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August 31, 2005

Good Night, And Good Luck.

Watch the trailer for George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck., a portrait of 1950s journalists Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly of CBS-TV, as they dissected the smears of alcoholic, serial fabricator Congressman Joe McCarthy. If the movie crackles half this much...

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Constant Africa: indelible fiction and nonfiction

The Constant Gardener, a melancholy romance and thriller set in contemporary Africa opens today; Andrew Niccol's heady satire of gunrunning on that continent, Lord of War opens in September, but still the most haunting piece of work about commerce in Africa this year, Darwin's Nightmare, is terrifying nonfiction, a movie I've tried to shake but can't. In The Age, Philippa Hawker visits with filmmaker Hubert Sauper as the movie makes its Antipodean debut. "People know that there is a crisis in Africa, [he] says. They don't need to be told - at least, not in those terms. "If all they see is some specialist saying that Africa is starving, viewers will fall asleep." But... his new [Tanzania-set] documentary, won't let its viewers slumber: it's a haunting, devastating film, a provocation and, in its own way, a revelation. It is the story of a predatory fish and its place in a system that consumes rather than sustains - but, says Austrian-born Sauper, it could equally have been about coffee, or bananas, or oil. The fish, however, is a particularly potent metaphor. At Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake, a few Nile perch were added to the fish population in the 1960s. Gradually, the carnivorous creature with huge jaws took over, killing other species. These predators had a similarly destructive effect beyond the lake, as Sauper shows." The director, Hawker describes, stays close to the figures involved in the trade, working without voiceover and the distancing of "expert" testimony. "What he shows is simple, but also horribly complicated. It's a film about people and consequences.... And, while it deals with terrible realities, it's a film without either scapegoats or saviours, heroes or villains. Sauper isn't interested in those kinds of definitions. "When I select my characters, I ask myself: do I like this person? Do I want to spend a part of my life with them?" ... It's also too easy to find a nice guy trying to make a difference. "There's a tendency in American documentaries to do this, and it's bullshit. It makes you comfortable, instead of aware." [More of Sauper's terrible truths at the link.]

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August 30, 2005

Shooting where there's weather: massive infrastructure problems

The Reporter reports on Katrina's effect on Louisiana production, a reminder of why, historically, filmmakers hied west to California: consistent weather. "Louisiana, which has been aggressively courting film productions, was hosting at least 3 TV and film shoots in the state as the monster storm, which had threatened to hit land as a fearsome Category 5, approached. The Governor's Office of Film and Television -- located in Harahan, outside of New Orleans -- was not answering calls Monday. When New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation over the weekend, Element Films suspended production on its comedy The Last Time,"starring Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser, and immediately left... A Warners spokesperson said The Reaping hopes to return to New Orleans on Wednesday and resume filming Thursday, even though the production suffered what was said to be minor set damage. But that may prove challenging because, as one source on the production said, "Flights, electricity, manpower, car rental -- there are going to be massive infrastructure problems." [New Orleans-based filmmaker David Gordon Green reportedly has relocated to Austin for the duration.]

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August 29, 2005

Terrence Malick and The New one

From Mumbai, New Kerala's Nitin Sethi reports on Mr. Malick's new one, Tree of Life. India's Percept Picture Company would executive produce with a January start, and Colin Farrell starring with "2 major Hollywood stars in the leads." Working from Malick's script, it would be shot by Emmanual Lubezki."

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Lighting Harvey's Fuse?

The lowest-rated of 60 cable channels tracked by Neilsen, a music video channel called Fuse, may be getting eyed by the Weinsteins, reports Broadcasting & Cable. "Ex-Miramax Pictures chiefs Harvey and Bob Weinstein may reach their goal of getting into the cable television business by [trying to buy] Fuse. The brothers are reportedly in talks with [business partner] Cablevision about purchasing the channel and [shifting] �the programming into a mix of "lifestyle" shows and movies, aimed at a more broad audience� than the 18-34 demographic Fuse targets... The network could probably be had for about $450 million."

Posted by pride at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

Almodovar journals: haphazard and not particularly orderly

Pedro Almodovar is keeping a chatty diary on the making of his new movie, Volver, with pics: "These are all spontaneous and spur-of-the moment photos taken while we prepared to film. They are like a domestic “making of”, without any pretensions. Next time we’ll have photos of the actual shooting. I’ll take them myself since, in case you haven’t noticed, this is all part of a haphazard and not particularly orderly director’s diary."

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August 28, 2005

Tattling on Tykwer: collaborator peeps on Tom

Ed Blank of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a local playwright fill in Tom Tykwer's projects: Former Pittsburgher Thom Thomas, a veteran of the Pittburgh Civic Light Opera reports that he and Tykwer will collaborate on 2NDS, which the writer self-describes as "a quite ingenious thriller about twins." Two years ago, he wrote a screenplay of Paul Auster's novel, "Mr. Vertigo," which the producers dangled at Tykwer. Relates the chatty playwright: "Earlier this year Tom called and said he'd be in L.A. and wanted to meet with me. I assumed it was about the same script. But instead he said there was a different script -- one he had written but that he said wasn't jelling at all. I read it and told him what I thought was wrong with it, and he suggested we co-write it." Of another project, the writer says it went through 3 directors and three casts, but, as Blank relates, "The producer pulled out, and then he died." Meanwhile, Thomas' latest play, "A Moon to Dance By" world preemed at Indiana's New Harmony Theatre.

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Me and You and Everyone who's slumping: summer 2005 indie b.o.

Crain's New York Business offers an indie slump stats piece, to line up with all the other "slump" journalism: "Over the last 12 months there have only been a very, very small number of films that we've been excited about," says Ted Mundorff, VP of film and head film buyer at the art house chain Landmark Theatres, where box-office grosses this summer are down 10%... "We keep turning over more and more films hoping they'll catch on, but they don't." ... Still, industry insiders insist that the summer won't be a total flop. IFC Films' Me and You and Everyone We Know was made for under $1 million and is expected to gross close to $5 million. In August, ThinkFilm's The Aristocrats, a documentary about a dirty joke, raked in $100,000 its first weekend at just one theater."

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August 26, 2005

Meghan, Thursday

Online viewing tip: New York photographer-illustrator Jorge Colombo continues his experimental shorts with a sweet, simple study-in-motion Meghan, Thursday. Most of Colombo's films are shot with a digital stills camera, and run precisely one minute with looped soundtracks made with GarageBand.

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Effing artists scare their parent companies: John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus

Yet another report on the winding road John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus has taken to exposing a foot of film. One of the performers remarks, "Most people get self-conscious being naked in front of other people, but we're really concerned with the story, what's going on within these characters... The fact that we're naked having sex in front of each other, it's just a variable that's very easy to deal with. It wasn't so easy for potential financial backers to deal with, though. Mitchell says he initially approached about 50 to 60 investors, with little luck. Even envelope-pushing HBO, which filmed parts of the audition process, eventually backed away from the project. "Regular financing companies were scared because they have parent companies... A lot of investors said they were interested, but they didn't trust their guts."

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American boss: Bret Easton Ellis

In LA Weekly, Brendan Bernhard profiles LA novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, who talks about his new book, "Lunar Park," and jokes about writers' vanity: “I remember I was talking to my assistant pretty much every other day from L.A.... And he’d gotten a galley of the book, so I asked him, ‘So what do you think?’ He’d started it, and he sent me some e-mails saying, ‘I’m loving this book. I think it’s your best book, I really love it.’ And then the e-mails stopped. And we had a couple of conversations, and he didn’t bring the book up anymore. And I said, ‘Lookit, Cole, what’s going on? Did you like the book or not?’ And he said, ‘I really loved it up to a certain point, and then I thought it began to totally fall apart, and then it came in for a save at the end and it kind of all worked.’ And then I got furious, and I said, ‘I don’t pay you for your f-cking opinions. Shut up! Why did you tell me that? You’re fired!’ ”

Posted by pride at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

A screenwriter's life: I'm your friend, Eddie.

War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman's blog, "I find your lack of faith disturbing," is quickly becoming the Rude Pundit of screenwriter's journals. The swears come furiously, especially in the memorable "Snakes on a Motherf-king Plane." From Wednesday: "If any of you have checked me out on IMDB you'll note that I wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay to Keanu Reeves's most famous movie Chain Reaction. I've only got a shared story credit now but it began as a spec script sold by yours truly some months after making his first $20,000 on the previously discussed serial killer movie. I got paid pretty well but I was still living in the attic and driving my mother's Honda. In the future I'll write about selling this script but all you need to know right now is this: There is ONE line in the movie left over from my spec. "I'm your friend, Eddie." [More of Friedman's backstory, plus swears, at the link.]

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August 25, 2005

Gross Gardenering: Larry talks to Fernando Constantly

Fernando Meirelles doesn't seem to give the same interview twice; Larry Gross parlays the nous from LA Weekly: "I like films that you have to work with while you are watching them, that demand an active audience, like Memento or 21 Grams or Last Year at Marienbad. Actually, organizing things in a chronological order is just one way to organize things. I can also organize according to colors, numbers, emotions. I mean there's so many ways to organize things, why do you have to put them in chronological order?"

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Looped: Ebert remembers Chicago's darkened movie palaces

In the Sun-Times "The New Downtown" series, Roger Ebert recalls past glories: "Just for the sake of nostalgia, let me name the theaters I remember: the Chicago, State-Lake, Oriental, Roosevelt, United Artists, Woods, McVickers, Clark, Monroe, Michael Todd, Cinestage, World Playhouse, Loop, Bismarck Palace and, oh, a place called the Shangri-La that materialized out of a Chinese restaurant, showed some porn and disappeared." [Optimism at the link.]

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August 24, 2005

Black-and-white in the dark: Besson's Angel A

What Luc did on his summer vac: Besson shot a black-and-white feature without telling anyone, called Angel A, a romantic comedy written by lead Jamel Debbouze, reports Cineuropa. The cast includes Gilbert Melki and Sara Forestier.

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Bloggery: the travels of Thumbsucker

Thumbsucker writer-director Mike Mills was a charming interviewee the other day, and so's his blog, with photos and observations from the luxury hotel death march, in which your correspondent finds himself described as "the guy in Chicago": "The blur of kind humans continues for days: There was Ruth the DJ from Minneapolis - Is she my mom? Can I go to her house and play with her border collie and maybe she’d cook dinner? The DJ in Denver who didn't look 68 at all, the girl in Chicago who took a picture of me sitting on Lou, the man in SF who thought Lou's role was subversively feminine, the guy in Denver who said the film was Romantic (as in Romantic literature) because Romanticism is based in loss, the radio station that didn't seem to care about their phone ringing loudly while we were on air, the guy in Chicago that knows Chris Ware! Can I know Chris Ware if I live in Chicago? And Ira Glass too?" [Travelogue videos are linked at the site, too.]

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August 23, 2005

Terry Gilliam on grim architecture

Terry Gilliam tells New York's Logan Hill about looking up in New York: "Brazil was inspired by fascist German and fascist American architecture—Rockefeller Center. For Fisher King, I started thinking in those terms: a nice steel-and-glass photogenic place with no soul, but full of life and jest and joy and beauty and color. And what I like about [the film] is, it did seem to enchant people about New York—the story of the woman who walks home afterwards twenty blocks in the wrong direction, the fact that they waltz in Grand Central station. I put a line in the movie when Jeffrey’s hanging off the building—he says, “Nobody ever looks up in New York.” Architects do the ground floor with a lot of elaboration, then nothing till they get to the top, then they have the crown: It’s like they’re showing off to God. We deserve to see that, too."

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Like Ali G.: How Fernando Meirelles learned his craft

Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles gives a decent overview of his career to the Reporter's Anne Thompson: "I learned to shoot doing commercials. We started out doing experimental videos. For 10 years, we did different comedy shows on TV, comedy with journalism, we pretended to be doing docs or news of the week. I was a cameraman, director and host. It was fake journalism, like Ali G. After that, we were invited to do commercials with the characters we had in our shows. We were getting married [and] having kids who wanted to eat. Then, for 10 years we were only doing commercials. I've done 800-900 commercials, five to six a month. After 10 years, I was bored... Did you shoot "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener" in the same way? It was just a matter of locations. We shot them the same way, mixing 35 and 16, mixing some classic sequences with some more urgent. What we learned on "City of God" was to shoot freestyle. Instead of setting up the camera and the lights and bringing the actors in so that they perform for the camera for each angle, we create a general flat light and bring in the actors who perform. I don't give them marks or ask them to move. The camera is there like a documentary trying to get what is happening. I don't interfere. So I never break the scene, I always run from the top to the end, and I ask the actors to not be aware of the camera. They never know when we're doing a close-up. The camera goes to a wide shot and a close-up all in the same shot. They got used to it after a while."

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August 22, 2005

Did I ever want to build an automobile?: Pennebaker at 80

David D'Arcy has a swell interview with D.A.Pennebaker over at Greencine on the doc-maker's 80th birthday.

Did you ever want to make dramatic features? I didn't understand how they were made. It was like, did I ever want to build an automobile? Sure I did, but it has no meaning for me. When I saw Francis Thompson's film, N.Y., N.Y. (1957), which he made by himself with a hand-wound city special, I said, "Shit, I can do that." I'm a graduate engineer from Yale University, for Chrissakes, I've got to be able to do that. That set me off doing it, because the idea was that I could do it all by myself. I knew I couldn't do features by myself because you had to have it written, you had to have actors, and I was a loner, so those things were not part of my life at all.

Posted by pride at 04:53 PM | Comments (2)

Four Eyed Monsters: DIY eyes wide open

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez collates email and blog entries from Four Eyed Monsters co-everythings Arin Crumley and Susan Buice as they describe what it's like to be left out in the open with a gentle, imaginative, inventive (and sometimes winsome and often adorable) independent, DIY Amelie-of-digital-video after more than a year of filmmaking and festival appearances at Slamdance, SxSW, Gen Arts and the Chicago Underground Film Festival with no distribution deal in sight and a pretty pile of credit card bills. "In the meetings we've presented our marketing plans and had a quick discussion about our bigger picture ideas of promoting our movie in innovative ways,"

Hernandez quotes Crumley. The pair prepared "materials to present to the rest of the company like a trailer, an edited preview of our free online content that will be used to promote the movie, a pitch video that explains our ideas on how the release could be successful, and a traditional press kit." Bryan Wendorf of Chicago Underground Film Festival [Disclosure: I directed CUFF's 2005 trailers] told me he was amazed at how the pair, whose alter egos meet via the fictitious "meetster.net" had used MySpace in order to find copacetic crowds for the Chicago showings. "Most of Susan's MySpacers are guys and Arin's are girls," Wendorf added. Hernandez reports that "Buice and Crumley recently met in Los Angeles with the CEO and the marketing director at MySpace.com... Apparently the meeting went quite well, but as of Friday they weren't quite ready to announce how they might work with the website on a release of their film... An obvious option for the pair is self-distribution. As Buice explained... "Even though we'd rather be making movies we are willing to establish our own mini-distribution company, it would just be kind of pathetic though because then the only distribution offer we would have ever received would be the offer we gave ourselves."

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Oman, it's the newest thing: filmmaking in Muscat

Visvas Paul D. Karra of the Times of Oman reports from Muscat on a new film industry: "Even as Oman’s first feature film, Al Boum, is taking its first tentative steps into the record books of the Sultanate’s film history [there's another first]: Oman’s first bilingual (Arabic and Malayalam) commercial film.... [Producer-director] Gulab Prem Kumar might be the ubiquitous next door neighbour if you walk past him on the street, but this man is all set to walk into the history books pretty soon. [He's] all excited about this bilingual project, which he says, will be ready for release in Oman in 2006, subject to ministry approval.... The script for this film has already been submitted to the Ministry of Heritage and Culture and the Ministry of Information for their approval.... The bilingual film’s storyline is a general subject, a very good family drama, says Prem Kumar. “I will be roping in big artistes from Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India for the Malayalam version while the Arabic version will have Omani artistes on the same sets,” Prem Kumar informed."

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Fingering Saw II

The MPAA rejected teaser posters for Saw II that included a set of dismembered fingers. Middle finger intact, here's what the censors say falls within the boundaries of community taste. Oh, that's much better.

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Sumner of our discontent: did the NY Times just call Redstone OLD?

In a mostly patronizing mishmash of a tick-tock about cable newcomer Current, the NY Times' Alessandra Stanley indulges a sub-Anthony Lane cultural sideswipe or two before coming to a pleasing full-on crash of a last graf: "...Current is for-profit public-access television, an attempt to add grass-roots diversity to a television universe that is ever more controlled by a few media conglomerates. Current is easily mocked, but it is at least one youth-oriented cable network that does not dance to the tune of the 82-year-old Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom."

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August 20, 2005

You can't out-exorcist The Exorcist: on Emily Rose

Edward Douglas from ComingSoon asks Exorcism of Emily Rose writer-director Scott Derrickson about inevitable comparisons: "I am a big fan of that picture, but I think if you're going to make an exorcism movie of any kind, you have a certain burden to carry... The subject matter is profoundly compelling, and I think that everybody knows it is a real phenomenon out in the world whether you believe there's anything spiritual to it or not. It happens. People get exorcisms. There are lots of stories of cases, and that fact alone makes it interesting. What I wanted to do was approach the subject matter in a less exploitive way, because you can't out-exorcist The Exorcist. You have to almost go under it... To really frighten a contemporary audience you just can't do that with special effects and sound and camera tricks. [There] are manipulative tricks of the trade that were implemented that were extraordinary at the time, but now that same sort of approach has been used in a million different horror films... My intention was for the effectiveness of the horror elements and the exorcism itself to be rooted in the reality of these real characters, portrayed by great actors, and for the phenomenon that you watch to be very counterintuitive, but not over the top... What we're trying to do is make a movie that's a little bit more of an exploration of what does [an exorcism] really look like, what's the range of possibilities there and what can it mean?"

Posted by pride at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Ebert's cheetahs: racing Duma

Roger Ebert reports that Duma gets one more last chance in Chicago, as it's held over for a third week. "Why penguins and not cheetahs?" [Warner Bros. president of domestic distribution Dan] Fellman asked me a week ago. The studio found that audence exit surveys showed adults liked [Duma] even more than children (for whom its strong narrative might seem slow compared to the nonstop noise and action of video games." [While previewed for reviewers in 35mm, the 5 Chicago-area theaters where the movie is held over are showing Duma only in digital projection.]

Posted by pride at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

Taking plans from Nigel: the FT likes Miranda July

Rubbishing the Guardian's prickly-puss, the Financial Times' Nigel Andrews air-kisses mild modest Miranda: "It is completely unfair to make a film such as Me and You and Everyone We Know. Hollywood and the high-budget tripe industry toil night and day to produce a Bewitched or an Unleashed: the first a big-screen sitcom stuffed with whimsy and Nicole Kidman, the second a barking-mad action thriller starring Jet Li as a human attack dog. Then the video-artist-turned-filmmaker, Miranda July, strolls in... and world-releases her no-frills, no-stars, almost no-budget movie about absolutely nothing... If this film were any more enchanting, it would have to be quarantined. Moguls whose movies are powerless to enchant, even to charm, would not want their impotence derided by its insouciance... [It proves] there is a subtly beating pulse of wit, sadness, compassion and gentle satire even in the land of Bush and Bruckheimer."

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A Masterpiece, and Then Some: The Conformist and George Fasel

Couple weeks ago, the 67-year-old George Fasel, keeper of the compulsively readable "A GIrl and a Gun" website wrote about Bertolucci's best movie; Wednesday, he passed away. The entire piece, the next-to-last he posted, is worth reading. Here's a little: "Let us put aside for a moment that The Conformist (1970) is the most magnificently photographed, scored, choreographed, and costumed film made--ever, anywhere--because while those are not insignificant achievements, there is more to this work by Bernardo Bertolucci, who finished it when he was just short of 30.� It is also the most evocative and stirring political movie of the post-World War II era, a framing of the emptiness and deindividualization which was the goal of fascism and how that experience played out in one particular life.� I first saw it more than 30 years ago and was deeply moved and impressed; this time around, I was floored with admiration and astonishment... In every scene, the camera slips about into unlikely places, then quickly emerges into conventional setups, then again edges around a corner and sneaks a look from a revealing angle, but does it all on the fly.� Nobody moves a camera like Bertolucci, and nobody moves one for him like Vittorio [Storaro], the greatest color cinemtographer of our age.�.. The Conformist is not meant to be summarized verbally, and cannot be: it is a succession of images, often staggering: long vistas, camera moving a ground level parting fallen leaves as it progresses, huge rooms empty except for one person (again, the visualization of fascism), views from outside in through windows, and the reverse.� Nor are these simply compositions.�.. I don't know of a picture which handled atmospherics better after The Conformist until Wong Kar-Wai came along with In the Mood for Love, also placed in the hands of a genius DP, Chris Doyle.� Sadly, I have the impression from hearsay that the film has dropped into the deepest circle of distribution hell.� To say this is a pity is like saying that it would be unfortunate if all the scores and recordings of The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute were somehow lost or destroyed..." [More at the link, including memorials to Mr. Fasel, whose words will be missed.]

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August 19, 2005

Surfacing the scratch: Chaos producers pony up to challenge Ebert

The producer and director of a scabrous-seeming slaughter item ponied up a rumored $14,000 for a full-page rejoinder to Roger Ebert's zero-star review; at the top of the front page and across page 4 of the newspaper (and at the link), the Sun-Times offers Ebert's reply, which takes up an entire page of its own. Excerpts: "Your film does "work," and as filmmakers you have undeniable skills and gifts. The question is, did you put them to a defensible purpose? I believed you did not... I left saddened and disgusted. Michael Mirasol, a fellow critic, asked me why I even wrote a review, and I answered: "It will get about the audience it would have gotten anyway, but it deserves to be dealt with and replied to." Yes, you got a good review from the Daily Herald, but every other major critic who has seen the movie shares my view.... The line "why do we need this s--t" was not original with me; I quoted it from Ed Gonzalez at [slantmagazine.com], who did not use any dashes in his version. I find it ironic that the makers of "Chaos" would scold me for using "coarse" language and "resorting to expletives." ... If Chaos has a message, it is that evil reigns and will triumph. I don't believe so... You use the material without pity, to look unblinkingly at a monster and his victims. The monster is given no responsibility, no motive, no context, no depth. Like a shark, he exists to kill... What I miss in your film is any sense of hope. Sometimes it is all that keeps us going... As the Greeks understood tragedy, it exists not to bury us in death and dismay, but to help us to deal with it, to accept it as a part of life, to learn about our own humanity from it... Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.
Sincerely,
Roger Ebert"

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Blockbuster fatigue: Spielberg explains

Steven Spielberg explains epic-fatigue toTom Shone of the Guardian: "Times have changed... It's like when the first 747 landed at Los Angeles international airport: everybody thought flying through the sky was the most greatest marvel they had ever seen - floating through the air, seemingly in slow motion. Today we never even look at 747s. They're a dime a dozen, and it's that way with the blockbuster. If there was one blockbuster every 3 years, it meant a lot more than when you have a blockbuster every 3 weeks. It's the job of each of these studios to market these movies as the must-see movie of the year, so they go after blockbuster status by creating a grand illusion. Sometimes they've got a real engine behind that grand illusion, meaning the movie is damned good and the audience will say they got their money's worth. Other times the audience comes on the promise of seeing something they've never ever seen before and it becomes just another sci-fi action yarn, and they feel disappointed."

Posted by pride at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

Peter Bradshaw sez pshaw: You and Me and Everyone blows

In the Guardian, lead cricket Peter Bradshaw says no July for him: "You will need a very high quirk-ceiling and strong fey-tolerance levels to handle this fey, quirky... comedy... It's got some funny lines, which partly mitigate its strong whiff of passive-aggressive cutesiness. It feels as if watching this will earn you credits on an American college degree course in emotional correctness... There are a couple of Ghost World-y teen girls who flirt with a fat guy. July gets some laughs at the expense of the art world, but the whole thing reeks of the goatee-wearing, mocha-drinking, vinyl-appreciating indie smugness that permeates a certain type of American cinema." [Bradshaw does not offer further examples.]

Posted by pride at 02:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Why you'll hear more Hallelujah: breaking Leonard Cohen

Maclean's Katherine Macklem has the cover story: Leonard Cohen's music has been in a lot of movies lately, such as The Edukators and Lord of War and we're likely to hear even more: "Take an iconic artist, mix in missing millions, hints of tantric sex, a lawsuit replete with other salacious details, and a ruptured relationship with a long-time, trusted associate, and you've got the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster. Except in the case of Leonard Cohen, it's a true tale, with the bizarre twist of a Tibetan Buddhist suing a Zen Buddhist, Cohen. For the 70-year-old poet, singer and songwriter, it's a nasty, rapidly escalating legal battle that on the one hand accuses him of conspiracy and extortion, and on the other has him accusing both his highly trusted personal manager and long-time financial adviser -- the Tibetan Buddhist -- of gross mismanagement of his financial affairs. The case exposes not only private details of Cohen's finances, but also a dramatic tale of betrayal. The conflict... has left him virtually broke -- he's had to take out a mortgage on his house to pay legal costs -- and facing a multimillion-dollar tax bill. But the artist, who is soon to release a new album with his collaborator -- and current girlfriend -- Anjani Thomas, is today remarkably calm about the potentially embarrassing conflict. Still, when he discovered last fall that his retirement funds, which he had thought amounted to more than $5 million (all figures U.S.), had been reduced to $150,000, he wasn't so sanguine. "I was devastated," Cohen says. "You know, God gave me a strong inner core, so I wasn't shattered. But I was deeply concerned." [Lots more at the link.]

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London recalling: V for Vendetta bumped

Variety reports WB is shifting the new Wachowski Bros. pic to March," citing post-production delays. Studio steered clear of addressing speculation that it might be bumping the film because of the terrorist bombings in London earlier this summer.I n the pic, V is the character who abducts the film's heroine, played by Natalie Portman, and teaches her how to use terrorism to fight the totalitarian government gripping London."

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Market forces: newspapers respond to ad cutbacks

Over at his MCN "Digital Nation" column, Gary Dretzka surmises the future relationship between the studios and big newspapers, especially the slashing of full-page ads predicted by writers like LA Weekly's Nikki Finke. Dretka notes that "not to be forgotten is... that the advertising in features sections—especially on Sundays—pays the freight for such slacker sections as sports, editorial, op-ed, books... local news and business (who, in this digital age, really needs 4 open pages of stock listings?)." The Chicago Sun-Times boldly answered that question earlier this summer, becoming, in early June, "the biggest daily newspaper to eliminate stock market and mutual funds listings. The traditional listings were replaced by a 2-page summary of financial data called "The Markets." ... Many newspapers, including, most recently, The New York Times, have trimmed some market listings in recent years as readers increasingly turned to the Web or cable TV for market information, and as newsprint costs [rose]. The Sun-Times is the biggest, however, to jettison individual stock quotes. Stock and mutual fund listings are moving to the papers Web site, where the markets report is... [here]." The amount of information is "far more extensive than we ever could provide in the printed Sun-Times," Business Editor Dan Miller said."

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August 18, 2005

New reviews...

... over at Pride, Unprejudiced, including Secuestro Express, The World, Saraband, Last Days, Tropical Malady, Happily Ever After, Grizzly Man and The Aristocrats.

Posted by pride at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)

Withnail and Wah-Wah

From Edinburgh, Screen International's Allan Hunter has a mouthwatering review of Wah-Wah, the writing-directing debut of the long-absent Richard E. Grant, comparing it to Jim Sheridan's In America, then going on to say: "In its early stages Wah-Wah seems to have strayed into Graham Greene territory as Harry turns to drink and [young son] Ralph is left on the sidelines to witness the guilt and betrayal that have torn his parents apart. It blossoms into a much warmer and more appealing piece as Grant reveals more about the characters... Ralph and a friend sneak into a screening of A Clockwork Orange, the mother returns, demanding a second chance and the whole community becomes involved in staging a production of Camelot in front of visiting royalty. Grant displays a generosity towards his characters that is almost reminiscent of Renoir in the way he insists that everyone has their reasons; their embarrassing flaws and shining hours. Even the selfish mother is never turned into a simple villain."

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Shepherding The Good

The Reeler lets on that Eric Roth's script for The Good Shepherd, the best unproduced script I've ever read, is rolling: "Probably the biggest news is that Robert De Niro's directing effort The Good Shepherd starts filming this week in Gotham. The film features Damon as Edward Wilson, a son of privilege whose life changes with his involvement in the fledgling CIA of the 1940s. Angelina Jolie co-stars, assuring that the agency's early history will be portrayed in the sexiest way possible. Perhaps most notable is the roster rounding out the cast: William Hurt, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton and De Niro himself, among others."

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August 17, 2005

Brightly: MOMA gives a Ross McElwee retro

The veteran documentarian appears at some of the programs in September's MoMA exhibition of his 11 films: "For the past twenty-five years, Ross McElwee has given new meaning and flair to first-person nonfiction cinema. A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, McElwee studied at MIT with the legendary filmmakers Richard Leacock and Edward Pincus, from whom he learned that the verité documentarian need not be a detached recorder of events—as practitioners of direct cinema in the 1960s often claimed—but rather an engaged, even intrusive, participant in the unfolding action. The confessional mode of McElwee’s autobiographical films... is always wise and irreverent yet rarely solipsistic; ever the unreliable narrator, McElwee is aware of the strictures of self-knowledge, and of our limited ability to know the hearts and minds of others."

