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September 30, 2007
[LOOK] Paul Donellon's animated credits for Love in the Time of Cholera
Watch Paul Donellon's credit sequence for Mike Newell's filming of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel (adapted by Ronald Harwood). "The film is set in the early 1900s in Colombia, therefore I felt the sequence should not feel too digital and would have a handpainted oil painting feel to the rendering."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2007
C-C-C-Coffee?
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September 27, 2007
Posting shortly....
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September 25, 2007
Chicago Sun-Times brags on Ebert's "number one pundit" status
"Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, bested them and others to be named the most influential pundit in America by Forbes magazine," writes Maureen O'Donnell in a front-pager. "Forbes analyzed market research on more than 60 top pundits in current events, entertainment, law, politics and sports. Ebert "appeals to 70 percent of the demographic and [his] long career makes him well known to well over half the population,'' wrote Forbes' Tom Van Riper... The magazine's list of top pundits is "very impressive company,'' Ebert said by e-mail. "It never occurred to me anyone would make such a survey, especially since I never thought of myself as a pundit. . . . Maybe it means movies are more popular than politics, and non-partisan.'' ... "Despite all my health adventures, I can still see, hear, and type, and now that print reviews are my only way to exercise the full range of my communication abilities, I find I write them with something approaching bliss,'' Ebert said.... "As one of my friends observed, 'Even if you lose your voice, Ebert, you've already talked more than enough.' "
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September 24, 2007
Indie returns late Tuesday
Gee whiz, what a lot of movie screenings...
[Photo © 2007 Ray Pride.]
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September 22, 2007
Michael Haneke: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence
Quoth Michael Haneke in a lengthy Sunday New York Times profile by novelist John Wray: "The decision to remake his signature work in America with an A-list cast caused considerable controversy among hardcore cinephiles, not least because of Haneke’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics. Haneke was quick to defend himself. “Of course I’m a critic of the studio system,” he said, as if it were unthinkable not to be. “But that doesn’t mean that one can’t work within that system. ‘Funny Games’ was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence. And nothing has changed about that attitude since the first version of my film was released — just the opposite, in fact.” When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.” [The trailer for the 2008 release is above.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2007
Eau de Alicia Silverstone
If there are folks who are upset in Houston over the fragrance-advert-like imagery of this commercial, they ought to go over to the site it's advertising for explicit footage of animal slaughter. A lighter touch... Reports the LA Times, "The 30-year-old actress set off a firestorm of interest -- and, apparently, controversy -- by posing nude in a television commercial on behalf of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Silverstone, a well-known animal rights activists and environmentalist, is shown swimming in a pool naked and talking about the beauty of a vegetarian lifestyle."
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September 20, 2007
[LOOK] "Leave room now" scene from Eastern Promises
An icy clip from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2007
[LOOK] Postering I'm Not There
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2007
indie returns Wednesday afternoon
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September 17, 2007
The Reeler talks Last Winter (and Hostel) with Larry Fessenden
"As someone who makes strong horror films with unmistakably thematic interests, how do you react to directors like Eli Roth," queries S. T. Van Airesdale over at The Reeler "and others who retroactively attempt to defend their own work with such metaphorical or thematic values?" Larry Fessenden, whose latest is the global-warming horror, shot in Iceland Last WInter, following his equally snowy Wendigo, replies, "It's funny you ask. I just watched Hostel for the first time; I didn't enjoy or find the merits of Cabin Fever, so I had somewhat written Eli off. I know he's always whining in the press, defending his movies, so I thought I should see Hostel. In fact, I was asked to write something about my movie versus torture porn. I watched it and I didn't find it offensive the way I thought I would. I thought I would find it contemptible. Sure, it's homophobic in the sense that he's got some issues, but it's not like he's not aware that he's not dealing with that sort of thing. The sexual politics and the hatred of Americans was interesting enough, and the torture did not seem extraneous. It was obviously the point of the movie, and it was scary and doled out pretty tastefully considering the whole thing is repugnant. I think some of the later Saw movies are truly perverse, and a lot of the remakes have no agenda whatsoever. I've been thinking about it a lot, because some people hate The Last Winter, of course, and you get into this thing where it becomes hard to discuss. My movies have themes; I present them without shame. I'm a sincere filmmaker, and fuck it if you can't take that. As for Eli, he does protest too much. I do find him unappealing as a public figure, but he's making his money, so whatever. He can always say that, and he always does, and I also find that tiresome. The worst pieces of shit make money; it's hardly an excuse. It hardly represents how well he's doing. But I couldn't completely dismiss Hostel."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)
