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The Hitchens/God challenge & The Atheist Film Fest

Jim Emerson

Jesus W. Bush.

Forget Christopher Hitchens on Iraq. The author of the “controversial” “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (9 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, now at number 2 — but only among people who buy and read books) has misplaced his delusional faith in the Rumsfeld / Cheney / Bush version of Mess ‘o Potamia for too long. When he writes or speaks about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, he is as unintelligible as someone speaking in tongues. Which, essentially, he is.

But when it comes to god, Hitchens is not similarly faith-based. To decide not to profess faith in a personal god in America these days — when even militant Islamists acknowledge Muslims, Christians and Jews as “people of the book,” fellow believers in Abrahamic religion — is one of the few remaining Politically Correct taboos. Theistic concepts of god are everywhere: on our money, in our Pledge of Allegience, in White House pronouncements from our Televangelist-in-Chief… There are no self-identified atheists (“non-theists”) in Congress [correction: one, as of 2007: Rep. Pete Stark], and some state laws prohibit nonbelievers from running for public office — the “no religious test” provision of the constitution notwithstanding.

So, it’s rather surprising for a change to find a small breath of fresh air emanating from Hitchens, who is better known for his stale, flammable whiskey-drenched halitosis. Some of his anti-religious arguments are as irrational as his Rumsfeldian ones (and the religious beliefs he savages), but at least his atheistic provocations lack the overwhelming sense of self-justification that overburdens his ex post facto rationalizations about Iraq.

Responding to a Washington Post piece by Michael Gerson (What Athiests Can’t Answer”), Hitchens poses a challenge:

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first — I have been asking it for some time — awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

Essentially conceding that philosophy and secularism do not condemn their adherents to lives of unbridled selfishness, and that (say) the Jewish people did not get all the way to Mount Sinai under the impression that murder and theft and perjury were okay, and also that we could not have evolved unless human solidarity was in some way innate, Gerson ends weakly by posing what is a rather moving problem.

“In a world without God,” he writes, “this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution but designed for disappointment.” Again, he substitutes the wish for the thought. We very probably are, as he admits, not the designed objects of the Big Bang or of the process of natural selection. But this sober conclusion, objective as it is, is surely preferable to the delusion that we have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture. That sick joke is one that we can cease to find impressive, that belongs in the infancy of our species, and gives a false picture of reality that we would do well to outgrow.

Which got me thinking: I can think of many, many religious movies (from silents like “Ben-Hur,” through the biblical epics of the 1950s, the Christian parables of Ingmar Bergman, up to “The Passion of the Christ” and “Dogma”). But can you think of some movies that are explicitly atheistic, that argue against belief not just in religious dogma but in theism itself? Even “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” though a satire of religious history and religious thinking, specifically confirms (in a tongue-in-cheek way) the New Testament version of the birth of Jesus in the opening scene, when the three wise men withdraw their gift-balms from Brian’s manger and re-gift them to a child in glowing swaddling clothes nearby….

If you were programming an Atheist Film Festival, what titles would you include? I’m drawing a blank at this moment.

Robert Downey Jr. plays it black

Jim Emerson

Who’s that black guy in between the blonde Jack Black and the tattooed Ben Stiller? It’s Robert Downey, Jr.

One of these days

I’m gonna play it black

Play it black

One of these days…

— misquoted Elvis Costello song from “My Aim is True”

What will the Jim Crow “one-droppers” who didn’t think Angelina Jolie was “African enough” to play Dutch-Jewish / Cuban-black-Hispanic-Chinese Mariane Pearl make of this? The actor in the center of the accompanying image is Robert Downey Jr., a white German-Scottish / Irish-Jewish actor. He’s playing a white actor who is cast in a part originally written for a black actor, so he decides to play it black. The movie, “Tropic Thunder,” is a satire of Hollywood actors making an epic war movie. It’s directed by Stiller, co-written by Etan Cohen (“Idiocracy,” “My Wife is Retarded” — note that the “h” is not in the first name but the last; he’s no relation to Joel) and Justin Theroux (who played a director in “Mulholland Dr.” and an actor in “Inland Empire”). Nick Nolte, Jay Baruchel and Steve Coogan also star — along with some big names in cameo appearances.

As Downey told Entertainment Weekly, “If it’s done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.” […]

Dr. Haneke’s diagnosis

Jim Emerson

Michael Haneke, Austrian experimenteur.

UPDATED (03/15/08)

Selected interviews: From Adam Nayman’s interview/review with “Funny Games” director Michael Haneke in Toronto’s eyeweekly:

“I’m trying to impart in my films what mainstream movies work to take away,” explains Haneke in an exclusive interview. “Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator.” […]

Haneke says that he had always conceived “Funny Games” as an assault on American films, and that the remake merely serves to place the action in its correct context. (It also creates severe cognitive dissonance; my eyes kept scanning the impeccable, palpably Euro-art-house compositions for subtitles.) Over the past decade, American genre flicks have only grown more sadistic.

“This makes my film even more up-to-date than it was before,” laughs Haneke. So what about the trailers, which make the film look like the very dreck it means to critique?

“If that kind of marketing brings in the audience that I want to reach, then that’s fine,” says Haneke. “The bigger the audience, the better… every filmmaker feels that way. The difference [between myself and other filmmakers] is that I am not willing to make any concessions within the films themselves.”

The Elements of Style

Jim Emerson

“Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, ‘Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!'”

— Strunk & White, “The Elements of Style” (musical adaptation by Nico Muhly)

I love it when artists known for their work in one medium show a passionate investment in another. Over the weekend I stumbled upon composer Nico Muhly’s blog. This is the guy who studied with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, made two albums of his own music (Speaks Volumes and Mothertongue), and has collaborated with Philip Glass, Björk, Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham, of “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy”) and Grizzly Bear, among others. And he’s the composer of the scores for “Choking Man,” “Joshua” and “The Reader.” (The middle one is actually a pretty good movie.)

Faking the real and unreeling the fake

Jim Emerson

View image Performance? Art?

Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like “Greetings” (1969) or “Hi, Mom!” (1970), would he or the films’ producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest “Redacted” scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:

I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for “Redacted” Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of “redacting” the images of actual war casualties in his film’s final montage. And it worked. Here’s a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and… look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don’t know how many other outlets including… well, the site you’re looking at right now.

How much more meta do you want to get?

Bowles denies he was in on any “staging.” But De Palma? Isn’t that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what’s genuine and what’s phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn’t part of a “Be Black, Baby” performance piece (see “Hi, Mom!”) then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn’t, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither — it’s still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.

Far from Vietnam: Internet technology as used, parodied and, yes, redacted in Brian De Palma’s “Redacted.”

But that’s not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for “Redacted” — an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder — the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie’s strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you’re watching. In the version of “Redacted” shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out — as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly “redacted.”)

De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):

the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone’s unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there’s no issue about who’s purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one’s mutilated body living on in the world wide media). Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true — and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, “Redacted” announces itself as a “visual document” of “imagined events” (I’m not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that’s close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while “Redacted” plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can’t help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It’s right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.

Again, that’s what De Palma does….

Reminder: Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon next week!

Jim Emerson

View image It’s a jolly horrorshow with Mary.

Just a reminder that I’m hosting the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon next weekend, Feb. 16 -18. Got some contrarian thoughts you’d like to share? A film theory that goes against the grain? A despised movie that, upon reevaluation, deserves respect and admiration? A “masterpiece” that only you recognize as disingenuous hack work that is bad for children and other living things? We’re here to listen, and to learn. Please let us know about it. Send me your links at the e-mail address above when the time comes…

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon, Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has posted a, um, “depreciation” of Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins. Just a spoonful of castor oil to help the sugar go down…

What is your favorite Oscar-winner of the last 10 years?

Jim Emerson

Wow, this is sad. There aren’t even very many good movies on the list, much less great ones. Guess this is an example of what one Spinal Tap member called “too f—–g much perspective.” So, what was the last really great movie that won Best Picture? “Unforgiven,” perhaps? “Sunrise”? (Damn, that one got an award for “Unique and Artistic Picture” in 1927-28, but Outstanding Picture went to… “Wings.”)

Argument Clinic: Fair and balancedvs. real and unreal, true and untrue

Jim Emerson

The kind of faulty reasoning that Stanley Fish writes about so incisively in the New York Times (“So’s Your Old Man”) derails meaningful discussions in politics and film criticism all the time, and it’s so transparently bogus that I wonder how people keep getting away with it. I’ve railed against it in Scanners many times over the years, but Fish dissects it beautifully here:

We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush — he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.

What we talk about when we talk about film criticism

Jim Emerson

Matt Zoller Seitz’s “The House Next Door.”

I feel strongly that film, and film criticism, are two sides of the same coin, each essential to the experience of the other. Without both sides, the coin itself couldn’t exist in three-dimensional space (and certainly wouldn’t be worth anything!). If movies are just forgettable eye exercises, patterns of light and shadow and sound that have no artistic or psychological or cultural significance, then what is there to analyze or criticize? And if the unexamined life is not worth living, then I don’t see how the unexamined film is worth watching.

Last Saturday, I was supposed to have been on a panel called “Why Film Critics Matter” at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State, organized by Kathleen Murphy. And I would have been, if it hadn’t been for a scheduling misunderstanding. As it turns out, I was still in Toronto. But I sent Kathleen some thoughts to share on the panel, and I’d like to share ’em with you, too. This e-mail was composed after a lunchtime conversation with one of my favorite movie bloggers, Girish Shambu, and what we talked about was still reverberating in my head, so I want to thank him for his substantial contributions to this train of thought:

* * *

It’s Friday, I’m still at the Toronto Film Festival which winds up this weekend, and I just got back from lunch with Girish Shambu, a movie blogger based in Buffalo, NY. I’d never met Girish before — I’ve known him only through his blog, and the community of bloggers who contribute to critical discussions of movies on one another’s sites (including my Scanners blog) — and I’ve never been more excited about the future of film criticism than I am at this moment.

First, let me explain what I mean by “film criticism.” In traditional, mainstream print media (mostly newspapers and magazines), it is usually thought of as reviewing. Newspapers run their critics’ reviews of movies that are entering theatrical release in their local market. This is the most common, and narrowest, definition of what “film criticism” can be — part consumer guide (a recommendation on a binary or sliding scale from positive to negative), part reportage (what the story’s about, who’s in it, who directed it), and, if you’re lucky, part film appreciation (how the movie functions as an assemblage of images and sounds).

The Hollywood studio mentality in one paragraph

Jim Emerson

Kimberly Peirce.

The first time I interviewed Martin Short (one of my “SCTV” idols) in 1987, he told me an anecdote about his experiences in Hollywood. A typical encounter with studio executives would begin with something like, “Wow! We love you! You did this and you did that and we think you’re great!” Followed, almost immediately, by, “And now that we’ve hired you, don’t do that stuff anymore because that’s not what we want from you. Just do it our way.”

Here’s director Kimberly Peirce on why nearly ten years elapsed between her last feature, “Boys Don’t Cry,” and her latest one, “Stop Loss”:

… After “Boys Don’t Cry,” Hollywood came and offered me some very expensive projects, some very good stuff…. I had one project that I got almost to fruition, “Silent Star,” about the unsolved murder of [the silent movie director] William Desmond Taylor in the 1920s. It was wonderful – the story of how Hollywood was built on an unsolved murder and a cover-up. We had it cast and ready to go, and the studio ran the numbers and they said, “We want to make it for x amount of money.” And I said, Uh, all right. But then they said, “We don’t want to spend that much, we want to spend 10 million dollars less.” I said, Well, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but I’ll go ahead and make the adjustments I can. And they said, “Well, we don’t want to see the version of the movie that we’re prepared to pay for. We want to see the version we’re not willing to pay for.”Perfectly circular bureaucratic logic — so beautiful in its impeccable shape that Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller must be laughing so hard they’re crying….

TIFF 2007: Movie bloggers EXPOSED!

Jim Emerson

View image Me with post-festival headcold, after just getting back home and sinking into the comfort of my den-like Man Chair. (all photos by Jim Emerson, except as noted)

My taxi driver to the airport yesterday (he was Ethiopian, but had lived in Toronto for 18 years) asked me if I’d seen any “movie stars” at the film festival. I had to admit I hadn’t — although I’ve encountered people I consider to be movie stars on the street in past years: Luis Guzman, Liev Schreiber, Brian De Palma, Sara Polley, Stephen Rea, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne…

View image

The ubiquitous (and deservedly so) Girish. A man with cinecurean tastes. (That’s a neologism of my own invention that is related to “epicure” and has nothing to do with “sinecure,” I don’t think.)

Toronto, at least at festival time, is a celebrity-mad city like no place I’ve ever seen. Celebrities make the front pages of the newspapers just because they’re celebrities and they’re in Toronto. Rogers cable used to have a non-stop TIFF schedule of celebrity gossip, celebrity interviews, off-the-cuff “reviews,” and celebrity press conferences. I don’t know if they did that this year, because I never turned on the television in my hotel room. (Meanwhile, TiVo was covering other necessities for me at home.)

View image Andy Horbal plays Mephisto at the foot of the Stairway to Heaven (the escalator to the Varsity Cinemas).

View image The House Next Door’s Keith Uhlich took this shot of himself with his MacBook, outside the press office at the Delta Chelsea.

Some journalists and critics were doing celebrity interviews in addition to going to movies, with stars like George A. Romero (whose girlfriend was the bartender at my hotel!) or Jodie Foster or Brian De Palma or Bela Tarr — in gang-bang roundtables or 15-30-minute individual sessions. The people I was most excited about getting to meet were my fellow movie bloggers. I had lunch with Girish Shambu between screenings in Toronto last year, and it was a pleasure to see him again, particularly since he enjoyed the oblique, androgynous eroticism of the luminous Eric Rohmer movie as much as I did. His highest recommendation was for Barcelona-born director Jose Luis Guerin’s “Dans la ville de Sylvia” — which, unfortunately, I missed. We also thought Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine” was among the very best things we’d seen.

View image Frames within frames within frames — and film-festival bedhead. Me at work in my Toronto hotel room.

Keith Uhlich, editor of “The House Next Door,” organized a mid-fest critics’ roundtable podcast, ’round a tiny round table in Nathan Lee’s hotel room with Nathan (whose byline should be familiar from the Village Voice, Film Comment, The New York Times), Torontonian eyeWeekly critic Adam Nayman, Keith, and me. It was too much fun — we ran out of time long before we ran out of stuff we wanted to talk about. Of course, that was the morning I forgot to bring my camera. Too bad, because if you saw Nathan’s new-mown haircut, you’d want to rub his head. It’s that cool. (I’ll post a link to the podcast when it’s available, if you want to hear us go on about the trials of film critics filing reports and interviews from festivals, our indelible images from TIFF, Brian De Palma, Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes, semiotics [not much!], and I forget what else.)

View image Christopher Long, in Philly Eagles t-shirt, who has a woman on his right shoulder saying: “Come, have another cup of coffee!” and a man on his other shoulder saying: “No, there’s a huge schedule of films to see — what’s next?”

I also got to meet up with Christopher Long, a frequent and valued contributor to Scanners comments, and reviewer for DVDTown and other sites. Chris claims to loathe Paul Haggis’s “Crash” (and Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty” — two peas in a pod) even more than me. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I found him convincing. They both do the same morally corrupt thing, anyway: taking grotesque clichés and then flipping them around so that that they are… even more insulting clichés. All in the name of “enlightenment.” We had a nice talk about our mutual admiration for Divine, too. Don’t recall how that one came up.

I’m delighted to have more faces to put with the words I’ve appreciated from these folks for so long.

Opening Shots: Shotgun Stories

Jim Emerson

Through an open doorway we see a man without a shirt sitting on an unmade bed. In his hand is a white piece of paper. On his back is a spattering of circular, scarred-over wounds, like craters of flesh. Both membranes have stories inscribed on them. We just don’t know what they are yet. Maybe we’ll find out. Maybe we won’t. The man, Son Hayes (Academy Award-nominee Michael Shannon), reads the unfolded note, nods in acknowledgement, and looks up, as if to face himself in an off-screen mirror.

You, Me and ‘You, Me and Dupree’

Jim Emerson

View image: ANY movie is good as long as Seth Rogen is on the screen. When he isn’t… no guarantees.

While Roger Ebert is on the mend, I’ll be chipping in and doing occasional reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times (and RogerEbert.com, under my “editor’s notes” banner). So, prepare yourself. This week it’s… “You, Me and Dupree” — bigger, longer and uncut!

A Convenient Semi-Truth

Jim Emerson

Without greenhouse gasses, cute little girls and weeds would be impossible.

I am a big fan of absurdist advertising campaigns. My all-time favorite is still Monsanto’s astonishingly brilliant ’60s slogan: “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible.” The delicious disingenuousness of that tag line still makes me well-up with laughter and delight, even when I am chemically depressed. I treasure its Pythonesque logic: Chemicals support life. Monstanto manufactures chemical products. Therefore, Monsanto supports life! (My second-favorite is the possibly apocryphal story of the launch of Pepsi’s “Come Alive!” campaign in Taiwan, which was supposedly translated into a distasteful and not-at-all easy-to-swallow: “Pepsi raises your ancestors from the dead.”) Now the concerned folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have come up with an ad to counter Al Gore’s global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” (recently unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival) — and it’s bold and hilarious enough to rival Monsanto’s.

To spoil or not to spoil? (Don’t worry.)

Jim Emerson

The guy in the black suit is really the millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne who became a caped crusader after his parents were killed. And he’s played by Christian Bale, just like in the previous movie, “Batman Begins.” Ooops. Is that giving too much away?

Note: There are no “Dark Knight” spoilers in this post. None whatsoever.

There, I said it. Really, what’s so difficult about adding a spoiler warning to a review? Ken Tucker, “critic at large” for Entertainment Weekly, is just indignant about the whole idea:

Whether I’m writing a review or reading one, I don’t want any held-back information to prevent that review from being the most interesting, thought-provoking one possible.

If that means a movie critic reveals a crucial plot point in order to lay out an argument for a film’s greatness or its hideousness, so be it.

OK, remember we’re talking about a deadline-driven review here — something relatively brief (usually more than seven words and considerably less than 1,000 words in EW) shortly before or after a movie or TV show first becomes publicly available in one or more US cities. Not a longer critical essay targeted at a reader who has already seen the work in question. (See David Bordwell’s recent piece about the differences here.)

I feel there are two kinds of ideal readers for release-date-dependent reviews:

Apocalypse Now: An audio-visual aid

Jim Emerson

The communal Parallax View film criticism blog, coordinated by Sean Axmaker, has resurrected Richard T. Jameson’s provocative, penetrating “Apocalypse Now” review, originally published in the Seattle Weekly (then known only as The Weekly) October 17, 1979. I think it’s the most lucid thing anyone’s ever written about the movie, and should be required reading after every screening as a way of ensuring substantive discussion.

Jameson’s piece illuminates essential truths about “Apocalypse” (and, I think, about Coppola’s body of work), with a precision few critics have been willing or able to explore. You may want to argue with it (and by all means go ahead!), but if you read it closely I think it will show you things you may already have felt, even if you never quite noticed them before. That’s true for me, anyway. I’ve just re-read it for the first time in almost 30 years, and I feel it’s been there, under my skin, the whole time:

“Apocalypse Now” is a dumb movie that could have been made only by an intelligent and talented man. It pushes its egregiousness with such conviction and technical sophistication that, upon first viewing, I immediately resolved to withhold firm judgment until I’d seen the film again: perhaps I’d missed some crucial irony, some ingenious framework that, properly understood, would convert apparent asininity to audacity. I didn’t find it. It isn’t there. What is there is the evidence of a reasonably talented filmmaker having spectacularly overextended himself — Francis Ford Coppola who, having had a toney pop epic widely accepted as great cinema, felt he was ready to make “Citizen Kurtz.”

Descent imagery #1

Jim Emerson

Now that “The Descent” has passed its second weekend, I thought I’d begin posting some of the visual quotations I’d promised. But first, there’s one auditory quote that should be mentioned. When Sarah goes off to explore inside the cave, she hears — or thinks she hears — the laughter of a child, reminding her of her dead daughter. That’s a direct reference to Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” maybe the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, and definitely one of the finest psychological horror pictures that wasn’t directed by Roman Polanski.

“The Descent” invokes an ineffably unsettling moment from Peter Weir’s best film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” On the climb up to the cave, Juno simply stops and looks at the wilderness around her. There’s something strange, wild, and mysterious in the air — something beyond the ken of these women as they are about to begin their descent.

After the jump: “The Shining.”