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January 31, 2007
Meatwad and Frylock shut down Boston: perils of the viral
Guerrilla marketing, a device often used by independent filmmakers, can entertain, inform, advertise, or, in stupid hands, shut down traffic all across Boston. WBZ reports that Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System's weird promos for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" caused police to shut down several important traffic arteries and cause chaos across that city. [Time Warner's CNN Headline News also employs the inflammatory Glenn Beck, a bomb-setter in his own right.] 
"The suspicious devices which forced bomb units to scramble across Boston today were actually magnetic lights that are part of a marketing campaign for a television cartoon. The reports forced the temporary shutdowns of Interstate 93 out of the city, a key inbound roadway, a bridge between Boston and Cambridge, and a portion of the Charles River but were quickly determined not to be explosive. "It's a hoax -- and it's not funny," Gov. Deval Patrick said. All of the devices are magnetic lights which resemble a character on the show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force"... "The "packages" in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger. They are part of an outdoor marketing campaign in 10 cities... They have been in place for two to three weeks in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco and Philadelphia. [We are] in contact with local and federal enforcement on the exact locations of the billboards. We regret that they mistakenly thought to pose any danger." The ATHF movie, starring Master Shake, Frylock Meatwad is due in March. Incoming! [Details on the tie-ups in Boston at the link, included one that was detonated under Interstate 93.] UPDATE: Overnight, AdultSwim included multiple-card print apologies in their interstitials amid programming. More panic, and arrests of those who did the deeds as opposed to those who paid for them to do them, can be found around yr. standard news sources.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
Philip Glass is 70
[H/t
Screengrab
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
Scoop's droop: Wolcott, late, better
Better late than never, plus, "Ouch!" Over at his blog, James Wolcott catches Scoop on PPV, which he writes, "sags and drags with the same flaccid verbosity and vague purpose that plagued Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and, lodged at the bottom of the well, Anything Else... 
The literate wisecracks that once peppered Woody Allen's dialogue and put him in the company of quick studies such as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce—for instance, the famous joke in Annie Hall about Commentary and Dissent merging to form "Dissentary" (dysentary)—have been replaced by Metamucil gag lines that might have been dug out from the depths of Bob Hope's vault or Neil Simon's notebook, and delivered with less spin." Wolcott also notes "the bizarre repartee between Allen and Scarlett Johansson. She plays a cub reporter and he pretends to be her father... and informs a polite couple... that his daughter has come so far in life, considering she grew up with a learning disability. Later, when the murderer's identity has been supposedly unmasked... Allen jokes, Well, actually, you were adopted—you're mother and I were looking to adopt a handicapped child... Learning disability, handicapped--his fibs about her aren't funny, and they aren't pertinent to anything in the story. I don't know what the fuck they are. Perhaps they're veiled swipes at Mia Farrow, who has adopted handicapped children, because they make no sense in the context of Scoop except as misplayed shots of displaced hostility. Or maybe it's displaced hostility borne of erotic frustration. In a Washington Post interview... Allen lamented, "One of the great pastimes of my life was eyeing girls in short skirts, and that's gone. They're unavailable to you, and in the few cases where you could work your magic, it's to no practical avail because you can't plan a future if you're 70 and she's 22. So your flirtation life goes, which is a big part of everybody's enjoyment in life." By the time you're 70—and married—you might have matured enough to get over it and reconcile with reality..." Once more, with feeling: "Ouch!"
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
Do-re Lee Mi-do: hard English training
South Korea's leading film translator subtitles his life for Korea Times' Jane Han. Lee Mi-do has translated over 450 movies from English to Korean, but his career began with Kieslowski's Blue. "After starting to work at an agency importing foreign films, one of the brokers asked me if I would be interested in translating the film 
myself... 'Why not?' I thought, and that first film led me all the way here... I grew up getting hard English training,'' said Lee, recalling that his father, who served as an English translator in the military, had him memorize word after word and familiarized him with American culture by showing him movies. "My father had a heart for emigrating abroad, so that's another reason why I was pushed to learn the language.'' ... The single 45-year-old who says he doesn't have many other personal commitments begins each day at his local Starbucks coffee shop. "I drink coffee, read three different dailies and think of ideas. It's a great place for me to work in a vibrant atmosphere,'' the full-time translator said, smiling. "But most of all, it's boring to work at home alone.'' ... Translating one or two movies a month, he recently put out his second book, titled "100 Movie Dictionary, English Encyclopedia," which consists of stories about 100 popular movies, catchy keywords in each film and detailed explanations of proper English usage." He's a publisher, too: his company's called "FISH library." "Fashion equals following the trend, ideas must be fresh, stories should always be extraordinary and each piece should carry its own heart, giving inspiration to the audience... The four letters of each word led to FISH _ that's my publishing company. I only publish books that carry those characteristics.''
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)
Protect this: Ukraine dubbing imported pix
A large percentage of all movie imports to Ukraine will have to be dubbed into Ukrainian, Kyiv Post reports. 
"Authorities warned film distributors Wednesday that they will face punishment if they do not abide by new guidelines stating that half of all foreign movies shown in the nation's theaters must be translated into Ukrainian. Amid persistent disputes in the ex-Soviet republic over language use, the state cinematographic service and film distributors signed a memorandum last week setting the rules. Movie distributors, who mainly buy films in Russia, have complained of financial losses and many in the largely Russian-speaking east and south have not been translating movies into Ukrainian... Language is a sensitive issue in Ukraine, where Russian was heavily promoted during the Soviet era, and nationalists see protecting and promoting the Ukrainian language as a way to prevent meddling from Moscow. President Viktor Yushchenko has said all foreign movies - which in Ukrainian theaters are typically are shown dubbed into Russian - should be translated into Ukrainian... The Party of the Regions, whose head, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, enjoys strong support in the east and south, campaigned in elections last year on a promise to make Russian a second state language. Six regional governments in the east and south, where Russian is mainly spoken, earlier this year granted Russian a special status - decisions that were heavily criticized by Yushchenko."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)
Great Scots! YouTube, pancakes and two grand
A Scottish film student gets a kinda-sorta lucrative deal with Time Warner after posting film-student style stop-motion shorts to YouTube reports the Scotsman's Eben Harrell. Twenty-four-year-old James Provan "is set to earn thousands after being spotted and signed by the media giant 
Time Warner. [His] latest YouTube hit, The Garden [pictured]—filmed at his parents' house in Aberdeen—is already being used as [part of] an advert for a Time Warner internet service in the United States [for which he was paid £2,000]... Provan's 'distinct, idiosyncratic style' [seen for decades in student work and in no-budget music videos] —which blends his original music with the same stop-animation technique used for Wallace and Gromit—has made him one of the most popular film-makers in cyberspace. He first shot to fame last year when his Pancakes!... became one of the most popular videos on the internet. It was featured on news programmes across the world and viewed by some 1.5m people." in The Garden's "climax, Provan pushes his friend along the ground as if he were a lawnmower." The most blood-curdling sentences of the dispatch? "The synthesised, toe-tapping music accompanying Provan's videos give them a feel-good quality that is perfect for the open-access medium of YouTube, [unidentified] media commentators said... "I don't have any training as a film-maker. The first time I used a video editor was in June, so I've been learning as I go along. I'd like to be a film-maker. I love making my videos and I think that's where my talent lies." Provan's oeuvre is here.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2007
Bollywood today: I do not think we can claim to be in the same league as Hollywood on exploitation
Bollywood's success is leading to Western greed, Reuters reports from Mumbai in the dispatch, "Bollywood toys with spinoffs." "For decades, Bollywood was happy just to sell filmgoers a 20-rupee (US50c) cinema ticket. Now studios, tentatively evolving from dynastic family firms to Hollywood-style companies with a taste for merchandising, are increasingly trying to market everything from movie hero action figures to mobile phone ringtones of film soundtrack snippets. Krrish, Bollywood's all-singing, all-dancing, black-caped answer to Superman, was perhaps the industry's most full-on attempt yet to cash in on merchandising..." After seeing 2006's biggest Bollywood entry, "children could nag their parents to buy them Krrish dolls, Krrish superhero mask, Krrish dartboards, Krrish Rubik's Cubes, and Krrish school stationery. It is all a contrast to a a few years ago when old-fashioned revenge melodramas played in often dilapidated cinemas... Studios and analysts say the industry is ambitiously aiming at following Hollywood with "media convergence" - the buzzword for plastering a product across a wide array of media such as television, radio, the internet, video games and mobile phones... "The Indian film industry has definitely opened up to exploring various innovative revenue streams," Siddharth Roy Kapur, marketing and communications chief of... a leading Bollywood studio, said. "However, I do not think we can claim to be in the same league as Hollywood on exploitation of our content amongst non South Asian audiences." [More stats at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
Sundance on Ice (closing weekend)
Commingling a few minutes before Saturday's Closing Night awards.
