Nobody makes movies about crazy families like the French, and Ursula Meier's Home (2008) is a fresh, mysterious entry in the Post-Modern Family Blues derby, hyperreal to the touch but keeping symbolic secrets. It's officially a Swiss movie, but I think only because Meier, who's French, could only find her remarkable location in Switzerland: a lonely, nondescript brick house sitting on the shoulder of a huge expanse of decommissioned highway. The layout, house and road both, are so stark and odd they're like found objects out of a Surrealist painting.
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Barely heralded today among the midcentury Hollywood auteurs, Albert Lewin was as distinct in his personality as Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang or Sam Fuller, and just as much of a terrarium-maker. His micro-worlds, including the new-to-disc 1951 classic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, had a particularly dreamy vibe. His most-seen film, the 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, is unforgettable not for its fidelity to Wilde's morality play but for its very strange, doomed-romantic bell-jar effect, a movie seemingly made up entirely from Hurd Hatfield's cheekbones, Angela Lansbury's round eyes, a single Victorian tavern set, and mist.
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Even as Roman Polanski seemed destined to stand trial, finally, for having champagne-&-Quaalude-leavened sex with a 13-year-old 30 years ago, he was polishing up his 18th feature, The Ghost Writer, about a famous man who cannot leave his house for fear of being extradited. Polanski's sense of isolation and bitterness seeps throughout the new film, for better or for worse, and you cannot be blamed for wondering if a Polanski biopic is inevitable (starring Simon McBurney!), preferably directed by the man himself. The intrigue!
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Was I hallucinating last year, or did Roger Corman receive a honorary lifetime-achievement Oscar? An unrivaled one-man schlock factory, Corman produced and/or directed hundreds of films, and if they turned out well it was mostly by accident or by virtue of his talent at hiring film-school grads to knock off pulp assignments on ridiculously stingy budgets. In fact, for several generations now Corman's penny-crazed movie mill has been more famous for producing auteurs than terrific films.
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What is art for? Art with a capital A -- should it be measured only as a "pleasure" delivery system, as New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl rather lamely contends, or does it represent a higher purpose, a public good, a high-water mark of human achievement? Or is it just a business, a marketplace run on run on vaporous critical judgments? Or some morph of the above?
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Already one of this year's best movies, Marco Bellocchio's Vincere bears the mark of a master filmmaker -- there isn't a wasted or ill-considered frame in it, and what is there is about as rich and immediate as traditional cinema gets.
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Deadpan farce so dry Ernie Kovacs might've wanted to use it for kindling, the BBC series Look Around You is the kind of comedy freak you'll never find on an American network. For one thing, it mocks a specific form of old public-service film (old? As in, not new? Not post-2005? Forget it!), and for another, the episodes are each nine minutes long. (The whole first season, now available on DVD, is packed into 71 minutes.) How and when was this thing broadcast?
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In the DVD supplements for the new, typically gorgeous Criterion set Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu, film school mega-guru and one-man textbook industry David Bordwell sums up his veneration for Ozu by saying that the Japanese master simply had "the hottest hand," the greatest filmography, in the history of the medium. Bordwell goes so far as to assert that he "cannot imagine such a thing as a 'bad' Ozu film." Are you going to argue?
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New waves come and go. The Iranian zeitgeist seems to be gradually fading from eminence, the Romanians are lazily spinning their wheels, and the Malaysian wave still lingers on its rumored promises. But we still have the Koreans, more than a decade into their explosion -- and we shouldn't take them, including Bong Joon-ho and his latest release Mother, for granted.
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Honestly, Japan terrifies me. While American pop culture, with its adolescence fetish, prideful ignorance, superhero love and video-game fantasias, can merely make me queasy, what I see flowing out of Japan triggers a flight response.
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There are plenty of reasons to look back at the '60s and envy its crazy natives, but Bob Levis's notorious and rarely-seen Gold (1968) manifests a beaut: in those days, the rules that govern mass culture could be treated like toilet paper. Music and movies could not just toss out the rulebook but act as if it never existed, making up stuff as they went along with the copious assistance of very good dope, a ubiquitous and intoxicating sexual chaos, and a happy disdain for the establishment that's never been equaled. (American youth since then has been mere sheep -- sheep!)
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I know what you're thinking: At this rate, they'll get around to remaking even Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things sooner or later. But the new reboot of George A. Romero's The Crazies is the right kind of remake -- the kind that endeavors to squeeze every drop of acid out of its potent scenario, execution-wise, in ways Romero rarely could.
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By now the rape-revenge pulp movie is a staple, but in 1971, when Burt Kennedy's Hannie Caulder leapt upon the anti-western bandwagon, they were brand-new. It was still five years before Lipstick (1976) and six until I Spit on Your Grave (1977) --incidentally two of the most reviled movies of that decade (and bombs to boot) -- and Charles Bronson's Death Wish (1974) was still a few years away, which in any case gave the gun to Bronson, not the woman in question. Did it all start with Burt Kennedy's modest, Spain-shot paella western?
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Not hard to love: When stick-dumb movies just lay out their idiotic premise right in the title -- call it the Snakes on a Plane Syndrome -- hiding nothing, leaving no recourse for shame or cross-marketing vagueness or anything else, really, that might mess with the movie's ability to rise or fall on its dubious merits as all movies should. (It could be a Google translation tool.) Steve Pink's piquant comedy Hot Tub Time Machine is all the title promises and a splash of urine and exactly nothing much more, which is why it's funny, and why lowered expectations should be a vital area of sociopsychological study for Hollywood publicists. Imagine the manure we wouldn't have to wade through.
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You can't toss a rock up in the air over a city street without braining someone who has definite but vague ideas about how new electronic media is going to "change everything." And of course they're mostly right, while at the same time you wish you could do that all day -- toss that rock, brain those people. Movies are still movies, pop songs are still pop, crummy TV shows are still crummy, etc. (The big change is now we expect to get it all for free.) Yet some things have arisen spontaneously, like mushrooms, from the keyboard-console-screen mode of cultural intercourse we're so enjoying. The epic new, remastered, five-season box set collecting Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles is a perfect example.
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