About PressPlay

About PressPlay

Greetings and salutations, readers, and welcome to PressPlay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading, and watching.

Much love,
Matt
June 28, 2011


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

http://blip.tv/play/AYHYugUC

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

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

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

DEEP FOCUS: Mike Figgis’ STORMY MONDAY, as reviewed by Roger Ebert

DEEP FOCUS: Mike Figgis’ STORMY MONDAY, as reviewed by Roger Ebert

By Kim Morgan and Matt Zoller Seitz
PressPlay contributors

This video essay is not just about a certain film, but a certain review of a certain film: Roger Ebert’s appreciation of Stormy Monday, the 1988 debut feature by writer-director-musician Mike Figgis. It’s a modern noir, or neo-noir, set in Newcastle, about a couple of hardboiled innocents (Sean Bean and Melanie Griffith) who get caught up in the power struggle between a nightclub owner (Sting) and the Texas real estate tycoon (Tommy Lee Jones) who wants to run him out of business so that he can buy his property and complete a waterfront development deal.

But as Ebert points out in his review, that type of summary doesn’t really capture what Stormy Monday is about. In sound-and-image-driven, genuinely cinematic films — a category to which Figgis’ modest but stylish debut definitely belongs — what happens is less important than how it happens: the look and feel and flow of the images, the little details of voice and gesture that you notice in scenes where characters are flirting or hatching plans or making threats.

I was 19 when I first read Ebert’s Stormy Monday review. It made a huge impression on me because it was one of the first pieces of mainstream newspaper criticism I’d read in which form followed function. The review quickly dispenses with the standard, literary-oriented focus of newspaper reviewing and becomes a list of elements, images and sensations: the glistening of rain on pavement stones, the glow of a neon sign in a doorway, the distinctive timbres of actors’ voices. If Ebert’s review is less a parsing of Figgis’ film than a tribute to it, then I guess this video essay is a tribute to Ebert’s tribute, and maybe an attempt to circle Ebert’s written appreciation back around to the movie itself, and the elements that inspired Ebert in the first place.

My friend Kim Morgan, who has contributed to Ebert’s new TV series At the Movies and has collaborated with me on a video essay about Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, provides the voiceover, reading Ebert’s review in laid-back, smoky tones. The music is from the Stormy Monday soundtrack, composed and performed by Figgis.

Roger Ebert is the Chicago-Sun Times film critic and the creator of Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies. Kim Morgan is a film, music and culture writer who authors Sunset Gun and her tumblr blog Sunset Gunshots. Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder and publisher of Press Play.

REELING AND SPINNING: How the INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS soundtrack weaponizes cinema

REELING AND SPINNING: How the INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS soundtrack weaponizes cinema

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

By Craig D. Lindsey
PressPlay contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMON SAYS: What is a “bad” movie? Not GREEN LANTERN. And definitely not ZARDOZ

SIMON SAYS: What is a “bad” movie? Not GREEN LANTERN. And definitely not ZARDOZ



[Editor's note: This piece marks the debut of SIMON SAYS, a weekly column about popular culture.]

By Simon Abrams
PressPlay contributor

When Roger Ebert first reviewed Zardoz back in 1974, he half-heartedly dismissed the film as being, “an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by [director John] Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful Deliverance.” My mind reeled as I read this line: how could an “interesting” film be so easily dismissed? Ebert complains that Boorman puts a lot of heavy concepts into Zardoz, but seems reluctant to take them seriously himself. He then lists a series of wacky things that happen in the film; there's a passing mention of an erotic “sight gag” and a “combination shoot-out and mercy-killing spree.” From his review, it’s hard to tell what Ebert meant when he wrote that the film is "interesting" considering that he’s mostly listing elements he finds hard to take.

Of all the superlatives one can use when praising a film, to say a film is “interesting” is the most non-committal. It is also, in some ways, the most peculiar. Surely a film cannot be all bad if it is interesting. And if its interesting parts are truly worthwhile, then why treat it like just another mediocre film?

This is the fate that befell Green Lantern. Metacritic's consensus ranks it with a meager score of 39 out of 100, as opposed to X-Men: First Class’s score of 64 and Thor’s 59. The difference is even more pronounced on Rotten Tomatoes, where X-Men: First Class has a score of 87%, Thor 77%, and Green Lantern trailing with 27%. My taste must be out-of-step with consensus; I found the uneven eccentricity of Green Lantern — which was directed by Martin Campbell, of No Escape, Goldeneye and Casino Royale — vastly more "interesting" than the other two films' machine-tooled smoothness. Give me Campbell's film, with its overstuffed plot lines and gaping plot holes, over a slick but lifeless super-hero movie like Thor or X-Men: First Class.That takes an ephemeral inspiration that I never saw in either of the two aforementioned Marvel Comics films. For a movie to be bad — to be truly worthy of being dismissed outright as a “bad film” — I need to feel as though the filmmakers don’t believe in whatever they’re peddling. Thor and X-Men: First Class don’t strike me as works where the screenwriters or the directors involved cared enough to invest some part of themselves in the script. There's no unique identity to either movie — no idiosyncratic traits that make them worth revisiting later.

At least Green Lantern has the guts to be flamboyant, and has a couple of spectacular set pieces and two very strong lead performances from Ryan Reynolds and Peter Sarsgaard. Though the film often struggles to take off, the juxtaposition of Reynolds' fearless Hal Jordan and Sarsgaard's Hector Hammond is a fruitful comparison, one that the film's screenwriters were wise to make. Furthermore, the film feels like it's more of a piece than the Marvel Comics films: there may be a subplot or three too many in Green Lantern, but all of the inside references to mysterious people or objects that old fans should get a kick out of are actually incorporated into the story as plot points. Thor and X-Men: First Class, in contrast, are watchable and feature commendable performances from their respective casts, but they lack the ambition or central pathos that drive Green Lantern. And as boilerplate origin stories, they just don’t stay with me after a point. As a comic book nerd, I don’t particularly need any of these films to tell me who their characters are—I already know. But when a movie is good enough to show me a character or a story in a new light — as Green Lantern does — no matter how troubled it may be in other aspects, I don't think it can be considered "bad."

But what about a film whose reputation as a “bad movie” precedes it? What about the films that are supposed to be so flat-out bad that any attempt to defend them is automatically considered suspect? What about Zardoz?

How exactly do you solve a problem like Zardoz? John Boorman’s psychedelic sci-fi opus has become infamous, regarded more as a curio than an honest-to-goodness landmark of ‘70s cinema because it’s still dismissed outright as a bad movie. The film’s token status as a wonky kooky crazy film has been established for decades now. There seems little chance that it will ever achieve mass acceptance. At best it's treated as an ambitious failure: apparently, its themes are sprawling and its humor is too off-puttingly kitschy. Take this piece, which just name-drops Zardoz and assumes that readers will automatically understand it as shorthand for "indisputably bad film." How can one even argue with unqualified assumptions like that? Surely Zardoz is too interesting to be truly bad.

Admittedly, many of Zardoz’s fans have inadvertently done more harm than help to the film by treating it like a specialty cult item. There’s a reason why whenever you mention the film to someone who’s seen it, they’ll chirrup a loaded line like, “The gun is good; the penis is evil.” It’s like a secret handshake for fans who probably don’t even remember the meaning of the line anyway. I’m not trying to suggests that Zardoz’s cult is witless, nor am I trying to sweep the out-there-ness of Zardoz under a rug. You can’t make a movie where Sean Connery runs around with a ponytail, a loaded pistol, a bikini bottom, go-go boots and a bondage harness look normal. Still, the tendency of even the film's fans to repeat lines such as “The gun is good…the penis is evil…” suggests that even admirers have bought into the idea that Zardoz is more of a camp artifact than a potently strange film that happens to be worth serious consideration. The movie needs rescuing from detractors and defenders alike. Its revolutionary stance is only tempered by its intensely strange dedication to a continually devolving scenario. Boorman deliberately made it impossible to ever feel completely comfortable with Zardoz by concluding it with the end of human civilization. Connery’s character is an agent of chaos who can only create a brand new world by first destroying all the cultural treasures that the futuristic civilization he infiltrates has hoarded and kept to themselves over time. To expect a film this volatile to be tonally consistent is like expecting a Stan Brakhage film to have a linear storyline: it’s never gonna happen.

I suspect that Ebert was reluctant to outright dismiss Zardoz partly because it’s a Boorman film. He mentions Leo the Last and Deliverance in such a way as to suggest that Boorman was stepping away from the qualities that Ebert believed made him great. But I don’t understand how one can appreciate Boorman’s earlier explorations of man’s self-destructive tendencies and the power that comes from devolving and embracing one’s animal instincts and not care for Zardoz. It is in many ways the most vibrant expression of Boorman’s fascination with the problems and advantages of becoming more feral in order to become more civilized. In that sense, it's an incredibly personal film, just a few steps removed from Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain in its incendiary, get-out-your-pitchforks-and-start-a-revolution message. Its frothing-at-the-mouth madness needs context to be fully appreciated. That’s what criticism should strive for: making films like Zardoz, or a vastly more mainstream but still eccentric superhero film like Green Lantern, look good — and in general make films whose faults and/or merits might otherwise be inaccessible more accessible.

Yes.

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

DEEP FOCUS: War Against the Machines: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

DEEP FOCUS: War Against the Machines: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened on July 3, 1991. It was a sequel to his surprise hit The Terminator, which was released 7 years earlier; in the original, Cameron was clearly working with a limited budget, but "Terminator 2" was designed to be more ambitious, as he had made both Aliens and the personal but financially unsuccessful The Abyss in between. Perhaps in response to that failure, Cameron fully subscribed to the "Bigger is Better" school of filmmaking to guarantee audiences would not reject his future work. He decided to revisit his earlier hit to not only expand on that story, but to realize a vision that was limited years before by both technology and budget. Cameron was given a then-astronomical budget of $102 million. What did that money buy, you may ask? A turning point in photorealistic, computer-generated images — or what we call today, in the post-Terminator land of films, "CGI".

The Terminator films operate on the same premise. In Cameron's future, the world has been taken over by an artificially intelligent computer system called Skynet that has revolted against its human creators, the defense firm Cyberdyne Systems. In Terminator 2, the assassin sent back in time to kill future human resistance leader John Connor is the constantly morphing T-1000. Or perhaps we should refer to it as James Cameron's machine creation.

The shapeshifting T-1000 is a more effective killing machine than the original T-800 model played by Schwarzenegger in both films, but humanity ultimately wins out when the older Terminator model outsmarts him. With both the cyborg assassin and Cyberdyne Systems' technological research destroyed, the sequel presents a definitive ending. The victorious T-800 lowers himself into burning liquid metal, ensuring the world will not be destroyed and humanity will triumph. James Cameron leaves us with amessage of hope. At least, that is what we thought when we watched the film end back in 1991. Unfortunately, the story did not end there. Not unlike Cyberdyne, Cameron had let his creation turn against him. It is easy to point out both the unnecessary sequels and television show which undid the ending to Terminator 2 to shamelessly cash in on the premise again and again. But those were not necessarily Cameron's doing. They may instead be long-term effects of building movies out of CGI blocks. This is the film's true legacy, and Cameron himself — the director of such CGI-laden films as True Lies, Titanic and Avatar — is not only a practitioner of this type of filmmaking, but a vocal advocate as well. We must ask: Is James Cameron Cyberdyne, building the technology that will be used against humanity?

In the 20 years since Terminator 2, our movie theaters have become inundated with one soulless CGI spectacle after one another. Filmmakers have looked to what was groundbreaking in Cameron's 1991 film and responded with a weightless cinema in which larger percentages of any shot are given over to computers and, ultimately, lack dramatic consequence; it becomes more difficult to believe in something once you realize it was created by hardware and software.

When we look more closely at Terminator 2, one can see the seeds of this planted in the contradictory ways it presents its ideas. Surprisingly, the CGI in Cameron's Terminator sequel is restrained in its use, especially compared to what subsequent movies, including Cameron's, have done since. At the time, Cameron was still using practical in-camera effects, a product of his earlier work in low-budget filmmaking. His 1980s movies often employed models, miniatures and puppets, even as he eventually moved towards digital effects in 1989's The Abyss. Cameron's vision at the time was not as disconnected from the human experience as it is now. We could differentiate between the machines and true flesh and blood. This is why Terminator 2 cannot be dismissed so easily. Yes, Cameron is playing with a bigger toy box, but he does not do so at the expense of his ideas or the genuine affection he has for his characters. The movie never forgets that it is about a mother-son relationship, though one that has the future of the world at stake. As with many Cameron films, there is a great deal of skepticism about how we employ technology in the modern age, particularly when it leads to some sort of blowback. The villains in the Terminator movies are not only the machines, but those who created them — namely the researchers at Cyberdyne Systems, the fictional corporation in T2 that allowed the machines the opportunity to wipe out humanity. The film preaches a message that machines are not to be trusted.

But it does so by relying heavily on computer technology. And at one point, the film's heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) too easily accepts the possibility that the T-800 sent to protect her son John (Edward Furlong) would be his best possible father figure. It often feels as if Cameron wants us to love the machine, especially when it has him spouting catchphrases ("Hasta la vista, baby") to make metal and steel more cuddly.

