Snark Tank

So here goes:

First, the plug: the FFC 2007 Annual is on sale now. Please buy one. I held my first one today in the basement of Denver's Mayan Theater because, in Colorado, Landmark is carrying the book at all its locations. Call your local Landmark and ask why they're not doing the same. We get this thing viral and suddenly we're in business for another ten years. It's also the first time, by the way, that I read the complete Neil LaBute preface and. . . holy shit.

Seriously.

Okay - business at hand: just turned in my Top Ten for the year - let's hear your Bottom Ten.

Ground rules: let's not kick the hapless; let's go after the genuinely vile. People ask me what my favorite movie is all the time and that's easy - people ask me what my most-hated is at all time and I say that it changes every year. Flip? Yeah. But I sort of mean it. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Happy New Year.

Shadows in the Spotlight: Peggy Sue Got Married and Raising Arizona

"There's no Godfather-like pathos to mine in this Francis Ford Coppola dramedy," or so claims the Netflix description of Peggy Sue Got Married. At first, it sounds like sniveling, "where did he go wrong" sarcasm in relation to Coppola's astonishing body of work through the '70s--but you finally watch the movie and you can't help but think, Well, why isn't there any? Somehow the story of a woman transported twenty-five years into the past, back to the halcyon days of high school, feels like it should carry a lot more weight than it does here. But I'm beginning to suspect that time travel films only have the capacity to be great (the first two Back to the Future films, Time After Time, even Frequency and Groundhog Day, in a sense) when your travellers are complete aliens at the mercy of an uncrossable generation gap. Bring them back to a familiar era and it's just a nostalgia trip, the curious fulfillment of regrets and what-if scenarios carried out in the same manner as a play date with action figures representing the people in your life. Oh, if only you had been nicer to that kid, if only you had asked that dreamy boy out on a date--well, to whom could it possibly matter outside of your dumb ass? Peggy Sue Got Married is told from such a one-sided perspective that it's almost suffocating.

It's only natural that we should land on Coppola's nephew Nicolas Cage as a lonely beacon of interest--as Charlie Bodell (Peggy Sue's 1960 beau-turned-1985 estranged husband), he is as close to an alien as his identity will allow as a resident of this era. Critical examinations can't seem to decide whether Cage based his squeaky, naïve accent on Gumby's pal Pokey or Donald Duck, both of which he has claimed at various times--it's a brilliant compromise between the two, if you ask me, one that finds a literalized voice to teenage angst: the desire to fit in with your dull-as-dishwater surroundings, constantly haunted by the threat that your emotions will bubble over uncontrollably. Working from that "outcast" line of thought, by the way, you can find an early indication of Cage's strange link to vampirism, three years before Vampire's Kiss. Take a look at our two introductions to Charlie in a physical form: a foreboding, almost supernatural presence in 1985, a mysterious figure watching passively from the shadows; and "later," this is referenced to comic effect in 1960, adopting a Hollywoodized Romanian accent as he approaches the time-displaced Peggy Sue during a blood drive.

It's this kind of tease that makes me wish the film looked beyond the obnoxious, self-centered titular character; I particularly ached to see more scenes that featured Cage and Jim Carrey as old buddies in the same doo-wop group. More than just a desire to see a couple of irrepressable screen presences act the part of Martin and Lewis, however, they share a real kinship in this film. Their personalities and interactions here seem to better explore the wounds that a figurative and literal return to high school would hypothetically open, something that the film itself casually sidesteps in letting Kathleen Turner do whatever the fuck it is that she does here. (Seriously, I'm mystified.) There's a precious scene during the 1985 school reunion when Carrey's Walter Getz flies into humorous faux-outrage when the school nerd (Barry Miller) is singled out as a success; in 1960, he offers an exaggerated gag at the suggestion that the nerd is writing a book, which might expose gentle ribbing as genuine hatred spread out across several decades. Doubtful that anyone but Carrey could possess the bombastic energy necessary to pull that off, and Cage seems like the other side of the same coin, exuding a sense of projective defeat in his past and future. It's as if the older Charlie has been secretly transported back to the past along with Peggy Sue, as if he knows that his plans for life and love will result in rejection twenty-five years later. It's this general emotion that leads to another near-vampiric moment--Charlie/Cage's weird, orgasmic gasp just before locking lips with Peggy Sue upon the suggestion of dancing as a mating ritual.

The only time that Charlie/Cage seems at ease is when he's singing in that doo-wop group, The Definitions. Witnessing Cage's complete comfort in this scenario gives a slight indication as to why, from his adulation of Elvis and Brando to his onscreen indulgence in leather-jacketed motorcycle rebellion, the actor seems so keen to emulate the artistic and cultural trends of the 1950s: he subscribes to a similar sense of incompleteness, a visceral stream-of-consciousness that often results in breathy, guttural noises and half-thought expressions. (Compare Cage's performance here to that of Kevin J. O'Connor, who quakes with false intensity and subsequently becomes a pale parody of Beat poetry.) The excitement and cheer to this effect inverts after some music bigwig informs Charlie that he just won't make it in the industry: "Elvis is dead--that's Ajax," he tells Peggy Sue when she mistakes one of his dogs for another. Cage drops the first half of this phrase with such leaden finality that the heartbreak of a dead dream is all that we can hear; even we, in the ironic dead-Elvis age, cannot hear it any other way.

The key scene for Cage/Charlie comes earlier, however--not when things are at their bleakest but when they are at their most uncertain. Cage understands that Charlie is at his absolute lowest when he allows his mind to tear itself apart with doubt. After a brief, creepy moment wherein Charlie silently contemplates smothering Peggy Sue in her sleep, she admits that she and Mike (O'Connor) had "gone for a ride." He grabs her in a brief rage; the DVD subtitles claim that Charlie's response is "Then it's true! Damn it!", but it comes out like a vague mashup of enraged syllables, an almost cathartic burst of emotion upon a partial explanation. In suggesting Cage as her romantic opposite in Moonstruck, Cher supposedly likened his performance in Peggy Sue Got Married to watching a two-hour car crash--and this is the scene that best exemplifies those sentiments, as Charlie ever-so-slowly falls apart while recounting the only kind of analogy that he can muster: "When The Monotones did 'Book of Love', chapter four--'you break up, won't you give it one more chance'--I'm thinking, 'Did we break up?'" On the last two words, Charlie/Cage's voice completely submits to the Donald Duckness and seems to hit a pocket of helium. He clasps his neck, clears his throat and continues. Accidental or not, the moment's integration into the film represents Coppola's ultimate defense of his nephew's performance, and his understanding that Cage's treatment was the right one for the role: only barely keeping it together as a messy collection of desires and preconceived notions, liable to burst at any moment.

Trading the shadow cast by Kathleen Turner's overbearing presence for the shadow cast by the Coen Brothers' burgeoning auteurism in Raising Arizona, Cage also injects a dose of sad humility into H. I. "Hi" McDunnough, a corner store-robbing recidivist sporting a head of hair that shuffles through various stages of messiness between scenes and shots alike. The problem with the film itself is that the Coens understand the basic forces at play in a screwball comedy, but don't spend enough time exploring their characters to give any credence to the wacky scenarios into which they are thrown. On three separate occasions, William Forsythe and John Goodman spend a good minute or so screaming at the top of their lungs, and it's a hollow release. There's a little sorrow to be felt when it is realized that Cage will be playing the straight man--you keep thinking that he could probably teach everyone a thing or two about screaming with the correct level of crazed intensity. But the fact that this outrageous man is poised as the voice of reason contained in a world of insanity results in a strange passion that Raising Arizona has difficulty locating on its own.

Indeed, the hindsight benefited by Cage's career seems to point to casting against type, ideologically as well as practically: bounty hunter/Leonean spectre of death Leonard Smalls (Randall "Tex" Cobb, an obvious progenitor of No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh) is introduced into the mix via one of Hi's precognitive dreams, described by him as "the lone biker of the apocalypse; a man with the powers of hell at his command." Knowing all that we know about Cage now, the implications are impossible to ignore--Smalls is like Johnny Blaze, n'est-ce pas? I particularly like the disgusted quiver in Cage's voice, trying so hard to convince us that he didn't think that this motorcycle rebel was the awesomest thing ever. That might seem like a stretch, but it's not like it could have been accidentally prescient, either; by posing lifelong comic book fan Cage (Nicholas Coppola's stage name was chosen in honor of Luke Cage, Power Man) as the horrified/awed narrator for this obviously Ghost Rider-like entity, Raising Arizona reflects on our own reaction to the cinematic culture of cool, admiring this demonic man with a satisfied grin as he casually blows bunnies and lizards to kingdom come.

As its silly baby-kidnapping plotline progresses, Raising Arizona becomes something of a Feed the Kitty scenario, with the whole world envisioned as a domino-effect deathtrap and Cage/Hi playing the role of both oblivious victim and exasperated savior. (The film directly acknowledges its forebears early on, during the scene in which Hi attempts to kidnap an Arizona quint while leaving the others undisturbed, sweat pouring down his face.) Having successfully survived his three strikes as a petty criminal, Hi has acquired a certain level of invincibility, given the supernatural ability to outrun both the ever-compounding forces of law and death in the film's slapstick centerpiece--a sequence that succeeds thanks to Cage's dedicated concentration, a certain feeling of hidden exasperation that very rarely betrays the fact that Hi is playing it all by ear.
This newfound aura hasn't come without a price, however, as realized by one of Cage's subtlest moves as Hi: his right eye involuntarily twitches whenever he is placed in immediate danger from another human being--such as his knock-down, drag-out brawls with Gale (Goodman) and Smalls in the third act of the film--as if he's already prepared for the black eye he's about to receive. Certainly Hi tries to fight back, but his battle cries come in the form of scratchy, high-pitched howls and confused babbling, leaving his eye as the only honest indicator of how he feels about his predicament. It's an intentionally half-hearted performance that interprets the character's misanthropic tendencies as embarrassed loneliness: note that, even when he is knocked to the floor while tied to a chair, Hi only lets loose with his deepest, loudest shout after he has been assured that his assailants will not be returning--watch Cage turn a bright shade of red the instant that Gale closes the door for the final time. It all brings into question an earlier scene in which Hi winks with his right eye while trying to convince his wife Ed (Holly Hunter) to let him play with old friends, then immediately submits when she refuses. Throughout the film, Hi/Cage acts the part of a sensitive, capable hero when alone, but becomes a beaten dog whenever anyone else enters the picture. He's so humbled by his checkered past and how he has unintentionally caused harm to others that he can't even recognize how special he is.
How, then, do you take the moment when Hi kills Smalls, pulling the pin from a grenade on his vest seconds after learning that they share the same Woody Woodpecker tattoo? "I'm sorry," Hi just barely whispers with the pin dangling from his fingers, his eye having finally closed from the beating he's received. Whether Hi is Smalls' son, whether he is a simple representation of his criminal past, or whether he recognizes that they're both on the same mad, murderous quest--he seems to know that he's killing a part of himself. (Which, in itself, offers another level to Hi's fear of Smalls.) The brief, shit-eating grin that Cage wears as he scrambles to his feet, however, almost renders the following emotional redemption redundant: it's a flash of comprehension that someone else will be taking the lumps from now on, a transferrence of Hi's unwanted identities as a perpetual criminal and cosmic whipping boy into an appropriate avatar that is subsequently destroyed. Although Hi seems to have his doubts until the very final moments before the end credits, the fear and loathing leaves Cage after this altercation, at last presenting himself to the world, emotionally naked--not a gesture that represents Hi throwing in the towel, but recognition that he can take on all comers.

Hieronymous Bosch's Heck

At long last, I have finally uploaded my 2005 short film Hieronymous Bosch's Heck on Youtube! The impetus I needed to go through with it? Andrew Blackwood's Slap, a short film premiering on Dennis Cozzalio's blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Rule, that I absolutely hated. I said as much in the comment section.

Posting this is, arrogantly, my reaction to it. I think that what I did is better, though God only knows there's room for improvement. But you could also consider this as me putting my own neck on the chopping block.

Something else I've been meaning to share. I saw Enchanted the night after last and knowing that it's a minor hit, while truly great films that played at this same mall multiplex like The Assassination of Jesse James, The Darjeeling Limited, and No Country For Old Men seem to have been slow to gain an audience. What exactly is the appeal of this? I hit the internet movie database with my complaints on the film and some questions for the fans (doing moderately OK in supressing my condescending snootiness) and was actually rather surprised at the results.

Finally, I'm working to get a review out of the 1951 Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol before Christmas. VCI's "Ultimate Collector's Edition" is, to give you the short version, one of the strangest DVD packages I've ever seen. Won't get into specifics as of now, but it got me wondering. Which DVDs have you seen that are actually successful as works of art, complementing the films that they house to the point where those who viewed only the theatrical release aren't getting the whole picture.

Two examples from me to let you know what I'm talking about: Capturing the Friedmans which has an exhausting but not exhaustive second disc of material that attempts to address many of the complaints made against the film. The DVD itself suggests the inadequacy of the documentary form, a dominanting theme in the film. It seems that every statement needs to be qualified and then the qualification must be qualified, and there is no end to it. The more you go searching for the "truth" behind the matter the further it pulls away.

Then there is the 2001 Special Edition of Platoon which features two audio commentaries, one by Oliver Stone and the other by military supervisor Captain Dale Dye. These audio commentaries are also included in the 20th Anniversary 2-Disc Collector's Set, along with a second disc of material; but I'm including the 2001 version because the commentaries make up a greater proportion of supplementary material (it's them, the terrific 52-minute documentary "Tour of the Inferno", a photo gallery, TV spots, and a trailer) and more honestly, because it's the version I own.

What intrigued me about the commentaries is that Stone is a "stoner" and Dye is a "juicer" (beer not 'roids). This emphasizes the dualistic quality in the film, how it's not an anti-war film or a pro-war film but both. It's easy to mistake Tom Berenger's Sgt. Barnes (juicer to Elias' (Willem Dafoe) stoner) as the villain of the piece, but he in fact informs the values of the film equally. When Chris (Charlie Sheen) kills him at the end of the film, it's not hypocrisy but Oedipal fulfillment. In killing Barnes, he shows that he has become Barnes. Stone suggests in his commentary that this doesn't represent a moral failure on Chris' part but a moral victory. This would not have sunk in as much if there were a third commentary, if we only had Stone's track, or if he shared one with Dye or somebody else.

Peter Greenaway provocatively states that film is dead and the future is in multimedia. These two DVDs suggest to me that he might be right.

Film Freak Central's Storefront

We'll make this official at the site later today, but THE FILM FREAK CENTRAL 2007 ANNUAL is now available for purchase. We've set up a special Lulu storefront for all our books; this is currently the only way to get the newest one, but it will be available for retail sale soon enough.

Final tally, by the way: 216 films reviewed, 30 of which we're formally critiquing for the first time.

Click the image below to check it out. Thank you in advance for your patronage.

Quiki Contest

Wanna win this(?):

All you have to do is be the first person to correctly identify the source of the screencap below. North American readers only, please.

2007 Annual: Final Specs

Streeting next week, The Film Freak Central 2007 Annual includes a provocative foreword by filmmaker/playwright Neil LaBute in addition to previously-unpublished reviews of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, The Omen, Monkey Warfare, Rocky Balboa, The Queen, Flags of Our Fathers, Night at the Museum, Idiocracy, Silent Hill, 13 Tzameti, and (no shit) many more.

Instead of that Optimus Prime voice-changer helmet, why not hit up Santa for a copy of The Film Freak Central 2007 Annual? List price is $20.00; check back at the mothersite for further details.

Nosferatu, Arschloch der Nacht: Vampire's Kiss

It may seem like a matter of putting the hopelessly-crazy cart before the socially-integrable horse to start off a Nicolas Cage retrospective with Vampire's Kiss, but it may be the film that best represents my intentions in starting this little project: the exploration of Nic's routinely over-the-top acting beyond giggling face value. In a wonderful feature-length commentary for the film with director Robert Bierman, Cage mentions that "over-the-top is one of those things that doesn't work with me, 'cause I don't believe in such a thing. I feel that it's just stylistic choices--and this was obviously a choice to use grand gesture and go bigger." A reasonable enough explanation, because a deeper look validates his performance here as something more than just madness for madness' sake--it may be hilarious when the actor flails his arms and screams the alphabet, but realize that this occurs upon the slight suggestion that his character has committed a misdeed and you'll find that pinning everything down becomes a lot more difficult.
After all, Vampire's Kiss isn't about a man descending into insanity so much as it is about a neurotic corporate asshole's transformative search for redemption--it avoids the pitfalls of Michael Clayton, however, by better realizing that such people are trapped by what they know, and by how they have operated their entire lives in clawing their way to the top; their idea of redemption only means being absolved of wrongdoing. The film doesn't have an ounce of sympathy for its lead character, Peter Loew (Cage), by any account a complete fraud in everything that he does: his dragging, "Continental" accent is a put-on to make himself seem more worldly (Cage mentions that he got the idea from his father, who adopted the same accent as a professor of comparative literature); he has little desire to admit fault during sessions with his therapist, Dr. Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley); and his day job as a literary agent seems to have little consequence beyond harassing his secretaries. It eventually wears down on him when he recognizes some never-fully-explained sexual inadequacy in the form of a wayward bat. After what is surely his most flagrantly prickish act (without a second thought, he skips out on love-interest-of-the-moment Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) when he excuses himself to go to the bathroom), he receives a sharp rebuke on his answering machine--to which he drawls a depressed response from his ersatz psychiatrist's couch. ("Yeahhhh, well fuck youuuu tooooo, sister.") Loew finally recognizes that he is a bad person and sets out to do something about it: make sure that he can come up with a good excuse. In that case, you could call the preceding scene--his vampiric encounter with Rachel (Jennifer Beals)--a retroactive fantasy, a one-night-stand purposely misinterpreted to set a plan into motion.
At first, Loew's regular bouts with hallucination feel like a forged doctor's note, a conscious attempt to exploit his innate eccentricity--and there's a distinct feeling that he already gets away with a lot of things based on that alone--entering a false plea of insanity to pardon everything that he's ever done. (Note that, after a hollow apology to Jackie, Loew's first post-bite vision of Rachel prevents him from attending a follow-up date.) The problem is, of course, that the plan works too well. In order to convince others that his natural douchebaggery is worthy of forgiveness, he believes that he must convince himself that he is a monster controlled by supernatural urges--eventually ending with his death in a state of grace mandated by "it wasn't his fault." Cage's primary treatment of the material as slow transformation (rather than as simple loss of mental capacity) can be traced to an early scene: after chanting his secretary Alva's (Maria Conchita Alonso) name from a mumble to a shout, Loew finally storms out of his office--and in one athletic move, he leaps on top of a desk and points an accusatory finger at her: "There you are!" When Alva instinctively runs out to the hallway, notice how Loew initially gives "chase"--mixing the confident stride of a go-go eighties power-player with the unstoppable gait of Michael Myers.

But the most prominent among Cage's touted influences in playing Loew (alongside Mick Jagger and the Brando of Reflections in a Golden Eye) is another great screen bogeyman, Max Schreck. Only one scene shows Loew watching Nosferatu, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had become a nightly ritual for him, picking up villainous traits here and there in order to better convince others that he is a menace to society that must be vanquished. In that, there's another example of how you can follow Cage's inexorable build-up--after cruelly berating Alva with great big bug-eyes and a weird, rectangular grin, he calls after her with a touch of sadness in his voice: "Don't you wanna use your gun, Alva?" Loew soon realizes (after the "formal" viewing of Nosferatu) that he must adapt some rudimentary sense of charm before he can convince anyone that this run-of-the-mill eccentric dickhead has transformed into a vampire. Thusly come some of the oddest scenes in a film full of much louder oddities: shortly after eating a cockroach, Cage/Loew does his best to embody Schreck in his entirety, visiting Alva's home when she fakes sick. He attempts to curry her favor with apologies and "soup!" while arching his shoulders and tucking his arms into his body in such a way that he comes to resemble a crooked, German Expressionist stick. At last, after this bout of charm is replaced with more invective, Alva is convinced to fill her gun with blanks provided by her brother Emilio (Bob Lujan).

Alas, Loew's imagined self-pity reaches its apex when he discovers that the blanks fail to do him in, crying out loud, literal sobs of "boo hoo" as Alva lies unconscious next to him. It seems that, in his latest attempt to turn Alva into his personal Van Helsing, Loew has raped her--but it is of no concern to him. Such a self-conscious act of prefab emotion draws attention to the several layers of "actor" that embody this character (Cage as Loew as "Continental" Loew as "Vampire" Loew) and the "Method" attempt to bypass anything that could possibly stand in the way of the performance. It's an idea enforced by Loew's subsequent spree through the streets of New York ("I'm a vampi-yah! I'm a vampi-yah!") which perfectly captures Cage's palpable joy at being able to shake loose any misgivings and go bigger, to use those grand gestures--and, handily, it also reflects Loew's masked elation at achieving a vital step towards freedom from responsibility.

But Loew finds that he is in need of external validation, because his "former" self is gnawing away at his newly-discovered vampirism--with only a few dollar bills in his wallet (never mind the credit card), Loew plays the cheapskate, eschewing professionally-crafted fangs in favor of dime-store plastic. The scenes that follow may be inherently ridiculous--acknowledged by the dramatic music sting when Loew sticks the fangs in his mouth--but watch how Cage plays the next few scenes, with his forays into exaggeration borne of complete earnest: Loew's call to his therapist through his new choppers (his desperate pleas to reschedule an appointment are actually heartrending in a knee-jerk pathetic kind of way); the capture and devouring of a pigeon; and finally the murder-by-neckbite of a young woman at a discotheque--which plays out like a self-contained, minute-long version of Dracula and represents Cage/Loew's most valiant attempt to encompass his identity in the hallucination. But it's all for naught--even his visions of Rachel have begun to mock him for his inability to completely succumb to the night.

And so he continues into the dawn, begging for someone to kill him with a makeshift stake. Wandering down the street, wailing at the top of his lungs, he soon walks face-first into the corner of a building (silent horror becomes silent slapstick), an interruption which he naturally interprets as his appointment with his therapist. The scene alternates between the reality and the imaginary; the latter features a newly-invigorated Loew, announcing that he has decided to abandon his therapy sessions and that he will search for love on his own. What I really adore about Cage here is that, cutting back and forth as they do, the two versions of Loew flow together so nicely--the upstanding, self-sufficient hero and the slobbering, blood-drenched maniac are both such outrageous fantasies on either side of an acting spectrum that they circle around and meet each other.

It seems to be a last-ditch effort to let Loew have his cake and eat it too: "Dr. Glaser" rationalizes away any guilt from the rape and the murder (presented here, of course, as an after-thought fear of consequence) as "a little id release" and even pairs him with "Sharon," a theoretically perfect soulmate who, we gather, comes to dog him about his "identity" as a vampire, until--"God damn it, what did I just say?!"--he launches into a hate-filled diatribe directed at thin air. After so many moments that could be interpreted as mere silliness (or moments of terror purposely masked by Cage's own hysterical melancholy), Loew's explosion finally introduces a sense of fright to the proceedings. Cage has suddenly become a terrifying on-off switch. His film-long build-up is no longer some cycle of weirdness, but has finally culminated in choppy mood swings that exude pure danger--the very final stage of this on-the-street insanity. Even previous outbursts were not quite as violent and abrupt; the actor's ferocity in battling himself translates as the final attempt from whatever sanity Loew has left (or whatever sanity he ever had in the first place) to deny him his self-contained forgiveness and peace of mind.

But Alva's brother, dramatically set up in the last few minutes of the film as some ever-approaching avenger/demon slayer, storms into his apartment as a whimpering Loew brings the "stake" to his chest; Emilio obliges and forces it in. At this point, Cage performs his final act of reining it in: after a brief, painful scream, he slowly brings his arms to his side, his final thoughts being of Rachel, begging that he dream of her. In other words, the asshole wins because we've taken him up on his fantasy. He had it comin', but we've all got it comin', kid--Loew has beaten the rap by dying on his own terms, successfully pleading "not guilty" to the crimes committed during his life by reason of supernatural monstrosity, and his mind has finally thrown up the white flag and forgiven him. Cage mentions that he didn't want Loew to go out quietly, and perhaps he doesn't--but Loew's death rattle is not exaggerated in any way, which emphasizes his mortality and drives the point home that this is an inappropriate end for such a horrible person. The dual expectation for more histrionics and some form of cosmic retribution leads to one inevitable, "unfair" conclusion: he should be going out in a much louder fashion.

The Beginning of a Screamin' Mad Odyssey

So I've been leaving a lot of "Drafts" across the THE FILM FREAK CENTRAL BLOG 's administrative pages lately, trying to cobble together some cohesive thoughts to instigate discussion. But I've come up flat in the last few months--a particularly messy endeavor was trying to form cohesive thoughts about "Final Fantasy VII" and its undeniable link to Vertigo. When I find the time, I'll probably just play through the game again and give it the old college try. Until then, however, allow me to announce my intention to embark on a self-reflective odyssey in the form of a short diatribe.

I just saw Southland Tales, shortly before the box office plans to perform its mercy killing. Long story short, it just strikes me as all so much non-directional bile. The problem isn't that it doesn't make sense, it's that everything's so freakin' clear in its complete and utter contempt for the movies, for the avant-garde, for art in general, for philosophy, for itself, for its audience, and for anything else that comes within fifty feet of it. After a lot of self-conscious blather vaguely related to philosophy, sex, media, politics, literature and poetry, its one ultimate truth seems to be that "no one rocks the cock like Krysta Now [a porn star/media darling played by Sarah Michelle Gellar]," apparently the coda for humanity at the apocalypse. Because those words come from a smarmy, omniscient voice at the tail end of a cocktail party, it might be seen as some hyper-absurdist satire if it weren't for another piece of omniscient narration (from none other than Mr. Dick-in-a-Box himself) that quotes from the final lines of The Hollow Men; "whimper" and "bang" switch places in such a way that seems to imply that even the bangs themselves are ultimately whimpers. "No one rocks the cock" becomes an entirely earnest statement--none of it matters, metaphors are useless, and everything is so fucking stupid, so why bother trying to figure anything out?

Southland Tales' greatest crime in this regard may be how its plot and cast contrivances (an awful, nonsensical script that serves as the figurative and literal stand-in for the film; hiring washed-up actors to play washed-up actors-turned-political activists) act as ironic-cum-nihilistic reflections on the accepted conventions of "art" and "indie" films (non sequitur and dreamlike scenarios; the tendency to cast unknowns and b-listers). In doing so, it ignores any other directions that these "genres" have taken, and boils "good" and "bad" to immutable, objective concepts--in this case, it only recognizes and defines "bad." Immerse yourself too deeply into those immutable, objective concepts and you won't be able to see anything beyond those strict parameters. Encompassing yourself in irony comes at a price, after all, and you can't help but think about how this mentality has already creeped into societal acceptance. How would a kid raised on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" respond to a film of dubious intentions like Red Dawn? Counting myself as a member of that misbegotten generation--and not having been old enough to care when the Soviet Union collapsed--well, I'm still not entirely sure. But after I saw Southland Tales, I started wondering if my own relationship to cinema was capable of that brand of reductive hostility, and I found a concept to discuss in my long and storied history with Nicolas Cage.

You may have guessed by my throwaway mention in the "Shark: Season One" review that I have a particular affinity for Cage's batshit-nuts performances--but ask any of my friends and they'll tell you that "Screamin' Mad" Nicolas Cage is a recurring topic of discussion and fairly reliable running gag. Dude screams, dude grimaces, dude is hilarious. I'm not sure where all of that started, precisely--might've been after The Wicker Man, when that out-of-context "comedy of the year" clipshow started circulating on YouTube; maybe it was when I saw his manic, arrested-development performance in Ghost Rider; or maybe it didn't really gain momentum until I found his Japanese pachinko commercials. I've long considered these examples as hilarious for essentially the same reasons and never thought twice about it--but, of course, Wicker Man was intended as a thriller and the commercials were meant to be silly and a little unhinged. Contemplating that clipshow, I'm forced to wonder if these (mis)interpretations have had an adverse effect on my ability to properly discern Cage as anything but some knowing/unknowing avatar of wackiness. The guy won an Oscar some twelve years ago, but it's a lot easier to just pigeonhole him as a pleasant nutjob and leave it at that. I watched Face/Off again recently, and man, Cage is just wonderful in it. But is my admiration just post-ironic hangover?


Another example: just about everyone I know died laughing when they saw Nic play Fu Manchu for Werewolf Women of the SS--despite the fact that we all knew that it was coming. Why did we think it was so funny? Because it was just another example of Cage's madness? Because he had found the perfect outlet for appeasing a projected image to the masses? For all intents and purposes, Cage is the halfway point of Grindhouse, smack dab between the tiring post-modern sarcasm (Planet Terror) and the genuine post-modern self-analysis (Death Proof)--and by the same token comes the uneasy task of categorizing and understanding Cage's craziest performances.

Trying to figure this man out, then, has challenged my critical faculties, and I need to step up to the plate. So over the next few weeks, I'll be watching some of Nic's films--Raising Arizona, Vampire's Kiss, It Could Happen to You, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Adaptation., Ghost Rider, and more--and discussing them here on the blog through the prism of his performances and his career as a whole. Stay tuned.

The Trench

So – fighting a flu that’s had me tits up for about six full days now. Get your flu shot. My productivity took one right in the pants.

Got in trouble a little with the local publicists this week over our posting of an I’m Not There review before its limited (?) release on the 21^st. A quick check revealed that the embargo I was breaking had already been broken by Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Ebert’s website, Time, The New York Observer, Movie City News, the Brussats, Rich Cline and so on – making me wonder, specifically, what the fucking point of it all is and what was being threatened exactly. I half expect to receive a screener of it in the next day or two, making me wonder even more fervently who’s penalizing whom and for what.

In other news, the Denver International Film Festival is running this week and we’re not covering it. It’s not pique, it’s sort of a general lack of interest. The kind of lack of interest that’ll kick me in the balls if the DIFF ever gets stuff I’m really interested in down the road, but with the centerpiece guest being Norman Jewison (Norman Jewison) well, I just couldn’t bring myself to manufacture ten capsules – especially with deadlines looming left and right on our new Annual. Opening night is The Savages; closing is, gulp, Robin Williams’ August Fire. In between? Juno I think, Jason Reitman’s newest. Good luck to the DIFF and all – hope we hook up again somewhere down the road.

No hiding the fact that 2007 is shaping up in my mind as a watershed year in pictures. Still a few more, There Will Be Blood high amongst them, before it’s all in the can – but I’m chuffed, man, it’s been great.

RIP Norman Mailer.

Did anyone see Lions for Lambs or Bee Movie or, better yet, Martian Child?

Watched Being John Malkovich again for the first time since seeing it multiple times in the theater and, man, it’s fucking amazing. I’d forgotten more than I’d remembered. Kaufman is like this amazing alien intelligence. Good festivals could be made of his stuff; Ashley Judd’s, and Wes Anderson’s too. It’s given me an idea of a new book of critical essays. Think I’ll run it by Bill.

Anyone have a lead on the theatrical cut of Blood Simple on DVD?

Been watching a lot of Disney classics lately what with a four-year-old needing “good night shows” and all and have come to the conclusion that most of them are psychotic when they’re not just garden-variety homicidal – they are almost to a one not useful in any significant way in dealing with conflict, preaching the idea that the best way to deflate The Shadow is to stick it with a knife. Tie in the racism and general misogyny and marvel no longer that Michael Bay’s flicks make bazillions. To suggest that there’s not a tie-in here to what we consent to as a society with what’s wrong with us as a society is blinkered and moronic. I hate Cinderella with its cat/mouse filler and I despise Peter Pan with its “they’re not as smart as us, but they’re cunning” – but I do like The Fox and the Hound and The Jungle Book for their social intelligence and native nihilism. I love the second Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Toy Story and of course Ratatouille - can’t wait to screen The Iron Giant for them. Brad Bird’s a fucking genius.

Reading Proust nowadays – along with Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner. Weird how it jibes.

Looking forward in a sick-to-my stomach way to I Am Legend - missed, to my dismay, a screening of The Mist. One of the last long-form stories I’ve liked from Stephen King. The ending, I remember, is especially bleak. King at his best for me captured a sort of winsome melancholy – like that story “The Reach” that’s all about remembrances of things past – and of course “The Last Rung on the Ladder” and “The Woman in the Room”.

Here’s a lunchtime quiz: best Stephen King stories not yet translated to film.

Just When I Thought I Was Out...

Coming this Christmas. What can I say, Walter made an awfully convincing case for it. ("Let's do it.") Start saving your pennies!

Courage

When Bill asked me to contribute to the blog--and the blog only--as a guest, I was reticent. I’m a counter-puncher by nature: passionate but cautious, a leader only among followers. But thanks to e-mail’s unique ability to prolong the answers to simple questions, I had enough time to think things through and accept. All I needed was a topic.

“Write what you know,” you know?

I’m not terribly interested in the concept of a “guilty pleasure.” Just because you got high and laughed your ass off during Norbit, it’s unlikely that you’d really say it’s good. I’m far more interested in a “shameful ethical stance.” I genuinely think Pumpkin is excellent, but I’ve struggled to articulate exactly why that is, so I’m left with awkward pronouncements like, “No, I really do think it’s good.”

But sometimes, we don’t even bother with the stance. No one wants to look like a dumbass, especially since everyone’s born with the psychic ability to sense the impending judging eyes of dumbass accusation. So we hide our unpopular beliefs.

Well, I’d like to call them out. About a week ago, I found myself defending Fantastic 4: Rise of the Awkward Cultural Artifact, and mocking Nicolas Cage. I feel dirty about it. If we can’t honestly discuss art, how can we discuss that which is truly important in life, like socialized medicine, or the role revenge plays in morality, or Jenna Fischer?

So if you secretly think Billy Joel is the greatest recording artist of his generation, tell us. (Remember, I don’t want to know if you occasionally enjoy singing Piano Man karaoke. You really have to believe he’s good.)

If you think, as I do, that After Hours is the only truly great film Marty’s ever made, tell us.

Still not sure exactly what I'm looking for?

Hi, my name is John and I think Ben Affleck is the most underrated actor of his generation. He was just unlucky to run into a couple of directors who were incapable of protecting him.

Your turn. I refuse to believe that everyone is cooler than I pretend to be.

"FTP"O'd

Since our FTP server is down I haven't been able to update the index; and because I know everybody's been looking forward to it, here's a direct link to Walter's review of Eastern Promises.

And here's a direct link to a thought-provoking rumination by the great Bryant Frazer on the half-life of Miramax's fraudulent marketing tactics circa the mid-1990s. It made me remember a drunken conversation I once had with Atom Egoyan (I was drunk, he was patient) that marked the first--though certainly not the last--time I heard "Faust" and "Weinstein" mentioned in the same sentence.

Why I'm Not Formally Reviewing 'Control'

Control is an authentic-feeling biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic front man for Joy Division who committed suicide--though a revisionist theory absurdly contends that he "accidentally" hung himself from the clothesline in his Manchester flat--in 1979 at the age of 23. Spoiler. Directed by music-video auteur Anton Corbijn and objectively lensed in black-and-white and 'scope by Martin Ruhe, the film overcomes the central miscasting of Samantha Morton as Ian's wife Deborah (though she would've nailed this role in her Morvern Callar days, she's far too long in the tooth for it now) with the near-perfect casting of Sam Riley as Curtis, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honoré, a.k.a. The Other Woman. (Morton's incongruous star-power is easily explained by the basis for Control's screenplay: Deborah Curtis' own memoir Touching from a Distance.) The film is admirably not a hagiography while engendering empathy for a gifted asshole more successfully than, say, Man on the Moon, and the song recreations are surprisingly persuasive, although I was a bit disappointed with how literalmindedly the music is applied at times.

Anyway, I liked it and thought it mostly deserving of its Cannes honours, but towards the end of the film, I found myself growing increasingly restless: instead of dreading Ian's fate, I became impatient with any scene I knew wouldn't end with the money shot. Rather than give the Brothers Weinstein ammunition to butcher another film, though, I'm more apt to blame the anti-piracy measures that have been put into effect for this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Throughout the film, some skinny, anime-looking dork attired in a security uniform that was sliding off his shoulders paced the aisle next to me, stopping occasionally to put a pair of infrared specs to his eyes and pivot his head back and forth, Terminator-style. Call me a prima donna, but when a movie is quiet and intense, as Control most certainly is, there's just something distracting about a guy incessantly goose-stepping in your periphery. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when he leaned against the screen, spilling some of the projected image onto his smug expression. I kept hoping someone with a little influence would speak up (Dave Poland was seated in my vicinity) until finally I tried staring down the twerp myself. Alas, he wielded those night-vision goggles like a talisman, using them to shield himself from direct eye contact. Eventually I hotfooted it to the other side of the theatre--the Nazi stationed there was much less obtrusive, seemingly conscientious of Control's fragile tone.

Now, I'm not gonna get all self-righteous about being monitored during these press & industry screenings, even though I think they're very obviously going after the wrong people. Everybody knows that the Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka's factory comes with some caveats. But at least properly train this Gestapo to blend into the furniture and conceal their contempt for the whole charade, because it's the films--not the spectators--that ultimately pay the price.

My TIFF So Far:
Just Buried *1/2
Angel **
Emotional Arithmetic **
King of the Hill ***1/2
Love Songs *
A Promise to the Dead **1/2
Amal **1/2
Lust, Caution ***
Control ***
Mother of Tears: The Third Mother ***1/2

The Trench

Somebody talk to me about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in socio-political context because I think I just saw its millennial doppelganger in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Fresh from a nice chat about Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return at Beaver Creek’s beautiful Vilar Center, I’m dying to see his new one, Banishment, based on a writing by William Saroyan and premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The trailer looks like more of the same which is, of course, not a bad thing at all. Heard today, too, that Burn After Reading, the new Coen Bros. spy flick starring Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Malkovich has started production.

Owen Wilson tries to kill himself? That’s some bad juju there. Now Steve Coogan and Courtney Love are in the fray – the latter accusing the former of getting Wilson into some heavy shit. Whatever happened, it reminded me a lot of The Royal Tenenbaums and, from there, The Darjeeling Express - when brother Luke’s character shaves his hair and opens his wrists to the tune of the late Elliot Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”. The singer, incidentally, dead by auto-inflicted steak knife to the chest.

(Another odd non-synchronicity, some guy working at the University of Colorado’s student center slit a student’s throat out of nowhere and then started stabbing himself in his chest until police tasered him. It’s the goddamnest thing.)

Saw Rob Zombie’s Halloween tonight. Um. . . it’s more interesting in the context of an emerging auteur’s work? Let’s go with that.

Got a last second gig to host a screening of The Third Man on Saturday, projected from a 16mm source, at Denver’s Starz Filmcenter as part of their “Tattered Cover Film Series”. Admission is free, but it’s always a sellout so get there early if you’re coming. That afternoon, at 1:00pm, screening Bonnie & Clyde as part of Gilpin County’s “American New Wave” series. Admission? Also free.

Finished the first seasons of “Rome” and “Dexter” and the last season of “Deadwood” – two are great, one sucks. Here’s a hint: Showtime series are uniformly awful. Imagine if “Dexter” had been written by David Milch instead.

In other news, Elias Merhige has a new film out. A short film that you can watch for free here:

http://www.dinofcelestialbirds.com/. Just found out that his Begotten is out of print. Shame, that.

Some links

In lieu of a Friday update at the mothersite...

• A super-sized update at FFC contributor Alex Jackson's homebase, including the site's first guest reviews.
• The trailer for Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, a movie I can't believe actually exists.
• A guy who is restoring Star Wars on his home computer.

Discuss if you're so inclined.

P.S.: They're splitting Grindhouse into two movies for DVD. Bummer, huh?

The Trench

I dunno. Ebb and flows.

Busy time coming up. A new film series starting in the Vail Valley: one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Most of the notoriety comes from the ski resort, but the last three years or so a fledgling film festival has started up on its slopes that’s actually fairly impressive. Celebs like resorts – festivals like money – movie people like monied people: it all works out. The series is four films: Chungking Express, The Return, 3-Iron, and Pan’s Labyrinth. New American New Wave series starting up as well: five Saturdays. We’ll be doing Bonnie & Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Conversation, The Last Detail and The Stunt Man – as well as a cinematography series that will include pics like Hud and Days of Being Wild. It’s good because I like the work – and good, too, because I need the money.

Working on a couple of big projects – a few interesting assignments, a few that are just frustrating as fuck – and looking around at a few of my friends and peers who are going back to school, going out for drinks, going off on a lark. Checking that watch and wondering if it’s too soon for a mid-life crisis. How old was I ever going to get, anyway?

Amid a few screening duties (including Walter Hill’s still-delightful The Warriors – anyone here for an all-out revival of Hill’s works? Post-Sunshine, I was really hankering for a director’s cut of his Supernova) got a chance to watch Jack Hill’s Spider Baby, released in that annus mirabilis, 1968. Things really fucking flew apart that year in the United States, you know, bad enough that Richard stinking Nixon actually quoted Yeats in one of his speeches. He was talking about hippies, I think (most probably Abbie Hoffman in particular), but it’s gotta’ be bad for Mr. Bad Faith to assume the role as the proverbial falconer. 1968 in the movies has generational horror flicks like Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead – and the ultimate freak-out in 2001: A Space Odyssey – too many to mention, really. The Wild Bunch is in there, right? Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider. . . and Altamont and Bobby Kennedy and My Lai and The Family. In a lot of ways, America is still suffering the hangover of that year. 1968.

But, oh yeah, Spider Baby is hilarious. An opening murder-by-shears is appropriately nauseating (though not overly gory by any stretch) and Lon Chaney’s sad performance as a caretaker of a family of inbred misfits recalls of all things, certain feelings elicited by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Inspired? Not quite. But definitely worth a look.

Saw The Invasion tonight and it’s just fucking bloody awful. Dumb as dirt and proselytizing, too – with every line of dialogue written by Kang and Kodos.

Saw Superbad last week and it’s not bad – mostly because I like Michael Cera.

Anyone here bite the pride bullet and go to Stardust?
Anyone here read the pieces on Antonioni and Bergman by Scorsese and Allen?

“John from Cincinnati” just got the hook – though what I’m really interested in is Alan Ball’s new Vampire series. I have hope, but frankly after “Six Feet Under”, the premise feels a little redundant. I have faith that he’ll surprise me. It’s good to have faith in something.

Here’s my lunchtime poll: best pod movie?

The Trench

I finished up an interesting Shakespeare on Film series with the Douglas County Library System – ending with Michael Almereyda’s just fantastic Hamlet (it’s fucking amazing - re-orders the universe in a way), and Orson Welles’ savage MacBeth - and am looking forward to talking Pan’s Labyrinth and, among others, Birth and Days of Being Wild for a couple of new series at the end of this month. Gilpin County has been good enough to green light an “American New Wave” series for me in September – I’m hoping to program The Conversation, Bonnie & Clyde, The Parallax View, The Last Detail, and so on. Good times. Mostly I remember the paranoia. It occurs to me that a whole, interesting series could be built around just versions of “MacBeth”: from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood all the way through to the Polanski and Welles versions and then that funny one with James Le Gros, Christopher Walken, and Maura Tierney. After the upcoming The Invasion, you could do one with versions of the pod story as well. Truly a tale for all times.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be doing Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American – the film that I’m starting to think is better than Noyce’s other film from that year, Rabbit-Proof Fence. At the time of the latter’s release, I remember calling it “critic-proof fence” to the consternation of the picture’s publicist. What a jackass I am.

A couple of Bergman events planned for the mothersite – and a eulogy proper planned for airing in this blog, penned by one of our fine writers – but for now, RIP, by the way. I’ve mentioned it before around here but we got the name of our daughter from his The Seventh Seal: thus are we bound to art. I’m reminded, too, of a great Coleridge quote:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?

I never thought Bergman necessarily deserved any of his reputations: great artiste; insufferable bore; airless intellectual – but there are certainly a handful of films of his that I think about not infrequently. I consider it to be a great honor to have spoken about Persona a few months ago. I’m looking forward to writing it up in the near future.

Just finished a particularly long project that’s taken a lot out of me but, simultaneously, given me a tremendous amount of insight into an American icon I had heretofore taken for granted – and am engaged in another mega-project that I hope will segue into a few personal projects. A couple of interviews simmering: too soon to talk lest we jinx them – I’m feeling a new energy around these parts and hope that it doesn’t flag before a few more tent-posts are planted into the ground.

Saw a giant standee for the new Robert Zemeckis Beowulf that made me fairly hard, I have to admit. Especially its script by Neil Gaiman. . . okay, especially the Frazetta-like profile of Angelina Jolie. I guess there’s a new teaser for The Dark Knight floating around and am happy to report that a second viewing of Harry Potter 5 is as good as the first. I suspect the same won’t be true of any subsequent screenings of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

Currently reading J. Hoberman’s exceptional The Dream Life. Currently listening to Gram Rabbit’s “Music to Start a Cult To”. Francis Coppola admits that he wanted to do Godfather IV with an ailing Mario Puzo in the same week that I discovered that the new director’s cut of The Outsiders is possibly his last true masterpiece – and weep at the revelation that Ray Harryhausen has praised colorization using the “we wanted to shoot it in color in the first place”. Fuck all over that. Have given up on “John from Cincinnati” apparently just at the moment that it started to get good – thank goodness for On Demand – and is it just me or has “Big Love” turned “Carnivale”?

Weird few weeks, guys – seismic upheavals on the personal front though nothing fatal, I think – but it’s all left me feeling exhausted, a little delirious in that head rush when drinking sort of way, and present in a way that I haven’t been in months. Let’s hope it lasts.

Groovin' on a Thursday Afternoon

A few things:

• R.I.P. Edward Yang.
• Did anyone catch one of TCM's multiple screenings of Richard Schickel's "Spielberg on Spielberg" this week? Perhaps predictably, it's spectacularly evasive, skipping over Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, Always, Hook, The Lost World, and Catch Me If You Can (the latter two hardly more embarrassing than, say, Amistad) while breezing through Spielberg's filmography in a mostly chronological fashion. Any self-flagellation is limited to the topic of 1941--the irony there being that it's not exactly eating humble pie to recount the time you exploited the power bestowed on you by a string of successes...then luckily happened to be ensconced in Tunisia shooting the redemptive Raiders of the Lost Ark when the shit hit the fan. It was inevitable that either Schickel or Laurent Bouzereau--the two biggest sycophants in the cottage industry of supplemental documentaries--would direct this thing, since Spielberg is not one to sanction scrutiny of his methodology. (Accountability so scares him that he wields the existence of Stanley Kubrick's fabled treatment for A.I. like a talisman here to ward off blame for the perceived failure of the eventual film, particularly its final act.) What surprised me most about the piece is that, unlike TCM's similarly clips-laden hagiographies for John Ford and Marlon Brando, it left me with little urge to revisit the Spielberg canon; it's not even good auteur porn.
• Edward Yang? Still dead.
• Do yourself a favour and pick up the latest issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG. It's a real return to form for the magazine, which had been noticeably sidetracked in recent months while editor Tim Lucas put the finishing touches on his mammoth tome "Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark".
• Anyway, consider this an open forum. I presume you'll want to discuss Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Walter's attendant review, but anything from the recent death of director Richard Franklin (whose Psycho II is drastically underestimated) to that stupid J.J. Abrams trailer is of course fair game. We know better than to violate the Prime Directive.

The Trench

In the middle of writing up To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep and what comes across my proverbial desk than this image (WILD THINGS). Oh man. Pants tighter? You bet.

When Lauren Bacall says “Hey. . . I think I’m sitting on somebody’s cigarette” during Have Not’s drive-by shootout sequence – the combination of elements (the film on my television, the image on my computer, the joy of writing on good film and anticipating new ones) speaks long and loud about the absolute, un-distilled joy of going to the movies. God bless Faulkner. He didn’t do it alone and, really, didn’t do shit in Hollywood, but these collaborations with Bogie, Bacall, and Howard Hawks are for the ages.

Finished up a seminar series at the Denver Public Library last night with the beloved Bagdad Café; a film that I’ve never liked and liked less upon each subsequent viewing. Not easy to speak on a film one doesn’t like in the company of folks who love it. Next series in the planning stages and looking extremely promising: the finalists, from which the library panel will choose five, are: L’Atalante, The Sweet Smell of Success, Hud, Miller’s Crossing, Birth, Days of Being Wild, The Seventh Seal, Shadow of a Doubt and Out of the Past. Can anyone guess the theme? I suggested Children of Men early on in the process, as well, but I’d be pleased talking any of the titles.

Anyone read Christopher Doyle’s diary of the Happy Together shoot? Brilliant, stuff.

Didn’t get a screening of Die Hard 4: Die Harderer, but will catch it as a civilian. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, the first flick counts as one of my favorites from my halcyon teen years: John McTiernan really hit a couple of those bastards out of the park, didn’t he? And the third flick is underestimated.

Ratatouille is awesome.

Nancy Drew is still haunting me.

Negotiating a post-modernism series in a different library system – some proposed titles include The Stunt Man, Adaptation., and Tristram Shandy. Later in the summer will find me talking Pan’s Labyrinth in Beaver Creek and Hero in Douglas County.

A few weeks late, but an official shout out to Ousmane Sembene – the voice of an entire fucking continent, a novelist by devotion who turned to film because it could reach a broader audience. I reviewed Moolaade for our last Annual, and it’s a masterpiece, but so are the other films in his too-brief filmography. Next up after the Bogie/Bacalls for me are a pair of lesser Bette Davis flicks, Forbidden Planet (which I may be talking as part of a Shakespeare-on-film quartet down south); and a couple of things by Henry Rollins including an interview I conducted with the man a couple of weeks ago. That list of things to do before I die keeps getting shorter.

Musing, if time permits, a brief retrospective of the films of Jacques Becker and, I’d love to do it, a similar one on Kenji Mizoguchi starting with Sansho the Bailiff. Of course there’s roughly thirty pounds of DVDs staring at me with their hollow, Cyclops eyes, needing some serious attention before I go off on any skylarks.

Currently listening to Francis Cabrel – especially a song called “Bonne Nouvelle”. Extra points for figuring out how and why I tracked down this dude. He’s a legend in France, I guess, shame on me for only just now discovering him for myself. Also giving heavy play to the Children of Men soundtrack and Clint Mansell’s score for The Fountain.

This thing with the Germans and Tom Cruise - this not letting Cruise film in the country because he's a member of a cult - is everyone just being polite in not mentioning the irony of Germany of all countries offering a blanket, discriminatory condemnation of a religion with which they don't agree? I especially like the son of the proposed Cruise character coming out and predicting that the film they're sabotaging will inevitably be "kitsch."

Any early thoughts on the new David Milch series?

Late, again, but "The Sopranos" series finale? I loved it.

Ten Years, Ten-Lists #5 (Bill Chambers)

You may resent me for not giving you ten more rental ideas, but since I realized that FILM FREAK CENTRAL's tenth anniversary obliged me to recap the site's "origin story," anyway, I just decided to dedicate my list to landmarks in our turbulent history. (Like I warned, "self-indulgent.") Th..Th..That's all, folks!-Bill Chambers

10. 10th Anniversary (Present)
Woah... Meta.

9. Press release from New Line (November, 1998)
I've said many times before, only half-jokingly, that I started FILM FREAK CENTRAL to get free LaserDiscs. Well, that never panned out--and the format was on its last legs by 1997, anyway. Cut to the fall of 1998: out of left field, I receive a press release from New Line Home Video; nothing ventured, nothing gained, I e-mail the address at the bottom asking them to send me review copies of both DVD titles they were promoting therein. The following day, a FedEx truck rolled into my driveway, accompanied--in my head, at least--by the Hallelujah chorus hymn. It was FFC's first fix, the first time the industry acknowledged our existence in any way, shape, or form...and I've probably been chasing that high ever since.

8. Sued...Sorta (2001-2003)
They say you haven't made it until somebody wants to sue you. In the interest of self-preservation, I'm truncating the details, but back when FFC was starting to gain some traction on the Internet, a certain web personality I had, contrary to his belief, not heard of before sent me a j'accuse! e-mail vis-à-vis my alleged trademark-infringing use of the term "film freak." I ignored him at first, but he was persistent, and so I sent him a list of about 30 sites with some variation of "film freak" in their brand (if I was ever going to change the site's name, that would be the reason). Well, I guess that pissed him off, because his rent-a-lawyer then couriered me a small forest's worth of paperwork, none of it amounting to anything but evidence that they had toner and they were gonna use it! Suffice it to say, I continued to do nothing, though I took advantage of a free hour of legal counsel from an entertainment attorney, whose advice boiled down to "do nothing." Eventually I got worn down by his passive-aggressive threats of litigation and e-mailed him ("Dear [name withheld], I'm not taking the bait. Bill, xo"), at which point I was notified by an Intellectual Property arbitrator that I had something like a weekend to counter his multi-point entitlement claim. This time I did something, but not much; and the committee unanimously decided in our favour. Justice! I still receive the occasional message from his cronies asking why I can't be a "gentleman" and, y'know, undo a decade of hard work by changing FFC's name to appease an ego obviously bruised by every disappointed visitor who goes to his site thinking they're going to ours. Should the day come, I'm partial to Cinema Jolie-Pitt.

7. Fight with Ebert (August, 2004)
The most e-mail I ever got in one day (not counting the odd spam flood) attended Roger Ebert's review of The Brown Bunny, wherein he rebutted my Ebert-baiting capsule on the same film. Perhaps more of a private milestone than one for the site, it nevertheless sticks out in my mind as a moment of validation from the establishment--when my own friends and family began to look at FILM FREAK CENTRAL as a legitimate pastime; Ebert did nothing less than make it easier for me to run this operation unabated, at least temporarily. You might be interested to know that I've crossed paths with him many times since (we even powwowed but a few weeks later at a screening of Saw), and if there were any hard feelings, I couldn't tell. I missed him greatly at last year's TIFF and wish him nothing but the best as he recovers from his gruelling medical ordeal.

6. "Attack of the Drones" (May, 2002)
If you ask me, Walter's written far better reviews than the one he wrote for Attack of the Clones, but I doubt he'll ever write another review with the half-life it's had. From being the root cause of our first bandwidth fine to begetting our first special edition of "Reader Mail" to, most notoriously, landing us on Lucasfilm's shitlist so that we were explicitly denied screeners of the Star Wars trilogy when it finally hit DVD, it holds a special place in FFC lore. It even, in a roundabout way, led to us interviewing Mark Hamill! For all that, what I like best about it is that it set us apart, at a critical juncture, from the fanboy contingent.

5. The Publication of Our Annuals (2005, 2006)
Now's as good a time as any to formally announce that we will not be publishing a 2007 Annual--the first two simply didn't sell enough copies to make it worth our while. But we're not ruling out the possibility of another book of some sort; it's a genuine, selfish thrill for us to see all those bits and bytes quantified like that. And how many film sites can lay claim to two thick volumes of their work? With forewords and blurbs by some of their favourite directors, to boot? The whole experience was intensely gratifying, and it surely revitalized our writing, that intimate awareness of a destination beyond the ether.

4. Birth of a Blog (August 23, 2005)
Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight: this blog was Walter Chaw's idea. A lot of the stuff he was itching to write was difficult to contextualize within the traditional parameters of FFC. I was game but leery, seeing as how each of us has a backlog that could stop a river and this would just provide one more distraction. But I'm proud of the community that has sprouted up here and I feel, as I wrote in the introduction to "The Film Freak Central 2006 Annual", that it makes great scaffolding for the mothersite. Truthfully, I can't get over how civil the conversation around these parts is on average--the cynic in me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

3. E-Mail from Walter Murch (January 16, 2000)
I was DVD-shopping in Toronto when I spotted a childhood favourite, Return to Oz, sitting on the shelf. "Don't buy it," my friend advised, "it doesn't hold up." But for some reason, even if it wasn't as good as I'd remembered, I knew I would regret not buying it more. A few months after I wrote up the disc, I received an e-mail from Return to Oz helmer Walter Murch. He was quite complimentary towards my review, though I suspect he had an ulterior motive to correct a misnomer I perpetrated regarding the film's soundmix. Be that as it may, it took me a day or two to process that the freakin' editor of Apocalypse Now had casually struck first contact with me; I replied, paraphrasing Mario Puzo, that if I'd known he was going to read the review I would've written it better (I'm sure he groaned), then begged him for an interview. I credit the resulting Q&A with forcing me to get serious, truly serious, about FILM FREAK CENTRAL, if only to honour Mr. Murch's generosity and good faith.

2. The Hiring of Walter Chaw (April, 2001)
The name Walter has been good to me. You know how they say that some talk shows are host-driven and some are guest-driven? My utopian fantasy for this site was one that was review-driven rather than critic-driven, and when I first started recruiting writers, I wanted to create a cinephiliac supergroup of budding talent. But there's no denying that one voice has risen above the chorus. I can honestly say that while I created this site, with all due credit to esteemed colleagues Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Alex Jackson, and Ian Pugh, Walter made it. Dude's a rock star. For what it's worth, when he came aboard, a lot of folks informed me that he sounded the death knell for the site--and I usually responded that it's better to hate someone for the right reasons (Letterman?) than to love them for the wrong ones (Leno?). Unfortunately for Walter, he rarely equivocates in a world that petulantly equates anything but utmost equivocation with "meanness." Politesse has somehow become a greater virtue than honesty, conjuring the image of Rome fiddling while Nero burns. It's an honour to provide Walter sanctuary in these cowardly times, to be affiliated in any way with his genius, and to call him a friend. If anything gives me hope for not only the future of not only film criticism, but the battle against anti-intellectualism as well, it's that I detect Walter's influence in a lot of up-and-coming young critics. I'm sure that drives him batshit, though.

1. The Purchase of the Domain Name FilmFreakCentral.Net (November 19, 1998)
Christ, why didn't I pick .COM?!

See also:

• Ten Films That Changed the Way I Look at Film (Walter Chaw)
• The Ten Best Canadian Films (Travis Mackenzie Hoover)
• Teasers: Ten Great Opening Title Sequences (Ian Pugh)
• Ten Underappreciated Classics from the 1980s (Alex Jackson)