Movie City Indie Archive for November, 2005
Honoring the future hope of the past: Scorsese gets another scroll
With Martin Scorsese on the road with No Direction Home, ANSA reports on Scorsese’s latest late-career honor, an honorary degree granted in Bologna. “In a long speech… Scorsese cited Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi and Francesco Rosi. “It’s impossible for me to express how much I learned from Italian cinema,” said the 63-year old director… Without the postwar Italian film renaissance, Scorsese said, “As a Sicilian, as an American and as a movie-maker I wouldn’t know where I’d be.”
“As for Pasolini, Scorsese said “his films re-opened my eyes like a smack in the face.” Scorsese, known for violent films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, ended his speech by urging his young audience to “become human beings able to feel compassion… It might seem easy but it’s a long, risky and sometimes deceptive road. I’m 63 and I’ve just started.”
True-life apocrypha: Melton Barker, auteur
Melton Barker? Chris Garcia of Austin American-Statesman makes the question more than rhetorical, the gorgeous enigma of “a man who has seemingly, and utterly, disappeared.” Too true to be good? “The man is Melton Barker. He made many movies, two-reelers featuring small-town children that mimicked popular Hollywood fare of the time… the Depression and the Golden Age.
“When she talks about her quarry, [Caroline] Frick, a film archivist and historian… at the University of Texas, lights up with a tangy fusion of fevered fascination and lip-pinching frustration. Since 2001, Melton Barker has wrapped his ghost around Frick’s head, haunting her dreams, work, life. Barker made so-called itinerant films… from documentaries to lightly veiled ads for local stores… He shot and screened the movies for an invariably delighted community, and likely made a comfy living.” Barker, Frick tells Garcia, shot in several states between the 1930s and 1950s. A naming of eight Texas towns is fragrant: “Austin, Waco, Childress, Munday, Keller, San Marcos, Huntsville and Quanah.” … [Frick’s] imperishable commitment to the case, has a big fat hole in it. She cannot discover who the man was, or where he went. No birth certificate. No obituary. Just a name, some movies and a lot of air… “There have been times when it’s all-consuming… My father came to visit and I brought it up and he said, ‘Seriously. Is this all you talk about? This is really scary.’ … Who is this guy who traveled from town to town? What was he thinking? Where has he not gone? Then I found out he was a Texan, and that solidified it.” … Under the banner of Melton Barker Juvenile Productions, the roving filmmaker would place an ad in the local paper offering to put children ages 3 to 12 in the movies for $10 a child—an opulent sum in the Depression paid by parents giddy to watch their children… Lead roles were auditioned. [Then] up to 125 other children just paid the fee and showed up. As a filmmaker, Barker had a genius for jangly messes…”They’re fabulous. They’re fantastic… They’re so bad that they’re so good… I’m not going to lie to you.” [Lovely, loving anecdotes reel on at the link; the ending of Garcia’s telling is marvelous. There are also clips of Barker’s legacy at the link.]
Back to the future: cultural crackdowns in Iran
A long survey of cultural bans in Iran by Mehdi Khalaji is up at Iran Press Service. Some notes on movie troubles: “After a period of some tolerance under former president Mohammad Khatami, Iran is now experiencing a cultural clampdown. President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad is implementing the hardest of hardline ideological tendencies in the cultural arena, consistent with his belief that his administration should prepare the country for the reappearance of the hidden imam (who is now more than 1,000 years old). To this end, Ahmadi Nezhad has taken a host of provocative steps, believing that “freedom of speech [is] a way to destroy people’s religious beliefs…
Harandi’s background of attacks on liberal journalists and political activists strongly suggests that Ahmadi Nezhad wants to suppress cultural freedom and to limit the freedom of information… In its first session… the [The Supreme Cultural Revolution Council] adopted a circular banning all movies that “propagandize for schools like secularism, liberalism, nihilism, or feminism, and destroy the authentic cultures of religious societies and humiliate them”. The circular emphasizes that all movies that explicitly or implicitly deny the right of religion to govern, or that show secular regimes as superior to their religious counterparts, are forbidden. Many Iranian directors, like Bahram Bayza’i, experience delays lasting into years receiving permission to produce films, and many others, like Abbas Kiarostami, cannot show their work in Iran. Some Iranian filmmakers, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, prefer to live abroad in order to pursue their art in freedom and safety.” [More of lessening at the link.]
