Zero for Conduct

Man on Wire

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:26:00 GMT

Tonight I submit myself, amid the first serious cold I've had in five years, to groggily compete in Opium Magazine's new Literary Death Match, at the Bowery Poetry Club @ 7:30, and I'm all about those split infinitives... It's late notice, of course, as it was for me, so I'll save this space for afters, as they say in Brighton, and for the inevitable and inevitably mortifying YouTube clip...

1/22/10: All done, no clip as yet, but I lost, my subtly ironic/noirish Hemingway narrative proving no match for the distinctive non-sequitur humor mill of the Opium contingent... Ah, well. Sold some books, had some drinks, met many lovely women.

Year of the Gun

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:00:00 GMT

Overdue, perhaps, but here's a breakdown of my year-end Top Ten lists and poll participations and ancillary notations regarding 2009 and its year in film, and regarding the '00s, likewise:

My annotated Top Ten, at The Boston Phoenix.
My appreciations of 2006 and 2007, accompanied by video mashups by Matt Zeitz, at The L Magazine.
My choice for American film of the decade: Adaptation, at IFC.com.
Film Comment's polls, for the year and the decade.
My profile at indieWire.
Sight & Sound's poll.
My annual list of the Best Straight to Video releases, forgotten orphans that they are, at IFC.com.
The Moving Image Source contemplation of the year, in which I still can't get around Godard.
The Village Voice poll, saints preserve me.
And my '00s Top 25, two entries down, and here, and here.

Skol!

Red Line

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:46:00 GMT

A blast from the past, from my pre-website Voice years, just in time for Christmas:

"We all pretend the rainbow has an end/and you’ll be there my friend someday..." And so goes the chilling, enigmatic bridge verse to "There’s Always Tomorrow," the key ballad in boomer America’s most protean air burst of televised Christmas mythology, 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The first and most resonant of the CBS-broadcast holiday puppet passions, this deep-dish freakazoid may not be the greatest find in AMMI’s "Wishing You an Animated Christmas" series starting Dec. 20 (that would be Lev Atmantov’s 1957 restored The Snow Queen), but it is, metaphorically speaking, the mother lode.

Nearly all Christmas tales, from Dickens on down to Jingle All the Way, are capitalist parables at heart — it’s what Christmas is all about, to quote Linus Van Pelt out of context — and Rudolph is as Adam Smithian in its politics as it is Jack Smithian in its nutlog extrapolation of the Johnny Marks’s original carol. Like it or not, the story’s dynamics hinge on the North Pole’s alarming reindeer unemployment problem — only eight tenured positions and so many applicants. Rudolph begins as a mutant (born too close to the factory?), and is quickly deemed an unprofitable embarrassment by everyone from his Member of the Board dad Donner to Santa himself, the unforgiving nabob at the local industry’s helm. "Shame on you," Santa tells Donner —not for hiding Rudolph, but for having him at all.

While a snowman sings "Silver and Gold," Rudolph tries to prove himself worthy of cost-effective membership in the machine despite his "noncomformity," all the while skirting the advances of the Abominable Snow Monster — the subSiberian Cold War specter of Communism. A spry little Horatio Alger, Rudolph embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery until Santa, focused as always on efficient trade practice, realizes how he might profit from Rudolph’s inflamed uniqueness and enthusiastically formulates a new frontline team position for the young buck. "I knew that nose would turn out to be useful!" an ass-protecting Donner exclaims, and Rudolph becomes Christmastown’s first freelance consultant. But his is a per project application — won’t Rudolph get laid off when the weather is clear?

Along the way, Hermie the Elf Dentist evokes the obsolete craftsman losing his soul on the Industrial Revolution assembly line (complete with barking foreman), and Yukon Cornelius embodies the pre-industrial entrepreneur scrambling after the American Dream, penniless, semi-deranged and running amok in the wilderness. The Island of Misfit Toys — a kind of fascistic monarchy of capitalist castoffs eventually rescued from a gainless limbo — is clearly Cuba. Fearlessly righteous, the narrative assures us that every sensibility, even the finally toothless shell of Communism, can be folded successfully into the system.

But there's a price to be paid: during the end credits, the gift-delivering elf aboard Santa’s sleigh throws a bird overboard without an umbrella — not knowing the bird is a misfit toy and cannot fly. It’s never been said that mass production wouldn’t have casualties, only that we shouldn’t care. What’s more vital is Rudolph’s expression of rampant Americanism: not simply to join, but to lead.

Time of the Wolf

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:47:00 GMT

Everybody's doing it! I was distracted, I guess, and didn’t realize it was time for all of the movie critic polls to assess not just 2009 but the entirety of the ‘00s as well. This is sport, but I like it, so here’s my decade-best list, the Top 50, in order because it's not fun any other way, as it’s being fed into the exanding universe of film critic best-of stats...

1. La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, France)
2. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
3. Adaptation (Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman, US)
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
5. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman, US)
7. Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, France)
8. Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)
9. Cache (Michael Haneke, France)
10. Inland Empire (David Lynch, US)
11. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, US)
12. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, US)
13. Children of Men (Alphonse Cuaron, US/GB)
14. Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, Korea)
15. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weersethakul, Thailand)
16. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, US)
17. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
18. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
19. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
20. Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden)
21. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France)
22. The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
23. Safe Conduct (Bertrand Tavernier, France)
24. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, US)
25. Platform (Jia Zhangke, China)
26. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, US)
27. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)
28. 4 (Ilya Khrjanovsky, Russia)
29. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
30. The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, Iran)
31. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, France)
32. Wordly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
33. Dans Ma Peau (Marina de Van, France)
34. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US)
35. Ballast (Lance Hammer, US)
36. Le Fils (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
37. Wendy & Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, US)
38. Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, US)
39. The World (Jia Zhangke, China)
40. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, US)
41. Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/Iraq/Kurdistan)
42. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)
43. Once (John Carney, Ireland)
44. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China)
45. Monday Morning (Otar Iosseliani, France)
46. The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel, Argentina)
47. The Last Train (Alexei German Jr., Russia)
48. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel)
49. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US)
50. The Mist in the Palm Trees (Carlos Molinaro & Lola Salvador, Spain)

A cavil: there are only three films on the list that were never distributed in any way in the United States, and this is not because I have such fabulous faith and commonality with this country's running-scared film distribution industry, but because I have children and a mortgage and do not get to travel to international festivals very much. So, my list should be seen through this scrim; conservatively speaking, I don't think the list would change radically if I was single and wealthy and festival-obsessed, but it would change somewhat.

My 2009 lists are forthcoming...

I'm Gonna Explode

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:59:00 GMT

More stuff!: the first stop on my barnstorming blog tour, discussing my history as a sentence-making scofflaw;

keeling over at Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and Alexander Sokurov's The Sun, at IFC.com;

kvelling over Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Scott McGehee and David Siegel's Uncertainty, at IFC.com;

DVDing, on Lance Hammer's Ballast, and Don Siegel's The Lineup, at IFC.com;

my supplemental essay for Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, for The Criterion Collection;

my first "guest-review" column for IFC.com this month, looking at The Men Who Stare at Goats and the apocalyptic doc Collapse;

and my DVD column, loving Sam Fuller's lesser-known plooges and screenplays, at IFC.com.

Skol!

Life During Wartime

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:22:59 GMT

Some uncollected thoughts:

I've said that I think it's apparent Dick Cheney is the only political figure in memory who seems to know he's evil. It is true, as far as it goes; but if you consider Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh "political figures," then their unarguable narcissistic turpitude, disguised as it is as ideological outrage, qualifies them as well. They make real politicians, current governors and congressmen, look like responsible town-hall clerks by comparison, and take a moment to consider how odd that is.

Obama seems to be doing okay, under the circumstances, by which I mean he's behaving like an adult patiently, oh so patiently, dealing with 300 million undereducated and sociopathic third-graders.

It is clear that the Internet is destroying modern civilization -- methodically obliterating newspapers, book publishers, the music industry, Hollywood, TV networks, magazines, live performance of every kind, and much more. Why isn't anyone alarmed?

Lastly: Michael Chabon is right, our children's experience of constant supervision and control and safety paranoia is a form of deprivation.

And a quick rundown of my recent stuff -- in addition to, if you're interested, my third Hemingway book, a YA novel that asks the unmusical question, "Why is it that I feel like crying everytime I read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes?", and a TV pilot for 20th Century Fox, and that's not counting the things I'm not being paid for. So:

- Finally, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Ludwig and Karl May make it to DVD, plus a love letter to the 1936 proto-zombie Karloff flick The Walking Dead, at IFC.com

- Considering Dusan Makavejev's first three New Wavey Yugo-loogies, released from Criterion, plus Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, at IFC.com

- My rueful tell-all memoir-essay about the making of my dead network pilot Babylon Fields, at Lost Magazine

- on Anvil! The Story of Anvil, plus the savage Dutch anime Princess, at IFC.com

- Piles of DVD and movie reviews, as usual, in Sight & Sound, but unlinkable individually -- gotta buy it...

- My rants on Polanski, Nobels and such, at True/Slant

- My "story," concocted to attach "significance" to a more or less randomly selected and worthless tchotchke, and then together sold on eBay, at Significant Objects

- on Cornel Wilde's Beach Red at The L Magazine

Skol!

Big Two-Hearted Book Party

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Finally Hemingway Deadlights is out, available, for sale and making rumbles -- and I have a book release party this Thursday, at The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street in Manhattan, and I promise you a drink if you come! More info at my author site, www.mike-atkinson.com. Now, go down one blog entry here and watch the book trailer to get the jones on --

Book Trailers Like White Elephants

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:08:00 GMT

OK, revised blog entry: here it is in its final YouTube version, book trailer #1 (set to Perez Prado's "Mambo #5") for HEMINGWAY DEADLIGHTS, my first novel due out in roughly seven weeks --

http://zeroforconduct.com/2009/06/29/book-trailers-like-white-elephants.aspx

Heroes for Sale

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:35:00 GMT

I haven't been blogging lately, but I've been busy, if you were thinking to ask, finishing my second Hemingway mystery (tentatively titled HEMINGWAY CUTTHROAT), and returning to finish a mountain of other projects like a hawk hungry to pick off field mice. In the meantime, here's the first review/interview for HEMINGWAY DEADLIGHTS from the icebreaking prow of Library Journal.
And, to be thorough, a crotchety review of EXILE CINEMA: FILMMAKERS AT WORK BEYOND HOLLYWOOD from the pages of Cineaste, though what exactly a writer in Cineaste is doing reviewing a book about non-mainstream filmmakers while admitting to have never even heard the name Christopher Munch is a bit beyond me. But I'm just kvetching; it's a relief someone reviewed it!

The War Lover

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Reviewing indie/archival/imported DVDs has an ethical parameter distinctive from plain old movie reviewing – rather than simply assessing everything that cascades down the pike, you must select, and then in an effort not to appear at all peevish, you select the most worthwhile options, week to week. So, the movies on the lower end of the scale, which I have to see as well, never get their day in court. I’m committed to justice, so here are money shots taken at recent releases I refused to cover:

The History Boys (2006) Straining, education-free theatrical camp, and I mean that in an actively hostile way.

The Notorious Bettie Page (2006) Was Page this dull? It’s impossible to imagine.

Nuit Noire (Black Night) (2004) German brooder Olivier Smolders essentially remakes Eraserhead, but with large and weird European bugs.

My Best Friend (2006) What crap. So of course it was remade in Hollywood.

Life Is a Bed of Roses (La Vie Est un Roman) (1983) Alain Renais has fun in a mansion full of actors, but can’t say we had the same.

The Bow (2005) Kim Ki-duk’s comet continues to arc downward. Folktale-simplistic to the point of being childish.

Trigger Man (2007) Quite like the movies I made on Super 8mm in high school. Wait a minute, it’s exactly a movie I made on Super 8mm in high school.

You Kill Me (2007) I was already done right here with the idea that beautiful young women would love to have sex with Ben Kingsley. So arch it curdles in the belly.

Party 7 (2000) The warmup swing before Ishii’s A Taste of Tea and Funky Forest: The First Contact, and not at all amusing.

Redacted (2007) DePalma doing post-Blair Witch combat mock-doc in Iraq?! DePalma doesn’t do realism, folks. The only thing real-seeming about this ham-handed Casualties of War remake is the ordnance.

Sixty Six (2006) If the director of Leonard Part 6 and City Slickers II can still snag, and immolate, new projects like this soft-soap Yiddishe drischla, you can, too.

Where the Truth Lies (2005) Hard to grok what Atom Egoyan was thinking here.

Lady Chatterly (2006) What the fuck? Literally. She’s less "awakened" here than trapped in the mouth-breathing mind of an incurious preteen, and he’s a mopey ape. Jeesh.

Margot at the Wedding (2007) An abomination, glib, anything-for-an-uncomfortable-laugh-line. Is every character on a psychopharmacological program, and if so, why don’t they mention it?

What Remains (2006) Sally Mann is a savvy narcissist, and her documentarian just wants to fuck her.

This Is England (2006) Spittle-flecked skinhead hysteria. Expert, but so? Was it such a serious social problem, or is it just those wacky clothes?

Ludwig (1972) You watch this waxworks wondering how Visconti didn’t get run out of Rome for putting audiences through his films.

The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) I used to like Hammer films as a boy. I must’ve been a very patient kid.

Bosque de Sombras (The Backwoods) (2006) Gary Oldman picking up rent money in Spain.

Day-Time Wife (1939) The worst movie of 1939? If it is, it’s not Linda Darnell’s fault.

Hotel des Ameriques (1981) Andre Techine making it up as he goes along. A wonder he found work again.

Gospel According to Harry (1994) Lech Majewski’s uproariously pretentious music-video-surrealism at work. Likewise for The Roe’s Room (1997) and Glass Lips (2007).

The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) Forgotten, rumored to be lost, rediscovered experimental color Maigret mystery, shot in Paris, starring Franchot Tone and Charles Laughton, and still a dud.

Noise (2008) Henry Bean tries for frustrated-modern-man satire, and gets very lost.

Slacker Uprising (2008) This is the mad Moore ego trip evil conservative shitheads have been defining all of the other Moore films as.

Dark Floors (2008) Atmospheric haunted-hospital horror, but the demons are actually the members of the Finnish rock band Lordi, growling.

Rachel Getting Married (2008) A step up from Baumbach’s wedding fiasco, but if Demme hadn’t tried to impress us with his great taste in world music and his cohort of cool musician friends, this would be a 40-minute featurette.

Monte Grande: What Is Life? (2005) A biography of the late philosophical physicist Francisco Varela, who seemed very smart and nice, but who had no significant message to impart. The title question goes unanswered, except as something that ends.

The End of America (2008) Smokin’ hot pundit Naomi Wolf essentially reiterates the points made in her bestselling anti-Bush book to a medium-sized audience. She’s right, and I appreciate the Nazi parallels, but this isn’t a movie, it’s a promotional tool.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976) Another famous import hit from the ‘70s bites the dust. Almost unendurable.

Way Down East (1920) Griffith was a stodgy hump; compared to contemporaneous movies (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Parson’s Widow, The Penalty, The Golem, even Olive Thomas’s The Flapper), this is a preachy, lumbering snooze. The ice-floe stunts were cool, though.

The Way I Spent the End of the World

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:45:00 GMT

A steady blogger I have not been -- too busy polishing a new TV pilot for submission to the network maws, and finishing the next Hemingway novel, which has become an unwieldy historical beast and not nearly as breezy to write as the first. And crit, accounted for on my sidebar, left. Anyway, my Top Ten 'o '08:

1. My Winnipeg
2. Ballast
3. Wendy & Lucy
4. Silent Light
5. Still Life
6. Waltz with Bashir
7. Flight of the Red Balloon
8. The Wrestler
9. Synecdoche, New York
10. My Blueberry Nights

Runners-up, in order: Times and Winds, The Duchess of Langeais, The Wedding Director, WALL-E, Woman on the Beach, Appaloosa, Che, Alexandra, Pineapple Express, Jellyfish, Operation Filmmaker, Milk, The Edge of Heaven, Boy A, My Father My Lord, Encounters at the End of the World, Snow Angels, Chop Shop, Stuff and Dough, In Bruges

Didn't see in time: A Christmas Tale

Here're my polled lists/results/comments/etc.:

IFC.com
Sight & Sound
Boston Phoenix
indieWire
Moving Image Source

with Film Comment to come.

O Noel to all, and to all a brave new year.

Floating Weeds

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:37:00 GMT

Recent stuff:

"Children of Paradise: How to Watch Hal Roach's Our Gang Comedies and Why," Moving Image Source;
On W. and cinema during the Bush Reign, Sight & Sound (actual periodical purchase required), along with a review of Lakeview Terrace;
At the 20th Boston Jewish Film Festival, The Boston Phoenix;
Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising, In These Times;
the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott-Harry Joe Brown westerns, and Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye, IFC.com
On, long after the fact, Battle in Seattle, The Progressive (paper purchase also required, apparently);
Looking at Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon and the deathless legacy of Mystery Science Theater 3000, IFC.com;
The Thin Red Line, as we know it and as it may've been, a decade later, Moving Image Source;
Paris vu par... and Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph, IFC.com;
"First Person Plural: Mike Leigh's Search for Happiness," Moving Image Source;
Mon Oncle Antoine, TCM.com...

Smash Palace

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:41:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Part V

[A 2001 PTSNBN piece, "Auto da fe," on the emerging subsubgenre of crash-trauma movies, explored for rather personal reasons...]

The crash – be it in a car, train, plane or less popular mode of high-speed, high-risk transport – has always been one of cinema’s basic visual sacraments, starting with silent comedy’s injury-free Model T smack-up. Like the dance number, the adventure-film stunt and the gunfight, crashes have been ubiquitous ocular orgasms ever since Hollywood began using the phrase "big budget," raising unshirted hell from a comfortable distance and filling the screen with krazy chaos audiences, in the 20s, 30s and 40s, would more than likely see nowhere else.

The attraction is primal – not long before movies coalesced into a functioning culture, transportation was relatively slow and scant on decimation, but combustive technology and flight raised the stakes on vehicular accidents, and the results were something to see. For seven decades or more, wrecks have been an axiom and qualifier of pulp entertainment – they were pure spectacle, resonating waves of hair-raising danger that never quite reached us.

That has changed: in movies, crashes are no longer just marvels of destruction or, even, narrative kick-starts. Slowly, the crash has claimed ground as a thematic and dramatic fulcrum, finding itself at the shaken, shuddering center of movies’ emotional mission. And it’s not just Cronenberg’s Crash that matters in this way, although that film did an astonishing and largely unrequested job of raising consciousness about the fiery, deadening enchantment of mechanistic calamity. Of course, it’s Ballard and Cronenberg’s nipple-twist on civilian post-traumatic stress, a psycho-state usually relegated to subplots but addressed unblinkingly in Weir’s Fearless and Kieslowski’s Blue, both released in 1993, for all intents the start of the crash season. Here, the survival of deadly catastrophe becomes its own perverting cross, and in both movies the wound is at first experienced as an incomprehensible unburdening. There is no other story; the crash has become the story.

In 1996, Jacques Doillon’s Ponette studied the bludgeoning after-effects of an orphaning wreck on a 4-year-old, for whom the accident began a crisis of metaphysical hunger. But in the last two years, crash shock has proliferated. While Random Hearts was traditionally configured around an airline wipeout, and Fight Club's chicken run was only a minor impasse on its way to apocalypse hyperbole, Jesus’ Son hovered over a slick-highway smack-up as if it was the forbidding memory it would’ve been had the hero not been lost on dope. The Dutch film Total Loss also flashed forward and back around a protracted flyaway pile-up that punctuated everything coming before it with friction sparks and spraying glass. Pollock’s climactic collision, like the ones that ended both Steve Prefontaine biopics, was deliberately anticlimactic, while Erin Brockovich’s opening sleight-of-hand whiplasher had Julia Roberts blind-sided out of the corner of our eye; emotionally marginal, they still clubbed the viscera. Unbreakable began with an off-screen train derailment that seemed to haunt the film and Bruce Willis’s gloom-plagued hero long after the nominal plot was supposed to have taken over. Cast Away’s aerial plunge was a universalized nightmare come true, and was never forgotten amid the trials that followed. Even You Can Count on Me’s most potent moments – and there could’ve been more of them – stem from the sister-brother protagonist’s shared lives under the shadow of their parents’ fatal crash years before. A split-second in time that continues to exhale decades later, dwarfing the lives that press on.

Quite apparently, in reflecting and refracting their audience’s perspective, movies have been compelled to address the reality of vehicular disaster. As the century-plus of cinema and modern transportation has worn on, more and more of us have become familiar not with merely what it’s like to witness this particularly lunatic by-product of automotive convenience but what it’s like to endure one. Our mass participation in the dynamic has evolved from spectator to survivor, and anybody who’s escaped a serious crash can tell you that the electric relationship between an individual and the juggernaut trauma he or she experienced on the road or rails or airways is, in the end, harrying, demonically irreducible and bottomlessly mysterious. (I’ve had my share, and my life turns on one of them as if on a hinge.) Strange as it may seem to the non-initiates, Ballard’s and Cronenberg’s vision isn’t merely metaphorical, it’s affective. So many of us belong to this tribe, and more are being inducted every hour. It might be the characteristic social ache of the last and next 50 years, the holy ordeal of the post-industrial community. Our mundane experience of machinery gone amok has silently demanded representation, and movies have begun to listen.

Memories of Underdevelopment

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:29:00 GMT

I’m despairing of actually saying anything new or fresh in regards to Tuesday’s election, coming finally to the barrel end of an inhumanly long election period in which virtually anything that could be said has been said ten times, but nevertheless, there’s this: I think the whole thing is horsecrap, medicine show shucks and intellectual pollution. I’d vote for Obama even if he were headless, but that doesn’t mean I think very much of what he says has meaningful substance or legislative teeth. Nothing either candidate, or any candidate going back decades, has said can be relied upon to hold true once office is taken. They’d say anything, and there’s no way for us to "know" anything about them, or what they might do once elected.

The fact that I "feel" a "sense" of "trust" about Obama that overshadows my reaction to any Presidential candidate since I’ve been of voting age means nothing. My choice is simple, and has been since I was told by my mother to vote for Nixon in my fourth-grade classroom election ("the lesser of two evils," she said), and did so, and then came to regret it by the time I made it to fifth grade. My choice has always been dictated by this: vote against the bomb-dropping, mass-murdering, pocket-filling, Christ-howling, lie-vomiting conservative barbarians. You vote this way, you can’t go wrong.

But that’s not how people are deciding their vote, and this is what terrifies me. When you hear people talk about why they’ll vote for McCain, it sounds like hunting-lodge whiskey talk. When you hear people explain why they’ll vote for Obama, it’s a spew of vague rationales and encomiums about "hope." If they mention taxes or health care, it’s always without understanding. No one is voting, in other words, for any good reason at all. They’ve placed their weight behind Obama because of his rhetoric, and it never occurs to them that that’s not enough.

What would be enough? How about knowing something about socioeconomics, about social policy, about the reality of Iraq and Afghanistan, about why exactly Iran may or may not be a threat, why health care needs reform – what exactly a President does and can do, beside be a seemingly competent "leader" so the rest of us can be safe little children content in knowing we don’t have to pay attention to the way the big world outside is run. It’s laziness, it’s amnesia, it’s morally abhorrent self-indulgence. Because we don’t pay attention, thousands of people are murdered every year with bombs and ammo we pay for, accounting carpetbaggers rob us blind of tax dollars and investment funds, lobbyists hawk our airwaves and bandwidth and media resources to monopolies, insurance companies kill people rather than pay for care, wars are initiated on preposterous untruths and whim, and so on. The same clueless narcissism that allowed the Bush administration to wreak its historic havoc is now, turning 45 degrees for emotional reasons of its own, coming close to electing Obama. We’ll always be better off without a conservative administration in power, but the reasons we choose our government chairmen remain paltry, nonsensical and shameful. However you vote, do us all a favor: ignore your gut, save your "feelings" for group therapy, and find a factual reason, or preferrably reasons, for your choice.

Frantic

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:53:00 GMT

I've been a deadbeat blogger, no argument, due to rampaging work busy-ness, and a novel I'm supposed to deliver by year's end and fear I may not. But in the meantime, what I've been up to lately:

~ looking at Nagisa Oshima's sexual politics, in In the Realm of the Senses and beyond, on the occasion of his NYFF retro sidebar, at Moving Image Source;

~ crawling around within the dark places of the Bill Douglas trilogy, for Moving Image Source;

~ looking mildly askance at Canadian legend Mon Oncle Antoine, at TCM.com;

~ loving Aki Kaurismaki's mid-career bloom, and Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Shadow (1956), at IFC.com;

~ contributing to Sight & Sound's film critic lovefest, once again remembering the weight David Thomson brought to bear on the throat of my adolescence (the issue also includes my swoon over Jaromil Jires's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders);

~ looking at things minimal, Sri Lankan and mumblish, at IFC.com;

~ a rumination on the power and necessity of evocative and vivid poetry book titles, as opposed to the titles that so often allow me to leave new books on the bookstore shelf and not even crack them once, at The Poetry Foundation;

~ a retro look at Mosfilm and the long legacy of Soviet film, for The Boston Phoenix;

~ getting to the bottom of Pasolini's Salo, at IFC.com;

~ appreciating the cultural torque of The Man in the Glass Booth for The Forward;

~ mourning Larisa Shepitko at IFC.com;

~ suggesting a double bill for Sight & Sound's critics' colloquy -- Mr. Freedom and Team America World Police!

~ on Peter Watkins's Privilege, at Moving Image Source;

And coming: Battle in Seattle for The Progressive, Mirrors and Lakeview Terrace for Sight & Sound, and Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising for In These Times.

And so on.

Flight to Fury

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Part VI

[Since it is now apparent that the PTSNBN has, characteristically, ceased carrying any archived articles on its servers that predate 2005, the Muniment Room returns with renewed purpose, here revisiting the initial blush toward Scorsese's The Aviator, which now if anything feels hesitant in its dissatisfactions...]

There’s no underestimating the contributions Martin Scorsese has made to the state of American cinephilia. More than just a moviemaker, he has been a restless, tireless gadfly nagging the long-term-memory-loss culture around him to hold onto the past. Italian neo-realism, Michael Powell, film preservation, John Cassavettes, John Garfield, the blues, the reputations of studio auteurs like William Wellman, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller – he devotes so much celluloid and interview time to his various causes it’s a wonder he can find the time to make his own films. (Indeed, if you’re assembling a profile of any industry figure from Cecil B. DeMille to Satyajit Ray, your first step is to sit Scorsese down.) Now, Scorsese the director has finally nailed down an opportunity to cannonball into the old Hollywood he knows so well; hard as it is to believe, The Aviator is the first non-documentary feature in the man’s canon to serenade the act of making cinema.

Or at least in part – however much a Hollywood gossip-page ubiquity, Howard Hughes was hardly a vital Hollywood producer (ruled by erratic and exploitative instincts), and can barely qualify as a filmmaker. (His two directorial credits, 1930's Hell’s Angels and 1943's The Outlaw, are woeful and sensationalistic claptrap.) Hughes is more accurately remembered as a half-baked engineer, an irresponsible pilot, an underhanded billionaire capitalist, and, most spectacularly, a world-class neurotic whose famous descent into unwashed, paranoid junkie madness in the years before his death assured his notoriety after many other late industrialists had faded from the country’s consciousness.

The Aviator, working with a script by John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai), skims the surface, of course. Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a paradigmatic brash young powermonger, spitting out orders, puzzling his minions with his mania for details, courting starlets. As is de rigueur for its genre, the movie’s narrative feels like a long string of boxcars – incidents from the Hughes biography are dutifully reenacted in sequence (meeting Katherine Hepburn, conceiving of the Spruce Goose, crashing the XF-11, "discovering" the 15-year-old Faith Domergue, defending himself against accusations of war profiteering before a corrupt Senate committee). Meanwhile, the parlor-game-casting cameos demonstrate the futility of reincarnating yesteryear’s icons by way of today’s movie stars (holy Toledo, is Kate Beckinsale not Ava Gardner). Scorsese clearly has an Oktoberfest with the period ambience, just as he did in New York, New York, orchestrating busy crowds, swooping his camera through the Tinseltown chintz and staging frantic overlapping patter across dinner tables (and golf greens) like Howard Hawks eagerly returned from the grave.

But where’s Hughes? In the public bathroom, frozen in fear of the doorknob he must turn in order to exit. Given the amount of time devoted to depicting if not understanding Hughes’s pathologies, Scorsese may have made the first epic biopic portrait of OCD. Fairly controlled by his cleanliness compulsions and neat-freak-hood (when Jude Law, as a rather dubious Errol Flynn, steals a single pea off Hughes’s plate, it’s enough to scotch the meal), our semi-hero is something of a study in self-immolating, verminophobic frustration. At times, the movie’s title seems ironic – The Hand-Washer might have been more to the point. When the FBI ransacks his home at the backroom behest of competitor/PanAm prez Juan Trippe (a suave Alec Baldwin), Hughes squeals in horror, "They’re touchin’ things!" How exactly Hughes manages to sleep with – exchange fluids with – so many women while he can scarcely tolerate shaking hands is a mystery the movie doesn’t try to solve, but his allure as the subject of a nearly-three-hour examination is evasive. Certainly, wealth, womanizing, neuroses and larceny hardly make for a distinguished profile in Hollywood. (The post-crash addiction to morphine is elided altogether.) Unaccountably, Hughes’s 1938 global circumnavigation, cutting Lindbergh’s 11-year-old New York-to-Paris record in half, is summed up in a newsreel.

Scorsese gets down to it with the air action, and if the Hell’s Angels sequences and the searing Beverly Hills smash-up of the XF-11 are the film’s fiery peaks, it may be because there’s a scent of sulphurous, Scorsese-ite danger in the otherwise well-regulated air. (It’s hard not to wonder who else was hurt or killed in that crash, but their names are apparently lost to or bought out of history.) The omnipresence of digital unreality provides another layer of safety and homogeneity.

Still, DiCaprio is The Aviator’s pivotal quantity – that is, if you buy him as a master of the universe-slash-man of action, bedeviled by impulses. But the conscious contrast between today’s baby-faced, teen-voiced toddler-men movie actors and the Golden Age’s grown-ups is unavoidable, and though DiCaprio is the same age here as Hughes was in 1934, he may not be convincing as a 30-year-old until he’s 50. (Dean Stockwell’s Hughes, in Tucker, seemed a good deal more traveled.) When Hughes is swapping repartee with Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, who nails the vibe stunningly) during a Bringing Up Baby-ish nine rounds, it plays as if she’s interviewing him for an internship.

