The District (no, the other one)

Over at No More Marriages, the recently returned Andy Horbal puts District B13 on his year end best list (and also make a good case for why we should appreciate the distribution benefits of the Oscars, even if the whole ceremony itself is a sham). I put the film in my year end best list as well (albeit in a special category reserved for unpretentious genre films), and, having just watched it again recently, I have to say, it holds up really nicely.

District B13, in fact, gets better and better with time. The prologue scene in the secret room and the ensuing action scene where the good cop is introduced... well, someone needs give director Pierre Morel about $200 million and the keys to the ILM wizard room.

Or better yet, don't, and just let him keep making really amazing little action films.

Plus, I love that it harkens back to late 70s B-movies in that it has a serious (but not, of course too serious) political message underlying the action--a laughably simplistic argument for French socialism and general governmental goodwill, of course--but the movie bothers to try to say something it believes in along with delivering the fun, and yet it never once lets its message get in the way of the fun (of which there is much).

On a side note, I can think of pretty much nothing that would give me as much cinematic glee as seeing the two leads of District B13--clearly the best new action stunt stars in the West--go up a against Tony Jaa and his equally jaw-dropping team of Thai stunt players. And maybe Jackie Chan could show up and play the wise mentor . . . any successful producers reading this, just drop me an email and I'll have a treatment at your doorstep like that.

David, x2

You really need to read this interview between David Mills and David Simon--two of the key creative forces behind the greatest show in the history of television, The Wire. Thanks to Alan Sepinwall for the heads up.

Addendum: And in part one, they talk politics. Needless to say, it's interesting.

Just saying.

Greatest Galley Slaves post ever. Just saying.

Ah, publicity

So, being something like (but not quite fully) a member of the movie-reviewing press, I get press releases by the bucketload announcing screenings and casting information and other assorted hype and information. I'll just be kind and say that most of the releases aren't exactly high literature, but once in a while I find gems like this description of the new Hannibal Lecter film:

In RED DRAGON we learned who he was. In SILENCE OF THE LAMBS we learned how he did it. Now comes the most chilling chapter in the life of Hannibal Lecter – the one that answers the most elusive question of all – why?

I can only assume the writer just forgot to add the words "in the name of all that is good and holy was this even made?!!!!" on the tail end.

Critical Labyrinth

Why the excess of critical love for Pan’s Labyrinth? The film’s current Metacritic score is a stupendous 98 (higher than almost any film of 2006)), with the majority of critics positively dazzled by the splendor and political allusions of this dark fantasia. And no doubt, Del Toro’s film is a ghoulish visual feast; his eye for the golden-hued worlds of myth and legend is basically unmatched in current filmmaking. The refinement of his visual sense is really rather incredible. In some ways, Del Toro resembles a Mexican Jean-Pierre Jeunet, except he replaces Jeunet’s bleakly comic quirkiness with a more melancholy spirit. Here, though, that spirit tends to drag the movie down, keeping it slow and not entirely engaging, letting its parallel storylines languish in partial disconnection.

More pointedly, at least with regard to the general critical reaction, is that Del Toro’s penchant for simplistic narratives and characters works much better in pulpier genre fare like Mimic and the vastly underrated Hellboy, and comes off especially bad in light of the film’s flirtations with history and politics. As Ross Douthat smartly notes in his review in the latest print edition of National Review (sorry, subscriber only—but subscribe!):

You’d have to be pretty thick not to realize that del Toro intends the fairyland narrative — heavy with arbitrary commands, underground abattoirs, and intimations of blood sacrifice — as a commentary on the politics at work in the real-world storyline, and this realization has sent many critics into raptures over the film’s supposed political sophistication. Hence, for instance, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern’s announcement that Pan’s Labyrinth “deepens our emotional understanding of fascism, and of rigid ideology’s dire consequences.”

This is, of course, precisely what the movie doesn’t do. López makes what he can of the character of Vidal, turning a cardboard villain into a memorable monster, but the film’s politics are about as deep as a puddle of blood. The fascists are beasts who torture, maim, and kill without compunction, before sitting down to fine dinners with local grandees and corrupt clerics; the Communists in the woods, on the other hand, are a heroic lot, sturdy and kindhearted and ethically pure, like figures out of, well, Communist propaganda. The only thing such caricatures deepen is our understanding of predictable left-wing bias in Western cinema.

I’m glad I saw the movie, and it certainly serves as a potent reminder of Del Toro’s visual panache, but I think he’s better suited to directing films that don’t require such subtlety. I’d love to see him, for example, take on the Greek myths, with their larger-than-life heroes and villains and gods. These stories would be far better fits for his all-or-nothing approach to character and story, and would better match the unrestrained grandiosity of his visuals.

Writing with Clarity

Comments here may be infrequent over the next few weeks as a new chapter, nay volume, of life begins. And there'll be more about that before long, I suspect. But in the meantime, do read Stanley Kurtz's pointed comments on the academic left's obsessions with obscurantist prose. This is an old conservative standby, but Kurtz does a good job with it.

I tend to agree with this critique in general (and you can always point to the Alan Sokal Social Text hoax as the prime example of the left's obscurantist tendencies gone utterly awry), but would probably classify fewer writings as incomprehensibly muddled than some conservatives. When writing about abstract art or modern theater, for example, it's sometimes necessary to write in a manner that, at least initially, seems difficult, even inaccessible. Abstract notions, I think, demand something like abstract prose, at least when describing them, and this prose won't always be generally accessible--much like how detailed economics and policy writing isn't always instantly accessible to the masses. The trick (in interpretive/critical writing anyway) is to bring those ideas into clarity and accessibility on the tail end. So, don't deny the ambiguities and vague ideas, but then use those to point toward meaning (or lack of).

Alternately, you can point to material like the dramatic theories of Artaud which you might be able to dismiss as sheer nonsense, but are also lit by a fairly undeniable linguistic power. He's not always clear, and in some passages he's downright impossible to understand, but that doesn't mean there's not something of value there, that there's no use reading his work and making an attempt to pull some stable, concrete ideas from it. None of this is to argue with anything that Kurtz wrote, or even to suggest that I think he and I would differ much on the principles involved, just to say that, just as there's a liberal tendency to snidely dismiss material that's too accessible, there's an opposite conservative tendency to push away material that doesn't deal with absolutes and concretes in quite as firm a manner as we might like.

Addendum: On the other hand, there are a solid number of conservatives willing to engage in exactly the sort of difficult, somewhat inaccessible writing I'm talking about. Take, for instance, Steve Talbott, whose essay "The Language of Nature" in the new edition of The New Atlantis (unfortunately not yet online)--the quarterly journal of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Kurtz is employed--contains the following wonderful line:

When we crucify the world-text upon a scaffold of grammatical logic, the resulting corpse presents its own fascinations, but these are not the fascinations of the original meaning; they are only a shadow of it.

This is not entirely impenetrable, but robbed of its context, it is certainly daunting, and even in context, it's a sentence that may appear imposing to some readers, and will require rereading by many. However, it's actually a very good sentence in a remarkably insightful essay about how the current scientific approach to nature denies its content and meaning in favor of diagramming its structure in an abstract mathematical manner.

First Dance

"The First Dance," Mark Oppenheimer's NYT Magazine piece on the first dance at a conservative Christian college, is a smart, surprisingly gentle piece that fairly accurately portrays a milieu I have some experience with. Ostensibly, the piece is about the relaxation of dancing restrictions at a small, conservative Christian college, but what it quickly turns into is a picture of the way those schools are changing, the surprising (to the author, and probably many NYT readers) decency of its students, and the way that these school manage to carve out a unique, separate college experience from the vast majority of what's offered in modern higher education.

I went to a similar school for part of my college career (though I finished at a state university), and the article captures the experience surprisingly well. Oppenheimer notes the preponderance of, well, less than mainstream beliefs at the college, "In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time." And yet he also thinks that the students he met there were, "for the most part, the kind of thoughtful undergraduates whom top secular colleges would be proud to have." This despite an overwhelmingly conservative political outlook: pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war, mostly anti-abortion (I suspect the way he got the middling figures he got on abortion was by including those who believed it should be legal in cases like rape, incest, and life of the mother as believing that it should be legal in some circumstances). Oppenheimer makes a little more of their differences than I might have, of course--finding that only a third would oppose homosexuals teaching in schools doesn't seem like strong evidence for openness toward gays--but he seems to get that many of the students are independent minded, not Christian zombies.

