jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Does anybody still remember what Dr. Leary said about “set” and “setting”? Seeing movies at critics’ screenings isn’t always the best way to do them justice, and I distinctly remember sitting at the MGM screening room on Park Avenue sometime after lunch and feeling underwhelmed by Dave Chappelle’s concert movie. The sound wasn’t turned up enough, people were scribbling notes instead of at least bopping their heads to the beats, and I wasn’t exactly in a party mood, either. Both the music and the comedy left me dissatisfied at the time.

Cut to: Friday night, a few drinks, and the volume cranked good & proper. Suddenly, the jokes crack me up and the tunes hit me right in that sweet spot. The Roots, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, the Fugees–are you kidding? I’m not much of a fan of Michel Gondry’s fiction films, but there’s no doubt the man knows how to direct music, and Chappelle effortlessly combines silly hijinx with slyly concealed sentiment. He clearly threw this party as a present to himself, to the hometown Ohio folks he invited to Brooklyn, and whoever else happened to luck into the free show–a generous, inspiring celebration that went right over my head the first time around.

Block Party. Michel Gondry, 2005. ****

• Rotten Tomatoes
• Stephanie Zacharek’s rave

The trailer:

The Fugees, “Killing Me Softly”:

Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.

Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.

Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.

Read the rest of this entry »

New York Film Critics Online now has a page on Wikipedia, and there are lists of the madly prestigious awards we hand out.

“We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you.” –AO Scott on the job of the critic

I was Russell Crowe’s stooge