What We've Done: August 22nd thru August 28th

UPDATE TIME!
I have to do this super-fast as deadlines are breathing down my neck like a fatman in a packed subway car:

- Posting powerhouse Simon Abrams has the usual glut of material on the webs. He's updated his own blog, Extended Cut, reviewed another cartoon for the AV Club, written a nice think piece on Guillermo del Toro's efforts as a producer/presenter, interviewed del Toro for Vulture, reviewed a brace of new releases for Wide Screen, talked about Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry for Fandor, threatened the safety of our souls with another Bad Idea Podcast (an endeavor co-piloted by Steve Carlson), and - finally - hated on the new Conan. Per his Facebook status, he's also "just ate (his) penultimate home-grown jalapeno." So Simon's a busy bee/beaver/whatever.

Lest this be an all-Simon, all-the-time affair, it's worth noting the following:

- Jason Alley liked 30 Minutes or Less, Fright Night, and that Apes movie equally.

- Ali Arikan's inaugural installment of Nobody's Business But The Turks, a column for Indiewire's Press Play, focused on the Apes as well.

- Danny Baldwin encapsulated Griff the Invisible and Senna.

- Sean Burns barely gave Fright Night a passing grade.

- Chris Devlin linked to a Schlitz Malt Liquor advertisement featuring Shaft and Huggy Bear (don't miss this).

- Dennis Cozzalio revisited his hometown movie palace.

- Ari Dassa has posted a teaser trailer for his forthcoming documentary, The Israeli Dancer.

- Jim Emerson weighed in on Sean Penn's Tree-pissing and commented on the much-ballyhooed Press Play "Chaos Cinema" piece which I refuse to link to.

- James Frazier liked One Day.

- Kenji Fujishima updated his ever-charming Artistic Consumption index.

- Craig Kennedy writes a love note to Los Angeles and participates in a podcast wherein The Help and the best movies of the summer are discussed (and I'm pretty sure those two subjects don't intersect).

- Uncle Crizzle has been almost Abrams-busy: he reviewed a Jill Scott concert, learned about white people with the Hold Steady, took a look at a pair of early Spielberg features, and -- in a great piece over at indieWIRE -- asked "just what is a 'nigga movie'"?

- Phil Nugent contributed with wild abandon to the AV Club, adding to their Katrina and songs-about-disease Inventories, reviewing episodes of Top Gear, Leverage, and Homicide: Life on the Streets and tackling the 2011 MTV Video Awards.

- Lucas McNelly continued his Year Without Rent.

- Mark Pfeiffer is gearing up for Toronto 2011.

- and, alphabetically last but first in the hearts of her countrymen, Alison Willmore reviewed The Caller and Special Treatment for the AV Club and co-starred with her former IFC colleague Matt Singer on the Filmspotting podcast, chatting about their favorite haunted house films.

If I may highlight two pieces that were too old to make the last update:

- Daniel Getahun's 300 Words About Steve James' Stevie, an extremely overlooked doc that needs to be seen by all of you.

- My own take on the Criterion disc of Polanski's Cul-de-Sac because what's in it for me if I don't shamelessly plug my own e-scribbles?

While people are yammering about "Chaos Cinema" (a postulate that excites me about as much as the "Pool Movie"), here's some beautiful chaos, courtesy of Stan Brakhage. It's 1994's Black Ice and contains multitudes in its two minutes:

 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have Jean Vigo's ENTIRE filmography to watch before I retire for the evening.

EXTRA CREDIT: Should anyone want to weigh in in the combox: now that we're two-thirds through 2011, what are the must-sees of the year? Particularly the hidden gems?

What we've done: August 19th-21st, 2011

Whew, been a while. Sorry for letting this place get dusty and abandoned. Trying to do this daily has proved too difficult for me to keep up with. So, couple of changes:

1) Updates will be twice a week. Larger, but less day-to-day work.

2) I've enlisted a bit of help. Both Paul Clark and Philip Tatler have volunteered their time in keeping the updates going. Which is very cool of them.

Anyway, here we go:

- Simon Abrams knocked out another episode of Cowboy Bebop.

- Jason Alley gives a thumbs-up to both The Help and Glee 3D.

- Danny Baldwin likes Point Blank a lot more than One Day.

- Jim Emerson dredges up the origin of a blatant continuity error and says a quick word about Paradise Lost 3.

- Glenn Heath Jr. got giddy at the new Fright Night. He was not so keen, however, on A Proper Violence.

- Daniel Cook Johnson had mixed thoughts about One Day.

- Craig Kennedy posted some news of interest, then caught up with The Help and the Fright Night remake.

- Michael Lieberman eulogized Raul Ruiz with Ruiz's own words.

- Craig Lindsey broke down the soudtrack to Despicable Me. He also dug up a couple of older pieces.

- Lucas McNelly spun tales about Day 9 and Day 10 of the shoot for Paul Osbourne's Favor, his latest Year Without Rent stop.

- Phil Nugent found the latest episode of Leverage to be better than he'd feared. He also penned a piece on a classic episode of Homicide: Life on the Street and another on a film about a texting competition. (No, really.)

- Bryan Whitefield crowed about Rap Genius.

Today's video: This here's expiring from Netflix Instant in the next couple of days. Maybe you'll want to give it a look. I know I'm gonna watch it as soon as I'm done here.

What we've done: April 4th & 5th, 2011

- Simon Abrams found some nice things to say about Machete, fewer nice things to say about Antonioni's I Vinti.

- Danny Baldwin found Little Fockers "commercially vanilla," preferring the more action-oriented stylings of Source Code.

- Notoriously tough grader Matthew Lotti's latest round of reviews includes a couple positive writeups: Nightmare Alley, Colossal Youth and... Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes?

- Chuck Bowen was frustrated yet elated by Black Swan.

- Glenn Heath Jr. wasn't keen on Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. The Muriels, on the other hand...

- Craig Kennedy ran down some recent film-news headlines and revealed the poster for this year's Cannes Film Festival. (A classy image, at that.)

- Lucas McNelly wants Batman to bug off.

- Phil Nugent weighed in on the latest episode of Nurse Jackie.

- Scott Von Doviak was lukewarm on the most recent episode of Being Human U.S..

- Philip Tatler confessed to some errata in regards to his Muriels ballot.

- A couple of amusing images found by Martin McClellan involving a law firm and an airplane.

And in case you missed it, the 5th Annual White Elephant Blogathon took place last week at Paul Clark's place. Among the many excellent contributions were pieces by Simon Abrams, Kent M. Beeson, Andrew Bemis, Dennis Cozzalio, Philip Tatler, Patrick Williamson and Paul himself. (Oh yeah... also, there's a piece from this scrub.)

Today's video: At South By Southwest, Kenji Fujishima got a chance to play around a with Super 8mm camera. The results are below:

At long last!

The official Muriels site is completed for 2010, with all voter pages up to date! New and shiny! Go on and take a look.

And now, on with 2011...

A few words on the wrap-up of this year's Muriels

Another year gone, another ceremony done and enjoyed by all. I think this year went particularly well, all things considered - I'm really starting to get the knack for this.

The Muriels 2010 page is ready for your viewing pleasure. You can access it here. The voter pages are still under construction. Hopefully, by Thursday I'll have wrapped that up.

Thanks to all the voters and writers who participated this year. I tried to thank you all individually upon receiving your pieces, but I know I probably forgot a few. Don't think that means I didn't appreciate what you gave me - you all stepped your game up this year. The consistent high quality of our writing this year was heartening. Thanks also to everyone who read, commented, recommended, passed on links and/or bitched about our selections, either here or on Twitter or on other websites. The link field on the side has been updated to include the new voters. Link roundups should resume next week (if I can remember/find time to do them). Now, I leave you with this:

Golden Muriel for Best Picture of 2010

The Social Network [268 points / 23 votes]

"For a long time before The Social Network was released, people just called it "The Facebook Movie" -- even after the inspired trailer (the one that combined footage from the movie with Facebook screenshots and a choir singing Radiohead's "Creep") made it clearer that it dealt with the human stories behind how the social networking site was created.

I joked that the studio should adopt the approach used in the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962: "How did they ever make a movie of Facebook?" That turns out to be the title of the "making of" documentary on the extras DVD (the people who made this movie have an exceptionally sharp sense of humor). Since it opened the New York Film Festival in October, it's been described as a ruthless ladder-to-success story, a thwarted romance (with Erica or Eduardo?), a courtroom drama, a fast-moving portrait of a generation and The Way We Live Now -- and "a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people" (that last comment written by a person still in beta, apparently).

