tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:/mzs/feed MZS 2014-12-19T13:01:00-06:00 tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/54906159cd3b5652a600004e 2014-12-19T13:01:00-06:00 2014-12-23T08:09:18-06:00 Mr. Turner Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_mrturner-2014-1

Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere"—which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love—yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding. Leigh, the writer and director of such classics as "Naked" and "Secrets and Lies," usually tells stories set in the present day, often of a more urban character. His notable exceptions, such as the outstanding "Topsy-Turvy" and this movie, require him to work in a somewhat different vein, and be more attentive to composition and atmosphere and period-accurate psychology; but it's just as compelling a mode, because Leigh's emotionally reserved nature comes through more strongly, and seems attuned to his buttoned-up, often repressed characters, who shove negative thoughts way down inside themselves, practically to the bottoms of their feet, and soldier on. 

The film's title character is one of many such characters in "Mr. Turner." Timothy Spall plays the Cockney painter, who imbued often outwardly unremarkable panoramas with an intensely spiritual feeling that's intriguingly hard to match up with the man we see before us onscreen. Often described as the "painter of light," Turner was part of the Romantic school of painters, whose work eventually led, on visual art's slowly unfolding timeline, to the Impressionists. The film is appropriately fascinated by light and color and what it takes to create or re-create them. Turner, who's a  stiff when it comes to talking about everything else in life, can go on forever about light. He listens closely when his Scottish polymath cousin Mary Somerville (Lesley Manville) schools him on the magnetic properties of violet, or when his father (Paul Jesson), who travels the world buying his son paint, warns him, "Ultramarine's going up a guinea a bladder." 

I say Turner's a "stiff" when he's not talking about art, but that's an understatement. When not painting or discussing painting, much of his behavior is socially inept, insensitive, often unfathomably inappropriate, to the point where you wonder if he has some sort of condition. He seems not to be in control of his impulses, much more so than more functional people around him. At times he seems—to put it in a modern way—to be not quite wired right. The combination of his awe-inspiring talent and the acclaim it brought him explains, at least partly, why almost nobody calls him on his strangeness or piggishness. To be fair, though, the 1829 death of his father, an event that occurs early in this movie, might have spurred a lot of the behavior that Leigh explores; depression tends to amplify one's personality as surely as intoxicants might. We see Turner going to a brothel and asking to draw a prostitute, then weeping inconsolably, then having his way with his housekeeper (whose expression indicates that this is not an uncommon occurrence, and is in fact one aspect of their complicated relationship). He is a shattered man.

We also see Turner interacting with his colleagues, many of them landscape painters nearly as famous, at a gallery show, where he walks around inspecting the layout of the gallery, telling a painter friend that a woman's leg in a panorama could use a bit of highlight, and then startling everyone by painting a single daub of red in the middle of an intricately finished landscape painting—an act that another painter interprets as a declaration of war on whatever cliches the show embodies. It's in this latter sequence that "Mr. Turner" most distinguishes itself from other films about art and artists, indeed from most screen biographies. 

Like Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy," which showed the world of Gilbert and Sullivan almost exclusively through their eyes, and the eyes of their performers and collaborators, "Mr. Turner" understands creative people on every conceivable level, and translates that understanding with a deftness rarely seen outside of astute documentaries about creative people. To watch it is to feel as though you're a part of its world, talking shop with the painters, experiencing tiny fluctuations in received wisdom and sudden changes of artistic direction that can only be sensed by professionals who are plugged into their art form, and completely in command of their talents.

That the performances are excellent will come as no surprise to Leigh fans. Spall, who's had a remarkably varied career, adds another fine portrait to his own actor's gallery with Turner, a character who's impossible to fully fathom (as if you'd want to!) and even more impossible to approve of. He can be high-handed, brusque, oblivious. But there's something immensely sad about him, and you can sense it most strongly during moments like the one pictured at the top of this page, when he's seen from a distance, from head to toe, moving through the sorts of landscapes that he himself might paint. These images, photographed by Leigh's regular cinematographer Dick Pope, express the essence of a phrase used by Manville, "the interconnectedness of all things."

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/54906137cd3b5681fd000060 2014-12-19T08:27:00-06:00 2014-12-23T08:09:03-06:00 Annie Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_annie-2014-1

The new "Annie" is getting kicked up and down Critic's Row like an unwanted orphan, but if you see it with a big audience you'll experience an emotion entirely different from the one being described in many reviews: unabashed cheer.

This new version of the Broadway musical is the first since the 1999 ABC TV version, and the only theatrical movie version since the 1982 John Huston picture that starred Aileen Quinn, Albert Finney and Carol Burnett. (The '99 TV version is excellent, by the way—well worth seeking out; it's easily the best thing director Rob Marshall has been associated with.) Judged purely in terms of its production and direction, this latest "Annie" is inferior to its predecessors; director Will Gluck, of TV's "The Marshalls" and "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," has envisioned it as a repository of 2014 music and musical performance cliches, the actors cavorting through indifferently composed widescreen vistas, and singing in voices that have been heavily AutoTuned. 

And yet a quality of willfully naive optimism—of repeatedly neglected and disappointed goodness hauling itself up off the pavement, summoning a smile, and singing out—shines through anyway, and you might or might not be amazed to learn that it cancels out the movie's many flaws. Bottom line: this "Annie" is a gigantic smiley face, arriving on screens at the tail end of one of the most miserable years in recent American history—a year whose uninterrupted flood of not just bad but national-identity-challenging, often racially toxic news made even some of the most optimistic among us want to crawl into bed, pull the covers up, and stay there until the calendar rolled over.

And now here's little Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest Oscar nominee in history, stepping into shoes that have previous been filled only by red-haired Caucasian girls, and striding through a present day New York City enclosed and in some ways superseded by the virtual world of the Internet and cell phones and satellite locators, singing and dancing opposite an African-American version of Daddy Warbucks, a self-made cell phone magnate played by Jamie Foxx—and it's still "Annie," a deeply American story about reinvention and striving, survival and dreams.

This Annie is a foster child living in an apartment with other foster children rather than an "orphan" as described in other versions. And she's been situated within a universe that's contemporary, but which nonetheless connects forcefully with the Depression-era landscapes of the stage musical, the '99 and '82 films, and the source material that inspired all them, Harold Gray's comic strip. All were about maintaining one's optimism in the face of personal misfortune exacerbated by a Grand Canyon-vast gap between rich and poor; they were about the difficulty of staying sensible, and sensitive, in world in which everyone but the very wealthy had to struggle constantly, and deny themselves pleasures, and some essentials. This is also the story of a heroine possessed of a specific kind of optimism: Annie's signature ballad "Tomorrow" is not sung by an ignorant, stupid or naive child, but one who's aware of how miserable things can get and how cruel the wheels of fate can be, yet squares her shoulders against whatever life might throw at her, and continues to dream of, and pursue, a better future.

Wallis is the first Annie to bring something both culturally and personally new to this role, and the film knows it: it even sets up her appearance by having a more typical Annie anchor an opening scene in a classroom, then letting Wallis take over (as, literally, a different Annie who happens to have the same name) and school her teacher and students with a lesson set to music with a bubble-gum R&B back-beat. Wallis seizes control of the film through sheer charm. 

But the really beautiful thing is, like Foxx's performance as Stacks—basically a germophobic Michael Bloomberg, shrinking from human contact and busting out antibacterial hand wash after every meet-and-greet—the point is not to rebuke any of the previous versions of "Annie," but to say something more like, "Look, we changed the color of the leads, and revised the music to make it modern, and changed the plot so that the complications and resolutions are filtered through new technology, and yet it's still the story you remember, with the same themes and messages."

The movie is sharp in grasping how the plot of "Annie," indeed most dramatic public interaction these days, must be reconfigured and re-thought, to take camera phones, YouTube, satellite tracking, and other technology into account. Stacks' bid to be mayor of New York is DOA a the start of the movie, thanks to his extremely unlikable queasiness about human contact, but it's resuscitated when a cell phone video of him rescuing Annie from a near-hit-and-run accident goes viral. (His advisor's attempts to recreate this random event for political gain have a Preston Sturges feeling.) The movie is filled with knowing, playful acknowledgments that experience is becoming more theoretical than physical, such as the "starry sky" on the wall of Annie's bedroom at Stack's place, which is really a series of video screens; yet such touches only confirm that, no matter how physical or virtual the world becomes, love and the absence of love are real, and can save or wound us.

When you consider that such a project could have easily collapsed under the weight of its own self-created mandate, the film's easygoing nature seems all the more remarkable.  "Annie" is light on its feet, frothy, and always insistently, at times provocatively kind, determined to melt grumpy hearts like marshmallows. 

Wallis is impossible not to like; she plays Annie as she should be played, as a smart, tough kid without an unkind thought in her head, and when her resolve finally crumbles in the face of one disappointment too many, your heart sinks with hers. The supporting cast is equally fine. The cream of the crop includes Foxx, a handsome, brawny leading man whose acting convinces us that Stacks might actually be terrified of the world, and his own heart; Rose Byrne as Grace, Stack's right-hand-woman and living, breathing conscience (and, of course, unacknowledged romantic option); David Zayas as Lou, a bodega owner who's kind to Annie and has a crush on her harridan foster mom, and Bobby Cannavale as Guy, Stacks's campaign advisor (the only character in the picture who's not basically decent, and who therefore steals every scene he's in). 

The cast's only weak link is Cameron Diaz as the cynical, cunning foster mom and system-gamer Miss Hannigan, a onetime wannabe R&B star. (The movie's soundtrack has an urban contemporary coat of shellac, and there are pretty good new songs by compeer-producers Sia and Greg Kurstin.) Diaz is is a trouper who's game for anything, and her big "Easy Street" number with Cannavale is enjoyable even though the director inexplicably hacks it to ribbons with unnecessary cross-cutting. But she lacks the exuberant crudeness and vampy joy that every other Hannigan has brought to the part. Diaz is not slinky enough or desperate enough, and she's too wounded early on, which means we can't be surprised when Hannigan reveals hidden, decent qualities.

This "Annie" won't win any awards for subtlety, much less filmmaking elegance. But a great deal of imagination has been put into it, along with a lot of heart. This would be easier to see if the film were more of a self-regarding, art house showpiece, and less of a cotton candy multiplex confection—but what does it matter, really, when you've got Wallis deadpanning through a city of sugar? This "Annie" is so very, very welcome right now. Its easygoing, multicultural, can't-we-all-just-get-along utopianism is a pop culture Band-Aid for a country with a bloodied sense of possibility. Judged purely on aesthetic merit, it is a two-and-a-half-star movie at best. The extra star is for sending people out of the theater wanting to hug and be hugged, then face whatever tomorrow may bring.

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/549060ddcd3b5652a600004c 2014-12-17T13:21:33-06:00 2014-12-17T13:21:33-06:00 If You Don't, I Will Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_ifyoudon_tiwill-2014-1

What happens to a marriage once the early ardor cools? That's the central question in this likable drama starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos as a husband and wife at a crossroads, and it is explored by writer-director Sophie Fillières (in her fifth feature) in a refreshingly low-key way. 

The specific themes at the heart of the story of Pomme and Pierre will be familiar to viewers who've seen domestic psychodramas: the couple are in their forties, still sharing a small Parisian apartment, and taking each other for granted and misunderstanding each other when they aren't practicing the fine art of staying out of each other's way. The epic two-character drama "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby" (which was released in three—or is that two?—features) situated its married leads at a comparable crossroads, and many other films have depicted similar situations, including the work of John Cassavetes, whose domestic psychodramas are slyly acknowledged at various spots in this film. (At one point Devos' Pomme introduces herself as "Gena Rowlands," Cassavetes' wife and favorite leading lady.) 

Devos and Amalric, who worked tougher in Arnaud Desplechin’s “Kings and Queen," win at least half the storytelling battle by seeming as though they actually have been sharing the same space, and the same life, for years and years. There's a comfort level in their body language but also an extreme, at times comical sensitivity to real or perceived slights, plus the sorts of exchanges in which one partner or the other can feel as though they've been tricked into participating in a test whose purpose and methodology is a mystery. (When Pomme notes that her husband has wrapped himself in a beach towel to try off, he responds, "It was in with the other towels," and she follows up with, "Right. You don't love me anymore." "What's the connection?" he asks. "You don't know. Wrong answer," she says.) 

Theirs is not a terribly mysterious kind of distress. They're dealing with issues, plural. Pomme is recovering from surgery on a (thankfully benign) brain tumor, and they're both dealing with empty nest syndrome: their college-age son Romain (Nelson Delapalme) recently moved out. On top of that, Pierre, while basically polite and attentive, is a bit of a hound dog, and Pomme is convinced that he's bored with her and is having an affair with younger TV weather forecaster named Mellie (Josephine de la Baume). Everything comes to a boil when they indulge their mutual fondness for hiking and go off into the woods, where Pomme takes off on her own, not reappearing for days. Romain urges his father to go look for her, which leads to one of the film's most uncomfortably true moments. It's his wife, she's gone, he has no idea where she is, but he's rather enjoying not being around all that anxiety, so he's in no huge rush to find out what happened to her. 

The film's second half veers off into the near-allegorical, charting Pomme's rather random and ultimately small-scale misadventures in the woods, though the filmmaker is careful not to tip the story over into proscriptive drama. There's one incident that's impossible not to read in terms of a statement—they put a bottle of champagne into a freezer to chill it, then end up freezing it rock-solid—but for the most part she avoids trying to make any grand pronouncements about love, aging or anything else, believing, probably correctly, that the film's delicate tone and the couple's passive-aggressive, private ways of mis-communicating wouldn't sit well with it. Much of the film's appeal lies in watching the two lead actors enact subtle, honest moments of observed behavior. You know couples like this one. You probably don't want to invite them to parties, but you know them.

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/54860f9e2afe7bec320000e2 2014-12-12T08:08:00-06:00 2014-12-22T08:41:53-06:00 Inherent Vice Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_inherentvice-2014-1













I digress. Um.




Beauty. So much beauty. 


What were we talking about?


tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/547dfe3acd3b5633ae00000c 2014-12-05T11:55:00-06:00 2014-12-05T15:36:09-06:00 Remote Area Medical Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_remoteareamedical-2014-1









tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/547dfc35cd3b5652a6000018 2014-12-05T08:19:00-06:00 2014-12-22T17:10:53-06:00 Dying of the Light Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_dyingofthelight-2014-1

Paul Schrader is one of those filmmakers that some cinephiles will never stop rooting for, even though a good number of his films (the recent ones especially) are better in concept than execution. "Auto Focus," "Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist," "Adam Resurrected," the occasionally excellent "The Walker" and last year's "The Canyons" had the spiky energy and fascination with fringe-dwellers that've been Schrader hallmarks since the 1970s, when he rose to fame as an independent writer-director and regular collaborator with Martin Scorsese ("Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ"). At the same time, though, they were stubbornly theoretical in certain ways: filled with good ideas that often felt more illustrated than dramatized. 

If only "Dying of the Light" had broken Schrader's recent close-but-no-cigar streak. This story of a career CIA operative (Nicolas Cage) doggedly pursuing a terrorist who once imprisoned and tortured him is not a good movie. It is impossible to know which percentage of its failures are attributable to Schrader, who wrote and directed the movie, and which to his producers, who allegedly took it away from him and reworked it to the point where Schrader decided he wanted nothing more to do with it. Schrader is contractually barred from discussing what happened, maybe because he's been blisteringly vocal about past instances in which his films were re-edited or reshot without his consent. He and his lead actors, including Cage and costar Anton Yelchin, did appear in photos online recently wearing t-shirts that read, "I have no comment on the film or others connected with the picture,” which isn't, strictly speaking, a criticism but sure doesn't feel like an endorsement. 

But here's the problem: Gene Siskel famously said that his litmus test for giving a movie thumbs up or thumbs down was asking himself which would be more interesting: the film he'd just seen, or a documentary of its lead actors having lunch. A similar question here might be, "Which would I rather watch: this movie, or a documentary about the creative battles that happened while it was being made?" Option #2 seems preferable. "Dying of the Light" is a shrill and bombastic slog, with an all-over-the-map collection of tones that never cohere into a compelling vision. 

From its opening credits sequence onward, the film's editing, music and overall tone evoke a hard-R action thriller, or perhaps a bloody TV series in that tradition, such as Fox's "24"; but the movie's hero, Cage's former field agent turned greying, embittered desk jockey Evan Lake, seems a George Smiley type, more an intellectual than physical threat. No matter: the film shows him getting in brutal hand-to-hand fights with people, running them down while firing guns at them, and otherwise carrying on as if he's Liam Neeson in one of the "Taken" films. This is all tough to accept, not just because Evan has been set up as the sort of character who wouldn't be carrying on in that way, but because the action has a '70s cop show clumsiness, and is carried out by a lead character whose biography mitigates against him doing what the script has him doing.

The tale begins with a flashback that the film will revisit periodically: in 1994, Evan is imprisoned, beaten and mutilated by Islamic terrorists in an Al Qaeda vein, and is about to be murdered when US forces storm the place. Twenty years later, Evan still bears scars from that encounter, including a maimed ear. He gives a fire-and-brimstone speech to a bunch of new, young agents, then settles in at his desk in CIA headquarters, where he's treated like a peevish professor emeritus that nobody wants to learn from. Then his young coworker Milton (Yelchin) gives him information indicating that his chief torturer, Muhammad Banir (Alexander Karim), might be alive in Bucharest, seeking treatment for his rare blood disease. (This twist echoes an aspect of the Osama bin Laden bio: the Al Qaeda figurehead had kidney problems.) Long story short: Evan goes rogue, as they say, and wanders around Romania with Milton in tow, chasing his tormentor.

On paper, this story feels very Schrader-ish, evoking key images and themes from earlier in the writer-director's long career. Chief among these is sight of an emotionally or physically tormented and socially maladjusted loner, partly modeled on Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers," who embarks on a mission of vengeance that is ultimately less about justice than about feeding the hero's obsessions so that he doesn't have to face himself, a task for which he's ill-suited anyway. Travis Bickle in Schrader's "Taxi Driver" script is emotionally scarred by his Vietnam experience, while the 'Nam vet in the Schrader-penned "Rolling Thunder" loses his hand when local criminals feed it into a garbage disposal; in both stories, the hero's "mission" seems an elaborate and bloody distraction from the storm of misery raging in his mind. 

There are fleeting hints of that kind of psychological acuity in "Dying of the Light." Evan spirals into self-pitying rage when his bosses tell him to forget about Banir and force him to retire. Things get worse when he's diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, an Alzheimer's-like condition that might account for his more unpleasant behavior, which is abrasive even in the film's early scenes. 

How much of Evan's desire for vengeance or justice is really about vengeance or justice, and how much is about distracting himself from feelings of age and irrelevancy? (He rails against the cluelessness and incompetence of the post-9/11 CIA in a way that turns the United States' foreign policy misadventures into a sort of coded parable for dementia, and maybe impotence, too.) These are good questions that the film needn't have answered, but it would've been nice if it had moved the into the spotlight and really scrutinized them. There's a weird poignancy in the sight of two brutal adversaries, Evan and Banir, both of whom are in physical decline, chasing each other around Romania—the terrorist is basically the Comanche chief Scar to Lake's long-deskbound Ethan Edwards. But the movie explores their feud in the most clumsily rhetorical terms, via speeches and subtext-as-text dialogue and action scenes that are intriguingly small-scaled (such as a pistol-toting Evan chasing a man through hotel grounds on foot) but over-edited and over-scored. to the point where the movie seems to be trying to force a level of "awesomeness" that one rather doubts that Schrader aspired to. The inevitable final man-to-man struggle verges on Zucker-Abrams-Zucker style absurdity. It's basically George W. Bush vs. Bin Laden; add a shrieking free-jazz score and you've got yourself a comedy setpiece for the ages.

Again, though, it's impossible to lay blame for all the things that went wrong here, and it's a pointless exercise anyway. What matters is what's on the screen. What's on the screen is frustratingly unrealized, often tone-deaf, and more painful to watch than a deliberately trashy or stupid film might have been. Yelchin is likable playing a young blank slate; Irene Jacob is mostly wasted as one of the hero's old flames; Karim is a touch hammy as Banir, though one can't complain about an actor overdoing it opposite Nicolas Cage, whose character is maybe a 6 on the Cage Scale of Nuttiness. (The character has a medical reason for acting erratically, and throughout, Cage seems to be calibrating how big is too big.) Every now and then you can hear murmurs of ambition beneath the film's surface chaos, but they're faint and and agonized, like the voice of a gangster movie foe being strangled with a pillow.

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/547ea242cd3b5652a6000021 2014-12-04T11:29:44-06:00 2014-12-22T08:41:51-06:00 Video: "Ida" Panel Discussion at Columbia University The Editors Thumb_ida

Paweł Pawlikowski's "Ida," just named as the Best Foreign Film of the year by New York Film Critics Circle, is considered to be one of the strongest contenders in the upcoming Oscar race. Below is the video of a post-screening discussion of the film that took place on November 15th at Columbia University. The event was organized by Polish Filmmakers NYC, Harriman Institute, Columbia University East Central European Center and Polish Club at Columbia University. The panelists included Matt Zoller Seitz (editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com), Sheila O'Malley (RogerEbert.com) and professor Stuart Liebman (City University of New York). It was moderated by Michał Oleszczyk (RogerEbert.com), the artistic director of Gdynia Film Festival. The video was shot and edited by Barbara Kalina.


tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/5474d95c2afe7bec32000060 2014-11-25T13:47:00-06:00 2014-12-18T10:05:18-06:00 Film critic Jürgen Fauth on his anthology "Raves", and why he quit reviewing Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_tribeca2008

Editor's note: Jürgen Fauth, longtime film critic for About.com, was born in Germany, raised in the United States, studied creative writing and film in both countries, and settled in Germany in the '90s. He is a fiction writer, editor and translator who co-founded the German-language literary magazine Der Brennende Busch as well as Fictionaut and published the visionary novel Kino, which is suffused by his obsession with cinema. He built an identity in his birth country as a film critic of wide-ranging tastes. His typically short, punchy reviews occasionally veered from the gist of things, and examined the style and structure of films with an acuity rarely seen in mainstream criticism.

Fauth has just published his first collection of criticism, "Raves," which you can order here. You can follow him and his writing at his blog Muckworld.

Matt Zoller Seitz: Tell me about how you got started in movie criticism.

Jürgen Fauth: I started writing reviews for my hometown newspaper, the Wiesbadener Kurier, in the early '90s, when I was a student. I’d see the movie with the critic from the rival newspaper, then peck out my review on a manual typewriter.

Do you remember the first review you ever got paid to write? 

They sent me to the "weird" movies their main critics didn’t want to bother with. I’m not sure which was the first one—maybe "The Ghost," by Herbert Achternbusch? They paid, and they let me tackle bigger movies little by little.

I didn't realize you started out at a traditional ink-on-paper publication. Tell me a little bit about the newspaper. How did you get a job there? What sort of publication was it? What sorts of things did you learn there?

I started in 1990—just called them up and said, “I think I’d like to write about movies.” They invited me in, and the editor, whose name was Horst Goschke, gave me a speech about how I had to judge a movie by how well it achieved its intentions rather than my own taste. The WK was the main paper for a town of about 300,000, and I remember it was a huge kick to get on the bus on Friday morning and see people read the newspaper.

You've been doing this for a long time, which presents a problem when you're putting together an anthology like “Raves”: what not to include? It seems like you have chosen movies that for one reason or another stuck in your mind, perhaps for reasons of style or subject or tone, and not so much for whether they're milestones in art or commerce. You've got Rian Johnson's "Brick" in there, and "Coraline," and quite a long, good piece on "Che," and the through-line is, it seems to me that you really seem to enjoy taking apart the inner workings of a movie.

The key idea for the collection was to pick the most enthusiastic reviews. I always liked the job best when I could recommend something highly, so I literally went down the list, looked at all the four or five star reviews I'd published, and then started whittling it down. Maybe the more distinctive movies are the ones I always got most excited about?

It sure seems that way. I don't see any reviews in here that seem to have been included just because the subject matter was important or because the film won a lot of Oscars.

I don’t think I ever cared about that. I like to think of myself as an omnivore who doesn’t discriminate by genre or any other external marker. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what Horst Goschke meant — don’t worry about if you like "that sort of thing", whatever it is, just be open and see if it succeeds on its own terms.

The notion of a film succeeding on its own terms—that's something Roger Ebert used to insist that he kept in mind when reviewing, which explains why he could give four stars to "Shoah" but also to "Lethal Weapon."

There you go. Maybe that’s where my editor got it from. By the same token, you have "Uncle Boonme who Can Recall His Past Lives" and "Revenge of the Sith" in here.

Yes, and—as you know, because you and I first bonded over this movie years back—I am very excited that you have the piece on "Revenge of the Sith" and the "Star Wars" prequels in there. It’s such a full-throated defense of—well, not the totality of the trilogy, but certain aspects of it, specifically the intricate structure—how Lucas makes sure every scene or sequence mirrors something in the original trilogy. That's something no other film critic at the time noticed, because they were too busy making fun of the dialogue.

Right. And you point to something I started to notice more and more, how critics sometimes mistake observation for judgment. Yes, the dialogue in the “Star Wars” movies  is "wooden" — I think we can all agree on that. But instead of asking why that is, what purpose it might serve, a lot of people used it as a reason to dismiss those movies.

