Movie City Indie Archive for July, 2005
Waving the Tartan flag: another indie definition
Tartan Film’s Hamish McAlpine details his US biz plan to the Voice’s Matthew Ross: “The man behind Tartan is Hamish McAlpine, a Scotsman known as much for his business acumen as his brash, dandyish persona (wearing white fur to premieres, getting into fistfights with Larry Clark, etc.). “I feel that America has been culturally challenged, and that’s where we come in… we’re sort of an agent provocateur. We don’t have to answer to any American stockholders or banks; we have no one saying we are too outrageous; we have no one holding us back. In other words, we are operating in the true spirit of independence.” For McAlpine, embracing the risque� is essential to Tartan’s branding strategy. … “Sometimes that can take us into sexually explicit territory and other times into intellectually explicit arenas.” For the past few years, Tartan has maintained its bottom line thanks to its lucrative Asian Extreme video label, which has built up a cult following in Europe with a slate of mostly Japanese and Korean horror films… For a veteran like [Gregg] Araki, Tartan’s arrival has given the indie landscape a welcome alternative to mini-major dominance. “Small distributors have become like mini-studios… There’s an expectation at this point, with these runaway successes like Napoleon Dynamite, that every film needs to make tons and tons of money to be successful. But the old-school independent movies like Mysterious Skin, need companies like Tartan.”
Ballard on Powell: like giddy kites over the peaks of entertainment cinema
In the Guardian, JG Ballard does some waxing over the great Michael Powell: “Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi? Could Crash be seen as a tender love story? More to the point, in this centenary year of Michael Powell’s birth, could his flamboyant and extravagant films seem like hard-edged psychological dramas about the nature of human consciousness? Are these remarkable films, which float like giddy kites over the peaks of entertainment cinema, in fact far closer to the psychiatrist’s casebook than their audiences ever suspected?” [More musing at the link.]
2 left thumbs: Crash-ing race
Writers Jeff Chang and Sylvia Chan do the Ebert-Roeper thing over Crash at Alternet: “CHANG: [In] this post 9/11 moment, Crash [comes out] during a time of war. Our nation is in “crisis,” we have a “deeply divided nation,” as the media [tells] us. When Grand Canyon, and one of the first white liberal Hollywood movies, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, were released, the nation was at war. Times of crisis and war are when whites have the strongest desire for reconciliation with blacks, when blackness is most desired as part of a triumphant narrative of nation. Don Cheadle’s character is a type of black male protagonist who’s very common these days: a proxy for the state, working against all the unruly elements of internal diversity and external threat…. This is the type of narrative Hollywood needs to keep putting out there right now—the black man as the symbol for our nation, the guy who’s going to provide order for not only the U.S., but for the world. And let’s be real: this isn’t happening in real life. In the end, [Crash] paints racism as a postmodern malaise where conflict happens because we don’t touch each other except when we crash. That’s bullshit. Racism is structural and institutional more than it is personal and sentimental. CHAN: The pitch is go to see Crash, then go home and ponder your prejudices. For some people it may do that. For a lot of people, though, it won’t. It’s the feel-good race hit movie of the summer.”
The new male infantilism: Wes Anderson, et al
Matthew Wilder roughs up a wuss generation in City Pages: “Wes Anderson is perhaps the dean of the LittleBlue SmurfBoys™, having plied his middle-schooler wares for the past decade. Of this trinity of Smurfs, Young Master Wes seems to show the most promise as, if not a Big Bruiser, surely a Soigné Uptown Sophisticate. Where a stunted self-regarder like [Conor] Oberst seems condemned to an incommunicative trance, the 36-year-old Anderson is aware enough of the lineage of movie auteurs as lion-taming showmen to, some day, escape his autistic fugue state. In his bizarrely engineless recent effort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson left the Broadway aspirations of The Royal Tenenbaums to plunge headlong into a silo stuffed with a haut-bourgeois 12-year-old kid’s fetish objects. No longer concerned with suspense or surprise, or even story or character, Anderson gives himself a consolation massage as the screen widens with little red ski caps, zany matching Nike tracksuits, Hottentots out of Master Wes’s moth-eaten National Geographics, and a series of nautical vehicles that recall the playthings of bath time…. Still, the winning noblesse oblige of Anderson’s audio commentaries on [his] Criterion DVDs… leave me thinking that the director might one day possess the character traits of a functioning adult. [Wilder also describes novelist Jonathan Safran Foer‘s latest, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” as “‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ for the yellow Converse set.” … In the world of blue-state liberal-arts grads, and most especially in the world of movie/book/music criticism, there ain’t a lot of Big Bruising going on. In this Blue Smurfy climate, the outsized obsessions, red-hot rhetoric, and violent argument of the Bruisers would give the tastemaking class a panic attack…. I can only pray some hibernating Bruiser–Don DeLillo, say, or Robert Rauschenberg–will spring from his cave, tear [the] Saint-Exupéry scarf off [a] pencil neck, and show him how it’s really done: art-making revealed as high-wire act, fire-eating contest, bare-knuckle barroom brawl.”
