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David Foster Wallace, 1962 – 2008

Jim Emerson

From a commencement address by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon University, May 21, 2005:

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.'” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

Internet Meme Timeline

Jim Emerson

Internet Memes on Dipity.

Don’t forget your memes. And don’t play in puddles unless you’re wearing your rubbers. And wash behind your ears.

(tip: David Pogue)

Quentin Tarantino’s top 20 movies since Reservoir Dogs

Jim Emerson

A predictably eclectic list of QT’s favorite films that have been made since he started directing in 1992. I mean, who else would even do something like this? The guy demonstrates again and again that he lives and breathes movies. One of my own fondest moviegoing experiences was in 1992 or 1993 when (drop, names, drop!) QT took Julia Sweeney, Kathy Griffin and a few others (David Cross? Janeane Garofalo? Phil LaMarr? Margaret Cho? I can’t remember who all was there that day…) and me to see Jackie Chan in “Supercop” (aka “Police Story 3”) at the Laemmle in Santa Monica. It was my first Jackie Chan movie and I was blown away (as any Buster Keaton devotee would be). I’m forever grateful — and happy to see that movie on his list, along with some of my personal faves, including “Boogie Nights,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Fight Club,” “The Insider,” “Shaun of the Dead,” “Memories of Murder,” “The Host,” “Unbreakable” and… you just have to see him deliver it himself.

Full list after the jump…

TIFF 2007: Abortion in demand

Jim Emerson

View image The negotiation.

When it comes to grim accounts of healthcare issues and bureaucracy in Romania, photographed in long takes with a hand-held camera, the 2007 Cannes Palme d’Or winner “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” plays like a screwball comedy next to last year’s relentless three-hour endurance test, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.” (A test, by the way, that I failed.) That’s not to say it’s any less harrowing; it’s just shorter and, in my view, less distractingly theatrical. (The cinematographer is the same — Oleg Mutu — so the difference may be in the director.)

Here, the long takes (sometimes entire scenes) don’t keep reminding you that they’re being filmed by somebody walking around with a camera. The work is steady, controlled, disciplined. And, like several impressive films at this year’s Toronto Film Festival (including “No Country for Old Men,” “Chop Shop,” “Persepolis,” “Paranoid Park”) it chooses just the right moment to cut to black at the end. (That’s a favorite device of mine, and it seems to be quite popular about now.)

As you may know, Cristian Mungiu’s film is about an abortion, which virtually guarantees it will be “powerful.” But what makes the movie work is the portrayal of the characters: Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), the central character, helps her passive-aggressive roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) arrange for an illegal, hotel-room “probe” procedure performed by a cut-rate black market abortionist who goes by the name Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).

But this isn’t just another story about women victimized by men in a repressive and bureaucratic political system (although it is that, too). The most infuriating character in the whole piece is Gabita, who is so irresponsible and “helpless” that she deliberately puts Otilia at risk again and again, by forcing her to take all the risks except for the actual procedure itself. You wonder how the weak and utterly blank Gabita ever even survived to reproductive age, and whether she would have done anything at all if Otilia hadn’t stepped up to take responsibility. (Gabita seems like the type who would just give birth and then walk away from the baby — whether in the hospital or in an alley somewhere.)

This in no way excuses the ways Mr. Bebe exploits the situation, but during a painful, protracted negotiation in the hotel room, your sympathies are — for a while, at least — more with him than Gabita. She has failed to follow any of his instructions (meeting him in person, reserving the room), which makes him justifiably distrustful in a country where performing an abortion carries a stiff prison sentence. But he eventually crosses a line, from understandable paranoia to cold manipulation of the situation.

“4 months…” is a sharp political commentary about free-market forces in a socialist bureaucracy where nearly everything is regulated by the government. In certain respects, Mr. Bebe is simply an entrepreneur, a man who identifies a need and fulfills it to make a profit. Pure capitalism, supply and demand. Meanwhile, the government keeps its citizens’ social, economic and private lives wrapped in a binding of red tape.

