The Mumpsimus

Because I am an unabashed Terrence Malick fan , there was little question that I would find something to adore in his new film, The Tree of Life . Nothing highlights the subjectivity of evaluation to me as well as the fact that I will find a way to appreciate the work of a handful of creators in various media no matter what, because something in my past experience with them has made me assume that they are in some way or another smarter than me, and my job is to learn to appreciate whatever they have created. It's a sort of subservient humility -- anybody who wants to evaluate something honestly has to approach it with at least a bit of humility and try to allow the work to offer as much as it can, but with most things, especially in realms where we have some experience ourselves, humility soon enough gives way to the most basic, brutal evaluation: I think this thing is good, bad, or ugly. Without a sense of differentiation, there is no taste , and anyone who was humbly sub...

The wonderful online film magazine Reverse Shot has just released an entire issue devoted to sound , with essays on the sound of specific and quite varied films: If one shot can contain an entire film in essence, then can a sound? And if the instantaneous break between two images contains shifts in perception that are the exclusive domain of cinema, then what happens when the aural element is added? Since the late twenties, sound has been as essential an ingredient as the shot or the cut in film’s construction, yet more often than not it isn’t discussed in film criticism, with all elements of mise-en-scène making it take a back seat. I'm very sensitive to sound in general, and whenever I used to direct plays I spent nearly as much time on the sound design as anything else.  For the past eight months or so, I've been working as the sound recordist for an independent film some friends of mine are making, and that's made me even more aware of film sound than I was bef...

The ever-wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz has written a great feature for Salon.com -- "Directors of the Decade: The Sensualists" . Actually, this is one of ten features Seitz is writing for Salon about "Directors of the Decade" , but for me this is the group that matters most, because it includes Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-Wai, some of my absolute favorites, though I had never thought of them as a group before.  Or maybe I have -- I've been thinking a lot recently about why Lynch, Malick, and Mann in particular appeal to me so deeply. (I love some of Wong Kar-Wai's films, too -- 2046 , In the Mood for Love , and especially Happy Together , though My Blueberry Nights proved nearly unwatchable and Ashes of Time , in either version , left me cold. Hou Hsiao-hsien I hadn't really thought of in relation to the others, and I'm least familiar with his work, having only seen Flight of the Red Balloon and The P...

The many people who thought the 135-minute theatrical cut of The New World was already too long are probably not lining up to get the new extended cut DVD , but for the passionate minority of us who think The New World is not just a good film, but one of the greatest American films -- for us, the new DVD provides overwhelming bliss. The movies I care about most are the movies that so capture my imagination that I rarely think about anything else while watching them -- they expand beyond entertainment into a kind of meditation. It's an entirely individual thing, and though I expect most compulsive filmgoers have a list of such films, I doubt any of our lists are too similar.* When I first wrote about The New World , I began by saying, "I, too, thought The New World suffered because of its length, but unlike the various reviewers who thought it was too long, I felt like most of the problems came from it being far too short for all that director-writer Terrence Malick tried t...