Matt Zoller Seitz – Page 5 – Press Play Video Blog

24: Kiefer Sutherland’s ticking clock classic turns 10

EDITOR'S NOTE: Kiefer Sutherland's ticking clock classic debuted 10 years ago this week. To mark this milestone, Press Play is re-publishing the video essay series "5 on 24" which was created by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas for the Museum of Moving Image in 2010. According to their introduction, "5 on 24" examines various aspects of the show, including its real-time structure, its depiction of torture, and the psychology of its hero, counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer. The show tapped into the ticking-clock on-the-go mentality of post-millennial society. And its machine-gun pacing, real time structure, and long-form plotting took aesthetic risks that no other action show had dared.

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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. Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The big tease of “Glee”

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following recap of Glee season three, episode 5 contains spoilers; read at your own risk.

Really, Glee? Was it really necessary to end an episode revolving around virginity loss with a shot of a roaring fireplace?

That’s a trick question. Midway through its third season there’s little that’s necessary about Glee, save for the underused Chris Colfer’s performance as out gay teenager Kurt Hummel, the even more severely underused Mike O’Malley’s performance as his dad, one out of every five musical numbers, and Sue Sylvester’s surreal rants, which Jane Lynch sells even when the writing is just sassy word salad. And even those compensatory values aren’t enough to make me watch each week. After a long and increasingly desperate infatuation with this musical comedy soap — which repeatedly threatened to be astonishing and sometimes delivered, only to settle for cheerfully incoherent inanity at least 80 percent of the time — I’ve relegated it to the second tier of my DVR, which consists of shows that I skip for weeks at a time, then catch up on in one dutiful burst. I doubt I would have watched this installment in real time if my 14-year-old daughter hadn’t reminded me that it promised to deliver big moments this week. Her reactions were more entertaining than the show. She contrived reasons to leave the room whenever nooky threatened to break out, and ended up watching the parts she’d skipped while I was in the next room writing this recap. “If you were 14, would you want to watch this episode with your dad?” she asked later. Hell, no. I vividly recall being in the same tiny house with my mom while she watched The Postman Always Rings Twice on cable with the sound cranked way up, but only because my therapist dug that repressed memory out through hypnosis and primal scream therapy.

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

Matt Zoller Seitz is TV critic for Salon and publisher of press play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The awesome, thrilling spectacle of Vietnam?

The awesome, thrilling spectacle of … Vietnam?

Before I review Vietnam in HD, the six-hour History Channel epic, I need to get a couple of caveats out of the way.

First, if you have a high definition television, access to the History Channel’s HD signal, and a killer home stereo system, you should record the series and watch it in a dark room with no interruptions, preferably while indulging your inebriating substance of choice. It’s a sound and light show extraordinaire — a trip.

But you should only do this if — and here comes caveat No. 2 — you consider intense, often shockingly bloody documentary images to be just another thing to gawk over; something to toss up on a big screen instead of, say, Sucker Punch or The Dark Knight or The Dirty Dozen. Judged purely as a technical achievement, “Vietnam in HD” (Nov. 8-10, 9 p.m./8 Central) is impressive. It merges thousands of bits of footage collected via the History Film Corps into a nearly seamless whole — a roiling canvas of chopper evacuations, napalm strikes, city and jungle infantry skirmishes, and shots of wounded and dead soldiers with burned and mangled flesh. And it weds these images to the narratives of individual American soldiers who served in different phases of the war, from the early advisor stage (roughly 1961-1964) through the peak of infantry combat (1965-1969), the post-Tet Offensive period of “Vietnamization” and the fall of Saigon. (I’ve previewed the first four hours; the last two, “A Changing War”/”Peace With Honor,” weren’t available for critics.)

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

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

SLIDE SHOW: THE SIMPSONS save halloween, again

The Simpsons airs its latest installment of “Treehouse of Horror” this Sunday — a long-standing tradition that lets an already formally daring cartoon show let its imagination run wild. The “Treehouse” segments have been the show’s most reliably inventive during its second decade; while composing this list of my personal favorite segments (not entire episodes) I was pleasantly surprised by how many installments from the later years ended up claiming slots.

What else is there to say? Oh, right: If you’re wondering where “Dial Z for Zombies” is, it’s No. 11, which means it’s not on here. I love it — especially the immortal line “Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?” — but I like these just a little bit more. List your own favorites in the Letters section. To quote Marge in “The Shinning,” go crazy.

To view Matt’s slide show at Salon, go here.

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

LIFE’S WORK: THE FILMS OF ROMAN POLANSKI – Chapter 2: Spaces

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is devoting much of its content this week to a study of the films of Roman Polanski, whose new movie Carnage opens the New York Film Festival this Friday, September 30. We will count down to the event by running a new video essay every day this week under the title Life’s Work: The Films of Roman Polanski. Chapter 2 of the series is a video essay by contributor Steven Santos entitled Spaces. It explores how Polanski uses physical space in his films to reveal unexpressed or unknowable traits buried in the human psyche. You can view Chapter 1 of this series, Polanski's God, here.]

By Steven Santos
Press Play Contributor

Roman Polanski has been making films for five decades now. His latest film Carnage is yet another of his works that takes place within a single, confining location, the better to allow Polanski to explore social, political and sexual issues. From his student shorts at the National Film School in Łódź to his early features Knife in the Water and Repulsion through his more recent films The Pianist and The Ghost Writer, Polanski has consistently explored how a physical space can affect a character's mental state.

When noticing this pattern, I asked myself: What exactly makes Polanski return to this theme over and over again? As problematic as I find about half of the films included in this essay, I was impressed by how cinematic he makes these stories, using the confines of apartments and houses to explore isolation, repression, paranoia, sexual dysfunction and madness. In Polanski's world, home is considered less a haven than a battleground.

This video essay references a dozen films from Polanski's career, and was made so that both fans and detractors of this divisive director will see how the juxtaposition of images from different films speak to each other, and perhaps provide insight into his obsessions.

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.