In this end-of-year editorial, Landon Palmer discusses the pattern that movies demonstrated in 2012 for telling stories through protagonists defined by their various personality traits rather than through conventional, straightforward characters. In so doing, movies this year showed how our individual identities have become divided within various aspects of modern social life. This trend made some of the year’s movies incredibly interesting, while others suffered from a personality disorder. Landon argues that movies ranging from The Hunger Games to The Dark Knight Rises to Holy Motors alongside cultural events and institutions like the Presidential election, social media, and “Gangnam Style” all contributed to a year in which popular culture is finally became open about its constant engagement with multiple cults of personality. Six years ago, Time magazine famously named its eagerly anticipated “Person of the Year” You in big, bold letters. Its cover even featured a mirror. As a result of the established popularity of supposedly democratized media outlets like Facebook and the home of the cover’s proverbial “You,” YouTube, Time declared 2006 as the year in which the masses were equipped with the ability to empower themselves for public expressions of individual identity. More than a half decade later, social media is no longer something new to adjust to, but a norm of living with access to technology. Supposing that Time’s prophecy proved largely correct, what does it mean to live in a 21st century where we each have perpetual access to refracting our respective mirrors?

Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Django Unchained (and all of Tarantino’s other films). With Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino has taken a decisive shift in his approach to storytelling. Abandoning the non-linear, present-set depictions of an organized criminal underworld in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill films, Tarantino has not only transitioned to more conventional linear storytelling (with the exception of the requisite flashback), but chooses familiar historical contexts in which to tell these stories. With the WWII-set Inglourious Basterds and now with the pre-Civil War-era Western Django, Tarantino has made a habit of mixing the historical with the inventively anachronistic, and has turned recent modern histories of racial and ethnic oppression, dehumanization, and extermination into ostensibly cathartic fantasies of revenge against vast systemic structures of power.

It’s nothing new to say that the term “independent filmmaking” has come to no longer reference the actual practice of making films outside the studio system, and alerts more directly to an aesthetic of hipness. That the cute-and-quirky consecutive multi-Oscar nominees Little Miss Sunshine and Juno were similarly marketed by Fox Searchlight as “independent films” despite the fact that the former was actually produced independently and the latter was funded by studio dollars, effectively put the nail in the coffin for actual independent filmmaking to have any meaningful visibility. Meanwhile, first-time directors who make their name at Sundance like Marc Webb, Doug Liman, and Seth Gordon quickly reveal themselves to be aspiring directors-for-hire rather than anti-Hollywood renegades. Tom DiCillo, Hal Hartley, and Jim Jarmusch seem ever more like naïve, idealist relics each passing year. It’s clear what the blurring of the lines between independence and studio filmmaking has meant for the mainstream: as my friend and colleague Josh Coonrod pointed out last week, it renders “platform release” synonymous with “independent,” it means that movies featuring Bradley Cooper and Bruce Willis are the top competitors at the “Independent” Spirit Awards (see the John Cassavetes Award for actual independents), and it means that Quentin Tarantino is, for some reason, still considered an independent filmmaker. American independent filmmaking has lost its ideological reason for being. But when it comes to films that are actually independently financed – films for whom the moniker is less an appeal toward cultural capital and more an accurate

Editor’s Note: Landon is participating in a top secret experiment this week, so he’s invited colleague Joshua Coonrod to fill in for him. Your usual Culture Warrior and I teach at the same university (Indiana U – home of Breaking Away and the Hoosiers) in the same communications program. Amongst the most interesting things about teaching media studies at a major university is the sense you get of what young film students are interested in, what (few) films drive them into theaters, and how they understand the constantly shifting mediascape around them. While you obviously don’t have to be an academic to watch film, love it, study it and critique it (re: the title of this site), it is intriguing to consider how upcoming film students – who make a decision to invest copious amounts of time, energy, and money into the study of film – approach the medium. With all the end-of-year discussions of 2012’s best films, what have those students been heralding? From my experience – barely anything. I feel like there’s a lot of assumptions as to the answer to that question, though. Film students? They like foreign films, right? Really arty, cerebral shit? Don’t they want to prove themselves by knowing the most obscure, hard-to-find films? My semester began with a student introducing himself in (just about) the following way: “My favorite filmmaker is this director Quentin Tarantino. He made this film Inglourious Basterds. Everyone should really check it out.” People nodded. The student looked proud of himself. I stared blankly, wondering

Twelve years ago, the western and the musical, two genres that were incredibly successful during Hollywood’s heyday, had been considered long dead with no hopes of a revival on the horizon. After all, why would either of these genres make a comeback? The western is a remnant of a sense of American cultural imperialism and pre-Howard Zinn history-writing long past, and the film musical requires such an astounding degree of suspension of disbelief that audiences who seek special effects that blur distinctions between the fabricated and the real simply aren’t willing to engage it. But lo and behold, on December 25th, 2012 (always a day for big movies), a western (Django Unchained) and a musical (Les Miserables) will be launched into wide release on the heels of outstanding buzz (sure, Tarantino’s film is a revisionist western, but since revisionist westerns have been around for nearly fifty years, let’s just refer to them as the current standard western, shall we?). It’s difficult to say how this particular revival of these Hollywood genres has taken place. Of course, the unexpected success of previous films of these genres that took a risk with audiences (3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, Moulin Rouge and Chicago) certainly helps create the terrain for more such films, but this doesn’t necessarily explain why updated versions of classical Hollywood genres come back into style. Arguably, there are a multitude of genres we could use today, but unfortunately have no contemporary examples of. For instance, the ’30s and ’40s-style

Two weeks ago, thousands of people read a restaurant review in full for the very first time. Many of these people don’t live anywhere near the restaurant, or would have no intention of visiting it if they did. Pete Wells’s Socratic takedown of Guy Fieri’s bloated American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square is an exemplary work of fiery, hilarious, righteously indignant criticism. By constructing nearly the entire review through questions, Wells paints a detailed picture of his experience while simultaneously explicating, point-by-point, its astronomical failure. So why the hell am I writing about a review of a restaurant on a movie site? As the vast reception and ensuing conversation about Wells’s review indicates, the implications of this singular work stem far beyond food criticism. Movie critics and restaurant critics may seem to have as much in common as apples and celluloid in the world of written evaluation. However, as leisure activities, movie theaters and restaurants share a great deal. After all, dining out and moviegoing just about weigh even in the ritual of the American first date, and these activities are regularly combined, sometimes simultaneously (thanks, Alamo Drafthouse!). But beyond the disparate objects of analysis, Wells’s work brings to light several important concerns particular to the enterprise of film criticism.

In 1989, two major studios released films about race relations in America that couldn’t be more different. Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Alfred Uhry’s successful off-Broadway play, was a heartwarming tearjerker about a rich, isolated elderly Jewish woman who comes to the astounding revelation that her friendly African-American chauffeur is often subject to discrimination in the South during the 1950s. Do the Right Thing, meanwhile, enshrined Spike Lee’s place on the cinematic map. Its pull-no-punches mosaic of conflicting, negotiating racialized voices in contemporary Bedford-Stuyvesant refused happy endings and clear answers, leaving critics and audiences in a gray area where they couldn’t decide whether the film was a lament over the brick-wall met by post-Civil Rights discourse, a call to violent action, or something else entirely. The relative critical and economic successes of both Driving Miss Daisy and Do the Right Thing paved a crossroads for future representations of African Americans in mainstream American cinema: should they pursue the direction of  affirmation and closure in the face of racism dismissed as a problem solved long ago, or strive for contemporary relevance and a refusal of easy answers to complex questions? Time and again, Hollywood has overwhelmingly preferred to continue in the direction of Driving Miss Daisy. As a retelling of history, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which chronicles the hard-won political gymnastics enacted in order to get the 13th Amendment passed and abolish human slavery in the US thereafter, would seem to continue Hollywood’s preference to gaze backwards at race relations

Warning: this post contains mild spoilers for Skyfall. At some point during the middle of the first decade of this century, it felt like the practice of rebooting franchises would not see an end anytime soon. A gritty, realist new Batman origin story was followed quickly by a new blonde James Bond who, supposedly modeled after the new spy paradigm of the Bourne series, seemed as messy as he was vulnerable.

Please permit me in some indulgent, semi-autobiographic self-reflection for a moment. I first began writing this column on February 2009, less than a month after the current President’s inauguration. My first post was titled “A New Wave of Cinematic Optimism,” and attempted to cull together several films released in late 2008 in connection to the optimistic rhetoric of then-candidate Obama’s historic campaign (it’s a bit prescriptive – not my best work). While I strive, week-by-week, to both critique and celebrate the art of cinema in various ways through this column, I’ve also thought of filmmaking for much of my adult life as a fundamentally political practice. The practice of making films, particularly studio films, is deeply invested within and respondent to the plural political landscape of a given moment. Thus, my work on FSR for the past three and a half years has been thoroughly – sometimes overtly – contextualized by the political events that have occurred during the Obama administration. The death of Osama bin Laden, the residual effects of the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, LGBTQ rights, post-Arab Spring politics, the Tea Party, and Iron Marx have all served as direct or indirect subjects of this column. This has not been an effort to simply incorporate the latest hot-button political topic into a movie site. Instead (and against the fundamental logic by which the Internet works), I’ve attempted to use this space as a means of continually working through an evolving understanding of the contemporary intersection between

When cinema history is written, what gets highlighted most often are the films that made an indelible mark: films that were beloved by critics, represented a particular cultural moment, or become a popular phenomenon. The films that aren’t often written about are the outliers: films that don’t make much sense in their context, didn’t function as an index of a larger cultural moment or trend, or didn’t make for significant hits or misses. However, with hindsight, those strange films that don’t belong, films orphaned without a definite place in history that can be made sense of, can eventually reveal themselves to be the most interesting, be they good or bad. 2001 was a strange year for comedy. In the latter part of that year, it seemed we needed a laugh more than ever, but no single film really filled that void. Unlike Meet the Parents in 2000 or My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002, 2001 was without a mammoth comedic hit. The once-crowned Farrelly brothers released the first of a string of underwhelming, forced films, and a gap in popular comedy cinema persisted until Judd Apatow turned a litany of non-photogenic sitcom stars into bona fide movie stars in 2005. Sure, 2001 had the expected combination of the hit sequel (American Pie 2), the romantic comedy (Bridget Jones’s Diary) and one genuinely inspired star-maker (Legally Blonde), but the comedy movies that existed just on the margins of the radar, if not off it entirely, reveal a crop of strange,

Criticizing the Academy Awards is becoming a tradition as solidified as the Awards ceremony itself. The ink spilled over anticipation of who will come out swinging during Awards season is typically followed by an anticipated – but, when well-argued, often necessary – critique of the pomp and circumstance of the ceremony itself. Now that we’re neck-deep in Presidential election season, the time dedicated to polling, statistics, and manufactured drama all in the service of something ultimately unpredictable resonates alongside the earliest Fall predictions of the Winter’s Awards competitors: no matter the race, we can become hopelessly invested in every detail in the process of competition. As Matt Taibbi stated bluntly in an editorial on the Presidential race, this is not what democratic participation should look or feel like. Nor, for that matter, is immersing oneself in the Kool-Aid of Oscar anticipation what a genuine investment in cinema should look like. While I’ve bloviated more than enough on the Oscars, it’s something different entirely when someone who ostensibly stands to benefit from the institution itself to criticize it, as potential Best Actor nominee Joaquin Phoenix did recently. Perhaps criticizing the Oscars is not the bravest thing a wealthy famous person can do (perhaps), but the exact form that it takes is certainly worthy of attention because such instances evidence certain power relations and possibilities in Hollywood. Why do some Hollywood figures participate in this criticism, and others don’t?

Warning: This post contains spoilers about the ending of Argo. As George Carlin once said, America’s greatest export is the “manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit.” Whether it be campaign promises, the work of advertising firms, or Hollywood movies, America is deeply invested – economically, culturally, and emotionally – in the bullshit industry. Ben Affleck’s Argo is, in various ways, a demonstration of the prominence and even vital importance of bullshit throughout several facets of transnational experience. Argo evidences the incredible extent to which the fantasies that accompany bullshit create meaning within our daily lives. Argo is, as you no doubt already know, a staging of the extraordinary true story about a carefully orchestrated rouse executed by the CIA in tandem with the Canadian government in order to rescue six refugees from the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979. And what more effective way to execute such a complex rouse than to use as its cover an industry fluent in the perpetuation of lies: the Hollywood studio system. Affleck’s Tony Mendez utilizes an industry known for creating and promoting suspense of disbelief in order to navigate a life-or-death scenario that requires outside individuals to believe the façade that covers what they are actually witnessing.

Thursday is National Coming Out Day. While this annual recognition of LGBT civil awareness on the anniversary of the 1987 Lesbian and Gay Rights March on Washington marks an important milestone each and every year, it seems particularly important within today’s heated political climate. The tide of support for equal rights for LGBT-identified persons has shifted dramatically since the previous election year, when the inauguration of the first African-American President occurred on the same day that the 2nd most populous state in our country voted to take away the rights of same-sex couples to marry. But subsequent the passing of new hate crimes legislation, the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and the first declaration by a sitting US President in support of same-sex marriage, it seems that support for equal rights is no longer the social boogeyman on the national scale that it once was; in fact, at least generationally, the polarization of anti-gay/pro-gay has reversed. Social politics are changing in favor of progress, and at a dramatic rate. It is now politically beneficial to be for equal rights. 2012 is also the year that has seen more LGBT characters on television than ever before. According to a recent study by GLAAD (and neatly summarized by Buzzfeed), 4.4% of all regular characters featured on scripted network television are LGBT-indentified. And with the popularity of shows like Glee, Modern Family, and The New Normal (and popular cable shows like HBO’s True Blood), the presence of LGBT characters resonates further outside what the

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Looper. Several hours after seeing Rian Johnson’s Looper, I find the film still rattling in my head. Not because certain moments have resonated with me, nor because the möbius strip sci-fi structure has motivated any existential introspection. Instead, I felt surprisingly conflicted by Looper, perhaps more so than any other film this year. Looper is a film that consists of so many great parts, miles above what most studio genre fare has released this year, yet somehow even the success of these parts didn’t seem to cohere into a resonant whole on the drive home. What stands out the most about Looper is the emotional and thematic import of the film’s time travel plot device. In situating a young man confronting his aged (and changed) self, a middle-aged man attempting to change course in his life through any means possible, and several evident cycles of fate-determining actions shared between characters, Looper connects its investigation of predestination v. free will to a rumination on how our choices directly effect the lives of others in lasting ways. The logic of Looper lays out a vision of life that includes many potential options from which we choose or have chosen for us. Here there is no such thing as fate, only opened and closed opportunities, the implications of which we can’s possibly comprehend in the present moment.

In 2002, a shift occurred in the structure and thematic concerns that inform the style, characters, and narratives of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films. Anderson’s fourth film, Punch-Drunk Love, clocking in at only ninety-four minutes (exactly half the length of his previous Magnolia) seemed a necessary exercise in modesty for the ambitious auteur, a means of proving himself capable of telling a story that focuses on the lives of less than a half dozen characters in a running time that is far from daunting. This film seemed, at the time, to be a momentary departure. Certainly Anderson, after working Adam Sandler toward what will certainly remain the greatest performance of his career, would return to constructing complex labyrinths depicting the intertwining lives of many memorable characters. After all, Punch-Drunk Love only featured two members of Anderson’s signature ensemble (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Luis Guzman). But as There Will Be Blood indicated, Anderson intended no such return to Altmanesque mosaics, opting instead to dive even further into the impenetrable psychologies of enigmatic leading men, an interest that has almost inevitably led Anderson’s trajectory to The Master.

The upcoming election might make the air feel a bit more politicized than it usually does, but there’s one arena that is investigated and interrogated for its supposedly partisan leanings far more often than every four years: the mainstream entertainment industry. Hollywood and prime-time television are continually called into question for supposedly left-leaning tendencies. Hell, there are even entire websites that profit off the flimsy thesis that Hollywood is an evil institution devoted to the full-scale indoctrination of feeble young minds into sullying the name of Ayn Rand and buying Priuses (Priusi?). However, the latest accusation made toward Hollywood as a liberal indoctrination machine came from an unlikely source: Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine. While it’s interesting to hear these points articulated from a self-defined liberal rather than a conservative culture warrior (yes, I’m well aware of the irony of my column name when I write stories like this) who stands to benefit more from the critique, Chait makes several of the same stumbles that conservatives encounter when voicing this familiar argument, like failing to provide a stable definition of what institutions the term “Hollywood” describes or an adequate explanation for the process by which an institution made up of mostly liberal people actually translates into liberal products.

I recently viewed the trailer for Andrea Arnold’s upcoming Wuthering Heights. Besides being a truly awesome-looking adaptation of some literature you were probably forced to read in high school, the third feature by one of the UK’s most promising new filmmakers, and sporting a nice quote from none other than our own Kate Erbland, there’s something else worth noticing about this upcoming indie period drama: it uses the old-school Academy standard (1.33:1 to 1.37:1) aspect ratio instead of the more conventional cinema standard (1.85:1) and anamorphic widescreen cinema standard (2.35:1) ratios. Now, this might sound like I’m drowning deep in some movie nerd recess that actually involves numbers (and escaping anything seemingly math-related is scientifically-proven to be the means by which most movie nerds come into being), there’s something genuinely important about the fact that a handful of small independent and foreign films have embraced this all-but-abandoned ratio. In an era in which all of our screens (movie, television, laptop, tablet, phone) are rectangles, the squarer-shaped screen that characterizes the Academy Ratio is proving to offer unique, even startling approaches to film visuals that can only rarely be found in other categories of experiencing audio-visual media.

Warning: This article contains possible spoilers for Cosmopolis. At some point about halfway through David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton) informs young billionaire asset manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) that the chaotic protestors wreaking havoc outside the windows of the state-of-the-art, impenetrable limousine 2.0 they occupy subscribe to an anarchist philosophy that holds destruction itself to be a creative act. Implicitly citing the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter, Kinsky then points out (perhaps ironically, perhaps not) that capitalism is also a form of “creative destruction”: the market moves through cyclical ebbs and flows, older resources must be exploited in new fashions, the seemingly new is always replaced by the purportedly antiquated, and so on. This view of destroying the old as a means in of itself to produce something new also emboldens the work of productive critique, a practice in which Cosmopolis (as both novel and film) is heavily and centrally invested in terms of its narrative and intellectual preoccupations. Cosmopolis is no doubt a strange and unique film, a provocation as necessary as it is unwelcome in the wake of Hollywood’s stock cloning practices. That the film stars Pattinson, an actor both beloved and despised because his astronomical fame has been created by this Hollywood, highlights the film’s inevitably polarizing difference all the more. Cosmopolis is a sort of narrative “essay film,” at once a polemic without urgency, a manifesto that doesn’t design a way out, and an apocalyptic suicide note too disillusioned with and desensitized in the

When the trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible debuted on the web – an upcoming holiday release starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts as the parents of a living-comfy British family vacationing in southeast Asia in 2004 when the Indian Ocean Tsunami hit – it caused quite a stir. Nathan Adams referred to the trailer as “melodramatic,” and our comments section was abuzz with seasoned FSR writers and readers alike assessing the merits of a film about a real-life natural disaster that devastated the lives of countless people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India which focuses instead on a white, ostensibly wealthy British family on holiday. David Haglund of Slate called the trailer “deeply troubling” and “horribly misjudged,” going so far as to say that, out of the hundreds of thousands of lives adversely affected by the tragedy, …The Impossible is, so far as one can tell from this trailer, about the uplifting story of five, well-off white people. Which is not to say that the lives of well-off white people don’t matter. But movies like this one create the unmistakable and morally repugnant impression that their lives matter more. The whitewashing of the silver screen has been proven to be an issue that is neither small nor unfamiliar when it comes to the enterprise of Hollywood representation. As Cole Abaius pointed out in a recent editorial, one of the more ironic repercussions of a globalized Hollywood economy dependent upon foreign sales is that Hollywood studios are still hesitant to

The music video is in terminal condition, if not certainly dead. MTV hasn’t been associated with music for a long time, and nobody invests real money in the format that formerly revolutionized the relationship between audiences and musicians. The music video had a great run, introducing us to visionary directors and creating profound visual iconography whose power was unmatched by album covers and promotional materials, but beyond the occasional breakout video that circulates on YouTube, it’s time to say goodbye to the format that brought us everything from “Billy Jean” to “Frontier Psychiatrist.” In the past few years a new music/video hybrid has become increasingly prevalent. The “visual album” (as coined by Animal Collective) continues to emerge as a means of creative visual expression and (often) as a form of cross-promotion for an album. Unlike music videos, visual albums stage, sometimes with interruptions, the majority of a musician or band’s LP. Even though this format seems designed to exist exclusively through web distribution (visual albums can occasionally be too long, interconnected, and narratively or stylistically cohesive to be parsed out as standalone shorts or individuated music videos, but aren’t long enough to be feature films), the visual album is also a risky declaration in the age of iTunes, proclaiming albums to be cohesive works of musical artistry rather than conveniently divisible bits of audio information.