Movie review by Greg Carlson

Pop culture chronicler Alexandre O. Philippe, whose tremendously entertaining 2010 documentary “The People vs. George Lucas” examined the devotion of “Star Wars” fan communities, applies a similar approach in “Doc of the Dead.” Philippe splatters his canvas with bloody, broad brushstrokes, painting a rapid-fire array of talking heads both noteworthy and obscure to contextualize the development of zombiphilia. On-camera interviews with authorities like George A. Romero, Simon Pegg, Tom Savini, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Kirkman are interspersed with liberal doses of movie clips from established classics and no-budget, backyard labors of love. Even zombies can’t be all things to all living people, however, and “Doc of the Dead” is best when it remains focused on the details of great genre films.

Zombie emperor Romero shares stories with his typical candor and humility, and “Doc of the Dead” would make a good double feature with Rob Kuhns’s “Birth of the Living Dead,” the 2013 film that focuses specifically on 1968’s seminal, game-changing “Night of the Living Dead.” Everyone in Philippe’s movie agrees that there is no single figure in the zombiverse more important to its evolution than Romero, and the filmmaker digs in to both “Night of the Living Dead” – with assists from co-screenwriter John Russo and actors Judith O’Dea and Russell Streiner – and Romero’s phenomenal 1978 sequel “Dawn of the Dead.”

The latter film is cited for a number of Romero’s brilliant genre contributions, including the perfect consumerist metaphor encapsulated in the film’s shopping mall setting, humorously described by Philippe via footage of rabid bargain hunters congregating outside a big box store on “Black Friday.” “Day of the Dead” is discussed primarily in the context of Sherman Howard’s fantastic performance as Bub, a turn that Pegg affectionately compares to Boris Karloff’s iconic interpretation of Frankenstein’s monster as a reminder that Romero can even be credited with realigning audience sympathies to allow us to root for the shambling flesh eaters – a rare occurrence in the canon.

Philippe loves the well-practiced one-liners of “The Zombie Survival Guide” and “World War Z” author Max Brooks, and “Doc of the Dead” outlines all kinds of scientific correlations, rules, and guidelines, including an informal referendum on the slow versus fast zombie debate. One of the movie’s most engrossing segments investigates the links between race, slavery, Haitian voodoo and pre-“Night of the Living Dead” interpretations of zombies on film. Philippe pauses to briefly acknowledge Victor Halperin’s influential “White Zombie” (1932), but skitters past other important titles. Brief mention is made of “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943), but Philippe pretty much skips international contributions, like the work of Italy’s Lucio Fulci and the “Blind Dead” series by Spaniard Amando de Ossorio.

Of course, running time makes it impossible to cover every important zombie movie, especially when surveying such a vast and varied genre, and Philippe can be credited for squeezing in mentions of many influential titles, from the brutal but comic fatalism of “Return of the Living Dead,” which popularized the notion of zombies as brain eaters, to the libido-driven sensuality of “Re-Animator,” in which Stuart Gordon inverts a central zombie tenet by, as producer Brian Yuzna indicates, giving the priapic Dr. Hill “a stronger idea of who he is” once he becomes a corpse. A case is also made that Pegg and Edgar Wright’s socially aware “Shaun of the Dead” closely follows “Night of the Living Dead” in importance, especially in terms of jumpstarting the contemporary wave of zombie popularity.

Among the most successful content creators of the current zombie apocalypse is “The Walking Dead” writer Kirkman, who notes, “I will plainly say that Bram Stoker is to Stephenie Meyer as George Romero is to Robert Kirkman.” “The Walking Dead” aside, the film’s final section speculates on the danger of zombie saturation, and Philippe lists a variety of cottage industries that have expanded production in the wake of zombie fever. Zombie video games, pub crawls, organized runs, immersive live action role play, television commercials, pornographic parodies, and survival preparedness gear manufacturers have all benefited from our ongoing fascination with the thin, mysterious veil between life and what happens to us after we die. That curiosity means the undead business is not likely to satiate its hunger anytime soon.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Every single penny of its modest budget up on the screen, William Eubank’s “The Signal” integrates impressive special effects in a manner similar to Josh Trank’s “Chronicle,” another out-of-the-blue science fiction thriller about a group of smart young people in over their heads. Unfortunately, “The Signal” lacks a great deal of the adrenalized rush found in “Chronicle” – despite its own high octane ambitions – and labors under the weight of too many frustrating hairpin turns in the careless script by Eubank, his brother Carlyle Eubank, and David Frigerio. Despite numerous promising stylistic flourishes and several moments of inspired visual design, “The Signal” takes itself too seriously. It’s the kind of movie that one imagines was way more fun to make than it is to watch.