Is it any of those things -- or all of those things? I don't think we know yet. As the movie's Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) says of the newly launched Facebook to his friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield): "We don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what it is, what it can be, what it will be." That may be the smartest thing Mark says in the movie, and I think it may apply to The Social Network itself -- a deceptively conventional film that races by at such high-bandwidth speeds that even after you've seen it, you may not be sure you know what you've seen. I've seen it only twice (though I've gone over individual scenes in shot-by-shot detail), but I feel like it's been downloaded into my brain and I'm still trying to process it. What I know for sure is that it's exquisitely designed and thrilling to engage with. (John Pavlus was absolutely right to compare Fincher's direction with Jonathan Ive's designs of Apple products.)

Actually, there's a kernel of truth to that "1.0 vs. 2.0" comment: the visual grammar of The Social Network is fairly traditional. Establishing shots, two-shots, reverse angles, limited use of steady dollies and cranes rather than shakycams and extended takes. (Though, as I learned from the DVD supplements, the shot over which the title appears is really several shots stitched together.) The difference is the rapid speed at which they are deployed, and the effortlessness with which the movie delivers multiple streams of information.

Unlike that other 2010 movie that made such a big deal of explaining arbitrary rules for getting from one level of storytelling to another, The Social Network just does it. And you get it -- without the actors reading you instruction manuals encoded into dialog. It shifts backward, forward, sideways in time and space (with no "present tense" defined), through depositions, memories, e-mails, affidavits... and you may get temporarily/temporally thrown now and again, but it's not hard to follow. Again, unlike the science-fiction movie that preceded it into theaters in 2010, The Social Network is complex without trying to appear complicated. Indeed, its design and direction, the tools of its tale-spinning, are far more sophisticated, but less ostentatious. And more fun. And lead to a better life." - Jim Emerson

Multiple Levels of storytelling in THE SOCIAL NETWORK from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #2

True Grit [180 points / 20 votes]

"My recurring dream, as a young girl, was that the world needed saving and nary an adult was willing nor able to do anything about it. I’d fly around, battling evil and righting wrongs, while the adults in my life bumbled about like benevolent buffoons. My father always wore a top hat.

Mattie Ross in True Grit is this dream fully realized, and Hailee Steinfeld inhabits the character like she was born haggling for ponies and bringing evildoers to justice while the language of Charles Portis tumbles acrobatically out of her firmly set jaw. She is a wonder and a force, staring down corrupt businessmen, wayward marshals and the man who killed her daddy while haughtily, scoldingly reminding her companions that she is, “only fourteen years old.”

Mattie is the brilliant center of a film that hits every mark. The Coen Brothers, the Kings of the Remake and the Jesters of Genre, kept very true to the original text, rarely getting cutesy Coeny (the Medicine Man comes to mind). It’s a love affair with the Western, gorgeously shot by Roger Deakins (oooh, that night ride!) and achingly scored by Carter Burwell, playing gracefully with the traditional hymns that disqualified him for Oscar consideration.

The cast supporting Mattie (yes, she is the lead here, Academy) is uniformly marvelous. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn doesn’t reinvent the character canonized by John Wayne, but delves deeper into his true grittiness. His shoot-em-upmanship with Matt Damon’s Texas dandy is the funniest bit in a film that massaged my every emotion. Barry Pepper and Josh Brolin round out the crew of scruffy bad 'uns.

But it is Mattie who moves us. Mattie whose sense of right is unfailing and happens to entail hiring the most ruthless marshal she can find to track down the man who killed her daddy and bring him back dead or alive. Mattie who politely and eloquently bulldozes everyone in her path to get what she wants. Mattie’s insistent, “I want what I want!” is a line my five-year-old echoes instinctively, and one I’ve forgotten completely. Where is my inner Mattie?

My favorite update to the original film calls back to the novel where adult Mattie comes looking for Rooster, who’s already passed away. And adult Mattie? She’s no more willing to take any crap than child Mattie was. We don’t have to lose that strength, that drive, that conviction. True Grit is a nearly perfect film that, as Mattie tells Rooster after a particularly violent interlude, “displayed great poise.”" - Marya Murphy