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October 31, 2007
Focus tests Jarmusch's Limits of Control
Better than one more trick-or-treat press release, especially with Chris Doyle shooting and a plot line that sounds like the template for a Claire Denis movie: "Focus Features has acquired worldwide rights to independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s new film, which is tentatively titled The Limits of Control. Mr. Jarmusch will start shooting the new picture in Spain in February. Focus Features International will commence overseas sales for the movie this week at the American Film Market. Focus CEO James Schamus made the announcement today... The new film is the story of a mysterious loner, a stranger, whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged. The film is set in the striking and varied landscapes of contemporary Spain (both urban and otherwise), and will star Isaach De Bankolé (marking the actor’s fourth collaboration with Mr. Jarmusch) and other acclaimed international actors to be named shortly. Stacey Smith, who has worked with Mr. Jarmusch for over a decade, and Gretchen McGowan (who co-produced the filmmaker’s Coffee and Cigarettes) will produce the new film. Award-winning cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love) will be the film’s director of photography; Eugenio Caballero, an Academy Award winner earlier this year for his art direction of Pan’s Labryinth, will be the film’s production designer." [Full release below.]
FOCUS FEATURES ACQUIRES WORLDWIDE RIGHTS TO
NEW FILM FROM WRITER/DIRECTOR JIM JARMUSCH
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEW YORK, October 31, 2007 – Focus Features has acquired worldwide rights to independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s new film, which is tentatively titled The Limits of Control. Mr. Jarmusch will start shooting the new picture in Spain in February. Focus Features International will commence overseas sales for the movie this week at the American Film Market. Focus CEO James Schamus made the announcement today.
The pact reunites the writer/director with Focus, which also handled his most recent film, Broken Flowers, after acquiring worldwide rights prior to the start of production. That film world-premiered at the 2005 Cannes International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. Upon its global release through Focus later that year, it became Mr. Jarmusch’s all-time top-grossing feature.
In addition to Broken Flowers, Mr. Jarmusch’s films include Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth, Dead Man, Year of the Horse, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Coffee and Cigarettes, and the short film “INT. TRAILER. NIGHT.”
The new film is the story of a mysterious loner, a stranger, whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged. The film is set in the striking and varied landscapes of contemporary Spain (both urban and otherwise), and will star Isaach De Bankolé (marking the actor’s fourth collaboration with Mr. Jarmusch) and other acclaimed international actors to be named shortly.
Stacey Smith, who has worked with Mr. Jarmusch for over a decade, and Gretchen McGowan (who co-produced the filmmaker’s Coffee and Cigarettes) will produce the new film. Award-winning cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love) will be the film’s director of photography; Eugenio Caballero, an Academy Award winner earlier this year for his art direction of Pan’s Labryinth, will be the film’s production designer. The filmmaker’s longtime collaborator Jay Rabinowitz will edit the feature. Jon Kilik (Babel) will executive-produce the film, continuing his association with Mr. Jarmusch.
President of production John Lyons and senior vice president, European production Teresa Moneo will oversee the project on behalf of Focus. Mr. Jarmusch and his company, PointBlank Films, were represented by Bart Walker of Cinetic Media in negotiating this agreement.
Mr. Schamus commented, “Jim Jarmusch defines what it means to be an independent filmmaker for audiences all over the world, and we’re delighted to rejoin with him following our success together with Broken Flowers.”
Focus Features (www.focusfeatures.com
In addition to Mr. Jarmusch’s new film, current and upcoming Focus Features releases include David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which won the top prize [the People’s Choice Award] at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival; Terry George’s Reservation Road, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly, and Mira Sorvino; Joe Wright’s Atonement, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Romola Garai; Shane Acker’s animated fantasy epic 9, starring Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly; Henry Selick’s stop-motion animated feature Coraline, starring Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher; Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes; Bharat Nalluri’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams; Cary Fukunaga’s immigrant thriller Sin Nombre; Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, starring George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and Brad Pitt; and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, winner of the Best Picture [Golden Lion] Award at the 2007 Venice International Film Festival.
Focus Features is part of NBC Universal, one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience. Formed in May 2004 through the combining of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, NBC Universal owns and operates a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group, and world-renowned theme parks. NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric and 20% owned by Vivendi.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2007
The prequel to Southland Tales?
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
Indie is at the movies
Back later today.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2007
Totally unrelated blog-a-thon: Why your blog must die
IT'S AN OLD SCREED, ONE THAT I LINKED TO A COUPLE YEARS AGO, but it's still fragrant. From a site called "kuro5hin.org," Why your Movable Type blog must die. "You are all pretentious twats. Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology." [Further spew at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)
Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon: "The Impact of the Cities," after Bertolt Brecht. [AN URBAN ADVENTURE IN 18 IMAGES.]
Leave the woman where she is.
She has two arms of her own
And two legs for that matter
(Which, sir, are no longer any affair of yours).
See that you yourself come through.
If you've got anything more to say
Say it to me, I'll forget it.
There's no one here to observe you.
If you come through
You'll have done more
Than anyone's obliged to.
Don't mention it.
Give up your dream that they will make
An exception in your case.
What your mother told you
Binds no one.
There's a home for you here
There's room for your things.
Move the furniture about to suit yourself
Tell us what you need
Here is the key
Stay here.
Here's where you're to sleep
The sheets are still clean
They're only been slept in once.
That's the room
Hurry up, or you can also stay
The night, but that costs extra
I shan't disturb you.
You'll be as well off here as anywhere else
So you might as well stay.
When I speak to you
Coldly and impersonally
Using the driest words
Without looking at you
(I seemingly fail to recognize you
In your particular nature and difficulty.)
I speak to you merely
Like reality itself
(Sober, not to be bribed by your particular nature
Tired of your difficulty)
Which in my view you seem not to recognize.
The cities were built for you. They are eager to welcome you.
The doors of the houses are wide open. The meal
Is ready on the table.
As the cities are very big
Experts have drawn maps for
Those who do not know the program, showing clearly
The quickest way to reach
One's goal.
As nobody knew exactly what you wanted
You are of course expected to suggest improvements.
Here or there
There may be some little thing not quite to your taste
But that will be put right at once
Without your having to lift a finger.
In short, you will be
In the best possible hands. Everything is completely ready.
All you
Need do is come.
Fall in! Why are you so late? Now
Just a minute! No, not you! You
Can clear out, we know you; it's no use your trying
To shove your way in here. Stop! Where do you think you're going?
So, of an evening, when we three sit drinking
And my friend shoves the cigarettes aside
And turns his eyes toward her, damply blinking
I see to it her glass is never empty
Forcing her willy-nilly to drink plenty
That she may notice nothing in the night.
[Text: Bertolt Brecht; Images © 2007 Ray Pride. Thanks: BB, SR, TL.] [This is entry 2,000 in this version of Movie City Indie.]
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October 26, 2007
Artist on Artist: MySpace's convo between Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Beige or vanilla, the choice is you...
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Totally unrelated blog-a-thon: The Armageddon cooler that is the G+T
As suggested by The Reeler, an entry about something in mind that has peripheral, if any relationship to the movies, this lovely anecdote from Friday's Wall Street Journal about JFK, the Bay of Pigs, and a sparkling refreshment: "On a warm day in December 1961, John F. Kennedy drank Gin and Tonics in Bermuda while working out the details of the end of the world. The president was meeting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, discussing how to combat the growing Soviet nuclear threat. Each had his own team of 
Strangeloves, and all were gathered for drinks before lunch. Among them was Macmillan's chief science adviser, Sir William Penney, the physicist who had built England's first nuke. Asked how many bombs Russia would need to destroy the U.K., Penney said, "It would take five or six, but to be on the safe side, let us say seven or eight, and" -- just at that moment a steward passed by -- "I'll have another gin and tonic if you would be so kind." This statement, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in "A Thousand Days," "uttered in one rush of breath, summed up for the Prime Minister and the President the absurdity of mankind setting about to destroy itself." For the rest of the summit, Kennedy and Macmillan used "I'll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind" as an all-purpose punch line."
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Silent no more at Silent Movie Theatre
You'll have to agree that L.A.'s relaunched Silent Movie Theatre has a lovely, lovely program. You can download it at the link: the rep sked they're running is one of the most ambitious I've seen in ages.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)
[FETISH]: The I Am Cuba boxset
Arriving November 20 from Milestone Films, in time for self-getting and gift-getting. If you don't know this astonishing, staggering movie, shot by visionaries with a handheld Eclair—or what Paul Thomas Anderson keenly appropriated for a major scene in Boogie Nights—do check out this remarkable long take. More when the set's released. [The trailer is here.]
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[LOOK]: Otto The Feral Cat And The Perfect Strangers
What did I just watch? [Via Cody Diablo's blog; find a Russian variant here.]
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October 25, 2007
Indie is at the movies
Thursday's screenings: Blade Runner; It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine.; American Gangster and a conversation with Crispin Glover. Back on Friday.
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October 23, 2007
Script to screen: reading Paramount Vantage's award contenders
Screenplays for awards consideration have been offered for download by studios on websites at least since Fine Line offered Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter in 1997, but Paramount Vantage is unusual in putting PDF files of its five 2007 potential year-end contenders on a public page. The titles include A Mighty Heart; Into the Wild; The Kite Runner and Margot at The Wedding. And if you follow the format of the four other URLs, you'll find Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:52 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
[PR] The Hotel Chevalier press release
Quoted, punctuation in the original: "LOS ANGELES, CA, October 22, 2007 – Due to overwhelming demand, Fox Searchlight Pictures announced today that it will add director Wes Anderson's short film HOTEL CHEVALIER, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, to Anderson's hit comedy THE DARJEELING LIMITED beginning on Friday, October 26. The short is a companion piece to the main feature and details the life of one of the three brothers in the film played by Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody. The short has been a popular download on iTunes during its month long availability which ends October 23. The film, together with the short, will expand into approximately 650 theatres.
"Fox Searchlight Pictures’ THE DARJEELING LIMITED set the all time record 2-day opening theatre average when it opened in New York theatres on Saturday, September 29. The film had its premiere as the opening night film of the New York film festival on Friday, September 28 and to date has grossed over $3.9 million on only 200 screens.
"HOTEL CHEVALIER was screened in four select Apple stores on September 25, with Anderson, Schwartzman and Portman at the Soho store in Manhattan to introduce the film and answer questions following the screening and Roman Coppola (co-writer, THE DARJEELING LIMITED) at the Chicago store as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco stores. On September 26, following the in store premiere, HOTEL CHEVALIER became available for download online exclusively at www.apple.com/itunes and has received hundreds of thousands of downloads.
Wes has crafted a brilliant companion piece to The Darjeeling Limited, adding to an already engaging and funny film," said Peter Rice, President of Fox Searchlight Pictures. After generating enormous buzz from festivals worldwide, we are thrilled to be showing these two films together in theatres for the first time." [Full release below.]
FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
A UNIT OF FOX FILMED ENTERTAINMENT
For Immediate Release
WES ANDERSON'S SHORT FILM "HOTEL CHEVALIER" TO JOIN
"THE DARJEELING LIMITED" IN THEATERS OCTOBER 26TH
LOS ANGELES, CA, October 22, 2007 – Due to overwhelming demand, Fox Searchlight Pictures announced today that it will add director Wes Anderson's short film HOTEL CHEVALIER, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, to Anderson's hit comedy THE DARJEELING LIMITED beginning on Friday, October 26. The short is a companion piece to the main feature and details the life of one of the three brothers in the film played by Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody. The short has been a popular download on iTunes during its month long availability which ends October 23. The film, together with the short, will expand into approximately 650 theatres.
Fox Searchlight Pictures’ THE DARJEELING LIMITED set the all time record 2-day opening theatre average when it opened in New York theatres on Saturday, September 29. The film had its premiere as the opening night film of the New York film festival on Friday, September 28 and to date has grossed over $3.9 million on only 200 screens.
HOTEL CHEVALIER was screened in four select Apple stores on September 25, with Anderson, Schwartzman and Portman at the Soho store in Manhattan to introduce the film and answer questions following the screening and Roman Coppola (co-writer, THE DARJEELING LIMITED) at the Chicago store as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco stores. On September 26, following the in store premiere, HOTEL CHEVALIER became available for download online exclusively at www.apple.com/itunes and has received hundreds of thousands of downloads.
“Wes has crafted a brilliant companion piece to The Darjeeling Limited, adding to an already engaging and funny film,” said Peter Rice, President of Fox Searchlight Pictures. “After generating enormous buzz from festivals worldwide, we are thrilled to be showing these two films together in theatres for the first time.”
HOTEL CHEVALIER was shot on location at the Hotel Raphaël in Paris approximately one year before THE DARJEELING LIMITED feature, and has been shown at numerous festivals worldwide. HOTEL CHEVALIER was written and directed by Wes Anderson. The thirteen minute short is set in a hotel room in France and stars Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman. It is the brief coda to a doomed romance and the prologue to THE DARJEELING LIMITED.
In THE DARJEELING LIMITED, three American brothers who have not spoken to each other in a year set off on a train voyage across India with a plan to find themselves and bond with each other -- to become brothers again like they used to be. Their "spiritual quest", however, veers rapidly off-course (due to events involving over-the-counter pain killers, Indian cough syrup, and pepper spray), and they eventually find themselves stranded alone in the middle of the desert with eleven suitcases, a printer, and a laminating machine. At this moment, a new, unplanned journey suddenly begins. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman star in this film about their adventure and their friendship. The film was written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman, produced by Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Roman Coppola and Lydia Dean Pilcher and executive produced by Steven Rales.
About Fox Searchlight Pictures:
Fox Searchlight Pictures is a specialty film company that both produces and acquires motion pictures. It has its own marketing and distribution operations, and its films are distributed internationally by Twentieth Century Fox. Fox Searchlight Pictures is a unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, a unit of Fox Entertainment Group.
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:51 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2007
[PR] Taming the Bee within
No one knows why North American bees are dying, but here's why The Bee Movie is thriving: From over the transom, McDonald's would like us to know about the recent event promoting their tie-ins for Jerry Seinfeld's The Bee Movie, with a guest appearance by Jeffrey Katzenberg to increase awareness about the educational aspects of selling both lines of product while also learning how to "Bee Good to the Planet." "McDonald’s® Launches DreamWorks’ Bee Movie™ Global Happy Meal® Promotion Extends Environmental Partnership with Conservation International to Reach Children Worldwide," the 
release is headed, pitching a successor to the Shrek the Third™ Happy Meal. "Beginning October 26 at McDonald’s restaurants in North America and rolling out around the globe through the end of the year, McDonald’s Bee Movie Happy Meal program features exclusive characters from DreamWorks’ upcoming Bee Movie film from creator Jerry Seinfeld. McDonald’s continues the fun online to reinforce the movie’s environmental message with eco-friendly tips provided by its long-time partner, Conservation International. Kids around the world are being invited to take the “Bee Good to the Planet” pledge at both happymeal.com and conservation.org and get active in protecting the environment." Notably, "McDonald’s is celebrating the arrival of the “Bee Movie” with a “Barry Approved” campaign. The promotion showcases Chicken McNuggets™ made with white meat and the movie’s main character, Barry B. Benson, on Apple Dippers (fresh, peeled apple slices with optional low-fat caramel dipping sauce) and low-fat white Milk Jugs served in child-friendly containers. The kids’ digital community 
encouraging kids to make “eco-pledges” to protect the environment, will be available in English in the U.S. on October 26 at www.happymeal.com." In Canada, the Happy Meal will have characters on the packaging "with Apple Slices and Milk Cartons. Honeycomb-flavored Sippah™ straws will be available with the purchase of McDonald’s Milk Jugs. Also moms will be recognized for their heroic efforts through the “Queen Bee” sweepstakes... Australia: McDonald’s restaurants will have Bee Movie themed PlayLands... United Kingdom: McDonald’s UK will be launching a new pineapple and grape fruit bag featuring graphics from the Bee Movie. To highlight the importance of bees and the process of pollination to the environment, there will be an on the box competition for children called “Draw one, Plant one” that asks them to draw their own “bee friendly” flower. Each child who submits a flower drawing will receive a packet of flower seeds to plant." [The complete release is below.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:44 PM
October 19, 2007
Something's gone Wong again and again and again: Weinsteinco's no-go on Blueberry for Christmas
The Weinsteinco/Dimension end-of-2007 release list just popped over the transom: Control is rolling out now; Frank Darabont's The Mist creeps along November 21; I'm Not There materializes the same date; Hayden Christensen is actually Awake November 30; Grace is Gone detonates December 7; Denzel Washington's Great Debaters tries to make a point on Christmas Day; Woody Allen's crime story (or criminal act, according to some early reviews) Cassandra's Dream opens December 28, approximately in Picturehouse's newly minted Spanish-language horror slot (Pan's Labyrinth; The Orphanage); and Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights is... is... erm... (I'm looking forward to seeing in next month—a lot of reviewers have suggested it would be improved by subtitles, and I'll see it with Greek ones on the opening night of November's festival in Thessaloniki.) [A late report: the U.S. will see it for Valentine's Day 2008. Happy V.D.!]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
Is it Safe? Todd Haynes plays doll parts
Todd Haynes' was at the New York Film Festival with I'm Not There, so he couldn't present Safe back home in Portland at the Northwest Film Center. Instead, he sent this, harking back to his Superstar days. Below, the trailer for the not-on-DVD Safe, the opening 10 minutes of the surpressed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, the trailer for I'm Not There, and a few words on "how to make it in Hollywood." [First clip via Film Experience.]
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Recollecting Joey Bishop: A food fight with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Regis Philbin
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
Yes, Norman Mailer on "The Gilmore Girls"
Honest to fug. H/t The Reeler.
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October 18, 2007
Indie is at the movies
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2007
Cinefile Video's groovy garb
Darn, they only sell them at their location next to the NuArt in West Hollywood...
But forget Von Trier and Fassbinder. What Know We Of Ingmar Bergman? Or Werner Herzog?
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK]: The Index Of Absence
IF A MOVIE, ANY MOVIE, WERE SET IN NEW YORK CITY THE SUMMER OF 2001 and its story ended before 9/11, it might well be near unbearable. Every gesture would be freighted. Every hope would glimmer with the possibility—nay, the fatedness—of sudden ruin and loss. A thought that came when I first saw a 40-minute video by a young Chicago video artist. Mary Scherer's artfully artless The Index of Absence V. 1. In notes toward the project, Scherer writes in unalloyed academese, perhaps a reflection of it being a BFA project. But the result is furious, precise, elusive and alive. She used to work at a coffee shop near where I live and co-workers and customers of that café, most in their 20s, comprise many of the 35 participants. I’m acquainted with some of the subjects, but the result would be as powerful even if they weren’t faces I see regularly. Each collaborator is asked to address the camera as if it were someone they lost, in whatever sense of the word. Abrupt cuts to black between the 60-second vignettes are part of the phenomenal power of the best bits: don't look away, don't look away, look away, look away.
The structure is based on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, but the segments—the subjects—are compelling on their own. Some are cryptic, others elliptical. Early on, a woman against a white wall, a cigarette alive below the frame, with cascading curls and silent movie star eyes, fidgets before exploding in anger at another woman whose betrayal is unspecified. ["Jessie," pictured.] Pages of writing are seen in mirror reflection along a hallway: a man enters, finishing a can of beer, strips down, leaves the frame, pitches himself against the pages, the wall. Again. ["Jeremiah," also on the site.]
In several segments, grandparents are evoked, those gone before these twentysomethings were even born. A filmmaker positions herself in darkness before a window during a lightning storm, with crackling results. An open-faced woman worries about "this virgin thing,” and her lack of sexual experience. My favorite line of the summer past is in another, the heartbreaking "I would have loved to have gone trainhopping with you.” (“That day, grandma, you were a knockout,” also made me cry.)
A markedly bearish man begins to cry, recalling that the number of someone he’s lost is still on his cell phone. In almost total darkness, a man shrouded in a hoodie remembers a dead friend. Another subject’s face is rounded by a hoodie: cigarette smoke rises as, almost without blinking, she recalls how she’s grown strong because of her late mother’s failures, resolute beyond her years, steadfast and articulate. That’s “the nature of family legacies,” she says, coolly, impressively.
Each person shot their own footage. “I thought that the participant should have complete control over the way they were shot,” Scherer tells me. “I knew that some participants might want to say something, but hide their identity. I wanted it to be clear to the audience that the participants were not exploited,” that they wanted to be part of the project. “They controlled how they were represented, and I even gave them first choice over which one minute segment I used. However, most participants allowed me that jurisdiction. Some participants had their own camera and I simply sent them the video format (mostly mini-DV, but also Hi-8 and DV-Cam) of their choice, and they mailed me the tape. I provided a camera to about half of the participants. I chose the most compelling one-minute moment, and then arranged them in the five stages of grief. Since the participants knew that I would be choosing one minute, many tried to fit everything that they wanted to say into a minute, which is an impossibility. I wanted to find the tip of the iceberg.” It’s an endlessly malleable notion. Scherer intends to make two more, with the elderly, to “see what an 80 year old has to say about loss,” and then children.
The final moment of Absence is chipper and hale: a 27-year-old filmmaker in a bright, flowered dress displays a camera from her collection to her late grandmother and says, “This is the dress you made for mama when she was the strawberry queen.” It’s a radiant envoi.
Four segments are at the project's website; this image is from "Jessie," a segment that seems brittle and forced until a certain, not-safe-for-work utterance takes even her aback. I don't know why it's so affecting: but it is.
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[LOOK]: Cinema's 100 Greatest Numbers
Via Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
DVD: Interkosmos (2006, *** 1/2)
Chicagoan Jim Finn’s first feature film, Interkosmos, is the sort of no-budget experimental lark that shouldn’t work at all, but it’s a lovely thing indeed, a weird original, of 16mm faux-documentary-cum-musical about an apocryphal 1970s Soviet program to train and indoctrinate non-socialist cosmonauts. Unexpected poetry seeps from its willful anachronism. The human figurines in the imaginatively mocked-up footage are convincing physical types sent through routines of a strange utopia that never was. The lovely, low-key score by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke includes several wonderfully goofy musical numbers. Minimalist yet expressive, it’s a real original. Among the eruptions of lilting peculiarity is an underwater battle between slight, great-eyed Nandini Khaund (as the first female Indian cosmonaut) and a large, bright, coiling snake. With Goran Milos, Dean Dematteis, Ruediger Van, Den Boom, Bettina Richards, an animated East German guinea pig, and Finn. [Facets Video, October 23; Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
[LOOK]: Postering The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
A lovely and wholeheartedly misleading poster for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
After interviewing Wes Anderson...
Wes Anderson chose to do a quick round of Chicago interviews for The Darjeeling Limited at the Drake Hotel, often seen on the lakefront in establishing shots in John Hughes movies.
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:47 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2007
A report from Monday's László Kovács tribute at Raleigh Studios
From Monday afternoon's tribute to the late, great cinematographer: Dennis Hopper said, "Laszlo was the greatest telephoto operator I know of. He was a great cinematographer. His lighting was quick, fast, and complete. We shot Easy Rider in five weeks going through and shooting in five different states. We used a fast film that had not been used before in feature movies. I would never have been able to make Easy Rider without Laszlo and Paul Lewis, my production ,anager who brought Mr. Kovacs to me. He said, "This is your man", and he certainly was. My vision for Easy Rider and The Last Movie , both shot by Laszlo, were simple, but very complicated. Since I was starring and directing in both films, hand signals were the way we communicated. That's how in the same groove we were. A wonderful, charming, hard-working genius. We are all lucky to have been his friend. He will not be missed, but will be with us forever through his films and our collective memory. GOD BLESS LASZLO KOVACS!" And Peter Bogdanovich: "Laszlo Kovacs and I did seven pictures together, more than I did with any other cinematographer, and the reason is simple: Laszlo was the most versatile director of photography. He could do anything and he did it with ease and charm and a kind of gracious intensity. It was enormously easy to work with him and always a lot of fun. When I did pictures without him, I always missed him. I miss him now. He was the best." [More at the jump; A brisk backgrounder on Kovacs is here; a photograph from the event Vilmos Zsigmond cinematographer, Audrey Kovács, wife of the late László Kovács, The Honorable Consul General of Hungary in Los Angeles, Ambassador Balázs Bokor, Nadia, the daughter of László Kovács, here.]
PRESS STATEMENT
OF THE CONSULATE GENERAL OF THE REPUBLIC OF HUNGARY
IN LOS ANGELES
ON THE FILM SEMINAR „IN MEMORY OF LÁSZLÓ KOVÁCS”
The Consulate General of Hungary in Los Angeles organized today a film seminar „In memory of László Kovács” at the Chaplin Theatre of the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood.
The event paid tribute to the life achievment of the great Hungarian American cinematographer who died last July.
A 20 minutes film on the life of László Kovács „Master and the disciples” (directed by Csaba Káel, produced by Béla Bunyik) has been screened.
Synopsis
Conversations about the art of cinematography probably began at the birth of film. Interestingly, however, very few of these professional discussions have been recorded onto film, due to cinematographers’ camera shy behavior. In fact, the public knows very little about the art itself and its prominent ambassadors. Included among this „obscure” group is the internationally renowned school headed by György Illés, the grand master, regarding whom few outside the inner circle know anything. Our six-part series focuses on ”Papi” Illés (or Uncle Gyuri to some) through interviews with his five world famous pupils: Vilmos Zsigmond, László Kovács, Sándor Sára, Lajos Koltai and Elemér Ragályi – reminiscing with three directors: Gyula Gazdag, János Szász, and Csaba Káel. These conversations remain unfinished as György Illés and László Kovács are no longer with us, leaving only their body of work for us, while the rest will hopefully be able to continueou joint endeavor.
Ambassador Balázs Bokor, Consul General of Hungary delivered a speech below.
WORDS OF TRIBUTE
BY THE HONORABLE CONSUL GENERAL OF HUNGARY IN LOS ANGELES
AMBASSADOR BALÁZS BOKOR
IN MEMORY OF LÁSZLÓ KOVÁCS
We have lost a great cinematographer in July. There was a long-long road, László Kovács went on. Since 1933 – a small village not far from the capital of Hungary, till 2007 – Beverly Hills. Kovács – the great cinematographer was a witness. A witness of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, the 51st anniversary of which we are going to celebrate on October 23. It was a milestone of the Hungarian history bloodily pushed down by the Soviet tanks. He did not plan to escape from Hungary, he and his friend, Vilmos Zsigmond left the country rescuing the very precious film made by them about the revolutionary events. He put his fingerprint on the history of filmmaking for ever, here, in the United States. He was, what we call, a Hungarian American. He had brought with himself the Hungarian skill from his homeland and the knowledge of art from his master. He joined even in his life the pantheon of world famous American film people, among them quite a lot of Hungarians, like some of the founding fathers of Hollywood. The Consulate General of the Republic of Hungary is aware of the fact that a real great Hungarian has left us. László Kovács gave an example to all of us, how to preserve his original Hungarian identity, to keep the roots, not to forget where he had come from, and still to be in service of his new homeland. I feel that we simply have the obligation to keep the memory of this great Hungarian American alive, to pay a continuous tribute to him, to his life achievement. We are proud of him and we try in this modest way to contribute to raising László Kovács`s flag high. As far as I am concerned, my acquaintance with the art of Kovács goes back to 1971. That was the year when the 1969 year film, the Easy Rider was screened in Hungary. Being a teenager that time, I remember well, me and my friends lined up in a cue in front of the ticket office of a cinema in a small town at the famous Lake of Balaton to get in to the screening. This film gave a unique glance for the young generation of the that-time communist Hungary at a different way of life. The song „Born to be wild” had become a constant tune for our whistling that time.
Standing here, today, I am sure that the memory of László Kovács, the great cinematopgrapher and a great man, will be an everlasting memory staying with all of us.
I am particularly happy to note that the 2008 American Society of Cinematographers Student Awards will be known as Laszlo Kovacs Student Heritage Awards, in his honor.
Vilmos ZSIGMOND, Oscar Winner Cinematographer, a life-long good friend of László Kovács, Bob FISHER, Journalist on Cinema, Steven LIGHTHILL, Senior Filmmaker in Residence in AFI, Michael NEWPORT, Manager - Raleigh Film, Gyula GAZDAG, Filmmaker, UCLA Professor, Gábor KÁLMÁN, USC Professor, Béla BUNYIK, Founder and President of the Hungarian Film Festival in Los Angeles, Róbert GYŐRI, President of the William Fox Film Club, Attila BOKOR, Filmdirector, Director of „56 Drops of Blood” spoke on their personal experience with LÁSZLÓ KOVÁCS, on his life achievment and on Hungarian-American film cooperation.
The personal messages of Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich specially sent to this occasion were read.
TRIBUTE TO LASZLO KOVACS
FROM DENNIS HOPPER
Laszlo was the greatest telephoto operator, I know of. He was a great cinematographer. His lighting was quick, fast, and complete. We shot EASY RIDER in 5 weeks going through and shooting in 5 different states. We used a fast film that had not been used before in feature movies. I would never have been able to make EASY RIDER without Laszlo and Paul Lewis, my Production Manager who brought Mr. Kovacs to me. He said, "this is your man", and he certainly was. My vision for EASY RIDER and THE LAST MOVIE, both shot by Laszlo, were simple, but very complicated. Since I was starring and directing in both films, hand signals were the way we communicated. That's how in the same groove we were. A wonderful, charming, hard-working genius. We are all lucky to have been his friend. He will not be missed, but will be with us forever through his films and our collective memory.
GOD BLESS LASZLO KOVACS!
TRIBUTE TO LASZLO KOVACS
FROM PETER BOGDANOVICH
Laszlo Kovacs and I did seven pictures together, more than I did with any other cinematographer, and the reason is simple: Laszlo was the most versatile director of photography. He could do anything and he did it with ease and charm and a kind of gracious intensity. It was enormously easy to work with him and always a lot of fun. When I did pictures without him, I always missed him. I miss him now. He was the best.
The wife of the late László Kovács, Audrey Kovács greeted the audience at the end of the seminar thanking for paying their tribute to her late husband.
The seminar was hosted by Raleigh Studios. As the longest continuously operating studio in the country, Raleigh Studios has played a central role in creating and supporting the modern entertainment industry. Over the years, the studio has thrived because of its commitment to providing both the highest levels of studio service and the most advanced production technology. Together, Raleigh`s entertainment companies comprise the largest independent studio and production support operation in the Nation.
In 1915, Raleigh`s Hollywood studio commenced operations as Famous Players Fiction Studios, with a Mary Pickford production – one of the first features to be filmed on this historic Hollywood lot.
The Raleigh`s entertainment group has seen many changes over the years, but one thing has remained constant, its commitment to assisting visionary leaders in film, television and commercial production make their dreams a reality. Raleigh`s long operating history and role, as a leader in production services, studio development and management speaks to its capabilities and commitment to the entertainment industry.
Raleigh Film, Budapest – Hungary, a complete motion picture production service company was started in 2007 to service the needs of the clients filming in Europe. It is a pre-cursor to Raleigh`s lighting and studio operations that will be developed in 2008. Budapest will headquarter Raleigh Film and serve as Raleigh`s European base of operations.
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October 15, 2007
[LOOK]: S. Korean director Dong-il Shin
At a reception on the rooftop of Chicago's Cliffdwellers Club, held by the Korean Consulate as Dong-il Shin's My Friend And His Wife was honored for its selection in the Chicago International Festival. I shot better likenesses, but this somehow resembles an image from a SK movie...
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In memory of László Kovács in Los Angeles
Press release: "The Consulate General of the Republic of Hungary in Los Angeles pays tribute to the Great Hungarian American Cinematographer László Kovács at a Film Seminar on October 15, 2007. at 3.30pm at Chaplin Theatre – Raleigh Studios 5300 Melrose Ave, Hollywood, CA 90038." [program at the jump.]
Program
Ø 3.30 pm – Screening: „Master and the disciples”
A 28 -minute film on László KOVÁCS
Director: Csaba KÁEL
Producer: Béla BUNYIK
Ø Opening words by Cathy PORTUGES, Moderator – 2 minutes
Ø Greeting by The Honorable Consul General of Hungary
Ambassador Balázs BOKOR – 2 min.
Ø Presentation by
- Vilmos ZSIGMOND, Oscar Winner Cinematographer – 5 min.
- Bob FISHER, Journalist on Cinema – 5 min.
- Steven LIGHTHILL, Senior Filmmaker in Residence at AFI – 5 min.
Ø Dennis HOPPER`s special message read by Cathy PORTUGES – 2 min.
Ø The Moderator calls Béla BUNYIK, Founder and President of the Hungarian Film Festival in Los Angeles on the stage to brief the audience on the 7th Hungarian Film Festival – 2 min.
Ø Presentation by
- Michael NEWPORT, Manager - Raleigh Film – 5 min.
- Gyula GAZDAG, Filmmaker, UCLA Professor – 5 min.
- Gábor KÁLMÁN, USC Professor – 5 min.
Ø Peter Bogdanovich`s special message read by Cathy PORTUGES – 2 min.
Ø The Moderator calls Róbert GYŐRI, President of the William Fox Film Club on the stage to greet the audience – 2 min.
Ø Presentation by
- Attila BOKOR, Filmdirector, Director of „56 Drops of Blood” – 5 min.
Ø The Moderator calls Audrey KOVÁCS, widow of László on the stage
Ø Closure
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2007
Jim Gordon, 1947-2007
This man's smile I took for granted for years: he was like this almost every time I saw him. Roger Ebert remembers one of the nicest guys in the Chicago screening room, Jim Gordon, who died recently at 60. "I didn’t know Jim Gordon well, but I knew him with great affection. His personality improved the weather in a room, 
and we shared the same room for years. That would be the Lake Street Screening Room, where as often as five times a week the film critics of the Chicago area gather for previews of new movies. Jim was for 23 years movie critic for the Post-Tribune in Gary, Ind., and more recently for The Times of the northwest Indiana area, published in Munster... I knew about his commute, his grandchildren, how he grew up in Gary, his politics, and his heart problems. The last time we talked, he told me about an approaching heart valve operation. On Friday, preparing for a garage sale at his home in Chesterton, Ind., he died of heart arrest. “It wasn't a heart attack,” his daughter Rachel Tednes of Hoffman Estates told The Times. “His heart just stopped.” ... He was a big guy with a moustache. Quietly sure of himself. Nothing to prove. How many people have you met who worked the steel mills in Gary, drove a cab, and had a Ph.D in film from Northwestern? ... All this seems sort of vague to base an obituary on, but sometimes people will do something to give us a glimpse of what they’re made of. Here’s what I noticed Jim doing. We had been talking before the screenings for years, when I was absent from the screening room for 11 months with illness. When I came back, I had a trach tube and I couldn’t talk. I had to write notes. That didn’t seem to bother Jim. A lot of people, they notice the trach tube, they ask you how you’re doing, you nod, they translate “fine,” and then they move along. You can’t blame them. Maybe they’re a little uncertain about how to handle the situation. Jim was never uncertain. He picked up our conversation where we left off. He did the talking for both of us. He was exactly the same. His topic was the wonder and variety of everyday life." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
An American shares the Nobel Peace Prize; anticipating inconvenient flak
Has the shitstorm started already? Let the flinging of mud begin... Albert Gore, Jr. shares the Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from a field of 181 official nominees, joining such past winners as Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Medecins sans frontieres, Mikhail Gorbachev, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, The Dalai Lama and Henry Kissinger. [Gore's statement is here. The Guardian's even-handed coverage. CNN offers "The White House offered an initial reaction to the Nobel win by President Bush's 2000 opponent. "Of course, "we're happy that Vice President Gore and the IPCC are receiving this recognition," said deputy press secretary Tony Fratto." The New York Times, chose to highlight on their online front page a blog commenter who called Gore a "hypocrite," something I can't recall being done to other figures in and out of politics. (The page changed fairly quickly.) Maybe they couldn't get Bill O'Reilly on the line? The Washington Post tick-tocks Gore's possible next moves; the Her-Trib looks at others who were considered; Canada's London Free Press tipped Inuit activisit Sheila Watt-Cloutier's efforts to preserve the melting Arctic; CBS News touts Gore's last minute trip overseas after venturing Gore would jump into the Democratic fray. Rupert Murdoch's The Australian touts the oddsmakers. The New York Times notes a meeting of 15 Nobelists in Potsdam, Germany, on the subject of global warming. My conversation with Mr. Gore from the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth is here. [Photo © 2006 Leah Missbach Day.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2007
5 minutes with Harmony Korine
Les inrocks has a short, blunt interview with Harmony Korine, whose Mr. Lonely will be released in a few months. The site's in French; the interview is in English (with subtitles). "Basically, I was like, maybe 8 years ago, I just started, um, I was getting really fucked in the head. My brain wasn't working correctly. I just was in a very, uh, dark spot in my life. I was writing screenplays about pigs." More about the never to be made "What Makes Pistachio Nuts" and other tidbits at the link. [An earlier entry with a link to the only long interview I've seen about Mr. Lonely is here.]
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[LOOK]: Trailering Carlos Reygada's Silent Light
{Via Karina Longworth at Spoutblog.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007, *** 1/2); Hotel Chevalier (2007, ****)
ANY PICTURE THAT OPENS WITH BILL MURRAY WEARING A TRIM, TOO-SMALL FEDORA POKED ATOP HIS HEAD WHILE IN SUIT AND TIE IN A GETAWAY TAXI THROUGH THE CROWDED, COLORFUL STREETS OF A CITY IN INDIA is showing all the right signs for pleasure to come.
In fact, Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's serio-comic follow-up to the (at least to these eyes) disastrous The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (written with co-star Jason Schwartzman and second-unit director Roman Coppola) is the best thing he's done since Rushmore. Storybook preciousness of color and frame recur, as does the sight of thirtysomething male characters working out wounds bequeathed by their fathers. Still, there's an intriguing growth in temperament. While some elements still might make the construction of the movie seem not everything but the kitchen sink, but a kitchen sink full of kitchen sinks, matters deepen, moods darken.
Three brothers are brought together a year after the death of their father by Francis (Owen Wilson, whose head is garishly bandaged for most of the movie), the emotionally tone-deaf, millionaire control freak of the family. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is a writer, and Peter (Adrien Brody), well, he just looks like he's always ready to burst into tears, except at the prospect of purchasing a poisonous snake. This is mismatched casting of siblings that is almost as bold as Luis Buñuel having two actresses interchangeably play the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire. Yet their constipated, passive-aggressive pissiness is of a suit. Soon you are convinced by this trio, this Larry, Curly and Moe with the vapors.
The notion of naming the three brothers Francis, Jack and Peter, seems to superficially allude to the 1970s Francis Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Peter Bogdanovich. Anderson is a pal of Bogdanovich, and co-writer Roman Coppola is Francis' son and Schwartzman is Francis' nephew—and an allusion to the Beatles' guru-hopping with Schwartzman always in trim suit and barefoot, a la a very alive Paul. A one-note in-joke, perhaps, but once on the train, Jack does work Nicholson moves on a stewardess, Rita (Amara Karan), who has the widest, the brightest, the wettest brown eyes, barefoot in emerald fish scale-patterned silk, proving that at long last Anderson is getting moony about a less brooding form of female beauty. (A later shot of a woman's bare back seen from a mirror inside a compartment has a light whiff of Velasquez to it.)
But the movie snaps to from the brother's petulant behavior after the classic line blurted by one of the brothers, "Look at these assholes." What follows changes the trio, and the movie, for the better. Anderson admits drawing on Jean Renoir's great The River. At this point the movie is no longer "The Life Sub-Asian With Wes Anderson": The Darjeeling Limited transforms into a different, unruly beast, a knowing self-critique of moneyed ego-tourism performed by the well-off with unexamined lives. The film is not dismissive, yet its characters' shortcomings are fully on display. The world wounds. Cauterization fails. Suicide attempts are bad. Mourning requires the rest of your life. (And if Anjelica Huston plays your mother, you will wonder why she's chosen such a distant retreat.)
What's missing, for the moment, is the preamble, Anderson's 2004 short Hotel Chevalier, which was shown at festivals and to reviewers in 35mm widescreen and premiered at Apple stores, and now available to download from iTunes, YouTube and elsewhere. (It might be added later.) Schwartzman's writer character invites his ex, played by Natalie Portman, for one last bit of damage. (Download a version that runs at least 10:11 for a taster that's like a parallel to scenes and themes in the feature; here's the iTunes link, which requires registration). Anderson's angling for the brittle ache of a writer of lapidary short fiction like the great James Salter, and the attempt is worthy, where men and women bruise one another but also share a balcony moment with "my view of Paris." The already-notorious profile nude of Portman in sweat socks only, calf kicked back in an arabesque that approximates Jean-Paul Goude's iconic 1978 nude of his muse, Grace Jones, it is sweet enough in its casual cruelty to be Anderson's least hermetic, likely best film to date, and I could either live or die with the line, "I promise you I will never be your friend, ever." (The refrain "Sweet lime?" is swell, too.) Robert Yeoman shot the bold colors; the impossibly crisp costumes are by Milena Canonero, of Reds, The Godfather, Chariots of Fire and Barry Lyndon. [Ray Pride.]
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October 10, 2007
To The Nines: John August shares his script
Generous screenwriter-blogger John August has advice and downloads on his site; the latest is The Nines.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
Lust, Caution (2007, ***)
LUST, CAUTION IS A BOLD NON-CAREER MOVE: to make a film of its own style and pace, but within a budget that allows it, instead of ruining its financiers, to use the goodwill earned from a movie like Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, drawn from a short story by Eileen Chang, adapted by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon co-writers Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus (who co-produces and is also the head of distributor Focus Features), is a Chinese-language art movie and proud of it, as well as its NC-17 rating. Some reviewers dismiss the movie as the equivalent of Michael Cimino following The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate, but it's not an apt comparison, even starting with the lower budget that's likely already amortized across all its international revenue streams. "Lust," is an espionage thriller set in World War II Shanghai, for the most part, and makes literal invocations of Hitchcock, among other filmmakers. But the noir elements have a blush, in the sexual grappling between a young Hong Kong acting student, Wang Chia-chcih (Tang Wei) who is sent to befriend, to bed, and to kill a political figure in charge of torture, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). The sex scenes were shot on padded sets as in the filming of hand-to-hand combat, if that's any indication of how the issues of power get depicted. Wei has slightly wonky eyes in a round face, and her expressions are sometimes more evocative than the clean, simple lines of the narrative. (Her eyes tend to travel a bit when her character dissembles, followed by a purse of her small mouth.) Still, there is an explosive moment that follows the key, definitive decision of one of the characters, that all the talk and fuss (and mah-jongg games) add up to: I will simply say it is like the launch of a rocket and is the most masterful instant of a well-observed, luxuriously mounted, committedly languorous movie. There are details galore, including a usage of the backs of characters the way Carl Dreyer did (a favorite of Schamus); Wei weeping at a close-up of Ingrid Bergman in a battered 16mm projection of Casablanca; the interiors of cafes and bars that emulate lost Kowloon; and the last shot holds its breath, and shadow, for the proper, illuminating moment. [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)
Into the Wild (2007, *** 1/2)
SPEED RACER'S HAIR IS STILL AS BLACK AS NIGHT. It's only a few hours after Emile Hirsch has finished shooting the Wachowski brothers' 2008 Speed Racer movie in Berlin, and he's promoting Sean Penn's bravura epic, Into the Wild in Chicago. The 22-year-old actor showed his brooding side in Nick Cassavetes' teen-kidnapping-gone-wrong Alpha Dog, and hardly cracked a smile in Catherine Hardwicke's Cali skater tone poem Lords of Dogtown. In person, the slight actor is affable, and at a post-screening audience Q&A after our interview, it was hard to stop his storytelling. (I wish I'd recorded the anecdote about the son of legendary Bart the Bear, who shares a scary scene with Hirsch.)
Into the Wild is an adaptation of Jon Kracauer's 1995 nonfiction bestseller about Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating from Georgia's Emory University in 1992, hit the road without telling his parents or sister, abandoning his plans for graduate school, forsaking possessions, giving his $24,000 education fund to Oxfam and burning cash on the side of the road. He wants to hitchhike to Alaska. Does he want to find himself? Some deeper meaning to life? Was he naïve? Did he make choices that could mean he was a little unsettled mentally?
Penn doesn't provide these answers. Instead, he shows us his illustration of what Christopher encountered, with each location seeming like a small film of its own, with its own textures and colors and moods. (Call it "Heart of Larkiness.") Penn's cameraman is Frenchman Eric Gautier, one of the great living cinematographers, who usually functions as his own operator. (In this case, Penn also worked camera.) Gautier's marvelous resume runs the range of French filmmakers, including work for Olivier Assayas (Clean, Demonlover, Les Destinees), Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument, Kings and Queen), Catherine Breillat (Brief Crossing), Patrice Chereau (Intimacy), and Leos Carax (Pola X). Hirsch suggests that Penn's interest in working with Gautier's perhaps came from the way he shot the journey of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries.
"Tactile" is one key word that suits the ambition, and achievement of this long but rewarding movie. It was more than ten years after Penn first wanted to make the movie before the McCandless family allowed production to proceed, and it seems to be for the best: this is mature work, from a middle-aged man's remove, about the hopefulness of youth. Penn's raised children, his beloved father, of whom he has often spoken movingly, has gone on, and he recently lost his brother, Chris. All of those things, and much more are deep beneath the earthy, febrile surfaces.
Yet it's Hirsch's presence, living up to Penn's belief in him, that keeps the movie buoyant. He's been a compelling screen presence in all the movies he's worked in, but this performance captures a light-headed male adolescent optimism and anticipation like no movie I can think of. (Christopher reads books along the way, passes them on to others, loves his Tolstoy but also runs up against Dostoevsky more than once.) Hirsch talks more like a cinephile than a movie geek, but on the subject of other actors, is endlessly impressed, such as his manic Alpha Dog costar Ben Foster, and of course, Penn's phone call for him to come up to the Bay area and flip through the script he'd just finished. Hirsch says Penn was intrigued by his work in Lords Of Dogtown, which shows another layer of Penn's instinct as a director of other actors: Hirsch could play gloomy, but he could also capture the bittersweet quality of youth that has not yet been tamped or trampled.
The production hewed to the dream Francis Coppola had pre-Godfather, when he made a small road movie called The Rain People. A few vans were packed and decamped from place to place, following the route that Christopher had taken to Alaska. Along the way, Christopher encounters many diverse people, and the gorgeous glory of Penn's approach is that in many ways, the story becomes not about what these characters (and character is the right word for most of them) show Christopher, but what he leaves behind, the joy and hope that remains in a hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker, also the marine coordinator) he befriends; the amusing yet intense outpourings from a man who employees him briefly during a harvest, played by Vince Vaughn; Kristen Stewart's youthful longing for his companionship and his reaction. Jena Malone plays his sister with her usual brimming empathy; his uncomprehending parents, acted by Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt, are granted their moments, especially a heartwrenching moment of grace from his father near the end of the movie.) There's a brief role by Hal Holbrook, who is 83, that is as focused and splendid a performance this year.)
Into the Wild feels like a summation of the many things Penn's known for, its shooting and editing style suffused a youthful jauntiness, but storytelling fully aware of the many seasons of life. It's a gorgeous tragedy describing a brief time lived with reckless, headlong force. [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
The Heartbreak Kid (2007, 1/2 *)
The Heartbreak Kid, a remake of a memorably bracing Elaine May comedy, is directed by the Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, whose biggest success was There's Something About Mary (1999) with its pinched-testicle and semen hair gel jokes. The Jackass crew and Sacha Baron Cohen, among others, upped the gross-out ante since then, and extended what the MPAA allows in its R-rated movies. While the source material is respectable, the Farrellys do desperate things in hope of a career comeback after the sweet-tempered but low-grossing Stuck On You and Fever Pitch. The result isn't outrageous, but almost insanely repellent.
Acting 40 with gray hair and dark circles under his eyes, Ben Stiller plays Eddie, a San Francisco sporting goods store owner whose 77-year-old father (Jerry Stiller) mocks him for not being a "pussy-crusher." Eddie meets a Cameron Diaz-like blonde, Lila (Malin Akerman) at the wedding of his ex-girlfriend, where his henpecked best friend (Rob Corddry) mocks him mercilessly and they trade unfunny barbs in unlikely "Italian mouse" voices. As quick as you can say "the first of many, many scenes not written but assembled and scored to pop songs," they marry and they're driving to "Cabo" for their honeymoon. Akerman's mannerisms as the increasingly insane woman are straight from the Diaz playbook, but within the cheer, more shiksaoid than shiksa. A sudden veer into dirty motel room sex is the first time you want to fall through the floor, or at least run to the candy counter to smell the hot dogs. "Helicopter me!"; "I'm not a big helicopter guy!"; "Jackhammer me! Cock me! Cock me!"; and "Fuck me like a black man, Eddie, come on!" The look on the face of America's most consistently commercial leading man is confusion, not comedy when Lila calls from behind a closed bathroom door, "That's good, 'cos I just queefed big time!" The turgidly paced, two hour Heartbreak Kid reveals itself to be about a sexually inexperienced dullard who's too stupid to discover that the blonde who giggled into his life is nothing less than batshit crazy. With Charles Grodin in Elaine May's version (written by Neil Simon from a Bruce Jay Friedman short story), you empathize with his mortification and humanity; with Stiller, you feel mortified and in mortal danger of losing your own humanity. Michelle Monaghan, who was splendid in the underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a glorious presence as the down-to-earth woman he meets and woos while on his honeymoon, and she's the only one who comes away with a modicum of dignity intact. There is no sweetness outside her glow. This is a hateful movie. There are two especially repellent scenes in the Farrelly Heartbreak, one involving an exaggeratedly hairy pubic mound on a woman as she prepares to urinate on a man's back in public in front of dozens of onlookers. (The exploding cartoon muff resembles the dry scruff along the tracks of a scale model railroad set.) The other features a burro with a grandiose erection. “That was actually a female donkey with a strap-on penis,” Bobby Farrelly tells the Times of London. “It took two weeks to train her, but the very first take that she gave us made us laugh our heads off. So it was worth it in the end." There's really no reason to talk about misogyny in the case of this disastrous, ill-starred, filthy, hateful movie. There are broad racist caricatures involving Mexicans and jus' folks from Mississippi, but misanthropy is the depressing sum. An inexplicably extended montage shows Eddie as part of a crowd of Mexicans attempting to cross the board across the open U. S. border, and their roustings go on long enough to be accompanied by two songs. We're a long way from the desert scenes in Fast Food Nation and Babel. There's a fine closing line, which reeks of an existential dilemma this lying, unfunny, unattractive, serial adulterer could never experience. Matthew F. Leonetti's camerawork is grimy and sub-par, with a palette of grain that would not be out of place in a Hostel sequel. There's a cornucopia of product placement, and the corporations that cleared their products for display include co-star Patagonia, Corona, Lay's Classic, Ruffles, Nike, Tylenol, Aquafina, Cuervo Especial, eVite, Tivo, Motorola Razrs, Corona, Subway sandwiches, Ruby Tuesdays and Patron.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
John Ashbery on working with Guy Maddin
In the current Stop Smiling Magazine, poet John Ashbery poet John Ashbery talks about how movies overlap with his work, and his ongoing collaboration with Guy Maddin: "It was fun participating in the live performance of 
Brand Upon the Brain! and rather exciting being in the orchestra pit along with an orchestra, Foley artists and a soi-disant castrato, who certainly didn’t look the part and whose voice was apparently piped in from somewhere. I had watched the film several times on DVD and was wondering how to read the text in a way that would contribute to the gesamtkunstwerk envisioned by Maddin. By chance, on the afternoon of the performance, I was absentmindedly watching the film Ed Wood on TV, which I had seen before, and suddenly remembered the role played by the “psychic” Criswell in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space — “Are you ready for the revelation of grave robbers from outer space?”. This seemed the perfect tone for Maddin’s text and I found it easy to channel Criswell’s whiny delivery. I share Maddin’s fascination with the clunky poetry of so many silent movie titles."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2007
Redacting out: an NYFF report [UPDATED AGAIN 9:03pm]
[UPDATED 9:03PM] A commenter with a DGA email address writes, "The DGA did NOT rule against Brian De Palma -- that statement is entirely false. An arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include." BRIAN DEPALMA'S EARLIEST MOVIES, LIKE THE ANTI-VIETNAM WAR COMEDY GREETINGS, showed an acute awareness of the theater of the streets outside the confines of the 35mm frame. Filmmaker Jamie Stuart drops a line about the possibly contrived yet provocative goings-on at today's New York Film Festival presser for DePalma's latest men-in-war/media dissection Redacted: "In the middle of Brian De Palma's NYFF pc for Redacted earlier today, as he began discussing the film's use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade theater to refute De Palma's claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture's release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman's mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention." [Consider this an affirmative reply of sorts.] [YouTube link via IFC.]
A look at the video, which I hadn't seen yesterday, clearly suggests, "Look out, Brian, it's real!" Eamonn Bowles has kindly offered his perspective on the incident: "there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we've compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette's like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn't true. the thing that really frosts me is that we've been incredibly above board and have funded and continue to unapologetically support this incredibly incendiary film. the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media). the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma's work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it's fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director's vision. file this under no good deed goes unpunished." [Photo by Jamie Stuart.]
[First published 2007-10-08 16:39:09.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:39 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 07, 2007
[LOOK]: John K.'s Mighty Mouse Night On Bald Pate
Crazy is; crazy does.
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October 05, 2007
Indie returns over the weekend
Oh, 'tis the silly season of screenings, festivals, deadlines... and 75 degree nights in Chicago. And a Friday screening line-up of Things We Lost In The Fire, Control, We Own The Night and 30 Days Of Night. Plus the Chicago Film Festival is... I'll stop here.
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October 03, 2007
[LOOK] John McNaughton
From last weekend's IFP/Chicago gala.
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