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September 30, 2005

All Shu Qi up: whose Times are these?

The Taipei Times offers a little recondite spice about local movie figures: "The onscreen and offscreen romance between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie while shooting Mr. and Mrs. Smith has been copied Chinese style. Shu Qi (舒淇) and Chang Chen (張震) of Three Times (最好的時光) by Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) reportedly moved in together during the shooting of the film. Both parties denied the rumor, but left a space for maneuver by saying they didn't rule out the possibility of being together in the future. Gossipmongers view the news as a good example of the tried and tested publicity stunt. But for Hou, at least, it's a giant step forward as now he knows entertainment gossip can add marketability to even arthouse films."

Posted by pride at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

Daniel Neman loved it: A History of Violence

Daniel Neman of the Richmond Times Dispatch saw a different A History of Violence than some of us did; he's irritated to the max by the tasty minimalism. Neman reviews Cronenberg's sleek stunner as "a cheap movie, cheaply filmed and cheaply made. And the editing leaves a lot to be desired, too... David Cronenberg ought to know better, but it is clear that he is working with too little money and too little script. [This] shows up plainest in the horrendous digital video photography, in which everyone is cast in a sickly light and looks nauseous. [Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky shot on film with a lovely, pale palette.] The problem with the story is clear when we consider all the filler used just to stretch the movie to an hour and a half... Cronenberg does not help matters by shooting the film so deadpan, so quietly, that it seems slow and uninteresting. The calm is punctuated by occasional bursts of violence and the disgusting special effects that follow them, but they don't help... It is obvious where Cronenberg's interest picks up, though it is only in a few places. A couple of sex scenes are raunchy, and it is unusual to see raunchy sex among married couples in the movies these days... He clearly revels in the scenes of blood and gore, though each one looks rather like the others... What doesn't interest him or the writer is the ending. The [ending] feels like it was written by a committee that jettisoned logic and character motivation just for the sake of ending. The filmmakers want it to end, so it ends." [For the record, Cronenberg has told interviewers, including yr. correspondent, that the final scene was one of his key demands to New Line, which readily acceded to his choice.]

Posted by pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2005

6,500 words of Joss Whedon on Serenity

No quotes pop out at me, but for those so inclined, Oregonian freelancer M. E. Russell transcribes all 67 minutes of his gab-a-thon with Joss Whedon�.

Posted by pride at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

Someday my prints will come: distrib on costs of Masculin Feminin

Upon the Criterion Collection release of Masculin-Feminin, here's a patch from a Gothamist interview with Bruce Goldstein, partner in distrib Rialto Pictures and repertory director of New York's indispensable Film Forum. Rialto distributed M/F and Goldstein says, "These prints are very expensive. The prints in a movie theater, like a Loews Cineplex—for example a film like Million Dollar Baby... they're probably no more than $1500 a print because they mass produce them. They make something like 3000, and the prints are fairly cheap. The print of Masculin Feminin, I don't mind telling you, is $6000. For a small company, that's a huge investment. And if you make five prints that's $30,000. If you make 10 it's $60,000. Even these new studio restorations, they are not mass-produced. They make one or two. A big studio like Warner Bros. or Sony, they may make like five. The audience is still fairly niche-y. Although now all the studios have arms that deal with classic films, and that's a great thing." Of what movies he watches, Goldstein notes, "I watch more movies that I program than I ever did before because my memory of films is fading. And it's always great to watch movies you haven't seen in a long time -- to see them again with a fresh more sophisticated eye. I do try to watch a lot of old films that I'm programming, but even more than that, I prescreen prints for quality. We send things back all the time."

Posted by pride at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

Dylan, unbugged: Bob vs. the press in No Direction Home

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, examines Bob Dylan's prickly relationship with reporters in Scorsese's No Direction Home: "Dylan has always had a combative relationship with the media, and wrote one of the most scathing and, arguably, most influential attacks on the press in modern times, "Ballad of Thin Man." That song holds that memorable refrain: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" ... The Scorsese film shows plenty of evidence of why Dylan turned off to the press long ago. Along with many of his fans, they just didn't "get" him... "You don't sing protest songs anymore," a reporter asks. "All my songs are protest songs," Dylan replies evenly. "All I do is protest."

Posted by pride at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

The Squid finds its Voice: A Whale of a Tale

In the Voice, a week after a cover package touting David Cronenberg as the paper's historically best-reviewed auteur father, Noam Baumbach, son of former Village Voice reviewer Georgia Brown (and Mr. Jennifer Jason Leigh) is anointed as the best kid on the block for his magnificent short story The Squid and the Whale. Former Voice intern Rob Nelson makes a case for mom's critical savvy;

Jim Hoberman offers a long caveat on why he's even reviewing the film: "Full disclosure: If I hadn't liked The Squid and the Whale so much, I might have begged off reviewing. For, while I have only the slightest personal acquaintance with the filmmaker, I do know his brother, his father, and particularly, his mother, former Voice movie critic Georgia Brown. From this privileged position, the movie is, of course, additionally fascinating—albeit not so much for what the filmmaker reveals about his family but how he chooses to represent them. Janet Malcolm opened her infamous screed "The Journalist and the Murderer "by observing that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." But isn't this true of any writer who takes people's lives as grist for her mill? I don't necessarily recognize Baumbach's actual family in [his movie] but I do recognize the artist's ruthlessness—and the degree to which he's been true to their aesthetic family values." And Jessica Winter listens to Baumbach: "The director grew up in a household of voluble cinephiles. "My dad [Jonathan Baumbach] had been a film critic for the Partisan Review, but when I was younger and not aware of those kinds of things. Then my mom started reviewing around the time I was finishing high school and starting college, and I was so excited—I felt like the family finally had a mouthpiece, that she could write about all the stuff we'd been discussing for all these years. What interested me about my mom's film criticism was that she really valued an emotional reaction to a movie... I feel that with this movie I learned the value of an emotional approach to filmmaking. I made an emotional movie about intellectuals."

Posted by pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2005

Your funeral, my reviews: Nick Cave on "dark"

The Age reports from the Aussie premiere of Nick Cave's The Proposition: "Directed by John Hillcoat, [it's] set in the 1880s in a fictional town and was shot in Winton in rural Queensland. The Australian western, starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson, tells the story of three brothers on the run from the law. Reviews have described the film as "dark and bloody''. "Is dark bad?'' Cave asked. "It's a sad film and it's a violent film and I guess in some respects that's what I do.'' Cave indicated he would be keen to work with Hillcoat again, saying he had already written another script. "We have got another thing up and running But I can't talk about that. If Johnny wants me to write more for him I will but I'm a musician. This is my kind of other job.''

Posted by pride at 08:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Below 14th movie humor via Mr. Musto

A two-liner via the VVoice's Michael Musto: "In a love-apalooza straight out of the art house circuit, MIKE MILLS (Thumbsucker's writer-director) is dating MIRANDA JULY (Me and You and Everyone We Know's writer-director-star). If there's a baby, they should name it Angelika IFC Sunshine."

Posted by pride at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

An exorcism by any other name: pitching Emily Rose

Screenwriter Josh Friedman tells his version of the legendary Emily Rose pitch meeting: " There's only one pitch I've ever heard of that I wish I would have done. My friends Scott Derrickson and Paul Boardman wrote The Exorcism of Emily Rose... The movie is based on a true case which occurred in Germany around 1970. While researching another project, Paul and Scott were given an audio tape by a NYC police detective who investigated the occult. When he gave it to them he said: "I don't even know if I should give this to you. I truly believe playing this tape is dangerous." And what's on the tape? THE RECORDING OF THE REAL EMILY ROSE'S EXORCISM FROM 30 YEARS AGO. [This tape] inspired them to write the movie. And it was this tape that helped them sell the project. Because what did they do? ...They did what you and I would hope we'd do if we were in their position. They'd take that scary-ass tape from studio to studio and play it for people. The way I understood it went...: Scott and Paul would go into the room, do their pitch, and then pull out the tape recorder and some headphones. One of them would say: "There are those that believe just playing this tape invites darkness into our lives." Then the curious exec would put on the headphones, thus drowning out all other EARTHLY AND NORMAL noise.Then they'd press play... From what I understand the tape is ABSOLUTELY THE MOST TERRIFYING THING YOU'VE EVER HEARD and consists of a girl DYING while screaming in German at two priests attempting to pull SIX DEMONS from her body. Then Scott and Paul would leave."

Posted by pride at 03:00 AM | Comments (0)

The penguin voyeurs' survival instincts: We huddled together for warmth

The NY Times has a long Paris dispatch on the perils of consorting with penguins: "The long journey to create and sell the film March of the Penguins was as pitiless as the ice-desert migration of the emperor penguins that waddled to cinematic triumph...

The French company that produced the movie struggled to avoid bankruptcy while the film was being made and confronted near disaster when its 2 cameramen were trapped in a deadly Antarctic blizzard... "I always kept the image in my mind of the long march and the struggle to survive," said Yves Darondeau, 40, one of three partners in Bonne Pioche. "Like the emperor penguin, we huddled together for warmth. It was extremely difficult, complicated, risky and full of anguish." ... The new-found popularity [of docs] has given filmmakers more confidence about the future, but financing remains elusive. One reason for optimism is the rapid development of new digital movie networks in many countries; they are intended to nurture specialty markets and slash film printing costs - an expense that has long stymied distributors and filmmakers. The networks, supported by a mix of public and private money, basically supply heavily subsidized digital projectors to theaters to entice exhibitors to show documentaries and non-Hollywood fare." [More tick-and-tock at the link.]
[Publicity photo: Jérôme Maison/Bonne Pioche Productions/Alliance de Production Cinématographique]

Posted by pride at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)

Andrew Niccol wields Lord of War

There's a belated interview with Andrew Niccol about research and politics, over at the Pride, Unprejudiced blog.

Posted by pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2005

Aegean gracefully: the revamped Thessaloniki Film Festival

Athens News' Angelike Contis reports on the revamped Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the November Greek event considered over the past decade by many observers to be one of Europe's most important, in a new formation after a spring shake-up.
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At an Athens press conference, new director Despoina Mouzaki (replacing longtime head Michel Demopoulos) described the revamped event as "more condensed." The important International Competition will continue, along with tributes to South Korea's Kim Ji Woon (The Quiet Family) and Park Chan-wook (known for his “Vengeance” trilogy), as well as Taiwanese poetic minimalist Hou Hsiao Hsien Japan’s yakuza king Seijun Suzuki. The festival has retained its Balkan Survey, and there will be peeks at the Mexican film tradition and the latest Danish and Irish films. Honorees of those offering masterclasses include Michael Winterbottom, Patrice Chereau, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Alex McDowell. However, the vital New Horizons section founded by Dimitris Eipides will be replaced by a category called "Independence Days” for films from around the world. At the conference, Contis reports, “It’s a festival of new creators and new creations,” noted Greek-French actor Georges Corraface, the festival’s new president, who replaced Pantelis Voulgaris, who replaced Theo Angelopoulos, all in a matter of months....With regard to local film, Mouzaki (who is also a film producer) said, “A festival can’t solve the problems of a national cinema, but it can showcase talent.” (The dismissed Angeloupolos was out talking to students, Katherimerini reports: "The young filmmakers asked Angelopoulos [about digital and other new formats]. “We see a film through our own eyes, which are our internal gaze... If we manage to communicate, then that is a small miracle. That is the only reason I love movie theaters.” As for the Festival who no longer wanted him, the veteran director says, “I cannot accept the compromise that the Thessaloniki Film School has turned into. In my opinion it is a mistake, caused by the previous and the current governments.” [Photo of the Olympion Theatre interior by Ray Pride.]

Posted by pride at 08:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogging the slog: Levy on the cricketical life

In the Oregonian, cricket Shawn Levy blogs the critical slog, being kind enough to omit meals, daydreams and tummyaches:
"What Do You Do For a Living? Part I
So it's about 5:15 pm on Monday and I'm slowing down a little. Here's what I've done so far today in my capacity as film critic: 1) Written [2] items to run inside of the Living section during the week, one recapping [a] just-concluded... Festival, the other previewing a show... by local filmmakers Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick. About 600 words total. 2) Written two full-length film reviews for Friday... The Greatest Game Ever Played and Thumbsucker. About 1400 words total. 3) Began work on my Sunday feature story... About 800 words so far, with another 1500 or so to come. 4) Did planning for... issues of Oct. 7 and 14; answered e-mails and telephone calls from readers, publicists and colleagues; conferred with a couple of editors about the workload for the rest of the week and a few little problems that arose. 5) And, of course, produced a couple of entries for this blog. Right now, I've got about a half hour before I need to go across town for a screening of Serenity. I should be home by, I don't know, 9:30 -- on a day when I began writing at about 6:30 And tomorrow is the real crunch day this week....
What Do You Do For a Living? Part II
It's Tuesday at 4-ish pm. Thus far today, I've 1) Finished my Sunday feature story... adding about 1600 words to yesterday's 800. 2) Written the first half of a review of Serenity for Friday... About 400 words. 3) Transcribed the tapes of two interviews that I conducted back in January at the Sundance Film Festival with the star and director of Thumbsucker." (I hate transcribing more than any other part of my job and maybe my life: not only is it time-consuming—about 75 minutes to transcribe 25 minutes of tape—but I have to listen to my own donkey voice asking questions in the most idiotic fashion and ignoring obvious follow-ups.) About 1500 words. 4) Seen the new Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley. 5) The usual e-mails, phone calls and check-ins with publicists, freelancers, colleagues and editors. In about two hours, I'm off to see another adaptation of a nineteenth century classic, the new Oliver Twist, which was directed by Roman Polanski. Again, pretty much constantly going from 6:30 am to 9:30 pm.
Tomorrow I catch a break, though...."

Posted by pride at 07:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Agee breaky heart: the life and death of a novelist and cricket

In the Boston Globe, English prof Alan Jacobs recaps the life of screenwriter and film cricket James Agee on the occasion of the publication of 2 volumes of his work in the Library of America, edited by Michael Sragow: "50 years ago... James Agee's heart stopped in a Manhattan taxicab as he was on the way to a doctor's office. He was only 44, but had already suffered several heart attacks. Despite his illness, he had managed to all but finish his novel, ''A Death in the Family," in which he recreated the inner world of a 6-year-old boy whose father dies suddenly, just as Agee's own had done. The book would be published in 1957; it won the Pulitzer Prize. Even among the remarkable characters of the New York intellectual scene of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Agee's energy and charm made him extraordinary. Not even the heart attacks had slowed the pace of his drinking, smoking, talking, or womanizing. Walker Evans, the photographer with whom Agee collaborated as a young man, would remember him as one who'worked in what looked like a rush and a rage, and as one whose ability to win the trust of others was worrying—or would have been, except that for Agee ''human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls." [More nice detail at the link.]

Posted by pride at 08:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cronenberg on choices: it's the middle of the winter, are you suicidal?

