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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, April 7th, 2006 - Comments Off on Screening Gotham: April 7-9, 2006
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Screening Gotham: April 7-9, 2006


–I have no idea what to tell you about Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s new film 4 (right), which opens today at Cinema Village for your general exhilaration, puzzlement and frustration. Probably more famous for its troubled backstory—co-written by famed Muscovite novelist Vladimir Sorokin, shot over four years on a shoestring budget and subsequently banned in Russia for its relentlessly bleak portrayal of peasant life—than its aesthetic magnitude, 4 nevertheless reveals a talent to watch. Khrzhanovsky’s off-by-this-much mise en scene and meandering narrative bring to mind Lucretia Martel haunted by the Soviet ghost; the camerawork loosens as the film rumbles along, fusing the sound of industrial wreckage to a handheld camera on loan from the Dardennes. Then there are the doll faces made from chewed bread, the roaming pack of four dogs, random quartets of trucks and ribald peasant women who take turns drinking and stripping. That you have never seen anything like it is kind of a given; whether that is a good or bad thing is totally up to you.
–Speaking of distinct backstories, Amos Gitai’s latest, Free Zone, is the first Israeli film ever shot in Jordan. It is also the Natalie-Portman-crying film to end all Natalie-Portman-crying films, with the soon-to-be-shorn starlet the subject of the single longest sob take in the history of cinema. That said, she is quite good as an American on the outs with her in-laws and subsequently thrown into a road trip with a single-minded Israeli woman (Hana Laszlo) traveling to the commercial hub of Jordan’s “free zone.” Gitai’s flashback sequences are a thing of beauty–exquisitely directed dissolves comprising as many as eight points of view at a time—and Laszlo’s edgy work earned her Best Actress honors at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
–The Gen Art Film Festival is evidently carrying on without me this weekend, with Steve Anderson’s FUCK, Scott Glosserman’s Behind the Mask and Bruce Leddy’s Shut Up and Sing taking the screen in Chelsea. Naturally, Gen Art is picking up the drink tab at the film’s respective afterparties, so call that cheap date you have been meaning to plow since your last payday and get to work.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon