Mary (d. Abel Ferrara)
Third-tier Ferrara, as evidenced by his choice of star (Matthew Modine). ** (out of four)
Heading South (Vers le sud) (d. Laurent Cantet)
Cantet works in dread the way some work in oils. A much-needed antidote to the twee likes of Ladies in Lavender. *** (out of four)
Takeshis' (d. Takeshi Kitano)
A kind of career summary for Beat by way of Buñuel; heard outside the screening: "Was that a comedy?" Short answer: yes. ***1/2 (out of four)
September 12, 2005
September 10, 2005
In Es-Crowe
Because Cameron Crowe considers it a work-in-progress, critics at last night's TIFF screening of the interminable Elizabethtown were asked, in not so many words, to handle the film with kid gloves. (Apparently the folks at Venice saw a completely different cut.) So to avoid a flap, I won't be posting a capsule review at the mother site, but let me just say that the version I saw--which looked polished but by no means finished--makes one long for the subtlety and finesse of Garden State. (And really, how much more warning do you need?) Its epiphanies are so processed and its characters are so inorganically whimsical that the movie verges on self-parody (and it's possible that a performance of "Free Bird" by the Stillwater-esque Ruckus pushes it over the edge, albeit consciously)--the suicidal hero (Orlando Bloom, channelling Crowe surrogate Tom Cruise (Elizabethtown's producer)), for instance, plans to do the deed by rigging up his exercycle with a butcher knife to simulate a stabbing motion! While it may say more about my proclivities than about Kirsten Dunst that she still turned my knees to jelly even though I found her Claire insufferable, there is distilled in one aspect of Dunst's characterization virtually everything that is wrong with the piece as it currently stands: she does this thing where she pretends to take a picture, and the first time, it's fetchingly spontaneous; but by the third, you can smell the screenwriting. (I'm reminded of something Alex recently wrote concerning the cigarette-lighting motif in Now, Voyager.) And the presence of Susan Sarandon actually increases one's respect for the similarly-themed Moonlight Mile, which at least knew when to get the hell out of Dodge (hint: before Sarandon had a chance to embarrass herself with an impromptu stand-up routine/tap-dance number). Know that I really want to go to, er, town on this flick, but some form of chivalry is holding me back.
September 08, 2005
Notes from the Trenches
This last Tuesday to the Tuesday before represented the single busiest public speaking period for me since Denver Film Festival week last October – I spoke in Beaver Creek twice for the last two films of their summer film series (Dark City and Spirited Away), completed a classic science fiction series for the Gilpin County Public Library (Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned), and subbed once, as a favor, for local NPR critic Howie Movshovitz (away at Telluride) for his monthly “Tattered Cover Film Series” at the Starz Filmcenter: a presentation of Mark Sandrich’s 1935 Top Hat. Four different presentations of four very different films, complete with notes (and sometimes handouts), to four different audiences in the course of seven days. It takes its toll on a guy in surprising ways.
But the most surprising thing when I first started doing this critic thing professionally (besides every other thing about this critic thing), was the amount of public speaking that you were expected to do in the course of your job: introducing films, conducting on-stage Q&A sessions with visiting talent, teaching the occasional course, lecturing the occasional captive audience. In the course of the last five years, I’ve spoken to groups of “at risk” high school kids about foreign films, gone to speak at a career day, and done something like two hundred post-film discussions – I’ve been on panels of film critics (sometimes with hostile filmmakers in the audience and on stage), facilitated post-screening discussions with Vincent Gallo, Cory McAbee, David Cronenberg, Bob Rafelson and others, moderated panels, been publicly slandered by a minor Canadian producer, served as a judge on a couple of festival juries – and, in the last couple of years, even been asked to program my own series. It’s fun if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
Anymore, it’s the only real pleasure that I take from the job.
The interaction with people immediately following one of these screenings is amazingly gratifying. You make a lot of assumptions about audience when you’ve experienced, first hand, dispiriting cinema only to have it gross into the nine-digits. The new wrinkle this summer was having to suffer some of your peers writing op pieces about how critics are “out of touch” when they slam some happy horseshit like Meet the Fockers only to have it go on to be the top-earning comedy of all time. When I chimed in with a two-star review of Million Dollar Baby, in fact, the vast majority of the hate mail had something to do with how did I dare to deviate from the (at one point) 99% of the rest of the critics (call it 100%, I was the 1%), and diss the best American movie ever made? Something about the rule of consensus – about mob think, yes?
