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December 31, 2006
Sundance Film Fest adds glitter, glamour to Utah ski resort
O, this cannot wait until 2007: MC Indie's first Sundance dispatch comes from Park City resident Kurt Repanshek of Travel Arts Syndicate, who reminds us that "Sundance Film Fest adds glitter, glamour to Utah ski resort." "Celebrity spotting takes precedence over powder skiing come mid-January when the tony mountain town of Park City morphs from a ski destination into a glitzy Hollywood backdrop, often with a snowstorm or two and the A-list from central casting. Here comes Sting and his entourage, complete with a mountain of luggage holding everything and anything he might need on the slopes. There goes Emilio 
Estevez ducking into a ski shop to get his board waxed. Val Kilmer was here just a minute ago, and Jennifer Aniston is looking as chic as ever despite the biting weather and relentless tabloid pursuit. Heck, even Al Gore picked Sundance a year ago to debut his acclaimed film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, Park City definitely will be the place to be from Jan. 18-28 when the Sundance Film Festival again transforms this nook of the Wasatch Range into a three-ring circus. You'll have your black-garbed industry types armed with millions of dollars in contracts looking for a sleeper project, the satchel-clutching, Starbucks-addled media and the celebrities who flit about town, usually in big, black and more-often-than-not, stretched rigs." [More deeply ringing cliches are available at the link, sadly, to be repeated in the hours ahead in variously reheated form by supposedly more seasoned writers.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
Nanni states: why we love Moretti
I've feared for years going back to watch Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, which I love dearly and don't want to be disappointed by on another go. But Signor Moretti never disappoints in his public profile, from being a premier Roman film exhibitor to this short, sharp shock, per the BBC. "Award-winning Italian director Nanni Moretti has stepped down as artistic director of the Turin Film Festival, two days after accepting the job." Moretti "resigned after learning his appointment was opposed by some festival organisers." "There has been talk of organizing two competing festivals in the same city, someone suggested a lack of ethics and some have even said that I would be an instrument for politicians to strangle the festival's independence," Moretti wrote. "With great pain I give up the job and leave you to your method problems, procedural disputes, personal grudges." The Beeb contextualizes: "The annual November festival, now in its 25th year, is facing increased comp[e]tition from the newly inaugurated Rome Film Festival, which takes place in October. "The nomination of Moretti positions the Festival of Turin on the same level as that of Venice and Rome and this is an important point of departure," Sandro Cosazza, President of Turin's National Museum of Cinema, said when the appointment was first announced last week. "For this we are grateful to Moretti to have accepted the challenge."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)
Forbidden civics: 2006's final error message
"Are you mistaking? What's wrong about here? You are seeking for trouble.
(Sorry, that section of the site is inaccessible from the web.) Why are you lossing temper? You said the net is unbreakable, why it's broken? All ill-fated jinxes have come. (Don't be upset. Sometimes this happens on the Internet. It's not bad luck.) All fanciness are posted outside. I'll throw all the stuffs away, see how you get out. (Don't worry, it's easy to get back on track. Perhaps you can find what you wanted here.) I don't mean to play on you this time, really can't help. (Sometimes directories are closed for surfing. It's not your fault.) How come in such period of time? Do it just over there, really trouble maker... (It only takes a second to go back to the home page, friend.)"
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
Hail Mary: lacking the very density of materiality
Random bloggotry: Chongqing reflects upon Godard's Hail Mary: "This was one of the first art films I've seen in a long time, and it was horrible. It was so bad. 
Shot of moon, of waves, of contemplating a [R]ubik's cube. I am tired of Godard's Brechtian inauthenticity. It is weird when I think that Spike Lee is more Godard than Godard nowadays. Manny Farber said Godard was like a zoo of animals. Godard is more like a man who has thought he has launched himself into new ground and new territories, but does not realize he still sits absentmindedly at the table of high-modernism. Godard speaks to museums and old French novels. There is a reason Godard could never relate to the third world in his films. He is so rooted in his Frenchness that everything he attempted to absorb from outside the borders of himself ended up being cardboard parodies that lacked the very density of materiality."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
Kino-fist defined in 90 seconds
“The film is like a battleground; love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion,"
Sam Fuller said in Godard's Pierrot le fou, and he meant it. Here's the incredible, indelible opening ninety seconds of his 1964 The Naked Kiss. (You'll never look at a bald prostitute the same way again.) At the YouTube link, check out the "Children's Song" scene, too. [Via ScreenGrab.]Posted by Ray Pride at 04:17 AM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2006
Would you like to talk about Lolita?
Would you like to talk about Lolita? "Well, no. I said everything I wanted to say about the book in the Afterword appended to its American and British editions." Did you find it hard to write the script of Lolita? "The hardest part was taking the plunge—deciding to undertake the task. In 1959 I was invited to Hollywood by 
Harris and Kubrick, but after several consultations with them I decided I did not want to do it. A year later, in Lugano, I received a telegram from them urging me to reconsider my decision. In the meantime a kind of script had somehow taken shape in my imagination so that actually I was glad they had repeated their offer. I traveled once more to Hollywood and there, under the jacarandas, worked for six months on the thing. Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. I composed new scenes and speeches in an effort to safeguard a Lolita acceptable to me. I knew that if I did not write the script somebody else would, and I also knew that at best the end product in such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations. I have not yet seen the picture. It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance. From my seven or eight sessions with Kubrick during the writing of the script I derived the impression that he was an artist, and it is on this impression that I base my hopes of seeing a plausible Lolita on June 13th in New York." [Vladimir Nabokov, 1962.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)
By the blurbling brook: listening to crickets
Blurbs away! Variety's Timothy Gray selects favorite flavors in 2006 cricket-hype. In his annual tradition of collecting "these blurbs, one begins to ponder cosmic matters. Such as: "Who exactly qualifies for recognition as a film critic?" Some blurbmeisters do not come from the world of reviewing. For example... Larry King, You, Me and Dupree—"Owen Wilson has to be one of the greatest comedic actors of all time." ... And what exactly is "praise"? Studios apparently were convinced that these comments were surefire audience lures[:] Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning—"There's hardly a body part that isn't mangled or lopped off, ground up or sliced through." ... The Dove Foundation, Barnyard, "You have to see it to believe it." ... Pete Hammond, Maxim, Beerfest—"The party film of the summer. You'll laugh your Heineken off!" "Of course, one of the jobs of blurbmeisters is to recognize great films[:] Anthony Kaufman, Indiewire, Climates—"Masterpiece!" [;] CineScene, Zen Noir—"A genuine masterpiece." [;] Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com, Flannel Pajamas—"A spiny and dispassionate little masterpiece."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)
Rules of the Game's positive negative
"Rules of the Game taught me the rules of the game," Kevin Thomas quotes Robert Altman in a dispatch detailing the recent 35mm digital restoration of Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece (the prior Criterion DVD edition was only cleaned up for video). 
Thomas also quotes Renoir as saying his rationale for making pictures was to make "audiences feel a little less lonely." Showing at the NuArt in Los Angeles and opening Friday at Chicago's Music Box, the negative of Rules of the Game was destroyed by bombs during World War II. The two men who first reconstructed the film "labored three years to incorporate the trimmed footage, found untouched in a warehouse, with the best portions of the few copies of the soon-banned film that survived the war. They managed to reconstitute the film with less than a minute missing. Only now has it become possible to see Rules of the Game as it looked upon its July 7, 1939, Paris debut. That's because Criterion['s Janus] Films has undertaken a complete digital restoration of a fine-grain master print located in Paris after a painstaking search... While Roger Ebert has expressed puzzlement that "this magical and elusive work" always seems to place second to Citizen Kane on best-films lists, Bertrand Tavernier, a major contemporary French director whose work reflects a deep knowledge and appreciation of world cinema, has said that he would "give the whole of Citizen Kane" for a shot like that of the guests arriving at the chateau "like in a Robert Altman film, with people talking, overlapping within the shot, and a wonderful depth of focus." Indeed, for critic J. Hoberman Rules of the Game is "a movie that Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Mike Leigh, to name three, are always trying to remake." *
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2006
Mark Urman: No one ever died over a movie crisis
"Hollywood is dead, or at least in a coma," writes Gregg Goldstein at Hollywood Reporter on the holiday hiatus. But there are exceptions. 
"ThinkFilm US theatrical head Mark Urman... is the nervous dad of young drivers, [and] leaves his cell phone on all night, leaving him victim to text messages from a nervous director at 3:30 in the morning. "When someone gives you their film, it's like their child. There are very few boundaries, and notion of protocol flies out the window. No one thinks, 'Should I be calling someone when they're having an appendectomy? ... I'm not a surgeon and I don't save lives. No one ever died over a movie crisis."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)
Graf of the week: Manohla on Mann
Reportedly, NY Times doesn't let its crickets write recommendations unless they're the principal reviewer, but with year-end lists, anyone curious about what Manohla Dargis thought of Miami Vice can find out in her best-of-year citations: "Michael Mann doesn’t always receive the critical respect he deserves, partly because he likes to make genre films; maybe if he had hired Jack Nicholson to run around with Crockett and Tubbs 
he might have at least seduced the audience. Glorious entertainment, Miami Vice is a gorgeous, shimmering object, and it made me think more about how new technologies are irrevocably changing our sense of what movies look like than any film I’ve seen this year. Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have." BONUS dialogue from Vice: Detective Gina Calabrese's Harry Callahan-style drop-dead: "That's not what happens. What will happen is... what will happen is I will put a round at twenty-seven hundred feet per second into the medulla at the base of your brain. And you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won't even twitch. Only you get dead. So tell me, sport, do you believe that?"
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2006
Second sight: getting Déjà Vu
TOO MUCH COULD BE SAID about the parlous state of contemporary movie reviewing, but two crickets take the cake for 2006, with Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson's dense, knowing, estimable auteurist analysis of Tony Scott's grossly underrated Déjà Vu in Cinema Scope 29. Zowie! Zoinks! "Regularly dismissed by critics as an ADD action hack director, Tony Scott’s sixth collaboration with Jerry Bruckheimer has a title that can be taken as a provocation: Déjà Vu seems to invite glib puns about the recurrence of heated fast cuts and heavily filtered celluloid, of slick surfaces and pretzel plot twists wrapped around eye-popping explosions. Yes it delivers, but never mind that the director, for all his constant flash and stylishness, has long moved on from mere action work towards ambivalent psychological thrillers, employing an expressionist visual style corresponding to heightened emotions: his themes and structures [that] cry out for old-school auteurist appreciation. Maybe the comparative restraint and metaphysical bent of Scott’s masterpiece, a surveillance-era post-Hitchcock concoction that dares to begin with a nine-minute bravura sequence of dialogue-free “pure cinema,” will help viewers see past the prejudices—though the incomprehension that greeted the magnificent, if meddlesome biopic-atomizer Domino a year ago, makes it doubtful... [The] case of the fantastic machine used for investigation in Déjà Vu that turns (even more top-secret) surveillance footage to a window back in time for plot purposes, [is vital yet] clearly is foremost present as an equivalent of The Movies—it’s even named Snow White. Pointedly, Tony extends the idea to the visual media shaping contemporary experience, TV and internet broadcasts. The ridiculous quasi-science banter “explaining” Snow White expressly stresses the analogy: space (like time) may be folded in on itself, but it sure is flat, like a screen. And in a Tony Scott film, no screen is as great as the Jumbotron... Yet size serves to emphasize here: the growing romantic attachment of the loner Carlin as he follows the footage of a dead woman’s life, while discussions about the nature and ethics of movies, themselves windows to the past, ensue among agents and scientists, with the huge image presiding over the room. And of course the looming size of the screen approximates the condition of present-day viewing: a similar intrusion on privacy, as envisioned in Rear Window (1954), was a first-hand, cozy neighbourhood affair. Over 50 years later,Déjà Vureframes it to fit the current era of second-hand, Jumbotron “reality.”
As an allegory about filmmaking and morality this may be as blatant as Minority Report (2002), but it’s more successful on every level: despite all the high-tech lure the grandstanding is undercut from the beginning... Scott’s collaborative team must content themselves with following the data-flow of “a single trailing moment of now in the past,” praying the camera is in the right place at the right time... Déjà Vu is upfront about the questionable nature of the whole government-funded enterprise; this is not about clearing your name (as in Spielberg). Saving the woman being watched, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), is not the goal, rather trailing her past will help the agents solve a terrorist bombing with echoes of both 9/11 and Oklahoma City. The projected futility of the investigation’s outcome for Claire makes Carlin’s obsession with her all the more poignant, but like in Vertigo the voyeuristic and necrophiliac aspects of his romantic feelings are foregrounded. “I got the weird feeling I’m being watched,” reads Claire’s diary after an uncomfortable Jumbotron-surveyed shower, and soon Carlin doubts the quantum physicists’ assurances that Snow White’s link from the present to the past is strictly a one-way affair. More effective is his touching prior assertion to Claire: “Don’t you remember we held hands once?” It is also quite sinister, since this happened during her autopsy." [Much more vital, chewy goodness at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
