August 2007 Archives

One of the best educations in filmmaking that you can ever get is to spend a day on a set -- even (or maybe especially) as an extra, because that puts you right in the middle of the action, as it were. (When I was doing a Seattle Times story on the shooting of Alan Rudolph's "Trouble in Mind," Alan decided to stick me and my pal Eden, who was also working on the film, into the tiki bar scene, where I could observe everything that was going on all around. We appear as blurs behind the heads of Kris Kristofferson and Lori Singer.)

Anyway, back in 1986 (or early 1987?) my friend Nancy Locke, a longtime Seattle movie publicist, and I were invited to be extras on David Mamet's directorial debut feature, "House of Games." We showed up at Bagley Hall at the University of Washington (my alma mater) and I was put in a classroom, where Lilia Skala was our psych professor. In explaining the scene to us, Mamet mentioned we could now say that we had been directed by David Mamet. So, I'm sayin'.

I don't remember where they used Nancy, or if she made the final cut. (I'll have to ask her.) I do remember we did another semi-surreal scene in the hallway between classes, where we students brushed passed Lindsay Crouse while her character walked in a dazed, almost trance-like state. It was an experiment. They didn't use it.

I was reminded of this experience while looking at the new Criterion Collection edition of "House of Games." Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars, and in 1999 selected it as one of his Great Movies. It's pure Mamet -- hypnotic, suspenseful, surprising -- a noirish con game that reminds me of a Fritz Lang thriller, with stylized performances that hint of Bresson, Fassbinder, or Herzog's "Heart of Glass" (in which the director actually hypnotized the cast), but I've never seen anything quite like it. Three of my favorite actors -- Joe Mantegna, J.T. Walsh and Ricky Jay -- also star. Are you in?

Because I enjoy the confessional aspect of blogging, I'm going to admit to you something shocking. It's shocking to me, anyway. I have fallen under the spell of Bravo's "Top Chef" program.

Here's the thing: I don't normally watch "reality shows" (though I saw the first few "Survivors" and the bizarre American debut season of "Big Brother") and I don't cook and I rarely eat in "fine dining" restaurants and I don't know anything about food.

But I stumbled into one episode by accident, and that led to another, and then I ordered the first two seasons downloaded to my TiVo from Amazon Unbox and plowed through four or five episodes at a time into the wee hours of the morning. The damn show is like a bag of potato chips.

So, why have I gotten into this show so much? Well, for one thing, I like looking at and hearing about the pretty foods and how they got to be that way. (A friend of mine used to enjoy describing recent meals in loving detail. I called him "The Food Descripter" and he went on to work in a top San Francisco restaurant for a while, where writing the menus was one of his specialties.)

The format "is what it is," to use a favorite expression of the competing cooks. The beats are as comfortable and familiar as those in a genre movie, and they don't pretend to be anything else. (They also recycle the same few music cues again and again, just like early-'60s Godard and similarly irritating and addictive.)

But most of all, I think, I enjoy watching how the producers develop the characters and shape their relationships into "stories." Every carefully cut line and selected mannerism -- tics, gestures, glances -- underlines (and in some cases I mean underlines) which role(s) the individual chefs are supposed to embody: The Outrageously Pretentious Sommelier-Diva-Geek, The Nervous Nelly, The Crunchy Granola Gal, The Egomaniacal Pest Who Annoys Everybody, The Big Sweet Lunk, The Betty Blue Unpredictably Temperamental Foreign Wacko Chick, The Hot-Headed Italian Bulldog Bully, The Mean Mean Bitch Bitch Queen, The Male Model-Lookalike Who Takes Everything Way Way Too Seriously Including Himself, and so on. And, of course, The Guy With The Hair. That one describes at least half the men on the show. I assume the hairdos are good attention-getters when everybody has to wear he same white jackets most of the time.

The cutaways are hilarious, emphasizing each cast member's most memorable personality quirks over and over and over. The off-set interviews (a staple of MTV's "The Real World" -- oops, I also saw some of those, back in the '90s) are chopped up like onions and sprinkled through the show. And sometimes they're supposed to make you cry, too.

MSN Movies received this despairing e-mail regarding my "Open Letter to Hollywood" piece. I'm not sure what to say, but I thought I'd share it as the cri de coeur of one disillusioned man, and a reminder of the chasm that has always existed between art and commerce in Tinseltown -- but a canyon that is occasionally bridged:

I was recently at a bar north of Boston, and discovered that the bartender was attending Emerson College, studying film production. He was interested in pursuing a career as a DP and eventually a director, and I asked him what kind of films he viewed in his program, mentioning such names as Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, the old great studio system directors such as Hawks, Huston, Cukor, etc. He said that he almost never watched such films, at least not as part of a class, and had only marginal curiosity about their work. He was far more interested in the technical [side] of film and the marketing aspects of the industry. He stated he understood the reputation of all of those people (although he had never heard of George Cukor), but his professors didn't stress much film history, and he didn't believe that this old work had much bearing on the reality of the industry today.

I look upon the mainstream films made in the current atmosphere and wonder how many have even a remote chance of standing the test of time. I've sat through dozens of viewings of films like "The Maltese Falcon," "The Quiet Man," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," "Network," and none of these films have lost their freshness. "Titanic," for a while the biggest movie ever, is now ten years old. Does anyone have any interest in it at all anymore, a decade down the line? "Casablanca" is 65 years old. How many Hollywood films made in the last ten years will still generate interest in the years 2062 to 2072?

The film industry as it exists today is no different than any other major corporate enterprise. Corporate enterprises are by nature conservative; their goals are to limit risk exposure and do whatever is the easiest thing within a given business structure. They want to sell you things they know you'll buy because you've bought them already, so the conglomerates that own the studios will keep churning out sequels, franchises, and copycat product until you stop buying, and then they'll go on to the next thing and bleed that to death.

That's right. Either from beyond the grave ("Anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story," Kubrick said of "The Shining"), or from within it, Stanley Kubrick responds to a critic who accuses him and his films of nihilism:

Is this, I wonder, because he couldn't actually find any internal evidence to support his trend-spotting? If not, then it is extraordinary that so serious a charge should be made against [my film] (and myself) inside so fuzzy and unfocussed a piece of alarmist journalism.

The accuser is Fred M. Hechinger in the New York Times, the movie in question is "A Clockwork Orange," and the date is February 27, 1972. "A Clockwork Orange" was the subject of red-hot debate all over the place, celebrated as a masterpiece and condemned as everything from "fascistic" to "anarchistic" to "nihilistic."

(Oh, and If you haven't already, be sure to "bone up" on the spirited discussion of Kubrick below. Is he just a big ol' human-hater?)

I'd never read this letter before today, when I found it while searching through the New York Times archive. Naturally, one should always trust the art and not (just) the artist, but Kubrick has to much to say here about about his view of humankind, and this is so revealing of the vision expressed in his films, that I'm going to quote him at length:

Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness feels, as the judge said, is not evidence -- the more so when the charge is one of purveying "the essence of fascism."

"Is this an uncharitable reading of the film's thesis?" Mr. Hechinger asks himself with unwonted, if momentary, doubt. I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-orienting conditioning of human beings by other beings -- which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.

Make what you will of Kubrick's stated intentions, but note the value he places on humanity and free will. He continues:

It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative ["Emile"] -- but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage, rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one as a tyrant (I hope).... [Times film critic Vincent Canby] classified "A Clockwork Orange" as "a superlative example" of the kind of movies that "seriously attempt to analyze the meaning of violence and the social climate that tolerates it." He certainly did not denounce me as a fascist, no more than any well-balanced commentator who read "A Modest Proposal" would have accused Dean Swift of being a cannibal. [...]

Kubrick continues...

The most superficial and shopworn cliché about Stanley Kubrick is that he was a misanthrope. This is up there with calling Alfred Hitchcock "The Master of Suspense," and leaving it at that. The cliché may contain a partial truth, but it's not particularly enlightening. It's just trite.

In the free Seattle weekly tabloid The Stranger, Charles Mudede writes about a local Kubrick series, and begins by stating: "Kubrick hated humans. This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands." This is a nice grabber -- particularly for readers who don't know anything about Kubrick, or who want to feel the thrill of the forbidden when reading about him. ("Imagine! He hated humans!")

Unfortunately for readers, this is Mudede's thesis, and he's sticking to it. Here's his summary judgement of "2001: A Space Odyssey":

As is made apparent by "2001: A Space Odyssey," his contempt was deep.

It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts. No matter how far we go into the future, into space, toward the stars, we will never break with our first and violent world. Even the robots we create, our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives. For Kubrick, we have never been modern.

OK, that's one interpretation (though it gets the direction of the movement entirely wrong), but I think it's a facile misreading of the film. Is there really something un-"modern" about portraying the raw, simple fact of evolution, with a little otherworldly nudge?

And why does Mudede have such contempt for apes and "animal instincts"? Is he going to apply "Meat is Murder" morality to primates? (Besides, they're so dirty!) Or does he not feel the awesome and primal beauty in the whole "Dawn of Man" sequence? If he doesn't, I suppose it's no wonder he sees no wonder in the rest of the movie.

What the hell is wrong with the studio risk-management -- er, movie -- business these days? I share some of my own modest ideas for improvement in an "Open Letter to Hollywood" at MSN Movies.

Now, some people say everything is just fine, and that we've even had a better-than usual crop of summer pictures this year: "Knocked Up," "Ratatouille," "Superbad," "The Bourne Ultimatum"... On the other hand, there's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Hostel Part II," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"... These, I submit, are conscious or unconscious cries for help.

None of my prescriptions is a panacea, but among the measures I suggest Mr. and Ms. Hollywood might want to consider are: more nudity (way more nudity); less emphasis on pain and torture as a form of entertainment (bad for concessions sales, for one thing); better recycling of stars who have fallen out of fashion (like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction"); watch HBO and learn about sex, violence, character, and storytelling; don't keep making sequels until the original audience hates you for it (even the last installments in "trilogies" tend to range from disappointing to insulting); stop wasting time and depleting resources fighting protracted, losing battles against technologies that have always proven to make you more money in the end: "The future arrived the day before yesterday and you're still pretending it's due next week."

An excerpt:

...[Why] why do adults in Hollywood movies still behave as if they're on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"? (Nothing against "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which is one of the great achievements in television history, but you know what I mean: Rob and Laura not only slept in separate twin beds but they always wore pajamas.)

Sex in the movies seemed like it was going somewhere in the '70s, with "Five Easy Pieces," "Last Tango in Paris" and "Don't Look Now." In 1993, the great Julianne Moore played out a full-frontal scene -- an argument at home with her husband -- in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," and it wasn't the nudity that was shocking, it was the physical and emotional reality of the scene. Do you know people who pop out of bed after sex sporting underwear? Who's in such a blasted hurry to get dressed?

The best special effect in the history of movies is the human face, with the human body coming in a close second. Use it. You think torture porn sells? The audience for porn-porn is exponentially larger. (Have you heard of this thing called the World Wide Internets? It revolutionized a whole lucrative section of the movie industry -- mostly the one located beyond Warners, Disney and Universal in the farther reaches of the San Fernando Valley.)

Read the full "letter" here.

Got any advice for "Hollywood" yourself?

So many movies have opening shots that are like overtures, condensed miniatures of the whole film. In Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" you might even say it contains the entire movie in one shot. Not only does it begin with the ending, but the movement of the shot (together with the next one) takes us from underground (the land of the subconscious, the imagination) up into the light of day -- or, looked at another way, from political and psychological repression into the liberation of the open air. This presages the momentum of the entire movie.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is so locked into the emotional and fantasy world of its protagonist, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), that the camera itself lies on its side next to her and is then plunges vertiginously into her pupil, entering her head, where the movie takes place. This initial dazzling sweep (actually a composite shot, but executed in once continuous motion) sucks us into the movie so quickly that we barely register what we've seen until the end, when we remember these prophetic first few seconds from the start of the movie.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is riddled with pupils and irises, holes and portals that lead to new worlds. In this first shot, we appear to rise out of the ground (although it's a right-to-left movement, reversing time), into Ofelia's eye into a fantasy realm of her own creation, and then moves back to the right (setting the story into forward motion), following a running figure (Ofelia herself) up a circular stairway and through another doorway, into another chamber, with another stairway. The next shot follows her up the stairs, leading through a reverse of the opening pupil-shot: an eye-hole flooded with white light. And, with that, the movie-proper begins...

Roger Ebert has published a Great Movies review of "Pan's Labyrinth. My own review, originally in the Chicago Sun-Times, is at RogerEbert.com, too, in the Editor's Notes section.

Nobody does a better job of reminding us that movies are always in the present tense, no matter how long ago they were made, than movie historian, critic, and (above all) enthusiast Leonard Maltin, who's celebrating the fifth anniversary of his own, personal movie-zine, "Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy" ("A Newsletter for People Who Love Movies"). That's right -- it's a newsletter. As in, printed on paper and snail-mailed to you. The "Collector's Corner" of the most recent issue (which just arrived in my mailbox today), appropriately features some vintage promotional envelopes -- one from RKO studios, and one "Direct From Location" in Old Tucson, AZ, for Wesley Ruggles' "Arizona," starring Jean Arthur. I love Jean Arthur. Almost as much as Barbara Stanwyck.

Though he also has a web site (and writes a "Journal" -- not a blog!), I love that someone of Leonard's stature still puts out a good, analog-style newsletter. (Could we consider it "artisanal"?) But, of course, it's also perfectly in character for Leonard, someone whose passion for movies has always been deeply personal as well as professional. (I take pride in getting Leonard on the web in the first place. He used to fax his weekly columns to me at Cinemania Online, which was a bit "klugey," as we used to say. So, I went to his house and set him up on e-mail in 1996 or so. Leonard was an ebay early-adopter -- for his astounding collection of movie memorabilia, of course -- and once he discovered e-mail, he took to it like a sprocket to celluloid.)

The new issue features an interview with 92-year-old Leslie Martinson, a television director and former MGM script supervisor who worked for Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, Sam Wood, Rouben Mamoulian and others, and who has plenty of stories to tell -- including anecdotes about Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

"Long before I had any real awareness of directors and their careers, I knew the name Leslie H. Martinson," Leonard writes, recalling his days as a budding auteurist. "No one who watched television in the 1950s and '60s could have avoided seeing that name. It was emblazoned on countless TV shows, ranging from "Topper" and "The Millionaire" to every Warner Bros. show imaginable, when that studio dominated the airwaves..." Martinson directed episodes of such series as "Maverick," "Hawaiian Eye," "77 Sunset Strip," "Mannix," "Mission: Impossible," "ChiPs," and "Dallas" -- and some movies, too ("Lad: A Dog," "PT 109," the 1966 feature "Batman," based on the hit TV show).

The cover story, "Grade B -- But Choice," is devoted to an obscure 1934 musical called "Young and Beautiful," featuring "budding starlets, grade-A character actors, grade-B musical numbers, a pair of vaudevillians, a look behind the scenes of Hollywood, bogus appearances by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and a script by Dore Schary" [later famous as a producer of films such as "Crossfire," "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," "They Live By Night" and "The Red Badge of Courage"].

Maltin describes "one of the most bizarre musical numbers ever staged, in which actors wearing full-face masks of major stars appear on stage together," along with the WAMPAS girls, beauties selected by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers -- an organization that, between 1922 and 1934, chose an annual list of promising "Baby Stars," which included Clara Bow, Mary Astor, Fay Wray, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Lupe Valez, Jean Arthur (!), Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart.

These stars were not on display in "Young and Beautiful," however. (Betty Bryson, anyone? Dorothy Drake? Hazel Hayes? Lucile Lund? Neoma Judge?) Imagine this:

At first, youre not sure whether or not to believe your eyes; many of the caricature masks are quite good. Some of the performers adopt the actors' body language, and appear in costumes from the stars' most recent roles: John Barrymore as he appeared in "Reunion in Vienna," Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa from "Viva Villa," George Arliss as "The Iron Duke," Joe E. Brown in uniform from "Son of a Sailor," Eddie Cantor in costume from "Roman Scandals," along with Clark Gable, Maurice Chevalier, Adolphe Menjou, Jimmy Durante, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. After an introductory sequence, the bogus stars participate in a kind of elaborate parade with the WAMPAS lovelies.

If that doesn't sound tantalizing, I don't know what will.

Believe it or not, "Young and Beautiful" is still available on VHS from Turner Classic Movies.

Thanks, Leonard! Here's to five -- or 55 -- more years of film fanaticism. You're right: "We movie nuts have to stick together..."

Adding further grist to the discussion of "critical sameness" ("The Stepford Critics?)," Village Voice Media has cut another (film-)critical voice from its payroll. This time it's National Society of Film Critics member Rob Nelson, of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. GreenCine Daily quotes critic Dave Kehr:

This is not good. Soon, we will have a choice between the re-animated Paulettes who dominate the print media and the Knowles-nothing fan boys who dominate the internet. Which in my book isn't much of a choice at all.

(See Kehr's clarification in comments below.)

As far as I can tell from the CP web site, Nelson's final piece for them was on the critically acclaimed documentary "No End in Sight" ("Surge This," August 22, 2007):

As the movie's more begrudging admirers will likely acknowledge, Ferguson is no Michael Moore. His background is as a scholar and a Brookings wonk, and "No End in Sight" — his first film, amazingly — is less a work of investigation (or activism) than history. There's no psychology in the movie (e.g., Dubya has daddy issues), and neither are there conspiracy theories (e.g., the war is about redrawing the Middle East map and further fueling Halliburton's tank). On some level, it even endeavors to be a film without politics—and might be that if such a thing were possible. [...]

Here are questions cinephiles and critics still hear all the time: "Why do you like old movies and foreign movies so much? What about new movies? Aren't you just being elitist to say you like movies that are in black and white or have subtitles? Movies are supposed to be fun!" The implicit assumption is that "old movies" are outmoded movies and that new movies (with the latest technologies, unrestricted by old codes regarding sex, violence, drugs and other content) are inclined to be more liberated or superior. Oh, and that "fun" cannot be inspired by anything made before one was born. Not that there's anything inherently inferior about recent, English-language movies, either, but what's wrong with a kiss, boy? (Yes, I quote ol' Monty Python a lot.)

I like to counter this narcissistic question with another proposition: "Think of the new music you've heard that's been issued over the last year. Is more of it "better" than what's been made over the last 100 years? Would it be "elitist" to say that it's more likely you'll find more favorites from the last 99 years than from the last one? Even in purely statistical terms, it just makes sense.

Let's say I'm an even 50 years old. Well, movies themselves have only been around for about 100 years, so I would not be surprised to find that I had at least as many favorites that were made before I was born (1957) as I do that were made since the advent of my existence. Now let's assume that I am turning 30 in 2007. If I say I'm really interested in movies, then it shouldn't seem the least bit unlikely that I've seen more great movies made between 1900 and 1977 than I have between 1977 and now. Especially since so many of them are so easy to see -- whether on basic cable (Turner Classic Movies) or DVD.

I know, I know -- there are people who don't like musical styles of the past, either. They don't like punk or rockabilly or bebop or big band swing or Western swing or blues or Romanticism or Baroque music. And that's their taste, and they're entitled to it. But, if they haven't been sufficiently exposed to these styles, that doesn't mean those tastes are terribly well-rounded tastes. (This is where we could argue about whether some "opinions" carry more weight than others in a debate.) We don't have to like everything, we just need to have enough knowledge and experience to know what it is we don't like.

The question itself seems understandable, if misguided, at first hearing. Until you consider it for about three seconds. And then you see how insulting it really is, because another underlying assumption is: "You can't really like that stuff, can you?"

As Sammy Davis, Jr., one wrote: Yes, I can. (Whether Frank Sinatra says it's OK or not.)

Is Beyonce a greater singer because she's relatively new and young and recorded with the latest technology? Are Aretha Franklin and Edith Piaf and Dinah Washington and Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and Susannah McCorkle and Billie Holliday and Astrud Gilberto automatically not as good because they recorded a lot of their best stuff earlier -- and some of it was not in English? It just depends on what you like, not on when it was new.

So, why do cinephiles and critics like old movies, and movies from other lands, so much? Maybe for the same reason oenophiles like vintage wines so much: They've stood up over time, and different regions have different styles and distinctive flavors. And maybe because it's part of the definition: Anybody who doesn't consider movies made more than 10 or 20 or 30 years ago has no business calling him/herself a critic or cinephile any more than somebody who dismisses the traditional cuisines of the world could be considered a gourmet. (I've been watching "Top Chef," you see...)

Longtime Scanners commenter and Ebert correspondent Ali Arikan, in Istanbul (one of my favorite cities), solves the mystery of The Sixth Man in "The Godfather" (or "One," as they say in the Sopranos family) and "The Godfather, Part II" in Roger Ebert's latest Answer Man column. The unidentified man in question is present during the meeting in which the Corleones plan the killing of a New York police captain. And his name is...

... Rocco Lampone... [whom you may remember from] the earlier scene in the film where Rocco executes Paulie in the car as Clemenza urinates outside (the “leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene).

... He eventually becomes one of Michael’s two caporegimes (Al Neri is the other one). Incidentally, it is Rocco who, in the second film, assassinates Hyman Roth at the airport, only to be shot in the back by a police officer as he tries to flee the scene.

Read the full item here and last week's original question here.

Edward Copeland, mastermind and organizer of the online ""Best" non-English language films poll, reports that Danny Leigh at the film blog at The Guardian (UK) is wondering about our motives ("The view: Is Hollywood America?"):

Naturally it's nice to see this kind of attention lavished on some of history's finest yet lately neglected films; but between Copeland's poll (coming after The Guardian's similar exercise earlier in the year) and the surging popularity of foreign movies in the UK, I can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that - and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled. In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?

If so, it's clearly a phenomenon with differing degrees of enmity; few US bloggers are likely to share the anti-Americanism of many British audiences. And yet in both cases there may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of US foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren't just dopey time-killers - but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.

I see his angle regarding Hollywood hegemony, but to attribute anti-American (or, rather, anti-Bush) motives to this particular project is stretching things quite a bit.

When it comes to Hollywood movies, I thought we had the British (Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat) and the French (the Cahiers du Cinema crowd) to thank for originally helping us see the artistic worth of American studio pictures once dismissed as "dopey time-killers."

On the other hand, according to the incessant drumbeat of Fox and the rest of the far-right media, "Hollywood" is America's greatest enemy (since Ronald Reagan left town, anyway) -- especially its outspoken movie stars and Jewish singers! Their favorite targets are Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand... So, in this climate, if we really wanted to appear "anti-American" (by their definition) wouldn't we actually align ourselves with "Hollywood"?

But this effort to showcase films that aren't in our native tongue (including non-British films, if you want to put it that way) has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It has to do with looking beyond the English-speaking film-world to... the rest of the world and the diversity of movies beyond the five government-selected nominees for the annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the like.

There's a movie moment for nearly every occasion in life. Take this one from Harold Meyerson -- arguing against impeachment (of Bush and Cheney, anyway) in a cover story in The American Prospect:

You may recall the scene in Clint Eastwood's 1992 Western "Unforgiven" where Eastwood's character levels his gun at Gene Hackman's malevolent sheriff, whom he is about to dispatch to hell's lower depths. "I don't deserve this," Hackman protests. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," Eastwood replies, and pulls the trigger.

And that -- a touch overstated, I'll admit -- is pretty much my position on impeachment. Does George W. Bush deserve to be impeached? Absolutely. Problem is, that doesn't resolve the question of whether trying to impeach Bush (and, necessarily, Dick Cheney, too) is a good idea.... "Deserve" does have something to do with it, but not enough to carry the day. At least, not this day. [...]

Are movie critics too much alike? Not just in their opinions, but in their very approach to movies, or their writing styles? In March, Andy Horbal, formerly of the film criticism blog No More Marriages! and now writing at Mirror/Stage, observed, "When looked at side-by-side at sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes most movie reviews reveal themselves as guilty of a shocking degree of sameness."

Of course, 10 or 20 years ago, virtually nobody outside a newspaper's local circulation area would have any idea of what its movie critic said about a particular film. I wonder: Are aggregation sites like RT and Metacritic revealing sameness, or influencing it, or creating an illusion of it? Could this appearance of uniformity have something to do with the little chunk-ettes these sites choose to excerpt from the reviews -- not unlike the (even shorter) ones studios choose to use in ad campaigns?

In early February, preparing for his contribution to my Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon, Andy was in the winter of his discontent about film criticism in general:

I'm frustrated by the film blogosphere. I'm also frustrated by journalistic film criticism, and the primary problem in both cases is what I see as a plague of sameness. Additionally, I'm frustrated by the imitative quality of much blog writing: specifically, the way film blogs imitate journalistic film criticism which, as I said, frustrates me itself.

As I've written before, I think these are golden days for film criticism -- in large part because of the unprecedented explosion of writing now easily accessible on the web: not only the writing of big, established critics and scholars, but the distinctive voices and perspectives of many bloggers who in the past would not have had access to a publisher, or an audience. At our fingertips we have not only considerations of new movies, but vast archives of writing, from the present and the past, about the whole history of movies.

This has never been possible before, when you'd have to make a trip to the library to physically search for newspapers and magazines, perhaps in bound volumes or on microfilm. Now, no matter how small a town you live in, as long as you can get on the Internet, you have access to much of what was once available only in big-city libraries. And, if you have a mailbox, you can watch or rent more movies on DVD (through NetFlix, for example) or on cable or satellite TV (Turner Classic Movies, On Demand, premium channels or any number of pay-per-view services, including Amazon Unbox) than you'd ever have had the opportunity to see in any major city over the course of several years. (How many times were "Le Samourai" or "Madame de..." or "Celine and Julie Go Boating" or even "La Dolce Vita" actually projected on screens in your town during the 1970s, '80s or '90s? They and many thousands of others are now available everywhere, all the time. That is revolutionary -- beyond anything we could ever have predicted in the 1970s, when we saw these films in 16mm student film series or film societies. Or, if we were lucky, in 35 mm at rep houses, but even then the prints were often dirty, scratchy, choppy or multiple-generation dupes.) All this access also allows us to correct the millions of errors contained in pioneering works of film criticism that were, of necessity, based on old notes or faulty memories. The movies are more alive to us than ever.

I hold movie bloggers (and web sites) to a higher standard than I do daily newspaper critics, because they have luxuries of time and space and choice that the pros don't: 1) they don't have to write on deadline about something they've seen only once before it is released; 2) they can take the time (if a film is on DVD) to be sure they quote it correctly (not just rely on memory or notes hastily scribbled in the dark), and even provide clips or frame grabs to illustrate their points; 3) they can include hyperlinks to related sources of information and opinion; 4) they get to pick and choose which movies they actually want to write about, instead of being limited to what we used to call "the review treadmill" of whatever happens to be opening this week; 5) they are not subject to the many, many constraints of conventional print journalism, including limited word counts, layout restrictions, editorial concerns about writing for a "broad" or "mainstream" readership, and so on.

There's a lot of amateurism on the web -- which can be refreshing and stimulating (especially when, as Andy points out, the writers do not try to imitate some mythical "professional" style, and instead write in their own voices), or it can be embarrassing and stultifying (when ignorance combines with arrogance and a dull or strident writing style). At the same time, there are a plenty of reviewers holding jobs with major newspapers or magazines whose stuff isn't up to the standards -- of readability, accuracy, knowledge, or basic interest and engagement -- that I would consider "professional" quality, either. Yet some bloggers have all this and more. In most cases, they've got everything but longtime professional (i.e., paycheck-cashing) experience writing about movies. (Just try reading some of those reviews you find on RottenTomatoes for some excellent negative examples. Next time you read a printed review, ask yourself if you think this writer actually likes his/her job. Or movies. You may have discovered one of those former sportswriters or feature reporters who've been unceremoniously shifted over to the "movie beat.")

I was not familiar with TotalFilm.com, until I spotted a link over at Movie City News.

Thanks a lot, guys.

