By Andrew Grant, Glenn Kenny, John Lichman, Matt Prigge, Vadim Rizov and Keith Uhlich
[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]
1. In honor of the day and [adult swim] showing The Room, here are five links that have absolutely nothing to do with film or TV, starting with this Tribute to Discontinued Breakfast Cereals. How many do YOU remember?
["For those people that won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk blue. Or if the pink milk of Pink Panther Flakes isn't you, try these very smurfy breakfast treats. The perfect cereal to eat while you sit back and watch Saturday morning cartoons. At least when Saturday morning cartoons existed. Introduced by Post, breakfast was never been the same after The Smurfs had their very own cereal. Because Post already had success with turning the Flintstones into a cereal, the Smurfs was the next logical step. Smurf-Berry Crunch was released in 1983 and was later reformated and renamed Smurf Magic Berries around 1988 (allegedly Smurf-Berry Crunch turned poop weird colors and parents got freaked out). The former was red and blue colored corn puffs, while the latter had yellow cornpuffs and added marshmallow stars instead of "smurfberries." Just look how much Papa Smurf enjoys eating a big bowl of Smurf-Berry Crunch cereal. Maybe Gargamel should have tried this stuff instead of attempting (and failing) to eat the Smurfs all the time."] Continue Reading »
By Dan Callahan
The last five films of Carl Theodor Dreyer are accepted classics of world cinema, written about, shown regularly, and given the full Criterion treatment on DVD. Many who have only seen a few silent films have seen his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and Criterion recently put out a comprehensive Vampyr (1932) that helped to shed some light on that misty, eternally disorienting film, with its radical, bizarre use of space. His three late sound films stake their claim in an essential Criterion box set: Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943) continues to exert its nearly unbearable tension; watching it is like working up a sweat, almost dying, then letting the sweat evaporate off of your mind and body until you are as free of fear as the accused witch Anne (Lisbeth Movin). (Dreyer disowned his next film, the nearly never-seen Two People {1945} but I've heard that a rare print was screened at the Toronto Film Festival, and I can only hope that this final piece of the Dreyer puzzle will someday play in New York and elsewhere.) Continue Reading »
[The following is an excerpt from Part 1 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 2, on Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols, is here. Part 3, on Hal Ashby, is here. Part 4, on J.D. Salinger, will be published April 8. Part 5, an annotated version of the prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums, will finish out the series April 10. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]
With just five features in 13 years, Wes Anderson has established himself as the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation. Supremely confident in his knowledge of film history and technique, he's a classic example of the sort of filmmaker that the Cahiers du cinéma critics labeled an auteur—an artist who imprints his personality and preoccupations on each work so strongly that, whatever the contributions of his collaborators, he deserves to be considered the primary author of the film. This series examines some of Anderson's many cinematic influences and his attempt to meld them into a striking, uniquely personal sensibility.
After the release of his second film, Rushmore, in 1998, it became obvious that Anderson was, love him or hate him, an idiosyncratic filmmaker worth discussing. In the decade-plus since then, dissecting Anderson's influences, and Anderson's influence on others, has become a bit of a parlor sport among cinephiles. Sight and Sound and Film Comment have been particularly rich resources. More recently, the Onion A.V. Club contributed a couple of playful, astute lists. Anderson himself has gotten into the act by paying tribute to his heroes in interviews and magazine articles.
This series will take the process a step further, juxtaposing Anderson's cultural influences against his films onscreen, the better to show how he integrates a staggeringly diverse array of source material into a recognizable, and widely imitated, whole. It will examine some, but certainly not all, of Anderson's evident inspirations. Along the way, it may incidentally illuminate why Anderson-esque movies—from Garden State to Son of Rambow—can seem, no matter what their virtues or pleasures, a weak substitute for the real thing.
If the United States makes it easy to follow a certain path to some form of success, it also makes it a little too easy for someone to get lost. "Down," written by Sam Catlin and directed by John Dahl, is evenly split between two deliberately paced stories that converge at the end. In one, a man tries to reconcile with his wife after his secrets and lies take their toll on his marriage. In the other, the man's partner in crime confronts the fact that he's being cast out of the place he's been staying and he doesn't really have a backup plan. Like last year's much-acclaimed film Wendy and Lucy, his descent into some American underbelly becomes a story about just how easy it is to blip off the map, to find yourself completely and utterly gone. Continue Reading »
1. The Rotten Tomatoes Show. Friend and contributor to The House John Lichman writes to let us know that anyone who wants to can contribute to the Rotten Tomatoes Show. If they have a webcam. And here's some other fun stuff they've done, including 3 Word Movie Reviews, Five Favorite Films with John Cena and I Learned It from the Movies: How to Be a Man.
