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July 31, 2006
Taking MPAA shots: has This Film is Not Yet Rated inoculated its interviewees?
So how on earth did Kevin Smith get that R rating on a single pass from the notoriously dodgy and inconsistent MPAA, considering that they warn us that it's filled with "pervasive sexual and crude content including aberrant sexuality, strong language and some drug material"? (As Smith put it to me, "When the dust settled, I was just like... Are they fucking nuts? Did they see the same movie?") 
Kirby Dick has suggested that the filmmakers he interviewed for This Film Is Not Yet Rated could be inoculated from future ratings battles with a press-shy MPAA. Smith was notably harsh toward ratings board chair Joan Graves in Dick's pic; other frank interviewees include John Waters, Matt Stone, Kimberly Peirce, Atom Egoyan [pictured], Darren Aronofsky, Mary Harron and distributor Bingham Ray. Over at Filmmaker, Anthony Kaufman gets Dick to expand on this notion. As for his own future dealings with the board, the filmmaker says "I think there is a clever construction of the film: since it is about the MPAA, I think it’s very unlikely that they would come after me or IFC because they’re already portrayed negatively in the film and they would be portrayed in the press even more negatively. The amount of publicity around the film would double. The MPAA is very savvy in the way that it’s dealt with its public relations... If I submit a film for a rating, I’m certain some of them might harbor those feelings towards me. But on the other hand, I think, myself, and all the filmmakers who appear in the film, we’re inoculated in a way, because the press will pay attention, particularly, if my film goes in front of the rating board. The last thing that the MPAA wants to do is bring attention to the process. It wants to operate under the radar as much as possible. I don’t think they’d cut me any breaks, but I don’t think they’d be exceedingly harsh on my films." There's valuable material about the film's application of Fair Use in the interview, and in a piece on the film's post-production, Elina Shatkin describes another rights issue. "The third act also contains the film's most clever visual trick. Dick recorded his initial phone conversation with Joan Graves, chair of the MPAA's ratings board. For subsequent conversations, Graves did not give her consent to have her side of the conversation recorded. Dick's side of the calls were filmed, however, so Dick had voiceover actors re-enact Graves' side of the calls. The final image is a split-screen, with the actual video footage of Dick talking on the phone on one side and a Waking Life-style animated version of "Joan Graves" on the other."
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother: Weegee's noir genius
"Weegee, the great tabloid photographer... took a remarkable picture of Veronica Lake. The legendary movie star and pinup model is shot from behind, so only her fur-coat-covered back and 
neatly coiffed hair can be seen. The picture’s real focus is a group of fans staring at her, their faces unsmiling, and more than a little menacing, writes Adam Cohen in a passable NY Times thumbsucker on the occasion of the ICP's “Unknown Weegee”exhibition. "Weegee’s classic film-noir style is represented in black-and-white pictures of blanket-draped corpses on sidewalks, and more elegantly chilling fare, like the picture of a fashionable young woman covering her face with black-gloved hands, entitled “Irma Twiss Epstein, Nurse Accused of Killing Baby.” While Cohen is most intrigued by "crowd shots... that capture people on the street gazing too intently at celebrities, accidents and crime scenes." But he also has fun littering his piece with Weegee's tabloid titles: “This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother"; “Mrs. Anna Sheehan ... Accused as Murderess"; “Cop Who Looks Like Gary Cooper Books Blind Man for Murder”; “Woman Signing Autographs in Car”; “Ermine-Wrapped Patron Caught in Gambling Den”; and “Virginia Ornmark, Gun Girl." [Extended citations of Neil Postman's pessimism at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2006
He's such a clean old man: M. Night and Hard Day's
Still haven't read Michael Bamberger's mash note to the M. Night magic,
The Man Who Heard Voices, Or, How M Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale," but here's another quotation that's a real comic conniption: 
"Describing the director’s sense of purpose as he wrote the script for Lady in the Water, Bamberger says Shyamalan felt that: “If it came together, it would be like Dylan and Clapton and Springsteen and Eminem and Kanye West and Miles Davis and Bonnie Raitt and Joan Armatrading and Jerry Garcia and every musician you’ve ever loved joining George Harrison and belting out the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night at the same time.” [Come together, right now.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2006
Movie City Indie returns Friday
Deadlines, ongoing WiFi weirdness, rioting routers, deadlines, talking to Oliver Stone and seeing Miami Vice and a half dozen other movies are keeping Indie down a little longer... CURSES!
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:28 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2006
Men behaving gladly: prankish Lady in the Water, puckish Kevin Smith
Over at Movie City News, you'll find my take on Lady in the Water; I'll post some thoughts about Chris Doyle's cinematography later. Plus: over 6,500 words with Kevin Smith on the release of Clerks II, 
conducted a few weeks before the recent kerfuffle begun by that noted, timeless lover of film and its possibilities, Joel "Time to go!" Siegel. Our garrulous conversation contains profanity, natch; explicit sexual language and third act spoilers, as well as Smith's insights into the Weinstein Company's alliance with MGM. "Harvey calls up and goes, "I've got good news, man. We can do this MGM deal and we'll see a massive pay cable sale that we were never going to see on this movie." I was like, "Does that make you happy?" 'Cos me, I don't give a fuck. I don't watch movies on HBO or any of those things anymore. I buy DVDs. I was like, "Does it make you happy?" He's like, "Yeah, it means more backend." I was like, "Fine, good for you." And we hung up and then I thought about it. I was like, wait a second, MGM might be signatories to the MPAA. So I called him back. I was like, "Harvey, is MGM a signatory to the MPAA?" And he's like, "I dunno. We'll have to look into that." I was like, "Aw fuck, it's coming." And what was coming —and he never flat out said, "You must get an R"—but he said, 
"I'm telling you Kevin, you're leaving a lot of money on the table for an unrated film. This pay cable deal yields a lot.... So me and Mosier started really biting our fingernails, 'cos it was like, fuck, sooner or later, this is going to go from a friendly persuasion to him going like, "I looked at your contract and you have to deliver an R." ... The MPAA is never that helpful in terms of the things they find problematic. They don't tell you, "If you cut four seconds of this, we'll give you an R." They would say something like, "You might want to look at the donkey show." Well, what part of the donkey show? Y'know? It's like nine minutes! ... 
Finally we could delay it no longer, we're going to have to have this MPAA screening. So we submitted it to the MPAA, and I had my arguments ready to go, like all the movies I could cite, which they don't want you to cite in the appeals process, but I would fuckin' blurt 'em out anyway. All the movies that have gotten an R. Bachelor Party had a donkey show, they got an R. In Brokeback Mountain, fuckin' Heath Ledger spits in his hand, that got an R. Why can't we have the donkey dude spit in his hand in our movie? I was ready for the holy war of all time. The massive fuckin' jihad against the MPAA." [So much more at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)
Mann talks to Hiscock: Michael and John on Vice
John Hiscock gets some grit from Michael Mann in the Telegraph: "The 63-year-old writer, director and producer... freely acknowledges that he demands total control over his films, and his perfectionism is legendary: 
it is said that on the set of Miami Vice he made one actor walk through a doorway 17 times before he was satisfied. "Sometimes I go longer than 17 takes... It's about getting what you really need and not wasting time on stuff that doesn't count; I spend time on things that do count and don't stop until I get them. When I go out to make a movie, I go out to make a movie. That involves producing it, directing it, writing it and if I am not writing it, I'm rewriting it. I operate the cameras a lot, too. It's all the same function - making a movie."
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)
Albert Maysles greying the Gardens
At indieWIRE, Johnny Leahan has a crackerjack chat with Albert Maysles as a sequel to Grey Gardens is released in New York City. "[T]hat is often a question people ask about your documentaries: Are you exploiting your subject? "Well, there are two things that you ought to avoid... exploiting and being so protective that you're overdoing the project and don't allow the person to really come through. So you have to be very discreet... I mean, reality shows. 
Who needs all that profanity? Come on. There's a film that I'm doing now [In Transit] about people on trains. And it's not just interviewing a person - it's going to be in half a dozen different countries, different cultures. I met a woman at the train that was pulling out of Pittsburgh and I stopped filming her because she was getting nervous... I find out that the reason she was on the train was that when she was three years old, her parents broke up in an ugly divorce. Her father got custodianship, and she would never see her mother again. Why is she on the train? The night before, she got a call from a woman in Philadelphia. "Get on the next train, I'll be waiting here at the station." So that's when I got off the train with her and filmed the encounter. It turns out the mother finally puts her head over her daughter's shoulder, cries, and says she's gorgeous."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2006
Giving quote: Lee Daniels on a real person
As astringent quotes go this week, producer-turned-director Lee Daniels (Monster's Ball, The Woodsman tops anything out of the mouth of M. Night Shyamalan or Kevin Smith. 
Reports Lola Ogunnaike in the New York Times, with his directorial debut, Shadowboxer, Daniels' "decision to cast Mo’Nique, the proudly plus-size comedian, was met with raised eyebrows all around. Her character, a crack addict, was originally written for an anorexic white woman in her early 20’s who dates a handsome young doctor. Casting Mo’Nique, he said, prompted the film’s writer to remove his name from the credits. Mr. Daniels remained unrepentant. “My sister was an obese crack addict... She had a chicken wing in one hand and crack pipe in the other, and she had the finest white men lined up waiting for her. This is a real person to me.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2006
The cricket ticket: Joel Siegel evokes a Kael tale; ALSO: Foundas' Clerks II ejection (wiith love to come)
On the occasion of "Good Morning America!" class clown Joel Siegel's epic fissy-hit and heated exit after taking v., v. seriously a bit of bawd about a donkey show at a screening of Kevin Smith's Clerks II, 
publicist-turned-blogger Reid Rosefelt shares a couple of cricket anecdotes. "On Opie and Anthony's radio show, Siegel was defiant. He adamantly refused to say that his action was unprofessional. He said he wished more critics would walk out of films." Writes Reid, "Not only don't I think critics should raise a fuss at a screening, 
I think they have to watch the whole thing. Films often get better as they go along. One should never make a judgment until you see it all... Watching bad movies is very taxing, but that's the film critic's job." A story about NY Post's late Archer Winsten and a coughing fit is accompanied by a Pauline Kael tale. She "was famous among publicists for her sighing. If something happened in a film not up to her critical standards, you could hear that familiar oooohh of disgust from the last row. Whenever we had a budget, we dealt with this by giving Pauline her own screening..." [Punchline at the link.] MEANWHILE, LA Weekly's Scott Foundas has an open letter to the pride of New Jersey: "Tiffs between critics and the subjects of their criticism are nothing new: 30-odd years ago, the actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of spaghetti on the head of then–New York magazine theater critic John Simon after enduring one of his famously harsh and personal missives," Foundas writes for a spot of history before his own experience. "[I]magine my surprise when I took my seat at a press screening of Clerks II last Monday morning, only to be tapped on the shoulder by a publicist and kindly, albeit firmly, asked to leave... After some further reflection on your part, and a few diplomatic words of intervention by our mutual friend “Fiji” John Pierson, we kissed and made up—in a strictly heterosexual way, of course—and, by Tuesday morning, I was finally sitting down to watch Clerks II. But perhaps you’ve guessed, Kevin, that I still entered that screening room with considerable trepidation, not for fear of ejection (this time, I was the only one there), but because it’s true that I haven’t cared for your last couple of pictures, and I wondered if a sequel to the no-budget gem that first put you on the map would mark a return to form or merely prove that you really can’t go home again..." [A little more excerpted below.]
"Clerks II is about the end of something — a slacker Iceman Cometh in a drive-thru Harry Hope’s. But it’s above all a romance, and the dialogue in the scenes between Dante and Becky, as you slowly reveal to us the depths of their relationship, is tender and wise in the way of Chasing Amy. Watching the film, I was reminded that, for all your outward irreverence, you’re a big old softie at heart... [Y]ou stage Dante and Becky’s climactic heart-to-heart against the backdrop of a male-on-male bestiality show, and I can’t think of many other filmmakers who could pull that off. (Actually, I’m not sure that you pull it off, but you certainly come closer than most.)" And Foundas' kicker? "The grandest romance in Clerks II, however, is reserved for Dante and Randal themselves, and if the latter’s third-act admission of heterosexual man-love will doubtless strike some as a self-conscious retread over Banky-Holden territory, I personally found it more affecting than anything in Brokeback Mountain." [More neat observation at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2006
Snakes and crickets: establishing the food chain
Variety reports crickets won't even get standby for Snakes on a Plane. Dave McNary writes: "Taking the route employed by many genre films, New Line has decided to avoid any potentially buzz-killing pre-release reviews... "Snakes," which has developed a surprisingly high interest level on the Internet in the past year, will launch without press screenings prior to its first late-evening showings on Aug. 17. The pic, starring Samuel L. Jackson, will open at 2,500-plus [screens]... "Understanding that [fans] would be the driving force behind the film, we decided early on they should be the first to see it," McNary quotes New Line. "They will have the opportunity on Thursday evening, Aug. 17, at 10 p.m. shows across the country. We are not planning any advance media or promotional screenings prior to that."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
Winter Soldier's latest warm reception
The powerful post-Vietnam doc Winter Soldier, a raw 1972 assembly of testimony from soldiers about the facts of the acts of war they'd seen, has won a prize for video rediscovery, the Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards in Bologna, Italy. Winter Soldier was released this summer by the vital Milestone/Milliarium Zero label, which, they write, is "proud to share the Best Rediscovery Award for its very first release." Cites the jury, "For the best rediscoveries, we want to single out three Finnish melodramas from the 30s and 40s directed by Teuvo Tulio, released by the Finnish Film Archive-an example of remarkable films made over 60 years ago and never before seen abroad-as well as the resurrections of exceptional, collectively made documentaries which are also precious documents: Winter Soldier from Milestone Video in the U.S. and Les Groupes Medvedkine from Editions Montparnasse in France." [Complete list and jury follows.]
The Jury was Peter von Bagh (Artistic Director of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival), Alain Bergala (cinema critic), Mark McElhatten (independent Film and Video Curator and Film Archivist), Paolo Mereghetti (cinema critic) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (cinema critic).
Best Rediscovery (ex-aequo)
LES GROUPES MEDVEDKINE (Francia, 1967-1974) - 2 Dvd+booklet
Editions Montparnasse (Francia)
WINTER SOLDIER (USA, 1972)
Milestone/Milliarium Zero (Usa)
TEUVO TULIO: Laulu Tulipunaisesta Kukasta (1938, Finlandia)
Unelma Karjamajalla (1940, Finlandia)
Sellaisena Kuin sinä Minut Halusit (1944, Finlandia)
Finnish Film Archive (Finlandia)
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2006
Lurks II: when Caro Met Smith again
ChiTrib's pop blogger, Marc Caro, gets Kevin Smith to talk about his relationship with reviews and movie crickets, and, of course, with Marc Caro. Producer's rep and author John Pierson "recalls that after Clerks came out, 
[he] bought a laminator. "He would save all his reviews and laminate them," Pierson says. Makes sense. Newsprint turns yellow, after all. Now, of course, everything's online, so when Pierson asked him the other day whether he still uses the laminator, he was surprised that Smith answered in the affirmative. "I said, 'Are you telling me you laminate [stuff] you print out on your own printer?' " Pierson recalls. "He said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'That's sick.'" The day that Smith's inside-joke-filled farce Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back came out in 2001, he actually posted on his Web site a rundown of every single review in the country—the star rating (if there was one) and his own comment. When he got to "1 1/2 stars, Chicago Tribune," he wrote, "Lose my e-mail, Caro." Almost three years later, when I e-mailed him for comment for a news story I was writing—as I occasionally used to do before my review—he responded by asking if I'd first take back my Jay and Silent Bob review. My response was that now he knew that my positive reviews, such as of Chasing Amy, weren't just snow jobs. No dice. No comment."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2006
Robin Wood on Claire Denis: come with me and we'll play a game
Elder cricket Robin Wood makes a rare apparition in Film International, contributing an essay on the work of Claire Denis, in a piece called "Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous." Here's Wood's keen, apt way of describing how her films work: "It is a part of her great distinction that her films (and especially I Can’t Sleep, arguably her masterpiece to date) demand intense and continuous mental activity from the spectator: 
we are not to miss a single detail or to pass over a gesture or facial expression, even if it is shown in long shot within an ensemble, with no ‘helpful’ underlining and no ‘spelling out’ in dialogue. It is the particular distinction of Denis’ cinema that sets it apart from—almost, indeed, in opposition to—the work of many of our most celebrated ‘arthouse’ directors: Bergman, for example, or Fellini or Antonioni. Their films are rooted in autobiography—not necessarily in any literal sense, but in terms of personal introspection—whereas Denis left autobiography behind with Chocolat, and even that film is notable for its poise and critical distance, its objectivity. Where Bergman or Fellini seems to be saying to us ‘Come with me and I’ll tell you my secrets, share my experiences—how I feel about things, my thoughts about existence’, 
Denis issues a very different invitation to the spectator: ‘Come with me and we’ll play a game, albeit a serious one. Let’s see how much you can notice in what I decide to show you, how you interpret what you see and hear, what connections you can make, how much can be explained and how much remains mysterious and uncertain, as so much in our lives remains unclear. I’ll allow you a certain leeway of interpretation, because I don’t always understand everything myself, not even my own creations, though I’ll be as precise as possible...’ [Via GreenCine.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
When Caveh [Zahedi] met Bruce (Conner) (who didn't meet Louise [Brooks])
This frame grab makes me intensely happy, and artist/experimental filmmaking great Bruce Conner has to be the coolest 72-year-old of the week: Conner still makes art (often under a variety of pseudonyms and heteronyms) and Caveh Zahedi reports on the briefest of 
encounters (with a snip of video) from Conner introducing a show of Pabst's Pandora's Box: "[T]he main reason I went was because experimental film legend Bruce Conner was introducing the film... When I was in college, I spent two full days at Anthology Film Archives in New York watching their entire library of canonical experimental films... [T]hey were showing the entire library to a film scholar who was writing a book... and they let me sit in... It was just me and this guy in a darkened room for two days, watching one experimental classic after another." Along withJoseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, Zahedi was struck by Conner's Report. "Both of these films sent me in a whole new direction in my filmmaking. Along with the work of Godard and, later, Ed Pincus, these were probably my biggest cinematic influences..." In the tiny clip [pictured], Conner talks about he and Brooks being from Wichita and "the story of their almost meeting." Stills from Conner's terrific work and more information here; Kristine McKenna's loving 1990 LA Times profile, ""Bruce Conner in the Cultural Breach," offers this vital passage: "Conner's last burst of intense art activity came in 1978 when he became involved in the San Francisco punk scene as a staff photographer for fanzine Search and Destroy. A corrosive aesthetic of outraged idealism that Conner had anticipated by decades, punk was tailor-made to his sensibility, and he spent most of 1978 at a punk club called the Mabuhay. "I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay... During that year I had a press card so I got in free, and I'd go four or five nights a week. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock 'n' roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that. Many of the punk pictures look carefully composed, but 
I didn't futz around with the images after I shot them, and if they didn't work out perfectly I threw them away... A lot of people seem to feel that these photographs have nothing to do with the rest of my work, but if I hadn't done the collages and assemblage I never could've spontaneously composed these photographs as I did. But, people's reluctance to accept this work as fine art is very much in keeping with art world thinking. Being an artist is like being a medieval craftsman... you're expected to do one thing only, and many artists function like someone producing a line of cars.
They stick with one style, and while next year's model will be a bit different, it won't differ too much from the original prototype. But I couldn't conceive of restricting myself to one medium because the medium dictates how you see things. A sculptor, for instance, sees the world in terms of three-dimensional forms. This is one of the limitations of consciousness, and my way of getting around it was to develop different media almost as if I were another artist. This confused a lot of people, and they couldn't see any connection between the various bodies of work I've done. For me, however, there's a clear relationship between all these forms. I used to be concerned that people didn't understand my work as I did, and I worked hard to land a major museum exhibition in hopes that would clarify things a bit. But I found museum people to be so bound by the requirements of curatorship that they couldn't deal with my work. Their attitude is: 'We want to show every last assemblage you did before 1964 and maybe we'll put in a few drawings, but we're not interested in the rest of your work.'"
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2006
An Oscar Darkly: disqualifying Linklater's chances?
FilmForce has posted the opening 24 minutes of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly along with other stuff about the movie; if memory serves, any excerpt over eight minutes online disqualifies a picture from Oscar consideration. Who's got the goods on this future crime?
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2006
Scoring at 80: maestro Morricone rooks a journo
In the Guardian, Will Hodgkinson can't tell if Ennio Morricone is having him on in a crisp little interview: 
"Morricone remains prolific. He spends most days writing at his Rome apartment. He takes a month off each summer but ends up composing anyway, working for an hour or so every morning. "When I do have free time my concern is: will I ever be able to write again? But this is normal. There is a tenor singer I knew who used to wake up every morning convinced he no longer had a voice. So I keep going because the function fuels the organ; the work creates the work." ... It's taken a while for me to realise that this haughty old man, this Caesar of film music, is having a sly laugh at the expense of the rather earnest foreign journalist. I ask him if he has any unrealised ambitions. He almost smiles. "Of course. I would like to be the chess world champion. But perhaps I will have to wait until I'm reborn for that."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
An anniversary darkly: Ingmar Bergman is 88 today
Ingmar Bergman was born in 1918 on this day. The website devoted to his archives, "Ingmar Bergman Face to Face" has been adding more material in English, including a page of links to his writing and a handy guide to personal demonology.
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2006
Despite the heat it will be all right: Indie recommends
No time for posting today, but for more summertime heat in the meantime, sample Joe Swanberg's NSFW Young American Bodies serial from Nerve.com here. [Production still by Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2006
I'm jus' sayin': the MPAA on Clerks II
Pretty much sums it up: Clerks II is rated R for “pervasive sexual and crude content including aberrant sexuality, strong language and some drug material.” [Look for a long Kevin Smith interview, linked here early next week.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2006
Indie's deconstructing until Wednesday...
Deadlines and travel and screenings and interviews... And that sun's kind of nice out there.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2006
Centering WTC: revenge of Ollie's expropriationist
The New York Times' Felicia R. Lee catches up with the latest development in the story of Chris Moukarbel, the artist sued for producing a $1,000 video out of the screenplay for World Trade Center. [Movie City Indie was cited in the complaint for earlier coverage.] 
The new bit o' criticism sounds like a more fascinating piece of work than the earlier appropriation: "This one was created from film shot in the process of making the video that led to the lawsuit.... After a temporary restraining order was placed on the distribution and showing of his video (part of a thesis project for his Master of Fine Arts at Yale), Mr. Moukarbel went ahead and produced another for Wallspace [Gallery in New York]. For his new 13-minute video, he used film of the two actors in the first video while they were waiting for direction and getting into character. It has no dialogue except for the banter between the actors and off-camera direction from Mr. Moukarbel. Mr. Moukarbel, 28, who graduated from Yale in May, said his new video was intended to capture the art of performance and to serve as commentary on his plight. "I had to put together a project to reflect on the old project but also stand in its own right," he said.... Spokesmen for Paramount could not be reached for comment yesterday."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2006
New and recent releases: The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; Superman Returns; The Devil Wears Prada; The Road to Guantanamo; Strangers With Candy and The War Tapes.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (**)
GOTTA LOVE THE JOKE ABOUT THE UNDEAD MONKEY. Gotta be peeved that Keith Richards doesn’t show up as Jack Sparrow’s dad until the third installment, months down the road. Mr. John Depp also does wonders with the line, 
“I feel sullied and unusual.” Yet, as a continuation of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl, with most of the crew and cast intact, Dead Man’s Chest feels both too much and too little. While I really, really liked Gore Verbinski’s goofy, erratic first edition of three Pirates pictures, the result here, at 150 minutes, is like Three Stooges auteur Jules White being given Breughel as a production designer, and the borrowings, in the form of digital settings and CGI creatures—such as a squid-faced Davy Jones, voiced by Bill Nighy—and ranks of images drawn from work by Terry Gilliam, Dave McKean (Mirrormask) and Matthew Barney, are both overscaled and underwhelming. Keira Knightley has tomboy gleam, but most members of the cast—Jonathan Pryce, Orlando Bloom, Jack Davenport, Stellan Skarsgard,a racial caricature played by Naomie Harris—are overwhelmed by the Bruckheimer scale of the production, and where the mascaraed Mr. Depp made antic hay through Black Pearl, there are only three or four moments here that betray similar, if modest and quickly passed over, comic inspiration.
Superman Returns (** 1/2)
You’ll believe a Christ can fly. Beautifully shot and lovingly crafted, Superman Returns’ eye candy made me content for its 157-minute running time, even with the loudly sighing and sniffling middle-aged fanboy in the seat next to mine. Come the next morning, it was a different “Passion of the Reeve”: while watching Bryan Singer’s third superhero feature, what seemed charmingly sleek feels chilly and undernourished. But that’s not to fault the consummate visual craft on display: from its tiniest details to its most gargantuan set-pieces, Superman Returns is an eyeful even as its heart, worn on its burgundy cape, seems smaller than small. The low-key mix of tones, from near-camp to heroic feats of special effects, at first seems assured, but then grows enervated when you realize how little dialogue of passion or poetry is spoken: it’s left to Kevin Spacey’s bald, middle-aged Lex Luthor to purr and play patty-cake with his 
madman gab, with Spacey’s solipsist crusty gusto. There’s a streak of the el serioso that doesn’t hold water by morning light, either, with a punishing brutal beatdown of the Caped One by his enemies that approaches the brutality of The Passion of the Christ. The muted colors of the new Superman costume are also suggestive of a range of Renaissance painters, and the postures of levitation and flight often resolve into Crucifixion-light attitudes. As Superman and Clark Kent, Brandon Routh is quite tall; Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane is wanly charming yet forgettable, and Lois’ fragile young son doesn’t have much to do, either. With the late Marlon Brando (sound and image drawn, respectfully, I suppose, from Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman), Parker Posey (as Kitty Kowalski, Luthor’s dizzy squeeze and inconsequential character), Frank Langella (a frightfully bottom-line Perry White at a gloomy Daily Planet), Eva Marie Saint, Sam Huntington (Jimmie Olsen), a mute Kal Penn and James Marsden, who ought not speak. Still, there are inspired touches, including a light-fingered piano duet of “Heart and Soul” between a child and a thug, and the bizarre appearance of a cannibalistic Pomeranian. The joys are various and sundry but with an intelligent filmmaker like Singer and a production and distribution budget rocketing toward $300 million, how can there not be memorable moments? Widescreen. 157m.
The Devil Wears Prada (***)
Manhattan ingénue lifestyle porn: bring it on! Based on Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling roman-a-clef 
about her brief tenure as an assistant to Vogue magazine’s demanding editrix Anna Wintour, directed by David Frankel (“Sex and the City”) and shot within a hem of its darling life by cinematographer Florian Ballhaus (also “Sex and the City” and Flightplan as well as son of the great Michael B., who shot Goodfellas), The Devil Wears Prada is chic, shallow marzipan fun. Anne Hathaway, fresh from her spring-loaded performance as Lureen in Brokeback Mountain, neatly inhabits a coltish, Audrey Hepburn-styled role as the drab gosling abused by controlling boss Meryl Streep, and who, under the tutelage of a fairy godfather (fashionista Stanley Tucci), blossoms into pampered Manhattan-style young womanhood. Her Andy Sachs does well by this Princess Diaries all-grown-up archetype, embellishing it with loads of perk-quirk quizzical expressions. Streep’s Miranda Priestly, black-clad with silver hair, resembles a deracinated Cruella da Ville, but her underplaying is epic, and Mr. Tucci does no wrong with character, comedy or the temptation of stereotype with his fathering fashionista.) As a colleague described after a screening, contemporary movies that find their protagonists facing off with corporate evil almost invariably find a way to heroically turn from the path of darkness and move toward the light of self-actualization, rather than embracing the darkness (or at least dandling the narrative with a tickle of irony). Yet Frankel & Co. find joy in details, gesture, bright colors and the streets of Manhattan, and amid the rubble of name-checking and attitude-dodging, it remains a quintessential New York narrative of progression and moving past one’s early 20s into a still-amorphous version of adulthood. Emily Blunt is also consistent comic bliss as another harried assistant, conveying levels of fluster and frustration with tactile immediacy.
The Road to Guantanamo (***)
We live in a country where our leaders believe that it befits the great traditions of our land to incarcerate, 
for life, anyone dubbed an “enemy combatant,” on the good word of unidentified judges. We live in a country where the Supreme Court has said such behavior by a “unitary executive” is illegal, unconstitutional, and contravenes international treaties like the Geneva Convention; “the very definition of tyranny,” Justice Stevens wrote, quoting Madison’s Federalist 47. We live in a country where the congressional majority intends now to craft legislation to make presidential secrecy without oversight and the activities at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, legal. A country where the congressional majority suggests that a permanent record of all phone calls and email ever made within our borders should be kept in a government database. (That would be the Hon. Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, who told USA Today, “It's difficult to say you're covering all terrorist activity in the United States if you don't have all the [phone] numbers. It probably would be better to have records of every telephone company.") A country where our President says that “the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people.” Englishmen Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ staggering, brutal, aggressive, infuriating, exhausting, necessary agitdoc/drama, The Road to Guantanamo, recounts the stories of “The Tipton Three,” a trio of Muslim friends, British citizens held for two years without charges at Gitmo. The film doesn’t question the men’s rendition of what happened, but recounts their capture and torture through harrowing recreations and after-the-fact interviews with them. This is incendiary stuff, but what of the hell of injustice that is being depicted? Say a prayer to Kafka for me. 97m.
Strangers with Candy (**)
Amy Sedaris, who, without her customary disfiguring makeup appliances, is far from a gargoyle, lives to be weird and off-putting, and in the fitfully funny adventure in serial tastelessness, Strangers with Candy, the film version of her Comedy Central series (written by herself, Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert), manages to surpass the series’ epic self-disgust with underwhelming zeal. Sedaris, repeating her role as Jerri Blank, a 47-year-old ex-convict with “thirty-two years of depravity” behind her) who returns to high school to finish her education. With Colbert as a Bible-hugging science teacher, with the memorable line, “I wasn’t pushing you away, I was pulling me toward myself.” Also: Deborah Rush, Gregory Hollimon, David Pasquesi, Dan Hedaya, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Ian Holm, Allison Janney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Ten minutes have been cut from the film since its Sundance debut, which may or may not be because of a legal battle over obtaining releases for certain jokes and references.) 86m.
The War Tapes (****)
More epic intimacy on the field of war: The War Tapes, Susan Scranton’s eye-opening, hands-on documentary (edited by Hoop Dreams’ Steve James) collages a thousand hours of video shot over the course of a year by three New Hampshire National Guardsmen at war in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. The result is powerful, and an important, non-judgmental contribution to the understanding of what goes on behind the closed doors of the military and the media about our role as a nation waging war in the Middle East for the indefinite future. “I love being a solider,” one man says. “The only thing about being a soldier is that you can’t pick your war.” It’s the kind of simple yet complex insight that makes the insult of Sam Mendes’ would-be war poem Jarhead ever more lamentable. The War Tapes captures the essential absurdity of war, which ripples from even an offhand observation like "I don't smell burning dead guy.” 97m.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 05, 2006
Richard E. Grant on Wah-Wah, widescreen and the underrated sense of smell
RICHARD E. GRANT’S DEBUT AS WRITER-DIRECTOR, the wry, witty and pungent coming-of-ill-age Wah-Wah, should surprise no one who’s seen his unforgettable, eccentric performances in movies like Withnail & I or read his quippy, gossipy film diaries (“With Nails”). 
Patterned from events in the veteran actor's own life growing up in the African former English colony of Swaziland—including having Ralph, his young protagonist, witness his mother’s adultery in the opening scene—Wah-Wah is set at the end of English empire, as well as past the end of a torturous marriage. While Grant's script is rich with keenly observed details and behavior about boredom, snobbery and the inevitable colonial provincialism, he also gets uniformly fine performances from a strong cast, including Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne as Ralph’s parents, Harry and Lauren, and Emily Watson as Ruby, the bold American stewardess his father later marries. (Harry’s descent into Jekyll-and-Hyde alcoholism is touching and unsentimental: Byrne seeps melancholy.) Grant, 48, is in a good mood when we speak. “The sun is shining. I had a very good response to an AFI screening last night for my friends and some famous faces. Steve Martin did the Q&A with me afterwards. I couldn’t be in better shape if I tried. Of course, I’d like it to be on 4,000 screens but I don’t have the MI3 or Poseidon [advertising] budget behind me.”
PRIDE: Roadside Attractions have done well with unexpected films, like Ladies in Lavender, even if Wah-Wah is less… genteel. You may be in good hands.
GRANT: I hope for their sake that their faith is proved to be rewarded and reciprocated.
PRIDE: You’ve said this story is very personal. I’m wondering how you organized your thoughts. Personal history is sometimes the most difficult thing for a writer to organize and it can take a long time to get there.
GRANT: I’d been thinking of writing a script for some years, about the last gasp of Empire and the 
community of people who are past their historical sell-by date. That [was] a source of comedy and tragedy in my own personal life, and I thought that it would be a good set-up to have the story of my utterly dysfunctional family set against the last gasp of empire, the disintegration of the English empire, this private family life against the public show of a broad political canvas. That’s what I did. I then spent two months in 1999 writing the first draft. In the way of the world, a first-time writer-director’s movie getting off the ground has now taken six years to releasing in the U S of A... Yeah… Six.
PRIDE: There has been a gap in your acting CV the past few years.
GRANT: That’s because I’ve been taken up with the all the pre-production, shooting and post-production on my movie.
PRIDE: You’ve described writing this movie as being like “a tax return in the middle of a nervous breakdown.”
GRANT: Yeah, because… Yeah, I’m sure you know, as a writer, that if you try and organize a story that is taken from your own life, trying to condense and compress things that have happened over 10 years into a three-year time scale, you’ve got to seriously edit, and take, y’know, as objective an overview as possible to translate it into a cohesive narrative. I had been writing scenes or descriptions of what I thought would make up a 
movie over X number of years. Only they were all on scraps of paper in paper bags and drawers of stuff. When it came to collating all of them, I realized a great deal of the movie had already been written in some shape or form. So I wasn’t starting with a blank page, if you like.
PRIDE: From a project of my own that’s taken too long, what you’ve said about foreground and background, family and canvas, matches the solution I’ve finally found. The innocent in the foreground, and the world’s crazy around him.
GRANT: Mm-hm. It’s the perfect vehicle, or, if you like, route into a story. You take the audience on the same journey as that adolescent 14-year-old boy goes on. Where you experience the same confusion, and decisions taken by adults that you had no control over. I think you experience that as a moviegoer on the same journey he does.
PRIDE: Tell me what you mean by saying that the 1960s Swaziland setting of Wah-Wah is “Equatorial Ealing.”
GRANT: Yeah, suburban tropical. Where everybody knows everybody else’s business and it’s a kind of incestuous, hermetically sealed environment overlaid with all the social order and snobbish pretensions of that happen in any kind of provincial situation. But when you add a bit of colonial administrative power to it, it ups the ante: comedy, snobbery and inevitable drama.
PRIDE: Do you shoot stills?
GRANT: Photography? Oh no, no, no, nothing at all, just other than handicam with my family on holiday and Christmas and that kind of stuff. No, nothing at all.
PRIDE: I wondered because Wah-Wah has an impressively clean visual style. And widescreen is always an interesting choice, and in this film, you use it for a bounty of vistas but also for groupings of characters. Why did widescreen appeal to you?
GRANT: Because I wanted to have the landscape as much as possible without banging people over the heads with it. That you saw these characters, these people, in relation to this landscape. Snobberies and pretensions under a kind of cultural environment that was not naturally theirs. It belonged to the Swazis, the people of Swaziland, if anything. It would emphasize that difference, that the climate doesn’t suit them, that they’re uncomfortably hot. That they don’t really fit in against that landscape. I also was very keen that you… 
It also gives you an opportunity, because [there are] so many interior scenes, it gives you a chance to, I suppose, breathe, if you like, by then pulling out and seeing that all this high drama and comedy is really like ants and a molehill compared to the bigger landscape that they exist in. Of course, I think Swaziland is so visually beautiful that it was irresistible to do that. Also, with the letterbox format, because the main character is often so emotionally isolated through the story I could put him on the extreme right or left of the frame and then have a huge amount of air of landscape to the side that would emphasize that, as opposed to a normal format. 
PRIDE: Sydney Pollack says his career-long use of widescreen is pragmatic; his stories are about men and women and relationships. He was essentially saying that it’s the best way to have them both in the frame at the same time, to focus on the man or the woman but not to neglect either.
GRANT. Absolutely true, yep. That’s more succinctly put than I. I’m going to use that from now onwards. You’re the first person who’s asked me about that framing format.
PRIDE: You also open with unusually clean and good-looking credits. Talk about how you arrived at the look of the film in general, especially with your cinematographer.
GRANT: Yes, absolutely. I had a French cinematographer whose English wasn’t great but it was certainly better than my bad French. I found that, so to avoid any misunderstandings, I did storyboards of the whole movie, so that the whole crew had my crude, cartoon storyboards of the whole movie on a daily basis, which I did the night before shooting. It wasn’t pre-planned, and I found I had to make very clear visual decision before I shot anything, before rehearsals and tossing everything out. That clean, sort of unfussy, I suppose, classical style that doesn’t involve wobbly-scope or a million jump-cuts is what I was absolutely determined to have. I thought if a story like this suffered from “NYPD Blue” [jiggering] it would drive me nuts. And I know that’s the fashion for almost any cinematography now, this reluctance to actually allow the camera to rest on somebody’s face for more than two nanoseconds without jiggling it around or moving it. The cinematographer thought it was a fairly radical departure because he expected that’s what I would be after.
PRIDE: Have you kept a diary like the one published as “With Nails” on a daily basis since childhood?
GRANT: Yeah, ever since witnessing my mum’s adultery, which is the first scene in the film. The idea of not having anybody to talk to, I couldn’t speak to my parents about it, or certainly not my friends, so a diary was a way of, I suppose, having a conversation about it, without everybody else, y’know, knowing.
PRIDE: What happens on a day when you can’t write?
GRANT: Oh. You can always write. You can always find something to write down. It’s such a lifelong habit that I don’t’ even think twice about doing it, I just do it.
PRIDE: Excellent philosophy for a writer, to have the muscles developed.
GRANT: Yeah, it is.
PRIDE: Many times I’ve read you say that you’re quite the smeller.
GRANT: Yep. Yeah, I think it’s the great underrated sense.
PRIDE: Here’s a silly way to walk around that: what are the last three great smells you’ve encountered?
GRANT: Gardenia flowers, which are my favorite. The smell of my daughter’s neck, which is like newly baked biscuits. And the smell of when you open your Apple laptop and you put your nose down to the computer keys. There’s a most fantastic smell there that never fails to get me going.
PRIDE: So you like being a director rather than an actor?
GRANT: Yeah, because you, y’know… [Grant laughs] You get to use much more, your full brain, as opposed to just the tunnel vision required in focusing in on one character. You have to multi-task, it’s the perfect job for a detail-obsessive masochist.
PRIDE: That sounds like a self-description.
GRANT: Ah… Yeah. If you think that you have to deal with rejection as an actor, as a director you can punch through all that because you’re told no on, if not a daily, an hourly basis, of what can’t be done or what shouldn’t be done or how this can’t be or no that can’t be, so you just get inured to that. Like dog-and-the-donkey, you’ve gotta keep the carrot of the thing that you want to do in front of your nose when everybody else is saying, This is not possible. And keep consistently trying.
PRIDE: You have to envy someone like Ang Lee whose producing partner James Schamus makes it his place to keep people like that out of Lee’s hair.
GRANT: Oh yes.
PRIDE: It sounds like you had a more arduous experience. [“I had a French producer whose name I can’t even speak because I’m so splenetic with rage about it, but the film got made in spite of what she didn’t do,” Grant told Australian ABC. “We got to Swaziland and we had 110 cast and crew three days before we were due to start shooting and I was red carpeted by the Swazi Minister in a Government department saying 'you have no right to film in the country, you’re illegally here. 
You don’t have police certificates or medical clearances so you’ll all have to leave'. So I then begged an audience with the King, which you can do in Swaziland, and he then granted us clemency to allow us to start shooting whilst these things were processed. But I don’t know if you can imagine arriving with 120 foreign nationals at Sydney Airport and saying, 'Well, we’re going to be shooting at Bondi Beach for seven weeks but have got no papers'. I don’t think you’d get two steps ahead of yourself.”]
GRANT: Yep. Well, I certainly won’t be working with that producer again and I hope she never gets to work with anybody again, that she doesn’t torment with her professional incompetence.
PRIDE: But this is the film, the finished film we’re seeing, that you intended to make, wanted to make?
GRANT: It is. Yeah. Absolutely.
PRIDE: Tell me about this project you’ve written that you want to write next, Zeitgeist.
GRANT: It’s about the making of a disaster movie, basically The Poseidon Adventure set in outer space. So it’s really about acting.
PRIDE: Small story against the big canvas. A good thing to remember.
GRANT: Indeed.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 04, 2006
Best wishes on Independence Day...
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:53 PM
July 03, 2006
Roger Ebert is to the movies what baseball is to America
Neil Steinberg's Auberon Waugh-ish medley of a column at the Chicago Sun-Times usually leans to the ish, but here's a crisp personal anecdote about working with Roger Ebert: "When I joined this newspaper, 20 years ago, there were more reporters than places to put them. I would wander from desk to desk, dragging along my stack of files, setting up camp wherever there was a free computer, at the desk of someone who had... sometimes, merely stepped away. 
No refuge was more welcoming than Roger Ebert's office—crowded with memorabilia, movie posters and little wind-up toys, already famous from the opening montage of his TV show. He was almost always somewhere else: at a screening room, at Cannes, or his beloved London. You can't imagine the joy of... banging out my workmanlike news articles among the mementoes of the great Pulitzer Prize winner, wordsmith, social force. The pride of belonging to an organization that employs an Ebert, who underwent emergency surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital over the weekend... What I felt hearing the news was deep concern and cold dread. Roger is to the movies, and to this newspaper, what baseball is to America—the enduring certainty, the agreed-upon universal, the cherished standard of excellence. Next month will be the 40th anniversary of the August day when Ebert loaded his old Dodge and drove up Route 45 from Urbana to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and join the Sun-Times, and while I've never really thought much about the anniversary, or looked forward to it before today, I'm thinking about it and looking forward to it now with an unexpected intensity." [Photo: Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Candy-dancing: Sundance expansion into a Fannie Mae factory
The long-mooted, Robert Redford-guided Sundance Cinemas announces a Chicago location on the gentrifying West Side, "a deal that would add celebrity glitz to a once-gritty area now brimming with new condos and townhouses," Crain's Chicago Business' Thomas A. Corfman reports, brimming glibly. "Sundance Cinemas LLC is close to signing a letter of intent to open a six- to eight-screen theater in a 266,000-square-foot, multistory development" in a former Fannie Mae chocolate plant. 
"A Chicago location would be a key step in a planned nationwide rollout of movie theaters featuring the artsy independent films [And who the hell wants to see "artsy" films?] and brainy documentaries [Lord forbid! Brainy documentaries!] that have gained wider popularity thanks in part to Mr. Redford's non-profit Sundance Film Festival. [The Sundance Institute might laugh at this reductionism.]... Sundance Cinemas was launched last year by Oaktree Capital Management LLC, a Los Angeles investment firm with $30 billion in assets, and Provo, Utah-based Sundance Group LLC, which oversees Mr. Redford's business interests, including a cable channel, a catalog company and a resort." Madison, San Francisco and Boston are other targets; in 2001, Business Week described Oaktree as a "vulture fund." "Sundance Cinemas is looking at many sites all across the country," says President and CEO Paul Richardson, declining further comment. Mr. Richardson is a former top executive with... Landmark Theatres, the country's largest art house chain... The developers have been working on the project for nearly two years, after paying $12.2 million for the nearly four-acre site at 1137 W. Jackson Blvd, part of the liquidation of the historic Chicago candy company. Called Metro Center 290, to play up the location along Interstate 290, plans for the project also include a specialty grocery store and a health club... [T]he Near West Side would at first seem an odd choice for Sundance, compared with trendier neighborhoods such as Bucktown or Lincoln Park," where an earlier incarnation of the business plan failed to materialize in the late 90s. "In Madison, as part of the redevelopment of Hilldale Shopping Center, Sundance is planning a six-screen, 1,200-seat theater that would include a bar, restaurant and shop for Sundance-themed merchandise, says Andrew Stein, vice-president of development at... real estate firm Joseph Freed & Associates LLC, which owns Hilldale. "Sundance is the premier name in independent art films. That's what we're banking on," he says."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)