While we can all acknowledge that we have seen CGI employed to realize some filmmakers' artistic visions, those films have been rare amid the visual noise that we have had to endure. Cameron himself has not been immune to film's greatest indulgence of the last two decades; his movies have become more bloated, not merely in budget, but in spectacle. The runaway box office successes of both Titanic and Avatar may suggest that his finger is on the pulse of America, but it is also representative of the collective short-sightedness of both the filmmaker and his audience. The fighting cyborgs of Cameron's Terminator films have evolved — or more appropriately, devolved — into the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robot creations that today's filmmakers insist we love. While we cannot quite blame Cameron for the lesser filmmakers who imitate his films poorly, we can certainly point an accusing finger in his direction for the current 3D trend, which Cameron has repeatedly declared the future of cinema.

So now, it is a battle between the resistance and the machines, not unlike the future world presented in Terminator 2: Judgment Day — a world in whiich 3D has been given a purpose, thanks mainly to CGI-reliant movies. The questions to ask are: Did James Cameron and his audience forget the message of Terminator 2? While we remember T2 as an effective science fiction action film that had some heart, do we also remember how Cyberdyne did its research with the best of intentions, not realizing what its creations would one day become? This is not to advocate sending a Terminator to deal with the James Cameron of 1991, but to wonder if the director would have done things differently if he could have known where his innovations would lead — or if his message to those in the resistance who seek more of a human touch in films was always: "Hasta la vista, baby."

Steven Santos is a freelance TV editor/filmmaker based in New York. His work can be found at StevenEdits.com. He writes about films at his blog The Fine Cut. You can also follow him on Twitter.

One Flew Over the Transformer’s Nest: or, What Michael Bay could learn from Randle P. McMurphy

One Flew Over the Transformer’s Nest: or, What Michael Bay could learn from Randle P. McMurphy

By Steven Boone
PressPlay contributor

Have you ever been subject to someone in a position of authority who denied you a basic adult right, as if you were a child?

Of course you have. It’s a universal frustration we’ve all experienced at one point or another. In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, a guy named Charlie Cheswick wants his cigarettes. He’s a voluntary patient at a mental institution in 1963, and the ward supervisor, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), serenely refuses to let him have his smokes. She’s been punishing him in this manner for a while now, and he’s nearly fed up. Adding fuel to the fire, fellow patient McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) asks other ward mates to let Cheswick bum a smoke.

Cheswick loses it. “I don’t want his cigarettes, or his, or his, or his….” He turns his fury back to the nurse. “I want my cigarettes, Nurse Ratched! What gives you the damn right to keep our cigarettes piled up on your desk and to squeeze out a pack only when you feel like it, huh?” He’s in a rage of understandable frustration (and nicotine withdrawal), but Nurse Ratched exploits the situation by remaining inhumanly calm, making him look like the unreasonable crazy man that violence-prone attendants standing nearby are all too happy to believe he is.

“That’s just wrong,” said a young man standing next to me, staring up at the movie and shaking his head. “Give that dude his cigarettes.” We were gathered at an outdoor screening in midtown Manhattan, part of Bryant Park’s summer movie series. On the giant screen, Charley Cheswick, played by the great character actor Sydney Lassick, continued to throw a tantrum (“I ain’t no little kid! I want something done! I want something doooonne!”) until McMurphy rushed over to the nurses’ station, put his fist through its thin plate glass window, and grabbed a carton of Lucky Strikes. The crowd, at least a thousand strong, erupted in applause. McMurphy shoved the carton into Cheswick‘s arms, but it was too late. Attendants dragged him away. Nurse Ratched won this round. Boooo.

There would be a lot more applause, catcalls and dismayed head-shaking from this Bryant Park movie crowd, which was Standing Room Only that night. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an allegorical drama adapted from Ken Kesey’s novel, played like a non-stop thrill ride. Originally released in 1975, it’s the most thrilling summer movie of 2011.

The park was packed, in part, because the movie was free. HBO, apparently out of the kindness of its corporate heart, shows free classic films in Bryant Park every summer since the early 90s. But what struck me was how the place stayed packed, standing room only, for the film’s duration. I was standing alongside the great lawn in the middle of the park, where I could see the multitude staring up, barely blinking—and, at times, crying, grinning madly in unconscious pantomime of Jack’s ridiculously charismatic smile; or resting a head on the shoulder of a loved one. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest doesn’t let you look away. How does it do this?

