How desperate are we for a little inoffensive escapism when all the critics start falling over themselves trying to find the right adjectives to praise Wes Craven’s booger-sized “thriller” Red-Eye? Have we really expected this “master of suspense” to have suddenly grown either a brain or an aesthetic in constructing his latest two-fister (or should we say thumb-twiddler)? How low can we go this summer?
It’s “tight,” “expertly crafted,” and “chilling.” Nonsense. Critics are just so pleased to nestle their tooshes for a scant 80 minutes because they know the Angelopoulos screening comes directly after. Truth is, Craven finds it difficult to make even those 80 minutes compelling: It’s an unsurprisingly spineless affair, with murky, laughable political undertones that are about as convincingly “real world” as Craven’s Music of the Heart was palpably inner-city. I’ve read about seven different reviewers refer to its “expertly choreographed” claustrophobic two-seat set as “Hitchcockian,” daring even to invoke Rear Window. Truth is, the alarmingly un-tense plane stuff, weighted down by one of the most ludicrous political assassination plots ever to burden a “nifty little thriller,” takes up about half, if not less, of the film’s running time; Craven runs out of visual ideas for his simple coach-class tableau after about ten of those. It soon devolves into a particularly risible chase movie, fashioned after the final 20 minutes of Craven’s own genre-destroying Scream. As a friend said, Craven really just likes to watch skinny white guys trip over chairs.
Kudos, though, to Cillian Murphy’s post-tracheotomy addition to his wardrobe: a deliciously scarlet ascot that had me chuckling till the sun came up…which incidentally is when the oft-referred to “Comedy Marathon” (imagine your own boings and gagonks) that Brian Cox’s Dad was exercising his eyelids all night to watch would end. With his floppy hair, bee-stung lips, and pot-haze eyes, Murphy is our first Britpop villain, and about as intimidating as Blur’s Damon Albarn hopped up on Pop Rocks and Mountain Dew.
Hey, I’m all for a sturdy little white-knuckler as much as the next sensation-starved cinephile layabout, but Red-Eye requires far too many nose-scrunching stares of incredulity to get truly lost in. As preposterous as the slightly overappreciated Collateral but without that film’s intriguing sense of real mortality, Craven’s film might work as a cable knock-off. I guess for those pining for a renaissance of mid-Nineties psycho thrillers like Unlawful Entry or Fear it could provide momentary diversion…but is that truly what we’re reduced to longing for? Fine, I’ll play along, here’s my blurb:
“Wes Craven’s RED-EYE is a nifty, knock-em-dead hand-wringer. Hold your popcorn tight—there hasn’t been a thriller like this since Ray Liotta’s Turbulence!”

Reverse Shot's fearless web designer and programmer, Jessica Ward, is currently looking for short film entries for her company's short film festival contest.

Just don't letterbox!

The 2005 NOKIA/DARKLIGHT POCKET MOVIE CHALLENGE

Nokia Ireland and the Darklight Film Festival are delighted to
announce the inaugural Nokia/ Darklight Pocket Movie Challenge.

A great opportunity for aspiring and emerging filmmakers!

You are invited to submit your films to the new and innovative Nokia/
Darklight Pocket Movie challenge.

Films of all genres, including animation, documentary, drama, and
comedy are welcomed, with the only constraint being that the films must
be under five minutes long and suitable for the small screens of mobile
phones.

Filmmakers with all levels of experience are welcome!

Finalist entries will be showcased on the latest Nokia mobile phones at
the Darklight Festival 2005 in Ireland, and the winner will be
announced at a special awards ceremony during the festival party.

The competition will feature a student and a professional category with
first prizes of €1,000 and €3,000 awarded respectively. Each of the
category finalists will receive an exclusive mobile distribution deal
with the Wildlight Channel (www.wildlight.tv).

The finalist films will also be available for the public to view on the
Nokia website.

Enquiries should be sent to: competition@darklight-filmfestival.com

Closing date: Friday 30th September 2005

For information on: how to enter, formats accepted, full competition
Terms and Conditions and guidelines go to:
www.darklight-filmfestival.com and www.nokia.ie
For entry form go to: www.darklight-filmfestival.com

We've already discussed Mr. Null's wonderful powers of cinematic analysis, but we didn't touch on his firm grasp of the history of cinema. (Chapter 3 in Five Stars).

From his review of Roberto Rosselini's 1950 film The Flowers of St. Francis:

It almost goes without saying that the film's production failings -- choppy video, out-of-sync audio, and generally decaying film stock -- detract from the simplicity and wisdom of its message.

I, for one, never knew just how far ahead of the curve Roberto was on using video. Thanks Chris for continually illuminating cinema lovers everywhere.

Now that I've caught up with Saraband (holy shit - who is this Bergman guy?) and The Conformist re-release, Grizzly Man seems like a natural next step. Maybe Red Eye for a lark.

From Dennis Lim's assessment of the new Wes Craven thriller Red Eye:

"If anything, given its gently misanthropic view of the general populace as rude, pushy, self-absorbed Dr. Phil readers, Red Eye could even be called anti-American—a parable on the horrors of flying coach, from one red state to another."

Sure, Dennis. The deadline's looming and the review needs a little heft? Just trot out red states and hope for the best. But seriously, have you dudes ever even set down in flyover country?

Oh, and just once, perhaps, could somebody write the name "Larry Cohen" and not follow it, within the space of a sentence, with the word "pulp?" That'd be killer.

This family got what they deserved as far as I'm concerned. Taking a handicapped kid to an art movie and letting him laugh? Jesus, keep that shit out of sight.

If I were any self-respecting mid-forties theater manager with little education, few prospects, and a healthy graphic novel collection, I would've sent these jerks packing too, but without a refund. I hope the higher-ups at Loews promote this dude. He's saving the theatrical experience for us all.

That kid looks like a punk.

It's official: Ray Winstone as Beowulf, Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother, and the ever reliable Danny Glover as the monster Grendel. According to the article, Zemeckis "will use 'performance-capture' technology, which transforms the actors into creepy plasticine replicas with no souls," as in The Polar Express.

I smell:

But we'll have to wait for 2007. As an enthusiastic Cast Away booster, I won't close the door completely on it.

Just check out the "Five Star Thong" available here. Only 8.99, a fucking steal.

And the "send a thong picture/win a free DVD from the Christopher Null collection" deal is hott branding.

Friends, I think it's indisputable - this man cares about movies more than we'll ever know. Buy the book! And check out his blog.

Closing in at three years old, Reverse Shot has officially entered its rebellious adolescence--anyone who doubts it needs look no further than the indiscriminate Freudian slaying of father figures that's practiced routinely at this blog. But I'm afraid a few of our readers may have taken the wrong idea away from our rants; what's been on display up until now hasn't been genuine bile, more like a little churlish joshing, really.

Take one of our favorite bete noires, New York Press's Armond White. The tragic truth is that we expend so much vitriol on Mr. White not because we're convinced that he's the worst critic working today--quite the opposite; if we obsess overmuch on Armond, it's only because we've all been smitten by his turd-in-the-punch bowl iconoclastic, solidly starless columns in the Film Comment critical round-ups. If Armond is a detriment to film culture, it's not by merit of his unmistakably passionate engagement to the medium--a quality sorely missing in contemporary criticism--but his jaded reiterations on the death of cinema, a ten-ton fuddy-duddy "Fuck you" to any kid who's "self-centered" enough to think their formative movie experiences might be special (not that any kids read Armond, but you know�). So, you know, we kid Armond, because we love. Or, well: We don't hate.

But then, there's this twat.

Christopher Null is the founder and editor-in-chief of filmcritic.com, an online review site operational since 1995, provider of feckless Hey, It's Only A Movie! reviews set in bold opposition to the allegedly dominant mode of "dry, stuffy mind-food about the movies." Is there anything more depressing/ hilarious than when some douchebag, in the midst of a staggeringly inane mass culture, fancies himself to be taking the air out of stuffed-shirt phonies and razzing authority by proudly trumpeting the cause of mediocre thinking? Because, you know, any of us who grew up in flyover country have had Bresson stuffed down our throats for long enough, am I right?

Observe, the No-Nonsense Shucks I'm Just a Regular Popcorn-Munchin' Guy critical paradigm of Chris Null and his army of fucktards (undoubtedly recruited readers of Null's how-to-be-a-film-critic-and-escape-mom's-basement-and-totally-hang-with-Bruce Willis tome, FIVE STARS):

"If I didn't understand it, then it's crap. But chances are I did understand it, and what I understood was that it was crap. If I really didn't understand it (Lost Highway comes to mind), then it's really crap."

Cool, dudes. A sampling of filmcritic.com's more delectable chestnuts:

-From Blake Franch's LOLocaust review of STEVIE:

"With no demanding actors, expensive special effects, or enormous film crews, documentaries are probably the easiest movies to make."

"Southern Illinois, in a town where the landscape distributes ramshackle country houses across the horizontal planes like raisins scattered through a bowl of Raisin Bran."

"Stevie is not special enough to be the subject of a film. He's poor, uneducated, rural white trash complete with tattoos, crooked teeth, and long, greasy hair. These traits do not warrant a two-hour documentary film."

"The film doesn't invoke our interest by arguing or contemplating controversial topics; it just candidly observes its uninteresting subjects. I've seen this work before, in Barenaked in America, for instance, the documentary about The Barenaked Ladies�

- Null himself, clearing up a few misconceptions around Jean Renoir's utterly shitty THE RIVER:

"Jean Renoir's greatest films -- Illusion, The Rules of the Game, The Lower Depths-- don't involve weepy schoolgirls and their snaggletooth parents."

"just because a few Indian girls throw colored dust into the air and run around under it, it doesn't make your film great."

-Null again, on A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES. Dig that Holden Caulfield-esque conclusion!:

"Now, I'm sure if my life were pathetic enough that I had to inebriate a horse to raise money for my kid brother's operation or I had to hear other kids shrug and say things like, 'No, my dad and his mule were blown up by a mine,' this movie might have contained some appeal. But as it stands, very few viewers are going to be inspired to wake up long enough to feel empathy for these poor characters, brave though they might be. A word to those still on the fence: Anyone who claims to enjoy this movie is as phoney as they come and cannot be trusted. Be warned!"

-Or, perhaps most exquisite of all, James Brundage's five-star review of PRESSURECOOKER, a short film by CHRIS FUCKING NULL, posted ON FILMCRITIC.COM:

"In the Null brothers (Director Bradley and Writer/Producer/Actor Christopher), we find the next David Lynch."

This is by no means a call to bombard filmcritic.com with incensed e-mails; Null's bland brand of bad-boy contrarianism grows fat on such attention. More than anything, we just wanted to express our profound awe at Mr. Null's project. I mean OMG, finally, somebody to cut out all dem highfalutin' ten-cent words and jes' shoot from the hip!

"We rarely follow the conventional wisdom here, and we think that's what makes the site great. But just because we don't agree with a bunch of hacks doesn't make us wrong -- it makes them wrong."

From today's NY Times, an article about the new wave of luxury theatres cropping up everywhere except, seemingly, NYC. Having ordered, been served, and eaten a burrito all to the distraction of my neighbors at a theatre in the South that will remain nameless I think its safe to say that fully combining the viewing and eating the experience doesn't really work to anyone's benefit except the truly hungry. However, some of the "innovations" described in this article actually work to (gasp) enhance the theatrical experience rather than cheapen it. It's easy to blame slumping box office on crappy films, but I haven't seen exhibitors stepping to the plate with promises to update decaying infrastructure or offer better wages to attract more helpful staff (I was long a member of the underpaid and unhelpful). We've got plenty of movie theatres in malls, and bringing the malls into the movie theatres isn't going to do anything to make folks want to leave their houses.

Ok, enough joking around. The new issue of Reverse Shot is up and ready to go. This month's main symposium is a career retrospective of Jim Jarmusch, with at least one long piece on each of his features, a profile and feature story on Jarmusch and the Bill Murray persona, and a mini-symposium on his new film, Broken Flowers, which, hyped as it's been, has become something of an art-house event in New York, filling the Angelika to capacity -- and then some.

Also in the issue, don't miss this month's Shot/Reverse Shot in which two staff writers go head to head on contemporary horror, with The Devil's Rejects as a starting point; a spotlight on Junebug featuring an interview with the director, Phil Morrison; plus, reviews of upcoming and current releases, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Forty Shades of Blue, Land of the Dead, Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus, 2046, and Grizzly Man. Plus our expanded DVD section continues to grow.

Hours of cine-fun! Read till your eyeballs burst!

Sincerely,
Your friendly neighborhood film fans.

Because we care about your cinematic health.

I may take the bold step of seeing no movies this weekend. We'll see how that goes.

From his rave review of Pretty Persuasion, a turn of phrase that could come from no one but the NY Times' own SH:

"Watching Pretty Persuasion is like passing through a sudden, violent thunderstorm; behind it, the air is fragrant, and the visibility extends to the horizon. Think of the movie as a clearing shower."

Uh...right. And people complain that Reverse Shotters are obtuse.

Congrats to Eric Bilodeau and the Cable Car Cinema of Providence Rhode Island for being named among the Top Ten Theatres "Doing it Right" (whatever "it" may be) by Entertainment Weekly. I've spent many a fine hour curled up on one of their tremendously comfy couches, often with a freshly prepared house turkey melt (on a croissant) in hand. A "mom and pop" in the true sense of the word, Eric's taken over the business from his father, and on any given day it's not at all unlikely that you might run into his wife and two children on your way to get your free popcorn refill.

While their regular line-up of films consists largely of whatever indie fare is currently making the rounds, it's their willingness to take on special programming (Magic Lantern experiemental shorts, French and African Film Festivals) that makes them a true asset to the community in a way that no faceless multiplex ever could be. I always try to stop by whenever I find myself in Providence, and if you ever have time to catch a movie there, I couldn't recommend it more highly.

In the face of Darwin's Nightmare everything else seems pointless and insufficient. And I'm not just talking about movies. Walking past the throbbing lines to get into Broken Flowers at the Angelika on Monday night, I trekked down to the IFC Center and joined a much smaller (though not insubstantial, thankfully) crowd to see Hubert Sauper's insightful and horrific documentary, an experience both edifying (putting into visual practice all the globalization terrors we've read about or tenuously made connections about in our heads) and withering. In contemporary Tanzania, villages surrounding Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake, are in dire, profound poverty and sickness, a reality made terribly ironic through an intricate yet so bald-faced humanly obvious web of natural and capitalist manipulations: the genetically engineered Nile Perch was introduced into the lake years ago, it proceeded to devour all the other species in the lake, leaving it a severely declining dead body of water; the humungous Nile Perch, caught by local fisherman and cleaned and filleted in Tanzanian factories, are then taken away to Europe by Russian pilots flying in every day to collect what is "rightfully theirs," an expensive food that the locals cannot afford.

Sauper then proceeds to outline, deliberately and with a subtle mounting sense of dread, unimpeded by any sort of voiceover, the fallout in almost every aspect of this pitiful exchange of goods: of course, the area is riddled with AIDS and prostitution...and when Sauper discovers what just might be in those cargo planes when they ARRIVE in Africa before loading up with fish, the whole thing might just make your jaw drop.

This week in the New York times, a big deal was made out of the odd occurrence and possible ecological repercussions of the discovery of the Snakehead fishes in Queens...horrible beasts indingenous to parts of Asia, mysteriously spawning on these shores, possibly dumped here through live food trade, which devour everything in their path and even breathe air and crawl on land. A further irony here: there's no possibility of there being a substantial economic catastrophe as the result of this aberration. Yet the headlines are there. I can't recall reading anywhere at all about the Nile Perch tragedies going on half a world away. Hubert Sauper is doing his best to correct this oversight. Don't miss it.

They say we're assholes. But all we want to do is honor our favorite filmmakers. Help us do that in this week's round of crazy match-em-ups! First prize is a set of Criterion DVDs of your choice.* Some are easier than others, so watch out!

-Your friendly neighborhood film critics, Clarence, Robbie, and Filmenthusiast2000.

(*From our used pile of scratched selections -- only Armageddon, Chasing Amy, and Salo are left.

1) Ozu, 2) Denis, 3) Welles, 4) Cassavetes, 5) Kubrick, 6) Bresson, 7) Fuller, 8) Eisenstein, 9) Godard, 10) Marker, 11) Bertolucci, 12) Minnelli

a) A pathetic mix of heady pseudo-intellectual post-Algiers revolutionary and squirming idealist, this four-eyed Commie prick mistakenly confuses the idea of "movie" with "lesson" in his pedantic, nearly unwatchable treatises on film and politics. Yes, we get it, we get it…history/cinema/genocide/image. Throw in a few random broken sound shards and we'll lap it up. Hateful misogynist to boot.

b) Critically-pandered habitual overeater whose one acknowledged "masterpiece" is a rattling bag of tricks that betrays his true vocation: birthday party magician. David Fincher circa 1941.

c) The textbook case of cinematic pussy-loathing, his filmography never met a woman it liked. His phallocentric universe trades actual cock for ridiculous handmade lenses and ejaculation for slow, throbbing camera movements. For first dates only. (*We can use the same for John Ford, just substitute "squaw" for "woman.”)

d) Bombastic, semi-competent ham who delighted French intellectuals in the 1950's by tickling the bourgeois Euro appetite for quaint American “crudity.” Turtle-necked homo-macho Left Bankers slobbered over his junky existentialism just as they enshrined any blind, barefoot Mississippi Negro who could twang out a chord; the canon has been shackled with his agit-slop ever since.

e) Labeled "transcendental" by those in the know, and "a real snoozer" by those who have sexual relations regularly, his small, mini-mustachioed career has cast an unpleasant shadow over an entire continent's worth of cinema. In some alternate universe, 40+ films' worth of stationary cameras and kimonos would be called tedious. Here it's called genius.

f) Dessicated drunk ham actor who couldn't crack it in the theater so took out his aggression on a pack of wounded outcast performers, forced them to bray and mime and shriek for the camera, all the while blowing endless amounts of cheap looking film stock in the hopes that someone somewhere would enshrine it as "edgy," "honest," and "real". Guess what? It worked, and then he died, drunk.

g) A Midwestern transplant locked in the most fabulous, spangled closet this side of Liberace, reeled out enough tawdry Technicolor to keep ascot-wearing old queens shrieking and ironically applauding for a century to come. With an undisciplined sense of color that would consign him to thrift store bins had he been a painter, in cinema his orgiastic Italian-American tackiness is “riotously vivid.” Ever wonder why nobody takes the medium seriously?

h) Embraced mainly because of today's paucity of relatively talented European filmmakers, she has such a lack of grasp on the fundamentals of film narrative, that she time and time again falls back on dreamlike, esoteric imagery to buoy her non-movies. Hey, lady, female sexuality was already covered way back in the days of Maya Deren…get over it already.

i) Foppy-haired pinko who some argue invented editing, in reality is nothing more than the direct progenitor of MTV and ADD. Obsessed over by academics because he cuts faster than their brains can work, he churned out a series of thinly veiled Stalin-cozies and capped it all with his very own Lord of the Rings Nazi-killing swashbuckler.

j) Frigid old French coot name-dropped roughly a thousand times more than his arid, airless movies are ever actually watched. If his 'Notes on Cinematography' were applied filmic practice, going to the movies would be as lively as a visit to the Medieval wing at the Met. Mouchette is an austere TV movie weepie, Pickpocket cliff notes Dostoevsky, The Devil, Probably a sullen adolescent melodrama. The worst filmmaker in history.

k) If Al Gore invented the internet, then this guy surely invented the artiste as a continual stream of boring video docs, hypertext handjobs and low rent Myst knock-off CD-ROMS (see also: Godard). A gnomic Left Bank recluse who should've sold it out along with Varda and Resnais when he had it, maintains his reputation through the sheer unavailability of his work, except of course, the fanboy Holy Grail of his photo scrapbook short La Jitney.

l) Despite early efforts, he could never crack it as a truly political filmmaker so he proceeded to fall back on soft-core imagery, whether it be the Nazi chic of his overlauded 1970 flick, currently enjoying a “large-screen” (ha!) run at Film Forum, or the truly risible apocalick-tic bedroom butter farce of a few years later, both luxuriating in bad-taste cinematographic gloss that covers up a venal banality. His unmitigated prurience extended to forcing viewers to witness Jill Clayburgh playing an incestuous mom, Gerard Depardieu's wee-wee lolling about rather close to De Niro's leg, and his Fu Manchu-lite winning nine Oscars. The apotheosis of this brainless shell's career came with last year's riotous May '68 parody, which unforgivably mistook youthful idealism for…youthful idealism.

***Yeah, okay, we really love all these filmmakers.

It's not so much the grandiose claims (is Twentynine Palms really all that much “about” America?), the mystifying misreadings of films (who in their right mind would reduce the gorgeous, humane Paris, Texas by lumping it with films that supposedly shit on Americana?), or the factual errors (Kubrick is an American, dude…or is that supposed to be some clever, elitist joke?) in this silly little trinket in The Guardian by John Patterson that antagonized me; it's that it reflects an increasingly trendy point of view that cuts off all discourse with the art at hand. Thanks to Lars von Trier--whose Dogville, I would even argue, for all its vitriol, is much more interested in the workings of universal groupthink and the quick slide into social exploitation than it is in good ol' America-bashing--we see a growing number of writers and moviegoers instantly distrustful of anything that they couldn't term as say, “indigenous” art. Should we then reject Henry James for his reverse artistic hubris?

It's a meager trump card for Patterson to pull out Wilder, Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Lang…who would argue in the face of such venerable masters, but the reference point is dead wrong, seeing as how Patterson believes he is dealing with explicitly political filmmakers. Therefore, what we have here is could be seen as a rejection of political cinema.

It's on the occasion of Twentynine Palms' UK release, apparently, that this article has been written. And I can't think of a less appropriate event on which to build this most tenuous of arguments. Bruno Dumont's L.A.-to-desert setting certainly toys with cultural markers (the marine, the hummer) but the film couldn't be less site-specific. So elemental in fact is its id-bursting horror tale that location is abstracted into a whirlwind of cruel rootlessness by its bloody close. Just because it applies to current policy, the notion of political hypocrisy and its violence-begetting-violence is no more intrinsically American onscreen than Michael Collins.

Is “balance” all we're really looking for in films about America made by European auteurs? Surely Team America: World Police is as schizoid in its political nihilistic audacity as Dogville or Dear Wendy, yet have Trey Parker and Matt Stone's American Midwest birthplaces granted them a fair and “balanced” view of politics that validates their oft-cutting puppet show over von Trier's obviously well-read self-consciously literary smackdown? It's the American image, exported in every TV show and movie throughout much of the world, not our “way of life,” that's being questioned in much of these films. I'll take a Danish parable like Dogville over “indigenous” art like Todd Solondz's hopelessly apolitical American “thinkpiece” Palindromes any day of the week.

Here we have the cinephile's elite-endorsed excuse for shameless “Love it or leave it” flag-waving. Thanks for your British solidarity, John Patterson…we really appreciate it. But you don't have to be European or American to really get Paris, Texas.

If I can get out of here by 3:45, then I'll be heading straightaway to the Sunshine for some blockbuster art cinema: 2046. After that...maybe Stealth again? To answer filmenthusiast's question from last week: it's most certainly as funny in practice as I'd imagined.

And for all our loyal readers, that "we" above is meant for anybody who reads the blog--we're curious what people are seeing.

Given that the movies I've seen in the past two weeks (in order: The Island, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Devil's Rejects, The Bad News Bears, Hustle and Flow, The Wedding Crashers, Sky High and Stealth) could all be generally classified under the heading of "studio" releases, this post over at The Backrow Manifesto's had me thinking: why do I do this? Especially when there's stuff of real "worth" playing around town: The Conformist, Saraband, and more.

While I definitely acknowledge the overall slumping of the industry and the toll this is taking on the indies, I don't think cinephiles of any stripe should feel embarrassed by a bit of time spent multiplex hopping, in fact, I think it's necessary. Although the pleasures of sitting down with mindless entertainment and laughing hysterically can be undeniable, watching even the “worst” film can be time well spent.

Many of the people reading this will be, to their circle of acquaintances, "the movie friend"—that person whose taste in film is regarded and opinion is sought after, and who can usually be counted on to crap all over some more mainstream film that’s generally well-liked. (I once killed a party by violently stomping Hotel Rwanda.) That interaction is only possible if we’re not willing to cede the field; if we stay rarified, and holy in our cinema-going we don’t have any credibility in bashing the mainstream or praising the highbrow outside of a small circle of people who share the same cinematic values. I saw The Wedding Crashers for a very simple reason: Because everyone else in America is seeing it, and I wanted to be able to join the discourse. And now when someone asks me what I thought, I can honestly say: “Yeah, I laughed a few times, but don’t you think the gay character is a little problematic?” Then I can neatly switch the conversation to something more worthwhile, like say, Linklater’s The Bad News Bears, a comedy you don’t have to feel bad about enjoying.

The other reason I spend so much time scraping the bottom of the barrel: Maybe optimistically I still believe that you can never really know what you’re getting when you buy a ticket for anything. If I told you how much I genuinely enjoyed Sky High you’d probably laugh, but I did. See it if you can. Almost every film playing has some small pleasures, and it can be a treat to spot them. Before Charlie and the Chocolate Factory hits train wreck-awful, audiences get some of the best, warmest Burton in years. Or Stealth--abominable as a whole (as expected), but I had to give some credit to Josh Lucas for trying to make a meal out of a role that was little more than an amuse—trying to infuse that piece of crap with some shred of integrity was a sight to behold. And don’t even get me started on the “Freebird” sequence in The Devil’s Rejects. Love or hate Zombie’s film (I think it's pretty great) his closing sequence…now that’s cinema.

A slight confession: I did catch Phil Morrison’s lovely Junebug at a press screening in and amongst all these other behemoths. But I wonder if I would have appreciated its gentle quiet as much as I did if without all the noise of the larger films ringing in my ears. Buying tickets for small fare is great but the cinephile slogan shouldn’t be “support indies,” it should be “support movies.” As anyone who watches a lot of films should know, big doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and just because it came from Sundance doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily have any more value than anything else.

The Mongoose and the Ferret
In the tradition of Schmatty's Millions, I direct your attention to another long-forgotten movie treasure. Ever since stumbling across a GoodTimes video release (which was once the video store equivalent of scrambled porn) of Joe McLuckett's The Mongoose and the Ferret in a dollar bin at Video Paradise in my Massachusetts hometown, I knew one day I would have to write about it, pass the word on to fellow film-lovers who may eternally be in the dark. A strange hybrid of Southwestern dustbowl teen angst and gore-drenched slasher flick, this 1983 oddity might just have ushered in a new era of tawdry indie cinema, paving the way for Blood Simple (for its dingbat noir pastiche), Stranger than Paradise (for its groundbreaking aesthetics of removal), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (for its so-subtextual-it's-just-textual homoeroticism), and Haute tension (for its “lesbians are evil, chainsaw-wielding, phallus-obsessed maniacs” modus operandi). A very young and button-nosed but still not so fresh-looking John C. Reilly stars as the socially maladjusted Percy Fieldmouse, a high school drop out in dead-end, po-dunk Knotting, AZ, who can find solace neither in his convenience-store job nor in the arms of his blowsy truck-stop girlfriend, Daisy (spot-on work by Kristy McNichol). When his parents (uncommonly serious work from Jonathan Winters, perfect as the barrel-chested foil to Reilly's bird-framed Percy, and Paula Prentiss, rampaging through each scene like Hunter S. Thompson on a slip-n-slide) take away his driving privileges after an unfortunate locker-room mishap with his distinctly lascivious gym teacher (Tom Selleck, who seems a tad lost here, honestly…is he the film's titular Ferret? It's left up to the viewer), Percy exacts vengeance on all those that threaten to keep him all Bogdanoviched out in his tumbleweeded little burg. I've read all the griping over the years-everyone from Joe Bob Briggs to B. Ruby Rich-about the disparity between the first and second halves of the film. Yet in a shift even more radical than Tropical Malady's bifurcated, sub-Balzac narrative gambits, McLuckett, without warning, commits a stunning act of sabotage on his own film, transitioning from layered Matt Dillon-esque character study to full-on Anthony Perkins freakout. One wouldn't dare give away the details (suffice to say that the dispatching of Tom Selleck by dull BBQ grill equipment has to be seen to be believed, McNichol's progression into psychosis is blissfully irreverent, and the blink-and-miss-it cameo by a pre-incarceration Tim Allen is a rare treat). McLuckett's sorry death at age 26 left a serious hole in the early independent film movement that has yet to be filled. Never released on DVD, I urge serious filmgoers to scour the shelves of their local mom-and-pop video stores until your eyeballs glaze over and your fingers bleed.

I've always been a firm believer in media education that moves beyond showing film adaptations of relevant texts in high school English classes, and that's exactly what LIFT does by offerring its participants the chance to make their own short films and discuss the process. We live an existence saturated by images, and if you're teaching kids (of any age) to interrogate what they're being constantly bombarded with, you're better preparing them to live in the world.

Media education is increasingly necessary, but still lagging. We may not be at the point yet where we can say that learning semiotics is as important as reading Huckleberry Finn, but that's not to say that we won't get there.

All that aside - this is a worthy program. And I hear the work itself has turned out great.