Matt Zoller Seitz – Page 3 – Press Play Video Blog

In David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS, the language can’t keep up.

COSMOPOLIS: A Masterwork of Compression

David Cronenberg’s movie version of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a black comedy about a financier whose life is falling apart, is a snapshot of Western civilization in existential panic. It’s the early 21^st century. Labels and categories are blurring or dissolving. Economies and governments are disintegrating too, melting like Cronenbergian flesh. We humans don’t know who we are anymore as individuals, as a nation, as a race, as a species. Everything—philosophy, politics, religion, economics—has become data. So it's no wonder DeLillo’s characters compulsively narrate their lives, stating, in hilariously hyper-specific words, what they think, feel, and believe, defining and re-defining themselves as they speak: “What happens to all these stretch limos that prowl the throbbing city all day long?” “One learns about the countries where war is occurring by riding the taxis here.” “You have your mother’s breasts.” “Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.” “A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.” The words sound desperate even when delivered in a DeLillo/Cronenberg fervent/mesmerized monotone. “This is good,” says one member of a conversation. “We sound like people talk. This is how they talk.” But language is not enough. “Life is evolving so fast,” a character muses, “that language can’t keep up.”

Rob Pattinson stars as Eric Packer, the aforementioned billionaire—a 28-year asset manager inching through Manhattan in his stretch limo, headed for a haircut appointment. When the story begins, he’s cool and collected, if a bit frayed around the edges. He thinks he’s insulated from harm by his wealth, his tank-like limousine, his deadpan driver (Abdul Ayoola), and his unflappable chief of security (Kevin Durand). But he doesn’t control anything. His limo can’t get anywhere because a presidential visit and a beloved rapper’s public funeral have gridlocked the city. Eric’s brittle young wife Elise Schifrin (Sarah Gadon) won’t have sex with him because, she says, she wants to conserve her energy for her career; she’s also hip to his alpha-male infidelities, and she keeps insisting he smells sex on him. (“It’s hunger you smell,” he says, lamely.) He can’t really control his fortune, either. He thinks he’s made smart investments, but soon enough his net worth trends downward.

All these frustrations and misfortunes feel less like moralistic punishment than something more chillingly mysterious: a disaster/miracle creeping over everything, like the Airborne Toxic Event in DeLillo’s 1986 novel White Noise. “I think you acquire information and turn it into something awful,” Elise tells him at one point, unwittingly describing what society itself has been doing for decades. As Arthur Jensen bellowed in Network, “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.” Or to quote Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked, “Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday.”

This is the smallest movie Cronenberg has directed in a long time, and yet its containment seems more like a proof of his ability than a constraint. Even though Cronenberg wrote the script for the screen, I will always think of Cosmopolis as a filmed play, one of the best I’ve seen. It compresses DeLillo’s novel (which itself feels play-like in spots) without trying to “open it out,” as hack movie producers are always begging playwrights to do. Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was…, and Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42^nd Street and My Dinner With Andre pursued a strategy similar to Cronenberg's. Roughly 60% of the movie occurs inside Eric’s limo, its ribbed dark interior evoking the telepod in Cronenberg’s The Fly; the other 40% takes place on streets and sidewalks and in garages and claustrophobic nightclubs packed with writhing bodies. Its climax is a ten-minute conversation between Eric and a shadowy tormentor (Paul Giamatti) in a depopulated, run-down warehouse. By that point, we’re so starved for open air that its narrow hallways and cluttered offices feel as big as palace throne rooms.

Even though its tone is resigned and mordantly funny and its pace is slow, Cosmopolis is a thrillingly spare, controlled work. But you have to be willing to adapt to its sleepwalking mood and to its performances, which occur within such a narrow emotional bandwidth that at one point I pictured an orchestra conductor handing a violinist a Stradivarius with one string and saying, “You can make beautiful music with this, trust me.” Every actor rises to the challenge. The movie features one bizarre knockout supporting turn after another: Juliette Binoche as a lover who interrogates Eric after fucking him; Gadon’s Elise, whose beyond-her-years cynicism is a bulwark against emotional collapse; Durand’s security guy Torval, who’s got more didja-know tidbits than Johnny the Shoeshine Guy on Police Squad! but ultimately comes to seem like just another lost soul blustering through chaos. Giamatti’s all-out anguish in the finale almost steals the picture from Pattinson.

But the star never loses his grip. I never would have guessed from the Twilight movies that he was capable of a performance this intelligent, despairing, and honest; at his best he reminded me of James Spader’s character in sex, lies and videotape, a smug bastard who intellectualizes his selfishness into faux-philosophy. If Pattinson gets nominated for awards for Cosmopolis, the clip should be the scene where Eric carries on a high-flown conversation while enduring the longest prostate exam in history, an invasion of an asshole’s asshole. But there’s a real person beneath Eric’s shellacked surface, and when it finally cracks—in a surprisingly tender exchange with a rapper (Gouchy Boy) grieving for his dead hero and his own mortality—the character’s pain feels real, and true.

Cronenberg doesn’t just ask his actors to be ascetics. He keeps the camera far back whenever possible, cuts to closeups as punctuation, and sometimes lets amazingly intense moments run from one angle for a minute or longer, the better to allow us to scrutinize speakers and listeners. This stripped-down approach makes Cosmopolis feel a bit like live TV drama from the ‘50s, devoted mainly to performance and dialogue but constantly thinking in pictures. An opening scene featuring Love Boat-level rear-screen projection would sink lesser films, but here it seems to fit because the action is (for all its perversity, violence and sudden bursts of emotion) more figurative than literal.

More so than any other Cronenberg film—including the manifesto-like Play of Ideas eXistenZ—this one feels like a summing up of everything he’s been telling and showing us since the 1970s. Flesh, identity, consciousness are all prone to disintegrate or morph. By adapting a book by DeLillo, a fellow chronicler of slow-motion apocalypse, the filmmaker expands his vision to encompass a species grappling with cataclysmic change.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the co-founder of Press Play.

Grains of Sand: The Meditative Beauty of SAMSARA

Ronald Fricke's Samsara is a trance movie. Its title is a Buddhist term that roughly translates as, "The cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound." And in a roundabout way, the movie does tell that story. Fricke's 1992 feature Baraka tells that story, too—the biggest, simplest story; the only story, really. But for my money, Samsara is better than Baraka—and better than Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi, which Fricke shot—because its images are more purely contemplative and much more free. They aren't being bent and juxtaposed to advance certain arguments, however loosely.

There are points where the film steers you in a certain direction—for instance, rhyming shots of factory-farm butchery and shots of newly-minted rifle bullets pouring into a bin at an ammo factory (industrialized violence), or the placement of uncannily realistic robots, rubber sex dolls and meat-market strippers in the same montage (dehumanization). But for the most part it's a very loose, confident movie, one that seems to have been made by a much wiser, more relaxed director than the one who created Baraka. Fricke used a birth-to-death structure in Baraka, too, but it was more mathematically precise there. The earlier film was linear, for the most part. It confined its tangents to subchapters that might as well have been captioned: "The same industrial power that brought us modern cities also brought us genocide." "Different cultures observe different rituals, but deep down all rituals are the same." "The rich don't give a damn about the poor." In Samsara, Fricke and his editors work with similar images (though more vivid and crisp because they're shot on 70mm film). But this movie deploys them differently—in a looser, more confident, more open-ended way. You have to get into the spirit of the movie, engage with it, relax, and float downstream.

I wish there were more movies like it. I wish Tree of Life were a bit more like it, actually; I adored Tree of Life, but it wasn't until I saw Samsara that I realized why I was never quite able to embrace it as a Malick masterpiece. The problem wasn't that Tree of Life went too far into abstraction for my taste, but that it didn't go quite far enough. By anchoring ephemerally lovely images to a simple story and innocent/questing/banal voice-overs, Malick got as far away from mainstream narrative cinema cliches as he could without cutting the cord. Fricke cuts the cord. The result covers some of the same thematic ground as Tree of Life, and offers some similar images, but it's a much more direct, simple, free-spirited movie. It's experimental cinema pitched at mainstream audiences. As such, it has few equals.

The director/cinematographer and his editors juxtapose images of wealth and poverty, nature and civilization, war zones and dead bodies, guns and ammunition, old people and young people, people of different cultures and faiths, and shots of babies, village elder-types, packed commuter trains and oppressive offices and charnel-house factory farms, scudding clouds, plumes of volcanic steam, rivers of lava, image after image in section after section. But rather than string the images along a linear-philosophical clothesline stretched from cradle to grave, Samsara shuffles and reshuffles images like cards in a deck. The movie visits and then returns to images of individuals, crowds of people, animals and vehicles whirling in circles, and dancers posed so that the lead dancer in the foreground seems to have multiple arms, like a Hindu goddess. Every person, every country, every climate, every body of water, every type of terrain is connected: we sense this connectedness from the rhythms of the film, not because individual cuts are telling you, "See? This thing here is kinda like this thing over here."

There's no missing the disgust Fricke brings to shots of poultry being skinned and gutted, or the shots of shantytown residents digging through dumps while gleaming condominiums and office buildings loom behind them. And yet Samsara is not a didactic movie. It has a showman's sensibility. The probing closeups and geometrically lovely wide shots are presented as little movies in themselves, self-contained spectacles with their own internal logic and personality. Each shot is an object of contemplation, a springboard for emotion and reflection, but at the same time, the sheer handsomeness of the production says, "If you want to just sit back and enjoy this as a travelogue or a borderline-psychedelic sound-and-light show, that's fine, too." Samsara is the work of a guru, not an acolyte. Fricke is a master leading the audience through meditation, giving us suggestions for dreaming. Our mind takes us where it takes us.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the co-founder of Press Play.

REMEMBERING ANDREW SARRIS, 1928-2012

Aaron Aradillas

There is no single review or article by Andrew Sarris that I can turn to at this moment to illustrate his impact in shaping my critical mind. For me, Mr. Sarris was part of a wave of movie critics who came before me—before all of us—who forced me, through his writing and constantly evolving thinking, to challenge myself as to why I responded to movies the way I do. Pauline Kael’s specialty was conveying her immediate, heightened response to a movie. Mr. Sarris would also do that, but then would investigate how exactly a director or an actor went about in provoking a response, good or bad, from the viewer.

Of course, Mr. Sarris’ The American Cinema is one of the cornerstones of any self-respecting critic’s approach to writing and criticism. It doesn’t even matter if you agree with the auteur theory as put forth by Mr. Sarris. What matters is the way it provides an organizing theory that attempts to put certain filmmakers’ bodies of work in a larger context. Mr. Sarris dared to offer the kind of serious consideration of movies that had been afforded to musicians, painters, playwrights, and poets. Even those who rejected the auteur theory as silly or dry or too academic (most famously Ms. Kael) would go on to practice their own form of it. (See Ms. Kael’s writing on DePalma.)

It is impossible to write about Mr. Sarris without mentioning his partner Molly Haskell, a powerful critical voice in her own right. Ms. Haskell, with soothing Southern voice and disarming yet firm demeanor, was a perfect counterpoint to Mr. Sarris’ veteran college prof easiness. Her From Reverence to Rape remains a provocative and essential examination of the portrayals of women in the movies, while Love and Other Infectious Diseases is both a harrowing and moving chronicle of Mr. Sarris’ extended stay in the hospital in 1984.

I met them once at the Museum of the Moving Image’s workshop for film critics. They were like the John & Yoko of movie critics, rarely separated and in perfect harmony. (If you want to see just how good they were together, then check out their back-and-forth discussion on the Criterion DVD of Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait.) They were generous with their time and genuinely curious about online criticism, as most of us there wrote mostly for online outlets. When it was decided that the conversation would continue over dinner, Mr. Sarris chose to be driven to the restaurant while Mrs. Haskell opted to walk. Being visually impaired, I asked if I could walk with her. She said yes and adapted to guiding me without a problem. I would speak to both of them separately on later occasions by phone. I remember one conversation with Mr. Sarris where we got into a discussion about the movies of Steven Soderbergh. He was mixed on his most recent work. After I finished a five minute dissertation on his body of work, Mr. Sarris said something to the effect of, “You seem to have thought about this. Maybe I’ll think about it.” And that’s what I take away from Mr. Sarris: the desire, the need to constantly think about why I love the things I love.

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

Miriam Bale

The first thing I remember about meeting Andrew Sarris is the twinkle in his eye when he discussed cinematic crushes, ever-evolving ones like Jennifer Jones, and the old standbys like Margaret Sullavan, for whom he reserved not just a twinkle but a beatific, reverent grin. It was then that I realized that, as much as we are taught to think of Kael and Sarris in separate camps, both critics introduced the most definable aspect of American criticism, a criticism based on personal, unreasonable love. The next time I saw that twinkle and grin, Andrew was talking about Jennifer Jones at a Film Society Screening, but he was looking at his wife Molly, the woman who both embodied and shared his love of the great sirens of cinema. It was a playful spirit of flirtation and passion that kept his love for cinema always fresh; he was constantly watching new things, constantly revising old opinions. And it was this same flirtation and passion that fueled one of the greatest collaborations in cinema, that between he and his wife and co-presenter Molly Haskell. Andrew had enough a deep enough lust for cinema to spark all the work-based-on-love that we critics are continuing now.

Miriam Bale is a film programmer and critic based in New York.

Steven Boone

Andrew Sarris made a name for himself as a film critic. That's an amazing feat in a world where critics are rated somewhere between accident lawyers and executioners in popular appeal. To do that, you must either hold a set of opinions so bold, idiosyncratic and gorgeously worded that they stand out like an outlandish hat in rush hour (like his rival Pauline Kael) or introduce an original concept that was actually always there, waiting to be named. Mr. Sarris did the latter. Importing from the French, he named the film director as the true author of a film, at a time in America when they were thought of as Hollywood's assembly line foremen. Would an entire generation of maverick American directors have stepped out so boldly in the 1970's if they were still regarded as anonymous, interchangeable employees of moguls?

Another great thing he did was fearlessly brush against the grain when the grain simply chafed. He is famous for his stirring, spiritually astute readings of masterpieces like Au Hasard Balthazar and Lola Montes, but my favorite review of his is a cranky pan of the beloved Southern Gothic classic To Kill A Mockingbird. Practically anticipating Phil Ochs' bitterly ironic song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" and James Baldwin's Hollywood essays in The Devil Finds Work, he described the film's happy ending thusly: "This is a heartwarming resolution of the novel and the film. Yet somehow the moral arithmetic fails to come out even. One innocent Negro and one murderous red-neck hardly cancel each other out. How neat and painless it is for the good people of Maycomb to find a bothersome victim in one grave and a convenient scapegoat in the other. When all is said and done, Southerners are People Like Us, some good and some bad. So what? No one who has read the last letters of the German troops trapped in Stalingrad can easily believe in a nation of monsters, but the millions of corpses are an objective fact. At some point, a social system is too evil and too unjust for personal ethics to carry any weight. It is too early to tell, but it is too late for the Negro to act as moral litmus paper for the white conscience. The Negro is not a mockingbird."

Sarris wrote with the understanding that movies are not mockingbirds, giving us song to help pass the time and feel a little better about things. By most reliable accounts, he laughed easily and often but never forgot that movies are a matter of life and death.

Steven Boone is a critic and filmmaker, the publisher of Big Media Vandalism, and a regular contributor to Capital New York.

Godfrey Cheshire

In 1968, as a 17-year-old high school senior, I published my first film reviews in the school paper. As I recall, the first hailed Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler while the second registered my fervent but not terribly articulate enthusiasm for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The same year, I discovered Andrew Sarris’ reviews in the Village Voice, and Sarris published his magnum opus, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. Looking back, I can’t say which came first: my reading of Sarris or the commencement of my own film reviewing. What I can say is that no film critic meant more to me, then or later, and that no other writer’s example was a greater influence on my eventual decision to try writing film criticism professionally.

During college, attending the campus film societies’ screenings and debating Sarris’ and other critics’ reviews were intertwined obsessions that, though extra-curricular, actually seemed to add up to the foundations of a real education in cinema for myself and a small corps of cinephile friends. When asked later what made Sarris so crucial to this era, I usually point to two things. First, while he was known for importing the auteur theory from France (and “theory” was always a misnomer; the French were right to call it a “policy”), the key idea that undergirded it was that film was an art, one uniquely capable of reaching from the grossest of lowbrow slapstick to the chilly peaks of high modernism. It’s hard to believe now perhaps, but until the auteurist floodgates opened in the ‘60s, most reviewers (people rarely spoke of “film critics”) regarded movies, good or bad, as entertainment ground out by big studios for an unsophisticated mass audience. In introducing the director as artist-auteur, Sarris helped us see the work of studio hands like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford as beacons of personal vision no less than the more determinedly individualistic and idiosyncratic work of new directors like Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Truffaut. And his eloquent, probing reviews elucidated the films of both sets of artists in terms not just of cinema history but of other trends in art, politics and society.

The second reason for Sarris’ importance was simple: he gave us a map. In ranking directors in a hierarchy from “The Pantheon” (Chaplin, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Renoir, et al.) down to the lowliest of genre hacks, The American Cinema provided an evaluative overview of the whole history of Hollywood cinema that had no parallel in film criticism. For a college-age film nut in the early ‘70s, it was at once wildly entertaining, wittily challenging and endlessly instructive. Of course one could (and did) disagree with some of Sarris’ predilections and aversions: that was part of the fun. But on the whole, he was a remarkably generous and authoritative guide; there was simply no better way to get a sense of the whole amazing expanse of American cinema, to begin making one’s own evaluations, and to learn which classic films needed to be seen for an assiduous cinephile’s education to be considered adequate if not complete.

To flash forward a couple of decades, I ended up in New York in the early ‘90s and had the great pleasure of getting to know Andrew and his wife Molly Haskell, a Southerner like myself. Encountering the man, happily, involved very little in the way of surprises. He was in person just as he was on the page: charming, engaged, funny, warm, curious, articulate, gracious, sharp-witted and kind. If cinephile means “lover of film,” Sarris will always represent to me the consummate cinephile, because his love of cinema was so passionate, prescient and precise that it kindled and shaped that same love in myself and many others. I feel a tremendous gratitude for all he taught me. Thank you, Andrew.

Formerly the film critic of New York Press, Godfrey Cheshire is a New York-based filmmaker who directed the documentary Moving Midway.

James Grissom

Andrew Sarris and I shared a birthday—Halloween—and a deep admiration for Molly Haskell, his wife and one of my first Southern-born friends when I moved to Manhattan. My parents did not feel I would be safe and well in New York City until I was surrounded by people with Southern sensibilities, and Virginia-born Molly met their qualifications. I introduced myself to Molly in Grace’s Marketplace—over chocolate, as I remember—and my memories of her and Andrew are always around food and talk and laughter.

Andrew was proud to defend the films and the actors he loved, and his passion was infectious: Very few people cared about, studied, and shared as fulsomely as he did. As much as he loved films, he loved words, and he could toss them about with great alacrity until they fell into perfect placement. Andrew was happy to do this with another writer’s words as well, and they always came into sharper focus, grew leaner and tighter and stronger. I think Andrew thought it a particularly severe sin to not clearly convey what a film or a book or a person or a sensation had meant to you: He was very much aware of being a witness to things, and he felt an obligation to share whatever he had learned or felt.

I took for granted the idea that I would always have a dinner with Andrew and Molly; that they would listen to my ideas and share their own with me; that we would sit in their apartment, watching the sun set or the moon rise over the Guggenheim, and sort things out. As painful as it is for me to consider that Andrew is gone, it is far worse for me to realize that I did not appreciate, until now, how lucky I have been to have known him, to learn from him, and to be able to love—with his approval—Molly Haskell.

James Grissom is the author of Follies of God, a book about his five-day visit with Tennessee Williams, which is scheduled to be published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Margaret Hames

An A+ Gent

It was my privilege to be Andrew Sarris’ teaching assistant at Columbia University’s film school in 1998. Sarris taught a large, very popular World Cinema class that admitted both undergrads and grad students. His class was a bit on the loosey-goosey side, as Andrew would sit at the front of the class and talk about his favorite films of that particular week, discussing up-and-coming directors he admired, and young actors he thought showed promise. I remember he had very high hopes for “Rennie” Zellweger, and once when an undergrad asked a particularly pretentious “look how smart I am” question, Sarris answered, “I’d rather talk about Rennie Zellweger.”

I was also Sarris’ student in a combined undergrad/grad class on writing film criticism, hands-down one of the best, most inspiring classes I took at Columbia. Once, Sarris called me out for being a bit dismissive in that “smart-ass critic” way regarding John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Sarris reminded me that John Frankenheimer had certainly more than earned a wee bit of respect in this world. And that goes a long way to understanding Sarris. He had the long view. He had seen so much—good and bad—you’d think he’d have seen enough; but “enough” never came. He was quick to call out the over-praised empty suits, but just as quick to stand up for those directors who had earned their stripes, whose work deserved careful consideration and respect because they were (among other things) auteurs. Oh yes—that word that Sarris introduced into the English language is pretty much taken for granted now. Would anyone question whether a director was (or should be) the true author of a film? He knew it was his greatest legacy and told me so.

Sarris was never dismissive. Visiting over the years, I saw him take up a cane to help him walk, then two canes. The last time I saw him, Columbia was awarding the first annual Andrew Sarris Prize. He kissed my hand, which he often did to female students, one of the only people in the world who could get away with such a gesture. Columbia grades their film students on a pass/fail model. But since I took Sarris in a seminar that included undergrads, he was forced to give me a letter grade. He gave me an A+. So on my Columbia transcript, there’s a whole bunch of passes and one gleaming A+, which is precisely the grade I give to him.

Margaret Hames is the publisher of Media Darlings.

Kevin B. Lee

To my knowledge, the above video essay, produced last month for Press Play and Sight & Sound features the last recording of Andrew Sarris' voice. We recorded it one afternoon in Sarris and Molly Haskell's chic apartment filled with books, paintings and grand windows overlooking the Upper East Side; walking into it was like walking into a film critic's loftiest lifestyle aspirations. "We bought it 30 years ago, otherwise we could never afford it," Molly shrugged.

With Andrew's potential for participation limited by poor health, he occupied himself in the dining room with a sandwich while we recorded Molly in the living room. Nonetheless, Molly procured Andrew's original Village Voice review of the film and read from it. She really wanted his voice to be included, and the video is all the better for it. The selected passage, with its discussion of cinema as the beguiling dynamic between surfaces and essences, also gets at something about the relationship between film criticism and its subject, the mad pursuit of conveying the essence of one medium through another. The video is as much a tribute to the essence of Sarris' approach to cinema as it is to Rohmer's. And for all the talk of Sarris being the anti-Kael, there's something about his articulation of ideas that's every bit as sensual and sexy in its own way as what Kael was famous for.

In the midst of the recording, Andrew walked in and eased into a sofa, quietly listening to the conversation. But at one moment, in response to the discussion of scenes involving the touching of Claire's knee, he interjects with a hearty, satisfied chuckle and a soft mumble. I've gotten emails asking what he says, and all I can do is wonder what thoughts went through his mind as the image of that knee flashed across the screen of his memory. But as far as conveying an essence of a lifelong love of the movies, this final sound of his laughter may suffice.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of Press Play.

Craig D. Lindsey

I never paid much attention to the whole Kael vs. Sarris debate. I always thought it was two writers engaging in a good ol’ pissing contest. They were two film writers with two wholly unique perspectives on film criticism—end of goddamn story.

I say that to say this: What I enjoyed about Andrew Sarris was how, in his later years, he served as the sensible, introspective yin to Rex Reed’s catty, oversensitive yang in the pages of the New York Observer. Both writers had their own separate columns in the salmon-covered weekly. Since Reed’s column (titled “On the Town with Rex Reed”) dealt with movies, theater, cabaret shows, etc., it wasn’t as intense a film column as Sarris’s. However, on many an occasion, you’d see both men review the same movie in the same issue—and this is where things got fun.

Here’s a sample of what Sarris wrote about The Dark Knight:

“What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.”

Now, here’s Reed’s take:

“The Dark Knight is preposterous, unnecessary and a far, far cry from the old DC Comics of my youth created by Bob Kane. But before the hate mail pours in, let me confess I’m a fool for this stuff, and if “logic” is a word you cannot apply to this movie, neither is “boring.” Compared with the summer’s other action potboilers, it’s a Coney Island roller coaster ride with some of the rails missing.”

This isn’t to say one style of criticism is better or worse than the other. However, you did get an immediate sense of how both men looked at movies. Sarris = well-mannered, pragmatic, detailed, looking at something from all angles before coming to a conclusion. Reed = ornery, hyperbolic, contrarian, getting an idea of what he saw and running with it. If they were a comedy team, Sarris would be the dry-witted straight man, while Reed would be the low-brow clown.

Unfortunately, Sarris was laid off from the Observer in 2009, making Reed the last critic standing there. It’s sad now that not only Sarris has passed, but that fascinating balance will never be replicated again at that paper.

In my opinion, Andrew Sarris will always be seen as a great critic and writer because, quite simply, he knew what he was doing. And whenever you read him, you knew it too.

Craig D. Lindsey is one of the earliest contributors to Press Play.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Andrew Sarris put a frame around cinema itself. He turned the appreciation of movies into an art, but with elements of science. The American Cinema is a taxonomy of directors, arranging them from most to least evolved, most to least artful, most to least memorable. His way of thinking about movies influenced not just film criticism, but pop music and TV criticism and comics criticism, too. Critics of any art form that was previously too young, awkward and humble to dare to define a pantheon were emboldened to try it thanks to Sarris, who insisted that movies could be art as well as entertainment and found the words to explain exactly how that could be so.

I was in the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics for a number of years with him and always looked forward to seeing him at screenings and voting meetings. He was an affable man who seemed to always be taking notes, and he'd been around so long by the time that I got into those groups that he didn't seem to be flustered by anything that happened in the room—though of course by that point, the 1990s, the arguments were pretty mild compared to what I'd heard went on the 60s and 70s. Even when critics were sparring with each other over whether this film or that actress deserved an award, he just grinned, glancing back and forth between the antagonists as if he were sitting courtside at Wimbledon and chuckling a bit. I went up to his house one time to take his picture for the then-new New York Film Critics Circle Web site, which my brother and I built. I felt as if I were making a pilgrimage. He was charming. While I was taking his picture, his wife Molly Haskell—a giant in her own right—came into the room, introduced herself, then told her husband that he should sit in front of a different window because the light was better there.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the co-founder of Press Play.

Oliver Stone

Mr. Sarris was quite generous to me. I was a young screenwriter in New York City. I remember writing a critical appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in the early 70s and sending it off. Surprisingly, Mr. Sarris published it in the Village Voice. Meeting him years later, he struck me as a gentle soul, and although over the years his reviews could be tough, I never felt a bone of meanness.

Oliver Stone is the director of Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers and the upcoming Savages.

Max Winter

Sarris silenced them. By them, I mean the group of people I met and befriended when I started at Columbia University, fresh from Dallas, Texas, in fall 1988. Silenced in what way? Every way. These people didn’t talk like the people I grew up with. They were affectionate at their core, and you could tell that when you talked to them about things they loved, from the Velvet Underground to William Carlos Williams to Bob Dylan to Lorca, but it was buried under several very thick layers of toughness and aggression. It took a while for me to get used to it, but I learned; I remember ending one conversation by overturning a glass of soda on someone’s plate, for no reason I can recall. It seemed to make sense at the time. But Sarris.

Sarris shut them up. We brought the Village Voice to lunch in high-ceilinged John Jay Dining Hall in those days, and every week, the same ritual lionizing of certain names would occur: J. Hoberman. Greil Marcus. Andrew Sarris. When Sarris’s name was mentioned, though, only he got the kind of hands-in-the-air, I-won’t-even-humor-any-other-name response awarded to people deserving of great reverence. He wasn’t a “tough guy,” but his mind was tough, and that brought all the aggression to a halt. There was no question: when one of his pieces appeared in the Voice, that was a treat. The dense, surprising, literary prose seemed to me far more stimulating than anything I was reading in class, in an academic structure seemingly designed to encourage distraction. And it silenced students in a generation which viewed everything from classroom lectures to poetry readings to the level of service at a diner as an opportunity for review, of some kind.

Sarris’s death feels symbolic, a sign of the erosion of a tendency. Towards what? Towards more courage in criticism, towards engagement, towards saying something that might seriously dismantle a reader if there was a thought it might change their thinking. Think Lester Bangs! When Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung came in for review at the Columbia Spectator, everyone was on it. Who would attract that kind of interest now? Our premier critics are plenty sassy these days; they know what they like, and they know what they can’t tolerate, but they don’t necessarily have the erudition necessary to put weight behind their punches. Sarris taught at Columbia when I was a student there, as did Martin Scorsese, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Milos Forman, and as with many people I admired, I stayed away. I wanted to preserve my reverence. I did hear one lecture, though, almost by accident—and he said something during that lecture which has stuck with me, for years. He told a student, “As a critic, you understand, I can’t make the sun rise. However, I can tell you it has risen.” Who knows if that was original with him, or if he said it once a year and I was the last to know, I still feel sorry I didn’t see more of those lectures; that kind of sunrise I could have seen over and over.

