Seven Angry Men: Father knows best

Marked by weepy Gothic windows and heavenly low-angle portraits, Charles Marquis Warren’s side-eye take on the John Brown saga is a holy war, a prophet’s crusade against a reverend and his flock of slavers culminating in personal martyrdom. John Brown doesn’t liberate the land so much as he exerts his iron will. In Raymond Massey's hands, Brown doesn’t think; everything is already thought. “An eye for an eye, my sons.” He doesn’t need to deliberate, even when it means risking his own children. The card says Moops.

Enlightened: Making a scene

“All I Ever Wanted” doesn't look like Enlightened. Directed by Todd Haynes, he of the underground Barbie diorama/soundstage Sirkbinder/prismatic Dylanology, “All I Ever Wanted” is a work of remarkable control. No nervous handhelds that sometimes mark Amy's frenzy. No broad-brush comedy that sometimes seeps into the writing. No consumerist detritus that sometimes reduces people into stock footage. There’s nothing generic here, nothing corporate outside a brief foray into Cogentiva and a stray Perrier bottle. Instead of looking up at the black cancer-box of Abaddonn, we look down on it from a turtle's-eye-view, and the usual office Earth Day color palette gives way to a passionate red. This isn't about a powerful corporation. This is about Amy.

Well, That's One Theory: TV vs. Film Part 7

Fun as the “TV vs. film” bathroom-stall graffiti competition is, I was disappointed to read Alan Sepinwall’s cheerleading in the introduction to his otherwise terrific book The Revolution Was Televised. He talks about the extinction of adult dramas, “the middle-class movie,” which he sort of defines as taking up the space between highbrow sticks and lowbrow stones. According to Sepinwall, “TV stepped in to fill that void. If you wanted thoughtful drama for adults, you didn’t go to the multiplex; you went to your living room couch.” O RLY? Sepinwall’s pop-historical fly-over depends on this idea that serious television supplanted film over the past few decades. Which wouldn’t be so frustrating with language that isn’t living beyond its means (“extinction”) and a few crucial qualifiers (like “American,” “major studio,” and “except for all these counterexamples”). But this vulgar history is a front for a more pervasive, more dangerous sentiment that promotes the easy while pretending it’s difficult. Not that there isn’t something cosmically satisfying about a person supported by the boob tube telling his audience they’re smart for doing what they’re doing already, but can I get a pillow and a refill, please?

Top 20 Older Movies I First Saw in 2012

Hey, everyone, come look at pictures of my baby! I saw about 650 movies in 2012. That includes 75 Silly Symphonies, 67 Looney Tunes, 64 Alice Guy shorts, 50ish Mack Sennett one-or-two-or-half-reelers, and a night of shorts that TCM calls "rare animation" even though the ones that got garbled by my DVR were on Youtube. I finished off Nicholas Ray, Val Lewton at RKO, and Oscar's Best Pictures. Marathoned Soderbergh, Sternberg, and Anthony Mann. Filled in some Flaherty, Ophuls, Wilder. Met William A. Seiter, John Brahm, and Hammer Horror. All in all, it's been more of a completist year than an adventurous one. Here's hoping 2013 takes more side streets.

RIP Winrich Kolbe

Reading that television director Winrich Kolbe had passed away, I finally felt that blow to nostalgia that must compel people to write blog posts memorializing artists. Not that I know anything about Kolbe. I just recognize his name from some of my favorite episodes of modern Star Trek, like The Next Generation's "Darmok" and Deep Space Nine's "The Siege of AR-558." Trek can be so close-up-heavy that it's counterproductive—unless Riker's beard counts as a strange new world—but between the nostril shots and the CGI, every once in a while, a decent portrait helps tell the story.

Sight & Sound 2012: The Year Without a Santa Claus

Josef von Sternberg isn’t even among the top 250 films of the Sight & Sound swimsuit edition and nobody noticed because Orson Welles dropped a spot. The list of auteurs who have been relegated to deep-cut status stretches from the pioneers (Feuillade, Bauer, Stiller, and Sjostrom are waiting outside while they enshrine one of those pretty pink Melies candy boxes) to the captains of midcentury Hollywood (not that Fuller, Mann, Aldrich, or Preminger give a shit) and beyond (Desplechin, Oliveira, Maddin, and Martel are trying really hard to smile at the interviewer who says to try again in ten years), but nothing is more faith-testing than that Sternberg-shaped hole in the wall.

The Dark Knight Rises: Batteries Not Included

The only thing I feel during a Christopher Nolan movie these days is my bladder swelling. The Dark Knight Rises is so clunky and mechanical it feels like a tinker engineered it out of dead hunks of steel: stopped-clock images, mascot characterizations, hospital-form dialogue, Rube Goldberg emotions, lifeless cityscapes, conveyor-belt music, accountant editing, and bumper-sticker politics. The thing moves because every breathing moment is lopped off with a guillotine. This isn’t the techno montage of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but a frenzied hurry-up-and-wait technique—bureaucratic filmmaking at its most punctual. With robotic enthusiasm The Dark Knight Rises asserts love and fear instead of evoking them, and it takes three tries for its hero to make it to the final act because that’s what they tell you in screenwriting class. Its greatest joke is that the Scarecrow’s psychotropic mask and the Joker’s chaotic menace are succeeded by a dom-bear’s gag ball. The film’s so dead I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a joke or not that higher-ups keep calling Joseph Azrael-Levitt’s Jump-Street do-gooder a hothead: He’s the most calmly insubordinate cop in pulp history. This is a film about villains hurting Bruce Wayne where he lives, and demagogues riding populist outrage into military dictatorship, and an empowered lower class storming the Bastille, and an underground resistance, and a busload of orphans, and two of the sexiest men in Hollywood, and it has all the emotional power of a bank. And they say Nolan doesn’t pick sides.