It’s midnight and I’m in the living room of a small suburban house. The TV is chattering away in the background, casting a harsh, bluish glow over a middle-aged couple that I’ve never seen before. They’re on the couch, unmoving, and the woman’s head is cocked at an odd angle. I glance down at the cool, heavy object resting in my palm – a 9mm Smith & Wesson – before I hear the voice behind me, annoyed, frustrated, and cold-blooded: “You picked the wrong house again, Aarons.” I turn slightly and see one of the most eccentric-looking men I’ve ever laid eyes on. At 6’4” and a hair shy of 140 lbs., Doug Jones resembles nothing more than one of Tolkien’s tree-like Ents made flesh and blood. He grins, but it isn’t an I’m-so-happy-to-see-you grin: he’s holding a gun to my head.
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In spite of my desire to decide the winner by gladiatorial combat with rabid badgers, a random number generator was used instead to select the proud new owner of Transsiberian on DVD. Again, I’d just like to say thanks to First Look Studios for sponsoring the contest. In addition to Transsiberian, which hits DVD today, they have Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django streeting next week, a unique and wholly unconventional film from Japan’s primo splat-master.

Oh, wait, you want to know who won? Well then…
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There's something in the mist....

The blogosphere is all a-twitter on big holidays like today, chomping at the bit to post something related/themed/marginally relevant. Never one to stand back as the lemmings rush over the cliff, MovieZeal is joining the fray by cataloging all of the horror reviews we’ve written over the past 9-10 months. Not surprisingly, Luke has written almost every one.

Wondering what to watch tonight at your Halloween party tonight? Concerned that The Strangers might be as bad as everyone says it is? Inquisitive about whether The Orphanage is really that awesome? Look no further, my gore-hungry friends.

Oh, and Happy Halloween. Hit the jump for the goods.
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Why? Because we like you guys. Really. We do. And First Look Studios has graciously agreed to give a copy of Transsiberian away to one super-duper-awesome-special MovieZeal reader. The film stars Ben Kingsley, Woody Harrelson, and Emily Mortimer; it’s a twisty little neo-noir thriller set in the Siberian wilderness; it’s directed by Brad Anderson, who’s last film was the extremely underrated The Machinist; and Luke gave it a nice 3 1/2 stars in his review.

In order to be eligible, just leave a comment on this post and be sure to use a valid email address. That’s it. Just leave a comment (duplicate comments will be punished with fire & brimstone, however). We’ll randomly select one of the entries and announce the winner a week from today. Piece. ‘O. Cake.

You can find more information on the film at its official website and you can watch the wicked-cool trailer here. Transsiberian hits DVD and Blu-ray on November 4th, a week from today.

Thank you to everyone who helped make Noir Month the modest success that it was. To all of our contributors…you guys did a fantastic job. I was consistently surprised at the quality and intelligence of the work you turned in, and enormously appreciative of the effort that you expended for MovieZeal. In addition, thanks to all of those who took the time to contribute prolifically in the comments section. Most of you know more about film noir than I ever will, and your insights were both entertaining and enlightening.

We’ll be taking a bit of a break before running another theme month. This was a blast but also a bit exhausting. And for those of you who could have cared less about film noir, we’re hoping to launch some less “academic” features this month. There’s new stuff on the horizon and one project that I am very excited about, which we will unleash upon you mid-September.

In case there was anything you missed, all of the reviews and articles are listed below for your reading pleasure. Seriously guys, we wrote a freaking book this month.
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Anil Usumezbas is the founder of The Long Take, a site dedicated to thorough, exhaustive examinations of films, both classic and current. He has obviously placed a great deal of time and work into this detailed examination of noir’s history, as well as its myriad of cultural and sociological influences. It’s a wonderful piece with which to exit Noir Month at MovieZeal, so settle back and enjoy; tomorrow we’ll return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

If you have started reading this article here, then you probably know what a film-noir is. Chances are, you are also knowledgeable about the basic elements and characteristics of a film-noir to some satisfactory extent. Initially, I have intended this article to be informative and exhaustive; I wanted talk about the thematic and stylistic attributes of this genre as well as the whole timespan of influences and spin-offs; but then I decided it would be a little boring and completely unnecessary to do so, considering the intellectual capacity of the target audience. You have been told numerous times, I’m sure, by various other articles in the blogosphere that a film is not a film-noir without shadows, light-dark contrast, a femme fatale, a detective/private investigator, morally ambiguous existentialist undertones, complicated plots and an overall sense of pessimism. Therefore I will not merely remind you what I presume that you already know.

