In the end, it all came together.

“Something Good,” the video for rising British indie pop quartet Alt-J’s new single, directed by BREWER, was the most complex shoot I’ve ever had a hand in producing. For a while, planning the shoot was like trying to assemble a puzzle whose pieces wouldn’t fit; as soon as one crucial element was put into place, another one would fall apart. How do we bring a live bull legally into an arena? How do we film it safely? Is there a costume shop anywhere in the city that has an authentic matador outfit that fits our actor? Where are we going to get a whole crowd of bullfighting fans? I admit to having felt way-over-my-head a few times each day of preproduction and might have lost it if it wasn’t for Matt Paley and Adam Hirsch, veteran producers compared to me, whose confidence that “it would all work out” assuaged my fears.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and it now seems ludicrous to imagine that the amazing crew, led by the unshakable Brewer brothers, wouldn’t have been able to pull off a stunning video. We were privileged to work with so many virtuosos, from Pat Scola‘s industrious camera crew to Jason Kisvarday‘s endlessly inventive design to our patient and precise actor Frankie Dugan, who worked from dawn until dusk on one very warm, sweaty day at the Portuguese D.E.S. Hall in Artesia, CA.

Directors Ben and Alex Brewer have spent the last two weeks in front of a computer screen, tirelessly working out the post-production effects. I don’t know many artists more committed to bringing their unique vision to life.

Enjoy!

Maybe it was 3am. Maybe it was 4am — I can’t remember. But one night in late April, Matt Paley and I were standing at the edge of a pool in Brentwood, steeling ourselves against an improbably cold California rain and dreary temperatures, looking down at Purity Ring‘s Megan James waist deep in the freezing water, covered in black tentacles and slime, a bed floating along behind her, directors Ben and Alex Brewer in their wetsuits at her side, vibrating from the cold and their ninety-ninth cup of black coffee, and we knew everything had quietly (shooting all night — under the radar — in Los Angeles necessitates absolute silence, in case you’re wondering) come together. It was a perfect, delirious moment of filmmaking.

“Belispeak” — the new EP and video from Purity Ring, directed by BREWER and produced by STE — has been released and we could not be prouder of it. The madness of the all-night shoot translated into hauntingly beautiful images by Jackson Hunt. A video with a concept so ambitious everyone involved in the project, from our rugged and committed crew to our patient and generous patrons (the lovely Nancy Ritter and the infinitely kind Julie Hoffman and Tim Wickman of Canyon Ranch), granted us favor upon favor and committed to making this work come to life. And two directors so insanely dedicated to their vision that we haven’t seen them more than twenty feet from an editing timeline in weeks.

The video — our first conceived and produced in Los Angeles — marks STE’s expansion to the best coast.  We couldn’t be happier with this monster of a project.

As many of you know, I spent a great deal of last year writing a senior thesis about the work of American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. Now, I’ve written a short overview of his work and consideration of the new Hollis Frampton Criterion Collection DVD for the online magazine Idiom. Take a gander! Thanks for reading.

Shane (Jon Bernthal), Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and Rick (Andrew Lincoln)

(This was originally written for a blog run by my friend Alex.)

The Walking Dead, on AMC. Developed for television by Frank Darabont. Based on the comics by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore.

Siegfried Kracauer first suggested that the films of a nation reflect its mentality. What of a nation’s TV programming? The tone of AMC’s The Walking Dead bears undeniable similarities to the political language that has emerged in the United States during this nascent 21^st century. Since their rise to prominence in George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, zombies have served as potent political symbols; warning against the evils of bioengineering as well as cheekily critiquing mindless consumer capitalism. The Walking Dead separates itself from classical Romero-style zombie narratives by focusing on a band of survivors instead of portraying the outbreak of a zombie epidemic–much like 28 Days Later, a triumph of zombie revisionism.

