This post was originally published in July 2008, in accordance with the New York and Self-Involvement blogathons. Ghostbusters was recently released on Blu-ray in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film’s premiere.

When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

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July 4th weekend is typically reserved for huge blockbuster releases, particularly those starring Will Smith and/or showcasing America as a force not to be messed with (against aliens or the British). Very, very rarely does an independent release even bother trying to go up against the studios during the big holiday. For example, the only option for an American indie we have this weekend is IFC’s wrong-holidayed I Hate Valentine’s Day, which is uneventfully the second Nia Vardalos movie in a month. And this year we don’t even have the usual sort of event movie debuting on July 4th weekend. There’s just Public Enemies and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Boring.

Isn’t it ironic that independent films can’t open on Independence Day? It would make sense for there to be a number of good U.S.-produced indies opening this week, going up against the big guys with their American spirit (including their disregard for broad, worldwide marketability) and evidence of the American Dream come true. Wondering if there have ever been great independents released at this time of year, we took at look at the last 30 years of cinema and found only a few significant titles.

See what little (American) films bucked the 4th of July weekend release system after the jump:
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It’s an appropriate week for Universal to announce they’re making an adaptation of the classic Atari game Asteroids, because chances are the thing will end up opening on a 4th of July weekend. Just like Independence Day and Armageddon. Actually, as far as I can tell a movie of that arcade game could very well be a sequel to Armageddon. Except that Universal won the four-studio bidding war, and Disney did not (I’m unsure if Disney was even one of the bidders, which also included Fox and Sony). But Disney should go ahead with Armageddon 2 anyway in order to give us another summer like that of ‘98. DreamWorks can also get in the game with a Deep Impact sequel, but it’d probably have to be distributed by Disney, so that might be an issue.

I have to concentrate on when this thing will be, because focusing on what this thing will be is futile. And that’s the primary reaction to the news today: what the hell will an Asteroids movie be about that will fill up a feature-length running time? And why did four studios fight over such a simple property? Check out some of these reactions from the film blogs after the jump:

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T

his review was originally published in February. Two Lovers is out on DVD this week.

Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

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Before seeing Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s new crime film Public Enemies, we decided to check out an earlier portrayal of the infamous bank robber, Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger. The 1945 picture is a bit disappointing in terms of bank jobs, which are mostly shown in quick succession during a montage. There is one interesting robbery, but technically it’s an armored truck heist (also, having been shot by Fritz Lang for an earlier film, the scene doesn’t quite fit the rest of the movie). From what we hear, the robberies in Public Enemies aren’t that much more memorable, even if they do resemble an MGM musical, which is a shame considering how clever the real Dillinger was.

We definitely prefer a clever criminal and a clever plan when it comes to bank robber movies. Otherwise it’s just yet another taut thriller or slapstick comedy involving a tunnel dig from the bakery/bathhouse/chicken restaurant/luggage store/etc. next door. So we’ve come up with ten favorite bank jobs that involve originality and a successful getaway (a plan isn’t that clever if it doesn’t work). There have been hundreds of bank robberies throughout film history so if we’ve forgotten something really clever, inform/remind us of the movie in the comments. We’ve purposefully excluded armed vehicle, stagecoach and train robberies, though, so stick specifically to internal bank jobs.
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The celebrity deaths keep on happening, which makes me hope that Death takes a holiday at least over the 4th of July weekend. Yesterday we lost actor and baritone singer Harve Presnell, who is best remembered nowadays for playing William H. Macy’s father-in-law in Fargo, and now today we say goodbye to Karl Malden, who won a supporting actor Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire, which was one of his four collaborations with director Elia Kazan. He was also Oscar-nominated for his performance in Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

Other memorable film appearances include roles in Gypsy, Patton, How the West Was Won, Birdman of Alcatraz, I Confess, Pollyanna and One-Eyed Jacks, directed by his occasional costar Marlon Brando. He also starred on TV’s The Streets of San Francisco. My favorite of his movies is Baby Doll because his character was one of the first I’d encountered where I wasn’t sure if I should like him or hate him. Ultimately I sympathized with him over his rival in the film, played by Eli Wallach, simply because I grew up loving Malden and his big bulbous nose. Plus, between Waterfront and Pollyanna, as a kid I always associated Malden with good, religious roles. Even though he hadn’t worked in years, his passing today marks quite a significant loss for both cinema and television.

Check out other film blogs’ tributes to the great actor after the jump:
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Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold, which has been somewhat missing in action since premiering at Sundance 2007, screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York before coming to DVD via Carnivalesque in November. Starring eventual Alexander the Last dreamboat Barlow Jacobs, who also co-wrote and produced, it’s a drama/documentary hybrid feature set in just-post-Katrina New Orleans that doesn’t always hold up in terms of narrative, but is always interesting in the frission between fact and embellishment. As I wrote when I saw it at Sundance:

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Yeah, it’s that kind of day where the teaser trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel is the most interesting thing to talk about. Well, honestly, it’s not the most interesting thing I’d like to talk about (though I realize I should have included the first movie in our “Creepiest Kids’ Movies” list), but not enough blogs are commenting on the latest racism evident in Disney’s upcoming 2D-animated film The Princess and the Frog (heck, hardly enough blogs are commenting on this). So instead of a discussion of racism in a kids’ movie, here’s a discussion of highly sexualized chipmunks in a kids’ movie.

Karina kind of foresaw the Chipette-debuting sequel “appealing to a young male audience’s latent lust for a trio of tarted-up little girl chipmunks” a year ago, and now this teaser is proof that the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise has gone from being influenced by Pink Flamingos to being influenced by Porky’s (or some other horny teen comedy). But while we actually had to see shit-eating in the first film’s trailer, at least we didn’t have to see any chipmunk erections in this spot. Meanwhile, some concerned people are fearing that this movie will encourage more lookalike couples. Really? Are lookalike couples that bad? Or is the real concern that the movie somehow will inspire kids to dress in drag? Is the tagline “Munk Yourself” some kind of reference to a transsexual narcissism fetish?

Check out the film blogs’ reactions to the trailer after the jump:
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Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:
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David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are releasing their second feature, Kamp Katrina, on DVD today via their Carnivalesque Films imprint. I wrote about the film nearly two years ago when it screened in New York, and described the film’s exploitation of the odd beauty of low grade imagery, a stylistic trope which the directors have expanded on in ther subsequent features, Intimidad and Invisible Girlfriend:

Kamp Katrina is shot cinema verite style on prosumer digital video. The roughness inherent to the format produces unexpectedly exciting effects. As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light.The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the “normal” American city.

The DVD package includes two essays: one on the movie itself by Stuart Klawans of The Nation, and another byJeff Ferrell on the notions of “cultural criminology” and the “carnivalesque.” The latter doesn’t directly reference the movie in the case, but instead provides theoretical backup for Redmon and Sabin’s wider project.

You can buy Kamp Katrina at Amazon or via the Carnivalesque web site.

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

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Leave it to Michael Bay to turn something already big into something bigger. No, I’m not talking about the “life-size” IMAX version of Optimus Prime. I’m referring to the gap between critic and general audience tastes, often referred to as the “critic-audience divide.” We’ve already seen it get worse this year via terrible yet popular movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but given the $201.2 million grossed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen over its first five days, we film writers are feeling the coming apocalypse soooo much more. Remember how last year we thought The Dark Knight made so much money so quickly due to the fact that reviews were so great? Eh, that probably wasn’t the truth after all.

Of course, a success like Transformers 2’s doesn’t exactly prove critics are worthless, only those who function simply as a thumbs up/thumbs down sort of recommendatory guide. Plenty of critics should continue to be worth reading if they’re otherwise good reads and create or allow for discussion without merely saying a film is good or bad. One of my favorite kinds of critic, for instance, is the kind that may turn me onto a film despite him/her having disliked it, as some scathing reviews of Transformers 2 have almost done.

A reader commented on my previous post about Transformers 2 with the claim that all our negative reviews helped the movie be so successful. If that’s the truth, maybe we should start using negative psychology and trash the great little films we really love. Or, we can just stop worrying about the majority audience liking different things as us and enjoy all the death threats we get from mainstream moviegoers when we disagree with them. Isn’t it often better for our sites’ traffic to stir up contention anyway?

Oh well, here’s another crop of critical whinery after the jump:
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Apparently three-time Oscar nominee Michelle Pfeiffer has been relegated to playing only “cougars.” The slang term has been used heavily to describe the actress’ latest character, a Parisian courtesan who has an affair with a pretty boy half her age (Rupert Friend). But just prior to appearing in Chéri, which reunites her with the Dangerous Liaisons writer-director team-up of Christopher Hampton and Stephen Frears, Pfeiffer starred in two direct-to-video releases in which she similarly ends up with a much younger guy. In Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman she falls for Paul Rudd, while in Personal Effects she has an affair with Ashton Kutcher (ironic since Heckerling’s film takes shots at Kutcher’s marriage to real-life “cougar” Demi Moore).

The term “cougar” has some negative connotations, which is a shame given all the movies we see in which an older man romances a younger woman and think nothing of it. But it’s good to see Pfeiffer still getting work at her age (51), especially in roles celebrating the idea that older women can still be desirable. And in our opinion she’s every bit as desirable as she was at age 25, when she broke through with her sexy appearance in Scarface.

Below we spotlight ten other actresses/characters who’ve shown us that aging women can still be very attractive to young men.
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In Coppola’s house on Broadway. Outside the wind is howling, whipping the laurel bushes. The sailboats in the bay are lying almost flat, the waves sharp-contoured and restless. The Alcatraz Light is flashing signals, in broad daylight. None of my friends is here. It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams. Only books provide some measure of comfort.

The NYTimes.com has published an excerpt of Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.