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April 28, 2006
Putting the fix in Netflix: a history
At Business 2.0, G. Pascal Zachary curates a gallery showing 13 steps across seven years in the evolution of the NetFlix envelope: "When the DVD first came out, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings had a key insight: The plastic disc's light weight and small size would make it cheap and easy to send through the mail, letting him create a cross between Blockbuster and Amazon.com. By taking advantage of the U.S. Postal Service, it could send rental DVDs to customers through the mail - and accept returns the same way. 
But before Netflix became a dotcom darling with millions of subscribers, it had to figure out the details of how to mail DVDs cheaply and economically. Learning the ins and outs of the post office's operations was key: Every ounce of weight in the mailer added to postage costs - but if the mailer was too flimsy, DVDs broke in the mail." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)
New Genius baby: Weinsteinco's vid arm embraces Tartan
Indie vid distribution is one bigger family as another mini-distrib aligns itself with the Genius label and Tartan Video USA moves its US home-ent distribution of 60 library titles and future releases to the Weinsteinco-affiliated concern that recently shuttered the distribution activities of Wellspring. 
As Tartan PRs, they're "continuing the momentum established by its landmark agreement with The Weinstein Company in December 2005," as described by Genius Products CEO Trevor Drinkwater and Tartan Video USA President Tony Borg. Tartan's library, they say, "generated approximately $6 million of net revenue in 2005 and is expected to grow to $9 million in 2006." The titles include upcoming releases of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Lady Vengeance. Dropping names and jargon, Drinkwater is quoted: "The Tartan Video library is a remarkable line-up of films that have been recognized around the world as not only entertaining and inspiring, but thought-provoking as well. The titles represent another example of the ever-increasing quality of content distributed by Genius through the expanded infrastructure we created to handle major titles from The Weinstein Company. With our newly implemented Vendor Managed Inventory system, we anticipate even greater success for Tartan’s library." [The loser in this deal is Tartan's former distrib, TLA Releasing; the release's "Safe Harbor" statement is below.]
Safe Harbor Statement
Except for historical matters contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements reflect assumptions and involve risks and uncertainties that may affect Genius Products’ business, forecasts, projections and prospects, and cause actual results to differ materially from those in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the Genius Products’ newly implemented Vendor Managed Inventory system, the anticipated timing and financial performance of the Tartan library including CELLO, THE HIDDEN BLADE, OLDBOY, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, MAREBITO, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, LADY VENGEANCE, DERAILED, HOODWINKED, MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, WOLF CREEK, THE MATADOR, DOOGAL, THE LIBERTINE and any other statements relating to such new release that are not historical statements of fact. Actual results could vary for many reasons, including but not limited to, the unpredictability of audience demand, the effect of technological change and the availability of alternative forms of entertainment. Other such risks and uncertainties include the matters described in Genius Products’ filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Genius Products assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this press release.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Airport 9/11: only another Universal disaster pic? (Kaufman, Denby, Ebert)
At AlterNet, New Yorker Anthony Kaufman contemplates whether United 93 is the descendant of movies starring George Kennedy and singing nuns like Helen Reddy. "The Sept. 11 attacks, it has often been noted, looked eerily similar to a Hollywood blockbuster. With Universal Pictures' United 93... we have arrived full circle... Just take a look at United 93... or what it is: a movie, but more specifically, a gut-wrenching disaster movie, complete with regular American folks who turn into heroes and a collection of authority figures [who] don't know their ass from their elbow. How does this piece of media function—as a jingoistic call to arms, or a searing indictment of power? 
Rhetorically, he ponders, "Is it just a coincidence that Poseidon, Hollywood's new big-budget remake of the survival tale, opens just two weeks after United 93?. Writes Kaufman, "The '70s disaster [movies] arrived during a period of profound crisis in our nation's history, when the Vietnam War had reached the breaking point, and the government was losing its grip... [T]he film's distrust of high muckety-mucks ultimately reinforces the renegade populism of the Bush presidency—and more widely, the American western mythology. Again, the valiant individuals on the hijacked plane have always provided the potency behind the real-life story of the doomed flight 93... About three weeks ago, an early version... screened for critics... ended with the title card: "America's war on terror had begun." The neocon-cowboyish clarion call has since been cut from the film. But the sentiment still reigns." The increasingly neocon-sounding David Denby, who has been known to turn a fine phrase in his time, concludes his New Yorker review: "Flight 93’s departure, scheduled for 8 A.M., was delayed. By the time the plane got off the ground, the attacks on the World Trade Center were only a few minutes away... [O]nce the flight is aloft Greengrass sticks to real time, and the passing minutes have an almost demonic urgency. This is true existential filmmaking: there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do? Many films whip up tension with cunning and manipulation. As far as possible, this movie plays it straight. A few people made extraordinary use of those tormented minutes, and United 93 fully honors what was original and spontaneous and brave in their refusal to go quietly." Roger Ebert ends his review this affecting way: Greengrass "does not exploit, he draws no conclusions, he points no fingers, he avoids "human interest" and "personal dramas" and just simply watches. The movie's point of view reminds me of the angels in Wings of Desire. They see what people do and they are saddened, but they cannot intervene." ALSO FROM ALTERNET: How is Universal modifying its advertising on blogs, which began on predominantly right-leaning sites? Link here. [More at the links.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
God's happy man: dinner with Herzog
Tom Hall, director of Programming at the Sarasota Film Festival, shares memories of his dinner last month with Werner Herzog after he arrived for a retrospective of his nonfiction work: Herzog arrived at the festival right on time. I was off greeting another filmmaker at a private reception when I received a phone call; having just arrived, Werner was sitting down to dinner, would I care to join him? 
There are very few questions one faces in life that require absolutely no reflection, and this was one of them... I almost instantaneously found myself short on things to say. There is a dilemma that we all face in that crucial moment... how does one talk about life and the world around us without deferring to the source of our admiration? ... I had read many interviews with Werner that were difficult and somewhat surly as he answered banal questions with funny, honest, and often curt answers. Would he be the same in person? It didn’t take much time to find out. Werner was a warm, generous person, animated and full of life... [D]inner arrived, and with it more wine. Herzog took a copious slice from his steak, a generous drink from his wine glass, and began telling us more stories about his life that are best reserved for Werner himself to tell; the stories of the 3 times he had been shot at (once as a rambunctious teenager who, attempting to shoot a duck, was mistaken for a serial killer, once in the middle of a civil war, and recently by an air rifle during an interview for the BBC)... We even got Werner’s thoughts on Godard (I won’t spill the beans). As we approached the end of the evening, Werner told me how much he appreciated what I had done with his documentaries in the program and how pleased he was to be at our festival. Before I could respond with anything more than a simple ‘Thank you’, our group was departing and we both had many hands to shake in thanks." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
411 on the 666?
The middle-aged goateed, balding late-night stencil-painting corpo-taggers for Fox's Omen sequel (opening 6-6-06) weren't too keen to find someone on a cell phone observing their endeavors; the duo broke into a spirited run across the street and around a corner. I counted a dozen manhole covers defaced like this on my way home.
Posted by Ray at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)
New and recent releases: United 93, Silent Hill, Battle in Heaven, more
A catch-up of capsule reviews of the past month, including United 93, Silent Hill, Battle in Heaven, Le Mujer de mi hermano, Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, On a Clear Day, The Sentinel, Brick, Lucky Number Slevin and The Syrian Bride.
United 93 (*** 1/2) Did I only imagine the quiet tolling of a church bell under the Universal Pictures logo at the start of United 93? There is much to praise and admire and fear in English director Paul Greengrass’ scrupulous imagining of the events that befell the passengers on the last of four hijacked passenger planes to crash on the morning of September 11, 2001, which made them, as the writer-director has put it in one too many interviews, the first inhabitants of a post-9/11 world. His work, however, is mostly without such big-picture posturing, instead working with small strokes of telling detail and framing and cutting with the same visceral authority demonstrated in the intimate kineticism of his first wo features, Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy. The documentary-trained, 51-year-old director’s widescreen compositions show rare, quiet intelligence, which benefit foreordained dramatic events in a story like this. For instance, as the hijackers prepare to board, there is a simple swish pan across their faces as they walk through the Newark airport, and for a split-second, the camera holds on an advertisement in the corridor: a pair of smiling women, cleavage exposed; the libidinous excess of a culture these men supposedly disdained. There is a moment when Flight 93 passes over Manhattan. One of the murderers looks out the window. For a flash, through the halation of early morning sun, we see part of the island below, and that part is the antennas and rooftops, only the tip-top of the Twin Towers. Sweet banality and bursts of jargon jar and sadden: “She’s got a crush on that maintenance man”; “Do you guys have sugars up there?”; a co-pilot preparing to slosh hot sauce on his breakfast;
a pair of female attendants sliding on their mid-heels before moving into the cabin. Before a climactic sequence that attempts to imagine the last half hour or so of the doomed flight in approximate “real time,” Greengrass intercuts the events in the cabin with those on the ground, in flight centers across the East coast, with more than a dozen of the actual controllers and supervisors from that day playing themselves. Their astounded reactions at the one-two-three of the flights into the WTC and the Pentagon do include a judicious “What-The-Fuck” or two as the military fails to find the President or even to locate jets that would be in a position that would allow them to prevent further, unknown events. But the greatest terror awaits in the cabin: the forty or so men and women who knew; they knew the World Trade Center was ablaze and there was almost no chance of surviving. United 93 is a wonderfully etched process piece, forceful, assured. Greengrass consulted family members of the victims, and as many of the FAA and military members as he could. What is the larger picture? Vast systems fail. Art attempts to reconstitute failings and start conversation. This is a movie worth talking about. The widescreen photography is by the gifted Barry Ackroyd, who shoots Ken Loach’s films; the restrained score is by John Powell. 111m.
