Pinch-hitter: on set with Altman and Anderson

Chris Hewitt goes on location with A Prairie Home Companion for St. Paul Pioneer Press: “The right side of the stage is jammed with monitors on which Robert Altman and his crew watch the progress of a scene that is being shot with three cameras… Standing behind Altman, you can see one of his signature, take-in-all-the-action shots come together. It’s an early sequence in the film that combines three scenes — an elderly couple has their picture taken on the “Prairie Home” set, stagehands bustle about, [a character] saunters onto the set. It appears chaotic, but the shot itself is fluid and graceful, with the kind of calm elegance that characterizes the radio show. “Mr. Altman likes to design shots that are very complicated and that require everyone to be tremendously focused,” Keillor says…” Paul Thomas Anderson “also is working on Prairie Home. He has no official title, but he works mostly with Altman and the actors, and his director’s chair is labeled “Pinch Hitter.”

Getting some: Seitz on 9 Songs

In NY Press, Matt Soller Seitz has a sturdy take on 9 Songs: “What is [distinctive] is Winterbottom’s nonjudgmental and even affectionate attitude toward his characters and their sexual relationship. This is not a Dark Night of the Soul movie; the lovers aren’t punished for having—and enjoying—sex. When their relationship sours, as most relationships do, the movie doesn’t blame society or the church or the war or anything else; in fact, it doesn’t attach any grand importance to it at all. It treats sex as sex, and a relationship as a relationship… Winterbottom’s filmmaking style is by nature hit-and-miss… he’s always worked intuitively, devising action, dialogue and camera positions in the moment. (Wong Kar-Wai works the same way, though he has a better eye.) Except for Jude, Winterbottom has never made a movie that didn’t strike me as unfinished or even half-baked, and some of the have been train wrecks… But it would be a mistake to describe Winterbottom as a director who enjoys making movies so much that he never stopped to ask why he makes them. On the contrary, he has a very distinctive, purposeful esthetic—it just happens to be one with a success-to-failure ratio that rarely climbs higher in anyone’s favor than 50-50. Despite varying budget levels, all his films have a certain immediacy; they feel like documentaries with actors, and they capture little, truthful moments most films skip. (Cassavetes and James Toback also work this way, and are similarly erratic.)” [More good stuff at the link.]

Roger Ebert Day

Punch-drunk short cut: backing up Bob (Altman)

When older directors get work, insurance companies sometimes insist on a younger director who could replace them, such as Karel Reisz staying on the set of John Huston‘s The Dead; Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1997 project, Two Telegrams, that Atom Egoyan was prepared to complete; or Arthur Penn‘s willingness to do similiar duty on David Lean‘s unmade Nostromo. It’s a responsibility both chilling and thrilling, in the worse case, completing the work of someone who’s been a mentor or a major influence. From Rex Sorgatz of Fimoculous comes the report that Robert Altman‘s got a shadow up Minnesota way: “There’s the matter of the… rumor of the director who has been tailing… Altman on the set—and, some say, basically running daily production of the film. That mystery proxy director is none other than Paul Thomas Anderson… who will be officially credited… as “Executive Producer” on the film… The producers of the film probably insisted that Altman commit to a “backup” director because of his age (he’s 80)…. Several people have speculated that Robert and PT have gotten close in recent years, and their friendship is what the producers hoped for… On the set, Anderson works much more directly with the actors, simply because Altman can’t travel the distance of the theater (from monitors to stage). Between cuts, Robert belts directions over a mic while PT runs up to stage and speaks with the actors directly.” (Via Cinematical.)

Jia and Jonathan's World: trailering critics

Taking an unusual, earnest tack in marketing arthouse movies, Canada’s Films We Like trailers Jia Zhang-ke‘s splendid deadpan satire, The World, by interviewing critic Jonathan Rosenbaum within the world of his own workspace.

Adding down: IMAX's out-of-home experience

IMAX’s big, loud secret: the show runs on time, with few ads, write the LA Times’ John Horn and Brian Triplett. “Audiences have complained long and loud that moviegoing isn’t as much fun as it used to be… The drinks aren’t a penny cheaper at Imax venues, and the tickets are even more expensive, but that hasn’t kept the giant-size screens from attracting an increasing stream of patrons. … “To me, Imax is the closest you can get to being that little kid again, watching a movie with that larger-than-life scale,” said Chris Nolan… of Batman Begins, which has been a popular Imax release. “It can’t be reproduced anywhere else. And that’s what movies need to be. Otherwise, you are making TV shows.” … Unlike most multiplex operators, Imax encourages the theaters showing its films not to litter the pre-show with commercials. It even recommends raising ticket prices (which run about $3 more than standard theaters) rather than run ads…. [Says] Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “Ads are simply not a part of the Imax culture.”

Yes, Jesus loves me and we love your incredible grass-roots tentacles

Odd quotery in the New York Times’ ill-informed piece on marketing movies to Christians, to complement the paper’s outreach to market itself to conservatives, while also reinforcing its pages’ faith in a Hollywood “slump.””Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians number an estimated 30 million in the United States, and Hollywood – faced with a prolonged slump in ticket sales – has followed its natural instincts in trying to tap one of the country’s most powerful niche markets. “There’s definitely more of an awareness, but it’s just another group to be marketed to, albeit a very strong one, with incredible grass-roots tentacles,” said Russell Schwartz, president of theatrical marketing at New Line Cinema, a Time Warner company. Universal Pictures’ vice chairman, Marc Shmuger, said, “It’s a well-formed community, it’s identifiable, it has very specific tastes and preferences and is therefore a group that can be located and can be directly marketed to… In every fashion, you need to customize your message to your audience.”

Vengeance is mined: Spielberg's next pic

Also in the Forward, Ami Eden thinks aloud about the ramifications of Spielberg’s latest, ≈noting that “the media [is] essentially trying to set up a sequel to the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, only this time with Spielberg cast as the object of Jewish outrage… The problem with making the Mossad movie into a Passion sequel is that Spielberg is no Gibson… Spielberg’s film might force Jews (and other Americans) to ask some uncomfortable questions about the Israeli and American responses to terrorism. But for the most part, American Jews can tell the difference between Spielberg’s healthy self-criticism and Gibson’s nostalgia for the days before the 1965 Second Vatican Council reforms, which, among other things, cleared the Jews of the charge of Deicide. American Jews know the difference between a director with a Holocaust-denying father and one whose mother owns a kosher restaurant.” [More at the link.]

The grand detour: Edgar G. Ulmer on DVD (in Yiddish!)

Noah Isenberg, the author of a forthcoming study of the great King of the Zs, Edgar G. Ulmer, describes a 4-DVD set of restored work, in the Forward. “Although for many years it has appeared that the work of Austrian-born filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was destined to fall into oblivion — in one of the earliest accounts of his career, from the 1970s, film scholar John Belton pronounced Ulmer “a totally unknown or, at best, an obscure figure in film history” — recently there has been a… surge in interest… Thanks in large measure to the tireless efforts of his daughter, Arianne Ulmer Cipes, head of the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp., many of Ulmer’s films, even some of his most obscure, have been restored and released on DVD. The latest addition to this larger wave of rediscovery and re-evaluation is a lavish 4-disc collection of all of Ulmer’s Yiddish films, which he directed in New York and New Jersey between 1937 and 1940. They have been preserved, digitally restored and re-mastered from 35mm nitrate prints with new English subtitles, by Brandeis University’s National Center for Jewish Film. These generally modest pictures, all of them shot on a shoestring budget, include some of the milestones in the history of Yiddish cinema.” Isenberg’s short yet comprehensive article describes Green Fields, The Singing Blacksmith, “The Light Ahead, “and the startlingly modern, urbane comedy starring Leo Fuchs, American Matchmaker,” at the link, describing how the “match between a German-speaking, assimilated, nominally Jewish director like Ulmer and the American Yiddish film industry is, perhaps, not so obvious.”

Cool Cat Chris: Mr. Walken gets all kittenish

Tiffany Rose in the Independent has a fun ramble with Christopher Walken: “Walken thinks it would be great if actors had tails. A tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell if they’re annoyed. You can tell whether they’re scared. They bush their tail. If I was an actor and I had to play scared in a movie all I’d have to do is bush my tail. I think that if actors had tails it would change everything.

When Harry met Charlie

There’s a new entry on the Saturday Night Wrestle between “Harry Potter” and Willie Wonka over at Pride, Unprejudiced.

By the crock of the Bay: Michael vs. The Crickets One More Time

In Newsweek, David Ansen has another one of those cutesy “I hate you, I hate you, not really” critic-filmmaker Q+As with Mr. Bay: Do you have imaginary arguments with critics in your head? “I do. What was highly offensive was Roger Ebert [on “Pearl Harbor”]. He commented on TV that bombs don’t fall like that. Does he actually think that we didn’t research every nook and cranny of how armor-piercing bombs fell? He’s watched too many movies. He thinks they all fall flat. The armor-piercing bomb falls straight down. That’s the way it was designed. But he’s on the air pontificating and giving the wrong information. That’s insulting.”

It's a term of endearment: more from drunken sailor Christopher Doyle

The Observer’s Gaby Wood has open ears for yet another session with the great shooter and ranter Christopher Doyle: “Calls to a Hong Kong mobile phone go unreturned, and when eventually I doorstep him at the SoHo Grand Hotel, I see why. There before him on a table in the outdoor bar, next to a bottle of beer and some uneaten oysters, are 4 phones, all different shapes and nationalities, all of them switched off. ‘Terrible for a marriage,’ he says, unprompted, of his travels… He makes no secret of his love for Asian women or of his preference for beer as breakfast, and is clearly aware of the legend that precedes him…. He is known for his perfectionism and eccentricity. A single love scene in Days of Being Wild, the first of 7 films… made with… Wong Kar-Wai, [took] 53 takes. Their last film together, 2046, took five years to make. For Zhang Yimou’s Hero, Doyle insisted on filming a certain kind of tree that only blossoms in Mongolia for 10 days a year… On Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon he drank a bottle and half of whisky a day… [Doyle] is… storyboarding M Night Shyamalan’s next eerie blockbuster… When asked if he grew up watching movies…: ‘In Australia? No, you go to the movies to fuck!’ … ‘In my world… talent is an insult. If you say, “Where is the talent?”, you mean “Where is the stupid bitch?”‘ It’s perhaps not surprising that when I ask Doyle to teach me a few words of Chinese, the… most useful phrase he comes up with is: ‘You stupid cunt.’ He seems offended that I have no plans to use it. ‘It’s a term of endearment,’ he insists.”

Janine [hearts] Michael: Basinger on Bay

In the Miami Herald, in a piece where the director refers with annoyance to “the death of cinema from Michael Bay“, one of his teachers instructs, citing Ingmar Bergman in the Islander’s defense: “Janine Basinger, chairwoman of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University Film Studies Department, was the then-18-year-old Bay’s first formal film professor. She is also an avid defender…. “I often joke that my tombstone will read `She taught Michael Bay.’ … But I don’t think Michael Bay is the devil. I think he’s a good filmmaker. He was an award-winning photographer as a high school student, a fully defined visual artist as a kid, and I don’t think he approached the medium with the idea of pleasing other people necessarily. Ingmar Bergman said, `Every great filmmaker has to define film on his own terms,’ and in a sense, that’s right… For Michael, it’s about pace and rapid movement. Michael is actually an abstract artist in the way he uses time, space, light and color. He’s almost an experimental filmmaker in that regard. He uses the medium in the fastest, sharpest way that it can be used, and if you don’t like it, tough luck.” For a clip highlighting some of the more vigorous, um, Bayhem, click here; the clip’s in QuickTime.

Next word on Last Days: Gus van Sant

Scott Foundas has the best interview I’ve read yet with Gus van Sant on his latest minimalist movie: “Like Van Sant’s two other recent films — Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) — Last Days… is the product of a rigorous stylistic formalism that sees time elongated, dialogue and plot employed sparingly, and actors used less to inhabit characters than as representative figures in some vast, untenable landscape. “With the type of movies I’d made up until Gerry… you’re constantly leaning over the editing bench going, ‘Gotta cut away from that or you’re gonna lose the audience.’ And you say stuff like that all day long. It’s all about getting the next scene up there and moving things along. You don’t want to lose the beat, you don’t want to let the audience stray, you want to grab them and hold them all the way through for an hour and a half. Whereas these last three movies are about trying to forget that kind of hyperconcept and hoping that people don’t need to be grabbed and held or strapped in their seats.” … Rooted in the work of such European directors as Miklós Janscó, Chantal Akerman and Béla Tarr… Last Days is the one part of Van Sant’s minimalist trilogy in which the movie’s formal daring seems symbiotic with… its content…. For Van Sant, whose 1998 remake of Psycho lives on in contemporary movie infamy, it’s another of Hitchcock’s films, Rope, that now seems a guiding influence. “The close-up/medium shot/wide shot model is a certain process where you’re on the set gathering shots to use later in editing… Even though it works — Orson Welles would combine a shot taken in Greece in 1952 with one from Rome in 1958 — our minds, I think, recognize that as a particular type of cinema. And with this type of cinema, there’s just another vibe to me — organic, almost unseen, almost like the medium itself is different.”