« May 2006 |
Main
| July 2006 »
From Leonard Maltin:
The one that first comes to mind is from a film I fell in love with thirty-some years ago, "Scarecrow," directed by Jerry Schatzberg and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. I revisited it when it finally came to DVD last year and felt exactly the same way. It opens on a static shot of a wood and wire fence alongside a two-lane highway, as a figure makes his way down a hill toward the fence (and us)...the sky is gray behind him. We're riveted to this image, eager to find out who this is, where he's coming from, and where he's headed. I haven't timed it to see how long the shot actually runs, but it's long, and absolutely mesmerizing: an opening shot that draws you in and makes you want to watch the movie.
JE: Thanks, Leonard -- it's a beauty! The dark gray clouds contrasting with the pale tan of the dry, grassy slope; the light playing across the hillside that makes the clouds shift even darker; the sound of thunder echoing in the distance -- it's the kind of shot where, seconds into the movie, you can almost smell the setting: The ionic scent of the approaching rain, the dusty pollenated aroma of the baked grass. And it's also funny, as Gene Hackman attempts to extricate himself from the fence. Anyone who's attempted to climb over, under or through barbed wire knows the pain and frustration of this moment all too well! It looks like the shot was originally even longer, and is interrupted by a few cutaways to Al Pacino watching from behind a tree -- perhaps to substitute different takes. And you're right: Now I'm going to watch the whole movie. (Love Pacino's introduction: "Hi. I'm Francis.")
 Bobble this. It's a very special Tom Cruise Night when the California League Lake Elsinore Storm face the High Desert Mavericks this evening (Friday) at 7:05, PDT. The Los Angeles Times reports: Besides giving away a Cruise bobblehead — make that a "bobble-couch," depicting the star in full Oprah couch-jumping mode — the San Diego Padres' Class-A affiliate will celebrate the "silent birth" of Tom and Katie Holmes' baby, Suri, with a "silent inning," during which no batters will be announced and no music played. "Silent birth," a Church of Scientology teaching, specifies no music and no talking during the birth.
Other planned activities include a couch-jumping contest, a Scientology information and sign-up booth and a retrospective of Cruise's movie career.
The Storm's opponent? The High Desert Mavericks, of course. No doubt in honor of Cruise's character in "Top Gun." Next week: The Adelanto Operating Thetans take on the Yucaipa Cocktails.
(tip: Defamer)
 What was I thinking? David Poland sent me this funny picture (of me) that he took during a panel discussion at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in May, called "Not Playing at a Theatre Near You." It is clear that I was lost in thought. What was I thinking? I'm pretty sure it was either: "How can I get more coffee here right now?" or "We'd better stop fussing about how 'superior' the 'big-screen theatrical experience' is and just accept the reality that: 1) more people watch more movies on smaller screens (even big HDTV ones) than go to theaters, in part because home screens and sound systems have improved, while audience etiquette and other aspects of the theatrical experience have deteriorated; 2) theatrical exhibition should be seen as a luxury, not a necessity, since economics prevent many of the best movies being made nowadays from getting the wildly expensive full theatrical release treatment; 3) even critics who tout 'the big-screen experience' often don't see movies on big theater screens, or with audiences; they see them in small screening rooms with a handful of other critics, where the screens aren't appreciably bigger than my 55-inch Sony HDTV -- which, from where I sit, is about the size (and clarity) of your average movie screen to someone sitting in the back half of the auditorium; 4) there's nothing wrong -- or necessarily aesthetically inferior -- about watching movies on a video screen (particularly a rear-projection one, which uses a xenon lamp not unlike a movie projector) in a comfortable room at home, and DVDs are far superior in quality to most of the beat-up 35mm art house prints and 16mm nontheatrical prints (many of them multi-generational dupes) with which those of us who grew up as cinephiles in the '60s and '70s had to content ourselves; 5) there should be nothing shameful about 'straight-to-DVD' releases; that's a perfectly legitimate, and realistic, distribution strategy for the world we live in."
Yes, I'm pretty sure it was that second thing I was thinking about. Because I seem to recall saying it out loud.
I was reminded of this when I came upon girish's provocative posting about "Theater vs. Home" at his always-insightful and stimulating blog: It is of course a happy truism that watching a movie in a theater is the inarguably ideal way to experience it. For a movie-lover, the theater is a sort of temple, and the experience touched with religiosity. You look up in hushed awe at the screen—in contrast, you look down at a TV screen, as Godard once noted—and the darkness dispatches all distraction, leaving only the light and sound emanating from the screen.
And then there’s the enveloping scale of the image, which you can regulate in relative terms by sitting closer or farther away from the screen. Cinephiles often have their favorite rows and vantage points (when I’m alone: usually fourth or fifth row center; when I’m with others: based upon a process of grumbling and negotiation). Most of all, you relinquish control over the movie by submitting to its (unbroken and continuous) terms, accepting its rules of temporality.
And yet, and yet….there’s a part of me that sees this hushed, worshipful submission to the terms dictated by the work of art as….a tad stifling.
Here’s one thing I believe with all my heart: art is meant for use. For use in our daily lives, to be incorporated and integrated into the very fiber and fabric of our quotidian existence. Home viewing can allow this to happen in slightly unique and different ways from theatrical viewing.
I like the “impurity� of the home video experience—the way you can enter the work in new, unfamiliar and changeable ways, interactively, both as a whole and in fragments, disrupting unity and linearity, developing an intimacy with it, committing aspects of it to memory, and thus making use of the work and making it part of yourself in fresh ways. I'm generally a third- or fourth-row moviegoer, myself. I used to like to sit up close because I liked to see the texture of the emulsion, the feel of an impending dissolve when the film got grainier -- stuff like that. But new technology has pretty much done away with that virtually tactile aspect of watching film. (At least the changeover marks are usually still there -- even though almost all theaters these days build up features, trailers and ads on one big automated platter system, so there are no changeovers.)
Certainly, for film critics, video is manna from heaven. You know, we have a whole generation of film scholarship riddled with errors because of (understandably) faulty observations of movies based on memories of theatrical showings. We have critics writing about things they thought they saw, but that aren't actually in the films they're writing about. (Of course, this still happens to some extent with reviews of new films, but at least those films are somewhat fresh in the mind -- not memories from months or years ago.) Today, for the first time, people studying film actually have the "texts" themselves available for close examination. Can you imagine having to write about literature without being able to go back and look at the precise way that a sentence is phrased, or a paragraph constructed? That's the situation film scholars were in for decades.
