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December 31, 2005

Always let it keep rolling: Terry Malick talks in OK

Reporting in from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Susan Albert of the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise catches up with a Terrence Malick Q&A after a screening of The New World: "Mike Bush, local chiropractor, wife Cathy, and two children, Trinnie and Madison, attended the preview because “we are art people and we have to be entertained.... We came to hobnob,” he said.... Malick's wife Alexandra welcomed the audience... She credited Malick's parents, Irene and Emil Malick of Bartlesville, who were in the audience, as the reason for the screening.

"Later, at Theater Bartlesville, Malick said, “I knew it would have a slow, rolling pace. Just get into it; let it roll over you. It's more of an experience film. I leave you to fend for yourself, figure things out yourself... I film quite a bit of footage, then edit... Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always let it keep rolling... There's a good many pictures I'd like to make, we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make...” [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

Foundas finds foreign film foundering

in LA Weekly, Scott Foundas chooses the best movies that didn't play Los Angeles in 2005: Robert LePage's The Far Side of the Moon; Claire Denis' The Intruder; Marco Bellochio's My Mother's Smile; Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear and his The Century of the Self; and Theo Angelopoulos' epic The Weeping Meadow.

"The set pieces in The Weeping Meadow—including the flooding of an entire village Angelopoulos had constructed from scratch for the filming—are remarkable, but above all, the movie feels like a summary of everything Angelopoulos has done, and a renewal. As Eliot said, “In my beginning is my end.” And vice versa."

Posted by pride at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)

World's oldest cinema reopens in Beijing

China Daily's Beijing Weekend reports that the oldest cinema in the world has reopened: "Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Chinese [movies, Daguanlou Cinema], running 102 years since it opened in 1903, has just been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest operating movie theatre. With an investment of 5 million yuan (US$620,000) from the government and the support of China Ancient Architecture Research Centre, the cinema has regained its original look from the 1900s. It is like travelling between the past and present as visitors step into the century-old cinema. Though there is still that "new smell" in the new renovated theatre, people can easily find themselves lost down memory lane. Yellow glazed glass, black and white posters, long gowned ushers and richly ornamented corridors all take people back to the times of a century ago. "We just want to rekindle people's interest in the old cinema," said Wang Zhanyou, the 12th manager in the long history of the cinema: "Because in the last few years Da Guanlou has sustained losses," he sighed." [More history and anecdotage at the link.]

Posted by pride at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

Peter Howell says it's over and it makes him sad

While Toronto Star's Peter Howell has a 2005 top 10, he's sounding the knelliest of death knells for the cinema-going experience: "We may look back on this year as the beginning of the end of movie-going as we know it. I'm referring to the magnificent ritual of the past century, whereby film lovers congregate in dark public auditoriums to gaze upon a silver screen reflecting wondrous images. I see this rite changing dramatically, and it saddens me.
This might sound alarmist, and I wish it were simply that. But technological and cultural innovations of the past 12 months have pointed the way to a revolutionary future for the movies, one that few could have envisioned until recently. Watching a film is fast becoming a hermit's pursuit."

After a stretch musing on the iPod, Howell writes, "Traditionalists who demand a larger screen may well opt to stay in their basements, viewing a DVD on a new high-definition TV, because the cost of turning your abode into a bijou is rapidly dropping. How many times have you heard people say in the past year that they'd prefer to stay home and watch a movie on DVD, because the quality is so good, the price is right and they don't have to put up with the cost, the noise, the ads and the rude patrons found in cinemas?... The century-old habit of going out to the movies could become a cult pursuit indulged in by the nostalgic, much like the people who gather for antique car shows. And the films that do get shown in public theatres will either be blockbusters like King Kong or sentimental reissues of Casablanca and other classic fare. Independent and foreign films will be virtually shut out. The vast middle ground of popular entertainment will have been ceded to the single end-user, huddled in a basement or coffee shop."

Posted by pride at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

Tony gets a bony in Movie Club: logrolling in our Times

There will be time to read the rest of A.O. Scott's Thursday Movie Club contribution, but it does open with a forbidding hedge of gentlemen-well-met that would not be out of place over premium beers after a Manhattan evening screening:

"I'm agog at the range and erudition of the three previous posts, which I don't hope to match. I would happily spend the next week—the next six months—studying and annotating Jonathan's list. Reading it reminded me of why I love your books, Jonathan—"Essential Cinema: Of the Necessity of Film Canons" is the one I've been reading most recently. It is possible, in the book as in that roster of 24 movies, with its witty juxtapositions and exemplary cosmopolitanism, to discover not just a universe or two of taste and sensibility but also portals that lead into politics, spirituality, and every conceivable realm of human experience. Which is what movies are uniquely and almost miraculously able to offer, but perhaps too rarely deliver.

In fact, I did scroll down a little, and I like this: "...DVD and other technologies have, potentially and in fact, liberated cinephilia from the parochial confines of New York and a scattering of college towns. We are approaching an almost Borgesian situation in which a global, virtual cinematheque will be available at the spin of an iPod wheel or the click of a mouse. The softness of the domestic box office and the looming possibility of "day and date" home video and theatrical releases have been discussed mostly in terms of potential effects on the movie industry. A corollary question that has not been raised sufficiently is what effect the eclipse of theatrical exhibition and the proliferation of available titles for home consumption will have on film culture." [Much more from the panel at the link; the Scott pic is from the Times, the Rosenbaum from this Argentinian movie site.]

Posted by pride at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

indieWIRE foreign pic poll and gamy grosses

29 crickets and programmers chirp in indieWIRE's " fourth foreign-language film survey". Amid the results, compiler Anthony Kaufman sounds this sad, sour note about the poll's topper: "In a slow year for foreign language films at the box office, few of the survey's top films broke [$1 million]. Kings and Queen—which not only was voted best film, but star Emmanuelle Devos was a widely popular favorite in the best actress category—made a paltry $290,000 in theaters after 30 weeks in release.

"Look at Me was the highest grossing top-rated film, at roughly $1.7 million, while 2046 was not far behind with nearly $1.5 million in ticket sales. The rest failed to crack the $1 million mark." [Pictured: Rois et Reine's Mathieu Amalric; Disclosure: I was one of the 29 who voted.]

Posted by pride at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

Live free or indie: NH's Lars Trodson challenges NY's Tony Scott

A. O. Scott's recent paean to the death of "howler" movies gets a gauntlet thrown down by Lars Trodson in New Hampshire's Seacoast Online: "A.O. Scott and his peers may feel they see representative regional cinema at the big film festivals. But the idea that the best of the best of these independent films will eventually surface at these festivals, by the way, isn’t always true... This is a difficult and tricky point to make[, but] the idea of film festivals is to celebrate the best, not the worst, so the filmmaker who is wildly off base in his first few tries but has ambition and talent isn’t really going to get seen.... Can the film critic of the New York Times get out of the office and go to film festivals such as the New Hampshire Film Expo? ... He should... How many more reviews can you squeeze out of a product that you have no real interest in any more, A.O. Scott?

"This was certainly an implicit message in your "Howlers" essay about the status of Hollywood and in other reviews you write. In your review of Casanova, you wrote: "So I sighed and sank down in my seat, preparing for a long, perfumed ride to Prestigeville." About the latest Jennifer Aniston movie, you write: "I suppose Rumor Has It could be worse, though at the moment I’m at a loss to say just how." You sound tired, tired, tired.... Getting out to the heartland of movie-making is certainly not as glamorous as watching films in New York City. You’ll have to sit in dingy auditoriums, suffer through too many conversations with young filmmakers... stay at a hotel that’s uncomfortable and take part in conversations that are howlers in their own right... In the process, you will see some films that, in all their glory, in all their howling glory, may revive your interest in the state of film-making today. Because there will be a moment, maybe just one, but it will be there nonetheless, inside the "train wreck, the catastrophe, the utter and complete artistic disaster" — as you so aptly described these bad films — where you’ll not see just abject failure but also a glimpse of a Scorcese, or a DePalma, and then you’ll know it was worth the trip. So get out of the office. Come see us up in New Hampshire some time."

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

Original Chen: Harvey goes back on Promise

In another odd shift, coming after postponing platform releases of Transamerica and Mrs. Henderson Presents until the new year, Weinsteinco drops Chen Kaige's Promise, reports Variety's Ian Mohr. "Last May, the Weinstein Co. pacted for North American rights to Chen Kaige's film, with plans to release it under the title Master of the Crimson Armor." Pic opens Friday in Los Angeles for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run." But sales rep Etchie Stroh's Moonstone Entertainment and China Film Group will handle that as well as its US, UK, Australian and South African releases with partners to be named. Mohr suggests the pic got in the way of Weinsteinco's other Oscar designs, and quotes H. Weinstein, "We have thoroughly enjoyed working together for the past seven months and have reached an amicable decision to part ways on Master of the Crimson Armor."