Silent Hill (**) Only once have I been tempted to begin a review with these words: What The Fuck? With Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill, drawn from a popular video game in Roger Avary’s (Pulp Fiction, Rules of Attraction) adaptation, the production starts rapidly with suggestions of a febrile, ash-covered Don’t Look Now, but it devolves into imaginatively designed incoherence and inconsequence. But Gans, whose Brotherhood of the Wolf 
displayed similar bravura and bloat, is a man whose influences are rife: a “Red Harvest”-like bedrock of a city afire from its deepest riches; street signs labeled “Bradbury” and “Bachman”; a City of Lost Children/Caro-Jeunet love of moldy metal; a burn victim like David Lynch’s Eraserhead baby grown large; the ashy doom of Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor; the framing of a witch about to be burnt from Dreyer’s Day of Wrath; Guy Maddin-like desiccated footage of the town of Silent Hill’s past; and a phalanx of undead lizard-faced nurses clad in slips, who dance in bare, bold light with the mistakable rhythms of Bob Fosse chorines. 127m.
Battle in Heaven (*** 1/2) Mexican provocateur Carlos Reygada strikes again with the magisterial, languid Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005). While I can’t go as far as some admirers and call Reygada a visionary, his work is certainly idiosyncratically expressive and thrilling for that. Openly admitting that he finds film narrative oppressive, the 35-year-old director establishes the simplest narrative frameworks then embellishes them with incidents ripe with symbolism and challenges to power, class, and most emphatic, representations of sexuality. 
A dreamy, drifting naturalism propels Reygada’s work, denying the melodramatic stew favored by Mexican directors past and present. Carlos works for a private security firm; one client is a general whose beautiful young daughter he’s known since she was tiny and covets into his pudgy middle age. (As in Buñuel ‘s Belle de Jour, this bored, privileged girl tricks on the side.) Before the film begins, Carlos and his wife have kidnapped a baby that’s died in their hands. While there is a literal pilgrimage threading through Battle in Heaven, much of the film partakes of a near-religious progression between two acts of violence and two explicit sexual acts, detailing the everyday of life in Mexico City without underscoring an immediate interpretation. The film feels both Latin and European. Every shot has a detail, a lightly freighted strangeness, Bresson-deadpan with absurdist sight gags. Quietly willful, Reygada even dares an invocation of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Red Hat” during a moment of quiet, great violence and a climactic scene of the ringing of bells that evokes his esteemed Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev in a most clever manner. 98m.
Le Mujer de mi hermano (* 1/2) A peculiar Pan-American concoction but a decently indecent shallow entertainment, Ricardo de Montreuil’s Le Mujer de mi Hermano (My Brother’s Wife, 2005), is a cleanly shot (by Andres Sanchez) but blandly paced variation on Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (keeping the adulteries closer to home). It was a hit across South and Central America, embellishing simple telenovela-style emotional complications with canny production choices. 
The nonspecific urban location where the elegant homes of its rich and moneyed characters and their pansexual entanglements are located could be Mexico City, but was shot in Santiago, Chile, by Mexico- and Florida-based producers by a Peruvian director and actors from Colombia, Uruguay and Peru. (Cross-cultural imperialism?) Of the three leads, Manolo Cardona, Christian Meier, the startlingly beautiful Barbara Mori is the most interesting to watch in the movies brief eighty-nine minutes of shallow, mellow melodrama. Angelo Milli’s memorable soundtrack is accompanied by a tango-inflected cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” by Tanghetto. The subtitles, notably, fail to translate a wide range of obscenities in Spanish. 89m.
Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School (1/2) Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School is the kind of movie where, after a screening, you want to burn your notebook, purging your thoughts in brilliant sunlight in the great out-of-doors. Incorporating a 1990 American Film Institute short made by director Randall Miller, MHBDACS is rotten enough to have been accepted by Project Greenlight, a treacly, sentimental, noggin-bashing mix of Dirty Dancing and Amores Perros, and with the presence of a vulpine Robert Carlyle, perhaps The Half Empty Monty. (Spoilers follow.) Carlyle plays a wealthy, widowed baker in a well-appointed “thirtysomething”-worthy Mission house where he speaks to his dead dog’s ashes—“Good boy!”—and the ashes of his wife, who committed suicide for no discernible reason. (One assumes the dog did as well.) He says lots of things like “We have a lot of bread to bake before dawn,” as if a “Bright Lights Big City”-era Jay McInerney had been his writing teacher. Incessant intercutting grows from several strands: the 1990 footage of pre-teens making nice and naughty in 1960s Pasadena, Carlyle’s meetings of the latter-day version of the school, led by Hotchkiss daughter Mary Steenburgen, Carlyle’s group grief counseling sessions, and intermediate flashbacks to John Goodman as a car crash victim narrating the story, a role in which a hoarse actor does not even have to move, pinioned in his wreckage or in the back of the ambulation, variously spewing blood, bile and bromides. 
MHBDACS is emphatic about its own wisdom, from Goodman’s vulgar, condescending and the therapeutic fuss and bother of almost every other line about blame, anger and guilt. (I blame the investors, I’m pissed it’s so bad, and I’m guilty I can’t tell you what I really think of the movie.) If it weren’t for the prospect of a small role by the criminally underrated Marisa Tomei as one of the students, I don’t know if I would have lasted more than ten minutes. Even in the laugh-out-loud moment when the actress is required to be observed from a distance revealing that one of her legs is a prosthetic (which, unaccountably, she is rubbing as if it were a pained ghost limb). Yes, the one-legged merengue devotee. Tomei plays it with sweetness and dignity. She has a smile and a voice that would charm the socks off a dead man, and she can earn a line like “You’re a good man. How come you’re not married?” Sorrowfully, Most of the characters are on the level of Hotchkiss’ mute black operator of a flyblown, schmutz-grimed boom box, whom she inexplicably seems to be calling “Three-Way.” The score announces the movie’s sinister sentimentality, and the dance sequences are cut with the grace and gravity of the late Herbert Ross—that is, almost none to speak of. As a character could well be saying of the movie, “I like to think of my smell as a work in progress.” Theaters that have booked this item would be well advised to invest in brighter exit signs. 103m.
On a Clear Day (***) Gaby Dellal’s feature debut, On a Clear Day, finds the great Scots actor Peter Mullan as the gruff center of this likeable bit of charm and uplift. As a Glasgow shipbuilder “made redundant,” the middle-aged Frank (Mullan, in his late 40s, playing a stocky 55) begins to question his self-worth in unsurprising fashion. The mix of eccentric comedy and unabashed drama brings the too-long-silent Bill Forsyth to mind—as well as other recent UK middle-age feel-good tales like The Full Monty and Calendar Girls—although it’s unlikely Forsyth would have hatched the notion that Frank would train to cross the English Channel as a way of regaining his respect and atoning for the guilt of a long-lost child. Still, Dellal’s keen understanding of how life can stop when the life of a loved one ends is matched by a clean, unassertive visual style that, among other things, captures the huge majesty of tankers against the working-class shape of a city whose workers built them. With Brenda Blethyn. 98m.
The Sentinel (*) Even with a few pages of notes scrawled in the dark, an identikit movie like The Sentinel leaves almost no residue on the memory: Michael Douglas, looking reasonably hale in his early 60s with notably unlined eyes, plays a Secret Service agent who’s been on presidential detail at least since he helped save Ronald Reagan from further damage when he was shot by John Hinckley. (The film opens with tricked-up footage of the Reagan shooting.) A colleague is killed early on (played by director Clark Johnson), and suspicions of an inside job—a traitor in the SS—run wild. Kiefer Sutherland is on hand as an investigator from another part of the government, angry years later because old friend Douglas had an affair with his wife, and he keeps rookie Eva Longoria under his wing. The banality is crushing, the shouting is dull, even with the introduction of lusty first lady Kim Basinger, bored by the president (David Rashe). The unmotivated swirling of Johnson’s camera, as in his earlier SWAT has some energy, but an overly busy, oddly garish digital re-coloring of almost every scene is like visual sandpaper. The extras casting is oddly distracting, too, as is a terrorist hoping to commit a murder in Toronto and making the darndest, spiffy Atom Egoyan-lookalike. 108m.
Brick (***) Rian Johnson’s loopy first feature, Brick, transposes the slangy conventions of 1940s pulp with a dose of David Lynch-style obsession to a contemporary San Clemente high school campus, a patch of California that is always bright but filtered a rain-blue, cloud-gray cast. (Call it “Blue Snuggle.”) 
“Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the mop-topped, bangs-in-eyes Brendan, and it’s another stellar performance by the former TV star, even if Johnson’s conceits are ultimately suffocating. “Where you been eating?” a girl asks. “Who you been eating with?” a boy asks. “Lunch can be difficult,” they agree. Keep your specs on, find me if she shows,” Brendan says of the missing Laura. “You said her business was none of yours” is prime pop and “I really loved you a lot” makes for a lovely, terse moment of inarticulable emotion. All well and good, and there’s much of the aping of noir grownups in the cracked cadences of a more purple era: “I got all five senses and I slept last night so that puts me six up on the lot of you.” Some love this thing; I can respect that. With Lukas Haas as “The Pin.” 110m.
Lucky Number Slevin (** 1/2) Compulsively derivative, Lucky Number Slevin wants to be the cleverest three-legged dog on the block. Scots director Paul McGuigan’s first feature since the baleful Wicker Park is this Montreal-shot rendition of screenwriter Jason Smilovic’s relentlessly smart-ass feat of recombinant typing suggests Quentin Tarantino and Chris McQuarrie on slow days—“Fuck-shit-Jesus is right” is a swear by sometimes-narrator-gunman Bruce Willis in an opening set-up that includes the invocation of sthe creenwriting jargon “the inciting incident,” and later Hitchcock’s North by Northwest will be explained in painstaking detail in order to footnote (or headstone, in the case) Mr. Smilovic’s lifts. McGuigan also allows Hartnett an extended James Bond audition that’s more inside than a kidney stone. 
(While set in New York, most of the establishing shots involve vehicles rather than actors.) McGuigan alter ego Josh Hartnett is the wrong man who’s picked up by warring clans of gangsters—one black, one Jewish, each depicted with similar casual stereotyping—while wearing only a low-slung fluffy floral bath towel and a prodigious treasure trail. While McGuigan’s work ranges ambitiously from The Acid House to The Reckoning, he doesn’t have the chops to reconcile the warring acting styles: Willis, Hartnett, Lucy Liu, Morgan Freeman, “Sir” Ben Kingsley and Stanley Tucci, to name a few of the denizens of the Pork Store of Finer Acting. François Séguin’s mad Mod production design is a consolation, as lit with designer alacrity by Peter Sova. (While set in New York, most of the establishing shots involve vehicles rather than actors.) Lucy Liu’s the one respite, a freckled quirk-kitten made of Pop Rocks. Everyone else seems smug; she’s a charming comic resource awaiting further investigation. (There are twelve credited producers, for those who consider that sort of thing alarming.) 109m.
The Syrian Bride (***) Every decent movie about a wedding party will seem like it’s had an uncredited rewrite by Beckett and/or Kafka, and Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride (2004) is a prime example. Beautifully observed, acted and shot, 
Riklis’ prickly, provocative heartbreaker finds a young woman of Syrian descent who lives in the Golan Heights facing what may happen once she goes through with her arranged marriage to a Syrian television comedian, after which both the Israeli and Syrian border police will recognize her only as Syrian. “Perhaps I’m going from one jail to another one,” Mona (Clara Khoury) groans, her large, intense green eyes and regal nose stoic with resignation. (Khoury resembles Sarah Jessica Parker, only she’s attractive.) Hiam Abbass, who played the mother of one of the potential suicide bombers in Paradise Now, plays Mona’s older sister, and easily the most affecting of the performances. The many bold story strands are cleanly aligned and Riklis’ wide-screen style is deceptively simple yet efficient. The Syrian Bride is a rich surprise. (Khoury’s own father plays the “father’ of the bride.) 98m.
Posted by pride at 10:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
Never an A+: cricket L Schwarzbaum on E Weekly
At RockCritics.com, Aaron Aradillas is keeping warm with the occasional film cricket, like EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum, with whom he parses a few thousand words. 
In this lengthy, good read, she says that her years at Sarah Lawrence, which "didn't have majors (or exams, or grades, or requirements," she says, "I studied piano, viola, music theory, music history, composition, and conducting. I sang in a chorus that traveled to Europe for a month-long concert tour. I wore black garments. I took classes in fiction writing. I made my own yogurt. I took a course in oxyacetylene welding since I admired the sculpture of David Smith. I wrote in blank notebooks with a leaky Rapidograph pen. You know, the usual." 
Schwarzbaum considers her music background in terms of her critical practice, and says she's "still pondering the implications of Terrence Malick's arresting use of Mozart's Piano Concerto #23 in The New World—a pointed decision to juxtapose the serenity of ordered, peak-of-culture Old World music against scenes of much wilder beauty and newness." She likes pop, but classical matters more: "The canon of classical music though--Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, the biggies, and Mozart above all-—ills me with the joy of passionate emotion organized into tonal order. Like an exquisite math. I don't know how else to say it. Maybe I can play you a Bach fugue?" Describing her weekly routine, she confesses, "I'm a down-to-the-deadline (or, er, a tad-past-the-deadline) type, so at the start of the week I'm writing (or about to write) all day, or working with my editors and making revisions. I happen to love my office at the magazine, which has a door I can close and a view of the Hudson River that can't be beat, so I tend to do a fair amount of writing there, but sometimes I also file from home, and then come into the office for editing." And grading on a scale? "You may notice that the movie section of EW has never handed out an A+, although other review sections in the magazine have done so... The tradition was established before I came on board—something about preserving a Platonic ideal, something no actual movie could attain..." What other crickets is her ear pitched toward? "The answer to this question always feels to me like a shout-out to friends, a suck-up to influential people, or a settling of scores with adversaries. The question I'd always love to hear critics answer instead is, what else do you love to do, read, or read about[?].
So I'll answer my own question: I love the fiction of Dawn Powell, John Fante, and the short stories of Laurie Colwin. I have a strong interest in graphic design and typography... with a corresponding collection of books about books. I'm just getting involved in gardening, so I've got a stack of stuff to read about mulch, ripped from the pages of magazines... I like to take hiking vacations to places far from screening rooms—Morocco, Iceland—so I've got a shelf of Lonely Planet guidebooks. I own a cookbook, but I use it mostly to weigh down the stuff about mulch ripped from other publications." And if she were a movie character? " I am the child that Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter should have had in Broadcast News, grown up to become Allison Janney." [Much more at the link, including James Toback's sexual comments after a review, a contretemps about Jewishness between herself and Barry Levinson, plus Aradillas conversating with David Edelstein here.]
Posted by pride at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)
Korean director bios: download Park Chan-Wook, Bong Joon-Ho, Ryoo Seung-Wan
The estimable Korean Film Council's just published three new filmmaker bios, of Park Chan-Wook, Ryoo Seung-Wan and Bong Joon-Ho, all of which are downloadable as free PDFs. Writes the site: "To increase the international standing of Korean film directors and to promote the international circulation of Korean films, KOFIC chooses three to six directors and publishes the Korean Film Directors series every year." 
Direct downloads: Park Chan-Wook; Ryoo Seung-Wan; Bong Joon-Ho. (The files are about 20-30mb each.)
Posted by pride at 03:28 PM | Comments (2)
Getting all cinematical: more movie-ish Neil Young intrigue
Why are the circumstances of the recording and release of this new Neil Young album turning out more cinematic than anything I've seen in days (except the superbly measured United 93)? In the Globe and Mail, Robert Everett-Green has the memorable lede of the moment as he gets to hear the "profoundly patriotic" "Living in War": "We met outside a bagel joint in north Toronto, then drove a few blocks to a quiet street where two strangers could sit in a big old Cadillac and listen to the car stereo in peace. Then Robert Young slipped a CD-ROM from a plain white sleeve and gave me a rare preview of the nine explosive new songs on his brother Neil Young's much-anticipated album... 
The disc was made in a hurry, recorded in three days on Neil Young's California ranch and another 12-hour session in a Los Angeles studio. I can hear the urgency in Young's singing, as if there's not a moment to lose when a great lie has spread over the land and only strong, sustained truth-telling can turn it back. "Living With War" is a fierce, comprehensive indictment of the Bush administration and all its failures, at home and abroad, but it doesn't feel like an outsider's dissent. It's the work of someone who clearly identifies with the core values of ordinary Middle Americans who voted for Bush, who sent their sons and daughters to war, and who are beginning to feel betrayed... The text [of the lyrics] alone can't convey the sense of gasping outrage in Young's singing, and his forceful arrangements for guitar, bass, drums and sometimes trumpet. His electric guitar's gnarly, saturated tone has an almost drunken quality, as if it too were reeling from the great betrayal.... Mostly, it's a big-tent collection of ordinary citizens, which at the end of the album sings an a cappella version of 'America the Beautiful,' recalling in a more robust key the final scene of Michael Cimino's... Vietnam film, The Deer Hunter." [More blow-by-blow at the link; the album starts streaming on Friday for one week at Young's own website or visit Young's .]
Posted by pride at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)
Skin off Tartan's back: Araki reclaims
At Filmmaker, Anthony Kaufman digs into the tale of the abortive release of Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki's haunting, abuse-driven feature: its producers took the movie back, filing "a lawsuit against distributors Tartan Films USA and TLA Entertainment Group in November 2005", and placing the DVD rights with Strand Releasing. 
"This unusual scenario came as a result of a contentious dispute between the film’s producers and its original distributors, an ongoing litigious battle about money, power and delivery requirements," writes Kaufman. “By the time of the release, they had paid us $50,000 of the $250,000,” says [producer Jeffrey] Levy-Hinte. “We were asking politely, and then forcibly, for the money. They coughed up two more payments, paying a total of $175,000 by July.” "Delivery requirements" led to further assertions by the distributor, described in the dispatch, including an October "complaint in U.S. District Court accusing Tartan/TLA of never acknowledging the contract’s termination and continuing to “engage in distribution activities, despite the fact that they no longer have a license to do so and in so doing, have engaged in copyright infringement.” Levy-Hinte tells Filmmaker, “The importance of this lawsuit is that we can’t allow distributors to get away with this... it happens all too often with these red herring delivery issues.... ‘I don’t want to pay you. What are you going to do, sue me?’ And fortunately we were in a position to do that, and we had a termination clause which was ironclad.” The Strand DVD include sdeleted scenes and audition tapes, and was supervised by Araki, despite TLA having already released a different version.
Posted by pride at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
Agee and Farber, sitting at UT
Fred Brown of the Appalachian Journal reports on the James Agee Trust's gift to UT Knoxville, including a lost collaboration with fellow cricket Manny Farber [pictured]. 
A bounty of Agee notebooks, drafts and manuscripts were delivered to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library last year. "The fresh news is that cache of Ageeana is now online via UT's Special Collections Web site. [This is at least a listing; there may be other links.] "Special Collections has four different sets of Agee collections, four manuscript groups and papers that span the period from 1930-1955 when he died at 45 in New York City from a heart attack... "The one piece I know to be nowhere else is an abortive screenplay collaboration with Manny Farber just after WW II entitled 'Furlough,' a project which was never completed but provided some of the experience for Agee's later screenplays. The correspondence is largely new as well." [O]ne of the more astounding finds in the Agee Trust Collection is a Civil War manuscript, written in Agee's almost unreadable and microscopic handwriting. The manuscript opens: All through the night and even by early morning smoke lingered on the long, devastated field. The mists were burned off long before noon, but the smoke would not be entirely dissolved before nightfall. Along one edge of the field, among scarred, stumbling trees near a deep ravine two soldiers lay in the deepest part of the ravine. They had lain where they fell, without sound or motion, since late the afternoon before." [More prose at the link.]
Posted by pride at 10:15 PM | Comments (2)
Paul Allen's revamped Vulcan: Sharing the Hard Candy
In the Seattle P-I, Winda Beneditti takes stock of "philanthropist, arts enthusiast and all-around rich guy" Paul Allen's revamped Vulcan Productions, starting with production of Hard Candy, which they consider "a wicked little gem." Of Allen's Seattle-based independent film company, Beneditti writes, "it's the first Vulcan [film] finished under the company's new production model—one focused on making feature films on lean budgets and with [an] egalitarian revenue-sharing plan. Michael Caldwell, director of motion-pcture production, thinks the company's new approach will allow it to make films that are "genuinely original and financially responsible."
"We want to put great stories onscreen and we want to do it in a way that emphasizes tackling the basics of film—great scripts, great directing, great acting," says Richard Hutton, Vulcan's vice president of media development." Vulcan, born Clear Blue Sky Productions, had produced six films for $5-$15 million each, she reports. Far From Heaven, while critically acclaimed and a recipient of four Oscar noms, was she reports Caldwell saying, "financially it was a break-even type film." "Hutton says they were inspired by the low-budget/revenue-sharing model created by [InDigEnt]. Through this production company, filmmakers agree to work with downright anemic budgets and under specific technical limitations and, in exchange, they're given total creative freedom. Meanwhile, the entire crew shares in the revenues generated from the first dollar grossed... Hutton says Vulcan Productions decided to do something similar -- that is, make films with budgets under $1 million and then split the revenues generated with the people who helped make the films from the get-go." [More at the link.]
Posted by pride at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
My mother was afraid I'd end up a projectionist: revisiting a Kevin Brownlow masterpiece
Kevin Brownlow's best known for his work as a historian and restorer of movies like Napoleon, but he made two features as a young man, including the brute period marvel, Winstanley, set in the era of the English Civil War, and the what-if-the-Nazis-had-won no-budget eight-years-to-make dystopic gem It Happened Here, presently reissued in the UK, and which he began work when he was but 18. In the Independent, Neil Norman talks with Brownlow about the course of time. 
"It is one of the most striking scenes in British cinema: Nazi stormtroopers marching through Parliament Square. Clearly designed to alarm and provoke, it is an image that could have been ripped from a WWII Nazi propaganda film. [But] it is a scene from [1964's] It Happened Here... [I]t tells of partisan resistance to the Vichy-like state, and how survival and compromise can easily slide into collaboration. Shot in black and white, in 16mm and 35mm, in the manner of a documentary, it has the jackbooted kick of authenticity... "I wanted to be the next Orson Welles... But I never even put on the weight. And I am hopeless at raising money... My mother was afraid I'd end up as a projectionist... She encouraged me to be creative and bought me a camera." ... It is hard to reconcile the massive chutzpah this must have taken with the endearingly diffident, quietly spoken 67 year-old man sitting opposite me. But the evidence is on film for all to see... Brownlow retired from the fray of feature directing to concentrate on film restoration, documentaries and his books. Even now, one senses that his directorial career was nipped in the bud.... "If we hadn't made this film it is possible I might be making feature pictures today... [W]e made a film for what most filmmakers spend on their main titles. An iconoclast does not gain entry into the cathedral. Second, it made no money, apparently. Third, I got a reputation for being anti-Semitic, which didn't help. Finally, one thing I've found as an historian is that, if you are going to ask for a great deal of money on a risk, you have to give reassurance to a producer. Directors need to look like Alan Parker, Orson Welles, Victor Fleming. A scrawny, bespectacled individual does not inspire confidence."
Posted by pride at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
Coffee Bees: Starbucks' promo deal with Akeelah
A sweet sleeve job: Starbucks cuts itself into the movie biz with its promo reach. With the Lionsgate release of Akeelah and the Bee, reports Newsweek's Johnnie L. Roberts, the caffeinator's 8,300 North America stores prompt viewers to purchase elsewhere:
"Starbucks is promoting Akeelah to its millions of [customers as it's] touted on the sleeves slipped onto the Starbucks cups (it sells 4 million beverages daily), emblazoned with obscure words like "shalloon," a lightweight wool fabric used for coat linings. Coasters are used to promote the movie, too, and a display table at the Starbucks in South Orange, N.J., recently was stacked high with travel Scrabble sets.... .Last Friday the chain began a countdown to Akeelah's opening date, April 28, on the ubiquitous chalkboards that spell out the day's coffee blends. Starbucks has no plans to pour bucks into making films, limiting its involvement to promoting the movie (and taking a cut of the profits in return) and selling DVDs."
Posted by pride at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2006
LA People: Laura Kim, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Mickey Cottrell
LA Weekly's "LA People 2006" is a swell read, and it includes short profiles of Larry Clark, who makes a confession about his Wassup Rockers? pals: "Although Clark is probably as familiar with South-Central as he is with his froufrou neighborhood on the Westside, he has no plans to move to the hood... “I was actually thinking about it for a while, because I was spending so much time down there,” says Clark. “But the boys made me promise I wouldn’t. They were scared I’d get in trouble.” 
Also: Scott Foundas' lengthy takeout on director Charles Burnett: "Burnett is in the final editing stages on what may be his most ambitious project to date—a biopic of Sam Nujoma, the first president of Namibia—and the folks at the invaluable Milestone Film & Video confirm that their long-standing project to issue both Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding on DVD should reach fruition by year’s end." And: Ella Taylor on crack publicist Mickey Cottrell and the "brainy esoterica" the former monk champeens, plus a sweet pipe dream: "Today [Cottrell's] company, Inclusive PR, has expanded its functions to grassroots niche marketing and helping filmmakers to self-distribute their films in multiple cities. “It would be even more fun if I didn’t have to make a living at it... I’ve always dreamed of the day I could afford to take out a full-page ad in Variety, requesting submissions for an absolutely free full Sundance PR campaign for one film I adore, one masterpiece to put all my efforts into and not represent the usual four films I’m paid to do.” Plus: Warner Independent marketing and publicity maven Laura Kim who says of March of the Penguins: "Penguins can't do interviews."
Posted by pride at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
Crashing in: Ebert at Northwestern
The Daily Northwestern's Lauren Levy transcribes as Roger Ebert talks the cricket walk before a screening of Crash: 
"Modern movie audiences are becoming increasingly apathetic in the way they view films... Ebert told a crowd of 179 people at Block Museum Wednesday night. “When I started in the ’60s, people would stand in the rain in November to see a film... Today’s movie-goers are much less curious, adventurous and informed... I have a background as an English student... I never took a film course in my life... Crash took us to the next level of racism in this country... The movie showed all kinds of people dealing with prejudices, not even knowing who they’re dealing with.”
Posted by pride at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
Fatelessness: something that had never been written about
Lajos Koltai's adaptation of fellow Hungarian, Nobelist Imre Kertész's first novel, Fateless, about a feckless boyhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is one of the year's most criminally underappreciated in the U.S.. (For instance, Roger Ebert did not review it.) Kertész talks to the Guardian's Julian Evans about inspiration and other matters. 
"He does not discuss the details of his adaptation to peacetime and adulthood. [Kertész] has the profound charm and good humour of those who have seen life at its vilest and most absurd, but the disturbed pattern of his early years is painfully clear. Having found his life again, he felt he was losing it. "To my horror, I realised that 10 years after I had returned from the Nazi camps... all that remained of the experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes." He was adrift into the 1950s. "What happened was that I got so deeply involved in these dictatorships, I was beginning to get lost in them. First, I had to recognise that I was stepping out of line, out of line with the masses." He began to write "pieces of text and then more pieces of text. This was not the novel as you know it, but I tried to create a summary or a description of dictatorship."... "[O]n a lovely spring day in 1955", he realised there was only one reality, himself, his own life, "this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expro-priated by alien forces ... and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone." ... An advantage of conditions in Hungary was that "all the circumstances were there for you to become a cryptowriter, a hidden writer, because it was a cheap way of life, the outgoings were low, the cost of maintenance was low, there were no status symbols to wish for, and it was a reduced way of life and you could concentrate on your work" ... "[I wanted] to write a scandalous book, a scandalous piece of text, some-thing that had never been written about before."
Posted by pride at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)
Mystic praise: lovin' me some Julia!
A couple of gentlemen of Manhattan goo and gah over movie star Julia Roberts and her B'way debut in Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain." Ben Brantley's review is charming in its unabashed confessional quality: "[S]he's stiff with self-consciousness... only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don't want to let her out of your sight... I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars—and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930's—to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades. Lord knows, she isn't a versatile film actress... Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable... to vulnerable but feisty.... Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty. 
Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams." Meanwhile, David Edelstein coughs up New York's front cover furball: "The close-up is Julia Roberts’s voodoo. Critics and elite cineastes discuss Julia Roberts with a certain amount of condescension. No one claims she’s not a true movie star, but is she much of an actress?" Edelstein pours on the sop: "On the other hand, Roberts has inspired in this reviewer a fair amount of gush. During my tenure as film critic of Slate, readers made sport of my frequent application of the word “thoroughbred.” I stand by it. It’s not that she’s an icon of glamour. This is a woman who was once married in bare feet, and part of her charm is that she doesn’t move especially gracefully. It’s not that her features are refined, either. They’re outsize, even freaky: that friendly, unpatrician nose with its bumpy slope and large nostrils; that smile that’s wider than most people’s heads... It’s that somehow those clown-princess features coalesce into one of the best faces ever captured on the big screen. She’s plainly gorgeous in still photos, but it’s in motion that the real magic happens. She can entrance you with the tiniest shifts in expression." But let's leave it with James Wolcott over at his joint: "The reviews for [Roberts'] impersonation of an upright ironing board in 'Three Days of Rain' acknowledge that even as a stationary object she might have tried putting a little more oomph into it. But the same reviewers use the occasion of her Broadway debut to pay slave tribute to her plebian-royal majesty, swooning as if no pair of goggles devised by science is strong enough to shield the eyes from the solar radiance of her beauty whenever she parts those lush lips and gives us one of her heehaw grins."