One thing I've found most energizing and exciting about my whole Opening Shots Project has been the process of looking closely at individual shots (on DVD, on my PowerBook) repeatedly, and pulling frames for the purpose of critical illustration. It's like crawling inside the movies to see how they work -- and some of these opening shots contain whole worlds within themselves. I've never appreciated the artistry of the cinema more than with this hands-on approach. The images lose no "magic" for me when I examine them so closely, running them back and forth, in slow motion, or even frame by frame. All the magic is there, in the frames themselves!
There's no denying that sitting down and watching a movie, uninterrupted (by the telephone, or the need to go to the bathroom, or a trip to the kitchen or the concessions stand) is its own kind of experience. But, of course, it's not restricted to theatrical viewing. I often sit down, turn off the phone (and the lights) and watch a movie straight through. Although, if I do have hunger pangs or a need to empty my bladder, I can pause the movie so I don't miss anything while I'm gone. Trying to watch a movie in the theater (with people chatting, coming and going, cell phones ringing, etc.) can be more distracting than watching a movie at home. Of course, you deprive yourself of the communal experience of seeing something with an audience, but I'm not convinced that's always such a bad thing.
Filmmakers themselves, of course, don't sit and watch their movies continuously, from beginning to end, while they're making them. They look at little pieces over and over and over. What's wrong with looking at a movie the way its makers do, so that you can examine the little decisions that went into constructing it? I'm not saying people shouldn't watch the movie from start to finish first ("as it was intended" -- whether in a theater or on a home screen), but part of the joy of the digital age is that we can find new, more fruitful ways of enjoying and appreciating filmmakers' work.
Girish has more fascinating insights -- including Jonathan Rosenbaum's account of critic Manny Farber's preferred "discontinuous" method of watching movies -- here.
ADDENDUM: From the comments section, Girish's Breakfast Ritual: I have this weird daily breakfast ritual. I'll feed the doggie, make myself a bowl of cereal and fruit, and over breakfast, I'll pop in, randomly, a DVD into the laptop and watch a random ("shuffled") couple of chapters. I appreciate how this takes away the need to experience the work as a unified whole, and the need to follow a traditional "path" through the movie (anchored by plot and narrative, for example). Wrenching the segments from the movie's normal context allows small and (ostensibly) peripheral details to often rise to the surface. It's a tiny ritual, a small thing, but I look forward to it each morning. (And of course, I always pick a movie I've already seen before.)
Here they are, eleven of the most famous opening shots in movie history, plus a bonus that I threw in just because I like it. Prepare to smack your head and say, "D'oh! I knew that!" But don't give up -- keep sending in your nominations for great opening shots, along with your explanations for why they set up the movie so well, to: jim AT scannersblog dot com.
Congrats to Daniel Dietzel, who got all ten right, but did not hazard a guess about the two bonus shots -- and to Jeremy Matthews, who got nine out of the top 10, but also correctly identified both the bonus/tiebreakers!
And come back Sunday for the answers to the original Opening Shots Pop Quiz.
Now, the answers to the Opening Shots Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2):
1) "Do the Right Thing" (Spike Lee, 1989)
"Wake up wake up wake up!" The final words of Lee's previous film, shouted by Laurence Fishburne at the end of "School Daze," become the opening call of DJ Mr. Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) in "Do the Right Thing." As Love Daddy continues with his rap about playing "the platters that matter, the matters de platter," he also offers a steamy weather prediction: "Hot!" The camera moves from this close-up of clock, mic and lips, pulls back, out the window and then looks down the block where all the movie's action will take place. And Ernest Dickerson's photography makes it look oppressively, inflammably hot indeed.
2. "La Dolce Vita" (Federico Fellini, 1960)
The incongruous image of a statue of Jesus, with arms outstretched, being flown over the ruins of ancient Rome, on its way to the Vatican. It's the first example of spectacle -- of an event staged for public viewing and publicity -- in a film that's all about creating imaginative stages and giving performances. Aboard the second helicopter is the playboy celebrity journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastrioanni), both covering the event and part of it, who will stop to float above, and flirt with, some rooftop sunbathing beauties along the way.
3. "Psycho" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
I think it was Robin Wood (in "Hitchcock's Films") who wrote that the first few shots of "Psycho" -- looking out over Phoenix, AZ, on a particular date at a precise time, as the titles tell us, before closing in on a hotel room window -- convey both a sense of randomness and inevitability. That the camera should choose this particular couple in this particular room seems almost arbitrary. Who knows what's going on behind all those other doors and windows out there? But the fact that we have, in fact, landed in Marion Crane's (Janet Leigh) "private trap" (even before she's fully sprung it on herself) indicates we're going to follow her, inexorably, to her unforseen destiny.
4. "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956)
The woman opens the door, and the camera moves through it with her and her family to greet Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). At the end of the film, she will be dead, what's left of the family will be re-united thanks to Ethan, but he will remain beyond the threshold of that doorway, only to "turn his back on home" and "ride away" as it closes behind him.
5. "Blade Runner" (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Not only is it a magnificent special effects shot, this futuristic vision of Los Angeles as a high-tech post-industrial wasteland, but it sets up a feeling (along with Vangelis's synthesizers) of oppressive, nighmarish dread (with a dash of awe) that doesn't let up until the final bright, blue-green images of escape back into nature.
6. "Blue Velvet" (David Lynch, 1986)
The credits play over a waving sheet of crushed blue velvet, which gives way to an equally blue sky. The camera tilts down to the white picket fence and red roses (accomplishing more in one image than in all of the hackneyed "American Beauty," which strove for a similar effect). This is just the first shot in Lynch's picture-postcard small-town montage (set to Bobby Vinton's recording of the title song), which ends with some sort of heart attack or seizure on a manicured suburban lawn and descends beneath the turf to discover a world of swarming, devouring insects beneath. But it is the essential set-up, without which the whole sequence would be off-balance. Red, white and blue -- quintessentially American images of roses, a picket fence, and an endless blue sky.
7. "8 1/2" (Federico Fellini, 1963)
A claustrophobic nightmare of traffic and congestion (later parodied, memoably, by Woody Allen in "Stardust Memories"). We are sealed in the airless car with Guido (Marcello Mastroianni). And, all around, others are entombed in their separate compartments. The vehicles are simultaneously bell jars (or killing jars) and department store windows, with their mannequins on display, while glassed off from one another.