Yet lost in that is the fact that right after the screening, I got into an argument with one of my colleagues – I said that it didn’t matter what else was released this year, Million Dollar Baby was going to win the Best Picture Oscar because, and I quote myself, “Oscar eats this shit with a spoon”. I went on the record in my Oscar predictions, for what it’s worth. I don’t know how that makes me out of touch, exactly; if you asked me after the aggressively mediocre (and timid, and conventional) The Wedding Crashers if it was going to do boffo business, I would’ve told you without reservation that it would. Gangbusters, in fact. It’s not so much that I’m out of touch as it is that I have a pretty good – and pretty cynical – idea about the kind of stuff that’s going to pack ‘em in.
If I get drawn into playing that game too much, I’d never leave the house. Maybe that’s what they mean by being “out of touch.”
It’s a tradition, one stretching all the way back to Gone with the Wind, that films that are mediocre in just the right way for just the right time, will rake in the bucks and draw in the awards. A truism as staunch as the one that states that the truly exceptional films from any era are doomed to be discovered in subsequent eras – fodder for wise-asses like me to later point back to their anemic grosses, arms crossed, nodding in insufferable self-satisfaction for the delight of the few people who never would have argued the point in the first place. Zero sum outrage: a policy of solipsism that infects a lot of criticism and, more troubling, the majority of American “prestige” cinema. I say this, he says cryptically, after screening Proof this week (starring Apple's mom and Donnie Darko). Too often, though, I’m just preaching to the choir – enough so that when I was asked recently what it was I hoped that my writing would accomplish, I said “nothing, I just want to be on the record, for right or for wrong, when the buzz fades.”
Last man standing, holding his junk in one hand and a tattered flag in the other: Dante would have a field day.
Anyway – you make a lot of assumptions about audience when you don’t meet the portion of the audience that very seldom goes to movies anymore. These are the folks, for the most part, who show up for moderated discussions at public libraries – in part to escape mainstream audiences, and in part to participate in a guided conversation about what they still perceive as a work of art designed to inspire instead of a piece of commerce designed to rob. The questions are almost always not what you expect – and the level of perception is almost always startling. (Like the near-universal suspicion of the happiness of Dark City’s ending, the offense taken from Klaatu’s dire ultimatum in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the almost universal disapproval that I told the story about ostrich feathers flying off Ginger Rogers’ dress during the “Cheek to Cheek” number in Top Hat.) Hard to call the culture war at an impasse, it’s the enthusiasm that greets these gigs that makes me think that a similar program attached to new release films (something that I did for a period of four months last year for the now-defunct Madstone Theaters – who folded up still owing me over 1,500 bucks – ah, the joys of freelance) might actually begin a trend of people talking about movies again in a way that might change, at least, the way that we approach films and, ultimately, the way that films are made.
As dreams go, it’s more likely to happen than the one I have involving Mary Louise Parker and Alison Elliot.
Appropriate to nothing, went shopping in my semi-affluent Denver suburb tonight when I hear a woman tell her child to "stay away from japs like that" referring to my clearly chink self. Fight the fight and there are still so many idiots in the world. And all we got to show for it is a simpering piece of moralizing crap like Paul Haggis' Crash.
But the most surprising thing when I first started doing this critic thing professionally (besides every other thing about this critic thing), was the amount of public speaking that you were expected to do in the course of your job: introducing films, conducting on-stage Q&A sessions with visiting talent, teaching the occasional course, lecturing the occasional captive audience. In the course of the last five years, I’ve spoken to groups of “at risk” high school kids about foreign films, gone to speak at a career day, and done something like two hundred post-film discussions – I’ve been on panels of film critics (sometimes with hostile filmmakers in the audience and on stage), facilitated post-screening discussions with Vincent Gallo, Cory McAbee, David Cronenberg, Bob Rafelson and others, moderated panels, been publicly slandered by a minor Canadian producer, served as a judge on a couple of festival juries – and, in the last couple of years, even been asked to program my own series. It’s fun if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
Anymore, it’s the only real pleasure that I take from the job.
The interaction with people immediately following one of these screenings is amazingly gratifying. You make a lot of assumptions about audience when you’ve experienced, first hand, dispiriting cinema only to have it gross into the nine-digits. The new wrinkle this summer was having to suffer some of your peers writing op pieces about how critics are “out of touch” when they slam some happy horseshit like Meet the Fockers only to have it go on to be the top-earning comedy of all time. When I chimed in with a two-star review of Million Dollar Baby, in fact, the vast majority of the hate mail had something to do with how did I dare to deviate from the (at one point) 99% of the rest of the critics (call it 100%, I was the 1%), and diss the best American movie ever made? Something about the rule of consensus – about mob think, yes?
Yet lost in that is the fact that right after the screening, I got into an argument with one of my colleagues – I said that it didn’t matter what else was released this year, Million Dollar Baby was going to win the Best Picture Oscar because, and I quote myself, “Oscar eats this shit with a spoon”. I went on the record in my Oscar predictions, for what it’s worth. I don’t know how that makes me out of touch, exactly; if you asked me after the aggressively mediocre (and timid, and conventional) The Wedding Crashers if it was going to do boffo business, I would’ve told you without reservation that it would. Gangbusters, in fact. It’s not so much that I’m out of touch as it is that I have a pretty good – and pretty cynical – idea about the kind of stuff that’s going to pack ‘em in.
If I get drawn into playing that game too much, I’d never leave the house. Maybe that’s what they mean by being “out of touch.”
It’s a tradition, one stretching all the way back to Gone with the Wind, that films that are mediocre in just the right way for just the right time, will rake in the bucks and draw in the awards. A truism as staunch as the one that states that the truly exceptional films from any era are doomed to be discovered in subsequent eras – fodder for wise-asses like me to later point back to their anemic grosses, arms crossed, nodding in insufferable self-satisfaction for the delight of the few people who never would have argued the point in the first place. Zero sum outrage: a policy of solipsism that infects a lot of criticism and, more troubling, the majority of American “prestige” cinema. I say this, he says cryptically, after screening Proof this week (starring Apple's mom and Donnie Darko). Too often, though, I’m just preaching to the choir – enough so that when I was asked recently what it was I hoped that my writing would accomplish, I said “nothing, I just want to be on the record, for right or for wrong, when the buzz fades.”
Last man standing, holding his junk in one hand and a tattered flag in the other: Dante would have a field day.
Anyway – you make a lot of assumptions about audience when you don’t meet the portion of the audience that very seldom goes to movies anymore. These are the folks, for the most part, who show up for moderated discussions at public libraries – in part to escape mainstream audiences, and in part to participate in a guided conversation about what they still perceive as a work of art designed to inspire instead of a piece of commerce designed to rob. The questions are almost always not what you expect – and the level of perception is almost always startling. (Like the near-universal suspicion of the happiness of Dark City’s ending, the offense taken from Klaatu’s dire ultimatum in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the almost universal disapproval that I told the story about ostrich feathers flying off Ginger Rogers’ dress during the “Cheek to Cheek” number in Top Hat.) Hard to call the culture war at an impasse, it’s the enthusiasm that greets these gigs that makes me think that a similar program attached to new release films (something that I did for a period of four months last year for the now-defunct Madstone Theaters – who folded up still owing me over 1,500 bucks – ah, the joys of freelance) might actually begin a trend of people talking about movies again in a way that might change, at least, the way that we approach films and, ultimately, the way that films are made.
As dreams go, it’s more likely to happen than the one I have involving Mary Louise Parker and Alison Elliot.
Appropriate to nothing, went shopping in my semi-affluent Denver suburb tonight when I hear a woman tell her child to "stay away from japs like that" referring to my clearly chink self. Fight the fight and there are still so many idiots in the world. And all we got to show for it is a simpering piece of moralizing crap like Paul Haggis' Crash.
September 07, 2005
Throwing the Book at You
So you may have gathered from the main page banner that the "certain upcoming project" I mentioned a couple of weeks back was none other than FilmFreakCentral.net's first published volume of reviews. Pretty much the sexiest trade paperback ever produced, The Film Freak Central 2005 Annual compiles all our output on 2004's theatrical releases and also includes a previously-unpublished essay from Walter on The Cremaster Cycle, a foreword by Suspect Zero director E. Elias Merhige, last year's best and worst lists, and the proverbial more. For now the book is only available through Lulu, but in the coming months it should start cropping up at other online retailers and maybe even at a bookstore near you. In any event, if you're a fan of the site, chances are slim you'll be disappointed.
September 04, 2005
Delicate Sound of Chunder
In a lot of ways 2005 so far is typified by Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder; two films that aren’t really offensive in any way but so essentially poor in their craftsmanship that they bugger the imagination. How could, in other words, they possibly have happened? Much of the conversation about what’s wrong with our culture is the malady of being too comfortable in our culture. Our visual knowledge is over-developed, the thinking goes, to the point that everything’s become shorthand while nuance, more often than not, flies to the wayside.
(Consequently, the breath of fresh air some feel with 2046 and Broken Flowers is, to a large part, breathed from slow lungs.)
See, but, that implies that the people making films and shows nowadays have assimilated a lot of other films and television, when I suspect that the truth is a lot of these people are just aware of film and television without any sort of consideration of what’s been seen – that any sort of analysis of what’s been seen is steadily devalued at the same rate as all other forms of intellectual discourse in the United States. It’s the danger of feckless consumption.
Watching Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder exactly approximates the experience of reading a book by someone who doesn’t actually know any English (like Robert James Waller, for instance, or that jackhole who wrote The Celestine Prophecy). They’re movies made by people who don’t seem to have ever taken a moment to consider what it was that worked about one thing and didn’t work about another – the product of people who think that leaving your brain at the door is a good idea and possible in any case; people who make no bones about admitting that thinking is hard for them and, most tellingly, mutually exclusive from any ability to have pleasure. Cultural artifacts like this happen because in this time and this place (and for some time now), being critical is bad manners.
With the former costing around $20m and the latter upwards of $80m (two years ago), Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder have squandered $100m between them before PR and distribution costs. And that’s not just one person, that’s a whole bunch of people getting together and agreeing that, for their money, they’ve assembled the right cast, the right crew, the right screenplay – that they’ve found a winning combination to not only make their hundred mil back, but maybe a tidy profit to boot albeit most likely in overseas and home video sales. (I’d like to believe that somewhere along the way someone thought that they might be making a good movie, but, seriously, if you wanted a good movie, you wouldn’t be associating yourself with names like Uwe Boll, Christian Slater, Tara Reid (!), Peter Hyams, and Ed Burns.) All of these people have seen movies that have succeeded and believed that in seeing them, they have understood them.
With only about a dozen or so viable, intelligent film critics left gainfully employed in the United States: paladins for the medium in all the glorious pretense of that claim, I do wonder if the parasitical arrangement between critics and the movies they review isn’t closer to a symbiosis.
But then I read Roger Ebert’s review of A Sound of Thunder and, as is his tendency now and again, he’s made a few really puzzling errors in his review. It doesn’t matter that much here, but I suspect that it did matter a lot in his Rules of Attraction review in which he asserts something happens which most certainly does not - and then changes the offending paragraph in the online edition (the one for posterity, but not the one that matters) after what I fantasize to be a lot of angry letters. I don't care if you hate it Roger, but at least do a better job pretending to have seen it.
Anyway:
Ebert talks about “saber-toothed eagles” appearing in future-Chicago which, although no stupider than what actually does appear, don’t appear. He mentions the scene where “a giant brontosaurus” attacks, but it’s not a brontosaurus and, neither of us being a paleontologist, we’re told by this idiot film that it’s not a brontosaurus and is actually an allosaurus. I don’t know what an allosaurus is, but I do know that a brontosaurus is what Fred Flintstone rode to the gravel pits, and that thing doesn’t look a thing like this thing. Is he making a joke? Maybe he is, and it must be an elaborate one because later he misquotes a line about “brontosaurus blood.” Does it matter? Naw – not in terms of the two-star “aw shucks” review he gives this thing – but what does matter is that he wasn’t paying very close attention to this film to which he’s now offering a patronizing pat on a head. And not paying attention may be only what the film deserves, but is also part of the reason why films made by cinematic illiterates happen.
I think if you don’t like movies very much, you smirk about films like Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder. You feel superior to them in a way as unwise and puzzling as feeling superior to approaching hurricanes and rising floodwaters.
But I was well and truly curious about why anyone would go to a film like this and, in going, why did they stay? So I went to a “civilian” screening of A Sound of Thunder on a Friday afternoon. With me on this ill-advised sojourn: five other lonesome souls, one of which, a middle-aged lady in a cardigan (in the middle of summer) left twenty-three minutes into the film which, I’m guessing, is early enough to still get your money back. I heard no comment, no snortles, no cell phone, no crinkle during the entire film – it was the most polite audience I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a film with in about five years – and afterwards, stealing a page from Joe Queenan, I offered them a refund of their ticket price ($7.00 matinee. Bargain!) if they didn’t like the film in exchange for them telling me why they didn’t leave after the five minute mark when any question of its extraordinary ineptitude could any longer be rationalized away.
The only couple was comprised of thirtyish Jake and his girlfriend Cayleen. They went because Jake had read the Ray Bradbury story when he was a kid and had sort of been looking forward to this movie – they both thought it was “okay” and politely declined my offer to refund their cash. Jake said that he just went to movies to relax and have fun and implied that he resented it when they made him think. “Critics, man, every single movie out there you can find some who likes it.” Why not pick one you agree with and stick with him? “I hate critics, their job is to hate everything.”
Me, too, Jake – especially the ones that liked Fantastic Four. Cayleen said that this wasn’t her cup of tea, that usually she liked other kinds of movies (“like what?” “I dunno, something with John Cusack in it?”), but that she didn’t mind going to the occasional “guy flick” with Jake. I told Jake that he was a lucky man. “I know it, brother!”
Peter had read the story, too, and now in his early fifties, he liked to go to shows earlier in the day before the “kids” got out of school. Peter thought the movie was “pretty bad” but that he never left a movie before it was over. I asked him if he thought it was funny and he said “no, it wasn’t a comedy.” I like Peter a lot. Peter took the seven dollars.
