ShaunHuston filmblog

DVD review at PopMatters

ShaunHuston — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:01:13 GMT

My review of the Dakota Skye DVD posted to PopMatters yesterday. Because this is a small film that many will not have seen, here's a one-line synopsis and excerpt from the review. It's essentially a young adult romantic comedy, but low-key and with a particular wrinkle: the female hero has the power to discern when people are lying. While this conceit creates some problems for the narrative, it also opens up some interesting possibilities:

Indeed, the most important function of Dakota’s truth-seeing is that it gives the filmmakers the freedom to develop her as a complex teen/young adult, and not reduce her to a girl looking for love. During the course of the movie, she engages in a number of behaviors largely forbidden to female romantic leads. She ditches her friends. She cheats on her boyfriend with his best friend, and does so without any overt displays of guilt. She continues to act as a dutiful girlfriend after the infidelity. She appears to enjoy sex.

In the moral economy of teen romantic comedies and coming of age films, any one of these acts would usually be enough to mark her as a bad girl, or at least as too blemished to be the hero. Here, her power not only makes her, by definition, extraordinary, but the particular nature of her ability means that she always has her own, good and demonstrable, reasons for what she does. She knows, in a real way, that Kevin’s feelings for her are shallow, that her friends are aggravated by her, and that people, boys and men in particular, will say all kinds of things if they think it will result in sex. All of these insights, and the fact that they are shared with the audience, make her behaviors understandable in ways that they normally would not be on screen, even though in the real world of teenagers, they are all common enough.

Read the full review.
PopMatters home.
Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

New review at PopMatters

ShaunHuston — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:00:37 GMT

I have a review of the Criterion Collection DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her at PopMatters today.
Read the review.
PopMatters home.

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

Bullets of Summer: Movie Edition

ShaunHuston — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:01:02 GMT

Picking up more pieces from this summer of non-blogging. Now, summer films.

Star Trek. Like, well, pretty much everybody, I found the new Trek film to be well-cast and thoroughly entertaining. Structurally, I think that the intro for Kirk could have been tighter – the joyride scene in no way needs to be as drawn out as it is, especially not when followed by the bar fight. For me, the movie really gets started when Spock shows up. And yet, I do agree with Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot about the lack of philosophical ambition in JJ Abrams' reboot. Trek's creators have always strived to make the franchise about something, and while this hasn't always led to good film or TV, it does, I think, help explain the durability of the storyworld. The new movie is not only the first installment that seems to have been made purely for thrill and spectacle, but allows horrific genocide to go by with hardly more than a nod in the direction of the profundity of such an event. I still enjoyed the movie, but after the fact, I felt myself missing the typical moral and intellectual earnestness of the series.
Sugar. An interesting and sometimes beautiful film, particularly in its handling of cultural juxtapositions and the deftness with which it wraps an immigration story in a sports movie. I need to watch it again though to fully develop my thoughts; my expectations were pretty high going in and sometimes it helps to see a movie like that once, with those burdens, and then again later, without them to gain some perspective.
The Brothers Bloom. Another film I was looking forward to, and enjoyed, but need to see again. I mentally composed, but never wrote, a post on the movie's production design, which I think works well to shift the core cast into their own version of reality, one where Stephen's elaborate and literary cons might actually work. Motivated quirkiness of this kind, which is probably most often associated today with Wes Anderson's movies, works better for me than unmotivated oddness, as in Juno (2007), where the quirks are pretty much their own arguments, and not in the service of anything of consequence.
The Girlfriend Experience. Not sure what to write here; a film I'm glad I saw, but can't say that it left much of a lasting impression.
Public Enemies. This is a movie I like and appreciate more now than when I first saw it. I am compelled by the use of HD for a period piece like this, a device that clearly announces itself as a product of now, a movie about the 1930s, not of or from the period, which is the more conventional way of approaching historical material.
Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. As the film franchise has progressed, I am less enthused about seeing these movies. In part, this is because the films are becoming more what they should have been to begin with, which is directed at fans and readers of the books, which I am not.
Moon. The best film I've seen this summer, easily. Beautiful, cool, provocative, anchored by a surprisingly understated lead, almost one-person show, performance from Sam Rockwell. Love the way the film quietly and cleverly plays with the memory of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

Catching up with DVD reviews at PopMatters

ShaunHuston — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:00:52 GMT

Since my last update, I have had three new DVD reviews post at PM:

A Film is a Burning Place: Works by Enid Baxter Blader
Inside Ouside: Vandalism, Art and Vandalism as Art (On spout)
RiP: A Remix Manifesto (On spout)

Cross-posted on Spout.

