June 2008
Trailering: Benjamin Button, Neil Young.
Thursday, June 19, 2008 | 9:43 AM
I don't think the otherwise gloriously shiny teaser trailer for David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" needs such twinkly Tim Burton music, and Brad Pitt's accented voiceover at the beginning worries me a bit, but it does look awfully good. The film is an adaptation of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (that can be read online) about a man who's born elderly and who ages backward, a conceit that's lodged itself in the plenty of noggins — most recently, Andrew Sean Greer's novel "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," the title story of Gabriel Brownstein's collection "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W" and even, sort of, Coppola's "Youth Without Youth." The film's due out December 19th — the trailer's here.
My head knows that the "CSNY" part of concert/anti-war doc "CSNY Déjà Vu" stands for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but my heart kind of expected the trailer to start off with a riff from "Baba O'Riley," giving way to Gary Sinise solving crimes. This may be because I'm starved for television. "CSNY Déjà Vu" is directed by Young, and will be Roadside Attractions' big experiment in day-and-date releasing — the distributor plans to open it July 25 in theaters, on VOD and online on Netflix Inc's "Watch Instantly" streaming service. The trailer can be found here.
"Life is Cool" seems to be Korea's answer to Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," similarly all animated via rotoscoping, though in this case the story's one of three men falling for the same woman. The trailer (unsubtitled) is here. (Hat tip to Kaiju Shakedown.)
[Photo: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Paramount Pictures, 2008]
+ Trailer: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Apple)
+ Trailer: CSNY: Déjà Vu (Moviefone)
+ Life is Cool Korean Movie Trailer (YouTube)
Opening nights.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 | 2:25 PM
Yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that its opening night film will be "Passchendaele," a $20 million World War I epic from actor/director Paul Gross, whose other helming credit is 2002's "Men With Brooms," as far as I know, the only curling rom-com in existence.
Guy Dixon at the Globe and Mail talks with Gross, who based the film on the life of (and stars as) his grandfather Sergeant Michael Dunne:
"About two-thirds of the film is set on the home front, so it is a romance that culminates in battle," Gross said. "It is at times epic and at times terribly intimate."When it premieres at TIFF and then hits Canadian screens this fall, the movie is expected to draw inevitable comparisons to the 1981 Australian film Gallipoli. In many ways, Passchendaele tries to do what Gallipoli did: portray a key moment in a country's history for that country's audience.
Over at his blog at the New York Post, Lou Lumenick wonders if the May 15, 2009 opening date that Universal has set for Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" follow-up "Bruno" will mean it's Palais-bound: "Cohen's 'Borat' created a sensation on the late-summer festival circuit, including Venice and Toronto, that helped turn it into a box-office hit. So don't be surprised if 'Bruno' opens the 2009 Cannes Film Festival." Using a premiere date to guess at a film's presence at Cannes doesn't always work — see "Sex in the City"'s non-appearance this year — but if "Bruno" does make it to the festival, I can only imagine the bathing suit photo-ops to come.
Also: David Gordon Green's "Pineapple Express" will open the Just for Laughs Film Festival in Montreal, reports Variety.
[Photo: "Passchendaele," Alliance Films, 2008]
+ PAUL GROSS'S LABOUR OF LOVE TO OPEN TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Globe and Mail)
+ Will 'Bruno' Open Cannes '09? (NY Post)
+ 'Pineapple' opens comedy festival (Variety)
Exile on 15th Street, N.W.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 | 12:08 PM
At the New York Sun, S. James Snyder writes about both the ever-discussed endangerment of the print critic and last week's gathering/reading of selections from "Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood," a book of film essays edited by Michael Atkinson, who also writes IFC.com's DVD column. Snyder slips in a bit of news on the first front I hadn't yet heard: "Three weeks ago, what has become a familiar scene played out once again at the Washington Post, as acclaimed writers Stephen Hunter and Desson Thomson accepted buyouts and resigned their full-time positions."
Mr. Hunter is one of the few film critics to have been given the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. While I've never much cared for his work, particularly when he suggested the Virginia Tech massacre could have been instigated by overconsumption of the films of John Woo (choice sentence: "Their possible influence on Cho can be clearly seen in 11 of the photos that feature handguns."), it smarts to see that only five years after winning the prize he's gone, his position likely with him.
As for the reading, Glenn Kenny has a report at his blog Some Came Running.
[Photo: Mark Wahlberg in "Shooter" -- totally based on a novel by Stephen Hunter. Paramount Pictures, 2007]
+ Rescuing the Critical Mass With 'Exile Cinema' (NY Sun)
+ "Exile," cunning, no silence (Some Came Running)
Cyd Charisse, 1922-2008.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 | 6:55 PM
Cyd Charisse, the impossibly long-limbed actress and dancer (born Tula Ellice Finklea) who starred alongside Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic musicals like "The Band Wagon" and "Singin' in the Rain," passed away today. From the AP:
Her height was 5 feet, 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, "Steps in Time," as "beautiful dynamite."
You can watch her dance with Kelly at the end of "Singin' in the Rain" here on YouTube.
[Photo: Charisse and Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain," MGM, 1952]
+ Actress-dancer Cyd Charisse dies in L.A. at 86 (AP)
+ Gene Kelly & Cyd Charisse - from singin' in the rain (YouTube)
Odds: "Red Tails," over-restoration, the greatest Western of all time.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 | 6:35 PM
George Lucas "plans for [new movie 'Red Tails'] to be based on the historic record that brought the Tuskegee Airmen fame, drawn from their own accounts." Let's see that Spike Lee try to pick a fight with me, he thinks. [AP]
David Bordwell on film restoration: "[I]t's possible to 'over-restore' a film. That is, by adding footage culled from many versions, the restorer may be creating an expanded version that nobody actually saw." [DavidBordwell.com]
Joe Leydon points out that the Western Writers of America have named "Shane" the greatest Western ever made. [Moving Picture Blog]
Thomas Doherty tackles serial killers in cinema, particularly "Dirty Harry" and "Zodiac," which trace "the emergence of a predator whose criminal profile, once a blurry police sketch, has sharpened into a wanted poster more photogenic than the western outlaw, urban gangster, or corporate mobster." [Moving Image Source]
And Erik Sofge defends Ang Lee's "Hulk":
In your standard comic-book adaptation, there's a moment when the superhero realizes his gift, a moment typically accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of power and often elation: Peter Parker, having discovered his ability to spin his webs, swings euphorically through the streets of New York. Later, of course, the hero learns that "with great power comes great responsibility"--in Parker's case, this means stopping a power-mad, creatively dressed inventor called the Green Goblin from terrorizing the city with a hoverboard. Lee's Hulk, by contrast, isn't really all that important to the future of the world, and isn't even much of a hero. He's a physical and psychological casualty who spends the entire movie trying to save himself, not the world. Considered at once a threat to national security and a potentially valuable research commodity, Banner is hunted by his own government and eventually imprisoned without a trial. While the authorities decide on whether to simply execute him, he escapes, forced to hide out in the Amazon. [Slate]
Elsewhere, Kim Newman attempts to defend "The Happening." [Guardian Film Blog]
[Photo: "Shane," Paramount Pictures, 1953]
+ Tuskegee Airmen to be subject of George Lucas film (AP)
+ American (Movie) Madness (DavidBordwell.com)
+ Shane: No. 1 with a bullet (Moving Picture Blog)
+ Portraits of a Serial Killer (Moving Image Source)
+ In Defense of Hulk (Slate)
+ Second opinion: The Happening (Guardian Film Blog)
Famous families.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 | 6:03 PM
"The Edge of Love," director John Maybury's biopic about the amours of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (played by Matthew Rhys), is having its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival tomorrow. Anna Burnside at the London Times talks to screenwriter/playwright Sharman Macdonald about how one gets such a film made, the secret being, and here's one for all the struggling writers out there to try at home, to get your daughter Keira Knightley to sign on as one of the leads.
Knightley asked to read the script, loved it, and set up some meetings in LA. It was during one of these calls that Knightley accidentally cast herself as Vera. "They said to her, 'Of course you're going to be in it', and she said, 'Well, Shar' -- that's what she calls me, she doesn't call me Mum -- 'I couldn't say no'."
Also in the Times, Andrew Lycett interviews Thomas' daughter Aeronwy Thomas, who likes the film while pointed out a few deviations from the truth: " 'The dresses all look too expensive,' she says, recalling her childhood. 'Where are the patches on the elbows of coats and cardigans?' " Sheila Johnston at the Telegraph talks with the film's producer Rebekah Gilbertson, who has her own family connection to the story — two of the people portrayed in the film, Vera Phillips (played Knightley), who had an affair with Thomas, and William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who was married to Vera and tried to murder Thomas, are her grandparents:
Her family rarely mentioned the scandal: "There was always a sort of mystery around it. I was told once that they had agreed, the four of them, not to talk about it. And my grandfather felt he had five daughters and didn't want to be considered as the person who tried to kill Dylan Thomas."
The film has yet to secure a U.S. distributor, possibly because its rumored Sapphic and threesome scenes are apparently just that. With this and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," we've almost got enough for a year-end trend piece on the vaporware ménage! Frustrated fanboys everywhere rage, rage...eh, whatever.
[Photo: "The Edge of Love," Capitol Films, 2007]
+ Sharman Macdonald: Keira, Dylan Thomas and me (London Times)
+ Aeronwy Thomas on The Edge of Love and her father, Dylan Thomas (London Times)
+ The Edge of Love: 'My granddad tried to kill Dylan Thomas' (Telegraph)
"Nowadays they call them sound bites."
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 | 5:02 PM
A look at who's been saying what in interviews lately:
"There are maybe seven women who make up Caroline. But these 'Did it really happen?' questions really don't interest me. That's what everybody kept asking me when I did a Q&A at South by Southwest. I got off a couple of one-liners, like, 'I've got a BA in dope but a PhD in soul.' I'm good at those. Nowadays they call them sound bites."
—Lou Reed on the inspirations for the main character in "Berlin," at the Independent.
"To me, it's used up. It's condescending now. The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they're looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to."
—John Waters tells the AP his feelings on Honfest.
"It was sort of surreal. He is very professional and made me feel comfortable and it was pretty cool."
—Mary-Kate Olsen on making out with Ben Kingsley in "The Wackness," at the Independent.
"They asked me if I would partake and I had to decline. Part of me would love to run around and act like a freaking a-hole again but I can't do that. I've got two kids. I saw something on VH1 or something about me in the 90s and I thought, oh my God, how am I going to explain this to my kids? I have a few years to think about how to finesse it but I do think about it on a daily basis."
—Mark Wahlberg on why there's no Funky Bunch reunion looming in the near future, at MTV.
"I don't have a clue. But we'll figure it out, because that's what we do."
—The late Stan Winston on what he told Steven Spielberg when asked if he could build a 25-foot dinosaur for "Jurassic Park," at CinemaTech.
[Photo: "Lou Reed's Berlin," Weinstein Co, 2007]
+ Bad boy of rock, cleaned up and making movie magic (The Australian)
+ John Waters swears off the word 'hon' and Honfest (AP)
+ Mary Kate Olsen - she wants to be alone (Independent)
+ Mark Wahlberg Passes On Funky Bunch Reunion. 'Not A F--ing Chance,' He Laughs (MTV)
+ Stan Winston on Art & Innovation (CinemaTech)
Trailering: Johnnie To, "Death Race" and Mr. Lee.
Monday, June 16, 2008 | 2:36 PM
New on the trailer circuit:
Johnnie To's been a busy man — after premiering "Mad Detective," a thriller about a brilliant but insane investigator trying to track down a missing cop that To co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai, he opened supernatural romance "Linger" in Asia and then brought "Sparrow," his lighthearted tale of Hong Kong pickpockets, to Berlin. At the moment, "Mad Detective" is the only one with a U.S. release date (July 18th) in its future, though both it and "Sparrow" are also going to screen at the New York Asian Film Festival. Here's the trailer for "Mad Detective."
Here's the trailer for Paul WS Anderson's remake of Paul Bartel's "Death Race 2000," which, now that we've passed the year 2000 without the formation of any massive cross-country competitions more dystopic than "The Amazing Race," has become just "Death Race." The film's due out on August 22nd.
Here's the trailer for Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna," on behalf of which he's been kicking up all kinds of fuss with Clint Eastwood. That bit of drama's been getting more attention than the film itself, which actually looks as mainstream friendly as "Inside Man" with a period gloss. It comes out September 26th.
And here's a teaser trailer for "Mirrors," the new film from French splat pack member Alexandre Aja starring Kiefer Sutherland and some haunted reflective surfaces. Spooooky! But not really, at least from what's shown here. The film, a remake of a 2003 Korean film, opens August 15th, after which Aja's due to move on to a "Piranha 3-D."
[Photo: Toothy car — the original, still undefeated "Death Race 2000," New World Pictures, 1975]
+ Trailer: Mad Detective (IFC)
+ Trailer: Death Race (Yahoo)
+ Trailer: Miracle at St. Anna (Yahoo)
+ Teaser: Mirrors (Yahoo)
Critic wrangle: "My Winnipeg."
Friday, June 13, 2008 | 12:38 PM
Guy Maddin's "docu-fantasia" "My Winnipeg," about a town almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Manitoban urban center in which he grew up, opens in theaters today. And the crowd goes wild! Or at least murmurs appreciatively. "Even though much of My Winnipeg is overtly ludicrous--from the corrupt judging of male beauty pageants in The Hudson's Bay Company's "Paddle Room" to Maddin's memories of a locally produced TV series about an overly sensitive man who spends every episode out on a ledge, threatening to kill himself," writes Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club, "the movie still touches on real feelings of loss and regret." He concludes that it's "perhaps his best film to date." "My Winnipeg is Maddin's best filmmaking since the not-dissimilar confessional bargain-basement phantasmagoria, Cowards Bend the Knee," suggests J. Hoberman at the Village Voice.
"[E]ven though I suspect that some of its more outlandish assertions are at least partly grounded in fact, Mr. Maddin is engaged less in historical inquiry than in hallucinatory autobiography," writes A.O. Scott at the New York Times. "[W]hatever its connection to the actual, transitory city, Mr. Maddin's Winnipeg -- 'My Winnipeg' -- is as real as any work of art can be." "By turns madcap and painfully nostalgic, it's at heart a mournful fugue to origins, aging, and something like forgiveness, familial and civic," claims Bill Weber at Slant.
For David Edelstein at New York, "My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing." But for Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot, the film is an (unwarranted, from my perspective) opportunity to write off Maddin's entire output at "boutique cinema, frilly and clever enough to be momentarily diverting and content to be set aside when amusement begins to dwindle."
[Photo: "My Winnipeg," IFC Films, 2007]
Critic wrangle: "Chris & Don. A Love Story."
Friday, June 13, 2008 | 12:33 PM
"Chris & Don. A Love Story" is a documentary about the longterm romance between artist Don Bachardy and "Berlin Stories" writer Christopher Isherwood — the two met when Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood some 30 years older, and were together, openly, for three decades, through times not always hospitable to gay relationships. Tina Mascara and Guido Santi directed; Bachardy is now 74 and Isherwood passed away over 20 years ago.
Grouping "Chris & Don" with Derek Jarman doc "Derek," Armond White at the New York Press writes that "These gay documentaries show more loving than today's gay film fiction... by examining this older/younger couple for differences of social circumstance, individual ego and personal desire that pertain to any love relationship, Santi and Mascara present a complex testament of gay experience." Similar sentiments from Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "If only someone would make a fictional gay romance that had as much feeling and depth as Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's "Chris & Don: A Love Story":
This documentary is wholly suffused with genuine romantic longing, even as it purposefully investigates the complex bonds between the two men -- as lovers, as artists, as mentor/protege, as father/son surrogates -- with psychological clarity. While in description, a documentary focusing on the experiences of one pair of lovers might sound hermetic, "Chris & Don" comes across as remarkably expansive; rarely is love depicted onscreen with this much soul-rattling care.
Stephen Holden at the New York Times calls the film an "elegantly structured documentary," while Chuck Wilson at the LA Weekly notes how "to describe the novelist's final days, Bachardy opens a drawer and begins pulling out the magnificent deathbed drawings he did of Isherwood -- a fusion of art and love that's deeply moving." Ernest Hardy at the Village Voice suggests that it's the subject matter of the film that's more groundbreaking than the craft behind it: "Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's film uses standard documentary-filmmaking tools to celebrate three entities--Isherwood, Bachardy, and their relationship--that flaunted all the rules." "A whole other documentary would be necessary to do full justice to either Isherwood's writings or Bachardy's portraits, yet the beauty of the film lies in how it reveals the ways their art reflects their feelings for each other, challenging their cultural disparities as well as the passage of time," concludes Fernando F. Croce at Slant.
[Photo: "Chris & Don. A Love Story," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Inappropriately Handled.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 | 4:49 PM
HBO was forced to change the ending of Marina Zenovich's acclaimed documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" shortly before its TV premiere on Monday, after Los Angeles Superior Court officials "complained the film's conclusion was a 'complete fabrication.' " Said conclusion, which relates an incident that allegedly occured in 1997, is explained in the LA Times:
The documentary originally asserted that a local judge had offered [Polanski] a deal whereby he could return to the United States with no jail time if he allowed the legal proceedings to be televised...Allan Parachini, public information officer for the court, said that the offer alluded to in Marina Zenovich's documentary "never occurred."
He added that the "fabricated reference" to the televised hearing had "the potential to . . . enormously" injure the reputation of judge Larry Paul Fidler and that court officials had been pressuring Zenovich and HBO to correct the film for about a week.
Kim Masters at Slate explicates further:
Fidler... presided over the recent Phil Spector murder trial, and in that case, he allowed the cameras to roll. Spector's case was the first criminal trial televised in its entirety in a Los Angeles Superior Court since the O.J. Simpson case in 1995. That may be why Fidler was sensitive to the film's implication that he was another media-obsessed jurist.
Now, former Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson and Polanski's attorney Douglas Dalton, who are both featured in the film, have issued a statement indicating they have issues with the Superior Court's issues. It's up on Deadline Hollywood Daily:
During the meeting, Mr. Dalton pressed Judge Fidler for a resolution of the case that would allow for minimal news media. Mr. Dalton recalled that Judge Fidler would require television coverage at the proposed hearing due to the controversy. Mr. Gunson recalls television coverage discussed at the meeting. Mr. Dalton told documentary director Marina Zenovich of this requirement. It is our shared view that Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case.
No takesies backsies, LASC.
[Photo: "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," THINKFilm, 2008]
+ L.A. Superior Court called for revision of Polanski doc (LA Times)
+ HBO's Roman Polanski Problem (Slate)
+ EXCLUSIVE: Polanski Prosecutor and Defense Attorney Charge L.A. Court Made "False And Reprehensible Statement" (Deadline Hollywood)
Two Joans.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 | 4:25 PM
Looking at a 1930 photograph of Joan Crawford by George Hurrell, the Independent's Hannah Duguid describes it as "the stuff of fantasy...simply a close-up of her perfectly beautiful face. Crawford's troubled character is not apparent in these photographs, nor is her battle with alcohol; the ravages of life are painted over with clever lighting and a thick concealer." Duguid, writing on the occasion of a new exhibit of celebrity photography at Yorkshire's National Media Museum, traces the progression from the idealized portraits of the studio era to publicity stunts and the rise of the paparazzi. Question: Which is the true opposite of everything represented by that Crawford photo — US Magazine's reoccuring "Just Like Us!" feature of the famous taking out their garbage, picking a friend up at the airport or getting coffee, or the gallery I stumbled on while looking for "Just Like Us," entitled "Stars Falling Down"?
Elsewhere, blogger Self-Styled Siren has produced an anecdote from another Joan that's ever timely, given the recent attention being paid to the upcoming remake of "The Women." When starring in the first remake of the Cukor film, the 1956 musical "The Opposite Sex," Joan Collins, in the Crawford role of home-wrecking shopgirl Crystal Allen, took a blow to the face from co-star June Allyson that wasn't your typical stage slap when the two were filming the dressing room scene: "Any more shooting was out of the question. On each of my cheeks was forming the perfect imprint of a tiny hand! Branded, if not for life, for the two or three days it took for the welts to go down."
[Photo: George Hurrell's photograph of Joan Crawford, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, 1930, used without permission]
+ Shooting stars: A dazzling new exhibition explores how Hollywood exploits the power of photography (Independent)
+ Anecdote of the Week (Self-Styled Siren)
Versus: Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, Werner Herzog and Abel Ferrara.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 | 11:07 AM
In the left corner, you have the highly quotable, controversy-courting filmmaker Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee. In the right, the generally taciturn but sometimes just as headline-quote worthy actor-director Clinton Eastwood, Jr. At stake: the accuracy of the racial makeup of the casts of "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima."
Lee threw the first punch at a Cannes press conference on the film he's just finishing up, "Miracle at St Anna," a drama about four "Buffalo Soldiers" in the 92nd Division fighting in Tuscany during World War II that he suggests is a corrective to films like Eastwood's:
"There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in 'Flags of Our Fathers' and 'Letters from Iwo Jima']. That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.... It's not like he could say he didn't know. It was a conscious decision not to have any black people."
Eastwood refused to respond at his own press conference for "Changeling," which took place half an hour later, but had no such hesitations in an interview with the Guardian on Friday. Not one to mince words or, apparently, think twice when speaking on record to a reporter, he said:
"He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate"...Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."
And now back to Lee, who's responded to the ABC News:
"First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either. He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films ... And a comment like 'A guy like that should shut his face' - come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there..."If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I'd like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist," he said. "I'm not making this up. I know history. I'm a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II... Not everything was John Wayne, baby."
Clint, you had me until "shut his face." I love approximately 50% of Lee's films and still wish he would shut his face approximately 90% of the time, but no one's going to throw my ill-considered remarks far and wide on the news wires. By taking Lee's bait, Eastwood does look like a grumpy codger, albeit one who's very generously doing his part to help publicize Lee's latest work.
Elsewhere, on the main IFC.com site, Aaron Hillis gets clarification from Werner Herzog on the tiff with Abel Ferrara we're all longing to see play out:
That's "Bad Lieutenant," right?Yes, it's a completely new version that people think is a remake, but it's a completely different story. I've never seen the "Bad Lieutenant" that was made sometime in the '90s, I guess.
You told Defamer you hadn't even heard of Abel Ferrara.
I don't know who he is, but I heard he has a good, gruff face and maybe he would be good as a gangster in the movie. The last James Bond is not a remake of the previous one. They're completely different stories, but the leading character is somewhat similar.
But the Bond movies are a series. So basically, the only thing your film has in common is its title?
Well, there is a bad lieutenant in the previous film and in this one. We may even drop the title. I don't know yet. [It's] not to avoid it, even if people think it might be a remake. You see, once this kind of rumor is out, you can never stop it. It's like slashing open a pillow on the roof of your house and the wind blows in it and spills all the feathers out into the landscape. Now go out and find those feathers again and put them back in the bag. It's impossible. We have to enjoy it as it is. I think we have to allow the rumors to live on. We cannot stop them, so let them live on.
[Photo: Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna," Touchstone Pictures, 2008]
+ Spike Lee accuses Clint Eastwood of erasing black GIs from history (London Times)
+ Dirty Harry comes clean (Guardian)
+ Spike Strikes Back: Clint's 'an Angry Old Man (ABC News)
+ Werner Herzog on "Encounters at the End of the World" (IFC)
"Brokeback Mountain" becoming an opera.
Monday, June 9, 2008 | 6:23 PM
From BBC News:
Brokeback Mountain, the story by Annie Proulx that became the basis for an Oscar-winning film, is to be made into an opera. The New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on the 1997 short story.The opera is scheduled to premiere in spring 2013, the company said.
Upcoming operas adapted from films:
"The Fly," based on David Cronenberg's 1986 film, is set to have its world premiere in Paris on July 2nd.
Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is, fascinatingly, being adapted by composer Giorgio Battistelli to become part of the 2011 season at Milan's La Scala.
And "Dancer in the Dark," already halfway there, is being adapted by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Henrik Engelbrecht for the 2010-2011 season of the Denmark Royal Theater.
[Photo: "Brokeback Mountain," Focus Features, 2005]
+ Brokeback Mountain set for opera (BBC)
Trailering: Falco, Philip Roth, Bill Maher.
Monday, June 9, 2008 | 6:00 PM
Es war um 1780, und es war in Wien: I understand not a word of it, but I'm totally entranced by this trailer for Thomas Roth's Falco biopic "Falco - Verdammt, wir leben noch!". And really, what is there to understand? It's a musical biopic: humble beginnings, "Rock Me Amadeus," rise to fame, wild Austrian debauchery, untimely death by bus. Actually, I would like to know how Grace Jones fits into it all, as she's somehow in the trailer too. The film just opened in Germany, having hit Austrian theaters a few months ago, with, of course, no U.S. distribution in sight. [Hat tip to Twitch].
Here's a trailer for "Elegy," the sixth feature from director Isabel Coixet, of "The Secret Life of Words" and "My Life Without Me." It's based on Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal," the third in a trilogy about the character David Kepesh, all three of which have, as they say in the literary world, squicked me out. No one's adapted Roth to the screen to any sense of general satisfaction, but this work is one that would seem to pose an interesting challenge to a female filmmaker — at the very least, it looks like the film may downplay Kepesh's boob fixation, though maybe that's just not trailer friendly. Ben Kingsley plays the aging professor, Penélope Cruz his younger lover, Peter Sarsgaard his son and Patricia Clarkson his not as young lover, and the film's due out August 8th.
Here's one for "Religulous," Bill Maher's not at all controversial anti-religion documentary set to open October 3rd. Fine use of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" during a montage; the title is apparently a combination of "religion" and "ridiculous."
And here's a trailer for "Boy A," a brilliantly depressing film about a young man trying to start anew after having spent most of his life in juvenile prison for the murder of another boy. It's directed by John Crowley, whose last feature was the intersecting Dublin lives drama "Intermission," featuring Colin Farrell in one of the few roles in which he's actually looked comfortable.
[Photo: "Falco - Verdammt, wir leben noch!", MR Filmproduktion, 2008]
+ Trailer: Falco - Verdammt, wir leben noch! (Falcoderfilm.at)
+ Trailer: Elegy (Yahoo)
+ Trailer: Religulous (Apple)
+ Trailer: Boy A (Apple)
Odds: "Donnie Darko" Sequel Star Threatens to Retroactively Ruin the First Film
Thursday, June 5, 2008 | 6:16 PM
Larry Carroll at MTV talks with Briana Evigan, one of the stars of the non Richard Kelly-approved "Donnie Darko" sequel "S. Darko": "Calling the script 'very twisted,' the 21-year-old actress also said that 'S. Darko' will interact with the events of the original film, à la the 'Back to the Future' sequels. 'We just come back [in time] and change what happened in the first one.' "
Anne Thompson at Variety gets "the real dope" on the Paramount Vantage fold-in:
TRUE: So far, only three Paramount Vantage films have made any money: An Inconvenient Truth, which cost nothing to acquire, which was released in partnership with Participant Productions and won the doc Oscar; this year's best picture Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, a 50/50 worldwide co-production with Miramax Films, which took over its domestic release, and Son of Rambow, a worldwide acquisition which earned $8 million in the UK and $2 million here, for which Vantage did not wind up paying $7 million. Moore and Lesher insist that the other films, at the end of the accounting process, will either make a little, or lose a little. "The movie business is tough," says Lesher.FALSE: There Will Be Blood lost tons of money. Let's call it, after a lengthy Oscar campaign, breakeven.
At Slate, Troy Patterson writes that "I Spy [the '60s TV series, not the recent film] represented pop culture's first (or, at the very least, boldest) attempt at entertaining a notion of racial equality on screen."
"Atonement" director Joe Wright talks David Lean with Louise Cohen at the Telegraph:
Lean was, as Andrei Tarkovsky put it, a "sculptor of time". He totally understood the use of time in relation to image and drama and sound. The moment that stands out is in Lawrence of Arabia when the match is blown out against the rising sun. It is a classic lesson in the dramatic potential of cutting from something very close up, to something extremely wide - juxtaposing the macro and the micro to tell a story.
The three-year-old Rome Film Festival's fate has been up in the air since the May election of right wing mayor Gianni Alemanno, who swore he'd downsize (or shut down) the festival, change the focus from Hollywood premieres to homegrown films and oust head Goffredo Bettini. The last he can now check off his list — Bettini's replacement is Gian Luigi Rondi, a critic and one-time acting director of the Venice Film Festival. Fun fact: Rondi's an old friend of Giulio Andreotti, the politician who's the subject of Paolo Sorrentino's not-so-flattering satirical portrait "Il Divo," which screened in competition at Cannes this year and won the jury award. [Via Variety]
[Photo: "Donnie Darko," Newmarket Films, 2001]
+ 'S. Darko' Star Briana Evigan Defends 'Donnie Darko' Sequel, Which Has Fans, Writer Of Original Flick Up In Arms (MTV)
+ Paramount Vantage Fallout (Variety)
+ I Spy a Progressive Racial Fantasy... (Slate)
+ David Lean, with his glamorous, beautiful worlds, is my hero (Telegraph)
+ Rondi to head Rome Film Festival (Variety)
Trendspotting: Brownface, bags, polibiopics.
Thursday, June 5, 2008 | 4:51 PM
I remain on the lookout for an overview trend as convenient and analysis-friendly as last year's Summer of Threequels, but so far, not so much. Will "the season of overlong run-times" count? How about "the summer of our discontent"?
Trend: Brownface
"Outside of color-blind Shakespeare adaptations, cross-race casting has been one of Hollywood's obvious taboos for decades now -- a no-no so basic it didn't even merit discussion. No more: Enough Hollywood stars are enthusiastically applying bronzer in 2008, either for a quick gag or for a serious leading role, that we're forced to hesitatingly declare this movie season the Summer of Brownface." —New York's Vulture blog
As evidenced by: Adam Sandler going Israeli and Rob Schneider Arab in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan"; Robert Downey Jr. donning blackface in "Tropic Thunder"; Fred Armisen as Barack Obama on "Saturday Night Live"
Possible significance: "In the age of Barack Obama, the idealistic interpretation is that it's simply not a big deal, and what we're witnessing is Hollywood's unusually astute reaction to the onset of the post-racial society... A more cynical explanation is the delayed box-office aftershocks from Borat: If Americans were ready to laugh at a Hebrew-speaking British Jew pretending to be a Russian-speaking Kazakh oaf, then why not fake Arabs and Israelis?"
Rooftop shorts on the web.
Thursday, June 5, 2008 | 11:39 AM
Shorts from the Rooftop Films Series are back for the summer at IFC.com — there'll be three new films online each week here, but you can also find them through the Rooftop Films Blog, where the Rooftop crew will be posting information, commentary and interviews along with each film. They'll be posting 100 films over the next few months — here's what's online so far:
The Morning Sun (Bryan Wizemann, 5:30)
A woman wakes up, takes a shower, gets dressed, and leaves the house. In this fascinating and ephemeral film -- a study in the use of available light and narrative restraint -- it's up the audience to string together the pieces of her morning, and the night before.Eric The Secret (Joe Quinn, 3:50)
Lonely and bored, two friends mess with their head (the one hidden behind the couch). A story of pathos, perversion and secret playpals.Mad Cows Vs. Crazy Eyes Dolphin (Ian Stewart, 5:40)
A sobering animated expose about how Mad Cow Disease is now killing dolphins. Via karate.Devil's Teeth (Roger Teich, 8:30)
A film about Ron Elliot, the only sea urchin diver who works the Farallon Islands, even though he regularly encounters enormous sharks. With a grant from the Rooftop Filmmakers' Fund, Roger Teich constructed an underwater helmet camera using a black and white surveillance video lens and cable so Ron can use his hands freely while the footage records the eerie underwater world, at the margins of grace and terror.Roswell (Bill Brown, 19:17)
Bill Brown drifts through New Mexico trying to find out what caused that lonely spacecraft to crash land in a tiny town in American desert half a century ago.Vision Test (Wes Kim, 5:39)
Who would you feel most comfortable with as CEO of a Fortune 500 company? What begins as a routine eye exam turns into an examination of people's subconscious attitudes towards race, gender and power.Hot Dog Man (Joyce Ventimiglia & Jim Haverkamp, 5:45)
Director of Last Pack (Rooftop 7/14/01) and Armor of God (Rooftop 6/28/02). A hilarious and poignant home movie about an absurd American icon, a giant self-devouring hot dog statue in downtown Durham, North Carolina.
[Photo: Bryan Wizemann's "The Morning Sun," courtesy of Rooftop Films, 2008]
+ Rooftop Films Short Film Showcase (IFC)
Moving images, online articles.
Thursday, June 5, 2008 | 11:17 AM
Moving Image Source, "a major new website devoted to the history of film, television" that's an offshoot of the Museum of the Moving Image and headed up by Editor-in-Chief Dennis Lim, has finally launched. There's a thorough calendar of retrospectives running around the world, a guide to online film resources and a dozen new articles with some familiar bylines it's awfully nice to see:
Anna in Wonderland A documentary short evokes the great blind spot of 1968 by Joshua CloverGolden Years
The late-period works of auteurist hero Howard Hawks
by Dan SallittVietnam in Fragments
William Klein in 1967-'68: A radical re-evaluation
by Jonathan RosenbaumOutskirts of the Kingdom
Werner Herzog bears witness to the life beyond moviemaking
by Michael AtkinsonThe Producers
A look back at the pioneering team of Hal B. Wallis and Joseph H. Hazen
by Ed SikovThe Persistence of Memory
The introverted cinema of Terence Davies
by Michael KoreskyA Mirror for Mama-san
How the young Tatsuya Nakadai offered a crafty old director a new shade of maleness
by Chris FujiwaraThe Outsider
Arthur Penn's decades-long struggle against the Hollywood machine
by Michael ChaikenSpending Time With Andy
Andy Warhol's unique blend of artifice and reality
by David SchwartzHe's Not There
A new biography takes on the ever-elusive Jean-Luc Godard
by B. KiteBelle de Siecle
From jeune fille to mother superior, the many faces of Catherine Deneuve
by Melissa AndersonGames Without Frontiers
Video artist Eddo Stern explores the porous boundary between the virtual and the real
by Ed Halter
Given how tough the going has been for film criticism and writing at papers and glossies lately, I'm unashamed to say that seeing this gives me a warm glowing warming glow.
[Photo: Werner Herzog filming "Encounters at the End of the World," ThinkFilm, 2007]
+ Moving Image Source
Odds: Doc to power, sexist Lane, nuking the fridge.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 | 5:11 PM
The most interesting article amongst the ones from the new issue of Cineaste now up online is actually from the editors. The editorial, which I appreciate for its don't-stop-believin' sentiments but don't entirely buy, is entitled "Speaking Documentary Truth to Power," and argues that despite audiences' Iraqdoc fatigue, "political documentaries do get the attention of the powers that be":
We should therefore take hope from the fact that, as much as politicians in office try to hide it, distort it, or avoid dealing with it altogether, they cannot fail to recognize the truth, especially when documentary filmmakers so powerfully and persuasively speak it to the powers that be as well as an increasingly angry and concerned electorate.
Elsewhere, New York's Vulture blog responds to online clamor that Anthony Lane's review of "Intercourse and the Municipality" is sexist.
Peter Sciretta at /Film offers an "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"-inspired update of "jump the shark." Meet "nuke the fridge." From Urban Dictionary:
The term comes from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which, near the start of the movie, Harrison Ford's character survives a nuclear detonation by climbing into a kitchen fridge, which is then blown hundreds of feet through the sky whilst the town disintegrates. He then emerges from the fridge with no apparent injury. Later in the movie, the audience is expected to fear for his safety in a normal fistfight.
Robert Sanchez at IESB reports that, despite all of the Edward Norton noise, Zak Penn will receive sole writing credit for "The Incredible Hulk."
Recall Roger Ebert's strange insistence that Alex Proyas' 1998 film "Dark City" was a masterpiece, and realize that ten years have passed, and the pattern is repeating itself with Tarsem's "The Fall," which, Ebert writes before adoringly interviewing the director, "will be on my list of the year's best films, and is setting box office records on the art house circuit."
And from the Hollywood Reporter, Showtime has picked up "Tara," the Diablo Cody-scripted comedy series that "stars Toni Collette as a wife and mother with dissociative identity disorder. John Corbett co-stars as her husband."
[Photo: Iraqdoc "No End in Sight," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]
+ Speaking Documentary Truth to Power (Cineaste)
+ Is Anthony Lane's 'SATC' Review Really Sexist? (New York)
+ Is "Nuke the Fridge" the New "Jump the Shark"? (/Film)
+ Zak Penn Receives Sole Writing Credit on THE INCREDIBLE HULK (IESB)
+ Tarsem and the legend of "The Fall" (RogerEbert.com)
+ Showtime picks up 'Tara' (Hollywood Reporter)
Re-imagine, re-invent, recycle.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008 | 2:55 PM
"It's a re-imagining of the original DEATH RACE. It's not a straight remake. It keeps a lot of the original concepts in tact. The masked racer called Frankenstein, who appears to be indestructible, but is not who he appears to be underneath the mask. Yeah, it's still got Machine Gun Joe. It's still a death race, you know, it's a race to the death where the drivers are allowed to kill one another and are encouraged to do so. And just like the original movie had a political message in the 1970s, this does. It's not a massively overt political message but it's about reality television and the Internet run rampant."
—Paul W.S. Anderson talks "Death Race 2008" with Joblo.com.
"The logline remains under wraps, but execs at Warners are aiming to reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson. Wigram's noted that the new Holmes would be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman."
—Variety reports that Guy Ritchie will direct Warner Bros.' "Sherlock Holmes."
"As reviled as it was when originally released, 'I Spit on Your Grave' was a precursor to a slew of female revenge film hits, Hertzberg said. Contemporary genre fare has become so graphically violent that the original doesn't seem as outrageous as it did 30 years ago. Hertzberg is listening to pitches from writers on how to ratchet up the shock factor. 'After seeing what was done with an R rating on films like 'Saw' and 'Hostel,' we think we can modernize this story, be competitive with what this marketplace expects and not have to aim for an NC-17 or X rating,' Hertzberg said."
—Variety on plans to cash in on one of the most notorious exploitation films ever made while keeping it safe for the multiplexes.
Update: "It was not so much a remake as an homage to Murnau. But I don't feel like doing an homage to Abel Ferrara because I don't know what he did -- I've never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?"
—Werner Herzog is making "Bad Lieutenant," but it's sort of not a remake, and he'll totally take up Ferrara on his offer to fight, at Defamer.
[Photo: "Death Race," Universal Pictures, 2008]
+ INT: Paul WS Anderson (Joblo.com)
+ Guy Ritchie on Sherlock's case (Variety)
+ Cinetel set for 'Grave' remake (Variety)
+ Defiant Werner Herzog to Defamer: 'Who is Abel Ferrara?' (Defamer)