["The Rotten Tomatoes Show is a movie review show that airs on Thursday nights at 10:30 e/p on Current TV. From reviews of the newest releases to commentary on cult favorites and movie trends, each episode of The Rotten Tomatoes Show is a fast-paced, comedic journey through the week in cinema."] Continue Reading »
"It's gonna blow, don't ya know." It's a phrase that a Dallas sports radio host was fond of saying back when the polarizing Terrell Owens joined the Cowboys. Since very early on in Season 3 of Friday Night Lights, the phrase has been looping in my head. For nearly the duration of the season, Joe McCoy's fuse has been burning, and it was only a matter of time until the man did something drastic. "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" was written by Bridget Carpenter, Patrick Massett, and John Zinman; the only other Friday Night Lights episode crediting three writers was the Season 1 finale, "State." It seems fitting that these specific three would write this episode, as they're responsible for scripting some of the more McCoy-centric stories this season such as "How the Other Half Live" and "It Ain't Easy Being J.D. McCoy." With the Texas High School Football State Championship just a game away, the show's writers, along with the episode's director, Michael Waxman, and the actors playing the McCoys (D.W. Moffett, Janine Turner, and Jeremy Sumpter) are tasked with bringing this festering problem to a climax at the most inopportune moment. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. This is the second half of a two-part conversation; the first part can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
ED HOWARD: You selected Steven Soderbergh's Solaris as the film from the last few years you believe to be unfairly overlooked, and it's not hard to see why you chose it. There are few types of films that are more often overlooked and forgotten, en masse, than the amorphous category of the "remake." Fairly or unfairly, critics tend to be inherently skeptical of remake projects, even if audiences flock to genre remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the "reboots" of franchises like Friday the 13th and Halloween. In Soderbergh's case, his film couldn't even be called a commercial success; it was more or less a flop whose memory has almost completely faded from the popular imagination in just a few short years. When Soderbergh's film came out in 2002, I skipped over it for the same reason that I suspect a lot of other people did: by all appearances, it was yet another Hollywood "updating" of a classic film from years before, a film that if you ask me didn't really need to be revisited. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris is a classic of the science fiction genre, as well-loved and admired among art-cinema fans as Stanley Kubrick's more popularly known 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Tarkovsky was directly responding in making his own film. Moreover, the 1961 novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem is also a classic, one of the greatest works of sci-fi literature (and a personal favorite of mine). Soderbergh was stepping into tremendous shoes by attempting to tell this story, and I'm sure he realized that this film would inevitably be compared to its predecessors, making it difficult to evaluate on its own terms.
The question then becomes: on its own terms, what is Soderbergh's Solaris? What was his rationale for revisiting a classic story? What does he bring to the film to make it his own? Does this new Solaris deserve its current obscurity or should it be remembered simultaneously with its predecessors (or even elevated above them)? I have my own opinions on these questions, but for now I'm interested to know what you think. Does what I've described gibe with your own reasons for picking this film? And why do you think Soderbergh's Solaris deserves a second look? Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. This is the first half of a two-part conversation; the second part can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
JASON BELLAMY: For our third installment of "The Conversations," we decided to each select a film from the past 10 years that we thought was unfortunately overlooked and/or unfairly maligned. Serendipitously, we selected films that the other person had yet to see. You elected to champion 2004's Undertow. I selected 2002's Solaris. These films have few similarities, and so there will be no attempt to connect them beyond our feeling that they are deserving of increased discussion and praise. Continue Reading »
1. Warner Bros. is starting up a potentially revolutionary program where, eventually, every program in their library will be available on a custom-burned DVD. Hitfix's Drew McWeeny exults. (h/t: Ryan Kelly)
["So how does Warner Bros. ever expect to get those other 5000 titles into the hands of collectors who would want them? The reason many of them aren't available is because the studio isn't sure there's enough demand to justify the expense of mastering and pressing and marketing each and every one of those movies. But what if they only had to make a DVD when someone ordered it? What if they could press a single copy of a film instead of having to press thousands and thousands? At that point, there seems to be no reason to hold any title back."] Continue Reading »
Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) has always been one of Lost's most under-served characters. If you go back and look at the Pilot, the revelation that he's an Iraqi is played for friggin' COMIC EFFECT, for God's sake. Andrews' performance is so solid (to the point where he's one of the few Lost cast members to score an Emmy nomination, somewhat inexplicably) and his presence is so great that he's been kept alive long after other characters the show had no idea how to service would have been killed off. Every season, the series tosses in an episode that pretty much boils down to, "Hey, Sayid used to torture. Isn't that MORALLY AMBIGUOUS?!" and calls it a day. Without Andrews, most of these episodes would be complete yawns (only "Solitary" and "The Economist" are really worthy of his talents), but the actor has managed to save most of these by just gritting his teeth and pushing through the pain. Like, pretty much all I can remember about Season Three's "Enter 77" is that the Sayid flashback was ridiculous (I think it involved a mystical cat?), but Andrews was SO GOOD that I liked it more than I probably should have. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The following is the first in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
[Photo Credits: Shing Ka (all, except logo); Leif Fortlouis (logo).]
Day One
The 8-year-old boy, Matthew, is clutching his mother's sleeve tight and holding her hand. He looks very pale. As the director of photography, Arsenio Assin, sits on a nearby couch inspecting the Hi-Def camera, which is state of the art and still has that "new car smell," and the filmmaker, Preston, assembles the costumes, which are, to say the least, quite bizarre (a white cowboy hat, white zip-up hoodies, white sweatpants and Texarcana cowboy boots), the boy seems to wonder just what he got himself into here. We load up the passenger van and drive out to the shopping mall, where we will proceed to shoot these actors in these strange costumes moving through this consumer-driven space. Matthew barely says a word to us; he is going through something completely interior—and completely personal. Continue Reading »
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Sunshine Cleaning, Everlasting Moments, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Horton Foote, Teaching the Young: Take Two, The Mask of Dimitrios, Burn Notice, Castle, ER.
SUNSHINE CLEANING (2008. Written by Megan Holley. 102 minutes): Not Little Miss Sunshine.
Yes, it has "sunshine" in the title. Yes, it has Alan Arkin as a crusty grandpa. Yes, it has a light colored van. Yes, it is set the Southwest. Yes, the poster is similar. But does Little Miss Sunshine start with a man bringing a shotgun shell into a sporting goods store, asking to look at a shotgun and blowing his head off with it? No. Sunshine Cleaning is a darker film (in spite of what you may think from the trailer), further along the continuum of dramedy to drama than to comedy. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: A belated acknowledgment of and congratulations to Kenji who made his byline debut at WSJ.com this past week.]
British visual artist Steve McQueen's first foray into narrative feature filmmaking, Hunger, arrives on these shores after having won a slew of prizes in Europe last year.
In recreating the 1981 hunger strike in Ireland's Maze Prison led by Bobby Sands, Mr. McQueen isn't focused on scoring political points: he's more preoccupied with individual figures within the harsh prison landscape. He doesn't make it easy to resolve our feelings about the decisions Mr. Sands and others make; in fact, the film's remarkable centerpiece sequence, a 22-minute exchange (17 of which are an uninterrupted "long take") between Mr. Sands and a priest, has them vehemently debating the merits of the hunger strike.
Mr. McQueen himself is similarly cagey about making broad pronouncements about his own film, as The Wall Street Journal discovered in a recent phone interview.
Big Love's season finales often have a bit of an out-of-control feel to them, as though any given season's plotlines have gotten so all-encompassing that it's all the show can do to race just ahead of the giant boulder of story that threatens to overtake it at any moment. "Sacrament," written by Victoria Morrow from a story by Coleman Herbert and directed by Dan Attias, managed this feat more elegantly than last season's finale, and it mostly brought the series' sporadically brilliant third season to a close, even if the finale was, itself, only sporadically brilliant. I suspect everyone here is tired of hearing me diagnose the show's problem as spending too much time at Juniper Creek (even if I'm more charitable toward those characters and storylines than some commentators), but the four episodes following "Come, Ye Saints," the best episode the show has ever done, just got too bogged down in compound morass. Still, developments in the finale suggest that the focus of the show will shift decisively to the Henrickson compound in Sandy, Utah, and to stories of Bill Henrickson's (Bill Paxton) third wife, Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) in the show's fourth season. Continue Reading »
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