And I started catching myself doing it with other films—I’d see something, and I’d jump to a conclusion about it. I got more and more wary of that first impulse. I like to notice things about movies, but I don’t much care for the act of judging any more.

Let's talk about that. You write in your introduction to "Raves": "The more I learned about crafting reviews, the harder it became. This is true of most kinds of writing, but eventually I reached the point where the work of formulating an opinion began to overshadow the joy I took in watching movies in the first place — and it just didn’t seem worth it anymore. When I first started writing reviews for the web, there were only a handful of us, and we took movies very seriously. But as the decade wore on and online criticism exploded, my work felt increasingly redundant. It's easy now to find diverse, nuanced, well-stated opinions on even the most obscure art film or re- release. Why add to the noise?"

Were there any particular events, or any particular developments, that spurred you toward these realizations?  

It’s such an exciting thing to do—if you love movies, and you love writing, what could be better than writing about movies? I felt that way for a very long time. But eventually I fell out of love with it. It happened slowly, but there were a few key moments I can point to.

Name one.

The big turning point came 2008, the year I went to the Berlin Film Festival for the first time. I’d been to plenty of festivals before, but nothing on that scale, and I was absolutely overwhelmed. I’m still pretty happy with the pieces I wrote in Berlin, so in a way it was the high watermark of my career as a critic, but at the same time it was the moment I realized how far I had to go. I met some very accomplished critics there who’d truly dedicated their lives to cinema, and I didn’t quite recognize myself in that.

At the same time, Google retooled its search algorithms. As a result, my reviews got a whole lot harder to find, and I suddenly made significantly less money. In my memory, this happened the week I got back from Berlin.

Those were the practical kinds of reasons—the sense that if I wanted to stay a serious film critic, I’d have to absolutely dedicate myself to it.

At the same time, I was hard at work on my debut novel, and I think I started thinking more and more like a writer and less like a critic.

What do you mean, "more like a writer and less like a critic"? That's an interesting phrase.

Well, you said something earlier about the way I’ve always liked to dissect movies. All along, I think I was teaching myself things about structure and storytelling, things to use in my own work.

I also felt more and more humbled by the work. Once you’ve spent years, literally years of your life, on one creative project, you get a much better idea of what goes into it. It got harder and harder for me to watch a film and then judge it that afternoon. I think a part of me began to respect the work too much, and I got more and more careful about what I said about it.

It almost sounds like you were becoming intimidated about passing judgment on creative work once you started doing more of it yourself.

It takes a certain confidence to not just have an opinion but also deem it worthy of broadcasting. You have to muster this authority to say, this is worthy, this isn’t. And yeah, I found that more and more difficult, especially with the negative reviews. My attitude started to change to, who’s to say? It’s not for me, but hey, if someone likes it, that’s fine with me.

And once that starts happening, you’re probably finished as a critic.

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/546b75e7592cb052de0001ac 2014-11-21T10:38:00-06:00 2014-11-24T08:49:23-06:00 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_thehungergamesmockingjay-2014-1

Jennifer Lawrence's charisma and the the sly excellence of her supporting cast keep "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1" aloft. This third installment in the "Hunger Games" saga (technically chapter three, part one) is a bleak, sometimes dire experience, and not only because it's the darkest installment yet in an already dark saga, catching dystopian rebels in a beaten-down and demoralized state. As written by regular series scribes Peter Craig and Danny Strong, and as directed by Frances Lawrence (who helmed the second film in the series, "Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), it also feels a bit stretched out, not to give the actors room to breathe and widen the film's narrative margins to better pack them with detail, but because that's how Hollywood increasingly does big budget "event" franchises these days: chopping one volume into two or three, a la "Harry Potter" or "The Hobbit," to satisfy the most literal-minded readers by dramatizing as many scenes as possible, and to sell more tickets.

When the story begins, our heroes have literally been driven underground. Hunger Games champion Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) survived multiple iterations of the books' nationally televised, gladiator-styled, bread-and-circuses reality show, then was cynically positioned by the evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) as a false figure of inspiration. She became the real thing thanks to her indomitable spirit, plus clever plotting by rebel fighters and image manipulators, including Katniss's once-drunk and now sober mentor, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson); the propagandist and image consultant Plutarch (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, to whom the film is dedicated); the tech genius Betee (Jeffrey Wright), and the image wizard (and ace comic relief) Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks).

