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December 31, 2004

Brian DePalma'll love it

Retouching the untouchable: A newly reconstructed version of the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin will premiere at Berlin Film Festival. "It now includes Russian graphics and words from revolutionary Leon Trotsky, which were censored in the 1920s," reports the BBC, to be shown 12 and 13 February with live music from the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg. "As well as the inclusion of the graphics and Trotsky's words, changes and cuts carried out on the famous staircase sequence as a result of the film's censorship have been corrected."

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

In the Moodysson for Lukas

Lukas Moodysson offers up 5 of his favorite films as Hole in the Heart opens in the UK. Here's #2: Steel Magnolias: It is sad and it's about cancer and I like films about cancer. It is possible that it is, objectively speaking, a really bad film, but I don't care. I don't believe in objectivity.

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Going down with Marty

Financier Graham King gets the LA Times treament: "For 91 days, all Marty heard me say was how much this movie was costing," explains King, who retains the cockney accent of his old London neighborhood. "Before we started, I told Marty, 'We have a schedule of 91 days, and if that's not realistic, tell me now, because if we go to 115 days, it could put me out of business. And if I go down, we all go down."

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Only Arab films

What's the state of Arab film? From Beirut's Daily Star: "In my opinion there isn't an Arab cinema, only Arab films. Part of the reason is that the relationship between the audience and the films is non-existent. I'm trying now to promote the private sector to play a bigger part, as well as seeking co-productions with other Arab countries as well as with European countries like France.

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 30, 2004

I was Susan Sontag's graphic designer

Designer William Drenttel remembers a number of days caught up in the whirlwind that was Susan Sontag, capturing a few things about a mind that was always curious about film and farther: "15 years after this first series, Susan asked us to design a new paperback series of all her books for Picador. I agreed, with an unusual stipulation: the art on the book could have no meaning or association with the content. We worked with abstractions of images to create feelings and patterns and colors, and my conversations with Susan were purely about aesthetics — the beauty or sharpness or hue of an image. I used to look forward to these meetings: I think Susan loved getting lost in this unusual territory where content and language were less critical. While she was always the opera critic, I imagine seeing these covers were a bit like being awed by a beautiful stage set in the darkness of an opera house. This approach to bookmaking — less literal, highly subjective, even lyrical — was refreshing for me as well."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 29, 2004

Overnight f-ing success

In City Pages' Artists of the Year compendium, Rob Nelson wipes with a page of the Book of Troy Duffy: "Put it this way: Troy Duffy, goddammit, is the f---ing face of American cinema. No, f--k that: He's the f---ing face of America, bitch. He's a 10-ton SUV of f---ing filmmaking force. Better buy his DVD on amazon.com, you pussy. Autographed screenplay for $25 at theboondocksaints.com/store; click on "Hot deals" and get the f---in' Brothers Rosary Package for $79--or $67 each if you f---in' buy two or more. Now f--- off and die while I go spend my capital."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

indieWIRE's Best Foreign Films 2004

Here are the provocative results: "Defying low box office numbers and a throng of big-name competitors, veteran Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène's Moolaade topped indieWIRE's third annual foreign-language film survey. Other big winners in this year's poll included Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's ode to loneliness Distant, Jean-Luc Godard's elegiac cine-essay about war and representation Notre Musique, and Zhang Yimou, for his two Chinese martial arts spectacles Hero and House of Flying Daggers." (Ray Pride was one of the 31 contributors.)

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Tenderness and pure chemical attraction 2004

Dennis Harvey checks for tracks of sex in the movies 2004: "Bernardo Bertolucci's pretentious The Dreamers felt like a dirty old man pushing nubile young actors into yoga positions for (alleged) art's sake; its two guys-one girl ménage notably shrank from the whole bisexual side of that triangle (as did A Home at the End of the World, an infinitely better film). The Door in the Floor offered good sex, albeit in the conventional fantasy guise of a gorgeous older woman "initiating" an underage male. Only Michael Winterbottom's sci-fi romance Code 46—like his forthcoming 9 Songs, which is running into serious ratings-board problems—dared to present grown-ups really enjoying themselves and each other, with tenderness as well as pure chemical attraction."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

A pro's final cut

Mira Nair describes the modern concept of "final cut": "Although Nair didn't have final cut, she insists that doesn't mean her creative vision was compromised. ("They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some filmmaker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'") Her main battle with Focus was over the running time. Nair's Vanity Fair clocks in at not much over two hours - quite a feat of compression given the length of Thackeray's novel. It moves forward at furious pace, as if the film-makers were terrified they'd lose their audiences' attention if they slowed down, even for a moment."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Minor masterpieces in San Fran

The Bay Guardian surveys San Francisco-area filmmakers who are Sundance-bound for their best of 2004, including The Devil and Daniel Johnston producer Henry S. Rosenthal:

1. The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, USA, 2003). Vincent Gallo's minor masterpiece with not a frame out of place to my eye, easily takes my top pick for the year.

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 28, 2004

Where are the ashes of Luis Buñuel?

Trickster Buñuel still hasn't taken his last breath: "[Father] Fernandez talks vividly of his meetings with Buñuel. But one thing he refuses to discuss is his claim to have his friend's ashes, hidden in the private chapel of a Mexico City cultural centre run by his order. According to Father Miguel Concha, the centre's prior, this has been kept in a rectangular wooden pedestal beside the altar, adapted to hold Buñuel's ashes locked inside. "Julian asked the community if he could keep them here temporarily until he'd arranged a more dignified public place where people could pray to Buñuel... It was a big secret and we never said a word about it until now.'"

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Pan Am flies north

Newsweek International meditates on the influx of Latino talent to North American movies, quoting Focus Features James Schamus: "There's this cross-cultural creative ferment in which people are finding stories that cut across boundaries. A lot of that has to do with the melting pot of Latin American cultures in the United States now." The piece goes on to quote Walter Salles: "My generation is the first generation [in South America] to be able to express itself freely. Until the early '80s in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, we were living under military dictatorships, under censorship. If you haven't been able to express your voice for 25 years and you finally recover it, there's a passion to express yourself that has no parallel. This generation of directors and actors has blossomed from that." Lest it all sound drily political, here's Guillermo del Toro, "Alfonso [Cuaron], Alejandro [Gonzalez Inarritu] and I were hungry to talk in a language that would drive the audience back into the theaters, by adopting a more contemporary type of filmmaking."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 27, 2004

Winning the Lottery's lottery

"Films about Britney Spears, evil mobile phones and legendary creatures are among 29 short films to receive funding from the National Lottery," the Beeb reports. "More than 400 young people will benefit from the £100,000 funding from First Light—the UK Film Council's young people's filmmaking initiative. First Light enables 5-to-18 year olds across the UK to make short films with professional filmmakers."

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

A very indie New Year

Reading "Herzog on Herzog" in preparation for Sundance: "The whole of Aguirre was shot with one camera," he relates, explaining he'd stolen it from the predecessor to the Munich Film School. "They had a row of cameras sitting on a shelf, but never actually gave any out to aspiring young filmmakers... It was a very simple 35mm camera, one I used on many other films, so I did not consider it theft. For me, it was truly a necessity... If you need air to breathe and you are locked in a room, you have to take a chisel and hammer and break down the wall... it is your absolute right." To today's filmmakers, he says, "with the cheaper digital cameras and editing equipment... you need only guts to make films, just the sense that you have to make your films. Every able-bodied filmmaker... should be able to raise the pittance... Do not wait for the system to finance [your work]." Repeating something he's surely said many times before and since, including the first time I met him and I was 23: "Rob a bank, for God's sake!"

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December 26, 2004

Film Comment's 50 best of 2004

... as picked by 62 contributors and friends, including Thom Andersen, Tom Charity, David Chute, Edward Crouse, Gary Crowdus, Manohla Dargis, Larry Gross, Molly Haskell, Kent Jones, Bill Krohn, Phillip Lopate, Guy Maddin, Todd McCarthy, Geoffrey O’Brien, Mark Peranson, Andrew Sarris, Paul Schrader, Chuck Stephens, and Michael Tolkin. Plus! The 30 best unreleased 'uns.

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Sideways—the map

Sidelong marketing: "Weeks ahead of the movie's fall release, the Santa Barbara Conference and Visitors Bureau and Film Commission aimed to capitalize on hoped-for buzz... The commission created 'Sideways, the Map,' which traces the movie's key scenes at 19 local attractions, including Sanford Winery's tasting room, the Hitching Post II restaurant and the "Windmill Inn." In real life, the motel is the Windmill Days Inn, where its recent brush with Hollywood makes the towels seem less thin and the smoke-scented rooms less stale."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Remembering the Breast of Meyer

Chris Gore assembles two pairs of Russ Meyer's favorite women: "We gathered three stars of Meyer's films—Erica Gavin, Kitten Natividad and Raven De La Croix—at Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills (Tura Satana, another Meyer favorite, joined the conversation by phone) to discuss his legacy, his relationship with women and his fascination with breasts."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Chinese cinema has urgent work to do

Film scholar Shelly Kraicer's incisive essay, "Lost in Time, Lost in Space" charts the present and future of Chinese filmmaking: "I’ve been discussing cinema as a symptom of a crisis; films as alarm bells, summoning us to rethink the way we live. Chinese cinema has urgent work to do: things need to be said; wounds need to be exposed. There’s a palpable sense of frustration, at least in the Beijing film community, that with a society in such evident crisis, the country’s filmmakers haven’t yet produced a response equal to the challenge. Keep an eye... on independent directors like Wang Bing (Believe in the Future, 2005), Li Shaohong (Baober in Love, 2004), Wang Chao (Day and Night, 2004), He Jianjun (Pirated Copy, 2004), Li Yu (Dam Street, 2005), Zhang Yuan (Beautiful, 2004), Xie Dong (Summer, 2004), Cui Zi’en (The Narrow Path, 2004), Gan Xiao'er (Raised From Dust, 2005), and Li Yang (Red Passion, 2005), all of whom have either recently completed or are working on new features. If China’s current cultural upheaval hasn’t yet produced the kind of masterpieces that its prodigiously talented filmmakers are capable of, it is nonetheless producing a body of work that is vibrantly engaged and aesthetically challenging."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 25, 2004

The African public is very, very talkative

My longish interview in Cinema Scope with Ousmane Sembène on Moolaadé, one of 2004's best films: In the cinema you have two hours to tell your story—and people become sensitive. The African public is very, very talkative. You have to keep them quiet for the first ten minutes of the film. Then you have to capture and hold their attention. Sometimes have some comic relief and then come back to your story. But that is the classic, tested way. If you take the Brechtian approach, you do have to distance yourself from the story sometimes. The Italian cineastes, like Pasolini, who I met when I was making Mandabi in 1968, were able to strike that balance. But I learned from everyone. I do think in Africa, we have to always invent a new writing. But I also take something from other cultures.

