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April 30, 2008

Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired and released by THINKFilm after HBO preem

A note that had been made at Sundance now fully flowers: THINKFilm topper Mark Urman spent several years in the 90s as a publicist to Polanski and was an early consultant on Marina Zenovich's documentary. Here's today's PR:

"THINKFilm Acquires Theatrical Rights To “ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED” From HBO
 
New York, May 1, 2008 – THINKFilm has acquired from HBO, the US theatrical and home video rights to ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED, Marina Zenovich’s acclaimed documentary about the public scandal and private tragedy that drove the legendary director from the United States more than 30 years ago. The film, which had its world premiere at Sundance 2008, will make its international debut in the official selection at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. HBO will air ROMAN POLANSKI on June 9th, with THINKFilm’s theatrical engagements beginning with a New York opening on July 11th.  The deal, which was jointly announced by THINKFilm President Mark Urman and Sheila Nevins, president, HBO Documentary Films, is the latest and most innovative collaboration between the two companies, whose long series of partnerships has yielded two Oscar wins, most recently with this year’s “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
 
About the acquisition, Urman says, “Marina’s film is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years.  It is as compulsively enjoyable as the juiciest tabloid yet it also serves as a stunning indictment of our tabloid-crazed culture. Buoyed by HBO’s terrific promotional support, the film should have enormous want-to-see, and exhibitor interest in the film couldn’t be higher.”  Urman, who served as Polanski’s publicist for several years in the 90’s, was interviewed by Zenovich on background at the earliest stages of production.  Of Urman’s involvement as the film’s distributor she says, “While researching this film I discovered that Mark had worked with Roman Polanksi [sic].  After talking to him, I realized that he had a real understanding of the story and knows how to get it to the biggest audience.  Having THINK and HBO behind the film is every documentary filmmaker’s dream.”

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED, A THINKFilm and HBO Documentary Films release, is directed by Marina Zenovich, written by Zenovich, Joe Bini and P.G. Morgan, produced by Zenovich, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, and Lila Yacoub, executive produced by Steven Soderbergh and Randy Wooten, with cinematography by Tanja Koop and editing by Bini.

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Walter Murch chats up another of his editing tools

Among the points the veteran editor makes in this promo clip, an important one to anyone who's read how he charts the cuts of his projects: "FileMaker makes storyboarding of screen captures possible. Images of key moments in a specific shot are gathered, printed and posted to a board in the editing room. The process makes it clear to everyone on the team what the most important actions, expressions or moments are to a particular scene. "FileMaker is the database repository for all of those thousands of photographs that we extract from the film, which are very valuable things for me in editing…"

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And truly the end... of Planet of the Apes.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)

The truthiness of Errol: veritas, vérité

Errol Morris returns to the pages of the New York Times with a lengthy first installment of a piece on re-enactments in documentaries. It's almost 5,000 words long; here's a taste. "Memory is an elastic affair. We remember selectively, just as we perceive selectively. We have to go back over perceived and remembered events, in order to figure out what happened, what really happened. My re-enactments focus our attention on some specific detail or object that helps us look beyond the surface of images to something hidden, something deeper – something that better captures what really happened. I also thought the re-enactments provided a way of presenting the crime [in The Thin Blue Line], so that it could be understood, of reducing the crime to essential questions... Critics don’t like re-enactments in documentary films – perhaps because they think that documentary images should come from the present, that the director should be hands-off. But a story in the past has to be re-enacted. Here’s my method. I reconstruct the past through interviews (retrospective accounts), documents and other scraps of evidence. I tell a story about how the police and the newspapers got it wrong. I try to explain (1) what I believe is the real story and (2) why they got it wrong. I take the pieces of the false narrative, rearrange them, emphasize new details, and construct a new narrative. I grab hold of the milkshake as an image because it focuses the viewers’ attention and helps them to better understand what really happened. The three slow-motion shots of the milkshake – the milkshake being thrown, its parabolic trajectory through the night sky and its unceremonious landing in the dirt at the side of the road – are designed to emphasize a detail that might otherwise be overlooked and to focus attention on where [the policewoman] was and what she saw. It never occurred to me that someone might think that the re-enactments were not re-enactments at all, but honest-to-God vérité footage shot while the crime was happening. It’s crazy for someone to think I had just happened to be out on that roadway, that night, with a 35mm film crew and many, many cameras – cameras taking multiple angles, high angles from overhead, low angles at tire-level looking under the car, even angles inside the suspect vehicle. How could anyone think that? How could anyone believe that? Of course, people believe some pretty amazing things, and it made me think: is it a legitimate question?

