Blogcritics Author: A. Horbal

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Movie Review: Mystery at Mansfield Manor

A. Horbal — Tue, 8 Aug 2006 22:55:37 EDT

Mystery at Mansfield Manor, an "online, live-action interactive murder mystery movie," is set on a dark and stormy night. Billionaire Colin Mansfield, lord of the titular Manor, has been murdered on the very night that he has gathered his closest family, friends, and business associates to inform them of changes to his will.Our proxy in this world is Frank Mitchell (Ben Trister), a brilliant detective who arrives at the Manor two hours shy of a forced retirement presumably hoping to go out on a high note. Instructing his partner not to let anyone leave the sitting room in which the entire ensemble is gathered, he retires to an adjacent room to interrogate the suspects (everyone is a suspect) one at a time.We don't precisely control Mitchell, though we do decide in what order the suspects are interviewed. We don't exactly help him solve the crime either, though we do eventually tell him which suspect to arrest and then sit back to watch the consequences of this action. Instead, our primary function in Mystery at Mansfield Manor seems to be keeping Mitchell from losing interest in the case entirely.In a "Making Of" documentary included in the bonus features section, Trister describes his character by saying, "He basically doesn't give a damn anymore. He's moderately amused by the people he sees in the mansion and hopefully will solve the crime, but he doesn't care too much about it."Mitchell's apathy is the film's (game's?) defining characteristic. In my favorite "alternate ending" (resulting from our inability to make it past the first problem-solving stage, in which we identify which suspects are lying) he simply hands his notebook to the next shift and walks away unconcerned into the night, the case unsolved.This isn't much different from the other endings in which Mitchell is wrong: they all end with him packing up his belongings and heading for home with naught more than a handshake and a card ("some of the guys chipped in and bought you this") to show for his efforts. Which is, for that matter, more or less what happens in the ending in which he's right.So it's no wonder that he doesn't care. The question, then, is why should we? Well, for starters this is probably a more accurate depiction of the work of a police detective than most- Mystery at Mansfield Manor is the film that dares to be boring.Like Sergeant Joe Friday, Mitchell is "only interested in the facts." But here that means he remains aloof from any romance, any drama. His investigation is characterized by repetition, by catching his targets in the most trivial lies. It's an interesting (if not very exciting) corrective to the romantic Hollywood image of the detective, operating on instinct, who gradually becomes embroiled in the intrigues of the characters he's investigating.Mystery of Mansfield Manor also points towards possible future uses of the "online, live-action interactive" movie form. Here we have the concept at its most stripped down, its most basic-chassis, wheels, engine. It's not actually very interactive (what we do amounts to little more than what we do when we navigate the menu of a DVD) and it's not very filmic (the cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène aren't used: all of the clues are in the dialogue, or in dramatizations of the dialogue), but it has now been done. A foundation has been laid, and that's something.Finally, Mystery at Mansfield Manor is a fairly well-made film for its low budget. Producer- screenwriter Rory Scherer and director Boris Mojsovski are a B-Movie mogul's dream, coaxing fine performances from his cast in only one or two takes, saving money by shooting only interior scenes at one setting but avoiding a feeling of claustrophobia by never lingering too long in one room, and in his biggest coup effectively finding a way to use his outtakes in the finished product (the vast majority of the interrogation scenes would be cut from a more traditional film).But if there's a lot to admire about this film (not least the fact that it exists at all), it's still not very entertaining- there's a reason why we don't see many films about the workday drudgery of the life of a detective, why murder mysteries typically dispense with the more mundane parts of an investigation.Mystery at Mansfield Manor is a step in the right direction towards a more creative, a more diverse cinema that utilizes the potential of the internet, and it's hopefully an inspiration to DIY filmmakers everywhere (you don't need a distributor!). It is itself only an appetizer, though, and I'm left wanting more.Mystery at Mansfield Manor is available online at http://www.mysteryatmansfieldmanor.com. It costs $7.99 Canadian for 96 hours access to the film.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Book Review: The Film Snobs Dictionary*