In the Schwimmer: marketing an indie drunk
Michael Booth in Denver Post has a nice lede before having to talk about Duane Hopwood: “When marketing a $1 million independent film, a downbeat tale of an alcoholic stumbling through the gray winter of Atlantic City, the entire strategy hangs on David Schwimmer’s familiar chagrined look and three-day stubble. Literally… Writer-director Matt Mulhern sits in a Denver restaurant and watches his marketing budget go from Schwimmer’s fork to his mouth. “We blew it on that chicken roll,” Mulhern says with a shrug. “That’s the budget, right there.”
Gary Arnold loved it: The Passenger
Washington Times’ Gary Arnold is not over the moon about Sony’s Classic: “If anything, The Passenger was the movie in which Mr. Antonioni, who recently turned 93, appeared to be emptying the creative well down to the last muddy drops. In his previous MGM fiasco, Zabriskie Point, the preposterously oversold and deflating hippie rhapsody of 1970, the director stranded himself in Death Valley.
“The Passenger found him lost in the desert again, this time a North African desert, with Algeria meant to simulate Chad, or anywhere uprisings were topical. [The film’s] anticlimax is nestled inside a tediously affected shot sequence designed to slide the camera from an inside-looking-out position in Locke’s street-level hotel room to the reverse outside-looking-in vantage point. There was a great deal of praise at the time for this flourish, more welcome as a practical matter because it cued spectators that the funeral was just about over…. To the extent that he’s characterized, lackluster Locke inspires no confidence as sleuth, impostor or amorist. The film generates scant incentive to care about the gradual expiration of a character who fails to embody much life or establish urgent claims on credibility or sympathy.”
Fabricating Kubrick: Raphael on the LOOK pictures
Frederic Raphael, collaborator on Eyes Wide Shut was one of the first after Kubrick’s death to cash in on his memories in the Guardian, he has his way with the new coffee table volume, “Stanley Kubrick: Dreams and Shadows, Photographs 1945-1950,” from Phaidon Press, which draws from Kubrick’s work in the archives of LOOK magazine. The selection, claims Raphael, “reveals a command of camera angles which it is tempting to call “instinctive”, but is more likely to have been planned as consciously as chess moves. The photographs show an appetite for the dark side… The camera suggests confident familiarity with local life, which the monoglot down-there-on-assignment Kubrick can never have had…
“Never an ambulance-chaser or a crime-scene specialist like the great Weegee…, young Kubrick was not content to catch life on the fly… If Kubrick often honoured the ethos of the on-the-spot observer, he also cheated; one of the earliest prints is of a newsvendor, in his kiosk, framed by April 1945 newspapers announcing the death of FDR. The very image of America’s bereavement, the guy appears ineffably sad. It looks as “natural” as a picture-desk editor would require, but in fact the vendor was coached to adopt his sorry expression. What looks to have been caught on the fly is a set-up.” [More know-it-all guff at the link.]
Paul Verhoeven's latest: a shitfight?
Geoffrey Macnab reports on the shooting of Blackbook, the new Nazi-era film by 67-year-old Paul Verhoeven: “According to producer San Fu Maltha, Verhoeven’s reputation as a driven, uncompromising filmmaker is fully deserved. “No matter what he does, he doesn’t do it for personal pleasure. It’s all for the good of the film. He does it to make a great film. He is always pushing, but he is also willing to find a solution… Don’t come to him with bullshit because it doesn’t work.” Despite the demands Verhoeven places on his collaborators, most show… affection for him. His lead actress, Carice van Houten, has the most gruelling role: one that entails being put alive in a coffin, hiding in freezing water, and being brutally humiliated by Dutch police who think she is a collaborator. “We did some very hard scenes with 200 litres of pigshit,” Van Houten says… “Somewhere at the end of the day, I said to him, ‘You have to go in the shit, too.’ He said, ‘OK, at the end of the day we’ll shitfight together“.’ He was prepared to do that.”
