Criticwire

Every Pixar Movie Is About the Same Thing

Matt Singer — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:07:13 GMT

After "Cars 2" and "Brave," Pixar Animation Studios' unprecedented, unbroken streak of classic children's films seems to be over. But even if the last few years have seen a (slight) dip in the quality of Pixar's movies, the company still holds other traditions that date all the way back to its very first feature, 1995's "Toy Story." All thirteen subsequent films, for example, feature a vocal performance from "Cheers" star John Ratzenberger; all thirteen also include some kind of reference to classroom "A113," where Pixar directors like John Lassseter and Brad Bird learned their craft at the California Institute of the Arts. And though it's less frequently discussed than those famous easter eggs, all of Pixar's movies, from "Toy Story" to this weekend's "Monsters University," are basically about the exact same thing: the value of friendship and teamwork.

Although each Pixar movie (besides their sequels and prequels) exist within its own universe with its own unique characters -- living toys, futuristic robots, superhero families, college-aged monsters -- each follows essentially the same basic story arc. They all start with a character who is talented and smart, but also, in some way, a loner. Flik from "A Bug's Life" is a clever inventer, but an outsider in his colony of ants. Merida in "Brave" is a free-spirited 16-year-old girl who refuses to listen to her parents and doesn't have any interest in marriage. "Cars"' Lightning McQueen is one of the best race cars in the world, but he's cocky and self-centered. "Up"'s Carl Fredrickson is still reeling from the death of his beloved wife, and just wants to be left alone in his little house.

No Pixar hero wants help, but they eventually realize they not only need it, they enjoy working with others. Flik recruits a group of circus bugs and together they defeat a band of evil grasshoppers. Merida's adventure in the woods makes her realize how much she loves and needs her mom. With the help of the friends he discovers in the community of Radiator Springs, Lightning McQueen realizes that good sportsmanship and loyalty are more important than winning. With he help of his new friend Russell, Carl finds a reason to keep on living after his marriage. The theme song to "Toy Story," Randy Newman's "You've Got a Friend In Me," could be the theme song to every single Pixar movie.

I first noticed this trend back in 2009, when I was commissioned to write a piece on the best buddy duo of "the naughts" as part of a retrospective series on the decade in film. I picked "Finding Nemo"'s Marlin and Dory, and as I rewatched the movie and considered its story I realized that this great story of friendship had a lot in common with other Pixar movies. Many of them have quirky, curmudgeonly protagonists who discover the value of companionship.

In the four years and four films since, nothing has changed. It may not be the studio's most brilliant or creative production, but by this rubric, "Monsters University" is easily one of the Pixar-iest Pixar movies ever. Mike Wazowski is an ambitious college freshman at Monsters University, Monstropolis' greatest educational institution devoted to the the art and science of scaring children. Since he was a young monster, Mike has dreamed of becoming a great scarer (the monsters who enter the human world and frighten kids so their screams can be harvested as the energy that powers Monstropolis). He arrives at MU eager, cocky, and brilliant -- and immediately begins a rivalry with laconic, lazy, naturally gifted monster Sulley. But despite his ample knowledge about the world of scaring, he quickly gets in trouble with the college dean -- and the only way to get back in her good graces is for Mike and Sulley to put aside their differences and work as a team.

In 2009, I speculated that Pixar was making movies about Pixar -- a place where talented, singular artists like Lasseter, Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and others combine their vision and passion with the skills of hundreds of animators to create great works of art. Individuals are important at Pixar, but without teamwork, their contributions are worthless. And so each Pixar movie celebrates the sort of working environment that produces Pixar movies.

What has changed since I wrote that earlier piece is Pixar's reputation. The studio is still the golden child of the animation world, but their image has been tarnished just a little bit. They're increasingly accused of losing a bit of their great creative spark, and of relying too heavily on franchises rather than original properties ("Monsters University" is the company's third sequel in four films). Meanwhile, many of Pixar's most talented artists have begun working elsewhere. Stanton and Bird made live-action films; Lasseter expanded his job to include Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

So while the Pixar message has remained unchanged, the message's meaning is beginning to look very different. Now teamwork isn't just important to Pixar's continued success; with the loss of some key personnel, it's absolutely vital. If the company wants to maintain its dominant position in Hollywood, it will need new artists to rise to the occasion. But that's why you have a team. Like the Randy Newman song says, you stick together and see it through.

From the Wire: In a World... of Trailer Articles

Matt Singer — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:46:53 GMT

In 2013, the trailer has become the most important part of any movie's advertising campaign. At this point, the trailer might be more important than the movie itself.

Coming attractions, one of the oldest and most reliable forms of movie marketing, have, in recent years, morphed into something different. Something bigger. Something that transcends advertising.

People who enjoy trailers (and I'd certainly throw myself in that category) have always insisted that these movies in miniature are works of art unto themselves. But until recently, they were still works of art unto themselves that were only viewed in conjunction with films; at the movie theater or on VHS tapes or DVDs before the feature presentation. High-speed internet finally made trailers into their own medium; still derivative, of course, since they're (usually, mostly) comprised of sounds and images from longer films, but freed from the constraints of the pre-show. Online, trailers are the show.

Trailers are perfect for the Internet. Movie news websites love them because they're free content that generates lots of traffic (studios love them because lots of traffic means lots of free advertising). At 60 to 150 seconds, they're the perfect, easily digestible nugget of web content. Because they're promoting a product, studios generally don't care about piracy -- so they can be shared or recut to the viewers' hearts' content. Earlier this week, a GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio popping and locking in the trailer for the upcoming film "The Wolf of Wall Street" went viral. You can bet there were high fives up and down the Paramount Pictures lot over the way that half a second clip of Leo getting down with his bad self spread like wildfire. If that shot wasn't put in the trailer with the explicit intent of sparking a viral GIF (and I suspect it might have) then you better believe that studios will start putting shots in trailers with the explicit intent of sparking viral GIFs in the future. In six months, every trailer will have a shot of its star doing some silly breakdancing move.

A culture this pervasive deserves due consideration, so Wired has dedicated an entire series of articles to "The Art of the Trailer." It begins with "A Short History of Coming Attractions," considering the tropes of trailers from decade to decade, and continues on through an interview with trailer maker Mark Woollen (who made the famous "Social Network" teaser), an anatomy of a single marketing campaign (for "The Wolverine") a study on the cutting speed of trailers through the ages ("Dr Strangelove" is the fastest they found), and finally a list of the greatest trailers of all-time. For the top spot, Wired picked the same trailer Indiewire TV editor Alison Willmore and I chose for that title when we did a massive list of "The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time" for IFC.com back in 2009:

The trailer I really fought for that no one mentions in these kinds of conversations but I've always loved and can vividly remember seeing -- and getting insanely excited over -- in the theater is the first teaser for the Bond movie "GoldenEye," which I still contend is basically perfect as these things go:

Man, that's awesome. Now can someone make me a GIF of Brosnan saying "No more foreplay?"

Read more of "The Art of the Trailer."

Sorting Out 'The Attack' and 'A Hijacking'

Jordan Hoffman — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:11:03 GMT

Criticwire is here to help.

There's a chance, however small, that you live in a "select city" and want to catch that foreign language movie with the somewhat blank, declarative title about an act of violence's devastating psychological effects. Oh, you forget the name exactly, but it's been getting decent buzz since last year's fall festivals.

Under normal circumstances, this would be more than enough information to slap into Google to get the proper screening times. Not this weekend.

Neither Magnolia Pictures' "A Hijacking" nor Cohen Media Group's "The Attack" blinked when they saw that the other film also picked June 21st as their weekend. The two movies have been giving one another Sergio Leone stares since they both played at Toronto ("The Attack" had its world premiere a few days earlier at Telluride, and "A Hijacking" did the same at Venice.) This could make for mutually assured destruction at the arthouse -- and it's a shame, because both movies are really quite good, and not quite as similar as the names suggest.

So I'm here to stand between these two warring parties and help you find the partisans that are right for you. Ready? Here we go:

Which one is which?

"A Hijacking" is a disturbing, realism-heavy portrayal of a Danish industrial ship captured by Somali pirates. It's claustrophobic and unpredictable and switches between action on the boat and negotiations back the the Danish head offices. "The Attack" is the story of a successful Israeli Arab surgeon whose wife is accused of being a suicide bomber. The film details his ensuing investigation, forcing him to question his own beliefs about virtually everything in his life.

Which one is supposed to be better?

Well, on Rotten Tomatoes both films have a 100%. On the Criticwire Network both films have a B+. On Metacritic "The Attack" has an 82 and "A Hijacking" has a 78.

Wow, that's sounds pretty dead even. Okay, beyond the numbers, what are some critics saying? Let's start with "A Hijacking."

Guy Lodge at Variety says it "eschews sensationalism at every turn of its spare but tightly wound narrative." Nick Schager at Slant says "Writer/director Tobias Lindholm's long takes and handheld cinematography provide a docudrama sheen that never feels intrusive, and his plotting has a taut and methodical inner logic in which every development has a clear cause-effect relationship to that which has come before." And Oliver Lyttleton at The Playlist says "Meticulously researched, and adhering to absolute realism with hand-held camerawork, use of non-pro actors like [Gary Skjoldmose] Porter, and canny cross-cutting -- more similar to Greengrass' 'United 93' than anything else -- means the film lands closer to a docudrama than a thriller."

Holy crap. Clearly I gotta see this movie. I'm sure it would be getting more attention if there wasn't another arthouse movie with such a similar title coming out the same weekend. Okay, so what are critics saying about "The Attack?"

Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter says "Although the subject matter is inherently disturbing, it's hard to imagine any audience remaining unmoved by this mournful tale." Roger Moore at Movie Nation say "[Director Zaid] Doueiri has brilliantly and simply put a compassionate human face on a part of the world where ethnicity still trumps education, class and achievement." And Jordan Hoffman at Badass Digest says "The movie is pretty clear in its condemnation of terrorism, but many may get worked-up because it treats some of those in support of 'asymmetric warfare' as something other than tasmanian devils of pure evil."

You're quoting your own review in this piece? Just how egotistical are you?

Well, I thought it was relevant to the conversa-

Och -- that's really a low-class move, you know that?

I'm sorry, I... hey, listen, let's get back to the movies here.

Well, they both sound interesting, but I probably won't get a chance to see both in theaters. Are either on VOD?

No.

Not even "A Hijacking?" Doesn't Magnolia put all their stuff on VOD?

What do you want from me? I said no.

Okay, well, just how similar are these movies?

They are similar in that they take events "ripped from the headlines" and really dig deep on the psychological repercussions. "A Hijacking" is a little less specific. It works on a more allegorical level about the human condition. You don't need to know anything about that movie except how to spot good and evil and then to stare in horror at the gray zone between them. "The Attack" dives head-on into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and while you need not be Christiane Amanpour to "get" it, it is a film that does want to make a statements about a very real and particular issue.

Do you like one better?

Oh, so now who's coming to me looking for opinions?!? I think they're both very good. I want smart foreign language films to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you have genuine interest, try and see them both. And next time something like this happens, maybe the distributors won't pick the same weekend.

Celebrate Roger Ebert's Birthday With Some Vintage 'Siskel & Ebert' Clips

Matt Singer — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:14:30 GMT

June 18th was Roger Ebert's birthday. The late film critic, who passed away on April 4th of this year, would have turned 71 today.

To mark the occasion, RogerEbert.com has all kinds of new articles, including a contest to finish a short sci-fi story Roger wrote while he was in the hospital and a lovely list by new RE.com editor Matt Zoller Seitz of the "Eight Films For Which Roger Ebert's Reviews Made a Difference."

Around the web there were several other tributes to Ebert the critic and the writer, like this one at Movie Mezzanine, and this lovely personal story by Steven James Snyder at Time. At this point, though, I don't think you need a mediocre writer like me to tell you what a great writer Ebert was; the man won a Pulitzer Prize, reviewed movies for more than forty years, and wrote more than a dozen books. His skills were self-evident.

My instinct at times like this is to instead hail Ebert (and Gene Siskel) the TV host. So many of my peers still blame "Siskel & Ebert" for dumbing down film criticism and ruining the field forever. But the show inspired countless young critics (myself included) and brought films and film criticism to audiences that may never have found either without them.

Not a week goes by that I don't spend at least a little time on SiskelandEbert.org or YouTube watching or rewatching vintage clips from the show. The conversations, arguments, and observations by Gene and Roger still hold up. I could -- and will -- listen to these two men talk about movies for the rest of my life.

As a brief tribute (and an excuse to watch more "Siskel & Ebert") here are a few clips to enjoy, chosen almost completely at random from recent uploads to YouTube. These are not the best reviews from the history of the show (I did a piece like that for IFC.com with my colleague Stephen Saito on the occasion of "At the Movies"' cancellation by Disney), nor the most influential (see Seitz's list for that). These are just a few excellent ones I sampled today.

Even bad movies were opportunities for good criticism on "Siskel & Ebert." I love how this review of "The Mighty Ducks" becomes a referendum on racial stereotypes in kids movies:

Here Siskel and Ebert succinctly dismantle the American version of "Godzilla" -- even as an ill Siskel comments on the film from a hospital bed. They also consider the fact that they'd been written into the film as the Mayor Ebert of New York and his aide Gene.

I enjoyed hearing Ebert describe the joy that old Disney animation continued to bring him as an adult in this 1981 review of the rerelease of "Cinderella:"

Here's a cool clip I'd never seen before: Ebert, sans Siskel, filing a news report for Chicago's WMAQ on the "Rocky Horror" cult and its sequel, "Shock Treatment." Ebert correctly predicted the sequel's fate:

And just because you can't do a "Siskel & Ebert" retrospective without a Siskel and Ebert argument, how about this disagreement over "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy:"

There are hundreds more clips like that on YouTube and SiskelandEbert.org to watch (I'm off to enjoy all 45 minutes of Siskel and Ebert on "The Howard Stern Show"). Browsing through them sounds like the perfect way to spend a June 18th. Happy birthday, Roger.

Popping a Cork With Filmdrunk's Vince Mancini

Jordan Hoffman — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:16:33 GMT

If news from Hollywood can sometimes seem like a joke, it might as well be an intentional one. I am one of the many who frequently freshens up on what's happening in the biz while also having a chuckle at Filmdrunk.com.

A part of the larger Uproxx network (think the Gawker model with different sites focusing on different niches like TV, geek news, urban celebrity news, and "outrageous NFL opinion," among others) Filmdrunk's primary voice is one Vince Mancini. He's been the Editor in Chief since the beginning, he runs the hilarious Twitter account and he writes most of the big articles that get attention. His writing is almost stream-of-consciousness, usually unpredictable, and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. It may be a tad on the lewd side for some people's tastes, but it's always clever (more Howard Stern/Louis C.K. than full-on "bro" humor.) It did not surprise me to learn that Mancini is also a stand-up comic.

He's also -- and this is something you may not realize the first time you sniff out the site -- a really sharp guy. His movie reviews aren't just played for laughs. He's got opinions, he can back them up and he has a deep knowledge of cinema to draw upon. Yet most people, I feel, still tend to ghettoize him as just a bordering-on-NSFW yukster. Certainly the Sundance press office does, as you'll read below.

The opening of his much discussed pan of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" works as good sampling of what you'll get at Filmdrunk.

"As an MGMT video, 'Beasts of the Southern Wild 'is pretty good. It’s got soaring music, pretty cinematography, fantastical imagery that borrows heavily from 'Where the Wild Things Are,' an impossibly cute little girl, and deep south swamp locations exotic to urbanized yankees like me ("look, crawdaddies! Isn't that a funny word, Brent? 'Crawdaddies?'")."

Yet between the gags there are some real moments of insight, as with this line his review from "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans:" "Like rock n' roll, there's something about a movie being almost bad that makes it infinitely better." Then there was the out-of-left-field decisions to review "Les Miserables" to the tune of a Smash Mouth song.

I had the good fortune to speak with Mancini to see what makes him tick. This is the man who once interrupted his own explanation of how he calculated his end-of-year top 10 by saying "I just tore a Chipotle burrito in half and screamed at it like it was a dead wildebeast" for no real reason whatsoever. Here is a shaved-down transcript of my conversation with one the funniest guys writing about film.

Let's start with basic questions. How long has Filmdrunk been going on?

2007.

Was this your site that you created before it became part of the Uproxx Network?

No. There was a network called Fat Penguin. That was (celebrity site) What Would Tyler Durden Do, (sports site) With Leather and (links site) Gorilla Mask. Ryan Perry, who was running Fat Penguin, wanted to start a movies site. Filmdrunk started at Fat Penguin, later sold to Uproxx, and I've been Editor in Chief the whole time. But I did not start it in my basement.

So what were you writing prior to this?

I was working as a copy writer for Adult Friend Finder. This was my day job. I'd commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto to write newsletters for Adult Friend Finder.

Wait, so, this... this is a site for married guys who want to find a quick hookup at lunch, right?

Well, not specifically married guys, but... yeah. It was a boring, crappy desk job. While I was doing that I wrote film reviews and got other writing gigs on the side. I don't want to name the sites -- I had a non-disclosure -- but I was on a decent sized site but I wasn't me. It was someone else's site and I contributed. I was, however, a film major as an undergrad at UC San Diego. And I was in the creative writing MFA program at Columbia, later. I've taken all the film studies classes. My favorite professor at UCSD was Jean-Pierre Gorin [collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s and early 1970s, later the director of "Poto and Cabengo."] He was this angry French guy who would come in chugging espresso and saying these insane things like "teaching is not about bored or being boring, is about the grand clowning act of child molestation!" That was a favorite quote of his.

Not too many critics can say they studied under Jean-Pierre Gorin.

And I've worked tangentially in the production -- as a PA and whatnot.

How would you describe the philosophy of Filmdrunk?

I look at it like the "Daily Show" model. You watch that show you'll get an overview of politics for the day. Read Filmdrunk you'll know what's happening in movies, just with a funny take. It isn't just dick jokes -- but you'll hopefully laugh and still come away with the news for the day.

There's nothing less funny than analyzing comedy. However, if you had to, can you describe the comedy you do, and if it has changed since 2007?

It's changed in that when I started I had more confidence that people would see the thought behind the juvenile jokes. Now I think I have a lower expectation that people will get that. People sometimes say snarky. "It's snarky!" I hate that. The root of that is snide, and when I think snide I think someone being arch and dismissive and "above" -- like you don't know what they really think. And that's the opposite of me. I say exactly what I think. I never take my feelings out of anything. I want to express my opinion to the fullest, then make it funny.

You have a bit of an anti-ivory tower streak to a certain extent, no?

I like what I like. But I feel like all comedy is inherently anti-ivory tower. Some people get bored with film criticism because it comes from that perspective. It can be so pedantic and bloodless. I'm trying to put the cock and balls and flesh and blood back into it, if that makes any sense and doesn't come off super pretentious.

But I don't recall much knee-jerk dismissal of anything that's, for a lack of a better term, arty. There isn't a jock mentality, but perhaps a little more audience friendly.

I love to poke holes in anything full of itself, but I don't shy away from foreign films or art films. When they're good, I like them. The jock mentality doesn't preclude you from that. I use my sense of humor and the way I am to maybe make it more accessible for guys like me to watch those kinds of movies. People into "bro" humor -- and I hate to describe myself that way, but I know that I have that audience -- I want to bring them to movies they wouldn't necessarily know about otherwise. I try to be so honest about why I like something that they'll automatically get it.

Have there been pieces you've done that have gotten an inordinate amount of criticism?

Yeah, the "geek girl" fiasco a few years back. My video editor made a supercut called "Hot Women Pandering to Nerds." It got a reaction from a lot of women like "What are you talking about? Hot girls aren't allowed to be nerds!??!" They totally missed the point. This thing where everyone feels the need to self-identify and self-pigeonhole. I just hate it, I've always been against that. So we got a lot of criticism for this -- they thought we were questioning a woman's ability to have nerd cred, and it wasn't that at all. I don't give a fuck about anybody's nerd cred. I think that's stupid. To say "I'm a super nerd, blah blah blah" is just so stupid, and this is the worst example of that. But people took it the wrong way -- they always want to boil down your point of view to something that's already been expressed.

I know there was a stretch of time where, despite the fact that your website gets a lot of traffic, you were not linked from Rotten Tomatoes, and you had to campaign a little bit, correct?

Not exactly. I don't know the backstory. I think that may have been just administrative problems. Once I actually got in touch with somebody there it got set up within a day. There was a thing with Sundance, however, a few years ago when I didn't get in. I had a friend who was in the office and I knew for a fact that someone there said "Oh, we know Filmdrunk -- they're inappropriate" and I was denied press credentials.

Sundance just felt you weren't a serious outlet, compared to some of the other people who get credentials?

The word was "inappropriate." A word that's been used against me my whole life. A word that makes my skin crawl.

Your reviews are not loaded with profanity. Maybe an F bomb here and there for comic effect.

I don't set out to be vulgar. I write like how I would speak -- I swear now and then to make it funny, but there's always a serious point of view. The Sundance thing pissed me off so much. I've gone without press credentials and I've written some glowing early reviews of movies that there's no way certain people would ever have heard of. I know for a fact lots of people saw "Hesher" because I was screaming that it was a good movie. "Winter's Bone," too. I saw 'em, I had to wrangle my own tickets and get in line with everyone else. Then I screamed to my audience about how good they were and I still got the reaction of "Oh, this guy, we're not gonna' let him in." That's typical Sundance, they're all about being pretentious.

Are you done with applying to Sundance?

I'll try again next year. I didn't go this year only because my friend who gets a place didn't go. I still enjoy it, even if they don't really want me there.

You also do stand-up.

I like stand-up. I like the instant feedback. It feels more real to see a live reaction.

If a very reputable outlet offered you a space to write "straight criticism" where you could be witty but drop the comedy, would you ever consider it?

I guess I could do it. I wouldn't leave Uproxx to do it. Well, I guess it would depend on what they were paying.

There are some other unorthodox film critics and writers out there. Film Crit Hulk, I'm sure you know, who has a specific gimmick, but is also really smart.

I don't really see myself as having a gimmick. Or even a schtick. I have a way of thinking. But I never think it has to fit into a format. No diss against Film Crit Hulk, but I'm not writing in all caps. There's no format. People sometimes say "Filmdrunk -- does that mean you watch movies drunk?" No, it's a synonym for punch-drunk, like in a daze from watching too many movies.

You mentioned you've been interviewed a few times before but the story always gets killed. That you aren't funny in interviews. And one time Lena Dunham interviewed you? What was that for?

I think she just liked Filmdrunk. This was before "Tiny Furniture." I think she had an idea where she would pitch the story somewhere, but it just fell through. Frankly, I've been trying to get her to return the favor in some way, but it hasn't happened yet.

I'll try to work that in, in the hopes that she reads it. I may just shove it in at the end if it doesn't flow.

Read more of Filmdrunk.

From the Wire: CinemaScore and Critics

Matt Singer — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:32:39 GMT

"Can you spare a few minutes? This allows you to be the critic."

This, according to TheWrap, is the line used by employees of CinemaScore as they hand opening night theatergoers a one-page, six-question ballot (seen at right). Viewers fold down their answers -- including a letter grade, A through F, and whether or not they would rent or buy the film on Blu-ray, DVD, or VOD -- and hand them back. Their responses are averaged out to create a film's "CinemaScore."

The results of these paper foldings are often included in weekend box office reports, where they're used as an indicator of audience reaction and a predictor of word-of-mouth: a good CinemaScore typically means a movie stands a decent shot at sticking around in theaters for a while; a bad one typically means it doesn't.

The men who run CinemaScore, Harold and Ed Mintz, seem like smart guys; and this quote in particular from the former suggests he understands his business very well:

"It's not necessarily the film's quality that's being graded, Mintz cautioned. 'Opening night audiences are already sold on the movie, or what they think the movie is,' he said, 'so in a very real way, it's a test of whether the marketing is in synch with the film and its target audience. The grades say whether the film delivered what the marketing promised.'"

That's perfectly fair -- and, I'm sure, valuable to the studios that use this system to gauge how effectively they've sold their movie to its audience. But getting just the people who show up on opening night, and just the people who show up on opening night who are willing to kill some time on the way to their car grading the movie (meaning they probably have a pretty strong feeling one way or the other) creates to a very specific group of respondents. The lists of movies that have received an A+ CinemaScore -- which includes "The Blind Side" and "42" -- and an F CinemaScore -- including Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris" and Richard Kelly's "The Box" -- speaks volumes about the sort of movies the system favors (feel-good uplift) and those it struggles with (feel-bad ambiguity). I've often said that an F from CinemaScore is maybe the best endorsement a movie can get. That's exaggerating slightly (some stinkers, like "The Devil Inside" get Fs too) -- but only slightly.

I don't know why I care about this stuff; I guess it just sticks in my craw to call it criticism for some reason. Because that's what criticism is; spending thirty seconds on your way out of a movie theater folding a piece of paper.

VODetails: 'How to Make Money Selling Drugs'

Matt Singer — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:03:00 GMT

More and more films premiere on Video on Demand -- if they don't simply bypass a theatrical release altogether. Because VOD reviews are often scarce and hard to find, Criticwire created VODetails, a recurring column to help you figure out whether a new VOD release is worth your hard-earned dollar. This time we're looking at "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," a documentary about the war on drugs -- not a pharmaceutical company's employee training video.

Director: Matthew Cooke

Cast: "Freeway" Rick Ross, Russell Simmons, Susan Sarandon

Criticwire Average: A- (2 critics)

Synopsis: "A shockingly candid examination of how a street dealer can rise to cartel lord with relative ease, 'How to Make Money Selling Drugs' is an insider's guide to the violent but extremely lucrative drug industry. Told from the perspective of former drug dealers, and featuring interviews with rights advocates Russell Simmons, Susan Sarandon, and David Simon (creator of 'The Wire'), the film gives you the lessons you need to start your own drug empire while exposing the corruption behind the 'war on drugs.'"

Trailer:

Reviews:

Tim Grierson, Screen Daily:

"A far more sobering and substantial piece of work than one might expect."

Linda Holmes, NPR:

"An ambitious, creative attempt to talk in a single film about everything from the disparate treatment of black and white dealers to the influence of asset forfeiture on law enforcement strategies to the devastation of Mexico's drug war."

Todd Brown, Twitch:

"This is not 'balanced' reporting in any sense of the world, this is a cleverly packaged argument and plea for change. It just also happens to be damn entertaining."

John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter:

"Proposing realistic solutions, one concludes, is a good deal more difficult than finding clever new ways of saying 'The system is broken.'"

John Anderson, Variety:

"By being both glib and preachy, this highly stylized pic ends up being a tiresome buzzkill."

"How to Make Money Selling Drugs" is now available on VOD.

From the Wire: Biskind's Welles at Lunch Book Sounds Delicious

Jordan Hoffman — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:45:46 GMT

"Hows everything?" the waiter asks.

"We're talking," the large, grumpy man with the deep, timbre-rich voice snarls back.

This is just one of many uncomfortable moments recorded by filmmaker Henry Jaglom during his lunch encounters with Orson Welles toward the end of the legendary auteur's life. Peter Biskin, the noted critic, editor and essayist best known for his books on "New Hollywood" (1998's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls") and the rise of the independent film movement (2004's "Down and Dirty Pictures") has a new one coming out next month, and if this excerpt reprinted in Vulture (and the June 24 issue of New York Magazine) is any indication, it looks like a hoot.

"My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles" is more than just griping about the wrong kind of mustard in the chicken salad (although that's in there, too.) It's an opportunity for Welles, at his lowest Paul Masson-hawking nadir, to belly-ache about perceived slights (how dare Swifty Lazar exit by saying "take care of yourself") and spread rumors about people's character (Grace Kelly allegedly used a shared dressing room for intimate purposes when she thought no one was looking.)

But between full-frontal disses to Richard Burton, to whom he refuses an audience with Elizabeth Taylor ("I'm in the middle of my lunch") and lashon hara toward Irving Thalberg ("the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood") there is, as one would hope, more than a soupcon of first-hand sagacity concerning the Golden Era of motion pictures.

Welles' description of non-premeditated moviegoing struck me as most fascinating:

"In my real moviegoing days, which were the thirties, you didn’t stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater."

One would simply enter, sit down, then wait for it to start again, then leave upon realization that "this is where we came in."

You would think that the director of such tightly-wound films as "Citizen Kane," "Touch of Evil" and "The Lady From Shanghai" would be repulsed by this notion, though it does, I suppose, add a bit of interactivity on behalf of the audience, trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

Also of note is reading that Welles was a full-on believer in the Carole Lombard plane crash conspiracy theory. The incident, which took place on January 16, 1942, killed the full compliment of crew and passengers (22 in all) and, coming so soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was quick to become a magnet for the early fnord set.

Welles repeats the claim that the cabin was loaded with "big-time American physicists" and was "shot down by the Nazis." The cursory Internet research I've done tells me it slammed into mountain due to pilot error and the other passengers were members of the military (Lombard was on a war bond tour). Nevertheless, if I was at lunch with the 20th Century's finest raconteur, I might believe there were Nazis in the Nevada mountains, too.

Orson Welles' final years have long been a depressing topic. What this chat with Jaglom makes me realize is that maybe a splash of modernity would have done the early 1980s some good. If late era Orson was around today he wouldn't be sparring with voiceover directors about frozen peas. With the endless reality television and satellite radio hours to fill he'd probably be doing something slightly more dignified. Or at least more entertaining. At the very least he'd have a podcast. While I can't claim to be much of a Henry Jaglom fan (I checked out from him with 1996's "Last Summer in the Hamptons" and haven't looked back) I'm glad he took his tape recorder along to his lunch encounters, and even more glad he's decided to let us have a listen.

A 'Man of Steel' Ending Spiel

Matt Singer — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:16:58 GMT

The following post contains SPOILERS for "Man of Steel" and "Iron Man 3."

Comic book movies often inspire intense debates between fans and critics, but I can't recall one quite as fevered as the conversation that is quickly coalescing around the new Superman film, "Man of Steel," and in particular around its controversial ending.

In it, Superman (Henry Cavill) discovers the true nature of his strange existence and remarkable powers just as a band of soldiers from the planet Krypton, led by the renegade General Zod (Michael Shannon), arrive on Earth. Zod plans to terraform our world, changing its atmosphere and gravity to make it hospitable to Kryptonians (and therefore make it inhospitable to humans, killing billions*). Superman refuses to join Zod's forces, and fights them repeatedly, first in his hometown of Smallville. This fight razes most of Main Street, demolishing, among other things, the local IHOP (thankfully, the local Sears is spared most of the devastation).

Eventually, Zod activates his terraforming device, the World Engine (while screaming "RELEASE THE WORLD ENGINE!" because Michael Shannon). The machine contains two parts: one lands in Metropolis and begins flattening the city's busy downtown area while the other descends on the Indian Ocean. Rather than destroy the World Engine in the heavily populated area, Superman instead flies to the one that is apparently in the middle of nowhere and poses no immediate threat to human life. After a battle with a bunch of metal tentacle things, Superman punches the World Engine's death laser and heads back to Metropolis.

Meanwhile, Superman's military allies are able to destroy the Metropolis World Engine by flying a cargo plane into it; everyone onboard dies except for Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and Zod. Enraged by his decision to side with the earthlings, Zod attacks Superman. Their fight begins in the blasted-out crater where the World Engine sat and then careens between, through, and into the remaining skyscrapers of the city, causing even more property damage (and likely loss of human life). The conflict concludes at a train station where Zod pins down a small group of civilians with his heat vision. Faced, in his mind at least, with no other choice, Superman snaps Zod's neck, killing him before he can incinerate the bystanders.

Defenders of this series of action scenes offer a variety of evidence on its behalf. In one comic book storyline of the 1980s, Superman did indeed execute General Zod, so that decision has some precedent, however out of character it may seem. And they point out that Zack Snyder's film is about Clark Kent becoming Superman; this is basically his first day on the job, and he's still learning out the ropes. We shouldn't expect him to be perfect, some argue, in the first fight of his life.

And then there's the argument that I actually take most seriously: that this Superman simply isn't the "truth, justice, and the American way" guy that people think of when they hear the name Superman. In 2013, as the argument goes, it's time to reevaluate the character and find the version of him that works for the modern era. And this version shouldn't be held to the standards of previous ones.

This Superman makes mistakes. He kills people (when he feels he has no other choice). He doesn't always save everyone. He's super, but he's a man, too. These are deliberate changes to this character and to his mythos, done specifically to make him more relevant. Who cares what Superman's done in the past? This is Superman now.

That argument is particularly compelling because it's similar to one I've used when writing about how comic book movies should be allowed to futz with their source material. Just last month, I wrote a piece called "Defending 'Iron Man 3''s Big Plot Twist" in which I lauded co-writer/director Shane Black for having the guts and the cleverness to rewrite the Mandarin, traditionally a stereotypical yellow peril villain, as a rug-pulling ruse. The guy who looks like the Mandarin from the comics with the flowing robes and the ten rings of power is actually an actor hired by the movie's secret big bad to distract Iron Man from his real plans.

Some comic book fans rejected this change on principle, but I defended it. "Filmmakers are not court stenographers," I wrote, "and movies are not transcripts." And I chided comic book fans for refusing to accept any deviation from the familiar, adding "It's not just the [comic book] characters that resist change; their audience does too. Everything must remain the same, all the time, over and over again. No wonder so many comics feel so tired; they have to be. Their readers demand it."

So why did I enjoy the Mandarin in "Iron Man 3" and feel so uncomfortable with Superman in "Man of Steel?" If I'm pro-change in comic book movies, why did this change rub me the wrong way? You might call me a hypocrite, but I'd argue I was actual less put off by "Man of Steel"'s unfaithfulness to the comics than by its unfaithfulness to itself.

After all, this Superman is introduced saving lives. In Cavill's very first scene, he protects the staff of an offshore oil rig, propping up its collapsing structure so the rest of the workers can escape in a helicopter. In flashback, we see Clark as a teenager rescuing a bus full of his classmates after they drive off a bridge. His Superman is clearly established as guy who instinctively wants to help people. For whatever reason, though, those instincts never really kick in during the final battle. You could argue the character is actually more heroic in the beginning of the movie than at the end.

One of the explicit recurring themes of this movie -- not Superman comics in general, but "Man of Steel" specifically -- is Superman's ability to inspire the people of Earth with his incredible deeds. In a speech featured in the film's trailer, Russell Crowe's Jor-El tells his son how he will help the human race:

"You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They'll race behind you. They'll stumble, they'll fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders."

Jor-El's words are referred to several times throughout "Man of Steel," including the great scene where Superman and Lois discuss his costume; Lois asks him what the "S" on his chest stands for and he tells her "It's not an 'S.' On my world, it means hope."

These are lovely sentiments, but in "Man of Steel" we mostly get the reverse; it's actually the humans who are generally heroic without much prompting from Superman. Meanwhile Clark, after those early flashes of selflessness, seems more preoccupied with his father issues and his fight with Zod than with protecting the populace of Metropolis. Frankly, it's the regular people who really help Superman accomplish wonders here (like destroying the World Engine), not the other way around.

That's where my dissatisfaction lies; not in the character's "unfaithfulness" but in his stasis; not his change from the comics but his lack of change over the course of the movie. Despite what some of my colleagues argue, Cavill's Clark doesn't really grow into the role of Superman; if anything, he shrinks under the weight of it. It's not that he doesn't feel like Superman -- it's that he doesn't even feel like the Superman introduced in the beginning of this movie. He basically has no arc; at the end of the film, he still hasn't make any huge strides forward from the man we met on that oil rig. And this for a guy who should be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

And If your counter-argument is, "Well, that's all setting up his arc in 'Man of Steel 2,' where we'll see him grapple with his actions and become a true hero," you could be right -- but that doesn't make "Man of Steel 1" any more satisfying. But I guess there's always hope for the future, right? That's what the "S" stands for.

*This raises a question I hadn't quite thought of before: if the yellow sun of Earth makes Kryptonians all-powerful, why would they even want to reshape Earth in Krypton's image? Krypton had cool flying dragons and stuff, but it also, y'know, exploded as a result of environmental instability. Wouldn't it be safer -- not to mention easier -- to conquer the world by leaving it the way it is? This way you're relatively sure the planet won't explode and you've got the added benefit of being a walking god amongst mere mortals.

Can Critics Make Their Mark on 'Man of Steel?'

Jordan Hoffman — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:45:01 GMT

As the yellow sun peeks over the clouds this Monday it probably feels good to be Zack Snyder, Henry Cavill or a Time Warner stockholder. "Man of Steel"'s domestic take was over 125 million of your Earth dollars, netting it the biggest June opening weekend in history, beating out "Toy Story 3"'s $110.3, though whether it flew around the planet to go back in time and adjust this fact we'll never know.

Kal-El, the Last Son of Krypton, a.k.a. mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent a.k.a. Superman is, of course, an international icon matched only by the likes of, say, Ronald McDonald or Santa Claus. Surely people are going to go see his first movie in seven years, particularly in our current superhero-crazed, comic-books-are-a-legitimate-source-for-four-quadrant-entertainment mindset. It is the very definition of critic-proof. What's interesting, though, is just how perfectly split critics are on this latest iteration.

Rotten Tomatoes has "Man of Steel" at 56%. Metacritic is at 55%. I don't know if you follow movie folk on Twitter, but if your feed was anything like mind this past weekend you witnessed the crisis of infinite gripes -- with some folk getting testy and buttons being pushed all over the place.

Some of the more fanboy-friendly critics love it, others feel Kal-El's actions in the third act are quite unbecoming a Kryptonian. Some of the cineaste critics dig Zack Snyder's style, others are ready to take a boom tube to Apokolips rather than watch another of these long underwear-fests again.

With this sort of polarized dialogue dominating the film's critical conversation, you figure this would monopolize the chatter among those buying tickets. I took a stroll to my local cineplex (the UA Kaufman Astoria 14 in beautiful Queens, New York) and initiated conversations with moviegoers at and around the concession stand.

First, I approached a young couple sitting at a little table with Bloomberg-busting sodas in front of them.

Hoffman: Did you guys read any reviews before buying your ticket?
18 Year Old Male:No.

17 Year Old Female: No.
Hoffman: Did you hear anything about the movie?
18YOM: I heard it was great.
Hoffman: Who did you hear this from?
18YOM: From people.
Hoffman: Like, on Facebook?
18YOM: Yeah, on Facebook.
Hoffman: If a friend on Facebook were to link to a review of the movie, would you ever click through?
18YOM: Sometimes.

17YOF: Nope.
Hoffman: Do you think after you see the movie today you may go home and check out some written reviews to compare your own thoughts?
18YOM: Maybe, if I see one, I might click.

17YOF: Nah.

Next to them was another couple, a little older, both absolutely glued to their PSPs or Nintendo DSs. The woman didn't want to talk to me; the man spoke, but did not look up from his game.

Hoffman: Did you read any of the reviews before coming here?
26 Year Old Gamer: No.
Hoffman: Did you know that this was something of a divisive movie among critics?
26YOG: No.
Hoffman: Do you ever read reviews? Ever visit Rotten Tomatoes?
26YOG: Nah. Reviews just spoil the movie.
Hoffman: Oh, okay. Well, do you ever read a review afterwards?
26YOG: I don't really see too many movies.

Next I caught a 26 year old dude in a full-on DC Comics T-Shirt. Not a vintage one, a new one, with most of the major members of the Justice League on it in action poses. Even J'onn J'onzz. He was with his mother. No, I'm not making any of this up.

Hoffman: Are you on your way to see "Man of Steel?"
26 Year Old Comics Fan: We saw it.
Hoffman (wondering to himself what this dude is doing hanging out at the concessions counter, but soldiering on): Like it?
26YOCF: It was so-so. I prefer the original. The Christopher Reeve version.
Mom: The camera was moving all over!
26YOCF: She didn't like the shakycam.
Mom: Och, the shaking cam!
Hoffman: Okay, fair enough. But, I'm wondering if you read any reviews before you came here.
26YOCF: No. None.
Hoffman: Do you ever read reviews?
Mom: No! Get your own opinion!
26YOCF: Yes, I like to get my own judgement.
Hoffman: If a friend links a review on Facebook, do you ever click through?
26YOCF: No. Not really. I don't go to many movies.

I left this pair (who continued to just sort of float around the theater lobby) and darted over to a 32 year old man wearing a classic "S on his chest" Superman T-shirt.

Hoffman: You are here to see "Man of Steel," I take it?
32 Year Old Superman Fan: Yeah.
Hoffman: Did you read any of the reviews?
32YOSF: No. I heard it was good, though. Has a good story.
Hoffman: Oh, you heard this from a friend? Or on, say, Facebook?
32YOSF: Heard from friends.
Hoffman: Oh, so you have friends who saw it already?
32YOSF: No, we're gonna' see it today.
Hoffman: Wait, so how did you hear it was good?
32YOSF: I saw the preview.
Hoffman: Will you go read reviews after you see it, to see how it compared to your opinion?
32YOSF: No.
Hoffman: Do you ever read reviews?
32YOSF: Not that much.

Lastly, I saw three happy looking people in their mid-twenties. One dude, who did not speak, was wearing a fedora and had a goatee. The other dude was loaded with tattoos. The gal with them wore glasses and had bushy hair.

Hoffman: You here to see "Man of Steel?"
Tattoos: Nah, we're here to see. Ummn. Wait, what is it?
Bushy Hair: "This is the End."
Tattoos: Yeah, "This is the End." But I wanna see "Man of Steel" at some point. Maybe we'll try and sneak in afterwards. Wait, you don't work here, do you?
Hoffman: No, no. It's all good. You do what your conscience thinks is right. Tell me, you want to see "Man of Steel," but have you heard about it being divisive? Have you read any reviews?
Tattoos: Nah, no reviews. But I saw Russell Crowe on Kelly Ripa. I like him, he's good. I'm not a big Superman guy, but I'm gonna see it. I don't like, though... I don't like that it's this one guy who can get ya, though, y'know?
Hoffman: Uhhh, I'm not 100% sure I know what --
Bushy Hair: But this one, this one is by the guy who made "Watchmen," right?
Hoffman: Yes.
Bushy Hair: I like that. I like that it's like darker.
Tattoos: Hey, she knows everything!

The conclusion: everyone has their Kryptonite. For a critic, it's walking around a multiplex on a Saturday.

The Criticwire Survey: Best Criterion Essays

Matt Singer — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:02:04 GMT

Every week, Criticwire asks film critics a question and brings you their responses in The Criticwire Survey. We also ask each member of the poll to pick the best film currently playing in theaters. The most popular choices can be found at the bottom of this post. But first, this week's question:

Q: What's your favorite essay written for a DVD or Blu-ray in The Criterion Collection?

The critics' answers:

Edwin Arnaudin, Ashvegas:

"Kent Jones' 'The Royal Tenenbaums' essay was the first long-form writing I'd read on Wes Anderson and one of my first serious pieces of film criticism. Released the summer before I went to college, the essay was a fine lead-in to the years of watching, reading, and writing to come and one that I revisit whenever I watch my favorite film."

Adam Batty, Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second:

"I've probably learnt as much about film from Criterion liner notes as any other single source. I'm going to go with Armond White's piece on Truffaut's 'The Last Metro.' For me White's reputation very much preceded him, but his essay on this late Truffaut classic helped to demythologize the writer, in the sense that it contextualized him outside of the hyperbolic notoriety that welcomes most of his work in to the critical realm."

Danny Bowes, Movies By Bowes:

"Farran Smith Nehme's one for 'This Happy Breed.' Great piece about a great (and tragically underseen) movie."

Sean Chavel, Flick Minute:

"The Michael Wood essay on the 1961 film 'Viridiana' is my favorite. It not only gives rich insight into the sacrilege and uproar of the film at the time, it gives an amazing career chronicle of master Luis Bunuel. The sad thing is that he is becoming a forgotten master, but the Wood essay and the film itself (I feel is Bunuel's best) restores my faith that avant-garde film and social satire live forever. I could have also easily chosen Michael Wilmington's essay on 1949's 'The Third Man.'"

Marc Ciafardini, GoSeeTalk.com:

"Alexander Sesonske writes a great essay titled 'West Meets East' for the Criterion release of 'Yojimbo.' Sesonske calls attention to the fact that Kursoawa's films of the '50s 'were exotic for Westerners but alive with characters who continually impress us with their humanity.' Further stating that the shared humanity 'helped ease our cultural stereotypes about the Japanese created by World War II propaganda.' Mifune (who Sesonske says is 'more akin to that of Sam Spade than Shane'), Nakadai and the bunch may be foreign to Western audiences but many of the themes on display are entirely universal. That element continues to make Kurosawa's work timeless and allowed those same archetypes to very easily live on in scores of American films for decades. It's a brief piece but is also the first of many insightful pieces in the 'Yojimbo booklet' (e.g. the one about Kazuo Miyagawa) that detail how and why Kurosawa was, is, and continues to remain such a revered filmmaker."

John DeCarli, FilmCapsule:

"I really like Mark Polizzotti's essay 'Which Year at Where?' on the 'Last Year at Marienbad' Blu-ray. 'Mariendbad' is as labyrinthine and complex a film as there is, and Polizzotti does a nice job approaching its mysteries through the film's polarized critical response. A daring masterpiece or a pretentious bore? Both? Polizzotti also sheds light on the crucial participation of novelist/screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet went on to make his own films, with narrative structures somehow even more twisted than 'Mariendbad''s. By analyzing the areas where the two artists agreed -- and greatly differed -- Polizzotti shows how 'Marienbad' is the improbable result of this unique collaboration, something that would never have been the same without the contributions of both men."

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap/What The Flick?!:

"Wow, I've read and enjoyed so many that it's hard to pick one -- so I'll go with the first one that comes to mind since it obviously shoved its way to the front of the pack. Matt Zoller Seitz's take on 'Man Bites Dog' offers the critic playing to his strengths, contextualizing a piece of work into its own time as well as into cinema as a whole, offering up the moments (pleasurable or otherwise) that will stick with you after viewing, and rationally putting forth an explanation as to why the movie matters and endures."

David Ehrlich, Film.com:

"With over 600 essays to choose from (nearly all of which are excellent and essential), it's nearly impossible for me to select any one of them as my 'favorite,' though some have proven to be more helpful than others. At this particular time, on this particular day, I find myself thinking of the Phillip Lopate essay that can be found in Criterion's OOP DVD edition of Godard's 'Contempt,' which might be a bit of a cheat given that it was originally written for Lopate's book 'Totally, Tenderly, Tragically.' One particularly astute passage: "'Contempt' is an ironic retelling of Homer’s 'Odyssey.' At one point Camille wryly summarizes the Greek epic as 'the story of that guy who’s always traveling.' But Paul’s restlessness is internal, making him ill at ease everywhere. In modern life, implies Godard, there is no homecoming, we remain chronically homeless, in barely furnished apartments where the red drapes never arrive. Paul’s Odysseus and Camille’s Penelope keep advancing toward and retreating from each other: never arriving at port.'"

Eric Havens, Downright Creepy:

"My favorite essay is a direct correlation to my favorite genre. When Criterion actually gives its treatment to a bonafide horror picture you know it's deserving. 'Rosemary's Baby' is one off favorite movies of all time, so to see it get the Criterion release, which included Ed Park's excellent essay, made this guy a happy fella."

Peter Howell, Toronto Star:

"Tough assignment this week, but I have to say that I'm partial to William Rothman's essay for the 2001 Criterion DVD release of Luis Bunuel's 'That Obscure Object of Desire.' Rothman deftly sums up the Spanish erotic provocateur's final film and entire career in about 1,000 words. He concludes with this potent thought: 'In Bunuel's art, what is principled, and what is perverse, cannot be separated. Bunuel is a moralist. He is also a terrorist.'"

Sean Hutchinson, Latino Review:

"Criterion does an absolutely wonderful job with the essays included in their releases even considering when they release a film without any supplemental material. Sometimes only the essay itself along with the film makes it nonetheless a must-own. Yet of all the essays included in their 600+ releases that seek to contextualize the sometimes difficult, sometimes radical, sometimes fun movies they correspond to I feel drawn to J Hoberman's essay 'One Big Real Place: BBS From Head to Hearts' included in the absolutely essential 'America Lost and Found: The BBS Story' box set. Despite including five other essays in the release from writers like Chuck Stephens and Matt Zoller Seitz, I think Hoberman's essay does the best job of typifying the kind basic yet substantial essays that Criterion is known for. He insightfully maps out the history of BBS Productions but subtly lays the groundwork for the atmosphere of American cinema that brought about the revolutionary company and its cast of deranged wackos that somehow struck late 60s and early 70s perfection with films like 'Easy Rider,' 'Five Easy Pieces,' and 'The Last Picture Show.' It's a great read from an indispensable release -- a kind of film school in and of itself -- and a great primer for the best types of films Criterion has to offer."

Peter Labuza, LabuzaMovies.com/The Cinephiliacs:

"Adrian Martin's essay on 'Days of Heaven' is quite a triumph of writing. He smartly avoids all the cliches of writing about the director and concentrating on the fleeting, ephemeral moments that make up so much of the film, and connecting it among filmmakers (Rivette, Truffaut), philosophers (Simone Weil), and composers (Camille Saint-Saëns) rarely discussed along the work. He does what criticism does best -- put into words what the eyes see but can rarely articulate."

Andrew Lapin, The Atlantic:

"For all those who believe Armond White has never contributed anything of value to the critical community (I know you're out there), you owe it to yourself to read his 2002 Criterion appreciation of David Gordon Green's 'George Washington.' He ties Green's striking vision of the American South to language both cinematic and historical, and touches upon precisely what mystifies and delights about the Green film, with no attacks on the bourgeoise in sight. If White approached every film this past decade the way he approached 'George Washington,' I have no doubt we'd now be looking at him as one of the finest critics around."

John Lichman, Freelance:

"The 'White Dog' Criterion features dueling essays from J. Hoberman and Armond White. It's sort of a rarity to see the two of them clash, yet here both come to go into the merits of Fuller. Also in the same booklet: Fuller interviews the dog."

Joey Magidson, The Awards Circuit:

"I'm sure this is not going to be a favorite answer, but I have to go with the first Criterion film I ever picked up, which was 'Chasing Amy.' It has an essay by Kevin Smith himself called 'The Hows and Whys of 'Chasing Amy'' that's vintage Smith essay writing/more evidence of his skill as a raconteur, be it in written or verbal format. I mention this film a lot, I know, but it has a special place in my heart."

Mike McGranaghan, The Aisle Seat:

"This was a great question because it forced me to finally make the time to read some of the essays in my Criterion Collection. Then again, the more I read, the less I was able to definitively choose just one as the best. They're all so good! But since I like to give specific answers to these survey questions, I'll choose the piece David Thompson wrote for the Criterion release of Jonathan Demme's 'Something Wild.' I choose this one for several reasons. First, this is one of my all-time favorite movies; there are no words to sufficiently describe my love for it. Second, I think Thompson does a fantastic job of analyzing the things that make 'Something Wild' so great -- the carefully executed tonal shift halfway through, the inventive use of music, the manner in which the plot continually reinvents itself -- while also giving a nice overview of how the movie fits into Demme's larger filmography. Mostly, though, I'm picking this article because it gives me an excuse to recommend 'Something Wild' to people who have never seen it. If you fall into this category, you need to get right on that. Seriously."

Ryan McNeil, The Matinee:

"For two or three years, I'd only ever known Armond White as 'The Contrarian.' I'd scratched my head at his pattern of decrying wildly popular movies while defending others that were generally loathed. My confusion with his schtick reached a new level when he appeared on a podcast in 2010 to discuss 'Inception.' White was asked which other critics he felt were worth reading, and he was stumped. I was convinced the man was just an attention-seeker. The very weekend that podcast dropped, I bought myself a copy of 'The Complete Monterey Pop Festival.' Wouldn't you know it, one of the three essays included inside was 'People in Motion' -- written by Armond White. The essay is warm, joyous, insightful, and intelligent. It evokes such love: for not only the music within the film, but the way that music was captured on film. It underlines the way great music documentaries don't just roll tape, but actually work with the musicians being document as if following another staff of notes on the sheet music. In short, it completely dispelled my notion that White was just an attention seeker, and it leaves you wishing he'd write pieces filled with its level of love and intelligence more often."

Jana J. Monji, The Demanders/Pasadena Art Beat/Examiner.com:

"Movies can become tied to memories and for that reason my favorite essay is film critic Maitland McDonagh's for 'Kuroneko.' The movie is one of two that I will forever associate with Roger Ebert (the other being 'March of the Penguins'). For that I can credit Michael Jackson. My husband and I had compiled a CD of interpretations of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller.' On a whim, I sent one to Roger Ebert for Halloween. In return, he sent to me 'Kuroneko.' The McDonagh's essay has a balanced blend of background information, cultural contrast between East and West and commentary on cinematic style. Yet I would want to say something different. Roger urged me to watch Japanese films on Hulu and write about Japanese movies. This essay reminds me of those two things as well as appealing to my growing affection for Halloween (I'm already contemplating my costume for this year) and interest in horror films that are targeted at frightening men over women ('Audition' or 'Fatal Attraction')."

Scott Nye, Rail of Tomorrow:

"I'm going to cheat a little, but reading Kent Jones' essay in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' release was a pivotal moment for me as a cinephile, introducing a level of passion and real heart into film analysis, recognizing that cinema is as much a collection of wonderful moments as an overarching experience, and how each ties into the other. It doesn't hurt that it remains among my favorite films, and his favorite moments were mine as well. More recently, Kim Morgan's essay on 'Design for Living' was revelatory, in part because the film is far from my favorite Lubitsch, but she addressed and elucidated the way in which those elements with which I took issue were actually to the film's benefit, all the while displaying, again, a real passion for her subject. Lesson is, I suppose, passion goes a long way, certainly for me."

Rudie Obias, ShockYa.com:

"Oh man, there are so many great essays packaged with Criterion Collection films. When I read this week's Criticwire question, the first thought that popped in my mind was Georgina Evans' essay 'Red: A Fraternity of Strangers' -- on Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Three Colors: Red.' Not just because it was the last Criterion essay I read, but also it's an insightful and poignant look at Kieslowski’s final film and how it impacted the 'Three Colors' trilogy as a whole. Evans' emphasis on 'Red''s similarities to Kieslowski's 1991 film 'The Double Life of Veronique' makes watching both films all the more rewarding."

Josh Spiegel, Mousterpiece Cinema/Sound on Sight:

"So many great essays to choose from, but I'm going with 'Faded Glories,' the essay for 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' written by Kent Jones of Film Comment. 'The Royal Tenenbaums' has long been one of my all-time favorite films; I remember, upon buying the Criterion DVD back in 2002, being so thrilled that the film got such an impressive treatment, both in supplements and in Mr. Jones' musings, instantly comparing Wes Anderson to Preston Sturges as one of America's best new comic minds. Like 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' the Kent Jones essay alongside it in the Criterion Collection is shrewd, incisive, and one of my favorites."

Brian Tallerico, HollywoodChicago.com:

"I went back and reread a number of essays but could easily have missed a gem. I can't wait to read what others point out. As for what I reread, I'm going to cheat and offer two favorites because one comes from a critic and the other an author. The critical favorite is Kim Morgan's take on 'Design For Living.' The best Criterion essays are both informative regarding the film's history and insightful on its impact then and now. Morgan offers not only background on the making of the film but convincingly makes the case of its relevance to today's audience. Like the best special features in the Criterion Collection, it doesn't just offer trivia but deepens the experience of appreciating the film. As does Dennis Lehane's essay on 'The Wages of Fear,' a stellar piece of writing from one of our best authors. Clouzot's film is such a visceral, physical experience that reading about it from the perspective of an author and not a filmmaker, one who notices structure and not just the notorious stunts, makes a complex film even more interesting."

Scott Weinberg, Twitch/Movies.com:

"Probably a simple pick, but film critic Jack Mathews' brief essay in the 'Brazil' set is a great jumping-off point for the wealth of supplementary material. Not only do I adore this bizarre 1985 Terry Gilliam masterpiece, but the essay (and the supplements) tell fascinating tales about horrific studio meddling and the quiet importance of outspoken film critics."

Andrew Welch, In Review Online:

"There are too many I haven't read, but of the ones I have, Kent Jones' take on 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is one of the most striking. I'm slightly cool towards the movie itself -- I like it, but I don't love it. Yet, when I read what Jones says, I begin to doubt myself. I think, 'You know, it really is pretty good,' and I'm tempted to put the disc in again. That, to me, is what criticism is about. History and context are important, but they should be second to the writer's passion. Jones brings that to whatever he touches, and it's contagious. Genuine passion always is."

The Best Movie Currently In Theaters on June 17th, 2013:
The Most Popular Response: "Before Midnight"
Other Titles Receiving Multiple Votes: "Frances Ha," "This Is the End," "Man of Steel."

Two Refreshing Twists on Familiar Territory from the Seattle International Film Festival

Steve Greene — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 21:04:42 GMT

Film festival synopses can be a blessing and a curse. They're certainly a helpful tool to help pare down the unlimited options at some festivals -- especially those that reach the triple digit mark in a hurry.

This year, at the Seattle International Film Festival, there were plenty of titles that were cause for excitement. Destin Daniel Cretton's "Short Term 12," which wowed audiences at SXSW earlier this year is a strong look at a juvenile short term care facility. Stephen Silha and Eric Slade's "Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton" handles the poet and filmmaker's personal and professional lives with equal grace. "This is Martin Bonner," a Sundance title from Chad Hartigan is a careful examination of two men in various states of societal transition.

And among those titles on the SIFF slate were a pair that took well-trodden sub-genres and infused them with something a little more special. In some cases, synopses can be deceiving. These two merit a closer look.

"Teddy Bears"

There's a unique joy that comes from watching a cast that works together so comfortably. The six actors at the heart of "Teddy Bears" have differing pedigrees from TV and film. But all of those sensibilities gel together for a genuine and affecting look at friendship, commitment, and curiosity.

"Teddy Bears," the latest film from writer Thomas Beatty and co-director Rebecca Fishman, operates from a simple premise: Andrew (David Krumholtz) is still coping with the passing of his mother when he invites his close circle of friends up to Joshua Tree for a weekend vacation. Once he, his girlfriend Hannah (Melanie Lynskey) and the other two couples (Jason Ritter and Gillian Jacobs; Zachary Knighton and Ahna O'Reilly) get settled in at their momentary abode, Andrew makes an unusual proposal. In order to better cope with his recent loss, Andrew asks that all three female members carve out some special alone time with him at some point during the weekend. He gives the individual couples the time to talk it over, but the understandable resulting tension seeps into every action for the rest of the film's runtime.

Beatty and Fishman understand the ridiculous nature of Andrew's request, but they also treat him with an empathy that stays right in the emotional buffer between mockery and wholehearted endorsement. There's an edge to Andrew, handled adeptly by Krumholtz, that suggests that he has issues that no woman's touch can magically resolve. But momentary glimpses into Andrew's daydreams show us the delicacy with which he plans to handle his special night, should his friends be so willing. Wisely, the whimsical fantasy aspect isn't overdone, but employed just enough to keep the unexpected alive.

Andrew's declaration of his needs creates the possibility for some uneasy storytelling footing, as his friends try to regain some semblance of normalcy for their vacation weekend. But the performances keep the action tethered in something organic as each character takes their turn being the voice of reason in an uncomfortable situation. Knighton in particular captures the natural incredulity of the whole affair, all while trying to keep the characters around him from straying too far from logical responses. Binding them together is Eric Potter's editing, an ideal visual companion to the acting skill on display. In a film rife with reaction shots and a narrative built on responses to unexpected actions, it's the timing in those cuts that shines through just as bright.

Another strong asset at work here is the way that Beatty, as a writer, unspools how all of these characters' stories are interrelated. There's no giant information dump at the beginning that instantly establishes the framework. Instead, we observe the various combos of the six friends, discussing past feelings, uneasy tensions and genuine concern over others' well-being. Their conversations aren't coy just to withhold information from the audience, but carefully observed with an unspoken understanding that close friends would naturally have when discussing the potential dissolution of the friend group.

This gradual dispensing of character depth also applies to the supporting cast. Dale Dickey continues her streak of playing compelling anti-charmers, while Ned Beatty pops up as the friends' weekend neighbor. A nearly unrecognizable French Stewart (in appearance, voice and demeanor) is Rich, the de facto landlord of the desert house the six are renting. All three are helpful reminders that life and all its consequences still go on outside the friends' bubble of awkwardness.

Even though the friends-who-go-away-to-a-cabin-and-discover-something-about-themselves is bordering on a trope at this point in the American indie landscape, Beatty and Fishman infuse their tale with a sense of camaraderie that elevates each relationship and delivers real emotion when that fabric is challenged. There are no easy answers at the end of the "Teddy Bears" journey, but the palpable sincerity that runs through its story lends a genuine eye to what easily could have devolved into caricature. It doesn't get precious, keeping its off-kilter sensibilities all the way up through the lyrics of its closing song.

"The Trials of Muhammad Ali"

There's something inherently fascinating about a figure who chooses to forego the unlimited spoils of world fame, regardless of the reason. In the sporting world, when an athlete is robbed of his or her prime, there's usually an accompanying off-the-field tale that dovetails with that fall from grace. ESPN's "30 for 30" series featured a documentary on Ricky Williams, an NFL running back whose social hurdles and marijuana use led him to a self-imposed exile of sorts. But even though Williams' story happened in the Internet age, the scrutiny that followed boxer Muhammad Ali, even at his peak athletic performance, may never be equaled. Bill Siegel's documentary "The Trials of Muhammad Ali" chronicles the decades surrounding Ali's meteoric ascension, equally drastic fall from public favor and the fights that eventually led him to become a Medal of Freedom recipient in 2005.

Imagine your most defining Ali moment: odds are, it's in here somewhere. Whether it's his triumph over Sonny Liston (when he was still widely known as Cassius Clay), a remark from his public Nation of Islam speaking engagements or a particular quip at a press conference. But for all the familiar Ali touchstones spread throughout the proceedings, there's a real strength in letting them run a few seconds longer. Everyone remembers "I shook up the world!" but far fewer remember the line immediately after that which perfectly encapsulates the fine line between sports and his religious inclinations.

The film's most impressive feat is its balancing of three distinct threads that weave together Ali's struggles. That sports-religion divide is eventually complicated by a legal battle over Ali's refusal to enter the draft during the Vietnam war. Rather than veering too far into any of the three directions, "Trials" sticks to the promise of its title and follows the repeated hurdles, self-inflicted or otherwise, that Ali faced. Siegel takes advantage of Ali's ubiquity during his ascent to power, even using footage from Ali's appearance on "The Jerry Lewis Show" (a brief clip in which the titular host gets awfully prickly). For as loved in some circles as he was, Siegel shows that a certain air of wariness followed him even in the days when he would play croquet and do magic tricks in his front yard.

Siegel's choice of prominent figures' response to Ali's persona and public decisions effectively captures his actions' racial and political ramifications. We see Jackie Robinson, pioneering figure in the athletic world and American society, deliberately refer to the champ as "Cassius." But more than anything, Siegel reinforces, through visuals and testimonials, the idea that Ali was continuously co-opted as a selling point. Whether as an icon of local Louisville civic pride, a banner member for an emerging religious group or as a means to perpetuate the popularity of one of the nation's most popular sports at the time, Ali was a symbol for both his supporters and detractors to use.

Archival Ali, even at half of his charismatic powers, needs little help to hook viewers' interest, but Joshua Abrams' jazzy score (a clear step above standard stock doc music) helps give these tales forward momentum. The closing minutes of the film amps up the pace, racing through the moments after the point in Ali's life where Parkinson's Disease began to take its toll. Even after Ali was vindicated and made his return to the sport he was effectively ousted from, the burdens of being one of the most recognizable faces in the world were still there. The religious elements of Ali's struggles largely dissipated with the Nation of Islam's changing makeup, but most of the stories of "The Trials of Muhammad Ali" make it clear that this was a man who was never afforded the luxury of privacy. Even though this film's epilogue spans decades over a matter of minutes, the idea that some of Ali's struggles never fully resolved is a fitting close to a documentary about a man whose legacy is still being shaped.

Weird Pull Quote Theater: 'Hatchet III'

Matt Singer — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:47:03 GMT

And now, it's time for another installment of Weird Pull Quote Theater!

From: The Village Voice, Vol. LVIII No. 24

Movie: "Hatchet III"

Criticwire Grade: C (2 critics)

Pull Quote: "The most anticipated slasher film of 2013."

Author: DreadCentral.com

Why It's Weird: Because this is something you say before you see a movie. Being anticipated is not the same thing as being good. Okay, so people are looking forward to it. Awesome. But do they, y'know, like it once they actually watch it?

Out of curiosity, I looked up Dread Central's review of "Hatchet III" -- and guess what? It's not particularly positive. Drew Tinnin, who gives the film two out of five stars, says "Hatchet III" "doesn’t seem all that interested in expanding the legend of the bayou boogeyman, Victor Crowley, so much as it just wants to blow it the hell up" and claims there was "an excitement present in the first movie that even carried over to the sequel, but it doesn’t seem to have survived" to this third film. Sorry to cut the anticipation down, but that's the way it is.

Suggested More Accurate Pull Quote: "Inferior to previous installments in almost every way!"

This has been another installment of Weird Pull Quote Theater!

This Summer's Movies Have a PG-13 Problem

Matt Singer — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:23:12 GMT

This post contains MINOR SPOILERS for "Iron Man 3," "Star Trek Into Darkness," and "Man of Steel." If you want to avoid any particular section, just look for that title and skip that paragraph.

A viewer should walk out of a movie like "Man of Steel" feeling elated or, at the very least, entertained. This is a big summer blockbuster -- maybe the big summer blockbuster of 2013 -- and it's designed to dazzle us and excite us and thrill us with action, adventure, and spectacle. Even as I admired the craft that went into creating such a handsome, well-executed film, I felt none of those things from the end of the latest reinterpretation of Superman. I was less dazzled than dazed; less excited than alarmed; less thrilled than troubled by the surprising violence and destruction of "Man of Steel"'s lengthy climax.

The movie ends -- and I don't think this is a spoiler -- with a big battle in Metropolis between Superman and the forces of General Zod, a mad Kryptonian warlord. As these super-beings pummel each other, they slam into and through countless skyscrapers, toppling dozens of buildings, and wreaking even more havoc. When the dust settles, there is literally a giant, hollowed-out crater where probably five square blocks of Metropolis used to be. But beyond a few shots of crowds running from dust clouds, there's almost no acknowledgement on the part of director Zack Snyder or even on the part of Superman, the superhero who's supposedly all about saving people, that every time one of these buildings falls, hundreds more innocent bystanders die.

Walking out of "Man of Steel" I found that I loved Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, and Michael Shannon as Zod, and kind of disliked the movie they were in -- particularly that final hour, which is mostly a Kryptonian demolition derby. I know blockbusters are predicated on a more-is-more aesthetic, but this was just too much. Too super (man).

At Vulture, Kyle Buchanan has written an outstanding article about "Man of Steel" linking its "orgy of gratuitous building-battering" to a trend in recent blockbusters that evoke (or perhaps exploit) the imagery of 9/11. In doing so, he explains exactly why "Man of Steel" left me feeling so defeated:

"With the removal of mortality from the equation, the mayhem is just deadening; all bombast, little consequence. Zod's villainous compatriot Faora warns Superman, 'For every one of them you save, we will kill a million more:' 'A million' is such a large number -- and one so easily attained in expensive CGI-laden blockbusters these days -- that it's meaningless. A special-effects department can conjure up a million people as easily as they can one. That's why it's actually surprising in 'Fast & Furious 6' when, after the villain begins to run over innocent bystanders in his tank, Vin Diesel barks to his crew, 'Take their attention away from the people!' Characters in blockbusters these days rarely ever comment on the titanic amounts of destruction they (and we) are witnessing. We've seen buildings smashed onscreen since Godzilla trampled on Tokyo in 1954 (and I have no doubt we will again when the 'Godzilla' reboot is released next year), but now there's a coldly pornographic attention to detail that implies that the only lessons imparted by 9/11 were technical ones. It's as if more time and effort were spent on simulating a toppled skyscraper than in telling you why you should care about the people trapped in it."

Buchanan also refers to a similar scene in "Star Trek Into Darkness" where a spaceship crashes into San Francisco, obliterating Alcatraz in the blink of an eye, and knocking down who knows how many other buildings -- not to mention killing untold thousands -- before it finally comes to a stop. The key word here is untold. All of this carnage is mostly the flashy backdrop for a foot chase between the heroes and villains. They barely even notice the mass casualties all around them as they chase after one guy they want to capture in order to save a single wounded person on their ship. The Enterprise's crew succeeds, of course, but at what cost? It's hard to say because the movie barely addresses the devastation it has wrought for cheap, violent thrills (thrills it even advertised on the poster seen above; "Come watch this guy blow the shit out of these buildings!"). I guess the needs of the many really don't outweigh the needs of the few.

I left "Iron Man 3" with a similar feeling of unease. While Tony Stark, James Rhodes, and Pepper Potts are fighting the Mandarin in the big final battle, the Mandarin's forces are duking it out with dozens of Tony Stark's remote-controlled suits. Much of the early portions of "Iron Man 3" are about Tony Stark investigating a mystery; bombs that leave no shrapnel or evidence. Eventually, he realizes that the Mandarin is outfitting former U.S. combat soldiers with "Extremis" technology that turns them into human bombs. The "bombers" themselves are victims; test subjects who've been mutated against their will by the Mandarin's mad scientists. Stark even goes out of his way to tell the widow of one of the bombers that he wasn't a bad guy, and that the deaths he caused weren't his fault.

Clearly, these bombers weren't murderers -- and as we see at the end of the film, Tony Stark has the technology to turn them back into normal human beings. But what happens during the big climax? He tells his A.I. to target and destroy the Extremis enhanced thugs; and not just to target them, but to take them out "with extreme prejudice." Not "Try to keep the casualties to a minimum," not "These guys are still human somewhere deep down inside, let's save as many as we can." "Target with extreme prejudice." And as the primary protagonists and antagonists duke it out in the foreground, the background is filled with laser blasts and explosions -- presumably of Iron Man suits terminating these poor Extremis guys.

The night before Buchanan's piece was published I was talking privately with a colleague who'd also seen "Man of Steel." We were comparing our reactions and I told him how uncomfortable the end of the film made me. He suggested that its oblivious attitude to collateral damage might have something to do with its rating. "It's PG-13," he noted. "I don't think we actually saw that many people die on screen; just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of implied deaths."

He's absolutely correct. But isn't the callous disregard for human life -- and the thoughtless use of wholesale (implied) death and destruction for entertainment -- just as disturbing as the actual consequences of violence and mayhem? Just because you didn't literally show me the people trapped in those collapsing structures doesn't mean they're not there. This is a very strange and very problematic quirk of the MPAA ratings system. Kill thousands of people, but do it off-screen. Level half a city, but show none of the dead bodies almost certainly buried beneath that half a city. Then you get a PG-13.

What would have happened if Iron Man had paused to consider the deaths he'd caused (or if these Extremis guys actually left behind some human remains)? What if Spock stopped his chase to assist someone injured by debris, and they were bleeding or had lost a limb? Or if Superman had pulled a dead victim from the wreckage of one of those skyscrapers? Would those scenes warrant R ratings? And if so, do the peculiarities of the PG-13 actually make these heroes less heroic? If they stop and help, they see things that keep kids out of movies. So instead they fly on, unconcerned for the bloodshed.

It's almost like they're not allowed to care. For a character like Superman, who wears a symbol on his chest that supposedly represents hope, that's kind of a problem. The only thing I walked out of "Man of Steel" hopeful for was a sequel where Metropolis doesn't get completely eradicated.

Melissa McCarthy Responds to Rex Reed's 'Identity Thief' Review

Matt Singer — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 04:02:39 GMT

In his review of this spring's "Identity Thief," New York Observer film critic Rex Reed called its star, Melissa McCarthy, a "tractor-sized" "humongous" "female hippo" and "a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success." Later, he addressed the controversy generated by his comments on WOR Radio, where he refused to apologize, said that he objected to people "using health issues like obesity as comic talking points," and insisted that his review was "constitutionally protected, so there's nothing anybody can do" to stop him.

Through it all, McCarthy remained silent. But yesterday, out on the publicity tour for her latest movie, "The Heat," McCarthy finally commented on Reed's nasty review. As part of a profile in The New York Times, McCarthy broke her silence to reporter Dave Itzkoff:

"When Ms. McCarthy was asked about the review over lunch in April, her characteristically cheerful tone evaporated. In a softer voice, she said her initial reaction to reading it had been 'Really?' and then, she said, 'Why would someone O.K. that?'
Without mentioning the name of its author, Ms. McCarthy said: 'I felt really bad for someone who is swimming in so much hate. I just thought, that's someone who's in a really bad spot, and I am in such a happy spot. I laugh my head off every day with my husband and my kids who are mooning me and singing me songs.'"

McCarthy also noted that if she'd received Reed's review when she was was 20, it "may have crushed" her.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how Reed handles this in his review of "The Heat." I'm sure it will include a thoughtful, deeply nuanced consideration of McCarthy's performance.

Read more of "Melissa McCarthy Goes Over the Top."

The Showrunner as Auteur: How TV Critics Have Learned From Film Critics' Mistakes

Sam Adams — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:15:00 GMT

At The New Republic, Craig Fuhrman uses a review of Brett Martin's "Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad'" -- multiple colons in the original, sadly -- to go after what he calls "the showrunner fallacy." He writes:

"Our best TV shows may be more complex than ever, but our theory of their greatness has become utterly reductive: In this reputedly golden age of television, it all boils down to the showrunner, television's own auteur."

Television, Fuhrman argues, is a collaborative medium, "created less by celebrity chef than crockpot." On his blog, he goes into specifics, citing examples of great TV moments that came about because of interaction -- and sometimes friction -- between creative elements. The memorable moment in "Mad Men"'s first season when Don Draper's reunion with his family turns out to be a fantasy was suggested by an AMC executive, while the vertiginous pullback showing "Breaking Bad"'s Walt in his crawlspace was suggested by the episode's director.

To this, I can only say: Duh.

Although Fehrman produces plenty of evidence, much drawn from "Difficult Men" and Alan Sepinwall's "The Revolution Was Televised" that the recent rise in television's critical fortunes has been accompanied by a concomitant focus on showrunners -- a role that often encompasses creator, head writer, and executive producer -- he's hard-pressed to find examples of anyone treating a showrunner as a series' sole creative authority.

The closest he gets is a quote from Martin's book. At one point, he notes Chase's affection for the powerful post-auteur directors of Europe. Yet those directors, Martin continues, "would have killed for a fraction of the godlike powers over an ever-expanding universe that [Chase] exercised from his office. ...His name and its power were so often invoked, usually in whispers, that he came to seem like an un-seen, all-knowing deity."

Fuhrman makes brief reference to Cahiers du cinema, "the French publication that popularized the original film version of auteur theory," but he seems unaware that this particular straw man has long since been torn apart. In essence, he's retracing the tracks laid down by Pauline Kael in her book-length essay "Raising Kane," which argued that writer Herman Mankiewicz deserved as much credit for "Citizen Kane" as Orson Welles, if not more so.

There's a reason Francois Truffaut called his initial formulation "la politique des auteurs" rather than the auteur theory, as Andrew Sarris named its English-language equivalent. Treating a director as the primary -- not sole -- creative force behind a film was a polemical notion, one that could be applied to a select group of artists. That a movie like "The Wizard of Oz" achieves greatness despite its having been been worked on by no less than four directors does not disprove the auteur "theory," any more than "The Walking Dead" surviving the departure of several showrunners disproves their overall importance. Like any other school of cinematic analysis, auteurism is a tool, more useful in some cases than others. Pointing out that it doesn't account for every facet of a work's complexity is like saying that hammers are useless because they can't cut wood.

The elevation of showrunners has as much to do with culture as criticism. It's an easy shorthand, and one that reflects the tremendous influence that certain -- not all -- showrunners have on their shows. Part of running a successful show is knowing how best to take advantage of the many talents at your disposal: that David Milch deliberately wrote long monologues for "Deadwood" actor William Sanderson, whose discomfort with extended speeches fed the constant anxiety of his perpetually ill-at-ease character E.B. Farnum, hardly contradicts Milch's influence. In fact, it's a prime example of a creative force turning a potential negative into a positive, seeing something no one else saw.

No sane critic would claim, or ever has, that a director or showrunner is the only force at work on a movie or series, excepting experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage or James Benning. Nor do most auteurs attempt to take all the credit. Matthew Weiner's "Mad Men" commentaries are rife with acknowledgements of the costume designers, cinematographers, directors and day players whose work goes into the show. Of course, you can't make an amorphous collective the subject of a New York Times Magazine cover. Showrunners are, among other things, brands: Would you be more or less likely to watch a futuristic Western set in space if you knew it was "from the creator of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer?'"

As cultural phenomena go, the notion of "serious TV" is relatively new, and that goes for TV criticism as well. The auteur theory helped legitimize the work of the overlooked studio craftsmen whose personalities shone through their work in disparate genres, and it's helped legitimize an art form whose boundaries are still being tested. But few if any critics endorse the "showrunner fallacy" Fuhrman militates against. Perhaps some film critics were slow to learn the lesson, but TV criticism shows few signs of repeating their mistakes.

UPDATE: An "erstwhile assistant" to "Mad Men"'s Matthew Weiner has weighed in with a comment on the TNR article, under the name Orbots: "Yes, it's a collaborative process and everyone contributes to the show, but all employees of the show, including the directors, report to the showrunner who tells everyone else what to do."

Does Sofia Coppola Have a Problem With Privilege, or Do Her Critics?

Sam Adams — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:01:04 GMT

With Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" due in theaters this weekend, the perennial debate over the distinction between the director and her characters has again reared its immaculately styled head. Although she's hardly the only filmmaker to come from wealth, Coppola has been uniquely diligent -- or, if you will, obsessive -- in making that privilege the subject of her movies. "The Bling Ring," which features Emma Watson and a cast of largely unknown young actors as pampered teens stealing baubles from the houses of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom et al., addresses the subject more directly than any film she's made. Most, though not all, of these kids are rich, but no matter how much they get, they want more.

Coppola based the film on a real-life case. Although she changed the names of the Bling Ring's bandits, she used transcripts from Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales to inform her fictional characters, and the names of their victims remain unchanged. She even convinced Paris Hilton to let her return to the scene of the crime; the starry-eyed teens rifle through Hilton's actual closets, extracting unseen but unambiguously naughty Polaroids from her safe (who knew Hilton was such a good sport?). Coppola seems intent on blurring the line between fiction and reality, just as her characters, gorged on a steady diet of TMZ and Perez, lose sight of the distinction between their victims' public faces and their private selves (not to mention private property). They refer to Lindsay, Paris, and Audrina with the faux familiarity of a red carpet reporter.

Throughout her career, Coppola has been dogged by references to her privileged upbringing, and a recurring tendency to conflate the director and her protagonists. After likening the luxe-besotted heroine of "Marie Antoinette" to Paris Hilton, the New Yorker's Anthony Lane went on to say:

"On the other hand, I spent long periods of 'Marie Antoinette' under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton... There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends."

This kind of bubbling bon mot is Lane's stock in trade, the kind that invariably makes people say, "I love him -- he's so funny." But there's a unique kind of derision that attaches to Coppola, a level of personal affront that never seems to fall on Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach. To be sure, Coppola's not as arch as Stillman or as self-flagellating as Baumbach; she watches her characters from up close rather than at a safe distance, more interested in seeing the world through their eyes than judging it through hers. But even after five features, she's still treated in some corners like an upstart, a spoiled little girl who owes her career to her famous father (Jason Reitman, by contrast, has earned everything he's ever had). Note the recurring theme in "The Bling Ring"'s early reviews:

Don Simpson, Smells Like Screen Spirit:

"As if using cinema as therapy to deal with her own guilt trip for being brought up into Hollywood opulence, writer-director Sofia Coppola once again delivers us into a world of spoiled young people grappling with their warped sense of entitlement."

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter:

"These scenes needed a kind of satiric edge that is clearly beyond Coppola's grasp... Perhaps even more here than in her other films, Coppola's attitude toward her subject seems equivocal, uncertain; there is perhaps a smidgen of social commentary, but she seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it.

Ryland Aldrich, Twitch:

"Instead of using character development to teach the audience what went wrong with these kids (or, say, generation), Coppola just takes us on a 90-minute vacation into their fun-filled lives of coke-fueled clubbing and slo-mo selfies."

Prairie Miller, Newsblaze:

"The fact that Sofia Coppola ('Marie Antoinette,' 'Lost In Translation') is herself a pampered Hollywood princess -- and has even signed a pricey item for Louis Vuitton's collection, whose fleeced product placements figure all over this movie along with endless others -- may scream conflict of interest from the starting gate... Coppola is socio-economically immersed to such an extent in her subject matter at hand, that it's repeatedly difficult to tell what she's observing as opposed to embracing."

Kaleem Aftab, The Independent:

"Coppola's regular cinematographer Harris Savides (who died shortly after principal photography completed) shoots Hilton's house like it's an episode of MTV’s 'Cribs.'"

This last criticism is especially baffling, since "The Bling Ring"'s furtive, dimly lit nighttime excursions are the polar opposite of "Cribs"' glossy wallowing. If anything, "The Bling Ring" veers too far in the opposite direction; an early scene in the white-on-white kitchen of Watson's surrogate family is overlit to the point of being washed out, and the stars' treasure troves have the flat, overstuffed look of a clothing store's storage closet (in his review, Time Out New York's Keith Uhlich specifically noted the "consistently sickly pallor" of the images). There's one mesmerizing long take of the Bling Ring burglars making their way through the glass box of Audrina Patridge's Hollywood Hills pad, but the movie doesn't fetishize their loot with anything like the single-minded determination of its characters.

The attacks on Coppola's upper-class upbringing -- by far the rule, rather than the exception, in Hollywood -- resemble nothing so much as the cries of nepotism directed at Lena Dunham, whose success has also long since surpassed whatever leg up she may have had. It's hardly a coincidence that they're both women, or that neither has made any attempt to hide where she came from. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to take issue with Coppola's work, or Dunham's, but there's also an insidious bias at work, a tacit assumption that women's art is always about themselves while men can stand outside and objectively comment: Women feel; men think. That Coppola might be capable of both is apparently more than some critics can swallow.

Read "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," the article that inspired "The Bling Ring."

From the Wire: From China With Love (Of Additional Revenue Streams)

Matt Singer — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:07:03 GMT

The recent remake of "Red Dawn" was initially conceived as a paranoid thriller about an invasion of the American homeland by Chinese military forces. But in post-production, every reference to China -- dialogue, names, uniforms, flags -- was replaced with a reference to North Korea out of fear of upsetting Chinese censors. Ironically, the fact that North Korea is so economically weak enabled the filmmakers to cast them as such physically powerful villains. Presumably if North Korea suddenly decided to start permitting American films into the country, the producers would have had to recast the bad guys again (to, I don't know, mad invaders from the Maldives or something).

As Vadim Rizov's fine article for Film.com makes clear, when it comes to the international box office these days, China's the country with the true power. When movies aren't cutting out potentially objectionable material for the Chinese market, they're cutting in additional scenes featuring Chinese actors and storylines. Why? Rizov's primer on the subject:

"China's ever-increasing role in the decisions Hollywood makes have been an urgent topic of discussion for years now; various projections all conclude the country should be the second-biggest market in the world by the end of this decade. Consider 'Iron Man 3:' as of pretty much right this second, China has contributed 10% of the film's nearly $1.2 billion worldwide gross, one reason why Marvel was ready to hire a consulting agency to help it gain official approval. Like two recent releases -- '21 & Over' and 'Looper' -- the strategy was to create China-only footage that would win the authorities' approval to make it one of the 34 foreign films released in the country this year. That strict quota can be evaded by making an official co-production, but the rules for that are stringent: 30% of the production funds have to come from China, 30% of cast and/or crew must be Chinese, and the film must meet the nebulous standard of reflecting Chinese values and themes. (The major example so far being the 2010 remake of 'The Karate Kid,' though the final product was still recut to meet the censors' standards.)"

"Iron Man 3"'s additions, involving a pair of Chinese surgeons (played by Fan Bingbing and Wang Xueqi) who operate on Tony Stark's robo-heart, existed only to help the film gain traction in the Chinese market; by all accounts, you gained little by watching them and you lost nothing by missing them. The really interesting part of Rizov's piece is when he describes other movies that have made far more substantial content changes to appease Chinese officials. Take, for example, the movie "21 & Over," about a bunch of American buddies who celebrate their pal Jeff's (Justin Chon) 21st birthday with a wild night of partying. Or at least that's what American audiences saw...

"The point of the American version is that Jeff realizes he doesn’t want to be a doctor and stands up to his traditionalist dad, but in the Chinese cut he’s a Chinese transfer student who wakes up, realizes how terrible American lack of discipline is, and returns home to become a diligent doctor for the homeland. This, the 'Los Angeles Times' noted, gives the film the special distinction of not only giving 'the film a different feel but in fact also actively casting the U.S. in a bad light.'"

That's more than adding scenes; that's adding a wholly different theme than the original film contained.

Generally, these China-friendly cuts have not been well-received (that Kotaku article says many Chinese moviegoers actually "hated" the scenes with Fan and Wang). In an free marketplace, that would probably kill the push towards pandering scenes in a matter of months. But the Chinese market is closed, and carefully controlled by government censors. The added scenes might piss off audiences, but if they please the censors, then Hollywood's going to keep making them for a long time to come.

VODetails: 'Twixt'

Matt Singer — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:26:58 GMT

More and more films premiere on Video on Demand -- if they don't simply bypass a theatrical release altogether. Because VOD reviews are often scarce and hard to find, Criticwire created VODetails, a recurring column to help you figure out whether a new VOD release is worth your hard-earned dollar. This time we're looking at "Twixt," the latest film from Francis Ford Coppola -- not the classic story of star-crossed lovers who meet over a shared candy bar.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Val Kilmer, Elle Fanning, Joanne Whalley

Criticwire Average: C+ (13 critics)

Synopsis: "A writer with a career in decline arrives in a small town as part of his book tour and gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a young girl."

Trailer:

Reviews:

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York:

"'The Godfather' it's not, but this had more vigor and immediacy than either 'Youth Against Youth' or 'Tetro.'"

G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle:

"Fun, but fairly flimsy -- it doesn't have the ambition of his previous film, the black-and-white character piece 'Tetro.'"

Chris Alexander, Fangoria:

"The joy of 'Twixt' is to watch Coppola unspool a film that acts on instinct and impulse as opposed to narrative drive, a picture that celebrates the joy of experimenting free of the commercial choke of any kind of studio system."

Catherine Shoard, The Guardian:

"Apparently inspired by a booze-induced dream, it's simply too full of personal import to connect with an audience."

Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter:

"An embarrassingly juvenile film from a once major auteur."

"Twixt" is now available on VOD and iTunes.

Neil LaBute Trashes Theater Critic Who Trashed His New Play

Matt Singer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:33:39 GMT

Writer/director Neil LaBute has a new Off-Broadway production entitled "Reasons to Be Happy," a sequel to his 2008 show "reasons to be pretty." On the whole, it's gotten some pretty good reviews, including a very favorable notice from Alec Baldwin's favorite theater critic, The New York Times' Ben Brantley, who called the show "the most winning romantic comedy of the summer" with a "dynamite cast." "Reasons to Be Happy" has already been extended through the end of June.

But that is not reason enough to be happy, it seems. Because amongst the positive reviews is a negative one from Time Out New York's David Cote. And it is a negative one. Here is its introduction:

"If Neil LaBute were to teach a course on playwriting, I bet his lesson plan would look something like this: 'Week 1: Dumbing down characters to pad out dialogue and pump up conflict.' 'Week 2: Stringing together two-person scenes, no matter how monotonous it gets.' 'Week 3: Embracing flat, shallow protagonists whose poor life choices are both predictable and banal.' And finally, 'Week 12: Blasting tracks by Nirvana during changes to simulate tension and edginess.' Luckily, there is no Professor LaBute, so we're not overrun with relationship clunkers such as 'Reasons to Be Happy.'"

Cote also suggests that LaBute title his next play "Reasons to Be Silent" -- so I'm going to guess he wasn't a fan. And LaBute, understandably, wasn't a fan of Cote's review. So he left a note for Cote in the comments below the article:

"david: actually i have taught writing courses at various universities and workshops and my lesson plan invariably begins by having students read the collected works of George Steiner, who was clever enough to remind us that 'a critic casts a eunuch's shadow.' some shadows, of course, are more portly than others but their effect on mankind is basically the same. brief and passing. keep enjoying the free tickets while they last.
nl"

Talk about hitting below the belt.

Cote and LaBute have sparred in the comments' sections of the critic's articles about the playwright before. Still, it does make me chuckle at the headline of Brantley's review: "Same Couples, Reshuffled by a Mellowing Playwright." Mellowing!

Read more of "Review: Reasons to Be Happy."

How Hit Movies Become Flops

Matt Singer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:00:40 GMT

It's one of the core components of modern online film culture: in the run-up to a new installment of a long-running franchise, you consider what's come before. When there's a new "Star Trek," you rank all the previous ones. When there's a new James Bond, you pay tribute to your favorite interpretations of the character. When there's a new Superman movie, you write about the underrated Superman movies that fans don't properly appreciate. This week, as audiences prepare for "Man of Steel," a lot of writers are defending 2006's "Superman Returns." At Deadspin, Tim Grierson goes to bat for "The Little Superhero Movie That Couldn't." Little might be a stretch -- the movie cost at least $200 million to make (Box Office Mojo lists the budget at $270 million) -- but who cares. The movie, Grierson says, has its merits:

"With hindsight, we can see that 'Superman Returns' is something of a precursor to the approach that J.J. Abrams has taken with his 'Star Trek' reboots. Those movies function both as a nostalgic reminder of the franchise's past glories and as a self-aware twist on a story we think we know. Except 'Superman Returns' isn't nearly as cute and self-satisfied. Yes, the movie riffs on two of Superman's most well-known catchphrases ('Truth, justice and the American way' and 'It's a bird, it's a plane...'), but especially rewatching the movie you notice how incredibly innocent the whole thing is."

At Cinema Blend, Sean O'Connell has his own 3-point defense of "Superman Returns," which includes an appreciation of the way the movie looks away from its hero long enough to consider his impact on his (and our) society:

"And what would happen to us in his absence. Beyond Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) winning a Pulitzer Prize, Superman's 5-year journey to Krypton's remains and back dropped the world into turmoil. Kal-El's presence alone should have a deep impact on our planet and its society. When you have an all-powerful force of justice policing the planet, who's going to commit a crime? There are deeper themes at play in the Superman mythology that [director Bryan] Singer tried to explore. At times, he went off the deep end into religious symbolism. But there have been suggestions in Snyder's marketing materials that say he and screenwriter David Goyer will explore the hope Superman brings to our nation... and I think that was touched on in 'Superman Returns.'"

Playing off Lois Lane's Pulitzer Prize-winning article in the movie, Film School Rejects' Bitter Script Reader has his own essay on the subject entitled "Why the World Needs 'Superman Returns.'"

"It may not be a perfect film, but how often does one find such a film? 'Superman Returns' doesn't get enough credit for everything it does right, and for its ambitions to tell a different kind of Superman story. You can't judge the value of a film by how many sequels it spawned or how many careers it launched. Does the fact that Henry Thomas had few notable roles after 'E.T.' diminish the power of his performance there? Or the legacy of the film? Is 'Batman Begins' a great film only because it beget 'The Dark Knight,' or can we assess its creative success on its own merits? I won't dispute that there are metrics to measure the business success of a film but it would wrong to consider only those figures while giving the film a superficial reading."

The Script Reader's comments echo a tweet that floated through my feed earlier this week, with the following brief summation of the strange twists of fate that have befallen "Superman Returns" since its 2006 premiere:

"Weird fact: SUPERMAN RETURNS got good reviews when it was released, and made more money than BATMAN BEGINS. Now it's considered a flop."

True. When "Superman Returns" opened in 2006, it earned $391 million worldwide, slightly better than "Batman Begins' $374 million. At Rotten Tomatoes, "Superman Returns" still has a 76% approval rating from critics; only slightly worse than "Batman Begins"' 85%. But one movie spawned two sequels that were even more critically and commercially successful, and the other didn't.

When "Superman Returns" opened, I remember having long conversations about the movie's beautiful visuals, its impressive special effects (particularly in the spectacular mid-air shuttle rescue), its glorious John Williams score, and Kevin Spacey's deliciously campy turn as Lex Luthor. Now if someone brings up "Superman Returns" in casual conversation it's mostly as an example of what not to do in a superhero movie; to make fun of Routh's Christopher Reeve imitation or Singer's obsession with Richard Donner's "Superman" movies, or the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) Routh's Superman is, in the words of others, a "deadbeat dad."

This is a curious phenomenon. The movie hasn't changed in the slightest -- it is, frame for frame, the same motion picture it was when it was released seven years ago. This isn't like going back to "The Adventures of Superman" from the 1950s and discovering that George Reeves didn't fly so much as he jumped around on springboards; "Superman Returns"' effects haven't significantly dated yet. And it's not as if superheroes have gone out of fashion in the intervening time and we now scoff at the naive, foolish moviegoers of yesteryear with their curious and inexplicable tastes.

So how does a movie go from a hit to a flop in less than a decade? I think the culprit is something I've written about before on this blog: a movie industry that values hype over quality.

Today's blockbusters are designed to open as big and as wide as possible. Maximizing box office in a movie's first three days is not about quality -- it's about hype. Quality isn't what packs people into a multiplex on opening night; hype does that. Quality is what keeps them coming back for weeks or months on end, a business model that is increasingly irrelevant in modern Hollywood.

Big hype translates to big opening weekends. But hype can be dangerous as well. As I wrote a few months ago in a piece about the lukewarm reaction to the heavily hyped "You're Next" at South by Southwest, we become so fixated on the hypothetical movie in our minds that we're almost inevitably letdown by the actual movie on the screen. Eventually "the pleasure of assumption trumps the pleasure of discovery... as soon as [a movie] becomes tangible, we nitpick it to death, explain what it should have been instead (based on our extensive, authoritative analysis of the hype), and move on to the next obscure object of our desire."

Researching this blog post, I found an interesting article on Rotten Tomatoes from 2006 about the reaction to the first negative review of "Superman Returns," which was written by Movie City News' David Poland. His original piece doesn't appear to be online anymore, but Rotten Tomatoes' article quotes from it. Here are some of his comments:

"It's terribly cast, poorly conceived, extremely light on action, features a romance that is not remotely romantic, doesn't feature a single memorable, 'gosh, that was great' repeat-to-your-friends moment in a positive way (the blunder bits start early and often).
It's not a hideous piece of crap. It really is about a step behind 'X-Men: The Last Stand,' equally poorly directed, equally missing complexity, equally not up to the standards of the first two films, but with less interesting characters and absolutely zero sense of humor about itself."

Today, "Superman Returns" is considered a flop and a failure, so no one would bat an eye at Poland's comments. But guess what happened when he wrote them back in 2006?

He was vilified like a bald genius industrialist trying to create a new land mass in the Atlantic Ocean.

In a post on his blog, Poland republished a few of the emails he received after panning "Superman Returns:"

"I've seen the movie and I'd like to congratulate you on the sale of your soul. I hope you got a good price.
go fuck yourself! you suck as a movie critic. Get a new job. Your work place should hire me
nobody gives a shit about your stupid review of superman so shove it prick."

That right there is hype run amok.

It's interesting to note that "Superman Returns" wasn't just well-reviewed; in the early going, it was uniformly praised. Even after Poland's pan, the movie still had a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. One wonders if the overwhelmingly positive early reviews actually contributed to the eventual backlash by hyping the movie even further, and increasing the potential for disappointment.

It's too bad these emails to Poland are unsigned and anonymous; it'd be great to see whether these people have left the same or similar comments on negative "Man of Steel" reviews praising the movie (sight unseen) for returning the character to his roots in action and away from Bryan Singer's more touchy-feely interpretation. And even if these folks like "Man of Steel" now, how will they feel in seven years? Will they still like it? Or will the wind have changed again?

It all depends on the hype. For "Superman Returns," hype was both the life-giving rays of the yellow sun and the deadly radiation of Kryptonite.

A Young Roger Ebert's Letter to the Editor of 'Amazing Stories'

Matt Singer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:59:52 GMT

Here's a cool discovery. Ian Schoenherr runs a blog called John Schoenherr devoted to the work of his father, who was an award-winning illustrator for science fiction magazines and children's books. In a new blog post, the younger Schoenherr tracks down an issue of the sci-fi pulp Amazing Stories that featured one of his dad's pieces. Flipping through the magazine's August 1957 edition, he found another item of interest: a letter to the editor from one Roger Ebert, the future Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, then just a 15-year-old science fiction fan from Urbana, Illinois.

A few choice excerpts from the letter (which you can view in full at Schoenherr's blog):

"Dear Editor:
'Cosmic Kill' retained all the flavor and action of 'Empire of Evil,' another adventure classic.
I don't understand why you aren't going to use more serials. Surely a month isn't too long to wait, if the story is worth waiting for. It seemed to me that your recent continued tales weren't really long enough to warrant serialization...
By all means keep the book reviews! I don't read them for advice on which books to buy -- I have them before they are reviewed, but I just simply get a kick out of finding someone else's opinion on a book I've read.
I can't understand how a fine writer like Randy Garrett can produce work like he does, then turn around and come up with that 'Kyvor' nonsense. Just a satire on Edgar Rice Burroughs, and not even a good satire."

Even at that age, Ebert was a critic (get it together, Randy Garrett!). The most interesting item is the middle one, when Ebert encourages the publication of book reviews for books he's already read. Ebert was already more interested in criticism as a conversation starter, rather than a passage of judgement. That's fascinating.

Ebert had written on several occasions about not only his love of science fiction itself, but for the conversation those sci-fi stories started. In an essay for Asimov's Science Fiction, he described the influence "prozines" (professional sci-fi magazines) and "fanzines" (the homemade mags that sprung up in their wake) had on his life:

"It was in the virtual world of science fiction fandom that I started to learn to be a writer and a critic. Virtual, because for a long time I never met any other fans; they lived only in the pages of mimeographed fanzines that arrived at 410 E. Washington St. and were quickly hidden among the hundreds of SF mags in the basement, on metal shelves that cost four books of Green Stamps. 'Hidden,' because at first I concealed my interest in fandom from my parents. Fanzines were not offensive in any way -- certainly not in a sexual way, which would have been the worst way of all in a family living in the American Catholicism of the 1950s, but I sensed somehow that they were... dangerous. Dangerous, because untamed, unofficial, unlicensed. It was the time of beatniks and 'On the Road,' which I also read, and no one who did not grow up in the fifties will be quite able to understand how subversive fandom seemed...

Fan friendships, for me, were mostly long distance and conducted by mail, and the influence of fandom was on my writing voice. I became critical. I wrote smart-ass locs about other people’s writing, and read them about my own. I was in a world that stood outside the mainstream. Science fiction was the occasion for fandom, and often the topic, but the subterranean subject was a kind of kibitzing outsider world view. Because of fandom, we got to 1967 ten years before most of the non-fan world."

For a while, Ebert published his own fanzine, called Stymie. God, I would love to read a copy of that.

Ebert describes these fanzines as one of the first stages in his development as a writer. It's funny; years before I wrote my first review, I was already writing critical letters to the editors of comic books I loved. Then I moved up to letters to movie magazines; Premiere, Entertainment Weekly. On many occasions, I wrote to Ebert. He even published a couple of my questions in his Movie Answer Man column. It's funny, the similar ways seeds get sown, even in different eras. We all just want to talk to people who think the same strange way we do.

Read more of "Amazing Bedfellows."

[H/T The upcoming Ebert documentary, "Life Itself," on Twitter]

Much Ado About the Man of Steel: What Comic Book Filmmakers Can Learn from Shakespeare

Sam Adams — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:05:01 GMT

The reviews of "Man of Steel," Zack Synder's eagerly awaited -- and, in some corners, nervously dreaded -- Superman reboot are in, and one thing is clear: It's definitely better than "Superman Returns." Or it's worse. Henry Cavill is the best Superman ever! Or he's not fit to carry Christopher Reeve's jockstrap. Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer have boldly reshaped the Superman mythos for the 21st century, or they and Christopher Nolan (who did the initial legwork on the project before ceding the reins) have turned an iconic do-gooder into a brooding, conflicted mess: Batman in a red and blue suit.

Part of the attraction of superhero movies is that they come from a rich (if not always noble) history; they arrive with a tradition --and, more importantly, an audience -- attached. But in today's fan-dominated culture, that tradition is also a millstone around a filmmaker's neck. "The fans," an amorphous group composed of whoever happens to be yelling the loudest at any given moment, don't want a retread, but they don't want something too new either (sorry, Ang Lee). It's a no-win game, even with critics. Variety's Scott Foundas called "Man of Steel" "strenuously revisionist," while on Twitter, Film.com's David Ehrlich said it was "hopelessly torn between regurgitating a myth & telling a story. [I]nert, dull & terribly timid."

So is Snyder trying too hard or not hard enough? Perhaps he shouldn't be trying at all. In a New York Times editorial, Juliet Lpidos compared movie franchises to classical theatre, where the same stories were told and retold by different playwrights. Aeschylus wrote "The Oresteia," three plays about the Trojan warrior Agammenon; Sophocles wrote a play about Agammenon's daughter, Electra; then Euripides wrote his own Electra play. "That is not so different," she wrote, "from Christopher Nolan's deciding to take on Batman after Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher did."

Leaving aside the implicit equation of Sophocles and Joel Schumacher -- even if Sophocles totally put nipples on Oedipus's toga -- it's worth considering whether we'd be better off treating superhero stories like the received lore they are rather than holding each new version up against the previous one(s). Perhaps we could treat Batman or Spider-Man the way Shakespeare treated the earlier works he based his own plays on, or the histories he liberally reshaped (note: Do not use "Richard III" as a study aid for your English history test). Or, for that matter, we could treat the classic texts -- Steve Ditko's Spider-Man, Bob Kane's (or Frank Miller's) Batman -- as rough clay, to be molded into new and unfamiliar shapes.

The trouble, of course, is that while Aeschylus and Shakespeare were free to rip off whom they willed, the keys to the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude are held by some of the most powerful and well-funded entities on the planet, and they have no intention of letting their prized properties lapse into the public domain. The comic book creators who revolutionized the industry in the 1980s knew as much, which is why they chose neglected characters like the Sandman and Swamp Thing to make their mark (even Batman had fallen on hard times by the time Miller penned his iconic "The Dark Knight Returns"). One of the breeziest and most successful superhero franchises of recent years is "Iron Man," which approach its subject with the same devil-may-care smirk Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark fixes on a supermodel in a tight dress.

It's fitting that Joss Whedon used his break between the production and editing of "The Avengers," which hits its genre's sweet spots while winking at its absurdities, to make "Much Ado About Nothing," a loose-limbed Shakespeare production shot in his own house. "Much Ado" serves Shakespeare's words, but Whedon isn't afraid to add his own sensibilities, acknowledging the strain of barely submerged misogyny that marred Kenneth Branagh's more overtly faithful film version. Peter Jackson’s tediously faithful "Hobbit" or the bloated "Harry Potter" movies are the equivalent of an uncut "Hamlet" -- not without their potential charms, but at base, redundant. It's time filmmakers were allowed to approach the canon with an axe instead of a scalpel: They may do some damage, but at least they won't do the same old thing.

Read more of "'Hamlet' Meets 'The Hangover.'"

Laura Poitras and the Snowden Leak: How a Documentary Filmmaker Put a Human Face on the PRISM Scandal

Sam Adams — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:49:25 GMT

The Guardian and Washington Post's articles on the National Security Agency's top-secret PRISM program -- which no less an authority than Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg called the most important disclosure in American history -- bore the familiar bylines of reporters Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman. But those bylines were shared by an unfamiliar name, or at least one more likely to be familiar to film festival frequenters than readers of Foreign Affairs.

In the last decade, Laura Poitras has established herself as one of the sharpest and most gifted documentary filmmakers in the field, honored with awards from Sundance, True/False and Full Frame as well as a Peabody and a MacArthur "genius grant," not to mention a spot in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She's also been granted the dubious distinction of landing on the Department of Homeland Security's watch list, routinely detained and interrogated at the U.S. border while working on her 2010 film "The Oath." (One of the film's subjects was Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the former bodyguard to Osama Bin Laden whose Supreme Court case led to the end of the Bush Administration's military tribunals.) Along with 2006's "My Country, My Country," "The Oath" formed what Poitras began to call a trilogy of films about America post-9/11.

It's now clear that the subject of that still-untitled third film is the American security state, first previewed in a 2012 New York Times "Op-Doc" about NSA whistleblower William Binney. When it's placed side to side with the video interview of Edward Snowden, the government contractor who blew the whistle on PRISM, the two form an engrossing and deeply frightening picture of a society that has no idea how closely it's being watched.

The Snowden interview, shot in the Hong Kong hotel room where he was then taking refuge, is a shoestring affair, but even in its lightly edited static shots, Poitras' filmmaking skills are evident. She frames Snowden, who with his blotchy skin and scraggly stubble looks even younger than his 29 years, against a reflection of himself, an image that suggests the internal struggle preceding his life-changing, world-shaking decision and the fact that he will spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. "My Country, My Country" and "The Oath," both filmed largely in the Middle East, are observational portraits, designed in large part to humanize people the U.S. has spent the last 12 years demonizing, but her interviews with Snowden and Binney are more confrontational, facing their subjects head-on rather than following in their footsteps.

From an aesthetic standpoint, it's mildly disappointing to see Poitras falling back on talking heads, even when what those heads have to say is of vital importance. But the release of Binney and Snowden's interviews as stand-alone pieces indicates a savvy distinction on her part between breaking news and long-form documentary. It's a hard truth of documentary, one which too many issue-oriented filmmakers are slow to learn, that conveying large chunks of information -- in the sense of facts and figures -- is not something for which the medium is especially well-suited. Why would you watch a documentary based on Jeremy Scahill's "Dirty Wars" when you could simply read the book? ("I've only got a couple hours" is a practical reason, but not a very good one.)

What documentary can convey is the human cost that accompanies those facts, the toll it takes each time Scahill shoves a pushpin into his office wall, adding one more piece to an endless puzzle. Since the revelation of Snowden's identity, the debate over his decision has predictably turned personal: Who is he? What does he want? Have you seen his girlfriend's blog? But what emerges from Poitras' interview is a personal truth of a different sort. You see a man facing the potential wrath of the world's most powerful nation, with full knowledge of its capabilities. He may have come forward on principle, but he’s also made his name and face public because he knows there's no way to hide from the people he once worked for: better everyone know him than just the NSA. By putting himself on video, he's made himself human rather than abstract, and in so doing shined light on a government agency that thrives in the shadows.

Watch Laura Poitras' "The Oath" on Netflix. "My Country, My Country" is available for digital rental.

A Potential Record Breaker on Rotten Tomatoes

Matt Singer — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:29:39 GMT

The Hollywood Reporter reports that with two more reviews, 'Hating Breitbart,' the new documentary about the late conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart, will break a record on the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. That record: Biggest Gap Between Critics and Audience Score.

The audience's current RT score for 'Hating Breitbart:' a whopping 96%.

The critics' current RT score for 'Hating Breitbart:' a reverse-whopping 0%

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Rotten Tomatoes records become official when a movie hits ten reviews; 'Hating Breitbart' currently has eight. Here's what RT editor in chief Matt Atchity told THR about the impending record breaker:

"While interesting, Rotten Tomatoes editor in chief Matt Atchity says not to read too much into the phenomenon, since 'Hating Breitbart' is the kind of film that attracts politicos who are motivated to pump a film not on its merits but because they agree with its message."

THR also lists the current record holder and runners-up in this category -- #1 with is "Broken Bridges," a 2006 film starring Toby Keith about ~~a rift between Jeff and Beau Bridges~~ a washed-up country music star. That movie holds a 5% approval rating with critics and an 87% with audiences. Other films on the list include "The Boondock Saints" (20%/92.9%) and "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" (15%/87.7%).

I use Rotten Tomatoes at least once or twice a week, but I never really look at the audience scores. Should I? Atchity says in this case the grade is skewed by viewers' politics, but what about for regular Hollywood movies? Is it truer to an audience's reaction than CinemaScore, the de facto reference for theatergoers' opinions about movies? This week, for example, CinemaScore says audiences gave "The Internship" a B+; Rotten Tomatoes' audience score is a 69%. It breaks down similarly for "The Hangover Part III;" B- on CinemaScore, 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. In both cases, the RT audience rating seems closer to the truth (as I see it based on my own highly scientific analysis of asking random people I know who've seen those movies).

This is all moot, I guess, if "Breitbart" doesn't earn any more reviews -- or if it gets two positive reviews, which would put it at a 20% rating, and rank it below "Broken Bridges" on this list. Just how much do people hate Breitbart? That is the question.