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September 30, 2006

Jesus Camp (2006, ***)

WHO WOULD JESUS KILL? Let me respond from the bottom of my heart: Jesus Camp is terrifying in its portrayal of sadistic things which are deeply oppressive, suffocating in its study of hostility to youth and knowledge, and I hope nothing else the rest of this year on screen, in the press, or in real life makes me feel as hopeless and helpless about the future of America. In their brave, necessary documentary, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (The Boys from Baraka) follow three small Missouri children-bright-eyed, mullet-haired pastor-to-be Levi and two girls, Tory and Rachael-and their trip to Pastor Becky Fischer's annual "Kids on Fire" camp in Devils Lake, North Dakota. The children are freckled, wide-eyed, energetic, innocent, as beautiful as a child can be. Fischer is adamantine yet inarticulate, a middle-aged woman who fashions endlessly bizarre yet always banal metaphors to indoctrinate her charges into "God's Army." She sees a "key generation" of children ready to die in the name of Christ. "Are you READY?!" The offhandedness of Ewing and Grady's frames is telling, without sarcasm: consider the William Eggleston-worthy shot of a girl in pink, her back turned, the image slightly out of focus as dances through raindrops, a flag drooping foreground. (It may be the only beautiful moment in the movie.)

At no point do Ewing and Grady purport to show a movement, only the ministrations of Fischer, who eagerly awaits Rapture from "this sick old world." Typical words from Fischer, director of Kids in Ministry International, as she sits at her dining room table: "Where should we be putting our focus? I'll tell you where our enemies are putting it, they're putting it on the kids... You go into Palestine, and they're taking their kids to camps the way we take our kids to bible camps and they're putting hand grenades in their hands." (Fischer supports the film, telling last Sunday's Denver Post: "I have deliberately pushed the envelope because I feel like we are in such a ditch on one side, of not taking our children seriously in their spirituality.")

We see not a message of love, but of violent separatism, as Fischer and not at all humble home-schooling parents rally the kids to become warriors, even to become martyrs. While a documentary does not capture every moment of a subject's day, what's on screen in Jesus Camp is evidence enough of malign hostility to reason and thought and beauty emanating from every action by these Pepsi-drinking, almost without exception white, middle-class suburbanites. Fischer revels in hostility to democracy, with some of her cohorts threatening "extreme liberals" who allegedly comprise the judiciary and who prevent a "righteous government."

We see the children chant about a return to "righteous" leaders, while, in one of Fischer's many eccentric rituals, smashing crockery with a claw hammer. Later, they worship a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, and "lay on hands" to the graven image. (Pastor Becky also says a prayer "in the name of Jesus!" over a PowerPoint presentation.) Children in camouflage face paint make "prophesy" in pageants of warfare. They are encouraged to "speak in tongues." The contemporary language spoken by the subjects is uninfected by and uninflected with any sort of poetry or philosophy, untainted by insight, mere regurgitations of brutally simple sermons, rife with mixed metaphors and cracked syllogism. The evil of secular kid's books is addressed: "Harry Potter would have been put to death! Warlocks are the enemy of God!" A girl of 9 is shown in a bowling alley, trembling as she proselytizes in a bowling alley, her "bowling ministry!" she calls it. She dreams of opening a Christian nail-wrap salon "with soothing Christian music. [Then] their walls would be down!" A child using a dollar bill as his Bible bookmark-that would have gotten me slapped as a boy. There is also a creepy, hoarse-voiced man with a creepy mustache with creepy little dolls who coaches a gathering in the necessity of becoming an army of weeping children who will kill to stop abortion, which is cited as the cause of most of the wickedness and sorrow in our time. He tapes their mouths shut with red tape labeled "LIFE." The children weep and howl copiously. "Alison," the abortion preacher tells one girl, "You look great with that tape on your mouth!"

I'm far, far from unsympathetic to matters of faith: Without too much personal revelation, I'll say I grew up in Southern, evangelical, sometimes Pentecostal surroundings, yet I never met a single solitary person who seemed as angry, delusional and fearfully misguided as the uneducated adults in this quiet, punch-to-the-gut documentary. If Jesus Camp is true, this is a picture of civilization, smothered, ravaged, ruined. A few minutes of radio host Mark Papantonio in his studio trying to hold calm conversations with Fischer and others cannot stanch cries like "Stand up and take back the LAND!" [Ray Pride]

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2006

Admit it, I’m an idiot: the Trib’s new hires

Nothing like a crackerjack cultural critic getting down to the nitty-gritty right out of the gate: "Admit it," writes Chicago "Tribune staff reporter" Jessica Reaves, "sometimes you get tired of art house movies starring actors who take 'their craft' very, very seriously. Sometimes you want to buy an extra-large popcorn and settle in for a big budget Hollywood blockbuster replete with entertaining explosions, undemanding dialogue and completely unrealistic action sequences. If all that sounds like gloriously uncomplicated fun," she writes in a two-and-a-half star review, "The Guardian is your movie." And: "There are movies that burst out of the starting gate and soar along effortlessly right through the finish line. Those movies are rare, and School for Scoundrels is not one of them..." Reaves' disappointment grows: Old School was "one of my favorite stupid movies in recent memory." And what of Jesus Camp? "Whatever you think of America's religious right, one fact is undeniable: They know how to make noise. And not just literal noise (although a quick visit to any worship service will prove they're quite good at that) but figurative, symbolic noise in the form of political lobbying and outreach... If you weren't aware of this powerful voting bloc, you've probably spent the past five year with your head under a rock." (Note the demurely placed "probably," a hacktastic feat of journalistic restraint.) Further evidence of the terrifying rigors of being a fourth or fifth string reviewer forced to take things seriously when all you want to do is sneer is heaped by one Michael Esposito, who writes of Kyle Henry's defiantly opaque 2005 Sundance entrant, Room: "Room is one of those films that wants to make you think. You know the kind: lots of weird stuff happens, topped off by no real resolution in the end. It may also be the longest 75-minute film in the history of cinema-there was a clock check 25 minutes in, after thinking, 'this has got to be over.'" Surely mid-twentieth century Trib critic Mae T. Inee is rolling in her collective grave.

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

Michelangelo Antonioni is 94

Posted by pride at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

Mama took my Kodachrome away: Super 8's demise

Another nail in the coffin of Super 8 film, writes Will Hodgkinson in the Guardian. "The factory in Lausanne, Switzerland, that processes Europe's supplies of Kodachrome—grainy, colour-saturated frames of 8mm film that have convinced a generation that their 60s and 70s childhood and adolescence was spent leaping through flowers in a Technicolor haze—is shutting its doors on Saturday. The ritual of shooting a three-minute masterpiece on your Super 8 camera, sending off the film in a little yellow envelope and waiting... for the ready-to-project reel to drop on to the doormat is over. If you want to get your Kodachrome film developed now, you are going to have to get in touch with an outfit in Kansas called Dwayne's Photo... Kodachrome is black-and-white stock to which colour is added during the processing. This gives the film its kaleidoscopic, escapist charm, but it is also expensive... [T]he Lausanne lab's closure coincides with the biggest boom in Super 8 usage since its 70s heyday. The Widescreen Centre in London is shifting more than 250 reels a week, and its clients include the BBC, independent production companies, pop-video directors and even a few amateur-movie enthusiasts, who shoot the film and have it transferred to digital format... [T]he Burbank-based Pro8mm company is supplying Hollywood with reconditioned cameras and Super 8 stock, as more and more directors succumb to the film's grainy allure. "Regular film doesn't come with scratches and tramlines," says Jake Astbury, a film-maker who has shot videos for the Corrs... and much of Nicholas Cage's movie 8mm on Super 8. "You can deteriorate video but it looks fake. Only Super 8 has that romantic, worn quality. It has a roughness that no other medium has." More at the link, including the high cost of refurbished Super 8 cameras. [Here's Kodak's telling of the tale.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2006

Independently Poor: Jon Jost, Errol Morris in the HerTrib

While John Clark's extended take-out in the Herald-Tribune eventually hits the fates of Sundance vets who want to be "independent" filmmakers but are stymied by the casting demands of the money men, it's bracing to see him start the piece talking to, well, someone truly indie: "Jon Jost might be considered the epitome of the aging, alienated and aggrieved independent film director. He is sitting in a borrowed New York apartment in hand-me-down clothes, doesn't have a place to live and has no visible means of support, other than a coming arts residency at the University of Nebraska.
"Most people from my generation became teachers long ago," Jost said." Across 40 years, "Jost, 63, has been making films on shoestring budgets with no-name casts that almost nobody outside of European film festivals ever sees. Perhaps the closest he has come to popular awareness was All the Vermeers in New York [which played on PBS]. Since then he spent a decade in Europe toiling away in relative obscurity and then moved to Montana, where for four years he scrounged from garbage cans and lived with a single mother and her daughter in one room with no heat or running water. His latest address was Portland, Oregon, where he stayed at the house of one of the actresses he cast in his most recent film, Homecoming, which he is still trying to find a festival home for domestically - forget about distribution. His income [comes] from selling DVDs of his work on the Internet. "I can't say I'm happy not making a living after 40 years in the business... I'm not independently wealthy. I'm independently poor." Clark cites many Usual Suspects and few surprises, but also gets this in: a "filmmaker who has found both a lucrative and technically satisfying way to make a living outside his chosen profession is the documentarian Errol Morris.

Over the past decade, in addition to winning a best documentary Oscar for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, he became what he describes as "an unlikely avatar of American business." In other words, he directs commercials for Apple, Toyota, AT&T and Miller Brewing while making movies about mole-rat specialists and Holocaust deniers. Morris, 58, is one of the few independent filmmakers who have benefited from the turns the business has taken over the past two decades.... Now, of course, in part because of the success of his films... documentaries are the darlings of the indie world. Still, they won't make Morris rich. Advertising may. It has also contributed to his skills and to... his films. On a Reebok commercial he [indulged] his interest in "shooting the world at alternate speeds" by playing with a high-speed digital camera. "Will I use that in my next movie?" he asked. "You betcha." Morris is also not above using locations required by his advertising work to further his documentary aims... [F]or The Fog of War he needed to shoot a B-29. The only one available was appearing at an air show in Rockford, Illinois, so he asked his agent to get him a commercial in nearby Chicago. He did, for Quaker Oats, and the company has since become a steady client." [More at the link; here's Jost's site.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

Indie returns Thursday [if not sooner]

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

Jesus Camp: Ewing and Grady testify

As attacks on Boys of Baraka directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's new doc, Jesus Camp, accelerate, they talk sect vs. secular with Annie Nocenti at Filmmaker. Of the bubble the Jesus Camp kids live in, Ewing says, "Two types of parents home-school: far-right conservatives and the far left, the hippies. Anyone in an extreme situation wants to remove his or her children from the mainstream. That is their right. But you can’t shelter somebody forever. Eventually they’re going to interact with the outside world, and the parents’ hope is that their children will stay strong and be for God." And what about the dogs? Nocenti asks, "When one of the mothers says something ridiculous, you cut to a dog looking up startled, almost like an eyebrow raised. I thought, Is that Heidi and Rachel’s POV?" Grady concedes, "You’re right." Ewing says, "We have to be honest. You are right. It’s not like the dogs are the director’s voice necessarily, but we do have two scenes where we cut to dogs." Grady adds, "The dogs look into the camera like, 'Huh? I just live here.'" Nocenti asks, "What about the comparisons of the political side of the Jesus Camp training to the extremist Islamic madrassas? Is that a fair comparison?" Grady answers, "It’s fair in the way that you can make a comparison of all fundamentalist religions worldwide. They have something in common: blind faith." But Ewing adds, "I initially said something similar. But comparing the kids in Jesus Camp to the kids in madrassas is a little overstated, just like it irritates me when people bring up Hitler Youth. The difference is that Evangelicals do not need to strap on guns and bombs. We have something called a democracy, and these children are learning how to utilize the offerings of this democracy to get what they want. That’s what the movement’s doing. They’re not doing anything illegal... Their leadership keeps abreast of every single hot-button issue, and that’s legal. These guys aren’t going to kill anybody, ever."

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:57 PM | Comments (1)

Broomfield sweeps clean: Haditha is next dramatic reconstruction

"The massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines is the subject of Nick Broomfield's next movie, the Reporter's Charles Masters reports from San Sebastian. Broomfield said "he will use dramatic reconstruction rather than documentary techniques to tell the story of the slayings. In November, Marines allegedly shot dead 24 Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha, in western Iraq, in reprisal for the killing of a lance corporal by a roadside bomb. Witnesses said the Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, including a 1-year-old child. Military investigations into the incident are ongoing. Broomfield said shooting on the film will begin in November in Jordan. "We met with some of the survivors of the massacre who had a lot of material that they filmed, which gave us a very detailed idea of what happened... We talked to members of the insurgency because I felt the insurgency is almost like a concrete wall. It's like, who are these insurgents?" ... It will be Broomfield's second incursion into dramatic reconstruction of real-life events after Ghosts, which had its world premiere [at] San Sebastian... That movie uses nonprofessional Chinese actors to recount the tale of illegal immigrants and the slave-labor conditions that led to the death of 23 shellfish gatherers in 2004 on a beach in the north of England." Narrative film, Broomfield says, "can take an audience into a deep emotional place that they will never get from a newspaper article or a more analytical documentary."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

Sayles force: John's a Honeydripper

It's Alabama authenticity for the new John Sayles-Maggie Renzi production, writes Birmingham News' Bob Carlton: "They film their pictures where they take place, and to give them more authenticity, they hire as many local actors as they can. Sayles and Renzi are in Alabama scouting locations... and doing other pre-production work for their next movie, Honeydripper, which they will start filming in and around Greenville in October." Before accepting an indie lifetime achievement award on Friday at Birmingham's Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, Sayles told Carlton, "It is very hard for people to continue to be an independent filmmaker... It's very hard to raise money and very hard to get your movie seen... So more and more, that world is for people who are making their first or second movie - usually on video, sometimes with their mother's credit card. But to survive and continue to make movies without getting accepted in Hollywood and getting that kind of money is pretty rare." Of his 27 years with Renzi, Sayles said, "If you want to be a filmmaker... find a good producer and treat her right." The Honeydripper takes place in a small, cotton-producing community in the 1950s, just before the outbreak of the Korean War," Carlton writes, with the title refeering "to a struggling roadhouse owned by an aging piano player played by Danny Glover." Glover's character hires a young musician with an electric guitar he made himself. "It's set right in 1950, when Ike Turner and Chuck Berry and those guys were starting to discover the electric guitar," Sayles says. "That instrument, which had been in the background, is about to take over." [More at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:57 AM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2006

Drama lesson: Clinton on Fox's set-up

Why does Fox News' Chris Wallace hate America? (Rhetorical question.) Every writer who's been on a beat for years or decades has a few tropes, fixations and straw men they fall back upon on a morning with a touch of the flu: pudding-headed political commentators love to describe dark turns in a pol's career as "Shakespearean," which, unless it's coming from a studied, articulate, passionate former theater critic like Frank Rich, is usually so much bumf drawn from a dip into the Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I don't have a stock phrase to describe the fifteen minutes linked here, but former President Clinton's reaction to a dishonest set-up by Fox News' Wallace is the most dramatic thing I've seen anywhere in too long. (Maybe Clinton should have advised Steven Zaillian on All the King's Men instead of James Carville.) At the link, the art of countering the art of the devious interview, without the help of writers or prompters. [Via Crooks and Liars; the rush transcript has errors; the video has the fire.] "Okay, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits, but I want to talk about the context (in) which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right-wing conservative on "The Path to 9/11" falsely claim that it was falsely based on the 911 Commission Report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission Report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough claimed (then) that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people... You asked me why I didn’t do more to Bin Laden.... You brought this up, so you get an answer...

I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him. The CIA was run by George Tenet, who President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to and said he did a good job. The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came to office. If you can criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: after the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full scale attack-search for Bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11. The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that Bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would have had to send a few hundred Special Forces in helicopters and refuel at night... All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book... But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country: Dick Clarke... So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know.. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you’ve asked this question of? [The answer, several bloggers have noted is "zero."] Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on Climate Change. And you came here under false pretenses... [Y]ou didn’t formulate it in an honest way and you people ask me questions you don’t ask the other side... What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill [bin Laden]. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still President, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush, and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is one-seventh as important as Iraq... And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever… I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get Bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could... There’s a reason it’s on people’s minds because they’ve done a serious disinformation campaign to create that impression. This country only has one person who has worked against terror…[since] under Reagan. Only one: Richard Clarke. And all I’d say [to] anybody who wonders whether we did wrong or right; anybody who wants to see what everybody else did, read his book. The people on my political right who say I didn’t do enough, spent the whole time I was president saying ‘Why is he so obsessed with Bin Laden?’ And that was Wag the Dog when he tried to kill him. My Republican Secretary of Defense, - and I think I’m the only person since WWII to have a Secretary of Defense from the opposition party - Richard Clarke, and all the intelligence people said that I ordered a vigorous attempt to get Osama Bin Laden and came closer apparently than anybody has since... So if you’re going to do this, for God’s sake, follow the same standards for everybody."

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2006

Dimming the lights: Chicago's Esquire Theatre

Memories of some movies are inseparable from where you first see them. My prime Chicago example: Oak Street's 70-year-old deco dowager, the Esquire. In 1982, I saw Blade Runner there five, six times. That creepy, crapped-out metropolis is stuck in the same zone of memory as the bold, stories-high vertical neon marquee outside, Vangelis playing across huge curtains, forty feet high. Subdivided and sold several times since then, the Esquire closed last Thursday: as the developer who's bringing the wrecking ball phrased it to the Sun-Times, the up-up-upscale environs of Prada-era Oak Street are missing "a restaurant component." Loews and most recent lessor AMC, for whatever corporate interests, let the joint, like many before, run to ruin. Posters on the walls included E.T. (also 1982), and JFK and Bugsy (both 1991). Advertisements are the modern decor, and I get a coupon for $5 off at Old Navy, expiring the next day. Cup and napkin cartons are stacked in the foyer. A print of a Fox picture in two cans awaits an empty dolly at the other end of the lobby.

The metal doors clap loudly against each other with each entrance. At The Devil Wears Prada, a clutch of thirteen watches Stanley Tucci's character talk about the proud tradition of fashion as art, forehead foreshortened by the projectionist. The overhead fans are off. Two abandoned poster cases flank World Trade Center, where, inside, 14 viewers are trapped underground with Nicolas Cage. I expected the dank smell of dirty carpet, but the third floor reeks of cherry Twizzlers. But the ivy-patterned carpet holds deep crimson and black stains, like shadows in shallows beneath the surface of a stream.

This final show is at 7:40: Scoop. A tiny woman as old as the theater sits in the back row, platinum hair high, an immense tub of fluids in lap. A trailer for Hollywoodland plays. "If it stops one person from a buying a ticket, I have to stop it," a character menaces. The animated AMC filmstrip leaps about and the stereo's off-whack, but Woody Allen's a monaural man. Allen's familiar white typeface against black pulsates, the dim, picture flickers. Twenty-four people watch without audible complaint.

There are intermittent open holes along the balustrade where footlamps once beamed. This place was thrilling once. In one abandoned marble-counter ticket booth, paint peels, the board that covers the gape of a missing machine is smashed. Back on Oak Street, the night smells of rain and the lake. Beneath the marquee, there are missing burned-out or missing small white bulbs. Across the street, a woman works angles with a flash disposable. A chubby man behind a tripod focuses on the orange, yellow and white light of the marquee that will be doused for good, seconds from now. [Photo: Ray Pride.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2006

Hustle and promo: cut your own trailer for Black Snake Moan

I see nothing wrong with the majestically misguided and delightfully wrongful teaser trailer Paramount Vantage put in theaters when Snakes on a Plane was released, for Craig Brewer's Samuel L. Jackson-starring follow-up to the Oscar-winning Hustle and Flow, but there's a new angle in town: PV is inviting DV filmmakers to craft their own trailer and maybe win a trip to Sundance (swag bags not included). Details, elements and legalese here.

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

Murdoch's dozen: Fox goes "Christian"

While searching for the lyrics to the anthem, "Throw the Jew down the well," to NewsCorpFox's Borat in anticipation of tomorrow night's 25-city, worldwide sneak via MySpace, word came through of another side to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled conglom. It's called "FoxFaith," reports LA Times' Lorenza Muñoz, and will release up to twelve pics a year marketed toward religious audiences. "In the biggest commitment of its sort by a Hollywood studio, News Corp.'s Fox Filmed Entertainment is expected to unveil plans [for the] home entertainment division of Rupert Murdoch's movie studio plans to produce as many as a dozen films a year under a banner called FoxFaith. At least six of those films will be released in theaters under an agreement with two of the nation's largest chains, AMC Theatres and Carmike Cinemas. The first theatrical release, called Love's Abiding Joy, is scheduled to [open] Oct. 6. The movie, which cost about $2 million to make, is based on the fourth installment" of a Christian novel series called "Love Comes Softly." "A segment of the market is starving for this type of content," said Simon Swart, general manager of Fox's U.S. home entertainment unit," using the word "content" rather than "message" or "artistic endeavor." "We want to push the production value, not videotape sermons or proselytize." ... "Over the last four years, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has quietly built a network to mobilize evangelical Christian moviegoers... The network includes 90,000 congregations and a database of more than 14 million mainly evangelical households. FoxFaith films, to be based on Christian bestsellers, will have small budgets of less than $5 million each, compared with the $60-million average. The movies each will be backed by $5-million marketing campaigns." Although relatively small, "the budget is significant for targeting a niche audience, especially one as fervent as many evangelical Christians... "It is extremely satisfying to be taken seriously," said Nancy Neutzling, vice president of marketing for Word Distribution, FoxFaith's distributor to Christian retailers. "It's like we have arrived." ... FoxFaith's biggest splash came in July at the International Christian Retail Show in Denver... Inside a massive white tent... a studio-sponsored event had all the earmarks of a Hollywood fete: a lavish buffet, an exclusive movie preview of 20th Century Fox's upcoming family-friendly horse drama Flicka and acrobats from Cirque du Soleil. Because it was a Christian convention, no alcohol was served and the performers' costumes were inspected to ensure demure necklines." [More testimony at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2006

Epiphany: James Schamus at sea

In Sunday's NY Times biz section, Focus Features chief executive James Schamus gets "The Boss" treatment, and shares this lovely moment: "After bouncing around several colleges, I got my bachelor’s in English at U.C. Berkeley in 1982. In grad school there, my academic interests shifted from Milton to the history of cinema. One of my first teaching jobs was as an assistant for Prof. Carol Clover’s Ingmar Bergman class. Incredibly, this summer Ang Lee and I were invited to visit Bergman on his little island in the Baltic Sea. He’s 89 and has been my hero since I was a kid. He touched our faces as if we were small children, which, I suppose, we were. As Ang said, “You can dream of winning an Oscar, but you could never dream of this.”

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

Playing Field: Todd's Risky Little Children

Writer-actor-director-sometimes-photographer Todd Field's multiple virtues don't escape Anne Thompson as his soph feature, Little Children debuts: "Like many actors, Field's emotions run close to the surface; after the first screening of In the Bedroom at Sundance, he broke down as he talked about losing his two mentors before they could see the film: author Andre Dubus, who wrote the short story on which the film was based, and his... Eyes Wide Shut director Stanley Kubrick. Field's experience makes him a brilliant actor's director... After Miramax... picked up Bedroom, then-Miramax head [Harvey] Weinstein recommended cuts. [Field] guarded his print with his life. Weinstein was not pleased, but when many critics hailed Bedroom, Miramax pulled out the stops on an Oscar campaign. Field "frets about the details. All directors are control freaks to some degree... He fusses and worries and drives many people around him crazy. "He thinks he knows more than everyone else," says one producer who worked with Field as an actor... "He carries the weight of everything on his shoulders," one source close to the production says. "He makes the movie in his head and sweats and bleeds for it. He's absolutely fully committed to what he's doing. How to achieve what he's trying to do is the only thing he cares about. He's wedded to actualizing his vision. He's one complicated dude."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:45 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2006

Like, four people said they had a degree in semiotics: Gyllenhaal on H'wd IQs

In the Observer, Gaby Wood talks at length to Maggie Gyllenhaal as a quartet of her pics hit the UK: "Gyllenhaal's closest friends are not in the movie business. Two of them are academics, and one is a photographer, which is, she says, 'very nice'. 'At first I didn't like mixing those worlds, but they're so understanding of the weird stuff I have to do in my job, and having someone come over with three racks of clothes, and I get to pick whatever I want to wear to a premiere. I used to be so embarrassed, and I just realised: my friends love me, and they understand that silly stuff.' ... I'm sure that if anyone can keep the silly stuff from encroaching, she can, but I wonder if in the end she'll feel that Hollywood offers her enough that's more than silly. She laughs, and... tells a story. 'My friend, who is very smart and is a producer, told me that he was sitting at a table at some silly award lunch and someone got up to introduce someone who was getting an award. She said: "This is the only person in this room who has a degree in semiotics." And, like, four people at my friend's table said: "I have a degree in semiotics!" So yes, there are some unintellectual people in Hollywood... but there are some really interesting, smart, thoughtful people making movies, too.'

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2006

We want the finest wines available to humanity: Withnail, once more

Time Out London returns to the well for more Bruce Robinson on one of the great singularities of UK cinema, Withnail and I as it ripens into its twentieth anniversary: "The night before we were due to start shooting, I'm sitting in the bar of this hotel in Penrith with a bottle of vodka. It's three in the morning, and I'm smoking myself silly, drinking myself daft to try and get arseholed so I could get to sleep—anything to escape or somehow navigate this fear that was coursing through my veins. And I couldn't get drunk. I couldn't get anything out of it and [co-producer] David Wimbury... came in, sat down with me in this empty bar and had a couple of glasses and said something to me that is so true about the film industry. He said, 'The thing is Bruce, it doesn't matter how good your script is, how good your actors are, how good you may be as a director, if you haven't got luck, you're fucked.' The thing about Withnail is that we had luck. That's why the film worked. Can you imagine how obscenely horrible a film like Withnail would be, if it didn't work? Goddamn... I have sometimes sat in pubs when I used to booze and hear these old bastards talking dialogue as good as anything by Pinter – and I love Pinter – or Beckett. It is absolutely phenomenal and so funny, but if you told them it was funny or copied it down and gave it back to them and said, 'Do it again', they couldn't do it. The moment they knew it was funny they would fuck it up." At a New York preview, he recalls, "We put the film up and they start laughing. Not immediately, but ten minutes in... There were two girls in front of me. By about 30 minutes in, they were standing up to laugh, hanging over the seats in front of them. I thought they were going to choke to death and it was the best noise I've ever heard. I'm staring at their arses as they're rolling on these seats and the whole theatre was screeching, so that was one of the best experiences of my life, because that's what we were all about. [More teling tales of fuck-ups at the link; Kevin Jackson wrote a BFI Modern Classic on the film; promoting the as-told-to "Smoking in Bed," Robinson told Rachel Ong "What I think it does do is touch that moment that we’ve all had where we’re all broke, all starving, all aspiring and all knowing that it might not work in our lives. For one of them it does not definitely and for one of them it might. I really think audiences love good dialogue. Brilliant photography costs a lot more than crap photography, whereas good dialogue doesn’t cost any more than bad dialogue, so even a cheap film can have great dialogue in it."]

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September 15, 2006

MyMurdochSpaceGlobalBoratBlackCarpetFreebie

FoxNewsCorpGlobalBigConglom is peddling potentially free 20 September tickets to screenings of Borat in "Twenty Five Cities. Six Countries. One World. One Borat" via their new "Black Carpet" MySpace account; MS members click for more liking.

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Noting Gondry: Sleep's traces

A feverish chat with Michel Gondry at Zoom-In with Reid Rosefelt: "I don't want to mix my current work with my blog, but in this case I'll make an exception. I recently wrote the production notes for Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep... I met with Gondry for an hour. Since then, I haven't been able to stop thinking about our conversation... Gondry has often said that he gets his ideas from his dreams. But I was fascinated to learn more about Gondry's idiosyncratic approach to interpreting dreams. When you wake up from a dream, you can write it down and look it up in a dream interpretation book... If you are a Freudian you can use his symbolic language; if you're a religious person, you can make connections to the Bible or the Koran, etc. ... Gondry doesn't see why everyone can't have their own mythology. He believes you can find the secrets of your dream life by exploring your memory... [I]f you have a dream about a snake, why is the only interpretation the obvious Freudian interpretation? In this case, he suggests you search for the answer in all your memories of snakes, not in communal symbols. More to the point, by probing your mental landscape, he believes you can find out who you are... One dream that regularly turns up in Gondry's work is some kind of "misplacement": the bed on the beach in Eternal Sunshine..., the bathtub in the office in The Science of Sleep... Gondry thinks our brains are normally in a passive state, where everything makes sense. But when we see something that's incongruous, we have to work to reconstruct it. As it isn't something normally see, you question your reality. And he call this "a very creative moment." [Further ado at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

UK docmaker John Pilger on why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings

In the midst of a retro at London's Barbican, UK journo and doc maker John Pilger rues the televisual corporate lack of interest in politidocs the public would want to see in the Guardian: "The political documentary, that most powerful and subversive medium, is said to be enjoying a renaissance... This may be true in the cinema but what of television, the source of most of our information? Like the work of many other documentary film-makers, my films have been shown all over the world, but never on network television in the US. That suppression of alternative viewpoints may help us understand why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings," he writes. "I learned my own lessons about the power of documentaries and their censorship in 1980, when I took two of my films, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia and Cambodia Year One, to the US in the naive belief that the networks would want to air these disclosures of Pol Pot's rule and its aftermath. All those I met were eager to buy clips that showed how monstrous the Khmer Rouge were, but none wanted the equally shocking evidence of how three US administrations had colluded in Cambodia's tragedy; Ronald Reagan was then secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Having bombed to death hundreds of thousands of Cambodians between 1969 and 1973 - the catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, according to the CIA - Washington was imposing an economic blockade on the most stricken country on earth, as revenge for its liberation by the hated Vietnam. This siege lasted almost a decade and Cambodia never fully recovered. Almost none of this was broadcast as news or documentary." A PBS senior exec "proposed that PBS hire an "adjudicator" who would "assess the real public worth of your films". Richard Dudman, a journalist with the rare distinction of having been welcomed to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, was assigned the task. In his previous Cambodia dispatches, Dudman had found people "reasonably relaxed" and urged his readers to look "on the bright side". Not surprisingly, he gave the thumbs down to my films. Later, the PBS executive phoned me "off the record". "Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan administration," he said. "Sorry." More worthy fear and loathing at the link, including recommendations of current films and filmmakers; details on the retro at Barbican website.

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Mick LaSalle: the long answer

At SF Chronicle, cricket Mick LaSalle ventures re: the future of moving pictures to a reader: "Dear Mick: With the large majority of today's movies aimed at the minuscule mentalities of puerile teenagers and immature zombie-heads in their 20s, do you think we'll see many movies of high quality and thoughtful worthiness in the foreseeable future? —Delbert Shofner, Blue Lake (Humboldt County)

Dear Delbert: The short answer is no. The long answer is nope.

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September 14, 2006

RES in piece: more old media expires

Anthony Kaufman gets email: "It's with great sadness that I must inform you of the fact that this next issue of RES will be the last edition published in 2006... Most importantly, I would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for your contributions to RES. Whether we worked together once or many times, your work has made RES one of the smartest and most beautiful magazines around." After almost a decade, Kaufman queries, "Is it a victim of its own success? Do the fringe artists they once championed no longer need championing? Or is it simply another nail in the coffin of alternative print publications?" While believing that for owner Chris Blackwell, "RES was probably always a [loss] leader... you have to wonder what's happening now that made [him] finally pull the plug." Kaufman recalls, "As one of the earliest contributors to the magazine (and I was just starting to write for them again), I'll miss the [illuminating] profiles of experimental artists that no one else was writing about and the free DVDs that accompanied every issue.... While teaching, I've found these DVDs invaluable tools to widen the imagination of my students, allowing them to see what is possible in today's era of new media making. Alas, another one bites the dust."

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

Rapeland: LA Times swims with the leeches

When you were little, did you aspire to the fame, glory and spiritual avoirdupois of Harry Knowles? Not me, but it seems one Jay A. Fernandez, in a " Special to The Times" column called "Scriptland," wishes to become Hollywoodland's next red-headed stepchild. In a vile column of pointless corporate espionage, Mr. Fernandez begins by rationalizing his potential revelation in the pages of the TribCo's ever-faltering daily, the contents of the latest intellectual adventure by writer Charlie Kaufman, then doing so with alacrity. Unproduced scripts circulate throughout the bottomlands of Hollywood; like gossip, they're a component of what makes the community tick. Information? Power. [And there are SECRETS for a reason.] "I feel a bit like Frodo palming the One Ring," Fernandez geeks to start. "The last two weeks have been a grueling cacophony of real and imagined voices—other journalists, producers, publicists, Kaufman, myself—trying to convince me either of my righteousness as a journalist or of my complicity in possibly hurting one of the greatest screenwriters in history... On a personal and professional level, I thought reading his latest script would bring me great joy.... [M]any people, beginning with Kaufman, do not want me to have the script, do not want me to read the script, and without question do not want me to write anything about [it]. Words like "super-sensitive," "invasive" and "freaked" have been cautiously leveled at me as I've reached out to those involved with the project to get their thoughts on it." So why not fold? "Ambitious doesn't even begin to describe the sublime and scary head-trip that is 'Synecdoche, New York.'" Assuming his readers are stupid and that Fernandez can flag his superiority to them or to anyone who is smarter than he, he geeks further: "For all those who aren't AP English professors, a "synecdoche," other than a clever play on Schenectady, where some of the film takes place, is a figure of speech in which a part is used to describe the whole or the whole is used to describe a part... Yes, I had to look it up. Several times." He parcels a plateful of spoilers, of which I offer but one: "Page 1 features a 4-year-old girl having her butt wiped." "No one has ever written a screenplay like this," Fernandez avers. "It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious." He also covers the perverse sexuality in Scorsese's The Departed. Disingenuously, Fernandez types, "But the script I have is only the backbone of the story, because the director apparently encouraged and used a significant amount of improv during filming." [There's a review of Fernandez's rave over at the Big House of Charlie, Being Charlie Kaufman: "It's all rather cryptic... but he gives the screenplay a mind-bogglingly big rave.... Not afraid of making a big call is our Jay. Kind of a hesitant relief to me, actually, because I had been thinking... another story about a writer, and about folks having problems dealing with their own realities?" Let's see... a major metropolitan daily decides it's a blog and... Paging Michel Gondry... Paging Michel Gondry...]

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

Reports: Borat no big to Kazakh powers

ABC's Asa Eslocker writes that Kazakhstan's oil-agarch's trip to the US isn't about Borat. The September 29 presidential audience between Mr. Bush and the authoritarian 66-year-old Kazakh head, Nursultan Nazarbayev has its own logic trailing the Fatherland party candidate, re-elected with a remarkable 91% of the vote, contested by observers worldwide. [Bloomberg reported at the time, "Kazakhstan has never held a free and fair election during Nazarbayev's rule, according to Freedom House."] "The reports were strongly denied by Roman Vassilenko, the Press Secretary at the Kazakhstan Embassy. "The meetings have nothing to do with Cohen... The whole premise of the story in the Daily Mail is actually misplaced..." The White House also [said] three different times to ABC News... there is "no truth to it." Of its oil reserves, ABC says, with masterful reserve, "Kazakhstan is a stable secular country located in a very strategic region with major energy and investment opportunities for the United States." Nazarbayev, sitting on one of the world's largest reserves of oil and gas, will not only be feted at the White House, but will also trek to former President and present power broker George Bush's Kennebunkport compound, the library to which, one must not forget, New Yorker writer Brendan Gill observed was stocked with but one title: "The Fart Book." Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan opens November 3. Another freewheeling election may or may not take place in Kazakhstan in 2012.

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

Hulk smash: next gen P2P blockers emerge

A long piece at the FT looks at new strategies for preventing digital piracy and peer-to-peer sharing. Writes Joshua Chaffin of the notorious bootlegging of The Hulk: "As the premiere approached, Universal executives were brimming with optimism. The final print was in the can, and they had the weekend of June 20 all to themselves for an opening on more than 3,600 screens... But nobody had counted on Kerry Gonzalez, then a 24-year-old insurance adjuster and film buff from Hamilton Township, New Jersey. Through a friend who worked at an advertising agency in Manhattan that was creating a campaign... Gonzalez received an advance copy... [T]wo weeks before [the] premiere, he posted the film to a file-sharing service in the Netherlands, making it available to anyone with a computer and a broadband connection who wanted to download it from the internet. “We freaked out,” a former Universal executive said... [B]ased on estimates of lost ticket sales and other revenues compiled by one consultancy, Deloitte & Touche, the hacker may have cost Universal between $60m and $90m... Seeing Jonathan Friend in the conference room of a midtown Manhattan law firm, you might easily imagine that he is one of the partners’ school-age children who has strayed into the wrong office... Yet on a recent afternoon in one such conference room, Friend was the star attraction... With media executives and entertainment lawyers gathered around him, he was showing off the culmination of six years’ toil: a new computer program designed to help the media industry in its fight against piracy." [The cogent overview follows at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2006

Synergery: AOLTimeWarner clips Death of a President

While Newmarket—the company formerly helmed by Bob Berney, who is now boss at TimeWarner subsidiary Picturehouse—acquired the bold what-if mockumentary, Death of a President, about what draconian measures might be meted in America if President George W. Bush were murdered in 2007, TimeWarner/AOL subsidiary TMZ.com gives away the money shot, clipping the apocryphal killing for the edification of idle gossips everywhere. Does it help or does it hurt? Writes a Chicago observer: " I was outside the River East [movie theaters] when they shot that assassination scene at the Marriott hotel a block south. I remember hearing the screas and the police cars and ambulances rushing by, doing take after take. I was told they were shooting a TV pilot, but there were DOAP signs everywhere for the crew parking and extras."

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:33 PM | Comments (1)

September 12, 2006

Come and see: Meirelles' Blindness

Blindness is looking good for City of God's Fernando Meirelles, reports Adam Dawtrey in Variety. It's courtesy of Canada's writer Don McKellar and producer Niv Fichman. It's a $25m budgeted Brazilian-Canadian co-prod, an English-language pic adapted by McKellar from "the 1995 novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago... a philosophical thriller about an epidemic of blindness that sweeps through an unnamed contemporary city and pushes society to the brink of breakdown" to be shot summer 2007 in Toronto and Sao Paulo, Meirelles' hometown." Of course, McKellar's in the cast; Fichman produces with Simon Channing-Williams and Gail Egan of London-based Pot Boiler Films, who produced Meirelles' The Constant Gardener.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2006

Getting away from mad fact: Toronto 2001

indieWIRE linked to an article I wrote for them from Toronto on September 11, 2001: "Pure joy, pure bliss: I saw a movie called "Amelie" on Monday night that may make my fictional year. Little tears sting my eyes throughout this dream of a dream world. I am sated. I join friends from New York at a party for a pseudo-documentary about youth and ambition set in Los Angeles. We talk about what we have seen. I think of questions to ask the director of "Amelie." I wake a little after 10 A.M. on Tuesday to the voice of my festival roommate. CNN is on in the living room. We watch the footage from New York. We're kibitzing in a void, not really listening to each other, just commenting and theorizing so gravity does not pin us to the ground. Toronto local lines work; I can get on-line. Cell phone, forget about it. I have to presume my New York friends are fine. None live or work near the World Trade Center. He and I watch the footage, ash-covered emergency vehicles slaloming between pedestrians, spilled into the street, faces mostly blank, some bloodied, all urgently getting away: from danger, from cameras, from mad fact." [More at the link.]

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Communications breakdown

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September 10, 2006

Caption, please: The Departed

For a moment, I mistook cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (right) for the actor Jack Wallace, known mostly for roles in saloons in David Mamet's movies and plays.

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2006

B&D: DePalma on the dearth of politipix

Brian DePalma muses on the lack of political films in the US of A to the Guardian's Steve Rose in Deauville: "I'm astounded there aren't more American political films," he says, apropos of nothing. "I'm amazed, when you can make movies for nothing, there are not people out there making these incredibly angry anti-war movies. How come?" I nearly choke on my coffee. Brian De Palma bemoaning the demise of political film-making? That's like a wolf crusading for sheep rights... David Thomson even compares him to Leni Riefenstahl, so morally vacant does he find De Palma's oeuvre. In fact, De Palma did start out making politically minded counterculture films in the late 1960s and early 70s in the Manhattan streets outside - Godard-influenced, anti-Vietnam fare... So why isn't he out there making anti-war films now? "Well ... ," De Palma says, with a sigh. "Of course, I can do it because I still have the same feelings now that I did then. But you'd have to make it for no money and you'd probably have to make it in Europe and get it independently financed. I'm just amazed you don't see them... I've always had the inverse quote to Godard: film lies 24 times a second... And anybody that's used to using moving images like a film director, when we see stuff on TV, it's all positioning and public relations, there's not an ounce of truth to any of it. I always look behind the image and say, 'why are we seeing children with flies on their eyes this week?' Those images are always out there. Like the war in Iraq. If you think Americans are ignorant, it's because we're not seeing anything. We're constantly being manipulated by images. They're lying to us all the time. We have no idea what we're doing!" And he laughs his short, desperate laugh again. "I've been screaming about this stuff since the 60s, but it doesn't seem to have had any effect."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:09 PM | Comments (1)

Mutual deprecation: it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment

“Just ’cause a lot of people write about me on the internet doesn’t mean that anybody in the world actually cares," Mutual Appreciation's Andrew Bujalski tells Vadim Rizov of NYU's Washington Square News. So, which is it: realism or extreme emotional repression? “Maybe it’s passive-aggressive filmmaking—I don’t know... But I feel like ... the real conflicts in the world usually do happen on a much smaller level than we’re used to seeing in films... Obviously I come from a certain kind of specific background where stability and these things are valued pretty highly... [There might be] an equal amount of unpleasantness in that world as there might be in a world where people yell at each other all the time. But I just find it much more interesting—the negotiations and the hesitations and the pregnant pauses and all this kind of stuff where there’s a lot of drama taking place. We just kind of need to know where to look for it.” ... Between the awkward romantic encounters and spells of drunkenness that comprise the film’s... plot, [musician-lead actor Justin Alan] plays a riveting solo set at [Williamsburg's] Northsix, taking on songs from [his band's] first album, "Charm School"... Bujalski lets Alan get through one and a half songs before cutting away. Rice’s electrifying performance is met with a seemingly lackadaisical response from the small crowd; Bujalski’s camera and editing don’t indicate whether to be excited or bored. “We showed the film at a festival in Portugal,” Bujalski [says]. “One of the festival jurors came up to me one day and said, ‘I’m on the jury. I’m not supposed to talk to you, but I have a quick question. I don’t know anything about pop music, so I just wanted to know—in that performance scene, is he supposed to be good or is he supposed to be bad?’ And I couldn’t answer his question. I told him, ‘It’s really up to you.’ It’s not a scene about the triumph of a performance, it’s not a scene about the failure of a performance. It should be—it’s the way that I feel if I go to a rock show, a lot of times it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment, whether I think they’re good or bad.”

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

Stupid fox: another Idiocracy take

"Knowing Judge's sterling track record as an American satirist,I had to find out what went wrong," writes John Patterson in the Guardian of Idiocracy. "Usually a film eliciting such utter contempt from its own backers is a disaster. Far less often, it's a masterpiece... There is venomous anti-corporate satire throughout... remarkable mainly because Judge names real corporations. I was astounded - and invigorated - by the sheer vitriol Judge directs at these companies... Like fast-food giant Carl's Jr, which in 2006 sells 6,000-calorie burgers the size of dictionaries under the slogan, "Don't Bother Me, I'm Eating". In Idiocracy, this has devolved into "Fuck You! I'm Eating!"... [E]very commercial transaction has been sexualised: at Starbucks you can get coffee plus a handjob (or a "full body" latte). Idiocracy isn't a masterpiece - Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage - but it's endlessly funny, and my friends and I will be repeating certain lines for months... [W]ord got out fast: I saw it last Saturday in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show - packed-out. There's an audience for this movie, but its natural demographic barely knows it's out there. Behind the movie's satire lie long-term social changes like the stupidisation of the American electorate over 30 years through deliberate underfunding of public education, the corporate takeover of every area of public and private life, and the tendency of the media - particularly Fox News - to substitute anti-intellectual rage and partisan division for reasoned public debate... So why was Idiocracy dumped? Perhaps because it taps a growing anti-corporate mood in the nation; perhaps because it expertly satirises the jingoistic self-absorption that now passes for public culture. Or perhaps because more people are sick of the modern America that Fox energetically helped to build than the Fox corporation itself is ready to admit." [Patterson is a great fan of Office Space.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

Transcendentally giving up: Paul Schrader's lost book

Paul Schrader offers up a lengthy intro to an article about a book he never finished, which is supposed to be one of the longest pieces in Film Comment's history (and which you have to buy to read in full.) "In March 2003 I was having dinner in London with Faber and Faber’s editor of film books, Walter Donohue, and several others when the conversation turned to the current state of film criticism and lack of knowledge of film history in general. I remarked on a former assistant who, when told to look up Montgomery Clift, returned some minutes later asking, “Where is that?” I replied that I thought it was in the Hollywood Hills, and he returned to his search engine. Yes, we agreed, there are too many films, too much history, for today’s student to master. “Someone should write a film version of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon,” a writer from The Independent suggested, and “the person who should write it,” he said, looking at me, “is you.” I looked to Walter, who replied, “If you write it, I’ll publish it.” And the die was cast. Faber offered a contract, and I set to work. Following the Bloom model I decided it should be an elitist canon, not populist, raising the bar so high that only a handful of films would pass over. I proceeded to compile a list of essential films, attempting, as best I could, to separate personal favorites from those movies that artistically defined film history. Compiling was the easy part—then came the first dilemma: why was I selecting these films? What were my criteria?" Schrader audited classes at Columbia University in 2004-2005, including one of the history of film aesthetics by writer-producert-studio head James Schamus. "I kept returning to Hegel’s insight that the philosophy of Aesthetics is the history of Aesthetics. That is, the definition, the essence of Aesthetics, is nothing more or less than its history. The philosophy of Aesthetics equals the mutation of the Aesthetic Ideal—understand the mutation, you understand Aesthetics. By extension, the philosophy of Religion is the history of Religion, and so forth. Aesthetics, like the canon, is a narrative. It has a beginning, middle, and end. To understand the canon is to understand its narrative. Art is a narrative. Life is a narrative. The universe is a narrative. To understand the universe is to understand its history. Each and every thing is part of a story—beginning, middle, and end." ... What can be gleaned from this adventure? If Walter Donohue asks you to dinner in London, think twice. [More middle at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2006

Crashing in: Charlize's Toothless in Seattle

Charlize Theron's motoring a movie about the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999: writer-director-boyfriend-Irishman Stuart Townsend's under-$10 million Battle in Seattle will star Theron "as a pregnant bystander who loses her [unborn] baby in the WTO riots," reports SeattlePI.com. "It's going to be the next Sleepless in Seattle,'" said James Keblas, head of Seattle City Hall's film office. "Once you capture a star like Charlize Theron, you are instantly a big picture." Big enough to fudge, natch: "Lower production costs mean the film will be made in Vancouver, British Columbia, but Keblas said he's trying to get some of it moved to Seattle... The crew may spend a week shooting in Seattle, Aloe said, and Townsend hopes to use real WTO protesters as extras... The film will explore the "power of the individual" in the face of powerful governments and global corporations, Townsend told The Observer, a British newspaper. The script will weave together cast members' stories while dealing with serious issues, similar to the Oscar-winning Crash," a producer added, "We did not want to give one point of view. When you see the movie, you'll feel a lot of gray areas." The mother of the miscarried pregnancy will be "the voice of an outsider and the most relatable role for the audience because she didn't have any agenda as a protester or political leader."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2006

Does independent film exist anymore?: excerpting Vachon

In a 6,000+ word excerpt from her new book, "A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond," Christine Vachon ponders what, if anything, "indie" means, working out from the example of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, of which she provides the most knowing schematic of its success I've read. "Here's my counterexample and an argument for a new definition of the term "independent." Bearded and intense, Mark Romanek directed music videos for over a decade. You could tell from his videos that he thinks with his eyes. He'd made videos for Madonna... Nine Inch Nails... Beck... even Michael Jackson... In 2002 he was so moved by a Johnny Cash cover of Trent Reznor's song "Hurt" that he shot the video for free. He came to us with the script for One Hour Photo, something he'd written in three weeks on spec. But with One Hour Photo, we had the opposite problem of Greek Wedding: Mark's lead character was a middle-aged, sexually deprived stalker. Studio executives believe people don't want to spend two hours in the company of a character like that.... The whole setup of the studio versus the rugged, loner artist is, like most dualistic constructs, a false one. Look to autodidact Paul Thomas Anderson ... skateboard video auteur Spike Jonze... and midwestern ironist Alexander Payne... and you'll see directors who have made their strongest work within the studio system, with Hollywood casts. The Nation film critic Stuart Klawans has argued that "independent film" is another kind of branding, a marketing ploy. "What the [independent] movement is about is a commercial reconsolidation of the film industry" ... In this formulation, B pictures are the ones independent producers like me care most about, and this hedged bet works in our favor: fewer executives are meddling because the studio's risk is lower. Which allows me to push for the kind of independence in the filmmaking process that is crucial for our writer-directors. "Independent film" as a media brand never interested me.

And trust me, "independently financing" a film only makes my job harder. But guarding a filmmaker's autonomy and agency—to tell unconventional stories, to cast the right actress not the star, to reject studio notes, to cut a third out of the movie right before the delivery date — is everything, since those values are what make film an art form and not just entertainment..." Each of her own productions, she writes, "'can be somebody's favorite movie because of its clarity of vision, because of the distinctiveness of what it's saying. It's that distinctiveness that allows somebody to say, Yes, this is singular and it relates to my life in this particular way.. [If] real creativity is allowed to get what it wants, that is independent film: the freedom of the vision behind it."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2006

The Long Good Friday is 25: John Mackenzie recollects

Noting its 25th anniversary, the gangster great The Long Good Friday gets a chat-up in Time Out London with director John Mackenzie and Chris Tilly. Why does it hold up? "The plans [for the redevelopment of Canary Wharf] had been around for several years before we started work on the film," Mackenzie says. "There was a lot of building going on around the dock before 1981 with various big firms involved, so we knew quite a lot about what was proposed. London had essentially been a port and we regretted that all that had gone and it felt like a total area of neglect. The writer Barry Keefe, Bob and myself were very aware that there was going to be huge exploitation and that everyone was going to try to get rich quick... I think [gang boss] Harold [Shand, played by Bob Hoskins] would have liked how it's turned out. I think he would have been delighted, because it has flourished – it's a whole new extension of London. The high-rise buildings and skyscrapers make the whole place come alive and Harry would have been at the heart of that. Of course, he also would have been the biggest exploiter of them all.// When they got the final product, the producers were very uncertain about it. I'd built up the IRA a lot from what was originally in the script, because I wanted this theme of terrorism versus the state. But the Grade organisation didn't really want to put it out as a feature film. They wanted to take out all the 'offensive' bits that they thought were there, all the – in their opinion – unpatriotic stuff about the IRA, and put it out as a simple television film. That argument went on for two years... I certainly didn't think it was going to become a legend or a cult film like it has. I think the reason is a combination of things. The idea of the classic gangster was important... so I wanted Harry Shand to be like that. People are never totally one-sided; even the worst villains in the world have certain qualities that are liked, and Bob had the personality and humour to pull it off... I also think it's to do with the diversity of themes that are in the film. There's terrorism, religion, corruption… The one that instantly emerged and stood out was the terrorist theme: how can you ever fight a war against terror? We're still asking that question and I still think you can't. But I think all those themes will keep the film interesting and fresh for other generations." [Among the DVD editions, there's a bare-bones Criterion and shortly, a 25th anniversary UK release.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

Lynch's latest: "It's supposed to make perfect sense

David Lynch gets a Golden Lion lifetime award in Venice today, and of his new movie, Inland Empire, writes Reuters, "the master of mystery and the macabre is more impenetrable than ever, prompting a journalist to jokingly ask after his mental health." The movie blurs the boundaries between one story and the next, and between dream and reality, the unsigned report says. "Nearly three hours long, the most obvious plotline centers around the making of a movie and how the lead actress fears the wrath of her husband when she has an affair with her co-star. But where that story begins and others, including one set in Poland, begin, is impossible to tell. Asked if the film was supposed to make sense, Lynch told a news conference following a press screening: "It's supposed to make perfect sense." ... When asked to explain the appearance of three actors wearing rabbits' heads, one of whom stands in the corner doing the ironing, the 60-year-old replied: "No, I can't explain that." ... "I really would like to be able to explain, but the film ends up being the explanation. That's what's so terrible about press conferences. It's all about the film, not about the words." The longtime acolyte of Transcendental Meditation also said, "You should be not afraid of using your intuition and feel, think your way through... Have the experience and trust your inner knowing of what it is." [Illo from Steven Lapcevic, from the cover of the Lynch tribute album, "Brilliance."]

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"Jackass meets 'Wild Kingdom'" meets Telander: Irwin was a crock

A small regret about not following sports is missing out on the output of talented sportswriters like the Chicago Sun-Times' Rick Telander, with unsentimental, independent-minded columns such as this one, headlined "Irwin's nature act, sadly, was a crock." Starting with a cleanly described childhood anecdote about encountering a jellyfish. He recalled the pain when he "heard that animal provocateur Steve Irwin, the Australian television celebrity known as ''Crocodile Hunter,'' was killed Monday by a stingray's barb... There's nasty stuff in nature... Irwin, a hyperactive entertainer whose giddily-excited expression was part-lemur, part-carnival barker, was drawn to it the way a cat is drawn to rolled string. I am saddened that he died, and it is tragic that he leaves behind a wife and two small children... But isn't there something very much like karma at work here? If you flaunt the dangers of the animal kingdom—using the creatures' teeth, claws, armor, venom, reflexes as your props—you really aren't teaching about the natural world, you're exploiting it. Besides putting himself recklessly in the path of creatures' natural instincts, hyperventilating, ''Crikey!'' every so often, and mesmerizing awe-stricken kids crouched in front of TV sets—what exactly did Irwin, lauded as a conservationist, do?... The simple fact is, Irwin's show was an inevitable melding of ''Jackass'' meets ''Wild Kingdom'' for the short-attention-span set." [More at the link.] (Predictably, the New York Times has a dithering scrap on its editorial page that says nothing, by Lawrence Downes: "It was easy to parody Mr. Irwin’s boisterous shtick, and many people did... It is all too obvious that Mr. Irwin was no biologist, that exploring the world on cable TV is a lot different from actually plunging into it, that wild animals really are dangerous, and blah blah blah.")

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

Hollywoodland Babylon: Allen Coulter on sound and image

HOLLYWOODLAND (***) IS A SWEETLY SEEDY ANECDOTE, a termite rhapsody to gumshoes, cheaters, leavers, and at its center, the first Superman, 1950s television star and ultimate suicide George Reeves.

Ben Affleck plays Reeves, who played Superman on television, becoming a campy kiddy icon for that decade; Diane Lane, his mistress Toni Mannix, married to hot-temperered MGM exec Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), and Robin Tunney the firecracker floozie who comes into Reeves’ life after Toni. That story’s refracted by an investigation that takes place years later, by PI Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) who’s led by Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) to believe Reeves was murdered. (Like the recreations in Thin Blue Line, we see several variations of how Reeves might have left this life, and Affleck is brave to have enacted so many ways to kill or be killed.)

Reeves embodies a featherweight 1940s glamour; Simo, hair full and oiled like a James Dean wannabe, lives at the start of rock-‘n’-roll, or “the hatless age,” as director Allen Coulter puts it in a conversation at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel on August 16.

Coulter, a veteran of series like “Rome,” “The Sopranos,’’ ‘‘Six Feet Under’’ and ‘‘The X-Files,” works many small, telling details into the fabric of the multiple storylines. Coulter also speaks with the slightest of twangs, hailing from Texas. “If I’m around someone from Texas, if I have a drink with someone from Texas, you can hear it,” he says.

Affleck does an interesting turn with the material, on one hand, playing a likeable but limited actor, sashaying among glib sophisticates in a world of cheap glamour, straining to glimpse the cut glass of privileged, and on the other, working to capture Reeves’ pat acting style. (He does a surprisingly good job of embodying both.) Wasn’t Affleck born to don the tawdry tights of the 1950s Superman and inquire, “You can’t see my penis, can you?” “Not being Mr. Diplomat here, but Reeves was a better actor than [some people think],” Coulter tells me. “Ben watched the 120 hours [of the “Superman” series] and [Reeves] had a kind of charm, not indicating he’s above the material, but being aware. And then you realize that Superman is acting, too, he’s playing Clark Kent.”

With Brody’s moody Simo, sometimes he’s a private dick with a lick of gum, other times he’s jangling whatever’s in his pocket, sounding like a janitor’s key ring, and one, like a couple silver quarters and a nickel. “Simo has car envy,” Coulter says, ticking off scenes. “Adrien is so conscious of things like this. It’s like the chewing gum. I gave him a flow chart that showed when he could chew gum and he couldn’t chew gum. It’s not about the keys, but there’s one scene where Adrien asked what lens we were using, I said, a 22, a 26, something like that—his mother’s a photographer, Sylvia Plachy—and in the corner of the frame, he’s doing this little thing with his fingers, like this, rubbing them together.” Coulter continues, “You don’t say today, 'Oh, he’s an Acura man,' but cars meant something different then, say, if someone said, ‘He drives an old Packard.’” Coulter makes a dismissive face.

There’s another scene where the down-on-his-luck Simo watches a chandelier being wheeled up the drive of the Mannix household. It tinkles gracefully. “It shows what rich people have that he can’t have, that he can’t even understand. But he doesn’t realize that. It’s an homage to a scene in Chinatown where there’s this squeaking sound, and it’s the chauffeur with a chamois on the car. It’s the kind of thing Polanski does so well.”

As did another age of filmmakers. “Yes, the early filmmakers came from radio, from the age of radio, and they used sound in that way. People say that movies became more visual, but it’s not entirely true.”

Throughout, Hollywoodland lightly touches on prior films, and the dialogue in Paul Bernbaum’s script (with an uncredited polish by Howard Korder) is quippily amusing: “Good people to know”; “Not if you know them”; and the classic putdown after Lane’s character has made a scene, “My wife will take another Gibson.”

Lane is an eyeful, having a grand time being period-vampy, even when wearing only a medium-size periwinkle terry towel, even when turning into a Gloria Swanson figure; characters with similarities to figures in Citizen Kane (an older witness in an office) and Chinatown (a possible cuckold crueler than confused Burt Young). But Coulter says he’s careful to keep his eye on the story, and not just play in a cool toy box. “I have directed things like that. Where it’s about the toy box, but that’s when I was hiding the fact there was no story. Here, I think we have a strong story.”

Coulter’s strong with iconography, though: a repeated device involves men with their backs turned to the camera as they face an overexposed window. “That’s interesting,” Coulter says, hesitating for a moment, but now giving in. “I try not to think about things like that, not to be conscious of it.”

It could become mannered? “Yes. But talking about it… I think it makes them into, not an icon, but an enigma. I’ve been told I use a lot of mirrors, but I’m not conscious of that.”

It’s just something you learn to do from being on the floor, the experience and efficiency to do the work intuitively? “Exactly.”

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

Here, Kitty, Kitty: more Science of Gondry links

At LesInrocks.com, a new video from Michel Gondry, for "Hollywood Kitty," from The Science of Sleep. The link is to a RealPlayer file that may not work with all browsers. Here's the trailer on YouTube. And from Dailymotion, a pile of files about Gondry, including three making-ofs, the French trailer, and a Hollywood Kitty bit.

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

September 05, 2006

Idiocracy (2004-2006) ***

Fox dumped Idiocracy, Mike Judge's savage, often very funny satire of media and mediocrity over the weekend, with little notice and no advance screenings. After catching it on Saturday with an audience of five (and I seemed to be the only English speaker in the room), I was pleased to run across three other moviegoers over the holiday who had seen it and were buzzing about its brazen “Planet Butt-head” mix of stupid characters behaving in numbingly stupid ways. Luke Wilson plays very ordinary Army private Joe Bowers who’s conscripted into a cryogenics experiment that should last a year, but lasts until The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. He wakes to a world of relentless crudity, but of Kafkaesque familiarity and repetition, with a fistful of familiar brand names, transformed into gaudier (truthier?) versions of their current incarnations: Fox News is read by naked bodybuilders, FuddRuckers has transformed into ButtFuckers (where a kiddy birthday party can be seen under the sign) and Starbucks has become a chain of handjob parlors. (They love their “vente lattes” with “full release.”) TV watchers are addicted to The Masturbation Channel. The most popular series if “Ow, My Balls,” which consists of the star getting repeatedly kicked in the crotch. A talking Carl Jr’s’ vending machine obscenely tongue-lashes its users. Anyone who can finish a sentence—Bowers, basically—is mocked for “sounding faggy.” (Knowledge=Weakness.) A vista that seems to be vaster and more polluted than Mexico City has on its horizon a CostCo that’s larger than Mexico City. Yes, the vulgarity goes all the way to the White House, where the failed country is run by President Camacho, a machinegun-wielding man in flag-emblazoned tights, part Apollo Creed, part Rick James. I could go on—there’s a provocation at every turn, despite the choppy editing and aural wallpapering of the movie with a dull voiceover—but I’ll leave it at this: Mike Judge’s angry, insistent voice, and his willingness to take a premise into absurdity, still come through loud and clear. (So does his contempt for where a fellow Texas is taking our culture.) You have to ponder whether anyone in read the script, most notably in the product placement offices of the above-named corporations. 84m. [Also check out my favorite perspective from another writer, over at Matt Dentler's Austin-centric-rific pad.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 04, 2006

Judge not: the Beavising of Idiocracy

Fox dumped Idiocracy, Mike Judge's savage, often very funny satire of media and mediocrity over the weekend; here's the clueless ad that ran in a few newspapers in the half-dozen or so cities where the picture opened without benefit of preview or word-of-mouth screenings. Over at Esquire, Brian Raftery tools down to Austin to have words with Judge, a man of few words. After terrible experiences on his first two pictures, Beavis and Butt-head Do America and Office Space, Raftery writes, "Idiocracy was supposed to be different. He filmed it two years ago, but once photography was finished, the real problems began: So-and-so executive hasn't had a chance to see it, so everything was put on hold. Then Fox started nickel-and-diming him over a few special-effects costs. Finally, once the movie was totally finished last fall, Judge and the execs started to butt heads over the marketing, especially the trailers. (He's still steamed over the ad campaign for Office Space.) "They're just overthinking it, which is what they always do," Judge says. "It's just about an average dumb-ass person who winds up in the future. It's not about 'What if you could travel through time....' "I've never experienced anything like this," he says. "It's just dragged on way too long, a good seven months longer than Office Space. I could have made another movie after I locked the picture before this one comes out." [A review, to come, in this space.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Jump count: every issue of JUMP CUT online

Over at GreenCine, David Hudson alerts that every essay ever published by "JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Cinema" is now online, including the Winter 2006 issue, with 31 pieces, including "new worlds of documentary. Crouching Tiger. "Buffy," "Smallville," The Woodsman, Que Viva Mexico! and Terri Schiavo videos." From the editors' note in the first issue, in 1974: "As you see from what you hold, we are using an extremely inexpensive format. Quite simply we are subsidizing it ourselves because we believe JUMP CUT should exist, and that what our writers have to say needs saying. By using this format we gain the opportunity to publish frequently enough to live up to our claim of being a review of contemporary cinema, freedom from the problems of institutional and patron interference and capitalist intent, and a low subscription cost that will allow our readers to subscribe for the price of a first run feature in a large city." Writing 32 years ago, the editors assert in their non-manifesto, "It becomes increasingly obvious that film criticism in the U.S. is operating in a void that grows larger and larger and that this most modern of art forms relies on a particularly inadequate aesthetics. This is especially objectionable now that film has become so popular on and off campus. There is little satisfaction in seeing this booming interest in film when one surveys the new parade of coffee table books, plot summary analyses, vacuous interviews with this or that director, and so forth that passes for film criticism and scholarship... We want to learn to see film in a social and political context—its practical and political uses, the economics of film making and distribution, and the functions of film in America today. We also want to expand the usual realm of film criticism to include video which is more and more often being considered as a screen art.

Finally, we want to develop a political film criticism; that is, a film criticism which does not accept as binding the bourgeois idea that art is somehow separate and detached from the social life of women and men. Films often entertain, but, more importantly, they manipulate our image of people, of our society, of our world. We feel that it is important to reveal this manipulation in our most popular and successful films. We stand for a political film criticism because understanding film has meaning only when we are also trying to change the world.

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

Caine at 90 (films): I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was

"I can't think of one I could see again," Michael Caine said yesterday of today's movie crop on the preem of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men in Venice. Reports Dalya Alberge in the Australian. Casablanca is full of memorable lines, he said, citing the moment... Rick recalls the day the Germans marched into Paris. Rick tells... Ilsa: "I remember every detail. The Germans wore grey, you wore blue." Caine said, "Who today writes such lines?" He spoke yesterday of feeling "quite depressed" on Saturday night after casting his eye over the top 10 box-office hits in the US. He said: "I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was."

Posted by Ray Pride at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

Resnais at 84: our destiny can depend on a person we’ve never met

"I’ve never felt a very big difference between film and theatre," Alain Resnais tells CineEuropa's Camillo de Marco. "We usually say “I’m going to the theatre”, because it’s the opposite of cinema, because theatre is fixed, it’s in the past. Actually, it’s like the various languages of the world, which are all different, yet linguists say they’re all similar, that the differences are not that great. Adapting a play [Couers, from an Alan Ayckbourn play] does not scare me, because these two kinds of entertainment have one thing in common: you can never go back, you can’t tell the projection to show them the same scene again, you can’t act an actor to repeat a scene. I feel comfortable transposing a play into a film, and I am faithful to it... There is a gloomy and noisy aspect to this text, which we tried to create on the screen. During production, we tried to a framework of contradictions, to create that mix of fluctuating instincts that move within in us and that I imagine I share with a good number of the spectators. I wanted to bring out through images and acting characters that could potentially express something better, but can’t or don’t want to, to give an idea of a nostalgia to do better that leads them not to do better or to attempt hopeless cures... Our destinies, our lives, are always guided, our destiny can depend on a person we’ve never met."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 03, 2006

Jeremy Thomas on Kiarostami: He's completely free

"There is a single shot in 10 on Ten, a cinematic masterclass by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which [producer] Jeremy Thomas calls a "touchstone" for everything he tries to do in his own work," writes Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph. "In the film, Kiarostami mounts the camera in his car, sits next to it. and drives around Teheran talking to us about cinema... At the end of this journey, we're in the mountains looking down on to the city when he says, 'I'm just going to have a pee.' He leaves the camera in the car, you hear him getting out and you realise that he's been shooting the film completely alone. Then he suddenly says, 'I've seen something so fascinating that I've got to show you.' He takes the camera out of the car and zooms into an ant going down a hole carrying something three times bigger than itself. I found it so moving: the simplicity and power of nature and the brilliance of an artist observing it for us, in a shot which costs nothing but signifies everything. That one image of an ant has stayed with me. It's more incredible than everything you see in Titanic... [T]his is a wonderful example of what can be done with DV. You just need a camera, an idea and the virtuosity of a master... I love road movies... But Kiarostami's are different because they're so very sparse, and about a country which we know nothing about... Kiarostami works without the need to conform to a commercial role model. He's not a victim of money or of anybody else's ideas – he's completely free. He has no need for a producer like me. But if he ever did, I'd welcome him with open arms." [More at the link.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)

Mr. Frears has no talent for making films on my doorstep

As The Queen begins its royal festival tour, Stephen Frears chats with the FT's Tobias Buck. "Ensconced pacha-like in his Paris hotel room, Frears pours himself the first of several cups of tea. A sort of waiting game is under way, which will end only once the director arrives at the Venice film festival, where The Queen is showing in the main competition. . "Making a movie about the Queen is almost like making a movie about your mother – and in England, the Queen really does serve as a kind of symbolic, emotional mother of the country. So you don’t want to be in any way perceived as unfair or facile. But how do you do that? You do it by instinct, I suppose. You’re more attentive to not leaning on your prejudices and you stay away from anything that might be unsupportable.” ... When I suggest that the “never mind the bollocks” sensibility of his earlier films has taken a bit of a battering, Frears visibly winces. “You’re right: I wasn’t capable of making a film like this irresponsibly. Perhaps I’m growing senile and respectable. Oh God! How depressing!” he exclaims and busily pours himself another cup of tea. “But it’s true you can’t make a film like this carelessly. The whole time you’re measuring it against some test of believability. It’s slightly because people are alive, so you have an innate sense of responsibility.” ... Would Frears ever consider making [film] that painted [PM Tony] Blair in a less sympathetic light? “No, it’s too depressing... I can’t watch Citizen Kane, once Kane starts to collapse I can’t bear it, it’s too upsetting.

Or when you read about Welles where it all starts to go wrong, or Fitzgerald, or Preston Sturges... If I make a film about the Queen I’m like a tourist: ‘Oh gosh, isn’t that interesting or isn’t that interesting.’ I’m not interested in making films on my own doorstep, or I have no talent for making films on my own doorstep... If you make films about yourself you don’t have any sense of what people know and don’t know. I prefer to make films where I’m the first member of the audience.”

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

Raising Kael: a compendium

Two thousand, eight hundred forty-eight reviews by Pauline Kael here. [Via Greencine's conscientious link-hoovering.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2006

Not cricket: All those tiny minds!

The Financial Times' Peter Aspden is one of the more diverting general cultural critics, and this weekend, his subject is his own disenchantment with pop music. In October 1993, he attended a converered at the then-Tate Gallery, on the "meaning" of Madonna. "Much more stuff and nonsense followed," Aspden writes. "What was almost chilling, putting aside the ridiculous language used, was the uncritic nature of the remarks. Because Madonna had played many roles in the various manifestations of her art, her true meaning was "endlessly deferred"... She may have appeared in pornographic poses; but because she was in control, that inverted the patriarchal structure implicit in most such scenarios. "My pussy is the temple of learning," she had memorably stated in her glossy, soft-porn book, 'Sex,' a remark that was taken entirely at face value by the assembled company, who, frankly, sounded like they had taken their degrees there." Pop, he concludes, "is generally drivel, not only failing to provide any instance of originality but celebrating its very dim-wittedness with retro styling... I don't entirely blame Madonna. She made a very good album, 'Ray of Light,' nearly a decade ago and remains a committed stage performer... But those people who write about her! All those tiny minds, flaunting their half-baked understanding of Semiotics-Made-Simple, urging us to take seriously any personality that combines shrillness, reasonable looks and obdurate ambition."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2006

Bullets over Holcomb: Thomson and McGrath on an alternate Capote

David Thomson's already on record purporting greatness for Douglas McGrath's parallel, if more sexually charged, Capote pic, Infamous, with Telluride programmer Bill Pence offering to the Denver Post this rationale for its inclusion at this weekend's festival: "[W]hat made it worth tempting deja vu... says Pence, was the input of David Thomson. The film historian, critic and author of the go-to "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" will receive the festival's [silver] medallion. "It's his choice for the best film of the year so far," says Pence. "I told him if he's willing to get up and say that in front of an audience, I'm going to have him introduce the film and we'd play it." From Mr. Thomson's notice in the Independent: "In Capote, the achievement of the film—and it delivers—is to show that Capote was a shit, a devious glory-seeker and a fine writer who got his own way all the time. That film says he was ruined by his success, but you don't feel it, because Hoffman's Capote is too tough and too self-centred to be brought down by his own moral failure... [T]his is a staggering advance