The line, though, that most struck me, was this one: "The only thing they all agreed on was that there was something special about their campus culture, even the parts they disagreed with." These schools aren't perfect (far from it), and they are faced with a constant struggle over how and when to modernize, but these schools, in many ways, are some of the few places that preserve the old small college experience that's been eaten away by the excess and debauchery of the modern university--wide-eyed kids away from home in the middle of nowhere without much money, getting into mild amounts of trouble, but surrounded mostly by thoughtful individuals bent on reading, learning, and thinking through the problems of life.

John Podhoretz,,,

is funny.

Cooking for social justice.

OK, I haven't actually read the entire New York Times today, but I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that the following sentence is the most ridiculous, most awesome line in today's paper:

At 16, Ms. Moskowitz dropped out of the High School of Music and Art in New York to follow bands, live in squats in the East Village and cook for social justice.

I imagine this involved her cooking up meals, handing them out, and declaring, "Justice is served!" This person also has a show called "Post Punk Kitchen," which we all know is just a lame retread of Spencer Ackerman's original punk rock kitchen. I mean, honestly.

Smokin' Aces in NRO

My review of Smokin' Aces is in NRO this morning. I didn't like it so much:

Late in Smokin’ Aces, a gun-packing, blood-covered neo-Nazi redneck who spends most of the movie costumed in highly decorated bondage wear looks at a man who he’d earlier attempted to kill and, with a sort of apathetic sincerity, apologizes, offering as an excuse, “S*** gets wild and crazy. Fate just up and f***s you for no good reason.” Which is pretty much exactly how I felt after watching the movie. Director Joe Carnahan’s crime romp is a vapid, degenerate foray into wanton nihilism, a movie steeped in senseless, joyless bloodletting and vulgarity. Despite stacking the deck with gobs of attitude, a madcap plot, and a cast of outrageous rogues, it’s a decidedly losing hand.

The Future of Fusionism

This evening, AFF is holding what looks to be a really awesome panel on the future of fusionism, starring Cato's David Boaz and Brink Lindsey, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, and The New Republic's Jon Chait. That's a lot of smart in one room. Watch the sparks fly at Heritage this evening.

Some Movies I Haven't Seen, and a Few I Have

I haven't been keeping up with my theatrical viewing recently. I saw Breach, which I'll probably write about next month. If you liked Shattered Glass, well, then you'll like this--maybe even better. Billy Ray has gone and made the D.C. movie of the year . . . again. I'll have a review of Smokin' Aces up on Friday (ace isn't the first word I'd use to describe it). And I saw the D.C. premiere of Mine Your Own Business, a very fine documentary about NGOs and the mining industry, tonight (full disclosure: my current employer helped co-sponsor the screening). But somehow I've still not managed to see Volver, The Last King of Scotland, Pan's Labyrinth, or Letters from Iwo Jima--a rather unacceptable situation that I hope to soon remedy.

I did manage to catch The Fan, Tony Scott's mid 90s De Niro-sports-stalker pic, on DVD. I can't say it was one of the director's better films. It might best be described as flash, splash, and rehash – or better yet, just trash. Scott's direction is vivid, glossy, and dashing as always, like an AT&T commercial on steroids, and De Niro turns what should've been a nothing role into something almost compelling. But he's just replaying better parts (Pupkin, Bickle), and Scott's direction can't even manage the bloated, overwrought guilty pleasure of something like Last Boyscout. Surprisingly, Snipes is the best thing here, a conflicted, but ultimately decent, guy. It's not high art, or maybe even art in any sense, but it's an honest performance.

This is what happens when movie critics cover politics

It gets all awesome.

(Not that Christopher Orr was anything otherwise beforehand.)

Politi-who?

I know it's only their first day and all, and maybe I'm supposed to give them a break because of it, but don't you think it's a little bit odd that at 11 p.m. The Politico--which I thought was supposed to be the newest, hippest, most up-to-the-minute Capitol news source--has absolutely no current State of the Union analysis or news? (I've uploaded a screenshot here, but Blogger is giving me trouble trying to put a thumbnail in the post. Stupid internet.)

Mean Critics

Rod Dreher on American Idol and "mean" criticism:

I watched some schlub in the tryouts talking about how great she was, and how her husband didn't support her trying out because, in her view, he was jealous of her desire to soar. She talks for a bit about how much of her own self-worth and dignity and dreams and yadda yadda are riding on this tryout.