A. Horbal — Tue, 1 Aug 2006 12:52:36 EDT

The Film Snob*s Dictionary begins by describing the archetypal Film Snob as:[F]amiliar to anyone who has walked through the doors of an independent video store and encountered a surly clerk - hostile of mien, short on patience, apt to chastise you for not intuiting that Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket is in the James L. Brooks section “because Brooks was the movie’s executive producer!”This might sound a tad mean-spirited, but authors David Kamp (who co-wrote The Rock Snob*s Dictionary) and Lawrence Levi (who blogs at Looker) have their tongues planted firmly in their respective cheeks. To employ an old saw of the playground, it takes one to know one, and if Film Snobs (as they charge) are employing a form of “Reverse Snobbery” when they favor the “soapy, over-emotive shlock of India’s Bombay-based ‘Bollywood’ film industry” over the “artful, nuanced films” of Satyajit Ray, then surely the authors are indulging in Reverse-Reverse Snobbery when they embrace Spaghetti Westerns as a “Worthwhile Snob Cause Célèbre" but then reject L’Atalante as “Fraudulent.”Like those video store clerks who proudly grant their recommendations a section of their own, at the end of the day the authors of A Film Snob*s Dictionary are motivated by a desire to spread the word, to share a canon of unjustly neglected cinematic pleasures with other like-minded but unenlightened souls. Kamp and Levi presume a certain knowledge of and interest in film history, eschewing canonical directors like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman ("mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured") in favor of more obscure figures like the actor Walter Beery or the sound designer Walter Murch.And herein, ultimately, lies the book's greatest strength - at its heart is the idea that there is more to love about the movies than simply their capacity to entertain or educate. If Ingmar Bergman is "so PBS tote-bag" then so, by now, is les politiques des auteurs. A Film Snob*s Dictionary challenges the notion that the best films are the most "intellectual," the most "important" by focusing on different aspects of the film experience: the faces, the sounds, the cinematography, the personalities.Which is not to say that the book isn't first and foremost an entertainment. Organizing it as a mock reference text with individual entries in alphabetical order, Kamp and Levi infuse the entire proceedings with levity and humor. The entry for "meditation on," which describes the phrase as a "stock hack-crit used to bestow an air of erudition and gravitas on both the critic and the film he is reviewing" has ruined the term for me forever.There are weak moments. Some of the inserts go on too long and wander too far afield. For instance, a discussion of "confusing similarities" that starts promisingly with the easy to confuse Bibi Andersson ("the Swedish actress who appeared in several of Ingmar Bergman's most famous films") vs. Harriet Andersson ("the Swedish actress who appeared in several of Ingmar Bergman's other famous films") devolves into more strained comparisons between the not-so-easy-to-mistake William Wellman and William Wyler or Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway.These ocassional lapses, though, are more than compensated for by the even more frequent laugh-out-loud, it's funny 'cuz it's true observations (it's "Tony," never "A.O." Scott) and genuinely interesting tidbits of information that the book contains. A Film Snob*s Dictionary will appeal the most to those with a bit of a Snob streak in themselves, but there is something here for every movie lover with a sense of humor about his or her passion.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Movie Review: Cars

A. Horbal — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:37:04 EDT

Cars is the first Pixar movie to be released since the studio was acquired by Disney, but it’s a watershed moment for the studio for another, more important reason -- it marks their first significant departure from the basic premise of their first six full-length features. From Toy Story (1995) to The Incredibles (2004), Pixar films have always been set in our world. Each plot unfolds in a contemporary American universe, inhabited by human beings. Each of these films explores a part of this world unseen in everyday life: Toy Story and Toy Story 2 imagine our toys coming to life whenever our backs our turned, A Bug’s Life‘s drama occurs on a scale too small for our eyes to perceive, Monsters Inc. takes place in a universe that parallels and intersects with our own, Finding Nemo takes place under water, and The Incredibles fleshes out the secret lives of super heroes that walk amongst us.In Cars, for the first time, human beings are absent. Except, of course, they're not. Here is a world in which the rock formations of the American southwest resemble tailfins, in which "cows" are tractors, and in which even the bugs are miniature Volkswagens with wings. But where did these cars come from? What God wrought these creatures in His (or Her) own image?In one telling scene, Radiator Springs' oldest resident Lizzie (Katherine Helmond) gestures towards a picture of her husband, the town's founder Stanley (like Lizzie, a Model T Ford). This begs a question: what where Stanley's forefathers? Horses? As in last year's Robots, human beings might be absent from this world, but their presence looms over it hauntingly.The first six Pixar films are effective at fueling young (and young at heart) imaginations because they operate in much the same way. They make sense of the wider, unfamiliar world by imposing a child's understanding of human society on inanimate objects, animals, and nightmares. They take lessons from the World I Understand and apply them to the World I Don't.And this is why these films are so magical: they reinforce a child's natural inclination to play make believe, compliment a childlike sense of wonder. Cars, though, is a bird of a different feather. Unlike its predecessors it entirely reimagines our world, and instead of making some part of it seem more real, more familiar it instead creates a strange, alien, and even disturbing universe of its own.Much has been made of Pixar's decision to buck the tradition of equating an automobile's headlights with its eyes and to locate them on the windshield instead. The problem with this approach to anthropomorphizing the characters is typical of a problem with the film as a whole.The headlights are typically used as eyes because the front of a car resembles a human face. By downplaying this similarity the animators are accentuating the differences between these car-creatures and the vehicles that we drive in our own world, just as re-landscaping desert plateaus emphasizes the difference between the geography of the world in the film and the corresponding area in our own.This creative decision carries with it a number of unintended consequences. In previous Pixar films there was a certain logic to the characters' use of familiar words -- they learned them from the humans. Here, though, the use of names like "Route 66" or "Los Angeles" are at best strained and at worst vaguely post-Apocalyptic.It also draws attention to the limits of the filmmakers' imagination. To go so far towards creating a whole new universe but then to include such obvious gags as a Hummer as the "Governator" seems cheap. One-note jokes like this fill the movie and feel wearying, like pandering to parents and guardians.But if Cars represents some of Pixar's weakest writing to date, this shortcoming is almost entirely compensated for by some of the most breathtaking animation that I've ever seen.The backgrounds are rich, sumptuous, even textural. Both the smallest details (small pebbles kicked up by cars racing around a NASCAR track) and the largest expanses of sky and the desert are rendered with astonishing beauty and realism. I'd like to draw attention to one moment in particular because it's the single most satisfying "cinephiliac moment" I've encountered in quite some time.It occurs during the scene in which Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) is showing Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) the abandoned Wheel Well motel. There's a medium shot of the pair talking outside, "shot" from inside. Suddenly we become aware of a small insect (one of those VW "bugs") tracing lines in the dust at the bottom right-hand corner of the frame and of the window.This only lasts for one brief second, but at that precise moment we become aware of the faint film of dust that covers the window which, in turn, makes us aware of the "camera" placement. It's a glorious, subtle, artificial "artifice" that made me swoon.This moment demonstrates, I hope, the care and attention paid to the animation throughout the film. There are other, grander, achievements, such as the successful rendering of metal and speed, long the bane of animators digital and hand-drawn alike. It's with these little touches, though, that the filmmakers really steal your heart. And they are alone worth the price of admission.With their next film Ratatouille, about a gourmet food-loving rat living in Paris, Pixar seems ready to return to the tried and true formula they've perfected by wondering what goes on under our table as we eat. It's for the best, I think. A Pixar film is ambitious enough already without the burden of trying to create an entirely original universe.Cars doesn't quite succeed in its attempt to breath life into this new world. But were it so that all failures worked this well or were even half as beautiful! It's hard to hold anything against a film this good-looking.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

The Cardinal Sin of Film Criticism

A. Horbal — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:37:05 EDT

I'll need examples to illustrate my point, so I'll use two somewhat recent reviews by Anthony Lane: this review of Inside Man (The New Yorker, 20 March 2006) and this review of American Dreamz (The New Yorker, 17 April 2006). He's a critic of great stature so I'm sure that neither his feelings nor his reputation will be hurt by anything I say here, and should it come to fisticuffs I'm pretty confident that I can take him.Anyway, in both of these reviews Mr. Lane makes statements based on incorrect details from the film under consideration. About Inside Man he says:The screenplay, a first-time effort by Russell Gewirtz, displays a double gift: it is clever enough to clutch our attention, but also dumb enough, with large logical holes punched through it at regular intervals, to make the audience feel equally clever for having spotted the mistakes. These include: (1) Voice recognition. Russell may be clad in shades and a white balaclava, but he converses with Frazier in person, and, given that Clive Owen’s American accent keeps slipping like an old sock, it should not be hard to pick him out of a lineup.And about American Dreamz he says:Among the other contenders are an Orthodox cantor turned rapper, of whom we see not nearly enough, and a sweet, stumblebum Arab (the film is too chicken to specify his country of origin) by the name of Omer (Sam Golzari), who just happens to have been trained, somewhat reluctantly, as a terrorist.I've noted these errors before, and corrected them: Dalton Russell never ends up in a police lineup (he's still hidden in the bank when Frazier is interviewing the hostages), and we are told that Omer is from Baghdad (which, granted, isn't his country of origin, but come now). But it isn't the errors per se that bother me.Film critics see a lot of films, and errors are unavoidable. Plot details are virtually impossible to fact-check (if it's an advance screening no one has seen the film yet!) and there's nothing wrong with garbling a name or distorting some specifics of the story. Roger Ebert, for one, is prone to small mistakes of this sort, but his criticism is rarely any the worse for it.What I object to are the significant critical judgments Lane issues based on these errors. His claim that Inside Man is "dumb [...] with large logical holes punched through it at regular intervals" is invalidated by the faulty evidence that he supplies to support it. Likewise his claim that American Dreamz is "cowardly."And this, I propose, is the cardinal sin of film criticism. To put it in the form of a commandment: Thou shalt not make specific critiques based on erroneous information about the film in question.First, if there's really a problem with the film significant enough to warrant mention in a review, it's probably unnecessary to use an example that's less than 100% certain. If, for instance, Inside Man has logical holes punched through it at "regular intervals," than Mr. Lane could have chosen an example that he could verify.If there's any doubt about the veracity of the complaint it should be left out of the review. If the makers of American Dreamz are genuinely cowardly, afraid of hurting their box office, or of invoking the wrath of the Bush administration by mentioning the Iraq war in a less than flattering context (a fairly serious charge), then examples should abound of this cowardice. But if not, if this is simply one isolated "cowardly" act, does it really merit a mention at all?It is easy, perhaps necessary, for a film critic to forget that every film is a human endeavor, one that represents a substantial investment of time and money for all involved (and there are invariably many involved). Critics traffic in opinions, and they are not beholden to anyone in this regard. But we do owe it to the filmmakers, to our readers, and to ourselves to make sure that our review is reconcilable with the film we're reviewing.Because film is such a human endeavor it engenders strong emotions. Negative comments about a film often invoke hurt or angry responses, there's nothing to be done for this. As long as the critic is true to him- or herself and true to the film, this isn't even undesirable. Disagreement can lead to discussion, which is beneficial for all of the parties involved.But when we make criticisms based on incorrect information we do a great disservice to ourselves and our readers. We inflame passions, hurt feelings for no productive reason. We put ourselves in a rhetorically indefensible position, and we undermine our credibility.It is, in short, a bad move. The one bad move to be avoided at all costs. The cardinal sin of film criticism.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Website Review: Criticker - Crunching the Numbers

