It’s not inconceivable that the single poet often attributed to the “official” recorded text of Beowulf might have been aware that in the very process of committing to parchment a mess of real historical figures, locations, and occurrences blended with freshly imagined interpretations of traditional legend and fictions he was performing an utterly new act. Not inconceivable—but perhaps unlikely. Though Beowulf was commonly held by scholars as among the earliest recorded works of English literature, its writing down on paper was more likely due to a moment of inspired invention borne of necessity than a self-conscious desire for entry into the historical record. If the latter were the case, I’m sure we’d know well the identity of Beowulf’s “author.”

What a different a millennia makes—flash forward about a thousand years and the crew behind the technology-driven film adaptation of the Old English epic poem have arrived singing the praises of their own advances from the rooftops; hosannas abound in trade and entertainment publications as if Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf was already a formative part of some new computer-generated lore. It may well be. More than a little unnerved by the bulbous, shark-eyed plasticine forms that populated the director’s previous foray into “performance capture” technology, I left The Polar Express to more heroic members of the Reverse Shot team. But promises that Beowulf represented a huge leap forward in the technology (More realistic movements! No more dead eyes!), and my love for this much groaned-over staple of high school and college lit classes were enough to lure me to a theater, even in the face of a wildly infantile (yet apparently successful) marketing campaign. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's "We Have the Technology."

Like his previous films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly attempts to elevate the middle-brow biopic to the status of high-brow art cinema. Schnabel, an artist and sometimes filmmaker, has carved out a niche for himself crafting visually arresting, loosely conventional movies inspired by the lives of noteworthy artists and writers. In the case of Diving Bell, adapted from a memoir of the same title, the noteworthy individual in question is Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor of French Elle who was almost completely paralyzed after suffering a massive stroke at the age of 43. Despite his condition, referred to as locked-in syndrome, Bauby eventually learned to communicate by blinking his left eyelid, dictating his memoir to a translator, one letter at a time. It's a remarkable story, and depending on how you see it, it's both unadaptable and profoundly cinematic. Diving Bell's protagonist is largely immobile and to a certain extent static, but he is also the embodiment of spectatorship, an individual reduced to an eye, an eye reduced to a camera.
Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

And earlier, at Reverse Shot.

"Is that the Shawshank Redemption?"

With the recent successes of Todd Haynes’s beautiful, confounding I’m Not There, the Coen Brothers’ pitch-perfect genre excursion No Country for Old Men, Noah Baumbach’s hateful, yet also sneakily great Margot at the Wedding, and Frank Darabont’s hokey, fun, and surprisingly weighty The Mist, American cinema’s having a pretty solid fall. If advance word on There Will Be Blood is to be believed, all of these films might be handily eclipsed come Christmas time.

“Frank Darabont?” you wonder. Surprisingly, yes—the man may be a simpleton, but at least he’s a filmmaker, which separates him out from the vast hordes of those who simply make movies (Brett Ratner, Tom Shadyac, et al.). I can’t make truly grand claims for The Mist, hobbled as it is by some terrible CG effects, a somewhat over baked script, and under-considered politics, but on the whole, it’s successful as mildly thought-provoking entertainment with an unexpected gut punch of an ending. If a cinema’s only as strong as its weakest links, please let all the faceless scary movies be at least as good as The Mist.

Like 1408, this year’s other solid Stephen King adaptation, The Mist works to remove horror from its recent, needless emphasis on torture and the violent extreme. King’s terror has always been more about the demons within anyway, an almost refreshingly quaint idea in the aftermath of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth (though, to his credit, Zombie’s excessive because his firm allegiance to a certain strand of the genre requires nothing less, Roth’s merely a sicko who cowardly claims his illness reflects that of the world around him). So, of course the physical mist that descends upon a small town in The Mist is less important for what it contains than for what it reveals in the small parcel of townsfolk trapped and afraid inside a local supermarket.

Metaphor for the great unknown that is terrorism and how this threat has sent panicked ripples through our nation’s fabric? Sure, I’ll buy it. But The Mist is more successful in its moments of immediate physical confrontation—captured by two roving cameras, the big set pieces within the grocery store have the feel of theatre (off Broadway, of course), and are neatly edited to build to maximum effect. And if the film’s stabs at CG aren’t particularly believable, the physical creature work is generally inventive and fun.

Then, finally, there’s The Mist’s ending. No spoilers here, but you’ll be surprised at how pleasurably bitter the taste it leaves is. Somewhere in the midst of the final crane upwards over the devastation you’ll realize how skillful the cast of familiar no-names has been in selling us the film’s dread. This may be a minor goal for this time of year, but its achievement is nothing to sneeze at.