Adding to the confusion, there's Chen's 121-minute Chinese hit, with the scissored US version clocking in at 97 minutes. "The Crimson Armor title has been jettisoned, and both versions will screen under the title The Promise. While the longer version is the Oscar hopeful, the shorter version is nominated as a foreign film contender at the upcoming Golden Globes. Revised version includes a new beginning and a modified ending to reshape the pic for Western tastes... Pic is expected to take in $16 million-$25 million in its homeland."

Posted by pride at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

Home for the holidays: Family Stone's Thomas Bezucha

From the LaPorte County Herald-Argus News comes the tale of Family Stone writer-director Thomas Bezucha visiting mom in Beverly Shores, Indiana. Writes Catherine Lafrance, "Bezucha was in Beverly Shores visiting his mother, Suzy Vance, for the Christmas holiday. Sitting in his mother’s home, looking at the lake, Bezucha said he enjoys visiting northwest Indiana, calling the area “incredibly rich.”

“I’ve been coming here every summer since the early ’70s,” he explained..." Gushes Lafrance, "The actors’ pride in the film has extended into their own adulation of Bezucha as a writer and director.“Diane and Sarah Jessica are like den mothers,” he said with a laugh. “They go out of their way to mention my name during interviews.” Bezucha accepts the negative reviews he's gotten, saying the movie "can be a little divisive... Some people have really hated it. But that’s when you know you did a good job.”

Posted by pride at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2005

Grain of the VOICE: film crickets put 2005 to bed

A prime highlight of the VOICE year-end movie crickets' poll is when contributors hone their anti-bourgie cred and press gobbets of caffeinated contrarianism, sultry snobbery and juicy, injudicious phrasing into the mix. Bangkok-based expat Chuck Stephens, who has a naughty one I won't quote, seldom disappoints. But here's a personally triumphalist one from his East: "A History of Violence and Land of the Dead are a pair of potent reminders as to why I won't live anywhere near North America anymore." Other choice entries in this seventh edition: NYPress' Armond White spearing the Squid and the Whale: "The almost unbelievably biased critical response in favor of the dreadful Squid and the Whale is proof of what happened when the educated and privileged classes moved into positions of power. They usurped cultural savvy as their own provenance the way they also gentrified neighborhoods—turning the movie theaters into cultural slums. A friend exclaimed that he wouldn't want to live next door to the people in The Squid and the Whale let alone watch a movie about them."

Philly City Paper's Sam Adams on 2046: "More than a year after its Cannes debut, 2046 finally snuck into theaters. Everyone I know already owned the DVD, but many declined to watch it, an act of fetishistic denial perfectly in tune with Wong's universe." Plus, this from NYC freelancer Saul Austerlitz: "Caché was so diabolically effective in large part due to the production design. The couple's apartment was a bourgeois intellectual's idea of paradise, all modernist furniture, overstuffed bookshelves, and recessed lighting. You could practically hear critics salivating as they pictured their own dingy walk-ups." Sweetly, concisely, Boston Globe's Wesley Morris takes on one of the most cavalier of cavils against Brokeback Mountain: "Stonewall, Harvey Milk, Fire Island, Edmund White, John Waters, and Andy Warhol are all going on simultaneously with Ennis Del Mar's loneliness. But gay culture can't save him. Gay culture doesn't know he exists. The idea of his "choosing" to live (and presumably die) alone in that closet of a trailer with two shirts in the middle of nowhere is tragic. It all hails from Annie Proulx, but Ennis is a man after Edith Wharton's heart." [My ballot is here.]

Posted by pride at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

Cannibalizing the crickets: Weinsteinco's Wolf-ish ploy

In Wednesday's New York Times, advertisements for Wolf Creek lead off with heavy verbiage from Earl Dittman of "Wireless Magazine" (which is also a Website-less magazine): TERRIFYING! A thriller that takes fear to another level." (The lack of an exclamation point at the end of the last phrase casts modest doubts on its authenticity.) Premiere and the New York Post are also weighted. But Weinsteinco's Dimension Films pulls a fresh variation on an old trick, quoting Darren Bousman, director of Saw II with the banal "An edge-of-your-seat thriller!" but also in-house directors Robert Rodriguez ("As real as horror gets!") and Quentin Tarantino: "John Jarrett delivers a performance that's destined to go down as one of the greatest film heavies of the last 25 years!" Rodriguez and Tarantino are collaborating on a Dimension-Weinsteinco effort called Grindhouse; the star of Tarantino's segment is reportedly... John Jarrett. (Nothing to see here, move along, keep moving.)

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

Niche bitch: Foundas on foundering films

In a dauntingly articulate entry in Slate's year-end Movie Club, Scott Foundas (in conversation with David Edelstein, Scott Foundas, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and A.O. Scott) addresses a number of pics and stats (especially Munich), and makes these painful points about the current state of audiences for independent film: "As David Ehrenstein pointed out in an excellent and scrupulously researched LA Weekly article earlier this year, champagne corks now pop in distributors' offices if a foreign-language picture crosses the $500,000 mark at the U.S. box office, while most foreign titles don't manage to gross even one-tenth of that amount. I wish I could say the depressing news stopped there, but it doesn't. Independent American films—by which I mean the real thing and not the pseudo-independents produced by the studio-owned subsidiary divisions—are hardly faring any better... Debra Granik's superb Down to the Bone (with its award-winning lead performance by Vera Farmiga) took nearly two years to find a distributor and has earned all of $25,000 since opening in limited release one month ago, while Lodge Kerrigan's equally excellent Keane (backed by a relatively larger marketing campaign) has barely squeaked past $33,000. And what we critics say scarcely seems to matter. Both Down to the Bone and Keane had stellar reviews (as, for that matter, did The Intruder; Good Morning, Night; and The Weeping Meadow), yet taken together, all five films didn't attract as many moviegoers over the entire courses of their runs as flocked to Brokeback Mountain in its first week on a single Los Angeles screen...

"When Happy Here and Now—a Michael Almereyda film [pictured] I like even more than his William Eggleston documentary—finally opened in Los Angeles after three years on its distributor's shelf (and after repeated extolling of its virtues in print by myself and other critics), it grossed $700 in its first (and only) weekend, which sort of gives a whole new meaning to the term "niche audience."

Posted by pride at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

My year, at length: Miranda July

Miranda July says good-blog to all that, ending her Me and You and Everyone We Know blog, while offering up the tallest image of the week at the very least, a vertical ribbon of her 2005 experiences.

[Yes: she remembers to thank Mike Mills.]

Posted by pride at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

Sheetal that and more: Looking for women in Comedy in the Muslim World

"In the summer of 2004, American Comedy Actor and Film Director, Albert Brooks, steeped out of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi braving the summer heat," writes Bollywood Reel's Bhuvan Lall. "An hour later, he announced he had applied for permission to shoot a Hollywood comedy in India." But Bhuvan is more interested in Sheetal Seth.

"Hollywood actress of Indian origin Sheetal Sheth plays Maya, Albert Brooks’ chirpy assistant in the film. She is today one of the most popular actresses among the young NRI directors in USA. Her work in NRI films like American Chai, ABCD and Wings of Hope have resulted in several awards." Bhuvan notes, "Sheetal was born the middle child, and grew up on the East Coast playing sports and dancing... She has also been offered leading roles in Indian films but is still looking for a meaningful part." Variety, Bhuvan writes, "described Sheetal as an eye catching pretty person who beams like a ray of sunshine."

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

Chinese checkered: revenues up, ideas down

China's film industry revenues increased $150 million 2005, writes CRI Online's Tu Yun, to $US600 million from 260 movies. "The two latest movies—The Promise, a martial arts epic directed by mainland director Chen Kaige and Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, a family film directed by Zhang Yimou that puts emphasis on artistic merit—are currently screening... Tong Gang, director of the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said that these two films have significantly boosted the domestic film market... Nevertheless, experts say the lack of good screenplays, shortage of funds, unnecessary modifications as well as high ticket prices and other issues still remain the bottleneck for China's movie industry."

Posted by pride at 03:13 PM | Comments (0)

Ebert and Spielberg go P2P on Munich

... and Spielberg speaks on free speech, citing himself in the third person: "Some of my critics are asking how Spielberg, this Hollywood liberal who makes dinosaur movies, can say anything serious about this subject that baffles so many smart people. What they're basically saying is, 'You disagree with us in a big public way, and we want you to shut up, and we want this movie to go back in the can.' That's a nefarious attempt to make people plug up their ears. That's not Jewish, it's not democratic, and it's bad for everyone -- especially in a democratic society."

[Production still from a passerby found here.]

Posted by pride at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2005

Sundance-bound: Nick Cave's Proposition

Rouge has published two extracts from Nick Cave’s shooting script for The Proposition, "John Hillcoat’s drama about Australia’s violent colonial history. "The plot concerns the proposition given (in the first extract) by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) to Charlie (Guy Pearce): to free his young brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson), from jail and pardon him of crimes, Charlie must find and kill his older brother, the vicious Arthur (Danny Huston). The second extract, from later in the film, is a scene involving Charlie’s uneasy reintegration into Arthur’s gang." [Cave also wrote an unproduced "Gladiator II"; he talks about it, his music and screenwriting careers here.]

Posted by pride at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

Stephen Gaghan: execute it so well they have to make it

Over at Written By, Stephen Gaghan's ire remains on fire as he talks about the personal reasons Traffic and Syriana had to be written. "What is it about us that we need war on an abstraction to define ourselves? And why are the details of actual life such a potent defense against that abstraction?

"To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson: All politics is personal. To quote Robert Caro, Johnson’s biographer, “Absolute power doesn’t corrupt absolutely; it reveals absolutely.” We hold a mirror up to ourselves and find our political institutions in the reflection. We are our government. We are what is done in our name. So what kind of government are we? If our self-interest is borne out in our personal ambition and we wish the world to be shaped in that image, then what is the shape of the world? And what is the shape of us? ... “You realize they will never make that movie. That movie will never get made. It’s too political; people don’t go to films they can see on the news. You can’t show the War on Terror to be wrong or, worse, absurd and tragic. There’s no clear-cut antagonist. No hero. No victory. No life-lesson to go home with. Too much is left unanswered. Politics is personal? The limits of self-interest? Where are the easy answers? ... Well, as a filmmaker friend of mine said, “Isn’t the goal always to write something unmakeable, but then execute it so well they have to make it?” [Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, several letters to the editor examine the factuality of an op-ed that attacked Syriana's factuality.

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

December 23, 2005

Is the 4 Star Theatre (the last US Chinese theater) doomed?

At Asia Pacific Arts, Brian Hu offers a personal reminscence of the 4 Star Theatre in San Francisco, the nation's last Chinese movie theater, as its legal woes are mounting. "When I moved to the... Bay Area five years ago, the 4 Star Theatre in the Richmond District became one of the real pleasures for a young film lover... As the only remaining theater in the United States playing new Hong Kong films, the 4 Star represented a universe of filmgoing that existed in Asian-American communities before I was old enough to know who Wong Fei-hong or Asia the Invincible were.

"Attending 4 Star screenings of new and classic Hong Kong cinema showed me that while my many friends and family preferred their Asian cinema on bootlegged VHS and VCD, there was still a stronghold of fans—Asian and non-Asian alike—who made it a principle to see Hong Kong films on the big screen with a group of fellow cinemagoers... The 4 Star is facing eviction from the Canaan Lutheran Church, which purchased the property in 2001 and has waited for the 4 Star’s lease to run out so they can move in. Frank and Lida Lee, owners of the 4 Star, are suing the church, claiming that such an eviction violates a city ordinance which prohibits theaters from getting shut down because cinemas bring business into the surrounding area. Neighborhood businesses have petitioned, expressing their support for the 4 Star... I respect the Canaan Lutheran Church and I wish them luck in finding another piece of property in San Francisco. But to convert the 4 Star into a place of worship is counterproductive: the community has been worshipping the movie gods there for a century now, and it has no intention of stopping." [History and lots of cinephilic feeling at the link.]

Posted by pride at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

Dante's warpath: Homecoming keeps coming

Joe Dante continues to ignite the lumps of coal in everybody's political stocking, talking at length with Mark Peranson, editor of Canada's invaluable Cinema Scope magazine about his politically-charged zombie parable, Homecoming. Peranson observes, Some people are saying, “Oh, Michael Moore cost us the election.” "Which is bullshit. First of all, who knows who won the election? ... You’re going to sit around and actually tell me that these people won the election in Ohio ? Where the guy who’s in charge, and the people who make the machines said, “We’re going to deliver the election to George Bush.” The thing that’s amazing to me, and the thing where this movie came from, is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we’re in and what we’ve done to the image of this country around the world... It’s been happening steadily for the past four years. And nobody made a peep about it... The New York Times and all these people, they actually abetted the lies... that went into the making and selling of this war. And now that they see that the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with the toe of their foot to make sure that he doesn’t bite back.... It gets cowardly, and it’s sick, and I think nobody’s done anything about it. And this pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B-movie is the only thing that anybody’s done about this issue? That killed 2000 Americans and untold amounts of Iraqis? It’s sick, it’s fucking sick."

Dante concedes that George A. Romero's Land of the Dead broaches similar material, but "if you’re going code the message to that point, which is the way we’ve all done it... that’s fine, but, you know, it’s not going to reach an audience like a movie that’s overt… and this movie is not exactly subtle, the one I made... It’s really obvious what it’s about and what’s going on. And it seems to me that you have to be. Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. And everybody is afraid to do it. It’s not commercial, and people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Everyday people go through their normal lives and they go ahead and they pick up the mail and they take a bath, they walk the dog, and they do all this stuff and every minute they’re doing it somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish what, a religious theocracy in Iraq ? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it... I’m angry. I’m not the only one, I’m just the one who got to make the movie. But I represent a lot of people who don’t like the fact that the country that they grew up in is saying “Fuck you!” to the rest of the world, you know, without asking me. I didn’t tell anybody that it was okay. Nobody asked me if we should go to war."

Posted by pride at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

French ticklers?: legalizing file sharing in Paris

An odd note from the International Herald Tribune: "A nearly empty midnight session of the French National Assembly voted to add amendments to an antipiracy law that would allow peer-to-peer sharing of films and music over the Internet, a move that would legalize here what is considered piracy nearly everywhere else in the world." But, Thomas Crampton writes, The amendments face a tough time later in the legislative process, since the government, which holds a majority of seats, said it opposed the move. The small group of late-night lawmakers in the assembly, the lower house of Parliament, tacked on amendments that would establish a global license fee of 7 euros ($8.40) a month... That would permit Internet users to download unlimited digital music and films from the Internet for personal use..."We are trying to bring the law up to date with reality," said Patrick Bloche, a Socialist representing Paris, who was a co-author of the amendments. "It is wrong to describe the eight million French people who have downloaded music from the Internet as delinquents." [More of the politics and finances at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Secret cinema: Besson's latest materializes

Screen International's Benny Crick reviews Luc Besson's first pic in six years, Angel-A, shot with the same speed and secrecy this past summer as Munich, with slightly different results. "The French film industry’s best-kept secret of 2005, the offbeat romance was shot on the sly in Paris last summer... from a script that Besson wrote a decade ago, then put aside. Taking the familiar boy-meets-girl (in Paris) plot, Besson overlays it with a supernatural premise: that the girl is a female angel sent down to Earth to help a sympathetic sleazebag... Released in France on Dec 21 without press or preview screenings—although with a good deal of last minute media promos—it remains to be seen how Besson’s core youth audience will take to the film...

"Returning to the black and white of his 1983 debut [Le derniere combat], Besson turns mid-summer Paris into the film’s third main character, as Thierry Arbogast’s lush photography gives the script a timeless, fable-like quality.... The recurring leitmotif of Paris bridges also recalls an earlier and more insanely ambitious Paris-set boy-meets-girl tale, Leos Carax’s Les Amants Du Pont Neuf." [The trailer's up at the Angel-A website; click on bande annonce.]

Posted by pride at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)

But hey, it worked: self-DVDing Monday Night at the Rock 'N Bowl

Over at Chicago's Sharkforum group art blog, I've got an easygoing chat with Genevieve Coleman, who's putting her likeable rockumentary Monday Night at the Rock 'N Bowl on DVD because no one else would. She's got the right attitude: "We had no money to begin with, no money at all, I mean barely enough to buy a tape that costs ten bucks, so there is no way I could have started shooting if I had been rolling film. But more than that, it would have been really difficult, logistically, to shoot in a place with 36 lanes of bowling going on, loud music, running around non-stop, fluorescent lighting, with a film camera.

"The smaller video cameras really made it possible to just roll tape, and don't stop until they lock the doors that night, in an affordable and easily obtainable way, you know, borrowing a camera from friends every Monday. But hey, it worked."

Posted by pride at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Ledeing into The New World: John Patterson's sweet swoon

One viewing wasn't enough for me to sort out Terrence Malick's The New World, but I really, really want to see it again after reading John Patterson's marvelous lede to his essay in the Guardian. (I'm ready to switch to his blend of coffee.) "The finest American movie of the year—the finest, indeed, of many a year—is Terrence Malick's fourth feature, The New World. It takes America's first mythic story—the encounter between Jamestown pioneer Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the Indian maiden Pocahontas (an astonishing performance by 14-year-old newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher) in 1607—and renders it both ancient and modern. The script was originally written during the early 1970s—the era of Vietnam and the American Indian Movement's occupation of the Wounded Knee battlefield—and the movie feels like a time capsule of sorts, having gestated in the director's head for three decades, a message composed in the depths of one terrible war, and reverberating now in the mire of another."

"It is also an attempt to render onto film the concepts invoked in the famous final page of "The Great Gatsby": "a fresh green breast of the new world ... for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." [More ♥ at the link.]

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

Vocal criticism: the 7th Village VOICE crickets poll

While Jim Hoberman's summary and comments from other crickets won't be up until Tuesday, the top 144 movies of 2005, according to a roster of critics, including yr. correspondent, is up at the VOICE site. Top 5? A History of Violence, 2046, Kings and Queen, Grizzly Man and The World." 139 more at the link... [My ballot, which would be different on any given day, is here.]

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

3.5 Eyed Monsters: a sloth blog

Filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice blog a video paean to how life gets in the way of Episode 4 of their ongoing saga of trying to get Four Eyed Monsters out into the world.

I do not have the ambition to do these. I have been trying to do this, like, I've sat down to do the editing, I've looked at the interviews—It's like licking pavement... I mean, why aren't you cutting Episode 4? What's your fucking problem? What's your excuse? The duo are battling, but their taste in music remains cool.

Posted by pride at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

Pandora's Pillbox: bobbing for Christmas

Diary of a lost estate: someone in Santa Monica's put the late Louise Brooks' Medicare card up on eBay.

CAPLOCK ON NOW!: "LOUISE BROOKS AUTHENTIC ORIG.MEDICARE CARD,HAND-SIGNED FROM LOUISE BROOKS 1985 ESTATE SALE, W/ NOTARY CERTCOPY"

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

December 20, 2005

New World pictures: Malick goes Kubrick

Variety's Dave McNary and Gabriel Snyder report at least one perfectionist remains hard at it this holiday season, with Terrence Malick making major tweaks in The New World.

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"Just days before its Christmas bow at two venues in Los Angeles and one in [NYC], director Malick has been trimming his historical drama from the 149-minute version shown to critics and advance screening auds. Newer version is said to include 15-20 minutes of tweaks and trims, but has no major chunks cut out. New Line will release the longer version this weekend, will show it at awards screenings and has sent out DVD screeners of it to such voting groups as members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. New Line execs will see a shorter version soon and decide then which version will go out when the film expands late next month—around the announcement of Academy Award nominations on Jan. 31... New Line distribution and marketing topper Rolf Mittweg [says] the studio will make a decision on the exact release pattern of the new version once Malick delivers the new cut...."It's all part of the process of working with Terrence Malick," Mittweg added. "He simply wants The New World to be the best possible film that it can be." ...Malick is famous for tweaking his films until the last minute."

Posted by pride at 11:59 PM

December 19, 2005

Turnhere internet television: Filmmakerz n the 'hood

Turnhere is a new website (still in beta) compiling short videos about neighborhoods around the world. As the co. pr's, Turnhere is "seeking professional and independent filmmakers, [which] it pays for their work and creativity, to participate in an ambitious initiative which is chronicling life in American neighborhoods across the country through 2-5 minute short films made specifically for the Internet." Their bold claim? "TurnHere is essentially making the largest documentary on American culture ever made. Films should be artful and high-concept, focusing on the people, culture, history, local businesses and political landscapes across America...

"The site is highly viral, as each film has [its] own unique URL which can be forwarded via email." Austin, Texas is the setting of the sample they suggest; the short from my still-gentrifying Chicago neighborhood is emblematic to the point of parody, such as this shot of a young woman in an AC/DC t-shirt, wearing oversized sunglasses and dog-ears, striding in front of a U-Haul trailer on a leafy side street.

Posted by pride at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

Kenneth Branagh: Charity case?

Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute, writes Variety's Adam Dawtrey, was not greenlit with the expectation that Mr. Branagh's work could make a profit. "You might think a $27 million movie of [it], updated to the First World War, wouldn't stand much chance of making a profit... The producers... want to make absolutely certain it doesn't... The Mozart movie, conceived and directed by Kenneth Branagh with a libretto by Stephen Fry, is being bankrolled by a grant from the Peter Moores Foundation. As a charity, it's not allowed to make profits." But Producers-like, did they examine Branagh's filmmography and find a history of failure? Dawtrey jokes that possibility away in his opening graf.

Deeper in, he explains, "The film has been set up to ensure that any upside flows to the distributors, rather than to the foundation... Sales agent Celluloid Dreams is offering buyers an unusual deal—the better the film performs, the bigger their share of the backend. Once the distrib recoups its minimum guarantee and [other] costs, overages are initially split 50/50 with the production company, rising to 90/10 in favor of the distrib. "In my 20 years of experience as a producer, it's the first time I've seen a film financed that way," says the pic's French producer Pierre-Olivier Bardet. In this way, the foundation hopes to recoup some of the production cost without actually slipping into the black." $25 million of the budget comes comes from the Littlewoods retail and gambling concern, and "the charitable intent of Sir Peter Moores, the 73-year-old Liverpool-based patron of the arts... is to bring opera to the masses. Over the years, his foundation has funded roughly 50 recordings of operas in English."

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

Full Kael Press: Armond and Matt on Pauline and a sly Stone

In this week's New York Press, they're raising Kael. First, Matt Zoller Seitz: "This year's theatrical one-two crucifixion punch of Aslan from Narnia and Kong recalls a great Pauline Kael description in her review of the 1976 Kong:"Christ as a mistreated pet." Armond White is on the Family Stone's case. On PK: “The left are really great haters,” Pauline Kael wrote when taking exception to Mike Leigh’s class comedy High Hopes. White also gets at one of the the sly Stone's accomplishments, then cites an obscure precursor while kicking class: "When Thad is around, the Stones use sign language—to better ostracize Meredith while enjoying the in-jokes and private codes that families take pride in. This incestuous badinage is a fact of family life rarely shown on screen; the last time was the 1991 classic Crooked Hearts where a family imploded of its own claustrophobic rituals and secrets.

"There were moments of aching intimacy in Crooked Hearts (such as a physical fight between brothers that turned tenderly forgiving) that I’ll never forget; quotidian American scenes took on Ingmar Bergman intensity. But though The Family Stone’s style is farce, it becomes similarly moving."

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

Harvey: not an imaginary, invisible honcho

Variety's Timothy M. Gray and Ian Mohr handicap the emerging possibility of an Oscar sweep by niche pics, finding Weinsteinco's boss in an expansive mood: "Some players are able to switch horses in midstream, perhaps none as deftly as Harvey Weinstein... whose Weinstein Co. was third in Globes noms this year, behind Focus and U. Back at Miramax, the honcho might have flogged one title—say, All the Pretty Horses or Cold Mountain—only to realize buzz was building behind another, like In the Bedroom or Finding Neverland. With a swift shift in direction, Miramax could then drop one pic and light a fire under another—a move sure to drive marketing execs crazy...
For 2005, "the Weinstein Co. raked in 7 Golden Globes noms, including 3 for Mrs. Henderson Presents. "It's been a great 74 days, what can I tell you," quips Weinstein." Weinstein really, really likes these guys: "On the HFPA's indie bent this year, he adds, "They are a critics group with scrutiny, and they picked films like Match Point, which is a superior piece of filmmaking in my opinion. Reaction to the... studio films has been mixed. So we're not only rooting for our own stuff, but rooting for the people around us. I've been in Terrence Howard's corner for years."

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

December 17, 2005

Film crickets: essayists with ravishment fantasies

In the FT, Nigel Andrews has some splendid verbiage in his appreciation of visual appropriations in Kong while getting over a few other truths: "Film critics, far from being the coldblooded commentators of renown, are essayists with ravishment fantasies. We want tremendousness, outrage and damned cheek. (And yes, we get that as much from Buñuel, Fellini, Godard and Almodóvar as from good monster hokum.) Jackson was a promising imagist back in the days of Bad Taste and Braindead. He became a genius-on-the-cusp with The Lord of the Rings. Now King Kong proves that no one on the planet can touch him as a circus-master of the fantastic.

"... Unclassified "things"—including a super-worm designed to enrich Freudian totemology with the concept of a phallus dentatus—crowd up a Skull Island dream-painted by Jackson and his designers. This island contains not a single location shot. Its beauty, realistic yet rhapsodic, will have Henri Rousseau and Gustave Doré �gazing in wonderment from artists' heaven. Even the nightmare moments have their lyricism. From where did Jackson pluck the image of the heroine's abduction by a midnight pole-vaulter, who resembles one of Goya's spooky stilt-walkers mixed into a nightscape by Fuseli? Then there is the wooden edifice—part tower, part drawbridge across a chasm—on which Naomi Watts's sacrificial heroine (venturing the first volley in an inventive repertory of screams) is lowered towards the jungle, like a human muffin on a toasting-fork." [More chewy goodness at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Praising Raging: "Scorsese was my hero"

Talented Dane director Per Fly (pronounced "Flu") jabs at Marty but celebrates Raging Bull to the Telegraph's Sheila Johnston: "In The Aviator, the magic is gone and very much so in Gangs of New York. It was a sad experience to see that film because, for part of my life, Scorsese was my hero." But in Raging Bull, fly says, DeNiro is "fantastic at depicting a not very nice man whom we still want to watch and whom we can understand... Most people remember the boxing scenes and, yeah, they are good, but that's not the most important thing about it. It's a tough, mind-blowing film about the masculine way of thinking.... Jake La Motta will never move forward unless he can understand his own feelings and go into a relationship. He sees his whole life as a fight..."

Fly's most recent film, Manslaughter, is "a stern, Nordic Lutheran film," Johnston writes. While researching it, "Fly recalls reading an interview with an Italian Catholic priest. "As a young man, when people confessed, he would send them off to recite Ave Marias. But, as he got older, he would say, 'Go to your grandmother's house and paint her windows.... I love that practical, colourful way of dealing with guilt. You confess, do a penance and get absolution. The Protestant way is to keep it inside you; there's no escape. When you look at Ingmar Bergman's films, the guilt in them is much more melancholy and depressive. Although my own work seems to be about class, it's also about different men's ways of dealing with the world." [Production still from The Departed.]

Posted by pride at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2005

Hostel-ity: Tarantino introduces Eli Roth in LA

In a short clip from its L.A. premiere, producer Quentin Tarantino introduces Eli Roth and Hostel, describing Roth as

"the sick fuck who put the pen to paper!" Of the genesis of the reportedly ultraviolent movie, Tarantino says Roth told him the studios had offered him remake work, but QT wanted to know Roth's real passion. It was Hostel. “We were swimming in my pool, he was telling the story, I was like, 'What are you even doing thinking aboaut fucking around with that stupid remake shit? That’s what you’ve got to do!'" [More of the garrulous one at the effing link; WMV file.]

Posted by pride at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

In a family way: Jordan Scott directs

The Independent's Alice Jones talks to the 27-year-old Jordan Scott about her being the last of Ridley Scott's 3 children to turn to the same game as he and Tony: "Imagine the pressure on a fledgling film director whose dad made Alien and Gladiator whose uncle made Top Gun and whose two brothers have both been directing for 10 years. This is the life of Jordan Scott—the latest scion of the Scott dynasty, which comprises father Ridley, uncle Tony and brothers Jake and Luke, and which has been a dominant force in the industry for nearly 40 years."

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

PR o' the day: William Shatner's DVD club

William Shatner Launches DVD Club
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, December 16, 2005
Brooklyn, NY
William Shatner's new DVD club casts him in the one role he's not had during his storied 50-year acting career: film critic. The recently launched Official William Shatner DVD Club... a DVD-of-the-month club, showcases the best sci-fi movies that didn't come to a theater near you. Shatner explains, "Determining what movies get broad distribution and studio marketing support is [complicated], and... the caliber of the film isn't the only consideration. I've chosen a select group of memorable and entertaining sci-fi movies that never got the exposure they deserved, and made them available to fans everywhere at a great price." The Canadian Shatner's first pic is Ginger Snaps, a popular-on-DVD Canadian horror entry. "One of the benefits of featuring less well known content is that the movies are available at very reasonable prices. In fact, subscribers to the William Shatner DVD Club will own a new film every month for about the cost of a rental. At the very reasonable price of less than $4 per DVD (including shipping) William Shatner hopes to make his club available to all sci-fi fans. Right now, the William Shatner DVD Club is offering anyone with an e-mail address a free Ginger Snaps DVD.

"Adam Schwartz, one of the very first people to join the club, had this to say, "I had never heard of Ginger Snaps but it was a great movie. And they gave me a bonus disc with it, so I actually got two movies for free. I've always liked William Shatner as an actor, but I think I like him even more as a film critic."

Posted by pride at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

A new Miyazaki-san in Ghibli-town

The next from Hayao Miyazaki's studio, Studio Ghibli, will be directed by his son, reports say. "Defying opposition from his father, [he] will make his directorial debut next year with a film on the Earthsea fantasy novels by US writer Ursula Le Guin. Goro Miyazaki, a 38-year-old former construction consultant, is directing the animation film for July next year release, according to Studio Ghibli, which has released his father's works.

"It may sound a bit abrupt but let me say this first -- my father Hayao Miyazaki was against my directing Tales From Earthsea," his eldest son said without delving into the reasons," reports Taipei Times. "I realized I have undeniable affection for animation, which I had long pretended not to notice in my mind due partly to relations with my father," he wrote on the Ghibli Web site.

Posted by pride at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

New biz cards after six years: Lionsgate saws off a space

After a quarterly downturn, Lionsgate cuts back on space, introducing "a new, one-word corporate logo and name, aimed at turning the company into a recognizable brand, before a gathering of reporters at its Santa Monica, Calif., offices on Thursday. The new logo drops the space between Lions and Gate and puts the name in all capital letters, with a curved E at the end. It also loses the second word of Entertainment...

CEO John Feltheimer said "the logo change should have a “tremendous impact” on the Lions Gate brand and joked that he has had the same business cards for six years despite the company’s growth." (The version above presumably is a representation of Vancouver's Lions Gate horizon, where the name of the company originated.)

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

Foreign Language Oscar nom: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and a life in Romanian movies

"This movie set out with a series of drawbacks. It is a movie that lasts 153 minutes, it is a Romanian movie in Romanian, it is a movie about a man who dies, as is also announced in the title, so from the very start there are several small impediments," director Cristi Puiu says of his prize-winning The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in a lengthy interview with Bucharest Daily News' Otilia� Haraga about his film's Foreign Language Oscar potential and the future of that small country's indigenous movie industry. The 38-year-old director, who says his next movie will be called Food for Small Fish, talks title: "Without taking into consideration the story itself, I think a title like this sends the viewer in at least 2 directions. Supposing I am a cinema spectator and browsing the newspapers I discover this movie I have several references: there are cultural references like "The Death of Ivan Ilici." If you have never heard of Tolstoi before or nobody told you anything about this book before, then everything comes down to this title, "The Death of Ivan Ilici." It is somebody's death. Behind this movie there can very easily be a detective story. The same applies to Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." For me it was important that the movie be called The Death of Mr Lazarescu because it told precisely the story of an old man who dies and he dies in a very specific way. This is why I am saying it is like a rope dancing with this title because some of the spectators will certainly not go to see this movie unless they find out in the [trailer] that it is a detective story. Why should the public go to see a movie about an old man who dies? ...I think it matters less if Mr Lazarescu is 60, 30, 20 or 90 years old, I think it matters less if he is a gentleman or a lady, what matters first of all is that this title speaks about the death of a human being. And at least for me this is reason enough to see the movie which talks about this. If the spectator has the courage to conceive himself in this hypothesis, as a future corpse, then he will go to see the movie. If not, he will not go. It is clear that the title is not appealing but at the same time if you go to see the movie you are rewarded." Puiu also elaborates on how Lazarescu is the first of six movies about love. "There are six of them because it is a kind of homage I am paying in this way to Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales." And that is why I decided to make only six of them, because you can talk about love in "The only solution would be for the government to decide to invest in cinema. But on the other hand it seems grotesque to think about cinema when we are not even capable of paying decent salaries to teachers or doctors. What cinema? I mean, really, cinema is a luxury. We are not even capable of having a sound health and education system. Really. If I were a Prime Minister, I would not grant money for cinema. I would grant money for education and health. A healthy country should have competent teachers and medical staff. What is happening to them is unacceptable."

Posted by pride at 11:03 AM | Comments (1)

Offside: did Dolby refuse Iranian director Jafar Panahi?

"The London office of the U.S. company Dolby Laboratories Inc. refused to sell its services to Offside, the latest film of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) reported on Monday. Celluloid Dreams, the French distributor of film demanded the services from the company, which said in response that they will never let the film utilize Dolby facilities...

"The countries used to exclude cultural affairs from their extensive political conflicts up till now... As nothing could sabotage production of the film in Iran, we, in collaboration with the production crew, are trying to make the film technically ready in line with international standards for Iranian people," Panahi is quoted as saying. Offside is about a girl who attempts to enter Tehran's Azadi Stadium dressed as a boy in order to watch a big football match but she is caught and arrested because women are not allowed to enter the stadium... Crimson Gold and Panahi's previous film "Circle" have never received permission for screening in Iran due to some restrictions enforced by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. However, his first feature-length film, The White Balloon, was shown in Iran..."

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

December 14, 2005

Chomet meets Tati: It's the memory of the hand

In the January 2006 Esquire, The Triplets of Belleville's Sylvain Chomet says he's staying silent, but his next film is based on an unproduced Jacques Tati script, The Illusionist, which he's setting in Edinburgh. The story is about "an aging magician (portrayed by an animated Tati) who befriends a young girl in Scotland and can't bear to tell her that his magic is not real... Because it's Jacques Tati... I have to get his character perfectly. He's a very, very difficult character to get. We're used to seeing him with a hat and with a pipe in his mouth. When you remove those, he looks different. Sometimes, I take a sheet of paper, and without looking at the model, I try to draw it again. It has to be in my hand. It's the memory of the hand." There's also a 2004 profile of Chomet, talking about the film to Scotland's Sunday Herald. [The print edition of Esquire has three very nice drawings by Chomet.]

Posted by pride at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

Technical Bob: shooting Altman's Companion

The Reporter's Sheigh Crabtree reports on 80-year-old Robert Altman's foray into high-def video: "Altman wanted to be able to record for at least 30 minutes consecutively without reloading as some scenes in the film are as long as 23 minutes. The HD cameras also came in handy because some of the interior settings had low lighting levels.

"Ryan Sheridan, the production's HD engineer, says the crew employed lots of long, fluid shots. "It was the perfect mix of live-performance camerawork and dramatic theatrical cinematography... (We were) able to capture everything from extreme close-ups to extreme wide shots with two lenses, and sometimes with just one."

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

Little comic caprices vs. the meaninglessness of life, the unreliability of humanity: Mr. Konigsberg at 70

"Mr. Allen says that he has accepted that he won’t be another Bergman," writes Suzy Hansen in a long, 70th birthday conversation with Woody Allen, "But he wants to make serious films from now on. “Now that I’m older, I don’t know how much time I have to make movies for the rest of my life,” he said, after noting that his next film, Scoop, is a light, light comedy. He said that Scoop might be his last comedy. “I should try and not indulge myself in little comic caprices, but try and do something more meat-and-potatoes. I find that it might be a good thing for me to not be in my movies so much—because when I’m in the movie, it forces it to be a comedy. I’m not believable in any other way. I can do much more interesting things if I don’t have to think, ‘Well, I’m going to be on the screen and I have to make people laugh.’”

"And the interesting things weighing on him these days are the usual preoccupations: “the meaninglessness of life, the unreliability of humanity—nothing good, nothing commercial. Nothing that can’t be turned against me.” He laughed at that and seemed unfazed, the confidence of a man who’s been through much worse already, whether he’s pessimistic about what the future holds or not." But, of the fantasy world of the movies he grew up on, Allen says, "The less reality, the better. You get enough reality... It finds you—you don’t have to seek it out. If you were locked into reality all the time, you’d go crazy. You’re reduced to escapism. Magic.”

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

December 13, 2005

Somebody oughta sue: satirizing old-media movie journalists

THE EARNEST YOUNG SATIRIST who compiles the cruelly sclerotic “davekehr.com” parody blog continues his/her dual project, mocking the style of the New York freelancer ("self"-described as a former writer "of fourth string reviews" for the New York Times who "eventually backed away from fourth string reviewing, mainly because the movies—a flood of fifth-rate American independent films—were so appalling and the Times freelance review rates were so dispiritingly low") But there's also an ongoing parody of what happens to some writers who go online without the protection of an old-media copy desk. After trashing Ang Lee and Brokeback Mountain—the ventriloquizing writer is well-versed enough to telegraph that “Kehr”’s tastes run to 60-to-70-year-old post-“classicists” like Clint Eastwood, Harold Ramis, Robert Zemeckis of Frank Oz—“Kehr” further takes the occasion of a review of the DVD of The 40 Year Old Virgin to compare Steve Carell to Harold Lloyd, and while striking again at Lee’s quaking heart, offer up a phrase that would find the word “USAGE!” full-capped in the margins of copy in your everyday newsroom: “…The 40 Year Old Virgin has no apparent ambitions beyond its core mission of assuring its young, male target audience that just because you’re afraid of women, it doesn’t mean you’re gay (a motif regrettably reinforced by the film’s abundance of fag-bashing humor). Which somehow brings us back to Brokeback Mountain...”
The anti-Brokeback remarks, of course, summon up a non-film array of targeted Google ads (pictured). Earlier, having his way with Brokeback—“Film by film, Lee’s work seems almost painfully sincere, but in the aggregate his oeuvre looks disturbingly opportunistic”—Kehr’s double argues that Lee’s film is in no way a Western, before proceeding then in a tepid King Kong notice to misspell “Yosemite” (perhaps as a way to avoid seeming anti-Yosemitic). “[Peter] Jackson doesn’t even show these hurled bodies hitting the ground, allowing the viewer to assume that they bounce back to life like so many Yosimite [sic] Sam’s [sic] in a Warner Brothers cartoon.” Many messages are mixed in another sneering satirical passage: “Lee has set the story in the 60s and 70s, presumably to take full dramatic advantage of the period’s more blatant and socially-approved homophobia (and allow the contemporary audience to congratulate itself on its more enlightened attitudes), but he doesn’t hesitate to evoke the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard when it suits his storytelling ends. The whole thing reeks of a masochistic romanticism that is probably more appealing to teary-eyed straights than it is to gays, some of whom might prefer to see a touch of the hopefulness and happiness in their lives that Apichatpong Weerasethakul captured with such casual grace in Tropical Malady.” Somebody oughta sue.

Posted by pride at 09:17 AM | Comments (1)

December 12, 2005

Tortured sentence for today: NYT does WTC

Writing (again) on Oliver Stone's forthcoming 9/11 feel-good tragedy, World Trade Center, the Times' David M. Halbfinger inscribes, "The producers allowed a reporter and photographer from The New York Times to visit the set in hopes that the first images of this staged ground zero would be placed in context, rather than risking that unauthorized photographs hit the blogosphere devoid of any explanation."

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

December 11, 2005

OK Blogger: Radiohead re-scoring A Scanner Darkly?

Blogs David Hudson at Greencine: "I'm going to be ridiculously irresponsible (but you know, life is short) and pass along an unsubstantiated rumor:

Radiohead may be this close to signing on to do a new score for Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Even if that turns out not to be true, in some parallel universe, that film is screening and it sounds lovely."

Posted by pride at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

Charming: Snakes on a Plane, the Neverending Story Part 2

Variety's Dave McNary catches up with Snakes on a Plane, and while mentioning the many thousands of Google hits for the late summer release, also manages to cover almost all the same items as Movie City Indie's October report, citing several of the same items as little Indie. (We salute those who link, like Cinematical.)

Blogs McNary, "Though New Line has done no publicity and the thriller is eight months away from release, buzz has reached epic proportions... The title alone has already inspired songs, merchandise and growing use of the phrase to signify something on the order of "It could always be worse." ... The Topatoco Internet boutique, for example, is selling T-shirts picturing a pair of snakes flying an airplane... Screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds)... gleefully posted his reaction on his blog: "I love Snakes on a Plane. Love it. It makes me giggle like the fat, lazy schoolgirl I am."

Posted by pride at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

King Kong: Indeed it is

In the Observer, Philip French finds the ape is great, but offers up with a lovely vignette with his reservations. Peter Jackson's King Kong, French writes, "rather confuses the complex web of meaning—political, psychological, sexual and moral—that has grown up around Kong over the years, starting with the double-edged appeal he had for Depression audiences as a symbol of the destructive chaos of capitalism and the revenge of the people against the system. I remember emerging from an early-evening screening of King Kong at the National Film Theatre in the Sixties and meeting the distinguished Jungian analyst Anthony Storr, who was going in to see it for the first time. 'You're in for a treat,' I told him. 'It's right up your street.' He grinned broadly, rubbed his hands together, and said: 'You mean real archetypal stuff?' And indeed it is."

Posted by pride at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

Depression impression; director Annie Griffin on Groundhog Day

Festival director Annie Griffin talks a little like Harold Ramis as she praises Groundhog Day: "I think it is the most brilliant image of depression... Yes, the film is funny, but it's also so profound about depression. Bill Murray's character, Phil, hates everything. He's just bored - he's bored with his life, with himself above all. The plot device of that endlessly repeating day very effectively creates that depressed feeling that every day is the same, nothing changes in life...

"The ritual of Groundhog Day itself revolves around the small animal being yanked rudely out of hibernation. If he sees his own shadow that means he'll retreat back into his cave. "He always sees his shadow, he always says there will be six more weeks of winter," says Griffin. That end-of-winter desperation is clearly something Griffin identifies with. She grew up in Buffalo... not far from Groundhog Day's small town of Punxsutawney, and talks... of "that sense of what am I doing in this dump, this is Nowheresville, nothing happens here. And also I know those really tough winters, that feeling of being locked up, of longing for winter to end. Thinking, fuck it, this just sucks. I suck, my life sucks. All of that... The film doesn't ever try to explain why the day repeats itself, we can project so much on to it and bring all kinds of associations to that experience... It's really about the ability to change. Phil is very much a middle-aged man who hasn't made it in his career, and he has that feeling of, 'Oh, I'll never be somebody who can play piano', and then he realises he can do anything. It's wonderful that one of the first things he wants to do when he realises there will be no consequences is to eat too many doughnuts...The 'why not?' that he discovers is the lightness of it. It's almost that the lightness takes him out of the day."

Posted by pride at 07:44 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2005

Richard Pryor, RIP

There's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at...
Everyone carries around his own monsters.

A 2004 Guardian profile is here.

Posted by pride at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

Flatulence and fog: the images of Jack Cardiff

Ace eye Jack Cardiff talks to the Independent's Chris Sullivan as his "Magic Hour" memoir is reissued. "I think starting with Michael Powell would be a nice idea, wouldn't you?" suggests the wonderfully loquacious 91-year-old director-cinematographer Jack Cardiff. "One day as I worked on second unit for Michael Powell shooting all the dull stuff on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I was asked to photograph this large wall full of animal heads. I heard a voice saying, 'Very interesting.' It was Michael Powell. He then asked if I'd like to photograph his next film. That was in 1943 and I was 29; but I had to wait another three years to do the job on A Matter of Life and Death—but I suppose I had been waiting all my life... My first job as crew was on the last big British silent movie, The Informer, in 1928... It was my job to be on hand all day to supply the director Dr Arthur Robison with a glass of Vichy water to help with his flatulence problem."

... "Michael really encouraged suggestions," says Cardiff. "In the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death when David Niven sees this long shot of a beach and thinks he's in heaven, in the script it says 'Fade in' and Michael said, 'This sounds so corny. I wish I could do something different.' So I said, 'Michael, look through the camera.' He did, and I went to the front and breathed on the lens so that it went foggy. After a few seconds it cleared. Michael was absolutely delighted." [More at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

Seen you in your underwear: Amy Adams

Living up to the old saying that you get no respect back home 'cos folks have seen you in your underwear, St. Paul Pioneer Press brings wonderful Amy Adams down to earth: "Former Chanhassen Dinner Theatres actress Amy Adams may be headed toward March's Oscars...

Adams, a Colorado native who appeared in productions such as "Good News" and "Crazy for You" at Chanhassen, went directly from here to Hollywood... the "Gurus of Gold" at the www.moviecitynews.com site are picking her as one of a dozen actresses with legitimate shots at a nomination."

Posted by pride at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

Ang Lee: I just want to love everyone

David Gritten in the Telegraph is the latest to have his pulse stirred by Brokeback Mountain and gets Ang Lee on an interesting track. "I read the last paragraph of the short story," he recalls, "and I got choked up. It's a story I didn't quite understand, but because I got choked up I felt there must be something there. Then I read the existing screenplay... and had to let it pass with a lot of regrets, because I was on my way to make The Hulk.... When I finished it, I assumed [it] must have been made. I asked... James Schamus, 'How did it work out, is it a good movie?' ..." Students of Lee's work will discern a familiar pattern here. Making films in America or Britain, he casts himself as the inquisitive Taiwanese outsider who, despite having lived in New York for 25 years, does not quite understand the codes of societies portrayed in his films. Thus his presence has the effect of subverting the genres he touches... He shrugs... at this idea of subversion: "It would be vanity to say that. You may have that thought at first, but it won't last the year you need to make a movie. So I don't think it's a factor. It's excitement: [tackling] something I don't know about.... Every movie is an adventure for me. It ought to be exciting."

After Hulk however, "I told James Schamus, if you want me to make this, don't make me angry. I just want to love everyone on the set. No personnel to make me angry. I don't want any stress, other than the weather."

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

Harvesting the Nation: Klawans on Ramis

The Nation now makes Stuart Klawans's movie reviews available online. While the fireworks of Manohla Dargis and the great expectorations of Armond White get more pixels of comment these days, Klawan's assured words about the virtues of Harold Ramis' unappreciated gem remind how little-appreciated he is as a critic, even in the slot once held by James Agee and Manny Farber: "What makes The Ice Harvest stand out is the crispness of the dialogue, the sureness of the pacing and the unexpected depth of feeling that comes through. "Guys of our age," begins a sentence spoken at one point by [John] Cusack to a very drunk buddy (Oliver Platt) who functions as his chubby and disheveled double. Platt is married to Cusack's former wife, lives in what had been Cusack's house, acts as a not very capable stepfather to Cusack's children and boisterously, sloppily, hilariously voices the desperation that Cusack would now be feeling, if he weren't hopping out of his skin with anxiety... If [Billy Bob] Thornton is the tougher self that Cusack is trying to become, then Platt is the self he wants to escape--a desire that plays as both funny and poignant. By the calendar, Cusack is hardly ready to be one of the "guys of our age," but his face in The Ice Harvest is more wan and puffy than you've seen before. His management of a perpetually quarter-drunk state is convincingly practiced; his demeanor before his children, appropriately subdued; his stabs at flirtation with Nielsen, the stuff of middle-aged shame... The ending may be the best thing of its kind since Joe E. Brown's immortal "Nobody's perfect."

Posted by pride at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Comedy is you fall in an open manhole and die: Schamus on happy Brokeback set

The Reeler ropes choice quotes from the makers of Brokeback Mountain, including this analysis from producer James Schamus: "It's funny," Schamus replied, smiling. "Most of the great comedies are made by people who are having nervous breakdowns. It's weirdly vice versa. We were all making this horribly tragic, moving experience, and yet sheep jokes abound." [The headline refers to part of Mel Brooks' definition of tragedy vs. comedy.]

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

December 09, 2005

Off with her bed: Marie Antoinette

Kirsten Dunst is Marie Antoinette; trailer scored to New Order for Sofia Coppola's fall 2006 film. Um. Okay.

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

Day and date and jargon: Parson's parsing re TW

"Windows are inevitably going to collapse over time," [TimeWarner topper Richard] Parsons told reporters, Variety writes "I don't know if everything will be day and date. But managing that transition in a way that is respectful of our distribution partners is the challenge." Further wordyiage, which a CEO is paid well for at events like this, the Credit Suisse First Boston Global Media Week Conference: AOL "came a little late to the advertising side of the party... We're talking to people about how we can kickstart that business... AOL is not an albatross around our neck but a valuable part of our business." Reports the Reporter, " the industry will "get close to the day-and-date paradigm." (Babelfish does not yet have a jargon-to-English translator; no estimates on how long this will take.)

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

December 08, 2005

Blogging Syriana: Gaghan goes for it

"My first blog.... I’m on a plane. I’m drinking bad coffee. I’m promoting a new film, Syriana, that I’ve spent the last three and half years writing and directing, cutting and scoring, agonizing as recently as three weeks ago over details like the font and point size of the end-title scroll - I chose Highway Gothic, considered in some circles to be the new Helvetica," muses Stephen Gaghan at Huffington Post.

"Since this is an inaugural blog and it’s clear skies at 37,000 feet, I thought I might write a brief primer on corruption," which the writer-director proceeds to do. "Corruption is the inducement of a government official to allocate state assets at a price below market value...

"As Tim Blake Nelson playing Danny Dalton, says in Syriana, “Corruption is just government intrusion into market efficiency in the form of regulation… that’s Milton Friedman, he got a goddamn Nobel Prize.”... Remember that if a culture can spring into existence on the banks of the Potomac that makes it seem perfectly okay to accepts multi-million dollar gifts from private business, that same culture can be changed, induced, if you will, to turn those gifts down and represent all of the people instead of a tiny, super-wealthy minority."

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

Defining the trailer-maker's art

The definition of a talented maker of coming attractions trailers?

Someone who can make you salivate at the prospect of a new Spike Lee Joint like Inside Man.

Posted by pride at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

Cheese it, it's cinema: Raul Ruiz

An extended transcript of a Sight & Sound interview with prolific Chilean-born, French-spoilt filmmaker and talker Raul Ruiz is a discursive wonder, including this bit: "One definition of cinema is that it is a kind of total art like the opera. Another is the extremist proposition of Bazin that cinematography is the only case in which a machine can make masterpieces without human interpretation. I suggested the students should mix both ideas since cinema is the totality of all the arts connected by poetry—meaning poetry in the sense of craziness, the poetry that Plato was afraid of. The French have a good expression for it—bricolage. I recalled Jack Valenti's statement that the French should stop making films and make what they know how to do—cheese. But to make cheese is very close to making films—it needs all kind of manipulation.

"The French way of making cinema makes one film very different from another so it's difficult to make them competitive, difficult to make them acceptable as a genre because you can say that this film is a mystery movie, or an erotic movie or a western." [A lot more at the link.]

Posted by pride at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

Even cocks started small: Sundance's Aluminum Fowl

Jim Ridley in Nashville Scene profiles Sundance short Aluminum Fowl: "Sundance shorts programmer Roberta Munroe hails the film as “an unflinching look at what it means to be poor and unemployed.” At times, [it] resembles one of the first Sundance award winners, Charles Burnett’s 1977 film Killer of Sheep, a study of a Watts homeowner struggling to support his family by working in a slaughterhouse... “It took 2 years to make a 22-minute film,” [director James] Clauer says, laughing. The genesis involved filmmaker Harmony Korine, Clauer’s longtime friend and fellow Nashvillian, with whom he’d worked on Korine’s locally filmed... Gummo. Korine had formed a production company, O’Salvation, with French fashion designer and film producer Agnès B. ... [Clauer] and Korine were at the now-closed strip club Showtime when they ran into a friend from junior high [who worked] shuttling cocks between Kentucky and Louisiana. The idea stuck. When Clauer went down to Louisiana to visit, he was drawn to his friend’s neighbors, four kids between the ages of 15 and 18, who spent their time raising cocks, obsessing over aliens and manufacturing homemade bling out of tinfoil." Ridley describes the process of accumulating 80 hours of footage in his piece. "They ended up with a 22-minute cut, capped by a poetic voiceover Clauer adapted from conversations with the four brothers... Though impressed, the Sundance shorts programmers suggested that Clauer make the film even shorter. “It was horrible to decide what to cut... But in the long run, it makes you understand your material better.” He says he’s “really happy” with the new version, nine minutes shorter, although the longer cut was accepted into Rotterdam." Ridley has details on the work of other emerging Nashville filmmakers as well. “It’s a portrait, but I wasn’t trying to do a political or sociological portrait,” Clauer says. “It was more like, ‘Damn, that’s the way it is.’”

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

Life sentences: liking John Simon's prose, not pose

NP Thompson cherry-picks from John Simon's collected criticism in NYPress, including, while contesting accusations of Simon being homophobic, the remarkable sentence that ends his Nuits de Fauve notice: "Consider Simon's words on the French film Savage Nights, released in the United States in early 1994. The novelist and photographer Cyril Collard wrote, directed, and acted the lead role in this essentially autobiographical movie... Much like the character he portrayed, Collard lived with and died from AIDS. Simon: "What I found particularly moving is the film's clenched reluctance to let go. Toward the end, scene after scene looks to be the last, but it isn't; always there is more. You can feel Collard hanging on, literally, for dear life: as if, as long as he was making his movie, he could not die." Thompson continues: "There's no way that a homophobe could have written those lines, which betray an uncommon sensitivity.... That, quite possibly, is the quality that lodges in the collective craw of those who would paint Simon one-dimensionally—that he can be as tender as tough, and that both are equally valid, both are inescapably sides of the same coin, the human condition, the intimate dance... Simon doesn't laud every gay-themed work. But to write that "Angels in America""goes nowhere" isn't homophobic; it's good taste... "John Simon on Film" revives invigorating assessments... My favorite is... Simon's discerningly poetic take on the role of country music in Tender Mercies... "Simplistic as the songs may be, musically and verbally, they mediate between the people and the flat silence of the land, where the only sound is that of cars whooshing by—an uncomforting sound that only emphasizes the elsewhereness of the world."

Posted by pride at 01:26 PM | Comments (1)

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is 70

At Syberberg's website, the materials include complete versions of his epic Hitler, retitled by Francis Coppola for US distribution as Hitler: A Film From Germany.

Posted by pride at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

You can find something wrong with anything: Salman Rushdie on criticism

Just got around to reading the fine Salman Rushdie "Art of Fiction" interview, number 186 in the Paris Review's invaluable, ongoing, decades-long series (many of which are online in PDF form). One paragraph stuck out, illuminating an idea about the aims of reviewing that matches what I try to describe to friends. Rushdie converses: "I like the Randall Jarrell line: 'A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.' I think that's true. If you're going to write a hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand words, perfection is a fanstasy. If you're Shakespeare and you're writing 16 lines, you can create a perfect thing. I suspect though that if Shakespeare had written a novel, there would be imperfections. There are imperfections in his plays—there are boring bits, if one's allowed to say this. If you're reading for the sake of reading, you look for what it gives you, not for what it doesn't give you. If there's enough there, a misstep is easy to forgive. That also happens in literary criticism. There are critics who approach work on the basis of what they can get from it, and others who approach in terms of what they can find wrong with it.

"Frankly, you can find something wrong with any book you pick up, I don't care how great it is. There's a wonderful riff in Julian Barnes' 'Flaubert's Parrot,' in the chapter called 'Emma Bovary's Eyes,' when he points out that her eyes change color four or five times in the book."

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

December 07, 2005

Homecoming: Pinter's Nobel speech scorches

The Guardian, with the permission of the Nobel Foundation, publishes the ailing Laureate Harold Pinter's blisteringly political acceptance speech in full. A sample suffices for the 75-year-old playwright-screenwriter's language: "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US." [Five thousand curt, precise words at the link.]

Posted by pride at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

Effing can wait: a Wiki workout

Online viral encyclopedia, Wikipedia, does the heavy lifting for the word "fuck". How many SPM (swears per minute) does Magnolia have against Goodfellas? ResDogs vs. PulpFict? Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth vs. Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (470 vs. 560)? Never say "Fuck if I know!" again! [A total of 56 pics are scrutinized, and a handy "Fuckometer" chart is provided for the visually oriented.]

Posted by pride at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

C.R.A.Z.Y. for synching of you: music rights stall Canadian hit in US

Describing a scene from Quebecois hit C.R.A.Z.Y. (Canada's Foreign Language Oscar nom), Denis Seguin writes, "In one scene, 15-year-old Zach [feels] trapped at midnight mass [and imagines] that the choir is doing the trademark woo-woo from the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." As Jagger and Richards kick in, Zach rises messianically toward the cathedral ceiling, and the entire congregation joins in the chorus." The astute use of tunes are part of why it's stuck at the border, Seguin continues in Canadian Business. "David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" are used to similarly potent effect. [Writer-director Jean-Marc] Vallée has woven three pop anthems into his tapestry; the songs are integral to the story." Oh-oh: "C.R.A.Z.Y. has one of the most expensive soundtracks in Canadian film history; nearly $600,000, or almost 10% of the entire budget. Producer Pierre Even [knew] the difficulty of landing a U.S. sale when he and Vall�e started planning... They decided to license the songs everywhere but the U.S. The savings were dramatic--but a potential U.S. distributor will now have to spend at least US$250,000 completing the license fees...

"It's criminal, I know," says a U.S. distribution executive in the lobby... "The film is too mainstream to work as a foreign-language film..." But, he adds, his face brightening, "It's totally remake-able."

Posted by pride at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)

Collaborating with the dead: the transcripts of Sophie Scholl

The director of Foreign Language Oscar nominee Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, Marc Rothemund, talks to Bloomberg about his film, drawn from "original transcripts of her interrogation by the Gestapo, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were hidden away in East German archives."

Rothemund got the transcripts after a simple phone call. "After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gestapo transcripts were sent from Berlin to Koblenz, to the archives. But at that time everyone was worried about the end of the Cold War—and then more interested in their own transcripts and files. No one thought about the older transcripts. When I read that Sophie Scholl was interrogated by the Gestapo, I called the archives... and asked them whether they had the transcripts, and they said yes. And I asked whether I could have a copy, and they said yes—for 1 euro ($1.18) per page. So I got everything—the interrogation transcripts, the court transcripts, the execution transcripts... I saw that she first said that she was innocent, that she lied. It was gripping to read it. You had to ask: How long can she keep this up? When the evidence then forced her to confess, she continued lying to protect her friends...

"In America, people have realized that Saddam Hussein didn't have that much to do with al-Qaeda, and that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, and some people have a bad conscience about believing their leaders so quickly. They have understood that every single person in a society has a responsibility to empathize and to be curious—not to believe everything the politicians say, but to double-check." More on the film here.

Posted by pride at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

Crix nix trash? Woody weighs in

Current magazine asks Woody Allen 20 questions, including the oddly phrased, "How do you see the function of the critic, if at all?" A ticket-buyer's guide - to keep the poor citizens from wasting his hard earned money on trash.

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

December 06, 2005

Soderbergh 2.0: The Good Bubble

While shooting The Good German Steven Soderbergh talks tech with Xeni Jardin at WIRED. What's up with the day-and-date theatrical/DVD release of Bubble in January? "Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last 4 years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy... Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's TwelveI saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it." Soderbergh notes the little-noted Warner Bros. plan to release "low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there," which began with Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. "It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will." Of Bubble: "A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit." Soderbergh returns to the self-distributing model he's been talking up. "When the changeover from film to digital happens in theaters in five or 10 years, you're going to see name filmmakers self-distributing. Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German.... As technology gives filmmakers more freedom, you'll see them producing work that is more unique, less beholden to the mainstream film template. That means rethinking the economics. But I'm always willing to gamble."

Posted by pride at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

Reviews we wish we hadn't read: Friedman on Munich

Shorn of all useless context, here's Fox gossipseuse Roger Friedman touting Munich as the best movie of 2005: "This is not "A Beautiful Massacre."

Posted by pride at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Proulx on Brokeback, her little canoe

While the New Yorker has her original short story online, John Detrixhe talks to Annie Proulx about Brokeback Mountain and more at Bookslut: "Did you ever feel like your work might be defined by 'Shipping News,' and now it seems there's a lot of attention being given to 'Brokeback Mountain'? "It's starting to look that way, yeah. It's odd, but that's how it is. Actually, that story was to be one of three or four stories about offbeat and difficult love situations, but I never wrote any of the others. I just wrote that one. I had to get away from it. It just got too intense, and too much on my mind... As it is right now, it stands out rather like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the work, so I think I have to do those other stories." "

Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana prepared the screenplay... Did you work with them at all...? It was in their hands. I think Diana called me one day and we talked for a couple hours on the telephone. I pretty much stayed out of it. Mostly because I was busy with something else, and because I'm not a movie person. I'm not a screenplay writer. There's certain rhythms and certain shape to the screen that's just different from short stories or novels... I really hate the tendency that many writers have when their stuff is made into a film, that they are in there, they want to do everything..." "A friend who [saw the movie at] the Toronto Film Festival... loved the way certain parts were filled in to make a feature-length story." "I liked it, too. I thought that what they did was really quite wonderful. It really enriched the story. Instead of a little canoe, it became an ocean liner."

Posted by pride at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

Discounting UK: new tax credits coming

The UK's film production tax credit