"Mockingjay, Part 1" picks up where "Catching Fire" left off, with Katniss, rescued from Quarter Quell, living in a compound under the rubble of District 13 with her fellow insurrectionists. Led by their intrepid district president Coin (Julianne Moore, sporting a frosted 'do and a severe demeanor), our heroes endure attacks by Snow's planes and troops while plotting their next righteous move. Of course, Katniss is also supported and pined-after by her loyal right-hand, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), even as she frets over the fate of her great love, the still-milquetoast Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who's being held hostage by Snow's forces and turned into an anti-Katniss propaganda tool, denouncing our heroine on national TV in order to legitimize his puppet masters.

If "The Hunger Games" films were to be compared structurally to "Star Wars"—still the commercial Holy Grail of film franchises—you might say that this one is the first half of "The Empire Strikes Back," with emphasis on the visually and drastically oppressive Hoth sequences. The plot takes us from from setback to setback to setback until we feel suffocated (on purpose). Snow has the overwhelming military advantage, and in a couple of effective action scenes, we get the sense of just how long the rebels' odds of victory are. The best of these depicts an aerial assault that's filmed mostly from ground level, envisioning Snow's warplanes as chunky blurs that can corner in midair, like gulls. 

There's also a mild strain of media criticism and satire, though this time out it's less focused on the puerile distractions of televised mayhem and more interested in the construction of political images. Like the other films in the series, this "Hunger Games" sequel is good at evoking present-day, real-world phenomena while coyly refusing to commit to any specific allegory. A full-on, deliberately suicidal assault on a heavily armed government target faintly echoes images of nonviolent resistance from the Indian uprising against the British and the American Civil Rights movement, up to the point when the advancing rebels quit absorbing punishment and start dishing it out. Katniss is sold to the like-minded as a Che Guevara or young Fidel Castro (or perhaps a video-taunting Al Qaeda or ISIS-type, though of course Western audiences would rather not consider things from that angle). A good portion of the film's first half is about Katniss being shaped and sold and even packaged by Coin and her allies as a sort of pre-fabricated deliverer, the Mickey Mouse or Mr. Clean of the revolution, then rebelling against this tendency and figuring out (with help from Plutarch) that in revolution, as in advertising, authenticity sells better than slickness.

The problem is, for all its surface intelligence, "Mockingjay, Part 1" has little depth, and that sometimes makes it much more frustrating than a more knowingly shallow and silly movie might have been. One sometimes gets the sense that the moviemakers want credit for more political daring (in a mainstream blockbuster) than they're actually willing to earn. There are many tantalizing and even powerful allusions, such as Katniss addressing her public while standing in a cityscape bombarded by Snow's forces, a scene that evokes pro-Palestinian camera crews showcasing collateral damage from Israeli airstrikes; but these are never developed beyond the barest wisp of a notion, and they sit quite awkwardly next to all the film's narrative cliches and emotional shortcuts: the scene where the excessively "packaged" icon throws away the script and speaks from the heart; the scene where the powerful old bad guy is being shaved with a straight razor and gets nicked and treats the wound as a metaphor; etc. 

Katniss's participation in a chaste and (seemingly deliberately) dull love triangle with two young men of negligible charisma seems intended to build her up and ensure that no one can steal the main character's spotlight; there's a "turnabout is fair play" aspect to this, and at times it plays like the long delayed answer to those '70s films driven by super-capable male characters, often played by Paul Newman or Robert Redford or Al Pacino, whose love interests were simpering bores. Katniss is such a powerful character, so strong and simple, that she wouldn't be diminished by playing opposite more interesting romantic leads. As is, she's like Scarlett O'Hara opposite two Ashley Wilkeses. The blandness of the film's romantic energy might not seem so glaring if this particular installment didn't find Katniss in a state of vulnerability, recuperating from physical and emotional damage; she's much more passive here than in previous installments (which is true to the novel, I'm told), but it's still frustrating to see her reduced to a bystander during the film's action climax, watching heroic guys doing heroic things on TV monitors.

Despite all this, "Mockingjay, Part 1" is still an engrossing movie, with a wrenching ending. It's good enough to move the story along, but no more than that. It has a good heart, exemplified by its inspiring heroine. If only it had poetry, or some sort of edge.

tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:Review/546b7580592cb0656800019b 2014-11-20T11:13:00-06:00 2014-12-22T08:41:53-06:00 Happy Valley Matt Zoller Seitz Thumb_happyvalley-2014-1








