Mole and Fish
Posted on May 31, 2009 at 8:00 am
Many thanks to Dana Stevens of Slate for recommending this heartwarming little film:
‘Star Trek’ and ‘Terminator Salvation’ — Spoiler Alert Discussion
Posted on May 26, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I love the Slate Spoiler Specials, discussions of movies for you to listen to on the way home from the theater. Because they allow the participants to include spoilers in the conversation, they are more satisfying than a review can be. I’d love to invite my readers to have a spoiler-permitted discussion as well. If you like, listen to the Slate spoiler specials on Star Trek and Terminator Salvation first if you like, and then weigh in with your comments, questions, criticisms, and spoiler-filled thoughts. I’d love to hear from you and will add a few of my own. Beware, though — do not read until you’ve seen the films.
Debate: Is ‘The Reader’ Great Art or Hackneyed Tripe?
Posted on February 22, 2009 at 8:00 am
“Don’t Give an Oscar to ‘The Reader'” is the headline of an angry Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
I’ve argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness–what some critics have called “Nazi porn.” But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed–the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of “Holocaust revisionism,” which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.
SPOILER ALERT: Based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling The Reader
On the other side is Roger Ebert, who says “The Reader” is not a Holocaust movie; it is a movie about the consequences of not speaking up. He agrees with Rosenbaum that Winslet’s character “was responsible for inexcusable evil.” But he does not feel that the movie excuses her or redeems her in any way. He believes the movie’s point is that Michael was guilty of worse not because the consequences were as bad but because his education and circumstances gave him more of a choice.
Who committed the greater crime? Michael, obviously, although few audience members might see it that way. He was more mentally capable than she was. She is deeply, paralyzingly ashamed of her illiteracy. It has led her a lifelong neurosis. She worked for the Nazis, as many other Germans did with much less reason, or none at all. What did she go through to keep her secret? What lies did she tell, what intimacies did she betray? Has she never been able to have a relationship with a man without using sex and her greater age to prevent the man from learning of her shame? What kind of a monster was she, that she helped innocent victims to go to their deaths because of a secret that seems trivial to us?
Slate’s Movie Club Analyzes 2008
Posted on January 12, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Every January Slate Magazine asks some of the country’s top critics to have an exchange of emails about the year in film and reading it is like sitting in on a terrificly well-informed, lively, thoughtful, and provocative conversation about what we’ve seen and what it all means. I like seeing these critics transcend the reviews of individual films and look back on everything they have seen to provide some context and contrast. This year, for the first time the group is all-female and I think that adds an extra level of candor and some new topics to the debate. They talk about what made them cry and laugh, about the way parenthood and the decision to terminate a pregnancy are portrayed on screen, about the different ways readers respond to women critics and how all of us bring what we are to what we watch, and about the effects of plastic surgery on actresses. They had very mixed feelings about the year’s biggest hit, “The Dark Knight,” lukewarm admiration for much of the winter-season “earnest snooze” Oscar-bait, and some surprising affection for “The House Bunny” and “Ghost Town.” I was also glad to see how moved they were by the wonderful documentary “Young @ Heart” but surprised — and unpersuaded — by some support for “Step Brothers.” The conversation is well worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the comments I found most illuminating and fascinating:
Reluctant as I am to suggest that gender guarantees anything when it comes to opinion, I do believe that a greater number of female voices would add more to the debate than a deeper appreciation of the work of Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola. (The under-representation of African-American, Asian-American, and Latin American voices is a whole other movie club.) At the very least, screenwriters might hear our exhaustion with lame slacker comedies and so-called romances that encourage us to welcome the attentions (and incubate the sperm) of socially maladjusted busboys. Or with “chick flicks” that speak to us solely in the language of consumption. (“SATC” and “The Women,” I’m looking at you.) Or with the endless parade of superheroes, differing only in costume and sidekick and comic-book provenance, making the world safe for … more superheroes.
Don’t get me wrong: My brain is permanently branded with some of Christopher Nolan’s vivid imagery (that trip-wired 18-wheeler!), but The Dark Knight left me more stunned than admiring. Nolan may be making a sincere attempt to confront the ethics of vigilantism and the seductiveness of disorder, but he’s constantly undermined by a baffling screenplay (just because a movie’s theme is chaos doesn’t mean the storytelling has to comply) and a vision that draws all of its energy from death. And am I the only person to notice that Christian Bale has less personality than the Batbike? His terminally constipated crusader made me yearn for Michael Keaton’s superlative spell in the suit a decade ago: Being sexy while wearing a pointy-eared balaclava is a lot harder than it looks.
Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times, Reverse Shot, and Las Vegas CityLife
owns every crease in that monument of a face, and his great strength as a performer, especially as he ages, has been to understand and inhabit that monumentality with an ironic intelligence that, in this year’s Gran Torino, comes close to imploding the Eastwood myth from within.
Dana Stevens of Slate
I know that when I analyze something intended for women, I reflexively filter what I’m seeing through a kind of primal female truth-ometer, and then I decide whether to make use of my findings or toss them aside. (And, see, this is where I completely get Jeannette’s intense response to “Revolutionary Road,” although it’s not a response I share; I was definitely among those peering through thick Plexiglass and admiring the home furnishings. By the way, read Judith Warner’s really excellent New York Times piece about “The Lure of Opulent Desolation.”) I mean, it’s not that a story can’t be a wild and crazy fantasy–but neither can I, a girl of my gender, put up with a crass, clueless pantomime like, say, Diane English’s wrongheaded remake of “The Women.” Similarly, when I consider something obviously intended primarily for men (I mean specifically boy-men, a la Apatow, Farrelly, and related Jackass-iana), I’m aware of my minority place in the audience.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, movie critic at Entertainment Weekly
Dana Stevens on the Melancholy Beauty of the Charlie Brown Specials
Posted on November 8, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Slate’s Dana Stevens has a lovely essay on “Why I love the melancholy Peanuts holiday specials,” in honor of a new holiday collection dvd set
Those specials–at least the big three: the Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas shows that were recently released in a “deluxe holiday collection” by Warner Bros.–have a mood unlike any animated film for children made before or since. For one thing, they’re really, really slow–slow not just by our ADD-addled contemporary standards but also next to the programming of their own time. Just compare the meandering pace of A Charlie Brown Christmas
(in which Charlie tries, and fails, to direct a single rehearsal of a Christmas play) with the generation-spanning epic crammed into Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
(1964). But what really sets the Peanuts specials apart is their sadness. Even digitally remastered, with the background colors restored to their original vivid crispness, the Peanuts holiday specials have a faded quality, like artifacts from a lost civilization. As Linus observes of the wan, drooping pine sprig Charlie Brown eventually rescues from a huge lot of pink aluminum Christmas trees, “This doesn’t seem to fit the modern spirit.”
My favorite is this beautiful scene with the children skating to the bittersweet music of Vince Guaraldi.
Stevens talks about the insights from the extras on the new DVD set, which reveal that it was Schultz who insisted that there be no laugh track and that real children provide the voices. But the highlight of the piece is her lyrical descriptions of what made those early specials so, well, special.
Here I could write an epic poem detailing the multiple felicities of the Peanuts specials: the van Gogh-esque night sky that dwarfs Linus and Sally as they wait in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, Linus’ stirring reading from the Gospel of Luke at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas