The Film Freak Central Blog

The Long Goodbye- Part 2

2012-01-18T18:15:00.003-05:00

I'll confess, with no shortage of shame, that I had been putting this off for more than three months and am only writing it now because the Sundance Film Festival is starting tomorrow and some may be wondering why I won't be covering it. You see, I have retired from film writing; for Film Freak Central and a little less definitely for my personal website I Viddied it on the Screen. I had been going in this direction for a while, I fear. It’s too difficult for me to get up at five in the morning, work all day, and then come home to write. Furthermore, it became too difficult to justify spending my free time writing. This work is rewarding, but it is work and I guess that I reached the point where the payoff didn’t really warrant the effort. Most of the time, it’s a struggle knowing that my wife was in the other room watching television and instead of joining her I was on the Word Processor trying to sort through my feelings about THE BABYSITTERS.

I tried, but never could figure a way to balance work, family, and this. But the actual cataclysmic event was being accepted into a part-time Master’s program for social work. I’ve always seen film criticism as kind of a romantic dream job, not all that different from wanting to be an actor or director actually. Or a painter or novelist. Social work was kind of a synthesis between that romance, the social worker is at heart a kind of bohemian after all, and some kind of grounded pragmatism. No, it doesn’t really pay all that well, but it IS a real career. But social work really isn’t a compromise for me. All those years I covered Sundance, I came to realize that the people I was really jealous about weren’t paid film critics, but LCSWs. After only one semester, I’ve realized that this isn’t even just a career for me. It’s making feel... whole in a way that no other career ever could. When I die, I don’t know if I will look back on this life as being one of accomplishment. But I do know that I will be able to say that I was there when other people were at their worst , I was there when I was at my worst, and I never hid from any of it.

Maybe that was what I was trying to get at in writing about movies. I was trying to be honest and develop a real set of values that spoke truthfully of my own feelings and attitudes. And maybe I felt that I wasn’t getting anywhere because I was dealing with the shadow of reality instead of the reality itself. That’s just my best guess at this point. You could probably argue me down from it.

I feel pretty confident in saying that Korine and Morrissey have a more accurate understanding of poverty than DeSica or Rossellini. It’s not a tragedy, it’s a tragicomedy. To some extent, it’s a cartoon. There was one boy I worked with that I don’t think I will forget. He was a tall, skinny, “African-American” was lazy eyelids and big donkey teeth. He was always talking. He talked so much that you could see white stuff form in the corners of his mouth. He would ask female staff if they “had any black in them” and said that he was going to go into porn because you don’t need to be good looking you just need to be well-hung. When the patients were allowed to make their own pizza he asked for one with chicken wings. At one point he asked me if “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” was based on a true story. I am not making any of this up. None of it. I occupied the same physical space as this person. Am I racist for noticing him? Obviously, he is not representative of all black people and obviously he is an outlier. But I tell you that he exists and I’m not going to pretend that he didn’t exist. I wonder though, maybe it’s not political correctness that keeps people from acknowledging his existence. Maybe most people aren’t very film literate and don’t understand the tradition that he comes from or they haven’t learned how to regard other people as abstractions. See, I don’t really know. I’m still working through this.

This really does feel like I’m breaking up. I have written about movies for almost half my life and it’s hard to think that I’m really giving it up. It’s been part of my life for so long and I don’t think that it will really ever fully get out of my system. These last three months I’ve felt the itch quite a few times, but I’ve notably never quite worked my way to scratching it. I think this is all for the best.

Props

2011-11-07T22:54:00.014-05:00

Watching Super 8 this morning, I grew nostalgic for those pre-film school days when I made movies with my weird friends the way other kids got a band together and jammed. But what it made me nostalgic for was mainly the idea of writing with an ambition--if not a skill--that wildly exceeded my resources and expertise. Really, Super 8 augmented a bittersweet feeling that came over me recently when I stumbled upon a relic that was the product of ingenuity and a fire in my belly that's only embers at this point.

I actually shot a few things on super8 as a kid, mostly glorified home movies, but it wasn't until my parents bought me my first video camera, in 1990, that the directing bug became incurable. That was the year of the Miller's Crossing/Goodfellas/The Godfather Part III hat-trick, and I wrote my own gangster movie--The Gentlemen--that dutifully ripped them all off. A brief summary of the production: the 19-page script we started with ballooned to about 60 pages by the time we were done; and we shot virtually every weekend and school holiday for two years straight.

Due to the genre we were working in, the creative demands weren't that extravagant. We realized early on that we could get away with painted-on facial hair--moustaches seemed essential in aging us up--because of the generally shitty picture quality. We wanted rain in one scene, just hitting the window, so my friend sent his sister outside on a November night to spray his bedroom window with a hose. It flooded his basement. Looked great, though. There was an easy solution to the many scenes that called for us to smoke: buy cigarettes and smoke them. At one point, we needed a City Hall stand-in. My friend's/the star's mother was an alderwoman, so the mayor gave us the keys to his office for the weekend. (Come Monday, he was not happy to find an ashtray full of cigarette butts and a script page littered with profanity--but hey, we had everything we needed by then.) And we somehow talked a gorgeous teenaged model into playing the female lead, who might as well have been called Helen of Troy.

But as time wore on, I started getting self-conscious about the guns. As we had cap guns and an effeminate little starter pistol filled with police-issue blanks (my two closest friends working on the production were sons of cops), the choice was a cool-looking gun with no muzzle flash or vice-versa. Enter Dave F., a guy I nicknamed Pockets because he had everything you could ever need somewhere on his person. A savant with power tools, Dave would assume the role of my fairy godmother on this and subsequent projects.

So I says to Pockets, I says, "These guns suck." He borrows a dummy gun we had on hand and proceeds to drill a hole through the hollow handle, thread a wire up through the barrel, and secure a charge fashioned from cherry bombs to the tip of it. He rigs the other end of the wire so that it can connect with the batteries we use for the camera; all someone has to do off screen is touch the contacts together while someone on screen pretends to pull the trigger, and voilà!: muzzle flash. It wasn't exactly practical (you couldn't really get more than one take out of it), but still.

I found one of the many guns he set up for this the other day. And before tossing it, I took pictures.

This gag inspired me to ask for the moon, by the way, and probably our most impressive achievement was a shot of a helicopter coming to pick up our main character. Dave built a model helicopter and motorized the propellers; in order to have it move without obstructing the blades, we suspended it upside-down on a makeshift zipline and turned the camera upside-down to match. For added realism, we shot it against a grey sky--I blew out the exposure (erasing the fishing line) and zoomed in from far away to flatten out the image.

Unfortunately, that scene was cut out of The Gentlemen and this helicopter footage now only exists on a Hi8 tape I can't access, or I'd put that fucker up on YouTube right now.

Anyone here have similar misadventures in Sweding to share?

Halloween Horror: Abominable, Adorable, Indelible

2011-10-30T10:31:00.022-04:00

Nobody ever dresses up as Dr. Anton Phibes for Halloween, and I need an explanation of why that is. Underexposure? An allergy to camp? The death of the UHF groovy-movie marathon channels? Whatever, the man needs more respect. He demands it. Or he will set a plague of boils upon thee.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) is a great helping of late-period Vincent Price on a ham platter. It's also the rotten little B-horror treasure that foretold at least two mass mainstream successes. And it's a Halloween movie to its marrow, with masks, hooded robes, dark kitsch, deathly allure, and (tasteful '70s) gore. The Doctor of the title -- wealthy polymath, gifted musician, fiendish plotter of deathtraps and riddles -- is a dead man, burned to a crisp in a Swiss car accident as he rushed to the side of his dying wife. Alas, she too would die, despite a nine-person medical team's best efforts. As far as the not-so-dead Dr. Phibes is concerned, their best wasn't good enough; in fact, it was tantamount to murder.

From just this side of the grave, courtesy of the great Sam Arkoff's American International genre factory, Phibes reaches out to destroy those surgeons, syncing his murders with the Ten Biblical Plagues of Egypt. On screen, his victims are consumed by locusts, frozen into mansicles, bitten to death by bats, choked to death by mechanical frog masks, exsanguinated by hot ladies, and impaled with a brass unicorn.

No, I don't think that last bit was in the Bible either.

If you can't be arsed to hunt it down and watch it -- and I'm indebted to scholar and genre-film fan Dan Hassler-Forest for my DVD copy -- find an excellent scene-by-scene recap at The Bad Movie Report and a solid appreciation at Mark Bourne's Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal. But if you've any appreciation at all of David Fincher's Seven or the Saw films, you're missing out on their progenitor. By his efforts, Phibes marks himself as the granddaddy of John Doe (the Seven Deadly Sins vs. the Hebrew plagues) and Jigsaw (psychologically significant deathtraps). Take that legacy for what it's worth ($327 million and $848 million respectively), but acknowledge that mainstream film culture has scraped the strata of schlock and polished the gems there to a new shine.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a camp carnival that must be seen to be believed. The antihero is a Phantom of the Opera given new life in a kind of mod Agatha Christie dreamscape, pursued by bumbling Scotland Yard detectives named Trout and Crow (Peter Jeffrey and Derek Godfrey) to absolutely no effect. Humor and horror, intertwined and balanced by former "Avengers" director Robert Fuest, expertly acted by a seasoned star who never once opens his mouth to speak, surprise-guest-starring the great Joseph Cotten as the Final Girl, and speaking elegantly to matters of loss, death, madness, and the survival of love.

And please don't let that sequel fool you. Dr. Phibes never rose again. The last scene of this movie, with love and death fulfilled, is the last of the magnificent musician-mastermind. AIP is history; Vincent Price is gone. We may see his like again, but we'll nevermore meet Dr. Phibes himself.

Yeah, nice slogan, Harvey.

2011-10-24T17:02:00.007-04:00

For those who haven't heard, I went and wrote a scene-by-scene analysis of a little film called The Dark Knight. Would you be interested in an in-depth thematic discussion backed up by thorough research and third-party quotations? In that case, The Faces of Gotham: Myth and Morality in The Dark Knight is available exclusively as an ebook, and can be purchased at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for an all-too-affordable $7.49.

And don't forget--if you don't own a physical e-reader, both Amazon and B&N have free programs for download on the computer/phone/iMachine of your choice.

So give it a read! And hey, if you liked it, spread the word, and write a review on the book's storefront page, whydoncha.

TIFF 2011

2011-09-09T09:29:00.000-04:00

TIFF 2011 coverage here.

Charging Star

2011-07-24T20:34:00.011-04:00

I wasn't quite sure what bothered me about Captain America. It took me forty-five minutes to really warm up to the thing, and even as I left the theater with a handful of moments that screamed do not forget about this film in December!, something else stuck around to nag at the back of my mind. At first I thought it was because the film lacked moral dimension, but no--it's a Saturday morning serial straight outta 1944. It's supposed to be operatic, goddamn it, and it certainly accomplished that. But my inability to comprehend that first act soon forced me to question the parts that I did enjoy--even as I recognized it as a faithful mock-up of Allied propaganda, I couldn't help but think, "Didn't Inglourious Basterds already dissect this kind of wartime fiction?" Walter's review helped immensely in understanding and appreciating the film, but a second screening was inevitable, and I soon knew that my reluctance could be traced back to a single moment. Halfway through the movie, the Red Skull denounces Hitler as his cronies belt out an emphatic "Hail HYDRA," throwing out their arms in a ridiculous parody of the Nazi salute. The first time through, I giggled derisively, because seriously, what is this Mickey Mouse shit?

My friend Bob Chipman made the excellent point that Joe Johnston and Captain America didn't need to expound upon the mytho-religious implications of the Cosmic Cube because Thor had already done that job for them. (To which I responded that I would now only accept Thor as a direct prequel to Cap.) His astute observation eventually made me realize that the universe was my problem. Continuity was my problem. Now, I still firmly believe that Iron Man 2 erased any and all need to throw The Avengers at us, but this time the fictional timeline interferes with our own. Before I recognized Captain America for what it was, I wasn't sure how to feel about Marvel sidestepping the Nazis in favor of its own villainous organization. But why? People have been doing this for years. This company's been doing this for years--Adolf Hitler met his end in Marvel Comics when the Human Torch burned his ass to death in the bunker... only to be resurrected as the "Hate-Monger" some twenty years later. That's fiction for you, man, and I've argued over and over and over again that superheroes are capable of handling the headiest of topics. But Captain America appeared to be somewhat gun-shy when it came to the icons of Nazism. As Walter mentioned, the Red Skull states that he "no longer reflect[s] Hitler's ideal of Aryan perfection," and you'll see plenty of armbands and red flags and what have you, but swastikas are mostly obscured--HYDRA's tentacled skull is the fetishistically omnipresent symbol in this universe. Cap spends the majority of the war on a campaign against HYDRA, and I couldn't help but think, "So the actual war is still on, right? We're still fighting the Axis?" You can call it an attempt to keep the movie viable on the international market, but in the wrong hands, it could have been twisted into an extreme example of what bothered Jefferson about Dead Snow: at first glance, Captain America seems too squeamish to truly approach ideology or iconography.

Thankfully, Johnston knows what he's doing. What makes Captain America such a great movie is how it understands the components of propaganda, and, moreover, the power they carry. I got that the first time through, but the second time forced me to really contemplate it: the ultimate soldier becomes a film star/comic book hero/inspirational symbol before he feels compelled to join the action--to live up to his name, his image and his potential--with an "A" helmet stolen from a USO showgirl. The symbol gathers up a few more trinkets from popular entertainment and becomes tangible. Watch how Cap's role changes between newsreels and wonder how many layers of fiction and documentary we'll have to traverse before we finally make it to 2011, to the present-day schmoes sitting in a movie theater. You want a moral dimension? Johnston doesn't ignore the influence that Goebbels and Riefenstahl had over the Third Reich--he simply refuses to give the Nazis any more power by indulging them in their cult of icons. I'm reminded of Oliver Hirschbiegel's bemused reaction to those Downfall parodies on YouTube: "The point of this film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality. I think it's only fair if now it's taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like." If an icon is to defeat another icon, it must be accomplished metatextually. Despite all indications that the man is basically a walking flag/bullseye, Captain America can sneak around a HYDRA base with impunity; meanwhile, the swastika has difficulty showing its face in the war that it instigated. But even with all that in mind, the dangers inherent to this identity are never ignored. (Consider how the image can swallow the individual whole--how often Steve Rogers is addressed as "the Captain," even when it's not a particularly relevant point.) Call it a moment of patriotic self-awareness born from seventy years of retrospection. Great stuff, man. Can't wait to see it again.

Those Tapes I Made For You

2011-06-23T21:50:00.019-04:00

Do me a favor and watch this episode of "Street Fighter". Be forewarned, however, that this is a Saturday morning cartoon based on a video game franchise, so you know what you're in for.

Nonsensical pap, produced on the cheap and aimed squarely at American children--the sequel series to the original Street Fighter movie that no one particularly cared to see. However, search online and you're more likely to find thirty isolated seconds that have since become subject to an internet meme:

And search for "Bison yes" and this little baby will be your first destination:

I don't really think of this reduction as hostile in any sense of the word. Sure, you can't get around the reduction itself, but the blaring, "dramatic" horn section, the bizarro camera movement, and the fact that one recording of "YES!!" was so obviously doubled--this is an ancient Saturday morning distilled to perfection. I think it's a little wonderful, actually, that I can consider this six-second clip as part of a mutual language. There are several points I want to tackle from here, and they all involve ideas removed from their original context. (Appropriate, I suppose, that the now-largely-forgotten episode of "Street Fighter" is entitled "The Medium is the Message.") I've talked about that before, but this video has the odd distinction of simultaneously forging assumptions about the source material and creating something new from those ashes. Maybe I can believe that the rest of the series falls in step with that four seconds. But that's kind of silly, isn't it? I can assume all I want and I won't know until I actually sit down and watch the damned thing. But after that, what am I left with beyond the desire to keep "Yes!! Yes!!" outside of its original narrative boundaries?

One thing to consider is that this is a "widescreen, HD reupload" of the "Yes!! Yes!!" clip. This is a short clip posted by a fan, but it's fair indication that the whole world's going widescreen, baby. Cartoon Network's website has an annoying habit when it comes to posting full episodes of their pre-widescreen cartoons: for shows like "Dexter's Laboratory," they stretch the borders of the image to fit a 16:9 frame, which gives it an awful fish-eye effect. Ironically, Genndy Tartakovsky and his crew already operated by a cinematic sensibility, and stretching the picture becomes a serious problem when the series indulges in one of its many pans and zooms. "Street Fighter" is too flat to entertain such concerns, especially from this infinitesimal scope--and, what's more, the widescreen clip keeps its silliness intact. (Note that the edges of the image have been chopped, rather than stretched.) But it's still not in its original format, and it's still stripped completely bare. Isn't it like "MST3K" in that regard--I'm geared to laugh simply because there are familiar shadows at the bottom of the screen? If we're not looking at the source seriously, should we really concern ourselves with such particulars? Why aren't we looking at it seriously, anyway? Why am I laughing at all?

Now, when I talk about the official mangling of television, I don't want to paint Cartoon Network as some villainous entity. (Indeed, they're not averse to exploring the very nature of their business: J. G. Quintel's "Regular Show" is a keen exploration of how popular culture tends to fracture our worldview.) I just find the reasoning a little difficult to decipher. Individual clips are shown on the website in the correct "standard" format. The Looney Tunes are also shown in their original aspect ratio, though not always in their original form: a few weeks ago I caught Show Biz Bugs on television, and the infamous finale--Daffy guzzles nitro and gasoline, lights a match and performs the trick that he can "only do once"--had been inelegantly chopped out. But I suffered from the same limited perspective growing up--before the advent of YouTube, when was the last time anyone had seen the minstrel show that ended Fresh Hare?

So, obviously, it's not a new problem. But it's easier to argue for the complete visions of Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, to forgive the unsavory material, because we admire these men as geniuses and we want a more complete understanding of the era. How do we apply that same attitude to a genuine piece of shit? The only reason anyone watches Bedtime for Bonzo anymore is because Ronald Reagan is in it--and the convenient presidential punchline is why it remains in popular thought. And, hey, if that's the way it goes, that's the way it goes. But here's what I want to know--did they ever bother to colorize the movie? We're naturally repelled by the concept of colorization but if they did, I doubt that anyone cared, because the movie is just so goddamn bland. Do it to Casablanca and it's inexcusable. Do it to Bedtime for Bonzo and you'll change the channel faster than you'll complain. Is that right? We lost a couple of Hitchcocks to the flaws of nitrate stock, and we lost a lot of television history to the networks' habit of taping over obsolete broadcasts, but between the masterpieces we must have jettisoned a lot of tone-deaf crap. How far down the totem pole do we have to go before we stop caring? When does culture become a game of breaking-and-entering?

Of course, "value" is a relative term. Everything is preserved now, which I consider more of a blessing than a curse. We may be dealing with a more cacophonous playing field, but beyond the obvious historical value that any sort of record can provide, lame/mediocre properties can inspire great works just like any other. Without Dr. No, there'd be no From Russia with Love. But whenever something, anything, catches my intellectual fancy, I want to know the context. And if that's the case, what do I retain from that journey? On his Twitter page, Matt Prigge just posted a quote from Richard Leacock: "Film is terrible at giving a lot of information, but it's great at giving a feel for a place." I get that feeling, but I'm still picking it apart. Maybe I want to understand it to its logical conclusion.

Sometimes I catch myself watching Tarantino's pictures in piecemeal fashion--not because I don't want to watch the entire thing, but they contain a multitude of different tones and the chapter divisions give them a natural bookmark to revisit. Tarantino is himself a pop plunderer of the highest order, but should I really indulge that desire so often? I mean, that's YouTube for you. (David Lynch would throw a fit, I know.) I guess what I'm asking here is whether a complete picture is always better than a fractured one--whether this concept of a media democracy will sometimes produce long-term benefits, now that everything will be preserved in some form or another. Is it really possible to pick and choose what we take from certain media? Are there any legitimate instances in which more context is unnecessary or distracting?

But now I'm getting into the very nature of mass communication, and hell, you don't need me to tell you that media is changing--I'm just curious as to how it's all going to play out. For me, the best movie news this week is Valve's long-anticipated release of Meet the Medic:

Which is great, y'know, because it touches on the inherent ridiculousness of the character's role on the team--and how we integrate atrocity into popular entertainment. (Not to mention that those final ÜberCharged moments are made of pure, giddy excitement.) Oh, and by the way, did I mention that "Team Fortress 2" recently introduced an M. Bison hat that makes reference to the meme in question? Culture changes, culture spreads. Welcome to the party.

