It’s time for (what should be a weekly but always turns out to be something like a bi-annual) roundup of some great reads by Reverse Shot staff writers from other publications. More evidence of Reverse Shot’s iinfiltration of the [online….cinephile…..?] world, whether you like it or not.
“An oeuvre made up of fragments naturally spawns fragmentation in its wake, but the erratic and haphazard appearance of Chris Marker’s films on DVD is less a distortion of his work than a peculiarly apt form of presentation. The least proprietary of filmmakers, Marker nevertheless seems immune to misrepresentation. Regardless of his assorted pseudonyms, effacements, and evasions, Marker has managed to exert a remarkable degree of control over his work by the sheer distinctiveness of his textual method. The enshrinement of Sans soleil (19821) and La jetée (1962) on Criterion does not isolate them from the rest of his career (“that despicable word,” he writes)—elegant constructions both, the sensibility from which they issue so clearly travels beyond their borders that they serve as gateways into, rather than summations of, Marker’s work.” Click here to read the rest of Andrew Tracy’s Cinemascope feature “Out of Time: Notes on Marker.” (Also, in the issue, on some newsstands now, Adam Nayman on The Happening.) And then read more from Andrew on Marker in our last symposium, The New World: Reverse Shot Goes Digital.
“Has David Gordon Green gone pop? The question hovers over BAMCinématek’s retrospective, which culminates in a preview of Pineapple Express, a ‘stoner-action-comedy’ from the Apatow family, and the first script Green’s directed that he didn’t write.
More accurately, Green’s gone pragmatic: ‘The passion projects, they’re necessary for me to make, regardless of if anyone wants to show up at the box office or get behind them and market them,’ he says. ‘[But] there’s an actual business, an industry that needs to be respected if not catered to.’ Recall that the film that broke a then-25-year-old Green, 2000’s George Washington, was the antithesis of a careerist calling card, shooed from Sundance’s doorstep. From the filament of a young-adult-fiction plot device shines a racially mixed cast of nonprofessionals, mostly children. Their voiceovers and monologues, in which the kids yearn toward true love and civics-class ideals, give the compartmentalized scenes a melic unity.” Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton’s Village Voice feature “David Gordon Green Moves to the Mainstream?”
“For over forty years, with a career comprising more than thirty-five films, Frederick Wiseman has been insinuating his camera into seemingly every facet of modern life, from the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane in 1967’s Titicut Follies to the State Legislature of Idaho in his 2006 film. In between, his remarkably consistent body of work has been busily chronicling dozens of such places in the United States and abroad. Places, as Wiseman likes to say, are the stars of his films: a primate research center, the Neiman-Marcus store in Dallas, a shelter for victims of domestic violence, an Army training center in Kentucky, La Comédie-Française in Paris, two high schools, and the town of Belfast, Maine. And Wiseman’s interest in these sites and institutions, and the structure of everyday life around them, shows no sign of depletion.
“At the end of Batman Begins, the Wayne mansion lies in charred ruins, torched by high-minded crusaders aiming to wipe the slate clean in decadent Gotham. In a summer that also saw War of the Worlds, Begins was, upon reflection, a potent crypto-terrorism tale laced with post-9/11 echoes: Scarecrow’s ‘weaponized’ drug literally producing mass terror, Bruce Wayne’s attraction-repulsion to vengeance as justice, even a CIA-esque strange-bedfellows tie through Wayne’s past association with his future enemy.
The thread continues in a sequel that virtually plays out the FISA wiretapping dilemma, but, more important, the Dark Knight (Christian Bale) continues to stoke director Christopher Nolan into a frenzy. His work twists and turns with the anxiety that the cracks and fissures in fractured identities could let through unsavory impulses, which here tempt not only our hero but his traumatized town. Batman, who like most superheroes would not exist after rudimentary psychotherapy, stalks and growls through The Dark Knight, tormented by the fun-house mirror the Joker holds up to his conflicted rectitude and to Gothamites’ baseline morality. Click here to read the rest of Nicolas Rapold’s review of The Dark Knight from L Magazine.
