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January 2010 Archives

Pee-wee gets an iPad!

By
Jim Emerson
on January 29, 2010 5:45 PM | | Comments (11)

Cherry Bomb! The Sundance Swag Fest

By
Jim Emerson
on January 28, 2010 5:48 PM | | Comments (16)

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In today's New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes:

For almost as long as it's been in existence, the Sundance Film Festival has fended off criticism that it has gone Hollywood. [...]

But let us not be (entirely) cynical. For all its problems, the festival remains one of the most important in the world and the foremost launching pad for American independents.

Both parts of that last sentence are arguable, but if Sundance is (or has ever been) one of the most important film festivals in the world, I hope it's because it retains some power to launch American films, "independent" or otherwise, into the media and consumer marketplace -- and not just because it's a big party in an upscale ski resort town.

Ironically (intentionally?) embedded in the above article, however, was this (un-embeddable) Carpetbagger video about the exclusive swagfest -- the "gifting suites" to which persons of predetermined celebrity are invited and... "gifted" by corporations and boutique merchants. You may want to throw up (I did), but the shameless decadence is something to see. (Does the festival officially cooperate with these ventures? How do they determine who's attending and who's on their lists?)

Meanwhile, Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe says he's never heard more griping about the actual movies being shown:

Continue reading Cherry Bomb! The Sundance Swag Fest.

BREAKING: Generic News Story

By
Jim Emerson
on January 28, 2010 3:32 PM | | Comments (10)

(via Drew Tipson)

Also see: This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post.

Name That Director!

By
Jim Emerson
on January 26, 2010 11:44 PM | | Comments (77)

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Click above to REALLY enlarge...

UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...

Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.

In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)

Continue reading Name That Director!.

The Haneke MacGuffin: What is the mystery?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 22, 2010 2:32 PM | | Comments (4)

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"It's important to always try to tell a story in a way where there are several credible possible explanations. Explanations that can be totally contradictory!"
-- Michael Haneke

(This is a follow-up to a previous post: What is hidden in Caché?)

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com asks Michael Haneke about the surface mysteries -- the MacGuffins, as I like to think of them -- in "Caché" and "The White Ribbon":

AO: You spoke earlier about using the black-and-white photography and the narration as a distancing mechanism, a way to remind the viewer that the film is an artifact. There's another sense in which you are challenging the audience. As you did in "Caché," you lead us part of the way toward a solution of the central mystery: Who is committing these violent acts, and why? And then you seem to suggest that solving the mystery is not actually important.

MH: Those are the least important questions. In my previous film, "Caché," the question of who sent the videotapes isn't important at all. What's important is the sense of guilt felt by the character played by Daniel Auteuil in the film. But these superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It's relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.

Continue reading The Haneke MacGuffin: What is the mystery?.

Irreversible: Will he see it or will he pass?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 21, 2010 6:58 PM | | Comments (46)

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The decision to see a film is irreversible. The decision to not see it -- today, right now -- is not. It can be put off indefinitely, subject to reconsideration at any time -- until you run out of time, permanently -- but once you've seen the movie, you can't "urn-see" it, no matter how much you might want to. Innocence cannot be recaptured, virginity cannot be restored. In a suspenseful post at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio faces this dilemma head-on: Should he watch Gaspar Noe's grueling 2003 "Irreversible"? Sometimes, Dennis writes, he is nagged by the presence of films "that I feel an obligation to get to know, sometimes out of simple curiosity, sometimes because to not know them is to be left out of a conversation that might stretch beyond the boundaries of that one particular film, and sometimes I feel the desire to see a film because people I respect and trust advise me to see it because they hold it in high regard. That sense of obligation reared its head again this past week concerning Irreversible, a movie with a rather proud reputation for being a shocking, unrelenting, formally compelling but ultimately nasty piece of work."

Continue reading Irreversible: Will he see it or will he pass?.