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

Tags and tagging

ShaunHuston — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:00:56 GMT

Many times when I add a new item to my delicious account or LibraryThing or to Spout, etc., I have a moment when I pause to think about my tags. I go back-and-forth about adding new tags to items that I know ought to be applied to ones already in my account. With tags I use commonly, I sometimes can't remember my original construction (lower case, upper case, and so on; services vary in how easy it is to check this kind of thing). And there's frequently the temptation to apply unique, virtually one-of-a-kind tags to items. Sometimes I resist this temptation, why create something you're only going to use once, but at other times I know I'll want a label that will give me virtually certain one-click access to the item. So, some days I tag very conservatively, and on others I tag with abandon (hee). But today I've been wondering how much of this is beside the point. Maybe tagging is about the moment and then discovery later? On the other hand, doesn't there need to be some kind of order if you're going to actually find things in the future? Maybe the best idea is to apply and create as many tags as possible for each item to maximize your chances of finding it in some later search? Librarians? I know you're out there.

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

Yes, another PopMatters pointer

ShaunHuston — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:01:12 GMT

I have a review of the Ashes of Time Redux DVD that posted today.

Read the review.
PopMatters home.

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

PopMatters: "Most Memorable Films of 1999"

ShaunHuston — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:00:50 GMT

To commemorate the site's 10th anniversary, PopMatters is rolling out a special feature on the sixty-two most memorable films of 1999. This entry will link to each day's selection.

Monday: January-May.

Tuesday: May-August.

Wednesday: August-October (includes my entry on The Limey).

Thursday: October-November.

Friday: November-December.

(Cross-posted on Spout).

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

To Catch A Thief DVD review posted

ShaunHuston — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:01:08 GMT

My review of the new "Centennial Collection" DVD of To Catch a Thief posted to PopMatters yesterday.

Read the review.
PopMatters home.

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

PopMatters feature on Touch of Evil

ShaunHuston — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:45:04 GMT

I have a feature on directors, marketing, auteur-ship, Orson Welles, and Touch of Evil up at PopMatters. It will be on the front page for another day or so.

More on the writing of DVD reviews

ShaunHuston — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:01:22 GMT

A little while ago, I posted an entry about my evolving approach to writing DVD reviews. Since then, I have thought more about how my writing process has changed over the past few years.

One mental block I have had to push past is the idea that each review needs to hold some grand insight into cinema, or pop culture, or society, or, at least, the TV series or film itself.

The truth is not every film or TV show lends itself to such statement-making. I have been detaching myself from this idea for awhile, but it was my recent, forthcoming review of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief that crystalized the need.

When confronted with a film by someone like Hitchcock, I immediately gravitate towards the Statement, but Thief, not surprisingly, deflected such thinking. Yes, it's well-crafted, etc., etc., but no one is going to mistake it for one of the director's masterworks. It's high gloss entertainment. No reason to make it into much else (by way of example, I think I forced the modest Diggers into too big of a box, and I know that one reason why I struggled with Touch of Evil is Orson Welles).

There is also the question of readership. PopMatters aims at a general, but literate audience. That gives me license to write with an academic eye and formality of language, but PM readers, ultimately, want what most readers of reviews want: a sense of whether a DVD is worth their time or not. Being able to claim some grand significance could be one reason to buy, rent, or watch something, but, of course, there's a lot of ground leading up to that point, too. In academia, there's a fetish for originality that I've had to unlearn, something that I'm actually a little thankful for for other reasons as well. I think that readers likely gravitate to the “voice” of a reviewer more than they look for novelty.

Length is another perceptual adjustment I've had to make. Journal articles tend to run 5,000-10,000 words. I knew that that wasn't necessary for features at PM, let alone reviews, but I started with three pages, or 1,500-2,000 words as a standard. This has been largely self-imposed, my reviews editor is pretty laissez faire on this issue, but I have, over the past few months, especially, begun to value concision. I think that this has emerged from writing “Worlds in Panels” where my editor does insist on brevity. Online reading is measured primarily in time rather than pages, and avoiding TLDR-type judgments only makes sense in terms of building and keeping readers.

And on that note ...

Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs