Recently in Critics & criticism Category

Richard Schickel wrote a book review of Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff. Except that, rather than review the book, he chose to review Robert Altman's capacity for drinking and dope-smoking:

It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (when illness slowed him), Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life. When he was not drinking heavily, he was smoking dope -- often doing both simultaneously. When he screened dailies on location, he insisted the cast and crew gather to view them in a party atmosphere, with the merriment rolling on into the night.

Shocking, isn't it?

Blame it on Roger Ebert. He Tweeted up (@ebertchicago) a coupla weeks ago and I have learned from his example that there's more to Twitty-ositude than using a small keyboard to broadcast what you're doing at any given moment. You see, in my daily Intertubular rounds (it's part of my job), I come across all kinds of interesting -- even fascinating -- things that I never get around to writing about. Often because all I want to say is: "Take a look at this, why don't ya?"

So, that's what I will do. I will show you all the good stuff. And warn you about the bad stuff. I do not like the term "follow," for I am neither a Pied Piper, a Fantastik, nor a Jesus Christ, but do pop over here and help me get started, won't you? That's jeeemerson. Thank you.

Above: The most flattering mug shot I could find. Almost used it for my passport.

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism has composed a mesmerizing collage (OK, montage) using text from Jackson's 1988 biography "Moonwalk," audio interviews with MJ, and footage from some of Lynch's films, notably "The Elephant Man," "Mulholland Dr.," "The Straight Story," "The Grandmother" and "Eraserhead" to imagine a biography of Michael Jackson directed by David Lynch. He calls it "Notes for a David Lynch adaptation of Moonwalk."

Boone writes:

It all comes down to what you believe, because none of us knew the man....

In his groovy new iPhone app movie guide, my friend Leonard Maltin writes that "Where the Wild Things Are" "puts me in an awkward situation as someone who is supposed to deliver a clear-cut opinion of a film: I didn't love it, yet there are passages in it that are so magical I don't think I'll ever forget them." I'm with you there, Leonard. And because the lively discussion from my previous post about the movie, "Where the Mopey Things Are," has been so stimulating, I thought I'd offer excerpts from two impressive reviews -- one positive and one negative -- with which I (almost) completely agree. That is to say, I can absolutely see how people might come down on one side or the other, but I remain ambivalently in-between.

First, from Ty Burr at the Boston Globe:

Let's dispense with the preliminaries: What do the experts think of "Where the Wild Things Are''? As the end credits rolled, my 12-year-old daughter and her bestest friend turned to me with faces like the twin masks of comedy and tragedy on a Broadway playbill. One girl's eyes were wet with tears of sadness and profound joy; "I loved it,'' she sighed. The other looked as if someone had stuck an egg-beater in her ear and scrambled her brains. "That is not a children's movie,'' she growled.

"As a sequence is being cut, the cutter should know where a particular setup most effectively presents the information needed for that particular part of the scene. In other words, he will stay with the shot as long as that shot is the one which best delivers the required information and cut to another shot only when the new cut will better serve the purposes of the scene, whether because the size is more effective, the composition is more suitable, or the interpretation is superior.... In short, as long as the scene is playing at its best in the selected angle, leave it alone!"
-- veteran Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk ("Murder, My Sweet," "Crossfire," "The Caine Mutiny"), On Film Editing (1984)

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism says he gave up on film criticism (for the fourth or fifth time) this year:

I quit film criticism because somebody has banished the shot from mainstream commercial cinema.

The shot, man.

That unit of film composition which lends film its cumulative power and structural integrity.

In place of the shot, like a leaky sandbag in place of a brick, somebody put... Well, what to call it, this fragment of film that has more in common with a spontaneous cutaway during Monday Night Football than with the ruminative, kinetic moving image discovered by Kuleshov, Porter, Griffith, et al? I once jokingly called it a gotcha-fragment, but that doesn't quite get it. The word for "shot" in the new century shall be...

Snatch.

A little two-shot movie in a corner of the kitchen of critics Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson.

"Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, 'Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!'"
-- Strunk & White, "The Elements of Style" (musical adaptation by Nico Muhly)

I love it when artists known for their work in one medium show a passionate investment in another. Over the weekend I stumbled upon composer Nico Muhly's blog. This is the guy who studied with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, made two albums of his own music (Speaks Volumes and Mothertongue), and has collaborated with Philip Glass, Björk, Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie "Prince" Billy (aka Will Oldham, of "Old Joy" and "Wendy and Lucy") and Grizzly Bear, among others. And he's the composer of the scores for "Choking Man," "Joshua" and "The Reader." (The middle one is actually a pretty good movie.)

Film critics and journalists Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc were robbed and killed at their home in Quezon City, Manila, Philippines, earlier this week. David Hudson has collected writings and reminiscences by and about the couple at The Auteurs Daily. I wasn't familiar with either of the young writers -- he, a Canadian-Filipino critic and editor; she, a Slovenian film journalist; both champions of Southeast Asian cinema. But I was moved by the belated discovery of a piece Alexis wrote to Nika in Rogue Magazine last year in which he spoke of his love of Filipino film and his love for her. It's called "The Letter I Would Love To Read To You In Person," and it's a meditation on love and work and doing what one must:

I think QT is wrong about Paul Dano (who is, to repurpose his Anderson-Tarantino comparison, Montgomery Clift to Daniel Day Lewis's Marlon Brando), but this makes me want to see "There Will Be Blood" again, willing to reconsider it afresh. Dano's character Eli Sunday is supposed to play the smaller, weaker, younger, inferior charismatic performer to the bombastic Daniel Plainview -- but both characters are born salesmen in different fields (religion, business), comparably calculating, bitter, egomaniacal and insane. Day Lewis got all the attention (and the Oscar), but he owes half of it to Dano, without whom his performance could not be what it is.

I hope you're enjoying all the arguments swirling around "Inglourious Basterds" as much as I am -- not just here, but all over the place. Since I posted "Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]," I've been reading other people's reviews and comments and interviews about the movie and, hell, even Quentin Tarantino doesn't always agree with Quentin Tarantino about what the movie's up to. (And why should he? Like all of us, he contains multitudes.) It's not about the Holocaust, but it is about the Holocaust; it's not real, but it's real; it's not fantasy, but it's fantasy; it's not history, but it's history; it's not amoral, but it's amoral; it's not moral, but it's moral...

What some people have difficulty with is exactly what others delight in: "Inglorious Basterds" is never situated in one reality or another reality. It's always juggling various combinations of reality and unreality -- history, alt-history, war movie (platoon movie, mission movie, spy movie, detective movie, propaganda movie, European art movie...), cartoon, folklore, satire, comic book, revenge fantasy, etc. -- and the combinations change from one moment to the next. And that, I think, is its subject. I don't think there's anything more to it than QT trying to create movie-moments. He does, and some of them are superb. I don't blame people who find its story and characters thin, or factual liberties preposterous, or generic conventions twisted, or (a-)morality ambiguous, or humor offensive, but he's got no reason to apologize for creating his alternative historical universe in a Hollywood movie -- a world in which all of the above are woven into its warp and woof.

Because "Inglourious Basterds" provides so much to talk about and to interpret, I thought I'd put together some fascinating observations (some of which I wish I'd made myself; some of which I think are off-base, but nevertheless revealing of something about the film) and set them bouncing off one another to get your own analytical juices flowing, starting with QT's (and others') takes on the nature of the world in which it unreels:

"I stop short of calling it a fantasy. I present it in this fairytale kind of thing as far as for the masses to take in, but that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is my characters changed the course of the war. Now that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens in the movie is possible."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan

From a Quentin Tarantino interview with Ella Taylor in the Village Voice:

Film criticism is in a strange place. Talk about 17 years later! [After "Reservoir Dogs."] I could never have imagined that print film reviewing would be dying. It's unfathomable to me. I don't like reading film criticism on a laptop. I like holding it in my hand.

You're a geezer, Quentin.

Exactly. It seems to me from reading a lot of the film criticism that came out of Cannes this year that the few print critics that are left writing are so busy combating these Internet bozos that there's a new formalism, a new self-seriousness among remaining critics, to prove they're professionals. Even some of the younger critics who are still writing in print--well, they're not that young--are coming across like young fogies. There are some good online critics, but then there's these fanboy types: "Ooh, this sucks balls." It's a little bit like '78, '79, '80, where exuberance in filmmaking is not getting its due anymore. For example, "The Blues Brothers" never got any respect. Now, it truly is beloved, as it goddamn well should be. I mean, it's sad to think of what happened to John Landis after "An American Werewolf in London," but in those two movies, he was the first fanboy director making movies out of his head.

And, regarding his favorite movies of all time in life:

I can tell you now. This got picked up on from [your] piece [17 years ago] for the next five years, those top three in particular: "Taxi Driver," "Blow Out," and "Rio Bravo." I've changed. I know I was cagey about it before, but my favorite movie of all time is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." That's the best movie ever made. I can't even imagine myself doing better; that's how much I love it. I would also throw "His Girl Friday" in there. The fifth will always be however I feel at the moment. So I'll throw in "Carrie," give De Palma a shout-out.

(Above: Tarantino dances up the red carpet at Cannes, 2009. AP photo.)

I'll be in the hospital most of Friday for my AV node ablation (see my latest film -- a little thing I like to call "Biventricular Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator" -- at right), but should be out this evening, when I will make an effort to approve comments. So, please, keep 'em coming in.

Meanwhile, although it might not have been the natural choice on the eve of a surgical heart procedure, I watched "Kill Bill Volume 1" last night, an experience I found thrilling (Tarantino and Robert Richardson know how to create images), though not at all involving. But that's the kind of movies Tarantino makes. They are abstract art, not strong stories, not emotional experiences. I thought of Hitchcock, who said his films are not slices of life but slices of cake. Tarantino makes candy necklaces, tasty chunks strung together -- little climaxes without much overall dramatic shape. Sometimes it's a little like ADD De Palma (love that split-screen sequence in the hospital), but Tarantino does not waste a single shot. Every single image has a place, a reason to exist in that particular context (see Dogme 09.8 #1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10), and it's so satisfying in contrast to the random mish-mash action editing of... well, you know the movies I'm talking about. Tarantino's eye makes me delirious with movie love.

Best of all, in Volume 1 there's not much stilted, wordy dialog to distract from the excellence and exuberance of the filmmaking. I'd like to see Tarantino do a silent film someday -- only music on the soundtrack. His music selections, as always, are dynamite, though sometimes too short and inconsequential (see Dogme 09.8 #6 about "segues using snippets of pop tunes that fade out just as they're getting started"). I'd like to see him really stretch out and develop more whole sequences around a piece of music instead of just a tiny piece of a piece of music. (Only reservation: the music during the first part of the fight in the snow between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu was too slight and slick to fit the gravity of what should have been the climactic confrontation of Volume 1.)

More on Volume 1, Volume 2, "Inglourious Basterds" and other topics of interest after my ablation. (Sing along with the Ramones: "I wanna be ablated!")

JE: Back from hospital, in recuperation mode. I'm feeling much better... Not dead yet!

Nonsensical polemicist Armond White, dis-inspiration for "Contrarian Week" here at Scanners back in early 2007, got a lot of folks riled with his review of "District 9" -- mostly on fan forums at RottenTomatoes. OK, so once again, White's aim is not so much to examine the movie (that's always secondary, or tertiary) but to assert that he alone knows what's going on and his colleagues are all idiots or corrupt or both.

But his baseless verdicts are not what put him in league with the Dining Room Table Lady. At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny gets to the heart of why White embodies a commonplace form of flaccid, anti-critical thinking:

Here's a challenge. Tell me what this sentence, from White's review of the new version of "The Taking of Pelham 123," means: "Audiences who enjoyed the original 1974 'Pelham 123' took its grungy dangerousness as a realistic confirmation of their own citizens' distrust." Now here's the rub: I don't want to know what you think it means, what you infer it means when you put it through your own personal White decoder ring, no; I want to know what the words in the sentence as they are actually written actually mean. As, you know, an actual copy editor would understand them. Because an actual copy editor would tell you that the sentence is gibberish....

OK, who's ready to see the new movie about a gastroenterologist named Joe?

One of my favorite tree-based movie critics, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, explains why you won't be seeing many reviews of "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" before it opens (Paramount isn't pre-screening it for critics) and wonders who cares -- about the movie or what critics think of it?

Movie critics are put on earth first to alert you to good movies you might otherwise miss, then to cut through the PR fog and consider the actual worth of a given film (depending on what, exactly, it hopes to achieve). With certain types of movie -- typically smaller, more ambitious fare attended by people who regularly read reviews -- a critic can mean the difference between a successful run and an early DVD release. But blockbusters? In most cases, we're BBs bouncing off the hide of an elephant....

"500 Days of Summer will own you."
-- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

I have not been able to find the context in which the cutesy ad blurb above originally appeared. It's not in Travers' review at RollingStone.com. Maybe he spoke it, or something like it ("It will own you"), in video or podcast remarks. I've seen it used in web ads and TV spots. But, really, what was Travers trying to communicate by employing this phrase? That the movie vanquishes you, the viewer? (At least he didn't say "pwn.")

What's the adjectival form of "n00b"?

For those critics who don't understand how these things work.

If those screwball lovers Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner ever hooked up and had sex, they'd do it the way Brüno and his "pygmy" paramour do in "Brüno": with ACME slingshots, projectiles, champagne bottles and a customized Rube Goldberg device that appears to have been built with materials from Home Depot by George Clooney's character in "Burn After Reading." The matinee audience with whom I saw "Brüno," Sacha Baron Cohen's partially improvised Üniversal Pictures remake of RW Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (with a happy ending!), howled at the grossness, the perversity, the preposterousness of it -- the same way audiences laughed and groaned at the explicitly cartoony perv-sex in John Waters movies of the 1970s. "Brüno" is rather tame compared to "Pink Flamingoes" or "Female Trouble" -- in part because it's 2009 and not 1974, and the experience of "shock value" has changed considerably. Truth is, it's hard to be too terribly shocked by anything in the bland, artificial cocoon of the mall-tiplex, no matter what's playing.

Inevitably, in all comedy, the joke comes down to: What is the joke? I've had a grand old time reading bewildered critics -- amused, disgusted, even shocked -- try to puzzle out what Borat and Brüno (the characters and the movies) are really saying. The most entertaining explanations are by writers who don't necessarily know they're bewildered, or how much they're revealing about their own prejudices when they claim the movie is revealing the prejudices of the "real folks" on screen. (Hint: Even more so than in "Borat," the butt of the joke is the title character, not the "real people" with whom he interacts. Tricking people is not exactly the same as making fun of them -- and most of those who get punk'd react about the way you'd expect them to.)

"Those who think "Transformers" is a great or even a good film are, may I tactfully suggest, not sufficiently evolved. Film by film, I hope they climb a personal ladder into the realm of better films, until their standards improve."

-- Roger Ebert, "I'm a proud Brainiac"

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is the "Dark Knight" of 2009. In what way? It's the pop-smash action picture that has excited a bunch of fanboys fans who don't usually read movie critics to howl with inarticulate rage about movie critics who don't like their movie. Of course, "The Dark Knight" was met with considerable mainstream critical acclaim, and "ROTFL" with equally considerable mainstream critical disdain, but the important thing to remember is: critics had nothing to do with making these movies hits.

Want to see critics made completely superfluous? Bestow upon them the magical power to predict box-office success. Instead of awarding thumbs or stars or letter grades, they can just provide ticket sales projections that can be quoted in the ads: "I give it $109 million in its opening weekend!" Voila! Instant redundancy, instant irrelevance. Why do you need critics to gauge grosses when you already have tracking reports, followed by the actual grosses themselves?

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (aka "ROTFL" to those who are rolling on the floor laughing about it) reportedly cost somewhere between $200 and $300 million to make, and the only special effects the critics are talking about are the ones of humping dogs. Or maybe they're humping dog-bots.

Anyway, there's nothing like an Uwe Boll movie to bring on the critical invective. Did I say "Uwe Boll"? I mean Michael Bay, of course. How did I get those two confused? What I mean to say is that critics who hate this movie don't just hate this movie, they find it anti-movie.

Why? It's just a summer screen-filler, isn't it? Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com thinks it stinks:

Andrew Sarris -- dean of American film critics, leading proponent of the auteur theory in America, author of the essential The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (and equally praiseworthy review and essay collections such as Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969, Politics and Cinema and The Primal Screen), senior critic of the Village Voice for decades, co-founder of the National Society of Film Critics -- has reportedly been let go by cut from the staff of The New York Observer.

UPDATE: Dave Kehr has a clarification from Sarris's wife, critic Molly Haskell: "Andrew, along with a dozen other writers at the rapidly sinking weekly, was taken off staff on Monday, but he will continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently. Not great news, but -- particularly in the current context -- not a catastrophe. Andrew's day job, teaching at Columbia University, is not in danger."

Sarris, who turned 80 last October, was along with Pauline Kael the most influential film critic of the 1960s and 1970s. He was also the titular target of Kael's infamous attack on auteurism, "Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris" (1963) -- ironic, since Kael was patently an auteurist through-and-through, even if she failed to recognize herself as such. No one has done more than Sarris to make the case that "Hollywood movies" were worthy of serious critical attention, every bit as much as "art films," no matter where they're made.

If you do not have a copy of The American Cinema -- from which, coincidentally, I just quoted a few indelible paragraphs a couple days ago -- do yourself a favor and buy it now. It's the best guide to approaching American movies that there is, beginning with Sarris's celebrated "pantheon" directors (some of whom were not, strictly speaking, "American" -- though they all worked in the US at some point): Charles Chaplin, Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, Josef von Sternberg, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. (Later he added Billy Wilder to the pantheon.)

Glenn Kenny simply quoted Jean-Luc Godard on Orson Welles: "All of us will always owe him everything."

Here's a question for you: Can a movie ruin a good review? Conversely, can a review actually improve upon a movie? Sure, good criticism (whether positive or negative) should encourage you to see a film in new ways you may not have recognized before. Just as cinema itself is a way of looking at the world through someone else's eyes, criticism is a way of looking at movies through someone else's eyes. Yet, the movies themselves don't change -- only our perceptions of them (we'll put aside William Friedkin's "French Connection" Blu-ray for the moment). On the one hand, a piece of film criticism is kind of like an adaptation. It offers an interpretation of the original, but does not replace it. Other "versions" still exist, just as they always did.

I can think of several examples of criticism that I think is superior to the work being criticized, in the sense that the critic is writing about an idealized version of what's on the screen -- the movie we might wish was on the screen, rather than (or in addition to) the one that's actually there. A clarification: This has nothing to do with whether the critic is divining the filmmaker's intentions or not. It has everything to do with what the critic is seeing in, and getting out of, the film.

Psychologists say that depression is rage turned inward. Stand-up comedy, on the other hand, is rage turned back outward again. (I believe George Carlin had a routine about the use of violent metaphors directed at the audience in comedy: "Knock 'em dead!" "I killed!") In the documentary "Heckler" (now on Showtime and DVD) comedian Jamie Kennedy, as himself, plays both roles with ferocious intensity. The movie is his revenge fantasy against anyone who has ever heckled him on stage, or written a negative review... or, perhaps, slighted him in on the playground or at a party or over the phone or online.

"Heckler" (I accidentally called it "Harangue" just now) is an 80-minute howl of fury and anguish in which Kennedy and a host of other well-known and not-well-known showbiz people tell oft-told tales of triumphant comebacks and humiliating disasters, freely venting their spleens at those who have spoken unkindly of them. At first the bile is aimed at hecklers in club audiences (with some particularly nasty invective for loudmouthed drunken women), then it shifts to "critics" -- broadly defined as anybody who says something negative about a figure whose work appears before a paying public. Some of the critics are actually interested in analysis; some are just insult comics who are using the Internet as their open mic. It gets pretty ugly, but it's fascinating -- because the comics, the critics and the hecklers are so much alike that it's no wonder each finds the others so infuriating.

Spent last week in Boulder, CO, participating in the Conference on World Affairs -- an event that gloriously celebrates the values and principles outlined in this video. It's 9 minutes and 40 seconds that, I hope, illustrate the proposition upon which this blog is founded: critical thinking.

(tip: Andrew Sullivan, whose blog I plugged mercilessly)

Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is momentarily distracted by a swooping avian creature as she heads for shore on Bodega Bay. Edith Olive Eggplant Dog (with tennis ball in mouth) is momentarily distracted by a swooping avian creature as she heads for shore on Lake Washington.

UPDATE BELOW:

Those who doubt how thoroughly the sensibilities of the French New Wave have been absorbed into the work of today's filmmakers (see discussion of the recently posted Opening Shot for Truffaut's "The 400 Blows") should check out Matt Zoller Seitz's series of video exploring the "scavenger-hunt" sensibility of Wes Anderson, "The Substance of Style," at Moving Image Source. Part 1 (of five) has been posted, with the rest to follow over the first week in April.

Matt -- as writer, editor and narrator -- not only compares images that Anderson has lovingly quoted and reinterpreted from the works of François Truffaut, Orson Welles and Charles Schultz (and Bill Melendez, director of the Peanuts television specials), but teases out subtler influences at play in Anderson's work -- his features ("Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "The Royal Tennenbaums," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," "The Darjeeling Limited), shorts and commercials, including his famous American Express ad based on the Opening Shot of Truffaut's "Day for Night." (Coming in Part 2: Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols.) Says Matt:

Anderson draws much inspiration from French New Wave filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, a clear influence on his cutting, and Louis Malle, whose "Murmur of the Heart" heavily influenced the tone of all his films. But towering over the rest is François Truffaut, an impresario in the Welles tradition, but a warmer and more earthbound auteur.

Above, via Aaron Hillis at GreenCine Daily, a new york craigslist ad soliciting, um, designer film criticism. This is the indie route, of course. The studios can afford to make up their own blurbs in-house.

Is this what people mean when they say craigslist has made the old newspaper business model obsolete?

In the days before aggregators like RottenTomatoes and Metacritic created the appearance of instant-consensus by assigning numerical values to opinions, it was more fun to have an opinion of your own because it wasn't quantified and averaged with everybody else's.

The tendency now is to view critical opinion as a measurement -- and I'm not just talking about rating systems like stars or letter grades or thumbs. Those things may be mistaken for substantial observations, for the simple reason that the idea of a four-star rating is more tangible than, say, a sentence like, "This tension between realism and spectacle runs like a fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease," from Manohla Dargis's rich and revelatory New York Times review of "There Will Be Blood." But Dargis's sentence actually conveys a hell of a lot more about the movie than "Four Stars!" does. (Times critics don't do star ratings, which means that somebody at RottenTomatoes and Metacritic has to actually read the reviews and make them up. The results can be incongruously amusing. Sometimes they don't read very closely.)

When what somebody has to say about a movie is subordinated to a numerical scale -- and then all the grades themselves are plotted on a curve.... well, who cares about the textures of the experience: What percentage did it get on the TomatoMeter?!?!

I bring this up because of an experience Roger Ebert describes having last week:

"After the revelation of "The Dark Knight," here is "Watchmen," another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it's not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope."
-- Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

"This movie delivers as a splashy, bloody comic-book adventure that stays true to its roots without being slavish about it (despite numerous images taken directly from the comic's pages). It's both headlong and thought-provoking, attacking the notion of heroism and the role of the hero in society in ways that 'The Dark Knight' only talked about."
-- Marshall Fine, Hollywood and Fine

Let's get the unavoidable DC Comics-based superhero movie comparisons over with: Despite superficial affinities (masked marvels, super-hype), "The Dark Knight" and "Watchmen" could not be further apart in style, ambition, or their approach to storytelling. One is set in a photorealistic Gotham City, shot on location in Chicago; the other in a sprawling fantasy universe that encompasses places called "New York," "Antarctica" and "Mars," but that exists only in the imagination. One takes place in a specific window of time; the other in a distorted, alternative 1985 (Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as President of the United States) that re-invents the past and the future so as to turn the very concept of "time" inside-out. One is a mechanical, plot-driven action movie, edited in a woodchipper; the other is a dystopian science-fiction satire that doesn't so much spin an intricately tangled web of interwoven stories as create an environment in which its various elements are set bouncing off one another in perpetuity. ("Nothing ends...")

(Below: One of many period influences on "Watchmen" -- Ridley Scott's famous 1979 Chanel No. 5 commercial. It's still the director's finest work.)

Yes, I believe "Watchmen" is cleverly designed especially for people who have read the graphic novel -- and I'm very glad I re-read it the week before seeing the movie. Instead of feeling like I already knew was "going to happen," I felt a quickening sense of anticipation over how (or if) what I thought was going to happen was going to happen. I found myself mostly delighted by the multifarious choices the film was continually making, many of them playing on those very expectations with a subtle wink or a nod.

I speak, of course, of the Muriels, the most glamorous and prestigious movie of awards named after Paul Clark's guinea pig. (You can put a comma in the previous sentence if you like. Anywhere you like.) More than thirty movie bloggers (including yours truly) cast their point-weighted ballots in umpteen fabulous categories. The winners, the runners-up, and the voters' comments about them have been announced every day since February 6. And now, they're all here. Nibble Feast away.

Other big winners: "Rachel Getting Married," "In Bruges," "Man on Wire"...

Meanwhile, live from Istanbul: Ali Arikan liveblogs the Oscars!

More about the Muriels later, but first...

But I just had to look,
Having read the book...
-- John Lennon

Really, I just wanted to point out that a glowing blue naked guy is the hero of one of the most anticipated mainstream movies in years. Did you know that? Seriously, though, I do have a dilemma: "Watchmen" opens March 6. I read the compiled comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons back in the early 1990s, I think -- just around the time Terry Gilliam was attached to make the movie version. Here's the poser: Having read the book so long ago I've forgotten it, should I read it again before seeing the movie?

"Watchmen" is something many fans know practically by heart. I know one who attended an early screening of the movie and said it was one of the best adaptations he'd ever seen. An already notorious Nerd World post by "Simpsons" executive producer Matt Selman ("My Own Private Watchmen") broke the review embargo by proclaiming that he didn't consider himself "press" and wasn't actually reviewing the movie, but couldn't control the 14-year-old still living inside him: "Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen."

"The truth is, Black History Month was started by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a Black historian fed up with the lack of historical representation of people of color. In 1926, he pioneered Negro History Week, putting it on the same week as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass' birthdays. That's how February became associated with Black History Month, not some attempt to play us cheap. So, my apologies to Dr. Woodson. Mea culpa to the Man as well, though as my Mom used to tell me after erroneously beating my ass for something I didn't do, "you probably deserved this for something I didn't catch.' "

Odienator is back, and he's beautiful! The self-described "bald, Black, half-blind kid" has returned to Big Media Vandalism for his second annual "It's Black History Mumf, Odienator" Film Festival, aka "Odie 2: Electric Boogaloo." (And he's filing some of it from a business trip to Dublin, Internet willing!)

"Since Obama has made Black History every month until at least January 2013," he writes, "I am now claiming February as my own." Yes he does. So far you'll find inimitably Odienesque personal essays on "Devil In a Blue Dress," "Beat Street, "Baadasssss!," "Eve's Bayou," "Cotton Comes to Harlem,"Something the Lord Made," "Lady Sings the Blues," "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," Scary Black Movies (including "Blacula," "Abby" and "Candyman") -- and appreciations of "Sanford and Son," actor Roscoe Lee Browne, and the late Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes and Rudy Ray Moore, aka Dolemite. (Odiebama also makes a couple guest appearances.)

LOW BUDGET EYE CANDY #1 from Steven Boone on Vimeo.

Yes, there was a time when it seemed George Lucas might become more of a director than an entrepreneur. Steven Boone of Big Media Vandalism analyzes one neck-snapping action sequence from Lucas's first (and most adult) feature, 1971's "THX-1138," in this terrific video essay, hosted at Vinyl Is Heavy. "Low-Budget Eye-Candy" showcases a precise but unfussy directorial style that grasps "the subtleties of true film craft... and the power of its simplest tools." Here's evidence that a pursuit sequence (OK, a car chase) doesn't have to cost loads of money, or resort to frenetic cutting and camera placement, to create excitement. Writes Boone: "Post 1970's, post-MTV, post-AVID, post-Internet, post-DVD, this is what mainstream American cinema has lost."

... continued from here...

5. "Wendy and Lucy" (Kelly Reichardt, heartbreaker). A couple bad breaks and a stubborn act of unkindness push a girl and her dog over the edge, from a marginal migratory existence into near-invisibility. Wendy (Michelle Williams) is driving to Alaska with her dog Lucy to find work in the fishing industry, probably in a cannery. (Note to Eastern critics who found this notion strange or fanciful: It's not even unusual. Many people, especially young people, in the Pacific Northwest head to Alaska for good-paying seasonal work.) Only a few acts of kindness manage to keep her from falling off the map entirely. This (almost) opening shot (again, I present only a chunk from the middle) is scored to the humming in her head, and represents a perfect miniature of the movie as a whole: Wendy and Lucy walking in the woods, playing fetch, moving in and out of the frame, passing through light and shadow, occasionally disappearing behind trunks and thickets, then emerging on the other side. (Christopher Long has a beautiful appreciation of the shot and the film at DVDTown.)

or: as promised, an explication of why I chose these pictures and sounds:

I. Titles: Chad Feldheimer gives the invocation (Brad Pitt in Joel and Ethan Coen's "Burn After Reading").

II. Prologue: Hannah Schygulla, Goddess of Fassbinder, Animating Spirit of Cinema, awakens to look us in the eye and set the movie-countdown in motion. (From "The Edge of Heaven." I tweaked it to begin in black and white and fade into color.)

10. "The Fall" (Tarsem Singh; comedy, Western/Eastern, fantasy, adventure). "The Fall" is a tall tale about storytelling and the movies -- the shadows that flicker on screens and the images that excite our imaginations. It is a tale told by an injured American stunt man, bedridden in a Los Angeles hospital circa 1915, and filtered through the consciousness of a little Romanian girl with limited English and a broken arm. She craves the story as much as he craves morphine. He becomes a too-human god, creator and destroyer of worlds; she becomes hooked.

The shot quoted above is a piece of shadowplay from the opening sequence -- the reverse-image of a bridge and a locomotive imprinted on the surface of the water. The white specks are men in the water. A figure on the shadow-bridge tosses them a rope, which becomes a thread linking the positive and negative sides of the picture in the same shot. The rope itself snakes out in shadow (in the foreground, illuminated from behind, not cast on the water) until the tangled coil appears, falling through sunlight, set off against the shadow of a pillar of smoke, and the "tail" is swallowed up by the black of the bridge. "The Fall" accomplishes astounding feats like that throughout.

All men are created equal. All opinions aren't. Sure, anybody can hold one, and is free to express it. But of what value is an "opinion" that's based on faulty, insubstantial, incomplete, irrelevant or nonexistent information? Answer: None. In Harper's Mark Slouka writes ("A Quibble") about what may be the most important subject of our lifetimes... in my opinion:

A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame -- no longer. [...]

...[We] we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love. I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about -- constitutional law, for example, or sailing -- a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us." [...]

Although perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all folks (and their opinions) are suddenly created equal. [...]

The professor is about to supply his answers. Not the answers, his answers, and the prof is Dennis Cozzalio, Senior Quizmaster of Professor Kingsfield's Hair-Raising, Bar-Raising Holiday Movie Quiz at the always enlightening and delightful Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

It's been up since Christmas Eve, but first I was sick and then I got snowed in and then my dog ate my homework. So, I just got around to posting my answers yesterday. Get over there before the bell rings. Not that Prof. Cozzalio wouldn't let you turn yours in late, even if he fills out the questionnaire himself first.

UPDATE: The professor's answers are in!

Here are a few of my responses, which you'll find way down in the comments. I didn't read over anybody else's shoulder, though!

8) Are most movies too long?

Yes, and 20 years ago they seemed too long because they were too short. Perfect example: Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America." Anybody who had to sit through the 139-minute US release will tell you it was way, WAY longer than the 229-minute version.

9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.

Phillip Baker Hall as Richard M. Nixon in Altman's "Secret Honor."

4) Favorite actor/character from "Twin Peaks."

Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer). My hero. (Incidentally, there would be no "House" without this character.)

I never got tired of Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and I loved any scene with Sarah and/or Leland Palmer (Grace Zabriskie, Ray Wise).

12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?

"Life might very well lack purpose, and it might very well be a struggle. But that doesn't mean you have to be an asshole about it."

So writes Ali Arikan in his thoroughly illuminating (and not at all repetitious) "Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A 'Groundhog Day' Retrospective" at The House Next Door. This is one of those appreciations that lights up the movie from within, and makes you happy reading just it, as the writer weaves together detailed observations of the film itself and parallels to "It's A Wonderful Life," "The Sopranos," Schopenhauer and Camus. And it's funny!

A shot of a blue sky (cotton-white clouds floating, lazily, across the screen) opens the film. Every few seconds the shot changes--yet it remains the same. The sky is blue, the clouds as pearly as before and still in their hazy dance, even though they are not the same as the ones from the previous shot. It is a visual metaphor that permeates the rest of the film. That it is intertwined with an otherworldly small town marching band track only adds to the positively Lynchian feel.

From Roger Ebert's remarks last night at the DGA Awards, where he was granted an Honorary Lifetime Membership in the Directors' Guild of America. They were delivered by Chaz Ebert:

Of course sometimes my reviews have not been favorable. Robert Altman once told me, "If you never wrote a negative review, what would your positive reviews mean?"

"That's true," I said.

"Unfortunately," Altman said, "in my case, all of your negative reviews have been mistaken." [...]

We are born into a box of space and time, and the movies come closer than any other art form in giving us the experience of walking in someone else's shoes. They allow us an opportunity to experience what it would be like to live within another gender, race, religion, nationality, or period of time. They expand us, they improve us, and sometimes they ennoble us. They also thrill us and make us laugh and cry, and for that gift, and for this honor tonight, I am very grateful.

Full speech, and news story, here.

At MSN Movies, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy continue their tradition of conjuring indelible cinematic moments of the previous year -- made all the more indelible by their luminous descriptions of them. A few samples, from some terrific movies, and some not-so-terrific ones:

• In "The Edge of Heaven," a brown ribbon of road glowing under the last shrinking patch of blue in a lowering, end-of-day sky ...

• "In Bruges": The twinkle and the glower: First views of the "Belgian s---hole" by, respectively, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) ...

• In "Revolutionary Road," April stands in milky light with her back to us, gazing out her picture window as blood pools at her feet. Hats off to Douglas Sirk . ...

• As a hospital explodes in the background, a nurse sporting an obscene mask of white, black and red greasepaint totters in the street, gazing into the camera as though daring us not to get off on the way the Joker plays in "The Dark Knight" ...

• "I was a guard!" -- the courtroom profession that instantly defines the literal and moral limits of Hanna Schmitz's (Kate Winslet) imagination, and perhaps a nation's, in "The Reader" ...

• In "Che," the most romanticized revolutionary ever (Benicio Del Toro) staggers up a steep wooded hillside, wheezing with asthma. ...

• A scene of pastoral skinny-dipping suddenly turns cold and black with the threat of death, and in "Tell No One," nothing afterward is as it seems. ...

• Wendy (the superb Michelle Williams) gazes helplessly from the backseat of a cop car as her tethered golden Lab recedes from view -- the first in a cascade of losses in "Wendy and Lucy."...

• "The Happening": Mark Wahlberg delivering a monologue to a houseplant, just in case ...

• "Let the Right One In": At snowy evening, a man making his way home passes out of a tunnel, and the dark little creature Eli drops on him as if from above the screen itself. ...

• "Burn After Reading": Chad Feldheimer's last grin (Brad Pitt, sublime) ...

Many more here.

Care to contribute some of your favorite movie-moments from the past year?

or: Ways to Fall (in one or more pieces)

The first part of this little movie provides an overview of different approaches filmmakers from Buster Keaton to Alfred Hitchcock to Christopher Nolan have taken to shooting falls and/or jumps from high places. (It wouldn't do anyone much good to fall or jump from a low place.) The second part examines, in vital but nit-picky detail, a twelve-shot sequence from "The Dark Knight" and makes suggestions for improving it, based solely on what's already there.

TWO WARNINGS: Part I includes possible spoilers for "In Bruges" (two reminders of what makes it one of the best-directed films of the year), "The Fall," "The Tenant" and "Infernal Affairs" -- as well as not-so-spoily clips from "Vertigo," "Superman," "This Gun for Hire," "Our Hospitality" and "The Dark Knight." Some parts are a little gruesome, too. Part II delves into a brief segment of "The Dark Knight" repeatedly, shot by shot. If that places unreasonable demands on your time or patience, you're at the wrong place on the Interwebs, so don't subject yourself to it. There's a little button at the lower left of the movie player that will stop it. You have been warned (and will be again).

Some notes about falling down:

I was going to ignore it, I really was. But several people have e-mailed me about the appearance of Armond White's "Better-Than List 2008," and requested an opportunity to discuss it here. Well, OK.

White insists once again that what "it all comes down to" is a contest between "movies you must experience versus movies that threaten to diminish you":

Most of these high-profile films insult one's intelligence, while the year's best movies vanish from the marketplace for lack of critical support. This tragedy is exemplified by the scary acclaim for the year's worst: The atrocious "Slumdog Millionaire" and Pixar's hideous "Wall-E," the buzz-kill movie of all time. Trust no critic who endorses them.

So, it's not really Batman vs. the Joker. It's "Transporter 3" BETTER THAN "The Dark Knight": "Olivier Megaton, Jason Statham and Luc Besson reinvent the action movie as kinetic art, but impressionable teenagers mistook Chris Nolan's nihilistic graphic novel for kool fun."

I can't tell from that sentence (which constitutes the entirety of White's blurb-ument in this case) what the first part has to do with the second part, but it illustrates once again the meaninglessness of plugging movies into equations and pretending it's criticism.

Two Three observations:

"I couldn't tell if it was a fable or if it was badly written."

-- couple leaving theater in Bruce Eric Kaplan New Yorker cartoon (1/19/09)

* * * *

"I think a record is something to be consumed and to be experienced by tons of people in different ways and in different lights. Context is everything for some people. Context isn't everything for other people."

-- Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, on his album "For Emma, Forever Ago," which he recorded during a winter spent living alone in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods

* * * *

"Framing is everything. I remember [someone] asked Erland Josephson, who worked with Bergman, 'How did he direct you? What did you do?' And he said, 'He didn't really direct us that much. It was just really where he put the camera.' I think that's true. It's really how, suddenly, the image takes a kind of energy. I'm fascinated by the visual language."

-- Sophie Fiennes, director of "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema"

If there's any doubt in your mind (and I can't imagine why there would be) that "Pineapple Express" is a head trip movie about stoners imagining themselves the heroes of a movie they'd like to see, the final morning-after breakfast-and-bonding scene (not to mention the Robert Palmer "Woke up laughing" snippet followed by the Huey Lewis song over the end credits) drives it home like Bubby. The "Extended Version" now on DVD and Blu-ray goes even further. The guys re-live their movie, summing up what they've shared, and what they've learned.

Check out the clip above (WARNING -- spoilers and R-rated language), and then continue below for the Huey Lewis plot-synopsis lyrics. Director David Gordon Green reportedly asked just three things: 1) that it sound like his '80s stuff; 2) that it contain repeated mentions of the movie title; and 3) that it contain something like a plot synopsis. I smell Oscar! (In a good way...)

P.S. Hey, man, have you ever played "Dark Side of the Moon" at the same time as "The Wizard of Oz"... ?

I've been trying to imagine a conversation about a movie that would include the argument: "Well, you only point that out because you liked the movie." Or, "You wouldn't have noticed that if you didn't already like the movie." In response to all the stuff I wrote last year about the many moments of brilliance in "No Country for Old Men," I don't recall anybody saying, "Well, you wouldn't have liked that if you didn't like the movie."

But that's more or less what some are saying to me about "The Dark Knight": "You didn't like that because you didn't like the movie." I can understand where some of it is coming from: People feel defensive when they've enjoyed something and somebody else criticizes it; maybe they don't want to examine that experience closely -- although that has always been the purpose of this blog. The closer the better. I didn't expect to win friends and influence people by attempting to get specific about why I found "The Dark Knight" a lightweight entertainment, but also a letdown. It may seem like I'm just trying to justify my dislike; you might otherwise think I'm trying to discover the source(s) of my dissatisfaction. I don't think that's dishonest, or a waste of time, but if you do, please feel free to skip to a post in another category!

I also put people on the defensive by "going negative" prematurely, which added injury to insult. Maybe I let that silly "Love TDK -- or else!" threat get lodged in the back of my brain and it's been subconsciously gnawing away at me for the last month, I don't know.

Filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee, of Shooting Down Pictures has been posting video essays and shorts on YouTube for three years. Until yesterday, when the site pulled all his work -- more than 40 pieces totaling over 300 minutes -- on grounds of "copyright infringement" because he included clips from the films he was discussing. This is a travesty of the principles of intellectual freedom that the Fair Use doctrine is designed to protect and encourage under US Copyright Law.

Matt Zoller Seitz also had a run-in with YouTube recently. (See his splendid Busby Berkeley reverie here.) I can't improve on the eloquent case he makes at The House Next Door, where Lee has been a regular contributor:

Can a critic argue without clips? Sure. Film criticism has largely done without external accompaniments for a century and can continue to do without them. But it's important to note that clips and still frames have been a central part of cinema studies since its inception. Anyone who's attended a film history or theory course knows how valuable they are. Clips often determine the difference between learning something and truly understanding it. They're quotes from the source text deployed to make a case. Take them away, and you're left with the critic saying, "Well, I can't show you exactly what I mean, so I'll describe it as best I can and hope you believe me."

This, in a nutshell, is the defining difference between criticism pre- and post-millennium. For the first time ever, when someone says to a critic, "Show me the evidence," the critic doesn't need to unlock a film archive vault or even haul out a DVD player to produce it. He can call it up online anytime, anywhere, for anybody.

At the risk of getting ahead of myself (I can tell from the initial comments, I'm probably already in way over my head), let me directly address (as I have in some comments all ready) one of my primary concerns with "The Dark Knight" and movies in general. And that, simply, is that, as I always like to say, if it's in the movie, then let's talk about it. If it's not -- that is, if you're coming up with some scenario or motivation or explanation that a particular image or sound in the movie does not address -- then you can't pretend it's part of the movie. Because, manifestly, it isn't. That's the difference between Ain't-it-cool fanboy speculation and actual movie criticism, based on what's on the screen, not what's in a previous draft of an unpublished comic somewhere....

