." The opposite end of the spectrum was represented by Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, who wrote of the Se7en and Zodiac director: "Giving Fincher this project is like asking the great French humanist director Jean Renoir to do a slasher movie." Turan's sense that the film was too coldly perfect and too obsessed with mood, production design, and special effects technique—particularly the CGI that aged Pitt's character backward—was echoed by many detractors.

Another persistent gripe was that the title character wasn't really much of a character—just a cipher, more acted upon than acting, which made his story undramatic and the film a crashing bore. San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle wrote, "To call Benjamin a passive protagonist is not enough. He's all but inert, and the movie defines him almost exclusively in terms of his aging process. He has no interests, no ambition, no position save that of an outsider, and no desire except for Daisy. He is an uninteresting person to whom something medically interesting has happened. For the screenwriter, this is the weakest possible choice." LaSalle's condemnation of the crux of Button—the essential helplessness not just of the afflicted hero, but every other character as well—is perhaps the key to understanding the wildly divergent critical reactions to the film's technique, story, and themes. It's a worldview thing: either you share the film's philosophy and appreciate the elementally simple way it expresses it, or you find the entire contraption obvious, precious, trite, and dull. The unabashed enthusiasm with which Button articulates its concerns all but eliminates any possibility of critical middle ground.

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To the rest of the text or view the video essay, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

This is the first video essay for The L Magazine on aspects of film, TV and popular culture. A new one will appear every two weeks.

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Mr. Spock, the Vulcan first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek series, is one of the most enduring characters in popular culture—so charismatic, conflicted and, well, fascinating, that his name and character are synonymous with the series, and in some ways synonymous with its potential, both achieved and unrealized.

As envisioned by series creator Gene Roddenberry, and honed by actor Leonard Nimoy and many inventive writers, including original series story editor D.C. Fontana, Mr. Spock is the company man par excellence—a spit-and-polish naval officer whose unstinting excellence stands as an example (sometimes a rebuke) to others. His first thought is invariably not of his own welfare, but the good of the starship, its crew and the highest ideals of Starfleet Federation. He is impressive in every way—eloquent, educated, fair-minded, resourceful and above all else, cool under fire. And on top of all that, he's got cool signature moves: the split fingered Vulcan salute; the mind-meld, and the Vulcan nerve pinch, which can nonviolently disable a foe.

Along with impetuous Captain James T. Kirk and cranky chief medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Mr. Spock was part of a central trio of characters that dominated the original Trek. Yet from the moment the series premiered on NBC in 1966 through its cancellation in 1969, its resurrection in syndication and as an animated series in the '70s and its reinvention as a movie franchise—including director J.J. Abrams' upcoming theatrical re-boot—Spock stood apart from the rest. To this day he arguably remains the franchise's most popular character, a walking emblem of Roddenberry's earnest attempts to use myth and melodrama to examine the human condition, and the poster Vulcan for a media and merchandising phenomenon that continues to this day.

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To read the rest of the article, or to view the video essay at The L, click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

[Part 5 of the Moving Image Source documentary series "Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style" runs the seven-minute prologue to Anderson's third feature, The Royal Tenenbaums, with onscreen annotations—some drawing on information from previous chapters in the series, others somewhat random and personal. Part 1 of the series, on Bill Melendez, Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut is here. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, here. Part 3 (on Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby) is here; Part 4 (on Anderson's affinity for J.D. Salinger) is here. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]

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To watch the video, click here.

More from the L.A. Times, Glenn, and The Daily. Other links and tributes welcome in the comments section.

By Kevin B. Lee

This review was written as an epilogue to "Oliver Stone: The Official Story," a series of articles and video essays on Stone's films commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. The series includes considerations of Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon and Alexander.

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W. continues the trajectory of Oliver Stone's political biographies toward examining (and often identifying with) protagonists firmly situated in the seat of power. But as with Nixon, Stone portrays George W. Bush less as a driver than a prisoner of his own destiny. Like all of the protagonists explored in this series, the younger President Bush struggles for self-determination against a social system where family and nation both coddle and control him. And as with Nixon and Alexander the Great, the exorcizing of his personal demons leaves the world utterly changed.

It is a questionable prospect to largely attribute the motivations of a president's career, and especially the complex series of events leading to the Iraq war, to a man's lifelong rivalry with his father, as Stone dares to do in W. Nonetheless, this thesis is consistent with Stone's career-long obsession with the psychological traumas inflicted by fathers and other patriarchal figures (the military, the government) on their children. It's fascinating to watch Josh Brolin's portrayal of W. in his youth, as crippled emotionally as Ron Kovic was physically in Born on the Fourth of July, and as desperate in his search for redemption. Young Dubya is barely able to articulate his ambitions without recoiling in fear of his father's disapproval. Bailed out by the elder Bush from one mishap after another on a pre-paved road to success while plying himself with booze as his only means of self-expression, W. is a man effectively castrated by the American Dream. It is only when he casts himself as a born-again public servant (declaring that he answers to an even greater Father than his own) that he finds sufficient ego fulfillment to challenge the legacy that has long haunted him. Some viewers may find little use for this Freudian apologia of the Bush persona in understanding the many domestic and global crises that emerged during his administration (in the film even Bush complains about "all this psychobabble about me in the media"). But if W. makes for a compelling account of the failure of America on a psychic level, it's because Stone has spent his career perfecting this narrative.

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To read the rest of the W review, click here and scroll down.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

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By Andrew Johnston

One day during the long lazy summer of 1983, I found myself at a matinee of Mr. Mom and saw a trailer that featured a kid in his underwear lip-synching Bob Seger and a quick glimpse of unshaven teen saying "I've got a trig midterm tomorrow and I'm being chased by Guido the Killer Pimp!" The former got me curious, the latter made damn sure I was at Charlottesville, Va.'s now-defunct Barracks Road Theater (where I'd seen my first-ever movie, Disney's Song of the South, in 1972) the night Risky Business opened. Continue Reading »