What do we mean by the "worst" movies of the year?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 21, 2010 5:08 PM | | Comments (92)

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Of course, critics can only choose the best or worst of a given year from among the movies we've actually seen. I'm fortunate that I get to avoid most of the plain-old, garden-variety bad movies these days ("Old Dogs," "All About Steve," "G.I. Joe"). Something really has to be Monumentally Misconceived for me to consider it "the worst" -- which usually means there's a considerable amount of misapplied talent on display. So, I've managed to see only three of the movies on the consensus worst-list in the Vulture Critics' Poll. (Guess which three?) Was the #1 choice too obvious? See the whole "Bottom 11" after the jump. Individual critics' ballots and comments here.

Continue reading What do we mean by the "worst" movies of the year?.

Hitler on Leno

By
Jim Emerson
on January 21, 2010 1:47 PM | | Comments (11)

Of this I do not tire. Go ahead and click. You know what you're about to see -- but the subtitles are exceptionally humorous.

Continue reading Hitler on Leno.

What is hidden in Caché?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 21, 2010 1:35 PM | | Comments (1)

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In his recent Great Movies review of Michael Haneke's "Caché," Roger Ebert writes of a shot he believes may hold the key to the film's mystery:

How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that's in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke's "Cache" did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film. I was not alone. I haven't read all of the reviews of the film, but after seeing that shot I looked up a lot of them, and the shot is never referred to. For that matter, no one seems to point to a conclusion that it might suggest....

No, he's not talking about the final shot: "You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39," he says. "You tell me what it means. It's the smoking gun, but did it shoot anybody?"

Continue reading What is hidden in Caché?.

Thank you, James Cameron...

By
Jim Emerson
on January 20, 2010 3:54 PM | | Comments (18)

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... for confirming a few details in Entertainment Weekly: about CGI techniques (and your intentions) that I noticed when I saw "Avatar." James Cameron, I see you:

"[Bob Zemeckis ("Polar Express," "Disney's A Christmas Carol"] essentially is making animated films using an actor-driven process. His visual choice on 'Beowulf' didn't require photo-realism. 'Avatar' is a different kettle of fish. We were intercutting live-action footage with CG footage, so our CG had to be interchangeable with photography."

* * * *

There's a rumor going around that some of the humans in "Avatar" are CGI creations. Any truth to that?

''There are a number of shots of CGI humans,'' James Cameron says. ''The shots of [Stephen Lang] in an AMP suit, for instance -- those are completely CG. But there's a threshold of proximity to the camera that we didn't feel comfortable going beyond. We didn't get too close.''

Continue reading Thank you, James Cameron....

Leaked: New Leno Tonight Show opening

By
Jim Emerson
on January 20, 2010 11:28 AM | | Comments (7)

Vatican cautions against pantheism on Pandora

By
Jim Emerson
on January 14, 2010 11:23 PM | | Comments (37)

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Can you stand one more "Avatar" post? We've talked about the CGI, the design and palette, the politics, the ins and outs of shooting in 3D... but you can blame this one on the Vatican:

[Much] of the Vatican criticism was directed at the movie's central theme of man vs. nature.

[L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper] said the film "gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature." Similarly, Vatican Radio said it "cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium."

"Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship," the radio said.

Continue reading Vatican cautions against pantheism on Pandora.

The Mountain Goats: Love Love Love

By
Jim Emerson
on January 14, 2010 5:10 PM | | Comments (16)

(tip: @rcjohnso)

John Darnielle is one fine songwriter. I'm amazed at how people (mis-)interpret this song, from the Mountain Goats' 2005 album, "The Sunset Tree." Like many great songs, it's open to a variety of readings. But it's not a love ballad to love, love, love...

Continue reading The Mountain Goats: Love Love Love.

Life with Rohmer

By
Jim Emerson
on January 13, 2010 11:02 PM | | Comments (1)

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In the nearly three days since I learned of Eric Rohmer's death, I've been looking over his filmography, which has stimulated a flood of fond recollections. Few directors have left behind so many enjoyable, stimulating, gorgeous movies -- photographed by none other than Nestor Almendros until the mid-'80s, a beau mariage made in cinema heaven. I was trying to think of a Rohmer film I actively dislike... and I can't. (There are a few I haven't seen, a few I like more than others, a few I don't remember very well...) But a surprising number of them still live among my favorite movie-memories: "Perceval," "Summer"/"The Green Ray," "My Night at Maud's," "The Marquise of O...", "Pauline at the Beach," "Le beau mariage"...

At The Crop Duster, Robert Horton, who was discovering these movies at the same time I was, recalls Rohmer by resurrecting his terrific 1984 piece on "Pauline at the Beach," and by lightly tracing his own life through cinematic encounters with the director's movies in an entry he calls "A Rohmer Datebook."

First, a swell mini-overview from the former:

Rohmer has been on a hot streak lately. Keep in mind he was a slow starter compared to some of his friends in the French New Wave. Rohmer made short films during the 1950s, and he was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema, the magazine in which Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol et al. vented their auteurist spleens, from 1957 to 1963. Those other fellows had already collected an armful of international awards by the time Rohmer completed his first widely-recognized feature, "La collectioneuse," in 1967 (though he had been directing for some time already). That film was part of his contes moraux--Moral Tales--and the next entry, "Ma nuit chez Maud" ("My Night at Maud's," 1968), brought him shoulder to shoulder with the world's leading filmmakers. After he finished the Moral Tales, Rohmer took time out to pursue projects with settings completely different from the palpably modern landscapes of the six Moral Tales; predictably enough, "The Marquise of O..." (1976) and "Perceval le Gallois" (1978) were two of the best and most intriguing works of the decade.
Continue reading Life with Rohmer.

Voltaire addresses the voodoo of Pat Robertson across the chasm

By
Jim Emerson
on January 13, 2010 8:42 PM | | Comments (3)

From Voltaire's "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne," written in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755:

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother's breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
Tranquil spectators of your brothers' wreck,
Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
Let them but lash your own security;
Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.

That's Jeremy Renner in the bomb suit

By
Jim Emerson
on January 13, 2010 5:57 PM | | Comments (3)

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Ray Pride reports on the filming of Oscar favorite "The Hurt Locker" (just out on DVD) at Movie City Indie:

There are scenes inside the blast suit and simply crossing the frame where the character feels fully fleshed out, I tell [director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal] during an abbreviated interview in Chicago last July. As a past collaborator of Bigelow's, the writer-director Walter Hill liked to insist, character is revealed through action. [Lead actor Jeremy] Renner reveals character with every bit of his body. "I know! And he's in a bomb suit, no less," she laughs. "It was so hot," Boal adds, "it was hard for Jeremy to be in that bomb suit all of the time. The thing weighs like 85 pounds, it's a real bomb suit. Naturally, you're like, well maybe we can get a stunt guy to do some of this walking stuff and save Jeremy so he doesn't die. The sets are really long and he's walking up and down, we thought, shit, what if he gets heatstroke? He'd had heatstroke before. It's what 100 degrees outside? We tried, I probably grabbed every white guy in Jordan to audition for [Bigelow]: actor, non-actor, soldier, worked at the U. N., whatever."

"They studied his gait," she says, "they'd watch his walk. Couldn't do it." "We couldn't get a double," Boal continues. "Just put on the suit, walk down the street, that was the job." "Every single time, it was Jeremy," she says. "I tried it, everybody tried it!" "There's that kind of almost jauntiness to his gait, and cadence, that was unreplicatable. It was also part of that character."

Rerun: Conan O'Brien guests on Between Two Ferns

By
Jim Emerson
on January 13, 2010 5:04 PM | | Comments (1)

Consensus? Mulholland Dr. is LA Film Critics' movie of the decade, too

By
Jim Emerson
on January 12, 2010 9:03 PM | | Comments (39)

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Critical polls conducted by Film Comment, indieWIRE, the Village Voice/LA Weekly, Cahiers du Cinéma and now the Los Angeles Film Critics Association have all chosen David Lynch's 2001 "Mulholland Dr." as the best movie of the decade.

UPDATE 2/12/10: The Muriels and Slant Magazine also choose "Mulholland Dr." as best of the Aughts.

Full list below...

