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February 28, 2006

How can filmmakers make a living?: a conversation

At Springboard Media, Brian Newman starts a conversation about the role of film festivals in distributing independent filmmaking: "Today, too few independent films reach a broad audience, and despite some signs to the contrary, the situation is worsening. Outside of a few successful instances, truly independent work by exciting makers remains largely in the realm of film festivals, limited theatrical runs and institutional sales, brief (if any) exposure on cable or broadcast television and the extremely rare success on home video. In spite of—and often because of—recent developments, including the DVD, the distribution system for independent media remains in crisis, with few films successfully reaching a broad audience... It has become obvious that the market for a diversity of voices has grown over the past several years, as evidenced by the success of blogs and the recent success of several documentaries. American audiences hunger for diverse, interesting work and are connecting with it in new ways. At first confined to major cities, film festivals of one form or another began to pop up in towns across the U.S. (and internationally) more than 30 years ago. These smaller, less internationally recognized film festivals have become the de facto art house circuit, often screening works in conjunction with local film societies. General audiences have prospered culturally by having more access to a wider range of films than ever before. Unfortunately, this type of exhibition leaves the filmmakers well-traveled but none the richer for their efforts... What if the same filmmaker could sell copies of their film at the festival? What if filmmakers handed out postcards to the audience, with a website where they could buy or rent the film and recommend it to a friend?

What if they did this in every city they visited and mentioned the website every time they were interviewed? One can imagine a small success for a filmmaker who took this approach. Why do so few filmmakers and/or distributors do so? Because it doesn’t fit the model of the release window — a model that only works for a small number of films. Additionally, few filmmakers want to put their energies behind distribution of their film — generally, they want to make another film. Many distributors work with festivals as publicity for a theatrical release, or sometimes to allow filmmakers to satisfy their desire to connect with audiences before an institutional release on DVD. Almost none have made a concerted effort to use these festival screenings as nontheatrical tours of work, to help spur DVD sales. Even fewer filmmakers have taken this strategy, with most hoping that a festival tour will help them find a distributor, instead of helping them find an audience." [More provocative thoughts, as well as a chance to join the conversation, at the link.]

Posted by pride at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)

Thomson: Oscar pics won't be remembered in 50 years

At Truthdig, Sheerly Avni checks in with film uberpundit David Thomson to dismiss this year's Oscar crop. "I think they’re quite good examples of small independent pictures carefully made. It’s a fairly good group, I think. I just don’t think any of them is what I would call a knockout big-experience picture. They’re thoughtful. And I like that, I mean, please, don’t think I’m against it. And they all have an interesting, valuable, useful point to make. But I don’t think they are going to be remembered in 50 years’ time.... Very few of the movies up for nomination this year have cost very much, and very few of them have done the kind of business that Best Pictures are expected to do. In many respects those are good things. Brokeback Mountain... cuts quite radically against the grain of popular American taste and, as you say, there are a whole lot of places where the movie has not been playing at all." Crash avers Thomson, is "heavy-handed and somewhat self-righteous." Good Night, and Good Luck is also shit, Thomson believes. "If Good Night, and Good Luck can congratulate itself, which it sort of does, I think, about being an indirect oblique political statement about the world we live in, the world now, I think that is also a sign of a sort of helplessness—a cowardice still in dealing with situations... If there’s a political consciousness that made that film, why isn’t there a film about what we’re going through now, that might really have offended and made trouble? And after six years they’ve had time to respond, and I think it’s still the case that the liberal faction in Hollywood are much better at going to parties and raising money than actually making challenging film.... Sound is not good these days, the projection is not good, and you have to pay a lot of money. When I say old, I mean people 40 or older. People think, “I’d rather not see this latest horror film with eye-gouging and so forth.... I’d rather sit at home and get a good DVD and see if it’s as good as I remember.”

Posted by pride at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2006

Maddining: pinning Guy down, wrinkly as a prune

Over at Offscreen, David Church takes a 12,000 word peramble with the always-loquacious Guy Maddin on what's revving his Manitoban motor these days. On getting in the water for Cowards Bend the Knee: "I spent many hours daydreaming while swimming. Swimming requires a lot of patience and I’d swim for about an hour a day and just daydream about this movie and about things that have happened to me and how to fit it into templates established by maybe Electra or The Hands of Orlac—only to be astonished, after the swimming pool water had made my entire body as wrinkly as a prune, that all those stories somehow fit together. Maybe the soaking in the water really helped all those stories fit together; Euripides, Orlac, and my own autobiography were all the same story somehow and I got a sort of chlorine delirium everyday.... [I] just picked up a camera and shot it, kind of from memory—just gathered all the actors together and had them act out my life as I remembered it through a haze of chlorine and amnesia. I would shout out orders, directing while operating the camera so I could make instantaneous judgments in my head. It was a real pleasure and really strange..." The almost-50 auteur's brimming 2006-2007 roster includes a doc: "Although I’m no expert on budgets... it’s easy to forget that the most expensive element in filmmaking is time if you’re paying everybody... I think it’s got to be a little bit cheaper to use video. At least you can tape over it or something like that, although I don’t think you’re supposed to. More and more I like the look of it for certain subjects. When you’re making a documentary of a city, Winnipeg looks ugliest on video, and that might be the way to go." Working at such velocity? "I love being busy, I really do. I’ve been a lazy person for so long in my life. It feels good to lick it for a while. I know I could slide back at any second like an alcoholic can start drinking or a smoker could light up again; I feel like I could just fall back on a couch and never get up... So I really love the feeling that putting in consecutive days, months, and years of productive time gives me."

Plus the outspoken Maddin on a notorious local figure: "I recall you did have that Svengali-like figure who mesmerized the character of Veronkha in Archangel. "Yes, Ihor Procak is a real life Svengali, a sort of hypnotist who actually hypnotized Dorothy Stratten in a movie [Autumn Born] made in Winnipeg... But Dorothy came up to Winnipeg and made a movie shortly before her death, and Ihor had a great big part in it and it was his idea to wind up a little squeaky mouse toy to hypnotize her with or something. Anyway, he’s an evil man and I always try to keep my girlfriend away from him."

Posted by pride at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)

New Yorker anti-Normal?: Colleges screening pix without pay

Some college film societies don't read the warning labels and don't realize they need a public exhibition license to show DVDs, reports Dave Newbart in the Chicago Sun-Times. "All the students in the Illinois State University Cinema Society wanted to do was get together, watch alternative films largely absent from theaters in Bloomington-Normal, and talk about the movies afterward." Distributor New Yorker Films found their listings on the internet, and sent along an $8,000 bill for 20 titles they hold shown since 2000. "I would call it a shakedown,'' said ISU English professor Curt White, the cinema society's adviser [and publisher of alternative press FC2]. "The effect of what they are doing is, there isn't going to be any alternative cinema here.'' New Yorker Films, per Newbart, with DVDs available, has "to be extra-diligent these days in enforcing copyrights." Chicago's Columbia College can't afford to run a film club, claiming "the cost of the permission rights are prohibitive." The student coordinator of ISU's program, William Barker, "said the group's budget has never exceeded $1,300, and that went toward promoting events and bringing in speakers. He said the group can't afford the so-called catalog rates for showing 15 movies a semester. "In good conscience, I couldn't ask [ISU] for $6,000 to show films,'' Barker said.

His group has stopped the showings... New Yorker Films, however, says the university should show that it values film and pay the money. Companies won't take a risk of distributing alternative films in the United States if they don't get paid for showings... "If these films aren't supported, they aren't going to be released in this country,'' Newbart quotes a New Yorker Films rep. [You can download a PDF of New Yorker Films' stance from their website here.]

Posted by pride at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

Leaving it to the divulgers: Wolcott on Vendetta

James Wolcott enthuses elliptically over on his corner: "If it seems as if I’m darting around V for Vendetta rather than zeroing in on what I liked/didn’t like, grading the performances, and pointing-out-subtle-details-to-prove-how-observant-I-am, it’s because I don’t want to give away too much of the movie, leaving that job to A. O. Scott and his fellow divulgers. To say that I found the domino montage as thrilling a coup de cinema as I’ve seen since DePalma first displayed his slashing mastery of crosscutting is to sound cryptic, but to be unelliptical I’d have to explain too much and wreck your fun. And make no mistake[,] V for Vendetta is fun, dangerous fun, percussive with brutality and laced with ironic ambiguity and satirical slapstick (a Benny Hill homage, no less!). But gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousnessthat drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That’s what I didn’t expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist. Off come the masks, and the faces are revealed."

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

After 100 shorts, Area Six: Chicago's James Fotopoulos tries to go comm'l

At Reel Chicago, news of a truly underground prodigy hoping to cross over to the bank. "After eight features and more than 100 shorts that have made him a favorite of museum and underground festival programmers, James Fotopolous is embarking on his first commercial production," writes Ed M. Koziarski. Area Six is budgeted at $2 million and based on Chicago novelist Jay Bonansinga's "The Sleep Police." The producers, Fotopoulos says, are "taking my art world rep and moving it into commercial territory." Fotopoulos sees both he and Bonansinga as profilic Chicago compatriots. "Fotopolous said he was attracted to “the fact that it’s about sleepwalking, hypnotism and abortion. All those themes are interesting to me.” ... Fotopoulos, whose father was a police officer, said he’s interested in exploring the stylistic contrast between the procedural and hypnosis/sleepwalking aspects of the story." [You can read my 2003 profile of Fotopoulous here.]

