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August 31, 2007
The MPAA's testes of time
A lot of huff and puff's expended on how the MPAA makes sure that every piece of publicity and advertising for ratings-approved movies pass muster, and standards shift in interesting ways. Strange, though, to see how many current, wild-posted one-sheets are allowed to demonstrate a pronounced... mmm... testicular fixation. (The first set of posters is from the side of a bodega in the middle of Ukrainian Village; the second ad is from the a stall in the men's toilet of a mildly disreputable bar in Chicago's Wicker Park.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 30, 2007
Regrets the error...
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Notes on a bad movie
Sometimes you get asked if movie reviewers can read their own notes after scrivening in the dark...
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 29, 2007
Korean Pizza Hut Hot Dog Pizza
There is nothing to add to these rapturous images and the expressions on the diners' faces at the end of the spot. [H/t Grady Hendrix.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Opening today: Quiet City (2007, ****)
Aaron Katz's second feature, Quiet City, opens today in Manhattan at the IFC Center. It's pretty wonderful, and I hope to write about it length shortly. (What a lovely, limpid valentine to the look of modern Brooklyn!) Watch even the first few shots of the trailer [below] and try not to be charmed. Here's a squib from The Reeler: "Stephen Holden's glowing review ofQuiet City—easily the best film screening in IFC Center's ongoing Generation DIY series—in today's NYT gets within one word of director/self-distributor Aaron Katz's critic-blurb wet dream. And then that phrase comes up: "Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry." Lovely. I'm sure the producers will take it, but the air of condescension is so thick it's shorting out my computer."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 28, 2007
Just because I'm hungry: Cooking up Ratatouille's CG food
Time to reheat that pork shoulder...
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
Forward to the past: television end logos
I've always been fascinated by credit sequences, presentation credits and production company signatures, the briefer, the bettter. Here's almost six minutes of old television titles. {Via bOing-bOing.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2007
[LOOK] Clips from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
Three clips from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, including "He offered me the stars"; "Read the diary"; and "The address."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)
More mumbling about architecture: is it a white guy thing?
Indie filmmaker (and doggedly prolific blogger) Sujewa Ekanayake asserts at his site that "a very widely read film journalist who blogs for indieWIRE told me a while back that American indie film has always been a "white" thing. Not really ("race films" of the 1930s on, Cassavete's Shadows, Spike Lee, Jarmusch's Mystery Train & Night On Earth & Dead Man & Ghost Dog, Ang Lee & Mira Nair & Wayne Wang's careers). So how come the indie film media does not seem to be at all concerned about the hottest new thing in our world—Mumblecore—being an all-"white" thing? So is Mumblecore independent film by & for "white"people only? Or for people who do not have any non-"white" friends or acquaintances or business partners? Maybe it is, at least up to now. At least that seems to be the message in the casting decisions made in the films." [More at the link.] Meanwhile, Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE profiles producer Anish Savjani of Film Science, which produced Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes The Stairs and his forthcoming Nights and Weekneds, and Kelly Reichardt's (Old Joy) next project. "behind the scenes a new generation of film producers are also starting to make a mark, including Austin-based Savjani," writes Hernandez. Savjani, in his mid-20s, like Swanberg, raised under $100,000 to produce Hannah; his prior experience includes work as a DGA trainee; work on Old Joy and working for mega-producer and taste maven Scott Rudin. "Now, through his own company Film Science, he hopes to foster a "family of filmmakers" that he can work with over the longterm." [A little more detail at the link.] And, not to forget, the prime primer of the moment, S. T. Van Airesdale's summa over at The Reeler.
August 22 from IFC First Take.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[LOOK] Lust, Caution... Clive?
While the lubricious Lust, Caution, awaits, remember one of Ang Lee's few short films, from the BMW series, The Hire, with Clive Owen?
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2007
Speedy li'l Davey Lynch
David Lynch tells MTV the present moment of his future—"Digital is so friendly for me and so important for the scenes, a way of working without so much downtime. It's impossible to go back. Film is a beautiful medium, but the world has moved on. The amount of manipulation we can do, anybody can do, is so much the future. Film is so big and heavy and slow, you just die. It's just ridiculous"—and then there's his daily weather report back at the ranch.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:05 AM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2007
[LOOK] A teaser for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK] David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises has a website
Rated R for "strong brutal and bloody violence, some graphic sexuality, language and nudity," in case you were wondering. Does that look more like London fields imagined by Cronenberg than real London streets? More cool, strange, Cronenbergian stuff here.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)
Who are the oldest living film directors? [updated 21 August]
WHILE REELING FROM THE WASH OF COMMENTARY AFTER THE DEATHS OF INGMAR BERGMAN AND MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI ON THE SAME DAY, much of which ventured who, beyond the prolific near-centenarian from Porto, might be the oldest surviving world directors, it was striking to realize how many persist at their craft even as they grow older. Other patterns emerged: it’s intriguing to consider the work of dissimilar directors born in the same month or year. Is it meaningful in any way that the director of Annie Hall and the director of Our Hitler were born in the same week? Or that Carl Reiner and Alain Resnais are the same age? (Abbas Kiarostami and Victor Erice collaborated on “Correspondences,” a beautiful book about their work and the age that they share.)
Which led to this, rather than yet another rumination on the work of the two men—a project for later, perhaps, after coming to grips with Rivette's Out 1—a necessarily selective survey of over 310 directors from around the world, all of whom are 60 or older, who have had lasting impact or a moment that matters in one way or another. More will be added: comment or email (pride_at_moviecitynews.com). Entries are listed by year of birth, date, their most recent project completed or in production and its release date. Directors between the ages of 98 and 80 are immediately below; the rest are at the jump.
1908
Manoel de Oliveira, 11 December, The Singularities of Rapariga Loira (2008)
1909
Richard L. Bare, 12 August, "Green Acres" (43 episodes, 1965-1971)
1911
Jules Dassin, December 18, Circle of Two (1980)
1912
Kaneto Shindô, April 28, Fukuro (2003)
1915
Mario Monicelli, 15 May, Le rose del deserto (2006)
Kon Ichikawa, 20 November, The Inugamis (2006)
1916
Dino Risi, 23 December, Le Regazze di Miss Italia (2002)
1917
Mel Shavelson, 1 April, Yours Mine And Ours (1968) [DIED AUGUST 8, 2007]
1918
Gabriel Axel, 18 April, Leila (2001)
1920
Eric Rohmer, 4 April, Les amours d’Astree et de Celadon (2007)
Mickey Rooney, September 23. The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960)
1921
Chris Marker, 29 July, The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004)
Miklos Jancso, 29 September, Ede megeve ebedem (2006)
1922
Carl Reiner, 20 March, That Old Feeling (1997)
Alain Resnais, 3 June, Private Fears In Public Places (2006)
Blake Edwards, 26 July, Son of the Pink Panther (1993)