Hanna and Her Brothers

2011-05-06T01:10:00.008-04:00

Hanna was raised in the woods by her beloved Papa, a hunter and woodcutter (both trades undertaken for the simple matter of survival). Her nemesis is also her Grandma, in a sense, with an oral hygiene compulsion so fierce she scrubs her teeth till they bleed. (She's sharpening them, see?) When the green-slippered foe confronts Hanna, she steps forth from the maw of a wolf. (Nor is this the last transformation she'll undergo before the end.)

Joe Wright's Hanna is an espionage quest which, like all such riffs post-Bourne, is really a search for identity. Hanna — no ordinary girl, but a Chosen One just as surely as Harry Potter is — has been shaped one way, but her emerging individuality demands she sculpt herself anew. It's at just such points that our forebears turned to the folktales of their culture, like those collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, to illustrate the perils of straying from the path or trusting in the wrong authority figure. The root wisdom of these tales, we are told, have resonance for the ages, and we do well to heed them.

The film's own distributor tried hard to make such a point, publishing an interview with highly-paid fairytale inverter Gregory Maguire. But just as Hanna sets out to refashion those myths to its own ends, I'm not convinced there's anything more to be done with Grimm-era fairytales but invert them. We don't read them to our kids nowadays, but we all know their gist — at least their bastardized versions, filtered once by the Grimms, once by Disney. So they remain a kind of irrelevant background hum of easy reference and surface psychology.

Yet how often they're employed when filmmakers turn their lenses on young female heroines! Catherine Hardwicke's recent Red Riding Hood, Matthew Bright's 1996 Freeway — have we no other overlay to apply when making a film about a young woman's transition to sexual maturity or worldly wisdom? Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves remains the best contemporary application of childhood myths to the passage into womanhood, and it won that mantle by developing its own allusive, symbolic vocabulary.

Most commonly, the palimpsest of a childhood myth is held up in order to be overwritten. The movies believe they're striking a feminist blow in this way. Riding Hood will not be eaten (read: raped). The princess will escape the tower, with minimal assistance at most. And when it comes time to kill the wolf, she don't need no stinking huntsman to do it for her. There's no instruction taken from these stories anymore, just an opportunity for postmodern mockery.

Comic books saw the opportunity long ago. After Alan Moore deconstructed the superhero, Neil Gaiman did similar for the fairytale — gently, because he respects the power of story, but his groundbreaking Sandman opened the door for future creators to get it wholly wrong. After Sandman and Bill Willingham's Fables, it's very hard to look a classical myth straight in the eye without smirking. Much easier for our young people to learn life lessons from the troubled, downtrodden Marvel heroes, who teach us that no matter how nobly endowed we might be, we're easily pricked by debt (Spider-Man), addiction (Iron Man), anger (The Hulk) and all the other ills of the modern day. But where the fairytale-derived femme flick has to do with transcending boundaries, the comic book movie has a lot of interest in reinforcing them.

Thor, by way of Marvel, is both a superhero comic and a folktale — a rough gloss on Norse myth that remains "classical" in the sense that pride is at the root of Thor's fall to Midgard. Once there, of course, he becomes its defender, all the while trying to live up to the standards of his distant, powerful father Odin. He can regain his status only by defending the status quo, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

In comics, superheroes are bound by their archetype to be defenders of the norm, not transformers. This goes for female superheroes too (unless they're named Promethea, and there's Alan Moore again). They spring forth fully formed and go punch stuff alongside the boys. This is why Wonder Woman may never get a movie treatment, and why her latest TV show may founder before it even airs: There's nothing at stake when you start out perfect.

To this end, if my choice of Germanic heroes come down to Thor or Hanna, give me the ice-blond girl-assassin. Hanna is made to be one thing and becomes something else; she's slotted into a design — actually two designs: that of her foes and that of her father — and then outgrows it. Thor was born to break shit with his hammer, and that's what he does, for pretty much one purpose, no matter where you put him. Hanna is a superheroine, but not in the limiting comic-book sense. She's something older than superhero tales, older even than Stan Lee.

But why must it be either/or? Surely there are other lenses through which to view film heroes, and particularly film heroines. Not every male hero needs to be a tortured Bruce Wayne, nor every female a sheltered princess awakened by a kiss. Close the book of fairytales. Put the comics back on the store rack. Think of what makes boys and girls into men and women now, today, and then tell me that story. I'm sitting comfortably, here in the dark, waiting to see it.

Apropos of Nothing: "Doc Hollywood"

2011-04-29T15:51:00.006-04:00

So, the other night Doc Hollywood was on TV. Now, every time Doc Hollywood is on TV, I try to time it so that I happen to channel-surf past it just as Julie Warner is making her Ursula Andress-style topless exit from a sylvan lake. But this time, I decided to keep watching, and...

I actually saw Doc Hollywood a number of times during my Michael Caton-Jones phase. Back then, the Scottish director had followed up the amiable Doc Hollywood with the lovely This Boy's Life and the marvellous Rob Roy, and he made enough interesting decisions--like putting nudity in Doc Hollywood (the film that would essentially inspire Pixar's Cars), or dropping the score for the climactic swordfight in Rob Roy--that he didn't seem to be so completely at the mercy of his scripts, as later films like The Jackal and Basic Instinct 2 revealed him to be.

But Doc Hollywood, in retrospect, already made this abundantly clear. Scripted by the decidedly low-wattage trio of Daniel Pyne (Pacific Heights) and partners Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman (Wild Wild West), the picture coasts on the charm of its actors, including Michael J. Fox (although knowing that he went into production having just been diagnosed with Parkinson's casts a shroud of melancholy over his performance), whose character's braggadocio would be unpalatable without Fox's knack for turning Alex P. Keatons into total softies.

The movie is not without merit as cinema, don't get me wrong. I'm particularly fond of a scene Caton-Jones himself came up with, if I'm remembering the publicity lore correctly, in which Fox and Warner--sounds like a corporate merger, doesn't it?--dance to Patsy Cline's "Crazy": as these would-be lovers lose themselves in each other, everyone around them momentarily vanishes into thin air. Little dashes of magic realism like that would go a long way towards keeping many of today's romcoms out of the ghetto. Still, even as far as these things go, the love story in Doc Hollywood is perfunctory, and there's nothing particularly original or seductive about the town of Grady, which cleanses Fox's soul like a Norman Rockwell enema. It's basically a less oppressive precursor to "Gilmore girls"' Stars Hollow.

What really ruins the movie for me today, however, is the fucking pig. More specifically, it's a sequence where Fox inherits a pig for fixing a patient's toe. (Hey! It's That Guy! Raye Birk plays the patient, making Grady feel at once more cozy and more artificial.) Fox, desperate to get out of Grady, then barters the pig to the mechanic fixing his Porsche, only to learn that Warner's four-year-old daughter is crazy about pigs and would love it if Fox brought his porcine pal around sometime. Fox, desperate to get in Warner's pants, then tries to buy back the pig, but discovers the mechanic has turned around and sold it to the butcher. Fox frantically races to save the pig's life--and does, by putting his surgeon's hands to use cutting meat all night for the butcher. Phew!

The trouble is, the next day, Fox shows up at Warner's, pig in tow, and Warner's daughter, sitting placidly on the stoop, doesn't react! She doesn't acknowledge the pig--doesn't pet it, doesn't smile, doesn't freak out the way kids sometimes do when confronted with the reality of an animal they've only envisioned. Nor is her apathy itself the punchline, insofar as we can tell. All that sweat-inducing set-up, no payoff.

Anyway, I think it's this lack of ruthlessness that ultimately became Caton-Jones's undoing. Does the shot establish that Fox accomplished his mission? Well, yes. That'll do, pig.

You can blink now.

Incidentally...

2011-04-11T04:43:00.012-04:00

Just a little screencap game while I clear out the cobwebs. A couple of movies have been on my mind lately, and I thought I'd present them from a different angle: by giving a look-see to the incidental shots between significant moments, the midpoint of a pan, the split-second right before a cut that sends us right back into the action. (For the sake of argument, let's just say that I want to celebrate every single one of those twenty-four frames per second.) Bet you wish you had that FaceBack app now, huh? There are a few telltale hints, so you eagle-eyes should be able to identify them. No prizes, I'm afraid, but would anyone care to take a crack?

COSMONAUT review

2011-03-16T21:26:00.003-04:00

COSMONAUT (Cosmonauta) (2009)
**1/2/****
starring Claudio Pandolfi, Sergio Rubini, Mariana Raschilla, Pietro Del Giudice
screenplay by Susanna Nicchiarelli, Teresa Ciabatti
directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli

Susanna Nicchiarelli's Cosmonaut (Cosmonauta) opens with little Luciana fleeing Holy Communion, shedding the accoutrements of the ceremony on her sprint back home. She seems a little young to be throwing off the shackles of religious conformity, younger even than her alleged onscreen age of nine, but the punchline's priceless in its precociousness: "Because I'm a communist!" she barks when her mother asks why she left church. There's actually a bit more to her rebellion than that. With their dad gone (having died a "true communist"), she looks to her geeky older brother Arturo for guidance, and because it's 1957 and the Soviets are about to launch Sputnik, he favours the godless world of communism as well. From a North American perspective, the movie is interesting in that respect, as very rarely do our history books stop to consider the excitement that Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin must have engendered in Europe on their way to depicting America's mad rush to win the space race. Even propaganda footage showcasing the likes of Laika the Russian dog--which forms the basis of transitional montages similar to but less operatically intense than the ones that constitute a good portion of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere--was mostly new to me. In fact, when the moon-landing cropped up in the finale, I breathed a sigh of disappointment, though it's worth noting that it may not be such a cliché in Italy.

Arturo is diagnosed with epilepsy. Cosmonaut flashes forward to 1963, the year Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman--moreover, the first civilian--in space: Luciana's now a surly, chain-smoking fifteen-year-old (she doesn't appear to inhale, which may have been actress Mariana Raschilla's own squeamishness but suits a character who's all affectations just the same), a heavily-medicated Arturo is a social liability to her, and their mother has remarried, mainly for stability's sake. Following in her late father's footsteps, Luciana joins the Italian Federation of Young Communists, implicitly out of childhood nostalgia. While Arturo mysteriously hoards match-heads, headstrong Luciana establishes herself as a promising addition to the party, but her efforts are clearly designed to attract the attention of her handsome branch leader, who, somewhat hypocritically, has his eye on the seemingly better-heeled Fiorella. Luciana's actions then become strictly jealous and petty; proving the wisdom of a voting age, her raging hormones trump her allegiance to any political cause.

The movie has its charms, including an enticing, Almodóvarian palette and an intriguing juxtaposition of Cold War iconography and old-world architecture. Raschilla's humourless, almost joyless performance is decidedly disengaging, though, and I lost patience with Cosmonaut as it became an increasingly pro forma coming-of-age flick. Nearly every beat in the film's second half, down to Luciana's cruel rejection of Arturo's advice and Arturo subsequently running away from home without the identification he needs in the event of a seizure, finds its origins in genre convention rather than in organic storytelling. (Although Nicchiarelli elicits sympathy for Arturo by showing others marginalizing him, she ultimately marginalizes him as well (a Catch-22?), making his theatrically self-destructive gesture feel arbitrary.) And what to make of the picture's historical irony? Luciana and Arturo cling to doomed concepts (socialism, rocket ships), allegorizing the youthful ignorance of us all, yet the smartest, most humane characters are arguably a pair of middle-aged Communists, one of whom is played by Nicchiarelli herself. I haven't seen Nicchiarelli's companion piece, Sputnik 5, an animated short about the veritable Noah's Ark that was the titular satellite, but without all that narrative baggage perhaps it has a chance to fulfill Cosmonaut's aesthetic promise.

Cosmonaut begins a one-week engagement at The Royal in Toronto on March 18. Visit the filmswelike website for more details.

The SUPER 8 trailer is here!

2011-03-11T17:42:00.001-05:00

So let's rejoice...by watching the just-released trailer for The Smurfs!

I watched "The Smurfs" religiously until they phased out Gargamel by introducing Johann and Peewee, and the show gave way to all sorts of inscrutable Belgian horseshit.

UPDATE: I don't actually want to see this movie, just to clarify.

Unfinished

2011-02-16T22:42:00.004-05:00

I'm Lucy operating the conveyor belt when it comes to keeping up with my review queue; here's a taste of my numerous false starts over the past few months, if for no other reason than to shame myself into finishing the two or three pieces I'm currently juggling.

SMALL WONDER
I was 10 when "Small Wonder" debuted, and I seem to recall it as being the first TV series I approached with anything resembling cynicism. For starters, actually landing on it while channel-surfing was a bit of a crapshoot. The vagaries of syndication not meaning much to me then, I interpreted this as corporate embarrassment in the program which transferred over to me, even with my undiscriminating latchkey palette. For another thing, "Small Wonder" marked the first time I noticed special effects as such: done by Disney, according to creator Howard Leeds, they generated more laughs for their transparency than for any sight gag they were aiming to execute--which, along with the dependably lame jokes, gave the show a certain ironic lustre. I seem to recall most often encountering "Small Wonder" at the tail end of Saturday-morning cartoons, and it was only my extraordinarily passive viewing habits--combined with a frankly bottomless appetite for sitcoms--that kept me from changing the channel. A few more things I remember about my childhood experience with the show: that I loved the theme song, or at least that it took up permanent residence in my brain almost immediately; and that Tiffany Brissette, in the title role, was one of the few child actresses I didn't have a crush on, for reasons that ultimately had less to do with her looks than with the uncanniness of her performance. More on this later.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE
Oddly enough, the worst scene in The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the one that apes the titular segment from Fantasia/2000. It's a non sequitur, for starters, its shoehorned-in feeling aggravated by a weird edit that plays like a skip in the record. For another thing, there is nothing charming about an enchanted mop in live-action. On this we might blame the Swiffer commercials, in which anthropomorphized custodial implements are sent to the gulag because the lady of the house has decided to "give cleaning a whole new meaning." (The sequence relies on the same sort of crude puppetry and self-demystifying close-ups--all your mind sees is a grip standing just outside of camera range.) And Jay Baruchel is no Mickey Mouse, so it's a long time before we even realize that this is supposed to be that.

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not a direct translation of the original Korean title of this first instalment in Park Chanwook's "Vengeance Trilogy" (and the only one he didn't have a hand in writing--although it was clearly a huge influence on his own writing style), but it describes the film much better than the generic Vengeance is Mine would have. Revenge here is not biblically cathartic but rather the sort of dysfunction we aim to minimize with a cute title, because in fact we never want to experience it. Late in the picture, two good but misguided men stand in a river; one tells the other that he's sorry but he has to kill him, and we don't necessarily agree, but we're, yes, sympathetic to the impulse.

from an abortive attempt at expanding my BACK TO THE FUTURE review
I guess I never really realized, seeing as how I saw it before I would've seen anything that influenced it, Back to the Future's playful conversation with the cinema. It's not a pastiche, but it references a gamut ranging from James Whale's Frankenstein ("It works!!!" is this movie's version of the similarly lightning-soaked "It's alive!!!") to, with Doc Brown's climactic dangle from Hill Valley's clock tower, Harold Lloyd/Safety Last!. As the background use of 1954's Cattle Queen of Montana to signify Ronald Reagan's silver-screen past is a little bit anachronistic, one could argue that they may as well have picked the more familiar Bedtime for Bonzo from 1951, but the esoteric choice suggests more respect for the audience's intellect--not to mention Reagan. And the DeLorean's introduction struck me as especially funny this time: a truck opens up to lower a ramp like E.T.'s spaceship, and, as Alan Silvestri's score bespeaks wonder and the camera rises with reverence, billowing clouds of CO2 mist part to reveal a futuristic automobile retrofitted for time travel. Then Doc Brown stumbles out of the car...having a mild coughing fit from all the smoke. Talk about taking the piss out of Spielbergian awe--something which audiences would've especially appreciated in July of '85, if you take into account that the re-release of E.T. earlier in the summer was met with picket signs that read, "E.T. Go Home!" (At least it was in my hometown, where E.T. had barely ended its official run before this revival.)

Read anything good offsite lately, even only tangentially film-related? I really enjoyed this VANITY FAIR article on the wartime experiences of J.D. Salinger.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations

2011-01-25T12:13:00.005-05:00

Best Motion Picture of the Year
127 Hours (2010): Christian Colson, Danny Boyle, John Smithson = oy
Black Swan (2010): Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver, Scott Franklin = yay, pretty much
The Fighter (2010): David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, Mark Wahlberg = barf
Inception (2010): Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas = obligatory
The Kids Are All Right (2010): Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Celine Rattray = sorry, no
The King's Speech (2010): Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Gareth Unwin = Miramax nostalgia
The Social Network (2010): Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca, Ceán Chaffin = and the winner is
Toy Story 3 (2010): Darla K. Anderson = yay, pretty much
True Grit (2010): Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Scott Rudin = yay
Winter's Bone (2010): Anne Rosellini, Alix Madigan = barf

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Javier Bardem for Biutiful (2010) = Julia paid 'em
Jeff Bridges for True Grit (2010) = yay
Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network (2010) = sure
Colin Firth for The King's Speech (2010) = whatevs
James Franco for 127 Hours (2010) = at Gosling's expense

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right (2010) = best thing about it
Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole (2010) = barf
Jennifer Lawrence for Winter's Bone (2010) = yawn
Natalie Portman for Black Swan (2010) = yay
Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine (2010) = yay

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale for The Fighter (2010) = the full retard
John Hawkes for Winter's Bone (2010) = best thing about it
Jeremy Renner for The Town (2010) = interesting
Mark Ruffalo for The Kids Are All Right (2010) = shrug
Geoffrey Rush for The King's Speech (2010) = shrug

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams for The Fighter (2010) = her perennial nomination; also: yum
Helena Bonham Carter for The King's Speech (2010) = shrug
Melissa Leo for The Fighter (2010) = oh please
Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit (2010) = emoticons to express yay because she's 14
Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom (2010) = yay

Best Achievement in Directing
Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan (2010) = won't win
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen for True Grit (2010) = awesome
David Fincher for The Social Network (2010) = deserved this fifteen years ago
Tom Hooper for The King's Speech (2010) = whatevs
David O. Russell for The Fighter (2010) = aw hail no

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Another Year (2010): Mike Leigh = throw the dog a bone
The Fighter (2010): Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington = no no way n'uh uh no way fuggetit
Inception (2010): Christopher Nolan = oh please
The Kids Are All Right (2010): Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg = see Inception
The King's Speech (2010): David Seidler = he wrote Tucker

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
127 Hours (2010): Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy = Slumdog ass-covering
The Social Network (2010): Aaron Sorkin = rent that tux
Toy Story 3 (2010): Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich = ok
True Grit (2010): Joel Coen, Ethan Coen = yay
Winter's Bone (2010): Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini = barf

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
How to Train Your Dragon (2010): Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders = ok
The Illusionist (2010): Sylvain Chomet = love-children everywhere are checking their attics
Toy Story 3 (2010): Lee Unkrich = believe it or not

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
Biutiful (2010): Alejandro González Iñárritu(Mexico) = or Julia would've killed everyone
Dogtooth (2009): Giorgos Lanthimos(Greece) = yay
In a Better World (2010): Susanne Bier(Denmark) = didn't see, but Bier should be in movie jail
Incendies (2010): Denis Villeneuve(Canada) = go Leafs
Outside the Law (2010): Rachid Bouchareb(Algeria) = news to me

Best Achievement in Cinematography
Black Swan (2010): Matthew Libatique = yay
Inception (2010): Wally Pfister = best thing about it
The King's Speech (2010): Danny Cohen = rock me, Danny Cohen
The Social Network (2010): Jeff Cronenweth = runs in the family
True Grit (2010): Roger Deakins = Susan Lucci

Best Achievement in Editing
127 Hours (2010): Jon Harris = hope he thanks Cuisinart
Black Swan (2010): Andrew Weisblum = yay
The Fighter (2010): Pamela Martin = whatchutalkinabout?
The King's Speech (2010): Tariq Anwar = shrug
The Social Network (2010): Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall = whatevs

Best Achievement in Art Direction
Alice in Wonderland (2010): Robert Stromberg, Karen O'Hara = barf
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010): Stuart Craig, Stephenie McMillan = yay
Inception (2010): Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias, Douglas A. Mowat = A for effort
The King's Speech (2010): Eve Stewart, Judy Farr = shock of shocks
True Grit (2010): Jess Gonchor, Nancy Haigh = yay

Best Achievement in Costume Design
Alice in Wonderland (2010): Colleen Atwood = first mostly-CG costume nom?
I Am Love (2009): Antonella Cannarozzi = shrug
The King's Speech (2010): Jenny Beavan = "
The Tempest (2010/II): Sandy Powell = didn't see, but it's Julie Taymor
True Grit (2010): Mary Zophres = yay

Best Achievement in Makeup
Barney's Version (2010): Adrien Morot = Giamatti hasn't looked so human since Planet of the Apes
The Way Back (2010): Edouard F. Henriques, Greg Funk, Yolanda Toussieng = ironic
The Wolfman (2010): Rick Baker, Dave Elsey = yay

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score
127 Hours (2010): A.R. Rahman = yawn
How to Train Your Dragon (2010): John Powell = ok
Inception (2010): Hans Zimmer = ok
The King's Speech (2010): Alexandre Desplat = I like Desplat
The Social Network (2010): Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross = rooting for it

Gonna stop there because we start getting into categories with too many blind spots for me personally. No surprises or even big huge disappointments this year, except maybe the lack of love for Marwencol.