Late and great and lasting: Ballhaus on work with Fassbinder
At the Grauniad, Will Hodgkinson uses the occasion of a production still of Fassbinder on set to tout the career of a cinematographic great who outlived the protean German director.
“The squatting man behind the movie camera is Michael Ballhaus, one of the most innovative cinematographers of European film. He is shooting Margit Carstensen and Karlheinz Bohm, playing a fragile woman and her manipulative husband, on the Spanish Steps in Rome for the 1973 film Martha. On the right, watching with haughty solemnity, is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the volatile, self-destructive, and extremely talented director who reinvented German cinema throughout the 1970s.” [The several paragraphs at the link are worth the time.] Photo: BFI
Americans can handle only one genocide per Christmas: Syriana vs. Munich
Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow considers how much serious can holiday audiences (and the Academy) stand? “We call the film ‘Elf 2’,” joked Stephen Gaghan, the creator of Syriana, with a hint of desperation…. Ambitious filmmakers have faced this paradox of timing year after year, with unpredictable results. Warren Beatty opened Reds on Dec. 4, 1981. He garnered mixed to rave reviews, earned 12 Oscar nominations, and won three statuettes: best director for himself, best cinematography for Vittorio Storaro and best supporting actress for Maureen Stapleton. Yet the movie didn’t make its budget back… Spielberg’s Munich opens Dec. 23. Although it has a wildly different focus – the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the search for the killers by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency – two movies that depict terrorism may be too much even for hearty appetites…. The situation is reminiscent of 1993, when Walter Hill‘s Geronimo: An American Legend opened Dec. 10 and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List opened Dec. 15. “I guess Americans can handle only one genocide per Christmas,” Geronimo screenwriter Larry Gross joked to Sragow upon the film’s release.
Kiss Kael Boom BANG!: imperiling Pauline
OC Weekly’s Greg Stacy is on deck for a little Kiss Kael Boom Bang: “In many movies, even the classics, there comes a scene in which the action screeches to a halt, the music swells and the camera sweeps in for a long, loving closeup as one of the characters imparts unto us the picture’s Big, Important Message. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael warned us about such scenes, observing that it was as if the film’s director was jabbing us in the ribs and saying, “Listen to this; it’s pure gold.” Next up: Michael Barnes of the Austin Statesman, taking up the Black slack for the week: “Critics and audiences have so far underrated Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the detective comedy with serious Raymond Chandler roots (including subtitles and themes — incest, pornography, mistaken identity, abuse of power — snatched from Chandler’s books) and a wink to movie hyperconsciousness (starting with the Pauline Kael reference in the title).”And the Stranger’s listings editor works the apocrypha, averring of The Sound of Music: “When the movie version came out, famous film critic Pauline Kael panned the film, calling it ‘The Sound of Mucus.’ Supposedly, Kael lost her job over the review.” May we all work so hard after this life is over.
Giving and taking fingers: the Disney way
Several longstanding Disney mysteries get cleaned up in the Age, with Jim Schembri talking to animation vet Paul Carlson: “As a renowned specialist in rendering Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck… can Carlson shed any light… on why these characters wear white gloves? “I don’t know about that,” he says, genuinely flummoxed. “That’s interesting. I’ve never been asked that.” Still, he can explain why so many Disney characters have only 3 fingers. “When they first started animating, they had so many fingers to deal with that they figured it was too much work to animate 4 fingers. It was easier just to animate three. As silly as that may sound, if you think about it, we did 300,000 separate drawings for Lady and the Tramp, then each of those were cleaned up, which makes 600,000. Then they were inked and painted. That makes another 300,000. So there were almost a million drawings. So when you have 200 to 300 artists working, think of the time you can save if you only have to draw 3 fingers instead of 4! It sounds silly, but that goes way back to the 1930s and ’40s.”
Harold Ramis: Death is inevitable
SF Chron’s Hugh Hart transcribes as Harold Ramis polishes his lump of coal, the lovingly black Ice Harvest. Give ’em heck, Harry: “Buddhism, and religion in general, I think, evolved as a way of dealing with the fact that we live with impermanence, we can’t hang on to any good feeling we have, we’re fundamentally alone in the universe, death is inevitable… We’re all facing doomsday no matter what we do. Life has no intrinsic meaning. No matter what we’re told, we still feel this emptiness. So for a lot of people, life is a kind of purgatory; we’re just marking time until we die, you know? And that keeps us going to shrinks and churches and ashrams and dojos, or strip clubs, looking for meaning somewhere…
“I don’t go to strip clubs, partly because I think it’s a waste of money putting dollar bills in a stripper’s G-string—if I’m not actually going to have sex, why am I spending the money? … So I don’t go to bars, I don’t go to strip clubs: I go to movies. This is where people find a little vacation from their real lives. We watch someone else’s tragedy or comedy, and when the movie is deeply felt and full of meaning, we feel enriched by it…. Unfortunately… 90% of the time we feel ripped off.”
My screen: from nickelodeon to porn booth to iPod
The Reporter’s Robert J. Dowling meditates mildly on the “personal” screen, a notion for a fascinating article for someone else to write, tracing the palm-sized image from one-person nickelodeon to porn-loop booth to iPod: “In recent years, screens have begun to show up everywhere—in planes, cars, buses and supermarket aisles. Even elevators now have screens. Even theater lobbies now are equipped with small screens so patrons can watch trailers while waiting to buy popcorn. Most workplaces are overrun with screens—[not] used for… entertainment, but… screens nonetheless… In a world inundated with screens, the ultimate window on the world has arrived in the form of the video iPod, the cell phone and other tiny, portable communications devices. These are personal, private screens. The owner thinks of it as “my” screen.” [More at the link.]
Bee here now: how conscious is Season?
Indiapost.com gets the Hare Krishna perspective on Bee Season, which includes Aaron, a young man played by Max Minghella, finding a devotee (played with Hare Barbie gleam by Kate Bosworth) almost as irresistable as her religious beliefs. A statement released by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) reads, “We appreciate the filmmaker’s sincere efforts to accurately depict the Hare Krishna movement. At the same time, we are concerned that, despite those efforts, viewers and members of the media may misinterpret some of Aaron’s actions to be representative of our policies or beliefs.”
Reports Indiapost, “In the film, Aaron is shown deceiving his parents to stay at a Hare Krishna temple… ISKCON maintains a rigid policy that requires minors to provide written parental consent before they may stay at a temple. “Interfering between a child and his or her parents, no matter how eager the child is to take up the Krishna faith, is unacceptable and strictly prohibited,” says ISKCON spokesman Vyenkata Bhatta.”
Season of love: loving that Lucas
A spirited comment came over the transom from a reader of a May item, in which I quoted a few snips of snark from a blogger at The Bynk Zone, who wrote, in part, before I’d even witnessed the conclusion of Lucas’ double-truck trilogy, “I wanted to see Yoda fight. Who hasn’t. But I’m also a martial artist, have been for over a decade. What you realize is that as you work with folks who have been doing this for say, over half a century is that they don’t waste movement. The better they get, the more economy of motion. There’s no grand gestures anymore… I’m looking for something that shows Yoda as the Master he is, because even at that point, he’s been doing it for what, 700 years? … I am hoping for this economy of motion from someone who is a part of The Force at levels that no other Jedi can comprehend. From someone who has transcended anger and hatred. I’m a complete moron for thinking Lucas could do that.”
“Mike” didn’t like Bynk’s entry, writing in comments, overlooking the Movie City News email link, Hey you coward. The only people who go on ranting about anything let alone a saga and dont leave an open email adress to argue back with are wimps. A million people can prove what you said to be stupid and immature. I will in the next 2 days. Expect to be hearing alot from. Oh but theres a bonus because this is a forum any person who logs on reads your comments on star wars will now see mine blasting yours to the ground. But this can be easily avoided. My email is [-]. Email me your adress and i will send you my one page response to you personally and nobody else will have to see because it will be your eyes only. You deserve it after running your mouth for so long without listening to the publics voice. Email me or i will knock your thread six feet deep. [Call-forwarding to the Bynk Zone here.]