I’d love to see a Bordwellian Average Shot Length analysis of this film. Fortunately, the long takes don’t call attention to themselves. One such shot at a dinner table, during a birthday party at the home of Otilia’s boyfriend, is composed with the boyfriend’s mother on the left, Otilia in the center, the boyfriend slightly behind her, and his father on the right. Olilia has just left Gabita in the hotel room after the abortion. She doesn’t want to be here, and she’s thoroughly distracted. The conversation and activity (eating, smoking, drinking) go on all around her, and she remains relatively immobile in the frame. She is in the action, but not of it, and the camera communicates her distress and unease with subtle effectiveness.

“4 months…” is an impressive film. But it does not reflect well on the Cannes jury that it was chosen for the Palme d’Or over the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men.” That seems almost inconceivable. One is a good movie; the other very nearly defines the essence of movies.

Tinseltown Trash Alert!

Jim Emerson

The lovely Mses Griffin and Sweeney in “It’s Pat: The Movie” (which has a helluva opening shot!)

OK, I don’t usually get into the tabloid “news” (that much) — this is, after all, a site devoted to the in-depth appreciation of cinema in all its manifestations (while understanding the realities of the entertainment business) — but this is just too much: Three irresistible trash stories all hitting the wires in one day! Where is Kathy Griffin when I need her?

Tom and Nicole: Never Married!

BBC: In fact, Kidman didn’t need an annulment for one simple reason: in the eyes of the Catholic Church her 10-year union with Tom Cruise, a renowned Scientologist, never happened.

Rush Limbaugh Busted for Illicit Viagra Possession!

AP: Rush Limbaugh could see a deal with prosecutors in a long-running prescription fraud case collapse after authorities found a bottle of Viagra in his bag at Palm Beach International Airport. The prescription was not in his name. [Dare we ask whose it was? We always knew not enough blood was getting to his head.]

Barbara Walters Upstaged by Some Old RuPaul Impersonator!

AP: “I love Star and I was trying to do everything I possibly could — up until this morning when I was betrayed — to protect her,” Walters told The Associated Press.

The Stepford Critics?

Jim Emerson

View image It takes a Village of Damned Critics. Are there more where he came from?

Are movie critics too much alike? Not just in their opinions, but in their very approach to movies, or their writing styles? In March, Andy Horbal, formerly of the film criticism blog No More Marriages! and now writing at Mirror/Stage, observed, “When looked at side-by-side at sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes most movie reviews reveal themselves as guilty of a shocking degree of sameness.”

Of course, 10 or 20 years ago, virtually nobody outside a newspaper’s local circulation area would have any idea of what its movie critic said about a particular film. I wonder: Are aggregation sites like RT and Metacritic revealing sameness, or influencing it, or creating an illusion of it? Could this appearance of uniformity have something to do with the little chunk-ettes these sites choose to excerpt from the reviews — not unlike the (even shorter) ones studios choose to use in ad campaigns?

In early February, preparing for his contribution to my Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon, Andy was in the winter of his discontent about film criticism in general:

I’m frustrated by the film blogosphere. I’m also frustrated by journalistic film criticism, and the primary problem in both cases is what I see as a plague of sameness. Additionally, I’m frustrated by the imitative quality of much blog writing: specifically, the way film blogs imitate journalistic film criticism which, as I said, frustrates me itself.As I’ve written before, I think these are golden days for film criticism — in large part because of the unprecedented explosion of writing now easily accessible on the web: not only the writing of big, established critics and scholars, but the distinctive voices and perspectives of many bloggers who in the past would not have had access to a publisher, or an audience. At our fingertips we have not only considerations of new movies, but vast archives of writing, from the present and the past, about the whole history of movies.

This has never been possible before, when you’d have to make a trip to the library to physically search for newspapers and magazines, perhaps in bound volumes or on microfilm. Now, no matter how small a town you live in, as long as you can get on the Internet, you have access to much of what was once available only in big-city libraries. And, if you have a mailbox, you can watch or rent more movies on DVD (through NetFlix, for example) or on cable or satellite TV (Turner Classic Movies, On Demand, premium channels or any number of pay-per-view services, including Amazon Unbox) than you’d ever have had the opportunity to see in any major city over the course of several years. (How many times were “Le Samourai” or “Madame de…” or “Celine and Julie Go Boating” or even “La Dolce Vita” actually projected on screens in your town during the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s? They and many thousands of others are now available everywhere, all the time. That is revolutionary — beyond anything we could ever have predicted in the 1970s, when we saw these films in 16mm student film series or film societies. Or, if we were lucky, in 35 mm at rep houses, but even then the prints were often dirty, scratchy, choppy or multiple-generation dupes.) All this access also allows us to correct the millions of errors contained in pioneering works of film criticism that were, of necessity, based on old notes or faulty memories. The movies are more alive to us than ever.

I hold movie bloggers (and web sites) to a higher standard than I do daily newspaper critics, because they have luxuries of time and space and choice that the pros don’t: 1) they don’t have to write on deadline about something they’ve seen only once before it is released; 2) they can take the time (if a film is on DVD) to be sure they quote it correctly (not just rely on memory or notes hastily scribbled in the dark), and even provide clips or frame grabs to illustrate their points; 3) they can include hyperlinks to related sources of information and opinion; 4) they get to pick and choose which movies they actually want to write about, instead of being limited to what we used to call “the review treadmill” of whatever happens to be opening this week; 5) they are not subject to the many, many constraints of conventional print journalism, including limited word counts, layout restrictions, editorial concerns about writing for a “broad” or “mainstream” readership, and so on.

There’s a lot of amateurism on the web — which can be refreshing and stimulating (especially when, as Andy points out, the writers do not try to imitate some mythical “professional” style, and instead write in their own voices), or it can be embarrassing and stultifying (when ignorance combines with arrogance and a dull or strident writing style). At the same time, there are a plenty of reviewers holding jobs with major newspapers or magazines whose stuff isn’t up to the standards — of readability, accuracy, knowledge, or basic interest and engagement — that I would consider “professional” quality, either. Yet some bloggers have all this and more. In most cases, they’ve got everything but longtime professional (i.e., paycheck-cashing) experience writing about movies. (Just try reading some of those reviews you find on RottenTomatoes for some excellent negative examples. Next time you read a printed review, ask yourself if you think this writer actually likes his/her job. Or movies. You may have discovered one of those former sportswriters or feature reporters who’ve been unceremoniously shifted over to the “movie beat.”)

The Basterds who would not die!

Jim Emerson

As a number of online critics have noted, Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” has inspired some of the most exciting critical discussion of the year. I’m grateful to Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, who has been a big part of that discussion, for pointing out one of the most penetrating pieces on the movie yet, “For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS” by Chris Stangl at The Exploding Kinetoscope.

Although I think he misinterprets something I wrote (and I’ll get to that later), he’s a superb writer who has an affinity for Tarantino’s work and an ability to articulate it compellingly.

Stangl offers inspired analysis of the structures and character games in Tarantino’s films; the invocation of decadent “Nazisploitation” (from “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS” to Visconti’s “The Damned”) among the layered movie textures in “IB”; Tarantino’s use of deep focus “to impart as much information as possible in a shot”…

Ecstatic truth

Jim Emerson

View image Werner Herzog with Roger Ebert at Ebertfest 2007.

“Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you’re not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It’s not just a possibility. It is a certainty.”

— Jean Shepherd, 1975

In the past 72 hours, I have read two extraordinarily personal pieces of film criticism that have moved me to tears. The first is Roger Ebert’s “Letter to Werner Herzog,” and (just now), David Bordwell’s “The adolescent window.” Both miraculously distill the essence of cinephilia (or, a lifetime of intimacy with the arts and popular culture in general) into a single, eloquent piece of writing. Roger’s is, of course, devoted to his enduring relationship with the work of a single artist over many years, while David’s (though focusing on Jean Shepherd) traces a lifelong multi-media love affair with books, magazines, radio, TV, movies….

What does it mean, what does it feel like, to connect with another’s sensibility (and recognize something of yourself) in a film, or a book, or a voice? Each man approaches these questions from his own angle.

Roger Ebert directs his letter to Werner Herzog, who dedicated his most recent documentary, “Encounters at the End of the World,” to Roger Ebert. Ebert writes of Herzog’s “belief that the audience must be able to believe what it sees”:

Not its “truth,” but its actuality, its ecstatic truth.