Posted by pride at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2006
Eye Candy: what's Hard about defining art
One of the more compelling strands of subtext in Brian Nelson's script for Hard Candy, directed by David Slade, is the consideration that what is offensive in the eyes of one person—a 32-year-old man, a 14-year-old girl—may in fact be artful to another. While the "worst" of the male protagonist's collection of images is never seen, several large photographs he's shot are displayed on the walls of his home, commissioned by the production from photograher Ye Rin Mok; young Haley finds them troubling. Here are two.
Posted by pride at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2006
Canadian film? Sorry.
In Macleans, Brian D. Johnson puts it impolitely: Why does Canada keep making movies that no one wants to see? Here's how he defines seven of spring's "English Canadian movies": "They contain flashes of eccentric brilliance, and some fine performances. But they seem smaller than life. They tend to be populated by desperate women and repressed, self-loathing men. And they plumb new depths of anti-heroism... 
It's hard to imagine these movies were designed with an audience in mind. So how do they get made? Welcome to the Byzantine world of English Canadian film financing—a surreal maze of auteur dreams, bureaucratic nightmares and ritualized failure. It's a world where distributors routinely snap up publicly funded movies, flip the TV rights to broadcasters for an easy profit, then dump the films into a few theatres for a token release. A few bigger pictures get a better shot, and occasionally one breaks through. But our film culture has become conditioned to obscurity." Johnson notes that in 2005, movies from Quebec counted for 26% of the French-language box; English Canada: one-point-one percent. More worries: "No country in the world has a film industry that can survive without government financing—with the robust exceptions of Hollywood, Bollywood, Hong Kong and (oddly) Nigeria." [A survey of the ills at the link.]
Posted by pride at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)
I am a gossip addict: Mark Cuban on Rodman, Hilton, Zahedi
Matt Dentler reports on a Mark Cuban masterclass at UTexas: "On the two celebrities who taught him a lot: Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton. Simply because they are perfect examples of how individuals can use the media's thirst for gossip to their advantage... "kinda like Caveh did in his blog."
Posted by pride at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2006
Blog suicide: blogging is fun, but my career is far more important
Is "inside baseball" too much of an inside-baseball term nowadays? An old phrase for information comprehensible only to the participants in an event, "inside baseball" could profitably be replaced by "inside blogging," capturing the relentless outpouring of "what my job-my day-my dreams are like" writing that constitutes a lot of web-based reportage. My saturation point came at Sundance 2006, where I struggled to find a way to write about films and filmmakers and the swirl of events that wouldn't sound like all the other shiny, whiny, solipsistic stuff getting pixilated by the virtual pound. 
(I wound up posting many more photographs than words.) Collating coverage for Movie City Indie, I find myself awash in procedurals of the daily routines of filmmakers, film crickets, and other Keepers of Word and Image. In a worthy instance, Caveh Zahedi's prickly indieWIRE-based postings about the pre- and post-release matters of I Am A Sex Addict have been unusually forthright, or foolhardy, depending on your perspective. On Sunday, Zahedi pointed out that the film's gross had reached $43,600; on Monday, he reviews Anthony Lane's New Yorker review: Lane, Zahedi says, "He has a slithery ease with the pen which is almost reptilian in its meanderingness. If one loves the intricacies of prose (and I, for one, do), then one can read his reviews with real enjoyment... The problem with Mr. Lane's reviews is that they don't tell one much about the film... He is like the court jester trying to spin everything into a joke, no matter its gravity or urgency or true import. This has, unfortunately, become the norm in film criticism... The ideal, it seems to me, would be a review in which content and form were one, but here content has been abandoned as too difficult, too demanding, and too much of a party pooper. So instead, critics don their party hats, and blow on their noisemakers, and act drunk. It's alll fun... The breezy, ironic tone of most film critics (of whom Mr. Lane is only one of many, unfortunately), while arguably entertaining, in the end serves no one, but only contributes to the on-going debasement of public discourse. It makes one nostalgic for the film criticism of a James Agee, or a Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose reviews not only manage to avoid the showoffy fluffiness of a Mr. Lane, but are positively punctilious in their rigor and willingness to actually grapple with the moral and esthetic issues present in [films]. Mr. Lane's review of my film is not negative, only irrelevant. He neither gets it nor addresses it. It is merely a pretext for him to wax eloquent about nothing whatsoever... You're very funny, Mr. Lane. Keep up the great work." Does this help or hurt Zahedi's cause as a filmmaker or polemicist? Writer Lee Goldberg recently identified a phrase for what seems the underlying urge beneath a strain of blogging among professionals: blog suicide." Over at "A Writer's Life, he considers the wages of suicide by blog. "Being too candid on your blog about the happenings in your professional life can have serious personal and financial consequences, which is why I don't talk much about my current projects (beyond blatant self-promotion).
The anecdotes, rants, and observations that I post here are not about people I'm working with today or might work with in the future, much to the relief of my wife, my writing partner and my two agents, all of whom keep a close eye on my blogging. I have seen too many people I know commit blog suicide by trashing their current employers or co-workers (studios, networks, producers, editors, publishers, etc) or by revealing a little too much about their own insecurities, ambivalence or creative difficulties regarding whatever projects they are working on... You can commit the same sort of career suicide by saying the wrong thing in an interview with a print or broadcast reporter..." Goldberg quotes literary agent Steve Axelrod, who posted on his client, novelist Jayne Ann Krentz's blog, a post titled "Why Smart Agents Don't Blog." Excerpts: "[Dave] Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency, didn’t blog, but about a year ago, he let himself be interviewed for a long, candid profile in the New Yorker. It made for great reading—it was the real deal—but his candor is widely believed to have cost the agency at least two major stars, Halle Berry and Sarah Michelle Geller, as well as a major director, etc. A few months after... W Magazine interviewed the now-retired Sue Mengers (“Hollywood’s first superagent”) and she [says] something I thought was pretty perceptive: “It’s very tempting for an agent to give interviews. We want a little credit, so it’s hard to say no. But you should.” And I’m starting to believe that what’s true for agents granting interviews is doubly true for agents blogging. Agents should just say No." Goldberg had first broached the subject in November, with this entry. An author named Sandra Scoppettone had expressed her anxieties about her editor, Joe Blades, leaving her publisher. "This prompted an anonymous commenter to warn her that her very candid blog posts could be damaging to her career. Sandra angrily fired back. Soon, the ugly little argument spilled over to other blogs… it illustrates that even someone who's been in the business as long as Scoppettone has... can sometimes let things go all too haywire. And it further illustrates the power of blogging in the publishing world—because you never know who'll be out there reading, passing judgment, and jumping to conclusions. The blog skirmish brings up an interesting issue—how honest should you be on your blog? I have to admit I cringed a bit at some of Sandra's posts, and at my friend Paul Guyot's surprising candor about the ups-and-downs of his [television] pilot experience, and at my cousin regularly trashing her employer. [Guyot’s “Inkslinger” blog is currently down.] Sure, it makes good reading and can be cathartic for the author—but is it self-destructive? I don't know. I just know I don't want to find out for myself.... I'm clearly not shy about expressing my opinion—but I'm careful about it. I don't hesitate to criticize fanfiction, self-publishing scams... or people searching the Internet for Lindsay Lohan's nipples—those are safe. But... you won't see me trashing a producer, a studio, a network, or a major publishing company. I think some bloggers forget that they aren't writing a private diary—it's like a column in a newspaper. You have no idea who is reading it or how your words are being passed around. Blogging is fun, but my career is far more important." [For non-journo tradecraft dish, War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman's "I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing," about movies, Snakes on a Plane, and his recent brush with death, is a small epic; for a splash of the absurdly arcane, I'm fond of Matt Watts' modest feats of typing.]
Posted by pride at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
The Notorious Tony Blair: when a PM-to-be dated a future director
The Independent reports on the college dalliances of spiky former film cricket Mary Harron and director of The Notorious Bettie Page, including with the Brit PM. Marie Woolf and Francis Elliott wrote in late February: 
"When Tony Blair was a long-haired undergraduate at Oxford, he dated the vivacious Canadian student and future film director Mary Harron, who observed she went out with the future prime minister because he was "good looking in a kind of sweet way, and wasn't at all predatory"... By remarkable coincidence, she also went out with Chris Huhne, an Oxford contemporary of Blair, who last week was tipped in the polls as the most likely contender to take over from Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader.... Tony Blair, who resembled a Led Zeppelin roadie with his flares and long hair, was studying law and singing Rolling Stones covers with his band, the Ugly Rumours. In the audience of one of his college bar gigs may have been Chris Huhne, who drove an old yellow taxi and dressed head to toe in denim, when not politicking with the university Labour club.
He was also writing for the university newspaper Isis, which he went on to edit, bringing him into the milieu of future Fleet Street editors such as Tina Brown, the future editor of Tatler, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Stephen Glover, the columnist and founding editor of The Independent on Sunday, and Patrick Wintour, just appointed political editor of The Guardian, were also in his inner circle of friends... [B]oth ended up managing the heavy metal band Jaded at different times, without knowing each other... At Oxford, Huhne and Blair's paths did not cross directly. But between 1972 and 1975 both students were taken with a vivacious Canadian "literary type" that hung out with the trendy music set who partied to bands such as the Grateful Dead. Mary Harron later commented that while at Oxford she was "seeking bohemia, looking for the underground"... Harron, in an interview in 1994, hinted at which boyfriend she may have preferred. "Even before he became an MP and famous, I always thought of Tony as the only 'nice' person that I ever went out with at Oxford," she said."
Posted by pride at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
How do I, too, become a cricket? A pro replies
Lisa Nesselson, an established, Paris-based freelancer for Variety, helps answer the question, "How do I, too, become a film cricket?" on Roger Ebert's website after having coffee with "a very nice 29-year-old" who freelances for the Village Voice. "People his age and younger who envy my position... want to know whether they'll ever be able to make a living as film critics... [L]ately, like clockwork, I've been approached by bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Americans who claim they want to be me when they grow up. Some of them can write and some of them can merely hustle. In my experience, those who hustle make headway.... My definition of a good critic is somebody who communicates their enthusiasm for work they find of merit, without ruining the option of you, the reader, also discovering the film's merits. ... What I've never been able to reconcile is that when a movie is about some topics it's "only a movie" but if it has a character or line of dialogue that some group objects to, then it allegedly becomes an incredibly powerful medium freighted with deeper and possibly harmful meaning... I'd say the privilege of being a critic really kicks in when I get to write "the Variety review" of an important film and I feel like I really, truly, am the "right" person for the job. I'm enormously proud of my reviews of Bowling for Columbine and Irreversible (both written on tight deadlines in the pressure cooker of Cannes) and I've been told that my review of Memento has helped other people understand the film. But I have colleagues who just crank out copy, figure one word is as good as another and everything they write will be glanced at at best and then discarded, so why knock yourself out?"
Posted by pride at 08:56 AM
April 16, 2006
ViacomCBSMTVPar's Sumner Redstone: I would prefer to be a starved cat
The 82-year-old multibillionaire uberhoncho of the two Viacom entities offers up a smidge of self-regard to Newsweek's Johnnie L. Roberts: "How do I look to you? I get up in the morning every day at 5 o'clock ... I'm on a bike for 35 minutes, exercising. I then swim a number of laps. I'm very conscious of nutrition and exercise. I don't remember a time in my life when I felt better. I've lost over 15 pounds recently. You know why? Starved cats live longer than fat cats, and I would prefer to be a starved cat. There's no chance of me retiring."
Posted by pride at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
Not in my name: another Chris Doyle's gay karaoke (plus Chris Doyle)
Two Chris Doyles, and at least one's a genius. First up, In Ottawa, Bradley Turcotte of Capital Xtra reports on some Canadian Idols: "Dog & Pony's song "bible" lists tunes as varied as the Jackass soundtrack and Disney standards. The bible also outlines karaoke tips and techniques to aid the singer, so your voice is the only way you'll be made into a fool. Owner and operator Christopher Doyle is the "Dog" in their company name while his wife, Danni, is the "Pony." "I'm the dirty dog who gets to ride the pony," Doyle chuckles." But what of the genius? Yes, cinematographer Christopher Doyle is doing the journo crawl and dog-and-pony drinks show once more, this time with Mathew Scott from The Australian: "It's 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon, but acclaimed Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a self-confessed "madman", enters the Hong Kong Fringe Club looking as if he has only just greeted the day. He is wearing crushed cotton shorts, a loose, grubby T-shirt and running shoes. His hair is a wild mop and his fingernails look as though he has not been hitting the tiles but scraping them clean. He orders a beer,
which he will hold on to for the next two hours as we go from the Fringe Club to a 40-minute photo shoot in a neighbouring suburb and back into town, where we part company at another bar... He can be an outrageous haam sup, the local slang for pervert, as the photographer's young female assistants try to get him into position for the shoot and he threatens to pull down his shorts. "It's all part of my game, isn't it?" says the 54-year-old. "I won't change who I am or how I am. It's like when I work with directors either here or in the States. They know I am a madman, but for that period of time I'm their fucking madman." And of why he and Wong Kar-wai have done so well over their history? "All great partnerships work this way, whether it be in the bedroom or on the film set. You don't give a shit about that person's faults if you know what you have is special." But Doyle, as always, is unafraid of assailing what he finds less than special. ""Look, I could go on for about eight hours about Lost in Translation. [Coppola] took a nation and shat on it. The way it presents this American world view is perhaps the most insulting thing I have ever seen. Where is the humour in presenting Japan as a nation of freaks? And then you have Memoirs of a Geisha, a film basically put together by a speech coach... Why not try to give people something real?"
Posted by pride at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)
Being a cricket is hard work: some rules
In about 2,800 words, Blogcritics.org's Mark Schannon lyricizes the cricket's song, in a ditty titled "So You Want To Be A Critic." “Being a critic is hard work” is one note. The criteria that most reviewers use, Schannon writes, “are not completely objective nor are they totally subjective. They lie somewhere in between. But if you deny the criteria and claim that all opinions are subjective, why bother to review anything at all? Your opinion carries no more weight than a 3-year-old watching the same movie.” A summa of “standards used by professional critics” follow, including “The Hook,” “After the Hook,” “The Rest” and “The Close.” More to learn and sing: “Remember adjectives and adverbs are weak words; nouns and verbs are strong words.” Also: “avoid being cute and keep yourself out of the hook unless there's a really, really, really good reason.” Conclusion? “If the point hasn't been driven home by now, let's make it simple: Being a critic is hard work, it requires study and analysis, but if you're just starting out, this article should be consider[ed] inspirational rather than a foundation you have to build before you can proceed… Being a critic can be one of the most satisfying things you'll ever do — but you'll only succeed if you know what the hell you're doing.”
Posted by pride at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2006
Something a little brutal: Olivier Assayas goes Clean
In the NY Times, Charles Taylor admires Olivier Assayas admiring his own beautifully jumpy new movie, Clean and his ex, Maggie Cheung. Making with the odd metaphor, Taylor writes, "To watch Ms. Cheung's performance is to see someone who, as Garbo did, uses the camera as though it were radio transmitter, trusting it to pick up the inchoate moods that move across her face. That talent dovetails with Mr. Assayas's carefully chosen music... several songs composed by Dean Wareham, late of the band Luna and David Roback, late of Mazzy Star, and sung by Ms. Cheung in a style both wafting and grounded.... Mr. Assayas said that Clean was the closest he had come to the style he wishes for his films. 
"In terms of camerawork, editing, in terms of the way they interact with the characters, in terms of closeness to the human material... but also, at the same time, in terms of brushstrokes, in terms of an abstract visual energy that would connect with the emotions, I really got hold of something I had been looking for in a couple of films." A movie, Assayas tells Taylor, "has to leave things open up to a certain level so that somehow the viewer has some space within the film... I think that it's important to understand, intuitively understand, what you are doing... But when you are doing it you must follow instinct. There has to be a certain level of risk, creating images, characters, emotions, it involves something a little brutal. You must be prepared to go in areas where you lose control... There's such a broad way of representing the world, and specifically representing a world that has become so complex with totally different ...articulations.... I like the adventure of making films... And the adventure of making films has to do with the capacity you have of listening to your guts."
Posted by pride at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)
Men in movies in the black: Barry Sonnenfeld
Casual neurotic Barry Sonnenfeld adapts to the modern economies of Hollywood, writes LA Times' John Horn. The 53-year-old director, writes Horn, "is a complex combination of insecurity and confidence, a tightly wound showman who wants to do well by Hollywood but is among its most refreshingly unguarded critics... There are people in Hollywood who are openly gay. There are people in Hollywood who are openly vegan. Sonnenfeld is openly neurotic." After Men in Black II, "I had this fear I was never going to direct a movie again... So I thought I better find a TV show and hope it's a home run and it's my dowry." 
... 2002's "Men in Black II," grossed a strong $190.4 million in domestic theaters, it seems to have left pretty much everyone (Sonnenfeld, the studio, the producers, the audience) unhappy." Sonnenfeld tells Horn that his one misfire as a director was not the incomprehensible Wild Wild West, but the second Men in Black. "It was a huge payday for me, but not really... Because that [movie] made me not work for the next 3 1/2 years, in many ways. So if you take the money I was paid on MIB II and divided it by four, it wasn't all that brilliant of a move." His newest, RV, cost a reported $50 million rather than the $150 million level he'd grown accustomed to. "I love my family," Sonnenfeld tells Horn. "But I really like to work. I realized that over the last couple of years of not working how much I missed being in charge. Because when I'm home, I'm not in charge."
Posted by pride at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
Making good movies is as good as it gets: Denis Tanovic
Oscar-winning Danis Tanovic talks to the Telegraph's SF Said about adapting Kieslowski's adaptation of Dante's "Inferno": "Tanovic emerged from the war as a fully formed filmmaker... "My documentaries won prizes, but nobody watched them, because they were documentaries," the 37-year-old director tells Said. "I felt an urge to make movies that people would see, because I was angry about Bosnia. So I sat down and wrote. Ten days later, the script for No Man's Land was written... 
"I think the basic difference between East and West... is that the West concentrates on form. Having too much money, you concentrate on how to do things. Not having money, you concentrate on content. For people in the East, it's the story that counts more than anything." Given this lineage, it's fitting that Tanovic's latest film, Hell, is based on Kieslowski's final, unfinished project... [W]hen he died in 1996, he was developing another trilogy for young filmmakers to direct, based on Dante's Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. "I think we live in terrible times. We lost the spiritual dimension of our lives; the world is messed up. We live in such an egoistic society. Nobody gives anything any more. The Spanish Civil War would be finished in two weeks today, because nobody would go to defend Spain—that's what our world has become. It's almost impossible to love and be loved in this world." ... Although Tanovic respects Kieslowski, if he has a role model, it would more likely be Milos Forman.... "When you watch Forman's first works... compared with the movies he made when he came to America, or the films he is making today - they are all completely different. You never know what is coming next, but they are all great movies. That is what I wish for myself: to make good movies. That is as good as it gets."
Posted by pride at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)
Not lovin' it: McD convenes anti-Linklater "council of war"
The Independent's Martin Hickman reports on the McDonald's corporations plans to resist Richard Linklater's upcoming movie, Fast Food Nation, which Hickman asserts "is looming as a potent threat to the burger chain's fragile reputation.... Although the plot is closely guarded, it tells the story of a group of young fast-food workers, in a small Colorado town with a meat-packing plant, who uncover some unsavoury truths about the burger business... Mr Schlosser's book discusses how McDonald's targets young children, the treatment of its "McJob" employees, the mass breeding and slaughter of its livestock, the relationship between burgers and obesity, and the preponderance of additives[, claiming] there are 40 chemicals in a strawberry shake... Reports from the US suggest that McDonald's has been rattled by the risk to its reputation. The corporation was stunned by the success of Super Size Me, so [t]his time, McDonald's plans to fight back. A "council of war" has been convened inside the corporation's global HQ, according to... Advertising Age. "They're worried about a backlash," one insider was quoted as saying. "When the consumer sees the movie, they will react. It would only need to take consumers to cut back one or two visits to affect the bottom line." ... "The McDonald's family will vigorously communicate the facts about McDonald's, our people and our values," a US spokesman said."
Posted by pride at 02:16 PM | Comments (1)
April 14, 2006
Prairie wind: Neil Young's mise-en-scene
Via Scott Macauley at Filmmaker, singer Alicia Morgan's blog describes a dramatic scrap of mise-en-scene while recording Neil Young's post-Neil Young: Heart of Gold 9-day insta-album. "Have you, like me, been recalling the great protest songs of the sixties, and wondered where the new protest songs are? Yesterday, I found out... On Wednesday, I was at work when I got a call for a Neil Young session the next day.... I was excited about it—Neil Young is one of my musical heroes." Arriving at the studio, "we found 98 other singers, a collection of L.A.'s finest. All I knew was that we were singing on a new Neil Young record, but when the lyrics we were supposed to sing flashed on the giant screen, a roar went up from the choir. 
I'm not going to give the whole thing away, but the first line of one of the songs was "Let's impeach the President for lyin'!" ... The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally. Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. It was a spiritual experience. I can't believe my good fortune at being a part of this... I've never been at a recording session that was more like being at church. Heck, I've never been to a church that was more like a church than that session... We finished the session by singing an a capella version of "America the Beautiful" and there was not a dry eye in the house." Morgan says Young told her the record should be out mid-to-late June; predictably, a spell of rants ensued in Morgan's open comments, such, as "if this is true and neil young is actually going to help get some more of our soldiers killed by emboldening the suicidal maniacs of persia, then i am going to dump him. i have been enjoying young's work since 1970 but i will ****can everything i own from him if he's truely going to further risk the lives our guys for the sake of his moody brand of capitolism." The album is called Life in War and Howie Klein has heard it and gets... excited.
Posted by pride at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2006
Cinema in its further stages of ripening and rot: crickets converge
Jonathan Rosenbaum introduces his 1997 compilation, "Movies as Poltiics," with an essay entitled "How to Live in Air Conditioning." While a constant of Rosenbaum's writing is the assertion that American business conspires against the distribution of interesting films—"vividly reflected in the movies we see and the ways that we see them"—he was one of the first critics to consider what the growth of film on video might mean. "Whatever name or interpretation we give to this climate," he wrote over 20 years ago, "we all feel that something is in the process of ending—unlesss we feel that it has ended already... I don't think we can call it cinema in the old sense." 
In 1999, Godfrey Cheshire did a surmise in his epic "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema": "[T]he overthrow of film by television–which is what this amounts to–will be related to a dissolution of cinema esthetics and the enforced close of cinema’s era in the history of technological arts." Cheshire updates at The House Next Door, in conversation with Jeremiah Kipp: "DVDs have been in some ways very positive in the sense that people have an idea of film culture with the kind of presence and precedence that literature has. They can look at Carl Theodor Dreyer as a great artist; they can purchase the Dreyer box set and have it on their library walls, so maybe even their kids will watch it with that idea in mind. There’s a way film history is being packaged now that definitely has a positive educational value." James Wolcott's posted an intriguing contemporary anecdote that extends Cheshire's point: "Saturday I was standing in the checkout line at the Barnes & Noble across from Lincoln Center, which was lined with DVDs for last-minute, late-decision purchase. But the DVDs weren't the usual Blockbuster hits. One whole rack [contained] a cluster of Fassbinder movies. I have to admit I did a mild double take..." More Wolcott below, as well as links to similar reflections from Susan Sontag and Manohla Dargis.
"Even if I had been able to foresee DVDs and digital downloads back in the Seventies when Fassbinder was pumping out films as fast as Joyce Carol Oates novels, I never would have reckoned that someday they would be handy checkout items—collectibles. Even then Fassbinder movies were relative rarities on the art circuit until the breakthrough hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, and these B&N items weren't even the best-known...--we're talking Satan's Brew and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven... What it italicized for me is how much of what's considered underground/fringe/outre/rarified migrates... into the mainstream until it's part of the cultural ecology... The other thing that struck me about the Fassbinder checkout films is how well I remember them even though I haven't seen most of them since they were originally released, including lesser-known titles that... are seldom reshown, such as Chinese Roulette, Beware of a Holy Whore, and Fox and His Friends."Picking one of the most memorable scenes in Fassbinder's many movies, Wolcott quotes Manny Farber: "The final scene—Fox lying dead in a garishly lit subway, his pockets being rifled by a pair of twelve-year olds—is appallingly unremarked. Two of his ex-lovers passing by trying not to notice, the cobalt-blue tiled station, combine to stamp Fox's unimportance." ... Also in the checkout rack was The Bitter of Tears of Petra Von Kant, another movie I've seen in its entirety only once and yet three decades later can still hear and picture Petra's calling her lover's name like a crying refrain ("Karin... Karin!"), the mute servant out of Genet, the drag-queen bad-taste dream of a boudoir with silent mannequins functioning as an ironic chorus as the lovelorn lesbian drama pouts and frets its hour across the stage until the figurative curtain is brought down to the croon of "The Great Pretender," a tableau as newsprinted in my memory as the scratchy-opera-record languorous-cigarette interlude in [Jean Eustache's] miserabilist masterpiece The Mother and the Whore. I picked a copy of Petra out of the rack... and slow-footed it to the cash register, making my own impulse buy... I'm also piqued by the mystery of why some movies that didn't mean that much to me at the time... have shown more staying power in the mental attic than many movies that did. Or is the sloven force of the mid-Seventies itself that won't let go? I don't feel nostalgic about Fassbinder, but I feel nostalgic about the juicy-rotten period that made a Fassbinder possible—and a CBGB's too." And don't forget Susan Sontag's 1996 "The Decay of Cinema"; the link here is to the text of the New York Times version, which edited out many of her cross-references. A slightly more timely 2004 essay by Manohla Dargis, commenting in part on Sontag's ruminations, is here.
Posted by pride at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
Insouciant crickets: Caveh's cavil
I Am A Sex Addict's Caveh Zahedi contests cricket Nathan Lee's song stylings in the 243-word notice he wrote for the NY Times. "[W]hile it was for the most part extremely positive [Lee] nevertheless felt compelled to include the obligatory back-handed compliment ("a minor triumph of sincerity") and the obligatory concluding dig... [T]he obligatory dig took the form of an allusion to one of my favorite songs of all time... "Still, the missing song on the soundtrack is "No Compassion" by Talking Heads: 'What are you, in love with your problems?/ I think you take it a little too far.'" Well, that's a great song, and it's a clever dig. But what are the ideological assumptions behind it?" Zahedi continues: "The main assumption, it seems to me, is that there is something a little bit excessive and unseemly in making an autobiographical film about "one's problems." ...The reason, it seems to me, is because of yet another underlying assumption, namely that "one's problems" are one's own, and are not shared. [Yet] the entire history of storytelling is based on the idea that we all share common traits, and that one person's story can stand in for other people's stories... So why the dig?...
The answer, I think, has to do with a fundamental confusion about the difference between documentary and fiction, or, in the case of literature, between memoir and fiction. If I had made a fiction film, I don't believe Mr. Lee would have complained that the author is too in love with his character's problems. In fact, being in love with the problems of one's fictional characters is considered a sine qua non in fiction writing. But in autobiography or memoir, it's considered a vice... But I believe that there is no essential difference between fiction and documentary. Jean-Luc Godard was fond of saying that every documentary is also a fiction film, and that every fiction film is also a documentary.... Documentary and fiction are two sides of the same coin, and my film, among other things, is a demonstration of that fact.... There is something so inherently reactionary in this societal taboo against self-expression, so on the side of social conservatism and a maintaining of the status quo (with its concomitant pre-ordained forms of etiquette), that I can't understand why Mr. Lee would write favorably of my film at all, since every frame of the film was conceived in opposition to the ideological assumptions that his review seems to embody... It is a commonplace of psychology that what you accuse others of is usually more true of yourself than of the others in question... None of this would matter very much... if it weren't for the fact a New York Times reviewer has the power to make or break a film, and that an off-handed remark like that can mean the difference between success or failure at the box office. And it's not just the fate of the film that is at stake: it's also the [filmmaker's] ability to make more films in the future. With such power comes a dizzying responsibility, and it saddens me to see film critics wield their formidable power with such breezy insouciance."
Posted by pride at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)
How indie is it? Would you like to start writing for free?
Over at indieWIRE, blogger Anthony Kaufman and editor Eugene Hernandez have a blunt exchange over how to keep the servers turned on. "One of the problems with the corporate media today is the blurred lines between content and advertis[e]ment, news and marketing," writes Kaufman. "[A]fter seeing my story today in indieWIRE about Spring Festivals, which includes reporting on the San Francisco International Film Festival... I was... perturbed to see that the "coverage" was "sponsored" by the San Francisco Film Society, presenters of the San Francisco fest." Kaufman's "byline appears directly underneath—not the headline—but the phrase: "World Cinema coverage presented by San Francisco Film Society." Normally, this would be called a conflict of interest. I'm not sure how to avoid it, because indieWIRE needs the money. But it just goes to show how dependent independent media is... Maybe no one cares. But I guess that's just as bad. 
. Hernandez posts a comment: "anthony, many of indieWIRE's special sections are sponsored by companies, organizations or groups. for example, our doc section is sponsored by a festival, our awards section was recently sponsored by a popcorn maker, our short film section is sponsored by a car company, and our recent SXSW coverage was sponsored by another car company. this is how we raise the money to pay you to write for us. would you like to start writing your world cinema column for free?...
[A]s editors we take care to insulate our writers from such influence and pressures. same thing goes for advertisers." In a similar vein, in the New York Times, editor Bill Keller answered a reader's question a couple days ago about how this works in trad-media, after the Times accepted an ad from the government of Sudan: "My newsroom colleagues and I don't control what goes into advertisements. (In turn, and more important, the advertising department does not influence what goes into the news coverage.) I know that the executives on the business side of The Times argued long and hard about accepting the Sudan ad. In the end, as I understand it, the prevailing argument was that the advertising space in the paper should be as open as possible to points of view, even those our editorial page and columnists vehemently disagree with."
Posted by pride at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
Hard Candy director David Slade: like any other existentialist nihilist
Hard Candy opens Friday on the coasts, and Scott Macauley touts his interview with director David Slade, from the upcoming issue of Filmmaker. I had a spirited talk with screenwriter Brian Nelson and co-star Patrick Wilson, and I hope to post that soon. But Slade's talking the good talk here: "I would say this film asks you to acutely evaluate what your prejudices are.... Your prejudices toward sexuality, where you personally draw the lines of pornography, what you deem acceptable and what you don’t. 
The film’s two characters are monsters. The only thing redeeming about Hayley is that she’s at that uncertain age where passion drives her life. Morally, she has no redeeming features. The only thing that allows you to identify her as a human being is that she is doing what morally should be the right thing, but she’s going so far over the line. In a world where we’ve see so many monsters... [t]he one monster left could be a pedophile, because crimes against children are the worst crimes of all. So, Jeff is the scariest monster human society has left. And this character was beautifully written by Brian, because here you are identifying with someone who morality and society says you can’t. So there alone, you question your prejudices. Another thing that really attracted me to the screenplay was that Brian Nelson had managed to [construct] arguments and put them into the words of human beings who talk in a way that people talk. That’s such an astonishingly hard thing to do... Politically speaking I’m a solipsist—I believe I’m the only one who exists in the world and no one else is around! Or, like any other existentialist nihilist, I have poor politics. But I abhor conservatism in the non-political sense, and so the film is something that gets a hold of values, goes “wham,” and says, “Now put them back together.”
Posted by pride at 01:41 PM | Comments (1)
Acronym City: pr-ing TriBeCa's M:i:III NYC o.d.
They're calling the movie M:i:III and JJ Abrams' pic (JJA's MiIII?) is preeming (partly) at TriBeCa, a press release notes. The US preem of "Mission: NYC” includes Tom Cruise on MTV's "TRL" (also owned by Viacom). "Traveling by motorcycle, speedboat, taxicab, helicopter, sports car, and subway, Cruise will crisscross the island, making his way to premieres in Tribeca and Harlem before heading to the U.S. premiere at the Ziegfeld... hosted in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival.” [The image is of Craig Bierko's tribute to Mr. Cruise in Friday's Scary Movie 4.]
Posted by pride at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2006
The uses of disenchantment: Hard Candy's red hoody
Even among colleagues who admire Hard Candy, the Patrick Wilson-Ellen Page two-hander about nasty things that happen when an older man meets an apparently underage woman online, there's been one head-shaking question: how do you sell material this touchy? While the key art in one of the movie's posters from the House of SAW (aka Lionsgate) diminishes the visual impact of the film's ending—a girl in a red hoody standing in an enormous metal trap—the use of red gets taken one step farther with the sponsorship of a website called "Surf Safe, Wear Red," 
which is described at the link as "a movement for online empowerment and awareness, inspired by the film Hard Candy and its protagonist’s red hoody. Wear a red hoody to stand up for online safety and against internet violence." The site also promises to revisit a long-fallow fad, with plans for "flash mobs in New York and Los Angeles." In light of the movie, a listing of basic precautions turns itchy: "Avoid posting anything that would make it easy for a stranger to find you, such as where you hang out every day after school. People aren't always who they say they are. Be careful about adding strangers to your friends list. It's fun to connect with new friends from all over the world, but avoid meeting people in person whom you do not fully know. If you must meet someone, do it in a public place and bring a friend or trusted adult... Don't post anything that would embarrass you later. Think twice before posting a photo or info you wouldn't want your parents or boss to see! Don't mislead people into thinking that you're older or younger. Be truthful online."
Posted by pride at 08:30 AM | Comments (1)
Overlooking Ebert photographed for Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival
At Friday's Chicago press event announcing the lineup for Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, playing Champaign-Urbana end of the month, Charles Coleman, programmer for Facets Multimedia, non-digitally photographs Ebert, Dusan Makavejev and wife.
Posted by pride at 08:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2006
Zhang Yimou: avoiding the third-rate
China Post reposts a Sunday quote from a South China Morning Post piece (subscription only) about Zhang Yimou's feelings about Chinese content in his pics: "I'm not interested in films that have no Chinese elements in them... If I try to make a film completely without Chinese elements, I'm sure it won't be any good. The result would be a third-rate film... It's mostly because of unfamiliarity. When I don't even know the language, there's no way I can make it work."
Posted by pride at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2006
Shameless cricket: I also appreciate Schneider's supporting work in the Adam Sandler canon
Carla Meyer of the Sacramento Bee raises her hand for crickets with everyday bad taste: "Not having to review a throwaway vampire flick allows me to focus on more worthy films. Of the times I have rushed to see and review a film upon its Friday opening, I have yet to uncover a gem—though The Wash, starring Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, had its moments. My blase attitude shifted upon learning that two films I planned to review recently—Phat Girlz and The Benchwarmers—were not being shown in time for reviews." Meyer quotes a Colpix rep: "Most of our movies are screened for critics as a courtesy, but like other studios, on occasion, when our target audience is not very influenced by critical opinion, we may opt not to show the film early." I understand the reasoning, having seen critical snobbery firsthand a few times, most notably at a screening for a David Spade comedy several years ago. Frequent laughter among critics in the audience led, inexplicably, to pans of the film. Critics, after all, have reputations to protect. Not all critics. I enjoy a nice broad comedy, so much so that I graded... the widely—and wrongly—despised Sorority Boys higher than almost any other critic." She thinks she would've liked Phat Girlz and Benchwarmers, "the kind of breezy films I always look forward to seeing—as opposed to some gritty independent films that might be of quality but feel like medicine. As much as I like Mo'Nique for making the mostly awful Domino bearable, I like Benchwarmers star Rob Schneider even more. I have seen Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and The Hot Chick too many times to count, and I also appreciate Schneider's supporting work in the Adam Sandler canon. His co-star Spade is a harder sell, though I tend to enjoy him in a wig..." [Further brave persistence at the link.]
Posted by pride at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)
The Tire: Pirelli turns from pinups to Malko-pics
Taking a marketing page from BMW's Clive Owen chase pic series, The Hire, Italian tiremaker and pinup calendar publishers Pirelli are getting into the internet shorts biz, debuting a "Pirellifilm," which the site's uncertain command of English describes as "an innovative communication project that will take place over several years and consists in the production of superb short films to be broadcast over the Internet... <
[T]his project combines Cinema and the Internet and uses them as a new communication tool that joins the instruments traditionally used by the [Pirelli] group." The pricey entry, The Call, stars John Malkovich and Naomi Campbell and was directed by Antoine Fuqua, and, as the site breathlessly touts, it's "a breath-taking thriller of just 8 minutes and 45 seconds that depicts the eternal battle between Good and Evil." Aside from the eye candy of night-lit Rome, there is the spectacle of Mr. Malkovich in priestly finery insisting that "the power of Christ compels. you" to a beast in a fast car.
Posted by pride at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2006
Hou's coming to dinner: the key point is how to observe
Xinhua has words with Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose intensely well-reviewed Three Times will be released soon as part of IFC's "First Take" series. What kinds of movies do audiences want? he's asked. "Simple, touching and powerful movies are always most welcome." Hou appeared at a Wednesday seminar of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. 
"Movies are divided into two groups: good and bad. A good movie should be simple and touching, and in the meantime, it must be powerful. It's most difficult to make a powerful movie because truth is usually beyond words and images... Personal style is not opposite to the market. What you shoot is life and the society. Your own experience also reflect and express others' experience. Why you say 'I can't understand' is just because of the habit of movie-watching is being changed." "Hou has kept shooting films that require audience to think all these years. He believes that such films can inject fresh blood to the movie industry and finally make an impact on the mainstream. "Since these films are of low cost, they are courageous enough to experiment and produce something creative. Hollywood movies are always ready to pick up those fresh elements," Hou said. Any worries about DV, which allows almost anyone to shoot and produce a movie? "The films they shoot are always based on others' imagination. They are so alike to what they have watched in the theaters. They do not feel the life with their own hea