“Peter Lynch is the great wanderer of contemporary Canadian cinema, traversing wide swaths of physical and psychological terrain in search of what he calls the ‘deeper myth.’ It’s an idea that’s within easy walking distance of Werner Herzog’s oft-cited ‘ecstatic truth,’ and comparisons to the German master are inevitable given both filmmakers’ predilection for (and reputation as) obsessive, questing types. When Grizzly Man was released in 2005, Canadian critics couldn’t help invoking Lynch’s wildly successful debut, Project Grizzly (1996), a simultaneously wry and awed account of how inventor/nutcase Troy Hurtubise—shaken by an unexpected encounter with a grizzly bear—endeavors to construct an ursine-proof suit out of whatever materials he has at hand. (The finished product, which sustains collisions with trucks, trees, and even a group of drunken motorcycle enthusiasts, would make Tony Stark proud.)” Click here to read the rest of Adam Nayman’s Moving Image Source feature on filmmaker Peter Lynch.
“The references throughout WALL-E to 2001: A Space Odyssey (the Strauss pieces on the soundtrack, the villainous autopilot computer with a single red eye — a dead ringer for Hal-9000) are more than throwaway in-jokes — they’re sign posts. A sci-fi adventure with philosophical resonance and minimal dialogue, the latest Pixar film may be a spiritual cousin to Kubrick’s movie (as well as those of Chaplin, Keaton, Tati, Spielberg, etc., ad infinitum). There is something audacious, maybe hubristic, in Pixar’s gamble to market a potential blockbuster — to families, no less — so out of step with the expectations of multiplex audiences weaned on a succession of Shreks with diminishing returns. But WALL-E dazzles, particularly in its magnificent first half-hour, a post-apocalyptic love-story in miniature that serves as a graceful introduction to the intergalactic journey that follows. Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski’s Stop Smiling review of WALL*E.
“‘At last, the cult film where they first met!’ boasts the cover of the new Cult Epics release of Pierre Grimblat’s 1969 Mod explosion, Slogan. The couple referred to is none other than the seemingly born-old Frenchman Serge Gainsbourg (checking two bags per eye on this flight) and the apparently ageless British model Jane Birkin, whose real-life romance together inspired many a song and film, as well as captivating international celebrity gawkers for 12 torrid years. A movie essentially about artifice, Slogan is heavy on style and light on substance in an almost subversive way. Gainsbourg plays Serge Fabergé, an award-winning ad man and photographer whose name rings like a slogan, and whose head is turned by every insubstantial slip of a girl who passes in front of his camera. Whilst on a Venetian escapade with his latest paramour, (his gorgeous and very understanding pregnant wife is at home), Serge’s gaze meets that of Evelyne (Birkin), and Cupid casts a mysterious spell prompting the two to strike up a Lolita-esque love affair.” Click here to read the rest of Sarah Silver’s Stop Smiling DVD review of Slogan.
“Despite feigning journalistic and sociological ‘objectivity,’ documentaries create heroes and villains just as often and prejudicially as their fiction film counterparts. In this sense Operation Filmmaker is a remarkable film not for dispensing with clear demarcations between the real people we’re meant to ‘root’ for and those we are not — this has been accomplished countless times before — but by unintentionally implicating the filmmaker among its ambiguously motivated cast of characters.
The main word here is ‘unintentionally.’ Any director with a guilty conscience can plan to call attention to the sizable distance between himself and the film’s subjects in order to excuse his privileged role on the controlling side of the camera — witness the lamentable Hurricane Katrina documentary The Axe in the Attic — but few actually learn about the problems of that privilege in the midst of shooting and then successfully display the painful process in the final result. This seems to have occurred in the making of Operation Filmmaker, Nina Davenport’s slow-building disaster of a documentary that began as a simple feel-good profile of Muthana Mohmed, a 25-year-old Iraqi with cinematic aspirations given the chance to intern on the set of an American movie production in the Czech Republic, and ended as a case of manipulation, exploitation, and bruised egos.” Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin’s Stop Smiling review of Operation Filmmaker.
