American Psychosis. The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions.
It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class. The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. It is the cult of self that is killing the United States.
Sight & Sound's Critics' Top 250 Films.
In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh. Steven Soderbergh has directed 26 films since his 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape — the behind-closed-doors portrait of yuppie Louisiana often credited with kick-starting the indie-film revolution of the nineties, released when he was only 26.
In the 24 years since, he’s been a remarkably prolific chameleon, managing arguably more than any other director of his generation to successfully bounce between the low- and high-budget, not only directing but often editing and shooting his own films, each, in its way, an audacious experiment. In one extraordinary three-year streak — 1998 to 2001 — he directed two noirish classics (Out of Sight, The Limey), pulled an Oscar performance out of Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich), earned an Oscar of his own (Traffic, the same year he was also nominated for Brockovich), and launched a lucrative franchise (Ocean’s Eleven, followed by Twelve and Thirteen). So, retirement.Just to be clear, I won’t be directing “cinema,” for lack of a better word.
Film criticism: Always declining, never quite falling. Daumier, Le mélodrame (1860-64) DB here: Before the Internets, did people fret as much about movie criticism as they do now?
The dialogue has become as predictable as a minuet at Versailles. Film criticism is dead. No, it’s not! Hah! Well, the track record of the official movie critics isn’t that great. Infinitely more awful is what you read on the Net. The result being….? Same thing goes for the Net. Yeah? But not a passion for using Spellcheck.
So if print criticism is so valuable, how come all those professional critics are getting fired? Film criticism is dead. Repeat as often as you like. I thought I had watched this rondelay often enough from the wallflower section, but I got dragged onto the dance floor by Tom Doherty. To watch their backs and retain their 401(k)’s, most print critics have been forced into sleeping with the enemy. The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn. Mad Men a television series created by Matthew Weiner Lionsgate, 4 DVDs per season: Seasons 1 and 2, $39.98 each; Season 3, $49.98; Season 4 (to be released March 29, 2011), $49.98 Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness.
At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design.
Race. Superhero Movies. Observations on film art. The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
Kristin (with some help from David) here: David and I have been offering this greatest-of-90-years-ago series almost as long as this blog has existed. For earlier annual entries, see 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, and 1925. I approached 1926 with the assumption that it would present a crowded field of masterpieces; surely it would be difficult to choose ten best films. Instead it turned out that some of the greatest directors of the era somehow managed to skip this year or turn in lesser films. Still, the Soviet directors were going full-tilt by this time and contribute three of the ten films on this year’s list. The Russians are coming Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother was a full-fledged contribution to the new Montage movement in the Soviet Union. Along with Potemkin, Mother was one of the key founding films of the Montage movement. Mother was released on DVD by Image Entertainment in 1999, but it seems to be very rare.
Petit mais grand.