Happy Halloween Movies!

My top three favorite horror movies listed below are the ones that give me the most joy (and fear) to watch. Happy Halloween horrors, my friends!

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)



Tarantula (1955)



Poltergeist (1982)

W. (2008)

Perhaps the least psychedelic of any movie directed by Oliver Stone, his most recent release W. (2008) is starved of the twisted canted angles, flashes of colored lights, and intercutting between crisp images on reels of color film stock and the grainier sorts on foggy black and white, 16mm, a la JFK (1991). There are no provocative and bloody battle scenes as seen in other Stone films like Platoon (1986) and most notoriously in Natural Born Killers (1994), but perhaps most gratuitously in Any Given Sunday (1999); and if the trend keeps up after the rather sedated World Trade Center (2006), W. might portend a future of methodical presentation of fact for the political figures and events Stone portrays.

That might be a sigh of relief for the Cheneys and Rummys of American politics. After all, though the temporal jumps in W.'s narrative may initially remind us of Stone's JFK, a down-the-rabbit-hole story steeped in fear and conspiracy, it hardly hints at the creative liberties taken in the latter film. Which, as it happens, is what makes a movie like JFK so breathtaking, gutsy and engaging. Of course, then, that implies the strength of W. suffers because it lacks that same attitude; it is a mostly factual account, and adheres to the blandness of biopic formula. The exception to that is the uncanny performance of Josh Brolin as our current president, and Richard Dreyfuss as VP Dick Cheney.

Then again, W. may still be just as controversial as its post-Vietnam predecessors: in terms of timing, W. is revolutionary. Stone's earlier films JFK and Nixon (1995) enjoyed historical perspective. We already knew what made the films' respective subjects, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, great or great failures, and there was plenty of distance, decades of it, in fact, that made their critique comprehensible to a mass audience. W. is a whole new ball game, and I can't seem to wrap my mind around the rules. To ever sit in the Oval Office at all is an experience a rare few can understand, but to be critiqued while still there in a manner than fictionalizes you is quite another, and one that both frightens and fascinates me.

The release of W. was bumped up to be the first in line at the polls this election, and though it is a clear repudiation of the last eight years of the American presidency, there is a movement about it (by its release date alone) that suggests that no matter your political ilk you should be itching to vote this November 4th.

I. Am. Canadian.

Thanks to a friend at the Foundation for the National Archives, I attended "A Salute to the National Film Board of Canada" last night, hosted by the National Archives in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film. Yours truly, unfortunately, missed the reception but made it in time for the screening and panel discussion that followed, which included a number of Academy Award-winning and -nominated animation films produced by the National Film Board.

As Canadian, and a cinephile, I am truly embarrassed to admit that I hadn't seen any of the films screened last night. Whenever I participated in any kind of Oscar pool every year, picking the shorts and animation categories always ended up looking like a blind guessing game. By the time I left the theater dabbing my eyes (yes you read that right - I cried - more on that later), I was swelling with pride that we have such a wonderful organization like the National Film Board of Canada that provides a sanctuary for filmmakers to explore the medium without having to sacrifice creativity for commercial viability.

And explore the medium, they did! The range of films shown last night yanked me right out of my cushy and comforting place that is the digital world, and see film again for what it can be. Norman McLaren's delightful public service spot, "Mail Early (1941)," was hand drawn in pen and ink on clear 35 mm film stock, then photographed against a painted background. Ryan Larkin, whose works and life were chronicled in the Academy Award-winning film Ryan (2004), worked entirely with paper and ink to mimic and recreate movement that came delightfully alive on the big screen. For her film, The Street (1976), Caroline Leaf manipulated watercolor and ink on glass, frame by frame, to create animation. The way each and every one of these filmmakers put their hands, quite literally, on film, and reverse engineered movement and animation is simply magical, even to my jaded eye, living in a digitized world.

Oh, you wanted to know why I cried. Right. The film that ended the evening was The Danish Poet (2006) by Torill Kove, who won the Academy Award in the Animaed Short Film category for this film. It's a jewel of a film at just under 15 minutes, describing a series of events that happened by coincidence that led to the birth of the narrator (who, most of us assumed, was Kove herself and therefore autobiographical, but she just happens to be a really, really great storyteller). The film begins and ends with animated squiggles of embrio, but everything that comes in between is as precious as a fairy tale. I probably don't do the film justice by saying this, but think of it as the most beautiful and appropriate answer to a four-year-old's question about "where do babies come from." So yeah, I laughed and cried, because it was a story about love that was so simple enough for children to understand yet profound enough for adults (especially weepy and sentimental ones like me) to be touched by it.

I do hope you'll get a chance to see some of these films someday soon. In fact, I know you will. In celebration of its 70th anniversay, the National Film Board of Canada will be opening its vault and stream some of its archival film online, for free. Now, that, mes amis, is a wondeful marriage of the old and new worlds.

Image and Film Info: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film, and the Foundation for the National Archives.

Election 2008: Late Night

This picture makes it look a lot happier for McCain than it was when last night David Letterman, maybe the Democratic party's biggest asset in entertainment, debased John McCain into nothing but stammering defensiveness. Sure, Letterman and McCain have been chummy on the show in previous years, but did McCain really think this would be a softball interview? Anyone who has seen The Late Show in the past five years can attest Dave is gleefully argumentative, even taking on the biggest disgrace to the modern news media, Bill O'Reilly with fierce incisiveness.

Watch the interview here, if you missed it.

The Conversation Continues...

Geographic hurdles kept me from attending the New York Film Festival's "Film Criticism in Crisis?" symposium on Saturday, September 27th, where a select few from Cineaste's "Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet" panel, among others, participated in a live round table. Kent Jones, Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Hudson and more where there to elucidate their ideas off the printed page (or the computer screen, whichever way you read it), and what a bummer to miss it. Any devoted Scarlett Cineastes who were there for it, pipe up and tell us how it went!



The opening night of the Chicago Film Seminar began this academic season with smart timing, then, to salve the sore spirits of having missed the NYFF's continuation of this lively conversation; it took place late last month, on the 25th of September. I'll be frank here, you probably don't know what the Chicago Film Seminar is, most don't. I for one ought to consider myself lucky, a nerdy insider taking advantage of a formidable PhD student in Cinema Studies at the University of Chicago to have been there. The Formidable One is the organizer of the seminar, and a cohabitant of the second floor north side digs I call home. To put it another way, yes, that's right, I'm just sneaking into this monthly conference of "scholars, students, critics, practitioners, and otherwise interested parties of film and film studies from around the Chicago area" to overhear their conversation and steal their Yellow Label Coppola chardonnay ("Anymore, his wine is better than his movies," is my cute conversation starter). Most of the attendees pop in from the U of Chicago and Northwestern, and Northwestern University's Scott Curtis is always there; but you won't be starved to find folks from moderately distant universities such as Notre Dame, whose Chair of Film Studies, Don Crafton, is a usual presence. The CFS committee is actually made up of professors from U or C, University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), Northwestern University, Notre Dame and DePaul University, so this is a Chicago-centric event.

A fitting topic of discussion for the evening was appropriately, and again in light of the recent Cineaste piece, something I felt concerned me more urgently than usual, the globalization of film studies. "Huh," you might be sighing? What the flip does that mean, dude? It means, in short, how does a contemporary film scholar expand the field of knowledge without diluting the standardized film studies base? More precisely, and to paraphrase the aforementioned Formidable One, how does the study of film remain distinct among the many channels through which it is taught? Most former and current film students can testify to a film education provided through an English department. Others programs exist within Art History departments, or a combination of other specialized areas. The issue of new media also enters into the question of a distinct "film" studies, especially as television, digital technology and video games are an increasing presence in the body of cinema scholarship.

This was all profound to me--albeit on a more formal level--because these issues can be applied to commercial film criticism as well. It begs the question, what is the job of the critic? What are our standards? On a basic level, I hope this wider discussion eventually moves the profession away from simple "good/bad" evaluative remarks and closer to a deliberative "what does this film mean?" conversation that fosters real engagement with the text--be it "good" or "bad."

The Duchess (2008)

The Duchess with Keira Knightley began with a lot of anticipation and energy, but ended much differently. At the front of the film I looked forward to the newly-wed Duchess of Devonshire (Knightley) to break up the stiff manners of the English social elite, throw out etiquette in favor of intellect, and express unbridled, lustful joy toward her lover Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper)--the fellow interested in her thoughts and affections before his stature in the state of England--but these primary sentiments, which urged me to the theater on its behalf in the first place were denied.


The overall production featured an astonishing amount of detail, as you'd expect a period drama of its sort to do. The costumes were undeniable, the scenery and set decoration as good as any of its kind; and those things alone often make up for the lack of any compelling story. I, for one, find it easy to be swept up in the production (or reproduction) of cavernous wood-paneled rooms with tailored silk curtains, magnificent candelabras, marble floors, columns and facades, all filled to the brim and brought to life with the presence of characters who are dressed so superbly that even the buttons on their shirts give off an extra gleam. But there is no number of buttons available to give life to the more pressing issue of The Duchess, namely that of women's issues.

In a way, director Saul Dibb's picture is the ultimate women's film, not a weepie in the classic sense, but one that spends a lot of time ringing chords of pity without offering much insight into the plight of the woman as the overlooked second class citizen. The film begins promptly with Georgiana's (Knightley) marriage to the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), and in perhaps the second or third scene beyond it, Georgiana is engaged in a moment of tense intellectual conflict, where she expresses her disagreement with the politician Charles Fox (Simon McBurney). What initially looked like the start of a long-term exchange of ideas, and ultimately a struggle for power, ended there, no sooner than it began. Georgiana speaks of big things in that moment, the definition of freedom as an absolute, not as something to be acquired in moderation. Even though the premise is then set for her ideals, they are not revisited and the film switches down a more domestic path.

Without spoiling the exact outcome, it is sufficient to say that where we find ourselves sympathizing with Georgiana is not in the marginalization of her intellectual desires, but in her struggle to remain in custody of her children and maintain the unity of her family. Not ignoble causes, but not the ones a modern female audience hopes only to see. The energy of the brazen young woman living in a time when even her civil rights were scarcely acknowledged, where she caught us with the hook of her original ideas at a table where she was the only woman among many men didn't last. The Duchess still remains vocal throughout the remainder of the story, and I do admire her anger and ablity to articulate it so clearly. But again, these tremors are the result of domestic conflict, and the narrative ends with the unhappy conclusion that women really are prisoners in their own home. Without the freedom to balance her role as mother and as an individual acting on her personal desires, whether that means her political voice, her love life, or her career, that presumed outdated question of a woman having the full rights of a man being able to care for her kids at the same time, creeps back up again.

Georgiana clearly dealt with rather tough domestic and civil circumstances in her lifetime, I acknowledge that fully. I just would have liked to see more of her intellectual self in play, the way she was when we met her at the start of the movie, to emphasize less pity and more inspiration in women's history.