Reverse Shot’s not just a place for film writing, it’s a state of mind. Reverse Shot’s not just a state of mind, it’s a community. And as a reminder, It’s time for our periodic round-up of a selection of articles to show what our prolific staff writers are up to elsewhere:
“Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris’s two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris’s Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism.” Elbert Ventura on Standard Operating Procedure in the New Republic
“Little known fact: Martin Scorsese likes the Rolling Stones. He’s even used their songs in a few of his films. And when he lazily slapped “Gimme Shelter” yet again on top of a montage sequence in The Departed, he all but officially certified them co-authors of his trademarked brand of rock-scored violence. But directing a concert movie of Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie in sexagenarian action? The marriage might sound perfect on paper, but, lest we forget, both Scorsese and the Stones are well past their respective primes, and any such collaboration, no matter how thrilling at the level of inevitable consummation, should be warily and skeptically received.” Michael Joshua Rowin on Shine a Light for Stop Smiling
“Pity the poor, unknown (and thus utterly pliable) young actors asked to put their mouths around George A. Romero’s impassioned but dead-obvious thematics. “In addition to telling the truth, I am trying to scare you,” intones Debra (Michelle Morgan), pulling double duty as the Final Girl and after-the-fact narrator. Hang on to your hats, kids, here comes some edu-tainment!” Adam Nayman on Diary of the Dead in Cinemascope (and in print, check out Andrew Tracy’s feature on John Ford)
“...the sharper lines can perk up scenes, especially when they flirt with absurdity. In one recurring gag, Angie is baffled by the automatic locks on Kate’s car and, generally, both comics show strong timing with their occasional sarcastic zingers. After all, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler (who is also a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe) honed their chops at ImprovOlympic in Chicago in the ’90s. On e gets the sense they could generate endlessly delightful tomfoolery, such as a sketch-like courtroom scene (don’t ask) in which Angie addresses the judge with ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’”Nicolas Rapold on Baby Mama in the New York Sun
“Director Shane Meadows is of a rare breed, touching headline issues in his films without ever putting human interplay at the service of some message. His Somers Town details an inter-dialect friendship between an adolescent Midlands runaway (wizened Thomas Turgoose, who also starred in Meadows’s This Is England) and a young Polish immigrant (Piotr Jagiello), a big, uneasy kid with an incongruously piping voice and photography hobby that makes him stand out amid the jostling biceps of his father’s construction-worker buddies . . . Cinematographer Natasha Braier’s ringing silver-and-black London is enough to refute the tenacious idea that visual articulacy somehow contradicts honesty.” Nick Pinkerton on his picks from the Tribeca Film Festival (Baghead, Night Tide, and Somers Town) in the Village Voice ... Not to mention, Pinkerton’s “turkeys” as well: (Seven Days Sunday and SqueezeBox)
“For the professionally outraged, a Too Soon! double feature this weekend poses a tough choice for fulminatin’: Errol Morris’s eerily beautiful reenactments of Abu Ghraib incidents vs. Harold and Kumar’s (five-minute) stay in “Guantanamo Bay” for a big-bubba prison-rape joke. In either case, you kind of know what you’re getting into. Morris’s customary interests in odd-hunting, unknowability and denial prove apropos yet frustrating when applied to the facts of Abu Ghraib, while Harold and Kumar’s second trip yields a bewildering mix of bathroom humor, supersized stereotypes and flashes of sharp satire.” Nicolas Rapold on Standard Operating Procedure and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay in L
“It’s a pleasure to appreciate the efforts of re-creation undertaken here, and easy to assume that the overt shortcomings in comedy and characterization are the result of an inevitable deficit of TLC. But those elements — Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s Clooney-polished screenplay, Renee Zellweger’s pursed-lip spitfire reporter — have also been sweat out, and humor, unlike decorative detail, loses charm when it oversells.” Justin Stewart on Leatherheads for Stop Smiling
“In Swaziland, one of Africa’s smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years. But Without the King, Michael Skolnik’s subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival.” Jeannette Catsoulis on Without the King for the New York Times
“In the context of David Mamet’s directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he’s done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far. In taking up where 2004’s largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet’s unique brand of tough-guy dramatics. ” Michael Joshua Rowin on Redbelt in L
Surprise, surprise: You’ll be hearing a lot more, eh, gushing about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood from your friendly neighborhood Reverse Shotters in the days and weeks to come.
First up, Michael Koresky’s feature article on There Will Be Blood for Stop Smiling.
In the introduction to The Profits of Religion (1917), which he called a “study in Supernaturalism,” Upton Sinclair wrote: “Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?” Sinclair’s common targets were distinctly American, the capitalist and the religious zealot, both seemingly locked in a self-serving quest for righteousness, and deceived by their own single-minded surety. With Sinclair’s status as a turn-of-the-century muckraker, tireless Socialist advocate, gubernatorial candidate, and even novelist all but forgotten by later generations (save 1906’s eternally cited The Jungle), a literal resuscitation of Sinclair’s point of view would be all but raising the dead. In There Will Be Blood, his new adaptation of Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson wisely invokes Sinclair less as literal source material than as a guiding spirit. Anderson chose to focus only on the book’s first 150 pages, specifically the relationship between an oil prospector and his son, as well as the character of the antagonistic preacher Eli Sunday. Eliminating, among other things, the book’s advocacy for the rights of oilfield workers, Anderson’s whittling down of the novel brings his film even closer to Sinclair’s view of man as “evasive beast,” plagued by “unheroic self-indulgence.” Click here to read the article in its entirety.