Top Ten Talkback

2011-01-02T01:34:00.005-05:00

Here's your chance. What'd we miss? What'd we get right? What were we smokin'? And what was the deal with all that cunnilingus? (Full lists with intro here.)

Ian's list:

10. Iron Man 2

9. Somewhere

8. Marwencol

7. Mother

6. The Other Guys

5. Valhalla Rising

4. I'm Still Here

3. Greenberg

2. Black Swan

1. True Grit

Bill's list:

10. The American

9. Black Swan

8. Blue Valentine

7. Exit Through the Gift Shop

6. Somewhere

5. Dogtooth

4. Greenberg

3. Marwencol

2. Life During Wartime

1. True Grit

Walter's list:

10. The American

9. Marwencol

8. Dogtooth

7. Greenberg

6. Mother

5. Animal Kingdom

4. Black Swan

3. Somewhere

2. True Grit

1. Valhalla Rising

I'll start: I'm completely unwilling to acknowledge that Iron Man 2 is anything but a turbid, often-unwatchable mess that may lend itself by its very vapidity to some read or another, but doesn't present much beyond just the fact of itself. So be it - I don't know that I've been immune to that instinct in the past (like Blue Crush, for instance) - he without sin, and all that. I lament not having seen Todd Solondz's latest as I really, and for truly, love Todd Solondz's stuff (well, except for Storytelling) - and wish I'd seen Soderbergh's latest on Spalding Gray because, as Bill has eloquently put it about things in the past, I feel like I've dreamed it already.

I want to echo Bill's Twittered pride about not any of the three of us sticking Social Network in the top ten though, yeah, I think we all liked it. It's just, you know, so blandly intelligent and well-crafted... sort of like The Ghost Writer though I fear that I don't see any connection to it and Chinatown. The Ghost Writer doesn't end with resignation... ah well. I do wonder about the venom, though, of my colleagues against Scott Pilgrim which, though it didn't touch my heart in any discernible way, I was sort of impressed by in a technical way. It was my Tron 2, I guess, and I was sort of excited by Wright's joking dedication to making a sequel to Krull in the Twitter-verse. Maybe I'm just a sap.

And what is it with all the cunnilingus?

I think it's interesting that I was the only of these three male critics to rank Somewhere above Greenberg... though when it came time to do the top flick, well, it couldn't be more masculine.

I noticed, too, that there were a lot of people jumping off things in movies this year; that Resnais' Wild Grass is actually sort of a twee piece of shit; and that even though I still don't think that Shutter Island is great, I'm coming around to the idea that it's not as elderly as first suspected. Here's the thing, it's been a long time since a year in pictures has boasted as many beautiful-looking films, independent of their ultimate value. Stuff like Ondine, for instance, by the always-reliable Neil Jordan, which is mostly cross-eyed badger spit and missed opportunities, but in moments flabbergastingly lovely. Like Inception, which sucks, but is a wonder to look at - even the documentaries - even the foreign flicks... I'm excited to catch up with what I missed this year; I'm thinking 2010 was a deep well.

Real Life, Real Nudity, and the Breast Actress

2010-12-30T05:16:00.005-05:00

What follows is a type of confession. By that, I'm not saying that this is the sort of thing in which I admit that Ben Affleck is actually pretty good in Surviving Christmas. No, this is the sort of thing in which I admit that I'm not a very good person and don't particularly care.

There were two events that led me to post this. One was the brief mention of "real nudity"--the sort of nudity mentioned by Bill in which you see a featured actress' parts, and not a nameless, often faceless, stripper's. Real nudity is the sort of thing that intimately involves you in the life of a famous actress--irrevocable and invasive, it has very little to do with sex and quite a lot to do with the destruction of privacy. Also, it's awesome in every way and a few I'll never be able to articulate.

The other event is Bryant Frazer's piece on Fantasia--a leisurely and fair dissection of one of my favorite films. "Of course," you might think, "the Pastoral Symphony section is too goofy for words." What can I say? "If it accomplishes nothing else, it does seem pretty fucking 'pastoral?'" Anyhow, my band-aid having been fully removed, it's time to go for broke and tell my little story.

So I'm having a conversation about the greatest films of this era with a girl--a friend--who has just turned 21. My assignment, and hers as well, is to pick the major Academy Award categories (Picture, Director, Screenplay, and the four Acting categories), but for her lifetime instead of any particular year. I add on a pick for Foreign Film, not because pretentiousness gives me little cerebral erections, but because she came up with one first. And I try to avoid repeating films wherever possible. So here are my choices (I don't entirely remember hers, but they are non-terrible and non-interesting):

Best Picture 1989-Now: Pulp Fiction
Best Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Best Director: Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Best Actress: Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves
Best Supporting Actor: Samuel Jackson, Pulp Fiction
Best Supporting Actress: Lara Belmont, The War Zone
Best Foreign Film: Hero (I actually prefer Hable con ella, but she's already an Almodovar fan, and they're so close in my mind, I went with something I didn't think she had seen.)

So my list, if you know me, isn't particularly surprising. I feel no responsibility to mention less common films just to seem worldly, so I find the lack of anything idiosyncratic strangely idiosyncratic. My friend told me her list, listened to mine, and nothing of any particular value was discussed. Then I started thinking about my list.

It's not particularly interesting except for the fact that both of my best actresses play sexual victims. Lara Belmont is raped by her dad and sets her own breast on fire in front of her brother and still somehow comes out in better shape than my best actress, who basically allows her disabled husband to talk her into getting fucked to death by strangers. I mean, Daniel Day-Lewis is pretty great in There Will Be Blood, but he doesn't have to take a bowling pin in the butt. No doubt Day-Lewis, the consummate professional, would set his nuts on fire if the role depended on it--one thinks about the tears jerked from a hypothetical filming of My Left Ball--but the fact is that the sexual degradation of dudes isn't interesting. Not from a plot perspective, and not from a "real nudity" perspective.

Naked tits have value, even in this Google and external hard drive culture. Readily available, not to mention the most infantile valuable object ever conceived, a previously unavailable naked boob is very possibly one of the last true currencies. This isn't the sort of thing I'd write on resumes, and it isn't exactly uncommon, but I know if it's possible to see a famous girl's boobs. Which famous girl? Pretty much all of them. Is this a creepy sexual thing? Well, it's creepy, but it's not sexual.

I don't want to fuck Zooey Deschanel. I mean, sure I'd marry her, but that's not the point right now. First of all, putting aside all issues of taste and decency (and feminism), wanting to fuck her would be impolite; I don't know her. Also, she's a vegan and it's difficult (though not impossible) to make fun of someone cooler than you while you're fucking them. So to recap, if you walked up to me with a faceless picture of Zooey Deschanel's vagina, I'd decline on the grounds that I have better reasons to hate myself. But.

If you told me that there was in existence a completely authentic picture of Zooey Deschanel's face and naked boobs, I would fetishize that picture in the completely insane (and mostly asexual) way that people fetishize new photos of the Titanic under water. I mean, it's HER face and HER boobs.

You can never undo that.

Human interaction has come a long way. People can look, hopefully, at another person's picture on a dating site, and instead of thinking, "Is the possibility of having sex with this person worth getting stabbed in the throat with the smallest and least impressive member of a terrifying collection of mail-order ceramic pastel unicorns?" they think, "Well, at least he claims to love his mom." There's something kind of great about the optimism with which we face relationships these days. But it's total bullshit--more people than ever before know that most every aspect of polite society is the overcorrection we publicize to make up for how damaged and deranged we are all the time.

So I'll come right out and say it. When the film theory types talk about the voyeurism inherent in female screen nudity, they're on the wrong track. A voyeur has a goal, a point of view. That's not what happens when a girl is naked on screen. It's not about looking; it's about showing. Female nudity, real nudity, is truth--not the manufactured, italicized truth that shaky-cam and other verite techniques claim to be, and certainly not a documentary either. No, real nudity is better--more and less pure, it's theater and fiction and the girl you always wanted to see naked and a real person whose nudity can never be revoked. If you're the kind of person who'd rather see guys naked, then I apologize, but there simply isn't an analogue. A dick can be theater and fiction and desire, but no one ever thinks that to show your dick is to give away a piece of yourself. I hesitate to say that boobs--either literal boobs on display or literal boobs slightly hidden or metaphorical boobs commenting on the female experience or metaphorical boobs commenting on the nature of being an actress (metaboobs?)--are necessary aspects of any quality female performance, but my hesitation is based on shame and not analysis.

When it comes to my choice of best actresses, I'm more than willing to call myself a misogynistic pervert and call it a day. But the fact is that women will never play Day-Lewis' part in There Will Be Blood or Jackson's part in Pulp Fiction. Oh sure, the scales will balance and all that jazz, but there have been only a handful of men asked to carry a movie like Day-Lewis carries There Will Be Blood. To expect a role like that for a woman is simply childish.

But if our expectations of real nudity and film as a whole are a distilled and amplified concoction of theater, fiction, desire, and truth, maybe those women are the best actresses after all. How do you compete with a man who methodically rapes the country and beats a man to death? If you've seen Breaking the Waves, perhaps the analogy isn't far off.

UPDATED w/ANSWERS + WINNER: "Somewhere" Giveaway

2010-12-16T17:24:00.006-05:00

Want to win a Somewhere prize-pack featuring a $25 movie theatre gift card, a copy of Lost in Translation on DVD, and, best of all, a Somewhere poster autographed by writer-director Sofia Coppola? Of course you do. To qualify, all you have to do is submit your answers to the quiz below along with your name and address to by Wednesday, December 22, 2010--the day Somewhere opens in select cities across the U.S.. (Speaking of which, this giveaway is limited to residents of continental North America.)

Alas, we only have one of these to hand out, and the winner will be drawn at random from among the correct entries.

A COPPOLA FAMILY QUIZ

1. How many Lisbon sisters are there in The Virgin Suicides? FIVE
2. Which actress did Sofia Coppola replace in The Godfather Part III? WINONA RYDER
3. What was the name of the magazine Francis Ford Coppola started in the 1970s?
CITY (though whether he started it or hijacked it is I guess open to debate)
4. Which of the following actors is NOT a member of Sofia Coppola's family: Nicolas Cage, Alicia Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, or Talia Shire?
ALICIA COPPOLA
5. How many Oscars do Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola have between them?
6 (five for Francis, one for Sofia)
6. What did Sofia Coppola use as a stage name in the 1980s?
DOMINO
7. Which of her father's films did Sofia Coppola co-write with him?
"LIFE WITHOUT ZOE," from New York Stories
8. Six degrees of separation: connect Stephen Dorff to Sofia Coppola pretending that Somewhere doesn't exist.
I loved reading this answer. Most of you used Stephen Dorff in World Trade Center to Nicolas Cage (Sofia's cousin as well as her Peggy Sue Got Married co-star). My personal answer to this was Stephen Dorff to Giovanni Ribisi (in Public Enemies), narrator of Sofia's The Virgin Suicides.
9. What is the pseudonym Anna Faris's character uses to check in with in Lost in Translation?
EVELYN WAUGH. (Everyone got this--I thought it'd be harder since it's not part of the film's Wikipedia entry.)
10. Sofia Coppola played a resident of what planet in Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace?
NABOO

Congratulations DANIEL NUNEZ of WORCESTER, MA. Your prize-pack is on the way. Daniel, for what it's worth, had the most esoteric answer to #8: Stephen Dorff to Stan Tracy (!) in I Shot Andy Warhol. (Veteran extra Tracy earlier drifted through Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club.)
My thanks to Focus Features for sponsoring this contest. In the meantime, carry on as you have been--intrigued to see something of a backlash forming against cult darling Scott Pilgrim. Lots of good stuff coming up, by the by, including our own Top 10 lists for the year. Any guesses?

Spy in Our Midst

2010-12-03T03:45:00.023-05:00

If you're wondering why my Twitter avatar has been stealing the identities of others, well, blame Valve's brilliant "Team Fortress 2"--one of those countless obsessions that tend to crop up at the most inconvenient moments. But hear me out, blog patrons, I'm going somewhere with this.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the parameters of this game are basically identical to its predecessor: a multiplayer first-person shooter that pits two teams, comprised of nine classes (Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Spy), against each other in various wargames. Balance is the key to success--the advantages of one class can be circumvented by the advantages of another--and that's precisely what made the original game so popular. The same dynamic carries over, but a lion's share of the the sequel's lasting appeal lies in its backdrop. "TF2" takes place in a retro-futuristic version of the early 1960s, but what's interesting about this world is that it doesn't really try to parody the era in question. The game carries no pretensions beyond a series of visual and musical cues: it never lets you forget that it is a straightforward fiction created by people born several years after the fact--their idea of contemporary culture dictated by pastel comedies, Silver Age comic books and action movies.

Appropriately, this mentality extends to the purely conceptual inhabitants of "TF2". The classes were updated to reflect this new landscape; the characters in the first game were little more than faceless ciphers, but their '60s counterparts are given personalities based on an Americocentric view of the world. The Heavy is a meatheaded Russian; the Spy is an obnoxious Frenchman; the Medic is a straitlaced, sadistic German--and they all comment on their enemies' performance as they kill them. In an interview with Game Informer, writer Chet Faliszek talks about writing and casting actors for the classes:

"'Team Fortress' was fun, because we knew we wanted to make it sounds like what Americans in the '60s would have imagined these people had sounded like, not what they actually sounded like, which I think got some positive reviews and some negative reviews. Depending on what country you're from, because as we updated each nationality that nationality would be outraged that we got the accents wrong."

However, in terms of visual influence, the creators cite Norman Rockwell, Dean Cornwell and J. C. Leyendecker, all of whom came into prominence long before this period but reflect "TF2"'s aesthetic intentions quite well. The dominant question, then, is not "where are we" but "from where have we come"--and subsequently, we must imagine what forces have led us to this point in time. How did we come to accept these stereotypes? Why do they serve as cultural signifiers for the 1960s? What are these RED and BLU corporations that hire such men to kill one another? Supplementary materials expound upon a century-long war between two obscenely-powerful brothers vying for world domination, but most the specifics are left to the imagination. (The game's production/update blog humorously notes that the game was first created in 1963--the birth year of the modern conspiracy theory.)

After nearly a decade of production and innumerable rebuilds, "Team Fortress 2" was released in 2007 to great fanfare, and it has maintained a steady fanbase since then--thanks in no small part to Valve's savvy marketing campaign. Which brings me to the reason why I'm sharing this game with you, my fellow cinephiles: Valve has produced several promotional videos introducing the viewer to each member of the "Team Fortress" team. They were first utilized as trailers, and now release periodically to celebrate major updates to the game. Over the past three years, these videos have caused enough ripples across the Internet that even those who are vaguely familiar with the game might cry "old meme." But in the interests of crossover (and passing my personal obsessions on to you), here's the "Meet the Team" series. (HD and fullscreen are highly recommended.)

Meet the Heavy (2007) was the first video, released some five months before the game itself. I can't possibly imagine a better way to introduce the concept--recounting the mechanics of gameplay (can you devise a strategy to get past this bruiser?) while clearly stating that it would be driven by a deep sense of personality.

The dialogue flows beautifully, but pay close attention to the body language in Meet the Engineer (2007)--the subtle way that this pleasant, easygoing dude shifts his shoulders and grins as you slowly come to realize what sort of man he really is.

Later profiles would describe the Soldier as a rabid hawk who fought the Nazis independently ("I did three goddamn tours of duty and I wasn't even asked!"), but maybe you can already infer that from Meet the Soldier (2007), which deftly intercuts two similar forms of insanity before smashing them together.

Using a format similar to that of Meet the Soldier, Meet the Demoman (2007) is the first video to directly acknowledge that the characters of "Team Fortress 2" are built on broad stereotypes. Describing himself as a "black Scottish cyclops," the Demoman laments that he is several times removed from the rest of his team--and by placing an angry, depressive interview against the chaos of the battlefield, the video operates as a harsh self-criticism on the use of tokenism in fiction. (The game reaches beyond the setting to further comment on the character's racial politics--a haunted sword called the "Eyelander" would later join pimp hats and afros as the Demo's accessories, further sneering at stereotypes by throwing them in our faces.)

Meet the Scout (2008) also toggles between "documentary interview" and "narrative violence," but blurs the line separating them--his self-congratulatory rhetoric is just as aggressive as his assault on the Heavy. By breaking the fourth wall and addressing the camera on such direct, physical terms, the video introduces the Scout as "that guy" we all know: that guy who's so consumed with talking about how great he is that it becomes a part of why he's so great.

Meet the Sniper (2008) is accompanied by a lovely homage to Lalo Schifrin's title theme from Magnum Force. Most of these videos are in one way or another about the love affairs between men and their weapons of choice. But like the opening title sequence of that film, the video concludes that there are only three things that matter in this world: a man, his gun, and the job. (Whether or not the world outside will understand is another matter entirely.)

We have yet to see Meet the Pyro or Meet the Medic, but Valve filled the gap with Meet the Sandvich (2008), the promo that introduced the titular health item to the Heavy's inventory. By now, the writers are confident that you can recognize their characters--and imagine their hilariously perverse scenarios--without seeing anything at all. The closing shot, functionally identical to the closing shot of Meet the Heavy, establishes that "Team Fortress 2" has developed a culture unto itself.

The same goes for Meet the Spy (2009), which shoves four of its most abrasive personalities into one room without a second thought. This one appears to break the mold set by previous videos--concentrating on BLU characters in an exclusively narrative setting--but it takes an appropriate route by presenting the cutthroat Spy as a man known only by reputation. With that in mind, I like how the video lightly touches upon the fact that these mercenaries are the same characters on either side of the war. Who better to deliver this monologue than the man "closest" to the subject?

Valve has certainly capitalized on the potential that these wonderful short films provide, encouraging viewers to link and share them at their own discretion; while the videos themselves are technically copyrighted, their title cards are labeled with the same notice in fine print: "COPYRIGHT LOLOLOL." Further updates--new items, achievements and voice clips--make direct reference to their stories and dialogue. What's important to understand is that these additions never feel like excessive self-regard or autocannibalism. They simply add to the growing universe of "Team Fortress 2". Is it so difficult to imagine this band of mercenaries watching these videos and studying up on their rivals? Constantly rewriting the rules of their own meta-world, Valve sees "TF2" as as a crossroads between media--a cinematic experience as well as a playable experience.

Because of that artistic malleability, the idea of "interactivity" must be held under close scrutiny. "Team Fortress 2" is an online strategic-multiplayer FPS, so the thing is practically built on player interaction. (Trolls notwithstanding.) Like any good enterprise, Valve pays close attention to how the fans interpret and reinterpret their work--but most interesting is how they incorporate and facilitate those interpretations. One minor example: when players found that they could contort the Spy into a bizarrely unnatural position, Valve referenced the resultant joke as a character taunt.

Fan art has always been encouraged (and design contests have been used to introduce new items!), but one particularly notable outlet is machinima. Through the use of sandbox tools like Garry's Mod, players can fool around with the basic elements of specific video games. Given free reign over character models and environments--with a library of sound clips at their disposal--users can take screenshots, create their own games, and yes, make their own movies. While Garry's Mod and machinima in general have been around for a good long while, it shouldn't come as a surprise that these specific characters have inspired a wealth of fan films. Creative output ranges from the straightforward...

... to the parodic...

... to the bizarre...

... to the surreal.

"Team Fortress 2" films have become an everyday occurrence on YouTube, and every time there's an update to the game, the new material is almost immediately folded into that collective. Of course, none of these concepts are exactly new. Any popular artistic property will produce in-jokes and memes--the very idea of pop culture is built on these foundations. As evidenced by the movie references in those fan videos, communities aren't born in a vacuum. But what really fascinates me about "Team Fortress 2" is how it crafted something so self-contained while laying its influences out on the table. It thrives on a system of give and take. It's a '60s-mod landscape that is at once defined and unrestrained by its setting. it's a cult of personality constructed around characters who are self-admitted stereotypes but completely unique all the same. It makes perfect sense that artists and filmmakers would blossom from this particular subculture.

Further reading/watching: Andrew Kepple's Spy & Pyro (a lovely cartoon that recreates the game in its own image in service to a very silly pun); Valve's "The Insult that Made a 'Jarate Master' Out of Sniper" (a perfect spoof of the famous Charles Atlas ad that introduced a disturbing new item to the game); Joe Horan's Meet the Spy (a fan cartoon made before the official video was released, complete with the popular Spy memes and sound clips); FineLeatherJackets' Sniping's a Good Job, Mate (something like a Kids in the Hall sketch); Scoutellite's Scout Becomes a Satellite (weird for the sake of weird--and kind of amazing).

And speaking of recommendations, you damn well better have read Walter's review of Black Swan by now--it's the most incisive analysis of Aronofsky's film that I've read thus far.

My Favourite Music Videos: "Across the Universe" (1998, d. PT Anderson)

2010-11-27T16:34:00.009-05:00

Fiona Apple - Across The Universe
Uploaded by samithemenace. - Watch original web videos.

Of the four videos Paul Thomas Anderson directed for then-girlfriend Fiona Apple, this one, their first collaboration, is by far my favourite, though "Paper Bag" is quite good and indicates that Anderson has a glitzy Hollywood musical in him--or at least a Pennies from Heaven-style critique of one. The other two might represent him getting some delayed student-film impulses out of his system, and consequently they're somewhat risible in their contrived artiness. He's still recognizably himself in "Across the Universe," doing relatively long takes (especially for the medium), shooting in 'scope*, and even slipping in a John C. Reilly cameo.

Rejuvenating a music-video standby (fiddling while Rome burns), "Across the Universe" is a tie-in clip for Pleasantville that takes place in that film's soda shop and re-enacts--with a visceral impact and visual sumptuousness that makes you wish Anderson had helmed Pleasantville instead of Gary Ross--the riot visited upon it by the titular town's black-and-white residents, who object to the polychromatic painting decorating its glass façade. (Here, unlike in the movie proper, the park bench that goes flying through the window has the ferocious impact of Mookie's garbage can, shocking colour out of the image.) But dollying into the establishment, Anderson gets comically distracted by the pretty girl: snaking illogically but determinedly around a corner and past the looters as if following the siren song, the camera finds the mesmerizing Apple, looking for all the world like a flower child drawn by Disney. She's wearing headphones, and her presence seems to have a similar effect on Anderson, who blots out the world with blissful ignorance. Oh, he tries to zoom out or pan away from her, snatching a few choice glimpses of dreamily-choreographed mayhem in the process, but he clearly can't resist the magnetic pull of her face. While plenty of videos fetishize the hot singer chick, so few of them feel like this, that is to say genuinely infatuated; and those moments when Apple's not on screen suggest a bashfulness on the part of Anderson more than anything else. (The unwavering use of slo-mo is definitely a contributing factor to the sense of lovestruck awe, reminding of that cornball homily from Big Fish: "They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops.") Before long she engages him (or is it the other way around?) in a kind of flirtatious game of chicken, testing him as she tilts her head to the side and what we'll call his P.O.V. follows suit until both are upside-down defying gravity. It's silly, it's romantic, and it's the kind of abstract idea that lends itself to the music-video form. Behold, the stupidity of the mutually besotted.

I think of Tarantino's pastiches as letting me see all the schlock that influenced him through rose-tinted glasses. Similarly, it's hard to come away from this video not pining a little for Fiona Apple, because the piece is so palpably taken with her. That her cover of this Beatles favourite is gorgeous just adds icing to the cake.

*Unfortunately, I couldn't find a version of it in its original aspect ratio on the Internet.

Walking Dead 1:2

2010-11-10T20:29:00.008-05:00

Something that's been bugging me since the first episode reveal that Officer Dipshit's slut wife was doing Ponch somewhere in the Georgia wood is the timing of everything. Let's say that the assumption was made for whatever reason that our moron hero died when the hospital was overrun - and let's say that people can survive for about a week or so without water. And then let's say that his IV ran out probably later the same day that his unit nurse got lunched on by the shambling horde... doesn't that mean that he couldn't have remained in a coma for much more than a week, and doesn't that mean that his wife decided to do the ol' protein exchange survival strategy not much more than a week after her husband maybe died?

That's maybe why the opening of episode two, in which the wife gets doggy-styled in the wilderness while we look at her wedding ring in extreme foreground, left such an ugly taste in my mouth. Either this fucking whore was already cheating on her husband or she's doing what she's doing to provide for her kid and really misses Officer Doofus. You can't have it both ways, Frank Darabont.

Anyway - the fact that none of these characters are worth a shit is the least of the "Walking Dead's" problems. Not when there's a speech in eps. 2 in which we're told that there's no such thing as "black" and "white" anymore, man, it's just the living and the dead. Not when ace B-man Michael Rooker is wasted completely as some slavering gomer who's the punchline to the worst CGI "oops" since that hot conehead girl ate a Subway sandwich in a few bites to the delight of Chris Farley. Not when there's a Short Round character dropping one-liners and no-time-for-love-Dr.-Jones bon mots before descending into the sewers for no good reason but that whatever dunce directed this episode wanted their very own matchbook-in-a-stairwell sequence.

My fave, though, is when our heroes stand around slack-jawed as they smash into a zombie corpse (but not before Sheriff Andy delivers a soulful speech over it) and expect not to get any zombie gristle in their chops. They do that, see, because they want to roll around in it so the other zombies can't smell their freshness. And then it rains.

Bullshit.

Stupid bullshit, besides.

And what's the deal with the racial representation? It's like the friggin United Colors of Bennetton up there on the rooftop of the Only Department Store in Atlanta.

I'm done. This show has gone from pretty godawful to unwatchable in two weeks, and, folks, life is short.

Walking Dead 1:1

2010-11-01T21:50:00.005-04:00

Soooo... I was pretty geeked about this series despite Frank Darabont's involvement in it. I liked The Mist rather a lot but he seems regularly to squander opportunities for horror in favor of syrup and, y'know, hard to say which Darabont was gonna' show for an adaptation of Robert Kirkman's Image comic series. Jury's still out. The problem I have is that main character Deputy Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is a fucking idiot. He makes bad choices, seems inconsistent in his acceptance/comprehension of the zombie apocalypse, and, lamentably, exists in a scenario that doesn't sensibly punish him for his idiocy.

Consider that when he returns home after bumbling about in hospital (in straight ripper of 28 Days Later) and making his way through a few impressive environments, he makes quite a spectacle of himself in his house and neglects to dress and arm himself upon his departure. Immediately after, a sympathetic father/son survivor unit warn him that any excessive noise draws the "walkers" (in a world without George Romero, I guess, you call them something else) which leads to The First Night in which Deputy Grimes' suburbia is seen crawling with nocturnal baddies (in a straight ripper of I Am Legend which is, by the by, also not about zombies). The idea that zombies would be more active at night is curious to me - and to the makers of the series as well, apparently, as soon enough our moronic hero rides a horse (!) into the middle of downtown Atlanta into a horde of the hungry undead in broad daylight.

It's not smart. It's kind of stupid, actually. Stupid being exactly what Romero's zombie movies are generally not. Honestly, whenever anyone in a deserted hospital that's obviously the scene of violence decides to go into an unlit stairwell with a pack of matches; well, son, you've already lost me - and most likely for the duration.

Like the scene where Deputy Grimes and his buddies take a hot shower at the local police station, a-whoopin' and a hollerin' in appreciation of one of modernity's luxuries: lost to the horde! But what about the noise? And what about Grimes' complete non-acceptance of the infestation despite witnessing scary hands and a half-eaten body at the hospital? And what about his failure to ask one of his former colleagues if there's any Bub in there after the "sickness" took hold? And what about the stupid cross-cutting between Grimes dispatching a cool-looking zombie chick out of... mercy (in a scene so poorly established that I did wonder for a few moments if the monster was his wife), and his buddy trying to shoot his zombied-out wife and failing in fits of unsympathetic weeping? What's it all about?

Hoping for the nihilism of The Mist, I'm sort of thinking that Walking Dead is more akin to the Eisenhower-era relational melodrama of The Majestic. As it's written so far - with the dumbass dialogue, the wooden performance, the stupid actions of its stupid characters (the wife's hooked up with moron Ponch? who gives a shit about any of these douchebags?) - there's not much hope for me that this derivative though often handsome-looking series is going to be much more than heartfelt pap with occasional gore: zombies your mom could love (to go along with the "Dragon Tattoo" series' ugly rape-revenge-sploitation you could take your grandma's sewing circle to).

Sure, I'll hang with it a couple more installments... but I'm just saying...

R.I.P.

2010-10-31T02:52:00.006-04:00

The first screening that I attended in a professional capacity was for a now-forgotten piece of quaint English shit, Greenfingers. It was at Denver’s historic Mayan theater, run by Landmark, and I was only the third person to arrive after the lovely publicist, who used to be on a soap opera and has since moved out of the market, and local radio show host Reggie McDaniel. I was nervous – scared, really – and he was kind. He was, in fact, the only person genuinely kind to me for the first couple of months on my new beat – my other colleagues were suspicious of me in exactly the way that I find myself suspicious of all the new faces that show up at screenings in the Denver area nowadays. Reggie passed away a couple of months ago after a long illness so long that I’d started to think of him as invincible. In a lot of ways, his congestive heart failure brought back the last two years of my father’s life for me – I was hoping to replay it, I think, with dad pulling through this time. But he didn’t, and Reggie didn’t. And it’s been hard for me to make it back to the Cineplex ever since his passing. If my output seems anemic lately, well, it has been.

Reggie called his show the “Every Day People’s Guide” and listening to him, and then reading me, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of common ground. We both loved horror films, but where he tended to find something positive to say about everything that he saw, I tend to find something negative. It’s just the way our critical muscles attached to our public skeletons, I guess, but it didn’t stop Reggie from inviting me onto his show on a few occasions, nor from encouraging me when I was most frustrated by my treatment by an industry that, frankly, doesn’t owe you any favors and knows it. He was wiser than I am still. He told florid stories, gory with embellishment (I think), about times he tried to kill commanding officers with lab rats and his stint as a drill instructor, using them as explanation for his genuine philanthropy. Everyone noted with irritation that he seemed always to be on his phone. Not everyone knew that he was fielding calls from crack addicts, ex-whores, and assorted convicts he’d taken under his wing and into his home. Reggie said he had a lot to atone for.

The truth about Reggie is that he was a keen critic with a good eye who understood that the only way he could parlay his passion for film into something like a living wage was to bank on his expansive personality and play to the dumbest person in his audience. The thing is that he did it without condescension. It’s something that I couldn’t do – and something that I couldn’t always resist judging him for. But in private conversations, he revealed to me a depth of understanding – and a clear, precise way of expressing himself – that belied his persona as the affable buffoon; his careful presentation as the voice of the people. There’s a part of me that still doesn’t know what to feel about that. It’s the part of me that probably needs to lighten up.

I remember a screening of Mulholland Drive where, midway, Reggie muttered “What the hell?” in what might be the most honest initial reaction to the picture. I remember a BBQ dinner at a wonderful little hole-in-the-wall called “Blest” that has, alas, since folded and disappeared, in which a few fellow diners at first disdainful of Reggie in his purple suit were won over by the end by his good humor. I remember telling Reggie that if we were religious at all we’d ask him to be godfather to our kids and him saying that it was just about the greatest thing he could think of that it would even cross our minds – us being not religious at all, and all. I mostly remember shaking his hand and patting his shoulder at every screening, asking after his health and him asking after my “beautiful wife” and “beautiful kids.” He made me feel welcome and safe at every screening that I attended for almost a decade. I miss him.

I met George Hickenlooper after a lecture he gave at the Aspen Shorts Festival several years ago. I approached him after and expressed admiration for his thoughts and the breadth of his knowledge and he agreed to an interview the next morning in the lobby of his hotel. He was modest, unassuming, and ferociously honest about his experiences in Hollywood and the people he met there. During a fest in which I met people like Alexander Payne and Bruce Beresford, it was Hickenlooper that I stayed in contact with. Later, during the Denver Festival a couple of months later, George called to ask that I withdraw the transcript of the interview that we did together because of a possibly embarrassing revelation. I remember talking to him while I stood in a crowded upstairs hall at the filmcenter, waiting for a screening. I remember telling him “no.”

“Listen,” he said, “I really like you and that’s why I told you those things. You’re smart, you did your homework, and I thought we had made a connection.” I responded that I felt that we had as well and that if only he had indicated that his remarks were off the record, I surely would have respected that. I have an entire interview with Bob Rafelson that I can’t ever share because at the end of it he said to me “Oh, hey, all of this is off the record.” Ethics. I felt wounded that George would ask me to be something other than what I was because he was embarrassed that he’d told me too much. I’ve learned a lot about myself and about others doing this job that is, essentially, sitting by yourself in a dark room and then sitting by yourself in front of a little lit square and a keyboard. I’m conflicted again.

Hickenlooper was back in town this year for this year’s edition of the Denver Film Festival. I’d reached out to him through Facebook; I’d hoped that we could have a drink and put it behind us and talk again, as we had years ago, about the auteur theory, and what a boob Bogdanovich could be, and Welles, and final cuts and confederate ghosts. I saw it as a way to get back on the proverbial horse, maybe cover this fest again with the same kind of enthusiasm and gusto as I had before I lost my shit and let my frustrations with what you can’t control get the better of me. I’d even chatted with a fest director that I’d alienated some time in the past and done my best to bury the hatchet. Truth be told, I was almost moved to tears to see him.

And then Hickenlooper was found dead at the age of 47 in his hotel room. With apologies to Nick Ray, it’s a lonely place. With apologies to Cory McAbee, this space is a lonely town. R.I.P. Reg, R.I.P. George. Welcome to the downhill side.

Watch Out Where The Wehrmacht Goes

2010-10-25T03:00:00.012-04:00

Good Hallow's Eve, my children of the night, my darling spectres and succubi. Gather close. Closer still. Are you sitting comfortably? Right. Let me tell you a tale, my little sex pumpkins.

Let me tell you what a shitty movie Dead Snow is.

This derivative Norwegian lump (Død Snø) made a stir on the festival scene back in 2009, and its trailers became an online sensation. Nazi zombies! How fun! How new! But I'm pretty convinced "Nazi zombies" was just the incantation that summoned earnest money from investors, who'd never heard of a little gem of Cushingiana called Shock Waves.

Look at that! Not just Nazi zombies, but underwater Nazi zombies. That's amping things up a bit.

I digress. Thing is, Nazi zombies, unless deployed in a correct context, are no scarier or more dangerous than regular zombies. Once risen, all zombies are equal, no matter what they did in life. We know that barricading oneself in a snowbound cabin with an undead horde outside is an untenable position, so does it really matter if the walking corpses are wearing Schutzstaffel armbands, or lederhosen, or nothing at all?

Not unless you're going to take it all the way. What do Nazis do that's bad? Two things come to mind, and since the setting of Dead Snow is the ass-end of the fjords, we can discard "annexing the Sudetenland." If the trapped protagonists, each just vague silhouettes of slasher-flick victim stereotypes, had some personal or ancestral stake in the matter -- if one or more of them were Jewish, say, or if they were the only ones in a position to repel a Nazi zombie putsch into the population centers -- that makes a difference. If the zombies had some ultimate purpose beyond, apparently, safeguarding the gold they looted during the war and killing any warm human who snowshoes onto their glacier -- that makes a difference. If their undeath spread like disease, as zombiehood usually does, and victims risked being transformed not just into walking corpses but into doctrinaire National Socialists ... you see where I'm going. Real monsters are metaphors, and these monsters are devoid of any meaning deeper than a uniform and a snarl.

The filmmakers would probably rather we not discuss politics, but they brought it up. Nazis are political, and any cinematic impact they carry is rooted in their well-recorded misdeeds. (I mean, they recorded them themselves.) I fear we're moving too far away from that history, so there's no shame in proving Godwin's Law anymore. Dead Snow is like a facet of the Tea Party protests, where fringies decry national health care with reductio ad Hitlerum placards -- for shock value, just to get the cameras turned their way.

Dead Snow's posthumous brownshirts, although acting in an organized military fashion, aren't driven by any racist or nationalist ideology or even a hunger for brains. It's dangerous in that it's so free of real-world reference. Even Shock Waves had the sense to touch on Nazi medical butchery, to make the gimmick matter. Raiders of the Lost Ark highlighted the Nazis' territorial aggression and racial doctrine, and then meted out God's incinerating justice.

Halloween movie fests are a tradition. It's fun to select a stack of flicks for your party or sleepover and indulge in a case of the creeps, or the titters. Dead Snow is available on Netflix Instant Watch. Avoid it. Don't rent the disc, don't torrent the stream. I don't care how much you love ScandiHorror -- this is not Let the Right One In. As horror spoofs go, this is not even Shaun of the Dead and it's a hell of a long way from Evil Dead 2. It's just a waste.

Okay, I misspeak -- there's one good kill. One! A Nazi zombie hooks his fingers into a fat guy's eye sockets and pulls until his skull splits and his still-living brain flomphs out on the cabin floor. That's ... pretty awesome. But it's just a garnish on a bucket of vacuous bilge, something that's hollow and desperate at best and, at worst, subtly corrosive to the untutored conscience.

You know what else is on Netflix Instant? Shock Waves.

To end on a positive note: I'd love to know the fright films, if any, that find their way to your home screen around Halloween time. My touchstones are the Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond, the first Alien, and select Hammer fare including, but not limited to, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. Please share in comments ... and Happy Halloween, my tumescent sin biscuits.

Goodnight, June

2010-10-17T22:08:00.006-04:00

Though I always have "Leave it to Beaver" on the brain, I was thinking about Barbara "June Cleaver" Billingsley specifically just the other day, thinking about how the only thing that convinced me to watch the Muppets in cartoon form, which seemed vaguely sacreligious--and cheap--at the time (circa 1985), was that Billingsley provided the voice of Nanny. The show of course was "Muppet Babies", and while I recall very little of it at this point, I can still hear Billingsley interrupting the opening theme to ask, "Is everything all right in here?" It tickled me then and tickles me now that two of my most (if not the two most) formative amusements intersect in some fashion.

Like her "Beaver" co-star Hugh Beaumont, Billingsley, born Barbara Combes in 1915, drifted back and forth between uncredited parts in film (Invaders from Mars) and bigger showcases on TV series that didn't last ("Professional Father", "The Brothers") before landing the role that would make her an icon. Just what kind of icon is, I guess, up for debate--today there's a tendency to look down on June Cleaver, but I look up, at this towering domestic goddess, whom Billingsley played with warmth, dignity, great humour, and a poignant dash of anxiety. She did housework in pearls, but context is everything: Ward wore a suit to the dinner table.

"Leave it to Beaver" was not actually a hit in first run, and Billingsley quietly retreated from showbiz after the series ended in 1963. (Fittingly, in June.) But syndication had an effect on the show similar to the one it had on "Star Trek"; by 1980, Billingsley was being sought out by the makers of Airplane! for a cameo that traded on the incongruity of the erstwhile Mrs. Cleaver speaking ebonics. She never looked back. Over the next two decades, Billingsley would alternate mild subversions of her alter ego with a resurrection of the real McCoy in the TV movie Still the Beaver and its sitcom spin-off. By the time they made "Leave It to Beaver" into a feature film in the television-adaptation-happy '90s, she was old enough to play stodgy Aunt Martha, but she was nonetheless woefully miscast. Too lovely. Too hip.

Barbara Billingsley died yesterday at 94. But she lives on.

From the first great episode of "Leave it to Beaver", season one's "The Haircut." June's reaction to Beaver's haircut is priceless--talk about an underrated comedienne:

Billingsley's infamous "I Speak Jive" scene from Airplane!:

Requiescat In Genre

2010-10-10T06:00:00.007-04:00

From the New York Times, Oct. 8:

Roy Ward Baker, an undersung British filmmaker who directed “A Night to Remember,” a vivid black-and-white rendering of the sinking of the Titanic revered by history and movie buffs alike, died on Tuesday in London. He was 93.

Thirteen paragraphs later:

When he returned to feature films, it was largely to work for Hammer, the British studio most associated with horror films. His movies in that period included “The Vampire Lovers” (1970), a tale of revenge and bloodlust that was especially notable for its two nude scenes; and “Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde” (1971), a campy adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic that adds a soupçon of erotic intrigue by making the good doctor’s evil alter ego a woman.

Let me pose this question: Who the fuck remembers A Night To Remember? It's thoroughly occluded in popular recall by every shipwreck-disaster flick to arise from The Poseidon Adventure on. And really, who gives a shit about the sinking of the Titanic when you could be looking at these? (NSFW.)

I'm saying this hyperbolically, not to argue that Baker's near-documentary accomplishments in A Night To Remember pale next to a few bared knockers. What I'm saying is that Baker's B-pictures have achieved a life well beyond his mainstream work, yet his obituarists felt compelled to log them almost as footnotes, not as part of his respectable portfolio.

