Press Play Video Blog

THREE REASONS FOR CRITERION CONSIDERATION: Shuji Terayama’s PASTORAL, TO DIE FOR THE COUNTRY (1974)

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play's Robert Nishimura spotlights the provocative career of the late Japanese avant-garde director Shuji Terayama. He has created this essay with the accompanying trailer for Pastoral, To Die In The Country in an effort to convince Criterion to restore and release this important work as part of its collection.]

Every great filmmaker reaches a point in their career when they need to reflect upon their life and childhood, tracing the path that lead them to where they are today. Most often these nostalgic quandaries find their way into new fictionalized scenarios, drawing on personal experience to entertain themselves as well as audiences. Sometimes a director takes a more direct approach, probing their past in the form of autobiographical diaries. Our experiences as children inevitably make us who we are today, and tapping into those memories can provide some tasty material for any filmmaker who questions why they make the kind of films they make. (Look to Federico Fellini’s entire career for further evidence of that point.) Not all memories are immediately accessible to recall, especially those associated with extreme emotional connections.

Those particular memories are stored in the deep recesses of our subconscious and often emerge in our dreams; even then, they're not exactly clearly defined. So, then, what happens when a director decides to make a film about their childhood, but also must confront issues of psychological trauma that have been buried within their subconscious? The result is Shûji Terayama's Pastoral, To Die in the Country, a film so unique and spellbinding that it transcends all classification.

Shûji Terayama is probably the most radically subversive yet well-respected director in Japanese film history. He was the filmmaker's filmmaker, a media darling and a true Renaissance man. For many directors from the 1970s onward, Terayama was pure inspiration. In my previous Three Reasons installment for The Noisy Requiem, Matsui Yoshihiko told me that seeing Pastoral was an eye-opening experience, one that immediately inspired him to become a filmmaker himself. In Japan, Terayama was a well-known poet, artist, writer, street performer and leading figure in Japan's growing avant-garde theater movement in Tokyo. He had a profound effect on the art community in Tokyo, but remained elusive to mainstream attention outside of Japan. One of his first films, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a wildly experimental short in which children overthrow the adult world, shocked critics upon its release and managed to get banned outright in several countries. Despite being completely avant-garde and metaphoric, what offended the censors were the film's scenes of simulated sex involving children. By today's standards, these same scenes would hardly lift an eyebrow. Even a casual Freudian reading of the film reveals what would be his strongest contextual trademark: serious mommy issues.

For anyone who would like to know more about Terayama's life, Pastoral is as good a place as any to start. For the most part it is an autobiographical film, teaching us all about Terayama's upbringing in a small countryside village in Aomori Prefecture. After losing his father during WWII, Shûji was raised by his very domineering mother as well as the determinedly traditional and superstitious townspeople. We see Shûji compete with these traditional values, struggling to find stimuli and sexual satisfaction in a small town that is very much stuck in time. All Shûji wants to do is break away from his mother and the other backward hillbillies, get laid by the milf next door and catch the first train out of town. Such a synopsis might very well have been from the movie you watched last night at the multiplex (like Judd Apatow's Midnight Train to Bonerland, coming to a cinema near you…probably), but Pastoral is in no way a traditional narrative. Just as our own memory becomes fragmented and nonlinear, Terayama utilizes the same disjointed dream logic that corrupts all our memories. Characters float in and out inexplicably, settings change without warning, the cinematography and editing are highly expressionistic, and just when you start getting comfortable with this style of storytelling the film abruptly stops. Halfway through Pastoral, we learn that not only are we watching a film, but that Terayama hasn't finished making it yet. The director (played by Kantarô Suga) isn't satisfied with how things are going and must go back in time, enter his own film and change the outcome.

The film begins (as does the Three Reasons video) with his earliest childhood memory: playing kakurenbo (the Japanese equivalent to hide and seek) in a cemetery. As little Shûji lifts his head to find his playmates, all the people associated with his youth come creeping into view from behind the tombstones. At this point we see that all the characters in the film are wearing whiteface, a characteristic usually reserved for ghosts. But these are not ghosts come to haunt him, they are the specters of his past that have become faded over time, himself included. These characters are stuck in time as well as place. Terayama uses images of clocks throughout the film to exemplify this point, especially in his own childhood home, where his mother's refusal to fix their broken clock indicates her unwillingness to change, forcing young Shûji to be stuck along with her. The film maintains dull monochromatic tones whenever Terayama is at home or in the village. The villagers are represented by a coven of black-hooded, eyepatch-wearing old women who keep the town in a stranglehold of superstition. Just outside the town is a traveling circus troupe, constantly preparing for a show that never occurs. Whenever we visit this particular location, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of color fills the screen and covers the circus characters. For Terayama, these characters represent modernity with their wild sexual escapades and complete freedom from time and tradition. Once Shûji is exposed to these people his desire to run away is firmly cemented. The only thing holding him back is his mother.

Terayama once wrote that life was like an enormous outgoing book. So if we needed to change something about ourselves, we need only go back and rewrite what happened. Pastoral represents his desire to do just that. This is why the Terayama character must go back and confront his younger self. In order to complete his film Terayama must convince his younger self of what needs to be done: kill their mother. In scenes where Terayama is in contact with the younger Shûji, his subconscious is allowed to run wild. Free associations and dream-derived figures parade past the two Terayamas in one particularly beautiful sequence. Fans of Luis Buñuel's surrealistic films or Guy Maddin's recent introspective films will find a kindred spirit in Terayama. But in many ways Terayama is Maddin's stylistic opposite, and Buñuel couldn't hold a two-sided candle to the effortless phantasmagorical freedom of Pastoral.

Albeit titled "For Criterion Consideration," I largely use that phrase as a euphemism. This film needs to be seen; I just point to Criterion because they are respected for bringing important films to a wider audience (in the best editions, etc., etc.). Needless to say, Pastoral, To Die in the Country is an important film by an important filmmaker. The unfortunate fact that none of Terayama's films are distributed anywhere outside of Japan forces determined cinephiles to use questionably legal means to find them. Japan's FilmForum does have the English-friendly four volume compilation of Terayama's short films, which includes the oh-my-god-think-of-the-children Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Die-hard fans of Japanese cinema or the avant-garde will know Terayama, but it is time that the West pay their proper respects to a great filmmaker by allowing his films to be widely seen. I cannot think of a better salute to Shûji Terayama than a Criterion release in the U.S. or a Masters of Cinema release in the U.K.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. Born and raised in Panamá, he then moved to the US, working at the University of Pittsburgh and co-directing Life During Wartime, a short-lived video collective for local television. After fleeing to Japan, he co-founded the Capi Gallery in Western Honshu before becoming a permanent resident.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: TV’s unconscionable spectacle

The scariest, most disgusting show on television isn’t American Horror Story. It’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Bravo’s unscripted series offers that horror movie gimmick of showing you unlikable people doing ill-advised things that you can’t prevent no matter how loudly you yell or curse at the screen. But because the characters are — in the physical sense, at least — “real,” and the world-shattering plot twist at the core of this season was telegraphed to the audience long in advance, what might otherwise seem a guilty pleasure seems instead a travesty, as depraved a spectacle as anything that has ever appeared on American screens.

We all knew before this new batch of episodes started that Real Housewives husband Russell Armstrong killed himself in August 2011. We knew that some of his family members blamed the unrelenting public scrutiny built into the show’s production for hastening his death, and that the tension with his wife, Taylor, was more than a tabloid spat between shallow rich folk — that it was, in fact, symptomatic of something far darker than the typical unscripted cable show could handle. But Real Housewives either ineptly failed to integrate our awareness of the tragedy into the plot in any meaningful way, or else decided to plug its ears and tiptoe through the hand-woven silk origami tulips. Is this approach evidence of a conscious creative choice — the calm before the storm? If this franchise weren’t so committed to manufactured melodrama and toxic materialism, I’d offer a very tentative “yes,” but I suspect it’s more likely the case of the show not having the slightest clue of what to do with such explosive material — material that it frankly never should have tried to deal with on-screen, because it is morally, intellectually and creatively unequipped to get anywhere near it without making it dishonest and trite. We’re not talking about Deadliest Catch here, or even Survivor or freaking Celebrity Rehab. It’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play and TV critic for Salon.

SLIDE SHOW: Martin Scorsese’s greatest movies

This has been quite a year for 60-something American filmmakers. Terrence Malick, who started directing in 1973, created the year’s most divisive conversation piece with The Tree of Life. Woody Allen, who started directing in 1966, had his biggest financial success with Midnight in Paris. Steven Spielberg, who directed his first feature-length movie 40 years ago, has two blockbusters coming out this month, The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. And Martin Scorsese, who made his directorial debut in 1966, has had another success with Hugo, a film history-conscious 3-D art film for kids that finished second to The Muppets at the box office during its opening weekend and was just named film of the year by the National Board of Review. It’s as good a time as any for a Best of Scorsese list — as if I really need an excuse!

What you see here is my own personal list of Scorsese’s 10 (actually 11; I cheated on one slide) greatest films. I’ve tried to cast a wide net here and include both fiction and nonfiction; he works regularly in both modes, and the latter tends to get neglected. This list was in some ways harder to compile than the Woody Allen list from a couple of weeks back, because although Scorsese hasn’t made a film that totally satisfied me in a while, his films are nearly always brilliant in places — sometimes for very long stretches. Even The Aviator, Bringing Out the Dead and Gangs of New York — which I think are sorely hampered by miscasting — are often breathtaking. If you’re wondering where Cape Fear, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Last Waltz, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Color of Money are, I don’t hate them. I just think these films are ultimately richer.

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

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play and TV critic for Salon.com.

Joe Swanberg’s CAITLIN PLAYS HERSELF defies expectations and categorization

There’s not much nuance to the discussion around Joe Swanberg’s films. You either think the amazingly prolific director’s the second coming of Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave or a sexist softcore sleazebag. No other member of the mumblecorps generates so much heat, even if Andrew Bujalski or Aaron Katz’s films aren’t universally liked. At a Q&A in Brooklyn two months ago, I asked Swanberg why he thinks his work is so divisive. He pointed out several possible reasons – shooting entirely on video (although he’s far from alone there), acting in his own films – before settling on the fact that he puts his libido explicitly into his work. That sex drive is usually but not always directed towards beautiful young women. However, Swanberg has also filmed himself masturbating for real, and his forthcoming film, The Zone, an update of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, depicts a mysterious bisexual stranger.

As if to bait Swanberg’s critics, Caitlin Plays Herself opens with a shot of Caitlin (Caitlin Stainken, who does indeed play herself) baring her breasts. However, voyeurs will soon be frustrated, as she’s covered in dark liquid in the very next shot (echoing Brian De Palma’s Carrie) during a performance piece about the BP oil spill. Caitlin’s in an on-again, off-again relationship with a filmmaker (Swanberg) who frequently travels out of town. She dates other men, but she can’t pull herself together to make a definitive break with Swanberg, who takes offense at her onstage nudity. The film exposes both female bodies and, more daringly and threateningly, male egos.

Swanberg has improved greatly as a visual stylist since early films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. At this point, he rarely moves the camera or uses close-ups. His feel for the expressive potential of digital video has increased, as he gets a particularly uncanny glow from onscreen lights. He’s left shakycam clichés associated with the mumblecore movement far behind.

Swanberg claims that he makes films with no written script. Be that as it may, Caitlin Plays Herself does include a writing credit for himself and Stainken. As Swanberg’s work has progressed, it’s become clearer that its central point is his ability to simulate reality in all its messy aimlessness. At first, it seemed as though he were simply shooting amateurish improv sessions. In more mature films like Silver Bullets, the quality of his direction of improv has improved so much that the purpose behind the aimlessness is usually evident.

If only that were always the case in Caitlin Plays Herself! Especially in its first half, it is full of scenes that seem hopelessly digressive, introducing minor characters who never reappear, or subject matter that sheds light on nothing. The film promises to address the contradictions and difficulties of making political theater in the Obama era, but it turns out to have almost nothing to say about this. It’s far from devoid of subtext, such as Caitlin’s desire to get back to nature (which seems linked to her politics), but Swanberg’s storytelling methods are so haphazard that little of it really resonates.

Swanberg’s cinema picks up on one of the promises of the French New Wave: a kind of filmmaking akin to writing a diary. With The 400 Blows, François Truffaut filmed his difficult adolescence. With his trilogy of reflexive films, including Art History, Silver Bullets and Caitlin Plays Herself, Swanberg has created a public persona that seems to acknowledge the gossip some people have spread about him online. However, his self-portraits are rarely flattering. In Caitlin Plays Herself, his flightiness makes him emotionally – and often physically – unavailable for Caitlin.

How much of the real Swanberg exists in his cinematic alter egos? His use of fellow filmmakers as supporting actors and his tendency to work with the same collaborators repeatedly – here, co-cinematographer Adam Wingard, with whom he directed Autoerotic earlier in the year – suggests a network of friendship belied by the film’s often icy view of interpersonal relationships. All the same, they seem designed to provoke questions about Swanberg’s real life.

Much of Caitlin Plays Herself plays like the café-set first 90 minutes of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, except that neither Swanberg nor Stainken is as charismatic an actor as Jean-Pierre Léaud, and the drama that ultimately emerges offers nothing as compelling as Eustache’s devastating finale. Perhaps judging this film by the standards of conventional screenwriting or French films from the ‘60s and ‘70s is misguided; after all, Swanberg has said that he’s more influenced by YouTube clips than cinema from the past. At its best, his cinema suggests a hybrid between previous models and something genuinely new, specific to video and our fragmented technological communication. (Caitlin talks about reducing her anxiety by going off the grid.) While not nearly as accomplished as the films it evokes, Caitlin Plays Herself resists easy dismissal.<

Steve Erickson is a freelance writer who lives in New York. He has also made 4 shorts, the most recent one being 2009's SQUAWK. He writes for Gay city News, Fandor's blog, the Nashville Scene, Film Comment, the Tribeca Film Festival's website, The Atlantic website and has written for many other publications.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: On “Weed Wars,” drug clichés go up in smoke

“I run a family business, and the business is cannabis,” says Steve D’Angelo, a central character in Discovery’s new series Weed Wars and the co-founder and executive director of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which distributes medical marijuana to almost 100,000 customers. D’Angelo’s matter-of-fact statement sums up the tone of this series, which treats the Harborside Heath Center as just another family-owned (albeit nonprofit) business, ultimately not too different from a veterinary clinic, a hair salon or a tattoo parlor.

Well, OK, there is one major difference: Although the clinic’s main product can be sold legally to any California resident with a medical permit to buy it, the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule 1 narcotic, as dangerous to the republic as crack cocaine. That means that in addition to the usual entrepreneurial headaches, D’Angelo and his brother Andrew, the clinic’s general manager, live in fear of a massive bust by the DEA on whatever pretext — a catastrophe that would wipe out everything they’ve built.

You can read the rest of of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play and TV critic for Salon.com.

GREY MATTERS: How “Lifeforce” and “Mean Streets” saved my sanity

In 1986 an M.T.A. bus ran the light on 42nd Street and smashed into my face, sending my body hurtling about 15 feet until it crashed into a mailbox and the cement. My nose was crushed to the side of my face and gushing blood, my skull cracked, my knee and leg broken.

Some intense E.M.T.s out of Bringing Out the Dead showed up, cut away my ruined clothes and drove me to New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

A broken brain is like a sieve and memory is water. Right off, I lost all but twenty minutes of what happened to me at the hospital, and then a year of my life here and there in hours, weeks, months and more. I only knew time was lost when, for typical example, I thought today was Sunday, looked at the paper, and saw it was next Friday.

Having no money, I had no therapy. For a while, my food was brought to me by a sex worker/songwriter I knew and her cellist roommate. But otherwise, I can’t recall for certain who tended to me during those first crucial months spent on a mattress in a railroad apartment on 82nd Street in Manhattan. Pain was a constant; the cast on my right leg itched like torture. Finding words to make sentences, stopping the world from spinning sideways – beyond me. The most terrifying, horrific thing: one day I had a cat…the next I didn't.

And yet, all the time, my brain was busy repairing itself, reclaiming things lost – a process enabled first by music, then by music and cinema.

The recent 20/20 interview with the entirely astonishing Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, doing extraordinarily well after being shot in the head less than a year ago by an untreated schizophrenic, was as painful and inspiring as it was familiar. I am not suggesting that my situation was as remotely catastrophic as Congressman Giffords, but the effects of traumatic brain injury do exist on the same continuum of devastation.

I learned that the most terrible thing about brain trauma is the absolute loneliness of being trapped in a broken brain, of being unable to even ask, “I’d like some Motrin.”

After I started coming out of the worst of it, I had – of all things – an almost intolerable need to see a film. And which film did I need to see so much I smashed the cast off my leg with a screwdriver and a hammer?

Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.

Good or bad, for me, it was a reparative film. Between its batty image assault (Naked space vampire! An Alien Resurrection in London! A mile-long umbrella spaceship!) and Henry Mancini’s source-poaching score, it was like cinematic jumper cables were jacking a galaxy of new connectivity into my ailing old cortex.

On 20/20, you see Congresswoman Giffords constantly trailed by therapists with keyboards and guitars, because it’s now a done deal that music is essential to making an injured brain again the cradle of a person’s identity. Instinct led me to compulsively program on my synthesizer thousands of sounds – think of sounds as words – and so I recorded hundreds of songs. What is music but sounds stringed together to create sound “sentences?”

The film that best combined sound and image at the time was Blade Runner. I would eventually be compelled to see Blade Runner, either at the St. Marks Theater in the East Village where admission was 99 cents, or at another theater, or on video, 174 times. Watching Ridley Scott’s masterpiece became less about story and more about images and sound and being safely in the moment, a very crucial thing.

When I regained the ability to walk, I met a trans woman named Lore who got me work programming synths, which led to studio work. I moved often, losing things along the way – addresses, photos, the validating artifacts of a life before 42nd Street. And then I lost Lore too. I can’t remember how.

I’ve been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately, where losing track and time happens every week. I miss Lore.

But lately I’m thinking nothing truly goes away. That even if there’s no scrapbook or person to confirm anything, maybe there’s still a way to get it.

Because as it turns out, there is: Netflix.

As an only child from a dysfunctional family, I moved on to a life in the outliers of the arts, where the attrition rate of friends and lovers – to mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, to just getting the fuck outta Dodge – has always been high. And then there was 42nd Street.

Often, survivors wonder if everything, especially good things, were made up. You want evidence and validation that doesn’t come. The happiest day of my life, for example, had always felt like a bedtime story I just made up.

But then Netflix’s half-assed accumulation of film history led me back to Mean Streets, and the floodgates were torn open and a little bit of my secret history is back. It was just a brief scene of Harvey Keitel in a restaurant, but it was the trigger I needed.

I see myself on that happiest day at Luna on Mulberry Street, in Little Italy, 1980. I’m sitting at a rickety table as a huge man in butcher’s whites tops off a small glass with bright red table wine as the ambient night music of Little Italy, the sound-blur of souvenir barkers, tourist murmur, and piped-in Bennett, Sinatra and Tormé, floats in through the front window-wall.

Why this moment is so perfect is something I’m afraid I can’t share right now. But it was.

Not long ago, Luna was shuttered. But it doesn’t matter now. Whatever nerve cluster storing that Luna memory that seemed to had been destroyed but wasn’t so destroyed after all, it just needed the magic word – or Scorsese film – to bring it back.

Next – Bette Gordon’s Variety, about a girl new to New York and her own sexuality. What I see in the film: my go-to dive bar and the faces of people I used to drink with, pulled out of the black lagoon of supposedly ruined memories.

Even when you’ve done a good deal of healing, exterior stress can create a blast radius of pathology. So when I lost my best friend and fiancé to illness in 1994 and my life savings to financial miscommunication, my still bone-china-fragile mind responded by essentially saying, “Fuck this shit,” and sort of, well, deleted most of that year from memory.

But as my project was suggesting – and at this point I was realizing I was engaged in some kind of batty project – perhaps everything is stored somewhere in your brain.

And so a few months ago, when, on Netflix, I saw Douglas Keeve’s Unzipped, a delightful look at the incredibly silly/inspired designer Isaac Mizrahi, it was like a guardian angel with supernatural AVID skills was delicately feeding me back images of every 1994 place with a good memory attached while editing out all the bad.

There – my favorite bizarre SoHo antiques store! And there – the West Village magazine shop that had both the latest Kerrang! and Italian Vogue! And the NoHo coffee shop where I wrote my first article.

After a few films, I came to realize that I was trying to create a sort of virtual "family album" of my life via other people’s films, while also trying to trigger memories of my lost self.

Speaking of family, the early ‘90s were all about seeking refuge from grunge’s anti-style “authenticity” fetishism by embracing the exploding plastic wow of drag ball and voguing culture, as seen in Paris is Burning. To a degree, my fragmented memory had glamorized the clubs; now I see the poverty, dreams, hustling and H.I.V. They were so damned and brave.

On a more otherworldly level, Man on Wire flashed back my Wall Street Sundays, where the streets would be empty, and the Twin Towers so elemental and majestic they created their own weather system.

But the most nurturing film so far has been Rockets Redglare!, directed by the late Luis Fernandez de la Reguera (October 20, 1966 – August 14, 2006). A self-destructive, morbidly obese, East Village extreme comedy progenitor who appeared in films such as After Hours and Mystery Train, who counted among his friends such downtowners as Steve Buscemi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem Dafoe, Julian Schnabel and Jim Jarmusch, Rockets performed at holes like Pyramid Club and Club 57, places where I was hanging out when 42nd Street happened.

There's a scene in the film where Rockets is doing a gig at a dive called King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. I thought I’d made this up – fuck, maybe I’d made the name of the club up. But there it is, and I’m recalling that I’d had the worst panic attack ever, and responded with way too much to drink.

And then Rockets comes on and says this astonishingly disgusting/hilarious shit that’s so bad, you can’t believe you’re hearing it, and I’m having that Luna feeling again, except this time…

…There’s a group of people. Just as I recall. One of them – I know it – is me.

The other night I watched a Doctor Who episode that had me in tears. A traumatic event has caused someone to unnaturally forget people and things they love. In the words of the Doctor:

“People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces. Little things we can't quite account for. Faces in photographs. Luggage. Half-eaten meals. Rings. Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back.”

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, indentity politics, music and tragedy.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: When great TV shows disappoint

As regular readers know, I sometimes fall head-over-heels in love with promising new shows, and when they deliver a problematic or outright bad episode, it’s disillusioning. I tell myself it’s the nature of the beast — that it’s hard to make just one great half-hour or hour-long episode, let alone 10 or 12 or 26 in a row. The law of averages has to catch up eventually. But that doesn’t change the fact that a show that once seemed to have excellent judgment suddenly made what felt like out-of-character or flat-out stupid choices. A botch-job episode can make you wonder if you were right to like the show in the first place. At its most misjudged and tone-deaf, a bad episode of an otherwise terrific series can emphasize flaws you were previously inclined to overlook. It can even make you second-guess the things you praised in the past.

I’ll give you two recent examples, then pose a few questions and open the floor for readers to share their own experiences. I’ll place the examples within self-contained sections, so that you can easily skip them if you’re afraid of spoilers.

You can read the rest of Matt's recap here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play and TV critic at Salon.com.

RECAP: The man’s world of BOARDWALK EMPIRE

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article contains spoilers for "Boardwalk Empire" season two, episode 10 ("Georgia Peaches"). Read at your own risk.

On one hand, yes, oh my God, oh the humanity, poor Angela Darmody (Aleksa Palladino), rest her soul; what a ghastly exit. Philadelphia gangster/butcher Manny Horvitz (William Forsythe) avenged a botched assassination attempt by Angela’s husband, Jimmy (Michael Pitt), by invading the Darmodys’ seaside house and putting Angela and her girlfriend down like livestock. It was obscenely dark, and I mean that as a compliment. Violence that’s supposed to mean something — to feel “real” and hurt the spectator — can’t be clean, abstract or comic bookish. It needs to have that ’70s movie nastiness, and this killing definitely had it. It reminded me of the murder spree that ended Boys Don’t Cry, with the bodies on the floor and the bloodstains on the wall. Horrifying.

But on the other hand: sooner or later “Boardwalk Empire” had to kill off somebody who was listed in the show’s opening credits, otherwise it would have seemed like Guest Star Murder Theater, and Angela was definitely the most disposable major character. She never drove important plotlines; mostly she reacted to her husband’s macho shenanigans, sometimes suffering in silence, sometimes acting out. Her appearances tended to tease the same question over and over: “Is Angela being true to herself and flirting with women this week, or trying to pass for straight again?” That’s a fascinating predicament for a female character in male-dominated 1920s Atlantic City, with its boho influence bubbling just under the surface, but “Boardwalk” has yet to address it in a meaningful way. We got a parting taste of Angela’s internal conflict during her final episode, but it ultimately felt like a glorified setup for the surprise of seeing a woman coming out of that bathroom instead of Jimmy. (On TV, when unhappy characters try to set things right with the people who mean the most to them, it often means that death is right around the corner.)

If you would like to read the rest of Matt's recap, click here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play and TV critic for Salon.

VIDEO SLIDE SHOW: The Muppets’ greatest hits

After Jim Henson’s death, the Muppet troupe spent a couple of decades wandering the pop culture wilderness, trying but mostly failing to get in touch with the magic that once fueled their popularity. They got a big step closer two winters ago, when “Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody,” their first hit viral video, debuted on YouTube. This week they’ve got their first big-screen hit in almost three decades, The Muppets, written by and co-starring comic actor and Henson obsessive Jason Segel. “It bumbles along episodically from one thing to the next — hey-ho! — and captures the spirit of Henson’s Muppet Show admirably,” writes my colleague Andrew O’Hehir.

The key to their success is the same one that fueled the success of the classic Warner Bros. characters and Matt Groening’s The Simpsons: the ability to appeal to several age groups at once. Kids laugh at the pratfalls and silly voices. Adults chuckle at the literary references, pop culture in-jokes, puns and innuendo coded just cleverly enough to go over children’s heads.

You can read the rest of Matt's piece here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of Press Play.

Jason Segel’s THE MUPPETS proves it’s time for Kermit & Co. to pack it in

In his effort to revitalize the brand, Jason Segel exposes his fondness for the Muppets as boldly as he exposed his naked body in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. No hidden agendas here, The Muppets is packed with full-frontal nostalgia that suggests not just Segel’s desire to relive the magic of yesteryear but also his fervent belief that the Muppets’ charms can cast an equally powerful spell today. The Muppets, which Segel co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller, opens with an outright appreciation of The Muppet Show and the not so subtle implication that Segel spent his childhood feeling as if the Muppets were part of his family. If you’re a hardcore fan and realize how much the brand’s spirit has strayed from its roots since Jim Henson’s death in 1990, this is exactly the kind of opening you want to see, and it’s equally encouraging when, not much later, Segel’s Gary and his brother Walter (a Muppet performed by Peter Linz) break into song. The film’s rousing opening number, “Life’s a Happy Song,” captures some of the cherished Henson-era optimism and sweetness in its title alone, and the lyrics have a casually playful absurdity to them that feels just right. But the capper is a massive dance routine at the end of the song, when the citizens of Smalltown, USA, come flooding into the frame to form a leg-kicking, jazz-handsing chorus, creating a spectacle that would rank among the all-time greatest Muppet moments if not for one small problem. None of them are Muppets.

For a guy who so clearly gets the Muppets, Segel should be the first person to realize how utterly un-Hensonian this is. Henson’s Muppet movies are full of big musical performances, but always with the Muppets at the center of the action. In The Great Muppet Caper alone, there’s the black-tie dance sequence that includes Miss Piggy tap-dancing, the synchronized swimming number, also starring Piggy, and “Couldn’t We Ride,” with the whole crew on bicycles. The thrill of these Henson numbers is their audaciousness, the way Henson dared to make the Muppets part of the action in scenarios in which it seemed logistically impossible. Segel’s opening dance number takes the opposite approach. One moment Walter and Gary are singing their way through the streets, and the next moment Walter is gone, literally kicked from the frame, never to return until he’s wheeled in on luggage at the very end of the sequence as dozens of humans dance behind him. Audacious? Hardly. And it’s a sign of what’s to come. Segel’s core mistake is to repeatedly push the Muppets to the margins in a movie designed to give them the spotlight. Case in point: Of the more than 20 songs in Henson’s three Muppet movies, only one of them has a non-Muppet performer (“Piggy’s Fantasy” in Caper, in which Kermit vies with a voice-dubbed Charles Grodin, which is part of the joke). Yet of the six original songs in Segel’s film, only one of them is Muppets-only. One.

None of this is to suggest that Segel’s approach to the Muppets isn’t endearing in its own way. But The Muppets speaks to the ability of Segel and Amy Adams (as Gary’s girlfriend Mary) to be Muppet-like as often as it speaks to the appeal of the Muppets themselves. What’s particularly odd about Segel’s reboot, directed by James Bobin, is that it tends to miss most glaringly when trying hardest for the bull’s eye. Midway through the film, for example, the Muppets, who have been gathered together from far and wide to put on the traditional one-last-show, are faced with
cleaning and repairing their decrepit studio. After watching Scooter quietly push a broom for a few unproductive seconds it’s Walter who reminds the Muppets that this is the kind of stuff that they’re supposed to do to music, and he’s right. But Starship’s “We Built This City”? Uh, no. That scene might be intended as Segel’s nod to the Muppets’ recent successes on YouTube, where they covered Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to hilarious results, but it lacks the Muppets’ own signature. It’s more like an Alvin & The Chipmunks cover: same song, different performers, no reinvention. Thus it smells like surrender, an odor that returns late in the film when the Muppets sing “Rainbow Connection” as the main act of their studio-saving telethon. Make no mistake, watching the gang
perform “Rainbow Connection” is lump-in-the-throat touching and realistic, too (not that the Muppets have ever been about realism), but it comes off like a concession – that the Muppets’ best days are behind them and the most magic we can hope for is an occasional performance of their greatest hits.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe what Segel’s film shows us is that Henson and Frank Oz, the puppeteers extraordinaire who through their voices and hands gave so many of these characters their spirit, are irreplaceable. As disappointing as it can be to watch the Muppets lose their identities in adaptations like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, the catch-22 of letting the Muppets be themselves is to be made increasingly aware that, with Henson and Oz gone, most of the performances can be nothing more than imitative. Credit where it’s due, Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is as strong as it's ever been – he’s mastered the subtle finger movements that make Kermit so thoughtful – but Fozzie and Piggy, to name two, are frequently off key, and Rowlf seems to have lost his personality entirely. When the new troupe nails it, as Whitmire and Eric Jacobson do when Kermit and Fozzie have a quiet conversation in hammocks underneath the stars, it warms the soul. But so much of what works in this picture is an allusion to the Henson era (the lens flares that recall The Muppet Movie) or a direct quotation of it (the cover of the “Rainbow Connection”), and as welcome as it is to see banjos hanging on the wall of Kermit’s office or to spot a photograph of the African-mask puppets from Harry Belafonte’s famous performance on The Muppet Show, these little details can make the film feel less like a reinvention for a new generation than like a fantasy camp for the old one.

Segel’s stroke of brilliance with The Muppets, beyond reviving the running gags and meta references that are key to the brand, is to backload the picture with the sort of colorful, chaotic and heartfelt performances that typified The Muppet Show, ensuring that the movie ends on a high note. I’m not sure what the shelf life is for the cover of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” by about a dozen chickens, but I do know it’s precisely the kind of mischief Henson would be up to if helming The Muppet Show today and that it inspired much of the packed crowd at my screening to break into gleeful rhythmic clapping. Trouble is, so many of these thrills send us backward, not forward, like the goose bump-inducing recreation of The Muppet Show’s opening number, confining the Muppets to retro appeal. In the movie’s greatest shot, one that perfectly blends the familiar and the new, Kermit sits alone backstage, his hand on a small handle that he’ll use to throw open the oval hatch through which he’ll announce the start of the show, looking angst-ridden and full of questions. Will their material hold up? Will anyone come to watch? Will the crowd still love them? Segel’s film makes it clear that the answer to those questions is yes, but we’ve yet to see if someone can return the Muppets to their roots while moving beyond nostalgia. Segel’s film offers hope and also confirms fears.

Maybe the time has come for Kermit and the gang to cede the spotlight, not to eliminate the brand but to preserve it. Maybe the Henson-era characters need to be retired, replaced by Walters, Bobos and Pepes. It’s a tough task, immortality. Then again, part of loving the Muppets is believing in the dream.

Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. Follow him on Twitter.