Sure enough, she stood in front of the panel of judges, and she's horrible. Excruciatingly bad. And boy, did they let her know. I'd heard that this Simon person is especially cruel, but it shocked me how harsh he was with that young woman. She begged for another opportunity to sing, but after the second one, they sent her away with a fusillade of insulting remarks. Offstage, she sobbed, which you knew was coming. She graspingly tried to salvage her dignity by saying that she was "sick," and that that had affected her voice. But she was, of course, completely untalented. She didn't realize that. She does now, most likely.

I did something I never would have done 10 years ago: I turned off the TV. The schlubby young woman was a fool, but it was unbearable watching her torn down like that. To be honest, it reminded me of when I used to be a critic, and would gleefully trash untalented filmmakers, actors and the like. Had a blast doing that. Never once thought about the real people with real hopes and real dreams, however tawdry and delusional, that I was bashing. My reviews could be really funny and entertaining, but if I were ever to return to criticism, I wouldn't write reviews in the same way. I'm not saying that I would pull punches, and overpraise something that didn't deserve it just to be nice. But I would put aside callow cruelty, of which there is too much in the world. I regret having added more than my share back in the day.

I sympathize with this sentiment, but I'm not sure the comparison between an amateur singing competition and Hollywood entirely stacks up. I imagine a lot of critics--no matter what the topic--will, at least once in their life, take a moment to wonder about the targets on the other end of their pens. Many will at least be tempted to feel a little bit of guilt about their harsher words. Does anyone really deserve to be made fun of in a public forum?

The answer is more complicated than Rod seems to make it. I might agree with him that there's little need to lay into someone as deluded as the AI contestant. But when a filmmaker makes a product designed to waste your time, money, and thoughts--when a filmmaker, either by intention or incompetence, makes a sucker of you, the paying audience, then I think there's a good argument that he or she deserves to be the target of scorn, if not ridicule.

I also tend to think a critic has a responsibility to honestly portray their own reactions. Movies (or politicians, or sculptures, or restaurants, or architecture) that make a critic irate should be treated as such. And critics also have a responsibility to engage their readers--which means that they, like movies themselves, need to make use of entertainment, humor, wit, etc. Publications don't pay for pep talks to filmmakers, nor do they pay critics to squelch their own views. As a good employee, a critic has a responsibility to both readers and bosses to write in an honest, engaging manner--which often means being, well, what Rod might call "cruel."

Of course, a good critic will (hopefully) be able to judge the appropriate tone for a piece, will not indulge in gratuitous mud-slinging, and will avoid piling on easy snark at the expense of substantive content. But sharp words are a tool that should not be yanked from of any critic's rhetorical arsenal just to salvage some creator's feelings. And, just as conservative and liberal pundits can often share drinks and make peace even while launching print salvos at each other (well, usually), knowing that it's just part of the trade, I think both the critics and the criticized can have some understanding about the nature of their business and not get too worked up over harsh judgments.

He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved (or not)

I'm moving to New York next month. More on that at a later date, but for now, does anyone have words of wisdom for a soon to be New Yorker who grew up in a small, southern town and stuck to the suburbs in D.C.? What's the best place to see a movie (blockbuster, art house, or revival), drink coffee and work on an article, eat brunch? What's the best New York movie, the one that "gets" the city, its aesthetic, its people, its flaws or strengths? Arts, culture, housing, funny stories, tirades--whatever you've got. Cause I've got zip.

There are many copies

All the world-leader wannabes are announcing their candidacies (or hinting of an announcement to come), and there's much flutter amongst the pundit class. But I think the truly important question that no one is asking is: Which one of them is a Cylon? Is it the smoky-voiced Obama? The mother-robot Hillary? The New Model (now with patented Perfect Hair!) Edwards? And what if none of them are toasters, but one or more is a collaborator? We could end up with Baltar! (Would that make imaginary-6 Vice President?)

Nine more episodes left this season. And apparently, some of them will be doozies.

Inland Empire

I'm in NRO this morning with a review of David Lynch's newest--and weirdest--movie, Inland Empire.

With no narrative, no stable characters, no sense of time or location, the movie is utterly resistant to simple summary or interpretation. It isn’t actually about anything, really, except maybe the total destruction of the sensation that anything either is or could ever be about anything. There’s no meaning, just the absence of it, and in its place, pure chaos. Whether you find it a surrealist masterpiece or pretentious dreck will depend on your tolerance for art that flaunts its effrontery. As something of a sucker for artsy-fartsy experimentation, I thought it was a demented hoot, but I’m still somewhat skeptical that it’s anything more than random imagery. No matter what, though, it’s a dizzy, mesmerizing mind trip.

Every episode better than the last one

Looks like I'll be on this Boston NPR station talking about 24 tomorrow around 11 a.m. You should be able to listen in online from the link. And, since you can never, ever, ever spend too much time debating the show, here's a recent bit from Rush Limbaugh on the silliness of treating the show too seriously.

I moderated a seminar last June for the Heritage Foundation with Howard Gordon, who is the lead writer and executive producer, and Joel Surnow, who is the executive producer-creator, and Mary Lynn Rajskub was there (Chloe) and Carlos Bernard (Tony Almeda), and a couple other people, and Bob Cochran, who was Surnow's co-creator, and of course they were kind of amused at the serious think tank-type questions that were being lobbed at them. They said, "Well, we do take terrorism very seriously, but it's a television show, and we write this thing so many months in advance that to try to predict future events and then tie our show to them is sort of impossible. We don't do that. We're just trying to make every episode better than the last one."

Tim Carney, incidentally, wrote a piece on that seminar for NRO.

Update: Looks like the panel lineup has changed, and I won't be on. But it's possible that Carney might be on, so listen in anyway.

Hollywood and Art

Terry Teachout has an essay in Commentary provocatively titled "Why Hollywood Cannot Make Art." I'm sure I'll find time to comment on it eventually (perhaps in combination with Denby's recent New Yorker essay on the future of cinema), but for now, I'll just recommend you read it.

Overstreet's Top 25

Jeffrey Overstreet has an impressively long year-end feature in which he discusses his 25 favorite films of 2006 with other movie critics, writers, and filmmakers. I had the opportunity to go back and forth with him about The Science of Sleep (with some overlap into Marie Antoinette) down at number 15.

Bauer Power

Jim Henley has interesting, funny, useful thoughts on the new season of 24 here, here, and here. Best point (which I wanted to make, but didn't have the willpower to go back and figure out how long each of the annoying suburban subplot characters lasted):

This season’s “suburban teen subplot that needs to end ASAP” is done, and in record time. Last year, they kept Derek on my TV screen through hour 5. The year before that, Behrooz was on my TV screen for nearly half the season, but it was OK because his terrorist mother was the awesomest villain in any season of 24. In season 3, viral decoy (don’t ask) Kyle Singer was on my screen for 6 hours (and they didn’t even kill him!). And in seasons 1 and 2, despite constant kidnappings, every single villain failed to kill Jack’s annoying daughter.

I also have to say that this season's suburban teen subplot was far less loathsome than the others, mainly because it focused on something directly related to the action at hand. Did anyone really care about Behrooz and his teeny bopper girlfriend? No. Not for a minute. But dealing with the way decent folks handle finding out that their nice neighbors are actually terrorists is, well, kind of interesting (if typically ludicrous).

The true definition of riveting

Boostery hack critics who like to get quoted in ads love to throw around the term "riveting." But I suspect not many of them really know what it means. It's just one of those words, like "visceral," that has entered the pop culture critic's jargon and come to mean "good," maybe in an exciting sort of way. So, being the helpful guy I am, I looked it up:

Riveting (adj):

1. that which holds (the eye, attention, etc.) firmly.

2. 24, especially any scene with Jack Bauer.

Riveting, it's clear, was a word invented to describe everyone's favorite action blast of a television show, 24, the most extreme macho fantasy of the last decade and, not coincidentally, the fictional show that most reflects our nation's views—or at least its fears—regarding the war on terror. Intentionally over the top in almost every possible way, the show posits a world where terror has become a regular part of the American landscape. This season it's especially true. Instead of trying to prevent an imminent attack, the show's hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), is trying to put a stop to a terror wave that's already in progress. Fortunately, Bauer, a do-whatever-it-takes public protector, is the epitome of the modern action hero: a hypercompetent, single-minded terrorist killin' machine who, through 6 seasons, has never stopped to eat, sleep, or use the restroom. In fact, he once actually died and then continued working. Talk about productivity levels--that's devotion to your job.

Mostly, of course, 24 is built to relentlessly bludgeon its viewers with suspense. Each and every week, it straps you in, pulls out the pliers and the blowtorch, and goes to work—and it's jarringly effective. Partly this is due to the creative lengths that the show's writers go to in order to drum up suspense. In the same way that horror movie mavens attempt to satisfy hardcore gore fiends with ever more creative methods of death and dismemberment, the writers of 24 seek to jolt viewers with continually more twisted situations for their hero, Jack Bauer.

Thankfully for all of the besieged residents of 24's America, Bauer is up to all of them. He's Superman, except he doesn't need powers; he's traded the suit, cape, and American flag for a pistol, a cell phone and the ability to override any order, public or private, simply by barking, "I'm a federal agent."

This season looks like most of the others: explosions, mad plots, terrorists with bad accents and what seems to be unlimited funding and manpower. Surely by this point the henchman's union must be demanding some sort of extra compensation for any job that requires facing off against Bauer. He takes out machine gun-toting terrorists by the dozen; we don't need a surge—just send Bauer to Baghdad.

Doublethink 2007 Winter Issue

The latest issue of Doublethink is now available online for your reading pleasure. As one of its editors, I am, of course, entirely biased and possibly even unreliable, but it's well worth your time. If I had to pick one that readers of this blog might be particularly interested in, it would be Mollie Ziegler's sex column, in which she examines the links between big government and fetishism. Of course, you should really take a look at all the stories. And for bonus non-internet fun, those of you in the D.C. area are all invited to the issue release party this Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Russia House near Dupont Circle. Both the editors and several of the writers will be in attendance; if you're early enough, we'll even give you a free issue of the magazine. And, perhaps more importantly, there will be vodka samplers. As the Russians have been reported to say, "There cannot be too much vodka. There can only be not enough vodka." This Wednesday, at least, that won't be a problem.

Notes on a Critic

I am completely obsessed with critics’ notes. Maybe this is because of how important mine are to me. I tend to remember my general impressions of a movie fairly well, but I’m terrible remember the specifics—the exact order of certain scenes, the particulars of how a shot is set up, visual or auditory cues of particular note, and, most importantly, specific dialog. So my notes, which are about 50% transcriptions of dialog and 50% observations--my brain struggling to process the film in real time--are incredibly important. They're like an incredibly low-level recreation of, if not the film itself, my individual experience of it.

I know there are critics who don’t take notes and still manage to write convincing criticism. I’ve done it, and I used to do it regularly in college, but it’s a scary thing, and I tend toward broad generalizations for fear of getting specifics wrong. I’m too scattered, too busy, too mixed up in too many diverting projects and ancillary thoughts to mentally hold onto the information in a really comprehensive manner.

One of the things, though, that always interests me is when critics refer to their notes in their reviews or other writing. David Edelstein does this sometimes, and I seem to recall Dana Stevens doing it as well. It’s sort of a weird thing to do: Isn’t the job of the professional writer not just to transcribe those notes, but to take them and process them into something slick and professional? Except at the same time, it’s also interesting: It tells you not just about the movie, but about the critic, the person reviewing the film and how they think.

Anyway, it just strikes me that someone ought to do some sort of museum project on critics’ notes: a blown up collection of notes from noted critics or notes that led to famous reviews. Or, even better, some professional critic should scan their notes and publish them online alongside their reviews. How cool would that be?

Addendum: On the other hand, as Terry Teachout implies, notes are a symbol that something is being viewed for work, not just pleasure. Of course it's not quite that simple either. These days, when I go to movies just for fun, or when I watch DVDs at home that aren't related to anything I'm working on, it feels like something of a relief, and yet I also get the urge to start scribbling. How else will I remember? For a regular note-taker, seeing a movie without notes is to be reminded that casual viewing is both more relaxing, and even more involving--yet doesn't lend itself as easily to the thorough consideration that a note-taker might be used to.

Hustle and Moan

Am I the only one who is intensely curious about Steve Sailer's take on this?

The Curse of the Golden Flower

In Curse of the Golden Flower, the staggeringly gorgeous, luxury-laden production design trumps all. It’s almost difficult to consider anything else, so blindingly beautiful is the visual work on Yimou Zhang’s newest period epic. From the costumes to the sets to the almost musical-like mise-en-scène of the action scenes, film positively glows with lavish period grandeur—whatever else, it’s a sight to see.

The first half of the film often concerns itself with the elaborate lengths to which the royal servants go to provide luxury for their masters. These sequences, which focus on the steady, rhythmic movements of anonymous people and useful objects, are cut together almost like industrial documentaries—guides to the laborious physical processes necessary to generate luxury. Even as the film showers us with wealth and beauty, it reminds us of its human cost.

But the gilded elegance of the aesthetic is not visual eloquence for its own sake: Flower is a movie steeped in restrained passions, and its production design, at once bursting with abundance and precisely managed, reflects this. All of the film’s characters are bound in by custom and tradition; like the gloriously patterned walls that surround them physically, these customs are both magnificent and stifling. And, tellingly for a grandly produced movie out of modern China, the film exhibits both a respect for history and tradition and a desire to break free from its shackles. By focusing on the royals, the movie shows us people who, because of tradition, have anything and everything they could possibly desire—except, of course, the one thing tradition will not allow them: true ownership of their lives.

Heeeeere's Stanley (and David)

Not only is AFI Silver doing a David Lynch Q&A screening of Inland Empire this weekend, they're soon starting a Stanley Kubrick retrospective where you'll be able to see A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and, yes, 2001 on the big screen.

Watching TV

With David Edelstein gone, TV-critic Troy Patterson is shaping up to be Slate's most consistently fascinating entertainment writer. TV critics tend to focus on dramas and sitcoms, but Patterson has set himself apart by writing brilliant dissections of guilty pleasure gimmick television--the ephemeral waste of what passes for reality and gamesmanship on television. It would be easy for him to simply run through each show's faults, or line them up and knock them down with obvious punchlines. But Patterson gives the shows, if not respect, then careful consideration, allowing each to suggest something about the shallowest fringes of pop culture. He doesn't make the usual culture crit mistake of railing about the decline of Western civilization either, and is willing to recognize when (and how) a show is effective, even if it's not great. His work is smart, narrowly-focused, to the point, and balanced.

Just look at his two most recent articles, one on the new reality show about wannabe rock journalists competing for a spot on the Rolling Stone roster, the other about two new dating shows. He gives the Stone-show credit where it's due, but doesn't hesitate to examine and poke fun at the show's cast of young wannabes, managing to play the "I'm an actual journalist" card fairly lightly, considering:

A bit later, braying a summer's-long farewell to her hometown from a concert stage, [one contestant] pledges sincerely to represent up in New York City. "We gotta make money, dawg. We gotta make money. That's what I'm talkin' 'bout." What is she talking about? Has the dear thing confused print journalism with one of those lucrative professions—bagging groceries, say?

His piece on dating shows is even better, capturing rather succinctly the distinct awfulness of two new shows that offer their contestants a chance to compete for a hot date, but at the risk of humiliation. And again, even though he is clearly disturbed by what he sees, he's honest about its appeal, saying about one of the shows, "As pure nonsense goes, Gay, Straight or Taken? is briskly paced, invitingly shot, and painfully contemporary—a Love Connection for the conspiracy-minded." This, I think, is what really sets him apart from other TV critics--the ability to both seriously examine the cultural implications of the idiot box and simultaneously not require it to be anything more or other than what it is--shameless, shallow diversion.

Sharp 'Eyes'

Despite my stated general antipathy toward this type of movie, I have to admit, this is a fairly clever trailer. Far too often, trailers give away the whole movie--all the major narrative twists, all the best lines, the coolest effects shots, the smartest conceptual ploys--and for genre movies that ride on their ability to shake up familiar formulas, that's deadly and stupid. You already know what to expect; a trailer shouldn't have to drill it into you, kindergarten-style, yet again. Clever teasers like this one assume, quite correctly, that you know what's coming already (a lot of wildly implausible pain and gore), and, instead of going on about plot details that don't really matter anyway, sell you on tone and sensibility. I have no desire to see The Hill Have Eyes 2, but if I was the kind of person who did, this is a trailer that would certainly sell me a ticket.

Two Films Enter, One Film Leaves

Over at The House Next Door, they're linking to Armond White's end of the year list--a side-by-side comparison called the "Better-Than" list, in which the always-cantankerous White lines up films he thinks are "better than" certain mainstream favorites. In the comments section, site editor (and recent addition to the New York Times movie crit roll--congrats!) Matt Zoller Seitz writes:

Armond's list, while necessarily fragmented, showcases the critic at his button-pushing, Sermon on the Mount best. It's also a refinement of an experiment from last year that's trying to move beyond the usual Top 10 list of capsule verdicts. ... This should be a weekly feature, I think.

But isn't it kind of already (regular if not weekly)? White regularly goes out of his way to champion his favorites as not just good but explicitly better than what he sees as the mainstream picks.

It's okay every now and then, but the regularity of it--and making it into a full-fledged feature like this--strikes me as a bit juvenile, fanboyish, and standoffish, like the Ain't It Cool talkbackers always arguing over whether Heroes or Lost or Battlestar is the One True Good Show--as if, Highlander-like, there can only be one.

This isn't to say that White doesn't often interest me, that he's not an unbelievably powerful writer (his best sentences, of which there are many, have wrecking ball force), and that we don't need someone challenging the conventional critical wisdom. But sometimes I think that he's more concerned with picking a fight than with championing good filmmaking.

2006: Top Honors

I named Apocalypto the best movie of the year, but the best filmmaking I saw in 2006 wasn’t at the movie theater. It was on television—specifically, on HBO. The Wire is the best dramatic series ever to grace the (increasingly larger) small screens of our nation’s homes, and the fourth season was the best so far. I’ve written about my love for the show before, but I’ll say it again: No other filmed fiction matches its intricate narratives, its sprawling cast of carefully drawn characters, its masterful dialog, its thematic depth and complexity. And, certainly this year, nothing else matches its pathos. It’s quite simply the best thing on a screen of any size, and it deserves every bit of the accolades it's received, as well as any others the various proprietors of awards and critical judgments can throw at it.

An Addition

I had been considering Sympathy for Lady Vengeance a 2005 film, but come to think of it, the D.C. theatrical release was this year. If we're going to call it a 2006 film, it should've been in the honorable mentions section of my year end best list.

One word.

Yes!!!!!!!!!

Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal plays like Rushmore by way of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and though it has its moments of exquisite creepiness, it’s not as fresh or smart as either.

The story outline is a familiar mashup of stalker movie beats and forbidden love flourishes. Cate Blanchett plays a beautiful upper-middle class British art teacher who has an affair with a 15 year old student. When a lonely, obsessive fellow teacher (Judi Dench, also the narrator) discovers the affair, she uses her knowledge of it, as well as Blanchett’s children and May-December marriage (to the always watchable Bill Nighy) as leverage to coerce the younger woman into what she intends (and believes) to be an ever deepening relationship. The movie never quite transcends its stalker movie narrative, and instead chooses to use the form, with its gradually escalating creep-factor, as a template for examining the perils and intersections of self-delusion, loneliness, and lust for youth.

It’s a well-made movie, with excellent performances from all three leads, but while it succeeds in being creepy, it is sometimes too focused on burying its nose in unpleasantness. Mined with dramatic explosions that give the actors a chance to show off, the movie revels in psychological misery, but it often seems primarily designed to toy with variations on self-delusion and suffering. Dench’s character is Tom Ripley but with less purposeful conniving and far more blinkered desperation, and if there’s some psychological insight in the film, it’s in her soul-deadening loneliness. Decades of emptiness and despair have eaten her up, carving away her ability to effectively self-analyze and causing her to build up an elaborate fantasy world of connections with others that do not really exist. Thus, her every action is an attempt to solidify those fantasies in the real world.

Blanchett and Dench are both superb, of course, with both actresses managing (for most of the film) to come off simultaneously unpleasant and sympathetic. Dench lets us peer into the fraught mental state of someone in the grips of violent self-deception, and her performance will likely get the most attention. But Blanchett deserves similar accolades for her work as the flighty, restless upper-middle class bohemian who manages to appear far more stable than Dench but is just as much a victim of her creepy, self-deluded passions. In a film riddled with internal deception that spins outward into misery and chaos, it’s her turn—fragile, innocent, without malice—that is most affecting. She has the most to lose, and so falls the hardest.

With its drab English hues, wintry milieu, and carefully watchful camera (which often feels as if it’s stalking the characters) the movie has the chilly aura of a cold, damp, winter’s day; just watching it you’ll want to bundle up in a scarf and overcoat. Effective as it is, its undiluted bleakness may be too much—an icy case around a heart that’s already cold and black.

Mentions

I'm sure David Denby's New Yorker essay on the future of movies in the internet age will provoke a lot of discussion amongst the blogogeeks (John Podhoretz has already weighed in with agreement), but for now I'll just say that I think he gets a lot right, but that even in doing so, he misses some of the good ways in which film will evolve as a medium.

And I probably should've mentioned this last week, but the New York Observer has a review of (semi) fallen TNR critic Lee Siegel's book of criticism, Falling Upwards, that's worth reading.