It’s that time of the month….time to get caught up with what our loyal Reverse Shot staff writers are doing in other necks of the woods.
Andrew Tracy’s
Beyond Brut:
The Art of Cornel Wilde
in the brand new issue of CinemaScope:
“Celebrating the primal and primitive in cinema is a convenient fiction of criticism. To speak of a medium entirely premised on advanced technology as if it were an eruption from a bloodily liberated id—as if camera, crew, and equipment were merely the tactile extensions of the Neanderthal artist’s fingers smearing paint against the cave wall—is, of course, absurd. That the trope can be used at all is precisely because nobody takes its premise seriously; it’s simply another rhetorical club against genteelism, violating the middlebrow “cinema of quality” at its manicured root. While it may be a useful polemical device, its value in actually helping us understand films is limited, and often distorting. This is hardly the first instance where critical rhetoric has taken a sharp detour from filmic reality, but the particular irritation of the “primal” is that, by way of its implicit connection to unmediated authenticity, it brooks no argument and furthers no discussion. The primal is an end unto itself—indeed, the only “real” end to our supposed bestial natures and an excuse for pale, sallow-cheeked scribblers to carouse in print like lusty buccaneers, while neglecting the testimony of the films themselves.”
Elbert Ventura on Sergio Leone,
from Slate’s Summer Movies Issue:
“Essentially a compendium of flourishes, the action hero is rooted less in the movie he or she inhabits than in our collective pop consciousness. But the notion of the action hero as a pop icon isn’t entirely a Hollywood invention. It can be partly credited to an Italian director working in an American genre on Spanish soil. In the 1960s, Sergio Leone made a string of Westerns that introduced to audiences a new sensibility—gloriously baroque, self-consciously iconic, and steeped in movies. The release this month of “The Sergio Leone Anthology,” a box set composed of remastered versions of the Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and the little-seen Duck, You Sucker, gives us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with a blockbuster director who pioneered that now-familiar archetype: the film buff as artistic savant.”
Nicolas Rapold on Sicko:
“Yet like so much of Mr. Moore’s work, Sicko is most healthily taken as a satirical polemic, not an airtight policy proposal. Mr. Moore’s screed wallows in pitiable anecdotes, cherry-picks history, and applies skepticism selectively as suits its arguments. But as the filmic equivalent of a shameless and sardonic dinner-table raconteur, Sicko at its best rocks more like Twain than Chomsky, stringing together a story that begs to be retold.”
and Michael Joshua Rowin on Sicko:
“The irony is that while Bowling for Columbine reestablished Moore’s reputation and influence, the film also exposed how his talents were best served in the television format. The for-the-camera stunts — the montage sequences, the ubiquitous figure of Moore himself — all work to humorous effect on a small screen unable to contain his overload of ego and mainstream-unfriendly politics. Yet on a large screen the effect is diminished. There’s something embarrassing about Moore’s movies when viewed in a theater, like viewing a puffy, sleep-deprived face under bright lights. Flaws become magnified and horribly exposed: The stunts feel cheap, the montage sequences seem simplistic and Moore becomes an insufferable showboat.”
Jeannette Catsoulis on Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox:
“Directed by Sara Lamm with more attention to texture than focus, the movie probes beneath the bubbles to unearth its subject’s troubled relationship with his Jewish heritage and his insistence on the equality of all human beings. What emerges is a complex portrait of a man who cares more for humanity than for his own children, often left to languish in orphanages while their father scoured bodies and minds.”
Nick Pinkerton on Knocked Up:
The template for big-numbers success in American screen comedy, as established a decade ago in the twin box-office landslides of There’s Something About Mary and American Pie: over-the-latest-top raunch supplementing wide-eyed, naïve emotionality. The new reigning master of the form is Judd Apatow, whose 40-Year-Old Virgin treated its premise-title with absolute earnestness when it wasn’t loading the film with enough boner gags and just-us-guys bullshitting to diffuse accusations of dishonest sentimentality. Knocked Up, Apatow’s sophomore feature, furnishes a much-deserved leading role to Seth Rogen, one of his faithful supporting players, primed for stardom from his early days on Apatow-produced sitcoms Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. It’s a piece of casting that’s a little coup unto itself — the tubby, woolly-headed goof of a buddy is a familiar enough romantic comedy trope (see Rogen himself, doing journeyman work in You, Me, and Dupree), but trusting that guy to command the center stage nearly passes for profound subversion amidst the intellectual aridity of contemporary industrial moviemaking.
Michael Joshua Rowin on A Mighty Heart:
“So the Daniel Pearl story unfolds, with less political or emotional resonance than can be gathered from a Wikipedia entry containing the same details. Winterbottom attempts to inject some life into the proceedings with never-sit-still editing, tourist glimpses of local color in Pakistan, India, and France, and unannounced flashbacks. Nothing works.” Click here to read the rest.
“Bracketed by stunning long shots taken from the front of a moving freight train, Wang Bing’s epic, three-part documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks, is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy. As factories close and workers lose not only their jobs but also their homes and social networks, the filmmakers patiently observe the end of an era and the fortitude of those left floundering in its wake.”
“Despite the nobility of his intentions, the turn toward the political marks a regression for the filmmaker. Forget the consensus: The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are Morris’s two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris’s Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism.”
“Little known fact: Martin Scorsese likes the Rolling Stones. He’s even used their songs in a few of his films. And when he lazily slapped “Gimme Shelter” yet again on top of a montage sequence in The Departed, he all but officially certified them co-authors of his trademarked brand of rock-scored violence. But directing a concert movie of Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie in sexagenarian action? The marriage might sound perfect on paper, but, lest we forget, both Scorsese and the Stones are well past their respective primes, and any such collaboration, no matter how thrilling at the level of inevitable consummation, should be warily and skeptically received.” 
“Pity the poor, unknown (and thus utterly pliable) young actors asked to put their mouths around George A. Romero’s impassioned but dead-obvious thematics. “In addition to telling the truth, I am trying to scare you,” intones Debra (Michelle Morgan), pulling double duty as the Final Girl and after-the-fact narrator. Hang on to your hats, kids, here comes some edu-tainment!” 
“...the sharper lines can perk up scenes, especially when they flirt with absurdity. In one recurring gag, Angie is baffled by the automatic locks on Kate’s car and, generally, both comics show strong timing with their occasional sarcastic zingers. After all, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler (who is also a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe) honed their chops at ImprovOlympic in Chicago in the ’90s. On e gets the sense they could generate endlessly delightful tomfoolery, such as a sketch-like courtroom scene (don’t ask) in which Angie addresses the judge with ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’”
“Director Shane Meadows is of a rare breed, touching headline issues in his films without ever putting human interplay at the service of some message. His Somers Town details an inter-dialect friendship between an adolescent Midlands runaway (wizened Thomas Turgoose, who also starred in Meadows’s This Is England) and a young Polish immigrant (Piotr Jagiello), a big, uneasy kid with an incongruously piping voice and photography hobby that makes him stand out amid the jostling biceps of his father’s construction-worker buddies . . . Cinematographer Natasha Braier’s ringing silver-and-black London is enough to refute the tenacious idea that visual articulacy somehow contradicts honesty.” 
“For the professionally outraged, a Too Soon! double feature this weekend poses a tough choice for fulminatin’: Errol Morris’s eerily beautiful reenactments of Abu Ghraib incidents vs. Harold and Kumar’s (five-minute) stay in “Guantanamo Bay” for a big-bubba prison-rape joke. In either case, you kind of know what you’re getting into. Morris’s customary interests in odd-hunting, unknowability and denial prove apropos yet frustrating when applied to the facts of Abu Ghraib, while Harold and Kumar’s second trip yields a bewildering mix of bathroom humor, supersized stereotypes and flashes of sharp satire.” 
“It’s a pleasure to appreciate the efforts of re-creation undertaken here, and easy to assume that the overt shortcomings in comedy and characterization are the result of an inevitable deficit of TLC. But those elements — Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s Clooney-polished screenplay, Renee Zellweger’s pursed-lip spitfire reporter — have also been sweat out, and humor, unlike decorative detail, loses charm when it oversells.” 
“In Swaziland, one of Africa’s smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years. But Without the King, Michael Skolnik’s subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival.” 
“In the context of David Mamet’s directorial career, Redbelt breaks no ground, signals no new direction, adds nothing to what he’s done at the typewriter and behind the camera thus far. In taking up where 2004’s largely ignored Spartan left off, Redbelt instead merely reconfirms the pros and cons of Mamet’s unique brand of tough-guy dramatics. ” 
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