Zero for Conduct

Blue in the Face

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:07:27 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 15:23:50 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 11:57:58 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 08:49:09 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 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:56:16 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 10:17:38 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 — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:18:49 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 — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:48:00 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 — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:19:22 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 — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:10:29 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 — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:02:29 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 — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:08:40 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 16:34:13 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 08:33:22 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 — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:24:07 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 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:55:15 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 16:43:06 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 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:37:20 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 — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:11:28 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 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:23:12 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 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:19:36 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 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:00:40 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 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:27:28 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 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:54:32 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 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:41:48 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 — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:24:36 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, 30 Mar 2008 19:03:19 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.