Tracks of his tears: crying with Bill Viola
Video artist Bill Viola tells Joyce Morgan of The Age about art, tears and the mystic: “The near darkness of the editing suite draws close as video artist Bill Viola speaks in calm, measured tones… “I cry a lot… Usually once a day. I think it’s one of the most profound forms of human expression.” The insulated room that absorbs all echoes suddenly feels more like a confessional than a high-tech post-production centre in the heart of… Hollywood. “A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.” … Viola is a thoroughly modern mystic, who uses digital technology to create images that invite the contemplation of life and death. His small plasma screens pay homage to the portable religious icons of the Middle Ages.. As Gandhi once said, there’s more to life than increasing its speed… The slowness of Viola’s work also has a political dimension. It is an antidote to what he sees as one of the greatest dangers of our age – the speed with which we receive information and our growing inability to makes sense of what we see.”
Take a little Dogme pill, Trier smirks
Time Out’s Dave Calhoun does the Dogme dance with Lars von Trier: “Trier suggests that it is only a matter of historical accident that Americans speak English, not German. ‘That would have been different. I could make a film – a science-fiction – about how it could have been, in which they all speak German. That would be kind of fun, no? With lederhosen…’ Of the near lack of reaction to his Manderlay at Cannes, Trier says, “First of all, for most of Europe, I think, the film is politically correct. In a way that it is not, I’m sure, in America, as the film allows black people to be stupid and to behave like normal people.” … Recently, von Trier reached a crisis point. For half a year he tried to write ‘Wasington’, his planned third film in the American trilogy, but he wasn’t happy with the outcome. [He’s] decided to postpone that and make a Dogme film next year, his first since ‘The Idiots’. ‘It’s what I’ve said to all these directors who come to me, saying ‘I’m confused, what can I do?’ I say, ‘Take a little Dogme pill. Relax and nobody will expect anything from you. ‘It works, this Dogme pill. So I’m taking a Dogme pill.’
Van Gogh killer gets life
A Dutch court condemned Mohammed Bouyeri to life in jail on Tuesday. The Islamic radical had admitted to killing filmmaker Theo van Gogh last November, saying he acted out of faith. The 3-judge panel of the Amsterdam high-security court announced the life sentence against Bouyeri for the murder which the prosecution said signaled the end of innocence for the tolerant Netherlands…. Bouyeri, a 27-year old who holds dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality, has made it clear he does not recognize the authority of the court. During the trial he ordered his attorney not to present a defense… The slaying of van Gogh, carried out in broad daylight as he cycled to work, shocked the Netherlands… The filmmaker, a distant relative of 19th century painter Vincent van Gogh, was also an outspoken columnist who often criticized Islam and multicultural society.”
Cutting Murderball: 99 more cuts
The Reeler drops a few quotes from Murderball‘s editor after a seminar at Soho Apple: “It was literally hundreds of edits just to get up to the end of Act One,” [Geoffrey] Richman told the crowd on hand between demonstrations on Apple’s Final Cut Pro… “In the end, it comes down to something like just where you fade up or where that title falls. Even if everything else sucks, it’s 99 more cuts like that until you get a finished movie.” [A couple other OK quotes at the link.]
Michael Bay's debacle
There are good reasons to defend The Island but after the not-Number-One weekend results, Michael Bay has apparently decided it’s a piece of shit, telling the LA Times, “I’m not blaming the whole thing on the marketers…. Everyone from [Steven] Spielberg to Zemeckis to Kubrick – they’ve all had big flops,” he said. “I was five for five. You know it’s going to happen.” (Take credit away where credit is not due.)
Jack on: more on Bogdanovich's Saint
Singapore-based UK-born journo Ben Slater offers more about the toil behind his forthcoming Saint Jack tome: “When I finally felt in a position to deliver the goods [to my blog], I ended up being strangely scooped by [Movie City Indie, which] spotted the online incarnation of an article about my activities that… was published last week in a… Singapore [paper,] TODAY… My aim was to research like crazy for 4 months and then write for 4 months, but as someone once said – a plan is a list of things that don’t happen – and that turned out to be exactly right. My first port-of-call was to be the director, Peter Bogdanovich and my ‘plan’ was to interview him first and then move on to everyone else. Well, tracking him down wasn’t too hard since I had been kindly given a contact for him through film critic Tom Charity. After emails had been sent and several weeks had passed, I got a reply – Bogdanovich was happy to talk to me. However, a window for the first phone interview couldn’t be arranged till late March, and so my research didn’t really begin proper till the moment I picked up the phone to Peter in New York and heard that distinctive mellow voice.After that things began to tumble into place in fits and starts…” After describing the process of his research, Slater offers, optimistically (Envoi!), “And this week I seriously begin writing the book in earnest. Here goes.”
Pottering about: What's a kid, Mike Newell?
In the July 29 Entertainment Weekly, Mike Newell, director of the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, offers this: “It’s my view that children are violent, dirty, corrupt anarchists. Just adults-in waiting.”
Another reason we like the Guardian
Blogrolling in our time: “For a heads-up on new independent and foreign releases and whatever’s flying off today’s rumour mill, an industry-savvy blog like David Hudson’s GreenCineDaily. Get your festival updates at Filmmaker Magazine Blog and gossipy US media round-ups at Movie City Indie.” Well, we’ll take that.
and yes I said yes I will Yes: Sally Potter, blogger
Sally Potter‘s been keeping a terse, tidy diary of her recent travels promoting Yes: “In the afternoon, however, I did interviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Irish Echo, the latter two by phone. All three conversations were stimulating and intriguing. Annette Grant, in New York, sent me a surprising and beautiful poem of an email later that evening with a vivid description of a pregnant woman carrying an orange she had seen shortly after leaving the hotel. (We had briefly discussed the charged question of not having had children. Or, as on a gorgeous cartoon postcard I once saw of a woman weeping diamond-like tears whilst exclaiming: “I don’t believe it! I forgot to have babies!”) Victoria Looseleaf (what an excellent name) of the LA Times is a dance critic and had many droll, funny things to say about The Tango Lesson, particularly her own envy at watching me dance with someone as marvelous as Pablo. It is never too late, I assured her. My tango debut on screen was at the age of 46.”
Defining documentary: Richard Corliss has some sex
Writing about 9 Songs in Time International, Richard Corliss makes some distinctions: “Whenever a fiction film goes hard-core, the artifice of character and story disappears, and the movie instantly becomes a documentary record–something between a stag film and a nature special on Nova. Realizing this, Winterbottom dispenses with most of the standard narrative props: there’s no Other Man, no mistaken identity, no quest. Matt and Lisa are not really people, in the multiplex-movie sense. They are performers, like the band members, working in public for our pleasure. The only drama is that, omigod, they’re doing it!”
Troma's blunt object lessons: Kaufman tells some if not all
The Globe & Mail’s Matthew Hay picks the mind of prolific schlockster Lloyd Kaufman, who’s been almost as prolific as classmate Oliver Stone: “Kaufman points out that due to Troma’s “commitment to art and auteurist cinema,” many people contact him through Troma’s website… to work for free. “Just about everybody on the set is there to experience the joy of making some art,” Kaufman explains, with a straight face. “We posted lyrics on our site and said we needed music for them. We were contacted by someone in Edmonton who wrote the music for it. And he did it for free. We said we needed pulsating eggs as a special effect. So this woman in Sweden made some pulsating eggs and sent them to us. They were stopped at the border, though. I guess pulsating eggs are suspicious after 9/11.” … In his book, he advises that you recycle fake limbs for gore sequences as a method of penny-pinching. Ground beef, he points out, works perfectly when simulating a head crushing.” Regarding film festivals, “he distills bits and pieces of know-how. Be sure to take as much food from the airplane as you can, he warns, so that you avoid the high cost of eating at [Canne’s] expensive restaurants… The changing scene at Cannes is part of the reason Kaufman lectures… “I’ve been going to Cannes for over 30 years… Look at this year: Everything was sandwiched by George Lucas and that no-talent hose hound Paris Hilton. Today, the word independent has been stolen. When the major newspapers call divisions of AOL Time Warner independent, and the public actually believes it, the vocabulary has been stolen too… If you’re not in it for the art, then get the hell out.”