No small obsessive himself, Scorsese dares to limn Hughes’s mid-life breakdown – holing up in his private screening room naked and unshaven, filling hundreds of empty milk bottles with piss – in terms repetitive enough to try the uncompulsive’s patience. Similarly afflicted viewers, however, may have shivers of empathy, just as ex-cokeheads sweated through the final act of GoodFellas. But the thorough dissolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s is only hinted at, a tactful strategy that asks us to provide The Aviator with its gruesome denouement. Instead, Hughes’s temporary self-collection (with Gardner’s grooming help) and grandstand before slimy Senate goldbricker Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) serves as the only conceivable triumph a screenwriter could locate in the man’s messy, ethically crippled life. At best, The Aviator could’ve been a Raging Bull brother-film, given that film’s crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:29:00 GMT

I’m frankly getting tired of being the kid in the crowd pointing at the emperor’s bare-naked buttcheeks, but someone (besides Chicago Reader’s J.R. Jones) has got to make the case for the achingly obvious: Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a sophomoric, cliched howler, so ludicrously bad in so many ways one doesn’t know where to begin. It could be with the arch narration, the prose and thrust and supposedly-short-story tone of which is so amateurish that it could never find publication outside of a high school lit mag, much less substantiate itself as a film’s redundant narration literally explaining actions as we see them, or worse, explaining things we should see and experience but don’t. Or, perhaps, with Allen’s conception of character, which has become so one-dimensional that his heroines wouldn’t seem out of place in a decades-old YA novel. Or Allen’s ponderous recycling of storylines, M.O.s, jokes, compositions and sometimes entire scenes from his other films. Or his pretentious-idiot-freshman ideas of "creative people" and artists and the mythical dichotomy between the artistic life and the mundane lives of "ordinary" people.

Or his relentlessly held faith with wealth porn. Or his nonsensical notions of art and painting and photography and poetry, all of which are invoked in the film without being convincingly portrayed. Or his banal invocation of Gaudi and Miro and "Spanish guitar" in the same way he got derisive yucks years earlier namedropping Bergman and Kurosawa and Klimt. Or the simple thinness of the story, which tries to emulate Rohmer but amounts to a quarter of a decent Rohmer script, but with none of the humor or feeling.

Sure, Cruz, Hall and Bardem were charming, if in spite of some of the extraordinarily unnatural things they were given to say. (Johansson is milky-gorgeous, but comparatively dull.) But Allen’s film is a tired, sick dinosaur around them, and the exasperating experience of it hardly meshes with the happy tolerance and even indulgent praise it’s received by the majority of critics, including a handful of smart ones, who I can only assume have been so deadened by superhero bullshit that this movie looked like a refreshing glass of urine might to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Honestly, on paper it wouldn’t pass muster in an undergrad screenwriting course, and on the screen it’s a patronizing snooze.

Summer Interlude

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:33:00 GMT

Money-shot movie reviews, July-August '08:

Der Freie Wille (The Free Will) (2006) Epic portrait of a German rapist. Too close to be comfortable, which is all some will need. But I needed something else. Like a reason.

The Love Guru (2008) The absolute worst. To quote my own upcoming Sight & Sound review, "double entendres rain down like volcano ash, most often mocking Indian names; non sequiturs are usually accompanied by Meyers smirking at the camera, and then an awkward pause. With its story grinding gears in neutral for huge patches, The Love Guru seems to have been assembled in the dark and under the influence of some magically immobilizing ganja."

Searching for Debra Winger (2002) Blame the wife. Actually a klatch fest about motherhood-vs.-career, not the where-did-the-women’s-roles-go excoriation it could’ve been.

Carosello Napoletano (Neapolitan Carousel) (1954) Michael Powell gone to Naples? Old-town fable-making and canzones, and a treat, from the Lionsgate Sophia Loren set.

Sunflower (2005) At IFC.com, thus.

Times and Winds (2006) A Turkish trip to Ciudad de Erice, and an intensely lean meal amid contemporary distractions.

Chop Shop (2007) Holy smokes, is Willets Point a walking, talking, clanking metaphor for world economic territories everywhere, thriving on manufactured leftovers and cannibalized industry? Why didn’t the director see the possibilities?

A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash) (1929) Exoticistic Punjab fairy tale, made in India by a future Nazi.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) The cheese factor got jacked up to where it belongs; every superhero movie requires a Manilow interlude.

WALL-E (2008) Hardly a masterpiece, but when the clouds of family-movie fart vapor clear, it’ll be the sharpest and meanest social commentary a $180,000,000 movie ever made.

Elmer the Great (1933) Joe E. Brown + Ring Lardner & George M. Cohan = pleasant sub-Our Gang sludge.

The Dark Knight (2008) Don’t get me going. A 2.5-hour commercial for Maxalt.

Heartbeat Detector (La Question Humaine) (2007) Rather lugubrious French non-thriller, arcing unshockingly back to Nazi complicity, but the human resources exec angle is interesting, and Mathieu Almaric is Mathieu Almaric.

Hotel des Ameriques (1981) The worst Andre Techine movie.

Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) C’mon, the best Canadian film, as the Canadians think? (not a Cronenberg or a Maddin or an Egoyan?), or just the only completely normal, Hollywoodian one they can come up with and keep a straight face?

Space Chimps (2008) All you can take away: Kristin Chenoweth’s voice as a nervous, balloon-headed alien sprite who hits operatic high notes when she’s scared.

Witman Fiuk (The Witman Boys) (1997) Grim and predictable turn-of-the-century sociopathic boys drama from Hungary, but shot in oil-lit ambers like Vermeer-meets-Wyeth.

Les Felins (Joy House) (1964) Fab Riveria fun with Delon and Fonda; enjoyment rationalized at IFC.com.

Day-Time Wife (1939) The worst film of the fabled year of 1939? Slackly unfunny marital farce featuring Tyrone Power as a faithless husband we’re supposed to like, and a brand new Linda Darnell as the wife who can’t seem to stop smiling anyway. Warren William owns his scenes.

Gospel According to Harry (1994) The first Lech Majewski movie I’ve seen entirely, and a risible lark. Haven’t given up.

Wings (1966) Soviet New Wave martyr Larisa Shepitko's first feature, a study of frustrated middle-aged womanhood that could've only have been made in the USSR. A newfound wonder we'd never see if it weren't for Criterion.

Throwing Down

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:27:00 GMT

It’s time, I’m afraid, to let loose the dogs of apocalyptic cultural complaint, this time upon the throat of The Dark Knight, which I was coerced into finally seeing despite my official moratorium on voluntarily watching superhero movies, or any film in which someone puts on a mask or has "special powers," the latter of which is all by itself a dead giveaway, as a narrative device, to the film-culture mess we find ourselves in. Superheroes are, essentially by definition, idiotic confections intended for children, and the fact that I can’t escape them as an adult so far this millennium makes my blood boil. I did my time as a kid loving X-Men and Spider-Man and The Avengers and Jack Kirby specials (and E.C. reprints and even Warren mags like Creepy and Eerie), and heaven knows I do not begrudge the American early-adolescent his or her time in the shade with comic books, or their afternoons in matinees watching Batman or Iron Man or whatever. But it’s gotten to the point that superheroes comprise the substantial percentage of movie options we have now, in one form or another, and to avoid them as a grown-up you’d have to avoid cinema. What’s more, adults are flocking, adults reviewers are treating the movies seriously, the filmmakers themselves apparently believe they’re making coherent and profound statements. Meanwhile, the digital whooshing and ultrasurroundsound noise are getting so assaultive it seems we’re not that far away from a movie somehow reaching out during an action scene and just hitting you in the head with three-pound piece of flying shrapnel, just to "make you feel" the chaos.

But that’s my beef in general; The Dark Knight epitomizes the problem specifically not by simply being a Caped Crusader trifle masquerading as Paradise Lost, but because it failed to do the simplest things movies have always done: tell a fucking story. The film is quite literally one violent set-piece followed by a 20-second snatch of exposition, to explain what significance the set-piece is supposed to have, repeated again and again and again, for over 2.5 interminable hours. Stories require character and incidents that happen to those characters and decisions those characters have to make, and us watching them make those decisions, and then the tragic/triumphant/ironic result of those decisions. The Dark Knight runs along literally like a series of disconnected cabaret acts, with what passes for narrative happening off-screen most of the time, and the ample screentime remaining filled up with chases and fights so haphazardly shot and cut you can’t tell where anybody is or what’s going on. We hardly see Bruce Wayne, the Joker (yes, Heath Ledger was fascinating) has no backstory or motivation, plot holes loomed like event horizons (sure, you evacuated that hospital), dialogue scenes never lasted more than a few seconds – in other words, anything that might substantiate the film as dramatic material fit for adults was almost completely elided. I’ll tell you the two moments I appreciated, both missable in the melee: Christian Bale’s dry, almost imperceptible chuckle at Michael Caine’s I-told-you-so mini-punchline as they walked away from the camera, and the way the hulking gangbanging convict played by Tommy Lister went back to his seat after tossing the detonator overboard, brooding over perhaps having sealed his own death by doing the right thing. You can see why: these tiny instances involved humans, reacting and revealing their history. That’s about it for the whole film.

We wouldn’t be having this conversation if the audience were only kids, however large that audience might be. Somehow the entirety of American culture, young and middle-yeared and old, is embracing the childish universe of superheroes – which is structured around the easily-distracted worldview of kids, not around the reasoned, complex worldview we would hope children would grow into. Does America need that badly a post-post-9/11 big Daddy to vanquish danger so we can slumber in our cradles? The much-lamented infantilization of the mass populace continues, and at what cost? How much public effort and energy and time is spent consuming this attenuated nonsense – watching it, watching PR stuff about it, ‘Net-surfing for it, blogging about it, texting about it, pursuing gossip about it, rewatching it, YouTubing it, ad infinitum – and not attending instead to a government that eats tax monies like a Moloch and kills people by the thousands? Movies can be art, and can connect us with human verities and empathies and experiences that might help us deal with the real world. That’s what stories have always been for. But instead we’re using film as the walls of a bubble we’re constructing around ourselves like the disturbed children of abusive parents. Old Hollywood movies have always had their fair share of bullshit, but they were about people, always (or until Star Wars). Not anymore.

Blue in the Face

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Catching up/itemizing recent work appearing all over, before I take a brief vacation:

~ "St. Bill of Illinois: The Poignant Case for William Holden," at Moving Image Source;
~ a look at Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac, at TCM.com;
~ me on My Blueberry Nights and The Free Will, at The IFC Blog;
~ looking at recent Canadian pseudo-hoax non-docs in Film Comment;
~ on Pulitzer poet Philip Schultz at The Poetry Foundation;
~ on G.W. Pabst's Freudian splooge Secrets of a Soul, at TCM.com;
~ "Outskirts of the Kingdom: Werner Herzog," at Moving Image Source;
~ on Derek Jarman, at The IFC Blog;
~ underseen noir at Harvard, for The Boston Phoenix;
~ the myopia of Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, in In These Times;
~ again at The IFC Blog, reconsidering 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva.

And coming momentarily: reviews of Get Smart, The Love Guru and Hellboy II: The Golden Army for Sight & Sound, a look back at The Man in the Glass Booth in The Forward, and commentary on Zhang Yang's Sunflower, Ettore Gianini's Carosello Napoletano, Reha Erdem's Times and Winds, and Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop for The IFC Blog.

Body and Soul

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Part V

[Being a revisit to a piece titled "The Anti-Kazan" -- a consideration-slash-interview of/with Abraham Polonsky on the occasion of Elia Kazan's 1999 "lifetime achievement" Oscar -- done for some long-lost newspaper or other... A toast to your dudgeon, Abe.]

"Wherever you may land on the Kazan issue nearly 50 years hence, there’s no getting around the fact that somebody’s getting a Lifetime Achievement Oscar this year for a long career they had during and after the blacklist, and somebody isn’t getting one for a long career they didn’t have because of the blacklist. That second somebody is Abraham Polonsky, easily the most talented and fascinating filmmaker to be blacklisted, and arguably American film’s greatest HUAC loss. Polonsky came to Hollywood as a scriptwriter in 1947 after going to Columbia Law School, teaching at City College and serving during the war with the OSS. He shook the world with his second script, for Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), and at the urging of star John Garfield wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948). It’s not going too far today to suggest that Force of Evil is far more original, sublime and lyrical than any Kazan film; equally, what it implies for the career that never subsequently happened is momentous. The 50s, at the very least, would not have been the same decade had Polonsky been working at full cry.

"Though he got to eventually write-direct two more films, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1970) and the forgotten Yugoslav epic Romance of a Horsethief (1971), Polonsky is famous now only as the Kazan antithesis, the Hollywood director who lived up to his principles and surrendered his career rather than surrender his friends’. Today, his reflections on Kazan’s final moment in the sun display little mellowing with age. 'About Kazan, I put it three ways: one, I wouldn’t want to be buried in the same cemetery with the guy. Two, if I was on a desert island with him I’d be afraid to fall asleep because he’d probably eat me for breakfast. Three, we’ve already given him the Benedict Arnold award, which is usually reserved for presidential assassins. Except he didn’t kill a president, just his friends. All those people with the Group Theater, they were his best friends.'

"'Seriously, it’s a terrible mistake,' the 88-year-old Polonsky growls from his home in L.A. a few weeks before the Oscar ceremony, waxing enthusiastically about Greenwich Village, his great grandchildren, Charlton Heston ('I was on this radio show and Chuck called in, and I said hey, you’re the king of guns, why dontcha go get a gun, give it to Kazan, he could blow his brains out and go down in infamy, which is all he wants.') and the 'media blitz' he’s enjoying. 'Suddenly everybody remembers the blacklist.' But does he plan to go to the Oscars? 'I’m invited, I’m always invited, I’m a member of the Academy. But why would I go? Did you know you have to pay to get into that? Why would I pay good money to see that guy, to go and sit on my hands?'"

The Gang's All Here

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:49:00 GMT

Money-shot reviews for May-June ‘08 (excluding several dozen films reviewed at IFC.com (check the index, at left), TCM.com and The Boston Phoenix):

My Effortless Brilliance (2008) Terrific if unambitious Kelly Reichart-esque indie about two estranged friends (a wary forest ranger/ex-grad student and a lonely, porcine, self-absorbed young novelist, played with wincing authenticity by critic/musician Sean Nelson) weathering the final death thrashes of their friendship in a secluded Washington cabin.

Ira & Abby (2006) I don’t know why Jennifer Westfeldt isn’t a star, but the witty-yet-conventional rom-com scripts she writes for herself might be a factor.

Speed Racer (2008) What tutti-frutti similes haven’t been evoked to describe this nightmare? It’s not a movie, it’s not even a Fruit Roll-Ups kiddie-TV commercial, it’s the Fruit Roll-Ups box design itself. Or the Roll-Ups? The high fructose corn syrup of contemporary cinema?

Petit Pow! Pow! Noel (2005) Watch for the upcoming Film Comment article in which I try to suss out exactly what this nauseating, creepy Canadian non-doc is actually about (along with Canadian non-docs like 2004's Jimmywork, 2006's Radiant City and 2006's Missing Victor Pellerin), beyond perhaps surmising that Canadians have an odd sense of humor.

Secrets of a Soul (1926) German Expressionism meets Freud in a nine-rounder, and G.E. wins by a knockout.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) Crashingly overrated Ealing farce, which famously has Alec Guinness taking on eight small roles while a muttering, sleepy Dennis Price slowly, humorlessly, goes about killing them off for the sake of inheritance.

Lost in Beijing (2007) Middling Chinese melodrama in which a young couple of capitalist scroungers get mixed up, pregnancy-wise, with an older massage-parlor pimp-hood and his dragon lady. The Taiwanese Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Jin dominates easily.

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite) (2007) The best looking Turkish cast eva? Revealing and powerful and marvelously generous to Hanna Schygulla, when it doesn’t stretch for those idiotic, whatta-awful-coincidence Crash moments.

The Gang’s All Here (1943) Busby Berkeley’s nightmarishly strange wartime musical froth; was BB, as many have maintained, a Surrealist/abstractionist, or did his irrationally opened-out, impossibly-observed orchestrations represent a striving toward a kind of bathing-beauty Gesamtkunstwerk that always lingered just beyond view?

The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) I used to enjoy Hammer films. I must’ve been a patient kid.

