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November 30, 2006
Got yer lists: Gothams, Spirits, Sundance
The Independent Spirit nominees. The Gotham winners. Sundance Documentary and Dramatic competitions, World Doc and Dramatic. Sundance Premieres, Spectrum, Midnight and New Frontiers. [Photo: Yes, Black Snake Moan.]
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For your consideration: in the post
Go away a week, and suddenly everybody's wanting a critics' award nomination.
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November 29, 2006
More Altman: One long movie and another interview
Two more Robert Altman shorts: brief notes on duration in Altman, Wenders and Bela Tarr films, plus an interview from the time of Cookie's Fortune. "I'VE BEEN MAKING ONE LONG MOVIE" is one of the nice lines Robert Altman had in his quiver to keep from telling journalistic outsiders about just what it was that he did as a filmmaker.Altman worked variations on the form of the musical, sometimes hiding it, sometimes celebrating it. He claimed to hate genre, which is why he employed it and also why he would worm his way through the cliches of a given genre in movies like The Long Goodbye (the always-moral figure of the P.I. turns amoral; a blowzy 1940s-style theme is repeated ad infinitum down to supermarket Muzak and doorbells), or McCabe & Mrs. Miller (the maverick Western entrepreneur is demonstrated as a mumbling mess-up, scored to dour, fateful songs by Leonard Cohen like "Susannah")." [More at the first link; click on the photo for its source information.]
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November 28, 2006
Off the Black: digging for Orr
Here's a glimpse at James Ponsold's Off the Black, which has many virtues, including standout cinematography by Tim Orr (Raising Victor Vargas, George Washington, Come Early Morning).
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Indie returns Wednesday
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November 24, 2006
Thessaloniki International Film Festival: selection 3
Branding: the filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, who had an enormous retro- spective; Jameson, branded and sold everywhere in Thessaloniki.
[Photos © 2006 Ray Pride.]
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Smoke and mentors: Deutchman recalls Altman
In a loving personal reminiscence at the new Emerging Pictures blog, Ira Deutchman, who worked at Fine Line at the time of The Player and had other dealings with Robert Altman recalls the smoke-able stone in Altman's shoe as well as this important, cogent point: "His body of work speaks for itself. But as great as Bob’s directing was, his truly great gift was producing. In all those years, when his films would be greeted with anything from accolades to distain, and even in the years in which he had no box office success, he never stopped working. There was no one more resourceful in getting his vision on the screen. And he extended that gift to help his loyal friends to get their films made as well…the most notable being Alan Rudolph, who he continually supported." [This is the 1,500th entry at this version of Movie City Indie.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:35 AM | Comments (1)
November 22, 2006
Robert Altman: putting my gloves in a shoe box
ROBERT ALTMAN DIED TUESDAY at the ornery age of 81. It was my good fortune to meet the veteran director more than a few times; Nashville is one of the key reasons I got interested in movies. I grew up on a couple-acre patch of green amid rolling farmland in the west of Kentucky—I spent 18 years there one week, the tired joke goes—and didn't grow up with movies. I grew up among people. People who talked. And talked. Stories were everywhere. Histories were spoken aloud. Women and men in their eighties and nineties who had sat on the lap of Civil War veterans when they were small. Legacies were alive. Everyone knows and trusts implicitly the basic, indispensable relationships and alliances and mutual associations in a town of a thousand. You're forced to, through fires, floods, illness, economic slumps. Cemeteries were filled with the names of people you knew who were the successors of the passed. A dozen identical headstones would answer to the same name.
One night, young, I saw Nashville on a big screen and The 400 Blows, uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late night TV. And that was it. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way.
There are articulate tributes and long-morgue obits cascading across the internet; here are outtakes from a bromide-rich interview I had with Altman in 2000, when he got a lifetime achievement nod from the IFP/Gotham Awards.
COSTA-GAVRAS ONCE OBSERVED when asked what he might do with absolute freedom from budgetary constraints: "In such Draconian conditions," he wrote, "it is, I am sure, impossible to be able to choose a subject or to direct a film." There's a second's pause before Altman observes in his dry Midwestern accent, "We get those kinds of questions, we have to give those kinds of answers."
So much for glib questions. So you're paying the rent, keeping good people employed, getting stories told. Then the critics are cold and the audiences are tiny. Is there any consolation in knowing the films can be discovered on video even if the marketers, publicists, journalists and audiences don't see the theatrical release? "Yeah. My 
feeling is that most people catch up with the video. I'm starting to get a whole bunch of calls about Cookie's Fortune, 'Oh, I didn't know about it. I've been wanting to see it since it came out. God, it was good!'" He laughs. "But that's okay. they're seeing it." I suggest that actors do seem to recognize that he holds the philosophy that if you cast well, trust your actors, and most of the work will be done. "Well, [these phrases are] all bromides. No two things are alike, things are similar, but they're never alike. Identical twins aren't alike."
Altman shifts the focus to how an answer is put to use by journalists. "I have to answer these questions or I become [portrayed as] crotchety, and I try to answer as truthfully as I can but everyone wants to put everything in a cubbyhole. Just because a film doesn't succeed at the box office, a certain amount of the blame has to be put onto the marketing people, how they try to sell it and who they try to sell it to. That can be timing. Many things cause a film not to be commercially successful, but that doesn't have anything to do with the perception of success in my mind." While Altman been toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with distributors in the past—he has the last laugh that he outlasted many of his distributors—including New World, Cinecom and most recently. Polygram Films. Of his 1998 "The Gingerbread Man,” Altman told me before Cookie's Fortune was released, “Well, it's criminal, their treatment of that film. There was a vindictive order from the guy who was running [Polygram Films], he was so pissed off with me, he literally told them, 'I want that movie killed.' We're talking to lawyers, but it's almost impossible to win a lawsuit. You can't prove what a film could have done. They were just pissed off because it didn't test the way they wanted it to with the teenagers, y'know, in those malls.”
An attempt to be original counts as some kind of success, doesn't it? "Now, if you see 
anything original, you won't see it [out there for] very long. It's time turtling on. These kids... they don't understand anything else. There's so much saturation. There's not a policeman today who didn't learn his behavior from watching films or television. We all imitate each other.” Does Altman ever think he's imitating himself? “It now occurs to me they're all chapters of the same book. My fingerprints are all over them. Whatever I do, I can't not do it.”
I shift the conversation to a few elements of production, asking if he ever felt any kind of fear on the way to the set in the morning anymore? "Fear? No. Concern, to some degree. It's difficult, there are so many elements. One element goes wrong, you have to constantly readjust. I have to say it's anxiety, not fear."
Have your budgets always been adequate? "I've never been short. On any of those films, if I had an extra week, I don't know what I would have done with it. I set my own schedules. I don't always have all the actors, I don't have the access to the money to pay certain actors who won't work at a certain special effect, things like that. But that just means I have to be a little more creative. I like that."
Ringing off, I mention I like the similarities between Cookie's Fortune and the work of the cinema's great humanist, Jean Renoir (whose Rules of the Game was the acknowledged template for his later Gosford Park. "All these tags are beyond me," he says. Well, I joke, I guess it's your job to do the work, and the job of the journalists is to put your art in a shoe box, I joke to the man who said Hollywood made sneakers and he made gloves. I can almost hear a smirk down the phone line. "Yeah, to put my gloves in a shoe box."
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Thessaloniki International Film Festival: selection 2
Wim Wenders and Franz Lustig, his younger cinematographer on Land of Plenty and Don't Come Knocking, conduct an impromptu discussion on digital moviemaking (LOP) versus traditional styles (DCK).
a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/raypride/303541874/" title="Photo Sharing">
[Photographs © 2006 Ray Pride.]
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Thessaloniki International Film Festival: selection 1
Concurrent with the 47th Thessaloniki International Film Festival is a tribute at the Cinema Museum to Kryzstof Kieslowski: directly behind the image of the late filmmaker, a bold, crooked tree seems to rise from his head.
[Photographs © 2006 Ray Pride.]
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November 21, 2006
Block Quote: Idiocracy
From Mike Judge's futuristic farce, Idiocracy, dumped earlier this year by Fox; Judith Regan's also-dumped, Murdoch-financed interview with O. J. Simpson would fit in nicely as a DVD extra. Written by Judge and Etan Cohen. [Sixth in a series.]
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November 20, 2006
The 47th Thessaloniki International Film Festival: over there
This week, I'll be taking in the sights and sounds at the 47th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Thessaloniki (the city once known as Salonica) in the north of Greece. One of the most ambitious and rewarding of lesser-known (in the US, at least) European regional festivals, this year's programs include a complete retrospective of films by Wim Wenders and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant, Climates). Photo posting should ensue during the week.... [Here's my coverage of an earlier edition of Images of the Twenty-first Century, the festival's spring documentary component. Photographs © 2006 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2006
New reviews: Fast Food Nation; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; For Your Consideration, Shut Up and Sing!
Reviews of four new releases, two of which are swell, and two of which are pretty awful. Read on: Fast Food Nation; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; For Your Consideration and Shut Up and Sing! (Plus: read my interview with Daniel Craig about becoming Casino Royale’s new Bond.)
Fast Food Nation (2006, *** ½)
Richard Linklater’s heartening, lucid polemic, Fast Food Nation, is so much better than the reception it got at Cannes when it debuted earlier this year. Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," with over 1.4 million copies in print, is nonfiction. Schlosser is also a produced playwright, and that profession shows in his collaboration with Linklater, with its sense of focused outrage, which is always dramatically parsed without the extended, overly pointed monologues of, say, John Sayles’ work, and with succinct wit, such as describing the central problem this way—"I’m saying there’s shit in the meat.” (See also: "Marketing 101: don’t kill the customer" and "There’s a reason it only costs 99 cents.") The e. coli-infested meat leads its Slacker-style vignettes from the boardroom of the fictional but too-easy-to-imagine "Mickey’s" hamburger chain, to Colorado ranches and slaughterhouses, to keystroke-surveilled Mickey’s chain stores, to clutches of student activists who think they can free the cattle, but don’t realize the cattle have customs of their own. Fast Food Nation parses an elemental dilemma of the American working class today: everyone wants some sort of change, but each character, from whatever profession or life experience, falls short in one way or the other. Linklater is an admirer of the great French director Robert Bresson, and “Fast Food”’s characters are just as naïve as the titular donkey in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar: it’s Bresson with a side of fries. There is attention to sound and image here that produces some of the most quietly sophisticated work that Linklater has done yet, and in some ways, it is a dour masterpiece, examining the terrorism, the emotional and moral mastication of a food chain gone very, very wrong. The film’s not at all depressing: it’s just very, very serious and gratifyingly thoughtful. (Hawke’s character is a complex wonder.) The ending recalls a particular documentary by another French filmmaker named Georges Franju; if the next-to-the-last scene strikes you, search for his name along with the subject matter. The final shot is a brilliant punch in the face. Co-financed by Participant Productions—brainchild of beneficient eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll—which also made An Inconvenient Truth. The large cast, all of whom do excellent work despite carping from a number of shallow reviewers, includes Patricia Arquette, Bobby Cannavale, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, Esai Morales, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Lou Taylor Pucci, Wilmer Valderrama.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006, *)
Several false starts preceded this paragraph on Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, the second collaboration, after girl-popular S&M soaper Secretary, between director Steven Shainberg (Hit Me) and writer Erin Cressida Wilson. (None of them are imaginary but all were more splenetic than this one.) Drawing from Patricia Bosworth’s biography of the famed photographer and suicide (for which Shainberg’s uncle, Lawrence Shainberg, was a major source), Shainberg and Wilson work up phantasmagorical versions of the artistic libel that Arbus’ work is about cruelty and perversion. (Arbus’ estate denied any employment whatsoever of her imagery, but there are Mary Ellen Mark and Matt Mahurin photographs strewn about.) This uneasily confected "Arbus" discovers her muse in the form of a mysterious new upstairs tenant whose body is covered with fur, a precious wolf-boy played by Robert Downey, Jr. with belladonna-wide eyes. He introduces her to midgets and marijuana, to masochists and dominatrixes, and kewpie-wide eyes are opened wider. As in Secretary, the bold production design suggests a Lower East Side boutique afflicted with unsightly gigantism. David Lynch is already David Lynch, and the Rev. Charles Dodgson beat Fur to many of its pallid, pulled punches. The final shot, like that of another ambitious, hermetic Nicole Kidman vehicle, Birth, is perfect in its own way, but neither shot is earned by the movies that precede them. (A similar criticism I have of the final five minutes of Secretary, which are cogent in a way different from the rest of that movie.) Carter Burwell’s gorgeous score will make a lovely soundtrack album. Bill Pope, whose credits include The Matrix trilogy, shoots and frames beautifully, but the wallpaper and the bold costumes keep getting in the way. Oh, and the relentless borrows from Jean Cocteau’s Belle et la bete (Beauty and the Beast). The only bete here, however, is noir: This is a stinker that gives ambition an unusually high order of odor.
For Your Consideration (2006, ½ *)
Someone’s in the corner over there wanting to talk about “Waiting for Guffman” or “Best in Show”: Sometimes I have to say this upfront in conversations about movies when this fairly common sort of proselytizer is afoot: I don’t like Christopher Guest’s movies, the bitterness of which feels largely curdled and glib. For Your Consideration may be his lamest effort yet, a malnourished small wean, but it does have the courage of its cruelty. A bookend to the 58-year-old writer-director-musician-curmudgeon’s first feature, The Big Picture, which suggested that ambitious young filmmakers were idiots, For Your Consideration follows the making of a grotesquely
implausible caricature of an "independent" picture in which the supremely untalented but limitlessly vain actors (Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer) become convinced via a single line on the internet that they will become Oscar contenders for "Home for Purim," a 1940s melodrama about lesbian Parker Posey bringing her girlfriend home for the holidays. (The Big Picture has Martin Short’s brilliantly ADD caricatyure of an agent; FYC has Eugene Levy spraying his proferred tootsies with borrowed foot spray.) Here's of Guest's more aggravating bits of clumsiness: he shows a single shot being set up, say, with the camera within the film moving, then cuts the scene together with traditional, if indifferent, cutting patterns as if four or five cameras are shooting at once. It’s not something average filmgoers might notice, but it's typical of the thin, nonsensical "wit" of most of the movie: making fun of a process or an impulse the filmmakers or improvisers do not care to understand. The movie’s also one of the drabbest things all year, shot by Roberto Schaefer in a ghastly green pallor like it was developed in a bath of recycled Scope mouthwash. (Schaefer also shot one of the most beautiful-looking pictures of 2006, Stranger than Fiction.) O’Hara indulges her magic frazzle, but the material’s not worthy of the Shakespearean weft of her drunk scenes and brilliant lack of vanity. The overtly brutal five minutes when the actors are thumped is the cruelest thing Guest has ever done, and shines with more clarity of his entire career. The final shot, a grubby hand-held 16mm shot that a manic, wild-eyed O’Hara stumbles toward only makes you want to murmur Guest’s real name, after his cheap allusion to the end of Sunset Boulevard, "I’m ready for my close-up, Baron Haden-Guest of Saling." With Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Dooley, Ricky Gervais, Guest, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchcock, Jane Lynch, Michael McKean, Larry Miller and dozens more.Shut Up and Sing! (2006, *** ½)
Shut Up and Sing! is Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s stirring documentary about three years in the life of the Dixie Chicks: is this the wilderness or a new world for them after their brush with infamy?
