Dim the House Lights

DtHL! What does that mean? It’s Dim the House Lights. We're a two-man film-crit concern based in both Miami, FL and Montreal, QC.

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Tournament of Film 1966: A Round-Up Post

The first round of the latest Tournament of Film has come to a close. Here are the six essays, with links to each one:

Tokyo Drifter v. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 

Blow-Up v. Mondo Topless

Au hasard Balthazar vs. The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini

Django v. Torn Curtain

The Big Gundown v. After the Fox

Daisies v. Navajo Joe

Stay tuned for Round Two! 

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

by Juan Barquin

Trudging through the swamp that is Man of Steel is a hell of a struggle, which made the worry that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice might be more of the same all the greater. Lucky enough for viewers cautious of its behemoth length, it’s a movie that actually proves rather entertaining and well-paced when compared to its prequel of sorts. That said, the latest entry in the DC Cinematic Universe shows that Warner Bros. are still finding their footing, and it’s going to take a lot more than Chris Terrio and Ben Affleck to fix everything David Goyer and Zack Snyder have already gotten wrong.

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[floodingwithloveforthekid]

It’s an open secret among everyone who does art criticism that rankings, comparisons, and gauges of quality are so unfair as to be borderline meaningless. Once you get to a certain level of quality, any idea of “better” or “worse” art kinda falls away, and halfway through ranking your 50 favorite science fiction comedy-dramas based on half-remembered quotes said by Tony Shalhoub’s legendary character Antonio Scarpacci from 1990s television series Wings, you realize that you’re just arbitrarily throwing al dente cinema noodles at the wall and seeing what sticks. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable and interesting and a goddamn joy to do, but it’s really all a Buzzfeed-ready fart into the wind, a protest against the empty universe and your emptier wallet, because someone’s gotta get paid to tell the public which twenty-three GIFs of dogs reacting to meeting Thomas Pynchon (just offscreen) will most blow their minds. Clearly, what I’m saying is: I had to watch A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Tokyo Drifter and decide which was better. Thankfully, this fart was one of the easier ones I’ve had to pass.

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And thus begins the 1966 Tournament of Films.

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Stay tuned...

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The Method and the Madness: The Politics and Aesthetics of the List

by Derek Godin

“Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.” -James Gleick, The Information

Here’s a ranked list of movies from 1979:

1. The Marriage of Maria Braun 2. The Brood 3. Breaking Away 4. Nosferatu the Vampyre 5. The Wanderers 6. Alien 7. The China Syndrome 8. Time After Time 9. Rocky II 10. Tale of Tales

Reading this, you probably had some kind of snap reaction, either regarding placement (“The Brood over Alien, what gives?”), omission (“Where’s Apocalypse Now? Or All That Jazz? Or Manhattan?”), or your own cinephilic blind spots (I have only seen numbers 4, 6, and 8). Maybe you remembered that The Wanderers is an underrated movie, or that James Bridges was an underrated director. Maybe the fact that none of these movies were directed by women jumped out at you, or that there was only one film not in English, or only one film that was animated. No two sets of eyes or brains will react to a list in the same way; maybe like me, you’ll go down a Wikipedia wormhole and go from not knowing what Tale of Tales is to wondering if The Overcoat will ever see the light of day to gobbling down interview/workshop footage of director Yuriy Norshteyn. Then I saw that Norshteyn’s short Hedgehog in the Fog was named the best animated film of all time at the Laputa Animation Festival in Japan in 2003 and thought, “Really?” And the cycle begins anew.

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The Revenant

by Michelle Arf

The Revenant is a movie that believes it is important.  It is not.

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Bridge of Spies

by Derek Godin

On the surface, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies looks exactly like the kind of prestige film the Academy Awards revel in rewarding. It takes place during the Cold War, rendering it able to engage with the boogeyman of the moment, Communists. One of the choice sound bytes used in the trailer refers to the U.S. Constitution as a rulebook, so the misty-eyed patriotism is taken care of. A title card early on points out that the film is based on real events, and the characters get a “where are they now?” blurb towards the and. Even the credits read like a laundry list of achingly tasteful performers and technicians: Spielberg, Tom Hanks, composer Thomas Newman, cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. Ultimately, though, Bridge of Spies exposes a similar truth about so-called “adult” filmmaking that Spotlight did: that care, craft, and competence are underrated virtues, and what distinguishes the torpidity of real Oscar bait from the placidity of great drama is raw skill.

