Press Play

Press Play Is Not Done Playing

Max Winter — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 12:15:04 GMT

Hello readers, watchers, listeners, cinephiles, and curious sorts of all stripes!

This is just a quick note to say that, yes, as you may have suspected, this will be Press Play's final day on Indiewire. But it is ***not*** Press Play's final day, period. Press Play is doing what the youngsters like to call "moving." Murmurings are echoing throughout its hallowed halls of what the future holds, and its esteemed editorial board is debating, with fervor and passion, which of the options available to it for continuance it will choose--and believe you me, the said editorial board feels lucky to have these options to consider, for any of the destinations rising through the mists would be wonderful locations to drop anchor. When the surveying is complete, and a tract of land has been designated for the building of the new Press Play megalopolis, a great cry will go out through the blogosphere, and you will know this blog has risen from its slumber and is ready to stride upright once again through the wild and woolly jungle of Internet publishing. Until that day comes, do two things: wait. And, more importantly, watch.

KICKING TELEVISION: 'The Ranch,' Redemption, and the Multi-Cam Sitcom

Mike Spry — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:34:09 GMT

It’s a strange time in the life of the sitcom. Somehow, television seems suddenly incapable of producing a true hit comedy, a show that goes beyond simple ratings success and enters the cultural zeitgeist. While Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory—both of which premiered last decade—capture viewers and Emmys, the shows have never penetrated the fabric of Western culture. No one calls another “such a Claire” or inserts “Bazinga” into their everyday parlance. The last sitcom to find such relevance was Friends, which left the airwaves in 2004. While the drama, be it Game of Thrones or Mad Men or the soap of Shondaland, has found a way into life beyond television, the sitcom has been left out of our conversations and colloquialisms. This is partly because of ambitionless productions, partly due to the ebb and flow of viewers’ tastes, but mostly because we, as viewers, have been left wanting for better comedy fare.

I’m critical of the sitcom, and yet hopeful for its return to prominence. But, perhaps I’ve been too hard on the form. Maybe it’s time to lower expectations to find a suitable metric with which to measure artistic success. I came to this realization while watching Netflix’s The Ranch. When I first tried the latest Ashton Kutcher project, I got about two and a half minutes in before giving up. Formulaic plot, grating laugh track, Ashton Kutcher. But a day later I returned, because I felt I owed any attempt at art more, because I have the utmost respect for and affinity with co-stars Sam Elliott and Debra Winger and wondered what they were doing in a sitcom, because I have fond memories of Kutcher and co-star/co-producer Danny Masterson in That ‘70s Show, and because I was bored and there’s not much left I haven’t watched. And though The Ranch won’t single-handedly change the sitcom, it is a surprisingly deft, funny, and insightful portrayal of Middle America, and a hopeful sign of a resurgence of the multi-cam sitcom. Once a prominent form that was always TV’s connection to theatre, its association with art over entertainment, the multi-cam has given way to the single-cam sitcom, reserved mostly for family comedies (The Middle, Last Man Standing, Fuller House) or Chuck Lorre.

The Ranch is about a former high school football star Colt Bennett (Kutcher) who returns home to his family’s struggling Garrison, Colorado ranch after failing to make it as a pro. His parents Beau and Maggie (Elliott and Winger) live separate lives, torn apart by Beau’s stubbornness and a dying way of life. Maggie owns a bar in town, and lives in an Airstream out back. Beau runs the family business with the son who stayed, Rooster (Masterson). They are middle-class farming Americans: Bud, bourbon, and bovines. But while TV tends to make caricatures out of the red states and their denizens, The Ranchtreats them with respect and deference. The characters in The Ranch feel genuine; people struggling to make ends meet in a world that doesn’t pay them much attention.

The Ranch is the first sitcom, or TV series for that matter, to accurately and respectfully discuss middle class families and values since Roseanne. For whatever reason, sitcoms tend to revel in the lives of the upper class, featuring characters with fabulous jobs, luscious apartments, and lives of privilege. Poverty is either mocked or ignored, though usually played for laughs. The Ranch doesn’t aspire to find its characters better lives; it concerns itself with the hardship of the lives they live. Like Roseanne, The Ranch is about paying bills, supporting your family, and settling down with a beer at day’s end.

Politically, The Ranch differs from Roseanne in its right wing leanings. Jokes are made at Al Gore’s expense; the liberal world of the blue states is mocked for its folly. But, in turn, The Ranch doesn’t mine Beau Bennett’s conservatism for easy laughs, but rather respects a character who may have voted for George Bush simply because in his democracy that seemed like the best choice for his family, his ranch, his livelihood. And The Ranch doesn’t linger on the clash between Democrats and Republicans as a point of narrative, but lets it exist in the fabric of the show’s setting.

The Ranch also shares a kinship with Roseanne in the way it allows the comedy to disappear into drama. Roseanne was graceful in its discussion of adolescence, poverty, domestic abuse, gender roles, loss, and sexuality. While The Ranch has yet to delve into such issues, and perhaps never will, like ‘Roseanne’ it is not afraid to leave the jokes and laugh track behind and settle in silence, or anger, or sadness. Freed of the twenty-two minute episode constraints of the network model, Netflix gives The Ranch the luxury of long scenes that defy the laugh-a-minute construct of the contemporary sitcom. The way that part one of season one (part two will be released later in the year) evolved promises that issues of substance may be addressed, and the series has proved itself capable (aesthetically, anyway) of crafting such television.

At the core of the show is redemption—primarily in the reparation of a fractured family, a fractured way of life, a fractured class—as Colt tries to make amends for his failings as a son, as a football player, as a man. In many ways it’s also about the redemption of the multi-cam form, an art lost in the raging sea of single-cam comedy and a form that’s lost its way. But beyond that it’s about the reclamation of the careers of its cast. Kutcher never became the rom-com/action star that Hollywood and Demi Moore expected after the breakout success of That ‘70s Show, and always seemed like Charlie Sheen’s stand-in on Two and a Half Men. Masterson disappeared into the abyss of on-and-gone series like Men At Work and off-camera successes as a DJ and entrepreneur. Winger, once Hollywood’s it girl, a three-time Oscar nominee, left acting for seven years in the late 90s. To see her in a multi-cam sitcom—and being wonderful in it—goes against the image of a preconceived difficult star, who took her craft (and self) too seriously. And Elliott, well, Elliott was born to play a rancher. His genius pervades each scene, and to see him both satirize and build upon his caricature is sitcom perfection.

I didn’t have high hopes for The Ranch, but somehow fell for its simple charm, its subtlety, its quiet ambition, and its cast. When season one, part two arrives, I hope it’s able to maintain its delicate balance between comedy and drama, its affection for blue collar America, and its use of the liberty of Netflix. I also hope that they give Elisha Cuthbert, who plays Colt’s high school sweetheart, more to do. Cuthbert was sublime in the gone-too-soon Happy Endings, and the only thing worth watching in One Big Happy. While I would also love more of Elliott and Winger, Cuthbert hasn’t quite gotten her due as an actress, perhaps because the industry prefers to see her as a Maxim pinup, literally The Girl Next Door. She seems to embody the essence of comedic brilliance, and the ability to temper that with dramatic flare. There’s a quiet perfection to her comedy, like she doesn’t seem to know she’s in on the joke. Hers is role that is often left scraps, the love interest. But her talents beg for more screen time, which would allow The Ranch to continue to evolve into, dare I say it, a model for what a relevant multi-cam sitcom can be.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

Watch: Steven Spielberg's Artistic Strength Depends Upon His Humanity

Max Winter — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 11:23:26 GMT

Fans of Steven Spielberg say he gets them at their gut; critics of Spielberg say he goes corny too often, and in so doing betrays his craft. Both viewpoints hinge on one attribute: his ability to capture moments of what we call, for lack of a better word, humanity, or times when human sloppiness, idiosyncrasy, even stupidity, might achieve resonance, even luminosity. This video essay by Andrew Saladino does an excellent job of calling out these moments, explaining Spielberg's technique in executing them, and discussing their relevance to Spielberg's work. Whether it's an alienated scientist playing with mashed potatoes in 'Close Encounters' or a boy crying for his mother (or any mother) in 'A.I.,' the ability of Spielberg's films to drop anchor, to reach his viewers in a memorable way depends on his skill at observing those viewers and the way they act when they think no one's looking.

Watch: David Fincher's 'Gone Girl' Retells Euripides' 'Medea'

Max Winter — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 08:59:10 GMT

Every story you know and love originated in ancient times. David Fincher's 'Gone Girl,' adapted from Gillian Flynn's brilliant, acidic novel, is no exception. You've been listening to, reading, and witnessing tales of revenge, tales of escape, and tales of murder for as long as you can remember, but you may not have made the link, when doing so, between the modern-day film you're watching or story you're reading with the dramas of ancient Greece, the dramas with themes and ideas so enormous they had to be screamed to be fully realized. This video essay by Ivana Brehas makes its crucial point, which is that 'Gone Girl' is a retelling of Euripides' 'Medea,' in a calm but firm manner, Trent Reznor's soundtrack circulating beneath the methodical analysis, an analysis which bears down upon barbarism, betrayal, and a level of discomfort in the relations between two people that would be enough to curl most viewers' toes for an indefinite period of time, doing so through point-by-point comparison which, as presented here, makes perfect sense. One would have to imagine that Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike would have had to have ample PTSD therapy after dipping their toes in Flynn's sea of dysfunction, but hey, perhaps not. The story of Medea, of revenge, of escape, of rage, is in our narrative bloodstream. We see these stories, and we are horrified by them, but we aren't that horrified--because we recognize their essential truth.

Watch: Guillermo Del Toro Thinks in Pure Colors

Max Winter — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 10:06:23 GMT

Shame on anyone who says watching a film is passive! When you watch a film, you're actually doing several things at once. First and foremost, you pay attention to the nuts and bolts of the story. Almost as gripping, though, is what your retinae are doing. In certain filmmakers' work, and Guillermo Del Toro is one of these filmmakers, the visual play acts as a complement to the story, such that if you were in a certain mood, you might simply look at the colors and not even notice the plot-character-setting scenario being laid out before you. This video by Quentin Dumas takes us on a lush tour of the colors Guillermo Del Toro likes best: red, blue, and yellow. These colors have meaning, certainly; who could deny the importance of a deep, decadent red in a dark film like 'Crimson Peak,' and who could consider the use of blue, the color of night, in the revelatory and mind-stretching 'Pan's Labyrinth'? These colors are coded, yes--but don't try to figure out the code. You won't be able to. Accept that they have an effect on you: a weakening of the resolve, a quickening of the pulse, the vaguest sense of dizziness. The less you try to figure out the "why" of these feelings, the happier you'll be.

Watch: John Carpenter's 'Halloween' Scares Us With Simplicity

Max Winter — Sun, 24 Apr 2016 21:11:54 GMT

If fear made a sound, what would it be? That's a trick question, somewhat, because fear and silence, the complete absence of sound, are inextricably linked. John Carpenter understood this when he made 'Halloween.' We can't say, of course, that the film is completely without an audio component, given that its soundtrack is one of the most famous soundtracks in film history, but we can say that Carpenter's approach, in his acute sound editing, in his spare production design, was to narrow the viewer's field of attention so that whatever was happening to his central figures at any given moment was the only thing readily noticeable--making the scenes of attack in the film all the more frightening, given that they seemed almost as if they could be happening to us. As Julian Palmer indicates with this excellent video essay, the actions in the film occur in something of an aesthetic still chamber, and are all the more harrowing for that.

KICKING TELEVISION: 'Fuller House' and the Stasis of Nostalgia

Mike Spry — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 18:52:22 GMT

One of the most vivid memories I have of my adolescence is gorging on Doritos and Pepsi in my friend Tim’s basement and watching TV. There was no junk food in my home. I used to try and make my own Orange Crush from tonic water and orange juice. I was not a cool tween. I don’t know what the cool 12-year-olds were doing on their Friday nights in the late 80s, but they definitely weren’t in Tim’s basement laughing at the comedic stylings of the Olsen twins, cutting-it-out with Dave Coulier, digging on Jesse and the Rippers, crushing on Candace Cameron, and augmenting our sugar cravings with the sweet banality of Full House.

Full House has returned to the television landscape as Fuller House, part of a wave of reboots. The Netflix series essentially flips the premise of its forbearer; recently widowed DJ Tanner-Fuller (Cameron) welcomes her sister Stephanie (Jodie Sweetin) and best friend Kimmy Gibbler (Andrea Barber) into her home to help raise her three sons, as DJ’s recently widowed dad (Bob Saget) accepted help with his three girls in exchange for room and board for his brother-in-law Jesse (John Stamos) and best friend Joey (Dave Coulier). Sterile hilarity follows, as do occasional guest appearances from series originals Saget, Stamos, Coulier, and Lori Loughlin. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (Michelle Tanner)—Forbes Celebrity 100 listed, fashion icon paparazzi subjects—declined participation

Full House wasn't a show that revolutionized the sitcom or embedded itself deeply in the cultural fabric of TV, but that didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now. It wasn’t offensive or malicious. It was benign—comfortable. It served its purpose as a family comedy, a staple of ABC’s TGIF lineup, and a sitcom that made 12 to 14 year-old me laugh bootlegged Crush out my nose. Tim did not live in a sugar-dry home. I remember very little about the show other than hanging out in that basement, ignorant of my absence of cool, and happier for it. Teendom came soon after, and being cool became infinitely more important, and so I didn’t watch much of the later seasons of Full House. The only time the show entered the zeitgeist was in conversation about the Olsen twins, the websites counting down to their 18th birthday, and the piracy of their youth by the infancy of the Internet’s intrusiveness.

I’m not sure how many Full House episodes we actually consumed in that basement. But that’s how my memory places the show, and that’s where Full House will remain, regardless of the truth, whatever that may be. Memory is static—it exists in our solipsism. Television is a mnemonic device as much as a form of entertainment. It gives personal associations cultural and temporal references points born of its archival inertness. It’s a literal record of a performance, but a figurative record of individual experiences. No one else, not even Tim, likely associates Full House with Pepsi and Cool Ranch, but for me the affiliation is so vivid, so real as to have the essence of fact.

Our televisions and streaming apparatuses have become inundated with reboots and revisions of beloved series, and Fuller House has chosen to rest in its past, much like The X-Files echoes its earlier seasons, as if Mulder and Scully had just been waiting in stasis for us to find them. Properties are given the choice to either contemporize their efforts or mine nostalgia for viewers. Fuller House attempts to revel in the nostalgia of Full House in order to build upon its audience, much as Star Wars did with The Force Awakens. Star Wars provides a new foundation for a narrative that will leave behind the past while Fuller House stays in the past. The mixed family of Fuller House lives in the same home as the extended Tanner family did on Full House; the set is nearly exactly the same, as is the comedy. Maybe they should’ve killed Danny, Jesse, and Joey off in the first episode, but that would’ve made for a different show—a darker, perhaps more interesting series—one that would ask that its original audience disregard nostalgia and indulge in a universe that has aged as its viewers and their universe has.

The show is keenly aware of itself as a cultural entity; often making reference to the absence of the Olsens and the fact it’s a reboot. In almost breaking the fourth wall, the show continues its participatory nostalgia in winking at the audience it indulges as we do. It dances the edge of satire, with grand canned oohs and aahs and reactions to the guest appearances of Saget, Coulier, Stamos, and Loughlin. In fact, a close watch of Fuller House finds a much more complex sitcom then what shows on the surface, discussing loss, the modern nuclear family, and puppy ownership. But the core of the show remains its fascination with an ever-static past, both theirs and ours.

Interestingly, the reboot’s three principles—Cameron-Bure, Sweetin, and Barber— have been mostly absent from show business since the original series. Removed from the cultural landscape, its almost as if they’re characters were off living the twenty-one years between episodes as we were. Perhaps this is why the original’s leads—Saget, Stamos, Coulier, Loughlin—who have remained part of the zeitgeist, have mere ancillary roles in Fuller House. (Okay, maybe not Coulier.) In this way, the show is honoring both universes, that of Full(er) House and our own, respectful of the associations of memory that exist in relation to the original.

There is nothing revolutionary in Fuller House, other than that it is fearless in living in the past. Complete with groan-worthy catchphrases—old (Oh Mylanta!, How rude!, Have mercy!) and new (Holy chalupas!)—the show remains committed to the bygone era of TGIF and the big, fluorescent family sitcom. Watching the series will probably not attach a marker of memory to this moment, to my now. I’m able to procure my own sugar these days. But the show is successful in recapturing its own youth, and perhaps a bit of mine.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

'Burnt,' 'Whiplash,' and the Myth of the Lonely Triumph

Spencer Short — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 17:03:28 GMT

It’s easy to imagine how life as a writer or director in Hollywood—which on a good day promises meddling producers, scripts-by-committee, and fealty to test audiences—might seriously distort how you think about the relationship between art and commerce. Given these obstacles, just getting a film to the screen might feel like a victory, though that victory can quickly turn pyrrhic. Just watch any actor or director on a late-night talk show, trying to put a shine on a film that’s DOA. It probably shouldn’t surprise us, then, if a film stumbles a bit when it addresses artistic life. I was thinking about this recently while watching Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash for the first time. I was four hours into a flight home from Amsterdam, tucked away in a cozy business class pod I’d poached at a bargain at a Schipol kiosk, and I was already on my second film—I’d started Whiplash almost immediately after finishing Burnt, the Bradley Cooper vehicle from last year, about a bad-boy chef’s scheme to bully his way back into the culinary thermosphere. Even the airline’s precision-tuned hospitality couldn’t stop me from feeling slightly dispirited. By any popular accounting, these were very different films (a heralded debut, a failed vanity project) and yet, in certain fundamental ways, they seemed disappointingly indistinguishable.

***

In Bradley Cooper’s hands, intelligence is a protean thing—charming, willful, defensive, and destabilizing, at once or in waves, at times touched by mania (Silver Linings Playbook), overcompensation (American Hustle), or even fraud (Limitless, The Words). In Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell gave Cooper’s self-doubt room to breathe and leveraged Cooper’s stubborn enthusiasm against the intractability of our idea of mental illness. In American Sniper, Clint Eastwood pushed Cooper’s charm inward, allowing it to bubble to the surface only occasionally, while simultaneously projecting the anxiety and insecurity out into the world, reconfiguring T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative as political gesture. If American Sniper is, as Richard Brody has written, a story about “genius in crisis,” it’s also a story about genius in the making and, ultimately, a story about the self-bargaining and self-deception with which we justify the sacrifices genius demands. That Kyle’s particular “genius” is lethal is a sly touch, though it doesn’t change the calculus. Eastwood’s film, far from being glib, elevates an abiding sympathy and righteous anger into a form of patriotism. As the Manichean architecture of Kyle’s moral universe crumbles, and his notions of duty, honor, good, and evil are undone by the complexity and carnage of war, Kyle crumbles along with it. Eastwood makes the heroic seem inherently fragile.

In John Wells’ Burnt, Cooper is, once again, a genius, though this time culinary. It’s a shame the film doesn’t take better advantage of Cooper’s comedic gifts and its own diminished stakes to inject the levity its premise demands:

Adam Jones had it all – and lost it. A two-star Michelin rockstar with the bad habits to match, the former enfant terrible of the Paris restaurant scene did everything different every time out, and only ever cared about the thrill of creating explosions of taste. To land his own kitchen and that third elusive Michelin star, though, he’ll need the best of the best on his side, including the beautiful Helene.

Wells is an accomplished writer and producer, though Burnt is just the third feature film he’s directed. Perhaps the pitch-meeting heuristic of “Top Gun meets Top Chef” appealed to John Wells, Producer even as the script’s reliance on exhausted signifiers doomed John Wells, Director, to failure. I’m saying it’s bad. But there are a lot of bad movies. So why did critics carve into this one with such cruel high-spirits? (This review, for instance, does yeoman’s work.) The answer, I think, resides in the film’s mistaken belief that it has something to say about something (“Art”) critics care about; that it proceeded to say it in such a hackneyed way only made the offense worse. Take an early scene in which Jones solicits a favor from a powerful restaurant critic, played by Uma Thurman, who not only goes along with his unethical plan but also says, to no one in particular:

“You know, when I lie awake at night and list my regrets, you're one of them. I say to myself, ‘Simone, you're a lesbian. Why did you sleep with Adam Jones?’”

This is the stuff of failed rewrites. Worse, however, this dialogue shows up just moments before the film’s protagonist screams at his staff that perfection takes priority over convenience (“Throw it away if it’s not perfect!”). That’s brazen.

The answer to Thurman’s question, if you’re wondering, is that everyone sleeps with Adam Jones. Or wants to. The film works diligently to ensure we understand Jones’ asceticism as a choice—men and women fawn all over him—tied to his heroic focus on craft. He’s more smug than seductive, however, and we’re left to infer his appeal from the fact that people around him react to him as if charmed. This is a perfectly fine method for detecting black holes from 8000 light years away (until recently, the only way), but it feels a tad lazy as a screenwriting technique. And yet, if the metaphor fits: Jones’ efforts at brand-rebuilding are driven by a pragmatic calculus that thinks nothing of blackmail and theft, and he’s no less of an asshole in the kitchen. In one particularly egregious series of events, Jones wheedles a fellow restaurateur to fire his head chef, Heléne (Sienna Miller), a single mother, so that she’s forced to work in Jones’ kitchen in spite of her clearly-stated preference otherwise. In due turn, he screams at her, assaults her, and fires her. They reconcile, of course, and yet even then he refuses to grant her a half-day off for her daughter’s birthday. Naturally, she develops into a love interest. Why?

No matter. Burnt makes masochists of all of us. The chefs are petulant, if talented, children who take a kind of survivor’s pride in their cruelty. Abuse is mistaken for competition, and competition is mistaken for education; it’s a marketplace of culinary idealism animated by a petty animus and creative destruction, regulated only by the invisible hand(s) of loyalty and respect. That’s not a complaint, mind you—I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so I get it—or at least it wouldn’t be if the movie took the idea seriously. But the film refuses to entertain the possibility that Jones isn’t the best (Jones never doubts himself and his peers never doubt him, and thus we’re never permitted to question it). As a result, Burnt isn’t the story it thinks it is, that of a persevering, battle-tested genius; it’s a story of peerage, more Russian oligopoly (or kleptocracy) than Adam Smith.

In spite of the focus on greatness, the film shows little interest in exploring the nature of Jones’ talents. We learn nothing about his origins (he had the standard “difficult” childhood, someone mentions), or his skills, or even, and this is most remarkable, his tastes. It’s fair to ask if the movie cares about food at all. Instead of taking a deep dive and showing us what culinary inspiration means, the film leaves us to watch him fret and fuss while he chases a form of perfection designed to please a Michelin reviewer. A third star is an accomplishment, but it’s one that completely ignores the relationship between a chef and his audience (whether it be his diners or those of us watching at home). Perhaps it’s a necessary narrative crutch. How do you show culinary inspiration, after all? But even so, it’s a MacGuffin that swallows the entire film. We’re left listening to Jones wax psychological about the kitchen being the “only place he’s every felt like he belonged” and his attraction to its “heat, pressure, and violence.” Save for a turn toward graciousness at the end—the equivalent of a tyrannical director dutifully checking off names from the Oscar stage—Jones behaves a bit like a sociopath. If only the film had the courage of its convictions and let Jones be the cipher or black hole it insinuates he might be… There’s a formalist and utilitarian appeal to the idea that art (culinary or otherwise) can channel our most unruly and dangerous impulses into another person’s pleasure. To recognize this appeal, however, you also have to recognize that art is larger, more interesting, and longer-lasting than its practitioners. Wells, caught somewhere between test audience expectations and serious inquiry, gets it precisely backwards. Burnt devotes too little attention to real emotions or real cooking to teach us anything about either.

***

Whiplash, a year older, might have provided Burnt some tips on how to dramatize the obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection. Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), the protagonist of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, truly comes alive at his drum kit. But that’s just a charitable way of saying he’s a bit of a snooze everywhere else. For the first fifteen minutes of the film, Neiman, a freshman at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory in New York, shuffles from frame-to-frame, an amiable if blurry presence. There’s a hint of something edgier, though. It’s in the quickness with which he tells people that Shaffer is the best program in the country, and his semi-endearing, slightly-annoying transparency about his ambitions. Everything changes once Neiman falls under the tutelage of Terrance Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the director of Shaffer’s top jazz orchestra, however. The movie turns abruptly away from its minor key realism and toward the allegorical, and what follows is a showy psychodrama that pits a father’s unconditional support against a legendary teacher’s arbitrary rules and impossible demands, making for crackling drama but shoddy psychology. As a theory of art, it’s worse. Fletcher, for whom “tough love” is too long by half, elevates withholding to an art form. And yet, for all of his splenetic, rhetorical force, Fletcher’s doctrine is incoherent. If he’s such a purist, and if validation is such an enemy, why does he rely so heavily on professional validation to motivate his orchestra? Ironically, Fletcher’s band is built for competition, and it’s safe to ask, as one cousin does at a Neiman family dinner, only to be met by Neiman’s contempt, how one decides who “wins” when aesthetic response is subjective or when genius is supposed to be its own reward. For Neiman, “the best” requires a belief that greatness can be measured and recognition meted out accordingly. Nothing Fletcher says challenges this conception. For all of his railing against the dangers of validation, he’s telling himself “good job” every time he polishes his trophies.

Fletcher is less a teacher than a cult leader, and his jazz-based religion (sadly, not this one) demands not discipline but monomania. Neiman is disappointingly quick to adopt Fletcher’s disdainful view of everything not-jazz, however, and almost immediately his successes and failures at Shaffer exert a Sims-like control over his outside life: when he earns praise, he asks the lovely cashier at the local art house theater on a date; later, when he’s castigated by Fletcher, he meets her for coffee and breaks up with her. She is dead weight, he says, and he’s on a path to glory that requires him to travel light. Worse, perhaps, at least professionally, he treats his fellow musicians with contempt. We watch him practice alone until his hands bleed, and this tortured solitude carries over even when he’s playing with the orchestra. Even if we accept that the life of a musician can be a bleak one, jazz itself has never felt so lonely.

In the final scene, an ambitious, tightly-choreographed set-piece, Neiman launches an epic drum performance, dragging the orchestra into a stirring rendition of Juan Tizol’s and Duke Ellington’s standard “Caravan.” As the camera circles, Neiman is framed in sharp focus as the rest of the orchestra blurs at the edges of the frame. The camera picks up even the smallest details of Neiman’s solo, the sweat bouncing on a cymbal, tiny specks of blood on his kit, before swiveling to Fletcher, now reduced to being a cheerleader, and then to Neiman’s father, looking on in disbelief from behind the small glass window of a door. Watching Neiman leave everything behind—Fletcher, his father, his fellow orchestra members, and seemingly physics itself—I thought, of all things, of Kubrick’s star-child and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dialectical, allegorical, virtuosic, and fetishistic, Whiplash seems to be talking less about artistic genius than it is about something both more grand and more abstract, a transcendent individuality based on technical proficiency, at once accomplished and utterly masturbatory. Sure, as Neiman drums deeper and deeper into solipsism, he gets an approving nod from Fletcher, but at what price to his friends and family, his bandmates, and, finally, his audience? To Chazelle, like Kubrick, audience members are like taxpayers, expected to foot the bill for an exploration that was designed to leave them behind all along.

***

Ground control to Major Tom? The risk inherent in thinking of artistic ascendance as a dialectic is an almost pathological linearity. The narrative necessitates that everything feed into the development and arrival of the artist and thus that everything be consumed or discarded along the way. It’s fundamentally solitary. And through it, even the past is converted to fuel: Jones is drawn to flash of fire and the knife’s-edge, and his derogation of sous-vide cooking as poaching fish in a “condom” is intended, I can only imagine, to posit him as a bareback kind of guy in a world of culinary safe-sex. Neiman draws inspiration from the mid-century virtuoso Buddy Rich, identifies with the jazz of the 1930s (he tries to impress his date by noting some swing from 1932 on the pizza parlor stereo) and, as far as I can tell, ignores anything after 1960. The films fetishize tradition but can’t be bothered to get that tradition right. Through this kind of utilitarian alchemy, the rich, complicated history of jazz—quintessentially American, born of slavery-era African American culture—becomes the story of a white private school student’s struggle to play drums in front of Lincoln Center millionaires (right next to Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theatre). Is this kind of white-washing a symptom or side-effect of this process or is it the point? Does it matter? The method by which Fletcher “teaches” Neiman is a caustic winnowing in which he attacks everything—Neiman’s sexuality, his ethnicity, his socioeconomic background, his birthright—that’s not straight, white, male. Burnt doesn’t fare much better, braced and bracketed by its own rigidly hierarchical notions of masculinity. It’s not just that lesbians stop being lesbians around Jones, it’s the almost-vampiric unilaterality of Jones’ relationship with Tony, an old friend who funds Jones’ restaurant, cleans up his messes, and pines for him from across the kitchen. There’s a risk inherent in confusing competition for natural order. The films’ faith in competition as a kind of meritocratic clearinghouse is essentially neoliberal, and like neoliberalism the films are frustratingly blind to their own narrow demographic sensibility. The films rise out of, and give in to, the same narrative Hollywood has been telling itself for years and, as a result, serve to justify and reify Hollywood’s entrenched successes, excesses, and biases.

This world-view is called into question by the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which dares to suggest, in an almost Rawlsian way, that the distribution of talent and success might each be inequitable or even arbitrary. Set at the turn of the 1960s in New York’s Greenwich Village, it follows a few days in the life of its titular antihero, a folk singer trying (and failing) to carve out a career. Davis isn’t so different from Jones or Neiman. He sings beautifully, and he’s darkly charismatic, self-absorbed, ambitious, and self-sacrificing. He is, in other words, a character of thorny complexity, and thus perfectly at home within the Coens’ cosmology. But there’s an uncomfortable neutrality toInside that’s a far cry from the hero-worship of Whiplash and Burnt. The film is decidedly agnostic about Davis’ talent. He’s not bad, mind you, but he’s not great, and the way this plays against narrative expectations creates a fog of uncertainty that rolls in early and never clears. Davis, on the other hand, is convinced that he’s special, and his sense of his own specialness drives him onward, over and through everything that might stand in his way. Although he’s not without conscience, his loyalty to his own ambition is blinding and, as a result, even his attempts at accountability tend to exacerbate his mistakes—he’s like “King Midas’s idiot brother,” he’s told, because “everything he touches turns to shit.” Like Jones and Neiman, Davis looks for validation everywhere. He’s hungry for commercial success, and he’s hungry for artistic recognition (even from people he doesn’t respect) and, in their absence, he’s prone to a petty nihilism that expresses itself through bullish destruction, whether by angrily heckling a performer onstage or sleeping with married friends. For much of the film, we’re inclined to question Davis’ behavior, but not his ambition. By the end, it’s impossible to tell the two apart.

The film blurs these lines by up-ending the myth of artistic ascent and instead tracking what might be Davis’ last days as an artist. Davis is broke, dead-eyed from his day-to-day hustle, exhausted from couch-surfing. He’s no longer young. His solo debut album isn’t selling. As a result of all of this, his search for validation takes on an almost manic intensity that inspires Davis to tag along on a drive to Chicago in a last-ditch attempt to catch a promoter’s eye. Davis fails, of course—the promoter doesn’t “see a lot of money” in Davis’ songs. But even the successes don’t feel much like successes—the film is stacked high with remaindered albums (by Davis and others) that drive home the point that what feels like artistic arrival often ends up disappointingly anticlimactic. Here, validation seems less a coronation than a kind of payday loan, a usurious line of credit fueling a bad bet. Artistic neediness becomes indistinguishable from blind self-bargaining. If this sounds dispiriting, that’s because it is. One evening, after dinner with the Gorfeins, a sweet, middle-aged bourgeois couple who now-and-again provides Davis with a meal and a bed, Mrs. Gorfein asks Davis to sing for them. The wife struggles to comprehend his hesitation, noting that music issupposed to be “a joyous expression of the soul.” It’s clear, however, that Davis doesn’t even understand what that means anymore. Like Jones and Neiman, Davis mistakes his lack of generosity for purity and purpose, and defines himself through what he rejects. The difference, of course, is that the Coens recognize this as a character flaw. They don’t elevate it to an ethos.

***

I was Andrew Neiman. I was built for my MFA program, a natural fit for an environment where the fight for funding (and by extension status) was very public. Those times I managed to come out on top, I imagined it to be not only fair but just. Like Jones and Neiman, I was an outsider, or felt like one—small-town, middle class, a middling student who graduated from a mid-sized state university—and I viewed my time in graduate school as a kind of class struggle, relying upon fellowships, awards, and praise to prop me up and propel me onward. By the time I left Iowa, I’d won a national prize and my first book of poetry was on the verge of being released by a giant New York publishing house. Which is why it would be hard for me to say that the MFA system as I knew it doesn’t “work.” It just depends on how we define “work.” I improved dramatically, others around me improved dramatically, and something akin to literature was created almost daily. That’s no small thing. But the system—an illusory gift economy that also yields at a nudge to reveal a neoliberal faith in competition—could hardly be called fair or just. In retrospect, I’m not even sure what “winning” meant, other than that I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. It’s probably not coincidence, then, that the “winners” of the Workshop sweepstakes (and, honestly, the program itself) looked an awful lot like the monolithic casts of Burnt and Whiplash.

Further, as much as the structure and validation—the constant reassurance that I was, in fact, talented—provided me with a temporary fix-it or release from lacerating self-doubt, it wasn’t the source or catalyst of my improvement. Not really. Inside Llewyn Davis seems to grasp this. For all the struggle and internal competition within his Greenwich Village community, Davis is cared for by those around him, both artists and patrons, who provide him with meals and shelter, find him jobs, line up his performances. The artists struggle with one another, but they struggle together. As such, the Coens construct a Village that is truly a village and it’s hard not to feel some longing for their shared purpose and experiences. If the film allows for any redemption at all (and if does, it merly flickers), it rests in the possibility that Davis might come to appreciate those around him just a little more by the end. Art isn’t forged in the fire of competition. Not really. And, although artists may live for moments of Neiman-like transcendence, they still need to figure out how to live every other minute of the day. Two years after I left Iowa, I’d stopped writing altogether.

If we’re at the end of the MFA’s reign as a gatekeeper and tastemaker, I’m not going to mourn. I benefited from it, without question. I not only ended up publishing a book but managed to parlay my experience there and a decent LSAT score into a legal education. But the fact that I so desperately craved admission and approval, that I blindly accepted both as a measure of actual value, explains a lot about the trajectory of my writing career after. When I walked away from academia and writing, it was in large part because I realized that I’d gotten the math all wrong. And Mrs. Gorfein, it turns out, was right. As the credits to Whiplash began to roll, and I tilted back into the dark quiet of the cabin, high above the Atlantic, I thought of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” It was the first short story I ever loved, and I used to teach it in my writing and literature classes. Like Whiplash, it’s the story of a young jazz musician. Narrated by the title character’s brother (like Neiman’s father, a high school teacher), who has been at odds with Sonny over his lifestyle, Baldwin’s short story concludes with Sonny’s return to the stage after his release from prison on drug charges. Baldwin’s depiction of the performance shares little with Whiplash’s celebration of willpower and technique, invoking instead the idea of art as an act of generosity and community:

And as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horns insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. They all came together again and, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face.

In the ebb-and-flow of the on-stage collaboration, Baldwin provides a compelling argument for the pain (collateral and otherwise) that we must accept as the price for art. Genius, he suggests, resides in performance, not the individual, and as such it is a fleeting thing, existing “only for a moment” before releasing us back into the world, where “trouble stretches above us, longer than the sky.” For Baldwin, the quintessential outsider, this is far from a lonely act:

Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever.

Spencer Short is an attorney and author. His collection of poetry, Tremolo (Harper 2001), was awarded a 2000 National Poetry Series Prize. His poetry and non-fiction have been published in The Boston Review, Coldfront, theColumbia Review, Hyperallergic, Men’s Digest, Slate, and Verse. He lives in Philadelphia.

Watch: In Andrea Arnold's 'Wuthering Heights,' Music Is the Film's Soul

Max Winter — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 18:25:59 GMT

Emotions cannot always be expressed in a straightforward conversational manner. We gesticulate, we make facial expressions, we shift our body language... or perhaps we sing. Usually the singing is self-directed, and the emotion being expressed isn't necessarily nameable. There are many moments in Andrea Arnold's 'Wuthering Heights' when characters simply sing, either to themselves or to each other. This new video essay by Filmscalpel gathers together some of these moments, and the overwhelming sense one gets, in watching the moments unfold, is that the chief emotion being expressed is a desire for contact, for recognition, above and beyond the emotion being expressed. And what more basic emotion could there be for a human being to express, either in public or in private?

Watch: Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia' Captures the Experience of Depression

Max Winter — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 21:53:57 GMT

If you've ever been immersed in the condition known to clinical psychologists and others as "depression," but really too indescribable to fit within one label, then Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia' should have great resonance for you. Evan Puschak, aka "The Nerdwriter" on YouTube, makes the great point (one of several) at the beginning of this piece that von Trier's film inscribes the physical experience of depression in his cinematography, in his painfully slow pacing, and in Kirsten Dunst's performance as Justine, one of her most memorable, strange performances yet. Von Trier uses slow motion quite frequently, and yet here it has special poignance as it recalls the feeling many depressed people have that time has slowed down, that each second feels like sixty, each minute feels like a lifetime, and that were a rogue planet to crash into Earth, it might not be such a bad thing.

Watch: What Lies Between TV Shows' First and Last Frames?

Max Winter — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 18:18:18 GMT

There is a pressure on any work to create, within its span, a tiny world whose life begins at the film's opening credits and ends with its closing credits. It would seem that for TV dramas, that pressure is doubled because of the additional boundary the TV screen, so much smaller than a movie screen, places on it for containment. This video piece by Celia Gomez, inspired by Jacob T. Swinney's near-canonical study of the first and last frames of films, shows us some shocking correspondences between many shows' opening frames and closing frames, among them 'Mad Men,' 'The Sopranos,' 'Lost,' 'The Network,' and, oddly enough, 'Frasier.'

Watch: Quentin Tarantino's Choreography in Slow Motion

Max Winter — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:25:03 GMT

In Quentin Tarantino's films, movement is everything. If his characters are not moving, they are about to move. In 'The Hateful Eight,' the maneuvering of the devious travelers around each other in Minnie's Haberdashery, with its rambling architecture, is every bit as important as the words they say to each other, or the shots they fire at each other. The ability of a Tarantino character to move or not move can often be telling: consider the lonesome death of Vincent Vega on the toilet in 'Pulp Fiction,' or the sky-bound pirouettes of Uma Thurman's Bride in the 'Kill Bill' films. So when Tarantino slows down the motion of a character in one of his films, whatever the external reason may be, the ultimate take-away is this: Tarantino notices. He is attentive to human movement, to human physiognomy, almost with the attentiveness of Eadweard Muybridge. When he slows down a character's motion, then, we, as viewers, are intended to see everything: muscular shifts, the different ways clothing falls on the moving body, the beauty of the body moving through space--and we are supposed to consider what the movement might mean. In his sixth (sixth!) video piece on Tarantino, Jacob T. Swinney brings us up close to Tarantino's study of motion by focusing on his slo-mo scenes. What do we learn? Well, why don't you look and tell me?

Watch: Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'The Revenant' Creates a World of Stillness

Max Winter — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:59:32 GMT

When watching Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'The Revenant,' these lines by Wallace Stevens came to my mind many times.

Among twenty snowy mountains,
the only thing moving
was the eye of the blackbird.

How could they not? The film tells the tale of human activity crushed to near-silence by the enormity of the landscape--but not quite. Within each frame, there is a trickle of movement, indicating that whatever assault the natural world may offer, be it from punishing cold or sexually aggressive bear, the human urge to colonize and explore will endure, and yet that endurance will take place nestled within a stillness more immense than anything the merely human mind could imagine, a stillness that has been on Earth for millions of years, impenetrable, impassible, unchangeable. Tom Williams' beautiful video piece gives us a view of that stillness, but it also points up the importance of its opposite. The story of one wanderer across a frozen landscape then becomes, in a sense, the story of America.

KICKING TELEVISION: Bingeing on Judd Apatow's 'Love'

Mike Spry — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 19:03:08 GMT

In love, I’m Paul Rudd eating cupcakes out of the garbage. My failings are not malicious. I was single for a long time. And I’m a writer. And I used to live in the woods. Loneliness and solitude are—were—my jam. I wouldn’t say I’m good at marriage. It’s a process, I keep telling my wife and my therapist, which makes her furious and makes him nod. The love part I’m good at. I think.

I’ve never been very good at moderation, so the advent of streaming media was made for people like me. I am Netflix. My predisposal to binging is indicative of what makes me a less than ideal husband. I’m incapable of diffusing any manner of consumption. I crave excess at the expense of reason or commitment or even Friday night. Let’s watch six hundred and thirty-one minutes of 'House of Cards'! is not a loving proposition, but to me it’s the very definition of happiness.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between my gluttonous leanings and my marital duty I binged on 'Love,' Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series. I was initially apprehensive because—though I like many of the productions that Apatow has been involved in—I was worried Love would be a TV adaption of his bromantic comedies. But 'Love'’s Gillian Jacobs' effortless wit and against-type female leads in 'Community' and 'Life Partners' were outstanding performances, and the supporting cast—Brett Gelman (excellent in the gone too soon 'Go On'), Kerri Kenney-Silver (reboot 'Reno 911' please)—provided hope. I worried about Paul Rust, though I knew very little about him except a faint recollection of hating 'I Love You, Beth Cooper.'

A show that is about love is an ambitious undertaking. Of course, most shows are about love on some level, except for Chuck Lorre productions. But to be so forward about the intentions of your series’ discussion creates almost impossible expectations. In discussing love, 'Love' asks that the audience consider their own experiences with the state. Gourmandizing the series inflates the scope and breadth of that experience, or it did for me anyway. Binging on 'Love', whether by accident or by design, was a cathartic and introspective three hundred minutes, which asked me to reevaluate how I have loved or been loved..

'Love' is the story of Mickey (Jacobs), a program manager at a satellite radio station, and Gus (Rust), an onset tutor, navigating the peripheries of modern day LA. I didn’t love Rust early on—he seemed too out of place as a lead, my issue not his— but as I ate through the first few episodes, he grew on me. He’s not a typical male lead, but perhaps that’s why he eventually appealed to me. I can identify with someone who’s not the archetype of masculinity, who errs on the side of idiosyncratic, who isn’t the most beautiful of God’s creatures, who dances like a drunken Muppet, who crushes up. But early on he and Jacobs develop a chemistry that seems organic and true, which is absent from most film and TV. And I like that they’re in their 30s, and close in age. I’m sick of leading men who get older while their love interests remain the same age. It’s masturbatory and false and, frankly, tired.

At some point in binging on 'Love,' I fell in love with Jacobs. Or maybe I fell in love with Mickey, I’m not sure. Jacobs is brilliant, and she embodies the hesitancy of love. She’s the type of flawed character I adore, the kind I like to write and am drawn to in literature. Mickey wants to be loved, but her manner suggests either she doesn’t believe she deserves it or she’s afraid of it. I think I love Jacobs/Mickey because I’ve lived in that realm myself; I’ve occupied that self-destructive fear of the possibility of happiness.

At the core of any good romcom, or relationship, is a meet cute. To dismiss this trope as simply a tired device of the genre is folly. Mickey and Gus meet cute in a convenience store when Mickey has forgotten her wallet and the chivalric Gus covers her cigarettes and coffee. Meeting cute isn’t an easy plot device but rather a truthful one. Most of us meet our partners cute and it provides a narrative foundation for our lives together, just as it provides narrative foundation for romcoms.

In the meet cute at the end of 'Love''s pilot, Mickey and Gus are enduring hangovers, one spiritual and the other of spirits. We tend to under-quantify how much alcohol has to do with love. Some would argue it's more effective than match.com or Tinder. It’s surprising that every beer, bourbon, and hard soda commercial doesn’t promise romantic bliss more explicitly—like: Drink Bulleit Tonight and You’ll Get Married Next June!—because they’re certainly employed as vehicles for love. Love discusses alcohol in these terms, as a facilitator, but also finds Mickey in AA, though she’s less than committed to the process. AA has become a convenient trope of television; 'Mom,' 'Nashville,' 'House of Cards,' 'Nashville,' 'Flaked,' and 'Grey’s Anatomy' are among the series that use the mutual aid fellowship as a plot device. It’s a convenient exploitation; it provides a forum for characters to share, to be vulnerable, to provide drama. But here it becomes evidence of Mickey’s deeper failings, and not of the simplicity of what her addictions reveal about her character.

In their relationship’s infancy, Mickey and Gus get to know each other through conversation on an afternoon trip around LA, reminiscent of 'Before Sunrise.' We don’t see the early moments of love revealed so simply—so artfully—very often on television. What 'Love' captures with near perfection is the nervous furor of the virginity of companionship hopeful of affection. Mickey and Gus are not in love yet, but you can see the roots of something. We’re nervous with them—for them—as we indulge in the vicariousness of their burgeoning ardor. To witness its slow growth is something special on TV, where series race to establish love and then leave viewers with one hundred episodes of monotonous consummation.

In love and television there’s nothing more tired than the date. I’m not sure I’ve been on a date since I took a girl to see 'Singles' in 1992. My wife and I eat dinner together in restaurants, is that a date? But 'Love' uses “the date” in a unique and creative way, as a confused Mickey, wary of love, sets Gus up on a date with her roommate Bertie (the beyond excellent Claudia O’Doherty). Mickey participates in the date from hell by texting both Gus and Bertie, manipulating the evening, but ultimately endearing all three to each other. O’Doherty’s Bertie could’ve been a stock character, a wacky roommate, the Aussie sidekick. But instead there’s a truth to her, consistent with the series conceit, a sincerity that comes out as she Skype bakes with her mother or makes lame, nervous jokes. If season two of 'Love' gets bored of Mickey and Gus, I’d follow Bertie wherever life, or love, took her.

By episode seven of 'Love', Mickey and Gus have consummated their relationship. But they do so before their first date, and then fall awkwardly into a relationship of sorts, but one that’s difficult to watch and disappointing for the lovers. Soon after they become what many of us become in relationships: bored and self-destructive. Mickey’s fatigue and despondency manifest themselves in alcohol; she gets drunk and more awkward. Gus’ manifests in sexual greed; he has an affair with an actress on the TV show he works on.

While at this point in their narrative they’re not quite together, their egos, flaws, and fears convince them to implode. They’re suffering from the realities of post-infatuation. As I watched this I couldn’t help but recall the many, many, many, many times I’ve done this in relationships. It also made me realize how many people I’ve hurt in my self-destructive laziness. Watching it in 'Love' is cringe-inducing, in a positive way, in that it is genuine, true, that I understand it because I’ve behaved that way, and in seeing 'Love' I feel the shame and guilt I somehow avoided when I committed those crimes of dispassion. Ultimately, Mickey and Gus commit to each other, but in a way that seems perilous and unstable, but isn’t that how we all enter into love? Unsure, unprepared, but hopeful?

'Love,' in many ways, is about secondary and tertiary characters. And so is love. Those around us inform our relationships. They filter our emotions, our eccentricities, our fears. 'Love' fills around its leads with representations of elements of love. Iris Apatow plays life without sexual love, the wonderment of adolescence, before love confuses and drains. She’s confident, honest, and I trust her performance as a kind of younger version of Mickey from an alternate universe, a child actor who Gus tutors. Her character is a revelation, and may be the best thing about the show, but it is her mother’s (Leslie Mann) comedic timing and wit that shines here. Gelman is Mickey’s boss, with whom she indulges in an affair that confronts the act of love without love, of love as a weapon, and in doing so illuminates many of Mickey’s disturbing fears, fears about love and acceptance and sexuality that we all have. Kenney-Silver plays a future version of Mickey, her neighbor Syd, a woman who has endured love and settled in it. Gus’ apartment is often filled with a ragtag collection of his friends who get together to sing non-existent theme songs to films without theme songs. It’s a representation of the silliness of love, of the kinds of strangeness in us all that a prospective partner needs to accept, or at least tolerate, in order for love to be completely realized.

There’s a true awkwardness to the interactions between characters in 'Love' that is absent from these types of romantic narratives. The absence of the time constraints of traditional television promotes the natural, organic feel of the show. And in that manner, the show becomes a living treatise on love itself, and examination of an emotion that is attached to nearly everything on television but rarely with the subtlety and deft touch that Apatow et al. have used in creating the universe of 'Love'.

There’s a quiet, beautiful moment in Love’s second episode when Bertie and Gus carry a chest-of-drawers into Mickey’s house. The two agree—having just met her—that Mickey is the best. She’s cool, right? So cool. But a little scary, right? She is a bit scary. But so cool. At its best, this is the very essence of love; fear infused with the divine. The same can be said of the series; it excels in moments of simple truth, allowing subtlety to carry the exploration of emotion.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

Watch: Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq': The Blossoms of Violence

Max Winter — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 12:06:43 GMT

How many people do you know who've been shot? This was a question that occurred to me as I watched Nelson Carvajal's latest, a video essay on Spike Lee's recent cinematic leap into rhymed verse 'Chi-Raq,' a film whose eccentricity grows on you. Carvajal approaches the film from an up-close perspective, that of a Chicago resident who has, in fact, known many people who've been shot, in Chicago, which is becoming one of the country's most violent cities. Carvajal does not do voice-over much--this may be his first video essay with voiceover, if my scholarship serves--and he has chosen a nice place to deploy the technique. Where better, indeed, than in a piece about this film, which addresses the matter of gun violence head-on in a way which doesn't seem head-on at all? The presence of the editor here makes the essay's central argument, which is that critics back away from 'Chi-Raq' because they can't handle the reality it depicts, quite convincing. After all, neither the quality of the film's direction nor the brutality of the state of affairs the film satirizes can really be questioned. Can they?

Watch: Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' Is All About Power Struggles and Blocking

Max Winter — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 06:47:50 GMT

Any good story ultimately involves a power struggle of some sort, whether it be between two characters or between a character and his or her own mind. Character X wants something Character Y has: since the story of Cain and Abel, this is the most basic plot vector there is. In the scene from Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' shrewdly and economically analyzed here by YouTube's Evan Puschak, aka 'The NerdWriter," Gavin Elster wants Scottie Ferguson to take his questionable case very much, but Scottie is reluctant. The conversation we witness between the two of them is all about power: who has it, who wants it, who takes it away, how it can float between two individuals like a cloud. And that power play is show through blocking, though the way the two men occupy the space they share: who stands. Who sits. Who's in the foreground. Who takes up more screen territory. If you turned the sound off on this scene, you'd be able to tell what was happening with only the slightest bit of extrapolation. And that is the nature of true drama, as we see it on film.

Watch: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 'Amélie' Depends on Symmetry for Its Curious Power

Max Winter — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 17:42:45 GMT

Interestingly enough, restraint may be the defining characteristic of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 'Amélie.' Regardless of how many surreal leaps and gestures occur within this story of a whimsical Parisian, the film never leaves the realm of what can be easily imagined. Some might see this as a flaw; I tend to see it as a deliberate aesthetic choice, backed up by the film's cinematography, which, as this new video piece by "Lessa" shows, skews symmetrical. The center of the viewer's vision will never be too far away from the center of the lens, a perfect technique for a stroll into the center of the imagination.

KICKING TELEVISION: O.J. Simpson v. The People

Mike Spry — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 07:00:27 GMT

A friend of mine recently posted a photo of himself on Instagram with a C-list celebrity who was visiting my hometown. It really shouldn’t have annoyed me—though it did. I mean, what do I care what people do on social media? I’m sure people are perturbed when I post links to my columns or openly question the integrity of bourbon lemonade. At least they’re not posting photos of cats or newborns or newborns with cats, right? But, when I took a moment to calm myself, I realized what frustrates me about our cultural obsession with celebrity is not the celebs themselves, but the pathological need to attach ourselves to them, no matter their character or accomplishments.

My distaste for fame-driven obsessive addictive disorder is not new. I’ve never understood People magazine or Entertainment Tonight or TMZ or Brody Jenner. For a while I had a weekly column for the Playboy offshoot The Smoking Jacket, for which I spent most of my virtual inches mocking the Kardashians and Hiltons. Perhaps somewhere in my sympathetic mind, I can accept obsessions with musicians or actors or whatever Ryan Seacrest is, but the celebrity afforded to spoiled, privileged, talentless, walking selfies angers me to no end. The Kardashian/Jenner cartel is the worst of the offenders. The beginnings of our allowance of celeb contributions to the cultural discourse can be traced to the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Our celeb culture, as it is today, is the fault of the OJ Simpson trial.

In some alternate universe, this column would be about NBC’s Frogmen being renewed for its twenty-second season. The O.J. Simpson vehicle, about an elite team of Navy SEALs freelancing out of a Malibu surf shop, would no doubt be celebrating its Law & Order-esque longevity with special crossover episodes with NBC’s other hit dramas The Blacklist and, well, The Blacklist, and guest star arcs from Al Cowlings and Caitlin Jenner. Matt Lauer would sit down with Juice and ask about how Orenthal James was able to escape the mean streets of San Francisco for NFL and Hollywood stardom, about growing up with rickets, about his father’s sexuality and gender, and his death from AIDS. In this alternate universe, racism is a forgotten nightmare, the gender gap is but a sliver, policing is done with hugs, and Scott Disick works at a Taco Bell in Encino.

Simpson was, and is, the product of our obsession with contrived royalty, our elevation of athletes, and our malignant, wilful ignorance of sexism. I’m amazed it took this long for his story to find its way to television. FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson revisits the trial of the century, the spectacle that was everything for 15 months in the mid-nineties. Its accuracy is debatable. Its realization is flawed. Its performances are heavy-handed. It stars everybody. But despite its faults, it provokes a discussion of what the Simpson trial came to represent, how it changed the manner in which our culture disseminates “news,” and how we are dangerously obsessed with celebrity and stardom.

On June 17^th, 1994, someone’s parents were away. I was in my second to last year of high school. We moved in for the weekend to drink beer and be young. That night, a Friday, Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and the New York Knicks played on a muted television in the corner of the family room while we listened to music too loud and ignored the neighbors’ warnings. People came by. At some point, someone pointed at the TV. There was a white SUV racing slowly along a highway. We would have thought nothing of it, if it hadn’t interrupted a live sporting event. We turned on the sound. And, like much of the rest of North America, we watched Al Cowlings plodding along in the now infamous white Bronco, O.J. Simpson hiding in the back with a gun, chased by what seemed like the entire LA police force. It was odd. It was surreal. It was narrated by Tom Brokaw. We had no idea what would come next, that what would follow would define the late 90s, and change the way we, as a culture, fed on celebrity.

My memory of the year that followed is confused by time and media saturation. I recall watching most of the trial, as CNN played it and nothing but it all day. I remember watching much of it from the campus pub at Carleton University or in a friend’s apartment, as we skipped our first-year university classes, got high, ate pizza, and marveled at the spectacle of celebrity and the judicial system. The trial became a show unto itself, a dramedy set in the L.A. world of glitz and celebrity, drugs and debauchery, money and mayhem.

People who were not celebrities, who lived not for the spotlight nor were given to accomplishment deserving of that spotlight, were suddenly household names. Lance Ito, Mark Furhman, Roberts Shapiro and Kardashian, Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, Johnnie Cochran et al. Kato Kaelin was a homeless surfer. Greta Van Susteren was simply a lawyer who answered a CNN producer’s phone call one morning. Suddenly they were household names. They were given a voice. The cast of characters was endless, and it seemed odd even then that I would know the names of these people, let alone the intimate minutiae of their lives, let alone spend every day with them, or CNN.

The People v. O.J. Simpson willfully subscribes to the injustice of celebrity worship. The series celebrates the virtues of fame, evidenced in allowing Kris Jenner and the Kardashian brood an unwarranted part of the narrative. Perhaps this is some sort of high satire of the culture that was born of the Simpson trial, but I refuse to give the series that much credit. The series had an opportunity to take the “trial of the century” and use it as a platform to discuss what it meant in terms of media, race, celebrity, justice, and the American dream. The series is guilty of a first-year creative writing class crime: telling and not showing. It concerns itself with grand monologues, that reveal character and narrative. Perhaps in the mid-nineties California lawyers were known for their soliloquies, but it comes across as false and lazy writing, like a voiceover in place of exposition. The People v. O.J. Simpson is also given to contrived moments, like in episode 5 when during opening statements co-prosecutor Bill Hodgman has a heart attack, which never happened. Why embellish what’s already shocking?

An entire episode, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” which concerns itself with Clark’s aesthetic and her challenges as a woman in a male-dominated environment, misses a chance to indict a culture that treats workingwomen as second class citizens. In a disproportionate number of scenes, she’s crying or swooning over Sterling K. Brown’s Christopher Darden, which I suppose is intended to elicit sympathy and enrich her character but instead comes across as a sexist depiction of an accomplished and intelligent woman. Sarah Paulson’s performance as Clark does its best with the material she’s given, but The People v. O.J. Simpson’s writers are intent on blaming Clark’s incompetence on gender. The focus is on her fragile character (which doesn’t seem believable), her struggles as a single mother in the midst of a custody battle, and her crush on Darden. And her hair. Six episodes in and we’re on her third hair style, and while Clark’s hair was certainly tabloid fodder during the trial, a more ambitious series would have moved past what we already knew from watching CNN and lingering in the grocery store checkout aisle. Don’t attach gender to the conversation; attack the media that continues to unnecessarily and offensively make that attachment.

The obstacles the series gives to Clark are all domestic, while Darden gets intellectual challenges. A perfect juxtaposition is in how they’re challenged as attorneys. Clark asks for a recess to go home to her children; Darden asks for Simpson to try on the infamous glove for the jury, which hurt the prosecution and gave birth to the trial’s catch phrase, Cochran’s: “If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.” There’s no way that in 1994, Marcia Clark, as a woman, was able to rise to her level of prominence in her vocation by being as fragile as the series suggests.

Clark’s true challenge was the insurmountable obstacle she faced in Simpson’s “Dream Team” of attorneys, the power of his celebrity, and the impossible spectacle that their union produced. The series is guilty of what its real-life characters were guilty of during the trial and the era, and what we’re still guilty of today: reducing women to elements of aesthetic and gender. Clark is more than a woman with a law degree. The series uses her chain smoking and drinking to make her “one of the boys”, but these are easy devices. It questions the media that would comment on her conservative attire, but celebrates that same media in giving narrative attention to the Kardashians. The contradictions get in the way of the performances, and what’s left is a disappointing dissemination of an important moment in our cultural evolution.

The flaws in the series are all tied to its inability to indict celebrity, a root cause of the prosecution's own failures, as if it’s nervous to offend. In casting the series with well-known actors, The People v. O. J. Simpson becomes its own victim of celebrity. Prominent performers are given to camp performances as if in some form of self-parody. John Travolta (Robert Shapiro) eats scenes like a termite infestation. David Schwimmer (Robert Kardashian) says “Juice” so many times I fear an undead Michael Keaton’s going to appear on a sandworm. Nathan Lane (F. Lee Bailey) looks ready to burst into Albert Goldman. Writing that makes Dan Brown sound like Emily Dickinson does not help the performers. It’s difficult to endure Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s O.J. blurting out, “Oh my god, Nicole has been killed? Oh my god, is she dead?” or Schwimmer delivering “OJ, come on, please, do not kill yourself in Kimmy's bedroom” without weeping for the future of the written word. Courtney B. Vance’s monologues make Joe Morton’s Scandal performance seem subdued. Connie Britton has an all too brief appearance as Faye Resnick, whose lingering celebrity as a result of her exploiting her friendship with Brown Simpson has given her a career. Britton’s Resnick would have been an interesting lens through which to filter the story and our celebrity obsession, but instead, the The People v. O.J. Simpson wonders if Kimmy’s ok.

The show is all spectacle and very little substance. Perhaps that’s its intent, to mimic the absurdity of its source material, but a story that is such a part of the fabric of our culture, it would have been far more interesting and appealing in the hands of, say, Noah Hawley (Fargo) than Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story), who’s a producer on the series and directed several episodes. Murphy’s style, which has its proponents, is one of exhibition over exposition, which works in musicals and horror stories, but not so well when the purpose of a series is to critically explore a crucial moment in American history.

But, like the trial itself, I can’t stop watching. It has made me guilty of the crimes I condemn. I’ve become obsessed with the series’ glorification of everything I hate, by circumstance rather than design. And in revisiting the trial, I’m left to revisit myself by way of nostalgia. Did I really waste that much of my life watching this train wreck of injustice? Is this why I got kicked out of university the first time? Is it weird that I know that Evan Handler was in Frogmen AND The People v. O.J. Simpson?

It’s possible that the series could redeem itself in its final episodes, just as it’s possible Travolta’s hair will grow back. The series could have been an interesting conversation about obsession, about the failings of contemporary journalism, about racism, about sexism, about corruption, about the incompetence of the legal system, about how in twenty-two years very little has changed besides haircuts and technology. Instead, it comes across as a prequel to Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

Watch: Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' is a Game of Perspectives

Max Winter — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 18:58:50 GMT

Consider this story: a woman steals some money, runs away with it, goes to a small motel, is murdered by the proprietor. Moderately interesting by itself, possibly with some potential for suspense--but this is not necessarily a gripping tale, especially when you add on an extra storyline: the woman's sister comes after her, followed by a private detective, both of whom are murdered. Again, it's interesting: if you saw it in the newspaper, you might "tsk" at it and then move on. And then, even if you add on the eccentric twist--the murderer dresses up as his mother--you still have a bare bones story. Of course he was a psychopath: look what he did! Alfred Hitchcock turned 'Psycho' into a classic by using this skeleton story to construct a madhouse of a tale, something like a cross between a house of mirrors, a surrealist novel, and a collage of tabloid headlines. One of his primary lines of attack, as shown in this brilliant video essay by Julian Palmer, was to constantly shift the perspective from which the story is told, so that viewers' sympathies are perpetually changing, at times moving into uncomfortable territory as we find ourselves looking at the world through the eyes of Norman Bates, of all people. In a sense, the suspense becomes less about the murder, or its investigation, than about what we, as viewers, will discover about ourselves and our sympathies next.

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: The Imperfect Male Artist: From Pablo Picasso to Kanye West, We’re Still Fascinated by Jerks

Arielle Bernstein — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:32:16 GMT

Soon after David Bowie’s death, many bloggers expressed unease at valorizing a man who slept with 15-year olds, pointing out that Bowie was yet another “problematic fave,” the go-to internet term that can be used to describe anything from a mild social gaffe to a history of sexual assault. Like clockwork, Bowie defenders asserted that the 70s were a different time and place and that the “baby groupies” who Bowie slept with don’t express that what they experienced was rape at all.

Like most Internet Wars, the focus quickly became about the individual—whether we should herald Bowie for his tremendous legacy, or condemn him as a rapist. Both Erin Keane at Salon and Jia Tolentino at Jezebel stressed a more nuanced look at the complicated issue of separating art from artist, while in his essay, “Celebrity deaths and the 'problematic fave': Enough with the moral tug-of-war between “hero” and “villain” legacies,” Arthur Chu fell back on a stand-by argument about bad men who make good art:

“So yes, in a way I am saying that if you’re a fan of the awesome feminist triumph that is 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” then you owe something to the horrific abusive racist bigot Mel Gibson. You don’t have to like him or “forgive” him, but if he hadn’t been there–and I’m not just arguing in terms of acting talent but in terms of all his deep and wide-ranging flaws–then a great work of art might not exist.”

Chu’s argument, that bad behavior, though not exactly excusable, is often inextricably wed to the production of art is deeply embedded in our culture. The idea that artists in particular must be permitted to be “bad”—that the artist must, in some ways, be allowed to be overly dramatic or reckless, or self-injuring, or obsessed with alcohol or drugs or sex, in order to be a creative powerhouse, is a mainstay in popular discourse.

After all, many of the most challenging and talented artists we still today herald are men who, in their personal lives, were outright jerks: from Pablo Picasso to Kanye West, from Ernest Hemingway to Roman Polanski, we not only tolerate male “bad behavior,” we often see it as the necessary backdrop against which male artists create.

For all the talk of the current age of outrage culture—how it’s changing the face of online discourse or demanding that certain ideas should be censored—the reality is that we live in a culture that continues to praise macho artistic swagger. We tolerate Roman Polanski’s and Woody Allen’s sins, precisely because there seems to be a prevailing attitude that if they were different, better men, they might not be as actively creative. Likewise, we tacitly permit Kanye West’s wildly misogynistic tirades against his ex Amber Rose, as well as his odd ongoing feud with Taylor Swift, precisely because his brand of in-your-face bravado is seen as an element of his innovative albums.

Where do women fit into this culture? If in today’s world the male artist is still heralded for dangerous and destructive “risk-taking,” the female artist is generally heralded for being a role model. Artists like Beyoncé are required to not only produce work that is compelling and edgy, but to also appear effortlessly poised and perfect while doing it. If today’s female characters are allowed the latitude of being jerks like never before, the creators of series like “Transparent,” “Orange is the New Black,” and “Scandal” are also expected to be Hollywood’s moral compasses, ushering in a world of greater representation, better public policies, and feminist awakenings. The female artist who has “lifestyle problems” ranging from addiction (a la Britney Spears), to shoplifting (a la Winona Ryder) to violent behavior (a la Amy Winehouse) is seen in need of reformation, a “trainwreck” who must be saved. This is in stark contrast to Hollywood celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Bill Murray, whose colorful pasts, and even run-ins with the law, are seen as edgy and endearing, rather than deeply troubling.

The attitude where “male artists will be male artists” is an unsettling double standard. In some cases, the tacit acceptance of male artists as likely to be a bit rough around the edges is harmless, but in others, as is the case with stars like Charlie Sheen and Woody Allen, the result is a long line of women coming forward with claims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Moreover, the conversations we are having online tend to focus on demonizing individual men, rather than discussing a culture in which an artist like David Bowie traveled in a world where bedding 14-year old groupies was considered normal, or a world in which R. Kelly is laughed about rather than looked at with true disdain.

I think one reason Bowie fans felt so exhausted by the discourse surrounding his relationship with young female fans, is that it felt like a “gotcha” moment, rather than a serious discussion about the ways that our culture permits, excuses, or even pressures artists to behave in certain ways. It’s not fair to expect celebrities to be “perfect” but it’s equally strange to see predatory or abusive behavior as arguably normal. While some who protest the double standard are eager for the day that women are given equal opportunity to engage in the same antics that many male artists do, without judgment, I think a more revolutionary change would be to live in a world where kindness is seen as cooler than cockiness, and a world where we can distinguish between behaviors which are quirky and offbeat and those that really do hurt others.

Arielle Bernstein is a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story contests. She is currently writing her first book.

Watch: 'The Dark Knight': Mapping Out the Action

Max Winter — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 11:20:20 GMT

As complex and, in a sense, limitless as Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' might be, with its heady urbane mood, its panic-inducing sense of foreboding, and the presence of Heath Ledger in the role that may have driven him over the edge, there is also a pre-ordained quality to it that slows one down. You wouldn't necessarily be curious where its characters go after they step off-screen; you wouldn't wonder what they're thinking; you probably wouldn't speculate on their past lives. The world of the film is laid out within the limits of the screen. This partially due to the film's previous life as a comic, a work in a form in which frame after frame after frame sends a louder and louder message: Look in here. Don't look out there. All of the information you need is right here. Because the comic upon which this film is based is better than average, the film itself is superior; other films based around frames, not always so much. This brief but densely packed piece by "Glass Distortion" places the storyboards for 'The Dark Knight' up against the actual film for an examination of an especially fraught chase scene, a move which reminds us how carefully the film was deliberated. It's hard to say if the film's over-planning works in its favor, or if it's merely a horse for the director to hang good performances on. Whatever the case, this 49-second piece will give you a unique and revitalizing look at the way movies can be made.

SXSW Film 2016 Honors the Past While Facing an Exciting, Gaudy and Uncertain Future

Anne Thompson — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 18:23:29 GMT

The night before the SXSW Film Festival got under way, Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, defended his communal love of film in theaters. "In pursuing the new future, we cannot decimate the past," he said in his acceptance speech as one of the honorees at the Texas Film Awards, the annual benefit for Richard Linklater's now 30-year-old Austin Film Society.

Watching the Sony Classics reel, the crucial art films I grew up on over the decades sped past. From Truffaut's "The Last Metro" and Merchant/Ivory's "Howards End" to more recent Oscar-winners "Blue Jasmine," "Alice" and "Son of Saul," I felt a twinge of loss. SXSW is all about change, and forward motion. But in our rush toward digital immediacy, we lose something too.

While Barker and partner Tom Bernard's Sony Classics remains the very model of a theatrically driven and adaptive studio specialty subsidiary, the world is changing around them. 35 mm is no longer a viable exhibition format, directors have to fight to shoot with celluloid, and distributors are increasingly challenged to lure consumers away from mobile and home-viewing options in favor of a theater.

Also fighting the good fight is Linklater. He announced construction on the Austin Film Society's new two-screen theatre, "showing repertory, international and arthouse films every day of the week," which will boast a 35 mm projector. Meanwhile, more local exhibitors are turning to alternative content like TCM Classic Movies to grab their customers—most of whom are well over 30, if not 60.

Linklater has enjoyed an enviably idiosyncratic career since his pre-SXSW 1991 Sundance breakout "Slacker" (picked up by Barker and Bernard). He's moved through a wide range of budgets and subjects, from animated "Waking Life" and the walking and talking "Before Sunrise" series to "Dazed and Confused," which Alphaville's Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks made with Universal chairman Tom Pollock. Universal couldn't figure out how to sell a Texas coming of age film with a young indie filmmaker and no-name cast (including Ben Affleck and Matthew "all right, all right" McConaughey) at the box office; "Dazed and Confused" eventually emerged as a cult homevideo classic.

After Linklater made commercial hit "School of Rock" in 2003 at Paramount, the studio developed the 1980 Austin film that became "Everybody Wants Some!!" And, as he said at his New York pre-SXSW party, it was still tough to get it made. The film took a decade to go into production, just as "Boyhood" hit big and headed for awards contention. However, it may be deja vu all over again: Cast with unknowns, the movie is hugely entertaining, shot with the same "Dazed and Confused" aesthetic (and many of the same crew, including long-time Linklater editor Sandra Adair), and Paramount is hedging its bets: "Everybody Wants Some!!" will go out via platform release April 1.

It's a struggle that speaks to why, these days, emerging film directors tend to find more work in television, from SXSW stars the Duplass brothers, who keep their film budgets low, to director-actress Amy Seimetz ("The Killing," "The Girlfriend Experience") and Lena Dunham, whose HBO series "Girls" launched SXSW Film's move into television premieres. These are now major draws, from "Broad City" panels to the outdoor preview exhibit “Welcome to Annville," which ties to AMC’s supernatural comic-book drama, "Preacher" (November) starring Dominic Cooper (from executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg); that will premiere at SXSW March 14.

As for the movies at SXSW, buzz has started as film buffs spread the word on opening-night titles like Joey Klein's bleak romance "The Other Half," starring real-life couple Tatiana Maslany and Tom Cullen. But it can be tough for the film side of SXSW to grab attention from the rest of the festival — even after President Obama had left town.

At SXSW 2016, everyone hovers on street corners searching for their Uber or Lyft drivers. Downtown Austin resembles San Diego's Comic-Con with its countless showrooms, meet-up tables, and brand marketing opportunities like the "Mr. Robot" ferris wheel, Capital One House, and pedicabs bedecked with HBO's "Game of Thrones.

As at Comic-Con and Sundance, the noise of the corporate world trying to nab a piece of the smart digital-driven demo at SXSW has gotten a lot louder. Interactive was SXSW's growth engine for four years, but attendance stabilized in 2015 and 2016 (2015 attendance included 30,000 music, 33,000 interactive and 20,000 film participants). "'Twas the night before SXSW and all through this hotel lobby bar there are Interactive nerds drinking wine talking about Macs and Minecraft," tweeted The Daily Beast's @jenyamato.

SXSW attendees lined up around the block to get into fashion and lifestyle site Refinery29's opening night high-school-themed "The School of Self Expression" party, serving miniaturized high school snacks on molded cafeteria trays to guests including Kate Bosworth.

"SXSW is about youth and the future," eight-year SXSW veteran and Refinery29 cofounder Philippe von Borries told me. "It's forward looking, but it's a dude-centric world. SXSW events used to attract diehard geeks who love technology. It then became about big marketing events, as brands started coming in. That's blown up in the last few years. Now there’s a much larger female presence, more style, more creativity in the air."

Targeted to millennial women, Refinery29 lures 150 million visitors a month with content ranging from horoscopes to in-depth interviews with Hillary Clinton, pushed out via social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. "It's about self-expression and empowering women, bringing content from incredible female voices from around the world: style, fashion, beauty, global issues, health, wellness," said Von Borries.

And it may be companies like Refinery29 that will shape the future of SXSW. Video is driving Refinery29's next evolution; at Sundance, it announced the "Shatterbox Anthology," a 12-part series of shorts directed by women. Produced by Killer Films' Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler, it will debut this spring with "Kitty," the directing debut of actress Chloe Sevigne. And Von Borries is proud of Jill Soloway's darkly irreverent six-part comedy series "The Skinny," about a young woman with an eating disorder, which "goes to places other media companies are not going."

Watch: In Charlie Kaufman's Work, The Self Is Bottomless and Will Outlast You

Max Winter — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 11:09:29 GMT

A sense of poignant exhaustion runs through Charlie Kaufman's stories. Not the bad kind of exhaustion, where you simply want to pass out, but the clear kind, in which you see only one thing in front of you, and that thing, that idea, that concept, becomes the entire world; the reason this idea becomes the entire world is that you've been thinking about it almost constantly. It may be a screenplay, such as the one Charlie Kaufman impales himself on in 'Adaptation'; it may be an art project as big as the Ritz, as in 'Synecdoche, New York'; it may be one's memories, and the gulf before and after them, as in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.' Whatever it may be, all it does is drive you deeper inside yourself. Leigh Singer's latest probing, soulful video essay for Fandor points up the loneliness at the heart of self-examination, even as it is essential. In Charlie Kaufman's vision of the gaze into the self, we are all either running along a deserted wintry beach, like the two hapless guinea pigs in 'Eternal Sunshine,' or spat out on a New Jersey interstate, as in 'Being John Malkovich.'

Watch: Vera Chytilova Makes the Richest Kind of Fun

Max Winter — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 11:26:54 GMT

Watch this video essay. It's okay if you haven't heard of Vera Chytilova. It's okay if you never saw 'Daisies,' the film about two young rebellious sexy kids the essay is centered around. All you need to enjoy this standout piece by Joel Bocko is a pair of eyes, a pair of ears (for the rocking soundtrack) and a couple of minutes. It won't be what you're expecting. And if you're made more curious about Chytilova after watching, all the better!

On Louis C.K., 'Horace and Pete,' and the Meanness of Donald Trump

Max Winter — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 20:43:05 GMT

I woke up late on Saturday morning to good news in my email inbox: a new episode of ‘Horace and Pete,’ Louis C.K.’s online series, had dropped. The first part of the email was fun and games as usual, but then there was a PS, during which C.K. delivered a lengthy and much-publicized rant against Donald Trump. As one might expect, C.K. had choice words for Trump, calling him a liar, a bigot, the equivalent of Hitler--all fair labels. Most saliently, though, C.K. called Trump out for a couple of things: he stated that he’s “not one of you. He is one of him,” urging readers not to be fooled by Trump’s promises. And he described, at length, Trump’s bullying, threatening tendencies, his pure meanness. Meanness should be distinguished from cruelty: meanness is inherent, deep, and yet also tacky; cruelty is slightly different, possibly situational. There’s a reason why C.K.’s words on the meanness and pretense of Trump should be taken seriously, and that his rant should not be dismissed as yet another self-serious celebrity’s conscious political statement. The reason is that C.K. is a student, practically a scholar, of both these qualities in humans. This knowledge is in glowing and wince-worthy evidence in Episode 6 of 'Horace and Pete.'

Pretense and meanness are, in fact, what the series is all about. Horace (C.K.) and Pete (Steve Buscemi) are cousins who thought they were brothers until Uncle Pete (Alan Alda), their late uncle (to Horace)/father (to Pete), revealed otherwise, running a bar which seems like a solid establishment but is in fact losing money and serving watered-down drinks. Horace presents as affable but is in fact highly dishonest in his relationships, and, in some ways, mean-spirited, with a damaged, unhappy daughter and a son who doesn’t speak to him. Pete seems like a retiring sort, but is in fact heavily medicated—without his meds, he begins having visions. And then there’s the meanness. Throughout this brilliant series, characters say unabashedly mean things to each other, from Uncle Pete’s call to Horace to say hi to his “fat daughter” onwards. The drama's characters regularly tell each other to go fuck themselves, believably, with full-throated anger. And they do mean things too; in one particularly harrowing and beautifully executed episode, we learn that Horace’s marriage ended because he slept with his wife’s sister. Repeatedly. And we learn this after Horace’s previous wife has announced that she’s cheating on her current partner with his father.

Episode 6 cranks this sort of ultra-meanness up a notch. It begins benignly, as Pete springs around his bedroom, preparing for a blind date. Then we cut to the date itself, as Pete and Jenny, played with great honesty and forwardness by Hannah Dunne, muddle around a bit and then speak openly with each other about their attributes and shortcomings. Nothing mean yet, really, but in the next scene, which takes place after the two have become a couple, Pete and his new partner have dinner with Horace and Horace’s sister Sylvia (Edie Falco), a tightly wound, short of phrase, long of vindictiveness, cancer patient. The dinner starts awkward and gets worse as probing questions turn into snappish judgments (she’s 26, he’s 46). And then, finally, the kicker: Horace explains, explicitly and bluntly, Pete’s condition. Crushed, Jenny leaves, but not before telling Horace and his sister off, as Pete sits, head bowed, destroyed and ashamed. After Pete leaves, Horace and Sylvia go on eating dinner. So, the siblings have taken an unstable, lonely man, who was clearly enjoying a chance at happiness, decided that he wasn’t being forthright enough about his past, made a decision for him, crushed him, and then savored a plate of family-style spaghetti and meatballs. If you want a definition of meanness, look no farther. But simultaneously, if you want a definition of nakedness, the absence of pretense, the conclusion of this dinner gathering would be an apt illustration, as well. Nothing is hidden. Everything is revealed. Everything is ugly. Pass the parmesan.

What is the origin of nastiness? The sad reality is that its origins are often hard to place. One could hazard a number of explanations for why Horace spills Pete’s beans for him: he didn’t want a painful situation to develop later; he was doing his cousin a favor by not allowing him to become involved with a woman not mature enough to handle Pete’s reality; he was protecting Pete’s stability by stopping things before he got in over his head; he was bringing truth in where there had been none before. But none of these explanations are quite as strong as: he felt like it. And: humans are like that. So, the spectacle of Trump must be quite interesting to Louis C.K.: a man who says whatever he wants, and who promises to commit acts of great barbarism if elected President, for no other reason than impulse. Simultaneously, Trump is a pretender, someone who acts as if he has compassion for the downtrodden and yet has none, clearly. C.K. understands this man, because he's watched this behavior in others, and he has allowed it to spark 'Horace and Pete,' and, to a lesser extent, 'Louie.' In C.K.'s dramas, the urge to be nasty or brutal or mean floats around like a life force, at times seeming like its own character. There are other impulses as well, but the injustice humans do to each other is often the catalyst behind each storyline. Dissembling is germane to C.K.'s work as well; C.K. plays himself, in a sense, in his dramas and in his stand-up--and yet who is this man? C.K. pretends to be a likable schlub, an everyman, a junk food addict, an ordinary guy--and yet, look: he's assembled a remarkable cast for 'Horace and Pete,' with a theme song by one of the best songwriters of the past 50 years, a drama packed with incisive, acute analysis of American sadness. Not the work of a schlub! C.K. demonstrates by example that there are two kinds of dissembling. His is the good kind. Trump's? Something else altogether.