Fifty-four year old Bob had, yep, read the story as a kid and was curious about the film. He asked me why it wasn’t reviewed locally and I told him that it had been screened late on a Wednesday night and that the deadlines for major dailies is generally Wednesday afternoon. “Why would they do that?” Well, Bob, they do that so that you can’t say that they didn’t screen it for the press but you still can’t write a review of it. Bob thought A Sound of Thunder was the worst film he’d seen all year (and he goes once a week) but didn’t leave because he’d bought popcorn and a soda and so was already into it for over twenty bucks. “Besides, it was nice to be in air conditioning.”
Couldn’t argue with him there. Bob took the seven bucks, too.
(Consequently, the breath of fresh air some feel with 2046 and Broken Flowers is, to a large part, breathed from slow lungs.)
See, but, that implies that the people making films and shows nowadays have assimilated a lot of other films and television, when I suspect that the truth is a lot of these people are just aware of film and television without any sort of consideration of what’s been seen – that any sort of analysis of what’s been seen is steadily devalued at the same rate as all other forms of intellectual discourse in the United States. It’s the danger of feckless consumption.
Watching Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder exactly approximates the experience of reading a book by someone who doesn’t actually know any English (like Robert James Waller, for instance, or that jackhole who wrote The Celestine Prophecy). They’re movies made by people who don’t seem to have ever taken a moment to consider what it was that worked about one thing and didn’t work about another – the product of people who think that leaving your brain at the door is a good idea and possible in any case; people who make no bones about admitting that thinking is hard for them and, most tellingly, mutually exclusive from any ability to have pleasure. Cultural artifacts like this happen because in this time and this place (and for some time now), being critical is bad manners.
With the former costing around $20m and the latter upwards of $80m (two years ago), Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder have squandered $100m between them before PR and distribution costs. And that’s not just one person, that’s a whole bunch of people getting together and agreeing that, for their money, they’ve assembled the right cast, the right crew, the right screenplay – that they’ve found a winning combination to not only make their hundred mil back, but maybe a tidy profit to boot albeit most likely in overseas and home video sales. (I’d like to believe that somewhere along the way someone thought that they might be making a good movie, but, seriously, if you wanted a good movie, you wouldn’t be associating yourself with names like Uwe Boll, Christian Slater, Tara Reid (!), Peter Hyams, and Ed Burns.) All of these people have seen movies that have succeeded and believed that in seeing them, they have understood them.
With only about a dozen or so viable, intelligent film critics left gainfully employed in the United States: paladins for the medium in all the glorious pretense of that claim, I do wonder if the parasitical arrangement between critics and the movies they review isn’t closer to a symbiosis.
But then I read Roger Ebert’s review of A Sound of Thunder and, as is his tendency now and again, he’s made a few really puzzling errors in his review. It doesn’t matter that much here, but I suspect that it did matter a lot in his Rules of Attraction review in which he asserts something happens which most certainly does not - and then changes the offending paragraph in the online edition (the one for posterity, but not the one that matters) after what I fantasize to be a lot of angry letters. I don't care if you hate it Roger, but at least do a better job pretending to have seen it.
Anyway:
Ebert talks about “saber-toothed eagles” appearing in future-Chicago which, although no stupider than what actually does appear, don’t appear. He mentions the scene where “a giant brontosaurus” attacks, but it’s not a brontosaurus and, neither of us being a paleontologist, we’re told by this idiot film that it’s not a brontosaurus and is actually an allosaurus. I don’t know what an allosaurus is, but I do know that a brontosaurus is what Fred Flintstone rode to the gravel pits, and that thing doesn’t look a thing like this thing. Is he making a joke? Maybe he is, and it must be an elaborate one because later he misquotes a line about “brontosaurus blood.” Does it matter? Naw – not in terms of the two-star “aw shucks” review he gives this thing – but what does matter is that he wasn’t paying very close attention to this film to which he’s now offering a patronizing pat on a head. And not paying attention may be only what the film deserves, but is also part of the reason why films made by cinematic illiterates happen.
I think if you don’t like movies very much, you smirk about films like Alone in the Dark and A Sound of Thunder. You feel superior to them in a way as unwise and puzzling as feeling superior to approaching hurricanes and rising floodwaters.
But I was well and truly curious about why anyone would go to a film like this and, in going, why did they stay? So I went to a “civilian” screening of A Sound of Thunder on a Friday afternoon. With me on this ill-advised sojourn: five other lonesome souls, one of which, a middle-aged lady in a cardigan (in the middle of summer) left twenty-three minutes into the film which, I’m guessing, is early enough to still get your money back. I heard no comment, no snortles, no cell phone, no crinkle during the entire film – it was the most polite audience I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a film with in about five years – and afterwards, stealing a page from Joe Queenan, I offered them a refund of their ticket price ($7.00 matinee. Bargain!) if they didn’t like the film in exchange for them telling me why they didn’t leave after the five minute mark when any question of its extraordinary ineptitude could any longer be rationalized away.