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:39 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Backtrack by the Bay

The NY Times reports on a fistful of retrenchments: "Francis Ford Coppola's San Francisco-based American Zoetrope Productions closed this month. The production center, founded as an alternative to commercial Hollywood, was co-created in 1969 by Mr. Coppola, the Godfather director; George Lucas, the Star Wars director; and Walter Murch, an award-winning sound designer. It is expected to reopen under the name ZAP Productions, focusing on DVD production, and to be run by Kim Aubry, who was previously in charge of Zoetrope. American Zoetrope will still maintain a Los Angeles office."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 24, 2004

Devdas reflux

A little fulsome advance praise for Black, the new film from Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the director of 2002's worldwide success, Devdas: "Without doubt Sanjay’s three films so far have been true highpoints for Hindi cinema. It would be no exaggeration to say that post-Devdas, he is considered the true inheritor of the legacy left behind by Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, V. Shantaram, K. Asif and Bimal Roy... Compliments delight him. Criticism kills him. And now as he sits before me in his exquisitely done-up home Sanjay sighs, 'I’ve always done what I think to be instinctively right. I can’t let others, be they individuals or moral codes, decide what I should do. When I made Khamoshi, everyone said, "Who would want to see a film about a deaf-and-mute couple?" Perhaps some people are saying the same about Black: "Who would want to see a film about a severely handicapped girl and her teacher?" Well, I’ve news for the doomsday prophets. There’s an audience out there which wants to experience a cinema that takes them beyond the expected... Yes, I want to be a magician on celluloid.”

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The fest after Tomorrow

Another round of titles announced in competition in Berlin: Roland Emmerich is the unlikely president of the International Jury of the Berlinale 2005. The new titles, which include 8 world premieres:
 
Gespenster (Ghosts), Christian Petzold; a woman whose daughter was abducted as a child believes a vagrant may be the lost child: from the excellent director of The State I'm In (Die innere Sichereit) and Something To Remind Me (Toter Mann).

Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl—Hope and Resistance), Marc Rothemund; the last 6 days of a founder of a World War II resistance group

One Day in Europe, Hannes Stöhl; globetrotting comedy about thieves on the soccer circuit
 
Le promeneur du Champ de Mars (The Walker of the Champ de Mars); Robert Guédiguian: the last days of François Mitterrand from the director of The Town is Quiet.

Les temps qui changent (Changing Times), André Téchiné: "Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu are lovers who, after a separation of 30 years, meet again in Tangiers."

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson.

Asylum, David Mackenzie. The director of Young Adam adapts Patrick McGrath's 1950s-set novel; with Natasha Richardson, Ian McKellen, Hugh Bonneville.

U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (Carmen in Khayelitsha), Mark Dornford-May. Bizet's "Carmen" set in a South-African township and made entirely in the country’s official language Xhosa.
 
Hotel Rwanda, Terry George.

Peacock, Gu Changwei. Directorial debut of the superb Chinese cinematographer (Farewell, My Concubine; Devils on the Doorstep; Autumn in New York), portraying 14 years of daily life in a small town in Henan province.

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December 23, 2004

Marty, out of time, out of touch

Scorsese doesn't live there anymore: "If I continue to make films about New York, they will probably be set in the past. The 'new' New York I don't know much about... It's not that I'm against contemporary film. I'm open to it in general, but I find the new colours of the city, the new Times Square, kind of shocking. I guess I'm stuck in a time warp," he says, smiling and shifting his thick-rimmed black glasses back up his nose. "I rarely go to the area I grew up in, which they now describe as 'chic'. New York is very different from the place I knew and loved."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hitting close to homely

In his "Meta-Media Madness Top 10," John Powers is "Mining Neverland": "Whether it’s Jim Carrey’s inexpressive nerd getting Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Quentin Tarantino idolizing his dream chick in Kill Bill Vol. 2—she’s a kung fu mom who looks like Uma Thurman—this is a year in which even art movies specialized in fulfilling the wishes of immature men. Nowhere was the fantasy balder than in the wonderful, voluminously praised Sideways, where Paul Giamatti’s homely, self-absorbed wine-geek Miles finds a soul mate in Maya, a gorgeous divorcée who knows her vintages, understands his pinot noir touchiness, even praises his unpublished, perhaps-unpublishable, novel and, of course, looks like Virginia Madsen."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:16 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Indier than thou

Robert Willonsky of the Dallas Observer cobbles a sturdy cover story about distribution's new, not-so-indie world, charting the post-Miramax waters, with words from the bigs at Warner Independent and thinkFilm. (Focus Features' co-president David Linde, who got dubbed "Lindley" in a San Francisco Chronicle article last week is now working for Fox Searchilight, Willonsky's article avers.) Who could say anything bad about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and who is more quirky and individual a creative voice than Charlie Kaufman? asks Mark Urman, head of distribution at THINKFilm... But there is nothing about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that was ever at risk. It's a film that, once somebody green-lit it, said, 'What do you need? You need Kate Winslet? Let's get Kirsten Dunst. A walk-on. Let's get Elijah Wood. A walk-on. It's barely a role. I've had bigger parts in movies... If it's gonna be quirky, we better protect it with as much production value, as much music, as much light, as much beauty, as much location, as much snow in the summer, as much sunshine in the winter. What can we do for this movie to guarantee that this quirky movie might reach an audience?' That's not independent. That's just the opposite of independent, where you walk that tightrope and there is no safety net in sight.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

Saraband, slowly

Ingmar Bergman's 2003 Saraband is at long last opening theatrically in some markets: "[Bergman] finally relented on the proviso that it be shown only [with] digital projection... [French] independent distributor Rezo Films won the contract and has so far opened it in two specially equipped Paris venues, where, despite the film’s airing on Arte in mid-December, it has enjoyed rapturous praise and brisk business." Sony Pictures Classics has announced a US release of July 8.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:39 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Scorsese defines mature...

.... in an excerpt from the third edition of Faber's "Scorsese on Scorsese": "People had reacted in such a way to Raging Bull, saying it was a beautiful film, like Days of Heaven, you could take every frame and put it on the wall, that I decided my next picture was going to be 1903 style, more like Edwin S Porter's The Life of an American Fireman, with no close-ups. So in King of Comedy, that's what I tried to do.When it was shown on the first night at the Cannes Festival, I went backstage with Sergio Leone and he looked at me and said, "Martin, that's your most mature film". I don't know if it was his way of saying he didn't like it. I guess that comes to mind because over the years my friends and I have had a running joke about slow movies, where the camera doesn't move, as being "mature"... I like it when two images go together and they move. I guess it may not be considered "mature", but I enjoy it.

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Digital in South Korea

The Korean Film Commission throws a few won toward bringing digital distribution to their marketplace, with the Projection Support for Feature-Length Digital Films program. "The support program provides three digital films per year with 30 million won ($28,000) to cover the rental costs of a digital projector, so that they can be screened directly in digital for their commercial release."

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 22, 2004

At Sixes and Elevens with The Life Aquatic

"So what’s the big deal with the number 11?"

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Siccing Sicko

The targets of the newest doc by Michael Moore are feeling a little queasy: "America's pharmaceutical industry is putting out an advisory about the latest potential threat to its health: Michael Moore [who has] set his sights on the healthcare industry, including insurance companies, HMOs, the Food and Drug Administration -- and drug companies. At least six of the nation's largest companies already have issued internal notices to their work forces, preparing them for potential ambushes. "We ran a story in our online newspaper saying Moore is embarking on a documentary—and if you see a scruffy guy in a baseball cap, you'll know who it is," said Stephen Lederer, a spokesman for Pfizer Global Research and Development.... In September and October, GlaxoSmithKline, the second-largest in retail sales, as well as AstraZeneca and Wyeth, sent out Moore alerts... Sanofi-Synthelabo and Aventis Pharmaceuticals each sent similar memos before their recent merger."

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A Beeb C's

The Beeb swaps banalities with Graham King, the "north London businessman" who kicked in big bucks for Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and The Aviator, managing to misspell the director's name: "The film producer told BBC London how star struck he was when he first met Scorsese. 'When I walked into the room he was sitting on the floor and there were history books open all over the floor because he was studying the history for Gangs of New York. He looked up and said 'it's so nice to meet you' and gave me a hug and I thought "wow," I was dying inside, this kid from north London is sitting here with Scorcese.'"

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Japan's rising sums

A survey of discouraging 2004 trends in the Japanese film industry in Daily Yomiuri: "What is different about the current internationalization is not just the watering down, the turning of cultural difference into commodities to consume, but—and this is probably the origin of those side effects—the fact it's now taking place in the major studios. What these global institutional moves threaten to do is further distance the majors from the minors and further undermine an already unfairly hampered independent industry through the force of big capital, especially in television."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Napoleon sells out

Bye-bye Nappy in Provo: "Various Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, K-Mart and Blockbuster Video stores in Utah and Salt Lake counties sold out of the BYU-student-created movie by mid-afternoon Tuesday... The Best Buy on University Avenue in Orem ran out of the Idaho adventure flick by noon, and before that sales clerks just handed the DVD to customers before they even asked for the movie by name. 'Yeah, basically everyone who walked in the store this morning pretty much wanted it,' a Best Buy store clerk told the Daily Herald."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Movie climaxes

Giving away the sweet endings to two reviews, each worth reading—first, Manohla Dargis on Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers: "For his part, Mr. Hoffman serenely wanders about as if he were padding around his living room, slipping away with the movie without breaking his smile or stride. He's a masterly thief." And Roger Ebert ends his plot-baring dither over Bad Education with this keen thought: "I think it's really more about erotic role-playing: About the roles we play, the roles other people play, and the roles we imagine them playing and they imagine us playing. If Almodovar is right, some of our most exciting sexual experiences take place entirely within the minds of other people."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Cuban libre!

Indie is as dollars do: Maverick money guy Mark Cuban is blogging up a storm, putting his moneyed ideas up for public consumption: "One of the nice things about being one of the owners of the Landmark Theaters, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures and HDNet Films with really smart partners, is that we can and will put our customers first and deliver our original movies in theaters, on DVD and on HDNet the exact same day. Our first movie, Enron—Ask Why, was selected to be in the Sundance Documentary Competition. So stay tuned!"

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:57 AM | Comments (4)

Hacks of the O.C.

The Orange County Register's "Adventures in Barrywood" columnist pees on his competitors: Bitterness and anger makes [some movie critics] mean. That explains why they can write those vicious reviews with such relish. They're getting even with the filmmaker for not being Orson Welles. OK, that's understandable. It's even entertaining to read some of those nasty reviews. You can read them and still go to the movie if you know from past experience that the critic is a bitter and angry person. What cannot be forgiven is when they see so many bad movies in the course of a year, their judgment is affected. Nothing is worse than a serious critic grading on a curve. There are no curves in movies. It's either a well-made movie or it's not. If it's a bad crop of movies in a particular year, then it's a bad crop of movies. And on and on he goes...

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 21, 2004

Celebrating Festen

The Guardian's Michael Billington calls the stage adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (Festen) 2004's best play: Tragedy will only survive if it adapts to the modern age, which it reassuringly shows signs of doing. [George] Steiner suggested the tragedy of the future might be based on documented fact and become a way of honouring the dead... Edward Albee in 'The Goat' shows how tragedy—in the sense of the destruction of an individual—an spring from an unimaginable obsession. But the creators of 'Festen'—Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov and Bohr Hansen—take tragedy in startling new directions, redefining it for the modern age.