Jonas Mekas, 24 September, Elvis (2001)
Arthur Penn, 27 September, Inside (1996)
Ebrahim Golestan, Ghost Valley Treasure (1974)
1923
Norman Mailer, January 31, Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)
Franco Zeffirelli, 12 February, Tre Fratelli (2005)
Irvin Kirschner, 29 April, RoboCop 2 (1990)
Seijun Suzuki, 24 May, Princess Raccoon (2005)
Sir Richard Attenborough, 29 August, The Snow Prince (2003)
Arthur Hiller, 22 November, National Lampoon’s Pucked (2006)
1924
Stanley Donen, 13 April, Love Letters (1999)
Sidney Lumet, 25 June, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Robert Frank, 9 November, Sanyu (2000)
Robert M. Young, 22 November, “Battlestar Galactica” episodes (2004-2007)
1925
Paul Newman, 26 January, The Glass Menagerie (1986)
Fernando Birri, March 13, ZA 05. Lo viejo y lo nuevo (2006)
Peter Brook, 21 March, The Tragedy Of Hamlet (2002)
D. A. Pennebaker, 15 July, Addiction (2007)
Joseph Sargent, 22 July, Sybil (2007)
Claude Lanzmann, 27 November, Sobibor (2001)
1926
Youssef Chahine, 25 January, 47 Years After (2007)
Haskell Wexler, 6 February, From Wharf Rats to Lord of the Docks (2007)
Bud Yorkin, 22 February, Love Hurts (1991)
Andrzej Wajda, 6 March, Katyn (2007)
Jerry Lewis, 16 March, Smorgasbord (1983)
Roger Corman, 5 April, Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
Herschell Gordon Lewis, 15 June, Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002)
Mel Brooks, 28 June, Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
Norman Jewison, 21 July, The Statement (2003)
Lina Wertmuller, 14 August, Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (2004)
Bud Greenspan, 18 September, Pride Against Prejudice: The Larry Doby Story (2007)
Albert Maysles, 26 November, American Prison: The Forgotten Jews (2007)
1927
Kenneth Anger, 3 February, Mouse Heaven (2004)
Ken Russell, 3 July, Trapped Ashes (2006)
Elliot Silverstein, 3 August, The Car (1977)
Marcel Ophüls, 1 November, The Troubles We’ve Seen (1994)
Jerry Schatzberg, The Day the Ponies Come Back (2000)
Alfred Leslie, Cedar Bar (2002)
1928
William Peter Blatty, 7 January, The Exorcist III (1990)
Jacques Rivette, 1 March, Don’t Touch The Ax (2007)
William Klein, 19 April, Messiah (1999)
Agnes Varda, 30 May, Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier (2006)
James Ivory, 7 June, City of Your Final Destination (2007)
Nicolas Roeg, 15 August, Puffball (2007)
Mel Stuart, 2 September, Charlie and the Chocolate Factor
Harold Becker, 25 September, Rififi (2008)
Clu Galager, 16 November, A Day With The Boys (1969)
1929
Ulu Grosbard, 9 January, The Deep End of the Ocean (1999)
Vera Chytilová, 2 February, Pleasant Moments (2006)
Alejandro Jodorowsky, 7 February, The Rainbow Thief (1990)
Claude Goretta, 23 June, Sarte, the Age of Passions (2006)
Buddy van Horn, 20 August, Pink Cadillac (1989)
Vittorio Taviani, 20 September, La massseria delle allodole (2007)
Alain Tanner, 6 December, Paul s’en va (2004)
Michael Snow, 10 December, *Corpus Callosum (2002)
1930
Frederick Wiseman, 1 January, State Legislature (2007)
Richard Donner, 24 April, 16 Blocks (2006)
Paul Mazursky, 25 April, Yippee (2006)
Jess Franco, 12 May, Snakewoman (2005)
Clint Eastwood, 31 May, The Changeling (2008)
Claude Chabrol, 24 June, The Woman Cut In Half (2007)
Robert Culp, 16 August, Hickey And Boggs (1972)
Sir Peter Hall, 22 November, Never Talk To Strangers (1995)
Jean-Luc Godard, 3 December, Vrai faux passéport (2006)
Richard Rush, Color of Night (1994)
1931
Robert Duvall, 5 January, Assassination Tango (2002)
Hal Needham, 6 March, Street Luge (1996)
Masahiro Shinoda, March 9, Spy Sorge (2003)
Ettore Scola, 10 May, Gente di Roma (2003)
Irwin Winkler, 25 May, Home of the Brave (2006)
Jan Troell, 23 July, Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moment (2008)
Ermanno Olmi, 24 July, One Hundred Nails (2007)
Alain Cavalier, 14 September, Le Filmeur (2005)
Marta Meszaros, 19 September, Hanna Wende (2008)
Paolo Taviani, 20 September, La masseria delle allodole (2007)
Bruce Baillie, September 24, The P-38 Pilot (1990)
Mike Nichols, 6 November, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
1932
Carlos Saura, 4 January, Io, Don Giovanni (2008)
Alfonso Arau, 11 January L’Imbroglio nel lenzuolo (2007)
Richard Lester, 19 January, Get Back (1991)
Milos Forman, 18 February, Goya’s Ghosts (2006)
Nagisa Oshima, 31 March, Gohatto (1999)
Elaine May, 21 April, Ishtar (1987)
George Sluizer, 25 June, The Chosen One (2007)
Monte Hellman, 12 July, Trapped Ashes (2006)
Melvin Van Peebles, 21 August, The Real Deal (2003)
Robert Benton, 19 September, Feast of Love (2007)
Dusan Makavejev, 13 October, Danish Girls Show Everything (1996)
Edgar Reitz, 1 November, Heimat-Fragmente: Die Frauen (2006)
John G. Avildsen, 21 December, Dancing Into the Future (2007)
John Mackenzie, Quicksand (2001)
1933
Jean-Marie Straub, 8 January, Quei loro incontri (2006)
Liliani Cavani, 12 January, Albert Einstein (2009)
John Boorman, 18 January, The Memoirs of Hadrian (2008)
Costa-Gavras, 12 February, The Ax (2005)
Bob Rafelson, 21 February, No Good Deed (2002)
Ken Jacob, 25 May, Razzle-Dazzle (2007)
Ivan Passer, 10 July, Nomad (2005)
Roman Polanski, 18 August, Pompeii (2009)
Lucian Pintilie, 9 November, Tertium non datur (2005)
Bruce Conner, Looking for Mushrooms (1996)
1934
Otar Iosseliani, 2 February, Jardins en automne (2006)
Peter Kubelka, 23 March, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] (2003)
Mark Rydell, 23 March, Even Money (2006)
Claude Berri, 1 July, La graine et la mullet (2007)
Sydney Pollack, 1 July, Sketches Of Frank Gehry (2006)
Gilbert Cates, 6 June, Backfire (1987)
Jan Svankmajer, 4 September, Sileni (2005)
Kira Muratova, 5 November, Two In One (2007)
Garry Marshall, 13 November, Georgia Rule (2007)
Robert Towne, 23 November, Ask the Dust (2006)
Chor Yuen, Pu ti you gui (1993)
1935
Theo Angelopoulos, 17 April, The Dust of Time (2007)
Joan Micklin Silver, 24 May, A Fish In The Bathtub (1999)
William Friedkin, 29 August, Bug (2006)
Michael Winner, 30 October, Parting Shots (1999)
Peter Watkins, 29 October, Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000)
Les Blank, 27 November, All in This Tea (2007)
Woody Allen, 1 December, Woody Allen Spanish Project (2008)
Hans- Jürgen Syberberg, 8 December, Hohle der Erinnerung (1997)
1936
Alan Alda, 28 January, Betsy’s Wedding (1990)
Burt Reynolds, 11 February, The Final Hit (2000)
Haile Gerima, March 4, Adwa (1999)
Kwon-taek Im, 2 May, Across the Years (2006)
Dennis Hopper, 17 May, Homeless (2000)
Ken Loach, 17 June, It’s A Free World (2007)
Robert Redford, 18 August, Lions For Lambs (2007)
Hugh Hudson, 25 August, I Dreamed Of Africa (2000)
Lau Kar Leung, August, Heroes of Shaolin (2008)
Philip Kaufman, 23 October, Twisted (2004)
1937
Warren Beatty, 30 March, Bulworth (1998)
Jack Nicholson, 22 April, The Two Jakes (1990)
Jorgen Leth, 14 June, Aarhus (2005)
Tom Stoppard, 3 July, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
Francis Veber, 28 July, The Valet (2006)
Andrei Konchalovsky, 20 August, Gloss (2007)
Carroll Ballard, 14 October, Colter’s Run (2008)
Luc Moullet, 14 October, The Liter of Milk (2006)
Claude Lelouch, 30 October, Crossed Tracks (2007)
Sir Ridley Scott, 30 November, American Gangster (2007)
Tom Palazzolo, I Married a Munchkin (1994)
1938
Istvan Szabo, 18 February, Journey by Moonlight (2008)
Paul Morrissey, 23 February, Veruschka (2005)
Jirí Menzel, 23 February, Obsluhoval som anglického krála (2006)
Jerzy Skolimowski, 5 May, Ferdyduke (1991)
Richard Benjamin, 22 May, Conditional Love (2008)
Kevin Brownlow, 2 June, I’m King Kong! (2005)
Paul Verhoeven, 18 July, Azazel (2009)
Ralph Bakshi, 29 October, Last Days of Coney Island (2007)
Liv Ullman, 16 December, Faithless (2000)
Rudy Wurlitzer, Candy Mountain (1988)
1939
Edgardo Cozarinsky, 13 January, Night Watch (2005)
Michael Cimino, 3 February, No Translation Needed (2007)
John Hancock, 12 February, Suspended Animation (2004)
Bertrand Blier, 14 March, How Much Do You Love Me? (2005)
Volker Schlöndorff, 31 March, Ulzhan (2007)
Francis Coppola, 7 April, Youth Without Youth (2007)
Krzysztof Zanussi, 17 July, Black Sun (2007)
Peter Bogdanovich, 30 July, The Broken Code (2007)
Wes Craven, 2 August, Red Eye (2005)
Michael Sarne, 6 August, Glastonbury the Movie (1995)
John Badham, 25 August, Incognito (1997)
Joel Schumacher, 29 August, Town Creek (2008)
