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May 31, 2006
Paul T. Anderson: Note to self
At "Little Boston News," Paul Thomas Anderson is "crypto-blogging" the pre-production of his new pic, There Will Be Blood, mostly with uncaptioned photos 
of his collaborators, in the office and on the set. There's also a "note to self" about the voyage that is a film shoot, a passage underlined from a novel not by Sinclair Lewis, source of the movie's script, but instead drawn from a little ditty popularly known as "Moby Dick."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
My blue haven: The New Yorker ♥ Nora Ephron
The June 5 New Yorker has some lines to read between as Bewitched auteur Nora Ephron becomes the fulcrum of the issue. First, the 65-year-old scribe-turned-helmer reminisces about her price-stabilized apartment while bragging on her income, and subtly dropping in the name of her mate, Nick Pileggi, 
who co-wrote Goodfellas for Scorsese. "When you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York becomes the worst version of itself," Ephron writes in gentle, only slightly condescending cliché. "Most people who don't live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America." Coy references to ex-husband Carl Bernstein are followed by mentions of "The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment... My husband, Nick, and I were married there... It was a symbol of family." The Sony (and Ephron) family are part of a fluff-and-fold profile of Sony chairman and CEO Sir Howard Stringer by Mark Singer. The 63-year-old Stringer, writes Singer, "seems a virtuoso of stealth ambition"—no reference to the failed movie Stealth, surely—and gets modest amounts of revelation from him: "They'd put five movies on [a] list [of 60 great Sony products] and I said, 'I know two of those movies are going to be awful. So for God's sake, don't put ads in the paper saying, 'Here are sixty great Sony products.' It's asking too much." Singer offers up Bewitched as one of Sony Pictures' "major disappointments" of 2005, kindly failing to cite Ephron as its director, but also offers testimony to Stringer's acumen from... Nora Ephron's husband: "To this day, I still think of Howard as a journalist, the writer Nicholas Pileggi, who befriended Stringer more than 30 years ago... said. 'Howard gets the overview. He can drop statistics and he knows the minutiae, but he gets the overview."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Kicking ash: India huffs at onscreen puffs
India's IBNLive reports that "all movies and TV programmes will be screened to ensure that they don’t contain smoking scenes don’t contain smoking scenes, said Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss on World No-Tobacco Day, Wednesday. The Health Ministry and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry have agreed to ban smoking scenes in movies... The ministries will notify the Supreme Court, where the matter is pending, that they have reached a consensus on banning smoking and use of other tobacco products." A million Indians are estimated to die each year from tobacco use. "A committee would screen every movie and TV programme to filter out smoking scenes. If the committee finds that a smoking scene is necessary from the ''artistic point of view,'' then the film would carry an advisory. The actor shown smoking would need to state that smoking its injurious for health. Old movies containing smoking too would have to carry the advisory."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)
Hollywood thought: why Poseidon's no Adventure
In "Backstory 3," Poseidon Adventure scripter Stirling Silliphant offers some seafaring experience to Nat Segaloff: "The matter of making the characters [in The Poseidon Adventure] empathetic was not a problem, because I had a simple and central conflict going between Borgnine and Hackman. In their conflict, they exposed their own fears—and therefore their humanity—and as this [affected] several other characters, we inevitably had to see them as facets of ourselves. And how can you go wrong with an actress of the brilliance of Shelly Winters, whose chubby rump has to be pushed upwards, and her face of complaint at such a rude contact; and then when she has to dive and swim a hazardous course underwater in her bloomers and dies in the arms of her husband before than can get to Israel—come on, that's really snatching candy from a baby."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2006
Shohei Imamura, 1926-2006
Brilliant, contrarian Japanese director Shohei Imamura has died. "Imamura, a pioneer of his country's New Wave movement, won the Cannes Film Festival's [Palme d'Or] for The Ballad of Narayama in 1983 and The Eel in 1997," writes the BBC. Other remarkable movies: Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Eijanaika and the indelible Vengeance is Mine. "Imamura's last work formed part of 11'09"01, a compilation of short films about events on 11 September 2001." Agence France-Press' Shigemi Sato quotes the great Japanese everyman actor Koji Yakusho, who starred in The Eel and Warm Water, "I feel so sad that we cannot see more Imamura movies that are original and powerful. He was a treasure of Japanese cinema."[Notes from a retrospective here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2006
Czech mate: video-on-demand in Prague
In Czech Business Weekly, a reminder that not every tech or marketing evolution comes from the U S of A: Pavla Kozáková reports on a local experiment in video-on-demand online, profiling Ivo Lukačovič, who may be the Czech Republic's answer to Mark Cuban.
The Czech Republic's domestic online portal Seznam.cz is the top search engine rivals, besting even Google. Late in June, "the Seznam.cz portal will launch video-on-demand service Kinomania.cz, where users can for Kč 45 download a copy of a movie... for one day." [The Beta version is up now.] [T]he company’s strategy is to stay local, adapting innovations for the Czech market, and there are no plans for international expansion for the next five years." Lukačovič founded Seznam in 1995, after admiring Yahoo. "Despite Internet penetration in the Czech Republic being around 2% at the time, and while mostly students were using the portal, it started making money from advertisements almost overnight... “We’re a very local company and we want to stay as local as possible"... adding that the company’s strategy for the next five years is to take the best services or innovations available and adapt them for local conditions... Seznam, in cooperation with software distributor Alef Nula [launches] Kinomania, and its pilot version, at kinomania.cz, was launched May 17. Based on BitTorrent technology, which is commonly used on peer-to-peer (P2P) sites and allows users to download not only from the original kept on the server but also from other users, the Kinomania project lets clients legally download a film for viewing on a one-day basis.
The fee per download is Kč 45, a price comparable to... a video or DVD rental. “The success of the project depends on the choice of movies available,” Lukačovič said, pointing out that if the selection is limited to B-quality movies, Kinomania will be doomed... Alef Nula is in charge of the copyrights negotiations with the distributors, and so far kinomania.cz [has] over 40 films on the Web, including the Czech blockbuster comedy Snowboarders... Seznam asks clients to use its own payment system – seznam peněženka (e-wallet). Seznam launched the e-wallet this January, enabling users to deposit from Kč 100 to Kč 10,000. Currently between 20,000 and 30,000 clients use e-wallet. “We aren’t considering broadening the ways in which customers can pay for the movie,” Lukačovič said, pointing out that in order to keep the film rentals cheap the transaction fees must be minimal. Kinomania was also granted a Kč 25 million subsidy from the Ministry of Informatics as a part of the ministry’s program to support broadband penetration. Part of the sum is still pending the approval of the European Commission in June." [Photo: Czech Business Weekly.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)
Non-Hollywood thoughts: Victor Erice, Abbas Kiarostami
"Film is not only dead but can represent death." “It’s a funereal art!” Spanish director Victor Erice sighed. “It captures lives. Life disappears, but cinema shows it... When you see a film with an actor who has died, everyone lives again for us spectators, using the same words, doing the same movements as when they were alive.” Abbas Kiarostami, asked "why so many of his films were set in cars, he responded that he likes cars. “I spend at least three-four hours a day in my car. It’s a good place to concentrate and to communicate when you sit side by side with someone, not looking at each other’s eyes; you commune better.” [From an Ekathimerini report from the 2004 Thessaloniki International Film Festival; the photograph by Kiarostami is from here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Shunning the cricket and going paperless: Carr construes
In his Monday NY Times column, David Carr offers his take on Hollywood studios showing no love to the lowly film cricket, essentially rehashing dozens of recent recaps, 
likely pegged to the $231.8 million worldwide gross Sony leveraged out of The Da Vinci Code. Carr lists three other successes, When a Stranger Calls, Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, that were not available for preview. 
While the dozen movies not shown to critics this year (namechecked in a raft of articles), have partaken of one form of exploitation or another, Carr opines that "Some movies have been labeled critic-proof, but vast swaths of the industry now seem interested in heading to the market without being turned over with a pointy stick." The shift from newsprint to the Internet is a large part of Carr's case. "Even among adults, the time-honored practice of perusing large-print ads and then checking the fine print for listings has been replaced by clicking on the Web." Along with the requisite nod in the general direction of Snakes on a Plane, and a keen appreciation of how the studios are cutting back on their print advertising budgets, here's the starkest assertion Carr meanders into:
"[A] new division of Fox Film Entertainment aimed at teenagers, Fox Atomic, will produce eight films a year with a print budget of exactly zero." Carr partially blames newspapers for the problem, since many "increased rates for movie advertising as other categories fell apart after the dot-com bust [and] may be partly to blame for the prospect of a paperless movie industry." And what's a national holiday without quoting Mark Cuban: "I know everyone is trying to make it come true because the cost of print ads could be considered extortion in some jurisdictions."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Unkind cuts: Ed Norton on Fox and Kingdom of Heaven
Mike Russell culturepulps Edward Norton, who knows a few things about recut movies. They're chatting up Down in the Valley but Norton offers up a word or two about the release version of Kingdom of Heaven versus the cut released on DVD last week: "That should have been a much longer movie. If you want an example of fear-based decision-making in Hollywood… You know, Alexander is just this incomprehensible, turgid thing, and Fox looks at it and has the most incredible rationale: "Let's look at someone else's failure as the rationale for how we cut our film." Instead of saying, "We've got Ridley Scott and a great script," they say, "Well, ours can't be 2 hours 45 minutes long"—which, in the case of Kingdom of Heaven, it really should have been. So they cut it down based on someone else's failure, and ended up taking a really great director's film down to a really pale shadow of itself."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2006
Potshots at the messenger: another comparison of Al Gore to Adolf Hitler
What's a nice little documentary about saving the world got to do to get a little respect these days? Think Progress unearths a "leading climate skeptic" makes a direct comparison in the Washington Post magazine between Al Gore and Adolf Hitler. 
