Divine inspiration: how artists find it

In the Observer, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, author of “Monogamy” and other epigramatic studies, makes a compelling survey of artists’ ideas about “inspiration”, with examples from musicians Beth Orton, Steve Reich and Martha Wainwright, artist Cornelia Parker, poet Andrew Motion, documentary-maker Nick Broomfield, and My Summer of Love director Pawel Pawlikowski: “One thing you develop with age and experience is an intuition for a good idea: something strikes a chord with you and it resonates. At any given time I’ll have four or five ideas, usually half-baked, but I’ll juggle them around and write story outlines until one of them stands out. Inspiration is an inchoate process that cannot really be legislated.For that reason, I find that starting with some didactic theory doesn’t work. Political anger can spark you, but it rarely gets you very far. My favourite of the films I’ve made, Serbian Epics, was the result of an unanswered question dealing with a particularly complicated and ambiguous political situation, but it was a very personal film. I think it conveyed the multi-layered nature of the situation, rather than simply explaining it and thereby reducing it to something partial and limited. Filmmaking is the most annoyingly complicated and diffusive process and lots of people are involved, so it had better be a strong impulse that pushes you to do it. I’ve made films where the ideas have carried me through, and it’s like being in love. But I’ve also made films where they haven’t, and it’s more like plumbing.”

Bubble under: a comprehensive local look

Old news to some, but there’s a weird and intriguing study of Bubble over at Pie and Coffee, talking to some locals. “Sarah, a book designer, once worked for Lee Middleton Dolls, and lived in Belpre much of her life. “I’m really excited about Bubble. I’m really excited because it was shot in the doll factory where I used to work. Too bad I don’t still work there, because I would’ve totally been in that movie. P&C: [You’re] from the Mid-Ohio Valley. And Bubble was shot here. This is the first major movie set in the Mid-Ohio Valley since “Night of the Hunter.” Sarah: Everyone I tell that I worked in a doll factory first of all thinks it’s creepy. Then they look it up online, and they think it’s even creepier when they see the dolls. People seriously get really creeped out… So I think that’s probably it. The doll factory is creepy. Bubble is like a murder mystery, right? There’s a cop in it, and he’s a real cop, and there’s these people that work in the doll factory… But what was creepy was we would—and I think I can tell about this—we would do work for other companies. Like we would make those full-size dolls you put in your car to make it look like you have someone with you. And we made like crack babies and stuff…” [More discursive stuff at the link.]

Mudd in your eye: Producing John Malkovich

With the release of The Libertine and the upcoming Art School Confidential, the NY Times’ Michael Joseph Gross gets an update on prodco Mr. Mudd fromJohn Malkovich. Of his driver on the set of Killing Fields, Malkovich again recounts: “One day, we were driving somewhere,” the actor said, “and Mr. Mudd was doing his usual running of Buddhist monks and bicyclists and old women off the road, and cackling. And he said to me: ‘Sometime Mr. Mudd kill. Sometime Mr. Mudd not kill.’ That seemed to me such a wise, such a sage philosophy,” Mr. Malkovich said, and one, he suggested, suited to the unpredictable and sometimes brutal business of filmmaking. In 1998, when he formed an independent production company with his partners Lianne Halfon and Russell Smith, the trio briefly considered naming it Jerry’s Kids but instead took the name of the philosopher-chauffeur… “The world just doesn’t owe you anything — I’m probably just too Midwestern for that — even if you’re really good,” he said… “Obviously we’d all like it to be easier. Obviously we’d all like it to be not such a struggle to do what are essentially quite small independent films that are funny, compelling, of interest. But it hasn’t been easy, and it probably won’t be any easier. But that’s the way it is.” [Here’s a list of future Mudd.]

Village idiocy: M. Night's Oscar senselessness

Who would click through an AmEx website link to “find out more about M. Night Shyamalan“? I’d missed the Oscar commercials, yet Shyamalan’s jaw-dropping self-regard makes this drip of ego some kind Visine-worthy classic. Sitting in a restaurant, Manoj’s “table for one” gives him a chance to imagine everyone around him is a skinhead or a foul creature while his beautiful mind confects $10 million paydays. The only laugh line (surely not intentional)? His waitress telling him how much she loved The Village… Where’s Catherine Keener when you need her? “You paid her to say that, didn’t you?”