The only couple was comprised of thirtyish Jake and his girlfriend Cayleen. They went because Jake had read the Ray Bradbury story when he was a kid and had sort of been looking forward to this movie – they both thought it was “okay” and politely declined my offer to refund their cash. Jake said that he just went to movies to relax and have fun and implied that he resented it when they made him think. “Critics, man, every single movie out there you can find some who likes it.” Why not pick one you agree with and stick with him? “I hate critics, their job is to hate everything.”
Me, too, Jake – especially the ones that liked Fantastic Four. Cayleen said that this wasn’t her cup of tea, that usually she liked other kinds of movies (“like what?” “I dunno, something with John Cusack in it?”), but that she didn’t mind going to the occasional “guy flick” with Jake. I told Jake that he was a lucky man. “I know it, brother!”
Peter had read the story, too, and now in his early fifties, he liked to go to shows earlier in the day before the “kids” got out of school. Peter thought the movie was “pretty bad” but that he never left a movie before it was over. I asked him if he thought it was funny and he said “no, it wasn’t a comedy.” I like Peter a lot. Peter took the seven dollars.
Fifty-four year old Bob had, yep, read the story as a kid and was curious about the film. He asked me why it wasn’t reviewed locally and I told him that it had been screened late on a Wednesday night and that the deadlines for major dailies is generally Wednesday afternoon. “Why would they do that?” Well, Bob, they do that so that you can’t say that they didn’t screen it for the press but you still can’t write a review of it. Bob thought A Sound of Thunder was the worst film he’d seen all year (and he goes once a week) but didn’t leave because he’d bought popcorn and a soda and so was already into it for over twenty bucks. “Besides, it was nice to be in air conditioning.”
Couldn’t argue with him there. Bob took the seven bucks, too.
September 02, 2005
Wake Me Up When this Video Ends
I kind of miss the days when Green Day were singing about masturbation instead of doing it, but for that mandatory protest record in every band's discography, "American Idiot" is, you don't need me telling you, pretty remarkable. But the 7-minute video for the album's fourth single, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" (which recently made ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY's "Must List")? Gimme a fucking break.
As "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a song not about 9/11, but about the death of singer Billy Joe Armstrong's father, director Samuel "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Bayer deserves a certain amount of credit for daring to dismiss artist intentionality. But seizing on the topical associations of the title strikes me as no less knee-jerk or jejune than asking Alanis "Who oughta know?". The piece, super-pretentiously shot in 'scope, opens exactly like In the Bedroom, with It Boy Jamie Bell and It Girl Evan Rachel Wood (a star, sure, but one with insufferable taste in material) nuzzling in the middle of an open field. They buy French fries (freedom fries?) and consume them in slow-motion, make out in a dingy rec room, play video games, and make out some more. She force-feeds him birthday cake in slow-motion and he spits some back in slow-motion, at which point she bitchslaps him for joining the military. Histrionics ensue. Cut to Green Day performing a few bars in an incongruously glam mise-en-scène.
Then the video becomes a remake of Stripes: shepherded off a bus and into a barbershop, Bell, like Bill Murray before him, inexplicably circumvents the brush-cut rule. Cue the faux-Saving Private Ryan montages, whose sophomorically-staged explosions send shockwaves through Green Day's studio, causing sparks to fly from the lighting grid above. (Dude, it's like, war totally has global repercussions.) Bell, in over his head, cowers behind a wall as Wood sits on some bleachers back home, her future evidently as uncertain as her boyfriend's. So ends the most embarrassing video with sound effects since "Hello."
Risible technique aside, Bayer's heart's in the right place, but something tells me he's preaching to the converted: despite its largely rural and thus implicitly "red state" setting, the video doesn't really seek communion outside its innate demographic, the contemporary American slacker (as opposed to Everybody's All-American), assuring him that if a tarty girlfriend and an XBox aren't sufficient, he's already lost the battle, anyway. It's an ugly, reductive piece that follows the narcissistic trend of casting international conflict as the pretext for a romantic crisis; perhaps, so we can still respect the nominally iconoclastic Green Day (when September ends), we should just chalk it up to satire.