A. Horbal — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 04:36:00 EDT

Both Anthony Kaufman and Anne Thompson have written about this new movie review site called Criticker. Their descriptions intrigued me, and today I finally popped over to their site to check it out.The idea is pretty straightforward. You rank movies on a scale from 1-100, they plug your rankings into their "Taste Compatibility Index (TCI)," and then you get a list of movie recommendations and film critics whose taste matches yours. It's a fun toy and a good way for movie buffs to while away a few minutes or hours.But being obsessive-compulsive (and stuck at work and bored), I decided to really run the site through its paces. Specifically I wanted to test this claim: "The more films you rank, the more accurate your TCIs will be!"Methodology:For my experiment I paused and recorded data after ranking 10, 25, 50, 100, and 250 films. I kept track of the critics that Criticker told me were my kindred spirits and the movies that Criticker recommended to me. As the number of films I ranked increased, I gradually followed more recommendations, but I tracked the same base group of films. For each film I noted Criticker's Probable Score Indicator, my own score, and the difference between the two.Predicted Outcome:As I rank more and more films, Criticker's recommendations should become more accurate and a stable group of kindred spirit critics should emerge.Data:10 Films Ranked25 Films Ranked50 Films Ranked100 Films Ranked250 Films RankedResults:Critics:I'm not as concerned here with the second predicted outcome (the emergence of a stable group of kindred spirit critics) because the TCI depends on the number of films you've seen in common with the critic in question. Even after ranking 250 films, that number is still typically very low. John Hartl is number one on my list, but that's based on only 10 films. Number 2, Mark Caro, is based on 30.Also, this number depends greatly on which films you've ranked. Rank different films and get a different list. Variety's David Rooney ranks 86th on this list, but after 250 different films he was number 1. Still, some critics do appear quite often in the upper echelons of all of my lists: Mark Caro, Scott Foundas, Marjorie Baumgarten, Rick Groen. All of these are critics that I read regularly and whose opinions I respect. And there are few surprises at the top of the list -- the only critics in my top 25 with whom I frequently disagree are V.A. Musetto (11), Peter Travers (17), and James Berardinelli (24).It's a fun tool, a different way to find new critics, and somewhat reliable. But especially at 10, 25, and 50 films ranked (the extent to which most people will use the site), it doesn't mean much. I'll weigh in after ranking 500 and 1000 films and we'll see if it becomes more reliable.Recommendations:Now this is interesting. At 10 films ranked, Criticker's predicted score deviated from my actual score by 16.2 -- pretty good on a 100 point scale. There are a few big deviations: the difference of 30 between my predicted score of 85 and my actual score of 55 for V for Vendetta is the difference between "loving" it and just "liking" it (with "enjoying" it in between).The average deviation does become more accurate as more films are ranked, but it levels off after 50 at around 10, which seems reasonable enough. To use the example of V for Vendetta again, after 250 films the predicted score is now 65 (I will "enjoy" it). Not too bad.But even more impressive is the way the size of the deviations shrinks. After 10 films, the biggest difference is 30. At 25 this falls a bit to 27, but at 50 it's only 18, and at 100 it's just 17. Throw out the aberrant difference of 34 for Silent Hill (predicted 26, actual 60) and only 5 out of 24 predicted rankings are off by more than 15 at 250 films ranked. And 4 are either exactly right (65 for Cinderella Man, 80 for In the Company of Men) or only off by 1 (78-79 for Donnie Darko, 64-63 for Citizen Ruth). That's impressive.Conclusions:Thus far I've collected insufficient data to conclude whether Criticker can succeed in this mission:"Criticker aims to match you with the people who share your taste in film most exactly." But I suspect most users won't rank more than 250 films, so it's fair to say that for most people, Criticker won't really fulfill this function.But what it will do is deliver uncannily accurate predictions, based on the critics in your TCI, of what movies you will like. So, as a recommendation service, I heartily endorse it. I also endorse it as a delightful way for movie-lovers to amuse themselves if they're bored.Notes:Criticker will also match you with fellow-users, but I only tested the critics' option.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

A. Horbal — Wed, 31 May 2006 06:50:35 EDT

One thing I've always liked (the one thing?) about Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor) is his willingness to own up to the consequences of his oversized vision. He realizes that if he wants to dream of collapsing buildings, car chases, and asteroids hurtling into New York City, then he's also going to have to confront massive property damage and the loss of innocent life. It's not much, but to a certain extent, I admire a director who's willing to dispense with hollow assurances that no one was hurt and let a little vengeance into his adolescent God-fantasy.In X-Men: The Last Stand, director Brett Ratner takes a page out of Bay's playbook and weaves an apocalyptic tapestry unlike anything I've ever seen before. He imagines an epic showdown between Professor Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) X-Men and Magneto's (Ian McKellen) rogue resistance mutants. For this to be "realistic," there must be casualties and Ratner's up to the task. The arbitrary fervor with which he rips apart the X-Men film universe by dispatching beloved characters right and left (and a veritable platoon of soldiers guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is breathtaking.The film begins with the resurrection of Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) who died saving the lives of her comrades at the end of the last film. She's returned as the Dark Phoenix with an unbelievable power that poses a danger to herself, the X-Men, and the world. Meanwhile, an outfit called Worthington Labs has created a "cure" for mutants from the DNA of a character called Leech (Cameron Bright) who has the power to neutralize other mutants' powers. Magneto uses this as an excuse to wage war upon the species homo sapiens, but of course he's opposed by Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and company. And thus the stage is set.Like the other X-Men films, The Last Stand touches upon a garden variety of issues of the day. Genetic engineering (and stem-cell research, perhaps), terrorism, and affirmative action all make cameo appearances. Unlike the franchise's two previous films (which were directed by Bryan Singer), though, this installment never pauses to consider the implications of its potential timeliness. Instead, it rushes forward at a breakneck speed that is mindless, but also exhilarating.X-Men aficionados might disagree. This brisk pace is almost entirely without relief and the film scarcely pauses even when someone shuffles off this mortal coil. In one instance, a good fifteen minutes of screen time elapses before we even know for sure that a character is gone. Ratner has sacrificed pathos for momentum. This might upset fans as he's deprived them of a chance to say goodbye to their favorite characters. He's also created a film that is curiously affectless, considering the number of death scenes it contains.Beginning as he does with a resurrection, it's clear that Ratner is not necessarily playing for keeps, a suspicion confirmed by one scene in which a character gets their powers back and another following the credits in which one more character comes back to life. Still, while the game lasts, it seems like anything can happen, which is not necessarily true in the highly formulaic realm of the summer blockbuster.X-Men: The Last Stand isn't terribly smart. Far too often it broaches an interesting subject only to drop it before it even begins to develop. Dialogue is largely replaced by insipid one-liners ("Not everyone heals as fast as you, Logan."), and there's just a hint of misogynism in the threat that Jean Grey poses and in the fickleness of Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).But it is fast, fun, and unpredictable -- qualities that have been lacking in the season's movies thus far. While it will disappoint those with higher expectations for the franchise, I think it will please most everyone else. X-Men: The Last Stand is a fine example of the Movie-As-An-Amusement-Park-Ride (whatever that's worth to you), and I can think of worse excuses to sit in the air conditioning for a while."X-Men: The Last Stand" 2006 United States, Brett Ratner.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Movie Review: The Beauty Academy of Kabul

A. Horbal — Sun, 21 May 2006 18:28:00 EDT

The Beauty Academy of Kabul 2004 United States, Liz Mermin.You don't necessarily need an "interesting" subject to make a good, thought-provoking film. Directors like Jim Jarmusch and Todd Solondz have made entire careers out of documenting the mundane details of modern life.But a good subject, provided it's treated competently, can redeem an otherwise unexceptional film. Thus is the case with Liz Mermin's documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul.Mermin chronicles the efforts of six Western hairdressers, including three Afghan expatriates, to start a beauty school in the war-torn capital of Afghanistan. The action unfolds over three months in 2003 and follows the school's first graduating class, beginning a few days before the school opens and ending with a graduation dinner.The film begins in earnest following a black-and-white newsreel-style primer on the recent history of Afghanistan that focuses on the wars that have almost unabatedly ravaged the country since the Soviet occupation in 1979. It includes interviews with the teachers (shot at the school) and some of the students (shot in their homes), footage of class in progress, and some scenes in which the Westerners explore the city.The tech credits are fine, despite what must have been difficult circumstances. Lynda Hall's cinematography, including both day and nighttime scenes, is clean and crisp, and a lively Middle Eastern score complements it nicely. Unfortunately the film is hurt by its lack of focus, point-of-view, or discernable style.It's only 74-minutes long, and because there are six teachers working in three-week shifts each (two at a time) it seems like there is always someone arriving and someone leaving. By choosing to film each teacher's hello and farewell address Mermin leaves herself no time to allow us to develop a feel for the pace or the character of a typical class.This also shifts attention away from the Afghan women enrolled in the class to the Western women teaching it. Mermin tries to counter this by interviewing some of the Afghan women in their homes. This creates a new problem, though: the women she interviews inevitably seem extremely nervous and ill at ease.The cameras are always accompanied by at least one of the school's teachers, and the discomfort that hosting a film crew causes these women is further compounded by the strangeness of having their teachers in their home and by their confrontational questions. In one scene they ask a student if she thinks that women will ever have political power in Afghanistan. She answers in the negative, and the awkward silence with which this is met prompts her to ask, "Was my answer wrong?"In another scene Debbie, the "crazy American" in the group, decides that she's going to teach some of her students how to drive. She's tickled by the amount of attention that she generates (people point and laugh) as she navigates the streets of Kabul: "They've probably never seen a women driving before!"But what exactly is attracting so much notice? Is it simply that a woman is driving a car, or is it something else? She's also a white, Western, non-military woman, and there's a camera crew in her back seat.Mermin's refusal to take sides and to allow her subjects to speak for themselves is a valid artistic decision. But there are so many characters and so many opinions voiced that we are often left adrift in a sea of ideas.Sometimes the Western teachers seem hopelessly naive. One American hairdresser begins each class with meditation and, asking how much sleep her students get each night, observes that insomnia can be "an indication of, you know, depression."This is greeted largely with bemusement, but we never learn from the Afghan students precisely what they find so strange. Is this an inadequate solution to their very different problems? Is it simply a strange and unfamiliar technique? Does this represent a cultural divide?The Beauty Academy of Kabul probably would have benefited from a smaller scope. By selecting as her subject one or two teachers and students Mermin might have given us more insight into their individual experiences with the school and thus more solid footing on this unfamiliar ground.Most of the questions raised by the film in its final form are implicit in the subject itself, and by adopting a specific point of view Mermin would have given us something to push against, a place to begin our consideration of her subject. All of these different voices clamoring for attention in this one short film make it difficult to begin a conversation.Whatever its shortcomings, though, The Beauty Academy of Kabul is fascinating as a cultural document. It raises manifold questions about the ways that Western culture is different and similar to this one eastern culture. It draws attention to one aspect of our society, the beauty parlor, that we might take for granted and asks what role it might play in our lives. And it portrays a different face of altruism and suggests that we can be creative when we struggle with the question "How can I help?"Is it a good film? Ultimately, I think not. It's too jumbled, too schizophrenic to say anything really insightful about its subject. But this subject is so interesting, so fertile that it's worth a look all the same.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

The Future of Film Criticism

A. Horbal — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:04:29 EDT

Pauline Kael, Dwight MacDonald, and John Simon were discussing this in 1963 and it's still very much on people's minds today, as evinced by the volume of internet chatter devoted to the subject these past few days.At Peter Suderman's blog Film & Culture they're talking about video games and video game criticism (here and here). Peter's initial question, "Why is no one writing good, strong cultural criticism about video games?" is a good one. Whether or not "society will eventually choose video games over film as our dominant narrative medium," I don't know. But BAFTA has already announced that "video games are as important to popular culture as film and television," (to the approval of The Guardian) and I certainly agree that they're deserving of more serious consideration.At The House Next Door Jeremiah Kipp interviews Walter Chow, an internet-based film critic at Film Freak Central. In a short post reflecting on Dave Kehr's thoughts about Jami Bernard's dismissal from the New York Daily News, Anne Thompson says, "Aggregate sites like Metacritic, criticker and Film Freak Central and blogs like The House Next Door are the future of film criticism."She also says something that all of us "younger, hipper, cheaper" internet-based critics would do well to heed: "There's plenty of good film writing on the web, including Kehr. It's just a lot harder to get paid for it." (my italics) Anthony Kaufman might be on to something when he wonders if "blogs are helping to kill journalism." There are a lot of talented film writers on the internet who are willing to work for free. If you edited an Alt-Weekly, why wouldn't you try to farm out your movie reviews to them?Maybe we, the unwashed but enthusiastic internet amateur brigade, are slowly driving professional film criticism into extinction. And maybe that's not even a bad thing. Responding to Joe Morgenstern's Wall Street Journal article "Rumors of Critics Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated", Peter Suderman recently wrote that:"[...] because of the net, criticism will become more diffuse. There will be more peoplewriting [sic] it, and, because it will be done for fun in a low-risk environment, it may flourish in ways we could never imagine in the print world."Morgenstern's article is a defense of the film critic, but is there anything in it that's defends the professional critic? Can't amateur critics support independent films? Why should we, the aspiring critics, expect to be paid for what we do? It's not as if this is a zero-sum game. There aren't n dollars reserved for film criticism.No, the fact is we don't know what the new economic model will look like. And that's why it behooves us to start asking serious questions about the very nature of film criticism itself.This one Duke University study about the way Americans read film criticism was flawed (read criticisms by: David Poland, Mark Caro, and Roger Ebert), but that doesn't mean the idea of empirical research into film criticism is inherently doomed to failure. Let's research the criticism reading habits of the American movie going public. Let's consider the connection between positive and negative reviews and a film's eventual box office.We should also begin to question some of our basic assumptions about criticism. Before we can argue that there should be paid film critics, we should first know what they do and why we have them.I want to address my fellow young Turks. In the comments section of Kehr's Bernard post Luke Y. Thompson (LYT Rules.com) defends his qualifications as a film critic. But I don't know that it's just about qualifications any more. Let's go back to the beginning and ask questions like, What is the primary function of the film critic? "Consumer guide" to movies? Initiator and facilitator of discussion about film and individual films? Reporter about movies as events?Let's go back to the silent era and ask where film criticism came from, starting with the first question of them all: What is film criticism? Let's first build a case that there should be professional film critics, if there's a case to be made, and then and only then let's make the case that it should be us.We should try to make ourselves useful to the larger film community at every turn. Are there too few video game or DVD critics? Let's do that! Do we need people to sift through the thousands (millions? I dunno) of hours of short films now available online? Let's do that!And let's keep an open mind to the fact that maybe, just maybe, we're all going to have to work for a living and do this in our free time. Cue the violins, folks: let's always remember that at the end of the day we're doing this not for money, but for love.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Online Shorts Digest: No. 1 - Why I Love Animation

A. Horbal — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:28:47 EDT

I'm always dismayed when I encounter a fellow cineaste willing to dismiss animation. Why do I personally love animated films? To paraphrase Annie Oakley: anything live action can do, animation can do better. And cheaper!These are some animated shorts that I've been enjoying online, beginning with an Academy Award nominee (1999 - Best Short Film, Animated):More 1998 United States, Mark Osborne.I'm actually not in love with this film for the same reason that Pauline Kael resented Fantasia. She wrote about that film that it wrecked music by "forcing us to hear it forever after with incongruous images welded to it" (New Yorker 11 November 1972). I can no longer hear New Order's "Elegia" without seeing Osborne's film. Of course, this is also a testament to just how well the images complement the music.What impresses me most about this film is Osborne's use of color and its absence for emotional affect. It's extraordinarily difficult to manipulate color like this in a live action film without simply switching between black and white and color, which as often as not feels contrived.Watch MoreAnimators can also appropriate the aesthetics of other artistic mediums much more successfully than live action filmmakers. For instance:What Barry Says 2004 United Kingdom, Simon Robson.The film's politics aside, Robson has basically taken contemporary political street propaganda and turned it into film art. Animators can actually incorporate their source material into their work, whereas live action filmmakers have to settle for imitation (as in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, which tried to recreate the look of a three-color comic strip).Watch What Barry SaysThinking along these same lines, animators can also create an entire film out of other movies, as in the collage film:Fast Film 2003 Austria/Luxembourg, Virgil Widrich.Fast Film is both a love letter to and a critique of classical Hollywood cinema. The film was made by making 65,000 photocopies from over 300 different films and arranging them into a prototypical Hollywood film. I absolutely love Widrich's commentary on the interchangeability of actors during the studio era and on Hollywood's treatment of women.Godard once said that best way to critique a film is to make another one of your own. Animation can do him one better by actually using the films in question!Watch Fast FilmTalking about the animated shorts of Chuck Jones, Roger Ebert noted that "no director has more power than a director of animated films" (RogerEbert.com 15 January 2006). Because they have absolute control over their universe they are best able to draw attention to filmmaking's inherent artifice. Such is the aim of:Broken Down Film 1985 Japan, Osamu Tezuka.Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura recently discovered a treasure trove of Tezuka's shorts. In Broken Down Film Tezuka draws attention to the way that the act of exhibiting a film degrades and alters the film print. It demonstrates the fact that every time a movie is loaded into a projector it changes in a very real way, however small the changes are. He also pays homage to the pioneering work of Jones and other animators, like Tex Avery.Watch Broken Down FilmYou can also watch Jones' Duck Amuck online, thanks to YouTube:Duck Amuck 1953 United States, Chuck Jones.Duck Amuck is hailed in many circles as one of the greatest animated films ever made, by some simply as a film masterpiece, no qualifiers attached. I for one prefer Jones' playful exploration of film's artifice to Ingmar Bergman's labored, intellectual treatment of the same theme in Persona.Watch Duck AmuckFinally, animators can incorporate actual physical objects from our world into their films, as in:Mothlight 1963 United States, Stan Brakhage.Mothlight was made by taping bits of leaves, insects, and other objects onto a strip of film. By making a film out of organic matter Brakhage reminds us of the intimate relationship between life and cinema, which is easily forgotten or dismissed. Celluloid was made with gelatin, so in a sense Brakhage isn't doing anything new when he constructs a film from once living creatures.Darragh O'Donoghue says about Mothlight, "You could say Brakhage puts the 'anima' back into animation, reanimating the dead, painstakingly affixing the remains of dead insects, leaves and the like onto the film strip, and feeding it through the projector back to life" (Senses of Cinema June 2004). It's a fascinating, troubling film.Watch MothlightAs is:Bloodlust 1999 Germany, Thorsten Fleisch.Fleisch made Bloodlust by applying drops of his own blood to a strip of film. The result is possibly the single most disturbing film I've ever seen. Eli Roth's Hostel doesn't begin to compare the sensation of watching a film constructed out of people.Download Bloodlust

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

Movie Review: Poseidon

A. Horbal — Sun, 14 May 2006 11:38:53 EDT

Poseidon is a perfectly serviceable disaster flick, but it's remarkable only for the extent to which it's unremarkable. It holds steadfast to the same mores which defined the original Poseidon Adventure. They were already out of date then, in 1972, and I can't imagine what made Warner Bros. think that they're back in style.There are, I suppose, "spoilers" ahead, but only if you've never seen a disaster movie before. As the passengers on a swank luxury liner count down the seconds to midnight one New Year's Eve, their ship is overwhelmed and overturned by a gigantic "rogue wave".In a Hollywood version of an exercise in game theory's prisoner's dilemma, ten passengers decide that they're going to ignore the captain's command to stay put in the "airtight" ballroom and wait to be rescued. There's a likable gambler (Josh Lucas), an unlikable gambler (Matt Dillon), a mother-son pair (Jacinda Barrett and Jimmy Bennett), a former mayor of New York (Kurt Russell), his recently engaged daughter and her fiancé (Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel), a stowaway (Mia Maestro), a Latino waiter (Freddie Rodriguez), and a suicidal architect (Richard Dreyfuss).Their subsequent attempt to reach the hull of the ship and safety lends itself to a satisfying, if somewhat predictable, game of Who's Going To Die Next? The non-white characters, of course, and the drunk; and finally, in a heroic moment of self-sacrifice, the alpha male who's past his prime. This leaves two white, affluent "family units" to tell the Poseidon's tragic tale of woe. And Richard Dreyfuss, who I suppose has too much star power to be killed off.Or perhaps it's an olive branch extended to the gay rights movement by Hollywood that last year failed to reward Brokeback Mountain with the Best Picture Oscar - we're told in passing that Dreyfuss' Richard Nelson is gay. Thank God for small favors, or too little too late? Meanwhile, they sure did "miss the boat" (!) with the burgeoning immigrant rights movement.And so once again it's the rugged individual male dragging the women and children to safety. Just once, just once I'd like to see a female character taking matters into her own hands in one of these films instead of slowing everything down by sobbing hysterically all the way.The effects are uninspired, but well-rendered, and Poseidon's relatively short 99-minute runtime moves at a mercifully brisk pace. But it's nothing we haven't seen before, and it's more interesting for what it doesn't do than what it does, namely, demonstrate that someone in Hollywood knows that there's a world beyond yonder hills that's changed a mite bit since the Warners rolled into town in 1918.

The author's name is Andrew Horbal. He blogs about film criticism at No More Marriages! and writes about film for Lucid Screening and PopMatters. He thanks you for your time and consideration.

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