B&D: DePalma on the dearth of politipix

Brian DePalma muses on the lack of political films in the US of A to the Guardian’s Steve Rose in Deauville: “I’m astounded there aren’t more American political films,” he says, apropos of nothing. “I’m amazed, when you can make movies for nothing, there are not people out there making these incredibly angry anti-war movies. How come?” I nearly choke on my coffee. Brian De Palma bemoaning the demise of political film-making? That’s like a wolf crusading for sheep rights… David Thomson even compares him to Leni Riefenstahl, so morally vacant does he find De Palma’s oeuvre. In fact, De Palma did start out making politically minded counterculture films in the late 1960s and early 70s in the Manhattan streets outside – Godard-influenced, anti-Vietnam fare… So why isn’t he out there making anti-war films now? “Well … ,” De Palma says, with a sigh. “Of course, I can do it because I still have the same feelings now that I did then. But you’d have to make it for no money and you’d probably have to make it in Europe and get it independently financed. I’m just amazed you don’t see them… I’ve always had the inverse quote to Godard: film lies 24 times a second… And anybody that’s used to using moving images like a film director, when we see stuff on TV, it’s all positioning and public relations, there’s not an ounce of truth to any of it. I always look behind the image and say, ‘why are we seeing children with flies on their eyes this week?’ Those images are always out there. Like the war in Iraq. If you think Americans are ignorant, it’s because we’re not seeing anything. We’re constantly being manipulated by images. They’re lying to us all the time. We have no idea what we’re doing!” And he laughs his short, desperate laugh again. “I’ve been screaming about this stuff since the 60s, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect.”

Mutual deprecation: it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment

“Just ’cause a lot of people write about me on the internet doesn’t mean that anybody in the world actually cares,” Mutual Appreciation‘s Andrew Bujalski tells Vadim Rizov of NYU’s Washington Square News. So, which is it: realism or extreme emotional repression? “Maybe it’s passive-aggressive filmmaking—I don’t know… But I feel like … the real conflicts in the world usually do happen on a much smaller level than we’re used to seeing in films… Obviously I come from a certain kind of specific background where stability and these things are valued pretty highly… [There might be] an equal amount of unpleasantness in that world as there might be in a world where people yell at each other all the time. But I just find it much more interesting—the negotiations and the hesitations and the pregnant pauses and all this kind of stuff where there’s a lot of drama taking place. We just kind of need to know where to look for it.” … Between the awkward romantic encounters and spells of drunkenness that comprise the film’s… plot, [musician-lead actor Justin Alan] plays a riveting solo set at [Williamsburg’s] Northsix, taking on songs from [his band’s] first album, “Charm School”… Bujalski lets Alan get through one and a half songs before cutting away. Rice’s electrifying performance is met with a seemingly lackadaisical response from the small crowd; Bujalski’s camera and editing don’t indicate whether to be excited or bored. “We showed the film at a festival in Portugal,” Bujalski [says]. “One of the festival jurors came up to me one day and said, ‘I’m on the jury. I’m not supposed to talk to you, but I have a quick question. I don’t know anything about pop music, so I just wanted to know—in that performance scene, is he supposed to be good or is he supposed to be bad?’ And I couldn’t answer his question. I told him, ‘It’s really up to you.’ It’s not a scene about the triumph of a performance, it’s not a scene about the failure of a performance. It should be—it’s the way that I feel if I go to a rock show, a lot of times it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment, whether I think they’re good or bad.”

Stupid fox: another Idiocracy take

“Knowing Judge’s sterling track record as an American satirist,I had to find out what went wrong,” writes John Patterson in the Guardian of Idiocracy. “Usually a film eliciting such utter contempt from its own backers is a disaster. Far less often, it’s a masterpiece… There is venomous anti-corporate satire throughout… remarkable mainly because Judge names real corporations. I was astounded – and invigorated – by the sheer vitriol Judge directs at these companies… Like fast-food giant Carl’s Jr, which in 2006 sells 6,000-calorie burgers the size of dictionaries under the slogan, “Don’t Bother Me, I’m Eating”. In Idiocracy, this has devolved into “Fuck You! I’m Eating!”… [E]very commercial transaction has been sexualised: at Starbucks you can get coffee plus a handjob (or a “full body” latte). Idiocracy isn’t a masterpiece – Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage – but it’s endlessly funny, and my friends and I will be repeating certain lines for months… [W]ord got out fast: I saw it last Saturday in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show – packed-out. There’s an audience for this movie, but its natural demographic barely knows it’s out there. Behind the movie’s satire lie long-term social changes like the stupidisation of the American electorate over 30 years through deliberate underfunding of public education, the corporate takeover of every area of public and private life, and the tendency of the media – particularly Fox News – to substitute anti-intellectual rage and partisan division for reasoned public debate… So why was Idiocracy dumped? Perhaps because it taps a growing anti-corporate mood in the nation; perhaps because it expertly satirises the jingoistic self-absorption that now passes for public culture. Or perhaps because more people are sick of the modern America that Fox energetically helped to build than the Fox corporation itself is ready to admit.” [Patterson is a great fan of Office Space.]

Transcendentally giving up: Paul Schrader's lost book

Paul Schrader offers up a lengthy intro to an article about a book he never finished, which is supposed to be one of the longest pieces in Film Comment’s history (and which you have to buy to read in full.) “In March 2003 I was having dinner in London with Faber and Faber’s editor of film books, Walter Donohue, and several others when the conversation turned to the current state of film criticism and lack of knowledge of film history in general. I remarked on a former assistant who, when told to look up Montgomery Clift, returned some minutes later asking, “Where is that?” I replied that I thought it was in the Hollywood Hills, and he returned to his search engine. Yes, we agreed, there are too many films, too much history, for today’s student to master. “Someone should write a film version of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon,” a writer from The Independent suggested, and “the person who should write it,” he said, looking at me, “is you.” I looked to Walter, who replied, “If you write it, I’ll publish it.” And the die was cast. Faber offered a contract, and I set to work. Following the Bloom model I decided it should be an elitist canon, not populist, raising the bar so high that only a handful of films would pass over. I proceeded to compile a list of essential films, attempting, as best I could, to separate personal favorites from those movies that artistically defined film history. Compiling was the easy part—then came the first dilemma: why was I selecting these films? What were my criteria?” Schrader audited classes at Columbia University in 2004-2005, including one of the history of film aesthetics by writer-producert-studio head James Schamus. “I kept returning to Hegel’s insight that the philosophy of Aesthetics is the history of Aesthetics. That is, the definition, the essence of Aesthetics, is nothing more or less than its history. The philosophy of Aesthetics equals the mutation of the Aesthetic Ideal—understand the mutation, you understand Aesthetics. By extension, the philosophy of Religion is the history of Religion, and so forth. Aesthetics, like the canon, is a narrative. It has a beginning, middle, and end. To understand the canon is to understand its narrative. Art is a narrative. Life is a narrative. The universe is a narrative. To understand the universe is to understand its history. Each and every thing is part of a story—beginning, middle, and end.” … What can be gleaned from this adventure? If Walter Donohue asks you to dinner in London, think twice. [More middle at the link.]

Crashing in: Charlize's Toothless in Seattle

Charlize Theron‘s motoring a movie about the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999: writer-director-boyfriend-Irishman Stuart Townsend‘s under-$10 million Battle in Seattle will star Theron “as a pregnant bystander who loses her [unborn] baby in the WTO riots,” reports SeattlePI.com. “It’s going to be the next Sleepless in Seattle,'” said James Keblas, head of Seattle City Hall’s film office. “Once you capture a star like Charlize Theron, you are instantly a big picture.” Big enough to fudge, natch: “Lower production costs mean the film will be made in Vancouver, British Columbia, but Keblas said he’s trying to get some of it moved to Seattle… The crew may spend a week shooting in Seattle, Aloe said, and Townsend hopes to use real WTO protesters as extras… The film will explore the “power of the individual” in the face of powerful governments and global corporations, Townsend told The Observer, a British newspaper. The script will weave together cast members’ stories while dealing with serious issues, similar to the Oscar-winning Crash,” a producer added, “We did not want to give one point of view. When you see the movie, you’ll feel a lot of gray areas.” The mother of the miscarried pregnancy will be “the voice of an outsider and the most relatable role for the audience because she didn’t have any agenda as a protester or political leader.”

Does independent film exist anymore?: excerpting Vachon

In a 6,000+ word excerpt from her new book, “A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond,” Christine Vachon ponders what, if anything, “indie” means, working out from the example of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, of which she provides the most knowing schematic of its success I’ve read. “Here’s my counterexample and an argument for a new definition of the term “independent.” Bearded and intense, Mark Romanek directed music videos for over a decade. You could tell from his videos that he thinks with his eyes. He’d made videos for Madonna… Nine Inch Nails… Beck… even Michael Jackson… In 2002 he was so moved by a Johnny Cash cover of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” that he shot the video for free. He came to us with the script for One Hour Photo, something he’d written in three weeks on spec. But with One Hour Photo, we had the opposite problem of Greek Wedding: Mark’s lead character was a middle-aged, sexually deprived stalker. Studio executives believe people don’t want to spend two hours in the company of a character like that…. The whole setup of the studio versus the rugged, loner artist is, like most dualistic constructs, a false one. Look to autodidact Paul Thomas Anderson … skateboard video auteur Spike Jonze… and midwestern ironist Alexander Payne… and you’ll see directors who have made their strongest work within the studio system, with Hollywood casts. The Nation film critic Stuart Klawans has argued that “independent film” is another kind of branding, a marketing ploy. “What the [independent] movement is about is a commercial reconsolidation of the film industry” … In this formulation, B pictures are the ones independent producers like me care most about, and this hedged bet works in our favor: fewer executives are meddling because the studio’s risk is lower. Which allows me to push for the kind of independence in the filmmaking process that is crucial for our writer-directors. “Independent film” as a media brand never interested me.

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The Long Good Friday is 25: John Mackenzie recollects

Noting its 25th anniversary, the gangster great The Long Good Friday gets a chat-up in Time Out London with director John Mackenzie and Chris Tilly. Why does it hold up? “The plans [for the redevelopment of Canary Wharf] had been around for several years before we started work on the film,” Mackenzie says. “There was a lot of building going on around the dock before 1981 with various big firms involved, so we knew quite a lot about what was proposed. London had essentially been a port and we regretted that all that had gone and it felt like a total area of neglect. The writer Barry Keefe, Bob and myself were very aware that there was going to be huge exploitation and that everyone was going to try to get rich quick… I think [gang boss] Harold [Shand, played by Bob Hoskins] would have liked how it’s turned out. I think he would have been delighted, because it has flourished – it’s a whole new extension of London. The high-rise buildings and skyscrapers make the whole place come alive and Harry would have been at the heart of that. Of course, he also would have been the biggest exploiter of them all.// When they got the final product, the producers were very uncertain about it. I’d built up the IRA a lot from what was originally in the script, because I wanted this theme of terrorism versus the state. But the Grade organisation didn’t really want to put it out as a feature film. They wanted to take out all the ‘offensive’ bits that they thought were there, all the – in their opinion – unpatriotic stuff about the IRA, and put it out as a simple television film. That argument went on for two years… I certainly didn’t think it was going to become a legend or a cult film like it has. I think the reason is a combination of things. The idea of the classic gangster was important… so I wanted Harry Shand to be like that. People are never totally one-sided; even the worst villains in the world have certain qualities that are liked, and Bob had the personality and humour to pull it off… I also think it’s to do with the diversity of themes that are in the film. There’s terrorism, religion, corruption… The one that instantly emerged and stood out was the terrorist theme: how can you ever fight a war against terror? We’re still asking that question and I still think you can’t. But I think all those themes will keep the film interesting and fresh for other generations.” [Among the DVD editions, there’s a bare-bones Criterion and shortly, a 25th anniversary UK release.]

Lynch's latest: "It's supposed to make perfect sense

David Lynch gets a Golden Lion lifetime award in Venice today, and of his new movie, Inland Empire, writes Reuters, “the master of mystery and the macabre is more impenetrable than ever, prompting a journalist to jokingly ask after his mental health.” The movie blurs the boundaries between one story and the next, and between dream and reality, the unsigned report says. “Nearly three hours long, the most obvious plotline centers around the making of a movie and how the lead actress fears the wrath of her husband when she has an affair with her co-star. But where that story begins and others, including one set in Poland, begin, is impossible to tell. Asked if the film was supposed to make sense, Lynch told a news conference following a press screening: “It’s supposed to make perfect sense.” … When asked to explain the appearance of three actors wearing rabbits’ heads, one of whom stands in the corner doing the ironing, the 60-year-old replied: “No, I can’t explain that.” … “I really would like to be able to explain, but the film ends up being the explanation. That’s what’s so terrible about press conferences. It’s all about the film, not about the words.” The longtime acolyte of Transcendental Meditation also said, “You should be not afraid of using your intuition and feel, think your way through… Have the experience and trust your inner knowing of what it is.” [Illo from Steven Lapcevic, from the cover of the Lynch tribute album, “Brilliance.”]

"Jackass meets 'Wild Kingdom'" meets Telander: Irwin was a crock

A small regret about not following sports is missing out on the output of talented sportswriters like the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Telander, with unsentimental, independent-minded columns such as this one, headlined “Irwin’s nature act, sadly, was a crock.” Starting with a cleanly described childhood anecdote about encountering a jellyfish. He recalled the pain when he “heard that animal provocateur Steve Irwin, the Australian television celebrity known as ”Crocodile Hunter,” was killed Monday by a stingray’s barb… There’s nasty stuff in nature… Irwin, a hyperactive entertainer whose giddily-excited expression was part-lemur, part-carnival barker, was drawn to it the way a cat is drawn to rolled string. I am saddened that he died, and it is tragic that he leaves behind a wife and two small children… But isn’t there something very much like karma at work here? If you flaunt the dangers of the animal kingdom—using the creatures’ teeth, claws, armor, venom, reflexes as your props—you really aren’t teaching about the natural world, you’re exploiting it. Besides putting himself recklessly in the path of creatures’ natural instincts, hyperventilating, ”Crikey!” every so often, and mesmerizing awe-stricken kids crouched in front of TV sets—what exactly did Irwin, lauded as a conservationist, do?… The simple fact is, Irwin’s show was an inevitable melding of ”Jackass” meets ”Wild Kingdom” for the short-attention-span set.” [More at the link.] (Predictably, the New York Times has a dithering scrap on its editorial page that says nothing, by Lawrence Downes: “It was easy to parody Mr. Irwin’s boisterous shtick, and many people did… It is all too obvious that Mr. Irwin was no biologist, that exploring the world on cable TV is a lot different from actually plunging into it, that wild animals really are dangerous, and blah blah blah.”)

Hollywoodland Babylon: Allen Coulter on sound and image

HOLLYWOODLAND (***) IS A SWEETLY SEEDY ANECDOTE, a termite rhapsody to gumshoes, cheaters, leavers, and at its center, the first Superman, 1950s television star and ultimate suicide George Reeves.
Ben Affleck plays Reeves, who played Superman on television, becoming a campy kiddy icon for that decade; Diane Lane, his mistress Toni Mannix, married to hot-temperered MGM exec Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), and Robin Tunney the firecracker floozie who comes into Reeves’ life after Toni. That story’s refracted by an investigation that takes place years later, by PI Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) who’s led by Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) to believe Reeves was murdered. (Like the recreations in Thin Blue Line, we see several variations of how Reeves might have left this life, and Affleck is brave to have enacted so many ways to kill or be killed.)
Reeves embodies a featherweight 1940s glamour; Simo, hair full and oiled like a James Dean wannabe, lives at the start of rock-‘n’-roll, or “the hatless age,” as director Allen Coulter puts it in a conversation at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel on August 16.
Coulter, a veteran of series like “Rome,” “The Sopranos,’’ ‘‘Six Feet Under’’ and ‘‘The X-Files,” works many small, telling details into the fabric of the multiple storylines. Coulter also speaks with the slightest of twangs, hailing from Texas. “If I’m around someone from Texas, if I have a drink with someone from Texas, you can hear it,” he says.

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Here, Kitty, Kitty: more Science of Gondry links

At LesInrocks.com, a new video from Michel Gondry, for “Hollywood Kitty,” from The Science of Sleep. The link is to a RealPlayer file that may not work with all browsers. Here’s the trailer on YouTube. And from Dailymotion, a pile of files about Gondry, including three making-ofs, the French trailer, and a Hollywood Kitty bit.

Idiocracy (2004-2006) ***

Fox dumped Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s savage, often very funny satire of media and mediocrity over the weekend, with little notice and no advance screenings. After catching it on Saturday with an audience of five (and I seemed to be the only English speaker in the room), I was pleased to run across three other moviegoers over the holiday who had seen it and were buzzing about its brazen “Planet Butt-head” mix of stupid characters behaving in numbingly stupid ways. Luke Wilson plays very ordinary Army private Joe Bowers who’s conscripted into a cryogenics experiment that should last a year, but lasts until The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. He wakes to a world of relentless crudity, but of Kafkaesque familiarity and repetition, with a fistful of familiar brand names, transformed into gaudier (truthier?) versions of their current incarnations: Fox News is read by naked bodybuilders, FuddRuckers has transformed into ButtFuckers (where a kiddy birthday party can be seen under the sign) and Starbucks has become a chain of handjob parlors. (They love their “vente lattes” with “full release.”) TV watchers are addicted to The Masturbation Channel. The most popular series if “Ow, My Balls,” which consists of the star getting repeatedly kicked in the crotch. A talking Carl Jr’s’ vending machine obscenely tongue-lashes its users. Anyone who can finish a sentence—Bowers, basically—is mocked for “sounding faggy.” (Knowledge=Weakness.) A vista that seems to be vaster and more polluted than Mexico City has on its horizon a CostCo that’s larger than Mexico City. Yes, the vulgarity goes all the way to the White House, where the failed country is run by President Camacho, a machinegun-wielding man in flag-emblazoned tights, part Apollo Creed, part Rick James. I could go on—there’s a provocation at every turn, despite the choppy editing and aural wallpapering of the movie with a dull voiceover—but I’ll leave it at this: Mike Judge’s angry, insistent voice, and his willingness to take a premise into absurdity, still come through loud and clear. (So does his contempt for where a fellow Texas is taking our culture.) You have to ponder whether anyone in read the script, most notably in the product placement offices of the above-named corporations. 84m. [Also check out my favorite perspective from another writer, over at Matt Dentler’s Austin-centric-rific pad.]

Judge not: the Beavising of Idiocracy

Fox dumped Idiocracy, Mike Judge‘s savage, often very funny satire of media and mediocrity over the weekend; here’s the clueless ad that ran in a few newspapers in the half-dozen or so cities where the picture opened without benefit of preview or word-of-mouth screenings. Over at Esquire, Brian Raftery tools down to Austin to have words with Judge, a man of few words. After terrible experiences on his first two pictures, Beavis and Butt-head Do America and Office Space, Raftery writes, “Idiocracy was supposed to be different. He filmed it two years ago, but once photography was finished, the real problems began: So-and-so executive hasn’t had a chance to see it, so everything was put on hold. Then Fox started nickel-and-diming him over a few special-effects costs. Finally, once the movie was totally finished last fall, Judge and the execs started to butt heads over the marketing, especially the trailers. (He’s still steamed over the ad campaign for Office Space.) “They’re just overthinking it, which is what they always do,” Judge says. “It’s just about an average dumb-ass person who winds up in the future. It’s not about ‘What if you could travel through time….’ “I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he says. “It’s just dragged on way too long, a good seven months longer than Office Space. I could have made another movie after I locked the picture before this one comes out.” [A review, to come, in this space.]

Jump count: every issue of JUMP CUT online

Over at GreenCine, David Hudson alerts that every essay ever published by “JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Cinema” is now online, including the Winter 2006 issue, with 31 pieces, including “new worlds of documentary. Crouching Tiger. “Buffy,” “Smallville,” The Woodsman, Que Viva Mexico! and Terri Schiavo videos.” From the editors’ note in the first issue, in 1974: “As you see from what you hold, we are using an extremely inexpensive format. Quite simply we are subsidizing it ourselves because we believe JUMP CUT should exist, and that what our writers have to say needs saying. By using this format we gain the opportunity to publish frequently enough to live up to our claim of being a review of contemporary cinema, freedom from the problems of institutional and patron interference and capitalist intent, and a low subscription cost that will allow our readers to subscribe for the price of a first run feature in a large city.” Writing 32 years ago, the editors assert in their non-manifesto, “It becomes increasingly obvious that film criticism in the U.S. is operating in a void that grows larger and larger and that this most modern of art forms relies on a particularly inadequate aesthetics. This is especially objectionable now that film has become so popular on and off campus. There is little satisfaction in seeing this booming interest in film when one surveys the new parade of coffee table books, plot summary analyses, vacuous interviews with this or that director, and so forth that passes for film criticism and scholarship… We want to learn to see film in a social and political context—its practical and political uses, the economics of film making and distribution, and the functions of film in America today. We also want to expand the usual realm of film criticism to include video which is more and more often being considered as a screen art.

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Caine at 90 (films): I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was

“I can’t think of one I could see again,” Michael Caine said yesterday of today’s movie crop on the preem of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men in Venice. Reports Dalya Alberge in the Australian. Casablanca is full of memorable lines, he said, citing the moment… Rick recalls the day the Germans marched into Paris. Rick tells… Ilsa: “I remember every detail. The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.” Caine said, “Who today writes such lines?” He spoke yesterday of feeling “quite depressed” on Saturday night after casting his eye over the top 10 box-office hits in the US. He said: “I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was.”