Max Winter is the Managing Editor of Press Play.

TRAILER WATCH – Marvel’s THE AVENGERS: Just Another Superhero Movie?

Matt Zoller Seitz: Have you heard there's a new Avengers trailer? All those great Marvel superheroes are in one trailer, just like in the comics! And Iron Man is there, and Thor, and …. sorry, I just can't get excited about this. As you might have heard, I'm sick unto death of superhero movies. Sick, sick, sick. I can't remember the last time I saw a big budget version that really departed from formula, in terms of either subject matter or tone — Superman Returns is one, and that came out five years ago and flopped; anybody who wants to watch a quixotic defense of it can click here.

Ang Lee's Hulk was another — a pretty bizarre movie in its old-school Freudian psychology, but interesting for that reason, vastly more interesting than the remake, or re-boot, The Incredible Hulk, which played like, "Let's take the same concept and leach all the personality out of it."

There's a new Batman movie coming out — the latest in a franchise that we can at least rely on to produce what feels like real movies, with characterization and dramatic stakes and stuff. But if The Dark Knight is the absolute pinnacle of the genre as we now know it, directorially and in terms of the quality of its dialogue and characterization, then the genre has nothing to brag about.

Compare this to the best that the western had produced thirty years into the sound era — I'm dating the start of the modern superhero film to Superman: The Movie in 1978 — and it's pretty embarassing, really. Reboots of Spider-Man and Superman?Thor? Who gives a shit? Green Lantern?

Simon, I know you defend that movie — we all have our idiosyncracies, and I already listed a couple of mine — but you know? Throughout my career as a critic I've been accused of having a bit of a fanboy mentality, but not for this genre. Why, by and large, does it suck so bad? Or am I just not seeing the artistry?

Simon Abrams: I don't know, the superhero movie as a genre strikes me as something with as much untapped potential as the medium of Video On Demand: it could be good but right now nobody knows what to do with it. Everyone's trying to court every potential audience member because comic book companies are still deathly afraid of losing potential audience members.

Christopher Nolan is an anomaly that proves the rules. He's a director/writer whose style with forceful presence and he has the box office standing to get the studios to take some creative risks. Otherwise, publishers and studios still think their own characters are too campy to have mass appeal. They think being conservative equals box office potential. I mean, did you see Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance? Neveldine/Taylor fans such as myself are just relieved that, unlike the unmitigated disaster that was Jonah Hex, a film whose Neveldine/Taylor script was totally mangled beyond comprehensibility, Ghost Rider 2 actually looked like a Neveldine/Taylor movie. It was watered-down as all hell but it definitely retained their unique personalities.

Meanwhile, in contemporary comics, Grant Morrison has turned Batman into an international franchise and made the caped crusader conquer death after hurtling through various different epochs as a human time bomb. How did this happen and why can't I see THAT movie?

Morrison is another figurehead, a comics writer that DC execs were originally reluctant to turn over their biggest characters to. One exec famously asked him, when he was still a young pischer and not the major creative force we know him as today, what he wanted to do next in his still-nascent career. This is one of those possibly apocryphal stories, but to put it into context: young Grant Morrison was the guy that would go on to make Animal Man's alter-ego a peace-loving, existential-crisis-having non-conformist and turned the Doom Patrol into Dada-fighting, Borges-alluding super-freaks.

And Grant said to the exec, (and I'm paraphrasing: "GIVE ME BAHT-MAHN. He's Scottish, see.

And the exec thought, "Hm…no. But what about Animal Man?"

They were scared of Grant's psychedelic might. But later, in 1989, Grant got his shot to do Batman, and it was called Arkham Asylum. It was a major hit. Like, a, big, big hit, much bigger than DC had hoped for. Arkham Asylum was also insanely abstract: it was drawn by Sandman cover artist Dave McKean and basically devolved into a non-linear trip through an insane asylum where super-villains would, without much dialogue, just emerge from the shadows, muttering to themselves by way of an introduction. All while Batman tried to escape.

I mean, think of it: Morrison was once an untested quantity, too. But he's since gone on to write a mega-lthic, titles-spanning Batman story arc, one that he's still currently hacking away at, and has also written other big, continuity-based events and series as Final Crisis, in which everybody dies in a hulking homage to Jack Kirby, and Seven Soldiers of Victory, in which old, obscure heroes and antiheroes like Klarion the Witch Boy and Frankenstein's monster team-up to save the universe. Not to mention Grant's long runs on New X-Men and Justice League of America. Most of these experiments were hits, guys! And even the ones that weren't didn't prevent Grant from ascending to the status of rock star comic writer that he so richly deserves.

So what I'm saying is: Christopher Nolan, as relatively conservative as his Batman movies may be, may be the comic book movie's Grant Morrison. He's an emblem of how much freedom a singular creator can be given. It's not going to happen immediately because nobody wants to rock the boat too much, no matter how much it needs to be rocked. But we've seen this creative stupor before from Marvel and DC as they try to cash in on big creative properties, as in the '70s when Marvel tried to make a wave of live-action made-for-TV films. But this time, mass audiences are buying into it. So we'll get sequels to movies like The Avengers and yet another Spider-Man movie, too.

And at this point, considering that we've already built a foundation of mediocre, connect-the-dots, don't-scare-the-plebs-too-much mismanagement, hopefully, we can get another Iron Man 2 or The Incredible Hulk or even a Spidey movie that lives up to the potential of the latest trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man. I'm not asking for much, really. But in this case, all we can do is wait and see, no?

Matt: Calling Christopher Nolan the Grant Morrison of comic book movies would work for me if I felt like what Nolan was doing thematically, and in terms of form, really pushed the superhero movie genre further along, and really opened people's eyes to what was possible. But I feel like what Nolan did in his first two Batman movies was comparable to what Frank Miller and Alan Moore did with the Batman myth in the late '80s and early '90s. I know people said that about the first Tim Burton Batman as well, but I think the comparison fits better here because if you go back and look at those two Burton Batman films, they actually feel like hybrids of 1980s comic book bleakness and the 1960s TV show, which was a complete lark, practically a counterculture sendup of superhero posturing and what were, back then, the only kind of comic book conventions that most people knew.

The Burton films, in contrast, are very knowing, and the villains, at least, are very campy. They look dark but feel light. They're bloody and sometimes perverse but they never go too far, into the genuinely disturbing. They're serious, but in another sense they're kidding around, having fun. They take the characters' emotions seriously but you don't feel as if you're at a funeral every single minute, which is how I feel watching the Nolan movies. I don't particularly care for Nolan as a visual stylist, and I think that anybody working in such a flamboyantly visual genre should not rely so heavily on conversation and monologue to advance his stories. I wish he had more of an eye. But I'm grateful that he's in there trying, really sincerely trying, to smarten up and toughen up the genre, even though.

I appreciated The Crow and Sin City, which strictly speaking weren't superhero movies, even though they felt rather thin in retrospect, more like crazy visceral experiences than totally satisfying works of popular art. And I liked Watchmen, which was a superhero movie, for the same reason, even though there was something deeply ridiculous about it, which was not the case with the original books. I am tempted to blame Zack Snyder, who brought a lot of passion to the movie but maybe treated it too reverently, too much like a sacred text that he was called upon to illustrate.

