“I’m talkin’ about friendship. I’m talkin’ about character. I’m talkin’ about – hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word – I’m talkin’ about ethics.” If you’re a cinephile of any sort, The House Next Door is probably already (or should be) on your reading list. Still in case it isn’t, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a particularly intriguing essay on the Coens’ view of morality last week (which you absolutely should NOT read until after seeing No Country for Old Men — it gives away the whole game.) “Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens’ body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema. To some extent, all of their movies poses questions that supposedly deeper filmmakers have broached time and time again: if we cannot be certain of God’s existence; if there is a possibility that no one’s watching what we do; if, to reference Johnny Caspar in Miller’s Crossing, ‘morality and ethics’ are agreed-upon lies…then what’s the point of being good? Just because.” Update: Also via THND, the Chicago Sun-Times‘s Jim Emerson offers up another quality dissection of No Country.
Category: Critics
The Monster and its Critic.
“Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it ‘Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean.’…But the ‘Beowulf’ travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Taking issue with the “plastic entertainment‘ that is Zemeckis’ Beowulf much more than I did, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya movingly explains what Tolkien understood about the poem, and how it informed his own work. “Tolkien’s brilliant essay can be seen as a ringing defense not just of ‘Beowulf,’ but of the work he was soon to embark on, another great tower composed of ancient stones. And the themes of lateness, of heroic loss, being caught between one age and another (his world is not called ‘Middle-earth’ for nothing), are the deepest and most sublime parts of his own epic.“
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (Wes).
“Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He’s wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there’s something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays.“
Also in Slate Jonah Weiner takes issue with the racial politics of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre. Food for thought — I thought Weiner scored some of his best points early on: “In every film he’s made, even the best ones, there’s been something kind of obnoxious about Wes Anderson. By now, critics [Note: and The Onion] have enumerated several of his more irritating traits and shticks: There’s his pervasive preciousness, exemplified by the way he pins actors into the centers of fastidiously composed tableaux like so many dead butterflies. There’s his slump-shouldered parade of heroes who seem capable of just two emotions: dolorous and more dolorous (not that there haven’t been vibrant exceptions to this). And there’s the way he frequently couples songs — particularly rock songs recorded by shaggy Europeans between 1964 and 1972 — with slow-motion effects, as though he’s sweeping a giant highlighter across the emotional content of a scene. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Richie can’t watch Margot get off a bus without Nico popping up to poke us in the ribs: ‘He loves her! And it’s killing him! See?’” Ouch.
Save the Aisle Seats.
As seen on AICN, thousands of vintage movie reviews from episodes of the Siskel & Ebert Show (and, ok, the Ebert & Roeper Show) are now available online for perusal. Some fascinating time capsules here, and it’s good to see the late Gene Siskel again. (Ebert lost a good deal of respect in this corner when he ultimately picked the pedestrian milquetoast Richard Roeper to fill Siskel’s seat. Somebody more combative, more knowledgable, or more interesting — heck, or somebody with decent taste in movies — would’ve been preferable.)
A Second and Third Opinion.
Don’t buy my take on Death Proof? Well, Keith Uhlich (Tarantino fan, perhaps overly much so IMO) and Matt Zoller Seitz (Tarantino skeptic, and more grounded) of The House Next Door have posted a long and wide-ranging conversation on Tarantino’s oeuvre, including Death Proof, that, like most of HND’s content, is well-worth-perusing, no matter where you come down on QT.
V for Vindicated.
“V for Vendetta may be–why hedge? is–the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed ‘controversial’ (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn’t play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it’s working on a deeper, Edgar Allan Poe-ish witch’s brew substrata of pop myth.” Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott seems to really like V for Vendetta. (Via Blivet.)
Apes in the News.
“‘A few people have already asked me why we’re taking twice as long to tell essentially the same story,’ says the director. ‘And I don’t really know. We’ve been asking that ourselves. I’m going to have to come up with a better answer.'” Newsweek‘s Devin Gordon sizes up PJ’s King Kong, and he seems to really like it: Jackson “proved once again that he might be the only guy whose films are worth getting on a plane and flying halfway around the planet to see.”
I Want Some More.
Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck all open to impressive reviews (the latter opening wide Oct. 7.) And, since I haven’t yet caught Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride or Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, I sense there may be some more movie-marathoning in my imminent future.
Say what?
A.O. Scott gushes over Sith in the NYT: “This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than ‘Star Wars.’…[it] ranks with ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.” And politically applicable to boot…Ok, I think, despite my best efforts, my expectations are now definitely raised for Wednesday night. (2nd link via Webgoddess.)
III like a bird?
“The bottom line is that ‘Sith‘ has a discipline missing from Episodes I and II. It is just repeatedly not-embarrassing at nearly every turn. Most of the flabby expository walks to landing pads have been neatly snipped. Important things are said with images instead of words. The special effects are better, but draw less attention to themselves.” Ok, now I might be a bit enthused. Alexandra du Pont, far and away AICN‘s best reviewer and a fangirl who loathed the first two prequels, gives Episode III an enthusiastic (and spoiler-filled) endorsement. Her verdict: “Not even close” to ANH and Empire, but Sith “edges out ‘Jedi’.”