Instead, with your permission, I would like to wind the clocks back to 700 years ago.
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Matt Gamble holds court at Where the Long Tail Ends, where he constantly entertains with his unique film selections. Did you know that William Shatner was once sacrificed by Satanists? Or that David Hasselhoff wielded a light saber in an Italian Star Wars knockoff? I’m not sure how many times I’ve left “Where do you FIND this stuff?” comments on his posts. Visit and adore.

When Evan first approached me to write an article on a noir film of my choice I was both excited and apprehensive. Excited because noir has always been one of my favorite genres and who wouldn’t enjoy writing about a film and style they love? But while noir is often classified as an American film style (much like the Western) and as such Evan rightfully tabulated an exhaustive list of fantastic American noir films, which brings us to my apprehension.

You see my favorite noir film is High and Low, directed by the great Akira Kurosawa, and that film is slightly less than American, and thus was excluded from Evan’s list. So knowing that it would be difficult in trying to explain why I was reviewing High and Low, I decided to switch gears and review an entirely different foreign film, that film being Fritz Lang’s M.
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Christian Divine blogs at Oh My Blog, although you can find his writing, passions, and obsessive love for Otto Preminger’s Skidoo at ChristianDivine.com. This piece was originally written for CREATIVE SCREENWRITING, hence the emphasis on the script, but Christian has graciously reupholstered his essay and donated it to noir month. Enjoy. It’s fine eatin’.

While John Carpenter clearly belongs in a class of recognized film auteurs, the scripts for his movies can be wildly uneven. He has an instinctual knowledge of film and music rhythm (he directs in a kinetic comic panel style) but the limitations of the auteur theory come into focus when one watches The Fog, Christine, Memoirs of An Invisible Man, Village of the Damned and Vampire$ (throwing away most of John Steakley’s fastpaced, funny novel was a bad idea). In other words, his unique widescreen vision cannot always compensate for low-priority narrative. It’s to Carpenter’s testament that we’re willing to go along for the ride anyway. Critics and –audiences — rarely note Carpenter’s films are often satirical (even Escape From LA is more humorous than exciting). To his credit, Carpenter remains a child of the 1970’s cinema: his films usually have ambiguous endings.
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Graham Culbertson of Movies et al. has provided a definitive list of noir inspired comics. I’ve read a handful of his selections and cannot wait to dig into the others. This is truly an epic list.

If you’re like me and you love all kinds of “genre” entertainment, comics are a great way to get your fill of superheroes, police procedurals, horror, fantasy, science fiction, mice with swords, and all the other fun escapist pleasures that are ignored or reserved for hackwork in the film world.

One of these is noir. Ever since Frank Miller revitalized Batman in 1986 with the noir-influenced The Dark Knight Returns, noir comics have been a steadily growing commodity. As part of Noir Month, here are 10 great comics that can get you through these dark times where the Hollywood noir is as rare as the well-written Fantastic Four movie. Happy reading!

I’ve broken the list into two sets of 5. The first set is straight noir for those of you purists. The second five represent noir intersecting with science fiction, superheroics, or some other genre exercise. If you only like your noir straight up, the first five are for you, but if you can handle a cocktail, the whole list is for you.
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Is it just me, or is this clip art awesome?

Piper over at the Lazy Eye Theatre has had a little “meme” going for about a week now, and Evan and I at MZ have been tagged no less than three times, so we thought we’d better do it.

The rules are simple: If you could pick twelve flicks to be shown at the New Beverly Cinema (a popular “revival” theater), what would they be? In more detail, it goes like this:

1) Choose 12 Films to be featured. They could be random selections or part of a greater theme. Whatever you want.

2) Explain why you chose the films.

3) Link back to Lazy Eye Theatre so I can have hundreds of links and I can take those links and spread them all out on the bed and then roll around in them.

4) The people selected then have to turn around and select 5 more people.

Anyhoo, Evan and I were thinking, since there are two of us, that opens up a world of “gimmicks” for our choices. Long-time readers may remember a debate we had on the site back in March…it went pretty well, all things considered, so we thought we’d try it again. But this time, rather than sling words, we’re going to sling movies. The rules go something like this:

1. The first person picks a pair of films for the first night that he thinks makes a point.
2. Person # 2 picks a pair of films for the second night that somehow undermine Person # 1’s point.
3. Person # 1 picks a pair of films for the third night that somehow undermine Person # 2’s choices.
4. Etc.

Confused? Yeah, Evan was too, when I tried to explain it to him. (I thought it was pretty straightforward…) But lucky for you, you only have to read the debate, not participate in it. Here we go…

Being a sporting man, I chose to give Evan first pick.
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This is part the second of a two-part article examining the ways in which one might become a better film critic. You can find the first part of the article here.

I was surprised by and appreciative of the responses that I received on the first part of this article. I also must admit that I found it quite surreal to see my name jutting out from blog posts in Spanish and Vietnamese. Hopefully the second part of this article is as much of a conversation starter as the first was. Again, your feedback is warmly welcomed.
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America, and like…1989, I think?
Directed By: Probably Steven Spielberg. He’s a director, right?
Written By: Not those guys who wrote the Pirates movies. So I don’t care.
Starring: Some dude who sounds like that mouse from Animaniacs
Running Time: Too friggin’ long.
Rated PG…for boring-ness.
(out of 57 rectangles)

Note: This was written for the Bizarro Blogathon at Lazy Eye Theater.

Okay, so I was just, like, hanging out, when this guy Evan says to me, “Why don’t we watch this movie?” and I’m all like “What movie is it?” and he says “It’s called Citizen Kane.” I say, “Citizen Kane? Is that one new? I’ve never heard of it.” And he’s all like “No, I think it’s been around a while now.”

“So it’s like, 80’s? Does it have Patrick Swayze in it?”

And he’s all like, “Patrick Swayze? Like in Dirty Dancing? That’s barely even a movie!” and I’m all like, “Whatever,” so he pops it in the DVD player, and it starts up.

OMG, it sucked.
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This is an epic article, one that I have been working and retooling for months. I’m splitting it into two parts because reading half of it in one sitting will be daunting enough. Most of the length can be attributed to the selections from other critics that I’ve included. As such, I hope it serves more as an introduction to the work of many a great critic some of you may have overlooked or never heard of, rather than a personal ego trip expounding My Important Opinions. The selections I’ve included, if nothing else, are worth the time and effort it will take to make it through this article. Expect the second half later this week or early the next.

Since beginning MovieZeal, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a good film critic. There are no books or how-to dummy guides out there on the subject, perhaps because there is an intangible, subjective element to film criticism that is difficult to pin down. Ignorant film watchers will resort to the tired judgment of “A critic is someone who couldn’t cut it as a filmmaker,” but they miss the forest for the big fat tree staring them in the face. There is much more to it, and film criticism over the past century has become an art in its own right. This article contains my humble thoughts, in no particular order, on how one might get better at it.

I fully expect a few of these to generate some debate, and while I’m not new to serious filmwatching, I am rather young in terms of written film criticism. In other words, I’m not claiming to have it all figured out. I’m also excluding some points that I think are obvious. For example, if you’re neither passionate about film nor consistent in your cinematic intake (multiple films per week), then you’re likely to prove a poor critic, no matter how many of the pointers below you take to heart.

Some of my suggestions are specifically practical, some are more subjective, and many of them overlap one another to varying degrees. In addition, I’ve included excerpts from reviews and critics that I think illustrate the point at hand, as well as provided links to the full review or where to purchase the book I found them in. Please note that while I’ve drawn exclusively from English speaking critics, I’m not saying that there aren’t vibrant, influential film critics elsewhere in the world, just that it’s difficult to find translations of their work.
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[Originally written as a contribution to the Indiana Jones Blog-A-Thon over at Cerebral Mastication.]

Last December, I sat down with my father to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. To me, it’s one of the best summer blockbusters in a long time (yeah, you heard me: the second one). Yet, after we finished, my Dad turned to me and said, “Where are the feel-good action movies?” I asked him what he meant and he replied by recalling movies that weren’t so oppressively dark. Where were the real good guys? he asked. Where were heroes like Indiana Jones?!
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Our Month of Coens was, I think, a modest success. Thanks to all of the contributors who took the time and effort to turn in such well written articles and features on the brothers auteur. Your participation is what made it such darn fun. You can find a handy-dandy list of all the articles and reviews below in case you may have missed anything.

In lieu of planning another themed month here at MZ (which is coming as soon as we recover from this one), we have a number of new columns and features in the pipeline, so keep your eyes peeled (what does that mean, excatly? Has anyone ever stopped to think what a horrible prospect it would be to actually peel one’s eyes?).

MZ is in its infancy, and we are (hopefully) ever evolving into a better, more streamlined destination for all things film.

Hit the jump for the list of articles and reviews.
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Our final guest article peeling back the cerebral layers of the Coen’s eccentric gray matter comes from Craig Kennedy, tzar-supreme of the cozy watering-hole of a blog Living in Cinema. Here he tackles the significant differences between Cormac McCarthy’s novel and the Coen’s adaptation. Be sure to check out his blog, which features industry news and reviews distilled through his keen wit and eloquence. He also has some of the best commentators and conversations going on in the blogosphere. Park your browser there for a spell and soak in the cinematic sunshine.

“The book was better than the movie.”