Wes Anderson gets in the toybox with Ma Bell
Extending theatrical-style scene changes that Francis Ford Coppola hoped to perfect after One From The Heart caught fire from sea to shining sea (and that George Clooney did cleanly in Good Luck, And Good Night) Mr. Anderson and the phone company collaborate on some Klever Krayoning. Or, as Reuters puts it "hiply," "AT&T plans edgy wireless ad campaign." "AT&T Inc said on Tuesday it was launching a new corporate advertising campaign, with ads designed to convey a younger, edgier style associated with wireless. The company's "Your Seamless World" corporate ad campaign features situations that "speak to the on-the-go lifestyle of today's consumers and businesses." The campaign includes six television spots overseen by Wes Anderson... AT&T also said it will now use orange as its primary corporate color. Ads, company signage and its Web site are undergoing a "color makeover," the company said. "The new initiatives are designed to highlight how AT&T helps connect people to their worlds wherever they live and work," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a statement. "We want to ensure this message is reflected in our brand."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)
Coming in December from Criterion...
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK] Peter Falk is 80
A scene from Elaine May's Mikey & Nicky.
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September 12, 2007
[Toronto] Eastern Promises (****, 2007)
DAVID CRONENBERG'S LATEST MOVIE IS ABOUT MANY THINGS. Superficially, Eastern Promises is the veteran director's second gangster thriller, after A History of Violence, and it provides the most succinct definition yet of "balls-out action." (More on than in a moment, if you haven't heard too much already.) Eastern Promisesis 
audacious in its simplicity and pared-down qualities. There's so much more here than a stylized Russian mafia story and the fact of contemporary sex slavery. The hard, steely light and pointedly clean geometry Cronenberg and his cinematographer Peter Suschitzsky prefer are in evidence in the opening three scenes, each slimed with a different form of a gush of viscous red that moves like flesh made liquid. A man dies. A child is born. The mother dies. Cronenberg does not fear the display of blood: he's more concerned with evoking the fear of the susceptibility and defenselessness of the human body against intrusion.
London is mostly night and brackish rain. Anna (Naomi Watts) is a midwife who wants to find the family of the dead girl, who left a daughter and a diary behind, written in Russian. Conveniently, her uncle Stepan (played as a great, gruff boor by Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski [Deep End]) is Russian and dismisses all of Anna's own losses and fears until he reads the terrible things in the little book. (Another director, Mike Sarne, of the notorious Myra Breckenridge, also appears, as a character named "Valery Nabokov," evoking two of Cronenberg's favorite writers.)
Watts is tremulous, her Anna always alarmed and shot as tiny, vulnerable on her motorcycle coursing through the narrow ways of London with oversized helmet and goggles that make her look like a bug. (The bike had been her Russian father's, a rarity called a Ural; another bit that will extend.)
A business card leads Anna to a restaurant where the girl may have worked, and whose patriarch, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), is actually a powerful mobster. He has a weak, drunken son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and Kirill's driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) is a taciturn enforcer whose reserve and constant watchfulness allows facts and history to emerge only in rare words and rarer sentences. Often very funny ones: once Mortensen appears, the film morphs into a very black comedy while balancing other fearsome notes. Surely an inside joke is that Mortensen's hair is an almost comic caricature of Cronenberg's own tall, stiff mane.)
The storytelling is disorienting at first, with the sturdy cast going through the setup in close-ups and medium shots. The script, by Stephen Knight (screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things, and creator of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire") is shot through with lovely, Shakespeare-ish apothegms and epigrams, but it's a concatenation of blank terse: "You play with a prince to do business with a king"; "There are always open doors"; "Slaves give birth to slaves" and "He offered me stars. I accept." More like the Cronenberg of body-mod yore is Nikolai's reflection as he accepts a rite of passage; "Now I live in the zone all the time."
The pacing grows more startling and increasingly thrilling in the tautness of story and the spirals, emotional and thematic, which eddy outward. Material involving Russian prison tattoos becomes another form of storytelling, added to the history slowly revealed by the dead girl's voice reciting passages from her diary in posthumous voiceover. "If you don't have tattoos, you don't exist," we learn: the history of the gangsters is written on their flesh by their elders.
There are other lovely, mostly subtle motifs. A bold one is that Anna lost a child herself, and comes to love the child in these few days between Christmas and the New Year. Added to all the other strands, these functions less schematically than as the work of a cinematic poet. The stuff of Eastern Promisesis asserted in the most concrete ways while deeper portent, elusive and hardly specific, rises to the surface in an ultimately touching fashion. The characters' phrasings, mostly gnomic, become lyrical through repeated variations.
Honor and pride and revenge career out of control. "London! City of howars and kveers!" Semyon sneers after a betrayal. Pounds of flesh may be required. The macho is bulletproof but the body is not. "I'm just a driver," Nikolai insists. More ominously, "They have just arrived from the mountains" is not what you want to hear regarding a clutch of Chechen hitmen. Their man-on-man mano-a-mano with Nikolai in an archaic steam bath extends Cronenberg's insistence on action occurring in approximate real time, in wider angles without editing tricks, as in his Crash and A History Of Violence to a staggering extreme: a five-minute sequence of fisticuffs and knives with two leather-jacketed killers while Nikolai is naked exceeds the viscera(l) force of any of the brilliant "body horror" notions in his earlier, more SF-flavored work, such as Videodrome placing a vaginal VHS entry slot into James Woods' stomach. The threat of puncture by parry is matched by thrusts that threaten sinew, flank, balls, cock. Nikolai's body is exposed, cut, beaten, violated, like the dead, beaten, cut, raped 15-year-old girl whose voice wafts above all.
There are more turns than alluded to here; the adept feints and dodges in the plotting that are less brusque elision than a demonstrable confidence that belaboring the turns would be a waste of time. Tonally superior to A History of Violence, What begins as a parable about pride becomes a compact masterpiece about compassion. [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[Toronto] The Brave One (*** 1/2, 2007)
NEIL JORDAN'S BEST WORK AS A WRITER AND DIRECTOR IS CUSTOMARILY WHEN HE DRAWS FROM FAIRYTALE FORM, ranging from In The Company Of Wolves to The Miracle, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, allusions to Alice in Wonderland are recurrent, as in the fate that meets New York public radio host Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) when she and her boyfriend (Naveen Andrews) walk their dog in Central Park late one night. It runs into an underpass at Stranger's Gate at the far north of the park at 106th Street, and it's down the rabbit hole for Erica. (Call it "This American Strife.") After the brutal mugging and weeks in a coma, Erica tries to return to her everyday life, which no longer exists—especially after she buys a gun illegally and soon un-lucks onto a liquor store robbery with queasy echoes of a similar scene in Taxi Driver, a fever dream of Manhattan paranoia and feelings of helplessness that Foster had no small role in. While Death Wish is a movie that The Brave One will be paired with by some reviewers, as Foster's steely version of Terry Gross is taken as a Charles Bronson vigilante—NPR meets NRA—there are other fevered Manhattan-set movies that it evokes, such as Abel Ferrara's city-of-death Bad Lieutenant and female revenge Ms. 45 as well as the lurid, moist In the Cut by Jane Campion. Jordan and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot impressively create a fearful post-9/11 milieu, and the liberties taken with topography and plot logic are often quite beautiful to observe: the fears in the world at large are reduced to the potential for harm on modern city streets. Yet the folie-a-deux between Erica Bain and the cop on her tail (perhaps too literally so), Mercer (Terrence Howard), which also arrives at absurdity, the simplicity, directness and brisk, assured pacing—despite expressionist explosions of sudden violence—make this conflicted amorality tale into more than hothouse lyricism or the latest in Foster's lineage of victims who correct wrongs (The Accused, Flightplan, Panic Room) Make no mistake: still, this small, fierce woman's brute cheekbones are an axiom of modern American cinema. Like David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, The Brave One is fearless even at its most foolish. Nicky Katt is a standout as Mercer's droll sidekick. [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[Toronto] Across The Universe (*, 2007)
ANYONE WHO'S LIVED THE PAST FEW DECADES AND MOVED THROUGH PUBLIC SPACE has swum atop a sea of songs by Lennon and McCartney: so much so that their sounds, depending on the listener, have become either aural wallpaper or dreary irritant. That's why it's exciting when someone comes up with a cover like the one of The Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" used twice in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men: suddenly the craft of too-familiar yet stellar songwriting seems fresh once more. (Ubiquity is not the same as propinquity.) The same can't be said by the grandiose folly of Julie Taymor's third theatrical feature, Across The Universe, which mostly evokes a tiptoe by elephants working on the side as advertising copywriters but still trampling the Sony-owned Beatles songbook for which a cool $10 million was reportedly passed along for the rights to the songs, but not the original versions. Collaborating with screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais (Flushed Away, Vice Versa) Taymor goes in for the fatally twee affect of giving characters names like Prudence... Lucy... Maxwell... JoJo... Jude... Hey, Julie? It's like a shout-out to your own cleverness. (Prudence? After a few reels' absence, yes, she comes in through the bathroom window.) The late 1960s war-and-protest setting is enlivened largely by the intrusion of contemporary commentary and parallels, which bluntly suggests the folly of sending young generations to war will always be compounded by hidden faces. It's elephantine whimsy with occasional inspired and quite beautiful images, such as when a splat of strawberry against a white wall becomes an acre of flaming napalm in a Southeast Asian jungle. But a moment on an Ohio football field where an Asian-American cheerleader in a golden uniform gazes longingly at her love while football players careen and pinwheel on the green turf behind her and she sings an a cappella version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to that other, female cheerleader, tears welled up from how poignant, how piercing that brief moment was. There's also a sweet, strange gag, involving the passing of a roach in a frathouse which is invisible, but we hear a harmonica zing each time, then the final inhalee blows smoke: reportedly Taymor made the change to assuage the ratings board, digitally eliding the offending object. Nothing's that consistent, however, but the inclusion of soldiers in tighty-whities bearing a Statue of Liberty on their shoulders while stomping as giants across a tiny palm-studded landscaped is typical of the bold visual gambits Taymor finds but for the life of her cannot integrate into anything more than second-rate vaudeville. The lead love story is between the damp Joe Anderson and frail, pale, lissome Evan Rachel Wood, who brings to mind images of her recent public snogs with Marilyn Manson. Bono, performing "I Am The Walrus," and Eddie Izzard, as Mr. Kite, are merely insufferable; the SDS and terrorism elements less offensive than oddly unenlightening and an anti-Catholic-cum-dervish musical number is just jejune. All you need is rewrite... [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 11, 2007
[LOOK] The Daisy Spot (1964, ****)
A comprehensive history of one of the most notorious short films ever made: the one-time only broadcast of a 1964 LBJ campaign spot against Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. From the site's introduction: "Every election season when politicians unleash their expensive and (usually) unimaginative attack ads, op-ed writers invoke the unofficial title of the most notorious 60 seconds in advertising history: "The Daisy Ad" (official title: "Peace, Little Girl," aka "Daisy Girl," "The Daisy Spot, "aka "Little Girl – Countdown"). The spot features a little girl picking petals off of a daisy in a field and counting out of sequence just before an adult voiceover interjects a "military" countdown which is then followed by stock footage of a nuclear explosion and the cautionary words of President Lyndon B. Johnson: "These are the stakes – to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." The ad – which never identifies its target – was aimed at reinforcing the perception that the 1964 Republican candidate for president, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, could not be trusted with his finger on the button. As has often been recited, the Daisy ad aired only once as a paid advertisement – on NBC during the network movie (DAVID AND BATHSHEBA) on Monday, September 7, 1964.[ 5 ] Since that long ago Labor Day, the film of the child and her daisies has been re-played millions of times. The spot was and still is a masterpiece of manipulation, juxtaposing the playful innocence of childhood with the protocol and horror of war. The simplicity of the message was made all the more effective because the 1964 campaign took place less than two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and within three years of the Berlin crisis in which President John F. Kennedy rattled the nation with his remarks on the importance of civil defense.[ 6 ] In other words, the "end of the world" was not an abstract concept for most Americans during this period of the Cold War. It was a very real possibility..." There's a wealth more at the Conelrad site. [H/t Boing-Boing.]
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September 10, 2007
Indie returns Wednesday afternoon
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September 09, 2007
[LOOK] The Shock Doctrine (2007, ****), by Naomi Klein, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón.
The Shock Doctrine is playing at Toronto; a better version can be downloaded at Klein's site, where she writes that when she finished her new book, of the same title, "I sent it to Alfonso Cuarón because I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones. I was hoping he would send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists -- including Jonás Cuarón who directed and edited -- to make The Shock Doctrine short film. It was one of those blessed projects where everything felt fated." (There's one more showing in Toronto, September 15 at 10:30.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2007
Indie returns over the weekend
[Photo © Ray Pride.]
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September 05, 2007
Sometimes I do love Mark Cuban: Calling bull on Bill
""I got this question from Mr OReilly's producers," Mark Cuban posts at his BlogMaverick site (the typos, as always, are Mr. Cuban's own).
From: "Watters, Jesse"
To: Mark.Cuban@dallasmavs.com
Cc: mark@hd.net
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2007 13:14:55 -0400
Subject: o'reilly factor request
> Mr. Cuban,
>
> The Factor will be doing a segment this evening on Redacted...which, as
> you know, depicts US atrocities in Iraq. The director says the the
> depicted rape is "the reality" of what is happening in that country.
> Of all of the schools that are being built, the medical care being
> supplied, and the security that our soldiers have been providing to
> Iraqi neighborhoods...do you agree that a few random and horrific
> crimes represent the norm of what is going on in that newly liberated
> country? and what exactly was it about the film that made you want to
> produce it?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jesse Watters
> The O'Reilly Factor
> Fox News
> 212-xxx-xxxx
From: "Mark Cuban"
To: "Watters, Jesse"
Cc: mark@hd.net
Date: 09/04/2007 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: o'reilly factor request
No, it doesnt represent the norm and the movie doesnt say it represents
the norm. Seperate the self promotion of Brian Depalma from the movie. The
movie is fully pro Troops. The hero of the movie is a soldier who stands
up for what is right in the face of adversity.
Maybe Bill can attempt to be fair and balanced and actually see the movie
before he thinks he knows what he is talking about.
And this is one of many movies we produce. I actually have seen it and
think it is an amazing movie. But to answer your question, I didnt read
the script or know all that much about it before we greenlit it. As we do
with several big name directors, we give them carte blanche in producing
their movies.
And to pre empt some of the stupidity coming from bloggers, I am fully Pro
Troops, Pro America. I think that the concept that the enemy will see
these films and use it as motivation is total nonsense. We have no plans
of translating these movies to arabic or other middle eastern languages.
Nor will we provide batteries or electricity for them to watch bootleg
DVDs as some zealots have suggested online.
And no , I am not involved in Loose Change. No I didnt finance it. No I
didnt plan to have it translated to multiple languages as Mr Oreilly
claimed on air. His command of the facts is truly abysmal.
What other lies has Bill spread that I can dispel ?
...
Oh, and I dont know how bill feels about No End in Sight, but we
distributed that movie as well.
Thats my feedback for Mr Bill
m
...
Which leads to my position on the Iraqi War. I hate that thousands of our troops have died. It sickens me to think of how their families must feel and every single day I wake up I say thank you to them, as I thank all those who have come before them for their sacrifices to make this country so great and to give me the opportunity to live the life I have and enjoy my family. I have never, nor will I ever take for granted the liberties we have in this country
That said, I don't agree or disagree with the war because I don't know enough. There isn't enough information available to me to take a position beyond hoping that it runs its course very very quickly and our troops return home safely as soon as it is viable.
And to anyone who has ever questioned my patriotism or love for this country, fuck you. [Photo from DePalma's Telluride Q&A conducted by Larry Gross © 2007 David Poland.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)