Yet the series inhabits a space free of any cultural evidence of zombies. The word zombie is never used (what we call a zombie they call a walker) and the characters appear to have no reference point for the creatures aside from the Christ’s promise to raise the dead. This sparseness of cultural reference mimics the leanness of the character’s own survivalism. This isn’t a pomo genre playground of zombie referentiality like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland: it’s a highbrow depiction of a zombie-infested America where people have to make serious sacrifices to in order to keep living. In this way, Walking Dead is perfectly in line with other resurrections of low-culture, comic book phenomena like The Dark Knight, which replaces pulpiness with high-gloss Hollywood realism and drama.

In the first season, it took only a few days for Rick to reunite with his wife, Lori, his son, Carl, and his best friend, Shane. All this after awakening from the coma that helped him sleep through the end of the world. Treating this story with dramatic pretension instead of to B-movie ridiculousness is already a stretch. Season two shifted the drama from asking “will we survive?” to “how will we survive?” For this, it exploded disagreements between Rick and Shane, in which Shane’s commitment to the lawlessness of the post-zombie world couldn’t co-exist with Rick’s attachment to the crumbs of humanity. Their arguments focused on two competing strategies for combating the zombie threat and for disposing of a human prisoner. Shane wanted to preempt the zombie threat, killing as many as possible; Rick thought the group could build good fences and stay safe. Shane, the typical national security candidate versus Rick, the soft-on-crime liberal who doesn’t look man enough in a tank.

As per their prisoner, a harmless-seeming young man, the show reenacted a narrative that has become a key parable of popular media. The captive narrative is visible in TV shows from Lost to 24 (so far, nothing has considered it better than Kelly Reichart’s Meek’s Cutoff). It’s roots are obviously American society’s own post-9/11 unease with enemy combatants. Who are they? What do we do with them? As a nation, we’ve been content to do basically the same thing people on TV do: lock them up until we think of something better. (More frequently we end up thinking of something worse). Here, again, Shane wanted to kill the prisoner; Rick would have rather left him blindfolded in the middle of a distant field. The argument was ridiculous enough to feel at home in congress: do we kill him ourselves or do we let someone else do it for us? Again, The Walking Dead coats this absurd debate with the veneer of high drama instead of exposing its inherent self-deception.

Rick and Shane’s countless arguments indicated a divide between no-holds barred survivalism and the right-to-due process liberalism that have characterized debates about the war on terror since 9/11. Shane suggested virtually every bloody alternative to containment except zombie waterboarding. Rick wanted to reclaim some shadow of the world that had been destroyed. Anyone who saw a Republican debate this year knows that Rick’s way is no longer an option. America is moving into uncharted waters, and if we are to complete with the Chinese and eradicate the threat of terrorism we require a new visionary leader who will be tough on Iran while simultaneously busting anti-free market unions. Though Shane’s fate was to die at Rick’s hand, he still managed to get his way: by pushing Rick to kill him, Shane made sure that the previous fantasy of post-apocalyptic harmony was forever soured. The process is analogous to a terrorist act or contemporary political strategy. Force someone to react and they will lose. Force the United States to engage in endless war and their economy will collapse. Republican Presidential candidates spend their free time away from each other’s throats baiting President Obama. (Obama, for the record, fails to take the bait.) Yet Rick also revealed something primal about what we desire from our leaders: the good man is the man who will say no and then, when push comes to shove, be man enough to kill his best friend. In this we don’t see a worrisome duplicitous–we see the drama of integrity. That’s why it’s so satisfying for Osama bin Laden to die under the Obama banner: we know the good guy made the tough call.

The show’s real focus, then, is the question of survival: how to survive in a post-human world infested with inhuman insurgent enemies. The answer provided is to lose the positive aspects of our humanity and indulge our every violent fantasy. What Rick learns when he kills Shane is much darker than a Gatorade commercial telling you that you’ve got what it takes. Rick learns that permission has been granted to engage in basic nihilistic survivalism, that the trappings of civilization have finally faded away.

The post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead is a fantasy without room for big-government intervention or citizens with nonfunctional skills. That hallowed minor irritant, democracy, has been thankfully done away with—much in the spirit of Carl Schmitt’s state of emergency. Such is every survival fantasy: the excess of civilization is finally discarded in favor of real life. Get rid of all those books and focus on building a fire with two sticks. Only your ability to survive determines your value. What’s the use of a lawyer in the zombie wasteland? When the old timer Dale tried to instigate a real debate discussing whether or not to kill the prisoner, he was mocked and silenced. Then he died. What about a painter? Not unless they can really contribute something. In this world, there’s no need for the NEA or universal healthcare (maybe more military spending would have saved us). Finally, we can all live like Libertarians with the perfect excuse for that tired, macho “get off my lawn” response to anyone who wanders on to your land. It’s a world where soft men won’t be tolerated and racial or sexual inequality is remedied when women are allowed to carry their own guns. Season two was complete with a questionable it’s-my-baby-too story line and a highly unrealistic depiction of how the morning-after pill works. The Walking Dead is a masculine, conservative alternative to a civilization running amok with prissiness and intellectualism.

When the show’s sophomore season ended Sunday night, Sheriff Rick Grimes growled, “This isn’t a democracy anymore.” A more fitting ending couldn’t be torn from Newt Gingrich’s fantastic imagination. Picture Gingrich himself, or any of his Republican rivals, watching the ease with which societal collapse effects the values that have been driving their Party since 9/11. What a relief it would be for them to operate without doublespeak—to say this isn’t a democracy anymore instead of endlessly repeating the same freedom-soaked talking point. Certainly Mitt Romney’s failure to lock up the nomination must keep him fantasizing about knifing Rick Santorum and then tearfully screaming, “Do you see what I’ve done to become your nominee?” on the convention stage.

Fantasy and fiction can be understood as ultimate distractions from our daily lives. Without them, though, we would be unable to digest the raw experience of our existence. Narrative is an essential tool for the formulation of memory and knowledge, and nothing is more influential on the narratives we create than the narratives we consume. Narrative becomes a permanent feedback loop that annihilates its own origin: we see what we understand so we understand what we see. At this point, we require radically new narratives or anti-narratives that fight against the rule of the same (how Adorno referred to capitalism). Unfortunately, we won’t find that in The Walking Dead.

Some of us have to settle for other Oscars.

Oscar nominations were announced this morning and they might as well have been delivered by Mitt Romney, considering the deafening yawns with which they’ve been greeted. Before you check out the list, I just want to say that the only nomination I was looking forward to was one that didn’t end up happening. Albert Brooks’ turn as a murderous gangster/movie producer in Drive warranted a Supporting Actor nod, though it didn’t receive one.

Fresh off the heels of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh delivers Haywire, a lean government spy story. What drives the film are its action sequences, driven by mixed martial arts star Gina Carano’s abilityto kick and jum and crush throats with her thighs. The film also reunites Soderbergh with writer Lem Dobbs, responsible for penning one of the director’s best films, The Limey. Like The Limey, Haywire is a bare-bones genre flick that depends on its ability to play with convention in a way that’s more reminiscent of Shoot the Piano Player than Pulp Fiction.

What I most admire about this mode of Soderbergh’s filmmaking is its approach to actors and their performances. The silver screen is a place where people best succeed when they play themselves: when Humphrey Bogart walks across a room, Anna Karina winks at the camera, or Bruce Willis creeps through an elevator shaft. Much the same is true of Carano: she’s not an actress, and even if she were, I doubt she would be a great one. Yet Soderbergh boiled down her performance to a competent and functional show that barely seems like a performance at all. Combined with the understated presence of veterans like Bill Paxton and Michael Douglas, the cast becomes a collection of compelling characters with a refreshing lack of prescribed depth.

Haywire also succeeds as a romp of the sexes, and I took particular delight in watching Carano annihilate a host of slimy male adversaries. Her fight with Michael Fassbender is especially funny; he delivers line familiar to women everywhere, “You’re out of control!” as she pummels him into submission. In our intertextual media universe, it’s all too possible that this is Fassbender’s sex-addict from Shame really getting some serious introspection handed to him. Haywire isn’t offering the feel-good empowerment delivered by the Kill Bill movies or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where sexuality appears as a uniquely feminine form of empowerment that’s appreciated by men and only tested when it goes head to head with other women. Whereas an overwritten character would have easily fallen into similar tired techniques, it is precisely the character’s lack of development and Carano’s subdued performance that make Mallory Kane a badass female unencumbered by an exhausting need for sympathy.

For all that’s made of the action, though, the film is more interested in unraveling mystery than the drama of a final showdown. Dobbs and Soderbergh know that by the time they’ve showed every card up their sleeves and Carano has unwrapped all the layers of her own betrayal, there will be no need for a final confrontation. The film ends just before Carano delivers her last dose of justice. Conventionally, it’s an unsatisfying ending. But not nearly as unsatisfying as it would have been to sit through a boring, drawn out finale.

Shame, dir. Steve McQueen (2011)

All of the stars were aligning for Shame to be my newest favorite film about destructive addiction.

I entered the theater with an enduring respect and trust for McQueen, and I had been nursing a relatively significant man-crush on Michael Fassbender for the past year. At the risk of sounding dismissive, Shame was overall disappointing, with jigsaw gems shining discreetly within an overly-fragmented narrative.

McQueen is most known for his style, which capitalizes on truthful cinematography and editing with slow gravitas and poise. It’s an eye that is unwaveringly serious and profound, which served him so beautifully in Hunger (McQueen, 2008). Shame, however, does not carry the historical and political drama of the Irish hunger strikes of 1981; Shame pales in comparison, meandering towards melodrama faster than tragedy. I’ll empathize faster with Bobby Sands than Brandon (Michael Fassbender), the wealthy new-yorker-sex-addict who tries to straighten his life out.

That’s not to say that there aren’t several profoundly cinematic moments built carefully into the film. One would be when Brandon’s trashy-yet-charming sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), sings a slow song in a high-rise bar where Brandon and his boss, David (James Badge Dale), watch. Mulligan’s pain dances behind a thin veil of sexuality as we watch her in an uncomfortably close and unwavering shot (which McQueen barely cut away from). It’s hypnotizing and powerful. Another occurs soon thereafter; the three end up at Brandon’s apartment, where Sissy and David lock themselves in Brandon’s bedroom and have sex in his bed. Brandon, with a visceral disgust, undresses, and just as the audience begins to contemplate the the revolting notion that he may be planning to join them, Brandon is in his running clothes out jogging the city streets at night. This jog lasts well over 5 minutes in a continuous take, and it is a well-needed breath for the audience.

There are many moments of beauty in Shame, but for me, the pieces didn’t come together in harmony. I can’t help but feel similarly to how I felt leaving Somewhere (Coppola, 2010). While the vision and pacing of a well-laid film appeared on the screen, the content couldn’t support its very careful presentation. My biggest reaction, overall, is how little I was able to care about Brandon’s situation. I engaged with the film more so on a clinical level than an emotional one; Shame is less of a character-study than a case-study.

Top 10 lists are a universally reviled form of critical expression for a reason: they force the thoughtful fluidity and artfulness of criticism into the confines of ascending order. It’s an exercise as banal as arranging a class of elementary school students by height. Countless stratagems exist that allow list-makers to ease the blow of their pointless task, though the successful approach for me has always been simple irony. See my inclusion of Tron: Legacy in last year’s top 10 list, or 2012 the year before that: two really bad movies meant to serve as a middle-finger to the very existence of year-end top 10 lists.

This year, I approached the list differently. I still don’t think of it as a serious critical process. I think of it as an impression. These are the first films I remembered when I thought about the experiences I had in movie theaters this year. Any picture I couldn’t remember on my own wouldn’t deserve a place below. In fact, I’m glad to have forgotten about the films I saw in 2011 that I can’t remember. They were the high school acquaintances of my movie-going experience. Their only suitable future purpose can be to serve as obscure punchlines.

Here are the films on my top 10 list, with a few words speaking to their inclusion:

Mysteries of Lisbon – Of all the enormous, dramatic film experiences offered in 2011, Mysteries of Lisbon was the grandest.

Sleepless Nights Stories –  Jonas Mekas’ new film is a moving collection of tales caught on video. The diary film is a quintessential homegrown American cinematic form, here it is at its finest.

The Turin Horse – Another monumental, apocalyptic, and beautiful vision from Béla Tarr. I am convinced this film explains the existence of the word heavy.

Melancholia – The last 5 minutes.

The Future – A lot of the time, people see what they want to see in movies. I’m hardly immune to this, in fact, I frequently sink into cushy red seats already formulating the best way to express my hate for the movie I’m about to see. The Future shattered my jaded predictions: where I had expected something unbearably adorable, I found a complicated and profound reflection on the properties of movies themselves. I heard an interview with Miranda July where she said The Future was about a couple struggling with changes in their perception of space and time. I don’t see anything twee about that.

Meek’s Cutoff – A quiet western with mythic and historical resonance.

Contagion – A lot of sleek, studio thrillers came out in 2011. Soderbergh’s vision was the most precise, haunting, and daring.

Hugo – I have always admired Martin Scorsese’s efforts to fund the protection of endangered films and promote the history of cinema. There are kids movies about every imaginable historical circumstance that turns them into fantastical, ridiculous tearjerkers. But when the subject is something already fantastic, like the films and legacy of Georges Méliès, the end result doesn’t seem nearly as sinister, say, Schindler’s List.

Le Havre & Bridesmaids – I laughed a lot at these movies.

Oh my god, it’s finally here.

This was one of those projects. None of the lovely people — Lily Susskind, my mighty co-director; Matt Ferro, our genius behind the camera; STE’s own Jake Teresi, our enabler, producer, and host in New Orleans; Carsie Blanton, our musical muse and sponsor – had any idea if and when it would suddenly (in my unsteady hands) transform itself into something lovely, hard and brilliant, and I had only the slightest inkling (and only sometimes).

Certainly, it was a project with the makings of something good. Carsie had managed to round up a veritable who’s who of the world’s greatest swing dancers – Chance Bushman, Giselle Anguizola, Peter Loggins, Amy Johnson, Reuel Reis, Laura Manning and Lisa Casper — and we’d constructed a tiny crew equally versed in dance and film primed to push the boundaries of the dance on film we’d seen before. Thanks to the generosity and excitement of the performers who joined us, our time in New Orleans and the footage we’d collected was unbelievable. But in the editing process, trying to capture the spirit of all of these dancers and their opposing styles, to respect the dance and still cut it mercilessly, to delight in the magic of New Orleans without reverting to cliché, and above all to fit everything into barely three minutes of song seemed an impossible task.

And yet, at long last, here it is! Shot in the streets of the 8th Ward, inside a St. Charles streetcar, on the balcony of Mimi’s in the Marigny, and in the abandoned Six Flags in Michoud, Baby Can Dance is a celebration of life and joy and dance and a city that’s always pregnant with all three. Please enjoy.

I recently had the profound pleasure of spending a quiet evening at the normally wild and crazy Acme studios in Brooklyn with my dearest friend Rachel Trachtenburg, her mother Tina, and Acme’s brigadier general, Shawn Patrick. After a dinner and a movie of nachos and Sidney Lumet’s Network (try this as soon as you can), I was tasked with sharing a few of my favorite music videos. Most, unsurprisingly, were received well — Rihanna’s Spike Lee/Keith Herring/Warhol/Basquiat send-up Rude Boy and Beyonce as bored/scorned housewife/Marilyn Monroe in Why Don’t You Love Me? are both incredibly fun and really smart cultural homage — but my very favorite video of the year, Robyn’s pitch-perfect (as far as I’m concerned) Call Your Girlfriend, was roundly rejected.

I’m not surprised the Trachtenburgs didn’t like it: in every incarnation for as long as they’ve existed, they’ve embodied a sort of anti-pop sensibility. Their music is smart, sophisticated, daring and different. One of the reasons I jumped to make Dumb Dumbs – Greg Hanson’s truly weird debut video for Rachel’s band, SUPERCUTE! — is the exhilaration of doing something really, profoundly different. Greg and the Trachtenburgs couldn’t be ‘normal’ if they tried — and they don’t. For people with such an eye and ear for the messy, complicated, frenetic, unexpected, and bizarre, what interest could Robyn’s clean, simple, catchy, perfectly engineered product hold?* Still, I feel the need to defend Robyn against the accusation that every character in Dumb Dumbs would surely level at her: namely that she’s just more of the same, or worse, boring.

Call Your Girlfriend is perhaps the millionth example of the single-shot music video, a reaction to the frenzied editing of the late MTV era that relies on the theatrical treatment of time to render whatever complicated spectacle — be it Beyonce’s impossible hip thrusts or a marching band hidden in a field — more impressive by virtue of its unfolding uninterrupted, the video acting as proof by photographic documentation. But Call Your Girlfriend doesn’t utilize the single-shot for the normal spectacular: Robyn dances alone in an empty warehouse towards a (very) handheld camera with only sporadic club lights as support. Robyn’s dancing is somehow simultaneously silly and incredibly alluring: she don’t give a fuck. And there in lies the video’s genius: Robyn’s comfort in front of the camera, and apparent disregard for what you may think of her dance moves, lends the video an extraordinary intimacy. With no one else in the space, it’s clear: she’s dancing for you.

And that’s it. What I love about Call Your Girlfriend (both the song and the video) is what I love about all good pop, especially classic Hollywood: the incredible subtlety and craft needed for the form to completely disappear into the content. Every decision in Call Your Girlfriend — the imperfect motion of the camera, the lack of editing and backup dancers, the crazy lights — serves to bring Robyn’s charisma and energy to the fore. It’s a visceral experience, and it works.

And then there are the little touches — the delayed reveal of Robyn’s shoes, the moment (at 1:20) when Robyn dips backwards and the camera moves sympathetically — that betray how well-conceived and carefully executed the video really is. At the end of the video, there’s a moment of dead space between the song ending and Robyn clearing the frame where she steps up and, suddenly in almost alarming proximity, takes a deep breath, wipes her nose, and smiles. It’s much like the ending of Single Ladies – in which we watch Beyonce catch her breath before breaking into a laugh — and it serves the same purpose: to remind us that the performer we’ve just watched is actually human. Contrary to most indications, Beyonce does need to catch her breath, and though Robyn’s dancing isn’t the same sort of physical feat, it’s still an act of performing bravado, and the disarming human contact at the end makes it clear that she enjoyed it as much as you did.

The principle characteristic Robyn embodies in the video is, of course, grace; an easy, tossed-off gracefulness that says we just used the first take, I just threw these clothes on, and I didn’t wash my hair this morning. It’s called cool, and it’s at the core of all good pop: it’s both of Bieber’s haircuts, Kanye’s backpack, and Justin Timberlake’s dick in a box. It’s Robert Downey Jr.’s acting career. It’s the photos of Obama in college, smoking a cigar. And it takes a number of the smartest artists and marketers in the world to keep it up, to keep it current, to reinvent it for every generation. For every JT there are a million stale Drakes and Maroon 5s.

All of this is not to belittle the Trachtenburgs’ talent. It takes a completely different sensibility to color effortlessly inside the lines than to utterly disregard them, and I am in constant awe of the courage and aplomb it takes to be truly different. But there is something pretty remarkable, too — and pretty unexpected — about stripping everything down, stepping up, and making everyone want to be your girlfriend, in the world of cool.

*Although they appreciated Robyn’s taste in clothing, of course.