8. "Cabaret" (Bob Fosse, 1972)
As the credits appear, we detect slight movements on the screen, which is at first dark and monochromatic. The indistinct sound of a crowd of voices seeps into our consciousness as the slow-moving images bleed into color. A drumroll. A crescendo, cymbal crash, und -- "Wilkommen!" The Emcee (Joel Grey) pops into the frame, looking right at us, and begins to sing. We have been peering into a distorted mirror, reflecting... ourselves, sitting in the audience. The moments when the Emcee fixes us with his gaze in the mirror, then redirects it into the camra lens as the camera pulls back, and finally shifts his attention to the audience in the cabaret are electrifying. This opening image will be reprised at the end, when we move across the reflected/distorted interior of the cabaret again, this time with Nazi swastikas distinctly visible in the crowd. (This one seemed to be the hardest to guess on this quiz -- though a few eventually identified it. I was afraid it was so distinctive it would be too obvious, so I chose a frame just as the Emcee's head is popping up.)
9. "Rosemary's Baby" (Roman Polanski, 1968)
La la la la-la la-la... The camera takes in a sweeping view and swings to look downward at one of the most famous (and sinister) residences in America: The Dakota Apartments. Far below, a young couple, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavettes) are taken into its maw. Sure enough, the final image reverses this movement up and away from the building. But inside, well... there's something wrong with Rosemary's baby...
10. "Touch of Evil" (Orson Welles, 1958)
Only the most famous and celebrated opening shot in movies -- with the possible exception of the aforementioned "Star Wars." Do I need to describe it again? This hand starts the time-bomb ticking...
BONUS #1. "Rules of the Game" (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Renoir's masterpiece has consistently appeared near the top of polls of the best movies of all time for decades. Why? Well, everyone has his reasons. But there's no better place to start than this electrifying opening, which begins with this radio operator and then follows an unreeling spool of cable to a reporter with a microphone working her way through the crowd as the famed aviator Andre Jurieu touches down, completing his 23-hour solo Atlantic flight... only to proclaim into the microphone (two or three shots later) his bitter disappointment that the woman for whom he accomplished this feat "didn't even bother" to greet him at the airfield.
Released on the eve of war in Europe, Renoir's is another film about public politics and private emotions.
BONUS #2. "Naked Lunch" (David Cronenberg, 1991)
It's simple: A red apartment door. A shadow of a man's head, wearing a distinctive hat, appears on it. An arm reaches up and knocks. The low, Midwestern-flat, vinegary voice announces: "Exterminator." (Could be the Grim Reaper himself knocking.) Cronenberg's underrated film (which phantasmagorically interpolates elements from several William S. Burroughs novels with events from the author's life) is about an exterminator who kills his wife, and must kill off his old identity and accept his homosexuality as part of his new identity, in order to be reborn as an artist. When I hinted that I love it beyond all reason, I was telling the truth -- but also referring to the film's tag line: "Exterminate all rational thought."
 "Barry Lyndon": Let's begin again... Some great (and maybe not-so-great) movies reward repeated viewings; others you may savor only once or twice. The newly redesigned Slate.com has asked several movie people what movies they've seen most often. (On my own personal list: I never tire of the crackling artistic life in "Nashville," "Chinatown," "Citizen Kane," "E.T.," "North By Northwest," "Trouble in Paradise," "Fight Club," "Donnie Darko," "Double Indemnity," "Stranger Than Paradise," "Stop Making Sense"... Then there's "Animal Crackers," any Buster Keaton movie [but especially "Our Hospitality," "Sherlock Jr." and "Steamboat Bill Jr."], "Waiting for Guffman," "Dazed and Confused," "Boogie Nights" -- oh, and "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy," an unheralded comedy masterpiece...)
Among the choices in Slate's "The Movies I've Seen the Most": Writer-director Paul Schrader (author of the indispensible book of film criticism, "Ozu Bresson Dreyer"): Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket." (Duh -- he's used the ending twice in his own movies, "American Gigolo" and "Light Sleeper.")
Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: "I'm very fortunate in being able to cite Jacques Tati's "Playtime" as both the film I've seen the greatest number of times and my favorite movie. I first saw it 38 years ago and suspect I've seen it somewhere between 30 and 40 times. I like to see it again and again because I find it inexhaustible, the way a favorite piece of music is, and something that never looks exactly the same when I see it again because I watch it differently; each time, my gaze dances in a somewhat different way to Tati's choreography."
Writer-director Neil LaBute: "For me, "Barry Lyndon" is the most distinctive and beautiful re-creation of period on film, bar none, and its leisurely pace and novelistic approaches to style—watch the way Kubrick slowly reverse zooms on the opening shot of many scenes, unveiling each new "chapter"—are pure cinematic pleasure. Plus, Ryan O'Neal kicks acting ass in this picture, swaggering through the proceedings with a brutish beauty, until he finally breaks your heart. Chilly and distancing? Sure. Long and filled with voluminous narration? Absolutely. It's also grandly handsome and furiously savage, and lit by John Alcott with lightning from the gods. It is not to be missed."
I still have plenty of excellent Opening Shots submissions to edit and post -- and I'm doing my best to get frame grabs to accompany them whenever I can. (Quiz answers coming soon, too.) To no one's surprise, "Star Wars" (1977) has been the most popular nomination -- and for good reasons. But do keep 'em coming. I think of new brilliant opening shots every day, so if your initial ideas have already been mentioned, keep thinking. (Or, if you'd care to add to the discussion of a particular shot, Comments have supposedly been enabled on certain posts -- though I have to approve 'em first.)
