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March 31, 2006
Basic Skyline: tear down this phallus, Mr. Livingstone!
In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw constructs prize contumely in: re a certain building being the anchor of today's London skyline in movies: "And, please, what is it with the Swiss Re 'gherkin' building? Why is it that every film set in London has to feature the gherkin? It used to be that London films had Routemasters sailing past the Palace of Westminster as their establishing shot. 
Now it's that bulbous, squat glass edifice poking up into the skyline as characters hurry in and out of cabs. Morrissey's office is actually in the gherkin, one of the most implausible sets I have ever seen, with its cross-diagonal struts visible on the windows overlooking the city. Why not have his office on the London Eye for 'Basic Instinct 3'? Our poor capital city adds nothing to the film, and the film contributes nothing to London; it might as well be set on one of Jupiter's moons for all the atmosphere that is injected. Basic Instinct 2 resembles nothing so much as the toe-curling sex-obsession drama Killing Me Softly, another movie in which the UK is about as sexy as a pair of old Y-fronts."
Posted by pride at 03:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2006
Dunking the bucket: why Dorothy was lucky
Over at screenwriting blog Alligators in a Helicopter, a few notes about why you must earn The Bucket: "The longer I read, the more intolerant I have gotten about dumb logic mistakes in scripts. There's nothing that makes me throw a script across the room quicker... I don't think I even realized how stupid the bucket was, until I was an adult.The bucket, of course, is the bucket of water that Dorothy throws on the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, melting her. There are so many amazing things wrong with the bucket. First of all, it has no reason being there... You're a witch. And your main Achilles' heel... is that water will melt you... it takes a lot of effort to avoid water your whole life.We're talking no showers. No swimming in pools, or lakes, or skinning-dipping in the local pond. No dancing through the rain as a little girl... No toilets, because she wouldn't want to risk the splashback... Was she limited to juice? Milk? Martinis? ...But despite what must have been a tyrannical water ban... there's a bucket of water. Just sort of sitting there...
The obvious fix is to have Dorothy learn of this, and bring a little water with her... A stoppered bottle, a prototype water pistol... even a flying monkey, that needs to pee really badly. But Dorothy has no idea. And this is the second problem. She douses the witch with the bucket accidentally, while putting out the scarecrow... Obviously, the idea is that Dorothy is really not a bad person. She's not a killer, she just conveniently kills witches by pure contrivance... I'm more jaded now. The bucket has to be earned. I think that's a good thing."
Posted by pride at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
United 93 opens the Tribeca Film Festival
Touchy topic: "The Tribeca Film Festival and Universal Pictures today announced that United 93, the feature film which chronicles the unfolding drama of the hijacked September 11 flight that crashed outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, will have its world premiere [April 25] as the Opening Night film of the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
“The events of 9/11 had a massive effect on me, like everyone, and I wanted to use my position as a filmmaker to contribute something so they are not casually forgotten,” stated [director Paul] Greengrass. “United 93 tells one story of that morning and I hope that by showing the film at Tribeca, whose roots and inspiration grew in response to the devastation of 9/11, we will be reminded of the courage of all those on board and also the thousands of men and women who confronted similarly unimaginable scenarios in New York and Washington. By honoring the families who lost those they loved, I hope we can ensure that their sacrifice is remembered and hopefully seek wisdom in the future.” At SFGate, Mark Morford digests the 9/11 conspiracy theories cover story from the March 27 issue of New York. UPDATE: Cinematical's Martha Fischer reports the fest has more taste than Greengrass. The debut will be private, "open only to the families of victims, first responders, and festival staff. Press will be accommodated in an overflow room, but will not be allowed into the actual theater" and because Tribeca is home to Ground Zero, "negotiations are currently underway to hold it at a landmark theater in midtown Manhattan." Paging Flo Ziegfeld...]
Posted by pride at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
Who the hell's sitting in it?: Peter Bogdanovich muses, invokes the dead
Links here and there this week to the dependably crusty 66-year-old Peter Bogdanovich's recollection of the Big Screen and What It Meant in the LA Times, pegged to the paperback release of his latest Song of Myself, "Who The Hell's In It?" 
The essay's auteur-hauteur has a certain faint odor beyond mothballs—of course, the moviegoing experience died once you started making fillums, doh!—as well as Bogdanovich's keen sense for when dropping a famous name (almost invariably of the dead) will clatter like a penny in an otherwise empty washing machine. Still, this classic swatch of Bogdanovichery has notes: "On special occasions, my parents took me to the greatest movie theater in the country, Radio City Music Hall, which, for $2, would show a first-rate new film exclusively (such as An American in Paris or North by Northwest) plus a live, 40-minute stage show featuring the Rockettes. That's why it meant so much to me in 1972 when my first comedy, What's Up, Doc? was booked to open in New York at the Music Hall. I was so excited I called to tell Cary Grant (a friend of 10 years). "That's nice," he said casually. "I've had 28 pictures play the Hall. "I tell you what you must do," he went on. "When it's playing, you go down there and stand in the back — and you listen and you watch while 6,500 people laugh at something you did. It will do your heart good!" ... It remains the single most memorable showing of any of my pictures: The sheer size of the reaction in that enormous theater was like a mainliner of joy. The fact is, it takes at least 100 people to get a decent laugh in a movie—smaller audiences are just not given to letting go."
Posted by pride at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)
Cronenberg's corpus: they're all funny
The Davids D'Arcy and Cronenberg discourse in depth at GreenCine. Several savories from their career-ranging epic: "When I make a movie, I try to completely ignore everybody's expectations about what I do, and I don't think about my other movies, and I don't impose those things on any given movie that I'm making." When A History of Violence premiered at Cannes 2005, "There was a famous incident involving an Austrian critic saying, "Shut up, you fucking piece of shit critics. Don't you know this is not funny. It's serious." 
"This was reported in the New York Times blog, in which the writer says that he was a very good and intelligent critic, but they felt, and I think they were right, that they had a better handle on what was going on in the movie than he did, because it does ask the audience to twist and turn in terms of tone. It's funny, it's shocking, and then it's immediately scary, then it's immediately funny again, and then it's sad and emotional, and it does all that. It is a dangerous thing to do, because if you're walking a bit of a tightrope, it can't backfire on you. What I really wanted to do was replicate the kind of emotional roller coaster that you have in the course of a normal day... Why can't a movie have that many moods within it? The template for movies these days is very clunky... There's never any mixed scene of tones and moods. People can get confused. They can think that they're supposed to be solemn, because it's a Cronenberg movie, and they think that's a serious thing. But I've never made a movie that's not funny. They're all funny. Is violence "edgy"? "Conflict is the essence of drama, said George Bernard Shaw, and violence is the most basic kind of conflict. So violence doesn't give you an edge. What you see in a lot of movies is not even real violence, it's attitude. Attitude is anti-art. It's a pretense, it's a façade, it's a defense mechanism. It means you're not digging deep, you're not going into something real. It's not something that makes you vulnerable. If what you're expressing is attitude, it's all defensive. And you can't be defensive if you want to be an artist. You have to make yourself vulnerable. You have to allow yourself to open up, and that's anti-attitude." Cronenberg recalls the critics in the UK who demanded that Crash (the good one) be banned: "I'm still pissed off.
