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October 31, 2005

R. Lee Ermey: "Less is better is the stupidest effing saying I've ever heard"

EW reports in the November 4 issue on Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Origin and gets an earful from Full Metal Jacket's R. Lee Ermey, who's also given a nod up top of Jarhead.

Ermey, 61, talks acting: "The 'less is better' that all actors have heard is fucking wrong... That's the stupidest fucking saying I've ever heard, 'less is better.' It's the insecure directors who say shit like that. I'm the kind of actor who needs to be let go. I never heard that from Stanley Kubrick, 'less is better.' ... I'm not afraid to go the extra mile... If it doesn't work, I'll back it down. Just." There is a talking "motivational" figure, available on Ermey's own web ranch (below), and nicely described here. Reportedly, there's much scaldification to sear the ears. "Motivation and confidence is the key to success. Now drop down and give me 25 and wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. Ooorrrahh, semper fi, do or die, hold them high at eighth and I. Let me hear your war cry scumbag," are among the lovelies when you yank that chain. And along with the doll, there's acres of merch at Ermey's loud website.

Posted by pride at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Saw II seen from down under

Australia's Age celebrates a local success that's overseas: "Saw II, made by Melbourne masters of horror Leigh Whannell and James Wan, scared up the big bucks at the North American box office over the Halloween weekend..."

"While critics have called the fright flick grisly and nauseating even for the horror movie genre, it still hauled in more viewers than any other movie in the US last weekend.... Whannell and Wan, both graduates of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's media arts course, were struggling to make a living in Melbourne before US film company Evolution Entertainment agreed to shoot SAW in Los Angeles. Whannell, who wrote and starred in SAW, and Wan, who directed it, made the decision of their lives when Evolution offered them a deal." Of the original $1m production, The Age reports, "Instead of taking an upfront payment, the 28-year-olds opted to take a cut of the profits of SAW, including merchandising... It made them millionaires." (Wan's an exec prod on the sequel; Whannel polished the director's original script, which was repurposed from something he had already written.)

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

Tsunami follies: a baker's dozen of Thai digital shorts

Bangkok Post's Kong Rithdee reports on a program of Tsunami Digital Short Films, "shown in two programmes last week at the World Film Festival of Bangkok, glaringly lack is this ability to connect with the audience in any meaningful way. They feel detached, even removed from the real event.

"Each filmmaker - most of them young and upcoming, and not a single one from the tsunami-struck areas - had total freedom to do whatever they wanted in their under-20 minute piece. Each was welcome to make a personal movie from personal memories. But in light of such devastating tragedy, does that mean they can blithely bypass the collective memory of the rest of the nation? ... For example, a short called After Shock plunges headlong into the ecstasy of post-December 26 sensation, ending with a scene of a man masturbating in a boat, his body caked with mud and blood and maybe something else. Thunska Pansittiworakul, who directed the part, is Thailand's most radical provocateur; but I doubt if his brand of raw, risk-taking, politically incorrect movies is a jarring note here. Likewise with Santi Taepanich's Tits and Bums, the most enjoyable slice in the cake. The movie, also outstanding because it's the only one that doesn't include a single shot of the sea, is a hilarious spoof of a karaoke video featuring a sexy model in a cleavage-friendly costume." In an effort to find drama through fictitious, even experimental means, some filmmakers in this ensemble, talented as they surely are, have forgotten that reality, naked as it is, is the endless source of true, touching and relevant stories. [More frivolity at the link.]

Posted by pride at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

Jarhead's Mendes: visual imagery has become a trademark

Reuters' Bob Tourtellotte enjoys a moment with Sam Mendes, simplifying the stage veteran's approach to filmmaking: "When troops finally advanced into Kuwait, they found charred bodies, smoke-filled skies and black oil raining down from sabotaged wells. "Weird, surreal images all in this empty space," Mendes called them.

"Visual imagery has become a trademark of Mendes' films," Tourtellotte reveals. "His fans will remember the falling rose petals of [American Beauty] and the incessant rain in [The Road to Perdition]. Mendes captures the Marines' wartime isolation through a film bleaching process that makes colors seem bland and blurs images on the edge of the main action." [More of that sort of technical stuff at the link.]

Posted by pride at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

Winning and losing in Toledo: Twist of Faith strikes back

Toledo Blade columnist Russ Lemmon reports that about 700 people went to seeTwist of Faith at the a three-night, one-show-per-night stand at the University of Toledo after the documentary about alleged sexual abuses by a local priest wasn't booked by commercial venues. "At the Maumee Indoor Theater, Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith attracted 687 for its 14-day run in August. The Star Wars film ranks No. 7 on the theater's list of top box-office draws this year. Raise your hand if you're still buying the "business decision" reason for the theater rejecting a week-long screening of Twist of Faith." (The U of T grossed over $5,000 from the booking.)

Posted by pride at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

Pestering, um, postering at the Jarhead premiere

The Reeler has another red carpet moment, calling out Sam Mendes' graphic acumen: "What I... cannot figure out for the life of me is what is up with Jarhead's poster... Think what you want of American Beauty, but its poster is up there with Pulp Fiction as [one of] the most indelible posters of the 1990s. Now we have Jarhead, starring quintessential poster boys Foxx and Jake Gyllenhaal, with its Full Metal Jacket ripoff subbing a dogtag for a helmet and a colloquial tagline connoting "war" with "suck."

Mendes did not have anything to do with this, did he? "Actually, yeah, I did... What? You don't like it?" Well, no. If it is between a naked woman in rose petals and a dogtag, the woman wins out 10 times out of 10. We have got to get back, you know-- "Back to the sex?" OK, if you say so. "All right," he [said, shrugging]. "Well, maybe for the next movie."

Posted by pride at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

Gagiography: David Carr sounds Harvey's trumpets

In the NY Times, David Carr insures the Weinsteins will continue to break bread with him, carving hymns on the side of Mount Grey Lady: "Harvey Weinstein is a singular force, a brawny, monomaniacal figure who has chewed his way through many industry conventions on his way to becoming the rogue king of the movie business. He is a complicated man: a rustic and an auteur, a ruffian and an aesthete. He has battled almost every partner he ever had. But now he confronts a truly majestic opponent: himself. To draw investors, he has agreed to a whole set of restrictions. The brothers will receive small salaries and no bonuses this time around. The company's investment in any individual movie is capped at $40 million. And with no $700 million annuity from Disney, the Weinsteins, who own 51% of the company, will squeeze every nickel twice before they spend it."

Posted by pride at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

Where Harvey will get his gloss: L'Oreal p.r.'s

As Weinsteinco soldiers up, the Bros. also put on their pretty face, with a press release about their union with L'Oreal Paris. "This first ever, long-term partnership between a motion picture company and a major cosmetic brand is being established to further the natural association between the worlds of film and beauty." Cue: Golden Globes and Oscar ceremonies.

Junket duty is indicated as well: "In addition, L'Oreal's expert makeup and hair teams will support all promotion of Weinstein Company films." Scream and skin cream again: "As part of the partnership, L'Oreal will be the official exclusive beauty sponsor of all of The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films' US theatrical premieres over the next two years, beginning in January 2006."

Posted by pride at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)

Little Picturehouse on the Prairie: here comes Altman's Home Companion

Who's old is new again: Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion goes Berney's way, with TimeWarner's Picturehouse acquiring all North American rights. PR's Berney, "With his signature style, Robert Altman has crafted a hilarious and endearing film... 'A Prairie Home Companion' is a masterfully-acted ensemble piece that captures the humor and heart of Garrison Keillor's radio show with great cinematic flair. Fans are in for a real treat when they see Meryl Streep and the cast belt out their favorite songs." (Oh-oh.)

Posted by pride at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)

Inspiring The Weather Man: Steve did not participate in that

Producer Todd Black talks up his house screenwriter Steve Conrad to SF Chronicle's Hugh Hart, articulating the depths of The Weather Man, the first of three Conrad-Black movies out of the chute. "Steve was with a bunch of friends and his brother in Fort Lauderdale and there was a local weatherman walking across the street... A couple of kids in the car said, 'Let's throw a drink at this guy and keep on driving.' They thought it was funny.

Steve did not participate in that, but he found the image of a weatherman being hit with liquid very funny and always remembered that. Steve likes to think of pain and humor as being one and the same thing."

Posted by pride at 12:44 AM

October 30, 2005

Trafficking Syriana: Gaghan talks out of neo-con school

Syriana writer-director Stephen Gaghan riffs with LA Times' Rachel Abramowtiz in her tick-tock about new political pics: "During his research... Seymour M. Hersh introduced Gaghan to Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is considered one of the neocon architects of the war in Iraq. It was weeks before the American invasion, and the screenwriter had just returned from Damascus, where he heard [predictions of] what a quagmire the war would be. "I'm in Perle's kitchen. He's passing out favors in the Bush administration. He's dispensing wisdom and making me a cappuccino from this $3,000 cappuccino machine. He's really smart, really clever, and I'm having a great time. I feel really lucky. I [say], 'Mr. Perle, I have just one question. Who's going to run Iraq?' He said, 'Oh, no, no, no, we're not going into that. Who says we're going into Iraq?' "I said, 'Really, if we went in, who's going to run the country?' He said, 'It's a shame we haven't done a better job of supporting Ahmad Chalabi...' I said, 'Listen, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq since 1959.... He lives in Paris. If he goes back there, they're going to reject him like a bad organ transplant.... He looked at me like 'Who let you in here?' He stared daggers at me for about a minute."... The doorbell rang. "He said, 'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.'

"It was Benjamin Netanyahu, dropping by with 9 Uzi-wielding Mossad agents." As Perle ushered Gaghan out, Perle's wheaten terrier puppy, Reagan, [jumped] around and, as Gaghan describes it, "pawing the crotch of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just stands there and shakes with rage. So I pulled the dog away from him and said, 'Now, now, Reagan, not on former heads of state,' and they just held the door open and let me out."

Posted by pride at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Quel fromage: more from epicure Depardieu

"Like many men," he says with a grin, lighting up a cigarette, "I'm always a sex symbol in my own mind, but it's great to be told so now and then, especially when you eat too much and have big love handles like me," Gerard Depardieu concedes to Nigel Farndale of The Age. "But the love handles are a price he's happy to pay, for Depardieu is a gourmand. Not only does he love to eat - he's been known to consume four entire roast chickens at one sitting - but he is also a formidable cook who will produce a whole roast pig for a casual lunch...

"So seriously does Depardieu take winemaking that he describes himself as acteur-vigneron (actor-winemaker) on his passport. He owns more than a dozen vineyards around the world, from the Loire, Bordeaux and Languedoc to Sicily, Algeria, Morocco and Argentina, and helps with the harvest at [some]. "I love being hands-on, getting on the tractor. When you make wine you need to know how everything works." It's a "profitable sideline for him; he produces 1m bottles a year from his vineyard in Anjou alone. Is it true he talks to his wine? "I talk to my wine like I talk to my food when I am cooking. I am in communion with it. Totally absorbed."

Posted by pride at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2005

He's so rude about Billy Wilder: a defense at 100

Novelist Jonathan Coe has been a Billy Wilder obsessive for years, and opens a nimble consideration of critical contumely still directed toward the writer-director like this: "Recently a friend came round to my house and was examining the bookshelves, as friends so often do. He came to the part where most of my books about cinema are loosely gathered together, and seemed to be staring at it for an inordinately long time. Something was obviously bothering him. "Where is it?" he asked... "Do you keep it somewhere else?"I didn't even have to ask what he was talking about. David Thomson's 'Biographical Dictionary of Film' is, as everybody will tell you, indispensable. Far more than just a reference book, it is also [a]... passionate, opinionated work of literature. Everybody in this country who loves film seems to have a copy. Everybody except me, that is. And when my friend asked me why not, there was only one truthful answer I could give: "Because he's so rude about Billy Wilder."

Posted by pride at 12:02 PM

All the king's minions: guessing at King's Men's one-year delay

In the Guardian, John Patterson guesses at why All the King's Men was delayed from Christmas 2005 to 2006. The scribe doesn't believe they ran out of editing time: "Consider the political atmosphere the remake would have dropped into in mid-December: indictments gagging the White House and Congress, the super-rich soaking the poor, abject failure in New Orleans, inflation on the rise, a dejected electorate, Iraq, wall-to-wall corruption. The film might have been almost too perfect for its political moment, at least in the eyes of its backers, who, like all studios, have too much business pending at the Republican-controlled FCC to risk giving partisan offence. Better to delay it a year, when the mid-term elections will be behind us, than to earn the enmity of the nastiest pay-back outfit in modern American politics. It's only a theory, and possibly a paranoid fantasy, but in these bleak times I'm ready to believe almost anything." [Note: as a foreign-owned concern, Sony cannot own broadcast properties.]

Posted by pride at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Kurt Vonnegut: the huge illiterate population can sure as hell watch a movie

In a Forbes special on communication, Kurt Vonnegut ventures about how to tell a story today: "All of the arts, with the exception of architecture, are practical jokes, making people respond emotionally and at no risk to themselves, because things aren't really happening... What I do, which is becoming more and more impractical I think, is make people respond to idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page. And there was a time when this was a form of home entertainment, and so it was worthwhile for people to learn how to read. But reading it is actually quite difficult... But ink on paper is no way to tell a story anymore. Film and movies are the best way to tell a story today... Because of our terrible high schools, we have a huge illiterate population, but they can sure as hell watch a movie."

Posted by pride at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)

Having nun of it: Chloe Sevigny on cool, boys, bunnies, Bunny Boy and babies

Chloe Sevigny dithers sweetly, bluntly with Oliver Burkeman over at the Grauniad: "I can't make a single decision myself," Sevigny says, with a directness that disarms, though it turns out she's moved on to different matters. "My mom's in town today. I need to buy...shades. But there are a thousand different kinds. Really - there are too many options in the world. Can't we just have two different kinds of shades, and that's it?
I'm a 30-year-old woman. You'd think I'd be able to make a decision on my own. But it's just overwhelming." At the link: babies, boyfriends, The Brown Bunny and a cool swipe at Jay McInerney, Sevigny's original It-ographer.
AND OVER AT THE AUSTRALIAN, Sevigny tells Georgina Safe a tail of Gummo's Bunny Boy: "My favourite thing from Gummo is the rabbit ears that Bunny Boy wore.... I made them on my sewing machine, I fashioned them from pale pink felt, but unfortunately on the first day of shooting it rained and they just fell apart. Felt doesn't deal with rain. But I still have them at home."

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

Authority-exuding quirkiness: Wells blurbs film snob-crib squibs

Jeff Wells is first on the block to blurb the February 2006 release of the David Kamp-Steven Daly crib, "The Film Snob*s Dictionary." A few notes: "Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics," Wells inscribes. "Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I'm an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance..."

Wells quotes the introduction: "The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff—the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films." Wells reminisces about early career insecurities, saying he found his way past them "partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren't any better than mine... although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years... had a cumulative effect." Wells excerpts 8 entries from the slim tome, adding, "If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy)—each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness. There's certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I've mentioned in this [graf] is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let's not have any arched backs." [The column lacks entry permalinks; search for "Snob Aesthetics" on this page.]

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

Night and day-and-date: Shyamalan sees dead grosses

Manoj Shyamalan has a twist beginning to foreshortening the theatrical and DVD release windows at the Showeast trade show on Disney's Orlando home turn: "It's greed... It's heartless and soulless and disrespectful. And of course, cable companies are behind it, and Internet companies. They need their product. But they have to wait their turn. Wait for the thing to finish its life.... If you inspire audiences, theaters will be packed," M. Night told Daily Variety. "That's when the collective soul is talking. Great movies connect everybody. That's when humanity grows. What is art? Conveying that we are not alone."

Movies are the definitive art form of our lives...We have been seduced by the DVD and what will sell the DVD. It has been the worst year in cinema for quality." The Reeler has a few barks of snark about M. Night's own bouts of re-DVDism.

Posted by pride at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Nashville, Agnès B. and Harmony Korine: Mr. Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it

In Nashville Scene's autumn best-of issue, Jim Ridley chronicles an initiative called O'Salvation!: "It was not local news when filmmaker Harmony Korine, then based in Nashville, formed a production company [in 2004] with the French fashion designer Agnès B. It was international news... The designer has backed major talents such as Claire Denis, Gaspar Noé and Patrice Chereau. Now O’Salvation! is putting its resources behind Korine and Nashville writer-directors James Clauer [prankster, associate producer, location scout and second unit director of Gummo] and Brent Stewart—potentially the most exciting development on the city’s film scene since Robert Altman shot here 30 years ago. Clauer’s... Aluminum Fowl is a category-defying marvel: a semi-documentary about black Louisiana cockfighters, shot in a lyrical yet earthy style that suggests Terrence Malick working in tandem with Les Blank. It’s haunting, funny and otherworldly... Stewart’s locally filmed Blackberry Winter is a post-apocalyptic mood piece, strikingly shot in high-contrast black-and-white...

Meanwhile, Korine is overseas in pre-production on Mister Lonely, a film he reportedly co-wrote with his brother Avi ... If people really want to see Nashville become a destination and a home for world-class filmmaking, show these guys some of the love Craig Brewer’s getting from Memphis these days." [Image: Sister Berlin (of the Red Army), 2002, Harmony Korine, via galerie du jour — Agnès B. ]

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

October 26, 2005

Saw II: the genesis

How many more ways are there to market a horror sequel? Perhaps an animated comic to provide some brutish backstory?

Posted by pride at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

Inside his Bubble: Soderbergh's lo-fi process

Steven Soderbergh talks production process with the Independent's Nicola Christie as Bubble debuts at the London Film Festival. She notes that he takes on as many roles as he can, especially as his own DoP: "There are many cinematographers who are much better than I am, but it would be very difficult for me now to step back and insert another person between me and the image," he says... With Bubble, Soderbergh also edited at the end of each day. "We had the footage in my hotel room, on my computer, so we'd watch what we shot that day. I could edit scenes and then go out and shoot it differently the next day. It was amazing."

Soderbergh, she writes, belives that digital technology will allow a filmmaker like himself to cut the studios out of the game. "You'll see [name] film-makers self-distributing their own films. That's where this is going to go. If I can go to the bank and get money to make the movie, and in 2 to 4 years' time the digital changeover has happened in the US and all the theatres are digitally projecting, I'll just go right to the theatres and make a deal with them. I'm certainly going to pursue that... You can work so quickly with these cameras; they're lighter, more portable. The time between having an idea and seeing it expressed has collapsed, and that's great."

Posted by pride at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)

160 minutes, how can you measure the life of Jean Vigo?

Elbert Ventura has a keen appreciation of the succinct oeuvre of Jean Vigo at New Republic Online: "Standing on the cusp of silent and sound cinema, [Vigo's] movies feel appropriately disconnected from the art's current. So fully do they embody their maker's anarchic spirit that they resist classification, mingling prose and poetry, realism and surrealism, banality and transcendence.

His centenary this year has occasioned a new wave of revivals. But no matter how often we revisit them, the movies never seem to assume a more tangible form. Like the mist that envelops many of his images, they remain ethereal and ungraspable. 160 minutes, give or take, were all it took for Vigo to articulate a conception of the medium that is as inspirational as it is inimitable. Its elusiveness may explain why Vigo's cinema seems the object of cultish devotion rather than mainstream assimilation. Writing in the Nation in 1947, James Agee conceded that both Zero for Conduct and L'Atalante,

which had just then received a stateside release, were "far too specialized." But Agee couldn't restrain himself. In a two-part article, he rhapsodized about Vigo's expansion of the movies' formal vocabulary. "It is as if he had invented the wheel."

Posted by pride at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

IMDB at 15: the origin saga

Chris Kaltenbach of Baltimore Sun reports on the origins of the Internet Movie Database: "Col Needham once watched... Alien 14 times in 14 days. In 1990, he watched 1,100 movies. That same year, he founded what would eventually become the [IMDB]... As of last week, when IMDb.com celebrated its 15th anniversary, the site contained information on 471,378 film titles and nearly 1.2 million people, including stars, directors, key grips and best boys. Company officials point out that about 30 million unique users call up the site on their computer screens every month." [More blah-blah at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

Toledo gets Twist of Faith, finally

Kirby Dick's Oscar-nominated documentary, Twist of Faith, about Tony Comes, a Toledo firefighter who alleges he was sexually molested by a priest while he was a student at a local Catholic high school, finally gets a run in Comes' hometown—at the University of Toledo. Locally, reports the Blade, it "was shown once at the Maumee Indoor Theater in June for an invitation-only crowd... The Maumee theater, however, never showed the critically acclaimed film again, prompting complaints of censorship. Theater representatives said the decision to not show the movie was based entirely on financial reasons."

Toledo Blade quotes UT assistant film prof Tammy Kinsey: "The history of motion pictures is filled with examples of theaters, distributors, or towns engaging in this indirect censorship by preventing access. [There is] a clear historical precedent as a means of blocking the screening of a film."

Posted by pride at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2005

New Times: Hoberman on VVoice Film at 50

Marking its 50th anniversary in the same week the Village Voice stable (including LA Weekly) is set to be acquired by the New Times alt-weekly conglom if the Justice Dept. approves, J. Hoberman chronicles his long love for the Greenwich Village weekly's film section. Hoberman recalls how the Teenage Jim was taken with Jonas Mekas’ “Movie Journal” and Andrew Sarris’ “Films in Focus,” but he writes that the attendant fortune in the mid-1960s was ”to have revival dumps like the Bleecker Street, the New Yorker, and the Thalia—not to mention the 42nd Street grind houses and the Museum of Modern Art...”

"The French call adolescence the 'age of film-going,' " I would write in that same Village Voice some 20 years later. "And it may be that the movies you discover then set your taste forever." It will be many eons before the collected writings of Mekas and Sarris are enshrined between the Library of America's glossy black covers…” Hoberman recalls the careers of Mekas and Sarris, as well as later writers like Amy Taubin, Michael Atkinson, Georgia Brown, Stuart Byron, Katherine Dieckmann, Terry Curtis Fox, Tad Gallagher, Dennis Lim, William Paul, B. Ruby Rich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, P. Adams Sitney, Elliott Stein, Jessica Winter, Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, and Carrie Rickey for the Voice’s five decades of Voice-iness. “It was precisely because the Voice was so site specific, so committed to film culture as it was being made and experienced in New York City, that its coverage not only engaged the Teenage Me but cineastes all over the country and even the world. There's been an erosion of space and an imposition of format, but I'd like to believe that this readership is still there and that the commitment remains.”

Posted by pride at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)

Crickets go bad at National Board of Review?

Mystery deepens, as Variety's Ian Mohr reports on the doings of the enigmatic, 96-year-old National Board of Review: "When the kudos season kicks off each year with the National Board of Review's awards, many in the biz find themselves asking [who they are]... A group of former NBR members says the org is... a "private club rather than a public charity." A complaint, Mohr reports. has been filed by former members with New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer... "Dissidents further charge NBR prexy Annie Schulhof with having a conflict of interest by owning a production shingle, and with giving preferential treatment to friends and family... The NBR is the first widely recognized awards body to weigh in with its yearly list in early December.

"The complaint involves director governance issues, bylaw improprieties, conflict of interest on the part of the president of the board of directors, partisanship toward certain studios regarding awards and gala fees and awards vote manipulation -- none of which constitute ethical standards for a not-for-profit corporation," said Susan Nielsen, a former board member.... Taking on the charge that Schulhof should not be in her position because she owns a production shingle, [a rep] asserted, "Ms. Schulhof's company has not produced anything yet."

Posted by pride at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)

August expectations: John likes Clooney's writing

Over at screenwriter John August's online journal, there's only good words for George Clooney and Grant Heslov's screenwriting.

"I liked it a lot, not only for its strong performances, but also its complete disregard for anything approaching traditional narrative structure. The screenplay... is full of good dialogue — much of it apparently drawn from transcripts. What it doesn’t have are other Syd Field essentials, such as character arcs, reversals, and clear motivations. Stripped of such niceties as backstory and personal lives, the characters are left only with The Issue: challenging Joseph McCarthy and his destructive campaign against supposed Communists. Much like The Crucible can be read as an allegory about McCarthyism, Clooney’s movie draws parallels with the current between the media and the government (replace “Communist” with “terrorist”...). But to the script’s credit, it works without this “meta” aspect. Execution matters, and it in this case, it’s executed terrifically well." [A couple more notes at the link on his swell blog.]

Posted by pride at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

A Yank abroad: the advantages of foreign film schools

The Reporter's Christina MacDonald surveys schools where US film students are taking it on the road:" With top-notch facilities and high-profile instructors, institutions around the globe are attracting American students.... After attending the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for two years, Jonathan Wald packed his bags... to attend the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. His decision was based on one simple fact: At the Australian institution, Wald could devote all of his time to perfecting his craft. "At UCLA, for most of the time you're there, your fellow directing students serve as crew members for your films, so you've got directors who are acting as gaffers, assistant directors, designers and sound recordists... At AFTRS, students were very clearly differentiated: The directors directed, the writers wrote, and the designers designed." ... In sharp contrast with most U.S. universities, most charge little or nothing in the way of tuition. [And] as the movie business becomes increasingly international, studying abroad can help make young filmmakers more comfortable with other nations and cultures [which] can only help later in their careers." MacDonald cites Germany's independent-minded Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin, which ccepts fewer than 50 students a year, including only 12 potential directors. "Professors include Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and auteur director Werner Herzog, and with the exception of its screenwriting class, which costs €1,200 ($1,447) a year, the DFFB does not charge tuition." [More gazetteering at the link.]

Posted by pride at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

Through the Mills: Mike animates the inanimate

Pascal Wyse of the Grauniad winds up the writer-director of Thumbsucker and lets him go. Wyse leaves for a moment, returning to find Mills taking a snap of her bubbly.

"It reminds me of the way the camera slides off people and on to everyday objects... 'That drifting thing is my life view,' Mills tells her. 'I do it a lot. I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life. If this was your room, the stuff on your table would be telling me as much about you as you. As someone who grew up in a house where there wasn't a lot of talking, I'm used to just looking at the world. And in general I often feel like I just don't understand what's happening. That everybody else does, but I don't quite get it. That camera technique I often call 'the alien that landed - and doesn't know what's important'... It's the can't live with, can't live without thing... The huge vulnerable-making machine that love is." [More creativity at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

Smoking with Jack: get high and look at the sky

Jack Nicholson invites LA Times' Patrick Goldstein atop Mulholland for a smoke and a yak about The Passenger, the long-unavailable Micheangelo Antonioni picture the actor owns. "Nicholson has vivid memories about the making of the film, especially the weeks he spent in the desert, three days away from the nearest city. "I've never been that far from civilization, before or since," he told me the other day, sitting in the living room of his house... "We lived in thatched huts out in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert. It wasn't unusual to have these huge sandstorms where everything would be covered with this fine pink sand. I can still see Michelangelo walking in the sand, with the wind blowing, picking out shots that he wanted to get."..."It only takes a day to get used to the flies on your nose," he said, lighting the first of 3 cigarettes he has carefully lined up on a coffee table. "The Italian crew was serious about eating, so we'd have good food every night, get high and look up at the sky. The first night felt very eerie, because it was so quiet. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the most vivid filmmaking adventure I've ever had." It's a sign of Nicholson's affection for Antonioni that the actor, who [didn't do] interviews when he was up for an Academy Award for About Schmidt, [and of Goldstein's affection for himself that he recounts this fact] spent 90 minutes recounting his friendship with the legendary filmmaker. As Nicholson put it, "He's been like a father figure to me. I worked with him because I wanted to be a film director and I thought I could learn from a master. He's one of the few people I know that I ever really listened to."

Posted by pride at 01:51 AM | Comments (0)

Buff's bluff: what do today's screenwriters dislike?

David Anaxagoras, a recent UCLA MFA graduate in screenwriting and blogger, tackles the meaning of "film buff", a phrase as pleasant to my ear as the word "flick" or road work outside my office window. His take... "To me, film buff implied a broad affinity for film in general — a wide ranging appetite for celluloid, be it Hollywood blockbuster, experimental, silent or new wave. Film buffs seem to love it all, almost indiscriminately. I’m not indiscriminate. I like what I like... Here’s my confession: I... managed to get through film school never having seen... The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, Chinatown,

On the Waterfront, The Graduate, It’s a Wonderful Life, The French Connection, Platoon, Ordinary People,

and a whole bunch of other films you probably assumed... I had seen. I don’t want to watch these movies because I have strong suspicion they will bore the hell out of me... I don’t think a film buff has to pause the DVD and walk away from the TV three times just to get through a viewing of A Streetcar Named Desire— which I did (it was required viewing, and it damn near made me drop the class). If I’m going to watch a bad film, it’s going to be something very sci-fi and very cheesy... I have a strong suspicion that there are plenty of young Hollywood execs who also have not seen these films, but pretend they have... Is there really anyone out there who made it past the first 20 minutes of The English Patient? Didn’t think so... I’ll sneak an [oldie] in with every three or four Netflix discs. If I water it down like that, I might be able to take it."

Posted by pride at 01:10 AM | Comments (0)

Blowing chunks off the landscape: Shane Black

Kathryn Harris snacks with Shane Black in Variety's Hollywood Film Festival Guide: "Black says he doesn't regard his earlier films as pure action... "I was emulating a different model that's about style and wit. Swerving cars, blowing chunks off the landscape are just elements of thrillers," he tells Harris, citing Dirty Harry, North by Northwest and French Connection as movies that elude the "action" tag.

This "was a chance to re-invent the private detective story using realistic characters, in a modern setting but with the spirit of 1950s and 1960s," says Black, dubbing it "the bastard child of two fathers." First, there was comic kingpin Albert {sic James] L. Brooks, who gave him an office to write in, and then Joel Silver, kingpin producer of action suspense, whose door finally yawned open after several years of Black banging his head against closed ones. "It was a humbling experience... I thought people would remember me and I'd have more cachet... It was a sublime blur. I spent six months breathing movies from Spielberg to David Fincher."

Posted by pride at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

Valkyries over Iraq: Walter Murch, Jarhead and Apocalypse Again and Again

For the first entry in a cornucopia of Walter Murch items, Harper's Magazine devotes 13 pages of its November issue to essayist Lawrence Wechsler's vertiginously intricate contemplation of "the trouble with war movies," and a big chunk of his time is spent talking to editor Walter Murch about his work on Apocalypse Now and as editor of Sam Mendes' Jarhead, set in the First Gulf War of the early 90s of the last century. (It's a big raft: there's even room for John Milius.) Wechsler reveals that the "Ride of the Valkyries" sequence from Apocalypse Now is incorporated into the newer film in a way that may be unprecedented: a recognized, recognizable bite of culture refashioned into another work of art by one of its key original creators. "The result is... one of the most deeply affecting and disconcerting scenes in recent film history," avers Mr. Wechsler, "thanks in no small part to the lavish ministrations of [Murch], who in this context has himself been having to harrow the distinctly unsettling task of revisiting and revisioning a scene he labored over for months almost 30 years ago as a crucial member of the original Apocalypse Now team, this time, alas, in an entirely new and even more disturbing light.

"At times I get to feeling like I'm inside my own Escher drawing," Murch admitted... One hand, as it were, drawing the other into being: his past decisions shaping his current ones, and vice versa... Patiently, meticulously, Murch keeps interleafing the scenes. "It's probably best that I'm the one doing this... If it weren't me, some other editor would either be overly protective of the original—wary of breaking any of the precious china—or else just treating it all like raw material." If you've read "The Conversations," the literate and discursive book-length exchange about the junction of movies and life, between Murch and "The English Patient" novelist Michael Ondaatje, or listened to the Cold Mountain DVD commentary with Anthony Minghella and Murch, or dipped into the pages of the gratifyingly rich post-production procedural, "Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema," by Charles Koppelman, you'll be prepared for the intricate dissection Murch & Co. provide in the newsstand-only article. [Francis Coppola retains rights to refuse the final use of the footage, which was pending at the time the article went to press.]
AND OVER AT KAMERA, MURCH MUSES MIGHTILY ABOUT SOUND FOR 2,000 WORDS with Peter Cowie. "The human brain is wired to spend more of its computing power on vision than it does on sound. So what happens is that when we hear a sound we don't hear it consciously, but it has an effect on us, and that effect we sort of re-process and render into an attribute of the visuals. So it's very rare that an audience will hear sound for what it is. Usually what's happening is that the sound is conditioning and colouring the way we're perceiving the visual." There's a nice passage about whether films are too loud in latter-day theaters, followed by this: "The home experience will never equal the theatrical experience because you can never get 600 people sitting with you in your living-room. It's just by the very nature of the beast – when you look at a film in a theatre it's a communal experience, and there's something both tangible and intangible about the presence of hundreds of other people with you watching the movie. You see different things in a picture under those circumstances than when you watch a film at home... The fact that you have left your home and paid money and you're willingly sitting in the dark with six hundred other strangers to watch a film that makes you see different things in it even if, technically, everything is exactly the same." [Murch more at the link.] Plus! Murch will hold a "conversation" the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY on 19 November. And! Filmsound has the Walter Murch obsessive's one-stop archive, including an interview with poet Joy Katz from Parnassus magazine, on beauty: "When I know there are beautiful shots waiting for me in the dailies, I want to use them to their best advantage, but quickly become ruthless if the shots turn out to be superfluous to the story. Their beauty then almost turns into a liability, like handsome but empty-headed people. I much prefer a necessary shot to a beautiful shot. If it is necessary and beautiful, so much the better."

Posted by pride at 03:40 PM | Comments (1)

Unintelligent designs: Penguins slap back

The March of the Penguins is having its UK premiere at the London Film Festival, and director Luc Jacquet tells Jack Malvern he wants nothing to do with any stowaways: “If you want an example of monogamy, penguins are not a good choice... The divorce rate in emperor penguins is 80-90% each year... After they see the chick is okay, most of them divorce. They change every year.” In fact the rate is substantially worse than the American divorce rate, which is about 50%... Michael Medved, a conservative film critic and radio host, concluded that the story of the emperor penguins’ journey “most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Mr Jacquet, who has never made a film for the cinema before, is concerned that his documentary has been hijacked. “It does annoy me to a certain degree... For me there is no doubt about evolution. I am a scientist. The intelligent design theory is a step back to the thinking of 300 years ago.

"My film is not supposed to be interpreted in this way. Some scientists I know find the film interesting because it can be a good argument against intelligent design. People should not jump on these bandwagons.” [Via Scott Macauley at the Filmmaker magazine blog.]

Posted by pride at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

Harvey Weinstein: a poke in the eye?

"Harvey Weinstein said at last night's annual dinner meeting of the Business Council of Westchester that when he was 10 years old, he was poked in the eye while playing cowboys and Indians, and was out of school for six months," scoops Westchester Journal News' Barbara Woller. Speaking to 500 gatherees at the Hilton Rye Town in Rye Brook, Weinstein regaled that "he made good use of that half year in the days 'when there were no 500 channels/ to entertain him thanks to a retired librarian who lived next door and taught him the joy of reading." [Miz Machiavelli was unavailable for comment.] "This love of books, he said, helped him to appreciate and recognize great writing. And that appreciation, he said, has been an underpinning of his career in cinema...

Weinstein also referred to the book "Leadership" by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani." [The post 9/11 memoir, it's worth noting, was published by... Miramax Books.] Weinstein said guidelines Giuliani gave to "study, read and learn" are his own philosophy for success." Woller did not enumerate any of the shared precepts of the chummy corporate captains.

Posted by pride at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)

The Texas DNA of SPC, Michael Barker and Lee Harvey Oswald: deep in the heart

Chris Vognar of Dallas Morning News plucks at the Texas roots of Sony Pictures Classics, and it's an unusually good read: "Michael Barker... used to catch weekend matinees at the Texas Theater, best known as the place Lee Harvey Oswald decided to catch a [film] on that fateful November afternoon in 1963. "They used to put a rope over the seat where Oswald sat," says Mr. Barker. "When we showed up for the matinees, they'd take the rope off and we'd all take turns sitting in the seat." [But Tom] Bernard and Mr. Barker didn't know each other in their formative Dallas days... they attended different colleges... 2006 will mark their 15-year anniversary as co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics, one of the most successful and influential specialty distributors..."

"The Texas terrors," says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, who has known the SPC duo for 20 years. "They're the one unchanging constant. They do their thing, and they haven't varied much since they've started. They've stayed with their core audience of sophisticated art fans, and they really do business outside of the modern technologies available to them." Which technologies would those be? "Oh, fax machines?" quips Mr. Bowles... On this day in the middle of the Toronto International Film Festival, the bulky Mr. Bernard, a high school offensive lineman, and the smaller Mr. Barker are both busy with their Blackberries. ("This thing right here makes it all happen," says Mr. Bernard.)" [More anecdoting at the link.]

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

Stanley Kauffmann loved it: Capote

Stanley Kauffmann reviewed Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and at 89, he's still around to review Bennett Miller's Capote in New Republic: "I reviewed the book adversely in these pages when it was published in 1965. I was put off by the suggestion of relish that touched Capote's recounting of the murders, the prosecution of the killers, the interviews with them in their cells during the five years between trial and execution, and the inevitable chill of the hangings. But at least Capote wasn't present personally in the book.... But this new film is his story...

A re-reading of the book seems to italicize the literary flourishes intended to make it, in Capote's words, a new form, the "non-fiction novel." ... It is now more patent that Capote describes conversations and actions among the four victims that could not have been known to anyone else. Salient, too, is the apparent influence of the film medium on the book's structure: the book is "edited" cinematically, with the interweaving of disparate sequences in ways that make their juncture inevitable... A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony... With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic."

Posted by pride at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)

Based on an actual lawsuit: the horror behind Wolf Creek

Copping to the real, reports The Age's Stephanie Bunbury, may be a horror for shocker Wolf Creek: "There has been any amount of trouble about Wolf Creek, the home-grown horror film that was picked up by Miramax... {It] tells the story - with maximum efficiency and a lot of gore - of three travellers who are terrorised by a crazed outback murderer. The kind of story that is familiar enough to anyone who has read a newspaper in the past few years... By some bizarre coincidence, the film is set to be released nationally just as Bradley John Murdoch, the man accused of murdering backpacker Peter Falconio in the Northern Territory four years ago, is being brought to trial. And so McLean's debut feature, which has until now been an unalloyed Aussie success story, is suddenly a legal hot potato in the territory." Distrib Roadshow has withdrawn the movie in parts of Australia.

"Roadshow's caution, however, extends further. I received a press kit for the film months ago, detailing the specific cases that informed the story - the Falconio murder, "backpacker killer" Ivan Milat, and the Snowtown serial murders among them... A new version of the press kit has been issued, minus references to specific cases and with instructions to get rid of the earlier version." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

Cuban, freely: controversy outside The War Within

"Mark Cuban has spent so much time pushing boundaries and rattling status-quo thinking that he is nearly numb to the backlash that seems to accompany his every move, writes NY Times sportster Howard Beck. "In nearly six years as the Dallas Mavericks' owner, Cuban has drawn hefty fines from the commissioner's office, curious glances from other owners and acerbic broadsides from columnists and talk-show hosts... Cuban has been called irresponsible, foolish, crazy, an immature imp and a bigmouth. By now, those labels must sound kind. Cuban has acquired ... in the blogosphere ... a newly derogatory description: unpatriotic and un-American. Those accusations stem from Cuban's role as the executive producer of The War Within, a film that depicts the inner struggle of a would-be terrorist. Even for Cuban, who practically breathes controversy, this is uncharted territory.

"One incensed blogger labeled Cuban a "jihadist propaganda producer." [Googling the phrase will provide a link to the writer who said this, as well as the imperious assertion that "No film should ever have a homicide bomber as its "protagonist." Period."] Beck continues a new Times tradition of relying on bloggers and previously published web material rather than wasting pricey shoe leather: "How are we ever going to understand what's going on right now if we don't see these people as human beings?" the director, Joseph Castelo, said on the film's Web site." ... Cuban first read the War script two years ago, while the horror of 9/11 was still fresh. "I thought it was timely, I thought it was interesting, I thought it was scary as hell," Cuban said. "I'm the type that thinks if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it." ... Cuban said making the film was an act of patriotism... "If we can make a movie that reminds people over and over again that you always have to be vigilant or 9/11 can happen again, then it's the most patriotic thing I could ever possibly do."

Posted by pride at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)

Non-gratuitous Bellucci: a visit with the nude one

"With his trim grey beard and pipe forever clamped between his teeth, [Bertrand] Blier, now in his mid-sixties, cuts a professorial figure as he directs his actors perched on a wooden box, instead of the usual chair (he has a bad back)," The Observer's Mark Salisbury observes as he gets closer to profile subject Monica Bellucci. Blier "wrote the part of Daniela especially for Bellucci after seeing her in Irreversible, in which her character was graphically raped in an underpass in one horrific, nine-minute unbroken take. 'He told me, "Monica, I was so touched by the movie, I was inspired by you and I wrote this character for you." I said, "What kind of character?" And he said, "It's a whore."' She emits a wry laugh at the recollection. 'I said, "Is that a compliment?"' Apparently it was. She said yes before even reading the script. 'He told me the story and I felt something.'" ... Blier was impressed by how comfortable Bellucci is with her own body.

'She's completely relaxed with her image and with her own sense of modesty as well. Because she is so free and proud of being a woman and proud of her femininity, she has no problem with the fact that men look at her and desire her, and that is rare today with women.'... Nudity, she says, doesn't bother her, providing it's not gratuitous. 'I'm not scared by nudity, because for me, nothing is more beautiful than a body. You can have such an amazing emotion from a body. In Irreversible, I treated my body like it was an object and it's great when you can have this kind of relation with your body, it's a part of your job, an object you can work with." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

The Talented Mr. Minghella: I am very greedy

Anthony Minghella is directing "Madam Butterfly" for London's ENO, and he's collaborating with his wife, writer and choreographer Carolyn Choa. the ondefatigable director impresses the Observer's Kate Kellaway: "Minghella is full of gusto. His new mantra, he tells me, is that he is determined to enjoy everything he does. And there is a gleam in his eye even if he looks tired (I don't think there is anything 'designer' about his stubble). The nicest thing about him is his lack of swank, especially when he has so much to boast of as writer, musician and award-winning film director." Minghella's editing the Jude Law-starring Breaking and Entering, while producing another movie, writing a TV series with Richard Curtis, preparing to take on the chair of the BFI, and oh, there's Puccini. "He manages all this because 'I am very greedy. There is so little time and lots to do.' But in the past, he has tended to feel overwhelmed and self-critical. Is he [overly] critical? I ask [his wife]. 'I wouldn't say that. But he is a perfectionist who tries to do everything as well as he can within the hours of the day.' Just before [going] back into rehearsal, Minghella revisits his current obsession: that performance must never be an accessory, must be more than a garnish to the singing. 'If you don't know why you are moving, don't move,' he suddenly says. It's a good rule for life too."

Posted by pride at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

Frogger: d.p. Elswit on digital and dead animals

Mark Burger of the Winston-Salem Journal reports on good night, and good luck. and P. T. Anderson d.p. Robert Elswit's visit to students in northwest North Carolina: "In recent years, digital technology has changed the landscape of filmmaking, "I think in a good way," Elswit said. "It has made it possible, for very little money, to make films look bigger." One such example was Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, which culminates in a deluge of frogs upon the city of Los Angeles. Elswit laughed as he recalled "testing" dead frogs (obtained from a laboratory) with Anderson during pre-production to see how they might look on camera.

The frogs didn't look good. They just looked dead. "We looked at each other: 'Go digital.'"

Posted by pride at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2005

Junction City blues: can we have more Sundance, please?

If everybody's not a critic, then at least everybody wants a film festival on their own block. The Ogden (Utah) Standard Examiner takes a look at Park City envy. "Ever have one of those forehead-slapping moments? You know, an instant when you suddenly realize: Hey, that would work! We had one of those earlier this week after hearing about the Sundance Film Festival expanding in downtown Salt Lake City.... Ogden has a Sundance showcase, too -- Peery's Egyptian Theater, Utah's only remaining movie palace dating from the silent era. It is three blocks up Historic 25th Street from another historic Junction City gem, Union Station, home of the M.S. Browning Theater, a large auditorium that has been used to exhibit films in years past... Ogden could offer its own utterly unique experience along Two-Bit Street -- what with its nightclubs, restaurants, art galleries and other shops.... We wish Salt Lake City's Sundance expansion all the best and hope that experience moves festival organizers to consider a similar arrangement in Junction City between the Egyptian and Union Station... Soliciting the necessary sponsorships to make it happen shouldn't be a problem, since a "Sundance Avenue" approach would doubtless be appealing to the Historic 25th Street Association, whose members would benefit... Continued expansion of its presence in Ogden just means more fun."

Posted by pride at 11:25 PM

October 22, 2005

Tim Burton's Stainboy

Online treat: Flashing back to the messy supermite from "The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories" in six segments at Tim Burton Collective.

Search for "Stainboy" at the bottom of the page. And here's how they got stained that way.

Posted by pride at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2005

Har, har, Lars, superstar: Trier and now; Peter Aalbaek-Jensen is naked

The bane of the Danes is up for denying contemporary resonance for his latest flick-you to Emma Bell of the Independent: "It's an unseasonally hot day in Copenhagen. Lars... Trier invites me to sit outside by the pool at Zentropa, the coalition of production companies he co-owns with Peter Aalbaek-Jensen. Von Trier is a taut, endearingly hectic little man; friendly, if agitated. I ask about the politics of his... films. "Oh shit! That sounds dangerous... The political part of my work, it's nothing I'm proud of..." ... Publicity material claims that Manderlay is a metaphor for... Bush's aggressive interventions in Iraq: Grace cannot understand how her compassionate imposition of democracy turns into dictatorial severity, and Manderlay's slaves demand their own oppression, preferring the certainty of captivity... The director has retreated somewhat... "It's not necessarily about Bush. You can see the film like that, but it was written before Iraq. But why make a film that would do just that? I would never make a film like that." ... Zentropa boss Aalbaek-Jensen dives into the pool, splashing us. "Why does he have to do that while we sit here!" scowls... Trier. "This is my producer. He keeps in the background, as you can see. But now he has succeeded in making us completely aware of his presence." One could not fail to notice Aalbaek-Jensen; he's naked... Something of a circus is going on at Zentropa. Aalbaek-Jensen is parading naked again... Trier rebukes him: "Peter! Could you put on some clothes please?" Aalbaek-Jensen crossly retorts that he's "not trying to shock anybody"... Does he prefer that his films remain difficult and opaque? "Oh yes, absolutely. I would prefer that!" ... as his PDA beeps. "Sorry, I have to go to my yoga class now..." He bows, clasping his hands in prayer and offering a peaceful "Prana".

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

October 20, 2005

L.A.'s smelly ditch: refloating the Los Angeles River

One of L.A.'s boldest locations, the cement-lined Los Angeles River, described by Wim Wenders this way—"Landscapes tell stories, and the Los Angeles River tells a story of violence and danger"—is to become a river of dreams, writes the Telegraph's Catherine Elsworth. Elsworth writes that it's "a vast cement gutter so bleak that its major claim to fame is playing urban wastelands in Hollywood films...

Now a multi-million dollar project aims to transform the channel into a river the city can be proud of; a tranquil oasis lined by cafes, public parks and bicycle paths... Funded by £1.6 million from the city's Department of Water and Power, the 18-month research project will canvass public opinion at more than 18 meetings before a 20-year blueprint for the river is drawn up." Of its earlier incarnations, "William Mulholland, the city's famous water engineer, described it as "a beautiful limpid little stream with willows on its banks". [More backstory at the link; the pic's from John Boorman's great Point Blank.]

Posted by pride at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

Citizen Marty: chiming Welles' moves

I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since seeing Citizen Kane that Martin Scorsese hasn't thought of Orson Welles. At Senses of Cinema, John Thurman makes a dry, comprehensive, illustrated case for why Taxi Driver is as "rife" with quotations from movies as any smoothie from Tarantino's blender, admiring its "intertextuality" in its submerged allusions to Citizen Kane—far more expansive than his hiring of Bernard Herrman to compose the score. Framings taken from Murder by Contract and Salvatore Giuliano are neatly dissected, but the key passage compares, with frame captures, the entrance of Cybill Shepherd's Betsy into Travis Bickle's field of vision.

"I first saw her at Palantine Campaign Headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass," Travis intones. Notes Thurman, "Betsy appears, crossing over to her office's entrance in slow motion.... Behind her in the frame... Scorsese sits against a wall. As Betsy reaches the door, a dissolve brings a scroll over the words of Travis' journal with Travis still reading them in voice-over. This scene reproduces almost exactly the visual introduction of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. [Side-by-side still comparisons are provided.] When Kane's reporter figure, "still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of Kane's dying word, asks long-time Kane associate Bernstein (Everett Sloane), who thinks Rosebud might have been some girl. Thompson is incredulous." In Kane, Bernstein says, "A fellow will remember things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol, and I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all - but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." Among other entertaining digs, Thurman also points out that the St. Regis Hotel, seen in the final scene between Travis and Betsy, is where Scorsese stayed during the shooting, "because it was a favourite of Orson Welles."

Posted by pride at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

Levy loving Phil: going long on Capote

Over at the Oregonian, Shawn Levy and Philip Seymour Hoffman go long on Capote in a lengthy Q&A. On the screenplay: "It's amazing hearing you list the various aspects of it, because Dan Futterman's script—the story of the writing of "In Cold Blood" and the story of the Clutter murders—it's impossible to believe that somebody got it into 100 pages of script, and a script, by the way, that has so much judicious silence in it." Yeah, yeah. That's Danny and that's Bennett, too: the way he shot it and the way he edited it with Chris [Tellefsen]. It's everyone working in tandem, starting with the script. And then the shooting and the acting. Everyone had the same understanding coming out of Danny's script that the private moments were going to be the most compelling to tell in the whole story. Some of the things that happened between the lines -- not just listening to someone talk. Danny understood that, and then in turn Bennett and myself. It's a very spare, economic screenplay in a way that was very pleasing.

"Yeah, and so contradictory in a way to people's preconception of what a film about a writer would be like. You expect it to be filled with bon mots and rapier wit. And instead, with Capote being such a good reporter—and I don't even know if at that moment in his life he realized how good a reporter he was—he kept his mouth shut. The scene where he first meets Perry and says, 'They put you in the women's cell,' and he doesn't say more; he just lets that comment sit and comes back." [Maybe 6,000 words at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

Shopgirl's Tucker mothers melodrama

Anand Tucker (ne Thakkar), director of the sleek but wan April-November romance Shopgirl tells Mumbai's rediff.com what makes him swoon: melodrama.

What kind of films appeal to you? I am a sucker for stories with strong emotions. I can watch for hours the classic melodramas Hollywood made in the 1950s and 1960s. Some critics run down melodrama, don't they? I have never been concerned with that. I believe melodramatic films can be intelligently made. What makes you feel so strongly about it? The many great melodramas I have seen. And my own films. When I made 'Hillary And Jackie,' some critics wrote that it was a melodrama. That was perfectly fine with me. I have never ceased to admire melodrama... I believe melodramas�-- books and films�-- are about trying to reach a bigger truth about emotions. And something that touches people and makes them think cannot be anything but admirable.

Posted by pride at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

Exoticism doesn't exist anymore, says Malaysian-born Taiwan filmmaker

Malaysian Star inquires of waterlogged, deadpan festival favorite, director Tsai Ming-liang, about being the Malaysian-born son of a Chinese who works in Taiwan. "Being a Malaysian filmmaker working in Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang would naturally have a unique perspective on the filmmaking scene here in Malaysia. Having been based in Taipei for more than 20 years, Tsai has been through everything from the end of martial law to the democratisation of Taiwan that led to a flood of new opportunities for filmmakers there... When asked about the Malaysian obsession with creating a national identity for our films or promoting our culture, Tsai, who was in town last week for the 50th Asia Pacific Film Festival, replied: “The worst thing one can do is to promote an image before everything else. It is not very smart to do so. There are no such things as exotic elements that you can sell in this modern world. The world is so global and well-informed, so exoticism doesn’t exist anymore.” ... Tsai believes that [staying] true to himself that he has gotten this far. Apart from his ever-increasing collection of awards from film festivals around the world (the latest being a Silver Bear at Berlin for The Wayward Cloud [pic], he has also been invited, along with five other auteurs, to make a film to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. France has also invited him to make a film about the Louvre. For the Mozart anniversary, Tsai will be shooting a film, next year, about immigrant workers in Kuala Lumpur. It will be his first film to be set in Malaysia.

“I hope that our government will give the independent filmmakers more support,” he said. “I understand that our government may be concerned that the independent films are very personal or very artistic in nature, but it does not need to give the filmmakers large sums of money. It could just give a small sum for them to start things off and see what they can come up with..." Does Tsai see the irony of him being a Malaysian filmmaker attending a festival in Malaysia but representing Taiwan? “I’m fine with that... There are, in fact, a lot of filmmakers who don’t make films in their own countries but the people of their countries are still proud of them. My father who came from China inspired me to believe that it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you do good things.”

Posted by pride at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

Three lovely bottoms: Keira talks doubles

Knight-Ridder's Daniel Fienberg finds that, ass, and ye shall receive, chatting up Keira Knightley about her baggage in Domino: "Although the 20-year-old actress appears topless... some of the lap dance shots seem a little fishy... Knightley doesn't hesitate. "No, It's definitely a body double, I don't have that body," she says with an utterly disarming grin. "What a bum! I wish I had that bum! No, it was fantastic... Well, there were three lovely bottoms, they really were... But, I was trying to pick one that could be as close to mine as possible if mine were the perfect bottom, which it isn't." Her double, the piece goes onnnnnnnn, was coached by Knightley's mum, "a former go-go dancer."

Posted by pride at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Schrader, the devil and a gay, middle-aged American Gigolo

Ever-entertaining Paul Schrader exercises his gab with James Mottram at the Independent: "Remarkably, he finished his cut for just $35,000. Telling the story of Merrin's... first encounter with demonic possession, while on missionary work in East Africa, Schrader's version - what he calls "an old-fashioned intellectual melodrama" or "Shane with a crucifix" - far outstrips Harlin's shocker of a movie... Had Harlin's version not been made, Schrader believes [Dominion] would've been "cut to shreds" and "tarted up" by Morgan Creek. "I ended up with final cut from a company that prides itself in fixing every film they make! Their motto is, 'If it isn't broke, we didn't make it'!"

"As demonstrated by Schrader's problems..., like many [1970s] filmmakers... he is not the force he once was. "When I came back to Hollywood, it was a different industry... Those films I was making were now independent films. I kept making the same films - but now they're independent films." For years, he has tried to get a film made that some will regard as a follow-up to his 1980 classic American Gigolo."It's that American Gigolo character in his mid-Fifties, and he's now homosexual and he's a society walker, an older gent that squires rich old ladies to the opera." [More tale-telling at the link.]

Posted by pride at 05:13 PM

An auteur at my table: Campion returns

Garry Maddox of the Sydney Morning Herald chronicles Jane Campion's return to the screen: "Jane Campion has come back from her self-imposed break from filmmaking for an international feature involving such respected directors as Robert Altman, Jodie Foster, the Taviani brothers and Gaspar Noe." Two years ago, Campion swore she'd spend the next four years with her young daughter, but "she has been lured back for one of eight short films that will combine into a feature, called 8, to dramatise the United Nations's Millennium Development Goals...

"Co-ordinated by the French producer Marc Obéron, 8 started with the French director Noe ( Irreversible) shooting a film in July about the fight against AIDS in West Africa's Burkina Faso." Campion's passage is The Water Diary, "shot at Nimmitabel, near Cooma, [telling] a story through a child's eyes about living through a drought." The Tavianis are set to write-direct about poverty; Shinya Tsukamoto is up for universal primary education, Altman works with female empowerment, and Foster considers child mortality. The budget is €4 million, made in association with the UN Development Program. UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan hopes it will be launched at Cannes 2006.

Posted by pride at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

London calling: Time Out readers tab fave local pics

The readers at Time Out London pick their "favourite" London film : "Gangster [pic] The Long Good Friday was the runaway winner, John MacKenzie’s tense thriller about crooked investment in the East End ... Coming in second was Michelangelo Antonioni's '60s thriller Blow-up, while the Michael Winterbottom drama Wonderland came in at third."

Seven more at the link, including the peerless Withnail and I.

Posted by pride at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)

Dressing down: sweat pants and inspiration

Screenwriter Josh Friedman continues to blog manfully and with lashes of the profane. Some samples from his current couture-rific rant: "Many of you seem disturbed that I wear sweatpants. And to that I would quote the great Andrew Marlowe and say this: Get off my fucking blog... Because understand this: what you wear and how you look when you go to a meeting is of the utmost importance. Every interaction between a writer and an executive is a carefully orchestrated mating dance between power and creativity. It is Noh theater where every mask has been carved into a smile capable of four minutes of small talk about the newest Jon Krakauer book that the mask hasn't even read... A friend of mine is a very successful writer and generally obeys the successful writer lifestyle doctrine. He's a white Jewish male in his early thirties, shaves about once a month, sleeps with pretty goyim he isn't qualified to sleep with, and drives a big black car with illegally tinted windows. But every time I see the dude he's wearing a coat and tie. Seriously. Full-metal jacket and matching windsor... Me, if I'm meeting with someone over the v.p. level I do two things differently: first, I strap on my expensive watch. Second, I don't wear any socks. I find these two elements combine to make me practically invincible... As to the expensive watch...well, a girl does love her bling." [As always, more well-aimed arrows at the link.]

Posted by pride at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)

The Trib's wedgie for edgy: cover play for Jibjab jabbing "superstores"

The Chicago Tribune's internet guy, Steve Johnson columnizes sarcastic JibJab's take on Wal*Mart, including background on their 2004-2005 successes. "The transition from feared lunacy to Leno came with the presidential election and their video "This Land," a brilliant piece of equal-opportunity satire that inspired both raucous laughter and the instant urge to e-mail it... It seemed sunny, because of the cheery song it's based on and because in [the] Monty Pythonesque animation George Bush and John Kerry always smile, but it could also be read as a bitter lament over the quality of choice the country faced..." After 80 million downloads, "The brothers' new short is a workingman's critique of discount superstores. Labeled "Big Box Mart," it's an angrier piece of work than "This Land" or their previous videos, which include a rap parody featuring the Founding Fathers and a Christmas song played by flatulent elves.... The kicker: "Those everyday low prices have a price. They aren't free." ... It's an attack on Wal-Mart and the companies who... sell to the chain, yes, but the real object of the satire is the shopper himself too "hypnotized" by stuffed aisles and low prices to realize where his true economic interests lie." As for the Spiridelli Bros.' economic interests, "The business model is starting to emerge," said Gregg, an MBA and former investment banker.... You can even go to Walmart.com and buy some of the Spiridellis' earlier work, at least for [now]."

Posted by pride at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)

John Waters: groom reaper?

Court TV ups the quirk, reports the Reporter's Andrew Wallenstein; John Waters will host 12 eps of a scripted murder-mystery anthology featuring filmmaker John Waters, 'Til Death Do Us Part," dramatizing "real-life cases of spousal murder. Waters will take on a regular role as the "Groom Reaper" in "Death," setting the story for the viewer from his vantage point as a guest at the tragic couple's wedding, where each episode begins... "I've always been jealous of Vincent Price's career," Waters said. "Maybe now that he's dead, I can hijack it."

Posted by pride at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

if film goes under, I will go under with it: Peter Kubelka (hearts) emulsion

After a 26-year hiatus, experimental filmmaker and Anthology Film Archives co-founder Peter Kubelka has a new pic, which he describes to Michelle Silva in the SF Bay Guardian: "In a visual culture increasingly permeated by digital imagery, the disintegration of the exhibition and experience of cinema appears imminent. Peter Kubelka reminds American audiences of the physical presence of cinema as an inimitable medium. With a filmography that is only 63 minutes long, avant-garde master Kubelka (born in Austria in 1934) has progressed film by his metric and metaphoric montages, which are attentive to tactile qualities and mechanics that are exclusive to film. Since the 1950s, Kubelka has remained a committed proponent of film as a pure medium...

"After a 26-year hiatus, he has re-emerged with a new film, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and has toured and lectured in several cities throughout the US. The survival of film as an exhibition medium is... an issue right now. [Instructors] are projecting DVDs instead of the actual work. As a major founder of film culture, how do you feel about the future of cinema? I do not allow my films to be transferred to video and shown in digital form, which means that if film goes under, I will go under with it. But I don't do this in order to go under. I'm absolutely convinced cinema as a classic medium will stay on, because it has a heart core which cannot be replaced by any other medium. [More ping and pong at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

Hostile territory: Chris Doyle drops in on the US and onto Marty & QT

Chris, Chris, Chris! In a Filmmaker Q&A entitled "The Wild Man", Matthew Ross chats with great cinematographer and delicate weed Chris Doyle about US filmmaking and Martin Scorsese: "You know, I was in Kazakhstan two weeks ago, and that was nothing. This is hostile territory, this is bullshit. I don’t know if it should be said so bluntly, but... every people gets the government they deserve. Sorry, that’s a reality. The present climate in most of the western world is of course anti-artist, because the function of an artist is to open people’s eyes, and that’s not the function of a Texas oil-based meritocracy. Hello! ... You don’t have the integrity, you have to remake everything we’ve done anyway. I go to see Martin Scorsese, and I say, Don’t you think I should tell you about the lenses? And he says, What do you mean? And I said, Well, you’re remaking my film, which is Infernal Affairs. Infernal Affairs was probably written in one week, we shot it in a month and you’re going to remake it! Ha ha, good luck! What the fuck is this about? I mean, come on. In other words, if you read "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," then you’d actually have a very clear idea... about what’s really happening in the U.S. right now. So what do we do? You tell me... If Martin Scorsese can make a piece of shit called The Aviator and then go on to remake a Hong Kong film, don’t you think he’s lost the plot? Think it through. “I need my Oscar, I need my fucking Oscar!” Are you crazy? There’s not a single person in the Oscar voting department who’s under 65 years old. They don’t even know how to get online. They have no idea what the real world is about. They have no visual experience anymore. They have preoccupations. So why the fuck would a great filmmaker need to suck the dick of the Academy with a piece of shit called The Aviator? And now he has to remake our film? I mean this is bullshit. This is total bullshit. I love Marty, I think he’s a great person. And the other one is Tarantino. Oh yeah, let’s appropriate everything. Are you lost? Yes, you are lost."

Posted by pride at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

Cultural imperialism: UNESCO reacts to US's foreign films

The Guardian reports on a global plan to protect film culture; after all, aren't American movies "foreign films" once they cross a border? "The UN's cultural agency, Unesco, is expected tomorrow to approve a convention that will allow countries to protect their cultures from globalisation, despite bitter opposition from the United States.A Franco-Canadian initiative, which has won broad backing as a swipe at US "cultural imperialism", could mean that countries will be able to subsidise domestic film industries and restrict foreign music and content on their radio and television stations in the name of preserving and promoting cultural diversity... The US, supported only by Israel, filed 27 amendments in an unsuccessful bid to water [this] down... criticising it as "flawed", "ambiguous" and "protectionist". France, which has long defended its right to a "cultural exception", could barely conceal its delight. "We are no longer the black sheep on this issue," said the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, adding that the text was "a clear recognition" that cultural goods such as film, TV programmes and music are not "merchandise like any other" and should be treated separately in.. trade talks." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

More Terry cloth: Gilliam tells tales

After explaining once more how he and Brothers Grimm co-writer Tony Grisoni wound up credited as "dress pattern makers," the Telegraph's David Gritten sits for a listen. They met "last week at a pub near his home in Highgate, north London, he was amiable. He has a broad, slightly dazed grin, and hair that is spiky but with a little mane reaching down his back. He was wearing deck shoes with monkey designs on them. Wheezy laughter punctuates his conversation. How difficult could he be? Yet Gilliam is a visually minded director, who complains that most filmmakers never look at paintings. He formulates a visual notion of a film in his head, then fights stubbornly to capture it on screen. Who has he fought? Anyone who opposes him: studio heads, financiers, producers. He does not shirk confrontation - rather, he rushes towards it....

MGM accepted Gilliam's... script grudgingly. As he tells it, when he and Roven pitched it to a boardroom of executives, one said: "Why do you want to make this morbid movie about animals eating children?" "I nearly shouted: 'It's fairy tales! These are the stories Western civilisation grew up on!' " ... Gilliam defends The Brothers Grimm: "It is a beautiful-looking film," he says fiercely... "Studios are obsessed by a film's opening weekend. If it doesn't hit a pre-determined mark, they don't spend another penny on it. But I'm huge on DVD. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas didn't do well at the box office, but it's big on DVD. One thing I know about my films, they have longevity and they make their money back in the end. I know I keep getting cheques in the post."

Posted by pride at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2005

Good timing?: an influential musician just wants to direct

Gifted musician-producer Jim O'Rourke, a member of Sonic Youth since 2001, and who has recorded his own solo albums under the titles of Nic Roeg films, is pursuing a career as a director, ContactMusic.com insists. The composer of "Insignficance," "Bad Timing" and "Eureka" (which, ouroboros-like, inspired the Japanese epic of the same name) has been contributing to soundtracks for some time, such as for Love, Liza.

Posted by pride at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

Lions Gate roars in UK: taking the Redbus

While the Image Entertainment video deal simmers, Lions Gate Entertainment was feeling peckish, so they've bought "a British film distributor that holds the library rights to such films as Bend It Like Beckham and The Mothman Prophecies for $35 million," reports the CBC, "in a cash-stock deal." "We are acquiring a company with a strong distribution infrastructure, a valuable library and a gifted, experienced and highly entrepreneurial senior management team," Lions Gate chief executive Jon Feltheimer said in a release. "With the addition of our theatrical product, catalogue and the other resources we will provide, we intend to mirror in the U.K. the successful growth strategy we have executed in North America." The deal gives Lions Gate the ability to self-distribute its motion pictures in Britain and adds the library of rights of more than 130 films to its holdings." [You can read the original press release here.]

Posted by pride at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

A history of violence above the 49th parallel

Upon the Canadian opening of A History of Violence Maclean's Brian D. Johnson weaves a northern perspective: "Although it's a U.S. production, with American stars, "if we're talking creative categories," says Cronenberg, "it's a true Canada-U.S. co-production." It was shot in Ontario with a local crew. And it subverts a classic American genre with a distinctly Canadian sensibility.... If violence is the primal theme of American cinema—ricocheting through Coppola, Scorsese, Eastwood—[this] may well be the movie of the year, and a bold Oscar candidate... I t's as if this master outlaw from film's wild frontier has shown up on Main Street, swung open the saloon doors, and taken a place at the bar alongside Francis, Marty and Clint...

"The movie, which could be subtitled Scenes from a Marriage, is a story of trust framed by two carnal interludes between husband and wife. The first is sweet and tender. The second is a bruising confrontation on a staircase, an angry struggle that dissolves into lovemaking... Cronenberg agrees the film "does have political undertones, or overtones, although it's not overtly political. Those are things that Viggo and I discussed a lot when I was trying to convince him to do the movie. You have a man who's defending his family and his home against bad guys with guns. It raises the question of retribution. Is anything justified when you're attacked? It's also hard not to notice that George Bush uses American Western movies as a model for his foreign policy -- Osama bin Laden wanted dead or alive." Johnson concludes, "Cronenberg has always treated mutilation, and mutation, of the flesh as metaphor. His real goal is to make us feel an exotic discomfort with our own mortality. What's most disturbing about A History of Violence are not its flashes of heroic retribution, but the moments of intimate terror as a woman looks into her husband's eyes and sees a stranger." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

Sarah is magic: the New Yorker does Silverman

The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear profiles comedian Sarah Silverman on the eve of the release of her new film: "In September, Silverman took Jesus Is Magic, the concert-movie version of a one-woman show she did Off Broadway… to the Toronto Film Festival, where it was screened at midnight for a crowd of 1,200. The next night, there was a party for her at the Club Monaco on Bloor Street in the fashion district. She arrived at ten-thirty wearing a knee-length gray woollen skirt and high-heeled black loafers. She looked around uncomfortably and said she didn’t know anyone. Strangers came up and introduced themselves... and photographers took pictures of her with festival notables. “This is a lot of attention... I want to walk around, but I’m afraid.”

In a downstairs room... an Us Weekly reporter asked her what was on her iPod, and a movie-theatre manager from Chicago told her that he and his workmates were recently talking about “scatting,” and who they would let do this to them. “You were my choice,” he said. Silverman listened graciously, then found her way out... She said she hadn’t minded the obscene confession. “When he came up to me and said ‘I want to tell you a story that might not be that flattering,’ I was like, Ugggh. People want to hurt your feelings.” Outside another première party, she was accosted by autograph collectors waving blank white sheets of paper for her to sign... A young man in glasses, a red polo shirt, and a baseball cap called out to her, “I loved The Aristocrats,” and asked for her autograph. There was a hint of malice in her outwardly game response. She signed, “Vagina Silverman.”

Posted by pride at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

Little Nemo of Arabia?: the first Saudi cinema will show only cartoons

"Some 20 years after public screenings of films were banned, the first cinema will open next month in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia," reports Agence France-Presse, "but showing only cartoons, [said] a source from the firm handling the project... The cinema will open for women and children at a Riyadh Hotel at the Eid al-Fitr feast at the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on November 2 or 3... The move was made possible following an agreement with Riyadh municipality. The pan-Arab Saudi newspaper Al-Hayat said [Monday] that the 1,400-seat cinema will hold three one-hour shows to screen foreign cartoon films dubbed in Arabic every evening." Crowds of 50,000 are predicted during the first two weeks. "The paper said the project was a prelude to the start of real cinema screenings for Saudi Arabia, given that cafes in main cities already show films, sports games and video clips on large television sets. Cinema was once shown in private clubs in Saudi Arabia until all public screenings were banned because they were considered against Islamic law in the early 1980s.Saudi Arabia is the only country to have banned cinema houses in the Muslim conservative Arab Gulf region."

Posted by pride at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

The war within The War Within: the society of the spectacle

In Joseph Castelo’s The War Within, Hassan, a Pakistani suicide bomber, takes refuge in the house of a childhood friend in New Jersey while planning to blow up Grand Central Station. in the Stranger, Annie Wagner talks to co-writers Ayad Akhtar and Tom Glynn. Akhtar says, "This gets a little academic and bizarre, but we talked about a sense of alienation, or people living within something that Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle. We were trying to get underneath the level of political discourse that has become pretty stale about a lot of these topics. And to identify the root human cause of people going out and blowing themselves up in some giant statement of protest and murder. So when you start trying to understand why the Other has so much contempt, hate, and disdain for this way of life that they would want to come and decimate it or kill themselves… You start to look at the world that we live in a totally different light. And you start to recognize—the notion of the “society of the spectacle” is a little bizarre, but it’s about individuals sense of being alienated and isolated from something that’s always larger than it, that consumes, that mass produces.

It’s something that [novelist Don] DeLillo talks about too, writing in this age where writing is over and the age of terrorism has begun. Who is giving voice to the oppressed? It’s no longer [political writer] Franz Fanon. It’s now the bomb." [Much more at the link.]

Posted by pride at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

Duly indie: 2929 and these four walls

Variety's Ian Mohr reports on one more distribution wrinkle from Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment, "an initiative dubbed Truly Indie that gives filmmakers access to the marketing and sales tools needed to roll out a film without a traditional distributor. Move is the latest from upstart 2929, which has been tinkering with traditional distribution models for its own indie pics by releasing them simultaneously via its theatrical and cable arms." Filmmakers retain right to their pictures, most of the b.o. will go to producers, but, as Variety notes, "each deal will vary." According to 2929, the Truly Indie program will supply filmmakers basic marketing services offered by theatrical distribs, including publicity, promotion, press screenings and advertising." Wagner tells DV, "Despite the promise of the digital revolution, these filmmakers still face almost insurmountable hurdles in reaching theatrical audiences. We wanted to find new ways to open the market to these films. Truly Indie offers a much-needed safety net for quality independent films." Fest favorite Cavite, repped by John Pierson and a roomful of his U of Texas students, is among the first test subjects.

Posted by pride at 01:17 AM | Comments (0)

Tristam Shandy: Michael Winterbottom's Cock and Bull plus a necessary measure of true celebrity

In the Guardian, John Mullan provides background on the man behind "The Continuing Life of Tristram Shandy", the basis for Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story: "I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous," [Laurence Sterne] said. There had been bestselling novels before, but never an author who so openly revelled in his celebrity. He insisted always on wearing his clerical black - "Shandying it", as he put it - around the drawing rooms of London, a jester in a priest's costume. This is how he is painted in his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, wig askew, the foxy smile letting you know he is a mischief-maker. To ensure Reynolds' interest, he inserted into Tristram Shandy a passage celebrating his paintings. A Reynolds portrait was, he knew, a necessary measure of true celebrity."

Posted by pride at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

The Hire fired: BMW's axing its mini-movies

Friday's the finale for BMW's The Hire mini-movies; the site's shuttering, reports Motor Trend.

Aussie Duncan Macleod has an appreciation of the immodestly budgeted, Clive Owen-starring, branded shorts at Duncan's TV Ad Land, listing credits and noting that after Friday, "if you want to see the BMW films online, you'll need to browse around the sites of advertising agency Fallon and film production companies such as Anonymous Content and RSA Films." If you own a BMW, you can get the DVD for free, otherwise, it's $3.75 for postage.

Posted by pride at 10:08 AM | Comments (1)

Legal priorities: classing Hollywood with hardcore

The Reporter's Brooks Boliek runs down a booby-trapped congressional action to take sex out of movies: "Tucked deep inside a massive bill designed to track sex offenders and prevent children from being victimized by sex crimes is language that could put many Hollywood movies in the same category as hard-core... films. The provision added to the "Children's Safety Act of 2005: would require any film, TV show or digital image that contains a sex scene to come under the same government filing requirements that adult films must meet. Currently, any filmed sexual activity requires an affidavit that lists the names and ages of the actors who engage in the act. The film is required to have a video label that claims compliance with the law and lists where the custodian of the records can be found. The record-keeping requirement is known as Section 2257, fo