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November 30, 2005

A specialist reports: Mrs. Henderson's naked and the nude

In the Guardian, Sophie Heawood chats up Lily White, "a burlesque artiste from the Whoopee Club about the knickers and kit in Mrs. Henderson Presents: "I suppose some people might think all we do is ponce around and get our kit off, but there's a lot more that goes into it. In a way, it's harder to work without your clothes on than with them. There's one point in the film where the singer, who remains clothed, says rather sulkily to the head nude girl: "All you do is stand there." The girl replies: "I believe that's the definition of a star." I was cheering in my seat."

Posted by pride at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

Tehrangeles: movies by Darius Khondji, Sam Nazarian and Bob Yari

"One day Hollywood will make an Iranian-American Gone With the Wind, writes Behrouz Saba, "All the epic elements are there. Extended, deeply rooted families in Iran become fabulously wealthy during the oil boom of the mid-1970s, only to see their lives shattered by the Islamic revolution late in the decade. Fleeing to Southern California in droves, they begin to carve out for themselves a niche of wealth and promise they proudly call Tehrangeles... Iranian-Americans are... gaining the capital, clout and skills necessary to become Hollywood players themselves, and to fashion their own screen images as earlier immigrants [did]... Tehran-born Sam Nazarian lives the flashy lifestyle [of] a reincarnation of an old-fashioned Hollywood mogul. The owner of the two trendiest nightclubs in Los Angeles, he is buying and restyling hotels and restaurants here and abroad while backing such films as The Beautiful Country, about the search of a Vietnamese-American for his father, and Waiting, a comedy about a staff of underachievers at a chain restaurant.... More circumspect but no less determined is producer Bob Yari. One of his earliest film credits is as an assistant in Checkpoint (1987), a work by the pioneering director Parviz Sayyad, who made low-budget, independent films about Iranians in America in the revolution's immediate aftermath. Knowing that money speaks the loudest in today's Hollywood, Yari went on to become wealthy in Southern California's booming strip-mall real estate.... Yari is a backer of Crash, which depicts frictions among blacks, Latinos, Koreans and Iranians in Los Angeles. Its cast includes Sandra Bullock and Don Cheadle. Tehran-born actor Shaun Toub, who was discovered as he worked as a real estate agent in Los Angeles, plays an Iranian shopkeeper who is victimized when he is thought to be an Arab." Also noted: cinematographer Darius Khondji .

Posted by pride at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

It's Showtime: Dante's Homecoming

At its Turin world premiere, VOICE's Dennis Lim talks to Joe Dante about "Masters of Horror" and his episode, Homecoming: "In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horseshit and elbow grease." The dizzying high point of Showtime's new "Masters of Horror" series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era... Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch... reports to a Karl Rove–like guru named Kurt Rand... and engages in kinky [sex] with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver... a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy... Murch's glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, "If I had one wish... I would wish for your son to come back," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.

"How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury... "If you're going to code the message, which is the way horror movies have always done it, that's fine, but it's not going to reach an audience like a movie that's overt, and this is not exactly subtle," says Dante. "Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody's afraid—it's uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren't people upset? Every minute, somebody's dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn't seem to me quite worth it." ... Homecoming [accommodates] a devastatingly specific checklist of accusations, from the underreporting of war casualties to last November's dubious Ohio count. As if in defiance of the Pentagon's policy to ban photographs of... coffins, Dante's film shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but their irate occupants bursting out of them. "There's a lot of powerful imagery in this movie that has nothing to do with me... When you see those coffins, which is a sight that's generally been withheld from us, there's a gravity to it..." To [Dante's] surprise, Showtime executives didn't flinch... "I can't conceive of any other venue where we would have been able to tell this story: You can't do theatrical political movies; people don't go to them. You can't do them on television, because you've got sponsors... Michael Moore's last picture made a lot of money, but he was vilified for it so much he's practically in hiding... The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war—now that they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. It's cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It's fucking sick." ... Dante says he's eager for the right-wing punditocracy... to see it: "I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it—and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are."

Posted by pride at 09:55 AM

November 29, 2005

Mind-bloggling Pt. 37: Chicago Tribune's Rambling Gleaner

Chicago Tribune "Rambling Gleaner" Charlie Madigan sounds the klaxon for icky metaphors in the defense of megacorps over measly internet writers: "Generally, opinion, in the form of lots of blogging, will be slathered all over it, like peanut butter so heavily spread you can't see the toast anymore."

Posted by pride at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

France vs. U.S.

As a chunk of the 2006 Sundance sked falls from the sky

those rotten French moviegoers are watching Shu Qi in Three Times.

More Sundance slates: Wednesday—Spectrum, Frontier, and Park City at Midnight; Thursday, Premieres. And on Monday... Shorts!

Posted by pride at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

Baby, it's cold inside: Indiana on Brokeback insularity

In the VOICE, Gary Indiana scores a few points about the isolated lives of the characters in Brokeback Mountain: "No one ever refers to the large events of the day, or to places outside his or her immediate ken. Between 1963 and somewhere in the early 1980s, the only evidence of a realm beyond the rodeo circuit and the ranch is the cathode eye in the living room, the slowly mutating look of motor vehicles and supermarket wares, and an occasional reference to the state of the economy.

"In effect, two decades of history produce no important effects in the communities and individuals under scrutiny. Attitudes and opinions remain obstinately immobile... Even TV, which replaced verbalization in so many American homes during the period spanned, can only emit meaningless images to people who have nothing to say to each other in the first place. This is depressingly credible. Tight-knit communities, like tight-knit families, manage to stay tight by deflecting any strong sense of connection with larger social configurations—"America," to this mindset, is, or ought to be, a country whose norms are indistinguishable from their own, ergo not such a big place after all. The insular quality of American life reinforces a stubborn naïveté about sexual matters that's been part of our national character from the outset... The deviant, whether religious, political, or sexual, has always needed to be identified from among the existing population, then exterminated or expelled. The expunged have tended to found their own little territories, which in turn establish their identities by driving out the unorthodox—who have to be invented if they don't already exist... In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a pungent slice of an essentially unchanging reality."

Posted by pride at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

Nice Harvest: Keeping it in Chicago

Harold Ramis talks about keeping regional production regional, with Chicago, not Toronto, doubling for Wichita in The Ice Harvest. "Focus Features wanted to film The Ice Harvest in Chicago-look-alike Toronto... The budget for a Chicago-based [production] was still $200,000 over Focus' ideal," reports Sally Duros in the Chicago Sun-Times. "I felt this movie could so easily be made in Chicago, I couldn't see how $200,000 would be a make-or-break number," Ramis tells Duros. "I knew if they dragged me away I would wind up getting passive aggressive. I also know that when you are shooting a movie, time is money. I was guaranteeing the price when I said I could make it in 40 days on that budget in Chicago." ... Brenda Sexton, managing director of the Illinois Film Office, said Chicago native Albert Berger's Bona Fide Productions was the first to put the homegrown film into play. A Latin School graduate, Berger grew up on the Gold Coast.

The Ice Harvest was the first film to commit to shooting in Illinois under the first round of the new tax credit, Sexton noted. Focus received a 25% tax credit based on wages paid -- at certain levels -- to each Illinois employee involved... Busch said the Teamsters, International Stage Technicians Local and the Wardrobe and Costume Local provided concessions equivalent to 15% of labor costs... While tax incentives are nice, Ramis said they are less important than how Illinois contributes to the filmmaking world on its own. "We keep waiting for the studios to come here. It's not even about U.S. vs. Canada," Ramis said. "The key is to show your competence, and that you are asking for a partnership, not to go hat in hand, employing a beggar's mentality. There would be more production here if films were being financed from here. We have the creative talent." What's needed, Ramis adds, is "a really tough guy to squeeze the money out of people."

Posted by pride at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)

Flick this: Sarah Silverman gets an editorial

The Lowelll, Massachussetts Sun editoralizes against Jesus is Magic as an inhumane flick: "Sarah Silverman steps over a line that no American, no human being, should ever be willing to cross." [No mention of dogs, cats, or horses.] Silverman makes light of the worst day in this nation's history—Sept. 11, 2001. The horrific events of that day have remained untouched by comedians for more than four years... There's nothing funny to be found in the massive destruction, the thousands of innocent lives lost, the shattering of hearts and families, that occurred that day. Silverman... doesn't seem to understand the depths of this nation's sorrow... Perhaps she simply doesn't care... Humor can be found in many situations... Sept. 11 isn't one of those...

"Nearly 3,000 people died that horrific day, including popular Dracut resident John Ogonowski who was the pilot of [one] ill-fated flight... Perhaps Silverman was one of the fortunate Americans who didn't know anyone murdered in the terrorist attacks... But that doesn't excuse her callous disregard for the feelings of those who did lose a family member, a friend, a colleague... The $8 or $10 that might have gone for a ticket to Silverman's movie—were it a flick even mildly diverting—will be better spent elsewhere."

Posted by pride at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Bah smug-bug to journo hegemony: You and what Armond?

Over at NYPress, Armond White is having, erm... words? in a lengthy takeout entitled "Self Satisfaction, Hollywood Style." "In mass media, 'smart' has become the alternative to popular," White writes. "And 'smart'—the hipper-than-thou, angrier-than-thou attitude of today's culture—has led to smug... It's what connects Good Night, and Good Luck, The Squid and the Whale, North Country, The Dying Gaul, The Weather Man, Syriana and Capote—some of the year's most acclaimed yet detestable films... In today's fake populism, where obscenely overpaid and overpromoted journalists pretend to speak for the commonweal, pundits are superstars." [Name-calling without names: purple, purblind purism!] "And since each self-proclaimed expert certifies himself film savvy, movies are considered less important than how they make one feel superior. The hope that movies could bond a disparate populace is passé. Movies are now part of the way that the media elite (and the cyberspace fringe) proclaim their advantages.

"At no time in my experience reading cultural journalism was there a period when the culture was as hostile as today. Awful movies are foisted upon the public through critics' hypocritical confusion of bad taste and private interest. Propaganda for themselves. They automatically acclaim movies that align with their personal beliefs while shunning any intellectual challenge. Conflict-of-interest duds—from The Squid and the Whale to Good Night, and Good Luck—represent boomer vanity; their implicit values denote the backed-up sewage of the '60s counterculture's self-importance. These are films only people who fancy themselves New York intellectuals could love... One social set's prejudices get validated based on the unexamined acceptance of particular class priorities. This hegemony is put into effect by pundits with no grace or humility, who assert their difference—their smartness—from the general public." [More hautyoor at the link.]

Posted by pride at 03:13 PM | Comments (1)

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to the whinging billionaire who owns one: Zuckerman slags blogs

Writing from catbird seat in US News & World Report, owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman disdains the internet.

"There's a virtual galaxy of obscure blogs that may get a few hits a day but occasionally light up the blogosphere when they're picked up and amplified by the mainstream press... Blogs often resort to blood sport in their commentaries on politics and life, with many repeating and reporting without fact checking... This new age of journalism is challenging the "trustee model" of journalism, where journalistic professionals served as gatekeepers, filtering the defamatory and the false. Today, a large segment of the public believes the new media are flavoring their reporting so as to tell us not so much how the world works but how the media believe it ought to work... The blogs, while fragmenting our mass audience and carrying many more inaccuracies than mainstream media, have nonetheless democratized journalism by giving citizens daily and immediate access to different opinions and, sometimes, to purveyors of truly expert knowledge." No footnotes in Mr. Zuckerman's nest of generalities are provided to discern the balance of inaccuracies between the blogosphere and mainstream media. ["Mainstream media" may be defined in this case as "Who doesn't take car service?"] [The photo is from USNews.com; their photo editors slugged it as "mug_mort.jpg", not we.]

Posted by pride at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

Nollywood rising: the world's third largest B.O.

ChiTrib's foreign correspondent Paul Salopek goes to Nigeria, where money woes in the early 1990s stemmed a steady stream of kung fu and Chuck Norris videos, leading to the birth of Nollywood: "A wellspring of some 50 new films a week, home to a unique genre that might be called "romantic voodoo," and a cinematic assembly line that churns out blockbusters for as little as $8,000 apiece... Nigeria has emerged as the hottest... movie mecca in Africa... The country's brash young film industry—inevitably dubbed "Nollywood"—[rakes] in at least $200 million a year, making it the third-largest box office in the world after the US and India.... Shot mainly in English with hand-held video cameras, then copied endlessly onto cheap [CDs], Nigerian titles have flooded... stores and dusty village markets across Africa... Their popularity has even toppled the biggest obstacle to moviemaking on the polyglot continent: Nigerian films are in such high demand that they are being subtitled [for] French-speaking Africa... "We know we can't beat Hollywood on production values--not yet," said Cyprain Chukwunta, a producer with more than 40 movies, none of which took longer than a week to film... "But our quality is constantly improving,.. I predict that one day we won't just dominate Africa but the world. By 2010 we will be No. 2, minimum." See also this story from Nigeria Online. A Nigerian filmmakers' bulletin board, with links to a regularly updated raft of relevant articles, is here; you can find fan boards at this link.

Posted by pride at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

Liminal velocity: a dangerous Rendez-vous

Online viewing: Probably the most dangerous eight-minute, thirty-nine second single take known to Frenchmen: "C’était un rendez-vous is a short film made in 1976 by Claude Lelouch, the director of Un homme et une femme. Lelouch’s own car, a Ferrari 275 GTB,

"is driven by an anonymous driver [reportedly Rene Arnoux, an ex-Formula One driver for Renault] at breakneck speed through the streets of Paris just after dawn, for a romantic “rendez-vous” at Basilica of the Sacré Cœur."

Posted by pride at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

A stately pressure doc: where the Wal-Mart bucks aren't

SF Chronicle's Ron Dicker parlays with Robert Greenwald about the cost of Wal*Mart, the doc: "The distribution pattern is not designed to maximize dollars... For every house party we do, in a sense we lose money because, for every person who buys a DVD, 20 or thousands come and watch without paying anything, which is fine. It's not about selling tickets. It's about reaching people." ... Greenwald, a 61-year-old father of four, already has amassed Hollywood-standard riches in his dramas, which include the Farrah Fawcett beaten-wife vehicle The Burning Bed. He takes no profit off the documentaries. "The reason was I knew that I would be attacked... I didn't want the Bush administration, Fox News or Wal-Mart to attack, saying I wanted to make a buck. That's always the first line of attack. This makes them silent, at least for a while." Retaliation has ranged from death threats to exhumed reviews of Greenwald's 1980 flop Xanadu."That came courtesy of Wal-Mart... "It hurt my feelings and cost me a lot of money in therapy," he says, chuckling... "But it hasn't made me change my opinion of Wal-Mart."

Posted by pride at 05:40 AM | Comments (0)

What a mouth: transcribing Henry Jaglom

Conversing at SF Chronicle's John Stanley, veteran four-waller Henry Jaglom is
more a jag-man talking about his latest blabfest, Shopping: "My mother never told me just because I was a male I couldn't participate in the girl's world of buying a new wardrobe... She gave me the opening to see what a female life was like. I was in school getting into trouble, but after I shopped for a whole weekend I became much easier going.

"Suddenly, I was happy. The contrast was profound. My whole focus became fun. Life became a game as opposed to the serious values of the all-boys school I was attending. I became relaxed around women. I found out women talk about themselves. They have a sense of play. They have a way of bonding with each other that's different from men. Men are not supposed to play. They have their manhood to consider. But women, they play all their lives. They just want to have fun. That's why women are so special. They remain free-spirited, joyful. I never forgot that, and all my life I've loved to shop. I hope I'm still a kid having fun in a department store." Men "are pragmatic about shopping... 'I need a pair of pants,' and that's it. Some men are uncomfortable shopping, especially with women. But if a man can enjoy shopping with a woman, he has discovered an important way to bond. But what fascinates me most about women shoppers -- shopping becomes a metaphor for things not going right in their lives, or things that are going right. If I learned anything new, it is the extreme psychological depth women plunge to when they buy. It's a way of resolving issues. A woman has this instinct to find something new and pretty. Something to give them an upper. Shopping ultimately is this wonderful self-protective mechanism." Did Stanley cut anything from this interview? There's even more at the link.

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

November 26, 2005

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochqatsi: Qatsi Trilogy live in Wales

Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy will be in concert at Cardiff's Wales Millennium Center, reports Western Mail's Karen Price: "Technology is the big force, and like oxygen it is always there, a necessity that we cannot live without," said Reggio.

Philip Glass, whose ensemble accompanies the three film, weighs in before meeting the Welsh. "While a synthesised score might to some seem the obvious choice to support the technologically made images, I chose a contrasting language for the music. I've composed the score for a large symphonic ensemble and used the voice of the cello throughout to give audiences something familiar to hold onto and guide them through this unfamiliar world. My instinct was to balance the quite startling effect of the synthetically composed images with a sound world of natural timbres."

Glass said... "This idea is central to what the Qatsi films talk about - this world of technology has replaced nature, but we as humans, are in the middle of it, and just can't see how dangerous and damaging it is," added Reggio.

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

Honoring the future hope of the past: Scorsese gets another scroll

With Martin Scorsese on the road with No Direction Home, ANSA reports on Scorsese's latest late-career honor, an honorary degree granted in Bologna. "In a long speech... Scorsese cited Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi and Francesco Rosi. "It's impossible for me to express how much I learned from Italian cinema," said the 63-year old director... Without the postwar Italian film renaissance, Scorsese said, "As a Sicilian, as an American and as a movie-maker I wouldn't know where I'd be."

"As for Pasolini, Scorsese said "his films re-opened my eyes like a smack in the face." Scorsese, known for violent films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, ended his speech by urging his young audience to "become human beings able to feel compassion... It might seem easy but it's a long, risky and sometimes deceptive road. I'm 63 and I've just started."

Posted by pride at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

True-life apocrypha: Melton Barker, auteur

Melton Barker? Chris Garcia of Austin American-Statesman makes the question more than rhetorical, the gorgeous enigma of "a man who has seemingly, and utterly, disappeared." Too true to be good? "The man is Melton Barker. He made many movies, two-reelers featuring small-town children that mimicked popular Hollywood fare of the time... the Depression and the Golden Age.

"When she talks about her quarry, [Caroline] Frick, a film archivist and historian... at the University of Texas, lights up with a tangy fusion of fevered fascination and lip-pinching frustration. Since 2001, Melton Barker has wrapped his ghost around Frick's head, haunting her dreams, work, life. Barker made so-called itinerant films... from documentaries to lightly veiled ads for local stores... He shot and screened the movies for an invariably delighted community, and likely made a comfy living." Barker, Frick tells Garcia, shot in several states between the 1930s and 1950s. A naming of eight Texas towns is fragrant: "Austin, Waco, Childress, Munday, Keller, San Marcos, Huntsville and Quanah." ... [Frick's] imperishable commitment to the case, has a big fat hole in it. She cannot discover who the man was, or where he went. No birth certificate. No obituary. Just a name, some movies and a lot of air... "There have been times when it's all-consuming... My father came to visit and I brought it up and he said, 'Seriously. Is this all you talk about? This is really scary.' ... Who is this guy who traveled from town to town? What was he thinking? Where has he not gone? Then I found out he was a Texan, and that solidified it." ... Under the banner of Melton Barker Juvenile Productions, the roving filmmaker would place an ad in the local paper offering to put children ages 3 to 12 in the movies for $10 a child—an opulent sum in the Depression paid by parents giddy to watch their children... Lead roles were auditioned. [Then] up to 125 other children just paid the fee and showed up. As a filmmaker, Barker had a genius for jangly messes..."They're fabulous. They're fantastic... They're so bad that they're so good... I'm not going to lie to you." [Lovely, loving anecdotes reel on at the link; the ending of Garcia's telling is marvelous. There are also clips of Barker's legacy at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

Back to the future: cultural crackdowns in Iran

A long survey of cultural bans in Iran by Mehdi Khalaji is up at Iran Press Service. Some notes on movie troubles: "After a period of some tolerance under former president Mohammad Khatami, Iran is now experiencing a cultural clampdown. President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad is implementing the hardest of hardline ideological tendencies in the cultural arena, consistent with his belief that his administration should prepare the country for the reappearance of the hidden imam (who is now more than 1,000 years old). To this end, Ahmadi Nezhad has taken a host of provocative steps, believing that "freedom of speech [is] a way to destroy people's religious beliefs...
Harandi's background of attacks on liberal journalists and political activists strongly suggests that Ahmadi Nezhad wants to suppress cultural freedom and to limit the freedom of information... In its first session... the [The Supreme Cultural Revolution Council] adopted a circular banning all movies that “propagandize for schools like secularism, liberalism, nihilism, or feminism, and destroy the authentic cultures of religious societies and humiliate them”. The circular emphasizes that all movies that explicitly or implicitly deny the right of religion to govern, or that show secular regimes as superior to their religious counterparts, are forbidden. Many Iranian directors, like Bahram Bayza’i, experience delays lasting into years receiving permission to produce films, and many others, like Abbas Kiarostami, cannot show their work in Iran. Some Iranian filmmakers, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, prefer to live abroad in order to pursue their art in freedom and safety." [More of lessening at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

In the Schwimmer: marketing an indie drunk

Michael Booth in Denver Post has a nice lede before having to talk about Duane Hopwood: "When marketing a $1 million independent film, a downbeat tale of an alcoholic stumbling through the gray winter of Atlantic City, the entire strategy hangs on David Schwimmer's familiar chagrined look and three-day stubble. Literally... Writer-director Matt Mulhern sits in a Denver restaurant and watches his marketing budget go from Schwimmer's fork to his mouth. "We blew it on that chicken roll," Mulhern says with a shrug. "That's the budget, right there."

Posted by pride at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

Gary Arnold loved it: The Passenger

Washington Times' Gary Arnold is not over the moon about Sony's Classic: "If anything, The Passenger was the movie in which Mr. Antonioni, who recently turned 93, appeared to be emptying the creative well down to the last muddy drops. In his previous MGM fiasco, Zabriskie Point, the preposterously oversold and deflating hippie rhapsody of 1970, the director stranded himself in Death Valley.

"The Passenger found him lost in the desert again, this time a North African desert, with Algeria meant to simulate Chad, or anywhere uprisings were topical. [The film's] anticlimax is nestled inside a tediously affected shot sequence designed to slide the camera from an inside-looking-out position in Locke's street-level hotel room to the reverse outside-looking-in vantage point. There was a great deal of praise at the time for this flourish, more welcome as a practical matter because it cued spectators that the funeral was just about over.... To the extent that he's characterized, lackluster Locke inspires no confidence as sleuth, impostor or amorist. The film generates scant incentive to care about the gradual expiration of a character who fails to embody much life or establish urgent claims on credibility or sympathy."

Posted by pride at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2005

Fabricating Kubrick: Raphael on the LOOK pictures

Frederic Raphael, collaborator on Eyes Wide Shut was one of the first after Kubrick's death to cash in on his memories in the Guardian, he has his way with the new coffee table volume, "Stanley Kubrick: Dreams and Shadows, Photographs 1945-1950," from Phaidon Press, which draws from Kubrick's work in the archives of LOOK magazine. The selection, claims Raphael, "reveals a command of camera angles which it is tempting to call "instinctive", but is more likely to have been planned as consciously as chess moves. The photographs show an appetite for the dark side... The camera suggests confident familiarity with local life, which the monoglot down-there-on-assignment Kubrick can never have had...

"Never an ambulance-chaser or a crime-scene specialist like the great Weegee..., young Kubrick was not content to catch life on the fly... If Kubrick often honoured the ethos of the on-the-spot observer, he also cheated; one of the earliest prints is of a newsvendor, in his kiosk, framed by April 1945 newspapers announcing the death of FDR. The very image of America's bereavement, the guy appears ineffably sad. It looks as "natural" as a picture-desk editor would require, but in fact the vendor was coached to adopt his sorry expression. What looks to have been caught on the fly is a set-up." [More know-it-all guff at the link.]

Posted by pride at 07:33 PM | Comments (0)

Paul Verhoeven's latest: a shitfight?

Geoffrey Macnab reports on the shooting of Blackbook, the new Nazi-era film by 67-year-old Paul Verhoeven: "According to producer San Fu Maltha, Verhoeven's reputation as a driven, uncompromising filmmaker is fully deserved. "No matter what he does, he doesn't do it for personal pleasure. It's all for the good of the film. He does it to make a great film. He is always pushing, but he is also willing to find a solution... Don't come to him with bullshit because it doesn't work." Despite the demands Verhoeven places on his collaborators, most show... affection for him. His lead actress, Carice van Houten, has the most gruelling role: one that entails being put alive in a coffin, hiding in freezing water, and being brutally humiliated by Dutch police who think she is a collaborator. "We did some very hard scenes with 200 litres of pigshit," Van Houten says... "Somewhere at the end of the day, I said to him, 'You have to go in the shit, too.' He said, 'OK, at the end of the day we'll shitfight together".' He was prepared to do that."

Posted by pride at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

Late and great and lasting: Ballhaus on work with Fassbinder

At the Grauniad, Will Hodgkinson uses the occasion of a production still of Fassbinder on set to tout the career of a cinematographic great who outlived the protean German director.

"The squatting man behind the movie camera is Michael Ballhaus, one of the most innovative cinematographers of European film. He is shooting Margit Carstensen and Karlheinz Bohm, playing a fragile woman and her manipulative husband, on the Spanish Steps in Rome for the 1973 film Martha. On the right, watching with haughty solemnity, is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the volatile, self-destructive, and extremely talented director who reinvented German cinema throughout the 1970s." [The several paragraphs at the link are worth the time.] Photo: BFI

Posted by pride at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

Americans can handle only one genocide per Christmas: Syriana vs. Munich

Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow considers how much serious can holiday audiences (and the Academy) stand? "We call the film 'Elf 2'," joked Stephen Gaghan, the creator of Syriana, with a hint of desperation.... Ambitious filmmakers have faced this paradox of timing year after year, with unpredictable results. Warren Beatty opened Reds on Dec. 4, 1981. He garnered mixed to rave reviews, earned 12 Oscar nominations, and won three statuettes: best director for himself, best cinematography for Vittorio Storaro and best supporting actress for Maureen Stapleton. Yet the movie didn't make its budget back... Spielberg's Munich opens Dec. 23. Although it has a wildly different focus - the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the search for the killers by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency - two movies that depict terrorism may be too much even for hearty appetites.... The situation is reminiscent of 1993, when Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend opened Dec. 10 and Spielberg's Schindler's List opened Dec. 15. "I guess Americans can handle only one genocide per Christmas," Geronimo screenwriter Larry Gross joked to Sragow upon the film's release.

Posted by pride at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

Kiss Kael Boom BANG!: imperiling Pauline

OC Weekly's Greg Stacy is on deck for a little Kiss Kael Boom Bang: "In many movies, even the classics, there comes a scene in which the action screeches to a halt, the music swells and the camera sweeps in for a long, loving closeup as one of the characters imparts unto us the picture’s Big, Important Message. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael warned us about such scenes, observing that it was as if the film’s director was jabbing us in the ribs and saying, “Listen to this; it’s pure gold.” Next up: Michael Barnes of the Austin Statesman, taking up the Black slack for the week: "Critics and audiences have so far underrated Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the detective comedy with serious Raymond Chandler roots (including subtitles and themes — incest, pornography, mistaken identity, abuse of power — snatched from Chandler's books) and a wink to movie hyperconsciousness (starting with the Pauline Kael reference in the title)."And the Stranger's listings editor works the apocrypha, averring of The Sound of Music: "When the movie version came out, famous film critic Pauline Kael panned the film, calling it 'The Sound of Mucus.' Supposedly, Kael lost her job over the review." May we all work so hard after this life is over.

Posted by pride at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)

Giving and taking fingers: the Disney way

Several longstanding Disney mysteries get cleaned up in the Age, with Jim Schembri talking to animation vet Paul Carlson: "As a renowned specialist in rendering Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck... can Carlson shed any light... on why these characters wear white gloves? "I don't know about that," he says, genuinely flummoxed. "That's interesting. I've never been asked that." Still, he can explain why so many Disney characters have only 3 fingers. "When they first started animating, they had so many fingers to deal with that they figured it was too much work to animate 4 fingers. It was easier just to animate three. As silly as that may sound, if you think about it, we did 300,000 separate drawings for Lady and the Tramp, then each of those were cleaned up, which makes 600,000. Then they were inked and painted. That makes another 300,000. So there were almost a million drawings. So when you have 200 to 300 artists working, think of the time you can save if you only have to draw 3 fingers instead of 4! It sounds silly, but that goes way back to the 1930s and '40s."

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

November 23, 2005

Harold Ramis: Death is inevitable

SF Chron's Hugh Hart transcribes as Harold Ramis polishes his lump of coal, the lovingly black Ice Harvest. Give 'em heck, Harry: "Buddhism, and religion in general, I think, evolved as a way of dealing with the fact that we live with impermanence, we can't hang on to any good feeling we have, we're fundamentally alone in the universe, death is inevitable... We're all facing doomsday no matter what we do. Life has no intrinsic meaning. No matter what we're told, we still feel this emptiness. So for a lot of people, life is a kind of purgatory; we're just marking time until we die, you know? And that keeps us going to shrinks and churches and ashrams and dojos, or strip clubs, looking for meaning somewhere...

"I don't go to strip clubs, partly because I think it's a waste of money putting dollar bills in a stripper's G-string—if I'm not actually going to have sex, why am I spending the money? ... So I don't go to bars, I don't go to strip clubs: I go to movies. This is where people find a little vacation from their real lives. We watch someone else's tragedy or comedy, and when the movie is deeply felt and full of meaning, we feel enriched by it.... Unfortunately... 90% of the time we feel ripped off."

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

My screen: from nickelodeon to porn booth to iPod

The Reporter's Robert J. Dowling meditates mildly on the "personal" screen, a notion for a fascinating article for someone else to write, tracing the palm-sized image from one-person nickelodeon to porn-loop booth to iPod: "In recent years, screens have begun to show up everywhere—in planes, cars, buses and supermarket aisles. Even elevators now have screens. Even theater lobbies now are equipped with small screens so patrons can watch trailers while waiting to buy popcorn. Most workplaces are overrun with screens—[not] used for... entertainment, but... screens nonetheless... In a world inundated with screens, the ultimate window on the world has arrived in the form of the video iPod, the cell phone and other tiny, portable communications devices. These are personal, private screens. The owner thinks of it as "my" screen." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

Bee here now: how conscious is Season?

Indiapost.com gets the Hare Krishna perspective on Bee Season, which includes Aaron, a young man played by Max Minghella, finding a devotee (played with Hare Barbie gleam by Kate Bosworth) almost as irresistable as her religious beliefs. A statement released by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) reads, "We appreciate the filmmaker's sincere efforts to accurately depict the Hare Krishna movement. At the same time, we are concerned that, despite those efforts, viewers and members of the media may misinterpret some of Aaron's actions to be representative of our policies or beliefs."

Reports Indiapost, "In the film, Aaron is shown deceiving his parents to stay at a Hare Krishna temple... ISKCON maintains a rigid policy that requires minors to provide written parental consent before they may stay at a temple. "Interfering between a child and his or her parents, no matter how eager the child is to take up the Krishna faith, is unacceptable and strictly prohibited," says ISKCON spokesman Vyenkata Bhatta."

Posted by pride at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

Season of love: loving that Lucas

A spirited comment came over the transom from a reader of a May item, in which I quoted a few snips of snark from a blogger at The Bynk Zone, who wrote, in part, before I'd even witnessed the conclusion of Lucas' double-truck trilogy, "I wanted to see Yoda fight. Who hasn't. But I'm also a martial artist, have been for over a decade. What you realize is that as you work with folks who have been doing this for say, over half a century is that they don't waste movement. The better they get, the more economy of motion. There's no grand gestures anymore... I'm looking for something that shows Yoda as the Master he is, because even at that point, he's been doing it for what, 700 years? ... I am hoping for this economy of motion from someone who is a part of The Force at levels that no other Jedi can comprehend. From someone who has transcended anger and hatred. I'm a complete moron for thinking Lucas could do that."

"Mike" didn't like Bynk's entry, writing in comments, overlooking the Movie City News email link, Hey you coward. The only people who go on ranting about anything let alone a saga and dont leave an open email adress to argue back with are wimps. A million people can prove what you said to be stupid and immature. I will in the next 2 days. Expect to be hearing alot from. Oh but theres a bonus because this is a forum any person who logs on reads your comments on star wars will now see mine blasting yours to the ground. But this can be easily avoided. My email is [-]. Email me your adress and i will send you my one page response to you personally and nobody else will have to see because it will be your eyes only. You deserve it after running your mouth for so long without listening to the publics voice. Email me or i will knock your thread six feet deep. [Call-forwarding to the Bynk Zone here.]

Posted by pride at 12:26 AM

November 22, 2005

Cillian Murphy in heels: Learn when you're drunk

Jessica Winter talks to yer man Cillian Murphy about the demands of Breakfast on Pluto in the VOICE: "The voice was the thing for me, and her physicality. I didn't want to be butch; I wanted to be as beautiful and feminine as possible. We've seen the whole tough-transvestite thing before, and I wanted her to have a softness, a vulnerability. I wanted her to be a real girl."

Of co-writer-director Neil Jordan, Murphy says, "We never had enough money, never enough time, never enough light, and yet Neil would always somehow get that perfect composition or that perfect tracking shot." Winter confesses to Murphy that she can't walk in high heels. "Oh, you just need that confidence to go for it and fall down as much as you need to. I hung out with these transvestites in London, and their advice was, 'Learn when you're drunk,' so I did."

Posted by pride at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

From Adaptation to Bee and back again: Gyllenhaal on modern scripts

"I feel an enormous debt to Charlie Kaufman, who has really returned screenwriting to an art form," Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal tells the Writers Guild West's Dylan Callaghan. He's "allowed us to deconstruct it and use the visuals—it doesn't have to be completely linear. Bee Season was very challenging because it's a lot about the internal voice of the characters and I had to find a way to externalize that and to visualize it. [But] because the ending was what it was, [that helped]. So few things have a good ending. Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Spiderman 2)... says that's the hardest part. He says if you have an ear and you're observant, you can write a story, but to find a good story with a beginning, middle, and an end, that's a hat trick. This one had an ending that was so extraordinary that the struggle to balance the rest of it was made a lot easier by knowing where you were going."

Posted by pride at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

Let's roll: 9/11 hits UK

Bloody Sunday and Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass has cleared his Working Title-Universal 9/11 real-time tale, Flight 93, for takeoff. (And the handheld wizard is looking an awful lot like Harry Potter all growed older and wooly-headed.)

Reports Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye, "It's about the fourth plane involved in the 9/11 attacks in America four years ago, the one on which passengers famously fought back against their terrorist hijackers, under the rallying cry: "Let's roll!" Greengrass is shooting at UK's Pinewood studios, "thousands of miles from the US, for reasons of sensitivity and financial practicality... On two of the stages at Pinewood, replicas of the cockpit and passenger sections of the United Airlines Boeing 757 have been built." The film is based "on the conversations the passengers had with their families, air-traffic controllers and, in one famous instance, a telephone company superviser. The film will follow the real-life time frame of the actual incident as it happened on the plane, intercutting with air-traffic control."

Posted by pride at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

Big picture this: Goldstein sez movies done, calls it quits

Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by fierce warriors. "Well, what are we going to do," Lone asks Tonto. Tonto reflects, raises an eyebrow: "What we, white man?" In LA Times, Patrick Goldstein big-pictures his desire to shift to another beat, in an apocalypse-POW! piece that his editors subhed, the era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close. "New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant messaging and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the streets fast enough to stop suckers from lining up to see a new stinker. Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality." That, Goldstein suggests, is the only reason anyone at Sony could have gotten behind Bewitched. "Or why any of the studio's highly paid executives didn't wonder why it should shoehorn an obscure family movie into the one-week window between the Disney-powered Chicken Little and the latest Harry Potter juggernaut, especially when the movie, Zathura, has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the warning "side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction." ...

"The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is [getting] your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble... Too often studio people have the same ideas about the same things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing one Hot New Thing after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate Hudson to Colin Farrell, who've yet to connect with rank 'n file filmgoers." [More KA-blooey at the link; and no, it's only his tone that seems to be calling it quits.]

Posted by pride at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

Throwing the VHS out with the bathwater: what to do with all that tape?

Casey Dolan of LA Times writes about the fate of all those bulky VHS tapes. "Consumer discards... are just the tip of the tape-waste iceberg. Film studios, postproduction facilities, video- duplication companies and other industry enterprises are dumping tapes more quickly than Disney can shed Miramax movies... The tapes, which are not biodegradable, arrive 5,000 to 10,000 a day at Tropical Media in Burbank, Calif. Tropical and similar companies hire independent recycling companies to break down the cassettes in Mexico by stripping the plastic and screws off the tapes... Given that it takes one-sixth of a gallon of petroleum to produce a single half-inch VHS tape, the more tapes can be reused, the less they strain the world's energy sources..." One spokesman "points out that such processes fall short of... "recycling," of turning the products into something new. "It's actually reconditioning. The tape shell is made from engineering resin that can't be reused." Yet Sony announced in August that it has found a way to do just that. The solid polystyrene cases are chemically modified to create a water-soluble liquid polymer that can then be used to pull pollutants from industrial wastewater. A single cassette shell can treat 65 barrels of wastewater, according to the company's Web site."

Posted by pride at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

George Lucas on theatrical: You could chop that off in a second

The Reporter's Paula Parisi has a Hotel Bel-Air breakfast with George Lucas, whose coffee is definitely strong. "There are definitely some dynamics that are changing the economics of the business. What do you think of Mark Cuban's idea of releasing films simultaneously at home and in theaters?" I think it'll happen— it'll have to happen... because of piracy. It's the only way you can stop piracy; there is no other way. You have to get a very, very aggressive enforcement program so that people do have consequences to stealing, but you also have to be able to offer it to them ... for the same price they can get it on the street. It won't be DVDs—DVDs aren't going to be around too much longer. If you can get it at home for $2, then why would you go on the street and get a bad version? Lucas believes PPV will replace DVD. It's the way kids do it today. It's how you do it on your iPod: They just download it. You pay 99 cents for music, and movies will be like two bucks. That will definitely change the economics of the business because (studios) are losing money now... If you look at the (theatrical) divisions, I don't think they make any money. I don't think they've made money for five or six years... For studios, the fact is that the theatrical film market is less than 10% of their business—it's very, very small. I mean, you could chop that off in a second, and it wouldn't even bother them—they're just doing it as a promotional thing.

Posted by pride at 04:17 PM | Comments (1)

Greek chic: the next breakout national cinema?

Fiachra Gibbons of the Guardian thinks Greece might have the next breakout national cinema, writing on the eve of the International Thessaloniki Film Festival: "Only a few years ago Greek cinema was the preserve of arid intellectual epics choked with philosophical allusion and cloying nostalgiac melodramas on the manifold historical misfortunes of the Greeks.

"The only relief was provided by the odd... very broad comedy (we are talking films like the fantastically-named Cow's Orgasm here). [But] not only have mainstream directors found a formula that has Greeks returning in their millions to cinemas to see big, well-made films like Brides and A Touch of Spice, but a new wave of young filmmakers has emerged to rewrite the rules and create a very particular extreme humanist style of their own. For the first time in what feels like aeons, Greece is staring itself squarely in the face. To everyone's surprise - most of all the Greeks - the results make compelling cinema.... Yet this is not iconoclasm (another Greek invention) for the sake of it. There is something else going on that is very Greek in its way of melding conflicting, often contradictory emotions, and which avoids the chill cynicism of so much extreme cinema in Europe and the US." [She surveys specific titles at the link.]

Posted by pride at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

Saw seen: Forbes laps at Lions Gate

As a third Saw is foreseen, Forbes' Peter Kafka enters Jon Feltheimer's den: "No one likes a loser. But in Hollywood, even some of the winners don't get much love. Just ask the folks at Lions Gate Entertainment, the small movie company with one of the year's big hits—Saw II [which has] pulled in $80 million since it opened Halloween weekend.... Add that to the $100 million box-office take, and a slew of DVD sales from the original released last year, and Lions Gate has a franchise its bigger competitors would kill—or maim, slash, torture—for. [Yet] Hollywood's chattering classes instead argue—sotto voce—that the success of the Saw movies just makes Lions Gate more likely to try to sell itself... None of this is news to Lions Gate [CEO] ... Feltheimer, who is used to hearing that his company is for sale. But it's not, he insists. "People who tend to put themselves up for sale tend to do the opposite of what we're doing," he argues.... If Lions Gate were dressing itself up for a sale, it would logically be ratcheting down its movie-making business and focusing on its catalog of 6,200 films and 1,800 television episodes... Making new movies, even the small-budget ones that Lions Gate specializes in, is inherently risky." [More of the Lions Gate line at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

Egyptian Risky Business? Breaking with self-censorship

Self-censorship by filmmakers in Egypt may not occur to younger ones, writes Farah El Alfy of Beirut's Daily Star. "It is a well-known fact that within Egypt, premarital sex is a taboo subject. It's not that it doesn't happen but simply that there is a "silent agreement" between each individual and society not to talk about it. The independent film industry, however... is going all out to break it... The Fifth Pound by Ahmed Khaled is just one example of a film challenging the norm when it comes to sexual frustration on celluloid, depicting a lower-class couple who tip a bus driver to take them on a drive around the city while they consummate their relationship in the bus.... Unsurprisingly, Khaled's artistic 14-minute portrayal of a young man and his veiled girlfriend who make love... through Cairo, has created an uproar, being banned in nearly all cinemas and cultural centers. The camera focuses on facial expressions - the satisfied man, the erotic woman and the bus driver's subtle glances. In that it is more suggestive than explicit, which is even more dangerous in what remains a conservative country when it comes to the details of sex." [More blow-by-blow at the link.]

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

Truly spending: on the first trio of Truly Indie pics

Chantal Outon of Austin Business reports on one of the first lambs of the TrulyIndie initiative: "After Mari Marchbanks' debut feature-length movie, Fall to Grace, premiered at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival... the Austin independent filmmaker knew her life was about to change. ... "It's tough out there in the film festival circuit, marketing the film. I thought, 'This is a whole new game,'" Marchbanks says.... Marchbanks' film is one of the first three independent films chosen for Truly Indie, an initiative formed by... 2929 Entertainment LP, whose companies include... Landmark Theatres and Magnolia Pictures Distribution. [Mark] Cuban is co-owner of 2929... Kelly Sanders in the Austin office of Magnolia Pictures/Landmark Theatres is the point person for Truly Indie. She'll work with Landmark's Los Angeles office and Magnolia's New York office on the new initiative." Which, of course, requires more out-of-pocket. "Filmmakers retain all the box-office receipts and film rights, and they pay an upfront fee that covers all distribution costs, including publicity, advertising and marketing. A one-week placement of a movie in 5 markets can cost a filmmaker about $40,000, while a weeklong theatrical run in 20 markets can cost up to $150,000, says Bill Banowsky, CEO of Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theatres.... "We work with the filmmaker to create a release strategy most likely to reach the film's largest audience in the most efficient way." ...The other two films chosen for the Truly Indie initiative are Donal Logue's "Tennis Anyone" and Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana's "Cavite," which was shot in the Philippines on a $10,000 budget." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 08:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

To market we go: AFM, Lassie and Harmonyic convergence

In the Independent, Geoffrey MacNab reports on shaking paws with Lassie at the American Film Market, among other surrealism. And: "On the first day of the market, I have a brief telephone conversation with Harmony Korine... Korine explains the plot of his next film, Mister Lonely, in matter-of-fact fashion, as if it is the most conventional costume drama. This will be a tale about a young Michael Jackson lookalike (played by Diego Luna) who ends up in a Scottish commune with Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple for company. Other residents include Marilyn Monroe (to be played by Morton), the Pope, the Queen of England (Sixties icon Anita Pallenberg), Madonna and James Dean. There is also a subplot about nuns and lepers in Latin America. "It's an allegory," Korine explains, but offers few hints as to its hidden meanings. [This] may sound preposterous, but unlike many projects being talked up in the Loews, it should actually be made. Korine's fashion-designer friend Agne�s B is helping finance the �5m [pound] feature, which is due to shoot shortly in France, Scotland and French Guyana."

Posted by pride at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

Backbroke mountain of debt: when filmmakers don't get out

The Sunday New York Times catches up with the Four-Eyed Monsters duo whose sweet, restless movie I've persisted in pimping, using them as a lede for an article about the bills left after televising your revolution: "Arin Crumley, 24, and his girlfriend, Susan Buice, 27, sat in their cramped apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn," scrivens Charles Lyons, "in front of the computers on which they edite

Posted by pride at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)

Inducting James Agee into the bruised, vulnerable, too-good-for-this-world poster club

Philip Lopate writes another one of the sort of jingly-jangly fact-filled ledes inspired by the short life of screenwriter, novelist and film critic James Agee in the Nation, on the occasion of Agee's induction into the Library of America: "In 1958, three years after James Agee suffered a terminal heart attack in a taxicab at 45, his friend and fellow film critic Manny Farber wrote an essay called "Nearer My Agee to Thee." The title captured Farber's characteristically mischievous attempt to wrest the real writer from his pious followers. "Even when he modified and showboated until the reader got the Jim-jams, Agee's style was exciting in its pea-soup density."

"In retrospect, Farber's effort to forestall sanctimony by objective assessment seems doomed, because Agee was such a prime candidate for literary sainthood: Handsome, tortured good looks, a cross between Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan; body-punishing habits (alcohol, cigarettes, work jags, insomnia); a rebellious streak; many loves; obsession with integrity; and an early death. He belonged to that bruised, vulnerable, too-good-for-this-world poster club of actors, writers and rock stars whose authenticity was vouchsafed by premature passing." [More lopin' Lopate at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

Scorsese: Is it our nature to be good or bad?

"The Departed is the first modern-day film I've done in 20 years. I don't even know how people dress any more," 'Marty' Scorsese tells the Independent's Kaleem Aftab. "I dress sort of like my father, tie and shoes. Today, people wear sneakers, they wear these clothes with hoods and stuff that I don't know." Age has become an issue for Scorsese... The most telling moment I witnessed in Marrakesh wasn't something Scorsese said; it was his embarrassment at having to take a breath using his inhaler. As quickly as he popped it out, he tried to hide the inhaler behind the blue blazer he was wearing. It came off as an attempt to disguise his own weakness. Age plays heavily on his mind, and it's clearly been discussed in the Scorsese household. "I agree that 63 is not so old, and that is what my wife says. But it is like they say here, 'God willing, one should not tempt fate.' One is breathing one minute and then the next, who knows what's going to happen? To make it to 63, the interest now is to go even deeper into yourself, to know yourself more, and know what you are capable of. There is still this good and bad in me, but I want to know: what are we capable of as human beings? Down to the essential question: is our nature to be good or bad?"

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

Artless in the heartland: Landmark's Indy kills

Reports Indianapolis Star's Susan Guyett, Landmark's designated markets change some plans: "Key Cinemas on Indianapolis' Southside will change its name and format Dec. 2, but it's not because owner Ron Keedy wants to: This makeover is a matter of survival. Keedy was told that after... Landmark Theatres opens Dec. 9, the sort of independent, foreign language and art films that played on his screens... would be unavailable. They would all head to Landmark at The Fashion Mall at Keystone." Under the new name, Key Cinemas Beech Grove, the theater "will be operated as a discount movie house with admission prices ranging from 50 cents to $2 for second-run family-friendly movies. Keedy is expanding snack bar offerings to include whole pizzas, deli sandwiches and ice cream. He will keep serving Key Cinemas' celebrated homemade caramel corn.... Simon Property Group is expected to close the city's other art film house, Castleton Arts, about the same time Landmark opens at a nearby Simon property."

Posted by pride at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Terry Gilliam: Swedish visionary?

The Scotsman reports Terry Gilliam got the Stockholm Visionary Award: "I never thought it was fun," the director said laughingly of his craft, talking to reporters in a hotel room. "I just thought it was a hard job. And I wish I wasn't obsessed with making movies, then I could have a happier life. "I'm a visionary!" Gilliam said with another booming laugh. "I don't know what I was until Stockholm decided I was a visionary. I guess I was just a film director. Now I'm a visionary."

Posted by pride at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

David Lynch: One day I crawled into a bin behind Bob's Big Boy

Greencine's John McMurtrie gets David Lynch to expand on his multi-billion dollar TM university notion, but of course, we're drawn to the Lynchian world of cuisine. You're a smoker and you drink a lot of coffee. I've read 15 cups a day... Maybe 20. That doesn't sound especially relaxing. Well, you know, I'm pretty relaxed... It's a funny thing. I just love coffee... I'm proof that you don't have to give up something to start meditation, and that happiness does come from within. It's so powerful, it almost doesn't matter what we do. I think I would go faster on the trail if I, you know, was a hair cleaner." And, of Bob's Big Boy, Mr. Lynch adds, "I used to go there at 2:30 every afternoon to try to catch ideas. I'd have coffee and a chocolate shake. And one day, after about 7 years—not every day, but I mean over a period of 7 years; I really liked going there at that time and thinking—I crawled into a bin behind Bob's and looked at the ingredients of the shake, and everything ended with "zine" or "ate," and so I figured I better stop that. They don't serve those anymore. I don't want to say that those are still on the market there. They've changed their shakes."

Posted by pride at 11:40 AM

November 16, 2005

Out of 15, 9/11?

David Poland is predicting that of the 15 shortlisted nominees for Best Documentary Oscar, the winner, sight unseen, could be On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report. Watch the trailer. Its rapidfire impact demonstrates that director-producer Linda Ellman is a veteran: an NBC News veteran who'd worked for Tom Brokaw and who also executive produced Hard Copy. A truism of the movie industry is that it takes the industry a minimum of three years to respond to historical events, and often, much, much longer. Thus, Oliver Stone's World Trade Centerand Paul Greengrass' Flight 93. There's a brief stock shot of the Twin Towers, tall at twilight, in Rent, and the image no longer startles. References to the events of that day and its aftermath are starting to flood into movies. Ideally, there will be a minimum of bathos, and a film like On Native Soil will not merely repeat conventional wisdom, but go beyond the news-porn of endlessly repeated images of the first Tower failing, the second Tower failing.

Posted by pride at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)

A ridiculous human being: O'Reilly-on-Greenwald action in WalMart fracas

Fox News entertainer Bill O'Reilly has his one-sided way, saying of Wal*Mart, the High Cost of Low Price director Robert Greenwald, "this guy is just to the right of Fidel Castro, I mean, the guy is just a fu—, a ree-dick-you-lus human being... He's an idiot. He is. He's a liar and an idiot." Back on his Brave New Films site, Greenwald writes, "I have discovered the miracle cure for all ailments. As I work through 18 hour days on a tour with the Wal-Mart film and the body rebels, the wonder drug appears! An attack by my friend Billy! What a pleasure, what an energizer, what a restorer of faith in the levels that Fox News will go!... Leave it to Billy Boy to come down on the side of corporate greed and fighting unfairly... but then he knows all about that from his personal experience."

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

Fear, terror, war, red states, liberal or populist: issue movies now

In a "red state"-centric riff in the Reporter, writer Kevin Cassidy asks some questions about politically-charged movies. North Country screenwriter Michael Seitzman reflects, "I feel like people misconstrue liberalism as populism when it comes to Hollywood... Movies are a populist art form; they have to be because they require so many people to embrace them in order for them to make a profit. Conservatives will often purposely confuse [liberalism with populism] because it serves their agenda. North Country is not liberal or conservative; it's about the right to work, the right to make a living, the right to feed your family... the right to live free in a just society, regardless of the color of your skin. That is a populist message that applies to Democrats, Republicans and anyone else who wants to be treated equally." Syriana scribe Stephen Gaghan adds, "Although I live in California now, I spent most of my life in Kentucky: I'm from the middle class on the middle of the block in a middle-of-the-road state in the dead center of the country. My parents still live in Kentucky, and there's no great gap between what they want and what I want: fiscal responsibility, a safe world for my children, less torture done in my name and the name of democracy, moral as well as strategic leadership. I think before you declare war on terror, you should first declare it on fear and misunderstanding because by the time I get to terror, I'm utterly useless."

Posted by pride at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

Finding Comedy in the Muslim World: Albert Brooks goes UAE

Albert Brooks was invited to debut his newest, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World at the Dubai Film Festival in the United Arab Emirates; "We're going," he told ABC News on November 4. ScreenDaily.com says it's a coup for the new festival there [sub. req.].

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

November 15, 2005

It's time filmmakers took control of distribution: Peter Broderick opines

The UK's ioFilm.com listens to Peter Broderick's roadshow as he 'rethinks film distribution' at the Vancouver International Film Festival Trade Forum; there's so much there I'll only quote this: "Broderick also now has a new message, that it's time filmmakers took more control of the distribution of their films."

Posted by pride at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)

No, I'm king of the world!: how Brokeback Mountain is like Titanic

Defamer elaborates on a Brokeback Mountain quote from Focus Features frontman James Schamus, via MSNBC: When it came time to design the poster for the film... Schamus didn’t research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. “If you look at our poster,” he says, “you can see traces of our inspiration, Titanic.

Defamer puts the taste to the test: "The posters [have] more than just “traces” of similarity; they are nearly matching sets of pretty young matinee idols in love, all long lashes pointing meaningfully to the ground and chins nuzzled longingly onto shoulders. ...Even the [bow] of the Titanic is echoed in size and shape to Heath’s denim-clad, sturdy left arm." [Snark persists at the link.]

Posted by pride at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

Billionaires in H'wd, freedom of the press and the men who own one

Patrick Goldstein big-pictures who's paying for today's rich movies: rich men. "Syriana is precisely the kind of movie studios no longer want to make, certainly not with their own money. That's one reason why Hollywood has laid out the welcome mat for a new generation of wealthy investors... With costs skyrocketing and studios focused on... Big Event movies, outside investors are [ideal] candidates to finance riskier fare, in particular mid-budget dramas and filmmaker-driven prestige movies. Of the 5 films up for [2005's] best picture... Million Dollar Baby was co-financed by Lakeshore Entertainment's Tom Rosenberg, Ray was bankrolled by Phil Anschutz and The Aviator was largely financed by Graham King. Real estate entrepreneur Bob Yari helped finance Crash and Thumbsucker... Jim Stern, part owner of the Chicago Bulls, backed Hotel Rwanda and Proof. Bill Pohlad, whose family owns the Minnesota Twins, co-financed... Brokeback Mountain... Having been badly embarrassed by its experience with Elie Samaha, who made a string of box-office stinkers, including... Battlefield Earth, Warners has stepped up in class, making Syrianawith [Jeff] Skoll, splitting the costs of The Polar Express with billionaire activist Steve Bing and Batman Begins with financier Thomas Tull."

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

Oh, huge opportunities: Rupert's 'net fix

The Reporter has an hour with ageless Rupert Murdoch, who offers his view of the internet: "Oh, huge opportunities. The Internet is certainly ... you know, it's ... I was operating—we've all been operating—during a changing model of communications: television, moving pictures and so on. But the Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said, "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing." With the technology that goes with it, the fact is that everybody now is empowered: Anyone can buy what they want, shop where they want, talk to anybody in the world that they want... state their own opinions. There's no mystery to a blog: Put up your thoughts... find friends. And the younger people are, the more time they're spending on it—it's extraordinary. We bought [MySpace] a few weeks ago and just closed the deal last night, legally. There are 32 million people already registered on that, and there are 125,000 a day being added to it. They're finding common interests: When they're 17 or 18, they go on looking for dates; if they're 25, there are 3... or 4 million young mothers out there talking about things. Within that, there are lots and lots of communities, and they can all blog—they can all write in a personal diary every week, or whatever they want."

Posted by pride at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Online viewing: White Stripes' Denial Twist

There's a beguilingly odd, dreamlike video for White Stripes' new single, "Denial Twist." Michel Gondry seems to have directed...

Here's one source where you can watch. Warning: the clip includes an animated Conan O'Brien. Plus: a Real Media link.

Posted by pride at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

Cusack, Chalabi and Arianna: a HuffPuff night

Vanity Fair profile subject Arianna Huffington reports on a "surreal" evening colliding with future Iraqi president Ahmed Chalabi and John Cusack in a pricey New York sushi boite: "Chalabi looked downright laid-back in a multi-colored sweater that can only be described as Cosby-esque. His group was an hour into their dinner when I arrived... the remnants of a sushi meal spread across the table. Most were drinking sake but Chalabi (who doesn't drink) and I (who wanted to keep my wits about me) stuck to green tea.... His Master of the Bazaar manner reminded me of former Rep. Lee Hamilton's description of Chalabi as the best lobbyist he'd ever met—other than legendary Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti... My cell phone rang at 12:30 a.m. It was John Cusack, who had come with me to the Council on Foreign Relations to hear Chalabi speak earlier... "What are you doing?" ... "I'm having dinner with Ahmad Chalabi," I replied (not a line I get to use very often). I turned to Chalabi and asked if it would be okay to ask Cusack to join us. "He's an American actor"... "I know, I know..." he interrupted, and [reeled] off a list of Cusack's movies, including Being John Malkovich and The Thin Red Line. I was going to offer up Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil but bit my tongue."

Posted by pride at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

Cheap change: DV, greenscreen and Wiki world

At the Reporter, Scott Kirsner surveys change in the wind, ranging from usual suspects Cuban/Wagner to Gary Winick champing to return to a $300K-level InDigEnt pic after the $100m Charlotte's Web; SFX wiz Dennis Muren; Randal Kleiser shooting a musical Red Riding Hood entirely in a new green-screen technique in 18 days, plus this from DocWorld: "At Brave New Films, the shoestring Culver City, Calif.-based company behind the forthcoming docu Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, researchers used a piece of Web-based software called a "wiki" to share notes from their preinterviews and later, to post footage shot by camera crews. "We had 10 or 15 people... all over the world doing research," ...Greenwald says. The Internet was the place for anyone on the production team to access... material... during the editing process, Greenwald says, "When I had an idea, I could go on the Web and call up unedited footage on the wiki in the middle of the night and make a note that said, 'Let's use this here or there.'" The online collaboration software helped Brave New Films accomplish more, Greenwald says, with a spread-out crew that consisted of volunteers and "poorly paid employees."

Posted by pride at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

Is it just me or is everything shit?

In New Statesman, Charlotte Raven reviews a newly published cultural rant, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur's Time Warner Books-published "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? The Encyclopedia of Modern Life."

"There are many surprising entries, but the book reaches its critical pinnacle when attacking "Quality", that category of cultural output which aspires to depth and profundity. This is important, because the widespread belief that all is well is founded on the illusion that "art" still has the potential to redeem us from the trash. It's not frivolous to describe Sofia Coppola as "a supercilious rich-kid auteur who does pseudo-profound confections that people initially twat themselves over but which, on second viewing, are the cinematic equivalent of unflavoured rice cake". The authors are forcing us to confront our false belief that this kind of fare is more sustaining than some Hollywood movie McNugget. At least we know those are bad for us. Lost in Translation evokes profundity in the manner, the authors say, of "Wim Wenders directing a crap U2 video in 1993". I fell for it initially, too, then experienced the same rush of irritation as, yet again, significance dissolved into spectacle." More rant-on-rant action at the link; publisher TimeWarner UK summas that it's "the standard reference work for everyone who believes everything is shit. Which it is. This book is for the large percentage of the population interested in saying no to the phoney ideas, cretinous people, useless products and doublespeak that increasingly dominate our lives.... This very funny, well-informed, belligerent rant of a book adds up to an excoriating broadside against consumer capitalism that the authors hope will sell loads of copies."

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

Edinburgh's jewel, Tarantino's Cameo

Edinburgh's historic Cameo Cinema may be converted to a pub, and critic Hannah McGill thinks the 1914 edifice is worth saving" "There's a certain horrifying inevitability about this news. So the Cameo's beautiful – hell, maybe one of the most beautiful cinemas in the world. So it's the oldest cinema in a city with a film history that's unique in all the world. So it has a relentlessly terrific programme, and marvellous staff. So some character called Tarantino has a bit of a thing about it. Screw all that, because what Edinburgh really needs is another big old pub, perhaps with deep-fried onion rings and three-for-two offers on Australian chardonnay. It's no surprise, and no secret, that arthouse cinemas have faced an uphill struggle since multiplexes owned by global corporations took over much of cinema business...

"I'm not a Luddite. I have an iPod and everything. But don't some things deserve to be preserved? Wouldn't it be nice if the next generation of cinema-goers had the opportunity to see a film in an intimate, handsome space, suffused with the history of the art form? Isn't this kind of important? ... Edinburgh is adored by visiting tourists because of its beauty and its sense of history, not its abundance of modern drinking holes. To regard a building as lovely as the Cameo as a disposable slab of real estate isn't just heartless, it's plain silly. The Cameo is an asset. Preserving the plasterwork and shoving a little screen in a back room isn't enough. Preserve the cinema. Whatever it takes. Please." THE SCOTSMAN'S COVERAGE is here, pointing out that Tarantino discovered the Cameo, "his favourite cinema anywhere in the world," when Pulp Fiction opened there as "the showpiece of the 1994 Edinburgh International Film Festival." SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY'S Fiona Leith writes, "Multiplexes across Scotland, it's a wonder that all arthouse and independent cinemas aren't doing exactly the same thing. If you build it, they will come; if you sell it they will buy it; and if you destroy it they won't bat an eyelid. Surely cinema, and the sensory experience of viewing... is something which can evoke enough passion in us to create some resistance to this latest venture. Romance may be dead, but we cannot be apathetic at the removal of romance from the act of 'going to the movies' too." MONDAY'S BILL OF FARE at The Cameo? Alphaville, Notre Musique, Battle in Heaven, Broken Flowers, Corpse Bride, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and Torremolinos 73.

Posted by pride at 12:20 AM | Comments (1)

Chronicles in self-Googling: Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman takes some of Mike Thomas' bait in the Chicago Sun-Times: ...You get lots of attention for your looks. "I do, but that's because I'm good-looking for a comic, for a Jew, for a ... you know what I mean? I think guys who think I'm hot are like, 'I think she's hot.' Like, they think they're the only one. Like, I'm very approachable, I seem attainable. I mean, I understand. When they call me 'coltish,' I know it's a nice way to say horse-face.... But it's true.

"I Googled myself and I saw that I was No. 6 on some list. Ooooo, No. 6! Sarah Silverman! I was so excited and I clicked on it and it was a list of long, horsey-faced people. No. 2? Abraham Lincoln... Any list where I'm only four away from Lincoln is complimentary. He freed the slaves!"

Posted by pride at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2005

Watching all six Star Wars movies simultaneously

As a further entry in the George Lucas-is-a-clandestine-experimental-filmmaker sweeps, WeirdHat.Com notes uncanny, frame-by-frame parallels when you watch all six Star Wars movies simultaneously, cuing the DVDs so that the initial SW logos are aligned. Page after page of frame captures galore make the case with extravagant detail.

[Via Slashdot.]

Posted by pride at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You: blogging a Gotham Award

At the magazine's blog, Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macauley describes the selection of nominees for a new Gotham Award category (of which I was one of the judges): "This year Filmmaker partnered with the IFP to create a new award to be given out in a few weeks at this year's Gotham Awards.

"Titled Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You, the award is designed to highlight worthy films that have fallen beneath the theatrical radar. We asked 18 festival programmers to each nominate two films from their festival. From this list, our editors—myself, Matt Ross, Peter Bowen, Mary Glucksman and Ray Pride—narrowed it down to 5 nominees and, eventually one winner. It was an interesting exercise. The films nominated by the programmers weren't some of the ones that I was expecting, and, after watching all the films, our nominees (which were voted with a pretty remarkable degree of unanimity) weren't, for the most part, the ones I would have expected from glancing at the list we started out with. As for the typical festival cry—"The docs were better!"—it was interesting that 3 of our 5 nominated films are docs and the two that aren't have heavy non-fiction elements." At the link, Macauley describes the 5 nominees.

Posted by pride at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

Ed Koch loves it: The Passenger

Former New York mayor Ed Koch, who turns 81 in December, continues to type reviews in his Koch on Film column. This week, all will be explained about The Passenger: "This turgid film, produced in 1975, has been newly released. If it had not been directed by the master, Michelangelo Antonioni, I believe it would have been panned with credible kudos to Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider for their brilliant acting. The plot had great potential, but it was inadequately fleshed out, leaving too many unanswered questions...

"The decision of the director to imply and not detail all that was taking place was why this film failed. It could have been a very good film noir but instead it is uninspired and often boring. However, it is worth seeing for the acting and especially to see Nicholson in his youth when he was young, handsome, and smaller in girth. I remember myself 30 years ago and when I think back to those days, I can hear the Beatles singing, “Yesterday.”

Posted by pride at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2005

Black light: how Shane got the look

Mike Russell posts a lengthy Shane Black� interview, expanding a Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang piece that ran in the Oregonian. "I had a DP [Michael Barrett] who came from television, from "CSI." He did 3 seasons. We used a digital intermediate, which means we never really had a print until we finished the movie. All the shots, the entire cut, was on a computer. Then you output that finished product onto a piece of film," Black recounts, before revealings: "So we'd be shooting, and Michael would light minimally—just enough so he could come to me and say, "All right—this is going to look like shit in dailies. But once we get to post, we can start to dial up colors and make it look good."

"So we ended up looking at these shots in post, and dialing in the colors and punching up the things we wanted—a process that, if we’d done it photochemically, would have taken weeks. Now we can do it in hours. And the projectors that were showing us these colors cost a million dollars apiece—and they're video projectors. I'm surprised more people don't use it, because it's so powerful a tool if you're trying to save time and money. You can light things with much less effort, get it done down and dirty—with the knowledge that it can always be fixed later, when money and time aren't so at risk."

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

Considering William Eggleston and his Real World

Michael Almereyda's doc on the photographic great, William Eggleston in the Real Worldopens in the UK along with a major ICA tribute. The Telegraph's SF Said considers: "... At the age of 66, Eggleston is widely known as the father of colour photography.
"It's like suddenly people are ready, in a way that they weren't before," says Almereyda. "I think it's partly because Bill has influenced so many other people that the sensibility seems more acceptable; it's less shocking or puzzling." Eggleston's sensibility is radically democratic. He takes photographs of the everyday places, people and things that most of us take for granted. His eye is drawn to the ephemeral minutiae of life, mainly in the American South: cars, shopping trolleys, road signs; gas station forecourts and empty back yards; decaying furniture and discarded toys. But the way he looks at his subjects - from strange angles, saturated with intense light and colour - gives them an iconic stature, investing them with mystery and grace... He's had a massive impact on the form, transforming notions of style and subject matter alike in the course of a career that encompasses some 450,000 photographs. You can see his influence in the work of artists as diverse as Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin and Stephen Shore.... Most of all, though, his sensibility can be seen in contemporary cinema. Sofia Coppola has openly discussed her debt to him. "It was the beauty of banal details that was inspirational," she has said." More at the link, including descriptions of the doc, other proteges, and Eggleston at work.

Posted by pride at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2005

Indie shift: Lili Taylor's p.o.v.

Lili Taylor's in Bent Hamer's Factotum, an adaptation of the Bukowski novel, and after Gareth McLean of The Guardian snuggles up, the actress says what she thinks indie means today. "Lili Taylor is animated. Barely contained in the oversized armchair in which she sits, her svelte muscular frame is taut and her face expressive. She is talking, quickly and urgently, about how bad it has been being a liberal in America in the last 5 years... Even her hair, long and wavy, bounces enthusiastically. Despite, or perhaps because of the jet lag she's been suffering since arriving in London.., she's a Tiggerish bundle of energy, planning trips to the Tate and relaying how her previous night's trip to the theatre didn't go so well..."

Of changes in the past 6 years, Taylor says, "There's been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn't have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can't count the ways a director's vision is compromised... I hadn't done a film in a while where that independent spirit was happening... Factotum almost reminds me of films from the 1970s—it doesn't go anywhere, in the best possible way. As a film, it breathes."

Posted by pride at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)

Sarah Silverman: reality and fantasy

Among reviewers and profile writers, there's a different picture of the kooky kut-up in each mind's eye. In Rolling Stone, Vanessa Grigoriadis says of the star of Jesus is Magic, "Despite being almost too cute—a Jewish Cameron Diaz—Silverman has the mentality and wardrobe of a teenage boy (if she ever wears anything but a baseball T-shirt and jeans, I missed it)." In Dana Goodyear's New Yorker profile, "Quiet Depravity," we learn that "Silverman presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character." Blender calls the 34-year-old comedian "the raven-haired crush of a million indie-rock boys." At Blender, Andrew Goldman notes, "If you are a straight white guy in his 30s who owns at least one Guided by Voices album, you probably know her well enough to have fantasized about pawing her shapely tuchis."

Reports Sports Hollywood, "She's kind of like, what's her name? Babe Didrikson," longtime buddy Colin Quinn told "GQ" magazine. "She can throw a softball half a mile; she can hit a twenty-foot jumper; she's got a punch like a Guatemalan welterweight." And, as described in the HBO comedy fest program, "Sarah Silverman looks like someone you went to camp with, and maybe you did, but it is also because she's been in tons of shit." Plus, in a three-star review, Chicago Reader writer J. R. Jones writes about la politique de la salle in his city: "I missed Jesus is Magic. when it had its Chicago premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and wasn't looking forward to seeing it for the first time in a roomful of mostly male journalists. It's probably the hardest possible way to enjoy a comedy, jammed in among a bunch of competitors who are all hypersensitive to the others' reaction. (The Chicago Film Critics Association recently asked members to stop snorting and laughing dismissively during press screenings.)" Me, I'm more hypersensitive wondering whom the loaded phrase "mostly male" might be pointed toward.
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Posted by pride at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

A Wedding

"Moustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born filmmaker and producer of the Halloween horror movie franchise, died Friday from wounds sustained in the triple hotel bombings in Jordan. He was 75. His daughter, Rima Akkad Monla, 34, also was killed. Akkad, who lived in Los Angeles, was in Jordan with his daughter to attend a wedding. He died in the Jordanian hospital where he was being treated."

Posted by pride at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2005

Porn B.C.: Checking in with the East Van Porn Collective

Georgia Straight's Pieta Woolley visits with a happy camp of Vancouver no-no-budget filmmakers. "The East Van Porn Collective never expected its first and only movie to screen beyond East Vancouver. After all, the budget was just a few hundred bucks. Plus, it’s the work of 7 non-filmmakers, with the help of one member with a couple of documentary-film classes under her zipper." Woolley reveals more of her lasciv proclivs, as she narrates, "In spite of all that, the film is an independent filmmaker’s wet dream. Thanks to a self-funded tour, "Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective" is now... certainly an international rumbling. Over Earl Grey tea at the Our Town Café on East Broadway, the Georgia Straight met with alt-porn stars nerdgirl, JD Superstar, Monster, Mr. Pants, and Professor University. They’re just back (with the exception of nerdgirl) from a six-week tour throughout eastern and central North America. “We slept on couches and floors; it was like an old-school rock band,” Professor University told the Straight, explaining it was Greyhound, rather than jets and limos, that carried them from screen to screen. “Everywhere we went, people wanted to pick our brains about how to make movies.” ... Part of the film’s charm is that the collective members look like typical East Vanners, quiet revolutionaries who might serve you a latte, drywall your basement, or teach your kids second grade. Another part of the charm: the film is so utterly East Van. Even the name of the porn film within the film—Bikesexual—has a whiff of Commercial Drive about it. How was such a Vancouver-oriented film received in New York and Cape Breton? “There’s an East Van in every town,” Mr. Pants said." [More exposure at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

Times for a reality check: what kind of hit film satisfies 43rd St.?

Another semi-fathomable piece on movies in the NY Times, a profile of moneyed producer James D. Stern, headlined "Is There A Hit Film in the Battle For Ohio?" Straw men litter the corridors: "With Jarhead revisiting the gulf war and Good Night, and Good Luck taking moviegoers all the way back to McCarthyism for a history lesson, it must not have seemed like such a stretch to make a documentary about a divisive event that at least everyone remembers," recalls David M. Halbfinger. "To the lengthening list of political films vying for the attention of a polarized public"—nice alliteration and presumption of political polarization there—Stern, Halbfinger continues, giving with one adjective and taking with a verb— is "a serious Hollywood financier and Broadway producer who dabbles at directing his own movies - hopes to add one that looks squarely at the 2004 presidential campaign..." [Money=virtue; artistic ambition=cuckoobird.] "The question, of course, is just how many people will want to relive that fight." And who's asking that question? Halbfinger? Halbfinger's editor? Halbfinger's circle of friends? "Of course" that's the question? Prove it.

Posted by pride at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

Think Fink: Ken Finkleman out of The Newsroom

Ken Finkleman, Canada's equivalent of Ricky Gervais, behind CBC series "The Newsroom" and "More Tears" is shooting an ambitious, untitled six-part miniseries, set in a hotel and with 200 roles, running "the gamut from love story to comedy to murder mystery. Most shooting was done in Toronto but [Ottawa's] Chateau Laurier was chosen for several locations, including the kitchen, sub-basement and retro-looking pool. The sprawling story is framed around two murders, some 40 years apart, set at a hotel housing a bizarre range of characters. The project features recognizable Canadian faces such as Tom McCamus, Don McKellar and Martha Henry, who plays the drug-and-alcohol addicted facility's owner."

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

November 09, 2005

Weinsteinco and Swedish meatballs?

Mediabistro says they've got a Weinsteinco exclusive on doings around their first pic: "The new Weinstein Company has yet to release a film, and already, it's making pals... The director of it's [sic] first non-Mouse-owned [release] is caught in Harvey's tangled web. Over at the under-new-management Paramount, execs were eager to make a deal with Derailed's director, Mikael Hafstrom [and assigned him to] Marvel Comics'... Deathlok as a priority development deal..." But! "Harvey's got an option on Hafstrom, and insiders say he's not letting go so easily of his new Swede." Prediction: it depends on how much b.o. Derailed throws off, or "on just how willing Paramount is to cut in [Weinsteinco] on half of a new Marvel Comics movie just months after Paramount made an overall deal with Marvel...?"

Posted by pride at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)

b. movies: Agnes, producing

At Japan Times, Ketty Laurent talks to 64-year-old designer agnes b. about fashion and her contribution to moviemaking: "Agnes Trouble Bourgeois, known to the world as Agnes B., started to design clothes at the age of 19 and opened her first boutique in Les Halles in Paris in 1976. 29 years later, her company has 129 boutiques, selling clothes, accessories and travel goods around the globe...

"The company maintains two art galleries/libraries, and her stores sell a line of limited-edition artist T-shirts that feature the works of visual artists such as Jonas Mekas and Gilbert and Georg... Cinema is another longtime interest of the French designer. Her production company, Love Streams, has produced films of cutting-edge directors such as Harmony Korine, Gasper Noe and Claire Denis... Her designs have appeared in... Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive and Lost in Translation. "Fashion is like a stone that you throw into the water. There are ripples and little waves. I see some clothes that were inspired by mine, readapted, redefined. But as far as I am