Movie City Indie Archive for October, 2005
L.A.'s smelly ditch: refloating the Los Angeles River
One of L.A.’s boldest locations, the cement-lined Los Angeles River, described by Wim Wenders this way—”Landscapes tell stories, and the Los Angeles River tells a story of violence and danger”—is to become a river of dreams, writes the Telegraph’s Catherine Elsworth. Elsworth writes that it’s “a vast cement gutter so bleak that its major claim to fame is playing urban wastelands in Hollywood films…
Now a multi-million dollar project aims to transform the channel into a river the city can be proud of; a tranquil oasis lined by cafes, public parks and bicycle paths… Funded by £1.6 million from the city’s Department of Water and Power, the 18-month research project will canvass public opinion at more than 18 meetings before a 20-year blueprint for the river is drawn up.” Of its earlier incarnations, “William Mulholland, the city’s famous water engineer, described it as “a beautiful limpid little stream with willows on its banks”. [More backstory at the link; the pic’s from John Boorman’s great Point Blank.]
Citizen Marty: chiming Welles' moves
I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since seeing Citizen Kane that Martin Scorsese hasn’t thought of Orson Welles. At Senses of Cinema, John Thurman makes a dry, comprehensive, illustrated case for why Taxi Driver is as “rife” with quotations from movies as any smoothie from Tarantino’s blender, admiring its “intertextuality” in its submerged allusions to Citizen Kane—far more expansive than his hiring of Bernard Herrman to compose the score. Framings taken from Murder by Contract and Salvatore Giuliano are neatly dissected, but the key passage compares, with frame captures, the entrance of Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy into Travis Bickle’s field of vision.
“I first saw her at Palantine Campaign Headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass,” Travis intones. Notes Thurman, “Betsy appears, crossing over to her office’s entrance in slow motion…. Behind her in the frame… Scorsese sits against a wall. As Betsy reaches the door, a dissolve brings a scroll over the words of Travis’ journal with Travis still reading them in voice-over. This scene reproduces almost exactly the visual introduction of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. [Side-by-side still comparisons are provided.] When Kane‘s reporter figure, “still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of Kane’s dying word, asks long-time Kane associate Bernstein (Everett Sloane), who thinks Rosebud might have been some girl. Thompson is incredulous.” In Kane, Bernstein says, “A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol, and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all – but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Among other entertaining digs, Thurman also points out that the St. Regis Hotel, seen in the final scene between Travis and Betsy, is where Scorsese stayed during the shooting, “because it was a favourite of Orson Welles.”
Levy loving Phil: going long on Capote
Over at the Oregonian, Shawn Levy and Philip Seymour Hoffman go long on Capote in a lengthy Q&A. On the screenplay: “It’s amazing hearing you list the various aspects of it, because Dan Futterman’s script—the story of the writing of “In Cold Blood” and the story of the Clutter murders—it’s impossible to believe that somebody got it into 100 pages of script, and a script, by the way, that has so much judicious silence in it.” Yeah, yeah. That’s Danny and that’s Bennett, too: the way he shot it and the way he edited it with Chris [Tellefsen]. It’s everyone working in tandem, starting with the script. And then the shooting and the acting. Everyone had the same understanding coming out of Danny’s script that the private moments were going to be the most compelling to tell in the whole story. Some of the things that happened between the lines — not just listening to someone talk. Danny understood that, and then in turn Bennett and myself. It’s a very spare, economic screenplay in a way that was very pleasing.
“Yeah, and so contradictory in a way to people’s preconception of what a film about a writer would be like. You expect it to be filled with bon mots and rapier wit. And instead, with Capote being such a good reporter—and I don’t even know if at that moment in his life he realized how good a reporter he was—he kept his mouth shut. The scene where he first meets Perry and says, ‘They put you in the women’s cell,’ and he doesn’t say more; he just lets that comment sit and comes back.” [Maybe 6,000 words at the link.]
Shopgirl's Tucker mothers melodrama
Anand Tucker (ne Thakkar), director of the sleek but wan April-November romance Shopgirl tells Mumbai’s rediff.com what makes him swoon: melodrama.
What kind of films appeal to you? I am a sucker for stories with strong emotions. I can watch for hours the classic melodramas Hollywood made in the 1950s and 1960s. Some critics run down melodrama, don’t they? I have never been concerned with that. I believe melodramatic films can be intelligently made. What makes you feel so strongly about it? The many great melodramas I have seen. And my own films. When I made ‘Hillary And Jackie,’ some critics wrote that it was a melodrama. That was perfectly fine with me. I have never ceased to admire melodrama… I believe melodramas�– books and films�– are about trying to reach a bigger truth about emotions. And something that touches people and makes them think cannot be anything but admirable.
Exoticism doesn't exist anymore, says Malaysian-born Taiwan filmmaker
Malaysian Star inquires of waterlogged, deadpan festival favorite, director Tsai Ming-liang, about being the Malaysian-born son of a Chinese who works in Taiwan. “Being a Malaysian filmmaker working in Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang would naturally have a unique perspective on the filmmaking scene here in Malaysia. Having been based in Taipei for more than 20 years, Tsai has been through everything from the end of martial law to the democratisation of Taiwan that led to a flood of new opportunities for filmmakers there… When asked about the Malaysian obsession with creating a national identity for our films or promoting our culture, Tsai, who was in town last week for the 50th Asia Pacific Film Festival, replied: “The worst thing one can do is to promote an image before everything else. It is not very smart to do so. There are no such things as exotic elements that you can sell in this modern world. The world is so global and well-informed, so exoticism doesn’t exist anymore.” … Tsai believes that [staying] true to himself that he has gotten this far. Apart from his ever-increasing collection of awards from film festivals around the world (the latest being a Silver Bear at Berlin for The Wayward Cloud [pic], he has also been invited, along with five other auteurs, to make a film to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. France has also invited him to make a film about the Louvre. For the Mozart anniversary, Tsai will be shooting a film, next year, about immigrant workers in Kuala Lumpur. It will be his first film to be set in Malaysia.
“I hope that our government will give the independent filmmakers more support,” he said. “I understand that our government may be concerned that the independent films are very personal or very artistic in nature, but it does not need to give the filmmakers large sums of money. It could just give a small sum for them to start things off and see what they can come up with…” Does Tsai see the irony of him being a Malaysian filmmaker attending a festival in Malaysia but representing Taiwan? “I’m fine with that… There are, in fact, a lot of filmmakers who don’t make films in their own countries but the people of their countries are still proud of them. My father who came from China inspired me to believe that it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you do good things.”
Three lovely bottoms: Keira talks doubles
Knight-Ridder’s Daniel Fienberg finds that, ass, and ye shall receive, chatting up Keira Knightley about her baggage in Domino: “Although the 20-year-old actress appears topless… some of the lap dance shots seem a little fishy… Knightley doesn’t hesitate. “No, It’s definitely a body double, I don’t have that body,” she says with an utterly disarming grin. “What a bum! I wish I had that bum! No, it was fantastic… Well, there were three lovely bottoms, they really were… But, I was trying to pick one that could be as close to mine as possible if mine were the perfect bottom, which it isn’t.” Her double, the piece goes onnnnnnnn, was coached by Knightley’s mum, “a former go-go dancer.”
Schrader, the devil and a gay, middle-aged American Gigolo
Ever-entertaining Paul Schrader exercises his gab with James Mottram at the Independent: “Remarkably, he finished his cut for just $35,000. Telling the story of Merrin’s… first encounter with demonic possession, while on missionary work in East Africa, Schrader’s version – what he calls “an old-fashioned intellectual melodrama” or “Shane with a crucifix” – far outstrips Harlin’s shocker of a movie… Had Harlin’s version not been made, Schrader believes [Dominion] would’ve been “cut to shreds” and “tarted up” by Morgan Creek. “I ended up with final cut from a company that prides itself in fixing every film they make! Their motto is, ‘If it isn’t broke, we didn’t make it’!”
“As demonstrated by Schrader’s problems…, like many [1970s] filmmakers… he is not the force he once was. “When I came back to Hollywood, it was a different industry… Those films I was making were now independent films. I kept making the same films – but now they’re independent films.” For years, he has tried to get a film made that some will regard as a follow-up to his 1980 classic American Gigolo.”It’s that American Gigolo character in his mid-Fifties, and he’s now homosexual and he’s a society walker, an older gent that squires rich old ladies to the opera.” [More tale-telling at the link.]
An auteur at my table: Campion returns
Garry Maddox of the Sydney Morning Herald chronicles Jane Campion’s return to the screen: “Jane Campion has come back from her self-imposed break from filmmaking for an international feature involving such respected directors as Robert Altman, Jodie Foster, the Taviani brothers and Gaspar Noe.” Two years ago, Campion swore she’d spend the next four years with her young daughter, but “she has been lured back for one of eight short films that will combine into a feature, called 8, to dramatise the United Nations’s Millennium Development Goals…
“Co-ordinated by the French producer Marc Obéron, 8 started with the French director Noe ( Irreversible) shooting a film in July about the fight against AIDS in West Africa’s Burkina Faso.” Campion’s passage is The Water Diary, “shot at Nimmitabel, near Cooma, [telling] a story through a child’s eyes about living through a drought.” The Tavianis are set to write-direct about poverty; Shinya Tsukamoto is up for universal primary education, Altman works with female empowerment, and Foster considers child mortality. The budget is €4 million, made in association with the UN Development Program. UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan hopes it will be launched at Cannes 2006.
London calling: Time Out readers tab fave local pics
The readers at Time Out London pick their “favourite” London film : “Gangster [pic] The Long Good Friday was the runaway winner, John MacKenzie’s tense thriller about crooked investment in the East End … Coming in second was Michelangelo Antonioni’s ’60s thriller Blow-up, while the Michael Winterbottom drama Wonderland came in at third.”
Seven more at the link, including the peerless Withnail and I.
Dressing down: sweat pants and inspiration
Screenwriter Josh Friedman continues to blog manfully and with lashes of the profane. Some samples from his current couture-rific rant: “Many of you seem disturbed that I wear sweatpants. And to that I would quote the great Andrew Marlowe and say this: Get off my fucking blog… Because understand this: what you wear and how you look when you go to a meeting is of the utmost importance. Every interaction between a writer and an executive is a carefully orchestrated mating dance between power and creativity. It is Noh theater where every mask has been carved into a smile capable of four minutes of small talk about the newest Jon Krakauer book that the mask hasn’t even read… A friend of mine is a very successful writer and generally obeys the successful writer lifestyle doctrine. He’s a white Jewish male in his early thirties, shaves about once a month, sleeps with pretty goyim he isn’t qualified to sleep with, and drives a big black car with illegally tinted windows. But every time I see the dude he’s wearing a coat and tie. Seriously. Full-metal jacket and matching windsor… Me, if I’m meeting with someone over the v.p. level I do two things differently: first, I strap on my expensive watch. Second, I don’t wear any socks. I find these two elements combine to make me practically invincible… As to the expensive watch…well, a girl does love her bling.” [As always, more well-aimed arrows at the link.]
The Trib's wedgie for edgy: cover play for Jibjab jabbing "superstores"
The Chicago Tribune’s internet guy, Steve Johnson columnizes sarcastic JibJab’s take on Wal*Mart, including background on their 2004-2005 successes. “The transition from feared lunacy to Leno came with the presidential election and their video “This Land,” a brilliant piece of equal-opportunity satire that inspired both raucous laughter and the instant urge to e-mail it… It seemed sunny, because of the cheery song it’s based on and because in [the] Monty Pythonesque animation George Bush and John Kerry always smile, but it could also be read as a bitter lament over the quality of choice the country faced…” After 80 million downloads, “The brothers’ new short is a workingman’s critique of discount superstores. Labeled “Big Box Mart,” it’s an angrier piece of work than “This Land” or their previous videos, which include a rap parody featuring the Founding Fathers and a Christmas song played by flatulent elves…. The kicker: “Those everyday low prices have a price. They aren’t free.” … It’s an attack on Wal-Mart and the companies who… sell to the chain, yes, but the real object of the satire is the shopper himself too “hypnotized” by stuffed aisles and low prices to realize where his true economic interests lie.” As for the Spiridelli Bros.’ economic interests, “The business model is starting to emerge,” said Gregg, an MBA and former investment banker…. You can even go to Walmart.com and buy some of the Spiridellis’ earlier work, at least for [now].”
John Waters: groom reaper?
Court TV ups the quirk, reports the Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein; John Waters will host 12 eps of a scripted murder-mystery anthology featuring filmmaker John Waters, ‘Til Death Do Us Part,” dramatizing “real-life cases of spousal murder. Waters will take on a regular role as the “Groom Reaper” in “Death,” setting the story for the viewer from his vantage point as a guest at the tragic couple’s wedding, where each episode begins… “I’ve always been jealous of Vincent Price’s career,” Waters said. “Maybe now that he’s dead, I can hijack it.”
if film goes under, I will go under with it: Peter Kubelka (hearts) emulsion
After a 26-year hiatus, experimental filmmaker and Anthology Film Archives co-founder Peter Kubelka has a new pic, which he describes to Michelle Silva in the SF Bay Guardian: “In a visual culture increasingly permeated by digital imagery, the disintegration of the exhibition and experience of cinema appears imminent. Peter Kubelka reminds American audiences of the physical presence of cinema as an inimitable medium. With a filmography that is only 63 minutes long, avant-garde master Kubelka (born in Austria in 1934) has progressed film by his metric and metaphoric montages, which are attentive to tactile qualities and mechanics that are exclusive to film. Since the 1950s, Kubelka has remained a committed proponent of film as a pure medium…
“After a 26-year hiatus, he has re-emerged with a new film, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and has toured and lectured in several cities throughout the US. The survival of film as an exhibition medium is… an issue right now. [Instructors] are projecting DVDs instead of the actual work. As a major founder of film culture, how do you feel about the future of cinema? I do not allow my films to be transferred to video and shown in digital form, which means that if film goes under, I will go under with it. But I don’t do this in order to go under. I’m absolutely convinced cinema as a classic medium will stay on, because it has a heart core which cannot be replaced by any other medium. [More ping and pong at the link.]
Hostile territory: Chris Doyle drops in on the US and onto Marty & QT
Chris, Chris, Chris! In a Filmmaker Q&A entitled “The Wild Man”, Matthew Ross chats with great cinematographer and delicate weed Chris Doyle about US filmmaking and Martin Scorsese: “You know, I was in Kazakhstan two weeks ago, and that was nothing. This is hostile territory, this is bullshit. I don’t know if it should be said so bluntly, but… every people gets the government they deserve. Sorry, that’s a reality. The present climate in most of the western world is of course anti-artist, because the function of an artist is to open people’s eyes, and that’s not the function of a Texas oil-based meritocracy. Hello! … You don’t have the integrity, you have to remake everything we’ve done anyway. I go to see Martin Scorsese, and I say, Don’t you think I should tell you about the lenses? 
And he says, What do you mean? And I said, Well, you’re remaking my film, which is Infernal Affairs. Infernal Affairs was probably written in one week, we shot it in a month and you’re going to remake it! Ha ha, good luck! What the fuck is this about? I mean, come on. In other words, if you read “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” then you’d actually have a very clear idea… about what’s really happening in the U.S. right now. So what do we do? You tell me… If Martin Scorsese can make a piece of shit called The Aviator and then go on to remake a Hong Kong film, don’t you think he’s lost the plot? Think it through. “I need my Oscar, I need my fucking Oscar!” Are you crazy? There’s not a single person in the Oscar voting department who’s under 65 years old. They don’t even know how to get online. They have no idea what the real world is about. They have no visual experience anymore. They have preoccupations. So why the fuck would a great filmmaker need to suck the dick of the Academy with a piece of shit called The Aviator? And now he has to remake our film? I mean this is bullshit. This is total bullshit. I love Marty, I think he’s a great person. And the other one is Tarantino. Oh yeah, let’s appropriate everything. Are you lost? Yes, you are lost.”
Cultural imperialism: UNESCO reacts to US's foreign films
The Guardian reports on a global plan to protect film culture; after all, aren’t American movies “foreign films” once they cross a border? “The UN’s cultural agency, Unesco, is expected tomorrow to approve a convention that will allow countries to protect their cultures from globalisation, despite bitter opposition from the United States.A Franco-Canadian initiative, which has won broad backing as a swipe at US “cultural imperialism”, could mean that countries will be able to subsidise domestic film industries and restrict foreign music and content on their radio and television stations in the name of preserving and promoting cultural diversity… The US, supported only by Israel, filed 27 amendments in an unsuccessful bid to water [this] down… criticising it as “flawed”, “ambiguous” and “protectionist”. France, which has long defended its right to a “cultural exception”, could barely conceal its delight. “We are no longer the black sheep on this issue,” said the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, adding that the text was “a clear recognition” that cultural goods such as film, TV programmes and music are not “merchandise like any other” and should be treated separately in.. trade talks.” [More at the link.]
