Scanners

Mr. Jones’ review…

Jim Emerson

View image Mixed metaphors? Incoherence? Dylan?

Crix say the darndest things. From a review of Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There”:

“Obvious as [Bob Dylan’s] talent may be, he often mixes metaphors and combines images in a way that skirts the edge of incoherence.”Read it twice. It’s even funnier the third time. The key is in the unarticulated relationship between the two parts of the sentence. Is one of them supposed to be a dependent clause?

If you can guess who wrote it, you may win a brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat. Or not.

Here it is: Your first 2008 ten-best list

Jim Emerson

First but least, as always, it’s time for the National Board of Review selections. Their top pick: Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire,” which was also the fave in Toronto in September. No, I still haven’t figured out who these people are, either, but they’ve been doing this sort of thing for 99 years and describe themselves on their web site as “the oldest organization devoted to motion pictures as art and entertainment.” OK.

The NBR top ten (in alphabetical order):

“Burn After Reading”

“Changeling”

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

“The Dark Knight”

“Defiance”

“Frost/Nixon”

“Gran Torino”

“Milk”

“WALL-E”

“The Wrestler”

Clint Eastwood gets best actor for “Gran Torino” and “Doubt” snags best ensemble cast, even though it didn’t make the top ten. David Fincher wins best director for “Benjamin Button.”

… and then…

Sarcastica: Would this help?

Jim Emerson

Would sarcastic or satirical intent be better communicated on the InterTubes if we had access to backward-italic sarcastic fonts?

From the Sarcastic Font Manifesto:

For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word.

Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It’s time for a revolution. It’s time for a new font style….

(tip: Daniel Oxenhandler)

Town Hall High Q

Jim Emerson

Draw your own interpretations…

Sarah Silverman is a genius (still)

Jim Emerson

I’m posting this not just because I’m (still) in love with Sarah Silverman (though I am), and not just because she’s a genius (though, of course, she is), and not just because of the overt political humor in this short film (though The Great Schlep is an inspired idea), but because of how it relates to recent Scanners posts about comedy and understanding what the joke is. (See posts and discussions regarding “Tropic Thunder,” “Juneau,” and David Foster Wallace.)

So, please watch the above movie and then provide your interpretation of it, by considering my questions after the jump…

Close-Ups: Blinded by the grin

Jim Emerson

View image

For the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door:

Someone is trying to kill Dr. Sidney Shaefer (James Coburn). Hell, it seems like just about everybody is trying to kill him — or spy on him or abduct him or drug him or interrogate him or brainwash him or flip him or something. And it’s no wonder. He knows too much. He’s the president’s analyst in Theodore J. Flicker’s 1967 “The President’s Analyst,” one of the great unheralded movies of the ’60s and one of the great paranoid political comedies ever — part “Strangelove,” part “Parallax View,” part “Our Man Flint,” part “Little Murders.”

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Poor Sidney — or Sid, as his former patient and CEA (Central Enquiry Agency) agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) calls him. Even the President of the United States now has someone he can talk to. But Sidney can’t trust anybody. So, for now, he has managed to slip away in the station wagon of the Typical American suburban Quantrill family of Seaside Heights, New Jersey: Wynn (William Daniels), Jeff (Joan Darling) and their son Bing (Sheldon Collins), tourists he picks up while they are taking a White House tour.

“Gee whiz, Dad. Why can’t we take the FBR tour?” Bing whines. “I want to see the files.”

“Sorry Bing,” Dad replies. “We’ve got to get back to New Jersey as soon as we finish the White House.

“Now be a good boy and enjoy your heritage,” says Mom.

View image “Yes.”

The Quantrills are liberals. Not left-wingers or anything like that, but they’re for civil rights. They’ve done some weekend picketing. As a matter of fact, they even sponsored the “Nigro doctor and his wife” when they moved into the development. Their next-door neighbors are fascists, though.

Stepping into the Quantrill’s split-level home, Wynn flicks a switch on the living room wall and groovy Bacharach-esque Muzak begins to play. “Total sound,” he explains with evident satisfaction.