Factory profile: I wouldn’t want to confuse a pretty woman with a waitress
The ever-crafty Weinsteinco's newest news about the status of Edie-bio Factory Girl emits from the Sunday Styles section of NY Times, where Mickey Rapkin has a tipple with not-dethroned director 
George Hickenlooper. "As late as last week, he was still shooting new scenes... Despite news media reports that Mr. Hickenlooper had been taken off the project (not true) and that Bob Dylan was upset with how he is portrayed (true), the only opinion that matters now belongs to the executive producer, Harvey Weinstein. He has decided to release Factory Girl in Los Angeles on Friday, in time, barely, for the Oscars. “He wants a nomination for Sienna,” Mr. Hickenlooper said Wednesday... Mr. Hickenlooper, 41, had taken a break from editing to stop at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He was dressed in standard Los Angeles auteur gear (leather blazer, oversize plastic frames, goatee). “I really need a drink,” he said, looking around for assistance. “I wouldn’t want to confuse a pretty woman with a waitress.” He ordered one cabernet and then another... “We’re all starved for intimacy and we’re looking for something to fill that void,” Mr. Hickenlooper said. “You could take the names Edie and Andy off of this and it would still be compelling.” Hickenlooper offers reasons for the film's hiccuppy existence behind the headlines: "The film was over budget at the start, so scenes were cut. Shooting wrapped in February, but when the rough cut was first viewed in August, it was clear that there were holes. They had to wait for Ms. Miller’s calendar to open up. Three days of planned shoots in New York stretched to five. And when Mr. Weinstein suggested extra scenes to flesh out the friendship between Ms. Sedgwick and Warhol, two days in Connecticut were added." .... “I’d love another three months to edit,” Mr. Hickenlooper said, “but Harvey believes — and I agree — that the film has momentum.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)
The Dead Girl breathes: Karen Moncrieff
I like this writer-director: "I understand making an unrelenting film may make some people feel like 'Life's difficult enough, I don't want to see a movie that's going to make me that uncomfortable for that amount of time... I feel like I'm making films for people who are like me, who like to go to movies and be shaken up,literally taken by the throat and shaken up for an hour and a half. And moved and forced to look at things that are ugly, forced to contemplate the darkest moments any of us can imagine." Karen Moncrieff tells LA Times' Mark Olsen about making her forceful, focused new $4 million-budgeted film, which is divided into five vignettes and stars Toni Collette, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, Brittany Murphy, Mary Beth Hurt, James Franco, Marcia Gay Harden, Kerry Washington and Nick Searcy. [It's often possible to assemble a cast this powerful when the roles are many, small, and forceful, making lesser demands on the actors' time.] Olsen writes that The Dead Girl "has a relentless consistency from story to story, a somber, death-stained look at lives in stasis, in desperate need of new directions, though it is leavened by slight slivers of hope." Alluding to troubles at Miramax when her first feature, The Blue Car, was ill-released in 2003—"the seemingly waning support of a then-floundering distributor" is how Olsen phrases it—the piece details how Moncrieff's pregnancy and the interest of First Look's Henry Winterstern, and Lakeshore Entertainment's Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi affected the production. [Rosenberg enthuses.] "Somebody asked me if it would be better if the movie was uplifting," Moncrieff recalled. "And I said, 'Well, to me this is uplifting.' To me what's depressing is to see lies on-screen, to see lives sugar-coated, a fake version of life as I know it or I feel it. Anything less than that and I'd feel like I hadn't done my job. There are other people who are much better at shining a light on what's funny or what's sweet. Maybe my calling is to feel deeply some aspects of human pain and grief. Maybe I'm working something out in my work, but it's what I'm attracted to. People making choices, struggling to do better and change, to me is uplifting."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2006
Happyness!
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2006
Who said Hollywood is where you can die of encouragement?
She did.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2006
Playing myself: Ben Sliney on United 93
Ben Sliney, FAA National Operations Manager on 9/11, tells the Guardian about playing himself in United 93. 
"he way it happened was a surprise. I shot a 15-minute scene as a New York centre supervisor and they asked me to stick around as an adviser for the "Ben Sliney" scenes. All day Tuesday and Wednesday they shot with an actor, and then on Thursday morning I got a note under my door asking if I'd bring my suit and tie to the set. I never saw the actor again. It's really not hard to play yourself... The camera doesn't make me nervous. The subject matter wasn't terrific - I wasn't keen on reliving all that stuff - but it wasn't difficult. The stimuli were presented chronologically to me and I had to react as I did on the day. There was no script, so I just had to improvise. The biggest problem on September 11 was that we weren't prepared. If the film shows us looking perplexed or confused or trying to work out what was going on, then it's because that's what happened. At least three of the people in those scenes were with me on that day. The others were air traffic controllers from Boston and New York. There's only one actor in that scene... I think there's a good slice of reality here. I had many people saying to me they were glad to be air traffic controllers, and I was, too." [Also: Julian Fellowes on what it's like to win an Oscar and Mat Snow on why it's great to have Nick Cave write a song about you called "Scum."]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)
Spike Lee adds two hours to When the Levees Broke
A four-minute interview from CNN's "This Morning."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
The green bunny: PayPal sez no to Gallo
NY Post reports that PayPal's pulled the plug on VIncent Gallo's latest offering. While his website has used PayPal to peddle memorabilia including records, magazines and posters, recent "offerings" as a male escort and sperm donor led to their cancellation. "Vincent offers an intimate evening in his company with any "naturally born female"... for $50,000 plus expenses, or a full weekend for $100,000. The cost of having Vincent's baby is considerably larger at the princely sum of one million dollars... A representative for PayPal cited the company's "policy against facilitating meetings for sexually oriented activities," as their reason for terminating the account." Vinnie? "They are really fascists. They should breathe some death gas or something," NY Post claims he calumnied. "For them to say they have some sort of moral regard for their clients is incredible - they're a penny-pinching, conniving company." [The details of Gallo's love-you-long-time offering are here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
...as in olden days...
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2006
The Good Shepherd (2006, ****)
A WASP GODFATHER, THE GOOD SHEPHERD, directed with restraint by Robert De Niro from Eric Roth’s brilliant screenplay about the origins of modern spycraft, has a patience and command that accrues to a devastating conclusion. 