A few notes about terminology, just so we can be sure we're all speaking the same language:
shot: a continuous image on film, from the time it begins (when the camera is rolling) until a cut (or fade out or dissolve) takes us to the next image. Sometimes the word "take" -- as in continuous shot -- is used interchangeably, although it is more specifically used to refer to one of several attempts to "get" a certain shot during filming. The editor often chooses between several takes of a given shot, and may cut them into shorter shots, or inter-cut different takes with other shots.)
pan: when the camera pivots horizontally, usually on a tripod. If a shot is strictly a pan, the camera does not move from its location, it just swivels -- as if you were standing still and turning your head. It can, of course, be used in various combinations with any of the other techniques below. The opening shot of "Psycho" is a simple pan. Later, a zoom and a crane shot are used in the opening sequence.
tilt: like a pan, but a vertical movement rather than a horizontal one. The camera does not "pan" up the exterior of a skyscraper from a position on the sidewalk across the street; it "tilts" up. The last shot of Robert Altman's "Nashville" is a simple tilt up to the empty sky.
dolly shot: a shot in which the camera actually moves -- usually when mounted on a dolly or a crane, and often on tracks which have been put down to ensure a smooth-gliding and precise movement.
tracking shot: sometimes used interchangeably with "dolly shot," but technically a shot where the camera moves with, or "tracks," another moving object in the frame -- whether from above, below, ahead, aside, or behind. (See opening shot of "Birth" -- which also appears to use a crane and a Steadicam.)
crane shot: a movement where the camera is mounted on a crane (and sometimes a dolly as well), usually to rise above, or descend to, the scene of the primary action. Lots of movies end with crane shots that raise up on a crane and sometimes dolly back at the same time (think of "Chinatown" or "Silence of the Lambs").
handheld shot: any shot in which the camera operator simply holds the camera manually, whether standing in one place or moving around within the scene. Often characterized by a certain shakiness that we're used to experiencing as more immediate, immersive, or documentary-like than a solid, mounted camera, which can feel more detached and "objective."
Steadicam shot: a Steadicam is a gyroscopic device that, as its name indicates, can be used to eliminate the shakiness of handheld shots for a smoother, more fluid movement -- as if the camera is floating on air. (See "Halloween" for a dazzling example.) In a landmark shot at the beginning of Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (photographed by Haskell Wexler), the Steadicam operator is actually on a crane and lowered to the earth, where he steps off and continues the shot at ground level.
zoom: a zoom lens is simply a sliding telephoto lens that smoothly enlarges or reduces the size of objects in the frame optically, like looking through a adjustable telescope. The camera doesn't necessarily move (though it sometimes does that at the same time), but appears to magnify or decrease whatever it's looking at. As you zoom in on something, the image appears to "flatten." (Recall the famous shot of Omar Sharif riding toward the camera across the desert in "Lawrence of Arabia" -- he never really seems to get any closer because of the long telephoto lens that is used.) The dizzying "Vertigo" effect (after Hitchock's innovation in that film) involves dollying in and zooming out at the same time (or vice-versa) -- an effect employed memorably in a shot of Roy Scheider on the beach when a shark is sighted in "Jaws."
It was widely reported that Moose, the 15-year-old Jack Russell Terrier who played the title role in "My Dog Skip," and who played Eddie on the long-running TV sitcom "Frazier," passed away at the ripe old age of 105 in dog years. (He would have been 16 -- or 112 -- December 24, according to IMDb.) While we mourn the passing of Moose, we should point out that he played Old Skip in the movie, while his son Enzo played Skip for most of the film. (Actually, there were reportedly six dogs who performed as Skip in various capacities.)
Likewise, Enzo replaced Moose on "Frazier" after eight years on the show, which ran from 1993 to 2004. But while dogs may be good enough actors to play the same role (like, say, Dick York and Dick Sargent), we should remember that they are not interchangeable. They are individuals. I know this. I live with two of them, and Frances and Edith are very distinct personalities.
I used to live in Los Angeles and work in and around the movie industry, where I encountered hundreds of celebrities in situations ranging from the casual (say, at the drugstore) to the professional (on a set, in a meeting, or for an interview). But my favorite movie star sighting ever came at the Overlooked Film Festival in 2004, where a man and his dog exited an elevator in the Illini Student Union Building -- and I immediately recognized the dog as Skip. (It was Enzo -- a surprise guest at a matinee screening of "My Dog Skip.") Of course, I took a picture.
Moose is dead. Long live Enzo.
From Mark Roberts, Calgary, Alberta, Canada:
I am such a fan of movie opening moments (sounds strange I know, but a great opening moment is something I really treasure), that I had to respond to your call for favourite moments (and I'm going to have to see "Barry Lyndon" now too...). They're all pretty literal... nothing terribly deep in terms of artistic impression... but that shouldn't disqualify a great opening.
"Superman"
I always get caught up by the opening moments. As the child narrator speaks about the Daily Planet, the curtains pull back to reveal the first issue of "Action Comics", moving to the "live" shot of the Daily Planet, and then into space and the opening credits. John William's score draws us through the open curtains and into the other world of the movie. I still get a little leap in my chest when the theme reaches its first crescendo and the title "Superman" leaps into view.
 View image Move in on the Daily Planet panel, which begins a dissolve to....  View image: ... a beautiful Art Deco miniature of the Daily Planet Building (but notice that the curtains remain, so it's technically still one shot).  View image: ... and past a Méliès moon on the way to the planet Krypton!.  View image: Alexander Salkind's credit blows out the big screen.  View image: "Lost in Translation": The, uh, title card. "Lost In Translation"
And no, I'm not talking about Scarlet Johansson's... assets. That's more of a title card. I'm referring to our introduction to Bill Murray. Seeing him sealed away in the cab from Tokyo around him sets up the whole feel of the movie perfectly. The languorous vocals of the opening track evoke a post-plane-trip-ennui that resonates immediately with anyone who's had to travel abroad, especially alone.
"Star Wars"
While the opening crawl describes the "state of the galaxy" in the adventure to come, it's the first shot that sums it up so dynamically. The little blockade runner flashes past in an instant, followed by the long, slow passing of the massive star destroyer. This just perfectly depicts the conflict between the struggling little rebellion and the huge force arrayed against it. The remainder of the pursuit is shown completely from the blockade runner's perspective, allying the viewer with our plucky heroes before we've even seen them.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
Well, you did this one. Count me in too.
"Xanadu"
Gene Kelly's character plays a slow, 40's era clarinet tune in the lower corner of the picture while the sun and sky race by in time lapse, the sun rising from the same corner as Kelly and away from him in an arc to the opposite corner... I've spent a half hour trying to find the words as to why this works for me. Maybe its the juxtaposition of the slow tune with the accelerated sky... modern day racing away from the past as the sun speeds away from Kelly or something. Maybe it's because I'm a Gene Kelly fan and this was his last picture. I don't know. I just had to include it.
JE: Splendidly written, Mark! You know, I've never seen "Xanadu" -- even though I lived across the street (Oakwood and Sierra Bonita) from the Pan Pacific Auditorium, where it was filmed. I lived there when it burned down, too.
