Screen Rush is the blog of film critic and journalist Eric Kohn, whose work regularly appears in indieWIRE, New York Press, Filmmaker, Moviemaker, Heeb Magazine and a half dozen other outlets. A true twenty-first century movie buff, his writing centers around the impact of new media on the moving image, the changing face of film criticism, and the tempestuous relationship between pop culture and independent artistry. This site includes links to his recently published work and allows for additional thoughts on cinema's modern state. E-mail Eric at erichkohn(at)gmail(dot)com.
Perhaps a double-bill of the Duplass brothers’ Baghead and Nanette Burstein’s American Teen? Then some afterparty fun: Figure out which movie provides a more accurate representation of America’s white youth culture. Answer: Depends on your own experience. (Stephen Holden just doesn’t get it.)
When you get down to it, Baghead and American Teen are essentially horror films—visceral realizations of the emotional fragility of burgeoning mindsets. It’s not a pretty sight, even when the filmmakers get you to laugh.
Speaking of which—this has been an interesting week for The Dark Knight, on macro and micro levels. It made bank, and there was backlash, and backlash to the backlash, on the critical front.
I think Dark Knight is a decent movie—as I wrote in my review of the film—a sharply entertaining, strongly paced crime drama. In total, a very masculine experience. However, compare it to…I don’t know…Baghead, which is all about the way certain tones can manipulate your experiences, and it’s clear that Christopher Nolan et al have made a pretty conventional blockbuster inflated with importance by the unstoppable pump of studio marketing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the illusion. What was Memento if not a conventional film noir with fancy wrapping paper?
I recently got a chance to watch Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible miniseries and wrote up a brief reaction for Stream. It’s a very entertaining accomplishment, and I bet it would make big waves as a cable series. However, its prospects on the web are radically different. If DVD sales are strong, I hope Whedon gets a chance to make more episodes, because as it stands, the three acts of Dr. Horrible basically hold up as a very well-produced pilot.
“Okay, so then, Will Ferrell’s character gets so mad at his uptight step brother that he threatens to rub his nuts all over the guy’s pricey drum set.”
“Dude, I’m totally with you. Hilarious.”
“And then..get this..he runs upstairs and actually does it!”
“Hah! Yeah…wait, what?”
“Seriously! Let’s just get Will to slam his hairy testicles on the tom toms and rub ‘em around. Then, we’ll cut to a close-up.”
“Um, why?”
“Think about it. A decade on from the fleeting shot of Ben Stiller’s zipper-ensared nuts in There Something About Mary and we don’t need punchlines anymore. Situational humor is dead. Give people something to squirm about and they think it’s a joke. You’ve done your job.”
“Well…I suppose enough people thought the penis shots in Forgetting Sarah Marshall were priceless moments of giddy indecency…”
“Yeah! Or they bent over backward trying to explain the deep Freudian significance of Jason Segel’s floppy dick.”
I first met Brett Gaylor at SXSW in March and was fascinated by his concept of “open source cinema,” which he’s currently applying to his upcoming documentary, Basement Tapes.
The basic idea involves audience participation in the actual creation of the film—from allowing them to reedit footage to soliciting comments from them about completing segments. Very cool stuff. Here’s my piece on Basement Tapes for Stream. I hope to cover this project more after Brett finishes it up.
In his review of The Dark Knight (four stars—who’da thunk it?), Roger Ebert notes that a certain supporting character in the movie takes a stance that “has current political implications.”
No fooling. The grander themes at work in The Dark Knight revolve around universal concepts about what makes society tick (or explode), but there is one brief allusion that should be cited in the upcoming presidential debates, and it involves the issue of wiretapping.
It’s hard to say whether or not the Nolan brothers thought this one through when they devised the screenplay, since we’re talking about a relatively small component of the plot here, but it’s still far more overt than, say, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
It comes back to this idea of Batman as this crazed fundamentalist, an angle the movie approaches but never quite realizes, probably because many audiences would have a hard time with it if the character were difficult to empathize with. It’s another reminder why Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns offers the best Batman story ever told: He makes Superman look like a wuss.
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