Marco Belocchi, 9 November, The Wedding Director (2006)
Dariush Mehrjui, 8 December, Santoori (2007)
Fred Schepisi, 26 December, Last Man (2008)
1940
George A. Romero, 4 February, Diary of the Dead (2007)
Stuart Samuels, 8 March, 27 (2007)
Bernardo Bertolucci, 16 March, The Dreamers (2003)
Godfrey Reggio, 29 March, Naqoyqatsi (2002)
Paul Cox, 16 April, Human Touch (2004)
Al Pacino, 25 April, Salomaybe? (2007)
Abbas Kiarostami, 22 June, Certified Copy (2008)
Victor Erice, 30 June, Soliloquio (2006)
Brian De Palma, 11 September, Redancted (2007)
Bruce Beresford, 16 August, The Contract (2006)
Chris Menges, 15 September, the Lost Son (1999)
Dario Argento, September 7, Mother Of Tears (2007)
Fredi M. Murer, 1 October, Vitus (2006)
Terry Gilliam, 22 November, Untitled Gorillaz Project (2007)
Slava Tsukerman, Stalin's Wife (2008)
1941
Hayao Miyazaki, 5 January, Ponyo On A Cliff (2008)
Henry Jaglom, 26 January, Irene in Time (2007)
Michael Apted, 10 February, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2009)
Adrian Lyne, 4 March, Unfaithful (2002)
Wolfgang Petersen, 14 March, Poseidon (2006)
Stefan Jarl, 18 March, Flickan fran Auschwitz (2005)
Bertrand Tavernier, 25 April, In The Electric Mist (2007)
Nora Ephron, 19 May, Bewitched (2005)
Bob Dyland, 24 May, Renaldo and Clara (1978)
Stephen Frears, 20 June, Skip Tracer (2007)
Denys Arcand, 25 June, The Age Of Ignorance (2007)
Raul Ruiz, 25 July, Love and Virtue (2008)
Denys Arcand, 26 June, L'Âge des ténèbres (2007)
Jean Pierre Lefebvre, 17 August, See You In Toronto (2000)
Barbet Schroeder, 26 August, Terror’s Advocate (2007)
Michael Wadleigh, 21 September, Jimi Hendrix Live At Woodstock (1999)
1942
Walter Hill, 10 January, Broken Trail (2006)
Terry Jones, 1 February, The BFI London IMAX Signature Film (1999)
Margarethe von Trotta, 21 February, I Am the Other Woman (2006)
Mike Newell, 28 March, Love in the Time Of Cholera (2007)
Peter Greenaway, 5 April, Nightwatching (2007)
Douglas Trumbull, 8 April, Luxor Live (1996)
Michael Haneke, 23 March, Funny Games (2007)
Barry Levinson, 6 April, What Just Happened? (2007)
Barbra Streisand, 24 April, The Mirror Has Two faces (1996)
Raymond Depardon, 6 July, Profils paysans: la vie moderne (2007)
David Steinberg, 9 August, Frangela, 2007
George Kuchar, 31 August, Beastial Comforts (2005)
Mike Kuchar, 31 August
Werner Herzog, 5 September, Antarctic documentary (2007)
Michael Crichton, 23 October, The Thirteenth Warrior (1999)
Martin Scorsese, 17 November, Shine a Light (2007), Silence (2008)
Rosa von Praunheim, 25 November, Your Heart in My Head (2005)
Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol, November 29, Tamnaan somdet phra Naresuan maharat: Phaak prakaat itsaraphaap (2007)
George Armitage, The Big Bounce (2004)
1943
Larry Clark, January, Destricted (2006)
Tobe Hooper, 25 January, Mortuary (2005)
Michael Mann, 5 February, Hancock (2008)
Mike Leigh, 20 February, Untitled Mike Leigh Project (2008)
Andre Téchiné, 13 March, The Witness (2007)
David Cronenberg, 15 March, Maps to the Stars (2008)
Roy Andersson, 31 March, You the Living (2006)
Jean-Pierre Gorin, 17 April, My Crasy Life, 1992
Jon Jost, 16 May, La lunga ombra (2006)
Iain Sinclair, 11 June, London Orbital (2002)
Walter Murch, 12 July, Return to Oz (1985)
Peter Hyams, 26 July, A Sound Of Thunder (2005)
Alain Corneau 7 August, Le deuxieme soufflé (2007)
Robert DeNiro, 17 August, The Good Shepherd (2006)
Hugh Wilson, 21 August, Mickey (2004)
Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1 October, His Minor Majesty (2007)
Bob Swaim, 2 November, La France Made in USA (2007)
Terrence Malick, 30 November, Tree Of Life (2008)
Arturo Ripstein, 13 December, Carnaval del sodoma (2006)
Alan Rudolph, 18 December, The Secret Lives Of Dentists (2002)
Harry Shearer, 23 December, Teddy Bears' Picnic (2002)
Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
1944
Sir Alan Parker, 14 February, The Ice At The Bottom Of the World (2008)
Jonathan Demme, 22 February, He Comes In Peace (2008)
Jacques Doillon, 15 March, Le premier venu (2008)
John Milius, 11 April, Journey of Death (2008)
Charles Burnett, 13 April, Red Soil (2007)
George Lucas, 14 May, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Frank Oz, 25 May, Death at a Funeral (2007)
Tony Scott, 21 June, Emma’s War (2008)
Peter Weir, 21 August, Master and Commander (2003)
Harun Farocki, 1 September, Nicht ohne Risiko (2004)
Patrice Chereau, 2 November, Gabrielle (2005)
Danny DeVito, 17 November, Duplex (2003)
Harold Ramis, 21 November, Year Zero (2008)
James Toback, 23 November, When Will I Be Loved (2004)
Eliseo Subiela, 27 December, El resultado del amor (2007)
Taylor Hackford, 31 December, Ray (2004)
1945
Andrew Bergman, 20 February, Joe’s Last Change (2008)
George Miller, 3 March, Happy Feet (2006)
Werner Schroeter, 7 April, Deux (2002)
Ventura Pons, 25 July, Barcelona (un mapa) (2007)
Wim Wenders, 14 August, The Palermo Shooting (2008)
Bob Balaban, 16 August, Bernard and Doris (2007
Robert Greenwald, 28 August, Supermarket Swindle (2008
Willard Huyck, 8 September, Howard The Duck (1986)
Nikita Mikhalkov, 21 October, 12 Angry Men, Burnt By the Sun 2 (2007)
Terrence Davies, 10 November, The House of Mirth (2000)
Neil Young, 12 November, Greendale (2003)
Penelope Spheeris, 2 December, The Kid and I (2005)
Victor Nunez, Coastlines (2002)
Jim Sharman, Shock Treatment (1981)
1946
David Lynch, 20 January, Inland Empire (2006)
Christopher Hampton, 26 January, Imagining Argentina (2003)
Hector Babenco, 7 February, El pasado (2007)
Luis Puenzo, 19 February. The Whore and the Whale (2004)
Michael Radford, 24 February, La Mula (2008)
Bigas Luna, 19 March, Yo soy la Juani (200g)
Lajos Koltai, 2 April, Evening (2007)
John Waters, 22 April, A Dirty Shame (2004)
Franc Roddam, 29 April, K2 (1992)
Bill Plympton, 30 April, Idiots and Angels (2008)
Bruce Robinson, 2 May, The Rum Diary (2008)
Lasse Hallström, 2 June, Sammy (2007)
Sylvester Stalllone, 6 July, John Rambo (2007)
Paul Schrader, 22 July, Adam Resurrected (2008)
Bill Forsyth, 29 July, Gregory’s Two Girls (1999)
Barbara Kopple, 30 July, Shut Up & Sing (2006)
Martha Coolidge, 17 August, Zorro 2110 (2008)
Dennis Dugan, 5 September, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry (2007)
Frank Marshall, 13 September, Eight Below (2006)
Tommy Lee Jones, 15 September, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Steven Spielberg, 18 September, Indiana Jones IV (2008)
John Woo, 23 September, Red Cliffs (2008)
Jean-Jacques Beineix, 8 October, Mortel transfert (2001)
Ivan Reitman, 27 October, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)
Joe Dante, 28 November, The Greatest Show Ever (2007)
Andy Davis, The Guardian (2006)
1947
Takeshi Kitano, 18 January, Kantoku Banzai! (2007)
Paul Auster, 3 February, The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)
Benoît Jacquot, 5 February, L’intouchable (2006)
Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, 2 March, What No One Knows (2008)
Hsiao-hsien Hou, 8 April, Untitled Kung Fu Project (2008)
Ann Hui, May 23, Yi ma de hou xian dai sheng huo (2006)
Tim Hunter, 15 June, Mad Men (2007)
Albert Brooks, 22 July, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)
Stuart Gordon, 11 August, Stuck (2007)
Péter Gothár, 28 August, Hungarian Beauty (2003)
Stephen King, 21 September, Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Alan Moyle, Weirdsville (2007)
[Coincidentally, this is entry 1908 in this version of this site.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:51 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 20, 2007
Little Mister Sunshine: hating on movies
Someone's gotten a modest sinecure over at the Guardian, as the resident grump: a post called "Is Cinema Dead?" (which does not answer the question but seems to be affirmative in response) was preceded by "Did colour ruin the movies?"; "The 70s was the golden age of Hollywood. But why?"; "Dumb Hollywood is forever in debt to Europe" and his ever-popular series of screeds, "What every film critic must know." As a March entry asserted, "I believe that every film critic should know, say... the signified and the signifier, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and how both a tracking shot and depth of field can be ideological. They should know their jidai-geki from their gendai-geki, be familiar with the Kuleshov Effect and Truffaut's "Une certain tendance du cinéma français", know what the 180-degree rule is and the meaning of "suture." They should have read Sergei Eisenstein's The Film Sense and Film Form and the writings of Bela Balasz, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Serge Daney. They should have seen Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire [sic] du Cinema, and every film by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman, as well as those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and at least one by Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Mrinal Sen, Marguerite Duras, Mikio Naruse, Jean Eustache and Stan Brakhage. They should be well versed in Russian constructivism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, Cinema Novo, La Nouvelle Vague and the Dziga Vertov group. These should be the minimum requirements before anyone can claim to be a film critic. But then, they might never get a job because they would then "know too much about cinema." [He'll be back.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[LOOK] Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, aka Balle de match deux
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August 18, 2007
Ingmar's interred...
Bergman's buried, and Aftonbladet's brief video coverage (in Swedish) is here.
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August 17, 2007
[LOOK] Talking Elvis in My Best Friend's Birthday
And here I'd always heard that Tarantino's aborted first film had been destroyed... More lives than Elvis himself.
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August 16, 2007
Wishful wild-posting
Augusta at Damen, Chicago. [Photo © 2007 Ray Pride.]
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August 15, 2007
IFC First Take's next step: video-on-demand takes off
Is IFC's focus shifting to VOD? "A theatrical release of Mark Palansky's Penelope, the Toronto '06 premiere starring Reese Witherspoon which had been scheduled to open this Friday, was recently dropped. With no larger-budget releases on its longterm slate, IFC is instead focusing on its emerging IFC First Take label that simultaneously releases independent and foreign language films in theaters" and video-on-demand," writes Eugene Hernandez of movies like Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes The Stairs. "Asked to explain the apparent strategy shift, [IFC topper Jonathan] Sehring added that even outside the studio specialty divisions, the landscape for larger independent releases has changed... "There are more distributors for films in the 5, 15, 20 million budget range," noted Sehring. But, Hernandez reports that IFC First Take's reach of 40 million cable viewers nationwide is working. "The growth of this service... from zero to forty million in about a year is pretty much unparalleled," Rainbow spokesperson Matthew Frankel told indieWIRE... While not releasing specific download numbers for the First Take films, he noted, "And in regard to the films, we are very pleased with the kind of demand for this small independent film -- not only are these films available in Des Moines, Iowa but people are actually buying them in Des Moines, Iowa."
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The lineup for the 45th New York Film Festival: vive l'auteur
The 45th New York Film Festival will open with Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is their "Centerpiece." Closing night: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis. Also: Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding; Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park; Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There; Brian DePalma’s "trenchant vision of the Iraq war," Redacted, and Ira Sachs’ Married Life. Sidney Lumet "returns to the New York Film Festival for the first time in 43 years (Fail-Safe, 1964)" with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead [pictured]. Also: Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona's debut The Orphanage, presented and produced by Guillermo del Toro; Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light; Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales; Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress; Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon; Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon; Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra; Béla Tarr’s The Man from London; Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary Useless; Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Best Actress prizewinner Secret Sunshine. Five featured films in retrospectives: "the long-awaited 'definitive cut'" of Blade Runner; the premiere of a new score by the Alloy Orchestra to accompany Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld; John Ford’s first major film The Iron Horse (1924), Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s 1920 German production of Hamlet starring actress Asta Nielsen in the title role; and an evening called "The Technicolor Show," introduced by Martin Scorsese and featuring John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945). [The full press release is below.]
28 Films to Debut at 45th New York Film Festival, Sept. 28–Oct. 14
Closing Night: Persepolis
Five Special Retrospectives, Three Special Event Screenings, Three Sidebars Included
NEW YORK, August 15, 2007—The 45th New York Film Festival will premiere 28 films when it runs Sept. 28-Oct. 14 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and sponsored by Sardinia Region Tourism and The New York Times, also features three unique sidebars, three special event screenings and five retrospective films.
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis has been selected as the festival’s Closing Night film. The animated coming-of-age story, based on Satrapi’s popular graphic novel about her own childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, won a Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It features the voice talents of Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux and Simon Abkarian, several of whom are expected to attend the festival’s Closing Night screening at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday, Oct. 14. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing the film.
The festival’s previously announced Opening Night and Centerpiece selections (Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men) now headline a strong American contingent in the 2007 slate. Noah Baumbach, Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Sidney Lumet all return to the festival with American productions; Julian Schnabel and Abel Ferrara come back with international co-productions; and Brian DePalma, John Landis and Ira Sachs each make their festival debuts.
Baumbach will screen his follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, the very funny and very true Margot at the Wedding. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh star as contentious sisters thrown into a disastrous family weekend caused by Pauline’s (Leigh) engagement to the underwhelming Malcolm (Jack Black). Scott Rudin produces the film, a Paramount Vantage release.
Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, based on the novel by Blake Nelson, details the unraveling of a skateboarder’s life after he is involved in the death of a security guard. Newcomer Alex Nevins stars in the film, for which Van Sant won Cannes’ special 60th Anniversary Prize. IFC First Take will release the film.
The other American titles include Haynes’ I’m Not There—a rumination on the life of Bob Dylan, with actors Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Wishaw and Marcus Carl Frankin each representing elements the famed musician’s mystique—DePalma’s trenchant vision of the Iraq war, Redacted, and Ira Sachs’ taut melodrama Married Life. Lumet returns to the New York Film Festival for the first time in 43 years (Fail-Safe, 1964) with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime story starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei. Two documentaries—Landis’ Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project and Ed Pincus and Lucia Small’s The Axe in the Attic—round out the festival’s new U.S. productions.
The 45th New York Film Festival honors worldwide film production with more than half of its slate taken from other countries. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the story of magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, paralyzed by a stroke, blinks out a memoir that eloquently captures his vibrant interior life. Mathieu Amalric stars as Bauby in the Miramax release, which won Cannes’ Best Director award and Technical Grand Prize.
Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona will screen his feature film debut The Orphanage, a supernatural drama about a woman who re-opens the orphanage in which she was raised, only to discover terrible secrets as her seven-year-old son, Simón, begins making imaginary friends. The Picturehouse release is presented and produced by last year’s Closing Night director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).
Among the other international titles in the festival are Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which shared with Persepolis the Jury Prize at Cannes; Abel Ferrara’s Italy/U.S. co-production Go Go Tales; Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress; Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon; Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon; Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra; Béla Tarr’s The Man from London; and Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary Useless. Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Best Actress prizewinner Secret Sunshine were previously confirmed.
Five films will be featured as special retrospectives of the 45th New York Film Festival: the long-awaited “definitive cut” of Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, honoring the landmark science fiction film’s 25th anniversary; the premiere of a new score by the Alloy Orchestra to accompany Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld, winner of the Best Writing Oscar® at the first Academy Awards®; John Ford’s first major film The Iron Horse (1924), a massive production about the building of the transcontinental railroad; Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s 1920 German production of Hamlet, starring actress Asta Nielsen in the title role; and an evening titled The Technicolor Show, introduced by Martin Scorsese and featuring John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945).
The Walter Reade Theater will also host three upcoming music documentaries as part of the New York Film Festival’s special events. Carlos Saura will screen Fados, a exploration of the celebrated Portuguese musical style. Acclaimed rock documentarian Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965 features footage of Bob Dylan’s infamous Newport performances, where the musician first used electric amplifiers. Peter Bogdanovich will complete the set with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, an in-depth look at the legendary American rock band to be screened at its full 238 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission.
Persepolis joins a select group of films that have closed the New York Film Festival, many of which have gone on to critical acclaim and successful theatrical runs. Over the last 20 years, these have included David Mamet’s House of Games, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh and Talk to Her, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, Alexander Payne’s Sideways, Michael Haneke’s Caché and last year’s selection, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.
Due to ongoing renovations at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, this year’s New York Film Festival screenings will be held at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in the Time Warner Center. Opening Night will be held at Avery Fisher Hall, as well as Rose Hall. Closing Night will be held at Avery Fisher Hall only. Special events and some retrospective screenings will be held at the Walter Reade Theater.
The 45th New York Film Festival’s selection committee is made up of Richard Peña, chairman and the Film Society’s program director; Kent Jones, associate director of programming at the Film Society and editor-at-large of Film Comment magazine; Scott Foundas, film editor and critic, L.A. Weekly; J. Hoberman, film critic, The Village Voice, and visiting lecturer at Harvard University; and Lisa Schwarzbaum, film critic, Entertainment Weekly.
As previously announced, this year’s festival sidebar will honor director and screenwriter Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, a renowned member of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, who solidified his place as a master filmmaker with his 1969 classic, Macunaima. The series, titled Tropical Analysis: The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, will run Sept. 29-Oct. 9 at the Walter Reade Theater.
Two other sidebars are included among the festival’s events screening at the Walter Reade Theater. Views from the Avant-Garde returns for its 11th year as a distinguished showcase of experimental film and video, screening films during the second weekend of the festival, Oct. 6-7. The festival also celebrates the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region with Chinese Modern: A Tribute to Cathay Studios, Oct. 10-16, screening films from the Hong Kong production that, more than any other, introduced a distinctly modern lifestyle to Chinese culture.
Additionally, during the festival, the Film Society will salute New Line Cinema’s 40 years of extraordinary filmmaking at a black-tie gala to benefit the Film Society’s campaign to build a new film center. New Line Cinema’s Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne will be honored at the event on Friday, Oct. 5, at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The 45th New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is sponsored by Sardinia Region Tourism and The New York Times. The screening of Underworld is made possible through the generosity of the Ira M. Resnick Foundation. Tropical Analysis has been organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Os Filmes do Serro. Chinese Modern is sponsored by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office New York.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center was founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, to recognize and support new directors, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of film. Advancing this mandate today, the Film Society hosts two distinguished festivals: the New York Film Festival, which annually premieres the best films from around the world and has introduced the likes of François Truffaut, R.W. Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Scorsese, and Wong Kar-Wai to the United States, and New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art, which focuses on emerging film talents. Since 1972 when the Film Society honored Charles Chaplin, the annual Gala Tribute celebrates an actor, filmmaker or industry leader who has helped distinguish cinema as an art form. Additionally, the Film Society presents a year-round calendar of programming at its Walter Reade Theater and offers insightful film writing to a worldwide audience through Film Comment magazine.
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August 14, 2007
Dentler takes the stairs
SXSW PROGRAMMER MATT DENTLER HAS BEEN A MAJOR SUPPORTER OF JOE SWANBERG'S WORK and he's interviewed the participants in the Chicago-based writer-director's latest, Hannah Takes The Stairs, before its August 22 debut in New York via IFC First Take at the IFC Center. Dentler asked several bloggers to share the interviews, and Indie's got an exchange with actor (and Guatemalan Handshake director) Todd Rohal. [There's more at the film's website.]
Writes Dentler: “On the eve of the theatrical debut of Joe Swanberg's SXSW 2007 hit, I wanted to check in with each of the film's principal collaborators. The film has been documented as a successful collaboration between acclaimed film artists from around the nation, each one offering their own trademark influence on the finished film.
DENTLER: How did you first get connected to Hannah Takes the Stairs?
ROHAL: I met Joe, Kevin, Kris and Tipper at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, where they, like most people at film festivals, assumed I was Mike Tully's personal assistant because of the way I would stand just behind Mike Tully's left shoulder and listen in on conversations. Adam Roffman, the director of IFFB, told me just before my screening that Joe had been saying that he really wanted to meet me. Much to his surprise, we had already been hanging out for three days. In his embarrassment he asked me to be in his new film, which was flattering, but far from made up for the pain that he caused me.
DENTLER: What do you remember most about the shoot in Chicago?
ROHAL: I slept on an air mattress next to Andrew Bujalski.
He would wake up in the morning and pull the plug on the end of the mattress, letting all of the air out while still laying on it. I loved seeing the sight of that every morning and think that there is no better way to get out of bed in the morning than to do that. You're actually not getting out of bed, bed is getting out of you. I also remember everyone playing the Atari game Breakout way too much, and they were all amazingly good at it. I couldn't get into it, but I did download the song "Breakout" by Swing Out Sister and played it while everyone was getting into that game. I don't think I got any laughs for doing that, though. Kent Osborne's late night penis trick performances became legendary for me. He is a national treasure.
DENTLER: How did the production process differ from your own other projects, or projects you've acted in before or since?
ROHAL: I make "movies," Joe makes "films." He reminds me of that every time I see him.
DENTLER: What are your thoughts on the issues of sex and relationships that come to the forefront of the film?
ROHAL: Sex seems like it'd be a fun time and I would someday like to try out a relationship, though both of them do seem a bit time consuming.
DENTLER: Ever been in a love triangle?
ROHAL: It wasn't until my junior year of high school that I found out what a love triangle actually was...I thought it was the same thing as a three-way. So I wouldn't rent movies that had mentions of love triangles in their synopsis for fear of getting caught bringing home a porno from Blockbuster. Which explains why I didn't see "Days of Heaven until I was 17.
DENTLER: Did you ever work with "the stairs?" Any thoughts on why they didn't make the cut?
ROHAL: "Some get the elevator, some get the shaft -- Hannah Takes the Stairs" -- a rejected tagline idea. [Matt Dentler.]
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August 13, 2007
Indie returns Tuesday
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August 11, 2007
Engineering this fiasco: the making of Orchard Vale
TIM KINSELLA AND I MET IN 1997 AND HAVE BEEN EXCHANGING PREOCCUPATIONS EVER SINCE. Ever prolific, Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap'n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking as another artistic outlet, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. [Kinsella's diverse collaborations have appeared under such names as Joan of Arc and Make Believe.] His writing-directing debut, Orchard Vale, a claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, just a few weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe. We had several conversations about process as the movie was prepared and in the final stages of post-production, from the transition from songwriting to filmmaking, and the kinds of fears of contemporary apocalypse you’d find in the movies of the Dardennes brothers or Michael Haneke, what a younger John Cale or Captain Beefheart might be up to today, and why you shouldn’t compare your movie to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” (Orchard Vale was shot by Chris Strong, and edited by Amy Cargill; a trailer for the film is at the end of this interview.)
RAY PRIDE: Is the disintegration of the music industry because of evolving technology one of the reasons you decided to explore filmmaking?
TIM KINSELLA: I don't get the impression it was ever very easy to make a living as a musician. By the late nineties, I saw my life as potentially fitting into the historical archetype of traveling bard far more so than any aspirations towards rockstardom. I think I had a pretty realistic idea at a relatively young age that those ambitions would only end in bitterness and a sense of personal failure. So to a large degree, I feel I have been able to exist outside the music industry and whether the alt-fad that year is electro-clash or folk, I wouldn't really be fazed. I guess the music-industry life lesson that enabled me to embark on this Orchard Vale pit would be more a matter of internalizing the DIY ethics of my formative punk rock years and extrapolating that approach from hanging your own flyers to making a movie.
PRIDE: Is it one of the reasons you dropped out of Make Believe, this uncertainty about being able to recoup time, let alone money?
KINSELLA: The cost/benefit ratio has certainly stayed about the same, that is, lousy from day one, but I think I have just changed some. I was perfectly happy drifting around a different city every day for months at a time through my twenties and just being able to get away with it was enough. If we could make enough money traveling that I wouldn't need to work too much when I got home then I'd be able to work on the next record and recording is when I truly feel most myself and most alive and like I am doing what I should be doing. And having just returned from some adventure, I'd have plenty of material to think through. But touring eventually becomes twenty-three hours a day of mostly waiting around. You can't get anything done.
The way things were going in Make Believe it didn't seem worth sacrificing every other aspect of my life for anymore.
PRIDE: But who can make a career in the modern music industry? I remember Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey saying hopeful things way back about how she wanted to give her bands a comfortable living, and not worry about things like being American idols...
KINSELLA: I guess it's like the fifties again? People don't listen to albums anymore, just MP3 players on shuffle. So it's the single that is prioritized. In the same way that the listener doesn't sit with a side of a record and let it develop anymore, the business doesn't develop careers like it seems maybe was possible in some golden era of the seventies. I don't know. 
If John Cale or Don Van Vliet were young men today I'm sure they'd still find a way to get away with what they wanted to do.
PRIDE: Can you expand on the self-description on the Joan of Arc Web site about becoming a "bizarro David Lee Roth or whatever"?
KINSELLA: Oh, I guess I meant my specific role in Make Believe was constricting. A persona developed pretty naturally when we began that I felt was the appropriate approach at the time for front-manning those songs. But towards the end, when I required a new approach to remain interested, it didn't really seem like I had the space to develop that within the context of that band. I wish it wasn't the case, and maybe we could've talked through it better as a group, but it's the decision that appeared inevitable at the time.
PRIDE: Have you made any shorts or directed any videos for your music?
KINSELLA: I made two shorts. Me and Chris [Strong] made Ping-Pong Meditations, which was a slow-motion, twenty-minute ping-pong game on a ping-pong table floating in outer space then landing on the Earth. Joan of Arc did live accompaniment to it at the [the now-defunct] Three Penny [Cinema on Lincoln Avenue] a few years ago at a Movieside festival with Jim Jarmusch [as guest]. Not recommended viewing for anyone who is anything less than aware at that moment that they have never been so high in their life before. And last year me, Chris, Amy and Armeen [Monahan], our sound guy on Orchard Vale, made a short called A Lovers' Discourse with Rosie Sanders and Paul Koob. It was one line of dialogue, a joke with no punch line, repeated over and over in twenty different locations. It was really an exercise in setting up and breaking down quickly to get us in shape for the movie we thought we were gonna try to make before making Orchard Vale.
PRIDE: You've gone from the music industry, and now to narrative filmmaking, the industry support of which is being eroded, even demolished economically by the same technology that puts it into the hands of almost anyone. Is this out of the frying pan and into the deep fryer?
KINSELLA: The economic reality of it is, I'm a bartender. That frees up a lot of mental space regarding popular reception of an idea I may want to pursue, like nudging a note over here and there and straightening out the structure of this song just a teeny-weeny bit might make it more palatable to the masses and then I can pay my rent easier or whatever. But I don't need to worry about that because I am a bartender. For years I had this small bit of money I was able to move around from project to project to kick-start different things and then when it paid itself back, I could move it into the next thing. But this was never to be confused with the money I lived on. But since record labels discontinued the old tradition of paying royalties and after making Orchard Vale, this small bundle has dissipated.
PRIDE: In our earlier conversations about working on Orchard Vale, it seems you've enjoyed is the collaboration, expanding on ways you like to work as a musician. Can you tell me more?
KINSELLA: It has been a very rare occasion in which I have found myself with a song that I think is so preciously perfect that it shouldn't be tarnished by another's touch. For me, finding the right collaborators is the single most important aspect of any creative venture. We may both have blind spots that obscure ninety percent of each of our vision, but then focusing on the same thing, even if those blind spots overlap halfway, we're still both now aware of fifteen percent instead of ten percent. I know I didn't explain that so well, but you know what I mean. In the end, it's still all intuition and trusting your gut to know which opinions to listen to and disregarding what doesn't fit into the vague form you have preconceived to some degree. Different people twist the same things in different ways. I personally wouldn't be able to ingest the same depth into something that I trust multiple perspectives would. Which isn't to say cubist, but maybe a time-lapse cubism? Ideally creating something that can interact more with the listener or viewer. My favorite records and movies that I return to over and over are participatory, they all have some sense of mystery about them that seem to change as I interact with them at different points in my life. This is the vitality of the output.
PRIDE: What's the key influence that's not music itself or performance on the way you pull things out of your head?
KINSELLA: I guess I try to not try. Too much effort seems to corrupt the process. Music I listen to and performances of any kind I see have very little conscious effect on my approach. If it did I'd sound just like Fleetwood Mac and strut around like Humphrey Bogart. So maybe the trick for me to getting anything done has been integrating work into my life to such a degree that I don't notice when its happening or not? When I know I'm trying to work then the little censor sitting behind my forehead comes out and insists, "No, no, no its all wrong, I'm the pilot around here and I say its not clever enough or heavy enough or whatever and blah blah blah," and the 
entire ambition seems perverse and vain and I need to walk it off. I make great effort towards being conscious of humility in my approach and always remaining aware of what is the smallest gesture necessary, the most economical means to give every dimension summoned fair representation. Of course, I fail at all of this constantly and am aware that what I see and hear in others' work that bugs me is only how it resonates with some aspect of myself I want to strip away. It's really the hours between midnight and 6am that are vital. Everything else I could say is hypotheses, but those hours, the world is much more sparsely populated and that quiet leaves a great deal more room for turning inward. The only thing in the world I know for sure is I work best when I don't know if I'm awake or asleep. Amy worries about me when I go through phases of not sleeping for days at a time, but those are specifically the days she shouldn't be worried about me.
PRIDE: Like Jon Brion's score for P. T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, the score to Orchard Vale—the music seems to convey more discordance than the spare, repetitive dialogue.
KINSELLA: I wrote the title theme and played along on some other stuff a little, but mostly just steered the process. Nate Kinsella wrote the piano theme that reappears in various warpings throughout. Josh Abrams and Ben Vida can both play any instrument at any moment and make it sound great. I would say, "How about something like this?" and they would take my idea a step deeper and better than I had imagined it. Mark Messing made strange sounds with lots of instruments you would never guess were instruments from just looking at them.
PRIDE: You don't have much wordplay. These characters have been dulled into a banality beyond survival... They've survived to survive, to live in a few daydreams each of what came before. There's not much flashy discourse unless you include the film's last line, which is so unlikely yet so bittersweet and so girlish and so childish and so mature, cadenced like a small girl's equivalent of the opening line of "A Hundred Years of Solitude," which would be some kind of sendoff in any case. I don’t mean that pretentiously or preciously at all, but there's a precision and ache there, the sensations of a sensual moment she recalls that's forever a splinter in mind.
KINSELLA: I like that about the last line. Thanks.
PRIDE: Were you planning to have this much music and for it to be so integral?
KINSELLA: Not at all. I really hoped to make something like the Dardenne brothers or Michael Haneke. I am pretty excited about this contemporary approach to film making, that is, demanding such patience from the audience is certainly a subversive act. But as our movie was beginning to take shape, it became apparent that certain dimensions were lacking to see that vision through successfully. It just wasn't kinetic enough or compositionally developed enough to survive like that. So it needed a little boost. I felt unsure about how to approach it and wasn't into corrupting the original idea for months until I stopped thinking about it and then all at once I just knew how it should be.
PRIDE: Do you like quieter scores and sound design in movies? Examples? We were talking recently about Walter Murch's ideas about subtraction in sound and reflecting the aural sculpture of urban spaces...
KINSELLA: Equally as big an influence as the Murch articles I'd gotten absorbed in was the running gag in the Tromaville movies in which someone in the frame drops or throws something outside the frame and then a cat which has never been seen or referred to in any way before screeches.
PRIDE: How'd you keep yourself from working in a dense wordplay like your song lyrics?
KINSELLA: That was never an issue. The mediums are so totally different that even if the ambitions of my efforts with either form overlap in some ways, creating a half-dream state of some kind, the means of aiming towards those ends are so different. I think a lot of what I've learned through music in broader terms, both administrative and dynamic, gave me a boost towards engineering this fiasco. But there was never a temptation to try to replicate anything that might be seen from the outside as some signature style of mine or whatever.
PRIDE: Was there more chat in the writing or shooting? How'd you work with actors as a first-time director? Non-actors, I believe, for the most part.
KINSELLA: There was a lot more chatter in the first version of the script we all sat down with together. By the time we began shooting, it had been whittled down and streamlined a good deal. But the biggest leaps definitely came in later edits. Many of the scenes which seemed well balanced on their own suddenly seemed clunky and weighted down once they were placed side-by-side with other scenes. Once we got into taking out single lines within scenes, things really opened up. In the original concept, which includes how we shot it, there was a much more deliberate and exaggerated sense of cycles of long silences followed by babble. 
Once we started cutting, it really became apparent how totally boring both long silences and babble are and though moments of each have survived into our final cut, it was really torturous originally. The actors were all great to work with. I was very aware of positive reinforcement because we were all feeling our way through it together. I was mostly there to just keep everyone cool, make sure no one got too anxious about trying to act, and beyond that it was just talking through the characters with each of them and coming to decisions together.
PRIDE: Has this experience suited your customary method? If there's frustration, shift, surprise yourself? You've always seemed willing to say, "Fuck, my instinct was wrong and not my instinct is to try this. Fuck. What now?"
KINSELLA: When my customary method is explained back to me like that then I would have to say yeah, this suited my lifestyle micro and macro perfectly. But maybe you know me a bit too well to be interviewing me about that, I don't want to have to think of my customary method like that.
PRIDE: How long did you shoot? Edit? How did you collaborate with Chris Strong?
KINSELLA: Primary shooting was done in two absurdly long weekends last August [2006]. Beyond that, there were two afternoons and a few evenings over the next couple of months. The second long weekend, we ended up getting rained out with one scene left to go and we were up in Wisconsin. When we organized to all go back up to Wisconsin to shoot one scene, the van broke down on the highway. Then the dudes grew their beards back over the winter, tried to shoot again in April and a blizzard literally appeared out of nowhere right after we got the lights set up. It had been a month since snow. I won't tell you which scene it was, but we re-conceptualized it and it became a piece of cake. The fates were on my side. Editing began with thirty-five hours of footage and just sorting through it and I would make notes about all the takes and Amy would piece the scenes together while sitting with my notes and then it was just a long process of negotiation. Really I feel like we are now better suited to work as marriage counselors than filmmakers. 
Editing took from about nine months, a couple weeks at a time of concentrated attention and then a couple weeks off to get some perspective when we'd return to it. While shooting I'd say we were at pretty even thirds, me, Amy and Chris with coming up with specific camera set-ups or approaches to certain scenes. I had about half the screenplay story-boarded and very deliberately left the other half more open, but we were working at such an absurd pace that a few of my set-ups got simplified and blown off or blown through just to keep on schedule. Chris dealt with the practical aspects of lighting strategies and now color correction, but while shooting Amy had an equal say as me and Chris. Or you know, equal to Chris and more than me…
PRIDE: You were talking to me before about how dark you wanted the finished product to look, and how a local journalist had unwittingly asked for an image from the film that wasn’t dark.
KINSELLA: We're having a terrible time figuring out which monitor to trust—this color stuff is killing us.
PRIDE: You'd been talking for a while about another script, as I recall. Something like a latter-day John Hughes story shot in one simple location, a la Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth. How'd this one get to the front of the line? Is there anything about the practical location or the origin of the story you could share?
KINSELLA: We spent a year trying to figure out how to shoot the other script I had written, "Budding." It is a story of grown-up burnouts living in their parents' basements in the suburbs. But it just proved impossible to shoot with our budget—zip, zero, zilch—too many locations, too many characters, quasi-epic screenplay. So we tallied our resources like actors and locations, and I wrote the screenplay specifically with that in mind. There were, of course, a few minor holes to plug up. The story was greatly influenced by living with Amy while she was cutting [Usama Alshaibi's documentary] Nice Bombs, so every time I'd walk in the room there'd be some horrible Baghdad reality, as well as my cousin [Nate Kinsella] getting out of jail and telling me stories. The screenplay is really a warped consolidation of those two influences.
PRIDE: I know you'd personally avoid the comparison, but the young girl's hopeful voiceover and the film's confinement mostly to one location (in the "present" portion of the story) do share some of the aspects of "The Diary of Anne Frank." But Anne Frank never knew how hopeless things were, did she? There's a terrible, pervasive sensation of helplessness in the actions of these characters that have been stripped of civilization.
KINSELLA: I wasn't avoiding the comparison at all. In fact I was describing it to people as "Anne Frank set in the future" until Amy ordered a cease-and-desist order on that phrase fearing people may find it insensitive or coarse. So I can't say I was thinking of that, but I'm pleased to hear if that was evoked in any manner.
PRIDE: You don't specify how long suburbia's been divided into hermits and roving gangs. What's fearful is to consider it could be seventy-two hours or seventy-two days after the failure of the electrical grid and other fully accepted, fully expected parts of the infrastructure. You stay close in. You don't know about collapsed bridges or burning city centers. Onward and inward... Hermits and drunks and childlike dreamers lie as bait for marauders. You sit still, a target, or you move, seeking targets.
KINSELLA: Yeah, keeping time and space constantly ambiguous seemed vital to any tension we hoped to create. We didn't want to attempt to show this tension, but more to create a strange time/space hanging there as if the frame were a cage and the tension was creeping in from outside the frame. Did we succeed at that? I have no idea, I'm too in the middle of it by this point to even know if it comes off as a farce or just a sloppy pile or what. In a way I can only talk about our intentions, even if that is totally meaningless compared to what actually exists.
PRIDE: Have you read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"?
KINSELLA: No. Don't know what that is.
PRIDE: Are there other things you've read, fiction or nonfiction that made you think about how fragile the tendrils of technology are? There's a modest form of road rage from most people now if they discover a brief, momentary period their cell phone can't find a signal.
