Ask The A.V. Club - April 3, 2008
by The A.V. Club staff
April 3rd, 2008
Stop Washing Them Away
This is one of those "do you remember something obscure" questions. Sometime in the mid-'90s I caught a badass little music video which opened with some indie-ish band arguing with producers. The band request just a simple "band plays in a room" video, the producers finally acquiesce and film the band against a plain blue background… and then proceed to add a lot of cheap post-production effects, to hilarious effect. For some reason (probably just confusing the "blue" thing) I thought it was The Bluetones, but I've scoured them on YouTube and found nothing. It's probably something really obvious, am I exposing my ignorance here?
James
Josh Modell still loves David Cross and trusts his choices:
The video you're remembering is pretty clearly Superchunk's "Watery Hands," starring the band (naturally) along with "the best directors in the business," played by David Cross and Janeane Garofalo. The band explains that they just want a simple performance video, but Cross and Garofalo construct a CGI nightmare that makes The Cars' "You Might Think" look subtle in comparison. It's pretty awesome. Check it out for yourself, and don't be scared of Cross' naked ass!
Unsuccessful 2: Him Again
What was the first-ever movie sequel?
Clete Eastwood
Noel Murray is back, and this time it's personal…
Because of the proliferation of movie serials in cinema's formative years—and the loss of so many of those early films—this is a hard one to answer definitively, Clete. The most common answer is 1916's The Fall Of A Nation, Thomas Dixon's unsuccessful (and no longer available) follow-up to D.W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation. But Louis Feuillade's 10-part serial Les Vampires pre-dates The Fall Of A Nation by a year, and depending on how you define "sequel," you could easily count nearly any silent comedy or adventure two-reeler as a sequel if it shares the same basic characters and themes as an earlier film.
Fritz Lang was one of the first filmmakers to do sequels up proper, with carefully ordered two-parters like 1919's Spiders, Part 1: The Golden Lake and 1920's Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship. Once the sound era rolled around, the franchises came thick on the ground in Hollywood: the Thin Man series, the Dr. Kildare series, The Falcon, The Whistler, The Crime Doctor, Boston Blackie, Ma & Pa Kettle, et cetera. The tradition of numbering sequels with Roman and Arabic numerals began in the '70s, first with The Godfather, Part II, and then The French Connection II and Jaws 2.
Now here's a better question: What will be the last-ever movie sequel? My money's on The Hottie And The Nottie 2: Hottier And Nottier.
A Matter Of Taste
After reading your review of The Counterfeiters, I noticed a rather odd criticism A.V. Clubwriters tend to give Holocaust films, namely that they are too polite. The Counterfeiters review used the word "respectful" as a pejorative term, while your write-up of The Pianist uses the term "middlebrow tastefulness" to describe the quality of Holocaust movies at large. What I have to ask is this: What exactly do you mean when you use words like "somber," "tasteful" and "respectful" as an insult, especially when you are dealing with as solemn a subject as the Holocaust? Using cynical language like that to describe Holocaust films makes it sound like A.V. Club critics believe depictions of the Holocaust have grown cheap and manipulative, and that any new film would require some new stylistic twist. But is that possible without being grossly inappropriate? And, more importantly, just because the ground has been covered, does that mean new films should stay away from the subject? To summarize, A.V. Club… What's your beef with Holocaust movies?
Matt
Tasha Robinson defends her review:
I think you're overstating the case when you say I was insulting The Counterfeiters by calling it "respectful," Matt, and you're putting your own words into our mouths when you say we complained that those films were "somber" or "polite." Obviously, we'd prefer films dealing with gigantic historical tragedies be respectful rather than tasteless or tacky or dismissive. The full phrase in question in the Counterfeiters review was, "[the film] tackles the subject in the usual time-approved, respectful ways," which wasn't meant to be pejorative so much as descriptive, alerting potential viewers that they were about to see some much-covered territory handled in ways that they'd likely seen before. Which was meant to let them decide for themselves whether they wanted to see the film, based on their personal tastes and their familiarity with the subject matter and the genre.
For me, the big problem for me with The Counterfeiters wasn't that it was respectful, it was that it was, as I said later in the review, melodramatic, unsubtle, and clichéd. (Similarly, Scott's review of The Pianist doesn't just complain that it's middlebrow; he also says it's stylistically impersonal, artless, and ordinary.) But both of us complained in our reviews that the material was too familiar, which leads into the rest of your question. Should filmmakers stop making films about the Holocaust? Of course not, any more than they should stop making films about people entering or leaving relationships. Just because an area has been repeatedly covered doesn't mean there's no fresh, compelling way to tackle it. And even if there were no new stories to tell about any given topic, new viewers are born every day. I guarantee you that there's someone out there who'd never seen a Holocaust film before either The Pianist or The Counterfeiters, and they were probably deeply moved as a result, in ways that Scott and I weren't. Does that make us cynical? Possibly, but it also makes us experienced, and I for one am more interested in a review from a critic that can unsentimentally compare a new film to the existing body of similar work.
Does every new film about the Holocaust need an exciting new twist to hold our jaded interest? No, but I personally find that an awful lot of Holocaust films tend to rely on clichéd signifiers (symbolic grey skies and grey streets, sad swelling string music, etc.) and on mining the immense emotional impact of the moving sequences and images we all know from studying history. Just about everyone has seen photos of concentration-camp victims, in mass graves or in shell-shocked groups, and has (I would like to think) been justly horrified. Is all use of such images, as you put it, cheap and manipulative? No, but in cases where the filmmakers haven't made a convincing emotional connection to their central characters, their motives can certainly seem suspect.
So how do you make a Holocaust movie without getting called "familiar"? Well, last year Noel and Scott both heavily praised Paul Verhoeven's