Some thoughts on Vanity Fair’s Bright Young Hollwood thing: the only people I recognize besides for Jonah Hill and the kids from The Wackness are on this page, but that’s because I don’t watch Gossip Girl, right? Also: is Kat Dennings, like, wearing a bat suit?
Considering similar lines in Wanted and Jumper that each put the audience member in the unfavorable position of being condescended to by a pretty-boy unlikely action star, Glenn Kenny wonders, “Have screenwriters become so defensive/resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?”
Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeingSpeed Racer in a theater: Daniel Kasman’s latest entry at The Auteurs. It begins like this: “Upon return from Cannes, I saw two movies in rapid succession. The films probably should not be combined into any sort of synthetic criticism, but it is too tempting to at least collide their names in the same piece: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) adaptation. The arena we are dealing with is dimensionality.”
“The Happening is not just bad. It is more than awful.” At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully finds the dark side of Avante Retarde. “The painful truth is that I had a blast while watching the film–again, not in the intended manner–but when it ended, and especially when I woke up the next morning, my delight at the preposterousness of it all was gone and all that remained was frustration and anger.”
Blatant self-promotion: Your Blogger and Glenn Kenny joined the House Next Door boys for an epic, booze-soaked podcast. This is just the first part; stay tuned for parts two and three, where I accidentally slap my wife while she’s winning an Oscar and then walk into the sea in order to allow her career to continue its ascent without the anchor of my humiliations.
Glenn Kenny considers that “instant hit”, The Incredible Hulk. “If Edward Norton’s idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won’t play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody’s idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period?” He raises the issue to Norton himself, but ultimately comes closest to an answer via Jay-Z.
“It’s not just that there were a lot of black and white movies last year — it’s that most of them were fucking awesome,” writes Rich at FourFour. “Among them: Perspolis, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!…Killer of Sheep (a 30+ year-old bit of brilliance that didn’t see official release till last year), I’m Not There, in part (and, my opinion, the b&w parts were the only ones worth watching), and Frank Darabont’s preferred cut of The Mist. But my favorite black-and-white flick of ‘07 and possibly of all time is Control.” What follows is a short treatise on that film’s humanity through black and white cinematography; there are a lot of screencaps.
“When a filmmaker tells a story in such broads strokes, he or she does so because it allows certain ideas to be explored without exposition; when the scope of a story is already understood, already deeply seated in the audience’s understanding of narrative, those audiences are more perceptible to the details and nuances the filmmaker is able to explore and play with within that structure.” David Lowery considers Silent Light at /Hammer to Nail.
A day after learning and announcing that his job at Premiere.com had been eliminated, Glenn Kenny has already set up a new personal blog, free of association with Premiere/Hachette. Well, sort of: the subtitle on the TypePad blog is, currently, “Film writer Glenn Kenny’s own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very goddamn much.” The title-title is Some Came Running, and in the first entry, Kenny explains what he hopes to do with it: “Consider this space the drunken boat we stand in, trying to pull either and/or both of these figures in. Not to be loopy, or maudlin, or anything. Just a fancy way of saying…let’s hang, my friends.”
Related: “Hachette has always been an abortion of a magazine company,” writes Nick Denton at Gawker.
Another week, another dose of frustrating news about the state of film journalism. This morning longtime Premiere film critic (and occasional SpoutBlog commenter) Glenn Kenny used his blog to announce that his “position at Premiere.com is being terminated.” Glenn says he’ll keep up his Premiere-hosted blog if he can; otherwise, he’s looking for freelance work. The comments on his hour-old post are already getting lively; check them out and join in here.
Remember when the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle admitted that he hadn’t seen a bunch of movies that most would consider classic, and then he watched them and dismissed many (including Young Frankenstein and 2001) with lazy capsule “reviews” that, if not published in a major newspaper, would have been indistinguishable from IMDb message board missives?
It’s happened again. Apropos of … absolutely nothing, LA Times “Oscar expert” Tom O’Neill has made an announcement: he doesn’t like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise!!! Yeah, that Sunrise, the 1927 film that’s considered by many to be the pinacle of achievement of pre-sound cinema. Dismissing the film as the sentimental favorite of “hipsters” and “Oscar Nazis,”––and if such a thing exists, isn’t O’Neill, like, Mein Fuhrer?–– O’Neill then lays down his critical law:
Sunrise is paper-thin, hilariously schmaltzy. All three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham…What corn pone! Smothered in Cheez Whiz!
Of course, the hipsters and Oscar Nazi’s weren’t going to take this one lying down. Highlights from the eviscerations of O’Neill, and thoughts on What It All Means, after the jump. …Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”
For those of us old enough to have put a few years effort towards such a career but too young to have achieved any kind of institutional seniority, this is a pretty troubling state of affairs. Strippers are winning Oscars, but *I* have no future? There’s a great joke here, but because it’s on me it’s up to someone else to unpack.
In any case, I’ll point you to the comment sections on both The Reeler and The House Next Door, where bloggers/internet critics like Vadim Rizov and Andrew “Filmbrain” Grant are chewing over the issues with “old media” critics like Glenn Kenny and David Edelstein. Interestingly, a number of members of the extended Village Voice family weigh in, most notably Luke Y. Thompson, whose comment on Lee at The Reeler (which he now admits was “ill-considered”) touched off a firestorm of bashing.
Esquire has published a piece of “reported fiction” called “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” in which GOLF Magazine editor (!) Lisa Taddeo, writing in the voice of Ledger from beyond the grave, imagines how the actor spent his final days before overdosing on prescription medication in January. Inspired journalistic risk taking or tasteless garbage? Well, Glenn Kenny won’t honor this “loathsome stunt” with the compliment of a link. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wells, repeatedly justifying the story as an ancestor to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, essentially accuses his commenters who find it distasteful of hating: “All bold ideas are tut-tutted by the tut-tutters.” Tut. Tut.
I tried to read the story in order to make up my own mind, but I couldn’t get past the third sentence––something about the idea of a writer imagining a dead celebrity talking about how often he masturbated before his accidental death got blocked by my puke filter, I guess. If you are of stronger constitution, you’ll find it here.
Criterion is about to release a beautiful new edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I’ll have my own review of the two-disc set (which includes a new interview with Anna Karina, as well as a documentary about the actress’ relationship and work with Godard) next week, but others have already begun to weigh in.
Glenn Kenny sets to work dissecting the film’s literary references, both direct and indirect. At the A.V. Club, the less-enamored Nathan Rabin blames those references in part for making the film feel “at worst…like the product of a man rapidly losing interest in anything beyond politics and ideology.” Rabin cites the famous scene embedded above, in which Samuel Fuller reduces cinema to “one word, emotion!” as “bitterly ironic” because “it would be hard to imagine a film with less visceral emotion than Pierrot Le Fou.”
I have not watched my screener copy yet, but in art school I wore out a VHS copy of Pierrot Le Fou by watching it over and over again, falling obsessively in love with a film for maybe the first time,so I’m eager to watch it again and with Rabin’s assessment in mind. Still, after reading Rabin’s piece, I went back and took a second look at Kenny’s, and noticed that Kenny has very little to say in terms of an assessment of the film’s actual quality, or how it makes him feel––which is fine, neither is necessarily the goal of this particular piece––but it seems safe to assume that one doesn’t undertake such trainspotting in regards to a film that they could take or leave. Maybe the passion Pierrot inspires is more of the obsessive reference-catching and decoding variety; maybe that’s just not Nathan Rabin’s thing. In any case, I’m anxious to unwrap the DVD to see if it’s still mine.
Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeing Speed Racer in a theater: Daniel Kasman’s latest entry at The Auteurs. It begins like this: “Upon return from Cannes, I saw two movies in rapid succession. The films probably should not be combined into any sort of synthetic criticism, but it is too tempting to at least collide their names in the same piece: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) adaptation. The arena we are dealing with is dimensionality.”
Glenn Kenny
A day after learning and 
Another week, another dose of frustrating news about the state of film journalism. This morning longtime Premiere film critic (and occasional SpoutBlog commenter) 
Remember when
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”
Esquire has 
