Salon.com > Beyond the Multiplex http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 00:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Sympathy for the devil worshipers http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/until_the_light/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/until_the_light/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/12/06/until_the_light It's taken more than a full decade for the most widely demonized and vilified music scene in rock history -- the Norwegian black metal scene of the early to mid-'90s -- to get anything close to a fair treatment in a documentary film. In truth, the job isn't finished yet. As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's "Until the Light Takes Us" is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.

Black metal burst onto the international scene like an explosion of media catnip 16 or 17 years ago with a wave of church burnings in Norway and other Scandinavian countries that destroyed numerous historical landmarks, including the legendary Fantoft stave church, originally built in 1150. A few weeks after the fires started an articulate young musician named Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh, of the one-man band Burzum) discussed them with a reporter, suggesting that he knew who was responsible and elaborating a complicated litany of motives, from neo-paganism and anti-Christianity to Nordic nationalism and anti-Americanism.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/07/until_the_light/feed/ 18 On “The Road” with John Hillcoat http://www.salon.com/2009/11/30/john_hillcoat_the_road/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/30/john_hillcoat_the_road/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//2009/11/29/john_hillcoat_the_road John Hillcoat spent many years honing his craft with music videos and struggling to get feature projects launched. So his emergence in 2006 with the stylish, startling and violent Aussie western "The Proposition" -- scripted by singer-songwriter Nick Cave, an old friend and current neighbor -- wasn't as sudden as it appeared to be. (It was actually his third feature.) That film's depiction of a memorably harsh environment brought Hillcoat to the attention of producer Nick Wechsler, who was planning an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-son parable, "The Road."

Hillcoat's resulting film (scripted by British playwright Joe Penhall) has already been touted this year as an Oscar contender, which is remarkable when you consider that its characters have no names and its color scheme -- a few momentary digressions aside -- features steely gray, dark gray and pale gray. Indeed, the sun-baked 19th-century outback of "The Proposition" is like a summer garden party on the Seine compared to the world of "The Road," which has been devastated by an unexplained nuclear or environmental catastrophe that has killed off nearly all life, plunged the planet into endless winter and reduced human society to pure atavism.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/30/john_hillcoat_the_road/feed/ 10 Werner Herzog among the demented iguanas http://www.salon.com/2009/11/21/herzog/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/21/herzog/#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/20/herzog If the essence of Werner Herzog could somehow be bottled and preserved, it could make a more effective remedy for clinical depression and seasonal affective disorder than anything found in the pharmacist's cabinet. Whatever you make of the guy's movies -- a prodigious and often baffling output unlike anything else in cinema history -- he's the most irrepressibly optimistic man in show business. At one point in our recent phone conversation, he took a break from listing all his innovations and brewing projects and exclaimed in his trademark Bavaria-by-way-of-West L.A. drawl: "You name it -- it just can't get any better!"

Maybe "show business" sounds like a dis, when applied to a filmmaker who began as one of the young lions of 1970s New German Cinema (with "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and "Nosferatu the Vampyre"), developed a global reputation for overweening ambition (mainly "Fitzcarraldo") and then moved on to become a groundbreaking American documentarian (with films like "Grizzly Man" and the Oscar-nominated "Encounters at the End of the World"). I don't mean it to. What I mean is that Herzog loves traveling the world making movies -- lots and lots of movies -- and showing them to as many people as possible.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/21/herzog/feed/ 15 John Woo on “Red Cliff” and the rise of Chinawood http://www.salon.com/2009/11/19/john_woo/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/19/john_woo/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/18/john_woo When John Woo left Hong Kong in the early 1990s, a few years before the then-British territory was to be handed over to the People's Republic of China, it clearly marked the end of an era. Although he was hardly the only important Hong Kong filmmaker, Woo symbolized the sudden global emergence of the territory's highly choreographed action cinema. With pictures like "Bullet in the Head," "The Killer," and the "Better Tomorrow" series, he had personally elevated the violent police thriller to implausible levels of symbolism and visual poetry.

Woo's move to Hollywood suggested that Chinese authorities might have trouble convincing the best talents in Hong Kong's film industry to stay home, under what was presumably going to be a censorious and intrusive regime. It also suggested that however corporatized mainstream American film had become, it could still attract exciting directors from overseas. Indeed, while Hong Kong studios struggled with budgets and distribution problems over the next few years, Woo became a certified Hollywood hitmaker, directing the cult faves "Broken Arrow" and "Face/Off," along with the Tom Cruise vehicle "Mission: Impossible II," which grossed $565 million worldwide.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/19/john_woo/feed/ 4 Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Caught between two worlds http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:17:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/16/gordon_levitt At the ripe old age of 28, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is simultaneously a showbiz old pro and one of the hottest young acting talents to emerge in this decade. When Gordon-Levitt played his first high-impact dramatic roles in edgy, independent films like "Mysterious Skin" (2004) and "Brick" (2005), there were a handful of snickers at first: Wait, isn't that Tommy, the teenage kid from "3rd Rock From the Sun"? It was indeed, but Gordon-Levitt has been acting since early childhood. He had an extensive TV résumé long before the first of his 133 "3rd Rock" episodes -- with recurring roles on "Roseanne," "The Powers That Be" and the early-'90s "Dark Shadows" reboot -- and he damn sure hasn't let that role define his subsequent career.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/feed/ 6 Pedro Almod http://www.salon.com/2009/11/14/almodovar_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/14/almodovar_2/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:14:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/13/almodovar Whether by accident or design, Pedro Almodóvar never utters the name of Francisco Franco. He refers to the self-appointed generalissimo who cast such a long shadow across 20th-century Spain only as "the dictator." Yet there will always be a strange historical linkage between the two men. It was Franco's death 34 years ago that began to open Spain to the world, and it was Almodóvar's emergence as a major film director that symbolized his country's post-fascist cultural renaissance.

Having reached the implausible age of 60, Almodóvar today is no longer the hedonistic queer-cinema rebel who exploded out of Madrid's underground art scene with such mixtures of high camp, wrenching emotion and frank sexuality as "What Have I Done to Deserve This?," "Law of Desire" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Both the filmmaker and the world around him have changed immensely during the intervening decades, and with his new film, "Broken Embraces," Almodóvar reveals himself as one of the last great champions and defenders of classic European cinema.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/14/almodovar_2/feed/ 3 “The End of Poverty?”: How the rich steal from the poor http://www.salon.com/2009/11/13/poverty_8/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/13/poverty_8/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:13:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/13/poverty So here's the real question about capitalism, the one nobody really wants to face: Does it create gross inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of its energy and dynamism -- or is gross inequality itself, between rich and poor, between the industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the principal product of capitalism over the last five centuries?

Philippe Diaz's powerful and upsetting documentary "The End of Poverty?," which weaves together a wide range of talking-head experts and a startling array of ordinary poor people and their advocates from around the globe, casts a strong vote for Option B. Unfortunately, that answer is virtually off-limits in public discussion these days, and is likely to make the film and its French-American director unpalatable to precisely the audiences who should see it and think about it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/13/poverty_8/feed/ 109 Woody Harrelson on war, death, LBJ and Obama http://www.salon.com/2009/11/11/harrelson_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/11/harrelson_2/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/11/harrelson Woody Harrelson began our interview by climbing barefoot onto the interior windowsill of his hotel room overlooking New York's Union Square to point out an apartment across the square where he lived briefly, 15 or 20 years ago. (It's in the building that houses the Heartland Brewery, if you know the neighborhood. On the second or third floor, he couldn't remember.) Then he got into bed.

There wasn't an ounce of pretense about any of this, I swear. He was curious to get a look at that old apartment, and felt like telling me about it. He was tired, so he got into bed. When you meet Harrelson, you get a momentary glimpse of what a strange and exhausting job it must be to be famous. The job involves meeting an endless ocean of people you don't know and most likely will never see again. The obvious solution would be to retreat behind a well-rehearsed performance of your persona, to recycle a handful of gestures and mannerisms.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/11/harrelson_2/feed/ 32 The undignified near-death of Miramax http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/04/miramax It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "sex, lies, and videotape," "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love," "Chicago," "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men," I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/05/miramax/feed/ 33 Lightning survivors tell (almost) all! http://www.salon.com/2009/11/03/act_of_god/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/03/act_of_god/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/03/act_of_god You probably don't need a movie to tell you that lightning can evoke something approaching religious terror in the most atheistic people, and can be seen as the direct work of God by the faithful. Maybe your own body told you that, the last time the hair on your neck and arms stood rigid while a bolt took down a neighbor's tree. (At our family's getaway house in central New York state, summer lightning strikes have more than once caused the phone to ring. As my wife once observed, if it's actually God on the line, what do you say?) Or maybe the fact that virtually every religious and spiritual tradition views lightning as a death-dealing instrument of divine power clued you in.

Nonetheless, that movie is here, and Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal's "Act of God" is an undeniably provocative head-trip, laced with the most spectacular lightning-storm footage I've ever seen. (Baichwal got jobbed out of an Oscar nomination, in my view, for "Manufactured Landscapes," her film about photographer Edward Burtynsky and his remarkable work in China.) All those divided forks and curlicues and bizarre non-geometrical shapes are dreadful and gorgeous on their own terms, but you can't avoid the sense that there's something fundamental about them, and that they seem momentarily to open a window onto an understanding of reality you're not equipped to grasp.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/03/act_of_god/feed/ 17 Have an alt-horror Halloween! http://www.salon.com/2009/10/30/halloween_7/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/30/halloween_7/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:28:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/29/halloween

Alison Lohman in "Drag Me to Hell"

Maybe filmmakers have actually started to run out of ways to tell stories about the fact that we're all scared of dying (although we know it's likely to happen) and that we feel confused about sex. Maybe it's Hollywood's addiction to formula and nostalgia, and its corresponding aversion to artistic innovation. Maybe it's one of those cyclical, cultural things, that scholars a generation from now will start to figure out, like the disappearance of the western.

Whatever the reasons are, the mainstream American-made horror movie has been in dire condition for at least the last decade. A shambling corpse with rotting ligaments and lolling eyeballs, it just can't keep up with us. We want it to chase us away from the campfire and into the dark, deep woods, but it just shuffles around doing third-rate showbiz impersonations -- a little Jerry Lewis, a little George Romero -- and sinks back into its TV coma.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/30/halloween_7/feed/ 25 “Star Trek”: Coming to a theme park near you! http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/star_trek_live/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/star_trek_live/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/23/star_trek_live

A still from "Star Trek: The Animated Series"

Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. Or he would be if he had one; his ashes were shot into space in 1997. (Wait, I'm confused. Does that mean he's always spinning in his grave?) With Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Nurse Chapel in the original "Star Trek"), now both dead, control over the "Star Trek" franchise has devolved onto a slithery nest of interlocking corporate interests. Which accounts for a troubling press release I received on Friday, announcing the creation of something called "Star Trek Live."

Although the "Trek" franchise presumably has renewed Hollywood viability after this summer's lively and successful J.J. Abrams prequel -- the 11th "Star Trek" movie overall -- it long ago entered a decadent phase of creative and marketing metastasis: Spinoffs producing spinoffs, actors becoming directors becoming authors. (I'm still waiting for a film version of "Star Trek: The Animated Series," or a Web-only series based on William Shatner's co-authored "Trek" novels. Somebody's probably working on them.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/23/star_trek_live/feed/ 19 “Antichrist”: Lars von Trier’s voyage into madness http://www.salon.com/2009/10/22/antichrist_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/22/antichrist_2/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/21/antichrist

 

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in "Antichrist."

It's tempting to respond to Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" purely as an act of provocation, when it's really a cry of pain, and as such not fully articulate or comprehensible. Throughout his career, von Trier has fed on strong reactions, even insisted upon them. When informed during a press conference conducted by videophone after a New York Film Festival screening of "Antichrist" -- the Danish director rarely travels, and has never been to the United States -- that there had been few, if any, walkouts during the film, von Trier sighed heavily: "Then I have failed." He got a big laugh.

I'm inclined to think that the only honest way to deal with a movie as dreamlike and filled with self-hatred and sealed off from the world as "Antichrist" is by resisting von Trier's shtick. In other words, by withholding and scrutinizing your own strong reactions, by working your way around von Trier's pathological longing to be pilloried by many and adored by a few. So I'm not here to tell you that "Antichrist" is a great film, however much I admire its beauty and daring, because I think it's too damaged and crazy to be a great film. I'm also not here to tell you that it's a misogynistic abomination made by a sadist, even though that's one of the reactions von Trier has set out to provoke, and even though many women (and many men) may well decide they don't want to travel down the dark road into these particular deep woods.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/22/antichrist_2/feed/ 49 DVDs you should have seen — but didn’t http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/dvds/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/dvds/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/20/dvds

I keep vowing to publicists, editors and even a reader or two that I'll crank out these DVD roundups in something closer to a more regular fashion. But there's always some damn thing that trips me up, like the biological need for sleep and the fact that it's considered bad form to review films you haven't actually, you know, watched and stuff. (Check it out: One of the sets reviewed herein is an eight-hour documentary. In Czech. It was totally worth it and all, but seriously.) So suffice it to say there's way more stuff piled on the floor of the cubby I so laughably describe as my "home office," and I'll dig through some more of it soon. This time around we've got Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Fiona Gordon and Sara Diaz, supplying a veritable feast of quirky, off-center gal performances. (No, the woman in "Audition" definitely does not count.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/21/dvds/feed/ 12 Kids’ movies that aren’t for kids: The top 10 http://www.salon.com/2009/10/15/kids_grownups/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/15/kids_grownups/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/15/kids_grownups

 

A still from "Spirited Away"

I haven't yet seen the Dave Eggers-Spike Jonze film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," which might be the most eagerly anticipated big movie of the fall season. But let's be honest about that anticipation: Part of it is an earnest desire to see Jonze's apparently gorgeous fantasy construction, and part of it is mystified wonder mixed with schadenfreude. How do you turn a beloved picture book for small children -- a book with almost no text, predicated on evoking an imaginative response -- into a Hollywood movie, the most literal-minded and imagination-supplanting of all art forms?

