« June 2005 | Main | August 2005 »
July 30, 2005
"Bollyworld": I spent a whole evening in a bar in Thimpu
In a dismissive review of Raminder Kaur and Ajay J Sinha's "Bollyworld" in the Sunday Deccan Herald, M Bhaktavatsala runs off the rails as he concludes, "Incidentally, the book that claims to discuss global influences in Indian cinema ignores the most powerfully sustained manifestation of it. Indian film music has been global almost from the beginning. Today it is a craze that finds a responsive chord in the remotest parts of the world. It has driven many, like the Sri Lankans, to learn the language to understand the songs. I spent a whole evening in a bar in Thimpu listening to the Bhutanese singing old Hindi songs and asking me to translate them. But, I suppose, the subject is not abstruse enough for the editors of this book or perhaps it is too much to be fitted into an article. This is an altogether mixed bag of a book."
Posted by at 02:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bob Altman: I just do not understand that
Peter Kaufman of the WashPost pries out a laconic Altman gem: "Altman, 80, spent two decades making industrial films and toiling on TV series, which ingrained habits of efficiency. Not for him the icy perfectionism of a Stanley Kubrick, who would insist on scores of takes for the simplest scene. "I just do not understand that," Altman says in his flat Missouri drawl. "Never did. Didn't at the time. Still don't."
Posted by at 01:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 29, 2005
Jonas Mekas: linear on one level and totally unlinear on another
Over at 3am, Richard Marshall interviews filmmaking avant-garde-father Jonas Mekas, with this Mekas A before any Qs: "My movies are very linear. My movies are not jumping around. Let's face it. Time goes, my life continues, my friends are all around me, it's part of my life, people that I meet everyday and then I film my life. My friends. My films are horizontal. There is past, there is present. Of course I deal always with the present moment and life is continuing. There is no jumping around. Only when you make a film where you write a script or you have it in your head, an idea that you proceed to illustrate can you jump around. And whether it be connected with Hitchcock or Jarmusch that's how it is. But in real life film, I am the one who is connecting. But what I filmed yesterday might have no connection with what I might be shooting today. But it's the same person. The same strings that are connecting them all. So it might look like they're jumping but I have to do something with all of them. I'm the string. So they're linear on one level and totally unlinear on another." [A dozen or so more lengthy exchanges at the link.]
Posted by at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Reframer: Sunday LA Times logs blog
In the Sunday LA Times' Calendar, Rachel Abramowitz writes a long takeout on Defamer's Mark Lisanti, luxuriating in "hip, edgy" words like "flick": "It's almost exactly like crack addiction," says the affable 31-year-old from his command station, a Sony computer in his home office — a modest Los Feliz apartment. He doesn't have air conditioning or any pictures on the wall of his office save for a black-and-white publicity still of Ralph Macchio in the forgotten 1980s flick Crossroads. He does, however, have a site meter on his computer that shows him how many page views he's getting... "I check it all the time. Any given hour if you ask me how many page views I've had in the last hour, I could probably tell you. That's how our performance is benchmarked, so it turns us into crack-addicted McMonkeys." ... According to Technorati... Defamer was recently the 69th most popular blog out of an estimated 14 million blogs worldwide." Straining to make Lisanti seem—slightly icky?—Abramowitz writes: He's wearing a T-shirt and jeans and the slightly grubby sheen of someone who's just spent the entire day inside blogging... In his short career... Lisanti has posted about 3,800 items — about 12 a day, not including weekends. He says that if an item lies in his inbox, or his consciousness, for more than 6 hours, then it's usually too old to get on the blog. "Who's going to want to hear about 6 hours ago?" he posits, much like in another era when Hamlet asked "to be or not to be?" [More heavy lifting at the link.]
Posted by at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Will I be able to get through Customs?: Vinterberg on McCarthyism
The Evening Standard's Charlotte O'Sullivan chats up Thomas Vinterberg on the eve of Dear Wendy's UK release: "Variety's Todd McCarthy... slammed it as "anti-American". "Oh, yeah," sighs the Danish Vinterberg, "he bombed it. I'm angry, because the label is going to stick. Unfortunately, he represents a lot of people, the older part of our target audience anyway. They're tired, they're embarrassed by their country but they don't want to hear it, it's like having a disabled brother; you don't want other people to point it out." On working from Trier's script: "People said: 'It will be bad for your image. People will think you're Lars von Trier's right hand.'" He went ahead and doesn't regret the experiment, though it has "finalised" their collaboration. Finalised? He smiles. "Like I don't want to do it again... Do you think this will affect my career in the States? ... Do you think I will be able to get through Customs?"
Posted by at 04:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Inside baseball in an elevator: Ebert on Rosenbaum on The World
Ending his 3-star review of Jia Zhangke's The World, an exploration of time and space in a suburban Beijing theme park, Roger Ebert tells a personal tale: "After the screening, I rode down on the elevator with the great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. "I've seen it five times... It's one of my favorite films. I still don't understand the ending." I was not only afraid to ask him what he didn't understand about the ending, I was afraid to ask him what he thought the ending was. In a sense, The World is about a story that never really begins." [Notably, Ebert does not use the word "simulacrum." Not once.]
Posted by at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Braining Einstein: Errol Morris on objectivity and drama
Errol Morris updates USA Today while promoting his DVD collection: "Morris bristles at charges that Fog of War and Fahrenheit 9/11 aren't documentaries because they reflect the filmmaker's point of view. "Why should a film, and how could a film, be 100% objective—and what does that even mean?" After 25 years of directing documentaries and commercials, Morris is ready to try drama." [Writer Thomas K. Arnold makes no mention of 1991's misfire, The Dark Wind.] "He says he's looking at a fictionalized version of the story that Albert Einstein's brain was taken from Princeton Hospital in 1955. "Not surprisingly, I find a lot of dramas I'm attracted to are based on true stories."
Posted by at 04:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
State of the Union: behind the NY projectionists' union's concessions
The Reeler's getting in the trenches of the disagreement about unions and New York's new IFC Center, discovering there's more to the story, and that it might be unfair to single out IFC in light of other, prior machinations: "The Reeler spoke today with union president Michael Goucher, who explained an arrangement that might make the IFC Center standoff look downright equitable by comparison."We have with certain individual theaters within a chain of theaters [an agreement that] they have the right to have managers operate, provided they meet certain criteria... In the cases where it is contractually agreed, they must be managers. Once we agree to let that happen, we have no control over what the criteria are—the circumstances or whatever. As far as we're concerned, it is based on a negotiated agreement, and the negotiated agreement is what determines what we will not do and what we will do." What does this mean? "In other words, Regal, Loews and AMC do not have any obligation to use union projectionists—and there is no guarantee that they are." Goucher unreels further: ""The reason this was acceded to in New York City is because at one time, some of these companies were going bankrupt... We got hoodwinked, because those bankruptcies were all absolute phony bankruptcies, and they were meant to make the price of the company attractive to a new buyer." ... "Bottom line? Sayles--and not just a few other powerful New Yorkers--might be writing a lot more letters before this is all said and done." [More of the nitty and gritty at the link.]
Posted by at 04:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hot today, Chile tomorrow: another geek odyssey
LA Times' Lorenza Muñoz works to make geek chic in a profile of the almost too good to be true 22-year-old Chilean director Nicolas Lopez: "Standing at a chubby 5 feet 6 and emanating a manic, geeky charm... Lopez is... an unlikely lightning rod. He has shaken Chile's film industry by importing American-style marketing and publicity tactics to promote his films. He has popularized genre films in an industry more accustomed to sober dramas. His horror movies and teen comedies have been breakout hits at the box office, hitting a nerve among the country's youth. Only 22 and still living with his parents, Lopez is unabashed about his passion to "make movies not films." ... To some, Lopez "is the epitome of everything they loathe about globalization and the United States: instant gratification, cynicism, commercialism and vulgarity. His movies, his critics say, are all blood, gore and no substance." Muñoz quotes Chilean novelist and director Alberto Fuguet, "He is a symbol of the Latin American of the future... He is alienated, hip, ultra Internet savvy, raised on trashy culture and yet he is local." Lopez's first cinematic influence? Back to the Future 2. "I want to make auteur cinema — MTV style," he said. ... "If you are fat, high school is hard," he said. "If you are fat with [breasts] like me, it's even harder." His first feature, "Promedio Rojo," was dubbed by Lopez's hero Harry Knowles as "a geek masterpiece of comedic insanity." ... "This industry has been led by geeks," he said gesticulating wildly over his pizza. "I mean, look at Spielberg — he is the biggest geek. The people who have been on the outside have always been able to tell the best stories. We are the ones who have had problems with girls, wore glasses and are fat." [More enabling at the link.]
Posted by at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Only Fincher
What David Fincher does when he can't get a feature going: here's a link to his latest video for Nine Inch Nails, working with Digital Domain. (Via Filmmaker.)
Posted by at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
"Remain Calm": catching the Sundance Junebug
Bizreport reports on another source of indie cash: "Maybe it was only a matter of time before they took on Hollywood. Ethan D. Leder and Mark P. Clein... in their 40s, have already sold a financial company for $483 million in cash and created a pharmaceutical distribution firm that was bought for $160 million after a short existence. Now they run United BioSource Corp. , a Bethesda company with more than $150 million in venture backing that is trying to revolutionize the drug testing industry..." They also "financed an independent movie, Junebug, that was a hit at the Sundance Film Festiva , got picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and debuts in New York and Los Angeles next week. The movie was written by Angus MacLachlan, a childhood friend of Clein's. Clein and Leder, along with a New York investor, put up just under $2 million to shoot the quirky family drama... While Clein and Leder say the movie industry is more hobby than profession, they have set up a firm, Remain Calm Pictures, to finance more films."
Posted by at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Heralding Hark's latest: Seven Swords preems
Malaysia's New Straits Times talks to Tsui Hark about his latest venture into period martial arts: "As director, Tsui said that by the time he finished [post-production], he would have seen the movie more than 1,000 times and knew every single frame, every blink of an actor's eye and exactly what came next. But when it comes to watching the... premiere, it is still a fresh experience for him... "You need to distance yourself from it all before the movie actually airs... Because the more you look at it, the more you would want to remake it! However, no matter how many times you make changes, there will still be room for more. I try to keep things in moderation because if you change too much, then the end result would not be what you originally intended it to be. I stay away after wrapping up filming and do something completely different, like watch other movies or write a new script, just to cleanse my memory." Next? A comedy.
Posted by at 02:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Facts That My Mind Skipped: Ed Koch on Toback, I mean, Audiard
The 80-year-old former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, still reviews movies: here's part of his notice for Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped. "As the doors opened and the theater emptied out, I asked those departing what they thought of the film... I’m glad that I saw this picture. James Toback’s movie can be described as a French film noir. It is gritty, puzzling, unresolved, and interesting. The plot is a mélange of threads representing separate but interlocking stories. They are not directly linked like Robert Altman’s films which usually have a central, dominating theme... The film, set in Paris, is very sensual and includes the handsome and rugged-looking Tom having lots of affairs. When Tom isn’t assisting his father in the business, he spends his time practicing the piano with his Chinese tutor... who doesn’t speak any French. Tom’s ambition is to become a concert pianist as his now deceased mother had been. I liked the plot and the music and especially enjoyed the acting of all the principal figures."
