This brilliant and disturbing documentary takes you deep into the shallows of Kim Jong Il’s hermit kingdom. Somehow, Vice Magazine’s Shane Smith (founder of VBS, Vice’s video division and star of their Guide to Travel series) and a clandestine-camera-wielding companion secure passage into North Korea from China -- pretending to be tourists, of course, because journalists go to jail. For an hour Smith explores the thin, saccharine veneer of majesty and might that the dictatorship uses to obscure the truth about the desperately impoverished and broken country. He mingles with eerily upbeat hosts, waitresses and tour guides, all hand-picked to chaperone him 24/7 during his stay (the pretense of which is to view and report on the Arirang Mass Games, a spectacular orgy of propaganda and gymnastics too baffling for words). Complete with a heartbreakingly awkward karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistol’s "Anarchy in the U.K.," this documentary is a must-see: a visceral primer for anyone interested in understanding the uniquely other-worldly yet backwards North Korea. -- Adam Schaefer
Music, math, the interactive: these are three things that I really like, and Marco Fusinato's art includes them all. Mass Black Implosion is probably my favorite of his projects -- it reimagines musical scores, sometimes by overlaying them with scribbles of varying thickness (maps to some imagined territory), in architecturally-precise lines (an explosion into three dimensions), or as some kind of gloriously strange infographic for the world to come. Aetheric Plexus, in sharp contrast, turns audiovisual detail into interactive assault. It's difficult to get a sense of the scope of some of these works, but it's evident that Fusinato's gallery showings include a vast collaborative and musical component -- I'd love a chance to see some of this stuff live -- and I'm quite taken with his curatorial series You Don't Have to Call it Music, which tasks visual artists to create music. -- Lauren Caldwell
Dianne Wiest first struck me as the standout of Hannah and Her Sisters; then as the Law & Order DA who tells Sam Waterston what to do and how to think. She aged between these roles and now is even older, the offbeat beauty of her youth having morphed into a mature visage of both astonishing expressiveness and grandmotherly inscrutability — a crucial element of her facile and felicitous performance as psychotherapist Gina Toll on HBO's In Treatment. Psychotherapy is a delicate, hyper-pressurized encounter in which change rests on an enduringly empathetic therapist (who is also capable of being perceived as such) imbuing contingent actions and words with novel meanings and potentialities. Gina's patient Paul, a former protégé who returns for guidance after a decade of estrangement that began when Gina denied him a promotion, is ever probing Gina's face for nefariousness. A sleepy spider lying in wait, is what Paul calls her: What secret motives lie covertly in the fragile folds of her jowls, in the puffy bags beneath her eyes, etched on her weblike cheeks? Her enigmatic expressions initially offend Paul, whose history with Gina predisposes him to read any ambiguity in her mien as perfunctorily negative. Not sharing this pervading bias, we enjoy the virtuosic, Emmy-winning face of this gorgeous old lady whose allure and gravitas make me want to ask her to run for president. -- Kevin Hilke
Dec 31, 2009 2
It’s the unwillingness to explain that makes Avatar so successful. It realizes that the plot relies on relatively common archetypes that any audience can understand. Instead of trying to make everything plausible, Avatar piles on the spectacle.
Dec 19, 2009 0
Holocaust movies are sometimes meant to be flickering memorials – long sets of jittery frames that force us to remember past events, even if what happens on screen is purely fictional. But cinema always invades the thoughts and memories it didn’t create. So as Holocaust memory gives way to post-memory, Holocaust films give way to post-memory Holocaust films – La Question Humaine (2007) is an important example.
Dec 3, 2009 0
David Milch’s Deadwood lays bare the dynamic and discursive construction of subjective experience with unrivaled felicity, clarity, and skill. Milch’s characters emerge, shimmer, and recede too frenetically for us to pull back and examine them as complex wholes. We are instead absolutely stuck, with Deadwood’s inhabitants, in a state of constant, potent experiential flux. Radical contingency reigns, making moments of inexplicable terror and moments of astonishing grace equally likely and equally unpredictable.
Nov 17, 2009 0
Conventional wisdom on Mad Men is that there are two sides of the main character: 1) Don, the smooth-talker who sleeps around and plays it cool, and 2) Dick, the defenseless country boy who shies away during confrontations and altogether seems weak. I reject the distinction.
Nov 13, 2009 0
Season 3 was about Destruction, but the quiet kind of destruction. We saw JFK die, an event which Weiner once claimed he didn’t feel like showing, because what was left to say? Well, Weiner managed to be the first person in years, maybe decades, to say something new about the JFK assassination: far from changing everything and spoiling everyone’s fun and destroying Camelot, it was the best thing to happen to the characters all season. It opened their eyes.