Merci Pour le Chocolate (2000) Claude Chabrol, pianos, hot chocolate, a lurking pathology that’s never explored, Isabelle Huppert in one of six movies she made that year, and me, wondering why. Watching Anna Mouglalis, however, was akin to observing a new species of human.

Kung Fu Panda (2008) Refreshingly witty about both real Chinese martial art traditions and Hong Kong genre loopiness. If they had now the Oscar category they’ll have to invent soon for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature, because soon all acting will be at the behest of digital cartoons, then Dustin Hoffman would take it.

Get Smart (2008) Holy shit, they made it into an action film, and killed all the jokes. Only funny line: crusty character star-of-the-moment Blake Clark as a Homeland Security general, spitting something about Kim Jong-Il: "That man’s insane! Everyone knows you can’t make pudding from bones – bones are crunchy!"

My Blueberry Nights (2007) Catching up with this critical hot potato – nobody seemed capable of dismissing or faintly praising it fast enough – I was entranced. In a few years, after all the gotchas and one-ups have been forgotten, it’ll reappear as classic Wong.

Billion Dollar Brain

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:31:00 GMT

The absence of clamor for my judgments on contemporary issues has been deafening, and so here forthwith is the first edition of My Pedagogic Autocratism, a semi-regular feature of the blog that will, once and for all, solve the problems and issues addressing modern American culture. I know, I know, it’s about time, but I’ve been busy.

Abortion: Easy, pick a time limit. Since all pregnancies are more or less exactly the same length, you don’t have to consider a wide variety of scenarios, and one point, more or less randomly selected, in say, the second trimester, should suffice. Or, perhaps, the end of the first trimester – someone decide. If everyone wants me to, I will. Extreme parties on either side won’t like it, but they’ll have to compromise. It’s the only way. Some bodily rights will be surrendered (as little as possible), and some semi-advanced fetuses will die (as few as possible). Most of us, and our daughters, would be well-served.

Political campaigns: Here’s my plan: allow contributions to roll in unfettered from all corners for all qualifying candidates – then, pool the money and divide it up evenly. That’ll level the playing field; the candidates that get millions and the candidates that get pennies will, in the end, have the same amount of funds to spend. I’d also outlaw corporate lobbying and TV commercials in one way or another starting in an election’s year’s June, but I know that’d be difficult to swing. But this isn’t: mandatory weekly debates, unscripted and unrehearsed and four hours long, televised on network TV commercial-free and open to unscreened public questions, for fifteen weeks leading up to Election Day. You miss one, you’re out. It’d virtually obliterate the need to spend media money.

Drugs: What’s the problem? The controlled substances that are a crisis are only a crisis in impoverished urban centers, largely, and so economic disparity is clearly the problem, not the dope. Refigure and reconceive federal law to favor taxpaying citizens, not corporations, and the issue will vanish. It means socializing, of course, which isn’t an ideological leap – we’re already massively socialized, and have been for more than a century, but in the form of corporate welfare and market support. That’d have to change. It’ll mean the financial sector will suffer, and America will no longer be the biggest swinging dick on Earth, but its majority of inhabitants will be better off. We could reenter the top 75% of industrialized nations in terms of poverty-line qualifiers, infant mortality, literacy, etc. This would, of course, also solve the problem of crime in a broad sense. Really, who wouldn’t swap American trade dominance for, say, Norway’s benefits, quality of life, minuscule crime rate, and health care system? The 1% who control the wealth, that’s who, and no one else.

Hate speech: Ignore it.

Capital punishment and prisons: First, abolish capital punishment. It’s just too fraught with error and ethical compromise. I don’t question the universal principle of taking an indisputably guilty multiple murderer or child rapist and simply disposing of them like fish bones. But it’s proven too difficult to do as a matter of policy. But those felons – the ones convicted by way of unarguable evidence, not eyewitnesses – would be considered beyond the pale of "humane treatment," and so tax money spent on their lodging and upkeep would be kept at a minimum. They should not be given better conditions than the zoo animals of yore: concrete space, bars, period. No TV, no library, no rec time, no therapy. I have no large issue with how other prisoners are being treated, except that the rough 25% of them that are in for drug charges would be granted immediate pardon. The number of inmates in general would gradually decrease, as per my proposition on "Drugs," above.

Iraq: Get out. Now. They want us out, we are morally and politically obligated to get out, the entire world views our presence there, clearly, as occupation, not security. We’re hanging in there because we (read: them, Bush, etc.) still think there’s a chance that we will own and profit from the nation’s oil resources. Nobody in the Pentagon or The New York Times gives a holy crap about the Iraqi people (or if they do, it’s a private concern, not useful at the agenda-setting table). So, if it is in fact a civil war happening or on the brink of happening, we’ve already lit the gasoline, and so whatever hellfire erupts we’re responsible for. We apologize, pay reparations, deep into the future, maybe even enable The Hague to try Bush and Cheney for war crimes. We give up the idea that we’ll be able to run the Iraqi government by fiat, and control the oil. If they want a theocracy, they will have one. It’d suck for the moneymen, who see nothing more than multi-digit figures clocking down (just as they always did when a beleaguered country would go "red"). But it wouldn’t make a difference to the rest of us, anymore than Iran’s 29-year theocracy has.

Being There

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:35:00 GMT

And again: putting the word out for this coming Wednesday evening, at the KGB Complex, a party-slash-reading-slash-whatever-it'll-be in honor of my new book, Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood, from SUNY Press. See, this:

Readers will include Stuart Klawans, Ed Halter, David Sterritt, B. Kite, and me;

Go to: 85 East Fourth Street in Manhattan; more info from co-sponsor Cinema Purgatorio, here.

Looking forward to seeing you, gentle readers. Skol!

A Better Tomorrow

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:47:00 GMT

Finally, just as the climate is thick with lamentations about the state of cinephilia, the state of film criticism, the pale state of cinema history in the befogged skull of the American cultural citizen, Moving Image Source is unveiled, filthy with state-of-the-art critical attack, global retro coverage, and comprehensive research resources, as spiffy and easy to explore as a runway model on 'ludes.

The inaugural "issue": considerations of Werner Herzog, Chris Marker, William Klein, Catherine Deneuve, Terence Davies, Andy Warhol and Eddo Stern, by me, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Joshua Clover, Chris Fujiwara, Ed Halter, B. Kite, Michael Koresky, Melissa Anderson, and so on.

Patronize it, love it, keep the fire howling.

Come Drink with Me

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:16:00 GMT

It's not too late! for me, in thrall to my own superhuman procrastinative powers, to notify the Earth of an upcoming event/reading/tipple-rally in support of my new book, Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood, from SUNY Press, in the KGB Complex in Manhattan, on Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. Anticipated readers include Stuart Klawans, Ed Halter, David Sterritt, and B. Kite... Guy Maddin, who was so looking forward to the beers I'd buy him, will unfortunately be in transit.

Where: 85 East Fourth Street in Manhattan; more info from co-sponsor Cinema Purgatorio, here.

All welcome; come and buy a book and toss back some bumpers with your movieskull comrades and show support for beleagured/disenfranchised film critics everywhere!

What Happened Was...

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 19 May 2008 01:29:00 GMT

A propos of... oh, fuck a propos! The first of what might be interminable random sortings of bests; who said the history of cinema, as seen from a North American’s perspective, can’t be, in its every bump and moment and peak, weighed and measured? Argue if you dare.

Best Actor of 1929: Uno Henning, A Cottage on Dartmoor

Best First Film of 1931: Madchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan)

Best Soviet Film of 1933: Outskirts

Best Screenplay of 1940: Remember the Night (Preston Sturges)

Best Short of 1944: Hell Bent for Election (Charles M. Jones)

Best German Film of 1946: The Murderers Are Among Us

Best Supporting Actor of 1948: Thomas Gomez, Force of Evil

Best Film of 1952: El

Best Cinematography of 1959: The Letter Never Sent (Sergei Urusevsky)

Best Italian Film of 1961: Salvatore Guiliano

Best Actor of 1963: Michel Piccoli, Contempt

Best First Film of 1965: A Blonde in Love (Milos Forman)

Best Supporting Actor of 1967: Boris Karloff, Targets

Best Cinematography of 1969: The Color of Pomegranates

Best Hungarian Film of 1973: Riddance

Best Short of 1977: Valse Triste (Bruce Conner)

Best Supporting Actress of 1981: Lisa Eichhorn, Cutter’s Way

Best Documentary of 1987: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

Best Actor of 1988: Jeremy Irons, Dead Ringers

Best Actress of 1994: Karen Sillas, What Happened Was...

Best First Film of 1999: The Blair Witch Project

Best Japanese Film of 2004: A Taste of Tea

Best First Film of 2006: The Mist in the Palm Trees

Skol!

We Live Again

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:38:00 GMT

One-offs, for the Spring of 2008:

    - When it’s all looked down upon as if by a seagull caught in an updraft, it does appear that Dick Cheney is the only politician in memory who seems to know he is evil.

    - Tracks records count for only so much – I recently saw We Live Again (1934), a Golden Era melodrama that combined the talents/work of Rouben Mamoulian and Preston Sturges and Leo Tolstoy and Maxwell Anderson and Fredric March and Gregg Toland and Thornton Wilder (uncredited) and Alfred Newman, and despite its credits it kinda smelled up the joint. Anna Sten, whose second Hollywood film this was, remained dreadful, but she alone couldn’t’ve pulled the film down. It had to be fate.

    - I find as I plow through my 40s that I can no longer tolerate The Eagles.

    - It’s hilarious how reviewers of Martin Amis’s new book of 9/11 essays are taking to slam him for his fundamental position of seeing serious religion and civilized reason as standing opposed to each other, which they (the reviewers) are doing presumably because the corporations they work for insist on it, for fear of losing market share. They are wrong. Amis, admittedly too often a self-infatuated boob, is right. Look at the definitions. If religion wasn’t illogical, whimsical, fantastical and unreasonable, it wouldn’t be religion, it’d be fact. I could start a faith centered on, say, balloon-headed alien gods from Alpha Centauri, but the minute I produce an iota of evidence to support my religion’s ideas, a photo or strand of DNA, my Balloon-Headed Alpha Centaurion belief system is no longer "belief" or "faith" or religion, it’s science. Period.

    - Speed Racer, attended for the sake of children in a movie wasteland of few choices, is little more than sensory abuse. As if someone had taken a wad of radioactive Good ‘n Fruity and ground them into my eyes with their boot heel. As if we all, myself and my children, are regarded as little more than toddlers, instinctly and dumbly drawn to brightly colored objects.

Standard Operating Procedure

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Smoking hot money-shot reviewing, April '08:

We Are Wizards (2007) Doc made by high schoolers about extreme Harry Potter fandom. Terrifying.

My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello Figlio Unico) (2007) Reviewed here.

Beowulf (2007) Although deftly, Oedipally rewritten to fit the Hollywood standard of what-goes-around-comes-around storysmithing, a waste of hard-drive space. Digitals can’t act. And why are the women always cross-eyed?

The Ruins (2008) Boy, A Simple Plan was smart and gripping.

What Remains (2006) Sally Mann is a savvy narcissist, and her documentarian just wants to fuck her.

Party 7 (2000) The warmup swing before A Taste of Tea and Funky Forest: The First Contact, and not at all amusing.

Leatherheads (2008) Such a shame. Could set the the cause of historical sports movies back a decade.

Hypocrites (1915) Lois Weber’s magical moral diatribe, outshining Griffith in his prime. More here.

The Ocean Waif (1916) Alice Guy-Blache goes commercial. Doris Kenyon may’ve been the loveliest WWI-era actress in America.

The Pied Piper of Hutzovina (2006) Eugene Hutz goes to Eastern Europe and Russia, a British documentarian in love with the lug goes, and nothing is consummated except Hutz’s sweaty intercourse with his concert audience.

Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) Mumble this. Actually, Greta Gerwig is terrific as the in-between girl everybody wants.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) Errol Morris, stop blowing Karl Rove. Where’s the investigation up the ladder? And what is it with all that Elfman-scored F/X bullshit? What’s here that CNN didn’t tell me? My knives are out in In These Times.

I Am Legend (2007) A lazy rent. The Matheson book still awaits the right adaptation. For one thing, without the book’s ending the title makes no sense.

Bosque de Sombras (The Backwoods) (2006) Gary Oldman and Virginie Ledoyen and some little girl with Muppet gloves Straw Dogs-ing in Basque country, kinda, and for what reason I couldn’t say.

‘49-‘17 (1917) The first full-on Western parody? Short-lived phenom Ruth Ann Baldwin (who made 12 films in 1917 before being demoted to the script department at Universal) rips the cliches open, but gently.

The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) A wondrous, eccentric indie from Forgottentown, PA. I wax at IFC Blog.

Inside (l'Intérieur) (2007) Nothing is more vulnerable than a pregnant belly, but this blood bucket blows every opportunity, and goes too far too soon too crassly.

Smart People (2008) The firsttimer directing did whatever he could to fuck it up, but the literate personality in the house keeps things afloat. Thomas Haden Church deserves a Nobel.

Bamako (2006) Abderrahmane Sissako’s best film, and the oddest political polemic to come out of a developing nation since, well, maybe ever.

Touch of Evil

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:00:00 GMT

A new first – at least to me – in the history of Presidential doublespeak: today, in honor of Pope Benedict XVI’s U.S. visit, Bush spewed a requisite string of hollow ping-pong balls, and out with them came this pungent phrase, uttered in righteously doctrinaire tones: "the dictatorship of relativism." Roll that baby around in your cheeks for a minute before hocking back out.

Now, we could, but won't, leap right over the initial conclusion – that "relativism" is a word and idea Bush himself, who retains an aura of dumbfounded mediocrity despite his many, presumably educational years in office, could not have possibly defined during his grade-C Yale years, and, I’ll bet, for decades after that. Chances are he still doesn’t know exactly what it means, nor "sophistry." In this particular moment at least, you’d be hard pressed to find an instance in American history where the gap is any broader between a president’s literacy and the language he is given by speechwriters to say aloud.

Of course, his staff, and the Pope, know what relativism means, insofar as they’re familiar with their own definition: for them, "the dictatorship of relativism" refers to the blight that has infected our culture in the postwar decades, a blight of liberalism, plurality, multiculturism, tolerance and political correctness. You can just hear the think-tank thought-crunch meeting that decided that "relativism" would be the new neocon bugbear, the new code word intended to invoke in the economically terrified skulls of Middle America the new way to demonize them – foreigners, Muslims, homosexuals, abortionists, New Yorkers, liberals, anti-corporatists, atheists, artists, Frenchmen, what have you. It’s a good code word, because its translations are flexible and various, however unmistakable it is coming from the smirking and uncomprehending lips of Bush II.

What Mr. and Mrs. Joe Nebraska won’t contemplate, because they’re not instructed to, is the realpolitik oppositive term, which by definition is the ambition of Bush, Ratzinger, et al. – "absolutism." If you defined it for most Americans, though, I’d imagine they’d feel a giant, cold chill run up the collective spine. But that’s what the stakes are: ideological and therefore practical dominance. Bush virtually came right out and said it, and the struggle for it and against it won’t end when he’s gone.

Epic Movie

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:12:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Part IV

(Sometimes, one senses that a disposable piece of journalism never quite got its fair day in the sun, as didn't this 2004 PTSNBN consideration of Oliver Stone's Alexander; writing it was so much more fun than watching the movie.)

"There seems to be no dodging the big, fat neo-epic, a born-again genre with roots in the expensive deployment of muscular-dull movie stars, milling extras and Cinemascope. Today, only the expensive muscular-dull movie stars remain, stranded in a storm of digital backfill. Are a new line of weightlifter Hercules movies very far behind? Of this year’s dusty antiquities (King Arthur, Troy, The Passion of the Christ, Alexander), which has balanced pretension, budget bloat and profit desperately enough to win the inevitable Academy benediction?

