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As two new Pauline Kael books hit shelves, we search ours for other indispensable movie guides.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

This is not a list of the greatest books of film criticism, or film history, or film culture, or anything of the sort. It is simply my personal “short stack” — a list of the 14 film books — listed on 13 slides, with one strategic pairing — that I have read or thought about more often than any others. Some are very old, others were published recently; all meant something to me as a critic and a person. The list is personal and meant to be open-ended, incomplete. It is only the beginning of a much larger list that I hope will be filled out by you in the Letters section.

What books of film criticism or film history have meant the most to you?

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

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

By Aaron Aradillas
Press Play Contributor

Craig Brewer’s Footloose comes on the screen with the confidence of a perfectly executed playlist. Right at the start, the Paramount logo comes on the screen and a DJ’s voice does a mic-check and tells everyone to get on the floor. The opening beat of the Kenny Loggins title track takes the party to a new level. It’s a post-victory dance; the title sequence is both a tribute to and updating of the classic dancing-feet title sequence from the original Footloose. The whole movie is like that: an affectionate tribute and canny updating of the rebel yell youth fantasy of wanting to break free from the protective if sometimes overbearing rules of authority.

In contrast to most remakes of so-called pop classics where the filmmakers seem to be just cashing in on a well-known property (you can almost feel the director’s contempt for the material), Brewer is an unabashed fan of the original. While guys like David Lynch, Todd Solondz, and Paul Thomas Anderson seem to have turned their backs on the beauty of pop in order to make big statements, Brewer stands alone, I think, as the most vital pop mythmaker working today. He doesn’t traffic in mash-up deconstructions like Glee or have much patience for the arms-stretched-out-to-the-heavens projecting of American Idol and The X-Factor. He’s all about rock, country, and especially hip-hop. His hip-hop fable Hustle and Flow was easily the best directorial debut of the 2000s, with one of the all-time great star performances by Terrence Howard. His follow-up, the Southern Gothic sex comedy Black Snake Moan, contained Samuel L. Jackson’s finest piece of acting since Pulp Fiction. And now comes his take on the ultimate white-boys’s-gotta-dance fantasy. Brewer knows the story of Footloose — small-town kids standing up to adults for their right to have a good time — is a joke, but so what? It’s not any sillier than the Mickey & Judy musicals or Breakin’ 2. Brewer’s take grounds the story in as much reality as possible by giving it an authentic sense of place, and infusing every scene with the desire to break free from the natural rhythm of everyday life. This new Footloose is like a cross between a blast from a boom box and the interior soundscape created by putting in earbuds. The movie is not a toe tapper. It’s a foot-stomper.

Seen from today’s perspective, the original Footloose is a strange film. Released in spring of 1984, it was part of the initial wave of movies made in the wake of the advent of MTV. Launched in August of 1981, the cable channel’s constant loop of music videos, a live-action jukebox if you will, was instantly seen by Hollywood as a new way of tapping into the ever-growing teen market. Filmmakers were inspired by the channel’s innovative editing style as a shorthand for storytelling. Adrian Lyne’s soft-core follow-your-dreams Flashdance from spring, 1983 is often considered the first MTV movie, but this isn’t entirely accurate. The first film to display an obvious influence from MTV is Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky III, a Dolby-pounding crowd-pleaser that brilliantly uses musical montages to move its story along. (The opening “Eye of the Tiger” montage remains one of the greatest edited sequences of 1980s.) Other MTV-influenced movies include Pink Floyd: The Wall, Beat Street, Krush Groove, Reckless, Flashdance, and Staying Alive.
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Footloose was different. More so than Flashdance, it was a case where the soundtrack sold the movie and vice-versa. You could remove almost any 4-minute chunk of the film and play it on MTV as a stand-alone video. (In fact, the video for the title song was a re-working of Kevin Bacon’s “angry dance” sequence, which was originally set to Moving Pictures’ “Never.”) The story of big-city kid Ren MacCormack (Kevin Bacon) moving to small-town Oklahoma and running up against the towns’ fathers in his pursuit to cut loose was merely a clothesline for the film’s music and dance sequences. The teen audiences that made the movie a hit knew this, but they also knew it stood for something more. Director Herbert Ross (The Turning Point) knew that if the actors believed in the material it would carry the audience past any lapses in logic. Young viewers identified with the situations and iconography of high school life even if what they were seeing was far from an accurate depiction of American youth circa 1984. (There is nary a person of color to be seen in the original Footloose. Also, the music selections strangely made no acknowledement of funk, dance, or the then-emerging rap style. The soundtrack was purely whitebread rock.)

The one thing the original Footloose got right was the rise of Evangelical leaders wanting to legislate pleasure. John Lithgow’s Rev. Shaw Moore was a fire and brimstone preacher who rails against the obscenity of rock & roll music. When he says, “I don’t want to be missing from your lives,” he could be channeling the word of God. As it turned out rock & roll was not what preachers like the Lithgow character should’ve been worried about. It was hip-hop. (As the film plays out, it’s kind of funny to think that parents thought the music of Kenny Loggins and Sammy Hagar would corrupt their children.) The lack of an acknowledgement of black music (or sexuality) is the biggest oversight of the original Footloose. And it is the biggest corrective in the new version, complete with a racially diverse cast and a parking-lot dance sequence set to David Banner’s crunk take on Shalamar’s “Dancing in the Sheets” entitled “Dance the Night Away. (Side note: The release of the Albert Magnoli-directed Prince vehicle Purple Rain in July 1984 would rightly come to be known as the definitive MTV movie. A one-of-a-kind mix of music, drama, comedy, and attitude, Purple Rain foretold the coming domination of black music and sexuality in pop culture. Interestingly, it wasn’t Evangelicals who railed against the film. It was Tipper Gore who led the charge of obscenity against Prince’s music. Hmmm…)

Knowing that MTV has long since abandoned its commitment to music, (and that today’s audiences are more demanding when it comes to matters of motivation), Brewer fleshes out his script with subtle changes to characters and events. The result is a movie that has a purpose and a dramatic payoff as well as a musical one. After the rousing opening-title sequence, we are confronted with tragedy as a group of high school kids pile into a car and are killed in a car crash. This shocking event haunts the rest of the film as it echoes countless real life instances of innocent young lives cut short. The driver of the car turns out to have been the son of the town’s spiritual leader, Rev. Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid). He leads the town council in a grief-stricken movement to pass curfews and town-wide ordinances against “disturbing the peace.” With Sarah Palin appropriating Heart’s “Barracuda” and George W. Bush liking his oldies, it would make little sense if Quaid’s Moore were to rail against certain types of pop. While the original Footloose gave the strange impression that no one in the town ever listened to any pop music, this new version makes it very clear both the adults and kids are music listeners. (In fact, the ban on dancing and music has caused the kids to seek out music in a kind of underground network of CDs and iPod playlists.) Brewer re-frames the story of Footloose as a moving portrait of parents wanting to protect their children from a “danger” that is a rite of passage of adolescence. To survive your teen years is a miracle. If you do it, you can handle anything. Every scene in Footloose is propelled by this truth.

As Ren, newcomer Kenny Wormald gives an intensely likable performance. He never plays to the audience’s knowledge that he is stepping into Kevin Bacon’s well-worn sneakers. He comes on screen fully possessing the character, and wins you over with his intelligence. Brewer re-imagines the character as a kid from Boston who has recently been orphaned after his mother died from leukemia. His move to live with his Uncle Wes (Ray McKinnon) and his wife Lulu (Kim Dickens) in small-town Georgia is made out of necessity, not convenience. Brewer obviously knows a thing or two about parental loss. Having lost his father (who was his biggest supporter) before the making of Hustle & Flow, he captures the anger that comes immediately following the loss of a loved one. This is dramatized in a scene late in the movie where Ren confronts Rev. Moore alone in a church. The scene has a quiet power as the two exchange knowledge of how they cope with unexpected reminders of loved ones they’ve lost. Strangely, this scene, which is the dramatic payoff to the story, has no equivalent in the original film.

The rest of the cast is uniformly fine. Re-teaming Quiad with his Dinner with Friends co-star Andie MacDowell as his supportive yet independent wife Vi was a smart move. It taps the familiarity between them and allows MacDowell to fill in her slightly underwritten role. Quaid is very good as he swaps Lithgow’s bellowing anger for almost paralyzing grief. McKinnon and Dickens prove once again they are two of the best utility players working in movies and television. Dickens in particular is very strong in her big scene with Wormald. As Ariel, the wild child preacher’s daughter, Julianne Hough captures a sense of restlessness in some small-town girls beautifully. Ser’Darius Blain looks ready to be a star as he turns the throwaway character of Woody into something charmingly special. As Ariel’s best friend Rusty (a role originally played by Sarah Jessica Parker), Ziah Colon turns the task of being the sidekick into something original by never acting as if she’s just there to provide support; she has great chemistry with Miles Teller, who steals the movie as good ol’ boy Willard. Teller, who was so good in Rabbit Hole (he played his scenes as if he was a member of the walking dead), shows the makings of a major actor as he delivers a totally winning comic performance. Just as in the original, the sequence where Willard learns to dance (scored to Jana Kramer’s country-dance cover of the Deniece Williams classic “Let’s Hear It For the Boy”) is the film’s highlight.

And what about the dancing? Is it as good as in the original? Actually, it’s categorically better. The musical numbers in the original were fun but far from well executed. The quick cuts and elaborate nature of the numbers allowed viewers to overlook the use of doubles and dark lighting set-ups leped to obscure the actors’ faces. (There’s a reason why the “Let’s Hear It For the Boy” sequence was the best dance number in the original. The late Chris Penn’s amateur status as a dancer was built into the sequence.) Here, using trained dancers Brewer lights everything brightly so we can fully see the actors doing their thing. When he cuts between wide shots and medium shots, it’s not to sell the idea that an actor is executing a difficult dance move; it’s to keep the movie moving to its own beat. Wormald, a former backup dancer for Justin Timberlake, turns the famous ‘angry dance” number into a real workout. Set to The White Stripes’ “Catch Hell Blues,” the number is still a gymnastics workout, but this time there’s a sense of gravity that makes it all the more impressive. Another terrific dance number is the one where Ren takes his friends to a rowdy honky-tonk for some ferocious line dancing. The sequence is scored to Big & Rich’s unbelievably catchy “Fake I.D.,” a song that testifies to the lengths one must go (including breaking the law) in order to have a good time. And the climatic dance number, set to Blake Shelton’s energetic if slightly uninspired cover of the title song, has a widescreen purity that recalls classic Hollywood musical framing. Footloose is not profound, but then again it’s not trying to be. At its best it’s a tribute to the desire to cut loose from the everyday restrictions of life. You leave the movie humming, and with a bounce in your step. Like the best pop, it gives you a buzz.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

As the Footloose remake arrives, a look back at some of Hollywood’s best song-and-dance moments.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

You might know that a remake of 1984′s Footloose, directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow), opens today. I’ve been intrigued by the advance coverage that casually describes the original movie as “a musical,” because by classical Hollywood definitions, it really isn’t one. It’s a youth drama that happens to contain a lot of music, and the music is always “justified” in some way. Nobody just opens up their mouth and starts singing or dancing to the accompaniment of an off-screen orchestra or band; the songs either issue from an on-screen source, or else they’re treated as the background track for a montage.

Musicals didn’t used to be like this. Sure, there were exceptions — George Cukor’s remake of A Star Is Born is a big one — but for the most part, the creators of earlier musicals didn’t feel the need to explain where music was coming from. It just appeared, like a shooting star or a rainbow. Then at a some point the ratio got flipped, and most musicals featured “justified” music; the ones that did not seemed highly unusual, perhaps stubbornly nostalgic. The tipping point might have been Bob Fosse’s 1972 film version of Cabaret, a music-saturated Weimar drama that explains the origin of every song that its characters perform or otherwise experience. (True, a couple of moments involving Joel Grey’s faintly mystical emcee character blur the line, but every other element in the film is clearly set in “reality.”) Cabaret wasn’t the first film to handle music this way, but its high profile (and its best director Oscar win for Fosse) made it hugely influential. When I look back over the history of the form, it does seem like a dividing line. There’s before Cabaret and there’s after. Or if you prefer, pre-”C” and post-”C.” So for purposes of this slide show, I’m defining everything post-Cabaret as a modern musical. The year 1972 is my cutoff point; nothing made before that time was considered for inclusion.

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

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

By Steven Boone
Press Play Contributor

One “thing” in The Thing is the penis. The protagonist doesn’t sport one, so, despite being the smartest scientist at an Antarctic base camp full of boorish Norwegian men, she finds herself relegated to the sidelines. It’s 1982. “You aren’t here to think,” the lead researcher (Ulrich Thomsen) warns her after she questions one of his bonehead decisions in front of the men. But her thinking comes in handy after that decision rouses a shape-shifting, bone-crunching space alien, and she emerges as the tough-minded leader, like Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979).

The Thing (2011) feels like it was made by folks who really know their Alien; they know their sci-fi/horror history and aren’t out to trample over it nor reverently kiss its feet. The film starts with a memorable Ennio Morricone musical cue lifted from the 1982 The Thing, to which this film is a prequel. The general clean, crisp look conveys a genetic link to John Carpenter’s classic, and both films owe their hyperbolic title animation to the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby The Thing from Another World (1951). Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis’ creature effects are exquisitely ghoulish, a tribute to their hero, Rob Bottin, whose elegantly splatterific creations in the ’82 film inspired a thousand S.F.X. careers. Even the C.G. monster effects blend seamlessly with their work, and dynamic sound design sweetens the blend. (Too bad Marco Beltrami’s score is a straightforward series of musical gasps and gotchas better suited for the 1951 version.)

As for the Sigourney factor, director Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. discreetly orchestrates the workplace tensions and ambiguous relationships that Ridley Scott so skillfully managed in Alien (a film whose basic premise sprung from Dan O’Bannon and pal Carpenter’s fascination with the ’51 Thing). As with Weaver’s Ripley and Tom Skerritt’s Dallas in Alien, we sense that there’s some unspoken past between Dr. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Adam (Eric Christian Olsen), the research assistant who recommends her for the expedition. Just a few lingering glances between them suggests a hint of chemistry or history or … something. Yet they remain distant. Van Heijningen and screenwriter Eric Heisserer don’t pry, raising our curiosity for handy suspense purposes. When the scientists get to the base camp, there is a sliver of friendly tension hovering over Dr. Lloyd’s interactions with these burly Norwegians. She and Adam are in a minority of Americans at this impending slaughter.

That’s the other “thing” in this film: American exceptionalism. With gorgeous restraint, van Heijningen sets up the Americans as more humble and straight-shooting than their hard-drinking, sneaky, blustery European teammates, then shatters any sense of tribal loyalty when it turns out that a manifestation of the creature could be inside anybody. “The Americans are the real enemy,” one of the Norwegians unconvincingly attempts to assure his countrymen. The real enemy is whoever happens to spontaneously explode with tentacles, claws and rows of shark-like incisors. Paranoia sends the team in a panic that results in several preemptive executions by flamethrower.

“I walk out of this movie feeling like there is no one in this world you can trust,” said my Cameroonian friend as we exited our screening of The Thing into Manhattan streets coursing with strangers off to their own kills. We immediately started speculating about which of our neighbors back at the building we live in would fit the various roles assigned in The Thing; who would wield the flamethrower and who would burn? But I realized that there are no set roles in this film. The only way to survive these mercenary times is to follow the advertising words of the freak-out flick Contagion: “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anyone.” It’s ice-cold stuff. The Thing ends with a male and female survivor exchanging glances while catching their breaths, saying, “What do we do now?” But don’t expect any romance. Aside from headlocks, I doubt there’s a single embrace in the entire film. The emphasis on prickly paranoia goes back to the source of all the movie Things, the 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, but this latest descendant takes things to a positively schizophrenic level. It knows its history, and it understands the present historical moment, where surveillance isn’t just what cameras and cops do, but what we’ve come to expect of each other.

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for Capital New York and blogs at Big Media Vandalism.