Deep Focus

Breaking Bad (Nintendo version)

2012-02-01T13:16:16Z

Four seasons of Breaking Bad rendered as an old-school console game. (Spoiler alert.)

"Robot" (by Jim Henson)

2012-01-27T13:04:07Z

There's a definite proto-muppet (not to mention HAL 9000) quality to the robot in this vintage short introducing business owners to the cutting-edge concept of "data communications."

Why America Is Fucked

2012-01-23T00:55:37Z

I love this just because this graphic-design dude obviously cares SO MUCH about this motel's lousy signage decision. One boat against the current. If you check out the YouTube comments, the Sedalia, MO, design firm involved weighs in, but that's more or less beside the point.

Haywire

2012-01-23T00:27:45Z

Haywire opens with a scene in which Mallory Kane (the retired mixed-martial-arts fighter Gina Carano), an erstwhile member of a private contractor's elite, government-sponsored fighting force, has a tense meeting with Aaron (Channing Tatum), a beefy colleague who's come to retrieve her from the field. Before the inevitable beatdown ensues — she's gone rogue after being double-crossed by her boss, so she's obviously not going anywhere without a fight — it becomes apparent that this isn't your typical action programmer. The tip-off isn't in what you see, but what you hear. Or, rather, what you don't hear. The two leads converse in near-complete silence, as if they're floating in space instead of sitting in an upstate diner. The waitress says a few words, meekly, but the expected sound bed of dishes clanking and walla FX is conspicuously absent.

Dear Mr. Scorsese

2012-01-17T14:54:34Z

This video was purportedly shot near the end of a screening of Hugo at the Regal Union Square multiplex in downtown Manhattan. Farewell to scratched prints, melted film, and brain wraps. Still, CHAOS REIGNS.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-01-08T22:28:21Z

Though he wrote one of the more harrowing rape scenes in popular fiction, Stieg Larsson clearly had more on his mind than sensationalism. It's a little jarring to learn, for instance, that the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo translates unambiguously from the Swedish as Men Who Hate Women. It's a confrontational (and, you'd think, curiously uncommercial) phrase, but it's a clear signal of the seriousness of Larsson's intent. Violence against women is neither titillating or simply a convenient fear factor to work some urgency and shock value into a story that's primarily about Swedish industry, Nazis, 40-year-old crimes, and who gives a shit. (It does serve that function, of course.) In this book, and in the two that followed it, Larsson means to indict his own nation for its attitudes toward women.

A Dangerous Method

2012-01-07T20:55:54Z

I almost spat Coke into my popcorn when I saw the trailer for A Dangerous Method. Biopic? check. Costume drama? Check. "A Film by DAVID CRONENBERG," huh? I knew Viggo Mortensen's main man had a new film coming out, but a Knightley-Fassbender period romance was hardly what I expected. It's not that the subject matter — Freud, Jung, and the birth of psychoanalysis — is a bad match. More like a redundancy. Cronenberg's body of work can already be partly understood as a compendium of his feelings on Freud and a century of psychoanalytic thought. What's to be gained from a straight take on material that he's twisted and transformed, so imaginatively and elegantly, time and again? I know it's obnoxious for a critic to insist that a movie should be something it isn't, but I can't fight the feeling. The English major in me is impressed by the intellectual ambition and writerly craft that went into this careful portrait of Jung, Freud, and their lesser-known sidekick Sabina Spielrein. It catches in the periphery of its gaze the plight of the Jews, the tragedy of the World Wars, and something about the mood of the 20th century. But it's more educational than compelling. The cinephile in me longs for a real Cronenberg screenplay, which might have made something odd and truly majestic out of this historical triangle.

Deep-Focus.com with Google Eyes: So Many Nipples

2012-01-07T02:00:33Z

Because I'm a web-stats nerd, I find it amusing and sometimes instructive to see which Google search terms actually bring traffic to my site. Per Google Analytics, here are the top 10 queries that landed web browsers at Deep-Focus.com for calendar 2011, sorted by the landing pages Googlers most often clicked through to. I will say this: the stuff you think people will search for, they don't necessarily search for. I have no idea why anybody would end up here, for example, after searching for "waiting." (Around 40 people did.) But nipples are an enduring favorite. (It was not a mistake to build an explanation of aspect ratios and theatrical exhibition around Keira Knightley's nipples. Never bet against nipples, I say.)

1) "nipples [with innumerable modifiers]"
2) "keira knightley [nude, nipple, porn, ass, wet, etc.]"
3) "breaking the waves"
4) "twins of evil"
5) "laura gemser"
6) "leaving las vegas"
7) videodrome
8) "easy a [emma stone, corset, outfits, hot, etc.]"
9) "fifth element"
10) "private parts"

Pingu’s The Thing

2012-01-04T22:27:12Z

Pina

2011-12-23T21:58:12Z

With Pina, Wim Wenders aims to do for Pina Bausch and modern dance what Buena Vista Social Club did for Afro-Cuban music. In other words, it's utility cinema — this is the film you show someone who doesn't know much about modern dance, if you want them to learn quickly. That's not a slam against the film — I loved Buena Vista Social Club — but simply a description. As a documentary, Pina eschews analysis in favor of experience. It's not an overview of Bausch's career, or a statement on her art. It's a glowing celebration of the woman's work and of the dancers who bring it to life. Wenders doesn't dig into their personal stories, but his camera does dwell on their faces, often as they comment in disembodied voiceover on their experience with Bausch. The fact that they are, mostly, older men and women is both strange and refreshing — it made me think about how, if you watch enough films, you get your perceptions of beauty and physical grace tied up too closely with an expectation of youth. It's clear that Wenders sees Bausch's dancers conveying something mystical, or perhaps divine, as they move on stage. They seem serene, physically beautiful, and generally beatific. The time Wenders spends with them reminded me of those moments in Wings of Desire when the film passes briefly over the faces of ordinary Germans, their fragmented experiences standing out briefly from the pageant of everyday life.

The Artist

2011-11-25T17:15:00Z

Shot mostly silent, in black and white, and with the squarish, Academy-ratio framing that predated widescreen cinematography, writer-director Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist is a Frenchman’s tribute to old-school Hollywood filmmaking. Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, one of those silent-film actors who scoffed at the popularity of talking pictures until their careers hit the skids. Bérénice Bejo, who co-starred with Dujardin in Hazavanicius’s secret-agent comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, is fangirl-turned-starlet Peppy Miller, who looks to George as a mentor. But George, a generation her senior, refuses to embrace the talkies and his career fades to black as Peppy becomes a marquee name in her own right. As you might imagine, this situation leads to professional jealousy, personal resentment and, eventually, redemption through the love of a good woman.