Eubank begins well, effectively sketching the tensions of a westbound road trip taken by M.I.T. whiz kids Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp) on their way to deliver Nic’s girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) to a university on the coast. Involved in an escalating online battle with a mysterious hacker who goes by the handle Nomad, Nic and Jonah make the dubious decision to use their computer skills to locate and confront their challenger. When the journey leads them to a creepy, seemingly abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, most audience members will groan at the movie’s first major head-scratching leap of faith: why would a couple of ridiculously intelligent kids seek out a confrontation in the dead of night with an antagonistic creeper who has been taunting them with evidence of his surveillance powers?

It only gets worse from there, as the boys make the laughable decision to explore the structure’s basement while Haley remains by herself in the car. Sure. What happens next is a fleeting mash-up of “The Blair Witch Project” and “Signs,” followed by Nic waking up in a subterranean research facility/quarantine area where the calm but menacing Damon (Laurence Fishburne) interrogates the understandably freaked out young man. While the presence of Fishburne lends “The Signal” a strong dose of Morpheus cred, Eubank starts running in circles, working the paranoia and second-guessing to a frenzy without making up his mind whether or to what extent the viewer should buy the secret operation subterfuge.

Separated from a now comatose Haley, Nic discovers he can communicate with Jonah through a convenient air vent, just another of the movie’s endless red flags/red herrings/obvious tip-offs before revelation time. Outside the hazmat hospital, Eubank introduces a few divertissements, the best of which is an encounter with an Area 51 cuckoo played by the indispensable Lin Shaye and the worst of which is the tired fallback of a bullet-riddled, slow motion, machine gun showdown that makes zero sense once the big epiphanies are leaked during the movie’s final, optically dazzling movement.

Another unfortunate similarity “The Signal” shares with “Chronicle” is a blinkered point of view so male-centric that Cooke’s Haley is repeatedly silenced, shackled, and ignored. In a suspenseful attempted escape that is arguably the movie’s best scene, Haley lies unconscious on a gurney while Nic tries to wheel them out of the facility where they are held captive. The pattern loops: Haley doesn’t get to make any decisions; Haley doesn’t get to drive the getaway rig; Haley sits and waits while Nic takes action. It’s no shock that the real relationship of “The Signal” occurs in the bromance shared between Nic and Jonah. We’ve seen this before.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The uncanny resemblance of Louis Ortiz to the 44^th president of the United States supplies the fuel in Ryan Murdock’s “Bronx Obama,” an engaging and entertaining documentary that follows the ups and downs of a regular guy trying to make ends meet on the basis of his physical similarities to one of the most well-known people in the world. Unflappable, affable, and down to earth, Ortiz makes a terrific movie subject as he recounts the tale of his decision to take a chance on a career impersonating Barack Obama. Hitching one’s wagon to the political star of a sitting head of state is risky business, but the ongoing circus sets up the conditions for Murdock to deliver a very warm, funny, and thoughtful take on the contours of an American Dream.

At the time of Ortiz’s epiphany in 2008, the former Verizon field technician had been unemployed for about a year and was financially struggling. Williamsbridge Tavern bartender and friend Pat DeBelles was the first person to suggest to Ortiz that there might be real economic opportunities playing Obama. Even though Ortiz was skeptical, he changed his mind when he shaved his mustache and goatee and took a long look in the mirror.

In the introduction to Murdock’s February 17, 2012 “This American Life” segment called “The Audacity of Louis Ortiz” (which was the doc’s original title as well), host Ira Glass hints at the motivations for adopting a different personality, saying “Usually when you play a part, the expectations are pretty clear. There are lines. There’s a script. There’s a storyline you follow. So when you’re on the kiss cam you kiss. When you’re Hamlet you stress out. You know what you’re on stage to do.” Glass also anticipates Murdock’s angle in the film version, shrewdly recognizing that Ortiz “…found himself in a part with huge expectations and no script whatsoever. He had to make it up as he went along.”

That idea and the surrounding implications of the psychological toll levied by a sometimes thankless gig are explored by Murdock in any number of ways throughout the movie. One minute, Ortiz is treated like a rock star and the next minute, people are shouting hostile insults. Ortiz makes an appearance on “Flight of the Conchords.” He performs with a rock group of fellow impersonators playing Nobel Peace Prize recipients. Most entertainingly, he finds himself in league with a talent manager named Dustin Gold, whose abrasive onscreen persona contrasts with Ortiz’s calm demeanor. Gold’s roster includes versions of Mitt Romney and Bill Clinton, and “Bronx Obama” spends a significant amount of time exploring Ortiz’s transition from mere lookalike to full-fledged performer capable of approximating the vocal cadences and nuances of President Obama.

Murdock finds the emotional core of his film in the relationship shared between single father Ortiz and his teenage daughter Reina. Geographically separated by Ortiz’s demanding and sometimes unpredictable travel schedule, the two frequently communicate through video chat. The audience glimpses Ortiz’s devotion to Reina as well as his feelings of regret and guilt for not being more present. Narratively, it doesn’t hurt that Ortiz’s parenthood calls to mind Obama’s own daughters, providing one more example of the ways that class divisions shape “Bronx Obama” into a modern echo of Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Setting aside the inevitable comparisons to “Love Story” and the less inevitable comparisons to “Dying Young,” Josh Boone’s adaptation of “The Fault in Our Stars” is the most mordant and acerbic kids-with-cancer story to achieve such widespread appeal. Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, who played siblings in “Divergent,” are now star-crossed lovers Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, the central characters in John Green’s hit novel of the same title. Both teenagers are living on borrowed time, and one of the pleasures of Green’s writing — faithfully transferred from page to screen — is the non-stop deployment of prickly, self-aware black humor that disarms many of the genre’s unalterable expectations.

Hazel meets Gus at a cancer support group and they immediately spark, although Hazel at least pretends that romance is off the table. Augustus affixes himself so quickly and so forcefully to Hazel, several voices have questioned the appropriateness of his aggressive attachment. In a particularly prickly takedown in “Vulture,” Matt Patches writes that Gus tests the theory that “Watching any person battle cancer, even the biggest douchebag, is gut-wrenching.” Ouch. In the book but not in the movie, Hazel figures out that she bears a strong resemblance to Gus’s previous, and now deceased, girlfriend. It does not help that Augustus models every dimension of teenage fantasy without flaw: he’s gorgeous, smart, sensitive, devoted, and speaks and thinks with philosophical erudition beyond his years.

There is some comfort, then, that “The Fault in Our Stars” is Hazel’s story. Notwithstanding the age and gender of the original author, “The Fault in Our Stars” is a welcome change from the relentlessness of big screen fictions favoring a male point of view. Online carping about Augustus fulfilling the rare gender inversion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl only reinforces the need for more movies filtered through the perspective of a female. Woodley crafts an assured performance, refusing like Hazel to let the ever-present nasal cannula and portable oxygen tank limit or define her. A strong argument could be made that Woodley’s likability and charisma help members of the audience excuse some of Augustus’s pushy and obsessive behavior.

One thing hasn’t changed since long before Roger Ebert defined “Ali MacGraw’s Disease” as a “movie illness in which the only symptom is that the sufferer grows more beautiful as death approaches.” Both Woodley and Elgort are just the sort of impossibly lovely creatures that viewers demand even of their oncology patients.

The movie’s MacGuffin is the fictional document “An Imperial Affliction” and its alcoholic author Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe). Hazel’s admiration of Van Houten’s frank and honest account of cancer inspires Augustus to arrange a visit to meet the writer in Amsterdam, but the trip doesn’t quite go as planned. Dafoe is a superior Van Houten to the one described in the book, and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber make several bold changes concerning the character, improving and streamlining the novel’s more labored end game. It’s still a little weird, however, that someone as brilliant as Hazel wouldn’t be able to more quickly recognize the source of Van Houten’s expertise.

Boone retains the novel’s tour of the Anne Frank House (mostly recreated as detailed facsimile sets in Philadelphia) and its role as the site of a passionate kiss between Hazel and Gus. It is hard to say whether the moment works in either medium. While the brief length of Frank’s life echoes Hazel’s fleeting days, the parallels between death by cancer and the horror of the Holocaust are dubious. Not in doubt: the awful choice to retain the crowd of fellow tourists and visitors starting a cringeworthy slow clap for the kissers. At best, Green’s exploitation of Anne Frank as, in essence, a metaphor/symbol/emblem for the “fate” of an early death demonstrates a lack of sophistication, even if some of his fans may now be inspired to investigate Frank’s thoughts in “The Diary of a Young Girl.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Legendary magician and fraud investigator James “The Amazing” Randi is the subject of Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein’s engrossing biopic “An Honest Liar.” Covering Randi’s extraordinary life from his early years in Toronto to his more recent decision to speak publicly about his homosexuality, “An Honest Liar” seamlessly integrates a trove of mediated sound and vision from Randi’s long tenure in the spotlight. Measom and Weinstein also interview a key group of Randi associates, including several celebrity admirers as well as Project Alpha moles Steve “Banachek” Shaw and Michael Edwards. They also gain unprecedented access to their subject, now a sprightly octogenarian whose signature snow white beard, stooped posture, and reliance on a cane call to mind a wild and wizardly Yoda-Gandalf mashup.

Randi initially patterned himself on hero Harry Houdini, mimicking several of the famous escape artist’s well-known stunts before shifting a great deal of his time and energy to challenging and debunking a series of phonies who claimed to be endowed with telekinetic and supernatural powers. Randi’s bracing, no-nonsense attitude about the importance of not falling prey to flimflam conmen shaped the course of the man’s career. Randi’s relentless skepticism, made famous by the unclaimed One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge prize, makes for highly entertaining TV confrontations but is also taken seriously enough to assume the quality of a campaign for justice and rationality.

A fixture of television for decades, Randi has chatted with Bill Maher, Penn & Teller, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Anderson Cooper and many others. He has turned up on everything from “Happy Days” to “Nova” to “Today.” His more than thirty appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson introduced a generation to his quick wit. The filmmakers have access to so much fantastic archival content they don’t spend as much time on Randi’s series of lawsuits, his annual “Amazing Meeting” summit celebrating critical thinking, his foundation’s ongoing financial struggles, and his 2009 cancer diagnosis, the latter of which robs viewers of the dedicated atheist’s brilliant quip to writer Michael Mooney: “I want to be cremated. And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”

The heart of the movie elaborates Randi’s brilliant dismantling of two key charlatans: faith healer Peter Popoff and self-proclaimed psychic Geller. The former was exposed by Randi in what amounted to a carefully crafted sting operation involving a hired private investigator who managed to locate and record the radio frequency used by the evangelist to receive information from his wife via in-ear audio receiver. Geller, of course, is Randi’s longtime bete noire, a kind of less intellectually astute Moriarty to Randi’s Sherlock. Given the nature of Geller’s antagonistic relationship with Randi, Measom and Weinstein are wise to let Geller appear on camera and tie himself up in verbal knots of his own making (Geller now prefers to call himself a “mystifier” rather than psychic), as a project of this scope would sorely miss the stealthy spoon-bender.

The final section of the movie is a doozy, presenting just the kind of shocking turn of completely unplanned events that documentarians dream about. Revelations involving Randi’s longtime partner (and now spouse) Jose Alvarez, who aided Randi in the 1980s during the perpetuation of the “Carlos” hoax designed to point out the susceptibility of the media, materialize to threaten and challenge Randi’s dearly-held attitudes about honesty and commitment to the truth. It wouldn’t be sporting to spoil the details of this twist, but Randi’s on-camera reactions to some of Measom and Weinstein’s toughest questions about the justification of deceit are every bit as electrifying as the magician’s well-crafted sleight of hand.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A dizzying whirlwind of cinematic sensory overload, Gyorgi Palfi’s “Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen” demands the attention of every serious movie lover besotted with the woozy power of the silver screen. Lyrically edited from more than 450 films – some bad, many good, several great – Palfi’s achievement is undeniable once the lights go down and the journey begins. “Final Cut” is reflexive film construction par excellence, crafting a coherent narrative from dozens of reliable visual tropes tumbling and cascading to form a celluloid romance that makes the viewer the third member of an irresistible ménage a trois. Relying on the alchemy of a quartet of credited editors whose names few Americans will recognize, Palfi’s “film for educational purposes” will very likely exist in the legal shadows for some time to come.

In the post-YouTube era, the supercut has emerged as one of the most delectable bonbons of remix culture. According to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, the term was coined in a 2008 blog post attesting to, as Andy Baio put it, the “genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.” Movie-derived supercuts serve, among other things, to point out the numbing shorthand that wallpapers scripts struggling to achieve novelty – but can also be easily purposed for simultaneous critique and celebration.

For example, London-based supercut maestro Harry Hanrahan stictches together insanely gratifying mash-ups including “It’s Showtime!” and “Get Out of There!” as well as reels of heroes and villains getting hit by buses, Julianne Moore crying, Sean Bean dying, and Nicolas Cage losing his shit. Jonny Wilson’s Eclectic Method project presents a series of mind and ear-bending collages, including “mixtapes” featuring the work of directors like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Pedro Almodovar, and John Hughes. Baio and Michael Bell-Smith launched Supercut.org as a repository for the work of obsessive compilers.

When it was added to the 50^th anniversary schedule of the New York Film Festival in 2012, the program notes opened with the claim that “Final Cut” was “an odds-on candidate for the greatest movie ever made,” and as metanarratives go, that hyperbole doesn’t feel so far from the mark. At 85 minutes, however, “Final Cut” doesn’t measure up to the Incredible Hulk-like muscle of one of its closest siblings, Christian Marclay’s unbelievable installation project “The Clock” (2010), a monumental 24-hour marathon that synchronizes the moments of the day with corresponding shots from popular movies.

“Final Cut,” “The Clock,” and to some degree even Thom Andersen’s crazy ambitious 2003 documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” allow – maybe even encourage and invite – the spectator to an individualized experience. In his “Final Cut” review, Paul Constant notices the seemingly large number of clips from “Dick Tracy” and “Sin City.” I couldn’t help but alight on the love Palfi shows for Alan Parker’s 1987 cult favorite “Angel Heart.” There is plenty of Hitchcock. And it is impossible to ignore Palfi’s affinity for David Lynch, whose images are featured prominently along with a few choice sound and music cues, including Angelo Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” theme.

Music is, not surprisingly, of tremendous importance in an endeavor like “Final Cut,” which depends very little on spoken dialogue to propel forward its action. It all opens to Alan Silvestri’s main title from “Back to the Future,” a perfect choice given the ability of “Final Cut” to transport audience members shot-to-shot through space and time, from the silent era to contemporary CGI-dependent blockbusters. Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly will shortly remark “This has gotta be a dream,” echoing the thoughts of most giddy viewers. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” plays underneath a series of leading men on the move, skipping from Travolta’s strut to “Oldboy” to “Closely Watched Trains” to “Ninotchka” and so on.

On Twitch, Joshua Chaplinsky and Peter Gutierrez disagreed about the effectiveness of the movie’s boy-meets-girl device, with Gutierrez dismissing what he reads as an “intentionally simplistic” story that “ultimately doesn’t take the audience anywhere new or truly unexpected.” Chaplinsky counters that the “technical complexity of the experiment only benefits from the simplicity of the narrative,” going on to claim that “cinema is romance.” While I tend to side with Chaplinsky, one’s mind automatically begins to imagine roads untraveled by Palfi, since so much of the power of “Final Cut” resides in the rhymes of the edits. Here’s hoping more dreamers will pick up the torch.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In his sharp biography “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” filmmaker Brian Knappenberger spends very little time on the heartbreaking January 11, 2013 suicide of the title figure. Even so, the death, at age 26, of the brilliant Swartz looms over the contents of the movie, informing and shaping every element of a story that is as much about the future of the Internet as it is about a genius thinker, programmer, and activist who chose to use his mind for what he saw as the common good even when that position clashed with the views of the Department of Justice, inviting the draconian prosecutorial overreach of the United States government.

Knappenberger, whose previous movie “We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists” covered the controversial actions of the international network of digital disruptors known as Anonymous, demonstrates a deep knowledge of cyberculture. “The Internet’s Own Boy” is unabashed, call-to-arms, social action cinema, but the position carved out by Knappenberger and the movie’s impressive list of digital warriors is so articulately rendered that one can envision the previously unindoctrinated being convinced to rethink antiquated and inadequate regulations in much the same way that Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Blackfish” turned opinion on SeaWorld.

Swartz was an itinerant and restless participant in much of the contemporary computing landscape he so often helped to create, refine, or improve, and Knappenberger attests to the young man’s iconoclasm as one of Swartz’s most fiercely defined personality traits. From dissatisfaction with the intellectual straitjacket of traditional classrooms to the soul-crushing expectations of showing up to work in an office, Swartz’s refusal to conform to the rules in a rarefied world where those rules are comparatively liberal marked him as a radical among radicals.

Even with an avalanche of complex details to sift, Knappenberger clearly lays out the timeline of events that led to Swartz being indicted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. While a research fellow at Harvard, Swartz downloaded some 4.8 million academic journal articles through the JSTOR database, collecting many of the documents through a network-connected switch to his Acer laptop, which he hooked up in a wiring closet at MIT’s Building 16. Aware of the high-volume transfer, investigators collected hidden camera footage of Swartz accessing the small room.

For many reasons, those grainy images captured by the surveillance camera stick with you. At first, it just doesn’t seem like there is much to it. Swartz enters the space with backpack and bicycle helmet, crouching out of frame for several minutes while he hooks up a hard drive and checks on the progress of his download. But the existence of the video – and knowing everything that would happen later – colors the perception of the viewer. Kevin Poulsen wrote, “…It’s easy to see what MIT and the Secret Service presumably saw – a furtive hacker going someplace he shouldn’t go, doing something he shouldn’t do.” Looking back, it is not clear whether Swartz was actually breaking the law, even if he appeared to flout the rules.

With access to Swartz’s family, partners Quinn Norton and Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and big dogs like Tim Berners-Lee, Cory Doctorow, Gabriella Coleman, and Swartz’s mentor Lawrence Lessig, Knappenberger interviews plenty of voices more than capable of expressing the scope of harm that has been done by public agencies that treat so-called hackers like terrorists. The movie has plenty of indignation and frustration, all of it amplified by the urgency and passion of Swartz’s campaigns. “The Internet’s Own Boy” labors to end with a positive outlook on the 2013 measure known as “Aaron’s Law,” a piece of proposed legislation that has made virtually no progress in a system hell bent on a strangled public domain, unfailing and Orwellian support of a greedy corporatocracy, and the continued erosion of our personal digital freedom.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,” his infectiously entertaining second collaboration with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, the Slovenian cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek expands his shaggy, ursine celebrity as the most accessible and engaging of contemporary Marxist, Lacanian psychoanalytic critics. In essence an illustrated lecture, Fiennes juices Zizek’s talking head performance in the same manner established in “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (2006): by situating her star in detailed recreations of movie sets, from Travis Bickle’s shabby cot in NYC to Alex DeLarge’s catbird perch in the Korova Milk Bar to Jack Dawson’s icy grave in the North Atlantic. The delirious effect brings a series of big ideas to life, colorfully illuminating Zizek’s wide-ranging thoughts on politics, religion, and all things ontological.

At the center of Zizek’s overarching argument about humanity is the notion that people navigate the world with a kind of false consciousness that both allows us to justify all sorts of horrible behavior and obscures from us the “reality” of hegemonic social orders. The guide starts the party with a discussion of the weirdly protracted fight scene between Roddy Piper’s Nada and Keith David’s Armitage in John Carpenter’s “They Live” (1988) – a movie Zizek calls “one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left.” Zizek, after noting that he is already “eating from the trash can all the time,” explains the reason for Armitage’s refusal to don the sunglasses that allow one to view the unadulterated messages encoded in the monolith of capitalistic propaganda: to “step out of ideology” is painful.

“The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” references far fewer movies than the “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (just a little more than half of the total in the earlier film), but the picks include hugely popular texts like “The Sound of Music” (1965) and “Jaws” (1975) as well as material less well known to the American viewing public. The latter category contains Mikheil Chiaureli’s “The Fall of Berlin” (1950) and Jan Nemec’s “Oratorio for Prague” (1968), the short documentary that purportedly captures the only film footage of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Occasionally, Zizek also touches on content that calls for supporting imagery from the likes of Coca-Cola commercials, news reports of the shocking terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011, Donald Rumsfeld spewing utter falsehoods on the existence of WMDs in Iraq, and an aviation junkyard in the Mojave Desert stocked with decommissioned jetliners.

The most enjoyable dimension of Zizek’s engagement with cinematic texts is the excitement, glee, and sharp wit that rise up every time the man elucidates a surprise twist or contradiction that turns a previously held notion upside down. Zizek convincingly argues, for example, that Rammstein undermines fascism by performing a burlesque of “pre-ideological” Nazi-influenced gestures, and that “Titanic” (1997) offers a “ridiculous fake sympathy with lower classes” that allows the wealthy and privileged Rose to feed like a vampire on the penniless Jack, who really only functions to reconstitute her ego. Had the ocean liner not collided with the iceberg, Zizek reasons, Jack and Rose would have flamed out after “two, three weeks of intense sex in New York.”

In a similar way, the doctors of Altman’s “MASH” (1970) are not subversive, insubordinate, antiauthoritarian agents in an antiwar satire but instead operate “perfectly as soldiers,” fulfilling their duties with skill and devotion. The same goes for Matthew Modine’s Joker in “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), whose apparent derision and contempt for the rituals of military discipline give way to his training as a killing machine. The viewer receives as much pleasure from these little epiphanies as Zizek does in the telling, and one of the movie’s lessons in irony describes the widespread use of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” by totalitarian dictators. The tune – like ideology itself – becomes an empty vessel capable of holding any and every meaning ascribed to it. If, as Zizek maintains, lifting the veil of ideology through critique lets us function outside the narcotic haze to which we acquiesce, I’m ready to enroll in his film class.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Echoing the conflicted emotions that led Leonard Nimoy to title his first autobiography “I Am Not Spock” and then later publish another volume titled “I Am Spock,” the man who has given life to Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since the inaugural season of “Sesame Street” in 1969 articulates the intricacies of creating something simultaneously of himself and beyond himself in “I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story.” Making its world premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, “I Am Big Bird” offers a comprehensive portrait of Spinney’s life and career in and out of the vividly colored costume.

Now 80 years old, Spinney is the last of the original Muppeteers to perform on “Sesame Street,” even though apprentices Rick Lyon (for the opening theme song sequences) and Matt Vogel have crawled under the feathers. Vogel, who has been Spinney’s Big Bird understudy for nearly two decades and is the character’s heir apparent, is one of the movie’s many interview subjects. Blending newly shot content and never-before-seen film and video, “I Am Big Bird” includes Jim and Jane Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Judy Valentine, Sonia Manzano, Emilio Delgado, Bob McGrath, and Spinney’s wife and protector Debra, among others.

Directors Chad Walker and Dave LaMattina combed through hours and hours of TV history and several boxes of home movies provided by obsessive memory preservationists Caroll and Debra. Hardcore true-believers will be impressed at the sight of the original puppets Spinney’s mother made for him more than 70 years ago, as well as Spinney’s illustrations and animated cartoons, and clips of early performances on Boston’s “Bozo’s Big Top” as Mr. Lion. More riveting is the tale of Spinney’s disastrous gig at the 1969 Salt Lake City Puppeteers of America convention that attracted the attention of an admiring Henson (seven years after the two had first met).

Given the monumental popularity of Big Bird, the movie spends less time on Spinney’s other signature role, but the importance and value of Oscar the Grouch as a kind of unfiltered, curmudgeonly, miserable flip side to Big Bird’s positive, exuberant, and sunshiny optimist is a crucial component of Spinney’s genius. At Hot Docs appearances Spinney brought Oscar to the stage. Astounded audience members were quick to address questions directly to the green sourpuss. When a woman said she had always related to and identified with the furry monster’s irritability and impatience, Oscar immediately quipped, “What are you doing after the show?”

“I Am Big Bird” is effectively paced, but the filmmakers attempt to cover so much ground that some segments function as truncated, anecdotal asides that would have merited a closer look had the running time allowed it. Like “Being Elmo,” the documentary addresses the considerable time demands that come with performing a beloved, iconic character, and Spinney’s grown children allude to a bittersweet upbringing that required them to share their father with the world. The 1990s surge in Elmo’s popularity is attributed to the red Muppet’s fixed preschool age aligning with the younger demographic of evolving “Sesame Street” viewership, but Walker and LaMattina make no direct mention of the rough period that ended with Kevin Clash’s resignation following allegations of sexual relationships with teenage boys.