Before seeing Shut Up, I’d heard the Dixie Chicks’ music and seen stills of the three band members, but never really paid attention. I thought that Natalie Maines was striking-looking in a fairly goofy way, but on screen, she’s a fiery singularity: such presence and passion, even when slouched across a couch listening to one more marketing strategy, is indelible. There’s no condescension in wanting to call this trio “patriots with ponytails”: you always hope for but just don’t expect this level of informed and indelible dudgeon from a musician, a mother, a wife, a political activist, who’s also seen on screen on the phone consulting with her psychic after a particularly rotten threat. She calls herself a “big mouth” and she’s glorious. Kopple and Peck’s intelligence lies in their willingness to stand back: finding fierce central figures and following them through the brackish backlash to Maines’ extemporaneous comment at London’s Shepherd’s Bush venue in 2003 that she’s ashamed that George W. Bush is from Texas (a statement equally offensive to others, considering that the New Haven-born Bush is a Texas-transplanted carpetbagger.) So many things are right about Shut Up And Sing, but the incendiary heart is mainly Maines’: a central scene shows the group and their manager’s reaction to and precautions against a death threat in Dallas (didn’t John F. Kennedy get a few of those?). The police have brought a photograph. (The man’s features are blurred on screen.) Out of Maines’ mouth: “He’s kind of cute. He’s good-looking. He wants to kill me?” Complicated, loyal, devoted, troops-supporting, nationalistic and one hell of a responsible, respectable grown-up: I know there are more Americans like her.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2006
Adventures in babysitting: Fast Food Nation
While Roger Ebert recuperates, the Chicago Sun-Times is employing staff writers (and occasional freelancer) to fill the gap, much to the disadvantage of most releases. 
Take, for instance, staff reporter Teresa Budasi's sophomoric take on Fast Food Nation, which hits sour (and inadequately copy-edited) notes from sentence one: "Anyone who's ever worked at a fast-food chain knows what goes into making its signature products: Frozen meat on a perfectly calibrated hot grill, with pre-measured condiments squirted from a stainless steel gizmo onto heated buns, all wrapped up in greasy paper or a cardboard box." Anyone? "Perfectly calibrated"? "Greasy paper"? While I once called a certain actress "as welcome as a fart in church," it is surprising to read words like these in a major metro daily (aside from the wishy-washy language masking disdain for the movie's view of the life of work): "There are a lot of recognizable actors in this film, and most of them do a fine job with the material, but for every two who manage to rise above the weak script, there's one who sticks out like a turd in a punch bowl -- or, in this case, feces in a cheeseburger." Ethan Hawke? "When was the last time he played a character who bathed?" The Colorado setting is described as "Middle America." "Hey, it's Patricia Arquette of TV's "Medium"! Oops, sorry about that. Too many star-sightings in this movie. Focusing solely on the Mexican story line might have made a better film. Instead we have a whole lot of disjointedness that is supposed to all tie together... Ultimately the movie disappoints just like a trip to the food court for a No 2 with cheese. You think it's what you want, but it ultimately leaves you feeling a little bloated and full of empty calories." Roger... come back... you are missed.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:55 PM | Comments (1)
Sketching Pan: del Toro's Labryrinth of sketches
In the Guardian, Guillermo del Toro introduces a selection from his sketchbooks: "Pan's Labyrinth started with a visual image. As a child, I was convinced that a goat man lived in the bedroom closet and was going to come out and grab me. This goat man later became the basis for Pan, the central character of the film. I also wanted to create 
two opposing worlds. I used the angular, cold world of fascist-era Spain to represent reality, and a very rounded and uterine world to represent the fantasy that the child escapes into. I guess you could say that I am obsessed with images of stillborn things, and seduced by the idea that the womb is the most comfortable place to be. I also have a fear of reason and dogma; it gives me the shivers. But maybe my upbringing keeps getting in the way..."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:28 AM | Comments (0)
Go Bruins: cops Taser student, new media converge [UPDATED]
There've been too many stories lately about making mini-movies with cell phones, such as this AP dispatch about "mobilettes," a homely bastard of a word created to describe the results of a class taught at Boston University "through a unique partnership with cellular company Amp'd Mobile [backed by Qualcomm and Viacom and " branding itself as a youth-oriented company"] and taught by director Jan Egleson. During the semester, the students will produce a series of short episodes that eventually will be distributed by the company for its cellular customers. The students have challenged each other to shoot it using only the phones, despite obstacles surrounding sound and video quality." But, as with any emerging medium, unintended uses are more intriguing, such as in this sloppy yet horrific amateur recording of UCLA campus policemen Tasering a student. No news of when UCLA will release images from their substantial surveillance system. The Daily Bruin's Sara Taylor reports that "Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday... Tabatabainejad did not immediately leave, and UCPD officers resorted to use of the Taser when Tabatabainejad did not do as he was told. A six-minute video showed Tabatabainejad audibly screaming in pain as he was stunned several times with a Taser, each time for three to five seconds. He was told repeatedly to stand up and stop fighting, and was told that if he did not do so he would "get Tased again." UPDATE: Mr. Tabatabainejad is filing suit, reports the LA Times. "The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses." [Bonus irony at the jump.]
"The incident follows the recent announcement that four of the campus police department's nearly 60 full-time sworn officers had won so-called Taser Awards granted by the manufacturer of the device to "law enforcement officers who save a life in the line of duty through extraordinary use of the Taser." The award stemmed from an incident in which officers subdued a patient who allegedly threatened staff at the campus' Neuropsychiatric Hospital with metal scissors."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
Block Quote: Eyes Wide Shut
Words never spoken, never heard: one of the passages for Barry Lyndon-style voiceover in the script for Eyes Wide Shut, written by Stanley Kubrick with the intercessions of Frederic Raphael. [Fifth in a series.]
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November 16, 2006
Borat, unturned: on the cover of Rolling Stone
Would you like a little more Borat with that? 
RS previews its Sacha Baron Cohen cover story, in which he lifts the mustache for Neil Strauss. "Borat essentially works as a tool... By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' ... was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism... [W]hen I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
Block Quote: McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Like his mentor Robert Penn Warren, David Milch borrows from the best: from a draft of "Presbyterian Church," which became McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, with added muttering by Warren Beatty. "No Unescorted Whores Allowed"? Why is this not at every gate of every studio in town? [Fourth in a series.]
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Sundance at 25: Filmmaker's download
A chunk of Filmmaker Magazine's fall 2006 issue is online, including a downloadable PDF of a 33-page salute to Sundance at 25. I have a contribution that begins on page 70, "The Sundance Touch," broad-brushing the idea that what's good formally about the best Sundance entries has already been soaked up by studios and cable. "Okay, so a hundred filmmakers walk into the Eccles..."
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November 14, 2006
Block Quote: Miami Vice
Writer-director Michael Mann's vivid scene descriptions are prodigious, knowing, often show-offy assemblies of terms-of-art, brands, place names, with the odd breathtakingly painterly description. From a 2004 draft, a scene not in the release version of Miami Vice. [Third of a series.]
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Ratting Borat: more fine whine
Salon does a rundown of what's verite and what's fake in Borat, and AP's Erin Carlson chats up some of Sacha Baron Cohen's unsuspecting figures of fun in 'Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, never questioning that their eagerness to be in a television show, any kind of television show, kept them from reading the egregious release forms proffered by the production. 
D.C. public speaking coach Pat Haggerty, who got $400 after signing a release, is affable about the humor. ''They were exercising a First Amendment right,'' said Haggerty, adding that he enjoyed the movie. ''And this Sacha Cohen guy's going to make 87 gazillion dollars. You know, good for him. I'm just sorry that he had to do it in such a way that he allowed people to make jerks out of themselves exposing their character flaws.'' The drunken frat brothers lawsuit is mentioned, as well as this paragraph, which doesn't fully explain the last line. "Cohen's behavior also wasn't funny to former TV producer Dharma Arthur, who claims she was duped into giving Cohen airtime on a morning show segment in Jackson, Miss. Cohen's live appearance, in which he said he had to go ''urine,'' led her life into a downward spiral, she said." Professional unfunnyman Joel Stein doesn't like journalists who've allowed Baron Cohen to conduct interviews in character and sometimes with questions provided in advance. In the LA Times, Stein, who is inexplicably on the op-ed page, writes, "If you can't make a story about a movie this complicated and different interesting — without just getting Cohen to perform — then you might as well just direct people to a clip of his movie. The excuse is that it's only entertainment journalism... [P]opular culture has dramatic effects on our society...
I wrote a three-page story... for Time magazine, and my editors chose not to have me talk to Cohen in character. Instead, I asked the director and producer about what Borat's candid camera says about Americans and whether the film is offensive to Jews, Gypsies or Kazakhs. Or to people who prefer not to see movies with human feces in bags. But the most important question in Borat—the one that makes it a cultural turning point — is about whether the act of tricking unsuspecting victims and sharing it with millions of people is cruel or funny... The answer to that question about comedy — more than music, MySpace or Paris Hilton — is what cleaves the reality TV generation from their parents. And it's too bad that Cohen, a Cambridge-educated, traditional, observant Jew, isn't answering it."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2006
Block Quote: North by Northwest
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman sets the scene of utmost modernity (and timeless headlines) on the opening page of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959's North by Northwest. [Second of a series.]
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Bite this: processing Fast Food Nation
At SF Chronicle, Joe Garofoli, anticipating Friday's opening day, talks to Fast Food Nation's co-screenwriter (and 2001 source book author) Eric Schlosser about the bark of food processors and the bite of his movie. "As the son of former NBC President Herbert Schlosser, the 47-year-old had grown mistrustful of... the "sycophants" and sellouts of the entertainment industry... Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth), which put up 40% of the movie's budget, offers ways to get involved in the fight against "brutal working conditions, food poisoning, animal cruelty and low wages." So does distributor Fox Searchlight providing one [of] the strongest connections ever between a film and social action." A McDonald's spokesman says the website they're funding 
is to counter "Hollywood fiction." "Whatever happens in the fictionalized movie restaurant called Mickey's doesn't reflect the real world at McDonald's." ... While [Schlosser] envisioned the book as a documentary... veteran British producer Jeremy Thomas (Sexy Beast)... convinced him otherwise. Thomas had been given the book by Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager, who suggested it would be a good fictional movie. Thomas agreed... [W]hile in Austin, Texas, on a book tour, Schlosser ran Thomas' idea past [Richard] Linklater... Schlosser's major request was that the film "be financed without studio involvement, so there wouldn't be some kind of committee putting pressure on what could be said and what couldn't be said... And Jeremy... was great about all that." Schlosser and Linklater wrote the story together online and in pass-the-laptop meetings in Austin and Northern California. Schlosser took the director to meat-processing plants in Colorado... At the film's emotional core are the moral compromises made by everybody along the burger conveyer belt. From the environmental activists to the burger company executives to the immigrant workers, everybody refuses to fully challenge the status quo. So nothing changes." Says Linklater, "This is more about the politics of everyday working life." From the time of its Cannes premiere, Janet Adamy and Richard Gibson wrote for the Wall Street Journal, "The nation's largest fast-food chain is also funding TCS Daily, an arm of the Washington lobbying and public-relations firm DCI Group, that is making more pointed attacks against Mr. Schlosser and his work...
TCS Daily launched a Web site called Fast Talk Nation that called his theories "rhetoric" and argued that he wants to decriminalize marijuana, based on excerpts from one of his other books, "Reefer Madness," about sex, drugs and cheap labor in the American black market... TCS Daily abruptly closed the Fast Talk Nation site two days after its launch. James Glassman, who says he "hosts" the TCS Daily site, says he closed the Fast Talk Nation site because he wanted to pool his resources with the broader industry's Best Food Nation site.... Mr. Schlosser says he supports some lighter sentences for marijuana possession but opposes legalization. "What bothers me is the use of third parties to attack me when the people who are paying for it aren't standing up and taking credit for it..."
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)
Awards seasoning: inescapable technical demands
In the midst of "for your consideration" promos, the most straightforward yet charming p.r. I've seen this year quietly reminds crickets that they are reviewing movies and not television. "---- regrets that a DVD screener of XXXX cannot be available prior to your voting deadline. 
Due to the film’s delivery date and the time needed to fulfill the DVD mastering process, we do not anticipate having screeners of the film available until well after your initial ballots are due. ---- does not want to restrict your accessibility to view XXXX as we believe it is one of the most ambitious and accomplished films of the year. However, the availability of screeners is dictated not by our desire to create them early but the inescapable technical demands of production. We would like to invite you to screenings of the film through your voting deadline…
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
With Blood Still Warm on the Ground: The Decemberists
Shooting against green screen in a studio with no superimposed effects? Not quite Jonathan Demme's video for New Order's "The Perfect Kiss," shot by Henri Alekan with Agnes Godard pulling focus, but not bad, not bad at all. The song is "O Valencia!"; voice, Colin Meloy, the director, Cat Solen, whose earlier work includes videos for Bright Eyes' "At The Bottom of Everything" and "Bowl of Oranges."
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November 12, 2006
John Fante and Los Angeles: a photo essay
Please check out this photo essay from Los Angeles, accompanied by a passage from John Fante's "Ask The Dust."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)
Block Quote: Syriana
Stephen Gaghan demonstrates the craft of the brisk character introduction. [One in a series.]
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Waiting for guff: plugging corporate "alt-weeklies"
Passed without comment: Here's a new, presumably sponsored feature at Deadline Hollywood Daily. 
Blogs Nikki Finke, "This is a needed feature I'm starting for Saturdays: my round-up of what's new and hot in entertainment from Village Voice Media alternative newspapers across the country. Trust these alt-weeklies to know about the best or worst stuff first. Every week, check out the links to movie, music, video game and TV-related articles and reviews in the VVM alt-weeklies."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
Gypsy tears: When amid Roma [Borat]
In the FT, Christopher Condon reports that all that glitters is not Glod for Borat: "The residents of Glod, a remote village in southeast Romania that supplies the opening sequence of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, still don't know what hit them. They are just beginning to understand that cinema audiences around the world are laughing at them. To add insult to injury, the residents of a village whose name literally means "mud" say they were paid a pittance for their appearance in the spoof documentary... Glod appears in the first four minutes as Borat's fictional home town. "Paraschiva Stoian, the toothless 73-year-old who plays Borat's mother got 30 Euro and 200kg of cement... [T]he diminiutive Mrs. Stoain says she feels "insulted" especially because the film crew insisted she put balloons under her shirts to simulate large breasts" yet Petre Buzea, the vice-mayor of Moroieni, the municipality that includes Glod, is more Boratonian, not caring about any offense. "They got paid, so I am sure they are happy. These gypsies will even kill their own father for money."
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 11, 2006
Film cynic David Thomson hates film festivals: like banquets held to prevent world hunger
Late-career movie elitist, hater of Kubrick and Welles, and adopted resident of Baghdad-by-the-Bay David Thomson banks a few bob as he insists the popularity of film festivals is a very bad thing. "Something has to be done about film festivals - they begin to haunt us, like banquets held to prevent world hunger... 
Do not rule out the possibility that as the quality of [American] movies declined, so the habit of festivals came into being... [N]obody interested in films is falling for this mania. The best we can do is try to ignore it... [T]he culture has slipped into a surfeit of movies. In 1974 there was really no such thing as video yet, let alone the profusion of outlets that now prevail, along with the chance to see movies on the internet. Every kid is his own film festival, and so festivals begin to be antiquated events, a focus and a forum where no such needs are felt... I urge a moratorium on festivals, a Cromwellian meanness about them. It's the only way we'll rediscover the heady fun of Restoration." [The extended comments do a fine job of taking on Mr. Thomson's self-regarding pecksniffery, including from "franzbiberkopf" of a passage not quoted: "This is—seriously—about the zillionth article DT has written that lists "some good films from 1974" in place of reasoned argument."]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
Decay's Perfume: sniffing death with Patrick Suskind
As Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is about to be released outside of Germany, in Guardian Books, novelist Patrick Süskind considers death lit as sex lit from the perspective of writers like Goethe and Kleist, as well as Wilde and Mann. 
"We understand both attitudes: the one seeking death as the only possible liberation from the unbearable pain of love, and the other, as it were chivalrous attitude, accepting death as a necessary risk taken in pursuit of the erotic quarry, particularly at times and in societies where swords and pistols were swiftly drawn. Neither can be described as exemplary and worthy of imitation, both may be regarded as a deplorable aberration of the erotic drive, to be ascribed to its frenzied and indeed pathological nature, but we can understand such things, that is to say, we can put ourselves in the place of human beings who kill themselves or die for love. If it were not so, how could we read "The Sorrows of Young Werther," "Anna Karenina," "Madame Bovary" or "Effi Briest" unmoved? Yet the point where empathy and understanding end and interest wanes, giving way to outright repugnance, is reached when Eros throws himself violently into the arms of Thanatos as if to merge with him, when love seeks to find its highest and purest form, indeed its fulfilment, in death." In Spiegel, Urs Jenny has a long take-out on the movie's making, including this sum-up: "A special edition of the novel is being published in time to coincide with the film's release, along with an audio book version, two books about the film itself and, finally, a CD of the film's bombastic score, performed by none less than the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle. But the real piece de resistance has to be an item that couldn't possibly be interpreted as anything but a parody of the usual marketing paraphernalia. It's an exclusive "Thierry Mugler toiletry bag of the finest red velour," which contains 15 delicate little bottles of an "olfactory interpretation of the film." Unfortunately, the item isn't available at movie theaters, but only in "authorized perfumeries." The filming of the book, apparently, has led to its theme being used to market perfume." [Official site here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:08 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2006
Coy toy: Tony Scott reads Fuck
Friday's NY Times has an extended, favorable review of a film called ****. "Just to clear up any confusion: the four stars in the box accompanying this article do not represent a rave review," A. O. Scott writes, "though I did quite enjoy the movie in question. Really, what sort of a critic do you think I am? Certainly not one who resorts to nonverbal, quantitative means of expressing opinions. This just isn’t that kind of newspaper. 
Nor, however, is it the kind that will permit me to print the title of Steve Anderson’s rowdy and contentious new documentary, which consists of a single, highly versatile English word. I have been known to use the word in mixed company and even, I blush to admit, around my children — but only pedagogically, to call attention to the laxity of other drivers on family car trips. Never in front of the readers, though." [Further whimsy at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Moo Velvet: David Lynch and a cow on an LA corner
Via Defamer and James Israel's JumpCut blog, David Lynch and a cow are sitting on an L.A. street touting the chances for Laura Dern to get an Oscar nom for Inland Empire.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:29 PM | Comments (1)
November 09, 2006
Pull quote: Casino Royale's Mads Mikkelsen and Caterina Murino
Tidbits from Monday morning interviews: Danish star Mads Mikkelsen (Open Hearts), who plays the bad guy in Casino Royale, as well as in Pusher II, part of the upcoming DVD release of The Pusher Trilogy, isn't a big believer in Method acting; "In order to play a victim of rape, you don't necessarily have to be raped... To want to hit somone hard is a feeling I know." Playing Solange, a woman married of a Bond adversary and who strikes sparks with 007, Caterina Murino says, in a deliciously baroque Italian-Spanish-French-Caterina accent, her role is a modern woman: "[Women] used to be fucked, but we fuck now. Just from the touch of James Bond, she has an orgasm. She loved to be fucked by him." Murino says "I am really happy to be part of the European cinema," since other scripts she gets, "They just give me the role of beautiful, dangerous and sexy. I always reject a role with my beauty [as the only draw]." Solange is different because "she is not there to make seduce, seduction of James Bond." The 29-year-0ld Sardinian veteran of sixteen features wanted to be a doctor, failed entrance exams twice and became a model, but now after traveling to Africa, she's become part of a foundation, and "to hold those childen with SIDA [AIDS], I have been given a second chance to help the children in a different way, thanks to James." [Murino's own website is here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2006
Don't You Forget About Me: burning 16 candles for John Hughes
Macleans' Shanda Deziel reports on a doc stalking reluctant subject John Hughes and trying to divine why the 56-year-old King of Teen hasn't shot a pic since 1991's Curly Sue. 
"According to a new documentary, Don't You Forget About Me—which examines the lasting impact of Hughes's movies—today's teens also cite those films as the ones that best represent the way they look, feel and act. According to the filmmaker, [28-year-old] Matt Austin, "All the teens we interviewed said that they can't relate to any of the movies that have come out for them in the last decade." So Austin had the teens send a message to Hollywood and to Hughes. "To Hollywood.... they gave the finger and to Hughes they said, 'Come back.' " Hughes "hasn't given an interview since the '80s (even then, they were few and far between)and is thought to be living in Chicago or maybe Wisconsin. He's the J.D. Salinger of [movies]. But it's become Austin's mission to get the recluse on camera... After many dead ends, the filmmakers finally made a connection with Hughes's lawyer. "He's on our side.... but even he says, 'Good luck, John Hughes just doesn't do interviews.' " So Austin is putting together a... reel of people he's talked to— teens, actors, filmmakers inspired by him—all saying, "Thank you" or "Come back." Austin plans on giving that video to every single person who might be able to get it to Hughes. "Right now, I'm very hopeful that we're going to get him. My genuine feeling is we'll get a call."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 07, 2006
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November 06, 2006
UPDATED: The unbelievable truth: Adrienne Shelly murdered
"Prosecutors have charged a man with murdering actress Adrienne Shelly, who was found hanging from a shower rod in her West Village office last Wednesday," 
reports NYC's WCBS-TV. "Police have charged 19-year-old Diego Pillco, of the 300-block of Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn, with second degree murder. Pillco allegedly punched the 5-foot-2 actress after she complained about the noise he was making in the West Village apartment building where her office is located, killing her. He then allegedly admitted to dragging the body up to her office, and positioning her in the shower to make her death look like a suicide. EARLIER: Aw, just fuck. The New York Post reports on writer-director-actress-Hal Hartley muse-90s indie icon Adrienne Shelly's apparent suicide at 40. Shelly radiated a twerpy intelligence onscreen in her too-few roles; she embodied my long-held belief that smart, petite women are a special kind of goddess. The Post reports with unsavory tabloid gusto: "The body of a beautiful, talented actress was found hanging from a shower rod in the bathtub of a Greenwich Village apartment by her horrified husband, who cried out, "Why? Why?" cops and witnesses said. Adrienne Shelly, 40, who was also a director and screenwriter, apparently killed herself, cops said..."
She was briefly in Factotum and recently finished Waitress, her second directorial effort. "The petite blonde, who was born Adrienne Levine, was best known for her deadpan comic delivery and early lead roles in two Hal Hartley-directed films set on her native Long Island—The Unbelievable Truth and Trust... A family source said Shelly "wasn't on any medication. She doesn't drink and she was a pretty happy person. Everyone is having trouble accepting this as a suicide." ... Factotum producer Jim Stark said that when he told mutual friends that Shelly was dead, "they couldn't believe it. They thought it was a joke." "It's a great loss to all of us who are fans of independent film," Stark said. "She was extremely intelligent. A beautiful young woman." Shelley is survived by her husband and a 3-year-old daughter.
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2006
Recent reviews: Borat, Babel, Tideland, Marie Antoinette and more
Reviews of recent movies, including Babel, Borat, Old Joy, The Prestige, Shortbus, Tideland and a few words with Sofia Coppola about Marie Antoinette. (Remember that one?)
Babel (2006, ***)
Babel, the third collaboration of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, partakes of the same structure of overlapping lives and fates as their earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, 
and as such, has taken a substantial shellacking by crickets after its New York and Los Angeles openings last weekend. “We’ve seen this before!” goes the cry. Not, “What do you see this time?” The concurrent narratives include Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as Americans traveling in Morocco, when apparent “terrorism” erupts; Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Monica del Carmen (an emotional marvel) as relatives who travel to a wedding across the border in Mexico with Pitt and Blanchett’s children and the most imaginative and unsettling portion, the one that seems to most trouble the increasing chorus of detractors of Babel, which involves a Japanese businessman (indispensable everyman Yakusho Koji, from Shall We Dance, Charisma and Memoirs of a Geisha, whose gift of a Remington rifle to a Moroccan tribesman set the fates in motion. His teenage daughter Chieko, played by 25-year-old Rinko Kikuchi, is deaf-mute, obsessed with fantasies of her dead mother, and fixated on losing her virginity. Sign language is one more fashion of communication and miscommunication, along with English, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. Alejandro González Iñárritu does not shy from the oddness of Chieko’s condition and the boldness of her desire, including the attempted seduction of a young policeman. The director seems to regard the naked female form or face as Surrealist painters have: pale, perfect, a canvas blank for fantastications, like a movie screen, yet unapproachable, unattainable, to be feared, and for all that, pure. Seeing someone who can see but not hear: there is an elemental linguistic and perceptual paradox here, but it is no less fascinating for its directness. González Iñárritu’s substantial gifts as a conductor of image and sound (as opposed to The Big Picture) are at their heights in these portions, and the extended final shot, strangely dazzling, suggests a fragment from a parallel version of Blade Runner if the painters Magritte and Balthus were valued collaborators. It is portentous, pretentious (in the best possible fashion) transfixing, and utterly unforgettable. Dali and Buñuel would smirk approvingly.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, *** 1/2)
No, it’s funnier, much funnier than you’ve heard, no matter what you’ve heard. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make 
Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a marvel of economy, even in its most excessive moments, with sledgehammer social commentary performed and edited with the most restless of touches. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sagdiyev is ostensibly a correspondent for Kazakh television traveling to America to find what this country has to teach his; racist, anti-Semitic, sex-obsessed, Pamela Anderson-fixated, Borat is not so much a character of a rube from a backward country as performance art of brazen straight-facedness, a walking illustration of the most craven and narrow impulses of the human condition. That is, with jokes like the subtitle, “I still have the taste of your testes in my mustache” or the admission, “She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan,” just before a big family French kiss. I don’t even want to characterize the situations, let alone the jokes. To describe more is to diminish the power of Baron Cohen’s ability to elicit intimate reactions from his subjects, with jaw-dropping admissions of racism and meanness. Funny. It’s. Just. Funny. Somewhere, Andy Kaufman is making a deep curtsy in Baron Cohen’s direction.
Tideland (2005, ***)
Children shouldn’t play with dead things. “Feculent”: You could look it up, or if you have a couple of hours, you could see Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. A madbag of decay and curdled innocence, “trainwreck” would be a word Gilliam would likely endorse, as he saves his most beautiful, most measured, most deliriously wrong directorial touches for a bold, tragic scene. Mr. Gilliam asks Jeff Bridges and young Jodell Ferland to do some things to enact a variation on “Alice in Wonderland” that would terrorize a child, and one hopes that Ferland, the center of this tale of dysfunction of the highest and most Canadian order will come out all right now that she’s out of the dark director’s rabbit hole. (It’s has a similar prairie tang as Jeffrey Erbach’s chilling 2002-shot The Nature of Nicholas.) 
There’s a matter-of-factness from the start: a child tending to her dad about to go on his “vacation”: that is, slump into a reclining chair and tie off as little Jeliza-Rose holds his spike in her teeth after heating up the junk? (Note the smiley face tattoo on his biceps above his tourniquet.) Jennifer Tilly makes a brief, broad appearance as Jeliza-Rose’s mom, a magnificently malefic channeling of the bad Courtney Love; Tilly’s energy seems to be what sets Gilliam into his compulsive Dutch-angling of his widescreen camera. The look of the film is sumptuous, a refined, toxic take on Tenniel’s Alice illos that must be seen to be disbelieved. Yet most audiences won’t be ready for an arthouse release that goes farther than Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Let’s just say the former Python has no fear of necrophilia—a few scenes verge on Alice in Salo-land. One can decipher Gilliam’s intentions in illustrating a child’s fantasy life, and that when young, there is naïve acceptance that whatever is in front of them is the way of the world. The grandma’s house that much of the story takes place in is rusticated like an etching of weathered wood and Jeliza-Rose rests on a bed that even Tarkovsky’s Stalker would refuse to rest upon. There are walls scoured with obscenities, talking squirrels, doll’s heads come to blinking life and lines like “Dead things are slow. You have to be alive to run” and “Mama needs reading-to ‘fore I kill for you.” Your eyes will go as wide as young Ms. Ferland’s. As the fucked-up neighbors obsessed with bees, sharks and taxidermy, please note Brendan Fletcher, Janet McTeer.
The Prestige (2006, ** ½)
Here’s a word I’d banished from the critical vocabulary: “Burnished.” Yet in The Prestige, the year’s third pageant of prestidigitation (after Scoop and The Illusionist), that cliché is one of the most flattering things to say about Christopher Nolan’s cruel and splendidly furnished, intricately worked, often dazzling, essentially cold-hearted entr’acte between Batman projects. Fierce obsession persists in his pictures, elevated one more to sociopathic strata, with cascades of unreliable narration in the pitting of two turn-of-the-century magicians against one another (Hugh Jackman of Scoop and Christian Bale (Batman Returns). The story’s dense but comprehensible, with the script restlessly suggestive of a bit of abra-cadaver that marshals a whiff of Golem mythos as well. The opening shot is a dreamy delight, and its payoff rich, 
adumbrating unto even the final shot: a slow glide through a wood twined with fog, with dozens upon dozens of discarded silk top hats scattered about. (It’s a different hat trick than the iconic image from Miller’s Crossing.) This sort of imagistic patterning makes the film admirable even as it keeps a distance from emotions, even as the pair of artistes perform reciprocal disfigurements of body and soul, and battle to the edge of life. Scarlett Johansson (Scoop) goes for magic once more, with calf-baring results. Michael Caine is pleasant as an impresario of magic acts (“Obsession is a young man’s game, I can’t follow you any farther in it”); Ricky Jay turns up onscreen as well as an advisor, and a sometimes-actor of renown makes a pleasing turn as electrified inventor Nikola Tesla. While there’s a traditional score, the end credits run under a single song from Thom Yorke’s new album, and the lyrics are suggestive at the end of the tale.
Old Joy (2006, *** ½)
Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt’s fragile, stellar, melancholy gem is American minimalism at its finest, as two men in their early forties (Daniel London, Will Oldham) leave a glum Portland for a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains; memories collide and their faces, patiently observed, are awash with regret and self-willed loneliness, frustration and sublimated rage. This is a film meant as much to be heard as seen, beautifully measured. Almost nothing happens except the uncomfortable silences that time brings to friendship. The verdant, pastoral backdrop could take place anytime in the past century; Air American broadcasts from the lead-up to the 2004 election are the only time marker (although there is “times change” passage mourning the death of a record store). This is heartache, it’s hard to take, but it’s beautifully observed. From a short story by co-writer Jonathan Raymond, with a lovely score by Yo La Tengo.
Shortbus (2006, ***)
John Cameron Mitchell’s tender as well as sexually explicit Shortbus is a sweet follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a workshop-derived fable of post-9/11 New York in which many matters of polymorphous sexuality—tending to the gay—are mingled with an unlikely optimism. Raphael Barker, Lindsey Beamish, Paul Dawson, PJ DeBoy and Sook-Yin Lee are the primary actors who doff their kits and make their way to an apocryphal sex salon called Shortbus (based on an actual, now-closed club in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood). Music-drenched and fuck-filled, Shortbus is wildly democratic in its erotic permutations, including a gay male ménage-a-trois that includes the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a deeply depressed half of a couple videotaping himself in the opening montage attempting autofellatio. (Reportedly, Samuel L. Jackson evacuated the Toronto screening shortly after the very personal money shot.) Lee plays a sex therapist who can’t have an orgasm; the end of her journey has the same climactic glory’—can one female orgasm light an entire city?—as the river-filling joy of Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. A Yo La Tengo score bridges the many songs; the amount of sex might disappoint the practiced connoisseur of porn.
Marie Antoinette (2006, ***)
SEVEN MONTHS PREGNANT, WEARING A BLACK KNEE-LENGTH MATERNITY DRESS, substituting ballet flats for her customary flip-flops, Sofia Coppola is unapologetic about the style of her third feature, Marie Antoinette, based on a biography by Antonia Fraser (whose husband, Harold Pinter, is said to approve.)
While some reviewers have rehearsed their chops as scholars of French history since the movie’s Cannes debut, the 35-year-old Coppola confesses she applied a “very girlie, feminine sensibility” toward a “silk and cake” world. Fittingly, when jokingly asked who made her dress, she shrugs and turns the label out for display. In an Observer profile, Sean O’Hagan described the affect well, playing “a day-dreamy, slightly disconnected but immaculately stylish waif.”
In similar fashion, Jersey girl Kirsten Dunst plays 
the Austrian 14-year-old who was stripped at the French border of nationality, pug and clothing, to become Marie Antoinette, and wife in an arranged marriage to Dauphin Louis, eventually to be King Louis XVI (a bulked-up Jason Schwartzman). Versailles ensues: Marie Antoinette was given extensive access to the royal grounds (only on Mondays, when it’s closed to tourists), and when the marriage remains unconsummated for seven years, Marie becomes increasingly indiscreet, more of a party girl, drenched in the decadence of gowns, wigs, shoes, champagne, and all manner of cookies and cake.
Coppola seems incredibly self-aware: as a child of privilege American movie royalty with many friends in fashion, the film is as “personal” as The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. There is a moment when a torch-bearing mob has surrounded Versailles and Marie tentatively approaches, emerging from darkness to watch them wide-eyed. There is a hush. She curtsies quietly, deeply. Then the crowd begins to boo again. It’s hard not to be reminded of the death of Coppola's character as Michael Corleone's daughter at the opera that ends the ill-fated Godfather III. And for me, a magnificent shot at the very end of the picture that counts as a true, very knowing coup de theatre. Then again, the pictures’ palette is drawn from pastel macaroons she found Paris' Laduree bakery.
The soundtrack bursts with anachronisms. Who, dancing away at clubs in the early 1980s, would imagine the first musical to use the melodies that era would be this one? Opening to the fierce chords of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” (a bit of a hint?), and including songs by the cure, Marie Antoinette also boasts a masked ball scored to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden.” "The New Romantic music I listened to when I was a kid had this playfulness in the way bands like Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant referenced the eighteenth century. It was a film about teenagers and that mischievous, vital, youthful period. We had a little bit of a punk attitude to say that we were going to do history from this young girl's point of view. I wanted to have a real contrast between the world of the adults in court and the kids.”
Coppola is a contrarian, after a fashion. “When I read Antonia Fraser's biography, what was interesting to me was to read about the real human behind all the myths and the icon that we all heard about, the frivolous, evil French Queen. So I wanted to present a portrait of a real person, based on the research and the letters, and do more of an intimate portrait of this woman. I never set out to make an historical epic."
Of this brightly colored world, she says, "I mean, it's not a documentary or a history lesson, I wanted it to be impressionistic and as close to what it might have felt like to be there at that time. When I saw ‘Amadeus’ and they were just speaking in their regular accents, they felt like real people to me, as opposed to someone living in some other era that I couldn't relate to." (Everyone, including Rip Torn, Steve Coogan and Marianne Faithful, play their own accent except for a couple lines from a little girl.)
"For me it was a challenge to try to make a period film because it was difficult for me: 'How do you make a film in that period but also do it in my style and make it personal to me?' The biggest challenge to me was to work on that scale and still stay focused, not get lost in all that. To me, it was important to keep the focus on the main characters, and the acting and the emotion, and not just get carried away with all the grandeur around." [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Film is close to Esperanto: González Iñárritu's Babel
The Globe & Mail's Rick Groen gets hot quote from Alejandro G. I. "Images don't need translation, because they trigger universal human emotions. Film is as close to Esperanto as it gets." But silence? "Of course. Silence is hugely important. I use silence to fight against the tyranny of noise, the fucking noise of TV and... even movies. In silence, the seeds of profound things can grow."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2006
Going to Towne: MI:II's performance art
In the Sydney Morning Herald, Robert Towne puts his work-for-hire for newly-minted United Artists majordomo Tom Cruise in perspective: 
"While Mission: Impossible 2 was filming in Sydney, Towne was holed up in a Double Bay hotel rewriting scenes.... "It's a different kind of experience. I guess you'd call it performance art. It's certainly a lot of pressure. One good thing about it is you know the script is being made... Given the circumstances under which we did it, it turned out about as well as could be expected. I actually did that on the first movie, too. They were certainly commercial successes." As for Chinatown's continuing reknown? "It was a very complicated script, complex to work on. A lot of difficulties to overcome. There was a point where we didn't have a score …Initially, all I could see were all the things that had gone wrong. I failed to see the things that were right."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)
Jesus Camp figure fingered: UPDATED Haggard says he's guilty
Evangelical mega-church leader, close confidante of President Bush and vitriolic anti-gay activist Ted Haggard, whose toothy excess is one of the more frightening of the many scary parts of Jesus Camp, recently disowned that movie, but is also stepping down this afternoon as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and leader of the 
Colorado Springs-based New Life Church after allegations were mounted, with voicemail recordings presented for verification, of a three-year homosexual affair involving drugs. Haggard denies the assertions, and blames his exit from his ministry to the Denver Post as being the fault of the messenger, stating that he could "not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations made on Denver talk radio..." Continues the Post, "Haggard's lawyer, Martin Nussbaum, emphasized that Haggard has not admitted to the affair. Nussbaum said the church's bylaws state that if an allegation of immorality is made, the proper action is for Haggard to step down and put himself on leave." A colleague of the Rev. James Dobson, of the equally homophobic Focus on the Family, defended the Rev. Haggard's faith this afternoon: "He has shown a great deal of grace under these unfortunate circumstances, quickly turning this matter over to his church for an independent investigation. That is a testament to the character I have seen him exhibit over and over again through the years." Haggard's Colorado Springs church, "with 14,000 members, is the largest New Life congregation in Colorado." The contentious response to Mr. Haggard's allegations from the makers of Jesus Camp is after the jump. [On Friday, Pastor Haggard admitted many of the allegations: "Pastor Ted Haggard came out of his house Friday morning and admitted to 9NEWS that he bought meth from a gay escort in Denver... after contacting him for a massage."] Here's a brief clip of Mr. Haggard in action from Jesus Camp:
JESUS CAMP responds to Ted Haggard
As the directors of the film Jesus Camp we feel the need to respond to Pastor Ted Haggard’s comments on our documentary. As a co-directing team, we embark on each new project with two qualities: a healthy amount of curiosity—we’ll be living and breathing the subject for over a year—and with the utmost respect for our subjects. We make films to not just simply entertain, but as a way to learn about the myriad different lifestyles that together form the human experience. We see making non-fiction films as a way for our viewers and ourselves to connect with others.
When we heard that that Pastor Haggard has described us as having an “agenda” we were alarmed. Of course, there are plenty of filmmakers that do make films with a political or personal agenda, but our conscience is clear that we aren’t among them. We filmed with an open-mind and with a beginner’s eye (neither of us are Evangelicals) that allowed the story to emerge in a natural way.
As for accusing us of portraying our protagonists (people whom we’ve grown close to over the past year) “sinister,” this is a disturbing charge. Perhaps Pastor Haggard is projecting his own point of view on the film’s characters, as we absolutely do not see them as such, and went out of our way too make sure that they were shown in a human, three-dimensional light. The children come across as kind, passionate and intelligent. Pastor Becky Fischer is a very likeable and real person, both on and off the screen.
Pastor Haggard is the only person in Jesus Camp who has a problem with how he was portrayed, and with the film as a whole. All the others in the movie feel it is accurate and fair and are excited about people seeing it. The subjects in the film very much identify themselves as part of the Evangelical family and are hurt and stung by Pastor Haggard's wholesale and somewhat venomous rejection of them and the film. While they do identify themselves as Charismatics and Pentecostals, they feel (and we agree) that they have much more in common with the greater Evangelical movement—their morals, values, and political beliefs—than they have differences. For Pastor Haggard to marginalize and dismiss them by labeling them a “sub-group” seems unfair, mean spirited and unproductive.
As a religious leader, why wouldn’t Pastor Haggard take this film as an opportunity to discuss differences and similarities amongst Evangelicals and the various styles of worship and communication? Why not embrace the film as a tool for discussion about raising children with deep faith and keeping them in the church as young adults? Why miss an opportunity to address any misunderstandings secular Americans may have about the aims of the more politically involved arm of the Evangelical movement, of which Pastor Haggard is very active?
We taped at New Life Church for an entire day. Pastor Haggard played with the camera and made jokes through both sermons. We made sure to indicate in the film (from the audience’s laughter), that he was joking around with his parishioners. After the sermons he met and spoke to a child in our film who has dreams of preaching and gave him advice, which we show in a very straightforward way. His interview was also filmed modestly, sitting on the alter after his sermon. We did not put words in his mouth nor did we instruct him to utter the statement that has garnered him so much attention: “If the Evangelicals vote, they determine the election.” In fact, we were very careful not to include other material from his sermons that were more inflammatory in nature and could perhaps be interpreted as divisive.
Perhaps Pastor Ted regrets how he comes off in the film and is expressing it by criticizing us, Becky, and the children in the film. What he calls “negative” and not “normative” we see as simply true and accurate. As for us, we will continue to share “Jesus Camp,” with people from all backgrounds and beliefs and learn from the profound discussions that result from this film."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Giuppy Izzo is Renee Zellweger: dub's rub
In the Guardian, movie star dubbers tell their own tale, including Mexico's Kirsten Dunst, France's Angelina Jolie, 
China's Tom Cruise, Germany's Julia Roberts, India's Arnold Schwarzenegger, and taly's Renee Zellweger: Giuppy Izzo. "I was born into the business. My teacher was my father. He had four daughters and most evenings at dinner he would try to teach us something about intonation. He had a saying: "Your voice is the soundtrack of your life." One of my sisters also entered the business and is now a dubbing director as well as a dubbing artist. It was a bit like growing up as a circus child, really. My first job was as the 10-year-old daughter in The Goodbye Girl. I've no idea how many other films I've dubbed since then. I've voiced Renée Zellweger in both her Bridget Jones movies and several others. I've studied her diction, her movements and her breathing so much that I feel I know her. We've not met, though - the only actor I've both dubbed and met is Ellen Pompeo, the star of Grey's Anatomy. She came up and hugged me at a conference in Milan in the summer."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
D. W. Griffith, Bingham Ray and Tom Cruise walk into a bar...: relabeling United Artists
The most recent incarnation of the United Artists identity animation used before the no-longer-dormant distrib is pretty strange: a chromium edge turns to reveal the UA logotype, accompanied by a few stings of dark music that come to a sudden crescendo. Still, I've always found it oddly thrilling, even beyond the company's stellar heritage. 
(My reaction was never as extreme as Martin Scorsese's to the United Artists Classics logo after his split with Isabella Rossellini, when he told Roger Ebert something to the effect that he couldn't see a film with that logo at the front: it would only remind him of Rossellini, who had been in a UA Classics pic a few months earlier.) A couple of moments of vamping to figure out what to say about this head-scratcher: Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner are packing up their equity finance and heading to the intricately leveraged private equity-driven Church of Kerkorian, MGM, to run the Little House founded by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks, and in later years by the likes of Arthur Krim, Rober Benjamin, and Bingham Ray. The complete PR is below, including this quote: ""This is a great opportunity for Tom and me to re-establish the United Artists brand and to work closely with the creative community," stated Wagner. "As studio partner-operators, we will provide a supportive environment and infrastructure for filmmakers that will allow them to do their best work."
United Artists, the studio founded by movie greats Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith some 85 years ago and responsible for delivering such iconic film franchises as “Rocky,” “Pink Panther” and “James Bond,” will be reborn under a partnership formed between Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM). The announcement was made today by Harry E. Sloan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, MGM.
Cruise and Wagner, one of the most successful film production teams ever, will drive the rebirth of United Artists as MGM's operating partner. Along with their substantial ownership, Cruise and Wagner will have control of setting the company's production slate, from development to production greenlighting ability, subject to certain parameters. Wagner will serve as Chief Executive Officer of United Artists, overseeing the day to day operations of the studio alongside her longstanding producing partner Cruise, who will star in as well as produce films for United Artists and also be available to appear in film projects for other studios.
Cruise last teamed up with the original UA on “Rain Man” in 1988, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture.
In establishing United Artists as a new entity, MGM and Cruise/Wagner will return the studio to its former roots by recognizing what made UA great in the first place - studio management by creative talent who can best encourage and support other creative talent. The talent friendly studio will be reborn as a place where producers, writers, directors and actors can thrive in a creative environment, developing and producing entertaining film projects. The plan would allow artists throughout the community to pursue their creative visions outside of the traditional studio system.
The studio plans to have a production slate of approximately f