KINSELLA: Yeah. I suffered from severe zombie-apocalypse daydreams for years. Like whenever I would be in a crowd I would just be looking at people and imagine what it would take to transform everyone instantly into snarling dogs snapping at each other. I couldn't shake it for years. Shooting this has really helped me work through that and really improved my overall mindset in a lot of ways. My anxiety was really off the charts all the time about seemingly impossible scenarios; the sky cracking open and bleeding Biblical shit, but also all the liberal-rapture scenarios of environmental devastation a la [James Howard Kunstler's nonfiction book] "The Long Emergency" and political doublespeak towards an endgame of fascism that requires no use of force, its spiritual and mental bondage is so strong. I don't know. Complex systems collapse easily. I never don't feel like we're in the salad days now and living on borrowed time. It's a floating historical moment. There are no roots to connect us to any living history. Everything can evaporate and everyone would be cool with it. But my anxiety is more rooted in what if we don't all evaporate, but what if we are instead all forced to live with the repercussions, the flipside of our blessings, living in our own filth. I guess it'd be tough for a little while, and then slowly, like any heartbreak dissolves, everyone would just fall back into gossip and small hierarchies.
PRIDE: The young girl's memories are shown as cutouts floating across brightly lit public spaces that are surely deserted in the story's present tense—it's pragmatic for the budget and size of your production, but did you arrive at this without consideration of cost?
KINSELLA: More so than cost, it meant a lot to me to portray the suburbs as a dream-world utopia. That may in fact be the central motivating force to the entire movie, how to establish the circumstances in which I can show mall culture as a dream.
PRIDE: How'd you arrive at this bunch to represent the remnants of civilization?
KINSELLA: Mostly, they were the people I know with enough mutual trust to all get into doing this together. Cyan [Walker, who plays the young girl] and my uncle [Gene Blake] were vital to me to distinguish it from being a movie by a thirtysomething bohemian that shows a world populated exclusively by thirtysomething bohemians. I was Cyan's babysitter when she was a little kid, and I knew she would be great. And my uncle has always been a good sport and a spontaneous clown with some critical depth and an occasional sad streak to him, so there was no question it would be exciting, and important even, to work together. We were shooting in my dad's apartment shortly after my dad died and my uncle was the MC for his service as well as his old business partner and it was an act of temporary adoption in a way for him to get behind me with this. Joe's character was transposed into the story from another project Amy and I had been talking to Joe about getting into, the Christian gay-reformists.
PRIDE: Does Orchard Vale reflect on your own childhood experiences in suburbia? As a punk escapee from a young age?
KINSELLA: Amy sees the whole thing as just my tour-analogy, everyone locked in together and coping in their own way. I don't disagree, but it's equally "high school cafeteria."
PRIDE: Are you still discovering things in these last hours of post? What sort of tweaks are you making last minute? Sometimes when I write movie reviews, I think I'm translating messages that haven't been sent, but that's the beauty of any complex assembly that hopes to be artful, the subconscious is doing some heavy lifting no matter what the conscious intentions of the makers.
KINSELLA: Yeah, there are new rhyming patterns and tiny logics revealed every time I see it. I'm now in gynecologist mode, to steal Albini's analogy, so when I actually get the rare chance to see it all the way through, I am surprised over and over. Embarrassed at times and thrilled at others with how stuff seems to materialize from the resonance between moments.
PRIDE: Do you read reviews of your music? There's a streak out there of folks who like to hate your work. What's a phrase you've read you can't shake?
KINSELLA: I don't know. Out of survival I have had to give up completely on worrying about how I can be perceived by people I don't know. It used to scare me that I could come across so at odds with what I thought my motives to be, but it's too far beyond my control to waste any mind-space with. Consumer culture flips things on their heads to sell them, if I somehow line myself up to be consumed, I shouldn't complain when I get flipped on my head.
PRIDE: When's the next Joan of Arc album? What's its shape or form or configuration? Are you happy with it?
KINSELLA: I love the batch of songs that live in my room. I have never enjoyed working on music more than I am these days when I can steal an hour or two to sit with something. We are recording the new record in October for a summer 2008 release on Polyvinyl.
PRIDE: Coming down to the wire, what's your biggest fear about the two shows a week from Wednesday?
KINSELLA: Just the general public humiliation and ridicule before ones' peers. These fears are requiring an awful lot of attention these days. [Ray Pride; photograph of Tim Kinsella © 2007 Ray Pride; all others courtesy orchardvalethemovie.com.]
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August 10, 2007
The wages of writing about mortality...
It must have been inevitable after posting a list of the world's living directors who are AARP-eligible: Mel Shavelson died, and while writing an entry about the anti-Bergman post-mortems, including Jonathan Rosenbaum's at the New York Times and Roger Ebert's reply, my laptop died. RIP, or RiBook, as the case may be. Back on the beat shortly.
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August 07, 2007
[LOOK] Trailering Hannah Takes The Stairs
August 22 from IFC First Take.
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August 05, 2007
Schrader on that so-called golden age
Talking to Stephen Dalton at the Times, Paul Schrader offers perspective about the 1970s movie "renaissance". “Yeah, that so-called golden age,” he shrugs. “It was a golden age in the sense that cinema was really important, it had a powerful role in society. Movies really mattered. There were a lot more serious movies being made and people thought of movies a lot more seriously. That is true, but there was also a lot of junk.” Lurid stories about Schrader abound in Peter Biskind’s controversial postmortem on 1970s [American movies]. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." Cocaine, porn, nervous breakdowns and backstage bust-ups figure heavily. But like most of the heavyweight names whose highs and lows Biskind documents, Schrader dismisses the book as overblown quasi-fiction. “It was just a patchwork quilt of gossip of innuendo,” he argues. “Peter had himself a great theme but rather than do a solid book he decided to do a gossip book. It’s full of false things about people I know, one after another. It was a classic case of print the myth. It’s second, third, fourth-hand gossip. That’s why it pissed a lot of people off.”
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August 03, 2007
The Bourne Ultimatum (*** 1/2)
PAUL GREENGRASS HAS AGAIN TAKEN THE ESSENTIAL CIRCUS OF THE GLOBE-GIRDLING ACTION EPIC and distilled it to action/reaction/action. Arguably, The Bourne Ultimatum is as much a sequel to his United 93 as to the second Bourne entry. The dispensation with backstory in his 9/11 thriller was about the now: if we were there in that fated missile toward death, how would we 
react to what went on around us? We know the ending. What Greengrass excels at in his recent movies is sustaining moment and momentum. Knowing the then and then of the first pair of Bournes, we witness the character’s propulsion, blank-faced, cold-eyed, vein-templed, toward the idea of who he was or the fact of who he is in 2007, this killer who was tortured into shape by his own government, molded into one who reacts rather than acts, steeled by the language of contemporary spycraft and black arts. Bourne hardly speaks; the secret agency handlers like David Straitharn supply almost the entirety of the verbiage in verbal scowls comprised of the lingo of torture and “rendition” toward death in distant lands that are friendly to foul play. (Bourne’s recurrent memory of his training is comprised of two images: someone bound with their head covered by a black hood, and himself being tortured by an equivalent of waterboarding.) Greengrass exacts a narrative comprised of chases, with London’s coursing Waterloo Station the setting for one that seems unstoppable, at least until an acrobatic, athletic, mechanized chase through a Moroccan city’s streets and hillsides and rooftops that climaxes in confined space where there are two men, mano-a-mano, fighting to the death, jumpcut and accompanied only by the sounds of their lethal exertions. Finally it comes down to a book, a volume, an ordinary object, not Bible, not Koran, that becomes the deadliest threat. The winding path through the city toward this moment reduces the dilemma to its simplest part: kill or be killed. It hurts. In his movies since “Bloody Sunday,” Greengrass is less one-trick pony than one-man cavalry. This is stunning craft with quiet integrity despite the fury of its pace, and the final shot wittily suggests both a musical number and the opening graphics of a James Bond title sequence. With Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Albert Finney. [Ray Pride.]
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August 02, 2007
[LOOK] Bridge out
Gasp-worthy surveillance camera footage of moment rather than the net of happenstance and banality beloved by Ken Livingstone, Richard M. Daley and Michael Bloomberg.
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[LOOK] Trailering The Darjeeling Limited
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