September 01, 2005
Notes from the Trenches
The quick rundown of the week that was: screenings of Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Cave, The Edukators, Pretty Persuasion, The Baxter, Transporter 2, History of Violence and Dreamer – one better than I expected but only one really worth much of a damn. The last two, early screenings for critics headed to the Toronto International Film Festival (watch them here so you don’t have to there!) and early contenders, too, (without offering any opinion of how the films actually are) for the Oscar murmuring that becomes something like a sport this time of year. Three were evening screenings that each had two people checking messages, one making a phone call out, and one answering a phone and carrying on a conversation – too typical to be outrageous anymore, you just sort of sigh and let the cretins win.
Watching movies has become a Sartrean ordeal, why do it anymore if all most of the movies seem to do this year is suck soul? The year of the shrug.
During the exorcism movie at least, the call-answerer had the presence of mind to run up and duck down into that space between the first row and the screen to have his talk. Because, obviously, with acoustics in these meticulously-engineered amphitheaters being what they are, the front of the house is the last place your repeated “I’m watching a movie, yeah, yeah, speak up, it’s loud in here” jive will be broadcast in crystal clarity to the other five hundred people in the house. Good thinking there, champ. The film, by the way, sucks – it’s Life of David Gale with literal demons in place of Kevin Spacey’s, but I digress.
Award to worst person in the world this week goes to the heavy-ish woman in red top and skirt at The Cave screening who, after stepping on everyone’s toes in a defiant, brassy way, asked a soft-spoken woman if seats next to her were taken. They were (by her children away for some popcorn) she said, but red-top, with her hearing problem exacerbating her humanity problem, says “Speak fucking English.” After subsequently getting the cold shoulder from everyone in the section, she says to her whipped boyfriend in a voice, plenty-loud, “I have plenty of money to pay for my own movies, I don’t need to see a free movie, let’s go get something to eat.” And off she goes - light up a room and then leave them wanting more. The scary thing about calling her “common” is that she is. I console myself by imagining that she’s from Philadelphia. I don’t mention this out of outrage, I mention this to describe the average experience of an evening screening and to reiterate that it’s this kind of experience that the studios are hoping to sponsor by scheduling them at night and opening them to the public.
Then, a first for me, during the Dreamer industry-only screening, a security guard hired by the studio to remind critics to turn off their cellphones, sits in the back row to watch, receives a phone call, and has a nice long chat while the ink-stained wretches are losing their minds. I don’t know of any critics who would do that, and I don’t know of any critics who would ever want to record a movie off a screen to sell to Thailand, either, making me think that in targeting us through them as they do with nightvision scopes and metal-detecting wands, the studios may very well be overlooking the most likely group of folks trafficking in flicks that’ve fallen off the back of the proverbial truck.
Scurrilous, you say? Elementary, I say.
It’s a matter of respect for the product and the audience and if you ain’t got it, you’ve got no reservations selling a handicam’d version of a Nick Cannon film through your shareware site. Only other time I recall wanting to say something to the rent-a-cops this week is when someone with a clipboard, sitting in the audience, started taking notes with a little flashlight-pen (a colleague, more powerful than I, offered “Turn off the fucking light, jesus fucking Christ, that’s so fucking inconsiderate”) and then again when a pair of them held a top-secret conversation in normal voices behind that little rising half-wall that separates the walkway from the seats. Crystal clear, gents, as is the question of quis custodiat custodium?
A note to aspiring film critics, by the by, show up on the first day of the job with one of those light-up pens (or, better yet, your laptop – I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried) – the kind that a local film fest actually sold in the lobby as “critic’s pens” – and you’re definitely going to be ostracized and, possibly, physically assaulted. Do it and stigmatize yourself. If you disrespect films enough to shine a light in the middle of one, you should find a different profession. Actually, if you disrespect films that much, you’re just what most editors are looking for nowadays. You should, in fact, put it on your résumé. I stand corrected.
Brighter note: made the two-hour drive up to the Beaver Creek Ski Resort for the third of four films in their Summer Film series, a battered but serviceable 35mm print of Dark City. Conversation afterwards, brief but lively. Next week is Spirited Away – this Saturday, lectures in front of Rilla’s Village of the Damned and the pinnacle of the Astaire/Rogers partnership, Top Hat. More and more, the only reason to keep going to the new releases is just to keep a toehold in trends to better serve the discussion during teaching and other speaking gigs. God knows there’s precious joy to be found in this year’s tepid mudville: outrage at low-tide, out with the passion somewhere out to sea.
A non-seq note to future programmers: if you’re planning on doing a discussion post-screening, don’t program any Alexander Payne films. They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t have any undercarriage. Try to talk about them and you start regurgitating plot, comparing favorite scenes, and gushing about performance: they are what they are and that’s all you need know. Keats’ Grecian Urn, say, if you’re a fan.
So, on the horizon so long as these meds hold out, reviews of Anchor Bay’s new releases of Dario Argento’s Trauma and The Card Player, of the Director’s Cut DVD of John Waters’ Cry Baby, and, possibly, if the backlog recedes sufficiently, brief Blog-only thoughts about Kim Ki-Duk’s Bad Guy and Samaritan Girl.
Watching movies has become a Sartrean ordeal, why do it anymore if all most of the movies seem to do this year is suck soul? The year of the shrug.
During the exorcism movie at least, the call-answerer had the presence of mind to run up and duck down into that space between the first row and the screen to have his talk. Because, obviously, with acoustics in these meticulously-engineered amphitheaters being what they are, the front of the house is the last place your repeated “I’m watching a movie, yeah, yeah, speak up, it’s loud in here” jive will be broadcast in crystal clarity to the other five hundred people in the house. Good thinking there, champ. The film, by the way, sucks – it’s Life of David Gale with literal demons in place of Kevin Spacey’s, but I digress.
Award to worst person in the world this week goes to the heavy-ish woman in red top and skirt at The Cave screening who, after stepping on everyone’s toes in a defiant, brassy way, asked a soft-spoken woman if seats next to her were taken. They were (by her children away for some popcorn) she said, but red-top, with her hearing problem exacerbating her humanity problem, says “Speak fucking English.” After subsequently getting the cold shoulder from everyone in the section, she says to her whipped boyfriend in a voice, plenty-loud, “I have plenty of money to pay for my own movies, I don’t need to see a free movie, let’s go get something to eat.” And off she goes - light up a room and then leave them wanting more. The scary thing about calling her “common” is that she is. I console myself by imagining that she’s from Philadelphia. I don’t mention this out of outrage, I mention this to describe the average experience of an evening screening and to reiterate that it’s this kind of experience that the studios are hoping to sponsor by scheduling them at night and opening them to the public.
Then, a first for me, during the Dreamer industry-only screening, a security guard hired by the studio to remind critics to turn off their cellphones, sits in the back row to watch, receives a phone call, and has a nice long chat while the ink-stained wretches are losing their minds. I don’t know of any critics who would do that, and I don’t know of any critics who would ever want to record a movie off a screen to sell to Thailand, either, making me think that in targeting us through them as they do with nightvision scopes and metal-detecting wands, the studios may very well be overlooking the most likely group of folks trafficking in flicks that’ve fallen off the back of the proverbial truck.
Scurrilous, you say? Elementary, I say.
It’s a matter of respect for the product and the audience and if you ain’t got it, you’ve got no reservations selling a handicam’d version of a Nick Cannon film through your shareware site. Only other time I recall wanting to say something to the rent-a-cops this week is when someone with a clipboard, sitting in the audience, started taking notes with a little flashlight-pen (a colleague, more powerful than I, offered “Turn off the fucking light, jesus fucking Christ, that’s so fucking inconsiderate”) and then again when a pair of them held a top-secret conversation in normal voices behind that little rising half-wall that separates the walkway from the seats. Crystal clear, gents, as is the question of quis custodiat custodium?
A note to aspiring film critics, by the by, show up on the first day of the job with one of those light-up pens (or, better yet, your laptop – I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried) – the kind that a local film fest actually sold in the lobby as “critic’s pens” – and you’re definitely going to be ostracized and, possibly, physically assaulted. Do it and stigmatize yourself. If you disrespect films enough to shine a light in the middle of one, you should find a different profession. Actually, if you disrespect films that much, you’re just what most editors are looking for nowadays. You should, in fact, put it on your résumé. I stand corrected.
Brighter note: made the two-hour drive up to the Beaver Creek Ski Resort for the third of four films in their Summer Film series, a battered but serviceable 35mm print of Dark City. Conversation afterwards, brief but lively. Next week is Spirited Away – this Saturday, lectures in front of Rilla’s Village of the Damned and the pinnacle of the Astaire/Rogers partnership, Top Hat. More and more, the only reason to keep going to the new releases is just to keep a toehold in trends to better serve the discussion during teaching and other speaking gigs. God knows there’s precious joy to be found in this year’s tepid mudville: outrage at low-tide, out with the passion somewhere out to sea.
A non-seq note to future programmers: if you’re planning on doing a discussion post-screening, don’t program any Alexander Payne films. They’re great, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t have any undercarriage. Try to talk about them and you start regurgitating plot, comparing favorite scenes, and gushing about performance: they are what they are and that’s all you need know. Keats’ Grecian Urn, say, if you’re a fan.
So, on the horizon so long as these meds hold out, reviews of Anchor Bay’s new releases of Dario Argento’s Trauma and The Card Player, of the Director’s Cut DVD of John Waters’ Cry Baby, and, possibly, if the backlog recedes sufficiently, brief Blog-only thoughts about Kim Ki-Duk’s Bad Guy and Samaritan Girl.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)