When she was commissioned to make a documentary about Euripedes (a tall order, indeed), filmmaker Jessica Yu instead chose to see if she could apply the classical Greek playwright's dramatic structuring principles to present-day living. Rather than rehash what made the tragedian's works great or set them apart from those of Aeschylus or Sophocles, or probe his dramatic intentions through a flat biography format or literal stagings of his plays, Yu decided to make Euripedes somewhat tangential, a unifying force rather than the center of attention. She then spent a long time trying to find four individuals who would reveal for the camera, in soul-bearing conversations, the social conditions and moral decisions that brought them to where they are today--which is, to say, emerged from cycles of destructive and extreme behavior. To focus on truly ruptured lives not only gives Yu the appropriate dramatic hooks and embellishments she needs but also helps her fit her subjects' rites of passage and emotional turmoils into elegantly appointed narrative arcs right out of the Greek tragic playbook.

It's revealing, both for Yu and in terms of human nature, that she trains her camera exclusively on men; with the only female presence in the film hidden behind the camera, Protagonist often seems like a bemused inquiry into maleness. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Protagonist.

"The real Bob Dylan, whoever he is (let's call him Robert Allen Zimmerman for argument's sake), has always publicly been more of an idea than a real person, concealed beneath layers of mythology. In I'm Not There, Haynes and co-writer Oren Moverman take this mythology as a structuring conceit: Here, Dylan is a young African-American boy named Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), who, like his namesake, carries a guitar case labeled "This Machine Kills Fascists"; he is also Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), a Western-style outlaw trying to save Riddle, Missouri, from being demolished to make room for a freeway; he's the androgynous rock star Jude (Cate Blanchett) who turned his back on his fans and on the idea that music can make a difference; he's the philandering movie star Robbie (Heath Ledger); he's the Rimbaud-style poet (Ben Whishaw); he's the born-again pastor (Christian Bale)."

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's indieWIRE review of Todd Haynes's I'm Not There.

And we've already written a bit on this film, surely among the year's best—check out Jeff Reichert's New York Film Festival review as well.

Brian De Palma's Redacted has proven predictably, immensely divisive ... but would we want it any other way? Finally hitting selected theaters this week after months of scrutiny at festival screenings for the elite few, Redacted will finally now be available to those who have either criticized or praised it sight unseen. (Check out that imdb rating...do you think each one of those voters have actually seen the film yet?)

I'm not entirely convinced of Redacted's ultimate "success" or "quality"—but thankfully those are slippery, malleable terms, and the film needs to be evaluated in its own context. As a an attempt to make people use their own eyes, it's undeniably strong; as agitprop it's hampered by its own rigorous, at times ill-executed aesthetic.

Click here to read my own thoughts on the film, which have been available on Reverse Shot since its New York Film Festival premiere. And to get another side, here's RS staff writer Adam Nayman's new piece on the film in Eye Weekly, both a smart review and a nice summation of its reception thus far.

I'd guess that most people under 30 who know of Charles Nelson Reilly at all remember him as played by a leisure-suited, compulsively spectacle-tweaking Alec Baldwin on an SNL "Inside the Actors Studio" skit. The joke, as always, was that Will Ferrell's James Lipton was prostrating himself before a trashy, basically negligible career, one that, in this case, will largely be remembered on the strength of Match Game appearances, sharing Friars Club roast panels with Foster Brooks, and generally providing a reliable source of nudge-nudge feyness and snark when Paul Lynde was otherwise occupied (actual "Hollywood Squares" exchange—Peter Marshall: "Oh, Paul, what would we ever do without you?" Lynde: [acidly] "Replace me with Charles Nelson Reilly").

That said, it's one of the winning eccentricities of The Life of Reilly, a taped distillation of C.N.R.'s autobiographical one-man-show, that it--feigned modesty aside--takes for granted that its subject's accomplishments are worthy of our attention and esteem. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of The Life of Reilly.

That's right, Reverse Shot is legal today! It's our 21st symposium, and just to give you a sense of how masochistic we've grown in the past five years (five years!!), we've devoted it to a filmmaker we're not entirely convinced about. That said, we're endlessly fascinated by the career ups, downs, and sideways trails of Gus Van Sant, who's been a near-constant in our generation's evolution as film watchers and lovers, for better or for worse.

So, why wait, go right to our introduction and dive into Vague Recollections: Van Sant, an attempt to get at what makes this unique, odd filmmaker tick that ranges from the intensely personal to the staunchly agnostic, with many inquisitive pit-stops in between.

It's with great disappointment I report that Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's follow-up dramedy, is not only nowhere near as sharp as its predecessor, The Squid and the Whale, but a failure in its own right. Leaving behind Squid's relatable adolescent's-eye view on divorce for a hackneyed, adult-oriented dysfunctional family dynamic, and replacing Squid's modest realism for incongruent deep-shadow gothic, Margot attempts more but really offers less. Inasmuch, Baumbach's weaknesses are devastatingly exposed--the compassion he once showed toward his neurotic characters, starting from his 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming, has turned into rancor. Margot at the Wedding is mean-spirited, and its insufficient attempts at humor underline a tonal imbalance that hasn't before been present in a Baumbach film--a depressing thing to witness.
Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Margot at the Wedding.

Don't look now, but some guy named Matthew Michael Carnahan has split his loyalties and penned the most unintentionally revealing pair of Iraq War films to date—if by revealing we mean self-incriminating. The first, the abhorrent The Kingdom, portrays America's role in the Middle East as unobstructed spectacle, a last gasp salvaging of packaged shock and awe that for many Americans must evoke either wistful memories of the first term Bush Administration's arrogant first-term belief in indestructible vengeance or perhaps a desperate denial of its vanishing formidability. The second, the Robert Redford–directed Lions for Lambs, plays as mea culpa, substituting static talking points blather for jerky-cam gunplay. Softly self-righteous and at least two years behind the times, Lions for Lambs seeks to instruct its viewers on the total failure of the system to prevent the disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan, from neocon chicken hawking to media complacency to military vulnerability, but instead merely reiterates the weak-willed posturing of the mainstream left.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Lions for Lambs.

These days, films maudits can be recouped as misunderstood masterpieces within the span of about five days. The indieWIRE news briefings and blog posts reporting the boos and hisses at their initial festival screenings are summarily followed, about seven or so days later, by (relatively) more considered think pieces, from those reliable festival pros who counter the bad buzz and dare to speak the truth. Word spreads so fast nowadays that all these reactions get processed together into one mealy critical mash, and the actual movie gets lost. For general audiences, the proof will always be in the pudding (when the film comes out, they’ll either like it or hate it, divisive critical community be damned); for cinephiles, these fought-over films become locuses of redemptive self-actualization, as with The New World, or cults in the making.

This latter category is the more dubious—and self-defeating—as one can’t create a cult movie from scratch. As the word implies, taste for the film has to be cultivated, whispered about, passed around, before it’s designated as some sort of lost, grand entertainment. Likewise, a successful, or even watchable, cult movie cannot be made with the intention of being such—the level of self-consciousness in its form would falsify and negate all of its traits and intentions. And those signifying cult markers would cancel themselves out: direction too predicated on calculated idiosyncrasy, performance boxed into certain stylistic parameters. Woe to the filmmaker who starts to believe his own cult.

Which, of course, brings us to Richard Kelly...Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Southland Tales in its entirety.

We can't honestly say that Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men has proven particularly divisive in critical circles. But that's not the case at Reverse Shot.

"It’s good to have the Coen Brothers back. So good, in fact, that one can now consider the descending quality of their recent output (with the notable exception of 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There) an aberration, a temporary artistic malaise—which started with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and culminated in the low point of their career, The Ladykillers—but one that has now come to a thankful halt. Sometimes you’ve got to hit bottom before climbing back on top, as they say, and the transition from that miserable 2004 disaster to No Country for Old Men is such an about-face in the brothers’ filmmaking that the most obvious of phrases can be unashamedly employed to describe their latest venture: an astonishing return to form. . . . The clearest reason for the rebound is the new film’s source material and, through it, the reestablishment of gravitas in the Coen universe."

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin on No Country for Old Men.

"A man’s hair can speak volumes, and in No Country for Old Men, Javier Bardem’s is turned up to 11. It’s crucial to realize that such things as the ridiculous pageboy cut the Coen brothers have bestowed upon Bardem’s preternatural killer Anton Chigurh are not simply stray, eccentric details, but the shaping force of their films. They’re the quotation marks that let us know there’s no need to believe in any kind of reality therein, even as the all-too-real bursts of violence and cruelty expertly jolt our nerve endings. It’s hardly necessary at this late date to reiterate the Coens’ essential shallowness and artistic immaturity, though as with Tarantino, there are likely a few brave souls attempting to build a case for them as emotionally generous humanists. Best of luck to the faithful few—in the meantime, we might occupy ourselves in investigating what the Coens are actually doing. And this time out, what they’re doing is so impressive within its limits that the only criticism one can level is that the Coens are clearly aiming for something far beyond those limits, and have not the skill or character to reach it."

And click here to read Andrew Tracy's "Reverse Shot" on No Country for Old Men.

UPDATE: Plus, Michael Koresky's review at indieWIRE.

Photo courtesy Perfect Strangers re-make starring Bronson Pinchot and Josh Hartnett

Hopped up (or perhaps hungover) from a Halloween of pizza, candy, nachos, scotch and worse, a few buddies and I made a spirited attempt to recapture the spirit of the holiday with a post-viewing of the new, massively promoted vampire flick 30 Days of Night. Yet another big-screen graphic novel adaptation, our hopes were high that the comic’s nearly unimpeachable concept (seriously—setting a pack of vampires loose in a town so far North that it endures thirty days of night every year…no one thought of this before?) would transcend the mundane. Alas.

It’s a toss-up as to who fails the material most: David Slade’s (of Hard Candy fame) hyper-kinetic direction ruins the possibilities of hackle-raising scares arising from the most obvious source, namely the combination of flat, endless arctic expanse and vampires; the screenplay by Steve Niles, Stuart Bettie, and Ben Nelson strives for a kind of grim foreshortening of action that moves too brusquely past certain moments, too slowly through others and falls back on narrative cliché whenever it backs itself into a wall; and special note must also be made of the performers, almost all of whom believe they’re acting in slightly different movies than those they’re working opposite.

Kudos first to Danny Huston, who here continues his highly improbable rise to movie stardom as the vampires’ leader. Looking something like Billy Idol with jet black eyes and terrible teeth, Huston hisses his way through 30 Days looking more a real performer here under layers of pancake than he did in Birth, Silver City, and Marie Amtoinette combined. It's the most (un)intentionally hilarious performance of the year. He's almost matched by Ben Foster, who's been sent ahead by the bloodsuckers to prepare the town for their descent; the generally baby-faced actor dirties himself up nicely in the Renfield role. Constantly beset upon, townsfolk like Josh Hartnett (the local sheriff) and Melissa George (his ex and local fire marshal) don’t have space for much beyond squinting and looking grim. Hartnett especially looks out of place—he’s as much of a hero as he can be, but doesn’t quite carry the despair of a near-hopeless situation.

The script isn’t there to help anyone (I’m sure the vampires felt blessed in only being called on to snarl and occassionally utter lines of subtitled dialogue). In a thriller with a countdown built into the title, one wouldn’t expect to ever question what day the characters are living through, but placement within the duration of the month long night is too often left to our imagination. As such, the film’s most interesting possibility gets closed off—temporality just bleeds and we move from the first day to day seven to the end of the movie with alarming speed. Also left largely unexplored is the moral quandary of dealing with former neighbors turned vampiric—Hartnett is offerred the chance to decapitate a few friends, but there’s an ethical weight lacking that might have rendered these bits more poignant, and lent the overal scenario some flashes of tempering reality. An unexpected ending twist almost pays off, until it devolves into yet another illegible fight sequence.

Slade probaby fares best, pulling at least three or four worthy images out of his hat. The most memorable’s a langorous god’s-eye perspective of the town as it’s first beset upon by the vampires. The shot, though probably digitally rendered, lingers, and seems to bear the mark of terrific choreography—feasting vampires battling scared townsfolk amidst bloody piles of their dead comrades. Fires rage amidst the snowdrifts and modern frontier architecture, and it seems for a second that he might pull a movie out of a mess. Unfortunately, for a film that fronts like horror, 30 Days of Night focuses more on gore than genuine scares. And while the gore is occassionally effective, achieving something like camp at times, a more elegant touch could have worked wonders—early windswpt vistas full of foreboding quickly give way to the blandness of unconsidered interiors. All we’re left with are a handful of seizure-inducing fight scenes and bits of kismet that conjure up what might have been.

Better luck next year, I suppose. At least it's far better than Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf looks…

By the year 2015, any band that made the cover of NME in the Seventies will have been the subject of either a feature-length documentary (with commentary by Bono) or frontman biopic. As one to whom pop music and film both have both meant a great deal, I can't understand how this arrangement benefits either medium, but it's obvious there's money to be made, and so the process goes on. And if you've already forked out for your ticket to Control and you're still waiting on the Captain Sensible musical, you may as well take in a boogaloo eulogy to the Clash's dearly-departed Joe Strummer in the new doc Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten by Julien Temple.

There are new reasons to dislike the Clash every day. Their storied eclecticism has recently lent them to citation by such imminently annoying figures as the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, in his expose of the "whiteness" of indie rock (sample quote, re: Eminem: "He had to be better than the local black competition simply in order to be accepted--a fascinating inversion of the racism that many blacks have encountered in the workplace"), and the hologram created by refracted blog hype known as M.I.A., who samples 'Straight to Hell' on a recent single. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.