IFC.com - Film News

The Sandbox: "Flower"'s Video Game Poetry

2009-07-03T13:00:00Z

Though it sounds strange to say, few games have ever provided the rush that "Flower" does. The third release by thatgamecompany (TGC), "Flower" is a downloadable PS3 game that provides a two-hour ride over open plains and through deep canyons. You use the console's Sixaxis motion controller to direct a current of wind that, along its journey, accumulates flower petals. You tilt the control, and the wind tilts with you, a mechanism only complicated by having to push a button (any button!) to spur the wind forward. In the six levels, all obliquely cast as a flower's "dream," you're asked to touch, and collect, petals with the ability to animate the environments around you, ones crafted with an eye toward evocative detail (the sway of grass, the range of colors, the shifting temperament of the weather) and scored to a delicate combination of melancholy music and twinkling sound effects. Sounds "artsy"? It is, a status advanced by devoted fans like "Pan's Labyrinth" director Guillermo del Toro, who said it's "like Haiku poetry." Don't let such yucky, fawning praise dissuade you. On a purely sensory level, this daring title is more stirring than almost anything found at a mass retailer, imparting a heady blast of sensations -- of flight, of blooming, of birth, of renewal -- via a simple, abstract experience.

]]> Founded by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, the SoCal-based TGC has made its name with three games -- the PC's "Cloud," and the PS3's "flOw" and "Flower" -- that attempt to expand the boundaries of what games can do and what they are. TGC is at the forefront of a growing indie game movement fostered by the major consoles' new online distribution channels, which can deliver not just supplemental material for major titles, but also idiosyncratic stand-alone products aimed at niche audiences. And that's how one might describe "Flower," which has no avatar to embody, no enemies to kill and no concrete narrative to complete. Well, maybe that last point is debatable, especially with regards to the game's later levels, but we'll get to that. What's most notable about "Flower" is its ability to generate intangible emotions through its simple conceit. A surprising swell in the chest greets your first go-round with the game, which induces a potent feeling of limitless freedom, of being unshackled, thanks in part to how the controls create a tangible, tactile relationship between user and content.

If I sound enthusiastic about "Flower," and I am, it's because TGC's latest is that rare instance in which familiar gameplay mechanics -- touching a series of objects to unlock challenges; motion controls; cut-scene clues -- work not to further a traditional plot but instead to elicit primal emotions. Calling it a "zen" game, as many have, is apt when looking at its first four levels, which are pleasantly tranquil, requiring the player to coast through a windswept field, a windmill-peppered valley, some ravine-marked terrain and a nocturnal countryside dotted with bales of hay and lampposts. That peacefulness, allowed to flourish by a conceit that initially avoids burdening itself with overt meaning, has led many to make "Flower" a case study in the ongoing "games as art" debate, as it (like "Braid") self-consciously employs, and manipulates, time-honed formulas to stimulate both the head and the heart.

"Flower" is another heartening example of how games are evolving. But it's not, despite the praise I've just showered upon it, a revolutionary triumph, or really even a complete success when judged on its own terms. Considering how moving the game's opening sequences are, it's easy for enthusiasm to give way to exaggeration, a situation that's plagued many critical assessments of TGC's Little-Download-That-Could. But as it moves from levels of serenity to those of ominous darkness, progress that's mirrored by the gradual revelation of a guiding story, "Flower" loses its way, forgoing what made it so compelling in favor of delivering an experience offered by a bounty of on-rails shooters and platformers ("Sonic the Hedgehog"'s coin-collecting, tube-navigating race sequences being a direct influence) that gamers have been playing for the better part of the past 20 years.

Night Fever: The World of Obsessive Fan Movies

2009-07-02T14:00:00Z

A crowd eagerly watches as a man dressed in a white suit performs an elaborate disco routine to the sounds of the Bee Gees' "You Should Be Dancing." Sound familiar? It should; it's the signature sequence from 1977's "Saturday Night Fever." But now the scene belongs to another film as well, "Tony Manero," named after John Travolta's Brooklyn disco king character. In this version, a middle-aged "Fever" fanatic named Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro) appears on a Chilean TV show and reenacts those famous dance moves as part of a contest to determine the country's best Tony Manero impersonator. Raúl's impoverished struggles in late '70s Chile resemble Tony's in late '70s Brooklyn (a reason, no doubt, he responds so strongly to "Saturday Night Fever") with one crucial difference: where Tony strains against obstacles he encounters, Raúl simply removes them. If that obstacle happens to be a person, he kills him. Raúl's violent activities and compulsive need to reenact every facet of Travolta's routine, from the number of buttons on his slacks to the flashing lights of the disco floor beneath him, makes "Tony Manero" the latest and quite possibly the most unsettling entry in the subgenre of creepy movies about obsessive fans. In order to understand why it's so uniquely scary, we've got to first consider its predecessors.

]]> Traditional obsessive fan movies grow out of a subcategory of thrillers involving stalkers, where an innocent invites a seemingly harmless person into their life, never suspecting their new friend or lover is a deranged, homicidal maniac until it's far too late. One of the earliest archetypal films of the stalker genre is an obsessive fan film as well: 1971's "Play Misty For Me," directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. He plays a Dave Garver, a late night disc jockey at a jazz station in Carmel, California, where each night he provides "a little verse, a little talk, and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by." A woman calls Dave every night asking him to "play 'Misty' for me," and one night at a bar, Dave picks up a woman named Evelyn (Jessica Walter) without immediately realizing the two are one and the same. Dave thinks of Evelyn as a one-night stand; Evelyn thinks otherwise. She takes out her frustration on Dave's cleaning woman, and later on his girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills), which leads Dave to race in his car to save her, with Eastwood suggesting the character's fragile mental state by intercutting the sequence with shots of Evelyn slashing a portrait of Dave's face with a butcher knife. The terror of the Evelyn character comes from her persistent insinuation and a kind of curdled fake politeness strangers mistake for the real thing.

For fans like Evelyn, it isn't enough to meet their idol; they need to possess him forever. It's a truly queasy thought, but this desire to materialize and memorialize is at the core of many real world fan-artist relationships. We've all swooned over a film or a book we've loved, and a lot of us have tried to recreate that first giddy high by repeatedly rewatching the movie, or collecting the action figures, or completing the set of "Star Trek" collector's cups from Burger King. In obsessive fan movies, the need to possess is often giving extreme expression via the act of kidnapping. A famous example is 1990's "Misery," where James Caan's novelist Paul Sheldon is rescued from a near-fatal car wreck by his biggest fan, a seemingly cherubic nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). As Annie tells it, the roads are blocked by the storm, the telephones lines are down, and anyway, Paul's legs are too injured from the crash to move to a hospital, so it's up to Annie to nurse Paul back to health in her spare bedroom. Most of this is malarkey, invented by Annie because of her fixation with Paul's popular series of romantic historical novels about a character named Misery (her mantle is practically a shrine to them, with a signed picture of the author flanked by two stacks of novels).

Judah Friedlander Keeps Truckin'

2009-07-01T14:00:00Z

Comedian-turned-actor Judah Friedlander ("Zoolander," "American Splendor") wears a lot of hats, and that's not to say he's bogged down with multiple titles. No, if you're familiar with his stand-up, VH1 appearances -- or most likely, his role as sketch comedy writer Frank Rossitano on NBC's "30 Rock"-- you've seen his endless array of trucker hats with pithy messages on them ("World Champion" being his most recognizable proclamation). Add an oversized pair of thick-rimmed glasses and five o' clock shadow, and you've got the Friedlander look, which has its own methodology, as the Spirit Award nominee (for "Duane Hopwood") would soon school me.

Adding to Friedlander's eclectic résumé is the new indie rom-com "I Hate Valentine's Day," an encore reunion for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" leads Nia Vardalos and John Corbett. Vardalos makes her directorial debut and stars as a Brooklyn florist with a strict five-date philosophy on romance, and Friedlander plays her quirky neighborhood pal Dan. While the funnyman was off the clock during an unusual gig in Las Vegas, we discussed the new movie, what he learned about Mickey Rourke when they worked together on "The Wrestler" and why Manhattan comedy club promoters are always asking passersby if they like comedy.

Is it true that you're at a table tennis tournament in Vegas?

That is correct, sir. There's a special ping-pong tournament called Hardbat. Hardbat basically uses amateur-type paddles, the type used in the 1950s and earlier. It's not the modern game. The professional paddles are very fast. These are slow and not very spinny, so it's a different game. Anyway, @radical.media, Fremantle and the Mark Gordon Company got together with Bud Light and ESPN to put on a three-day Hardbat event [that will] air on ESPN in September. I play competitive ping-pong, so I came to them and said, "I want to be a part of this because I want to help promote ping-pong." I was a TV host, sideline and fan interviewer all weekend.

]]> I saw your skills in action in a Sports Illustrated video. What's your history with the game?

Straight up, I played as a kid in the basement and rec centers. I remember one of our childhood friends, all of a sudden, had all these new serves and shots. We found out he was learning them from a Chinese guy who lived down the street, and then we found out from the Chinese guy down the street that there are official tournaments. My brother started playing some events, he went to ping-pong camp. This was when I was around 14 or 15. I only did one tournament, but I mostly learned from my brother. Then we stopped playing for about 25 years, and this past September, I started playing again. I play several times a week. Ping-pong's an awesome sport. I'm the World Champion, you know. I never lose, so it's pretty satisfying.

What is the "World Champion of the World" competition like, and have you accomplished any new feats to keep your title?

Well, I just did another World Championship event, and I won it again, so I'm still the World Champion. It's straight-up death matches. That's pretty hardcore, dude.

I've never seen that televised. How do I know you haven't been making it up?

Just ask around, dude. Do some research. See if anyone will deny it. I got the windbreaker to prove it. [Anyone] could make a "World Champion" hat or t-shirt. I have the windbreaker that says "World Champion" with my name on it. I think that's proof enough.

I'm convinced. Perhaps now is a good time to talk about your role in Nia Vardalos' new feature.

She's a sweetheart. She's such a nice lady with great energy. Very warm. She's certainly an actor's director, and great to work with. It was a crazy shoot, 15 or 18 days. We did [my scenes] in the Windsor Terrace and Park Slope areas in Brooklyn. I don't know how much I'm going to be in the movie -- I'm guessing not very much. I'm one of a group of friends that [Vardalos] hangs out with sometimes, that group being played by Zoe Kazan, Rachel Dratch, Mike Starr and Jason Mantzoukas.

How do you feel about Valentine's Day? Sweet and romantic, or a greeting-card holiday for lemmings?

As the World Champion, every day is pretty much like Valentine's Day for me -- as far as hooking up with the ladies. But Valentine's Day is definitely one of those days where it's either awesome or it's a downer.

New Wave and Old Guard

2009-07-01T13:00:00Z

"The only thing important is where somebody's going." That bit of existential wisdom comes from none other than John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), the soft-spoken, bank-jacking antihero of "Public Enemies," Michael Mann's latest epic about unhappy tough guys doing what they do best. It's offered by way of flirtation, as part of Dillinger's out-of-nowhere and all-out attempt to impress a gorgeous hat-check girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) -- a pitch of woo so intense, and so divorced from what Billie considers realistic feeling, that it both unsettles and amuses her. "I'm catching up, meeting someone like you," he tells her. "Boy, you're in a hurry," she deadpans. "If you were looking at what I'm looking at," "Public Enemy" Number One informs her, "you'd be in a hurry, too."

]]> On first viewing, I was inclined to call "Public Enemies" minor Mann, a characterization meant not as a putdown, but a simple summary. As anyone who's read me before well knows, I'm a student of the poetic-bombastic filmmaker, whose worst films are more visually arresting and artistically committed than almost any recent Oscar winner I can recall. His films often play like Samuel Fuller by way of Michelangelo Antonioni -- violent tone poems exploring the angst of machismo and the impossibility of deep and lasting connection by way of dreamy montage, hypnotic music and disorienting, off-center compositions. I'm hugely impressed by Mann's formal restlessness, his thematic consistency and his willingness to change up his game over time (moving from the Stanley Kubrick-level anal retentiveness of his work prior to 1999's "The Insider" to a more visually and dramatically loose aesthetic, much of it stemming from his recent conversion to high-definition video and mostly handheld camerawork).

That said, "Public Enemies" initially struck me as a signpost/stopgap feature along the lines of "Collateral," a Michael Mann 101 movie that compressed some of his signature tropes into easily graspable baubles, a work less interesting for its situations and set pieces than for the way in which it seemed to find its director taking stock of recent preoccupations and stylistic tics before moving on. (Conscious callbacks to prior Mann movies abound, such as the mirroring of obsessed cops and robbers, and gestures such as Dillinger somewhat gingerly laying his gun on a tabletop when he enters a hotel-room-as-domestic-sanctuary, and telling bank customers he's after the bank's money, not theirs -- all echoes of key moments in "Heat" and its TV movie inspiration, "L.A. Takedown.") The structure of Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman's script is episodic, patchy even. Judged against the norms of modern screenwriting convention, the film doesn't cover much ground; it's episodic in a manner faintly reminiscent of mid-period Oliver Stone (think "Born on the Fourth of July" or "The Doors," films that traded narrative-advancing montage for a spare assortment of protracted, often borderline real-time scenes).

And yet, in the two-plus weeks since I first saw "Public Enemies," it has lingered in my mind more vividly than almost any Hollywood film of the past couple of years -- and I'm convinced that its ostentatiously un-blockbustery tendencies are the source of the movie's vividness. While offering many of the core elements that the marketplace demands (including a badass antihero, a crime-and-violence storyline and a love story), "Public Enemies" gives those same elements short shrift, the better to concentrate on intense but largely unarticulated feelings and psychological states.

Strangers in the Night

2009-06-30T14:20:00Z

Forget Who's Your Favorite Beatle, or Who's Your Favorite Monkee, or even Who's Your Favorite Little Rascal (for me, it's Wheezer, God save him) -- if you ask someone What's Your Favorite French New Wave Landmark and they say Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), you'd better start a endless tab for cocktails, hunker down for a long and glorious night of gamesmanship and bedevilment, and forget about tomorrow. Famous as the über-art film openly mocked by Pauline Kael and the authors of "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time," Resnais' saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies?

]]> Cavils are absurd, because "Marienbad" so obviously avoids being a "normal" movie in every frame. On the most fundamental level, it's a ravishing formal achievement, patrolling in drunken, swoony slow-motion through the Neoclassical hallways, ballrooms and elaborate gardens of an apparently infinite hotel-palace, a stomach-churning, cobbled-together location that's the film's most vivid character (decadent but hollow), and a fantastically expressive statement about wealth, class, narcissism and the dying European aristocracy. (Kael lovingly slammed the film as a "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe party.")

Resnais began as a liberal documentarian, and the architectural hyperbole of "Marienbad" is no accident. But the core of the film is, of course, more mysterious than that: it's an exercise, or a triathlon, on the very slipperiness of narrative, and therefore of memory. Or vice-versa. Within this cavernous maze of ornate filigree and looming artworks, the comatose guests stalk or sometimes just stand, and we follow one such tuxedoed zombie (Giorgio Albertazzi) as he attempts to make a woman (Delphine Seyrig) remember that they had, in fact, met and engaged in a romance the previous year, maybe in Marienbad, maybe here. He spins yarns and speculations like a talkative Beckett character, she toys with him, plays along, he doubts his memories, moments and slices of dialogue repeat themselves, and the film never establishes anything "happening" in the present tense -- just a rumored sense of a past that might never have been.

Resnais' movie (written and conceived by nouveau roman pope Alain Robbe-Grillet) is both a hypnotic trance to endure and a text intended to be interpreted in an infinite variety of ways; it was the latter aspect that made the movie both spectacularly popular back in a more adventurous filmgoing age and vulnerable to lowbrow attack. But think of Beckett and Calvino and Sartre, and you get closer to the film's accomplishment; the great existentialist questions on hand are easy to scoff at, but are also still harrowingly difficult to answer. What allowed the movie to rock bourgeois worlds in the early '60s (the ample Criterion supplements document the film's reception as attentively as its production) was its daring evacuation of narrative orthodoxy, asking us to wonder if anything in the film is "real" (such a silly question, but one that still drives viewers nuts), and to understand meta-characters who seem to be talking about "now" as if it already happened, or has already been imagined, and may already be forgotten.

The Action Movie Auteurs

2009-06-29T19:30:00Z

Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow... Tony Scott? It takes a certain type of action movie director to earn the love of the Film Comment crowd. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at which action filmmakers are taken seriously as artists and why.

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Nollywood, Bollywood and a Little Bit of Hollywood

2009-06-29T14:00:00Z

A little lightness this week to offset last week's doom and gloom in theaters; love is in the air, as we enjoy imported romance alongside some family friendly animation and docs on the film industry and its players.

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"The Beaches of Agnès"
While most people commit their memoirs to the page, Belgian octogenarian auteur Agnès Varda has constructed a nostalgic visual document of her life, times and work. Flitting between past and present, Varda assembles a collage of memory and experience channeled to us through whimsical reconstruction, archival photographs, home movies and abstract compositions (including a room where the walls are entirely comprised of 35mm prints from her failed stab at fantasy, "Les Créatures") that frame the rich tapestry of her life in her own inimitable style.
Opens in New York.

]]> "The Girl From Monaco"
Courtroom drama meets bedroom farce in this breezy multigenerational romantic dramedy from French co-writer/director Anne Fontaine. Veteran thesp Fabrice Luchini stars as Bertrand Beauvois, a slick defense attorney who's a smooth talker in the courtroom, but a fumbling neurotic in the bedroom. Fortunately, he has his buttoned-down bodyguard Christophe (Roschdy Zem) to rely on for advice with the ladies when the trial of Bertrand's life is complicated by his burgeoning relationship with weather girl Audrey (former real-life celebrity weather girl Louise Bourgoin). In French with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs"
With the spectacularly poor "Titan A.E" now a distant memory, Fox Animation has given Pixar and DreamWorks something to think about, with their Blue Sky Studios delivering a succession of solidly entertaining animated hits in recent years. This third installment to the sub-zero family saga from returning director Carlos Saldanha finds expectant mammoth couple Manny and Ellie (Ray Romano and Queen Latifah) and smart ass saber-tooth Diego (Denis Leary) on a mission to rescue Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), who's nabbed himself some dinosaur eggs. The real star of the show remains Scrat, the squirrel-rat whose inept pursuit of the perfect nut is now complicated by competition from a wily female.
Opens wide.

"I Hate Valentine's Day"
Less than a month after she returned to screens with "My Life in Ruins," Nia Vardalos is reuniting with her "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" co-star John Corbett, as this most profitable of indie screen pairings try their hand at the unromantic romantic comedy subgenre. In her directorial debut, Vardalos stars as Genevieve, a perennially unlucky in love New Yorker whose serial disappointment with the dating scene has led her to adopt a hard and fast rule of five dates max. After a newly arrived restaurateur (Corbett) with commitment issues turns her head, Genevieve seizes her opportunity to woo him with the idea of commitment-free dating.
Opens in limited release and on demand.

Dueling with Stephen Frears

2009-06-26T13:55:00Z

Stephen Frears burst on the scene in 1985 with his cheeky "My Beautiful Laundrette," igniting a winning streak that included "Prick Up Your Ears," "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Grifters" and "The Queen." Though famously hard to pigeonhole, the genre-spanning filmmaker gravitates toward folks struggling on the social margins or engaged in emotional gamesmanship. Frears is also, famously, a royal pain to interview. He almost defies you to extract responses from him, looking simultaneously gleeful and contrite, so you somehow empathize with him. In a sit-down for his new film "Cheri," he was reliably armored -- perhaps because his antennae are exquisitely attuned to pick up what he might call a "dodgy" reaction to his latest project.

More than two decades after "Liaisons," "Cheri" reunites Frears with ace screenwriter Christopher Hampton and Michelle Pfeiffer. Set in Belle Époque Paris, the saucy tragicomedy centers on the sumptuous world of courtesans -- demimondaines -- banned from polite society, yet another of Frears' fringe groups. Pfeiffer plays Lea de Lonval, a retired, still-seductive courtesan who's ambushed by love for boy toy Cheri (Rupert Friend), the wayward son of her former rival played by Kathy Bates.

]]> To date the critical consensus on "Cheri" has been mixed. The coifs, costumes, and art deco interiors of Hector Guimard are to die for, and Rupert Friend makes a dishy Cheri. But Kathy Bates is incongruous as a Grand Guignol grotesque who resembles a former courtesan about as much as Mrs. Thatcher. And Pfeiffer is a bit of a tease. Though you could be forgiven for expecting an Anglo-Saxon breakthrough film with a 50-year-old heroine as an object of desire, most of the time Pfeiffer looks, well, 30-something. Her Lea is more about cosmetically contrived youth than the earthy, sensual and maternal temptress of Colette's novella. Maybe it's Brit reserve, but "Cheri" never nails this very Gallic, very naughty world of women who have parlayed sexual savoir faire into gemstones -- or conveys Colette's knowing take on the intersection of desire and love. Fresh off a cigarette he's been sneaking on the terrace, Frears greets me with, "You rather look like Colette." So far so good.

How is Colette's "Cheri," published in 1920, relevant for viewers today?

It's about rich people. It all comes tumbling down in the end. [laughs]

How about the love story of an older woman and a much younger man?

I can see it would have been more subversive when she wrote it. It's unremarkable now.

So you see it primarily as a story about rich people?

[Irritably] Well, I'm not sure that's how I see it, but it's one of the things that I liked about it.

The film is gorgeous to look at, but the display of wealth is also a bit disturbing.

Yes, one man stood up and was appalled, absolutely apoplectic about it. "Why do you make movies about such worthless people?" Well, of course, they're not worthless -- their values are just different. Then it all comes crashing down.

Are you drawing a parallel in the film to what's going on in the global economy now?

Well, you're trying to force me into some position that I'm not sure is entirely mine. [laughs]

How would you put it then?

I don't know, I don't ask those questions. I just liked it when I read it. I thought, "This is rather wonderful." I don't sit around thinking is this relevant or is that relevant. I mean, how is "The Queen" relevant? It's a preposterous institution in Britain -- it's not at all relevant. So I don't really think about relevance. You're more obsessed with this business of speaking to people today than I am. I'm probably rather unworldly.

What is "Cheri" saying about the male/female dynamic?

People say to me, you always make movies about strong women.

Okay, what does the Lea/Cheri romance say about men and women?

That the unconscious is more powerful than the conscious.

Kathryn Bigelow Goes to War

2009-06-25T19:00:00Z

Kathryn Bigelow's long been known as the most bad-ass chick in the action movie boys club, a superbly kinetic filmmaker whose work has ranged from the vampire horror-Western "Near Dark" to the brawny surfer heist cult favorite "Point Break" to the dystopic visions of "Strange Days." Her new film, "The Hurt Locker," treads into the most daring territory of all -- the cinematic no man's land of the current Iraq War, where a U.S. bomb squad struggles under the overwhelming pressure of putting their lives on the line day after day.

Written by journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, an embedded reporter in Iraq whose 2004 Playboy story "Death and Dishonor" became the basis for the 2007 film "In the Valley of Elah," "The Hurt Locker" is no didactic slog through the conflict's well-discussed political mire. It's instead pulse-poundingly experiential, dropping you into the unstable head-space of a trio of men -- ably played by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty -- who in the face on constant peril have turned to breakdowns, violence and almost sociopathic bravado. It's a tour de force, and one that has a rare opportunity to unite the cinephile and cineplex crowds in acclaim. I got a chance to talk with Bigelow and Boal at SXSW earlier this year, as the film finished up a festival tour that started in Toronto in 2008.

I was going to ask you what I'm sure is a variation on a question you've gotten in every interview, about the Iraq War and how loaded it's become as a topic for a film. But I realized there really aren't many films that are actually set in combat, that they all tend to be about--

Kathryn Bigelow: Reintegration into the home front -- right. So I look at it as -- there hasn't really been one, and there's sort of zero competition. We're setting the bar.

Mark Boal: We made the movie because we thought it was going be a good story and, hopefully, an intense cinematic experience. We just hope people like it as much as we do, and then leave the market to those who specialize in counting beans.

]]> In the best way possible, "The Hurt Locker" is very much an action movie. And sometimes there's a sense that the Iraq War's not supposed to be represented as exciting in that fashion, that doing so is somehow ethically problematic...

KB: Well, it's really based on firsthand observation, the observation being Mark on an embed. So that's the purchase. And under the aegis of true fiction, we tried to look at it as accurate, authentic and realistic. It's not a documentary; it's a character study of a volunteer soldier and of men who, arguably, have the most dangerous job in the world. What is the psychological chemistry of that individual that gets up in the morning and walks toward what a rational human being would be running from? You can politicize that or non-politicize it.

MB: There's no politics in the trenches, is the old saw. And it's kind of true. We just tried to make it realistic, naturalistic and exciting -- exciting is probably the wrong word. But it's naturally tense. It's a bomb. It could go off. It could kill you. If we could show that, then we did our job. And leave the politics to the politicians.

KB: And not glamorize it. That was something very important to me, to not mediate it. This is an extraordinary facet of this particular conflict. There's a natural dramatic narrative to bomb disarmament. It doesn't need any other kind of framing. Personally, I think it's extremely heroic. But it's there for you to make your own opinion.

I thought Jeremy Renner's character James was pretty remarkable -- Mark, while you were embedded, did you come across people who were similarly addicted to that rush of danger?

MB: It's a movie -- I probably shouldn't generalize about the psychology of soldiers because it's a broad, complicated question that would take years to answer. But it's definitely true that we're dealing with an all-volunteer army, not a draft army, and we wanted to show what that meant in a cinematic way, and not show yet another Vietnam-era view of war.

Not to say there's anything wrong with those movies. But that was a different war in a different time. I think Kathryn did a great job of taking that type of movie, a war movie, and reinventing it in a contemporary way to be very intense and edge-of-your-seat and, second of all, to reflect the new psychological reality of an all-volunteer army, which is what we have. It's a job. They choose to do it. Good or bad, it's just a different situation than people that are drafted.

Was that part of the appeal in choosing this particular aspect of the war?

KB: The appeal for me -- and it's like this in all the projects that I've done -- starts from character first, and then moves outward.

The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time

2009-06-25T13:00:00Z

They should be called leaders.

We know them as trailers, but they don't trail anything; they play before the movie, not after it. The name dates to their earliest incarnation, when they actually did follow the feature. The documentary "Coming Attractions" dates the very first trailer to a 1912 Edison serial entitled "What Happened to Mary?" After each installment, a black card with white text would appear to inform audiences "The next incident in the series of 'What Happened to Mary' will be shown a week from now." Not exactly "In a world..." but it did the trick back in 1912.

What happened to Mary wasn't nearly as important as what happened to trailers, which have grown into one of the most popular forms of advertising in the world. Some think they spoil the movies -- Gene Siskel famously hated them so much he wouldn't enter a theater while they were playing -- but for the rest of us, they're a treasured part of the moviegoing ritual, a delicious cinematic appetizer to prepare us for the main course.

There are many ways to measure a trailer's quality, from the persuasiveness of its salesmanship to the cleverness of its copywriting. Ultimately, we decided that the best trailers are those that most effectively combine art and commerce, and that sell and entertain with equal skill. Some of the previews on our list are for classic films, but many are for mediocrities. Some are for absolutely bombs. That speaks to the magic of the trailers. You could argue that these clips play to our basest instincts in order to convince us to see movies that aren't always good. But considered from another perspective, trailers provide a version of cinema that's essentially utopian, in which every film is perfect, if only for two and a half minutes.

Now, in an online world ruled by pop culture lists, comes one film website that would dare to do the impossible. Pursued by a ruthless cyborg programmed to destroy it, IFC.com is about to engage in a battle to decide the fate of the human race!

No, wait, I'm sorry. That's actually the copy from the "American Cyborg" trailer. This is IFC.com's list of the 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time. No ruthless cyborgs here, unless our choices so enrage you that you send one after us. Please don't.

On to #50--->

The full list:

50. Night of the Iguana (1964)

49. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

48. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

47. Magnolia (1999)

46. Watchmen (2009)

45. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

44. The Big Sleep (1946)

43. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

42. Little Children (2006)

41. Maximum Overdrive (1986)

40. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)

39. Zabriskie Point (1970)

38. Face/Off (1997)

37. The Strangers (2008)

36. Spider-Man (2001)

35. The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

34. The Minus Man (1999)

33. Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

32. The Matrix (1999)

31. Corruption (1968)

30. Femme Fatale (2002)

29. Point Blank (1967)

28. The Bishop's Wife (1947)

27. A Night at the Opera (1935)

26. Speed (1994)

25. Real Life (1979)

24. Schindler's List (1993)

23. Red Eye (2005)

22. Sin City (2005)

21. Strange Days (1995)

20. She's Gotta Have It (1986)

19. Unbreakable (2000)

18. Sleeper (1973)

17. Charade (1963)

16. GoldenEye (1995)

15. Pulp Fiction (1994)

14. Garden State (2005)

13. Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

12. Independence Day (1996)

11. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

10. The Shining (1980)

9. Mission: Impossible (1996)

8. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

7. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

6. Citizen Kane (1941)

5. Comedian (2002)

4. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

3. Cloverfield (2008)

2. Psycho (1960)

1. Alien (1979)

A Brief History of Bollywood Sex and Romance

2009-06-24T18:05:00Z

You can't beat the Bollywood classics for their overt romantic tension, where intimate touching (yes, even kissing!) was replaced with the poetic, polite innuendo of hot rain and wet clothing. It's funny that they'd be so reserved about what happens between consenting adults, considering India is the second most populous country in the world. (We know they're doing it!) In some ways, however, B'wood has become more relaxed in its attitudes, as younger, Western-influenced generations come of age and make waves in an industry built on tradition. Previously unseen "taboos" like pre-marital sex, onscreen nudity and even wife-swapping have curiously been passed by the Central Board of Film Certification, the strict watchdog equivalent of the MPAA that has served as a censor since the early '50s. Gathered below is a look at the landmark moments and trends that have raised eyebrows through Bollywood history.

Behind the Steamy Scenes

Screen icons Dilip Kumar and the beautiful Madhubala fell in love both on screen and off in 1951's "Tarana," while she was still a teenager. Fearful that Kumar would steal away his breadwinner, Madhubala's father refused to let her see him or even go on location shooting when the two were signed to co-star in 1957's "Naya Daur" together. This led to two messy lawsuits, the couple's dirty laundry aired in court, and an uncomfortable decade-long shoot for 1960's "Mughal-e-Azam," during which the break-up occurred. Similarly fueling the gossip mill were speculations over actor-filmmaker Raj Kapoor (see below) and his longtime muse Nargis, which likely helped the box office success of their movies for years. But it doesn't get more scandalous than when actress Rekha turned up at a 1980 celebrity wedding wearing rings and sindoor (red powder in the part of a woman's hair, symbolizing marriage), basically announcing her coupling with former screen partner Amitabh Bachchan, who was also in attendance but already married to Jaya Bhaduri. The three even co-starred in 1981's infidelity triangle drama "Silsila," which is as weirdly sensational as if the three-headed tabloid monster Brangelinaniston had agreed to star in a quasi-autobiographical film about their relationships.

The X-Ray Glasses of the Imagination

Victoria's Secret could've made a killing if they'd invested in Bollywood during the '70s and '80s, when the appearance of a plain white brassiere represented the forbidden nature of onscreen toplessness. An actress wearing just her over-the-shoulder boulder holder who turned out the lights, for instance, would be implying that she'd soon be showing her breasts to her lover. If anyone realized the power of such clothed titillation, it was Raj Kapoor, whose films began to push the envelope late in his directorial career. His unparalleled 1973 teen romance "Bobby" made an overnight pin-up sensation of Dimple Kapadia when she appeared in a bikini, and 1978's "Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram" (which faced an uphill battle with the censor board, and was criticized by some as being exploitative) saw Zeenat Aman in a barely-there sari that defied physics by staying on. His final film, 1985's "Ram Teri Ganga Mali" caused further controversy when 16-year-old star Mandakini appeared bathing in a waterfall, wearing only a sheer white sari that made no attempt to conceal her nipples. Today, bikini babes are far more prevalent in Bollywood culture, and 2000's "Hera Pheri" even depicted male sunbathers in bikinis, mistaken as girls from a distance by the film's protagonist.

Lurid Lip Locks

Up until the '50s, if Bollywood stars wanted to express love or even lust onscreen, clasping each other's hands and staring longingly was about as risqué as it got. Hugging and light face caressing became the next leap over the following three decades, but it wasn't until the '90s that kissing was really acknowledged, let alone done. A woman might lean in for lip service, but would shyly run away before the deal was sealed, or else the actual act would be covered by a veil in the moment before, like some "Austin Powers" gag. While this, too, is changing today (superstar actor Aamir Khan even has a kissing clause put in his co-stars' contracts; if they won't kiss him, they can't act opposite him), puckering up can still be contentious. Padmini Kolhapure made headlines when she merely gave Prince Charles a peck on the cheek, and after Aishwarya Rai smooched Hrithik Roshan in 2006's "Dhoom 2," obscenity cases were filed. Most recently, everyone heard about the stir Richard Gere caused in 2007 when he playfully re-enacted his "Shall We Dance?" pose, catching Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty off-guard with a snog during an AIDS awareness benefit. Shetty told the press it wasn't a big deal; people on the streets of Bhopal burned her posters in effigy anyway.

The Hollywood/Bollywood Connection

2009-06-24T18:01:00Z

Long before "Jai Ho" entered the international lexicon, the gap between Hollywood and Bollywood had already been shrinking. In distinctly Western style, much of the action has occurred behind the scenes: Indian cable TV magnate and Bollywood producer Ronnie Screwvala's UTV Software Communications has co-produced the latest Hollywood films from Indian filmmakers M. Night Shyamalan ("The Happening") and Mira Nair ("The Namesake"), in addition to making financing deals with Sony and Will Smith's production company Overbrook Entertainment; Disney and Warner Brothers have begun to finance their own Bollywood productions; and last year, Reliance, one of India's biggest producer of Bollywood films, made production pacts with the companies of Nicolas Cage, George Clooney and Brad Pitt before making their biggest coup -- financing DreamWorks, an investment that allowed the Steven Spielberg-led studio to leave its deal at Paramount.

]]> However, Hollywood and Bollywood have been a little less quick to embrace putting their stars in each other's movies, though the road from Mumbai to Melrose is getting shorter by the day. It's gotten to the point in pop culture where Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan can introduce "Slumdog Millionaire" at this year's Golden Globes and Natalie Portman can play a Bollywood princess in her then-boyfriend Devendra Banhart's music video "Carmensita" without anyone batting a curled eyelash. As for actual feature films, here are a few examples of when East has met West in recent years:

Aishwarya Rai in "Bride and Prejudice"

If there's been any actor or actress poised to crossover from Bollywood into Hollywood, Aishwarya Rai has been the leading candidate for years. Having already been deigned the most beautiful woman in the world by none other than Julia Roberts, the Bombay bombshell has been slumming it in bit parts in big-budget Western flops like "The Pink Panther 2" and the epic "The Last Legion" in between Bollywood jobs, yet her best shot so far at conquering Hollywood came with the lead in Gurinder Chadha's 2004 musical take on Jane Austen's classic. Fresh off the surprising success of "Bend it Like Beckham," Chadha had the leverage to shoot a Bollywood-style romp on Miramax's dime and cast the largely unknown-in-America Rai as Elizabeth Bennet stand-in Lalita C. Bakshi opposite then up-and-comers Martin Henderson and Alexis Bledel. Not surprisingly, the film grossed nearly triple overseas what it did domestically, but the disappointing U.S. box office didn't prevent Chadha from pushing Rai further onto Western audiences with a film that her husband (Paul Mayeda Berges) directed, the little-seen 2005 fantasy "The Mistress of Spices," which starred Rai and Dylan McDermott.

Sylvester Stallone in "Kambakkht Ishq"

Audiences will have to wait until "The Expendables" to see Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same frame of celluloid, but the Bollywood buzz machine worked overtime to spread rumors of the first onscreen collaboration between '80s action icons in the 2009 Indian action comedy. It proved too good to be true, as only Stallone could commit to a cameo in the Akshay Kumar starrer (much of which can be seen in the film's trailer), in which Kumar plays a stunt double looking for love as his career in the West takes off, appropriately enough, with a gig as Brandon Routh's stunt double in "Superman." Routh appears as himself, as does Denise Richards, who was reportedly so thrilled with the experience she told the Times Online, "Bollywood is so unexpectedly awesome!" Audiences will be able to decide for themselves when the film unspools internationally in August.

Ali Larter in "Marigold"

If you're ever trolling the aisles of Blockbuster and notice "Heroes" star Ali Larter on a box cover in full-on Indian regalia, you've stumbled onto "Playing By Heart" director Willard Carroll's attempt to "bridge the gap between Indian and American cinema." Sadly, the film never scarcely made it to theaters, but does hold the distinction of being the first to bring American stars to Bollywood, as well as feature one of the latter's biggest stars, Salman Khan, in the lead. Larter plays an actress stranded in Goa after she believes she's been cast in one film and winds up with only a bit part in a Bollywood musical, with Kahn playing the musical's choreographer who helps her with more than her moves. But don't let your mind wander too far -- Khan only agreed to take the part if the kissing scenes were excised, something that the star is still averse of even when starring opposite Bollywood starlets.

Life During Wartime

2009-06-24T14:00:00Z

On stage with the cast of her latest movie at the Toronto Film Festival last September, Kathryn Bigelow leaned in closely to the microphone to dramatically proffer this greeting to the audience right before the lights went down: "Welcome...to 'The Hurt Locker.'"

The invitation suggested that we were about to enter both a specific physical place (Baghdad in summer 2004) and psychic space (traumatized warrior masculinity). Once in, there would be no over-explanation, little backstory, no maudlin psychologizing; Bigelow's film, written by Mark Boal, who spent several weeks embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq, is an assiduous re-creation of rituals, an accrual of tiny details. Calling "The Hurt Locker" the best of the films about the second U.S.-Iraq war -- which it is -- may sound like damning it with faint praise. More laudably, it is an undeniably visceral experience.

]]> "The Hurt Locker" wastes no time in establishing its sweaty tension, opening with a detonation and a death. Three members of the Army's Explosive Ordnance Disposal -- Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and squad leader Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) -- have a little more than a month left in their rotation. Eldridge, the most fragile of the trio, is suffering from PTSD and checks in occasionally with the squad's shrink (Christian Camargo). Though he has a steelier constitution, Sanborn cannot wait to get back home -- unlike James, who thrives on defusing IEDs and whose recklessness often puts Eldridge and Sanborn in danger. Sanborn initially calls James a "redneck piece of trailer trash," but soon the two come to respect each other deeply -- a love that's expressed by beating the hell out of each other.

As James shucks his 100-pound protective suit to figure out the best way to disentangle a trunkful of IEDs, Renner plays the character as inscrutable: Is he a psychopath? An imperturbable professional? Is his character named for the father of American pragmatism, who once famously said, "My experience is what I agree to attend to"? Bigelow's film is not interested in judging, but observing: how Sanborn sips from a juice box while never taking his eyes off his target in the desert, the kite in the sky after a man blows up in the middle of the road, the use of saliva to clean blood off ammunition. "War is a drug," a title card states at the beginning of the film. What "The Hurt Locker" shows so well is what happens to those who keep upping their dosage of the narcotic and to those who just say no.

Other coping strategies for life during wartime are uncovered in Havana Marking's documentary "Afghan Star," which might have been subtitled "Dance, Dance Revolution." In 2004, the Taliban-enforced ban on music and dancing was finally lifted in Afghanistan; the next year, the war-torn nation began broadcasting its own "American Idol"-like TV show. Viewers vote for their favorite Afghan Star by mobile phone -- the first experience for many Afghanis with the democratic process (even if that includes stuffing the ballot box). Marking's film follows four finalists, including, remarkably, two women of vastly different sensibilities: the steely yet pious Lema, a 25-year-old from Kandahar ("May God be merciful so that people vote for me") and 21-year-old convention-flouting Setara from Herat ("I always act according to my emotions").

"The bend of your eyebrows is like the sting of the scorpion," Setara sings in one of the semifinal rounds; with lyrics like that, you wish Marking had included more performance footage. The director does show, however, the stunning moment when Setara, swaying innocuously to the beat onstage, unveils her hair: restrictions on dancing may have been loosened, but not for women on national TV -- especially those who let their headscarves slip. Marking interviews men who say the singer should be killed; Setara must go into hiding in Kabul before she can return home.

Lema gleefully announces that the Taliban (predominantly Pashtun, like her) are SMS-ing for her to win; a title card at the end of the film announces that she would later receive Taliban-sponsored death threats. The two male finalists, Rafi and Hameed, are intriguing enough onscreen presences, but they can't compete with the harrowing drama facing the women competitors. "If someone held a knife to my throat, I wouldn't cry!" Lema, voted off, proclaims backstage to a cameraman who's goading her to turn on the waterworks. "Afghan Star" may ultimately be too scattershot in its approach, but the story of its unlikely heroines definitely puts obsessing over whether or not Adam Lambert is coming out or the number of times Susan Boyle's been smooched into perspective.

Melissa Anderson is our guest critic for the month of June.

"The Hurt Locker" opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 26th before expanding on July 10th; "Afghan Star" opens in New York on June 26th.

[Additional photo: Contestants Rafi Naabzada, left, and Lima Sahar, center, in "Afghan Star," Zeitgeist Films, 2009]

Drawing Out Memory

2009-06-23T14:15:00Z

Nobody saw it coming -- the most unique film of 2008-09 was a head-shaking Israeli fugue between social documentary and digital animated epic. Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir" is also a direct address of a modern atrocity Americans have all but forgotten, if they knew about it at all: the Sabra and Shatila refugee massacre of 1982, the politics of which were perhaps always a little too tangled to suit American news media. But, anyway, can a documentary be animated? The moment you create a film frame by frame, how close could it be to even a historical truth?

Folman's movie, heralded around the globe but still underseen, is all about contradictions -- its textural craziness corresponds eloquently with the knotted ethical dilemmas at the story's core. The movie comes at you like a lysergic drug that targets your optic nerves: from the opening, as we zoom along at ground level with a pack of ravenous, fanged dogs running through the Tel Aviv streets under a stormy yellow sky, drawn and animated with high-contrast, nightmarish surreality, it's clear that "Bashir" looks and feels unlike any other film. It's difficult to pin down exactly how the film was manufactured -- cartoonish, digitally fluid, painterly and journalistic, all at once -- and the disarming visual tide of it is enough to brand it upon your brain. As a subjective portrait of the hallucinogenic experience of war, it's poetic and expressive in a brand new way.

]]> The dogs are part of a dream -- the dream of an Israeli soldier who, years earlier amid the invasion of Lebanon, couldn't shoot people and so was given the thankless task of shooting watchdogs instead, all 26 of which hunt him in his sleep. The soldier is just one compatriot sought out by Folman, who, 25 years after serving in the army and being present for the '82 massacre, cannot remember a thing about it. So he interviewed friends from that time, and friends of friends, to find out what happened and, by extension, why he's suppressed the memories. The interviews, transformed after the fact, became the baseline of the film, as animated versions of very real people speak with an animated Folman about the invasion and the heady, Menachem Begin-led days of Israeli empowerment.

Most of Folman's film is comprised of those reminiscences, vividly captured in a dazzling, almost exhausting cataract of visual invention. The tableaux -- entire landscapes scorched by bombings, a downed pilot's sea-lost hallucination of a giant naked woman, an international airport wrecked and abandoned after an aerial attack, a lingering stream of blood running from the back door of an armored vehicle -- could hardly have been rendered so energetically, or indeed rendered at all, in a modestly budgeted live-action film. Points of view are always shifting, time frames meld, what the soldiers think they saw supplants the reality.

Memory cannot be photographed, after all. But it can be drawn, or puppeteered. Folman's own recurrent dream image is of fiery lights falling softly from the night sky; they're remembered by various characters as rocket fire and a meteor shower, but only later do we (and Folman's avatar) understand what they actually were: flares the Israeli soldiers shot to illuminate the sky above the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, passively allowing the Christian Lebanese Phalangists to carry out their bloody work. (The history behind the incident scans like a typical escalation catastrophe: after Israel had invaded in 1982 in order to assault PLO strongholds, the Christian militia leader (and Israel schmoozer) Bashir Gemayel was narrowly elected prime minister of Lebanon, then quickly assassinated by Syrian operatives. Two days later, Gemayel's Phalangist militias, with the cooperation of the occupying Israelis, slaughtered 2,000 Palestinian refugees, an act that dwarfed the PLO's car bombings in every way and drew international scorn. There's the waltz: the Israeli army (all young, naïve conscriptees) hovered close but did not touch, leading but otherwise merely following the proscribed dance steps.)

After seeing too many recent Israeli films (including quite a few good ones) that waffle about the Israeli-Palestinian question, and that too often adopt a "Crash"-like, can't-we-just-get-along centrism, "Bashir"'s attempt to mediate a howling sense of cultural guilt came as a surprise to me. Folman won't let us, and his Israeli audiences, miss the point: the climactic chunk of the film reverts to stock footage of the dead refugees (including children's body parts jutting out of rubble, exactly as discussed by the animated characters earlier), and it's a thundering exclamation point to an already searing experience.

DJ Spooky Witnesses a "Rebirth"

2009-06-22T21:25:00Z

A prolific artist and writer, Paul D. Miller is still best known under his "constructed persona" as the experimental trip-hop musician DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. Miller's latest multimedia project could begin classifying him as a film director, sort of, as his "Rebirth of a Nation" is a feature-length remix of D. W. Griffith's seminal yet blatantly racist 1915 Civil War epic "Birth of a Nation." Applying a similar methodology to what he does as a sampling, manipulating DJ, Miller's deconstruction of the original film has been hyper-colorized, with digital effects added, its previously silent soundtrack reinvented musically (aided by the Kronos Quartet) and politically (via Miller's eloquent commentary running throughout). I spoke with DJ Spooky himself earlier this month to mix it up about the (former) white man's world, who owns memory and why he wants to collaborate artistically with Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Dubya himself.

Can you remember back to your first viewing of "Birth of a Nation," and your initial reaction?

I saw it back in college. It was hard to take seriously: "What the hell is going on with this?" It's usually taught [to be] looked at as a historical document. I went to a small school in Maine, Bowdoin College. We were in the middle of nowhere, so we had a lot of free time on our hands. I got a chance to do quite a bit of reading and watching crazy, quirky films. When I saw it in the ancient early '90s, as a young plebe at Bowdoin, it was surreal. Here is this heavyweight film, but what's all the controversy about? It seemed like a comedy show.

]]> You've said that "Birth of a Nation" set the tone for the country. Is cinema so powerful that it could keep up a momentum of prejudice for several decades?

Absolutely. It's funny, right now, [with the] Sonia Sotomayor nomination, the Republican right is frothing at the mouth. They're saying she's like the KKK without the hoods. It's wildly hypocritical, saying she's racist. [laughs] It doesn't stop with the Republicans, they're like characters straight out of "Birth of a Nation." That was the first film to really show how deeply flawed elections are. It's also the first film to show a black person getting elected to the highest office of the land, so the resonance with contemporary culture is very direct. I'm looking at Obama versus these Gingrich-types as an update of the similar narrative.

You can't say "Birth of a Nation" set the tone without looking at what the actual tone was. [There was] the restructuring of American culture after the Civil War, and a century-plus of deep racial unease in the American psyche. If you look at the beginnings of American pop culture, it's the minstrel show, whites in blackface caricatures, saying nonsensical stuff, but immensely popular. Whether it's the Beastie Boys or the Rolling Stones, it's still a similar narrative, just updated and remixed. I'm not saying these guys are KKK, but the idea is their appropriation of racial politics through this prism of entertainment and mass media.

Minorities are expected to be the U.S. majority by 2050, and Obama's our chief executive. Is it still a white man's world?

What is "white"? I think we need preservation. "Whiteness studies" is quite intriguing right now. [laughs] If you're an American growing up, you're going to be bombarded by hyper-multi-cultures: your family going to a Japanese restaurant, your mother doing yoga. The bigoted Archie Bunker stereotype, that's pretty remote to most people, but the power and economic dynamics of whiteness are clearly defined. It's the self-entitlement that Bush... he doesn't represent all of white America, but [those] easily subdued by these breathtakingly incompetent idiots. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. Bush graduated with a D-minus average. [laughs] But he was on cruise control. Nobody questioned his intellect, in the Republican camp at least. Maybe whiteness right now is about strange insecurities popping up, or neuroses about becoming a minority? Whites, on the planet, are a minority -- the majority of the human species is Asian, then black and Latino.

I like your idea of the director as DJ, but with this project, I even see you as an essayist. I'd be curious to hear you expound on that idea, and what it means for future projects.

Most of my work is about this idea of looking at texts. I'm very interested in how we tell stories in the 21st century. Don't forget, 2004 was the last major election cycle before YouTube. I really think that YouTube, if it had been around, would've changed the dynamic of how the Republicans [circulated] disinformation.

DJ culture is an amazing way of getting information out. It's telling an underground narrative, something that says "You are the media generator." You're not receiving mass media, you're producing it. That's turned the whole media landscape on its head. You're going to be seeing a lot more people pulling bits and pieces from the media, and making compelling statements from collage. It's this blender of all the data around us.