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SIMON SAYS: Director Steve McQueen forces SHAME on his audience

By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor

As a filmmaker who initially screened experimental short films influenced by Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, Steve McQueen (Hunger) surely knows the importance of the image as symbol. In theory, Shame could have been set in any other city. But when he changed his film’s location from London to New York City, McQueen changed the texture and the character of his bathetic and fundamentally shallow update to Death in Venice. Visconti, this guy ain’t.

This can be seen in a telling scene in which Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a jaded sex addict wracked with guilt over his addiction and his lust for his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), races past the 2nd Gulf War memorial on 29th Street and 5th Avenue. It’s a brief shot, but it also has to be. Brandon is racing to save Sissy, to stop her from becoming just one casualty amongst many in McQueen’s dour N.Y.C., a New Babylon that’s had all the life sucked from its veins. Brandon doesn’t want her to become one more faceless name amongst many.

At the same time, Shame could be remade in any other city because any faceless city could be the setting for McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan’s facile and altogether trite observations about being stuck in a bad spiral of shame. That glancing shot of the memorial and all the other specific references to the city, from Madison Square Garden to the way Brandon conspicuously shuttles from 28th Street to Fulton on his way to work, make Shame, as it exists now, very much a film whose meaning comes from McQueen’s surface-deep view of the city. Then again, why should he value the character of the city he’s shooting in when he shows us that he doesn’t want to cut any deeper into his human protagonists’ personalities either?

Shame’s Manhattan is not what it used to be, as is evinced by the obnoxiously conspicuous graffito of “Fuck” plastered above Brandon’s head as he has sex with a stranger in public. McQueen indulges Brandon’s capricious and self-pitying vision of both the city and his sister when Sissy sings “New York, New York” in an embarrassingly slow and mournfully "meaningful" way. Her performance is shot in real-time and in close-up, making it impossible for McQueen’s audience not to be impressed by how hard both Mulligan and he by extension are straining to make the scene in question mean something, or just feel more significant than it does.

McQueen tries so hard to make Brandon’s problems seem more than just dramatic but rather momentous to the point that Shame doesn’t look operatic but rather self-satisfied and over-cautious. Every emotion is writ in impersonally large letters, such as the way that Sissy, the bright-eyed and unfettered bohemian who still thinks of New York as a playground for her amusement, stands right at the edge of the R train’s platform while Brandon, the morose and self-loathing sex addict, stands at least a meter away from the edge. By trying to keep Brandon as physically far back as possible from his sister and any oncoming cars, McQueen rubs in our face just how literally he can represent the carnal abyss that Brandon’s trying to avoid.

Shame does not organically develop any of its wan narrative into substantive drama because McQueen and Morgan never lay down any real stakes. With the exception of Fassbender’s strong performance, the film is an entirely superficial monument to self-indulgent hubris, and I don’t mean Brandon’s sex addiction. Bookend images of Brandon refusing to follow his hedonistic impulses and pursue a married woman he’s eye-fucked on the subway reveal just how un-nuanced, how consistently shallow Shame is. McQueen never really tries to dig into Brandon’s psyche beyond loaded symbols, like the wedding ring on Brandon’s subway daydream girl. Married as it is to Harry Escott’s bombastic score, this visual motif perfectly sets the tone for McQueen’s funereal drama. Fassbender gets buried alive here in a talented young artist’s pretentious, pseudo-spiritual vanity project.

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, The Extended Cut.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011

Major manufacturers have ceased production of new motion picture film cameras; cinema as we once knew it is dead.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

We might as well call it: Cinema as we knew it is dead.

An article at the moviemaking technology website Creative Cow reports that the three major manufacturers of motion picture film cameras — Aaton, ARRI and Panavision — have all ceased production of new cameras within the last year, and will only make digital movie cameras from now on. As the article’s author, Debra Kaufman, poignantly puts it, “Someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.”

What this means is that, even though purists may continue to shoot movies on film, film itself will may become increasingly hard to come by, use, develop and preserve. It also means that the film camera — invented in 1888 by Louis Augustin Le Prince — will become to cinema what typewriters are to literature. Anybody who still uses a Smith-Corona or IBM Selectric typewriter knows what that means: if your beloved machine breaks, you can’t just take it to the local repair shop, you have to track down some old hermit in another town who advertises on Craigslist and stockpiles spare parts in his basement.

As Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala told Kaufman: “Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world? We wouldn’t survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.” Bill Russell, ARRI’s vice president of cameras, added that: “The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared.”

You can read the rest of Matt’s piece 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.

LISA ROSMAN: Andrew Haigh’s splendid WEEKEND re-imagines romance

By Lisa Rosman
Press Play Contributor

Romance has always been the ideal film genre, and not just because its inherent glamour translates so beautifully onto a big screen, glittering and infinite in the dark. Really, all the best movies function like the best drugs, artfully coaxing you into core revelations about your life from a distance that lessens the sting you’d normally feel. It’s why so many people let themselves cry only at the movies.

And we all know romance is the most brilliantly chemically engineered drug of all time.

But such transcendence requires honesty without a grinding bottom line, and that’s harder and harder to come by in a climate afflicted by instant gratification and ever-higher stakes. What pass for intimacy are too often rapid, unearned disclosures; what pass for love are shared, inherited agendas; what pass for cinema romances are cynical variations on a tired-and-untrue formula.

Which is all to say that love stories blow these days — both off and on screen. As a movie reviewer, I used to clamor to cover the newest romances even as I feigned disdain, but in the last few years, they’ve stimulated my gag reflexes more than my tear ducts. Whether we’re soldiering through the Nancy Meyer interior porn fantasies, Judd Apatow’s socially conservative, sexually libertarian comic romances, the endless parade of Anistonian peanut brittles, or the sad-sack indie films that serve mostly as a vehicle for sad-sack indie soundtracks, one thing remains consistent: these romances are tin-eared and saccharine, and, well, they just blow.

Happily, Weekend, a Brit-born film billed as a “(sort of) love story between two guys over a cold weekend in October,” proves a very significant exception. In fact, it may be the only real romance I’ve seen on a big screen in years. Certainly it’s the only good one.

British in the very best sense of the word, Weekend is a film that neither showboats nor panders, so you must be fully receptive to register its particular brand of gently paced, adamantly phrased acuity. When I first saw it back in June, I missed some of its potency since I was accompanied by a person whom I’d just begun dating. This is highly ill-advised for a movie critic, at least this one, for we were so agog that the movie mostly served as a smart, sexy echo of what was transpiring between us. But when I saw it again last week in the cold light of day — four months into my romance (a do-or-die relationship checkpoint) and at the extremely sobering hour of 10:40 A.M. — the heft of this film’s subtle wisdom finally landed.

It begins as Russell, a 20-something lifeguard with sweet, darting eyes and the particular stoop of a tall man angling for invisibility, prepares for a night out. As he scrubs himself in the bath and smokes a bowl, he wears the blank expression of someone well acquainted with if not resigned to his solitude. This solitude carries into the next scene, in which he too-politely fields questions at a house party comprised of straight couples, though he clearly knows everyone there quite well. It’s only when he ducks out to a gay club that he begins to animate, catapulting himself onto the dance floor with a determination that betrays the degree to which he’s had to steel himself to even enter the arena. He locks eyes with a cute, shorter boy who quickly rebuffs him, then reverts to a shy deference when a less appealing bloke comes onto him like gangbusters. Talk about method cinema: just when Russell’s polite quiet grows intolerable, we cut to him solemnly bringing two cups of morning coffee back to his bed where the cute boy from the night before is already sitting up, nervy and bemused. “You brushed your teeth!” he says. “Now my mouth still tastes of cock and bum while yours tastes of mint.” Russell’s relieved bemusement is ours as well.

Thus sets the dance. Where Russell is nice, Glen, as the cute boy is called, is bold. He even whips out a tape recorder and interviews Russell about the events of last night, including their initial disconnect and the ugliness of the guy who subsequently pounced. (“A troll!” Glen crows.) With a new crinkle to his eyes, Russell takes it all in stride, at least until Glen wonders aloud why Russell wouldn’t let him fuck him, who stiffly answers, “I’d thought we’d had a lovely time and I’m sorry I didn’t make the grade.” His hurt is overt.

It is in this moment that the two encounter their first opportunity to earn each other’s trust, and they handle it well — as does the film itself. For Russell’s unadulterated response cuts through Glen’s flippancy, who, despite his edgy wit, displays the rare grace necessary to be visibly humbled by another person’s emotional honesty. Russell takes note, but before we’re subjected to any remonstrations or mea culpas they may exchange, the scene shifts to the boys exchanging numbers in the hallway, neighbors passing by with a studied casualness. It’s an admirable, and characteristic, restraint on the part of writer/director Andrew Haigh suggesting that we witnesses to burgeoning romance should always be left on its margins so that we may explore our own projections. How wonderfully un-modern.

As the two spend more time together that afternoon, they subtly power-play as any two new lovers who are not immediately assuming prescribed roles do. Glen pokes at Russell’s apparent lack of ambition or sophistication with a barrage of questions about his experience with travel and art. With a surprising wiliness, Russell in turn dares Glen to ride “bucky” — to perch on the handlebars as Russell bikes them over the bridge — neatly exposing Glen’s physical timidity with an image lifted from the French New Wave. The two also begin to expose (not just disclose) themselves, a necessary and terrifying step in any real intimacy. Glen unmasks his earnestness by confiding that his art project, in which he is taping post-mortem interviews with all his tricks, is to demystify without profaning “what men do with each other in bed.”

“Of course,” he adds. “Gays will only see it because it’s about sex, and straights won’t bother.”

A little later, when Russell reveals that he grew up in foster care and does not even know his parents, Glen’s response is once again extemporaneously, jarringly honest: he grows intensely aroused, which in turn gets Russell off, no doubt wickedly sick of people’s frightened, demure pity. It’s an encounter in which their wildly divergent natures serve them.

Explicit but not tawdry, the subsequent sex scene, like all which take place in this film, takes its cues from Glen’s art project. As ordinary as Weekend often looks and seems, it is in the business of building extraordinary bridges — between writer/director Andrew Haigh and his characters, between the characters themselves, between us and the film, between the hyper-specificity of a gay, male, white, British romance and the fraught, necessary thing that is any human intimacy. And a bridge, if also difficult to construct, may be the utopian boundary between any two things.

The push-and-pull of early romance being what it is, then, it is at that moment that Glen informs Russell that the next day he will be leaving the country for two years.

Later that night, Glen and Russell duck out of Glen’s own going-away party and indulge in a coke-fueled debate about the worthiness of gay marriage. An eternally vigilant yap dog, Glen approaches the issue from both ends at once, lambasting U.K. gays for not campaigning more strenuously for marriage rights while at the same time wondering why anyone would campaign for access to that claustrophobic heterosexual institution. Russell, as usual, takes a simpler tack. Recognizing that he’s still not comfortably open about his sexuality, he marvels over the bravery required for two men to stand up in front of the world and declare their love.

It devolves from there and suddenly Russell, weepy and strung out, is calling Glen out for distancing from his emotions. He’s right. Glen’s response to betrayal, whether it’s a cheating boyfriend or gay bashing, is to abstract his pain into a political or intellectual theory — a common reaction in smart, stylish people who can whistle in the dark so cleverly that no one calls them on their bullshit. Russell, on the other hand, despite the fact that he seems more timorous, demonstrates the temerity to approach his pain head-on. He’s self-possessed enough to admit when he is upset, courageous enough to admit when he is scared. This capacity to keep it simple and true emerged earlier, when Glen’s friend slanders him to Russell, who is repelled by the lack of loyalty. Despite a background that could so easily inspire the mindset of “orphans can’t be choosy,” Russell expects friends to stick by him. Instead of settling for crumbs, he’s transformed the emotional deprivation of his childhood into a yearning for connections that aren’t just filling space, and developed the muscle to withstand the emptiness until he finds them. It’s a higher form of bravery, one rarely, if ever, celebrated onscreen or, really, in our culture. It’s the equivalent of lauding the emotional independence of an unaffiliated woman rather than dismissing her as a fucked-up cat lady.

“I know you want a relationship,” Russell now cries, to which Glen shakes his head adamantly, “I don’t want a boyfriend right now.” Overwrought, Russell retires to the bathroom to collect himself. After a second, Glen turns on the saddest, sweetest music he can find.

That’s when the purest moment of onscreen romance all year takes place, for true romance always requires hurtling past your comfort zone in the spirit of great faith. In Russell’s case, his moment of bravery is to reenter that room despite the rejection he feels; Glen’s is to tolerate the discomfort of a naked display rather than fleeing it.

There, framed by a window, they commence a kiss more tender than hungry. It’s one lit square in a dark industrial building, yellow hope drifting out into the sorrow of an urban night sky, and the contrast offers a resounding beauty even more effective in a film composed of mostly inconspicuous cinematography, the visual equivalent of that Sherwood Anderson line, “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other.”

There’s more, of course — with a film like this, there’s always more, both within and without its unique city limits. But I’ll leave you to excavate that while a part of me lingers, hankie clenched, in the rich, rewarding darkness of the IFC Theater that day. Grateful for the confirmation that my lover and I were not crazy to continue on our own uncharted path despite our radically different natures. Grateful for the reminder that ambiguity — for, not surprisingly, this is the final note of this film — is the most we can expect from any romance that we improvise rather than inherit, embrace rather than enforce. Grateful to surrender to a movie so worth its while.

Lisa Rosman writes the indieWire film blog New Deal Sally and has reviewed film for Marie Claire, Time Out New York, Salon.com, LA Weekly, Us Weekly, Premiere and Flavorpill.com, where she was film editor for five years. She has also commentated for the Oxygen Channel, TNT, the IFC and NY1. You can follow Lisa on twitter here.

Sarah Bunting: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory and the Mixing of Blessings

By Sarah D. Bunting
Press Play Contributor

Joe R and I walked into Alice Tully Hall last night and I spotted him right away, on a balcony entrance above us: Damien Echols, surveying the scene. Right there, in a sharp black shirt and blue Bono shades — just right there! I gave Joe the “fame ahoy” arm-whap and pointed up. Then I stopped in the middle of the swirl of ticket-holders and looked at Damien like you look at a rainbow. I wanted to take a picture, but I knew I wouldn’t need one. Damien, rocking civilian hair product and the tattoo he just got, a real one, not sausage grease and ballpoint ink. Just…right there. Unbelievable.

The movie itself is about what you expect, if you’ve seen either of the other Paradise Lost films or followed the case, and as such, it’s almost beside the point. I would almost rather have seen the version the filmmakers had nearly in the can before the Alford plea — the ending to the story that WM3 supporters had feared, the end of the line — to see what got changed, and how they shaped a narrative that, essentially, still hadn’t changed at that point. And then I would like to see, in two years’ time, PL 4: Mixed Blessings, and see their lives, their workaday average lives, lizard-brain driving around on errands, dealing with customer-service phone menus and pesty housepets, their bafflement at the whole Twilight thing, just right here alongside the rest of us. The moment when “Anyone else want another beer?” happens without thinking.

You can read the rest of Sarah’s piece here at her blog tomatonation.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She’s the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

RECAP: BREAKING BAD, Season 4, Episode 13: “Face Off”

The dazzling season finale of Breaking Bad eliminates many of Walt's problems while creating new ones. The following recap of Breaking Bad Season 4, Episode 13 contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

The last thing Gus Fring did was straighten his tie.

The seemingly indestructible drug lord bought it in a nursing home after going with his henchman Tyrus to kill his mute enemy, Hector Salamanca. The visit had been secretly engineered by Walt with the cooperation of Hector, who falsely made it seem as though he was about to become an informant for the drug enforcement agency in order to lure his enemies into range. The killing device was a bomb strapped to the undercarriage of Hector’s wheelchair. In a brilliant touch, the mute Hector triggered the bomb the same way he communicated his wishes, by repeatedly hammering on a small silver bell. In an even more brilliant touch, the explosion was conveyed in long shot as its force blew the front door off Hector’s room and sent debris and smoke into the hallway. When Gus stepped out of the room, I thought for a moment that he had miraculously survived the explosion — an outcome that would not have surprised me, given Gus’ past track record of surviving attempts on his life; but then the camera tracked forward and situated itself in front of Gus, revealing that half his face had been blown off. He fell out of frame, and buenas noches.

So where does that leave Breaking Bad? As is often the case — on the show and in life — an act of violence created or intensified as many problems as it solved. Jesse and the Whites no longer have to worry about Gus trying to kill them, nor do they have to worry about reprisals from the Salamanca clan, the most prominent members of which were already offed in previous episodes.