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Mysterious Skin Down Under: almost banned

Philippa Hawker of the Age reports that Gregg Araki's latest was almost barredfrom Australia. While "he used directors Terrence Malick and Wong Kar-wai as reference points," the South Australian attorney-general requested a ban, and the film's R classification was reviewed, and upheld, with the review board praising "the film for sensitive handling of its subject matter." Araki reviews the factors in the film's feeling of intimacy; the setting may be "low-income Kansas and seedy motel rooms, but I wanted beautiful, ravishing surfaces, and with composition, lighting and controlling the colour palette, we could do that."

Posted by pride at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

All that useless beauty: are there too many movies?

A few late-summer musings about how movies are being written today, over at Pride, Unprejudiced.

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August 16, 2005

Whirlwind of a Sexual Nature

The London Times' Dalya Alberge reports on what happens when you have a swell script: "A-LIST actors including Ewan McGregor are taking a fraction of the fees they can command in Hollywood to star in a low-budget film by a writer and a director who have never made a feature film before.... Every actor approached by Edward Blum and Aschlin Ditta, whose careers have been limited until now to Crimewatch reconstructions and television dramas, wanted to be involved with Scenes of a Sexual Nature. They included [Oscar-nominated] Sophie Okonedo... Dame Eileen Atkins...and Adrian Lester... The story traces 7 relationships during one afternoon on Hampstead Heath, where filming was taking place yesterday. Each tale has a comic element, but a dark undertone in exploring fantasy and reality... Scenes of a Sexual Nature is believed to have a budget of �500,000 pounds, raised from private investors. The whole process, from finishing the script in June to raising the money and attracting the cast, took less than six weeks, rather than years of development.

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Bloody Tuesday: Paul Greengrass' severe clear

Michael Fleming reports in Variety that "Universal is stepping up for a 9/11 movie, the second major studio film about the terrorist events." A 40-day shoot is set for October for Paul Greengrass to make Flight 93 via Working Title. The $15 million film "will be 90 minutes long and cover the flight in real time. It begins with the takeoff and hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 by terrorists, the discovery by passengers with cell phones that other hijacked planes had been steered into the World Trade Center... and the realization that their plane was being steered toward D.C. Pic culminates [with the] passengers... sacrificing their lives to bring the plane down..." Fleming notes that the pic is closer to his 2002 Bloody Sunday than his The Bourne Supremacy. It'll "be partly improvised with an ensemble cast, and Greengrass will use handheld cameras and other stylized techniques to give the film a gritty feel." He presented "a 20-page treatment that begins with a stream of consciousness summation of the tragedy [that the director] feels "changed our lives forever." [More machinations at the link.]

Posted by pride at 02:48 AM | Comments (0)

Something much deeper than a diet: Herzog's still chatting

Werner Herzog: bit of a talker, eh? From a Manhattan shopper called Downtown Express, a few choice quotes. After the Internet Movie Database is described to him, Herzog notes, "It’s probably completely full of mistakes, very shallow." Michael Moore? "Michael Moore is a very good performer and he’s vile and base and hostile and has some wonderful qualities as a performer! I like to see him on screen. He’s always good." What kind of “cultural diet” does he have? "I don’t have any diet. The question is posed in an obscene way, as if culture for me is a consumer item and a diet that I buy and consume... I dislike your phrase. I have to say it straightaway. Culture is something different. It’s an education of mine. It is something much deeper than a diet... I’m just a good soldier. A good soldier of cinema."

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Anthony Lane has his doubts: 2046

"I am not competent to judge whether Chow [Tony Leung's character] is really the type to make the opposite sex go weak at the knees, waist, neck, and other points of seizure," The New Yorker's joker writes, in the process of acing Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, "although to my eyes he looked, with his whisker of mustache, like a no-good rat in a George Raft movie. What I will say is that nobody who has the ungallant gall to inform us, in voice-over, that 'I became an expert ladies' man' is a ladies' man at all. Ladies of every description will know him better as a creep."

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Running with scissors: Where the Truth Lies and the MPAA

The New York Daily News' Rush & Molloy report the MPAA's running with scissors again, taking on Atom Egoyan's latest. Egoyan writes that "the MPAA is concerned with "the actual number of thrusts seen." Before shooting his actors, he recalls, "I resorted to playing with dolls, trying to figure out angles and configurations." But in the end, he couldn't disguise the sexual mechanics. "I needed these scenes to feel lurid and unbridled..." Having promised producer Robert Lantos an R, Egoyan has continued whacking away at the offending scenes. But one insider tells us, "The mystery of the girl's death hinges on that scene. If he cuts any more, the audience won't know what happened."

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A life in tabloids, a life in fertilizer: Mary McGuckian shoots again

Irish director Mary McGuckian, whose all-star version of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey got only the most cursory release in the US, gets a second chance with Rag Tale, "a sordid world of faked photographs, bogus stories and the drug- and sex-fuelled antics of journalists on a fictional Fleet Street tabloid," reports Allison Bray of the Irish Independent. Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rupert Graves and Malcolm McDowell, it follows a tabloid's misprisions over the course of a week... "It's genuinely fictional. But I can't help it if my actors are inspired by what goes on in real life. It's not about people, it's about the use and abuse of power in the media," she said." It was shot in 30 days in Luxembourg by " the daughter of the Antrim-based agriculture billionaire, Alistair McGuckian. The 67-year-old businessman also recently staged the hit musical the 'Ha'penny Bridge' after making a fortune establishing the farming and fertiliser company, Mastock, with his brother, Paddy."

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August 15, 2005

Defending McD's against Super-Size Me for the little fat people

AP's Valerie Bauman comes to the defense of embattled, defenseless entrepreneur McDonald's, finding a documentary that's the anti-Super Size Me, one that advocates eating only the fast food chain's products in order to lose weight. The credulous Bauman writes that after seeing Morgan Spurlock's documentary, "Merab Morgan decided to give a fast-food-only diet a try. The construction worker and mother of two ate only at McDonald's for 90 days— and dropped 37 pounds in the process... Morgan, of Henderson, N.C., thought the documentary had unfairly targeted the world's largest restaurant company, implying that the obese were victims of a careless corporate giant. People are responsible for what they eat, she said, not restaurants.... "I thought it's two birds with one stone -- to lose weight and to prove a point for the little fat people..." Continuing to speak a bizarre lingo we don't quite recognize, Morgan [non-Spurlock division] is quoted as saying, "Just because they accidentally put an apple pie in my bag instead of my apple dippers doesn't mean I'm going to say, 'Oh, I can eat the apple pie.'" ... One person went so far as to make her own independent film about dieting at McDonald's. "Me and Mickey D" follows Soso Whaley of Kensington, N.H., as she spends three 30-day periods on the diet. She dropped from 175 to 139 pounds, eating 2,000 calories a day at McDonald's. "I had to think about what I was eating," Whaley said... Walt Riker, the company's vice president of corporate communications, said the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company is pleased--but not surprised--that some customers have lost weight eating only at the fast-food giant." [Photo: Ray Pride]

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Malkovich: pushing the train with 200 people

At the Locarno fest, the Age's Stephanie Bunbury draws some red blood from John Malkovich: "Malkovich [was] lethally outspoken. Terrorism, he said, was with us to stay. "Because committing murder for political change always works. Always. Violence rules the world." Later, he was asked if he were not afraid to be seen promoting terrorism with such rash remarks. "Terrorism hardly seems to need promotion... It seems to have done quite well, no?" He "concentrated largely on talking about acting in films; the comparison he favoured was between the successful play as a runaway train where actors just hold on, and film as a craft where a train has to be pushed up a hill...."Initially, I liked the form I knew... In later years, I got to enjoy pushing the train with 200 people."

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Stone by Stone: Oliver's still disinterring Alexander

Oliver Stone tells Stephen Dalton of The Age about recutting Alexander and the long view of history: "I think of those architects who say, 'I built the building, people may hate it but a building lasts'... People look at it again and again over time. They came to accept the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I need to take a long-term view on this. When I'm dead I hope to be appreciated. Ha-ha!" ... "We did 4 times the business outside America... That does indicate some kind of cultural difference.... That's a huge differential - it's usually one to one, two to one at most. I was hoping the British would look at it in another light, but it was impossible to overcome. In Britain I got some of the worst reviews, next to America, that I've ever got in my life... It never opened anywhere in the South, for example. Once 'Alexander the Gay' came out that was the headline, which was very cheesy - that killed it. You don't combine homosexuality or bisexuality with military men in America." He puffs a bit about his upcoming 9/11 pic for Par: "There was an overreaction after 9/11... It was a call for hysteria and as a result it led to war. Bush was given enormous powers and misused them. He created a huge bureaucracy, a Homeland Security system that won't really work. He created a war in Iraq that has further helped bust the economy, and has led to civil war there. He was the wrong leader at the wrong time. I always felt that. I wish I had been wrong."

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August 14, 2005

Miramax and the rush to flush: a Scots view

The Scotsman's Siobhan Synnot offers a UK perspective on the last-minute Miramax rush to flush, reviewing the fates of Proof and The Libertine, among other pics: "The whole situation has reopened one of the pet arguments in the film industry: whether Miramax is really responsible for revitalising independent film or for murdering it... Miramax can... be high-handed with its films and some of the artists the company claims to have nurtured. Besides delaying and shelving movies that the Weinsteins feel would be hard to sell, there is also Harvey's habit of re-editing films to his own satisfaction..." The biggest loser, Siobhan surmises, is Danny Boyle's Alien Love Triangle, "a project that appears to be not so much released as allowed to wander off into the undergrowth. Made between A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, this was a truly small film and has never been shown publicly. Miramax... commissioned it as part of a trilogy of science-fiction shorts, then decided to turn the other segments into full-length features (Impostor and Mimic), leaving Boyle's section effectively orphaned. Boyle himself wasn't sure what fate awaited the picture recently. A 28-minute fable about sexual stereotypes, it's a light-hearted [bit] in which Kenneth Branagh's scientist discovers that his wife (Courteney Cox) is really a male alien, just as Cox's own green, bald wife (Heather Graham) comes calling. Boyle called it charming but says that the film couldn't be expanded... because "there's a limit on charm". "I don't know if it's coming out on DVD or not. I hope it is, perhaps as an extra feature, but I can't see how you could watch it as a new release in the cinema. And I made it when Branagh and Courtney and Heather were rising young stars...And they're not that any more."

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Grimm's trims: Gilliam tucks it under

Terry Gilliam visits with old friend Jack Mathews of the NY Daily News (who was instrumental in getting Gilliam's cut of Brazil released) and has a word about the solo written-by credit for The Brothers Grimm as submitted by Miramax: Ehren Krueger "is a young and very busy guy best known for his adaptations of the Japanese movies that became The Ring and The Ring Two... Gilliam says his Grimm ... would have been another horror film... One wonders how the script evolved into such a deliriously whimsical fairy tale. "What's interesting about this film is that it was not made from a screenplay but from a dress pattern," Gilliam says, by way of explaining why he and his regular writing partner Tony Grisoni are not credited. "Tony and I have devised the idea of a dress pattern, a big thing that everybody can gather around and make little tucks here, little hems here. It's the future of filmmaking." Sure enough, if you look at the credits for The Brothers Grimm, you'll see Gilliam's and Grisoni's names as "Dress Pattern Makers.""

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Baby penguins: an 11

In a trend item in International Newsweek, Sean Smith transcribes a variety of head-scratches over March of the Penguins: "It's about the most committed parents on the face of the planet," says Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films. "So kids can relate to it and parents can relate to it, and yet it's unlike anything else that people can buy tickets to." And maybe one more little reason: "On a cute scale from 1 to 10, a baby penguin is an 11."

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New indie: Peter Mullan swims the mainstream

Gifted actor and writer-director Peter Mullan has a new movie out about swimming called On a Clear Day; he tells Scottish site iofilm.co.uk about other currents: "Mullan argues that mainstream is where it's at - it's just that a lot of independent filmmakers haven't caught on yet. "Those of us on the left, socially conscious type of cinema need to start playing with form, genres and style... Otherwise you just get trapped in a kind of worthy social realism and because the sentiment is good it's like 'it doesn't matter how we present it to you... it's the thought it counts'. But we need to grow up, guys. I don't want to abandon the multiplexes to some of the Nazi-type of stuff you get there and then let film festivals go, 'Yeah, we get the more humanitarian left-orientated part of cinema'... My family don't tend to watch arthouse types of film, festivals or whatever - they go to UG fucking C. I'm not just going to walk away from my family, my class, my friends because 'I don't go there'. I want to be in there with films that [I hope] aren't compromised and hopefully have something to try to touch upon. I go to the cinema a lot with my kids. You look up and, man, there's virtually nothing I want to see. Sometimes I even look forward to the fact that I'm going to see a kids' movie."

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August 13, 2005

Mick LaSalle's firsthand account of a disaster

The SF Chronicle movie critic explains the bloody art of bad reviews, sounding reminiscent of Mel Brooks on the difference between comedy and tragedy ["Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."]: "Each of them is an attempt to put into words an experience I considered... torture. In putting words to such an event, the event inevitably seems funny on the page, but the humor, to the extent it's there, doesn't derive from a disposition to mockery but from a genuine effort to describe a specific variety of hideousness. Thus, the reader laughs not because the critic is inflicting pain, which isn't funny, but because the critic is in pain, which is funny. The reader gets to enjoy the critic's suffering... There are few things less funny than a critic's trying to be funny, and nothing less useful than a critic's filtering information through the cliched, distorted and self-protective prism of a knee-jerk snideness... No, really the only way for a bad review to be fun is for it to be the honest product of misery."

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On the Fry: Stephen reflects

Wilde wordsmith Stephen Fry muses in the Observer's "This Much I Know": "By 15 I'd read just about every biography of every literary whoopsie that's ever been written and I imagined I would become a writer or teacher or belletrist in Tangier or Ischia or somewhere... I think people probably realised that to say I found intimacy distasteful was really a way of saying I was afraid of it. Sometimes people don't believe the things you say, not because they think you're lying, but because they think you're kidding yourself..."

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Batman continues: some true West

Adam West offers some independent-minded thinking in a swell profile in the Independent, talking to Robert Chalmers: "Wisdom," according to Adam West, is knowing when to shut the fuck up." And for the past 20 years or so, by this definition, there are few major stars who have been such exemplary models of good sense... Since the mid-1980s, by which time he'd retreated to a farm outside the remote town of Ketchum, Idaho (pop. 3,003) he has become increasingly reluctant to speak to journalists. The process of arranging a meeting with West has taken months and involved the submission of previous interviews, dozens of phone messages and emails. Even though the actor has finally agreed to see me, when I get to Idaho his mobile is switched off, and have to spend two days at a Tyrolean-themed motel in Ketchum before I manage to get through to him... "I got banned from Aspen," West says. "Why?"
"Well, you know, we'd been partying and..." "And?" A pause.
"Liquor?" "Yes."
"Women? "Yes."
"Police?" "Yes."
All this was some years ago, West recalls.
"I was escorted out of town and advised it would be unwise to return. About 15 years later, I had a letter from the Aspen authorities saying it would be OK to come back - to visit."

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Fear & Loathing in Saskatchewan: Gilliam finishes 2

Chip McGrath books some time with Terry Gilliam at 64 with 2 pics in the pipeline in the Sunday NY Times: "My problem is I worry too much sometimes about the time things are taking. And I keep pushing to get it done. So I say, O.K., we'll live with that, and keep moving forward. And it's always been like that, and I hate it. I hate being the one that's worried about the time."... I said that wasn't his reputation.... He looked at me and said, "My reputation has nothing to do with me." Of Brothers Grimm, he tells McGrath, "Usually my battles are when I finish a film, but this one got off to some very bad beginnings..." Dimension had acquired the movie from MGM after it was already in Prague, and lead Samantha Morton was fired, followed by DP Nicola Pecorini. Eventuallly, both sides agreed to walk away from the unfinished film. "It happens with every film... There comes a part where the money and the creative elements all come crashing together. Everybody's under a lot of pressure, and everybody is panicking about what works and what doesn't... I walked off and did Tideland and came back 6 months later... I always dreamed of being able to finish a film, walk away from it, and then come back a few months later... and this time the circumstances sort of allowed it to happen."

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August 12, 2005

Apple juices Errol

At Think Secret, which keeps its eyes on all things Apple, Ryan Katz rumors that Apple dumped its pricey new iPod campaign shot by Errol Morris, "before the first ads even hit television... Apple had selected 60 individuals for the campaign out of thousands who had responded to the company's call on its Web site for iPod-catalyst Switch stories. Those 60, which ranged in age from about 18 to 35 and spanned a diverse number of cultures and professions, were flown to Los Angeles in early May to shoot the ads with Moxie Pictures and Errol Morris... Of the 60 flown to L.A., Moxie and Morris settled on 30 who would be the new faces of the Switch campaign. Switchers were interviewed from ten minutes to over an hour by Morris, who asked them a wide variety of questions. According to sources, that's where problems started to arise. "So few people could speak into the camera," one source said, adding that -- almost with a sense of futility -- those too nervous ended up being spoon-fed lines.... With members of Apple corporate overseeing the filming, it became apparent to a number on set that tension between Morris and Apple over the direction and execution of the campaign was building.... "An unbelievable amount of money was invested in this campaign, you wouldn't believe it..." Like the original campaign, the new Switch ads were destined for television, print, billboards, and buses. Switchers were paid $3,100 for their day's work." At Morris' site, he's posted another in a series of clever if doomed ads, for a Quaker "weight control" oatmeal.

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