Anyway, I don't think there's ever been a comic book superhero movie that can outdo "Superman" for chills, thrills and wit. That opening catches it all: There's something childlike and innocent about the whole movie, but real pain beneath it, too. It's an exuberant big-screen spectacle and the special effects hit just the right note: neither "realistic" nor chintzy, but dazzling in a uniquely comic-book way. They do what CGI has not been able to accomplish; they meet your imagination halfway. (And I think the scene where Lois dies a horrible dusty death, buried alive in an earthquake, and then Supe swirls around the Earth to turn back time, is one of the most romantic moments in all of movies. I mentioned this at dinner not too long ago, and a guy objected because it wasn't realistic. You know, you can't reverse time by changing the rotation of the Earth. Yes, and the moon doesn't have a face and eyes as in Georges Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon," either. I didn't know quite how to respond to this guy. So I just didn't.
I love your description of "Lost in Translation." The fact that it's dark (no telling what time it is -- echoes of the perpetual night of dystopian Los Angeles in "Blade Runner") and the way the smeary lights outside the window stream by in a blur just adds to the sense of jet lag and psychological/physical/geographical dislocation.
From Scott Gowans, Web Manager, WOSU Public Media, Columbus, OH:
I had been reviewing films for four or so years before I decided to take some film courses at Ohio State. One intensive, joyful seminar was the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose films had just been re-mastered and were showing in pristine condition at the Wexner Center on campus. His work is both frustrating, fascinating, illuminating, and always puts me on edge. For anyone who doesn’t get him or his work, I understand, and I’m also sorry. He’s hard to watch and abstruse, but when you get it, nothing looks the same anymore. My professor hates the way society attached the term ‘genius’ to anybody who shows above-average intelligence, but he had no problem with putting Fassbinder in the same class as Goethe and Shakespeare.
One opening shot sticks with me, though I could site others. The first shot in “Beware of a Holy Whore� has the camera at waist-level looking slightly upwards at Deiters (played by avant-garde filmmaker Werner Schroeter), who has brown hair spilling over his shoulders, and is dressed in a black cowboy suit. Behind him is sky. Deiters, whose role in the film is an odd photographer, delivers a soliloquy about Goofy (the cartoon character) in drag, who teaches kindergarten, gets beaten up by his students, meets Wee Willy, a gangster who is "the size of a 3-year-old," takes the crook home, and feeds him. Though the police arrest Wee Willy, Goofy refuses to accept that his new friend is less than perfect.
 View image: Final shot: "He has rediscovered something that has been forgotten. Time."  View image: Final shot: "I guess I won't be content until I know he's been completely destroyed."
The camera never moves during this speech, and there’s not a shred of plot to it. In fact, this character barely makes an impression through the rest of the film.
This whole bit could seem like a lark -- in which Fassbinder allowed his friend Schroeter, whose work Fassbinder admired, a few minutes of screen time to tell a story -- except for the fact that all of Fassbinder’s recurring themes are present. Friends and lovers in the film go and go as though everyone is acting, which, since they are making a film within the film, they are. Characters step in and out of sexual identities as quickly as Deiters’ characters do. Relationships come and go, bringing with them unwanted entanglements, and taking with them individuals’ sense of identity. In one sense, the characters lounging around the film set are all cartoon characters who suffer abuse, then find someone else and rebound.
The speech is a performance bit, yet another constant reminder from the Brecht-disciple that all acting and moviemaking are all artificial representations of life, though they are every bit as important as reality. In one sense, this is Fassbinder’s mirror film, where he shows us a film set and lets us see the folly behind the method. In another sense, he plays with the roles such that what we expect to see and what we see never converge; another actor plays the person we expect to be Fassbinder, while Fassbinder plays someone else. Eddie Constantine and Hanna Schygulla play versions of themselves, but the audience has to question whether they are playing the film “straight� or as we expect them to be, or the director’s version.
What makes the scene particularly interesting –- and unsettling –- is that there’s a mechanical noise, like a car running, under the whole speech. It is too loud to be unintentional, but we never see nor are we told what it might be. It is as though Fassbinder is cueing the audience in that what you see and what you hear are not necessarily in synch, that there’s always something just out of our comprehension in every single image and piece of dialogue.
JE: Inspired choice, Scott. There's scarcely any movement in the shot at all. As you say, Schroeter hardly moves, and the camera is stationary. But there's something going on here. That grating, whirring sound (how characteristically Fassbinder to provoke and irritate the audience from the beginning) may be the amplified sound of film going through a camera. At any rate, because of the sound, and the lack of movement, you do become intensely aware that this is, as you note, a performance taking place in front of a camera -- in a film about filmmaking, where the actors are often arranged flatly across the frame, as though in a proscenium, before a stationary camera -- as in the famous final shot (a zoom; no camera move), which dissolves into the quote from Thomas Mann: "And I say to you that often I am weary to death of depicting human nature without partaking in human nature." A devastating statement for an artist to make, but not an uncommon sensation -- particularly for a filmmaker as concerned with artifice and melodrama as Fassbinder.
(Now I want to sit down and watch a triple bill of Godard's "Contempt," Fassbinder's "Beware of a Holy Whore," and Wim Wenders' "The State of Things"...)
 View image: Through the side window, the teenagers make out on the couch. From Robert C. Cumbow:
(An excerpt from my book, "Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter):
Following the main title shot-a slow track-in on a leering jack-o'-lantern-the opening sequence of Halloween is a spectacular tour-de-force, a four-minute single take that builds up to the brutal murder of a teenage girl in a quiet home in a quiet neighborhood in quiet Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween, 1963. The take ends as the murderer's mask is removed and a shock cut reveals the clown-suited killer to be the victim's six-year-old brother. The camera stares, then backs off, becoming a 15-second crane shot up away from the silent, blank-faced boy holding the bloody knife as his parents look on, questioning.
Thereafter, as in "Jaws," the shift to subjective camera often deliberately signals the presence, or possible presence, of the beast. In addition to imputing guilt to the audience, the subjective camera also serves the purpose of concealing the killer's identity in the crucial opening scene. The subjective camera technique was taken up by "Friday the 13th" and the raft of "Halloween" imitators that followed and became such a convention that it was parodied in the opening to Brian De Palma's "Blow Out" [1981]. But it became a convention for a purely utilitarian reason -- preventing us from seeing the
killer's face -- and acquired the unfortunate side effect of creating a sadistic woman-killing persona as the point of audience identification, something many critics and viewers reacted against.
 View image: The teens have gone upstairs. Lights go out.  View image: Around back, in through back door and into the kitchen, where The Intruder picks out a knife, then heads through dining room and into the parlor.  View image: Loverboy puts his shirt back on, his task having been accomplished in record time.  View image: The Intruder picks up a clown mask and puts it on.  View image: Back down the stairs and out the front door, where a car is pulling up.  View image: The first second of the reverse shot: Dad removes the mask and reveals the killer: "Michael?" The long take that begins "Halloween" works for several reasons: First, the unmounted camera, steady though it is, wavers just enough to keep us unsettled, off balance, vulnerable to shock even if slightly prepared for it. Second, the shot establishes the motif of the subjective camera as the killer's point of view. Third, and most important, the shot draws us into the action by a point of view that is unedited. Had the opening sequence been presented conventionally, as a mounted sequence of shots, the viewer's mind would become an editor's mind, classifying, comparing, and relating the shots to assemble the story -- in other words, a mind participating in the creation of the work and therefore more conscious of it as a work. The single take suppresses the artistic detachment that comes from mental montage, creating instead a direct involvement that-like real life -- we are unable to edit. The impact, in other words, is visceral, not intellectual.
The strongest precedent for Carpenter's long-take opening to "Halloween" is found not in the annals of horror film but in the spectacular single-shot opening credits sequence of Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" -- a crane shot that begins on an extreme close-up, then pulls back to a cityscape, tracks the
movements of two different sets of characters, and culminates in one character's reaction to an offscreen explosion. Both of the opening two shots of Halloween are grounded in the same technique: The first shot concentrates on setting a scene, building suspense, and culminating in shock. The second shot, because it is a crane shot, is a more direct descendent of the Welles shot, but it is shorter, simpler than the Welles shot, beginning close and ending high and wide, without the comings and goings and focal changes of Welles's "Touch of Evil" opening. Moreover, it establishes the ground rules under which, for the remainder of the film, Carpenter will switch from subjective to objective point of view, from killer's eye to director's eye.
The crane shot up and away, dwarfing the characters in the context of their surroundings, is a shot potent with emo-tional impact, and most commonly used as an end title shot, as in such diverse films as Jacques Demy's "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," Michael Cacoyannis's "Zorba the Greek," and Sergio
Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West." [And Polanski's "Chinatown," followed by LaRue's "Polynesiantown"! -- je] It was also used to great effect by Alan Pakula in the mountain-of-work library research scene of "All the President's Men."
But the second shot of "Halloween," though as powerful in its way as any of these, is most remarkable if seen as a reversal of Hitchcock's celebrated crane shot in "Young and Innocent," moving from high and wide over an entire ballroom of dancing couples to come to rest on the extreme close-up detail of the twitching eyelid of an onstage musician-the killer, as it turns out, masked in black-face. Carpenter, by contrast, begins on the unmasked face of his killer and pulls away to set the boy with the knife in the anomalous context of his quiet middle-American neighborhood.
JE: Great stuff, Bob -- thanks again! It struck me, while reading your description and looking at the shot itself, that Carpenter is also referring to the birth of the modern slasher movie in 1960, with the release of both Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" and Alfred Hitchock's equally shocking "Psycho." When you write that the Steadicam POV shot became a horror movie cliche, "creating a sadistic woman-killing persona as the point of audience identification," I was reminded that this is precisely the goal of Powell's childlike, sadistic killer, who stabs his victims with the sharpened, phallic "third leg" of his camera tripod while they scream in terror, looking into his lens. All the better to replay their deaths -- in long, fluid, unbroken takes -- over and over again in the privacy of his dark and demented personal cinema.
Certainly Powell's Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a fraternal (if not identical) twin of Hitchock's Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Carpenter pulls a clever switcheroo on the famous "Psycho" shower scene in several ways:
- Instead of Hitchcock's meticulously cut-together shot fragments, Carpenter does the whole thing in a single fluid take -- while mimicking some of Hitchcock's effects: the girl engaged in a grooming ritual, the victim screaming into the camera, the image of the knife being raised and slashed without ever showing blade-flesh contact, the naked body on the floor...
- Unlike "Psycho," which holds the revelation of the killer's identity until the climax, "Halloween" tells us who the killer is in the very first shot. Michael's sister mentions he's "around somewhere" when she's downstairs with her boyfriend, and she screams his name as he's stabbing her. At the end of the shot, before the unmasking (and reverse shot), Michael's father also says his name.
- The killer is also a boy, who begins his murder spree by catching a relative in a sexual situation (and probably exhibiting some repressed, forbidden desire for her). For Norman, it's his mother (the theory being that he may have initially killed in a frenzy after coming upon her and a lover in bed); for Michael, it's his naked sister in her room (remember that significant glance over at the rumpled bedclothes just before he attacks her).
From Christopher Long, Reviewer and Features Editor, DVDTown.com:
In terms of narrative structure, the opening shot of Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger than Paradise" is a perfect "mini-movie." The film opens with a shot of Eva (Eszter Balint, seen from behind) standing to the far right of the frame; in the background, we see a plane park on an airport runway. Eva watches a plane land, very slowly picks up her luggage (a ratty suitcase and a shopping bag), turns around (glancing around in almost a full circle) then walks (again, very slowly) left and towards the camera until she exits the frame.
The shot lingers, however, long after Eva has departed to witness the parked plane as it begins its takeoff. Here is the entire story laid out in miniature: "Stranger Than Paradise" begins with an arrival by plane (Eva coming to America from Hungary) and ends with a departure by plane (Willie [John Lurie] flying to Budapest).
The fact that we first see Eva situated so far to the right edge of the frame suggests that she has just arrived (in the frame and, also, in America) and also leaves a gaping void in the foreground of the left two-thirds of the frame, one that is destined be filled by the other two main characters in the film. Her near full-circle look also demonstrates the sense of disorientation she feels in "The New World." It is also no coincidence that we see her walking from right-to-left in her first several shots, as this mirrors her journey across the Atlantic. Is it a coincidence that, in the final shot of the film, Eva (again seen alone) sits all the way to the left of the frame, thus completing her journey? Maybe so, but it sure feels right.
Jarmusch also establishes the rhythm of the film here: this is a static long-take like most of the shots in the movie (there are some tracking shots but, in general, minimal camera movement and no analytical editing) and the action is slow and languorous. Jarmusch's use of scale in this shot also sets the tone for a film with empty, featureless spaces. Of course, you could argue that the real opening shot of the film is the black screen that figures so prominently in the film, which itself might be an even more concise encapsulation of the movie's theme!
JE: I can't describe precisely why, but your appreciation of this shot brings tears to my eyes. In part, it's because you capture the approximately 47 seconds during which I fell in love with this movie the first time I saw it. (I fell in love with Eszter Balint a few shots later, when she methodically sets down her bags, pulls a cassette recorder out of the paper sack, pushes "PLAY," picks up suitcase, paper bag and tinny-sounding cassette by their respective handles with her knit-gloved hands, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins begins wailing: "I Put a Spell on You.") This was one of those movies I felt was made just for me. (And that reminds me, I have some personal reminiscences about playing the film first-run in our Seattle movie theater in early 1985, and about Eszter coming to visit for a few days, that I've been planning to write about here. Later.)
What a perfect choice (and if you hadn't chosen it, I would have): a black and white gem (Wim Wenders supposedly provided film stock with the short ends from "The State of Things" -- you can certainly see the Wenders influence in that opening shot), made up of discrete shots, each separated (discreetly) by black leader. Couldn't ask for anything better than this.
After Bruce Springsteen referred to "present company included, the idiots rambling on on cable television any given night of the week" in an interview with something called Soledad O'Brien (what is a Soledad O'Brien, and why was Springsteen having an interview with it?), Stephen Colbert was outraged. He offered these Words of Wisdom -- something to keep in mind during the summer movie season, as well:
"All Soledad did was ask a perfectly legitimate valid question about whether artists should do anything other than entertain us! I've said it before: Popular music should be a series of meaningless cliches strung together by a pleasing melody to help pass the time during long commutes or loveless marriages."
C'mon, people: Isn't willful vacuity, and the lack of any ambition other than the monetary, the very recipe for what makes life so worth living?
 Enlarge image: Your eye just naturally alights on the figure to the right of the support...  Enlarge image: ...who moves slowly along the shore in the opposite direction of the camera. (Here, the person is dead center in the frame.) From Edward Copeland:
When Jim asked me to submit something about my favorite opening shot from a movie, I was at first flummoxed -- it seemed all the best ones were obvious and would have been written on to death, so I dug through my memory to try to find a less-obvious choice.
What I settled on was "The Crying Game." I was fortunate to see "The Crying Game" for the first time long before the hype about the "twist" kicked in, so I was genuinely surprised at the direction the film went in and I think, upon rewatching its opening, that the beginning was helpful to that end.
Percy Sledge's great "When a Man Loves a Woman" plays on the soundtrack (the irony of that song will only sink in later) as the camera moves slowly under a bridge across a lake where on the other side sits an amusement park with Ferris wheels and various rides going round and round. If you had no idea going in where this film was headed, you certainly couldn't have figured it out by these images, though you'd be mesmerized nonetheless.
 Enlarge image: On the edge of the beach: Where to go from here? One could never have anticipated... Once the song and the camera movement finishes, there is a quick jump-cut to within the park where we meet Forest Whitaker and Miranda Richardson on a presumed date, playing games before Whitaker ducks for a potty break with Richardson holding his hand. The only hint we have of what is to come is some brief shots of Stephen Rea paying close attention to their actions.
Soon enough, Rea, Richardson and the other IRA members have abducted Whitaker and the film begins in earnest -- at least the first act. I realize that this sequence really constitutes more than an opening shot, but for 14 years I've remembered that slow camera movement and Percy Sledge and when you bounce that opening over the final shots, where the song has been replaced by Lyle Lovett singing "Stand By Your Man," you realize how perfect an opening Neil Jordan had devised.
JE: Thanks so much, Edward, for reminding me of what a brilliant, poetic shot that is. It wasn't among the first to come into my mind, either, but you've persuaded me that it should have been! Not only does the camera move (right to left) under the bridge and cross to the other side, it also tracks a small, solitary figure (long dark coat, white pants) who walks left to right on the far shore, until he (?) reaches the edge of the water and can go no further. Figuratively, if not literally, it's Fergus (Stephen Rea) -- or maybe a black-and-white fusion/suggestion of where both Fergus and Jody (Forest Whitaker) are at this particular moment, when their lives are about to intersect. It's under this bridge where Fergus will encounter Jody (Forrest Whitaker) for the first time, interrupting a sexual encounter in progress. And "The Crying Game" is a movie all about bridges and barriers, natural and man-made.
I don't want to insist on a single, "this equals this" reading of this extraordinarily resonant shot, but as you point out, it's accompanied by Percy Sledge singing "When a Man Loves a Woman," it's a crossing over (under a bridge), and it shows a lonely figure reaching a place where land meets water. Once you know the trajectory of the film, about a love that quite naturally crosses (some, not all) barriers of gender, and even death -- and you savor the delightful irony of the final song playing off the opening one -- you really see how beautiful it is. The final shot of the film reverses the movement, this time from left to right, with two lovers together, on top of a raised structure yet separated by glass (but only for another 2035 days!), as we hear the great (Wellesian) story about the frog and the scorpion: "It's in my nature." "Stand By Your Man" indeed!
From Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun:
When reading the request for greatest opening shots, the first film that popped into my head was immediate and almost too easy — “Kiss Me Deadly.�
And then I reflected more.
There are so many masterful opening shots, some I find works of genius or some I simply love. But the more I thought about it, the more I drifted back to where my mind always manages to drift back to — stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho sexual angst — so there it was again, “Kiss Me Deadly.�
But for good reason. Robert Aldrich’s masterful noir hits you with a hysterical bang that sets its frenzied tone with such balls-out experimental élan; you can’t believe the film was released in 1955:
Before any credit sequence, the film begins with a pair of naked feet running down the middle of a highway in the black of the night.
The feet belong to a hysterical, heavily panting blonde (Cloris Leachman) wearing only a trench-coat. As the soundtrack intensifies, cars pass by but none stop. Desperate for a ride, she places herself in the middle of the road and stands holding her arms out in a V. Finally, a cool little Jaguar sports car comes to a screeching halt, blinding her with its headlights and swerving to the side of the road. She walks towards the car, roughly breathing and panting but with some relief. The driver, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is agitated by this mystery woman/potential loony, begrudgingly “rescuing� her with a sneer. He spits:
“You almost wrecked my car. Well? Get in!�
As the woman enters the car, you hear a velvety-voiced female DJ announce a Nat King Cole song on the car radio. With the camera placed behind our two characters (one absolutely frantic, the other as cool as a cucumber), the credits roll upside down against the highway’s white lines. The only thing you hear is Nat King Cole’s elegant “Rather Have the Blues� and the woman’s hard, almost sexual sounding hyper-ventilating.
I’m still amazed by how totally perverse and subversive Aldrich’s kick start remains. How many pictures, even current pictures, would have the guts to place a viewer on this kind of edge? But he’s not playing simply for shock—Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo instantly address the expressionistic, off kilter and monstrous universe we’re about to enter. Un-relenting, sleazy, mean, disorienting, neurotic, psychotic and hopeless, Leachman is the crazed conscious inside all of the film’s characters, maniacally running from a world that could explode (literally) by the opening of a suitcase. A seminal noir, a masterpiece of artistic pulp “Kiss Me Deadly� — opening shots alone — are exactly why the French praised Aldrich as “Le Gros Bob.�
JE: You are so right, Kim. That opening image -- the bare feet and legs, the trench coat, the lines on the highway asphalt -- doesn't last more than a few seconds, but man does it have an impact. I can't help but think of Bunuel (well, feet), and I'm sure David Lynch had "KMD" in mind when he did the credits sequence for "Lost Highway" -- another sleazy, apocalyptic noir.
 View image: The lovely Mses Griffin and Sweeney in "It's Pat: The Movie" (which has a helluva opening shot!) OK, I don't usually get into the tabloid "news" (that much) -- this is, after all, a site devoted to the in-depth appreciation of cinema in all its manifestations (while understanding the realities of the entertainment business) -- but this is just too much: Three irresistible trash stories all hitting the wires in one day! Where is Kathy Griffin when I need her?
Tom and Nicole: Never Married!
BBC: In fact, Kidman didn't need an annulment for one simple reason: in the eyes of the Catholic Church her 10-year union with Tom Cruise, a renowned Scientologist, never happened.
Rush Limbaugh Busted for Illicit Viagra Possession!
AP: Rush Limbaugh could see a deal with prosecutors in a long-running prescription fraud case collapse after authorities found a bottle of Viagra in his bag at Palm Beach International Airport. The prescription was not in his name. [Dare we ask whose it was? We always knew not enough blood was getting to his head.]
Barbara Walters Upstaged by Some Old RuPaul Impersonator!
AP: "I love Star and I was trying to do everything I possibly could — up until this morning when I was betrayed — to protect her," Walters told The Associated Press.
From Mike Leto, Bethpage, NY:
I agree with you about how opening shots are one of the most important parts in a film. If the opening shot is good then the movie takes hold of me right from the beginning and that can lead to a great movie. I'm glad I saw "Boogie Nights" and "Barry Lyndon" on your list and you made me look back on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to make me see how important that opening shot really is. But if I were you, I would need these three great opening shots on my list:
"Aguirre, The Wrath of God" -- The first shot sets up the mood for this film perfectly. First, the opening titles tell us that this is a doomed mission but we didn't even need message. We cut to a mountain covered in fog but as the fog starts to drift away we see a long line of men walking down the side of the mountain. This image, along with the music, sets a tone of failure and desparation before things actually start to go wrong.
"Dazed and Confused" -- I know what you're thinking but I happen to think that this film is a masterpiece and the first shot (just like "Aguirre") sets the perfect mood. When you hear Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" and you see the car making the turn in slow motion it brings us back in time. Not to 1976. But to our teenage years. We don't have to worry because it brings us back to a time in our lives where the worst thing that happens is that the party got cancelled.
"Star Wars -- Episode IV: A New Hope" -- My favorite opening shot of all time, but the problem is that it's really only effective on the big screen. The TV screen takes away all the power out of the shot. Of course we all remember the "Star Wars" logo flying backwrds into space and the "Flash Gordon" summary rolling up the screen. But what effects me is what happens next. We tilt down to see the planet Tatooine and we see the rebel space cruser fly overhead. It's obviosly being chased and we see lasers going back and forth. Then, we see the imperial ship fly overhead and it takes up the entire space of the screen. It almost seems to big to fit on the screen and thats how I viewed the rest of the film. I saw the story take place in a world too big and wonderful for us to imagine. That makes for not just an entertaining film, but a great one.
JE: Thanks, Mike. I'm glad to see someone else writing in about "Aguirre." And I completely agree with you about "Dazed and Confused": It's a masterpiece, and will eventually be remembered as one of the great films of the 1990s. (Not to slag "Pulp Fiction," but I think its reputation will decline -- it already seems dated to me -- while the subtler organic achievements of "Dazed and Confused" will look ever more impressive.) And I've never been much of a "Star Wars" fan (always prefered "CE3K" from the summer they both came out), but that opening is a stunner and accomplishes just what you describe. I'll never forget the sheer kinetic exhilaration of seeing that for the first time. "Star Wars" is what it is, no deeper (artistically or thematically) than the old science-fiction serials on which it's based, and it delivers a whiz-bang thrill ride through space (and mythological archetypes). It may be little more than zippy, superficial filmmaking (George Lucas is no Steven Spielberg when it comes to orchestrating awesome imagery), but it's a glorious spectacle.
 Seven men from now: How many Chicagoans does it take to make up a phony terror cell? On Monday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart reported on the big press conference called by Attorney General (and Pillar of Integrity) Alberto Gonzales to announce the arrest of seven men for "conspiring to support the Al Qaeda organization" -- by, maybe, tossing out the idea of blowing up the Sears Tower. Or something. Except that it turns out the men were a gaggle of losers living in Miami, had no weapons or explosives and no terrorist network connections, and one of them had mentioned the Sears Tower one time. However, one of the, uh, "alleged terrorists," was familiar with Chicago. (As Maureen Dowd described them on Saturday ("We Need Chloe!"): "[The] Miami gang of terrorist wannabes... look like they couldn't find the local Sears, let alone the Sears Tower. These guys were so lame they asked an informant for boots, radios, binoculars, uniforms and cash, believing he was Al Qaeda — and that jihadists need uniforms.")
Observed Stewart: "No weapons, no actual contact with Al Qaeda, but one of them had been to Chicago. By that standard, I believe this [see above] may be a terror cell." No doubt A--- C-----r & Co. would agree. Your Homeland Insecurity dollars at work...
|