Posted by pride at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

American censors: say it ain't so, Joe

How committed to free expression in a secular society are our elected leaders? Howie Klein, former head of Reprise Records, writes memorably and with telling details about firsthand encounters with censorship instincts of US politicians like Connecticut Democrat Joseph Lieberman, and it's an ugly, ugly portrait. "People often ask me what happened [with the parental ratings implementation] and what was the big deal. Lieberman knew exactly what he was doing... when he insisted on ratings on CDs and it had nothing to do with helping parents supervise their children. Few people understand, the way Lieberman did, that in the late 80s something like 70% of all recorded music was sold in stores in malls and that malls have very stringent lease arrangements about their tenants not selling "pornography." Klein characterizes the failed Vice Presidential candidate and his compatriots this way: "Over the course of this controversy two of the Senate's most uptight and close-minded prigs, Sam Brownback and Lieberman, pushed for the kinds of stickers that would make it impossible for the kind of music they objected to... to be stocked by 70% of American retailers. The effect inside the music business was chilling—and instantaneous. Suddenly a whole new internal bureaucracy had to be created to police every record and suddenly artists were being pressured—sometimes overtly and sometimes less overtly—to cave in to demands by two really reactionary fundamentalists whose values are far from mainstream. In one fell swoop Lieberman destroyed an alliance between young voters and the Democratic Party that had started with John Kennedy's election as he ham-fistedly savaged their culture for his own political ambitions." Klein quotes Danny Goldberg, former chairman of Warner Bros Records and his book, "Dispatches from the Culture War: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit." "When former LBJ advisor Jack Valenti, then head of the movie industry trade organization, and a friend of Lieberman's was asked by Danny if he had ever told Lieberman about the First Amendment implications of the type of censorship he was advocating, Valenti replied, "When people get very religious and they believe their course of action is sanctioned by a higher authority, there's not much you can do to communicate with them— left, right or center." [More venom at the link.]

Posted by pride at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2006

Flesh and the World: making plans with Nigel

I've read too much during and after Sundance and still have a wrap-up piece I want to write; in the weekend FT, Nigel Andrews does a bang-up job considering the omniporn omnibus Destricted and Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated and then a casual run-in sends him another way: "The most educative encounter I had in Park City—simultaneously charming and chastening—summed up the whole business. For whom should I run into near the festival’s close but Harry Reems. The Deep Throat star, once the biggest male porn actor in the world, is now a Park City realtor.... “I’m married now, I own my own business, I converted to Christianity. I’m a trustee of my church, I’m seventeen-and-a-half years clean and sober of alcohol, and it’s not a part of my life to speak now and I don’t think I have anything of value to add to what you’re doing... I’ve stepped back from that, it’s been good for me to retreat into a private life.” He adds that he didn’t settle in Park City... in order to be near a film festival. “I first came up here with skiing friends. It seemed such a quiet, quaint little town 30 years ago. I said to myself, this is the place I’d like to hang my hat and live the rest of my life. And I’ve made my dream come true.” As he says, he also found God, conquered alcoholism and settled into family life. For half a second I almost envy him. He makes me wonder why I spend half my life gallivanting around film festivals courting encounters with the world, the flesh and the devil. Then I come to my senses. I realise that chaos is where I want to be and where every self-respecting film critic should be. Not for the first time I think of St Augustine’s prayer and offer up my own paraphrase. Give me a chaste and contrite life, Lord, away from the feverish task of monitoring screen freedom. But not yet." [Photo: Ray Pride]

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

February 24, 2006

Critical condition: keeping stiffs under wraps

NY Post's Lou Lumenick makes some calls about the aborning practice of not previewing crap movies for critics, such as Friday's Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion and Weinsteinco's Doogal. Lumenick quotes Lionsgate boss Tom Ortenberg: "We are not going to spend $50,000 for the privilege of negative reviews for a film that isn't going to be affected by them." The Postie counts eight movies kept out of sight this year, as opposed to only 7 in 2005. "Kids aren't reading reviews, so these movies are essentially bulletproof," Lumenick quotes a reformed studio publicista. "Ortenberg is more blunt about why there were no screenings for... Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman," which grossed... $50 million... last year—despite awful reviews. Ortenberg concedes it's a "tough decision" to skip screenings... 'The money for screenings will be better spent on more advertising."

Posted by pride at 03:28 PM | Comments (1)

Wellspring's foreign matter; Tom Hall's art attack

Sarasota Film Festival programmer Tom Hall has the most lucid fury yet published over at Back Row Manifesto about the Weinsteinco-Genius-Wellspring death toll. The amperage is high. Excerpts: "I consider the closing of Wellspring's theatrical distribution arm to be a death knell for foreign film distribution in America. There are already far too few opportunities for foreign films to be seen on our theatrical screens... The first [problem] is obviously political; we are living in a time when internationalism, connections to other cultures, diverse perspectives and ideas are considered... culturally irrelevant.... Most foreign films [shown] in America [are] dedicated to the idea that art should challenge audiences to examine their assumptions, well, there is no domestic cultural network that supports art, challenging ideas, or foreign perspectives. Where is the cinema culture in America? The second problem... is economic; we are talking about the slimmest of margins for these companies. The idea that a film company is migrating its entire foreign film distribution business to DVD and firing its entire theatrical distribution staff in order to save a mere $1 million in overhead tells me that this has nothing to do with Wellspring as a business or movies at all; it is about Wellspring as an asset... This is the complete undermining of the collective, theatrical experience which, as a film festival programmer, is something that I consider to be the essential component of cinematic pleasure. The idea that art will be relegated solely to a private financial transaction between an individual, isolated multimedia buyer and a smaller and smaller batch of media owners completely goes against the nature of what going to the movies has always meant...

"There is now a void, and while wonderful companies like Magnolia, Tartan and THINKFilm have all of my support in the hopes that they will continue to provide challenging, engaging titles, I can't say I'm overly optimistic about the future of challenging and foreign film in America... Domestic film festivals are being priced out of the marketplace for most foreign product by foreign rights holders seeking €1000 and beyond for a single film. Tiny domestic distributors have clearly learned this game; many are now using no-profit festivals as a profit center in order to recoup money on tiny films that have traditionally benefited from playing festivals... Without little companies like Wellspring who put quality above money in order to make these films available to even the most marginal of audiences, I really can't hold much hope that a great re-flowering of the 1950's and 60's foreign film boom will ever occur."

Posted by pride at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)

Accounting for taste: hearing VOICES old and new

Over at his indieWIRE blog, New York writer Anthony Kaufman, "wherein I rant about all things film and film industry unfit to publish in any official capacity," publishes a reply to a recent dis of another writer new to his turf: "Luke Y Thompson—the critic we lambasted in my previous blog about the Village Voice[-]New Times merger—has seen his public flaying. Admittedly, I feel a little bad for the guy now, and I have had several conversations about one of my points: that New York papers should have New York-based critics.... My main problem with Luke... isn't that he's based in Hollywood, but it's that he doesn't reflect a "Village Voice" or New York state of mind...." Writes Thompson: "Wow, I have never had such a vocal reaction to anything I've written, ever, anywhere else. I must be doing something right at last... Your complaints about me seem to boil down to the fact that I don't have the same sacred cows you do. It's easy to find art house movies I've disliked and mainstream movies I've liked—it would be equally easy to pick and choose indie movies I've championed (my [top] film of 2001 was the still-undistributed Tomorrow Night) and mainstream movies I've disliked (Gladiator, for a big one). If you want a critic who agrees with you all the time, I'm sorry to say you're never going to find one. That isn't the point of criticism anyway. Anthony—if I feel like it, maybe I'll find your top ten list and pick it apart sometime. But right now I'm on vacation."

Posted by pride at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

Albert Maysles: the people haven't been killed yet

Paul Barman Q's and Albert Maysles A's in the VOICE: "I've been thinking especially lately of where I go from here? What have I yet to film that I should be getting? I go back to my childhood and think of the 1930s when it was most common for a father to hit the child with a strap if the child misbehaved. One day I must have done something terribly bad; [my father] did hit me with the strap. It didn't bother me, it didn't hurt me. Later I happened to walk past his bedroom and there he was with his head against the wall crying, and I stood there in amazement, but really understanding how much my father loved me. That's the kind of thing I want to get... My daughter, when she was four years old, we used to go pick up The New York Times the night before at the newsstand. One day we got to the newsstand and the paper hadn't arrived yet. I was getting a little fidgety and she said, "Daddy, the paper's not ready yet because the people haven't been killed yet."

Posted by pride at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

New and recent releases

With a dry spell of linkables, here are notes on recent releases, including Manderlay, Marebito, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story; Nightwatch; and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, as well as the loathsome London and the low Dirty Work.

Manderlay (**) That Lars Trier is such a scamp. Manderlay, an adaptation of Pauline Reage’s sadomasochistic surmise “The Story of O” set in a Depression-era southern backwater where slavery has persisted 75 years after the end of the Civil War, is the second installment of his stage-bound “USA” trilogy (which Trier says he’s now abandoned). Taking over the role of Grace from Nicole Kidman, who played her in Dogville, Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) enunciates Trier’s otherworldly English with the practiced disdain of a haughty, vain schoolmarm as played in a junior high recital. (To be fair to what gifts Trier allows her to display, the pale Ms. Howard does display a lovely russet bush during the explicit Mandingo-styled interracial sex scene.) John Hurt has fun with the racially charged narration, which hurts the ear more than the heart, and Trier reprises David Bowie’s “Young Americans” for a closing montage of lynching, murder and degradation of African Americans. With Lauren Bacall, Isaach de Bankole and Danny Glover. 139m.

Night Watch (***) (Nochnoy Dozor, 2004) Convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug, Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch was a massive hit on its Russian turf, with a sequel in the works and a third, shot-in-English installment rumored. Moscow’s a marvelous backdrop for Bekmambetov’s relentless camera hijinks—post-Jeunet, post-Fincher, mid-Wachowski and post-Lord of the Rings—and the otherworldliness of its vampires of day and night evoke a Russian culture both medieval and post-modern, derivative of every visual culture keen on big-budget eyeball kicks, along with an occasional dollop of Eisensteinian battle. The plot is seldom decipherable, but boils down to a battle for the soul of a boy born in 1992 at the fall of the Soviet Empire. The American subtitles are also post-Tony Scott, drawing from the playfulness of his Man of Fire verbiage with the kind of play—letters jumping, jittering, turning red, melting away in inky, smoky spirals—seldom seen since silent picture intertitles. “Just what we need,” a character says knowingly, “Another asshole with visions of the future.” (A Chicago reviewer read the movie as "pro-life propaganda" without considering how different the Russian culture is from that of the U.S. or South Dakota.) 114m.

Tristram Shandy (*** ½) Earlier this month, director Michael Winterbottom debuted The Road to Guantanamo at the Berlin Film Festival; the restless director has several more gun-and-run productions in the works. His prolific output makes a clever lark like Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story almost antique, despite only having debuted at film festivals in the fall just as Winterbottom’s rock-porn short feature 9 Songs was in American theaters. There’s something both obtuse and grand about the stuff he’s putting out. Like Steven Soderbergh, antoher filmmaker in his early forties, Winterbottom seems to want to produce as much as he can so long as his energy and finance hold out. Riffing outward from Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," which a character in the movie calls "a masterwork of postmodernism before there was any modernism to be post,” Winterbottom and his customary screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (writing as “Martin Hardy," a near-anagram for "Tristram Shandy” ) draw on Winterbottom's toher semi-pseudodocumentary successes like 24 Hour Party People to satirize the notion of adaptation, but also filmmaking and film love and big fat egos. Among the many delights are Steve Coogan playing “Steve Coogan,” a petty, vulgar, detestable ego-moron of an actooooor who perfectly suits Sterne’s comedy. There’s also “Coogan”’s flirtation with a young production assistant (who’s actually read the book) that may the first on-screen meet-cute-let’s-fuck steeped in an invocation of the battle scenes in Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac. (The actress’ name is Naomie Harris, and I could listen to her character rant for hours.) This is one attractive, feature-length wink. With a cooing, coosome Kelly MacDonald, Ian Hart of the magnificent ears, Rob Brydon and Gillian Anderson as “Gillian Anderson.” 94m.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (*** 1/2) Gentle, intimate and elegant, Jonathan Demme’s homespun Neil Young: Heart of Gold is the height of understatement and the depth of heart. Shooting a two-day engagement at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, working with small Super 16mm cameras, Demme’s earthy images emphasize the quiet moments between Young and his family of on-stage musical collaborators. (The final number, an unbroken take of Young on acoustic guitar by himself, is a heart-breaker and one of the best things Demme’s ever done.) Many of the songs are from his current album, written and recorded across several days before an aneurysm operation last year. Wise and tender are not the only notes: there are spirited. Young’s dozens of collaborators on the shows include his wife, Pegi, Hank Williams’ guitar, and Emmylou Harris, whose stoic features and shoulder-length grey hair are a vision of immense beauty, and in a duet with Young, in a broad-brimmed pale straw hat and wrinkled linen suit, the pair don’t make a couple, but aren’t they a pair of swells? And Young’s voice into his sixties, this unique Manitoba white soul, singing lines like “I just want to thank you for all the things you’ve done, I was just thinking of you.” No banality, only truth, only wisdom and love. (The battered varnish of Williams’ guitar is another image that lasts.) 97m.

London (*) A flashy-splashy pop-music-spiked widescreen drugs-in-New-York-City exploitationer, the off-off-Broadway talkathon London (the name of Jessica Biel’s elusive title character, not another city) is set at a going-away party in a billionaire-scaled Manhattan loft, but most of the story takes place in recurrent drug-and-skull sessions in an upstairs toilet. Syd (Chris Evans) is a baseball cap and goatee-bearing turd who could never tell his ex that he loved her and now she’s skipping town, boo-hoo. After wrecking his very large, dirty loft earlier in the day, Syd encounters the non-Bret Easton Ellis “Bateman” (a game Jason Statham without direction, but with a tidy, dark hairpiece), a drug trafficker who joins him in a night of blow and gab amid other loft-living partygoing drug abusers. ”I’ve just come out of the most psychotic therapy session I’ve fucking had in years, I was going to smack some cunt for a taxi, I don’t know if I’m really ready for this shit,” Bateman explains. The hostess, played by Wedding Crashers Isla Fisher, notes in an Aussie-English accent of our protagonist, “He’s fucking touching my Buddha’s head… He’s a fuckin’ cocksuckah.” The line, “So how is this shit? Pretty good?” does not have a pretty answer. Hunter Richards’ writing-directing debut also features Kelli Garner, Leelee Sobieski, and Dane Cook as “Cockblocker.” (Casting director Bonnie Timmerman is credited as co-producer.) 92m.

Marebito (** ½) (The Stranger from Afar) Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard Daley likes to watch. Snug behind his cocoons and cul-de-sacs of security and seclusion, he’s announced in the past week that he’d like to make the Second City first in surveillance, eradicating any notion of privacy in public space. For whatever rationale, which likely will never been fully articulated, the swaddled, ever-watched politician finds no folly in the same fate being handed down to us all. One of the most vital recent blips of horror at the idea of the unblinking eye is Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 Marebito, shot by the director of all the Grudge movies (and a protégé of Kiyoshi Kurosawa) in eight days with consumer-level video equipment. A cameraman who lives in a nest of wires and video equipment, obsessed with idea of fear records a suicide in Tokyo’s subway system, with a bleak, ghastly succession of secrets to be revealed. It’s creepy bosh, for the most part, but Shimizu remains more clever than most people obsessed with the act of staring at one’s fellow (wo)man. Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto stars as the haunted cameraman. 94m.

Dirty Work (0) A disaster in every conceivable respect, the made-in-Chicago Dirty Work (2004) is appalling, subliterate trash. Dirty Work is built upon the kind of numb, meretricious plotting that goes from A, gets scared at the sight of B and scurries back in vulgar haste to A. The feature debut of director-co-writer Bruce Terris suggests Chicago as a crude backwater—not for its inauthentic storytelling but for what it suggests about the possibility of having a sustainable film culture in this city. It’s yet another Chicago production that attempts the grittiness of genre with little flavor but a lot of odor. Composition, tempo, literary qualities, resemblance of real-life motivation or even plausible behavior? Nope. Every woman’s a drunk or a whore, every man a crook or a fraud. Lance Reddick (“The Wire”) stars as a chrome-dome, whore-mongering cop-on-the-take, spouting bromides petulantly to his more petulant daughter along the inspired lines of “He’s a pohnk!” Ed Burns stalwart Mike McGlone plays an assistant states attorney up for election; his “fuck”-obsessed alcoholic wife badgers him until he strangles her—“You fucking lush! You fucking bitch!”—and a cover-up ensues along with bizarre badinage from an unlikely gang boss played by wee Austin Pendleton, who, for his twee efforts, gets two topless sex scenes. There’s also a young Polish woman who, implausibly, cannot find a single person in Chicago’s Polish community to help her when she gets in trouble, played by Georgian Nutsa Kukhianidze, who was a small sprite in Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief but an object of contempt and punishment here. (“It’s hard for a beautiful young girl these days,” she’s told. “I wish I no go to party,” she says.) What’s the dialogue like? “Oh, don’t forget you have to call the governor later” is the wise counsel afforded McGlone by his campaign brain. “I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch, you fucking bitch!” Or as a hood mutters of a deserted cafe, “It better come soon or he’s going to have to torch this motherfucker.” (“What?!” may be the most repeated line, as if the actors could not believe what they are being asked to do.) Various Chicago theater regulars have embarrassing turns, including Rich Komenich, Larry Neumann, Jr. and Mike Nussbaum. One hopes they at least got a hot lunch. There are unfortunate resemblances to the execrable Lana’s Rain, with similar plotting and ploddingness about the torture and potential slaughter of Eastern European women; Terris, who has also directed short films, was first assistant director and second unit director of that crummy 2000 Chicago production. The night exteriors under Chicago’s characteristic sodium vapor light are muzzy as if shot through peach Charmin. The original score credited to Mark Messing and Benn Jordan is attractive but inappropriate. 97m.

Posted by pride at 09:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

Shirt off my Brokeback: where's the homophobe backlash?

USATODAY's Scott Bowles works the Brokeback Mountain angle that the homophobes are home alone. "Organized protests over Brokeback Mountain have been conspicuously absent, despite the film's focus on a romance between gay cowboys... "It's been pretty stunning to see how quickly we were able to expand it in theaters across the country," says Jack Foley, distribution chief for Focus Features. "Even in conservative states where we'd thought there would be resistance, people have been welcoming." ... "We didn't have any protests," says Melanie Bell of 5,600-screen AMC Theatres. "We picked up Brokeback Mountain in as many theaters as we could after the Oscar nominations came out." Bowles finds one "conservative policy group" who avers that it's gotten too much attention: "Why should we add to it?" O'er at the Reporter, Martin Grove handicaps the race at extensive length. On its website, however, USATODAY's link to awards coverage has its own fuel to the fire, featuring a still from Crash.

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

February 21, 2006

DVD 5-4-3-2-1: new and recent releases

Among the best new and recent DVD releases: the six-hour epic Italian meller, The Best of Youth, plus more below, including Ryan, The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, and The Constant Gardener.

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5. Ryan, Chris Landreth (****, Rhino, $20). Last year’s more-than-deserving best animated short Oscar winner is a timely treat before this year's kudos, a lysergic excursion literally into a man’s head: Landreth interviews 1960s Canadian animation great Ryan Larkin, whose career and life were marred by addictions, and now lives on streets and in shelters. The insecurities of the two men suggest Landreth’s brilliant breakthroughs in computerized animation; the DVD contains commentary, examples of Larkin’s earlier work and a documentary on the National Film Board’s investment in this new approach to animation.

4. The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle, Julien Temple (***, Shout Factory, $20) It’s been out for a while, but this long-out-of-reach screw-the-record-companies provocation has a newly timely quality to it. Ratty transfer, and certainly dated from the time Variety called it “the Citizen Kane of rock documentaries,” but there’s a time capsule worth of attitude in the movie (especially from manager and macher Malcolm MacLaren) and in director Julien Temple’s commentary.

3. The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles (*** ½, Universal, $30). Maybe it would have been better without such a darkly futile “romantic” ending, but there’s gentle beauty and terrible things throughout.

2. Thumbsucker, Mike Mills (*** ½, Sony, $25). Mike Mills has eyes and ears and intends to use them.

1. The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù), Marco Tullio Giordana (****, Miramax, $30). What television, what luxury, what cinema this is. Made for Italian TV and released only briefly in the waning days of Weinstein Miramax, this six hour telling of several lives over forty years of tumultuous Italian history deserves watching, not synopsis. This could have been one of my favorite films of 2005, if there had been more chances to see it on the big screen. Passionate, observant, tender and sad: it’s simply great.

OTHER RECENT RELEASES: Dave McKean’s intricately hand-made fable, Mirrormask (*** ½, Sony, $27); the Chris Gore-written topical comedy with few gags that actually work, My Big Fat Independent Movie (*, Anchor Bay, $20); Aardman’s arduous animation, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (**, DreamWorks, $20); Chris Columbus’ thin yet personal edition of the musical Rent (**, Sony, $29); All The President’s Men (*** 1/2, Warner, $27), with Robert Redford’s first commentary in this post-Deep Throat revelation 2-disc reissue; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s long-delayed but still chilling tech-horror Pulse (*** ½, Magnolia, $27); Claire Dolan (***, New Yorker, $30), obstinate Lodge Kerrigan’s cool, geometric take on an urban call girl’s life, with a stellar perf by the late Katrin Cartlidge; the comic Torremolinos 73 (***, First Run Features, $30) > about an encyclopedia salesman whose life is changed by giddy cinephilia; The Take (***, First Run Features, $30), Naomi Klein and Avi Lerner’s documentary about labor relations in one manufacturing plant in beleaguered Argentina; Michael Almereyda’s doc on the great photographer, William Eggleston In the Real World (*** ½, Palm, $27); and Jia Zhangke’s The World (*** ½, Zeitgeist Films, $30), a vast metaphor for globalization in the comings-and-goings of workers at a Beijing amusement park studded with scale replicas of world monuments. (“We’ve still got our Twin Towers,” one guide notes.)

Posted by pride at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Fuckin' Genius: Weinsteinco withers Wellspring

It was too good to be true: Eugene Hernandez reports at indieWIRE that the Weinsteinco acquisition of Genius Products for their rack-jobbing expertise does not extend to keeping Wellspring alive as a distribution entity. "The Weinstein Company confirmed that it would be the exclusive domestic distributor for any future Wellspring theatrical releases... Wellspring staff are expected to leave the company by the end of April and the Wellspring Home Entertainment division will move to Santa Monica... In early December, the Weinsteins announced a deal with Wellspring's corporate parent, taking a 70% stake in the newly named Genius Products LLC, a company comprised of Wellspring's large library of some 750 feature[s].... including the work of Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Rohmer, Fassbinder, Greenaway, Almodovar, Antonioni and many others... About 10 people are expected to lose their jobs at Wellspring as a result of the decision to curtail Wellspring's theatrical arm. The company indicated today that it would save nearly $1 million in overhead... "This realignment supports an aggressive acquisition campaign to build on the Wellspring brand with critically acclaimed films that celebrate intelligent cinema, while at the same time, supporting our strategy of leveraging our core competency by focusing on the sales and distribution of higher margin, packaged entertainment products at retail," Genius Products CEO Trevor Drinkwater is quoted as typing... "Genius remains committed to the independent film industry and we are moving forward with indie releases. We're just going to handle them in a different manner than we did before." ...

...Ownership of Wellspring has been anything but stable in recent years," Hernandez notes, with More history, names and titles at the link. Most notable is this irony: "While the Weinsteins made their name buying and releasing small art house movies — mostly foreign language and American indie titles in the '80s and early '90s — today a look at the new The Weinstein Company slate reveals a company—backed by $1.2 billion in funding — that is more focused on genre and star-driven projects... The state of the specialty film business is shaky, leading many companies to abandon smaller movies. In this case, the Wellspring Home Entertainment div[i]sion is expected pursue those films for exclusive DVD release. The concern among stalwarts is that it is becoming harder and harder to get art films on art house theater screens... The news comes at a time of transition for the film business, with fewer buyers giving well-funded releases to art house fare, particularly foreign language films that are not genre movies... Only Sony Pictures Classics maintains a consistent commitment to foreign films, while many smaller boutique buyers seem to be less focused on international cinema, in favor of docs which have performed better in recent years... With theatrical outlets dwindling, audiences will increasingly have to rely on film festivals, or DVD, to get their fix. "Imagine never seeing an Antonioni movie on the big screen," Wellspring's Marie Therese Guirgis said in [a] NY Times article. "There are so many filmmakers you wouldn't like if you just rented them on video." Apparently, Wellspring's final release is the Oscar-nom'd Unknown White Male, with the telling tagline, "Imagine if your entire memory were suddenly wiped away."

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

Stone, 9/11 and carry on doing what you love

in Bangkok, the Beeb's Neil Smith listens in as Oliver Stone explains his "austere" World Trade Center: "Speaking at the Bangkok International Film Festival, Stone called the feature a "24-hour document" in the lives of two New York Port Authority officers who became trapped under the rubble... "It's an investigation into how they survived - how they mentally made it under those terrible conditions... [It's] a very austere, technical attempt to be realistic about what happened - to show it as it really was"... When asked whether the world in general and America in particular was ready for a drama about the 9/11 attacks, the director was dismissive. "I would hate that to be the main question about the movie, though I sense that is what's going to happen... I'm not in the business of knowing whether America is ready. You just hope it will be... I'm not the only director who has had to deal with rejection, failure and defeat... But either you get a gun, load it and shoot yourself in the head, or you carry on doing what you love."

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

Rocket's redglare: an arthouse simply died

Small cities continue to have mixed success with arthouses: the Quad City Times' Tory Brecht reports, "Less than a year into its reincarnation, the Rocket Theater in downtown Rock Island will fall dark again, a victim of growing competition in the independent film market." Owner-operator Devin Hansen says, however, the screen may reopen as "a dinner-beverage-and-movie theater." "The type of films shown at the Rocket — and Hansen’s former theater business venture, Brew & View, which closed in August — began to be shown at Showcase Cinemas 53 in Davenport and Great Escape Theatre, Moline, taking away much-needed business from the theater that operates on narrow margins. "March of the Penguins and Brokeback Mountain became big hits in multiplexes across the country... Had we landed one of these films, our future may have been different.... We might have been able to survive as a music-only club had we not had so much debt from both movie theaters... Movies were always our main focus, our bread-and-butter, and that simply died.”

Posted by pride at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Everything is Polleytical: Sarah Polley's feature directorial debut

Ever since her written-directed-co-produced 2001 short, I Shout Love, a witty, tonally sophisticated 38-minute black comedy about emotional dependency and the love of the Leafs, I've been waiting for Sarah Polley to make her feature debut. It's official: The 27-year-old actress is writing and directing Away with Her in rural Ontario, a feature based on fellow Canadian) Alice Munro's short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which Polley calls her "favourite short story." A diverse cast includes Julie Christie, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy and uber-Canadian Gordon Pinsent. Atom Egoyan, who showcased Polley in The Sweet Hereafter is executive producer; it's being shot by Saddest Music in the World DoP Luc Montpellier.

Polley's been working on it for two years. The synopsis: "Married for 50 years, Grant (Pinsent) and Fiona’s (Christie) life together is full of tenderness and humour, their serenity broken only by Fiona’s restrained references to the past, complicated further by .. memory loss. Moving Fiona into a nursing home specializing in Alzheimer’s... Grant is not allowed to visit for the first month so she can “adjust”. When he sees her again, Fiona has forgotten him and turned her affection to Aubrey (Murphy) , another resident in the home. Heartbroken, Grant visits daily, bearing witness to the growing bond between her and Aubrey. When Aubrey’s wife, Marian (Dukakis), takes Aubrey home, Fiona becomes deeply depressed, and Grant embarks of the greatest act of self-sacrifice of his life." You can download Munro's short story, from the New Yorker, in PDF format, here. [Photo credit: Ken Woroner]

Posted by pride at 07:15 AM | Comments (0)

The road back from The Road to Guantánamo: rumors of freedom of speech unwarranted

The actors who starred in Michael Winterbottom's award-winning The Road to Guantánamo were given a good talking-to under terror act on their return from the Berlin Film Festival, reports the Guardian's Vikram Dodd: "Four actors who play al-Qaida suspects... were detained by the police at Luton airport as they returned... and questioned under anti-terror laws, alongside two of the former terrorism suspects they play on screen. They were returning last Thursday after the premiere... [The Road to Guantánam] depicts the life of three men from Tipton in the West Midlands, who go to Afghanistan and end up being held for two years by the US at its military base on Cuba before being released without charge... It depicts the alleged shackling, torture and other ill treatment the Tipton detainees claim they suffered at the hands of the Americans. The film's producers say four actors from the film, who all play terrorism suspects, were detained at Luton airport after flying back from Germany on an easyJet flight. They included Rizwan Ahmed and Farhad Harun, who were stopped along with Shafiq Rasul and Rhuhel Ahmed, the former Guantánamo inmates they play on screen... Rizwan Ahmed said police swore at him and asked if he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. He said he was at first denied access to a lawyer and was questioned about his views on the Iraq war by a policewoman. "She asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantánamo. She asked 'Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?'" Mr Ahmed alleged that he had a telephone wrestled from his hand as he tried to contact a lawyer and was later abused. He claimed that one police officer had called him a "fucker". A spokeswoman for Bedfordshire police was reassuring: none of the men had been arrested. "The police officers wanted to ask them some questions under the counter-terrorism act... All were released within the hour. Part of the counter-terrorism act allows us to stop and examine people if something happens that might be suspicious." If only the UK would turn its security over to the United Arab Emirates, things like this would never happen.

Posted by pride at 01:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2006

A new Broomfield sweeps clean: a UK doc retro

Nick Broomfield has a new doc about the aftereffects of South African apartheid, debuting on Channel 4, His Big White Self, revisiting an earlier subject, Afrikaner extremist Eugene Terre'Blanche. In the Guardian, Paul Hoggart uses the new pic as a way to describe Broomfield's output. "Broomfield bravado is nothing new, providing such memorable moments as his standing up at an American Civil Liberties Union awards ceremony, where Courtney Love was guest of honour, to denounce her for threatening journalists (Kurt and Courtney), and walking into an American high-security prison yard to interview Suge Knight, the jailed head of a record company called Death Row, whom he suspected was behind the murders of the famous rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (Biggie and Tupac)... Broomfield edits his films in his rural bolt-hole, an idyllic spot about an hour south of London.... Broomfield has just turned 58 and turns out to be as genial, laid-back, softly-spoken and ruminative as he is in his films. There is an air of old hippy-bohemian about the place. An antique roll-top bath sits in the middle of his office - only one item in a fine selection of Victorian sanitary ware.... "I was taught by someone who loved observational films where people are made to feel completely adequate about the way they are. That is what makes an insightful film," he says. He still thinks of his films as "political", though in a broader sense. "A film is a portrait of an aspect of society." ...

... Broomfield was not the first documentary reporter to put himself in the frame, but he is probably the one who has done most to popularise this style in Britain. His search for answers provides the narrative backbone to issues which may remain unresolved, usually laced with his gently sly comedy.... His work has been an important part of a wave of new, popular feature-length documentaries, many of which, like the films of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, are screened in cinemas. "They're politically more critical than can be made through the Hollywood system, which is so conservative and careful," Broomfield says. He compares this wave to the arrival of the "New Journalism" in the mid-60s. For Broomfield, "it is the feeling that the incidental stuff can be much more revealing than the big questions" ... Broomfield believes in the essential goodness of human nature, even in appalling circumstances. It is this trait that apparently motivates his [next film, a] Chinese cockle-picker drama. "Visually, it's tremendous, but we filmed in China illegally. The authorities are very controlling. I found China charmless and brutal. It was a ghastly place. I so hated it." He used new HD... digital technology, which produces superb sound and images, even in low light. This film, he thinks, might turn out to be part of an explosion in cheap, independent drama production made possible by this technology. If he sneaks under the radar here, catching his subjects off-guard as he has done in his documentaries, he could well be proved right." [Broomfield's website is here.]

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

February 19, 2006

Taylor made: Charles Taylor post-Salon

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks with critic Charles Taylor about what reviewers do (and ought to do) today: "I've heard people say that if a critic has a professed dislike for someone's work, someone else should review it so the artist gets a fair hearing. Well, we already have that. It's called publicity. It's not a critic's job to go in concerned with being positive. But news people are trained in that journalist's way of thinking, "You get the facts. You report them. You provide evidence to support the position." Critics take imaginative leaps, they employ] hyperbole and that makes the reportorial mindset very nervous, and they don't get it. It all comes back to that line Truffaut said about how no one at a newspaper has less respect than the movie critic. No one is going to tell the dance critic or classical music critic how to do their jobs... No one is going to say to a reporter who has been on the scene he or she is writing about, "Oh, you don't know what's happening there." ... Like a reporter, the critic is the one going out day after day, seeing movies, thinking about how they fit into the culture. Editors, for the most part, sit behind their desk saying they heard buzz on this or that.

But all that usually means is they heard publicity from somewhere, often from publicists who are calling to pitch them on getting coverage for their movies, or from other editors who've been pitched by publicists, or in magazine pieces which resulted because some editor was successfully pitched to by a publicist. They're not relying on the people who are actually out doing the footwork. That's a real problem. The critic should reflect the culture as honestly as he or she can. If you're a regular critic and you've got that weekly outlet, you're essentially writing a diary of the culture, and not in the stupid think pieces sort of way. You're reflecting the tone of what's going on week in and week out. A portrait of the culture you're dealing with can't help but emerge from that. If you're honest about what your response is, you're serving your reader whether they agree with you or not." [More at the link, including why he's no longer at Salon.]

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

Let's move on: Nick Cave and John Hillcoat on The Proposition

In the March Sight & Sound, director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave talk about their brilliant, brooding 18th century Western, The Proposition, to Nick Roddick. "The real theatre on which The Proposition is played out is the Australian landscape, lovingly captured by French cinematographer Benoi�t Delhomme [who] has responded to the light of the outback - harsh, unfiltered, almost horizontal - like many a northern DoP before him discovering the special properties of the southern hemisphere... The Proposition's aim is not to place its characters against a beautiful backdrop but to link them directly to the land's Darwinian indifference. "These were brutal times," says Hillcoat, "but the land also had a great beauty to it. I think it's a metaphor for the whole thing. In the middle of the day it's so harsh and oppressive yet when the sunsets come it's stunningly beautiful. It goes from one extreme to another." ... "From my point of view," says Cave, "we weren't putting the film forward as truthful: we were looking for truth more at a poetic level - with, of course, the amount of research Johnny always does to keep things on track." ... "I think [Peckinpah] was doing something very radical that we have since absorbed and regurgitated to the point where it has become banal," [Hillcoat] says. "I think a lot of people confuse violence: content gets muddled with intent. Personally I think Peckinpah's films are very honest, in an uncomfortable way, about heroic male action in extreme conflict." [The Proposition] is really fucking violent!" [Hillcoat continues]. "That it's very much a part of the actual time. The violence is brutal and very real but it's buried in the thrust of the story, which is why a lot of people don't have a problem with it." "There's no ritualistic violence, there's no fetishistic violence. There's no slow-motion," mutters Cave. "Let's move on."

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

Blurb of the day: Winter Passing

Sunday New York Times, Arts & Leisure, page 19: Searingly scripted and brilliantly birthed to life by its cast..., Elliot V. Kotek, Moving Pictures Magazine.

Posted by pride at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

To make a good movie is not a hard job: A Bangladeshi perspective

Reader Abdul Malek, writing in from Shahjahanpur, Dhaka, offers his suggestions for a better Bengali cinema in Bangladesh's New Nation: "Film producers and directors pay no heed to the advice of refraining from making vulgar movies. They think that vulgarism give them more revenue, meaning that money is more important than a creative cinema. We also agree that the investors have right to profit, but that can be done if all agree by making hale and hearty cinemas... We do not want to see our females in short uniform; to see them raped, violated; and in the dirty body language while they dance. We want them in heavenly look. A woman is more beautiful when she covers her head. She can play a role in the cinema and drama wearing head cover and without touching the hands of a male who is not her real father, brother, son and others so allowed.To make a good movie is not a hard job. Our film producers and makers can do it."

Posted by pride at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

Hollywood on Hollywood at the Shorty Machen Store

In the Birmingham News, Kathy Kemp junkets off to Hollywood, "in the Appalachian foothills just above Scottsboro... a far piece (roughly 1,830 miles) from the place where movies are made and celebrities frolic." She surveys how much Hollywood ("'We're the real Hollywood,' reads the... town water tower") knows of Hollywood: "Hmmm," Shorty Machen says, scrunching up his forehead... "Hmmm," he says again before pausing to ring up a customer's purchases. [The] Shorty Machen Store... seems to be the hub of activity in Hollywood, pop. 950, especially at lunch time. Besides groceries, gas, fishing tackle, pickled okra and hardware, Shorty's offers a full-scale sandwich menu starring a cheeseburger worthy of Schwab's drugstore... The word "Brokeback" does not ring a bell for Shorty, a quiet fellow whose favorite pastime is quail hunting. "That's what Dick Cheney was doing when he got shot," Shorty says, which suggests he does indeed follow current events..." The most movie-mad local Kemp found was "surprised to hear that [Brokeback Mountain] is up for best picture. "Once you get past the first part, it kind of had a good story to it," Kemp's focus group of one told her.

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February 17, 2006

Chris Doyle: This is my Macau... my New York... this is how Phuket feels to me

Bangkok Post's Kong Rithdee hoists a couple more with DoP Christopher Doyle as Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves opens the Bangkok International Film Festival. "Such visions comes from a mad-haired Aussie who speaks fluent Chinese, a genius goblin with a gush of energy bordering on drunken mania. Doyle is famous for quaffing Oktoberfest quantities of Heineken on set, and for inspecting the discotheques of the world's various cities... When he speaks, what comes out is a heady mix of prophetic lucidity and riotous incoherence... "What's important is the way Pen-ek and I collaborate. Once the script was ready to a certain level, we went to visit the locations, and we reworked the script based on our visits - what if we took this in or took this out. This way the script became more intimately related to the spaces. So the cinematography came in much more closer to the work." Unlike the rapt sensuality Doyle gave to some of his most famous works, Waves acquires a surreal power from its mouldy look; every scene looks as if fresh air has been sucked out through the windows and only a remnant of luminous staleness remains. The scenes on the cruise ship - shot in a Bangkok studio - are a meditation on space as the character roams the labyrinth of his own consciousness... "I mean, if you do try to go there, to push towards it, you'll find something that you wouldn't have found if you say 'oh no, it's not what I want, what am I gonna do?' For me, the idea is: just go there. If you are a filmmaker with an identity, or with a vision of how life is, you can overcome this kind of difficulty, or you can make it part of your style. This is something I learned from working with Wong Kar-wai - that you take what you have and make something more."... Perhaps the most intriguing visual aspect of Waves is how Doyle's images of Macau, Hong Kong and Phuket differ from... familiar images of those cities... "That's part of our job, right? ...

... "When I shot Last Life in Bangkok, the city was to me very poetic, and in fact until I made the film I didn't see Bangkok that way.What happens is that the engagement of the film process actually takes you somewhere special. It's not an objective thing, but it's our response to the space we choose to live in or we choose to photograph, because we feel this is expressing how we feel. It's quite subjective. Maybe some people would say 'oh I didn't know Macau's like this'. But this space exists and this space has a certain poetry and these people belong in this space, or don't belong in this space.So yes, this is my Macau, or this is my New York, or this is my Bangkok. Or yes, this is how Phuket feels to me." [Set pic of Mr. Doyle's refreshment via Twitchfilm.]

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

I wake up screening: where movie titles go at night

Stephen Hill's Movies Title Screens page is always a sweetly obsessive place to drop by.

Posted by pride at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

More Errol: new projects from the Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

Errol Morris has fact and faction on his plate, with 3 projects afoot, report Carol Beggy & Mark Shanahan in the Boston Globe. "In addition to a new documentary that he can't talk about, Morris is set to start shooting... a studio project called 'Nub City... a horror [movie] based on the bizarre true story of several Floridians who turned up missing arms and legs after taking out insurance policies on themselves. ''I'm not a big blood-and-guts guy, but this story's been on my mind for close to 30 years... I actually like horror films. Hitchcock's Psycho is a very important movie to me, and I love those Polanski pictures." The director's other film, also in pre-production, is a fictional account of the popular Michael Paterniti book, ''Driving Mr. Albert : A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain."Says Morris: ''Following the Oscars, I just decided this'd be a good time to expand my repertoire." Over at his own site, Morris publishes the lengthy transcript of his Harvard "History and Literature" lecture, The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist, including the clips he showed at the event. "I like to think of myself as the ultimate anti-postmodernist postmodernist...

"...Notwithstanding the unusual narrative or visual devices that appear in many of the films, what have kept me going for the three years of investigating this story, was the belief that there answers to questions such as, [Randall] Adams did it, didn't he? Or [David Ray] Harris did it, didn't he? That it's not just up for grabs. Today, I believe there's a kind of frisson of ambiguity. People think that ambiguity is somehow wonderful in its own right, an excuse for failing to investigate. What can I say? I think this view is wrong. At best, misguided. Maybe even reprehensible... I had a lot of trouble with [Robert] McNamara in the course of making [fog of War]. Horrible disagreements about stuff I had put in the movie that he did not want in there. One of the major disagreements concerned the lessons in the film. There are 11 lessons. And he repeatedly said, "You know, Errol, those are not my lessons. They are your lessons." And I said, "Yeah, yeah, they are. But they're extracted, of course, from things that you've said," things that McNamara said, which is indeed the case. Perhaps not the lessons that McNamara would have chosen, but then, he was not directing the movie. I think that the lessons are all ironic. It's very odd to me that people talk about the film and they talk about the lessons without pointing out that there might be intended ironies with each and every one of them. But yes, they are for me ironic, particularly the last one in the movie: You can't change human nature. It tells you that all of the other lessons are valueless, that the human situation is indeed hopeless."

Posted by pride at 03:44 PM | Comments (1)

Melancholy maybe: the Russian mood

A brief brood on the notion of why Russians like their melancholy, from Vladimir Kozlov in Moscow Times: "It has long been debated whether tragic plots indeed better coincide with the Russian mentality and cultural background, or whether that was just a stereotype successfully spread by greedy producers and distributors of the silent-film era, eager to cash in on anything. Some cultural theorists have explained the prevalence of tragic endings in early Russian films by stating that the entire Russian artistic tradition of the 20th century -- including cinema -- derived from ancient and, therefore, "sublime" art forms, as opposed to Hollywood-style mass-culture products...The practice of changing the finales of Hollywood films in order to bring them in line with the assumed tastes of Russian audiences started before the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, domestic producers claimed that Russian audiences, brought up with 19th-century theatrical melodramas -- which inevitably ended sadly -- would not like films with happy ends, instead preferring death, blood and suicide... With the loosening of censorship as a result of glasnost in the late 1980s, topics that used to be taboo under the previous system began to be actively explored by filmmakers. A wave of chernukha, or dark naturalism, inundated Russian cinema and swept away almost everything else. There was no longer a place for happy endings. The teenage heroine of Vasily Pichul's Little Vera attempts suicide; in Pyotr Todorovsky's Intergirl, a reformed prostitute dies in a car crash; and in Sergei Solovyov's Assa, the protagonist Bananan is killed by a mafia boss who, in turn, gets shot by his mistress.... Since then, despite drastic political and cultural changes in the country, Russian filmmakers' inclination for sad endings seems to have remained unchanged. The last major international success story in Russian film, Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2003 The Return, which won a Golden Lion at that year's Venice Film Festival, has a tragic denouement in which an unnecessarily strict father dies in an attempt to save his younger son."

Posted by pride at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

The enemies (and maker) of Darwin's Nightmare

In LA Weekly, B. Ruby Rich talks to Hubert Sauper, director of the fierce, Oscar-nominated doc, Darwin's Nightmare. "Sauper does not appear in his own documentaries. He’s no Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore, hogging the frame to brand his vision. Instead of his face, he pours his heart and wisdom into Darwin’s Nightmare, infusing it with a degree of empathy and compassion rarely encountered in contemporary documentaries. In the human-rights corner of nonfiction filmmaking, where docs usually rely on shocking revelations to do the job, his poetic lyricism is even rarer. More than an exposé, more than an anti-globalization screed, Darwin’s Nightmare is a cinematic Homeric ode, shot with a tiny consumer-grade Sony camera in four years of trips back and forth to Tanzania... Sauper brings such a contagious enthusiasm to everyone and everything he encounters that you immediately understand how he was able, in the most difficult conditions imaginable, to capture his intimate interviews with Darwin’s Nightmare’s unforgettable subjects... Darwin’s Nightmare, Sauper’s second film, leaves its audiences so devastated that some have complained it can’t work as an activist tool because it’s too depressing. “I think those people were already depressed before they saw my film,” says Sauper, who proceeds to rattle off facts and figures about arms-trading in Africa, environmental devastation and social collapse. “The biggest wars are in the center of Africa, not Iraq. A million people are dying in the center of Africa from the direct consequences of war, the arms are coming mostly from Western and Eastern Europe, and they’re not illegal. These people you see in the film are just doing their job, just making deliveries. They’re like taxi drivers.” .

.. Sauper has made enemies in high places — the Tanzanian government sees the film as an attack on its country, and the fisheries bureau is furious that Sauper focused his camera on its night watchman instead of its CEO. But as long as he keeps making friends where no one else cares to look, and treating them with respect, he will be unstoppable. Having completed the first two parts of his planned African trilogy, he’s currently back in Paris, his home base, raising money — something the success of Darwin’s Nightmare makes a little easier..." [More background on Sauper and the film at the link.]

Posted by pride at 01:59 AM | Comments (1)

February 16, 2006

The distributor who wasn't there: Brian Flemming's heresies

In LA Weekly, Steven Leigh Morris talks to filmmaker Brian Flemming re: self-distribution today: "Los Angeles native Brian Flemming is doing just fine without a distributor. As part of a strategy to get his films seen, the soft-spoken, mild-mannered auteur charges nothing to community centers willing or offering to screen his 2005 documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There... Flemming earns his income from the sale of DVDs at... events — a take that’s supporting his simple lifestyle as a bachelor in West Hollywood... That, and royalties from amateur productions of his hit off-Broadway stage parody, "Bat Boy: The Musical," co-written with Keythe Farley, which did well in L.A. and New York, before being crucified on London’s West End. “It’s much easier to make a film than put on a play,” Flemming says... And, he adds, it’s only getting easier. “All you need now is a digital camera and some editing equipment. . . . I know there’s an audience out there, and I know how to reach it.” Screenings of The God Who Wasn’t There and subsequent DVD sales have been brisk, thanks in large part to the movie’s unique thesis: Christ probably never walked the Earth." [More filmfrastructure and religious heresy at the link.]

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

Wiseman's documentary Award of Distinction

David E. Williams talks to Fred Wiseman as the American Society of Cinematographers gives the vet docco maker their Award of Distinction, which he'll get at the ASC Awards on February 25. “I’ve always picked subjects that have been around for a time, are common in America and have their counterparts in most other countries — the army, police, education, hospitals, prisons. The subject that links all my films is experiences that are common to many people.” How do his films reflect American culture? “My films are subjective, impressionistic accounts of some aspect of American culture. It’s impossible for me to calculate what effect or impact a film or group of films may have. It would be quite pretentious of me to say, ‘They have had the following effect.’ People come to films with such diverse individual life experiences that it’s hard to determine in advance how they might respond to or read a work. I don’t believe there is any direct, traceable relationship between any single work and social change. My movies are more novelistic than journalistic or ideological in their approach.

I always try to reflect the complexity and ambiguity of the place that is the subject of the film, rather than have ideological blinders on and try to present a particular political or social point of view. I’ve never found any ideology that adequately explains the complex events I’ve come across while making these films. It would be phony for me to offer solutions or explanations when I haven’t found any I believe in. I instead try to supply the audience with enough material to help them make up their own minds by placing them in the events and asking them to think through their own relationship to what they’re seeing and hearing.” [More stuff, including the technical, at the link.]

Posted by pride at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

Cutting edge Canada: what the NFB's buying these days

Brendan Kelly catches up with the latest ventures, including cell phone movies, with Canadian National Film Board commissioner and chairperson Jacques Bensimon for Montreal's Gazette. "What we've done in the last five years is open up to the democratization of the audio-visual industry," puffs Bensimon. "When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King tapped a dynamic 40-year-old Scottish filmmaker by the name of John Grierson to set up a new public film studio way back in 1939, the idea was to "interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations." Grierson, the first government film commissioner, proposed to do that by producing socially conscience films and screening them to as many Canadians as possible in theatres across the country... Sixty-seven years later, the NFB hasn't lost any of its enthusiasm for churning out activist films, but what's rapidly changing is how the films are distributed and where we see them. With the arrival of a slew of specialty channels over the past 15 years, the NFB has shifted its focus from cinemas to the small screen, and its films have become staples on networks like the Documentary Channel and History Television... Bensimon [makes] every effort to ensure that the studio's films make full use of all the new distribution avenues, from iPods to cellphones to the Internet... "The problem is that the NFB tends to live on its old glory and people have only the past on their minds. But there's a continuing need for someone who's experimental. When you win an Academy Award [for the innovative animated NFB co-production Ryan], someone is saying 'you're good.' What you need is a place that's innovative. When I arrived (in 2001), the NFB was closed in its bubble. You have to get out of the frame of mind where the NFB is stuck in its 67 years of history." ... The NFB is currently in negotiations with Apple to sell the iPod maker a package of 200 films - both animated and documentary shorts - that would then be made available for downloading from the iTunes online store for iPod users. The Board is also big on movies made for cellphones. Last year, the NFB and Bravo!FACT, a fund for Canadian filmmakers, partnered to co-produce four so-called "micro-movies" designed to be viewed on cellphones. One of the four, director Don McKellar's Phone Call from Imaginary Girlfriends, was actually shot using a cellphone, as well. The Shorts in Motion series also includes Unlocked by Sook-Yin Lee, host of CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera; Go Limp, from Love, Sex and Eating the Bonesdirector Sudz Sutherland; and former Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney's I'm Sorry... Bensimon's film studio also began shooting many of its major documentaries in high-definition long before private producers took to the format, and that gamble is paying off now that more TV networks are switching to broadcasting in high-definition." [More initiatives at the link.]

Posted by pride at 07:57 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

150 seconds of hell: Night Watch in its entirety

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Memory holds that the French coming attractions for Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale that did this first, running the entire movie at the length of a trailer, ending with, "You've just seen Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale"? The smarties at Fox Searchlight have put the entirety of Night Watch up for the eagle of eyes. In 150 seconds.

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

Eugene Jarecki: Why We Laugh or Cry

At Huffington Post, Why We Fight filmmaker Eugene Jarecki muses on the reaction to the news that Vice President Cheney shot a man in the face: "Dick Cheney’s America is a place so cutthroat that a 78-year old man gets shot by his own friend and the dominant response across the country is laughter... What is it about Dick Cheney that brings out the worst in us?
Is it his secrecy? — the secrecy that mocks the openness we all idealize as being the core of our democracy? Are we so tired of watching Mr. Cheney obstruct access to information about his activities that reading the Texas Parks and Wildlife Hunting Accident and Incident Report online gives us all a brief holiday in our hearts? Is it his arrogance? — the sense that he is above the law — that makes us relish the sheepish sight of him being interrogated by a park ranger? ... What frightens me is that when one of Mr. Cheney’s shotgun pellets slipped into Mr. Whittington’s heart tonight and Mr. Whittington himself slipped into cardiac arrest, I find even Mr. Cheney’s allies at the DrudgeReport rubbing their hands in ghoulish expectation. With a headline that reads CHENEY FACES GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION IF MAN DIES, I fear that too few prayers going out around the country tonight are directed at the vulnerability of Mr. Whittington’s life and too many at the vulnerability his death might bring to an overly-powerful Executive Branch. As for me, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry."

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

Paintings don't cost the same: David Leonardt saves the movies

he New York Times is speaking—shhhhhh—listen. Biz columnist David Leonhardt decrees changes to come in movie pricing. "It's not how airlines sell seats, the Gap sells shirts or eBay sells anything. Soon, it won't be the way the movies work either. You will pay more for a ticket on the weekends and less on weekdays. You'll be able to buy a reserved seat in the center of the theater for a few extra dollars." [No note is made of the dismal failure of this experiment in NYC earlier; why would you want to be stuck next to a tall or loud or fragrant fellow consumer?] "One of these days, you may even have to pay more for a hit movie than for a bomb. The changes are under way, and they are long overdue," Leonhardt sez. "The theater industry's attempt to ignore the laws of supply and demand is as good an example of corporate inertia as you will find. For decades, going to the movies was one of the rituals of American life, and competition among theaters revolved mainly around trying to land more hot films than the theater down the street. A thumbnail version of "variable pricing," noting the souk and discount airline People Express follows, as well as the bromide, "A theater can't sell marked-up popcorn to someone who doesn't buy a ticket first." After quoting an industry source who says that movies are "ultimately... art," Mr. Leonhardt brings on the mighty cymbals: "Fair enough. But the next time you're in an art gallery, check the price tags to see if all the paintings cost the same."

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

February 14, 2006

Obit the dust: an editor remembers a cricket

At CNN.com, editor Todd Leopold remembers his late editee, Paul Clinton, who died early this month: "As a critic, Paul Clinton was fond of using the word "perfect" in his reviews. As his editor, I was just as fond of taking it out.... There was something perfect: Paul, to his credit, was a perfect gentleman about my tinkering." Leopold notes that the 53-year-old Clinton, a lifelong smoker, "had struggled with respiratory ailments," then inartfully takes some more of the late writer's wind: "Paul wasn't the most artful writer -- or most art-obsessed movie reviewer -- as he would be the first to tell you. He loved the roller coaster rides and popcorn flicks as much as he enjoyed works that aspired to something more... Paul could accept a little manipulation -- after all, that's what movies do -- but he could not tolerate insincerity. If a movie appeared to making a blatant play for awards, or put technical virtuosity above human (and humane) values, he came down hard... Yes, he had the film studies courses, the student filmmaking experiences, the hours of Italian neo-realism and French New Wave -- but like most moviegoers, he was mainly a guy looking for two hours of diversion."

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

Quota quotable: Park Chan-wook protests

"South Korean director Park Chan-wook staged a one-man demonstration in front of the Berlin Film Festival's entrance for an hour on Tuesday to protest against moves to cut the Korean film quota in his country," Reuters reports. "Park, a top filmmaker who won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for Old Boy, held an English-language poster that read "Korean Films Are in Danger" and "No Screen Quota = No Old Boy" as he stood calmly in front of the Berlinale Palast. Outnumbered by more than 20 journalists and photographers, Park, 42, politely answered questions and posed for pictures with his sign at the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz square. "The Korean government is planning to cut the quota for Korean films in half and I don't like that," he said through a translator. "I'm protesting the changes in the quota. It will be very bad for the Korean film industry and all the filmmakers are coming together to stop it." [More at link.]

Posted by pride at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

Bubbling under: Winterbottom works some Revolution

Michael Winterbottom [pictured] and producer Andrew Eaton are working a Revolution in the afterfroth of Bubble, reports Variety's Adam Dawtrey. With The Road to Guantanamo, debuting Tuesday in Berlin and on UK's Channel 4 on March 9, will then have March 10 cinema, DVD and internet bows. Eaton says, "When Channel 4 decided to broadcast it so quickly after Berlin -- which was the right thing to do—we thought it was worth a crack to copy what Steven Soderbergh was doing..." "Eaton even consulted Soderbergh for advice on how to proceed. He is work[ing] with Tony Jones, head of the arthouse City Screen circuit, to book the movie on 20 to 30 screens, mostly utilizing the new Digital Screen Network set up by the UK Film Council... Eaton is planning a more intensive release across Yorkshire and Lancashire, the region where the three protagonists of the movie come from. Road to Guantanamo is based on the true story of the Tipton Three—three British Asians who were captured in Afghanistan and whisked away to Camp X-Ray for two years before being released without charge." Eaton is working deals on downloads and is near a DVD agreement. "Most of the theatrical screenings will be digital, but there will be three or four 35mm prints for major cities such as Birmingham which don't yet have any digital screens. Channel 4 ... has agreed to waive the contractual one-month holdback between the pic's TV premiere and internet release.Eaton says he has "absolutely no idea" how the multiple release will work. "That's why we're doing it. We're all curious to know what will happen," he said.... According to Eaton, Soderbergh told him that he regrets not being able to make [Bubble] available via the Internet as well."

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

February 12, 2006

Quaint, folkloric crap: Alex Cox visits with Arturo Ripstein

Writer-director-raconteur Alex Cox writes about trying to find directing gigs in the UK as well as in Mexico: "On Thursday I have dinner with the director Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego, his partner and screenwriter. Ripstein was once Buñuel's assistant; Paz has written many scripts for Rip, and did the Mexican re-write on El Patrullero. Ripstein was the first Latin American director to shoot a digital feature. He's just finished his latest, on HD. I ask who will distribute it, and they both laugh. Our positions are peculiarly similar. Rip and I are middle-aged white guys who like to piss people off. We refuse to die, or to watch American movies. For some reason, we continue to make films. Rip and Paz, like me and Tod, have no health insurance. Fortunately, they've both been given honorary Spanish citizenship, so now we all have the same health plan: if you get sick, try and make it to the airport, fly to Europe, and go the hospital. It's a fine plan if you're diagnosed with cancer or a wasting disease, but I'm not sure it works in the case of apendicitis, or a broken leg. I always have fun with Rip and Paz. We spend the evening shouting at each other ("I'm talking now! Let me finish!" and so forth). They both hate political correctness; I support it but I hate identity politics; so we have a lot to shout about.

As in England, the Mexican state film agency is pushing filmmakers to make shorts, which of course have no commercial value or chance of distribution: the goal—largely accomplished—is to convert both Mexico and Britain into maquilladoras for the Hollywood studios, making quaint, folkloric crap. Mexican filmmakers, if they're lucky, can work on American Zorro pictures, while London's film technicians can help out on the "Harry Potter" films. The only filmmaker Ripstein thinks highly of is a Hungarian called Bela Tarr: he recommends in particular Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies.... On Sunday I have two lunches - first with John Ross, the blind and brilliant journalist and Zapatista chronicler, and second with my dear friend Pedro Armendariz. He and Ripstein have fought and don't speak to each other. Almost everyone here has fought with everybody else and so nobody talks to anyone... Who are the new filmmakers? As in Britain and the US, it's now the children of the rich. Who else can afford to work as a production assistant, for no money, in Mexico, or London, or LA, except the independently wealthy? In 2005, Mexican cinemas screened 274 feature films. 156 of them were American, 93 came from other countries, and only 25 were Mexican. In the same year, 53 Mexican films - most of them extremely low-budget - were made...Most of my Mexican friends are looking south, to Argentina, which has repudiated its IMF debt, pissed off the Americans, and seen a resurgence of state and public support for nationally-themed films. Poor Mexico! Pobre England! So far from God, so near to LAX..." [More at the link, including downloads (for a fee) of Cox projects, realized and not.]

Posted by pride at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

Larseny: More bosh from the Dane

Fed up with making pronouncements, Lars Trier emits a pronouncement, via Variety, entitled a "Statement of Revitality," written in the same sort of improvised English that makes Manderlay sound so odd: "In conjunction with the departure of Vibeke Windeløv, who has been my producer for ten years, and the arrival of Meta Louise Foldager in her place, I intend to reschedule my professional activities in order to rediscover my original enthusiasm for film. Over the last few years I have felt increasingly burdened by barren habits and expectations (my own and other people's) and I feel the urge to tidy up. In regards to product development this will mean more time on freer terms; i.e. projects will be allowed to undergo true development and not merely be required to meet preconceived demands. This is partly to liberate me from routine, and in particular from scriptual structures inherited from film to film. I will aim to reduce the scope of my productions in regards to funding, technology, the size of the crew, and particularly casting, but I should like to expand the time spent shooting them. I want to launch my products on a scale which matches the more ascetic nature of the films, and aimed at my core audience: i.e. my films will be promoted considerably less glamorously than at present, which also means without World Premieres at prestigious, exotic festivals. With regard to PR, my intention is for a heavy reduction in quantity, compensated for by more thorough exploration in the quality press. In short, in my fiftieth year I feel I have earned the privilege of narrowing down. I hope that this attempt at personal revitalization will bear fruit, enabling me to meet my own needs in terms of curiosity and play, and to contribute with more films."

Posted by pride at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)

The half-and-half of human kindness: on screenwriting in LA cafs

Lisa Rosen goes gonzo java in her contemplation of LA coffeehouses and public screenwriters in Written By: "There are so many coffeehouses in Los Angeles... it’s hardly believable that they could each garner enough customers to stay in business. Until you figure in the equally astonishing numbers of screenwriters in Los Angeles... While many of those laptop-toters may be screenwriters in the way the barristas serving them are actors, a surprising number are making a living at it, are even household names, at least in the households where screenwriters have names. Some of them even have offices of their own. So why seek out the noise and disruption and human population that’s found in a café? ... Ed Solomon has been writing in coffee shops since before the café era. “Chris [Matheson] and I wrote Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure almost entirely in coffee shops. Our primary one was Ships, in Westwood. There was Norms in Santa Monica. Dolores’, we got kicked out of there.”... He often leaves his office on Montana Avenue to write at Café Dana around the corner. “But I especially like to go down to Koreatown and sit somewhere where there’s no English spoken or written anywhere. I feel like being in a different place gives me a clearer perspective." ... “A lot of people ask me how I can write in coffee shops, it’s so noisy, there are people working,” says [writer Dan] Wilson. “But in a way, especially when you’re working on something solo, there’s a lot of energy involved in coffee shops. It excites me. It makes me want to work too.” Another screenwriter observes this at a Westside Starbucks: “[A famous writer still] brings his little notebook, no laptop, sits there, and sort of stares somewhat angrily at the wall for about a half hour, then gets up and leaves. I think, So it’s still tough, huh. It’s good; it gives you hope.”

Posted by pride at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

You have no idea: Jeremy Irons, tingling and shredding

Rachel Halliburton has a Bloody Mary with Jeremy Irons in the FT: "Jeremy Irons will always be embedded in the... imagination as an elegant romantic," she ventures, "But to understand his approach to acting it helps to look at the buzz he gets from riding monster BMW motorbikes. Since 1999 Irons has been a member of the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, which rides in pursuit of art to locations that include Lisbon, St Petersburg, Novograd and Las Vegas. Members include Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim foundation; Frank Gehry, the architect, and Dennis Hopper... Describing a journey to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Irons declares: "By the time you get there you're tingling, absolutely in the right condition to look at art. Your skin has been shredded off and your nerves are exposed."

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

Promise Lands at Warner Indie

Warner Independent's plotting a May release for Chen Kaige's The Promise, picking up one of the shorter, Westernized cuts of the epic, according to CRI Online. The third highest grossing title in mainland China (behind Titanic and Hero) was re-cut by Weinsteinco several times between Cannes 2005 and December, when the Weinsteins "returned distribution rights to producers Moonstone Entertainment and China Film Group after a difference of opinion over awards strategy. Now Harvey [Weinstein]'s former Miramax lieutenant Mark Gill, who heads WiP, has the spoils. It is understood WiP will release a shorter, 102-minute Western cut. The Asian [version is] 121 minutes."

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

February 10, 2006

#167 with a Bubble

Video Business' Susanne Ault does the math on the outskirts of Soderbergh, notching it at 167 in Rentrak’s Top 1,000. "Its first week rental revenue totaled $75,991... Although far out of the Top 10, Bubble’s rental haul did top the film’s $72,000 opening weekend box office gross." And now, for the New Paradigm From The Bleeding Edge Of Math: "When counting revenues from all distribution platforms, Bubble has earned $5 million in revenue, say Magnolia officials."

Posted by pride at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

Spirit of Erice: Geoff Andrews calls a masterpiece

Time Out's Geoff Andrew gets the scoop on the latest from not-prolific Spanish maestro Victor Erice: "Thanks to an extraordinary collaborative exhibition highlighting parallels in the work of... Erice and Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, the former director... has made, very quickly and very cheaply, a half-hour film that ranks alongside his earlier The Spirit of the Beehive and The Quince Tree Sun.... There are four short digitally filmed 'letters'- Erice made the first (about Lopez's garden 15 years after he shot Quince Tree there) and sent it to Kiarostami, who replied with a short featuring a cow, Erice responded with a film about Spanish schoolkids being shown and discussing Kiarostami's Where Is My Friend's House, to which the Iranian replied with his own film about quinces. Two further letters are currently in the works..." Erice's new short, La Morte Rouge, draws on memories of seeing The Scarlet Claw as a 5-year-old in San Sebastian. "Seen at the Kursaal Cinema, then a grand palace but now a modern, boxy arts centre - this small, simple, personal soliloquy covers a multitude of themes in a way that can only be described as exquisitely poetic. Music, image, narration all combine to create a profound and profoundly moving reverie on the relationship between cinema and memory, reality and fiction, place and time, history and art. In short, it may be a modest creation, but it's far richer than almost anything else this writer’s seen in quite a while. A masterpiece, I'd say."

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

Leigh way: We won't begin to have an idea

Time Out London reports on reports that Mike Leigh's put his devising cap again. Sums Chris Tilly: "National treasure Mike Leigh is soon to start work on an as yet untitled new project [with] plans to cast in April, rehearse in autumn and shoot next spring, with the intention of getting the film into theatres before Christmas 2007... Even Leigh's long-time producer Simon Channing Williams is in the dark: 'It's simply another Mike Leigh film,' he told Screen Daily. 'Beyond that, until the casting process starts and we see what mix of cast is available for Mike to work with, we won't begin to have an idea of what it's going to be about.'"

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

What the Blip?!: down the Rabbit Hole

A distribution source suggests that the mutant mash-up of an earlier theatrical success now known as What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole: Extended Director's Cut has been "pulled from theatrical release," although the production's website lists a further national rollout for the recycled product. Last weekend's release from IDP/Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions reportedly grossed $28,000 in 8 theaters. Must be more to do in Tempe and Boulder than