Now, first of all, Jonze and Eggers are the men for the job, and if anybody can pull off such an impossible project without eviscerating the Sendak spirit, it'd be them. (I'm grateful that Tim Burton didn't get his clawed, furry paws into this one.) But that doesn't vitiate the marketing questions that obsess industry-watchers: Who is "Where the Wild Things Are" meant for, and who will show up to see it?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/15/kids_grownups/feed/ 87 Rape, power and Polanski’s “Chinatown” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/13/chinatown/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/13/chinatown/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/13/chinatown

In case you're wondering why the arrest of a 76-year-old man for a sex crime committed 32 years ago has provoked a world-historical display of stupidity and sanctimony on all sides, the answers, such as they are, can be found in "Chinatown." By pure coincidence (I think), the genre-defining 1970s neo-noir is the latest DVD release in Paramount's Centennial Collection, hitting the street barely a week after its director was detained in Zurich, pending extradition to the United States.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/13/chinatown/feed/ 87 The British indie explosion http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/brit_indies/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/brit_indies/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:08:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/08/brit_indies

 

From left, Tom Hardy in "Bronson," Michael Sheen in "The Damned United" and Carey Mulligan in "An Education"

Is it pure coincidence that three of the fall season's best movies are opening right on top of each other -- and that all three are products of Britain's suddenly resurgent indie-film industry? I'm voting both yes and no. It's coincidence in the sense that the film-release calendar seems to operate according to laws that aren't just random but positively irrational: It verges on marketplace suicide to open these three movies at the same time, but here they are. What's not coincidence is that the film biz in post-imperial, post-Tony Blair Britain is riding a hot streak, cranking out splashy, stylish, audience-friendly flicks that bear no resemblance to the fusty, fussy, Jane Austen-in-lingerie stereotypes of yore.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/brit_indies/feed/ 9 “Afterschool”: Death comes to YouTube http://www.salon.com/2009/10/03/afterschool/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/03/afterschool/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/03/afterschool

When "Afterschool," the impressive debut feature from the young American director Antonio Campos, first appeared on the festival circuit last year, it got described in various quarters as the first important movie of the YouTube generation. I fully understand how obnoxious that sounds -- and I'm eager to steer you away from such cliché snap judgments. While it's true that Campos uses such elements as cellphone videos, online porn clips and camcorder footage supposedly shot by the film's characters, those things are narrative tools or flavoring ingredients, and never the movie's point. If anything, "Afterschool" tells an archetypal story of prep-school alienation, reminiscent of both "Catcher in the Rye" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/03/afterschool/feed/ 5 Goys, God, dentistry and “A Serious Man” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:08:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/01/coens

AP photo

Directors Ethan Coen, left, and Joel Coen at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009.

So you want to hear a story? I've got one for you. It's about a beleaguered suburban dad who's got problems in his marriage and goes to see the rabbi -- actually, a whole sequence of rabbis -- with unsatisfactory results. It's got an envelope full of money and a glorious 1964 Coupe de Ville in it, both of which lead to startling and unforeseen consequences. It's got a secret message, possibly or probably from Hashem (aka God), inscribed on the teeth of an oblivious goy. This whole story might indeed be a fable about the way Hashem works in the lives of ordinary people -- or it might be about a dybbuk, a demonic spirit from ancient Jewish folklore. Then again, the fable might just be about the disordered, random operations of fate, and the futile human struggle to understand them.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/feed/ 42 Early odds on the Oscar derby http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff

 

A still from "Up"

It's an autumnal phenomenon, as predictable in its own way as the first signs of red and gold in the treetops: As dozens of new movies flood the fall marketplace, most of them without a hope in hell of reaching a paying audience, people in the industry begin to protest that the film economy is finally and permanently broken. This year the alarm has been sounded by indieWire blogger Anne Thompson, long among the most levelheaded and reality-based of Hollywood reporters, and that fact has momentarily transfixed the attention-impaired elite of movieland.

"The old independent market is over," wrote Thompson last week, summing up the aftermath of the just-completed Toronto International Film Festival, which saw only a handful of modestly scaled distribution deals. "A new one will take its place. But we are smack in the middle between the end of one paradigm and the start of another, and it's a scary place indeed." Added Thompson, "I saw one movie after another [at Toronto] that was unreleasable in the current climate," predicting that most of the 145 films for sale at Canada's huge film marketplace "will wind up streamed, downloaded and viewed on a small TV or computer or mobile screen."

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