How do we know what is real and what is re-enacted in a photograph? What is real and what is a simulacrum? It’s a question about images. How do we know what is happening for the first time and what is a re-enactment of an event? In a photograph or in a movie? How do we know it hasn’t been doctored or altered to deceive us about the “reality” we imagine we are observing?... Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens – no lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinéma vérité and kino pravda but no cinematic truth." [Much more at the link; Morris' site.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

I can has internets? Clay Shirky explains

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Now you know: Here Comes Everybody...

"Internet? I'd say internet!"

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2008

"Hollywood's Vietnam moment": the Atlantic's Russ Douthat on paranoia in American movies

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A sidebar to Douthat's April 2008 article, "The Return Of The Paranoid Style.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Leigh way: the sunny side of Mike

The Telegraph's got a package of pieces about Mike Leigh's latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, including the peppy, poppy coming attraction. It debuted at Berlin and won best actress for star Sally Hawkins. I'm stumped most times when I'm asked me about a most-favorite film, or to trippingly, lightsomely describe some Platonic ideal of what would define the perfect movie for me. (Anything that demonstrates itself as great; and when I really figure it out, I'll figure out a way to make it myself.) Still, I'd grasp at Rules of the Game and Leigh's Naked, and based on this trailer and what I've read between the lines in reviews and interviews, as well as the highs, lows, and general characteristics of Leigh's good and great movies, I take a deep breath and hope this is one of those movies: offhandedly serious with a light surface described through behavior, told through a bright, brash woman with the most generous of heart? I'd like to see a lot of movies like that. It's the one movie I'm really anticipating in the next few months. (My fingers are crossed under the desk.) In a profile of the 65-year-old conceiver-writer-director, Sheila Johnston goes through the ritual of visiting Leigh's threadbare Soho aerie and gets good quote on grumpiness from one of the more contentious interviewees I've ever had the pleasure to get stick from. "He ushers me into his production offices. He has been based here forever, a Soho institution nestled among Soho institutions: a pub, an art gallery and a prostitutes' flat. A compact, round, grey-bearded figure with large, watchful eyes and the soft trace of a North-West accent, he's a sharp interlocutor, who doesn't hesitate to describe a question as "ridiculous" or (less often) "good"—but also an empathetic one. I remark that the early reviews in Berlin... ran something along these lines: "What a surprise, a fabulous feel-good comedy from Mike Leigh, the… the…" I hesitate, looking for the tactful word, and the director helpfully supplies it: "Miserable!" So, yes indeed: a light-hearted comedy from that miserable grump who makes dour movies about the turmoil and pain seething through lower-class lives. "In a perfectly good-natured way, I reject all that as nonsense," the director declares. "People say it as though my other films have been relentlessly grim, but I haven't made anything that doesn't have humour in it..." He eyes me quizzically. "And, well, is Happy-Go-Lucky light-hearted? I certainly started from the premise that it would be an erupting, energetic film. But I think it has plenty of weight underneath it." Johnston gives the bare-bones of Leigh's extensive preparation process here. Johnston also interviewed Hawkins, on-set and off: "It is very much her film: she plays 30-year-old primary school teacher Poppy, who slowly but surely be comes a multi-faceted character, starting off as bright, easy and zippy and ending up as compassionate, thoughtful and complex. It is a brilliantly subtle performance, one that not only demands humour (there is a hil a rious scene where Poppy goes flamenco dancing) but also pathos (the apparently carefree Poppy also has to confront the harsh realities of life)." Since first seeing his work at the time of Life is Sweet, I've grown increasingly fond of Leigh's way with stereotypes that he proceeds to explore and burst. From a 1983 Guardian Interview with an audience at the NFT: "One of the things that I like to do is to take ideas which people think of as being clichés, social clichés—you know, like a postman and milkman go round and going into houses and having it off with people's wives—it's a cliché. The fact is, however, that the minute we started researching [we discover] that it's not really a cliché." "Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh" (edited by Amy Raphael) is published in the UK on 17 April. (No US release date slated.) Below: Film4's 10-minute Happy-Go-Lucky preview with Leigh and Hawkins, plus my interview with Leigh for Topsy-Turvy and some reflections on Naked, which originally appeared in a slightly different form in Cinema Scope; my conversation with Leigh about Secrets and Lies is collected in "Mike Leigh: Interviews." Plus: Leigh's mash note to Bruxelles. [Leigh's credits.]

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TOPSY-TURVY

MIKE LEIGH AS ARTIST MAY NOT BE ENTIRELY RAW NERVE, BUT HE OFTEN IS AS INTERVIEWEE. I've talked to the veteran filmmaker a few times, and know that the subject of his working methods is one that he doesn't care to go beyond practiced boilerplate. And while the secrets of "What we do as actors and directors" is the meat of Topsy-Turvy, one query of mine, based on a wonderfully dense anecdote told to me by Jim Broadbent, led to a brusque and smiling reply of "I don't know about that. Sorry. Can't help."

PRIDE: Let's talk about master shots. You have a marvelous one when the battling composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) and librettist W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) finally face each other. They can't look each other in the eye, but they review their differences while sucking on candies.

LEIGH: [Owing to the period setting], we struggled because we did more than we normally do. It wasn't just a kind of distillation of improvisation. We [worked with what we learned from the extant] correspondence as well. The thing with the sugar kind of crept in just a joke, really. I said, well, actually it's great, why don't you just do it? They were sort of slightly sending it up. I said, play the scene with that and it liberated it completely. Because what's fascinating about the whole thing, which I'm just doing sort of a quasi-bio-pic, it's not really a bio-pic at all, where you make famous people behave like for real. So we retrospectively invented the Swiss sugar, which is completely not a piece of research.

PRIDE: It's interesting because it's one of the scenes that seems ripely actory at first, filled with actor's business, yet it neatly fits the tale. Like some of Timothy Spall's scenes, such as his Richard Temple and the other actors speaking in that cracked continental polyglot and that unlikely reflection of his, "Laughter. Tears. Curtain." You could see an actor doing a botch of that, but you see ego love and hurt there. It's almost Beckett.

LEIGH: And of course [Spall] and I share this particular predilection for Dickens. In fact, he'd been very ill, he'd had cancer between Secrets and Lies and this. Then he was better. I said, whatever happens, you have to be in this next film. I'm not making a Victorian film unless you're there. He has this great [presence] and he knows quite a lot about [the era]. The great and fortunate thing about Richard Temple is there's not very much known about him. Where there was a lot known, such as about Gilbert and Sullivan, we tried to use that and activate these guys as we researched them. But that left Spall and me free to create this Victorian "Ac-Tor," y'know, which seemed very appropriate. When Gilbert cut [Temple's big] song , which he did [in real life], and when the chorus went to [Gilbert] in a posse, in reality, we had no idea whether Temple cared or was relieved in reality. but certainly it was very useful to make him this guy [care].

PRIDE: I was at the New York Film Festival press conference--

LEIGH: Oh, so you've heard me say that before! [laughs]

PRIDE: No, I've heard most of the basics you rehearse with familiar questions, such as the idea that you're subverting a "chocolate-box" story. It certainly went over well in the screenings there and in the press afterward.

LEIGH: I don't really know anybody's reaction to it at all. I know that Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard actually hates the film.

PRIDE: Was the idea of demonstrating what actors and directors do an overriding concern as you assembled the story?

LEIGH: Yes. It was a given, yeah. I sort of felt , in the way that I suppose everybody does, a lot of artists do, at a certain stage, you do a kind of self-portraiture. But it isn't in any literal sense, that. But I just felt it would be good to look at what we do, really. And y'know, as you know, I always shy away from or I'm more naturally gravitate towards ordinary lives, lives like lots of other people, really, the unextraordinary. I just thought, y'know, these guys are, let's, as I say, subvert that. Let's look at, these are real people, then. But yeah, the assumption was let's do a theater... film.

PRIDE: I used the phrase in my review, "Life as it is lived and lunch as it is eaten."

LEIGH: Did I say that?

PRIDE: I said that.

LEIGH: Oh. That's good if I say so!

PRIDE: But going to the scene at the start, where Broadbent brays out the information with the review of "Queen Ida," it's a model of narrative economy. All that information is gotten out of the way, and you establish Gilbert's blustery wit. It's acting and text. And the film is similarly precise and economically throughout. But nowadays, writers with nothing else to say complain when a film is almost three hours. But Topsy-Turvy, despite its length, is such a taut film.

LEIGH: I think that's right. In fact, of course, it won't surprise you I've had to put up with a lot of nonsense about length in this last year. The fact is, it is one minute short of two hours forty and I don't think there's a spare moment in it, really. I think it's absolutely all there. Nobody is more critical of long, boring films that don't say anything than I am. But I don't think it's that. It needs all that time. I mean, obviously, you do a scene where they're rehearsing, y'know, yes, he makes them go over and over it, and yes, they go through a whole scene, and yes, y'know, the point is made if it's just about making the point, kind of sooner. But actually, to make the audience enjoy and indeed be confronted by the gruel of doing this is important, really, y'know. It's the repetitious nature of it all.

PRIDE: We've talked before, yet this is one of those rare films I find difficult to talk about. It speaks for itself, fluently, confidently, quietly. Questions and interviews seem superfluous. Are you getting interesting questions?

LEIGH: That's an occupational hazard, this whole process! I dunno. It's quite interesting. Obviously, it has its detractors, but on the whole, its detractors tend to be... All the negatives are about something else, why is he-- why are you doing this, what is the point? I haven't really gotten the hang of it yet, because it hasn't been screened publicly in moe than a few places. There's not been very much press yet, but on the whole, the response is positive. The things that are interesting, I dunno, every time I get asked about the improvisational stuff, I dutifully reply, but I don't do much more. Aside from the fact, that yes, I usually do that, and yet we've still done it with this even though it's in [period]. But if I were to put myself in the critical world, to me I would have thought that what is interesting is the whole, what the film is interesting about on the level of reality and theatricality and life and art and y'know, um, deception and self-deception. Which works on all kinds of levels in the film. That's what's interesting.

PRIDE: I'm fascinated by the scene where you propose how Gilbert discovered the Japanese influences for "The Mikado." It's the most overtly cinematic, bowing toward some of the Asian masters you've esteemed, yet it's the most modern of the scenes: not the straightforward camera style so much as the fact that the Asians seem utterly of today and tomorrow and the bowler-hatted Victorians seem otherworldly antiquated, the art exhibit.

LEIGH: I know! Um. It's very interesting, that. There is something so resonant about the way Japanese design is [both] classical and contemporary. Even the Kabuki play, which is pretty accurate, although a distillation, it seems very, as you say, contemporary. I think it's just that, really, isn't it? Those images, the Japanese graphic images remain contemporary. The people in the black hats do not.

PRIDE: You use very simple cinematic strokes. Many people dwell on performance when writing about your work. But one of my favorite shots this year is in the shot where Broadbent watches the sword fight, whooshing between his face and the camera, blades across his face as he's filled up with inspiration.

LEIGH: I mean, the fact is I get pretty depressed when people go on and on about it as if it were just a film about acting. I mean, these films are very cinematic. I have worked for a very long time with Dick Pope, who is a great cinematographer, and we push ourselves we push each other to the limits. We do very sophisticated cinematic things. We don't just point the camera at the actors in a kind of naive way. I think it's both cinematographically and photographically, it's a major achievement, this Topsy-Turvy, it really is, y'know. And the design is also an achievement, given the budget.

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NAKED

THE NEED TO TOUCH WITHOUT BEING TOUCHED. TO ACT WITH THE IMPERVIOUSNESS OF A VIOLENT, INFLEXIBLE LAW OF PHYSICS. TO SPEAK VOLUMINOUSLY, INCESSANTLY, YET BE HEARD ONLY BY ONESELF. That's Johnny's loneliness. Mike Leigh's brave, brilliant Naked is a corrosive masterpiece, as likely to alienate as impress. Leigh describes his film as a "lamentation" about male aggression. His male characters, simply put, hate women as an integral part of their own self-loathing. This isn't sexual warfare: it's apocalypse. His protagonist, Johnny, obsessed with how the hardly evolved "cheeky monkeys" got to this end of the evolutionary scale, is presented as more Man than man: this is the pre-millennial condition the English condition is in.

Naked's core is David Thewlis's commanding, ceaselessly articulate vagabond: 27, from Manchester, a barmaid's son with a silver tongue, constant headaches, and some dangerous knowledge of psychology. Lean and shaggy, with large, sad eyes, Johnny is a hyper pup with a gift for talk. And what talk - the acrid fumes of a soul spending itself. Johnny has the fearful potential of insight. He murders with his mouth; he seeks compassion in order to tease it out and slay it. How dare you love me? If only for a few hours, his magnetism transfixes everyone in his path: ex-girlfriend Louise, whom he travels to London to see; her mumbling roommate who falls madly for his wit and rough sex; a philosophical night watchman; and a hilarious, if sad young Scots couple, whose near-incomprehensible grunts and yelps seem torn from the lower rung of Johnny's beloved evolutionary scale.

Leigh's extensive television work and movies like High Hopes (1988) and Life is Sweet (1990) trade in social embarrassments, epic awkwardness, and sometimes hilarious caricature. (And of course, after Naked, we have Secrets And Lies and Topsy-Turvy, refined and filigreed editions from the same cool eye.) But Naked bursts through the finely observed domesticity of the earlier work, making a leap into darkness. Leigh makes his movies with improvisation taken to seemingly mad extremes. Starting with little more than a notion, the director and his actors discuss possible threads of story and character for weeks, then partially base their roles on an acquaintance. In Naked, another familiar Leigh device rears its woolly head. If a central character has a bad habit, Leigh often sets up another character who's much worse. Johnny's doppelgänger in male aggression is a vile, arrogant landlord. With his Porsche and hundred-pound-notes and Dirk Bogarde looks with dead black devil's eyes, he'd fit comfortably alongside Ted Bundy.

But placed next to Johnny, that character is pure laziness. Johnny is a magnificent black cloud, an angry young Antichrist who puts the pissy antiheroes of late 50s and early 60s English theatre to shame. Johnny plunders the depths of hellishness for good material, a Stygian stand-up who's his own worst audience. Like Johnny, everyone in Leigh's London is adrift. The nuclear family has detonated, leaving a dank wasteland whose citizens live with the most tenuous connections to ideas of comfort and home. The dead capital of the ancient empire is all mildew, damp, and verdigris, with a perpetual overcast to chill the bones. In Leigh's construct, Johnny is at the highest stage of evolution and the highest circle of hell. With dozens of references to "the missing link," The Odyssey, and prophetic writings in the Bible and from Nostradamus, Leigh and Johnny are never not conscious of the multiple meanings of his traipse through London along what Johnny laughingly calls "the via Doloroso." Still, this prophet without portfolio, drawing from his cracked gospels, is not just another suffering Christ waiting to be nailed to the cross of that popular symbolism. He's more like Dostoevsky on the dole: a fevered creature with too much in his brain, powerless to change the world or shed his skin.

At first glance, the many metaphors and allusions chafe some, but Thewlis and Leigh are more than up to the task, carrying off their conceits with impressive bravura. For instance, Johnny's ideas about the emptiness of the modern soul are made literal when a lonely night-watchman lets him into the "postmodern gas chamber' that he's paid to watch, with floor after unoccupied floor of empty space. The ten-minute sequence of almost-unbroken talk is exhilarating and exhausting. Like the watchman, we're unwitting pupils to Johnny's too-clever-by-half Socratic dialogues. Leigh's television-bred style at last seems eminently cinematic, his seeming visual restraint demonstrating itself again and again as sly, patient pattern-making. Leigh is aided immeasurably by Dick Pope's lighting schemes, working from patterns of darkness into pools of light to darkness again. There are three pivotal points where the camera eddies around a becalmed Johnny who seems ready to disintegrate. At these rare moments when both his mouth and feet are still, Leigh's camera swirls around him with a vertigo so profound, you can sense the neuralgia bursting from Thewlis's brow. And at moments like these, Andrew Dickson's forceful score for harp, viola, and double bass, is as lyrical and wounded as Johnny's language.

To the bewildered young Scot bellowing for his girl, Thewlis' Johnny has an instant that startles even on the third viewing. Watch Thewlis's face: after taunting the other man for a few moments, there's a quicksilver change from antagonism to laser-like insight, as he suddenly, flatly, asks: "What's it like being you?" It's the question Johnny keeps asking himself, staring into an abyss that responds with deathly silence, but a silence more comforting than mere concern.

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Posted by Ray Pride at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Scorsese's Big Shave

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Time for Marty's IMAX remake of this one? [Below: S-T-E-R-E-O.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Teasing Blindness (2008)

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The adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel is by Don McKellar, whose credits include the mid-apocalypse Last Night. While the effects are likely only for the trailer, one of Meirelles' most striking effects in The Constant Gardener involved an in-camera aperture change when a window blind was raised, revealing London outside. Similarly striking yet simple imagery to come?

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

New media bloopers: TPMTV version

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An unembarrassed reel of embarrassing moments trying to change the way news is told... [Swearing is invoked.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2008

Tour Dan Waters' house: maybe check out Orson Welles' safe, Heathers collectibles

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Six silly minutes promoting the April 4 release of Sex And Death 101. [Via Monkeylicks.]

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:31 AM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2008

Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40

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STANLEY KUBRICK's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. Which would mean that Roger Ebert had been in the Sun-Times pages for just over a year when this review ran: "It was e. e. cummings, the poet, who said he'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. I imagine cummings would not have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in which stars dance but birds do not sing. The fascinating thing about this film is that it fails on the human level but succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale."

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When he Great-Movied the film in 1997, Ebert wrote, "The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe."

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Variety's reviewer at the time, one Robert B. Frederick (who likely wrote in the Variety style of the time under a handle like Fred.), averred the damn thing was just too "personal." "Stanley Kubrick is alive and well and living in Outer Space. Those filmgoers who have wondered what happened to the man who gave screen birth to Lolita and Dr. Strangelove can stop worrying. He's taken up a new hobby—science-fiction—and his first effort comes close to running away with itself. One criticism that will be raised is that film cost too much for so "personal" (i.e. Kubrick) a film... A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, 2001 lacks dramatic appeal to a large degree and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark. Despite the enormous technical staff involved in making the film, it is almost entirely one man's conception and Kubrick must receive all the praise—and take all the blame."

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The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does not really serve unless it can be verbalized."

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This may have been a common response: condescension posing as some form of intellectual purity. Of negative reviews from Adler, John Simon, Judith Crist and Andrew Sarris, Kubrick observed in a Playboy interview, "The four critics you mention all work for New York publications. The reviews across America and around the world have been 95% enthusiastic. Some were more perceptive than others, of course, but even those who praised the film on relatively superficial grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema, But film critics, fortunately, rarely have any effect on the general public; houses everywhere are packed and the film is well on its way to becoming the greatest moneymaker in M-G-M's history. Perhaps this sounds like a crass way to evaluate one's work, but I think that, especially with a film that is so obviously different, record audience attendance means people are saying the right things to one another after they see it—and isn't this really what it's all about?"

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That Playboy interview (date unknown) contains 12 questions for Kubrick about 2001" "The very nature of the visual experience in 2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that does not—and should not—require further amplification. Just speaking generally, however, I would say that there are elements in any good film that would increase the viewer's interest and appreciation on a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it's seen. The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don't believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art—a situation I'm glad is finally changing."

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There's an archive of lots of goodies here including sound bites and an early draft of the Kubrick-Clarke collaboration. Try Kubrick.com, which includes Michel Ciment on "Kubrick & The Fantastic" and Mark Crispin Miller's "2001: A Dark Descent", as well as the text of the booklet from the Cinerama release. Or another shrine, housed at Ryerson. And what about spaceships? There's a 3-D modeling archive here. Then there's One: A Space Odyssey, which recounts the film in Lego form. Below: Kubrick at the 2001 opening.

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[Thanks to Jamie Stuart for suggestions.]

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Kubrick at a premiere.

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Posted by Ray Pride at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

She's f---ing Obama, and I blame Sarah Silverman

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When even fucking is no longer sacred...

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Raising Kael, or, "I Lost It On The Internet"

Lots of movie crickets are losing their jobs. So... where was Pauline Kael this week? Not just in Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Mark Harris invites the august cricket over to Entertainment Weekly: "Perhaps because, in the history of movies, pictures had a 30-year head start on words, many cinephiles still talk approvingly of ''pure cinema,'' defining that term by the degree to which a director can speak entirely with his camera, not with words. Directors with writerly passions are sometimes treated with mild condescension; they're not seen as ''naturals,'' because, as Pauline Kael once put it, ''a movie that is primarily words tends to evaporate.'' (She wasn't entirely wrong, but giggle over that one the next time you watch All About Eve or Annie Hall.)" Liam Lacey takes a spin at the Globe & Mail talking up Martin Scorsese: "He has frequently used their music on his soundtracks, perhaps most notably in his breakthrough film Mean Streets, when he spent $30,000 of a $750,000 budget to buy the rights to Jumpin' Jack Flash and Tell Me. He wanted The Last Time but couldn't afford it. As Pauline Kael wrote of that film, "The music is the electricity in the air of this movie; the music is like an engine that the character moves to. Johnny Boy, the most susceptible, half dances through the movie ... He enjoys being out of control - he revels in it - and we can feel the music turning him on." Bill Katovsky introduces the tsk-tsker to HuffPost folks: "In the waning months of the primary season, she's become like an old Pink Panther movie, in which the same scene goes on way too long. (This would drive film critics like Pauline Kael nuts. "Director Black [sic!] Edwards simply doesn't know when to quit!") Neither does Hillary." For McClatchy, Bruce Dancis brings PK to the dance over Bonnie & Clyde: "Film critics Bosley Crowther and Pauline Kael: The most powerful film critic of his day, the New York Times' Crowther hated Bonnie and Clyde, calling it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie. At first a flop at the box-office when Warner Bros. gave it a halfhearted release in April 1967, Bonnie and Clyde became the most-talked-about movie in America after Beatty took over the publicity campaign - featuring the unforgettable slogan "They're young ... they're in love ... and they kill people" - and engineered its re-release in August 1967. Aiding the film's critical acceptance was a lengthy essay by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, in which she strongly defended the film's artistic use of violence and called it "the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate." Gene Seymour's also on the B&C beat: Kael's October 1967 essay on the film, which led to her being hired full-time by The New Yorker, began with the rhetorical question, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?" and ended with the observation that, "by making us care about the robber lovers," the film "has put the sting back into death." Glenn Kenny, whilst boxing the ears of Chapter 27 at Premiere: "The exchange between Chapman and the cabbie takes place about three minutes into the movie. 81 minutes to go. (Boy, and Pauline Kael thought it was a chore to spend time with the main characters of Raging Bull. At least Scorsese's film gave you something to look at.)" Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post on a metaphor-heavy picture: "To paraphrase the late New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, most movies give you so little, it's hard to ask for more from one as thoughtful as this." The Washington Post's obit for Richard Widmark: "Kiss of Death brought Mr. Widmark his only Academy Award nomination, for a supporting role... Pauline Kael wrote that when Mr. Widmark grins onscreen, "his white teeth are more alarming than fangs." Ah, but Ryan Gilbey in New Statesman goes a bit farther than a curtsy of citation: "The critic Pauline Kael once asked: "If art isn't entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?" The films of the Austrian director Michael Haneke answer resoundingly in the affirmative. His motto seems to be "Spare the rod and spoil the audience". Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Funny Games, his 1997 critique of cinematic violence disguised as a thriller. Haneke gets the best of both worlds: he piles on the suspense as ruthlessly as any slasher film, then uses Brechtian distantiation devices to berate us for succumbing to excitement." Bonus, from Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger, Ms. Kael speaks!

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 01, 2008

A "Woody Allen" iPhone ad

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

Marquee moons: in the Shutter

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The name of the movie is Shutter, but a half-second after seeing the mistake, it also resembled "The Shitter."

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

Meth and madness: 3 new shorts by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu is one of the directors contributing to The Meth Project; they're linked as part of "Phase 4" on that page, where you can watch or download. Or, you can use direct links for "Family"; "O.D." and "Sister". Reports the group, "The television ads directed by Mr. Iñárritu, along with four print and nine radio ads will begin airing in Montana immediately, and will reach at least 80% of the state’s teens three times each week. The Meth Project was created to address what the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board and the National Association of Counties consider the number one drug problem in American – methamphetamine. The Meth Project is a large-scale prevention program aimed at reducing first-time Meth use through public service messaging, public policy, and community outreach. Central to the program is a research-based marketing campaign that graphically communicates the risks of Meth use."

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

Woody Allen sues American Apparel; cross-examines self in Bananas

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AP: "The lawsuit complained of a billboard featuring a frame from "Annie Hall," a film that won Allen a best director Oscar. The image showed Allen, 72, dressed as a Hasidic Jew with a long beard and black hat and [Hebrew] text meaning "the holy rebbe." The words "American Apparel" also were on the billboard. The billboard falsely implied that Allen sponsored, endorsed or was associated with American Apparel, said the lawsuit, which seeks at least $10 million in compensatory damages and unspecified punitive damages. Allen's lawsuit describes him as among the most influential figures in the history of American film and a man who has maintained strict control over the projects with which he is associated. The lawsuit accuses American Apparel of "blatant misappropriation and commercial use of Allen's image" and notes that the company on its Web site promotes itself as one known for "provocative photography."

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

DVD: Southland Tales (2007, ***)

FOLLY, HUBRIS, AMBITION, CONFUSION, SELF-CONTRADICTION: how more American can you get? One of the glories of the sensory drench of writer-director Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darkois just how marvelous it is at its moments of greatest over-reach. Southland Tales, a post-modern paranoid musical comedy reshaped since its largely dismal reception at its Cannes 2006 premiere, is a multi-tasking, hypertextual, grandiose, hallucinatory, howlingly vulgar, intermittently inspired, ungainly, unforgettable entertainment. (It almost seems that Kelly wants to outdo the Book of Revelation, one of his touchstones, for Byzantine prophesy.) Strange how Southland's relentlessly referential and self-referential universe resembles two other releases of its moment in their formal ambition and density, Redacted and I'm Not There. Set in a parallel universe a few years after the nuclear destruction of Abilene, in which the government controls the Internet (that is, overtly, rather than covertly with the collaboration of telecommunication giants) and "neo-Marxist rebels" given to quoting Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot, largely cast with "Saturday Night Live" performers, challenge the establishment, "Southland" is almost impossible to synopsize, and in this space, I won't even try. But Sarah Michelle Gellar is pricelessly self-righteous as Krista Now, porn-star-turned-host of a TV show like "The View"; Dwayne Johnson is a terrific blank slate as an amnesiac action star given to twiddling his fingers in panic; the launching of a zeppelin over downtown Los Angeles by night is a major set piece, and when Justin Timberlake's scarred Iraq war veteran breaks into song with The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" is so wrong it's right. Imponderable conspiracies are described. Earthquakes strike. The national anthem is sung to Kronos Quartet-style accompaniment. Repo Man hovers above the scene. References to Philip K. Dick and Lyndon Larouche simmer. The line "I like to get fucked, fucked hard," has a myriad of meanings here. "Get the fuck out of my ice-cream truck, you Cro-Magnon bitch" is pretty much all surface. Moby's score is sweetly amusing. (Below: trailer and the Timberlake number.) [Ray Pride.]

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Trailer.

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Messy-ass dub of Mr. Timberlake's rendition of "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier."

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)