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Double Vision: Femme Fatale and Passion

by Ross Birks

If you’re going to pair up two Brian De Palma erotic thrillers, nine times out of ten you’d go for Dressed to Kill and Body Double. Upon recently revisiting De Palma’s canon for the umpteenth time, however, I found a better pairing: Femme Fatale and Passion. Made ten years apart these two films showcase a late-career De Palma returning to the genre he helped define with a newfound enthusiasm and experimentation.

Femme Fatale follows a jewel thief (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) who double-crosses her partners and adopts a new identity in Paris while Passion is set in the cut-throat world of advertising where two colleagues (Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams) develop an infatuation with one other that eventually mutates into a deadly rivalry. Both films were scripted by De Palma (though Passion is an adaptation of a previous French film) with Femme Fatale being his first original screenplay in ten years, since 1992’s Raising Cain. It should come as no surprise then that the two movies are deeply De Palma-esque. Lust, betrayal, sex, duality, dream logic and a heavy European tinge run throughout both pictures as does De Palma’s brazen craftsmanship behind the camera.

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2016 Golden Bulb Awards

During Dim the House Lights’ first couple years of existence, our end-of-year festivities have been somewhat modest. For 2013, Juan and I combined our movie lists for the year and made a top ten; in 2014 we did the same, but with the added help of Michelle and Chris. For both those years we held what was dubbed an Oscars recast, which was essentially us and some friends trying a little pizzazz into what we perceived to be a dull exercise in self-congratulation by fantasy-booking the shit out of it. By the way, if you’re a long-time reader and you want to know why the hell both Planes movies are Oscars recast nominees, blame our pal/DtHL trustee Finn (shout out to Finn).

This year, we decided to get a little more decadent. We polled the writers in various categories, most of them carried over or condensed from the slate of Oscars recast categories, and crowned a champ in each one. Since the sample size is pretty small (participants were me, Juan, Michelle, Ross, and Carl), and since most of us are pro-am critics who mostly see stuff at the multiplex or on home video, the field is somewhat limited to wider-release stuff. What’s interesting is what we nominated from the same pool of movies that other awards, online or otherwise, pull from. This also resulted in a lot of idiosyncratic orphaned picks, which while not enough to earn a movie a strap, are interesting enough to seek out since they have at least one of our writers’ seal of approval.

But enough of this jibber-jabber, let’s get to the awards!

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Purple Rain: Depicting and Interpreting Sorrow in Dated Cinema

by Juan Barquin

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.”

I’d quote the rest of the lyrics to Prince’s “Let’s Get Crazy”, but the internet exists already so there’s no reason for that. As an opening line of dialogue — and I say dialogue because so much of the emotion in Albert Magnoli’s Purple Rain is told through music — it’s a precursor for what’s to come: a pretty fascinating, musically driven, exploration of a man riddled with insecurity and an inability to take hold of the reins of life.

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MJFF 2016: Spaceballs

by Derek Godin

The A.V. Club’s Alex McCown puts it the most succinctly: Spaceballs is catnip for 12-year-old boys. That said, Mel Brooks’ intermittently successful but cultishly loved 1987 Star Wars spoof doesn’t play as well now for me as it did when I was 12. It’s not that I grew into having an aversion to dick jokes and lame puns, but that I developed a desire to have more than dick jokes and lame puns in my movies. To that end, Brooks isn’t a director with a gift visual flair or crackerjack plotting, and so his movies tend to live and die by their jokes. But what Brooks does have is an light, unpretentious touch and an ironclad dedication to the bit, whatever it may be, and so while Spaceballs way be wildly uneven in content and piecemeal in structure, it’s a fun time for Star Wars nerds and those tuned into Brooks’ comic sensibility, two groups in which you’d find a decent proportion of 12-year-old boys.

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Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman on Anomalisa

by Juan Barquin

It’s a new year and with that comes all the exciting releases for films that showed up late last year and are making their way around the world, and not just LA/NY. One of those great flicks is Anomalisa, directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman–based on Kaufman’s radio play of the same name–and lucky little me had a chance to kick off my Tuesday morning this week with an interview that was pretty lively and interesting as a whole. In a mix of laziness and sheer longing to get this stuff out there, it’ll be mostly formatted in transcript form, and I urge everyone to check out the first half of my piece in the Miami New Times (because it’s essential and also a cool conversation and lead-in), as well as my review here.

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Juan Barquin: So, the hotel is called the Fregoli, and obviously that’s a pretty straightforward reference to the delusion, but one of the most notable movies to, I guess, approach that delusion is Invasion of the Body Snatchers to an extent.

Charlie Kaufman: Oh yeah, I didn’t notice that. Though, from my point of view, this is a metaphor about – the character doesn’t really suffer from this delusion, it was something that I had read about that I decided would be an interesting way to talk about someone’s inability to connect to people or see people. I feel like to say it’s the Fregoli Delusion, it kind of just makes of the rest of the movie moot. Okay, there’s something wrong with this guy, as opposed to some problem that people have. But I like that Body Snatchers reference, I didn’t notice that.

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I own multiple full sized theatrical posters for The Oogieloves, and not because of the film’s quality, so my reasoning for so desperately wanting to see Jem should be obvious. And I have to say, I was shocked, but not for the reasons I was expecting going in; I was shocked because this now canonical flop is not only pretty good, it’s simply one of the best films to come out in 2015.

I adored Jem and the Holograms, and here’s my review of it.

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Found footage is, in its best iterations, a way to make a film on the cheap that can engage an audience while experimenting with new ways to tell stories.…It’s the reason I go out of my way to track down every found footage film I can.…So when Jeruzalem, a 2015 found footage horror film from Israel, made its way into my life, I pounced on it, really intrigued by what it could do with such a fascinating setting and inherently experimental form. Unfortunately, while not terrible by any means, its retreading of tropes was hardly the masterful regurgitation that Grave Encounters was and just ended up melting into the half-remembered pool of mediocre hand-camera horror films that I hesitate to retrieve much from these days.

A so-so review for a so-so movie and that’s really all I have to say about that.

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Anomalisa

by Juan Barquin

At this point in time, “male mid-life crisis” has practically become a subgenre of its very own. The amount of films each year released on that subject is baffling, and often it grows tiresome to see these protagonists go through the motions again and again. But, on occasion, a surprise shows up out of the blue. And, after years of patiently waiting, a Kickstarter-funded film by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson shows there are ways to approach the subgenre of sorts that proves worthwhile and, dare I say it, more emotionally compelling than most films this year.

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Joy

By Ross Birks

Making a movie about the inventor of the miracle mop might not sound like a commercial idea (which is why the marketing team has completely buried this key plot detail from all the trailers and posters) but in the hands of David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence it becomes a modern fairy tale full of oddities, dream sequences and a family of (almost) complete fuck-ups. Ah, the fuck-ups! From Spanking the Monkey right up to 2013’s American Hustle, O. Russell has built an eclectic career out of depicting lovable fuck-ups on screen. It’s one of the things that make his movies worthwhile. People are allowed to be devastatingly flawed in a David O. Russell movie and they don’t need to overcome their flaws to be accepted by the film’s end. In fact, the journey of an audience for an O. Russell film is usually about accepting a character for who they are in order to find satisfaction in their resolution. So if there’s one thing that sets his latest film apart from those that came before it, it’s this; Joy Mangano might be the least fucked up character David O. Russell has ever made a movie about.

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Listomania: DtHL’s 2015 Off-Site Round-up

by Juan Barquin

Everyone here at Dim the House Lights writes for some other website, be it their own or something bigger, so it’s about time we get to our yearly round-up of off-site reviews! Rather than limit it to Derek and I like last time, it’s a nice moment to highlight all the cool stuff our pals do elsewhere. Here’s every review and capsule and essay we’ve written elsewhere this year, in alphabetical order by film (or piece title):

12 Rounds (Renny Harlin, 2009)

“Some performers are very difficult to parse from their roles. This varies from person to person, and performer to performer; for example, I can’t unsee the social construct of Tom Cruise when I see Ethan Hunt. With John Cena, it becomes a little more complex. His performance, like so many other transplants from non-movie environments, lives and dies on how he can either parlay or play off his existing cultural cache. So in twisty little bit of conceptual performance, both John Cena and “John Cena” are playing a cop in this movie that might as well be named John Cena. In fact, this movie is so goofy and preposterous that had John Cena’s character been named John Cena, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. John Cena jumping off of buildings and stopping runaway trams with a car? Just another bump, whatever, this dude is practically Superman.”

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