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:40 PM | Comments (3)

18 questions for Leos Carax

On the eve of a retrospective, reclusive New York-Paris auteur Leos Carax answers 18 questions, including what he'd like on his cremation urn: "I finally quit smoking..." (The article's in French.)

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Mann to Mann to Berlin

Berlin's announced its opener, Man to Man, an anthropological epic from a script by novelist William Boyd and French director Regis Wargnier starring Joseph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nutley's Maggie Cheung

Screen International identifies some cross-cultural influence in Brit-born Sweden-resident director Colin Nutley's latest, The Queen of Sheba's Pearls: "Although much of the film is shot in interiors, the palate is rich, ranging from sepias to burnt out daylight shots that play up [Helena] Bergstrom’s blonde mane and ruby details. The combination of glossy cinematography, lush sets and glorious costume design are a Nordic riposte to the Wong Kar Wai-Chris Doyle-William Chang combo with Bergstrom happily established as Nutley’s Maggie Cheung."

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Ontario taxman giveth

Filmmakers get more potential tax breaks: In Ontario, Canadian producers' tax credits rise to 30% from the current 20%. "Tax credits for foreign producers will also rise, from 11% to 18%, under the terms of the $48-million plan," reports the CBC. "The beleaguered industry has been battered by a rising Canadian dollar, as well as campaigns in the US to repatriate the so-called "runaway" productions that choose foreign locations over Hollywood because of favourable tax rates."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

It's ennui to me

Micheangelo Antonioni's four-hour doc on China, 1972's Chung Kuo got a delayed debut in Beijing: Most of the Chinese audience were very young or had not been born at the time the film was made, and images of ordered communist living felt remote and unfamiliar. "I have a lot of complex feelings watching this film," says one 40-year-old audience member. "There have been so many changes since I was a boy. It's an fascinating record, remembering what things used to be like."

Posted by Ray Pride at 08:30 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 20, 2004

Oscar's world

Variety sez the Oscars "used to be like the World Series—a global event in name, but in actuality an entirely North American affair. But in recent years—spiking when Pedro Almodovar nabbed a screenplay award for Talk To Her—the Oscar race has opened up to the rest of the world."

Posted by Ray Pride at 02:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

David Thomson's dutiful gesture towards cunnilingus and fellatio

Apropos of Kinsey, David Thomson waxes erotic: "As the years go by, I remain unconvinced that there has ever been a more fascinating subject in the movies than sex... Sometimes I wonder if the whole, large purpose of the movies was not a very benign form of education in which the large, hitherto illiterate and untamed population of the world was made ready for the huge adventure of sex by choice (as opposed to brutal intercourse with the nearest body)... In recent years, sex has bowed its heads in most English-speaking films, as the actors made a dutiful gesture towards cunnilingus and fellatio."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Variety surveys the 50 foreign-language Oscar nominees

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The genre of Good

At the Whistler Film Festival, which wants to be a Sundance of the North, Macleans' Brian Johnson joins several filmmakers in bemoaning the state of Canada's English-language film scene. Writer-director Don McKellar has been one of the harshest critics of the outgoing head of Telefilm Canada: I've been to festivals across the country and heard all these appalling stories from filmmakers who were turned down by Telefilm because they basically said, 'We love it, but that's not in our mandate anymore. We want genre films.' I kept telling [him], 'Why don't you just say they should be good films?'

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Whilst far from a masterpiece

Mark Kermode unguiltily seeks the pleasures of Tobe Hooper's newest: "Yet no matter how many times Hooper shoots himself in the cinematic foot, he somehow retains the ability to surprise us—often when we least expect it. I remember the sense of crushing disappointment with which I was filled when learning that Hooper had been reduced to remaking Dennis Donnelly's infamously misogynistic 1970s slasher pic The Toolbox Murders, a clear indication of just how far down the toilet his career had finally been flushed. Yet the finished film, whilst far from being a masterpiece, is actually a perfectly passable piece of nostalgic trash—which is perhaps more than can be said of Donnelly's original."

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You may not censor Omar Khayyam

At the International Film Festival of Kerala, Abbas Kiarostami says it's increasingly hard to make films in Iran: "Kiarostami said authorities in Iran were even trying to take away the "originality" of a work. The director said he was once asked by censors to cut out a line of Omar Khayyam from his film."I told them that they may censor me, but not Khayyam," he said, adding four of his latest films could not be released in Iran."

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The UK taxman giveth

Beginning July 2005, UK producers will be entitled to government subsidies worth up to £4 million per film, the BBC reports. "Producers of films with budgets up to £20m will also receive a 50% tax waiver on their production costs, on condition that the film makes a profit." The deduction will apply to lower-budget films like The Full Monty, Bend It Like Beckham, Calendar Girls and 28 Days Later.

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How Shcottish is it?

The Scotsman chooses a tidy 10 for the best scenes in Scottish film, including from Gregory's Girl, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar. How Shcottish is it? For our purposes we have stretched the definition of "Scottish" to include anything with even a tenuous connection.

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December 19, 2004

Writing with Wes

Noah Baumbach tells all in his collaborative methods with Wes Anderson:
How long did you guys work on this?
About a year. We met every day at an Italian restaurant in Soho. We both keep odd hours, so we’d always plan to meet at 1pm then someone would show up late. Then one of us would anticipate that the other person would be late and the time would consistently pushed back. Then we’d go, "Okay, tomorrow, we actually meet at one!" Naturally, one of us would be late. But we’d stay through dinner, and just keep working on the script. We ended up using a lot of the items on the menu to name the fish. Some of the regular patrons’ names ended up in there as well which we used for the crew members and such.

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Vera takes

A sturdy online-only interview by Amy Taubin with Mike Leigh about Vera Drake: "I have to say it was an immensely difficult film to make. Because its predecessor, All or Nothing, was a commercial failure, our backers were not very enthusiastic about doing anything. So money was very tight for a period film. We did crazy things like shooting in super-16 and blowing it up to 35mm. We've cut digitally since Topsy-Turvy, but here we went to 35mm from a digital intermediate—all these things to save money. If it works, and it obviously does, it's the actors and the production designer... who did an amazing job. We shot a great deal of it in one location—an old hospital. We built all the bed-sits there."

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Simple is hard

More Marty monologuing: They talk about how as you get older you simplify. Scorsese shakes his head. I look at some of the great directors like John Huston, Bunuel, Robert Altman, Woody Allen—the simplifications. I'm looking for it in myself. It's not happening... There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

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When David Lynch met Daisy Duke

In the emerging digital dreamscape, Duane Dudek relishes the regionalism of movies like Sideways and Lone Star and movies by David Gordon Green: "His new film Undertow, about a boy fleeing a murder... combines 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' with the lurid populism of Walking Tall and The Dukes of Hazzard. "That was my pitch for the movie," said Green, whose films George Washington and All the Real Girls also were set in the rural South. "I wanted it to be the episode of The Dukes of Hazzard that David Lynch never got to make.'"

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Screenwriter, heal thyself

25-year-old Imaginary Heroes writer-director Dan Harris explains his unexplainables in Writer's Guild West's house mag, Written By: "This is my world. It's my head vomited up on paper. Even so, I soon discovered the strangest thing: For the longest time I had a profound inability to describe what the movie was about when prompted for an explanation. Earlier projects were simple—I could pitch them in a sentence, or 10, or for 10 minutes. No problem. But this one was different. This one was about things unspoken. This was about hatred that was hidden. This was about, well, all kinds of vague ideas like that."

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Viva the Castro

In San Francisco, protests over the sacking of 16-year-veteran film programmer Anita Monga: "More than 100 sign-waving film lovers, including an Oscar-winning documentarian, gathered outside the Castro Theatre on Saturday." They demanded that the owner of the 1922 movie palace, Ted Nasser, rehire her after her November firing. This is a space about movies, shared experiences, kinship and community, B. Ruby Rich tells the San Francisco Chronicle. We deserve to see something that we love not be destroyed. The glory of the Castro is that it's part of its community.

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December 18, 2004

Yu's & Darger's little girls

Oscar winner Jessica Yu discusses Realms of the Unreal, her dreamy doc about the dark fantasies of artist Henry Darger: "Yu eschews the traditional omniscient-narrator technique and instead has several voices to tell Darger's story—including a mysterious little girl narrator (Dakota Fanning), who comes as close as any of them to getting inside Darger's troubled mind. 'It was interesting having discussions with this 7-year-old about Darger. She just really got it.'"

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Newmarket, to market

As Newmarket Films may be bought by Viacom to supplant Paramount Classics, Lynn Hirschberg offers up a few small hints while profiling at length "The Distribution Artist", Bob Berney, who's spearheaded the releases of Memento, Y Tu Mamá También, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Monster, Whale Rider, and The Passion of the Christ, as well as the Kevin Bacon-starring sexual-offender-themed Christmas release The Woodsman: "There's a sense of romance in the way that Bob Berney talks about seeing his movies for the first time. He usually encounters them at a screening at a festival with other potential distributors. I'm always looking for something I can't predict, Berney said, over fish and chips at an Irish restaurant around the corner from his office. It's a little like falling in love—you couldn't imagine how this film hadn't existed in your life before, and then, it's there."

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Rained on and nibbled by rats

About 10,000 words transcribing a Cinemathèque québécoise conversation with Decasia's director, Bill Morrison about his techniques, influences, found footage and the nature of memory: When you work with the paper print collections, you become aware that you are watching many paintings that have been re-photographed 60 years after they were taken, and continue to be re-photographed today. So there are many things happening between the first time they were registered on the 35mm negative and transfered to a paper intermediary, to being stored, rained on, or being nibbled by rats; the hairs in the specs, the grain and what would have to happen for that to be brought out and to be re-photographed some 60 years later. So each picture has its own dimension of time, its own history. Whether or not you are conscious of this while watching, you are still watching these tiny histories go by and that was very powerful to me. This, in a way, satisfied my pictorial urge as well as still, somehow, giving a picture show. Via GreenCine.

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Wes is more

A pooped Wes Anderson opines on the making of metaphor: “To have the hero putting an adorable boy on his shoulders? Sure! That has very little to do with directing, if that comes off. It has everything to do with Bill [Murray] and the little boy. There’s some kind of weird metaphor that we were striving for, that we didn’t want to shy away from. I think you can walk the edge between the corny thing and the thing that moves you: That’s what you hope for.”

