http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/ REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog en Copyright 2009 2009-11-06T21:57:49+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/dont_open_richard_kellys_the_box/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/dont_open_richard_kellys_the_box/ Take me seriously! Many reviews of The Box will start out like: “After the disastrous reception that greeted Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly…” This opening apologia acknowledges the massive blunder that was Southland (though there are still a handful of defenders), and opens up wiggle room to reinstate Kelly as a filmmaker worth watching, regardless of the relative quality of The Box itself. His intelligence and ambition—perhaps even “vision”—will be referenced, his genre-mashing sensibility lauded, and even if the film might be not be any good (more on that shortly), Richard Kelly himself will likely emerge unscathed to fight another… Reviews 2009-11-06T21:57:49+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/all_fall_down_chris_smiths_collapse/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/all_fall_down_chris_smiths_collapse/ At the turns of decades and centuries, it’s fairly common for sky-is-falling prognostication to spike wildly. This angst often finds expression in popular entertainments, such as the appearance, as if on cue, of the clunky misfire Knowing and the upcoming sure-to-be tedious 2012.  What these kinds of spectacles provide is something like diversionary exorcism—the world outside may seem bad, but there’s some comfort in recognizing that visual effects artists can always imagine even worse.  These films are about as easy to dismiss as History Channel specials on Nostradamus, and probably less fun, so Chris Smith’s often unnerving documentary Collapse arrives… Reviews 2009-11-06T15:01:18+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/body_shop_frederick_wisemans_la_danse_the_paris_opera_ballet/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/body_shop_frederick_wisemans_la_danse_the_paris_opera_ballet/ La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film in about as many years, and his second about dance (after 1995’s Ballet), begins with a series of shots of Paris, immediately establishing the renowned company as subject to the city’s daily grind. Though La Danse features a number of administrative meetings and extended glimpses of finished performances, Wiseman’s primary interest is in the grueling rehearsals. Dancers run through their movements in mirror-lined rooms, usually to the accompaniment of a pianist in the corner, and choreographers, exacting and for the most part stinting on praise, pick those movements apart, suggesting… Reviews 2009-11-05T16:11:40+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/left_behind_lee_danielss_precious/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/left_behind_lee_danielss_precious/ Four years ago, in one of its most notorious episodes, The Tyra Banks Show found its host on a mission to enlighten her audience on the issue of anti-obese bigotry. America’s top model did so by placing the burden upon herself, taking her fat-suit to the streets, onto buses, and into blind dates—and arriving at the conclusion that she had hit upon “the last form of open discrimination that’s O.K.”  The idea of the show was for Tyra to heroically assert the dignity of a marginalized group, but her histrionic response to a few hours walking around in disguise only… Reviews 2009-11-03T20:18:34+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivseventh_night_ifantasia_is_night_on_bald_mountain/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivseventh_night_ifantasia_is_night_on_bald_mountain/ Now that you’ve been sufficiently scared all week, it’s time to party. Rarely has there been a better celebration of the spirit of Halloween than the magnificently unsettling “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from Walt Disney’s 1940 labor of love, Fantasia. Putting aside obvious narratives of how this terrified many a tot (coming after nearly two hours of plotless, dialogue-free, near abstract animated sequences, this piece de résistance sent kids over the edge, often from boredom into manic freak-out mode), this perfectly petrifying short film, based on Modest Mussorgsky’s 1860 composition, is simply the most effective hand-drawn spookshow of all… Halloween 2009-11-01T03:29:44+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivsixth_night_witchfinder_general/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivsixth_night_witchfinder_general/ by Andrew Tracy As with so many cinematic experiences in my misspent youth, Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (aka Conqueror Worm) was well-prepared for by copious before-the-fact study (thank you, Danny Peary); the film itself eventually functioned as confirmation of what had been read beforehand—thus no dark and unexpected encounter with primal fears here, I’m afraid. Yet that quality of remove almost seems appropriate for the quite astonishingly jaundiced eye which Reeves casts upon his horrors. Witchfinder General exists apart from the genre imperatives of shock, suspense, disgust, or prurience; rather, its ferocity and sometimes unbearable intensity is in the service… Halloween 2009-10-30T21:24:15+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivfifth_night_la_cabina/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivfifth_night_la_cabina/ by Adam Nayman Looking back through Reverse Shot’s “Great Pumpkins” series, I was especially struck by those pieces that dealt with horror films experienced via television viewing. “How,” wondered robbiefreeling, in his appreciation of Salem’s Lot, “could something so emotionally disruptive come packaged with something so mundane as toothpaste and car ads?” Reading that essay a year ago prompted me to scour the Internet for evidence of a television film I’d watched sometime in my tweenage years and thought back on many times since. Circa 1993/94, I was mainlining horror flicks at a rate of about five per week (mostly… Halloween 2009-10-30T07:38:45+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_iv_fourth_night_-_the_uninvited/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_iv_fourth_night_-_the_uninvited/ Brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) while on vacation in Cornwall, decide to purchase a large cliffside house. The place is lovely, eminently classy and full of light. Better yet, its owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp) is willing to part with the place for a song. All seems fine, great even. Except for one room on the second floor. It’s oddly cold in there, even when the sun’s shining in.  It gets more frigid, perhaps even…menacing, when local girl Stella Meredith (a luminous Gail Russell) stops by for a little flirtation. An old village… Halloween 2009-10-29T20:45:33+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivthird_night_paranormal_activity/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivthird_night_paranormal_activity/ No surprises here: Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, currently terrorizing people across North America, is genuinely scary. It’s also clunky, half-realized, and frustratingly compromised—none of which reduce its central, primal experiential heft. As far as inevitable comparisons are concerned, Paranormal Activity is no Blair Witch Project, as it misses out on that inadvertent masterpiece’s allegorical elegance (the film was downright Hawthornian in its portrait of mythical Americana seeking vengeance against interlopers) and technical coherence, not to mention its unwillingness to give up its ambiguities right to the final devastating image. One leaves Blair Witch with more questions than answers; Paranormal Activity… Halloween 2009-10-28T05:35:23+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivsecond_night_onibaba/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_ivsecond_night_onibaba/ During last year’s “Great Pumpkin” series, I extolled the virtues of the face in horror cinema. It’s so simple, really: few things are as terrifying as the makeup of a face, whether forthrightly demonic or human but just a little . . . off. The doubling terror effect of the mask, then, is not only the fearful visage of the false face but also the possibility of the human one hidden underneath. Kaneto Shindo’s breathtaking Onibaba (1964) exploits this tension to masterful effect, building a slow rhythm to an unbearably frightening climax predicated on the terror of one mask—what it… Halloween 2009-10-27T05:08:20+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_iv_the_leopard_man/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/a_few_great_pumpkins_iv_the_leopard_man/ This year, Reverse Shot’s annual end-of-October “Great Pumpkins” series can finally get off on the right hobbled foot. We normally like to begin our Halloween recommendations with something of an assessment of the state-of-the-art of horror filmmaking, and since for the past few years the genre has become decidedly moribund, what should be a demonic celebration ends up something of a eulogy. Sounds funereally appropriate, but it’s been disappointing nevertheless. So we can begin with very good Monday box-office news: The latest installment of Gruesome, Poorly Edited Faux-Morality Tales an Incredibly Cynical Mini-Studio Churns Out for Easy Profit Every October… Halloween 2009-10-25T23:44:29+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/plain_ride_mira_nairs_amelia/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/plain_ride_mira_nairs_amelia/ Gawrsh! Mira Nair’s Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia will easily be criticized for simply being the kind of film that it is. And you’ll know the type from the very opening, when an awestruck pubescent Amelia Earhart stands in a golden wheat field, brushing her hands against the whipping grains, staring up at the sky with dewdrop eyes while a voiceover states elegiacally, “When I saw that little plane, it lifted me above the Kansas prairie.” Yes, we’re in glittering, hagiographic territory, ripe with nostalgia: every time a plane soars, the traditional score by Gabriel Yared will swell; scenes will frequently… Reviews 2009-10-23T22:06:36+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/motherhood/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/motherhood/ “What Does Motherhood Mean to Me?” wonders Eliza, Uma Thurman’s harried West Village mother of two, as she works her way through a day of tough city living in Katherine Dieckmann’s Motherhood. Somewhat sadly, this existential pondering doesn’t spring organically from the material at hand: an episodic catalogue of indignities visited by the evil urban environment upon those who choose to procreate therein. Instead, our heroine, a creative sort left at wit’s end by the mundane distractions of her life, fresh from finishing a quickie post to her mom-blog “The Bjorn Identity,” is sparked to answer this rather large question… Reviews 2009-10-23T15:36:40+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/nyff_views_from_the_avant-garde_09/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/nyff_views_from_the_avant-garde_09/ Nestled in the middle of the New York Film Festival, the Views from the Avant-Garde program, now in its thirteenth year, has become something of a lightning rod for experimental work. For better or for worse, the rare, uncategorizable, and often difficult films it features are crammed into a dense, two and a half-day screening schedule that challenges the endurance of even the most seasoned viewer. In previous years programmers Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith organized their selections with session titles and descriptions, but this edition, which did away with both, left the work of finding the underlying logic up… Festivals 2009-10-22T15:35:42+00:00 http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/when_the_child_wasnt_a_child_spike_jonzes_where_the_wild_things_are/ http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/when_the_child_wasnt_a_child_spike_jonzes_where_the_wild_things_are/ It’s tempting to see Spike Jonze’s last film, Adaptation, about a screenwriter’s inability to find his footing in translating Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, as a sort of anticipation of his missteps with Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence bedtime classic Where the Wild Things Are. In adapting a literary work, particularly one that so eludes natural one-to-one transpositions, the choices are endless and hard, and some will inevitably not be the “right” ones. Sendak’s 1963 picture book follows a rambunctious boy, sent up to his room without dinner, who finds himself transported to a land of savage beasts. There he indulges his… Reviews 2009-10-21T16:04:35+00:00