Film and television

Going into Crips and Bloods: Made in America, I was concerned that it would just be a sensationalist exposé on LA’s two most notorious gangs. But I was pleased to find that it has a genuine curiosity about its subject, which extends beyond the violence and traces the roots of African-American marginalization from the early twentieth century to present day. It is often a bit too stylish for its own good, and I wish it… See more →

Lots of important things I need to do today, so I’m updating all my @letterboxd film diary entries with a new tag taxonomy instead.

Just Like Being There

Scout Shannon

One of the smartest things Just Like Being There does is to go out of its way not to ignore the “gig” part of “gig posters”. The film is thick with music in both the background and foreground, and the handful of live performances it features do a good job of capturing that certain kind of magic that only a great rock show can provide. Capturing that magic is… See more →

My annual announcement that the best place in the world to see a movie is at an Alamo @drafthouse. Wish it could be a weekly announcement.

Aaaand Dollhouse is my first complete dud of the festival. Couldn’t get out of that theater fast enough.

You think the Orphans ain’t with it? You think the Orphans ain’t well known? They got a heavy rep. Mess with them and you’ll find that out.

Trying to think of another cultural phenomenon as baffling as discerning comedy fans’ near-universal adoration of Parks and Recreation.

Has any television character ever been as handsome as Don Draper and done as much vomiting?

Okay, Ken Burns’ Civil War, let’s go. If anything can make a man out of me, it is you.

My neighborhood bodega stopped carrying the bread I like, and the alternative loaf is much smaller. Now I know how Nigel Tufnel felt.

In case anyone thought there was any justice, I just saw J.D. Williams (aka Preston “Bodie” Broadus) in a FedEx commercial.

Left the studio just in time to catch a marching band on Jay Street playing something that sounded an awful lot like the Terminator theme.

Any obsession with this video would be unhealthy, and mine is that. youtube.com/watch?v=ozoTzk…

Pretty sure I just passed @stephenfry on the sidewalk!

The Swedish hardcore band Refused took a few years to get great, and shortly after it did, it imploded. Given its incendiary legacy, fans might expect fireworks from this “documentary” about the band’s final days and rather abrupt end, and sporadic live footage does offer a taste of what all the fuss was about. But for all Refused’s unique energy, its breakup story is pretty standard – the tour’s not going well, somebody has a… See more →

You don’t need to know anything about chess to enjoy Bobby Fischer Against the World, but you may well want to learn more about the game after you’ve seen the film – if you don’t take it as a cautionary tale.

Bobby Fischer’s story is a true American tragedy, and possibly the twentieth century’s most fascinating example of the tenuous divide between genius and madness, as this film makes abundantly clear. The pacing is a… See more →

It is 6:21 AM and I am defending the live action G.I. Joe movie on the internet.

It is 3:38 AM and I can’t sleep and there will never be a better time to watch the live action G.I. Joe movie.

Much of Life During Wartime initially led me to believe it was a postmodern prank whose genesis took this form: “What if I made a sequel to Happiness? God, what a pointless, stupid idea. I’ll do it!”

As Michael Haneke’s Funny Games charges audiences with being complicit in the real-life violence they flock to see fictionalized on screen, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to make a mockery of the compulsion to drag new and… See more →

The extraordinary devotion Bill Cunningham has for his work means that any film about him is worth a look, but it’s a shame this one is not a more illuminating portrait. Amiable though he may be, Cunningham has made a career out of being an observer rather than a participant, and his years behind the lens have trained him well in the art of evasion. No one interviewed in this documentary seems to know anything… See more →

Dude next to me on the bus is reading espn.com, e-mailing, IMing three people, and talking on the phone while watching The Tree of Life.

There were at least two high profile odes to testosterone of the pull-the-superhuman-war-hero-out-of-retirement-for-a-suicide-rescue-mission variety in 1985: Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. Both traffic in the big, loud, and dumb of 1980s Cold War action tropes. But only Commando is actually fun, because it has the good sense not to take itself so seriously.

Each of Arnold’s one-liners in Commando is a winking acknowledgement that this is high octane escapism, a celebration of wanton… See more →

“You’re the one who’s making the mistake.”
“Yeah? What mistake?”
“Rambo.”

Death Star : Thermal Exhaust Port :: Apartment Building : Toilet

Breaking Bad is good. I like it. So why does watching it always feel like work?

Apparently the myth of the American sleepover is that its volume can rise above a whisper. This film tries so hard for understated adolescent authenticity that it forgets those first tentative steps into adulthood tend to be just as clumsily vibrant as they are furtively awkward. For a story that spans several nocturnal teenage gatherings on the last weekend of summer, it is remarkably – and fatally – sedate. I have no lack of patience… See more →

Just said goodbye to the people of The Wonder Years for the second time in twenty years. I miss them already.

Tom Cruise and “Old Time Rock and Roll” deserve each other.

Surely no one was more disappointed by Sarah Palin’s absence from the 2012 presidential race than Stephen K. Bannon, the director of this two-hour campaign commercial.

The Undefeated is a chore. With “tell, don’t show” as its storytelling mantra, it chronicles Palin’s public works in her own words (using excerpts from her audiobook) and the words of the people who helped her. And there are so, so many words, all of them black or white,… See more →

With the right combo of key art and hack writing, you’ll have any movie figured out before you even see the trailer. trailers.apple.com/trailers/param…

So @casey_malone asks if I saw the @MovingImageNYC Henson exhibit and I find they’re showing a newish Svankmajer film tonight. Yay internet!

Art communicates. The core message might be as simple as “I like Slayer” or as complicated as “Let’s begin reversing centuries of female marginalization.” The work’s context and various expressive textures contribute narrative layers that enrich that core message. The more we identify with the message, its layers, and their convergence, the more we like the art, even if we can’t explain what those things are or how we connect with them.

In the who,… See more →

What is Homer Simpson’s favorite solfège syllable?

What is Homer Simpson’s favorite woodland mammal?

What is Homer Simpson’s favorite pizza ingredient?

capitalism | ′kapətlˌizəm | n. Refusal to accept that a once-profitable system won’t sustain outrageous wealth forever. nyti.ms/sZZ4uk

Didn’t care about 11.11.11 until I realized it’s Nigel Tufnel Day. The date fits him like a flesh tuxedo. nigeltufnelday.tumblr.com

Let’s get this out of the way: I am not a Kevin Smith fan. He has always seemed more interested in hiring actors to recite his own self-consciously profane monologues than in creating living, breathing characters, and the results are reliably tedious.

For the most part, though, Red State avoids Smith’s usual pitfalls and just lets Michael Parks work his villainous magic. Parks plays a fringe fundamentalist Christian preacher in the mold of Fred Phelps… See more →

Following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a week-long drive through the sights, sounds, and tastes of the northern English countryside, The Trip is equal parts tour documentary, buddy movie, and road trip flick. But more than anything, and in spite of its many laughs, it is a poignant meditation on aging.

Ostensibly playing themselves, Coogan and Brydon are a juxtaposition of insecure and self-possessed, of serious artist and happy-go-lucky entertainer. Their differences are sussed… See more →

Every October, I try to watch as many horror films that I haven’t seen before as possible.

Hostel

Eli Roth (USA, Czech Republic, 2005)

Three backpackers head to a Slovak city that promises to meet their hedonistic expectations, with no idea of the hell that awaits them.

Saw

James Wan (USA, 2004)

Two men awaken to find themselves on the opposite sides of a dead body, each with specific instructions to kill the other or… See more →

A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated… See more →

Flashback: In 2003, @pdalkner and @mSutters put me in a TV show they worked on. Here it is, made funnier by German: youtu.be/yOjSx4AYcpI

The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn… See more →

Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.

The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately… See more →

If I bother to see Paranormal Activity 3, it’ll be hard for me to get past the faked 1988 video technology. Why not just use the real thing?

Metallica is the Stringer Bell of metal. They wanted out of The Game, but couldn’t figure out how to operate on the outside.

When I recently finally saw the first Hostel, I was surprised by how fun it was. Eli Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, had not endeared him to me, and that plus Hostel’s reputation for being a torture porn standard-bearer alongside the idiotic and gimmicky Saw films had done little to persuade me. But I had to admit Hostel was competently made and showed both the reverence Roth has for his influences and the glee… See more →

Paradise Lost 3 at NYFF. Amazing to share the room with the West Memphis 3 and so many people who told their story and helped set them free.

The lone threat to The Simpsons’ immortality is a dispute about who gets to have obscene wealth instead of merely insane wealth. Go America!