Posted by at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
King Lear: Norman puts money in the Matrix men
Norman Lear, who turned 83 on Wednesday, takes it on the Roadshow, investing $115 million as part of three-person consortium, taking " 50% of the main film and distribution companies making up Village Roadshow Pictures, which has a long-term co-financing deal with Warners Bros. Pictures and is based on the Warners lot," writes Variety. "Village Roadshow's production and distribution partnership with Warner Bros. has turned out a number of high-profile, profitable pics, including the current "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "The Matrix""The Matrix" trilogy. Upcoming releases include "The Dukes of Hazzard"... CEO Graham Burke said in a statement. "These are our type of guys and together we plan to take Village Roadshow Pictures to new heights."... Village Roadshow Ltd. predicted a $20 million accounting loss before tax in fiscal 2006 as a result of the restructuring. Whatever the loss, conglom said its board believes the new partnership is "a strategic necessity and financially prudent."
Posted by at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2005
Appreciating 3 Rooms of Melancholia
The NY Times' Stephen Holden is on top of his game, reviewing a great doc: "The acrid fog of war is palpable in Pirjo Honkasalo's magnificent documentary, The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, one of the saddest films ever made. The movie, which opens today in New York, is evidence that when a director-cinematographer with a poet's vision photographs the material world, ordinary human faces and landscapes can leave impressions that transcend any words that might describe them... Although tears are shed in The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, the film mostly lets its images speak for themselves. More affecting than any displays of emotion is the prevailing attitude of stoicism and endurance in the face of suffering. The film is a requiem for the living as well as for the dead."
Posted by at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Waving the Tartan flag: another indie definition
Tartan Film's Hamish McAlpine details his US biz plan to the Voice's Matthew Ross: "The man behind Tartan is Hamish McAlpine, a Scotsman known as much for his business acumen as his brash, dandyish persona (wearing white fur to premieres, getting into fistfights with Larry Clark, etc.). "I feel that America has been culturally challenged, and that's where we come in... we're sort of an agent provocateur. We don't have to answer to any American stockholders or banks; we have no one saying we are too outrageous; we have no one holding us back. In other words, we are operating in the true spirit of independence." For McAlpine, embracing the risque� is essential to Tartan's branding strategy. ... "Sometimes that can take us into sexually explicit territory and other times into intellectually explicit arenas." For the past few years, Tartan has maintained its bottom line thanks to its lucrative Asian Extreme video label, which has built up a cult following in Europe with a slate of mostly Japanese and Korean horror films... For a veteran like [Gregg] Araki, Tartan's arrival has given the indie landscape a welcome alternative to mini-major dominance. "Small distributors have become like mini-studios... There's an expectation at this point, with these runaway successes like Napoleon Dynamite, that every film needs to make tons and tons of money to be successful. But the old-school independent movies like Mysterious Skin, need companies like Tartan."
Posted by at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ballard on Powell: like giddy kites over the peaks of entertainment cinema
In the Guardian, JG Ballard does some waxing over the great Michael Powell: "Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi? Could Crash be seen as a tender love story? More to the point, in this centenary year of Michael Powell's birth, could his flamboyant and extravagant films seem like hard-edged psychological dramas about the nature of human consciousness? Are these remarkable films, which float like giddy kites over the peaks of entertainment cinema, in fact far closer to the psychiatrist's casebook than their audiences ever suspected?" [More musing at the link.]
Posted by at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
2 left thumbs: Crash-ing race
Writers Jeff Chang and Sylvia Chan do the Ebert-Roeper thing over Crash at Alternet: "CHANG: [In] this post 9/11 moment, Crash [comes out] during a time of war. Our nation is in “crisis,” we have a “deeply divided nation,” as the media [tells] us. When Grand Canyon, and one of the first white liberal Hollywood movies, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, were released, the nation was at war. Times of crisis and war are when whites have the strongest desire for reconciliation with blacks, when blackness is most desired as part of a triumphant narrative of nation. Don Cheadle's character is a type of black male protagonist who’s very common these days: a proxy for the state, working against all the unruly elements of internal diversity and external threat.... This is the type of narrative Hollywood needs to keep putting out there right now—the black man as the symbol for our nation, the guy who’s going to provide order for not only the U.S., but for the world. And let’s be real: this isn’t happening in real life. In the end, [Crash] paints racism as a postmodern malaise where conflict happens because we don't touch each other except when we crash. That's bullshit. Racism is structural and institutional more than it is personal and sentimental. CHAN: The pitch is go to see Crash, then go home and ponder your prejudices. For some people it may do that. For a lot of people, though, it won’t. It's the feel-good race hit movie of the summer."
Posted by at 03:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The new male infantilism: Wes Anderson, et al
Matthew Wilder roughs up a wuss generation in City Pages: "Wes Anderson is perhaps the dean of the LittleBlue SmurfBoys™, having plied his middle-schooler wares for the past decade. Of this trinity of Smurfs, Young Master Wes seems to show the most promise as, if not a Big Bruiser, surely a Soigné Uptown Sophisticate. Where a stunted self-regarder like [Conor] Oberst seems condemned to an incommunicative trance, the 36-year-old Anderson is aware enough of the lineage of movie auteurs as lion-taming showmen to, some day, escape his autistic fugue state. In his bizarrely engineless recent effort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson left the Broadway aspirations of The Royal Tenenbaums to plunge headlong into a silo stuffed with a haut-bourgeois 12-year-old kid's fetish objects. No longer concerned with suspense or surprise, or even story or character, Anderson gives himself a consolation massage as the screen widens with little red ski caps, zany matching Nike tracksuits, Hottentots out of Master Wes's moth-eaten National Geographics, and a series of nautical vehicles that recall the playthings of bath time.... Still, the winning noblesse oblige of Anderson's audio commentaries on [his] Criterion DVDs... leave me thinking that the director might one day possess the character traits of a functioning adult. [Wilder also describes novelist Jonathan Safran Foer's latest, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," as "'Tuesdays with Morrie' for the yellow Converse set." ... In the world of blue-state liberal-arts grads, and most especially in the world of movie/book/music criticism, there ain't a lot of Big Bruising going on. In this Blue Smurfy climate, the outsized obsessions, red-hot rhetoric, and violent argument of the Bruisers would give the tastemaking class a panic attack.... I can only pray some hibernating Bruiser--Don DeLillo, say, or Robert Rauschenberg--will spring from his cave, tear [the] Saint-Exupéry scarf off [a] pencil neck, and show him how it's really done: art-making revealed as high-wire act, fire-eating contest, bare-knuckle barroom brawl."
Posted by at 07:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Tracks of his tears: crying with Bill Viola
Video artist Bill Viola tells Joyce Morgan of The Age about art, tears and the mystic: "The near darkness of the editing suite draws close as video artist Bill Viola speaks in calm, measured tones... "I cry a lot... Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression." The insulated room that absorbs all echoes suddenly feels more like a confessional than a high-tech post-production centre in the heart of... Hollywood. "A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry." ... Viola is a thoroughly modern mystic, who uses digital technology to create images that invite the contemplation of life and death. His small plasma screens pay homage to the portable religious icons of the Middle Ages.. As Gandhi once said, there's more to life than increasing its speed... The slowness of Viola's work also has a political dimension. It is an antidote to what he sees as one of the greatest dangers of our age - the speed with which we receive information and our growing inability to makes sense of what we see."
Posted by at 04:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Take a little Dogme pill, Trier smirks
Time Out's Dave Calhoun does the Dogme dance with Lars von Trier: "Trier suggests that it is only a matter of historical accident that Americans speak English, not German. 'That would have been different. I could make a film – a science-fiction – about how it could have been, in which they all speak German. That would be kind of fun, no? With lederhosen…' Of the near lack of reaction to his Manderlay at Cannes, Trier says, "First of all, for most of Europe, I think, the film is politically correct. In a way that it is not, I'm sure, in America, as the film allows black people to be stupid and to behave like normal people." ... Recently, von Trier reached a crisis point. For half a year he tried to write 'Wasington', his planned third film in the American trilogy, but he wasn't happy with the outcome. [He's] decided to postpone that and make a Dogme film next year, his first since 'The Idiots'. 'It's what I've said to all these directors who come to me, saying 'I'm confused, what can I do?' I say, 'Take a little Dogme pill. Relax and nobody will expect anything from you. 'It works, this Dogme pill. So I'm taking a Dogme pill.'
Posted by at 12:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2005
Van Gogh killer gets life
A Dutch court condemned Mohammed Bouyeri to life in jail on Tuesday. The Islamic radical had admitted to killing filmmaker Theo van Gogh last November, saying he acted out of faith. The 3-judge panel of the Amsterdam high-security court announced the life sentence against Bouyeri for the murder which the prosecution said signaled the end of innocence for the tolerant Netherlands.... Bouyeri, a 27-year old who holds dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality, has made it clear he does not recognize the authority of the court. During the trial he ordered his attorney not to present a defense... The slaying of van Gogh, carried out in broad daylight as he cycled to work, shocked the Netherlands... The filmmaker, a distant relative of 19th century painter Vincent van Gogh, was also an outspoken columnist who often criticized Islam and multicultural society."
Posted by at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cutting Murderball: 99 more cuts
The Reeler drops a few quotes from Murderball's editor after a seminar at Soho Apple: "It was literally hundreds of edits just to get up to the end of Act One," [Geoffrey] Richman told the crowd on hand between demonstrations on Apple's Final Cut Pro... "In the end, it comes down to something like just where you fade up or where that title falls. Even if everything else sucks, it's 99 more cuts like that until you get a finished movie." [A couple other OK quotes at the link.]
Posted by at 01:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Michael Bay's debacle
There are good reasons to defend The Island but after the not-Number-One weekend results, Michael Bay has apparently decided it's a piece of shit, telling the LA Times, "I'm not blaming the whole thing on the marketers.... Everyone from [Steven] Spielberg to Zemeckis to Kubrick - they've all had big flops," he said. "I was five for five. You know it's going to happen." (Take credit away where credit is not due.)
Posted by at 12:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jack on: more on Bogdanovich's Saint
Singapore-based UK-born journo Ben Slater offers more about the toil behind his forthcoming Saint Jack tome: "When I finally felt in a position to deliver the goods [to my blog], I ended up being strangely scooped by [Movie City Indie, which] spotted the online incarnation of an article about my activities that... was published last week in a... Singapore [paper,] TODAY... My aim was to research like crazy for 4 months and then write for 4 months, but as someone once said - a plan is a list of things that don't happen - and that turned out to be exactly right. My first port-of-call was to be the director, Peter Bogdanovich and my 'plan' was to interview him first and then move on to everyone else. Well, tracking him down wasn't too hard since I had been kindly given a contact for him through film critic Tom Charity. After emails had been sent and several weeks had passed, I got a reply - Bogdanovich was happy to talk to me. However, a window for the first phone interview couldn't be arranged till late March, and so my research didn't really begin proper till the moment I picked up the phone to Peter in New York and heard that distinctive mellow voice.After that things began to tumble into place in fits and starts..." After describing the process of his research, Slater offers, optimistically (Envoi!), "And this week I seriously begin writing the book in earnest. Here goes."
Posted by at 01:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 25, 2005
Pottering about: What's a kid, Mike Newell?
In the July 29 Entertainment Weekly, Mike Newell, director of the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, offers this: "It’s my view that children are violent, dirty, corrupt anarchists. Just adults-in waiting."
Posted by at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Another reason we like the Guardian
Blogrolling in our time: "For a heads-up on new independent and foreign releases and whatever's flying off today's rumour mill, an industry-savvy blog like David Hudson's GreenCineDaily. Get your festival updates at Filmmaker Magazine Blog and gossipy US media round-ups at Movie City Indie." Well, we'll take that.
Posted by at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 24, 2005
and yes I said yes I will Yes: Sally Potter, blogger
Sally Potter's been keeping a terse, tidy diary of her recent travels promoting Yes: "In the afternoon, however, I did interviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Irish Echo, the latter two by phone. All three conversations were stimulating and intriguing. Annette Grant, in New York, sent me a surprising and beautiful poem of an email later that evening with a vivid description of a pregnant woman carrying an orange she had seen shortly after leaving the hotel. (We had briefly discussed the charged question of not having had children. Or, as on a gorgeous cartoon postcard I once saw of a woman weeping diamond-like tears whilst exclaiming: "I don't believe it! I forgot to have babies!") Victoria Looseleaf (what an excellent name) of the LA Times is a dance critic and had many droll, funny things to say about The Tango Lesson, particularly her own envy at watching me dance with someone as marvelous as Pablo. It is never too late, I assured her. My tango debut on screen was at the age of 46."
Posted by at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Defining documentary: Richard Corliss has some sex
Writing about 9 Songs in Time International, Richard Corliss makes some distinctions: "Whenever a fiction film goes hard-core, the artifice of character and story disappears, and the movie instantly becomes a documentary record--something between a stag film and a nature special on Nova. Realizing this, Winterbottom dispenses with most of the standard narrative props: there's no Other Man, no mistaken identity, no quest. Matt and Lisa are not really people, in the multiplex-movie sense. They are performers, like the band members, working in public for our pleasure. The only drama is that, omigod, they're doing it!"
Posted by at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Troma's blunt object lessons: Kaufman tells some if not all
The Globe & Mail's Matthew Hay picks the mind of prolific schlockster Lloyd Kaufman, who's been almost as prolific as classmate Oliver Stone: "Kaufman points out that due to Troma's "commitment to art and auteurist cinema," many people contact him through Troma's website... to work for free. "Just about everybody on the set is there to experience the joy of making some art," Kaufman explains, with a straight face. "We posted lyrics on our site and said we needed music for them. We were contacted by someone in Edmonton who wrote the music for it. And he did it for free. We said we needed pulsating eggs as a special effect. So this woman in Sweden made some pulsating eggs and sent them to us. They were stopped at the border, though. I guess pulsating eggs are suspicious after 9/11." ... In his book, he advises that you recycle fake limbs for gore sequences as a method of penny-pinching. Ground beef, he points out, works perfectly when simulating a head crushing." Regarding film festivals, "he distills bits and pieces of know-how. Be sure to take as much food from the airplane as you can, he warns, so that you avoid the high cost of eating at [Canne's] expensive restaurants... The changing scene at Cannes is part of the reason Kaufman lectures... "I've been going to Cannes for over 30 years... Look at this year: Everything was sandwiched by George Lucas and that no-talent hose hound Paris Hilton. Today, the word independent has been stolen. When the major newspapers call divisions of AOL Time Warner independent, and the public actually believes it, the vocabulary has been stolen too... If you're not in it for the art, then get the hell out."
Posted by at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Accepting The Devil's Rejects: about those 3 stars
For those unclear on the concept, here's how Roger Ebert ends his 3-star celebration of The Devil's Rejects: "OK, now, listen up, people. I don't want to get any e-mail messages from readers complaining that I gave the movie three stars, and so they went to it expecting to have a good time, and it was the sickest and most disgusting movie they've ever seen. My review has accurately described the movie and explained why some of you might appreciate it and most of you will not, and if you decide to go, please don't claim you were uninformed."
Posted by at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spreading Billy Bob: John Anderson's cosmopolitan cracker
Nice lede in the Voice from John Anderson trailing our B-Bob: "The most cosmopolitan cracker ever to play Santa Claus and Davy Crockett, Billy Bob Thornton is a walking contradiction, reconciling the conflicting aesthetics of Northern and Southern truth and fiction. In person, he seems to have fewer of those sharp, hillbilly angles than appear on screen." [Nice rhyme in the Kristofferson allusion there.] "He has skin that could advertise an L.A. salon (despite the scrollwork of tattoos up and down his arms). And while he's wearing cowboy boots, he bought them... in New York City! "But they're made in Texas... All the good boots are made in Texas. Some in New Mexico, but mostly Texas. I used to go to this place in Soho called . . . uh . . . Buffalo Chips, it was called. They sold Western wear. They had these boots made for me. The little diamonds are brown lizard." [More fungo at the link.]
Posted by at 02:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2005
Post-piracy: peddling Asian DVDs in the US
There's a survey of how US distribs are bucking already-imported Asian DVD titles with their Amercan releases, from Video Business' Susanne Ault: "Asian DVDs are as hot as ever, but suppliers and retailers still tread carefully when dealing with the often-pirated genre. During the last year, extreme horror and arthouse cinema from Asia have found a place beside still-popular anime and martial-arts titles... U.S. movie fans, ...versed in Chinese and Japanese films, are now branching out into discovering work from Korea and Thailand as well.Yet many of these films have been available on DVD for years in Asia. Consequently, discs have often found their way to the U.S. from distributors who may or may not have legitimate domestic home entertainment rights. American suppliers of Asian content, including Tartan Video, Palm Pictures and Ventura Distribution, are developing tactics to prevail over piracy." [Figures 'n' facts at the link.]
Posted by at 06:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
PR Home Companion: fluffing Altman's Powdermilk Biscuits
Give that PR-ista a bonus: the NY Times follows the beaten path to a Minnesota door with their own on-set of Robert Altman's currently shooting Prairie Home Companion. "A thin young man [he's 35] kept popping up on Mr. Altman's shoulder during shooting recently, offering bits of advice. Paul Thomas Anderson, director and Altman-phile, is ostensibly on the set for insurance purposes; Mr. Altman is 80, so a backup director is part of the package. But he [also] said, "it is invaluable to spend as much time around Bob as I can." He has no position as to whom the movie belongs to, other than that it is not his. "Whatever chef is going to take credit for it, it is going to be a very spicy dish that I will be more than happy to dine on," Mr. Anderson said." The Times' David Carr, who obviously studied the paper's internal memo to mention suburban and rural religion as often as possible, asserts, with disingenuous gooeyness: "A Prairie Home Companion is, to many, a kind of secular religion." Altman himself is a tad more irascible: "Garrison's audience is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience... This movie is going to play for two weeks in places like Chicken Switch, Arizona, because the program has such strong rural appeal."
Posted by at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
War of War of the Worlds: Maybe that's the job of a critic
Stephanie Zacharek of Salon did not like War of the Worlds and does the art-vs.-life thing in comparing her reaction to that of close colleagues.
"Tim Noah wrote an impassioned essay decrying Steven Spielberg's abuse of 9/11 imagery... and singled me out as one of the only critics... who were similarly appalled and troubled by the picture. Then on Wednesday Slate['s] David Edelstein -- who, in addition to being my friend, is also a critic I admire and respect above nearly all others -- responded to Noah (and, more indirectly, to me) with a vigorous and carefully reasoned defense of the movie as a valid response to 9/11. He did refer to my and Noah's reaction... as "screwy" .... In any event, nothing Edelstein, or anyone, can say will change my mind about "War of the Worlds": My screwy position is, at this point, more firmly and defiantly screwed in than ever.... The response I had... was immediate and visceral.... I've gotten a few letters from faithful readers of both Salon and Slate who were puzzled (or at least fascinated) by the idea that Edelstein and I could have such divergent readings of the same picture. I don't think the difference in our responses is all that remarkable; what's more interesting, I think, is how strong our feelings were, in comparison with those of so many other critics across the country. ...That alone is proof that if you sit down in front of a movie and open yourself wholly to it -- maybe that's the job of a critic in a nutshell -- you run the risk that it's going to hit you right where you live."
Posted by at 03:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
2005 meets 2046: Wong Kar-wai
"When asked, though, what he might do if he weren't making movies, [Wong Kar-Wai] doesn't waste time," writes LA Times' Scott Timberg on the eve of the US release of 2046. "I'd like to be a bartender... It would be very specific: It would have to be happy hour, or else very late at night. People go to bars to speak up—to tell you their stories." Happy-hour patrons would be full of boasting, flirting and good cheer. "And by the time it was late, they would be quite drunk," perhaps overcome by loneliness and despair. "They would tell you something quite deep — or else nonsense." ... [Cinematographer Christopher] Doyle, who has had several legendary fallouts with Wong, isn't so sure the process is quite so typical: "Thank God there is no one else in this world who works this way." ... As for the making of poetic, philosophical movies like his: "I think it will happen — always," he says. "Because don't forget, the first reason people are attracted to this business is their passion for expressing themselves through images. Some of them will make it and some of them won't. But we know those people are always there."
Posted by at 03:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 22, 2005
Kurt, Harmony, Bernardo and Michael: Nevermind
Michael Pitt, the lead of Gus van Sant's Last Days, marvels at Bernardo Bertolucci's tastes in Gaycitynews: "The strange thing was that when I had my first meeting with Bertolucci, he asked me questions about what kind of films and music I liked... He was a really big fan of Harmony Korine [who is in Last Days] which I thought was kind of amazing, based on the fact that he was nearing 60 and knew about this really young, obscure filmmaker. He also brought up Kurt Cobain and when he first saw him he said he thought, 'This is like a fallen angel.' I thought that was very strange, coming from Bertolucci, and this was before I even knew about this project."
Posted by at 06:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Keeping Kontroll: where Nimrod found his muse
Nimrod Antal, the Hungarian-American director of the stylish thriller, Kontroll
set in Budapest's underground, reveals his inspiration: "I wanted to make a film cheaply and I knew I could use existing lighting... I knew I'd be able to create a very strong production design in a given location without investing thousands and thousands of dollars. And while there were symbolic elements in the film, and certain things I wanted to get off my chest, I was mainly trying to make a [John] Carpenteresque B-movie thriller--a remake of The Thing or The Warriors by Walter Hill."
Posted by at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Snow job: Gordy Hoffman's directorial debut at Locarno
The only US entry in the video competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, A Coat of Snow, is the directorial preem of Love, Liza writer Gordy Hoffman. The producers' press release describes it: "Set in present-day Los Angeles, dramatic story deals with a bachelorette party unraveling over the course of a night until the bride disappears. Digital feature had Hoffman casting unknowns to maintain the look of a home video, followed by an extensive script workshop stretching over a 3-year period. Actors operated the camera throughout the shoot, with final edit containing 29 cuts and no music. Harrowing finale is a 12-minute shot, captured in one take."
Posted by at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 21, 2005
Drawing Burton: I find if I think too much, I start to confuse myself again
The Guardian's Hadley Freeman riffles through Tim Burton's sketchbooks: "Undoubtedly, his stylistic consistency owes much to his wonderfully weird sketches for his films. He used to storyboard his entire movies, shot by shot, but now really uses them more for himself: "They help me think more than anything else. They calm me down and, also, they're a way for me to think subconsciously. I prefer to act out of my subconscious - I find if I think too much, I start to confuse myself again." As if to confirm this, he makes another grab at his hair. They are also, he says, a way for him to get a measure of his crew: "It's like a test, you know? Working out who isn't intimidated by a crude drawing, or competitive about it. It helps me to see whether I'm dealing with an intuitive person or a literal-minded person, you know what I mean?"
Posted by at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)
Knowing Saint Jack: Bogdo still banned in Singapore
Peter Bogdanovich's 1978 Saint Jack is getting a new history, acorrding to Channel Newsasia's Yong Shu Chiang. "Based on Paul Theroux's novel about an American pimp hustling for a living in Singapore... the film is still rather obscure and is banned in Singapore, although it did play once at the Singapore International Film Festival in 1997. And to this day, Bogdanovich... still regrets having had to deceive the local authorities..." Singapore-based British author Ben Slater, "formerly a film curator in England, had originally intended to make a documentary... "I think Singapore has a really rich and interesting recent history. What I found researching the book is that it's not easy to get in touch with that history... Saint Jack represented the ends of two eras really. It was the end of the era of Singapore as an exciting, vibrant old port - the ex-colony that was a kind of Wild West town." ... Slater, who curated a programme at the 2003 SIFF that included a film about decaying movie stock, said he was writing the book, to be published by a "major regional publisher", to bring to attention the number of movie gems that fade into obscurity over time."
Posted by at 12:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 20, 2005
Up Wolf Creek: Craig McLean back down under
Before its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, (and its fall release from the new incarnation of Dimension Pictures), Wolf Creek's Craig McLean has coffee and toast with The Australian's Lawrie Zion: "Not everyone can see past the film's grisly moments. One American reviewer said [the movie] would be nothing without its violence. "That [critic's] an idiot, because the point of the movie is not violence," McLean says. "What I'm fascinated with is the unbelievable randomness of [violence], that your life can be suddenly ended." ... McLean names British social-realist director Mike Leigh as an influence. "In a different way, if Mike Leigh shows a dramatic experience between people, the camera doesn't just pan away from it. It will actually sit on the awkwardness of the moment where the characters don't know what to do. I thought, what if you apply that kind of directorial technique to a B-grade slasher movie? So you take a B plot in which three kids go into the bush and get killed, which is every slasher movie in history. You shoot it like a Dogme film so it feels more real than real, and you make the acting like a Mike Leigh movie. At the same time you don't shy away from the fact that it is incredibly Australian, and that it draws all its inspiration from true Australian crimes that we all know about... What it has going for it in the global marketplace is its point of difference. We've all seen lots of Australian movies where you get in a nobody American star to please some investors somewhere and try to make a half-American movie in Australia. As if you're going to please someone by being more like them."
Posted by at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Scottish play: John Sayles in Edinburgh
A few choice quotes from John Sayles in the Scotsman as Silver City opens there: "Despite the fact that Bush won a second term, the director reckons it was important that his film, as well as documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11, played in US cinemas last year. "I think there are definitely people who voted because they saw Fahrenheit 9/11. I also think that culture is a conversation and whenever that conversation gets too one-sided it's important to put in some voices from the other side. At the time we made Silver City it was almost considered treasonous to ask a question." ... It's tempting to view Sayles as someone who has been... marginalised for his political beliefs... "Because I'm self-employed I don't risk being fired," he says. "The usual reason that you don't get money to make a film is that your last one didn't make any. It actually doesn't have that much to do with politics." ... Gathering dust on his shelf is a script about the Philippines insurrection of 1901, which he describes as America's first Vietnam. "They're both movies that, because of their scale, would cost a lot more than our usual $5 million..." Couldn't he just sell the scripts to Hollywood? "Believe me, nobody wants to make those scripts in Hollywood."
Posted by at 02:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Born-again Polanski
Reuters' Mike Collett-White makes a startling revelation in a piece about Roman Polanski's libel lawsuit against Vanity Fair: "Polanski, 71, is fighting the case via video link from Paris, because if he came to Britain he would risk extradition to the United States where he is wanted after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. He cannot be extradited from France, where he was born." Ah! Le pianiste! Mais oui!
Posted by at 02:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Enigmas and populism: more of van Sant's plans
David Weissman, codirector of The Cockettes talks to fellow Portland director Gus van Sant about enigmas and big-budget movies: "Enigmatic is probably pretty true. I guess enigmatic would just mean hard to read. But if I say something like, "I want to make a movie about these street hustlers in Portland, Oregon," and I'm talking to somebody that just got out of merchandising who's working at Sony as a junior executive, they just go, like, "Uh-huh," and I become enigmatic just because what I'm saying is too off their charts, not because I'm really enigmatic. Sometimes people just think you're enigmatic because you're not a Republican Christian and they're not understanding your ideas." Would van Sant make another Good Will Hunting? "When I made those films, I had read this essay by Jamake Highwater. He had drawn this wild timeline of art and artists. How in Greek times images on vases were not about the artist per se but about representing things that would be understood by the whole community. And then, through the centuries, art started to be relegated to represent biblical stuff, and eventually it gave way to portraits of people that were wealthy enough to afford the portraits, and so the subjects became the rich guys. That gave way to artists making pictures about commoners and then making their own expressionist creations. Until eventually you reached a time where the artist's name was the only thing - whatever you were looking at was more about the name then it was about the representation... Good Will Hunting [was] an example of populist art. Like it was made to be recognized by the general population, and one of the reasons that I made it was just reading this [essay]. The same with Forester. So, yeah. It still appeals to me."
Posted by at 01:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Pinch-hitter: on set with Altman and Anderson
Chris Hewitt goes on location with A Prairie Home Companion for St. Paul Pioneer Press: "The right side of the stage is jammed with monitors on which Robert Altman and his crew watch the progress of a scene that is being shot with three cameras... Standing behind Altman, you can see one of his signature, take-in-all-the-action shots come together. It's an early sequence in the film that combines three scenes — an elderly couple has their picture taken on the "Prairie Home" set, stagehands bustle about, [a character] saunters onto the set. It appears chaotic, but the shot itself is fluid and graceful, with the kind of calm elegance that characterizes the radio show. "Mr. Altman likes to design shots that are very complicated and that require everyone to be tremendously focused," Keillor says..." Paul Thomas Anderson "also is working on Prairie Home. He has no official title, but he works mostly with Altman and the actors, and his director's chair is labeled "Pinch Hitter."
Posted by at 01:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Getting some: Seitz on 9 Songs
In NY Press, Matt Soller Seitz has a sturdy take on 9 Songs: "What is [distinctive] is Winterbottom’s nonjudgmental and even affectionate attitude toward his characters and their sexual relationship. This is not a Dark Night of the Soul movie; the lovers aren’t punished for having—and enjoying—sex. When their relationship sours, as most relationships do, the movie doesn’t blame society or the church or the war or anything else; in fact, it doesn’t attach any grand importance to it at all. It treats sex as sex, and a relationship as a relationship... Winterbottom’s filmmaking style is by nature hit-and-miss... he’s always worked intuitively, devising action, dialogue and camera positions in the moment. (Wong Kar-Wai works the same way, though he has a better eye.) Except for Jude, Winterbottom has never made a movie that didn’t strike me as unfinished or even half-baked, and some of the have been train wrecks... But it would be a mistake to describe Winterbottom as a director who enjoys making movies so much that he never stopped to ask why he makes them. On the contrary, he has a very distinctive, purposeful esthetic—it just happens to be one with a success-to-failure ratio that rarely climbs higher in anyone’s favor than 50-50. Despite varying budget levels, all his films have a certain immediacy; they feel like documentaries with actors, and they capture little, truthful moments most films skip. (Cassavetes and James Toback also work this way, and are similarly erratic.)" [More good stuff at the link.]
Posted by at 01:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 19, 2005
Roger Ebert Day
Roger Ebert Day in Chicago: a medallion to honor almost 40 years in the newspaper business has been laid in the sidewalk in front of the Chicago Theatre at 175 N. State. More appropriate might have been putting the jewelry down in front of the now-defunct Loop Theatre (its blackened marquee is visible behind Ebert's head), where old friend Russ Meyer's Vixen played for over a year.
Posted by at 01:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Punch-drunk short cut: backing up Bob (Altman)
When older directors get work, insurance companies sometimes insist on a younger director who could replace them, such as Karel Reisz staying on the set of John Huston's The Dead; Michelangelo Antonioni's 1997 project, Two Telegrams, that Atom Egoyan was prepared to complete; or Arthur Penn's willingness to do similiar duty on David Lean's unmade Nostromo. It's a responsibility both chilling and thrilling, in the worse case, completing the work of someone who's been a mentor or a major influence. From Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous comes the report that Robert Altman's got a shadow up Minnesota way: "There's the matter of the... rumor of the director who has been tailing... Altman on the set—and, some say, basically running daily production of the film. That mystery proxy director is none other than Paul Thomas Anderson... who will be officially credited... as "Executive Producer" on the film... The producers of the film probably insisted that Altman commit to a "backup" director because of his age (he's 80).... Several people have speculated that Robert and PT have gotten close in recent years, and their friendship is what the producers hoped for... On the set, Anderson works much more directly with the actors, simply because Altman can't travel the distance of the theater (from monitors to stage). Between cuts, Robert belts directions over a mic while PT runs up to stage and speaks with the actors directly." (Via Cinematical.)
Posted by at 12:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Jia and Jonathan's World: trailering critics
Taking an unusual, earnest tack in marketing arthouse movies, Canada's Films We Like trailers Jia Zhang-ke's splendid deadpan satire, The World, by interviewing critic Jonathan Rosenbaum within the world of his own workspace.
Posted by at 12:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 18, 2005
Adding down: IMAX's out-of-home experience
IMAX's big, loud secret: the show runs on time, with few ads, write the LA Times' John Horn and Brian Triplett. "Audiences have complained long and loud that moviegoing isn't as much fun as it used to be... The drinks aren't a penny cheaper at Imax venues, and the tickets are even more expensive, but that hasn't kept the giant-size screens from attracting an increasing stream of patrons. ... "To me, Imax is the closest you can get to being that little kid again, watching a movie with that larger-than-life scale," said Chris Nolan... of Batman Begins, which has been a popular Imax release. "It can't be reproduced anywhere else. And that's what movies need to be. Otherwise, you are making TV shows." ... Unlike most multiplex operators, Imax encourages the theaters showing its films not to litter the pre-show with commercials. It even recommends raising ticket prices (which run about $3 more than standard theaters) rather than run ads.... [Says] Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. "Ads are simply not a part of the Imax culture."
Posted by at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Yes, Jesus loves me and we love your incredible grass-roots tentacles
Odd quotery in the New York Times' ill-informed piece on marketing movies to Christians, to complement the paper's outreach to market itself to conservatives, while also reinforcing its pages' faith in a Hollywood "slump.""Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians number an estimated 30 million in the United States, and Hollywood - faced with a prolonged slump in ticket sales - has followed its natural instincts in trying to tap one of the country's most powerful niche markets. "There's definitely more of an awareness, but it's just another group to be marketed to, albeit a very strong one, with incredible grass-roots tentacles," said Russell Schwartz, president of theatrical marketing at New Line Cinema, a Time Warner company. Universal Pictures' vice chairman, Marc Shmuger, said, "It's a well-formed community, it's identifiable, it has very specific tastes and preferences and is therefore a group that can be located and can be directly marketed to... In every fashion, you need to customize your message to your audience."
Posted by at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Vengeance is mined: Spielberg's next pic
Also in the Forward, Ami Eden thinks aloud about the ramifications of Spielberg's latest, ≈noting that "the media [is] essentially trying to set up a sequel to the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, only this time with Spielberg cast as the object of Jewish outrage... The problem with making the Mossad movie into a Passion sequel is that Spielberg is no Gibson... Spielberg's film might force Jews (and other Americans) to ask some uncomfortable questions about the Israeli and American responses to terrorism. But for the most part, American Jews can tell the difference between Spielberg's healthy self-criticism and Gibson's nostalgia for the days before the 1965 Second Vatican Council reforms, which, among other things, cleared the Jews of the charge of Deicide. American Jews know the difference between a director with a Holocaust-denying father and one whose mother owns a kosher restaurant." [More at the link.]
Posted by at