Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Screening Gotham: July 28-30, 2006

A few of this weekend’s worthwile cinematic happenings around New York:
Like I said before, Gela Babluani is going to be around for a while, and you might as well find out why: His feature debut 13 Tzameti, which broke through at Sundance and is getting the American remake treatment this fall, recounts the Hitchcockian/Polanskian/insert-austere-Euro-thriller-director-here-ian tale of an impoverished young man embroiled in one of modern cinema’s more insidious get-rich-quick schemes.

No. 13 with a bullet: George Babluani shoots to live in 13 Tzameti (Photo: Palm Pictures)

Despite a serviceable lead performance by George Babluani and a brilliant, enervated turn by Aurélien Recoing (Time Out), Babluani’s script has nothing on his style: 13 Tzameti flourishes in its silence and space, more accomplished in all it leaves unspoken than any of its pedestrian plot trickery. Which, I guess, is what frightens me about the American version: Consider this my earnest prayer for more show, less tell.
–The Film Society of Lincoln Center continues the 2006 Scanners video festival this weekend, showcasing Diane Nerwen’s abstinence-ed satire The Sexorcist: Revirginize as part of Saturday’s Mediated Media program. Nerwen combines images from The Exorcist and the Britney Spears masterpiece Crossroads with a million or so sound clips culled from elsewhere around cinema; the result features a young woman (Spears) who swears off sex only to vie with her mother (Ellen Burstyn) and, naturally, her libido in the fight for her soul. Alternately campy, idiotic and borderline unwatchable, the film nevertheless symbolizes the type of creative, organic political rebuke that American culture so sorely lacks. OK, fine–I’ll give you the 11 o’clock hour on Comedy Central, if only to give you the exception that proves the rule.
–Celebrate Russian motherhood with tonight’s bouncy Sokurov/Tarkovsky double feature at Anthology. Mother and Son fires up at 7 p.m., with Tarkovsky’s The Mirror following at 8:30.

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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