political convention, to dragoon attendees into their proper roles.
friends were louder than the loudspeakers, even after
requests to go away and a couple of
unsubtle flash photos in their direction.
Another leave-behind.
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2007
The Death of Mr. Puiu and the rigidity of a communist system
Between screenings, I'm trying to carve out the time to close the books on a few more euphoric moments from Sundance, but then I find probably the most depressing story I've seen so far this year, from Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab: a gifted filmmaker who might just have quit: Ebiri reports on a press release that "Cristi Puiu, winner of the 2005 Prize Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Bear for Short Film at the 2004 Berlinale, announced at a recent press conference in Romania, his decision to no longer participate in the contests held by The Romanian National Centre for Cinematography. The announcement follows the denial of development funds for two of his projects, which were submitted to the latest contest organized by the Centre for Cinematography... Puiu [also] stated that he will not make use of the funding granted to another one of his projects during a previous contest..." Illuminates Ebiri, "[T]he idea of a smallish Romanian film director choosing to forgo state support for his films may not seem like a big deal, but... Puiu is the director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu the much-acclaimed masterpiece that made its way to the top spots in... critical surveys in 2006... In countries like Romania, state funding through organizations like the Center for Cinematography is absolutely crucial for film production to survive...This is Puiu basically saying he will not accept this funding, even if it means he never gets to make another film, which it very well might. The release goes on to say that "the hard line decision is a protest against what Puiu sees as the 'rigidity of a communist system' still present within the Centre for Cinematography and the way the organization spends public money on productions with no value." Fuck. You can find a remarkable earlier interview with Puiu at the link.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Letting Hounddog out of the bag
Beating LATimes' Scriptland to the punch. The Smoking Gun lets the dog out of the bag: someone's leaked the five key pages of the abused-child among abused-child movies at Sundance 2007. "With the Dakota Fanning rape movie Hounddog yet to find a buyer... it remains unclear when (or if) the controversial film will land in U.S. theaters. Until then, film fans will have to make do with the below excerpt from the... shooting script, which describes the sexual assault of the 12-year-old actress[' character]."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
S07, Year of the A*hole. sez Backrow Tom
Tom Hall calls Sundance 2007 The Year of The Asshole at Back Row Manifesto: "[T]he festival blues are kicking in; Many of the members of the industry have left town, the screenings are less frequent and the exhaustion of seeing 5 or 6 films a day has started to wear... [I] believe that Sundance 2007 will go down in history as The Year of The Asshole. In almost every single fiction (and, come to think of it, non-fiction) film I have seen at this year's festival, white American (heterosexual) masculinity has been exposed as the playground of self-serving, foul-mouthed, misunderstood pricks whose sole mission in life is to destroy the happiness of women and their fellow men. As a white American heterosexual man, I can understand how watching the constant parade of cultural and political douchbaggery might impact people's perceptions of what the tropes and parameters of the white guy ethos actually look like, but are we really that bad? ... It is a tough year for the boys at the movies, although maybe these guys are better than the neutered, incompetent drips that represent us on television. Where are the heroes? Ok, maybe asking too much; Where are the likeable men?" [Hall names names at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)
You don't send me: Sundance is a White Plastic Flower
Over at Filmmaker, Park City newbie, shooter Jamie Stuart, catches sight of the talent (The Interview's Sienna Miller, Great World of Sound director Craig Zobel) and watches the Watchers (S. T. Van Airesdale, for instance, and random attendees [pictured] at the Filmmaker magazine 15th anni party) in a rapidfire, short video podcast called White Plastic Flower. (The title refers to a bit with Ms. Miller being charmingly dorky with her hands.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)
Once more: the songs, the snow
For anyone who's wondering what the ruckus is about Sundance premiere Once, you can sample the songs on the fillum's MySpace profile. Still, that's not the best way to sample the charm of the duo: try this clip, in extended entry, of an impromptu perf out in the snow by stars Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard. (Tuig é nó ná.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dog the Swag: Save our Seals
Yes, that is Tom Arnold. From PR about "television celebrities" who posed for pics kissing baby seals on behalf of the Humane Society. "Teri Hatcher hit up Sundance 2007 for a week full of outrageous swagging, but she also stopped to show some love. This time, it wasn’t her hunky BF Stephen Kay (whom she was all over the whole week), but the Humane Society’s Baby Seals. Hatcher and a host of other celebrities visited The Green House in Deer Valley for Après Ski Swagging with The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) as one of the sponsors... Other celebs were also THRILLED to sign a pledge asking the Canadian government to stop the seal hunt." [Continued at the jump.]
Celebs who signed were:
Sienna Miller
Molly Shannon
Kelly Cole
Denise Vasi
Patricia Kara
Tom Arnold
Donovan Leitch
Kerr Smith
Matthew Lillard
Timothy Hutton
Isabelle Fuhrman
Brian Tee
Sienna Miller put and also agreed to let the Humane Society use her name in a full-page ad to the Canadian government. Even musicians Steve Kerr of the Sex Pistols and William Tell showed their support for the humane Society. The HSUS chose to migrate their cause from the ice floes of Eastern Canada to the mountains of Park City, UT to rally celebrity support to stop the annual seal hunt which begins in March.