A parallel universe search for meaning: Crashing in Austria

Walking through a fluff-filled Chicago the night after Crash got its Oscar tap reminded me of a 2003 movie, Austrian writer-director Barbara Albert‘s 2003 Free Radicals, or Böse Zellen. “Chaos theory” is what Albert says her film is about. In its parallel universe, how does US distributor Kino describe it?: “[An] Austrian housewife[‘s] narrow escape from the catastrophic consequences of “The Butterfly Effect” aboard an airliner only sets her up for an even more shockingly random fate. As the devastating results of a traffic accident transform [her] family and the young occupants of the other car, the personal and circumstantial fallout envelopes an entire community…. [A] dramatic fresco… exposes the lonely yearning and thwarted redemption ricocheting the human particles of Free Radicals off of each other.” Seeing it at Toronto, I wrote that Albert’s mosaic of people straining for spirituality had obvious influences: “the touchstone movie for films coming from all lands [this year], it seems, is Robert Altman’s Nashville… Free Radicals made a spirited, cruel attempt to weave together a dozen characters with the most minimal of connections.” It’s more experimental than its American kin, as J. Hoberman wrote in the VOICE after the film’s NY Film Festival showings: “Free Radicals… involves perhaps a dozen characters—mainly [the woman’s] friends and relations, and the teenage passengers of the car that collides with hers…. [Some] links are more oblique and are often created by natural sound bridges, subtle match cuts, and blatant synchronicity… Jumping from one vignette to another, the filmmaker succeeds in establishing a material mysticism from the web of secret connections and chance meetings. That a minor mishap has the same cosmic valence as some huge happenstance gives the movie a cumulative emotional intensity. Everything is connected . . . or will be.” Free Radicals is obsessed with terrible car crashes and ends in falling snow. Interesting how minds think alike: Crash was reportedly written months before this movie was on the festival circuit or submitted for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award. Then again, wasn’t there a filmmaker named Krzysztof Kieslowski who… Never mind.

Soul and heart: Altman's secret honored

Accepting his lifetime achievement award, Robert Altman revealed one of Hollywood’s great open secrets: I’m here, I think, under false pretences. I think I have to become straight with you. Ten years ago, eleven years ago I had a heart transplant, a total heart transplant. I got the heart of, I think, a young woman who was in about in her late thirties. By that kind of calculation you may be giving this award too early because I think I’ve got about 40 years left. Offstage, Altman said, “I didn’t make a big secret about it. I thought maybe no one would hire me again.”

12 Toes: cat-nabbing, dagnabbit

Oh, and did you see that rare 90-second documentary about 12-toed cats? The filmmakers are proud of it. [Large QuickTime file.]

Taking out the Crash: Crashism blooms

Three intriguing AM perspectives on the Best Picture win by Crash: David Poland acutely HotButtons why: “Crash is a valley movie. It is a film that was made by people who are, for the most part, longstanding members of the Hollywood (literally, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Burbank) community and the Academy is made up mostly of people who can also be described as the same. And in specific, all politics are local and the Academy race is nothing if not political. And with Cheadle-Dillon-Bullock-Fichtner-Esposito-Fraser-Howard-Phillippe-Sirtis-David-Danza-Tate-Ludicris-Newton all in play for longtime TV vet and recently film vet Paul Haggis on Crash vs. an Aussie, a young actress who worked mostly in North Carolina, a young New Yorker, and an even younger actress, who has made two films all working for a Chinese director who works with a guy in New York on Brokeback Mountain… well, you can add up the votes…” Back east, The Reeler spools some characteristic bile: “I face the migraine-inducing reality that what is so often hyped as the world’s most austere, powerful film body actually awarded its Best Picture prize to an abortion like Crash. I mean, I saw a half-dozen better films last year that were not even nominated, but I saw hardly any as intensely awful and overrated as Paul Haggis’s pedantic “drama”—as accurate an approximation of race relations as a Winnie the Pooh cartoon is an honest depiction of forest ecology. Yet Matt Zoller Seitz may have the title, from an extended entry before Sunday night’s win (I can hardly wait to see his reaction today) which I quote only in brief: “Haggis and the film’s defenders can pretend this is evidence of complexity and contradiction all they want; it’s really just evidence of Haggis’ version of Powerful Dramaturgy, which mixes the schematic earnestness of an old afterschool special and the Zen pulp grandiosity of Michael Mann in full-on existential dread mode, complete with pulsing synth music, massive telephoto closeups and time-suspending action montages. This movie should have been called “Mess.” But despite its pretensions to muscular lyricism, Crash doesn’t even deserve the top prize when judged as pure filmmaking. It’s nowhere near as brutishly powerful as Mel Gibson’s roundly sneered-at 1995 winner Braveheart—in my view, not really a historical movie as Oscar typically defines it, but the first atavistic action film to win Best Picture; the sort of movie Cornel Wilde would have directed if during the 1960s he’d been given tens of millions of dollars to throw around. Nor is Crash as good as The English Patient, a classy timewaster that almost nobody wants to watch twice… Unlike other recent Best Picture contenders, Crash isn’t slick, clever and safe, it’s hot, stupid and dangerous, and slick and “powerful” in that peculiarly West Coast way that used to be showcased on “Six Feet Under.” The characters chatter bitterly, like drunk screenwriters trying to one-up each other with demonstrations of hardboiled cynicism about life but then rallying at the last minute to exhort each other to go forth into the world and Make a Difference… Entertainment industry dumbasses… live in monocultural bubbles and experience race relations via news reports if they experience it at all [might] deem Crash a work of searing truth. If this movie wins Best Picture, the statutette should be headless.”