So, when I asked ("Dark Knight Quiz #1: What's wrong with this picture") for you to consider one of the key shots in "The Dark Knight" (the "punchline,", if you will, to of the opening sequence), one of the things I wanted to get at is the movie's conception (or, at least, the audience's conception) of the Joker as a supernatural being. I've found that discussing "The Dark Knight" can be like discussing Intelligent Design -- in all the worst ways.

This just in:

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
*1. Hanna Schygulla (The Edge of Heaven) - 29 (Strand Releasing)
2. Viola Davis (Doubt) - 29 (on fewer ballots)
3. Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) - 24

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
*1. Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky) 41 (Miramax)
2. Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) - 35
3. Josh Brolin (Milk) - 29

The best of 2008 in just under 8 minutes. Watch the movie, identify the images (all titles listed at the end). Some last only a few seconds, some for a minute or so. Coming soon: Shot-by-shot commentary (or, why I chose these particular shots for my tribute to the year's best favoritest.). And, of course, the second annual Exploding Head Awards!

Text list after jump...

Mike Myers' "The Love Guru" was chosen worst picture of the year in the Second Annual Ninth Annual Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll, in which I was but one of 81 balloteers. I may have been fortunate in that I didn't see it. Nor was I exposed to runner-up Alan Ball's "Towelhead," which was followed by a multiple tie for third-lousiest between "Burn After Reading," "Changeling," "Doubt," "Gran Torino," "Rachel Getting Married," "Step Brothers," and "Synecdoche, New York." The reason I mention this first is that most of these films (OK, not "Love Guru") were also chosen by some as among the best movies of the year, and they were directed by a few critical darlings: Joel and Ethan Coen, Clint Eastwood (twice), Jonathan Demme, Charlie Kaufman...

This year's poll favorites:

10) "Synechdoche, New York" (Charlie Kaufman, USA)

9) "Let the Right One In" (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

8) "Wendy and Lucy" (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

7) "Milk" (Gus Van Sant, USA)

6) "Waltz With Bashir" (Ari Folman, Israel)

Before I do my proper "ten best" honors (in a form that is not a critics' poll ballot), I just want to say that the best things I saw on any screen in 2008 were:

1) "Generation Kill" (seven-part HBO mini-series, adapted by Ed Burns and David Simon, the makers of "The Wire," and Evan Walker Wright, a reporter embedded with the 1st Recon Marines in Iraq in 2003, based on Wright's book). I don't like the title. At some point in Episode Three I thought this was the funniest show on TV. About 15 minutes later, I still felt so, but I also felt something radically different. Susanna White is one hell of a director.

2) "Liverpool" (Lisandro Alonso; seen at Toronto Film Festival)

3) "Four Nights with Anna" (Jerzy Skolimowski; seen at Toronto Film Festival)

4) "35 Rhums" (Claire Denis; seen at Toronto Film Festival)

5) "Mad Men" (AMC, Season Two)

6) "In Treatment" (HBO, Season One)

Just because they didn't play for a week or more on US movie screens doesn't mean they should go unacknowledged (any more than "The Dekalog" or "Fanny and Alexander" should), and I hope to have the opportunity to write about them in depth in 2009. ("Generation Kill" was just released on DVD December 16.)

When she put "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" on her Worst Movies of 2008 list, Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwartzbaum referred to the Holocaust melodrama as "Honey, I Gassed the Kids." And, if she honestly believes the movie is as awful as she describes it (and I have no reason to think she doesn't), it is her moral duty as a critic to pummel it with everything she's got. A "dumb summer comedy" can be awful, undendurable; an irresponsible or simpleminded film that exploits and trivializes a "powerful subject" (genocide, racism, pedophilia, rape, suicide, torture, any number of historical atrocities) can be flat-out evil -- precisely because it presents itself as Serious (or Risky or Important or Challenging) Cinema. If filmmakers choose to play with fire, they'd better be morally and artistically equipped to handle the responsibility, or they deserve to get burned.

"The moral of this outrageous, British-accented nonsense appears to be that if you build a death camp, sometimes the wrong people get killed," Schwarzbaum wrote. "Not for the last time, alas, has the Holocaust been co-opted into a kitschy 'universal' story of 'tolerance' about how we're all 'one.' But this one is supposed to be a story for children!"

I can't vouch for Schwarzbaum's take on "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" (although that title made me throw up in my mouth a little, as they say) because I haven't seen it, but I know exactly what she means. I feel the same way about the denial fable of "Life is Beautiful." (Protect your kid from the cruelty and stress of immediate danger by telling him death camps are just fun 'n' games! While you're at it, why not tell him that if he throws himself under a truck it will just bounce off him? And he can really fly if he wants to, too! Don't shatter his dreams!)

Todd McCarthy of Variety, who's old enough to know better, writes at the end of his review of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button":

Still, for what is designed as a rich tapestry, the picture maintains a slightly remote feel. No matter the power of the image of an old but young-looking Benjamin, slumped over a piano and depressed about his fading memory and life; it is possible that the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film. It has been argued that digital is a cold medium and celluloid a hot one and a case, however speculative, could be made that a story such as "Benjamin Button," with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized. These are intangibles, but nor are they imaginary factors; what technology gives, it can also take away.

[Don't worry -- no spoilers.]

This makes about as much sense to me as blaming the weather on Doppler radar pictures. It may be the second-most misguided thing I've read about movies all year (after Patrick Goldstein's assertion that a "dumb summer comedy" is more worthy of contempt that a dishonest or inept film that expects its ambition to be taken more seriously).

OK, let's say the movie feels "cold" to you, and you attribute this feeling to something in the film. You could acknowledge the movie's predominantly wintry settings and sepia color pallete (exemplified by the fully digital image, set in the dead of night in an empty hotel lobby in the middle of the Russian winter, above). Or contemplate the loneliness of the emotionally detached title character/observer/narrator, who is born an old man in a decrepit body and is cursed to grow physically younger while watching everyone around him age and die.

And you might very well consider the Kubrickian sensibility of the director, David Fincher ("Se7en," "Fight Club," "Zodiac"), the most deliberate and precise of filmmakers. Not known as Mr. Warm 'n' Cozy -- even when working from a Gumpian screenplay by the writer of "Forrest Gump." If the film is dark and cool in tone, it's not because Fincher chose digital technology. It's because Fincher chose to make it dark and cool. You may dislike the countless ways in which the movie emphasizes these qualities (in every composition, every cut, every performance), but don't pretend it's the video that's doing it.

Ten contributors to MSN Movies cast their ballots for the best films of 2008, unaware of what anyone else would pick. A simple point scale was used to weight the choices. And the result is one of the more surprisingly satisfying year-end consensus-mixes I've seen so far. Yeah, I'm one of the participants, and six of my top choices wound up on the aggregate list, but still...

Best of all, each title is accompanied by a micro-mini-essay by one of the critics. It ain't easy compressing one's appreciation into nuggets of less than 250 words, but the effort can occasionally yield its own rewards...

MSN Movies Top 10 (bottom to top):
(titles link to individual blurbs)

10. Slumdog Millionaire
9. Wendy and Lucy
8. WALL-E
7. Pineapple Express
6. The Dark Knight

A few weeks ago, the Hollywood trades were observing (or complaining) that, because of the 2008 presidential election, all the big studio Oscar-bait films had been pushed back into December. I mean, how are mere movies going to compete with that cast? "Obama. Biden. McCain. And Sarah Palin as Jaws."

Last year's Oscar-winner, "No Country for Old Men," played the Toronto Film Festival in early September, the New York Film Festival in early October, and began opening around the country November 9. The critics groups split between "NCFOM" (NY) and "There Will Be Blood" (LA, National Society), which was a 2008 release in much of the country.

This year, it's anybody's guess. "Slumdog Millionaire"? "Milk"? "WALL-E"? Something that hasn't won a critical consensus honor yet? (Right now my hunch is that the National Society of Film Critics will wind up going for either "The Wrestler" or "Wendy and Lucy." Just a hunch.)

UPDATE: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, bestower of the Golden Globules, has announced its nominations... and even with a total of ten best picture slots (in Drama and Comedy/Musical categories) it overlooked "Milk," "The Wrestler" and "The Dark Knight," all of which seem to me like fairly obvious Globuley-Oscary pictures. Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Heath Ledger all got acting nods, though. Go fig.

There will be lots to see between now and New Year's Eve -- and I still haven't caught up with "Milk," "Happy-Go-Lucky," "I Loved You So Long," "Ballast," "Rachel Getting Married," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" -- all of which have already opened theatrically. Still to come: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Nixon/Frost," "Revolutionary Road," "The Reader," "The Wrestler," "Doubt," "Seven Pounds"... none of which, however, have made much of an impact with critics groups.

The East Coast and West Coast critics have agreed on a few things here and there: Sean Penn in "Milk," Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky," Penelope Cruz in "Vicki Cristina Barcelona," "Man on Wire" for documentary, but... well, see for yourself:

Los Angeles Film Critics Association

Picture: "WALL-E"
Runner-up: "The Dark Knight"

Foreign language film: "Still Life"
Runner-up: "The Class"

Documentary film: "Man on Wire"
Runner-up: "Waltz With Bashir"

Animated film: "Waltz With Bashir"

First but least, as always, it's time for the National Board of Review selections. Their top pick: Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," which was also the fave in Toronto in September. No, I still haven't figured out who these people are, either, but they've been doing this sort of thing for 99 years and describe themselves on their web site as "the oldest organization devoted to motion pictures as art and entertainment." OK.

The NBR top ten (in alphabetical order):

"Burn After Reading"
"Changeling"
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight"
"Defiance"
"Frost/Nixon"
"Gran Torino"
"Milk"
"WALL-E"
"The Wrestler"

Clint Eastwood gets best actor for "Gran Torino" and "Doubt" snags best ensemble cast, even though it didn't make the top ten. David Fincher wins best director for "Benjamin Button."

... and then...

Remembering Robert Altman (February 20, 1915 - November 20, 2006). This piece, revised and expanded from a Scanners post, was published in the German film magazine steadycam in a 2006 tribute issue, "Der Spieler Robert Altman: Zocker, Zyniker, Provokateur, Bluffer, Genie."

Well, we must be doing something right
To last... two hundred years!
-- Haven Hamilton, "200 Years"

It begins with a cheesy, hyper, K-Tel-style TV commercial for itself, segues into a libertarian political spiel by the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party, and then into a rousing Bicentennial anthem sung by a toupeed country-western singer in a white rhinestone-studded outfit.

Oliver Stone's movie doesn't begin to approach this level of character insight or emotion. This genuine drama took place in Tallahassee, after the 2006 mid-term election. Notice the phrases over which the former president stumbles and weeps when talking about his son, Jeb, who served two terms as governor of Florida and was prevented by term-limit laws from running for a third:

I saw Oliver Stone's "W." a week or two ago, and I almost forgot. Believe me, it felt even more worn out before the election. I kept thinking I'd seen it before in some other form. Not just as in every day for the last eight years, or as in some other slab of Stone. This one reminded me of Woody Allen's "Zelig" or Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump" -- about a nobody who stumbles into history. Then I realized it was more like a reworking of Hal Ashby and Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" -- the story of a vacancy.

That impression was magnified Tuesday night as I watched Barack step up to fill it. In that one solemn but hopeful election night speech in Grant Park he did more to steady, strengthen and solidify the union for tough times than I've seen any president do in my lifetime. It wasn't just a matter of commanding screen space or being ready for his close-up (although the camera loves him). But after so many years of looking at a skittish hamster-in-the-headlights, squinting or staring blankly into the lens, how dramatic it was to see somebody there at last -- a solid somebody with a firm sense of who he is, and what it means to lead and to strive and to inspire. No smugness, no self-congratulation, no condescension, no desperation. A grown-up. I felt an enormous sense of confidence and relief. And I didn't feel alone in feeling that.

Which brings me back to the hollowness of W. and "W."...

Skeletons in the closet! Bats in the belfry! Wolves in sheep's clothing! Pit bull-barracudas in Neiman Marcus clothing! Flying pigs in lipstick bursting forth from unlicensed plumbing fixtures! Befitting the sinister tone of season (political and scary), David Bordwell has published a brilliant essay he calls "It was a dark and stormy campaign," in which he examines the concept of "narrative," as it has come to be used in film and campaign circles. This is essential reading:

Clearly the presidential candidates have come to believe that what seizes the public aren't just policy views and promises. Now the campaigns want to tell stories in which the candidates are the protagonists. The life of Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Sarah Palin is said to be a story (usually "an American story"). According to Robert Draper's influential recent article ["The Making (and Remaking) of McCain"], John McCain's campaign has deliberately set out a series of "narratives": McCain endures suffering in Hanoi as a POW; he enters politics and fights for reform in government. Mark Salter, McCain's staff member and coauthor, has the responsibility of stitching incidents of the Senator's career into what he calls the "metanarrative" of McCain's life--rather as George Lucas presides over the Bible of the "Star Wars" universe.

In some Scanners comments this weekend, we've been discussing various comparisons between George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon, seeing as how Oliver Stone has now made made both failed presidents the subjects of Major Motion Pictures. Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin B. Lee, in a series of visual and print essays at Moving Image Source about Oliver Stone's political portraits ("Born on the Fourth of July," "JFK," "Nixon," "Alexander" -- leading up to "W.") have been re-examining these films as part of Stone's cinematic autobiography-in-process. (I think all these films, for better or worse, say more about their maker than they do about their subjects -- though there's nothing exceptional about that.)

Nixon is a key figure in my life -- the center of many of my political disputes with my late father, who would not find it unflattering to be described a "redneck" from Catawissa, MO, which I think is a pretty accurate description. When I was 10 and studied the 1968 presidential candidates in elementary school, I decided I was for Hubert Humphrey. My dad voted Nixon (though sometimes I suspected him of actually going for Wallace -- a racist gargoyle who could not have terrified this young Seattle white boy more if he had actually worn a gown and pointed hood). To me, Nixon's resignation in disgrace represented the triumph of my morality over my father's. To him, the only difference between Nixon and any other politician was that "he got caught."

Now that I'm older than he was then, I think we both have our points. At any rate, the president the country chooses unquestionably reflects and defines that period in its history.

Which leads me to something Matt writes about "Nixon" (the movie):

... and what was that ending supposed to mean?

WARNING: HBO-rated profanity and imagery discussed -- including language previously restricted to top-level government officials, mostly during the Nixon and Cheney administrations.

(tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Before I get to the movie part of this post, I want to toast Paul Krugman. He is one of the few public figures I've ever considered a personal hero. (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are, too, and I'm not joking.)

In the bleakest hours of the new millennium -- through 9/11, Iraq, soul-shattering scandals, national elections, and impending financial disasters -- Krugman stood as a beacon of hope and, if you'll pardon the expression, moral clarity in what Nick Lowe (and Elvis Costello) memorably called "the darkness of insanity."

Hired in 1999 as the New York Times economic columnist, Krugman wound up doing what so many journalists, even at his own paper, were failing to do. He reported. Not just what people said, but how what they said compared to independently verifiable reality. Week after week, column after column, Krugman was virtually alone (alongside Knight-Ridder, NPR and "The Daily Show") in pointing out, and explaining the significance of, relevant facts that so many didn't care to notice, even when they were right there in plain sight -- and in the public record, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

He wasn't just a good reporter but a fine critic.

Fully customizable to fit YOUR blog or site. Just click the "Get Widget" button below. This one's already "transparent," so it'll blend into your page's color scheme, but with a few clicks you make it look however you like. Then just plop the code into your template on Blogger, Facebook, TypePad, WordPress, MySpace or whatever and you and your readers will see automatic updates. It's groovy and fun. You can also get a Roger Ebert's Journal widget by (ironically) looking in the far-right column below...

One of the things film critics do for a living is to pay close attention to how people behave, and how that behavior is presented through visual media. This applies not only to actors playing characters, but to people who play themselves, in fictional or nonfictional settings, on and off the screen. It should come as no surprise to learn that some of our best movie critics have backgrounds in psychology.

When Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman," it now seems impossible to believe that he fooled anyone at that particular moment. But if any movie critic misread Clinton's voice and body language, that critic should have been impeached. As opaque as the clumsy verbal gymnastics of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin may often be, behind the contortions it's hard to avoid seeing the painful truth, which is simply that they don't know what their own words mean, and even when they know what they've been told to say they don't know how to communicate it. As actors, they're thoroughly unconvincing: You can see the wheels turning inside their heads -- only the gears aren't even engaged. There's a lot of whirring and spinning, but nothing happens. That can be excruciating to watch, but it's also the stuff of modern comedy. Christopher Guest, Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert and the whole Judd Apatow crew come to mind.

Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that film critics like Roger Ebert, sophisticated in their knowledge of media presentation and human behavior, make more insightful political pundits than the usual beltway-bubble spin-docs employed by television, radio, print and online outlets. In a piece called "From film critic to political pundit," Goldstein writes:

To me, film critics, like TV and theater critics, are especially well equipped to analyze today's politics, which is why Frank Rich made such a seamless transition from theater to media and political commentator. In fact, in some ways film critics are probably better equipped to assess the political theater of today's presidential campaigns, since our campaigns are -- as has surely been obvious for some time -- far more about theater and image creation than politics.

The communal Parallax View film criticism blog, coordinated by Sean Axmaker, has resurrected Richard T. Jameson's provocative, penetrating "Apocalypse Now" review, originally published in the Seattle Weekly (then known only as The Weekly) October 17, 1979. I think it's the most lucid thing anyone's ever written about the movie, and should be required reading after every screening as a way of ensuring substantive discussion.

Jameson's piece illuminates essential truths about "Apocalypse" (and, I think, about Coppola's body of work), with a precision few critics have been willing or able to explore. You may want to argue with it (and by all means go ahead!), but if you read it closely I think it will show you things you may already have felt, even if you never quite noticed them before. That's true for me, anyway. I've just re-read it for the first time in almost 30 years, and I feel it's been there, under my skin, the whole time:

"Apocalypse Now" is a dumb movie that could have been made only by an intelligent and talented man. It pushes its egregiousness with such conviction and technical sophistication that, upon first viewing, I immediately resolved to withhold firm judgment until I'd seen the film again: perhaps I'd missed some crucial irony, some ingenious framework that, properly understood, would convert apparent asininity to audacity. I didn't find it. It isn't there. What is there is the evidence of a reasonably talented filmmaker having spectacularly overextended himself -- Francis Ford Coppola who, having had a toney pop epic widely accepted as great cinema, felt he was ready to make "Citizen Kurtz."

"It is not enough to like a film. One must like it for the right reasons."
-- Pierre Rissient

This is entirely coincidental, so consider it a fortuitous double-bill. Just as I posted the item below ("The sins of the critic"), Roger Ebert posted a blog essay on the subject: "'Critic' is a four-letter word." Here's a taste:

Too many simply absorb. They are depositories for input. They can hardly be expected to be critical of their own tastes, can they? Of course they can. It is not enough simply to be a "Cubs fan," although I confess I am one. It is necessary to feel the philosophy, the history, and even the poetry about the activity called "baseball." It is helpful to step outside a little, and see that sports teams are surrogates for our own desires to conquer, and expressions of our xenophobia. For some, they are even the best way ever invented to drink beer outdoors. If you are only a Cubs fan, you are a willing automaton in a business venture. Join me in being a Cubs fan, but know why you do it. What is my most fundamental reason? I am a fan because they are always the underdogs. That may be why I bought a Studebaker 30 years after the company went out of business.

Read the entire piece here.

Critic Kathleen Murphy takes a prickly, sarcastic inventory of common complaints against, well, critics at MSN Movies and finds them... not so sharp. I have this uneasy feeling some readers looker-atters won't see the irony, but -- what can I say? -- we live in an age when millions either can't or won't see the pig for the lipstick.

Among accusations addressed are the sins of seriousness, snobbery, geezerism and insufficient appreciation for the latest trends. (One of my favorite zingers: "Haven't you ever heard of the fierce urgency of NOW?" As if this week's movies were automatically better than last week's because they're more up-to-date! There's critical perspective for you.)

Kathleen quotes from my "Do the Contrarian" song (a big hit single for me during Contrarian Week in 2007) to introduce a little rant about that vintage favorite, "The Dark Knight," and an Oscar-winner that's soon to become a Dramatic Television Show:

Here's just what you've been craving: Twelve minutes and 19 seconds of stopping, starting, slowing down and gabbing (I mean, breathless commentary) over the one-minute, 47-second title sequence that introduces each episode of the cult-classic 1967-68 British science-fiction / spy TV series, "The Prisoner," starring Patrick McGoohan.

I was possessed by the need to do this -- just for myself -- while (re-)watching the entire series again on DVD and becoming mesmerized by repeat viewings of the opening. It sucked me in every time. I hadn't seen the show since it aired -- on PBS? -- in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and this time I was endlessly fascinated and delighted by the sheer sixties-ness of it all -- the camera set-ups, optical gimmicks (zooms galore) and cutting techniques that epitomized the era.

Do you want more information about "The Prisoner"...?

David Bordwell examines the crucial distinguishing characteristics of cinephiles and cinemaniacs, and catalogs the shared habits and competitive strategies of the former, in "Games cinephiles play."

Which are you? (Not that you have to be one or the other.) DB will help you resolve any cine-related identity crisis from which you may be suffering.

He writes:

... I do see differences. For one thing, most cinemaniacs like only certain sorts of movies--usually American, often silent, sometimes foreign, seldom documentaries. Do cinemaniacs line up for Brakhage or Frederick Wiseman? My sense is not.

Cinephiles by contrast tend to be ecumenical. Indeed, many take pride in the intergalactic breadth of their tastes. Look at any smart critic's ten-best lists. You'll usually see an eclectic mix of arthouse, pop, and experimental, including one or two titles you have never heard of. Obscurity is important; a cinephile is a connoisseur.

(Continuing the discussion, "Yes, but is it art?):

I labeled the above short film ("close up") a critical essay / dream sequence, which is what I intended when I made it last fall. But pretend you saw it at a film festival or a gallery and were told it was a "found footage" composition by a filmmaker whose influences include, say, Bruce Connor, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, and/or Guy Maddin. Would you perceive it differently, whether you thought it was any good or not?

What if you were told that it was a meditation on the intersection of the actor's gaze, the camera's gaze, and the gaze into the mirror; of the movies that have been implanted so deeply in our heads that they become part of us; of the human face as blank slate and reflection of thoughts and emotions; of the skull beneath the skin and the vanity of the flesh; of subconscious metamorphoses and/or stream-of-consciousness Surrealist dream-imagery? A densely interwoven montage of images that requires annotation and explanation to fully understand (you know, like Eliot's poetry)? Or a Surrealist experiment in the vein of "Un Chien Andalou," using only silent footage, scored to a multi-tracked collage soundtrack composed of excerpts from two symphonies by Gustav Mahler and stock sound effects?

The phrase above was the name I gave to the arts section I edited at the University of Washington Daily. I thought (and still think) it was funny, while it also satirizes the central conceit of writing about culture, whether it's "high culture" or "popular culture." (If I made a Venn diagram of those categories they would significantly overlap.) I still have a rubber stamp that says, "This is not art." I got it about 30 years ago. Sometimes I like to get it out and stamp it on things because I think it is absolutely hilarious -- both as a comment on art and a comment on criticism. I laugh and laugh, even if it's only on the inside.

The dialog that sets it up and spells it out for you. An inspired expository montage by Matt Zoller Seitz. What can I say?

"I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués -- such a horrible joke. I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do."
-- Manny Farber, quoted in Roger Ebert's appreciation of the late, great critic

Painter and critic Manny Farber, whose book "Negative Space" is one of the essential collections of visual-arts criticism, has died at the age of 91. Farber's writing was scrappy, unpretentious and iconoclastic, not unlike the films and filmmakers he favored, from the genre pictures of Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah and John Wayne, to the visionary and experimental work of Werner Herzog, R.W. Fassbinder, Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman. (See pages from the expanded 1998 edition here.)

Unquestionably his most famous and reverently-quoted essay was 1962's "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Modern art, he wrote, had become "a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition: far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerisms by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art."

Farber is as much fun to read as he is to agree -- and argue-- with. I can think of no better tribute than to cite a few excerpts from his "termite art" treatise:

I've been hearing from some disgruntled comic-book and superhero fans that they think critics have a prejudice against the genre. Or genres. I think there's a distinction to be made between comic-book, graphic novel and superhero movies (though, obviously, certain pictures overlap categories). So, I thought I'd do a little (and I mean a little) research to see if I could discern a trend. I did, and it was a pretty clear one.

So I sampled a few titles at RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic. Not that these sites should be considered the ultimate authorities on such matters, but they do give some indication of a movie's critical reception. Here's what I found:

... what? Not "Star Wars"? Not even "The Dark Knight"? (Wait -- that's the 21st.)

See? Cinephiles and music collectors aren't the only ones who feel the compulsive need to make lists. Though, usually, we flaunt the subjectivity of the exercise (and try not to figure box-office popularity into the equation). But not this University of Chicago economist profiled in Monday's New York Times:

Ask David Galenson to name the single greatest work of art from the 20th century, and he unhesitatingly answers "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," a 1907 painting by Picasso.

He can then tell you with certainty Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, as well. [...]

If, like me, you were spellbound by each season's opening credits for "The Wire," you must see the short film analyses of them by critics Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz at Moving Image Source (published by the Museum of the Moving Image). Using the actual footage, along with still frames and zooms (aka "the Ken Burns effect"), these short films examine the credits in critical detail, treating them as short movies unto themselves. Which is exactly what they are. Each season of "The Wire" introduced a new opening montage (cut to various recordings of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole") to set the scene. (Also see the Opening Shot essay for "The Wire.")

Hey, remember the year they released "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"? Where were you when the movie of "Sex and the City" came out? Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a 63-page spread about the former HBO show the week before the feature film came out? Oh, and what about the big "Chronicles of Narnia" sequel? It was such a hot property they made everybody go through security -- with metal detectors and everything. What if someone had made a shaky-cam bootleg of it 36 hours before it opened to the masses? Whoa!

Then, just a couple weeks ago, people lined up for days to catch the first midnight showings of "The Dark Knight." Oh, maybe that was last week. Once upon a time these things seemed like kind of a big deal, and now they all seem so three months ago.

This is my condensed version of David Fincher's 1999 comedy masterpiece, "Fight Club," to accompany and expand on my personal/critical essay below. Notice that only one punch is thrown. The violence is psychological, inner-directed and apocalyptic. That's the idea. See for yourself. (Speaking of condensation: Did you know that you can make explosives from soap and condensed orange juice? Tyler Durden says so. But don't talk about it.)

PLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD.

Spoilers abound.

"...There is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
-- "Hamlet" Act 2, scene 2

If you've ever suffered from clinical depression, you know the experience is impossible to convey to someone who hasn't also gone through it. It doesn't make sense. It's like trying to describe why you love somebody. How do you explain a lack of feeling, or interest, or pleasure, that is both numbing and excruciatingly painful? How do you account for a disconnection with the past and any conception of a future? It's not "living in the moment" -- it's being stuck in a moment from which you can't imagine any escape -- not just the feeling that this asphyxiating near-deadness will go on forever, but that you can't imagine ever having felt any other way (even though, logically, you know that is not possible). You can remember feeling pleasure -- no, make that "having felt pleasure" -- but you have no memory of what it actually felt like.

One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I've ever seen (though Laurent Cantet's "Time Out" and Eric Steel's "The Bridge" delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time. I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror. I recognized myself in the movie, relished the psychological acuteness of what I was seeing, felt its black absurdity resonate in my poor, chemically imbalanced noggin. From the very first images deep inside the human brain, I felt it could not be about anything else, even though I didn't know where it was going to go from there.

(Spoilers? Oh, yes.)

Kathleen Murphy has written a stunning piece over at Testpattern called "The Haunted Palace." (I've been waiting weeks for it to appear so I could send you there.) Although primarily about Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad," the article moves through those haunted corridors, into Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, passing through doors (and walls) into the worlds of Max Ophuls, Luis Buñuel, Josef von Sternberg... As you wander through the maze of this "Lady from Shanghai" hall of mirrors you'll catch glimpses of ghosts around every corner -- not just the phantom images of particular movies, but insights into a spectral world Dave Kehr has described as "the lost continent of cinephilia."

From Kathleen's magnificent guided tour of the grounds:

Once upon a time, movie-loving folk actually, in the words of Susan Sontag, "arranged their emotional and intellectual lives around an art that was 'poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral all at the same time.'" We thrived on films such as "Vertigo" (1958), "L'Avventura" (1960), "Jules and Jim" (1962), "Vivre sa vie" (1962) -- works that, like [Ophuls'] "Letter From an Unknown Woman," plunged into the very DNA of the cinematic imagination. We happily drowned, not in narrative alone -- or even at all -- but in the seductive images, spaces and faces conjured by the formidable magic of the medium....

"I'm a storyteller." That's the way many of the great old Hollywood directors used to like to describe what they did for a living. It was a way of being modest, but it also expressed their credo, which was that everything in the movie was meant to serve the story. We're still used to thinking that way about movies, that they're stories told with images and sounds. Sure they are. Sometimes.

I don't mean to say that storytelling is overrated (then again, maybe that's exactly what I mean), but we know it's not necessarily the most important thing in a movie -- even a mainstream studio picture. How it feels will always be more significant than the tale it spins. Because it's a movie.

Some films, of course, are what they call "story-driven." They keep you involved by teasing your curiosity about what will happen next. And it can be quite satisfying when all the narrative strands come together at the end in a nicely shaped bow (often culminating, in classical American cinema, by a wedding or a captured crook or a solved mystery or an underdog victory... or a kiss).

But how many movies really hold your interest just because of the story -- especially in this season of formula superhero melodramas and romantic comedies? Don't you already know, in your very bones by now, what the beats will be and basically where the picture is headed from the start?

The first sentence of "horror scholar" Kim Newman's stirring Guardian film blog defense of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" is: "Here's the thing: 'The Happening' is not that bad."

After noting that the film opened to "near-universal derision in America and Britain," and acknowledging that Shyamalan's "scripts are sometimes mawkish, sometimes pretentious," Newman defends the writer-director's "knack for genuine 'jump' moments and whispered, intense conversations that raise a chill." Newman concludes: "Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?"

Wow, so the best the "horror scholar" can muster on behalf of "The Happening" is that it's "not that bad" -- and the hostile reaction to Shyamalan must have to do with the filmmaker's "funny name" or his race? That's insulting. What about his Philadelphianism? Maybe that explains it.

What if you had a full-time job that you could get done in less than 40 hours a week? I've never really had one of those, but I've rarely had a 9 to 5 job, either. Most of my gigs (the ones I've really liked, whether writing for a daily newspaper or walking and boarding dogs) have averaged more than "full time" because the hours are not fixed -- that is, they are always in flux, somewhere between "flexible" and "unpredictable." In part, they involve being constantly "on call" -- available for unforeseen events. Drop everything: The death of a famous filmmaker requires a career-spanning obit/ tribute/ appreciation right now! A beagle with diarrhea demands comparably urgent attention, and a Great Pyranees with the same problem compels quick, decisive action no matter what hour of the day or night it is. There's no such thing as overtime (or "time off," really, either). That comes with the job.

At Zero for Conduct, film critic and former Village Voice staffer Michael Atkinson asserted the following about those whose job it is to cover the movie front:

I'd love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn't make very much sense, for the simple reason that it's not truly a full-time job....

Note: There are no "Dark Knight" spoilers in this post. None whatsoever.

There, I said it. Really, what's so difficult about adding a spoiler warning to a review? Ken Tucker, "critic at large" for Entertainment Weekly, is just indignant about the whole idea:

Whether I'm writing a review or reading one, I don't want any held-back information to prevent that review from being the most interesting, thought-provoking one possible.

If that means a movie critic reveals a crucial plot point in order to lay out an argument for a film's greatness or its hideousness, so be it.

OK, remember we're talking about a deadline-driven review here -- something relatively brief (usually more than seven words and considerably less than 1,000 words in EW) shortly before or after a movie or TV show first becomes publicly available in one or more US cities. Not a longer critical essay targeted at a reader who has already seen the work in question. (See David Bordwell's recent piece about the differences here.)

I feel there are two kinds of ideal readers for release-date-dependent reviews:

Jonathan Lapper offers an inspired free-associative montage/meditation on the moving part of the movies at Cinema Styles, which you must see. It's called "Frames of Reference," a little under seven minutes long, and it marvelously (too marvelous for words, obviously) orchestrates cinematic motion and memories to Oliver Nelson's "Complex City." (If you suspect you're unfamiliar with the great jazz arranger, think "Stolen Moments" -- which might make a great subtitle for this reference-packed short subject.) My favorite transition: From "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" to "Citizen Kane." You'll see why.

And now, for fans of Richard Lester, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (and Leo McKern and Graham Stark and Norman Rossington...), my own movie reference: "Frames of Reference" is "The Tracking, Exploding, Kissing, Watching, Crashing, Throwing, Fainting, Dancing, Drinking, Flying, Falling Backwards Film," though not necessarily in that order. And that's not the half of it....

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" screened all over the world yesterday -- on a Sunday afternoon, roughly in synch with the gala unveiling of the picture at the Cannes Film Festival. The usual film-festival and press-screening review embargoes were promptly ignored, so although the movie opens May 22, many outlets ran full reviews on their websites immediately. Because... well, because they could, I suppose. Variety even posted a preview of the review that its reviewer was about to write, in case, after 19 years of anticipating the next "Indiana Jones" movie, you couldn't stand waiting one more minute while he took the time necessary to process and record his thoughts about the film he'd just seen. Not because he believed it was great or a disaster or even because he had anything in particular he wanted to say about it right away, but because... well, Daily Variety knew its readership simply could not do without knowing instantly that the movie "begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish." OK! Doesn't that just whet your appetite for the full-course review?

As Roger Ebert noted on his blog Monday, he saw the film in Chicago and loved it, but at the time he filed his review he suspected he might be going against the critical tide, if there was one:

"One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years... This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of no reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims. Hence, the film is likely to inspire even more heavy thinking on the part of cultural theorists than 'The Matrix' did."

* * *

"A lot of fluorescent, 7-Eleven-tinted images flash by, any of which could easily be removed or re-arranged without significantly disrupting the film's continuity, because it has none. If you can determine the spatial relationship between Speed's Mach 5 (or Mach 6) and any other race car for more than a few consecutive seconds, then good for you. As on the TV series, the pictures don't seem to move so much as repeat -- movement with no momentum."

* * *

"'Speed Racer' is not a feature film in any conventional sense... Whatever information that passes from your retinas to your brain during 'Speed Racer' is conveyed through optical design and not so much through more traditional devices such as dialogue, narrative, performance or characterization."

* * *

"Alas, this radicalization of film language, while certainly impressive to behold, yields heretofore un-dreamed of levels of narrative incoherence, but hey, not every experiment succeeds."

* * *

"One of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's '1900.'"

* * *

""Speed Racer" is a manufactured widget, a packaged commodity that capitalizes on an anthropomorphized cartoon of Capitalist Evil in order to sell itself and its ancillary products."

* * *

Three of the above quotations are taken from a three-star review of "Speed Racer." The other three are from a one-and-a-half-star review. Can you tell which is which? Perhaps the tone gives something away, but the descriptions of the movie, what it does and how it works, are strikingly similar. Clearly both of these critics saw the same movie, although one found the experience less daring, less exhilarating, than the other.

Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he's moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I'd take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the writing he's done at his home, The House Next Door, since he opened the place January 1, 2006. Of course, he's done a lot of other writing -- for The Dallas Observer, The Newark Star-Ledger (the Sopranos' hometown paper), the New York Press and the New York Times among other outlets -- but he became a habit with me through the House.

Matt has been a generous proprietor (sometimes perhaps too generous, but that's hardly a grievous fault). Today the House Next Door masthead lists more than 40 contributors -- novices and vets alike -- including the invaluable editor-cum-landlord Keith Uhlich.

At the same time that I'm excited for Matt (who, by the way, I've never met face-to-face), I'm not going to pretend I'm not bummed. This is how I deal with the grief part: Let's celebrate MSZ for all he's done in (and for) the blogosphere. Consider this a very short clip reel. As the lights go down on one phase of Matt's career, and the curtain opens on another, sit back and immerse yourself...

Oh, and sorry about that headline, guys. (That's as in Zoller-, not polter-.)

Open House (first House Next Door post, January 1, 2006):

My grandfather, a self-educated German-American farmer from Olathe, Kansas, believed that no journey, however seemingly circuitous or self-destructive, was ever truly unnecessary, or even avoidable. Sometimes we just have to continue along a particular path for inexplicable, personal reasons, disregarding warnings of friends and family and perhaps our own internal voices, until we arrive at our destination, whatever it may be. This type of journey, my grandfather said, was the equivalent of "driving around the block backward to get to the house next door."

Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That's great news, and sad news for those of us who always look forward to his byline -- and, especially, the wit and insight that unspools beneath it. I want to compile a little "best of" sampling for Matt, just in case you haven't been following him, but I'm a little in shock right now. When I consider the exceptional, collegial atmosphere among our extended network of movie bloggers, and how much we learn and grow through exposure to one another's work, there's nobody of whom I'm prouder to consider myself a "colleague." You can read more about Matt's plans at the House:

Well part of it is… you know I produced a feature film, a low-budget thriller, a few years ago and then went on and directed a little movie myself. I have been working on projects that are in various stages of completion since then and it’s been slow going for a variety of reasons. But I would like to concentrate on that exclusively. I want to concentrate on filmmaking exclusively for a while and see how it goes because I’ve never given it my all. The two features that I’ve been associated with were done while I had a full-time job and a part-time job. So my thinking is, “well if I am not doing anything but filmmaking, what might I be able to accomplish?”

Whatever it is, I'm there. We'll catch up some other time. Meanwhile, we can all be glad that Keith Uhlich is in the House.

Yesterday, Matt posted a beautiful short film called "Some Other Time" in memory of his late wife Jennifer Dawson. The moment I saw the title I knew he'd chosen the version -- the greatest recording of one of my two or three favorite songs -- and he's set the music to movie with grace and understated eloquence.

This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Comes the time for parting,
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come.

See and hear it here...

I do believe the best single piece of film criticism that I've read in 2008 (and I've thought so ever since I read it two months ago) is David Bordwell's "Hands (and faces) across the table" -- which, parentheses aside, also happens to be the title of a delightful 1935 comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen ("Easy Living," "Midnight," "Remember the Night") starring Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy. (Manohla Dargis's review of Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" deserves mention, too. And Glenn Kenney became my hero this year when he posted "'Pierrot le Fou: An Annotated Bibliography," Parts 1 & 2.)

But Bordwell's article centers on a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" (just released on DVD) and the director's orchestration of screen space, which involves creating rhythm and texture by moving the actors, not just the camera. (This, too, is mise-en-scène.) Writes DB:

In books and blogs, I’ve expressed the wish that today’s American filmmakers would widen their range of creative choices. From the 1910s to the 1960s (and sometimes beyond), US filmmakers cultivated a range of expressive options—not only cutting and camera movement but other possibilities too. Studio directors were particularly adept at ensemble staging, shifting the actors around the set as the scene develops.

You can still find this technique in movies from Europe and Asia, as I try to show in "Figures Traced in Light" and elsewhere on this site. But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. I’ve called this stylistic paradigm intensified continuity....

In the middle of the week, while I was away at the Conference on World Affairs so beloved by Roger Ebert, I got my first e-mail (via Treo) from Roger since he underwent his latest surgery January 24. He said he was "Back in the saddle." The next e-mail, hours later, contained an obit/tribute for Charlton Heston and Richard Widmark. Ebert does not waste time.

Sunday's New York Times features a appreciation of Roger's return by A.O. Scott who, as he so often does with movies, gets right to the heart of his subject ("Roger Ebert: The Critic Behind the Thumb"):

For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

Yesterday, Nathan Lee sent out an e-mail to colleagues in which he announced:

In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for "economic reasons." My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in "My Blueberry Nights."

And so I am, as they say, "looking for work," though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist.

In the last 24 hours, Lee's lamentable departure and the whole moribund notion of "the professional movie critic" have been passionately discussed (at The House Next Door, The Reeler, and elsewhere). But before we get to the latter: Nathan Lee, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, is a perfervid cinephile (I hope he'll appreciate that phrase), a writer whose insights and observations are penetrating, often pointed and even more often hilarious. A few highlights:

On certain homophobic but ostensibly (and patronizingly) pro-gay reactions to "Brokeback Mountain": "If I hear one more straight critic complain that 'Brokeback Mountain' isn't particularly gay, I'm gonna spit on my hand, lube up my c---, and f--- him in the b---."

On "Transformers": "Director Michael Bay never met a rhetorical apocalypse he didn't love. Dude could film a round of Jenga with greater shock and awe than the collapse of the World Trade Center. There are mini-robots hiding inside his mega-robots. His lens flares have lens flares. He evidently controls the magic hour at a flick of a switch, and flips it willy-nilly for 'poetic effect.' In what may constitute the zaniest authorial signature in contemporary cinema, he has a habit of arresting an action set piece in order to indulge outlandishly backlit, monumentally pointless romantic interludes."

On "Zodiac: "... 'Zodiac' is the most information-packed procedural since 'JFK,' though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing.... The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. 'I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,' complained one viewer. Exactly!"

On ""I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry": "Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' is as eloquent as 'Brokeback Mountain,' and even more radical. 'The gay cowboy movie' liberated desires latent in the classic western, and made them palpable (and palatable) by channeling them into the strictures of another genre, romantic tragedy. Progressive values were advanced by a retreat to a traditional mode of storytelling, the love that dare not speak its name rendered intelligible through the universal language of the upscale weepy. [...]

The Drive-By Truckers' "Brighter Than Creation's Dark," features a song about John Ford -- and "The Searchers," in particular. (Listen to a sample or download here.) In some notes about the songs, Patterson Hood writes: "The album closes with 'The Monument Valley' and the classic imagery from John Ford's immortal masterpiece 'The Searchers' as the door closes on John Wayne's walk off into the desolate beauty of a disappearing America. Ford may have been America's greatest ever filmmaker and repeated viewings of his work reveals insights into our psyche that have never been expressed better. For me it's an extremely personal song and it was a magical take that night in the studio. I knew that it would be the last song on the album the moment I wrote it."

"The Monument Valley"

It’s all about where you put the horizon
Said the Great John Ford to the young man rising
You got to frame it just right and have some luck of course
And it helps to have a tall man sitting on the horse
Tell them just enough to still leave them some mystery
A grasp of the ironic nature of history
A man turns his back on the comforts of home
The Monument Valley to ride off alone

Some movies evoke strong opinions and some leave barely a trace behind in your memory. When I glance back at the deadline reviews I've been filing for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com the past few weeks, I notice that most of the movies haven't made much of an impression on me. Ask me right now and I couldn't tell you what I reviewed two weeks ago, much less what's coming up two weeks from now, without calling up iCal. I'm always amazed at how Roger does what he does -- which is way more than I feel capable of doing.

