“Beyond the mail delays and the botched orders, the lack of human interaction is the big problem with Netflix and its cyber-ilk. Thanks to the Internet, we can now do nearly everything — working, shopping, moviegoing, social networking, having sex — on one machine at home. We’re becoming a society of shut-ins. We deprive ourselves of exercise, even if it’s just a stroll around the mall, until we’re the shape of those blobby people in WALL*E. And we deny ourselves the random epiphanies of human contact.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 8.10 Time essay, “Why Netflix Stinks: A Critic’s Complaint.”
11 days and counting until the N.Y./L.A. platform break of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. No Metacritic reactions are posted but the current 89% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating is probably indicative of critical reaction to come. Will it matter? Will the no-Iraq-movies-under-any-circumstances crowd stick to their guns? Will the idea that it’s actually a suspense thriller by way of Aliens take hold? Tick, tick, tick, tick…
One of the best reviews so far was written by Time‘s Richard Corliss nine months ago, way back at the Venice Film Festival. It’s titled “A Near-Perfect War Film.” The last two graphs read as follows:
“On his first mission, Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner) releases a cloud of smoke, protecting him from sharpshooters but obliterating his comrades’ view of him. (There’s another company ready to cover him closer to the action.) A taxi has just edged toward the suspected device; he tells the driver to back out of the area. No movement. James walks closer, repeats the order; stillness. He puts his gun against the man’s head: ‘Wanna back up?’ The car slides into reverse. ‘Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent,’ somebody says, ‘he sure is now.’
“Finding a string nearly buried in the street dirt, James finds it attached to seven bombs and matter-of-factly snaps the wire for each. OK, that’s done. Piece of cake, seven slices.
“It’s a creepy marvel to watch James in action. He has the cool aplomb, analytical acumen and attention to detail of a great athlete, or a master psychopath, maybe both.
“A quote from former New York Times Iraq expert Christopher Hedges that opens the film says, ‘War is a drug.’ Movies often editorialize on this theme: the man who’s a misfit back home but an efficient, imaginative killing machine on the battlefield. Bigelow and producer/screenwriter Mark Boal aren’t after that. They’re saying that, in a hellish peace-keeping operation like the U.S. deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan (James’ previous assignment), the Army needs guys like James.”
Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Pixar/Disney’s Up “will, like last year’s WALL*E, prove to be one of the most satisfying movie experiences of its year. The story of a septuagenarian grouch who uses his cane, hearing aid and dentures to thwart all evildoers; a buddy movie whose pals are separated by 70 years; a love story that transcends the grave — has there been a movie like this in the history of feature animation?
“Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, this is the studio’s most deeply emotional and affecting work, sending the audience on a journey in two new directions — penetratingly inward and exaltedly up.”
I spoke yesterday with a Los Angeles friend who saw a flat version of Up a day or two ago (as opposed to the 3D version that will show in Cannes and in select venues once it opens on 5.29) and he was very thumbs-up also.
In his 4.9 review of Observe and Report, Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote the following: “About an hour in, mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) has finally achieved his dream and taken the blonde, egotistical, doltish perfume saleslady Brandi (Anna Faris) to bed, basically by getting her drunk. Problem is, she’s pretty much passed out, her puke staining the pillow, as Ronnie happily, obliviously churns away. He pauses for a moment to notice her comatose state, and without opening her eyes, Brandi mutters, ‘Why’d you stop, malefactor?’ Or a 12-letter word to that effect.
“Now that‘s character comedy, I mean tragedy, I mean tromedy, of the highest, I mean lowest, I mean high-lowest order. Beyond the weirdness, if you can get there, is a quick portrait of trailer-park America pursuing its urges by any means necessary. It’s clear that Ronnie, no babe magnet, will take what he can get on this night of nights, even if it’s not quite the exalted ecstasy he had hoped for; and that Brandi, who’s been in this position once or twice before, wants the sexual exercise, even if she’s not awake to take an active role in it — somewhere in her stupor, she’s feeling a rote rumble of pleasure.
