March 31, 2005
Ducking Harvey
Tom Carson throws words at "Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession" in May's The Atlantic Monthly: "Today's 800-pound Daffy—the heir to Samuel Goldwyn's mighty quacking—is Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, since he clearly won't rest until his company's Oscars are numerous enough to do battle with the emperor Qin Shihuang's terra-cotta army. But the Bugs side of movies is the subject of Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing's first-rate "Open Wide"... It is published, let us note, by Miramax Books, which may or may not irritate the rival studios being scrutinized, but does remind us that Harvey is sentimental enough to think that having an eponymous print division confers classiness. In contrast, Rupert Murdoch probably has to pinch himself on most days even to remember he owns HarperCollins."
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Toasting AOLTimeWarnerNewLineFineLineHBOica
At a post-party for the premiere of The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the Observer's Jake Brooks fills a few cocktail napkins with indie go-tos going to Bob Berney's move to AOLTimeWarnerNewLineFineLineHBOica, building a case that "smaller-budget films... will not be the new company’s entire diet, like it was at Newmarket, which means more elbow room for independent film companies operating exclusively in that sphere. “There’s definitely one less company that’s chasing after films that are in [the] $1-$5 million range,” said Ryan Werner, the head of distribution at Wellspring. “There are not that many companies now, and as we try to grow, obviously, yes, the less competition the better." [Bingham] Ray, who founded the now-defunct October Films in 1990, agrees. He foresees a marked change in the marketplace and is now optimistic about starting a new independent venture. “I don’t think the same could be said a year ago at this time.”
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Bowles'd over
Chris Vognar's late SXSW report from the Dallas Morning News sets the scene for a set by one Eamonn Bowles: "The Martinets rip through a blistering set Saturday night at the Lava Lounge, led by animated singer-guitarist Eamonn Bowles. Sporting black jeans and a puffy white shirt with pink frills, the 49-year-old Mr. Bowles whips out a few Pete Townshend guitar windmills, drops to a knee and engages his three bandmates in playful banter about who has the most garish clothes... Happy, and very busy. You see, Mr. Bowles – veteran of the '70s New York punk scene, front man for a respected indie band – is also president of Texas-based Magnolia Pictures. He pulled double duty at South by Southwest this year, as a film executive with a hot documentary (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and as a caustic rocker who attracts a particularly movie-savvy crowd... Bassist Dave Rick used to play for indie icon band Yo La Tengo... Guitarist Daniel Rey produced a little punk band called the Ramones. These are just two of the bands that influenced the Martinets' hard-driving sound. "It's definitely a New York City, 1979 kind of thing," says Mr. Bowles." (Nice snap, too.) More at the link.
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Aping Oop
Iowa novelist and filmmaker Max Allan Collins debuts a 3 1/2-year labor at the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival: "Muscatine novelist and filmmaker Max Allan Collins has completed a documentary on a subject sure to interest many Iowans - cartoonist Vincent T. Hamlin and his famous comic strip "Alley Oop." Caveman: V.T. Hamlin & Alley Oop, the Des Moines Register reports, considers how the " dinosaur-laden strip has been credited with inspiring everything from The Flintstones to Jurassic Park. ... "The documentary is chock-full of pop art images—there's a lot of eye candy," Collins said." [There was a glitch in clearing rights to the 1950s novelty song, "Alley Oop," so Collins riffed.] Ever the resourceful one, Collins called in a friend from California and they wrote a similar sounding song called "Alley Oop Rides Again" that has the same groove."
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March 30, 2005
Kicking and squeaming: the Times on Sin City
The Times engages in a little chatty thumbsucking over the content of Frank Miller's Sin City, while indulging the paper's persistent fixation on the doings of the duo Weinstein: Of course, not every film noir piece shows the heads of five prostitutes mounted on a wall, or a dog eating the legs of a still-live boy, or a man ripping out the genitals of another man, or—but never mind.
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Malaysian sensaysh in SF
Malaysia's Star gives the local angle on 6 Malaysian movies slated in next month's 48th San Francisco International Film Festival. "The organisers said the festival this year has a special focus on Malaysia, a multi-cultural society where the development of digital video and the growing sophistication of a new, cine-literate generation in the past three years has seen the emergence of an independent film movement. SFIFF's executive director Roxanne Messina Captor's quoted: “Filmmakers are taking risks and using the medium to speak out about the social issues that affect their country and the world at large, such as economic collapse in Argentina and the Enron corporation, political corruption in Peru and Denmark, the rise of US neo-conservatism and Islamic fundamentalism."
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Edwardsville, Illinois: many weekends with friends attending movies and sipping sodas
The Telegraph of Alton, Illinois celebrates the relighting of a huge theater marquee: "Three switches were thrown to light up a piece of Edwardsville history that had been freeze-framed for 20 years. The lighting of the Wildey Theater marquee on North Main Street attracted more than 50 people... Many turned out to pay their respects to a building that brought back memories of growing up in the community and simpler times. Some laughed, telling stories of sneaking in to the theater... or being tossed out of the building by "Mrs. Duffy." "Oh, my God, does this bring back memories," said Sharon Deppe of Edwardsville. The Edwardsville High School graduate said she spent many weekends with friends attending movies and sipping sodas. "They should’ve kept the ticket booth... Deppe spoke fondly of Verna Duffy, known to theatergoers of the day as "Mrs. Duffy." Deppe described the late Duffy as "tough and strict." Duffy managed the Wildey for many years and was manning the building the night it closed its doors... Before the official lighting ceremony, old silent film reels were projected on a window outside the building to the north of the marquee. The building was built in 1909, and the theater closed its doors in 1984." No mention of what they're showing behind the bright lights...
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Cuban, libre
In Wired's profile of billionaire Landmark Theatres/Dallas Mavericks/Magnolia Pictures/HDNet owner Mark Cuban, the writer gets at one of the key financial maneuvers yet to be hatched for the future of "digital cinema." "'One model that seems very attractive is for studios to divert the money they would otherwise expect to spend on prints,' says Charles Swartz, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC. They could then use this money to pay for equipment and installation in theaters that commit to showing digital fare. If the studios balk, another funding scenario gathering acceptance splits the financial burden among many parties. 'Money from investment banks or Wall Street could find its way to entities that will purchase the equipment and install it in theaters,' Swartz says. These new third-party entities could provide an array of services, from encoding and encrypting movies to packaging and delivery—essentially becoming a new middleman."
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Larry Clark: How'd you find me?
New York's David Amsden talks to photographer-filmmaker-parent terrible on the eve of a major retrospective at Manhattan's International Center of Photography: "At its rawest and best, Clark’s work reveals a 'Lord of the Flies' vision of being young in America—parentless kids fending for themselves, doing what they can to deny their own existences—one that’s often a few steps ahead of the news cycle... “I don’t want to toot my own horn, because that’s stupid, but I’m just saying that I got there early... When I did 'Tulsa,' people thought that drugs couldn’t be happening with crew-cut kids in Oklahoma. Look now! Meth is the scourge of the Southwest! And when 'Kids' came out, they said it was all about Larry, that it was the fantasies of an old man. Then suddenly the news was filled with school shootings, sex, AIDS—all the headlines were what you saw in the movie!” Then, without pause: “Wait a second. Why am I even talking about this? How’d you find me? I fucking hate talking about my work.”
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Six Degrees of Denigration: "Rebels on the Backlot"
In Seattle Weekly, Tim Appelo cuts to the chafe: Indefatigable foreign correspondent turned New York Times Hollywood correspondent Sharon Waxman is one of the finest showbiz reporters on earth, and one of the worst writers. She's a heat-seeking news missile, capable of penetrating the hardened bunkers of the industry's Saddam-like liars and bringing lively truths to light. But you'd have to turn to Quentin Tarantino to find a famous person more incompetent at handling the basics of English prose.
Posted by at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
Gore Tex art
AP reports from down Austin way on the making of Frank Miller's Sin City: "Working together, the co-directors paid obsessive attention to capturing the Sin City of the page, frame by frame."We were working with my drawings up on one camera where we would superimpose the real image and adjust it until it matched my compositions," says Miller... Shooting without film made for a very different experience for Nick Stahl... "They didn't cut ever, which was weird... In one sense it was great because it does kind of free you up. You don't have to think, 'Do I have time for this or that?' You just have to do it. For that reason, you had to come very prepared. It was a little exhausting."
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Christmas in March
Porky's Redux is not yet upon us, but Bob Clark is on the remake trail: the veteran schlockmeister's early Canadian slasher pic Black Christmas is getting a retread. Maclean's reports that Toronto's Copperheart Entertainment, co-producers of the Academy Award-winning animated short Ryan are going downmarket with former "X-Files" producers James Wong and Glen Morgan writing, with Morgan directing in the fall in Vancouver.
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I have finally figured out how to read your reviews
An Ebert reader writes to The Answer Man: I have finally figured out how to read your reviews. A review isn't about what it says; it's about how it goes about saying it: If you are stimulated to eloquence by the movie, then the movie is a must-see. It doesn't matter if you rate it well or poorly; it is the fact that you reacted strongly to the movie, and worked hard at clarity, that tells me what I need to know. If the review looks like it "wrote itself," then you enjoyed the film and I may or may not like it based on personal preference. If the review seems to lack punch, or seems confused, then I know the film was a stinker no matter which way you look at it, and should be avoided for mental health reasons. --Ron Wodaski, Cloudcroft, N.M.
A. By following these rules, one would not always see good movies, but one would usually see interesting ones.
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Nick Broomfield goes formal
The Guardian caucuses several filmmakers about the legacy of Dogme 95, including Kristian Levring, Mike Figgis, Harmony Korine, Bernard Rose, Dan Myrick, Thomas Vinterberg and Nick Broomfield: "With documentaries there are already a set of very strict rules in place: original sound, no restaging, minimal lighting, no cutaways. In a sense, Dogme rules are much more lenient and slightly inconsistent. They didn't, for example, specify non-actors, or no scripted dialogue—that would have been interesting. But it's neither here nor there whether a camera is handheld or on a tripod. Dogme's great benefit was that it focused attention on the grammar of making films."
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March 29, 2005
Confederacy of onces
The Reporter considers literary properties taking a bumpy ride to the screen, focusing on Confederacy of Dunces, the rights to which have reverted to Paramount. Co-writer-producer Scott Kramer "hopes to lock in a new financing deal soon and says the key players—[Steven] Soderbergh, [David Gordon] Green, [Drew] Barrymore and Mos Def—remain attached. But his office answering machine sounds sadly prophetic in declaring, "If you are calling regarding Confederacy of Dunces, that project is now on indefinite hold."
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'Job Vs. the Volcano': Ebert bats for IMAX
Roger Ebert considers the preemptive non-booking of IMAX movies that mention the theory of evolution in certain parts of the U.S.: Now we have theaters, school systems and the media asked to give equal footing to a theory based on science and a belief based on faith. Creationists want it both ways. They want their ideas introduced into schools, but (if IMAX is right) they do not want evolution included in movies about volcanoes. If they are right and can prove it, what do they have to fear?
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Lubricating P. T. Anderson
As reported by ptanderson.com, Anderson's next will be about politics after all, an intrigue adapted from Upton Sinclair's slangy Jazz-era 1927 novel of California life and graft, "Oil!," itself drawn from the scandals of the Harding administration. (Sinclair's text was adapted on stage in late 2004 in San Francisco by Word for Word Performing Arts as "Oil: Chapter One: The Ride.")
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Training Danny Boyle
In one of their occasional let's-get-'em-out-of-the-suites-and-into-the-streets profiles of traveling filmmakers, the Chicago Tribune's Robert Elder finds Danny Boyle spotting trains: "British director Danny Boyle didn't just hit the usual Windy City tourist spots... but what really captivated the spiky-haired filmmaker was the elevated train system. "Your railway is just the sexiest railway in the world," says Boyle..."There's this debate in the U.K. about why British films aren't more cinematic. It's partly approach, but it's also because we don't have anything to shoot, compared to [Chicago's `L']," Boyle says. "There's nothing on that scale. It is the most cinematic railway in the world."
Posted by at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)
The condensed typeface comes into play
Posterwire launches, a site devoted to the "paper" that promotes motion pictyoors. Examples of flashy graphics alternate with more designer-ey info: "Once you factor in all these names and titles, space becomes a premium in the billing block. That's where a condensed typeface comes into play. Most good ultra condensed typefaces (usually sans serif) will work in a billing block. A few popular movie poster credit fonts include: Bee, Univers Thin Ultra Condensed, Tall Skinny Condensed and Triple Condensed Gothic."
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Napoleon takes Alabama
The TeenFRONT section of Alabama's Decatur Daily looks for answers from the core audience for Napoleon Dynamite: local "geeks." Priceville High School senior Casey Smith, who resembles Napoleon with his long, lean build and his tight curls, sees meaning behind the movie's disjointed plot. "'Napoleon' is random, spontaneous and crazy just like a teenager," he said. "I can see why adults wouldn't like it. They don't do that kind of stuff anymore.
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March 28, 2005
Shaggy Dogme
Another snarking of a decade of Dogme in the Australian: "Ten years on, Dogme 95 looks like a fringe experiment that went badly right. The first films were too successful. The name became a brand, which I guess is much worse than a genre. The romance of Dogme 95 effectively died when the rules were appropriated by mediocrities. The idea that anyone can make a film chimes happily with the advent of digital cameras, editing suites on laptops and a proliferation of festivals hungry to showcase documentary masterpieces such as Gay Nazi Germans. Unwittingly, Von Trier and Vinterberg paved the way for the most meritocratic epoch in cinema history. They also put their finger on a crime that has been sedating audiences and infuriating critics for years – the lack of emotional honesty between the camera and actor. For the first time in celluloid memory, actors are free to do their own thing and (portable) cameras are forced to follow."
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Moore and less of Mondovino
Right-leaning City Journal, described by Wall Street Journal platitudinist Peggy Noonan as "the best magazine in America," hikes a leg in the general direction of Michael Moore, The Corporation and Mondovino: "Further, [Nossiter] brings before the camera the Italian and French winemakers who have gone over to the modernist side and asks them whether their families collaborated with the Germans (in the case of the French) or the Fascists (in the case of the Italians) during World War II, as if this were relevant to the wine debate. Throughout the movie, the modernists appear as collaborators (with American tastes, now) and the traditionalists as members of the resistance. When he interviews one of the modernists, Nossiter always starts the camera rolling as he approaches the vineyard in question, and shows himself being welcomed by secretaries, press representatives (indeed “press attaché” is one of the most common titles used in the film), or marketing functionaries. By contrast, he films... traditionalists toiling in their vineyards, as if they are all quaint, small-time men of the land... But some of the traditional winemakers are in fact major players--anything but defenseless little guys."
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Celebrating Festen
The London hit adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration is Broadway-bound: "Festen is an adaptation of the 1998 movie directed and written by Vinterberg and is part of the Dogme film movement," writes Playbill, adding that the co-producer says "that she wants this to be the first in a series of Dogme stage adaptations." Coming soon: The Idiots at the Neil Simon.
Posted by at 09:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cheesy Portland auteurs
Willamette Week surveys Portland's emerging film scene, profiling four makers and the cheesily-dubbed collective Cinema Queso: "It's the same all over the country: Wannabe auteurs who don't know what an auteur is, but really want to direct. Now we seem to live in an age when few people want to write the great American novel, even fewer want to be president, but everyone wants to make movies. Thanks to cheap technology, everybody can—it's just that not all of them will do it well."
Posted by at 09:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Triangulating Alien Love
Danny Boyle tells SuicideGirls' Daniel Robert Epstein about his lost film: It’s going to have to come out now because Miramax is jettisoning all their product. Alien Love Triangle has been done since 1999. It’s like 25 minutes long so it’s kind of like an orphan, because it doesn’t have any partners. It was meant to have two other 30 minute films to go with it. The other two they commissioned they turned into full length films and that was what Miramax wanted us to do. But we always thought it was ideal as it is. We tried to come up with two other parts to go with it. It’s got Courtney Cox, Heather Graham and Kenneth Branagh and it’s very funny and very silly. Courtney Cox and Heather Graham play aliens. But Courtney Cox is a male alien inside Courtney Cox’s body which is always an interesting place to be. Heather Graham is a female alien who arrives to take Courtney Cox back.
Posted by at 09:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Following your heart from D.E.B.S to Herbie
From the underwhelming weekend gross for D.E.B.S. to the post-production of the $70 million Herbie: Reloaded, writer-director Angela Robinson says they're the same: "It doesn't matter, in my mind, that 'D.E.B.S.' is about Amy's relationship with Lucy, or that in 'Herbie,' it's about Lindsay Lohan realizing her dreams of becoming a NASCAR driver. Both stories are really about being true to yourself, whatever that is. 'Herbie' and 'D.E.B.S.' thematically are both about just following your heart and believing in yourself."
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March 27, 2005
Commit the most horrendous crime with horrible alacrity
Charles Dance bats his icy blues at career prospects: "Taking the director's chair for last year's Ladies in Lavender, the self-confessed "over-the-hill sex symbol" further confounded people's expectations. A modest period piece about two elderly spinsters (played by Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench), one of whom falls in love, for the first time, with a boy a third of her age, the film was a more roundly enjoyable and better-made piece of filmmaking than the vanity project some critics had expected. "It didn't move mountains or break any new ground cinematically, but I am 85% happy with it," says Dance. "But I'd like my next film to be as different as it can possibly be: maybe something full of very violent, drug-addicted people of about 18 who commit the most horrendous crime with remarkable alacrity and get away with it."
Posted by at 09:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 26, 2005
The Sopranos Meet the Monsters
San Francisco's got a brand-boo film event, the Fearless Tales Genre Fest, and they're slapping a Fearless Vision Award on the 54-year-old John Landis, who'll chat in the time between Innocent Blood and An American Werewolf in London. Landis tells the Chronicle that he's "still fond of Innocent Blood," but admits the film was not well received in 1992. "It made people uncomfortable because it was extremely outrageous and a little ahead of its time—about an urban Mafia family tainted by vampirism. Today I'd call it 'The Sopranos Meet the Monsters.' "
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March 24, 2005
Urbane rednecks
The WashPost's Desson Thomson checks Woody Allen for a pulse: This climate is as rarefied and anemic as the way these New Yorkers most likely consider Appalachian life: an inbred inflexibility to outside ideas, a feeling of insular sanctimoniousness. Allen's New Yorkers may not twang tinny guitars in the mountains, but they clamor to watch Bartok string quartets with similarly reflexive reverence. There, I've said it: Woody Allen's people have become urbane rednecks.
Posted by at 09:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Defining indie: Christine Vachon
The veteran producer talks to AP's Christy Lemire about what makes indie: "She says she chooses projects based on what interests her, and not necessarily with a sense of social responsibility. As a gay film-maker, I was told, 'You should be making positive images about gay people, not Swoon and I Shot Andy Warhol. I have to resist that... I'm not a preacher, I'm a producer. I'm making movies that I want to make because I think they're interesting and have some commercial viability." ... Vachon also resists purists' definitions of what makes an independent film ... To her, the idea of independence is an aesthetic phenomenon, a singularity of vision. "If that is economically the way these companies choose to diversify their tentpoles from their arthouse movies, I think it's fine... I just feel like this whole notion of what's really independent—whether it's Miramax or Warner Independent or Fox Searchlight or Paramount Classics—it's just a way of separating the Spider-Mans from the Sideways."
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March 23, 2005
Romanian bonuses
A survey of the costs of making smaller budget movies in Romania—"While a Romanian technician has an average salary of $2,400 a year, Scottish technicians can earn more than $40,000 a year"—has a few cheap comments, too: Armand Assante’s passion for beautiful women has drawn him back to Romania. After shooting a movie in Bucharest, he returned to the Balkan country several times, attending a beauty contest and spending time on the Black Sea coast, in the Olimp resort. ''The women in Eastern Europe are very sexy”, he said to the Romanian media.
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