Justin Chang writes at LAFCA.net:

Call us provincial -- David Lynch's psychoerotic noir is one of the essential L.A. movies -- but the more significant reason for the film's enduring critical favor may be its deconstruction of the toxic allure of the Dream Factory. "Mulholland Dr." projects an ambivalence toward Hollywood with which almost any critic can identify: Moving images have the power to seduce and move us, but many of them are the products of a system that routinely turns dreams into nightmares and artists into meat. Famously salvaged from a rejected TV pilot, Lynch's film stands as both a cautionary tale and a mascot for the triumph of art and personal vision in an industry that, from where we sit, often seems actively devoted to the suppression of both. [...]
Continue reading Consensus? Mulholland Dr. is LA Film Critics' movie of the decade, too.

Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois: A knight on a soundstage

By
Jim Emerson
on January 12, 2010 4:57 PM | | Comments (7)

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I just wanted an excuse to publish a frame-grab from one of my favorite Rohmer movies, "Perceval." There's never been anything like it. I once double-billed it with its stylistic opposite, Robert Bresson's earthy "Lancelot du lac" (1974), but I'd also like to show it with a similarly soundstage-stylized biography of innocence, Alain Cavalier's "Thérèse" (1986), about St. Theresa of Lisieux.

"Rohmer's adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes 12th century Arthurian poem is a unique film, combining cinema, theatre, medieval music, iconography, mime and verse to create a stylised and surprisingly coherent spectacle: shot totally in the studio, its sets alone are worth the price of a ticket. But more astonishing, perhaps, is the way in which Rohmer translates the text into a moral investigation which frequently resembles his contemporary comedies as selfish young innocent Perceval, whose very naiveté literally disarms his enemies, undergoes a sentimental education in the codes of Chivalry, Courtship, and Faith. His odyssey is observed with ironic wit and revealing distance; not surprisingly for Rohmer, a key stage in his development occurs when he learns the dangers of talking too much or too little..." -- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Na'vi sex scene found. How they do it: For Your Consideration

By
Jim Emerson
on January 11, 2010 4:09 PM | | Comments (52)

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NEWS: WGA nominates "Avatar" for Best Original Screenplay (01/11/10).

NEWS: Second Palindrome Day of new year. (01/11/10)

NEWS: Deleted "Avatar" Na'vi sex scene to be restored for DVD release. (12/27/09)

"We had it in and we cut it out. So that will be something for the special edition DVD, if you want to see how they have sex." -- James Cameron

UPDATE (01/19/10): "Avatar to Get the Porno Treatment via Hustler"

Writer-director James Cameron acknowledged in his Playboy interview that he insisted his Pandora-dwelling Na'vi females "have tits," even though "that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals." In the same interview he said, "I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians."

Yes, I was wondering about that. In my first "Avatar" post, I listed a few minor questions I had about details in Cameron's reportedly ultra-detailed Pandoran universe. Among them: "The Na'vi wear loincloths, but their genitals don't appear to be located in their "crotchal regions," so what's the point?"

Perhaps we have the answer. Fox has posted Cameron's WGA-nominated script for awards consideration [download .pdf], and the missing sex scene between Jake and Neytiri can at last be read, if not yet seen (pp. 89 - 91):

He puts his face close to hers. She rubs her cheek against his. He kisses her on the mouth. They explore each other. Then she pulls back, eyes sparkling.

NEYTIRI
Kissing is very good. But we have something better.

She pulls him down until they are kneeling, facing each other on the faintly glowing moss.

Neytiri takes the end of her queue and raises it. Jake does the same, with trembling anticipation. The tendrils at the ends move with a life of their own, straining to be joined.

Continue reading Na'vi sex scene found. How they do it: For Your Consideration.

Catchiest movie theme music of 2009

By
Jim Emerson
on January 11, 2010 3:54 PM | | Comments (5)

The opening credits sequence of "An Education" doesn't seem fully developed to me, but the music -- Floyd Cramer's 1961 Nashville slip-note piano classic, "On the Rebound" -- had me coasting on an endorphin high for half the movie. Here's Cramer performing it on live TV with Chet Atkins in 1965, followed by a couple other toe-tappin' numbers...

"I saw a Rohmer film once...": The truth behind the Night Moves meme

By
Jim Emerson
on January 11, 2010 3:37 PM | | Comments (16)

Arthur Penn's "Night Moves" (1975) is one of the great movies of the '70s. As a detective picture about a private eye with flawed vision -- in this case, a small-time independent dick and former football player named Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), who'd like to think he's Sam Spade -- it would make a great double bill with "Chinatown," released the previous year. Yesterday, when the news came of French director Eric Rohmer's death, a lot of people who apparently hadn't even seen "Night Moves" (or, perhaps, a Rohmer movie) were freely quoting Moseby's famous wisecrack in pieces about Rohmer without providing any context for it:

"I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

It wasn't long before it even became a Twitter meme: #nightmoves. (See examples below, after jump.)

What some (not all) of the quoters didn't seem to realize or remember is that Harry's remark, as scripted by Alan Sharp, is a brittle homophobic jab at a gay friend of his wife's. (Watch the clip above.) Ellen (Susan Clark) invites Harry to join her and Charles (Ben Archibek -- that's him at the end of the clip) for a movie: Eric Rohmer's classic "My Night at Maud's" (1970), about an engaged man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who spends a long, memorable night in conversation with a divorcee (Françoise Fabian). Moseby is asserting his macho credentials, and ends the scene by teasing Charles about going bowling again sometime. "You seem to get some weird kind of satisfaction from this sort of thing, don't you?" Charles replies. Later that night, Harry drives by the theater as the movie is letting out and sees something indicating that his wife may be having an affair.

Continue reading "I saw a Rohmer film once...": The truth behind the Night Moves meme.

Eric Rohmer, 1920 - 2010

By
Jim Emerson
on January 11, 2010 11:34 AM | | Comments (4)

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The ever-reliable David Hudson tracks the Rohmer tributes at The Auteurs Daily.

I recall seeing Rohmer's last film at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007:

Eric Rohmer has made a career out of chronicling the rituals of romance (and Romanticism), from the 6th century to the present, and from his celebrated film series, Six Moral Tales (1963 - 1972), Comedies and Proverbs (1981 - 1986), and Tales of the Four Seasons (1990 - 1998). And then there are those elegantly contrived period pictures that don't fit into the series, like "Perceval," "The Marquise of O," "The Lady and the Duke" (which I haven't seen) and now "Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (known in English-speaking Canada as "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon").

Two of my favorite Rohmer films (perhaps my two very favorites) seem to be among his least-mentioned: "Perceval" and "Summer" (aka "Le Rayon vert") -- the former completely artificial (shot on a painted soundstage) and the latter an equally charming portrait of a romantic klutz.

"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" is a Rohmerian delight, another ritualized romance (highly mannered behavior, poetic language) played out in a naturalistic pastoral setting (an unblemished slice of French countryside around the River Lignon)....

(Continued here.)

Why one critic won't see Avatar: "What, am I a forest animal, unthinkingly hypnotized by shiny objects?"

By
Jim Emerson
on January 9, 2010 11:41 PM | | Comments (97)

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It has been argued that there are some movies you just have to see so that you can have an opinion about them. I have, on occasion, bought this line of reasoning. But after more than 30 years of seeing almost everything that was released (for professional reasons as much as personal ones -- I was curious), I now sometimes exercise my rights and freedoms as a consumer of popular culture and admit when I'm just not interested. In a short piece on True/Slant called "Why I won't see Avatar," noted critic Michael Atkinson explains why, based on what he's seen and read, he doesn't believe James Cameron's particular brand of fantasy film is worth his time:

Not only is the story recycled garbage and the script (reportedly, even by fans) idiotic, but the very essence of the film -- its visual cataract of fantasy -- is infantile. What, am I a forest animal, unthinkingly hypnotized by shiny objects? Oooo, I'm building a nest, I need something bright and pretty. Am I a toddler in the cereal aisle, blindly drawn to the box of Froot Loops because of the bright colors?

Since when is a flush of rainbow hues and sparkly art supposed to engage the adult mind? You read David Denby's review of the film in The New Yorker... and you hear a grown man -- who's written books -- try to explain that the film is stupid but he just loved the shimmering Crayola colors anyway. Maybe he'd like a mobile above his bed.

Continue reading Why one critic won't see Avatar: "What, am I a forest animal, unthinkingly hypnotized by shiny objects?".

Avatar? Political? Seriously?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 8, 2010 4:09 PM | | Comments (48)

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UPDATE (01/19/10): NY Times: "You Saw What in Avatar?":

"Some of the ways people are reading it are significant of Cameron's intent, and some are just by-products of what people are thinking about," said Rebecca Keegan, the author of "The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron." "It's really become this Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties."

The "Avatar" camp isn't endorsing any particular interpretation, but is happy to let others read the ink blots. "Movies that work are movies that have themes that are bigger than their genre," Jon Landau, a producer of the film, said in a telephone interview. "The theme is what you leave with and you leave the plot at the theater."

I'm fond of saying that movies are never made or exhibited in a vacuum. Even the most timeless films are inescapably also products of the times in which they're made and seen -- socially, technologically, aesthetically, politically. But at The Auteurs, Glenn Kenny poses a question that is nevertheless worth asking: "The politics of 'Avatar': Do they matter?" How, he wonders, did this become a hot topic -- what with conservatives vehemently attacking the movie... from both the right (as a pantheistic, tree-hugging, anti-capitalist tract that celebrates the slaughter of armed Americans) and the left (as an offensive "White Messiah fable")?

I think Kenny nails it:

Continue reading Avatar? Political? Seriously?.

Opinions: Are they really worth a damn?

By
Jim Emerson
on January 8, 2010 3:21 PM | | Comments (26)

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Do you agree that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is a terrific movie? Well, Nile Gardiner of the Daily Telegraph also thinks so. Does that mean you agree with him? He says that it's one of "The Top 10 Conservative Movies of the Last Decade." Here's the way he sees it:

What is refreshing about the film is its willingness to portray the US military presence in Iraq in an overwhelmingly sympathetic light, and the al-Qaeda-backed enemy as barbaric and fundamentally evil. There are no shades of gray in "The Hurt Locker," and this is a strikingly patriotic motion picture that has been embraced by an American public weary of the anti-Americanism churned out by Hollywood in its portrayal of the War on Terror - from "Rendition" and "Lions for Lambs" to "Redacted" and "In the Valley of Elah." "The Hurt Locker" is by far the best conservative film of 2009, and one of the greatest of the decade.

I hope this example persuasively illustrates several things (and why Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron got divorced is not among them¹):

Continue reading Opinions: Are they really worth a damn?.

Robin Wood: He was as good as they say

By
Jim Emerson
on January 7, 2010 9:16 PM | | Comments (11)

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I was in high school when I picked up a hardback copy of the first edition of Robin Wood's "Hitchcock's Films" (1965) from a remainder table at a depressingly small, sterile, fluorescent-lit Crown Books in an old-fashioned, long-gone outdoor mall (called Aurora Village) in North Seattle. That was in the mid-1970s and now I'm writing this and Robin Wood died last week at the age of 78.

I'll never forget standing in that store, reading the famous, much-quoted opening words:

Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?

It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or the drama -- if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature -- it would be unnecessary.

Continue reading Robin Wood: He was as good as they say.

No fatties

By
Jim Emerson
on January 7, 2010 5:45 PM | | Comments (37)

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I made a mistake this week. I followed a link from a discussion among reputable movie critics to a showbiz gossip blog that I usually find too sleazy to visit. There I once again found all manner of bilious items that creeped me out and reminded me why I shouldn't go there. One of them insulted a late, internationally renowned film critic for choosing, on his deathbed, a Howard Hawks western as his favorite movie over another title the gossip prefers. (No doubt the latter feels entitled to express an opinion about what your last meal should be, too.) Another post included the observation that Vince Vaughn "needs to lose 30 pounds. He appeared to be at the tipping point during the 'Couples Retreat' press junket."

Continue reading No fatties.

Larry King accuses Polanski of murder (accidentally)

By
Jim Emerson
on January 7, 2010 1:32 AM | | Comments (24)

The 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (which I recommend to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the charges facing him now) documents a public perception of Roman Polanski that blamed him not only for the darkness of his films, but even for surviving the Holocaust and for the Manson-led murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and friends. All of this years before he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and then fled the country before sentencing.

I don't know what was going through Larry King's mind last night on his CNN show, but here's what happened (from the CNN transcript):

KING: Joining Lawrence Silver with us now is Debra Tate, Roman Polanski's former sister in law, the sister of the late Sharon Tate. On a persona note, I knew Sharon Tate. I had interviewed her a couple of months before her tragic murder. What do you want to see happen?

DEBRA TATE, FMR. SISTER IN LAW OF ROMAN POLANSKI: I would like to see this whole thing go away. I think that there has been a lot of time that has passed and we need to bring it to an end.

KING: Have you ever talked to Roman Polanski?

TATE: I have.

KING: How can you have a civil conversation with someone who so brutally murdered your sister?

TATE: Roman didn't murder my sister.

KING: I'm sorry. When the fact that he would have this terrible thing happen to him after the death of your sister, to once again focus you into the public light. That's what I meant.

Bizarre how easily the lines get blurred...

Jason Reitman's newest movie: Lost in the Air (press tour simulator)

By
Jim Emerson
on January 7, 2010 1:00 AM | | Comments (2)

"Up in the Air" director Jason Reitman (known for his pie charts documented the whirlwind experience of his latest press tour in a movie (above) posted on Vimeo and /Film.

UPDATE: Reitman was nominated for a DGA award this morning, along with fellow directors Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Lee Daniels and Quentin Tarantino.

No comment

By
Jim Emerson
on January 7, 2010 12:19 AM | | Comments (9)

cheeky.jpg

I'm trying to decide which phrase is funniest: "for the most part" or "I know what I'm doing."

Favorite movies of 2009 movie: The commentary track

By
Jim Emerson
on January 5, 2010 10:20 PM | | Comments (7)

The first time I made a year-end list for Scanners, I did it by suggesting double-bills of 2006 films with older films (much like what contributors to The Auteurs did this year). In 2007, I made my first year-end movie, inspired by "L'Eclisse," as a tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni and a commentary on the WGA strike that was happening at the time. Last year, the concept was based on a shot of Hannah Schygulla, Goddess of Cinema, waking up, looking into the camera (in Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven") and dreaming fragments of the films on my list.

This year, I'm not quite sure how it came together (see opening title), but I took my cue from my favorite movie of the year, the Coens' "A Serious Man." I knew I didn't want to adhere to any rigid countdown hierarchy this time, but to let the movies converse with themselves through images. I chose the word "conversation" knowing there would be no dialog except at the very beginning and the very end, with the Jefferson Airplane song "Somebody to Love" (recurring element in "A Serious Man") in between. That gave me approximately 2 minutes and 58 seconds for the montage....

Continue reading Favorite movies of 2009 movie: The commentary track.

It's a feature!

By
Jim Emerson
on January 5, 2010 3:08 PM | | Comments (6)

Hey, Scannersers: We're trying out a new Moveable Type threaded comments feature that should allow you to reply directly to individual comments. Just click the "Reply" to the right of the date and time. Will it work? We'll see...

Jim's favorite movies of 2009: The movie

By
Jim Emerson
on January 1, 2010 11:11 AM | | Comments (25)

Once again, my favorite movies of the year engage in overlapping cinematic conversation with one another, blurring stylistic, thematic, national, linguistic, philosophical, theological and proprietary boundaries. No one is playing the blame game here. Happy new year!

(list and links after the jump...)

Continue reading Jim's favorite movies of 2009: The movie.
« December 2009 | Main Index | Archives | February 2010 »

epigraphs

""The role of an artist is to inoculate the world with disillusionment." -- Henry Miller (according to Bob Dylan)

"One can summarize a plot in one sentence, whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame." -- Raymond Durgnat

"Young man, let me explain something to you: Every shot in a picture is the most important shot in a picture." -- Ernst Lubitsch

"I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." -- Tom Noonan

"Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." -- Martin Scorsese

“An idea does not exist apart from the words that express it. Style is not an envelope enclosing a message; the envelope is the message.” -- Dwight Macdonald

"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear." -- Daniel Dennett

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