"Dispensing with the essentials, let’s immediately say that Oliver Stone’s Alexander – the winner of the just-like-the-awful-Columbus-movie-race-of-1992 sprint against Baz Luhrmann’s Untitled Alexander the Great Project – is a festival of risible wiggery. The blond mop someone dropped on top of poor Connor Paolo’s head as he catatonically limns the tween-aged Macedonian conqueror is merely the appetizer; together, warriors Jonathan Rhys-Davies, Gary Stretch and Jared Leto could assemble a Bon Jovi cover outfit when the Asian campaigns are over. Presiding above all is Colin Farrell’s tousled bleach job, his gypsy-moth eyebrows and dark brooding roots suggesting less the eponymous myth-figure in his battlefield prime than a Vanity Fair hairdresser ablaze with purpose during a high-pressure Kirsten Dunst cover shoot.

"Truly, Monty Python has scorched this earth already so well; the reoccurring title "June 323 B.C.' only does The Life of Brian’s "Judea 33 A.D.... Saturday Afternoon... About Tea Time' one better by not being a gag. Stone seems a vaguely sensible choice, given the Stoney, chopshop last half-decade of historical pageants, as messily incomprehensible in their montage-frenzy as the football games in Any Given Sunday or the taping sessions in Nixon. Alexander’s major battles are paradigmatically sloppy, too, overedited and consumed with the CGI delirium tremens, but in most aspects the man at the wheel here could have been Wolfgang Peterson. Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone’s post-produces the Dickens out of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.

"At least there’s no anachronistic insertion of martial arts into the soldiers’ training regimen. What’s unique about Alexander is its man love. A semi-hidden homo heart has always beat under pre-medieval pop; we’ve all seen the cut Curtis-Olivier seduction in Spartacus by now, if not the Ben-Hur that Stephen Boyd and uncredited scripter Gore Vidal were fashioning under Charlton Heston’s oblivious nose and with director William Wyler’s scoffing consent. But this Salome drops all of its veils – Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) is forthright in his belief that well-moderated gay fucking will 'build a city-state and lift us from our frog-pond,' while Alexander’s passionate longtime companionship with first lieutenant Hephaistion (Leto) is the movie’s only love story. Predominant among a few laugh-getters is Hephaistion’s silent, bedroom-eyes beseechment for nookie – augmented by a slight toss of Anistonian hair – only to be told by his top, 'not on the eve of a battle.' Once Babylon is taken from the Persians (yes, Stone goes for a replay of Intolerance’s vertical pan, although naturally nothing we see is real), the two die-hards lounge around in silk robes with chaliced cocktails like a married couple at The Pines. They even pledge to meet in Hades like Achilles and Patroclus, which is more than Troy had nerve for.

"Indeed, if Angelina Jolie, as A’s sorceress-mother Olympias, white pythons entwined around her legs, seems destined for a Maria Montez Lifetime Achievement in Vamp Award, Stone reaches for screaming-mimi drama queenhood. When Alexander, having conquered the Persians, decides to take the peasant girl Rozanna (Rosario Dawson) as his wife, a puddle-eyed Leto appears with his mascara running like Dorothy Malone’s to present his own engagement ring. The gay trysts are always implied but the l’amour fou is not, especially at Hephaistion’s deathbed, where Leto trembles like Wuthering Heights’ Cathy, and Stone scores another unintentional hilarity as odyssey-worn Alexander wanders to the window blabbing about the adventures the army will have in the spring while his lover endures lonely death throes in the background.

"There’s more – Val Kilmer, as Alexander’s one-eyed lout-Dad King Philip, delivers a refreshing draught of conviction, and the dialogue is full of standard-operating-bullshit humdingers ('And you, unbreakable Antigonous!'). The climactic battle with Indian elephants has a certain bizarre friction until you realize to what outlandish degree Stone is digitally shake-&-baking the images, 28 Days Later -style, to make the slow-moving beasts seem more scarifying. But despite all of the fringe benefits, Alexander is a patience-tester, clotted with relentless Vangelis hosannas and declamations of glory. Unsurprisingly, it’s a political lemon. The 'we’re superior to the Persians' speeches and Alexander’s cant about nation-building for the benefit of the poor 'barbarians' might constitute a critique – of Alexander or Bush II or both – if they weren’t undercut by the film’s exalting wail of praise. Intercutting regal eagles with Alexander’s profile may suggest Gance’s Napoleon or a recent campaign ad; either way, it’s celebrating bloodshed. Stone seems to identify with the slaughterer general, whatever era he’s in."

Fireworks

Michael Atkinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:28:00 GMT

Weighing in on two hot-button moviemad matters, in this the spring of our discontent: first, Charlton Heston was, in fact, a fairly terrible actor, "axiomatic" or not. Had he manifested in the age of Paul Muni and Norma Shearer he might've seemed remarkable, but in the naturalistic day of Brando, Newman, Hackman and Nicholson, Heston was a leaden, almost comical log of wood. (Imagine him attempting comedy.) If he's still an "axiom," cinema is in trouble. Of course, I have qualifications, having loved Heston's profile-to-the-sky essence when I was a kid. Primarily, Heston hit home runs, like many monolithic stars, when he was playing pricks and assholes -- The Big Country, The Naked Jungle, Major Dundee, (best of all) Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, etc. Planet of the Apes, in fact, remains a freaky and wonderful speculative satire to a large extent because of his egomaniacal, fuck-em-all personality. But the rest, in a career that stretched over a half-century, is tough to take. Touch of Evil is a masterpiece in spite of him. The historical epics are intolerable, excepting El Cid thanks to Anthony Mann's fluency with landscape.

Second, a cynical voice from the film-reviewing wilderness in regards to the recent Night of the Knives for American film critics, a bloodletting that seemed to begin with me when I was dumped, from the PTSNBN, in '06 (or maybe it just looks that way from here)... Essentially, I cannot be terribly surprised; the existence of full-time staff film reviewers is a nutty aberration in the history of periodical publishing, just as are (or were) book reviewers and theater reviewers, from a business point of view. I'd love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn't make very much sense, for the simple reason that it's not truly a full-time job. If you're David Ansen, say, you might see three or four movies a week, and be asked to generate maybe a 1000 or 1500 words of unchallenging copy reviewing them, and the time thus taken shouldn't take you more than ten, eleven hours, max. That's a part-time job. I treated it, and continue to treat it, as just one part of my work-life and income, because I've had to. But when I was handed a staff position, I felt as if I was running a scam. All of the hubbub surrounding the firings and buyouts seems, from anywhere out there in the real world, like a lot of whining, about how certain writers won't be paid a full-on living wage for watching a movie a day and then writing for a few hours about them, every week. The cops, bartenders, union agents, managers, editors and public school teachers I know would look on that job as a vacation.

Of course, those jobs existed to begin with because publishers and editors thought writers were valuable, and paid them to sit on their asses (like they still do at The New Yorker) because they wanted those writers' availability and flow of copy. But today that's far less important. The pancaking financial burden, and quarterly losses, of newspaper and magazine publishing is certainly one aspect of it. So is the undeniable sense that critics in general, being the last independent defense standing against a full-court press of consumerist ideology, may be doomed because of their adversarial position toward the corporate sell-machines that pay them.

But there's also this: the writing isn't valued anymore, and not only because there's a certain amount (not much) of decent writing to be had on the net, for free. Interesting expository writing, the kind that only a few writers can write, the kind that takes a retained high school education to read and understand, is just not considered of value in our culture. By evolution or design (I'd vote for the latter), we're much stupider now than we were 40 or 80 years ago, a simple fact that can be proven to any fool by a comparison between 1968 and today, by way of the two eras' political speech rhetoric, song lyrics, movie content, fiction bestsellers, primetime TV programming, magazine syntax, school curricula, so on and so on. If we as a culture couldn't find the interest and patience for, say, A.J. Leibling or H.L. Mencken or George Santayana or Rebecca West or Bertrand Russell or George Orwell -- and, if they were writing today, no interest or patience would be expended upon them at all -- then paying talented writers a staff wage nowadays makes no practical sense. Writers who can hit that middle ground, the one without demanding subclauses or allusions, etc., are a dime a dozen, and do not need to be kept on retainer. If writing in America is a matter for the common denominatorship, then we're all freelancers, and we'd better face up to it.

The Unbelievable Truth

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:59:00 GMT

Can't! Stop! Read! The Believer! Film Issue! -- I wax, in characteristically sploogey terms, on the ecstacies of the filmic protein...

Spring Fever

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:07:00 GMT

Aromatic money-shot film reviewing, March to April, 2008:

Night Nurse (1931) Cheesy pre-Code salaciousness, with Joan Blondell’s giant, shiny corneas and a bizarrely druggy performance from Ralf Harolde as an evil MD.

Terror’s Advocate (2007) Has Barbet Schroeder lost his nerve, after so long?

Her Name Is Sabine (2007) From The IFC Blog: "did the 16-year-old Bonnaire use her sister as a model [for A Nos Amours], and was the film’s Suzanne intended to be slightly ‘off,’ autistically disconnected in some hidden way from her family, helpless in her impulsiveness? It almost seems certain that Bonnaire was channeling her sister in Agnes Varda’s ferociously antisocial Vagabond (1985) – the existential tension of which could easily be read as an autistic crisis, or vice versa."

Aniki Bobo (1942) Manoel de Oliveira’s first feature, a Little Rascals melodrama blessed with a nightened rooftop idyll at a young girl’s bedroom window.

Rite of Spring (Acto de Primavera) (1963) De Oliveira has a Portuguese town reenact their own annual Passion Play as a Christ film – nudging over Rouch and forecasting Kiarostami, it might be MdO’s best.

Dangerous Crossing (1953) Jeanne Crain stuck on a cruise ship and no one believes her missing husband exists at all. Didn’t Jodie Foster remake this, for a ten million times the budget, and I've forgotten it already?

Khadak (2006) The best and most eccentrically Mongolian Mongolian movie ever made by an American and a Belgian.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) What’s wrong with it? Aims low, conjures quixotic characters in broad strokes, Adrien Brody is revealed to be the new Buster Keaton.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) Canned, underlit, underdramatized, and silly, but the aristocracy-pimping-daughters-to-the-king tale should be remade in a few years by someone who knows how, not some BBC bum.

The Dragon Painter (1919) Not a great silent, but a glimpse of a subgenre we never knew we had – post-WWI ethnic melodramas made specifically for Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

Paranoid Park (2007) Lovely, evocative and masterly – but isn’t Van Sant a little old to be still hanging out with disaffected teens?

Moolaade (2004) Sembene went out with a fuck-the-genital-mutilators-where-they-live bang. And it looks beautiful, an indulgence he finally allowed himself.

Daisy Kenyon (1947) Hands down, the most unpredictable, poetic, grown-up, four-dimensional Hollywood melodrama of the ‘40s. Alright, maybe not hands down, maybe arguably. But still.

The Band’s Visit (2007) Stone-faced comedy of alienation, except I’m not laughing.

Inspector Lavardin (1986) Claude Chabrol, snoring.

Children of the Sun (2007) A home-movie-built doc about the Kibbutz, which seen intimately here seem both idyllic and moronically destructive for kids.

And Along Came Tourists (2007) Idiotic "drama" about a German hunk "learning" about genocide while "working" a summer job at the tourist attraction that is Auschwitz.

War Made Easy (2007) Another primer in American propaganda, and as with all the others viewing it should be a high school graduation requirement.

Life Is a Bed of Roses (La Vie Est un Roman) (1983) Alain Resnais going crazy in the ‘80s. At least he and his cast were having fun like gangbusters.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) British history shot like a Lord of the Rings sequel. Risible.

Terror Island (1920) Harry Houdini, and an adorable artifact of a much-mourned, long-lost era before there was a Criss Angel.

The Man from Beyond (1922) Houdini again, but in a story that begs to be remade: a man, frozen on an Arctic shipwreck for a century, is thawed out and awakens to obsessions about the woman he left behind.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) Why can't all American movies be like this? Relaxed, thoughtful, ruminative, literate, comfortable with long scenes of dialogue and multiple narrative threads (Brad Pitt’s James is really just one in an ensemble). Sinfully overlooked, underseen, overcriticized and misunderstood.

Iraq for Sale

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:29:00 GMT

Read the new Modern Painters -- because I'm in it (dirty kuffar!), and there's art, too!

Outskirts

Michael Atkinson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:25:00 GMT

So, who's an exile?
The estimable James Keepnews comments: "'...salve for the cineaste’s lonesome fury' -- !!! I love this closing phrase from the description of exile cinema on the suny press site. As someone who views himself as a furiously lonesome cinephile (g-d forbid i should upset dave kehr on this point, much less others), your point is well-served by the fact that i don't recognize nearly half the names you mention in your intro. and, of those i do recognize, it's hugely embarrassing to note that i didn't realize how many of these directors have been active well into the 21st century -- how many people can name another solanas film after hour of the furnaces?...
"to this extent, we're all exiles, filmmakers as much as audiences who might be well disposed to embrace those filmmakers if they had any real way of finding out about their work. i mean, how many people have actually SEEN hour of the furnaces, much less solanas' other work? it certainly is an issue of distribution, of reels to theaters as much as to the video stores. even here in the, ahem, "greater new york metropolitan area," the amount of screens potentially dedicated to the work by the directors you list gets smaller and smaller as time wears on. and not to beat up on one of the outlets that publishes your work, but then you have an outfit like ifc, whose exclusive deal with blockbuster equals versions of films "edited" per blockbuster's policy of promoting "unrated" softcore but never anything rated nc-17. maybe something like 4 months may avoid being truncated, but what else would go under the knife, as it were?
"it's hard out here for a cineaste/phile, and even with so much information available on the web now, harder still to break through that sense of exile. ask alex cox fans, one name i'd add. hell, you could add godard for that matter..."
Skol! Gareth notes, "You've mentioned a couple, but you could add more or less any filmmaker from Africa to that list. Not all are, I think, inherently worth championing just because they're from Africa, but there are fascinating directors out there whose work is essentially invisible. Even when a film gets some mainstream coverage, like Mahamat Salah Haroun's film "Daratt" a year ago, there's no sign of a DVD release, while we can but dream of seeing Cisse's earlier films on DVD. Some films are available through outfits like California Newsreel, but they're not available through Netflix, the kind of thing that would give them wider visibility."

No question. From Dave: "...Lav Diaz, Catherine Breillat, Eugene Green, Julio Medem, Pedro Costa, Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Wang Bing, Manoel de Oliveira, Lou Ye, Abel Ferrara, Jose Luis Guerin, Fatih Akin, Jia Zhangke, Philippe Garrel, Alexander Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, anyone with the last name Makhmalbaf, and pretty much every genre or avantgarde filmmaker who doesn't work in English (and many who do). And while the book addresses some East Asian genre cinema or popular cinema - I'm always happy to see someone writing about Tsui - that material is mostly critically 'safe' as a subject. It's certainly worthy of attention - but so are films by Syed Noor or Daniel Calparsoro or Santiago Segura (OK, maybe not Segura) or Ashutosh Gowariker, or Abdisalam Aato or...
"I'm not trying to be critical, but rather to laud this as a step toward greater representation of these filmmakers, and to recognize that there's much more work to be done (which, of course, you know)."

For the sake of the book's parameters, I'd argue that Breillat, Kiarostami, de Oliveira, Ferrara, Jia, Sokurov and Tsai have release records here that scores of other directors would envy, though all could be improved, of course. The rest are prime choices.

Matt adds: "...Kim Ki-duk, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Agnes Varda... Very happy to see a chapters on Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Martin Arnold in there, by the way."