The link was to a pair of articles listing Total Film's choices for "The Greatest Directors Ever" Part 1 (100 - 49) and Part 2 (50 - 1).

Will I return to this site? I think probably not. Why am I linking to it now? Because it's my shameless attempt to stimulate discussion, which I hope will be on a more informed level than this list. Or maybe it's just to have a laugh. Or a moment of sadness. What do I think of the list itself? Well, let's see:

Baz Luhrmann is #97.

Tony Scott is #74, just edging out Milos Forman, Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Buster Keaton, who comes in at #88.

Bryan Singer is #65, two slots below Robert Bresson, who immediately follows Sam Raimi.

Rob Reiner is #35.

Michael Mann (#28) is on the list, but Anthony Mann is not.

Bernardo Bertolucci is... not on the list.

Otto Preminger is... not on the list.

Richard Lester is... not on the list.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is... not on the list.

Max Ophuls is... not on the list.

George Cukor is... not on the list, but George Lucas (#95) is.

Andrei Tarkovsky is... not on the list.

Eric Rohmer is... not on the list.

Claude Chabrol is... not on the list.

Luchino Visconti is... not on the list.

Vittorio De Sica is... not on the list.

Michelangelo Antonioni is... not on the list. Not even the top 100.

What's worse are the little names they have for each director. Sophia Coppola (#99) is "The dreamer" ("Dreamy, brave and cool, this Coppola is doing it for herself"). Singer is "The new Spielberg." Robert Altman (#26) is "The outsider" -- oops, but so is Hal Ashby (#58). Somebody ran out of labels. Well, at least they are not outside all alone; they are outside together. Sam Fuller (#50) is "The hack." Mike Leigh (#49) is "The grouch." Quentin Tarantino (#12) is "The motormouth."

OK, that's enough. Have at it if you feel like it. If you don't feel like it, you'll probably live.

ADDENDUM: A reader, spleendonkey, describes TotalFilm as a British magazine aimed at teens and pre-teens, designed to broaden their film horizons. For the record, here's the mag's description of itself on its subscription page:

In 2007, Total Film celebrates its tenth year of being the only film magazine that nails a monthly widescreen shot of the whole movie landscape. It’s the essential guide for anyone who’s passionate about movies - whether they’re into Cruise or Cusack, Hollywood or Bollywood, multiplex or arthouse, popcorn or - er - sweetcorn. Each issue is pumped full of reviews, news, features and celebrity interviews on all the latest cinema releases. The all-new home entertainment section, Lounge, is the ultimate one-stop-shop for everything you should care about in the churning world of DVDs, books, videogames and, occasionally, film-related novelty furniture. The mag regularly features highly desirable, Ebay-friendly FREE stuff - exclusive film cells, posters, postcards, DVDs… We’re currently in discussions with Health & Safety operatives about sticking a magical compass to the cover when "His Dark Materials" comes out. Subscribe to Total Film now, or forever be belittled by precocious children in discussions about what’s best and worst in movieland.

Doesn't sound all that different from Entertainment Weekly to me, but there you go...

If moviemaking were a science, then it would be a science. But guess what? Quite often elements that have nothing to do with the movie itself -- timing, release pattern, marketing, advertising -- have more to do with what makes the thing a hit or a flop. Especially today, when pictures are in and out of theaters before the public has a chance to decide whether they're worth seeing -- much less worth seeing again. Repeat business, which used to be a big factor in determining a hit, doesn't really kick in until the DVD release anymore.

But there are still would-be alchemists who imagine they can scientifically -- or, at least, statistically -- measure the ingredients of a successful movie. Take Professor Dean Simonton at UC Davis, for instance. He says he's isolated the components of the magical formula that accounts for a movie's appeal, with audiences and with critics.

Can you guess what they are? Of course you can.

Christy Lemire, who is identified as "AP Movie Critic," reports for the Associated Press ("Study analyzes secrets to movie success"):

Movies are supposed to be about getting lost in emotion. But one scientist has broken down the film industry to cold, hard facts. A psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, has done a statistical study of thousands of movies to determine what makes them critical darlings or box-office hits.

Continuing our discussion about the nauseating properties of hand-held, quick-cut, whip-pan, rack-focus camerawork, David Bordwell sends along this account of an unlucky filmgoer who saw "The Bourne Ultimatum" in IMAX:

We went to see "BU" on the IMAX in San Francisco. Near the end, when Webb is having the flashback to when he is forced to show his commitment to the project, the lady next to me spontaneously unleashes a huge amount of vomit all over my leg and all over the floor in front of her! I have never experienced anything like it in my life!

Now all the action sequences, the nauseating use of moving cameras, and the relentless score were enough to make anyone dizzy, but to throw up?

This, as DB observes, is truly a "Technicolor yawn."

That's what flashed through my mind when I saw this top image in an online ad, anyway. One of these pictures is from a "Star Wars" movie (I forget which one, but it was Episode I, II, or III, I can tell you that). The other is from "Resurrecting the Champ," starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett. Can you tell which one is which?

(Hint: One of the movies does not, as far as I know, feature the Grand Master of the Jedi Order.)

Answer: In the top image, Jackson plays an older Yoda. In the bottom picture, Yoda is played by a different actor.

Two gay icons in a network TV musical number celebrating illicit drug use. The "Anything Goes" of the 1970s. Have times changed, do you think?

(Than kyew to Dina Martina.)

An ad hoc bunch of 51 online movie enthusiasts (online movie critics, bloggers, et al.), organized by Edward Copeland, the eponymous proprietor of "Edward Copeland on Film," recently composed our unordered lists of up to 25 most significant (or enduring or even favorite) "foreign-language" talkies.

Eduardo (as he might be known in, say, Mexico or Spain or Uruguay or Nicaragua or Puerto Rico) took on the gargantuan task of tabulating the ballots and coming up with the initial list of 122 nominees. As he explains:

I set a few guidelines for eligibility: 1) No film more recent than 2002 was eligible; 2) They had to be feature length; 3) They had to have been made either mostly or entirely in a language other than English; 4) Documentaries and silent films were ineligible, though I made do lists for those in the future if this goes well. In all, 434 films received votes, not counting those that had to be disqualified for not meeting the criteria.

In order to make the final ballot, films had to receive at least three "votes." I'm happy that most of my initial choices made the finals. And there were five I've never seen, so I have these to look forward to: Elem Klimov's "Come and See," Sergio Corbucci's "The Great Silence" (a spaghetti western), Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood For Love," Bela Tarr's 7.5-hour "Satantango," and Hayao Miyazaki's anime "Spirited Away." (And I've never made it all the way through "Amelie" or "Chungking Express.")

This exercise also reminded me of a bunch of movies I need to re-watch, because it's been too long (at least 20 years) and I don't remember them very well, including: Jacques Rivette's "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (always hard to see, but available on Region 2 DVD, at least), Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Days of Wrath," Lucino Visconti's "The Leopard," Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Story of the Late Crysanthemums" (and, for that matter, "The Life of Oharu," which deserved to be on the list and which I have on import DVD), and Edward Yang's "Yi-Yi" (which I've been meaning to revisit since his untimely death).

Best of all, the list serves as a reminder that the vast majority of these films, available on DVD, are easier to see now than they have ever been since they were made! Most are just as easy to borrow from NetFlix as "Wild Hogs."

For my Own Personal List, and some observations about the preliminary results, click to continue...

Meanwhile, if any of the participants -- or any readers -- would like to publish their own lists, please feel free to do so in comments! I'll show you mine if...

In the discussion about my hypothetical Athiest Film Festival (before the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni), I was trying to get at the difference I see between Bergman's theological sensibility (seeing/defining the world in terms of man's relationship with god, even if that relationship involves god's silence, indifference, death or nonexistence) and a view in which god is not only not a default position, but not even a question. This, I think, is closer to Antonioni's aesthetic and philosophical outlook, at least as far as his films express it.

There's an excellent, and long overdue, article in the New York Times Magazine today ("The Politics of God"), which is primarily about how the West has (catastrophically?) failed to comprehend that, even in modern times, "theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."

The piece, by Columbia University humanities Professor Mark Lilla, is adapted from his upcoming book "The Stillborn God: Religion Politics and the Modern West," but the passage that got me thinking about the Atheist Film Festival (and the "Banana as Atheist's Nightmare") again was this one:

Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be....

Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.

In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth....

My question is: By what authority does anyone claim to know, and be able to interpret, the intentions of such a God? It's always puzzled me how many leaps of faith a person has to take before even getting to the idea of a deity... which may be one reason why, if I had to compare, I'd have to say Antonioni's films do speak to me more deeply and personally than Bergman's.

(Of course, when it comes to movies, you can usually just substitute the term "auteur" for "God" in that quotation above.)

See Martin Scorsese's eloquent appreciation of Antonioni for more...

The invention in the early 1970s of the camera stabilizer popularly known as the Steadicam (actually a brand name, like Kleenex or TiVo) was a milestone in the technology and aesthetics of film. The freedom and fluidity with which the camera could "float" through a scene was astounding. It was first used in films such as "Bound for Glory" and "Rocky" -- but try to imagine "Halloween" or "The Shining" without it. (On the other hand, the "Shaky-cam" created by Sam Raimi and crew for "The Evil Dead" -- which involved bolting a 16 mm camera to a two-by-four carried by two grips running through the woods -- had a lesser historical impact, but was comparably effective for its purposes.)

Woody Allen and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma used old-fashioned hand-held camerawork for "Husbands and Wives" (1992) -- most noticeably in the opening scene, which became notorious because it made some moviegoers dizzy or nauseous. Theaters posted signs at their box office windows warning people that the movie could induce motion sickness.

Roger Ebert has received a lot of Answer Man mail about all the jittery camerawork in Paul Greengrass's "The Bourne Ultimatum" (see "Shake, rattle, and Bourne!"). And now David Bordwell, in a characteristically well-researched and fun-to-read post on his and Kristin Thompson's blog ("Unsteadicam chronicles"), says: "A spectre is haunting contemporary cinema: the shaky shot."

... Some viewers and critics think the jarring quality of ["The Bourne Ultimatum"] proceeds from rapid editing. The cutting in "Bourne Ultimatum" is indeed very fast; there are about 3200 shots in 105 minutes, yielding an average of about 2 seconds per shot. But there are other fast-cut films that don’t yield the same dizzy effects, such as "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (1.6 seconds average), "Batman Begins" (1.9 seconds), "Idiocracy" (1.9 seconds), and the "Transporter" movies (less than 2 seconds). [...]

To put this in perspective, check out the Cinemetrics database (to which, of course, Bordwell is a contributor), and you'll find the average shot length of the late Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" is 18 seconds, while that whiz-bang "L'Eclisse" has a zippy 11.9-second average. (See Bordwell's article at Cinemetrics here.)

But as Bordwell explains, when it comes to the disorienting effect of some shots, it ain't the meter, it's the motion:

What's better than a cup of good, hot, black coffee? Well, nothing. But almost as good is the announcement of the "Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition" DVD box set (due Oct. 30, 2007), which will include both seasons of the show and -- for the first time ever on DVD -- the two-hour pilot episode! Not only that, but two versions of it: the one that originally aired on ABC, and the "European" version (with its own bizarre coda/ending) that was released in theaters overseas.

Oh, and that's not all. According to the My Two Cents blog at The Digital Bits:

You'll also get Log Lady introductions for each episode, never-before-seen deleted scenes, production documents, the 4-part "Secrets from Another Place: Creating Twin Peaks" documentary (includes "Northwest Passage: Creating the Pilot," "Freshly Squeezed: Creating Season 1," "Where We’re From: Creating the Music" and "Into the Night: Creating Season 2"), the "A Slice of Lynch" retrospective roundtable discussion video, the "Return to Twin Peaks" featurette, 13 TV spots, 3 image galleries (The Richard Beymer Gallery, Unit Photography and Twin Peaks Trading Cards), 3 Georgia Coffee commercials, Julee Cruise's "Falling" music video, 8 interactive maps and Kyle MacLachlan's monologue and "Twin Peaks" sketch from "Saturday Night Live." The episodes have all been remastered from the original negatives (a process personally supervised by Lynch) and will be presented in the original full frame aspect ratio with audio in both newly-mixed Dolby Digital 5.1 and the original 2.0.

Consider the new, two-disc DVD edition of Lynch's most recent feature "Inland Empire" a warm-up for this.

As for Lynch's own view on DVD extras, refer to Sean Axmaker's MSN Movies column quoted previously:

I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever. [...]

There are things in "More Things That Happened" [a selection of additional scenes on the 211-minute second disc] that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.

Obviously, I disagree with Lynch on the "commentaries" -- which provide one of the best ways of studying a film. But I see his point: When it's the filmmaker, rather than a third party (like a critic or a scholar) who is doing the talking, it makes the comments seem limiting, more like a statement than than an interpretation of the film. And Lynch does not like to put strictures on interpretations of his work. (I've seen him, in audience Q&A sessions, tell people when they're just flat-out, off-the-charts wrong about second-guessing his intentions, though.)

(Thanks to Jeff Shannon for passing along this news.)

The late Merv Griffin (July 6, 1925 - August 12, 2007) was in "Cattle Town" (1952), "So This Is Love" and "The Boy From Oklahoma" (both 1954) and Paul Simon's "One Trick Pony" (1980). He played (or voiced) himself in other movies, including George Cukor's underrated "Rich and Famous" (1981) and two Steve Martin comedies, "The Man With Two Brains" (1983) and "The Lonely Guy" (1984). Backed by Freddy Martin & His Orchestra, he had a #1 hit in 1950 with "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." His popular daytime TV talk show, where the likes of Orson Welles used to stop by for a chat, ran (with a few brief interruptions, including an abortive shift to late-night) from 1962 to 1986. Not only was he nominated for Emmys (he also won some) and Golden Globes, but he owned the Beverly Hilton Hotel (among others) where the Globes and other award shows were mounted and telecast.

He was one of the richest people in Hollywood, but for a while he was perhaps most famous for "dating" Zsa Zsa Eva Gabor, if you can believe that. He was also the subject of a recurring impression by Rick Moranis ("Show us your lining... We'll be right back!) on "SCTV" -- perhaps most memorably the "Special Edition" episode in which "The Merv Griffin Show"" metamorphosed into "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

But Merv's most enduring legacy (somehow it seems right to call him "Merv") was that he created game shows: "Wheel of Fortune" and the king of 'em all, "Jeopardy" -- both of which remain on the air today.

I love "Jeopardy." But back in early April, I was greatly disturbed by the disgraceful (lack of) contestant responses to a Double Jeopardy category called "Foreign Cinema." First, guess which two (TWO!) they got right. Then let me know how you scored:

1) This Taiwanese director's films include "The Wedding Banquet," "Pushing Hands" & "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

2) The submarine models for this 1981 German film were also used in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

3) In this 1957 Ingmar Bergman film, a knight back from the Crusades challenges Death to a chess game for his life.

4) Truffaut provided the story for this 1959 Godard film in which Belmondo plays a hood who kills a cop.

5) This 1963 Fellini film was the basis for the 1982 Broadway musical "Nine."

Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo doooo...

Click below for answers -- er, questions.

The debate about whether video games are art continues unabated, but maybe there's another question that transcends it: Are video games just a smaller simulation of reality? Or, is life as we know it a form of video game? John Tierney, the libertarian former Op-Ed columnist for the NYT, ponders the notion that consciousness is digital and virtual:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. [...]

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

It's "The Matrix," "Blade Runner" and Errol Morris's superior and even more challenging and imaginative "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" merged into one. And, as David Cronenberg will tell you, evolution is not limited to the organic...

While I was gone, the New York Times printed a magnificent appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni written by Martin Scorsese, called "The Man Who Set Film Free." This piece, which begins with Scorsese recalling the profound effect of seeing "L'Avventura" for the first time in 1961, is so moving, and so perceptive, that I think it ranks with the best work Scorsese has ever done in any medium. Reading it brings tears to my eyes -- like a great film does.

Scorsese traces how the film keeps redirecting, reshaping, and dissolving the narrative before our eyes. Is it an "adventure" or an intrigue, as the title suggests? Or a missing-person mystery? Or a detective story? Or a love story? Or a betrayal/revenge story?

But right away our attention was drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then toward one another.

So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

The more I saw “L’Avventura” — and I went back many times — the more I realized...

Sean Axmaker talks to David Lynch about digital video in general, and the new DVD of "Inland Empire" in particular, over at MSN Movies:

You have, of course, never done a commentary track, but the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" disc could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.

I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever.

You have about 70 minutes of deleted footage in the "More Things That Happened" section and you've edited them so they play like their own dreamlike film.

Right. There are things in "More Things That Happened" that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.

In the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" supplements, you go on a rant about people watching movies on their phones. So how do you feel about the huge explosion of home theater?

I feel great about the home theater. It's so hopeful. It's a counterpart to the telephone experience, or the computer screen, but a lot of people are going to see their films on computers and phones and they will think they saw the films, but they will not have seen the film. And that's a sadness, as I say in "Stories," that's a real sadness. It's very hard to sink into a world when the picture is so small. I hope that the home-theater big screens at home will be something they embrace so they can feel and think in the world -- not have all this distraction around it.

I'm waiting for my DVD of "Inland Empire" to arrive. (I almost always watch them at night, with the lights off, on a 55" Sony LCD projection HDTV with surround sound.)

Even if you haven't seen Lynch's latest magnum opus ("Twin Peaks" was similarly big and deep), you can still check out my review, which was written as a sort of "Viewers' Guide to 'Inland Empire,'" suggesting various ways of looking at it. A synopsis would be impossible, anyway...

I'm still on vacation. Back Thursday with some thoughts on Martin Scorsese, the late Tony Wilson and Merv Griffin, Michelangelo Antonioni (surprise!), video games, the Meaning of Life, and more. In the meantime, here's what in any rational world would be a shocking clip (if the country wasn't already so jaded by nearly seven years of malfeasance), from a man with (evidently) unimpeachable integrity:

David Bordwell weighs in on the Great Debate of August with a substantial post called "Bergman, Antonioni, and the stubborn stylists," in response to Jonathan Rosenbaum -- who gives his verdict on a recent viewing of "Fanny and Alexander."

First, Bordwell offers his perspective:

Timing aside, there wasn’t much in the piece that hasn’t been said by certain cadres of cinephiles for decades. Back in the 1960s, people called Bergman “theatrical,” “uncinematic,” pretentious, and intellectually shallow. He was even accused of hypocrisy. His spiritual, philosophical films always seemed to depend on a surprising number of couplings, killings, rapes, and gorgeous ladies, often naked. Rosenbaum contrasts Bergman with Bresson and Dreyer, more austere religious filmmakers as well as great formal innovators, and this gambit too is familiar from late-night film-society disputes. Jonathan’s case is news in the good, grey Times, but it’s an old story among his (my) generation.