If you want to judge by the obligatory "star ratings" (and I don't, but in this case I think they reflect something), just about everything in the last month (I know: February) feels like a 2.5 to me -- just short of "recommended" (which would be 3.0), but not unwatchable if you wanted to pay the money and kill the time it takes to watch it. Passable (B-/C+) for what it is, but not memorable -- especially when you consider that the scale tops out at 4.0, with no "A+" possible. So, "Chinatown": 4 stars. "Sansho the Bailiff": 4 stars. "The Bank Job": 2.5. "Cocktail": 0.0.

We all have a pretty good what kind of experience we had watching a movie (though it may take a while, maybe even another viewing, to process it), and what we saw and heard. But to paraphrase something a filmmaker recently said (or that I recently read, even though I can't recall who or where): If you put 300 people in a room and show them a movie, you'll get 300 different accounts of it. Even when I take notes (as I do when I know I'm going to write about a movie), I invariably misremember a word here, a shot there.

This week film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, 65, retires from a 20-year stint at the Chicago Reader. In this interview, posted at The Reader's site, Rosenbaum looks back at his career (writing, editing, blogging) and ruminates on what he'd like to do next, which includes the freedom to not have to see movies he has no interest in seeing. People who are not film critics have no idea how precious that freedom can be. (Rosenbaum also has a few choice words for out-of-control commenters on The Reader's blog that make me grateful for the readers and commenters we have here.) You can see Part II here, in which he expounds on film as politics and vice-versa, Barak Obama, "Charlie Bartlett" and "There Will Be Blood," which he sees as "simpleminded" and less-than-"challenging."

JR's authoritative, confrontational (sometimes even doctrinaire) style has sometimes provoked me to take issue with him, but I'm always interested in what he has to say -- and will continue to be. May his "retirement" (not from writing, from The Reader) be an eminently productive one!

Who says there's no accounting for taste?¹ Maybe there is. New Yorker music critic and Alex Ross (whose brilliant book "The Rest is Noise" I wrote about last month) mentioned another book on his blog and now I've gotta get ahold of it (as Barak Obama maybe sorta allegedly did).²

It's called "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste," by Toronto Globe and Mail pop music critic Carl Wilson, and it critiques a Celine Dion album. The one with the "Titanic" love theme on it. Well, kind of.

If you've been following posts and discussions around these parts recently ("Moviegoers Who Feel Too Much," "Are Movies Going to Pieces?," "Don't let this affect your opinion of Juno..."), you'll know why that title immediately grabbed my attention. And it's not because I'm a Celine Dion fan.

From a review by Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

Wilson’s real obsession here is not Céline but the thorny philosophical problem on which her reputation has been impaled: the nature of taste itself. What motivates aesthetic judgment? Is our love or hatred of “My Heart Will Go On” the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment, as Kant would argue? Or is it something less exalted? Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,” that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. (As Wilson puts it, “It’s hard to imagine an audience that could confer less cool on a musician.”)

From Odienator's Black History Mumf love-fest for Eddie Murphy's "Coming to America" at Big Media Vandalism, "You Ain't Never Met Martin Luther The King."

His caption for this photo : "Yeah, Juno got that hamburger phone idea from me. Bitch ain't even give me credit, neither, Florida!" (Please note: The man's bun has no seeds.)

Writes Odie:

"Coming to America" may be the Blackest comedy ever made, and it’s little touches like McDowell’s [the low-rent, individually owned McDonald's knock-off] that elevate it past the mild amusement it seems to garner from White viewers into the upper echelon of hilarity it occupies for us. It crushes us under the weight of familiarity, to the point where a musical cue or a mere image is enough to inspire raucous laughter. There are so many in-jokes that the film is like an old Negro Spiritual: everybody can hear the music, but only we can understand the code in the words.

"I love subtextual film criticism, especially when it's fun, when a guy knows how to write in a readable, charming way. What I love the most about it is that it doesn't have a f---ing thing to do with what the writer or the actor or the filmmakers intended. It just has to work. And if you can make your case with as few exceptions as possible, then that's great."
-- Quentin Tarantino, in Sight & Sound, February, 2008

Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of Pauline Kael, who may have encouraged more people to articulate their love for movies than anyone of her generation. She wasn't necessarily all that big on what he calls "subtextual film criticism," but she knew how to write in a readable, engaging and idiosyncratic style. The titles of her collections of reviews and essays, with their suggestive sexual and romantic overtones -- "I Lost It at the Movies," "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," "Deeper Into Movies," "Reeling," "When the Lights Go Down" -- told you everything about her approach to movies. I don't remember her using the word "film" or "cinema" much, unless it was to deride them as vacuous or pretentious. Though she became most famous and influential while writing for an upper-caste, urban(e) institution, The New Yorker, that reeked of calcified East Coast provincialism, she presented herself as an ardent movie populist. (Kael came from the northern coast of California.)

In November, 1964 -- that would be about 43 years ago, for those keeping count -- she published an essay for The Atlantic Monthly called, "Are Movies Going to Pieces?" in which she asks a lot of questions we're still asking today (see recent Scanners post and discussion, "Moviegoers who feel too much," and Stephen Whitty's column in last Sunday's Newark Times-Ledger," Critic's Choice").

Standard disclaimer-cliché: I obviously don't concur with all that Kael says here (but at least at this point in her career she was willing to admit to feeling some ambivalence!). One of the things I've always found fascinating about her is that, even when I believe she's dead wrong, she unwittingly includes much of the evidence to make a case against her right there in her review. It's not that she didn't observe what was there, but that she drew such different conclusions from it. Also, her favorite rhetorical trick is the false dichotomy. It's fun to consider her arguments, but are we really forced to make such dramatic (or simplistic) either/or choices: "The Eclipse" or "His Girl Friday"? "Art" or entertainment? Right brain or left brain? Herman J. Mankiewicz or Orson Welles? George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden?

"Are Movies Going to Pieces?" (1964). Most of these excerpts are from the middle and the very end:

I trust I won't be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity. I am interested in the change from the period when the meaning of art and form in art was in making complex experience simple and lucid, as is still the case in "Knife in the Water" [Roman Polanski, 1962] or "Bandits of Orgosolo" [Vittorio De Seta, 1960], to the current acceptance of art as technique, the technique which in a movie like "This Sporting Life" [Lindsay Anderson, 1963] makes a simple, though psychologically confused, story look complex, and modern because inexplicable.

Sarah Silverman stands against an overexposed white background, addressing the camera (and her boyfriend of five years, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel). "Hey Jimmy," she says, "It's me." It's the quintessential Silverman line delivery: faux-awkward, sweet and self-consciously cute, but so sharp and precisely targeted that it almost hurts a little. Of course it's her. But where is she?

Well, she's in some netherworld hotel, neither here nor there -- been on the road so long, you know, she's not even sure what city she's in, to be honest -- and she has something on her mind, something she's been meaning to tell Jimmy, that she's been carrying around with her like excess baggage. Dressed in a snug, lipstick-magenta/pink shirt, she stands out, flush and ripe, from the soft pale light that envelops her. She strolls to the right, from one lush, clean-green tropical split-leaf philodendron to another, a sexy and innocent Eve in the unspoiled Garden of Eden (or a hotel lobby facsimile thereof). Her delicate fingers stroke a wistful figure on her guitar, again and again, as she works up the backbone to expose her true feelings. (Insert what we imagine to be a typical candid photo of the happy couple: Silverman draped adoringly over the shoulders of a drunken, blurry-eyed Kimmel.)

The segue, if you call it that, is abrupt, jarring. Cut to a close-up of her guitar ("Here it goes...") and a crunching electric riff begins. Medium shot of Silverman as she sings the first line (and the title), with an expression of "Omygod!" on her face, like a teenage girl at a slumber party confessing a crush on the cutest boy in school: "I'm f***ing Matt Damon!" This is inappropriate. Not only is she singing this to her boyfriend, she's doing it on his fifth anniversary show on network TV. She has not only swallowed the forbidden fruit, she has swallowed the serpent: Matt Damon!

Cut to... Damon himself, in tight black t-shirt (like snakeskin!), arms stretched cockily over the back of a white couch as if in post-coital repose. He's been seated just outside the frame, all the time, and he gives the camera a knowing, testosterone-fueled smirk: "She's f***ing Matt Damon!" He's got the cat-with-the-canary grin. The knowledge that he's avenging Kimmel's repeated, disrespectful scheduling slights is written all over his face. He is no longer the butt of the joke, he gets to deliver the punchline. Repeat. Silverman shoots him a naughty-girl look, then shifts her expression to one of rue and sorrow for: "I'm not imagining it's you." Next, in an instant, she grits her teeth and turns into Joan Jett. On cue, Damon launches into a Henry Rollins punk growl and threatens to lunge at the camera, seizing it the way we imagine him grabbing Silverman's waist before they do the nasty title phrase. It begins in a two-shot, with Silverman cheerily bending down into the frame:

On the bed, on the floor
On a towel by the door
In the tub, in the car
Up against the mini-bar

One can't help but recall Theodor Geisel's seminal "Green Eggs and Ham," in which Sam I Am pesters an increasingly exasperated, unnamed character who does not like the titular dish. In this case, however, Damon and Silverman are turning the tables: The song is an expression of rapacious appetite, and the way Damon delivers it -- with a mad glint in his eyes and a leer on his lips -- is a volatile mixture of lust and vengeful glee. He likes them apples....

Charles McGrath wonders if critics and the public give genre work enough credit. In "Great Literature? Depends Whodunit," published in Sunday's New York Times, McGrath makes a case for pulp fiction that applies to movies as well as to literature. Often behind the generic labeling, he says, is:

... the assumption that genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories — is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be “serious.”

The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow — between genre writing and literary writing — is actually fairly recent. Dickens, as we’re always being reminded, wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial. The market and public appetite for this stuff became even larger in the early years of the 20th century with the tremendous growth of pulp magazines, which specialized in the genres and eventually even added a new one: science fiction.

I think of genre conventions as something akin to sonata form in music, or the chord progressions from a popular standard that jazz musicians may use as a foundation. The familiar prototype is just that: a recognizable structure upon which a craftsperson (even an artist) can create almost anything at all -- even turn it inside out or blow it apart.

Yeah, I'm sick of those "No Country for..." headlines (and the "There Will Be..." variations, too, but this one fits so perfectly.... In the February issue of Sight & Sound, Ben Walters and J.M. Tyree write that, at heart, the Coens' film is "an interrogation of American manhood." This is a wonderful paragraph:

There are no edifying models of manhood here. Sheriff Bell is well intentioned but troubled and halting; Moss is courageously but disastrously foolhardy. (Both Moss and Chigurh make repeated attempts at the sort of improvisatory survivalism that was a staple of 1980s television shows like "MacGyver" and "The A-Team," though Chigurh is notably more accomplished.) In Bell's and Moss' marriages, though -- with Bell's strongly reminiscent of the loving, supportive relationship between Marge and Norm in "Fargo" (1996) -- the Coens once again suggest that human connection trumps Hollywood-style man-alone heroism. Just compare the relaxed, warm atmosphere of the Moss trailer or the Bell homestead with the dump motels to whose garish signage, flimsy walls and soulless decorations the film pays such keen and damning attention. Here as elsewhere, hotels are the setting for a series of big and little deaths, most of them pointless and dumb. Sheriff Bell recognises the absurdity at work in this world. "I laugh myself sometimes," he says. "Ain't a whole lot else you can do."

"Sometimes the best movies are the ones we make up."
-- from the trailer for Michel Gondry's upcoming "Be Kind Rewind" (2008)

* * *

"This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself . . . the film that we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live."
-- Paul (Jean-Pierre Leud) in Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculin-Feminin" (1966)

* * *

Between the idea
And the reality...

Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
-- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1925)

In his review of Kent Jones' book "Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism," David Sterritt (for 35 years the film critic of the Christian Science Monitor) poses a challenge to movie critics and filmgoers alike:

Given his gift for perceptive film-critical thought, I wish Jones would now address himself to a problem that few critics (including me) have tackled with the care, energy, and resourcefulness that it demands: the predisposition of nearly all film critics to approach their subject(s) in terms that value the emotional over the intellectual and the descriptive over the intuitive. Good movies touch our feelings, of course, but that isn’t the only thing that makes them good; and while Jones knows this—hence his high praise for masters of film-thought like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, for instance—he too falls into the commonplace pattern of privileging the feelings that good films give him, and signaling his reactions in telegraphic ways that won’t mean much to people who aren’t equally familiar with the film or filmmaker in question.

What’s needed today is a new paradigm of readily accessible yet rigorously thoughtful prose combining theoretical analysis with intuitive ideas about cinema and the aesthetic world it creates.

OK, so let's tackle it! (Prepare to comment.) Seriously.¹

When somebody says they "admire" a movie without much "liking" it (or being "moved" by it), they may be addressing, at least superficially, what Sterritt is getting at above. But how much can we, or should we, attempt to separate our emotional responses from our intellectual observations, our descriptions ("This is what happens") from our intuitions ("This is what's going on")?²

My standard joke, when somebody asks what a movie is "about," is to describe the movie in stylistic or thematic terms -- which, in all honesty, speak to me more directly and powerfully than the plot. What's "Barry Lyndon" about? Oh, it's about slow, stately zooms. Or, it's about a man who keeps trying to exert his free will only he can't because he's trapped in a Stanley Kubrick film/frame. To me, both those descriptions are just different ways of saying the same thing, and in stating them I'm only being semi-facetious.

The Burt-a-Thon (formally known as the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon) starts today over at Welcome to L.A.. The awesome Larry Aydlette, whom some of you may know from his blog-lives as That Little Round-Headed Boy and/or The Shamus, has set himself a truly daunting, awesomely ambitious task: For the entire month of February, he will... well, let Larry explain it himself:

Obviously, Burt Reynolds didn't get the e-mail that he was supposed to go quietly away. But that's not the Burt Reynolds way. In his autobiography, "My Life," he begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live."

So, I've decided to honor that work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage. This isn't a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I've come to the conclusion that he didn't necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.

1. I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed.

2. I hate most people....
I see the worst in people.
I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.

3. I want to rule and never, ever explain myself.
I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.

Match the above comments to the character who speaks or writes them:

a) Anton Chigurh, "No Country for Old Men"
b) The Zodiac, "Zodiac"
c) Daniel Plainview, "There Will Be Blood"

(Answers at end of post.)

* * * *

NOTE: Spoilers lurk sinisterly below.

Three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer -- or someone's conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" actually culminates in a eruption of savagery, while David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.

Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country's moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on -- as we are simultaneously appalled by -- the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?

The popular press likes to talk about violence in movies with a superficiality that assumes all violence and all movies are the same, that blood is blood (and that gore and gunplay are automatically more sensational than depictions of beatings or other forms of physical and psychological abuse). But that Sunday feature-section approach ignores what it's like to watch the movies themselves, and the diverse contexts in which they present acts of cruelty and lethality. To say that "Zodiac," "NCFOM" and "TWBB" are all "violent films" tells you as much about them as saying they all use the color red.¹ I'd like to consider how the violence in these films conveys its own meaning, apart from any op-ed political parallels that can be drawn, however legitimately.

From McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If Werner Herzog were a guest entertainment pundit on the VH1 TV series "Best Week Ever," discussing the success of "Juno," by Michel Duchampbuffet:

The Phenomenon of Pregnancy creates in the Physiognomy of the Host the Epitome of humanity's Displaced Cannibalistic Desires: one believes oneself to be engaging in the act of Creation, only to discover, behind the Blinding Cloak of Elation, the Insidious Mask of Suicide. One need not be reminded of the Mating Habits of the Appalachian Dung Beetle to realize that Pregnancy is merely an act of Self-Immolation, veiled by the Momentary Pleasure of Copulation so as to dispel the one Elemental Truth of Human Existence: that we are provoked not by the desire for Preservation but rather by the need for Destruction....

I'm a little confused about precisely where we stand at this very moment in the "Juno" backlash cycle, but I predict the anti-backlash backlash will begin any moment now if it hasn't already. The movie was warmly embraced at the Toronto International Film Festival (OK, the director is the son of the rich and famous Canadian director of "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters") and was greeted with predominantly positive reviews when it opened in December, although some critics, me included, thought it got off to a grating start. Roger Ebert even named it his favorite movie of 2007. My 16-year-old niece says it's her favorite film "ever."

Then came the inevitable backlash after the movie was no longer a "discovery": Why was this snarky teen comedy getting all this attention -- even Oscar buzz? (BTW, I've been doing occasional Google searches for "Juno"+"snark" since before the movie opened in December and the latest total is "about 26,500 results.") Arguments lit up all over the place. At Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio chose it his worst film of the year. On rock critic Jim DeRogatis's Chicago Sun-Times blog, he accused the movie of "glib insincerity," suggested it could be seen as "anti-abortion and therefore anti-woman, despite its arch post-feminist veneer," and declared, "As an unapologetically old-school feminist, the father of a soon-to-be-teenage daughter, a reporter who regularly talks to actual teens as part of his beat and a plain old moviegoer, I hated, hated, hated this movie" ("Why 'Juno' is anti-rock," "More Juno Fallout," "And even a little bit more Juno").

Instead of a "ten best list," Armond White makes an annual "Better Than List" which, in principle, I'm all against -- simply because of the formula: He uses a few adjectives and a "greater than" symbol to bash selected movie titles with selected other ones, like Daniel Plainview bludgeoning someone with a heavy object.

Then again, any "ten best list" (or "top ten list" or "favorites list") represents a preference for some movies over some other movies, seen by somebody under certain circumstances during a period of time. And, to not-quite-paraphrase Jean Renoir, "Everybody makes his own rules."

So, perhaps White is really just doing what (I hope) any list-maker does: Making a claim for his/her own critical taste and values, while recommending some movies. That he assumes the attitude of a bully over the approach of a critic or movie lover is, perhaps, not so important. (Quote: "'No Country for Old Men' > better than 'There Will Be Blood,' 'Zodiac.' The Coen brothers hauntingly mythologize Americana, while P.T. Anderson and David Fincher make it morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory." Is there an inverse relationship between "morbid, sadistic and self-congratulatory" and "hauntingly mythological" -- Americana-wise, I mean?)

But look: Now I'm using other top ten lists to bash White's. Is there no getting around this? I fell ill (think of the scene with the old lady on the street in "The Orphanage") just as I was about to annotate my own 2007 list, after submitting various rankings to critics' polls at MSN Movies, indieWIRE and the Village Voice/LA Weekly poll, each of which had slightly different rules, categories and deadlines. (Then I posted a list in video form in late December). Consequently, I missed reading a lot of other peoples' lists (though The House Next Door and David Hudson at GreenCine, and the folks at Movie City News have put together invaluable lists of lists -- and/or lists of links -- that have helped me in my efforts to catch up, because, as I am fond of repeating, I actually learn from browsing these things).

Oh, yes, and I also posted the 2007 Exploding Head Awards as a kind of top-ten alternative. (Let me add that I have enjoyed no 2007 overview more than Dennis Cozzalio's at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)

Now, just to wrap up this whole 2007 wrap-up thing, I'm going to recommend some movies and (in munchable blurbs of 150 words or less -- I hope) give you some idea of what I liked about them, without the intention of over-selling them. If I've written more extensively about them, I'll link their titles to a more detailed review or posting.

Dear David Fincher:

Just a note to say how much I appreciate your film "Zodiac" -- especially its use of 1960s and 1970s analog technologies and strategies. Cryptograms, city grids, travel distances, postmarks, calendars, trailer stall numbers, gun calibers, meal schedules, geographical jurisdictions, faxes, date books, phone numbers, addresses... well, I've expressed my admiration of how your film works and plays with these signs (no, I'm not a semiotician) before, and Manohla Dargis does a fine job of it in today's New York Times, too. (I particularly like her observation that: "'Zodiac' is about thinking, it’s about working things through intellectually, hazarding guesses, trying to solve puzzles (the killer largely communicates through ciphers) and about the dawning of awareness, which encapsulates the experience of watching it." That's one way I like to describe a good movie: It not only teaches you how to watch it, but becomes about the experience you have as you watch it.)

In a movie about obsessive detail, and the life-or-death importance placed upon even the tiniest, one little thing has stood out to me from my first viewing as being slightly... askew. Prominently displayed by the desk of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is a campaign button for Richard Nixon. The problem is that this button reads: NIXON. It has always struck me that Avery would have done what so many of us did at that time, which is to flip the button (or bumper-sticker or whatever) upside-down so that it read NOXIN -- a simple visual gag that's also a kind of cryptogram, and maybe a malformed counter-cultural pun (NIXON = TOXIN). We found it amusing that the monolithic GOP (or the RNC or CREEP or the FBI or some other Republican Establishment entity) had unwittingly, through the use of simple block letters, made it so easy to turn their message on its head. Mild subversive gestures were rarely so delightfully effortless. Best of all: 100% analog!

Anyway, I hope you have already made this little adjustment in your Director's Cut of "Zodiac," which I am about to watch. Just in case, I've taken the liberty of making a slight freehand PhotoShop tweak to the still, above.