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Coral libre

The Havana Film Festival announced their 2004 Coral Awards:

FICTION
First Coral: Whiskey (Uruguay), Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll
Second place: Machuca (Chile), Andrés Wood (Chile's 2004 Oscar entry for Foreign Language Film)
Third: The Holy Girl (Argentina), Lucrecia Martel
Best direction: Lucrecia Martel (who won for La Cienaga in 2001.
Special Jury Prize: Punto y raya (Venezuela), Elia Schneider
Actress: Susú Pecorero, Roma (Argentina)
Actor: Roque Valero, Punto y raya (Venezuela)
Best first film: Whiskey Romeo Zulú, Enrique Piñeyro (Argentina)
Special Jury Prize: Días de Santiago, Joshua Méndez (Peru)
Script: Adolph Aristaraín, Mario Camus and Kathy Saavedra, Roma (Argentina).
Photography: Miguel Joan Littín, Machuca (Chile)
Editing: Mair Tabares, Quase Dois Irmãos (Almost Brothers) (Brazil)
Art direction: Mercedes Alfonsi'n, Luna de Avellaneda (Argentina).
Music: Naná Vasconcelos, Quase Dois Irmãos (Brazil).
Sound track: Abbate Diaz, Luna de Avellaneda (Argentina).
Fiction short: El otro sueño americano (The Other American Dream), Enrique Stream (Mexico).
Special mention: Utopia, Arturo Infant (Cuba).

DOCUMENTARY
First Coral: Memorias del Saqueo (A Social Genocide), Fernando Solanas (Argentina).
Jury prize: Digna... hasta el última, Felipe Cazals (Mexico).
Second Coral: Nelson Freire, Joâo Moreira Salles (Brazil).
Third Coral: deMoler, of Alexander Ramirez (Cuba).
Special Mention: Niños en la frontera, Luis Acevedo Fals (Cuba).

POSTER
A sombra del caminante, Alexander Marroquín (Colombia)

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Deux ou trois Film Fests in Montreal

Things are getting confusing in Montreal: after two government agencies withdrew their funding for the troubled World Film Festival (which turns 29 in 2005,) officials from Telefilm Canada and its Quebec counterpart drew from four proposals and "announced they are backing a proposal for a new international film 'project' from L'Équipe Spectra, organizers of the city's successful jazz and French music festivals. A 'transitional' film festival is set for next October, with a more fully established version in 2006."

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Latin America is on fire

Tracing Che's trail: "Latin America is on fire," said Todd Sotkiewicz, president of Lonely Planet Americas, the guidebook company, adding that passenger travel from the US to Latin American destinations was up 22% in the first 9 months of 2004... Expecting a surge in SA tourism, Planet joined with Focus Features to produce a promotional guidebook handed out to [Motorcycle Diaries] moviegoers... [Director Walter] Salles himself had long wanted to follow the Guevara route by motorcycle. Thanks to the film, he got to follow the route three times—twice for location scouting and once for filming—but had to travel via 4x4 instead of on a motorbike."

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December 17, 2004

Followed home by a mutilated lobster

The short, wet life of director of the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, is recalled as the National Film Theater launches a season of his work as "Robert Hamer: "The Shadow Side". The beginning of the end for Robert Hamer was the day he was followed home by a mutilated lobster. Deep down, in some sober part of his alcohol-ravaged mind, Hamer knew the horrible thing couldn't really be there, but that didn't stop his fear from mounting into panic as it scraped its way along behind him from a pond in Battersea Park and followed him up to his flat in Tite Street, Chelsea. He slammed the lift door on it and heard the crunch and the scream as its exoskeleton shattered.

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Schlesinger bloody Schlesinger

Gavin Lambert reviews a new biography of John Schlesinger, from highs to lows to the wages of compromise: In later years when he couldn't set up the films he wanted to make, Schlesinger damaged his reputation, then his heart and his arteries, by accepting too many potboilers in the desperate, unfulfilled hope of a box-office success that would enable him to work on his own terms again.

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Let 100 houses bloom, 100 directors expend

Talking visual style and politics (while disingenuously claiming a disinterest in politics), Hero and House of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou talks about a new sideline: "I'm not a businessman. I'm not in business at all," he protests, but then acknowledges that he has been on a buying spree. "In Beijing, there is a lot of property development and I saw the opportunity to acquire some property for myself and for my family." Zhang also tells the Independent his pragmatic inspiration for the torrential weather at the end of Daggers: "The final scene also presented problems. Snow fell unexpectedly early, posing enormous issues of continuity. Zhang decided to include the changing of seasons and makes no apologies for the unsettling blood-soaked snow. "I wanted to present the emotion of a love triangle moving from love to hate."

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Geopolitical lovin'

The Guardian's John Patterson smooches Before Sunset one more time in his year-end wrap, placing its exquisite tenderness into the larger world: "Talky, soulful, intelligent and, at 80 minutes, remarkably succinct and profound, it was an eloquent repudiation by example of the bloated and empty spectacles—and sequels—that mainstream Hollywood laid upon us. But much of its appeal had to do, tangentially at least, with geopolitics. Here an American man and a Frenchwoman talked calmly and intelligently and listened to each other with respect and honesty."

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Moving the Film Movement

New York Observer's Jake Brooks casts a wary eye toward the second year of Larry Meistrich's Film Movement: People in the New York film community have alternately categorized him as a frat boy and a bully—a megalomaniacal businessman who was hell-bent on making the Shooting Gallery into a multimedia empire. “Maybe I am an asshole,” [Meistrich] admitted. “But maybe my methodology doesn’t suck.” ... “You have to balance what’s good for the art with what’s good for the money. The reasons that the Met and the Guggenheim work are because those are straight-up businesses. They run like corporations. And then they are able to create a box of artistic freedom."

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The reality of making reality

Tom Ryan of The Age adds one more earnest attempt to corral the unruly new frontier of documentary filmmaking: As a documentary filmmaker, you can do whatever you like with the mechanics of the filmmaking process: as [Nicolas] Philibert points out, you have to choose somewhere to put the camera; you have to cut from one shot/scene to another. Your only obligation is to deal honestly and fairly with the people and the circumstances that you encounter. The same point applies whether you're making films as various as Letters to Ali, Heir to an Execution, The Corporation or My Architect, all of which are nothing if not carefully structured to produce a point of view on their subjects. But in framing events... you must not knowingly present an untruth or suppress information that might contradict your account. You should not put words into someone's mouth, but you can use the soundtrack—narration or sound effects or music—to comment on what you're showing. You are under no obligation to be "objective" because you can't be. But you are obliged to be honest.

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Surfing DIY down under

A new Australian road movie, mostly in Japanese, self-distribs across the continent: "Rachael Lucas' Bondi Tsunami defies categorisation: an exuberant Japanese road trip/surf movie/music video/pop culture combo set on the east coast of Australia... Two Japanese guys in a 1961 two-tone EK Holden [driving] along the coast, looking for waves, and finding travelling companions, Big Things, enlightenment and souvenirs." Lucas follows an Aussie tradition of "surf-movie entrepreneurs" by taking the DV production (edited from 220 hours of footage) from town to town, with cast, crew and the starring car. It was originally going to be a DVD, but we had the car, the film was crying out, 'Tour me'.

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Hartley working

After the Sundance 2005 premiere of his DV feature, The Girl From Monday, Hal Hartley's not waiting around; it'll play January 30 at MoMA's reopening premiere series, and then go out on his own DVD label soon after. Hartley explains: "I attended Sundance in 1990 and 1991 with my first two features. Everything was a blur to me then. But I could see that the films we were making then, and the way we were producing them, had the professionals thinking about new distribution trends. 13 years later, I'm back with new work and everyone is talking about even newer—more radically different—trends in distribution. This proves that moviemaking is still such a young art form, and it changes constantly... Sundance has been one of the important places where what is actually being made is actually being shown."

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Old and new Manitoban traditions

Canada's National Screen Institute has announced an Aboriginal Youth Pilot Project, a prototype for a national program, designed for Aboriginal youth living in Winnipeg, who are interested in a career in the film or TV industry. Participants are paid minimum wage for the 16-week program, which includes 4 weeks of workshops and seminas about the industry, and a 12-week internship with a broadcaster or producer. It kicks off January 4 "with several spiritual components, including a Traditional Feast to sanction the program. “These gifted participants will have the opportunity to sit with the Elders and pay homage to our ancestors, who will bless their journey through this program...” Traditional food including berries, wild rice and bannock will be offered during the Feast."

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December 16, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2 Pt. 1

Michael Moore is off to Glasgow: "Moore... is to film part of his follow-up in Glasgow, where he will interview the mother of a Scots soldier killed in Iraq. Rose Gentle, the mother of Gordon Gentle, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Basra in June, has been approached by Moore’s team and agreed to be interviewed for Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2... One of the factors Moore is expected to focus on in his new film is the fact many soldiers, both in the US and UK armed forces, come from the poorer areas of their countries such as the small towns of the American mid-west and deprived areas of British inner cities..."

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Proof of Aussie film life

Jocelyn Moorhouse prepares Eucalyptus, her first directorial project in 9 years, and notes Australia's need for "a reenergized low-budget sector": It's fantastic to encourage low-budget filmmaking because that's where the new filmmakers and the new stars come from. If we're interested in re-awakening and reviving the Australian film industry, that's the way to do it. The 44-year-old director spoke at the "launch of a new scheme to encourage more films in the tradition of Proof, Romper Stomper and Love and Other Catastrophes. Under the IndiVision scheme, the Australian Film Commission is backing eight creative teams to develop projects costing less than $2 million. They will work with leading low-budget specialists and will be eligible for production funding of up to $1 million... The commission's director of development, Carole Sklan, said the fact the country only produced 15 feature films last financial year made it hard for first-timers."

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Fest wrestling pre-Sundance

The New York Times ventures to Rochester and interviews some of the usual suspects in a pre-Sundance survey of the health of regional film festivals: "In the last 10 years, film festivals have spread across the country... There are roughly 2,500 worldwide[, an estimated] 950 festivals in the US alone, with 300 more in Canada; in North America, there are 100 Jewish film festivals, 30 gay and lesbian film festivals, and 279 festivals that either focus on animation or have animation categories... In a business saturated with independent films that are costly to market, festivals are an invaluable way for a distributor to generate word of mouth and local press for a movie. Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures said regional film festivals become alternative forms of distribution for some films that will never find distribution. The outlets in the commercial marketplace just cannot keep up with production, [he] said."

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Gilliam's Don Quixote producer dies

Veteran French producer René Cleitman died Wednesday morning in Paris at 64; his features include She's so lovely (1997),The Horseman on the Roof (1995), Bertrand Tavernier's Live Bait (L'Appât) (1995), Carlos Saura's Tango (1993) and Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989), as well as Terry Gilliam's ill-fated 2000 The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which is survived by Lost in La Mancha.

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Clint's golden indie oldies

Tenacity, perseverance, grit: Clint Eastwood defines independence at the age of 74 for LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Million Dollar Baby was a tough picture to get made, despite Eastwood’s clout and the combined critical and commercial success (more than $150 million worldwide) of Mystic River... 'I liked the Million Dollar Baby script a lot... Warner Bros. said the project had been submitted to them and they’d passed on it. I said, "But I like it." They said, "Well, it’s a boxing movie." And I said, "It’s not a boxing movie in my opinion. It’s a father-daughter love story, and it’s a lot of other things besides a boxing movie.’ They hemmed and hawed and finally said that if I wanted to take it, maybe they’d pay for the domestic rights only. After that, I’d be on my own... We took it to a couple of other studios, and they turned it down, much like Mystic River was turned down—the exact same pattern."