“Want a draft beah?”

Dr. Sidney Schaefer slides off his sunglasses and beams ingratiatingly. “Yes.”

I defy you to watch Coburn flash his killer pearly-whites here (can you tell Sid is maybe beginning to go a little off his rocker?) and not find yourself grinning, too. This is megawatt star-power, so bright you gotta wear shades.

Once is in!

Jim Emerson

View image We’re in.

After an investigation on the eve (literally) of the official Oscar ballot mailing, the executive committee of the Academy’s music branch “has met and endorsed the validity of ‘Falling Slowly’ [from ‘Once’] as a nominated achievement. The committee relied on written assurances and detailed chronologies provided by the songwriter of ‘Falling Slowly,’ the writer-director of ‘Once’ and Fox Searchlight” [the film’s US distributor]. For details, see “Is Once ineligible for Best Original Song Oscar?” below.

The issue centered on whether the song was actually written for “Once” (as Academy rules require), or for the 2006 Czech film “Kráska v nesnázích” (“Beauty In Trouble”), or in some other context. In addition to its performance by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in “Once,” “Falling Slowly” appeared in various versions on three 2006 albums: Hansard and Irglova’s “The Swell Season,” the “Beauty in Trouble” soundtrack album (also sung by Hansard and Irglova), and “The Cost” by Hansard’s band The Frames.

According to David “The Carpetbagger” Carr at the New York Times, music branch chairman Charles Bernstein released a statement about the evolution of “Once” and “Falling Slowly”:

Comments are working (I think)

Jim Emerson

It’s been days, but it appears that comments (and publishing) are now possible again. Apologies for the technical screw-ups. And if you got one of those ridiculous messages saying “Your text is wrong” — I can’t believe that the designers of ANY user interface would present that as an error message. Apparently, it had to do with those “secret letters” that some comment systems make type in to prove that you’re not a webcrawler. But we don’t require that kind of thing here at Scanners (yet), so why that cryptic message would show up is baffling.

No, it did not mean that anyone disagreed with what you wrote.

Gone missin’

Jim Emerson

I’m taking my first week off this year! Plan to read and sleep and work in the garden and watch movies, but not write. Back October 10. Please keep up the comments discussions, though — I’ll still be publishing those. Now I must rest…

Meanwhile, here are some of my recent reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com:

The Science of SleepThe US vs. John LennonHalf NelsonThis Film is Not Yet RatedThe IllusionistConversations With Other Women

TIFF: Borat R US

Jim Emerson

View image O, say, can you see Borat? For what he is?

The New York Times headline about all the political films in this year’s TIFF was: “At the Toronto Film Festival, Liberal Politics As Usual.” David M. Halfbinger of the Times cites Barbara Koppel’s Dixie Chicks documentary and the fictionalized doc about the assassination of George W. Bush (“D.O.A.P.” or “Death of a President”) in his round-up of evidence to support his thesis that Toronto “has been all but overrun with films attacking President Bush or the protracted war in Iraq — in subtle ways and like sledgehammers, with vitriol and with dispassionate fly-on-the-wall observation.”

This may well be true (even though, as some would quickly point out, it is in the New York Times); I don’t know because I haven’t seen most of the films he lists (yet), though I’ll probably get to a few. But I’m mildly surprised that he doesn’t mention the two most scathing attacks on the Bush regime that I’ve seen so far: Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” (in which the Franco Fascists fight the local insurgents) and Sacha Baron Cohen’s and Larry Charles’ “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” OK, Halfbinger does mention “Borat,” but mainly to say that Michael Moore was at the midnight premiere, where the projector broke down.

Before I forget to mention it explicitly: Yes, I loved “Borat.”