Surely, Michael Bay knows. He didn’t direct Cuckoo’s Nest. Milos Forman did that when Bay was 10 years old, playing with toy cars and army men. Bay’s new film Transformers: Dark of the Moon apes a basic understanding of why people flock to the big commercial movies. We don’t seek escape so much as communion. In theaters, strangers come together as at church, to experience something that spells out what fears, strengths, joys and frustrations we have in common. You can’t get an “amen” in your living room. The Transformers movies genuflect toward this phenomenon by building their tale around an Everyman hero who overcomes everyday humiliation and adversity in the manner of Buster Keaton or Peter Parker. The plots may be about an endless battle on earth between good shape-shifting robots (The Autobots) and evil ones (The Decepticons), but the heart of the franchise is likable Sam (Shia Leboeuf). Previously, Sam struggled to get out from under his loving but suffocating parents and maintain a relationship with an affectionate love doll (Megan Fox). This time he faces the same struggles while going through a mortifying recession-era job search and tending an even more affectionate love doll (Rosie Alice Huntington-Whiteley). What young soul, in Cairo or Austin, can’t relate?

Or so Bay seems to think. It’s clear that the director assumes we’ve developed some kind of relationship with Sam over the years. All Bay heroes are the kind of simple, red-blooded American boys that McMurphy encouraged virginal Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) to be in Cuckoo’s Nest, the kind who “oughta be out in a convertible bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver.” Except that Sam’s coming of age across three deafening Transformers movies has been like watching American Graffiti staged during the Battle of Fallujah. Despite Bay’s clear intention to bring us all together, there is no communion to be found here. All of the Transformers films are oppressive wonders, but I was impressed by how Bay left me so little with which to dull my pain this time around.

Granted, the entire series is nonsensically plotted and crammed with the kind of humor shared between Marines sitting in adjoining latrine stalls, so what was I expecting? Bay has, from the start of his career, demonstrated that his attention span lasts about .000005 seconds. The man has no concept of suspense or accumulation of detail. But the previous entries at least had a few majestic one-off images and fragments of montage that suggested that Bay’s connection to Steven Spielberg transcended the simple executive producer/director relationship. The shots of rollerblading Decepticons or somersaulting tanks in Bay’s work grooved like Spielberg in pure showman mode. But Dark of the Moon says: Enough of that shit. It is one clanking, crowded, homely image after another, in what is supposed to be a simulation of three dimensions but looks more like one of those faux-holographic Jesus cards you find in religious bookstores. Vehicles perform a lot of gymnastics that defy physics here, but this Real-D thingamajig makes them seem more toy-like than even CGI can guarantee. One potentially astonishing shot of soldiers free-falling in winged flying suits looks like a bunch of dolls dangling on fishing wire. Transformers: Dark of the Moon cost $150,000,000.

But the real horror in Dark of the Moon is the way it expresses a newfound ambition in Bay, one that surpasses even Armageddon and Pearl Harbor in devouring history, space and time. Here Bay recruits for his purposes CGI effigies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Obama; flesh-and-blood master thespians Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and John Turturro; the real Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Fox News crusader Bill O’Reilly, NASA and, as usual, a large swath of the military industrial complex. Megan Fox, the franchise’s signature eye candy, is not in this one because, according to gossip, Spielberg fired her for comparing Bay to Hitler in a press interview. Dark of the Moon tells me the comparison is apt, but only in the sense that Bay has a truly amazing ability to bend armies to his infantile will. Sitting in the dark, staring up at Dark of the Moon through flimsy Real-D glasses, I felt as if we were all being jumped by a vicious street gang or recruited for terrorism. The theater became a cattle car to certain doom. Michael Bay will be President of the United States one day, you mark my words. Or at least governor of California.

If we last that long, that is. Dark of the Moon seems to herald a definite end of the American empire, delivering, amidst a third-act frenzy of rockets and robot breakdance-fighting, one-liners that cut deep. “We are all working for the Decepticons now,” says Patrick Dempsey, as a slimy tycoon who sells us all out to the rogue Transformers, Lex Luthor-style. Like Avatar and the Star Wars prequels, this flick somehow critiques megalomania and totalitarianism while making vigorous, sweaty love to them. We are all working for the Decepticons now, and with Nurse Ratcheds like Bay denying us our cigarette while pretending to want only what’s best for us, 1975 seems like a lost planet.

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. You can follow him on Twitter.

SIMON SAYS: Shout Factory Delivers George Peppard in Scifi Double Bill and Not Much Else

SIMON SAYS: Shout Factory Delivers George Peppard in Scifi Double Bill and Not Much Else

By Simon Abrams

Though I love many films that are often described as “cult films,” I can’t help but feel bad for my fellow cult cinema connoisseurs. It’s like being the cinephilic equivalent of a drug addict. The more devout a cultist you are, the more dedicated you are to hunting for new highs in the most irregular places. Obscurity is often conflated and even confused with quality and no matter whose opinion you turn to for advice, you’re bound to wade through a lot of crappy movies before you stumble upon something great.

Shout Factory!, a budding DVD line that’s release shiny new “Collector’s Editions” of Roger Corman-produced gems, caters to cultists. That’s a double-edged concept if ever there was one. Shout Factory! goes the extra mile to provide commemorative features for most of their new DVD and Blu Ray releases. But the copious special features with which they supplement their films are usually pretty skimpy when it comes to providing some much-needed universal context as to what uninitiated viewers are looking at.

For example, take Shout Factory!’s new release of Battle Beyond the Stars, which just hit stores this past Tuesday. Shout Factory! not only commissioned a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film, but they also commissioned several worthwhile bonus features, including audio commentaries by screenwriter John Sayles and producer Roger Corman. The trouble with this DVD release isn’t with the supplementary features that were included with the film but rather the ones that weren’t. Excluding Sayles, Corman and James Cameron completists (Cameron served as the film’s art director; no wonder everything looks so chintzy) and anyone else that already enjoys Battle Beyond the Stars, Shout Factory!’s release doesn’t make an especially convincing case for the film.

This is probably because the film doesn’t really matter after a point. Battle Beyond the Stars is an intermittently clever but mostly lousy rip-off of Star Wars by way of The Seven Samurai. Within Corman’s oeuvre, the film is only really important as one of his most expensive productions. Battle Beyond the Stars is not going to blow down anyone’s doors. But maybe it has just enough to offer cult film buffs that are either looking for an ephemeral and insanely specific something to latch onto or just an intermittently funny Star Wars rip-off. After all, don’t you want to see George Peppard dispense scotch and soda from his belt buckle?

If the answer to that rhetorical question is “Uh, no,” I wouldn’t waste my time with Battle Beyond the Stars. Though Sayles gives almost all of his characters a decent one-liner or two, the film’s dumbed-down combination of The Seven Samurai and Star Wars’* storylines is pretty unremarkable. Today, an uninitiated viewer should watch Battle Beyond the Stars for Sayles’s quips and the film’s dated but satisfying production values, not for its acting, plot or characters.

The same is true about Damnation Alley, another cult item with a fairly modest reputation that Shout Factory! released for the first time on DVD this past week. Based on a novel by the great “New Wave” scifi writer Roger Zelazny, the film has a novel, even frightening, premise. A nuclear strike from parts unknown decimates most life on Earth. A trio of American Air Force men, led by (wait for it) George Peppard, travels cross-country all the way from California to Albany in order to find the source of a radio signal. Along the way, they fight giant cockroaches and almost drown in a flood in a giant armored tank (It’s got missile launchers, kids! And a decal of Captain America’s shield on the side! Buy yours today!). The rest isn’t particularly memorable.

With the exception of Zelazny’s potent post-apocalyptic scenario and some cheesy but memorable scenes, including an early confrontation where a young Jan-Michael Vincent rides around dodges enormous irradiated scorpions on his dirt bike, Damnation Alley is also unfortunately a dud. Even if you really like any of its cast members, including a very young Jackie Earle Haley, you’d have to be already seriously obsessed with the film, its cast or crew to pick the film up. There’s no buried treasure here, though Battle Beyond the Stars has its moments. And the search for the next unsung cult hit continues…

*I tend to doubt Corman or Sayles were even thinking about The Hidden Fortress, the Akira Kurosawa movie George Lucas based Star Wars: A New Hope on, when they made Battle Beyond the Stars.

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

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 7: Best Buy

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 7: Best Buy

What you can’t see is what happens after this troubled young man leaves. What happens is Gaga struggling with the heavy import of what the man said, struggling to regain her strength after giving so much to him. It takes a good 15 minutes before she’s re-Gaga-fied.

She often wonders in interviews why we’re content to accept pop stars who give us so little. Clearly, she isn’t part of that problem.