I think that this generational antipathy has many sources. While Bergman had considerable academic cachet, this may have hurt him with smart-alecks like us. Cinephile priests and professors told us that Bergman was a great mind, but we suspected them of snobbery, for they often disdained even foreign filmmakers who dabbled in popular genres. Kurosawa was admired for "Rashomon" and "I Live in Fear" rather than for "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." And many of Bergman’s intellectual fans despised the classic tradition of American studio film. Hitchcock had not yet convinced literature profs of his excellence, and Ford was a gnarled geezer who made Westerns. Bergman and his acolytes seemed just too square. Our money was on Godard, especially after Susan Sontag’s magisterial essay on him. [...]

Speaking just for myself, I didn’t have a deep love for Bergman, and I still don’t. I was drawn to his early idylls ("Monika," "Summer Interlude") and impressed but chilled by the official classics ("Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Seventh Seal," "The Virgin Spring"). "Persona," I admit, was a punch in the face. Seeing it in its New York opening, I felt that all of modern cinema was condensed into a mere eighty minutes. But no Bergman film afterward measured up to that for me, and after "The Serpent’s Egg" I just lost interest, catching up with "Cries and Whispers," "Scenes from a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander," and a very few others over the later decades.

Welcome back to Post-Bergman & Antonioni Art Film week (or two weeks) at Scanners -- and just about every other movie blog and film section out there! The term "art film" used to disgust me as a designation that's simultaneously crude and precious, but it's really just another sales pitch. Try booking what exhibitors matter-of-factly call an "art house" for a few years, as I did, and you learn the pure commercial exploitation value of promoting "art." It's just another niche-marketing approach, like selling horror pictures or porno. It also happens to be art, but in the marketplace that's almost beside the point. Except that it is the selling point. Like any promotional campaign, the "art movie" sell involves convincing your potential audience that they will be stimulated by the picture, and that they will want to be among the exclusive "first" to see it because it will make them seem cooler and ahead of the (pop-)cultural curve in conversations with their friends and co-workers.

Coming at the subject from a more critical/academic angle, Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity has a response to Jonathan Rosenbaum's NYT Bergman piece that relates to Rosenbaum's comments in answer to Roger Ebert's criticisms regarding the comparisons of Bergman to Carl Theodor Dreyer, even though Campbell's comment (quoted below) was posted before Roger's. Got that? Anyway, this is good stuff:

The question of form's importance really enters into whether or not Bergman's aesthetics are great, rich, profound, and if so, if they are such only insofar as they are "functional." To keep up the (perhaps shopworn) comparison: Dreyer was a storyteller, a narrative filmmaker, obviously. And no "more" cinematic than Bergman. But he was also, as I see it, more invested in the way his films felt, the way they impressed themselves on a viewer, than he was on letting his films breathe or go down unexpected sorts of paths. (It isn't so much innovation of film form/language as it is potentialy in film affect/reception.)

My impression of Bergman is that he was always going for effects, conclusions. To put it very crudely, because I can't find a more articulate or eloquent way of stating it, when I'm moved by Bergman--unsettled, saddened, uplifted--I feel like this movement is the calculation of form, that the form did what it was "supposed" to do. This isn't a sin, but neither is it the pinnacle of film art as I experience it and choose to think it. Whereas in Dreyer, I am constantly challenged, shot-to-shot sometimes, by the frictions and (im)balances and of shots, pictorial compositions, cuts, camera movements, etc. I don't feel like Dreyer is leading me to conclusions at all; there's a richness and a weirdness to shot combinations or spatial articulations that just doesn't exist in most of what I've seen in Bergman. It's not that Bergman is blind to form--clearly he cares about at least some major aspects of what he's doing, formally and aesthetically--but rather, a formal argument for or against his work should hinge on what he's doing with the form, and how & why.

I look forward to reading David Bordwell's thoughts on all this, which I hope will appear in the near future!

P.S. They did.

"... than a bad argument for something I hold dear," said Daniel Dennett, quoted at the top of the column to the right. In this case, the argument belongs to Camille Paglia ("Art Movies, R.I.P.") and the thing I hold dear is the intoxication of seeing a great movie. She does a lovely job of capturing what the latter is like (although she puts it firmly in the past tense), but spends too much of her time simply explaining what a dinosaur she has become. (What am I talking about? It's just Paglia in Apocalyptic Mode again. But I'm still trying to figure out why this column of hers bugs me so much.)

I have to admit: If I thought that in the last 30 years "only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film 'Star Wars' epic can genuinely claim classic status," you could stick a fork in me, too. Actually, you wouldn't have to. I'd do it myself, because I'd know I was done, without "A New Hope" for movies.

Paglia says t'was modernism killed the magnificent beasts of art cinema; I think it's more likely her own solipsism. Wallowing in what she calls a "cold douche for my narcissistic generation" (she's referring to the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni, natch), Paglia wonders: "I'm not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience." (Obviously, she doesn't read film critics or movie blogs, some of the best of which are also listed in the column to the right.)

But hers is not a rhetorical proposition. Posing a provocative open question is never enough. Paglia then formulates The Answer herself, and shuts the rest of us out in the cold, cold world of the Post-Boomer Death of Art:

The waning of art film has been just one of the bitter cultural disappointments that the baby-boom generation has had to endure. [...]

My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end -- and any liberals who don't recognize that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. When the gods are toppled, new ones will soon be invented.

While I sympathize with Ms. Paglia's Regrets ("I'm not sure who, if anyone, still views moviegoing as a quasi-mystical experience"), I resent her attempt to co-opt my pagan brand of atheism predicated on worship of both nature and art in the name of her art-movie secular-humanism death-wish. (OK, I wouldn't use the word "worship." What's wrong with a little "awe," girl? You needn't go leaping at "worship" like a bull at a gate.)

She sounds like a reactionary religious fundamentalist to me: My god will endure, resistance is futile, and any attempts to embrace another religion will only enable the false gods to rise! Is there some kind of contest between Pagliaism, Christianity, and Islam?

This, however, is quite beautiful, in a deliberately anachronistic fashion:

Other indelible memories: the grinding of the collapsing stone balustrade in the baroque gardens of Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad." The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park of Antonioni's "Blow-Up." The column of army tanks ominously rumbling through the city street in the unknown land of Bergman's "The Silence." The life-giving waters of the Fountain of Trevi suddenly stopping in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," stranding Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg mid-kiss.

Yet Paglia claims only the "Star Wars" movies are on that plane (ship?), "and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction." I'm not quite sure what conclusions she's trying to draw from that comparison. Are you?

(Thanks to girish for passing this along.

P.S. I just re-watched "The Silence" last night, in part because I didn't remember any "column of army tanks." Turns out that's because they aren't there. It's one tank that comes into the square below the hotel window, stalls, starts up again, stalls for a long time, and then moves on. It's ominous, but it's not the way Paglia describes it. Memory can greatly enhance these long-ago moments from the cinema, too...

Andrew Sarris, quoting himself, reminds us of what a big deal the late Michelangelo Antonioni -- and Euro-movie staples Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, et al. -- were in the late 1950s and '60s, at least in metropolitan centers like New York:

My own 1961 review in The Village Voice continued in the same vein. “As long as the great foreign films continue to trickle into New York at the present snail’s pace, the enthusiasm of discerning moviegoers will have to be concentrated on one phenomenon at a time. 1959 was the year of 'Wild Strawberries' and 'The Four Hundred Blows,' 1960 belongs to 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour' and 'Picnic on the Grass' [Jean Renoir]. So far this year it has been 'Breathless,' but now it is time for another blast of trumpets. Beginning April 4 at the Beekman Theater, 'L’Avventura 'will become the one first-run film to see in New York. The sixth feature film of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, 'L’Avventura' will probably be even more controversial than its French and Swedish predecessors, which have been conveniently misunderstood as problem tracts of old age, childhood, juvenile delinquency, miscegenation, nuclear warfare, or what have you.

“With 'L’Avventura' the issue cannot be muddled, Antonioni’s film is an intellectual adventure, or it is nothing. The plot, such as it is, will infuriate audiences who still demand plotted cinema and potted climaxes. A group of bored Italian socialites disembark from their yacht on a deserted island. After wandering about a while they discover that one of their number, a perverse girl named Anna, is missing. Up to that time, Anna (Lea Massari) has been the protagonist. Not only does she never reappear, the mystery of her disappearance is never solved. Anna’s fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) continue the search from one town to another, ultimately betraying the object of their search by becoming lovers. The film ends on a note of further betrayal and weary acceptance, with the two lovers facing a blank wall and a distant island, both literally and symbolically.”

So when exactly did I tire of Antonioni to the point of Antonioniennui? I am not sure. It may have been about the time of "The Red Desert" (1964), which I disliked, and well before "Blow-Up" (1966), which I liked enormously, unlike the late Pauline Kael, who dismissed it with a yawn.

It must be noted that at the time I waxed rhapsodic about "L’Avventura," I had not yet seen any of his five previous films.... "L’Avventura" was received here like a smashing debut film, and from then on it seemed just like more of the same, only less so, with "La Notte" (1961), "L’Eclisse" (1962) and most exasperatingly of all, "The Red Desert."...

Whose films today spark similar sensations, and love-or-hate debate? Living directors about whom your opinion really seems to matter, whose films are considered "must-sees" by serious moviegoers? The Coens? Quentin Tarantino? Brian DePalma? Steven Soderbergh? I'm asking. I don't think film festival mega-stars like Lars von Trier or Abbas Kiarostami or Wong Kar-Wai are nearly well-known or influential enough to have this kind of impact, on movie fans in general or on other filmmakers. Are any of the candidates European?

ADDENDUM: Another way of looking at it: Is there a filmmaker whose style is so recognizable that it could be parodied -- and mainstream moviegoers, from their 20s to their 40s, would know what was being parodied, as was the case with Bergman, who was lampooned by the likes of "SCTV," Woody Allen, and "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey"? (Then again, could a television comedy show as smart and aware of the diversity of culture and pop culture as "SCTV" exist today? Actually, such a thing did exist not all that many years ago on HBO: "Mr. Show with Bob and David.")

So much for the alleged lack of intensity in discussing the work of the late Ingmar Bergman. Roger Ebert responds to Jonathan Rosenbaum's critical take on Bergman:

I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader’s film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York Times op-ed attack on Ingmar Bergman (“Scenes from an Overrated Career,” 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity. It says more about Rosenbaum’s love of stylistic extremes than it does about Bergman and audiences. Who else but Rosenbaum could actually base an attack on the complaint that Bergman had what his favorites Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, “the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits?" In what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way? [...]

Rosenbaum writes, “Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr. Bergman’s strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.” This statement is perfectly accurate about Dreyer if you substitute his name for Bergman’s, and perfectly accurate about Bresson, if you substitute the names and change “Lutheran” to “Catholic.” Indeed, Bresson has been called the most Catholic of filmmakers. [...]

Finally, Rosenbaum laments how Bergman’s “mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated.” Hello? Bergman worked in Sweden! Does he forgive Ousmane Sembene’s African exteriors and mainly black-haired, brown-eyed cast members? Or the way Ozu used all those Japanese?

FYI: In a series of posts in a thread ("Rosenbaum disses Bergman in the NYT") at a_film_by, Rosenbaum elaborates:

"The article is meant to stir the pot, not close the lid."

* * *

"... I'm perfectly happy to listen to counter-arguments defending the beauty, seriousness, authenticity, and/or importance of Bergman's thoughts and emotions and what they contributed to our own thoughts and feelings. Maybe Bergman DID have something to teach us all about the Death of God. But will somebody please explain to me what this is? I'm waiting for someone to engage seriously with such issues--not assume that they're already settled and therefore unworthy of discussion."

* * *

"Not that this excuses anything, but my article went through many drafts, and some of the things I wanted to say necessarily got squeezed out--including more material about his theater work. (A dramaturge friend of mine is scandalized that there's been nothing written in the Times about Bergman's death by any of their drama critics.) For whatever it's worth, I'm something of a fan of one of Bergman's most unpopular and even scorned films, "All These Women" (but, then again, "Rhapsody in August" also happens to be one of my favorite Kurosawa films), and next weekend I'll be introducing and discussing "Sawdust and Tinsel" at a Bergman marathon organized by afb member Gabe Klinger.

* * *

"There are some very important Bergman films that I still haven't seen; I'm looking forward to seeing 'Fanny and Alexander' for the first time next weekend..."

* * *

He also wrote (though I can no longer find the post) that the piece was written at the request of a NYT editor (with whom Rosenbaum happened to agree that the obits were overpraising Bergman), and that he did not choose the headline or the insert quote himself.

Ebert reader Joe Krozel, who has contributed a couple puzzles to the New York Times, sent in a crossword he designed based on information found in Roger Ebert's annual Movie Yearbooks. The puzzle and the clues are at RogerEbert.com -- and the answers will be published in two weeks.

Following up on my recent posts about the commercial realities behind mid-century European "art films," and the various ways critics make sales pitches to exclusive audiences: Here's something fun and provocative from a 1964 French TV interview with Jean-Luc Godard, excerpts of which are included on the extras disc for the Criterion edition of "Contempt." (I transcribed the subtitles.) Like famed producer Bruce Dickinson, Godard put his pants on one leg at a time, but once they were on he made hits:

Q: Jean-Luc Godard, with "Contempt" you're once again on everyone's lips....

G: So much the better if it helps the movie.... I wouldn't really care as long as they go to my movies. That's what's important.

Q: What do you think of reviews?

G: I think much more highly of them than most people do. It's probably because I was a critic once, and I said a lot of bad things. I was cruel and mean to a lot of people. And though my opinions haven't changed, when I read bad reviews, the important thing for me is the discussion that's taking place. Whether it's good or bad is not the issue for me....

Q: Do you believe there's such a thing as a fair review?

G: (shrugs) Yes, but criticism isn't an artistic creation. It will always be inferior. Seventy-five percent of critics are only in that line of work temporarily. That's why critics are always bitter and sad towards those they praise and those they disparage.

Q: You became a director after having been a critic. Do you think it's a step up?

G: Yes, being a critic was a good experience. It's good training.

Q: Doesn't it run the risk of stifling the imagination?

G: No. It made me love everything. It taught me not to be narrow-minded, not to ignore Renoir in favor of Billy Wilder, or something like that. I like them both, even though they are extreme opposites. [...]

Q: ... Even with all her clothes on, ["Contempt" star Brigitte Bardot is] still a gold mine. [...] Those who would like to see Miss Bardot undress in a movie made by a bad or vulgar director wouldn't dare go see it. But with you their conscience is clean because it's art --

G: Good for them. They're right. If they find her pretty, as I do, there's no --

Q: Some of your films have been failures. How does that affect you?

G: One of my films in particular, "Les Carabiniers," wasn't even a failure. It was... nothing at all.

OK, as long as the simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have shaken the foundations of the pantheon and got us debating canons -- again: Near the end of the last millennium, I decided to do something difficult and convoluted and thoroughly silly. On this particular occasion I determined to figure out which 100 movies were the most highly regarded at the close of the century. I think this was in late 1998 or early 1999. But more recent films wouldn't have registered very high anyway, because I was using a larger historical sampling to compile the results.

I came up with some complex point scale for rating the movies by the awards and honors they had received, using a mixture of domestic and international, popular and critical sources. I no longer have any recollection of the formula I used, but I'm sure it was at least as complicated as the one for Coca-Cola. I know (given my personal bent) that I weighted, for example, the "Sight & Sound" international critics' poll more highly than, say, the Oscars. And I tried to find a mathematical way to properly consider and weigh American with non-English-language films (given the restrictions and biases of some sources), and older films with newer ones. The sources I used were (in no particular order): Academy Awards, "Sight & Sound" polls (1952, '62, '72, '82, '92), the first AFI 100 list, the National Film Registry (American films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress -- which had to be at least 10 years old), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards (1975 - ), the New York Film Critics Circle (1935 - ), and the National Society of Film Critics (1966 - ).

Although it seems inconceivable to me now, I actually put together several charts (spreadsheets!), so you could view the lists and the movies' individual honors, not only by rank, but by director, title (alphabetically), year/decade, -- and a comprehensive list of the 400+ titles that came under consideration, given my sources.

I doubt -- and I hope -- I will never be that anal again. But what I liked about the results was that they reflected a mix of "art films" ("The Passion of Joan of Arc," "Bicycle Thieves"), silents ("Greed," "Intolerance," "The Gold Rush") and popular titles ("West Side Story," "Annie Hall," "Schindler's List"). I was also pleased with the distribution over the decades, a little more balanced than you usually see in polls: two films from the 1910s; six from the '20s; 19 from the '30s; 16 from the '40s; 29 from the '50s; 19 from the '60s; 21 from the '70s; 13 from the '80s; and 14 from the '90s (which weren't quite over yet).

Point of interest: Bergman had three films on the list: "Persona" (22), "Wild Strawberries" (66), and "Fanny and Alexander" (84). Antonioni had one: "L'Avventura" (8).

Welles and Chaplin each had two films in the top 25. Other directors represented in the upper quarter include: Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Sergei Eisenstein, Stanley Donen, Steven Spielberg, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Vittorio de Sica, Woody Allen, Erich von Stroheim, Elia Kazan, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, D.W. Griffith, Jean Vigo, and Michael Curtiz.

The Big List begins like this:

I'm always intrigued when critics and academics try to characterize themselves -- or the appeal of something they like -- primarily in opposition to something else that they don't like. Or vice-versa. I'm not just talking about contrarianism but, specifically, about attempts to define or justify something not by what it is, but by how it allegedly does not resemble another thing. Like Jonathan Rosenbaum recently did with his pantheon-gate-slamming, anti-Bergman piece (e.g., "His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson..."), or Prof. Ray Carney in his intro/promo for a series of independent films that flew "under the radar" at the Harvard Film Archive. Tell me what you think of Carney's "Now how much would you pay?" sales pitch:

If we ask why many of these works are still lurking in the shadows or searching for a distributor, the reasons are not that hard to come up with. These films do not push dependable box–office ticket–sales buttons. Their characters are not “cute,” “charming,” or “sweet” in the "Napoleon Dynamite" way. Their stories are not “clever,” “crowd–pleasing,” or “feel–good” in the "Little Miss Sunshine" way. They do not feature big–name actors making “in–joke” cameos. Though most of these films are made by Gen–Y artists about Gen–Y characters, they don’t even fit the pattern of Gen–Y movies. Their male characters are not introverted and narcissistic; their female characters are not whiney or clingy; and their narratives are not reducible to the group–hug ethos that says everything will be OK if only you have friends. The films in this program do not pander to the prejudices or predilections of young viewers or attempt to flatter audience members of any age. They take the pulse of contemporary American life toughly and unsentimentally. They challenge the viewer to look at experience in new and potentially disorienting ways and, at their best, ask the viewer to think freshly about the untapped expressive possibilities of the art.