In the Cut, Part II: A Dash of Salt

Jim Emerson

Click here to watch larger video on Vimeo.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequencePart I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco (Bullitt, The Lineup, The French Connection)

From the introduction to my latest deconstruction of a modern action sequence over at Press Play:

In Part I of In the Cut we looked at part of an action sequence from “The Dark Knight” and examined many questions, ambiguities and incongruities raised by the ways shots were composed and cut together. In Part II, we delve into a chase sequence from Phillip Noyce’s Salt (2010) that uses a lot of today’s trendy “snatch-and-grab” techniques (quick cutting, shaky-cam, but very few abstract-action cutaways — I spotted one doozy, but I didn’t mention it; see if you notice it).  And yet, there’s very little that isn’t perfectly understandable in the moment.

There are certain directors I think of as “one-thing-at-a-time” filmmakers. That is, they seem to be incapable of composing shots that have more than one piece of information in them at a time. This makes for a very flat, rather plodding style. You see what the camera is pointed at in each shot, but you get very little sense of perspective when it comes to relating it to other elements in the scene. Noyce’s technique is much more fluid, organic and sophisticated. He keeps things from one shot visible in the next, even when shifting perspective — whether it’s only a few feet or clear across several lanes of traffic.

In Part I: A Shot in the Dark (Knight) I asked (rhetorically) whether the techniques used made the action more exciting or just more confusing. I left the question unanswered because it’s something viewers are going to have to decide for themselves. And, as usual in criticism, the goal is not to find the “right” answers but to raise the relevant questions. Noyce himself raised a good one when he said he thinks viewers are not looking for coherence but for visceral experiences. And yet, his filmmaking is quite coherent (grammatically, if not “realistically”). “Visceral,” like “realism,” is in the eye of the beholder….

“In the Cut” is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Part I is here. Part III will examine a classic San Francisco car chase from “The Lineup” (1958), directed by Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry,” “Escape from Alcatraz,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Charley Varrick”…).

Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence

Jim Emerson

View image Marlene Dietrich, “The Scarlet Empress” (Josef von Sternberg, 1935). A pivotal moment of (re-) birth after providing her country with a male heir — though not one fathered by her husband, royal half-wit Grand Duke Peter.

View image “Scarlet Empress”: “… one of those extraordinary women who create their own laws and logic…” Beds, dreams, filters.

Memory starts one image pinging off others across time and movies. Ruminating upon the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door (which, obviously, I can’t stop doing), I see close-ups flowing into and out of one another, dreams within dreams within nightmares, on themes of memory, loss, identity, the process of consciousness and the end of consciousness — you know, the stuff movies are made of.

View image “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Sergio Leone, 1968): Mrs. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Sweetwater to find her family slaughtered. After the funeral, she is alone in a big bed in a small room in a vast new land.

View image Final shot, “Once Upon a Time in America” (Sergio Leone, 1984): David “Noodles” Aaronson flops down in an opium den to smoke away his pain and drifts off into a narcotic dream…

In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies, here’s a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection. Looking back, most of them seem to be filtered, obscured, freeze-framed or reflected faces of characters reaching an impasse or a reckoning — largely from the endings of some of my favorite movies. I wish I could actually cut the film together, so that I could show them in motion, control how long each shot remains on the screen and fiddle with the rhythms (flash cuts, match cuts, reversals of motion), but I don’t know have the technology or the know-how for that at the moment. So, imagine this as a (sometimes perverse) little movie, a “found footage” montage sequence… Kuleshovian, Rorschachian, Hitcockian, Gestaltian, however you want to look at it. I suppose it’s also a look in the mirror.

Hope you can see the associations, juxtapositions, oppositions, contradictions I was going for, although I’m not sure I consciously understand all the leaps myself. They just flowed together this way. Feel free to make your own connections. (And, of course, be aware that you may find spoilers surfacing. With a broadband connection all 38 enlarge-able images should load in about 10 seconds.)

View image Final shot, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (Robert Altman, 1971): The camera moves in on Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), in an opium den while snow drifts outside.

View image Flash cut to final shot of “Petulia” (Richard Lester, 1968): Petulia (Julie Christie), in labor, feels the hand of someone (husband? lover? doctor?) on her cheek just before she blacks out under anaesthesia.

View image Flash cut to final close-up, “Le Boucher” (Claude Chabrol, 1970): Drained and devastated after a long and harrowing night-trip to the hospital, Helene (Stephane Audran) drives herself to a dead end and stares across the impassible river in the cold light of dawn.

View image Flash cut to final freeze-frame close-up, “The 400 Blows” (by Chabrol’s New Wave compatriot, Francois Truffaut, 1959): Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) reaches the ocean at the edge of the continent. Where to go from here?

View image Flash cut to final moment of final shot: “Nights of Cabiria” (1957) (Federico Fellini): Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) pulls herself together, puts her game face on, looks into the camera and smiles through tears in a tender moment of quiet triumph. Another of the most famous movie-ending close-ups.

Pauline and Renata Go Showboating

Jim Emerson

Pauline Kael by David Levine, for NYRoB.

This is a continuation of the discussion about the legacy of critic Pauline Kael, five-plus years after her death (Art and Trash: Critics on/of Pauline Kael). It’s particularly for those who don’t remember or have never read Renata Adler’s 7,646-word massive attack on Kael in the New York Review of Books, which was ostensibly a review of Kael’s 1980 collection “When the Lights Go Down.”

Lots to consider — and I say that as a kid who originally got into film criticism (and “deeper into movies,” as her National Book Award-winning anthology put it) in no small part because of Kael. Some excerpts from Adler (who for a time alternated with Kael as the New Yorker’s film critic in the late 1960s) — followed by samples from letters the piece generated:

From Renata Adler, “The Perils of Pauline”:

Movies seem to invite particularly broad critical discussion: to begin with, alone among the arts, they count as their audience, their art consumer, everyone. (Television, in this respect, is clearly not an art but an appliance, through which reviewable material is sometimes played.) The staff movie critic’s job thus tends to have less in common with the art, or book, or theater critic’s, whose audiences are relatively specialized and discrete, than with the work of the political columnist—writing, that is, of daily events in the public domain, in which almost everyone’s interest is to some degree engaged, and about which everyone seems inclined to have a view. Film reviewing has always had an ingredient of reportage. Since the Forties, The New York Times has reviewed almost every movie that opened in New York[1] —as it would not consider reviewing every book, exhibit, or other cultural event, or even every account filed from the UN or City Hall. For a long time it seemed conceivable that movies could sustain, if not a great critic, at least a distinguished commentator-critic, on the order, say, of Robert Warshow, with the frequency of Walter Lippmann. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, it seemed likely that such a critic might be Pauline Kael. […]

‘The Departed’ revisited

Jim Emerson

Jumpy: a scene from “The Departed.”

A few notes (and I took lots!) on seeing Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” for a second time:

I actually enjoyed the film more the next time around, and I think the usual forces are at work here: 1) since I already knew where it was going and how it was going to get there, I wasn’t bothered so much by my memories of “Infernal Affairs” and how many sequences, performances and techniques I thought were more effective in the earlier movie; and 2) some of the rough spots often seem to smooth out a little once you’ve been over them before. I’ve always found this to be true with movies, and maybe even more so with music: the irritating things that stick out the first time don’t seem quite as glaring with repeated exposure, if only because you already know they’re there, and that makes them easier to accept, get past (and, perhaps, downplay).

Even Jack Nicholson’s meretricious Jack-off performance seemed slightly less awkward, a little more nuanced (in spots) the second time. But I still think it’s the movie’s most conspicuously damaging flaw.

I took note of a couple scenes I thought were cut together in discontinuous ways that were particularly distracting and harmful to the performances. The first is in the seafood restaurant (with the nun and the priests sitting by the window). It’s mostly a conversation between Frank (Nicholson) and Billy (Leonardo DiCaprio), intercutting two shots from different angles, one favoring Frank on the left and the other favoring Billy on the right. With both actors’ faces fully visible in both angles (they’re seated side by side), the challenges of matching shots is doubly difficult. DiCaprio changes expression or shifts the direction of his gaze — sometimes dramatically — from cut to cut.

Something similar happens in the scene in the bar between Frank and Billy, where Frank makes his rat face and lights the drawing on fire. Here, most of the discontinuity is in Nicholson’s performance — possibly because he reportedly improvised a lot of business for this scene. I suppose you could make an argument that the jumps and shifts space and demeanor indicate that Frank is coming apart at the seams (or splices).

But, again, it’s a trade-off. Scorsese may have chosen these takes because he liked what the actors were doing in each of them and wanted those moments in his film. On the other hand, because the footage doesn’t cut together so smoothly, some of us were thrown out of the picture by these jarring cuts.

The two scenes I found the most thoroughly enjoyable, aside from every minute Mark Wahlberg or Alec Baldwin were on screen, were (like those characters) newly created for “The Departed” and not in “Internal Affairs.” The first is the charming encounter in the elevator between Colin (Matt Damon) and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), where they spar and she gives him her card. The second is the one in Madolyn’s office between her and Billy, as they try to out-psych each other.

Anybody else see things a bit differently upon watching “The Departed” for a second time? Got specific examples of what you thought worked or didn’t work? This “Departed” topic (see below) and its follow-up have received the most comments of any postings in the brief life of Scanners!

‘Rosemary’s Baby’ remake aborted; God not dead?

Jim Emerson

To the shock of God and everybody, Michael Bay and company will not be bringing up “Rosemary’s Baby.” Plans for a rebirth reconceptualization remake of Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror masterwork, based on Ira Levin’s best-selling novel in which the bambino of Beelzebub receives evil prenatal care at the Dakota building at 72nd and Central Park West, have been abandoned because the producers couldn’t conceive a way to make it viable for today’s post-Cheney audiences. Taking a break from their elocution lessons in Wasilla, Brad Fuller of Bay’s Platinum Dunes company tells Collider.com:

“Rosemary’s Baby” was announced and it’s like a little bit like we’re taking about with Freddy [Kreuger]. We went down that road and we even talked to the best writers in town and it feels like it might not be do-able. We couldn’t come up with something where it felt like it was relevant and we could add something to it other than what it was so we’re now not going to be doing that film.

Instead, the remakers of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Amityville Horror” and “The Hitcher” are proceeding with their remakes of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

God, whose 1966 TIME magazine cover story made a cameo appearance as an old doctor’s office copy in Polanski’s film, was not available for comment.

George C. Scott watches the Jack and Jill Trailer

Jim Emerson

It’s simple, really: Trailer for Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill” (Dennis Dugan, 2011) + memorable scene from “Hardcore” (Paul Schrader, 1979) in which George C. Scott discovers that his missing daughter has been making porno movies. Instant movie magic.

(tip: Pat Healy)

Critics to Philistines: Stop ruining our fun!

Jim Emerson

View image: Bob Balaban as The Critic: M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Lady in the Water” comes with its own built-in film critic, allowing the filmmaker a shot at beating critics of his movie to the punch.

I hope A.O. Scott’s editors aren’t giving him a bad time for writing about why he thinks “The Da Vinci Code” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” aren’t very good movies. He’s a terrific film critic (even if he did used to do books) and he’s just doing his job, and doing it well. Who cares if those summer movies are popular? It brings up the old analogy: Just because McDonald’s has served umpteen billion burgers, does that make fast food fine cuisine (or even good for you)? Would anybody be offended, or surprised, if a Big Mac got a bad review from a food critic? I’d hope not. And who’d make the decision on whether or not to eat a Big Mac based on a review? (Well, OK, maybe a nutritional description might affect one’s appetite, but that’s a quantifiable assessment, not a critical or aesthetic one. If only we could objectively measure the precise amount of cheese, or artificial pasteurized-processed cheese-food product, present in every movie…)

In today’s New York Times, Scott writes about this year’s most popular subject among film critics: Film critics. But Scott offers a sensible perspective:

Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody’s fun when it doesn’t live up to our notion or art? What gives us the right to yell “bomb��? outside a crowded theater? Variations on these questions arrive regularly in our e-mail in-boxes, and also constitute a major theme in the comments sections of film blogs and Web sites. Online, everyone is a critic, which is as it should be: professional prerogatives aside, a critic is really just anyone who thinks out loud about something he or she cares about, and gets into arguments with fellow enthusiasts. But it would be silly to pretend that those professional prerogatives don’t exist, and that they don’t foster a degree of resentment. Entitled elites, self-regarding experts, bearers of intellectual or institutional authority, misfits who get to see a movie before anybody else and then take it upon themselves to give away the ending: such people are easy targets of populist anger. Just who do we think we are?

