kidney bingos

Come With Me

2008-08-18T19:49:00.004-04:00

Sit down. We need to talk.

Look. This blog is dead. However, I -- at least the interweb I -- am not. Over the last year I've consistently maintained my Twitter page, where I've put down ca. 140 characters on every film I've seen (as opposed to usually zilch). And over the last month I've kept up with my Tumblr page, which is like this blog but prettier, snazzier and more prone to short (and hopefully sweet) posts. Also, it's not weighed down by past baggage and whatnot.

What I'm saying is follow me at either of those places. In the meantime, consider this a sort of homebase; the databases (films seen, grades for years, past top tens, etc.) will be maintained. Otherwise, see youse theres. And bombard me with comments. I'll reply. I'm nice.

So, where was I?

2008-05-26T11:48:00.000-04:00

Haven't been round these parts since January. Here's what I've been doing the last few months in lieu of Kidney Bingoing:

Blogged the Philadelphia Film Festival, which literally made me sick. (Or perhaps it was the violent change in weather. I still theorize that watching too many goddamn movies makes one physically ill.)
Interviewed Teeth director and producer Mitchell Lichtenstein and Joyce Pierpoline, Cristian Mungiu, Brett Morgen and Hammer & Tongs (i.e., Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith).
Did Six Packs on sorry late period films by great filmmakers, horror films about female sexuality, abortion, inferior director's cuts, deserved Best Picture winners, comic turns from serious thespians, bad films with kick-me sign-like titles, remakes by the original's director(s), films about youth by old directors, bad films by British comic geniuses, movies starring the Rolling Stones, underemployed female directors, character actors playing lead, actors' stunt weight gains/losses, visually striking documentaries and geriatric action stars.
Watched retros on Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pedro Costa, and finally caught up with Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Rode my bike a whole heck of a lot.

I'm not sure if I'm doing anything much with this blog; as I've stated before I'm far more prone to update my Twitter page, what with its refreshing and inventiveness-causing 140 character limit. But you know, who knows? Maybe I'll feel bloggy in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I definitely will not let my films seen list (turn to you right) go un-updated for longer than a couple days, much less four months.

2008-01-23T00:44:00.001-05:00

My Revised Top Ten of 2007 1.0

2008-01-09T18:53:00.000-05:00

My Top Ten is already set in stone, you say? Why, it's already slightly changed. Here's where it stands right this now:

01. Zodiac (David Fincher)
02. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel)
03. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
04. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
05. My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev)
06. Offside (Jafar Panahi)
07. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al.)
08. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)
09. The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass)
10. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)

This will probably change. It always does.

Where did the time go?

2008-01-09T18:39:00.000-05:00

How did I not find time for even shameless plugs? Got me. Let's get her done:
1/9/08 A review of Diva, happily reissued, plus Rep. The latter features a rather wordy blurb on Ken Jacob's Star Spangled to Death, which took me nearly a week to plow through.

1/2/08 A Six Pack on unlikeable protagonists in honor of There Will Be Blood, plus Rep.

12/26/07 My first ever printed Top Ten List gets, er, printed, with Zodiac at the top. The list is already out of date, wouldn't you know. Also, Rep.

12/19/07 A holiday-minded Six Pack on gruesome X-mas movies, plus reviews of Walk Hard and The Kite Runner. Also, Rep, featuring a lengthy gush on My Kid Could Paint That.

12/12/07 A Q&A with Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman in honor of Juno, which I review here along with The Red Balloon/White Mane mash-up and Starting Out in the Evening. Also Juno-related, Six Pack looks at reunions between actors that take on a meta weirdness: Michael Cera playing Jason Bateman's son in Arrested Development but giving him (Bateman) his (Cera's) son in Juno, etc. Also, Rep.

Sorry, Pt. 429

2007-12-06T23:44:00.000-05:00

Just got distracted by holiday shit and this whole Oscar season December movie thang. Updates (or something) tk in the forseeable future. In the meantime, no YTTOSSPW clip this week, but plenty of pluggings:

11/21 An interview with Todd Haynes, a Six Pack on eccentric biopics (whaddaya know, like I'm Not There) a review of The Bubble (third down) and Rep.

11/28 A lead on The Rape of Europa (slow week), a review of War Dance, a Six Pack on techno marvels that have been forgotten (or, like Beowulf, will be), an A-List bemoaning the decline of Peter Greenaway and Rep, where I bemoan some more.

12/5 An assessment of Futurama: Bender's Big Score, a Six Pack on clothed or nudity-free sex scenes, a review of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and Rep.

Lastly, I'd like to put in a word for the new blog Thrift Store Music, maintained by my landlord/roommate Shepard Ritzen. At this late date, solid blog gimmicks are hard to come by, but Shep has gone and dreampt up with one: an avid collector of semi-randomly chosen thrift store (and flea market) LPs, he'll be showcasing his findings on this new blog, complete with reviews, track listings, images, copious links and, when available, mp3 samples. It's a mighty task -- there's already a list up of dozens of records to catalog -- but Shep is entirely the guy who'll keep at it. Unlike some people.

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Brian De Palma is a True Villain

2007-11-15T23:13:00.001-05:00

I haven't seen Redacted yet -- hurry up, Cassidy -- but even I apparently know more about it than Bill O'Reilly. As you've surely heard, O'Reilly laid into De Palma and Redacted the other night on the Factor and the clip is really a hoot. Disregard him not even attempting to discover or even guess what De Palma's after when he shows (since redacted) images of real soldiers massacred. I mean, it's O'Reilly. (And by the way, he's not seen it yet. Natch.) What you should pay attention to is his cartoonish demonization of a man who's no stranger to cartoonish demonization. "Here's how vile this man is, this De Palma man is." "I think Brian De Palma, to me, is the worst Hollywood person I have ever come across." "I don't want to see anything bad happen to De Palma." And the line that made water come out my nose, "Brian De Palma is a true villain." 1983 all over again!

(Holly McClure, some conservative broadcast film critic, is also hilarious, declaring the film "anti-for-our-military" and expressing disbelief that a filmmaker could ever -- ever! -- have their film taken away from them by a studio. She wrote a book?)

PW! A Six Pack on movies about the end of mankind in honor of Southland Tales, which I review here along with Finishing the Game. Also, Rep.

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Richard Lester Rulez

2007-11-07T14:02:00.000-05:00

When I arrived at film school in 1997, I emulated Woody Allen. When I left in 2001, I emulated Richard Lester. My thesis film, which I never completed or even got terribly far into, was supposed to be a shameless Lester imitation, specifically of his exhilarating, experimental Grand Prix winner The Knack. Apart from granting an epic interview for Steven Soderbergh's book Getting Away With It -- which spanned both his career and unexpected asides, like evolution, atheism and Richard Dawkins -- Lester has remained frustratingly modest and reclusive, not even sticking up for himself when the director of Radio Flyer and Timeline kicks him around over Superman II. And yet suddenly he's...well, not everywhere, but at least present, chatting up on the finally dropped Help! disc -- something he did not do for A Hard Day's Night back in 2002 -- and granting an honest-to-the-intelligent-designer interview with Keith Phipps for The Onion A.V. Club.

Will his time finally come? We'll see, though the interviews with both Lester and his frequent, amazing and innovative d.p. David Watkin will hopefully at least awake the peoples to his considerable technical prowess. On the disc, it's revealed that this was one of the first films to make extensive use of bounce boards, which reflect the light, either natural or non-, onto the subjects. Back in Getting Away With It, Soderbergh and Lester had the following exchange:

SS: I'll make a bold statement here and say that Help! is, to me, the birth of what I consider to be modern color cinematography. The basic principles that are at play in that film -- particularly in the "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" sequence -- are still being used by the people today [i.e., 1995-ish] who are considered to be the top cameramen in the world. It's all there. Especially the hard, overexposed back light and the reflective fill light, which Watkin is a master of.

RL: I think it was the first serious attempt to make diffused lighting positive. In other words, I think people like Raoul Coutard were working with natural light and doing it fairly effectively, but David was making it into a dominant factor in the way that he photographed people's faces. It was stunning and he was brilliant. Totally extraordinary.

Hey, judge for yourself.

Today's PW A Six Pack on cartoonish cinematic representations of right-wing demons -- I would make today's YT clip Ed Begley in Billion Dollar Brain if someone had ever uploaded it or if I actually knew how to myself -- a review (third down) of Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten and Rep. Don't forget to read Burnsy's hilarious, dead-on review of Robert Redford's awful Lions for Lambs, which also swiftly assesses this season's dearth of blunt and underperforming War on Terra dramas: "Pundits are wondering if the timing is off. Too soon? Maybe so. But after enduring In the Valley of Elah, Rendition and now Lions for Lambs, I humbly suggest that perhaps the real problem is these movies are awful."

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion...Sunday Evenings

2007-10-25T18:13:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty sure this blog has devolved into either me plugging my writing alongside quickly chosen YouTube clips or me apologizing for not plugging my writing alongside quickly chosen YouTube clips. Meanwhile, as my sidebar now says in bold, I actually do update my Twitter page, figuring that something (i.e., 140 characters or less) is better than nothing at all. I've not decided where this blog is heading, but I feel, in the spirit of the recent, violent change of the seasons here on the Northeast Coast, I should decide on something. You'll hear about it soon as I decide what that something will be.

Anywho, treading on. In honor of Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic Control, for which I have mixed feelings, here's possibly my favorite stretch from another movie partially about Joy Division, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People. Winterbottom's rollicking, pomo-heavy style is lightyears removed from Corbijn's flat and forbodingly gray work, which plays like one of his photos of Joy Divison sprung to (inert) life. All things considered, I think I prefer Winterbottom's worldview, at least here. All across the film, he's about knocking legends off their pedastal, reducing famed meetings and landmark decisions to tossed-off, anticlimactic occurrences. Here, Martin Hannett (played by Gollum) agrees to produce Joy Division purely for the cash and in mere seconds. Later, Winterbottom shows them listening to the final mix of "She's Lost Control" in a beat-up car. It's a moment the movie Once stole then completely fucked up by letting the song take over the soundtrack -- not, as here, recording the shitty sound from inside the car along with the band oohing and ahhing over it.

Sorry for the anamorphic squeeze:

Weekly! From 10/31 A Six Pack on Godly movies for the Godless (mostly Dreyer and Dreyer-influenced), reviews of Terror's Advocate and the Branagh/Pinter Sleuth, and Rep.

From 10/24 A Six Pack on sightly B&W movies from the last decade in honor of Control, which I review here, along with Reservation Road, O Jerusalem and Bella, which are all big pieces of shit. Also, Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Sorry 'bout the Wait

2007-10-17T18:58:00.000-04:00

Yeah, no excuses. Just a very particular combination of busy and lazy. (I have, however, been rather good at keeping up my Twitter page. Go there for near-daily updates.) Here's the Shameless Plugs from the many weeks I've been gone.

Let's start with today's issue. Firstly, I did a web-exclusive interview with Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola that went up Monday. I also mentioned Anderson in my Six Pack, which concerned directors who should act more (as opposed to those who should act less, like good old QT). Also, a review of Kurt Cobain: About a Son and Rep.

From the 10/10. A biggish article on locale niche film fests, in honor of the just-beginning Terror Film Festival, a review of We Own the Night and Rep. I also did a Six Pack on movies about rich white people abroad, in honor of The Darjeeling Limited. One of the entries was Kip Pardue's mindmelting, Ugly Americanish jaunt around Europe from The Rules of Attraction and this week's YouTube! Whee!

From the 10/3. A Six Pack on American westerns directed by foreign-born directors (i.e., no Spaghetti Westerns) in honor of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowards at Warner Bros. Also, reviews of The Last Winter and Lust, Caution, where I actually got the phrase "Tony Leung's nut sac" into print. Lastly, Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Ya ever see a foot with four toes?

2007-09-26T17:04:00.000-04:00

Like many, the American version of The Office lost me immediately, with a painfully unfunny mimic of the first episode that was about on par with a third party watching me and my friend's endlessly quote it in poorly-done impersonations. But over the intervening years, word got out that it actually got its shit together, both honoring the show and becoming its own thing. Turns out that's completely true. I've been Hoovering up the show's first three seasons of late, trying to catch before the fourth seasons premieres tomorrow night. And while David Brent & co. have nothing to worry about, that's because, again, the new show is its own, almost as awesome entity. Hey, I'm as shocked as you.

It seems that each episode I decide on a new favorite character, and right now that character is Creed Bratton, the mysterious quality control guy who doesn't open his mouth up much but when he does manages to reveal new, increasingly disturbing factoids. He's played by Creed Bratton, who used to be the guitarist for the Grass Roots (of the terrific "Midnight Confessions"). The ficitious Creed Bratton also used to play for the Grass Roots and it's a sign of the sly excellence of the show that they let the viewers figure out that this obscure footnote in music history is making fun of himself. (The real Bratton's Wikipedia page is here, while his character's is here.) Here's a comp of, reportedly, all of his appearances from seasons two and three (he barely made a blip in the brief first). Apologies for the scratchy audio:

The Weekly. I interviewed Robert Benton in honor of the so-so multi-character Feast of Love, though our conversation turned more to his past works, like Bonnie and Clyde and The Late Show. Burnsy decimates Feast here, where I also do up the Michael-Douglas-goes-nuts indie King of California and the human traficking saga Trade. Also, Rep. Also also, some ill-reasoned complaints and fuzzy math with a piece of hate-mail directed towards last week's In the Valley of Elah review.

Belatedly Plugging (Shamelessly)

2007-09-23T18:14:00.001-04:00

Been a bit distracted of late, so here goes two weeks of self-promotion, shameless division. Only did a Six Pack (on loathsome pro-vigilante movies, in honor of The Brave, Despicable One) and Rep in the 9/12 issue. The 9/19 issue, however, found me wicked busy. Did a lead for Paul Haggis' less-terrible-than-Crash-but-still In the Valley of Elah, plus a Six Pack on Cinematic Iraq Allegories (The Village, Land of the Dead, etc.), plus reviews of In the Shadow of the Moon, Vanaja and Eastern Promises (grade since dropped a smidge on the latter), plus a not altogether skimpy Rep. Boy, are my arms tired.

Also, in case the bold "nouveau" to your right hasn't caught your eye yet, I'm partly atoning for my lazy Blogspotting by posting skimpy effluvia -- reviews, random insights, tired one-liners, drive-bys and whatnot -- over at my newly founded Twitter page, where brevity (i.e., 140 characters per post) is the soul of wit.

Oh, and yes, YTTOSSPWs will return Wednesday. One hopes.

Where on Earth I Have Been

2007-09-09T18:38:00.001-04:00

In California. Specifically, Los Angeles, with a brief stop in San Diego (and an even briefer stop at the Denver, CO airport). Out to visit a close friend who moved out there about two years ago, the 8-day trip wound up being my first bone-fide vacation in years. (When I have time off, I usually just go to a film festival, which is hardly a break.) Here are some highlights:

* Fell back in love with the Eric Schlosser-approved In-N-Out Burger. Despite some major strides in a healthier lifestyle back home, I totally threw it to the wind, eating far, far too many of their burgers in the week-plus than I'd like to admit. I also munched on a Bob's Big Boy Burger -- boy, is it a shame this place no longer exists back here -- and a Fatburger, which I found not as good (and way overpriced) compared to In-N-Out. Back to carrots, walnuts and salmon.

* Ate catfish in non-fillet form -- i.e., very little meat and some annoyingly tough-to-initially-detect bones -- at a Thai restaurant.

* Dropped an appalling amount of money during two (2) separate trips to Amoeba Music. Some major finds: Françoise Hardy's English-language album If You Listen; Primitive Plus, the hard-to-find first album from Boston whiteboy rapper/emcee Edan; Krautrock outfit Faust's mindblowing The Faust Tapes; McCarthy, the band that eventually became Stereolab (but not without sounding like alternately R.E.M. and New Order first); and a $7 copy of the R2 Articial Eye transfer of Godard's Week End that didn't turn out to be too good to be true. (The R1 New Yorker version is notorious garbage.)

* Saw someone I hadn't seen in far, far, far, far too goddam long.

* Was given a personalized(-ish) tour of the Paramount lot. Highlights: a window full of Oscars; replicas of several city streets; Dr. Phil's car entourage and lot cart, which has, um, monster wheels.

* Wept uncontrollably upon stepping foot in BevMo! Pennsylvania still (still!) has cartoonishly puritanical drinking laws; for instance, right now (quarter to 7pm on Sunday) one can't buy a bottle of wine as liquor stores, with very few exceptions, are closed on this, the day of our lord. A week ago exactly (adjusting for time difference, that is), I walked into a BevMo! and happily grabbed bottles of Späten, this awesome dark Heffeweissen and one of those wacky mini-kegs of Paulaner. (I also scored glasses for Heffeweissen, Stella Artois and Duvel. They survived the flight.)

* Went to the Hollywood Bowl for the first time ever. No Monty Python, but Rachmaninov, Shostokovich and Stravinsky were way pleasant. Also: wine and cheese.

* Attended the Getty Villa, the purdiest museum I've ever been to.

* Didn't drink any whiskey whatsoever at this ritzy whiskey bar called Seven Grand.

* Attempted to hike; was thwarted by the first desert rain in what? A billion years? Made up for it, if partially, by bouldering (with my brand new hiking shoes!) and "climbing" the trail up to the Griffith Park Observatory. Heard a pack of coyotes wailing on the way back down. Ominous.

* Ate some great BBQ.

* Drove out to Newport Beach. Body surfed for some 2 1/2 hours before, er, getting whacked something fierce on the head by a boogey board. My head bled, very minimally, for several hours later. Fun!

* Ate at a fancy-schmancy seafood restaurant in San Diego. My meal, which turned out to be in a giant fucking tin bowl, required wearing an actual bib. Not pretty.

* Snorkelled at La Jolla cove. I swam over (harmless) leopard sharks and swam with a bunch of bright yellow fish. Also seaweed and algae. Best. Thing. Ever. Except for the whole totally sunburnt back thing.

* Did karaoke for the first time since I was probably fifteen. Apparently I do a mean Girl From the Cardigans.

* Smoked medicinal marijuana. What paranoia?

* Didn't watch a single movie the entire time I was there.

The last two week's of PW pluggin'. Didn't feel like doing even the minimal of blog updates out on the West Coast, so here goes. From 8/29 issue, I reviewed the lo-fi 9/11 2 yarn Right At Your Door, wrote a Six Pack on unusual remakes (Losey's M, McBride's Breathless, Chris Rock's take on Eric Rohmer) and did Rep. From the 9/5 issue, I reviewed Dans Paris and Ten Canoes (second and third down), Six Packed decent movies shot on shitty video (The Celebration, Colossal Youth, Inland Empire) and Repped it up.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Take Sitram or Take Your Lumps

2007-08-22T15:56:00.000-04:00

All this talk over at Michael Atkinson's blog about long takes has got me thinking about Songs From the Second Floor, Roy Andersson's brilliant procession of deadpan/absurdist static long takes. In his long career, the Swede's made only four feature films, and his latest -- You, the Living -- pops up seven long years after Songs. But rest easier: turns out Andersson has had a far more prolific sideline in commercials, cranking out some 300 of the fuckers. Judging from the following collection of seven, they've nothing on his feature work, but they're still an ideal way for him to hone his work -- not just his skills for immobile deadpan shots, but his skill for portraying loneliness and anti-capitalism. (One of them is for Sweden's Social Democratic Party.)

In the Weekly I interview John Singleton, whose latest production Illegal Tender I review here, along with Resurrecting the Champ, the latest from ad quote whore film critic-turned-terrible filmmaker Rod Lurie. Also, Rep and a Six Pack on H-wood debuts from foreign directors that went less than swimmingly, in honor of Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel's chopped up The Invasion. The last one wound up hacked up a bit to make room for Nicole Kidman's sinewy bod, with special attention to Georges Sluizier's horrid The American Vanishing. Here's how it should have gone:

Hollywood is notorious for fucking up foreign film adaptations, but is hiring the original director really the answer? According to Dutch filmmaker Georges Sluizier’s redo of his bone-chilling 1988 original: no, it’s even worse. (Fingers crossed for Michael Haneke’s forthcoming Americanized Funny Games.) The director himself tacked on a ridiculous, thesis-shattering happy ending and had Jeff Bridges adopt a wincingly goofy voice as the everyman who discovers he’s capable of purest evil. Sluizer wound up with a similar self-discovery: barely heard from since, he’s currently attached to a Rob Schneider comedy.

That's right: a Rob Schneider comedy. Something tells me it's no Punch-Drunk Love.

Catching up, Part Two: Films Noir

2007-08-20T21:23:00.000-04:00

I’m about halfway through Warner’s new noir set (their fourth), and I have to say that it’s just the bee’s knees. There might have been some worry because, save They Live By Night (and maybe the Don Siegel-Robert Mitchum mash-up The Big Steal), there are no heavy-hitters. No wonder it comes with ten features (a fucking steal even at the full $60 listing price). But each film has either been really, very good or flat-out blown me away, no less because I knew so little about them. Who knew Fred Zinnemann, the tasteful workhorse of High Noon, Oklahoma! and A Man For All Seasons, was capable of a knotty great like Act of Violence?

I’ve been plowing through them, so let’s keep this appropriately short:

Crime Wave (1954, André de Toth) Never seen de Toth before, but based on this one, no less than House of Wax is already near the top of my Queue. Cheap, stark and stripped-down, it’s shot mostly in single takes featuring lots of harsh lighting and blocked perspectives, giving it a kind of exaggerated doc-like feel. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Nouvelle Vague bowed before it. Gene Nelson, best known as a hoofer (in Oklahoma!, for one), is suitably intense, though his innate decency - combined with the ruthlessness with which Sterling Hayden (awesome, as ever) pursues him -- grows wearying even over the (tight) 74 minutes. Ending either disappointingly pat or unique -- can’t decide. B+

Where Danger Lives (1950, John Farrow) Farrow was a Roman Catholic convert, and it shows: Robert Mitchum’s sweet-natured doctor descends into a nightmare just at the thought of bedding Faith Domergue, and that’s before he even knows she’s married. Like D.O.A. (haven’t seen), this movie has such a great hook and it really doesn’t spoil it. Essentially, Mitchum is thonked over the head by Dommergue’s older husband Claude Rains (who just murders his one scene) and spends the rest of the movie becoming increasingly woozy from his concussion, all the while going from swanky urban life to desolate Nowhere America. The climactic long take - e, like those in Children of Men, all the more impressive because you don’t realize they’re long takes till you’re well into them - is a doozy, but so is one bit of shot-reverse-shot that, at the end, is revealed to have both characters looking in different places. A-

Act of Violence (1949, Fred Zinnemann) As with the above, great existential/philosophical plot not remotely screwed up. Doesn’t even take the easy route with the ending. Van Heflin, after the obscure spag western The Ruthless Four, quickly becoming a favorite. A-

Side Street (1949, Anthony Mann) Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell back again. It’s no They Live By Night, though by design: O’Donnell is very much in the background, with more focus on the supporting characters. But she’s essential, since she and Granger have a bond that is childlike and so deeply affecting that all they have to do is swap puppy dog eyes and I tear up. (Too bad Granger couldn’t always act with her.) Above all, one of the great NYC movies, with one of the all-time best punchlines: “Made in Hollywood.” B+

Tension (1949, John Berry) Audrey Totter was the best part of Robert Montgomery’s apocalyptically wrongheaded Lady in the Lake stab, and she’s about as great here as a chilly fatale, essentially playing Marie Windsor to Richard Basehart’s Elisha Cook, Jr. in Kubrick’s The Killing. Abandoning Basehart in the second half in favor of Barry Sullivan’s dic -- the narrator inserting himself into the story as a third variable, as it were -- is a ballsy move. Sadly, I didn’t fully come along, no less because Sullivan’s smugness upended the whole enterprise. We know he’ll succeed, whereas we at least have our doubts about Basehart. Totter’s bulging eyes compensate mucho. B

Decoy (1946, Jack Bernhard) The real cheapie so far -- produced by Poverty Row annex Monogram - and a sufficiently twisty, resourceful one. Jean Gillie is an anomaly in noir -- a Brit whose cool detachment masks not fragility but a complete lack of compassion or selflessness. (Great tagline: "She Treats Men the Way They've Been Treating Women For Years!") When she cackles madly at the end, it’s just earth shattering. I can see how people would read about this for years without seeing it, and could even delude themselves into not being completely disappointed. But it’s a touch too plot-heavy for my tastes and noble old Edward Norris is a bit of a drag. Awesome touch: POV shot of a guy inside a working gas chamber. B+

Still to Go: Mystery Street, Illegal, /They Live By Night/, /The Big Steal/

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Tony Wilson Meets God

2007-08-15T21:13:00.000-04:00

More celebrity deaths, eh? One hopes that if there is a god, it either looks like a) Tony Wilson or b) Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson. From 24 Hour Party People (natch):

The Weekly In a particularly Superbad-centric section, I interview the Crü and cite it in a Six Pack devoted to great profanity in movies, while Burnsy bestows upon it masterpiece status. Elsewhere, I review both This is England and Death at a Funeral and prattle on and on (and on and on and on) about Chris Marker in Rep.

