Category: Uncategorized

By Craig D. Lindsey
Press Play Contributor

Not too long ago, I was going back and forth with a friend of mine on Twitter late one night, and he threw out a reference to the 2005 movie Hustle & Flow. I told him that I hadn’t seen the movie in years and I didn’t know exactly what he was referring to. When he explained the reference, he then basically said I should be more familiar with the movie – after all, it does star our people.

“It’s a nigga-movie,” he tweeted. “You have an obligation.”

Now, it should be noted that I am black and so is my friend, which is why the term “nigga-movie” was used so openly during our online conversation. (Also note the more familiar, chummier spelling of the slur, with the “a” at the end, instead of the original, more derogatory, more liable-to-get-your-ass-beat-down spelling, which ends with “er.”) However, when my friend referred to black movies as “nigga-movies,” that term seemed to carry an even more unsettling, negative connotation than the early 20th-century term “race movies” or the “blaxploitation” label of the ‘70s.

To me, “nigga-movies” sound like movies made for, by and about black people, movies that we know are bad and that don’t paint a rounded vision of the black community, but that we watch and worship anyway because, well, they’re all we have.

Yeah, excuse me for saying this, but that’s bullshit.

Starting even before that online convo, I’ve recently been thinking about how many movies starring a predominantly black cast, usually made (unlike Hustle and Flow) by a black filmmaker, have been released over the years but have not necessarily stuck in my consciousness the way they have for many of my brothas and sistas. I wouldn’t call such films “nigga-movies” per se, as my friend did. But black audiences have seen and embraced these films, quoting lines and recalling moments with each other like a secret language, and yet a large percentage of these beloved movies have slipped from my memory after I’ve seen them, just as Hustle did (I do recall finding the film quite ridiculous).

I’ve kind of felt this way about many black films this past decade. I usually come out of these movies wondering why more films that cater to African-American audiences can’t be, well, good. From what I’ve observed while watching movies with black audiences, whether or not the film’s good seems almost irrelevant. Most of these audiences seem to be in the same mindset they were throughout the last century: as long as black people are in it, we’re gonna love it!

I felt the same way when I was a kid, endlessly watching pro-black films on cable like House Party, New Jack City or anything starring Eddie Murphy. I actually enjoyed those movies, however flawed they might have been. Remember, this was during a time when films starring black casts were a rarity. Just the fact that they existed gave them a redeemable quality.

But ever since I’ve taken it upon myself to become a professional film critic, it’s been my job to watch movies that don’t often feature black casts and black themes. I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds of films in the 15 years since I started as a critic and I’ve often found myself being disappointed by black-oriented films – even more so than by films starring white people.

Think about it: white people make white movies all the time. Some good, some bad. When black people come together for a black movie – examples of which are unfortunately few and far between – it’s usually a bad deal.

But when I first started in this game in ‘95, those films weren’t all bad. That year Dead Presidents and Friday were the memorable black films that black viewers, including myself, enjoyed. (Just like Hustle, I haven’t seen either of them in years. I know – bad black man.) But as I look back on the aughts, I remember a decade filled with films like Soul Plane, Biker Boyz, Baby Boy and a whole bunch of Big Momma’s House movies — films that black audiences seemed to accept regardless of their mediocrity. (The fact that they were usually played on BET ad nauseam didn’t help matters much.)

And of course, let’s not forget the entire oeuvre of that hard-working, kitchen-sink melodramatist Tyler Perry, who has cornered the market on making movies black women will flock to over and over again, no matter how condescending and manipulative the films are. Now, I must admit I’ve grown to respect Perry’s hustle. After all, the man has done the impossible: make successful black movies on his own, outside of the Hollywood studio system. But, damn, can’t the brotha make better movies? And while we’re on the subject, can someone explain to me how a guy like Perry can keep churning out movie after movie while great black filmmakers like Charles Stone III (director of the underrated films Paid in Full and Mr. 3000) and Scott Sanders (Black Dynamite) can barely find work?

I’m seen dozens of good films done by people from other races and ethnic origins, and I refuse to believe that we can’t do better than all those damn Madea movies. There are good black movies out there, and some of them are of recent vintage (see the under-appreciated gems below). I know more can be made.

What I’m saying is that I have a dream, people, a dream that black people will rise up, get together as a moviegoing community and demand that studios and filmmakers make more black movies that won’t be referred to as “nigga-movies” at three in the morning by a guy I know on Twitter.

Tell me, is that too much to ask?

Without further ado, here is my list of favorite recent films about black folks that are definitely not Nigga Movies.

Akeelah and the Bee (2006): Excuse me for getting my sap on by mentioning this well-done family film about a girl who gets her neighborhood behind her when she enters a spelling bee.

Black Dynamite (2009): If you haven’t seen this movie at least twice, then you’re missing out on the funniest-ass blaxploitation parody/salute ever made.

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2006): Before he went all batty, Dave Chappelle assembled some of his musical brethren for an awesome show, captured on film by Michel Gondry.

A Good Day to be Black & Sexy (2008): This erotic/neurotic collection of vignettes about black love & sexuality played at an L.A. theater for a week. Could someone please get a revival going?

Good Hair (2009): Only Chris Rock could have the balls to make a documentary about black-hair culture, which is really just him telling sistas to stop messing with their hair. Thank you, Chris.

Jump Tomorrow (2001): A way, way, way underrated rom-com, with TV on the Radio lead singer Tunde Adebimpe as a nerdy Nigerian dude who falls in love with a Latin beauty.

Mr. 3000 (2004): The late, great Bernie Mac shined in Charles Stone III’s modest sports comedy about an aging baseball great returning to the majors.

Paid in Full (2002): Charles Stone III’s look at the ‘80s Harlem drug trade (featuring Wood Harris and Mekhi Phifer) went in and out of theaters too quickly. It’s worth another look.

Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002): A stone-cold must for anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the Funk Brothers. One of my favorite documentaries.

35 Shots of Rum (2009): French director Claire Denis crafts a quietly moving story about the relationship between a stoic black working dad and his ever-maturing young daughter.

Craig D. Lindsey used to be the film critic and pop-culture columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer. Now he’s back out there hustling, writing about whatever for Nashville Scene, the Greensboro News & Record, Philadelphia Weekly, The Independent Weekly and other publications. He has a Tumblr blog, and you can also hit him up on Twitter.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Please join Press Play in welcoming the unique and fearless voice of writer-critic Ali Arikan. Ali is based in Istanbul, Turkey.

By Ali Arikan
Press Play Contributor

“No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn’t exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone.”

– Gustave Flaubert, in an 1861 letter to Madame Roger Du Genettes (via Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James)

I recently went to see The Conspirator with a date. I had read that the film was dull as ditchwater, and I realize that even a great historical courtroom drama is not the best choice for a potentially romantic evening (unless it’s this). But there was a reason for my choice and it was obvious: I wanted my date to be so bored that, short of setting herself on fire like a deranged Tibetan monk, she would acquiesce to being fondled, feeling up an almost total stranger being the one shining lodestar in my otherwise blank and dingy universe at this point. Alas, it was not meant to be, since The Conspirator’s sheer miasma lulled us both into a state of torpor. In retrospect, maybe we should have seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the film that this column will eventually discuss once I finish regaling you with personal matters.

Despite my usual countenance that betrays bliss and merriment, the past few weeks have been infernal, and I’ve been trying to climb out of that bottomless pit with a steady diet of sex, booze and art. In this column, I will be talking mainly about the third item on that list, but I am sure alcohol and fornication will creep in, too. When the time comes, I will tell you how I broke down in tears after a bit of ’ow’s-your-father with a lady friend. How, after another session, I decided it was too warm for the three stray cats who live outside my building to stay out for the night and brought them into my air-conditioned flat, one by one, only to fetch them out in the morning with scratches on my arm and the faint smell of urine in my place. How I turned up at 11:30 PM, just after they’d cut the cake, for a fancy wedding where I was supposed to be an usher, looking — and smelling — like a cross between Werner Fassbinder and Grizzly Adams.

The occasional-but-inevitable digressions into my hedonistic (yet ultimately catastrophic) lifestyle notwithstanding, this weekly column will be dedicated mainly to cultural ramblings with a Turkish slant. I consider myself, in the words of Herman Melville, “a patriot to heaven,” but I am based in Istanbul. And even though I have spent most of my life abroad, both the Turkish culture and the appreciation of Western culture in Turkey fascinate me. I will be talking about relevant and sometimes not-so-relevant Turkish films, books and TV, as well as Turkish reactions to Hollywood films, and, occasionally, world events. If that sounds whimsically amorphous, that’s because it is. I intend to keep this as idiosyncratic and stream-of-consciousness as I possibly can.

We usually have to wait a good while for Oscar-nominated pictures to hit the screens in Istanbul, but summer films tend to open here and in the United States simultaneously. Interestingly, summer has always been thought of as a “dead season” for cinema in Turkey. The kids are out of school, yes, but we usually spend the holidays, well, holidaying. Kids go away to their relatives’ summer homes or summer camps, parents drive to the beach during the weekends and, generally speaking, good weather is presumed to be too great a commodity to waste in the dark watching people blow shit up. Winter in Turkey is absolutely abysmal, so we take summer very seriously, thank you very much.

Nonetheless, certain films still break out. The Dark Knight and Inception, for example, both opened in the summer and were sizable hits (no accounting for the public’s taste, I suppose), as Rise of the Planet of the Apes has become, which is interesting for a variety of reasons.

According to a study conducted in 2006 (there have been more recent ones that betray similar results that I cannot find off-hand), only 26% of Turkey’s adult population believes in evolution. This is lower than any other European country and even lower than in the States. Anything that suggests an evolutionary lineage between man and ape is thought of as preposterous, mainly for the mistaken yet prevalent belief (and not just in Turkey) that evolution just means “humans came from monkeys.” The simple fact that we evolved over the course of history from more primitive life forms, not just as humans but as living organisms, is an unpopular view to behold, as I have found out much to my chagrin.

It wasn’t always like this. Certainly, when I was in middle school, we spent weeks on evolutionary biology, and found it a mischievously fun pursuit to rile up our Religious Education teacher on how, as a devout Muslim yet a tutor in a secular school (the irony was lost on us at the time), he could justify belief in both. It was a more innocent time.

Recently, however, there have been a number of palpable changes in Turkish society. We have had a neo-Islamist government since 2002 (they prefer to call themselves Muslim democrats), and, even though there is an inherent chicken-or-the-egg paradox, under their oversight, the country has become more conservative. In March 2009, a government-sponsored-yet-somehow-premiere science magazine in Turkey sacked its editor for daring to put Darwin on the cover. Even though there were other political considerations that tend to tarnish said editor’s purity, the episode illustrated one of the key problems with science in Turkey. Though it is somewhat understandable, if wholly unfortunate, for evolution to lack support in a Muslim-majority population, it’s deplorable to see this from most of the top brass of the scientific community.

And this is not just the uninformed masses or the government-backed sponsors of science. I occasionally hear from people in my circles, people who are neither devout Muslims nor supporters of the government, that evolution is a fib. I have long given up arguing with them. If you are an affluent, “well-educated” 30-year-old member of society with intrinsic knowledge not just of Turkey but of the whole world and you still don’t believe in evolution, then a 10-minute verbal bitch-slap over a beer would be 10 minutes of my life I’d never get back.

So it has come as a bit of a surprise that Rise of the Planet of the Apes has turned out to be such a social event. Since the new football and TV seasons haven’t started yet, and since we’ve only recently been through a national election, water-cooler conversations are being dominated by talks about the film. Multiple viewings, not at all customary in this country, have become the norm. The film’s still playing in the larger screens of many a multiplex.

Of course, Apes does not offer any sort of scientific thesis in support of Darwin, and, as great as it is (I fucking loved it), it is more or less a very well made B-movie. But what it offers, and what I believe hit close to home with the Turkish audience, is the idea of rebellion itself. A parable is usually inchoate, and everyone takes from it whatever they desire. In Caesar’s evolution to a higher form of being through the work of godless science, maybe Turkish audiences see the idea of Darwinism itself. This is different from the obvious motif the film awkwardly weaves about scientific arrogance gone wrong. Maybe in the revolting, intelligent apes, they see the very idea of evolution, a man-made theory, standing up against its own creator, the “god-made miracle” that is man. In the parable, they see the justification of their own ignorance and prejudices.

Or maybe they just like the monkeys. That’s another possibility.

At the end of each column, I will offer a clip more or less related to that particular week’s piece. This one is most definitely appropriate.

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

The following slide show of underrated actresses is the promised sequel to last week’s roundup of the 10 most underrated actors. The same criteria apply — these actresses are versatile and charismatic, and viewed by peers and viewers alike as somebody who nearly always improves a scene. Yet when you look at their filmographies, you see surprisingly few awards and nominations next to their names — especially from mainstream organizations. They are well-liked, perhaps even loved, but for whatever reason they aren’t stars. And movies and TV are the poorer for it.

This list includes a number of chameleon-like character actresses, some offbeat leading ladies and at least one world-class clown. My admittedly arbitrary cutoff point is an Oscar or Emmy win; if a performer has taken home at least one statuette, she didn’t make my list, because she could no longer be considered “underrated.” But you may have different criteria, and I hope that as we list other great, underappreciated actresses in the Letters section, we’ll have a spirited argument about what, exactly, “underrated” means, and whether all these 10 performers qualify.

You can view Matt’s slide show at Salon here.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and the publisher of Press Play.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play would like to thank Alef Magazine, an art, culture and design magazine based in Tehran (Iran), for giving us permission to reprint this interview Matt Zoller Seitz gave to writer Liliane Anjo about the films of Terrence Malick. It was conducted in May 2011, shortly before the release of The Tree of Life. Interspersed amid the text are the five chapters of Matt’s video essay series All Things Shining: The Films of Terrence Malick, which he created for the Museum of Moving Image. In addition, Matt introduced Malick’s The New World at a showing in the main theater of the Museum of Moving Image on May 15, 2011; video of the introduction is included below.

By Liliane Anjo
Press Play Special Contributor

Liliane Anjo: In Terrence Malick’s films, the characters are typically anchored in a hard physical reality. Whether portrayed as murderous lovers on the run (Badlands), hard-toiling migrant workers (Days of Heaven), soldiers fighting during World War II (The Thin Red Line) or individuals torn by their encounter with a – from their point of view – strange population and unknown land (The New World), Malick’s characters are seen in the harsh reality of human existence. These stories are crosscut with images of absolutely stunning natural beauty. What does this repeated contrast in Terrence Malick’s cinema express?

Matt Zoller Seitz: It expresses a lot of things. Chief among them, the idea that we – the individuals – are not the center of everything. This is not a radical notion in a lot of the world’s cinemas, but it is in the West and particularly in the United States. I think that the American commercial cinema is one that is constantly affirming the supremacy of the individual experience. We are told when we go to film schools or when we study filmmaking that it’s always about the story of the individual.

This has always been true of any sort of storytelling everywhere, but that’s not all there is to a story. Part of storytelling is assessing one’s place within the larger universe or within a continuum that includes society, nature and also beyond that, time and space. These are aspects that often get neglected. I would say that they are neglected probably 95% of the time when you look at American movies. Terrence Malick does not neglect them; they are at the center of his films. In fact, when you look at Terrence Malick’s movies, starting with Badlands and then continuing through Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World and finally The Tree of Life, you can see him growing increasingly interested in this idea of the world beyond the individual, and the relationship between the individual and other forces. It’s a decentralized narrative that he is interested in.
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Liliane Anjo: You’ve just mentioned the decentralization from the individual’s perspective. Environmental consciousness has indeed become Terrence Malick’s signature. In his films, humanity is seen as part of Nature rather than an entity that would be in opposition with it. Does Malick’s work convey an environmentalist thought or is it all about a philosophical worldview?

Matt Zoller Seitz: I think it’s more a larger philosophical view than it is an environmentalist view in the political sense. However, I’m leery of hanging a label on it in any way. Because one of the things that is so distinctive about Malick is that when you watch his films, you are clearly seeing the point of view of one person. It’s like you have been granted access to the mind of Terrence Malick. So much so that a lot of people find his films rather off-putting, difficult to understand and to empathize with. He has a lot of admirers, but he is not a director who is a household name in the United States. Not even now. He is not like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Michael Bay, Quentin Tarantino or someone like that. If you mention the name of Quentin Tarantino to the average person on the street in the United States, they would know immediately who you’re talking about. But Terrence Malick would provoke blank stares. I think a good deal of that has to do with Terrence Malick’s complete indifference to being liked. Quite honestly, I don’t think it’s high in his list of priorities.

I don’t mean to imply that I think he is arrogant, quite the contrary. Everything that I’ve heard about him personally suggests that he is quite a humble and shy person. I just mean that what he’s doing is giving us access to his, for lack of a better word, worldview. He happens to be someone who is deeply interested in the natural world and who is constantly reminding himself that the natural world is bigger than any one person and in fact bigger than any one country or race or religion. I am not a particularly religious person, but when I watch Terrence Malick’s films, I feel the ways that I think I am supposed to feel when I’m in church. His movies give me those feelings and they inspire that sort of contemplation.

The Thin Red Line is particularly interesting in light of the environmental question that you raise. Because when it came out, a lot of reviews fixated on this idea that it was an environmental film, that there was some sort of environmental statement being made or that the war machine was destroying the natural world. I don’t think that’s what that movie was saying at all. In fact, I think the movie is quite explicit in saying that human beings are animals just like all the other animals that are pictured in the movie. Human beings happen to be more sophisticated animals who can build machines and destroy the rest of nature, but they are nevertheless a part of nature. One of the opening lines of narration in the movie is “Why does nature vie with itself? What’s this war in the heart of nature?” We are so divorced from the idea that we are a part of nature. The industrialized man, the 21st-century man, thinks of nature so rarely that when he hears something like that in the movie, he says, “What? Huh? What is this nonsense? What is this poetic clap-trap? Am I being sold some sort of environmentalism disguised as a war movie? Who is this hippie Terrence Malick?”

But to Malick, it is not a statement or a political position, it’s just a simple, natural way of seeing the world. And I think it’s quite reasonable.

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Liliane Anjo: Strong biblical imagery along with numerous allusions to themes such as heaven, hell, the Garden of Eden, guilt and punishment suggest the existence of a Judeo-Christian God in Terrence Malick’s cinema. In your own movies about Malick’s oeuvre (All Things Shining), you mention that there is however also a sense of continuum, i.e. the idea that humanity is merely a tiny part of a greater “Soul” which manifests itself in any element of life on Earth. In Islamic mysticism, we also find this idea that human beings embody only an element of a greater whole. Do you think that Terrence Malick’s vision of God is somehow universal?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Absolutely. And more than that. This may sound strange, but I believe that Terrence Malick’s view of religion is probably not that different from Stanley Kubrick’s view of religion in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By which I mean, I know that Stanley Kubrick didn’t believe in an afterlife and he certainly didn’t believe in a stereotypical Western God as a man with a beard in the sky pointing his finger and making things happen. But he did believe in mysterious forces that are beyond the understanding of human beings, not supernatural forces necessarily, but physics, mathematics, time and energy. And things that we are not evolved enough to comprehend. The aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey are essentially like gods, because they are so much more advanced than the people. And when we look at the apes, reaching out and touching the monoliths in 2001, that’s really the position of the so-called evolved human being when contemplating these larger forces that we don’t understand. These forces might as well be magic. Or it could be technology. It also could be another kind of creature or person. Or it could just be some kind of scientific process that our brains are not big enough to understand. I think Malick is perhaps coming from a similar position. I don’t think he is giving us any kind of answer, I think he is prompting questions.

One thing that I think personally is often overlooked is that Malick is a second-generation Assyrian-American. His dad was the son of an Assyrian Christian. Malick is a guy who has some philosophical or religious roots in the Middle East, but who was raised in Texas and went to an Episcopalian school as a kid. I’m from Dallas, and I can tell you who runs Texas. The Southern Baptist Christians run Texas. So think about what these two influences must have done to Terrence Malick: he could have either rejected one of those two influences completely or he could have tried to put them together. And I would not be terribly surprised if he had spent his entire life trying to reconcile those influences. And he is trying to do it in a very open-hearted and generous way. I think that at the very least it’s a pantheistic vision of life that he presents in his films. It may in fact be more or less than a pantheistic vision, it may be just a rejection of any kinds of boundaries. I recently had an interview with a critic from the Toronto Star, Peter Howell, who said that he thought The Tree of Life, more than any other Terrence Malick film, reaffirms his roots in a Christian tradition. I didn’t get that at all. I felt like it was affirming his upbringing in a heavily fundamentalist Christian part of the United States, but I didn’t feel the film itself was selling any kind of a Christian theology at all. And in fact, The New Yorker critic Richard Brody pointed this out: there is a moment in the film where the mother points out to the sky and says, “That’s where God lives,” and a piece of Hebrew liturgical music is playing. Something of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths are represented in this movie. And in The Thin Red Line we’ve got a little touch of Buddhism. I think Malick is inviting everyone into it.

Liliane Anjo: Is the reconciliation of influences you’ve mentioned somehow related to the decentralized narration that is so characteristic of Terrence Malick’s movies?

Matt Zoller Seitz: I think so. As I mentioned earlier, the progression in Malick’s movies, from being about a couple of individuals in Badlands to being about the universality of one experience in The Tree of Life, the idea that one person’s experience somehow contains elements of everyone’s experience. From Badlands through The New World, Malick’s work became increasingly decentralized as it went along. And even though Tree of Life is at least theoretically taking place within the mind of one man — the narrator Jack, or maybe Terrence Malick the filmmaker — it’s very decentralized, too, in terms of the ground it covers and how it covers it. I think the shift is also reflected in the way that Malick addresses religion and cultures. Look at what happened between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, which is a 20-year gap. Days of Heaven is a movie that is much more explicitly about the natural world and the possibility of there being larger forces at play, but it has one narrator. And the narrator is detached from the action somehow. She is not unreliable, but she certainly lacks the ability to really understand what’s happening. Even though she is straining to put it all in perspective.

Twenty years after that, Malick comes back with The Thin Red Line. And there we have several narrators. And whenever we have several narrators, we don’t always know who is speaking, we don’t identify the narrators a lot of the time. There are some people who have voice-overs who are not even really characters in the movie. I could not even tell you how many narrators there are in The Thin Red Line. In some cases, you hear one or two lines from one really marginal character. Martin Scorsese had a wonderful reaction to this, saying that he thought that The Thin Red Line was something truly new in Hollywood cinema, and that it was completely opposed to all the commercial clichés that rule those movies, because it is a film that has no beginning and no end. It seems that this movie started before you started watching it and that it is going to continue after you’ve left. Some critics were confused by the voice-over narrations and they were asking, “Whose voice-over is it?” And Scorsese said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s everybody’s voice-over.” I think that’s exactly right.
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Liliane Anjo: Unlike the majority of American movies, Terrence Malick’s films do not invite the spectators to identify with their characters. Malick therefore persistently reminds us that his characters are not at the center of everything, either by distributing the film’s attention between several characters or by creating characters who are not depicted as heroes we would like to resemble. There is no concept of villain either. How come the spectators nevertheless feel involved with Malick’s characters?

Matt Zoller Seitz: It might be too much to say that everyone will feel involved with the characters, because in fact some people don’t. If everyone were inclined to open themselves up to Terrence Malick’s way of telling a story or making a movie, he would be a lot better known than he is. In the United States, he is known more for being the filmmaker who won’t be photographed and won’t give interviews than he is for the movies he has directed. Which is unfortunate. Even now I think that’s true. But I think that if you are open to Malick’s unusual and perhaps in some ways infuriating mannerisms, you can see that he has what you might call a transcendentalist attitude. There is a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays that I quoted a lot in relation to Terrence Malick. It says, “This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.” And here comes the sentence that really gets to the point: “Of the universal mind each individual man is but one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.” I think that probably speaks to what you’re talking about. That’s maybe the key. Malick’s cinema insists on this idea that everybody’s experience is in some way reflected in everyone else’s experience, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Liliane Anjo: Mowlavi, the 13th-century Persian theologian, philosopher and Sufi mystic known in the Western world as Rumi, describes in one of his poems how an elephant is exhibited to a number of men in a dark room. Each one of them feels the animal without seeing it and, depending upon where he touches it, believes the elephant to be a roof gutter, a fan, a pillar or a throne. None of them has the ability to comprehend the whole, so that each one perceives a limited part of the elephant (trunk, ear, leg, back) as being an absolute reality in itself. Rumi tells us that individual perception is limited and that the nature of truth is beyond our human comprehension. How would you relate this tale to Terrence Malick’s cinema?

Matt Zoller Seitz: I think that applies quite incisively to Malick’s cinema. The fact that all these characters are to some degree limited by their own perceptions. They can’t see the whole picture. I would say that the only major characters who are really striving to see a bigger picture can be found in the later films. For instance the character of Private Witt in The Thin Red Line who says he has seen a world beyond this one, or the character of Pocahontas who is constantly searching for the presence of her ancestors and her loved ones in the natural world. And the protagonist of The Tree of Life who goes into this reverie about his past and his own personal evolution connected to the evolution of the universe, time and space. But these characters are only grasping one small part of the elephant, no matter how hard they try.

Liliane Anjo: You’ve already revealed some information about Terrence Malick’s latest film The Tree of Life. What more can you tell us about this movie ?

Matt Zoller Seitz: It has been described as perhaps Malick’s most personal and in some ways impenetrable movie. It’s the least tied down to conventional narrative of any films he has done. It’s the most seemingly autobiographical. I say “seemingly” because there is so little information about Terrence Malick that he has provided himself, we just have to guess. But we know based on his age that he was a child in the 1950s, early 1960s, and the childhood we see in The Tree of Life is in that period. And it’s in a small town in Texas. It feels almost like a deathbed flashback in some ways. As I watched the film, I was reminded of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which summarizes one man’s life in about ninety or a hundred pages.

But the beautiful thing about it is that you can’t really compare it to anything. It is probably the closest thing to a poem that Malick has attempted or that any big budget movie I’ve seen has attempted. You would have to go to experimental cinema to find works that are comparable to it. There is this ceaseless flow of memory and experience. It is very Proustian. If he never made another film again, I would be disappointed, but I would understand. Though, he has already directed another film and he is editing it now. I’m very excited.
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Liliane Anjo: In what sense is it very Proustian? Is it a matter of temporality?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Yes. And also in the sense of a present-day experience triggering a reverie. The sense of the mind ceaselessly running throughout the past and the present to the point where there seems to be no past and no present. All those boundaries that we were talking about – the past versus the present, the natural world versus the man-made world, the secular world versus the metaphysical world – there is no “versus” in The Tree of Life. It’s all one big bang. And it does prompt reminiscence among spectators. Almost everyone I talked to, even if they didn’t like the film, they knew that they had seen something unusual and it made them think. I had a number of memories coming back to me that I had completely forgotten about for decades. The movie unlocked something. And I’m very thankful for that. It’s a very generous movie, as if Malick was saying, “I can’t tell your story, I wish I could but I can’t, so I’m gonna tell mine and hopefully you’ll find something in common with me.” I think that should be the impulse of every storyteller, but in a lot of cases it is really not. Actually, there is a recurrent motif in the film of people embracing other people, people shaking hands with other people, people welcoming other people, etc. As if the film was reaching out to you with open arms.

Liliane Anjo: So would you define it at as a cinema of emotions?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Certainly. Philosophy and religion become the means to understand and feel the seemingly inexplicable. Metaphors are all around us. You just have to be observant to see them, and Malick is clearly a very observant person. One of my fantasies was always that Terrence Malick and Abbas Kiarostami sit together having tea and I could sit there listening to them talk. I guess they would have a lot to say to each other.

Liliane Anjo: So if you wanted to compare Terrence Malick to an Iranian filmmaker, would it be Abbas Kiarostami?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Yes, it would be Kiarostami. Although Kiarostami is much more focused on the individual, but there is always a sense of tradition, religion and national history. And also a sense of the world beyond the one that we can see, some force beyond our understanding that is affecting what happens to us. And there is the question of how we respond to that force. I thought of Kiarostami’s movie Close-Up for some reason during certain parts of The Tree of Life. This idea that identity is fluid is an intriguing one. That’s an idea that Americans really instinctively reject, the idea that under different circumstances we would be completely different people.
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Liliane Anjo: What about the fact that Abbas Kiarostami prefers to shoot his films outdoors? Does it create formal similarities between both filmmakers?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Oh, for sure! The way that Terrence Malick doesn’t distinguish between foreground and background, the fact that the camera is constantly in motion, the documentary aspects. And the light. The light is very similar with Kiarostami. And the sense that nothing occurs in a vacuum. No individual actions occur in a vacuum. There is always this other world and all these other lives.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in criticism. His video essays about Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, Budd Boetticher, Wes Anderson, Clint Eastwood, Michael Mann and other directors can be viewed at the Moving Image Source, the online magazine of The Museum of the Moving Image website. His book-length conversation with Wes Anderson about his films, titled The Wes Anderson Collection, will be published in Fall 2012 by Abrams Books.

By Craig D. Lindsey
Press Play Contributor

There are several artists/sought-after producers I wish would take a chance one of these days and score a movie: Danger Mouse, Mark Ronson,
Bernard Butler, the team of James Poyser and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson. These guys not only have distinctive sounds that I would love to see serve as the musical backbone of a film, but with all the eclectic artists they’ve worked with in the past, I would love to see who they would round up to work with on the soundtrack.

Pharrell Williams is another producer I most wanted to see with a music/composer credit opening a movie. (Wait a minute – do movies even have opening credits anymore?) Last year, Williams did indeed take that plunge and supplied music for – of all films – Despicable Me, the computer-animated kiddie flick where Steve Carell strapped on an Eastern European accent and voiced spear-tip-nosed wannabe supervillain Gru.

Having Williams (or Pharrell, as he’s usually referred to), who’s mostly known for producing basically every pop, rap and R&B hit from the past decade (at least it certainly seems that way), is indeed an unorthodox choice for a kids’ movie. I mean, this is a man who has produced some hardcore down-and-dirty hip-hop starring pimps, hoes, drug kingpins and other assorted ghetto dwellers. Not to mention he’s had his hand in some sexually-suggestive baby-making music. You’d think with a resume like that, Universal wouldn’t have let him anywhere near this project. (Think of the children!) Somehow, someway,Williams got involved and ended up proving he’s versatile enough to compose music that can appeal to both thugs and their children. Apparently, he’s been itching to branch out into movie composing. In 2005, Williams said he was going to produce and score the live-action big-screen version of the ’80s anime show Voltron. Although Relativity Media announced at this year’s Comic-Con that they’ve optioned the film rights, Williams cut off his ties to that project years ago. I guess he just needed to score something. Like most animated feature scores helmed by major artists, the music in Despicable Me is featured quite prominently. In the film, both Gru and Williams show up virtually at the same time. When we first get a whiff of Gru’s awfulness, as he pulls out a freeze gun and zaps everyone in line at a coffee shop so he can get in front, Williams steps into the protagonist’s shoes on the soundtrack and starts rapping about his bad behavior:

“I’m having a bad, bad day/It’s about time that I get my way/Steamrolling whatever I see/Huh, despicable me.”

Here it is. Listen for yourself below.

You’d think a guy like Williams, who has created platinum-selling hits for Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Jay-Z and other A-list pop stars, would pull out the big guns when it came to his first soundtrack effort, calling in favors from the people who, thanks to his compositions, he’s helped make famous, and turn out a star-studded compilation album under his supervision.

Instead, Williams chooses to keep it low-key and perform most of the music himself. You could say that the soundtrack is Williams once again showing that he can be a viable recording artist, a man who is talented both behind the control board and in front of the microphone. It seems like this is a chip that’s been resting heavily on his shoulder ever since his 2006 solo album In My Mind – a much-delayed, critically maligned (unfairly, I think) flop.

But while In My Mind had Williams the artist looking for some of that mainstream recognition, the Despicable Me soundtrack has him looking to appeal to the all-ages crowd. His next song, the bouncy, acoustic-guitar-crazy Fun, Fun, Fun plays completely to the prepubescent cheap seats. It’s played briefly during a sequence where Gru takes the trio of orphaned kid sisters he’s adopted (part of his plan to steal a shrink ray gun from a rival evil genius so he can rocket into space and steal the moon – you know, that old story!) to an amusement park so he can abandon them. The song kicks in when he begrudgingly gets on a roller coaster with the girls, the youngsters screaming out of sheer joy while Gru screams out of pure fear. During the ride though, we get Williams lyrically pandering in a falsetto voice:

“No more teachers and principals/A good behavior is sensible/Let’s do everything till the summer’s done/It’s the greatest time for a soda, yum!”

It almost seems fitting that, as both the song and the roller coaster ride end, Gru is on the verge of vomiting as he steps off. Nevertheless, the song is also used to pinpoint the beginning of Gru’s slow-but-sure evolution from dastardly bastard to misunderstood sweetheart, as he stops worrying about being a criminal mastermind and starts enjoying himself. The song rolls back in after he finds himself coming to the girls’ aid when a con-man carny (voiced by 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer) deprives the youngest girl of a big, plush unicorn doll following a rigged game. This incites Gru to pull out a fireball-creating gun (what’s up with the guns in this movie?), blasting the game and the whole stand to shreds, getting both the unicorn and the girls’ admiration. Listen to Pharrell’s Fun, Fun, Fun below.

The next song we get is Prettiest Girls, a sprightly, upbeat number that’s played over a montage of Gru and his minions (comprised of small, yellow, nubby-looking, purposely adorable creatures who can have either one or two eyes) building his rocket and of the girls practicing for a ballet recital. As Williams sings of beautiful girls winning over his cynical heart, the same thing starts happening to Gru in the montage. Soon he’s making them pancakes – pancakes that are shaped like skulls and corpses, however. When Gru checks off dates on his calendar, noticing on a ticket that the recital is on the same day as his moon-jacking, Williams, in a perfectly timed moment of pondering, realizes on the soundtrack, “Oh God, I think I’ve changed.” Listen to Prettiest Girls below.

The final Williams number isn’t even performed by Williams, but by blue-eyed soul singer Robin Thicke, the star of Williams’ Star Trak label, which released the soundtrack. Titled My Life, it had me wondering if it was an old, unreleased song Thicke and Williams had lying around. In the tune, Thicke riffs on a time he invited a pretty girl from D.C. to a party and wondered if she was going to stand a dude up. She doesn’t, prompting Thicke to rave about how much he loves his life. (I don’t think kids will pay attention to the song’s subject matter, since it’s played during the end credits as those cute little minions engage in shenanigans.) As corny as that sounds, My Life is the best track on the soundtrack, thanks to Williams serving up a this-joint-is-jumping rhythm by throwing in high-energy horns, a thumping piano and jubilant hand claps. It also provides a nice button to the film, as Gru (not to give anything away!) learns he can have the moon without stealing it – and still be happy about it. Listen to Robin Thicke’s My Life below.

Williams doesn’t just provide songs for the soundtrack. He collaborated on the score – not with Chad Hugo, his on-again, off-again partner in the super-producing duo known as the Neptunes, but with film composer Heitor Pereira, whose credits include Beverly Hills Chihuahua, From Prada to Nada and that recent, big-screen monstrosity known as The Smurfs. Dubious credits aside, he does manage to take Williams’ slick, synthesized sound and lay it out for the theatrical crowd. It appears that Williams and Pereira owe a lot to the late, great John Barry, creating a score that sounds like a remixed version of one of his wildly orchestral James Bond film scores. Despicable Me’s score was also produced by the omnipresent Hans Zimmer, who additionally picks up some slack by throwing his more conservative, staccato-heavy orchestral cues into the mix. (You can hear those cues here.) One of many cues composed by Heitor Pereira appears below.

The Despicable Me soundtrack may not have raised Pharrell Williams’ profile as a legitimate mainstream recording artist, but it did show that the man can be called in to add some unexpected hipness to another all-star, computer-animated, kids’ movie.

Craig D. Lindsey used to have a job as the film critic and pop-culture columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer. Now, he’s back out there hustling, writing about whatever for Nashville Scene, the Greensboro News & Record, Philadelphia Weekly, the Independent Weekly and other publications. He has a Tumblr blog. You can also hit him up on Twitter.