You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top. […]

Your documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” begins with a real man, Dieter Dengler, who really was a prisoner of the Viet Cong, and who really did escape through the jungle and was the only American who freed himself from a Viet Cong prison camp. As the film opens, we see him entering his house, and compulsively opening and closing windows and doors, to be sure he is not locked in. “That was my idea,” you told me. “Dieter does not really do that. But it is how he feels.” […]

In one scene you can foresee the end of life on earth, and in another show us country musicians picking their guitars and banjos on the roof of a hut at the South Pole. You did not go to Antarctica, you assure us at the outset, to film cute penguins. But you did film one cute penguin, a penguin that was disoriented, and was steadfastly walking in precisely the wrong direction—into an ice vastness the size of Texas. “And if you turn him around in the right direction,” you say, “he will turn himself around, and keep going in the wrong direction, until he starves and dies.” The sight of that penguin waddling optimistically toward his doom would be heartbreaking, except that he is so sure he is correct. […]

I have started out to praise your work, and have ended by describing it. Maybe it is the same thing. You and your work are unique and invaluable, and you ennoble the cinema when so many debase it.

David Bordwell recalls the “Law of the Adolescent Window,” that time in our lives (roughly between ages 13 and 18) when the world, and the world of culture, opens up to us in ways that make indelible impressions:Whatever called out to you when your window opened… is likely to retain its bright purity throughout your days. What’s kitsch or cheesy or retro to others is precious to you.

Make no apologies. It’s not mere nostalgia or guilty pleasure to revisit these creations. You can return to them as to old friends. Encountering them again, you remember when you took it for granted that anything was possible in your life. Their sharp, shining lines fitted your range of vision, and mostly they still do.

Your taste was unerring. These teenage passions represent a big chunk of the finest part of you. In some secret place you are still as uncomplicated as you were then.

Go ahead. Tell us. What ecstatic truths have you seen through your window?

When comedy happens

Jim Emerson

I had just begun working on a piece about how comedy is the the only adequate response to the modern world, and the most profound approach to exploring and understanding the modern human psyche… when this happened. The folly and tragedy of human existence, and the indifferent and inhospitable relationship of the universe to human needs and desires, can be plumbed only by the sharpest and most penetrating comedy, without which tragedy loses its meaning and its deepest pain. And sometimes it just happens without comedy writers needing to make anything up. Or is it the other way around? Miss Congeniality. Elle Woods. Tracy Flick. Could this be an example of life imitating comedy?

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times takes a lighter comedic view:

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin. […]

This chick flick, naturally, features a wild stroke of fate, when the two-year governor of an oversized igloo becomes commander in chief after the president-elect chokes on a pretzel on day one.

The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it’s close to Alaska. “Back off, Commie dude,” she says. “I’m a much better shot than Cheney.”

[UPDATE: Now comes news from the McCain-Palin campaign that there’s an unmarried, pregnant 17-year-old daughter in the pro-family Palin household. You can’t make this stuff up. Reuters reports that the minor is “about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, according to aides of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.” Damn right she will. It’s written into the GOP platform!]

Quite often, the behavior of public figures displays a cosmic humor beyond anything a comedy writer could actually have gotten away with. In this case, the joke would seem too crass and cynical if it weren’t for real. Now its crassness and cynicism give the humor real bite. A week ago if some film or television writer had proposed this preposterous scenario (old politician chooses Alaskan creationist former small-town mayor and beauty contest winner as running mate), it would have just seemed mean and a little desperate. Now? Well, see “Ham Sandwich McCain’s Actual Choice for Veep.” It no longer seems so far-fetched.

Now you have to wonder: Why didn’t he choose someone more qualified? Like Harriet Miers?

When it comes to experience, Dan Quayle was the natural choice — but his Y chromosome made him ineligible in the all-important tokenism category. (Brownie could bring his hurricane ineptitude to the table, but he’s still sporting a scrotum so that won’t play.) The main attribute McCain’s running mate needed was that she be able to play up her sisterhood with Senator Hillary Clinton, the veteran politician so long beloved and revered by the Republican Party. That and she had to have spunk. The convention is in Minneapolis, and she’s gonna make it after all.

Once comedy of this magnitude has occurred, and satire has been rendered superfluous, the really brilliant comedians have only to recognize the situation for what it is. I’m tremendously grateful, then, that Jon Stewart, with his unerring eye for future casting opportunities, and Samantha Bee, with her sharp-as-a-tack “lady brain,” found exactly the right words to summarize the genius behind this unprecedented decision.