Catching Up, Part One: What Do You Call Italian-Made Westerns Shot in Spain?

2007-08-13T19:15:00.000-04:00

Heat and a move back downtown have kept me from the old K.B., but I've been more screening-happy, if anything. Lest I get more ruthlessly behind, let's take this one in-bold bit at a time:

"Beyond Leone" Spaghetti Western Fest @ I-House
Everyone's an expert on Sergio Leone, but are there filmmakers or even individual films just as worthy? Possibly not, but this cavalcade -- picked by the great collector Harry Guero, of Exhumed Films -- was revealing all the same. The most eye-opening stuff was, not pejoratively, the oodles of trailers. Exploitation films make for the best adverts, as they tend to be nothing more than recycled bits and stars. Hence the reams of Lee Van Cleef vehicles, which find him cast as everything from heroes to villains to a badly-toupéed injun. (Il bruto, if you need know, hails from Jersey.) As with the fake trailers from Grindhouse, seeing the full thing would almost be superfluous -- they could never live up to the shorn-down version. Should trailer-makers be held on the same pedestal as filmmakers? Discuss.

As for the six features themselves, they were an understandable mixed bag. Even the two movies featuring the "Man With No Name" ripoff character Sartana spanned from entertainingly lurid (1970's If You Meet Sartana Pray For Your Death) to stiff to the point of lifeless (1971's Django Challenges Sartana, essentially a spag western "vs" pic). The Wild Bunch-esque Five Man Army -- released the same year, so who knows if rip-off charges are in order -- features Peter Graves, a fat guy, a Japanese guy, a Mexican bandito and another old guy milking the Mexican Revolution via some of the longest set pieces this side of a Melville heist pic, albeit without the rigor. They wind up fighting alongside the peasants, whereas the leads in 1971's amazingly-titled (aka Heads I Kill You, Tails You're Dead! They Call Me Hallelujah (aka, Heads You're Dead, Tails I Kill You -- for some reason I like this title more) continue to happily play for only themselves; not sure what to make of the wisecracking Eastwoodesque star (George Hilton) teaming up with the Russian Kossack dude. (Fuck the Cold War!)

The regrettably spotty Day of Anger -- with bandit Lee Van Cleef, as directed by Leone protégé Tonino Valerii (My Name is Nobody), training a gawky kid on how to be a selfish baddie -- was paired with the series' sole eye-opener: 1968's The Ruthless Four. What bugs me about my liking it so is that it was the most traditionally American of the fest's offerings. Most spag westerns, at least the ones I've seen, tend to revel in bad-ass amorality, rejecting both the classical moral greyness of classic westerns and the bitter, revisionist history stylings of the westerns being made in America at the same time. (Your Peckinpahs, Hellmans, Little Big Man, The Hired Hand, etc.) The Ruthless Four, meanwhile, is a pretty spot-on imitation Anthony Mann -- well-plotted, with dark themes and a slew of unlikeable but (for the most part) human characters.

An ancient, near-death Van Heflin plays a gold prospector whose partner turns on him in the opening scene. Heflin acts quick and winds up having to detonate his mine, which he's been digging out for months, with said backstabber still in there. Hoping to return with a boy he helped raise (Hilton again), he winds up taking on two more men in addition: Gilbert Roland as a former partner who he accidentally (or not) helped put behind bars; and no less than Klaus Kinski, as a pale, effete, vampiric man of mystery who "helped" Hilton (who's not so trustworthy after all) after Heflin and he parted ways. (Kinski's performance at times seems like a dry run for his and Herzog's Nosferatu.) So no one trusts anyone, each person has ulterior motives and there's gold to be had.

So rare is The Ruthless Four that the (faded, dominantly red) print was in 1.33 rather than its alleged 'scope*, so I can't say how Mannish director Giorgio Capitani's compromised frames are. (The editing is fine, though, particularly during a leftfield shoot-out at the halfway mark.) This leaves it transfixing as pure drama, and the film is rarely less than captivating, its four-way battle of wills sometimes reminiscent of Mann's genius The Naked Spur. Sure, it's no masterpiece, but a reddish, sliced-up print is far less than it deserves.

To come: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Pedro Costa, The Bourne Fucking Ultimatum

* If you haven't seen what people did before the days of digitally-abled pan-and-scan, then ye gods are you in for a treat. The framing is usually centered; if the director and/or cinematographer wished to, I don't know, spice things up a bit, then the solution is to simply cut to a different section of the frame. As you can imagine, this is all kinds of jarring, with people sometimes "moved" a mere couple inches so we can someone who'd be left out entirely because he's been staged at the extreme right or left. Disparage P&S as much as you want, at least sudden, unsightly pans are better than sudden, jarring cuts.

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Not Lee Hazlewood, Too!

2007-08-08T20:58:00.000-04:00

Dang. I know that everyone's posting clips of Nancy Sinatra -- Hazlewood's best known for penning "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'," as well as many other N. Sinatra songs -- but some of his best work is off his surreal 1970 album Cowboy in Sweden. The compositions themselves -- written for a film of the same name that itself was little more than a block of music videos for the songs -- are like most of his work: dusty country songs with alternately fatalistic and purple lyrics, complete with frequent contributions from two (2) N. Sinatra-soundalikes. But the production makes them either dustier still or overly lush, at time rivalling "Some Velvet Morning" for sheer whatthefuckness. Here, from the film, is Hazlewood and Nina Lizell pairing up for "Vem Kan Segla Förutan Vind?" (Tell me about it...)

The Weekly A Six Pack not on Bergman films you should see but underseen ones (e.g., Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel, Shame) and Rep, which features mucho words on a night of oddball westerns like Rancho Notorious, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and the "Living in Harmony" episode of The Prisoner, as well as a lengthy bit on a two-nighter of doc scraps from the Brothers Maysles. (Note: over the last week, the PW web designer has apparently decided to up the font size from microscopically tiny to comfortably readable. Hurrah!)

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Antoniennui Still Dead

2007-08-01T16:48:00.000-04:00

Guess what? My people are still smarting from the nation of Cinephilia's double-death Monday. I linked to this yesterday, but it bears embedding: here's the amazing, explosive, Pink Floyd-accompanied finale to his one and only Hollywood effort, Zabriskie Point. No, the rest of the movie isn't this awesome, but it would be nice if everyone had a chance to find that out on their own.

Two weeks of Weekly I was remiss in updating last week, but really, there ain't much to link to. Just a review of Lars Von Trier's The Boss Of It All, plus Rep. Today's issue contains a Six Pack on great, non-lazy narration tracks (Band of Outsiders, Raising Arizona, etc.), reviews of Gypsy Caravan and The Simpsons Movie (third and fifth down) and Rep.

Damn, Antonioni, too?

2007-07-31T15:44:00.000-04:00

Look out, Alain Resnais.

As with Bergman, I turned my back on Michelangelo Antonioni, another classic world cinema titan to pass on 30 June 2007. (Again: damn.) Unlike with Bergman, I’ve more or less recanted. Pauline Kael’s in/famous “Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party” – in which she slaughtered La Dolce Vita, Last Year at Marienbad and Antonioni’s La Notte in one foul swoop – had a sizeable effect on my budding cinephilia, and I wrote Antonioni off as a trendy little operator without even having delved much into his oeuvre. (And what’s more, really liking what I had seen: L’Avventura and Blow-Up.) Frankly, I’m still a bit iffy on La Notte, The Eclipse and Zabriskie Point, particularly the latter’s stiff, uncharismatic non-pro leads and borderline-comical, lip-smacking hatred for the U.S. And you thought he hated Europe. (The original planned ending was to have a plane skywriting, “Fuck You, America.”)

It took The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson wanting no more than to shirk all responsibility, to re-convince me of his style -- namely, that it overwhelms all, by design. One of Antonioni’s niftiest tricks was to take a genre plot – a disappearance in L’Avventura, a Hitchcockian murder plot in Blow-Up, a proto-Robert Ludlum page-turner in The Passenger – and let the narratives fade into the ether. It’s ironic that these gradually listless films twice ended with a literal bang – the climactic detonations in The Eclipse (seen here) and especially Zabriskie Point (seen here) would make Michael Bay cream his shorts. (Where did the “repeating explosion from multiple cameras” schtick come but from Antonioni?)

As noted almost verbatum, his characters typically desire connection in an increasingly isolating world. But it’s their battle with their surroundings – be they urban or rural, or the oppressive fusion in Red Desert – that really caught his eye, literally and figuratively. No one could frame an alienating shot like Antonioni, depicting his characters – thinly designed, often ciphers, but sometimes deeply, if remotely cared for, as with Monica Vitti or Nicholson in The Passenger – struggling to contend with their environment. Sadly, Antonioni only worked in cinemascope once. Naturally, it – i.e., Zabriskie Point – isn’t even on DVD.

It’s really too bad that Antonioni leaves us with The Dangerous Thread of Things, his nudity- and dumb line-laced contribution to the omnibus film Eros that plays like a devastating parody of a pretentious art film you’d see on SCTV. Antonioni wasn’t afraid to be pretentious, but his films were, for the most part, never bad.

Yet to see: Story of a Love Affair, Le Amiche, Il Grido, The Mystery of Oberwald, Beyond the Clouds

Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007

2007-07-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

Me and Ingmar Bergman have a checkered past. Like Fellini and, to an extent, Truffaut, The Brooding Swede™ was a gateway filmmaker I eventually forsook. My earliest memories of cinephilia -- and surely I'm not alone on this -- involve marveling over The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The Silence, which I then congratulated myself for "getting." (Sort-of, in the latter case.) His stark images, starker ideas and starker still monologues, whose bluntness I too often confused with honesty, were intregal in making me feel hardcore about loving cinema, just as he was intregal to the popularity of world cinema in the '50s. There's no doubt that without him -- or Fellini, or Truffaut, or anyone else I watched at the time -- I wouldn't have found Godard, Buñuel, Bresson, Ozu, Teshigahara, Imamura and onto the Tarrs, Assayases, Denises, Weerasethakuls, etc.

But I also don't want to give you the wrong impression.

The truth is that I often find Bergman more than a little bit insufferable. I appreciate his contributions and innovations, and even like them from time to time. I would even say I generally "like" Bergman. But at least half of what I've seen of his work strikes me as juvenile and onanistic, and not in the good ways. Not long ago, I wound up in a bizarre bar-set debate over Toy Story vs. The Seventh Seal. Don't ask. Both, weirdly, have similarities. Each deals with an existential crisis -- Woody vs. his sudden irrelevance in the face of a new, flashier toy; Max von Sydow vs. mortality itself. And I totally came down on the side of Toy Story. While The Seventh Seal deals with life and death in stark terms, using undeniably iconic imagery, I realized that the superficially lighter Toy Story actually explored its crisis more thoroughly. (Actually, it's Toy Story 2 that plums really deep.)

Would Pixar even have had the cajones to wrestle with such Big Ideas had Bergman not first made it chic? Possibly not. But there's respect and there's genuine appreciation, and the twain shouldn't necessary meet.

The weird thing is I'm not alone in my blasphemy. Once upon a time, or so the story goes, Bergman was the toast of Cinema -- appearing on American talk shows, getting all (or most) of his films released stateside, having his name associated with intellectual restlessness. Nowadays, you get Dave Kehr lambasting Criterion for kicking off their budget-priced Eclipse label with early Bergmans -- this out-of-fashion auteur. I don't think this is a minority opinion. With the DVD revolution making cinema literacy even easier, budding cinephiles don't need to subsist on just La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Jules and Jim, Day For Night and the collected work of miserable old (dead) Ingmar Bergman. Why delve into Eclipse's Early Bergman when there's Late Ozu to be had? Those with regionless players can watch seven hour Béla Tarr movies or Jeanne Dielman, fer chrissakes. What's the point in trawling through that plodding ode to mortality, Cries and Whispers?

I'm not sure myself, and in typical Bergman fashion, I feel a pang of guilt for writing him off, no less because when he's good, he's pretty dang kickass. I have little use for some of his work, but I still don't mind being among the breathless throngs when it comes to Persona, Scenes From a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander. I can even somewhat rationalize away the plainness with which he presents his ideas -- you know, just having people stand there and talk about them? The bald theatricality of his staging and the plainness with which they're filmed -- actors talking without moving in a static frame -- has an otherworldliness that can be pretty infectious. It's like his films go from cinema, past theater and back into cinema again. (They've also clearly inspired no less a passionate fella than Arnaud Desplechin -- surely Bergman's polar opposite in temperament. Kings and Queen steals Bergman's idea of having dead people simply strut on up to the living and chat them up, as well as the whole notion of having people reading their letters to the lens.

And let's not forget that he's a whizz with atmosphere, particularly in creating a sense of menace. Even as straightforward and clumsy a film as Winter Light has a hushed, depressive sense of dread that's palpable. Even as overloaded and fussy a film as The Silence has a hothouse atmosphere that Tennessee Williams would lap up, and a rampant weirdness that no doubt did a number on David Lynch young, impressionable self. And then there's the no-stops-pulled climax of 1966's Hour of the Wolf, which still sticks out as unmistakably Bergman amidst all the other psychdelic freak-out set pieces of the era.

I doubt I'll ever come around to the work of his that I don't much care for. (Sorry, Cries and Whispers.) But his passing makes me suddenly interested in going back to fill in gaps that I probably wouldn't have otherwise bothered filling. (Last year when I watched Hour of the Wolf, I was mildly appalled that my last new Bergman was about four years before.) I can't help but wonder if his death will give his rep the kick it might almost deserve.

In the meantime, here's five films of his I heartily endorse:
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
The Silence (1963)
Persona (1966)
Scenes From a Marriage (1973)
Fanny and Alexander (1983)
(a boring list, now that I look)

But just things aren't too reverent, here's five I could...well, not do without, but you know:
The Virgin Spring (1960)
Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
Winter Light (1962)
Cries and Whispers (1973)
Autumn Sonata (1978)

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Like Anna Karina's Sweater

2007-07-18T17:43:00.000-04:00

In honor of me finally owning a not just decent but brilliantly sharp DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, here's the film's second go at a low-rent, on-location musical sequence. (Listen to the outdoor noise, the fuck-ups with singing, etc.) Sigh, Anna Karina.

In the PW I did a Six Pack on art house movies where the characters actually enjoy fucking eachother (and without dropping the f-bomb, no less). Also, five scattered caps for the second week of the Philly Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, as well as Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Sly Wants to Take You Higher

2007-07-11T22:30:00.000-04:00

Ten minutes of Sly & the Family Stone, from Woodstock:

The Weekly. Lotsa stuff this week, starting with nine caps for the descending Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, including the revival of Gus Van Sant's debut, Mala Noche. Also, a longish interview with Zoe Cassavetes, son of John and director of Broken English, as well as another one with Steve Zahn, on the occasion of him working with Werner Herzog on Rescue Dawn. HerzogMania™ continues with a short list of his most awesome antics and a review of Dawn, where you can also find me weighing in on Broken English and Lady Chatterley. Lastly, Rep, whose big draw is a Bastille Day screening of Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Phew!

Halftime Report '07: Cinema is Alive!

2007-07-07T13:34:00.000-04:00

Usually around this time of year, I'm pretty blah on the fare released in the last six months. The second half tends to be better, what with studios saving their loftier fare for Oscar season, Cannes films finally seeing the light of day (unless they win the Palme d'Or, in which case they invariably take a year to hit Philly) and the combination of January dumping grounds and two months of financially burdened summer fare. So color me a sheepish optimist, because I think 2007 So Far has been pretty fucking amazing.

Hell, I don't even mind ordering the list so far:

01. Zodiac
02. Regular Lovers
03. Grindhouse
04. Knocked Up
05. Offside
06. Black Book
07. The Host
08. Woman on the Beach
09. Hot Fuzz
10. Bamako

Simply in terms of arbitrary grade ranking, that's eight (8) films I've given an A- or higher. And two (2) I've given higher than an A-. I wish most years were this good, let alone the first half of most years.

Of course, if you want to be a stickler, a number of those debuted -- internationally speaking at festivals or in other countries -- last year. That would mean stricking from the list nos. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10.

Altogether now: Yeesh. But don't fret, because a "pure" list -- released for absolutely the first time anywhere in the last six months -- would be if not as tasty, still pretty tasty. Like so:

01. Zodiac
02. Grindhouse
03. Knocked Up
04. Hot Fuzz
05. 28 Weeks Later
06. Black Snake Moan
07. Ratatouille
08. Tick Tock Lullaby
09. Vacancy
10. In the Shadow of the Moon

I can get happily behind all of those. And keep in mind I have yet to see the following: Alexandra; Boarding Gate; 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days; Go Go Tales; Joshua; The Man From London; A Mighty Heart; My Blueberry Nights; No Country For Old Men; Paranoid Park; Sicko; Silent Light; or QT's expanded version of Death Proof.

Bring on Half the Second in my opinion.

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Apparently It's a Holiday

2007-07-04T23:50:00.000-04:00

One of the more inexplicable missing items from DVD is Storytime, an eight minute short Terry Gilliam made in 1968, just before Monty Python. When Gilliam's first non-Python feature Jabberwocky was reissued in the late '90s, this multi-part deluge of cut-out madness was attached; when Jabberwocky was released on DVD shortly thereafter, the disc was missing this. I've long been searching for this on YT, and it finally looks like someone had the good graces to throw it up. Kudos, someone.

The ol' PW A Six Pack on food movies, which gave me a chance to mention Dusan Makavejev's just-Criterioned Sweet Movie as well as the obscure '80s horror pic Motel Hell. Also, Rep.

Fuck. A. Duck.

2007-07-02T22:39:00.000-04:00

Of course, it's all a ruse to get you to go some net dating site. (In fact, don't click on the link.) Still, I was hoping for at least an NC-17.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: We're Coming Up Around the Bend, This Time Tomorrow

2007-06-27T17:44:00.001-04:00

Humor me for a sec. In one of my usual soujourns through the jungles of YouTube, I stumbled upon a random chunk from the amazing party section of Olivier Assayas' Cold Water, which eats up nearly half the film's running time. (Aside: yo, Region 1 DVD maestros! Get on fucking issuing this already. Jesus.) The scene culminates in an epic mass dance in front of a bonfire to CCR's "Up Around the Bend" -- which, in one of the greatest testaments to the awesomeness of CCR, is played halfway through and then, just 'cause it's sad to think the song is that much closer to ending, is stopped and started over again from the beginning.

It's been well over a year since I first saw this film, but this scene looked familiar -- as though I had seen it even sooner than that. In fact, it reminded me of another amazing frügging session, with the camera trained tightly on a messy and borderline unsightly mass of cavorting bodies, namely the "This Time Tomorrow" scene from Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers, also used as a sort of Last Dance. Did Garrel, the elder statesman, pay homage to Assayas, an obvious protégé? Or is this kind of thing an old Garrel standard? (I haven't seen enough of the latter's films to know for sure.)

So here they are back to back. Like I said, the snippet from Cold Water is a random section (roughly seven minutes), and the dancing doesn't begin till the 5:47 mark (or since, the embedded counter goes backwards only, 1:33), and then doesn't really get into the thick of things till 6:22 (or with about a minute left). If you've never seen the film before (and not many have outside of Europe), then you might want to avoid watching the whole thing. But know that you should see it (it pops up on Sundance now and again) and that this section alone justifies the usually dubious art of pumping in pop songs to convey emotion. Even moreso than with Assayas' other films, Cold Water represents a terrific use of music, particularly the two lovers slow dancing to Leonard Cohen early on in the clip. In fact, having rewatched this section, I'm starting to wonder if Assayas isn't perhaps the true heir to Kenneth Anger (as far as using songs goes, that is).

And now Regular Lovers. (I've shown this clip before, by the way. Sorry about the quasi-recycling.) The action doesn't really begin till the minute mark.

And the PW. A Six Pack on actors cast awesomely against type (Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich), a review of Manufactured Landscapes, a visually striking doc on still photographer Edward Burtynsky, and a very summery Rep.

Briefly Breaking My Coulter Ban

2007-06-27T12:47:00.000-04:00

About a year ago, after several years of getting in a tizzy every week over Ann Coulter's columns (and occasional books, TV appearances, etc.), I took an online oath: I promised that I would do my best to no longer read her increasingly unreadable, transparently calculated, quip-heavy hate screeds. That way, I can help cut back on her only form of power (attention, duh). I can't even remember at which site I took this pledge, nor could I find it with a quick Google search. Regardless, I mean business, and my sanity has been happily preserved.

But every now and then I break it. I couldn't resist thumbing through her "takedown" of evo-devo in Godless (effectively dismantled here), and I couldn't resist seeing how she would respond to someone (i.e., Elizabeth Edwards) who called her on her shit on-air, the cameraman very tellingly holding on her face. (Nice sabotage, dude.)

Surely, I don't need to post the incident on this page (you can see it here, as well as, oh, everywhere else). I have a (possibly rhetorical) question, though. Edwards asks her to stop making personal attacks (on her husband, and in general). Coulter immediately interprets/spins that as meaning she should stop writing altogether. Does that mean she's acknowledging that she has nothing to write about except personal attacks? That if she stopped "making fun" of grieving parents, widows, et al., there'd be a blank page? A brutally honest admission, if you ask me.

(By the way, how awesome is Chris Matthew's exasperated sigh when, having asked her a pretty direct question about why she mocks, say, Monica Lewinsky's fat legs, she ducks it by demanding he superfluously cite the entire sentence? Awesome enough that I almost like the guy.)

And with that, my Coulter ban resumes.

p.s.

2007-06-25T22:09:00.000-04:00

I was interviewed -- via IM, for a good two and a half hours -- by my good pal (and fellow PWer) Craig D. Lindsey for his blog at his North Carolina paper, The News & Observer. I'm honestly not sure how interesting it will be to a third party, as it's quite chatty and laid-back. (Though I did, apparently, talk quite a bit about Seth Rogen's bare ass.) Perhaps if you need a mid-day nap?

A Breach in Breach

2007-06-25T13:28:00.000-04:00

As with Keanu Reeves, Andie Macdowell and the version of Mark Wahlberg that’s straight and boring, a lot of seemingly intelligent filmmakers have an unhealthy affinity for Ryan Phillippe. I like Billy Ray’s approach to docudrama. In both this and Shattered Glass, he combines an unmistakable intelligence with a willingness to find empathy in real people not worthy of them. But he cast Phillippe as his lead, and the movie, by and large, just goes down with him. I don’t mean that as a glib joke. Phillippe literally opens up a conceptual black hole in the movie. Chris Cooper’s Robert Hanssen – the FBI agent who sold secrets to the Soviet Union for some 25 years – is built up time and again as the slyest crony on the block, capable of shaking down the best of Soviet spies and generally impossible to, um, breach. The film finds him fooled into trusting Phillippe’s newbie Eric O’Neill, essentially making Phillippe an actor playing an actor. And since Phillippe can’t act his way out of a plastic bag, neither can O’Neill, lending a surreality to Hanssen’s downfall. He can hang with Soviet spies but he can’t catch a guy who can’t even sell a line? Hanssen’s a fascinating enough subject to keep Breach worthwhile, and Ray even works a thoughtful dissection on the meaning of trust: the film manages to express Hanssen’s pain over being deceived without making him into some fallen hero. It even manages to deal with his hardcore, nutty Opus Dei faith without resorting to easy yuks. But despite the top billing, the movie belongs not to Cooper but to Phillippe, and Phillippe fails at even playing the bland eye at the center of the much more showy storm. B-

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: The Rhythm of Denis

2007-06-20T18:26:00.000-04:00

Denis Levant's frügging session from the finale of Claire Denis' Beau Travail -- second to the Tony Leung-featuring ending of Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild as the greatest unexpected final scene ever:

In Ye Olde PW I totally interviewed Ben Kingsley, totally reviewed his movie You Kill Me as well as Luc Besson's typically ridiculous Angel-A (second and third down), totally wrote about the POV-heavy Britcom Peep Show (which I totally mentioned about on this spot earlier), and totally did another session of Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: No More Mr. Passive-Resistance

2007-06-13T21:56:00.000-04:00

I'm totally interviewing Ben Kingsley this weekend (re: his hitman comedy You Kill Me). In my head, I'm imagining that getting him to talk will be a bit like this. In honor of this possibly terrifying occasion, here's the trailer for Gandhi II, aka the best part of "Weird" Al's UHF.

In the Weekly: I interview director Olivier Dahan, whose Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie En Rose, I decimate over here (while also praising Guy Maddin's latest, Brand Upon the Brain!). Also, Rep, in which I heap some praise on John and Yoko's forgotten TV movie Rape.

I finally see (part of) Dark Side of the Rainbow

2007-06-07T16:35:00.001-04:00

That's it?! This is bullshit.

Years ago, during a period of abject poverty (and pot), a roommate and I used to while away parts of evenings by cuing up albums to movies. The music/film mash-ups weren't scientifically selected. We just wondered whether Stereolab went with Fantasia or Broadcast did up 2001 or Led Zeppelin was a nice fit with Koyaanisqatsi. On all three counts: oh yeah. (Try Zep III with 'qatsi sometime.) We even tried Brian Eno's Another Green World with an episode of Flipper. The music would nicely alter the image, and vice versa, and we'd even chuckle loudly when there was a connection, sonic or lyrics-wise, with the song and what was on screen.

What we didn't do was claim that these songs were intentionally recorded alongside the movies we were watching, citing dozens of tenuous connections even as the artists themselves state outright that we had far too much time on our hands and besides, they didn't even have the capability to project the films in question in the studio.

I state this not because I expected Oz and Moon to connect much -- I've publicly mocked screenings of this on several occasions -- but because, having seen a snippet of it, I'm just amazed at how...fucking...lame it is. "The lunatic is on the grass" = the Scarecrow dancing about like a moron on a yellow brick road? A brief chuckle as Dorothy discovers the Tin Man's foot? A veritable cottage industry based on specious connections like these?

I won't begrudge people who enjoy the experience, but the Floyd/Fleming mesh is about as effective as my roommate and I experimenting with whatever movie and album we got our hands on -- less so, actually, since the music doesn't perform an interesting or particularly pleasing alteration on the film. It's just occasional, minor, accidental match-ups. Not to mention, in order to do the synch, one has to start the album thrice since Dark Side is over twice as short as Oz.

Each connection on the afore-linked page is a clear-cut case of confirmation bias, wherein the brain hunts for connections between unrelated objects, embellishing the finds while ignoring the far more prevalent misses. Notice how the song segues into different sections and the scene just keeps playing out, oblivious to Roger Waters et al.? Of course you don't, because the song just called the frügging Scarecrow a "lunatic" (albeit one "not on the grass"). It's like when people claim that coincidences are part of an overall intelligent design. You're thinking of Person A and then Person A calls you right at that moment. "Some higher being meant for you to call me just now," you tell Person A, who promptly responds, "What are you, fucking high? What about the thousands, maybe millions of times you've thought of me and I didn't call? The world does not revolve around you. Jesus."

I'm just saying.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays:That Boy Needs Therapy

2007-06-06T17:05:00.000-04:00

Mike Maguire's video for "Frontier Psychiatrist," off of the mind-melting, all-sample album Since I Left You by Aussie electronic outfit The Avalanches:

Unlike those on the Director's Label (Jonze, Gondry, Corbijn, et al.), Maguire's not a particularly well-known director. (He's apparently a memeber of The Director's Bureau, a collective headed up by Coppolas Sofia and Roman.) I don't know why not. This video is at least the equal of the best of anyone mentioned above, coming up with the amazingly novel idea of assigning each of the song's samples a tactile analogue -- ranging from the hilariously literal ("you're crazier than a coconut" = a ventrioloquist dummy with a coconut head) to the troublesomely weird (the turtle man) -- then arranging them all on a stage. It's a nifty piece of deconstruction, literally taking the song apart piece by piece. And like most great videos, it makes it hard to listen to its song the same way again. From now on, the image I conjure up when I hear whinnying will be an older woman slapping a horse's ass.

The Weekly. In today's pape, a Six Pack on Out-of-Nowhere Movie Deaths, like Wages of Fear, Deep Blue Sea and, my favorite ending ever, Martin. Also, a review of Alain Resnais' Private Fears in Public Places (known in France more succinctly as Coeurs) and Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Sonny Bono Turns into a Plant Pod

2007-05-30T19:04:00.001-04:00

Everyone's going nuts over this bit from Troll's cheapo(-er) Italian sequel, and rightly so. But even hilariously unemotive line readings that lead into way over the top screaming can't top the part in the first one where Sonny Bono turns into a forest. Sadly, this isn't the whole thing, missing the infectious ring stab (don't ask) at the beginning and the rest of his plant growth at the end. This scene, though, made the kid version of me totally fucking wretch. (I have something of a crush on this movie, as this exhibits.)

Da Weekly. I totally interviewed Chris Eigeman, the brilliantly sardonic star of Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach movies and who would already rather be bow hunting. (I got him chatting about Gilmore Girls and his brief stint on the unaired Red Dwarf U.S. pilot, but didn't have the room to put it in.) His new film, The Treatment, which finds him cast interestingly against type, opens in Philly this weekend, and I reviewed it here, along with the wildly overrated but not bad Irish musical drama Once and the majorly spotty Brit-horror Severance. Also, Rep. Also also, don't miss Burnsy's spot-on rave of Knocked Up -- the only summer movie worth your buckazoids thus far.

How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend

2007-05-29T19:35:00.000-04:00

I did a lot of non-cinema activities over the three day weekend. (Actually, four day, since I didn’t work on Friday, either.) I got food and drinks with people on a couple occasions. I finally played Wii. I visited friends I haven’t seen in ages. I went to an MD party where, on three separate occasions, groups of us left the hordes to go play basketball and some made-up wiffle ball thingamajig. I lost a game of Pig to an 11 year old.

But as far as this blog cares, I plowed through ten movies. Apart from catching William Friedkin’s partly awesome Bug and going to a long-awaited Alejandro Jodorowosky double feature (which I'll go into later), the holiday siege was all about catching up with DVDs I either bought recently or needed to ship back to NetFlix.

Let’s do this shit.

In his NYT DVD column a couple weeks back, Dave Kehr went mad for Canyon Passage (1947, B+), a western from the French-born Jacques Tourneur, who’s best known for Out of the Past and being the prize horse in Val Lewton’s stable of directors (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man). I initially skimmed the rave, so I wasn’t sure what made Kehr so frothy. I couldn’t quite place what it was till late in. For the longest time, it seemed like just a case of humanism. In short, this is a western without any clear-cut baddies or goodies -- where the “hero” is kinda sketchy, where his best friend has a dishonorable streak, where whatever villains there turn out to not be so evil. It’s easy to overrate these things. I know I have.

But there’s no reason to overrate Canyon Passage, because it’s not humanistic -- it’s realistic. Dana Andrews plays a taciturn, tough guy businessman as he returns to remote, developing town of Jacksonville, OR. There, he gets embroiled in a series of events, ranging from romantic triangles, vigilantism and an Injun siege. Plot isn’t Canyon Passage’s strong suit, and that’s just fine -- Tourneur’s after the rhythm and textures of his town, which is open enough to include both hothead Lloyd Bridges and wandering minstrel (er, fiddle-player) Hoagy Carmichael.

Its appeal can be best summarized by a comparison someone made on Kehr’s blog to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, to which Canyon Passage is like a grandfather. (I was going to say prototype, but that feels condescending.) Though Jacques Tourneur possesses little of Robert Altman’s wise-acred cynicism, the two films share a need to debunk western tropes, and to establish a feel for how communities try to find a balance. There are many moods in Canyon Passage; a typical passage finds Tourneur working up a lather with a cabin-raising party, only to stroll off with Brian Donlevy’s banker and Susan Hayward's longtime-g.f. as the former remarks, crankily, “There’s so much of this world we’re missing.” The film doesn’t have anything like McCabe’s devastating arc, but that may be because I haven’t found it yet amongst the riches. I can’t wait to start watching Canyon Passage for the rest of my life.

Paired on the same disc with Canyon Passage was King Vidor’s 1936 docudrama The Texas Rangers (1936, B), so why not? Luckily, it’s very ‘30s -- fast-paced, quick-witted, clever, not much for bloat and, for the most part, fairly unsentimental. Fred MacMurray and Jackie Oakie may eventually turn into noble heroes worthy of statues, but not before logging time as vile, snickering bandits who, upon being recruited into the fold, initially try to use their power for their own needs. Had this been made a decade later, it would have been grandiose and bloodless. But it wasn’t made a decade later.

Kehr’s Canyon Passage gushing aside, the real eye-opener for me was Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets! (1951; A-), which I had always assumed was somewhere in the middle of its director’s oeuvre. Oh my, no. This is Fuller on all cylinders, mixing high octane incident and troop repartee even more effectively (arguably, I guess) than he did with The Steel Helmet and The Big Red One, with which it shares similar concerns (Richard Basehart plays a weak-willed gunman who freezes when he has a perfect shot). Moreover, it projects a more affecting dissection of how war is fought -- the ethics of survival; the need for working with blinders; killing as a job the need for fun and banter amidst the horror. Did Béla Tarr rip off the nighttime tracking shot, with each character lapsing into narration before the climax, for Sátántangó?

I also saw Fuller’s Hell and High Water (1954, B), which, like Fixed Bayonets!, was released just in time for our war-themed holiday. Apparently this was purely for-hire, the studio asking Fuller to test out the new cinemascope frame on a submarine set. But it’s still pretty good. Reuniting with his Pickup on South Street director, Richard Widmark is awesomely sour as a sub commander, and Fuller manages a couple bits of purple prose. (The opening credits feature a mushroom cloud.) It’s a lot fatter than a Fuller should be, which is to say, really, that it strikes equilibrium between Fuller and The System. Gene Evans is totally wasted, though, which is sad. Aside: Godard must have been homaging this one’s red-filter scenes in Pierrot le fou’s party sequence (which featured Fuller). That’s so like Godard.

The less said about Let’s Go to Prison (2006, C), the better. Bob Odenkirk, how could you? Subversive but almost never funny, it reconfirmed my suspicion that the whole The State/Reno 911 troop, members of whom wrote it, just aren’t funny, and prone to wasting promising subjects. It also reconfirmed my suspicion that Dax Shepard is kinda awesome. With this, Zathura and Idiocracy, me and Dax are three for three. Dare I rent Employee of the Month? (A: I daren’t.)

Lastly, I finished up my Mario Bava Box Set (or “Bava Box,” as the top lid reads). I haven’t yet written about Bava, the famed Italian genre director, but the Box -- which includes five, rather randomly selected ‘60s works, including Black Sunday and the ur-giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much -- makes him come off like the missing link between the minimalist horror of Val Lewton and the baroque gore of Dario Argento.

The Lewton comparison aside, Bava hasn'talways much for subtext, but he’s a whiz with resourceful, striking and transporting mise-en-scène. Black Sunday (1961) -- in which Barbara Steele’s executed Satanist threatens to take over another, more innocent Barbara Steele -- always seems on the verge of sneaking in some feminist statement, but whiffs in the end. That’s okay -- it looks fucking great. Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966) comes awfully, frustratingly close to being a rich portrait of man snuffing burgeoning female sexuality. That’s okay, too -- it looks even fucking greater. (I love how the opening fifteen minutes of this film have a cheap, faded auburn sheen, while the rest of it is one of the most overly-colorful films this side of a Vincente Minnelli musical. Dig the OCD staircase shot, above.) Thematically, Knives of the Avenger is the richest, taking Shane and turning it into a swords and sandals epic starring a guilt-ridden knife-thrower. But it’s also not as fun, slightly deficient in the action category.

None of this, by the way, is meant as a diss on Bava, who’s clearly one of the great technical directors -- a master of color, B&W shades, camera movement and mood. Bring on the one with the vampire aliens.

Alright, America: Ready...Set...Decipher!

2007-05-25T10:17:00.000-04:00

As you lug your notebooks, spreadsheets and Venn Diagram paper with you to see Pirates o' Caribbean: Retroactively Kinda Irrelevant Title this holiday weekend, be prepared to consider the following on your way out:

Is Pirates 3 the most confusing movie in history (yes, even moreso than the cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Syriana) because

a) it's stacked wall-to-wall with impenetrable and arbitrary exposition, with characters literally explaining the plot to eachother in a fashion that winds up making things more confusing still?; or

b) screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio are simply inept at storytelling, akin to someone who stretches out a simple anecdote with endless diversions, corrections and irrelevant explanations?

I ask because, like many who've seen it, and even moreso than with number two (which I still sorta liked), I had no clue what was going on from moment to moment. I'd written it off as an immense latticework of tedious backstabbings, reversals, abrupt-changes-of-heart, tedious re-backstabbings, re-reversals, double whammies, re-double re-whammies and triple backstand quadruple gainers. But then Slate's Dana Stevens somehow managed to coherently summarize at least part of it (while intentionally leaving out at least half of the plot, that is). So I'm not sure what to think, and really have no desire to ever set eyes on that fucker again. (Had there been a triple fight on a runaway water wheel, that would be another thing.)

In any case, have fun, America! You've sure got your work cut out for you!

YouTubing-to-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Plodding Along

2007-05-23T13:02:00.001-04:00

As you well know, Cannes is in full swing, and by now you've doubtless found a couple bloggers to habitually read. (Regardless, here's a no doubt needless shout-out to Mike D'Angelo's contributions to Nerve's Screengrab.) Premiering this week is Bela Tarr's latest, The Man From London. So once again, I'm posting a random selection from his brilliant 7 1/2 hour epic Satantango, in which two characters stroll down the windiest, most garbage-strewn street in cinema history. To the unitiated: no, it doesn't spoil anything and yes, it gives you a good idea of what it's like without taking up too much of your time.

Weekly!! Weekly!! Reviews of the dull omnibus film Paris Je T'aime and Hal Hartley's comeback film Fay Grim, as well as mucho words in Rep on an Alejandro Jodorowsky double feature descending upon Philly this weekend. There's also another edition of The Six Pack, this time belittling the MPAA's decision to start considering cigarettes into the rating of movies.

The lack of a "best of" or "greatest" in the semi-regular "Six Pack" feature works two ways: one, it eliminates any arbitrary ordering (who cares why In the Mood For Love is a slightly better smoking movie than The Man Who Wasn't There, just to make a hypothetical example?); and two, I (or anyone else writing it) can completely forget obvious examples and brush off carps by saying, "Well, it's just a sampling!"

Which is to say that I forgot (or just felt compelled to leave off) a couple really obvious examples. I very nearly threw Michael Curtiz's 1950 Gary Cooper vehicle Bright Leaf (as seen in Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves) on there, as it's about turn-of-the-century tobacco growers. Ditto The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, of which I squeezed in a mention. And had film noir not been well represented by Out of the Past, I certainly would've mentioned Double Indemnity, which has that great bit where Fred MacMurray's relationship with Edward G. Robinson is charted through the lighting of the latter's cigars. Similarly, had I not already had two R-raters on there, I surely would have mentioned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Johnny Depp rocks an off-white cigarette holder. And I'm just appalled that I neglected to remember Jean Genet's almost-gay porn classic Un Chant D'amour, which features the memorable bit of blowing smoke through prison walls through a phallic piece of straw.

So much for the auteur theory

2007-05-21T22:42:00.000-04:00

Q. What does the trailer for the visually striking Hungarian Holocaust drama Fateless, as seen here

have to do with the trailer for the über-chick flick Evening, as seen here?

A. They were both directed by Lajos Koltai. No, really. No, really, I'm not joking. I'd really appreciate if you'd stop insisting that this is a tall tale told by me, a liar.

The cherry on top? Koltai is a longtime cinematographer who's worked for Tornatore, Szabó, Albert Brooks and even Jodie Foster. I suppose his tenure working on pictorially homely Hollywood fare like the Born Yesterday remake and Out to Sea have prepared him for a middlebrow maelstrom. Still: What. The. Fuck.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays...er, Saturdays

2007-05-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

A power outage with my wireless -- and my service's typically slow reaction to it -- caused me to miss plugging my shite this Wednesday, and then I just couldn't find the time till now to hop on here. Sorry 'bout that.

Anyway, a couple months ago a friend tipped me off to a Britcom called Peep Show, whose gimmick is one hell of a: every shot is a POV. That means, in essence, that our chief characters -- stuck-up, Tony Blair-supporting office monkey David (David Mitchell) and dopey slacker would-be musician Jeremy (Robert Webb) -- are rarely shown physically interacting. Kisses are particularly awkward, with large chunks of the characters' heads disappearing beyond the frame while the rest of it bobs and weaves. There's more meat to it than just the gimmick, and however mean-spirited and bleak it gets, it's quite a rich -- and consistently hilarious -- show, particularly the performances by Mitchell and Webb. (The two are also the stars of the UK version of the Mac/PC ads, with Mitchell as John Hodgman and Webb as Justin Long.)

I highly recommend you looking up the clips, because I'm not posting them here.

Instead, I'm posting a clip (two, actually) from their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look. The duo's first show, The Mitchell and Webb Situation was also a sketch comedy show, but it only lasted one series. Peep Show's made them a sensation (over in Britain, anyway), and so last year the two went sketchy again, showing that they, like John Cleese, can do EPs as eloquently as they can LPs. The following is one of their more popular bits -- a send-up of superhero duos where one arguably doesn't even need a partner:

And here's their first of many goes at "Numberwang," a game show that makes not one lick of sense:

Weekly? Weekly! A review of 28 Weeks Later..., the vastly superior, Danny Boyle- and Alex Garland-free sequel to the fast zombies original, plus an interview with Chris "Kazi" Rolle, the star/subject of The Hip Hop Project. Also, Rep.

R.I.P. PG-Rated Movie Smoking

2007-05-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

First it was Tom and Jerry; now smoking will be considered during the rating process of all movies. Yet another reason I'm glad I quit months back. One thing: will this apply to older movies, too? Has Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas now earned its rating for its "Pervasive Extreme Drug Use And Related Bizarre Behavior, Strong Language, Brief Nudity, and Pretty Much Near Constant Smoking?" Will Out of the Past, named by Roger Ebert as the greatest smoking movie ever, now be a hard R? So much for rearing your kids on the classics.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Peter Greenaway Comes Back?

2007-05-09T17:38:00.000-04:00

Long ago, so the story goes, avant garde filmmaker Peter Greenaway sold his soul for the riches of modest, art house success. In hits like The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, he kept his obsessions with formalism, patterns, absurd organization and symmetrical static shots, but merged them with (gasp!) narrative film. Bad avant gardist! But even the art house crowd only tolerates formalism so much, so when the balance tipped back into obscuritanism via Prospero's Books, the backlash came something fierce. "Ha ha!," chuckled his former avant garde compatriots! "How pretentious!," chortled the art house crowd! And save for a brief sojourn filming Ewan McGregor's uncircumcised dick, Greenaway's success completely waned. Why, even a mammoth project -- boasting three feature films, an impenetrable website, a game, a planned phallanx of DVDs, TV shows, books and who knows what else -- couldn't get the world to jump back on his trolley.

Which brings us to Nightwatching, his film on Rembrandt painting (brace yourself) The Night Watch. The film is due at Cannes this month, which I suppose gives it a leg up in terms of anticipation over any of the Tulse Lupers. (By the way, there are at least five of us who'd really like to see the other two films in that (aborted?) series.) At the very least, it features the first purely dramatic turn from Martin Freeman. I know, it sounds weird having Tim from The Office headlining the latest Peter Greenaway. But at least on the evidence of this trailer -- which also shows that if Greenaway's coming back, he's coming back pretty much the same as ever -- it appears that he's actually quite the ideal Greenaway character. He knows how to deliver the director's nasty, self-impressed lines quite well. And I could probably listen to Freeman saying "goddamn" all day.

And here's his awesome 1974 short Windows

Me!! Me!! Three reviews of The Hip Hop Project, The Valet and Charles Burnett's amazing 1977 Killer of Sheep, which I hereby command all I know to see forthwith. Also, Rep.

The best Zoo headline pun finally arrives

2007-05-06T22:12:00.000-04:00

The release of Zoo, Robinson Devor's film about a group of men who used to fuck horses, in Gotham has unleashed a maelstrom of yukky, defensive puns, as this Nerve ScreenGrab piece noted a couple weeks back. I'm not interested in going into the pros and cons of the squirmy, defensive chuckling this film has produced (at least not now). But this line -- which a friend also came up with at a party back in March (when the film was about to descend upon the Philadelphia Film Festival) and which I had been impatiently waiting to be made by someone with access to newspaper headlines -- is pretty fucking hilarious, not to mention way, way wittier than "horse of a different color" or "year of the horse." (Or the one that the article itself is actually titled, "Bareback Mountain." Do one-liners come so easily to Slate they can waste their best ones on covers that will be up for no more than a day?) Well done, Slate.

Twelve Reasons Spider-Man 3 Isn't So Good

2007-05-06T21:38:00.000-04:00

First off, and this has been sounded by almost too many elsewhere, this movie is seriously overcrowded. Four villains, five if you count Spidey-as-wearing-the-symbiote-suit, two love interests, two speeches from Aunt May and roughly ten thousand subplots. (And yet Pirates 3 is the one that lasts 172 minutes.) The script has a clearer throughline than anything this jumbled ordinarily should have, with a Peter Parker arc that’s almost as novel and organic than in the previous outings. But that’s upset by how

Everything feels way phonier and corporate this time around. Installment three is well-noted as the one where franchises take a choice: develop a new radical approach (Alien 3, Batman Forever), or repeat the same thing only with a certain weariness. Spider-Man 3 does not take a new radical approach. (Like, Dunst’s awesomely insane idea for a Rosemary’s Baby-style Mary Jane off-shot on an Evil Dead 1 budget.) So repeating the same thing only with a certain weariness it is. You can detect this yourself any number of ways, but most noticeably in how

Everyone’s going through the motions, if that. Here’s one example: the Front Page-style newsroom. Now, I love J.K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks, Ted Raimi and Bill Nunn. (I crack up even now thinking of Simmons’ head leaning into the left side of the frame during the latter’s wedding scene.) But they’re there but briefly, not used terribly well and there only to get a little rise by merely popping up. As in, everyone in the audience suddenly thinks, “Look! It’s J.K. Simmons’ Walter Burns routine!” A little rush, a flurry of nostalgia, and that’s it.

The principal cast and crew pretty obviously wants to move on. As you’ve no doubt heard, Tobey no longer wants to be Spidey, and clearly relishes the part where he gets to go all Buddy Love. Kirsten Dunst very obviously no longer wants to be Mary Jane, and conveniently her dissatisfaction and antsiness are written into the movie. Sam Raimi, having finally unleashed his true self in parts of Spidey 2 (the Doc-Ock-awakes scene; the obvious-blue-screen-while-falling-from-Darkman bit; a scene featuring many, many shock zooms-cum-tilts in a row), essentially returns to the invisible-auteur of the Spidey 1. Only the initial Spider-Man-Green Goblin 2 tussle screams Raimi. Do not they realize that they’re in the most expensive movie property ever devised? Perk up a little! But the living (at least until they nix the franchise) no doubt envy the dead (i.e., James Franco).

The action scenes are pretty lackluster. Number two showed a significant improvement over number one, with two for-the-ages action sequences, plus a better fusion of Tobey Maguire with the mesh of 1s and 0s that takes his place when he dons the mask. This one features only one decent action smackdown (see above) and generally returns to having Maguire completely disappear when Spider-Man’s slinging about the boroughs.

Kill Aunt May. I’m one of the few who read her end-of-second-act speech in S-M 2 on the value of heroism as winking, if not to say sarcastic -- as in, Aunt May had figured out her Peter was Spider-Man and was just trying to drive into his skull what he should do. (There’s also a slight sarcastic, jokey tinge to Rosemary Harris’ delivery.) But her two major appearances here make me want her to go the way of Uncle Ben, and just reiterate the whole going-through-the-notion vibe of the film. Or not the way of Uncle Ben, because...

Re-Kill Uncle Ben and Norman Osborn. Enough with the fucking flashbacks already. Also, Cliff Robtertson was terrible in 1. It’s not like he’s Marlon Brando or somesuch.

