Monthly Archives: August 2007

Respect and trust come to mind while skimming through Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason. It is hard to not have a sense of respect for the man who penned this well-intentioned work, as it seems at first motivated by nothing less fundamental than a righteous regard for the truth, a thing that has been flayed and brutalized in more brazen ways during the last six years than at almost any other time in modern American political history. One also has to respect Gore for how he wrote it, without betraying hardly a shred of sour grapes—because while we Americans may not have a problem with stolen elections or a dangerously overzealous executive branch, what we really really can’t stand is a sore loser.

The full article was published in PopMatters. Link

Since the inevitable comparisons have already been made between last year’s Al Gore lecture on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, and The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio’s dissertation on looming environmental catastrophe, let’s go ahead and make one ourselves: The 11th Hour is better. While DiCaprio’s film benefits in some ways from following in the wake of Gore’s film — namely, it doesn’t feel the need to prove whether or not human behavior, like adding massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, is having an adverse effect on the planet — it cannot be seen merely as a me-too follow-up.

The full review ran in filmcritic.com. Link

The most searing, retina-burning images in Jason Kohn’s rangy, seat-of-the-pants documentary, Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), are in fact frogs. At a vast frog farm in central Brazil, thousands upon thousands of the slippery and slimy green creatures are raised in great water tanks before being unceremoniously dumped (they slide and tumble out helplessly, limbs flailing at the air in slow-motion like a breathing green river) into buckets or plastic bags. After that, they’ll be shipped out of the country in massive pallets marked “Live Frogs” or butchered at home to end up as deep-fried delicacies. Kohn’s film is really about the manic state of life in modern-day Brazil, and how people cope with it, but he can’t help cutting back to those frogs. From aerial shots of the teeming favelas to those panicking, hopelessly flopping, doomed little amphibians; the point isn’t subtle.

The full review ran in filmcritic.com. Link

The 23 episodes of The Simpsons‘ Season 10, broadcast between August 1998 and May 1999, reveal a show securely positioned both as money-making endeavor for Fox and well-regarded repository for smarty-pants satire. The show’s writers, one of TV’s greatest collections of comic minds since the stellar days of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, know exactly what notes to hit, and they hit them over and over again; meaning, in short: lots of Homer being an unthinking idiot. Homer could save Grandpa’s life with a kidney transplant, but he’s too scared of the operation and keeps running away, ala the climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Homer becomes a bodyguard. And so on. But all this attention also means that the writers are constantly feeding Homer the best lines (“Are you sure this is a sci-fi convention? It’s full of nerds.”), though Bart gets plenty of one-liners as well (“Dad, you make a great hippie; you’re lazy and self-righteous!”).

It came out last week on DVD. The full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

Originally published in French in 1997, The Professor’s Daughter is an enlightened collaboration between the great graphic novelist Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat, Klezmer) and Emmanuel Guibert (Alan’s War, as well as many of Sfar’s series, like Sardine in Outer Space) that should have come to these shores long ago. With Sfar providing the story and Guibert the limpid and lithe watercolors, the book (their first collaboration) is a marvel of wit, economy and good humor that puts most graphic novelists — who seem to work just so hard in their frantic genre-splicing — to shame, and with ease.

The full article is in the July edition of Bookslut. Link

Glomming on quite nicely to the current vogue for zombie-related culture in all its grisly glory, Jason’s newest, The Living and the Dead, strips away what little warm fuzziness there was from his earlier book and replaces it with a funny and strangely terrifying comedy of manners — with human-devouring zombies. The filmic style here is not so much noir as it is 1950s science fiction; think of the paranoid classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers wherein the primary fear was not so much literal death as it was assimilation into an unthinking automaton. Another influence dates back even further: there is not a word of dialogue in these 48 pages, only a few intertitles like in an old silent film. So when the meteor containing that pesky and ever-so-catchy zombie germ falls on the city and incites a cycle of cannibalistic ultraviolence, there arebno cries of surprise or shouted warnings. Instead it’s just the chasers and the chased, both equally blank-eyed and pupil-less (a nod to Little Orphan Annie).

The full article is in the July edition of Bookslut. Link

There are actually three screenwriters credited for The Bourne Ultimatum, though it’s hard to imagine what exactly they all did to earn their paycheck. “You don’t remember anything, do you?” “It’s Bourne.” “It ends here.” [insert car chase] That doesn’t mean that this third installment of the popular shaky-cam travelogue spy thriller series doesn’t deliver all that it’s intended to, and occasionally more, it just means that you’re more likely to hear barked-out commands or the sound of squealing tires and shattering glass than two or more actors exchanging full sentences as part of a conversation. This is a film that asks exactly how much traditional storytelling structure can you cleave away and still have a coherent and engaging piece of work? The answer: Nearly all of it.

The full review ran in filmcritic.com. Link

Due most probably to the immediacy of the graphic image, documentaries on the Iraq War have focused on the experience of soldiers and Iraqis on the ground. Films like Iraq in Fragments and The War Tapes are less about the how and why of the conflict as they are about the what of the actual fighting, what it looks and feels like from street level. The more in-depth casual discussions on the war have come from the ever-increasing mound of books on the subject; at least until Charles Ferguson’s studious documentary No End in Sight, which will have you alternately slapping your forehead in stunned disbelief and shaking your head in disgust.

It opened last week in New York and should expand soon around the country; expect some Oscar buzz on this one. The full review ran in filmcritic.com. Link