Many thanks again,

jim

"I am not interested in writing about music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front."
-- Alex Ross, December 2004

I've just finished reading New Yorker music critic's Alex Ross's mind-bogglingly ambitious critical history of modern "classical" music, "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century." It's 1) a biting, passionate, ironical survey of political, religious and aesthetic fashions and dogmas (from Richard Strauss to Stalin to Boulez); 2) a serial biography, and 3) an illuminating analysis of individual compositions and musical influences. And I'm absolutely dazzled by it. With incisive humor, Ross chronicles various circular debates (historical, personal, nationalistic, musical) concerning whether, at one time or another, a particular work or a composer or a clique was, let's see, too elitist, too commercial, too bourgeois, too fussy, too fascist, too socialist, too florid, too ascetic, too anal, too free, too beholden to state or other interests, too abstruse, too grandiose, too formal, too casual, too programmatic, too old-fashioned, too melodic, too atonal, etc., etc., etc.

And this was just over last century, when, say, Stravinsky and Shostakovich were hailed and condemned as all of the above -- respectively, sequentially, cyclically, and/or simultaneously.

I came across some inspiring remarks Ross made at a 2004 symposium called "Shifting Ears: A Symposium on the Present State and Future of Classical Music Criticism" (see John Fleming's article in the St. Petersburg Times here). People tend to think of modern classical music as a rarified, elitist realm and movies as a popular industry/art form. But the perceptions are relative: There are big marquee names, big studios (labels, distributors), and major league international venues/festivals in classical music just as there are in movies. And there are academic, niche, or "experimental" circles in both worlds. Ross and John Davidson of Newsday proposed some ways of approaching music that, I think, work just as well for movies. Among Ross's estimable propositions:

# "We're all fighters in a strange guerrilla war in which the object is not to defeat an enemy but to win a place at the table. This doesn't mean you give up objectivity and become a PR agent for the business. It means, instead, that you write with more urgency, more immediacy. The writing itself becomes crucial. Language is our secret weapon."

# "Classical music has an actual audience and a potential audience. I try to write with both fanatical and unconverted readers in mind. The trick is in finding a language that intrigues both."

# "Nothing is more off-putting than the critic who puts down one kind of music in order to praise another. There is no need to mention Britney Spears until such time as Ms. Spears writes her first piano quintet." [This reminds me of Robert Altman's late-life conviction that he and the studios who once hired him were no longer in the same business, and that neither was interested in making the kinds of movies the other was interested in.]

# "If the big orchestra is playing the same repertory ad nauseam, I don't have to complain ad nauseam. Instead, I can seek out youth orchestras, new-music ensembles, chamber groups playing in inner-city schools. Critics can take the lead..."

# "There is nothing shameful in unchecked enthusiasm. If I walk out dancing on air, I say it in the review, even if my colleagues smirk."

"The Rest is Noise," without necessarily intending to do anything so specific, also provides a welcome perspective on year-end critical/historical summaries, polls, and the illusions of meaning we sometimes try to impose upon them, without much real evidence beyond our own hunches. (That -- and not commonplace snarkiness (!) -- is what I was attempting to convey with my loopy, switchback sentences in the post below, about the results of the Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll. What direct cause-effect meanings can be teased out of any snapshot consensus, whether it's a popular election or a secret ballot by committee?)

Ross has posted a paragraph from Marcel Proust on his blog ("The man who saw everything") that I'm tempted to quote in full because it's so hilarious in this regard. Instead, I'll just quote most of it. Ross introduces it as a comment "on the politics of style in twentieth-century music [and] the limits of a teleological interpretation of music history" -- but, you know, it could just as well be about movies:

Ten movies, two or three shots apiece (more or less), 76 seconds, no dialog, no annotations. (The critical comments will come later.) This is my hommage to the ending of the late Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Eclipse" and to the writers who are currently on strike. (Full disclosure: I'm a WGA/west member and I strongly support the writers.) The effort was to look at my favorite movies of the year (inspired, to begin with, by the opening of "No Country for Old Men") solely through establishing shots, architecture, landscapes, inanimate objects... and a few glimpses of extras and motionless actors who don't speak.

How many of them can you name (in one shot? two?). Titles, writers and directors are cited at the end. (For some reason, this iKlipz/Flash version hangs for a few seconds just before the final titles -- but they do appear...)

IndieWIRE has announced the results of its annual critics' poll, and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" dominates (picture, director, screenplay, cinematography, lead performance), followed by David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Joel & Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men.

For most American viewers, this is going to be a Netflix list: Two of the top ten movies never barely opened theatrically outside of New York ("Syndromes and a Century," "Colossal Youth"); two never played in more than 20 theaters at once ("Offside," "Killer of Sheep" -- the restoration of Charles Burnett's 1977 film); two haven't opened yet, and won't in most places until 2008 ("There Will Be Blood," "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days"); and, in these days when wide releases typically launch on 2,000 - 4,000 theaters, two never made it to more than 400 at any given time ("I'm Not There" [149], "The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford" [301]). Only two others ever spread beyond 1,000 screens: "No Country for Old Men" and "Zodiac." Three of the ten best selections -- "Killer of Sheep," "Offside" and "Zodiac" -- are currently available on DVD.

Poll administrator Dennis Lim noted that, compared to 2006 when "the relative dearth of truly exciting films" was lamented by many critics, this year's 106 participants were more enthusiastic about their choices. One eyebrow-raising development was cited in the indieWIRE introduction, though:

If there is a strking hole to be found in this year's [poll results]... it is the utter lack of American indie films. While last year's survey celebrated outside-the-system films such as David Lynch's "Inland Empire," Kelly Reichart's "Old Joy," Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson" and Andrew Bujalski's "Mutual Appreciation," the acclaimed new films from American filmmakers this year came from directly within the Hollywood and Indiewood system, starring name actors.

Other poll-toppers: Best First Film (Sarah Polley, "Away From Her"), Best Documentary ("No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson), Supporting Performance (Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"), The complete results in all the categories can be scrutinized here. And the individual critics' ballots (including mine) are here.

Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson present their much-anticipated annual list of indelible memories-at-24-fps, Moments Out of Time, at MSN Movies. They've been sifting through the fragments of movie-time for these shining moments for many years, beginning in Movietone News and continuing through the 1990s in Film Comment.

Beginning when I was in high school, I would read through them religiously, looking for moments I'd treasured, too -- or maybe even ones I hadn't spotted or properly appreciated. Then I'd re-read, again and again, as if I were holding gems to the light and examining them through a magnifying glass, for the sheer pleasure of how they caught the rays. I'd pore over every turn of phrase, teasing out the meanings, even for the movies I hadn't seen with my own eyes (yet).

Here are a few of my favorites for 2007:

In "Ratatouille," the remembrance of things past courtesy of the eponymous dish: the critic's flashback to childhood

When Bourne (Matt Damon) wonders why the CIA operative (Julia Stiles) who once set him up is helping him now, she answers with what passes for a declaration of love in the killing environs of "The Bourne Ultimatum": "You were ... hard for me." ...

In "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," the pebbles sliding away from the vibrating rail as Jesse's boot rests there, waiting to stop his last train

Leaving her friend to wait out her abortion, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) attends an obligatory birthday party in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." The camera holds and holds as she sits frozen, claustrophobically hemmed by babbling guests, until she and we nearly explode with tension

The first getting-to-know-you-and-your-music duet in "Once," one of the purest distillations of rapport ever

In "Starting Out in the Evening," confronted by a redheaded beauty (Lauren Ambrose), the elderly gentleman (Frank Langella) involuntarily covers his face with his hand -- to hide his age or to shield his eyes from her bright heat

Night birds: Chigurh, the raven, and the gunshot reverberating off the otherwise deserted bridge, after which the two bend their separate ways in "No Country for Old Men" ...

"There Will Be Blood": Killing God in a two-lane bowling alley: "I'm finished."...

Hungry for more? Devour all of 'em here.

It wasn't even close. In the MSN Movies 2007 Top 10 Poll, Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" scored 106 points out of a possible 120 -- the only film to rank on all ten of the contributing critics' best-of-the-year lists. It was #1 or #2 on nine of the ten, and #4 on the other one.

Some of you may have gotten the impression that I think rather highly of "No Country for Old Men," so I was pleased to be asked by editor Dave McCoy to write a little blurb about it summarizing my appreciation. It goes like this:

Shot by shot, cut by cut, sequence by sequence, no movie this year (or any other year) was more grippingly, cinematically exhilarating than "No Country for Old Men." Joel and Ethan Coen's first literary adaptation (from Cormac McCarthy's novel), crackles with an intensity that sharpens and stimulates your senses and reminds you of how little most other films do with the essential expressive properties of the medium: light, color, sound, movement, language. Movies are as much about the orchestration as the composition, and the Coens have orchestrated and composed a masterpiece -- one that embodies what most movies only describe.

A Western, a crime picture, a chase thriller, a ghost story (though not in the supernatural sense), "No Country" is the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a man chasing a dream ($2 million in drug money he's found in a satchel); Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a messenger of death who's tracking down Moss for the money; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who's trailing both of them. Tension builds as the film progresses, even as the violence recedes. This isn't a movie about murder; it's about the awareness of inevitable death that stalks us all.

Check out our individual lists here. My Scanners list (with blurbs on all my favorites) will be somewhat different...

(A comment by Phillip Kelly in reply to an earlier post made me chuckle and got me thinking. He wrote: "I guess my theorizing [of] Anton Chigurh as main character doesn't stand now that Miramax is touting him for Best Supporting Actor. Too bad." That's the jumping-off place for this entry.)

The New York Film Critics Circle gave Javier Bardem its 2007 Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Anton Chigurh ("shi-GUR") in Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country For Old Men" (which was also named Best Picture). The funny thing is, so much of the discussion of the of the movie centers around Chigurh that you'd think he was was the lead. And critical reservations about "No Country" tend to focus on interpretations of Chigurh, and whether the critic accepts him as a character or a mythological presence or a haircut or some combination thereof.

"No Country" traces the path of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), from his opening narration to his closing monologue, from his nostalgia about the "old times" and his fear of the violence in this modern world to his account of two dreams about his father. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), sets things in motion by taking the satchel of drug money, and Chigurh spends most of the film relentlessly tracking him down, while Ed Tom follows a trail of blood to catch up with them both. None of these characters is a conventional "lead." We never even see Moss or Ed Tom come face-to-face with Chigurh. He exists in the physical world, but his presence is strongest when it's felt by these other two characters, even though they don't share screen space with him.

I'll publish my annotated "best of" list next week, but while thinking back over the year's movies I recalled some things that seemed to me "beyond category." Or the usual categories, anyway. One way or another, they made my head feel that it might explode. So, while everybody's preoccupied with all those other awards, here are the 2007 Exploding Heads for Achievement in Movies:

Best endings:
• "The Sopranos" (final episode): blackout
• "No Country for Old Men": "Then I woke up."
• "I'm Not There": Dylan's harmonica on "Mr. Tambourine Man"
• "Superbad": Baby-steps toward adulthood, separating at the mall escalator
• "Zodiac": Stare-down

Most electrifying moment:
A dog. A river. "No Country for Old Men."

Best grandma:
"Persepolis"

Best surrogate grandpa:
Hal Holbrook, "Into the Wild"

"Arrested Development" Award for Best Throwaway Lines:
• "Keep it in the oven..." -- Jason Bateman, "Juno"
• "... Terrorism..." -- Michael Cera, "Superbad" (actually, Cera has so many astonishingly brilliant under-his-breath moments in "Superbad" and "Juno" it's uncanny)

Best performance by an inanimate object:
(tie) The cloud (and its shadow), the candy wrapper, the blown lock housing in the motel room door, "No Country for Old Men"

Most cringe-worthy lines:
• "My cooperation with the Nazis is only symbolic." -- "Youth Without Youth"
• "That ain't no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, home skillet." -- "Juno" (the cutesy moment at the beginning when I nearly ran screaming for an exit; cutting this entire unnecessary scene would improve "Juno" immensely)

Funniest double-edged observation:
"He's playing fetch... with my kids... he's treating my kids like they're dogs." -- Debbie (Leslie Mann) in "Knocked Up," watching Ben (Seth Rogen) play with her daughter, who is loving it. That's her point of view, and she's right, but she says it like it's a bad thing.

The Real Thing:
"Non-actor" Brian Dierker, rubber tramp, "Into the Wild" (and, of course, his "old lady" Catherine Keener, actor extraordinaire)

Best film about the way The Industry really works since "The Big Picture":
Jake Kasdan's "The TV Set." The moment I knew it was going to be exceptional (sharp, precise and, therefore, extraordinarily funny) was when the writer's choice for the lead role gives an audition that's just... underwhelming. He isn't good. He isn't terrible. He just isn't enough. Which then allows the network execs to push for the "broader" alternative ("To me, the broad is the funny"). And even he proves himself capable of being not-awful -- in rehearsal, at least...

Best political film:
(tie) "12:08 East of Bucharest" and "Persepolis" -- a pair of smart, funny movies about the effects of political revolutions on individuals in (respectively) Romania and Iran.

Deadliest stare:
(tie) Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), "No Country for Old Men"; Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), "Atonement"

Young comedy whippersnapper stars of the year:
Michael Cera (19), Ellen Page (20), Seth Rogen (25), Jonah Hill (24), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (18)

Game savers:
J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, who come to the rescue of "Juno" not a moment too soon

Best torture porn:
The excruciatingly funny baptism scene with Paul Dano and Daniel Day Lewis (both of 'em overactin' up a storm -- but in a fun way), "There Will Be Blood"

Most worthless critical label:
"Independent." A movie should not be viewed through its budget, financing or distribution. And in these days of studio "dependents" (Miramax, Focus Features, Paramount Vantage, Fox Searchlight, etc.), the term "indie" is frequently misleading at the very least.

Best bureaucrat:
Dr. Fischer (Alberta Watson), "Away From Her"

Best negotiations:
• Chigurh and the gas station owner, "No Country for Old Men"
• Chigurh and the trailer park lady, "No Country for Old Men"
• Chigurh and Carla Jean, "No Country for Old Men"
• "4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days": The painfully protracted, ever-shifting moral balance (and exhausting power-struggle) in the hotel room, between the friend and the abortionist -- while the pregnant woman herself passive-aggressively bows out of any responsibilities for what has happened, or will happen.

"Perfume" Award for Best Portrayal of Synesthesia:
"Ratatouille"

Best Supporting Crotch:
Sacha Baron Cohen, "Sweeney Todd." An squirm-inducing scene-stealer that makes you long for a change of angle: Please give us an above-the-waist shot! (Did they have spandex in mid-19th century London?)

Excerpts from two pieces I've read recently that to me (of course) get at the essence of movies, and how we perceive them: First, a paragraph from Jonah Lehrer's introduction to his book "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" (look for the madeleine on the cover!), a most enjoyable volume dedicated to the proposition that the arts understood science long before science did. (Lehrer, the 26-year-old author, is described in the jacket blurb as a Columbia grad and Rhodes Scholar who "has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Erik Kandel and in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin." His book includes chapters on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.)

Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified or calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of the matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

On the other hand, the mind is what the brain does. We just have no way of knowing how or why. But this paragraph speaks directly to experience of all kinds, including vicarious or representational ones -- and to my conviction that valid criticism of any kind needs to be both empirical (drawing on specific examples) and aesthetic (a subjective attempt to explain how something feels). Blanket terms like "beautiful" or "ugly" can only be defined/refined in this context. I think of it this way: A dog's butt doesn't smell "bad" to a dog. And poop doesn't offend a dog's sensibilities. Canine responsiveness to scent is roughly 40 times greater than ours, so perhaps you could say that dogs can smell "past" the limitations of our olfactory abilities to detect something more fully dimensional (the way some people savor the flavor of stinky cheese, perhaps). Or, they just like stink, in which case we may consider them to have bad taste. Or, maybe, admire them as perverse primitivist punk rebels who enjoy wallowing in filth for the sheer animalistic pleasure of it. Or would that be anthropomorphizing them? If only dogs could explain what and how they see and smell and hear and feel...

OK, moving on to number two....

Richard Corliss writes at TIME:

In the past five days, five groups — the National Board of Review, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Washington. D.C. Film Critics Association and my crowd, the New Yorkers — have convened to choose the most notable movies and moviemakers. "No Country For Old Men" was named best picture in four of the groups, "There Will Be Blood" in L.A. George Clooney won two best actors awards, playing a lawyer at crisis point in "Michael Clayton," Daniel Day-Lewis a pair for his oil mogul in "There Will Be Blood" and, in Boston, Frank Langella won the prize for playing an aged novelist in "Starting Out in the Evening." Three groups selected Julie Christie as best actress — she's an Alzheimer's patient in the Canadian film "Away From Her" — and two liked Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in "La vie en rose." [...]

That's the deal with critics' awards. They give prizes to whom they damn well please. No problem with that; it's their gig, and obviously they should pick their favorites. (The choices are fine with me: "No Country," "Persepolis" and "No End in Sight" are all on my 10 best.) But these laurels factor into publicity campaigns for the Oscars and Golden Globes; often they are the campaigns. It's the way we critics contribute to the art-industrial complex. Our prizes certainly help determine which films get nominated, setting in motion the next round of ballyhoo before the final prizes are handed out. So almost all the nominees will be from worthy obscurities that can't draw much of an audience in the theater or, when the awards shows are aired, on TV. [...]

Actually, it's hard to tell which if any of the critical faves will be popular, because most of the big winners ("Diving Bell," "No Country," "Persepolis," "Starting Out in the Evening," "Sweeney Todd," "There Will Be Blood") are November or December releases. Half of them haven't hit the commercial theaters yet. Maybe the critical establishment has A.D.D.

More likely it's a combination of the novelty of the new and the deliberate timing of "serious" movies for what has become known as "awards season."

But I think the key phrase above (and one RC has appositely chosen) concerns how critics' awards "factor into publicity campaigns." I doubt that critics, even bevies of critics, have much direct influence on the actual Oscar balloting -- or on ticket sales, either, for that matter. But I know for a fact that filmmakers can use the leverage of critical awards in order to pry publicity dollars out of a studio or distributor. Some may even have it written into their contracts.

But movies are personal matters. I don't put much stock in committee decisions about the "best" or the "worst" -- particularly within an arbitrary unit of measurement like a "year." (That won't stop me from participating in critics polls, though!) What interests me are the critics' personal selections, and their reasons for selecting them. A list... well, it's just a list.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (my former homies) have announced their collective choices for best achievements of 2007 and... well, for now, I'll just say that I doubt most of them would even be on my short list of runners-up for this year. (I haven't seen "Sweeney Todd" or "Diving Bell and the Butterfly" yet, though.) I'm glad that some honorees are getting recognition: Milestone Films, Sarah Polley, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (from "Once": music as dialog/acting), Jack Fisk (to whom I will always be grateful for, among other things, the prom in "Carrie," the house in "Days of Heaven," and pulling the lever in "Eraserhead" -- yes, that was him), "Persepolis" and "Ratatouille" (tied for best animated feature), Vlad Ivanov (for negotiating the trickiest of roles) and a few others. But I know how misleading these group-ballot things can be. LAFCA's list does leave the impression that they felt "Blood" (and, perphaps, "Diving Bell") tower the rest of the year's releases. I wonder if that's really the overwhelming majority opinion, or if it's another case of second- or third-choice consensus carrying the day. Too many of these seem like Academy-style picks to me (Most Noticeable Acting, Most Obvious/Intrusive Score, etc.). More about that later on in the month...

UPDATE (12/10/07): LAFCA member Robert Koelher writes to Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere:

"I've cited to both Anne Thompson and David Poland the various fictions they've written about re. LAFCA's awards, namely that our pick for 'TWBB' had to do with going against National Board of Review (Anne) or the Academy (David). And now you say we were generally flying the contrarian flag. [...]

"By a wide margin, LAFCA felt... that 'There Will Be Blood' was the best American film of the year. That's all. No chess work, no calculations, no triangulation -- nothing but a matter of taste based on seeing more movies over the year than anybody else.

"And Jeff, the group judgement was based -- with perhaps no exceptions, since there was simply no time for most or all of us to view it more than once -- on a single viewing of 'TWBB.' It's a great movie on the first viewing."

[NOTE: In my post I did not surmise that LAFCA was intentionally striking any groupthink contrarian pose. I know from experience that it doesn't really work that way -- and, besides, LAFCA is the first crix group to vote, so what's to react against? But I wondered about the margin of victory, a legitimate question regarding the results of any balloting or committee decision-making procedure -- including the Oscars. Koehler's letter helps clarify that. I'm glad to know I disagree with some genuine majority sentiments rather than some statistical flukes. I disagreed with some choices when I was a member of the group, too -- and I don't know anyone who didn't, from time to time. It's a group of critics, you know....]

The LAFCA 2007 awards:

PICTURE: "There Will Be Blood"
RUNNER-UP: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson, "There Will Be Blood"
RUNNER-UP: Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood"
RUNNER-UP: Frank Langella, "Starting Out in the Evening"

ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, "La Vie en rose"
RUNNER-UP: Anamaria Marinca, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Vlad Ivanov, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
RUNNER-UP: Hal Holbrook, "Into the Wild"

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Ryan, "Gone Baby Gone" and "Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead"
RUNNER-UP: Cate Blanchett, "I’m Not There"

All week I've been meaning to link (and contribute) to the 'Short Film Week' Blog-a-thon co-hosted by Only the Cinema and Culture Snob (December 2 - 8). But I'm still recovering from the Pacific Northwest storm and flooding (long story) earlier in the week. There are many things I'd like to write about, but I probably won't get to them until after the blog-a-thon is technically over. (For now, maybe I can recycle my Close-Up Blog-a-thon short movie [above] and my piece on the opening credits sequence for 'Dexter', which is a perfect little short on its own -- not unlike Martin Scorsese's "The Big Shave," in certain provocative respects.)

But the archive of articles will remain -- and there's some great stuff, including Matt Zoller Seitz on Chuck Jones' classic Looney Tune, "What's Opera, Doc?"; Joe Bowman at Fin de cinema on 20 breakthrough music videos (hey, they can be incredibly expressive and accomplished works); Jeffrey Hill at Liverputty on the Disney science film "Our Friend the Atom" (1957) [as a kid, I was fascinated by Frank Capra's Bell Telephone film, "Hemo the Magnificent" (1957), about hemoglobin]; and more than I can even begin to mention. It's a trove you'll have fun digging through...

Sometimes I doubt Richard Kelly's commitment to Sparkle Motion. The first time was the "Director's Cut" of "Donnie Darko," which de-emphasized all that was mysterious and exciting about the original film by insisting on a literal explication of the time-warp theories of Roberta Sparrow (aka "Grandma Death"). Huge mistake -- as bad as showing us the inside of the mothership in the "Special Edition" of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." At least Spielberg knew that was an error, and removed it from his Director's Cut: He'd wanted to tweak things he'd had to rush in order to meet his deadline (after all, the fate of Columbia Pictures was riding on this picture), and to flesh out some character details. But Columbia let him go back and fine-tune his blockbuster on the condition that he show Richard Dreyfuss inside the ship -- something we really didn't want to see, because it ruined the uplifting momentum of the ending, and who wants to see Richard Dreyfuss crying over anti-climactic special effects anyway?

"Southland Tales" is the product of the same literalist sensibility that produced the second version of "Donnie Darko." Part of me questions whether it's even worth writing about, mainly because it offers so little of cinematic interest. It's fussy and inert, like Part 4 of a PowerPoint slide-show based on a set of elaborately drawn storyboards that explain in excruciating detail the minutiae of the mythology behind "Hudson Hawk." There's nothing close to a movie here.

There's an obvious channel-surfing aesthetic to mimic "information overload," but nothing's on, anyway. One shot could just as easily be followed by any other shot -- they aren't cut together with any verve or intelligence, so the effect is flat and linear. We flip by a beachside talk show ("The View" with porn actresses), and that's as sophisticated and penetrating as "Southland Tales" ever gets about sex, politics and media. (He said "penetrating"!) Is it hard to follow? Not really. The voiceover makes sure everything is explained (often more than once), but it could just as well not have been explained and it wouldn't matter, because nothing is illuminated in the explanation.

Like "Hudson Hawk," it's a bloated, white-elephantine vanity production (for the writer-director, not the star) -- a strained, deliberate, joyless, big-budget, star-studded Hollywood effort to manufacture a "cult movie" by pandering to what some studio execs probably consider to be "the comic-book youth demographic." It wishes it could be "Repo Man" (or "RoboCop" or "Starship Troopers") but it's not even "The Postman." Actually, "Southland Tales" -- co-financed by Universal, which is distributing the film internationally but dropped any domestic plans after the disastrous reception at Cannes -- isn't "big-budget" by today's Hollywood standards ($17 million). But the feeling of waste and desperation behind it -- "Let's throw money at the screen for big sets and unimaginative digital effects!" -- is not unlike that dead-lump-in-your-stomach feeling you get while watching your average Michael Bay movie. [Since writing this, I have learned that the time and (Sony) money spent re-tooling "Southland Tales" after Cannes has included cutting 20 minutes, adding to Justin Timberlake's too-literal voiceover, and beefing up the special effects. That's what I was afraid of. It shows.]

Two sentences in the New York Times story announcing the line-up for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival jumped out at me as symptomatic of a fashionable but misguided attitude toward the art and craft of filmmaking today:

And some of the more striking, original documentaries were quite unpolished, [Sundance festival director Geoffrey] Gilmore said. “You’d get a sense they’d never touched a camera before.”

Now, I am all for striking, original films -- including unpolished ones. Among my favorite documentaries of recent years are Chris Wilcha's "The Target Shoots First" and Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation" -- both films made with small consumer video cameras by people recording their own experiences over long periods of time. Neither man considered himself a "filmmaker" when he started shooting, but both discovered what they needed to express while making these films. I could not be more enthusiastic about the means of production finally being within the reach of the proletariat (people like me).

But, as I've been wondering for some time now: What is behind this popular and patently false critical suspicion that a "well-crafted" movie is automatically phony or inauthentic, while a film that is "unpolished" is considered genuine -- automatically real or truthful? This is especially troubling to me when the people expressing this attitude fail to convey a recognition of the distinctions between artistry and production values -- or between validity and lack of skill.

Likewise, I've never understood why a so-called "independent film" (a term that usually refers to the source[s] of the production financing, if that) should be appreciated or evaluated any differently than a studio-bankrolled film (which may well be a negative pick-up distributed by a major or one of its "dependent" arms). It's unbelievably hard to get a film made either way, and just because you have studio financing doesn't mean you won't be fighting for money or time or resources (and, probably, creative control as well). It definitely means that more of your budget will go to overhead costs. Studios also force you to deal with development execs who may consume a lot of your time and energy trying to put their unwelcome fingerprints on the movie (just to justify their salaries). But even if you get your movie made more or less the way you want to with your indie financiers, there's no guarantee that your indie distributor (if you get one) won't demand cuts or changes that don't necessarily make the film any better or more marketable.

I've seen plenty of big-budget Hollywood films made by professionals who evidently knew little or nothing about what they were doing. It's like they'd never touched a camera (or an editing table or a mixing board) or even encountered an actor before. And it's not pretty. It isn't any good, either, but there it is. I've also seen low-budget films, shot on video or 16 mm, that exhibit an affinity for cinema, for communicating through images and sound, that no budget or payroll could ever buy. And I've seen way, way too many indie movies that have no reason to exist except as somebody's lottery ticket for a Hollywood deal. They're as empty as any studio product, just more dishonest about their commercial ambitions.

I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five. Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriff at the same time, him in Plano and me here. I think he was pretty proud of that. I know I was.

Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe.... You can't help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can't help but wonder how they would've operated these times....
-- Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)

The land is black, swallowed in the shadows. The sky is beginning to glow orange and blue. This is Genesis, the primordial landscape of "No Country for Old Men." We may think we're looking at a sunset at first, but the next few shots show a progression: The sky lightens, the sun rises above the horizon to illuminate a vast Western expanse. No signs of humanity are evident. And then, a distant windmill -- a mythic "Once Upon a Time in the West" kind of windmill. So, mankind figures into the geography after all. A barbed-wire fence cuts through a field. The camera, previously stationary, stirs to life, and pans (ostensibly down the length of the fence) to find a police car pulled over on the shoulder of a highway. There's law out here, too.

Light, land, man, boundaries, law. Each image builds subtly on the one(s) before it, adding incrementally to our picture of the territory we're entering. The establishment of this location -- a passing-through stretch of time and space, between where you've been and where you're going, wherever that may be -- seeps into your awareness. Not a moment is wasted, but the compositions have room to breathe, along with the modulations of Tommy Lee Jones' voice, the noises in the air, and Carter Burwell's music-as-sound-design. The movie intensifies and heightens your senses. Light is tangible, whether it's sunlight or fluorescent. Blades of grass sing in the wind. Ceiling fans whir (not so literally or Symbolically as in "Apocalypse Now"). Milk bottles sweat in the heat. Ventilation ducts, air conditioners and deadbolt housings rumble, hiss and roar.

"To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated."
-- Jean-Luc Godard

"No Country for Old Men" has been called a "perfect" film by those who love it and those who were left cold by it. Joel and Ethan Coen have been praised and condemned for their expert "craftsmanship" and their "technical" skills -- as if those skills had nothing to do with filmmaking style, or artistry; as if they existed apart from the movie itself. Oh, but the film is an example of "impeccable technique" -- you know, for "formalists." And the cinematography is "beautiful." Heck, it's even "gorgeous." ...

Crix say the darndest things. From a review of Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There":

"Obvious as [Bob Dylan's] talent may be, he often mixes metaphors and combines images in a way that skirts the edge of incoherence."

Read it twice. It's even funnier the third time. The key is in the unarticulated relationship between the two parts of the sentence. Is one of them supposed to be a dependent clause?

If you can guess who wrote it, you may win a brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat. Or not.

This is about a hallucinogenic experience I had years ago... and how it relates to the way I look at movies. I can't say this psychedelic "revelation" altered my perception of cinema in any way; it just gave the perception a form, a metaphor. And I wasn't under the influence of an illegal synthetic drug, but an ancient (legal) herb: Salvia divinorum ("The Divine Sage"), which grows wild in Oaxaca, Mexico. Unlike LSD, which can induce an altered state of perception that lasts for hours, a hit of Salvia divinorum (smoked) provides a disorienting, headlong visual rush that may last for only a few seconds or minutes. Problem is, you could pass out for an instant before you hit the floor. (Salvia divinorum, although it's related to the common sage plant, has since been classified as a controlled substance in a few states -- and will become one in Illinois in January, 2008.)

But, talk about your theory of relativity: those seconds can last a long time. Here, as near as I can describe it, is what happened: I was "falling sideways," as some have described it, hurtling forward through what felt like a blurred tunnel of orange and yellow leaves (this was in the fall, of course). And near the end was the shape of an overstuffed chair, not unlike the one I was sitting in at the time. Only the texture of the chair, instead of being leather or some other kind of upholstery, was the leaves, and they were moving, too, fluttering in the breeze. It's not that the chair was made of leaves. It was that the idea of "leaves" and "chair" became inseparable, and they were intertwined fractal shapes, holding space and gently defining each other. You know how that is. The color and the texture of the leaves became one distinguishable thing, and that thing was a beautiful overstuffed chair. And then the chair was water. It wasn't wet, it wasn't made of H2O, it was still just a chair with the visual properties of water. It was transparent and currents or ripples slightly distorted the substance of it, as if you were peering into a soft, chair-shaped aquarium without any glass walls holding it together. (I guess you could say it was something like the "water tentacle" in "The Abyss," but it was more stable and not so in-your-face.)

If film is first and foremost a way of seeing (and I believe that to be the case, even if not everyone sees seeing the way I do), then what we see in a shot, or a series of shots, is as important as... as anything. The movie is what the film does, as the mind is what the brain does. One of my oft-used analogies is Picasso's "Guernica." Now, you can know or not know what the painting is "about" -- the story it depicts, the historical-political events upon which it is based. You may even sense the emotions the artist is expressing and the techniques he's using to express them. But all those things don't even come close to adding up to "Guernica." "Guernica" is a large composition designed to evoke responses in the viewer. That's where you begin to discover the thing itself.

All of which serves as an introduction to one image from "No Country for Old Men" that I would like to point out (separate from the longer piece[s] I'm working on now). It's a second or two of film that occurs just after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who is being chased through the desert by a truck at night, jumps over a river bank and glances back and up to see how close his pursuers are. It involves seeing dust produced by the braking truck, illuminated by the headlights as it breaks over the edge of the bank, darkly silhouetted against the light from above. It's Moss's POV, and it's a detail we notice because he notices it. The hounds of hell are loose on his trail (or will be in moments), but here's this moment of sinister beauty develops from it, and sticks around just long enough to register before more urgent matters assert themselves.

It's a directorial (and photographical) coup in many ways, but I was delighted to discover that it's one of those images the Coens visualized in advance and actually chose to record in an early version of their screenplay (which deviates from the finished film in several significant aspects):

Moss is almost to the steep riverbank. Another whump of the shotgun.

Shot catches Moss on the right shoulder. It tears the back of his shirt away and sends him over the crest of the river bank. Moss airborne, ass over elbows, hits near the bottom of the sandy slope with a loud fhump.

He rolls to a stop and looks up.

We hear a skidding squeal and see dirt and dust float over the lip of the ridge, thrown by the truck's hard stop.

That moment, in the middle of a deadly chase, is a "privileged moment" of a kind that, perhaps, Francois Truffaut did not have in mind when he coined that phrase, but it sure is one. For all we know, it could be the last play of the light that this man will ever see -- and we share the site with him. It's natural, it's what perhaps anyone in this situation could see, but the Coens make sure that we do see it. The next several images I don't want to describe right now, but they are among the most electrifying and surreal in all of cinema -- at least since the relentless approach of the nightmare dog in Buñuel's "Los Olvidados" (1950). But at this moment, we're awash in sensations: the squeal of the tires, the clang that tells us something or someone is getting out of the unseen truck atop the bank, the cold river into which the wounded and disoriented Moss is about to plunge...

But I just wanted to point this out, and that they wanted to be certain it was not just in the film, but even in the screenplay (which in other respects is somewhat different than the film itself). Writers often do that kind of thing, and the credit (or blame) for a shot or sequence will usually be attributed to the director, even if it was right there in the script. But it is the director who bears responsibility for realizing those images, and sequencing them, and presenting them so that they do what they need to do. The Coens, being their own writers, directors, producers and editors, pretty much understand what they're looking for. And they recognize what they've got when a miracle drops in their lap: the birds, and shadows of birds, over the highway in "Blood Simple"; the pelican plopping into the ocean at the end of "Barton Fink").

"Content, as I see it, is a series of connecting shocks arranged in a certain sequence and directed at the audience." Sergei Eisenstein, you are so right! (I wish I liked your movies more.) Shocks as content -- the junior-high equation [ART = FORM + CONTENT] trembles, previously secure elements threaten to swap sides. What Eisenstein theorized about cinema goes for writing, too: words as shocks; shocks arranged in a certain sequence. Words call up images and the images recur, mutate, cross-refer as the words extend in linear space and the reading-experience extends in time."
-- Richard T. Jameson, "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980)

If Michael Bay turns everything up to 11 and assaults you until you feel bludgeoned and numb, the Coens do the very opposite. Bay, from the Alan Parker school of airless imagery, tries to shut you down, to restrict your imagination to fit his literal forms. (If you feel like cattle being funneled through the slaughterhouse, so be it.) The Coens open up the doors of perception, so that you become hyperaware of the many vibrant sensations -- light, color, sound, motion -- that are in the world around us every day, the kinds of living details to which most (flat, inert, mechanical) films just aren't attuned.

So, one brief shot of the dust in the headlights -- it's a small thing, but it makes all the difference. It's just one of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and one reason I emerge from a movie like "No Country for Old Men" feeling like my senses, my emotions, my mind, have been stimulated, invigorated rather than dulled.

"Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty."
-- Jean Shepherd, 1975

In the past 72 hours, I have read two extraordinarily personal pieces of film criticism that have moved me to tears. The first is Roger Ebert's "Letter to Werner Herzog," and (just now), David Bordwell's "The adolescent window." Both miraculously distill the essence of cinephilia (or, a lifetime of intimacy with the arts and popular culture in general) into a single, eloquent piece of writing. Roger's is, of course, devoted to his enduring relationship with the work of a single artist over many years, while David's (though focusing on Jean Shepherd) traces a lifelong multi-media love affair with books, magazines, radio, TV, movies....

What does it mean, what does it feel like, to connect with another's sensibility (and recognize something of yourself) in a film, or a book, or a voice? Each man approaches these questions from his own angle.

Roger Ebert directs his letter to Werner Herzog, who dedicated his most recent documentary, "Encounters at the End of the World," to Roger Ebert. Ebert writes of Herzog's "belief that the audience must be able to believe what it sees":

Not its “truth,” but its actuality, its ecstatic truth.

You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top. [...]

Your documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” begins with a real man, Dieter Dengler, who really was a prisoner of the Viet Cong, and who really did escape through the jungle and was the only American who freed himself from a Viet Cong prison camp. As the film opens, we see him entering his house, and compulsively opening and closing windows and doors, to be sure he is not locked in. “That was my idea,” you told me. “Dieter does not really do that. But it is how he feels.” [...]

In one scene you can foresee the end of life on earth, and in another show us country musicians picking their guitars and banjos on the roof of a hut at the South Pole. You did not go to Antarctica, you assure us at the outset, to film cute penguins. But you did film one cute penguin, a penguin that was disoriented, and was steadfastly walking in precisely the wrong direction—into an ice vastness the size of Texas. “And if you turn him around in the right direction,” you say, “he will turn himself around, and keep going in the wrong direction, until he starves and dies.” The sight of that penguin waddling optimistically toward his doom would be heartbreaking, except that he is so sure he is correct. [...]

I have started out to praise your work, and have ended by describing it. Maybe it is the same thing. You and your work are unique and invaluable, and you ennoble the cinema when so many debase it.

David Bordwell recalls the "Law of the Adolescent Window," that time in our lives (roughly between ages 13 and 18) when the world, and the world of culture, opens up to us in ways that make indelible impressions:

Whatever called out to you when your window opened... is likely to retain its bright purity throughout your days. What’s kitsch or cheesy or retro to others is precious to you.

Make no apologies. It’s not mere nostalgia or guilty pleasure to revisit these creations. You can return to them as to old friends. Encountering them again, you remember when you took it for granted that anything was possible in your life. Their sharp, shining lines fitted your range of vision, and mostly they still do.

Your taste was unerring. These teenage passions represent a big chunk of the finest part of you. In some secret place you are still as uncomplicated as you were then.

Go ahead. Tell us. What ecstatic truths have you seen through your window?

In celebration of the 30th anniversary three-disc DVD release of three -- count 'em, three -- versions of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," I offer yet another quotation from Richard T. Jameson's "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980):

"Energy" has become the new cliché of film criticism, which is a damn shame since the cinema is a medium of energy... "Energy" as a cop-out for mindless noise and jitter is reprehensible. But energy, sans quotes, can be lucid, multivalenced, aesthetically informed, and beautiful in ways unique to cinema.

Steven Spielberg misapplies it in "1941," but illuminates the world and his medium with it in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." "Close Encounters" is, like any other good movie, about mise en scène, the transliteration of energy. "The sun sang to me last night," an old derelict beams. The dissonant but regular chant on a mountain in India is echoed on the toy flute of an Indiana boy, while his mother finds herself painting an odd rock formation into all her pictures and a newly-ex power-company employee (he's chasing a new power) looks for it in rumpled pillows and bowls of mashed potatoes. Form finally compels its own content. Music becomes light, gesture, mathematical formula, the patterns described in space by a celestial craft in motion. The metamorphosis of reality, the rediscovery of possibility, the translation of an idea into visual action: what movies do: why movies exist. The foremost pleader of the UFO cause is played by one François Truffaut, movie director.

This is energy as style, style as energy. It's radiant because it's been defined by a cinematic sensibility: What Spielberg's seeing and the way he sees it are one.

I get chills reading that, because it puts me back in touch with the sense of awe I get from a movie that sings... like the sun.

"This is this!"
-- Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), The Deer Hunter

Three little words (well, two, really) -- each, individually and collectively, with flexible meanings. Yes, the significance of that short statement really does depend on what the definition of "is" is -- and "this," in both contexts, at the beginning and the end of the sentence. What does he mean when he says this? Well, to even begin to understand, you have to consider the moment in the movie and go from there.

When a critic adopts the attitude of De Niro's character, well, film criticism itself is automatically made superfluous. A bullet is a bullet, a killer is a killer, a zombie is a zombie, a gangster movie is about gangsterism, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and don't even ask about the cigar. Lift and separate "content" from the movie and, once you've removed the context, what more needs to be said? In Keith Uhlich's eloquent words, such an approach exemplifies "the dubious product of American literalism, of an inability to grapple with a film's numerous layers of experience, falling back on easy prejudices and dichotomies as a way of stopping discussion and disagreement cold." (That's from a profile of Jonathan Demme at sensesofcinema that I recommend to literalists and non-literalists alike.)

We're familiar with the ways politicians use this technique (invading Iraq = war on terrorism; questioning policy = siding with terrorists; smoking gun = mushroom cloud). Substituting dogma for evidence is an easy way to evade the possibility of meaningful debate, something that might challenge an assertion of monolithic authority. The same thing happens in film criticism all the time. The trick is simply to eliminate the subject (the film itself) from the equation. This way, opinions don't have to be based on anything because there is no verifiable external reality with which to compare them.

Richard T. Jameson's article, "Style vs. 'Style'" (Film Comment, March/April, 1980), which I have recently re-read (and hence have been quoting a lot), ought to be as widely anthologized as any piece ever written about film, for the way it zeroes in on the heart of what a movie is:

"Content" is not content; "the meaning" is not a concrete certitude cunningly buried so that one may have the pleasure of a civilized, mental version of hide-and-seek, strip-mining through "the story" to get to "the themes." "The meaning" is only one more piece of material, as deformable by the operation of the artistic sensibility as the sea is by the pull of the moon's gravity. Content is what happens from moment to moment, and then in the suspended moment that is one's life within the aesthetic life-system the artist has created. And content is at the beck of style.

This would be a good opportunity to jump into a discussion of the confusion of "craft," "technique" and "style" (all related; by no means equivalent) that riddle so much film criticism today, but I'd like to save that for a separate piece.

In a moving and illuminating 2005 article (that poetically invokes Jonathan Richman's haunting "That Summer Feeling," a favorite song of mine), Adrian Martin wrote that his view of film, and writing about film, is shaped by "a rigorous analytical sense, a demonstration of some form-to-content logic... often dazzlingly intuited and demonstrated."

