Matt Zoller Seitz
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For the love o
So apparently Tom Cruise is going to "star" in a remake of The Magnificent Seven, which itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. What does "star" mean? The Variety story doesn't say. But you have to wonder whose shoes is he going to fill, or try to fill. Yul Brynner's? Steve McQueen's? ...
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Nicolas Cage is big; it's the pictures that got small
The pictures may have gotten small, but Nicolas Cage is still BIG. More often than not, he acts in CAPS LOCK mode.
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VIDEO ESSAY: Spike Lee's free-floating, dolly shots collected, stitched together and deconstructed
This video essay by Richard Cruz collects Spike Lee's loopy, free-floating dolly shots into a music video. In the process, it makes them less jarring and problematic than they were when they first appeared in Lee's films. You know what I'm talking about: a shot where a major character is still, or p...
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VIDEO - Motion Studies #1: The Substance of Style
A sampling of exemplary works from the emerging genre of online video essays on cinema. What better way to kick off the series than with an opening credit sequence, unpacked in such a way that can only be done via video essay?
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LUCK RECAP: A Herd of Two
Episode seven of "Luck" at first feels like a placeholder, until you look back over it and realize that the universe is reordering itself beneath the surface of things. In the pilot, most of the characters seemed detached from life, or isolated; but now, with just two episodes left to go until the e...
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VIDEO ESSAY: A close analysis of the Season 1 title sequence from THE WIRE
Analysis of the opening credits of the first season of "The Wire," exploring how the images highlight the overall themes of each season and offer predictive snippets of future plot twists.
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MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: GAME CHANGE, Sarah Palin, and the Limits of Competence
HBO's "Game Change," about the making and unmaking of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election, is basically that scene stretched out to feature length — an agonizing experience. You don't need to know the names of political consultants or remember every detail o...
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LUCK RECAP: No icing error, this
About a third of the way through episode six of "Luck," a conversation between the horse trainer Turo Escalante and the veterinarian Jo is cut short by portents. A flock of birds erupts from behind, or within, the stands; silhouetted, they look like bats. The horses freak out. Then comes an earthqua...
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MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: What makes MAD MEN great?
We head into "Mad Men’s" fifth season knowing nothing about it. The on-air promos recycle moments from past seasons, and the teaser art has been cryptic even by this show’s standards: an opening-credits-styled image of a falling man that could be hawking any season, and a photo of hero Don Draper st...
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VIDEO ESSAY: AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN HOLLYWOOD: HORROR, MAKEUP AND THE OSCARS
The practitioners of visual effects have a favorite phrase for what they do: the Invisible Art – effects that are imaginative, even astonishing, but that are ultimately there to sell a world, a character or a moment. Special makeup might be the best illustration of this principle. One of makeup's gr...
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