Plenty of darker chapters take viewers behind the scenes, including acknowledgment of physical and emotional abuse meted out by Spinney’s father, the cancellation of a trip on the space shuttle Challenger (teacher Christa McAuliffe took Spinney’s place on the doomed mission), and the murder of Judith Nilan by a man who worked for the Spinneys. Professionally, Spinney faced what many colleagues believe was unfair and unwarranted animosity and antagonism from longtime writer/director Jon Stone, whose brilliance was accompanied by a level of perfectionism and high expectations that could be construed as cruel and cantankerous.

For the millions of fans whose early childhood included the intimacy and comfort of a deep parasocial relationship with the large yellow fowl, “I Am Big Bird” will bring tears to the eyes on multiple occasions (both the death of Will Lee’s Mr. Hooper and Spinney’s Big Bird performance of “Bein’ Green” at Henson’s funeral call for the handkerchiefs). The filmmakers know and understand that Big Bird’s curiosity and innocence, often manifested in the simple misunderstandings of very young people, are the keys to his longevity and acclaim. Spinney’s own gentleness and kindness, shining through so clearly in “I Am Big Bird,” will make every viewer feel eight feet tall.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The brain dead “Brick Mansions” is, not surprisingly, a completely unnecessary remake of Pierre Morel’s “District 13,” (also known as “District B13,” “Banlieue 13,” or just “B13”) another title from Luc Besson’s seemingly endless supply of co-produced and/or co-written projects. Crammed start to finish with preposterous lapses in even the most basic logical assumptions about human nature, director Camille Delamarre’s movie may be remembered chiefly as the last film performance completed by Paul Walker prior to his death in November. Walker had not finished shooting his scenes for “Fast & Furious 7,” which will presumably mark his final cinematic appearance when released in 2015.

While Walker’s death adds an eerie, melancholy mood to “Brick Mansions,” especially during scenes in which the actor is involved in any kind of vehicular mayhem, his screen presence and persona are otherwise no different from the bland comeliness – highlighted in the actor’s athletic physique and pretty blue eyes – that served Walker from supporting roles in “Varsity Blues,” She’s All That” and “The Skulls” to his higher profile status as Brian O’Conner in the “The Fast and the Furious” franchise. In “Brick Mansions,” Walker plays undercover office Damien Collier, just about the last honest cop in corrupt, dystopian, 2018 Detroit.

The movie’s title refers to a walled-off stretch of public housing projects in the heart of the city where rampant crime and impossible economic conditions have led to a lawless no man’s land that echoes the isolated Manhattan of “Escape from New York” (minus John Carpenter’s wit and inventiveness). Greedy city officials are poised to level Brick Mansions to make way for new economic development, but drug kingpin Tremaine Alexander (RZA), in possession of an old Russian missile complete with groan-inducing red LED countdown clock and override/abort code keypad, has other ideas.

Choosing the movie’s worst feature is no easy task, but the convoluted knot of shifting allegiances involving straight arrow Collier, avenging anti-drug vigilante Lino (David Belle, reprising his role from the French original), and murderous kidnapper Tremaine is probably the leading contender. Tremaine guns down one of his own men at point blank for failing to kill Lino. He abducts Lino’s ex-girlfriend Lola (Catalina Denis) and subjects her to physical abuse at the hands of henchwoman Rayzah (Ayisha Issa), fully coded and loaded as the sadistic lesbian and lone female enforcer. Tremaine also chops peppers and speaks in culinary metaphors.

And yet, once the depth of City Hall malfeasance is revealed, Tremaine looks clean by comparison, emerging as a Robin Hood of the slums and joining forces with Collier and Lino. The laughable turnabout is arguably more entertaining than the frantic parkour choreography and certainly more enjoyable than the dismal and disheartening disposability of human life on display. The movie’s coda, an unintentionally hilarious vignette depicting Collier’s BMW convertible crawling through the streets of a reborn, sunny day Brick Mansions while previously homicidal thugs plant trees and Lino teaches tots to acrobatically vault and leap, punctuates full-circle idiocy: former nemesis Tremaine’s mug, previously tacked up on Collier’s wall as persona non grata, is now plastered across red, white, and blue posters announcing his mayoral campaign.