Like Kathryn Bigelow, recipient of the Oscar for Best Director, I’m utterly speechless. Last night the Academy decided, under pressure from the big moneymakers and unique genre films, to select the best-made film for best picture. Going into this, I was almost certain that it was going to be Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director and Avatar for Best Film. I am so glad that I was wrong.
This entry comes via an e-mail from Matt. Apparently I had to see this. Check it out for yourself before I go on because anything I say on the matter will be utterly useless if you don’t.
Friends don’t let friends trip alone. The inexplicable terror of the otherness of time, to borrow the cocktails-at-seven phrase from Freud, has overwhelmed this television ad in many ways. Forty-odd years later it seems like an odd relic of some civilization of indeterminable musical taste and choice in travel. Most haunting of all might be the realization that it was our civilization.
Video artist Amy Greenfield was recently informed that Youtube would be pulling her work from their website. She was told that “her works, which contain some artistic nudity, did not conform with YouTube’s ‘community standards.’ Under YouTube’s policies, ‘Films and television shows may contain [full nudity]; however, videos originating from the YouTube user community must abide by the YouTube Community Guidelines and are not permitted to include such content.’” Though Youtube has now reversed their decision thanks to efforts from the EFF and the National Coalition Against Censorship, I fear the issue is far from over. I found out about the story through BoingBoing, where one reader identified only as pjcamp commented: “I’m having a hard time telling the difference between artistic nudity and busty.pl[.]” I’m having a hard time deciphering “busty.pl,” but what intrigues me about pjcamp’s comment is how magnificently it manages to miss the point completely.
Youtube isn’t protecting anyone from “busty.pl,” though it might appear so. What’s happening, instead, is that Youtube is continually serving the interests of “films and television shows.” These, to be sure, aren’t your films or the tv talk show you and your friends record every Sunday night: “films and television” shows are films and television shows from networks, studios, and distributors that have a serious financial worries about how their media is viewed. Since Amy Greenfield wasn’t one of those, her work got axed–though, presumably, if it had been from the film Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor, Youtube wouldn’t have thought twice. That’s what is dangerous about Youtube: its interests couldn’t have less to do with you. The question is not one of moral censorship but rather of financial censorship: Youtube isn’t barring nudity, they’re just not allowing it if you aren’t distributed by Fox Searchlight. It’s a question, all the same, about what we’re allowed to see.
There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list. We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.
Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.
I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals. I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking. The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.
I just found this wonderful little video directed by Dewey Nicks of superstudio for Jade Castrinos (of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros):
There’s something unexpectedly vital about the video that blooms out of Nicks’ decision to use layered live audio where most music videos just stick the studio recordings on top. It’s not the take-away show idea, either, which from the very start was a familiar idea–a stripped-down concert video. This is something new entirely: edited like a music video (which is to say, edited heavily), recorded like a take-away show, you get pulled in to the reverie of the song–eternal, omnipresent, out of time and space, whether you’re on the beach or in a park or getting in your car or following a toddler in a devil-jumpsuit down the stairs, the way a good piece of music lingers under your breath for a day, or a week.
Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)
As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour. (more…)
Fish Tank, dir. Andrea Arnold (2010)
There are movies I see every once and a while that remind me why I watch in the first place. If that seems clichéd, let me assure you that Andrea Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank, is not. Here is what we hope for and rarely get: urgency without manipulation, intimacy without bland sentiment, shock without exploitation. (more…)
Every year they make the same mistake. They rinse off the pot, give it a quick dry, pop it on the burner and twist the heat to high. The prep work takes precedent, chopping the onions and slicing thin the meat, letting the pot heat all the while. Then the time comes for them to brown the meat and they pour in a few tablespoons of oil, which smokes for a moment, and then, with a sudden and heavy breath, pfoof! – fire. (more…)
Yesterday, NPR.org’s picture show blog featured the work of Kate Stone. I knew Kate at Bard, but had missed her thesis show; boy, am I grateful to NPR for cluing me in to what I’d missed.
In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene. In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms. In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. (more…)
Fresh off the heels of the romantic and alluring The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Joshua Safdie has teamed up with his brother (and fellow Red Bucket Films mate) Ben Safdie on Daddy Longlegs, also known by the title Go Get Some Rosemary. The film’s two titles are indicative of the film’s own dual identities. If you watch the trailer available now via Apple and then watch what’s on the Red Bucket website, you’ll see two different films. (more…)
Our company is, also, pleased obliged to report that Warner Brother’s The Blind Side has been nominated for Best Picture. [Insert despairing, snarky remark about the Academy here]
"Hurt Locker" Director Kathryn Bigelow
Co-head New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis just gave an interview with Jezebel, and she held little, if anything, back. “Let’s acknowledge,” she says right off the bat, “That the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially… I’ve learned to never underestimate the academy’s bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.” (more…)
Yesterday, J.D. Salinger died at the ripe old age of 91. We here at the Company thought there couldn’t be a better way to send the old boy off than with the proper belt of a proper beverage, our eyes firmly set on something heavy with the whiskey.
However, we ran into a revealing snag: there doesn’t exist a Salinger drink. And so, we filled the gap. (more…)
The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2009)
While I was touring in NYC with my band last week, I took some downtime and went to go see The Lovely Bones. $12.85 later, I find myself in a theater with about 25 seats and a screen no bigger than a Jimmy Hendrix wall hanging. Whatever, it’s New York.
I was concerned at first that I would need to be completely enveloped by this film in order to enjoy it’s overwhelming visuals and super dramatic content. Fortunately, I was wrong. (more…)
If I had to pick a moment from a film that’s resonated with me lately, I would choose one that’s been vastly ignored. It’s from Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, and it’s buried within the emotional climactic scene where Tom Cruise barges in on the neo-feminist divorcee club to win back Renée Zellweger, delivering a long monologue ending with the phrase that permanently entered the zeitgeist, “You complete me”.
But that’s not the moment that I’m thinking of. It’s about three sentences earlier. Cameron Crowe knows how to write dialogue; he easily inherits the chair of conversation-mastery recently vacated by the late Eric Rohmer. Yet this monologue wanders and meanders, and finally Jerry loses his train of thought. He pauses, and in a wonderful non-sequitur, slowly says, “We live in a cynical world. A cynical … world …” (more…)
A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (2009)
There’s a moment in the film where George (Colin Firth)—an English professor—lectures about a book written by Aldous Huxley. In the hands of another director and another actor, this would have been a misguidedly rousing moment. George talks about fear and love and aging, all the themes that, in another film, would be seized on to convey a heart-warming, trite, and hollow message about homosexuals. In the hands of Tom Ford, though, there’s nothing falsely rousing about this speech. (more…)
I just stumbled on (not stumbled upon, thank you–I do my internet research old school) this beautifully executed, remarkably simple Ok Go video. Ok Go went from indie band to… well, bigger indie band, largely because of their wonderful videos, which are marvels of efficiency and flair.
But I’m not embedding this video because of how much I enjoy it (although I do, very much). I’m embedding it because Damian Kulash (the lead singer of Ok Go) is asking us to. All of us. (more…)
Crazy Heart, dir. Scott Cooper (2009)
There’s nothing surprising or radical in Crazy Heart. Instead, the film serves as a brilliant reminder: it reminds us of Jeff Bridges’ greatness and urges us to recall how irritating and overindulgent a performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal can be. The film also reminds us about a particular kind of movie made in the United States during the 1970s—films with strong main characters and stronger performances. Crazy Heart exists very much in the tradition of those films. Bridges quiet, genuinely soulful portrayal of how country singer Bad Blake gets his groove back carries the film into serious character study territory and keeps it from veering into overly sentimental, saccharine territory while also deftly covering up the film’s heavy reliance on music. (more…)
For All Mankind, dir. Al Reinert (1989)
For All Mankind begins with JFK’s announcement that our technology–put together, he says, more perfectly than the finest watch–will take us to the moon. Speaking, JFK looks comfortable in a dated, ancient way. Kennedy’s announcement sets the tone for the rest of the film: it’s not laudatory or patriotic, though it depicts one of the proudest moments in American history. For All Mankind is a strangely distant film, refusing to revel in the triumph of the moon landing and instead constantly wondering what it means to have sent anyone into space anyway. (more…)
After a record-setting year at the box office, what can we expect in 2010? More of the same. Don’t expect Hollywood to surprise us when things are going so well. Expect more 3D, more talking CGI animals, more lame comedies/soft dramas starring Sandra Bullock.
Not that I’m cynical. (more…)
I went to see The Road (2009) today. I went to see it alone–a new experience for me that I’m now sure to repeat. I found it liberating because I didn’t have to come up with an opinion to defend afterward; instead, I let it simmer while I watched another film at the Landmark theater (something only possible when alone). I kept coming back to the scenes in the underground bunker with all of the food and the cellar stocked with starving people–food for cannibals. It reminded me of Fallout 3, a video game that I had beaten a month ago. And then pirates. (more…)
(The beginning of a series on my own favorite films of the aughts.)
Crimen Ferpecto, dir Álex de la Iglesia (2004)
Crimen Ferpecto is a deliciously wry and bloody satire of contemporary consumer culture—in fact, the last film with such a sharp edge against consumerism was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, where muzak still rang amongst the flesh-eating zombies. In this film, Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) is a dapper and libidinous clerk at a Madrid department store who aspires to playboy perfection. After he accidentally murders his competitor, Don Antonio (Luis Varela), he covers up the crime with the help of the one sales girl he hasn’t slept with—Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), whom he describes as “not the kind of person you would see on TV.” (more…)
While my filmmaking brethren are location scouting up in the snowy land of Pickering, Ontario, I’m holding down the fort back here in the States and keeping warm in the nascent days of the new year.
The Round-Up Endorsements this month are leaner than they have been before, but never worry: come February, we’ll have more laid out for you.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck – Short, sweet and sour stories from a master of style and form. Most people recall Steinbeck as a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, resigned to a high school senior’s reading list, but he’s at his best and grittiest when he’s spitting out short stories.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – Speaking of short stories, if you haven’t read Lydia Davis then you’re truly missing out on a modern pioneer of the form. She packs more into a single paragraph than anyone else out there.
Alka-Seltzer – Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh! what a relief it is! And, indeed, it is. Get the original kind, the two tablets that drop into a glass of water. Even though it seems just to be an ironic throwback (akin to, “Hey! Moxie soda isn’t just delicious, it’s nutritious too!” [actual advertising slogan]), we at the Company have found that Alka-Selter actually works wonders for both colds and hangovers.
Carrying Tea Packets in Your Coat – Why not chase the tablets with some hot tea? Everyone has more tea packets lying around their place than they would ever like to admit. Make use of them, especially in these chilly winter months, by carrying a few around in your coat pocket. Gas stations, cafes, and even Starbucks rarely charge for hot water, so keep your money and stay warm. Also, green tea helps your immune system. Hypochondriac or no, a little boost in flu season never hurt anyone.
Appendage is a blog run by my friend Brian Ehrenpreis. Brian’s taste is impeccable, and it’s always on display on his blog. Curated with obscure atlases and even The Society of the Spectacle, Appendage constantly reminds me of something I love or introduces me to a new obsession. There’s no reason it shouldn’t do the same for you.