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April 25, 2007
[LOOK] Images from Hot Docs Toronto
[Photos © 2007 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)
Overlord's Stuart Cooper's 10 Criterion Collection raves
Does the man dream the machine or the machine dream the man? American-born director Stuart Cooper’s epic, stoic, willfully peculiar Overlord (1975) is a hybrid of fiction and fact, of the Futurist and the post-modern, tracking the preparations of one supremely ordinary 20-year-old soldier, Tom Beddow (Brian Stirner), one Tom among tummies, as he trains to become part of Operation Overlord, or D-Day. More soon about the DVD edition, but for now, in an ongoing Criterion Collection tradition, Cooper offers 10 personal Criterion favorites. One fave among the raves: "The Battle of Algiers, for its originality, objectivity, and political power. I studied it while I was preparing Overlord. I admired a quote of Pontecorvo's: “Technically U.S. directors keep improving. But this technical expertise hides an emptiness that keeps getting bigger. They’re very good at saying nothing.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
[LOOK] A close-up of the human face: Jessica Lynch
Again, simplicity itself: a C-SPAN single position shot, medium-close on the human face. Jessica Lynch, a working class woman who joined the Army to gain the opportunities for an education that would allow her to make a career teaching children somewhere near her hometown Palestine, West Virginia, who was injured in battle in Iraq in 2003, the details of whose capture was fabricated by person or persons in the Department of Defense. I can hardly get past the first few seconds: that shy smile after she repositions the microphone in front of her is devastating. An all-American face. An all-American hero. It's good she's alive.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 23, 2007
[LOOK] The US Trailer for John Carney's Once
If you pick up the Spring 2007 Filmmaker magazine, among the features you'll get that you can't get online is my interview with John Carney, the director of Once, and Glen Hansard, the star and co-composer of this lovely small film. I'll have a different interview with them on Indie in late May when the picture's released. Close to perfect, sez NY Times' A. O. Scott? It may well be the best music film of our generation, sez ChiTrib's Michael Philips? Getting warm, gentlemen. Getting warm.
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 18, 2007
Year of the Dog, 2007 (1/2 *)
A PORTRAIT OF MENTAL ILLNESS BROUGHT TO THE FORE BY THE DEATH OF A LUMP OF A DOG NAMED “PENCIL,” The Year of the Dog stars Molly Shannon as Peggy, a drear crackpot, a bore with no life beyond office job and needy hound, a life wasted away between grande Starbucks. Writer-director Mike White, who wrote Chuck & Buck and starred as its gay stalker with reveries (and arias) of prehensile sexual exploration, expanded on his statement that his directorial debut is a “comedy that’s not funny” 
to Filmmaker magazine, “I find it funny, but it plays at such a deadpan level for so much of it that I feel like some of the comedy is missed” Or missing, perhaps? “And there are also so many minor keys in it. My preference for comedy is something that’s played so straight that, in a way, you’re wrong-footed. I think it’s a comedy; it definitely plays for laughs, but it plays with the audience. As somebody who sees a lot of movies, when something’s not pre-digested, it’s very pleasant because you’re like, ‘I don’t exactly know how to take this.’
Interminable, morally and psychologically incoherent, it is a soulless bore. Brightly lit, bluntly framed and criminally dim, The Year of the Dog is Todd Solondz light, as infuriating as a stone in a shoe on a 90 minute walk somewhere you wouldn’t want to go. This is a failure worthy of sustained contumely. It seems to go on for hours. Dog is more tedious than it is skin-crawling; it's the kind of movie you’d expect the people who don’t just walk out would light up the room with the soft blue glow of their cell phones. You miss the steady yet soulful hand of director Richard Linklater on White’s script for School of Rock.
White’s convinced Shannon to look beyond her age, weeping through creases and wrinkles and bulging veins at her temples, flashing her big teeth and riotous freckles like an angry, lost woman of 50. There is an absurdism only just shy of snark in the pastel interiors of offices and apartments, and most conversations are shot in head-on medium close-ups, with 180 degree reverse angles on the other person. White also places his actors where they have to squint into the sun. (With this tic, if any of his characters were Asian, White would be accused of racism.) The general glow of the lighting, however, by cinematographer Tim Orr (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Raising Victor Vargas) is inspired, narcotic-bright, capturing the flat blue light under incessant haze of Southern California somewhere past the 10 and 101 between Xanax and Celexa. Even with the genuine empathy of actors like Peter Sarsgard and John C. O’Reilly is vanquished by intentionally tepid, wormy performances. (Laura Dern is shrill in a way I’d probably be as well if this ass were my sister-in-law.)
After the sudden death of Pencil, Peggy cracks up. “He had a really unique personality,” she says of her dead dog, admittedly cute but also pretty much a throw pillow. She tries to date neighbor Al (O’Reilly), a hunter and knife collector, and they share a scene which includes a long, gibberish answer to “Were you ever married?” that could have been followed by “Are you a virgin?” and “Did you ever finish kindergarten?” Peggy befriends dog trainer Sarsgard, a celibate, apparently bisexual dog trainer named Newt who indicates he was sexually abused as a child in a religious cult. (In a turn of desperate erotomania, she brags on a nonexistent relationship with Newt; her equally annoying friends reassure her, “Even retarded, crippled people get married.”)
Peggy’s journey begins as she by annoys friends and co-workers with questions like, “Do you any soy milk?” and quickly becomes a child-abusing, vicious-dog-enabling, horror-show naïf, a vegan-animal rights maniac, embezzling hundreds of dollars of corporate cash on behalf of animal rescue groups. Peggy’s consummate stupidity and Shannon’s dreary, self-pitying performance makes for a wearying slog. The costume design is consistent with White’s hum of disdain. Peggy’s got one get-up with a crucifix necklace above white coveralls that best demonstrates the sartorial clues that shriek and wail a single sustained sentence: “Run away!”
Tragically, White chose not to go the Chuck & Buck direction and turn this earnest bore into a bomb-throwing activist. (Perhaps early drafts trafficked in mass murder.) He makes the impulse to become part of PETA (who cleared the use of their trademark) and other animal rights groups seem naïve, misguided, needy, and deeply selfish, so why not go whole hog, not chicken out, and make her an incendiary terrorist as well? (The word “Holocaust” is tossed about, but for White, as he notes, “joke” is defined as “rhetorical provocation.”)
There is an image of a dirt-streaked Chevy crammed with fifteen dogs saved from euthanasia that amuses, and the scene afterward, as “Joan of Echo Park” watches helplessly as they demolish her home has energy. But all you really want for Peggy is to see her jailed, silenced, reviled and demonized on trash television. “I wish I was a more articulate person,” she whines. I wish you would just shut up.
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 15, 2007
Jeff Daniels on why Dumb and Dumber is art
"Oh, yeah, Dumb and Dumber. Did all those fart jokes hurt your reputation?" Boris Kachka asks Jeff Daniels in New York Magazine. 
"You lose your membership in the serious-actors club, so it took me a long time to get over that." Kachka suggests Daniels' roles in The Lookout and on stage in Manhattan Theatre Club's "Blackbird" are a "bit more challenging than Dumb and Dumber, I’d imagine." Daniels: "Yeah, but I visited Walter Reed in February and met these vets with horrible injuries. And every single one of them knew Dumb and Dumber. It made them laugh. You can’t tell me it doesn’t matter when a guy with no legs and half a face is laughing through his painkillers, reenacting a scene from Dumb and Dumber. That’s art."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:43 PM | Comments (1)
April 14, 2007
[LOOK] Love for Sayles: A Honeydripper clip
Via Filmmaker and Emerging Pictures, a two-and-a-half minute rough-cut clip from John Sayles' latest, due this summer.
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)
[SCRIPT] Peter Morgan's screenplay for The Queen
Download the PDF here, via Miramax's 2006 awards site.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Red Road: A word or three with director Andrea Arnold
I've got a couple of pieces coming up in the late Spring issue of Filmmaker, including a chat with John Carney and Glen Hansard, respectively, writer-director and male lead-co-composer of the marvelous musical Once; here, for the nonce, from Sundance 2007, is a snip of conversation with Red Road's writer-director Andrea Arnold and her remarkable lead, Kate Dickie. "It’s usually dangerous, and sometimes insulting to directors to talk about influences, but it is shorthand to get at the work. Certainly, Red Road is going to be aligned with Rear Window and movies by Michael Haneke, like Caché." ARNOLD: Yeah, I’ve had that lots. [Find the homonymic error in the last graf and I have a shiny nickel for you.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2007
[LOOK] An internet secret revealed by Monkey Dust
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK] A goof from Zoran Bihac
Zoran Bihac directs a chipper, dazzling goof of a video for the German group Die Fantastischen Vier for a song called "Wir Ernten Was Wir Säen." Warning: drag showgirls and smiling Germans ahead. [Bihac's site is here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2007
The forthright Sarah Polley directs: could she make a Battle of Algiers?
"As a director, [Sarah] Polley is a rarity because of her youth," writes Kira Cochrane in the Guardian, "but also because of her gender. She recounts the story of a friend, "an incredibly intelligent woman, who was making a film, and was meeting quite a famous actor about it. The actor eventually turned her down, saying, 'I'm just used to working with people who are more like mad visionaries.' I thought that was interesting, because, in fact, we're still at a point where women aren't allowed to be mad visionaries. 
We have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're responsible, that we can handle it, that we've got all our ducks in a row ... most women who direct always come in on budget, always come in on schedule, and if they were wild and irresponsible it would not be put down to brilliance, but to a general flakiness." In the extended profile, Polley mentions upcoming acting projects a couple of scripts. "Would she like to combine her interest in politics with her film-making? "I'd love to," she says, but "I think it's so rarely done well. It's really hard to make a useful political film, and, at the same time, make a great film artistically - I feel like the Battle of Algiers did it, and a few Ken Loach movies ... That would be my ideal, though, and one of the main reasons that I want to be a film-maker is to combine those things. But I think it's one of the trickiest things to find a delicate and graceful way to do."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
[LOOK] John Hillcoat's "Funeral For A Friend" promo
The Proposition director John Hillcoat brings the weather indoors in this nice promo for the song "Oblivion," by the band Funeral For A Friend.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2007
Grindhouse (2007, ***)
THE NOTION OF SECRETING SOME CHEETOS PUFFS AND AN OIL CAN OF FOSTER’S INTO MY SHOULDER BAG into last week’s past-my-deadline all-media Grindhouse screening at Chicago’s AMC River East 21 held momentary allure, or perhaps packing a flask, in honor of the mid-adolescent shake-‘n’-bake tradition of drive-ins and dollar houses in decades past, but I resisted, yet still experienced the exchange of deliciously bitchy talk-out-louds from nearby audience members and the 
apposite spectacle of a late-coming, morbidly obese woman clumsily tramping on my feet and blocking the screen in the oversold auditorium and loudly dubbing me a “motherf--ing little white c---sucker.” (Free shit makes me stupid, too.) I could almost smell the scorched, foul carpets and seats of the Loop’s late and lamentable UA, McVickers, Woods and pre-civic-ized Chicago Theater venues. Other rancid things comprise the 191-minute spectacle, thrilling and dismaying in equal, vivid measure. Also of interest is writing about the film after its cataclysmic opening weekend, with mooted plans by distributor The Weinstein Company to perhaps pull the $90 million-plus investment from theaters and to release Robert Rodriguez’s twangy, frenetic Tex-Mex-neck zombie Planet Terror separately from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, a sadistic, even nihilist, limb-scattering car-crash demolition derby opus and girl-gawking trash-talk epic (aka “Gone in 60 Footrubs”).
It was also a fresh turn to hear moviegoers over the weekend who didn’t want to see the film explain why: the title was meaningless to them; their friends said it was two overlong shitty movies aping shitty movies they had no interest in; and women almost universally said they weren’t in for an evening of unrelenting misogyny. (Not everyone has nostalgia for the years-past perhaps-deranged company of snoring, stinking drunks, either, can you feature that?)
You could read Grindhouse politically, as voices on both sides of the aisle have, considering the portions as two responses to totalitarian fervor, shambolic and anarchic in the face of dread and drear and language loosed from moorings to rove the underbrush of political, careerist, go-along-to-get-along, cliquey, insidery, acquiescence. There’s incendiary contempt throughout—Bruce Willis’ speech about how he wasn’t supposed to be the one to kill Osama Bin Laden is pretty spectacular—amusingly, for those in the know, spending Weinsteinco investor cash to crayon upon and beyond the lines of taste, form, decorum.
Rodriguez goes full-bore in digitally simulating the wrecked quality of the sub-par prints of bad 1970s exploitation pictures, relentlessly jiggling frame and soundtrack, a gesture that almost qualifies Planet Terror as an experimental film that ought be taught in post-grad classes. Roger Ebert’s described a fondness for sentences that have never before been spoken, and there are moments, such as the almost-too-late trashy spectacle of the things that come to pass before the arc of MacGowan’s character's prosthetic leg, a promiscuously hair-trigger machinegun. This eyeball kick has never been seen before, and Rodriguez deploys it inventively. If you think about it, though, you’ll feel awfully guilty: there are nasty undertones and overtones galore. (More successful is Rodriguez’s trailer that opens the film, for the apocryphal Machete, in which Danny Trejo wreaks havoc—“You fucked with the wrong Mexican” is practically the first line of dialogue you hear after the lights go down.)
Tarantino’s slasher/stoner film, Death Proof, has its own peculiar pace, functioning as four discrete shorts, not flagged with title cards—“The Quentin Problem”—but not unlike the chapterization of Pulp Fiction. The writer-director-piss-poor-actor also goes hog-wild with his foot fetishism, packing his picture with innumerable shots of feet, toe-splay and arched sole, from tic to trope and back again, fetish, fixation, totem, swoon and bore. The racial politics of his dialogue for women are best described by Tarantino himself, from an interview in the April GQ: “[B]lack-male things and me tend to go hand in hand… I just walk in step with… There’s a lot of things that me and black males walk in step with. In our masculinity.” Better to comment on the look of his film, in which he takes his first credit as cinematographer, which draws upon the plein-air parch of director of photography John Alonzo’s work on Vanishing Point and John Deerson’s work on Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. (Fortuitously, both of these pictures about the horizon we always approach but never overtake were written by litterateurs just as eccentric as Tarantino; the first by Cuban-born novelist G. Cabrera Infante and the second by Rudolph Wurlitzer. Rudy Wurlitzer’s dramaturgy in in Blacktop is a tetch terser than Tarantino’s.) He also pulls a neat trick like something Elmore Leonard does on the page with patois: after twenty minutes or so, the put-on “damaged print” idea goes away and we’re simply in a Tarantino movie.
He’s not a consistent cameraman. Where Robert Rodriguez makes Rose McGowan a voluptuous screen sired to blast away Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, director and cinematographer Tarantino puts her pale face in a thumb-oval blotch of white, less angel than affectless specter. Tarantino admires darker and stronger features in his actresses, and I mean that admiringly, approvingly. These are beautiful women most casting directors wouldn’t let in the room, and bless Tarantino for that, even if he puts several of them through explicit humiliations and dismemberments. [Eli Roth's cheaply deadly deadpan Thanksgiving trailer is here.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2007
[LOOK] Alex Cox directs Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry
In honor of the completion of a new feature by Alex Cox, Searchers 2.0, Screengrab's Faisal Qureshi digs up this sweet little video from 1990, as the duo cover Cole Porter's "Well Did you Evah?" for the Red, White & Blue Aids project.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2007
Loving some Miranda July: a promo for "No one belongs here more than you"
This is easily the silliest thing I've seen all day, aside from Bill O'Reilly's spittle, Geraldo Rivera's curled mustache, the snowflakes curling in the blue, bright Midwestern sky and endless commentary from Quentin Tarantino scrawled across the vastness of the internets about women's dirty feet, but it's endearing in the best possible Miranda July fashion as the writer-director-actor of Me And You And Everyone You Know offers a few pointers on her new collection of stories, "No one belongs here more than you."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[LOOK] Geraldo Rivera's "My Nightmare..." with a whiff of Paddy Chayefsky
Grindhouse hits Fox News with a toe-to-toe, tit-for-tat, fact-versus-fiction, spit-versus-spittle spat that turns into a Bill O'Reilly-Geraldo Rivera cage match... "You are telling me, Geraldo Rivera, a man with teenage daughters..." Per the man who first showed the Zapruder film on ABC, "Cool your jets! It has nothing to do with illegal aliens… t has to do with drunk driving! Don't obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point. It is a cheap political point and you know it!" Planet Terror, indeed. [You might wanna lower the volume if you watch; h/t Oliver Willis.]
Still, I prefer Paddy Chayefsky's version.
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April 05, 2007
[LOOK] Teasing David Lynch Documentary 2007
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April 04, 2007
Bob Clark, 1941-2007.
Even for those who weren't inundated watching its cable holiday marathons starting back in the 90s, I like to think A Christmas Story brought an immense amount of giddy, goofy happiness into the world. Bob Clark also directed one of the most successful independently-financed pictures of all time, Porky's. He and his 22-year-old son were killed on the Pacific Coast Highway past two this morning by a drunk driver without a driver's license, when his car "was struck head-on by an SUV. The 24-year-old driver of the other vehicle was arrested on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter and for being under the influence." 
Some drunk-driving enthusiasts, unknown or celebrities, are more fortunate than others; this makes me deeply sad—actually, pretty fucking angry—which makes it unlikely I'll finish writing tonight about the images in my head from Quentin Tarantino's epic, limb-scattering head-on collisions in Death Proof. Here's the LA Times' more detailed report. PLUS: the Christmas Story house. PLUS: Roger Ebert's nostalgic and very personal "Great Movies" review; he and Clark are of the same generation. "The movie is not only about Christmas and BB guns, but also about childhood, and one detail after another rings true. The school bully, who, when he runs out of victims, beats up on his own loyal sidekick. The little brother who has outgrown his snowsuit, which is so tight that he walks around looking like the Michelin man; when he falls down he can't get up. The aunt who always thinks Ralphie is a 4-year-old girl, and sends him a pink bunny suit. Other problems of life belong to that long-ago age and not this one: clinkers in the basement coal furnace, for example, or the blowout of a tire. Everybody knows what a flat tire is, but many now alive have never experienced a genuine, terrifying loud instantaneous blowout." Here's a tongue-freezing selection of sound clips from "A Christmas Story," and a photo album from a happier time, when the twentieth anniversary of the film was celebrated in Newport Beach, California.
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[DOSSIER] Everybody's a critic: taking shots at Werner Herzog
Or, Werner Herzblog, as it seems on a range of sites this week, despite the postponement of MGM's release of Rescue Dawn, Herzog's fictional, Christian Bale-starring remake of his own doc, Little Dieter Wants to Fly. Last week, Indie linked to the Financial Times' interview with the director, in which he recounts getting shot during an interview with English writer Mark Kermode; here's the excerpt from Kermode's doc with the incident in question. (The entry also links to
screenwriter Alan Greenberg's screenplay for an upcoming project of Herzog's, "The Cheese and The Worms" (Greenberg's Robert Johnson biopic, "Love in Vain," never made, was championed years ago by Herzog; the published version is worth the updig.) David Poland, at Hot Blog, reprints Herzog's lightly likeable, 12-point "Minnesota Declaration", from 1999: "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." The "only authentic and official website of Werner Herzog" is here, and among its many resources is a vast library of stills from Herzog's immense filmography (click the camera icon on the toolbar). More: a 12-page chapter from Herzog's book, "Walking in Ice" [downloadable PDF] and Tim Bissell's fine, 15-page December 2006 Harper's profile of Herzog, "The Secret Mainstream" [downloadable PDF]. And: a few key examples of Herzog's history of on-set "suffering and anguish" [downloadable PDF]. Plus: Ernst Reijseger's long-player, "Requiem for a Dying Planet," with intensely eclectic music drawn from Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder and The White Diamond with RealAudio streaming links of all the tracks. AND ALSO: Jamie Stuart wrassles with Herzog when Grizzly Man opened. Below: a clip from Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, in which Herzog expatiates on the "obscenity" of the jungle; Blank's 1980 Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (20 minutes) about an ostensible bet with Errol Morris [see comment below]; Herzog's 13-minute, 1968 short, Last Words (Letzte Worte) in its entirety; the trailer for Rescue Dawn; Henry Rollins' recent, earnest eight-minute interview with Herzog from his IFC show; Harmony Korine on his mentor and collaborator; and footage of Klaus Kinski on the set of Nosferatu.
On the obscenity of the jungle
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Last Words
Rescue Dawn
"The Henry Rollins Show"
Harmony Korine
Klaus Kinski on the set of Nosferatu
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 03, 2007
The Life Phonetic: leaking Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Express
Leaky teacup of the day, via the IFCBlog and a nest of several other sources, including Big Screen, Little Screen: a downloadable PDF of a draft of Wes Anderson's new enterprise, written by Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, Darjeeling Limited. Casting: "Francis Wilson": Owen Wilson; "Jack Wilson": Jason Schwartzman; "Peter Wilson": Adrien Brody. Can it really be about Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jack Nicholson, kinda-sorta?
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
A few words from David Lynch about product placement
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April 01, 2007
Mon espace pour des auteurs: JLG
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