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Indie as high as an elephant's eye

A Des Moines TV station wants to do the Sundance Channel thing for local filmmakers: "There are many people in the state who have no idea about the films being made in Iowa, and KDSM is helping us get our material out there... The program is a great opportunity for filmmakers to gain a larger audience, and it also supports the Iowa film industry, which definitely needs to be recognized."

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December 15, 2004

The boot of Errol

Commercials production house @radical.media gives the boot to Errol Morris, where he's shot many spots for the likes of Miller beer: "We really share different values," [chairman and CEO Jon] Kamen said, declining to be more specific. "We accomplished everything we could for Errol in his tenure with the company. ... We reached a point in which Errol was unhappy and wanted something more."

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Henry Selick's shining Knight

Henry Selick on Life Aquatic and relocating to Portland to be supervising director at Vinton Studios: "I do my best work when I'm left alone... That was the gift Tim [Burton] gave us on Nightmare'—he loved what we did and gave us a huge amount of freedom to put our efforts on the screen. That's the situation here. Phil Knight is a risk-taker. And there's no point in playing it safe and trying to catch up with Pixar or DreamWorks because that's what everyone else is doing."

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Tops above the 49th

The Toronto International Film Festival Group names Canada's top 10 films of 2004.

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Pioneer Iranian pix coming to US

First Run Features will release on DVD two important movies by Dariush Mehrjuei, 1969's Cow and 1990's Hamun, with interviews with Mehrjuei and essays by Iranian cinema expert Godfrey Cheshire.

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Northwest passage

Seattle's Stranger reports on Pacific Northwest indie production inspiration: Though it seems to be based on the old studios of Hollywood, with crew members under contract to work on whatever film is in production, the Film Company at the Northwest Film Forum is more like a theater company whose key staff members collaborate on every project... At the end of January, when Guy Maddin comes to Seattle to present Cowards Bend the Knee, [he's} making a short film with The Film Company. More from Seattle Weekly.

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26,000 Dutch faces

Filmmakers protest immigration matters in Holland: "There is almost no film-maker, whether from the fictional or documentary arena, who will say no to such a project."

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December 14, 2004

Tony Scott reads Million Dollar Baby

The New York Times' lead reviewer cross-references his Yeats for Mr. Eastwood: "Late in the film, in his darkest hour, Frankie reads from 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree,' the younger Yeats' pastoral dream of flight and transformation, a choice that makes sense in context..."

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Mikey & Nicky

Loving the DVD of Elaine May's essential gangster pic from 1977 here.

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Michael Atkinson loved it: The Aviator

The Voice reviewer nails a thing or two about the life aeronautic: No small obsessive himself, Scorsese dares to limn Hughes's midlife breakdown—holing up in his private screening room naked and unshaven, filling hundreds of empty milk bottles with piss—in repetitive enough terms to try the uncompulsive's patience. Similarly afflicted viewers, however, may have shivers of empathy, just as ex-cokeheads sweated through the final act of GoodFellas.

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Where are you going?

Filmmaker Jason Massot chronicles his doc about hitchhiking around Britain, Where Are You Going?: "The plan had been so simple. I was going to hitchhike round Britain for a month or so and make a documentary about the people who picked me up. There were just two rules: I would accept every lift I was offered; and I would go wherever the drivers took me. I'd always wanted to make a British road movie. There's something about the blandness of the British landscape—all those dual-carriageways, Travelodges and power stations—which I find very appealing."

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December 13, 2004

Whispering Voices of Iraq

Questions about the provenance of current doc release Voices of Iraq, from In These Times: "The Magnolia Pictures contact for Voices of Iraq said that while his company is technically distributing the film, Manning, Selvage & Lee is coordinating the publicity. MS&L has the public affairs contract for the U.S. Army. The firm’s revamp of the Army’s image with the... “Army of One” ad campaign is credited with enabling the Army to meet its recruiting goals... According to [the] MS&L Managing Director... he and his colleagues also deliver key targeted messages about the war in Iraq to specific constituencies. Was the left-leaning art house crowd one of those constituencies? Is the government hiring documentary filmmakers to propagandize the U.S. population?"

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Beyond the grave

The last film by murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh debuted in the Netherlands, "a political thriller entitled 06/05. The movie tells a fictionalized version of the death of Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration Dutch politician assassinated on May 6, 2002... Van Gogh wove together archival news coverage of the murder and facts from the case—such as the identity of Fortuyn's convicted killer, an animal rights activist—with the fictional storyline of a conspiracy between the U.S. government and the Dutch secret service."

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December 12, 2004

Affirmative actions

Promoting their doc in the UK, The Yes Men offer an "exclusive" interview with the Observer's Sean O'Hagan about their December 3 appearance on BBC, impersonating a nonexistent spokesman for Dow Chemical who heralds a $12 billion settlement for the surviving victims of Dow's disaster in India in 1984: "Somewhere between satire and surrealism, activism and absurdism, the Yes Men seem likely to wreak embarrassment and confusion for some time to come, and not even the censure that followed the 'Bhopal incident' seems to have dimmed their determination. 'We may seem entirely mischievous, but we are in fact deadly serious,' says Bichlbaum. 'We both had grandparents who died in the Holocaust so we share an inbuilt suspicion of power, and a healthy fear of the places it can lead to if the powerful are left unchecked. That has transferred itself into a refusal to take those in power seriously, but it doesn't mean we are not serious in our goals.' And how would he summarise those goals? 'To make the world a better and a fairer place."

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Wong turns

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 opens in Scotland and he tells the Scotsman's James Mottram that If he has learned anything from his five-year odyssey, it’s that you can’t work with computer-generated images, which take months to plan, if you’re constantly revising and revisiting your idea. "My advice for any director who wants to use CGI is work with a script," he grunts. He’s next set to work with Nicole Kidman [on the Shanghai and New York-set The Lady From Shanghai], which, given her rigid slate of forthcoming productions, may prove an even bigger headache. "Actually, we’re going to start shooting early next year," he says. "We want to do something different this time." And Wong concedes to the Straits Times, “There are only good or bad movies and some arthouse movies are pretty bad, too. These labels are just a marketing strategy.”

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December 11, 2004

Jonzeing for less money

In a snack of an interview in Blacklist magazine with skate filmmaker and DJ Wing Ko, a mentor of Spike Jonze, Ko tells tales on Jonze and compares filmmaking with a hobby: The type of film work I do parallels djing in that you're editing for an audience that will get hyped watching or listening to what's coming out of your head. I enjoy djing for the instant gratification and because I like my music loud... The film business is less immediate and you're usually working collaboratively... I choose to work with as few people as possible... I'm getting grumpier as I get older. The film world is... 50/50 business vs. creative so I try to keep the business wallet-size and manageable... mo money, mo problems. (The issue's free online; see page 13 or click here for a PDF download.)

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Handicapping the Oscar docs

The Hollywood Reporter highlights the changing faces of documentaries in theaters and at the Oscars: That's not to say popular films are guaranteed to make the cut. A case in point is IFC Films' Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, a well-reviewed movie that has earned more than $1.2 million domestically. In a strong year for documentaries about musicians—also including Palm Pictures' DiG!, Magnolia's End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, ThinkFilm's Festival Express and Sony Pictures Classics' Lightning in a Bottle—Metallica seemed a contender for Oscar consideration. But it is not among the dozen short-listed titles. "I think, sometimes, pop-culture subjects might not be taken as seriously," [Wellspring's Ryan] Werner says.

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Claire shoots, scores, clarifies

A captivating and technically specific interview with director Claire Denis about her tenth feature, The Intruder, via Greencine: "Much of the movie is infused with a rhythmic guitar loop by Stuart Staples of the British band Tindersticks, a haunting, recurring, unresolved riff, obstinate and cold, sad in its ceaseless drone. Like so many scenes in Denis' films, this one doesn't need words. I asked her how long that shot of the ocean is, and without hesitation she replied, "It's a minute and 17 seconds, I think."

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David O. says yes to this human bargain

Hard upon the release of Huckabee's in Australia, ever-quotable quirkster David O. Russell puts his quest in context of the recent US election: "I think the Democrats have not authentically spoken from a spiritual place. It is this humanist position [they have] that is too limited. It doesn't speak to that appetite. And it says that if you have that appetite, that just means you're stupid... I believe that appetite is an authentic thing, but that more rigor is needed. This movie is about people who have that hunger but are not taking the road of moral certitudes. They are taking the harder road." ... He sees [Huckabee's] as posing an alternative vision of America, albeit in the guise of farce. Perhaps, he ventures, the Bush victory should be treated as an opportunity rather than a calamity... "Because my movie says, well, how do you challenge yourself in these ways, yet remain open-minded? I'm part of the dialogue." Which is all very well: while the left rethinks its spirituality, the war in Iraq and deepening poverty at home are not going to be taking time out. "But that's the cross, right?" says Russell. "That is the mysterious part of the mystery to me. That you have to say 'yes' to this human bargain."

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December 10, 2004

Force of Hobbit

The Hollywood Reporter surveys the Indiewood distribs to see if there's room for new species of smaller creatures to lord it over the kudos: This year, the indies also have a shot at cleaning up on Hollywood's biggest night because no clear studio successor to New Line's "The Lord of the Rings" franchise has emerged. "I think this year is a special year because there aren't any obvious contenders from the studios in the major categories—with some exceptions, of course," Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker says. "I think there's an opportunity here for the independents to make a really good showing."

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Dan Talbot's indie modest proposal

Distribution-exhibition veteran and New Yorker Films majordomo Dan Talbot was presented the IFP/New York's Gotham Award for Industry Lifetime Achievement on December 1; Talbot's let indieWIRE reprint his heartfelt, heartening text: Our business is not so much a business as a casino. And in this casino the independent filmmaker must spend over 90% of his time looking for money to make his film. Would that they could be as lucky as Wayne Wang, who made Chan Is Missing for $20,000 or Jonathan Caouette who assembled Tarnation for $231, but this rarely happens... I [once] wrote an editorial in the NY Times Op-Ed page suggesting a system of film funding based on the Cinema de Centre operation in France. Simply put, if IFP or some offshoot of IFP lobbied for a setup that accumulates money out of box office receipts, the boring, stupid and deadening search for independent film financing could appreciably change. If just 10 cents on each ticket sold could go into a pot, sufficiently large, based, for example, on one billion, 500 million tickets sold in 2003, there would be enough money to finance at least 140 films with reasonable budgets. Of course this would not guarantee good films, but it would encourage the filmmaker to think more about his art and not what will work at the box office.

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Nossiter's world wine wars

Real world wine wars and wars of words behind Jonathan Nossiter's doc, Mondovino: "What I find disturbing about Michael Moore is that, just like George Bush, he reduces all his arguments to the most infantile, black and white level," [Nossiter] says."He presents everyone as either goodies or baddies, whereas there were only 3 or 4 people out of the hundreds I met that I didn't like—and they are not on the screen." Given the satirical eye Nossiter casts over his subject matter, this profession of total even-handedness is perhaps a little hard to swallow... The self-important Robert Parker is shown holed up in his Maryland farmhouse with his farting English bulldogs, whom he credits with helping to develop his sense of smell.

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The Ophuls truth

Marcel Ophuls epic, 243-minute 1994 doc, The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime (Veillées d’armes), gets its first U.S. release in up to 50 cities in 2005 from Milestone Films, which plans to co-produce an update. In 2000, Milestone reissued Ophuls' masterpiece about life in France under the Occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity. Why work with Milestone again? "Asking why I'm grateful for Milestone's existence is like wanting to know why we like buying our croissants for breakfast at the village bakery, rather than at the nearest supermarket. The local baker doesn't spend his entire life trying to figure out what product the consumers will buy at a minimum cost in fabrication. He bakes his own bread according to his own choices, in the hope that the villagers will share his tastes. [Milestone co-owner] Dennis Doros sends individual Christmas cards to individual filmmakers, sometimes featuring photographs of his whole family. To me, that indicates rather strongly that he considers the motion pictures he distributes to be the work of individuals, not just products or properties, in the shopworn vocabulary of the 'In-dust-tree' to be placed and removed from the shelves according to the rules and fashions of mass marketing. My father [director Max Ophuls] used to say: 'If you run after the public all your life, all you ever get to see is its ass!'"

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Oliver Stone and the [un]conventional mind

Oliver Stone says Alexander's weakling b.o. isn't his fault: The script was just too ambiguous, too questioning about an action-hero who was masculine/feminine. These are tough qualities in Hollywood. It's just too big a life. It doesn't fit in into the Hollywood formula. Stone speculated that Hollywood would have transformed [it] into a revenge saga as Alexander pursued the men who killed his father. Revenge movies are the western ethos. One of the problems with the movie for the conventional mind is there is no villain.

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Altman: not paved asphalt

Composer William Bolcomon working with Robert Altman, structuring A Wedding for opera: "It bears Bob's trademark of an elaborate, contrapuntal layout with lots of plot threads." Altman provided a scenario for the opera, but [Arnold] Weinstein, the librettist of all Bolcom's operas, "did most of the work," reducing the film's 48 characters to 16. "There are lots of possibilities for set pieces," a format Bolcom prefers to the continuous operatic flow associated with Wagner, the "paved asphalt" style, as Bolcom has called it. "I'm not against it when it works, but even Wagner has extractable numbers... A Wedding, "people come up and declare who they are in different styles. Dino [the groom] has a 1950s platter song."

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From X2 to Imaginary Heroes

Director Dan Harris offers a compelling insight into his debut: "At age 25, he made a fairly smooth transition from student to writer to director. As a writer on "X2," Harris had spent time on the set throughout the shoot, and that helped to prepare him for "how to talk to actors," he says, since one of his jobs on "X2" was to present the actors with overnight rewrites first thing in the morning. "We had to explain to all these credible actors why the scenes had been changed," he says, "and that was a huge learning experience."

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Stephen Holden loved it: L.A. Twister

A few words for a no-budget collection of "stale, sexist sitcom clichés": L.A. Twister is the first feature film directed by Sven Pape. Its aim is inches above the gutter.

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Last temptation of Marty

Scorsese's winding down: I'm getting to a certain age where I don't see myself doing any more big films within the context of the Hollywood system. I think I will be doing smaller films in future because I can take more risks.

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Facing the face: Che, y'know

An Aussie piece posing Walter Salles on a reverse angle of what's going on: "We've all seen the T-shirt, even if we don't all know exactly who he is," writes The Age's Jim Schembri. "Indeed, so iconic has the face of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara become that some T-shirts now sport his famous visage with the poser: "Who the fuck is this guy and what is he doing on my T-shirt?" He wasn't the biggest political celebrity of the 20th century, but his face is easily the most ubiquitous... He was even the rebel of choice for terrorists who happily wore Che T-shirts while hijacking passenger planes."

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Jonathan Rosenbaum only recently realized

Writing about The Exiles, A Tale of Two Sisters and more: I only recently realized that The Seventh Victim was my favorite horror film. I was looking at a list of my 1,000 favorite films, which had asterisks next to 100 I preferred most, and saw that The Seventh Victim was the only horror movie among them. This movie creeps up on you in more ways than one. Its urban poetry may have been created inside a studio, but [it] projects a mood of meditative melancholy as solitary women take long walks at night.

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Pointing at Saw

Pointers and points: "It was a high risk choice for Wan and Whannell as they could have been left with nothing if the film bombed and disappeared from theatres quickly. "We said to James and Leigh 'We can pay you or you can own your movie' and they said 'We'd rather do that'," Hoffman said. "They said 'Let's put it (all of the budget) all on the screen. Who cares? We're two starving kids, we've starved this long, why not?"'

Hoffman refused to reveal the exact details of the contract."

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December 09, 2004

Tony Scott reads Life Aquatic

Wes Anderson is "less a storyteller than an observer and an arranger of odd human specimens. The Life Aquatic is best compared to a lavishly illustrated, haphazardly plotted picture book—albeit one with frequent profanity and an occasional glimpse of a woman's breasts—the kind dreamy children don't so much read start to finish as browse and linger over, finding fuel for their own reveries." (Or reviews.)

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Harvey's still learning

The Times' Neil Norman gets an extended call from "Harvey" across the sea: Given the current negotiations, which I have been warned not to address, The Aviator looks like Harvey’s final fling with Miramax. “I’m not sure it’s a swansong,” he says... “Bob and I are having negotiations, and it might not turn out the way people think. We may not even leave. It is Marty and my’s second marriage..." Harvey laughs down the telephone line. "For me it was about painting with a large canvas. I think we proved with Fahrenheit 9/11 that we could take a $6 million movie and make $100 million, and if anyone thinks I will not make small films that will make a lot of money... I will continue to do that. We started out making low-budget movies that made a profit, then we made middle-budget movies that made a profit, and then higher-budget movies. Give me five years and I’ll figure out how to make intelligent, thinking men’s movies on an epic canvas, and all of them will make reams of money for people. I’m still learning."

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Willem Dafoe talks docs

Your son is working on a documentary about the Wooster Group. Any favorite documentaries?

I love the classic [D. A.] Pennebaker films [The War Room, Don’t Look Back]. In fact, he was feeling out the group about doing a documentary—and to familiarize us with his work, he showed us three or four of his documentaries. They were incredible. So we freaked out. They were too revealing! We said, “There’s no way we’re going to let you do this with us!”

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Morocco rococo

The Marrakesh International Film Festival wants to rewrite "the popular image of Marrakesh as the home of souks, camels and snake charmers... [The city] is about to get a movie makeover [with] the festival.. a central part in the country's wooing of Hollywood and the attempt to establish the city as the Bollywood of Africa."

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Plot Against Sex

Frank Rich's Sunday thumbsucker is up at the Times, putting Kinsey in contemporary context. From "The Plot Against Sex in America": Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But not unlike Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of "Kinsey," this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at "Kinsey" as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence.

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Colinized

A trailer for Terrence Malick's The New World: Now I'm smiling.

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Cinematographer as shaman

Titanic DP Russell Carpenter would rather "protect the leading lady" than shoot "the next big Bruckheimer film": When you look at the work of one of the gods of cinematography—a Vittorio Storaro, Connie Hall, or Haskell Wexler—you almost see the cinematographer as a shaman. I look for one or two moments in each film where I can try to get close to that.

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Mark Kermode loved it

The New Statesman's able reviewer, Mark Kermode, picks his 2004 heroes and villains, leaving his worst for last: "As for the downers, Frank Oz's fatuous remake of The Stepford Wives looked like a strong contender for worst of the year, with its hideous revision of a classic 1970s social satire. But that was before the release of Exorcist: The Beginning, a movie that redefined the boundaries of buck-chasing Hollywood stupidity. The film's first director died, the second was fired—but judging by the disaster of the finished product, both got off lightly." (The version by Paul Schrader—the director who didn't die—is reported to be getting a small theatrical release in 2005.)

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December 08, 2004

Having Goldilocks

David Mamet has his way with Goldilocks and the essential form of fairy tales in the 100th issue of The Threepenny Review: Goldilocks is active, Baby Bear is active, but Mama and Papa are mere ciphers, existing only to complain. How is it that they are blind to the problem? Because they are the problem. So restructuring of the latent dream reveals: things were fine in bed until Mama wearied of her affection for me and enticed Papa back to her bed. I wish that both of them were killed.

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Nappy holidays

Here's Fox Searchlight's Napoleon Dynamite Christmas e-card. Merry marketing!

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The social atom bomb

Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has a substantial take on Kinsey the man versus the reaction to Kinsey, the movie: How quaint it seems now that, during his lifetime, journalists who came knocking for Kinsey saw only a ho-hum professor of zoology, happily married, with no apparent axe to grind. As a contemporary Look magazine article read, "Today on the campus of a Midwest university, a soft-spoken, keen-eyed man is quietly at work—producing a social atom bomb." But then again, maybe those reporters were on to something: The research was far more interesting than the man. His surveys, not his sex life, produced a social explosion.

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Room, uncontrolled

Control Room goes east: A hit documentary about Al Jazeera television drew sharp reactions this week in a rare screening in the Arab world where the popular channel is often banned... The response of Arab viewers to the film, which has yet to be distributed in any Arab country, was one of anger and unease at the Dubai International Film Festival at a screening watched by Hollywood star Morgan Freeman.

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Booking Sean Astin

It's not Sam Gamgee's ghostwriter talking, is it? Of his new book, "There and Back Again," Sean Astin waxes semicoherent: One thing I'm learning that I suppose I should have learned beforehand is the nature of the public discussion versus private interpersonal discussion, and I think those lines have kind of blurred for me, or at least they had when I was working on the manuscript. ... It's selfish, but I've used the book to facilitate conversations with friends and family, because it necessitates conversations sometimes.

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Mmmmmmmm! Ba-con...

Here's your 30-second taste.

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2046's UK trailer is here for RealPlayer

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Another reason for lovin' Manohla

I violently disagree that my reviews skew toward extremes; I'm just emphatic. The fact is that like every other type of art, movies tend to fall into the bad-to-average range. It's tough to make a good film and exceedingly difficult to make a great one; and from the evidence it is pretty easy to make a lousy movie. Given that life is so short, I don't think I'm unduly harsh. When a filmmaker wastes two hours of my life... it really annoys me because I can't get those hours back. Paul Schrader tells a great story about falling asleep while watching a preview of Warren Beatty's Reds. Mr. Beatty found out and chastened Mr. Schrader, saying that the film had consumed 10 years of his life. Mr. Schrader said (and I paraphrase), "Well, it may have been 10 years of your life, but it was three hours of mine."

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December 07, 2004

The first time Samuel Fuller slapped me across the face was in 1951

I was 11 years old, in a theater watching "The Steel Helmet," a depiction of the Korean War that Fuller had written, produced and directed -- the film that would put him over the top in Hollywood. Grizzled, battle-wise Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans) turned his Thomas submachine-gun on a Chinese major and triggered a burst into his stomach writes John Stanley, a longtime acquaintance of Sam Fuller on the occasion of the restored Big Red One: The words on the doormat at Fuller's Hollywood home set the iconoclastic tone: "Go Away." The man with whitish-gray hair who answered the door was wearing only a pair of silk shorts and had a cigar between his teeth. It was a hot summer Sunday morning, and Fuller stood in the doorway a squat figure with beady, suspicious eyes. But then those eyes began to sparkle and a boisterous manner emerged as he welcomed me into his extraordinary world.

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They Get Mail

Chris Hanley's Muse Productions lets us all in on some of their heated correspondence about projects like an adaptation of Martin Amis' "London Fields" for David Cronenberg, with heated volleys between themselves and Bob Shaye of New Line. (Click on the mailbox to the left.) [via Filmmaker magazine's blog.]

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James Schamus on "Mr. Torture"

Producer, screenwriter and Focus Features big James Schamus weighs in on a pressing concern: As progressives wonder at how best to direct—and revive—the struggle to return America to its basic values, a dizzying number of worthy causes, coalitions and strategies present themselves. But one immediate issue must be engaged: America has become a country that tortures its prisoners... Although the Democrats have lost seats in the Senate, they still have the numbers to support a filibuster. If the Democratic Party is to mean anything to the millions of activists who kept it alive this year, Democrats in Congress should be put on notice that [Alberto] Gonzales’ confirmation [as Attorney General] is a fight they cannot skip. It is time to play Eminem’s new cd, Encore—at 125 decibels, 24 hours a day—until the Democrats pledge to filibuster.

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Armond White loved it: The Life Aquatic

Partaking "of Spielberg's cinematic zest and humanist zeal": The particular species of American Eccentric explored in The Life Aquatic represents the last few generations of affluent habit and dispensation—generations for whom degrees, trust funds and limitless opportunity come before responsibility.

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:48 PM

John August dresses down

Words of—wisdom?—from the screenwriter of Go: In my first Hollywood meetings, I always overdressed. I was uncomfortable, and the executive was uncomfortable. Gradually, I realized that the writer should always be the worst-dressed person in the room. Not by much, mind you—you don't want to look homeless or sad. But if the executive is wearing a suit, you want to wear a sweater. If he's wearing a button-down shirt, you wear a polo. Just going one step more casual puts everyone at ease.

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Michael Atkinson loved it: Life Aquatic

A headlong rush into the mind of Wes A.: There's something retrogressive, almost Mélièsesque, about the strategy Anderson has found here and in The Royal Tenenbaums: flat compositions, direct camera address, expository demonstrations for the camera's sake, an abstracted nursery worldview, a vaudeville sense of progression.

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Kiarostami plots a story

At the 45th Thessaloniki International Film Festival Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami rejiggers his creative path once more: According to Kiarostami, up until now, his films have resembled documentaries and were based on his own personal experiences. “However, I feel like I’ve reached a turning point, like I’ve stumbled upon a wall and this makes me want to return to films based on a story” ... Kiarostami also said that [audience indifference] has made rethink his course and therefore return to feature films. Regarding Kiarostami the photographer, [he] said, “I hope that I don’t photograph as a director but direct as a photographer”.... While photographing, he is aware that the audience has no expectations of visualizing a story in the photographs. As opposed to films, photography provides the audience with the opportunity to create its own story while looking at the photographs.

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A post-Fitzcarraldo film fest

The Amazonas International Adventure Film Festival, in its inaugural edition in Manaus, Brazil (pop. 1.7 million) wants to be ""the Cannes of the Amazon", playing in the opera house depicted in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: Manaus has not always been a provincial backwater. A century ago, it was one of the wealthiest cities on earth. Flushed with the riches of the rubber boom, it boasted the first university in Brazil, had electrical street lighting before Boston, and, its crowning glory, the absurdly opulent Teatro Amazonas opera house, a neo-classical folly that took 12 years and $3 million to build, and opened, in 1896, with a performance by Enrico Caruso. Within years, the micro-economy had collapsed, leaving Manaus poor once again, and the vainglorious opera house stranded amid the squalor.

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Shwaasbucklers

The Hindustan Times weights the chances of Shwaas, India's foreign language Oscar entry, a story about a little boy with eye cancer: Several foreign delegates who have actually sat through Shwaas feel that it might not quite pass muster at the business end of the 2004 Oscar race. Says a Bangkok-based film festival organizer who included Sandeep Sawant's film in his programme earlier this year: "I did show Shwaas though I did not much care for it personally. I was merely responding to the buzz that it had generated back in India. Shwaas is far too melodramatic for my own liking." ... An American curator of Indian films says: "I do appreciate that b>Shwaas is a simple film but what might work against it when it goes before the Academy members is its lack of sophistication. It tends to be rather naïve in its treatment of the theme."

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Labeling Wes Anderson's face

The Gothamist gets on the horn with Wes Anderson while slurping a cuppa:

So then maybe would say it’s not fair to call you an auteur? Do people, to your face put that label on you?

It’s definitely not something people say to my face. Or rather they say, “He wants to be thought of as an auteur.” It’s a way that I might be described if I’m not in the room.

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Refurbishing Rex

London's Time Out ventures to Berkhamsted to take in an indie movie palace, The Rex: The Rex is unique; a custom-made slice of celluloid heaven that exudes luxury and quality from every cinematic pore. The main feature is the big screen, one of the largest in the UK, which stands tall in front of 294 huge seats with 'leg-room for giants...' Gone too are the days when The Rex of the 80s screened the likes of 'Teen Wolf' and 'The Witches of Eastwick' using the same sound system that was installed in 1938. Today it's surround sound all the way, a new concept for former projectionist Alan Rees, 73, who came out of retirement especially for the re-opening and is now sure to become a permanent fixture at the cinema.

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December 06, 2004

Finding Leighland

Sean O'Hagan visits the director some consider a "grumpy sod" and "melancholic soul given to brooding silences" in the Guardian: "Mike Leigh's flat-cum-office in Soho is situated above a pub and below a knocking shop. You pass a handwritten sign advertising 'Models for Hire' on your way in. It seems somehow appropriate that our greatest cinematic chronicler of oddballs, misfits and malcontents should hold court here in a functional-going-on-drab space where the only distraction is the sound of the human traffic that passes beneath his window, many of whom, even at this early hour of the morning, seem to have wandered, fully formed, out of Leighland."

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:33 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Beating drums for "Beat" Kitano

Time Asia's calling Yoichi Sai's Blood and Bones "distressing, violent and the best Japanese film of the year": Sai's freewheeling, often humorous style. But the director's gutter humanism and [Takeshi] Kitano's steely meanness fuse elegantly in their portrayal of a ruthless man who, as he builds a new life for himself in Japan, is gripped by a need to destroy what he creates. Even as we're repulsed by Kim's violence and heartlessness, we're seduced by his survivor's charisma—in fact, Kitano's performance is so compelling that Kim's victims have a hard time competing for our compassion. "Takeshi is the only actor I know who's capable of playing such a dark character," says Sai. "I waited six years for him to accept the part, and I wouldn't have made the movie without him."

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Sundance 2005 shorts lineup

Our annotated list of background on projects and directors, supplementing the Sundance Film Festival's site.

For the first round of announcements, go here.

For the second round, go here.

Each link is the most comprehensive available about either the movie or its director(s):

U.S. SHORT FILMS

Dramatic Shorts

THE ACT; directors: Susan Kraker and Pi Ware

AMERICA’S BIGGEST DICK; director: Bryan Boyce

AMERICAN FAME PT. 2: FORGETTING JONATHAN BRANDIS; director: Cam Archer

AMONG THIEVES; director: Oscar Daniels

ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYBODY?; director: Miguel Arteta

BILLY’S DAD IS A FUDGE-PACKER; director: Jamie Donahue

BROADCAST 23; director: Tom Putnam

CHOKED; director: Brad Barnes

CRY FOR HELP; director: Nicholas McCarthy

EATING; director: Rebecca Cutter

ESTES AVENUE; director: Paul Cotter

EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN; director: Aaron Ruell

EXACTLY; director: Lisa Leone

FLOTSAM/JETSAM; director: David Zellner

GOODNIGHT IRENE; director: Sterlin Harjo

HUSK; director: Brett A. Simmons

IN THE MORNING; director: Danielle Lurie

IN TIME; directors: Maurice A. Dwyer and Adetoro Makinde

THE LAST FULL MEASURE; director: Alexandra Kerry

LATE BLOOMER; director: Craig Macneill.

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL; directors: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

LOVE AND LAUNDRY; director: Barbara Alvarez

MARY; director: Aaron Ruell

mOTION sTUDIES #3: Gravity; director: Jake Mahaffy

OH MY GOD; director: John Bryant

ONE WEEKEND A MONTH; director: Eric Escobar

PLANET OF THE ARABS; director: Jacqueline Salloum

PURA LENGUA; director: Aurora Guerrero

THE RAFTMAN’S RAZOR; director: Keith Bearden

RAW; director: Tonia Lynn Barber

THE SAILOR’S GIRL; director: Brett Simon

SPELLING BEE; director: Phil Dornfeld

STARING AT THE SUN; director: Toby Wilkins

SWIM TEST; director: Alex Chung

A THOUSAND ROADS; director: Chris Eyre

UN DIA EN LA VIDA; director: Marco Orsini

WEST BANK STORY; director: Ari Sandel

THE YOUTH IN US; director: Joshua Leonard

Documentary Shorts

BULLETS IN THE HOOD: A BED-STUY STORY; directors: Terrence Fisher and Daniel Howard

DIMMER; director: Talmage Cooley

THE FAIR; director: Jason Rayles

FAMILY PORTRAIT; director: Patricia Riggen

THE LAST DAYS OF JONATHAN PERLO; director: Joe Warson

NATCHILIAGNIAQTUGUK AAPAGALU: SEAL HUNTING WITH DAD; director: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean

RECYCLE; directors: Vasco Nunes and Ondi Timoner

SAVING JACKIE; director: Selena A. Burks

SMALL TOWN SECRETS; director: Katherine Leggett

Animated Shorts

9; director: Shane Acker

A BUCK'S WORTH; director: Tatia Rosenthal

THE MEANING OF LIFE; director: Don Hertzfeldt

MOTEL; director: Thor Freudenthal

INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILMS

Dramatic Shorts

BEING BAD / UK/France; director: Laurence Coriat

BEROCCA / UK ; director: Martin Taylor

CON DIVA / Spain; director: Sebastian Mantilla

ELEPHANT PALM TREE / UK; director: Kara Miller

ELKE’S VISIT / Spain; director: Morgan Dews

EMAIL TO MOM / Peru; director: Gerardo Ruiz Miñán

FROM CHERRY ENGLISH / Canada; director: Jeff Barnaby

FUEL / Australia; director: Nash Edgerton

GREEN BUSH / Australia; director: Warwick Thornton

HOME GAME / Norway; director: Martin Lund

KARE KARE ZVAKO – MOTHER’S DAY / Zimbabwe; director: Tsitsi Dangarembga

KID / Mexico; director: Tim Parsa

MATÁLO! / France; director: Jean-Stephane Sauvaire

PIZZA SHOP / Canada; director: Mark Mainguy

PLAINS EMPTY / Australia; director: Beck Cole

STRONGER / Canada; director: Debra Felstead

TAMA TU / New Zealand; director: Taika Waititi

TONGUE BULLY / Canada; director: Annie Bradley

VICTORIA PARA CHINO / US/Mexico; director: Cary Fukunaga

WAITING FOR THE MAN / Canada; director: Rob Stefaniuk

WASP / UK; director: Andrea Arnold

Documentary Shorts

THE CHILDREN OF LENINGRADSKY / Poland; directors: Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celinski

