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October 31, 2006
New DVD: Down to the Bone (2004, ***)
ONE OF THE REGRETTABLE THINGS about not having the luxury to write only about one film or two films a week is the lack of time to consider what truly constitutes “acting” in movies. 
It’s one of the most mysterious components of the alchemy of filmmaking. Pauline Kael, for one example, was terrific at finding zingy one-liners to describe the physicality of a performer. “There are things you just can’t write, like the way an actor will look at another actor,” Oliver Stone once told an interviewer. “And these little things are everything in a movie. So I think that as filmmakers, we don’t truly have control over everything.”
Made on the most modest of budgets on digital video, Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone, (Hart Sharp, $20) which won two prizes at Sundance 2004, including for actress Vera Farmiga's “outstanding performance” is a powerful mix of control and fearlessness, of observation and contemplation.
Set in the drearier reaches of economically failing upstate New York, Bone is the story of Irene (Farmiga), a young mother with a child to raise and a cocaine addiction as well. Working in a dead-end job as a grocery cashier, Irene’s life is one urge at a time more than one day at a time.
Granik’s work as a writer and director, drawn from research for a documentary she did not make, has the felicity of nonfiction filmmaking, but the grace of Farmiga’s fearlessness. Even if you choose just to stare into the center of the screen at this marvel of an actress, you cannot help but admire the authenticity of each moment as it plays out. Irene is wearied from drugs but also from work: it’s a double-edged situation, with the lower-working-class milieu as inescapable as a bad habit yet likely more permanent.
“Do you have an advantage card?... I don’t either,” is Irene’s potentially condescending opening line to a customer at the grocery, yet in Farmiga’s delivery, wry grin and body language, the movie opens out like an vulnerable smile. Irene isn’t a histrionic audition piece for a Steppenwolf try-out: much of the pain stays simmering within. There’s casual authenticity in verbal and gestural exchanges, which could be summed up by a post-rehab pal of Irene’s offering the shrug of "I just feel more comfortable high.”
Down to the Bone failed to get a distributor after its Sundance awards, and after being picked up by a small start-up, opened in Los Angeles in late 2005, to almost no response, except critical raves and a Los Angeles Film Critics’ award for best actress. The subject matter may be off-putting in outline—woman-kids-junk-uplift-downfall like too many recent Sundance dramatic entries—but to deny oneself the chance to see Farmiga’s performance is a more painful prospect. (The promise of a non-romanticized working class milieu may also be alienating to audiences, from those who don’t want to see such things because it doesn’t speak to them to those who don’t want to see such things because they’ve escaped (or hope to escape) it themselves.
The only movies that are “downers” for me are ones that are badly mad or poorly observed, and while dealing with hopelessness and haplessness, Down to the Bone is uplifting for its minor-key yet majestic feats of empathy. (And Michael McDonough’s digital cinematography is lyrical without straining.) Granik’s movie is a feat of listening, and a feat of watching as well.
There are theories to hatch and cases to be made about what constitutes the best of screen acting, but as in Down With the Bone, start with the human face. And in Farmiga’s face, you will see one of the most powerful performances of recent years.
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 30, 2006
Feral Children: when Field was Little
The Oregonian's Shawn Levy calls it Todd Field's Mystic River moment in this scarifying outtake from a long Sunday interview about Little Children: "I remember coming home one day on my bicycle along this gravel path near 157th and Division, and this Ford Falcon pulled up, this white 
Ford Falcon with two guys in it, and they said 'Come 'ere kid, come 'ere.' And you know when you're near trouble, at any age. And I knew they were bad, and I knew they were gonna get me in that car, and I knew that no one was every gonna see me again and they would do bad things to me and I would be dead. And I was screaming and tried to get away, and my bike fell in the gravel and they started chasing me, and lo and behold the next-door neighbor started coming down the street and saw me, and these guys ran and they sped off. And they didn't catch them. And I went home and I told my parents and they didn't show the fear that they had about the situation, but they didn't stop letting me have my independence. And that's what formed me as a human being: being allowed to have that childhood. And I wouldn't trade that for anything. I'd just as soon have gone off in that car and not exist as not have the childhood that I had, which was tremendous—a great, great childhood. And as I've observed other parents in places I've lived—Los Angeles, New York and even London—it was a rare childhood. And it didn't have to do with my parents being good consumers and going out and buying everything and making you safe. They let us be as children and let us be feral and let us figure out who we were. They let us fight our own battles and some of them were hard."
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2006
Snatching shoes from a cricket: why didn't Kael get Cassavetes?
Filmbrain contrasts the respective legacies of film cricket and filmmaker in a ditty entitled John Cassavetes and the Shoes of Pauline Kael." The piece begins by quoting Kael: "The acting that is so 
bad it's embarrassing sometimes seems also to have revealed something, so we're forced to reconsider our notions of good and bad acting... Faces has the kind of seriousness that a serious artist couldn't take seriously—the kind of seriousness that rejects art as lies and superficiality. And this lumpen-artists' anti-intellectualism, this actors' unformulated attack on art may be what much of the public also believes—that there is a real thing that 'art' hides..."Of which Cassavetes once said to cinematographer Frederick Elmes: "The way I figure it, if Pauline Kael ever liked one of my movies, I'd give up." Writes FB, "[T]he reasons behind my veneration have changed tremendously over the years. What grabbed me back in the 80s was just how different his films were[, a] sense of immediacy combined with a seemingly 'fuck you' attitude towards Hollywood was terribly exciting... [N]ow that I've reached the age of Archie, Harry and Gus (the infernal trio from Husbands), I find myself looking at Cassavetes' films through an entirely new set of eyes. The modes of behavior seem less foreign to me, as do the intricate subtleties of the various relationships—be it between friends, lovers, spouses, or parent and child. The desperation, the loneliness and longing, the inability to communicate, and the overall tragic nature of many of his characters speaks to me in a way not possible back then... 
Cassavetes' work wasn't fully appreciated during his lifetime, and his relationship with film critics was tumultuous at best. For every critic that praised him, there was a Vincent Canby, John Simon, or Stanley Kauffmann ready to cut him down. Yet the harshest of all his detractors was New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, whose distaste for Cassavetes was nearly as strong as [hers for] Kubrick." Re-reading Kael on Cassavetes "reveals that she spends as much time rebuking the audience as she does the film itself. That the realism in Cassavetes' films is not her liking is acceptable, but her attitude towards those genuinely moved by them is nothing short of condescending..." [Always a danger when a cricket's pique reveals more of themselves than of the art/artist on view.]
"I think embarrassment is not a quality of art but our reaction to failed art, yet many members of the audience apparently feel that embarrassment is a sign of flinching before the painful truth, and hence they accept what is going on as deeper and truer because they have been embarrassed by it." ... Cassavetes was no doubt bothered by Kael's opinion of him, and his various run-ins with [her] certainly didn't help... He tried to ban her from a screening of Husbands, but Ben Gazzara intervened on her behalf." FB quotes Marshall Fine's bio, "Accidental Genius": "Cassel recalled a taxi ride to a bar after a screening that he had been to with Cassavetes and Kael. Kael was talking about the film they'd just seen and Cassavetes looked at her with a suspicious grin. "Pauline, you don't know what you're saying," he said. Before she knew what was happening, he reached down and snatched the shoes off her feet. Even as she squawked in protest, Cassavetes hurled the shoes out the taxi window. Once they arrived at the bar, Cassavetes and Cassel chivalrously offered to carry the diminutive Kael into the bar. She walked in her stocking feet instead." An immature gesture... but one that seems so in character for Cassavetes I've always been curious if the Paulettes toed the party line on Cassavetes. As far as I know, über-Paulette Armond White hasn't reviewed any of his films, but references to Cassavetes in other reviews have always been positive. I'm not sure what Denby, Edelstein, Powers, et al. think about him. Regardless, Kael's scorn towards the films of John Cassavetes has always been a bitter pill to swallow, for she was the first critic I read religiously, and who opened my eyes to so much about cinema. But as my opinion of Cassavetes continues to grow, so does my assertion that Kael just didn't get it."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2006
One-on-one with the Kazakh's minions; Borat replies
An offer for 5,000 tickets to Borat on its opening night, via MySpace, turned out to be an intense irritation: following the link led to a pernicious "survey" site offering Readers Digest, nicotine patches and travel packages to Branson, Missouri, in which it was necessary to "opt out" of hundreds of choices after giving personal information. I didn't make it through: almost 20 pages of junk was enough for me. [I've started getting spam already from these gentle folk.] Impulsively, I sent a message via the site to the "Borat" identity, and have gotten these two replies so far. Special attention, or is there a Borat-bot shuffling random replies? Not very nice.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 27, 2006
Shut Up and Shut Up: Weinsteinco sez GE-NBC, CW nix Chicks [UPDATED}
Reports Variety, The Weinstein Company is claiming that General Electric's NBC network and the Viacom-Warner Bros. CW network have kicked the Chicks, refusing to accept national advertising for Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's brilliant documentary, Shut Up & Sing! 
[View the offending ad here.] While a CW rep denies the Weinsteinco assertion, NBC "has specifically said it won't accept the spots because they are disparaging of President Bush. Opening today in NY and LA, the deeply felt and incredibly entertaining doc "revisits the fierce fallout that occurred in 2003 after lead singer Natalie Maines said she was ashamed that the president is from Texas, her home state. The national spot shows a clip of Bush authorizing troops to fight in Iraq, then cuts to a clip of Maines' comment. Next is a clip of the president saying publicly that the Dixie Chicks shouldn't have their feelings hurt if people don't want to buy their records anymore. The final frame shows Maines saying that Bush is a "real dumb (bleep)." ["Fuck" would be the epithet in question.] "It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America," Harvey Weinstein said in a statement. "It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is profoundly un-American." While Weinstein is, of course, one of the masters of "free media," the practice of creating controversy where there is no intention of actually dishing out for paid advertising, NBC's blunt statement that it "cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush" is pretty frightening. [At the link, the counterclaims by the CW versus TWC.] [UPDATE October 28: Weinstein reps have been quoted in Saturday reports to the effect that if this were an attempt at free media, they'd've done it last week, in order not to diminish the thunder of the largely approving opening day reviews in NYC and LA.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
Babel babble burst
Babel producers Jon Kilik and Steve Golin are lucky enough to be able to afford an ad to respond to the Right Coast Paper of Record: In the October 25 New York Times, the pair purchase a fair number of square inches to address a double-barreled blast of hearsay from the LA Times and NY Times regarding the writer and director of that film (and of Amores Perros and 21 Grams): “To The Editor: As the producers of Babel, we feel it is a shame that The New York Times chose to base an October 22 article upon a gossip piece that the Los Angeles Times Arts section printed on October 4… 
We have worked side by side with Alejandro González Iñárritu for the past two years and have witnessed a great example of the collaborative processes of moviemaking… [E]xamples of the loyalty, trust, inclusion and teamwork that define his way of working [include the] continuity of Gael Garcia Bernal… Adriana Barraza (Amores Perros, Babel), Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel), composer Gustavo Santaolalla (21 Grams, Babel), production designer Bridgette Broch (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel)… editor Stephen Mirrone (21 Grams, Babel) and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel). We have never heard [González Iñárritu] use the word “auteur” to describe his filmmaking style but often the word “we.” … While the debate of authorship is as old as cinema, philosophical differences that had nothing to do with the creative process of making Babel… [have] resulted in Alejandro and Guillermo choosing not to work together on their next features. Those same philosophical differences [led to] the decision to not appear together in Cannes… We know that both of these men are saddened that their long and successful relationship has been reduced to salacious gossip.” Kilik and Golin quote a letter sent to the LA Times by the collaborators but which was not published: “We were both saddened to see your article. It is disappointing when the focus of a 10-year relationship is at its conclusion… Alejandro does not have a manager and therefore could not have confirmed anything. The fact of the matter is our professional relationship has run its course. We have worked together… on three very successful projects and are incredibly proud of those films. We intend to move forward independently.” [A partial LA Times correction is here. Pictured: Rinko Kikuchi.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Death of a President: (2006, ***)
THE TWO MOST STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL SENTENCES OF THE WEEK were likely penned by a lawyer: “This film is fictional. It is set in the future.” Coming at the end of British director Gabriel Range’s Death of a President (co-written by Simon Finch), about an aftermath of authoritarian opportunism when President Bush is killed while politicking in Chicago in October 2007, this disclaimer suits Range’s neatly arrayed paranoid prognostications, which, of course, are trumped by reality each and every present day. (“Habeas Corpus”? What’s that?) How would a patriot act after the death of a president? 
By destroying every last vestige of civil liberties and anointing themselves saviors; by committing all manner of craven cover-up and pitiful power grab, DOAP suggests, and in the director's own words, a metaphor for what came after 9/11. Range’s use of Chicago topography (and footage drawn from several Bush visits to the city) in his neo-doc (or “retrospective documentary” style, in his words) is astute, as is the examination and reexamination of “surveillance” footage in the fictional dissection of whodunit. Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool is an obvious antecedent for this style of speculative fiction, as are Peter Watkins’ post-nuclear scenario, The War Game (which won the 1965 Best Documentary Oscar) and Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here, and while DOAP proposes the existential quandary of a fear of “terrorists” dictating entirely the course of a country’s decisions, the film’s follow-through, while compelling, never reaches the heights of irresponsibility attained by numberless politicians and business leaders. Of Nazism, and by extension, any vast, complex horror, George Steiner wrote of the “sheer incapacity of the 'normal' mind to imagine and hence give active belief to the enormities of the circumstance.” Range does yeoman’s work in capturing circumstance, but he cannot run as fast as a contemporary headline ticker. In a director’s statement, Range writes: “While the premise... is certainly an incendiary one, as a metaphor for 9/11 it must by necessity be unspeakably horrific. And history teaches us that there is nothing that can have a more convulsive impact on America than the assassination of a President. I have always known that I would be condemned for the very idea of this film, but I believe that sometimes it is not only acceptable for art to be outrageous—it is necessary. We live in a time of incredible fear… The advance condemnation… by politicians and pundits who have not seen—and may never see—this film reflects the landscape of fear in which we live today, and which my film attempts to address.
What disturbs me most about what is happening today is the complacency. Terrible things happen and there is a lack of remark. It is my belief that this complacency is largely due to the way the media presents events. As a longtime TV journalist myself, I am very attuned to this… What I wanted to do with this film was offer another perspective on what’s happened in the last five years, and look at how the war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq is changing America.” With Becky Ann Baker, Brian Boland, Michael Reilly Burke, Neko Parham and James Urbaniak (Henry Fool), marvelously dry as a forensics tech who will not tailor the facts. Richard Harvey’s dour score is a plus. You can view the first six minutes at this link. Major theater chains chose to demonstrate their conservatism by not booking the essentially liberties-concerned film: it opens Friday in about 80 largely independent locations including Chicago’s Music Box; the Arclight in Los Angeles; Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas; Cambridge’s Kendall Square; the Brooklyn Heights Twin; Houston; Detroit; Petaluma; Encino; Portland; Pittsburgh; San Antonio; San Francisco; San Jose; San Rafael; Santa Monica; Missoula; Key West; Tuscaloosa; Seattle; Wilder, Kentucky and Nitro, West Virginia. [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 24, 2006
Climates control: photos by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Hadn't visited Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's website for a while, so it was a swell surprise to happen upon an extended gallery of his work, especially the folio this image is drawn from, called "Turkish Cinemascope." His intensely beautiful movies of contemporary discomfort, such as Distant and Climates are important, and these 24x50 images look pretty terrific. [They're larger on his site than shown here; this one took my breath away.] The series is of panoramic photographs shot across Turkey in the last four years, mostly during location scouts. They'll debut at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece in November 2006, along with a retrospective of all of his films. Here's the trailer for his latest, opening this weekend at Film Forum in Manhattan:
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Kazakh it to me: Borat not minting Cohen?
If I had an item about Black Snake Moan, the world would be so different... but Variety's Michael Fleming & Ian Mohr offer intel of the moment on Borat's queasy-making for 
FoxNewsCorpZondervan upon its very nice preem at GrauMann's Chinese: "Much as unsuspecting people try to gauge the strange [character], Fox and rival distributors are trying to figure out what to make of the Borat box office potential.... Fox maintains standard tracking methodology doesn't apply. "This is a new genre of movie," said Jeffrey Godsick, exec VP of marketing... "The awareness is beginning with a targeted audience. When you are breaking a new kind of genre, not everyone knows what to make of it." ...Cohen was to be ushered into his preem by a phalanx of Kazakh locals bearing fruits and wonders of the country. Plans were for Borat to be carried, bridelike, to the podium by an oversized woman. There, he would address the throng of press and fans and respond to a recent invitation to visit Kazakhstan, which has tried to disown Borat almost from the moment he claimed it as his country of origin." Or, as one of Baron Cohen's subjects puts it, more condescendingly than the poop he puled on her in a BBC piece about the production's m.o.: "I thought I was talking to an uneducated man, maybe from a tribal community," Ms Stein says. "I mean, that's how it seemed to me... I thought about it, I worried about it, and then felt I have to get back to my work. I just have to move on. I'm a New Yorker, all sorts of things happen in New York. I'm not angry." But the artist, whose sculptures represent "empowerment and strength", wants to ask Baron Cohen why his art "zooms in on human weaknesses and foibles." [DEVELOPING...]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: the opening four minutes
And it's only the set-up for his journey... The BoratMovie YouTube page also has deleted scenes and other crunchy bits. The Borat homepage is ridiculously funny as well, even after being bounced from its original "kz" domain. Very nice.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2006
John Moore: I might fucking hate Stanley Kubrick
Omen auteur John Moore comes to a conclusion about Full Metal Jacket: "It occurred to me the other day," he tells the Telegraph's Marc Lee, "that I might fucking hate Stanley Kubrick. I've spent 20 years thinking I love him, but now it feels as if his movies are like some cancerous, mean-spirited construction on mankind. It's as if he whispers something in your ear that you wish you hadn't heard. I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's similar to when you watch something grotesque on the internet, like an al-Qa'eda execution, and you immediately wish you hadn't seen it. But you can't unknow it, unlearn it. It seems to me that most of Kubrick's stuff is like that. There's a horrible meanness to it. You know, I don't think there's an ounce of optimism in Full Metal Jacket." [Opines JeffMCM in comments: "It sounds like the auteur of Behind Enemy Lines is missing the point. No great artist is ever truly a nihilist; the very act of filmmaking, in Kubrick's case, is proof that, underlying all his cynicism, rests the belief that mankind is capable of redemption and change. This is why Dr. Strangelove is a comedy. This is why the ending of Eyes Wide Shut happens as it does. Moore's The Omen is certainly a more soul-dead movie than anything Kubrick ever made."]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:33 PM | Comments (2)
October 21, 2006
All politics are not local: Michael J. Fox advocates
There is no more powerful device in cinematic grammar than a close-up of the human face. In this blunt, elegant, powerful political advertisement Michael J. Fox demonstrates. The human face, no one draws so close to it as Bergman does. In his recent films there is nothing more than mouths talking, ears listening, eyes expressing curiosity, hunger, panic.—Francois Truffaut.
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:13 PM | Comments (1)
In the mudroom: Todd Field on Little Children
There's more than enough misunderstanding to go around ine arly reviews of Todd Field's ambitious second feature, Little Children. The writer-director articulates to Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, but does not explain: "It’s the basic rule of illusion. It’s like in the magicians’ union: If you sign into the Society of 
American Magicians or the International Brotherhood of Magicians, there are two rules. You work on something, and when you finally show it, you don’t do it again right away. And the second [rule] is that you don’t explain it. It’s the same thing with storytelling... Why would you go to all that trouble to do something that hopefully people are going to engage in enough to have a conversation about, and then get up and say, “What I really meant was...” Or, “Oh, and by the way, the characters you’ve been caught up in for two hours, they’re really actors, and here they are! ... That’s why cinema is great. It’s a very democratic process, and it’s open to everyone. Why do we sit and watch Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films that have no reflection of our culture at all? We’re not from Istanbul, yet we’re so profoundly moved. That’s why film, I think, is the closest form of expression to music. It doesn’t require that someone [be of] a particular background or gender or race or age." Of adapting Tom Perotta's novel, Field says, "What interested me about the book were its characters, its themes and, almost in an allegorical way, its sense of paranoia [and how that connected with] the state our country is in right now. Probably the only thing that made me take pause was the fact that it was set in this bedroom community and that it might be accused of being a send-up of suburbia, because I don’t believe that that’s what the story is. I think that would be a lazy way to perceive it." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2006
Christiane faith: remembering Kubrick
As a newly restored print of Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, makes an appearance at the 50th Times BFI London Film Festival, Christiane Kubrick appears as The Good Widow, taking the Times' James Christopher into the Kubrick cloisters for a rare chat. 
"The gravel drive leading up to Christiane Kubrick’s mansion near St Albans in Hertfordshire is protected by three sets of electronic gates and “Strictly Private” signs... It’s a rare honour... to stroll through the glass-roofed courtyard littered with paintings, past the creepy feathery masks for Eyes Wide Shut, and into a blood-red library crammed with art books, Thackeray, De Sade and the well-thumbed volumes on witchcraft that Stanley Kubrick collected for The Shining." Of the abandoned "Aryan Papers" project, Christiane says, "He also had some bad luck. He couldn’t get the finance to do 'Napoleon,' and the film he wanted to make around 1993 about the Holocaust... he gave up because he couldn’t stand it any more. It was far too dark. The SS papers were too much to bear. Stanley would lie in bed all day after researching this stuff because he didn’t think it was worth getting up. It’s the only film I persuaded him to leave alone." This can’t have been easy for a director with legendary stamina. “Even though he died at 70 he probably lived much longer than most people because he only ever slept for four or five hours a night,” says Christiane. “If people were ever exhausted by him it was never intentional. He just didn’t get tired."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2006
The world's stroppiest actors
Winnowing the clip file, I came across an article I wrote for a British magazine that's never been online: a search for the 'World's Stroppiest Actors," or in Left Coast, difficult talent. Here's the opening; the link takes you to the rest.
"WARREN BEATTY WILL NOT BE SPEAKING WITH YOU. Burned by journalists in the 1960s, Beatty was one of the first Hollywood bigs who refused to submit to the indignity of journalistic interrogation. Adam Sandler's used his box-office clout to resist interviews for his latest comedies, and you can't blame him. How many times can you answer the same questions about your life, your loves, your latest movie? There are actors like Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford who soldier onward, revealing little but at least making the gesture. 
Tom Cruise is all smiles and intense eye contact, a shining exemplar of all the self-help non sequiturs that stream from his anecdotes. Tom Hanks is all sunlight and jollies. He doesn't say much, but it's always with lighthearted good-cheer. While Ford does the circuit, he telegraphs answers shorter than the dialogue of any character he's every played. "I do this because it's part of my job, I do this because, what's the word," he told me recently. "It'll come to me." He slow-burns that famous smile, nearly a smirk. "I'm a profit participant."
Yet those luckless artistes earning less than $20 million a picture are contractually obligated to meet the ladies and gentlemen of the press. Most Hollywood publicity is manufactured during an exhausting weekend-long clusterfuck, day-long series of seven-minute television interviews and twenty-five minute roundtables where journalists fire their impertinent (or idiotic) questions at increasingly punchy performers. We're all working here, you want to shout at the stroppy lot." [More at the link, including Mr. Jones on what makes a good dog good.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 18, 2006
Atomic energy: Egoyan instructs
Atom Egoyan's directed opera, shorts and multimedia on top of his feature work: now those who can direct, decide to teach for three years, reports the CBC. 
"Canadian film director Atom Egoyan sees his three-year teaching stint at the University of Toronto as a way of extending his creativity into a new form." The course, which began in September, won't be "Atom Egoyan 101," yet "his own films and a reading list will form part of the course material and he plans a series of artistic labs, where he and his students will work through the process of artistic creation. "It's not a traditional course... We will look at how works translate from one medium to another, which is my area of interest." His dilettantism is purposeful. ""I think for me the peak of it came around 1998 when I was nominated for the Academy Award for The Sweet Hereafter, but I was doing a premiere of a new opera in London, and at the same time I was doing this experimental chamber piece and there was this surprise that someone who's riding the crest of the commercial film world would be interested in these other mediums... I just find that baffling because it's what nourishes what I do." Egoyan's post at U of T? "The dean's distinguished visitor in theatre, film, music and visual studies." Working with the ideas of 20 year olds, Egoyan says, means that "The discussions of how images affect our lives are as acute as ever."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Indie's been away: Oregon's Bend Film Festival
A travel day after a weekend as a judge at the third edition of the Bend Film Festival in Oregon; more images and a few notes and more Indie after I'm back. [PHOTO: Tower Theatre, Wall Street, Bend, Oregon.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
Infamous (2006, 1/2 *)
THE DEADLY INFAMOUS, SPITEFUL AND SUPERIOR, would be second best standing out in a field by itself. What a rotten, rotten movie, with the even more rotten fortune to follow the austere fictionalization of Truman Capote’s research of “In Cold Blood” that was Bennett Miller, Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote. 
Infamous reeks of curdled cosmopolitanism, with the co-writer of Bullets over Broadway taking a succession of eccentric potshots at his protagonist. McGrath’s got a callous, jaded eye for the complicated writer and a patrician disdain for the motley on parade in his fourth feature. (Call it “Bullets over Holcomb.”)
The almost unspeakably homely Toby Jones, a 39-year-old British stage actor, playwright and monologist with a crumpled resemblance to Capote, best remembered as the voice of “Dobby the House Elf” in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, has hooded eyes like an ancient pug with a nasal whine instead of a bronchial wheeze, follows Hoffman at a great distance, caricaturing Capote as a petulant bore who couldn’t charm his own mother. This is the awful burlesque everyone feared Capote would be. It’s like a clumsily homophobic “Saturday Night Live” sketch, presenting Capote as little more than a shallow, delusional skit figure.
But that’s just the cup of piss for some: Curmudgeonly critical elder, expatriate Englishman David Thomson, is already on record purporting greatness for this disaster: "In Capote, the achievement… 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… Hoffman's Capote is too tough and too self-centered to be brought down by his own moral failure... [T]his is a staggering advance in which Capote the social shit and Truman the crushed soul are equally apparent... Understand in advance that the leading arbiters of culture will tell you it's the same thing warmed up, a story you know, a curiosity even. It's none of those. We do not write off this year's "Hamlet" because we enjoyed last year's.” I will tell you this: we write off this year’s Capote because it is merely a bad movie.
McGrath uses Reds-like "witnesses" shot against a studio-setting skyline, taking a page from the form of his biographical source, a paragraphese, cut-and-paste bio by George Plimpton. It’s a drama-sapping device. Among the actors are Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, Gwyneth Paltrow as an emotional songbird, Sigourney Weaver and Hope Davis. (The half-star is for Juliet Stevenson’s vivacious turn as Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland, an enameled Jill-in-the-box, a paragon of chinosieries, practical observation and giddy nonsense that resembles the figure also seen in Mary Louise Wilson’s ”Full Gallop,” a brilliant 2003 one-woman show channeling the daft diva.)
Spookily, McGrath’s screenplay moves almost in lockstep with Futterman’s, hitting many of the same incidents, figures and notes. (The two films were produced almost simultaneously.) But compared to the first to be released, Infamous clumps blithely forward as if performed by a road company where the theater manager is a secret sot.
McGrath’s Capote is, as Thomson admired, a little shit in saddle shoes, arriving on the Kansas prairie with steamer trunks of frou-frou and unlikely garlandry. Telling the same anecdotes as told in Capote, Truman’s name-clattering gossip is the currency that gets confidences about the Clutters from the “foxy” sheriff. The dialogue veers from elevation to degradation, and the actors throw the alleged bon mots away: “It was deep calling to deep”; “This world isn’t kind to little things”; “What is your stupid fucking point?”; and the sweet-turned-precious “When that wind comes, it picks you up, light as a leaf, and takes you where it wants to go. You are in control until you’re not.” Mr. Jones does not have the chops to find the notes in those perfumed lines. He’s better at the twirpily naughty reply to “Suck my cock, cocksucker,” hurled by a Kansas convict: “I never snack.”
As the killer Perry, blonde Daniel Craig has dark contact and blackened hair, and while his performance has the vigor you’d expect from this talented actor, he looks off-puttingly strange, like Tommy Lee Jones on an exceptionally bad day. (Recall instead his smart-dumb performance as Francis bacon’s bit of rough in Love is the Devil.) The ostensible emotional bond between the two men is made gravely explicit. Still, it is mildly amusing to hear Craig’s Perry sneer at the vulgarity of “Holly-Go-Fucking-Lightly.” McGrath embroiders elsewhere, substituting the fiction of publisher Bennett Cerf accompanying Capote to the execution for Miller’s fiction of New Yorker editor William Shawn coming along to witness the deaths. Bogdanovich’s wooden, amateur performance as Cerf is perhaps the lowest, unless you fail to turn a blind eye to the death row fuck-without-touching between Capote and killer Smith. [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:41 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2006
Recent DVD releases: Spirit of the Beehive, Lady Vengeance, Hard Candy
Eight hundred words are not necessary to tell you the truest thing I know about Spanish film critic-turned-director Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973, ****) (Criterion, $40): this is one of the greatest movies I know. With only three features in 33 years, Erice is hardly prolific, but his work is lyrical, meditative and haunting, with 1983’s The South, 1992’s The Quince Tree Sun, and his 1973 debut, Spirit of the Beehive.
Spirit of the Beehive is a dream, and a dream about movies (not cinema), and about cinema, about glimpses of dreams, a glimpse of Franco-era rural Spain seen through the large, dark eyes of a child. Erice was asked to make a Frankenstein movie but lacked the money to do it right, so in its place, came up with something filled with the necessary poetry of indigence. It’s 1940. In a rural village, a pair of beautiful, forcefully curious, willful sisters, Ana and Isabel (Ana Torrent and Isabel Tellería) are in the audience for a traveling show of a dubbed version of James Whale’s Frankenstein. Little Ana has one question: Why did he have to die? The movie is strange to them, but so is the world of harsh nature around them. They live on a handsome estate. (The family’s rituals have a distant, downfall parallel in the discoveries of the privileged children of Fanny and Alexander.) Their distracted, older father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) keeps bees, falls asleep while writing. Their distant, equally dreamy mother (Teresa Gimpera), writes love letters. Isabel teases Ana that a remote barn, seen from a hilltop across a gorgeous plane of landscape, is where the monster lives, if you believe in him. Ana, a quiet, black-eyed voyeur, races the miles to get there, searching in vain. And one day a fugitive arrives, an injured criminal. She tends to him, his hunger and his need for warmth. And again, death arrives. Where is the monster? What is the monster? Why is he not loved?
Politics are an undercurrent in Erice’s cinema. The consequences of the [Spanish Civil] war are important, he told the Guardian in 2003. The politics are important aspects, but it is interiorized—the narrative has to be allusive, indirect. The information is conveyed by ellipsis. It is the historic decor. But the real heart, the universality of the stories, is the experience of children discovering the world. A father of two sons, Erice knows how to observe children. Can any movie with a child actor be described as anything but documentary? Whether Jacques Doillon’s Ponette or another film privileged with the presences of the remarkable young Torrent, Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos, (1976) a filmmaker working with children is capturing a reaction to a world where deeper meanings are beyond the subjects’ ken. (But children are capable of monstrous things, as we are well reminded in Spirit.)
Yet the movie’s mood is mysterious and iconic, its palette honeyed yet hazy, like an unrestored Velasquez daubed with decades of taper smoke. (The cameraman, as told on the DVD, was going blind at the time.) Erice’s masterpiece is thrilling in every moment, grandiloquent with lyricism from concrete details. (And as in the work of Vermeer, the master of intimate interior light, scenes in the home often take place in late afternoon or even dusky light.) Erice has successors like Claire Denis, who find mood and tempo through an otherworldly close attention to the material world, through tangible and often primal details. Erice also excels at framing scenes as tableaux, which seem not like stills or even stories, but like epic, timeless, truths. In movies like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Terrence Davies has worked a similar, if more autistic vein of letting furnishings and the fall of light carry mood. Terrence Malick is, of course, another great landscape artist. But with Erice, shot by shot, you are caught in an untamable flow of pungent free association, of plainspoken beauty, autumnal yet voluptuous.
Erice layers the planes of his deep compositions with offhand grace: a shot following a bicyclist from right to left catches a steam train in distance, a the third vehicle—the camera dolly—rushes to capture the meeting of the train and the bicycle on a station platform. It’s elemental and so beautiful. Sisters whisper lies by candlelight. The glass of the estate’s windows is inlaid with hive-like cells. With a tiny mirror, a girl watches herself rouge her small, pouting mouth with blood drawn by the family black cat after she’s tried to choke it. And let these words float beyond the movie’s context: Bit by bit, she’ll begin to forget. The important thing is, she’s alive. She lives. Spirit of the Beehive lives, too, and anyone who loves movies ought to be supremely grateful for this comprehensive edition.
Hard Candy, (2006, ***)
Nineteen-year-old Ellen Page is the sophisticated core of the vivid but intellectual thriller Hard Candy (Lionsgate, $28), a claustrophobic battle of wills between Jeff, a 32-year-old fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) and Haley, a 14-year-old he’s met via the internet and asks back to his minimalist bachelor lair to take a few pictures. 
Page offers a study in variations, an exquisitely modulated, mature performance, and Wilson, best-known for his role in "Angels in America," on stage and in Mike Nichols’ adaptation, is a sturdy foil to her in the unexpected conflicts that emerge in playwright Brian Nelson’s Misery-meets-Sleuth two-hander. (Wilson brings an intriguing opacity to his role in the forthcoming Little Children.) Director David Slade brings a brightly colored, antsy visual style to the confined spaces as the brutal, relentless battle continues. (Slade cites Nic Roeg as his key influence.) Will Little Red Riding Hood wind up with blood on her hands? There's a commentary with Page and Wilson, and another with Slade and Nelson, which ends with Slade's amusing jape, "Thank you for watching, buying or stealing or downloading this, whatever, however the hell you got this DVD, thank you for watching it." An extensive making-of featurette offers more insights into the stylistic choices, and there are some surprises. One of the best interviews with Slade ran in Filmmaker magazine; here's my interview with screenwriter Brian Nelson.
Lady Vengeance (2005, ***)
Reportedly inspired by the eclectic excess of Kill Bill, Oldboy< (2003) director Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) (Tartan, $23), concludes his “vengeance” 
trilogy with a bracing, formally thrilling cry of “LOOOOOOOK AT MEEEEEEE!” It's a splintered, fussy, often abrupt narrative about a woman wrongfully imprisoned for the torture and murder of a child, who spends her time behind bars befriending other criminals whose skills can help her exact the perfect revenge on the true villain once she is free. There are several moments that drove me out of the room, including the depiction on video of the moments before a child’s murder, with supplementary dreadful bawling. Park has written, “In popular culture… people mention love, forgiveness and reconciliation… Violence is another important force… That’s why I decided to deal with it.” His visual ferocity is unrelentingly impressive; his storytelling mostly incoherent, which is, of course , why the film’s theatrical promotions were larded with quotes from Ain’t It Cool News’ house torture-phile, Harry Knowles. [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2006
C***spotting: Irvine Welsh lingos pics and profanity
At Bookslut, Tony DuShane talks movies, guns and naughty words with Irvine Welsh as he tub-thumps "The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs": "What did it feel like when you saw ["Trainspotting"] adapted for the big screen?" Welsh: "It was quite a strange feeling. I mean, I’d seen it on stage first, but to see it in the cinema was kind of a weird thing. I was in the film myself. I had a part in it, so I was on set most of the time when it was being filmed, but I purposely tried not to look at any of the rushes. I just wanted to see it in the cinema, and at the cinema where it was playing, 
I invited some friends, people that were quite critical... people who were quite attached to the book and would be quite gobby if they didn’t like the film. But they were all blown away and all really exhilarated by it. It was a great feeling for me to see it come off like that. It could’ve been a shit film. It could’ve been done badly. But I don’t think that Danny Boyle would make a mess of it because he’s such a great director. I mean at that time he’d just done Shallow Grave so he was on fire, like. I was actually surprised at how strong the film was and how great the characters were. It captured the spirit of the whole thing, yeah?" Mr. DuShane asks after a passage from page 250 of the new book: "'It’s more offensive to use the word cunt, than to buy a handgun...' Would you like to comment on that?" Welsh: "Yeah, it’s weird, you know, you can buy a handgun, but when you go down to the South and there’s people walking around in restaurants with handguns in their holsters and stuff like that, and I think, well, if I get drunk, I don’t want to bump into this guy or fall across him. This is crazy, this is absolutely crazy. Yet if you say the word, “cunt,” you’re going to be ostracized, and you think, why is there this big taboo with words? Why not taboo on handguns? That would make more sense. More people would be alive, you know what I mean. I’ve called a few people cunts and none of them have died. But if I shot them with a handgun, yeah, different thing."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
Idiocracy: Mike Judge's script
Via Shawn Levy's
Mad About Movies blog, a link to the script to the deep-sixed Idiocracy. Earlier: a three-star review here. A quick glance suggests what was seen in a handful of cities is very close to the gloomy comedy on the page.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2006
The Departed (2006, ****)
FINALLY AND AT LAST MARTIN SCORSESE GIVES A SHIT about his indispensable moviemaking talent rather than the Oscars. The Departed is a departure from the muck of Gangs of New York and the moroseness of The Aviator, a welcome return to vulgar, vivid, 
visceral elegance for the 63-year-old director, and his serene, bloody confidence on the contemporary mean streets of Boston matches the exuberance he’s wrought in contemporary Manhattan settings. It’s the first picture of his I’ve fully admired since Goodfellas, a while back in the last century. Several of the major surprises in The Departed draw upon the sleek Hong Kong movie, Infernal Affairs (2002), and if you haven’t seen that film, it’s best to know as little as possible about the story’s twists and turns for full enjoyment.
But simply sketched, Scorsese takes on both cops and hoods in the duplicity-ridden plot. Irish Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) runs Boston’s largest organized crime ring, and the Massachusetts State Police are determined to take him down from the inside. Southie rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) has to prove his bonafides to get into Costello’s crew while his double, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), is on the “right” side of the law, finding a spot in the state police’s Special Investigations Unit, and in charge of one of the sections assigned to topple Costello. But as we know from the first scenes, with Scorsese glorying in criminal bestiality from the get-go, the malefic Costello has groomed Colin since childhood. Scorsese understands beautifully, both in casting and performance, what each of his actors can do. Among the tremendous performances are, of course, Nicholson, who ranges from the most deliciously precise of line readings to the most manic of threats; Damon, charming and plausible in his darkest behavior; Di Caprio, capturing unanticipated terrors in his deep-cover character; Alec Baldwin, hilarious as Colin’s deadpan boss; Ray Winstone as Costello’s enforcer; Mark Wahlberg, note-perfect, as a commanding, fearlessly witty leader of another investigative team (“If you had an idea what we do, we would not be good at what we do. We would be cunts. Are you calling us cunts?”); and Vera Farmiga, of the extra large, blue, blue windows to the soul, as a therapist who winds up treating both Colin and Billy, unbeknownst to any of the trio. Scorsese boldly holds on her large sparking eyes of endless quickness and keenness in a way other directors might fear.
Opening to the strains of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” The Departed’s alternation of portent and release, of rock and opera, of performance precision and actorly arias, seems suited to the schizophrenic patterning of the two cops with a father figure and a fuck in common. In a few conversations with colleagues in other cities who saw the picture sooner, the question of whether the movie has deeper resonance than its rambunctiously entertaining twist-filled plot came up more than once, yet a single viewing suggests that the transposed elements from the Hong Kong movies dovetail sweetly with Scorsese’s own great theme, the lacerating, internalized self-hatred and ultimate misanthropy at the heart of machismo. Scorsese’s gleaming craft is displayed in Michael Ballhaus’ gorgeous light and refined widescreen framings. Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker work with a nervous, accelerated cutting style that’s cut to the quick, restive in a way that among recent movies I can only compare to the restlessness of Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover and Clean. his movie races along to several pulses, including intriguing sound editing that uses sudden silence and sudden music in equally jarring but similarly satisfying manner. (There are also the non-joke jokes, such as an impotence reference followed immediately by a Molotov’d vehicle rising skyward.)
Screenwriter William Monahan’s taut, terse script, minimizes explanations of the many characters’ backstory and conflicts, yet his brilliant dialogue crackles with savvy, as attuned to gangland lingo and cop terms of art as David Mamet, but in speakable, naturalistic cadence, for the earnest, as well as the venal and corrupt. The words sing with lusty gusto: “Who am I? I’m the guy who does his job; you must be the other guy’; Of the Irish? “Freud says we’re the only people impervious to psychoanalysis.” An Indian shopkeeper: “What is wrong with this country, everybody hurts everybody?” Baldwin’s gleeful “Patriot Act, Patriot Act, Patriot Act, I love it, I love it, I love it!” And Farmiga: “I have to say your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now. Is it real?”
Nicholson’s impersonation of a rat is a certain classic, and who else could do what he does with a line like, “’Heavy lies the crown’ sort of thing? And asking after someone’s mother and hearing, “She’s on the way out,” Nicholson’s genius is refined in his delivery of the tart, simple “We all are, act accordingly.” But he’s also riotous in abuse like Costello telling a table of priests, “Enjoy your clams, cocksuckers.”
Watch for a shot in a foot-chase scene on a Chinatown side street that holds on a lamp made from vertical fingers of mirror, capturing multiples of DiCaprio’s eyes in foreground while the figure of Damon runs into the distance, in perspective the same dimensions as the long strips of mirror. Dazzling. Just dazzling. [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:26 PM | Comments (4)
Contrary Cuban mavblogs YouTube and Google
Mark Cuban has a few hundred words on YouTube and Google at his Blog Maverick [all typos, etc., remain Cuban's own]: "Would Google be crazy to buy Youtube. No doubt about it. 
Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime. Would Google be stupid to do a deal with Youtube. Not at all. Would Youtube be smart to do a deal with Google. Thats a different answer. If Google went to Youtube, like they did Myspace and said they would pay them a minimum of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in exchange for letting Google sell text and video ads on Youtube, as long as there were performance requirements it would make perfect sense for Google... Of course Google would build in protections against getting sued into oblivian. Their many lawyers will take care of that...
With Google, they may be probing them to host all those videos in the super secret server farms that host Google servers and probably some black helicopters as well. Like Myspace, they could walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. Five or Six years, $1.6billion in guaranteed advertising reveue from Google ? Not inconceivable as a deal. Plus it meets the Youtube criteria of not wanting to sell the company... Its not the big companies they would have to worry about the most. Its the little guy. Youtube would get sued by the thousands of rights holders who will seek the maximum amount per download from Youtube for their content. This is where Youtube is really screwed. Youtube doesn't stream. They use progressive download. So the damage claims are going to be per download and enormous... As I have said many times, that shit aint gonna fly. I dont think so, and neither does a long, long list of copyright owners. We arent just talking big media companies. We are talking fake a lawsuit companies... The copyright shit is going to hit the lawsuit fan. Personally, I think the site that has this handled first is going to be in a great position to leapfrog those who dont. They can be out enabling great user created content and building traffic while everyone else is fighting lawsuits." [More musing at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
October 08, 2006
Swimming through cold molasses: Lynch on (off) film
David Lynch reasserts himself as a DV star to the NYFF press conference, as reported by The Reeler: "Lynch responded to Richard Pena's inquiry if he ever saw himself returning to shooting film. "Never," he said, as devastatingly clear and emphatic as a severed limb. "For me, film is completely dead. We love film, and the quality is so beautiful, and the lure and all that's gone before it is so beautiful. But film gets dirty and film breaks and scratches and the color drifts. The equipment is very, very large and heavy. It's like swimming through cold molasses. Digital is the future and it's getting better everyday... I kind of fell in love with the digital look in early tests of digital-to-film... I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. I really believe in the story, but as I said before, I really believe in a story that holds abstractions, or can slip this way and that."
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
At least Harold Pinter likes it: Coppola on Marie Antoinette
"Sofia Coppola could easily be a character in one of her own films," writes Sean O'Hagan in a lengthy profile in the Observer, capturing the 35-
year-old director's affect in a few words, "a day-dreamy, slightly disconnected but immaculately stylish waif who seems all at sea in a world of extraordinary privilege.... If her vagueness and her sulkily beautiful Mediterranean face combine to make the 35-year-old Coppola seem like a slightly out-to-lunch teenager, I suspect this may be a way of keeping the world at bay. And keeping control... Lady Antonia Fraser, who has become friends with Coppola since the director purchased the rights to her... biography, can't see what all the fuss is about either. 'I love it... it doesn't deviate from the story, but nor does it copy the book slavishly. It's Sofia's vision of Marie Antoinette... I enjoyed it enormously and so did Harold [Pinter].' This is indeed the case. 'He liked the film. He wrote me a sweet letter,' says Coppola, smiling. ' That meant a lot. I mean, he's so honest. I don't think he'd write a letter if he didn't mean it. It's like, if it turns out that nobody else likes it, I can still say, "Well, at least Harold Pinter did".' And the source of a Sofia esthetic? "Well, um, when I was growing up, it was Godard, Truffaut, the French New Wave. The style was so cool to me.' So, your own aesthetic is essentially about style rather than, say, story or drama? 'Um, I guess. I mean, I've always been drawn to individuals really, people with their own distinctive but identifiable style that no one else has. That's all I try to do, find my own distinctive way of doing things."
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)
Why you don't trust a grab-asstic piece of amphibian shit: Ermey disinters Kubrick
Because they're gonna say crazy, crazy things years after you're dead: Promoting his role as "a sexually perverted homicidal maniac" in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, R. Lee Ermey confides in Radar Online's Jebediah Reed that Stanley Kubrick was a miserable weakling: "Stanley called me up all the time. He'd call at three o'clock
in the morning and say, "Oh, it's 10 o'clock over here."... "Yeah, well, it's three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well." He called me about two weeks before he died... We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him—exactly the words he used. He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:16 PM
October 06, 2006
De-evolving the future: Google-Borg gorging on YouTube?
Via the Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal's reporting "Google Inc. is in talks to acquire the on-line video site YouTube Inc. for about $1.6 billion. "Such a deal would represent one of the fastest creations of wealth in Internet history. YouTube was founded just last year in a Silicon Valley garage. 
The startup claims to already account for 60% of all videos watched on-line. The site attracts nearly 20 million unique visitors each month... The Journal cited a single, unidentified source it said is familiar with the matter. It said discussions remain at a "sensitive stage" and could break off at any time. The rumour was first circulated by Michael Arrington, editor of a blog called TechCrunch. Google, the world's largest search engine, has... a large war chest of nearly $10-billion in cash." Newsweek considers whether it's worth a billion here: "Warner Music.... digital-strategy exec Alex Zubillaga says he felt something like sympathy during a recent dealmaking visit to the firm's Silicon Valley headquarters. YouTube's 60 employees—who share a grand total of 10 landline phones—are so crammed into small offices over a pizzeria in downtown San Mateo that Zubillaga says, "I almost felt bad for them."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2006
Revenge of Jedi Daddy: Lucas thinks smaller
George Lucas started saying it back in April and now he's saying it in Variety: the tentpole era of the studios that he ushered in is over. Reports David S. Cohen: "George 
Lucas has a message for studios that are cutting their slates and shifting toward big-budget tentpoles and franchises: You've got it all wrong.... [S]mall films and Web distribution are the future." Lucasfilm is quitting the movies, to put his money where his mouth is. "We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky. I think the secret to the future is quantity..." Lucas "gave $175 million -- $100 million toward the endowment, $75 million for buildings -- to his alma mater. But he said that kind of money is too much to put into a film." For the dosh it takes and produces to make and market a massive movie, "For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That's 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that's where it's going to land, because it's going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable. You've got to really have a brand. You've got to have a site that has enough material on it to attract people." [More cherrypicking vision things at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)
Out on a Lim: losing VOICE
Here's a New York Film Festival centerpiece for ya: Village Voice Media film editor Dennis Lim got the boot from the Village LACEY, erm, VOICE, reports The Reeler. "Lim's departure follows months of meddlesome corporate squabbles that reportedly slashed his budget by half and had him so frustrated he was walking around the Toronto Film Festival intimating that he "was trying to get fired." (He did not answer his office phone this morning.) Further word indicates that J. Hoberman is safe (if not especially pleased) for the time being, and that New Times will attempt to rebuild the Voice's film section around his name."At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman opines thusly: [A]fter Ridgeway and Schanberg and Christgau got the axe, a half dozen other senior editors were forced out, and the national syndicate of arts reviewers moved in," Kaufman opines, "it was inevitable that longtime Village Voice film critic-editor Dennis Lim would be next on the chopping block of New Times management." [More of the apocalyptic politicklish of how this could and will likely affect the exposure of indie and non-US pictures in Mannahatta at his link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2006
"Go to Danville to see `Jackass 2': a theater owner's lament
"The "closed" sign went up a few weeks ago on the flashy neon marquee outside the Lorraine Theatre," in Hoopeston, Illinois, reports the ChiTrib's Bob Secter. "But the 84-year-old movie palace on Main Street hasn't played its last picture show. Business isn't bad. It's the movies that are wretched. "Both theaters in Hoopeston are closed ... because of such poor film choices available," explains a recording on the Lorraine's customer hot line. "Go to Danville to see `Jackass 2.'" ... Lorraine owner Greg Boardman "put his two screens here on hiatus rather than sell tickets to the gross-out 
and freak-out fare he said Hollywood distributors have made available in recent weeks. Boardman said he'd rather show nothing than such recent offerings as Beerfest, The Covenant or the Jackass sequel... "There's just so much lousy material out there--people vomiting on the screen," explained Boardman, 52, a local boy who now lives in California and uses the Internet to run the Lorraine from there. "I have one of the finest sound systems in the world, and I don't want to waste it on such drivel." When the town got its holiday from Hollywood, the manager of the Lorraine did too: two weeks off, with pay." While he's going to reopen with Open Season and Invincible, "he intends to shut down again if the quality of available films goes soft... There are plenty of action movies, the better to show off the rippling eight-channel digital sound system, a top-of-the-line feature rarely found even in big cities." There's a lot more heartening heartland detail at the link. The Lorraine Theatre website is here.
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:21 PM | Comments (1)
October 02, 2006
Indie returns Tuesday
Rushing to see The Departed...
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2006
Dante's impasto: Ferretti's designs for Scorsese, Fellini, Pasolini
The Black Dahlia's on its way out of theaters, but production design great Dante Ferretti tells the FT's Nigel Andrews a few dozen highlights of his long career: "The history of Italian cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century can be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti. The history of Italian-American cinema in the 21st century - and for a few years before - can also be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti. The 63-year-old production designer has crafted more important movies than you have had hot dates at the arthouse. 
While you were necking in the back row during the latest Pasolini or Fellini (ah memories!), Ferretti was up there on screen... His job, he unabashedly proclaims, is second in the pecking order only to the director. “After him the first person they call on is the designer. He has to discuss the look of the film, the colour, the style. He has to scout for locations. I work many times with the same directors, but I’m like a chameleon. Every story has a different look, sometimes even if they are set in the same period.” And of his final work with Pasolini? "Salo was Pasolini’s Sadeian nightmare set in Mussolini’s model republic. Its sexuality and cruelty suggested a turmoil in the filmmaker’s life and prefigured, for many, his murder in a notorious gay cruising ground outside Rome... After Salo he gave me another script before he died. It was called 'Theological Pornographic Colossal.' I still have it. I read it only once. I can’t tell you more.” But [Ferretti's] expression, growing visibly more sombre even 30 years on, tells one a lot." [Image from Ferretti's decor for Jonathan Miller's production of La Bohème.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)