It seems to me that this exclusive hard-sell approach shamelessly panders to the prejudices and predilections of young viewers and attempts to flatter audience members of all ages.

At what point do critics turn into fashionistas, more concerned with dictating today's styles or appealing to hipper/holier-than-thou posers than addressing the movies themselves? To me, this seems like such an adolescent approach: "Yeah, man! Disco sucks!" We all do it on occasion, but some rants are more effective than others.

There's a terrific discussion at The House Next Door about Carney and his complaints about the lack of mainstream media coverage (greatly exaggerated by Carney) for the series he cannily sold as anti-mainstream. (What did the filmmakers themselves think of that approach?) I don't know how well Carney's laboriously insular sales pitch actually worked, selling exclusively to a crowd that wants to flatter itself as anti-mainstream and elite (or elitist). But for me Carney's prose (perhaps especially his patronizing use of the term "Gen-Y," which in his hands sounds more than ever like a personal lubricant) destroys any credibility he might have as someone capable of understanding what makes an interesting movie. All I know is what he dislikes about commercial and Sundance-indie stuff, which is pretty much the same crap we're all sick of. But what does that have to do making a series of "under-the-radar" movies sound appealing? Are these films worth seeing just because they're NOT "Napoleon Dynamite" or "Little Miss Sunshine"? Wow, what a recommendation.

Does Carney's approach turn you off as much as it does me? Do so-called "mainstream" anti-intellectualism and Carney's bitter and equally reactionary anti-anti-intellectualism seem like two sides of a coin?

From Raymond Ogilvie, happyreflex:

This is really the second shot, following a brief bit of above-cloud photography. Let's not be too picky.

It starts with a TV set turning on. A suitable enough opening that many films have used. We know that when the movie starts with some TV, always with a healthy dose of analogue noise, we're being greeted by a commentary on the movie's world before we enter it. The TV set itself has a retro-futuristic design; the kind that was popular at least from the 20s into the 50s. All smooth curves, no sharp angles. Red and blue lights outside blink on and off, casting subtle glows onto the scene.

The TV shows a commercial from Central Cervices. An imposing logo and a happy little jingle: "Central Services. We do the work, you do the pleasure!" And already we don't trust them! It's a very Orwellian thing. We've lost freedom of choice in this society, and that's exemplified here by Central Services. All our home repair needs are now taken care of by official government employees, who can be as inefficient, bureaucratic, and unaccountable for their own blunders as they please. The customer comes last.

Now here’s the Central Services spokesperson. He’s here to tell us about how we can replace our old, unsightly ducts with newer, more fashionable unsightly ducts. They just get in the way and clutter up your living space, don’t they? The ducts are just like the bloated, bureaucratic government: they exist only for their own benefit. The public is an afterthought. You’ll see just how little the bureaucracy cares about human beings when the innocent Mr. Buttle is wrongly arrested and accidentally killed during interrogation, and no one feels any remorse: they just don’t want to be stuck with the paperwork.

Watching Ingmar Bergman's "Shame" over the weekend (which I was pleased to find that I had not seen before -- after 20 or 30 years, I sometimes forget), I recalled something that happened around 1982. Through the University of Washington Cinema Studies program, we brought the now-famous (then not-so-) story structure guru Robert McKee to campus to conduct a weekend screenwriting seminar. McKee, played by Brian Cox in Spike Jonze's and Charlie Kaufman's "Adapation." as the ultimate authority on how to write a salable screenplay, has probably been the single-most dominant influence in American screenwriting -- "Hollywood" and "independent" -- over the last two decades. Many would say "pernicious influence." (Syd Field is another.)

It's not necessarily McKee's fault that so many aspiring screenwriters and studio development executives have chosen to emphasize a cogent, three-act structure over all other aspects of the script, including things like character, ideas, and even coherent narrative. Structure, after all, is supposed to be merely the backbone of storytelling, not the be-all, end-all of screenwriting. But people focus on the things that are easiest to fix, that make something feel like a movie, moving from beat to beat, even if the finished product is just a waste of time.

The film McKee chose to illustrate the principles of a well-structured story that time was Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring."

"Shame" is another reminder that Bergman's movies weren't solely aimed at "art" -- they were made to appeal to an audience. Right up to its bleak ending, "Shame" is a rip-roaring story, with plenty of action, plot-twists, big emotional scenes for actors to play, gorgeously meticulous cinematography, explosive special effects and flat-out absurdist comedy. I don't know how "arty" it seemed in 1968, but it plays almost like classical mainstream moviemaking today. (And remember: Downbeat, nihilistic or inconclusive finales were very fashionable and popular in mainstream cinema in the late 1960's: "Bonnie and Clyde," "Blow-Up," "Easy Rider," "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry"...),

It's important to remember that Bergman and his fellow Euro-titan Michelangelo Antonioni, who both died on the same day last week, were big-name commercial directors -- who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form. (The Beatles, who in 1964-'65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after "A Hard Day's Night"!) And if they hadn't been so popular and famous, they would not have been so influential. These guys won plenty of high-falutin' awards at film festivals, but they were also nominated for Oscars in glitzy Hollywood.

Jonathan Rosenbaum puts another nail in Ingmar Bergman's coffin in today's New York Times ("Scenes From an Overrated Career"). As important as Bergman was to the rise of European "art film," especially in the 1950s and '60s, Rosenbaum says, Bergman -- who was more a theatrical director than a cinematic one -- wasn't really adding anything new to the art of film, and his work hasn't held up over time:

Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.

What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits, as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.

The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere.

So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from? At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson. And for younger cinephiles like myself, watching Mr. Bergman’s films at the same time I was first encountering directors like Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, it was tempting to regard him as a kindred spirit, the vanguard of a Swedish New Wave.

It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless. The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new. [...]

It’s strange to realize that his bitter and pinched emotions, once they were combined with excellent cinematography and superb acting, could become chic — and revered as emblems of higher purposes in cinema. But these emotions remain ugly ones, no matter how stylishly they might be served up.

Michael Atkinson, who I quoted earlier in the week, makes some similar criticisms, yet comes to a different conclusion: "[N]owhere... is there a lazy, unambitious or unoriginal directorial moment."

I think there's some truth in both Rosenbaum's and Atkinson's assessments, but Rosenbaum seems more interested in asserting his own personal pantheon than in evaluating Bergman's oeuvre. Yes, the reputation of Bergman's work, and its former sense of vital importance, has undeniably receded. After all, it had practically nowhere else to go, given Bergman's overwhelming stature in the '60s and '70s. (On a personal note, I haven't felt compelled to watch or re-watched any of his films in years -- except "Persona" -- although I still treasure "Fanny and Alexander," and have fond memories of his early, funny pictures like "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "The Devil's Eye.") That's why, honestly, I haven't been able to write about Bergman myself this last week: He feels like an indistinct memory to me, safely enshrined as "classic" but almost taken for granted. Nevertheless, I've put some of his films at the top of my Netflix queue ("Shame," "Hour of the Wolf") in hopes of getting reacquainted.

From: Andy Horbal, Mirror/Stage:

"Army of Shadows" actually begins with an epigram: "Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you… you are my long-lost youth… "

Perhaps a French person would immediately recognize the film's subsequent opening shot as the ultimate unhappy memory, but it took a bit longer for this American viewer to grasp the significance of what he was seeing. The transition from a black screen with white letters to the Arc de Triomphe towering over a frame also marked by a pallid, even sickly, gray morning light is like the shock of abruptly waking up in the middle of a dream. The sound of marching drifts in from somewhere offscreen. ...

After a few seconds a column of soldiers emerges from the left of the frame. Dwarfed by the monument, they look like a line of black ants. A few more seconds and the cadence of their footfalls (which seem to grow steadily louder and more ominous) is joined by the sound of a military march. The beginning of the column reaches the middle of the Arc and sharply pivots right towards the camera, towards us.

"Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry. It's just the right shape for the human mouth.... And it's even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier."

That's Ray. He's from Down Under. He's talking about a banana. Or, as he calls it, "The Atheist's Nightmare" -- because a banana (or, at least, a "well-made banana") proves that god exists, because it is so much like a soda can. One day after the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the invaluable House Next Door featured this as the vuddeo Clip of the Day, perhaps to gently remind us of the world we actually live in:

To paraphrase Max von Sydow in "Hannah and Her Sisters," if Bergman and Antonioni could come back and view this YouTube clip, they would never stop throwing up. Me, I can't stop laughing in wonderment: What a piece of work is Man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! Anyway, this obscene bit is almost as funny as the Flash intro at Ray and Kirk (Cameron)'s evangelical web site, "The Way of the Master," where they claim they make some big claims:

"Did you know that every day 150,000 people die? People just like you and me.... Do you ever think about that? Isn't there something within you that says, "I don't wanna die!" That's your god-given will to live, and we hope you'll listen to it, because we make some big claims on this site..."

1) "We can all know what happens after we die. Absolutely, positively, without a doubt. Don't believe us? Then take a very simple test that will show you what's going to happen to you when you die..."

2) "We can finish the age-old debate about Intelligent Design versus evolution. Did we evolve -- or were we created? Is there a god who made everything, or are we just a cosmic accident? Our claim is that we can prove there is a god and do it in three minutes, without reference to faith or even to the bible...."