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 27, 2007
Sundance on Ice (Friday)
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
The Scotch. The milk. The Trixie: The Times
There are many reasons to read the NY Times, but there aren't enough profiles like this these days: "It is 5:01 p.m. and Joyce Randolph, a k a Trixie Norton, is holding forth in the downstairs bar at Sardi's, sipping her... Dewar's and milk.," writes Glenn Collins. "'I think it does your stomach good,' she is saying. 'The Scotch. The milk.'" ... She is strong of voice and precise of diction at 82, given to addressing people as “Dear.” How sweet it is, then, to hang out with Miss Randolph in one of her favorite haunts where the honeymoon is never over. For his 16 years at Sardi’s, José Estevez, the perpetually amenable barkeep, has looked on as new customers [greet Randolph]... She is always available to smile and pose with them in a camera-phone flash. “I talk to everyone,” she said. “You can’t be hoity.” ... “I am the last one left,” Miss Randolph said a bit later, without drama. “Even the girl who held the stopwatch, Joan Reichman Canale, is gone.” [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
S07: Transcribing Hartley, Araki, Jenkins, Green
Hal Hartley, Gregg Araki, Tamara Jenkins and David Gordon Green comprised a sturdy Sundance roundtable; At GreenCine, Craig Philips transcribes more than 5,500 words. Hartley: "I don't think I've ever been in a development situation. It's always: Write the script and then come to the table with the script. These are my friends and we want to make this film. I guess I mean I've never been 
paid to develop a script. That sounds like such a civilized thing." Green: "I guess development to me is like flirting with a girl; you have to give yourself a lot of opportunities to turn around and go the other way, or you can hook up. You get in a room with producers, financiers, actors, you kind of all look at each other, assess each other, size each other up, see if it works. If it does, take the next step. Some of them, I'll write, get producers attached, and then I'll get to the casting and all of a sudden the studio or whoever I'm working with will say, "Eh, we see a different cast." I'll say, I don't like that idea, then go away and close up that project, open up another one. So I've got a number of experiences in... not going all the way." Are they "in it for the money"?Hartley: Well, to be perfectly honest, I am in it for the money. I mean, I consider myself an artist, too, and try to be true to that, but I do have a family to take care of. Why should I do this for nothing? I've learned a lot about doing business; I just do it in a particular way. I'm much more interested in talking to business people than I am talking to philanthropists. I don't want to be a charity case. It's important because, in the early days of your career, you get a lot of people talking about support. "We supported you." Right, you didn't program the film on television and make money - you were supporting me, that wasn't business. Right. So, you have to be careful about that. But, yeah, I'm a professional filmmaker; that means I get paid for what I do. No reason to be ashamed of admitting that." Green: "I think everything is fun. I even like going to the corporate meetings and pitching it. Getting everybody excited, that's kind of fun. The only thing I don't like is when you have to make the credits for your movie and everybody starts crying because they wanted their name in a specific place. I actually had to appeal to my union so that the title of my movie could come after my name. There's so many weird politics about it; everybody gets really possessive about credits. I don't think we should even have credits - the title sequence should just be cool parts of the movie, and they should take out the titles." [Much, much more at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
Sundance on Ice (Thursday-Friday)
Egyptian theater waitlist.
Nature's not in it: HQ's carpet pattern.
where many publicists dispatch the talent and journalists,
gets out of control.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)
The price of Sundance love: Dargis' Sundance reality
Multi-Oscar-nommed Little Miss Sunshine and Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy were favorites of Sundance 2006; to highlight the divide, in NY Times, Manohla Dargis does the fiscal comparison-contrast. "The two films had their premiere the same day, within a half-hour of each other: Old Joy played in a 150-seat house, and Little Miss Sunshine, 
in a packed 1,270-seat theater. People who actually saw Old Joy, a low-fi story about two friends on a weekend trip in the Oregon woods, seemed to love it, but, like many Sundance films, it left the festival without a buyer." Later, "it was picked up by the small New York distributor Kino International for what Gary Palmucci, the head of its theatrical sales, called the “low five figures.” Film Forum in New York, a key house for movies like this, was offered only the fall-prestige slot of 20 September. Old Joy "did spectacularly well at Film Forum, bringing in more than $29,000 the first week. It earned more than $21,000 the second week, but by then was competing with new studio-division arrivals... Mr. Palmucci estimated that by the end of its nearly six-month theatrical run Old Joy will have played in almost every major market in the country. Kino can’t afford to buy full-page ads in big-city newspapers but did run a few small ones. It also spent about $40,000 to blow the film up from 16mm to 35mm; $24,000 on 22 prints; $6,500 on 200 trailers; $4,000 on 50,000 postcards and about $3,000 on Web advertisements. Kino also bought posters and radio spots, and hired outside publicists. It has been a heroic effort, but the postcards, the trailers and all the glowing reviews have not been enough to make the film a hit for the distributor. As I write, Old Joy has pulled in less than $200,000." The theatrical gross for LMS? Boxofficemojo.com says the recent DVD release earned $59,599,618.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)
David Lynch: Dancing dwarf. No. No? No.
David Lynch is not only on the road to peddle Inland Empire, he's also got a slim volume to sell, "Catching the Big Fish," about transcendental meditation and inspiration.
Seattle Times' Mark Rahner shares the coffee and the bliss with the 61-year-old director. "One lady told me ... she went away partway through the film sleeping and dreaming, and she said she really wanted to tell me about the dream she had, because it was probably being fed by the film in some ways, and I didn't have time to get it from her, but she said it was quite something." Want to know what's missing? "What's missing?" Dancing dwarf. "No." No? "No." Cups of coffee per day? "Well, I always said 20. I don't know if it's quite 20. But it's between 10 and 20."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
Quentin does what Quentin does: in the third person
Grindhouse gets the Sunday NYTimes treatment from Whitney Joiner, who speaks to directorial duo Robert Rodriguez about Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino about Death Proof. Much lurid detail about the 1970s exploitation tribute, plus a de rigeur Tarantino quote. The theatrical versions will have missing reels, in a tribute to the chopped-up prints of the crappy movies that the director of Jackie Brown loves and collects. "My whole thing is to play with the audience," Tarantino tells the Times. "I guarantee you, when it pops up 'Missing Reel,' the entire theater is going to scream. They might very well be screaming my name: 'Quentin, you bastard! We hate you!" In the piece, Tarantino avers that the movie has "some of the best dialouge I've ever written in my life"; he sent it to Bob Dylan, who he thought might "appreciate the wordplay," but hasn't heard back. [My own encounter with Q3 was during interviews for Jackie Brown, when Tarantino told me, "All this time there was all these articles, what's Quentin doing, what's Quentin doing, when's Quentin gonna do something else? Well, Quentin was writing, okay? Quentin was doing what Quentin does, all right?"]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
Silent movies: Sundance conversation
All sorts of serendipity can happen at a film festival like Sundance; one of the most spirited unexpected conversations I've had here is with Sk8 Life co-screenwriter Elan Mastai, talking about improvisation and the fiction film at the Vancouver-shot fiction/skate performance pic's release party: there's no audio on this clip, but I like it this way.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2007
It's a sin: confessing Sundance midfest
More than a couple of Sundance sins got committed yesterday: For one, I saw Once twice; who sees a movie twice at a film festival when there's so much else possibly to see and do? But the simple beauty of John Carney's romantic musical was even more powerful a second time around—I can't resist the pun "Once singular sensation®"—and it was truly heartening to see the fillum with a public audience, rather than at a presser for journos as I did on the first go. I wasn't esthetically wrong, I wasn't unduly sentimental: the bliss remained; deepened, even. If the reaction from the earlier screenings was anything like last night's standing ovations and general glow about the Prospector Square, Once is in the running for an Audience Favorite. Bonus: At the Q&A afterwards, the stars of the film, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová [pictured] played two songs. I'd blown off meeting a charming shorts director and the film's lead actress to see Once again, but it was the right choice, maybe not precisely a sin against cin-e-mah. Earlier, a filmmaker whose movie I'd criticized caught sight of my festival badge and introduced himself. I quickly looked down at his badge: Oh-oh. Is it so wrong that Brett Morgen of The Chicago 10 and I went for an off-the-record conversation over coffee to compare our notes? I liked that hour's give-and-take more than the movie, but I also have a better understanding of Morgen's hopes for getting a message of criticial resistance to younger viewers and certain intentions that I didn't quite get when I saw the pic on opening night. Late, late in the evening, packing for a move-of-house necessitated a fit of swag triage, which must always be followed by a steaming shower. Maybe any of the sins washed away as well.
[Photo © 2007 ray pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Swag the dog: Crass? Brilliant? You decide (Black Snake Moan)
This is the rear of the Black Snake Moan promotional hat; after you see the back side, you may think it's both crass and brilliant, as a handful of people think of the movie itself. Reports Anthony Breznican at USATODAY: "Even the poster trumpets Black Snake Moan as an homage to the sexploitation thrillers of the 70s, with Ricci posed seductively and wrapped in chains, while Jackson towers over her. [Writer-director Craig] Brewer, who made his name at Sundance in the same theater two years ago with Hustle & Flow, said he laid out multiple chains for Ricci to choose from. He imitated her posing with different links. "She picked up a padlock and said, 'Oh yeah, this is it. I could see this on a runway.'" [At the jump, the front side of the leering swag.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
S07 Fortune cookie #7-Jo Rowling's cupboards
Popular success must be a fine thing: most times I think of "Harry Potter" I also think of J. K. Rowling in a teashop in chilly Scotland and scrunching her toes in her trainers against the damp and coming up with that freight train of adolescent dread. She's always claimed to have written the ending first. (Some plans are better laid than others, something you're reminded every day at Sundance.) This quote comes from a 2001 BBC special. "JKR [laying in her pile of notes]: This is the thing that I was very dubious about 
showing you, and I don't really know why because what does this give away? [It's a big folder] But this is the Final Chapter of book Seven. Um ... [laughs] which I'm still dubious about showing you, I don't know what I feel like, the camera's gonna be able to see through the folder. So this is it, and I'm not opening it for obvious reasons. This is really where I wrap everything up, it's the Epilogue, and I basically say what happens to everyone after they leave school -- those who survive, because there are deaths, more deaths, coming. It was a way of saying to myself, Well, "you will get here, you will get to book Seven, one day. And ... then you'll need this!" So I'd just like to remind all the children I know who come round my house and start sneaking into cupboards that it's not there, anymore. I don't keep it at home any more for very very very obvious reasons. So there it is."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2007
Awaiting Waitress: a friend recollects
Read it and weep: Reid Rosefelt recalls the late Adrienne Shelley, whose Sundance triumph, Waitress, also sold for big money to Fox Searchlight. "For many years, Adrienne Shelly was my best friend. She was the one I turned to when my love life went awry—which was often—and I played the same role for her. We emailed and talked 
pretty much every day and saw each other every weekend, for F&B hot dogs and a movie at the Chelsea Cineplex. Our relationship was never romantic, though. Even though I had a big crush on her when I saw her in The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, it was different when I met the actual person. She wasn't for me and I wasn't for her. I quickly settled into playing the role of heterosexual gay best friend in her life, and as we all know from the movies, the gay best friend knows things that lovers never do..." Shelley acted in Rosefelt's short, Tiger: His Fall & Rise, which he concedes, "The problem with Tiger wasn't that it was silly; the problem with Tiger was that it was awful." But there is this reward: "[T]he film will stand the test of time as a documentary on her poor eating habits. Many people were disgusted by the way she ate, but I'm a big slob myself and the way she nudged the food onto her fork with her finger just made me feel more comfortable. The truth is that I loved the way Adrienne ate so much that I had her eat all the way through Tiger: Chinese food, sub sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, you name it... [T]he truth is it gave me boundless joy to see her talking with her mouth full. I loved Adrienne a lot, but I can't remember loving her more than when she had a giant burger in her trap. Choose your bliss; that was mine. I will be paying off that damned film for the rest of my life, but I'm extremely proud I had the opportunity to record her eating that burger for posterity. This is my contribution to film history." [The rest, at the link, is a must-read.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
S07 Fortune cookie #6-Martin Luther King
While trying to find a way into writing about a half-dozen vital documentaries with social awareness—including Cocalero and White Light/Black Rain, the day after An Inconvenient Truth, Deliver Us From Evil, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp and My Country, My Country constituted an incredibly strong selection of Best Documentary Feature nominees, this quotation from Martin Luther King fell out of my notebook: "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." These filmmakers know this, too, and demonstrate that knowledge through their actions.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
To The Nines: John August gives it away
Screenwriter and debuting director John August puts a few pertinent pages of his Sundance premiere up at his estimable, entertaining blog. There's more here.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2007
S07 reviews: Once
BOY MEETS GIRL: HOW HARD CAN THAT BE? Sometimes a movie leaves you with such a warm feeling, you just want to point people in the general direction of its reflected light, and not write about it, not describe modest virtues in a way that oversells genuine heart and soul. Once, a grand, effortless Irish musical povera (shot in two weeks on DV for 100,000 euros), written and directed by John Carney, 
who was for several years in the fine band The Frames with star-composer Glen Hansard, is one of those movies. I saw it first thing Thursday morning and kept putting off writing about it... my eyes have welled up happily every time the fillum comes up with someone else who's seen it, adores it, loves it, too. Carney + Co. also work with some very sophisticated insights about the representation of music on film and also how one walks, talks, lives, breathes, stumbles, fumbles, triumphs, while trying to fashion any form of art. Hansard is the lanky, ginger-bearded "Guy" busking in a Dublin square who meets the "Girl," a slightly goofy, younger Czech émigré (Markéta Irglová) with an uncertain command of English. Carney introduces them with a simple shot that's breathtakingly right: we are watching Hansard play for a bit and then the camera pulls back, revealing Irglová's shoulder. Our POV becomes hers. The narrative strategy, built more around small misunderstandings and the making of songs, is similar. (Naked lyrics are quickly clothed in melody.) Layers peel away, their preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away, and Hansard's music, as urgent and lovely as ever, grows in collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a classical pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The Girl is not just a girl; they have talent to share. Let's make music together, all right? The most masterful stroke is this: Concert scenes in movies bear a simple ontological quandary. Live music is live music, and simply shooting a scene of a live gig with adequate or even innovative coverage is a representation of the live show, and not innately cinematic in itself. And, of course, the Dionysian element of the live performer enacting fantasy a few feet or yards away is meaningless on screen, lacking their human presence. A secondary insight is having songs play almost always to their conclusion, rather than cutting them into snippets of catchy hooks as many music-heavy movies do. There are so many things I've personally considered about how to depict the life of an artist, any form of artist, but especially musicians, without pretension or preciousness that these long-time mates have solved, and more than that, have made a wonderful, heartfelt movie. The music under the final scenes reprises a song we’ve seen the pair record; it’s heartbreaking on several levels, largely because Carney’s canny at how a song grows and thrives, as well as being a true king of Dublin. Once is more than just the best movie I've seen at Sundance so far, and I hope to have many occasions to write more about it later. Now pass me that feckin' tissue, wouldja? Fair play.
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Putting the EW in Ewwwwwwww
Oh, Lord, this press release just came sailing over the transom: Entertainment Weekly (which likes to be called EW, which I presume they expect to be pronounced E-W) touts their Sundance bloggers: Billy Baldwin, Elle Fanning, Rainn Wilson and Tara Reid. Blogs Wilson, who acts 
in New Line topper Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy, which screens for free on Tuesday night: "Hello everyone on the internet and in the world of entertainment. It's me, Rainn Wilson, international superstar... promoting myself as un-official [sic] "spokesman of a generation" and gynecologist to the stars... I'm here because of the greatest movie ever made, The [L]ast Mimzy... I am actually raped by Dakota Fanning in this film. It was very disturbing and is causing quite an uproar in the blogosphere... So anyhoo, check out the family sci-fi epic adventure, The Last Mimzy and you will see my thighs. Good-bye." Tara Reid: "HI its Tara Reid and i'm in Sundance its freezing here but alot of fun and alot of work my movie premieres tonight and i'm really excited." Baldwin? "What can I tell ya... I don't know what bothers me more about Sundance: all of the free shit that they give to the rich and famous who don't need it, or the way that I behave when thrown into the den of swag. I can sit here and pretend that I'm above it all, but in reality, after being given free iPods and Razr telephones, jewelry and vacations, if my grandmother--may she rest in peace--stood between me and the last Philips flat screen television, I'd lay her out right on her ass for that bad boy. I hired a publicist to come here with me because I had two films.... She wound up becoming my swag mule, schlepping the hoards up and down Main Street so that I didn't look like the gluttonous whore that I am in front of the throngs of media and paparazzi." [Apparently Carrot Top was not available to serve.]
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Sundance on Ice (Monday-Tuesday)
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Sunderance: "It's not really germane to this document"
I've posted a review and want to get another one done in ten minutes. Deadlines are a fine pressure. The man beside me in the lounge outside festival headquarters press/filmmakers lodge, loudly conducts business on a cell phone, insisting he has to "helm" the "elements" for DVD extras, and says the project's music he "got for a steal." A man is throwing a baby in the air while its mother shakes a pair of large maracas loudly. The child squeals. Usually, there's only a low hum of voices here. The man continues his checklist aloud. I have no idea who he is or who he thinks he is. He's not wearing the small sandwich board of name and face that is the festival I.D. I catch his eye. He looks away, speaks louder. The baby and the man are equally unaware of their surroundings. It makes it almost impossible to type any words except the stream he's letting: "There are a couple of non-integral clips that my attorney advised me and even wrote an opinion that passed E&O muster. If you guys want to take them out, we can talk about that. It's Jane Pauley and some audio. We could always just re-track it.
People do that. As far as the headlines go, we could pay for them." Several other people look toward his voice. "As for the Jane Pauley show, I would be really bummed if it had to go, but I think we could make a very good Fair Use argument. An argument could be made that it's integral to the story, but between you and me, we could pull it out. Just so you guys don't freak out, like, we didn't clear '60 Minutes' or something." The baby burbbbbbbles. "Of course, the television/airline materials are the same." Time for coffee. Time for quiet. "It's not really germane to this document," he says, and I try to remember the review I was trying to write as I pour cream into the cup.
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The Dude abides
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S07 Fortune cookie #5-Peter Morgan
On hearing he'd received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for The Queen this morning, screenwriter Peter Morgan said, "This is, of course, the highest compliment our industry bestows and the greatest honor. I am proud and thrilled The Queen has been embraced internationally like this. The whole journey has been mind-boggling and exciting. I sincerely hope friends at home will still talk to me."
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January 22, 2007
Sundance on Ice (Sunday-Monday)
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Park City: it's hard out there for a party
Park City's pulled a big ol' crackdown on big parties, and rental agencies have followed suit, writes Dana Harris in Variety. "There are perhaps 100 top-flight private homesfive-, six- or seven-bedroom places that include 
hot tubs, wi-fi, granite countertops and daily maid service—available for rental during the Sundance Film Festival. But if you want to throw a party, the available number drops to just about zero... [M]ajor property rental companies in Park City like Deer Valley Lodging and Alpine Ski Properties say they have a clear-cut policy on renting to Sundance's would-be party monsters: They don't do it." Two night's cash damage deposit is required, as well as a no-party contract. Past damage "included wine-stained and cigarette-burned carpet and furniture, broken glasses, impassable neighborhoods and a general disregard for the fact that renters were, in fact, using someone's home." Harris does find one person skirting the rule, the owner of PM, a New York nightclub, who calls himself "Unik." "It's noon on Sunday, and Unik (say "unique," no last name) is in a T-shirt and slippers, eating scrambled eggs and cilantro sausage as his staff clears away the last bits of detritus from the house party for 300 that ended just seven hours before. Laminated printouts are still pasted to the staircase, warning that your presence constitutes permission to use your name and likeness. .. "What a party last night," said Unik. "We mobilized the whole Park City: Josh Hartnett, Sienna, Diddy, Nick Cannon, Harvey, Damon Dash, Jamie Lynn, Pharrell..." Unik and his right hand man "spent most of the night standing guard at the foot of their driveway, personally approving every would-be guest. Sometimes they wouldn't let passengers get out of a cab. "If it's three girls and one guy, fine," said Unik. "Three guys and one girl? No way."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
S07 Fortune cookie #4: Todd Field
On the eve of Oscar noms in LA Times' Sunday Calendar, Little Children writer-director-producer Todd Field sums up what he thinks about getting to make independent-minded movies to Paul Cullum: "The enormity of this opportunity is mind-blowing, but it is a privilege, and it's not to be squandered. It's serious. Yes, in the end, for a lot of people, it will just be entertainment, something they did one afternoon. But it can't be that for you. You're telling someone a story, and that's the only connection we have to each other—the stories that we tell."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
Broken English: is the MPAA still all smoke and p.r.?
When This Film is Not Yet Rated preemed at Sundance 2006, producers Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt knew they'd be doing more research and editing before its release, and they said it might be an ongoing project. Voila! While the MPAA's execs are in Sundance to announce a number of alterations to the ratings system, Dick and Schmidt in town as well. From the press release about their continued adversary role (in its entirety in extended entry): “The MPAA’s reforms simply address the public’s perceptions of the system, rather than affecting real change in the system itself,” says “Rated” director Kirby Dick. “All the basic problems of the ratings system remain: its secrecy and lack of accountability; its bias toward independent and gay filmmakers; its excessively harsh rating of films with adult sexuality.” [Bulletpoint pro-con at the jump..]
MPAA REFORMS DON’T SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF A BROKEN SYSTEM
This Film Is Not Yet Rated Filmmakers, Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt, Weigh in on the MPAA’s Ratings Reforms
Los Angeles, CA (January 18, 2007) - Director Kirby Dick and Producer Eddie Schmidt are pleased that their IFC documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated has put pressure on the MPAA to make changes needed for nearly 40 years. Unfortunately, they find that the MPAA’s changes, as announced yesterday, are all cosmetic except for one – that in the appeals process, filmmakers can refer to scenes from other films.
“The MPAA’s reforms simply address the public’s perceptions of the system, rather than affecting real change in the system itself,” says “Rated” director Kirby Dick. “All the basic problems of the ratings system remain: its secrecy and lack of accountability; its bias toward independent and gay filmmakers; its excessively harsh rating of films with adult sexuality.”
Dick also notes the unprofessional nature of the board and its lack of adequate written standards; and finally, the fact that the NC-17 rating will continue to play a significant role in the censorship of films made and exhibited in this country. At the root of the problem is the built in conflict of interest between the profit motive of the MPAA studios and the MPAA’s responsibility to filmmakers and the public to fairly and effectively oversee the ratings system.
Outlined below are a list of the specific MPAA changes and responses to them from Dick and Schmidt:
MPAA: Most members of the ratings board will remain anonymous, although CARA will describe the demographic make-up of the board, which is composed of parents. The names of the three senior raters have always been public; now, they will be posted online.
RESPONSE: It will still be a secret ratings board because “most” of the raters will still be secret. Anonymity still = unaccountability. The MPAA says its rating system is for the public. If it’s for the public, it should be public, and the entire rating process and all the raters should be known to the public. Also, it is untrue that the senior raters were ever known to the public – until This Film Is Not Yet Rated, they were known only to members of the film industry.
MPAA: For the first time, CARA will post the ratings rules on the MPAA Web site, describing the standards for each rating. The ratings and appeal processes also will be described in detail, along with a link to paperwork needed to submit a film for a rating.
RESPONSE: CARA has never given enough information to parents and has consistently resisted giving out any more. Even the current descriptors such “some horror violence” came about only through intense pressure and criticism – and those are still useless to parents. Meaningful details? We’ll believe it when we see it.
MPAA: A filmmaker who appeals a rating can reference similar scenes in other movies, although the appeals board still will focus heavily on context.
RESPONSE: We are pleased they have finally removed this absurd restriction. However, there are quite a few other excessive restrictions that unfairly limit filmmaker appeals, such as a 2/3’s majority vote to overturn and not allowing an attorney of the filmmakers’ choice to be present.
MPAA: CARA will formalize its rule that a member of the ratings board doesn't stay on the board after his or her children are grown.
RESPONSE: Joan Graves has stated that the senior raters’ positions are permanent. These three senior raters, and chairwoman Graves, all have adult children. Are Joan Graves and the senior raters all going to step down, or will the MPAA continue to allow its most powerful raters to violate its rules?
MPAA: CARA also will formalize its educational training system for raters.
RESPONSE: According to former raters interviewed in our film, there is no educational training. And since the MPAA has consistently avoided “expert” opinions from child psychologists, etc, who will train them and to what standards and sensitivity?
MPAA: When the CARA rules are implemented later this year, the MPAA and NATO will designate additional members to the appeals board who don't come from the MPAA or NATO fold. (Indie filmmakers might be one possibility.)
RESPONSE: Most appeals board members will still be from the major exhibitors and studios. With a 2/3 vote to overturn the rating, it is unlikely that a few “additional” members will be enough to level the playing field for independent and foreign filmmakers. There is still a huge built-in conflict of interest in this process. Also, apparently they still plan to keep the names of the appeals board members secret, which means that the only people who know these names will be people within the studio film industry.
MPAA: NATO and MPAA will occasionally be able to designate additional observers from different backgrounds to the appeals board.
RESPONSE: The MPAA has been shamed into opening their doors in response to quiet arrangements revealed in our film that allowed Catholic and Protestant religious representatives into the appeals process. *Adding MORE religious representatives *wouldn’t necessarily solve this problem. What are they doing there in the first place? The MPAA needs to give full disclosure as to the nature of these “observers,” their role in the proceedings, and the process by which other observers will be selected.
“With the MPAA continuing to conduct its business in private, yet pretending to operate in the public good, they are still doing a disservice to parents and filmgoers, never mind filmmakers themselves. We’re grateful that they’re listening, but they should be trying much harder,” concluded director Kirby Dick.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, and will be released on DVD January 23, 2007 from Genius Products and air on IFC TV in March.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2007
Swag the dog: Sam Jackson's givin' it away
The tsunami of swag has only begun, and this bit of p.r. is an auspicious leap into the absurd: "When Samuel L. Jackson presents his new film at Sundance, he’ll fuel the buzz of Black Snake Moan with a bluesy thump. Jackson will be gifting OAKLEY THUMP PRO digital music eyewear to a lucky few. Only 20 Special Edition versions of the Oakley invention will be created and 
each will come preloaded with three songs from the film soundtrack. The frame will be customized with Jackson’s guitar graphic and signed with the film title, laser etched in the lens. And because Jackson loves to golf with lenses that darken automatically, we’re crafting them with Oakley Activated by Transitions Photochromic™ lenses... THUMP PRO combines the world’s best optics with a fully integrated digital audio engine. Its adjustable speakers can be positioned for a perfect fit, and all controls are built into the frame for easy access. Engineered for sport training, the sweat resistant design blends all-day comfort with the freedom of interchangeable lenses that let you adapt to any environment." [Including Park City, Utah.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2007
S07 review: Snow Angels
NOTHING LIKE A BITTERSWEET COMEDY-TRAGEDY AT 8:30 IN THE MORNING at Sundance: sigh. David Gordon Green’s fourth feature, the casual yet deeply serious, soulful Snow Angels continues along his own lovely path, reaching into particulars of working class life with wit and empathy. Life is a river, and sometimes it freezes over: Gordon, 
working with generous breadth in adapting Stewart O’Nan’s book, warms the heart. The cast is large, Altman-sized. Green moves between them fluidly. There are at least ten major characters, their interactions marshaled with novelistic care. It’s a tapestry of overwhelming complication, adroitly described, demonstrating well the abiding truth that you must forgive trespasses in tiny towns. Set in an unnamed Pennsylvania town (but shot in Nova Scotia), the movie conveys the chill of disillusionment, yet in the foreground or in the corner of many of the widescreen shots, tendrils reach. Trees, rooted, that will revive come spring. Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is the mother of Tara, a small girl. Working as one part of the seemingly entirely non-Asian staff of the local China Town restaurant, Annie tries to avoid estranged husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), who's developed a few messianic tics since their separation, and keep meetings with Nate (Nicky Katt), husband of China Town co-worker Barb (Amy Sedaris), a secret from all. Another co-worker is teenaged Arthur (Michael Angarano), whom Annie babysat for many years, and who is in a want-a-first-kiss flirtation with Lila, a proto-glamour-geek behind cats-eye glasses, under rats-nest tangle of dark hair (Olivia Thirlby). Theirs is a sweetly hopeful young romance despite the quietly catastrophic onset of middle-aged disillusionment in Arthur’s parents (still floppy-haired Griffin Dunne, weary yet luminous Jeanneta Arnette). The acting is very, very good, with the performers matching the capacity of Green’s fully furnished world to surprise from shot-to-shot.
The world falls apart terribly in this small, unspecified town and the landscape swallows many sorrows. And yet. Things change but life does not stop: young love, old love, they are as true as the hurts notched across years of acquaintance or relationship. Establishing shots are used as socioeconomic shorthand, and meticulously gathered props and interior design have talismanic weight.
As always, Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr observe landscape, working as the first-est second unit of them all. (How do they find the time to shoot all this concrete yet lyrical coverage?) Shots matter in movies like George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels: An overweight grandmother with faded tattoos on her forearm. Kate Beckinsale’s bare calf, cocked, across a motel room bedspread. Snowflakes on red wool. A lovemaking scene that builds from the elegant example of Don’t Look Now (plus a bonus goofball cunnilingus button). We see a boy in class seen drawing an enormous power transmission line, and Green cuts to the real line, which dominates a hillside and horizon without a lick of majesty. Among many other glorious instants, I would single out one of Lila, outdoors, watching Arthur leave the school grounds, taking a photograph of this boy to whom she is all the time more drawn; it’s from a bit of distance, and unsteady, framed just a little high on her as she looks over her glasses through the glass viewfinder of her twin-lensed medium format camera, contrasting geometry both above and below her of the outdoor stadium, and her bulky-at-the-base winter coat planting her there like a tree. The next couple of shots? Landscapes in the style of the photographs she’s taken: for a second, her eyes are the film’s omniscient vision. Green is good at this, at throwaway beauty. “Let me take your breath, okay? Now let’s move along.”
Dialogue matters to this still-young writer-director, too, as anyone who likes his films would tell you. A girl browsing a slang dictionary as a tease: “Fellatrix. I like that”; “If Tom Cruise were a little girlie, girlie, he’d look like you”; “Can you say that in Spanish?”; “She had a pickle”; “I’ll suck you right up my tailpipe, bud”; “I’m nice, aren’t I?... Do you have any idea of how adorably cute you are? … Right now?” And emotion, with motion: a girl’s “Stupid things you say make me like you even more,” caught in a handheld shot that moves uneasily back from a two-shot into an empty high school corridor, leaving them framed at the center of their world.
Aside from worthy embellishments on Robert Altman, Green makes a wry nod to Cameron Crowe with a bit involving a pencil earlier; the two men are parallel sweethearts. An end-credit bonus unlikely to be found in Altman or Crowe: there’s a tune in the movie entitled “Four Robots Fucking in A Wool Sock.”
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Sundance on Ice (Saturday)
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S07: Spletzer on Mudede on Zoo and AOL
For an admiring piece, Andy Spletzer's interview at GreenCine with screenwriter Charles Mudede (Police Beat) about his essayistic Sundance doc entry, Zoo, has quite the lede: ""It's hard to believe, but one of the most beautiful films at Sundance this year will be about a guy who was fucked to death by a horse." 
"Back in 2005, when the Seattle Times reported on the "Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident," the story spread like wildfire across the Internet and became their most-read story of the year. It also caught the eyes of Seattle-based director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede, whose dreamily poetic feature film Police Beat debuted at Sundance just six months prior. The resulting documentary essay is Zoo... Far from a traditional documentary, the narration is taken from extensive audio interviews with members of the group and was edited together to form the spine of the story. On top of that, they hired actors to portray the incidents that were being spoken about, and they brought in their Police Beat cinematographer Sean Kirby to create beautifully evocative images to punctuate the story." The story broke in the summer of 2005, with the revelation that bestiality was legal in the state of Washington. "[T]he Internet made it possible. There's no other reason why they got together, which is wonderful when you think about it. We didn't get this out in the film and I wanted to express this, but you can only do so much. I like the fact that the Internet, this advanced form of technology, made it possible to do something that you'd almost say was kind of... primitive. Right? You know what I mean? At the root, at the center of all of this, the exchange between nature, the wild, the animal and the human was only made possible by the foremost technology of our time." Spletzer notes that the caretaker of the barn says, "I got a computer in 2002 and started with AOL." Mudede: "Yes. That's right. "And I discovered myself. I discovered who I was. I was a zoo." I mean, he discovers it on the Web, which is amazing." [More amazement and perplexity at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
Sundance movies are bad for you, Corliss sez
Sundance defines indie, by the definition of Time magazine's Richard Corliss. "[T]he kind of indie film nurtured by Sundance has become the dominant non-Hollywood movie form for smart people," he asserts in a predictable plaint that could use some fresh reporting. "Sundance has become the crucial farm system for the major studios. 
Problem is, indie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood's. Sundance movies have devolved into a genre. The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect... Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to lethargic, these road movies rarely get in the passing lane. The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky) and some of the mainstream's champion swimmers (including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan). What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous... You don't find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless... There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren't quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre. In fact, truly imaginative movies have always been anomalies at Sundance..." [More of less at the link.]
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S07 fortune cookie #3—Baudelaire
After watching the gentle teen romance inside the darker matter of David Gordon Green's Snow Angels: "Genius is childhood recovered at will"—Baudelaire.
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January 19, 2007
S07 reviews: The Savages
Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins' The Savages puts an awful lot of American moviemaking to shame. Witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality, her long-in-coming second feature is an unlikely fusion of the comedic precision of Annie Hall and the melancholy humanism The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and I mean that in the most admiring and positive fashion. Line for line, The Savages has some of the most formidable comic dialogue I've been fortunate enough to hear in ages, and the screenplay is lovingly structured. I'll have more in a bit, but here's a sampling of Jenkins' ear for dialogue: "We're not in therapy right now, we're in real life"; "I'm not leaving you alone, I'm hanging up"; and "It's back to Krakow for Kasia. Your brother won't marry me, but when I make him eggs, he cries." [Like many other behavioral niceties one could cite, Cara Seymour's limpid yet freighted delivery of that line is dead-on lovely.] A quick free-range free-association: The surreal, heartfelt final shot, in its own strange way, evokes the "We need the eggs" scene that closes Annie Hall.
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S07 Fortune cookie #2—on fashion(able) criticism
After a couple hours up-down Main Street sampling the weave of swag and branding and "gifting," this small thought: Fashion criticism often falls victim to fashion’s function in socializing and acculturation. If fashion bears the dual roles of self-expression and social registration, its criticism is inevitably a cultural criticism, addressing the abstract and applied terms of dress and appearance as a reflection of self-expression and self-confidence, but also implicating the terms of dress within the social contract. Fashion as a consumerist system exerts prodigious power; society, the entirety of our small and large social constructs, wields a like power over each client and potential purchaser… We expect fashion to be superficial, possessing beauty only in the limited category of craft/dazzle; we assume that fashion’s timely brevity is the soul of witlessness. (Richard Martin, “Addressing the Dress,” from “The Crisis of Criticism” (1998).)
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)
S07 reviews: Chicago 10
“Look out, Haskell, it’s animated.” Brett Morgan’s The Chicago 10, aka Friends of Graydon Carter, continues the tradition of less-than-imperfect Sundance opening night attractions. Intercutting events on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention and a recreation of the “Chicago Seven” trial of Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin,
and others, the film makes a lurid, even fatal mistake: using crude, cheap-looking, never beautiful, merely illustrative videogame-style animation (with motion capture work as well) to capture the notorious courtroom theatrics. When you see footage of these young longhairs in all their indelicate stubbornness, especially Rubin in his red-yellow stripy jumper the colors of the Vietnamese flag, you look away from the failed anime and await the next burst of history. You can’t top the real stuff in the archival snippets: glimpses from the waterfront park of the John Hancock to the north, still under construction; a pale pair of martial shadows advancing against backlit teargas; a whip pan on Michigan Avenue that rests abruptly upon the dazed face of a pale young man with a high forehead riven and crusted with blood from his scalp; the vast jowls of the father of the current mayor, bleating about the threat of “terrorism” or smirking, “No, a snake dance never disturbed me”; Walter Cronkite, during the Convention week lockdown, stating flatly that the events are “about to begin in a police state. I’m afraid there is no other word.” It’s like seeing images from 1956 Budapest, except it’s the streets of the city I’ve lived in most of my adult life. Jeff Danna’s diverse, eclectic score stitches many rough transitions and boasts a few impressive passages of rangy guitar rock, as well as an ominous theme built on Philip Glass-like arpeggios as the riot starts to happen. The voice talent is largely mediocre and unsuited, seemingly chosen for their vantage to the reflective surface of Vanity Fair’s page including Mark Ruffalo, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, and an unrecognizable Roy Scheider mewling as the doddering Judge Julius Hoffman. Almost, just almost, the fragments of historical material are pungent enough, iconic enough, to stand out against the underwhelming animation. It ain’t “Boondocks,” an accomplished feat of animation which is also far more incendiary and subversive while beguiling the eye. [At least one historical quibble: in a bit of testimony, reference is made to a “squadron,” when the correct word is “squadrol,” Chicago copspeak for police wagons.]
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Sundance on Ice (Friday)
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Sundance on Ice (Thursday)
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Sunderance: "Some mornings..."
SOME MORNINGS WHEN SUNLIGHT IS BRIGHT AND CLEAR, there’s a band of light on the south, bedroom wall in front of me, slicing beneath the venetians as through squinted eyes, and if the door is cracked more than slightly, I can into the next room, only part of one white wall and all of a white ceiling and on those mornings there is the flush of light followed by shapes of birds, or more properly, the Birds. The Birds circuit and spiral above the building, over the urban intersection, shadows like furious origami conveyed in flickery, reflected anime, avian Muybridge of piercing presence. They gather in hope of a market. They remember the market that’s gone; they can’t know a new supermarket is being built to replace the old one, the 1950s supermarket founded as an A&P. They expect flat roofs the span of a small beach, with irregular, shallow mirrors of sky from regular rain. That’s why the seagulls join the pigeons two, three miles inland from Lake Michigan. They recall the market, they expect the mirror. How easy it’s been to slip from lucid dreaming the past few weeks to morning light and into a metaphor for the braces, coveys, rookeries, sieges and flocks soon to circle baggage claim 8 at SLC then ascend I-80 up the hill toward Summit County and lodging and the Albertson’s off Park Avenue.
Disguised as subarctic fowl, skinnier birds from lower climes forage. We know there was a market. Last year, the year before, back into the past century. We sense the market to come. We circle, land, marvel at the band of silver carts operated by other shoppers in Albertson’s, carts so full the wheels fail to squeak, gliding with near- silent hydraulic precision. Steaks and soups and Stouffer’s and Ben & Jerry’s smooth forward motion. A market is a place. A city is a market. The birds are like a marvelous cave painting in my mind. I close my eyes and envision sharp, cutting anime shadows and think of Park City. [To be continued.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2007
S07 Fortune cookie #1—Joe Carnahan
"Commerce marches, Art wanders." —Joe Carnahan.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2007
Sun '07: begin the penguine
WEATHER FOR THURSDAY AFTERNOON on 7,000 foot elevation Main Street, Park City, about 35 miles up the hill from Salt Lake City: 17 degrees and partly cloudy. Lovely weather for penguin slapdown!
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Knowing Dick: re-rating the MPAA
No, no, no, we never take advice, we never react, we are the sons of Jack Valenti, you'd think the MPAA would say in re: the ratings system, but it looks like Kirby Dick's bullhorn got heard. In the wake of This Film is Not Yet Rated, writes Variety's Pamela McClintock, the MPAA will be at Sundance tub-thumpingchanges to the film rating system that incorporate many of the suggestions in Dick's doc. "Looking to reform and demystify the ratings system, the MPAA and National Assn. of Theater Owners are planning... changes, including a new admonishment to parents that certain R-rated movies aren't suitable for younger kids, period." The surge starts Monday at Sundance "when MPAA topper Dan Glickman and Joan Graves, chair of the Classification & Rating Administration, will meet with indie filmmakers, producers and specialty arm execs to go over the alterations." When This Film was shown at Sundance 2006, McClintock avers, "Glickman had already been meeting with... various stakeholders [sic] in the ratings system—including filmmakers, guilds, parents' groups and Washington lawmakers—but Dick's film had an impact. "The documentary made it clear that we probably haven't done as much as we can to explain how it all works," Glickman [said], adding that the voluntary ratings system—devised and implemented by Jack Valenti, his predecessor—is a "gem," even if it needs some polishing." [Much like apples.] For the first time, CARA will post the ratings rules on the MPAA Web site, describing... The ratings and appeal processes also will be described in detail, along with a link to paperwork needed to submit a film for a rating... CARA will formalize its rule that a member of the ratings board doesn't stay on the board after his or her children are grown." [More particulars at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:17 PM |