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A.O. Scott’s perspective on NYFF

Jim Emerson

“The Queen”: NYFF Friday, commercial theaters Saturday.

In this morning’s New York Times, A.O. Scott offers his “Critic’s Notebook” view of where the NYFF fits into movie culture (at least in New York). Scott sees it as a showcase for “quality.” Compare to my questions and comments about NYFF:

Film festivals crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York’s is different. Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory, like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party, like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies it shows are daring and provocative.

If I may trot out another metaphor, the New York Film Festival might be compared to an established, somewhat exclusive boutique holding its own in a world of big box superstores, oversize shopping malls and Internet retailers.

Roger’s take on the Oscars

Jim Emerson

Supporting actress nominee Rinko Kikuchi (center) plays a deaf girl in “Babel.”

Here’s Roger Ebert’s analysis of this morning’s Oscar nominations:

Oscar is growing more diverse and international by the year. This year’s Academy Award nominations, announced Tuesday, contain a few titles that most moviegoers haven’t seen and some they haven’t heard of. That’s perhaps an indication that the Academy voters, who once went mostly for big names, are doing their homework and seeing the pictures.

From relative obscurity came the nominees Ryan Gosling, whose overlooked work in “Half Nelson,” as a drug-addicted high-school teacher was little seen, and Jackie Earle Haley, the conflicted child molester in “Little Children,” an erotic tale of stolen love in the afternoon. Also consider 10-year-old Abigail Breslin, and 72-year-old veteran actor Alan Arkin, in “Little Miss Sunshine,” a story of a dysfunctional family’s cross-country road trip. Adriana Barraza, whose heartbreaking role as a housekeeper in “Babel” earned her a supporting actress nomination, and Rinko Kikuchi, whose emotionally wrenching performance as a grieving deaf teenager in “Babel” also earned her a nomination in that same category.

Read complete article at RogerEbert.com

Message from Mucusville

Jim Emerson

I was hit with a heckuva headcold last weekend and I feel like Steve Buscemi at the end of “Fargo.” If only I could get my head out of this woodchipper. I’ve been making notes and trying to watch some stuff, but it’s too hard to write through all this viscous residue in my head. Hope to post again very soon. NyQuil calls…

Phlegmatically yours,

Jim

Letter: Inconvenient truths

Jim Emerson

This letter from Leland McInnes eloquently sums up so many of the issues I keep returning to in Scanners (recently in regard to “United 93,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “An Inconvenient Truth”) — because, well, I’m obsessed with their vital importance: (film) criticism and critical thinking, skepticism, logic, conspiratorial thinking, art, religion, science, politics, you name it:

Joe Killin wrote a letter on the topic of theories and skepticism. There is a valid place for skepticism, especially in science where no result is ever certain, merely highly likely given the evidence. There is a distinct difference, however, between the skepticism that keeps an open mind and the sort of perverse skepticism required to reject well-supported theories.

There is a classic tale of Pyrrho, the founder of skepticism as a philosophy. He took the view that without certainty it was impossible to know which course of action was wiser. When out walking one day he found his teacher stuck in a ditch, unable to get out. After contemplating for a while, he walked on, having decided that he could not be certain he would actually do any good.

.pdf test

Jim Emerson

Here’s a test, embedding a .pdf in a blog page:

dear-mr-beck.pdf

Bill Maher: Dumb jokes for the TV talk show set

Jim Emerson

“Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shellshocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right. […] It’s getting to where you can’t turn on your TV without seeing Obama.”

What grumpy old shellshocked fool said that? It was comedian Bill Maher, whose approach to political satire is to talk about televised presidential photo ops as if they were interfering with, or substituting for, policy-making. I mean, the guy admits he thinks what he sees on TV is “news,” and then he watches PR puff pieces about presidential puppies and romantic nights out on Broadway and thinks it’s Obama who lacks substance? Turn off the boob tube, Bill, and read a newspaper or a web site — or a blog. If you wanted to learn something about politics (and “topical humor”) from TV, you should be watching Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, not Leno. But I warn you, it’s going to make you feel as tired and ancient as your schtick. You may as well be telling jokes about airline food and Geritol. (Anybody remember Geritol? That’s my point.)

Visual Word Play

Jim Emerson

(via Radiolab)

Dramatic readings of Yelp reviews

Jim Emerson

By Real Actors!™

Opening Shots: ‘Dawn of the Dead’

Jim Emerson

View image: Waking into a nightmare.

From Brad Damare, New Orleans, LA:

“Dawn of the Dead” opens with an close-up of one of the lead characters, asleep against a blood-red carpeted wall. She seems both alone and surrounded by the red — an echo of what will be the film’s finale, in which she has to escape the mall rooftop alone, possibly alone in the world. But Romero jump-cuts with something of a joke: She’s only dreaming, and she’s actually in a room full of people. But that room full of people is in full-panic mode: She’s awakened from one nightmare into another.

JE: Thanks, Brad, for mentioning one of my all-time favorite horror movies. It’s like she’s in a red-shag womb, about to be born into a world that’s worse than anything she could have dreamed. That jump-cut happens as she cries out, waking herself up — and at the same instant a man pops into the frame and grabs her: “Are you alright? The shit’s really hitting the fan.” And the zombie head is really hitting the helicopter blades… A TV station colleage, watching a debate on a monitor (“We don’t know that,” says a man on the screen. “We gotta operate on what we do know!”), observes: “Still dreaming…”

Elected: 100 Must-See Foreign Films

Jim Emerson

Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho Dayu” (aka “Sansho the Bailiff”).

The ballots came in from all over the web. Edward Copeland tabulated them (and found nice stills for all the winners), under the supervision of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter. OK, I don’t know about that last part, but Edward did some great good work here.

He’s calling it “The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films.” Copeland writes: “The name comes, of course, from the great Indian director who failed to land any of his acclaimed works on the final list of 122 nominees.”

In all 174 people chose their top 25-or-so non-English-language talkies made before 2002 (nominees had to be at least five years old). The Top 100 is here — accompanied by comments from people who chose them. (Comments and vote totals for the other 22 nominees are here.)

My top choice was Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho Dayu” (which came in at #46 and is available on a Criterion DVD), about which I wrote:

If I had to choose just one movie –- one movie –- above all others on this list, Mizoguchi’s would be it. I’ve long felt that if there were a god, the closest expression we’re likely to find on this earth is in this movie. It’s not the only film on my list that gives me goosebumps whenever the title is mentioned, but I don’t believe there’s ever been a greater motion picture in any language. This one sees life and memory as a creek flowing into a lake out into a river and to the sea.That seems a little florid to me now (it was the night before I left for Toronto, and I was trying to tie together the imagery in the first and last shots of a masterpiece), but the emotions, and the awe, are genuine.

Here’s the Top 25:

1. “The Rules of the Game” (Jean Renoir)

2. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa)

3. “M” (Fritz Lang)

4. “8 1/2” (Federico Fellini)

5. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica)

6. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman)

7. “Grand Illusion” (Jean Renoir)

8. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (Werner Herzog)

9. “The Battle of Algiers” (Gillo Pontecorvo)

10. “The 400 Blows” (Francois Truffaut)

11. “Fanny and Alexander” (Ingmar Bergman)

12. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu)

13. “Rashomon” (Akira Kurosawa)

14. “Ikiru” (Akira Kurosawa)

15. “The Seventh Seal” (Ingmar Bergman)

16. “Ran” (Akira Kurosawa)

17. “Jules and Jim” (Francois Truffaut)

18. “The Conformist” (Bernardo Bertolucci)

19. “La Dolce Vita” (Federico Fellini)

20. “Contempt” (Jean-Luc Godard)

21. “Breathless” (Jean-Luc Godard)

22. “Ugetsu Monogatari” (Kenji Mizoguchi)

23. “Playtime” (Jacques Tati)

24. “Au Hasard, Balthazar” (Robert Bresson)

25. “Andrei Rublev” (Andrei Tarkovsky)

(continued…)

Bad news: “Amelie” made the list (though only at #92). Good news: “Life is Beautiful” (which isn’t) wasn’t even nominated!

Stop wasting your life. Get watching.

ANNOUNCING: The Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon: Do the Contrarian (Part III)

Jim Emerson

View image

I enjoyed our “Contrarian Week” discussions so much (even made it its own category!) that I wanted to open it up even more and ask my fellow movie bloggers to discuss any and all aspects of contrarianism on their blogs (and send me a link!) for a “Contrarian Blog-a-Thon,” the weekend of February 16-18, 2007 — a full month from today. That’s the weekend before the Oscars, so things should be pretty dull around then (and if you’re not sick of Oscar speculation by then, you never will be). Please help me spread the word.

Most of us like to inveigh against the conventional wisdom from time to time. What do you think makes for a good contrarian argument — or a bad one? Make your own contrarian argument for/against a movie or a specific moment in a movie or a filmmaker’s work or a whole genre if you want to. Just make sure you build a real argument (with examples!) rather than a crackpotty ad hominem attack.

I’m excited to see what you come up with. Please feel free to drop me a line (address in nav bar above) to let me know if you’re “in.” Muchas gracias!

Sex and subtitles: An Open Mind Is Advised

Jim Emerson

Two of the better fest trailers I’ve seen, from the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival:

Sex after the jump:

One long weekend

Jim Emerson

I’m taking an actual vacation (from the computer) — back in action Wednesday, June 2. Hope you have a meaningful (and, yes, enjoyable) Memorial Day Weekend. I will.

On the devaluation of monsters… and movies

Jim Emerson

Wiley Wiggins has some beautifully phrased thoughts on why monster movies aren’t scary anymore:

Now we no longer populate these movies with humans but with fodder. We’ve learned how to show the Monster but forgotten how to show people, and they become increasingly flimsy, predictable and mawkish — to stare at them too long is to get bored while waiting for them to be eaten. Instead we fetishize the Monster, and in staring at it too long, it loses its power too — everything has its depth stripped away, nothing means anything, and we’ve diffused or at least ignored our fears by shining a flashlight on every menacing shadow in the room. These movies have lost the capacity to connect to any real fear, and instead only appeal to our infantile desire to break our toys against each other.

Spectacle has been diminished in the name of “showing everything.” Just because it can be shown, doesn’t mean it should be. A movie with all “money shots” has no climaxes. It just neutralizes itself. The rules of storytelling apply to CGI: if anything can happen, then what’s the significance? Today’s CGI, when noticeable as a “special effect,” plummets fatally into the uncanny valley. It’s so pristinely close to photo-“real” it looks utterly fake.

(image by Till Nowak)

Neuro-cinema turns brains to zombie mush!

Jim Emerson

View image

The cinema is Max Castle! At least, according to the pompous French scholar Victor Saint-Cyr in Theodore Roszak’s spooky-satirical 1991 novel “Flicker,” which I’m now in the middle of reading. (I didn’t know when I started it, but Darren Aronovsky is reportedly working on a film version — something that’s now announced on the trade paperback cover.) Saint-Cyr proclaims that the fictitious Castle, obscure maker of seriously unclean sexploitation and horror films, “alone of all directors grasped the essential phenomenology of film. In the entire history of motion pictures, only he and Lefebvre have understood the technology so profoundly.”

In one of the funniest chapters so far, Saint-Cyr pronounces himself the founder of a new film theory he calls Neurosemiology, which in essence posits that it’s all about the flicker. The medium of cinema itself, alternating patterns of light and shadow, is a powerful form of mass hypnosis that alters the brain, quite independent of the images we think we see on the screen. One of Sant-Cyr’s students, “a bushy-haired, tautly nerved young man” named Julien, “who smoked incessantly while he spoke and never once raised his eyes,” offers an elucidation of the theory:

Bye bye Miss American Privacy

Jim Emerson

“What ‘American Pie’ betrays is not good taste but any notion that privacy could matter to these kids or to us. Everything in this picture is out front: whatever humiliates the characters most is precisely what everyone in the school learns about them, and the movie views this as proper and humane. For we are all swimming in the same soup of confusion and embarrassment, voyeurism and malice. But without some feeling for privacy as a value, a movie about teen sex and romance can’t be made with any grace or style. The idea that everyone should know everything, however productive of comedy, links the movie to the kind of daytime talk show in which neighborhood friends betray one another’s secrets and the audience howls at them in mock disapproval and open pleasure. The new hit comedies make us join that audience, whether we want to or not.”

— David Denby, The New Yorker (July 12, 1999)

Andy Warhol got it almost right. Everybody is a “Superstar” (in the Warholian sense) already, or at least everybody behaves like one. And in the future — that is, 10 years after “American Pie” and 22 years after Andy’s death — everybody’s also a self-publicist, using sophisticated technology to manage a public image that masquerades as a mutant form of privacy. Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter — these and so many other powerful promotional tools can be used by anyone, kids or mega-corporations, to create an illusion of intimacy with (in Facebookspeak) “friends” and “fans.”