Magnum force: George Lucas sez big budget pics are over

Lloyd Grove in the NY Daily News gets some more pre-visionary stuff from George Lucas: “The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,” said Lucas, a near-billionaire… “Those movies can’t make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong.” The portly Lucas, whose Star Wars sequel was nominated for the Oscar in makeup, was clearly in Yoda mode at Saturday’s Weinstein Co. party… “In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies,” Lucas declared. “I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.” [Back in November, Lucas was selling the Reporter’s Paula Parisi on the death of theatrical: “I think it’ll happen— it’ll have to happen… because of piracy. It’s the only way you can stop piracy; there is no other way…

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Wolcott on Oscar-baiting: milking the elk and the heartland doesn't exist

Over at James Wolcott‘s pied-a-terre, he’s effortlessly debunking some posh about why “Hollywood” doesn’t reflect “America.”The ‘Hollywood doesn’t reflect mainstream America’ argument is one of the oldest and phoniest in the playbook, with Michael Medved making the same case that Catholic organizers did in the 30’s to push for a decency code. The truth is that Hollywood has almost never reflected heartland values, from its birth it’s reflected urban energy, cosmopolitan taste, social conscience, and pagan fascination, and when it’s conformed to conventional pieties, as during the dreariest stretches of the postwar period, when disillusionment and subversion had to sneak in through the shadows of film noir… Think of the movies now considered classic… from the great grunge stretch of the late Sixties and Seventies, movies such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, Blazing Saddles, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, on and on—do these movies speak to the pieties and platitudes that William Bennett holds dear? … The heartland issue is such a crock, especially when it’s taken up by pseudo-populist pundits who cling to both coasts and wouldn’t move to the middle of the country unless the name of that middle was Chicago.

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Three Times a charm in the IFC-Comcast basket; plus Fox's Chernin wants some

Details on the IFC-Comcast deal for simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand release are all across the media, including Andrew Wallenstein‘s dispatch in the Reporter, and while many of the early titles in the PR I’d read were just so much bunkum, there are interesting twists. “Comcast Corp. and IFC Entertainment [set] a deal Tuesday that will ensure simultaneous distribution for independent films in select theaters and via video-on-demand.” Titles like American Gun; Sorry, Haters; and CSA: Confederate States of America are the kind of shelf items you expect to languish, but the 9 million subscribers to Comcast’s services will get more subversive material, including Caveh Zahedi‘s subversive, semi-autobiographical essay film, I Am A Sex Addict and strikingly, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien‘s masterpiece, Three Times. (Hou’s films are virtually unknown in the US.) The movies, up to five each month, will be marketed as “IFC in Theaters” for $5.99 a pop. “The theatrical distribution business for smaller, specialized films has become more challenging, and we saw this as an opportunity to create a national art house to be available to everybody from the outset,” IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring told Wallenstein. While many theater owners are reluctant, the Cuban-Wagner combine, which includes Landmark Theaters, will participate. Notably, “VOD programming cannot be copied or easily pirated, which might quell theater owners’ concerns that viewers could buy a day-and-date-distributed DVD and pass it around.” Also in the Reporter, Fox wants in on HD VOD $$$.

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Hannity undivided: excerpting This Divided State

There’s a lengthy, unfair and unbalanced clip of Fox News entertainer Sean Hannity over at the website for This Divided State, Steven Greenstreet‘s vivid four-star politi-doc about a 2004 fracas at Orem, Utah Valley State College in Orem when Michael Moore was invited to speak, local politicos predicted the apocalypse and Hannity was brought in preemptively to further inflame the populace against the liberal scourge. (With Hannity, were you expecting “fair and balanced”?) Hannity, when not making campaign fundraising appearances for Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), is busy threatening to sue the filmmakers of this powerful glimpse of hate and demagoguery: “I am extremely angry at what they have done with that video footage. I plan on suing them,” the Fox star has said about the showcasing of his epic incivility. One version of the 10 minute clip is here.

Focus Features: a pup-tent do-si-do is a mighty dicey proposition, sez USA TODAY

In USA TODAY, Susan Wloszczyna begins one more peek at the clever ways of Focus Features by zooming in on her startling vision of the impracticability of co-president David Linde having sex on a mountainside, writing that he and James Schamus would never be taken for gay cowboys. “Schamus’ sartorial taste runs to bow ties and J. Crew [and] Linde’s considerable height would turn a pup-tent do-si-do into a mighty dicey proposition.” The rest of the niche bit is more tactful and tasteful: :None of us here have any feeling like there is an Oscar in the bag,” says Schamus, sitting behind his desk in a roomy if unpretentious office in Greenwich Village. Dominating the space: a poster of The Tingler, the schlocky 1959 Vincent Price [horror movie]… Schamus, a film professor at Columbia University who also has produced and written such [Ang] Lee landmarks as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [is described by Lee this way:] “He is so hip and quite the intellectual.. He’s an artist and a good politician.”