Not just Chris Tookey, but Alexander Walker, who said it was "beyond the bounds of depravity," which I thought was a pretty good territory to be in. Chris Tookey - you can just tell by his name - actually gave A History of Violence a good review. However, he did manage to say, "What a surprise. I never thought I'd manage to say that Cronenberg could make a good film," and then he went on to slag five of my films that he hated, and then he went on to say that A History of Violence was good. Does that make me like him? No. I do not forgive. The relationship that you have with your critics is a very strange one." How does Cronenberg's writing process work? "With an original script, I'm very undisciplined... Every script that I've written has followed a completely different pattern. It's partly because it's been many years between writing scripts. So I don't really have that great rhythm that only a professional screenwriter would have. Even though, even to them it varies, because you're always working with other people ultimately. It's always a collaboration, and there are always other people's temperaments and expectations and understanding of what dramatic structure is... It really isn't like writing fiction. It's not even an art form, writing a screenplay. I can tell you that it's been a long time since I've gotten a screenplay that had good spelling. These are professional screenwriters. Some of them are getting a million, $2 million a script. And they can't spell. To me it's astonishing. They would never make it as prose writers, but that doesn't matter because you can actually write a good script with terrible grammar, terrible spelling and all of that, but if your dialogue is great, even if it's misspelled... I never know what to expect when I start to write an original script." [The screenplay for the director's unproduced period Formula 1 racing pic, Red Cars, has been published as a book with 194 illos; details here. "150 euros, you can't go wrong," sez Cronenberg.]
Posted by pride at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
ChiTrib: cyber, savvy, hep [plus nekkid Sharon Stone]
The Chicago Tribune continues a series of editorials with cranky granddad verbiage about the modern world, commenting on the internet's "DarkAlley.com": "...[T]oday we're neck-deep in the unforgiving age of cyberspace... Some users—MySpace alone has 32 million—dismiss these warnings with the belief that they can sanitize their postings whenever they wish. Maybe, maybe not. Provocative material tends to migrate swiftly to points unknown... it's only a matter of time before some shrewd dweeb with tape on his glasses develops software that can miraculously recapture much of what has appeared and supposedly been deleted... [A]lways assume the Internet is forever." [Or behind a for-pay barrier after 7 days.] 
At least Marc Caro's Pop Machine blog feels up-to-date, such as this posting about Sharon Stone, compiling seven of her hottest hits as she primes the pump for Basic Instinct 2.
Posted by pride at 07:06 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
WTF? Of course, THINK would've thunk it.
In the Reporter, Gregg Goldstein swears there's a topper to The Aristocrats: "The F-word is the word on everyone's lips in a documentary [with] an all-star lineup including crooner Pat Boone and newsman Sam Donaldson, rapper Ice-T and porn star Ron Jeremy. 
Independent distributor ThinkFilm has nabbed worldwide rights to director Steve Anderson's [FUCK, which] presents some obvious marketing challenges, "It's an invitation to cleverness," said Mark Urman, head of the theatrical division at ThinkFilm. "It's become clear to us who can print what, but here the entire title is an expletive, and it's going to be interesting to see how we'll get away with it." ThinkFilm has tentative plans to release the film in limited engagements in the fall, and will send it out unrated because "it's more consistent with the spirit of the film," said Urman. From THINKfilm's PR: “Steve has made a wonderfully clever, informative, and energetic film and we are not only excited to be releasing it,” says Urman, “we are thrilled to be among the few companies who CAN! Everything about the way we advertise, publicize and even discuss this film requires us to be thoughtful, original, and fresh, and for an independent distributor, there is no greater gift.”
Posted by pride at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
Take a bite out of horror: Kelly's heroes
Christopher Kelly, in a Sunday takeout in the Star-Telegram faces the fear of the faces of fear: "The most gruesomely vivid, elegantly made horror movie in recent memory opened with little fanfare on Dec. 25, 2005 in approximately 1,500 theaters nationwide. Titled Wolf Creek, it's a low-budget shocker... about three carefree twentysomethings whose hiking trip goes terribly awry after they are kidnapped by a maniacal serial killer in the Aussie outback. As is often the case with horror pictures, it was greeted by many critics like a Christmas present wrapped in soiled tissue paper. 
(...Roger Ebert: "There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?") The fact that the movie announced the arrival of an immensely gifted new director named Greg McLean—whose patience, control and ability to play the audience like a very cheap fiddle would have done Alfred Hitchcock proud—seemed lost on most adult moviegoers." Kelly says it's not an isolated case of B movies getting the blues, taking up the case for Hostel, Final Destination 3, and The Hills Have Eyes remake. "...These movies aren't slipping under the radar and disappearing straight to video. Instead, the largely teenage and college-age audiences who flood the multiplexes on Friday nights have turned them all into modest hits... Are the critics simply out of touch? Well, yes. Because if you can't recognize the often-astonishing level of craft on display in these films, then you're watching them with your eyes closed." Kelly thinks "the teenagers are getting it," the link to post-9/11 anxieties. "Gruesomeness," Kelly quotes Wes Craven as saying, reflects the real world. "The war in Iraq is a very violent, scary war, and it's a war not being fought by an army on one side," [Craven] says. "I'm sure the average kid who watches these kinds of movies has seen on the Internet someone getting his head sawed off with a kitchen knife by the enemy." [Lots more to cut through at the link.]
Posted by pride at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)
Crickets catch up: somebody reads 'em
Variety's Barbara Scherzer reports that moviegoers still read the papers; cue chorus of slumbering crickets. A Neilsen NRG survey asserts that "84% of moviegoers said that they use a newspaper with varying frequency. The Entertainment Section of the paper is used most by moviegoers, with a 65% useage rate... 
half of all moviegoers said that the newspaper was their primary source used in making movie plans." As for the film crickets: "For movie reviews, the most influential type is one that is printed in a newspaper (26%) which equals the influence of a review that appears on TV. The study found that a positive movie review is more likely to increase a moviegoer's interest than a negative review will detract their interest."
Posted by pride at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
Risk, free: where indie oughtn't
Aon/Albert G. Ruben's 2006 Risks In Global Filmmaking Map is available here. " Every filmmaker, from major studios to independent producers, experiences some element of risk while filming in foreign countries. That is why, each year, Aon/Albert G. Ruben, the largest entertainment insurance broker in the world, comprehensively measures and maps the risks filmmakers face across the globe.�The 2006 Risks In Global Filmmaking Map measures crime, corruption, kidnap and ransom, disease, and medical care risks, and references terrorism and political risks."
Posted by pride at 03:11 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
Matthew Barney: repulsed by the lack of moisture
Matthew Barney does some regular-guy shtick talking to New York mag's Karen Rosenberg about the influences on his uncinematic films: "Horror films, for sure. The Evil Dead films, the Friday the 13th films, Jaws, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Shining—the simpler, the better. When I started making art, I think the simple-format horror films were a model for me, as a way of making something that blended an object and its environment—if you accept that in some of these stories the antagonist and environment are interchangeable, like the cabin-in-the-woods stories, or the ocean and the shark in Jaws. On a visceral level there was a big difference for me between “wet” characters and “dry” characters. Zombie films never appealed to me because they were too “dry.” I was repulsed by the lack of moisture in those characters." [Drawing Restraint 9 premieres at IFC Center in New York tomorrow and opens Wednesday, when the man, the myth and the petroleum jelly will attend. The pic is from an uncredited page of party snaps at the site for the lamentably hiatusing Index magazine.]
Posted by pride at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
In Bulgaria, it's Alan Parker Central Time
Disappeared UK director Alan Parker gets some attention at the 10th Sofia Film Fest; Lucy Cooper listens. "Sometimes, if I’m watching TV late at night, or you’re going through jetlag or insomnia and you put the TV on in the middle of the night and there’s a film on, you go: ‘This looks good,’ then you suddenly think: ‘Oh, actually I made this film!’ You forget sometimes. But I think most directors would prefer not to see their work after all these years, which is peculiar.” What would he change? “I don’t think you should really...If you see Picasso in his blue period, he’s not going to look at it 30 years later and say: ‘I’m going to go back and paint everything yellow.’ You make your statement at that period in time and really you should stick by it. It always amazes me when you see these things saying ‘the director’s cut’- you think, well the original should have been the director’s cut. 
The films that I put out are the films I wanted to put out and if they don’t work it’s my fault, not some studio’s fault. So, no, I don’t have any regrets - sometimes I regret that I put so much anxiety into the making of it. Some directors I really admire are able to just sail through a film without getting a heart attack or an ulcer. I think I’m the opposite - every moment is so painful to do, day by day, because you’re so concerned and so worried - but that can be good work..."
Of Stephen Frears, Parker says, "he has no care in the world - it’s kind of a much better attitude I think! ... What’s really interesting is that a film like Birdy or Midnight Express - because Midnight Express had nobody known in it, it didn’t cost much money, it was filmed in Europe, that kind of film now, today, would be made as an independent film, but in those days they were studio films. Studios don’t do that kind of film anymore... I think it’s good really, it’s good in that the studios acknowledge that there’s another kind of cinema other than their big blockbusters. On the other hand, they bring to that kind of cinema the same kind of disciplines, the same kind of aggression about what it is they want. They’re not great patrons of art; they’re there to make money. But on the other hand, the most debilitating thing, the most depressing thing that film makers go through is not the making of the film, it is trying to find the money to make the film...That process can sap all your energy- it’s not such a terrifically good thing, but once you’ve got your money, you make the film you want and no one’s going to interfere with you, that’s the good side.” In terms of new technology, Peter Greenaway's name comes up. “It doesn’t matter what the technology is - no one will watch a Peter Greenaway film anyway!... New technologies mean that anyone can tell a story really, and that’s good because you’re going to get lots of different stories told by lots of different people. But, I have yet to be convinced that to watch a film on an ipod, or even on a computer screen, is as good as watching the experience with an audience in a cinema...How you record it, how you cut it, how you edit it, all those things are helpful, but if it means I’m going to watch it on my phone, that’s not an advance.”
Posted by pride at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
Censorshipped: I was tired of watching porn
Kaiju Shakedown's got an anecdote-rich rundown of the role of the censor worldwide: "It’s the worst job in the world... You watch hundreds of movies for a living, burning out the part of your brain that once found movie going pleasurable. Your career is a dirty little secret because it’s practically an insult... Maggie (not her real name) left Malaysia to attend graduate school in the U.K. She returned to Malaysia to become a university professor but unable to find work she wound up at one of Malaysia’s few private television companies, sitting in a windowless room and watching movies... Her job is to make sure that Muslims in these films are not shown doing “haram” things: drinking, smoking, or encountering pork products. She has generated hundreds of pages of notes...: “Scene in which the Koran is discussed in relation to belief in the supernatural needs to be further looked into.” 
...While Malaysia seems to operate on the principal of “when in doubt, cut it out” the truly tormented censors live in the UK and Canada... What the BBFC spends much of its time watching is porn. Every single porn film must be classified and Robin Duvall, the BBFC Director from 1999 – 2004, says that while the [UK censorship] offices are already “Dickensian…demoralized…and a little bit paranoid” he feels that regulating porn is the “least attractive and most exhausting task of an examiner.” Psychological counseling services are provided for those who have a hard time with it. [Explicit anecdotes follow.] ... Probably the most hated censorship organization in North America, the Ontario Film Review Board has publicly put its foot in it more than once. In 1999 it ordered cuts in Toronto documentarian, Ron Mann’s... Grass. The charge was cruelty to animals, and the material in question was... archival footage of restrained monkeys being forced to smoke pot. The distributor took the case to the media, the ruling was overturned and the Ontario Film Review Board became a laughingstock..." Baise-Moi was one of their tougher nuts, "a French rape-revenge [film] that was too pornographic to be classified under the mainstream guidelines, but had too much violence to be classified as a pornographic movie. After much soul-searching the Board ordered a 13 second rape scene removed because they worried that if allowed, it would set a precedent for violent rape in porn. “13 seconds of someone’s art wasn’t worth an explosion of explicit rape scenes in porn flicks,” Devine says. Soon after, she retired from the board. “I was tired of watching porn.”
Posted by pride at 07:43 AM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2006
9/11's United 93: new title, new trailer
So you had a bad weekend? Did you see Universal's new trailer for the newly titled United 93? Aside from the triply iconic key art, link it and weep. Hey, this is Sandy in the back? Can you call ground and see if we can get some more pillows and blankets? "A story of 9/11"? A myth of 9/11? A moment of 9/11? A song of 9/11? Even with a mustachioed man in fatigues appearing to take the role of the Vice President in a potential shootdown of civilian aircraft, the product seems promising.
Posted by pride at 03:48 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Schamus-less: NYRB Brokeback exchange continues
Over at Filmmaker, Peter Bowen prints a letter from Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus that continues the letters-page kerfuffle from New York Review of Books between Schamus and writer Daniel Mendelsohn about the movie's marketing; apparently NYRB thinks the first exchange suffices. Schamus: "In his reply to the few corrections in my otherwise laudatory response to his review... Daniel Mendelsohn calls me, and my work as a producer of Brokeback and as the head of the studio that distributed the film, “discomfited,” “embarrassed,” “defensive,” “bluster[ing],” practicing “obfuscatory sophistries,” “actually falsifying [the movie’s] content,” arguing “with breathtaking disingenuousness” and “evasive coyness” my “heated but ultimately self-destructive protestations” against his charges that I and my colleagues have consistently sought to “closet” the film’s central gay themes in our marketing of it. 
Of course, our very success ($150 million in worldwide box office to date) is prima facie proof of the efficacy of our sinister methods “in so aggressively marketing this gay story to the ‘heart of America’”: how else could we have snookered so many millions of people into embracing such a gay film? Mr. Mendelsohn was, as I so gently put it in my response, “unfair” in his original depiction of our marketing; he is viciously mendacious in his latest reply, and NYRB readers deserve at least a brief correction: it is important that, as gay subject matter continues to enter further into mainstream culture, parochial nay-sayers such as Mendelsohn are at least asked to maintain the minimum standards of honesty in discussions of such matters... I will gladly provide a full refund to any New York Review reader who bought a ticket to Brokeback Mountain, and who feels that he or she was misled by our marketing campaign into not knowing that the movie’s central story was an epic romance between two men." [There's more, more, more at the link.]
Posted by pride at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
Snakes one to know one: retooling the Plane
Snakes on a Plane, anyone? The Reporter's Borys Kit updates. New Line's one of the few studios to regularly take chances with extreme, outrageous R-rated materal of all sorts, and last week's reshoot of SoaP, to be released August 18, was to insure an R rating. [There are several swears below.] "Movie fans began noticing the black sheep of the New Line slate. They seized upon the title and started spontaneously creating fan sites, blogs, T-shirts, poems, fiction and songs. The title itself... has emerged as Internet-speak for fatalistic sentiments that range from c'est la vie to "shit happens." 
The Reporter quotes a website quoting Samuel L. Jackson: "That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title... You either want to see that, or you don't." Kit writes, "When [the studio] assembled Jackson and others for the recent shoot, the filmmakers added more gore, more death, more nudity, more snakes and more death scenes. And they shot a scene where Jackson does utter the line that fans have demanded." And what motherfucking line about which motherfucking snakes on which motherfucking plane might that be? [Also check out the comprehensive Snakes on a Blog, which links to today's NPR story and the official title treatment as snaked by EW; for some ancient history, move on to screenwriter Josh Friedman's original epic anecdote about the script and the titling-retitling of the pic, "Snakes on a motherfucking plane." Plus more here.]
Posted by pride at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
Motion picture sickness
A mess of interviews every day this week, two movies today, four on Thursday: Indie hopes to return by Friday. In the meantime, a portfolio of pictures I've taken after interviews in Chicago with filmmakers over at SharkForum, and this one on my way to moderate a Q&A with Wim Wenders on Sunday night.
Posted by pride at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2006
Aki Kaurismaki on Dusk: What's happened to all the years in between?
Aki Kaurismäki counts the days after 16 winters near Oporto in Portugal and before the Cannes debut of the end of his "loser trilogy." Hannu Martilla reports for Helsingen Sanomat. "Kaurismäki has completed work on his 15th full-length movie. Laitakaupungin valot (Lights in the Dusk)... completes the trilogy started ten years ago with Drifting Clouds. The success of this picture was followed up by The Man Without a Past, winner of the Grand Prize at [Cannes 2002]... Before the third film was in the can, movie writers were referring to Kaurismäki's "unemployment trilogy", and even to a "Suomi trilogy," as Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl ", had earlier been dubbed his "working-class trilogy". "One is a working-class trilogy, and the other is a loser trilogy, but I don't know which is which", the 48-year-old director says. Here's how they describe the new movie, focusing on "loneliness": "In the film, which was shot in the commercial- and office-block canyons of the Helsinki district of Ruoholahti, life - through its various agents and representatives - smacks down a forlorn nightwatchman hard and in very concrete fashion. Unlike before, this time there is no human rights lawyer stepping in, sent by the Salvation Army, nor the solidarity and camaraderie of a group of other losers. When the movie has run its course, the betrayed and bludgeoned man lies dying on the ground. In Kaurismäki's view, Man Without a Past, with its cast of good and supportive souls, was "already insufferably sickly-sweet". 
"Personally, I find the theme of bullying and being knocked around a more comfortable one than excessive optimism. There is no cause for optimism, not in the film nor outside it.... The initial idea for the film was a modern, exceptionally bleak suburban milieu and a battered individual, whom I'd have liked to batter and bully to death, but my soft side got the better of me", grins Kaurismäki." The antagonists "drive ‘50s American cars and don't use mobile phones even when they are ringing in to grass someone out - "Proper crooks, not your IT-criminals of today", says Kaurismäki by way of clarification." Of his four years of silence, Kaurismaki asks Martilla, "Has it really been that long?... Back in the day, I used to make three films a year, now it is one in three years, or in four. The old vim and vigour of youth has been blunted... No, it can't be four years. What's happened to all the years in between?... I wrote the screenplay in a week at the end of February, and before that I suppose I thought about it for two or three months. It used to be that a weekend was enough for the actual writing work." Of his winter home, Kaurismäki says, "I don't believe I will ever make a full-length feature about Portugal; it would require a greater understanding of the details of everyday life here. At one point I was going to make Juha here, as a talkie and in colour. I was already writing it when I suddenly realised I did not have the local knowledge to say what the main character would have taken with him as a snack when he went off to herd sheep." [Photo: Hannes Heikura, Helsingin Sanomat]
Posted by pride at 09:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2006
Jane Birkin on the secretion of milk through fur
Even if she weren't Charlotte Gainsbourg's mother, Jane Birkin, out thumping for a new album, is a timeless cinematic icon for several reasons. Aidan Smith has a gambol in the Scotsman, sampled here: "Birkin today looks fantastic. She's wearing a jersey, jeans, Ugg boots and a big, wide, full-lipped smile showing off the sexiest thing about her: the space between her front teeth. Her hair, tied at the back with a pencil, is flecked with the odd strand of grey and, of course, there are lines on her face. But it's hard to believe that this year... she will be 60... 
She's charming, if somewhat batty, company. She speaks without stopping to take in air, which is ironic, considering it was heavy breathing that made her name... The first woman to appear full-frontal in a movie - Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up in 1966 - Birkin was always too sexy for Britain... So who, Jane Birkin, is sexy these days? "David Attenborough, Jonathan Miller, someone who can tell me that bats have nipples under their arms. The other night I met a man, equally scientific, from whom I learned that the flat-billed platypus doesn't have nipples but secretes milk through its fur for its young to lick. That's sexy!"
Posted by pride at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
Cinema Scope 26: David Bordwell and something worthy of the art we love
Cinema Scope 26 is out now, with a few tidbits on line. Offline, Jason Anderson writes up Patrick Keiller's "peripatetic hybrids" and editor Mark Peranson has a regionalist perspective on Sundance 2006. Chuck Stephens has an extended conversation with just-retired film scholar David Bordwell, who describes how he comes across topics for his many books: "I think of a book as a cluster of questions or problems I want to illuminate, and usually those are ones I think have been neglected by other scholars. Fortunately or unfortunately, not many people are interested in most of the topics I write about, so I always have fresh material. Even subjects that people have written a lot about, like Eisenstein or Hou or Hong Kong cinema, haven’t been studied from the angle I favour, so I always seem to have a lot to study. For example, in "The Way Hollywood Tells It," I try to talk about script structure and visual style in ways congruent with the way the creative people seem to handle those matters, even if I also try to maintain some critical distance on their conceptions of their craft. This is something that most academics just aren’t interested in. Same thing with the CinemaScope talk you heard; there’s been a lot written about Scope, but academics haven’t much tried to figure out the various approaches directors and crews took toward Scope composition.
One way to frame this more broadly is to say that most film scholars aren’t interested in film as a creative art. I know it sounds odd to say that, but I think it’s true. Most scholars are interested in film as an expression of cultural trends, interests, processes, etc. or of political moods, tendencies, etc. More specifically, those who are interested in film as an art seldom try to find out the craft traditions—the work processes, the technologies, etc.—that give artists the menus they work with. The approach I try to develop is commonplace in art history and the history of music, but not very developed in film studies." Bordwell also contributes a brief cri de coeur for a different kind of film criticism: "Film magazines and free city weeklies promote that self-assured nonconformity which prizes jaunty wordplay and throwaway judgments... There are some fine journalistic critics and film scholars. Still, no one, as far as I know, is producing what I'd like to see. The film writing I have in mind would be essayistic, but it would have a solid understructure of evidence. It would be conceptually bold and bristling with subtly defended opinions... Add a graceful writing style leavened with humour and purged of vainglorious anecdotes... Something worthy of the art we love."
Posted by pride at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)
Roadside to Guantanamo: Winterbottom's pic to play US
indieWIRE reports on Roadside Attractions' acquisition of Michael Winterbottom's latest super-size provocation. "These are bad people," U.S. president George W. Bush is seen saying as The Road to Guantanamo opens. He, and later U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are pictured in news footage defending the existence of the base and [its detainment] of prisoners, hundreds of [whom] have already been released with no charges. U.S. leaders, and in particular U.S. military soldiers working the base in Guantanamo are depicted as brutal captors, leading one journalist at the [Berlin debut] press conference to question such a negative portrayal of Americans.
Asked, in his first question from the media in Berlin, how the U.S. government may react to his new film, Winterbottom said directly, "I don't know and I don't really care to be honest." "We think this film is a visceral punch to the gut that will leave everyone thinking about Guantanamo in a new way," said Howard Cohen, Roadside Co-President, in a statement today. "It plays like a thriller, but it also shows the real-life struggle of nations to balance fighting terrorism with preserving human rights."
Posted by pride at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
William Klein's eye: a glimpse
Liberation has a timeless portfolio of nine stills by photographic great and filmmaker William Klein, including Cineposter, Tokyo 1961. [Here's a bio of Klein.]
Posted by pride at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)
Nicole Holofcener's shitty first drafts
In the Reporter, Martin Grove asks Friends with Money's Nicole Holofcener about her writing habits. ""I've got a Mac and I write on Final Draft. I set my nice office up. I've got a view of my garden. My dog sits there. And, of course, I can't work in there. I don't know if you're the same way. If I'm in my office, I'll pay bills or fall asleep. So I prop myself up in a coffee shop generally with my laptop. Sometimes I'll spend 10 or 15 minutes making notes about where the characters are and where they came from in terms of the scenes that I've already written and I'll just start typing. I really encourage myself to be as stupid and bad as I can be. I really try to let myself be dumb about it because if I don't I'll be paralyzed. I even titled my folder 'Shitty First Drafts,' which I got from Anne Lamott. She wrote this terrific book called 'Bird by Bird' and it has helped me a lot over the years. It's a book about how to write. She's so funny and so brilliant... She might have had a chapter called 'Shitty First Drafts' and if you don't let yourself write one you can't write. I mean, that's the way I am. 
And often the stuff that comes from the place that lets yourself play is the best stuff—not what comes from your head or an outline. That's why I don't use an outline—because it kills the spontaneity, it kills the life for me. And since my scripts are not plot-driven—but don't tell anybody because I know no one really knows that!—I don't need it. I think if I was writing a plot-driven script, I would absolutely need an outline and index cards. I used to waste a lot of time with index cards. They're a really good thing if you don't want to write and you just want to screw around. 'Oh, I think I'm going to spend the day doing my cards.' You know, you write these beautiful cards and they're up on the wall and then you never look at them again. At least for me... I do the opposite of everything I was taught in film school [at Columbia University]. It's funny. I guess teachers are so afraid they're going to get this mess of 300 pages handed to them if they don't do that [about using index cards to organize screenwriting]."
Posted by pride at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Teasing Snakes: they're on a Plane of their own
Snakes on a Plane. A teaser here. Sam Jackson with a Taser up in their face. Loopy goodness. The only place there'll be more mayhem is at the press junket: it would be a public service for someone to capture Mr. Jackson's grin at the roundtables for posterity.
Posted by pride at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bettie Page lives: My first bikini was green with a little rickrack all around it
Sometimes a writer is right there and in an LA Times profile by Louis Sahagun of elusive, reclusive pin-up Bettie Page at the age of 82, the writer captures a simple scene but also much of her allure, charm and outrageously healthy look, which of course led to the oh-so-close Picturehouse release of The Notorious Bettie Page. Whether the excuse is Mary Harron's movie or an epic signing session by Page, there's no need to excuse such sweet prose. 
"The 82-year-old Page—a taboo-breaker who helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s—is not a quitter. "I'm about ready to roll," she said in a Southern drawl, freshening her bright red lipstick. "But I'm going to go slow. I won't squiggle if I write slow." ... Nearly five decades after the last photos of her appeared in magazines like Chicks and Chuckles, Page is finally earning a respectable income for her work. "I'm more famous now than I was in the 1950s... Being in the nude isn't a disgrace unless you're being promiscuous about it... After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!" ... "My land! Is that supposed to be me?" asked Page, surveying a painting of her reclining in a negligee with an ecstatic smile on her face. Putting pen to canvas and concentrating mightily, she muttered, "I was never that pretty." The sadder details of her long life follow. "From the start, Page — whose measurements were 36-24-37 — preferred the skimpy outfits she designed and sewed at home. "I made all of my bikinis and most of my lingerie," she said. "My favorite was my first bikini. It was green with a little rickrack all around it." ... Minnesota artist Rick Volkmar... has spent years painstakingly touching up old black-and-white Bettie Page photos, erasing rips and tears and thousands of tiny white specks with a fine brush to rebuild the mesh of her stockings, the sheen of her hair, the shadows on her face." Volkmar exhaustively describes her features, concluding, "Her thumb and hands are muscular, almost mannish. Same with her feet. Her rear end is noticeably squarish, and there are two creases under the left buttocks and one under her right buttocks.... It all adds up to this... She looks like fun." [Page's official website is here.]
Posted by pride at 07:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2006
Vendetta: Hoberman sez impossible not to break into a grin
Over at the VOICE, J. Hoberman keeps his fingers nimble in their cover package on all things V for Vendetta. Somehow, he seems smarter, more stylish and more sly than some of the early typists on this one: "Supremely tasteless, V for Vendetta, with the mysterious V (Hugo Weaving) haunting London in an insouciantly smiling Guy Fawkes mask, was scheduled to have its premiere last November on the day of the Plot's 400th anniversary. The opening was delayed out of deference to last summer's London subway bombings... What's remarkable about the Wachowski scenario, as opposed to Moore's original, is the degree to which it stands Fawkes on his head—recuperating this proto–suicide bomber as a figure of revolt... A movie of multitudinous comic book tropes, V for Vendetta is predicated on secret identities, floridly alliterative dialogue, and gnomic bromides... V's lone disciple, Evey (Natalie Portman), daughter of two disappeared social activists, works in a version of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Given V's essential abstraction, she's the movie's most human presence. A former Broadway "Anne Frank," Portman adds Saint Joan to her baggage—once captured and processed by the police, she looks like a diminutive, doe-eyed Falconetti... Absorbing even in its incoherence, V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts." [Smarter smart-guy stuff at the link plus links to the VOICE sidebars on the pic and its background.]
Posted by pride at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2006
Claire Denis: I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate
Claire Denis' brilliant, lyrical, elusive L'intrus is making its Los Angeles debut as Wellspring wheezes its last theatrical gasps; in LA WEEKLY, Scott Foundas finally gets to publish his 2004 Toronto interview with the great director. Of the film's three locations: "Tahiti was this dream Southern island — I didn’t know it would be Tahiti for sure, but I knew it was going to be like Gauguin’s paintings, and Gauguin described with such strength a place of the world that is in fact not a paradise. His paintings were misunderstood: Gauguin never painted a paradise. He painted a culture that was more than open sex, sunshine, fruit, and fish. The French-Swiss borderland, that I knew from childhood — one of my aunts used to live there and we were crossing the border very often. Also, it’s very wild, with beautiful forests and lakes — you can hide there. Korea I had been to, and in the script I had this in-between country where Louis is buying the boat, a sort of limbo between inferno and paradise." Her movies are very different from American ones. "You know, what is so attractive for me, being French, about American cinema, is this complete, solid American-ness — that American cinema is built solidly like a house with solid walls, and concentrates on what is inside the house. 
It makes American filmmakers sometimes so attractive and their films so attractive, because they’re so concentrated that they diffuse a sort of strength and power and reality. But on the other hand, it’s striking sometimes about some American directors — they might go to festivals and I see in their eyes how open they are to other cultures, but they would not take the risk to go outside with their cameras and film other people. Maybe they’re right in a way, because they make more solid films. Films like mine are maybe fragile in a way, more porous, more open. Sometimes, I would like to be in a more solid position, to be inside the fortress. But I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate."
Posted by pride at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2006
N for Neocon: Wolcott susses Denby's shushing
While I'm awaiting a Wednesday night second viewing in IMAX before frying my bacon over the ultra-crispy V for Vendetta, James Wolcott offers a tart aside to the most goombah of early reviews, with the New Yorker's august David Denby partaking in the aborning controversy over the movie's mere existence: "It's been awhile since we've had a truly critically divisive movie, and V for Vendetta is shaping up to be it. As David Poland writes in The Hot Blog, the next week or so promises to be an interesting ride for this film, with reviewers already declaring their opinions as "facts" as they try to dampen down expectations and excitement. Beware of professions of boredom when the subject and execution are this controversial. I anticipated that my Upper West Side neighbor David Denby—such a trial for him, bumping into me wherever he goes—would render a negative verdict on V for Vendetta, and so he does, rapping his gavel with stern monotonony... With this review and his pan of Why We Fight, I fear David is drifting toward neoconservatism, a doctrine more congenial to the sort of principled stands he likes to take, offering more room for rhetorical heroism. I pray I am wrong." [It's probably important to recall that Mr. Denby was making such invocations as far back as Do The Right Thing from his elevated step-stool at New York magazine. Of that movie's incendiary finale, Denby wrote, "Lee appears to be endorsing the outcome, and if some audiences go wild, he’s partly responsible.”]
Posted by pride at 08:31 PM | Comments (2)
Towne's L.A. Dust: there are occasional baboons
The Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea talks to Robert Towne about the $19 million Ask the Dust. "Towne wrote his... adaptation in 1993, and tried to get it off the ground with Johnny Depp... But the money was never there... Both Towne's screenplay and Fante's novel...became the stuff of legend." Why was it shot in South Africa? "There were pockets of Los Angeles in 1971 and 1972, when I first read the novel, that could still be exploited as the 1930s... but that was 1972," explains Towne..."But by the time I'd written the script in 1993, there wasn't much of it left. People were saying you couldn't shoot in L.A. because it was too expensive, but it was equally true that you couldn't shoot in L.A. because there wasn't that L.A. to shoot in." So they "re-created downtown L.A.'s Bunker Hill neighborhood on two football fields in the shadow of the Cape Town hills. "There were unexpected benefits of shooting in South Africa... The quality of the air and the sky was so much like Los Angeles, and it wasn't just that we were able to afford building downtown L.A. The location we found for Laguna Beach was more like Laguna than anything that's left in Laguna today. And the desert: three hours from Cape Town, there is desert that looks like the Mojave. There are occasional baboons out there, but you keep them out of the shot."
Posted by pride at 09:48 AM | Comments (2)
March 13, 2006
Jarecki: You're either with David Denby or you're with the terrorists
Over at Pride, Unprejudiced, I have a few thousand words each with directors Gavin Hood and Eugene Jarecki, both of whom are infectiously enthusiastic and uncommonly smart. Here's a sample exchange with Jarecki, when I asked him about "the incredibly jejune review that David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of Why We Fight. "I think it's a form of unfortunate elitism where the reviewer probably does not have sufficient experience sitting in an audience and feeling the way people are affected the movie. So their review reveals more about the rarefied world in which they watch films than about the way those films actually impact the public. In the particular case of that review, I think Mr. Denby literally didn't realize that most of the film he was watching was original footage. 
... He often invokes the name Marcel Ophuls in the review. I daresay, I think Marcel Ophuls, wherever in this universe he is, was an artist who would not have thought that a critic should set parameters by which artist should operate. It's just a tragic closure of the American mind, and thankfully audiences have not seen the film the way Mr. Denby did... I do go out of my way to find people who disagree with whatever impulses I have when I start... I honestly believe that David Denby has hurt too many filmmakers by writing things in the mainstream press that are vicious, that reveal a too-great distance from the creative process. If that makes me unpopular with David Denby, I think that any artist should be unpopular with any critic who sets tyrannical parameters about art... I guess, the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you're either with him or you're with the terrorists.
Posted by pride at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Divine inspiration: how artists find it
In the Observer, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of "Monogamy" and other epigramatic studies, makes a compelling survey of artists' ideas about "inspiration", with examples from musicians Beth Orton, Steve Reich and Martha Wainwright, artist Cornelia Parker, poet Andrew Motion, documentary-maker Nick Broomfield, and My Summer of Love director Pawel Pawlikowski: "One thing you develop with age and experience is an intuition for a good idea: something strikes a chord with you and it resonates. At any given time I'll have four or five ideas, usually half-baked, but I'll juggle them around and write story outlines until one of them stands out. Inspiration is an inchoate process that cannot really be legislated.
For that reason, I find that starting with some didactic theory doesn't work. Political anger can spark you, but it rarely gets you very far. My favourite of the films I've made, Serbian Epics, was the result of an unanswered question dealing with a particularly complicated and ambiguous political situation, but it was a very personal film. I think it conveyed the multi-layered nature of the situation, rather than simply explaining it and thereby reducing it to something partial and limited. Filmmaking is the most annoyingly complicated and diffusive process and lots of people are involved, so it had better be a strong impulse that pushes you to do it. I've made films where the ideas have carried me through, and it's like being in love. But I've also made films where they haven't, and it's more like plumbing."
Posted by pride at 06:28 PM | Comments (1)
March 11, 2006
Bubble under: a comprehensive local look
Old news to some, but there's a weird and intriguing study of Bubble over at Pie and Coffee, talking to some locals. "Sarah, a book designer, once worked for Lee Middleton Dolls, and lived in Belpre much of her life. "I’m really excited about Bubble. I’m really excited because it was shot in the doll factory where I used to work. Too bad I don’t still work there, because I would’ve totally been in that movie. P&C: [You're] from the Mid-Ohio Valley. And Bubble was shot here. This is the first major movie set in the Mid-Ohio Valley since “Night of the Hunter.” Sarah: Everyone I tell that I worked in a doll factory first of all thinks it’s creepy. Then they look it up online, and they think it’s even creepier when they see the dolls. People seriously get really creeped out... So I think that’s probably it. The doll factory is creepy. Bubble is like a murder mystery, right? There’s a cop in it, and he’s a real cop, and there’s these people that work in the doll factory... But what was creepy was we would—and I think I can tell about this—we would do work for other companies. Like we would make those full-size dolls you put in your car to make it look like you have someone with you. And we made like crack babies and stuff..." [More discursive stuff at the link.]
Posted by pride at 03:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 07, 2006
Mudd in your eye: Producing John Malkovich
With the release of The Libertine and the upcoming Art School Confidential, the NY Times' Michael Joseph Gross gets an update on prodco Mr. Mudd fromJohn Malkovich. Of his driver on the set of Killing Fields, Malkovich again recounts: "One day, we were driving somewhere," the actor said, "and Mr. Mudd was doing his usual running of Buddhist monks and bicyclists and old women off the road, and cackling. And he said to me: 'Sometime Mr. Mudd kill. Sometime Mr. Mudd not kill.' That seemed to me such a wise, such a sage philosophy," Mr. Malkovich said, and one, he suggested, suited to the unpredictable and sometimes brutal business of filmmaking. 
In 1998, when he formed an independent production company with his partners Lianne Halfon and Russell Smith, the trio briefly considered naming it Jerry's Kids but instead took the name of the philosopher-chauffeur... "The world just doesn't owe you anything — I'm probably just too Midwestern for that — even if you're really good," he said... "Obviously we'd all like it to be easier. Obviously we'd all like it to be not such a struggle to do what are essentially quite small independent films that are funny, compelling, of interest. But it hasn't been easy, and it probably won't be any easier. But that's the way it is." [Here's a list of future Mudd.]
Posted by pride at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)
Village idiocy: M. Night's Oscar senselessness
Who would click through an AmEx website link to "find out more about M. Night Shyamalan"? I'd missed the Oscar commercials, yet Shyamalan's jaw-dropping self-regard 
makes this drip of ego some kind Visine-worthy classic. Sitting in a restaurant, Manoj's "table for one" gives him a chance to imagine everyone around him is a skinhead or a foul creature while his beautiful mind confects $10 million paydays. The only laugh line (surely not intentional)? His waitress telling him how much she loved The Village... Where's Catherine Keener when you need her? "You paid her to say that, didn't you?"
Posted by pride at 04:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 06, 2006
A parallel universe search for meaning: Crashing in Austria
Walking through a fluff-filled Chicago the night after Crash got its Oscar tap reminded me of a 2003 movie, Austrian writer-director Barbara Albert's 2003 Free Radicals, or Böse Zellen. "Chaos theory" is what Albert says her film is about. In its parallel universe, how does US distributor Kino describe it?: "[An] Austrian housewife['s] narrow escape from the catastrophic consequences of "The Butterfly Effect" aboard an airliner only sets her up for an even more shockingly random fate. As the devastating results of a traffic accident transform [her] family and the young occupants of the other car, the personal and circumstantial fallout envelopes an entire community.... [A] dramatic fresco... exposes the lonely yearning and thwarted redemption ricocheting the human particles of Free Radicals off of each other."
Seeing it at Toronto, I wrote that Albert's mosaic of people straining for spirituality had obvious influences: "the touchstone movie for films coming from all lands [this year], it seems, is Robert Altman's Nashville... Free Radicals made a spirited, cruel attempt to weave together a dozen characters with the most minimal of connections." It's more experimental than its American kin, as J. Hoberman wrote in the VOICE after the film's NY Film Festival showings: "Free Radicals... involves perhaps a dozen characters—mainly [the woman's] friends and relations, and the teenage passengers of the car that collides with hers.... [Some] links are more oblique and are often created by natural sound bridges, subtle match cuts, and blatant synchronicity... Jumping from one vignette to another, the filmmaker succeeds in establishing a material mysticism from the web of secret connections and chance meetings. That a minor mishap has the same cosmic valence as some huge happenstance gives the movie a cumulative emotional intensity. Everything is connected . . . or will be." Free Radicals is obsessed with terrible car crashes and ends in falling snow. Interesting how minds think alike: Crash was reportedly written months before this movie was on the festival circuit or submitted for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award. Then again, wasn't there a filmmaker named Krzysztof Kieslowski who... Never mind.
Posted by pride at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)
Soul and heart: Altman's secret honored
Accepting his lifetime achievement award, Robert Altman revealed one of Hollywood's great open secrets: I'm here, I think, under false pretences. I think I have to become straight with you. Ten years ago, eleven years ago I had a heart transplant, a total heart transplant. I got the heart of, I think, a young woman who was in about in her late thirties. By that kind of calculation you may be giving this award too early because I think I've got about 40 years left. Offstage, Altman said, "I didn't make a big secret about it. I thought maybe no one would hire me again."
Posted by pride at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)
12 Toes: cat-nabbing, dagnabbit
Oh, and did you see that rare 90-second documentary about 12-toed cats? The filmmakers are proud of it. [Large QuickTime file.]
Posted by pride at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Taking out the Crash: Crashism blooms
Three intriguing AM perspectives on the Best Picture win by Crash: David Poland acutely HotButtons why: "Crash is a valley movie. It is a film that was made by people who are, for the most part, longstanding members of the Hollywood (literally, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Burbank) community and the Academy is made up mostly of people who can also be described as the same. And in specific, all politics are local and the Academy race is nothing if not political. 
And with Cheadle-Dillon-Bullock-Fichtner-Esposito-Fraser-Howard-Phillippe-Sirtis-David-Danza-Tate-Ludicris-Newton all in play for longtime TV vet and recently film vet Paul Haggis on Crash vs. an Aussie, a young actress who worked mostly in North Carolina, a young New Yorker, and an even younger actress, who has made two films all working for a Chinese director who works with a guy in New York on Brokeback Mountain… well, you can add up the votes..." Back east, The Reeler spools some characteristic bile: "I face the migraine-inducing reality that what is so often hyped as the world's most austere, powerful film body actually awarded its Best Picture prize to an abortion like Crash. I mean, I saw a half-dozen better films last year that were not even nominated, but I saw hardly any as intensely awful and overrated as Paul Haggis's pedantic "drama"—as accurate an approximation of race relations as a Winnie the Pooh cartoon is an honest depiction of forest ecology. Yet Matt Zoller Seitz may have the title, from an extended entry before Sunday night's win (I can hardly wait to see his reaction today) which I quote only in brief: "Haggis and the film's defenders can pretend this is evidence of complexity and contradiction all they want; it's really just evidence of Haggis' version of Powerful Dramaturgy, which mixes the schematic earnestness of an old afterschool special and the Zen pulp grandiosity of Michael Mann in full-on existential dread mode, complete with pulsing synth music, massive telephoto closeups and time-suspending action montages. This movie should have been called "Mess." 
But despite its pretensions to muscular lyricism, Crash doesn't even deserve the top prize when judged as pure filmmaking. It's nowhere near as brutishly powerful as Mel Gibson's roundly sneered-at 1995 winner Braveheart—in my view, not really a historical movie as Oscar typically defines it, but the first atavistic action film to win Best Picture; the sort of movie Cornel Wilde would have directed if during the 1960s he’d been given tens of millions of dollars to throw around. Nor is Crash as good as The English Patient, a classy timewaster that almost nobody wants to watch twice... Unlike other recent Best Picture contenders, Crash isn't slick, clever and safe, it’s hot, stupid and dangerous, and slick and “powerful” in that peculiarly West Coast way that used to be showcased on “Six Feet Under.” The characters chatter bitterly, like drunk screenwriters trying to one-up each other with demonstrations of hardboiled cynicism about life but then rallying at the last minute to exhort each other to go forth into the world and Make a Difference... Entertainment industry dumbasses... live in monocultural bubbles and experience race relations via news reports if they experience it at all [might] deem Crash a work of searing truth. If this movie wins Best Picture, the statutette should be headless."
Posted by pride at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
Magnum force: George Lucas sez big budget pics are over
Lloyd Grove in the NY Daily News gets some more pre-visionary stuff from George Lucas: "The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie," said Lucas, a near-billionaire... "Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong." The portly Lucas, whose Star Wars sequel was nominated for the Oscar in makeup, was clearly in Yoda mode at Saturday's Weinstein Co. party... "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies," Lucas declared. "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million." [Back in November, Lucas was selling the Reporter's Paula Parisi on the death of theatrical: "I think it'll happen— it'll have to happen... because of piracy. It's the only way you can stop piracy; there is no other way...
If you look at the (theatrical) divisions, I don't think they make any money. I don't think they've made money for five or six years... For studios, the fact is that the theatrical film market is less than 10% of their business—it's very, very small. I mean, you could chop that off in a second, and it wouldn't even bother them—they're just doing it as a promotional thing."
Posted by pride at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2006
Wolcott on Oscar-baiting: milking the elk and the heartland doesn't exist
Over at James Wolcott's pied-a-terre, he's effortlessly debunking some posh about why "Hollywood" doesn't reflect "America."The 'Hollywood doesn't reflect mainstream America' argument is one of the oldest and phoniest in the playbook, with Michael Medved making the same case that Catholic organizers did in the 30's to push for a decency code. The truth is that Hollywood has almost never reflected heartland values, from its birth it's reflected urban energy, cosmopolitan taste, social conscience, and pagan fascination, and when it's conformed to conventional pieties, as during the dreariest stretches of the postwar period, when disillusionment and subversion had to sneak in through the shadows of film noir... 
Think of the movies now considered classic... from the great grunge stretch of the late Sixties and Seventies, movies such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, Blazing Saddles, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, on and on—do these movies speak to the pieties and platitudes that William Bennett holds dear? ... The heartland issue is such a crock, especially when it's taken up by pseudo-populist pundits who cling to both coasts and wouldn't move to the middle of the country unless the name of that middle was Chicago.
Fuck the heartland. It doesn't exist... There's no such thing as an average American anymore ... unless by "average American" you mean (as news producers and pundits seem to do) white, middle-aged, heterosexual Christian small-towners and suburbanites who won't even be watching the Academy Awards because it'll be past their bedtime and they have elk to milk the next morning."
Posted by pride at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2006
Three Times a charm in the IFC-Comcast basket; plus Fox's Chernin wants some
Details on the IFC-Comcast deal for simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand release are all across the media, including Andrew Wallenstein's dispatch in the Reporter, and while many of the early titles in the PR I'd read were just so much bunkum, there are interesting twists. "Comcast Corp. and IFC Entertainment [set] a deal Tuesday that will ensure simultaneous distribution for independent films in select theaters and via video-on-demand." Titles like American Gun; Sorry, Haters; and CSA: Confederate States of America are the kind of shelf items you expect to languish, but the 9 million subscribers to Comcast's services will get more subversive material, including Caveh Zahedi's subversive, semi-autobiographical essay film, I Am A Sex Addict and strikingly, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's masterpiece, Three Times. (Hou's films are virtually unknown in the US.) The movies, up to five each month, will be marketed as "IFC in Theaters" for $5.99 a pop. "The theatrical distribution business for smaller, specialized films has become more challenging, and we saw this as an opportunity to create a national art house to be available to everybody from the outset," IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring told Wallenstein. While many theater owners are reluctant, the Cuban-Wagner combine, which includes Landmark Theaters, will participate. Notably, "VOD programming cannot be copied or easily pirated, which might quell theater owners' concerns that viewers could buy a day-and-date-distributed DVD and pass it around." Also in the Reporter, Fox wants in on HD VOD $$$.
"News Corp. is betting that people will pay $25-$30 to watch Fox films at home in high-definition quality via cable and satellite TV 60 days after their theatrical release." Newscorp pres and COO Peter Chernin reported that the conglom "has been "talking to the cable operators and satellite operators about the idea of a 60-day, high-priced high-def rental" offer costing $25-$30.... At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Chernin first mentioned that Fox was working on a plan for HD-to-home video on-demand offers 60 days after theatrical releases to establish a new HD window between theatrical and DVD runs amid a recent trend of shrinking distribution windows... Chernin on Tuesday indirectly admitted that $25-plus might sound like a high price point, but he argued that more than 1 million Americans spent more than $25,000 last year on a home cinema setup, and they would be "desperate consumers" of such offers."
Posted by pride at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
Hannity undivided: excerpting This Divided State
There's a lengthy, unfair and unbalanced clip of Fox News entertainer Sean Hannity over at the website for This Divided State, Steven Greenstreet's vivid four-star politi-doc about a 2004 fracas at Orem, Utah Valley State College in Orem when Michael Moore was invited to speak, local politicos predicted the apocalypse and Hannity was brought in preemptively to further inflame the populace against the liberal scourge. (With Hannity, were you expecting "fair and balanced"?) Hannity, when not making campaign fundraising appearances for Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), is busy threatening to sue the filmmakers of this powerful glimpse of hate and demagoguery: "I am extremely angry at what they have done with that video footage. I plan on suing them," the Fox star has said about the showcasing of his epic incivility. One version of the 10 minute clip is here.
Posted by pride at 10:13 AM | Comments (1)
Focus Features: a pup-tent do-si-do is a mighty dicey proposition, sez USA TODAY
In USA TODAY, Susan Wloszczyna begins one more peek at the clever ways of Focus Features by zooming in on her startling vision of the impracticability of co-president David Linde having sex on a mountainside, writing that he and James Schamus would never be taken for gay cowboys. "Schamus' sartorial taste runs to bow ties and J. Crew [and] Linde's considerable height would turn a pup-tent do-si-do into a mighty dicey proposition." The rest of the niche bit is more tactful and tasteful: :None of us here have any feeling like there is an Oscar in the bag," says Schamus, sitting behind his desk in a roomy if unpretentious office in Greenwich Village. Dominating the space: a poster of The Tingler, the schlocky 1959 Vincent Price [horror movie]... Schamus, a film professor at Columbia University who also has produced and written such [Ang] Lee landmarks as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [is described by Lee this way:] "He is so hip and quite the intellectual.. He's an artist and a good politician."
Posted by pride at 08:15 AM | Comments (0)