The Age has a histoire of David Cronenberg: "People are saying, are you feeling the love now for History of Violence, and I say, 'Yeah,' and that's a scary thing, because it could get addictive... I don't think it's a good thing, really, for a filmmaker or an artist of any kind to only want to be appreciated or loved. It's if you start chasing that, then I think you've destroyed yourself." A larger budget, he says, "also meant I was going to get paid, which I wasn't with Spider, so that was good... But that wouldn't be enough. There were a lot of projects I could have done which I would have gotten paid for, but they just didn't interest me. The rule of thumb is, OK, it's the middle of winter, you're either shooting or editing it. Are you exhilarated or are you going to be suicidal? If you're going to be suicidal, don't do it, because you're going to have to live with it at least a year and a half, probably two years, so you better love it. You just better be passionate about it."

Posted by pride at 06:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Tilda Swinton: I would run a cinema

Tilda Swinton gets interior with The Herald's Miles Fielder: "In a spacious, somewhat empty suite in Edinburgh's swanky Caledonian Hotel, Tilda Swinton is sitting on a large golden sofa. Clad in denim and with her long, red hair falling down around her shoulders, she's leaning forwards, elbows on knees, hands grappling the air as she searches for the right words to describe something that's very important to her. But the Scottish actress isn't talking to me about her new film, Thumbsucker...

Instead, she is intent on describing her home... "We have no television, but we do have the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest screening room in our house. We got some seats, sadly, from an old cinema that was knocked down to make an Ikea, or whatever. Anyway... I'm having a really beautiful time at the moment, because my children have become interested in cinema. So, I have a laboratory experiment going, to feed them films... They love Jacques Tati... It's a great delight to feel them begin to sense what cinema is. If my ship came in... I would run a cinema. That's what I really want to do."

Posted by pride at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

How much riper could a country be for pissed-off music?: Schama on Scorsese's Dylan

Of the yards of verbiage unfurled over Scorsese's PBS-BBC-DVD Dylan doc, next to Larry Gross' celebration, there's a lot worth the deciphering in Simon Schama's history in the Guardian, including: "Hermeneutics 101: the artist makes the world, but then again the world makes the artist, and heigh-ho round and round we go. Though Dylan insists that he just kinda happened along at the right time, he's right to acknowledge the hungriness of America - and Britain - for his wry take on, inter alia, injustice, hypocrisy and thermonuclear angst. So while [Irish folksinger Liam] Clancy, in a nice aside, says that "lightning strikes every once in a while in a different place, no one knows why", it's not that hard to figure that a country on the brink of nuclear war might well turn jitters into musical fury. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Roger Cohen remembers singing at the Gaslight with Dylan, "You're going to miss me when I'm gone," and thinking, "Wait a minute, there isn't going to be anybody left to miss us!" Then followed in succession: the assassination of the president, the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, and a deluded, unwinnable war which mowed down an entire generation. How much riper could a country possibly be for pissed-off music?"

Posted by pride at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 23, 2005

Ingmar Bergman, with this woman who keeps cows and horses

On the occasion of Saraband, the Guardian's Geoffrey Macnab surveys the generation after Ingmar Bergman to suss his lasting impact. Michael Winterbottom: "When I was 24 or 25, around the time of his 70th birthday, I made two documentaries about him... I watched all his films - which then numbered almost 50. I had written him a letter asking if we could make a documentary based on his book. When I met him, he said one of the reasons he had agreed to see me was that in Christmas in Sweden, there is a tradition of farcical comedy and one of the characters in it is called Mr Winterbottom. I was told you had to be extremely punctual - that that was an issue. So I was..." [He's impressed by Bergman's simplicity, too.] Liv Ullmann on the man on the island: "When shooting on Saraband was over, Bergman said goodbye and went to his island. That was two years ago. He lives there absolutely completely alone... We made Scenes From a Marriage 30 years ago in a stable he had made into a studio. Now, he has made that into a cinema. He gets all the films sent there. He sits there with this woman who keeps cows and horses showing her films. Every new film. He knows everything that is being made." Thomas Vinterberg : "Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since... After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was... I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad." Alexander Payne : "I am woefully underexposed to Bergman." James Schamus: "Look at Scenes From a Marriage and then look at Love Streams." Also: Sally Potter, Terrence Davies, Stephen Wooley, and Olivier Assayas, who makes a modest case for Saraband as " some otherworldly masterpiece."

Posted by pride at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

Smartie: Noah Baumbach on one impulse behind The Squid and the Whale

In New York, Noah Baumbach says that after 30, he wanted to make "more emotional movies that were less about being clever.... Intellectuals are depicted so negatively now, it's nice to show that they can be human beings, too—to make emotional movies about intellectuals rather than analytic movies about intellectuals."

Posted by pride at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

B. Ruby polishes Brokeback Mountain: Cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it

"Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it," B. Ruby Rich asserts in the Guardian: "Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando—all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon... it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era... Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off... With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it... It's a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that's broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society's intolerance and threats, an individual's fear and repression. In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema." [Extensive choruses at the link.]

Posted by pride at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

Nathan Lee loved it: The Weeping Meadow and drowned worlds

In the New York Sun, Nathan Lee has little patience for Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, but does manage to work in Katrina, 9/11 and Donnie Darko. "Theo Angelopoulos has announced that his new film is the first part of a trilogy that will attempt a "poetic summing up of the century that just ended." Those are some mighty big words, and he's backed them up with a mighty big movie. Just shy of three hours long, Meadow is an epic meditation on Greek history from 1919-49... Mostly what it's about are thick slabs of cinematography: elaborately orchestrated long shots that unravel the landscape with sinuous self-importance... An early shot introducing us to the characters' coastal village manages a dozen neat feats of telescoping distance, shifting scale, metamorphic point of view. So that's what an animated Bruegel looks like...

But if this is poetry, it hasn't learned the modernist lessons of concision and concentration. The movie isn't poorly written; it's barely written at all. Halfway through the story, the village is wiped out by flood.... It's a very pretty calamity. This sequence would be impressive in any context. In the wake of Katrina, however, such images penetrate the imagination from unexpected angles, posing unexpected questions. The mind can't help but struggle to connect them meaningfully to events outside the theater... Mr. Angelopoulos's ostentatious style invites (but doesn't reward) the most demanding engagement from its viewer....There is, moreover, a recent and illuminating precedent for the uncanny correspondence of film images to real world disaster. The first movie I saw after September 11 was Donnie Darko" a moody pastiche of sci-fi, satire, and 1980s suburban period piece. Five minutes into the story, a jet engine falls from the sky... The hypersensitive narrative that followed perfectly reflected the mood of New York in those days: tortured introspection, melancholy vertigo, a sense of reality slipping off the rails... The flood images of The Weeping Meadow embrace the viewer in nothing but their own virtuosity."

Posted by pride at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

Rushing un-spun: Control Room figure joins Al Jazeera

Josh Rushing, one of the central figures in Jehane Noujaim's documentary Control Room, for his considered responses as a U.S. Marine Captain who served in the United States Central Command media office during the invasion of Iraq, quit the Marines after being told he couldn't talk about the movie; now he's got a new job, at Al Jazeera International's 24-hour English language network.

"Josh's outspoken and conscientious nature in this sensitive role, his conflicts with the Pentagon and his subsequent resignation from the Marines," the network P.R.s, "as well his regular appearances as a fresh, non-partisan, critical voice in broadcast and print media have made him among the most recognisable young media voices today. Al Jazeera International, headquartered in Doha -Qatar, aims to broadcast globally at the end of the 1st quarter of 2006, from broadcasting centres in Doha, Kuala Lumpur, London, and Washington D.C." Rushing will be based in DC, as part of one of news bureaus around the world. More press release: "'In a time when American media has become so nationalised, I'm excited about joining an organisation that truly wants to be a source of global information," Josh said. "I witnessed during the war how the U.S. media was co-opted by the U.S. government's messaging. I am proud to be part of a news network that believes in the power of the un-spun truth."

Posted by pride at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

Vlad to know you: Coppola in Romania, datorită

Variety reports Francis Coppola, at 66, after 8 years of mulling Megalopolis, is making a low-budget, self-financed version of Romanian author Mircea Eliade's "Youth Without Youth."

It was reported in July in Romania, but who reads Atac? Most provocative somewhat discernible pharse? It's the story of an "asistenta medicala o bruneta si agent secret o blonda"! Variety says the current cast is Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Marcel Iures, and involves a post-World War II fugitive criss-crossing Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. Tim Robbins was originally involved: "Pentru rolul principal, al batranului Dominic Matei, regizorul l-a ales pe actorul American Tim Robbins, sotul actritei Susan Sarandon, dar pentru cateva personaje secundare a acceptat o distributie autohtona. In urma cu cateva zile, au inceput castingurile, in Romania, o asistenta medicala bruneta si o blonda agent secret. Una dintre actritele care s-a inscris deja la probe pentru rolul brunetei este Daniela Nane. In varsta de 66 de ani, regizorul Francis Ford Coppola a avut in minte acest proiect de film inca de la vizita sa de acum sase luni in Romania."

Posted by pride at 02:31 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

Tartan's cultural hand grenades

Ohmynews talks to Tartan prexy Tony Borg about Korean cinema and Tartan's output: "I know I'm biased but Oldboy and A Tale of Two Sisters are my favorite films. You can't get much better in terms of unbelievable bodies of work that represent the new wave of Korean cinema. If you can't appreciate either of these films and their styles, I don't think you can appreciate film in general.

Our owner, Hamish McAlpine, likes to refer to films that we release as "cultural hand grenades." We want to entertain people but we also want to push their buttons, so that even if they don't like the film they still have to talk about it the next day. Those kinds of films are being made all over the world and that's why we look not only to Asia but also Europe, Mexico and all parts of the world."

Posted by pride at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

Why does Mr. S. Run Mildly Amok?: Dargis on Soderbergh on Fassbinder

While Fassbinder gets one of the sexiest jokes in Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story, Steven Soderbergh confesses closer kinship to Manohla Dargis in the Times: "I liked that he was prolific," Mr. Soderbergh said of the uncompromising bad boy of New German Cinema. "I liked the subject matter. I envied his ability to really be a part of the worlds that he portrayed. He was in it in a way that I could never be. And, I don't know, just the bluntness of his movies or most of them, I really like. I was watching a lot of them and had some of them with me when I was in Ohio, not to ape anything in specific, just for the feeling." Later, when [he] leaves for his next [interview] and mentions that he is about to make his next two films, The Good German and Che, almost back to back, this interviewer jokes that he is a madman. "I'm just like Fassbinder," [he] says in his pleasant deadpan, "but without the drugs and the whores."

Posted by pride at 10:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A History of blog: Cronenberg posts

Now why would it be that David Cronenberg and the weird neologism "blog" might fit together? Entries at the website, including video diaries like this brief tape-measured bit about a sex scene in the movie, which won't make sense if you haven't seen it, show why.

Posted by pride at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2005

Slow food for thought: super slo-mo movies

At Epic Empire, a selection of low gravity and super-slow motion videos, collected by Dr. David G. Alciatore, "depicting everyday events [in] a collection of over 180 super-slow motion video clips [including] water balloons popping, animal trap crushing a pen and an egg, Bouncing Rubber Yo-Yo Ball, Ear Flick, milling block of aluminum, stomach punches, pen twirled in hand, stomach punches, computer hard-drive track seeking demonstration, mouth squirting water, face slaps, toy truck destruction, light bulb drop, egg crushed by a hammer, egg dropped on mouse trap, and Jello cube drop."

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Go, indie, go!: Mike MIlls

The SF Bay Guardian reports that Thumbsucker daddy Mike Mills is "working on a documentary on the development of antidepressants in Japan and another feature (and, word has it, dating... Miranda July), the 39-year-old Mills is moving away from his past in graphic design and videomaking – he designed album covers for, famously, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, and Cibbo Matto and directed videos for Ornette Coleman, Frank Black, and the Blues Explosion." And he gives a shout for indie filmmaking: "That's the good thing about film – it's really just a big pirate ship, and it's like saying, 'How do you become a good pirate?' Well, any fucking way that you want. Just find your way to do it. I would put a huge vote in for doing it yourself and not believing things made at home and made for cheap or things made on video and without movie stars aren't worth doing. That's a total contradiction, coming from someone who has a film with Keanu Reeves in it, you know. But that's what I believe."

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September 20, 2005

Edet Belzberg, aboveground: filmmaker gets MacArthur Fellowship

Edet Belzberg, director of the wrenching Children Underground is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.

The 35-year-old Belzberg, the Foundation writes, "is a documentary filmmaker whose films are distinguished by her choice of subjects, in-depth treatment of time and place, and elegant storytelling. In Belzberg’s signature film, Children Underground, she follows and films a group of homeless children living in a train station in Bucharest, Romania. Raw, graceful, and insightful, [her film] personalizes the often dangerous and always chaotic and uncertain world of youngsters casually abandoned by their families and the larger society..." [Photo: MacArthur Foundation]

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Classic Sony behavior: where all the back doors are

LA Times' Patrick Goldstein big-pictures Sony Pix Classics bigs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker: "Although rivals complain that the duo are abrasive and needlessly unpleasant in competitive situations, Bernard argues that their bad rep comes from a refusal to socialize with the competition. "In social settings... people share a lot of information which can sometimes lose you a movie." ... The partners have fought ferociously to keep their autonomy. "You have to remain outside the studio, because they'll always try to get you to conform to their ways of doing business," says Bernard. "We look at each movie individually. We have 22 movies this year, we might have 10 next year. We're not trying to feed an international distribution pipeline, which is what other specialty divisions seem set up to do." Barker and Bernard's festival exploits are legendary. Bernard was ejected from a sold-out Roger & Me premiere here by a fire marshal who found him sitting in the aisle without a ticket. He promptly sneaked in again, explaining, "You just have to know where all the back doors are."

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September 19, 2005

It's your Sloss: Cinetic partner ankles

John Sloss's sales and finance entity, Cinetic Media, loses partner Micah Green to CAA as an agent. "Move marks another step in CAA's push to beef up its indie financing ranks over the past year: Agency brought in ICM vet Bart Walker in November... Working with John Sloss since 1997, Green has experience putting together financing on pics, including docu "Murderball" and upcoming comed[y] "Strangers With Candy"... Green also contributed to promo and sales of movies like Mad Hot Ballroom, Napoleon Dynamite, Super Size Me, and Spellbound.

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Vinnie whinnies for Vinterberg: doing bad in Denmark

NY Post film editor V.A.Musetto admires handsome provocateur Thomas Vinterberg (but the old dog quickly notes his longing for a comely waitress to assure het bona fides): "Vinterberg — tall, blond and blue-eyed — looks as if he should be in front of the movie camera, not behind it. The cute young waitress at French Roast who served a late breakfast to Vinterberg and Cine File couldn't take her eyes off him. (Cine File must admit he couldn't take his eyes off her.)" Vinterberg shrugs at Dear Wendy's reception thus far: "All the films done by Danish directors in foreign languages have been totally rejected in Denmark. Films that do good in Denmark only do good in Denmark. Nobody else wants to see them in the world. And the ones that do bad in Denmark, such as mine and Lars von Trier's — those we can sell in the world."

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Bless you, Sony: How Emily courted religious conservatives

In the WSJ, Kate Kelly sniffs out the $30 million weekend for The Exorcism of Emily Rose:

"The $19 million project is a hit in part because Screen Gems deliberately courted an audience that it might not have counted on for a typical horror [movie]: religious conservatives. [The Sony subsidiary] worked hard to attract a spiritually-oriented audience. It conducted an online poll asking participants if they believed in demonic possession (66% did) and issued a promotional mini-newspaper that reprinted articles from recent years about the Vatican's views on Satanism and incidences of real-life exorcisms... The studio also courted the Christian media with screenings and interviews with director Scott Derrickson, pointing out that he is a churchgoing Christian. The result: some religious writers recommended the movie in their publications. [Co-writer] Boardman says he knew they had hit home... when he saw the feedback from a prerelease screening audience. The movie got good marks from Catholics, proclaimed agnostics, and even a self-described Wiccan. "We had positive responses to the movie ... from a completely disparate group of people..."

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In the year 2929: if film is still alive

Newsweek International's John Ness takes a blurry cellphone snap of the 2929HDNetLandmarkMagnoliaRysher combine: "2929 controls everything related to its own films, from the preproduction notes to the butter on the theater popcorn. The key change is in releasing movies on one "day and date," meaning... in theaters, on DVD and on cable, as a way to... consolidate ad campaigns, and maximize customer choices in a way that will discourage online piracy. With [Steven Soderbergh's] Bubble, 2929's latest movie, expected for release in theaters in January, the whole industry is watching, worried that the 2929 model will overturn the delicate balance of a business now predicated on a first run in theaters, followed later by release in other formats." [Slightly more at the link.]

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And a Variety scribe shall lede them: writing up Toronto

Todd McCarthy gives that little extra in Variety, reaching for a lede to encompass the entire wooly mammoth: This year more than ever, the Toronto Film Festival was reminiscent of the elephant everything thinks they know well when in fact they can only possibly touch a small part of its body. Cute, too, the summa: If you select your choices exceedingly carefully or are as lucky as a gambler on a run, there are enough entries here to theoretically see 30 good films and no bad ones during the course of the fest. On the other hand, with opposite fortune, you could undoubtedly see 30 bad ones. It all depends upon what part of the elephant you grab. (We'll grab the part a "gambler on the run" grabs, whatever that is.)

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September 18, 2005

Future now: Neil Gaiman on Mirrormask and Beowulf

In the Reporter, the veteran fantasy writer talks about the marvelous $4 million Mirrormask and more money with another director: "In terms of the future of filmmaking, I've (been working on the screenplay for) "Beowulf" with [Robert] Zemeckis recently. It was a script that we originally wrote as a live-action film, and suddenly we're doing it as a motion-capture film. Again, all the rules are turned upside down. There was one scene that I started writing, and I phoned Bob Zemeckis and said, "We're working on this scene, and we're worried it might be too expensive, this whole dragon battle." Bob just said, "There's nothing you and Roger Avary could possibly write that will cost me more than $1 million a minute to shoot." It's suddenly indicating a universe in which everything costs the same, whether it's a man battling a dragon or a bunch of people having a party."

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September 17, 2005

Loving the look: on Zhang Yi-yi in 2046

In the Voice, Graham Fuller rhapsodizes at length about one still of Zhang Yiyi from Wong Kar-Wai's 2046:

There she stands then, in a spangled black cheongsam, a noirish totem of sexual aloofness, in her room, 2046, at Hong Kong's Oriental Hotel. Her upper lip is cast in shadow as it separates provocatively from its neighbor. Her neatly coiffed head is cocked slightly to her left at an angle that would seem quizzical if it didn't seem she knows all the damn answers (in fact, she has none). She has, meanwhile, arrayed herself in insolent contrapposto: Her right hand is spread on her right hip in such a way that it crooks the arm at a 90-degree angle at the elbow; her left hand caresses her abdomen with the scarlet-tipped fingers at 10 o'clock (much too early for bed in mid-'60s Hong Kong). This accentuates not the curve of her back... but the prominence of her bust, which must be pressing painfully against her too tight sheath—a clear mark of masochism. The pose echoes Dietrich's akimbo stances in The Blue Angel. It's an advertisement, a challenge, and a taunt... The Zhang still is not a film frame but a production shot. Taken by Wing Shya, the celebrated Hong Kong photographer and graphic artist who works on most of Wong's movies, it was published in the Voice... and the Times, where it took up a whopping 115 inches of prime real estate on the first page of the August 5 Weekend Arts. It also graced the cover of the July–August issue of Film Comment and is one of 13 images collaged on the U.S. film poster, where it was reproduced in a panoramic version ... On the poster, it sits above another image of Bai looking out at the viewer, but this time lying naked in bed and looking suitably vulnerable after her seduction by Chow: The latter image delivers a sadistic lash to the Zhang fancier, but her haughty expression and fetishizing clothes in the top still draw the eye more than her glowing skin in the lower." [More at the link.]

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September 14, 2005

The Junkman cometh: thinking about Gone in 60 Seconds' H. B. Halicki

Andrew Tracy does some smart looking at the delirious output of the late H. B. Halicki: "To claim that gone in 60 Seconds is all action and no story is to miss the radically reconfigured narrative it tells to perfection: the interaction of two machines, man and vehicle, independent of any reason apart from their functional compatibility.

Halicki’s colourless Pace is the inadvertent symbol of that symbiosis: both investigator and thief, his heists carefully restricted to vehicles insured by the very companies that then hire him to investigate his own crimes, Pace is not between two worlds (as the ad copy would say) but at the heart of a ceaselessly functioning mechanism. Gone’s narrative is a systemic, not a dramatic one. The final chase is not an outburst of defiance; there’s none of the requisite cop-baiting of the good ol’ boy car-chase cycle to follow. Pace’s escape has all the outlaw triumph of an accountant’s tabled report, nothing more than the completion of a process that, we can only assume from the “open” ending, will begin anew with the next commission. Speed leads inescapably back to stasis, to a ceaseless recurrence masked by the spectacle of bodies and machines in motion, by the chimera of conspicuous destruction." [More smart but not pretentious stuff at the link; from Cinema Scope 24.]

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The Passenger: Out of nowhere

In Cinema Scope 24, Robert Koehler previews and reviews the reissue of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, "that cinematic Rip Van Winkle... 30 years after its controversial premiere in 1975, this anti-adventure, as slippery as an eel, has been let out of its vault for a limited North American theatrical release in late October. There is a story here (which we’ll get to), but the very curiousness of everything associated with the film’s public return—Why so long unseen? How is it that Jack Nicholson actually owns the film? Which version?—is somehow in fidelity to the curiousness of Antonioni’s achievement, which itself is in part the investigation of human phantoms. Only such a mysterious film deserves such mysterious treatment: out of nowhere, sometime in the middle of the 80s, it was gone; now, out of nowhere, it’s back." [Much more machinating at the link.]

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The Family Stone: the most hideous part of the process

As the tubs thump louder for writer-director Thomas Bezucha for The Family Stone, The Reporter's Martin Grove bellies to the front of the queue with a long conversation. "Writing, Bezucha said, really isn't something he enjoys: "Writing is just the most hideous part of the process. I always thinking of Collette, who said that the only thing harder than writing is not writing. I put a great deal of store in that. It's why I would never have given this script away... Directing it was my reward for having written it. The process is that there's a much longer period of incubation... which becomes this world of 3x5 cards and Post-its. I really don't like to sit down to any part of writing the script until I have everything figured out -- and that's (... with) Post-its and 3x5 cards. And then there's a very long treatment that happens. Writing the script is the final stage of the process and writing the script was actually pretty easy."

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Investment Criterion: Lions Gate to buff their Image?

A few weeks after Image Entertainment consumed specialty DVD label Home Vision Entertainment and signed a 10-year exclusive distrib deal with the Criterion Collection, Lions Gate bids for Image; they're "[mulling] an unsolicited bid from Canadian film producer Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.... North Vancouver-based Lions Gate also said it recently bought 4 million shares -- nearly 19 percent of Image Entertainment -- in hopes of acquiring the company, saying the merger would benefit both parties...."This acquisition would be consistent with our desire to broaden and deepen our library of filmed entertainment, as well as to add an important musical component, and, as we discussed, to introduce (Image Entertainment) as a new studio label focusing on specialty theatrical content," co-Chairman and Chief Executive Jon Feltheimer wrote in the letter.' [Lotsa crunchy numbers at the link.]

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Glimpsing Korean film history on DVD

Korea Times' Joon Sooh reports on an initiative to enshrine Korean film history: "Historical moments in Korean film history, including the first film made after the nation’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the first onscreen kiss, are being presented by the Korea Film Archive in their ongoing DVD series. The government organization, which works to preserve and archive the films of the nation, began the series titled the Korea Film Archive Collection last year. It has released three DVD titles so far: ``Hurrah! For Freedom’’ and ``Yangsan Province’’ last year and ``Hand of Fate’’ this year. ``Madame Freedom (Chayubuin)’’ is set to be released in December."

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Hayao Miyazaki: He visibly flinches on his way to the loo

In the Guardian, Xan Brooks gets the rarest of audiences with Miyazaki-san: "Miyazaki taps a cigarette from a silver case. The Disney deal suits him, he explains, because he has stuck to his guns. His refusal to grant merchandising rights means that there is no chance of any Nausicaa happy meals or Spirited Away video games. Furthermore, Disney wields no creative control. There is a rumour that when Harvey Weinstein was charged with handling the US release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki sent him a samurai sword in the post. Attached to the blade was a stark message: "No cuts." The director chortles. "Actually, my producer did that. Although I did go to New York to meet this man, this Harvey Weinstein, and I was bombarded with these demands for cuts." He smiles. "I defeated him."

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September 13, 2005

Holy roll 'ems: Monks take over Shaolin pics

From Hong Kong, The Age's Jonathan Watts reports that monks have the power: "From The Matrix and Kill Bill to Kung Fu Hustle and House of Flying Daggers, the Shaolin monks have had to watch passively as their trademark martial arts have made millions for film studios... But now the monks are striking back with a series of big-budget fight films that will, in true kung fu style, pit their rivals' strength against them by recruiting top international actors and directors. Abbot Shi Yongxin will serve as executive producer for the first of three features, entitled The Legend of the Monk Warriors of Shaolin Temple, based on a true story of 30 warrior monks who fought 16th-century pirates. Filming will start next year.

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Ebert on Toronto: as good as they possibly can be

Is this the perverted hopefulness Errol Morris speaks of? Roger Ebert bespeaks a rebirth of the movies from his privileged position: "At the halfway point of the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, one thing is clear: This is the best autumn movie season in memory. One film after another has been astonishingly good. Critics gathered in the hallways after the Varsity press screenings, talking in hushed tones as if witnesses to a miracle. These are movies for grown-ups. Intelligent, unusual, challenging, thoughtful. We plowed through a summer of the multiplex 2-week wonders, some of them good at what they wanted to do, few of them wanting to do very much. At Telluride, James Mangold, director of Walk the Line, told me: "Nobody wants to make a picture that depends on someone being able to 'pull it off.'" Now here are all these movies that someone did pull off: Films that aspire to be as good as they possibly can be." [Names named and notes taken at the link.]

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Errol Morris on the role of the director

The loquacious Mr. Morris is quick with the quip and a definition of the directing gig at The A.V. Club: "There's a perverted hopefulness that runs through Gates Of Heaven and you have to wonder... hope for what? Life after death? ...Hope for some kind of love, mortal or otherwise? For business success? For meaning? Hope for anything! In a sea of utter hopelessness! ... I saw Gates Of Heaven again about a year ago, at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival. I sat next to Roger. I hadn't seen it in probably a decade. And I thought, "This is fucked-up!" That's the nicest thing you can say about a work of art. Usually, the interesting ones are nuts. In literature classes, no one points out that "Moby Dick" is written by a madman... You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but. I kind of liked watching Gates Of Heaven. I thought, "This is nuts!" One of my favorite guys, the guy I did the Miller High Life campaign with, Jeff Williams, paid me the greatest compliment that I've ever heard. The first day that we worked together, he looked at me in a kind of funny way and said, "You know, when the director has everything set up perfectly, my job is to come in and fuck it up. But with you, Errol, I don't have to come in and fuck it up, because it's fucked up already!"

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Where the R flies: Egoyan on pixillating prolonged thrusting

More on what ThinkFILM can or can't do with the NC-17 for Where the Truth Lies from the National Post: "As for suggestions that the publicity is golden, producer Robert Lantos [and Serendipity Point majordomo] disagreed, calling it a "stigma" while Egoyan added it was just not how he wanted to position his film. "It's such a complex aspect of our lives," the director said about sexuality." Last week Lantos, however, had remarked that the publicity over the ratings controversy "could be a kind of serendipitous side-effect. Certainly I don't think it will hurt us." Egoyan thought one of the problems is his film looks gorgeous, like a big studio production, with major stars. But if it had been shot as an underground film in grainy 16mm with unknowns in the cast, he said, nobody would have paid attention. Egoyan revealed how one of the MPAA people told him he was so close to winning his appeal, that if only he could have pixillated or blurred the "prolonged thrusting."

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Locations, locations: kidnappings on the set of Paradise Now

Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad talks to Emanuel Levy in the FT about unusual production circumstances: "When rumours spread that the film was a polemic against suicide bombing, militant group kidnapped Abu-Assad's location manager, Hassan Titi. "That day, there was an Israeli missile attack and gunmen ordered ust o leave. This was the last straw for 6 of our European crew members, who left." Abu-Assad does not blame them... "From their perspective, they did the right thing," he says. "Life is more important than a film. We were too close to the destruction. I understood why the Palestinian crew might do this, but I wondered why foreign crews would risk their lives."Abu-Assad had to contend with the problem of how get his location manager back, and how to stay friendly with the factions without the Israelis knowing about it. He decided to contact Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, although he had never met him. Says Abu-Assad: "I knew for a fact that Arafat had never visited a cinema, but he did help us to obtain the release of Hassan within two hours."

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Thank you for bidding: neophyte producer David O. Sacks pr's

After the multi-dependent fracas over the rights to Thank You For Smoking' producer David O. Sacks fills in: "The fact that multiple studios bid intensely for this movie is a testament to what [director] Jason [Reitman] has achieved. However, I want to be clear that only one studio, Fox Searchlight, bought the movie. Although we had negotiations with Paramount Classics, no deal was ever concluded. Although this is my first movie, I was represented by highly experienced industry professionals. I am also a lawyer and have run a large public company. We know when we have closed a deal, and when we haven't. I am now enthusiastically looking forward to the release of this film with Fox Searchlight, the best possible distributor to handle this movie. Over the past year Searchlight has distributed a number of high-profile independent pictures which have achieved critical and commercial success, and I'm confident that they can replicate that with our movie. "I want to thank my representatives and everyone who worked on this film. I couldn't have asked to work with a better group of people."

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September 12, 2005

A rubber glove in axle grease: Hurt hearts Cronenberg

William "Hurt can’t say enough good things about his experience with Cronenberg... )I ask why. “He puts his hand in the axle grease,” says Hurt, “then slides it into a silk glove.”... Now there’s a metaphor. I ask if I can quote him. “Don’t you dare quote me,” says Hurt, looking like he might kill me. "Why not? “I want to work with David Cronenberg again.” “But it’s a flattering line. And it’s Cronenbergian. He’ll love it.” “I'm not sure.” ... “How about if I get his permission?” ... I go over to Cronenberg and repeat the line. "That’s exactly what I do," he says, warming to the idea of axle grease. "Except I don’t have a silk glove. I use a rubber glove. Tonight I’ll be using a rubber glove.” ... I go back to Hurt and tell him the director is fine with the axle grease and the silk glove. Hurt seems unconvinced. “If this means I don’t get to work with David Cronenberg again,” he says, “I’ll never forgive you.” [From Brian D. Johnson in Maclean's.]

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September 11, 2005

Harsh Times but well-fed

Along with extolling good food for cast and crew as a secret to directing, Training Day's David Ayer has a few words with LA Times' Patrick Goldstein about why grown-up pictures are few and far between: "It's the development process that makes movies so tame... They don't want to make people feel uncomfortable. They want to take out all the bad language because then they get an R rating and they can't advertise till after 9 p.m. They're always obsessed about behavior and consequences. If you kick a dog, you have to be hit by lightning in the next scene...That's just not reality, at least not in the world I've seen. In Hollywood, you're dealing with people who have a high-powered analytical education. But what's good about movies isn't logical. It's emotional. We shouldn't be afraid to have complex characters in our films, people who lie, people who contradict themselves and don't always act in their best interests. Maybe that's why people aren't going out to the movies these days... Writing saved my life. For another guy, it could be something else. But if you're going to have a good life, you've got to conquer the dark side of yourself. That's what this movie is about. I wanted to show the tough choices people have to make that you don't see in Hollywood films these days. It's not a candy-coated story. But, you know, sometimes the medicine isn't so sweet."

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What? And give up show business?: Anthony Bregman on producing

At Gothamist, Rafie Frank gets Anthony Bregman to define what a producer does, as well as his history with Good Machine and This Is That [while racking up an impeccable number of misspelled proper names]: "Well, here’s a story. The first movie I produced was Love God in 1997, which was one of my favorite production experiences. It definitely was a pioneering film. It was the first digital film ever made... It was about this guy with mental issues, released from an overcrowded insane asylum and he comes to a hotel in the Meatpacking district... and he starts to have hallucinations of, among other things, dinosaur parasites that have been released into the sewers of New York and come up through the toilets.... it was a really difficult production. Really ambitious. We worked for 6 months creating monsters... We shot in... crack hotels with 2 cameras most of the time... The day we started shooting, Ross Katz, who is a producer, a very big producer now... had been working out in Los Angeles, working for Sydney [Pollack's] company, living pretty well, but he wanted to move to New York... So he came in and it was his first day working with Good Machine and my first day of shooting Love God... So, at the end of the day I get back to the production office and the toilet, which is an illegal toilet, had overflowed and, basically, everyone is so tired and the toilet is overflowing and turds start pouring out and everybody says “Well, that’s it. I’m going home ” and I’m left there at midnight on a day we’d started shooting at 5 in the morning and I’m brooming shit out the front door into the street. And it’s right as I’m doing this that Ross comes by.. [I tell him] I’d love to talk to you... but at this point if I stop brooming we’re going to get overcome with shit. So, if you want to hang out, great… grab a broom.”

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September 10, 2005

Rum baba Depardieu, cooking or making love

The Observer serves up Gerard Depardieu's Rum baba with crystallised pineapple from his new cookbook; whoever translated knows a bit about making a Frenchman sound like a cliche: Cooking is a totally sensual pleasure, for you must be able to smell, to touch, to taste, to watch and to listen. I remember preparing a rabbit en gel�e, which I make frequently at my home at the Chateau de Tign� in Anjou, in the company of friend and fellow actor Jean Carmet. Normally, we eat it for breakfast, slathered over a slice of grilled country bread, and washed down with a glass of cold white wine. It is a wonderful memory and one of many that I hold on to. We have five senses. If we use them properly, they will help us appreciate the simplicity behind some of life's pleasures, such as cooking or making love. Bonus recipe: chocolate tart.

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September 09, 2005

IFC springs Werner: Wellspring exec ankles

The Reeler reviews the scoop that Wellspring theatrical dist head Ryan Werner is moving to IFC Films, where he'll be "overseeing the development and implementation of media strategies for all the company’s slate of film properties in addition to developing poster/trailer campaigns and strategic promotional efforts..." Reviewing Werner's campaigns for greats like Tarnation and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Mr. Van Airsdale slips in some snark: "It seems to me the last thing IFC needs is a better marketer when its recent films have been consistently… well, disappointing... but maybe a sharp cookie like Werner will make all the difference for Euro-marginalia like The Edukators."

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September 08, 2005

Finally emerging: Dylan with some direction home

Scorsese's Dylan doc gets the digi-theatrical experience, Variety reports in advance of its Par DVD and PBS release after its Telluride + Toronto preems. "Martin Scorsese's fest entry "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," which clocks in at almost 4 hours, will get a theatrical run courtesy of Gotham-based indie Emerging Pictures. Plan is to roll out the pic digitally in 30 cities nationwide before its skedded TV and homevid debut later this month. The film however will not screen for the full week making it ineligible for Oscar consideration. Screenings, which run the week of Sept. 20, will be free of charge to the public on a first-come basis. Pic is being released on DVD via Paramount Home Video on the same date. Emerging, which operates a consortium of digital projection theatres, was co-founded by Ira Deutchman, Barry Rebo and Giovanni Cozzi."

Posted by pride at 12:31 AM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

George Miller on narrative: You want nourishing, filling, fulfilling food

While he's near-silent on the cinema scene, George Miller wants to preserve Aussie television drama, speaking as "The Kennedy Miller Collection" is released on DVD: "George Miller, whose company Kennedy Miller has produced some of Australia's most successful TV dramas [says]"If the quality is there, and it's compelling, audiences will commit. Not only will they commit, they will also buy the DVD and watch it over and over again. And that's the trick, how to make it compelling. If it speaks to the audience, we will listen." ...His relatively brief affair with TV, in partnership with the late Byron Kennedy, was extraordinarily successful. Between 1983 and 1989 Kennedy Miller produced The Dismissal, Bodyline, The Cowra Breakout, Vietnam, The Dirtwater Dynasty and Bangkok Hilton. Those landmark titles have just been released on DVD, a timely and perhaps uncomfortable reminder of the local TV industry's capability. All were "pivotal stories in the Australian narrative", Miller says. "And obviously there is something elemental about the stories, and if that is the case, they speak across time to us today." ... Australian drama accounted for just 575 hours of TV air time during the past financial year, figures published by the Australian Film Commission last month show, down from 722 hours in the late '90s... Narrative, he says, is like good food. "You want nourishing, filling, fulfilling food. We seem to want it, and we're able to invest the time, providing the story is good enough, so the question becomes how do you get something interesting out of all the noise out there?" ... The real problem, Miller says, is much deeper and worrying, it's the erosion of our Australian identity. "Our culture has been so watered down, that we are basically ersatz Americans as much as anything else, and the horse has bolted on that one... In the current ecology, it is almost impossible for Australian writers, actors, directors, producers to do good-quality material. It's much more than just the fees they work with. It's to do with even the understanding, at every level, that our culture shrivels up and dies unless you actively try to tell its stories." [Photo: Steve Baccon for the Age]

Posted by pride at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

Processing: Mark Romanek

On the occasion of a DVD of his work being released on Palm, music video director tells Suicidegirls' Daniel Robert Epstein how his mind works: "I have a backlog of ideas on a file in my computer so if I don’t get an idea I can go into a backlog and see if any of them can be retrofitted. Sometimes I’ll have an idea that I think is really good and the other people involved don’t like it or can’t afford to do it properly so I’ll just put it in the file. Sometimes I’ll just be driving around and get an idea for a video that’s not connected to anything and I’ll put it in the file. I try to have the idea for the video emerge from listening to the song but sometimes nothing comes. Sometimes I’ll get a bunch of ideas that are kind of obvious but you don’t get beyond that."

Posted by pride at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

John Waters: I haven't been to the state fair since they cleaned it up

A Dirty Shame goes Down Under, so John Waters parlays with The Age's Craig Mathieson: "I haven't been to the state fair since they cleaned it up... It was so influential on me when I was young because they had a freak show - it was the same one Diane Arbus photographed. I used to go to look at the Fat Lady. Everyone else would avert their eyes and hurry through because there would be a 700-pound black woman sitting there in a polka-dot dress, eating a peach, but I stayed for 20 minutes. They also had the Octopus Man. That fair was very important in my upbringing." And of the DVD version, Waters allows, "I totally neutered it for Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, I made a baby version of my film... I used the footage the completion bond company made me shoot to cover every possibility in case it had to be recut for use on airplanes... In the neuter version, when Johnny Knoxville goes down on Tracey Ullman, he comes up holding a shoe and she says, 'Watch my corns!' I tried to be creative, but I never imagined I would have to use this footage. It's now out there widely, but all that happens is that people get mad when they accidentally buy the neuter version. Apparently it's for non-discriminating audiences - what's that mean? That they're dumb?"

Posted by pride at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

Thumbsucker... You might as well call it...: Mills on Schamus

Michael Muston in the Voice pulls out a plum from Thumbsucker's Mike Mills: "Everybody said no to this picture, including Sony Classics," Mills told me before din-din. "No one wanted to do a movie about thumbsucking, vulnerability, or flaws. James Schamus from Focus said, ' Thumbsucker? You might as well call it Buttf--ker.' OK, so you're homophobic and you don't like my movie. Even at Sundance, only one person wanted to buy it." Well, that's all you need, baby—plus a few thumbs up, which some critics have already generously provided." [The Voice offers no comment or, erm... rebuttal... from Schamus.]

Posted by pride at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

The parcels of Pauline: opening Kael's books

The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney reports on the 3,000 books that belonged to Pauline Kael, now in the stacks at Hampshire College: "Kael's marginalia are very much in the classic Pauline mode. Penciled in a quick, tight cursive, her comments favor the expressively expostulatory: ''gawd," ''oh my," ''huh?," ''poo," ''bull," ''good," ''Jesus!," ''he's right," ''ugh," ''yup," ''oh come on," ''??," and ''!" ...One can almost hear ''her sharp pencil rasping away," as David Thomson once described the auditory experience of sitting next to Kael at a screening.... After Kael's death, her papers went to Indiana University's Lilly Library: 126 cartons' worth of letters, manuscripts, and files... Kael's personal library, 70 boxes' worth, was sold off by [a] dealer in rare and used books. Kael, who lived in Great Barrington, had contacted him before her death. [He] also was charged with the task of finding a home for the film-book library.... The sale was made with the understanding that Kael's books would form ''a working special collection... rather than one just salted away." ... What students get are titles one might see on any film devotee's shelves, only more so: two editions of Lillian Ross's ''Picture," ... John Gregory Dunne's ''The Studio," Kevin Brownlow's ''The Parade's Gone By," four Stanley Kauffmann collections, Manny Farber's ''Negative Space" (inscribed 'for one favor after another)... both volumes of the paperback edition of ''Agee on Film," three Andrew Sarris collections... Her first edition of [Sarris'] ''The American Cinema" has just two markings in it, ''nonsense" (next to Sarris's assertion that the western resists parody and satire) and an extremely large exclamation mark next to Sarris's stating that his directorial chronology ''represents a weighted critical valuation."... William Goldman's ''Adventures in the Screen Trade" abounds in marginalia. Where Goldman notes that ''The Godfather: Part II" got more Oscar nominations than its predecessor, a clearly exasperated Kael scrawled, ''Did you notice its quality? Goldman sees everything in terms of formula."

Posted by pride at 02:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 04, 2005

The Day the Scribe Linked: sick fascination with Jerry Lewis

John Mitchell of the North Adams Transcript confesses to a "sick fascination with the King of Comedy, and generously offers up his world-'o'-links to all things Jerry Lewis, including a site where you can find two drafts of Lewis' screenplay for the never-to-be-finished The Day the Clown Cried.

"If it weren't for Martin Short, I would feel like the loneliest person in the world in regard to my never-ending capacity for the work and life of Jerry Lewis. It's not just a matter of liking or not liking Jerry's movies, it's more a case of being fascinated by the psychological make-up of the man and how these things manifest itself in his good films, like "The Ladies Man," as well as his bad ones, like "Hardly Working." ... I remember when I read the Jerry Lewis biography by Shawn Levy, I was so taken by the whole thing, but at a certain point, it felt not as if I was reading about Jerry, but that Jerry was my roommate, that he wouldn't go away, he would sit in our apartment and harangue me and go on and on, never stopping talking and, certainly, never stopping talking about him, Mr. Jerry Lewis." [Much, much more linked at the link.]

Posted by pride at 07:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Depardieu: Voulez-vous poulet avec moi?

Tim Atkin of the Observer guzzles in the personality of Ge�rard Depardieu in the cheekily entitled profile, "Voulez-vous poulet avec moi?" upon the publication of his "My Cookbook." "Gerard Depardieu is riding a large yellow motorbike through the streets of Paris with a dead chicken strapped to the passenger seat... France's best-known actor has been out to buy the protein for Sunday lunch, crossing the 16th arrondissement to visit a favourite butcher. 'Voila�,' he says, as his Les Deux Roues growls to a halt on the pavement, 'un poulet des Landes. Simple, mais parfait.' It is a thing of wonder, this corn-fed chicken. Or at least it is to the 56-year-old Depardieu. In his modern, marble-topped kitchen, he handles it like a small baby: coddling it, sniffing it, admiring it. 'This is a real chicken,' he says, grunting as he stuffs its guts with tarragon and plump cloves of garlic. 'It was raised in the wild, rather than in a shed, and you can taste that in the meat. Over the next hour-and-a-half it'll cook in its own juices, but there won't be any fat. It's a very simple dish; in fact you'd have to be an idiot to screw it up. But you wait until you try it.' In the confines of his kitchen, Depardieu seems bigger than his 5ft 11in, a large, ursine presence prowling in front of the stove. I can't get the French writer Marguerite Duras's description of him out of my head: 'a very attractive truck.'" [More culinary and reading pleasure at the link.]

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