January 24, 2017 On Film You Can Stop Believing in It, But It Doesn’t Go Away By J. D. Daniels The anality of Event Horizon. Still from Event Horizon. Oh, God. Do I have to watch Event Horizon again? I’d rather rip my eyes out. It’s a children’s movie. Let’s get that straight right away. Most movies are children’s movies. Event Horizon (1997) is the story of a spaceship that has gone beyond our solar system. The ship aimed to get around the laws of physics and travel faster than light using an invention called a gravity drive, which folds two points together in collapsed space-time by means of a miniature black hole. It would no longer take seventeen hours to fly from Boston to New Delhi if Boston and New Delhi were, briefly, the same place. Here is the problem: when the gravity drive was activated, the ship simply disappeared. As the film begins, it is the year 2047 and the ship, called the Event Horizon, has reappeared. It is being approached by the Lewis & Clark, a salvage-and-rescue ship. On its surface, Event Horizon is a haunted-house film in outer space. The ghost ship has returned from its mysterious journey both emptied and populated. “This place is a tomb,” says the captain of the rescue ship, exploring the emptied body of the Event Horizon; then, later, “Are you telling me this ship is alive?” Read More
January 18, 2017 On Film Let’s Get Ready to Crumble By Dan Piepenbring Andy Griffith, looking unhinged and awfully familiar. That slogan comes from a 2005 commercial for Kraft Crumbles, “intense nuggets of real Kraft Cheese” that give your food “that big cheese taste that blows you away.” (You might remember that these crumbles were “crumbelievable,” and that America learned about them to the tune of EMF’s 1990 dance-pop classic, “Unbelievable.”) As the inauguration nears, the phrase has come to mind almost hourly: let’s get ready to crumble. Let us watch as the Thick Man, with his processed-cheese-product glow, assumes the mantle of power and crumbelievable rubble rains down from on high. But you don’t simply wake up all ready to crumble. Crumbling preparedness takes time and effort. It begins by going to the movies. Read More
January 3, 2017 On Film The Source Material By J. W. McCormack Dipping into the thousands of ephemeral films in the Prelinger Archives. Still from Design for Dreaming. There’s a scene in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic of the director of Glen or Glenda, that has always struck me as profound. The young Wood, played by Johnny Depp, is doing thankless work as a stagehand on a Hollywood-studio lot where he kills time watching stock footage of bomb detonations and rampaging bison. Visibly rapt, he asks what’s to become of these clips, only to be told by the kindly clerk, “Probably file it away and never see it again.” He replies, “If I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what’s causing them, but it’s scaring all the buffalo!” Since 1982, the archivist, filmmaker, and open-access advocate Rick Prelinger has curated the Prelinger Archives, which comprises upward of sixty thousand sponsored, ephemeral, and industrial films. Some six thousand of these are available for free viewing on the Internet Archive. Like Ed Wood, I can while away hours watching these movies, many of which were originally made to be shown before feature films, as part of expos, or in classrooms. I am so grateful for the opportunity to take a journey by cable car in “A Trip Down Market Street” (1906), which captured downtown San Francisco just before the fire and earthquake reshaped the city; or to observe the industrial constructivism of the Chevrolet-produced “Master Hands,” (1936) where the toil of autoworkers converts the assembly of machine parts into a kind of proletariat ballet. Read More
November 29, 2016 On Film Titus in Space By Rex Weiner Steve Bannon’s obsession with Shakespeare’s goriest play. Here’s the pitch: Titus Andronicus in outer space. You might have forced a smile, sitting through a meeting with Steve Bannon during his Hollywood years in the early nineties. Today, as Trump’s chief advisor, the world’s second-most-powerful man designate has other scenarios to sell. But before Bannon was merely taking over the free world, he was bent on conquering Tinseltown, and he had a serious obsession: he wanted to make a movie version of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s bloodiest revenge play, rife with murder, rape, and disembowelment. Bannon succeeded, eventually. He optioned a well-reviewed but audience-challenged 1994 off-Broadway adaptation staged by Julie “Lion King” Taymor—putting Bannon, an investment banker, in the “Bard biz,” according to a story I reported in 1997, while on staff at Variety. But at the end of Bannon’s decade-long campaign to get his favorite play onscreen, victory was Pyrrhic. Titus, the twenty-five million dollar movie adaptation directed by Taymor, toplining Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, and released by Fox Searchlight in 1999, laid an egg at the box office, grossing just over two million dollars. For Bannon—the movie’s executive producer and chairman of the board of First Look, the production company that raised all the money—it was a learning experience. Read More
November 7, 2016 On Film How to Swim By Adam Shatz The Birth of a Nation, Moonlight, and the black protest tradition. A still from Moonlight Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s retelling of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Released in October, the film had already disappeared from most theatres, including my local cinema in Brooklyn. At the matinee at the Magic Johnson 9 cinema on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, there were a total of three people, and I was there with a friend. The Birth of a Nation was supposed to be the film of the year. Fox Searchlight acquired the world rights for the film for $17.5 million dollars, a record-breaking deal for the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January. Nate Parker, who produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film, instantly became a media darling, and the Academy nomination for best picture seemed all but assured. After the #OscarsSoWhite boycott of the Academy Awards, here was a FilmSoBlack, made by a black director, in which heroic slave rebels slaughter their white masters. The film seemed to speak to the insurrectionary spirit of contemporary black America while also offering a belated corrective to D. W. Griffith’s eponymous ode to the Confederacy, released almost exactly a century earlier. Read More
September 29, 2016 On Film Where Nothing Can Go Wrong By James Hughes We’re not spying, but it feels like we are. Each moment is tracked on surveillance monitors, recorded, studied. On one screen, a man, dressed moments ago in cowboy gear, is now postcoital with a robot prostitute. She soon makes herself scarce, heading back to recharge her circuits in the break room. The cowboy stares up at the ceiling, his six-shooter cooling in a holster draped over a chair. He’s luxuriating inside a simulacrum of an 1880s Western whorehouse, one situated within a network of amusement parks in an unnamed desert expanse. It’s the end of the first act of the 1973 film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, a master of the techno-thriller novel whose occasional forays into filmmaking—he directed a half dozen features over two decades—yielded more modest, earthbound results than the fantastical predictions he packed into his paperbacks. But Westworld, his feature debut, continues to haunt. Its vision of a pleasure dome with exploited, humanlike robots as moving targets has been reprogrammed into a highly anticipated HBO series, premiering Sunday. Read More