The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

James Gray's The Yards is, like everything else he's made in his sadly infrequent career, a bold mix of classical, Fordian technique and Cassavetian acting whose alchemical properties transcend the clash of sensibilities into something simultaneously raw and operatic. Uniformly excellent acting never plays the material as merely symbolic, even if its view of corruption as a fixture of post-industrial commerce certainly offers its share of commentary. Its ending works because of its deflation, a true abstention from a system that offers no good option and therefore makes a simple act of quitting a kind of victory in its admission of defeat.

My full article is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Re-Make/Re-Model: Rollerball (1975) vs. Rollerball (2002)

My latest Re-Make/Re-Model column looks into dubious futuristic satire of corporate power that spawned one cult classic and the most scathingly reviewed film of a great but neglected artist's career. Surprise, surprise, it's John McTiernan's remake, a jumbled and mediocre affair dotted with bad acting and chaotic patterns, that handles the material with more honesty and moral depth. Norman Jewison's holds the conduit of its satire at arm's length, treating the sport, and, more specifically, the television medium through which it is transmitted, with disdain. McTiernan recognizes how much cinema has tried to keep ahead of TV since its inception (widescreen, color, 3D, etc.), and with cinema about to fall behind and start desperately trying to keep up with TV, his Rollerball makes no distinction between prestige cinema and boob-tube brain-drain, shooting everything with the same rollicking, occasionally incomprehensible style. At the very least, it indicts Hollywood in the material's vision of a society tamed through bloodsport. I'll take that over Jewison's sense of superiority any day.

My full piece is up over at Spectrum Culture.

Duelle (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

The following is my April submission for Blindspots.

The first of an aborted quartet of planned films that variated on the same theme, Jacques Rivette’s Duelle (une quarantaine) is a noir-cum-sci-fi fantasia, a tale of goddesses locked in an immortal struggle for the right to be mortal that plays out in an oblique homage to the films of the 1940s. Dividing its four central women into various generic archetypes, Duelle then pits them against each other in a series of frictive encounters that gradually push characters outside their oppositional definitions and into new binaries until Rivette breaks through to areas outside constrictive either/or boundaries.

Even the film’s basic conceit operates on two levels filled with their own distinct dialectics. The quest for a precious diamond juxtaposes naïve bystanders (Hermine Karagheuz’s Lucie) and manipulated molls (Nicole Garcia’s Elsa, née Jeanne) against more duplicitous criminal elements (Juliet Berto’s Leni and Bulle Ogier’s Viva) in classic noir terms that fit the MacGuffin in with such coveted items as the Maltese Falcon. But the diamond itself carries mystical properties, capable of granting godhood to mortals and vice-versa, adding fantastical oppositions of mortal/immortal and sun/moon.

Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)

I belatedly got around to this excellent science-fiction picture, and it may be my favorite sci-fi film of the '50s. Trading the Cold War commentary for a psychological free-for-all for barely contained Freudian urges, Forbidden Planet is realized through some of the most impressive matte paintings ever made, along with some great animation. There's just something wonderful about seeing a caricature of '50s all-Americanism launched into space to confront not Soviets or aliens, but their own id.

My post is up over Movie Mezzanine.

Netflix Instant Picks 4/26/13—5/2/13

This week's picks are up over at Movie Mezzanine. Heads up, a lot more is expiring on May 1 than I went into. Be sure to double check your queues to see what might be lost.

The Vulgar Cinema (and letters to John McTiernan)

I am excited to announce that a group of writers I admire tremendously invited me to contribute to a new blog devoted to what has been termed "vulgar auteurism." Not so much a movement as a loose form of advocacy, it celebrates undervalued craft in critically overlooked genres, as well as the termitic properties of the best works. The term originated in discussion about primarily American entries in predominantly masculine genres, but we plan to discuss a wider variety of works outside our borders and in other equally ignored generic areas.

Our first posts are individual letters to John McTiernan, the recently incarcerated director of such great films as Die Hard and Predator. The responses are all nicely varied but uniformly adoring, and I doubt it will be the last time we discuss him.

So check out The Vulgar Cinema, and you can read my own letter to McTiernan here.

The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie, 2013)

Rob Zombie strikes me as one of the best B-movie makers working in America today, and certainly one of the preeminent horror directors of late. The Lords of Salem only solidifies that opinion, a work that extrapolates from the boldest, most experimental aspects of his more tightly controlled productions that results in a work of vivid expression. A host of referential touchstones is smoothed into a singular creative vision through a stripped-down variant of Zombie's usual grindhouse aesthetic, as well as his unorthodox sympathy for his tormented characters. There's a perverse comedy throughout the film, from the freeze-frame on a goat forced to witness a coven at the start to hellspawn paying little attention to that same coven at the end, but the comedy is always directed at the evil forces, not those who are already suffering enough. A major work.

My full review is up over at Spectrum Culture.