That part where he goes all Buddy Love is actually kind of excruciating. Not a deal-breaker, mind, but this whole stretch is just too broad for my taste, missing the balance (and the neat slide into despair) of 2’s “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” sequence. A Travolta strut? Just too obvious.

The plotting, while not always the franchise’s strong suit, is especially head-slapping this time around. Yeah, the news summary bit is pretty appalling -- a new low in clunky blockbuster plot management. But how about the whole pointless bit of revisionist history w/r/t Uncle Ben’s death. Oh, it wasn’t completely clear that that anonymous scumbag killed Uncle Ben, was it? How convenient for unimaginative screenwriters who run into a wall when trying to characterize Sandman! I’ll give the astonishingly uncreative way the black goo shit is introduced a pass because it’s from the comics. (Still no reason to keep it, given how much they trash the source this time around. I’ll get to that in a sec.) But there’s no excuse for the bit where Harry/Green Goblin suffers amnesia, just to get him out of the way and make room for Sandman. (The movie’s so overpacked I almost forgot the amnesia thing ever happened. Ha ha.)

Characterization is noticeably sketchy, rather than agreeably so, as it was prior. “I’m not a bad person,” Thomas Haden Church’s Flint Marko says pre-Sandman transformation. END OF CHARACTERIZATION. You see, the Spider-Mans are, at heart, humanistic and empathetic, meaning they don’t subscribe to purely good or purely evil characters. But it’s one thing to have Marko say, point blank, “I’m not a bad person,” and to demonstrate it. Thing is, Raimi et al. had an excuse to deepen his character: he’s trying to make money for his ill daughter. How many times do we see this bedridden spawn? Eddie Brock-as-Venom brings this up when he proposes a team-up with Sandman, which would have given the bloated climax some emotional heft: Spider-Man fighting off two baddies who are actually trying to do some good. But as you well know, that’s not what happens.

Why isn’t my friend who’s well-versed in and madly in love with S-Man lore hopping fucking mad at how this movie manhandles and anally abuses the source? Venom’s not even exactly a villain. Once he calms down, he’s closer to a vigilante, with all the questionable associations that classification brings with it. But oh well, he’s shoehorned in at the end, so fuck it, he’s just a villain. (This smarts extra because the casting of Topher Grace is, come to think of it, pretty ideal. Raimi seems to have got the idea to find the aggression and evil in his fast-talking charmer routine. A wasted opportunity.) And what in the holy hell is Gwen Stacy doing in this film if she’s just a plot point? Have comic book movie so desecrated the idea of a decent comic-to-film transition that no one really bats an eye at this shit? (Answer, he begrudgingly admits: uh huh.)

This whole thing has no point except [rubs fingers together, signifying a wad of cash]. I know this will sound naive, but I really don't mean it that way: the first two films, while obviously instigated by greedy execs, didn't come off that way. They felt lovingly crafted by actual human hands, acted by actual human beings. The people behind it cared. The first installment was that rare thing: an action-minded blockbuster where the bland, uninspired action scenes and special effects were but a distraction from the plot and characters. It’s a great portrait of adolescence and young adulthood, with its elliptical sudden jump-forwards and deep feelings of self-discovery and disappointment. Installment two struck equilibrium, exploring the struggle between hero and alter ego better than anything since -- whaddaya know? -- Superman 2. (Original cut, not Richard Donner’s after-the-fact Frankenstein monster.) This is just the one that costs more than any movie ever has.

The Spidey Franchise™ could very well have kept everything at the same level of 2, but they felt the need to go bigger (triple everything, if you will). And the result is just fucking bombast, repeating the same things, only bigger and more hollow. It is the first one to not feel lovingly crafted by actual human hands, or acted by actual human beings. The thrill is gone, and the greedy instigators have reclaimed the reins. Enjoy being wallet-raped, suckas.

Okay, there are good things about this movie. Hey, it’s not like this is Batman and Robin. The film is generally likeable enough that I was never completely soured, even while I kept waiting (and waiting, and waiting, and waiting...) for things to click like they did before. It could even almost pass for the first two. But I kept thinking of that great moment of Cronenberg’s The Fly where Geena Davis eats the transported steak and says, “It tastes fake.” This movie just tastes teleported.

But this is supposed to be about good things in a movie I don’t even hate that much. Right. The part where Sandman pulls himself together and learns to, y’know, work is pretty magnificent. (A friend compared it to Svankmajer’s work with clay.) And despite her transparent real-world irritation, Kirsten Dunst was kind of affecting at conveying Mary Jane’s unraveling, especially during the proposal scene. Speaking of which, Bruce Campbell should have wrestled Steve Martin for Inspector Clouseau, and as I mentioned, that first action scene was pretty tight. Also, Mageina Tovah rules.

But what do I know? I liked the movie about the girl who blew her dog directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: From Nakameguro to Everywhere

2007-05-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

Like Béla Tarr or (of late) David Fincher, Japanese headphone masterpiece-maker Cornelius doesn't release work very often, meaning you get unduly worked up over something you'll have plenty of time to digest and generally mull over. I was for a long time a bit let down by his previous album, Point (2002), whose mellow, laid-back tones stood in sharp contrast to the near-constant nattering of its predecessor, Fantasma (1998). But when I broke it out two years later, it immediately jumped to pantheon status. So I'm pretty cool with the fact that I find his latest, Sensuous -- which finally arrived here after hitting many other parts of the globe last fall -- to be, you know, only pretty really good. After five years, I was hoping for something a little more different than Point (not to say something more like Fantasma). But really, my opinion's not wholly valid till, say, 2009. (That said, if you can listen to "Beep It" without doing a really terrible robot, you're a stronger listener than I.)

(By the way, please advise: at least on my copy (and one friend's), there are two second gaps between each of the songs. It's pretty obvious that each song is supposed to bleed into the next. Has everyone else found the same problem? Is this a problem? Is it, in fact, a radical artistic decision, perhaps a satirical comment on how older iPods -- but not the latest -- had this short but irritating gap between each of the songs? Wtf, Cornelius?.)

Here, in celebration, is his video for my favorite song off Point, "Smoke":

Two weeks of the Weekly!! (I slacked. Sorry.) From this week, an interview with Paul Laverty, screenwriter of Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a review (second down, after Sean's awesome take on Barley) of the cycling docudrama The Flying Scotsman, a buncha blurbs on films being shown in our area's Black Lily Festival, and Rep. (Also, Sean is so, so right about S-Man 3. Get our your handkerchiefs.)

From last week, I had a review of the three-hour monk doc Into Great Silence, a Six Pack thingie on actually decent courtroom movies, and Rep, which has a lot of wordage on the traveling Russian Fantastik program that finally hit our neck of the woods. Ruslan & Ludmilla is pretty unbelieveable.

I Want to Blog!

2007-05-01T18:37:00.000-04:00

This blog has been on life support (or just purely self-promotion duties) for too long. It's about time I returned to semi-active duty. Here's what to expect round these parts from now on:

Quickly tossed off observations on films, both new and old, that I haven't been paid to write about elsewhere
Random, possibly eccentric minor observations on various errata (like the one you'll stumble upon in a minute)
The very occasional and very interesting factoid about my daily life
A political/social rant, but one well-considered and, well, not very rant-y
Shameless self-promotion. As though I could give that up.

To start things off, here's something I noticed after looking at the cover of the latest issue of Skeptic. I can't believe I never caught this before, but ye gods does the great, late scientist resemble Nouvelle Vague superstar Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows, Masculin-Feminin, etc.). Quick! Some enterprising French filmmaker go make a Carl Sagan biopic with the aging former child actor, possibly even in the French language. (And I really do mean quick: Léaud, 63, is currently one year older than Sagan was when he died.)

(An unusually fiery Sagan, from the cover of Skeptic, as mentioned; a typically laid-back Léaud, from, I believe, Bed and Board.)

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: You (Not You!) Fill Me With Inertia

2007-04-17T20:16:00.001-04:00

Among the new DVD releases for this week is Stanley Donen's Bedazzled, a Faust riff starring the great team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Along with Robert Altman, '60s Donen is probably the most manhandled by pan & scan. Having traded in outsized sets and dance numbers, Donen tried to make up for the loss through filmmaking coups, most often exemplified through unexpected pans, aggressive editing, odd framing and crazy-ass zooms. (One early segment in Two For the Road features, I think, whiplash pull-outs in a row.) So there's that, and then there's the film itself, which has been hard to come by, and for no terribly good reason. In this section, Moore's sadsack Wimpy Bar cook finds one of his wishes transporting him to a '60s American Bandstand-esque show, where he's soon upstaged by the robotically purring Cook.

WEEKLY!! Back to regular, non-PFF duties this week, with a Six Pack thingie on weird sequels (2046, The Wayward Cloud, Fay Grim, etc.), plus three reviews, including Fracture, Bamako and The TV Set. Also, Rep.

This Can No Longer Be Ignored - What is That You're Drinking?

2007-04-14T16:04:00.000-04:00

For those, like me, wondering just what in the hell was so tasty/drunk-making about that blue drink Jake Gyllenhaal gets Robert Downey, Jr. hooked on in Zodiac, wonder no more:

Aqua Velva

3/4 oz. vodka
3/4 oz. gin
1/4 oz. Sprite
1/2 oz blue curaçao
1/2 oz. Sprite

Shake vodka, gin, blue curaçao and Sprite with ice. Pour/strain into glass and top off with more Sprite.

For those not so into the taste of vodka or gin, give it a bit to settle in. It's palatable stuff.

[Hat tip: Yahoo! Answers answerers.]

About fucking time

2007-04-12T12:45:00.000-04:00

I finally updated my Films Seen database, as well as the 2007 and 2007 sections. That includes finally putting up links to reviews of said films. It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit. You're so very welcome.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: And We Return (Sorta)

2007-04-11T13:55:00.000-04:00

Technically, I'm on quasi-vacation, which means that I'm not at my soul-deadening day job for the week, but still doing PW stuff. What's more, the PFF rages on for another week. I've not really been going to it, as a) I watched an assload (i.e., ca. 40) screeners for the ol' PW beforehand, and b) a good friend is in town this week from L.A. How serious am I about spending not that much time at the fest? It began last Thursday, and so far I've only seen two features and two specialty programs, namely, Fantasia as introduced by Leonard Maltin and Roy Disney (!) and a quintet of silnet Our Gang shorts also introduced by Matlin. Me and cinema just need a break, though I'll try and pencil a couple in within the week that's left.

I'll try to write somethingorother about those films (plus Grindhouse and Hot Fuzz, which I'm seeing tonight [addendum: no, I did not see it last night]), but in the meantime here's the requistie YouTube extravaganza. I'm not reading as much fiction these days, but I do have a hefty backlog of comics, most of them penned by the brilliant Alan Moore. (These include Swamp Thing, Top 10 and his controversial archiac porn deluge, Lost Girls, which, believe it or not, you can pick up -- for a hefty price, that is -- at your neighborhood Borders.) Every book you get has a scary picture of Moore, a sinister looking man with scraggly hair, a long-ass beard and some freaky eyes. But this interview, performed by comic Stewart Lee and revolving around his "worship" of Macdeonian snake god Glycon, shows him to be a lot more approachable and charming than photos would suggest. Also, dude, is this guy fucking awesome.

Los PW Another batch of caps for the PFF, plus reviews of Perfect Stranger (top) and After the Wedding (fourth down). Also, Rep.

No YouTubing, Just Plugs

2007-04-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

Like, almost twenty caps for the Philadelphia Film Festival, which begins on Thursday. Also, a Children of Men-dominated interview with First Snow director (and CoM co-writer) Mark Fergus, who kind of sort of looks like my friend Ben Trout. Lastly, Rep.

P.S. I totally forgot to mention that I interviewed Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the increasingly brilliant former child actor, for Nerve.com.

Not really in the mood right now to search for a YouTube, or really say anything else. Suffice to say, you might be seeing a lot more of me 'round these parts in the forseeable future.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Still Totally Busy

2007-03-28T22:33:00.000-04:00

I'm about halfway done with the Philadelphia Film Festival screeners, and thus can barely muster the required energy to write even a lazy shameless plug and accompanying YouTube post. So here's ODB:

Now, da Weekly!! In which you'll find:

* Two Editor Picks
* Two reviews (of The Lookout and Reign Over Me)
* An interview with Lance Weiler, director of the low-budget psych-horror pic Head Trauma
* Rep!

BY THE WAY Cinephiles have long known that some noble soul threw Week End up on YT. (Albeit in 10 minute segments. I believe one of the divisions comes halfway through the traffic jam shot. For shame!) But did you know that an even nobler soul put up South Korean minimalist master Hong Sang-soo's Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors? Only drawback: hope you speak Korean. Here's the link (with the other segments clicks away), anyway, just in case you do.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: brb

2007-03-21T23:07:00.000-04:00

Totally swamped. Writing articles. Eyes otherwise glued to whatever screen is showing Philly Film Fest screeners. Also for some reason decided to brush up on '90s Tsai Ming-liang, none of which I'd seen before. Yeah, save your taunts for another time. Will update Films Seen list and such when finally get the chance. And hot damn it will be lengthy.

For now, here's an owl.

And now, the Weekly!! Including:
* Pride!
* A Dead Girl!
* A list chronicling six films movies about black people revolving around white people!
* A somethingorother about Secret Cinema's tenth anniversary spectacular!
* Rep!

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Ce n'est plus Mercredi

2007-03-15T23:18:00.000-04:00

Sorry I'm late and no, I have not watched The Ritches, the new FX show where Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver play the parental wing of a family of con artists. Perhaps that's because I'm all but broken-hearted that the Yemen-born Brit has been forced to wield an American accent. (That said, it seems to have worked for Hugh Laurie.) In honor/instead, here's one of the best parts of his stand-up show Dress to Kill -- a tough call, to be sure. This hails from the encore, and it's totally mostly in French.

THIS! IS! THE WEEEEEEEEEKLYYYYYY!! (Just saw 300.) Thanks to a slow week, I wound up doing the lead review for Mira Nair's The Namesake. Nair is interviewed right here. I also capsulized Starter for Ten, an Editor's Pick (bottom) on weekend showings of Gun Grazy and Christmas in July, and, in addition, also Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Money Spines Paper Lung Kidney Bingos Organ Fun

2007-03-07T23:25:00.000-05:00

Few love random word-spewing more than I -- note the blog title* -- so I'm not entirely sure why I've never thought to post Word Movie, Paul Sharits' 1966 short of rapid fire wordplay, which comes off for all the world like one of the films made by Infinite Jest's James O. Incandenza. (The descriptions of his films were parodies, after all.) Sharits is mostly known for the flicker-heavy avant garde classics T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G and N.O.T.H.I.N.G., sections of which, but not the whole, are available on YouTube. I won't link to them, as I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's funky seeing only portions of short films. Nor will I link to his IMDb profile, which features only 3 or 4 of his works. Instead, I'll direct the interested to this presumably complete resumé.

Hope you're not epileptic.

The Weekly Weekly!! Two reviews (second and third down) of the "Lost Boys of Sudan" doc God Grew Tired of Us and the reissue of Alberto Lattuada's so-so 1964 comedy Mafioso. Also, Rep.

* Plucked from Wire's awesome '80s semi-hit "Kidney Bingos," wherein a bunch of random words -- this post's title features the chorus -- are set to what sounds like a dreamy love song, but is, in fact, pure nonsense.

Mixed reviews that inadvertently describe what's so great about the movie in question

2007-03-02T11:32:00.000-05:00

Plucked from the Metacritic page for David Fincher's (brilliant) Zodiac (which, by the way, currently stands at a lofty 77):

"Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why." - Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

"At times, it becomes frustrating -- for example, about 30 minutes are spent pursuing a lead that goes nowhere." - Mike LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle (heh)

"The film feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics." - Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

"In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal)--who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60s--than about the murderer." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer." - Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

(For the record, I'll later be writing my own thang about Zodiac, so don't think I'm just taking a piss at those with a deadline.)

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Finally! An Imamura Retro

2007-02-28T22:23:00.000-05:00

This Friday sees the opening weekend/film in BAM Cinématek's month-long retro on Shohei Imamura, the great Japanese director who died last May. (As far as I can tell, it's complete, though I didn't spot his blessfully odd contribution to the otherwise seriously spotty omnibus film, September 11 -- in fact, the last thing he completed.) Back when I memorialized Imamura, I had only seen a couple of his films. I'm now better caught up, but there's only so much you can find on video, with everything he made before 1979's brilliant serial killer study Vengeance is Mine a blank spot on video shelves. Everything, that is, except 1966's The Pornographers, which Criterion put out a couple years back. Here's one of that film's more out-there sections. For the uninitiated, it shouldn't give away too much, while giving you an idea of Imamura's singularly whack style.

This Weekly!! I interviewed Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer, whose Black Snake Moan I reviewed; on the same page, you'll find me going off on Maria Maggenti's omnisexual, misleadingly titled neo-farce Puccini For Beginners. Also, Rep, the highlight of which is a longish blurb on Austrian artist Valie Export's brilliantly cluttered Invisible Adversaries (playing up in Gotham, too, I see).

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: What's Arguably Creepier Than the Scene in Dorothy's Apartment from Blue Velvet?

2007-02-21T17:37:00.000-05:00

A. This. (I.e., The same scene re-staged so as to implement both Slavoj Zizek's interpretations and readings of the scene and Slavoj Zizek himself. Sweating and sputtering forth as Dennis Hopper abuses Isabella Rossellini, the Slovenian philosopher doesn't settle purely on a voyeuristic reading of the scene, arguably Lynch's finest. In less than five minutes, Zizek breaks it down into different perspectives, acknowledging Dorothy's "passivity," as evidenced by that look of rapture after Frank coldcocks her.)

The scene, by the by, comes from Sophie Fiennes' epic doc The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, just one of the many pieces of Zizek-centric cinema from the last couple years. (There's also Zizek! and The Reality of the Virtual. So far, only the former is available on DVD.)

This Weekly!! I contributed two speculative bits for this issue's "Next" cover story, including a piece where I diss the HD DVD/Blu-Ray tussle and declare celluloid dead. (It's roughly halfway down, but you'll have better luck just typing my moniker into a page-search function. Funnily enough, a printing mishap left both pieces snipped from the print version. Whoops!) Elsewhere, I compare/contrast Children of Men's long takes with Ugetsu's (second down), review Michael Apted's Amazing Grace (the grade's a notch too high, by the way -- my bad) and The Lives of Others. And then there's Rep.

Oh, and I'm going to be on the radio Friday (2/13). That's right. The City Paper's Sam Adams and I will be joining Marty Moss-Coane on Philly's NPR affiliate, WHYY, to talk Oscars from 11am to noon. Those who'd like to listen but live nowhere near need only go to the site and listen on-line, either live or via archives. I promise not to cuss. (Addendeum: It happened and it appears to have gone well. You can download the clip at the bottom of this page.)

My Top Ten List is Totally Up

2007-02-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

Turn to your right. You will find a link to my 2006 Top Ten List. And there was much anticlimactic rejoicing.

Also, for those interested, this year I was welcomed into the ranks of The Skandies, the 'net's/world's known oldest movie nerd poll. I trust you can find my ballott, but see if you don't waste, like, an hour there, looking at individual ballots, etc. For history, plus an explanaton, see about halfway down the page on this sight.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Wherethefuckforth Spaced?

2007-02-14T22:16:00.000-05:00

Sorry to YouTube two Britcoms in a row, but the imminent arrival of Hot Fuzz combined with the realization that even Shaun of the Dead couldn't get the BBC to spirit Simon Pegg's show Spaced to North American DVD shelves got the better of me. Pegg and Shaun director/co-writer Edgar Wright actually only make up only two-thirds of the brains behind the heavily referential show. The rest of the pie is taken up by Jessica Stevenson, a flaky on-and-off journalist with whom Pegg's aspiring cartoonist/slacker pretends to be a couple to score a two-bedroom flat, if only because no one likes to flat-hunt. (Don't worry -- the Three's Company-level set-up is essentially ignored starting about halfway through episode two.) Stevenson swung by for a cameo in Shaun, but I wish she could score her own thing; looking at her IMDb page, it appears she played a Bridget Jones pal in the scary looking sequel and has a role in Harry Potter 5, but otherwise we may have to wait for Pegg to find time for either a third series or wrap-up of Spaced -- both of which he's mentioned if just in passing -- to get some quality time with her. Till BBC gets off their asses re: this (and others -- where's series two of I'm Alan Partridge?), you'll have to catch it on BBC America or get it on sale from across the sea.

Anyway, the following clip is a more-than-fair representation of the show's uncanny ability to take what sounds noxious -- a show full of broad British stereotypes, self-depricating-but-not-wholly-so slickness and endless pop culture homages -- and make them fun, clever and funny. This one doesn't have Nick Frost, who's alarmingly thinner as Pegg's military-minded friend, but it does have the very amusing Michael Smiley, who pops up a couple times during the series as the endearingly ADD-addled bike messenger, Tyres.

Las Weekly!! I totally interviewed Melvin Van Peebles. Also, Rep. I also forgot to mention, but I also wrote a lengthy-in-the-ass piece on Inland Empire for local catch-all blog-thing, Phawker.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Stop fighting...now. Stop writing...now.

2007-02-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

I've been known to go on and on about the Britshow Look Around You, a parody of old educational films that manages to cram more inspired nonsense into tight quarters than arguably ever before. (At least during its first series, when episodes lasted only 9 minutes. Series 2 stretched it out to 30 and heavily re-worked the format. Yuks suffered, but it's possibly even stranger.) They're no longer making the BBC America rounds and it has yet to find its way to Region 1, so what else is a voracious Anglophile to do? Here's episode, or Module, 1, my pick for the funniest. See if you can spot Simon Pegg.

Feh Weekly!! The Worst. Jaunary. Dropping Grounds. Ever. continues, leaving me with nothin this week but an A-List on the local mock-doc Disturbing Images: The Story of Helmut K., and natch, Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Michel Gondry Can Do Anything

2007-01-31T20:44:00.000-05:00

Nuts to lonelygirl15. The best -- or at least the most fun -- YouTube prank was perpetrated by Michel Gondry last month. Music videos, features, documentaries, not wholly evil commercials -- to this list of accomplishments we add the ability to solve a Rubik's Cube with one's feet in under two minutes. Or do we? Don't let the orneriness of the videography throw you. As Michael Caine said in The Prestige, are you watching closely?

Eh? Thankfully, Gondry is no Ernő Rubik. If you're stuck on the solution to this puzzle, head here.

Los Weekly!! Worst. January. Dumping Grounds. Ever. There's nothing but inane Underworld ripoffs and American Pang Bros. outings arriving in Philly, so just an interview with Rachel Libert, who directed the tense, nigh-Bergmanesque restorative justice documentary Beyond Conviction, which was picked up (and chopped in half) by MSNBC. (Review by Paul Farber here.) Rep surrenders to I-House's Selections from the Human Rights Watch fest, thus words on the mordantly amusing Source, set in the way corrupt Eurasian nation of Azerbaijan, the tut-tutting coffee-world exposé Black Gold and, finally making it to Philly, Iraq in Fragments.

Live and Direct From the 2006 Vaults

2007-01-30T21:33:00.000-05:00

(Whenever I get a couple free minutes, etc.. You're welcome.)

Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer)
A standard issue dress-down act from Maggie Gyllenhaal, which I suppose she had get around to sooner or later. (Please resist, La Zooey.) “Raw” and “non-judgmental” and “empathetic,” even when our protag -- an ex-junkie trying to regain custody of her son -- does the exact stupidest thing she could do at any juncture, which is a bit too often for my tastes. Should be needless to say that it doesn’t contrast well with Clean, with which it shares a near-exact premise (and a lead named Maggie!). Olivier Assayas did everything he could to dress up his film’s inherent silliness, and wound up cutting right to its heart. Collyer plays it completely straight and Sundance’ 93, and elicits little more than vaguely condescending head nods. Not to mention, in addition to getting trounced by Maggie C., Maggie G. loses out to a shockingly awesome Giancarlo Esposito. C+

Dreamgirls (Bill Condon)
[sound of finger nails on blackboard] The Supre...er, Dreams are a kickass budding soul girl group until an evil Berry Gordy type blands them up for white consumption, setting them up to become soulless peddlers of bombast. Meanwhile, this movie version is itself a soulless peddler of bombast. Thing is, it's not all Bill Condon's fault. A brainy type who relies too heavily on bombast and, worst of all, like to make a clean demarcation line between the song and the book (numbers are always clearly performances; no one ever bursts into song while, say, hanging out in a garage office), Condon wants nothing more than to kill the movie musical dead. Never seen the show, but it's not exactly like he trashed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The songs are a dire combination of weak and shrill -- nth-generation Motown ripoffs that are too Broadway and wear out their welcome halfway through a verse. The plot, meanwhile, is little more than one of those glib reductions that flatter the audience almost as often as it plainly explains it to them. Beyoncé’s ersatz Diana Ross is an empty vessel whose lack of sonic fireworks will translate over to the mainstream? Yeah, I figured that out two hours before Jamie Foxx’s ersatz Gordy put that in just about those same words. Speaking of which, the dead-on casting -- Beyoncé as an innocuous frontwoman; Eddie Murphy as a wild man forced to ditch his edge for commerce; Jennifer Hudson as a powerhouse singer left unappreciated and dissed -- just adds to the reams of nervous spoonfeeding. The acting’s generally good, but I’m torn over Hudson like I’ve rarely been torn before. Going in, I had read more than a couple reviews that remarked that Hudson may be a natural when speaking/singing, but freezes up whenever she’s not. (Burnsy memorably compared it to C-3PO being turned off.) And holy dear lord god were they right. I can’t wait to see her again and again, but can we perhaps wait till she learns how to react before declaring her any year’s Best Supporting Actress? I know -- it’s mostly too late. C-

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Stanley Nelson)
As noted elsewhere, it’s the opening half hour that makes this otherwise straightforward doc more than just that. Jim Jones & co. were, at least initially, major social progressives, and it’s easy to see how many were caught up in their wave. Nelson doesn’t just recreate the way cultists, not just these ones, get ensnared; he celebrates Jones’ more respectable policies, in turn showing how little has progressed three decades on. The adulation wisely ends there, and the doc gets harrowing even before the move to Guyana. Fascinating. B+

Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre)
Sloppy. Judi Dench veers from poison pen mordant to helpless and babyish whenever the script needs her to do so, and Cate Blanchett’s bohemian is thinly conceived and only slightly better played. (Her freeze-dried Dietrich turn in The Good German will be better judged by the future, methinks.) This either needed to be all-out nasty or thoughtful; annoyingly, it’s neither, but with elements of both. Patrick Marber: kindly go back to Alan Partridge. C+

Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
For reasons I still can’t figure out, part two of Eastwood’s IJ dyptych never entirely enveloped me. I “enjoyed” it and its quasi-clinical presentation of living death; it does just about just about everything right, it’s distinctly Japanese and always resists going for the jugular. (A much-needed reality check: Blood Work, which barely elicited apathetic groans, came out only four years ago.) Did it just need another element? Perhaps. I suspect Imamura would’ve hit this out of the park, even if he couldn’t bring to the production one of its strongest aspects: one of the American right’s heroes making a film that empathizes with the Japanese, at one point going so far as to make the Yanks look dread evil. By the by, another much-needed reality check: Unforgiven, still Eastwood’s most self-reflexive and thoughtful work, came out fourteen years ago. B+

Failure to Launch (Tom Dey)
md’a has been waging a one-critic war to re-evaluate this, not as some lost masterpiece, but as a solid rom-com. I don’t agree, but I can see where he’s coming from. The opening half hour, while not all there, has conscious elements of Screwball, i.e., ones that don’t feel second-hand, as with most rcs. Indeed, for a time, it even seemed like Sarah Jessica Parker might be doing a Kate Hepburn in Philadelphia Story: brainy and witty. It doesn’t last, basically because the film starts taking things way, way too seriously. (This PG-13 pic’s solitary use of the f-bomb is simply in the wrong movie.) Supporting cast strong, with La Zooey a memorable nut and Terry Bradshaw a low-key hoot [sic].* C+

The Good German (2006, Steven Soderbergh)

Believe me, no one’s more shocked that this one wound up needing defending as I am. Someone was saying on my dorky film newsgroup how it’s been awhile since Soderbergh gave himself fully to a project. The last several films have found him in restless experimental mode, bringing some of his powers to the production but not remotely all of them. Trouble is, I can’t remember when he did do that. Of his widely-agreed-upon masterstrokes (Sex, Lies, King of the Hill, Out of Sight and Traffic, let’s say), none are the same as the others. A more disparate bunch you’re not likely to see. Even when he’s firing on what appear to be all cylinders, he’s still trying on a different guise. Have there been an original and a sequel, at least as made by the same people, as violently different than the Oceans? (One is trying to be purely pleasurable; the other is even more aggressively a Hollywoof hall-of-mirrors than Full Frontal, while also working an obscure-‘70s-Eurothriller vibe.) The Good German ranks amongst his most experimental experiments, but it’s not merely a mimicry of Michael Curtiz WWII romances. If that’s what it is, then it’s a failure.

But that’s not what it is. Hovering somewhere between a Guy Maddin festish-fest and Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, German reimagines Curtiz and company as they would have been without the Hays Code, as well as without the need to downplay certain aspects of geopolitics. And so Tobey Maguire drops the f-bomb every two words, Cate Blanchett from gets shtumped from behind, and the American army comes off in an unflattering light. It’s not that Soderbergh hates the films of the ‘40s, as some have suggested; anyone who’s spent any time reading his interviews knows that’s a ridiculous notion. (The Third Man pops up on a Top Ten Fave list printed in the Sex, Lies diaries.) He wants to reimagine what they would be like without the Code and with the suitable amount of political cynicism. It’s pure exercise, yes, but one well worth performing. But that’s not the end of it. Soderbergh baldly quotes Casablanca, The Third Man and, in the form of cutaway doc footage, Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair. But he completely downplays those film’s brooding, romantic streak. German is cold, cold, cold, and the homages to the aforementioned only feel like cruel jokes. (Thomas Newman’s over-spirited retro score stands in almost comic contrast to what’s on screen.)

A lot of the film’s critics (and its fans) claim that Soderbergh relies too heavily on dull plot mechanics. I agree...and yet I can’t help thinking that, cold technique or not, that’s part of the point -- that the characters are too mired in plot to pay attention to emotions, or even offer even a non-traditional payoff. As for the nigh-Dogme-ish stylistic restrictions, the most striking part is Blanchett’s face, rendered as white and clean as a Kabuki mask. B

* I’m totally fucking serious. Bradshaw’s presence was one of the things that kept me from this movie for so long, too. But let me just say that dude’s subtle even when nekkid.

Eleven Favorite/Best Non-2006 Films Seen For the First Time in 2006

2007-01-24T20:35:00.000-05:00

Sadly, I watched each of these on DVD in my home, unless otherwise noted. Doesn’t that just suck?

01. Out 1 (1971, Jacques Rivette) - Museum of the Moving Image, 9 Dec thru 10 Dec

(Warning: I wound up typing away quite a bit longer than I thought I would about this movie. If you’re just here for titles and arbitrary rankings, I will not hate you if you skip past the following few bulky paragraphs of prose to the first sighting of in-boldness.)

I enjoyed a couple movies this year more than I did Jacques Rivette’s 12 1/2 hour epic. (For instance, number two.) But you could only count the number of people who’ve seen Out 1 on a couple hundred hands, so it gets some bonus points. Luckily, it has more going for it than just rareness. Filmed between his stylistic awakening (L’Amour fou) and his most popular outing (Céline and Julie Go Boating), Rivette’s rarely-screened film* often summons up comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, basically because it’s a) long, long, long and b) largely devoted to improvised madness that can be a bit difficult to parse. But there’s a clear, tight design to the whole thing wholly at odds with the apparent directionless of what’s on screen.

In fact, that directionless contributes to what appears to be the dominant theme: the slow (and, just to reiterate, I mean, slow) disintegration of one’s ideals, plans and ambitions. Out 1 doesn’t have a plot to speak of, but its characters -- a pair of theater troupes putting on an Aeschylus play each; and two con-artists (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, the latter my new crush) -- each fit that trajectory. The theater troupes, which eventually reveal themselves to be the disparate shards of one massive theater troupe that split once upon a time due to creative differences, are shown doing nothing but rehearsing. And not even that: they’re doing acting exercises -- warm-ups, improvisational scenes, and post-exercise discussions over cigarettes. Future Bond villain Michel/Michael Lonsdale, who heads up the troupe that’s putting on Prometheus, is often found saying that his group is trying to “find” the play, and later talks of being on the verge of “breaking through.” But over the 750-some minutes, the play never comes close to fruition; we never hear so much as a single line from the source.

Likewise, Léaud -- a deaf-mute whose shtick involves going to cafés and annoying customers with din-like harmonica playing until they give him money -- soon stumbles onto what appears to be a cryptic plot involving world domination found on a stay piece of paper. After much banging of head on the walls and such, he decides it has something to do with the Balzac novel The Story of the Thirteen, with a touch of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. (Handily, Léaud has not only several stacks of books along his one wall, but an actual blackboard -- a bizarre touch that gave me an idea about what to do with my next apartment.) Of course, Léaud is pretty much literally grasping at straws, as well as very nicely demonstrating the Heisenberg Principle. As with the theater troupes, his quest too never amounts to anything.

Out 1 was filmed in the shadows of the May 1968 riots, and like Regular Lovers did 35 years ago, it takes a pessimistic but melancholic view of idealism. Much of the film is very funny; Léaud has never worked the ham quite so well and who knew that Eric Rohmer, playing a Balzac expert Léaud annoys early on, had great, off-kilter timing? But by the final stretch, the film has snowballed into something that’s very affecting and upsetting, especially for anyone whose own youthful ideals have decayed before their eyes. (I almost balled like a little girl during the final hour of Regular Lovers.) But then the damnedest thing happens: the final shot, which I can’t quite reveal, suggests that whatever overreaching theory you have on the whole film might not be very accurate or germane. Either way, it sent the entire theater of beleaguered cinephiles into uproarious laughter. Greatest final shot ever? I think so.

(Note: not a month and a half later, I was lucky to see Out 1: Spectre, the 4 1/2 hour cut of the film, in Philly during I-House’s much welcome “Early Rivette” series. It’s not quite the complete reimagining of its eight-hour-longer cousin (father?), but it is significantly different. For one, much of the third act is different: Léaud no longer goes insane; Berto never dies; and Lonsdale is never shown falling into an ambiguous laughing/crying fit on the beach. It’s less funny, too, but also nowhere near as moving. The scenes are understandably shorn down (most sadly, the hilarious Rohmer one), but the film really makes its length felt while the original breezes by, at least once your mind adjusts to the fact that every scene will be long in the ass. I greatly enjoyed it, but I think I either needed to see this one first or at least not so soon after seeing it. I know: Yeah, like I had the option, ha ha.)

02. Sátántangó (1994, Béla Tarr) - MOMA, 16 Jan

I’ve spoken too much about this film, and yet I’ve really never gotten into why it’s bewitched me so. This article does a pretty good job of summing up the film’s many pointers, but the grand one, at least for me, was a feeling I sometimes turn my nose up at: escapism. Not, mind you, the kind that you typically want to “escape” to when you watch a movie -- unless you’re the kind of sicko who likes being trapped for seven and a half hours in the squalor of a failed farming community in bumfuck post-Communist Hungary. What envelopes you is a) the fascination of wandering around this microcosm, however unpleasant it may be; and b) as you may have heard, this movie is shot like fucking balls. Tarr’s slow, lengthy steadicam shots envelope you, taking you away to a world that’s part grim, gritty realism and part sci-fi. The village of Sátántangó is as fascinating and transportive as any George Lucas production, and Tarr’s fractured time-line (outdoing Pulp Fiction, the same year it premiered, no less) and dark sense of humor make it easy to become obsessive. (The latter aspect really hits you when you view the earlier parts of the Tarr catalogue, namely his initial neo-Cassavetes actorly exercises and the all-out bleakness of ’tango’s predecessor, the bluntly-(and aptly-)titled Damnation.)

03. Cold Water (1994, Olivier Assayas) - 09 Apr

Point when I realized Assayas’s film was more than just a well-observed gritty piece of neo-realism that had mutated into a hypnotic party movie: halfway through a spin of CCR’s “Up Around the Bend,” the needle is heard being lifted, only to be placed right back at the beginning. Of course, I had no idea what act three would bring. Good job, Sundance Channel, on finally bringing this to Amerika.

04. Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)

Some folks are putting this on their 2006 Top Ten List by virtue of it having never played theatrically in America till this year. Fuck dat shit. I actually, and for reasons I can’t remember now (and couldn’t begin to excuse anyway), never saw it projected. Thanks to nebbishy print distribution, the critic’s screening was scheduled after my paper’s print date, meaning I had to contend with a (perfectly watchable) screener. I look forward to seeing Melville’s heartbreakingly frigid portrayal of the French Resistance ad. inf. whenever I get around to ordering it from the U.K., and not just for the typically moody Melville lighting. Though Melville superficially retains the taciturn-badass approach of Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, he winds up turning it on its head. Unsentimental to its core, Shadows presents characters forced to do unspeakable deeds, exude a moral certitude in a world that doesn’t have it and fight a fight whose impact we never get to see. Should Ken Loach's Cannes-fêted The Wind That Shakes the Barley possess even a minute fraction of this one's world-scarred honesty, then we're all in for a good scare.

05. Luc Moullet Retrospective - 5 Jan thru 6 Jan, International House

In February, Philly’s Repertory scene suffered another significant, possibly fatal blow: the departure of its lone full-time programmer, I-House’s Michael Chaiken, to New York. (Albert Maysles nabbed him, and is no doubt the better off.) Luckily, he went out with a bang, curating this four feature/one short retro on depressingly obscure Nouvelle Vague director Luc Moullet. Chaiken screened what’s possibly Moullet’s only known film, 1968’s The Smugglers, a couple years back, and the film’s relentless absurdism, political gamesmanship and playful stylistics had me craving more. The series, which spanned from 1966’s Brigitte and Brigitte to 1988’s The Comedy of Work, did not disappoint, convincing me that Moullet is if not one of the finest then at least the most unique comic sensibility in filmdom. B&B, for instance, essentially outdoes Band of Outsiders in terms of nutty Paris-set whimsy. (If only either of its Brigittes were an Anna Karina. Alas.) A Girl is a Gun (aka Une Aventure de Billy the Kid) features Jean-Pierre Léaud hilariously miscast as William Bonney -- and even more hilariously, heard via an intentionally atrocious English dub job, à la the unintentionally atrocious French dub jobs with which Moullet first acquainted himself with American westerns. Anatomy of a Relationship features Moullet and a girl standing in for his real-life then-girlfriend in the buff. And I’m not sure who the nearly-ZAZ-esque The Comedy of Work is for -- an alien species, perhaps. Happily, Moullet has made it to disc. Unhappily, he’s made it to disc via Facets. Fuck Facets.

06. Michael Haneke’s Glaciation Trilogy: The Seventh Continent (1989); 20 May; Benny’s Video (1992); 3 Jun; and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), 5 Jun

For most of us confined to North America, Haneke’s “glaciation trilogy” has been a thing of legend, if not the kind of tales you tell around a campfire. (“What happens in Benny’s Video?!”) Luckily, when Kino released the films (plus Funny Games) last year, Haneke didn’t suffer some artistic rebirth between the all-out assault of Funny Games (which Jacques Rivette called a “disgrace,” “a piece of shit” and “vile,” but not “in the same way as John Woo”) and the thoughtful Code Unknown. Haneke can be found waxing fascinatingly (and with much giggling) on each of the film’s discs, but the film’s speak pretty well for themselves, as well as deepen Haneke’s skill. For one thing, they reveal his iciness to be even more of a mask than you’d think if all you saw were The Piano Teacher or Caché. The Seventh Continent is an upsetting depiction of one three-person family’s group suicide, finding empathy amidst the accumulation of ritualistic montages. (Still, what does it say about me that the section I remember the most months later is the notorious long take of money being flushed down a toilet.) In between its attention grabbing first act twist and potentially glib surprise ending, Benny’s Video manages more than a modicum of feeling for its lead character, a sociopath in the making. (Why anyone bothered with Hannibal Rising, both in book and movie form, is beyond me. This pretty much does the job, and no doubt with infinitely sharper formal chops.) And 71 Fragments may be a dry run for Code Unknown’s reams of ellipses, but it still sends the mind running in about as many directions. Bring on Funny Games U.S.A., in my opinion.

07. I Finally See Me Some Budd Boetticher: Seven Men From Now (1956), 22 Jan; Comanche Station (1960), 07 Feb; The Tall T (1957), 23 Dec

As far as a filmmaker repeating themself/adhering to a strict, narrow template goes, Yasujiro Ozu may hold the trophy, but director Boetticher is more than nipping at his coattails. Insanely succinct, richly ambiguous, sharply acted, masterfully composed, resourceful -- Boetticher is possibly even better at the western than John Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann. If only we had a chance to find out for sure. So far, only Seven Men From Now, which pairs Randolph Scott with a never-better Lee Marvin, is on any kind of purchaseable video. But keep a sharp eye, and you may just stumble onto any of the other six films in what is casually dubbed the RANOWN cycle (so named for the presence of Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown). They're all good. After all, they'd probably have to be.

08. Love Me Tonight (1932, Rouben Mamoulian) - 15 Mar

Rouben Mamoulian was one of the first filmmakers to keep up the stylistics after the conversion to sound; his 1929 musical Applause is usually shown to students to prove that early talkies aren’t all stiff and dull. The Chevalier-MacDonald vehicle Love Me Tonight, which finds Mamoulian treading on Ernst Lubitsch’s territory, is among the most playful musicals I’ve ever seen. Mamoulian's often chided for subscribing to the style-over-substance school, but he's at least a thoughtful stylist. On one extreme, you have the opening number, “Isn’t It Romantic?,” which finds the song passed from person to person, from city to countryside, like a disease. But on the other extreme, there's one song (forget which) that's entirely a shot of Chevalier's head asleep on a pillow, a smile suggesting that a kickass number is going on in his dreams. (No doubt this sequence was the inspiration for Andy Warhol's Sleep.) Who's Lubitsch again?

09. Early Peter Greenaway Shorts - 16 Apr thru 17 Apr

Greenaway was one of my first favorite avant-gardeists, thanks to a freshman year obsession with The Cook, the Thief, et al.. So it’s been more than a touch bewildering to watch as he’s been dragged across the coals over the last decade, the mainstream punishing him for being too out there and the avant garde punishing him for having crossed the aisles in the first place. (Not that I’ve never joined in on the pummeling; my first major piece of hatemail involved my pejorative dropping of a four-letter word w/r/t The Baby of Macon.) Perhaps finally realizing he has to help manage his body of work, Greenaway finally unleashed his early shorts and his masterly epic faux-doc The Falls onto North America, stressing that, though he may have the cred to film Ewan McGregor’s uncircumcised penis, his heart still lies with experiments with organization. Vertical Features Remake. A Walk Through H. H is for House. My.

10. Chimes at Midnight (1966, Orson Welles) - 07 Sep

Because every year should reveal an Orson masterpiece. Note to self: finally finish up Criterion’s Mr. Arkadin box.

11. The Holy Mountain (1973, Alejandro Jodorowsky) - 30 Jul

I’ve always been a bit cool on El Topo, but Jodorowsky’s bigger, badder follow-up -- bankrolled by Topo-heads John and Yoko -- made me a convert. He’s still full of shit (and this was before he invented a form of New Age therapy called “psychomagic”), but implied bullshit ideas go down better with a bigger budget, in ‘scope, and with a propensity for more out-there ideas -- when there’s more to distract you from the inherent silliness of the ideas, that is. The middle section’s introductions, in particular, all but blew my mind.

Now go see Children of Men a couple times. I mean jesus.

* Indeed, the screening I was lucky to get into was not only the film’s American premiere, but only the fifth time it had been publicly exhibited. (There was a NY critic’s screening held a couple days beforehand, so that freed up a handful of seats to us non-NY cineastes.) And as for these previous showings, it’s hard to tell if they went as swimmingly as this one. Claire Denis, who worked with Rivette back in the day and in 1990 made the terrific TV doc Jacques Rivette, the Watchman, was quoted in the NYT as saying most of those at the premiere were stoned out of their gourds, while supreme J.R.-head David Thomson once claimed the film has “never shown properly without technical breakdown.” Moreover, the print, which was a very clean 16mm struck in the ‘90s, was the only known complete one in existence. Surprise surprise: it didn’t sport English subtitles. Ergo, a series of very brave folks from the French Embassy had to work what is known as “soft-titles,” wherein the entire translation is projected manually, line by line, from a computer and onto the bottom of the screen. As you can imagine, this can be quite maddening and carpal tunnel-syndrome-causing, even with each episode only lasting between 95 and 105 minutes. More than a couple times lines were missed or there were long breaks where the same one would stay on the screen. Not once did the audience, which breed is typically very demanding and tsk-tsk-y when it comes to projection matters, so much as audibly sigh or shift in the seats or fake-cough or anything that would have conveyed irritation. I should also mention the film took two days to show: 6 1/2 hours one day; 6 the next. The lengthy break made it doubly weird when, not terribly shagged out on day two, I realized at one point that I was ten hours into the same goddam movie. Very surreal.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Peter Andrews wuz robbed

2007-01-24T19:22:00.000-05:00

Requisite, if not compulsory, ruminations on the Oscar noms en route (possibly), but just one thing I need to get off my chest for now: good job, AMPAS, not being stupid enough to snub Children of Men's Emmanuel Lubezki; bad job, AMPAS, letting the box office bombing and critical scourging of The Good German get in the way of nominating it for a slew of techie awards. Recreating some fantasia version of the Motown era in Dreamgirls is aces in your book, but recreating the honest-to-god technology used to create the past isn't worth your time? Whatever, AMPAS. Go and award Crash 2: Now With a Couple More Native Tongues!

In honor of this most irritating snub, here's the William Castle-ish opening to Steven Soderbergh's still-unfortunately-ignored fest of figurative (and occasionally literal) self-indulgence, Schizopolis. I've long been a fan, and this intro ably demonstrates not only its creator's gift for absurdism and wordplay, but his deadpan acting chops:

Tha Weekly!! An interview with Lloyd Shorter, co-artistic director and member of the Grammy-nominated musical ensemble, Relâche, who will be performing over Buster Keaton's The General this weekend at I-House. Also, Rep.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: There's a fish...in the percolator!

2007-01-17T21:26:00.001-05:00

Having shlepped up to the IFC Center this past weekend to see it (phuck Philly), I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Inland Empire. Or rather, I'm trying to wrap my brain around whether or not trying to make sense of it entirely misses the point -- whether it's best to give one's self up to its narrative, um, felicities and concentrate on what is there: namely, the plethora of themes. (And Laura Dern. I mean, hot damn.)

On the way up, I reread David Foster Wallace's amazingly thorough essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head," originally written for Premiere (and greatly, greatly expanded for his kickass collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) circa production on Lost Highway. In it, Wallace runs down the number of ways Highway could be interpreted, including as "one long hallucination." He then adds that this is "the least interesting possibility," and that "I'd be surprised if anybody at Asymetrical [Lynch's company] will want Lost Highway interpreted as one long psychotic dream." Of course, it's impossible to tell who in Inland Empire would be having this particular psychotic dream (if that's what it is). But simply filing this into the dream folder seems to be woefully missing out on this film's riches, the most lasting (so far) being a love for actresses and women, a feeling that's impossible to miss during the joyous, Nina Simone-backed end credits. Bizzarely enough, Lynch, that legend of the midnight movie circuit, has evolved into one of the finest directors of women. Recent Pedro Almodóvar, beware of Recent David Lynch.

But speaking of a Lynch joint whose image is difficult to parse and is seemingly made up of a series of disjointed episodes, I've been thinking again of his contribution to Lumiere and Company, Sarah Moon's 1995 project wherein 41 of the planet's finest filmatists were asked to shoot a 55-second, synch-sound-less short on the world's first camera, the Cinématographe. (Although much like the upcoming iPhone, it too could also serve as a makeshift projector.) Even in a distinguished group, which ranges from Theo Angelopoulos to Merchant-Ivory to Peter Greenaway to Abbas Kiarostami, Lynch stands head and shoulders, evoking dread not just with the fuzzy/scratched stock, but also half-glimpsed images. (Was that a naked lady in a tank?)

The meat and potatoes after some on-set, megaphone-aided hijinks.

Mon Weekly!! An interview with Repertory fixture, multiregion DVD-peddler and fellow cineaste Joseph A. Gervasi is the main thing this week. Also on tap are an Editor's Pick (third down) of the Nazi art-looting doc The Rape of Europa and, as ever, Rep. The latter is mostly devoted to I-House's Jacques Rivette retro that starts tonight and winds into Sunday, dropping largely unseen early work all over University City. (Including Out 1: Spectre, the 4 1/2-hour cousin to his 12 1/2-hour Out 1.) If you're in Philly and you can stomach elephantine lengths, you have no reason to stay at home. Unless you suck.

Speaking of Rivette, would you like to see every instance of Juliet Berto smoking in Céline and Julie Go Boating stitched together by some YouTubist? I bet you would.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Good lord. I'm on film. How did that happen?

2007-01-10T00:35:00.000-05:00

The other day on my wacky film newsgroup, someone was discussing Michel Gondry's awesome video for the Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be." In this video (which is awesome), Gondry seamlessly cuts between icky late-'90s video and glorious 35mm. Someone else mentioned that in an interview, he confessed that his aesthetic reasoning was partly as a comment on a bizarre BBC tradition: interiors on video; exteriors on film. Being around in the late '60s/early '70s, Monty Python were never abov this cost-cutting trick...but they did deliver it a massive, mind-bending blow in the following clip, which doubles as a delirious bit of filmic/televisual/media deconstruction. Besides, even the fourth-wall breaking in La Jetée isn't as unnerving as Graham Chapman's drawn-out one here.

I'd say you should skip to the two-minute mark for the pertinent section, but this sketch, en totale, easily ranks on my top ten list of Best Python Bits.

The Weekly!! Two A-Lists, one an overview of a retro on British documentarian-turned-falconer Peter Whitehead, the other a blurb on the not-very-good (but portentously titled) doc Before the Music Dies. There's plenty more on Whitehead, as well as Abel Ferrara's Mary, in Rep, plus a review of Cassavetes' brainless Alpha Dog.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Go see Children of Men

2007-01-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

First off, welcome to 2007.

In the spirit of end-of-2006 trophy-giving, here's a music video for my favorite musical "discovery" (in that I finally got around to digging it up) of last year: Serge Gainsbourg's mindbendingly lascivious 1971 album, Histoire de Melody Nelson. The following is from a 1971 TV special, in which Serge commissioned music videos for each of the album's seven songs, which constitute more of a suite than even, say, a concept album. The first, "Melody," clocks in at 7 1/2 minutes, and is paired with shots of a beleaguered-looking Serge purposefully driving, all while flashing lights, spinning statues and dancing ladies dissolve like mad. (If ye seek the rest of the cycle, click on the clip.) Beck-listeners will eventually hear the source of the song "Paper Tiger," which expertly paid homage to this one's unique sonic stylings. For those hoping to know just what the hell Serge is purring about, check this out.

Das Weekly!! I totally interviewed Alfonso Cuarón, whose Children of Men you really should go see. (Make sure to read Sean's review here.) Also, a review (second down) of Tom Tykwer's unabashedly deranged adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and, as usual, Rep.

My Screening Diary, which I accidentally abandoned a month or so back during a debilitating sick fit, will resume (in all likelihood) this weekend.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: The Two-Days-Late Edition (Plus My Super-Preliminary Top Ten List!)

2006-12-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

My last YTTOSSW of the year, and it's some 48 hours late! Sorry 'bout that, yo. Lazy holidays and shit, ya get me?

Anyway, to start with, here's the requisite clip, this time honoring, in a way, Orson Welles. At least for me, this has been quite a year for Orson-watching: not only did Criterion put out a three-disc (plus their now obligatory inclusion of a book) set of Mr. Arkadin (which I oughta finish one of these days), but I personally got my mitts on his bizarrely unavailable Falstaff-pic Chimes at Midnight, Jess Franco's unwatchable mutilation of his Don Quixote footage, and The Well, Kristien Petri’s obsessive chronicle of his search for Orson-in-Spain arcana.

With that in mind, here's Orson plastered at a shooting for one of his wine commercials. You think he sank to the bottom by shilling for Paul Mason? You ain't seen nothing yet. Similarly, if you found the uncensored Siskel & Ebert spat hard to watch, you won't even make it through this. I know I haven't. (For the real deal, jump here.)

La Weekly!!
Just an interview with We Don't Live Here Anymore/The Painted Veil director John Curran. And I ain't even sending you over to Rep. There's so not nothing there.

Lastly, as promised: THAT LIST!
Again: super-preliminary. But if someone asked me to name the ten right this now, it would possibly resemble this:

01. The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, UK/USA)
02. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, UK/USA)
03. Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)
04. Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Michel Gondry, USA)
05. Gabrielle (Patrice Chéreau, France/Germany/Italy)
06. Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine, USA)
07. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, USA/UK/France)
08. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)
09. L'enfant (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France)
10. Clean (Olivier Assayas, France/UK/Canada)

As yet unseen: Idiocracy (Judge); Inland Empire (Lynch); Iraq in Fragments (Longley); Letters From Iwo Jima (Eastwood); Notes on a Scandal (Eyre); Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro); probably more I'm currently forgetting.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Better Hopelessly Late Than Never

2006-12-20T00:08:00.000-05:00

Just when it seemed like those of us who didn't venture up to the 2005 NYFF would never get a chance to catch Philippe Garrel's devastating Regular Lovers on a big screen, doesn't New York's Cinema Village go and schedule it just before the end of the year. And just in time for Top Ten List finalizing, too! (It previously topped my 2005 list. Now, I suppose, it doesn't.) Those with regionless players have been able to catch Artificial Eye's R2 disc for months. But excellent as it is, surely William Lubchantsky's sharp B&W cinematography looks even more radiant when projected on film, to say nothing of the enveloping rhythms of the largely wordless first hour.

Garrel, whose ornery Nouvelle Vague films have long been unavailable to those with a crippling reliance on the English language (what discs there are don't boast subtitles), conceived the film, at least in part, as a reponse to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, going so far as to cast his son Louis as his autobiographical self. Bernardo gets a hilarious shout-out during a leftfield fourth-wall-busting moment halfway through, but it's unclear whether he holds much animosity towards his film. The Dreamers intentionally kept things holed up, away from the world. Regular Lovers dives right in, though its portrayal of its participants is arguably more acidic still. The first hour is devoted to their carefree ideology; the other two chart the steady, slow descent into disillusionment, aided by opium and what is gradually revealed to be a rocky foundation to begin with -- a depiction that should gut anyone who's ever harbored lofty aspirations.

Oh, yes, the clip. This is from around the two-hour mark, with the characters participating in what is one last hurrah. The song is the Kinks' immortal "This Time Tomorrow," which dates from 1970, two years after the revolts. Safe to say that no one has filmed dancing quite this way before, the camera calmly following around people as they dance with no care for rhythm, patterns or style, all the while boxed within a 1.33:1 frame.

Le Weekly!! Busy-ass Holiday Movie week, with three reviews woven into a bunch of Sean Burns ones: Zhang's nutzoid Curse of the Golden Flower, which reunites him with former muse Gong Li; the surprisingly desperate (in a good way) The Pursuit of Happyness; and We Are Marshall, which is surprising in less worthwhile ways. I also interview one-time Philly Rep scene queen/current PFF documentary film curator Jennifer Steinberg. Also, and I barely feel like pointing you towards it given how skimpy it is, Rep. (Seriously, there's nothing there.)

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Look, I Saw a 12 1/2 Hour Movie

2006-12-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

Still haven't gotten back on track with the ol' Screening Diary. But that will totally happen sometime soon. But this YouTubing thing is far easier. Ergo, here's an interview that should fairly blow your socks through your ass: Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham. "My next guest is a very charming and provocative gentlemen," the Woodman says in the intro, and far more shocking is that he's right. Can you imagine a famous atheist interviewing a major religious figure today, let alone the other way around? The mind reels.

La Weekly!! A review of Terry Gilliam's Tideland, which I can't believe actually made it outside of the IFC Center. (Guess begging outside of the Daily Show studio really helped.) Also, Rep.

Oh, and a possibly impenetrable ditty on Jacques Rivette's Out 1, alluded to in the subject title, is en route. Seriously.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Look, I've Been Sick

2006-12-06T17:04:00.000-05:00

And where's this week's Screening Diary, you ask? (Well, don't you?) It's coming -- I've just been horribly afflicted by this nasty-ass fever I caught during the East Coast's violent 30-40-degree drop over the weekend. Fun.

In the meanwhile, here's possibly my favorite chapter from Godard's Vivre sa vie, with the (need it be said?) luminous Anna Karina as the bestest cinematic prostitute in history. (Bite me, Cabiria.) My question: who, exactly, directed this clip?

Yer Weekly! An interview with local walking film encyclopedia, "Videohound" author and longtime Russ Meyer confidante, Irv Slifkin. Also, a review (one Sean Burns review down) of Alan Bennett's so-not-inspirational teacher-pupil dramedy The History Boys and, with a bit about Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy, Rep.

And a rare event for K.B.: honest-to-dog actual breaking news! For those of you who couldn't get into MoMI's monumental screening of Jacques Rivette's 12 1/2-hour Out 1, they've been kind enough to add another weekend screening session, in March. Luckily, this doesn't include me. My boxed lunches await me in Astoria this weekend.

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: There Is Entirely Too Little General Zod on YouTube

2006-11-29T17:24:00.000-05:00

I desperately wanted to post one of the many terrific clips of Terrance Stamp as General Zod in Superman II -- you know, in honor of that crappy-ass Richard Donner cut that came out yesterday -- but, alas, I came up empty. In its stead, here's one of the better shorts from Robert Smigel's genius TV Funhouse, long the only laugh-out-loud material on SNL. Tackling a favorite target, the breathtakingly cheap Hanna-Barbera company, Smigel goes after their little-known show Shazzan, in which a pair of teens (and a flying camel) frequently call on a genie to help them and enact vengeance that's far from commensurate with the acts that inspired them.

Yon Weekly!! A review (second down) of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's HD-shot Climates, plus an interview with local Repertory dude and filmmaker Michael Dennis. Also, Rep.

Screening Diary: Week of 11/19 (aka, the one where I drop the f-bomb too much)

2006-11-28T19:25:00.000-05:00

/The Apple/ (1980, Menahem Golan) [a D-/A- split]
I would pay a significant fee to go back in time and stare at Chuck Norris’ face as he watched this while researching his Delta Force director. Do you really think Golan (to your left, deep in thought) had the sense to hide it from him? Also, when Joss Ackland abruptly and inexplicably goes from playing a Gandalf-esque hippie leader to a slick-haired God within a single scene is...not even one of the craziest parts of this crazy-ass picture. Speeeeeeed!!

Night of the Comet (1984, Thom Eberhardt) [C]
I was under the impression, for some reason, that this apocalyptic ‘80s teen comedy was essentially The Omega Valley Girls. Who knows, maybe that’s what Eberhardt was going for. But that’s not what leads Catherine Mary Stewart (of The Apple!) and Kelli Maroney appear to be doing, so what in the fuck, in my opinion. (If that is what they’re doing, it’s the subtlest portrayal of a stereotype yet.) A total muddle of a faintly promising idea, saved periodically by Mary Woronov, who both brings her game and plays a part in a couple genuinely inventive death scenes. Tellingly awkward-but-awesome line: “I’m not insane - I just don’t give a fuck!”

Imprint (from “Masters of Horror) (2006, Takashi Miike) [B+]
I have yet to see The Great Yokai War, nor have I stumbled upon Big Bang Love: Juvenile or any of the ten others he’s made in the interim. But it seems to me that Miike is on something of a streak of late. And surely, it’s no coincidence that two of them -- Box, his contribution to Three...Extremes, and this, his (unaired!) contribution to Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series -- happen to be of the short-to-medium-length variety. Here’s the thing with Takashi Miike: even though he’s often depicted as a paint-dribbler, crazily dropping ideas and images in the hopes that a couple of them will stick, he’s not only capable of a strong semblance of structure and order, but he actually excels at it. (Either that or at least a narrowly-defined template, like another recent work, Izo, which milks the “damned samurai is stuck traveling through time, murdering people” for all its worth, and then some.) Like Box, Imprint benefits from a pretzeled, hermetic structure, one that hops through time and blurs the fiction-reality line something fierce. In just a hair over an hour, Miike presents a full and horrifying portrait of patriarchal wrath that’s largely carried by women; switches protagonists (and stories), from Billy Drago’s obsessive journalist to Youki Koudoh’s disfigured prostitute; and, by hopping around various time lines and plots, makes a film that feels like it would be better off watched sideways, not front to end. As the proverbial cherry on top, he even puts the gruesome torture, needle-laden torture scene not at the climax but at the halfway mark. That said, just what does Billy Drago think he’s doing. That guy’s fucking crazy.

Mikey and Nicky (1976, Elaine May) [B+]
Starts off like May aping Cassavetes' shtick with his own help (as well as Peter Falk’s); quickly develops into its own thing, though still very much a reworking of one director’s signature style. You kind of expect May to amp the macho bullshit, all the better to expose it. But she’s really with these two, as they take a long, dark journey of the (‘70s Philly) night, not to mention participate in a disturbing and fascinating portrait of male friendship. (Likewise, the brutality towards women isn’t cut down, though its impact is given extra stressing.) What she doesn’t do, in essence, is try to act as though it’s real, or The Truth, as Cassavetes had been doing up till that point. The stress is on the high theatrics of the performances, which rank near the top on both actors’ resumes: Cassavetes was never more quintessentially Cassavetesian that he was here, while Falk emerges as a truly tragic figure, honestly hurt by the way his friend treats him but also stuck with a need to one-up him, even if it means turning him over to the crime bosses who want his hide. It’s no Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the Cassavetes-directed release of the same year, but it’s close.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster) [C+]
Likeable enough, thanks to strong turns from Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman and a reasonably human spin on the kooky babe character by Maggie Gyllenhaal. But I have to go with Jim Ridley -- this is just a whimsy pile-up, a welter of promising ideas with little to no organization. Even Will Ferrell’s discovery of the voice is blown, coming far too early (or late) in the picture and for no discernible reason. What caused Ferreal to hear the voice? For that matter, why did this Zach Helm guy think it was such a great idea to have Ferrell and Thompson occupy the same universe? That this revelation produces, like, two bats of the eye from the characters, en total, is depressingly indicative of the lack of imagination on display. Against my better defenses, I found the film’s exclamatory ode to breaking out of one’s rut unexpectedly moving; decidedly less so its dubious and thin hatred for aspiring artists. Also, can I call a moratorium on screenwriter’s writing about novelists if they can’t convincingly reproduce believable prose on the screen, in particular if said novelist is apparently ace enough to ensnare literary professors? Thanks kindly.

The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman) [A]
I really forgot how fucking nuts this is, as in wall-to-wall. It’s not just every scene that has something offbeat in it, but just about idea, from the academic-stoner guy Elliott Gould’s Marlowe shares a cell with during his prison stay to the way the entire soundtrack, save for sarcastic “Hooray For Hollywood” bookends, is variations on the title song. This is Raymond Chandler, old Raymond Chandler movie adaptations (the screenplay is credited to Leigh Brackett, who wrote such things as The Big Sleep), the ‘70s, the ‘40s, film noir, Hollywood and Altman himself caught in a 112-minute time warp, floating around eachother, intermingling and making new cross-associations. The film is relentlessly and genuinely unpredictable, best exemplified by the moment where Mark Rydell’s initially harmless-seeming Jewish mafioso professes his sincere love to his air-brained mistress before smashing her face with a bottle to prove a modest point. Impossible to pin down, and restlessly experimental -- indeed, the shot through Sterling Hayden and Nina Van Pallandt’s patio door, in which you get both a fuzzy, hopelessly obscured image of the two arguing as well as a distant image of Gould dancing around on the beach, is probably the farthest Altman ever went into the visual ether. I’ll spill one for you, Bobby A.

[Seen for Da Weekly: And If Tomorrow? (2005, Giovanni La Parola) [C+]; /Dead Man/ (1995, Jim Jarmusch) [from a C to an A-]; Climates (2006, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) [B+]]

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: "Retirement? You're Talking About Death, Right?"

2006-11-21T19:01:00.000-05:00

So, earlier today I was casually worrying about what I was going to post on my obligatory YouTube Wednesdays. Let's just say the site really needs the flood of Altman material that's doubtless en route.

I have no eulogy. You can throw a rock and you'll hit one, maybe even three. I won't even link to any, lest I pretend to single any out. I feel no need to try to coax words to explain why I will miss a filmmaker who was in my top tier, and whose Hands on a Hard Body movie I was eagerly anticipating, even if it had only been in pre-production. And I really can't conjure up words to explain what it's like to live in a world where there will be no new Robert Altman films.

That said, there are plenty of Altman films which even I haven't seen, and some which even you haven't seen. (I counted about 10, plus a whole fuckload of TV work, his The Caine Mutiny and McTeague adaptations among them.) I eagerly anticipate, for one, the well-belated reassessment of his '80s, play-adaptation-heavy period. Ditto his television days, before M*A*S*H.

I leave you with lists.

Upper Echelon

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

The Long Goodbye (1973)

California Split (1974)

3 Women (1977)

Tanner '88 (1988)

Gosford Park (2001)

Underrated

Images (1972)

A Perfect Couple (1979)

Popeye (1980)

Kansas City (1996)

The Gingerbread Man (1997)

Ones I Most Desperately Need to See

Countdown (1968)

Brewster McCloud (1970)

Thieves Like Us (1974)

HealtH (1980)

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)

Vincent and Theo (1990)

Tanner on Tanner (2004)

And because no Altman break-down would be complete without it:

Overrated or Just Not Very Good (Yet Well Worth Seeing, Natch)

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's Lesson (1976) [but great visuals; squint hard and it's just as good as those from the same epoch]

Quintet (1979) [though something tells me this becomes a masterpiece on third or fourth viewing]

Streamers (1983) [so far the only Altman I flat-out just don't like]

Secret Honor (1984) [okay, not really, but it does has a chasmic gap between material and execution]

The Player (1992) [also not really, but I've always found the central conceit a little on the glib side]

R.I.P., dude.

And now, Le Weekly An actual film cover issue yields an article on the Greater Philadelphia Film Office and Sharon Pinkenson, its frizzy, golden-haired head. Meanwhile, a new, fancier spread for the film section debuts along with an interview section lorded over by moi; first out of the gate is an intervew with actual-Amerindie god Andrew Bujalski that I had to cut well, well down. (Forgive the name, by the by.) A review of his Mutual Appreciation follows. Ditto Rep.

Screening Diary: Week of 12 Nov 06

2006-11-20T19:22:00.000-05:00

Babel (2006, Alejandro González Iñarritu) [D+]
Too bad screenwriter-buddy Guillermo Arriaga’s jumping ship -- I was sincerely hoping that he and Iñarritu’s next film would take place all over the galaxy, sketching the connections between lowly earthlings and a variety of alien species, who of course brood up a storm. (“What makes us the same is what makes us miserable...from the sponge-gorillas of Centaur Delta 7 to the arachnid-frogs of Pegasus 9.4.”) The Crash allusions aren’t unearned, but they don’t explain what’s so aggravating about Babel. Haggis may never have had anything specific to say about his gallery of latent (or not) racists, but the message was still clear. (“No, I’m sorry, it was a trick question: the entire panel are racists!”) Babel’s just passive-aggressive, coyly refraining from making any grand judgments while making plenty of smaller, equally shallow ones. And so we get Iñarritu and Arriaga getting within an inch of saying, for instance, that it’s somewhat wrong that Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s children got saved from the wilds of the desert while the maid got shipped back to Mexico for stupidly leaving them there, but not quite saying it because, y’know, that’s kind of stupid when you think about it. Not to mention, this is one of those movies where everyone does the single stupidest thing they could possibly do, especially if they’re Gael Garcia Bernal. There’s a meme that’s been sifting through the, uh, memesphere that posits that the real villain of the trilogy is Arriaga, and that it’s entirely possible that Iñarritu is more a tech man. That may be, but that still leaves me with little hope for the guy: his gritty hand-held shtick is virtually indistinguishable from anyone else who throws out their tripods, his Intolerance-esque four-way editing suite rarely produces thought-provoking or even visceral ricochets, and the one scene that comes closest to conjuring up a new sensation -- Rinko Kikuchi in the club, the sound going on and off -- is built around an effective but jujune idea whose novelty wears off as soon as you figure out what’s going on. (I.e., pretty much immediately.) That said, anything that reminds me (and hopefully others) how awesome Code Unknown and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance are isn’t entirely wasteful. Crash, I’m looking your way.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, John Huston) [A-]
Hard to imagine anyone ever watched this in standard color; maybe that explains why it's been left for dead. Its famed pictorial shtick -- in which the entire frame is bathed in a hazy golden (heh) hue, except for one strategically colorized object in the frame (like Elizabeth Taylor’s red shirt in a room full of men) -- may be just that (i.e., a shtick), but it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and perfectly compliments this odd mood piece besides. (The film was released in this strange format, but was swapped for the traditional color version a week later after people complained it was too weird.) Certainly one of the most deterministically experimental studio pics ever green-lit, Huston’s film also made a benchmark for portrayal of homosexuality. It’s still caught in the gay=crazy vein, but it’s remarkably frank about what’s ailing Marlon Brando’s Army post Major, leaving little doubt as to why he keeps staring and stalking Robert Forster’s zombie-esque volunteer Private, who has a habit of riding around horseback in the buff. Though it won’t rank with Streetcar, Last Tango or even Burn!, Brando’s performance is uncommonly terrific and subtle; he plays his character as a man not so much torn as breaking down. When he screams “I’ll kill you” at Elizabeth Taylor, he puts his whole body into it, suggesting that every last inch of him is struggling to make sense of this new sensation. (Ditto his horse-beating scene.) Meanwhile, his big in-denial monologue plays like an android reading a script -- perfectly suitable for a character so excruciatingly in denial. Huston’s portrayal of violence, meanwhile, is sudden and brutal. Also, greatest final shot ever? No. But it’s close.

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuarón) [A-]
I might be writing about this when it comes out, so let’s keep mum till that potential occasion. Or rather, mum except for this: the three bravura long takes you’ll be hearing cinephiles yammering endlessly about within the next two months aren’t the only reason this kicks the holy ass. V For Vendetta better watch its back.

The Fountain (2006, Darren Aronofsky) [C-]
Hard to hate, and I feel guilty pitying it. This film has been through the ringer, from conception to development to the reaction from everyone who isn’t a Premiere lacky. And some of its images are pretty striking, especially the shot of hanging lights in Isabel’s court (it’s in the trailer), or any of the times Hugh Jackman’s fingers do a roundelay with the tree’s hairs (that one’s not, and you’ll have to see it). But it never even gets off the ground, let alone moves the posts of sci-fi. The problem (or one of them) is that it’s clear lightning fast that this isn’t to be taken literally, and that everything but the middle period is a fiction or a metaphor. A love story spanning a thousand years? Hell, we never even see the Bald Jackman design the poster’s space bubble, let alone hop into it with a tree. I so want to like Aronofsky, as he’s one of the few young turks working with Eisensteinian montage. But he needs to start adapting other people’s work, or at least come to grips with the paucity of his ideas. I still think his Batman: Year One would’ve been pretty awesome, just as Requiem For a Dream is often awesome if you don’t think about it.

Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell) [B]
I’m still not sold the way others are on the lack of bloat, and it’s definitely too long. But over the past couple days, I’ve realized I kinda can’t wait to see it again. The action scenes, and not only the one with parkour, are genuinely exciting and clever, Judi Dench M proves she’s even more valuable to the series than previously thought, Eva Green makes for the most fascinating Bond Girl since Diana Rigg (though, I should admit I have a thing for Sophie Marceau’s baddie B.G. in TWINE) and, of course, Fuck these people in my opinion. Moreover, while hitting the reset button doesn’t rejigger the franchise quite as aggressively as it did with Batman Begins, it has the gauling second half that one chickened out on. The whole film, slowly and steadily, builds up to a single, extremely familiar statement of purpose, and when it comes, it’s impossible not to titter. Not to mention, this is the first Bond movie I can remember where Bond gets more skin time than the girls. And one of the girls is Eva Green! Think long and hard about that. Moment I realized I truly dug it: hotel clerk tells Daniel Craig to enjoy his stay. Craig pauses, dumbstruck, then genuinely and through a big, chipper smile replies, “Thank you. I will!”

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: F*ck

2006-11-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

Sadly, I am unable to embed this week's clip on this site, as said clip's owner has, for whatever reason, disabled that particular function. What it is is my so-far favorite scene from HBO's The Wire, which I've heard is finally quite a bit popular. It's also, not coincidentally, the scene that a friend who had just gotten into it showed me when he wanted me to get into it, too. It only took a year for me to get around to watching, but man, am I about as addicted to the show as some of its characters are to other more recreational substances. In this scene, detectives Dominic West and smooth-voiced Wendell Pierce crack a months-old case wide open, all the while emitting nothing but infinite variations on the f-word. The recent doc Fuck does a fairly good job on defending the word, yet this scene not only better conveys its versatility, but does it in under three minutes and more entertainingly to boot.

So go here. (Note: I really wish the clip didn't end prematurely, as it snips off one final fuck. I believe it was a "motherfucker." By the same token, I wish it didn't begin prematurely, too. Oh well.)

Der Weekly! An interview with Richard Linklater in honor of the release of Fast Food Nation, which I also review at the page's bottom. At the bottom of page, you'll find me yammering about George Miller's surprisingly sometimes scary Happy Feet, while go one Sean Burns review down (while reading it, that is) for words on Barbara Kopple's even more surprisingly moving Dixie Chicks doc Shut Up & Sing. Also, Rep.

Also also, what's the fuck going on with The Beave? I know they've been having troubles, but it's been longer than usual (i.e., days and days) without a connection. Please say this ain't the end.

Screening Diary: Week of 5 Nov 06

2006-11-12T19:22:00.000-05:00

To Jon Rosenberg, who suggested I'd given up on this feature mid-first post: you're about to have a plate with some words on it and a knife and a fork.

Lorenzo’s Oil (1992, George Miller) [A-]
Bilge Ebiri, over at The ScreenGrab, called this the most underrated movie of the ‘90s. Funny, because I thought that was Babe: Pig in the City, also directed by George Miller. But I digress -- this is strong stuff, not just rejimmying the disease-of-the-week movie, but the pompous-Oscar-bait movie as well. Miller’s showy, to be sure: the camera’s always moving, wide-angle lenses are frequently strapped on, and the early shot of Nick Nolte flopping around like a washed-up fish on a staircase upon discovering the grim details of his young son’s rare and fatal disease is among the most over-the-top images ever left in a final cut. But he’s also thoughtful. The moment where care may have turned into cruelty comes around the hour mark, leaving plenty of time for the viewer to marinate on the ethical debate. Things turn out for the better (if not the best -- 14 years later, Lorenzo is still in about the same place, mentally), but that doesn’t let Nolte and mom Susan Sarandon off the hook for, among other things, ridding themselves of family members, fellow parents of kids with the same disease, and a revolving door cast of increasingly freaked nurses. (There’s also a scene where Nolte tries to wrestle with the notion of arrogance, and how it’s sometimes necessary.) Better than anything is that it doesn’t disguise its triumph in spirituality or divine intervention, but in the people themselves; there’s a part where Nolte chides Sarandon of turning her back on God, but the film makes no attempt to suggest that her resilience has to do with anything but her own inner strength. Special note: late in, Sarandon does a bit of oh-so-cinematic minimal crying, and I swear she actually manages to allow two drops to fall from both eyes at the same time. Now, that’s acting!

Lady in the Lake (1947, Robert Montgomery) [C]
There’s a ten-minute section in the second hour involving a car crash and a nighttime crawl when Robert Montgomery’s subjective-camera gimmick works gangbusters. Otherwise, it doesn’t at all. To those who’ve never heard of this film, what this is is Chandler’s titular novel shot entirely, save for a couple direct-address interludes/how’s-it-going’s, with POV shots. I.e., actors look right at the camera, cigarette smoke constantly wafts in the foreground, punches and slaps are given from off-screen and received by the lens, etc. Pretty innovative, no? Then why haven’t you (most likely) heard of it? Why is no one mentioning Montgomery in the same breath as Charles Laughton as actors-who-sadly-only-directed-once? (Not to mention Orson Welles, who at one point planned his debut as a subjective-camera movie.) Possibly because it bombed and earned a reputation as a giggle-inducing failure. Warner Bros. included it in their latest Film Noir comp set, suggesting a reassessment was a-transpirin'. But it turns out, no, it’s pretty much a total failure after all. For one thing, Raymond Chandler’s books (and the other movies based on them) are already plenty subjective. The idea that “You and Robert Montgomery solve a murder mystery together!” (as per the poster) would still hold up even if Montgomery was in front of the lens. As md’a would put it, it’s like a hat on top of a hat. (Incidentally, it’s almost tempting to think that Montgomery realized what a bland Marlowe he would make, and then came up with the gimmick. He certainly sounds like he’s doing a Bogie impersonation, and a bad one at that.) For another, not only does the camera suggest the stiffest of movements, both in the body and the eyes, but it encourages it in those in front of the camera, too. Put simply, there has never been this much eye contact on the planet ever. That said, Audrey Totter, as the potential femme fatale, almost makes it work in two ways: 1) she seems to be in on how absurd it is, and finds the right hammy tone, which most notably manifests itself in sporadically bulging eyes; and 2) by never ever ever ever breaking eye contact, Totter takes the notion of trust to its breaking point, as who can keep up a ruse without averting their eyes? (As we learned in The Negotiator, looking up is a classic giveaway.) In any case, the nicest thing you can say is that whatever’s involving about it has to do with the source -- surely not what one’s going for when trying to revolutionize cinema.

Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World (2006, Albert Brooks) [B-]
Starts out in the same self-pitying vein of The Muse before turning into the most scabrous assault on the Albert Brooks persona since Lost in America. Hooray! If only it was better directed (the flat style, which Dave Kehr has in the past not insanely compared to Ozu, only serves to give a formlessness to some of the scenes, most devastatingly the central stand-up bit) and didn’t devolve into International Incident that’s unfortuntately too little, too late. Brooks, who plays “himself” (see: Larry David), is in his late-middle age closer to a geriatric, forever whining about trivial matters, sometimes in front of picturesque landmarks. But the portrait of American isolationism was already devastating before the third act. That's Ed, I really can't carp; at least it's funny...

Zathura (2005, Jon Favreau) [B]
Methinks the brother angle is overplayed, while the sis one is egregiously underplayed, leaving her asleep or frozen for the first hour before whipping out a bizarrely unremarked-upon incest angle. On the other hand, as my brilliant colleague Sean Burns noted: there are actual dudes in actual freaking lizard costumes! Awesome! The retro, tactile approach compensates mucho, as does the general simplicity of the whole thing: as predicted with Favreau at the helm, there’s none of the fat of (what I’ve seen of) Jumanji, and he coaxes relaxed from both its kids and adults, namely Tim Robbins and Dax Sheppard. Speaking of which, how amazing is it that a modestly-budgeted, studio fantasy film that’s both a sequel to a blockbuster and one filmmaker’s follow-up to another monster hit (i.e., Elf) boasts a total of five cast members. (If you don’t count a handful in lizard suits. Or Frank Oz, who voices the robot.) Also, can anyone provide me with the philosopher or quantum physicist or whomthefuckever is responsible for that leftfield third act plot twist? My mind was actually and genuinely blown. Would make a nice double feature with Monster House.

[Seen for Da Weekly: Alpha Dog (2006, Nick Cassavetes) [C-]; Yolda (2005, Erden Kiral) [C+]; My Man Godfrey (1936, Gregory La Cava) [B+]; Happy Feet (2006, George Miller) [B- -- seriously].]

Next week: Why Babel blows!!

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays: Teapot Atheist vs. Meth-Smoking Gay Pastor

2006-11-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

The clip of recently resigned National Association of Evangelicals head Ted Haggard rhapsodizing on homosexuals in Jesus Camp has been dominating the media. But far more creepy and revealing is his appearance in The Root of All Evil?, Richard Dawkins' two-part TV doc about religion. (Perhaps you saw Dawkins buttfucking a transsexual on South Park!) You can find the full show, which spans two 45-minute sections, on YouTube, if you want. It's not prime Dawkins (neither, for that matter, is The God Delusion), only because the biologist tends to allow too many generalities when discussing religion, where he's typically air-tight when discussing evolution. Of course, not that he's wrong. Dig Haggard's rapidly diverting eyes and general impatient vibe when Dawkins is rhapsodizing on the beauty of science.

Weekly! I yammer on about Harsh Times and Old Joy (forth and fifth down). Also, Rep.

Finally, good job, America.

New Bloody Feature!! Screening Diary: Week of 29 Oct 06

2006-11-06T21:40:00.000-05:00

[Welcome, scant readers, to a new feature on the ol’ K.B. First off, go look at my Films Seen list. I’ll wait. Okay, welcome back. It’s pretty effing long, no? Yes, I’ve noticed that, too. And perhaps you too may have noticed that, while I write about at least half, probably far moreso, for the PW, that still leaves more than plenty for which I have very little to answer to. I mean, a letter grade? What is that? Not much, really. I’m usually able to brush off such concerns, heading directly for the “Well, I write a lot of shit for the PW. It’s not like I’m just hitting the Open/Close button my DVD player.” Except that I kind of am. I’ve therefore decided that once a week, I will grace this site with a breakdown of my movie-watching week, writing off the top of my head for, oh, 15 minutes a film, until I have a little, vaguely presentable blurb. Something that’s not too time consuming but forces me to justify my grade and time. I will of course excise any titles I watched (and am thus writing about) for the Philly Weekly. (You thought I wrote for Publisher’s Weekly?) But I will note them at the bottom. Because you care. This will also not keep me from writing longer reviews-cum-articles of films that particularly jog me cranium. Which is to say, of course, it won’t keep me any more than it once did. Ditto little random posts to say, oh, I dunno, thanks MOMI, for only showing Jacques Rivette’s super-rare 12 1/2-hour Out 1 once, and not making tickets available to non-members till fucking the beginning of December. Seriously, if any of you MOMI members have even the slightest reservation about spending two straight nights sitting on your ass for six-hours-plus apiece watching some longwinded Rivette madness, please succumb. Lastly, I know that I have started features like this and they rarely make it past a couple sessions, if that. But as I said, I think this one is perfectly manageable. And besides, I want to boost my visitor numbers for ego-stroking reasons, and this sounds like a really easy way to get people to come back regularly. You’re so being used. Diabolical laughter. And away we go!]

Time period up for scrutiny: 29 Oct 06 thru 04 Nov 06

/Dawn of the Dead/ (1979, George A. Romero) [A]
Second viewing in less than three months, though that was my first viewing since freshman year in college, as well as my first since becoming Mr. Die Hard Romero Head. (I should also note I watched the extended cut, which restores more characterization, jokes and boobs.) Bizarre how I missed all the blunt satirical jabs, which, in case you forgot/ignored, are more than mall-centric/consumerist. Indeed, the opening half hour is some of Romero’s densest work, sketching the breakdown of media and briefly, hilariously showing the rise of Western Pennsylvania’s rednecks, seen gunning down zombies while swigging Iron City Beer. (Should the apocalypse come, surely they will be the ones who triumph.) What’s really amazing is how Romero seamlessly weaves his own Marxist concerns into what really is, when you get down to it, one of the most delirious, perfectly realized popcorn pictures ever concocted. It’s always a thrill to watch our (surprisingly well-acted/-developed) quartet slowly figure out how to conquer the mall, step by step, even as Romero leads us down a dark corridor where humans wind up coming off worse than the zombies. (As I often say, it’s insane how, for all the zombie movies on the planet, no one but Romero bothers to explore or make them evolve. Except when Danny Boyle says, “Hey, I have an idea, let’s make them run fast instead of move slow, even though that’s one of the main reasons why zombies are so fucking terrifying. Of course, we’ll call the virus ‘aggression’ or something, as my screenwriter is a novelist.” And then Simon Pegg says, “No, they really should move slowly. Dumbass," and makes Shawn of the Dead. To which Romero says, “Yes, and by the way, this British comic performer understands the Dead movies better than most of you horror mavens,” and makes Land of the Dead, giving Pegg a zombie cameo in case he was being too subtle. You’re the man, Romero.) In the end, DoD is doubtless one of the most humane and sympathetic explorations of the consumer mindset, as well as the macho one.

Regular Lovers (2005, Philippe Garrel) [A]
I heart this movie. Is that a sufficient explanation? Perhaps, but I want to talk more about this anyway. And I probably will once I have a couple more minutes. In conclusion (for now), I heart this movie.

[Seen for Da Weekly: Harsh Times (2005, David Ayer); Moon Over Harlem (1939, Edgar G. Ulmer); Boarding House Blues (1948, Josh Binney); Shut Up & Sing (2006, Barbara Kopple & Cecilia Peck); Mutual Appreciation (2006, Andrew Bujalski); Kansas City (1996, Robert Altman); David Holzman’s Diary (1967, Jim McBride); Portrait of Jason (1967, Shirley Clarke) (aside: I’m not bragging, but whew!)]

YouTubing-To-Obscure-Shameless-Self-Promotion Wednesdays

2006-11-01T18:16:00.000-05:00

(Might as well make it official, y'know?)

Now, I'm aware I've yammered about this a bit too often, but then, I was too flabbergasted to find it on YouTube to keep it to myself. Here, then, is the opening eight-minute shot of Béla Tarr's 7 1/2-hour miserablist Hungarian epic, Sátántangó. Consider it a primer for its long-due DVD release later this month. (See here and, if you have to*, here.)

Only 442 minutes left! (I kid. This movie is the bee's fucking knees.)

I know that it doesn't remotely translate to YouTube, proper aspect ratio or not. But even from a scratchy transfer on your computer -- don't even bother blowing it up to fill the screen -- it at least gives you an idea of what it should look like. Furthermore, it shoud give the unitiated an idea of what Sátántangó is like. More then just a kickass long take, this shot sets up everything that the film trades in: the detached, grimly comic tone; the glacial pace of the shots (the first of only 150!); the film's view of humans as little more than animals; the muddy, rural post-Communist Eastern European milieu; and, perhaps most of all, the subtly menacing sound design, in a way as accomplished as the photography. (The faint ambient melody is what really helps one succumb to the shot.) Then there's the behind-the-scenes reality -- how you're made aware that Tarr actually had to find this gloomy locale, had to shoot this sequence over and over and over again until the cows did exactly what he wanted. (The film, like Werckmeister Harmonies and his still-in-development Man From London took years to shoot.) At the end of this shot's eight minutes, you know what you're in for. In all likelihood, your body should follow suit.

Now: Plugs! I A-List about Richard Dawkins, who's swinging by the Philadelphia Free Library tomorrow. (Aside: I totally never wrote "bollocks.") Also, Rep.

Lastly, a warm congrats to my wonderful former editor Doree Shafrir, who today has taken up the mantle of associate editor at Gotham snarkspot Gawker. (She's the one on the left.) You may have last seen her doing a fine job explaining the Auteur Theory over at Slate, just one of many high-profile web-rags to which she contributes. Make us proud!

*I actually hear that the Facets transfer isn't as putrid as I once made it out to be. Reportedly, Tarr oversaw the transfer -- perhaps he saw what they did to his early work -- and the release was even delayed two months to fix minor mistakes. (Or so says an anonymous employee on an -- no joke -- IMDb message board.) Also, I've heard that they didn't totally fuck up Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies as bad as I thought. Not that you shouldn't still get a regionless player and purchase the Artificial Eye release.

Only 9 more days of debilitating political ads left!

2006-10-29T16:47:00.000-05:00

And to celebrate, here's a classic Mr. Show moment:

Oh, and fuck Santorum.

Apropos of Next to Nada

2006-10-26T00:05:00.000-04:00

Because of The Brand Upon the Brain!, I guess, here's Guy Maddin's brilliant Eye Like a Strange Balloon...which is what I thought it was called. Turns out it has a far, far longer title: Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity.

Maddin operating on full cylinders. I love the shot [SPOILER!] of the old man, his eyes just stabbed through, walking through this vast, new wasteland -- one of the most eloquent and haunting images of blindness I've come across.

Of course, my real reason for posting is right here: an Editor's Pick (third down) on an all-night horror line-up from Secret Cinema, featuring a film you -- yes, you, you raging cinephile -- have never heard of; a review of Philip Noyce's moribund Catch a Fire; and, but of course, Rep.

Marie Antoinette (2006, Sofia Coppola) [B+], plus two other mystery blurbs at the bottom (psst! one of them’s also a titular protag deal)

2006-10-24T20:23:00.000-04:00

It’s all about that opening shot. M.A. has been criticized in many circles (and, in a couple cases, praised) for being overly-frivolous. In one instance, the complaint was that Sofia had the nerve to open up the film with Gang of Four’s searing “Natural’s Not In It,” thereby wrongly suggesting that a certain political exploration -- if not an actual plea for anarchism -- is on the way. Thing is, it is. Kind of. In the opening shot, Kirsten Dunst’s M.A. is seen in far shot lounging in a chair, having her shoes put on by a servant. She lazily fingers an ostentatious cake sitting conspicuously next to her. (You guessed it: I'm describing the above image!) Again, with Gang of Four blaring on the soundtrack (“The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure/Ideal love a new purchase/A market of the senses,” etc.), Dunst sits up ever so slightly and shoots the camera an insolent, snooty look: “Fuck off, I'm the queen!”

The first problem is that some (okay, most) are confusing M.A. with S.C. Playing pop psychologist, these critics, detractors and admirers alike, think something along the lines of, “privileged daughter, raised in movie royalty, even encouraged the wrath of moviegoers back in 1990, and so forth. Why, this must be Sofia’s story! And look at how the soundtrack is littered with tracks she probably listened to back when she was Marie Antoinette’s age! QED!” This line of thinking isn’t entirely misguided. But it uses a string of director-subject links to jump to the conclusion that it’s a kind of abstract autobiography, therefore missing what the film’s really about: the point where Sofia ends and M.A. begins. The opening shot is not only a kiss-off to anyone expecting a thorough dissection of the political/social world that led to the court of M.A. and her subsequent beheading. It’s an acknowledgment that Coppola may or may not align herself with the politics of Gang of Four and their ilk. However, we definitely know that Marie Antoinette does not. To clarify, there’s no doubt that Coppola sees traces of herself in M.A. But she is not her.

The second problem is one of audience identification: how does a youngish filmmaker, who radiates a liberal-humanist vibe, justify making an even somewhat positive film about a hermetic, wasteful hedonist in this day and age? The same crisis of conscience plagued Stephen Frears’ The Queen, and it looks like both took the same path: empathize. But empathy does not require aligning one’s self with the person themselves; it simply requires seeing things from their angle. There is something noticeably punk rock -- in a topsy-turvy way, of course -- about the opening shot, signifying that she doesn’t care that you might look down upon her. But upon closer inspection, it seems that what that look is really conveying is irritation -- “Look, buddy, it’s not really my fault. I’m but a product of my environment.” And Coppola drowns us in M.A.’s own corner of this environment, a worldview simultaneously noble in it eye-rolling and decidedly less so in its disinterest in what lies just over the horizon. You can’t justify her apathy towards politics and society -- conveyed through periodic visits from an increasingly flustered/hilarious Steve Coogan -- so why bother? We know that she and Versailles didn’t give a toss about the people, and it would only look like bobbing for brownie points if she simply regurgitated the old line about M.A. and co.

(Speaking of which: why all the carping about the awkwardness with which the real world infiltrates Versailles and, by effect, the last half hour of the film? It's clear that it's by design. Note that the second scene in which the American Revolution is ploddingly discussed, the scene ends with Schwartzman turning a piece of paper into a mock-telescope. Not to mention, M.A. is clearly dealing in a lack of reality: not only is this the only period piece where Aphex Twin and Siouxsie and the Banshees dominate the soundtrack, but also the only one with no unifying accents: Dunst and Schwartzman speak Yank, Coogan and Shirl Henderson do Brit, Mathieu Amalric (briefly) does French and Asia Argento does her unplaceable Euro Accent. This seemed refreshingly jarring, no less because I had just beforehand seen a movie that takes place in French but is stocked with British accents. Why do we give this shit a pass? Jesus.)

Anyway. Instead of reiterating the same-old-same-old, Coppola focuses on M.A.’s strong points: the way her visible awkwardness with functions and willingness to undercut them belies at least some care for those who serve her; her patience with Jason Schwartzman’s Louis XVI, who’s more interested in the history of locks, hunting and who possibly possesses a serious homosexual streak; the way she never actually said her famous Bartlett’s one-liner. In the second half, Coppola focuses on the way she starts coming into her own, building a life that’s both a part of and apart from Versailles: feeling free to take a lover after giving birth, asking for a looser-fit dress to wear in the garden/makeshift zoo that she’s created (not sat around and watched erected, mind), staying up to see the dawn after one of the parties. Finally, Coppola suggests that M.A. was growing, ever so generally, into a social consciousness, staying behind at Versailles as a form of suicide for previously not giving a shit. Coppola acknowledges that all this doesn’t excuse M.A., but it does at least partially explain her.

Also, this movie needs to start making some serious money, no less because it’s the first time I’ve really felt that Sofia Coppola has earned her acclaim. So, this is a note to the pervy teenager crowd, should they accidentally Google their way here: it’s PG-13 and a couple scenes put Spider-Man’s upside-down rain kiss to shame. What are you waiting for, pervs.

Edmond (2006, Stuart Gordon) [B]
Or, David Mamet’s contribution to the Chappelle’s Show’s feature, “When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong.” Of course, that’s if you think William H. Macy’s white-collar schnook even goes wrong, when it’s entirely possible to read it as him going, um, good -- discovering a sense of purpose and even landing an apparently healthy relationship. (At least -- SPOILER ALERT IN SECTION G! -- he can chat with prison bitchee Bookem Woodbine.) I think it’s the latter. Under all the race-baiting, all the seediness, all the bluntly shocking moments, there’s a certain unmistakable empathy in Mamet’s dark-night-of-the-soul trip. On the one hand, you have 23 short scenes where Macy’s Edmond is either rebuffed for sex (because of money, specifically lack thereof) or triumphant, but only when he acts on his burgeoning racist and homicidal tendencies. Very shocking, especially when you throw Denise Richards in there doing MametSpeak™. On the other, you have an apparently asexual man taking a journey of the self, hacking his way through a slew of wobbly facades before arriving at this: that he fits in best in prison and as a homosexual. Gordon may capture the sleaze of its New York (actually, L.A.) setting, but the humanity is not lost on him, despite (or because of) the rigidness of the text. At least in the movie version, the most shocking thing about Edmond is its entirely earnest suggestion that becoming a prison bitch could actually be enlightening.

Little Monsters (1989, Richard Greenberg) [D-]
I have no excuses for why I watched this, a nugget from my ten year old self. I can’t even claim morbid curiosity, because I knew it would do the opposite of holding up. It’s possible I’m a masochist. In any case, the only fascinating thing -- apart from the meta- delight of seeing Fred Savage and Daniel Stern, two Kevin Arnolds, playing father and son -- is the beneath-cheap, Forbidden Zone-esque design of the sub-world, where dwells the host of aesthetically-inconsistent monsters (pumpkins! blue people! big fat guys with hunchbacks and shit). Also, it is beyond painful to watch even as unfunny a comedian as Howie Mandell literally thrown in front of the camera and told to simply “free associate!” Only Funny Games 2007 should provide a more unnerving experience in audience-complicity. I mean, that dude’s got nothin’...

Sorry.

2006-10-22T11:19:00.000-04:00

Reviews of Clint's Flags of Our Fathers and Zhang's Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, plus Rep, in this week's PW.

Probably returning to semi-regular blogging duties sometime this week. Newsflash: The Prestige is fawesome.

Three Weeks of Me

2006-10-11T10:29:00.000-04:00

Seems I've been neglecting to link to my junk. Reviews: The Last King of Scotland (at bottom), The Queen (at top), and Jesus Camp (third down). A-lists/Editor's Picks: Secret Cinema's ransacking of their archives and I-House's "Views of a Changing World" series (at bottom). Reps: here, here*, and here.

*This one is where you can find words on the films in I-House's aforementioned "Views of a Changing World" series. Among these titles: Excellent Cadavers, Workingman's Death, and two by Chris Marker, including his latest, The Case of the Grinning Cat. Pretty kickass series, if you ask moi.

The repertory writer becomes the repertory writee. Or something.

2006-09-20T23:53:00.000-04:00

Hello, all of you in the Philadelphia area. Forgive the relative formality of the following missive. I'm reprinting this from a mass e-mail I've been sending around.

On Saturday, Sept. 23 at 2pm, I'm going to be showing Age of Consent (1969), Michael Powell's final feature-length film. If you know me at all, you've probably heard me blabber at great length about Powell, who's best known for his nearly two-decade-long collaboration with Emeric Pressburger from the '30s to the '50s. (Some of these lavish and eccentric films include The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcisuss, The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffmann.) This one, made almost a decade after the serial killer pic Peeping Tom unfairly ruined his career, is a lot more grounded than the aforementioned, but still plenty rich and strange. James Mason, who co-produced with Powell, plays a painter working through feelings of obsolescence via Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the oft-clotheless antics of a young Helen Mirren. (And yes, that movie where Mirren plays Queen Elizabeth is due in a couple weeks. Sheesh.) The insane Jack MacGowran (The Fearless Vampire Killers, How I Won the War) pops up for a stretch as his nefarious, speed-talking agent, as do many picturesque ocean shots.

The film will be projected from a DVD that's...well, not great. Consent, however, has never been released on video (at least stateside) and enjoys a life of quiet obscurity, seen only by hungry Powell completionists and horny teenagers. However crappy (but presentable) the conditions, this is a rare chance to see this unjustly-ignored minor classic.

If that's not incentive enough for you to mutter away part of an afternoon, then you'll get to see me -- whose first public screening since college this is -- fight through my fear of public speaking as I introduce this fool thing. I may even bust out my James Mason impersonation voice.

And besides, it’s free.

This showing will be part of the Goodbye to the Cinema, once known as the sticky-floored Cinemagic. Rich Wexlers lording over the whole thing, and many a fine repertory film programmer is involved, including Joe Gervasi, Andrew Repasky McElhinney, Michael Dennis and Dan Buskirk. Complete line-up here.

And now for the pertinent info:

AGE OF CONSENT
(1969, Michael Powell)
Sat., Sept. 23, 2pm.
The Cinema, 3925 Walnut St.
Free.

Michael Powell filmography right here.

Thanks, and do venture out. And tell your friends!

(Also, hat tip to Marisa for yapping about this over at Philly Metroblog.)

Un film de Almodóvar

2006-09-19T21:08:00.000-04:00

In this week's PW, I flap my gums re: Sony Pictures Classics' "Viva Pedro," an eight-film retro for the crazed Spaniard with the ever-tall hair. (It was weird seeing him pop up, avec moustache, in 1986's Matador.) Also, Rep. Readers will notice that there's a mention of me introducing and presenting Michael Powell's Age of Consent as part of a film curator suare at the to-be-demolished Cinemagic. Yep, that's right. It will be ten kinds of wicked, and anyone within driveable radius of Philthy-delphia should come out. My paper did a mention of it here...yet was remiss in mentioning me (or fellow PW-ian Dan Buskirk, who will be showing the 1975 William Fraker-lensed drive-in/car-culture classic, Aloha, Bobby and Rose). Hmm...

P.S. If you turn your eyes to the right and go down a click or two, you'll see I've finally and totally overhauled my phallanx of links. It ain't pretty right now -- I wanted dots before each link and was amazed when the proper HTML did not produce them -- but I'll get around to it. Here at K. Bingos, we're all about the aesthetics. But you already knew that.

Just FYI: Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day

2006-09-19T10:02:00.000-04:00

No. Really.

I Was a Teenage (and Young Adult) Theater-Hopper!

2006-09-12T18:57:00.000-04:00

It's not much of an admission, granted, but that didn't stop me from banging out a longish recollection of my younger days for the PW's Fall Guide. Elsewhere, I muse on Kirby Dick's cathartic but disappointing MPAA-salvo This Film is Not Yet Rated (below the Sean Burns lead) and chat at great length about Orson Welles, Richard Lester and Todd Rohal, director of the Sundance fave The Guatemalan Handshake, in Rep.

Also, recent visitors to his site might like to know that I might have overestimated Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. Nearly, seven hours later, it's sitting surprisingly well with me, though [THE RASA SPOILER ALERT IS ON] I may need another couple viewings to see if the way its doesn't come together is satisfyingly unsatisfying or unsatisfyingly unsatisfying. That's Ed, where's the set pieces? And I'd really like to know exactly what critic got all hot and bothered by the Scarlett-Josh table prelude-to-a-bonk scene? I mean jesus.

(Belated) Appreciation: Raising Cain

2006-09-11T20:54:00.000-04:00

"And the thing that's really fascinating about Raising Cain is you see a guy -- and I, and I, and I told this to him and he agreed with me. I don't know, I thought Raising Cain was a blast. I had a total blast out of watching it. But part of the fun about the movie -- which I don't, you know, if the studio liked it that much -- was the fact that it almost, the whole thing works to annoy the viewer because it, like -- you've got a man who's like, 'look, I created, more or less, in these last 20 years, this type of film. All right, and, and I do it better than anybody, but you know what? I'm bored with doing it now. All right, so the only way I can make it interesting for me, is to completely dissect it and not pay you off.'"
-- Quentin Tarantino (all [sic], natch) on Charlie Rose, 10/14/94

"Why couldn't we have an intercom to hear her, rather than a TV?"
-- Lolita Davidovich, in Raising Cain re: her and John Lithgow's daughter

Popped out between a high-profile disaster (Bonfire of the Vanities) and an underappreciated gem (Carlito’s Way), Raising Cain (1992) is arguably Brian De Palma's most elaborate private joke, designed to alienate 90% of the audience rather than the usual 60%. (Like most of the world, I initially hated it.) As has been well documented elsewhere, the script (by De Palma) falls somewhere between incoherent and irrelevant, with multiple John Lithgows lording over multiple corpses, an adulterous wife (Lolita Davidovich) and his attempt to abscond with his own daughter. (You can find a valiant attempt to sensically untangle the plot here.)

The thing is, it’s not, as per the usual De Palma charge, simply a handful of great set pieces he cares about strung together by material he in no way cares about. If anything, the filler has been wholly eradicated, leaving us with not only great set pieces, but manifest odd diversions and, of course, a plot that makes that much less sense. This is all by design, though to call it campiness -- as per John Lithgow phalanx of all-too-game turns -- is only scraping the barrel. No mere fanboy fodder this -- Cain seems designed to separate the -heads from everyone else, not only deliberately irritating the audience, but going out of its way to do it.

Perhaps most infamously is the way that, after a fairly straightforward set-up, he drops us into a time warp, where, for about ten minutes, Davidovich continually wakes up and gets murdered. Simply a dream vs. reality mindfuck? Not so -- looking back after what follows it, each of its threads convey some important plot information, from her history with ex-lover Steven Bauer (via a hospital scene that contains one of his best uses of reflection) to their romp in the dreamy forest. (Though that last one’s not verified as a fact till later on.) It’s obvious that De Palma had written a very dry, boring stretch of flat plot, cut it up into ribbons and threw them in the air, assembling them in much the fashion George Martin did the middle section of the Beatles’ “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” Maybe that explains Davidovich’s gratuitous expository narration. (The section also contains the pantheon moment where he repeatedly cuts between Davidovich getting a stone sword in the heart with her waking up in mortal fear, highlighting the split second of waking consciousness during which we’re convinced our nightmare is really happening.)

But like I said, Cain is all De Palma, no filler. So there’s more where that came from. De Palma constantly introduces something but doesn’t explain anything about it, staring with the opening zoom-out from a monitor showing Lithgow lovingly sleeping with his a little girl. Who’s Lithgow sleeping with? Who’s watching? (It later turns out it’s his version of a baby monitor for his daughter, and it runs 24/7 in he and Davidovich’s bedroom.) He denies us the thrills of the murder scenes: all homicides take place off-screen, and what ones we see are either fantasies or cut before we see the murderee actually die. (Another pantheon moment: De Palma cuts from a close-up of Lithgow’s blade en route to the deed to an overhead shot of the bloody body in a car trunk.) Along with the expected Hitchcock and Argento nods, there’s even a Dressed to Kill homage. (He’s homaging himself! After already doing it in...Dressed to Kill!)

There’s also a devastating parody of his signature traveling shot. Frances Sternhagen (who’s given a black wig for the sole purpose of having it stolen) is led by dics Gregg Henry and Tom Bower down an escalator, into a lobby and then up an elevator, all while she dispenses expository dialogue. To make matters funnier: she repeatedly walks off in the wrong direction, and Henry and Bower have to grab her and point her in the direction the camera’s supposed to be going -- directors on a masterful shot that requires another take.

And needless to say, the part where Lithgow suddenly finds himself telling his younger self (i.e., a boy actor with a sped-up Lithgow voice) to fuck off is rather indescribably amazing.

Unlike other De Palma wank-offs (Greetings and Hi, Mom!; Body Double; Femme Fatale), there’s no unifying statement(s), nor any attempt at some. I suppose you could argue that the film works in a reaction to charges of over-masculinity in films like The Untouchables. Early on, Lithgow is unflatteringly dubbed “the perfect husband” (Bauer, of course, is the ideal male), while his other personalities (his “brother” and father) take turns remarking on his sissiness. By the end, Lithgow has not rebelled against this charge but embraced it, turning himself into a woman. But to say that that dominates the film is to ignore the film’s delirious ode to the director’s peerless craft.

[This reevaluation has been performed in breathless anticipation of The Black Dahlia, coming to theaters near you Friday and to me tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday) morning. Whatever my thoughts on Dahlia turn out to be, go see it anyway, as De Palma needs all the money he can get to make more. Also, this reevaluation has been so silver-lined that I now wonder if I shouldn’t re-tackle the many other De Palmas I’ve hated or just not terribly liked through the years: Scarface, Wise Guys, Casualties of War, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Snake Eyes, and Mission to Mars. I think so.]

Newsflash: The Black Dahlia is going to fucking rule

2006-09-09T14:43:00.000-04:00

md'a was unimpressed. Todd McCarthy went and called it "overripe". The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt claims a steady decline over the film's second hour. James Ellroy likes, but no one seems overly giddy, though at least none seem to be outraged.

Keep your wits, fellow De Palma heads. This movie is going to fucking rule.

In all likelihood, I will be seeing this masterpiece du cinema on Tuesday. If it turns out it is, in fact, not a masterpiece du cinema, I will do my best to interpret it in such a way that it seems like it is. Frankly, this doesn't seem too difficult. De Palma films are typically hard to read at first, and can, to the untrained mind, come off stupid and embarrassing. Like Cronenberg, it takes some work to see what he's doing. But once you get it, he infects your mind and makes it hard to read his films any other way. Have I mentioned how high Femme Fatale leapt in quality after a second viewing, around the time I started "getting" De Palma? If I don't immediately think this movie fucking rules, I will see it until I feel that way. I'm not putitng a time-frame on "is" in the "This movie is going to fucking rule" sentence. Fucking-ruling movies can take all the time they went to sit with the viewer, as long as the viewer eventually realizes that they do, in fact, fucking rule.

My only reservation is that this particular story/adaptation may be too perfect for him. For most, Dahlia's web of voyeurism, chic lesbianism, gruesome murders and gruesomer sex would prove difficult, but De Palma could do it in his sleep. Let's hope he didn't. And he didn't. Because this movie is going to fucking rule.

In the meantime, sate yourself with Slant's immensely awesome film-by-film De Palma revistation, with much analsysis from expert/primo fanboy Eric Henderson. And at the expense of turning this here site into all-out You Tube-reliant, here's the genius trailer for a film which, I'm not sure if you've heard, is going to fucking rule.

Let's get into trouble, baby

2006-09-05T23:54:00.000-04:00

Trolling around for something to throw up during my weekly bout of shameless self-promotion (coming forthwith), I happened upon -- and, lucky for you, was unable to resist -- Bruce Conner's 1978 video for Devo's "Mongoloid." (The older version, not the one on Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo!) Skip Thurston and Mark if you're impatient:

I remember launching into a tedious, humorless defense of Devo when an old roommate asserted that they were a novelty act. I still feel kind of bad about my tone (yeah, I'm sure he rushed out and listened to their records afterwards), but not about the message. You don't have to go far from "Whip It" to discover the singular genius of Devo, who at their best sound like an only slightly more mainstream version of The Residents; any track on Freedom of Choice should do. (As should the aforementioned Are We Not Men? and the nigh impenetrable Duty For the Future.) If it's not awesome enough that the band recorded a cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" that entirely skips the famous riff, if you're not impressed that they were once almost Johnny Rotten's post-Sex Pistols backing band, if it's not intellectually peculiar enough that their name and theme bear strong similarities to Oscar Kiss Maerth's pseudoscientific The Beginning Was the End, which posited that the rise of man is due to an evolutionary accident caused by a species of sex-crazed, cannibalistic apes -- then at least you can concede that they're worth more than novelty status for getting Bruce Conner, without solicitation, to make a short film around one of their songs.

The clip is pure Conner. The one below isn't. This is one of the better parts of the intermittently genius Tapeheads. (Groupie to passing metal band: "Teach me to read!") Here's the Swedish synth pop band Cube Squared. (I.e., what I always hoped the sequel to Cube had been called. Cube 2: Hypercube? Come on.). The vocals, with lyrics rewritten for another tongue, are Devo; the bods are not. Do not zip past Don Cornelius.

Now for the nitty-gritty! Two features this week: one about "The Valerie Project," a film-music screening featuring members of Espers, Fern Knight and Grass performing over the 1970 Czech New Wave coming-of-age classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; another featuring Ryan Fleck and Shareeka Epps talking about Half Nelson (the review's at the bottom -- also, based mostly on this picture, Fleck looks like a far, far skinnier me; weird). Also, a review (third down) of Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man. Also, Rep.

Your helpful French-English movie title translater: La Moustache = The Moustache

2006-08-30T09:23:00.000-04:00

So, I went and neglected to post my Weekly crap last week. Sorry, scant readers. Basically, Philly's going through a French period: here are reviews of André Téchiné's Changing Times, Géla Babluani's miserablist high-concept 13 (Tzameti) (at the bottom, though don't skip Sean Burns' evisceration of the suffocatingly retro-smug-sounding The Quiet), and Emmanuel Carrère's La Moustache (second one down), which actually finds a fresh spin on madness, as well as fractured relationships. (Also, if there's any doubt, the picture to your right is not a snapshot of Moustache star Vincent Lindon, who looks more like a Gallic Huey Lewis.) Also, last week's Rep and this week's Rep.

I didn't see a movie for, like, four straight days. That was weird.

Artificial Eye again saves the day

2006-08-21T23:40:00.000-04:00

Remember when I whined and moaned about Facets' upcoming DVD hatchet job of Sátántangó? If not, you can read about it here. What a mixed blessing that was. Well, now it turns out you don't have to blow $80 on a mangled non-transfer of a film that probably doesn't work on home video anyway. Because the rumors that the comically superior British company Artificial Eye were also working on a disc set turn out to have been totally true. And you only have to wait two more months. And it's almost half the price. If you'd like to drool over how A.E. treats Béla Tarr, hop over here.

Speaking of which, this is about as awesome.

The Rainbow Thief on the Holy Mountain

2006-08-20T21:12:00.000-04:00

[Forgive me another bout of grave-robbing. I had written a version of what follows for the 8/9 issue of PW, in honor of an Alejandro Jodorowsky night put on by the estimable underground filmmaker Andrew Repasky McElhinney that paired 1973’s The Holy Mountain with 1990’s The Rainbow Thief. It wound up running long, and I had to cut it down to meet my not terribly lengthy word quota. But then a whirlwind of activity hit the film section and my editor was forced to edit it down further still, reducing it to a lengthy introduction and then plot summary. I know you’ve figured the rest of the story out by now: I’ve taken what I had originally written, beefed it up, and found some pics to give it a vaguely professional sheen. Bon appetit, beetches!]

Cult filmmakers don’t get much more cult than Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born rennaissance man who’s so under the radar, most of his cinematic output has been nearly impossible to see. You can thank John Lennon for that. Having declared El Topo - Jodorowsky’s bloody, ponderous, surrealist western and the first serious midnight movie sensation - his favorite film, Lennon advised infamous Sam Cooke/Rolling Stones business manager Allen Klein to snatch up the rights, as well as those of what would become his follow-up, 1973’s The Holy Mountain. Klein then held the two in limbo, keeping them out of theaters and off shelves. (The curious have long subsisted on more-than-passable bootlegs, some of which can be found at Philly's smattering of TLAs.) Jodorowsky and Klein made peace in 2004, and well-belated DVD are reportedly in the works. (Who knows when they’ll arrive is, to put it mildly, another matter.) But the damage seems mostly done, an entire generation having grown up without easy access to his work and the director himself not being able to use them to raise money for more. Though it’d be hard to sweat off his aborted attempt to make an all-star version of Dune in the 1970s -- Orson Welles as the Baron, Salvador Dali as the Emperor, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha and H.R. Giger on design duty -- at least its chances for existence are well and gone. Not so with his on-again-off-again attempts to make an El Topo sequel, which at one point co-starred Marilyn Manson, which currently appears to be in the “off” position.

Funded entirely out of John and Yoko’s pockets, The Holy Mountain is a classic follow-up to a success: bigger, more ambitious, more philosophically pretentious and at least twice as gory as the film that spawned it. But an elephantine scale (and cinemascope) actually proves a better fit for the director than the ramshackleness of El Topo, if only because Jodorowsky has the kind of overwrought, devil-may-care sensibility that’s best aided by spectacle and its promise of a new, impossible-to-foresee sensation on the minute. Jodorowsky delivers. Indeed, on some level, Mountain ranks up with Kane and 8 1/2 in its portrait of a filmmaker as kid in a toy shop, and as a pure riot of set design insanity, it sits alongside Donen at his most ostentatious.

Again melding Buñuel with Fellini, Jodorowsky spins the tale of a Christ-resembling thief who joins up with a white-haired alchemist (Jodorowsky himself) and seven of the planet’s most flamboyantly rich subjects to shed their material wealth and scale said mountain, at which point they’ll achieve immortality. As with El Topo, Mountain is neatly divided in three sections, constituting a philosophical journey to a hoped-for state of grace. Unlike El Topo, Mountain has no clear lead character, making it harder for we, the audience, to (attempt to) tag along.

But it also makes it easier to focus on the scattershot nature of his ideas, and for the better. The first section, with our long-haired klepto getting mistaken and exploited for his resemblance to J.C., may in fact contain more sacrilegious images than a Buñuel retro. (Un Chien Andalou’t ant-hand gets directly referenced at one point.) But he proves increasingly incidental to the plot, starting with the section that introduces us to the seven greats one-by-one in short, impossibly dense bursts. Within each one, Jodorowsky seems to be dumping his grievances with society, albeit in strange-comic ways: one guy runs a factory that makes, among other things, gadgets that make corpses feign kisses, so they can recipricate at viewings. Another, who works in the art world, has constructed a giant orgasm machine that, when correctly prodded, births a baby orgasm machine. Then again, the film’s density can prove exhausting: by the third, even less focused section, even a man holding up tiny tiger heads up to his nipples that then spew milk in slow-mo can’t get much of a rise.

As usual, the filmmaker plays fast and loose with the ideas. But also as usual, cohesion’s not really the point. Jodorowsky wants to hit the viewer with sensations in such a way that ideas have the same visceral impact as violence or imagery. That said, they’re blunt and sometimes questionable ideas. Given the well-tipped ratio of nudity from women and men (and Jodorowsky claims to have slept with all his actresses), what to make that both of the chosen ones’ lone femmes deal in guns? And what’s with the total lack of apparent outrage when the fabulously wealthy septet burn their scores of cash, rather than give it to Mexico’s impoverished? (It’s infinitely more appaling than the similar scene in Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, where the characters were clearly losing their tether.) Jodorowsky is at least as interested in making satirical jabs as he is being mystical and shit -- maybe even moreso -- but even they feel thrown-off and slapdash, less a clearly thought-through vision of the world than a hyper-pixilated version of same.

But while I’ve never seriously bought into Jodorowsky’s ideas -- here’s a dude who invented a kind of New Age therapy called “psychomagic” -- I have developed a, shall we say, zen-like detachment from it, or more accurately, a willingness to read it as entertaining in its nuttiness. Far more satisfyingly than El Topo, the film feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can choose what philosphies or satirical jabs you like and politely decline the rest. It’s not even clear how much of it he agrees with, and then, which ones. But inclusiveness may be part of his plan, and besides, it’s dizzying -- especially during the first two, more patently satirical sections -- to follow him from place to place, target to target. (You won’t soon forget the moment where our pseudo-J.C. awakens screaming in a warehouse full of models of himself, let alone the poo-to-gold machine.) It's undeniably silly, but as soon as it was over, I couldn't wait to watch it again.

After Mountain never received a stateside theatrical release, Jodorowsky all but disappeared, surfacing only thrice in the interim. Made just after the return-to-form that was Santa Sangre, 1990’s The Rainbow Thief finds a de-fanged Jodorowsky infiltrating the world of middlebrow international cinema, with Omar Shariff as a bum playing butler to Peter O’Toole’s sewer-dwelling heir - a potentially queasy premise to be sure. To his credit, he fails miserably, damaging the film with fuzzy plotting (test audiences said they couldn’t even find the story) and rampant weirdness, much of it during the opening where Christopher Lee plays a dalmation-obsessed billionaire who serves giant bones to his guests. Still, better a failed attempt to play straight than a successful calcification, best epitomized by the way the threatened ham-off between Shariff and O’Toole never even starts, the latter ceding to the aging Mediterranean dreamboat without so much as a glove-slap. Shariff, unpredictably, delivers some unsightly mugging, but there’s a dark side to his turn, and a couple times where he could turn murderous. The ostenatious rainfall that eats up most of the final half hour is techinically impressive, but it’s sad to think that, should the upcoming DVDs not result in the handing-over of a budget to Jodorowsky’s whims -- or worse, his game is now gone -- this would be where his oeuvre stops.

Oh, right.

2006-08-20T20:55:00.000-04:00

I've been in Pittsburgh for the last couple days (aside: most confusingly designed city on the East Coast), which may be why I neglected to shamelessly plug the shit out of this jawn. In last week's Weekly, I busted out an A-List (last one) on an outdoor screening of Hairspray, a review (at the bottom) of the Pittsburgh-shot (heh) South Philly mob saga 10th & Wolf, three more reviews (scattered) of Jailbait, Quinceañeara, and Pulse, and, as ever, Rep.

You may now recommence whatever it was you thought you were doing.

Shameless Plugs...in the Third Dimension...

2006-08-08T21:11:00.000-04:00

Again, just 'cause only giving you links to junk that I wrote (see below) is pure lame.

Context: These three shorts, totalling at 7 1/2 minutes, were Don Hertzfeldt's opening, intermission and farewell segments for the first installment of The Animation Show, the cartoon cavalcade organized by Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge. Now that the stick figure maven's gone slightly serious (if astonishingly so) with The Meaning of Life, I'm wondering if this fits into some kind of middle period in his ouevre. Like Billy's Balloon and Rejected, each one follows a simple trajectory, with a series of non-sequiturs that pile up, eventually giving way to an implosion surprising in its genuine menace. Say what you will about the (intentional) crudeness of Hertzfeldt's style -- even Ward Kimball wouldn't be able to top the otherworldliness of the second short's 3-D-glasses-aided trip sequence. Also, to paraphrase Larry the Cable Guy And Health Inspector: I don't care who you are, robot-cloud battles are fawesome.

As promised: PLUGS!! In this week's Weekly, you'll find me all over an Editor's Pick (second down) on a Secret Cinema fundraiser that lugs out a pristine IB Technicolor print of the Elvis-Elsa Lanchester pic Easy Come, Easy Go, a review (at the bottom) of François Ozon's Time to Leave, and, as ever, Rep, where I briefly attempt to explain the awesomeness of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain.

Meh. Too hot, pt. 2

2006-08-02T23:28:00.000-04:00

The East Coast is currently, like, on fire. (I was going to post a photo of Denis Lavant doing his firebreather shtick in Lovers on the Bridge, but gave up on trying to find one. This one, of him engaging in more heavenly activities from Tuvalu, will have to suffice.)

Anyway, you know the drill:
* An Editor's Pick on the season's innaugural Street Movies! session.
* Three (3) reviews, of Heading South, Brothers of the Head, and The Night Listener.
* Rep.

I'm also not posting because it's totally summer. Why would I spend more time on my computer than I'm supposed to, I ask you.

This Thing That I Wrote

2006-07-25T22:46:00.000-04:00

This is all I have in this week's PW. It's just Rep. But it does have a longish piece on the latest short from traveling, celluloid-shootin' documentarian Bill Brown. So I'm thinking "just" may be a tad on the self-depricating side, even for me.

That is all.