MEET MICHAEL OPPENHEIM / Israel; director: Roni Abulafia

SOLO UN CARGADOR / Peru; director: Juan Alejandro Ramírez

Animated Shorts

THE BIRTHDAY / Finland; director: Kari Juusonen

FALLEN ART / Poland; director: Tomek Baginski

IT'S LIKE THAT / Australia; director: SLAG Southern Ladies Animation Group

MOO(n) / uk; director: Leigh Hodgkinson

RYAN / Canada; director: Chris Landreth

THROUGH MY THICK GLASSES / Norway; director: Pjotr Sapegin

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Status quoting Poetic License

Mario Van Peebles, whose biting, impassioned Poetic License, a dissection of the controversy over Amiri Baraka's dethronement as the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, debuts Tuesday night on Sundance Channel and Court TV, to the Daily News' Lloyd Grove: "I grew up in a pretty radical family, and I was taught that what artists are supposed to do is offend the sensibilities of the status quo," the fortysomething son of director Melvin Van Peebles told me over lunch at Lever House Restaurant."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Indie is as pounds Sterling do

An amusing eat-and-chat interview with the father of Phantom, whose almost total self-financing of Joel Schumacher's $80 million or so film puts him in the George Lucas league of operatically independent filmmaking: "Andrew Lloyd Webber is only 56 and has a personal fortune estimated at £450m, so, you might well think, he can do whatever the chuff he wants. "Do you have my reservation?" Lloyd Webber asks the maitre d'. There's a blankness in the man's eyes that makes me want to sing 'Memories' at him to jog his, well, memory. To spare mutual embarrassment the titan of music theatre quickly adds: "It's under Webber." Typical: your fame girdles the globe but doesn't reach two minutes down the street."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hometown artistes

Possible winners touted for the UK's oft-controversial Turner Prize go to the hometowns of controversial figures: "A documentary film that takes viewers to US President George W Bush's hometown of Crawford has been tipped to take home this year's Turner Prize. Bookmakers backed Jeremy Deller as the even money favourite to win the 25,000 pound award on Monday night – one of the art world's most controversial—with his Texas documentary Memory Bucket 2003, which also takes viewers to the Waco siege site. A virtual tour around Osama bin Laden's abandoned Afghan home is also competing for the top prize from among a highly politicised shortlist."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2004

Enduring wrath

Enduring Love director Roger Michell shares his reactions with the BBC to the UK reviews of his latest: The dailies on Friday had been more mixed, and there was an especially unpleasant and dismissive squib in the Guardian from a writer called Peter Bradshaw, who also slagged off my film The Mother last year. I can only hope he gets run over by a bus before my next film comes out. Preferably quite a slow one, with big knobbly tyres.

Posted by Ray Pride at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Altman re-directs

Directing the opera of The Wedding at the Lyric Opera, about how Robert Altman tells the Chicago Tribune underplaying extends to the director's role: I'm a mirror, I reflect. I don't have to speak to have an impact. The less input I have, the better. The performers can look at me and know how they're doing. I can't lie to them, even though I might try. They'll make their own adjustments. They police themselves. I don't have to say anything. They know how to fit themselves into the mix. Really, all I do is turn the light switch on in the morning, say let's go, and turn it off at night.

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Heaven's Re-gate

Isabelle Hupper says Michael Cimino's at work on something old: "I ask her about Heaven's Gate, which, despite all the reports to the contrary, was actually a good experience for her - she's still on good terms with the film's director Michael Cimino, for example. She says that he's working on a director's cut, to be released shortly, and that she may make another film with him, based on "La Condition Humaine," the novel by André Malraux. But was Heaven's Gate as nightmarish to make as legend has it? "No, it was extraordinary—the nightmare was the failure, you know. I still believe that the movie is a masterpiece. But it was very anti-Wild West, and Americans just don't want to hear bad things about their country."

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Film fest fracas down Buenos Aires way

Film festival fracas down Buenos Aires way: from a slippery translation of an interview about the battle of wills and words that led to the sudden firing of the director of the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, director Edgardo (Quintin) Antin, ever fiery, says, We never signed an agreement for exclusiveness with the City Government of Buenos Aires, we signed a trash agreement: ... no holidays, no social security, no retirement or other rights. Since 1816, when slavery was abolished in Argentina, the work force belongs to the citizens. But López thinks that people hired in his department belong to him, and that he has the right to decide when they can work and when they cannot. And to communicate this faculty through acts of administrative terrorism, such as... communicating a dismissal to somebody who is 10,000 kilometres away from Buenos Aires, by e-mail, and due to unchecked journalistic information.

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 04, 2004

Thoroughly rubbishing

An entertainingly contentious interview with artist-turned-filmmaker Tracey Emin by Emma Brockes in the Guardian: God, you have to tip-toe around Tracey Emin, or she flares up in your face like Kevin the teenager. We are in the bar of the Walpole Bay Hotel, Margate, where scenes from Emin's debut film 'Top Spot' were shot. It is dimly lit and eccentrically furnished, like the setting for a seance, and Emin is scowling through the gloom. She is tired, she explains, and upset by early reactions to her film. In keeping with tradition, her work has been thoroughly rubbished by the critics and its teen suicide scene deemed too strong for a 15 certificate.

Posted by Ray Pride at 06:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Saw Outback

Another Aussie director, Greg Mclean, hopes the Sundance slot for his Wolf Creek might nudge his luck in the direction of his fellow countrymen's $60 million-plus grossing Saw.

Posted by Ray Pride at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 02, 2004

Silent Luc Besson

Luc Besson ventures to The Moscow News why he's not directing these days, if we can trust the translation: The French have a saying: when you have nothing to say, don't say anything. If I am not shooting anything right now, I must be certain, deep down inside, that I have nothing to say. The viewers trust me and I don't want to betray that trust. I hope that in time I will regain the power to share something important with them.

Posted by Ray Pride at 03:53 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Kitano's master class

The prof no one talks back to: Takeshi Kitano "will teach filmmaking at a graduate school of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music starting next April."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:57 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Maysles Meets Brando

Doc vet Albert Maysles is about to release the long-unseen Meet Marlon Brando (1965), which he unveiled at Amsterdam's International Documentary Festival. "The film has been out of circulation for nearly 40 years: Brando, who called it 'too much of a word salad",' didn't allow them show it. Now, though, Albert is planning a DVD release that will include footage he filmed at the recent memorial service for Brando, who died in July." Shot during the television junket for Morituri, "the film shows the star, bombarded with a series of ever more inane questions from interviewers who have not even seen his movie, responding in bravura fashion."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:38 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Zhang and the martial artshouse

Zhang Yimou sounds tired, yet optimistic: "I enjoy bringing all of my experience making 'art' films to the table when I make films like Hero and [House of Flying] Daggers," he says. "I don't see any contradiction between commercial and art cinema."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Swede on Ingmar

The Boston Globe's Ty Burr looks at Ingmar Bergman's early efforts as the Harvard Film Archive runs nine rarely-seen pics over two weeks of "Bergman: Early Work": ''I just grabbed helplessly at any form that might save me, because I hadn't any of my own," said Bergman once about his first films, and there's a certain amount of truth to the statement... You can feel a novice director casting about for the proper tone, the right camera angle. But you also sense an artist who knew exactly what he wanted to say and who had the impetuous assurance of youth to back him up."

Posted by Ray Pride at 11:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 01, 2004

Brion's song

A profile of Jon Brion, "the songwriter, film scorer and unspeakably gifted raconteur" who puts tunes into the heads of Paul Thomas Anderson, Michel Gondry and David O. Russell. A movie's soundtrack has to work as a cohesive whole, so the director is really in charge of what gets chosen to be in the movie. But in the creative act of coming up with individual pieces, you work how you work. For me, that involves treating the film like I’m a silent movie pianist: I play along with what’s happening onscreen, and when I hit on something the director likes, those are the things I build on.

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Independent Spirits' spirit

Bending the rules can pay off, as Sideways emerges a favorite for the Independent Spirit Awards: "The awards, intended to promote offbeat features, are open to films whose budget comes in under $15m—although the rules were bent to accommodate Sideways, whose costs were between $16m and $17m. In close second is Maria Full of Grace, the critically acclaimed portrait of a Colombian woman who becomes a drug mule, which collected five nominations including best actress, best first screenplay and best supporting actress."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Michael Atkinson loved it

The Voice critic has words with House of Flying Daggers: "The Hong Kong movie matrix has reached a state of deracinated gloss, homogenized out from speed-mad native pop lunacy to postcard-bourgeois picture show... Depending on your experience, you'll either think that Zhang [Yimou]'s new sumptuous, digitally Botoxed roustabout is simply doing what Hong Kong movies have been too fast, cheap, and out of control to do before or that it's commodifying the tropes into a streamlined McSpectacle."

Posted by Ray Pride at 09:26 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

It's cheap to me

The ever-suffering Greek cinema gets a post-Olympic swat, AFP reports, the Greek Film Centre almost broke, with potentially unsavory results for indigenous movies in the nation of 11 million: Tightening the state's purse strings at this moment would result in a dead production season and dry up the industry's pool of talent, [Thessaloniki Film Festival head Michel] Demopoulos warned. The festival hosted 18 Greek films this [November]. This could drop to just four or five next year, the lowest level since the early 1990s.

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The mouth of the North

An excerpt from mouthy Norman Jewison's memoir, "This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me" (Key Porter, Toronto), illuminates a patch of Moonstruck: "Because we couldn't count on Cosmo's moon appearing on cue, David Watkin, our British director of photography and Academy Award winner for Out of Africa, made us a portable moon of two hundred fay lights attached to a giant cherry picker. It could roll out over the Manhattan skyline when we needed it and cast its magical spell over the unlikely loves and betrayals of Moonstruck. It was so bright, it lit up two city blocks and fooled the birds into singing their dawn songs."

Posted by Ray Pride at 01:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Vera Drake sweeps Brit Independent Film Awards

Mike Leigh, a director who has often struggled to win praise and financial backing in Britain, was named best director from a list which included Kevin Macdonald for Touching the Void, Roger Michell, whose previous hits include Notting Hill, for Enduring Love, and Shane Meadows for Dead Man's Shoes.

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:40 AM | Comments (0)

30 days later

Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock takes his template to FX this summer, with a series called "30 Days," wreaking weekly bite-size fish-into-water stories on the Foxosphere: "'In that episode we ask the question, "What is it like to be a Muslim in America?"' ... Other episodes might tackle being homeless, abortion clinics or living on a Native American reservation, he says. 'We want to deal with serious social situations in America, but in a way that's still entertaining, funny and isn't preachy,' Spurlock says. '"Super Size Me" did a great job of doing that and dealt with what I think is a big problem in America without turning people off.'"

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack