By Matt Zoller Seitz

[Although I wanted to create a new video essay as my contribution to The Kiyoshi Kurosawa Blog-a-thon at The Evening Class, I didn't have time thanks to another project. I hope to revisit Kurosawa's work in video podcast format at some point; for now, here's the text of my 2005 New York Press review of Pulse. ] Continue Reading »

Interesting that Tarsem Singh's The Fall is opening the same day as The Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer adaptation. They're both the saturated-color ramblings of children (quite literally in The Fall's case), and all the more fascinating for all the surface infantalization. Neither can be said to "work" in any traditional sense, but for the willing, they cast a rather remarkable spell, like Svengali or Mesmer on a longed-for beloved. If Speed Racer is the more accomplished of the two films, it's no doubt due to the hermetically sealed nature of its mostly (if not entirely) green-screened production. The Fall is much more frayed and ramshackle, befitting both its central conceit (a constantly metamorphosizing fable subject to the various whims of its dual narrators) and the fact that Tarsem and his crew shot the film in fits and starts over four years in 15-plus countries.
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To read the rest of the review at UGO, click here.

What is Noise, exactly?

It's a film perhaps designed to make us posit that meta-question, neither explicitly fish nor fowl in its final form. That implies that it walks some kind of fine line, though it's really more of a muddled middle ground. The film is being sold as a fictional corrective to a very real problem—the incessant noises (car alarms, mostly) plaguing big city environs, with New York standing in as a sort of every-urbania—but it's really only interesting as a portrait of a disturbed personality, namely Hegel-reading businessman David Owen (Tim Robbins), who takes it upon himself to combat the intrusive soundscapes around him with increasing vim, vigor, and psychosis.
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To read the rest of the review at UGO, click here.

I guested on yesterday's Movie Geeks United! podcast, chatting about my experiences at the Sarasota and Tribeca Film Festivals, giving advance thoughts on Speed Racer, and then segueing (via overtime and with the help of House contributor Aaron Aradillas) into a "state of the art" discussion of criticism. A blast as always (my continued thanks to co-hosts Jamey and Jerry).

You can access the podcast here. My contribution begins at 70:43 and continues to show's end. Also featured on this episode are Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro (discussing their co-directed documentary Body of War) and Van Fischer, Gabrielle Union, and Jeremy Renner, director and stars, respectively, of Neo Ned, now out on DVD.
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Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.

By Steven Boone

[Battle for Haditha opens today at Manhattan's Film Forum. Click here for screening information.]

Lamenting that Nick Broomfield couldn't muster a more rigorous, professional job of recounting the Haditha massacre in Battle for Haditha is like bitching about the technical deficiencies of a kiss or a death cry. This film is as simple as war is not the answer/only love can conquer hate. Too simple for those who prefer to rationalize the Iraq War with statements like "Nobody wants war, but..." Battle for Haditha declares that there is no "but," not for anyone with a genuinely humanistic, pacifist pair of eyes. Continue Reading »

[Medium Cool screens May 9th & May 12th as part of The Film Society of Lincoln Center series "1968: An International Perspective." Click here for screening information and to purchase advance tickets.]

If any movie aspires to capture What It All Meant, you can't get much more assertive than Medium Cool, which tried to sum up the Summer of '68 in Chicago less than a year after it occurred. This has to be some kind of response-time record: we couldn't get 9/11 going on-screen 'til about three years later. The reason, of course, was that Haskell Wexler had heard—like anyone else with half an ear to the ground—that the Democratic convention would probably blow up in a big way, and shot his climactic footage accordingly (the opening title complements, reading "Chicago, 1968" over the sound of a siren). Forty years later, Medium Cool seems like one of the most ambivalent political films ever, which is both good and bad. Continue Reading »

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Lindsay Anderson and Malcolm McDowell's follow-up to the infamous If... (TSPDT #567) stars McDowell as a fresh-faced young Candidean stumbling through a picaresque that sprawlingly catalogs the abuses and absurdities of all corners of 70s British society: provincial philistines staging miscegenation sex shows; scientists grafting pig parts to human guinea pigs; and a military industrial alliance enabling genocide overseas. Indeed, the only institution that seems to be depicted favorably is the prison where McDowell is indoctrinated into Marxist utopianism, only to be mauled upon his release by the homeless people he seeks to serve. Heavy on incident and yet somehow vague in insight, David Sherwin's screenplay seems to depend heavily on the audience taking its wry depictions of widespread dystopia at face value to attain an aura of verity. For his part Anderson maintains a snarkily buoyant tone to the proceedings, aided by Alan Price's running commentary song score and various metacinematic gestures to keep things teasingly playful, such as casting actors in multiple roles and having Price and his band appear midway. The finale involves a casting session with McDowell's character for the very film in which he just starred, climaxing into a New Agey epiphany followed by a dance-a-long precursor to the ending of David Lynch's Inland Empire. The performances by the multi-tasking ensemble are uniformly convincing in conveying a societal landscape of alluring menace; watching them it's easy to be caught up in the skill by which they inhabit and skewer their roles, though the lingering feeling of cynicism following the proceedings may wear differently on a given viewer.

