Movie City Indie Archive for January, 2006
Sundance 2006 premieres: Sneaks
Seventeen movies, including world premieres, starting with one of at least three Sundance entries concerning themselves with sleeeeeeep, Michel Gondry‘s The Science of Sleep, in a world premiere. Here’s the incomplete official site.
Baltasar Kormakur‘s followup to 101 Reykjavik, the Wisconsin-set mystery A Little Trip to Heaven. with Forest Whitaker and Julia Stiles. Here’s Variety’s bio of Kormakur, as well as the trailer for the new film.
Nick Cassavetes‘ Alpha Dog stars Emile Hirsch and Sharon Stone; the Russian trailer is here. It’s a drama about a suburban drug dealer, Jesse James Hollywood, who became one of the youngest men ever to be placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
Terry Zwigoff‘s Art School Confidential is a second collaboration with graphic novel whiz Dan Clowes, after Ghost World.
Here’s a production profileof Zwigoff from the Reporter.
Trailer for Clive Gordon‘s Cargo here.
The camera supply house behind Finn Taylor‘s The Darwin Awards, with Winona Ryder, gives some background here and SF Chronicle has a making-of
Wim Wenders has a page on his personal site for the Sam Shepard collaboration, Don’t Come Knocking; the trailer is here.
Variety describes the deal-making behind opening night’s Friends with Money, by writer-director Nicole Holofcener.
The British Films catalogue synopsizes Kinky Boots, directed by Julian Jarrold. BBC Northamptonshire does a polish on “the feature film about Northampton’s boot and shoe industry”; the trailer is here.
Prodco Bona Fide‘s latest is Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine.
Paul McGuigan works to get Quebec’s Wicker Park out of his system with a NYC mob murder thriller; here’s the Russian trailer for Lucky Number Slevin
Here’s the official site for Jonathan Demme‘s Neil Young Heart of Gold, including the trailer for the two-night perf at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
For the $17 million The Illusionist, Neil Burger was talking it up while promoting his 2002 Interview with the Assassin; here’s the Sundance catalog copy.
The Business of Strangers director Patrick Stettner collaborates on an adaptation of Armistead Maupin‘s novel, The Night Listener, starring Robin Williams. Maupin’s site is here; prodco Hart-Sharp describes the movie like this.
Spanish director Isabel Coixet collaborates again with Sarah Polley in The Secret Life of Words, in which “a nurse forgoes her first holiday in years, opting to travel to a remote oil rig, where she cares for a man [Tim Robbins] suffering from severe burns.
Here’s the trailer on Coixet’s site.
Plus: the trailer for Jason Reitman‘s Thank You For Smoking.
Dargis on Satantango and the sacred contract between film and filmgoer
Manohla Dargis sketches a keen appreciation of a little-seen masterwork in the NY Times. “There are, of course, a few other things you could do in the 420 minutes it takes to watch Bela Tarr‘s 1994 masterpiece Satantango, which begins a six-day run today at the Museum of Modern Art… At seven hours, not including two scheduled 15-minute breaks, this Hungarian film is one of those unusual works of contemporary art that demand from the audience a concentrated commitment – the luxury of time. Satantango traces the fate of a small, isolated community that attaches itself to a mysterious messiahlike figure of dubious character. The opening scene, which seems calculated to weed out fainthearted viewers, tracks a herd of cows as they meanderingly exit a barn and enter the muddy yard of the near-desolate village, with its cracked building walls and prodigiously strewn trash. As he does throughout the film, Mr. Tarr shoots this luxuriantly paced scene in long shot, using his beautiful framing and richly gradated black-and-white tones to find beauty in every miserable and mundane corner… Mr. Tarr [has] explained his predilection for long takes: “The people of this generation know information-cut, information-cut, information-cut. They can follow the logic of it, the logic of the story, but they don’t follow the logic of life.” In “Satantango,” life is beautiful and grotesque by turns, and never less than mesmerizing… Plans are apparently afoot to bring the film to DVD, but as with Mr. Tarr’s gorgeous long takes, these sounds of life are best appreciated in a theater like that at MoMA, where the sacred contract between film and filmgoer has yet to be broken.”
Woody Allen's favorite joke
As told to Rob Feld in Written By magazine: Do you have a favorite joke? I have a favorite joke, but it’s slightly long. Do we not have time for it? You won’t like it. Try me.It’s about a guy who buys a horse. The horse seems to check out when he’s buying it, and the owner says to him before he buys, “I have to tell you one thing though. He’s got a bad habit. He likes to sit on grapefruits.” And the guy buying the horse says, “Okay, that’s the only thing wrong with him?” The owner says yes. The guy thinks, “He said grapefruits—all right,” and he pays for the horse. He’s taking it home with him. And they’re going across a stream and suddenly the horse sits down and won’t get up. The guy doesn’t know what to do. He runs back to the guy he bought it from. “I bought a horse from you, you tell me there’s one thing wrong, that he likes to sit on grapefruits. He’s sitting in the middle of a stream, I can’t get him to move.” And the guy says, “Oh! I forgot to tell you. He also sits on fish.” I told you you wouldn’t like it. I don’t dislike it, but why that one? … The Dada-ness of it. The absurdity of it is funny because it’s sort of like a perfect little joke. It encapsulates the utter meaninglessness of human existence and of the world.”
Munich and the Cinea cock-up
The Guardian reports a regional encoding goof will likely cost Munich any notice in the upcoming BAFTA awards. “…The preview DVD sent to the academy’s members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of BAFTAs 5,000 voters will not have seen the film… and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim…. The company coordinating [the] campaign blamed the mistake on human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted. “Someone pushed the wrong button,” she said… The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to BAFTA members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD “screeners”, but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.” The DVDs were late already, having “missed out on the first round of voting on January 4… A previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. “It’s been quite a cock-up,” said one BAFTA member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We were promised that they were going to send screeners before Christmas, but they never arrived. Now we finally have a copy but there is no way we can watch it.” [More politicking at the link.]
Getting in line for the sketchy taco: Josh Friedman blogs again
In 2005, Josh Friedman, screenwriter of War of the Worlds and Brian DePalma‘s forthcoming Black Dahlia began a funny, profane blog called “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Some of it is about screenwriting, most of it is deliriously rancorous rants, and he’s thrilled about the prospects of Snakes on a Plane. Then he was gone for a while. Now he’s talking about cancer. “This is not fun for me, nor do I think it’ll be fun for you, either. You won’t learn much, because I’m a fucking ignoramus. I never did like research and I certainly didn’t start for this shit. Some people want to know all they can about their disease, but I figured it would only keep me on the phone longer explaining it to my friends. Besides, [my doctor] Fish told me to stay off the internet. So I did.” But still, there are reasons we love John Friedman, who has been sick but not sad. “Without being too dramatic about it, there is a very good chance my bout with food poisoning saved my life. Which goes to show, if you see a taco stand and it looks even the least bit sketchy, get in line… As an infinite monkey I have little choice but to bow down to the powers of natural selection and mutation, even when it’s happening inside my own body. There are those who suggest a greater power must be looking out for me. But the greatest power I know was doing last minute post-production on Munich so I didn’t bother calling on him, either… I did not fight cancer and I certainly did not beat cancer. One night cancer came and grabbed me hard by the arm, yanked me down the stairs and stood over me on the landing while I begged for mercy and waited for the rain of blows to come. Some did, enough for me to know I couldn’t have withstood the whole barrage. And then without explanation it disappeared. And let me live. Like some monsters do. Thank you everybody.”
Running with The New New World
The official new runnning time: 2 hours, 15 minutes and 14 seconds. In City Pages, Matthew Wilder is the newest acolyte: “No contemporary filmmaker, not even Robert Bresson (who died nursing a dream of a film based on the book of Genesis), has removed everyday psychology from movie acting as Malick has here. By creating often wordless scenes in which his actors are focused on arduous physical tasks, Malick moves us back to a place discovered by the pilgrims of Christian portraiture: the revelation of the soul as the unselfconscious subject. In the magical alchemy between editing, music, and the guileless faces of his performers, Malick finds an inner light. Yesterday I ran into… critic F.X. Feeney on the street, and he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for The New World: “It’s as good as Dreyer’s Joan of Arc or Sansho the Bailiff! It’s as good as anything!” … 
There is something thrilling about watching the 62-year-old Malick trying to equal and exceed not his peers in the movie-brat generation, but Romantic opera, Whitman, and the Bible. Like [Walt] Whitman, Malick views his work as a nature-based Book of Life, a complete almanac in which wisdom is available for every living soul at every stage of life, the entirety of experience contained within a platter of film.”
Weather or not: the light of many Worlds
Variety profiles 2005 lensers, including Declan Quinn; Phedon Papamichael; Rodrigo Prieto and Janusz Kaminski.
Kaminski: “It has to feel real to me… The biggest challenge to any cinematographer is to tell a story that reflects the written material and to have the ability to fully understand what the story is about and then find the cinematic style and the individual storytelling that the cinematographer brings into the process. The trick is to fully immerse yourself and be able to enrich the story through nonverbal language, which is what cinematography is. Occasionally you see a movie that is completely inappropriate visually, where somehow you feel you are looking at romance, but there is no romance onscreen. Or you feel that you are looking at a movie about beauty and there is no beauty in the photography… Frequently as a cinematographer you end up restraining yourself.”
The New World took advantage of inclement weather to an unusual degree, writes Variety’s Anthony D’Alessandro, with the shoot surviving “four hurricanes, a tornado, floods, gale-force winds and a Virginia heat wave. All of these conditions contributed to Malick’s design for capturing the harsh environment encountered by the natives and settlers. “The motto of the film was to allow accidents to happen; to capture the slowness of life, the changes of season, the awareness of rivers flowing and the shifting of clouds,” says World lenser Emmanuel Lubezki. When Lubezki interviewed for the job, he convinced Malick that the only way to achieve a naturalistic look was to shoot the exteriors without any lights. “Terry’s response was, ‘Are you crazy?'” … But hurricanes gave way to gorgeous skies. And the soft light from overcast conditions proved perfect for capturing actors’ faces… Above all, the least of Lubezki’s worries was matching shots. “There’s an absolutely incredible shot where big clouds with thunder and [lightning] are rolling in, and the camera slowly moves into Pocahontas’ face. The frame tells you everything that’s happening inside of her.” [Jon Bonné of MSNBC has an overview of Malick’s career here.]
Shanghai's surprises: lo-fi filmmaking in the east of the East
“Last month, in a smoky basement bar at the heart of old colonial Shanghai—the legendary Bund—an assortment of young amateur filmmakers gathered for an improvised short-film competition. The event organizer, Juan Vargas, had come to Shanghai from Colombia… and turned to film production after realizing the potential in the market. ““We are trying to encourage people to make films,” Vargas told Ilan Carmel for China Business. His new prodco, Mei Wen Ti, had just finished its first feature for 3,000 Euro and on ten days notice, banded the filmmakers together for 15 shorts… These amateur filmmakers toiled day and night for 10 days to produce 15 short films, each several minutes in length, just so they could get their foot in the door and mingle with the rising small community of independent filmmakers in China’s eastern metropolis. One of these entrepreneurs was Frenchman Severin Bonnichon, who, like most of the contest participants, had used equipment from home to shoot… The short, slightly intoxicated Bonnichon said he had made a few short films back in France, but in Shanghai he was at a disadvantage because he did not have access to proper equipment…
“Tthere are two sides to the film industry in Shanghai,” writes Carmel, “the independent film sector, which is barely in its infancy; and the government-run Shanghai Film Studio, which has been releasing mainly propaganda films that are embarrassing even relative to typically low-quality features produced by China’s domestic film industry…. “Beijing also supports much better universities and training institutes for film production,” said Liu Haibo, a lecturer in film and media studies at the Film and TV Institute of Shanghai University. “There is no comparison between the quality of the training centers of Beijing and the talent they attract [and] what is available in Shanghai. Shanghai is open only in terms of its economy, infrastructure and its position as a financial center; in terms of arts and culture, it is a very conservative society and environment.” … As still another reason for the weak film industry in Shanghai, Liu mentioned the state policy of allowing only big investors to enter the business, as well as artificially directing investments to big studios in Beijing. Furthermore, Shanghai has seen a high turnover in its pool of film professionals and a brain drain since the early 1990s, mostly to the benefit of Beijing’s studios and production companies.” [More history, money woes and restrictions on depicting “the negative aspects of modern urban life” at the link.]
NEWSWEEK TOOK their own Shanghai snapshot recently. [Image from this site.]
Reeling in Chris Doyle: sipping at Cipriani's
Over at the Reeler, cinematographer Chris Doyle has some post-New York Film Critics Circle Awards banter. “And speaking of Doyle’s next film, there was a rumor going around… that he might be working with Anton Corbijn on the Ian Curtis/Joy Division biopic “Control. “Is that indeed the film the two had planned? “No, no, no, no… yeah, yeah,” Doyle said. “Yeah! We even went to the U2 concert together… 
Anton is a very discreet person, to put it mildly. I think that there’s some… I don’t know. You work with someone like me and we just talk about everything. I think that people need a certain… What’s the word? Reticence about their form to make it purer to them, and I think that’s what Anton is like. He has to step back to find out where he’s standing, whereas someone like me—or any cinematographer—we just step in and make a mess and work it out from there. You know. We’re slightly different personalities, which I hope will work.” OK, but what about Wong Kar-Wai? He was hanging around Cipriani somewhere, and I know Doyle had mentioned in the past that 2046—their seventh collaboration—would likely be their last film together. But tonight was the night for his change of heart, right? In which he and Wong would join hands and pledge each other loyalty for the rest of their careers? That estrangement talk was all bullshit, right? “We’ll see,” Doyle said, laughing again. “I feel that tonight is going to be the Brokeback Mountain of critical awards. Should I lick my hand first? What do you want me to do? I think you’re right. This is… What can I say? I am where I am because of Wong Kar-Wai. There’s no question about it. We will go further, and we do care.” So there you have it. Gene Seymour will go to war for the summer comedy, “Control” will get made and Chris Doyle will once more stem the rose with Wong Kar-Wai. I think I can die now.”
The times, they are a Chang: WKW's art director, editor, costume designer
Wong Kar-Wai‘s art director, costume designer and editor William Chang Suk-ping gives a rare interview to Alexandra A. Seno in the Herald-Tribune: “With a reputation in the industry as a shy and quiet genius who almost always declines to speak to the press about himself, Chang is best known as Wong’s frequent collaborator… “Editing is about proportion, rhythm…” On his career as Hong Kong’s most brilliant art director-costume designer, he said simply that he begins by asking: “What is the ambience?” Chang, whose soft-spoken manner belies his firm opinions about many things, creates worlds as he thinks they should seem: just the right interiors in which he can see the actors, wearing just the right clothes…
“Actually, I don’t like period that much, but I can do it,” he said with a laugh. His secrets: research on eBay and watching old films on local television and the Turner Classic Movies cable channel. For ideas, he said, “I just walk around, watch TV, just live and let things come.” … Chang also works extensively as an interior designer, in private residences and commercial spaces. He recently created a very modern foreign teachers’ dormitory at Guangdong’s Shantou University for Li Ka-shing, whom Forbes calls Asia’s richest businessman, and he’s currently working on an urban spa in the heart of Hong Kong’s business district… Chang, 52, rarely gives interviews because he thinks he is just repeating himself. “I haven’t changed. Inside I keep the same passion for films…” At home, he said, his entire personal wardrobe consists of T-shirts, four pairs of jeans and four jackets, including the neon-yellow windbreaker he was wearing. He owns only two pairs of footwear at an given time: a pair of sports shoes that he uses until they fall apart, and a pair of black leather ones… “for film festivals.” … “I don’t like fashion. It’s transitory.”
THE CHINESE FILMMAKING BOOM gets a look-see by David Eimer in the Independent.
PLUS, AT LOSSLESS, loving, lovely Wong Kar-Wai-inspired calendars are posted each month by members of wongkarwai.net. The link is for the January calendar page; later entries will be here.
The End of Boredom: Mark Cuban Bubbles
Maverickpreneur Mark Cuban daydreams about “the end of boredom” and Blackberries all about it: “Portable media devices… iPods… phones with all their features… have solved what has been a generations-old nuisance for all of us, boredom. We have our little devices and now we are never bored. We don’t find ourselves staring off into space unoccupied, wondering what to do.
“We don’t find ourselves muttering about how bored we are sitting on the train, or on a plane, trying to do anything to make the time go by more quickly. Our little mobile devices are so popular because they are the ultimate, continuous distraction. They are the easiest cure for boredom…. When we leave the house now, it’s keys, wallet, phone/pda/iPod, lock the door.� The minute we have nothing better to do, or our mind starts to wander, regardless of where we are, meetings, events, elevator, exercise bike, walking down the street, out it comes…. We are going to become increasingly dependent on these devices not because we think they are amazing or wonderful, but because they are there. They do their job. They distract us…Portable video will be successful not because it will siphon off viewing from traditional tv. Portable video sells and will sell in increasing numbers because its a better cure for boredom… Daydreaming and zoning out aren’t dead and gone, but they now have a soundtrack and� a video.”
IN OTHER 2929/HDNET/CUBAN/WAGNER/MAGNOLIA/LANDMARKING, The Parkersburg, WV News and Sentinel’s Evan Bevins comprehensively anticipates the first pop of Steven Soderbergh‘s locally-produced Bubble and its Thursday night premiere at the historic Smoot Theatre. “We can only accommodate a certain number of people to the premiere,” said Felice Jorgeson, executive director of the Smoot. “This will be good for the other people.” Regal Cinemas, the company that owns the movie theaters in Vienna and Marietta, will not show the film because it is being released concurrently in theaters, on DVD and on cable [network] HDNet… “It was fantastic,” said Debbie Doebereiner, a 47-year-old Watertown resident who makes her acting debut in Bubble in the role of Martha. “Steven is brilliant and he’s very, very understanding… He made our job really easy, because there was no tension or pressure whatsoever when we were making the film. He would give us points to start with, points to hit on and where to end, and how we got there” was up to the actors… Doebereiner, who had worked at the KFC in Parkersburg’s Traffic Circle for 24 years, was approached by the film’s casting director at the restaurant’s drive-thru window. “It was the most wonderful five weeks of my life…They cater to you; you feel like a princess. I pinched myself every day, because I just couldn’t believe I was doing this.” … To add another layer of realism to the movie, the actors were trained in the jobs their characters would have at the Lee Middleton Original Dolls Factory in Belpre… A limited edition doll, April Memories, was produced during the filming. There were only 250 made and Doebereiner purchased one of them.” [More WV lore at the link; the Bubble trailer is here.]
Steve Martin on beauty and girls
Steve Martin blabs to John Hiscock of the Telegraph as Shopgirl opens in the UK, pondering the small matter of beauty: “In times of crisis like Hurricane Katrina, beauty and the arts seem very insignificant, but in times of calm, they become very important to us and give us a kind of secular reason to live… Everybody has their own taste and what makes it all go round is there’s somebody for everybody.
“I remember once I was in Texas doing a film with Liam Neeson. We were sharing a house, and we were going for a walk in the afternoon and two girls came walking by. “By the way, this was 20 years ago,” he hurriedly adds. “I said to Liam, ‘Wow, I thought that girl was so beautiful,’ and he said, ‘I liked the other one.'” Martin smiles and shrugs. “That’s the way it works.”
Toasting Skoll: Participanting pictures
There’s a lengthy profile of billionaire producer and activist Jeff Skoll and his Participant Productions by Gaby Wood in the Observer: “Skoll describes Participant as a venture that straddles business and philanthropy. He’s not trying to buck the system, he’s trying to help it, in the form of what he calls a ‘virtuous cycle: the movie helps the non-profits, the non-profits help the movie.’
“[Robert] Redford is one of the Seventies ‘heroes’ to whom people constantly refer when they speak about Participant’s current crop of films. Yet one of the surprising things about Skoll is that he does not fit into the liberal tradition of Hollywood. In a move that cleverly removes him from the knee-jerk backlash against Hollywood lefties, he has said that, although he is Canadian and therefore doesn’t vote in America, had he been a US citizen he would have voted for Reagan, and for Bush Sr as well as for Bill Clinton. He calls himself a ‘centrist’ and has asserted that he would be equally open to making films that speak to conservative moviegoers… Meredith Blake explains how they decide to make a film: ‘We have a pretty unusual three-step review process,’ she says from their office in Beverly Hills. ‘First the creative team looks at it, then finance, and then I do a social sector review.’ Blake… greenlights films on the basis of the issues they raise. A project will only move forward if she finds it has a valid social or political message. She also selects the non-profit, corporate and media partners that will help audiences to get involved… John Boorman, veteran director of political films, thinks Participant’s work is less like the movies of the Seventies than those of the Thirties and Forties, when studios produced ‘problem pictures’ intended to combat alcoholism or racism.” [More nitty and more gritty at the link.]
Tim Robey loved it: Match Point and quality nookie
“There’s just one problem,” Telegraph cricket Tim Robey says, “and it’s announced with a typically audible Exposition Clunk: “What’s a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the English upper-class?” The ping-ponger is Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling actress, brazen hussy and bulging bag of neuroses who’s dating Tom but soon becomes Chris’s bit on the side. For Allen, Johansson is just the latest pert muse—she’s already signed on for his next, also British-set, project.
“But she’s meanly served by this one, which turns Nola into one of the least palatable of all Woody’s staple women: the chain-smoking mistress from hell. If there were a film equivalent of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, it would surely go to their blouse-ripping, blindfold tumbles here, before juggling financial security and quality nookie pushes Chris to truly desperate measures.” PLUS, ALLEN TALKS TO HISCOCK, John Hiscock, about why he and London are having a third go: “”It’s very easy to film there… and the weather is cool and grey day after day, which I like very much and is good for the photography. I had no problems at all. The crews were as nice as could be and the city was completely co-operative.”
Andrew Bujalski in the Times: quality of a puppy dog or a child
VOICE film editor Dennis Lim gets some more quality time in the NY Times, profiling marvelous micro-moviemaker Andrew Bujalski and his two features, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation: “Instead of being motormouths, his characters speak in half-sentences that trail off into excruciating silences. Compared to Richard Linklater‘s earnest philosophers or Noah Baumbach‘s poised wiseacres, Mr. Bujalski’s sheepish drifters are mortifyingly tongue-tied. But their verbal tics, taken together, could stand as a fumbling generation’s poignant cri de coeur: “I guess,” “I mean,” “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know.” 
“Both films are slow-burning comedies about the fear of adulthood made by someone who isn’t yet inclined to sentimentalize or belittle these threshold years. As Mr. Bujalski presents it, the quarter-life crisis is an inherently funny condition, but it’s not necessarily a laughing matter… Robb Moss, a documentarian and Harvard lecturer who lent Mr. Bujalski a Steenbeck editing machine for Funny Ha Ha, said, “One of the charms of Andrew’s films is that they spend no energy convincing you of his ambition.” An even more entertaining (and sweet) quote comes from Bujalski’s website, where veteran filmmaker and professor-mentor Dusan Makavejev avers, “This film does not leave me. I do not know why. It simply comes back from time to time. It has this great camera-created film glue. Quality of a puppy dog or a child—film has ‘look at me’ quality.”