“The scene achieves what few American movies even attempt: to pinpoint the grim compromise, the desperation, that can attend the sex act. Don’t call it love; don’t call it grand; but whatever it is, don’t stop.”
I’ve been waiting to see Gerald Peary and Amy Geller‘s For The Love of Movies: A History of American Film Criticism for a long time. It’s been in the works for years. So many, in fact, that one of the talking heads appears as a young, lean-faced guy with a shock of dark hair (in footage that was shot around 2000) and as an older, fuller-faced guy with less hair. Happens to all of us, but this may be a first. Same interview subject, two biological incarnations.
Anyway, For The Love of Movies — directed and written by Peary, produced by Geller — is finally here and it does the job nicely. Which is to say intelligently, competently, lovingly and, after a fashion, comprehensively. Meaning that it tells the story as thoroughly as the budget and running time have allowed. For those who don’t know much about the lore of the realm, it’s nutritious food and then some.
It’s a hell of a subject — a chronicle of magnificent obsessions and magnificent dreams, and a rise-and-fall story covering scores of critics, the entirety of the Hollywood film culture from the ’20s to the present, and hundreds if not thousands of movies.
Ideally (and this is no slag on Peary or Geller) For The Love of Movies should have been a well-funded, six-part American Experience series on PBS, shot on 35mm by Emmanuel Lubezski, and including a vast smorgasbord of film clips donated by their copyright owners as a gesture of thankfulness. (Today’s production and marketing community may resent critics, but they owe them big-time.)
But Peary and Geller’s low-budget, hand-to-mouth approach will do for now. I’m very glad it was made, glad that I saw it. I hope others follow suit when it has its big debut on Monday, 3.16, at South by Southwest, and more particularly at the Alamo Ritz at 8 pm. And then on Wednesday, 3.18 at the same venue. And again on Saturday, 3.21, at the Alamo Lamar 3 at 4 pm.
Gerald Peary (l.) and Amy Geller (r.) with unknown female.
You can’t watch this film and not acknowledge that Peary and Geller are fully up to the task of providing a clean and cogent history lesson. Could they have made a snarkier, trippier excursion piece? A more poetic and probing cultural epic or tone poem…whatever? Yeah, probably, but they were budgetarily constrained and wanted to reach the not-very-hip (or moderately hip) crowd.
So they’ve thrown together an easy-to-digest, chapter-by-chapter saga of the last 90 years of American film criticism, starting in the mid-to-late teens with the emergence of Frank E. Wood, the first “cricket” to earn his stripes by investing a modicum of personal passion and a writerly point-of-view, and hiking all the way through Vachel Lindsay, Robert Sherwood, the great seminal trio of Otis Ferguson, James Agee and Manny Farber, the 20-year reign of Bosley Crowther, the fall of Crowther over his Bonnie and Clyde review, the influence of Cahiers du Cinema and the auteur theory, the resultant reign of Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema, the huge influence of Pauline Kael and the writings of Stanley Kaufman, Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Richard Schickel, Molly Haskell, Roger Ebert, Stuart Klawans, etc.
This feels like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Stop the Fire.” I’m hearing a film-critic spoof version of the lyrics. Come to think, a mock music-video interlude would have been a great thing for Perry and Geller to run with — seriously.
Gleiberman, Hoberman, Harlan tell-it Jacobson.
John Powers, Elvis Mitchell, Leonard Maltin, mumblecore.
Titanic, Janet Maslin, Wesley Morris, David Sterritt.
Ain’t-It-Cool, Rex Reed, Nesselson and junket whores.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Orson Kane, Indies in the ’90s.
Wilmington, Weinberg, Siskel and Szymanski.
Ruby Rich, Kenny T., tits and zits, Anthology Film Archives.
I’ve lost the rhythm, can’t get it right, haven’t the time. Anyone?
For whatever reason Perry and Geller don’t mention the great French critic Andre Bazin. (Or at least not that I remember. He’s not listed in this cast roster.) Nor do they mention John Simon, whom I always regarded as a brilliant (if occasionally cruel) critic and one of the major go-to guys of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Or Todd McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, Bertrand Tavernier, Andy Klein, Armond White, Ty Burr, Glenn Kenny, Anthony Lane, Scott Foundas, etc.
There are a lot of holes and gaps — let’s face it. The doc only runs 80 minutes. A longer length (115 or 120 minutes, say) would have obviously allowed for a more comprehensive summary.
For those who know a lot about the American film-critic monastery, For the Love of Movies is a tidy and agreeable canoe ride down memory creek. With a tinge of melancholy, I should add, although this comes more from my own feelings.
Peary and Geller, to put a point on it, have chosen not to emphasize the dominant reality facing established film critics in the 21st Century — i.e., the extinction of the monk-like film critic cabal as it was known and defined from the late 1930s and ’40s to the beginning of this century, and the drop-by-drop decline and diminishment of the power and prestige of the traditional film critic. Which is due, obviously, to the winding down of the Gutenberg era, blah blah. With some critics and columnists adapting to the new technological climate (ahem) and some not so much.
Peary and Geller acknowledge that it’s currently a sink-or-swim, do-or-die reality out there. They begin by saying that “film criticism is a profession under siege” and that “according to Variety 28 film critics have lost their jobs in the last several years.” That, of course, is dated information and isn’t the half of it. Sean P. Means‘ disappearing film critic list is currently at 49. MCN’s Last Film Critics in America list has the names of 121 who are still collecting a check.
Clearly we’re looking at the end of the road here, certainly for the elite culture portrayed in the film.
The prime kiss-of-death factor is a diminished interest among today’s tweeting, texting, 24/7 digital-feed generation in being passive recipients of the views of learned, brahmin-like, know-it-all film critics dispensing ivory-tower insights. Economic issues aside, the firing of film critics is rooted in today’s common-currency belief that everyone and anyone with a computer or hand-held device knows as much as those snooty-ass critics do. Or certainly that their opinion is just as valid, and that they prefer a more democratic, interactive bloggy-blog conversation as the dominant mode of dissection and discussion.
In short, there’s a whole current of lament than runs underneath this story that probably should have been explored with more frankness and feeling.
For The Love of Movies is narrated by Patricia Clarkson. I don’t want to be a crank, but I would have preferred to hear a raspy, whiskey-tinged male voice tell the tale. The voice of someone who sounds like he might have personally lived through some of the history. Michael Wilmington would have worked in this respect.
As expected, Twilight is polling on Rotten Tomatoes about 55-45 negative-positive. Obviously a serious difference of opinion, but it’s interesting to see how this and that high-cred critic thinks it’s silly or worse and others are touched by it, or at least respect its strategy and understand what it’s going for. Like The Philadephia Inquirer‘s Stephen Rea, for example, saying “it’s about as intense a series of onscreen clinches as the movies have seen in ages…but amazingly, it feels real — the actors pull it off.”
But the two best paragraphs written about the film have come from Time‘s Richard Corliss, to wit:
“Twilight…observes movie laws as aged as Edward, who was initiated into the realm of the undead in 1918. Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling. Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She’s Natalie Wood to Edward’s James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo.
“This brand of fervid romance packed ’em in for the first 60 years of feature films, then went nearly extinct, replaced by the young-male fetishes of space toys and body-function humor. Twilight says to heck with that. It jettisons facetiousness for a liturgical solemnity, and hardware for soft lips. It revives the precept that there’s nothing more cinematic than a close-up of two beautiful people about to kiss.
“The movie’s core demographic is so young, its members may not know how uncool this tendency has become. But for them, uncool is hot. And seeing Twilight is less a trip to the multiplex than a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of puberty. It’s the girls’ first blast of movie estrogen.”
“Oliver Stone gets points for speed and efficiency — he shot the picture over 46 days this spring and summer on a tiny $30 million budget and gave it a rich, polished look — but not for the scope of his vision,” writes Time‘s Richard Corliss. “W. isn’t tragedy or farce; it’s illustrated journalism, based mostly on extant Bush biographies and memoirs of early Bush appointees. All the incidents are there but not the insight. What’s missing is the one thing Stone films have never lacked: a point of view.”
W. says Bush is a mediocre Oedipal figure (i.e., driven by father issues) and therefore, as repugnant as he may be in straight-up political terms, to be finally pitied. This isn’t a point of view? Sure seems like one. It never really sank in before I saw W. that George W. Bush is a fundamentally sad and trapped fellow. However accurate this view may be, it’s now with me and that’s the doing of Oliver Stone. The certainty of mind I’ve had all these years in simply despising Bush is, for better or worse, no more.
Update: An apparent policy not to screen Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa (New Line/WB, 10.3) for critics in local markets is being corrected. I reported this morning that screenings hadn’t been scheduled in Portland and Arizona, but I’ve since been told by the Arizona Daily Star‘s Phil Villarreal that a press screening was suddenly set up today, after my earlier story ran.
Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris in Appaloosa
Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling also told me that it’s being press-screened for her territory; same message from Dan Lybarger in the Kansas City area. So either things weren’t as bad as suspected or local WB reps are now getting things in gear.
Villareal and the Oregonian’s Shawn Levy told me this morning that Appaloosa is not being screened for them. I asked Appaloosa’s exec producer Michael London what the story was, and he didn’t get back.
The early reports seemed to argue with an upbeat 9.19 Conde Nast Portfolio column by Fred Schruers, called “New Life for a New Line Movie,” that says Warner Bros. seems to be getting squarely behind the film.
Schruers first explains how there was initial trepidation on the part of Harris and London that Warner Bros. might not fully support Appaloosa, a New Line production that became part of the WB release calendar when New Line company was folded into WB behemoth.
Schruers writes that “in his first meeting with the Warner Bros. marketing executives after the merger, Harris recalled that the outlook for his sober Western was decidedly downbeat. ‘I was getting the feeling they were going to throw it the dogs, or straight to DVD,’ Harris said.”
“We naturally had a lot of trepidation” after Warner Bros. absorbed New Line, London is quoted as saying. “But once the studio began really working on the movie, they started getting excited about their marketing materials. They got a great trailer out there.
Jeremy Irons, Viggo Mortensen
“Now, after the Toronto [Film Festival showings], Warners seems genuinely invested in the movie succeeding,” London states.
No screenings in Portland or Tuscon doesn’t sound like genuine investment to me. I can understand crappy programmers not being screened, but Appaloosa is a better-than-passable tweener. I wasn’t over the moon about it, but it’s certainly not a burn. It grabbed me for the most part, and at no point did it irritate or piss me off — a significant thing from my perspective. It’s not half bad. Engrossing, interesting, handsomely shot, character-driven.
“It’s a tiny bit better than James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma,” I wrote in Toronto. “It’s got a nice modest feel to it. And it’s nicely shot, very well acted (particularly by Harris, Viggo Mortensen and bad-guy Jeremy Irons) and ‘engaging’ as far as it goes.”
And a fair number of journos who saw it in Toronto posted admiring reviews. N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick called it “the best Western since Open Range [that] shows there’s still life in this most unfashionable of genres.” Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote that “in its fidelity to western verities, Appaloosa may seem radical to today’s viewers. At a time when images in all visual media bombard the brain, the western — the one original American film form — moves at the pensive pace of a European art film.”
Here’s Levy’s account: “Before Toronto, the local rep” — the Seattle-based Terry Hines & Associates — “contacted us wanting to know if we’re interested in speaking to Ed Harris about Appaloosa. We said sure, show us the movie, and they said okay, we’ll set something up. The deadline came and went. Then the picture got onto the release schedule, and the other day — this is a movie that’s coming right up, opening on 10.3 — and they said, ‘Oh, it’s not being screened in Portland.'”
Villarreal said the local WB/New Line rep has told him “nothing [is] planned right now” as far as showing Appaloosa to Arizona critics.
“Almost every week something is not being screened for the press up here,” says Levy. “Or they show it at the very last minute. You can’t see it, you can’t see it, you can’t see it…oh, you can!
“30 to 40 films per year don’t get screened in Portland,” Levy says. “I would say three to four each month. That’s thirty or forty per year — 10% of their annual product — that they don’t want to show people. And Appaloosa has about a 58 rating on Metacritic….it’s not shit.”
Here’s another, somewhat unsual take, conveyed in a couple of excerpts from A.O. Scott‘s review in the N.Y. Times: “It’s not a great western, and, as I’ve suggested, it doesn’t really try to be. This one shows a square jaw and a steely gaze, but also a smile and a wink. There is no shortage of killing — it’s a large part of how Virgil Cole, Mr. Harris’s character, makes his living — but Appaloosa works best as a cunning, understated sex comedy.”
The counter-current ‘s against Burn After Reading continues in this filing from the Venice Film Festival by Time‘s Richard Corliss: “The viewer’s fun, such as it is, comes from guessing where the movie is headed and why it’s going there. The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers’ work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, is a plaintive ‘what the heck kind of film is this?’
“As close to an answer as you’ll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay in the cocoon of ignorance most of us live in. It pushes the old form of movie comedy — smart people saying clever things — into collision with today’s dominant model of slackers whose utterly unfounded egotism eventually worms its way into an audience’s indulgence. Which is to say that most of the people here seem like bright lights but are actually dim bulbs. They’re not falling-down stupid; they radiate the subtler variety of idiocy that can be mistaken for charm, decency or even brilliance.
But in the end, says Corliss, “the movie’s glacial affectlessness, its remove from all these subpar schemers, left me cold and perplexed.”
Roger Ebert‘s attendance at Ebertfest (4.23 to 4.27) is uncertain due to having suffered a recent hip injury after falling during a visit to the Pritikin Center in Florida. He’s now recovering at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “The show must go on!” Ebert has stated in a press release. “I am doing fine and if the doctors clear me, I will be there to welcome our guests, including Ang Lee, Paul Schrader, Richard Roeper, Richard Corliss, Sally Potter, Christine Lahti, Rufus Sewell, Timothy Spall, Michael Barker and many others. But whether or not I am there, the audience will see some amazing films.”
“Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the somber phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle’s profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso — this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase.
“It is in this sense that one can say that Charlton Heston, by his very existence and regardless of the film he is in, provides a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like Hiroshima mon amour or Citizen Kane, films whose aesthetic either ignores or repudiates Charlton Heston. Through him, mise en scene can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.” — French film critic Michel Mourlet, from a 1960 Cahiers du Cinema essay, quoted today by both Time‘s Richard Corliss and Dave Kehr on his own film blog (i.e., not his Times DVD column).
“Will there be a good movie this year?,” Time‘s Richard Corliss asked yesterday. “Do we have to wait till November for Hollywood to unveil the niche prestige items that it saves for Oscar consideration? Is every movie till then doomed to be aimed at the all-important 8-year-old-girl-to-14-year- old-boy demographic?
The Best Films of 2008…hands down, take ’em home, in this order: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, In Bruges, The Band’s Visit, Cassandra’s Dream (second-tier Woody Allen, but not at all bad with a superb Colin Farrell weak-loser performance) and — I know this sounds like a stretch — Sylvester Stallone‘s Rambo, which is one of the most stupidly exhilarating wastes of time I’ve ever paid good money to sit through.
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