The Screengrab

As regular readers of this column know, we like to single out blog posts that bring a fresh perspective to these pictures we call motion; finely crafted, passionate posts that allow us all to see cinema through new eyes. But more than that, we love a good pissing contest.

This latest one began with another lamentation over the position of the modern film critic – otherwise known as the unemployment line. A piece called “Where Have All the Film Critics Gone?” from The Brooklyn Rail quoted several notable film bloggists, like Matt Zoller Seitz who said, “I think we’re fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.” And then there was Michael Atkinson, who wrote on his Zero For Conduct blog: ““[T]he existence of full-time staff film reviewers is a nutty aberration in the history of periodical publishing…I’d love to see every magazine employ an army of full-time culture reviewers, and pay them millions, but it doesn’t make very much sense, for the simple reason that it’s not truly a full-time job.”

That didn’t sit well with Glenn Kenny, who recently lost his own full-time job with Premiere.

Read More...

If you felt the film blog world shift a little on its axis this week, it’s probably because The House Next Door founder and proprietor Matt Zoller Seitz has departed for greener pastures. Of all things, Seitz has decided to concentrate on making his own films. Can you imagine? Why, if we all did that, there’d be no one left to snark about our work.

Seitz says goodbye with a lengthy interview with new House Next Door honcho Keith Uhlich, in which he discusses his plans as well as his lifelong love of movies. “There was this thing called The Scholastic Book Club, which I guess they still have because my daughter brings home the sheets for me to fill out. They had a book on the making of King Kong and I believe it was available before the movie had even come out. And I ordered it, along with some other things, and when it came I just read it from front to back. That was the first instance I can think of of my wanting to find out how movies were made. I don’t think I really knew anything about how movies were made. I just thought they were these things that kind of magically appeared on the screen when you went to the theater.”

Tributes to Seitz have been proliferating ever since his announcement.

Read More...

As much as we at the Screengrab would like to believe we’re your one-size-fits-all destination for movie news, reviews and ephemera, it has come to our attention that there are other film-related blogs out there that occasionally offer worthwhile content. In the spirit of what the late, lamented Spy magazine called “logrolling in our time,” we hereby launch a new weekly feature dedicated to highlighting all the good stuff we didn’t think of writing ourselves.

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting into the spirit of Valentine’s Day.

Read More...

In the Village Voice film section, Michelle Orange reviews the inelegantly titled Chuck Close:  An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist.  Set for limited release the year after Manufactured Landscapes signalled a great leap forward for documentaries about visual artists, its director (and friend of the subject) Marion Cajori won't be around to enjoy any success her film might encounter; having worked on the film for over fifteen years, died in 2006 after completing work on the film.   Cajori's previous work as a documentarian also focused on the art world; her best-known films were Joan Mitchell:  Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Louise Bourgeois:  Art is Sanity, and a previous iteration of the Chuck Close documentary, in a shortened form broadcast on PBS and entitled Chuck Close:  A Portrait in Progress, was nominated for an Emmy in 1998.  The completed film focuses on Close, best known for his gargantuan, photorealistic self-portraits, as well as other artists and creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Glass who received the same treatment (Gerhard Richter is a curious omission).  The focus of the film, however, is Close's artistic process, and not his often-irascable personality -- Close was partially paralyzed in the 1980s and since then, has used a self-designed system of leverl, pulleys, ladders and other Rube Goldberg devices to allow him to finish his massive paintings.  Cajori's film, Orange says, alleviates the usual arts-doc talking head boredom as she "regularly slows the gorgeously crisp, high-def film down to the brush-stroke" and notes that "Close's piecemeal, coherent style is wonderfully, almost winkingly well suited to Cajori's".  Matt Zoller-Seitz, reviewing the film for the Times, likewise calls the film "splendid" and notes that it "truly excels is in its depiction of the physical process of making art."  Close is a major figure in the world of art, and has deep ties to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago as well as claims to international fame as a painter; we're hoping that Cajori's documentary gets wider release than just the New York arts scene of which she was a part.

Well, it had to happen sometime. What with two weeks' worth of crushing hype mid-summer, the mumblecore kids were due for a backlash, but who knew Amy Taubin would be the one to do it? Taubin, after all, went on record in 2005 with a "Distributor Wanted" for Mutual Appreciation, exceeding all the hype two years ahead of time by calling Andrew Bujalski's work "Rohmer without subtitles." The tide turns, viciously, in a Film Comment jeremiad that goes viciously ad hominem in record time, from an opening shot bidding goodbye to "the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding." Studiously ignoring her own early championing (Matt Zoller Seitz correctly points out that Taubin seems to be suffering from "buyer's remorse"), Taubin taunts the movement for not making enough money at the IFC Center, accuses all involved of racism for not inviting So Yong Kim's In Between Days to the party "because the filmmaker is a Korean-American woman and her heroine is a Korean immigrant," and calls Joe Swanberg a "lout." These aren't criticisms of film; seemingly the spirit of political campaigning in the air has infected Taubin, whose article is as ridiculously mean-spirited as any negative ad.

Read More...

The blog-a-thon is a trend that's spread like wildfire all over the Internet cinephile community, but judged against even the loftiest of its predecessors, the Close-Up Blog-a-Thon, focusing (naturally) on great close-ups, was a runaway success. Hosted by critic/filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz at his blog The House Next Door, the Close-Up Blog-a-Thon has attracted a daunting selection of talent from all over the blogosphere, with topics ranging from contemporary arthouse cinema to classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Hop on over and check it out, but only if you’ve got plenty of time on your hands. Believe me, it’s well worth it. — Paul Clark