How many times have you heard someone say that? The truth is, books and movies are two very different things and the strengths of one don’t always play into the strengths of the other. There are exceptions of course. Gone With the Wind and The Godfather spring to mind as films that are equal to or better than their source novels. The movie versions might not be as rich or as in depth as the novels upon which they’re based, but they get the important things right and they still manage to work as movies.

To that list we can surely add the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and the film based upon it by Joel and Ethan Coen. The first thing that stands out in a direct comparison of the two is how faithful the Coens were to their source, yet how they still made a film with a recognizable Coen stamp. No Country is unmistakably a Coen movie, from the basic framework of McCarthy’s noir plot, to the strong regional characters, to the dialogue; it’s at home in the Coen canon, yet they seem to have changed very little. Much of the dialogue was delivered intact and even the structure of the narrative survived the translation. Somehow it’s McCarthyesque and Coenesque all at the same time.
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This latest feature article, delving into the spirituality (or lack thereof) in the world of the Coens, comes courtesy of Rick Olson. Once finished, be sure to skip, jump, and hop on over to Coosa Creek Mambo, Rick’s stomping grounds where film and religion intersect.

When Evan asked me to write a piece on spirituality in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, I said “Huh? What spirituality?” Because as big a fan as I am, the last thing I think of when I think of the Coens is spirituality. But as I began to think about it, some spiritual chinks in the brothers’ cynical armor, and thought why not? I can do that . . .
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This excellent article comes from Minnesotan native Daniel Getahun of Getafilm, detailing the love/hate relationship those lakeside Scandinavians have held with the Coens ever since they immortalized them in Fargo. After partaking, be sure to ride the intertubes over to Daniel’s excellent site.

“Fargo’s naht even in Minnesoda, ya know!”

So has begun many a contentious conversation with Minnesotans about the Oscar-winning film from native sons Joel and Ethan Coen. A word of advice: if you’re visiting, don’t bring it up. Ironically, we obsessively claim the brothers as our own, while at the same time distance ourselves as much as possible from their most famous portrayal of us. Over the course of their filmmaking careers, the relationship between the brothers and their home state has indeed been a delicate one.

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Part two of Daniel Cook Johnson’s auditory head trip down Coens Lane commences forthwith. As previously mentioned, be sure to check out the gurgling fountain from which such musings bubble, Daniel’s film babble blog. In case you have need of catching up, be sure to peruse the first part of his verbose article, From the Dark Debut To The Snowblind Breakthrough (1984-1996).

PART II: From A Movie Mix-tape Made By The Dude To A Muted De-Countrified Terrain With Some Soggy Mountain Boys Songs On The Side (1998-2007)

In late 1997, not long it felt after the buzz of the awards and accolades for Fargo died down, a trailer appeared that announced the Coen brother’s next film was going to be a loud colorful comedy about an aging hippie bowler caught in, yep, another kidnapping caper! I know I was not alone when watching the preview in thinking “bring it on!”

The Big Lebowski blew me away when I first saw it on the big screen with the music being no small part of the experience. Especially since the movie is wall to wall music – from the first frame to the end credits over 30 songs are heard in either fragments or filling entire scenes. The issued soundtrack is the first Coens’ recording to consist of songs – not composed tracks – with only one Carter Burwell original – “Technopop (Wie Glauben)”. That’s because there is almost no Burwell in the film – a bit of suspenseful strains to heighten the tension in the ransom drop-off sequence is the only bit I can find. With A-list producer T. Bone Burnett brought in as “musical archivist” it’s apparent that the songs are where it’s at in the world of The Dude. In an interview in Entertainment Weekly at the time of the film’s release Ethan Coen said: “We were trying to find signature songs for each of the characters so the only thing [the songs] share is that nothing is particularly contemporary sounding. They’re all from previous eras, consistent with the characters, who had attitudes shaped by the ’60s, ’70s, or earlier.”
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Dylan Fields (aka “Fletch”) is the proprietor of the always-entertaining Blog Cabins, as well as the Grand Vizier of the Large Association of Movie Blogs. I frequent the former and MZ is a proud member of the latter – both are worth your attention. He turns his attention here to the dynamics, the mystical connection, the ’secret sauce’ if you will of brotherly directing teams.

Ethan and Joel Coen

• “If me and my brother had to work together it wouldn’t be happy days. They’ve got an amazing amount of respect for each other and they’re both making the same film. There were never any decisions that had to be made one way or another. It was just easy. Before you actually start a film that’s going to be directed by two people you think, “well that’s going to be weird…” But after about five minutes you forget and you don’t even notice.”
  - Kelly McDonald on her experience working with the Coen brothers.

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