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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

By Steven Boone

Somebody needed to do a merciless sendup of Homeland Security bullshit, but are Harold and Kumar up to the task? Not quite. The indelible characters from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle are not political creatures. They tweak and diffuse class and racial tensions by rendering them silly and inconsequential. Like Team America creators Trey Parker and Matthew Stone, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg seem to believe that America's problems are just a matter of a few uptight douchebags spoiling the party for the rest of us level-headed dudes. (If Al Qaeda and the Pentagon would just chillax...) This is satire for unapologetic stoners and frat nerds who engage politics only when something of a political nature butts in and cock-blocks. Missing from this and most other post-9/11 lampoons are the element that would give them real electricity and bigger, longer laughs: the rude fact of power and powerlessness. Great satire requires a dash of blood. Continue Reading »

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Wong Kar-Wai's films aren't just intoxicating; they're intoxicated. They deploy slow motion, fast motion, freeze-frames and other visual flourishes not to highlight pivotal narrative moments, but to italicize feelings—some sorrowful or profound, others fleeting, playful, sensual. His frames are packed with chromatic and textural details and often separated from the viewer by environmental scrims (curtains, door frames, windowpanes, human blurs of foreground motion). Wong compounds disorientation by layering images atop each another in a series of luxurious dissolves. He glosses over dramatic housekeeping and fixates on tremors of emotion. His films seem to be struggling to remember themselves. Continue Reading »

By Steven Boone

[Anamorph opens today at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Click here for screening information.]

Everybody in Ho'wood wants to be a serial killer. What's up with all these flicks about ingenious murderers and the creative ways they find to mutilate their victims? The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en started something terrible that hasn't stopped yet. The only interesting thing about Anamorph, the latest liberal arts killer movie, is its apparent ambition to teach arts and crafts. Everybody in Ho'wood is a nerd. Continue Reading »

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Frank Borzage's most celebrated film (winner of three of the inaugural Academy Awards, including best director and actress) envisions romantic love as the ultimate absolution for a sewer cleaner (Charles Farrell) and a prostitute (Janet Gaynor). Borzage was one of the pioneers of envisioning spirituality onscreen, not with winged cherubs or beams of light, but through a thoroughly cinematic mastery of time suspended: masterful long takes and leisurely cuts that allow the presence of the screen to saturate to the point that it pours from the frame. This is especially true with the famous interludes in Farrell's top floor slum apartment with a window facing towards a cityscape that seems to be a projection of a poor man's daydream, and where Farrell and Gaynor seem to spend an ecstatic eternity discovering each other. Gaynor's raw, spontaneous expressiveness match perfectly with Borzage's insistence on perpetual innocence prevailing through unspeakable loss. On paper this is an archetypal Hollywood romance, especially in its unabashed childlike sentimentality, but the uncompromising conviction of Borzage's vision gives the film an integrity that can be emotionally devastating._____________________________________
To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here. See after the break for a video essay on the film, featuring commentary by Paolo Cherchi Usai. Continue Reading »

By Michael Healey

Shine a Light isn't the first IMAX movie about dinosaurs, but it may the first on which the dinosaurs receive Executive Producer credit. Continue Reading »

Winona Ryder is agreeably treated like a muse in Sex and Death 101, mysteriously slinking around the margins of this unfunny dark comedy until a climactic monologue allows her to bust loose with a more-timid-than-shocking tale of sexual abuse. If her pitiable backstory inspires some measure of sympathy, it comes only from Ryder's delivery (halting rhythms, batted eyelashes, continual downward glances: the sort of gestures and intonations for which the term "waifish" was invented) and not from writer/director Daniel Waters' mock-horrifying sense of sexual perversion. That's the primary problem with Sex and Death 101: the language and the pictures aren't up to Ryder's performance. Plain 'n' simple, there's no dare there.
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To read the rest of the review at Underground Online (UGO), click here.