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[EDITOR’S NOTE: “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” a film directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Stanley Kubrick, was released 10 years ago this summer. We are honored to present critic-filmmaker Benjamin Sampson’s two-part video essay on the film, which he edited in 2009 while studying cinema and media studies at UCLA. Sampson has written a new introduction for PressPlay. — MZS]

By Benjamin Sampson
PressPlay contributor

As most people know, Steven Spielberg’s A.I Artificial Intelligence actually started out as Stanley Kubrick’s A.I Artificial Intelligence. It was Kubrick’s longest gestating project, always in some form of development or another from the 1970s until his death in 1999. Part of Kubrick’s hesitance to make the film was actually very practical. Kubrick knew he shot films slowly, and therefore hesitated to cast a child actor in the starring role of David for fear that any real child would grow too rapidly for on-screen consistency. Kubrick spent a significant amount of time trying to solve this problem, even pouring a good deal of money into the development of actual robots for the role, only to abandon the attempts. While the troubles of children and robots endlessly delayed the project throughout the 1980s, it also eventually led to Spielberg’s participation in the film.

After viewing Jurassic Park in 1993, Kubrick thought digital effects might now be sophisticated enough to solve his technical problems. He knew Spielberg well—the two had been friends since 1979, when they both shared neighboring sound stages in England while filming The Shining and Raiders of the Lost Ark—and so he contacted the other director for advice. Their conversations led to Spielberg becoming a confidant and advisor on A.I and, as the collaboration grew, Kubrick eventually came to believe Spielberg’s sensibilities and quicker filming pace would better suit the material. He even offered Spielberg the job at several points, saying they could advertise the project with “Stanley Kubrick Presents a Steven Spielberg Film.” Spielberg, however, initially declined. After Kubrick’s death in 1999, Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan approached Spielberg and asked him to complete the film. Spielberg this time agreed and the final film was released, appropriately enough, in the year 2001.

So now we have the film—the technological and artistic child of two very famous and very different directors. But given this filmmaking pedigree, the film itself is sadly the most overlooked artifact of the entire venture. Critics and fans spend much their time debating the contributions of each filmmaker—what belonged to Kubrick and what was added by Spielberg—and often with incorrect theories. A common misconception, for example, is that Kubrick would have ended the film with David trapped under the sea, and that Spielberg tacked on some strange and sentimental ending set in the far future, which is false. Kubrick actually devised the entire ending.

But all of these speculations still distract from the central issue: the film. Regardless of production history—fascinating as it may be—A.I. is still a film and speaks in the language of a film and communicates to an audience on the level of a film. So, what is the film communicating?

When studied as a visual text, the film expresses many visual patterns and motifs. For example, A.I. is obsessed with patterns of doubling and circular design. Throughout the film, faces become superimposed on top of one another, while different characters echo similar actions and the film narrative circles around on itself. Circles also dominate the film’s visual compositions, with specific characters repeatedly framed through oval structures or reflected against rounded surfaces. These repetitions in the mise-en-scène suggest multiple readings and underlying themes, including an interconnection between humans and machines that spans both desire and destiny.

After examining the film itself, it seems rather logical that Kubrick offered Spielberg the project. Their dual authorship perfectly reflects the film’s own visual duality. And their much-noted contrast of temperaments—warm and cold, emotional and analytical, tender and pessimistic—perfectly compliments the film’s final message. Only their combination of perspectives could show why human love is so attractive and so addictive, and at the same time so maddeningly selfish and self-seeking. As a result of this duality, A.I. never recoils from either genuine emotion or its dark consequence.

Benjamin Sampson is a writer and filmmaker based in Los
Angeles, California. He studied cinema and media studies at UCLA,
where he created an online study project titled A.I.:
Artificial Intelligence, A Visual Study.

By Steven Boone
PressPlay contributor

Imagine going to your favorite opera tenor’s latest performance and he takes the stage only to play the orchestral portion of his selections on a MacBook while reading the lyrics off a sheet like it was a kindergarten roll call. That’s what John Carpenter’s The Ward is like. We know Carpenter mainly as a horror film director-composer, and in a court of law this can be called a horror movie. It has killing and screaming in it. But Carpenter’s name above the title is still a mystery. There is almost nothing about it that so much as whispers his name. The trouble seems to be in the editing room.

Most people who aren’t cineastes or filmmakers tend to think of film editing as the simple practice of cutting out the boring, botched or unnecessary parts of a movie. That’s always been more or less the prevailing misconception. What’s changed in the past 20 years is the number of professional film editors who agree with it. How many movies today are just a collage of “good parts” that leave you feeling like you’ve seen everything and yet nothing?

They are empty not because they’re stupid (and, yes, many of them are stupid) but because they proceed through their stories with no feel for pacing or rhythm, anticipation or tension. Their fear of losing audience attention span becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now John Carpenter is the latest veteran filmmaker to get abducted into the ranks of nervous wreck filmmakers. His films have never aimed higher than B-movie thrills and chills; the acting in them has often been broad and forced, the plots upgrades of ‘50s schlock. Didn’t matter. The majority of them are gorgeous enough to bring a sensitive soul to tears. The beauty was in the way Carpenter stretched suspense to the breaking point in a cavernous Panavision frame seemingly as wide as all outdoors—even when stuck inside a lighthouse, an arctic base camp or a suburban living room. Carpenter understood that every shot was its own luminous, shadow-shrouded universe, and that when those universes collided—when one shot gave way to another—the potential was explosive. He often expanded our sense of the space and heightened the dramatic stakes by drawing a canvas of percussive or steady electronic notes across the cuts. If film editing, which Andrei Tarkovsky called a director’s handwriting, could exude charisma, Carpenter’s had it in spades.

The only thing in The Ward that indicates Carpenter’s participation is its intelligent use of light and shadow to sketch this particular horror “universe,” an early-1960’s insane asylum. The fictional North Bend Psychiatric Hospital has a distinct look of steel blue-grey and rust, but bouncing around in this environment rather than luxuriating in it, Carpenter renders it pep squad chirpy, not scary. Every scene comes at you the same way, in three-second giblets that don’t instill panic so much as the irritation of a schoolteacher tending a bunch of hyper kids. That might have been the aim here, since the ward patients are all young, bratty females. But (at the risk of clobbering you with too many crude metaphors) that’s like letting the catty bitches who threw tampons at Carrie White edit Brian DePalma’s Carrie.

This movie’s Carrie is played by a very strong actress, Amber Heard, and her commitment as a girl traumatized by events she can’t remember gives us a reason to fight through the clutter of expository psychobabble and looka-here-looka-there cutting. And casting as a nurse Susanna Burney, an unsettling presence with sallow skin and cold shark’s eyes, feels like a Carpenter move. As with many of his ‘70s horror peers, he was always good at throwing some otherworldly faces into the mix. Indie film veteran Jared Harris also lends a pasty, creepy mug as the supervising psychiatrist who simultaneously evokes father figure and predator.

The big scare set pieces all conclude with a classic Carpenter-style money shot of swift, eye-popping brutality. Since the musical score (pointedly not by Carpenter) and visual flow have been uniformly frantic, these atrocities barely elicit a flinch. It’s ironic that a pivotal scene features a metronome that mesmerizes patients: Carpenter the hypnotist is nowhere in sight.

It’s the basic geekiness of all the above complaints that allows studios and big name filmmakers to get away with high-gloss, low-impact films like The Ward every time. After all, it’s exactly the kind of reedy lament you might hear while standing on line at Green Lantern and think, “Get a life, nerd. It’s just a stupid popcorn movie! Why don’t YOU go and make one if you can do better?”

Studio executives are monitoring such incidents through binoculars from the tops of their skyscrapers and rubbing their hands together contentedly. “Excellent.” They are saboteurs and poisoners of our relationship with what used to be the movies, and they’ve even co-opted great directors. It doesn’t matter that The Ward is low-budget and independently produced. Its flow is as vacuously corporate as a CGI skull-crusher with ten times its resources. Somebody write a horror flick about that.

By Craig D. Lindsey
PressPlay contributor

Whether you know it or not, In the Mood for Love is about the radio.

While it’s not implied, the radio is a heavy presence in the 2000 movie. In her essay on the film’s music, which can be found in both the soundtrack’s CD booklet and on the 2002 Criterion Collection DVD, Joanna C. Lee wrote that Mood is very much about writer/director Wong Kar-wai’s radio days: “The collage of musical styles, ranging from traditional opera to theme songs from popular films of the 1950s, represents a world of music that Hong Kong listened to and in which Wong Kar-wai spent his childhood.”

In a 2010 The Sheila Variations blog post, Sheila O’Malley wrote that the movie may be captured from the perspective of radios: “There are multiple shots of radios, in every space, every setting, and it’s rare that there is not music in the background. This may be me going out on a limb, but one thought that occurred to me was that the entire film was from the radio’s point of view. We saw what the radio saw. If it was placed in the living room, and people were talking down the hall in the kitchen, then the camera was placed in the dark living room and we peeked down into the lighted room in the distance. When people stood up, the camera didn’t move, because the radio doesn’t move. We are at the radio’s level, which is around the waist-line. The radio is omnipresent in the film (although subtle, it works on you, rather than presenting itself blatantly), so I wondered if the entire thing was seen from within that box of music in every space.“ Even the director has said inspiration for the movie, set during 1960s Hong Kong, came while he was listening to John Coltrane music on a cab radio while the cab was driving past Tiananmen Square. It’s amazing how inspiration can hit you when you’re listening to just the right melody.

It’s possible that even the most diehard fans of Mood may not even remember radio music being played in the movie. The music that is most remembered from Mood is “Yumeji’s Theme“, an entrancing waltz done by Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi, which he originally composed for the 1991 Suzuki Seijun film Yumeji. But it’s very likely Mood will be the movie that this piece of music will forever be associated with. Used nine times throughout the film, its haunting, pizzicato rhythm is used as theme music for the movie’s would-be, married (but not to each other) lovers, Mrs. Chan/Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Whenever the theme plays over the movie’s soundtrack, Wong slows down the movie, catching his two protagonists’ every movement — each glance, each touch, each thought they convey. Never has a film captured the awkward elegance that comes when two people try to figure out just what the hell they are to each other. It’s also here where we see Wong’s flair for cinematic rhythm, crafting oh-so-appropriate visuals (with cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Bing-pin as his co-pilots) to match the music that plays over it, at work. Whether it’s cigarette smoke wafting above Leung’s head as he’s alone at his desk or the sight of Cheung’s behind sashaying down the street in those tight-ass cheongsam dresses (I will forever be in love with Cheung because of this film), the fluid, hypnotic, almost dreamlike moments that are on display whenever that theme appears are priceless.

But the music that’s played through radio airwaves equally serves a purpose to the film’s narrative. As Lee mentioned, the radio music is a collection of tunes from Wong’s childhood, but it’s also music that reflects on the quietly tempestuous love affair being laid out in front of us. We start out hearing pingtan, traditional Chinese storytelling (or “story-singing”) with its themes of forbidden love and secret desire, as Chow and Chan first get to know one another.

Then, we move into more popular Chinese music, specifically somber melodies performed by legendary singer/actress Zhou Xuan (aka “Golden Voice,” one of China’s seven, great singing stars of the early 20th century) and contemporary singer/actress Rebecca Pan (who also plays the landlady), when things start to get serious. (By the way, it’s Xuan who sings the title song, titled “Hua Yang De Nian Hua.” Not Bryan Ferry, as he does in the trailer, which isn’t even in the movie. You’re welcome.)

Pan’s track in Love,”Bengawan Solo,” is an English-language track, an example of how Eastern music began to be influenced by Western styles in the mid-20th century. Like most of Wong’s previous films, Love shows how Western popular music would become – and had became — just as substantial to Hong Kong residents as traditional and popular Chinese music. (Wong fans may remember how he brilliantly established this in his breakthrough film Chungking Express, which memorably used The Mamas and the Papas “California Dreamin’,” Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and co-star Faye Wong’s own Cantonese version of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” as background music.)

Wong kills three birds with one stone when he picks up three tunes from Nat King Cole. First off, by using Cole, Wong gives love to his mom, whose favorite singer was Cole. Secondly, he uses Cole’s three tunes from Cole’s Spanish-singing phase – “Aquellos Ojos Verdes,” “Te Quieros Dijiste” and “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas (aka the Spanish version of “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”) – to shout out the Latin-influenced music being played in and around Hong Kong at the time. Finally, can you think of a better, Western voice of that era to serenade these conflicted lovers than Cole?

There is original music, provided by American composer Michael Galasso. Before he passed away in Paris in 2009, Galasso became a favorite of Wong’s, who used a track of Galasso’s for his breakout film Chungking Express. Galasso continued in the lovelorn, melancholy vibe “Yumeji’s Theme” stirs up for the film with “Angkor Wat Theme,” which is played in the movie’s final scene. A tender cello highlights this composition, as Leung’s Mr. Chow walks away from the awe-inspiring ruins of a Angkor Wat monastery (beautifully captured by Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle), leaving behind a past that’s just as fragile and heartbreaking. It’s in these moments that In the Mood for Love reveals itself as a film that both romanticizes nostalgia and reveals how little of it is fondly worth remembering. From Wong’s perspective, the past can be both blissful and painful. Sometimes, it’s best to move on and hold on to the memories that are worth treasuring, those memories that hit you when you’re listening to a good song — on the radio, for example.

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 now. You can also hit him up on Twitter.

By Simon Abrams
PressPlay contributor

I don’t expect people to have seen Eiichi Kudo’s original 1963 samurai film Thirteen Assassins before watching 13 Assassins, Takashi Miike’s recent remake. That said, I know that knowing where a remake is coming from is a helpful, if not always essential, part of my viewing experience. As such, I find 13 Assassins wanting. It’s a remake of a response to an original, and a disappointing one.

The first thing you should know is that Kudo’s original film is a response to, not a rip-off, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. What’s the difference? It might be an abitrary distinction, but for me, a film that owes its existence to another film is a rip-off if it’s bad and a response if it’s good. Kudo’s film is good, therefore it’s a response to Kurosawa. Thirteen Assassins is to Seven Samurai what Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) was to A Fistful of Dollars: a tribute that at a certain point takes on a life of its own.

Thirteen Assassins — which was released yesterday on DVD in its 126-minute international cut, 15 minutes shorter than the Japanese version — has both a more novelistic plot structure than Seven Samurai , and a more grueling climax. It follows a group of 13 samurai scheming to overthrow the corrupt brother of the reigning shogun. In the Kudo film, the shogun, Naritsugu (Kantaro Suga), is mostly described as a vile man who wantonly rapes and murders. Miike, being Miike, shows the character’s abuse of power almost immediately, and gruesomely: the character has lopped off the limbs and the tongue of a geisha and is forcing her to communicate by writing with a brush lodged between her teeth. One can’t help but watch this monster without expectantly taking it as a sign that Miike has made Kudo’s film his own. Such is (mostly) not the case. Much of 13 Assassins lazily mirrors Kudo’s film, especially the first 80 minutes of the 126-minute cut, which proficient but mostly sleepy set-up to his spellbinding 40-minute finale. Most of the earlier scenes are taken directly from Kudo’s film, and are not embellished in meaningful or even notable ways. As in Kudo’s film, Miike’s assassins debase themselves and risk their lives for the sake of their ideals (“There’s no samurai code or fair play in battle […] Lose your life, but make the enemy pay!”). Miike enunciates the film’s anti-violence message several times throughout the movie, including lines of dialogue that explicitly spell out the characters’ philosophies on violence and power.

In these first 80 minutes, Miike’s 13 Assassins rarely comes alive. There are hints of a livelier, more affably loose, and at least semi-original film in there, particularly in Miike’s sporadic, endearingly goofy comic interludes. In one scene, two assassins make and test bombs, waiting for a lit fuse to explode. It’s not exactly a ground-breaking routine, but it’s satisfying thanks to Miike’s comic timing.

That scene is also, unfortunately, a perfect example of what’s missing from these first 80 minutes, and perhaps the entire 125-minute cut: a reliable sense of pacing. While creating seamless narratives was never Miike’s forte, he has proven on several occasions that he can film tense scenes of mounting action (for proof, see his contribution to omnibus horror film Three Extremes). I grew restless during 13 Assassins not just because I had already seen Kudo cover the same ground before, but because he’d done it more purposefully and with more flair. 13 Assassins is, by contrast, mostly just a seemingly interminable period of rising action.

Which brings us to the film’s big battle sequence. Both Thirteen Assassins and 13 Assassins end with a mammoth fight between a couple hundred of Naritsugu’s men and our rebellious baker’s dozen of samurai. The small town of Ochiai is the chosen battlefield where, in 13 Assassins, booby traps are set to disorient, maim and/or hurt their opponents. It’s also the moment when Miike’s film finally snaps out of its torpor and delivers something worth remembering. It’s the moment where Miike’s queasy, blunt take on the material finally takes off. The difference in energy between this action-packed, seemingly interminable set piece and the film’s preceding 80-minutes of footage is not just a function of narrative necessity. The majority of his film’s original material is concentrated here, like the moment when Naritsugu is shown punting a retainer’s severed head away from him out of sheer disgust, and Koji Yakusho’s character asks him, in comic astonishment, “How can you kick his head? He gave his life for you,” There’s much more going on in the tail-end of 13 Assassins, both in its presentation of the film’s themes and in its immediate action. It’s no wonder that the long climax is the most talked-about part of Miike’s movie: it’s the only part that’s actively engaging.

A final note on Magnolia’s new DVD release: Would it have been too much to ask for Magnolia to have included both cuts of 13 Assassins — the 126 minute international version and the 141 minute original cut? The “Deleted Scenes” option featured on Magnolia’s DVD release are consists of all the footage that was excised from Miike’s director’s cut. I don’t understand why Magnolia didn’t give consumers the option of watching both versions of the film, considering that they already have the option to watch all the cut scenes separately.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

By Simon Abrams
PressPlay contributor

Like Incendies, Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s previous film Polytechnique courts controversy by representing acts of highly politicized violence in a staunchly apolitical light. The movie steeps viewers in a gut-level view of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, a real-life shooting spree at Montreal’s École Polytechnique that left 14 people dead and another 14 wounded. Like the political identities of the warring factions in his Oscar-nominated war movie, those casualty figures are ultimately irrelevant to the story — and in Polytechnique, as in Incendies, Villeneuve does not want us to process the impact of this tragedy in a rational, clinical, way. His approach worked in Incendies, mainly because that film had broad, almost fable-like vision of how terrorism destroys our ties with the past. But Polytechnique — which finishes a limited run tomorrow at New York’s Museum of Modern Art — is about a specific, real-life event. And yet the director is taking a similar approach, filtering hyper-real melodrama through an unspecific lens. That makes the film problematic and jarring.

At various points, Villeneuve presents events through a sometimes hokey, quasi-mystical perspective. Signs of the times are thrown into an experiential blender and come out looking like portents of things to come. The specific details of daily life at École Polytechnique make the calm-before-the-storm section all the more surreal. Students make photocopies of each other’s notes while “Safety Dance” plays somewhere in the background. Shortly after this, Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau) — one of the two victims of the massacre that Villeneuve follows from start to finish — is especially struck by a reproduction of Guernica hanging by the copy machines. These moments stand out because they’re the best examples of how Villenueve selectively practices the Gus Van Sant method of depicting trauma through an impressionistic haze of memory fragments.

I can’t deny the visceral impact of Villeneuve’s hyper-realistic attention to detail. Consider two separate close-ups of characters’ hands, which the director invests with an unnerving narrative symmetry. The first sequence is of a gunshot victim’s blood-smeared hand resting on its owner’s stomach; it rises and falls to the rhythm of her jagged breathing. Later in the film, Villeneuve interrupts the shooting with a flash-forward that takes us to a period after the massacre; Jean-François embraces his mother, and we see his hand cradling her back as they hug each other. By comparing these moments in time, Villenueve says that these two very different sets of disembodied hands are linked by the fleeting vitality that energizes them both. The film seems to be saying that hell is a static understanding of the past — a fixed understanding that Polytechnique challenges, however uneasily.

Polytechnique really finds its footing when it follows “The Killer” (Maxim Gaudette). This part of the film reminds of what my colleague Matt Seitz called Villeneuve’s “quasi-silent movie” approach to melodrama. Body language and simple gestures comprise character in Villeneuve’s films. As such, the grim, ruminative look on the Killer’s face is more important than his meager dialogue. Gaudette moves like a man possessed, and when The Killer finally does open fire for the first time, the viewer feels oddly relieved; it’s like a great weight has been lifted. The amoral implications of that immediate feeling of catharsis are fascinating, especially since the rest of the movie is about the Killer’s crushing short- and long-term impact on his victims. Villeneuve doesn’t valorize the Killer’s actions. He makes them look like an essential release of pent-up aggression; the release inadvertently creates ripples in time that warp people’s memories. When Villeneuve closes the film with an upside-down tracking shot of the empty halls of École Polytechnique, it’s reminiscent of the end of Irreversible: we cannot whitewash the past, only try to revisit it with new eyes.

I marvel at the oracular wisdom of that sentiment. But I’m still troubled by the particulars of Villeneuve’s approach. There’s a scene where the Killer reads aloud one of several suicide notes he’s written — a manifesto-like screed about how he could not stand being harangued by “the feminists” in his school. The fact that he has it out for feminists matters in the film because, just before he mows down a group of women, one of them protests, “We are not feminists.” This line illustrates a key theme in both Incendies and Polytechnique: the arbitrary nature of factionalism. The line also marks the only moment in Polytechnique where dialogue exclusively imparts a vital truth.

What’s troubling about it is that, despite the film’s opening disclaimer about the story being fictionalized, the Killer’s hatred of feminists is a detail lifted from life; before the real-life mass murderer Marc Lépine shot 28 people, he wrote a note listing feminists as one factor that supposedly sparked his rampage; the fact that all of the 14 dead happened to be women led some to characterize the massacre as an attack on women and feminism. But the movie doesn’t explore this, much less put it in context; it just alludes to it. Here, as elsewhere, Polytechnique‘s selective inclusion of historical fact undermines the movie’s ahistorical power. It mixes too much hard reality into a story that could have been set anywhere, at any time, and that seems most comfortable and confident when operating in the fable-like mode that made Incendies so effective. Why did Villeneuve make a film that is specifically about the Montreal Massacre, instead of a film loosely inspired by that tragedy’s impact? It’s a mystery — one that makes this outwardly well-meaning movie hard to swallow.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

Greetings and salutations, readers, and welcome to PressPlay.

This new site will be a gathering place for critics, filmmakers and critic-filmmakers, highlighting video essays on film and TV, and publishing provocative, personal writing about popular culture.

I'm Matt Zoller Seitz, the site's founder and publisher. My partner in crime is Ken Cancelosi, a writer, photographer and filmmaker who's been one of my best friends for over 20 years; Ken will be the managing editor and air traffic controller for the site, so if you have any questions, suggestions or pitches, you should contact him at pressplayvideoblog@gmail.com.

We have some terrific people contributing to the site, including Jim Emerson (Scanners), Kim Morgan (Sunset Gun), Kevin B. Lee (Fandor), Steven Boone (Capital New York), Sarah D. Bunting (TomatoNation), Aaron Aradillas (Moving Image Source, Ian Grey (The Grey Indexes), Steven Santos (The Fine Cut), Craig D. Lindsey (Uncle Crizzle), Simon Abrams (Extended Cut), Serena Bramble (Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind), and many more intrepid souls who hopefully will join this ongoing saga of opinionated voyeurism and movie love as it unfolds.

Although we will run reviews, thinkpieces, profiles and other traditional, text-only pieces, the site will be anchored by original video essays created specifically for PressPlay, by its contributors. From time to time, we may also feature some of our contributors' earlier work, made before they joined PressPlay. I hope this site will be an archive as well as a magazine. The major reason I started PressPlay is because so many of my peers are doing interesting work in this form, yet it's scattered all over the Internet — at YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Veoh and other third-party sites, and at publications such as Moving Image Source, Fandor, The L Magazine, and Roger Ebert's website, where the honorable Mr. Emerson debuts his own short video pieces.

PressPlay, then, will serve as a nexus point for this type of criticism. At some point in the future we hope to build an auxiliary site that will archive video essays by everyone associated with PressPlay, as well as by non-affiliated filmmakers creating notable work in the format. But that's a ways off, so hang tight.

In the meantime, here are our inaugural pieces: an action-packed video essay about the problematic legacy of James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, by Steven Santos, and a Steven Boone column reviewing Transformers: Dark of the Moon in context of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Thanks for reading, and watching.

Much love,
Matt
June 28, 2011

McCabe & Mrs. Miller: A Video Essay from Steven Santos on Vimeo.

http://blip.tv/play/AYHYugUC

Mad Men Season 4: The Ladies and the Boxes from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Diary on David Holzman Part 1: The Sons and Daughters of David from Kevin Lee on Vimeo.

Notes for a David Lynch adaptation of Moonwalk from Steven Boone on Vimeo.

[Editor’s note: This piece marks the debut of Reeling and Spinning, a weekly column by film and music critic Craig D. Lindsey about soundtracks.]

By Craig D. Lindsey
PressPlay contributor

Even though Quentin Tarantino’s M.O. is to make movies swarming with references, tributes, hat tips and shout-outs to earlier works, Inglourious Basterds might be his most blatant salute to the power of cinema yet, because it’s the first film he’s done in which the knowledge of movies is power, and cinema itself can be used as a weapon. Yeah, it’s a WW II movie, but it’s a WW II movie where you’ll find a British soldier who used to be a film critic, a German movie star working as a spy, and a vengeful Jewish-French heroine plotting to wipe out the whole Nazi elite by holing them up in the movie theater she runs and torching the place with flammable, nitrate film stock. The film itself is a mixed affair, giving viewers the best and worst of what Tarantino offers as a filmmaker. Yet all its elements are connected by the belief that movies can be an ass-kicking tool. And if there’s a glue holding all that together, it’s the 27 tracks that make up the movie’s soundtrack. (Only 14 tracks appear on the officially-released CD.) Practically every composition, every cue, every repurposed piece of music on Basterds was taken from other films – often war films. In typical Tarantino fashion, the music spans decades, as the director uses music not just from the time period Basterds is set in (the early ‘40s), but from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The soundtrack’s predominantly anachronistic tone actually accentuates Basterds’ surreal attitude. The movie itself is such a whacked-out clusterfuck — a bloodthirsty, Nazi-eradicating fantasy — that that the presence of music from other eras hardly seems strange.

Tarantino has said that, like nearly every film he’s done, Basterds is a spaghetti Western at heart. To that end, he populates the movie with instrumentals from renowned spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone. (Tarantino originally wanted Morricone to write new music, but Morricone was too busy scoring another flick.) Tarantino also picks up compositions that would feel right at home in a Leone-era spaghetti Western. Basterds starts off with “The Green Leaves of Summer,” also known as the theme from the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo. But instead of using Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster’s vocally harmonious original, he uses a ripped-straight-from-an-old-LP, instrumental version by Perry Como collaborator Nick Perito. This particular version — complete with Perito’s weary, smoky accordion playing — sounds quite spaghetti-esque. The composition also gives the movie a twisted, foreboding kick: Despite the song’s rosy optimism, there’s no way in hell none of that’s going to appear in this movie.

Tarantino uses the Morricone tracks (which include a track Morricone did with Gillo Pontecorvo for The Battle of Algiers) very well. Morricone always had a knack for composing music that ratcheted up the sense of imminent danger in a scene, and Tarantino plays to that strength. The film’s opening sequence he uses two Morricone pieces to cinematically bombastic effect. Tarantino starts off with the traditionally Westerny “The Verdict” when Christoph Waltz’s Col. Landa visits the suspicious home of French farmer. Near the end of the scene, when Landa gets the farmer to give up the Jewish family living under his floorboards, he goes for the more orchestral “L’incontro Con La Figlia,” complete with screeching violins and a thundering, choir-enhanced flourish that erupt when Nazis machinegun the floor and lone survivor Shosanna makes a run for it.

Morricone isn’t the only film composer Tarantino drafts into service. He uses Charles Bernstein’s loose, twangy main title theme from the Burt Reynolds hicksploitation film White Lightning as a virtual theme song for the titular Basterds, a group of vengeful Jewish soldiers led by Brad Pitt’s proud redneck Aldo Raine. He also uses Bernstein’s jarring “Bath Attack” track from The Entity quite startlingly when Shosanna meets up again with Landa. Works from Lalo Schifrin, Elmer Bernstein and Jacques Loussier — many of them composed for savage war films — also pop up on the soundtrack. There are brief glimmers of Tarantino sticking with the time period; specifically, he uses numbers that serve as background footnotes to the story. When we meet up with Diane Kruger’s double-agent screen siren in the film’s much-ballyhooed tavern scene, the music playing in the background is “Davon Geht Die Welt Nicht Unter” by German star (and rumored Soviet spy) Zarah Leander. Leander was also a star of German films many viewed as Nazi propaganda films. Since Nazi propaganda movies also figure in the movie’s narrative, Tarantino uses “Ich Wollt Ich Waer Ein Huhn,” a number that was used in a German propaganda film (a screwball comedy, believe it or not), in another part of the tavern scene.

Tarantino seems to take glee in finding cues that are proudly, unabashedly on-the-nose, as when he uses Billy Preston’s theme to the blaxploitation movie Slaughter for the backstory of Til Schweiger’s knife-wielding Nazi killer Hugo Stiglitz. And I certainly know a lot of my film nerd friends thought it was awesome when he used David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder’s “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire),” from writer-director Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake of Val Lewton’s Cat People, as background music for Shosanna stylishly preparing to take revenge on the Nazis. However divisive Quentin Tarantino may be as a filmmaker, you have to admire how he selects music for his movies. Inglourious Basterds‘ eclectic score of previously-used tracks — sampling war films, spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation pictures, even a Nastassja Kinski flick — may be a bigger celebration of the strength and power of movies than the film itself.

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 now. You can also hit him up on Twitter.