But a bombing at a nursing home will surely intensify the search for Heisenberg once the DEA realizes that the device was homemade, and therefore devised by someone with an intimate knowledge of chemistry. The law enforcement scrutiny of Walt isn’t going to go away; logically Jesse should get drawn into it as well, once the DEA figures out (via witnesses and surveillance footage) that Walt was at the same hospital as Gus and Tyrus at the same time earlier that day, and that Jesse and Walt had frequent cell phone contact, and even had a conversation on a hospital hallway bench in plain view of cops who later questioned Jesse about the poisoning.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece 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.

GREY MATTERS: HOMELAND and YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH go deep inside the minds of torture victims

By Ian Grey
Press Play Contributor

Have you seen Homeland? Claire Danes plays a C.I.A. operative whose failure to deliver on some intel possibly led to the 9/11 attacks. Now she's half crazy in her obsession with tracking a Marine (Damian Lewis) held by terrorists for eight years. Why wasn't he killed? Has he turned? What kind of threat does he represent — if any? It's a superior show in every way, a risky Manchurian Candidate for the terror generation, but right now my heart just isn't in it, because I just saw You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo. Already, I fear people are tuning out: "Oh great, more about that." But bear with me, because it just isn't often that one sees, in real time, the systemic shattering of a child's mind by American-led forces, a ruination that continues to this day. Homeland takes real chances, but the only thing you can do with Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez's heart-wrecking documentary is endure it. We will examine both works, but for now, I just want to talk about Truth, which takes a look at a Canadian named Omar Khadr.

At the age of 15, he was recruited to a compound in Afghanistan by his militant father, and in July 2002, U.S. forces attacked that compound. Army medic Christopher Speer died. Omar was horribly injured.

Recall that after 9/11, Vice President Cheney claimed sweeping rights to spy on and torture anyone he so desired, with impunity. Any part of the Constitution dealing with civil rights as it related to suspected terrorists was dissolved. And so Speer's death went unexamined, and was instead pinned on Khadr.

Canadian authorities gave Omar to the Americans as a sort of ritual offering. He was sent to Bagram Air Base and summarily tortured by American experts before being dumped down the moral and legal black hole that is Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At no point was he formally charged or given the right to representation, never knowing if he would ever be released.

Côté and Henríquez's film centers on a recently declassified seven-hour "interrogation" of Omar. We see him in blurry low-resolution video, a slight boy bewildered and trapped in three video quadrants, the lower right one left an unnerving black. Occasionally the Montreal-based filmmakers cut to footage of freed co-survivors from other American torture sites; all exhibit an eerie calm. There's also gut-wrenching testimony from Omar's mother and sister; empathy and clipped outrage from Lieutenant Commander William Kuebler, Khadr's military council and a conservative clearly disgusted that lawless big government crawled from the id of the Right; and Damien Corsetti, once the Army's "King of Torture," now seething with acid shame over sins you'd need Dante to catalogue.

But for the most part, we watch this boy whose Atlantic accent betrays an achingly sweet disposition. At first, he's almost jaunty when his interrogators show up (Canadians, their faces covered with digital black circles), thinking that he's finally being delivered from the Americans. But they're actually C.S.I.S., the Canadian version of the C.I.A. They ply him with offers of Subway and McDonalds, air conditioning and fluids.

For four days they systematically crush him, and we come to see that these "interrogations," these grueling sessions away from family and friends in constant terror that the American torturers will return, have little to do with fighting the War on Terror and everything to do with the interrogators. One ex-victim compares them to "salesmen whose job is on the line" — getting their subject to utter what they need to add to valueless reports that justify their employment. Seriously, what information could a child offer up to anyone a year after doing nothing in particular with people he didn't know?

I thought of the film The Lives of Others, of dead-souled East German Stasi ticking off boxes on a report as they force the answers they do or don't desire. And yes, I thought of Homeland and — this is essentially silly, I know — I got angry at it. I thought of a scene where Lewis' Sgt. Nicholas Brody takes off his shirt to reveal those awful torture scars. Morena Baccarin, playing his wife, weeps, showering him with kisses and love. In Truth, Omar also pulls up his shirt to show his tormentors his still festering torture wounds and, in pain, begs for medical help. With astonishingly glib cruelty, they mock him and tell him to be a man.

If history requires a single scene to summarize the stupid evil of Cheneyism and the uselessness of torture, it's that of Omar finally breaking. His interrogators say they want the truth. Omar begs them to please, tell him which truth they want, any truth, and he'll tell it to them. But they say they think he's lying.

Omar snaps. He curls into a fetal position, begging in Arabic for "Mommy, oh mommy." Disgusted, the monsters turn off the A.C. and leave him alone in a room that must stink with terror-sweat. The filmmakers do not cut away. He doubles up, his body wracking. "Mommy, oh mommy." It goes on and on, brutal beyond the telling of it.

The day after watching Truth, after accepting that its subject matter would never gain wide American distribution, I then wondered about Homeland, which is still a genre show — and I like genre TV. I believe it often functions best when it uses symbols and metaphors as tools to present the terrible and morally intolerable. But even with characters and situations as complex, conflicted and cruel as the show is already offering, there's something essentially safe about Homeland, even as it pushes hot buttons.

Then there's the show's central conceit that Danes' character would be be driven to illegal ends to spy on the Manchurian Marine. Until the show bends to reality and incorporates/updates its characters' and institutions' positions in the lingering torture and wiretap infrastructure, the idea that Danes' character would encounter any resistance to discretely eavesdropping on any single security risk will continue to feel like something ported from a dreamland, or, put less charitably, a fig leaf of never-mind pasted over the lingering horror of the terror state.

Just by existing, Homeland is doing its genre stealth work. Viewers who will never know Omar's story are being confronted with a show ballsy enough to show an American soldier tortured so horrifically that he beats his friend — an African-American soldier — to a bloody death. But even so, the series is localizing the disease: just one Marine destroyed by Others years ago. While it starts a conversation, Homeland's convincing vérité may also be an ornate means of denial. Omar's life still ticks away behind bars. Guantánamo is still open.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

SLIDE SHOW: The greatest performances by child actors

Why act your age? These young stars — including Jodie Foster and Kirsten Dunst — had it from day one.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which arrives on DVD next week, inspired divided reactions, but almost everyone agreed that it featured outstanding performances by child actors — particularly Hunter McCracken as the preadolescent version of the film’s protagonist (Sean Penn). McCracken, who had never acted in a movie before, is so unaffected that his performance seems less like a construct than a natural event, captured on film along with the film’s sunrises, waterfalls and volcanic eruptions. It’s the latest entry of a long list of great performances by child actors, the subject of tonight’s slide show.

Before we start, let’s get some caveats out of the way. First, because great acting is subjective anyhow, and great acting by children even more so, this is not an attempt to list the greatest child performances of all time, nor is it trying to be comprehensive. I didn’t “forget” to list anybody, and if one of your favorites didn’t make it on here, it just means that for whatever reason it didn’t speak to me as strongly as the ones I did cite.

Second, the parameters for inclusion here were fairly narrow. For an actor to qualify as a “child actor” in this slide show, they had to have been 7-13 years old at the time of the film’s production. I believe that a kid younger than 7 cannot be said to give a “performance” in the traditional sense, because he or she lacks the life experience and intellectual capacity to make the kinds of artistic choices that a fully professional adult (or older child) might make. I also think that actors older than 13 are teenagers, which put them in a different category for evaluation. So if you’re wondering why I didn’t list Justin Henry (who was 6 when he appeared in Kramer vs. Kramer), Cary Guffey (5 years old during the shooting of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or Linda Manz (15 when Days of Heaven was filmed in 1976) or James Dean (who played a teenager in Rebel Without a Cause at age 24), well, there’s your answer.

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.

SIMON SAYS: Finding the obscure and the strange at Austin’s Fantastic Fest

By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor

I feel like I have to preface this second of two Fantastic Fest dispatches with a disclaimer: I didn’t go to Fantastic Fest this year. In fact, I’ve yet to attend Fantastic Fest.

So, because I’m a cheapskate, this past weekend I plowed through a number of screeners. One week and seven films after my first Fantastic Fest report, I’m sad to say that my blasé attitude toward this year’s slate hasn’t changed much. To be fair, I’m still mostly ambivalent about this year’s selection. Extraterrestrial, Livid, Carré blanc, Melancholia, Take Shelter, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Karate Robo Zaborgar, Let the Bullets Fly, Milocrorze: A Love Story — all of these films are terrific, but I’ve already seen them at other fests and have written about them in one form or another, so I kinda don’t want to pimp them out again. I mean, there’s just not much in it for me, I’m just that good.

And that’s what sucks about reading festival coverage from someone as difficult to please as myself: I’m more likely to look up the obscure stuff playing at Fantastic Fest because, ultimately, I have to keep myself interested. That subjective interest is something most film festival correspondents don’t talk about but hey, I have to be entertained in order to convey some kind of enthusiasm to you, hypothetical reader o’mine. Basically, I try to be as wide-ranging as I’d like to be in the kinds of films I check out, but I’m not going to rehash stuff for the sake of putting together a better “Best of the Fest” post.

Besides, don’t you want to know about the other flawed but neat stuff that mostly fell by the wayside while everyone made a big stink about how puerile and ugly The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence was? I’d like to think so. Of the seven new films I watched, I didn’t really discover anything truly great to write home about, but I did catch a bunch of noteworthy also-rans. So that’s what I’ll talk about instead, because that’s what Fantastic Fest is good for, to my mind: getting you interested in little genre films from around the world.

Aardvark: This brooding thriller sounds a lot stranger in theory than it actually is in practice, but I think that strangeness also accounts for its allure. A blind, recovering alcoholic befriends a young alcoholic jujutsu instructor, and that’s most of the movie right there. You follow the film’s sight-deprived protag, who is in fact played by a blind actor, as he bonds with his martial arts-practicing new buddy, who may or may not be a hitman of some kind. Director Kitao Sakurai does a great job of approximating a feeling of disorientation similar to his protagonist’s psychological dilemma: who can an older, blind single man confide in, knowing that he can’t see any new acquaintances? Aardvark‘s big take-away — maybe we never really know the people we trust the most — is on the nose and I honestly have no clue what the title means. But apart from a lame ending, this one’s pretty decent. B.

Blind: A South Korean murder mystery where the protagonist is an ex-cop suspended after her brother dies in a freak car accident. True to its Italian giallo roots, the film’s heroine “witnesses” a crime in progress, making her the prime target of a ruthless serial killer. I like Blind more than most of the other films I saw during my screener binge because, while the film’s plot is strictly by the numbers, it’s, y’know, tense and stuff. I love the way that the killer is filmed with Bava-esque lighting cues (purple front-lighting!) and all of the chase scenes are a hoot as well. Plus, even if the film’s script is pretty schmaltzy, I actually cared about the protagonists, more than I might have in any other film of this kind. B+.

A Lonely Place to Die: I’d heard nothing but good things about this supposedly no-nonsense survival horror flick. Unfortunately, here’s way too much nonsense for my liking. Eventually, Lonely stops being a survival horror flick and becomes a doughy thriller in which a child is ransomed by generic Euro-baddies. Still, in spite of some seriously distracting trick shots that simulate the P.O.V. of the film’s imperiled protags, the survival horror stuff is pretty good. B-.

Retreat: Thandie Newton and Cillian Murphy shack up on a small, isolated Irish island. True to generic form, their relationship is falling apart slowly until Jamie Bell stumbles upon their cabin and warns them of a global pandemic with no cure. The final twist is satisfying, but the rest of the movie, save for Murphy’s typically compelling performance, is not. C.

Revenge: A Love Story: This batshit thriller is rabid in the most energizing way possible. Director Ching-Po Wong has no concept of restraint when it comes to dramatizing the lengths one man will go to defend his more-innocent-than-Mary girlfriend. This girl is so kittenishly innocent that she ought to wear a bull’s-eye t-shirt so that even the dimmest badman will know who to hassle. The most fun part about Revenge is watching as this cute young thing’s bugfuck protector, played by Dream Home‘s Juno Mak, goes to the mat and then some when it comes to defending his girlfriend’s honor, by which I mean he gets his head mashed into a bed of thumb tacks and a long, thin, pointy stick shoved in his ear in one of the film’s first couple of scenes. The film’s consummately over-the-top action scenes are redolently gruesome and churlishly violent. They’re also tons of fun. The romantic melodrama at the heart of the film is its weakest part, but it’s otherwise negligible. Still: wow, this movie is screwy. B+.

The Squad: An effectively moody Spanish thriller but not much more than that. I like the way that certain scenes showed us, sans dialogue, the psychology of a unit of soldiers before the soldiers in question start to generically fight amongst themselves. Pervasive dread matters more here than the film’s plot, which is kind of a bland, post-Ten Little Indians, the-enemy-within horror film. It just doesn’t matter that much more, unfortunately. B-.

Two Eyes Staring: While the final twist in this Danish ghost story overtaxes what was otherwise a wonderfully spare horror film, most everything else about Two Eyes Staring is very atmospheric and exciting. I was surprised at how well the film’s formulaic “girl discovers ghost who explains why her mother doesn’t like her” narrative worked. Until the ending, that is. No amount of atmosphere could rescue this film from its totally unnecessary final plot twist. B.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: George Harrison Living In A Material World

Martin Scorsese's new HBO documentary about George Harrison is as serious and sometimes mystifying as its subject

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

Who is your favorite Beatle? If you prize humility, generosity and gratitude — or if you’re a kid who loves the sound of his funny name –you might answer Ringo Starr. Otherwise it’s probably a two-way race between Paul McCartney, who stands for sentimentality, old-school musical craft and ceaseless productivity, or John Lennon, whose name still epitomizes rebellion, sarcasm, soulfulness and martyrdom. I’ve rarely heard anyone answer “George Harrison,” and Martin Scorsese’s two-part HBO documentary Living in the Material World (Oct. 5 and 6, 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 Central) incidentally suggests the reasons why. Harrison was the most studious, elusive and impenetrable Beatle. And as he got older, he became increasingly uninterested in celebrity except as a vehicle that could expose him to new experiences, and bring him into contact with artists and thinkers from whom he could learn something.

George — as I will refer to him from now on in this review, because calling the Beatles by their last names seems too formal — was the youngest of the Beatles, but by consensus he was the most mature. From a shockingly early age, he was a student of life, cultivating the demeanor of an acolyte on an endless pilgrimage to an unknown destination. John Lennon had a questing spirit, too, but his life had a wild, often deliberately comical performance-art aspect that George’s mostly lacked. Where Lennon’s personal evolution was a series of diary entries that he invited the world to read, George’s happened, or seemed to happen, in private. The outward evidence of whatever quest George was on (hair length, wardrobe, sitar lessons, Hare Krishna chanting) seemed mostly unconnected to his life as a public figure. He explained himself in the media only because, as one of the world’s most famous men, he had to — and because he hoped his celebrity might encourage strangers to try whatever he was excited about.

You can read the read of Matt's piece 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.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: AMERICAN HORROR STORY Prizes camp over suspense

This self-aware new show from the producers of Glee and Nip/Tuck is one-stop shopping for horror film imagery

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

American Horror Story doesn’t seem like the right title for this new FX series, which debuts tonight at 10 p.m./9 Central; "American Camp” might have been more accurate. It’s being sold as a noveau gothic ghost story, and purely in terms of imagery in situations, that description isn’t entirely misleading, but it’s not quite accurate, either. Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the show is one-stop shopping for horror tropes, ancient and recent.

The central family, the Harmons, live in a textbook haunted house — a spacious Victorian-style L.A. mansion that was built in the 1920s and that hosted a horrific double murder-suicide. Of course it’s haunted; there wouldn’t be a show if it weren’t. But in case that’s not enough to sustain a series built around gore, shocks and spookiness, Murphy and Falchuck pile on still more unsettling elements, including Seven-style opening credits; a dysfunctional back story for the main couple, Vivian (Connie Britton) and her psychologist husband, Ben (Dylan McDermott); relentless, verging-on-Carrie bullying of the Harmons’ teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga); a kooky neighbor named Constance (Jessica Lange) who came out to Hollywood to be an actress in the ’60s and now runs a doggie day care center and tends to her teenage daughter Adelaide (Jamie Brewer) who has Down syndrome; time-shifted shocks that seem to allude to horrors that happened in the deep past, or that will happen in the future; and last but certainly not least, an unnerving teenage patient of Ben’s (Evan Peters) who brags of murderous impulses and hallucinates bloody corpses.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece 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.