American journalism -- unless it's specialized, unless there's some unforeseen eruption into the popular culture (Twilight, Harry Potter), or unless a star reporter chooses to go slumming -- has a notoriously tin ear for genre art. There's a received wisdom about what's important, and that wisdom often overlooks the obvious. Like, say, the fact that Quatermass and the Pit (1967) is still screened, discussed, and even worshipped in a way that Tiger In the Smoke (1956) never was. In the battle to write the obit's lede, the Golden Globe winner tops the midnight movie favorite anyday, and those episodes of "The Avengers" and "The Saint" are carrion for crows.

I noticed this tendency to obscure the genre triumphs of deceased luminaries after Patricia Neal died back in August. From the Los Angeles Times:

"Three Secrets" (1950), "Operation Pacific" (1951), "Raton Pass" (1951), "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), "Diplomatic Courier" (1952) and "Something for the Birds" (1952) were hardly films to make her a memorable star.

Well, sniffy sniff sniff. Neal's posthumous plaudits were for her outstanding dramatic performances, deservedly, and for her astonishing victory over family trauma and near-fatal brain afflictions; the overall arc of her life is amazing. But I'd wager more people now have seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, and been more deeply affected by it, than have ever seen Hud. The classics of science fiction and fantasy are not ghettoized the way we were brought up to believe, and haven't been for a long time — at least since the B-movies became A-list in the late '70s, and the whole world starting flocking to sharksploitation flicks and space adventures.

Steven Spielberg has Oscars now, although he had to all but abandon science fiction to win them. When his obit gets written, which paragraph will pay tribute to Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Make Room! Make Room!

2010-10-04T04:45:00.061-04:00

"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"

Last week, I saw The Room for the first time. I had been aware of its dodgy reputation for a long while--friends in Hollywood had told me about the perplexing billboard that stood there for a good five years, as well as the various midnight screenings that took place around the Los Angeles area--but there were two roughly concurrent assessments of the film that finally prompted me to sit down and watch it. The first was Newgrounds' "The Room Tribute", a Flash game that recreates the events of the movie as a 16-bit RPG. The other was Alex Jackson's brief paragraph in a comment on the FFC Blog: "Speaking as a 'bad movie' buff, I actually hated it. Made me feel like it would be cruel to laugh. The content is just not abstract enough to benefit from Wiseau's ineptness." Whether it was bad or merely "bad," this was something that I needed to have in my life.

Now, I'm hardly an authority on bad movies, but it's always fun to hunt down the most infamous titles and find out how you react. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cringe, and sometimes you find something worthy of honest appreciation. One of the biggest surprises was Phil Tucker's Robot Monster, which was so many kinds of fucked-up that, deep down, it seems somewhat aware of its own ridiculousness; not blinded by Ed Wood's giddy appreciation for cinema, but a story that needed to be told nonetheless. It was only a matter of time before I got around to The Room, but I can't remember the last time I reacted so violently to a "good" bad movie.

The follies of The Room are well-documented: characters repeat the same lines with bizarre regularity; subplots involving breast cancer and a violent drug dealer are forgotten almost as soon as they're introduced; character motivations seem to change mid-sentence. I have to disagree with Alex on one major point--it would be cruel to laugh, but only because the movie is impossible to comprehend. A man, Johnny (actor/writer/director/producer Tommy Wiseau (he gives himself a title card for each role)), his "future wife" Lisa (Juliette Danielle), his "best friend" Mark (Greg Sestero) and his surrogate son Denny (Philip Haldiman)... it's true that the film's attempts at narrative are meager and straightforward (woman cheats on her fiancé with his best friend), but the execution goes beyond the pale. No matter how "good" The Room was supposed to be, or how much entertainment value it could provide as a "bad" film, I had no idea what I was watching. The film assumes that we know the characters more intimately than we actually do--did the final cut accidentally leave out a reel? The image looks a little out of place, a little too hazy, for something released in 2003--was it shot in 1987? The first half-hour alone features three sex scenes with the same woman, complete with some repetitive R&B--did Wiseau start out with a porno and fail spectacularly? Why do these people spend so much time playing catch with a football? Why do they fall down so often? Why? Why? Why?

Now, I haven't seen Best Worst Movie, so I can't say whether or not that film provides insight into the phenomenon of "so bad it's good." I have, however, seen Troll 2, the film whose fan base it documents. The dialogue is improbable and the leaps in logic are simply too far to make, but I don't recall ever being bewildered by the structure of it, exactly. It always feels broken beyond repair, but never outright dismantled. I laughed at Troll 2, but The Room's most inexplicable moments are lobbed at the viewer with such aggression that my first instinct was to curl up into a fetal position. The very least of these moments burrowed deep under my skin: when characters call each other "chicken," they don't cluck, they cheep--and Wiseau cheep-cheep-cheeps so many times throughout the movie that I began to wonder if he was making fun of me. Yes, watching The Room confused me, frightened me, and made me just a little paranoid. It's as if there was a joke, and I wasn't sure who was playing it, or whom the intended target was.

Wiseau is a somewhat terrifying figure in his own right. He's a mysterious character whose background is fuzzy at best, with an accent that's impossible to place. How did he finance this thing? Again, the details are vague. Wiseau apparently wants to maintain some control over his image. (A one-sided "interview" with the director on the Room DVD also suffers from the movie's most glaring technical flaw--several lines from Wiseau's pre-chewed lectures have been looped in ADR.) But one thing's been bothering me ever since I met The Room with wide-eyed incredulity. If it's so unfathomable and the artistic failure is so complete--and, furthermore, if I can't laugh at it--why can't I regard Wiseau with the same sympathetic eye that I offered the fictional Joaquin Phoenix of I'm Still Here? "They don’t understand The Room was done intentionally to provoke the audience," Wiseau once told LAist, and that was certainly the impetus behind Phoenix's act. But while The Room certainly provoked me, I never actually believed that it did so intentionally. I feel that, if Wiseau ever tried to tell us that his escapades were a hoax, I would ferociously reject that claim. Why? If I embrace the fake clown but deride the real clown, doesn't that make me just as ignorant as Hollywood's condescending Oscar mill?

"I'll go off and beat off and you can lick the seat off. Later, muchacho."

Part of the problem has to be that Wiseau is difficult to pin down in terms of precedent. In fact, the closest approximation to The Room that I can imagine is a parody of bad cinema. More specifically, a collection of cartoons produced by Something Awful in 2008--the saga of Peezle Ward. What began as an April Fool's Day joke eventually blossomed into a full-blown series about a fictional hack writer who has penned "more than 10 but less than a billion short stories." By "adapting" Ward's scripts in a brusque monotone, Dave Kelly and Josh Jones attempt to understand artists like Wiseau and pick apart the reasons for their failure. The first few episodes (Lawyer Street, Escape from Satan's Ass) establish Ward as obsessed with very important issues without knowing how to approach them: "I know rape is a very sensitive subject, but I believe I handled it very tastefully. It changes Frank forever. In the end, he believes in God. That's called character development. The self-rape was an analogy for time travel; I call it quantum rape." The rest of them (Ghost Unit, Fire Killers, Brave Aeronauts and Christmas in Essex) revolve around one all-conquering hero whose professional brilliance excuses his personality: "That black family thanked me for saving their lives. They didn't care that I had to hack up a dog to do it. May I remind you, officer, it was a black family."

Of course, it takes zero effort to link a dearth of talent to an enormous ego. But the Peezle Ward series tackles the very basic components of The Room by forcing its characters to spout exposition in long strings of static dialogue. More fascinating, and more important to this conversation, is how that dialogue is comprised almost entirely of circuitous insults from the author's surrogate/Mary Sue, Pete (or Tim, or Pip). The profane stream of consciousness mirrors Wiseau's belligerent direction quite well, and by the end of each cartoon you understand Ward as a terrible writer, a screaming misogynist, and utterly self-absorbed... and then you anxiously click over to the next installment, unable to look away. How will Pete stick it to his superiors this time? How will he (improbably) save the day? It makes just enough sense to force you into wondering where it's all coming from, and where it's all going. The series is a great satire because it's completely engulfed by the original source(s)--and if it doesn't completely decipher films like The Room, it explains their allure all too well.

"The Room Tribute" finally puts the rest of the pieces together. The player takes on the role of Johnny, and the game is presented exclusively from his point of view as he wanders in and out of the story proper. Plot holes are filled where necessary--the player has to take drug dealer Chris-R to the police, and we're there when Johnny learns that Lisa has accused him of domestic abuse--but most everything else is taken verbatim from the movie. (It even faithfully recreates the plodding soundtrack in chiptune.) An inventory and a turn-based battle system nominally make it a video game, but these conceits don't actually add up to a challenge. Collect spoons! Make sandwiches! Catch the ball! Throw the ball! Push your best friend! It's more about reacting to the silly plot than anything else. Johnny starts off with some six million dollars, and he never spends more than two hundred--not including the $50,000 used to pay Denny's college tuition in a single, negligible instant. So how can he possibly complain about an elusive promotion at the bank? By utilizing, and then ignoring, the interactivity inherent to the medium, "The Room Tribute" engages a conversation with the player/viewer about how Wiseau ignores nearly everything necessary to create dramatic tension.

"The Room Tribute" succeeds so well not just because it highlights the oddities of The Room, but because it acts as an interpreter of sorts. Now, the game cannot make sense out of the movie, per se. The new dialogue stands so far apart from the recreations of Wiseau's script that it cannot dilute the wackiness of the original work. Rather, it presents The Room as a supernatural dreamworld. An earthquake cuts the characters off from the rest of San Francisco, defining the playing field in a move reminiscent of "It's a Good Life." Levels are divided into days, and most of them begin with a sequence inspired by the ending of "Super Mario Bros. 2". Every store in the four-block area is operated by the same woman (the owner of the flower shop in the movie), who always makes it a point to mention that Johnny is her "favorite customer."

The game goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Johnny is everyone's favorite--the banker's favorite employee, the cops' favorite citizen, San Francisco's favorite donator. To drive the point home, it's soon revealed that Johnny's big, "confidential" client at the bank is none other than Tommy Wiseau himself. Despite the fact that it sees the movie as beyond all reasonable logic, "The Room Tribute" knows that if it operates within a dreamworld, it must be Wiseau's dream. Again, that's hardly a revelation, but what the game does is isolate Wiseau's ego and labels it as the lone source of all that wackiness. The conclusion is that The Room isn't bad because of the stilted dialogue--it's bad because Wiseau has so little respect for the cast, the medium and the viewer. At the end of "The Room Tribute", the player can either act out the climax of the movie with Johnny, or lead him outside first. In the latter scenario, he will take his anger out on the various people who have wronged him throughout the week. As he says in the film, "Everyone betrayed me; I'm fed up with this world." Tommy/Johnny is the hero of the story, the saint and the martyr, and that's all the more obvious when he becomes a video game protagonist from the late '80s/early '90s... one who barely does anything to deserve canonization.

What all of that means is that by "interpreting" The Room, "The Room Tribute" also cuts through the bullshit that makes it so difficult to approach. In the final analysis, what's so hard to grasp about an act of transparent narcissism? Portaying him as strange, artless, and not of this Earth, the game does see Wiseau is a provocateur, but not in any way that matters. "Joaquin Phoenix" was a passive character until we responded negatively to his public antics, and from there he revealed our prejudices about art and movie stars. With this big film about big important things ("do you understand life?"), Wiseau came out swinging, demanding our accolades right from the start, like a spoiled child. His artistic aggressiveness comes not from the inanity of his work, but from his self-satisfaction, and weirdness aside, that just makes The Room a run-of-the-mill bad movie. He prodded his audience, and contrary to his later claims, I don't think he ever expected them to prod back. True to his ego, he took in all in stride and grabbed all the attention he could get. The joke that drives "The Room Tribute" (ostensibly another outlet for Wiseau to exploit) is that it's the only tribute that The Room could possibly warrant. I laughed--and it was a catharsis that I desperately needed.

A subsequent viewing of The Room held no additional surprises for me--indeed, despite having a grand old time playing "The Room Tribute", I didn't take much joy from watching the moments that I now recognized as cult iconography. The veil of nonsense had been lifted, and the husk that remained just bored me stupid. I can't say anything for the midnight showings--they might be fun, after all--but they've given Wiseau license to peddle this film as an intentional comedy. No one actually believes him, but it's the mystique of the ultimate bad movie that keeps it alive, and that's far more than what the real movie deserves.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

2010-09-27T21:39:00.014-04:00

The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year's TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers. How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is "John Gray," which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as "James Gray." I was severely late for the flick, so I don't want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn't have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with "free spirit" music cued up on the soundtrack--he's not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian's Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on "Entourage".
If the effusive headlines at AICN are any indication, the geeks were born to love James Gunn's fast, cheap, and out-of-control Super (**/****). I wasn't exactly indifferent, but I'm definitely burned out on these pomo comic-book movies. Aggravating the picture's been there/done that feeling is its pronounced debt to Taxi Driver, which Super rehashes with selective realism and a much greater emphasis on shock value. It also has a Troma patina--which is probably a hard thing for Gunn, who cut his teeth on stuff like Tromeo and Juliet, to shake--that makes the all-star cast look like they're participating in a telethon, although Ellen Page overcomes this obstacle to deliver another performance for the ages. As the ferocious sidekick to Rainn Wilson's homemade superhero the Crimson Bolt, she resists every impulse towards good taste and forces audiences to start recognizing her as a) an adult woman and b) a sexual being by modeling her skin-tight spandex costume as indecently as possible. Still, the film is so glib and so arch that I kind of resented its presumptuous detours into sentiment and tragedy.
I don't show my appreciation for Bruce Springsteen--an evergreen artist if ever there was one--often enough, thus in a way going to see The Promise: The Making of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (**½/****) was a form of penance. But I confess I had an ulterior motive, which was to set foot inside Toronto's new state-of-the-art cinema complex the Bell Lightbox. It's beautiful. Huge, too. My visit was basically a hit-and-run, but I did of course get to audit one of the five spacious screening rooms, with its impressive corridors and seventies-brown, perhaps quintessentially Canadian interior. (The lobby is a mix of cool blues and modernist whites.) As for the Bruce doc, a quasi-sequel to Wings for Wheels: The Making of "Born to Run", it's a pleasant mix of fly-on-the-wall footage of the original recording sessions for the titular album and retrospective interviews with the E Street Band as well as various industry types. You've got to admire Springsteen's chutzpah in documenting and cataloguing his creative process with a borderline-Kubrickian obsessiveness long before his reputation warranted it, but as much as his collaborators bitch about his anal-retentiveness from their current vantage, he's such a benign genius that the studio material frankly doesn't generate a lot of electricity--at least between jams. Moreover, so much of it is presumed to need contextualization by the latter-day interviews that I grew restless with the constant cutting back and forth.
I don't know what to say, really, about Canadian Carl Bessai's Repeaters (*/****) or Ji-woon Kim's I Saw the Devil (**/****). Bessai has flirted with sci-fi tropes before but he's wading pretty deep into the genre pool with this indie riff on Groundhog Day, in which three rehab residents take the place of one weatherman. While these 12-steppers are more obviously inclined to seek redemption in do-overs than Bill Murray was, they might as well still be TV meteorologists: given that they cheerfully relapse upon realizing tomorrow now comes with a clean slate, it's a cheat that they're able to control and even forget their addictions once some semblance of a plot kicks in. The '80s-horror-movie coda doesn't help matters. The premise of I Saw the Devil, another film instantly enshrined by the geek cult, is that a serial killer locks horns with a Korean secret service agent, who uses every tool at his disposal to track his wife's murderer and thwart the bastard's attempts to claim another victim, thereby giving him a terminal case of blue balls. It's a potentially exasperating conceit rendered all the more so by the execution: the picture's too long, too repetitive, and neither stylish nor meta enough to get away with lazily-plotted scenes like the one where the presumed-unconscious killer overhears a crucial bit of information. I write this as a fan of Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters and his Leone pastiche The Good the Bad and the Weird.
Let's go out on a high note, with Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture (L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) (***½/****). (The literal translation of the French title is considerably more loaded: "The Man Who Wanted to Live His Life.") I actually don't want to spoil this one with a plot synopsis, because I can't discount the sheer pleasure I got from its constant gear-shifting. (This year's TIFF taught me that I'm learning to appreciate a good yarn well told.) Suffice it to say, the first act filled me with dread that this was going to be another film that sets out to punish the workaholic patriarch, only in French (it's in fact based on an American novel by Douglas Kennedy), but the picture soon flies off in a different direction, and then it soars--a draggy section of pipe-laying in the middle notwithstanding. What I love is its moral ambivalence, its neutrality: Romain Duris's Paul Exben isn't a bad guy, he just does bad things; and somehow, his acts of atonement are even worse, yet there is a certain consolation in that he's following his muse. We observe him with interest if not attachment. A literate epic,The Big Picture waxes poetic on everything from the nature of identity to the virtues of digital vs. analog (both reveal their boundaries in Paul's transition from one world to the other), to photography, to fame, to globalism... And let it not go unsaid that A Prophet's Niels Arestrup and Public Enemies' Branka Katic are absolutely lovely in pivotal roles that leave a little hole in the air when the movie's over.

Fuck.

2010-09-27T10:08:00.000-04:00

Looks like we're gonna have to switch to comment moderation, at least for the time being. These fucking spammers--they ruin it for everybody.

Working on a TIFF wrap-up and there's lots of other cool stuff coming up, so stay tuned. Please don't be scared off by the comments approval; our standards will be as lax as always.

Boardwalk Empire Talkback

2010-09-20T19:24:00.008-04:00

My two biggest issues with the show were evident in the ads though after last night's pilot I'm not really sure they are issues exactly.

1. Steve Buscemi is no James Gandolfini and he is no Jon Hamm. I like Buscemi and his directorial debut Trees Lounge, which he is in roughly eighty percent of the time, is easily one of the five best films of 1996. But he seems too broad and uncharismatic to carry an entire television series. (I find his henchman, played by Michael Pitt, considerably more interesting). Then again, I suspect that you could argue that Nucky Thompson isn't Tony Soprano and he isn't Don Draper. The line between politician and gangster is much more diffuse than in something like "The Sopranos". In fact, it might be something that we haven't seen before. I suspect the problem isn't that Buscemi is all wrong, but that he's just giving us something brand new.

2. Set in 1920, the show is a work of science fiction. Highlighted by a sideshow showing off incubators for premature babies and a strangely unfunny vaudville routine, the show has relatively few reference points to guide us through. I was so busy absorbing the alien culture that I found myself missing a lot of signficant plot points. Again, it might not be that it's wrong it might just be that's brand new.

Your thoughts though?

TIFF 2010: On "Womb"

2010-09-19T21:29:00.012-04:00

I found the jury-rigged misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer's great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I'm not sure I'd have the patience to sit through it again. It's challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy's, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table--and it's here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw's vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt "Doctor Who" Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he's so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist--an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation--and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas's clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff Lolita that makes up for in controversy (the incest angle) what it may lack in guts (all things considered, this is a fairly chaste film), though the Zen patience with which Rebecca courts Thomas II only affirmed the intelligence of the piece for me: you're just not going to see a woman exhibit the immoral lust of Humbert Humbert with the same urgency.

Beneath its sensationalistic hook, Womb is also solid pop anthropology, with Rebecca recreating original Thomas's environment as much as possible in the hopes of raising a true clone but finally bringing up someone who is, unlike his "father," unmotivated and kind of an idiot. (Though she appears to enjoy fucking him too much to care, new Thomas's girlfriend (Hannah Murray, who has the sexiest overbite I've ever seen--writer/director/composer/sound-mixer Fliegauf has an eye for carnal mouths) hits the nail on the head when she calls him "juvenile.") There are simply too many variables involved in how a child turns out, not the least of which the human soul. That none of this is actually put into words by the filmmakers shames Never Let Me Go, which wheels Charlotte Rampling out like Blofeld to speculate about souls in genetically-engineered individuals. Green is fabulous, by the way, a woman for the first time on screen and walking a tightrope with aplomb. There's ambivalence in her maternalism that's exactly right; accepting her predicament requires a huge suspension of disbelief, but she believes it first. ***1/2/****

TIFF 2010: On "Let Me In"

2010-09-15T22:48:00.009-04:00

The logo for the refurbished Hammer Films that opens Let Me In is a little like the one for Marvel Films, only images of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing flutter past instead of Spider-Man and other "-men." I think it may have caused me to squee, as the girls say. The movie itself doesn't labour to honour the Hammer legacy per se--I had secretly hoped it'd find room for at least one slutty Victorian barmaid--but it does reverentially emulate its key source, the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In, which Walter Chaw and I had on our Top 10 lists for that year. That Let Me In doesn't feel synthetic like Gus Van Sant's Psycho redux is something of a miracle; xenophobic viewers will get to have an experience roughly analogous to the original in tone as well as content--but do they deserve it? Me, I found it a pleasant sort of déjà vu, with Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas--ringers, both, in the final analysis--brilliantly cast as twin avatars of middle-aged pathos. Jenkins barely utters a line yet steals the show as the reluctant star of his own slasher movie (which has a curious resonance, given that the film is set in the genre's heyday of 1983), and writer-director Matt Reeves gifts him with the film's best (and most innovative) sequence, a white-knuckle car chase shot entirely from the back seat of an automobile. In the lead role of Oskar, née Owen, Kodi Smit-McPhee appears to be genuinely, heartbreakingly smitten with co-star Chloe Moretz, who initially struck me as too polished, too actressy, dare I say too pretty (between this and Hit Girl, I see a few too many Hinckleys in her future), though as Let Me In wears on, these qualities start to seem designed--she's a shrewder, if not preferable, take on a character who is, after all, grooming a replacement for her lackey. The bullying sequences are highly visceral, Greig Fraser's anamorphic cinematography captures the bleak Los Alamos winter without falling into colour-coded cliché (even as it's hamstrung by Reeves's prosaic shot-reverse-shot strategies), and...it's a little thing, but...the picture gets 1983 right, down to wholly ineffable details like body language. Reeves cut "the shot" (you know the one I'm talking about), but I actually don't blame him. If the mass exodus at my press screening during Moretz's first attack on an innocent is any indication, he's already fighting an uphill battle against the prigs. ***/****

TIFF 2010: On "John Carpenter's The Ward"

2010-09-14T22:52:00.013-04:00

Before we resume our regularly scheduled programming, a few words on a film evidently especially anticipated by readers of this site/blog. Like most movie fiends around my age of my gender, I'm a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool John Carpenter fan, and I didn't hesitate for a moment to clear a space in my TIFF sked for his first feature film since 2001's Ghosts of Mars. He's been off his game for years--decades, even--and this is the sort of festival fare that makes me feel like I'm opting for peanuts over the vegetable platter, but still: a no-brainer. Alas and alack, that's doubly true of The Ward. Usually when Carpenter fails, it's because he overthinks--not this time. Amber Heard plays a new patient at a psychiatric institute for criminally hot chicks (fellow inmates include Danielle Panabaker and Lyndsy Fonseca), though Carpenter's so asexual you can forget about Sapphic overtones or witty leering. (This movie must have the most un-titillating all-girl shower scene in cinematic history.) The picture courts the MAXIM demo, verisimilitude be damned, because that's how you cast something you expect to go straight to video, and Carpenter's similarly nuance-free direction all but confirms he had no higher aspirations for The Ward. Which is why I'm baffled that the film is officially called John Carpenter's The Ward: he made it abundantly clear in Gilles Boulenger's interview book that he leaves his name off the title if his heart wasn't in it. A return to form it definitely isn't, in other words--but, worse, aside from its cannibalizing of a few Cundeyian Steadicam moves and the ending to Prince of Darkness (and, again, that lack of sensuality), it doesn't feel like a Carpenter flick. There's no mood, no tension, no originality (and all that that implies in a year which saw the release of Shutter Island). It's deeply stupid, without the balm of his inimitable style, or any style. It relies on jump-scares. It broke my fucking heart. 0.5/****

TIFF 2010 Day 2

2010-09-11T22:34:00.027-04:00

Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who's been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they've decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted--and, one suspects, significantly "opened up"--by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy's relationship. In a fall preview on his delightful blog, Nick Davis summed up his level of anticipation for Jack Goes Boating thusly: "Loved Synecdoche but can't take much more schlub." Truer words, etc. Jack isn't just a schlub, he's the ur-schlub, a maddeningly static individual who has to be nudged into action like a soccer ball, and Hoffman lights and poses himself to look as appetizing as Grimace from the Happy Meals. I much prefer another passion project of Hoffman's, Love Liza: although it operates on the same demented frequency as Jack Goes Boating, there's a whole slew of theatrical affectations to contend with this time around. (You can eventually set your watch to Jack's nervous throat-clearing.) Ortiz is tremendously winning, though, in a bromantic role that reveals a lot more range, not to mention teeth, than Hollywood's ever given him a chance to show. Jack Goes Boating reminded one woman I spoke to of Rocky; I can see it if I squint.

The more aggressively deadpan Curling is the first film I've seen from the well-regarded Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté, and I'm getting a strong Kaurismäkian vibe from him--though VARIETY's review of Curling claims that Côté traffics in "arthouse misery." Maybe it's that a Canadian can see the humour in the sort of wintry desolation this movie depicts and an American can't. Real-life father and daughter Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau play, or perhaps role-play, Jean-François and Julyvonne Sauvageau, rural Quebecers trapped in a prison of the former's making. Lots of parents don't want their children to grow up, but Jean-François seems uniquely determined to freeze Julyvonne on the precipice of womanhood, sheltering her from the outside world to the extent that she doesn't go to school--he buys textbooks for her that probably collect dust--and doesn't get to go to work with him at the bowling alley (where the picture's most overt comedy springs from), because it's not "safe" for a twelve-year-old. She's left to her own devices at home, however, which ironically hastens her loss of innocence once she stumbles on some dead bodies (and, inexplicably, a tiger) during a stroll through the nearby woods. A slow burn that respects the audience's literacy when it comes to subtext, Curling is a gratifyingly dense piece that pings off zeitgeisty anxieties about powerlessness I wouldn't describe as exclusively parental. Further reading: Jason Anderson's cover story on the film and Côté's career in the latest issue of CINEMA SCOPE.

I succumbed to buzz by ending the day with Mark Romanek's Danny Boyle-esque Never Let Me Go, which proved not-uncomplementary to Curling in that they're both about dead-end indoctrinations of the young. Based on the beloved (and unread-by-yours-truly) Kazuo Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go represents an alternative history in which genetic cloning became possible in the fifties, inspiring the government to begin breeding people to give up their organs in adulthood; the story follows a love triangle from its inception at a Hogwarts-like school for future donors to its pitiful "completion" in sterile operating rooms. Never Let Me Go represents, too, my least favourite kind of exploitation: the polite, pretentious kind that, somewhat hypocritically, plays coy with the specifics while getting off on the emotional sadism of its high concept. (The movie is three innocents placidly riding a conveyor belt to a meat-grinder.) The blue-collar filmgoer in me would not stop asking literalminded but no less valid questions Never Let Me Go is above addressing, such as why don't these motherfuckers run? At the risk of accusing the book of same, the whole thing reeks of fear of genre, and while Romanek's direction is certainly moody, it lacks the tone-poem quality that might've transformed evasion into evocation. Credit where credit is due, the kid they cast as young Carey Mulligan (one Isobel Meikle-Small) looks so much like a shrunken version of her that it's actually topical, but my final recommendation is to watch Seconds or Blade Runner again instead.

JACK GOES BOATING: **/****
CURLING: ***1/2/****
NEVER LET ME GO: */****

TIFF 2010 Day 1

2010-09-09T22:48:00.012-04:00

I started the morning off on a bum note by boarding the wrong subway train (which caused me to miss The Town), but other than that, the day went off without a hitch. I found the new homebase of the Festival okay, spotted Karina Longworth (who like most critics of note looks part cartoon character), got mistaken for a stand-up comic (am I the only one who feels bizarrely contrite when this happens?), and managed to park my ass in a cinema just as Stone was beginning to unspool. As an aside, I now see a real upside to holding the press screenings at the Scotiabank instead of the Varsity, as the larger auditoriums are cutting down on the last-minute scrambles to find a seat; at both of my movies today, the first few neck-straining rows were almost entirely empty. It's a throwback, really, to the good old days of the Uptown.

Stone opens...if not promisingly, then intriguingly, with stand-ins for young Robert De Niro and Frances Conroy experiencing what is presumably only an uglier-than-usual day in a loveless marriage as she announces she's leaving him and he threatens to throw their baby daughter out the window if she does. Though this incident is never actually revisited directly, it informs every aspect of the De Niro character, a parole officer who uses his cases as a moral yardstick against his own transgressions and, as we've seen, treats his wife like a prisoner. Into his life enter convicted arsonist Stone (Edward Norton, doing voices now) and Stone's wife (Milla Jovovich), who's intent on expediting her husband's release through her considerable sexual charisma. Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil) frustrates: he has a nice eye for widescreen tableaux and good editing instincts, but despite their dramatic promise his films are crock-pots instead of pressure cookers, and Stone, like his previous work, never peaks in any way that could be conventionally described as satisfying. All kidding about his Travoltan croak aside, Norton is quite good, but the real stars of the show are Jovovich and the woman photographing her, Maryse Alberti, who shows her documentary roots in a close-up of the actress's blotchy legs, only to reveal a deepening interest in all the individual parts--the gumdrop toes, the antenna nipples, the dewy lips--that make up this authentically beautiful creature. De Niro is, alas, uninspired, and it doesn't help that his younger self is played by Enver Gjokaj, an actor with some of the hunger and tabula rasa range De Niro used to have; "Dollhouse" fans will wish for more flashbacks that fail to materialize. Worthy of further exploration: how Angus McLachlan's screenplay echoes the one he wrote for Junebug.

Post-Stone, I leapfrogged across the lobby to the much-anticipated I'm Still Here, which I have to FORCE myself not to type as I'm Not There. Here's my take on the whole Joaquin Phoenix-quits-acting-for-hip-hop thing: yes, it's a hoax--and what's pissing him off in this film is that everybody sees through it. (It suggests he's not a very convincing actor after all.) There are scenes in this movie, like when Puff Daddy tells Phoenix he doesn't like his music enough to take it on as a producer, that are just too well-timed in the vein of embarrassment comedy. Apropos of which, I liked Puff in this a lot more than I expected to: he has this great lecture about the democratization of the entertainment industry disrespecting the hardworking, talented people who deserve to be in it. Ben Stiller's cameo is heroic, too, and we infer real vitriol in his mocking impersonation of Phoenix at the 2009 Academy Awards. I also believe that Phoenix genuinely desired a break from (traditional) acting, that I'm Still Here is going to be as difficult for him to live down as a season of "The Surreal Life" would be, and that he needs a hug. And a Bowflex. Ian's got a full review of this one in the pipeline.

BOTH FILMS: **/****

Scott Pilgrim vs. Your Face

2010-08-14T00:05:00.015-04:00

Not pictured: giant sandwich board labeled "Remember this?" and "Get it?"

Edgar Wright is easily one of the smartest pop-culture mavens working in the movie industry today, which is why his latest film feels like such a betrayal: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (hereafter Scott Pilgrim) is perfectly content to drown itself in 16-bit graphics and comic book flash-bang because, the movie happily concludes, it never had all that much to say in the first place. Shy, mumbling Torontoan Scott (Michael Cera, natch) is a bassist in a shitty garage band who falls head over heels for American delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, before they can commit to a serious relationship, Scott must fight and defeat seven of Ramona's former sweethearts, a super-powered "League of Evil Exes" organized by record producer/final boss Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). It's supposed to be a coming-of-age story as told within the context of an arcade game, but it can only make one statement to that end: fifteen years ago, you were much younger than you are now, and you played video games that were much less sophisticated than they are now. Struggling to articulate the synchronicity between youthful immaturity and pixilated graphics, Scott Pilgrim defaults to hipster detachment--so endlessly amused by its central metaphor (the difficulties of life and romance re-imagined as a linear, Capcom-esque fighting tournament) that it doesn't care to explore what that metaphor means for this new generation or its hopes and desires.

The popular joke around the Internet is that most gamer-geek humor revolves around one tired concept--"video games are not like real life"--and Scott Pilgrim rehashes that tired concept with stunning fidelity. It really, really wants you to see it as ridiculous and absurd: time and again, we are reminded that people do not actually burst into coins after they've been defeated in a fight; that people do not actually "level up" after they've learned an important life lesson; that Michael Cera probably cannot leap twenty feet in the air and perform "64-hit combos." The problem is that this is all weightless navel-gazing--the movie doesn't see anything worth examining in these aesthetic signifiers beyond simple recognition. (Worse still is when it simply lists off a series of pop culture icons: Scott's band, Sex Bob-Omb, features two musicians named after members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and they sing a song that may or may not be called "Launchpad McQuack." Taken from the graphic novel, you say? That doesn't make it any less jarring.) Even Sin City--the epitome of style-as-substance and Scott Pilgrim's closest antecedent--amplified popular noir elements (guns, dames, monochrome) to emphasize the relevant themes (sex, machismo, heartbreak). So when can we discuss video games as elaborate, dream-like fantasies? Or, say, as the only appropriate outlet for a number of colorful, larger-than-life personalities? Never, as far as Scott Pilgrim is concerned. Want to know why Roger Ebert gives video games such a hard time? It's because of juvenile, masturbatory fan-crap like this--lauding the medium not for its aesthetic/thematic content, but for the popular conventions. It's only "fun" in the sense that you can name the game from which a specific sound effect originates.

That's precisely what Wright tried so hard to avoid with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz--in those films, he was always interested in figuring out why zombie/action flicks affected us so deeply. Scott Pilgrim merely congratulates its target audience for playing video games and being all meta about it, and, even worse, those congratulations come at the cost of any human element. You'll notice I have yet to mention that Scott has a few ex-girlfriends of his own (teenaged naïf Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) and Envy Adams (Brie Larson))--but that's because Scott Pilgrim isn't really about anyone or anything, except the feeling that you're part of some exclusive club. This movie is a rebel without a cause in the truest sense of the phrase: a vague collection of culture-fed images, so desperate to draw a line between "them" and "us" that it has no idea what enemy it's supposed to be fighting. * (out of four)

My Baby Shot Me Down

2010-08-12T22:32:00.003-04:00

I sometimes wonder if the firearm would have such a key position in American iconography if Hollywood hadn't kept it there. Sure, we've got the right to own them, but would we want them so badly if, after the settling of the last frontier/slaughter of the last rebellious Indian, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood hadn't convinced us they were an integral part of the national machismo?

The action figure, collaborators Steven Santos, Aaron Aradillas and Matt Zoller Seitz contend, turns to the gun in three stages. Their video essay "Lock & Load" explores these three stages, then ends with a bang. No dry-firing here, and no dud rounds either.

iMacGuffin: Portable Infotech and Suspense Cinema

2010-07-27T02:00:00.010-04:00

Every espionage movie is essentially a treasure hunt. You need a valuable trinket in play to get your spies in the game. More than weapons or money, information -- which in turn allows you to build weapons, or make money, or otherwise manage the fate of the world -- is the most sought-after commodity. For the viewer, the vessel used to smuggle that information is often the coolest thing about it.

Alfred Hitchcock popularized (but did not invent) the term "MacGuffin" to describe a spy flick's motivating object. (1) And in almost every discussion, including his famous interviews with Francois Truffaut, he talked about it in informational terms: "In the writings of Rudyard Kipling, any spy story written around that kind of period or atmosphere concerned the stealing, always, of the plans of the fort. ... Stealing, quote, 'the papers,' unquote."

Who uses paper anymore? The migration of data from print to magnetic storage to digital encoding opened up a whole new range of MacGuffins for filmmakers to exploit, but along the way it also endangered the existence of the MacGuffin itself.

The video series below tries to address data-storage MacGuffins (2) in four different incarnations. In its larval stage -- microfilm -- the iMacGuffin carries information that's important, but we seldom know what it is. Operatives of the 1950s were always after tiny spools of film hidden in shoe soles, in false-bottomed attachés, in shaving cream. And on the microfilm ... what? It's classified, it's top secret, what else is there to know? Hitchcock would say, and did say, "It doesn't matter," but this approach also reflects the authoritarian attitude of the '50s: If your government said it was bad, it was bad.

After Watergate, the paranoid '70s were concerned with overhearing and comprehending, so the audiotape became a spool of raw intrigue. When sound is committed to tape, we grow more intimate with it -- it's murmurs and screams captured for our listening pleasure, over and over again. But can we believe what we hear, and are we really hearing what we think? (3)

The floppy disk and the CD and the DVD-ROM are the coolest things ever, until you've migrated the same information across a dozen of them, at which point they become landfill or drink coasters. Mission: Impossible went high-end in 1996 by packing a list of all the world's spies onto one Zip disk, with no way of knowing the magnetic format was doomed. Fourteen years later, optical data discs are such a commonplace in our homes and offices, how could the one up there on the screen be special? When a trope is satirized by the Coen Brothers, who turned a pathetic spy's CD-ROM into a punchline anti-MacGuffin, its shelf life is nearing the end.

The flash drive, memory stick, whatever you want to call it, makes information pocket-sized. The wee thing represents the powerful modern ease of data transfer, devaluing electronic "secrets" as plot motivators the same way printed newspapers are devalued as informational carriers. It's practically a sideline whenever it appears on the screen, cropping up like a footnote to the main action. Everybody in the audience has one on their keychain, so hammering home its role as an informational lockbox is a non-starter. Sounds like a metaphor for Hollywood, embracing the latest digital technology without realizing that its own business cycle (creation, exhibition, in-home sale) would be disrupted by the movies' new high-tech format (bootleg DVDs, workprint leaks, BitTorrents).

I'm sad to see the suspense/action genre drift away from MacGuffins (4), digital or otherwise, but it's time. The secrets that spies and grifters once plumbed for can no longer be sealed in an envelope. They're dispersed and existential, like Jason Bourne's identity and memory, for instance -- he's not seeking blueprints or software or a network virus, but the subtracted qualities that will make him a whole person. As filmgoers gain better infotech and our computing moves to a distributed "cloud" model, the motivations for onscreen espionage will have to shift into a new realm of ether. Maybe Inception points the way ...

(1) Isaac Niemand's outstanding video "MacGuffin By Hitchcock," with animation by JealousGUY, spells out this concept for newbies way better than I could in any medium.

(2) These are all media for transferring data, not components of a computer per se. There's a separate piece to be written on the way action movies and TV fetishized the microchip for a time, valuing the means to process information over the information that gets processed. That's what IBM did too, and it allowed Microsoft to grow brobdingnagian.

(3) You should've overheard my internal monologue as I debated whether to include photography, cinema's other great recorded-media touchstone, in this overview. I soon decided that art form is so much its own beast that the way we convey it from one user to the next -- David Hemmings teasing Vanessa Redgrave with a film canister in Blow-Up, for example -- is all but irrelevant. In the case of photography, the image matters, but the frame doesn't.

(4) Worth noting, perhaps, that the spelling of "MacGuffin" that has passed into the culture is not the one Hitchcock laid out for Truffaut. He spells it with an E instead of an I.

Update: Find below the entire video essay in one big viewable chunk.

To Go Among Mad People

2010-07-21T00:00:00.005-04:00

Mad Men's third season was a narrative list of bad choices. (If you haven't watched it ahead of Sunday's Season 4 premiere, that's your bad choice, and there are spoilers ahead.) Not that Matthew Weiner's characters have ever been what you'd call right-thinking in their personal lives, but by season's end they'd torn down everything they valued. Betty Draper chose what she believed was her only option to flee suburban ennui, pursuing the same ennui with a different man she barely knew. Peggy Olson went to bed with Don Draper's direct competition. And Don, leading with his chin, fell in with violent drifters and poached his latest extramarital partner far, far too close to home.

Maybe the creators were tired of the Sterling Cooper cloister, and wanted new sets. So assume that Season 4 will open in a new corporate space for the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce -- the only good choice any characters made last year, if you discount Don's coming clean about his past and Sal Romano's stand against sexual harassment. But Don's confession was forced, and Sal's act went hand in hand with his denial of self; if only he'd sought help from the openly gay EuroSmith! (I'm not suggesting the two should have become lovers, the most obvious, tired dramatic path possible -- just that Sal might have found support in coming out to his workplace, if he'd only asked for it.)

I just pray that my favorite character, the Mad Men camera, continues to make perfect choices as it's done all along. This video essay first appeared on this blog last year, on the eve of Season 3, and contains spoilers for Season 2. That said, if you're still worried that two-year-old plot points from a TV drama will burn your toast and poison your dog, I don't know what to do with you.

Thoughts/wishes/expectations for this new season? Did you find the third season unfocused, and hope for balance to be restored? What's the best way to mix an Old-Fashioned?

News, Everyone!: "Futurama" Season 6, Part I (6.1 - 6.5)

2010-07-19T15:45:00.007-04:00

"Futurama"'s sixth season began with the Hypnotoad--and, theoretically, it should have been a welcome sight for any fan eager to celebrate the show's triumphant return to the airwaves. However, this immediate retreat to a familiar gag was enough to give me pause. Not only did this sequence forge uncomfortable parallels to Fry's old complaint about "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad" ("This show's been going downhill since Season Three!"), but the iTunes version of this bumper even features a stern warning from Bender: "This has been a test of the Emergency Hypnotoad System. Had this been an actual hypnosis, you would go limp and watch whatever crap comes on next. Comin' up next, 'Futurama'!" It immediately reminds of The Simpsons Movie and its prologue--you know, the scene in which Homer mocks the viewer for paying to see a television show lazily brought to the big screen.

The first thing you have to mention here is that an unavoidable seam exists between "Futurama"'s original broadcast run on Fox and the first few episodes on Comedy Central--they feel much more distant and impersonal than any of the first seventy-two episodes, or even any of the four movies. But there are minor indications that this is distance is intentional. Just compare "Futurama"'s two "triumphant returns": when the show came back to conquer the direct-to-video market, Planet Express had just been rescued from its own premature cancellation; this time, as the series proper starts up again, nearly every member of the crew has been violently killed and reduced to a skeletal corpse. Could this be a metaphor for the creators' ultimate opinion about the movies that brought them back in the first place? Find the answers you crave as Fry questions the Professor's methods in bringing his crew back to life:

Fry: Fetal stem cells? Aren't those controversial?
Farnsworth: In your time, yes. But nowadays, shut up!

It's a moment that clearly demands the viewers' respect. This is where "Futurama"'s sense of self-deprecation differs from that of its yellow-skinned counterpart: where The Simpsons Movie calls attention to its own faults and fails to defuse them, "Futurama" actively silences you by stating that its logistical intricacies are not yours to dictate. It's a reboot, after all! I'm the boss here, damn it, and we're doing this my way! It's undoubtedly an attempt on the writers' part to start anew, to bring "Futurama" back to a comfortable status quo on their own terms--and, perhaps most importantly, to cast off the shackles they imposed upon themselves with Into the Wild Green Yonder. Endings? Resolutions? Death? Several characters "[go] all Blade Runner"* in order to find new ways to invalidate them all, because death is for suckers in this brave new season on cable television. When Leela falls into a coma following her rebirth, the heartbroken Fry creates a robot that is written over with her personality--which causes all sorts of confusion when the genuine article reawakens.

While "Futurama"'s meta-resurrections are calculated experiments meant to bring back old friends, not all of them are accomplished quite so literally. Bender is equipped with one of the Professor's doomsday devices to replace his damaged power supply; in order to work off the excess energy, he must "party" 24/7, lest he explode. "Partying" is applied here strictly in the physical sense, a perpetual disco-dance that hardly aspires to the heights of debauchery for which Bender is so famous. But this minor subplot does well to quickly re-establish his personality in the compressed half-hour format: rude, callous, and gleefully self-absorbed. No character development necessary. All of this points to the real reasons why "Futurama" saw limited success in feature-length--movies have to establish a singular purpose, whereas individual episodes of a television series are always pieces of a larger puzzle. They can make minor additions to a long-established theme, they can forge new rivalries and friendships, or they can be silly asides that provide a much-needed break from the big picture.

Unfortunately, "Rebirth" cannot overcome all of the obstacles set before it--namely, that "tender display of tonguesmanship" that ended Into the Wild Green Yonder. Based on how its first "last episode" ("The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings") ended, I used to argue that a theoretical resurrection of the series would find Fry and Leela on the rebound from a failed, off-screen romance. After all, Leela knew how much Fry loved her, but she also knew why she couldn't love him back--his innate immaturity--and "Playthings"' final moment was a clear step forward that was, in turn, destined to fail. Even when dancing around this idea, Bender's Big Score reinforces it: Fry couldn't compete for Leela's heart when pitted against an older, wizened version of himself--and that, too, ended tragically. But now, here we are. Their feelings are out in the open and they became a couple, more or less... and it just feels so empty. We have yet to see if this is a case of "Moonlighting" syndrome, but whenever Fry and Leela share a tender moment in these new episodes, I'm overcome by a distinct sense of awkwardness. To its credit, "Rebirth" acknowledges that awkwardness and attempts to rewind a little--the events of that episode leading to a half-spoken hiatus on their relationship--but it still feels forced. Maybe the simple truth is that "Futurama" can't overcome those final moments of Into the Wild Green Yonder. There's just no way to erase the impertinence with which this new relationship was thrown together. No backsies.

The second episode of Season Six, "In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela," is certainly intended to represent that new status quo--and, as far as such things go, it's not too bad. At the very least, it reminds us that not much has changed since the Great Hiatus: no doubt through a Watchmen-like grab for power, Richard Nixon's head is still the President of Earth (and West's "werewolf" non-impression is still delightful--"Aroooo!"); Zapp Brannigan is still a childish, manipulative jerk; Kif is still his exasperated second-in-command. Zapp and Leela are sent on a "one-man" mission to destroy a death sphere satellite "censoring" obscene planets, only to crash land and re-enact a Garden of Eden scenario. Meanwhile, everyone else at Planet Express attempts to drive the satellite away by convincing their fellow man to ease up on their sleazy ways. It's cute and it's breezy--it's just not very funny. Maybe that's because the episode's allotted twenty-two minutes are so evenly divided between "A" plot and "B" plot that neither one has much time to forge a point. Left to their own devices, the "V-GINY" satellite (inexplicably voiced by Chris Elliott in the episode's final moments) could have been a sharp satire of media censorship (or, as it seems to intend, a satire of human debauchery), and Zapp and Leela's time in Eden could have been a reasonable parody of the Bible; smashed together, they don't boast anything of much worth. The best bits here are the interludes that reinterpret the plot as "The Transcredible Exploits of Zapp Brannigan," a send-up of '30s serials that perfectly captures their cheapo special effects and overt racism. In fact, this episode might be best described as an excuse for Billy West to exercise his Brannigan voice--the stalwart baritone that so often descends into a girlish whine.

Episode 6.3, "Attack of the Killer App," can only be described as a shrug-worthy attempt to appease that ever-elusive creature called "relevance." Monolithic corporate head Mom becomes the stand-in for Apple as she foists iPhones and Twitter on a universe desperate for the cutting edge of technology--and it all ends with a zombie-related metaphor for mindless consumerism that is, somehow, more obvious than Dawn of the Dead. Fry and Bender engage in a war for "Twitcher" followers, filming various moronic stunts for the amusement of the internet, which comes to a head when Fry discovers one of Leela's horrible secrets: a singing boil named "Susan" (Craig Ferguson...?) growing on her butt. There's something admirable about how this episode combines the two intended purposes of viral videos--star fuel and schadenfreude--with its version of Susan Boyle, but the whole thing still smacks of desperation. Don't forget that these were the guys who were writing about the distant future in 1999, and they were making references to CD players. "Life as a video game," as written in 2002 (3.18, "Anthology of Interest II"), mostly featured references to games produced before the industry crash of 1983. Methinks technology is creeping along even faster than they anticipated, and they're scrambling to think of ways to keep up. As such, their potshots at social networking and digital entertainment tend to feel like the old-man grievances that we dismissed a long time ago. (See also: the reappearance of minor character Scoop Chang, once of the BEIJING BUGLE, now the "NEW NEW YORK TIMES online podcast blog comments editor.") Sure, everyone had their misgivings about Twitter, but find yourself a pack of great writers and artists to follow and you have no idea how you got along without it. Of course, there's a lot of detritus to wade through, and this episode definitely aims its sights at the breakfast-and-weather Tweeters, along with the YouTube sociopaths--problems, both, that need to be addressed. But in a series that has often equated evil with excess and waste (even in this episode!), it feels like a knee-jerk dismissal of everything that new media has to offer.

We live in a world where advancements in technology--the kind of stuff that comes straight outta science fiction--always seem right around the corner. (I did appreciate the quick cameo from Flexo, stating that even sentient machines will become obsolete... but then, we've already talked about that in "Obsoletely Fabulous," haven't we?) But "Futurama"'s most effective jokes about the future always dabble in the impossible. Somehow, our descendants will utilize their unheard-of science to absurdly logical ends. Don't forget that these were also the guys who celebrated their second episode ("The Series Has Landed") by putting a chintzy theme park on the moon--is there any better way to encapsulate the human lust for adventurism, and how it inevitably leads to convenience and laziness? For all intents and purposes, "Attack of the Killer App" talks about instant sharing and social networking in the same way we've been talking about them for a while now. The willing surrender of your privacy... ridiculous apps... being hit up by Apple for more unnecessary upgrades... surely there's more to say beyond those old chestnuts.

There's not a whole lot to say about "Proposition Infinity" (6.4) except that it suffers from most of the same problems as "Attack of the Killer App." Amy breaks up with Kif over her predilection for bad boys--which leads her into a relationship with the ultimate bad boy, Bender. I have to admit that I felt a wave of relief when Kif left the picture, if only for this one episode--because it allowed Amy's personality to flourish in a way that it hadn't since she first committed herself to him: it's much easier to recognize the coy and flirtatious façade, and how it betrays a naïve sweetness. Unfortunately, whatever character development could be culled from this trial separation was overruled by another issue that all the kids are talking about. Bender soon proposes to Amy, and they become passionate advocates for robosexual marriage.

Gay marriage is going to be a hot-button topic in the United States for a long time to come, but "Proposition Infinity" practically acknowledges that it's preaching to the choir. I appreciated the lampoon of the "slippery slope" argument, not only for its carefully-built punchline--I suspect that I will carry the phrase "ghost and horse" with me for a while--but because it mentions that, in the far-off year of 3010, gay marriage itself has been long accepted into law and society. And then there's frequent "Futurama" guest star George Takei, who appears here, without comment, as a debate moderator. At the very least, this episode clearly sees a day when we won't have to make such drastic distinctions between lifestyles. However, 2010 has already seen deep tonal shifts in the way we talk about the controversy surrounding gay marriage and the relevant laws. Prop 8 is almost two years out, and in many ways--or at least, the ways that concern this episode--the lines have already been drawn on either side of the issue. Parodies of the infamous "Gathering Storm" ad have already run their course (and we all remember that one featuring Takei) and there's nothing to gain by pointing out the hypocrisy of those who fiercely oppose marriage equality. Is it too obvious to say that this episode would have played a lot better in July 2009?

After this string of clunkers, I still had to admit my skepticism--it's far too tempting, far too easy, to say that "Futurama" was just getting used to the half-hour format again; that they needed a little time to shake off the rust. But "The Duh-Vinci Code" (6.5) is the first episode that actually justifies the excuse, primarily because it doesn't give a shit about being relevant. The pop culture references are dated, but not in a way that matters. At last. After a parody of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?" brings Fry's limitless stupidity to the forefront, the plot works its way around to The Da Vinci Code as the Planet Express crew investigates the centuries-old clues hidden in Leonardo's work. But the road eventually leads to a long-lost region of space and a much more earth-shattering discovery than the identity of Christ... It turns out that Leonardo da Vinci is not just an immortal alien, but also the dumbest person on his native planet, eager to take revenge on those who scorned him. It's a wonderfully roundabout way to demonstrate that intellect is relative (notice, also, the apparent throwaway about Zoidberg's doctorate being in art history), and that the iconic geniuses of the past probably had just as many moments of pettiness and vindictiveness as the geniuses we know more intimately.

It's pretty easy to pick apart, and it may not seem like much ground is being broken here, but "The Duh-Vinci Code" is bound to become a vital chapter in "Futurama"'s history of irreverence. Religion isn't half as important to the writers as art and science, and for them, the "conspiracy" that they cooked up--the father of invention was a fraud and a fuck-up--has greater theological ramifications than anything in The Da Vinci Code. (Indeed, the fact that Fry and the Professor are literally sent into the heavens to find da Vinci makes a fine metaphor for the idols we worship--better than a similar gag found in The Beast with a Billion Backs, anyway.) It's a slightly nihilistic view of mankind's achievements, but it's also a mind game that reinforces the bare essentials. Like the opening strains of "Rebirth," "The Duh-Vinci Code" is trying to live up to its own standards and no one else's. Subsequently, it's the first complete episode that doesn't feel rushed, malnourished, or obligated to address any points that it doesn't want to make. Best of all, linking that mindset to Fry's "brain thing" has finally resulted in an episode that expands on years of characterization. Time and again we have been told that Fry is the Chosen One of the "Futurama" universe because he lacks the "delta brain wave," but this is the first time his lovable idiocy is directly responsible for saving the day. It begs the question: what makes a great man?

It's pretty fantastic, but right now, "The Duh-Vinci Code" represents a moment of cautious optimism--the moment you can tell yourself that maybe, just maybe, "Futurama" can move past its failures and make this sixth season worthwhile. Here's hoping.

*Blade Runner is a wonderful comparison to make--not just as a reflection of the robotic-clone plot, but also a reference to "Futurama" as a property that has seen numerous endings and reinterpretations.

Meme Streets

2010-07-17T00:06:00.004-04:00

So, It's out.

What'd you think?

Here's a meme to fill in as you're formulating a response:

1. Stupid movie for Stupid People: ________

2. Smart movie for Stupid People: ________

3. Smart movie for Smart People: ________

4. Stupid movie for Smart People: ________

an example:

1. Grown-Ups

2. Inception

3. There Will Be Blood

4. Evil Dead 2

Yes? And, expanding that, which of these four is most likely to make a bajillion dollars? I mean, isn't Avatar a prime example of #2? But Titanic is #1, right? And where does that leave Star Wars? #4 says my nostalgia, but, eek, #1?

Oh - and the new trailer for The Social Network? It was better the first time I saw it when it was the Parallax Test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GJcCUtdVOM

Discuss.

Blockbusted

2010-07-05T02:57:00.003-04:00

With the impending, inevitable demise of BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO fast on the heels of it being kicked off the NYSE for allowing its stock to plummet to, oh, around .18 cents/share, wanted to take this opportunity to allow us all to share our shadenfreude or - perish the thought - our regrets at the passing of this monolithic enterprise.

Best moment with the franchise? When Ethan Hawke's Hamlet does his soliloquy in its aisles; the most brilliant re-imagination in all of a brilliant film. You know what we don't see enough of? Michael Almereyda. Can't wait for his upcoming Jonathan Lethem adaptation TONIGHT AT NOON.

Also sort of like when the Fight Club boys break in and electro-magnet-erase all the tapes because 1999 = longer ago than you think.

Worst moments? The pricing, late fees, generally apathetic and ignorant staff, ridiculous stocking policy, legacy of closed mom & pops?

Here's my personal fave: when they took a poll to see what people wanted to see in the movies with the idea that they were influential enough an entity (like Wal-Mart, fer instance) to directly affect the content of films yet to be released. Call it a test audience without a screening. Chalk one up for the good guys.

Toy Story 3 Talkback

2010-06-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

Walter reviewed it here; what did you think of the film? Let's talk Toy Story 3 and all things related.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania - Creepy

2010-06-12T12:43:00.006-04:00

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival's official website.

Back in my early-twenties, there was one summer job I had where I found myself doodling animals saying inexplicable--and, needless to say, often repulsive--things. It started out as an effort to break the ice with my only co-worker (we spent most of our time locked in a makeshift editing bay together), then escalated into a constant test of her boundaries. I happened across some of these drawings recently, and they are resolutely unfunny: a bunny threatening to kill your mother with an axe, a frog telling a fart joke; in retrospect, I wonder why said co-worker eventually invited me to her wedding. Stockholm Syndrome's my best guess. Nevertheless, during the subterranean Looney Tune that is Everybody (animated; ds. Jessie Mott; 4 mins.; ½*/****), I began to feel grateful that there was no real public forum to display those cartoons back then, because all I'd really be doing is inviting some asshole on the Internet to dismiss it as adolescent shit. This is adolescent shit. Rendered in crude, impatient watercolours, various deer, bats, goats, etc. are anthropomorphized via cheaply cryptic remarks like "I'm too small in the necessary spaces," and "You paralyze me with disgust. You're spilling open like a gelatinous achin' belly." To which I reply, by way of Al Pacino in Heat, "Don't waste my motherfuckin' time!"

Credited as "un film improvisé," Québec's Jardin Dead End (live-action; d. Stéphane Laponte; 10 mins.; **½/****) continues a nihilistic trend that will be hard-shaken by the "Creepy" program, but I laughed and was suitably impressed by how well it hangs together as an improvisation, which here clearly refers less to ad-libbed dialogue--the acting is free of Method tics--than to a sort of spur-of-the-moment invention. (Dressing up for an exorcism, a priest dons a lucha libre mask.) When a lonely guy hits on an unfathomably-single woman at a nightclub, she's receptive but warns him that she's possessed by the Devil. He clearly presumes she's being metaphorical, but before long she's spitting pea soup at him; while the sex is good, he can't take her to a nice restaurant. Alas, the opening shot of a dog getting pasted to the road by a passing car is a dreadful miscalculation: it's not just a Seth MacFarlane moment of bad taste, it's pointless bad taste, and the film instantly faces an uphill struggle to redeem itself.

Comparatively chaste, Britain's The Elemental (live-action; d. Robert Sproul-Cran; 12 mins.; **) is also peculiarly unsatisfying. The synopsis at the official site says, "Karen's mother used to terrify her with tales of a presence on the dark tenement stair--something you should never look at. Years later Karen reluctantly returns to the house she loathed to find her elderly parents, and finds it facing demolition. But her childhood fear still waits within..." This is all very helpful backstory at best abstractly indicated by the film, wherein Karen discovers her parents in a zombified state that I gather is out of the ordinary--though in my experience a lot of elderly English couples are just like this, vacantly waiting for their adult offspring to brew the tea. The problem, ultimately, is that the movie suggests a pre-credits teaser rather than a self-contained story. And maybe it's supposed to (i.e., maybe it's a sample scene to secure further funding), but I can't say the slow pace or banal monster made me wanna know more. Back to exceedingly poor judgment with the Canadian Jack (live-action; d. Kryshan Randal; 5 mins.; ½*/****), and no wonder: it was produced for the Bloodshots Canada 48-Hour Film Challenge, whereby contestants are given a horror subgenre, a weapon, a prop, a line of dialogue, and two days to fashion these ingredients into a short subject. In my experience, that kind of pressure cooker is more likely to breed gonzo irreverence than anything resembling inspiration. Sure enough, not only does the movie...overstep with its baby-in-peril climax, it also--I'm not the first writer to point this out--conspicuously recalls Treevenge in its tale of pumpkins getting even with humanity for the jack-o'-lantern.

What to say about the morbid MRDRCHAIN (animated; d. Ondŕej Švadlena; 10 mins.; ***/****), from Prague, other than that its title cracks me up? A vivisected, quasi-human being (apparently called Sliceman) traverses a dark city in the desert where all the architecture looks like stretched tendons or rectal cavities. A marquee gains temporary illumination as each lightbulb sacrifices itself to violently inject life into the next--until one of the little guys refuses to conform, thus breaking the "murder chain." It might just be a desperate bid to decrypt the film, but one can't help drawing an allegorical line back to Švadlena's childhood, when he escaped the Czech Republic by crossing the Yugoslavian-Austrian border on foot. His vision is an idiosyncratic one, in any case, finally seizing on the potential for those creepy botched character renderings sometimes shown on Pixar and DreamWorks DVDs to become misfit Mickey Mouses of their own.

It's disappointing to chase something so fresh with something as stale as Canada's 5 Minute Dating (live-action; d. Peter Hatch; 6 mins.; *½/****). How many more wacky turbo-dating montages must I sit through until I've reached my quota? How many more skits will solve the problem of an absurd character's bachelorhood by pairing him off with his distaff equivalent before that particular well runs dry? As the debonair monster who shows up late for speed dating (with his monocle, top hat, and apple-doll complexion, he could be an undead Mr. Peanut), Gustavo Franco cuts a sympathetic Beast hopelessly searching for his Beauty. Then he's matched with the disfigured Sarah, and it's kismet. I saw the twist-ending coming, but in fairness to the filmmakers, I thought it would be the mirror image of what we get--which is hilariously meanspirited. As conventional as it would have been to have these two waltz off into the sunset together, one is again left waiting for sincerity to return to the movies.

Another Canadian entry, Chloe and Attie (live-action; d. R. Scooter Corkle; 8 mins.; **/****), grows progressively less intriguing the more it reveals, both literally and figuratively. The schematically-chosen camera angles--faces are rarely the subject of shots at first--slowly morsel out the premise, in which a middle-aged woman watches over her ailing sister in a small apartment. (One is reminded early on as we peer through a doorway at a woman with her back to us of that moment in Rosemary's Baby that had audiences craning their necks to "see" around a corner.) The titular siblings have a co-dependent relationship that seems headed for a Dead Ringers-style denouement until the filmmakers effectively grant them a sentimental reprieve, and once we finally see how dangerous Chloe--or is it Attie?--is, it is to laugh, really. It's a short whose reach greatly exceeds its grasp, though it didn't tax my patience like Scotland's monotonous Battenberg (animated; d. Stewart Combie; 12 mins.; */****). Imagine a scatological Fantastic Mr. Fox performed with rotten and emaciated animals, as a squirrel and a magpie butt heads over the titular cake and other things in a country kitchen.

Again programmers saved the best for last. Shot in 'scope, the BAFTA-nominated Off Season (live-action; d. J. Van Tulleken; 13 mins.; ****/****) transposes the boy-and-his-dog archetype of post-apocalypse flicks to a frozen tundra that obviously and, I think, intentionally (so rarely do we see this much snow on screen), brings John Carpenter's The Thing to mind, using it to provoke a Pavlovian dread in the viewer. Our surly hero and his underfed terrier companion have survived something others have not, or have lingered longer in cottage country than they should have; he spends his days looting abandoned houses, his nights guzzling whatever liquor his scavenging has yielded. Indeed, this is a quietly devastating portrait of alcoholism couched in a genre framework rife with haunted houses and bitter "Twilight Zone" ironies. A truly frightening film, it heralds writer-director Jonathan Van Tulleken as the next big name in horror. With any luck.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania - Freaky

2010-06-04T10:49:00.009-04:00

The Worldwide Short Film Festival got underway this past Tuesday in Toronto and continues until Sunday, June 6th. Click here to visit the fest's official website.

It's tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can't possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we'll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let's hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France's The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend's identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type's bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming--this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion--and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto--but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park--but is he hurting for inspiration?

I sincerely doubt that Norwegian writer-director Sara Eliasson thought she'd be labelled uninspired or derivative when she came up with the concept of a post-apocalyptic world where children rule and language is both dying and a MacGuffin, yet the dystopia of Still Birds (live-action; 13 mins.; **/****) is too redolent of Bad Boy Bubby to ignore, while the ragamuffin with the angelic singing voice is such an indelible part of The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover that seeing another one here feels like copyright infringement. (The constant mewling on the soundtrack, meanwhile, prompted somebody in the next room to ask if I was watching Eraserhead.) It's a shame, because Eliasson is capable of delivering the odd arresting image all her own, the best of them--that of a dying queen draped in a robe of stuffed animals--incidentally the only one in the film to exploit the cast's native innocence for something other than grotesque shock value. Speaking of shock value, Denmark's Clean Carousel (animated; d. Andreas Bødker; 2 mins.; ***/****) violates a very specific taboo with an impishness I can only describe as Von Trier-ian. Ditto a determinedly primitive aesthetic that's rather effective as a psychic projection of the main character, an obsessive caretaker of a merry-go-round whose solitariness and emotional seesawing between euphoria and horror are paralleled in the spartan, similarly binary-minded Flash animation.

From medium (stop-motion) to aesthetic (sickly) to concept (grim fairytale), Spain's The Twin Girls of Sunset Street (Les Bessons del Carrer de Ponent) (animated; ds. Marc Riba & Anna Solanas; 12 mins.; *½/****) is an uncanny Brothers Quay pastiche. (All that's missing is a soundtrack by Tool.) The eponymous villainesses are decrepit old sisters who steal children, strip them of gender by shaving their heads, and use their body parts in the preparation of various elixirs that are popular with what I presume is the local apothecary, who looks, for reasons unclear, like Chaplin's Tramp gone to seed. (I think they're supposed to be cannibals as well.) In the end, the film may be entirely too ersatz for its own good: I'm not a big Quay fan, and found it nailed the oppressive dourness of their work without transcending it; and yet, I can easily see devotees rejecting it for getting as close as it does to the Quays' style without being the real deal--like a forgery. An unlikely palate cleanser, Israel's To Kill a Bumblebee (live-action; ds. Sharon Maymon & Tal Granit; 7 mins.; **½/****) opens with the more alpha dog of two hunters thoughtlessly killing a bumblebee, then shows the pair quickly become equally desensitized to taking human lives after accidentally killing "something Asian" and gunning down the witness to that, and each subsequent, murder. The fact that we ourselves are disturbed by the first couple of deaths and laughing uproariously by the time the body count is approaching the teens doesn't necessarily prove anything, but it's food for thought about the hollowing toll of violence. Still, as cut and dry as it sounds, this was the first time watching this batch of shorts where I felt like I was missing out on a deeper cultural context for the film. I'd love to read an Israeli take on it, if only to have its peculiarly specific hostility towards Thais illuminated for me.

At 37 seconds in length, The Tail Gunner (animated; d. uncredited; */****) is barely worth mentioning: a Furby-type creature dreams he's a WWII flying ace; this isn't a short, it's a bumper. Then there's the interminable Beauty Plus Pity (live-action/animated; ds. Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby; 14 mins.; *½/****), which isn't really a movie, either. Indeed, to its credit, it's not like anything I've ever seen on screen before--though it is a lot like many an ultra-didactic, would-be avant-garde ("would be," if not for all the didacticism) high-school play I've sat through. Made by New York-based Canadian artists, the piece is half PowerPoint presentation done up in the style of airline-safety pamphlets, half found-feeling footage of a hunting party. Over the video-based material, a lunatic narrator with a Lee Perry-esque voice recites Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" and advocates the killing of animals as a way of communing with nature (this section is described in official literature as "part apologia and part call to arms"); in cartoon form, an anthropomorphized beaver holds a slideshow--hello, unauthorized still from Sixteen Candles--to aid a very human tale of woe involving the Catholic church's expulsion of a grieving mother for not preventing her daughter's alcohol-related death; and I compulsively check the timecode, however fascinated I am by the irreconcilable politics and inscrutable sincerity of the thing. In any event, I would maybe change that titular plus to a minus.

But it's arguably more palatable than The Prince of Milk (live-action; d. Eisuke Naitou; 15 mins.; */****), a student film reminiscent of amateurish Japanese gross-outs like Living Hell, if not half as endearing. The elliptical plot finds a possibly-retarded teenage boy killing himself after some giggly schoolgirls catch him jerking off and nickname him "The Prince of Milk" based on his long, ropey ejaculations. Shades of The Grudge, this manifests a vengeful, possibly-retarded spirit who goes around dry-humping the female student body and stabbing them repeatedly, all the while regurgitating milk onto their faces and into their mouths. Ten years later, the "Milk Prince" appears to be in a psych ward, where a schoolgirl rams an umbrella deep up his ass then opens it to protect herself from the arterial spray. Sorry for having given away the ending just now, but how often do you get to type something like that? I do like that it was shot in Academy ratio, or at least transferred that way to video, complete with frayed matte edges that bring super8 incongruously to mind.

They saved the best for last. Rounding out the "Freaky" portion of the WWSFF's Midnight Mania program, the UK's Yellow Belly End (animated; d. Philip Bacon; 9 mins.; ***½/****) is a deliciously absurd specimen, ripe for interpretation and stealthily emotional; no surprise that it's racked up an impressive number of awards. At the edge of the world, a man trainspots the animals he sees, keeping a running tally of which ones leap off the horizon to their presumed death by marking it in a book and taking a corresponding jellybean. I should clarify that there are no animals, per se, only people in Miyazakian costumes--like the man himself, who's dressed as a canary. When he inherits a suitcase with a bloody, beaten, and gagged "mouse" inside, he's confronted by a compulsive urge to give the mouse that last push he needs. Is it coldbloodedness? Pity? Completism? Or is it simply pretext for leaving his post and becoming more than a spectator in this society? (Given that the title links his costume to cowardice, it seems an act of bravery.) A late-developing romance in which the "bird" finds his complement in a cow avoids conventional geek uplift by distilling whatever bond they have to its temporariness. For all its accomplishment, including a perceptive sound design, I can't believe this is a student film.

We Lost

2010-05-29T10:36:00.034-04:00

---here there be spoilers---

Summer of 2005, I was so sick I couldn't see straight, but one thing I did notice was comic books had come to television. Through a haze of sleep-deprived delirium, it seemed to me the season finales of two J.J. Abrams joints were sequential art turned to moving pictures, working their respective genre cliffhangers the way funny books had done so well for generations. Alias, I recalled from healthier times, was winding down, but this Lost thing was just getting started. And though I hadn't seen a single other episode, I decided I should get better and do just that, 'cause I really, really wanted to know why Walt was kidnapped, and what was at the bottom of the Hatch. As someone whose fail-safe life support has always been story, the question 'what happens next?' took on personal importance. I needed answers, first from myself, and then, after I'd found a way to heal, from this intriguing show. Cue credits.

For five seasons, Lost inspired and moved me. I enjoyed Season One's soapy setup, and unlike many, dug the heck outta Season Two's focus on Locke and the iconic fable of brothers Eko and Yemi. As Season Three's character backstories ran out of steam to power the show's engine and narrative shifted gears to uncover the island's secrets instead, I was on board for the ride, and rewarded, I believe, by Season Four's luminous "The Constant", and Season Five's admirable, internally consistent handling of time travel (so much smarter than the Star Trek reboot kludge). This was the closest we'd come so far, I cheered, to nerdvana breaching the mainstream without compromising its pocket-protector principles. But come Six, my Season of Discontent, as each week I traded tears and goosebumps for groans and winces, I wondered if my chosen Geek Emperors were naked all along, and half a decade of compelling mytho-mystery was mere misdirection to kill time.

I'll say this for the finale: it gave the actors some emotion to play in a season starved for it, where characters who once carried the show (Sayid, rendered expressionless by a poisoned fountain of eternal life; Sun, separated from her love/hate hubby for 30 episodes until a throwaway beach reunion and hasty kill-off; Big Bad Ben become bit player with only a smidge more dialogue than pilot Frank Lapidus) sat idly on their squares of the chessboard asking Smocke where to go and what to do next. Thank God for Terry O'Quinn's wonderful, nuanced line readings, saving even a 'flash-sideways' gimmick that unspooled like wish-fulfillment fanfic (and not from the internet this time, but the writers room)! Therein, perhaps, lies Lost's most interesting payoff: a role-reversal that revealed a viewership more willing and able to backfill story gaps than the show's creators. It was Hurley, audience surrogate, after all, who inherited the island, and Scott Brown in Wired had it right: this fiction was fulfilled by the cloud. Without fan theories, what was found in Lost besides:

MOTHER EARTH ALLISON JANNEY
I've made it so you can't hurt each other.

MARK PELLEGRINO
I see. (kills Titus Welliver) Now I'm all you've got.

MOTHER EARTH ALLISON JANNEY
Watch over this glowing log flume tunnel, okay?

MARK PELLEGRINO
Why?

MOTHER EARTH ALLISON JANNEY
Because. Life. Death. Everything. Drink this.

MARK PELLEGRINO
Sure.

Lotsa other Losties have weighed in, definitively, about all the threads left dangling from Jacob's loom (here's a fine example, courtesy FFC Chief Chambers: College Humor). I share their frustration, but for me, whether 'Darlton' had the show mapped out from the beginning isn't the issue. Even obsessive long-form planners like Joe Straczynski understand an outline is just a guide; signposts are there to keep you on track, but without room to adapt and invent along the way, your story can't surprise or surpass its initial conditions. That is to say, making it up as you go along is part of the magic, and certainly a matter of course in serialized storytelling for TV, where actors can opt out, networks might decide not to renew, and writing duties change hands. To elegantly walk the tightrope, adjusting on the fly and honoring what's come before while retrofitting new elements onto existing mythology, is the job, and if I may come full-circle, comic book creators have done said job since the medium's inception. In funny books it's called retroactive continuity (retcon), and it's a skillset I wish the Lost team, avowed comics dorks, had brought to bear for their conclusion.

It's not outside their capability, see. They retconned beautifully, I feel, all the way from Seasons Two through Five, each year widening the perspective to show a bigger picture, a deeper drama, than the one we'd so far assumed was underway. Ben Linus and the Others and Dharma in Season Two. Jacob and the Smoke Monster in Seasons Three and Four. And Season Five's coup de grace, when our castaways were smoothly shoehorned into their own histories as catalysts of fate via an entertaining, emotionally satisfying, and airtight time-travel execution. Still, though I appreciate the thematic sense of 'turtles all the way down', discovering this year that twins Jacob and Nameless didn't know anything more about the island than anyone else we'd come to view as a secret-keeping authority, and neither did their crazy ma, became too painful a metaphor for the Lost team's own relationship with their audience: stop asking, we won't answer, every middleman's a fraud, and even the people at the top follow rules without question. I think we deserved better. Don't you?

HIKEEBA!!

2010-05-26T00:00:00.003-04:00

This ...

... is not this ...

... although either one can result in this:

This guy ...

... is not this guy ...

... but when they get together it is AWESOME:

This is Japan:

This is distinctly not:

Therefore, this ...

... cannot be this ...

... although it has the potential to become this:

And this guy ...... who used to get his ass kicked on film by this guy ...

... should really know the difference.

thirds

2010-05-23T02:55:00.000-04:00

So a brief topic for the hours between now and the next thing…

Having just watched Exorcist 3 again for the first time in a bit, I was stricken by its craft and the quality of its dread. Sure it’s edited by a trio of real idiots, jumping around like a fucking rat on a griddle – but Brad Dourif as the Gemini Killer is fantastic, ditto Scott Wilson’s zoned-out Dr. Wilson – not to mention a nice little cameo by Jason Miller that’s never failed to freak me out. George C. Scott looks like he’s about to die at any moment from some kind of congestive, stress-related event, and in his defense I have to say that the film is one of the few that earns its jump-scares. The ending is compromised, but the build-up is exceptional and honorable, and having just logged a review of the genuinely awful Legion, it’s nice to see a thinking-person’s horror film done well.

So the brief topic… on the eve of the third Toy Story: best second sequels.

I’ll start us off with this film, the third Children of the Corn flick with f/x by Screaming Mad George, and the just awesome Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Speak of the Devil

2010-05-23T02:00:00.014-04:00

Lovely piece of fan mail following the Shrek Forever After review:

Subject: just some more unsolicited email from a reader

Having read a considerable number of the reviews on this website I am
puzzled by the amount of apparent energy given to such self-selected and
self-serving projects as explaining why the Michael Bays and the Shrek 4s
etc etc are crap.

oh-really

I would think (and we all have our opinions don’t we) a reviewer – that is,
a cinephile – would wash out the terrible aftertaste of a Michael Bay
production with at least a sense of humour (one reason being that we all
knew what the reviewer was getting himself into when at the ticket kiosk,
even if, as it apparently turns out, said reviewer somehow didn’t).

But you seem to take some perverse sense of delight in explaining, quite
seriously it would seem(?), why a Shrek 4 is bad.

What would spur someone to do that with their time? Seriously, the reviewer
comes across in the “review” as depressed, distracted.

You folks seem educated in the worst text-book way - in that you do not know
how to apply it usefully. So you pick on movies as pretext to platform how
much you “know” (Prime case in point: the review of the latest Disney
animated feature (forget the name) in which the “reviewer” bases part of his
critique on the opinion that Disney is “evil”… ya-awn!... I mean - oh
really. Yes yes and Sony is what – “good”?).

You see, you become a cliché. You do the intellectual equivalent of taking
candy from a baby and then seem to take pride in it. What you pass off as
wit is really sophomoric bitching, and is at least partly so because you do
not have sufficient insight into the broader scope of genre to make your
slicing and dicing interesting. So you attach a Disney animation to social
evil and injustice. Give me a break. In this sense you provide humour but
it appears unintentional.

I s’pose I could hang around and wait for your scintillating and searing
reviews of Shreks 5 and 6, but I think I have already read them, at least a
few times.

Say, why not fill up the viewing roster with some interesting cinema. Since
you do the dvd thing why not open up a section of movie classics. Show me
what you know about cinema and what makes you interesting as
reviewers/writers.

Until then, I remain,

- A reader that doesn’t come around much anymore

Of course, I really wish I knew which Disney review ARTDCAMA was talking about, since it seems to be his prime case in point. Maybe The Princess and the Frog? I don't refer to Disney as "evil" in that review; I do, however, refer to it as an institution that knowingly projects a specific image. What baby are we taking candy from, exactly? The broader insight into the genre that Shrek 4 provides is this ridiculous opinion that you somehow shouldn't talk about children's movies (or action movies, or romantic movies, or horror movies...) seriously. It's not just that they're made for children, but this idea that they're made by children--and, golly gee, they tried their very best and weren't aiming very high anyway. The simple fact is that they're made by adults with their own motives; furthermore, the brains behind Shrek and Disney represent an ineluctable part of American culture that has a voice several million times louder than the average artist/human being.

Shrek the Third had a pretty piss-poor moral (kill anyone who doesn't go along with the program) and it made a mint, as was its primary goal. Shouldn't that be reason enough for concern when the next one comes rolling around? The same thing applies to those Michael Bay pictures. It's difficult to argue with Criterion's decision to put Bay's films into their Collection because, like it or not, they're cultural touchstones--and I would say the same thing if they decided to bring the Transformers movies into that fold. (Although I think The Rock is a pretty great picture.) It's important that we talk about these films--and rail against them, should the need arise.

We love movies enough to want to understand them from any number of vantage points. There's no shortage of movie love in what we write, and you'll find that love in our negative reviews just as easily as you'll find it in our positive reviews. But what ARTDCAMA is suggesting is that we're double-plus-bad eggheads because we watch films that might be terrible, and give them negative reviews if they do turn out to be terrible. That's just not the way it works. "Sophomoric bitching" would entail snarking all over something for the sake of being a snarky asshole, and that's not what we're about. Hell, I'm the guy who gave 2012 three stars--and I meant it.

You need to recognize patterns. You can't understand "good" if you don't understand "bad," and you can't understand artistic context if you don't understand social context.

Assembled

2010-05-06T05:00:00.008-04:00

Geoff Johns is younger than you'd expect, for a guy in charge of steering DC Comics' superheroes into new incarnations on the movie screen. Back in March I sat at his feet, almost literally — the "chief creative officer" of DC Comics was up on a conference-room dais at Seattle's Emerald City ComiCon, and I was in the front row.

Naturally, the 2011 Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds came up. Johns, who by now had turned the galactic policeman into just one color on a spectrum of highly marketable power rings, assured the crowd that he'd be hands-on with that project, just as he'd been with recent arcs on "Smallville." "You'll see the stuff start to represent the comics a lot more than it has been in the past," Johns promised, to general applause.

It's what we all want, of course, if we've geeked out over four-color champions and dreamed of seeing them filmed. Just make the comic book, we pray. The comic book is perfect. Why mess with perfection? Like the consumers who demanded a Starbucks or Starbucks-like coffee at every corner, we're getting our wish. And what a monkey's-paw wish it's turning out to be.

The media companies that own these characters are finally getting their acts together, decades after Richard Donner's Superman showed them how much the public would shell out for superheroes in the cinema. They're consolidating and streamlining, building pipes that run direct from Editorial through Marketing to Merchandising to the film studio. Marvel has its own studio, of course, and now its riches can be bankrolled and harvested by Disney. DC has its own entertainment division, which Johns also heads -- Johns, who got his start as an assistant to Richard Donner. In their film adaptations, both companies promise faithfulness to the original vision of the comics, to their characters and continuity (whatever that last term means). They're inviting us into their "universes," where, we're told, Batman will protect Gotham under Christopher Nolan at least once more, Spider-Man will be a teenager again, and Iron Man will soon take his seat in Avengers Mansion.

It would be naive to think that film franchise possibilities, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars to be earned, have no effect on the creative end of this pipeline. Both Marvel and DC have tightened control over their stables of characters, always focused on the next crossover and its potential to spotlight saleable heroes. Spider-Man had too much romantic angst for either print or film versions, so now he'll be unattached in both. Johns was personally in charge of resurrecting Hal Jordan, dead since 1994, as Green Lantern, and Barry Allen, 1956-1986, as the Flash. They're just being populist, giving the readers what they want: the fantastic married to the familiar. It just so happens that that's how you write a successful movie script too.

They're giving us what we want, more's the pity, and we will never fail to be unfulfilled by it. We wanted to know everything about how Wolverine became Wolverine, so they gave us that ... first as a comic, then as a shitty, shitty shitball of a movie. We wanted Rachel Dawes, the only character in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight who had no basis in the comics, to go kablooie. We wanted to see Galactus try to eat the planet, so ... oh God, the tears burn. And we wanted the Black Widow to work her curvy leather-clad magic on Tony Stark's joystick, and we wanted War Machine to bust shit up, and we wanted Samuel L. Jackson -- who was the artist's model for Ultimate Nick Fury long before he was actually cast as Nick Fury -- to be motherfucking Nick Fury. This is pop, eating itself.

So ... what impressions of this latest stab toward an onscreen Marvel Universe? Does Iron Man 2 measure up to Iron Man? Surpass it? Merit Walter's review? Give your thoughts.