Drawing on a range of notorious incidents involving American spies, such as a Russian interrogation subject being given LSD as a truth serum, but primarily working in roman-a-clef territory, basing the story’s Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) on OSS man-turned-architect of CIA, James Jesus Angleton. Explicit also is the influence of Yale and its Skull & Crossbones secret society, to which George H. W. Bush and William F. Buckley, both later CIA agents; Henry Luce, George W. Bush, members of the Heinz family and John Kerry are also Bonesmen. (There’s a knowing subplot involving Nazi sympathizers that coincides with members who had companies confiscated in World World II for trading with the enemy.) Working in the density of the best spy novels, and criss-crossing almost twenty-five years of history, encompassing World War II, the reconstruction fo Europe and 1961’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, Roth is comfortable in LeCarre territory, and Damon’s performance is worthy of comparison to those of Alec Guinness in similar roles. While the near-autistic reserve of Wilson’s intent powers of observation may put off some viewers—Damon, often shielded behind large horn-rims, is playing the most passive of characters—yet the power of the central dilemma grows from the analysis of how power can emanate more from concealment than display. While he’s a star-crossed double in The Departed, in The Good Shepherd he is the cipher who will kill you withou hesitation. DeNiro’s film might have gained from a different approach to momentum as the picture moves past its second hour, but it’s still a fascinating, fully inhabited world, weaving a vision or our own and never descending to mere conspiracy theory. With John Turturro, William Hurt, Angelina Jolie, Michael Gambon, Billy Crudup, Timothy Hutton, Joe Pesci, the great Alec Baldwin and De Niro. Nicely designed by Jeannine Oppewall, shot by Robert Richardson (JFK); inventively scored by Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler. [Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)
Woo-woo Tang: China aGong at Li's bosom
BBC reports that Gong Li's cleavage is the buzz of Beijing upon the opening weekend of Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou's $45 million Tang Dynasty melodrama, which grossed a record-shattering 96 million yuan ($12,282,497). Mother Beeb clucks that Chinese bloggers are calling the movie Curse of the Golden Corset. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, pants thusly: "The most eye-popping role is played by Gong Li, the empress, whose breasts are so tightly wrapped that they appear ready to pop out of her costume." "With costumes like that, you'd think China was more liberal than America," said one unnamed web user. Another: "What I remember is not the fighting scenes or the acting, but the shiny white flesh."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2006
Cassandra's Dream: As a boy, Philip Glass was fascinated by ants
There's a buncha quotes on the eve of Woody Allen's Film Forum retro from New Yorkers mad about the boy born Konigsberg at The Reeler; consider Harvey Weinstein, Manohla Dargis, Phil Morrison, Ryan Fleck and Barbara Kopple, as well as Philip Glass, who emits the no-longer-secret title of Woody Allen Spring 2007: "I recently had the opportunity and pleasure of working with Woody Allen, scoring his new film, Cassandra's Dream. Though I have been living in New York for 50 years, we had not met until now. I found him to be an excellent and sympathetic collaborator. He is clearly a master filmmaker, and though he knows what he wants in his film work, he was open to my suggestions and urged me to make my own contribution. This is a man who is completely sure of his art and sure of himself."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)
Honeydripper: an instrument about to take over
At Emerging Pictures, producer Maggie Renzi starts a distribution blog: "We did it. John Sayles and I—
along with a crew of about 100 and the usual giant Sayles ensemble, plus 400 Alabama extras—just wrapped Honeydripper. It’s John’s sixteenth feature and my thirteenth. Lucky 13th, I think. We filmed it all on location in Alabama, based out of Greenville. Editing room opens in our garage... Jan 8. And I’m damned if after all this work we’re going to see another movie sacrificed to the Petty God of Bad Distribution. We’re working with Emerging Pictures to see if we can reach these two simple goals: see the movie reach its audiences, and see the filmmakers pocket the profits." EARLIER: "Honeydripper takes place in a small, cotton-producing community in the 1950s, just before the outbreak of the Korean War, the title referring "to a struggling roadhouse owned by an aging piano player played by Danny Glover." Glover's character hires a young musician with an electric guitar he made himself. "It's set right in 1950, when Ike Turner and Chuck Berry and those guys were starting to discover the electric guitar," Sayles says. "That instrument, which had been in the background, is about to take over." Honeydripper was inspired by the story “Keeping Time,” from Sayles' short story collection, "Dillinger in Hollywood."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
Lucasphlegm Limited: the 5-minute Star Wars Holiday Special
Yes, this is why teh Internets were invented. (The 6-hour setting on VHS, too.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 19, 2006
Artcatcher: Lynne Ramsay profiled
The Guardian surveys terrific Scots filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Who'd play her in a movie of her life? "Jimmy Stewart, alternating with Dennis Hopper. Why does it necessarily have to be a woman? Also, I have a split personality: Jimmy is my good guy and Dennis is my demon" is among her memorable answers to Natalie Hanman. 
Ramsay cites three major influences, plus what she's been up to. "Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren; Blue Velvet by David Lynch; and Fear Eats the Soul by Fassbinder... Hidden by Michael Haneke was the last film I saw that really affected me. Walking in the hills in Scotland, examining the funghi, is all I've been doing for the past three months, apart from writing." These days, she says, "It's harder to make bold, interesting, challenging and exciting work. Long live YouTube: one place where art is free, and all the ad creatives scour it to rip shit off." [More coolness at said link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
Pursuing Happyness: Chris Gardner, Chicago 2000
Videographer Len Davis, who worked for Chicago's ambitious CITY2000 chronicle project, made a short video of a businessman in a cab talking about having been homeless, and how hard it is for a black man to get a cab in America. The man's name? Chris Gardner, who is played by Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness. The true-life Mr. Gardner displays a slightly higher amount of race awareness than as portrayed by Mr. Smith. If you want to sample another Davis CITY2000 bit, how about Dead Cop in Trunk? [The Gardner clip contains profanity and other strong language.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Crickets' Greatest generation? Koehler admires
Estimable cricket Robert Koehler surveys the elders of the tribe for Variety, suggesting that we are in the waning days of film crickets' "greatest generation". "While many still produce at a level that 
would put younger colleagues to shame, an elder generation of film critics that has held a powerful influence in the field is gradually, very gradually, passing from the international film scene." Among those surveyed for whom "age seems to provide no barrier for critics with intellectual energy to burn": WSJ cricket Joe Morgenstern (reviewing since 1959); in Japan, Shigehiko Hasumi (70), and Donald Richie (82); Brazil's Jose Carlos Avellar; from France, Raymond Bellour, Michel Ciment (78), from the US, Roger Ebert (64), Molly Haskell (67), 50-year New Republic stalwart Stanley Kauffmann (91 in April), Italy's Tullio Kezich (78), as well as Andrew Sarris (78) and Canada's Robin Wood (76 in February), and living on the Internet, Jonathan Rosenbaum (64). [Koehler's greatest heights at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:53 PM | Comments (1)
It's a Wonderful Counter-History: capsizing Capra
With Christmas and Christmas classics just around the corner, two takes on It's a Wonderful Life. First, ever-pessimistic "The Long Emergency" author Jim Kunstler, at his "Clusterfuck Nation" blog, muses on "the fact that things sometimes end up the opposite of the way we expect." 
It's a Wonderful Life, he writes, is "a splendid, heartwarming movie in many ways... It was released a year after the awful ordeal of World War [II] ended, which itself had followed the decade-long tribulation of the Great Depression. America was weary but victorious. Democracy and decency had triumphed over manifest evil, but the memory of all that hardship lingered on. [But] the main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie's major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s... we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey's good intentions. We also would have witnessed the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, when changes in federal regulation opened the door to an orgy of looting and grift (acted out largely in suburban development scams) so extravagant that a quarter-trillion dollar federal bail-out was eventually required... Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born... Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) ... 
Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place—the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts—a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale... Most ironically, today America's favorite main street town, Las Vegas, is Pottersville writ large, and most Americans see absolutely nothing wrong with it. How wonderful is that?" [Via James Wolcott.] And second, at DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson argues that the movie's retrospective chronology was crafted in the editing suite: Most of the "elements of the flashback wraparound were relatively inexpensive to put together. Only actors' voices were used, radio-style. We don't see George's neighbors or wife and children praying, we merely hear them. Heaven is represented by a little animation of blinking stars and planets. A blurry point of view is optically added to represent Clarence's 'learning' to see the heavenly 'rerun' of scenes from George's childhood. Later, the first time we see James Stewart as George Bailey, his gesture imagining a big suitcase is frozen-framed, so that time can be alotted for Clarence's voiceover to assess the now grown-up boy whose life he has been watching." [More heavy chawing at the link.]
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December 18, 2006
Failed atmosphere casting: an example from CNN
An underappreciated skill is that of the assistant director or second A.D. on a movie or television show, keeping the extras, or "atmosphere" in the background from ever becoming a distraction from the principal activity in the foreground. Of course, in real life, sometimes it's tough to give an insincere performance...
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)
The autist theory: Mamet's H'wd syndrome
David Mamet's new book," Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business," gets previewed by NY Daily News' Rush & Molloy. Mamet, they report, presents the daring theory that Hollywood's creators suffered from a form of autism. 
"Asperger's syndrome helped make the movies... The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate aways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence, and difficulty with transitions married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutiae of the task at hand... This sounds to me like a job description for a movie director. Let me also note that Asperger's syndrome has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants.… This group constitutes… the bulk of America's movie directors." [Mamet doodle from Huffington Post.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)
Work out as little as you want: Netflix, Ron Howard and white-water kayaking
Netflix primo Reed Hastings explains how Ron Howard influenced the idea for Netflix (and perhaps a wobbling company once controlled by Wayne Huizenga). He'd done some startups, 
, and "was doing white-water kayaking at the time, and in kayaking if you stare and focus on the problem you are much more likely to hit danger," he tells NY Times. "I focused on the safe water and what I wanted to happen." I got the idea for Netflix after... I had a big late fee for Apollo 13 It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette. It was all my fault. I didn;t want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, I'm going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee? Later, on my way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)
Monkey Warfare: I don't make bombs, I make films
"Revolutionary" imagery infects the marketing for Vancouver native, editor-director stalwart Reg Harkema's Don McKellar-starring flawed-radical satire Monkey Warfare, writes Globe & Mail's Guy Dixon. 
"Last September, posters appeared around Toronto on letterboxes and lampposts bearing the face of Canadian actress Nadia Litz, Che Guevara style, and ["I Fuck the Man"] in bold letters... The whole thing was a publicist's idea. Litz, a petite young woman originally from Winnipeg, wasn't so crazy about it. ... But the tuned-in crowd knew that the posters were... a come-on for the indie film Monkey Warfare, one of the hippest... Canadian films at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival." Three months after TIFF, " Litz sits in a Toronto coffee shop with co-stars Don McKellar and Tracy Wright [and] it's not the film's politics that animates the three actors, but the faux-radical posters. Litz's character in the film is a pot dealer flirting with radicalism... In real life, Litz shudders thinking about the posters. "I'm a little girl, and I'm always alone walking down the street [when I see them]," she says... "Oh, grow up!" McKellar jokingly chastises her over tea. McKellar and Wright, a couple in the film and in real life, play characters rooted in an anonymous existence in Toronto's lower-income Parkdale, harbouring their radical ways while hiding away from the authorities and from their neighbourhood's creeping gentrification... "The characters, although they may be trying to sound cool, are always exposed for not being so. They never get away with being kick-ass," McKellar says... Before Monkey Warfare, his third feature, the 39-year-old director co-wrote a script, which he tried to pitch to distributors at the Toronto festival years ago, about a woman who ends up suicide-bombing Toronto's Molson Indy race. The pitch session with the distributor was the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. It had been originally scheduled for Sept. 11." Harkema then made the doc Better Off in Bed on Vancouver's New Pornographers, fronted by Neko Case. "Harkema dug so deeply into the band's personal lives and relationships... that lawyers for New Pornographers singer Neko Case wouldn't consent to the film's release... "I think the Pornographers were a little uncomfortable about just how vérité the documentary ended up becoming." Harkema quotes the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder epigram on making films about radicals, "I don't make bombs, I make films." However, there is a post-credits scene shown at Monkey Warfare's Toronto preem which has been shorn for theatrical release, "in which Vancouver filmmaker and actor Flick Harrison demonstrates how to make a Molotov cocktail, speaking in badly accented French... "The purely technical reason why it's not going to appear is that our lawyers don't want to sign off on it, because there's some one-in-a-million chance someone will see it and actually be inspired to throw a Molotov cocktail," Harkema says, laughing. "I can't figure it out. Apparently there are far more explicit and worse things going on in the latest Bond film. I mean, lawyers are the real editors of films today." The poster (pictured, with McKellar, rather than Litz) and other clips are at the film's Myspace page, FlowerPowerIsDead, including the scissored "Molotov Cocktail safety video".
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:58 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2006
Zoom with a view: Dolby's new look and sound
The pre-show Dolby trailer's been updated; at the YouTube link, there are several short pieces demonstrating the development of City Redux. (Of course, the sound on a YT video only suggests what you'd hear in a theater.) Dolby collaborators on the short include 3D matte painter Kent Matheson of Radium, who worked on Superman Returns and The Matrix Revolutions and Academy award-nominated sound designer Stephen Dewey of Machine Head. [More details are in this downloadable PDF of the Dolby newsletter.]
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Weinsteinco speaks: we've taken periodic odysseys
"People who see us say we look happier and younger," Harvey Weinstein a's to Jeffrey Ressner's q's at Time, puttingsmiley emoticons all over the prospects for the Weinsteinco forge. "We feel good that we can do all the cool things we want to do.... In one week, we had a party in New York where the Eagles performed to celebrate Wal-Mart's commitment to 
environmental sustainability, then we opened Bobby with a star-studded premiere in Hollywood." Weinstein's idioms are his very own: "We've taken periodic odysseys across America and internationally to build partnerships with RAI Television in Italy and TF1 in France and ARD in Germany. We're laying down an infrastructure." Lots about their severed ties with the lot of Mouse, some asides from Bob, and Harvey be nimble, be quick: "We snagged the most sought-after title at the American Film Market, which was the Wong Kar Wei movie starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and Norah Jones. That showed nimbleness. At Toronto, between Penelope and the Vince Vaughn movie, we were right there where he had to be."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)
Cunning lingo: Borat's Hebrew secret
The fact that much of Borat's "Kazakh" language is actually Hebrew has been mentioned here and there, but AP's Aron Heller reports from Israel, where the film has an added layer for locals. "They actually understand much of what the anti-Semitic, misogynist Kazakh journalist is saying. Few realize that... Borat Sagdiyev is not speaking Kazakh or even gibberish, 
but rather mostly Hebrew, the biblical language of the Jewish people. [Baron Cohen] He is an observant Jew, his mother was born in Israel and his grandmother still lives in Haifa. In high school, he belonged to a Zionist Jewish youth group, Habonim Dror, and upon graduation, spent a year working and studying on a kibbutz, or collective farm, in northern Israel. He has since returned for several visits, his Hebrew is excellent and his understanding of Israeli culture superb. The irony of a Hebrew-speaking anti-Semite is not lost on the admiring Israeli audience, which has made the movie a huge hit here." Says Gaby Goldman, 33, of Tel Aviv. ''It's not just the Hebrew but also the way he speaks. He sounds almost Israeli, he sounds like one of us.'' ... The film is peppered with Hebrew expressions and Israeli slang, inside jokes only Israelis could truly appreciate. In one scene, Borat sings the lyrics of the legendary Hebrew folk song ''Koom Bachur Atzel,'' meaning ''get up, lazy boy.'' ... Even Borat's signature catchphrase—''Wa wa wee wa,'' an expression for "wow"—is derived from a skit on a popular Israeli comedy show."
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December 14, 2006
Thrown for a Hickenlooper: Factory Girl's heart of darkness
Hearts of Darkness is one of the great documentaries about filmmaking gone awry, so it's darkly ironic that its director, George Hickenlooper, is in the midst (or, according to sketchy reports, shunted to the side) of production hell with Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl. 
NY Post's Page Six has led the parade of Harvey-haters chronicling the reshoots and slow-motion tumble of the Weinsteinco production toward a Los Angeles opening date before the end of 2006 to qualify for Oscar consideration. Today's note: Bob Dylan's pissed. Mr. Zimmerman's solicitors believe that the movie "falsely suggests he was responsible for the Andy Warhol ingenue's suicide." A letter's been dispatched to producers Bob Yari and Holly Wiersma, and screenwriter Aaron Richard Golub, "demanding the [moive] not be released—or even screened—until they see it to determine if Dylan, who they say has "deep concerns," has been defamed... The original screenplay depicted the alleged relationship [with Sedgwick] using Dylan's name, and suggested he dumped Sedgwick - which led to "her tragic decline into heroin addiction and eventual suicide," Dylan's lawyer, Orin Snyder, writes... "Until we are given an opportunity to view the film, we hereby demand that all distribution and screenings . . . immediately be ceased." Weinsteinco, discovering they'd missed the deadlines for several NY crickets groups, it's reported, has cancelled all its Manhattan screenings.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
Scold in your stocking: Finke-ing on Black Christmas
Even more Weinsteinco for the horror-days: LA Weekly's Nikki Finke objects strenuously to Weinsteinco's historically successful Christmas counterprogramming to young audiences, ranging from the release of the Scream series to Bad Santa to 2002's dreadful Darkness. Bob Weinstein's simple insight in slating holiday horrors is that after a few hours with the family, if you're too young to legally drink, a few drops of blood can be just as calming. (And it also dilutes the red ink in the distribbery game.) "Shame, shame, shame on The Weinstein Company, launched by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and their distributor, MGM, headed by chairman/CEO Harry Sloan," writes Finke, "for opening a holiday-themed slasher movie on Christmas Day... In show-biz marketing parlance and psychology, scheduling horror pics around Christmastime is savvy counterprogramming. But releasing them on Christmas Day breaks new (and unholy) ground. Just how many disturbed human beings do The Weinstein Company and MGM think actually want to go see a gory movie on December 25... ?" Inveighs Finke in closing, "Investors in The Weinstein Company and MGM need to protest this deplorable decision."
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December 13, 2006
Better Santa: Zwigoff sez
Terry Zwigoff describes his final, finally, cut of Bad Santa to Jeffrey M. Anderson at GreenCine: enabled by the ascension of Daniel Battsek to Miramax after the exit of the snip-happy Weinsteins. It's three minutes shorter than the first theatrical release, but Zwigoff tells Anderson, "There are over a thousand changes... 
A lot of them are very small, but the cumulative effect is large, and a lot them have to do with shaping the characters. Comedy's tricky... It's quite difficult to pull off. Even if you're working with great comic actors, it's more than just being a traffic cop. There are a million choices you make and they're all important. You have to make sure the characters are emotionally grounded in some sort of truth. If not... all you'll be left with is a series of gags instead of a film." ... [C]heaper digital technology has allowed Zwigoff to complete his cut; no actual film print exists. For Roger Ebert's 2006 Overlooked Film Festival this past April, the film was shown [in] HDcam, which Zwigoff says "looks great." ... "It was really going through those test screenings for Crumb years ago that made it easier this time for me stick to my convictions... Everyone said to take out Charles Crumb, but I felt I was right to keep him in. I drew on that experience. In retrospect, I know they were wrong. In any case, you can't please everyone, so you might as well try and please yourself. I was right then and perhaps I'm right now." Additions and deletions are delineated at the link, including that B. Bob Thornton's "Willie can now be seen smoking while on the job and even inhaling amyl nitrate at one point, two vices extremely difficult to get away with in movies today."
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
In like a lion: teaching MGM at UCLA
The history of MGM and United Artists are the subject of a new course starting in January at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; the subject area follows, which, sadly, does not seem to include an inside look at the remarkable, almost four-decade run of deals that financier Kirk Kerkorian has parlayed to keep the entity in various states of play. 
"Taught by veteran film historian and archivist Dr. Jan- Christopher Horak, this multi-faceted, multi-year program will be available as a touring course for universities around the country after its initial run at UCLA," pr's MGM. "The course will consider both the creative achievements and contributions to American culture of this definitive Golden Age movie studio, whose existence spans the entire history of American film." Horak says, “The history of MGM is paradigmatic for the history of Hollywood, from the halcyon days of the giant studios to the present system of distributor-financed independent production. Through MGM, students will begin to understand that historical trajectory.” MGM touts their twenty films to come in 2007 after a "storied history" in the press release, curiously omitting mention of titles or even current diadems like Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj.
More press: "The ranks of MGM film classics include all time popular favorites starring Laurel and Hardy (1934-1943) and the Marx Brothers (1935-1947); the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan series (1932-1948); “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and “The Wizard of Oz” (1939); a long string of classic musicals, including “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), “The Pirate”(1948) and “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952); the Oscar-winning epics “Ben Hur” (1926 & 1959) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968); and such trend-setting pop culture landmarks as “Jailhouse Rock” (1957), “Shaft” (1970) and “Thelma and Louise (1991).”
Last year, Robert Rosen, dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television, presented the idea for a class focusing on the studio to MGM chairman and chief executive officer Harry E. Sloan, a 1971 graduate of UCLA and a member of its Executive Board. Sloan enthusiastically embraced the concept.
The course offers “a priceless opportunity for the young to learn about America’s film heritage and for filmmakers to learn from the past masters of the craft,” Rosen says.
The ground for what would become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was broken in 1915, when producer-director Thomas Ince, a prolific creator of silent Westerns, moved his studio from a beachfront location to Culver City. Film mogul Samuel Goldwyn took over the lot in 1918 and partnered with Louis B. Mayer in 1924. It was under Mayer and his brilliant head of production, Irving Thalberg, that MGM achieved greatness, adopting its world famous Leo the Lion logo and accompanying Latin motto “Ars Gratia Artis” (“Art for Arts Sake”), and expanding its physical plant to the size of a small city, with 28 sound stages and hundreds of acres of standing sets. Now based in the MGM Corporate Tower in Century City, MGM remains a major force in Hollywood filmmaking, maintaining the James Bond, Rocky and Pink Panther franchises.
Jan-Christopher Horak’s long career as a film archivist and curator has taken him from George Eastman House, where he was senior curator of the Film Department to the directorship of the Munich Filmmuseum (Germany). In 1998 he became founding director of Archives & Collections at Universal Studios, then moved to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, where he was curator until 2006. He has taught at the University of Rochester, the Munich Film Academy, the University of Salzburg, and Wayne State University and has been a visiting professor at UCLA since 1999, teaching in the Critical Studies and Moving Image Archive Studies programs. Horak has published numerous books, including “The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood's Golden Age” (1989). "
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)
Peter Boyle: Puttin' on the Ritz
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December 12, 2006
Apocalypto (2006, ***)
A FOOTRACE AGAINST THE FORCES OF TIME, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto runs with Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young Mayan with wife, child, and child on the way, who must run, for over two hours, away from becoming a human sacrifice. Gibson, like George Lucas, is the most independent of filmmakers, self-financing to the tune of “it’s my dime, give me your dollars.” (This may be part of why Disney, while cautious, isn’t panicking in the face of Gibson’s “Sugar-tits” drunk-driving, racial-ranting fiasco earlier this year.) 
As a director of action, his borrowings and variations begin with The Most Dangerous Game’s man-hunts-man archetype. Sending his protagonist speeding through the jungle, Gibson spends his millions more ingeniously than the man from Marin County, including a 2001 reference that works twice. Apocalypto and its trailer begin with a quotation from Will Durant, co-author of “The Story of Civilization” whose reign (with partner Ariel) on the shelves of Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers would have coincided with Gibson’s formative years. “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within,” the epigraph reads. Movies cannot help but be parables and history is ever analogous to the present day. Is Gibson concerned with the godless Western world? The Arab world? America? Tactfully, Apocalypto, in subtitled Mayan tongues, largely pursues what Gibson again proves is his imaginative strength: the depiction of excruciatingly vibrant violence, in the service of power’s barbaric actions to hold onto authority. The elaborate and diffuse brutality, more disparate than the mere homoerotic sadism of shredding the blooded body of Christ, often takes the breath away.
While there are gags galore and jokes in the subtitles—“Just get busy,” a mother-in-law tells her infertile son-in-law; “He’s fucked” to a character who’s multiply so; an unlikely Midnight Cowboy reference, plus a bonus, sustained fellatio prank. But most Gibson and co-writer Farhad Safinia’s subtitled pronunciamentos are as serious as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (another trick Gibson liberally indulges). “Deep rotting fear. They are infected with it. Fear is a disease.” I don’t remember lines like that in any other Disney-released films this year. Pirates of the Caribbean: Death of Civilization? (Maybe that’s the third of the trilogy.) And then there’s this sharp, equally pointed subtitle: “Now that you’re up, can you please kill that dog?”
Not as homely as the drably shot The Passion of the Christ, Gibson’s director of photography, Dean Semler (The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Waterworld) shot Apocalypto almost entirely with new Genesis high-definition video cameras for transfer to 35mm, with striking results: there are textures to the jungle scenes and close-ups of the beautifully cast faces that take advantage of the strengths of the HD format. (And the opening chase through underbrush of a stuck tapir doesn’t display telltale signs of its video origins.) HD’s fondness for the texture of darker skin is also striking throughout. Beyond some weirdly low angles in the opening scenes, there is hardly a foot put wrong visually. (I won’t forget the shot of Jaguar Paw, hued in dyes of Superman blue, kicking in clouds of vertical mist as he falls along a waterfall.)
Apocalypto travels from isolated hamlet to the heights of Mayan temples, and Gibson’s patient reveal along the journey is inspired, with a level of spectacle that often-gone-native John Boorman might admire. A poxed child the kidnapped men meet along the way tops all the infant warriors of Blood Diamond. Sloe-eyed, feline, the small one says. “You fear me. So you should, all ye who are vile. Would you like to know how you are to die?” She predicts an apocalypse and stares up at the fearful men with all the power of Linda Blair pissing a carpet in front of an astronaut in The Exorcist.
From verdant cloister of jungle to rushing rapids to an insurgent city, an agora of chattel and charnel, despoiled by overbuilding, over-farming, and overpopulation, like the favelas of Rio, the shanties of Soweto, the pyres of the Ganges, the imagery is indelible. With pikes of severed heads in stages of mummification, a single eyeball scattering in a wide shot, and giddy cheerleader squads at the base of the pyramids beneath the human sacrifices, Gibson delivers tapestry-level detailing. (Boorman, whose tales of primitives include the mad Zardoz, ought to oooooh at the point-of-view from a just-decapitated head.) When the high priest invokes the “great people of the banner of the sun… destined to be the Masters of time, nearest to the gods,” one can only think of a Rapture parable, as well as “Hello, Washington, D.C.!”
Every other inch of the barely-clad jungle citizens is ornamented with body modifications—the most underestimated audience for Apocalypto may be a crowd that favors elaborate tattoos, scarification, and nostril and brow and helix and rhino and septum and labret and tragus and third eye piercing on men, women and children.
The last shot is beautiful; a few shots earlier could well be the shot that precedes the opening shot of Werner Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
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December 11, 2006
Louder than crickets: the Inland Empire trailer
While the nation's crickets sing of consensus and compromise with a flurry of 2006 year-end best-of tallies, here comes David Lynch's trailer for Inland Empire. Strannnnnnnge what lovvve doesss...
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:13 PM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2006
Indie returns Tuesday
My Australian friend is cautioning me about the land where I am going where there are no Internets and The Google Maps have many blank spaces.
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December 06, 2006
Losing focus: InDigEnt's shallow grave
As his megadecamillion dollar Charlotte's Web prepares to open to throngs of Strunk & White-clutching kidlit purists on every corner of the Upper East Side, director-producer Gary Winick sez his underfinanced production entity InDigEnt is no more, reports Reuters' Larry Fine. It'll "shut down in January, bringing an end to the high-profile production outfit that championed low-cost, independent and digital movie making," as Fine kindly describes the enterprise. "I couldn't keep it together. As of January we're biting the dust after six years," 
Winick said. "I kind of think we had our moment in time. Unfortunately there is no million-dollar film any more that actually gets in the market place and makes some money because the studios want the Capotes and the Sideways [sic]... they want the $8-million film to make a $100 million instead of the $1-million to make $10 (million). That's the problem," he said." InDigEnt notably used consumer-level cameras to make professional features, with visually disappointing results, including a non-metaphorical lack of consistent focus. Reuters' Fine remains gullible about the potential of the medium: "In recent years, however, even independent films have become more expensive to produce as more and more stars work in them. And as the movies' box office has improved, money from the specialty divisions of major studios has raised the stakes." Winick, like a seer from a past century, sums it up this way, compounding his interest in money: "I think the good news is that the Internet, it's not there yet, but it's going to shift something to get independent film back where it will become lucrative again." Ah, the Internets. Use the Google and become rich in your spare time at home!
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2006
Great Zeitgeist's Ghost!: documentary's completion issues
In NY Times, Paul Vandecarr samples the deep fount of unfinished docs that might as well not exist, dwelling upon "unrealized visions [that] linger like ghosts in the minds of their originators, whose lives are often consumed by a strenuous cycle of fund-raising, filming, dreaming, more fund-raising, editing, cajoling, 
resting and returning to one’s muse." Melodramatic verbal venture of the day: “Once you’re bitten by the idea of a story, you can’t shake it, and you get all carried away, and you start to perspire, and you can’t sleep,” said Richard Saiz, director of programming at the Independent Television Service, a major financ[i]er of documentary film. “It just takes you over.” ... Albert Maysles, the filmmaker who with his brother David has made such acclaimed documentaries as Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, has had one such unfinanced work in mind for some 50 years. The project, which he plans to call “In Transit,” would chronicle a series of long-distance train trips in different countries, in which passengers — soldiers, orphans, lovers, former prisoners and others — would be tracked as they travel toward whatever experience awaits them at their destination. “It could be the great adventure of my life,” Mr. Maysles, 80, said by telephone from New York. “And [I hope] the viewer would find it an adventure as well.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2006
Tales of Hoffman: you piss on my date and you say you're sorry?
In London Times' Sunday magazine, Ariel Leve gets fine quoteage from the ever-generous Dustin Hoffman in a strong profile as he promotes Stranger Than Fiction. "Kramer vs Kramer, he explains, was the first time he made a film in which his real life paralleled his work. "I was getting a divorce, and any divorce is painful. When you wait until you're 30, 31, to get married, you figure you know yourself and it isn't hasty. So when it failed it was devastating... 
What makes divorce happen is that you can't be in the same space any more, for whatever reason - but the love stays. And that's the killer. That's where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from... I know it's written that I'm difficult," says Hoffman... "Look, the medical metaphor I use is, it's like you're on a table for brain surgery and you're being wheeled in and the guy leans in and says, 'Hi I'm your brain surgeon and don't worry--I'm not difficult, I'm not a perfectionist.' " He laughs. "I am no different from the focus puller-you're either sharp or you're not." So he's a perfectionist? "I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for-is it right or wrong?" Hoffman also recounts why he didn't work with Fellini, Bergman, and Beckett (the best of the stories) and recounts a familiar story from hard-times roommate Gene Hackman: "Hackman would see six films a day on his day off. "He'd spend his entire day in the cinema. It was a place where the homeless went, because for 35 cents they could sleep there all day. He was in there at 10am and he heard one homeless guy in the balcony saying, 'You're sorry? You're sorry? What do you mean, you're sorry? You piss all over my date and you say you're sorry?'"
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Life is Swede: a new film by Roy Andersson
Variety's Pia Lundberg reports there's a new pic by Swedish great Roy Andersson, to debut at Cannes. "As he proved in his Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize winning Songs From the Second Floor in 2000, there is contemporary Swedish cinema, and there is Roy Andersson. 
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
Tip of the Berg: Deliver Us From Evil's director reacts to LA diocese announcement
Cinematical's Kim Voynar tracks down Deliver Us From Evil director Amy Berg for her reaction to the announcement by the Los Angeles Archdiocese's allegation of a potential payment of $60 million to 45 victims of "clergy abuse": "I think the attention garnered by the film and the negative and neglectful tone of Cardinal Mahony in my film helped to expedite the settlement. Cardinal Mahony has been fighting to delay settlement for four years now, so I think we can assume the settlement shows how negative public attention is very damaging to him." Berg says her understanding is, however, that this is not a done deal. Those who had been abused, molested or raped by clergy "basically woke up to this and read about their own settlement in the newspaper. Whose news was this to break? This statement [seems] like it should have been the victims statement to make if forgiveness and reparation are what the church is after... It is my understanding these cases were hand-picked by the church and they were cases where there was no insurance coverage, so the church will not be able to pay them out... The only person(s) qualified to answer that are the 45 people who will get settlements. However, the fact that Mahony said these represent "A very special time for the victims" is a very strange statement. Who is Mahony or Tamberg (his spokesperson) to speak for them?" [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:25 AM | Comments (1)
December 03, 2006
Harmony convergence: new Korine cinema
The Observer's Jason Solomons crosses paths at the British Independent Film Awards with a long-quiet filmmaker who reports he's finished his latest project: "Harmony Korine - one time punk and enfant terrible of the New York indie scene - was there in a very ordinary shirt and V-neck jumper but could barely contain his excitement about having last week finished editing his new film Mister Lonely. 'It's pretty weird but it's the best thing I've ever done, by a long, long way,' he told me. It stars Samantha Morton (as Marilyn Monroe), Anita Pallenberg, Werner Herzog and Diego Luna as Michael Jackson." To celebrate, here's a younger Korine flummoxing David Letterman.
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
ARThouse: adapting Wings of Desire for stage
You'll believe an adaptation can fly: Boston's American Repertory Theater has posted a 10-minute doc on the making of their theatrical edition of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 01, 2006
To motherf--ker what Citizen Kane was to deep focus: f--kin' Geoff Pevere
"Among the many achievements credited to Robert Altman on the occasion of his passing last week, one milestone went largely unnoticed," writes Geoff Pevere in Toronto Star, until, that is, it was restored to posterity in Steve Anderson's documentary Fuck... 
"As it turns out, it was Altman who first slid the f-word past... a Hollywood studio. The movie was M*A*S*H and the context was that movie's climactic anything-goes... Looking an opponent square in the eye prior to the hike, John Schuck's character announces: "All right bub. Your fuckin' head is coming right off." ... If one can describe it so, the um, magic of the word lies in the fact that no matter how often it's used it still provokes a response. (It's also astoundingly versatile, the linguistic version of ketchup or duct tape.) ... [T]he f-word may well be one of the few things in mass marketed consumer culture that actually isn't compromised by overuse. To test the theory, try this: call up your mom, let it rip and see how blasé she is about it... [T]here's also something to be said for the fact that Jack Nicholson could and did say the word as frequently, creatively and forcefully as he did in a movie like The Last Detail. (Which was to the word "motherfucker" what Citizen Kane was to deep focus.) [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)
Bugsy Malone at 30: Not a cliché left unturned!
One of the UK's leading Mr. Crotchets of the cinema, Alan Parker, recalls in the Telegraph Bugsy Malone, his mix of gangster lore and kiddie cutes as it's reissued on its 30th b'day. 
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:08 AM | Comments (1)
Wank thanks: Meyers dot-dashes the Telegraph
Neither party's too proud: in the Friday Telegraph, writer-director Nancy Meyers tells the paper's Will Lawrence why they get prominent play in her swooning romcom, The Holiday. "I read it whenever I go to the UK," Meyers says. "Does she flatter every British journalist she meets in this way? 
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)
Even Herzog started small: Rosefelt recollects
Another feat of recall at Zoom-In from vet publicist-now-indie-consultant Reid Rosefelt, who remembers the 1970s apparition of Werner Herzog and the New German Cinema in NYC: "
"When I started... in the late 70s, it was hard to get people to go to German movies. At that time, going to a foreign film mainly meant French and Italian movies.... Remember Cousin, Cousine? Films like that played forever at the Paris Theatre... But there was a resistance to German films... Fassbinder made a lot of films and they were very forbidding aesthetically. It took a long campaign from Vincent Canby in the New York Times to get people to pay attention... I saw Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small at college and then The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser when I got to New York. So I was a huge fan when Werner brought his films to New Yorker Films... I had to write some stuff for the catalog! On movies that hadn't come out in the U.S. yet! ... [A]ll the journalism was really weird. One piece said that Werner tried to start his own country in Africa. I was just off the boat from Wisconsin, so I figured that if he said it, it must be true... When I finally met Werner, I asked him how he had done it. Did he run for office? Did he form an army? ... Did he make Bruno S. king? Werner just stared at me blankly. It didn't appear like the question bothered him. It wasn't like, "Why did you ask me such a stupid thing?" It was just sort of....nothing... Over the years... I was very fortunate to be around him for Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Stroszek, and other great films. Kinski too. I'm one of the few people who thinks Kinski was saner than Werner, but I guess, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, "It depends on how you define sanity." [Photo: Herzog in Rosefelt's New Yorker Films cubicle.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack