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January 30, 2008
Michel Gondry's craptastic "Sweded" trailer for Be Kind Rewind
And he seems like such a quiet young man.
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2008
I was robbed last night at one of the best parties I've been to in a long time: Arin Crumley seeks balance.
Four-Eyed Monsters co-creator Arin Crumley would like to report a crime, and also to restore Balance. This is a peculiar video. [Photographic evidence and more here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In honor of Rambo 5, here's Aki Kaurismaki's Rocky 6
Harvey Weinstein got on the blower with somebody or other and said there'd be another Rambo... Let's see what Aki can do.
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
Once, more
Two fresh comments from David Carr's Carpetbagger blog regarding the Oscar fortunes of "Falling Slowly" (all punctuation, etc., in the original): "I was lucky enough to have been peripherally engaged with the shooting experience of the Irish film ‘once’. The song contested, ‘falling slowly’ was written for the film, albeit a number of years before the film began actually shooting, but without going into long winded specifics I can assure all concerned that I was witness to the truth in this ridiculous matter. The song was written for the film. I have read alan’s material that his link provides. His presupposition that doubt should be cast upon the authenticity of the songs authors is bizzare to say the least. Certainly the fabric of his article has no argument to support his doubt. It is quite obvious that the true element of concern to the Academy in this issue is the fact that Glen Hansard had the gall to preform his composition before the motion pictures eventual release. Discussions that strive to debate the genesis of the song’s authorship are facile and to this observers mind without any merit or reason. I truly hope this great event for contemporary independent cinema is given the chance to gain a small degree of the recognition it truly deserves on the hallowed stage of the Academy, free from the impotent claims of falsehood of the aforementioned journalist and his ilk... — Posted by Paula R." And: "The song Falling Slowly had been banging around Frames gigs for a couple of years in different guises and Glen said at these gigs that the song had been written for a film that his Friend John had written that at the time had been called Buskers and the name was then changed to Once. Glen has always stated that that particular song had been written for the film project his friend was working on, and this was back in 2002, about the same time that Glen and Mar started writing music together.
— Posted by Toni"
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sundance wraps imminently...
Overview, reviews. photos, video... from a world with working WiFi and crossed eyes.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2008
[LOOK] Which candidate would you like to have a beer with?
An ad for a Senate campaign that answers the question, "What candidate would you like to have a beer with?" [His name is Steve Novick.]
"One of the more unconventional races in the country this year may pit Democratic challenger Steve Novick against a distinguished Republican incumbent, Gordon Smith, for a U.S. Senate seat in Oregon. It wouldn’t be hard to pick out Novick: he’s 4′9″ and has a steel hook in place of a left hand. And rather than view these traits as handicaps, the resilient, relentlessly upbeat Novick has made them his hallmark. I recently heard Novick give a talk in Manhattan and can’t recall having met a new political entrant in recent years who was quite as persuasive or quick on his feet."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2008
Sundance on Ice (day seven)
Michel Gondry. [Interview, Four Seasons Hotel, Chicago.]
Peter Wintonick, documentary director, producer and Agora advocate. [Main Street.]
Wait list. [Yarrow I, Yarrow Hotel, Park Avenue.]
Young Joseph O'Brien brought his guitar up the hill. [Yarrow Hotel.]
Dealing. [Sundance Channel party, 350 Main, Main Street.]
Jeff Dowd, teh Dude. [Sundance Channel party, 350 Main, Main Street.]
Matthew Lessner, director of the short By Modern Measure. [Filmmaker-Journalist confab, Shabu, Main Street.]
Master-tician Mickey Cottrell, one of the fathers of the annual "Homo Away From Home" Party. [Queer Lounge, Main Street.]
Film festival in a box. [Yarrow]
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Sundance on Ice (day six)
Night skiing. [Above Park Avenue, across from Albertson's, Park City.]
Filmmakers' Lodge. [Main Street.]
Filmmakers' Lodge. [Main Street.]
Event parking. [Park Avenue.]
Highlightering.
Main Street, dusk.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2008
Sundance wifi follies...
More photos, reviews and some video, soon, if there's a cup of wifi to be found anywhere on the side of this mountain...
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)
PR: Sam Mendes, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida are Untitled
OSCAR-WINNING DIRECTOR SAM MENDES TO HELM UNTITLED CONTEMPORARY COMEDY WRITTEN BY DAVE EGGERS AND VENDELA VIDA;
Focus CEO James Schamus said, “The many admirers of Dave and Vendela’s writing can look forward to an edgy, breathtakingly funny, and movingly scripted film worthy of a master like Sam Mendes. We’re thrilled that these three gifted collaborators will have the support of some of the most accomplished producers in the business.”
Mr. Turtletaub said, “Peter and I have long wanted to work with Sam. The opportunity to make it happen with this wonderful material from Dave and Vendela, and distribution by Focus Features, feels a bit like a perfect storm.”In addition to American Beauty, which also won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography, Mr. Mendes has directed Road to Perdition and Jarhead. He is currently in post-production on his latest film as director, Revolutionary Road, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Mr. Eggers, founder of the independent book-publishing house McSweeney’s, has written such novels as What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Ms. Vida, co-founder and editor of the monthly The Believer, has written such novels as Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and And Now You Can Go.
Founded by Mr. Saraf, Mr. Turtletaub, and Jeb Brody, Big Beach has produced such acclaimed films as Everything is Illuminated, Sherrybaby, and Chop Shop. Its production of Little Miss Sunshine won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay. Big Beach is currently in post-production on Is Anybody There?, starring Michael Caine; and is presenting the world premiere of Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, and Alan Arkin this month at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
In addition to The Silence of the Lambs, which also won Oscars for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Mr. Saxon’s Academy Award-winning films as producer include Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. His credits as executive producer include Victor Nunez’ Ulee’s Gold.
Current and upcoming Focus Features releases include Joe Wright’s Atonement, nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture; Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes, which world-premiered this month as the Opening-Night film of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival; Bharat Nalluri’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams; Andrew Fleming’s irreverent comedy Hamlet 2, starring Steve Coogan; Shane Acker’s animated fantasy epic 9, starring Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly; Henry Selick’s 3-D stop-motion animated feature Coraline, starring Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher; 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; writer/director Jim Jarmusch’s new film, tentatively titled The Limits of Control, starring Isaach De Bankolé; Gus Van Sant’s Milk, starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk; 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 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2008
Old media sends another suicide note # 117: LA Times
Does anyone copyedit these ledes or are there editors who despise columnist Jay A. Fernandez? "You can't throw a skim latte in L.A. without hitting a writer who has a screenplay that's been stuck in the system since grunge was breaking." What the fuck is this guy talking about?
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Heath Ledger singing: 10 Things I Hate About You
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Sundance on Ice (day five)
"The Gloves Of Park City." part 1. [Main Street.]
Snow day.
Enter stage left: the shuttle. [Park Avenue, across from Albertson's.]
Promo piece for Baghead. [Festival headquarters.]
Entrance. [Egyptian Theater, Main Street.]
Wait list. [Egyptian Theatre, Main Street.]
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Cricketing: David Sterritt tosses a manifesto at Kent Jones
Reviewing Kent Jones' "Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism" at PopMatters, fellow cricket (and admitted colleague and drinking pal of Jones) David Sterritt offers a modest manifesto at the end: "Given [Jones'] gift for perceptive film-critical thought, I wish Jones would now address himself to a problem that few critics (including me) have tackled with the care, energy, and resourcefulness that it demands: the predisposition of nearly all film critics to approach their subject(s) in terms that value the emotional over the intellectual and the descriptive over the intuitive. Good movies touch our feelings, of course, but that isn’t the only thing that makes them good; and while Jones knows this—hence his high praise for masters of film-thought like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, for instance—he too falls into the commonplace pattern of privileging the feelings that good films give him, and signaling his reactions in telegraphic ways that won’t mean much to people who aren’t equally familiar with the film or filmmaker in question." He continues: "What’s needed today is a new paradigm of readily accessible yet rigorously thoughtful prose combining theoretical analysis with intuitive ideas about cinema and the aesthetic world it creates. Jones is one of the few writers who might actually be able to work out an innovative model along these lines. Start down the road, Kent, and you’ll be surprised how many will join you on the path."
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 22, 2008
Wajda on Katyń's Oscan nom
“I received the great and very important news of the nomination of my film Katyń in Warsaw this afternoon,” comments Wajda. “Polish directors are no longer behind a wall and no longer have to use coded messages to communicate with their audiences. The Academy Award® nomination gives Katyń an additional opportunity to reach international audiences worldwide. It’s even more significant to me as Katyń is certainly the most personal film of all the films I have made. Katyń is the place where I lost my father, Captain Jakub Wajda who was murdered there by the Soviets. I also witnessed my mother’s desperate and hopeless efforts in search for my father and her discovery of the truth about his fate. Katyń still remains an unhealed wound in Polish history, the secret story which has been told for the first time on the screen in my film. Once more, I would like to stress how happy I am that the Academy® honored Katyń giving it such a distinctive recognition.”
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
A side of the Ledger
At David Thomson's perfunctory musing at the Guardian, this from commenter "fishcake": "His performance in Brokeback Mountain cut me like a knife. Mumbling and inarticulate, I thought he epitomized the man that hated his crappy life and was only happy with his one true love. Ledger and Gyllenhaal will go down as one of cinemas greatest screen couples. The scene with the shirts broke my heart, I didn't think there were any more tears I could cry after watching it."
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Oscar noms: Best Original Song, "Falling Slowly," from Once
Sometimes it's nice when what seems inevitable (but somehow unlikely) actually happens. [Sundance 2007; Photo © 2007 Ray Pride]
[Sundance 2007; Photo © 2007 Ray Pride]
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2008
S08: Having words with Howard A. Rodman (Savage Grace; August)
CAN SUNDANCE MOVE ON FROM "IT GIRLS" TO "IT SCRIBES? Howard A. Rodman passes for the "it" scribe of Sundance's opening days, as writer and co-producer on two debuts at Sundance, August, directed by Austin Chick (XX/XY, Sundance 2002), and Savage Grace, the welcome return of Tom Kalin to feature-making. Rodman is a screenwriter, Writers Guild activist, USC screenwriting teacher, and an artistic director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs, among other pursuits. His name has surfaced as the nom de brute of bad guys in Steven Soderbergh pictures, such as a lawyer in Traffic. When Rodman's double-dip was announced, I dropped a line, teasing, "Type, type, Eh Mr. Kerouac," to which he replied with an observation from Marx's manuscripts, "At a certain point, changes in quantity become changes in quality." A suitable citation, I suppose for a busy writer whose first original credit comes with August.
Premiere's "10 Best Unproduced Screenplays" included Rodman's F {PDF download]; his also-unproduced 1989 Daddy Empire is an unlikely lark, a pre-9/11 surrealist provocation about a young man whose oneiric misadventures in Manhattan include the belief that his father is a very tall, iconic building Skylines and clocks and fur-lined bathtubs sluicing the waterways beneath Manhattan ensue. (Here is a now-anachronistic musing as his Guy walks beneath the World Trade Center, "I began to think about the people who worked in the office buildings I'd been walking between. Their families. How they had been manufactured to become the kinds of people who could work in those kinds of buildings. I saw the office buildings sending out messages, by cable, underground, always underground. The messages said different things, but they said the same thing. We have these offices. Build us some people to fill them…. It would be easier just to take a job, an office job, in one of those large towers, my place in the grid, week in, week out. A place to live out my days. I was very tired." August, which is set amid the dot-com detonation in the weeks before 9/11, makes judicious use of the iconography of the standing Towers, and the process-specific dialogue sounds keenly of the era, as well as sometimes gleaming with rhythmic eruptions like an emerald inside a toad. (Do note Rip Torn's enunciation of the word "O-re-O.") Rodman's crisp 1999 novel, "Destiny Express," one of the few ever blurbed by Thomas Pynchon—"daringly imagined, darkly romantic--a moral thriller"—charts the hours in 1933 as Fritz Lang plots his escape from Nazi Germany after Goebbels has asked him to run "a new program for the cinema." While his two scripts at Sundance 2008, August and Savage Grace suggest a greater accessibility than these projects, do consider the gorgeous forebear, Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, which Rodman cites as an influence on August. While little-seen, it remains one of the great tone poems of American urban striving.
PRIDE: Tell me how these two movies came to be and how much you've hung on during the process.
RODMAN: August started with me and some imaginary friends playing in my basement in 2000, was revised extensively in 2003-2004, when what was not quite current became interestingly period. It's the first original screenplay of mine to be filmed, so I'm thrilled. I'm also an executive producer, with a financial as well as aesthetic stake in the film. August is a kind of free verse adaptation of my favorite film ever, Abe Polonsky's Force of Evil, except instead of being set in the numbers racket, the brothers' story is played out against the wild heyday of the dotcom bubble in lower Manhattan. I always like it when you can take a couple of characters with small differences, and watch those differences become large and larger as the world collapses around them. The pieces of the casting and financing took a long time to coalesce, but once they did, the production followed very quickly thereafter. Another very strong influence was The King of Marvin Gardens. Another brothers' story, set against a world on the verge of collapse. I like Romulus and Remus stories—two brothers build a city. But mostly I like what comes after...
PRIDE: How did you happen upon Polonsky's amazing work?
RODMAN: I fell in love with Body and Soul when I saw it at the Thalia [in Manhattan] soon after college, and then someone told me there was another film by the same guy, even better. It took a while to find it. I remember seeing it for the first time, if memory serves, at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Oh my. I'd grown up among leftists (Abe Polonsky was a family friend, and my father was one of Walter Bernstein's fronts) but never knew they had, in McCabe's phrase, "poetry in them." So I was about 24 when I saw it. Great politics, to be sure; but even better as a dream poem.
PRIDE: And Savage Grace, for the no-longer-M.I.A. Tom Kalin?
RODMAN: Savage Grace was an adaptation I began slightly after I started in on what became August. But it was never an "assignment" in the cynical sense of that word. I wanted to realize the astonishing world that was chronicled in the book, and, far more, wanted to come through for Tom Kalin. He's the most intensely collaborative director I've ever worked with, and I can't count the number of drafts I did for him. The good and bad news is the same: I was in on the conference calls, discussed each piece of casting, was on the set in Barcelona, saw six or seven versions of rough cut. I'm an executive producer of this one as well. The financing fell apart several times and we commenced the film in Barcelona (doubling for New York, London, Paris, Cadaques, and Mallorca) on our third start date. Both films are personal projects and feel as such. It's made it hard to go back to a more industrial model of the screenwriter's involvement (or, to be more accurate, non-involvement).
PRIDE: While fact-checking, I discovered Amazon has four new and used copies of "Destiny Express" listed, starting at $51.74. [Just before posting, the figure had changed to six copies, starting at 68 cents.]
RODMAN: You can get "DXpress" for far less than that, my friend. Alibris has at least six copies at $1.99. Don't be fooled into paying more for a first edition. There ain't any other kind. [The novel was just republished in Italy as "Destino Espresso".]
PRIDE: I know I'm one of the few people who's read "Daddy Empire," but after seeing Savage Grace with its period, cosmopolitan settings and August, there does seems to be a concerted fixation about cities and buildings and streets in your work.
RODMAN: As for buildings, all I can say is that I've been wandering urban streets, cityscapes, dwarfed by large buildings, all my life in my dreams. Mostly it's New York, or a version of New York; but about once a month it's Buenos Aires, a city to which I've never been. I think what I know about B.A. I know from Cortazar, Borges, Piazzolla, Happy Together and Apartment Zero. But somehow it seeped down into the brainpan where the dream set designers live.
PRIDE: Here's something you said over at John August's blog: " My mother was a script supervisor, so I spent my childhood knowing, intimately and on a daily basis, just how many people it takes to make a film, and just how essential is each person's contribution. For that reason if for no other, the phrase 'a film by' sets my teeth on edge." Can you expand on that?
RODMAN: I don't know if I could say it any better than I said it for John's blog. Lautreamont famously said that "poetry must be made by all, not by one"; and films (pace, Mr. Brakhage) can't be made by one. They're at once intimate and social. Like lying on a couch and trying to catch the thin tendril of last night's dream, only the couch is situated right next to the information booth at Grand Central Station.
Additional reading: Rodman's "Authorship in the Digital Age," a paper presented at the 2007 Rencontres Cinématographiques de Dijon, on the panel “Copyright and Droit d’Auteur in the Digital Age," which ends with the citation, "As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” [Photograph © 2008 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chapter and worse: overheard
In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh at Sunday's "Film Church": "'Director': It almost sounds like something you'd say to a girl in a bar to get her to go to bed with you. Whereas 'I'm a writer' is something you say to a girl to get her to leave you alone." ... "I thought they said the movie was called 'YouTube 3-D.' That was confusing." ... "You'll never lose a dime on a film you don't buy."
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Sundance on Ice (day four)
Joe Swanberg is looking for a party. [Main Street.]
Ronald Bronstein, director of Frownland, covering Sundance with Joe Swanberg. [Main Street.]
Greta Gerwig, from Baghead, observing Mr. Bronstein and the snow art behind him.
Marina Zenovich, hours after selling worldwide rights to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. [Sundance House, Heber Street.]
"Controlling the lives of non-white people." [Balcony, Wall Street Journal cafe, Main Street.]
Red director Trygve Allister Diesen and a pair of his actors. [Premiere party, Main Street.]
Director Ben Berkowitz, producer Effie Brown. [Black House, Main Street.]
Uncle Jer. [Air France display, Wall Street Journal lounge, Main Street.]
Veit Helmer is cartoonish; Absurdistan more so. [Premiere of Absurdistan, Egyptian Theatre, Main Street.]
Mia Trachinger (director), Rebecca Sonnenshine (Producer), Reversion. [Sundance House, Heber Street.]
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Sundance on Ice (day 3.5)
George Romero. [MCN house, Park Avenue.]
George Romero's watch. [MCN house, Park Avenue.]
David Poland preps a "lunch" with George Romero.
Press rules. [Filmmakers Lodge, Main Street.]
Film cricket John Anderson. [Yarrow Hotel lobby, Park Avenue.]
Sundance next gen: Rama Dunayevich +1. [Gateway Center, Swede Alley at Heber.]
Every time I see you falling I get down on my knees and pray, I'm waiting for that final moment, You'll say the words that I can't say. [Premiere party for Red, Queer Lounge, Main Street..]
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Sundance on Ice (day three)
Stapling. [Wild-posting, Main Street.]
Schedule grids. So many choices. Such finite time. [Filmmaker Lodge, Main Street.]
Preparing to inscribe a virgin Moleskine. [Yarrow Hotel bar.]
The festival's volunteer crossing guards are given light sabers. [Swede Alley at Transit Center.]
Laptopping. [Filmmakers Lodge.]
Slamdancing. [Treasure Mountain Inn, end of happy hour.]
Sick sex. [Filmmakers Lodge handout table.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2008
Sundance on Ice (Friday night blackout, Main Street)
The lights fail. For about half an hour on Friday night, the power went out on Main Street. (One DJ too far?) For another ten minutes, the power along the fairy-light-strewn street flickers cartoonishly on-and-off.
I set the exposure for a shot looking down the hill in the darkness. The instant before I click, the lights come back on to the cheers of dozens of dozens of dozens of voices, whose moan is just as spirited forty seconds later when the illumination sputters away again.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)
Sundance on Ice (day 2.75)
Gleeson. [In Bruges premiere party.]
Jens Jonsson, director of Ping Pong kingen. [Swedish party, Main Street.]
Buffet. [Swedish party, Main Street.]
Buffet, ECU. [Swedish party, Main Street.]
Swede, Stella. [Swedish party, Main Street.]
[Above Park Avenue. Park City.]
Party for In Bruges.
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Tesla blesses the fest
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Sundance on Ice (day 2.5)
Party for Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired [Microsoft HD-DVD House, Main Street.
Premiere party, In Bruges.
Volunteerism. [Shuttle stop, festival headquarters, Marriott.]
The hills are alight. [Above Park Avenue, Park City.]
Flakeworks. [Lift at Main, Main Street, In Bruges party.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2008
Sundance on Ice (day one)
Getting the shot. [New Frontiers on Main launch party.]
Bob. He's talking about change. [Opening day press conference for Martin McDonagh's In Bruges.]
Virgin red carpet. [Slamdance, Treasure Mountain Inn, Main Street..]
Incomplete signage. [Yarrow Hotel, Park Avenue.]
Incomplete provisional screening space. [Yarrow Hotel, Park Avenue.]
Working breakfast. [The Morning Ray, Treasure Mountain Inn, Main Street.]
[Photos © 2008 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Sundance on Ice (day zero)
Password: Wasatch.
More ladders than people. [Main Street, Park City.]
Orange people. [Main Street, Park City.]
DHeLves. [Main Street, Park City.]
The hills are alive... [En route from Salt Lake City International.]
[Photos © 2008 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2008
Toronto plays itself: What's Egoyan on?
The Torontoist surveys movies that take Toronto for itself, starting with Mr. Egoyan's Exotica and Where the Truth Lies.
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2008
Going globular: a choice Golden vignette
In the Times, David Carr carpetbags a cherce vignette from Sunday's demise of the Golden Globs in L.A. "A few hours after the event, the Focus Features 
private dinner was winding down. James Schamus, that company’s chief executive, spent the afternoon cooking homemade pasta dishes at a bungalow for the crew from Atonement. He busied himself fetching a glass of wine for Diablo Cody, the screenwriter of Juno, who had stopped by and seemed very happy to be among the mentioned. Just outside the bungalow... Joe Wright, the young British director of Atonement, swam under the reflected neon of the chateau sign, a big victory stogie in his mouth. “We just tried to keep the spirit alive in Bungalow One,” said Mr. Schamus, who counts as one of his eccentricities a love of the Golden Globes."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2008
DVD: Sunshine (2006, ***); Danny Boyle on space travel, futurism and the red bus rule
SCOTS-BORN DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE'S PROTEAN IMAGINATION TENDS TO THE TACTILE, THE IMMEDIATE, THE BLOOD-RUSHING, THE TRIPPY: think Trainspotting, Millions, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which he supervised. His latest, Sunshine, is no different. [Sunshine is now available on Region 1 DVD.]
A crew of astronauts, some fifty years in the future, is headed toward the sun. "Set the controls for the heart of the sun," goes a 1968 Pink Floyd title. A vast bomb is being ferried as the heart of the solar system seems in danger of expiring. 
But they're the second crew: Icarus II is following the path of an earlier Icarus, lost, presumed destroyed. Shipboard or in space for almost the entire duration of the film, Sunshine puts a physicist (Cillian Murphy) at the center of its story, appropriate for a production that counts a particle physicist among its consultants. A psychological officer is also on board, mediating the battles that grow in intensity as they near their destination: can they not know that there's little likelihood they'll return, even if they save mankind? Hardly a gram of philosophy is spoken: they're practical, pragmatic, all in thrall to the nearing fire, fire with the character of viscous fluid, heavy sultry water.
"The biggest problem of psychology is just surviving long-term space travel. Everything is designed to kill them," the 50-year-old writer-director tells me. "Everything! Like a in a battle zone. Everything is waiting to kill them. There's a wonderful book if you've never read it, by a British journalist named Andrew Smith. He had this idea that I think has been copied in a documentary, of going and talking to the remaining Apollo astronauts. He got to talk to some of them, there are only like twelve left. They were all marked by the distance and especially the dark side of the moon, when they lose radio contact with earth. Especially the guy who's left alone when the other two went down to the surface. That guy represents the most alone you can get. It's only forty-five minutes around the dark side, but… They were also pretty confident they would get them there but it was only fifty-fifty they'd ever get them back. And they knew that, the astronauts. It's astonishing they got them all back."
Sunshine unfolds fifty years from now, but it doesn't traffic in futurism, but a variation on today, which is what the canniest designers most often work from. Would the pinch-and-squeeze function of the iPhone have looked ridiculous in a film five years ago? "The problem with futurism is that it becomes the be-all, end-all of the whole film, then, the design, your impression of what things will be like in a hundred years time, becomes more important than the film itself," Boyle says. "The designer [Mark Tildesley] had this rule, the 'red bus rule' to connect with the past. In London fifty years ago, there were red buses. There're still red buses, they're a bit different, but they're basically the same! That's the way the future comes on you, y'know. You evolve into it."
Boyle admires how personal, and how drawn from the past, Ridley Scott's future landscapes are, such as in Blade Runner.
"A lot of that, you know, is based on where he's from, a place called South Shield in Newcastle. It's like there are oil refineries like those buildings there in the distance—" he indicates several miles west from our vantage— "Oil refineries burning excess. It comes from an industrial landscape he knew; you can see that in Alien as well, it's Victorian industrial landscape inside that ship. That's what's genius about him, it is the future but he is absolutely using the past. I think of industrial landscapes from Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the [video] screens weren't there, but the feeling."
One hopes to be as engaging and curious at 50 as Boyle: every zag of conversation holds a gleeful zig in turn. But in the movie, larger metaphors, say of the spaceship as an ark, as civilization, as the human heart, seem to emerge on their own. "If they're there, you try to heavily 
disguise them!" A burst of laughter. "Things evolve, don't they? The great thing about space movies, you shouldn't be too prescriptive about it, I think people like to use space as an experiment, who knows what they'll find?"
Boyle describes one of the unsettling ideas he used to make his actors think in a more tactile fashion about the story: the table, the glass, the chair they sat in, themselves: shattered stardust, re-formed, where we came from, where we'll all go. It's a noble and oddly Eastern destination for the narrative. Toward the climax, there's an extended sequence that in real time would take less than a breath, and Boyle stretches it majestically.
"What is literally happening…" Boyle starts, jumps up, the bright Chicago sky to the west bursting through forty-fourth floor windows, "What's happening is that behind him, when he gets inside the bomb, the bomb is detonating. That's a billionth of a second, if it's that. But nobody knows, if you're pulled into the sun, the gravity of the sun, the speed would be so colossal, no one knows what would happen. Would you flatten? Would you stop?" He laughs. "No one knows what would happen to perception, if there's any perception left. So you've got to try and fine find a way, of visually, of announcing that all. When he puts his hand up like that, that's that capsule we sent off into deep space, there's a woman and a man naked, and his hand is up like that. Somebody'll notice that!" [Photo © 2007 Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)
I drink your milkshake.com plus Filmbrain's jots of Blood
A new discussion board from Jürgen Fauth: "I Drink Your Milkshake! I drink it up!" "We have oil and it seeps through the ground. Discuss Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood or just keep hitting the play button to hear Daniel Day-Lewis bark the line that has already been called (by me) "the new 'Say hello to my little friend!'" For a limited time and while supplies last, I'll set up free idrinkyourmilkshake.com email accounts for anybody who wants them and leaves a post about the movie. To get one, just sign up with the username of your choice and drop me (jurgen at this domain) an email. Now go play and don't come back!" Also: Filmbrain's "There Will Be Blood: Sketches, Fragments, and Other Half-Baked Ideas." "What follows are notes I've jotted down at various moments, thoughts that occurred to me while in the shower, or connections I thought of on the subway. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments, even if it is to tell me I'm completely insane about any of this. I'm treating this as a work in progress, and I may add or remove sections over the next few days." (The Kubrick stuff is especially fun.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jams Run Free, Claire Denis (2008, ****)
Video for Sonic Youth. Via SpoutBlog.
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
Sweet chirp of the day: Ebert, again, on Juno
"I would argue that the dialogue in Juno mostly works because Ellen Page sells the tone so convincingly. She wins us over. Think of Diablo Cody's words in the mouths of Page's contemporaries, and you cringe. Yes, her parents talk that way: Where do you think she learned it? As for the drugstore clerk and Juno's best girlfriend, it's as if she affects the linguistic weather when she enters a room."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)
The Mamet-Pinter correspondence re: Oleanna
The BBC surveys an exhibit of Harold Pinter's papers: "[T]here's a fascinating correspondence with the American playwright David Mamet, whose controversial play 'Oleanna,' about sexual harassment, Pinter directed in London. 
He discovered that Mamet had changed the play's original ending. Pinter decided he wanted to keep the original version, calling it "dramatic ice". Back came Mamet's reply by fax from the Bel Air Hotel in Beverly Hills. "You're right. Go ahead and rehearse the sodding thing with the ending you like - you flatterer."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Speared in the sky, Highland at Melrose, Los Angeles
It would take more than the words of a drunken adolescent girl to rob me of my desire for you, as they say in 300.
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:19 AM | Comments (0)
Dr. Uwe Boll: Word!
A message, apparently from Dr. Uwe Boll about why people should go see In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: "Now a few days before IN THE NAME OF THE KING gets out in USA I have to tell whats going on in the filmindustry. If you dont get out with a MAJOR company the exhibitors and the tv and radio stations are not supporting you. This is the reason that independent movies are like self fullfilling prophecies and they almost bomb all. Our competitor in USA FIRST SUNDAY with Ice Cube is a piece of shit and for NOBODY nearly so interesting as IN THE NAME OF THE KING. We have a better movie and a bigger movie with a better script, better cast and we proved in europe that our movie has the power to stay 3 weeks in the TOP TEN and that we can get at least 50% good reviews. FIRST SUNDAY is a direct to DVD title in europe but in USA Sony puts 40 mill. $ in advertising to win that weekend. And this is completly absurd. Sony will not even recoup the advertising costs with that movie. The MAJORS own the TV Stations and the Radio Stations and they use that for free advertising and so the wide audience believes at one point that FIRST SUNDAY is the movie of that weekend - and they go and buy a ticket. The biggest problems in todays market is that nobody believes anymore in word of mouth or gives a film a chance without seeing upfront all 5 seconds in TV a spot. So to all my fans in America or everybody who like Jason Statham or our other actors or loves fantasy or period piece movies or action movies or videogame based movies: go on january 11 in IN THE NAME OF THE KING and show that its not only advertising."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hi, I'm George Romero
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:52 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2008
40 minutes with Into the Wild's Hal Holbrook...
From "Lunch With David"...
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
Argument To Beethoven's 5th, Sid Caesar, Nanette Fabray (ca 1952, ****) [With five more clips.]
The Clock, 1953.
The Haircuts: So Rare and Flippin', 1955.
Life Begins at 7:45, 1950.
Sid Caesar at the Movies.
Translating foreign films with Drew Carey.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
S08: The Sundance Channel's countdown to P.C.
At least it's not a strike clock...
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2008
Prosperity for 2008, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2008, ****)
For several months in 2007, the Thai military government barred YouTube. Elsewhere... here... a new short short by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. [Via Wise Kwai.]
Bonus: A trailer for Syndromes and a Century, which the Thai regime censored with a a series of seemingly arbitrary cuts;
Six minutes of Joe's Adventures of Iron Pussy;
A trailer for Blissfully Yours;
And another for Tropical Malady.
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
40 minutes with Tim Burton...
David Poland's "Lunch With..."
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:27 AM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2008
Robbie Baitz's "Leaving Los Angeles: Part Two"
Playwright and now former Californian Jon Robin Baitz etches his piercing envoi to life as a Los Angeles-centric writer of television after his ouster from the writing staff of a series. "Like many of the people I met who write about TV, (most of whom can be bought for the price of a single commissary crepe-suzette, a keychain with the show's logo on it, and a set-visit with its grimacing star), he was possessed of the winning duo of wild arrogance and a staggering un-athletic ignorance of all life outside of prime time, the culture of which depends on low-rent journalistic toadies penning breathless wooze in exchange for future favors and future keychains, and handshakes with future stars. When I left for New York in 1985, 
I was a young playwright with the residuals of the South African accent acquired in my teens. My friends were a boozy-druggy lot of Bohemian wrecked hipsters who made up the vibrant LA theater scene, which was exceptionally fecund back then. There was heroin, there was methadone, there was booze in spades, and fragile bits of sobriety to frame it all. When I returned to Los Angeles, in late 2002, it was as a member of the "writing-establishment," a decade and a half older, no more accent, just the slightly false schoolboy manners remained, manners which had done me no good, and with the goal of finally putting away some money, just a bit, so I would never have to think about lucre much ever again, (artists dream of money, etc.) for the remainder of my playwright's life... The online thing is not just an LA thing by any means. However, in New York, the life of the street, the flirtation and ebb and flow of strangers getting off of the bus, makes for a perpetual energy machine. New York is just sexier, smarter, and better dressed, less vulgar, more diverse, filled with accident, and unexpected encounters, as a rule. There is the Neue Gallery across from the Met, down the street from the Guggenheim, which is up from the Whitney, just a twenty minute walk to MOMA, across Central Park, etc, etc, forever and ever. You will see, smile at, spy on, talk to, stare at, be enchanted by any number of utterly different kinds of people within twenty minutes of leaving your apartment in NYC. A barrage rather than the white noise of the undulating palms and brackish skies of the dream coast." [Much much more at the link and the earlier installment at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2008
David Lynch in "The Case of The Scary Rat Paw" [BONUS: Lynch's classic Lumiere + Co. short (NSFW)]
In the nonspoof category, an actual David Lynch enterprise, photographed by Frederick Elmes.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2008
S08's first fine whine
Fine whine garnered by Elizabeth Day in The Observer: "'I don't enjoy the festival any more, it's just too big,' says film [book author] Peter Biskind. 'The screening venues are spread out all over the place and it's hard to get around if you don't have a car; you have to take buses. There are a million parties and it's very hard to get there. You are constantly scrambling in lines being asked if you know the right person.'"
Posted by Ray Pride at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)
January 04, 2008
Watch David Lynch on your iPhone [ADDED: Bonus note on Product Placement!]
[By xmas fi; via Brittney Gilbert.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 03, 2008
"True Films 3.0": Kevin Kelly's guidebook for free
Kevin Kelly, one of the brains behind the original Whole Earth Catalog and WIRED magazine, has been writing about nonfiction work at his True Films site (as well as maintaining his Cool Tools endeavor. For the third edition of his "True 
Films" compilation, Kelly's offering his work as a free PDF download. "This is the third version of a guide I have been developing for the past 5 years. It takes the 200 best documentaries I have reviewed on my website True Films and puts them into one handy book. For an explanation of why I bother to order the content of a website into a book see the previous entry. In True Films, I cover only true films: documentaries, factuals, non-fiction, reality-based series, and some instructional how-to. You can get a sense of what I like from the site. I love documentaries that 1) surprise me, and 2) inform me. Each review is a rave review; that is, I only review films I love and believe others will enjoy. Merely good films are left unmentioned. I also include what no other film review source does: I provide 4 to 5 screen shots from each documentary to give you an idea of what the texture of the film is. And I only review documentaries that can be seen easily on DVD or tape at consumer prices (either as Netflix rentals, legal downloads, or online purchase). Documentaries available only in theaters, or as high-priced "educational films" are regrettably ignored... It's in PDF format, but with a twist. To help offset the significant bandwidth costs of these downloads (I hope my server can take the wave), I have appended advertisements to the PDF book.' {More at the links.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wong Kar-wai not? Midnight Poison, 2007
How many more perfume commercials has he got up his sleeve?
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
John Sayles and Maggie Renzi expand on The Honeydripper
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
January 02, 2008
[NOT QUITE A SPOILER] Upon the drinking of the milkshake: newyorktimes.com edition
A ghost in the machine? A spoof in the works? The correct lede is here.
[From Jamie Stuart.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
"In a world where... noun, verb, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11"
Okay, this is scary and, to use the spot's own word, perverted filmmaking. "An enemy without borders. Hate without boundaries. A people perverted. A religion betrayed. A nuclear power in chaos. Madmen bent on creating it. Leaders assassinated. Democracy attacked..." I am Marie of Romania and I approved this ad. On the other hand, check the simplicity of this John Edwards ad... a medium close-up and a moment where a voice cracks...
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)
What road ought Wim Wenders be on now?
James Mottram, on the occasion of a British retrospective, roots for Wim Wenders to find his way again in the Independent. "No doubt the programmers of the British Film Institute's forthcoming Wim Wenders retrospective didn't plan it this way. But dividing the German director's 40-year career across two months has left a distinct "before and after" look to his work. While the second half of the season begins in February with 1987's Wings of Desire, his superlative story of two eavesdropping angels overlooking Berlin that won him Best Director in Cannes, it's arguably the exception that proves the rule. Nothing he's made since has come close to it or the films that once fashioned him as one of the leading lights of New German Cinema... "I always figured it was good if you're not too close to something in order to look at it and show it," Wenders once told me. "And looking at American cities and landscapes, I always liked the distance I had automatically. I've never felt like a stranger in America, but I was always a little bit of the observer." ... Still, one lives in hope that Wenders can shake off this torpor. He's currently filming The Palermo Shooting, which reunites him with Hopper. A romantic thriller about a photographer that bounces between Germany and Sicily, by all accounts it sounds like classic Wenders territory. Just maybe he'll become the King of the Road once again."
Posted by Ray Pride at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)