Movie City Indie Archive for June, 2006
Scope-ophilia: Sydney Pollack on widescreen
There’s a few thousand words of interview with Sydney Pollack over at Pride, Unprejudiced on the occasion of Sketches of Frank Gehry; including reflections on the widescreen format from a career-long practitioner. “For me, the beauty comes out of practicality. I’ve spent my life making movies that have at their center, a relationship between a man and a woman. Every single movie. And so the heart of the movies are two-shots. And sometimes I like to be quite close. You can’t work in a close, tight two-shot and have any room for where you are or any sets and environment in a less wide frame. You just can’t. You can’t. A tight two-shot in 1.85 can be in limbo. You can just put up a piece of cardboard and shoot the tight two-shot. You might as well. And if you’re using the environment to tell story—if you take a picture like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? or Jeremiah Johnson or any of these pictures where where the people are is essential, I mean, the studio kept fighting me with They Shoot Horses, saying, “You’re in one set, for godssake! Why are you using widescreen? It’s not the Grand Canyon. 
It’s the opposite of the Grand Canyon!” But that was precisely the point. I could shoot Michael Sarazin and Jane Fonda dancing or Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia, whoever, the pairs, and still see this sea of people dancing, or the bleachers, and the people staring at them. So there’s more redolence to each frame. It has a different impact. If I cut the edges off of those frames, and you just have those center people, without a context, I don’t think would be nearly as meaningful. I mean, on an absolutely practical, technical level, I can transmit more information per frame than I can with 1.85. I don’t say it’s more beautiful. I adore those old movies that were 1.33. They’re great. It’s not a question of beauty, it’s a question of… of what is the movie? The one movie I wish I’d done it in, this is when I stopped using ‘Scope, which was Out of Africa. Because I got so sick of it being butchered, y’know, DVDs weren’t in then, they were still doing VHS and they were always panning-and-scanning, chopping the edges off. And I just said, I can’t do this any more. More people see it in the aftermarket now, so they remember it that way. I didn’t frame it that way. I’ve had people come up now, who occasionally have seen a screening of Jeremiah Johnson or a screening of They Shoot Horses and it’s a different movie than what they ever saw. It’s a completely different movie.”
Not in my name: Christopher Doyle and the Cockman Trial
Cinematographic whiz Chris Doyle also gives some of the boldest chat of any major filmmaker, so why wouldn’t I think the “Cockman trial” had something to do with him? 
Sometimes you look for information about someone and it turns out they have the same name: there are a heckuva lot of Christopher Doyles banging around the internet, including the one in this item from from Fox Carolina: “Jury selection is scheduled to start Monday morning in the death penalty trial of a couple accused of kidnapping and killing upstate businessman, Jim Cockman… Jennifer Holloway told [investigators] she and her common law husband, David Edens wanted to steal a GMC Suburban Cockman had for sale. When the couple met with Cockman to look at the car, Investigators say they forced him into the back, put duct tape on his mouth and drove to their place in Tennessee. When they got home, they discovered Cockman was dead. Christopher Doyle, a friend of Cockman’s, told Fox Carolina’s Lidia St. Mark, “It was a tragedy for the Greenville community…volunteered for numerous hours. He was a person you can count on in hard times and good times.”…[I.nvestigators say Holloway told them where she and Edens put Cockman’s body. Nine days after his disappearance, authorities found Cockman’s body in a freezer in Sevierville, Tennessee. Doyle says, “It was a heinous crime..no doubt about..certainly punishment should be coming.”
Indie returns tomorrow
More links and new stuff after I make it through a couple of days of screenings and DVDs; please look for a long Sydney Pollack interview on the front page of Movie City News in the meantime.
CNN Headline host on Gore: "It's like Hitler"
An employee of Time Warner’s CNN joins the media commentators taking issue with the climate crisis presentation, An Inconvenient Truth by comparing Al Gore to Adolf Hitler. CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck on June 7 asserted on his syndicated radio program, 
“When you take a little bit of truth and then you mix it with untruth, or your theory, that’s where you get people to believe. … It’s like Hitler. Hitler said a little bit of truth, and then he mixed in ‘and it’s the Jews’ fault.’ “ Media Matters transcribes Mr. Beck’s extrapolations: “So, if you look at this chart, you will see the CO2, and it mirrors the temperature. Now, what I find interesting about this chart is CO2 seems to naturally go up by itself. Hmmm, I don’t remember those 200,000-year-old cars; I think Henry Ford wasn’t around yet. I don’t know if Fred Flintstone actually did have a car, but apparently, according to this chart, somebody was driving around in a car or an airplane. Maybe it was Al Gore giving the frickin speech at Stone Age colleges. I’m not sure, but it definitely correlates. Now, what happened where this thing falls apart—and it won’t for most people who go to this movie—is he then projects what’s coming. Again, it’s the projection that’s the problem. See, when you take a little bit of truth and then you mix it with untruth, or your theory, that’s where you get people to believe. You know? It’s like Hitler. Hitler said a little bit of truth, and then he mixed in “and it’s the Jews’ fault.” That’s where things get a little troublesome, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
Screening sickness: this is Thursday
No time for foraging, winnowing and posting today; instead, it’s all business: the press screening schedule runs from 10am-915pm, in this rotation: The Road to Guantanamo, Larry Clark‘s Wassup Rockers, Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini‘s My Dad is 100 Years Old, Roberto Rossellini‘s The Flowers of St. Francis, Luis Bunuel‘s Belle de jour and The Devil Wears Prada. Coming: DVD 5-4-3-2-1 and a long interview with Sydney Pollack about art, narcissism and 2.35 widescreen.
The Omen: 6/6/06=$12,633,6-6-6 (and a review)
Sometimes shameless grandstanding makes for fine entertainment: While few movies open wide on a Tuesday, Fox tub-thumps a 6/6/06 opening day gross of $12,633,666… An amusingly absurd tall tale and and eye-rolling turn for all those who have for any number of reasons over the decades through of NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch as surely a Friend of the Beast. The press release is at the jump: here’s a short review: “The third movie this season to exploit a gob of intrigue at the Vatican (after Mission Impossible III and The Da Vinci Code), Irish director John Moore’s remake of The Omen (*** 1/2 for design; ** 1/2 for thrills) (which contains a prominent thank-you to Richard Donner, the director of the 1976 edition, surely for entrusting them with a loan of his storyboards) is opulent bunkum, despite a mid-film sag that suffers from focusing on the least interesting characters in the concoction. The busy, witty production design includes an Escher-patterned parquet floor seen from a story up that would have caused Douglas Sirk to purse his mouth with insatiable envy. When lightning and rain aren’t swaddling the characters, the design consists largely of contrasts between bone white and rose red. Early glimpses of 9/11 and Katrina as being part of the signs in the Book of Revelation are among the handful of updates to the script, still solo-credited to original scribe David Seltzer. There’s a lot of fuss going on in the margins, rewarding the eye with a magpie’s nest of allusions, such as a sustained parallel to little Danny’s Big Wheel cruises from The Shining; a madman’s atelier is part Ed Kienholz, part Cornelia Parker, like a Bible-paper-lined installation piece; and as the devil spawn, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick is a little scowler-monkey with digitally-enhanced azure orbs that he narrows in caricatures of child-spite, his black bowl haircut making him resemble figures in Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative sculptures. There is always one extra bit of flair: a black dog in distance will drool, and the gleaming, digitally enhanced drop will leave a glassy ping on the soundtrack. Liev Schreiber takes on the serioso Gregory Peck role as an American diplomat into whose arms the antichrist is urged; Julia Stiles has less fortune as the stressed-out mom. David Thewlis manages to be the most disheveled photographer in a pricey stripy jumper in a movie this year, and other notable actors like Michael Gambon and Pete Postlethwaite get to shout and fret. But we must love Mia Farrow for her shameless turn, more black Pollyanna than lurid camp, as the nanny who watches over li’l Damien: “For me, caring for children has been the joy of my life.” Moore’s most decadent satisfaction may be the shot of the nanny feeding Damien huge, red, red strawberries by hand, fruit that matches her bee-stung lip stain. 110m.”
An Inconvenient Truth: an interview with Al Gore
My lengthy interview with Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth, Net Neutrality, the legacy of investigative journalism; “the democracy crisis”; television news “metanarratives” and “information ecosystems” is at here at SharkForum. Despite what may seem like big-sounding neologisms, it was kinda fun. 1 Comment »
Two Chicago photo exhibits: you are cordially invited
Chicago readers: you’re invited to receptions for two shows of my photography this week; Esta Noche, with 33 of my photos, opens Wednesday from 6-9pm at the Rainbo Club, 1150 North Damen (at Division); I’m one of the artists in “Chicago Car Culture,” which opens at the Cultural Center, Washington at Michigan, Friday from 6-8pm. [A preview of three images is below.]
Manny show: recollecting Farber and art
On the occasion of an art show in La Jolla and “Roads and Tracks,” an upcoming collection of uncollected criticism, Duncan Shepherd at San Diego Reader offers personal reminiscence about near-90-year-old critic and painter Manny Farber. “The eventual meeting would occur in the last half of my senior year at Columbia University, a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City, 
my primary yardstick for Quality of Life. By this time Farber—I was still on last-name terms with him—had moved his column to Artforum, readily available in the college library, and in some ways his most hospitable venue ever, where his observations on movies could share space with views of Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, and Andy Warhol… I got wind of a writing workshop run by Farber at the School of Visual Arts, ninety-some blocks southward in Manhattan… I would follow along on that trail come Spring… And then there he was, sitting six feet away from me, his prominent brow and forehead suggesting superhuman braininess, starting off fearlessly reading aloud from a recent piece he had penned on Luis Buñuel: “His glee in life is a movie of raped virgins and fallen saints….” “Manny… was a red-blooded American sports fan as happy to talk, in after-class adjournments to the coffee shop, about the Knicks as about the new Hitchcock or new Bresson. Too, he was preparing a show of his recent paintings in SoHo or thereabouts, a side to him I had known nothing about. Film buffs as a breed have a dangerous tendency to put on blinders to anything outside a movie screen, and the broadening of my horizons to the world of art studios, galleries, openings, and the bohemian digs he shared with his fellow painter and future wife, Patricia Patterson, was a healthy thing. Most fortunate of all, he was then putting together his own collection of film criticism, and I was flabbergasted and flattered to be called upon to help sift through the file box of clippings that dated back to the Forties, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Leader…” But what Shepherd appreciates about the Man is that “It was always about looking and seeing.” [There’s much more at the link, and it’s as sweet a song of well-rounded, well-founded cinephilia as you’d want; Farber’s paintings are at La Jolla’s Quint Gallery, and there are reproductions of new paintings and drawings at the link. An appreciative, informed review of the show by Neil Kendricks, film curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, from the Union-Tribune, is here. Via GreenCine.]
World Trade Center: a prequel
At Filmmaker, Scott Macauley points up twelve minutes of mischief by 28-year-old Yalie artist Chris Moukarbel that’s been making the Euro gallery circuit: a 12-minute film adapted from a bootleg script of Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center and its post-collapse setting, made with student actors. Over to you, Ollie; Sumner. [The entire project is at the link.] [UPDATE 21 JUNE 2006: The site is down. Paramount has filed a lawsuit.]
Pulling the rug: on being Shatnered upon
It’s fun to deadpan over fluff puffed by random publicistas, but then sometimes you get misconscrewed without the courtesy of a reacharound, such as The Case of “The Official William Shatner DVD Club.” I quoted from their press release back in December and now find their nubby prose being boldly cited on their site and merch as if the lingua were Movie City Indie’s (and Movie City News’) very own seed pearls. The blog Heart On A Stick, as linked above, digs deep into the soul of the 75-year-old Canadian idol and writes, “Not only did Shatner’s club quote one of its own press releases and attribute it to someone else, the quote they pulled from the release was one supposedly from Shatner himself.No one loves William Shatner like William Shatner does.” Gentlemen: a hairpiece can be comical, but a lie is no joke.
Crickets: We cannot allow a status quo gap!
While batting a fistful of interesting notions and bold assertions about what’s happening to those who’ve made a career out of being a movie cricket in the evolving print-and-online battle, Anne Thompson‘s two most interesting insights are: writers shouldn’t expect to be paid; and that movie attendance appears to dip in markets where an established, name cricket no longer chirps. “As a generation of top critics move into their 50s and 60s, newspapers are chasing the same young demographic as advertisers and studios… 
Long gone are the days when the New York Times’ Vincent Canby or the Washington Post’s Gary Arnold could make or break a movie. But according to Tom Bernard, co-president of… Sony Pictures Classics, critics still have a major impact on… art films… “In the smart movie world, critics have an effect in big movie markets.” Thompson observes that “[i]t took [Roger] Ebert decades to connect… with a local, then a national audience. He understands intuitively who his followers are and what they want from him; his job is secure. Not so for most of his peers… [D]aily newspapers are losing circulation, Hollywood advertising and their influence over moviegoers… Newspaper editors seem to believe hiring a younger critic will help them build a wider demo. Although they might deny it, veteran critics Kevin Thomas and Janet Maslin were pressured to give up their daily posts at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, respectively. John Anderson accepted a buyout at Newsday and is now freelancing. Most recently, the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Wilmington and the New York Daily News’ Jami Bernard were forced out… But when established critics stop reviewing, they often leave behind a gaping hole. “When audiences lose faith in a paper,” says SPC’s Bernard, “they end up doing something else.” [Bernard] contends that theater attendance has dropped in… 
Boston, Seattle and Miami [where] popular critics [have left].” Thompson goes on to assert that neither of the NY Times’ lead crickets, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis have ” a particularly mainstream sensibility. Both are canny careerists, though, as well as elegant writers who often seem more interested in crafting arcane intellectual arguments than reaching out to their readers.” Thompson champions one of her favorite arcane-ists as well: “Perhaps expressing some sour grapes of his own, respected former Daily News critic Dave Kehr… blogged at Davekehr.com about his and Bernard’s former employer: “During my tenure at the News, Jami and I suffered unbelievable interference from editorial higher-ups, all of whom seemed to believe that they were vastly more capable of registering the ‘populist’ perspective on a given film than the people they’d somehow (and clearly mistakenly) hired as experts on the subject… Oldsters in the field—which at this point means anyone over 30—may want to start looking for a new gig.” Thompson quotes an online reviewer she favors, Walter Chaw, on the money thing: “I don’t know if I’d be as moral… if I were banking Roger Ebert’s or even a living wage.” [Thompson has the URL wrong for Movie Review Query Engine; try it out here.]
20 years of Heavy Metal Parking Lot
From Metroblogging DC, chat with filmmakers John Heyn and Jeff Krulik on the 20th anniversary of the immortal Heavy Metal Parking Lot. May 31 was “the anniversary of the 1986 Judas Priest Capital Centre concert that was immortalized in the documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot, [their] 16-minute video of Judas Priest fans tailgating… “[L]uckily we blindly plicked the Judas Priest concert,” Krulik says. “John and I have absolutely no recollection of the parking lot we started in. That’s pretty cool you remember the names of those lots. They all had patriotic themes. I remember it was particularly sad to see all that was left of the Cap Centre after demolition were many of those giant poles with the parking lot names on them… I think we spent about two hours, 2 1/2 hours on site at the Capital Centre. That was it. Stumbling around the parking lot. Then John took the footage and months later really came back with the goods. He’s the genius architect behind it. My contribution was the equipment and the title.” Krulik tells the story of Sofia Coppola licensing footage from HMPL in the early 1990s, but this is the heart: “I loved those guys then. And I love them even more now. Those people feel like family to me. I’m most grateful that they never showed any aggression or hostility to us when we shoved our camera and microphone in their faces.” [More at the link. Via Gabe’s Declaration of Principles; website: Heavy Metal Parking Lot.]
NSFW: Borat in Cannes
Ali G. goes “R” in Cannes, totally half-nekkid in the guise of the Kazakh journo, Borat. Earlier, Matt Dentler wrote of its work-in-progress Croisette preview: “While in New York, some late-night channel surfing has Borat stumble upon an episode of Baywatch. He becomes infatuated with Pamela Anderson and decides that he must take his TV project to Los Angeles so that they can be united. Switching gears, he and his team purchase an ice cream truck and drive it cross-country. Along the way, they continue to document the clueless Americans they encounter, including a frustrated driving instructor, a Southern etiquette coach, some drunken frat boys, Evangelical churchgoers, and much more. Believe it or not, this sketch-turned-feature actually sustains itself, as Cohen and director Larry Charles blend in real interview moments with scripted scenes involving Borat and his crew. Plus, the Pamela Anderson storyline gives a thread for all these seemingly random events.” [This constitutes a heavy news day.]
Overlord (1975, ****)
Does the man dream the machine or the machine dream the man? American-born director Stuart Cooper’s epic, stoic, willfully peculiar Overlord (1975) is a hybrid of fiction and fact, of the Futurist and the post-modern, tracking the preparations of one supremely ordinary 20-year-old soldier, Tom Beddow (Brian Stirner), one Tom among tummies, as he trains to become part of Operation Overlord, or D-Day. What’s most striking about Cooper’s film is the extensive use of archival footage (from 3,000 hours viewed by Cooper from UK’s Imperial War Museum) in a jagged yet forceful admixture, such as a montage of sustained aerial views of steam trains being strafed. Is the movie about young Tom or about the entire war effort hurtling toward that assault on the beach? Cooper makes dozens of brilliant juxtapositions that do not jar but awaken the senses, but the movie is elusive, neither Zelig nor Saving Private Ryan, but with worthy parallels to movies like Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here and Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. Philosophically, it’s more like film essayist Patrick Keiller (London) meeting Stanley Kubrick (and the fictional portions 
were shot by Kubrick’s favored cinematographer John Alcott). One standout among so many: there’s a beautiful shot of Tom writing a letter in a wood, the camera moving back from stands of skinny trees, brightly backlit, the letter being read aloud: “It’s like a part of a machine that grows larger and larger while we get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left.” Radically, Overlord is a narrative that sees forest and trees. 88m. [Cooper’s film was rediscovered via Xan Cassavetes’ Z Channel documentary, and after several festival runs, debuts theatrically in Chicago this week with Janus Films releasing across the country in the months to come.]
