Movie City Indie Archive for August, 2005
Aggregating aggro: Metacritic's new owners explain all
In a press release announcing the purchase of Metacritic.com by CNET Networks, the money guys explain in investor-ese what’s behind those random-seeming number ratings: “Metacritic.com provides access to thousands of reviews across entertainment genres, presenting opinions in a concise, organized and easy-to-understand manner. The proprietary Metascore it assigns to each new release combines all of the individual critics’ scores into an overall grade for each item, so users can gauge the critical consensus at a glance. Metacritic.com carefully screens and selects the most respected critics, leveraging the work of a minimum of 40 top critics within each entertainment category it covers. The site encourages users to dig deeper in matters that interest them by reading full reviews when available.” Who needs full reviews when you’ve got a 67.4?
Kissing Bass: a gallery of Saul B's credit sequences
It’s been in the works for a while, but the folks at NotComing.com have done a superb job with a rich gallery of titles designed by the late, great graphics designer Saul Bass.
Four Brothers, 4 Seasons, 2 wallets: boosting Singleton in Philly
Philadelphia Inquirer “Inqling” columnist Michael Klein reports on an absent-minded, sticky-fingered film critic. On Friday after interviewing director John Singleton at the local 4 Seasons, Philadelphia Daily News writer Gary Thompson pulled an inadvertent switcheroo: “The critic packs up his briefcase… and inadvertently takes the director’s wallet off the conference-room table. The director realizes later that his wallet is gone and has no idea where it could be. The critic, unaware that [it wasn’t head], heads to the Poconos…” Singleton’s showing the movie in Atlanta over the weekend, “but cannot get on a plane without identification. An assistant gets on a plane from L.A. to Philly to bring the director his passport. Unpacking his briefcase [Monday],… Thompson says he found a “black, beat-up” wallet that looked like his. “I asked myself, ‘Why do I have two wallets?’ ” Finding Singleton’s i.d. inside, he “immediately phoned the publicist… I feel horrible. In this day and age, our whole lives are in there.” The publicist intends to carry the wallet to [Tuesday’s] Four Brothers world premiere in New York.”
Knowing The Constant Gardener
Over at Filmmaker, Scott Macauley transcribes a few of James Schamus’ remarks from the NYC preem: “Focus Films co-president… Schamus began his remarks Monday night at … Fernando Meirelles‘ fantastic new film… by quoting that “great American philosopher and epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld,” who, in March, 2003, assessed the limits of our knowledge of the situation in Iraq. “There are known knowns… These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Schamus then went on to quote the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek…: “What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the ‘unknown knowns,’ the things we don’t know that we know — which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself…’ The main dangers lie in the ‘unknown knowns’ — the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.” Schamus then listed his own series of “unknown knowns” which lie not so deeply within the American political unconscious, and one of those was “Big Pharma in Africa,” which forms the truly chilling backdrop to Meirelles’s exciting and unexpectedly moving conspiracy thriller/love story adapted from John LeCarre’s 2000 novel…” [More, including a lengthy LeCarre extract, at the link.]
CNN (NYSE: TWX) spins some indie
“Independent films move into the spotlight,” sez Tal Mekel from the [AOL] Time-Warner subsid, mantra-ing like a mutterless child in a Don DeLillo novel: “Penelope Spheeris… Decline of Western Civilization… punk music scene… “unless you’re Steven Spielberg”… Spheeris’ idea of an independent film is a personal statement, made on a low budget, with innovative financing methods and difficulties in finding distribution…” And now the white noise persists: “Peter Biskind… Miramax, Sundance… ‘Indiewood’… Harvey and Bob Weinstein… Oscar buzz… Walt Disney Co… Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction… Sideways… Lost in Translation… Sundance Film Festival… Eugene Hernandez… Indiewire.com… Hustle and Flow… pimp…. Paramount Pictures and MTV Films… a record $9 million… Sundance Channel, the Independent Film Channel, and HBO (a unit of Time Warner, as is CNN)… Napoleon Dynamite… The Blair Witch Project… Super Size Me… Whale Rider… My Big Fat Greek Wedding… McDonald’s food for 30 days… IMDb.com… action figures… The Passion of the Christ… The Aristocrats… tax breaks… Technology… Digital video and computers… [Spheeris says], “‘The good news is now everybody can make a movie, and the bad news is now everybody can make a movie.'”
Gwynnie shoots a short
The NY Times continues its crusade to make sure that little-known female filmmakers get more attention, focusing on a short film co-directed by an actress named Gwyneth Paltrow that will be part of a DVD inserted into a winter issue of Glamour magazine. Felicia R. Lee gets junket-quality quotes from the daughter of late director Bruce Paltrow: “It’s been great,” Ms. Paltrow said of her first effort at directing. “It’s been really interesting to kind of get in here and see that I have an instinct for it… I think I’m very sensitive to the actor’s perspective… Obviously, I’ve worked on 30 films so I think I’ve learned a lot about filmmaking through osmosis. I’ve spent basically 12 years of my life on film sets the whole time.”
Lowering the DVD boom: Image acquires Home Vision and Criterion's exclusive distrib rights
Announced several days ago, but news to us: Image Entertainment’s bought the privately-held Chicago-based DVD producer Home Vision Entertainment and signed the Criterion Collection to an exclusive home video deal through 2010. HVE reports $29 million in 2004 revenues for its titles and co-distributing Criterion’s output. While HVE will be retained as a label, its operations will be folded into Image’s in Las Vegas and Chatsworth, California. In a release, the various corporate figures weigh in, including Home Vision’s CEO Adrianne Furniss, who notes that HVE, Janus, Criterion and Image have a history of collaboration; HVE’s founder and chairman, Charles Benton, alludes to the company’s origins in 16mm and “our tradition of publishing ‘good films that sell.'” Image’s CEO, Martin Greenwald, talks about opportunities for expansion and growth, and, flatly, he states, “even more important is the opportunity to eliminate much of Home Vision’s overhead as it is absorbed into Image’s existing infrastructure.” Image’s COO David Borshell speaks of continuing “passion and commitment” in collating the companies’ catalogues, and signs off with, “Everyone at Home Vision should be proud of their company’s nineteen years of accomplishments.” [Disclosure: I wrote liner notes for two HVE releases.]
Bring out your dead: Kehr kids Kael
In his weekly DVD roundup in the NY Times, Dave Kehr makes a seemingly distasteful personal aside about the intimate reasons single mother Pauline Kael may have revered a movie: “Kino on Video’s ambitious new double-disc… Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920’s and 30’s includes two dozen rarely seen [shorts], most of them made in Europe in the 20’s… The Kino set… includes Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 M�nilmontant, a 37-minute work that the critic Pauline Kael rather surprisingly cited as the favorite film of her life in an interview a few months before her death in 2001… With its frenzied cutting and freewheeling camera work, the sequence looks forward to the paroxysms of violence that Kael much admired in the work of Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma. But it is hard to imagine the tough-minded Kael falling for the sentimental story unless it set off some now inaccessible personal associations for her. (The Sibirskaia character finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with a man who shows no further interest in her, and becomes duly determined to raise the child.)”
Constant Gardener's first bloom
Former NY Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath sounds a first call for the remarkable Constant Gardener: “After the success of City of God [director Fernando] Meirelles found himself much in demand. He was even offered Collateral… But he is not a fan of big studio movies and he turned all his suitors down. He [met] with [producer Simon] Channing Williams, however, because he is a great admirer of… Mike Leigh, and Mr. Channing Williams has produced a number of Mr. Leigh’s films. [He] gave Mr. Meirelles the… script, and Mr. Meirelles, who as it happens had just been visiting Kenya himself, signed on virtually overnight… [There’s] a remarkable sense of place: a vivid evocation of the Kenyan landscape and cityscape in one of Nairobi’s most down-and-out neighborhoods, through which sewage flows in open, rag-cluttered trenches; and tracking shots of Kibera, Nairobi’s sprawling, tin-roofed shantytown, which are as enthralling as they are disturbing…” Writing about class, the Times, of course, must write about first class: “Though Mr. Meirelles had never made a film outside Brazil… Mr. Channing Williams said he wasn’t worried [because] “at a certain level, filmmaking is just filmmaking.” Mr. Meirelles [added] that the main difference between [this film] and other films he had worked on was that “the wine is better; you travel first class.”
The Times on Winter Soldier, "this ancient, grainy documentary"
Milestone Films gets a long write-up in the NY TImes about their new doc project, with a dramatic lede from David M. Halbfinger: “Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary Winter Soldier has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment. Now, the 95-minute film—which has circulated like 16mm samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience—is about to get its first significant theatrical release… Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers [call] it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib… When one of the veterans—John Kerry… seen on screen for less than a minute—ran for president… [it] turned up as propaganda on both sides… Mr. Kerry’s friend… George Butler used footage… to lionize him in a biographical film… called Going Upriver. His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web site… and made a film of their own… to assail him as a traitor and a fraud…. “The context is why we wanted to do it,” said Amy Heller, co-owner with her husband, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films… “We have a 9-year-old son… but if he were 19 and wondering what he should do with the next stage of his life, I sure would want him to see this film before considering going into the military.” [More explicit description of the disturbing content of “this grainy, ancient documentary” at the link.]
Elvis Mitchell: fastest midget in the circus
In the Observer, Elvis Mitchell, identified as “a New York-based film critic,” puts his weight behind the weightiness of Crash, going 500 words without referencing any fave new rock videos: “Captain Kirk got it wrong–it’s race that is the final frontier, not space… In his surprise hit film… Paul Haggis understands that racism and its recurrent symptoms–anger, resentment–are like a physical force in Los Angeles, accelerating in the city Haggis creates at 32 feet per second, like gravity… At last year’s Toronto film festival… it was derided for its perceived white-liberal earnestness… But films that deal with race, and featured people of colour as their subject, are still treated as flukes when they manage some success. Of course, no studio would stop making action films when they fail. Yet, films with minority casts – or movies about race – constantly have to prove themselves… The good news is that [Tim] Story has made a hit of Four, making him the director of the largest budgeted studio movie ever handled by a black man. Such a sobriquet may sound something like being the fastest midget in the circus – meaningless.” [More poppop at the link.]
Spinning indie: Desson Thomson defines
The WashPost’s Desson Thomson does up a pretty good think piece about indie filmmaking, starting with his mother-in-law’s perplexment at Junebug and working his way to getting Jim Jarmusch on the horn: “What is independent cinema?” asked the filmmaker in his slow-mo diction. “Is it just this category that was invented since the ’80s, or is it something through the history of cinema? To me, all it means is someone who makes a film because they have a desire to express something, and they have control artistically over the film. It’s not a film designed to hit a certain marketing demographic.” How has Jarmusch retained his independence over the years? Simple… Avoid American money… (They want “input” and “control” and “final cut,” words that will chill any artist’s heart.) He gets “back end” financing from markets in Germany, Japan and other countries, in which distribution companies pay Jarmusch upfront for the rights to his film in their respective territories. And they don’t exert any creative control. When the movie is made, then he [seeks] an American distributor. [But] he recently accepted financing from the [Universal-owned] Focus Films forBroken Flowers… But Jarmusch doesn’t see this as a change in his ideology because Focus promised him creative carte blanche for casting, story and final cut. Bottom line: He still gets to do what he wants.” [More musings at the link.]
Drew Barrymore: chocolates filled with sympathy and affection
At his new website, novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem files a pile of published and unpublished writing, including a tasty little bit called “The Drew Barrymore Stories,” a sweet thing worth its weight in My Date With Drew, which begins: “I was riding in an elevator in London hotel with Alfred Hitchcock and Drew Barrymore. Alfred Hitchcock said, “Do you think he’s opened the box of poisoned chocolates yet?” Though I knew it was only one of Alfred Hitchcock’s deadpan jokes, I grew nervous. Drew Barrymore smiled and laughed, so infectiously that I couldn’t help laughing myself. She said: “I took the poisoned chocolates out and replaced them with chocolates filled with sympathy and affection.” Even Alfred Hitchcock began laughing now.” [4 more bites at the link.]
The Great leap: what Raid means for its Filipino lead
Actor Cesar Montano has a substantial chunk of screentime in The Great Raid, and the Manila Standard’s Remy M. Umerez reports on what’s next. The local distrib said he “could have put together a trailer for the Philippine audience in which Cesar would have been the focal point, like what the Japanese distributor of Last Samurai did to underscore Ken Watanabe’s importance in the movie… but he was already pressed for time. “Never mind the trailer,” [the distrib] said, “what is important is the fact that the role of Cesar is so important and without Capt. Juan Pajota, the character he plays, there won’t be a story to tell…. Cesar appears in the second half of the movie and up until the end. Don’t even think it is a minor role for an Asian actor like Cesar. I would not gamble acquiring the distribution rights of the film if it’s only a cameo role for him. When I saw the movie, I felt proud.” … Whether or not his role is minor, the fact that he is in a Hollywood production is reason enough for us to cheer for him just as millions of Filipinos did for Manny Pacquiao even if he lost in his last boxing bout in Las Vegas… The actor’s next move is to find himself an agent in the US.”
Breaking and Entering with the lovely, bearded tubster
Guardian anonycolumnist Pendennis takes snarky measure of a certain star and his filmmaker: “Philandering Jude Law‘s halo has slipped further, judging by his recent appearance at Camden Town’s Sainsbury’s, where he was shooting a scene for Anthony Minghella‘s new film, Breaking and Entering. Jane Havell, 24, was plucked from the supermarket staff to scan in shopping as cameras fixed on Law. But Havell preferred bearded tubster Minghella to svelte Jude. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m a fan, but I guess he’s a good-looking bloke… Anthony Minghella was lovely. He was really chatty and down-to-earth.”
