Randy Quaid has been lied to. Randy Quaid has been cheated out of what is rightfully his. Randy Quaid deserves reparation. Randy Quaid is taking out the garbage. The bulbous-featured actor, who made his splashy debut opposite Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail and then went on to be known as alternately, Eddie Griswold (whose teenage daughter, while perched on a see-saw, remarks on her French-kissing skills: “Daddy says I’m the best at it”) and “the ugly Quaid brother,” is suing Focus Features for ten million because of “willful misrepresentation” regarding the bromance Brokeback Mountain, in which he portrays the superfluous supporting role of the head sheepherder. Apparently, he was lied to by the diabolical Ang Lee and the devilish James Schamus, who thought, maybe, just maybe, an epic romance starring two male cowboys who fall in love, might not crack it as an American blockbuster. Now that it’s an almost-Best-Picture–winning phenomenon, Brokeback is provoking his ire, and allegedly, most crucially, that of his Lady Macbeth–ish wife. (They probably can only fit one in-ground pool in their backyard at this point.)

I don’t know what sort of reduced rates Quaid was forced to take, and I know that Focus Features has a history of inducing gay-panic in the Quaid clan (see Dennis’s post-Far from Heaven press junkets: “Oh my God, kissing a man was so hard, but I steeled myself and thought of a naked woman…”), but Randy, honestly…can you say “career suicide”? Now I’ve never been a fan of greedy actors, but I have always been a supporter of the “Quaids-meister”…so many indelible moments: “Shitter was full!” (pouring his RV’s septic tank into the sewer in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation); “That’s right…the Jews were responsible!” (lowering his eyes and bearing his teeth as anti-Semitic high school history teacher Pete Suvak in the unforgettable 1988 TV movie Evil in Clear River); “Here I come, you alien assholes!” (Independence Day).

I bring up Quaid’s career in an effort to convince him cease and desist and not deprive us of another half-century’s work of slightly maladjusted podunk character roles. With the lines between what is “indie” and “big-studio” ever dissolving, pay cuts would seem to be de rigeur…ask all those Crash nitwits who bravely “worked for scale” to realize Paul Haggis’s brave vision. Take it down a few notches, buddy. Or maybe you can just break into Heath and Michelle’s swanky Cobble Hill pad and crack into the safe, bursting with Brokeback residuals. But perhaps you’ll be too busy, as your lawsuit states, “working at reduced rates in ‘experimental, non-mainstream’ movies for the sake of art.” Which were those experimental Randy Quaid art films? The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Paper, or Hard Rain? I guess Vegas Vacation could count as sort of avant-garde….

ARMONDFLASH:

"Commercial filmmakers could do worse than update Shakespeare as the makers of She’s the Man have done. They could pretend to be hip by being fashionably superficial as in the horrible new hipster bloodbath Brick which disgraces the teen-movie genre that John Hughes revolutionized. Through coarse imitation of film noir clichés cynically transferred to a high school setting, Brick disgraces basic social ideas. But She’s the Man enlivens the basics of falling in love and of sexual maturity by sweetly adapting the premise of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night"

"Don’t dismiss Fickman’s sex farce for kids; rather, consider that its concentration on the basics of sexual adjustment is preferable to Hollywood’s typical diet of violence for kids. By “kids” I also mean the (WAIT FOR IT....WAIT FOR IT...) hipster adults (YEAH, BABY, YEAH ARMOND!) who, wanting movies to provide them with the carelessness and smart-ass arrogance of adolescence, will indulge a mindless, graphic-novel knock-off such as the Sundance prize-winner Brick which snarkily transfers Dashiell Hammett-style crime fiction to a high school setting."

"Brick jiggers the memory of camp; She’s the Man triggers the memory of art."

YEAH, BABY. DOWN FOR THE MOTHERFUCKIN' CAUSE! OR...

True Altman fans are in for a real treat come June: A Prairie Home Companion is a nice thick slice of prime Altman, served up slightly, pleasantly undercooked. Tonal incongruities, roving, restless camerawork, overlapping dialogue, churlish mix of high and low comedy—its most identifiable counterpart in the Altman oeuvre would be the severely underappreciated A Wedding. If you're hoping for a Short Cuts-esque revelation in light of its Berlin FF huzzahs it would best try to keep expectations at a minimum and just happily let the cacophony and lovely, Ed Lachmann-lensed images wash over you.

In fact, the camerwork is so exquisitely crafted here, that it's hard not to overstate the film's charms. Glowing with a candy-cane warmth, every interior is suffused with a delicate nostalgia: appropriate for a film about loss and wistfulness. It takes place on the night of the fictional last peformance of Garrison Keiller's titular folk music radio program as it's being shut down by corporate Texas interests, and as in the director's classic way, each member of the ensemble (Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Kevin Kline, Keillor himself) blends into the next; no true protagonist emerges...there's just the sense of the end of an era, with radio itself standing in for a bygone time and sensibility. Trickiest, and as it turns out, loveliest of all, Virginia Madsen wades through the expertly designed and modulated tableaux as a literal angel of death; it's a performance that easily could have been too overdetermined, but Madsen's wonderful calming presence (already terrifically exploited in that corny-but-gratifying life-is-like-a-pinot-grape monologue in Sideways) lays over the film like downy flake.

And ultimately, A Prairie Home Companion, musical-comedy though it may be, is a film about death. Altman's miracle is that he manages to keep it light as a feather, and then when exiting the theater, the full weight of its melancholy hits you. Its array of seemingly contradictory narrative markers (noir, radio, folk) all serve to reinforce the idea of time passing and the ending of cultural moments. It's a lullaby for a lost culture.

APRIL 22 – 30

Reverse Shot Presents…at Makor
Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

SCHEDULE AT-A-GLANCE

A ROB ZOMBIE DOUBLE FEATURE
POST-SCREENING DISCUSSION WITH ACTOR KEN FOREE
Sat Apr 22 / 8 PM / $20 (includes discussion)
HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES (2003) / THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005)
Heavy metal rocker turned genre auteur Rob Zombie has become America’s most skilled neo-exploitation filmmaker. With tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie offers this gruesome twosome: a diabolical avant-haunted-house-slasher flick and an unexpectedly gonzo, Peckinpah-ish vengeance western, featuring the same characters in two very different American film genres. Bring a strong stomach and an open mind and settle in for a night of magnificent mayhem.

Following the film is a discussion with actor Ken Foree, who portrays Charlie Altamont in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Ever since his breakout leading role as Peter Washington in George A. Romero’s indelible Dawn of the Dead, Foree has been something of a cult phenomenon. His subsequent appearances in Romero’s Knightriders and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond, have solidified him as a veritable horror movie icon.

[Director: Rob Zombie. Runtimes: 88 min + 109 min. HORROR]

Mon Apr 24 / 7:30PM / $9
NINE LIVES (2005)
In nine precise and rhythmic sliver-of-life segments, Rodrigo García, with the lyrical power of a short fiction writer, tells the stories of nine interconnected women, played dazzlingly by an all star cast including Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and a brilliant Robin Wright Penn. Garcia renders each woman as if she were the most interesting individual to ever walk the earth. These women are breathtaking, lived-in, flawed; in other words, exhilaratingly human.

[Director: Rodrigo Garcia. Runtime: 115 min. DRAMA]

Tue Apr 25 / 7:30 PM / $15 (includes Q&A)
JUNEBUG (2005)
A moving tribute to family in all its idiosyncrasies and a pitch-perfect evocation of Southern customs, Phil Morrison’s JUNEBUG was the great American film debut of 2005. When Madeleine, a sophisticated art gallery owner (Embeth Davidtz), travels to the South to meet her new husband’s family, it becomes much more than a fish-out-of-water tale. Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee Amy Adams is a standout as Madeleine’s pregnant sister.
Features Q&A with director Phil Morrison following the screening.

[Director: Phil Morrison. Runtime: 107 min. DRAMA]

Wed Apr 26 / 7:30 PM / $9
MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001)
Still underscreened and underappreciated in his body of work, MILLENNIUM MAMBO is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s daring 21st-century update of the pleasure culture examined in his masterwork Flowers of Shanghai. Powered by a gurgling techno beat and a luminescent performance by Shu Qi - whose glow far outshines the masses of red, blue and green neons surrounding her - MILLENNIUM MAMBO is arguably the filmmaker’s most lushly romantic film. See it on the big screen where it belongs.

[Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Runtime: 119 min. DRAMA]

Thu Apr 27/ 7:30 PM / $9
THE INTRUDER (2005) (intro by Kent Jones)
In adapting Jean-Louis Nancy's autobiographical text about his own heart transplant, the great French director Claire Denis has crafted a film of crystalline beauty and startling ambition. The story - about an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor) journeying from Jura to Pusan to Tahiti in an elaborate gesture of reconciliation towards his estranged son - is related to us as a waking dream. Elliptical, gorgeous, and unforgettable.

The film will be introduced by Kent Jones, editor at large of Film Comment, Associate Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee.

[Director: Claire Denis. Runtime: 130 min. DRAMA]

A NEIL JORDAN DOUBLE FEATURE
Sat Apr 29 / 8 PM / $15
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005) / THE BUTCHER BOY (1997)
Neil Jordan’s collaborations with Irish novelist Patrick McCabe resulted in two of his richest works. BREAKFAST ON PLUTO is a candy-colored Dickensian picaresque about a boy named Patrick “Kitten” Brady, who should have been born a girl. THE BUTCHER BOY is a darker yet rocket-paced surrealist narrative about Francie Brady, a deeply troubled preteen growing up amid terrible social and parental circumstances. These films show the triumphs and tragedies of forthright individualism.

[Director: Neil Jordan. Runtimes: 135 min and 109 min. DRAMAS]

PREMIERE
Sun Apr 30 / 5:30 PM / $15 (includes discussion)
A LION IN THE HOUSE (2006)
Offering a sense of scope comparable to Hoop Dreams, A LION IN THE HOUSE is an unforgettable journey that offers an unprecedented look at struggles of five young people and their families over a six-year period. Award-winning filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert bring audiences face to face with the uncertainty of the entire cancer experience and its rippling effects on family, community and professional caregivers. At the core of A Lion in the House is the resilience, courage and wisdom of five extraordinary young people. Features a post-screening discussion with guest speakers TBA.

[Directors: Steven Bognar + Julia Reichert. Runtime: 225 min. DOCUMENTARY]

Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

Film lovers and human beings—and those lucky enough to bridge the gap between those two sometimes disparate groups (sorry, Cinemaniacs!)—should be rejoicing this weekend. The Dardenne Brothers’ 2005 Palme d’or winner L’Enfant is coming to theaters this weekend. How good is it? Let me put it this way: I was walking down the street during lunch break yesterday on this particularly sun-dappled afternoon, and suddenly my mind spontaneously jumped to L’Enfant, which I first had seen last fall at the New York Film Festival. The quick recall of the film made me overwrought with emotion, and just the recollection of its encompassing power made me momentarily lose my senses, pass in front of a red streetlight, and almost walk into an oncoming speeding car. Appropriate enough for a film so breathless with incident, so ragged with near-collisions, so fraught with near-catastrophes and ultimate saving graces. It’s unfathomable how Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have managed to make so momentous so many small narrative incidents in so many amazing films successively, and how they have managed to so rigorously imbue so much passionate, relatable experience to what are essentially dark capitalist critiques. There’s never a moment in L’Enfant when you feel like you can catch your breath; every action teeters on the precipice of emotional collapse and societal devastation. Sound like a disaster film? In a way, yet as always, the Dardennes keep their camera insistently on one main protagonist. Never have I felt so close to someone so utterly alien to my own perceived moral compass. You can read more in-depth Reverse Shotting about L’Enfant here and here, so for now, for the sake of soulful hyperbole, I’ll say that L’Enfant is insanely great, and along with the upcoming Three Times and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a force to be reckoned with come time for best of 2006 listmaking. Run, run, run until you’re wheezing with desperation, to the movie theater.

For those of you out there who loved Brokeback Mountain but wished Ang Lee’s gay-friendly opus had featured a bit more butt kicking than butt ramming, and who felt the stifling period atmospherics of Good Night and Good Luck’s First Amendment defense could have been enlivened with a dash more future-goth posing and David Strathairn speaking truth to power from behind a Guy Fawkes mask, then, finally, at long last, ye olde Reverseblog has a film for you:

V for Vendetta had all the makings of an LOLocaust along the likes of which the world had never seen: a shorn Natalie Portman (snigger), the aforementioned ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask (chuckle), graphic novel source material (heh heh), and worst of all, an effete swashbuckling hero with killer bangs, who peppers his speech with quotations from Shakespeare and words that start with the letter “V” and inhabits an art-filled tower hideout in which a rotation of classic torch songs and anonymous chick-folk stream from a classic jukebox (Oh dear god, make it stop…)—this looked a promising contender to knock the eye rape that was Ultraviolet off its perch as my worst of ’06 thus far. V for Vendetta couldn’t be good, right?

And, cheesy as it is, it may not be, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t get more than a little bit swept up in the agit-prop fervor of the work, one whose good intentions far outweigh and surpass its execution. This is not to say that V for Vendetta is poorly made—on the contrary, James McTeigue’s direction is, refreshingly, a far cry less flashy than one would expect from a Wachowski brother protégé, hewing closely as it does to a scope of action delineated by actual corporeality that avoids wading too deeply into the waters of bullet-time or extensive CGI work. It’s rather that, given the politics the film endorses, and how surprising their appearance in a blockbuster was, I left wishing that V for Vendetta might have been just a few notches more ingenious. Though, given the relative paucity of free-speech and pro-gay-mongering found in the majority of high-budget action movies, I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I hate to burden ostensible popcorn entertainment with the mantle of "relevance," but well....V for Vendetta may be among the most openly pro-gay blockbusters ever.

I’ll go out on a limb: packaging this kind of rhetoric in with a rip-roaring (or close to it) actioner is a more important and valuable gesture than the sum of Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. Are those films better? We can leave that up to personal preference (for my part: yes to Brokeback, possibly to GN&GL). But I think that the dissemination of the ideals that these films share may stand a better chance at long term success in the places where they really need to be heard when not worn so openly on the sleeve. Radical polemic is important (though none of these films really are that), but there’s something to be said for the subtle, gradual absorption of unfamiliar ideals engendered by the lulling confines of a blockbuster narrative. As duly noted in the only salvageable sequence of Thank You For Smoking, Hollywood images have power over their audiences: There’s a reason why this shit works, and I dare any homophobe out there to sit down with V and not feel a twinge of outrage in the face of the neo-Fascist government’s persecution of homosexuals—the way this is framed in the narrative, against the backdrop of an unexpected, sun-dappled coming out tale parked three-quarters of the way in allows no other response. They say classical Hollywood manipulates, and well if these are the ends, the means might well be justified.

Joe Arkansas wasn’t buying a ticket to Brokeback no matter how many awards it won, how much money it made. But he might buy a ticket for V for Vendetta and end up confronting some ingrained assumptions—perhaps the, admittedly over-baked, combination of a Fascistic government, societal suppression and the castigation of minority groups might be eye-opening. Perhaps not. It’s all so obvious that part of me did chuckle at V for Vendetta until I stopped to think just how long it’s taken people to come around and realize how fucked we actually are under Bush II. Call me a Northeastern, elitist liberal, but when history weighs in with its assessment of this presidency, I’ll wager a twenty that I get the last laugh. Still a few steps away from the full-on superhomo outing that would have upended the apple cart entirely, V for Vendetta is, nevertheless, surprisingly watchable idea-porn that’ll square well with the lefty set (who among those this administration has alienated doesn’t occasionally wish for a lone hero wearing a Leon Czolgosz mask to enter stage right and correct society’s wrongs?), but I wonder if its effects might not be more widespread. Not quite the head-on confrontation with Conservativism that Brokeback was, though never seemed to really want to be, we may all look back on V with the benefit of hindsight and find it to be the more indicative of, and influential on its time.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is miraculously getting a U.S. release, and while I can't imagine it's going to shake up the New York art house scene (where Bruno Dumont and Tsai Ming-liang disappear like a fart in the wind and George Clooney's latest is considered by New Yorker folk as a pencil-to-mouth thought-provoker), it will certainly shake up anyone who sees it. You've been warned, don't miss out.

So grotesque and unpredictable as to border on the phantasmagoric, 4 is obviously, thoroughly Russian, and certainly might alienate many viewers used to more social realist depictions of contemporary life. 4 shuttles disorientingly from an urban space to the rural, yet each terrain is equally threatening and unable to fully engage with its inhabitants. The film begins with a chance meeting between three strangers who make up stories about their lives to elevate themselves beyond their suffocating existences: a prostitute says she's an advertising exec, a meat-manufacturer says he has ties to the Kremlin (via quite mundane circumstances, however), and finally, and most narrative-rupturing, a piano tuner claims to be a bioengineer who has been overseeing human cloning, which he swears has been a fact of Russian science since the late forties. After their lengthy tales, each goes his or her separate way. Khrzhanovsky then follows them on their increasingly odd, inexplicable journeys, most impressively, the prostitute's travels back to her impoverished village, which is populated by a group of rotting, haggard, old women who create dolls out of chewed bread.

4 may be less concerned with narrative than keeping its audience's brows furrowed, but Khrzhanovsky shuttles us back and forth between spaces and emotions with such precise meter and rhythm that time seems to simply stand still. It's impossible to completely regain your supremacy over the narrative after the initial meet-cute between the three principals, which promises a narrative of economy and linearity; once that dissolves, you're at the behest of Ilya Khrzhanovsky and his brilliant scenarist and writer Vladimir Sorokin, who has an enfant terrible reputation in Russia due to his insistently abstract works, and they're not about the let you off easy.

The film is more about repetition and memory recall than straight lines: pig carcasses, impromptu bacchanalias, vodka guzzled with vomitous frequency. Desolate and urgent, 4 needs further consideration to wade through its filth and to fully comprehend its portrait of contemporary socioeconomic decay. Expect more from Reverse Shot in coming weeks on this film.

This will most certainly be a contender.

(Artwork courtesy Matthew Barney/Mickey McKeon)

If you NYCers can possibly find time between Alex Kluge viewings, be sure to check out some of Film Forum's godsend Don Siegel retro, which runs from today through April 13. I'll be taking up camp there trying to catch as many as I can, perhaps all. The series begins with 1973's Charley Varrick, which I saw for the first time last year and is one of the most perfect movies I've ever seen. Following The Beguiled and Dirty Harry, it capped a cinematic hat trick rivaled in American cinema only by Coppola's Godfather-Conversation-GF2-Apocalypse four-peat, in my opinion**.

Other highlights: Body Snatchers, The Killers, Baby Face Nelson, The Lineup.

This is the kind of thing I moved here for back in 04.

**opinion adapted from opinion expressed by filmenthusiast2000

Attention all NY-based Reverse Shotters. (Which I think is most of you). Your Toronto-based correspondent has seen a Great Canadian Film, and it's not directed by David Cronenberg. It is, however, a history of violence, and it is coming to your beautiful Museum of Modern Art next week. On Wednesday, March 15, at 9:00; Thursday, March 16, at 6:00, to be precise.

It's called Six Figures, and it's directed by a Calgary-based filmmaker named David Christensen. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and it was one of the only Canadian films I didn't see there-- I caught it at a press screening on Monday, much to my delight.

At the time, I was depressed about missing a simultaneous showing of V for Vendetta. Why, I wondered, was I left to mop up the leftover Can-con while my friends and peers got to thrill to some comic-book allegory featuring a bald Natalie Portman? And then I saw V for Vendetta later that day. It is not a good movie at all. Six Figures, on the other hand...well, I can't imagine I'll see 10 better movies this year (well, 9 plus Snakes on a Plane.)

Six Figures is about a couple who want to buy a house in Calgary. I know, your pulses are racing. But it's evident from the first frame that Christensen, a former critic and documentarian, has his stuff together. His style, which favors long takes and subtly impassive compositions weighted with fully justified portent, is more than a little reminiscent of Michael Haneke (a stated influence), as is the film's centerpiece sequence, a perfectly staged moment of shocking (not graphic) brutality that left my un-jangle-able nerves severely jangled. How Six Figures develops from a film about househunting to an exploration of the subtly attenuated fallout of an attempted homicide is for you to discover. I'm gonna guess you're intrigued, so get to it, and we'll all talk about it afterwards.

And while you're at it, you might as well see the other Canadian masterpiece from last year: Allan King's documentary Memory: For Max, Ida, Claire and Company ( Friday, March 17, 8:30; Saturday, March 18, 1:00.) King is a contemporary of Fred Wiseman, and one of the true pioneers of direct cinema. Memory is about a group of Alzheimer's patients at the Baycrest Centre in Toronto, and it's bracing, aching, lovely and human.

Neither film got a sniff at the Genie Awards this week (our Oscars), but we're a bunch of Conservative-voting hockeyists. What do we know?

Alright, I'm gonna try to be as sensitive as possible here, but have to ultimately just hope the AAMR are not big Reverse Shot Blog readers. So I took in a noon-ish showing of Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's mediocre 70s shocker on Saturday, accompanied by two friends equally versed in cinematic sadism of the Robin Wood-sanctioned variety. At the point in the film where the young Carter boy runs out into the desert in search of one of the family's two German Shepherds ("Beauty" and "Beast"), the tone in the theater changed irrevocably. "Beauty!" called out the boy on-screen. "And the beast!" came the slightly infantile, irrepressibly enthusiastic reply from one of the front rows of the theater. This 'call and response' continued a few more times: "Beauty!"... "And the beast! Ha ha!" This guy was all over the whole 'beauty and beast' thing, and it turns out he brought friends: it soon became clear that the low guttural wail we'd been hearing throughout these desert sequences was not, in fact, the utterances of the irradiated mutants in the film, cleverly dropped on the soundtrack to suggest the baddies were ever-present, always watching (the hills have eyes, after all), but those of a group of, well, mentally challenged, handy-capable spectators seated in the front section accompanied by some type of chaperone.

This immediately added a surreality to the proceedings I'm not sure I can do justice to here. Normally agitated beyond restraint when fellow spectators insist on speaking (not to mention moaning plaintively) during a film, we were at a loss over what to do with this one. Certainly yelling, "hey you retards, shut up!" was not an option. Under these circumstances, even a gentle shooshing seemed just as insensitive. Who were we to piss all over "movie day," anyway? The only thing to be done was to try to relax while Aja ratcheted up the tension, bloodshed and depravity onscreen, while our more vociferous fellow spectators made their own extra-filmic contribution to the experience. "Kind of adds a whole new dimension," I couldn’t help but mutter to my friend Chad. "What, zombies in the theater? Yeah."

Before you jerk that knee and simply declare us heartless bastards, you need to try to absorb for a moment just how fucking bizarre this really was. Now in my normal walking around life I know better than to conflate the developmentally challenged with slobbering, deranged, mutant cannibals. Yet sitting in this dark theater watching the archetypal American family battle its repressed inverse image to the death, I admit to wondering more than once just who our friends in the front were actually rooting for.

“Dude, did you see that!?!” Chad, incredulous. “What?!” “That one guy’s totally hitting himself in the head! Isn’t that lady supposed to stop that?” It was all nearly too much. This was supposed to be a relatively uncomplicated experience: onscreen, mutation and deformity = bad…look, there’s a guy pulling an Ozzie Osbourne on the family parakeet to prove it. Last thing we bargained for watching a film like THHE was to be distracted by real world empathy for the disabled.

The situation raised all kinds of questions, like is it really a good idea for these guys to be watching this? Don’t get me wrong, I believe the mentally retarded can elect to watch or do whatever other adults watch or do; watching “L.A. Law” growing up I totally thought Benny should’ve been allowed to bone that chick from Pulp Fiction. You just have to wonder whose idea this outing really was. Had these guys been counting down the days till THHE hit screens? Long standing Craven fans since The Last House on the Left? Francophiles charting Aja’s handling of his first English language project? Or was this a classic case of poor research on the part of the party’s “handlers”? “Hmm… ‘The Hills Have Eyes,’ perfect!” “It does sound kind of ‘Sound of Music,’” Chad pointed out. In any case, the experience was nothing if not memorable, and even if you can’t catch it with the short bus set, the movie kicks ass – don’t let anyone tell you different (Michael Atkinson wouldn’t know a worthy horror experience if it raped and ate his entire family).

Well, no one could ever accuse Richard Linklater of playing it safe. A Scanner Darkly may have a star-studded cast, albeit of the easily-lambasted variety (Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson), but the film is undoubtedly one of the least audience-friendly films I’ve seen come from a major director for quite some time. Perhaps as a way of cleansing himself of the kiddie residue of Bad News Bears, Linklater has taken a significantly disorienting approach to adapting Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel, and not just in its technical audacity.

“It’s like Waking Life!” many will snort…but it’s really, truly not. Apart from its narrative cohesion (though that may be a dastardly inappropriate word choice), A Scanner Darkly differs from Waking Life in the unity of its visuals. This isn’t a stylistic free-for-all like that earlier animated film, which had as many different types of animations as it did rambling, giddy philosophizers; this is a single vision, thoroughly committed to its source material, and very much in step with its central auteur’s body of work. This latter point is where perhaps the film is most unique: though the film is set in the future, Linklater does everything he can to ground it in recognizable, if slightly drug-addled, human interaction. Covered in goopy layers of digital rotoscopic gloss though they may be, the central characters aren’t above descending into rootless jargon or argumentation: the animation may seem to elevate the actors to a different plane of consciousness, yet Linklater never lets the sci-fi trappings get the better of them—Reeves, Ryder, Harrelson, and (a very taxing and mannered) Downey spend a seeming eternity arguing in a trashy suburban living room about how many speeds a pilfered bike boasts. This sort of tedium is central to the vision of A Scanner Darkly, which unfolds in such a baffling, overtly performative (except for Reeves, whose odd mix of earnestness and vacancy works brilliantly and reassuringly here), and rambling manner, that many may run for the exits, especially those eagerly waiting a succession of cool sci-fi gadgets and gizmos.

This is the film’s most difficult narrative hurdle, as well as the key to unlocking its MO: science fiction, per se, takes a back seat to human interaction, as any genre does in any given Linklater film. The plot as is, which is much like Dick’s Minority Report trajectory (undercover cop ends up investigating himself, unbeknownst to his superiors, while descending into addiction), ultimately seems less substantial, or even stable, than it initially seems. It’s really hard to get a handle on any of the characters, seeing as how back story is nearly eradicated, and everyone seems to exist in a disturbingly fixed present. As a “head trip” movie, it’s almost as sustained and upsetting as Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, yet it doesn’t aspire to that film’s epic psychological grandeur. This is small, alarmingly so, with a suffocating headspace. It’s a film first and last about addiction, and all the narrative twists only work to underline this fact. Most revelatory is how Linklater’s talkative, free-associative style, which is usually confined to restricted time narratives (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Before Sunrise and Sunset, Tape, Waking Life), works as a wonderful approximation of Dick’s head-on dives into sci-fi stream of consciousness. It’s a lovely match-up, disorienting and strange, and requiring a second viewing, surely.

I'm a little surprised that people are still throwing hissy fits over The New World (toward which I, like Hoberman, remain an agnostic), so I thought I'd give a holler to -- and perhaps get this blog to start talking about -- Carlos Reygadas' grotesque, mesmerizing Battle In Heaven, which is so far the best film of the year. Since Bruno Dumont has abandoned his discomfitting Christian vision, Reygadas has seemingly picked it up, creating flesh-tormented passion plays of erotic and thanatotic intensity out of unforgettable compositions and enviornments. And this while hypersensitizing perception through unique plays on sound and image. I see now that the film has left the City -- I can't wait for it to return sometime, even though it might very well in some future fever dream.

...so I'm offering this, just to, you know, switch things up a bit.

"Death is the negation of time. But lust wants eternity." -- from Alexander Kluge's Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed

As Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog currently revive their careers and become rediscovered by cinephiles, it's the perfect moment for Anthology Film Archive's A Tribute to Alexander Kluge retrospective, starting tomorrow and going until the 21st. But other than being a fellow New German Cinema phenom during the Sixties and Seventies, Kluge has little in common with the aforementioned auteurs. Whereas Wenders and Herzog sought popular acclaim during their heyday by renewing narrative conventions with exotic culture clashing and an international cast of well-known stars, Kluge went a more political (i.e., Marxist), less assimable route. Close to Fassbinder in his preoccupation with Germany's traumatic past and close to Godard, Straub & Huillet, and Rainer in "essayist," hetergenous aesthetics, Kluge's films mix self-contained staged narratives, documentary, photographic stills and illustrations, and archival footage to profound effect. Of the four Kluge films I've seen, Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed and The Patriot stand out for their complex, dialectic considerations of the artist's and historian's role, respectively, in actively questioning and challenging prevailing ideologies. Yesterday Girl is an early take on Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, without the genre send-ups, a melancholic allegory on Germany's festering post-war wounds. The Power of Emotion is by far the most difficult -- I especially want to see this one again to unravel its mysteries -- and not for those adverse to Brechtian cinematics. Just don't get frustrated Kluge's project seems impenetrable at first. As Michelle Langford writes for Senses of Cinema: "Kluge advocates the adoption of a rather relaxed attitude on the part of the spectator. He has written: 'Relaxation means that I myself become alive for a moment, allowing my senses to run wild: for once not to be on guard with the police-like intention of letting nothing escape me.'" Take what you can from the images and then let them seep in over time -- connections and revelations will be forthcoming.

Case in point.

Swamped as I am, I just now got to read the discussions on Wellspring's demise on the blog. I just wanted to chime in with my thoughts:

Anyway, I think one point that seems to be getting underplayed is the role of major film critics in the demise of foreign film. I wrote a piece last year for TNR about that subject, using the National Society choices—the cream of the critics' groups—for best picture and director as a rough guide of how far we've fallen (look at their choices in their first ten years and compare them to the last ten—no contest).

I agree that the key is getting the city-dwelling, college-educated, book-reading, museum-going crowd to see these movies. Unfortunately, that crew invariably takes its cues from the New York Times and the New Yorker and similar outlets, and God knows we can't expect help from Denby and Lane on that front. (To its credit, the Times's film coverage and taste are now vastly superior to what it was when Maslin and Elvis were wasting space there—but the damage done was lasting.)

I hang out with a lot of smart, cosmopolitan, New Yorker-reading folk who couldn't tell me who Claire Denis or Hou Hsiao-hsien or the Dardennes are. (Thankfully, Wong Kar-wai has now entered their consciousness—I can't help but think that that NYT Magazine profile of him from a couple of years ago helped raise his profile in that demo.) It's going to be a challenge getting those people back, but it's not impossible (I hope).

Along those lines, the two most fulfilling pieces I've done to date were my overlooked films lists for The New Republic. It's a real thrill when someone tells me that they went and saw Primer or Kings and Queen—movies they'd "never even heard of!"—on my recommendation and liked it. (Happens rarely, but hey, I'll take it.) I think the crowd we’re talking about can be reached, and they can be receptive to good movies. We just have to keep plugging away, and it's as much bringing them to something like Reverse Shot as it is bringing Reverse Shot into their field of vision (through the Indiewire connection, etc.). (Also, kidnapping Denby would help.)

This is a long way of saying keep up the good work. Rant over.

—Elbert Ventura, Reverse Shot Staff Writer

Need I say more?

This is our chance, everyone! Screw the Brattle let's do this for J.!

John Smith's (Colin Farrell's) Fight Sword from The New World

Description
Here's your chance to own this amazing prop sword from The New World. This fight sword, used by John Smith (Colin Farrell), is made of tough plastic and has a wonderfully detailed horse head on the handle. Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity, place your bid today! Comes with a letter of Authenticity from New Line Cinema.

The New World is an epic adventure set amid the encounter of European and Native American cultures during the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 1607. Inspired by the legend of John Smith and Pocahontas, acclaimed filmmaker TERRENCE MALICK transforms this classic story into a sweeping exploration of love, loss and discovery, both a celebration and an elegy of the America that was.and the America that was yet to come. Starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, Yorick van Wageningen and introducing Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas.

http://auction.newline.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=66357459&prmenbr=31419869&aunbr=66704169

High Bid
$ 300.00 (7cardstud)
Close Date
03/20/2006 19:00 EDT


Open Date
03/06/2006 8:00 EDT


Number of Bids
14 (Bid History)
Opening Bid
$ 25.00
Bid Increment
2.00

We can do this, people! WE CAN DO THIS!!!

Seanmcavoy: Did you see the new Village Voice article on the "cult" of The New World?
clarencecarter: Yeah, I'm trying to think of what/how to blog it. It's pretty bizarro that liking a good movie a lot makes it worthy of cult status.
Seanmcavoy: Ahh. I was thinking about doing it, too.
Seanmcavoy: But you can do it.
clarencecarter: Do you have an angle on it? Nothing's coming to me readily. And people read enough of me on that rag.
Seanmcavoy: Though it's rife w/ the Voice's requisite snark, I appreciated its somewhat humble premise -- that maybe J's just sort of missed the boat from a jaded lack of that old cinema loving magic.
Seanmcavoy: It was almost a crow-eating.
clarencecarter: Kinda, though I picked up more on the snark than the crow.
clarencecarter: I could use more humility from J in general
Seanmcavoy: Sure. Me too. But the ending was so sentimental and acquiescing in a way.
clarencecarter: Going to read it again right now.
Seanmcavoy: Truly someday it will join the hallowed ranks of Showgirls and Rocky Horror. (I actually like the former but c'mon)
clarencecarter: Yeah, ok – you’re right: J. does get a little wistful towards the end. I still think he paints us all as a hair too naïve.
Seanmcavoy: Now that you mention it, I think I am glossing over his condescension.
Seanmcavoy: I was mostly just psyched to see Nick's quotes.
clarencecarter: yeah, finally some good writing in the Voice
Seanmcavoy: Ha. Someone's forgetting Nick Sylvester.
clarencecarter: Poor Nicky Sylvester. Though I am somewhat sad about this whole merger thing - we may not have Jessica Winter to kick around each week anymore.
Seanmcavoy: Oh right, she does two time.
clarencecarter: Actually - we should just post this conversation on the blog.
clarencecarter: "NEWSFLASH: J. Hoberman Acknowledges Others Love The New World, Grows Briefly Sentimental Over Death of His Soul, Wildly Lashes Out in Fit of Condescension."
Seanmcavoy: Fine with me.
Seanmcavoy: Please correct my spelling errors.
Seanmcavoy: Wait, did I use any ethnic slurs?

Okay, enough Crash vs. Brokeback already. It's Tuesday for Christ's sake! And there's no better way to get over the misery than to dive head-first into the freshly published new issue of Reverse Shot, up now, including a fairly bursting year-in-review featuring best-of-2006 winner The New World, Neil Jordan symposium, plus a rarely seen reprinted interview with documentarian Emile de Antonio, a new interview by Michael Joshua Rowin with Our Brand Is Crisis director Rachel Boynton, a head-to-head Shot/Reverse Shoton Munich, considerations of a batch of recent releases, and DVD reviews. Added bonus, you won’t see nary a mention of a certain Best Picture winner anywhere in its pages.

Many of those who read this blog may already know this, but on March 2 independent documentary filmmaker Garrett Scott passed away at the age of 37. I never knew Scott, but as an admirer of his two films in collaboration with Ian Olds, Occupation: Dreamland and Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story, I can rightfully say that his is a presence and voice that will be sorely missed in American filmmaking. Occupation grabbed my attention immediately upon seeing it, standing out among the glut of Iraq War documentaries as a record of the very complicated feelings of the soldiers fighting and dying over there. But it was discovering Cul de Sac that made me a true believer. As an investigation into the economic and social circumstances behind one of the most sensational news stories of the past decade -- Shawn Nelson's stolen military tank joyride through San Diego -- the film illuminates the social disenfrachisement left ignored by the mainstream press. This is documentary filmmaking at its best -- the loss of Scott is going to make it significantly less vibrant.

All thinking people seem to agree that Crash’s best picture win is a grandiose folly, either another in a long, sturdy legacy of terrible movies with aspirations to social significance that win the big prize, or a even worse still, a sign that there simply is no appreciation or understanding anymore of what makes a movie function. Nattering, infinitesimal matters like structure, coherence, character, plausibility, visual uniformity, technical ingenuity. All that went out the window when Haggis threw together his in-the-nighttable-drawer-since-1977 treatise on race relations, cast La Bullock, shopped it around to some low-level festivals (er, marketplaces), sold it to Lions “never met a hacked-off limb it didn’t love” Gate, and saw it sat on and finally released in the Hollywood dog days of spring. There’s almost something lovable in the dumb-ass populace’s embrace of Haggis’s self-congratulatory liberal fantasia, in which no one emits a single word that isn’t a defamatory remark about another race, or shows a single recognizable human emotion outside of what the script contrives for them. Yet what Crash-heads (lol) and Crash-bashers can seemingly both agree on is: “Wasn’t it effing cool that that pimp song from Hustle & Flow won? Man, at least they got that one right!”

Okay, well, maybe when compared to that twangy Transamerica song sung by a woman in a Kabuki mask and matching corset or the Aimee Mann rip-off from Crash accompanied by a chorus of slow-moving multicultis emerging from barrel fires so crass that, even after seven martinis, Debbie Allen couldn’t have dreamed it up, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” seemed refreshingly…tuneful. Yet the blind acceptance of Hustle & Flow’s hard-won vapidity and everyone’s willful ignorance of its rampant misogyny (much like most of white America’s exoticized, giggly embrace of a great deal of hip hop), translated to an easy win for the song, as well as for the a-tad-overrated Terrence Howard’s nomination. What is Hustle & Flow supposed to be about exactly? Living the dream, I suppose--whatever the hell that means. The film is muddled and pointless, and I’m willing to leave it alone, yet when it becomes an award-reaper, a la Crash, then there’s something even more rotten here than in the state of Lars von Trier’s Denmark.

Terrence Howard’s woman-beating, gun-toting pimp is really a soulful musician going through a self-proclaimed midlife crisis who just wants to pluck ditties on his Casio. Especially pernicious is that scene detailing (preposterously) the making of the Oscar-winning tune itself: pregnant, terrified Taraji P. Henson’s Shug begins to sing the lyrics written by and valorizing her thuggish owner into the mic in the makeshift living-room studio, and finds her true “soul”and identity. Indeed, the film, written and directed by the white Craig Brewer, seems to be saying that all black people need to do in order to climb out of the ghetto, is find their inner entertainer. And yessir, Hustle & Flow sho ‘nuff entertained the whites on Sunday night, with the Three 6 Mafia really going at it for a smiling appreciative Nicole Kidman, a grooving Heath Ledger, a roof-raising Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Crash may be a disastrous time bomb of hypocrisy (every character in the film, by virtue of having no inner life, just coiled rage and hate, ends up embodying the very same values the film purports to decry), but at least many seem to be onto its tricks. Hustle & Flow on the other hand, just here to put on a show for y’all, has been casually accepted, its best-song award cheered as a wacky black anomaly. It’s actually a perfunctory hip-hop tune used to prop up an irredeemably demeaning character in a piece of useless escapism. The music is fine, the context is repugnant, the response is suspect. Queen “I Ain’t a Bitch or a Ho” Latifah’s excitement at opening the envelope was particularly shameless. Like everything at the Oscars last night, and like every moment of Hustle & Flow, it was grandstanding, solipsistic, and soul-deadening.

Oh, come the fuck on.

Best,

Reverse Shot

"Guys, guys, hold on now - I think it sucks too."

Oh boy, have I been waiting a long time for this one. Ever since that first screening at the Toronto Film Festival where the largely canned audience (telltale sign: rapturous applause for the costume designer during the opening credits) birthed this Omen-level abomination into the public consciousness, I’ve been biding my time and sharpening my knives, waiting for this puppy to hit screens. Already the beneficiary of two publicity bumps unrelated to the substance of the film itself—the first for a silly over-covered acquisitions tug-of-war in Toronto (Paramount Classics: “But we, like, so totally pinky-swore on it, how could it get sold to Fox Searchlight, even though they have a signed deal and offered more money?!?”), the second for the Katie Holmes sex sequence which was inexplicably absent from its screenings at Sundance (director Jason Reitman: “Holy crap, I thought, like, Tom Cruise flew in on a spaceship with his army of Thetans and stole it, OMG!!! [Wink, wink]”)—chances are you’ve probably heard of this thing in some arena or another, and might already be planning to shell out for a ticket. So, if filmenthusiast’s Art School Confidential sneak preview was early critical CPR, then consider this an overt attempt at a little bit of old-fashioned well poisoning.

It’s unfortunate that Thank You For Smoking is so righteously bad as it is so fully centered around the terrific, underappreciated actor Aaron Eckhart, whose utter conviction and strong chin almost keep things together. Almost, but the satire Reitman’s enmeshed him isn’t nearly as sharp it thinks it is. It’s the 13 year-old spoiled-teen variety: smug, hot-headed, unfocused, and willing to lash out in every direction to score a cheap, self-satisfying point. As Nick Naylor (LOL—right?), Eckhart dances through a series of increasingly icky circumstances in which the audience is asked to question the limits of a very vaguely outlined “personal responsibility,” arriving at the end of its barely-there narrative with some equally ill-defined libertarian stance that he, and the movie, are unsure whether to believe in. At least, I think. See, we find in first-timer Reitman a filmmaker more aware of the subtle shades of light in a room than subtle shades of character—Thank You For Smoking is a very nice looking movie, but smart interiors don’t add up to cinema. By sacrificing a real point of view for bug-spray finger-pointing (a zero-sum game if ever there was one) Smoking continually cuts itself off at the knees. This could, and should have been the movie about the middle-class mother who makes bombs to pay her bills that Why We Fight was too squeamish to be. All we learn here is (gasp) that everyone’s a hypocrite. Great, can I go back to Manderlay now?

So, why get so upset about yet another dumb product of Indiewood? I guess I’m just tired of it all, tired in advance of all the reviews that will praise the film’s “wit” and “insight;” tired in advance of the Reitman profiles which will showcase his calculatedly modest “Aw shucks, I’m just lucky to be here” pose (see: his blog, also note: stupid hat); and tired in advance of its high per-screen average which will allow this thing to expand like a cancer to theatres across the country and force better movies to fall by the wayside. I’m also tired of ostensibly comedic works where the humor comes with a glint of malice in its eyes directed squarely at the poor sobs who bought the tickets—try and find a hint of audience-directed sadism in something like Just Friends and you won’t, because it's not there. That’s what we here at Reverse Shot like to call an honest movie. Jason’s father’s (Ivan, of course) films may check in at various points on the scale of cinematic stupidity (Kindergarten Cop gets its own section), but they’re never canny, never trying to pull a fast one. Re-watching Twins a few years ago, I was struck by two things: first, that it just doesn’t play as well as it did when I was ten, and second, that for a late ‘80s movie, the thing is really, genuinely good-natured. Ivan may be packaging and selling, but something about its straightforwardness registered as quaint and approached charming. If Thank You For Smoking is any indication of the filmmaker Jason Reitman will be, we’ve got true huckster on our hands—all broad smiles masking contempt. Given the choice, I’d advise you to stay home and rent Dave. And, in this season of movie drought, if you do find yourself at a theatre that happens to be playing both Smoking and Richard Donner’s 16 Blocks, choose the latter instead—at least I can guarantee that you’ll get what you paid for.

I've not commented on the post about the demise of WELLSPRING as we currently know it (mainly, because the one and only response confused the fuck out of me) so I cannot point fingers, but if this doesn't get people on this blog into some kind of discussion I'm not going to feel good about this place anymore. The announcement that WELLSPRING is saying bye-bye to theaters has put me in a state of semi-shock. Basically, Werner and Marie-Therese picked up the best stuff in the world and put it on screens for those of us who care to see it up there. Magnolia and the like have put in a great effort as well, but for me anyway, WELLSPRING was the place. NOTRE MUSIQUE, the Ming-Liang films and on and on. Denis. That's what it was all about to them and for the more formative years of my cine-education in this city's arthouses, that's what it was all about to me. WELLSPRING was the dream - the company that bought the works that will define cinema and...you all know the rest.

Having said all of that, I consider myself more aware of the realities of the business than your average bloke, and I'm not completely surprised that the company kicked it (to a certain degree - I know they're not gone altogether). The quote in the NYTimes piece is right on: "Foreign movies are generally regarded as more dependent on reviews and publicity than domestic ones, and Mark Urman, head of theatrical releasing for the art-house distributor ThinkFilm, blames the lack of media attention on dwindling audience interest. 'Nobody's writing about them, because nobody cares, and nobody cares because they don't penetrate the culture,' he said. 'It's a vicious cycle.'

I couldn't agree more. Nobody cares. That's basically the gist of it in my mind. It has always been the biggest issue with the arthouse community - fans and professionals alike have seemed trapped by this. So many films have come and gone, less than a blip on the cultural radar. My real interest in REVERSE SHOT was a belief that getting behind these films - in any way - was adding to the small campaign to get people to see them, to raise awareness (a phrase that seems fitting in this artfilm-as-endangered-species culture). Sometimes I fault the distribution companies for lackluster campaigns. WELLSPRING's recent release of Denis' THE INTRUDER seemed almost embarrassing. I am knee-deep in THE culture and I didn't really know about it's release. But ho-hum, I'm not privy to their strategy meetings or marketing budgets, so I'm hesitant to be too harsh here but more and more I feel like the strategies employed by the smaller distributors fall short. Yet I can't shake the constant reminder that our culture will basically go see whatever it is told to see. "Nobody is writing about them because nobody cares and nobody cares because they don't penetrate the culture."

Who are these people and how do we make them care? Not cinema studies majors who are writing their thesis on Mekas. Not "hipsters" and "literati" and whateverthefuck you want to call those who attend retrospectives at Lincoln Center but Average Joe Blow. How do you get his ass in a seat for a great film? I know more than a few who say it's impossible because Joe will just never "get" it, he's not smart enough. I still haven't bought that... I really haven't. And I haven't bought the campaigns on so many "arthouse" films - the add in the VOICE, the Lincoln Center screening, et al. I would love someone with a real marketing background to weigh in but my honest sense is that innovation in the realms of marketing isn't exactly alive in the indie film world. In the companies that run the world, the entertainment industry and most industries on the globe, the marketing departments are as important as any. I suddenly feel like so many films have been short-changed here...is the arthouse and foreign film incapable of penetrating the culture? Is it going to be impossible to make people care? Is it that the community doesn't care enough about our old friend Joe?

The only thing I am certain of is that I will not chalk up this kind of shut-down to The Man winning again. It is one of the faults of the "arthouse community" and so many who are passionate about the kind of films that WELLSPRING released that we balk at the sound of commerce, mass appeal, the Average Joe. He - or at least his friend who sneaks in a foreign film every once in a while at Blockbuster - may the one responsible for keeping places like WELLSPRING alive in years to come.

Why shy from kicking ‘em when they’re down?

For at least a handful of us here at Der Shot, Pitchforkmedia.com scribe turned Village Voice-handpicked golden boy Nick Sylvester has for some time represented the apex of critical fallacy. The rock crit wunderkind, who specializes in spinning out paragraphs of trying-too-hard slang appropriation and tooth-gnashing reminders of his tastelessness-masquerading-as-eclecticism pop saavy, ending every sentence with an audible pat-on-the-back of self-congratulation, stepped up to main stage this week. The coveted cover story! After clawing his way up from the backwaters of Voice blogging into drafting staggeringly lame essays on social phenomena that, though completely divorced from actual experience, provided our budding picaro ample opportunity to perfect the art of being clever while never verging on being funny, here was the spotlight moment. He took it, and promptly atomized his inexplicable career.

It’s not just that his piece, purporting to examine the shockwaves sent through the coastal dating scenes by some pickup guide, was a crummy index of hackneyed epigrams ripped from the lips of some lothario Romcom best-buddy (“Bro, chicks totally love jerks!”)—it also, apparently, wasn’t quite true . In light of the revelation of misattributed quotes and beaucoups of just-plain falsity, the article got the old vaudeville stage-left cane yank from the Voice website, Sylvester got suspended, issuing a shamefaced, eyes-on-the-carpet apology before leaving to stand in the corner, and the literally tens of people who give a shit about these sort of things got absolutely abuzz.

Now, I’m sure Mr. Sylvester’s puff piece-grade Shattered Glass transgressions stand in deep violation of journalistic ethics, and I sincerely hope he lands in his parent’s basement at the end of all this (or, worse yet, at popmatters.com)—but from a critic’s perspective, it seems a pity to see him nailed on some measly, quantifiable lie, when this would-be all-pop pundit’s resume is built on much graver shammed reactions, made-to-order google “expertise,” and other, non-tactile sins—my problem with Nick Sylvester is a hard one to elucidate, because it comes from the gut: I’ve always been just sure he doesn’t believe the half the clowning claptrap he writes.

Ex.: Cyann & Ben's debut full-length doesn’t “achieve epic heights through…cinematic, open-air production and full arrangements… [putting] forth once again the notion that the most convincing art is of a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur.” It doesn’t, and I outright refuse to believe Sylvester’s sincerity in saying that it does. Nor does Death from Above 1979’s output demand that I “get out of the corner and just fucking dance.” This is the sort of thing that music writers with two left feet always shit out when it’s 4 AM and they want to put a review in the can; pretty standard issue crap writing those, but then it’s hard to capture the full bluff—glib enough to garner 10 featured quotes in the most recent "Pazz & Jop" poll, prone to grandstanding schtick that makes the critic the subject of every review—in one paragraph’s space. This nugget on musician Ariel Pink from a recent post on Sylvester's Voice-hosted blog, "Riff Raff" says it best: "he's something along the lines of a real-life Weekend at Bernie's where Pink is Jonathan Silverman and Bernie Lomax is decades of now-listless chord changes and spent turns of phrase and once bleeding-edge keyboard and drum sounds. I don't know where this leaves Weekend at Bernie's 2, but I'm pretty sure it probably has something to do with grime." Ugh.

It’s not really so strange that this inexplicably cocky dude, who never appears to have waved a bullshit detector over a single word that he’s written, would meet such an ignoble fate (I don’t say “end”—I’m sure we’ll be haunted by his talking, balding head on VH1’s “I Love the 00’s” all too soon)? But it suggests another question: how can we stop critics who are so obviously pulling it out of their asses before it goes this far?

We’re all of us guilty at one time or another: mishandling adjectives, transmuting boredom into idle hyperbole, or getting too smitten with some adorable, original observation to bother asking ourselves if we believe a word of it. It’s a tough thing to police: the forming of an opinion doesn’t tend to leave behind incriminating evidence, and it’d take a telepathic kangaroo court to distinguish sincere stupidity/ bad taste from a flat-out put-on. The best we can do is make verboten some of the most obvious whoppers: Anyone who claims to have actually been “on the edge of their seat” during whatever through-the-motions thriller comes down the tube should get a punch in the neck—at least we wouldn’t have to endure any more Peter Travers pull quotes. And we can try to show all the integrity we can when dealing with the art in our lives. The old saw goes “There’s no such thing as a wrong opinion.” Maybe, maybe not. But an opinion can still, very definitely, lie. And if we make ours lie enough, we should at least have the decency to put ourselves through the private hell that Nick Sylvester’s right now in.

Since it's never too early to start the critical CPR...

I have a feeling that Terry Zwigoff's latest, from a script by Ghost World co-author Dan Clowes, is going to get knuckled down on pretty hard by the critics--and the robust 4.5/ 10 score it's throwing down at imdb would seem to imply it's not been much of a crowd-pleaser to date. I'm willing to grant that the excercise is a little, as they say, "all over the place"-- it's a staggeringly odd movie, but never haphazard enough to comfortably write off. And I found the whole thing very, very moving--Zwigoff makes the medium's best vitriol-saccherine cocktail going--in a way that makes the inevitable point-by-point complaints "Oh, but so-and-so wasn't very well developed, don't you think?" seem like quibbles.

Part of this has to do with the way the camera, surrogate for the gawk of Max Minghella's virginal Freshman, locks onto Sophia Myles--I haven't seen a woman looked at so lovingly in a movie for a very long time; the Lubitsch definition of cinema--"Doing pretty things to pretty women"--is here steadfastly adhered to. What I like even better, though, is seeing an American movie that's so deadly serious about art in a palpable, passionate way. In this respect Art School Confidential could make a fine double feature with Henry Fool--it's every bit as eccentic and antique in its insistent belief in those stirring ideas of Greatness that seem to belong to another century.

Adapted by Clowes (whose alma mater, Pratt, is the clear model for the film's outer-borough 'Strathmore') from a devastatingly funny, depressingly bullseye filler strip written for a 1991 issue of his comic "Eightball," Art School is an odd amalgamation of thriller (the film, implicitly and explicity, references Strangers on a Train and Lang's Scarlet Street) and aged-but-not-expired satire (though ostensibly contemporary, a handful of Soho scenes feel distinctly Downtown 81, and the production design by fresh-from-the-Rent -set Howard Cummings presents a distinctly pre-gentrification cityscape), in which a wholly detestable world is redeemed only through a taste for beauty. Try as I may, I can find little to protest in that.