"[M]eteorologist Bill Gray – one of the most prominent climate skeptics" writes, bizarrely: "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews." Opines the site, "It’s telling that so many of the attacks on Al Gore and his movie are ad hominem, not substantive. There really is no credible scientific rebuttal to An Inconvenient Truth, so people are forced to attack the messenger." Last week, an ExxonMobil consultant on Fox made a similar comparison, and now it's in the pages of the Washington Post, no less. What next, geriatric columnists getting damp over Hilary Clinton's "lemon-yellow pantsuit"? I know, I know. Unthinkable.
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:24 PM | Comments (2)
May 26, 2006
Pride, Unprejudiced today
A heavy movie screening day before Memorial Day, so just this post: this week's Pride, Unprejudiced looks at "The best film to incorporate Leonardo since Hudson Hawk; the mood of The Proposition—"Blood is a central force, blood that binds, blinds, sluices, spatters, gutters, gathers and bakes in the sun that makes alkali of the earth"; a Korean movie with ads "larded with quotes from Ain’t It Cool News’ house torture-phile, Harry Knowles"; and the perfectionism of X-Men: The Last Stand's Brett Ratner: "Any other director, honestly, you do thirty takes, I'd be done, I'd be over, I'd be so lost. I'd be frustrated and probably wouldn't want to do it anymore. I'd just be, y'know, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. But he's very specific."
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2006
Lions at the Lionsgate: an analyst says yes, Icahn
A multitude of emails in various inboxes this morning from "Richard Alan Incorporated Founder and CEO Richard A. Dorfman"'s publicistas: he has strong opinions about investor Carl Icahn tearing down The House of SAW, after acquiring "4.1 million shares of Lions Gate [sic]Entertainment at a cost of just under $42 million. As a result, Icahn now owns a nearly 4% stake in the last remaining major independent film... and distribution company in the United States." Specific analysis of Lionsgate's valuation follows before Dorfman's esteeming of the company's many titles. his "Film Library For Dummies" explanation is a sturdy basic read, followed by this: "So, what is Lions Gate [sic] worth? ... [I]t’s hard to say for sure other than that it’s going to be worth what the highest bidder is willing to pay for it in an arms length transaction. [We can] get some idea of its value based on [the fund controlled by] George Soros... 
one of the savviest investors in the world [acquiring] the DreamWorks library from Paramount for $900 million... [W]ith just 59 titles, it in no way comes close to having the breadth or depth of the 8,000 titles in Lions Gate’s [sicsic] would have to involve an auction to extract maximum value. This should be possible since there are likely to be plenty of potential bidders, including studios, cable operators and private equity players, all of whom could bid alone or... as part of a consortium. I suspect cable operators in particular will be eager to participate in the bidding since the Lions Gate [sic] library is well positioned to serve as the foundation for one or more new cable channels... "I would not be surprised to see Lions Gate [sic] bring $2 billion or more in a sale, which would translate into a stock price potentially in excess of $16 per share... [T]his conclusion is not based on any rigorous financial analysis. Instead, it reflects a common sense approach that takes into consideration the history and dynamics of recent transactions as well as the current state of the motion picture industry."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Doyle a la carte: Chris is not dearly on Departed
In his New Yorker review of In the Mood for Love, David Denby averred that Christopher Doyle's cinematography abetted "a new form of perversion." Grady Hendrix discovers a release date for The Departed, Martin Scorsese's remake of Infernal Affairs, on which Doyle had a Visual Consultant credit, and also the good old form of constructive Chris-ism on the topic. 
Hendrix quotes scribe and Light Sleeper mag majordomo, Saul Symonds, who offers up outtakes from a recent interview. ""I find it disappointing if not depressing to see someone of the integrity and scholarship of Marty: 1) apparently not knowing or caring where the original originates from (which I find insulting to our integrity and efforts...when of all the filmmakers in the world Marty is the one who pretends to celebrate excellence and integrity and vision in cinematography; )2) needing to suck box office, or studio, or whoever's dick he feels he needs to suck...it can't be for the money...it can't be for the film (for the reasons above)...it must be just to work...which is mostly my motivation most of the time...but to have something fall into one's lap because one is supposedly competent in a certain kind of filmmaking is exactly why we are moving on and accountants are making non-subtitled versions of what we do; .3) it makes me very sad to see Marty and so many others genre-fying and gentrifying himself into mediocrity. Granted, mediocre is not just a Western ailment...but it would seem the disease is malign and endemic." [Early love from Chris to Marty can be found here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Baby Dragon Dynasty: Weinsteinco faces East
No word on what it means for the unreleased product from Miramax days such as Tears of the Black Dragon, or the recent acquisition of distrib rights to the Tartan USA Asian-themed catalog, 
but Weinsteinco's introduced at Cannes a whole new pile-up of a label they're dubbing "Dragon Dynasty," "the dynamic new label under which all The Weinstein Company's Asian titles will be released," Forty-three titles come from Fortune Star Entertainment, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's STAR Group, "which owns the world's largest contemporary Chinese language feature film library," fifty Shaw Brothers productions, as well as John Woo's The Killer, Hardboiled, Bullet in the Head, and A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow 2. And wouncha know? "Quentin Tarantino, who is well recognized for his passionate interest and broad knowledge of Asian cinema, will actively work with the Weinsteins in all aspects of brand development for Dragon Dynasty." [A slightly edited version of the P.R. is below.]
NEW YORK, NEW YORK (May 23, 2006) - Continuing their passionate dedication to bringing Asian films to American audiences, Bob and Harvey Weinstein are proud to announce the unveiling of Dragon Dynasty, the dynamic new label under which all The Weinstein Company's Asian titles will be released, including "Ong Bak 2," "The Protector" (aka "Tom Yum Goong"), "Born to Fight," "SPL," "Seven Swords," and "Dragon Squad," as well as a package of high profile titles, which was licensed from Fortune Star Entertainment: the distribution division of News Corporation's STAR Group which owns the world's largest contemporary Chinese language feature film library.
The 43 Fortune Star titles, together with a special collection of 50 classic Shaw Brothers' movies and a number of independent acquisitions, including John Woo's seminal productions, "The Killer," "Hardboiled," "Bullet in the Head," and "A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2," combine to make The Weinstein Company the leader in Asian Cinema in North America.
Quentin Tarantino, who is well recognized for his passionate interest and broad knowledge of Asian cinema, will actively work with the Weinsteins in all aspects of brand development for Dragon Dynasty.
The Weinstein Company's Dragon Dynasty library already includes films starring some of Asia's hottest actors such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Stephen Chow, Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh and Sammo Hung, as well as titles from legendary filmmakers John Woo, Yuen Woo-ping and Corey Yuen Kwai, amongst others. The company has ambitious plans to continue building the library, and will be acquiring titles across all genres of Asian film such as contemporary action, martial arts, epic swordplay and hi-octane thriller. The titles selected for theatrical distribution will be released by The Weinstein Company, and all home video output will be managed by Genius Products, Inc. (OTCBB: GNPI).
The Weinsteins originally acquired the collection of Shaw Brothers' movies during their tenure at Miramax Films and brought the titles with them to The Weinstein Company as part of their settlement agreement with the Walt Disney Studios.
The Weinstein Company will redefine the presentation of Asian Cinema on DVD, and is developing a number of Special Edition packages for its new brand, including 2-Disc Platinum Editions of Jet Li's world-acclaimed "Fist of Legend" and "Tai Chi Master". Each Dragon Dynasty DVD will possess a unique and carefully crafted identity, and will include many groundbreaking, informative and exclusive special bonus features such as rare behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes, out-takes, and specially commissioned documentaries and interviews featuring cast members, filmmakers and celebrity enthusiasts of Asian film.
Peter Poon, General Manager of Fortune Star, stated, "Fortune Star is excited to work with TWC and their specialized team in bringing our popular titles at the highest quality for DVD release to the US market. The launch of Dragon Dynasty will be a tremendous boost to the Asian Cinema as it will now have a more powerful access to the American audiences."
Donnie Yen stated, "I'm delighted that my film SPL will be one of the lead titles for Dragon Dynasty. Harvey has put a great team together for the brand, and I look forward to collaborating with them on the upcoming release of Seven Swords. Finally, we Asian action film-makers have a proper platform to present our work to the international audience."
Sammo Hung stated, "I hope this new label brings more fans to our films, so that we have an even bigger audience in the future. I'm very happy to see SPL, Dragon Squad and some of my older films released by Dragon Dynasty. I'm a heavy hitter myself, and its good to see TWC throwing its weight behind our industry!"
Harvey Weinstein stated, "Bob and I are extremely passionate about Asian Cinema and have always been enormous fans of Asian filmmakers from Akira Kurosawa to John Woo. We started building a library of Asian titles years ago and hope to continue adding to it for years to come. Bob and I are proud to launch Dragon Dynasty and hope to continue bringing Asian cinema the recognition it deserves. Alan Bergman and the Disney team have been incredibly cooperative with the collection of Shaw Brothers' movies.”
Brian White stated, "I am really excited to be building the Dragon Dynasty brand with Harvey and Bob. Their passion and dedication to the genre is really quite extraordinary, and our collective goal is to produce imaginative, visually-dynamic, feature-laden DVD titles, which are designed to take the presentation of the genre to a new level of excellence, and bring to the widest possible audience all that is special and unique in the World of Asian Cinema."
The Weinsteins also announced today that Brian White has been named Director of Asian Brand Management and Post-production for The Weinstein Company's Dragon Dynasty. Brian White will work closely with Hong Kong based Executive Vice President of Asian Acquisitions and Co-production, Bey Logan, on all Asian acquisitions, on identifying projects for Dragon Dynasty, and will be charged with overseeing all aspects of the new brand. White will also be responsible for all creative aspects of the development and construction of the Dragon Dynasty DVD titles. White is based in London, and will report to both Bob and Harvey Weinstein.
Prior to The Weinstein Company, White served as Brand Manager and DVD Producer at Contender Entertainment Group and with Medusa Communications & Marketing Ltd. As brand architect, White played a pivotal role in the creation of the acclaimed Hong Kong Legends label in 1999 with Medusa Communications & Marketing Ltd, before launching sister label Premier Asia, a brand dedicated to the cinema of Japan, Korea and Thailand, in 2003. As a Brand Manager, he was instrumental to the ongoing commercial success of Hong Kong Legends and Premier Asia, spearheading the acquisition, marketing and PR strategies, and creating a unique 'positioning strategy' for the brands, which generated millions of units sold. As a DVD Producer, White has produced over 120 DVD titles for Hong Kong Legends, Medusa, Premier Asia, and Contender Home Entertainment Group. Beginning in 1999, working with the team at Medusa, he also pioneered a restoration program for the classics of Hong Kong Cinema, including the Golden Harvest Bruce Lee titles, thus creating a new benchmark standard for the presentation of Asian Cinema titles on DVD.
The Weinsteins have been involved with many highly acclaimed and financially successful Asian titles in the past including the record box office hit “Hero,” the Academy Award nominee “Farewell my Concubine,” “Iron Monkey,” the animated hit “Princess Mononoke,” the Japanese version of “Shall we Dance,” Jet Li’s “The Master,” “Twin Warriors,” “The Enforcer,” “The Legend of the Swordsman,” “The Legend,” “The Legend II,” and “Fist of Legend,” Shaolin Soccer,” starring Stephen Chow, “The Accidental Spy,” “The Legend of Drunken Master,” “Twin Dragons,” “Operation Condor,” “Supercop 1 and 2,” all starring Jackie Chan, along with “Temptress Moon,” and “Chungking Express,” among many others.
ABOUT FORTUNE STAR ENTERTAINMENT
Fortune Star Entertainment is the feature film and television programming, production, and distribution division of STAR, Asia's leading media and entertainment company. Fortune Star distributes the world's largest contemporary Chinese language feature film library, including over 600 titles featuring Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and renowned filmmakers John Woo, Yuen Woo Ping and Ronny Yu. Fortune Star also distributes STAR's television library of over 20,000 hours of top-rated Indian and Chinese programming. Fortune Star produces feature films and high-definition movies and will be developing new content businesses including wireless platform. Some of the titles acquired for Dragon Dynasty from Fortune Star includes "Police Story", "Police Story 2", "Crime Story," starring Jackie Chan, "Royal Tramp 1" and "Royal Tramp 2," starring Stephen Chow ("Shaolin Soccer," "Kung Fu Hustle"), "Millionaires Express," starring Sammo Hung (from the television show "Martial Law"), "Righting Wrongs / Above the Law," directed by acclaimed action-director Corey Yuen, and "Love Asia," Fortune Star produced with and starring Maggie Q ("Mission Impossible 3").
ABOUT THE SHAW BROTHERS' TITLES
The Celestial Shaw Brothers' library encompasses approximately 760 films, including the world's largest collection of Chinese-language motion pictures and many classics of Hong Kong cinema, which have all gone through a state-of-the-art digital restoration process. Many of the world's most famous Chinese actors and directors worked at Shaw and the library represents the legacy of legendary impresario Sir Run Run Shaw. Some of The Weinstein Company's Shaw Brother's titles include "36th Chamber of Shaolin," "Eight Diagram Pole Fighter," and "Heroes of the East," all starring Gordon Liu ("Kill Bill"), "King Boxer," the first Hong Kong movie ever to be a worldwide theatrical hit, "Martial Arts of Shaolin," a classic title from Jet Li, "Come Drink With Me," starring Cheng Pei-pei ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon").
ABOUT GENIUS PRODUCTS, INC
Genius Products, Inc. (OTCBB:GNPI), produces and distributes an ever-expanding library of home entertainment products including DVDs and CDs. Sold in retail outlets nationwide under such well-known brands as Wellspring, Sundance Channel Home EntertainmentT, NBC News, and Baby Genius®, the company's products are distributed through the Genius Products Branded Distribution Network, an extensive, proprietary distribution network that extends throughout the U.S. to mass, drugstore, supermarket and specialty retailers. Genius Products recently released on home video The Weinstein Company smash hits, HOODWINKED, the animated family comedy which ranked #1 in consumer sales in its debut week, DERAILED, starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, which ranked #1 in rentals in its debut week, and WOLF CREEK, an Australian horror film, DOOGAL, a comical animated adventure with the voices of Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg and William H. Macy; as well as the Oscar nominated film, MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins.
Genius Products boasts a premiere management team comprised of seasoned executives, formerly with major Hollywood studios, who have steered the company into the forefront of the industry through their landmark exclusive distribution deal with The Weinstein Company.
Upcoming films planned for release by Genius Products include films by The Weinstein Company such as THE MATADOR, starring Pierce Brosnan; TRANSAMERICA, starring Felicity Huffman; David Zucker's hilarious new sequel, SCARY MOVIE 4; and THE LIBERTINE, starring Johnny Depp. Potential new releases include a sequel to SIN CITY, SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS, CLERKS II and the highly anticipated film BOBBY.
ABOUT THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY AND DIMENSION FILMS
The Weinstein Company (TWC) was created by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the brothers who founded Miramax Films Corporation in 1979. TWC is a multi-media company that officially launched on October 1, 2005. Dimension Films, the genre label that was founded in 1993 by Bob Weinstein, is also included under the TWC banner.
Since launching on October 1, 2005, The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films have released "Derailed," "Wolf Creek," "Transamerica," "The Matador," "The Libertine," "Mrs. Henderson Presents," "Hoodwinked," "Doogal" and "Scary Movie 4."
"Lucky Number Slevin," a Weinstein Company presentation, was released on April 7th by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM).
Upcoming Weinstein Company films to be domestically distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) are; "Clerks II," the sequel to writer/director Kevin Smith's 1994 Sundance favorite "Clerks;" "Stormbreaker," based on the 1st book in the Alex Rider teenage superspy series by best selling author Anthony Horowitz; "Bobby," the political-culture drama with an all star ensemble cast; "Breaking & Entering," by Academy Award winning director Anthony Minghella, starring Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn and Vera Farmiga; "Killshot," from Academy Award winning director John Madden starring Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Thomas Jane, Rosario Dawson, and Johnny Knoxville; and "Miss Potter," the Beatrix Potter biopic.
Other upcoming films to be released by The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films include: "Pulse," a remake of a Japanese horror film starring Kristen Bell, Christina Milian, and Ian Somerhalder; "DOA: Dead or Alive," based on Tecmo's best-selling "Dead or Alive" videogame franchise; "School for Scoundrels," a hilarious remake of the classic 1959 comedy directed by Todd Phillips and starring Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Heder; "Superhero!" a spoof on the latest trend of comic-book inspired films; and "Grind House," a groundbreaking film that will unite two of the world's most legendary filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
During the Weinsteins' tenure at Miramax Films the company released some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful independent feature films, including fifteen Best Picture nominations and three Best Pictures of the Year for "The English Patient," Shakespeare In Love" and "Chicago." The films, which received 249 Academy Award® nominations and won 60 Oscars®, have generated billions of dollars in worldwide box office receipts and billions more in home video sales. In its history, Dimension Films has released some of the most successful franchises including "Scream," "Spy Kids" and "Scary Movie."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:49 AM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2006
Scott-free: A.O. OKs Marie A.
And he has fine taste in musique, as he namechecks GO4 in the NYT: "The first sounds you hear in Marie Antoinette are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt. The first lines invoke "the problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure," one of the chief problems the title character will face. And the name of the song is "Natural Is Not in It," a fitting motto for a film that conjures a world of pure and extravagant artifice." [Trailer.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)
Sofia Coppola: Who talks to a 12-year-old girl that way?
Kenneth Turan in LA Times is into his Sofia, profiling Ms. Coppola on the advent of Marie Antoinette: "Dressed simply in jeans, white shirt and flip-flops, she looks younger than someone who celebrated her 35th birthday the Sunday before Cannes opened." But Kenny feels the power, too: "I'm really determined; I won't take no... If people say it, I ask again in a different way. 
I can't imagine setting out to make a movie and not being clear about what you want; that's the point of doing it. That's why I want to make movies. I made Lost in Translation to see Bill Murray in it. In life, there are compromises. In making movies, you get to have it exactly how you imagined." As she's a woman from a royal family, Turan has to compare her to Daddy, doesn't he? "[T]his passionate determination seems to be a legacy from Francis Ford Coppola, the director's father. "Even if it seemed impossible, he'd find some way to do it... He seemed very heroic out in the Philippines, getting his movie made... [W]e were always, like, in training for film. I remember him talking to me about screenwriting when I was a little kid, telling me what made a good second act. Who talks to a 12-year-old girl like that?" [Trailer.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)
What are you doing in my closet, Jeffrey Beaumont?: make me some Blue Velvet art
Over the transom: a "Call to Artists and Blue Velvet Fans! Independent Art Company and Cucalorus Film Foundation seek works in all media for an upcoming exhibit of artworks inspired by Blue Velvet. Along with the exhibit, running July 21-August 9, Cucalorus Film Foundation will "screen the indie classic at Jengo's Playhouse in downtown Wilmington, NC, on July 28 during the opening. Submit works via email, cd, dvd or in person to Dixon Stetler before July 15; contact independentartcompany@hotmail.com
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2006
DVD 5-4-3-2-1: Game 6, The Devil's Miner, Kingdom of Heaven, Harlan County USA, Viridiana
Five current releases: Game 6; The Devil’s Miner; Kingdom of Heaven: Four-Disc Director's Cut; and Criterion editions of Harlan County USA and Viridiana.
5
Game 6 Don DeLillo is a brilliant novelist: his recent ventures into theater, and now, movies, makes you ache for the time the reticent writer expended cobbling such tight, tiny shoes. (*, Hart Sharp, $28)
4
The Devil’s Miner Winner of a documentary Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, along with a dozen other festival circuit nods, Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani’s The Devil’s Miner (***, First Run, $25), is a straightforward slice of colorful, terrible life, following two fatherless brothers, 14 and 12, who work the silver mines in Cerro Rico, Bolivia in “the mountains that eat men.” The miners who work there are devout Catholics, and believe God leaves them behind when they descend into the earth, where the tunnels are lined with hundreds of devil statues, upon whom they place their hopes of returning to light at the end of their shifts. The filmmakers don’t gussy up their telling: the days of claustrophobia that consume these hopeful teenage boys, among 800 other young workers who toil to raise money for their education and clothes and the folkloric manifestation of the centuries-long beliefs that surround them are sufficiently eye-opening.
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Kingdom of Heaven, Four-Disc Director’s Cut
Is Ridley Scott the greatest user and abuser of the successful director’s ability to revise a film on DVD? Leaving aside the myriad versions of Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down, Scott finally releases the version of Kingdom of Heaven (***, Fox, $35) that ought to have been in theaters (and which was briefly digitally projected in Los Angeles). The new cut is 194 minutes, 49 minutes longer than the theatrical version which Scott complied in cutting at the studio’s suggestion. From a review of the first released cut: “Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is many things, among them, a charnel house of parable.
In a $30 coffee-table book esteeming the 67-year-old Scott's attention to detail, he writes of his long-held fascination with the medieval, "There is no escaping parallels with our time, when leaders who try to make peace are admired, but their efforts so often are subverted by more radical factions." (And the early scenes are bedecked with white, lazing snowflakes as thick as 9/11's ash and soot.)
It's 1186. Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a French village blacksmith, surprised by the news from the visiting Baron of Ibelin (Liam Neeson) that he's the offspring of a sin: he's the Baron's bastard son. The events come fast if not furious, and soon Balian is one of the survivors of a shipwreck (a skittish black horse the other) that lands him on the road to Jerusalem. Court politics follow, with the leper King of Jerusalem, his sister Sibylla (Eva Green, eyes still as darting-mad as in "The Dreamers), 
her husband Guy de Lusignan (Martin Csokas, looking like a cranky cousin of "The Office"'s Ricky Gervais in need of a full-body shave) and the bloodthirsty warrior Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson, looking like the sex-mad screenwriter Joe Eszterhas with Powerpuff Girl pink-tipped extensions). Jeremy Irons is on-hand, playing the sage Tiberias with facial scars and a scare-the-kiddies guttural growl. Let the Crusades begin... Kingdom of Heaven, with its portrait of warring theocracies that include callow leaders given to smug cant, gathering the cloak of "the will of God" to warm their own impulses, is painfully topical.
Whatever one's sentiments about Orlando Bloom portraying a great historical hero, he carries his character's pain well enough, brimming eyes filled with curiosity and concern and cheekbones more defined, seeming less sweetly boyish than in his turn in Pirates of the Caribbean, his supernal prettiness seared with scowls.
While an epic set in the eleventh century might suggest endless mud and muck and death and despair, William Monahan's script, tracking the fall of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, is a story about the quest for peace as much as the thirst for vengeance and hunger for turf. There are a few lines of pure brass—"I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle"; "All death is certain"—but Balian is a Walter Hill action hero: one large speech and one small are the most of his articulation. All else is deeds.
Special effects, or perhaps computing power, have improved since the days of Gladiator, and an entrance into the city of Jerusalem has a glorious sweep surpassing any of the tableaux of Troy or the pinball-machine glass painting-like gloop recently favored by George Lucas. The city is a teeming souk that does not yet have to accommodate the prospect of sudden nuclear annihilation by zealots. (Apocalypse, however, may well be at hand.) There is another moment of pictorial grace that draws from lessons Scott surely learned from such medieval settings as those of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev as well as from Kurosawa: a battle that ends with two kings who meet in the midst of an arid plane—think Crawford, Texas, without battalions of SUVs—with lance- and flag-bearing armies awaiting on either side. The most beautiful shot also contains the only mediocre computer-generated work I could see: a hazy band of men approach the spectacle of a rapture of vultures swirling above a teeming bone yard that only hours earlier had been a battlefield. (It's a canny choice: most eyes will be fixed on the sky grayed with the eaters of the dead.)
Ultimately, Balian turns the course of history by giving his back to the privileged, protected overseers of a corrupt Church. "God wills it"? "To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven"? "Kingdom of Heaven" is anti-demagogue, and curious about men who can meet and speak of difference and not of holy war. While the madness of a movie antihero like Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is sorely missing from this tapestry, the sentiments are at least grand. Who is the seeker of forgiveness? Monahan and Scott ask.
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Viridiana: Special Edition
(****, Criterion, $30) One of Luis Buñuel’s late provocations: A young nun is abused when she tries to help the poor; the film ends with a beggar's orgy, a parody of the Last Supper, scored to Handel's "Messiah." Jean-Andre Fieschi writes in "Cinema: A Critical Dictionary":
"With its rites and ceremonies, [Catholicism] is an ideology peculiarly suited to correlation with a vast and pregnant ideological fetishism whose interdictions nourish yet more fetishisms: a special preserve [where] phantasm and ideology exchange guises... The subject of 'Viridiana' is in fact, the degradation of the rites, their disintegration... If there is a question of blasphemy, this desecration effect provokes the question: blasphemy against what?" With Silvia Pinal, Francisco Rabal, Fernando Rey. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Extras: video interviews with Pinal and movie journalist Richard Porton; excerpts from a 1964 episode of the French series "Cinèastes de notre temps" and the US trailer. 1
Harlan County USA
Harlan County USA (****, Criterion, $40), Barbara Kopple’s urgent, Oscar-winning 1976 documentary about the struggles of Kentucky coal miners, is one of the great nonfiction films, and it was recently restored before this Criterion edition. Kopple and her crew are working the longitudinal beat, observing for eighteen months the effects of a 1973 strike in Eastern Kentucky.
A thirty-year-old movie should not seem so topical, in its description of poverty, dangerous jobs for monopolistic companies and derelict educational systems, but the recent West Virginia mining tragedies and the negligence shown New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Kopple’s unflinching filming in the coal fields. (The glimpses of the claustrophobic, backbreaking work are images of dread.) Terrible things are described, terrible things that persist, yet Kopple also believes that the important struggle continues. She’s a brilliant editor, to boot: this is involving filmmaking every step of the way. Kopple supervised the DVD; she comments along with editor Nancy Baker; a new documentary on the making is included; John Sayles discusses the film; outtakes, and Roger Ebert's 2005 Sundance panel with Kopple and other collaborators is also included.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
An Inconvenient Truth: ExxonMobil has paid crickets comparing Al Gore to Nazis
In the pitched battle that's already in full fray to misrepresent the climate-crisis doc, An Inconvenient Truth, premiering in NY and LA on Wednesday, and to slam potential 2008 Presidential candidate Al Gore, Think Progress headlines "Exxon-Backed Pundit Compares Gore To Nazi Propagandist," and provides a video link to the offended party's ever-so-quotable iinsights. 
"Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, an organization that has received over $390,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998... On Fox, Burnett compared [Gore’s] movie... to watching a movie by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to learn about Nazi Germany... "That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming," Mr. Burnett asserts. "Burnett recently wrote an editorial defending former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s lavish compensation (which amounted to $190,000 a day in 2005). He failed to mention his financial connection to the company." If ColPix's notorious apocrypha-cricket David Manning had turned out to be a real quote whore, wouldn't he file a class action suit for alll shills-cum-experts to so well-remunerated? [Trailer.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:07 PM | Comments (2)
Green with savvy: combing the Cannes-Cannes
For the most eclectic and discerning selection of cricket-song off the Croisette and Cannes, it'd be hard to beat David Hudson's clipping service over at GreenCine Daily. Today's top item: Alejandro González Iñárritu's multicultural Babel, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and ineffable everyman Koji Yakusho [pictured]. Among the snaps: The Reporter's Ray Bennett: "Tense, relentless and difficult to watch at times, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel is an emotionally shattering drama in which a simple act of kindness leads to events that pierce our veneer of civilization and bring on the white noise of terror." Other leaders: Flandres, Il Caimano, Shortbus, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's' Climates. [Climates trailer here; Babel clip here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
Labor of Lust: Ang keeps Focus
Honestly, I was hoping that Lust, Caution was going to be Ang Lee's long-mooted musical route into Stephen Merritt's "69 Love Songs," but I guess a 1940s Shanghai espionage thriller, as announced at Cannes today, will have to suffice. From the PR: "Bill Kong, who previously produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, will produce the new film with the director... The Chinese-language feature is being scripted by Wang Hui-Ling, who previously co-wrote Mr. Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon... Mr. Kong has produced several films that Focus and/or Focus Features International have released, including Jet Li’s Fearless, starring Jet Li and directed by Ronny Yu (which Focus’ sibling company Rogue Pictures releases domestically nationwide on August 4th); and Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers."
Mr. Schamus said, “I’m delighted that Ang is back with all of us here at Focus, and he’s going to be making a very exciting film that’s unlike anything he’s done before. He and I glad to reteam with Bill and Wang again after our great success together on Crouching Tiger. Like that picture, Lust, Caution is a uniquely Asian story which, in Ang’s hands, will surprise and attract audiences around the world.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)
Missing the malt whisky: Schamus' solo Focus
LA Times' Lorenza Muñoz tightens James Schamus' bowtie as he takes solo CEO rein of Focus Features. Muñoz quotes Schamus: "I know this seems like James' bar mitzvah, but it's not a big deal... It's not like David was the guy running the nuclear reactor in the back room and he left with the keys." ... Schamus' mandate is a broad one. In addition to overseeing the company's expanding foothold in the international financing and distribution arena, he and his team must develop and acquire enough material to ensure a continued slate of ambitious artistic movies, like last year's The Constant Gardener. Killer Films' producer Christine Vachon notes an important facet of Schamus' makeup: "When he and I worked together, he was always delighted to actually read the contracts... The deal is exciting to him." Of co-Focuser David Linde, now at Universal, Schamus reflects: "I will miss him at the end of the day — that late-night bull session when the sales suite is empty and a cigar or two comes out," he said, remembering how he and Linde would whip out a bottle of malt whiskey on many occasions to discuss the day's events. "That is when he will be missed."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2006
Graf spree: Manohla's Da Vinci wish
Writes Manohla Dargis in the NY Times: "So, The Da Vinci Code, Ron Howard's critically skewered and roasted film adaptation of the Dan Brown book earned, according to a news release put out by Sony on Sunday, an estimated "$224 million in worldwide box office receipts during its first three days of theatrical release" and delivered "$77 million in U.S. ticket sales," thereby giving the company its "biggest worldwide opening ever." Does this mean that critics are out of touch with the public? Maybe, but really, who cares? All that box office doesn't make it a good movie. Here's hoping that this extra lucre means that Sony Pictures Classics, can go on a shopping spree at Cannes."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2006
Patterson's Film School Confidential: bad art about art, rotten films about film, tedious novels about writers
The Guardian's John Patterson has a film school tale or two on the occasion of Art School Confidential, as he describes Terry Zwigoff as "the merry misanthrope with a hair-trigger bullshit detector." Writes JP, "I came to think as I watched the movie, film school may be worse... because so many cosseted rich kids end up there thinking they're artists, not realising they have in fact joined glorified trade schools for the media-industrial complex. If they learn a little about camera placement and pacing and spend... their time cultivating industry connections, they should be able to land a regular gig directing episodic TV... a day job for life... [F]ilm school is packed with precisely the people who have the fewest interesting things to say: those with parents who can sponsor them in education until they turn 30, and for whom the one transformative locale in life has been ... a college campus. [In] recent art there is that strong, perhaps ineradicable tendency to make bad art about art, rotten films about films and tedious novels about writers." Patterson says he hasn't got "an axe to grind" but that twenty years ago classes at the U of C taught him "that I had the solitary temperament of a writer, not the collaborative one required of a film-maker... It is time for film-makers to learn the lesson of Quentin Tarantino, whose success a decade ago, ironically, helped pack the film schools with wannabe[s]... That lesson? Skip film school, just watch a lot of movies.... Because if you can't learn how to watch a movie without a teacher standing in front of the screen with a pointer, you'll never be any use to anyone when you're standing in front of your... cast with a bullhorn. As the careers of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Raoul Walsh and John Ford amply prove, if you wish to make movies about real life, it's best to live some of it yourself first."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:26 AM | Comments (0)
Bird Story: the McKees to the cage
A friend uses a copy of Bob McKee's "Story" to keep the birds from flying away.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:54 AM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2006
New Criterion: spinning some spiff
The Criterion Collection's got a spiffy new design identity: check out the intro animation logo here. There's a shiny new coat of paint on the website, too.
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)
Me and you and you and me: WKW's Happy Together limited edition
Coinciding with Wong Kar-Wai chairing the 2006 Cannes jury, if you've got the Chinese for it, you can order a special edition of Happy Together, limited to 2,046 copies worldwide from his Jet Tone prodco website. It's the "6-in-1 box set Limited Edition."s. The set's released at the end of May; PayPal your HK$ now! Reader Han provides this translation: "Happy Together: Let Us Start Over Again 2006, the 10th anniversary Cannes limited edition. Wong Kar-Wai made Happy Together in 1996 and became the first chinese to win best director award at Cannes. Ten years later, Wong now is the first Chinese to be the chair of jury at Cannes. In order to celebrate these two historical honors at Cannes, jet tone releases the 6-in-1 limited edition of Happy Together: 1. Happy Together DVD; 2. behind the scene DVD; 3. remixed soundtrack CD; 4. Happy Together "reunion" double posters + postcards; 5. "love until the end" boxers; 6. the Uguasu waterfall lamp (as seen in the film)."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:34 PM | Comments (1)
May 17, 2006
A. O. Scott loved it: The Da Vinci Code
On opening day, the NY Times' A. O. Scott throws out the first bitch, checking out what's crummy on the Croisette and, mirabile dictu! It's The Da Vinci Code! "Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this—a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness—would have given The Da Vinci Code some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller. But of course, movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It's MurdochSpace: The Last Stand
After spending a half bil or so on an internet entity like MySpace, wouldn't you brand the heck out of your acquisition to promote a short shelf-life product like XIII: The Last Stand?
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)
Movie fans vs. sports fans: Cuban sez a lot the same
Landmark-Magnolia-Mavericks Megapreneur Mark Cuban a's some q's on the USA TODAY sports page: "Comparing movie fans to sports fans: "They are a lot the same. You may think you know what will get them excited, but you never really know. Putting together a movie is like putting together a team. You think you got all the right pieces and the right director, and you put it out there and it's not what you envisioned." (No mention of what movie Bubbles he might be exploding...)
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2006
DVD 5-4-3-2-1: Winter Passing, Funny Games, Duma, Modern Romance, The New World
Five new and recent DVD releases, from Adam Rapp, Michael Haneke, Carroll Ballard, Albert Brooks and Terrence Malick: Winter Passing, Funny Games, Duma, Modern Romance and a consideration of The New World.
5 Winter Passing
Zooey Deschanel, Zooey Deschanel, sis-boom-bah. What a hollow little not-quite movie the beguiling young actress finds herself slacking in. Winter Passing (*, Fox, $28), the directorial debut of playwright Adam Rapp, starts attractively in a recognizable Lower East Side of New York, lit by Terry Stacey (Friends With Money) in an authentic range of late autumn urban colors, but the focus all too quickly shifts from her character, Reese Holden (?!), a near-mute, aggrieved, passive-aggressive young actress not-quite-making her way in the city to Reese’s conflicts with her father back in Michigan, a delusional, elderly writer who no longer publishes, and clearly patterned after J. D. Salinger, such as also using mentions of his avowed penchants for seducing younger female pen pals. (Oh, Zooey, how could you?) As played by Ed Harris, the literary loon is, well, played by Ed Harris in a fright wig. Dad has a couple of enablers, including Will Ferrell as a mild version of, well, Will Ferrell with eyeliner. Pointlessness and rude parallels with real-life figures ensue. When you have Deschanel’s wide, alarmed yet jaded eyes going for you, why leave town? Especially when the character’s up for bouts of coke and rough fucking in the toilet? And what’s up with that weird mantle of monkeyed-with black hair in her eyes? As well as the excursion to the end of a rotting pier with the dinkiest of tabby kittens, which she believes will soon die a terrible death by feline leukemia, which she’s very upset about after drowning the fuzzy mite. I could’ve left after that inexplicable bit, as I’m certain any potential distributors did as well. With Amelia Warner, Amy Madigan, Rachel Dratch, Sam Bottoms, Anthony Rapp. The minor key score includes songs performed by Cat Power, Azure Ray, Low and My Morning Jacket. 98m.
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Funny Games
I’ve admired the films Michael Haneke’s made since Code Unknown, but never liked his early movies, several of which Kino’s just reissued. But if that’s what it took to get him from there to here… Here’s a humorless spot of spite I wrote when Funny Games (* ½, Kino, $30) was released in the US in Spring 1998: “For those who consider the Euro-art movie torture, a humorless, clinical, near-unwatchable high Euro-art movie about torture. German-born Austrian director-misanthrope Michael Haneke, who has said his earlier films were about "the experience of coolness," has become pathologically attached to the notion that violence in the world today is inexplicable yet the fault of anyone who dares watch its depiction. The dead-serious hauteur-auteur of movies such as Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance once again attacks the director’s favorite subject, violence as it is portrayed in the media. I truly despised Haneke's earlier films and hadn't any intentions of seeing more. He says his newest, about the inexplicable torture of a bourgeois family at their lakeside house by a pair of unfunny buffoons, is a study of "pain, a violation of others." (Their own games of guessing at the source of bits of classical music repertoire, is interrupted by what seems to be groaning heavy metal, but is in fact by John Zorn, a high-art maven of another stripe. Even Haneke's trash has to come from an elevated source.) Haneke goes on, "How do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?" By making vacuous, excruciating, piss-elegant and sadistic movies such as this and posing as a philosopher, that's how.” Extras: a new video interview with Haneke. 108m.
3
Duma
Like all of Carroll Ballard's handful of movies, Duma (***, Warner, $20) is solid, graceful, gracious filmmaking, an exquisitely shot and edited adventure between a South African schoolboy (Alex Michaeletos) and an orphaned cheetah he adopts, naming it Duma, despite the admonitions of his parents (Campbell Scott, Hope Davis)
that it would someday have to return to the wild. (Soon, he'll be lost with the cat, out in the wilds, and it will be a long way home, lessons will be learned, yet Duma is a complete delight.) An exchange from my extended interview with Ballard: “Another thing I have scribbled down here, "Animals?" Ballard laughs. “How the fuck did I get into this gig?” What's striking and admirable, it's not what you've done with animals, but animals and people within environments, but your attentiveness to details of place and space and light. “Yeah, to me, that's the most important elements, personally,” Ballard says. “Character and a world of its own, those are the things that are most important in any picture, that it takes you into a world of its own that is palpable in some way, that you can practically smell. The same thing with characters, they're not a stock, off-the-shelf item, they're unpredictable and ephemeral and interesting and unique.” DVD extras: extended scenes. 100m.
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Modern Romance
Albert Brooks’ 1981 dissection of American romantic foibles is minimalist in many ways, all to indelible effect. Modern Romance (****, Sony, $10) is an eccentric masterpiece. Who else ever wrote a break-up line like this: “This is a no-win situation. You know what a no-win situation is—Vietnam… this.” 93m. No extras, so here’s a link to Bill Zehme’s Playboy interview with the loquacious Brooks is here, and here’s an extract from the original press kit with Brooks talking about the pic.
1 The New World
“Come, spirit, help us sing the story of our land…”
These are the words of a nameless Indian princess, whom we know from histories as Pocahontas, murmured over shimmering water, at the opening of Terrence Malick’s seventeenth-century-set The New World (****, New Line, $28).
Few directors nowadays have such soaring ambition, or the means, to make such elevated movies that invoke myriad intellectual precursors, with Walt Whitman’s towering odes as only one example, yet also rooted in sensation, both physical and within the mind. The New World is ecstatic and generous and unforgettable.
Malick is an intellectual—younger, he lectured at MIT and published a book about Heidegger’s thought—but he seeks a different kind of knowledge in his movies, a hunger for transcendence, the things larger than man that make humanity larger. On one hand, The New World is about the great filmmaker’s absorption in the primal and the primeval, the green and the innocent, but its staggeringly beautiful images resonate. This “new” world is an old one that begins dying the first time the natives meet the English in the tall green grasses near shore. We know that the “naturals” will lose their “old world” so that ours might come, but that is story and not storytelling. As the explorer John Smith, Colin Farrell’s beautiful features have never been put to better use. Bearded and his liquid brown eyes always agleam, he is a quizzical observer, brimming with interior romantic fancies yet always somehow hesitant, filled with curiosity and longing for the princess. (“Love, shall we deny it when it visits us? Shall we deny what we are given?”)
While the last shot of The New World resembles that of Munich—how far do our actions fall from the tree?—the movie’s most narcotic and lasting beauty is its capturing of the face of Q’Orianka Kilcher, a 15-year-old non-actress (who givens an enraptured performance) whose all-American, part-Quechua features are caught in so many different ways by Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki that she is innocence, and woman and The New World, a twenty-first century embodiment of a forgotten seventeenth-century. (“Afraid of myself, he seems a God to me. What else is life but to be near you? Do they suspect? To be given to you, you to me?” Kilcher’s beauty is so otherworldly, and yet so palpably flesh, she could be from the moon, and the settlers could as well be moon explorers. Here are the first small steps, small for a man, irreversible for mankind. “We come not here to pillage and raid; we are here to establish a colony,” Christopher Plummer’s Captain Newport intones.
Malick worked in natural light with Lubezki (Sleepy Hollow, Y tu mama tambien) and second unit director-cinematographer Jörg Widmer (Amelie, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Pianist, Time of the Wolf), often carrying a camera on his shoulder, by some reports. Natural light?: There is a breathtakingly lyrical shot of a massive sliver of moon against black sky where the hard, static light of a distant star or planet slowly fades into its embrace.
But sound is as important as image, perhaps more so, to Malick: there is a moment where the princess sounds the word “wind” repeatedly in her head, and the words are slightly muted, and the sound of wind slightly elevated. It is a chill and a thrill of uncommon sophistication, but such gentle notes are sounded throughout: the very last shot has a quiet sound accompanying a gentle action, but there is also the gentlest sparkle of a wind chime as the image fades to black.
Much of the movie is scored to Mozart’s "Piano Concerto No.23" and an insistent, grand arpeggio from Wagner’s “Das Rheinhold”; I’m listening to an advance disk of James Horner’s score as I write, and hardly recognize a note of it. At whatever stage that choice was made, as well as to have nature sounds accompany the end credits rather than a new pop song, it’s a fine one. Wagner, of all people, is less bombastic than the soft-hearted Horner. The New World was scheduled for a Thanksgiving release, but Malick was afforded additional time to make further refinements for a Christmas slot. That version was previewed for movie reviewers and Oscar voters in December, and reportedly, prints had been struck for the first wave of its release. Malick, however, had more ideas. He continued editing, and in a rare case of giving a director his head, the studio, New Line, allowed a newer, shapelier version to come to pass. Despite its swelling, swirling beauty, I had reservations about the “Academy” version; it felt unfinished. I don’t think I have any reservations about this version, which would easily have been my best film of 2005 if it had been released, or even existed before the end of the year. Some of the changes are in pacing, the placement of images, the addition of scenes that depict failed attempts at industry that are reminiscent of the bell-casting sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. Reportedly, Malick had considered telling this tale for over twenty-five years, and now we have it, not a moment too soon. The New World, in this version, is the first great film of 2006, and like Malick’s images fixee—air, water, wind and the human face—it is essential.
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 15, 2006
Manhattan Tales: the WTC trailer (im Deutsch)
Via Filmmaker, UIP's German trailer for Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, in which the Son of New York demonstrates that he intends to own 9/11. Of course, there are other things to wonder about beyond the lyrical rendering of the shadow outline of a plummeting jet across the face of a boldly-colored hotel at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Namely, the Asian Man in the Kolchak-the-Night-Stalker hat and Hawaiian shirt! What coverup has kept us from knowing what part he played in the terrible events of that day? Rotten atmosphere casting or another reason to feel the fear? Tell us, Oliver. Tell us. A rough translation of the German slogan, "An diesem tag sah die welt das grauen swei manner sahen etwas anderes": "You'll Believe a Man Can Cry."
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 13, 2006
Groupthink: how Robert Greenwald sees his distrib model
Activist director Robert Greenwald is optimistic about social change as his doc WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price opens in the UK, he tells the Telegraph's Marc Lee. Most notable are his observations about his grassroots distribution model: "The film has achieved what it has [in leading WAL-MART to announce potential changes], says Greenwald, because of its connection to a growing social movement, one that its mould-breaking distribution tapped into. "That took a huge amount of effort... And it is not a model to make money. We had 750,000 people at 8,000 screenings, but they didn't pay nine or 10 dollars each to see the film: a church bought one copy and showed it to 300 people, a student dorm bought one copy and had 50 people see it. However, from the point of view of reaching people, it is absolutely great. Would I have preferred to see it go straight to TV? No, I wouldn't. When people see the film in a group, their mindset is different. There's going to be discussion afterwards, and, in some cases, they are going to take action." Reviewing the pic in the FT, Martin Hoyle writes: "Greenwald's method is to let the interviewees talk. Far from a bunch of disgruntled ex-workers (or Wal-Mart’s imaginative term “associates”), the flood of speakers ranges from small-town family firms bulldozed out of business by the leviathan, to Wal-Mart managers of 17 years’ standing...
The society that prides itself on private enterprise subsidises Wal-Mart to a whopping degree in medical care and food stamps for poorly paid employees. Judges have used words such as “corruption” and “lying” of apparent cover-ups. An activist ex-employee describes one manager as resenting “people like you”. She asked what he meant: A woman? Black? “Two out of two isn’t bad,” he laughed... Progress is a fine thing, but this is regression in everything but the naked profit motive." [A link to the movie's site here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
Baghdad Rorschach: Army decides HBO's E.R. too graphic
The NY Times' Edward Wyatt reports on a flip-flop by Army brass over Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill's HBO doc, Baghdad E.R., shot over two months at the 86th Combat Support Hospital,
"where the filmmakers were given broad access to follow doctors, nurses, medics and others as they treated soldiers wounded by roadside bombs and in combat. As one nurse, Specialist Saidet Lanier, says in the film: “This is hard-core, raw, uncut trauma. Day after day, every day.” A Monday night screening at the National Museum of American History in Washington will go on without the presence of a number of higher-ups who originally intended to attend." Even more important figures are cited, with Wyatt noting that "concerns about the content of the film, which includes footage of wounded soldiers undergoing surgery, an amputation and in some cases dying, have also been raised by the wives of top Army officers..." HBO doc boss Sheila Nevins, however, understands imagery: “Anything showing the grim realities of war is, in a sense, anti-war... In that way, the film is a sort of Rorschach test. You see in it what you bring to it.” [Baghdad E.R. premieres May 21; preview it here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)
Above the Southland: picturing a "terrorist"'s Tales
Frame-grabbing a futuristic Southland skyscape, taken from the Southland Tales website, which, closer to an eventual release of allegedly Homeland-grounded director Richard Kelly's second feature, may someday be coherent enough to grow into an enigma. Cool music, tho. [See entry below about the Cannes-bound problems Kelly claims.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:51 AM | Comments (0)
9/11, United 93 and hot sauce: a pilot takes a taste
Pilot and Salon columnist Patrick Smith writes about United 93's relative technical accuracy and notes something that's in frame for the barest amount of time: "United 93 succeeds where almost every other movie fails. For the record, I counted about 15 minor gaffes, ranging from poorly rendered air traffic control lingo to an errant shot of an Airbus A320 standing in as the United 757. 
But the reconstructions are, if not flawlessly spot-on, close enough to keep a known pedant like me from listing the bloopers here. Even the background chatter between pilots and air traffic controllers is, in many instances, taken verbatim from actual ATC recordings. The overall lack of miscues is doubtless owed to the use of actual controllers and air crew staff as cast members.. The most touching bit of realism may be the moment when, preparing to eat his breakfast in the cockpit, first officer LeRoy Homer, played by commercial pilot Gary Commock, removes a bottle of hot sauce from his flight kit. I smiled at that, familiar with the popularity of those little red bottles among fliers—a requisite flight bag item no less crucial than maps, charts and manuals."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2006
Hollywood thoughts: Barham by the Nile
David O. Selznick, out for a walk one night with Ben Hecht in the cinema-is-dead early 1950s, is reputed to have said, "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands." (Attributed to Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak's 1977 "The Fifties: The Way We Really Were.")
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
Anthony Lane loved it: M:i:III
In the current New Yorker, Anthony Lane's genteel shrill focuses solely on Mission: Impossible III, with a side note on William Shawn at the movies. Speaking of co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lane puts some inside baseball down the middle: "To be honest, I prefer the Hoffman of M:i:III to the Oscar winner of Capote. The role of Owen Davian, though underwritten, is more of a piece and less of a turn than his chirruping Truman Capote. Say what you like about Davian; he may sell dirty bombs to Middle Eastern regimes and torture an American female agent, but at least he doesn’t drag William Shawn along to watch." Ouch! Give that man a saucer of warm milk!
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Banking on indie? Cross that New Bridge when you get there
Nikki Finke at LA Weekly's Deadline Hollywood has a few notes about a new "indie" film fund: "Merrill Lynch's Global Asset Based Finance Group and Rizvi Traverse Management have formed New Bridge Film Capital, a Los Angeles-based film financing company to provide gap capital to independent producers..." Writes finke: " These are the same two companies that poured $100 million into ICM to finance an expansion of the talent agency's business." ICM's Jeff Berg has been a Rizvi advisor in the past, she reports, as well as that "Rizvi's money management company and Merrill Lynch each ponied up $20 mil.... New Bridge will be run by two showbiz veterans: the executive director will be Diane Stidham, formerly exec director of the global investment bank ABN Amro, and the director will be Danny Mandel, formerly of local Union Bank." Many revenue streams make for an expected river, she suggests: "In this day and age, with so many film revenue streams, there's much better clarity on anticipated returns from indie films," an insider explained. "As a consequence, New Bridge will be aimed at the independent market and its most promising films where recent performance is very high."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)
Silent Whit Stillman: I have never met a billionaire I didn't like
Whit Stillman, last on screen with Last Days of Disco [pictured] and last heard from for an unproduced Western and an adaptation of the novel "Red Azalea," gets a little bit of Sterling anatomizing the snail's pace of his writing-directing career to the Guardian: "My idea for the new millennium had been to use competing scripts, with their differing deadlines and urgencies, to create the stop-start pattern I found so helpful in my day-job period." A script set in the Jamaican music scene 
"would alternate with other ideas to be kept under wraps. Finally, just in the last few weeks, that script has seemed to take its proper form - heartfelt apologies to any producer I rushed a draft to last winter. Any script with a date prior to May 12 2006 - please discard. So I now have a project to take to Cannes, and large or small parts of others in the trunk. But I will still be keeping my eyes open for the right day job. The other evening in Mayfair, I passed a high-end yacht brokerage - they were having a glass of champagne with clients - and that seemed like very good work for a slow screenwriter. Cannes itself has its share of enormous yachts - someone must be helping the very rich buy, sell or charter them." A career shift? "And, based there, one wouldn't have to look for accommodation when the festival rolls around. When I go next week I'll look into it. I have never met a billionaire I didn't like."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)
Celebrating In America: "What does living mean?"
Michael Eigen's new book "Lust," after his "Estacy" and "Rage," is another slim, unsettling commonplace book of the psychological and the literary, much in the style of Adam Philip's slim, epigrammatic expulsions like "Monogamy" and "Going Sane." Late in the book, Eigen has a celebratory passage about Jim Sheridan's last great fillum: "The movie In America has one sex scene, a beautiful sex scene," Eigen writes. "The husband/father, blindfolded, chases his children, two daughters. A game they love. He thinks of his dead son and forces himself to go on, although there is a hole in his being... His wife notes that he does not chase her, he does not find her... 
The play of desire and its lack, making up for its lack... The atmosphere heightens. Sexual arousal hinges on layers of unconscious meaning. Blind chase, energy, a vulnerable desperation running through childhood quickens desire. She sends her daughters to get ice cream at the nearby store called Heaven. They know what she means. Her husband is the last to know. While he blindly chases, she disrobes... [T]he heavens storm. Lightning, pouring rain, thunderous sound... The movie sets the challenge of linking life with death, the impossible with the real. Can one grown into living? Can one survive life—the shock of death? How? ... What does living mean?" ["Lust," Michael Eigen, Wesleyan, $16.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
Homeland Tales: Southland director grounded from Cannes travel for "terrorist" suspicions? [UPDATED]
"What the hell?" shouldn't trip off the tongue so readily, so often. With the headlines this morning about the government allegedly getting telco cooperation to spy on tens of millions of American citizens' phone calls, this from SF Chronicle's Daily Dish is an astonishment. Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, about to debut his soph feature, Southland Tales at Cannes is on the no-fly list. 
Canny promo or topical paranoia? Kelly will likely miss Cannes "because his passport is being reviewed by the U.S. government. Homeland Security is investigating 31-year-old Kelly, reportedly because there is a James Kelly on the terrorist watch list... Kelly has contacted a U.S. senator and has recruited his mother to hunt out documents to help him prove his American citizenship. The Virginia-born writer-director fears the issue could be connected to the plot of his new movie, which is in part about security measures taken by the U.S. government following Sept. 11... "The paranoid conspiracy freak inside me is starting to think this has something to do with the film." UPDATE: The Guardian has a bit more this morning: "Sources suggest that the film-maker has been confused with another man, "James Kelly", who is on the terrorist watch list. Kelly's full name is James Richard Kelly. "Born in Virginia, the son of a NASA technician... [h]is latest picture, Southland Tales, is set in a dystopian Los Angeles paralysed by economic and environmental collapse... [T]he film is implicitly concerned with security measures taken by the US government after the events of September 11, 2001."
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 11, 2006
New releases: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Mission: Impossible III, Interkosmos, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
This week: capsules for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, M:I III, The Proposition, Interkosmos, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, and Mountain Patrol: Kekexili.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (****) Lazarescu, Dante Remus Lazarescu, wakes with a bellyache. Or is it something at his temples? Or the cheap liquor that makes the close, dusty, newspaper-piled place with a trio of sleepy, bedraggled cats underfoot, a tolerable home for the 63-year-old man whose family has moved far away? Or simple disorientation?
Cristi Puiu’s brilliant comedy is 152 minutes of deceptively low-key shaggy-dogginess that earns the now-disfavored encomium of “humanist.” As Mr. Lazarescu descends into a nightlong nightmare of Bucharest’s health care, Puiu’s influences shine; the conversational ease of Rohmer is matched by simple allegory-making like Kieslowski. (Puiu says this is the first of six parables, and based on “Love thy neighbor”). There’s much more here than the common comparison to the rigorous documentary style of Frederick Wiseman. Mr. Lazarescu wears a soiled, striped shirt like a soccer ref, or a prisoner. And “Yes, I drink, like any other man,” he tells one of the many faces that peer into his, accusing him of being a beat-down old drunk. (He responds always with disgruntled melancholy.) Life and its complications persist all around, in the byplay and frustration and sarcasm and hope of the various health-care not-providers. This is a movie about life and death and breath and gallows humor, and there’s a bit of Mike Leigh favorite Timothy Spall to the long-suffering of Ion Fiscuteanu’s wonderful performance. One nurse is Mr. Lazarescu’s escort, ferrying him to the dawn that may not come. But many of the other healthcare workers are impatient women, at first resembling a flight of noble, curative female angels, but exhaustion and a refusal to be patronized leads them all to forget their role. But the sudden ending is wondrous and mysterious: the word “handsome” has seldom been as sweet and sincere-sounding. 153m.
Mission: Impossible III (**) “There's a point where bold becomes stupid,” a character burbles in Mission: Impossible III’s quippy script, but there’s also a point that movies become television. Clocking in at a painless 125 minutes (with credits), teevee auteur J. J. Abrams (Regarding Henry, “Alias,” “Lost”), collaborating with The Island screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, takes the reins of Paramount/Cruise/Wagner’s decamillion dollar franchise and makes safe, loud, television-scaled thrills while adding an uncommon amount of girlie stuff (such as casting “Felicity”’s Keri Russell as a trainee mentored by Cruise and some sweetie-pie romantic stuff). 
Competent but close-up heavy—big screen doesn’t have to mean bigger close-ups, J.—M:I-3, or however you’re supposed to acronym it, is classy junk food, but in such tight confines, you sense less the topography of action setpieces than Keri Russell’s hair, Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s lips, Cruise’s asexual, cashmere-clad catalog-model asexual steeliness and Ving Rhames’ velvet-voiced black-sidekick-ness. (There are far too many long-lens swish-pans and slam-zooms, too.) Okay, is this witty, if someone’s described as being “like a goddamn invisible man. Wells, not Ellison, if you want to be cute again… Please don’t interrupt me when I’m asking rhetorical questions"? (Sounds glib to me.) The overlapping double-triple-crosses involve topical intrigues: there’s a pretty serious example of the “extraordinary rendition” of an apparent terrorist and a lot of the damage, collateral and otherwise, in Germany, Virginia, Rome and Shanghai, are big bad terrorist daydreams with a soupcon of fem-jeop. One strange image: a plume of black smoke over Vatican City, ordinarily signaling that a pope has not been chosen yet, of a detonated Lamborghini. And yes, Cruise does have a scene where he dons a mask to attain the identity of someone else. Why would he stop now? Michael Giacchino’s (The Incredibles) score is good, seeming at a couple of moments to partake simultaneously of Lalo Schifrin and Vince Guaraldi’s music for “Peanuts.” (Schifrin’s theme is reinterpreted under the opening credits by Kanye West.) With Michelle Monaghan, Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup, Maggie Q and her long legs, a very funny Simon Pegg, and, oh, in the role of an omniscient mega-terrorist, someone who looks a lot like Philip Seymour Hoffman, if Philip Seymour Hoffman couldn’t be bothered to give a performance. Somehow this icy impersonator muffs even the line, “I’m gonna make her bleed and cry and call out your name.” 125m.
Interkosmos (***1/2) Chicagoan Jim Finn’s first feature film, Interkosmos, which opened the New York Underground Film Festival, is the sort of no-budget experimental lark that shouldn’t work at all, but it’s a lovely thing indeed, a weird original, of 16mm faux-documentary-cum-musical about an apocryphal 1970s Soviet program to train and indoctrinate non-socialist cosmonauts. 
Unexpected poetry seeps from its willful anachronism. The human figurines in the imaginatively mocked-up footage are convincing physical types sent through routines of a strange utopia that never was. The lovely, low-key score by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke includes several wonderfully goofy musical numbers. Minimalist yet expressive, it’s a real original. Among the eruptions of lilting peculiarity is an underwater battle between slight, great-eyed Nandini Khaund (as the first female Indian cosmonaut) and a large, bright, coiling snake. With Goran Milos, Dean Dematteis, Ruediger Van, Den Boom, Bettina Richards, an animated East German guinea pig, and Finn. 71m.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (***) Seventy-five-year-old Joan Plowright, widow of Laurence Olivier, 
is the solid center of Dan Ireland’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, in which an elderly widow who moves to London to shabby digs and soon finds herself attended by both a man her owan age (Robert Lang) and one who is much younger (Rupert Friend), who aims to be a writer. (Chat ensues.) Seattle International Film Festival co-founder Ireland’s filmmaking career has zagged more than zigged since his 1996 directorial debut, The Whole Wide World, which was a fine period vehicle for performances by Renee Zellweger and Vincent D’Onofrio. (His 1999 The Velocity of Gary is one of the saddest misfires I’ve ever sat through.) His 2002 Passionada, a middle-aged romance about a besorrowed Portuguese woman, suggests the direction he’s chosen to go here: observant miniaturism. There are sentimental passages, Brief Encounter is invoked, there are a few low jokes, and there are budgetary constraints to this $750,000 feature that lead to distracting confusions of era in manners and ambitions—while modern-day, it’s based on a novel by the late Elizabeth Taylor, written in the 1971 and set in the 1950s. But there are also lingering, trenchant moments that neatly illustrate the varieties of loneliness. It’s also resolutely a film about growing contentedly old. With Anna Massey, Zoe Tapper, Claire Higgins. 108m.
Mountain Patrol: Kekexili (2004, ***1/2) Like a an Anthony Mann Western for both its vast haunting vistas and its elegiac ambiguity, 
writer-director Lu Chuan's Mountain Patrol: Kekexili (2004) is a chase thriller that follows a photojournalist on a couple of weeks of traveling with a band of volunteer wardens charged with preventing antelope poaching in the remote reaches of mountainous Tibet, three miles above sea level. Man and nature are equally severe in this telling: morally gripping, quietly contemplative, this is sorrowful, iconic, even masterful filmmaking. (The quicksand scene gave me a couple of bad dreams.) Shot by Cao Yu. In Mandarin and Tibetan. 95m.
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)