(Transcript below, after the jump.)

Why the Hell It’s Funny Or Not, Part 2 or Possibly 3

Jim Emerson

Here is Borat ridiculing people who are not in on the joke so that you can feel socially superior, according to Christopher Hitchens and David Brooks.

British crank Christopher Hitchens has been writing about Borat’s Kazakhstan for years, only he calls it “Iraq.” Still, it’s an imaginary place in Hitchens’ brain, like Kazakhstan in Borat’s or Nicole Kidman in David Thomson’s.

I do not read Hitchens much at all anymore because he’s stuck in 2002 and can’t get out. But Hitchens has a perspective on “Borat” that’s worth mentioning. First, he quotes a dim-witted passage from a review in “London’s leftist weekly,” the New Statesman, in which the writer professes that “it’s shocking to witness the tacit acceptance with which Borat’s ghoulish requests are greeted. Trying to find the ideal car for mowing down gypsies, or seeking the best gun for killing Jews, he encounters only compliance among America’s salespeople.”

To which Hitchens replies:

Oh, come on. Among the “cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan” is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. At a formal dinner in Birmingham, Ala., the guests discuss Borat while he’s out of the room—filling a bag with ordure in order to bring it back to the table, as it happens—and agree what a nice young American he might make. And this is after he has called one guest a retard and grossly insulted the wife of another (and remember, it’s “Americana” that is “crass”). The tony hostess even takes him and his bag of s__t upstairs and demonstrates the uses not just of the water closet but also of the toilet paper. The arrival of a mountainous black hooker does admittedly put an end to the evening, but if a swarthy stranger had pulled any of the foregoing at a liberal dinner party in England, I wouldn’t give much for his chances….

Is it too literal-minded to point out what any viewer of the movie can see for himself—that the crowd at the rodeo stops cheering quite fast when it realizes that something is amiss; that the car salesman is extremely patient about everything from demands for p___y magnets to confessions of bankruptcy; and that the man in the gun shop won’t sell the Kazakh a weapon? This is “compliance”? I have to say, I didn’t like the look of the elderly couple running the Confederate-memorabilia store, but considering that Borat smashes hundreds of dollars worth of their stock, they bear up pretty well—icily correct even when declining to be paid with locks of pubic hair. The only people who are flat-out rude and patronizing to our curious foreigner are the stone-faced liberal Amazons of the Veteran Feminists of America—surely natural readers of the New Statesman.

I’ll stop there for now. Hitchens’ point is that “Borat” is something of a comedy of manners, and that what many are seeing as “shocking compliance” is simply politeness and an aversion to confrontation (particularly when there’s a camera staring at you). On this isolated point, I think Hitchens is generally correct and the heinous, America-hating leftist is generally wrong. But I wonder if Hitchens (or the other guy) can see that one accurate observation does not make all others invalid. Hitchens’ mistake — a fallacy he indulges endlessly in his writing — is in thinking the one thing he deigns to mention is all that’s going on.

In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)

Jim Emerson

Click here to watch larger video on Vimeo.

Annotated full transcript of the video here, for easy reference.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequencePart II: A Dash of SaltPart III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco (Bullitt, The Lineup, The French Connection)

The first of a three-part video series on action sequences at Press Play is a really detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of a famous chase in “The Dark Knight” that has always confused me. Others told me they had no problems following it, but the closer I looked at it, the better I understood what puzzled me.

As I say in the introduction over at Press Play:

When, for example, we’re shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there’s a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at.  But that’s not always the case. Why? I don’t know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible–and indefensible.

This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River.  It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart (and putting it back together) shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would–but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time.  At last, I now know exactly why.

“In the Cut” is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com.

UPDATE: 9/12/11): Part II is now here. This quotation comes near the beginning:

Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what’s important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that’s realistic because it shows you what’s ‘really’ happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is ‘realistically’ reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as ‘chaos’ (another description that Nobles applies to the Expendables action scenes)–well, action feels chaotic when you’re in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer?

–David Bordwell, Observations on film art (September 15, 2010)

For Sale: On Revolutionary Road

Jim Emerson

“One thing I’m willing to bet [about a “Revolutionary Road” screenplay written in the 1970s] is that it made the Wheelers a lot more sympathetic than they ought to be. It was a common misconception when the book was first published, even among good critics. Quite simply, Yates meant for the Wheelers to seem a little better than mediocre: not, that is, stoical mavericks out of Hemingway, or glamorous romantics out of Fitzgerald. Rather, the Wheelers are everyday people — you and me — who pretend to be something they’re not because life is lonely and dull and disappointing.”

— Richard Yates biographer Blake Bailey in Slate (June 26, 2007)

Plot and thematic spoilers ahead.

“How do you break free… without breaking apart”? That’s the rhetorical question posed as a tag line in this trailer (above) for Sam Mendes’ titanic version of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel “Revolutionary Road,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

But is that what “Revolutionary Road” — the movie or the book — is about? Does it even scratch the surface? I wonder if this is being sold as a story about two extraordinary people who might have fulfilled their promise… if they hadn’t been stifled by the suburban conformist pressures of America in the 1950s. If only they’d broken free and gone to Paris where people really feel things!

“40 years is not enough” — Roger Ebert

Jim Emerson

Message from Roger Ebert, now posted at RogerEbert.com:

As I look at the date, I realize I was named film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times forty years ago today. I had no idea I was embarking on a lifelong career, but I was, and I can’t think of a better one.

Now here I am with another milestone. Nine months ago I was leaving Northwestern Memorial hospital after surgery for salivary cancer. I was planning to be back in action in a few weeks, but unfortunately, there were complications, and more medical procedures resulted. I was in bed so long that I experienced serious deconditioning that led to a stint at the famous Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

I began my rehabilitation there, and I am continuing it, along with an overhaul of my general health, at the Pritikin Center in Florida. Also, because of a tracheostomy, my speaking voice is on hold until my upcoming completion surgery. I am feeling better every day and my wife Chaz says we can see the light at the end of the tunnel….

I am happy to say my Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival will be held as scheduled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign April 25-29. I’ll be there, but friends and colleagues will take over the onstage Q&A duties. I’ll watch from the audience. I think of the festival as the first step on my return to action. Because I will be under scrutiny there, I’ll tell you what to expect: a sick guy, getting better, who still loves the movies and the festival.

Read complete article at RogerEbert.com

Waxing Roth: Define “failure”

Jim Emerson

View image Is this man a “torture pornographer”? Strike that. Is he a “failure”?

Letters from Filmmakers Part II: This one was published today at MSN Movies, a response from Eli Roth to an article by Don Kaye about the phenomenon popularly known as “torture porn”:

Don,

I saw your article on “Torture Porn,” and while I disagree with you about your criticism of my film, I would like you to back up how “Hostel II” is a failure, a claim you repeatedly make. While the film did not do what the first film did at the box office, (which was a total shock to everyone – myself included) “Hostel II” cost only $10 million dollars to make, and is currently at $30 million dollars worldwide box office, with many territories left to open. How many other films this summer have earned triple their production budget in their theatrical run? Are those films failures as well?

Critically, your comments were that I had MTV style editing and a lack of character development. What, exactly, are you talking about? “Hostel II” has barely any flashy cuts or MTV-style editing, and the first 45 minutes of the movie is all character development with almost zero on screen violence. Heather Matarazzo’s torture scene doesn’t happen until nearly 50 minutes into the movie.

View image One of the milder posters for “Hostel Part II” — this one from Italy.

It sounds to me like you are jumping onto some kind of ‘anti-violence’ crusade without actually watching the film, when if you looked closely, you’d see that my film actually has a very strong anti-violence moral core. Writers I respect such as Stephen King, Elvis Mitchell, and writer/Attorney Julie Hilden, a former clerk for supreme court Justice Breyer, praised the film specifically for its anti-violence message and skilled filmmaking (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20070716.html) and in Europe the major critics hailed the film for its political messages against corporations that profit from the death of Americans.

My films are not for everyone, and many critics dismissed the film because of the violent scenes, which is the very thing horror fans are paying for when they see a film like “Hostel II.” But to lump my film in with other films that may be ripping off a trend for “MTV editing” and “lack of character development” shows more of a reflection of your lack of understanding as a critic and a desire to be seen as a ‘moral person’ than an actual critique of my film.

[…]