These days, film criticism — even the best-written — does little for me, finally, unless it can unearth, propose and in a way prove the existence of the logic that makes a film 'tick', as we say, that coheres it into some kind of whole work, whether classical-expressive or modernist-disjunctive. Godard, in fact, said it best in his challenge to Kael and, beyond her, all critics: "Bring in the evidence," he demanded. Film analysis or criticism without that logic, that evidence, is just assertion, and assertion is something I can take or leave (perhaps depending on whether or not I agree with it!).

Then again, assertion as a substitute for thought, as David Bordwell has written (citing specific examples), is "so glancing and elliptical that we can scarcely judge it as right or wrong."

The logic that structures Dennis Lim's New York Times interview with Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale," "Margot at the Wedding") is circularly inspired:

[In the film,] Margot, a fiction writer in the throes of a personal crisis, is at a bookstore appearance, which goes quickly awry when her interviewer presses her on the connections between her life and her work. He brings up a story of hers that concerns an abusive patriarch. She immediately begins to defend her father. He interrupts: What he meant to ask was whether she had based that monstrous figure on herself.

“I wrote that scene in response to the interviews I did when ‘Squid’ came out,” Mr. Baumbach said.... “I was having fun with what people assume when they think something is autobiographical.” [...]

“Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true,” he said. “ [...]

“Margot is me at my worst, probably,” Mr. Baumbach said. “I try not to analyze the characters when I’m writing, but I’m very analytical in my life.” [...]

With Mr. Baumbach the conversation has a way of circling back to autobiography — or, more precisely, to the notion of a writer creating autobiographical work by feeding on family and friends for material. It’s a recurring motif in his films. [...]

“My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical.”

OK, let me take that for one more spin around the block. After seeing "Margot at the Wedding" in Toronto ("The Eastern Inbred Class"), I wanted to address this inbred motif in the reflexive manner of Baumbach's film: "If I were a character from the movie critiquing the movie, I would probably say something like: "Noah Baumbach must really detest his dreadful dysfunctional family.'"

The people in this movie are types who either crib from their friends' and families' lives for their New Yorker short stories -- or who are mortified and infuriated that details from their lives are appearing in their friends' or families' New Yorker short stories. You may assume there's an "autobiographical" dimension to it...

"Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, 'No Country for Old Men' is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Here's where I agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Coen brothers' new movie: 1) it is based on a ("minor") novel by Cormac McCarthy; 2) it is a very well-made genre picture; and 3) Rosenbaum does not understand why it has been accorded so much importance. When Rosenbaum says the only way he can account for the critical response to "No Country for Old Men" (and "The Silence of the Lambs" before it) is to assume it's "because it strokes some ideological impulse," I believe he means what he says even though I don't know what he thinks he's trying to say. [Rosenbaum responds, in comments below that "the core of my argument [is] the occupation of Iraq and the daily killings and torture that we simultaneously support and strive to ignore."]

His review is based on the assumption, stated in the third paragraph, that "No Country For Old Men," is a "psycho killer" movie like "Silence of the Lambs," which it most emphatically is not. It is a genre movie, but Rosenbaum gets the genre(s) wrong. It's a noirish crime thriller and a western and a detective story. (The Library of Congress catalogues the book under "drug traffic," "treasure-trove," "sheriffs" and "Texas.") But the motives of Chigurh (Javier Bardem's character) have nothing to do with the psychology of a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates or Michael Meyers. There's no psychologist on the scene to explain him ("What does he seek?," as Lecter puts it), because he is not compelled to kill and he derives no pleasure from it and he does not choose his victims or his methods according to some profile or pattern.

Chigurh is out to retrieve a MacGuffin (briefcase full of cash), and he simply eliminates anything or anyone that gets in his way, using whatever means are available to him. The plain fact that he favors an efficient tool for quickly dispatching cattle (something not uncommon in Texas ranch country) reinforces how little emotion he attaches to the killing of most of his victims. He'll just as soon strangle them or shoot them. Or maybe he won't, if he has nothing to gain. He doesn't fit Rosenbaum's profile any more than he fits the ones Law Enforcement initially tries to impose upon him in the movie.

As for Rosenbaum's confession -- "I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse" -- I can only wonder what that ideological impulse might be, but it's clear Rosenbaum does not succumb to it. Do those who accord the film importance even know that their response is based on an ideological impulse?

I remember writing something similar about "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and "Back to the Future" in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan presented us with "Morning in America," which meant that the way to face the present and the future was to return to an idealized fantasy version of the past. Heck, it wasn't even too late to retroactively win in Vietnam! (Never mind that John Rambo was a psychologically disturbed Vietnam vet in the first movie.)

Rosenbaum compares Chigurh to the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is an illuminating comparison, though not necessarily for the reasons he gives:

In O’Connor’s vision, perfectly captured in a mere 16 pages, the Misfit is an emblem of religious despair, but in the less considered genre mechanics of Cormac McCarthy and the Coens, religious despair is nothing more than an alibi for violence. It’s invoked as a way of covering all the bases, tapping into fundamentalist fatalism without really buying into it.

"Religious despair"? "Fundamentalist fatalism"? Loaded terms, but they reflect a very limited reading of O'Connor and McCarthy and the Coens, of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "No Country for Old Men." Perhaps if Chigurh needs to be reduced to an "emblem" of something, it's ruthless, indifferent force in the single-minded pursuit of any goal (religious, financial, political, genocidal). Some people would define that as the nature of "evil."

I've read two or three other bewildered reviews of "No Country for Old Men" that concentrate on the plot and/or Javier Bardem's haircut, or how the stuff they think is supposed to be funny isn't funny to them. And everybody -- even those who really don't approve one bit -- want to assure their readers that the Coens and DP Roger Deakins are technically proficient, which tells us almost exactly nothing except that they think it has "beautiful cinematography" or something equally meaningless. But, fine, if that's what somebody feels the need to write about in response to this movie, then that is evidently what they have to say about it, and that's that.

I have more to say, but I would like to refresh my memory of the movie, which I saw once last September near the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival. Here's something from my initial (preemptively defensive) response back then:

"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Critics can disapprove of the unsettling shifts in tone in the Coens' work, or their presumed attitude toward the characters, or their use of violence and humor -- but those complaints are petty and irrelevant in the context of the movies themselves: the way, for example, an ominous black shadow creeps across a field toward the observer ("No Country" has a credit for "Weather Wrangler"); or a phone call from a hotel room that you can hear ringing in the earpiece and at the front desk, where you're pretty sure something bad has happened but you don't need to see it; or the offhand reveal of one major character's fate from the POV of another just entering the scene; or... I could go on and on. To ignore such things in order to focus on something else says more about the critic's values than it does about the movies. It's like complaining that Bresson's actors don't emote enough, or that Ozu keeps his camera too low.

Those words were written in the thrall of the movie, and I stand by them. Rosenbaum begins his review with a quote from George Orwell:

The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.

So... "No Country For Old Men" should be pulled down because it is a cinematic concentration camp? What of those who don't recognize a good wall when they see it, and mistake it for something it is not? What if they think they're pulling down a concentration camp wall, but it's actually a New Orleans levee and there's a hurricane on the way? What if they think it's a terrorist outpost and they bust down the walls only to discover it's really the home of an Iraqi family? What if the sturdy walls and magnificent arches of the Mezquita de Cordoba are left standing after the Moors are vanquished and the Christians build an elaborate Baroque Cathedral smack in the middle of the mosque?

Enough word games. More later...

No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg.

Two weeks ago, critic Robert Horton and I discussed Cronenberg's work as part of Robert's Magic Lantern Series at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This short film, conceived as a self-contained critical essay/appreciation, has been expanded and refined from the seven-minute version I assembled the night before that occasion, tracing Cronenberg's thematic obsessions and the development of his artistic vision across 40 years of filmmaking. "From the Drain" to "Eastern Promises" (neither of which are included here), it's all one big Cronenberg movie, no matter what the genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, biography, crime thriller...

Clips from nine chapters in the ever-mutating cinematic saga of David Cronenberg ("The Brood" to "A History of Violence") are interwoven to illuminate some of the director's major themes: technology (and art) as an extension/expression of the mind and body (guns, game pods, television, cars, computers, typewriters, eyeglasses...); the human appetite for extreme sensations; violence as sex, and sex as violence; the evolution of humankind beyond biology, and the inevitable dissolution of the flesh through mutation, disease, aging; corporate co-option of the intellectual property behind new technologies... all in only 12 minutes!

I warn you, it's going to be a wild ride...

Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka "Halloween") through November 2 (aka All Souls Day -- and Tara Mulan Sweeney's birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Roman Polanski's "The Tenant," Neil Jordan's "In Dreams," and John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" ("The critics were horrified!!!!"):

Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy -- too easy, sometimes -- to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero's extravagantly gory Grand Guignol "Dawn of the Dead" is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy -- that suggest far more than they depict.

Continue reading here...

Now this is how to make a list. Richard Corliss writes for Time magazine, a mainstream publication, but that doesn't prevent him from slipping in those inspired, idiosyncratic Corli-cues™ of his. (I just made up that word, and I know it's not a very good one.) Argue all you like with RC's choices (that is the point), this list strikes me as a brilliant balancing of the expected and the unexpected, the mainstream and the marginal, from 1896 to 2004. I think it will thrill you. It might shock you. It may even... horrify you! So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to, uh, well, we warned you.

So, sure, you see "Red Dragon" (2002) on there and you immediately think, "The Brett Ratner Hannibal Lecter movie? Has he lost his mind?" Then you think, "Well, at least it's better than the Ridley Scott one. Although he also liked that." And then you remember that Corliss never much cared for "Silence of the Lambs" ("a competent but pallid version of Thomas Harris' soul-chilling novel"), so it kind of makes perverse sense.

And then, beyond the solid chunk of essential 1960s and '70s titles (which together account for 11 slots in the reverse-chronological list of 25 -- and that doesn't even include "Don't Look Now," although of course it should), you spot... "Bambi" (1942). Doe! Why didn't I think of that?! Disney's mommy-killing nightmare was surely the most traum-atic horror movie for every generation of children since it was released -- and one that parents still enjoy "sharing with" (or inflicting upon) their kids. (Compare and contrast with the "Baby Mine" scene of the previous year's "Dumbo," an excruciatingly protracted exercise in maternal separation anxiety that is the essence of emotional torture porn.)

The punchline, though, is the last (and oldest) title in the list, by the Lumiere brothers. I'm not going to give it away, but in its day it provided 50 seconds of terror that must have compared with the "Psycho" shower sequence.

(Full list and links after the jump...)

First, let's get the quote right. When asked if the "Harry Potter" series character, Prof. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, a proponent of love as a power in the universe, had ever been in love himself, author J.K. Rowling said last week: “My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”

That's what started the whole rumpus, which Kristin Thompson analyses in splendid detail at "Observations on film art and 'Film Art'." I am particularly impressed by her post because I found it fascinating reading, even though I've never read a "Harry Potter" book or seen one of the movies.

Note that Rowling did not say Dumbledore was gay. She was explaining how she had always thought of the character she created, "probably before the first book was published." As Thompson reports, Rowling also said in a 1999 interview: “I kind of see Dumbledore more as a John Gielgud type, you know, quite elderly and -- and quite stately.” If I may resort to an idiomatic expression: Hello!?!?!

There was no uproar over the Gielgud remark. Others, it seems, had come to think of Dumbledore as more of a Richard Harris type and then a Michael Gambon type, although the movie role had originally been offered to Patrick McGoohan. But her point was that Dumbledore and his best friend Grindelwald had been in love, until the latter became his mortal enemy.

Last weekend, in a discussion about the work of David Cronenberg at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, I recalled that when Cronenberg's "The Fly" was released in 1986, it was widely interpreted as a metaphor for AIDS, and the pain of watching a loved one's body and mind ravaged by disease and transformed into something Other than what they once were. But, after the movie came out, Cronenberg said he'd thought of it simply as a metaphor for getting old, for the degenerative, transforming process of aging. Time and physicality themselves are the autoimmune virus, something to which none of us can develop a resistance.

Does that mean "The Fly" is about aging and not about AIDS? No. Cronenberg, like Rowling, was simply describing his thoughts during the process of creating the work in question.

It is the nature of serial fiction to create a world and let its characters move around in it, while leaving much of what happens to them off-page or off-screen, where we are encouraged to imagine them leading lives beyond what we actually witness as readers or viewers. Indeed, it's essential to the living illusion of the fantasy that we envision characters going about their business between scenes, and not just waiting around off-stage to make their entrances.

As Rowling said of the intense soul-mate relationship between the young Dumbledore and Grindelwald: “It’s in the book. It’s very clear in the book. Absolutely. I think a child will see a friendship, and I think a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation. I knew it was an infatuation.” Remember, too, that we're talking about a British boys' school here, a place where intimate same-sex relationships are supposedly as commonplace as schoolbooks.

So it's not like Rowling just made this up last week and then tried to slap it onto her seven-book series retroactively....

(My final contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, which just wrapped.)

Warning: This post (and the short film montage/hommage I put together to accompany it, above) may contain spoilers.

Jesus, Tom, it's the hat.

Take a look at the four shots from Joel and Ethan Coen's "Miller's Crossing" on this page: three close-ups of the same hat and a long shot of another one with a body under. The hat in all three close-ups, hat belongs to Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). The other one is on the head of his boss and friend, Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney). But let's re-wind a little bit.

The movie is set into motion with a close-up of three ice cubes plopped into a glass tumbler. We don't see Tom, our main character until the next shot, where he appears behind the bald head of a man (Johnny Casper, played by Jon Polito) who's delivering a lecture into the camera -- or just past it -- about friendship, character, ethics. Tom is the one who put the cubes into the glass and poured himself some whiskey. He crosses the room out of focus, moves past the camera, and when we see a reverse angle, he's standing behind and to the side of Leo. His tumbler of whiskey is in the frame, but his head isn't. When we finally do get a look at his mug, he's not wearing a hat. Meanwhile, Casper's henchman, the cadaverous Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman) stands behind his boss, holding his hat. And wearing one. It's a sign of respect.

When Tom leaves the room at the end of the scene, he puts on his hat. Then there's this strange credits sequence, like a dream in a forest, with a canopy of autumnal branches overhead. On the forest floor, a hat falls into the foreground of the frame, the title of the film appears (Figure #1), and the hat blows away into the distance. In the next close-up, Tom is roused from a stuporous slumber. He sits up and feels his head, for his hangover and for his hat.

"Where's my hat?" Tom asks.

"You bet it, ya moron," says the friend who woke him up. "Good thing the game broke up before you bet your shorts."

Turns out, the hat left with Mink and Verna. Together, they are the link between Tom's hat and his shorts. We've already heard, in the opening scene, that Mink (Steve Buscemi) is "the Dane's boy." Mink appears only in one brief scene at the Shenandoah Club, explains the whole movie ("as plain as the nose on your -- Turns out he's also involved with "the Schmatte," bookie Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro), who also happens to be the brother of Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Leo's twist and Tom's secret squeeze and the subject of Johnny Casper's opening rant.

Got that, or do I have to spell it out for ya?

OK, here's the deal:

Imagine the "Psycho" shower scene without Marion Crane or Mrs. Bates. Alfred Hitchcock's (and Saul Bass's) rapid-cut sequence is renowned for its use of close-ups to suggest the slicing of flesh when, in fact, there is none on the screen. You create that illusion in the cuts.

But what really makes the sequence work, I'd argue, is the way Hitchcock uses plumbing. Back in 1998, I published an extensive web article on Plumbing in the Cinema, in which I quoted from Stephen Rebello's book, "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho":

"The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America's sacred cows -- virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family... and the bathroom.'' Rubello quotes screenwriter Joseph Stephano on the subject of primal-screen plumbing: "I told Hitch 'I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and SEE that toilet. Can we do that?' A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, 'I'm going to have to fight them on it.' I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing -- we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures -- they'd be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], 'This is where you're going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We're going to start by showing you the toilet and it's only going to get worse.' We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet on-screen.'' Just the sight of the flushing toilet was considered shocking enough to mildly unsettle and disorient audiences of the day.

And the same is true today, though perhaps less noticeably so. In the same plumbing piece, here's the way I described what happens next:

Hitchcock's guilty fugitive protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having totaled the sum of her indebtedness, monetary and karmic, on a slip of paper, rips up the evidence of her culpability, flushes it down the water chute (although a telltale piece of it misses the bowl, as Detective Arbogast [Martin Balsalm] will later discover) and steps into the shower. Just as she's figuratively washing her the sins of her recent past down the drain, Mrs. Bates pays her a visit with a butcher knife. Marion pays for her sins in blood. And the image of her blood swirling into the blackness of the drain dissolves into an image of her now-lifeless eye. Her head lies on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. For what is a human body itself -- its arteries and intestines and organs and other viscera -- but an elaborate piece of organic plumbing?

That cold, hard biological reality underscores the whole scene, from the time Marion, looking for someplace to dispose of her accounting besides the wastebasket (where that nosy Norman would undoubtedly discover it), first glances toward the bathroom, hesitates, and then decides to take a shower. The hollow sound of the tiled room echoes through the scene -- and, of course, Marion's physical vulnerability is emphasized by her nakedness and the noise of the shower drowning out the rest of the world. She's even made a point of closing the door firmly before stepping into the shower.

You can make all the Freudian jokes you like about the phallic showerhead, but it works. Yeah, it's sexual, and Marion seems almost orgasmic when she slides under its spray. It's also cleansing, even cathartic after all Marion's been through since her furtive afternoon quickie (in bra and panties) with her boyfriend in the hotel room at the start of the picture: Since leaving work the previous day, she's made a rash and fateful decision to steal cash from her employer and skip town. She exchanged cars, had a close encounter with a cop beside the highway in the desert, drove in the dark and pouring rain, and then had that strange little talk with the young man in the back room full of stuffed and mounted birds -- the boy with the mean old invalid-ed mother locked up in that spooky house looming behind the motel. Who wouldn't like to take a nice hot shower after a day-and-a-half like that?

[images missing: insert your memory of Marion's murder here]

What you see on this page are just the close-ups of insentient bathroom fixtures in the sequence. All images containing organic matter have been stripped out. Marion is about to become one of these inanimate objects. The image of her blood swirling in the tub, and her dead face mashed against the white tile floor, shocks us even as it prepares us for the clean-up scene, where we will shift our identification from Marion onto Norman. To Hitchcock's perverse delight, we will soon be rooting for Norman to scrub away and dispose of the evidence of our (ex-) main character's murder. The drain is metaphorical, but it's also the abyss. Marion has been our surrogate; and now her pupil is as void and lifeless as that hole. We peer into it, unable to fathom where it leads, and the blackness beckons...

This is another contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door.

Words are linear. Movies not so much, even though they are encoded onto strips of celluloid or served up as streams or spirals of digital bits.

The web is not so linear, actually. Hyperlinks in all directions are more like the interconnected synapses of the human brain than any other technology or art form I can think of. But sometimes when I try to convey something about my experience of movies -- filtered, as always, through reflections and contrasts between images, memories, themes, styles -- what I really want to do is make a movie about it. That seems like the shortest, most direct way from imagination to articulation. The movie itself (as Godard famously suggested) is the criticism, the analysis.

When I put together the images and commentary for my previous post, "Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence," in celebration of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, that's what I was getting at. I just didn't have the tools to fully express what I wanted to say. Strike that. I had the tools, right here on my MacBook, but I didn't know how to use them.

One weekend and three long nights later, here's what I wanted to say. I will resist the temptation (you don't know how much I am tempted) to analyze my own cinematic essay, but I want you to watch it for yourself first. I'll translate it from web into movie and back into language later. This is a direction in which I want to move my film criticism.

Oh, and it's not a "literal" interpretation of the post. Some things just work differently on the motion picture screen than they do on the computer screen. Think of the first post as the original set of annotated storyboards, from which I felt free to depart whenever it felt right. The idea was not to overthink it, just to go with the flow and see where it led, like the ant-hole in hand / armpit / sea urchin / top of head sequence in "Un Chien Andalou." Enjoy -- and please leave comments, critiques, interpretations and questions! Just be sure to stay all the way through the end credits -- a minute or so of the six-minute running time....

UPDATED 10/19/07: While looking for a frame grab from "Black Narcissus" to honor the late Deborah Kerr, I discovered the source of an indelible mirror-image (you'll see) that I'd previously been unable to locate. It's now been incorporated into the movie.

Memory starts one image pinging off others across time and movies. Ruminating upon the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door (which, obviously, I can't stop doing), I see close-ups flowing into and out of one another, dreams within dreams within nightmares, on themes of memory, loss, identity, the process of consciousness and the end of consciousness -- you know, the stuff movies are made of.

In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies, here's a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards...) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory -- and my DVD collection. Looking back, most of them seem to be filtered, obscured, freeze-framed or reflected faces of characters reaching an impasse or a reckoning -- largely from the endings of some of my favorite movies. I wish I could actually cut the film together, so that I could show them in motion, control how long each shot remains on the screen and fiddle with the rhythms (flash cuts, match cuts, reversals of motion), but I don't know have the technology or the know-how for that at the moment. So, imagine this as a (sometimes perverse) little movie, a "found footage" montage sequence... Kuleshovian, Rorschachian, Hitcockian, Gestaltian, however you want to look at it. I suppose it's also a look in the mirror.

Hope you can see t