But maybe the problem is the same one that plagues so many superhero films, which is that when you're looking at these characters and situations frozen there on the page, just a lot of ink on a page, it's abstracted, easier to accept as a free-standing thing, something to contemplate and immerse yourself in. When you put that same material up on a big screen, suddenly you're looking at actors in what are, let's be honest, pretty silly costumes, no matter how beautiful designed they are, and their dialogue, which you might accept on its own terms if you were reading a comic book, seems affected no matter how skillful the actors are. Maybe it's just a translation problem.

And a budget problem: Making a comic or graphic novel doesn't cost very much, not compared to a movie. There's so much money at stake in a convincingly produced superhero film that they can't take chances. The very economics of the genre might be the number one thing preventing it from really evolving as a form, becoming more daring and varied and sophisticated. Set aside differences in pacing, tone and design, and the difference between the original Superman movies, the Burton and Joel Schumacher Batmans, the Nolan Batman, Jon Favreau's Iron Man movies, the X-Men/Hulk movies are not that great. I feel like we're seeing different versions of the fast food cheeseburger. There's only so much you can do with beef patties, cheese, pickles and a sesame-seed bun, and if you're in this business, that's what you have to serve, because that's what audiences have been conditioned to expect: a $100 to $200 million fast-food cheeseburger. And if they show up and the filmmaker serves them something that's even faintly different from that, they revolt and start moaning about how the movie sucks and the people who did it have no idea how to make a superhero movie.

Which makes me wonder if what we're seeing here isn't an example of an original genre simply evolving by leaps and bounds beyond what the cinematic version of it is able to accomplish. In other words, maybe it's just a matter of time before superhero movies finally escape the bounds of what's expected of them and really take a lot of chances. But what's it going to take for that to happen?

Simon: I completely agree that the drastically increased cost of production is a direct cause of the comparatively conservative nature of the comic book movie. But to clarify something: I never meant to imply a 1:1 connection between Grant Morrison and Christopher Nolan. Nolan is however unfortunately as close we've gotten to a guy that's in a position to change the status quo. He's the only bull in the china shop right now and that sucks because somebody's got to make a mess and it doesn't look like it will be him.

Also: yes, I agree with you that Nolan's take on Batman is fundamentally lacking. I found this to be more troubling in Batman Begins than in The Dark Knight because I think the explicit emphasis on Nolan's Batman's origins were more directly problematic. Meaning: Nolan and co-writer David Goyer's understanding of the character as a noble, symbolic and yes, operatic character bugged me more in Batman Begins because that film tamped down the character's inherent flamboyance instead of embracing it as Burton did.

Say what you want about the quality of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies but they at least that guy was willing to go out on a limb by forcing viewers to overdose on the character's more outre aspects. I mean, yes, there is a grown man in a Bat-costume that has spent billions of dollars to fight crime and he's fighting one guy that has a think for riddles and another guy that has a split personality–this is pretty nutty, guys! There should be a mix of severity and silliness, in other words, and so far, Burton's Batman movies have come closest to achieving that. But I like The Dark Knight too, if only because its over-serious politics are over-shadowed by a sleeker and more dynamic story. I could care less that Batman is basically telling me that the War on Terror is totally defensible: I just found The Dark Knight to be immediately absorbing.

And I think a lot of people did. It was refreshing to see a filmmaker like Nolan with such a clear vision for how his version of the character should be like take it on and accomplish exactly what he wanted to. But again, Nolan's exceptional in that regard. Studio execs don't implicitly trust anyone else. They want marketable talent to handle their films but they don't want to give that recognized talent that should come with the job of directing the latest would-be tentpole film. And that stinks. I wanted to see Kenneth Branagh's Thor and instead got a movie directed by an emasculated artist named Kenneth Branagh. There are some artful flourishes to Thor. But the film is generally underwhelming. I similarly felt Captain America: The First Avenger was imaginatively hobbled out of the gate. So now, what was once a theoretically promising series of films that were supposed to culminate with The Avengers only looks similar in the sense that they're all pretty much forgettable. So I get your gloom and doom and despair, too. But again: I'm only going to really be bummed when Avengers 2 sucks. Because by then, we'll know that the general public is fine with Happy Meal-quality superhero movies.

But generally speaking, the best mainstream superhero comic books, as I suggested in my first post, provide higher quality product but they're still just a very good burger. Which is totally fine! It's Shake Shack but after a while, you too would get bored of Shake Shack. The problem with Marvel Comics vs. Marvel Comics's movies is, in other words, not too different. Generally speaking, the more inspired creators that are currently working on big crossover events turn out work that's superior to the majority of other writers' stuff. But they're still just producing well-done but instantly forgettable product.

I've lent you copies of Scalped, the title I'd point to as the best contemporary title being published by either DC or Marvel, so you know what comics writer Jason Aaron can do. But would you believe that Aaron's X-Men comics and his Hulk stuff are so far just ok? I mean, the only other semi-mainstream thing that he's done that I kinda like is an adult take on the Punisher, where he kills Frank Castle. That character arc is wonderful. Every issue is like an episode of a 22-minute HBO black comedy starring Frank Castle as the guy that really has gotten too old for this shit and now is just looking to die on a high note.

But that series, Punisher Max, was recently cancelled after 22 issues. It got less than two years because not enough fans were buying it. That sucks because it was something exciting, new and, yeah, different. But people were much more willing to give Aaron's Wolverine a shot because, hey, Wolverine! And while I do enjoy Wolverine, Aaron's recent run is just basically a series of clever variations on familiar themes. I'll remember Aaron's run on Wolverine fondly when it ends. But he's not doing anything with the character beyond taking him farther in directions that previous creators already have. They're pretty decent superhero stories, but they're not great ones.

Still, that's better than what we've got when it comes comic book movies. Snyder's Watchmen is better than Rodriguez and Miller's Sin City because of the reverence that you just dismissed. Reverence to me is just an extreme form of love for the material. More comic book movie-makerss should be creatively hobbled in the same way that Snyder was. Because for the most part, Marvel makes look-alike, smell-alike, taste-alike movies. And within those limitations, only fanboy creators can add their own personal flourishes and make the movies we get more than just your average assembly line product. Granted, Burton was not a comics fan and neither is Nolan. But I think DC has been a little more willing to give creators freedom when it comes to their movies, though that's open for debate. I mean, jeez, Jonah Hex really is abysmal. But at least Bryan Singer got the chance to make a movie as idiosyncratic as Superman Returns and ditto re: Watchmen, which was as daring as Snyder wanted it to be.

So when it comes to Marvel movies however, I like the stuff that Jon Favreau and Justin Theroux brought to Iron Man 2 because it showed that they knew who their Tony Stark was and not just from a, "Well, we already did one movie with this guy, can't we just do it again," perspective. Favreau and Theroux are nerds! And right now, we need more nerds making comic book movies. More Andrew Stantons and less Kenneth Branaghs, more Frank Darabonts and less Joe Johnstons. It can be done, man, but they gotta get this stupid first wave cycle of films out of their system if it's ever going to happen. Get me Paul Verhoeven!

Matt: On one hand, I feel at a disadvantage talking about comics with you, Simon, because your references are, to put it mildly, a lot more current than mine. I don't know what's going on in the field unless somebody like you says, "Hey, this new thing is interesting, check it out." I was really into comics in the '80s and '90s and then kind of lost interest, not because the work wasn't interesting but because at a certain point the 24-hours-in-a-day rule kicked in and I just couldn't keep abreast of everything; I had to choose a few areas of interest and really drill down.

But in a way, that ought to put me in a somewhat more receptive position as a viewer of superhero films, because I don't know what I'm missing. I'm not aware of many of the possibilities that movies aren't exploiting that the printed page has been all over for like, ten or even twenty years. I grew up loving comics of all kinds — I still have ancient copies of 1970s Peanuts anthologies from when I was a kid, and I'm still pissed that collection of rare Marvels from that era got sold at my grandparents' estate sale. I had all the existing issues of Rom: Spaceknight and Godzilla and Micronauts, for God's sake! But that's a subject for therapy, probably; my point is, my sense of the medium was mostly frozen about fifteen years ago, and yet when I go to the movies, the superhero stories haven't even advanced to that point, with certain rare exceptions.

I keep going back to other genres as points of comparison. Look at the zombie picture, which is in its rotting little heart is even more constricted than the most utterly boring and conservative notion of what a superhero story can be. The basic story beats in the zombie picture are nearly always the same: the zombie plague begins, society falls apart, and we get to see what people are like when there are no institutions constraining their behavior. That's a very limiting template, or so it would seem, yet somehow, in the 44 years since George Romero made the first modern zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, we've seen the genre reinterpreted in all kinds of ways: as social satire (Romero's sequels), as comedy (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), as action picture (Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake), as postmodern statement on subjectivity and filmmaking itself (the Rec films, Romero's Diary of the Dead). There's even a whole subgenre of what I call zombie-by-proxy films, which come up with some other explanation for the zombie plague besides a mysterious force raising the dead, yet explore many of the same issues and that are, for all intents and purposes, zombie movies: The Days films, the two remakes of The Crazies, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.

There is no comparable variety within the superhero genre for the most part. There are just two kinds of stories: origins and sequels. The origin stories all hit the same beats, whether it's Superman or Spider-Man or whatever. Guy discovers he has a power, learns how to use it for good, battles bad guy, gets girl, saves planet, etc. And it's always a guy, which is a whole separate issue; this is still a very young male genre, very adolescent, even in the so-called "adult" permutations, which tend to offer the same thing as the family-friendly versions of the superhero narrative, but with harsher language and violence and maybe a little bit of sex. We're almost as far along in the modern superhero movie, timeline-wise, as we are in the zombie picture, if you accept my premise that the modern superhero film as we know it started with 1978's Superman: The Movie, and we just haven't seen a comparable variety of tones, flavors and styles. When I see something that's even mildly different from the norm, like Ang Lee's Hulk or Superman Returns — which for all their flaws were trying to mix things up a bit and try something mildly new, but were rejected by mainstream audiences — I tend to give them bonus points for at least not being so mind-numbingly safe. And if you compare the superhero genre to the most traditional and constricted version of the western — gunfighter wants to hang up his guns but gets drawn into a battle with ranchers or a quick-draw at noon or whatever — again you see a much more impressive array of moods, modes and themes. Clint Eastwood's gunfighter movies alone display more diversity, in terms of both subject matter and tone, than the entire superhero genre, at least as we've seen it enacted at the Hollywood level.

The greatest superhero movie I've ever seen — the greatest work of both entertainment and art — is The Incredibles. That thing works as a James Bond spoof; a meditation on identities, secret and otherwise; a domestic comedy; a statement on exceptionalism vs. mediocrity, and the perils of the nanny state, and the kind of unstable emotional bond between mentors and pupils, and so many other things, including a consideration of how the world might react if there were superheroes in it — the public, the media and so forth. And yet it all hangs together. No part feels perfunctory or stupid. It's all deeply felt. And in terms of design alone, it would be some kind of masterpiece even if it wasn't a great movie, which it absolutely is. But films like that, which are so amazingly good that people tend to think of them as simply movies rather than superhero movies, are the exception. A "success" in the genre is more likely to be something like Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2 or the first Iron Man, which were well-done but were definitely wringing variations on an established formula, variations that are, if you want to get ruthless about it, pretty minor.

Thinking about it again, I'm not sure that the bigness of the budget necessarily explains why superhero movies are, by and large, so tepid and emotionally stunted, so relentlessly juvenile even when they're affecting sophistication. There must be something else going on. Every other thriving genre has managed to produce a large number of medium- and even low-budget variations on the template, and a lot of them are fantastic. Back in the 1960s, Monte Hellman made two low-budget westerns back-to-back with Jack Nicholson, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting, and they're still fascinating, and should be as rewarding to anybody who loves westerns as a more expensive picture like Open Range or Silverado. And Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is one of the most original westerns ever made, a work so eerily controlled and disquieting that it makes most other movies in any genre seem pathetically limited, and it cost a pittance. Where's the superhero version of Dead Man? Or Ride the Whirlwind? Or McCabe and Mrs. Miller? Is that ever going to happen?

And why do you think audiences seem to be so deeply hostile to the idea of a superhero film departing from formula in a really significant way? I'm sure that when a lot of people read me asking for a superhero equivalent of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, they laughed derisively, knowing in their hearts that nobody would want that, and God knows they wouldn't, and feeling absolutely convinced that you have to be some kind of art-house chauvinist sipping tea with his pinky out to even fantasize about such a thing. Well, why is that? Are audiences just that conditioned? Or is this a case of people maybe not knowing what they want until you show it to them? Is the problem the audiences, the studios, the comics juggernauts like Marvel and DC, or is it something else? If superhero movies are always going to be with us — and judging from how long the genre has been existing at the forefront of the collective moviegoing brain, I'd say they're going to be with us for a long time — can't they at least be more innovative?

Simon Abrams: I don't know why audiences are afraid of radical change, nor do I think that they necessarily are. In fact, I'd like to think it really is just a matter of them not knowing what they want until they see it. And unfortunately, the Monte Hellman-directed acid westerns you listed were made on a miniscule budget. Likewise, ex-fashion photographer William Klein's bonkers 1969 superhero spoof Mr. Freedom, now available via the Criterion Collection in a handy Eclipse box set dedicated to Klein's "fiction" films, was made on the cheap. The closest I've seen a filmmaker come to replicating big budget production values and making a truly radical work of pop art is Alex Cox's Walker. Unlike Cox's Repo Man or Straight to Hell, Cox had a budget to work with when he made Walker, but he fought to get every penny to make that film. And wound up getting blacklisted for making a hilarious, wonky and pretty innovative indictment of Reagan-era politics. And yeah, it was a western. Incidentally, Cox had wanted to make a Dr. Strange movie but, y'know, somehow, after Walker, they never seemed too enthused about working with Cox…

But that's the kind of guy both you and I want to be making superhero movies. But, as I wrote, in the current, established climate, the best you can hope for is either a sharp sequel or a really out-of-left-field wannabe tentpole like Hellboy. That movie didn't do so well financially when it was initially released but, because of the success of director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, there was a sequel. I think the first Hellboy movie is my favorite contemporary superhero film, mostly because it was made by a guy that clearly loved the source material enough to faithfully adapt it while adding his own flourishes throughout. Del Toro's Hellboy is not Mike Mignola's Hellboy, but the two aren't drastically different from each other. And right now, that's pretty much what we've got to deal with.

I jokingly said that we needed Paul Verhoeven to come back and shake shit up, and I kinda think we still do. But I'm also not going to say that I don't really admire guys like Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro, Louis Leterrier and Sam Raimi, individual creators that were able to make their movies within the narrow confines of the studio system. But yes, I'd love to see more films like The Incredibles. Hell, I'd love to see more movies like Bruce Timm's multiple Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series. The one theatrical film that that series produced, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, is a personal favorite of mine, but again, the box office success of the current spate of Marvel movies sends a direct message to Marvel HQ: this is perfectly fine, too. Their strategy of hedging their bets is, in their eyes, working. Why fix what isn't broke? Well, because it's boring, to put it plainly.

But honestly, I don't think we know what the genre can be yet so all of this is really just idle speculation. Marvel's current plan to take some of their less popular properties and turn them into a series of "independent" films could be fantastic! Or it could suck. I want to see a great Warlock movie or a great Nova or Rom movie. Fuck, give me a shot-for-shot remake of any John Byrne Fantastic Four story arc and I'd be happy, even if it is directed by Zack Snyder and does feature an annoying amount of speed-ramping. Ooh ooh, let's get Tarsem Singh, the guy that did Immortals, to make an adaptation of the Bob Layton Hercules stories! I think there can still be a great and substantially different supehero movie made with a budget backing it. But we're probably not going to be able to imagine how it could happen until it actually gets made.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for New York Magazine and the founder of Press Play.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in theVillage 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.

Putting pen to paper, or the virtues of analog writing

Writing reviews in pen

null [EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first installment in "Egg Timer," pieces written in 30 minutes or less.]

Yesterday I got into the office at my new job and realized I had forgotten the power cord to my Apple laptop. I figured I had three options: (1) take a 30-minute subway ride home to get it; (2) buy another power cord at an Apple store nearby, or (3) walk around my new workplace like a total dork, asking, "Pardon me, do any of you people I don't know yet, and who appear to be working on Windows desktop computers, have an Apple power cord that I can borrow?"

So I decided to go with yet another option: (4) turn off my computer to save power, write the reviews in longhand on a notepad, and turn the computer on long enough to type them and send them to my editor.

I filed two medium-length reviews yesterday, both scrawled on a memo pad in longhand in black pen. Each review took me about two hours to write. I wandered off down a blind alley on the first one and ended up not transcribing one of my paragraphs once I turned on the computer. But I entered the second review almost exactly as I had written it in longhand.

A medium-length review (between 700 and 1500 words) almost always takes me the same amount of time to write, about two hours. It's been that way since I was in my twenties. Of course writing time can vary if the subject is particularly detailed or conceptually difficult, or if I am in an environment not conducive to writing, but for the most part that's a pretty reliable time frame for me.

null Here's the thing, though: I found that because I was writing with a pen, I spent less time revising I went and instead spent that time thinking about what I wanted to say, because as you all know, if you write continuously for too long, your hand starts to cramp. And I probably spent more time writing, or thinking about what I wanted to write, because I was disconnected from the Internet and could not check Facebook or Twitter or my various email accounts, or my blog, or anything else online.

When I read the two reviews on the magazine's site, they didn't seem inferior to or stylistically different from my usual. If anything they seemed a bit more relaxed and confident. I credit this to the removal of online distractions and the thinking time that I gained by deciding to compose on paper before turning on the computer to transcribe.

I'm going to try writing my reviews in longhand for a while and see what happens. I haven't written reviews that way in a long time, except for those rare instances where I had a deadline to meet and was trapped on a subway train without a computer and had to get started anyway.

If IndieWire had a longhand option, I would have handwritten this piece. But that's just as well, because my handwriting has so deteriorated from disuse that none of you would have been able to read it.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Should HOMELAND have quit while it was ahead?

[Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for the season finale of Homeland, season one. Read at your own risk.]

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck might not seem to belong in a review of a searing cable drama about terrorism, but bear with me, OK? In the climax of Show Biz Bugs (1957), in which Bugs and Daffy compete for the right to claim top billing in a show, Daffy decides he’s had enough of being bested by the rabbit and hauls out his trump card, self-immolation. “I must warn those with weak constitutions to leave the theater for this performance,” the duck says, then swallows gasoline, nitro glycerine, gunpowder, uranium and a lit match, and explodes. “That’s terrific, Daffy!” Bugs exclaims from the wings, over thunderous applause. “They loved it! They want more!” “I know, I know,” says Daffy’s ghost, floating toward the rafters. “But I can only do it once!”

As knocked out as I was by the first season finale of Homeland, a part of me worries that the series might be the self-immolating Daffy Duck of cable dramas — incapable of topping itself in future seasons because the nature of its achievements this year are innately singular, and can only be diluted by a storyline that stretches out for two-plus years. (I have the same fears about American Horror Story, and I remember having them after Twin Peaks finally revealed who killed Laura Palmer, then sort of stumbled along until ABC canceled it.)

I even worry that the only major tactical mistake that Homeland made in its 90-minute season-ender was letting Marine Sgt. Nick Brody end his weird odyssey free and unharmed at the end. If producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa had let Brody swallow the match, so to speak — and complete his suicidal terrorist attack, or get shot or otherwise neutralized in the State Department bunker, or be talked down by his teenage daughter Dana, or his wife Jessica or Carrie, and sent to prison — the series would have still dazzled as a stand-alone while leaving us lots of plot and motivation questions to chew over. Brody’s statement on the phone to Abu Nazir — about how it might be more advantageous to have a fifth column influencing U.S. foreign policy rather than a sleeper agent plotting a bloodbath — makes dramatic sense, and it works as a setup for a second season, one set in the heart of executive branch power rather than on the military-intelligence fringes. But it’s damned hard to imagine how a scenario like the one that Brody laid out to Nazir could produce TV more exciting than the season that we just finished watching.

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

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

CHAPTER ART: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG debuted Dec. 15

CHAPTER ART: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG debuts tommorow

Press Play's first video essay series in direct partnership with IndieWire: Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg. Beginning Dec. 15, 2011 at Press Play, this series examines facets of Spielberg's movie career, including his stylistic evolution as a director, his depiction of violence, his interest in communication and language, his portrayal of authority and evil, and the importance of father figures — both present and absent — throughout his work.

Magic and Light is produced by Press Play founder and Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz and coproduced and narrated by Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipknot TV, Press Play contributor, and one of Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. The Spielberg series brings many of Press Play's writers and editors together on a single long-form project. Individual episodes were written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and cut by Steven Santos, Serena Bramble, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz and Kevin B. Lee. For a taste of Magic and Light, check out the chapters above. The trailer for this series is here. Chapter 1 of the series is here. — Editors

The Art of MAGIC & LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG

MAGIC & LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG premieres Dec. 15 at Press Play. Check out these eye-popping title cards. As they used to say of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS trading cards back in the '70s, collect them all!

[Editor's note: These are graphics designed by Boke Yuzgen to promote the Press Play original video essay series Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, which will premiere Dec. 15 on this site. The series is produced by Matt Zoller Seitz and Ali Arikan and narrated by Arikan. It brings the talents of many Press Play contributors together on a single project. The individual chapters are written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and edited by Steven Santos, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz, Kevin B. Lee and Serena Bramble.]

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.

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.