Unchain My Tart

Jim Emerson

View image She’s got them radiator blues again.

Roger Ebert reviews “Black Snake Moan”:

The girl is Rae (Christina Ricci); it is no coincidence that Jackson’s character is named Lazarus, and Lazarus determines to return her from near death or whooping cough, one or the other. No saint himself, he wants to redeem her from a life of sluttery.

His technique, with a refreshing directness, is to chain her to a radiator. Good thing he lives way out in the wilderness. Lazarus and Rae have no sex per se, but they do a powerful lot of slapping, cursing and chain-rattling, and the reaction of the blue-collar town on Market Day is a study. I think the point is that Lazarus and Rae somehow redeem each other through these grotesqueries, a method I always urge be used with extreme caution.

JE reviews “An Unreasonable Man”:If the collapse of presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s reputation has been a “tragedy” of Shakespearean dimensions, as his friend Phil Donohue says near the beginning of “An Unreasonable Man,” then it’s reasonable to ask: What is the nature of that tragedy?

Is it that Nader, a consumer advocate who once stubbornly fought for progressive reforms that saved lives and held corporations and government accountable for their actions, has been treated as a pariah since the 2000 presidential election? Or is it that, having entered partisan politics, Nader has just as stubbornly placed the importance of his symbolic candidacy ahead of the real-world reforms he once struggled to bring about?

JE reviews “Tears of the Black Tiger”The term “eye-popping” could have been coined to describe Thai writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng’s “Tears of the Black Tiger,” not only for its retina-smacking colors, but because some eyes actually get popped. And some brains and lungs and other viscera, too. Bloody and syrupy, tragic and silly, this retro pastiche stands with its right foot in melodrama and its left in camp, shifting its weight woozily from one side to the other like a drunken Sergio Leone gunslinger straddling the camera.

Is it anti-American to like non-English movies?

Jim Emerson

View image Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Mellville’s “Le Samourai.” How un-American!

Edward Copeland, mastermind and organizer of the online “”Best” non-English language films poll, reports that Danny Leigh at the film blog at The Guardian (UK) is wondering about our motives (“The view: Is Hollywood America?”):

Naturally it’s nice to see this kind of attention lavished on some of history’s finest yet lately neglected films; but between Copeland’s poll (coming after The Guardian’s similar exercise earlier in the year) and the surging popularity of foreign movies in the UK, I can’t help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that – and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled. In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?

If so, it’s clearly a phenomenon with differing degrees of enmity; few US bloggers are likely to share the anti-Americanism of many British audiences. And yet in both cases there may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of US foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren’t just dopey time-killers – but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.

I see his angle regarding Hollywood hegemony, but to attribute anti-American (or, rather, anti-Bush) motives to this particular project is stretching things quite a bit.

When it comes to Hollywood movies, I thought we had the British (Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat) and the French (the Cahiers du Cinema crowd) to thank for originally helping us see the artistic worth of American studio pictures once dismissed as “dopey time-killers.”

On the other hand, according to the incessant drumbeat of Fox and the rest of the far-right media, “Hollywood” is America’s greatest enemy (since Ronald Reagan left town, anyway) — especially its outspoken movie stars and Jewish singers! Their favorite targets are Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand… So, in this climate, if we really wanted to appear “anti-American” (by their definition) wouldn’t we actually align ourselves with “Hollywood”?

But this effort to showcase films that aren’t in our native tongue (including non-British films, if you want to put it that way) has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It has to do with looking beyond the English-speaking film-world to… the rest of the world and the diversity of movies beyond the five government-selected nominees for the annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the like.