Most of whom are regularly distributed here, if lamely/cheaply. Kim, one could suggest, has received more than his due.

Island of Lost Souls

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:49:00 GMT

In the intro to Exile Cinema, I lay out the parameters of the book's subject selection process -- that the filmmakers "must be alive, and at least potentially productive," and that, in terms of their "visibility in the English-speaking world’s media eye," they should have "as little as possible. The filmmakers’ work could be distributed in the United States, but only sparsely, or badly, or invisibly."

Given that, I go on to vomit out a list of candidates who did not happen to be included: "...Jacques Rivette, Peter Watkins, Abderrahmane Sissako, Wojiech Has, Karoly Makk, Jan Nemec, Judit Elek, Craig Baldwin, Juraj Jakubisko, Claude Faraldo, Artavazd Peleshian, Elia Suleiman, Fred Kelemen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Miklos Jancso, Alain Resnais, Hur Jin-ho, Soulyemane Cisse, Yvonne Rainer, Jan Jakob Kolski, Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet, Bruce Conner, Otar Iosseliani, Shinji Aoyama, Manuela Viegas, Gianluigi Toccafondo, Michael Snow, Alex de la Iglesias, Zeki Demirkubuz, Jem Cohen, Darius Mehrjui, Faouzi Bensaidi, Jean Rouch, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Helke Sander, Alexei German (Sr. & Jr.), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Fernando Solanas, Jan Lenica, Youri Nourstein, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Jean Rollin, Lee Chang-dong, Roy Andersson, Ann Hui, Youssef Chahine, Yim Ho, Peter Solan, Lewis Klahr, Mati Kutt, Nils Malmros, Kazuo Hara, Andrew Kotting, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Nonzee Nimibutr, Pjer Zalica, Goran Paskaljevic, Vera Chytilova, Kira Muratova, Harun Farocki, Werner Schroeter, Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, Vitali Kanevsky, Teresa Villaverde, Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, Keren Yedaya, Marta Meszaros, Wisit Sasanatieng, William Greaves..."

It's an interesting talking point -- and the more you talk about it, the more appallingly clear it becomes that American distributors and media keep us pretty much blind and deaf as to what the global medium is producing. I'd love to hear more, as comments -- names I left out, arguments for and against -- and I'll post 'em.

Torrents of Spring

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:14:00 GMT

Random observations/ruminations, March ‘08:

Michael Haneke shouldn’t play ethics instructor. I love his last five movies, but Funny Games, either version, is a sanctimonious attempt to "implicate" those in the audience with presumably smaller brainpans than his. As Sight & Sound reasoned, he remade it with English-speaking movie stars because the Austrian version only got seen by critics and aficionados, who of course don’t need to be lectured to. Nice to know that both films were not made for me, as if I’d passed a minimum-requirements test and got to skip English Comp 101. But no one’s watching the new version, either. Maybe if he remade it again, on Sesame Street, he’d be assured of getting his laborious message across. Maybe even really dumb moviegoers don’t like sermons.

Parents throw away their children’s toys when the kids aren’t home – the toys that parents perceive as having been outgrown. They do it secretly because they know the kids might disagree. I’ve done it, they all do it, your parents did it to you.
Neither Marxist/historical film theory nor auteurism are sufficient to the work of film criticism – the former ignores the individual artist in favor of amorphous social forces, and the latter places too much emphasis on the artist, who even if he or she were to have everything he or she wanted the way they wanted it are subject to influences and imperatives beyond their control. But together, they are an eloquent answer. Dub it ethno-auteurism, the idea that, simply, many if not most worthwhile movies are most profitably considered as the conflict, tension and/or dialogue that a filmmaker has with his or her social and/or national culture. From the German Expressionists to the Soviet montagists to the "auteurist" natives and emigres working within the Hollywood factory, to the New Waves and the independents and the Iranians and beyond, there’s scarcely a single notable piece of work that can’t be viewed this way, and viewed in a way that appears comprehensible, responsible and profound.
Using "-core" as a suffix has got to stop, because it means nothing.
The deaths in teenage slasher films are not, contrary to decades of scholarly cant and critical dismissal, the punishment dealt out by the filmmakers – or by us all? – as a result of teen sex. Fans of the genre have always seen it differently: they see it as an extreme enactment of the perils and risks they see themselves as facing embarking on adult life, i.e., having sex, living without supervision, experiencing freedom & violence & pain etc. without the mollifying presences of Mom and Dad.
Why is it that the newspapers of today, March 18, feature David Paterson’s admitted infidelity on the front page, while the fact that Gov. Jim McGreevey told the Associated Press outright that he’d had THREESOMES! with his wife and a male co-worker is relegated to the mid-pages?
Is Manoel de Oliveira overrated? Well, provavelmente! Read more, even if the programmer at the Harvard Film Archives publicly denounced me as having "seen too many Bruce Willis movies" for saying so, to which I reply, of course I have, as have we all.

Tomorrow We Move

Michael Atkinson — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:57:00 GMT

Finally, available now: EXILE CINEMA: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood, from SUNY Press --

-- with swoony cover art courtesy of Guy Maddin and photog Jeff Solylo, and contributions by Maddin (on Jose Mojica Marins!), Chuck Stephens (on Monte Hellman!), Jonathan Rosenbaum (on Seijun Suzuki!), Ed Park (on Bong Joon-ho!), Stuart Klawans (on Chantal Akerman!), Joshua Clover (on Chris Marker!), Jonathan Romney (on Bela Tarr!), Dennis Lim (on Amir Muhammad!), Graham Fuller (on Christopher Munch!), and many more! No bathroom, coffee house, contemporary cinema seminar, video-library shelf, or hungry cinephile's nightstand is complete without a copy!

Also! at Mike-azon.com, you'd get a two-fer if purchased with Exile Cinema contribs' latest, including:
Pat Aufderheide's Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Univ. Press),
Howard Hampton's Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard Univ. Press),
Jonathan Rosembaum's Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press),
Geoff Andrew's Stranger than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema (Limelight Eds.),
Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids (Univ. of California Press),
Jessica Winter's The Rough Guide to American Independent Film (Rough Guides),
Ed Park's Personal Days (Random House),
Stuart Klawans's Left in the Dark (Nation Books),
Maitland McDonagh's Movie Lust (Sasquatch Books),
Jonathan Romney's Short Orders (Serpent's Tail),
Guy Maddin's From the Atelier Tovar (Coach House Press),
Ed Halter's From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (Thunder's Mouth Press),
George Toles's A House Made of Light (Wayne State Univ. Press),
and/or
David Sterritt's Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader (Univ. of Mississippi Press).

One Hour with You

Michael Atkinson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:17:00 GMT

Juicy money-shot reviewing continues, for Jan.-Feb. '08:

Monte Carlo (1930) Who knew Jeanette MacDonald was so fuckable? Lubitsch certainly did. A gift from the deep early-sound past, and Jack Buchanan, looking all of 19, saves us from leering Chevalierism.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) Sorry, Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, looking like a to-die-for prom couple, deserved to be razzed out of the office by Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman.

Planet of Storms (1961) Soviet sci-fi, famously recut and rereleased twice by Roger Corman, is in its aboriginal state, like so much Soviet pulp, surprisingly despairing, doomy and martyr-drunk. Crazy Venusian landscapes.

Secret Things (2002) Jean-Claude Brissau’s trite gender-warfare softporn, notable only for Sabrina Seyvecou’s wide-eyed orgasmic zest.

The Milky Way (1969) Luis Bunuel finally, after a lifetime of anti-clerical ire, addresses Catholicism head on, and as always a master satirist’s vision dwindles with the vitality of his target. Ah well, it’s still funny.

Island in the Sun (1957) Robert Rossen cashed a check directing this thick-limbed adaptation from Alec Waugh; James Mason stands out as a frustrated colonialist bigot, as does Dorothy Dandridge as a color-line-crossing West Indies maiden. The rest, as blah as Joan Fontaine’s postdubbing.

Darkon (2007) Profound and wickedly ironic doc about live-action sword-&-sorcery role-playing, saying bargeloads about the quest for meaning in the otherwise destitute lives of the American lower-middle classes. The filmmakers go the "game" one better, by arranging it into a straight-faced action movie, and making the warehouse workers, ex-strippers and fastfood clerks-in-armor the stars of their own fantasy epic. But are they?

Kilometre Zero (2005) Hiner Saleem returns to Iraq, with a dust-dry comedy about the Iran-Iraq war, the oppression of the Kurds, and driving with corpses.

Across the Universe (2007) What tripe. Did we ask for a remake of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? No one thought actually naming the characters Jude, Prudence, Lucy and JoJo was a bit... fucking stupid? And why in this version of the ‘60s are there no Beatles?

Wife to Be Sacrificed (1975) Crazy fetishistic Japanese exploitation, but with an ironic and lyrical heart, once you’re past the enemas and coprophilia. Masaru Konuma is new to me, but distance will be maintained.

One Hour with You (1932) Lubitsch and MacDonald again, ringing out like a penguin-headed crystal drink stirrer gently rapped against a Waterford glass.

Trigger Man (2007) Quite like the movies I made on Super 8mm in high school. Wait a minute, it’s exactly a movie I made on Super 8mm in high school.

The Master Mystery (1919) Harry Houdini’s first bid for stardom; almost four hours of serial (surviving out of at least seven) in which the escape artiste gets bound up dozens of times, and then wriggles loose. With arguably cinema’s first robot (but unarguably one of its most hilarious), and a blissful aura of aged pulpy innocence, like an itch-free morphine dream you don’t want to wake from.

The Man Who Wasn't There

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 05:24:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Article III

[Returning again to the forgotten/urinated-upon pages of the PTSNBN, this time in anonymous and very snide retort to the semi-notorious David Manning scandal of 2001, in which it was revealed that Sony publicity executives had fabricated their own blurb whore out of whole cloth. So, he responds.]

6/5/01

To: The Village Voice, Newsweek, Variety, MSNBC, Los Angeles Times, et al., and to whomever else it may concern:

I’d like a chance to respond to the recent news report that I, David Manning of The Ridgefield Press, am a fictional character concocted by a desperate and amoral (but very smart and hip) Sony Pictures publicity department to provide their fabulous, terrific films with advertisement blurbs. Though a riveting, inventive and even sexy conceit, this is simply untrue: I am alive and well and irresistible in America. Great! I have a house (or rather, the basement of a house), a gerbil, a credit card, a receding hairline, a used car and a kick-ass Sony DVD player. Absolutely real! Fantastic!

While it’s true I do not work for The Ridgefield Press, whatever that is, I am still just as much of a "legitimate" critic as any other – and I’ve got the blurb credits, Four Seasons towels and junket buffet waistline to prove it. (That sentence rocked!) Why am I being pilloried, among the nation’s "gray-market" reviewers? (Lewis Lapham’s phrase, not mine, and isn’t he sensational?) Could it be elitism? I was the only critic who had the nerve to declaim love for the heart-stopping thrill-ride Vertical Limit and that uproarious laugh-fest The Animal, and for that I’ve been relegated to the critic’s ultimate gulag – being a public relations felony instead of a flesh-and-blood filmgoer who just so happens to like virtually every movie he’s ever seen. I just love movies, like a pig loves its slop. With so many fussy, can’t-relax, can’t-stop-discerning-crap-from-cranberry-sauce "serious" critics scribbling away, isn’t there room for a little unconditional l’amour? Hot!

Anyway, I wasn’t entirely alone in my praise of Hollow Man and A Knight’s Tale, just almost alone, which proves something, I just don’t know what. That they’re all Sony movies – scintillating, cool, unforgettable Sony movies – isn’t a coincidence, but it’s not important, either. When Sony has a hard time finding blurbable praise, that’s when they call me. (And they always knew what suite I’m in.) The other studios never call. Simple as that. Blast off!

One thing’s for sure, though – the Sony people deserve to be cut a little slack. Of course they solicit quotes straight from reviewers after feeding them and getting them starched on chardonnay – you expect these busy pros to hunt through every review in The Oshkosh Telegram-Monitor looking for quotes? (Tremendous point!) This whole critic thing is absurd anyway, the studios should just be able to forget about the quotation marks and say IT’S GREAT without needing an "objective" judge to qualify it. Exciting idea! Bottles of soda don’t need critics, and neither do skin mags. You see it, you buy it, simple as that. Awesome!

I’m real, but I know for a fact that Peter Travers isn’t, and neither are most of the Times’ restaurant critics. For that matter, John Simon is not a man but a mutant bonobo that someone taught to type. (Go see The Animal, John!) So what? Critics are old-hat. Face it, I’m the future – I give a voice to hope, to acceptance, to treating corporate entertainment as though it were nature: it’s all good. The proof is in the asking: who’d invent a snobby, hard-to-please critic?

David Manning
Cleveland

Winter Kills

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:56:00 GMT

Money-shot movie reviewing, January to February ‘08:

Theodora Goes Wild (1936) The pioneering screwball comedy, proving only that a knack was needed, and Richard Boleslawski – whose only comedy this was – didn’t have it. Irene Dunne, too, needed instruction, and had to wait for McCarey.

Dance Party, USA (2006) Aaron Katz’s debut, a mini-teen morality tale balanced between mysteriously deft and amateurishly unconvincing.

Rocket Science (2007) Sometimes, all you need is to give up on insisting every scene has a punchline.

The Hands of Orlac (1924) Conrad Veidt becomes an Expressionist set design, miming "my hands suck."

The Heartbreak Kid (2007) How deliberate is this dreary patronizer, erasing the protagonist’s original blind narcissism (putting the blame on his demonic blonde anti-wife), and then, in the very end, sketching it back in?

Sunshine (2007) Ho-hum sci-fi (reminding me no one has yet adapted Tom Godwin’s classic "The Cold Equations") transcended by the dreamy rapture of solar proximity, and then ruined by a fourth-act deux ex cinema.

Looks and Smiles (1981) Ken Loach among the north country’s unemployed youth, avoiding the punk era’s cliches and basking in Chris Menges’s incisive-yet-ghostly black-&-white.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) Maurice Chevalier remains a mystery, if the stodgy staginess of early-talkie musicals do not, and Miriam Hopkins shines. Lubitsch was funnier mit out sprechen.

El Cid (1961) Hollywood’s greatest landscape painter, Anthony Mann, goes medieval, and history has rarely looked so forbidding.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) Inspired desert topping whipped up from nothing much at all, especially if you’re not intimately familiar with cannabis.

The Stepford Wives (1975) An ineptly-made marvel of gender-metaphor outrage, even with the dated ultra-conservative couture (as opposed to the Playboy bikinis William Goldman wanted), which suggest nothing today so much as a kind of New England sharia law.

Pierrot le Fou (1965) Movies don’t get any more transcendent, captivating, whip-smart – any more movie-ish. Seeing it again after decades, I feel ten years younger.

In Bruges (2008) Martin McDonagh, for all of his stage awards, plays like a McTarantino. Which is not to say this lark doesn’t sing and tickle, which it does. I hope the Belgian government helped with the financing, because they should’ve.

A Man Escaped, or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:00:00 GMT

The run of 2007 Top Tens, polls and surveys to which I contributed, below. I have no illusions about the year-end Top Ten rigamarole, but they may all be a helpful consumers’ guide for the Netflix-impacted. That, and I like making priorative lists, like a fool out of an unwritten Nick Hornsby novel; the yen for qualitiatively organizing a mad and tumultuous culture into heirarchies, the demon behind the entire phenomenon, may merely be our way of holding on lest our virtual planet spin us off.

The IFC Blog Top Ten
The Boston Phoenix Top Ten
indieWire.com Critics' Poll (the remnants of Dennis Lim's PTSNBN poll)
Film Comment's End-of-Year Critics' Poll 2007
Sight & Sound Films of 2007 (modified to comply to the UK's release calendar, and badly; I overlooked that Inland Empire was an '07 release in England)
The Boston Phoenix Alumni Critics' Poll
2007's Best U.S. Debuts on DVD, at The IFC Blog

Mewtwo Strikes Back

Michael Atkinson — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:44:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Article II

(More work previously performed for the PTSNBN, being my review of Pokemon: The First Movie (1999), in the spirit of things dying and of resistance to the entropy that befalls all good enterprises in time.)

"Stand aside, for I am the master of Perplexichu, the 152^nd Pokemon species of the Head-Slapping variety, with the special power of Gape! Upon confronting a foe, my Pokemon can muster the Alarmed Gaze, before which absurd and poorly trained moviemakers crumble! If called upon by me, my Pokemon can even transform into Irkadon, a highly evolved form of Pokemon of the Cranky Critic variety! Hmm!

"Upon confronting Pokemon: The First Movie, I as Pokemon Master declare, yes! Under my command, there will be a thousand more Pokemovies! Without my own Pokemon to train and battle other Pokemon just as some have been said to illegally set fighting cocks and pitbulls on each other for fun and profit, I might’ve thought five minutes into the lysergic introductory short Pikachu’s Vacation that I’d died and gone to very-bad-acid Hell. In fact, entire hunks of the saga (titled Mewtwo Strikes Back, about a cloned, psychic feline Pokemon endeavoring to take over the world by cloning more Pokemons, the bastard!) made me wish I was Dopechu, air Pokemon of the Peyote variety. Amid the low-grade Akira brimstone, noxious cuteness and stone-knives animation, the Pokemon universe reveals itself here to the neophyte adult as possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation imaginable outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics. It makes the Star Wars mythos play like Pong.

"Reeling in Poke-sorrow as the movie climaxed with the evil clone Pikachu pounding the peacefully protesting original Pikachu and weeping helplessly, Perplexichu nevertheless didn’t buy the film’s climactic anti-violence message anymore than I did, since Pokemons live to serve masters like me! and fight! Human and Pokemon alike will surely be stunned into a brain-raped silence by The First Movie, but kids everywhere, for whom the movie is simply a motivational training film for increased consumer binging on trading cards and video games, will bask as if in an opium fog..."

Advise and Consent

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:43:00 GMT

Allow me to finally and officially register my perspective on the 2008 election-year terrain and potentialities: we’re fucked. And we’re not fucked necessarily because the current administration has chain-dragged us so deeply into global death-chaos that we may never fully emerge, and we’re not necessarily fucked because the Republicans vying for their party’s nomination can be species-identified as either bloodthirsty warmongers or Christian mental patients. We’re not even necessarily fucked because our current choices for a Democratic candidate (for whom I’d have to vote even if she or he were not human but actually a farm animal – a sick, old, blind farm animal), are a woman and a black man, neither of whom have a junkie’s chance of getting elected President in this country. No, we’re fucked because of, simply, the Way Things Are, that is, the nexus of conditions that leads Americans to vote not with their common sense or their pocketbooks or their natural sense of responsibility toward their neighbors, or even the newly enormous amount of information available to anyone online, but instead with their fiercely-held whimsical prejudices and fleeting associative impressions and absolutely fantastical sense of what politicians do, why they do it, and why any of them want the job in the first place.

Listen to the mediascape, from Fox to NPR, right to the middle, where fantasies and lies and propaganda can grow like happy weeds, and you’ll hear it, as the polls are vetted and the primaries reported and the citizens interviewed: Obama or Clinton or McCain or Romney or whomever "sound" sincere or dedicated, "appear" to be moral or strong or insightful, are successful in "impressing" upon someone the sense of being human or independent or knowledgeable or whatever. One nitwit "likes" Huckabee, the other "trusts" Obama. Holy shit, is this all we've got? Feelings? This sort of vague, gut-reaction childishness not only dominates what we hear about our fellow countrymen’s reasoning, it is all there is. Often a campaigner’s real-world business connections and past non-campaign utterances and genuine actions are brought up, but no one takes these very seriously. The facts of Giuliani’s record as the Mayor of New York are not open for dispute, nor is the dishonesty of his hilarious attempts then and now in taking credit for everything but the moon landing, but no one cares. The Tolkien-esque faith-facts of Mormonism get aired around, but they make no impression. We hear nothing about Congressional voting records, or how much economic and environmental malfeasance each of the running governors could lay claim to, in their years slicking corporate money-chutes back home. Real actions, real costs, real profits, real victims – these are the hardcore gists of every political record, and these are what matters to our voting. But we don’t live in the real world, we live on, and/or through, television, where the momentary flushed feeling of trust or "likability" – a word that should be outlawed from broadcast in campaign years – is all voters are taught and told that they need to concern themselves with, and thus they reliably do, every four years.

In the real world, debates would be nightly, grueling, unscripted, unrehearsed, and impossible to fake through. Commercials would be forbidden. In the real world, every iota of a candidate’s professional record would come under universal scrutiny, and would be roundly prioritized over what he/she looked like, his/her "choice" of scripted words, or his/her wardrobe. In the real world, you’d need at least to pass the same Citizenship Test that scores of Mexican fruit-pickers pass every year; that tenet alone would’ve saved us from Bush II. In the real world, the actual motivators and organizational machines behind the candidates – the political parties’ funders, movers and powerbrands – would be transparent to the public eye. Corporate lobbying would be illegal. When the money comes in to the coffers, we would all find out from whom, and why. In the real world, we’d be voting for the most qualified and most educated Head Clerk we could find, not looking to baby-love the most adorable powermad would-be monarch. In the real world, we'd vet his cabinet apppointments as well, and publicly question every judiciary appointment. In the real world, we’d all be grown-ups taking responsibility for our government.

Winter Soldier

Michael Atkinson — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:43:00 GMT

Aphoristic money-line movie reviewing, for consumables viewed late December, early January:

Beyond Tomorrow (1940): Begins as deliciously crusty Christmas fable, de-evolves into trite showbiz morality play, but with elderly ghosts. Not helped in the least by the DVD-makers’ gambit of cutting necessary scenes from the film and packaging them as an "extra scenes" supplement.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007): Is acquainting my kids in a fun way with all-American history and iconography worth this agony?

The Golden Compass (2007): De-anti-Christian-ized and pumped full of digital hormones, it made as much narrative sense as a unicorn-&-rainbow dorm poster.

Chameleon Street (1989): The ideas still stand, but the self-aggrandizment and clueless filmmaking fall flat as old soda.

The District (Nyocker!) (2004): Hungarian animator Aron Gauder has mastered a hilarious fusion between digital animation, rotoscoped caricature and grotesque psychedelia, and it’s the most entertaining animated feature seen anywhere since The Triplets of Belleville. And the only animated satire for aeons.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007): Loving and self-glorifying. It never, after all, gets out of that chair and bed; Schnabel may be honing a distinctive filmmaking personality here (call it wistful eulogization, three films about three dead creative minds), but I was hoping for the winged moment that never came, despite the hotties.

Klimt (2006): Old-party historical surreal-ization of a rather uneventful biography. Ruiz dresses it up with nudes and masquerades.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): Like Primary Colors, Nichols’s other dressed-to-impress political "satire," this terribly witty claptrap ignores the realities of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, U.S. politics, and the invasion of Afghanistan just as it claims to be savvy about all of the above. "Let’s kill Russians," indeed.

Mafioso (1962): What’s wrong with spaghett’ with squid ink? Chortlesome and, eventually, coolly ironic, if a little overappreciated by American critics otherwise emaciated in January ‘07.

Quiet City (2007): So delicate it could crumble if someone opens a window. For reasons to do with its amateurishness as well as its melancholy realism.

Four Daughters (1938): Depression schmaltz, except it has the percolating Lane sisters (really, only Priscilla made honey), May Robson releasing genuine-sounding barbs as an old aunt, and the brand new John Garfield, seething as the screen’s very first Angry Young Man, and leaving his heelprint in America’s forehead.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:47:00 GMT

The Atkinson Muniment Room, Article I

(That is, a revisit to work performed for PTSNBN, in the inestimable Ed Park's acronymic term, in this case my infamous Pauline Kael obituary, which actually created enemies for me (albeit often by way of the misreading of the line about Kael being a "wolverine bitch," when I was, as you can see, explaining that that's how she was perceived), and which is still, I think, well-targeted and well-shot.)

"The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism, Pauline Kael has now paid the debt of nature, and provided the obituarians with the opportunity to finally top off their 35-year outpouring of ardor and awe. Never before has a film critic’s living reputation sent so many scrambling for encomiums, and never has a film critic’s passing left so many media mouths so faklempt. Don’t expect it to ever happen again: Kael reigned supreme as film culture’s fiery, maenadic Mrs. Grundy – what will she say? – during that culture’s most fecund and dynamic day, and both have gone the way of film clubs, the Monthly Film Bulletin, Luis Bunuel and the Bleeker Street Cinema.

"Kael occupied an utterly unique throne in the nation’s cultural consciousness: a film reviewer-as-high priestess, a self-invented demagogue that often garnered more attention than the movies she reviewed, and seemed by virtue of her discursive, combative style of argument to elide any subsequent opinion. She was never the nation’s eyes and voice, as much as she had wanted to democratize the filmgoing community; rather, she was the cognoscenti’s peppery permission slip to love their love of trash. Her public profile was a stunning balance between notoriety and high-brow respect, and so she reached readers many other critics could not. Her 12 volumes of collected pieces were routinely reviewed and universally lauded in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books and other pivotal venues that rarely, if ever, reviewed film books of any other stripe.

"Perhaps most tellingly, she was the focus of rumors – a film critic! – that speculated on her liaisons with colleagues and with certain testosterone-dizzy filmmakers. She was the obvious model for Clare, the tempestuous, pint-sized San Francisco-to-New York uber-critic in Theodore Roszak’s Pynchonian movie-conspiracy novel Flicker. Stories still circulate about Kael the wolverine bitch and her coterie of male critic cubs, nicknamed the 'Paulettes' by the excluded, disrupting screenings of films she didn’t like and rallying New York Film Critics Circle votes by intimidation or threat. Her fragging of Andrew Sarris’s auteurism, however preposterous (she misread auteurism, and at the same time saw every movie through the scrim of its maker’s intentions), became an anthologizable wrestling match. Though far from the most influential critic in terms of box office – Vincent Canby wielded a mightier sword in that respect – Kael so terrified Hollywood that they attempted, once, to bring her into their fold and experimented with a doomed Kael development deal. After smarting from Kael’s one-paragraph dismissal of Star Wars as 'plodding'" and 'exhausting, too, like taking a pack of kids to the circus,' George Lucas even named Willow’s arch-villain Kael.

"What other American film reviewer – without the benefit of ever actually writing a full-length book – became so famous for his or her opinions? Kael was infamous for her withering assbites, but her extraordinary handstand over Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris ('Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?') dates horribly, and few will still forgive her for singing hosannas about a director’s cut of Altman’s Nashville no one else got to see. Every reviewer digs cesspool ditches that he or she cannot help but fall into decades later, but few go as far toward the earth’s core as Kael did in making claims for, say, De Palma’s The Fury or Reed’s Oliver! Still, looking back over her oeuvre, Kael was right when it was important: she witnessed the peaking moments of Godard, Bunuel, Antonioni, Bergman, Altman, Bertolucci, Coppola, Wiseman and Scorsese, and yawped approval.

"It’s also stunning to ponder the amount of films she didn’t review – from 1961 to 1980, this most hallowed of cineastical judgment-makers never critiqued a single new film by Samuel Fuller, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jacques Rivette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrzej Wajda, Miklos Jancso, Jean-Pierre Melville, Monte Hellman, Ermanno Olmi, Dusan Makavejev, Jean-Marie Straub and Sergei Paradjanov. As an avid Kael reader from high school – I’d read her long, ropey, luridly subjective reviews at the newsstand and then put The New Yorker back on the rack – I loved her for chutzpah. She launched at a movie like a feckless boxer, taking as long as she needed to rationally explain her wholly irrational reactions, and caring little if the process was bloody, aimless and cruel. (Kael’s castigation of directors for making obvious thematic statements could just as easily be applied to Mozart, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Renoir.) More than anything, Kael’s ham-and-egger energy opened a conversational loop in your head, and in the 60s and 70s conversation was what movies were for. (She was particularly awake to the gritty American New Wave, believing as we all did that Hollywood had finally, irrevocably grown up.) Virtually Whitman-like in her rangy meanderings and obsession with the visceral and sensual, she was a critic who’d found her moment – imagine Kael trying to make her special sort of sense of this year’s movies. Her breathless blathering about a movie she adored – and no one’s world ever shook, rattled and rolled after a good movie like Kael’s did – was emblematic of its present: a lovely lost age when a love for movies was a Romantic passion, a lantern-lit children’s crusade that went with first love, sex, dope and freedom like cigarettes go with coffee.

"It was, at least, an unimaginable time when film critics would routinely repackage their reviews as books, and people would read them. The '70s have faded, but Kael’s popular status persists, as if no one can remember her writing as well as they remember the adolescent reading of it. If Kael was to be the most lavishly praised film critic in the country, then the actual substance of her reviews and style could be and have been comfortably overlooked. Often hailed as a great stylist, Kael was in fact the sorriest influence on critical prose in this country. (It was shocking to read, in the hagiographic New Yorker profile a few years ago, that she carefully wrote and rewrote in long-hand, and dithered over punctuation.) Beginning as deliberately anti-academe, Kael’s approach consisted largely of run-on sentences, endless repetitions, the bulldozing abuse of the cosmic 'you' (you sit there, you feel this or that, you notice something, ad nauseam), and the frustrating emphasis on actors’ looks and voices. No other critic has ever been so proudly subordinate to her own perverse attractions; for her, Sutherland and Christie’s matching curlie-dos made Don’t Look Now particularly notable.

"She has often been flattered for her classical allusions, but it wasn’t anything Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Parker Tyler and Manny Farber didn’t do before her. Her frequent diatribes about how unarguably crummy movies have gotten (at least nine such essays in 20 years, during the '60s-'70s) merely read today like fits of constipative crankiness. What’s more troublesome is Kael’s frivolity: if she took movies seriously, often her reviews did not. (The New Yorker still reserves derisive glibness for the film pages.) She seemed allergic to politics, and often ignored a film’s political context. Assessing the 1973 Jeff Bridges movie The Last American Hero, Kael admitted that the film is more cynical and despairing than the Tom Wolfe articles it was based on thanks to Vietnam -- but that, for her, was its ruination. In review after review, a film is merely something either well-done or botched whose highest purpose is distraction and amusement. Nowhere in Kael do you find the idea that cinema connects with the real world on any level; nowhere do movies mean anything outside of themselves. (Read her capsules on old noir films: it’s as if the genre was all about being cool.) In this, Kael seemed smugly hyperaware that movies are made by men and machines and chemicals, and are therefore silly, dismissible follies. Even her praise of Godard – calling Breathless 'a frightening little chase comedy' – smells of the populist’s condescension. Bad movies are simply entertainments that don’t 'work' (a lazy phrase Kael resorted to more than any other critic); good or great movies are entertainments that do.

"Which is the core of American film criticism, before and after Kael. So why is she so singularly lionized? Prolix reviewing alone doesn’t make a legend. Indeed, Kael’s relentless eminence seemed to have everything to do with her attitude and gender. Face it, a miniature tigress with gray hair and barbed tongue dressing down a male-dominated culture was and still is a richer source for personality cultism than the entire frumpy lot of American film reviewers combined. What if she’d been a man? She might have been less newsworthy, but if Kael remains important, it’s only insofar as her books keep the golden age of filmgoing alive, and insofar as her influence and power-brandishing has either hindered or helped cinema as it stands today. Film criticism is such a mundane project, plopped down upon an endlessly complex entity: movies. That Kael was the first and last true celebrity moviehead may be, in fact, a sign of hope for the future."

I Walked with a Zombie

Michael Atkinson — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:26:00 GMT

I'm surprised I haven't done it already, but here, on one of many blog and bloggish sites, is the full and final version of the CBS pilot I co-wrote, co-produced and co-created last year (getting mileage out of those WGA-designated credits), Babylon Fields, starring Amber Tamblyn, Ray Stevenson, Jamey Sheridan, Kathy Baker, David Patrick Kelly and me, in the non-speaking role as the grave-emergent hand. Kudos all around for a job well-done and, as far as I'm concerned, as yet unfinished. Skol!

Souls at Sea

Michael Atkinson — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:52:00 GMT

A totally functional weblog entry: first, let’s note that Laurel & I had a lovely, if ill-timed and, in the end, perfectly nonsensical NPR radio interview publicizing Flickipedia on December 24^th, on the Patt Morrison Show on KPCC Los Angeles, which you could, if you’ve resolved in ‘08 to subject yourself to hapless Christmas Eve malarkey, hear here.

Then, let’s note my next book, the cinephiliac essay collection Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood due in March from SUNY Press, and, perhaps, this gingery nugget from crypto-cineaste/word-wizard Guy Maddin, writing about Brazilian psychotronologist Jose Mojica Marins:

By now, Coffin Joe was the Freddy Krueger of his day. And yet it was hard for the great bellowing maniac to attract the money for his newest Joe adventure (a real problem, sometimes, in continuing characters, as I have found in my fruitless efforts to fund a series of feature length episodes about Archangel’s Lt. Boles). But Mojica persisted, and came up with a truly bewitching – and not a little upsetting – concoction: Awakening of the Beast (1970). Again the soundtrack is composed of near-constant screaming (a daring gambit, ill suited to cross-promotion), and almost every shot seems to have been made with a different type of film stock. Brutal spankings are meted out to the female cast members! Flaccid bottoms are painted with faces! A mad hippie shepherd violates women with his crook! All this; and with that wet liver-slab of a lip convulsing in jollity, the world tilts a little further on its axis. Ha-ha-ha-ha! No one has ever made another movie like it, and no one ever will.

For whatever it’s worth, and because blog-scribes do this frequently enough, I’d like to tilt an Amazon cocktail to friends and cohorts of mine, and the books they’d be delighted to see you add to your shelves this cruelest of seasons, or soon, when they’re available:

• O editor and everyone’s better half Jessica Winter’s Rough Guide to American Independent Film (Rough Guides/Penguin);

• Believer editor and master biblioculturist Ed Park’s long-percolating debut novel, Personal Days, from Random House;

• of course, The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits (Wiley), edited by Museum of Moving Image mover Dennis Lim, with what has become, in retrospect, a substantial helping of ambivalence;

• the second volume of jauntily allusive poetry from the ex-Jane Dark, Joshua Clover, from University of California Press: The Totality for Kids;

• the inestimable Chuck Stephens’s co-edited Japanese Movie Posters: Yakuza, Monster, Pink and Horror, which sounds like a law firm from, well, a Chuck Stephens riff;

• Laurie Sheck’s new volume of verse Captivity from Knopf (still haven’t gotten Io at Night out of my system);

• Jim Hoberman’s latest, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, from The New Press;

• roving filmhead David Sterritt’s last collection, Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Reader (Univ. Press of Mississippi);

• Bard prof Ed Halter’s From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (Thunder’s Mouth Press), and the curiously unavailable Cinema’s Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader;

• Newsday critic, Sundance chronicler and erstwhile tippling pal John Anderson’s newest angle on the indie scene, I Wake Up Screening: What to Do Once You’ve Made that Movie (Billboard Books);

• old-school poet-prince William Heyen’s ten-thousandth volume, Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems, from Etruscan Press;

• Luc Sante, premier cultural excavator/commentator, has Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005, from Yeti/Verse Chorus Press;

• Lincoln Center programmer and Film Comment gadabout Kent Jones’s overdue compilation Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism (Wesleyan);

• Promethean moviehead Howard Hampton's ever-awaited collection Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses, by way of Harvard;

• and naturally Guy Maddin’s indispensible From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Coach House Press), as well as the foreward to Angela Dalle Vache’s Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Univ. of Texas Press) – a book coming just in time with the March DVD release of gotta-be/gonna-be Maddin fave Diva Dolorosa (1999), by Dutch found-footagist Peter Delpeut.

Ten Canoes

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:42:00 GMT

Here're my official bests for 2007, weary and worrisome hag that she was:

1. Syndromes and a Century
Thailand’s great, mysterious, life-affirming, diptych-entranced, meta-meta-man Apichatpong Weerasethakul does it again, twice, or maybe more, while seeming to do nearly nothing at all. A dream had by us all, and just as maddening and gorgeous.

2. Once
Who knows how long the heart-kneaded buzz from this beloved greatest-musical-since-Demy may last, but in my seat it was an all-viscera epiphany, and it’s made moviegoing since a little bloodless.

3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
The greatest of the Romanians so far, Christian Mungiu’s patient knuckle-biter is at least 50% off-screen space and trauma; the mercilessly suspenseful birthday dinner scene alone is more concisely conceived and effective than any ten American films this year.

4. Half Moon
Northern Iran has supplanted the American West and the Australian Outback as the globe’s most expressive road-movie topos, and Bahman Ghobadi’s mythic Kurdish bus trip is simultaneously hilarious, magical-realist and tragic.

5. There Will Be Blood
Didn’t see it coming – P.T. Anderson sheds his pretentious snark-generation-ism for Upton Sinclair’s period saga of catapulting capitalism, scene for prickly, crazy scene the most fascinating new American film of the year.

6. Regular Lovers
May ‘68 awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Philippe Garrel’s impressionistic personal meditation, which manifests the cataclysmic, liberating, and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of resistance, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility-free, and ready to dope up and drop out, all of it seeping out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs.

7. Killer of Sheep
Charles Burnett’s legended, much-hailed, rarely seen 1977 classic about being black and poor and spiritually unmoored in ‘70s L.A. finally saw theaters, a full 17 years after it’d been an early choice for national Film Registry canonization. It’s a ghost movie, returned to haunt us.

8. 12:08 East of Bucharest
Another Romanian, Corneliu Porumboiu’s deadpan comedy picks at the scab of the 1989 revolution, revolviong around what must be the eloquent and entertaining three-shot in recent cinema.

9. Los Muertos
Lisandro Alonso’s lovely, remarkably eloquent naturalist odyssey tracks an aging convict as he is released in rural Argentina, and heads upriver to find his daughter and grandson. Exposition is all but absent; the focus is on the moment, the soothing re-establishment of intimacy with nature, performed and captured in astonishing single takes.

10. Michael Clayton
Semi-hack screenwriter Tony Gilroy steps definitively into the men’s club with this ethical torture device, thought-through and written and acted with a startling concern for the sickening quotidian of power culture.

Runners-Up, in order: The Host, No Country for Old Men, Lars and the Real Girl, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Brand Upon the Brain!, Czech Dream, 3:10 to Yuma, The Boss of It All, Zodiac, Lust, Caution, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Into Great Silence, The Lives of Others, Tears of the Black Tiger, We Own the Night, Dans Paris, Broken English

Candidates for Bests and Runners-Up, Had They Been Released Theatrically Instead of Debuting to DVD, which Should Qualify Them for Full Consideration in Any Case, by This Point: Vibrator (Ryuichi Hiroki, 2003), Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962), Five (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003), Green Chair (Park Cheol-su, 2005), The Way I Spent the End of the World (Catalin Miltescu, 2006), The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997), Quiet Flows the Don (Sergei Gerasimov, 1957), Moscow Elegy (Alexander Sokurov, 1987), Black Test Car (Yasuo Masumura, 1962), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (David Lee Fisher, 2005), Able Edwards (Graham Robertson, 2004), The Call of Cthulhu (Andrew Leman, 2005), Isolation (Billy O’Brien, 2005), Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii, 1969), Casshern (Kasuaki Kiriya, 2004), The District (Aron Gauder, 2004), I Am a S+M Writer (Ryuichi Hiroki, 2000)

Skol!

There Will Be Blood

Michael Atkinson — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:54:00 GMT

Lassoing up the stragglers of 2007 has been no ecstatic task. The Kite Runner is clumpy, unconvincing, programmatic dung (typically, lauded for its sky-flying cinematography, which is all digitally managed) so typical of company men like Marc Foster, who also denuded whatever might’ve been interesting about Monster’s Ball or Finding Neverland (the latter is particularly woeful, given its material and the melancholy potentialities that rise up the spine of any awake reader of Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys), while Doug Wright’s Atonement vacillates between big-movie abbreviation and real estate porn, and genuinely moving images, and remains equally conflicted between Christopher Hampton’s crafty script and the presence of Keira Knightley, who resembles a tubercular Treblinka resident (at the 20^th cigarette lighting, all one could think was, no, eat), and who is as pleasurable to watch as, and who has the responsive range of, one of the vampire extras in the Underworld movies. Still, I didn’t find the famed and reputedly ostentatious Dunkirk tracking shot inappropriate; I was happy for the space and time.

Like Juno, Margot at the Wedding is something of an abomination, a glib, arch, anything-for-an-uncomfortable-laugh-line family farce about a family no one has ever met, who say things to their parents and siblings and sons and perfect strangers than no human being has ever said, unless the meds have gone wanting on all fronts. ("I masturbated this morning," is Baumbach’s idea of an amusing/discomfiting non sequitur, said by adolescent son to mother.) All of which would be fine if everyone’s history of psychopharmacological tribulation was a prime subject for dialogue, which it isn’t, or if the film took place in a decaying southern mansion (even then). French movies that do this, and there have been a few, are not not lousy because they’re French, they’re just lousy, too. Which all might also be moot if anything else about the film was believable, from the falling tree to Nicole Kidman’s egomaniac forgetting her purse in the end, to the earwig she finds on her hand after having climbed thirty feet into a tree (earwigs, Noah, live under rocks and in the moist folds of patio cushions, not high up in trees).

Of course, Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a sharp, mean, leather-gloved slap in the face, with an arsenal of parallel-narrative weapons that all by themselves give the film a daunting gravity. But it’s been hosannaed elsewhere. It's Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that's the shock to the system, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair that sheds everything I’ve always felt self-infatuated and annoying about Anderson’s films (never-say-when sophomoricism, pointless epic-ness, aimless traveling shots, excessive quirk), and comes at the turn-of-the-century oil-prospecting morality tale with a stunning sense of grandeur (every image has an iconic feel), a bewitching respect for actors and viewers (you’ll find no other recent American film so full of multi-character set-piece shots), a disorienting soundtrack that keeps you on the balls of your feet (by Jonny Greenwood), and Daniel Day-Lewis, making good on the small but entertaining bet he lost, via caricature and cheese, in Gangs of New York. Also, this is a film of uneasy textures and elisions; like Punch-Drunk Love, what we witness sometimes seems to evoke things we didn’t, and the filmmaker has no interest in spelling things out for us, but instead lets us stew and grapple with the mysteries of history. The best new American film of the year, and in the nick of time.

Happy Together

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:38:00 GMT

More aphoristic money-line movie reviewing, for consumables viewed in late November, early December:

Lars and the Real Girl (2007) While it sat squarely in a Bunuelian frame of Midwestern mind, this was a remarkably funny/sad/sad/funny freak; when it schmaltzed, it schmaltzed. Why doesn’t anyone conclude that Lars was mentally ill?

Ten Canoes (2006) The present state of the art in middle-class exotica-racism; the Aborigines even fart! Can’t imagine what your average Aborigine thought of it, or what they made of so many flat-screen-TV-owning white people the world over basking in the warmth of such adorable primitivity. At the same time, it told a compelling tale, or tales. What can you do.

Paprika (2006) The Japanese scare me – is this their idea of narrative entertainment?! This most psychotic-infantile of animes positively quakes with a screaming fear of dreams.

This Is England (2006) Spittle-flecked skinhead hysteria. Expert, but so? Was it such a pervasive or serious social problem, or is it just those wacky clothes?

Silip (Daughters of Eve) (1985) Famed Filipino softcore hooey, but with a very Greek-tragic arc, and the sex, at least, is come by honestly.

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) Guy Maddin’s latest full-on dipso-psycho-retro-hyper-meta-Oedipo-mytho-melodrama, and a salve to the Maddin-addicted. Seen in the pre-recorded, non-live-performance mode.

Get Carter (1971) It’s been decades since I’d last seen this droll little nastiness, which suffers, datedly, by comparison with its own reputation. Are all landmark British genre films (I’m thinking of Michael Reeves) overrated?

Bug (2006) A play.

My Winnipeg (2007) I prefer this autobiographical demi-doc to Maddin’s last few features – although taking his word for it as non-fiction is a fool’s bargain. Poetic and eloquent and disarming and narrated, poignantly, by Guy himself. Is this coming in '08?

Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) The unearthed artifact amid a flood of fabulous but familiar Imamura films, a nearly-three hour epic of backward village incest, superstition and panic, and more evidence that the Japan we don’t commonly see exported here is in fact a land of maniacs. But in a good way.

The Doll (1919) Ernst Lubitsch’s answer to Lars and the Real Girl, or Making Mr. Right, made in Germany before The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Still witty as hell.

American Gangster (2007) When will they realize that evocations of The Godfather only serve to remind us what a terrific movie The Godfather is? Or were they hoping, not unreasonably, that the targeted 15-to-25 demographic wouldn’t know a Corleone from a canelloni?

No Country for Old Men (2007) Adroit, gnarly, riveting – and a little dry for lack of energetic Coenanigans? Perhaps I’d been cell-saturated with hype by the time I arrived. I certainly wasn’t surprised by any of it, save maybe the final act’s notorious ellipses.

Juno (2007) Imaginatively written, beautifully acted horsecrap. Does every character, in every line, have to be snarky-sarcastic-clever-allusive? Anyone who thinks this is how even bright American teenagers talk don’t know any. For all it does right, an irritant that rubbed me raw.

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) Tsai Ming-liang tries for a Apichatpong Weerasethakul bifurcated mystery, and comes up a little short, and tedious, at least by his own extraordinary standards. Love the butterfly.

Syndromes and a Century (2006) Weerasethakul slam-dunks another lovely, elusive, diptych-ed meta-consideration of life-as-movie, or/and vice-versa, and does it without unrealistic longueurs or lack of chat, and with an intoxicating sense of wise love. Here is the future.

Into the Wild (2007) I gave up after two hours. I knew how it ended, after all. It’s not that I couldn’t stand the protagonist’s company any longer, it’s just that there’s not much there there, or, more concisely, it’s no Vagabond.

Half Moon (2006) Bahman Ghobadi goes metaphysical, and outright comedic, and Kurdish-musical, and it’s the best Iranian film seen here this year.

Comfort and Joy

Michael Atkinson — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 16:43:00 GMT

They're loving Flickipedia -- in The New York Times, The Boston Phoenix, Newsday, Library Journal, Reel Talk, Oklahoma Gazette, School Library Journal, Bookgasm, Tribute, Books On, O, Daily Local News, Bozeman Daily Chronicle, The Daily Advertiser (Louisiana)...

And it's about the time of year to consider finding, rather than get stuck with holiday-special sitcom reruns before it's too late, or rewatching the same four classics yet again, a copy of Remember the Night (1940), or perhaps The Holly and the Ivy (1952), or Kino's A Christmas Past, a collection of "vintage holiday films" including D.W. Griffith’s fiercely moralistic A Trap for Santa (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking A Winter Straw Ride (1906), and Santa Claus (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers.