Work out as little as you want: Netflix, Ron Howard and white-water kayaking

Netflix primo Reed Hastings explains how Ron Howard influenced the idea for Netflix (and perhaps a wobbling company once controlled by Wayne Huizenga). He’d done some startups, , and “was doing white-water kayaking at the time, and in kayaking if you stare and focus on the problem you are much more likely to hit danger,” he tells NY Times. “I focused on the safe water and what I wanted to happen.” I got the idea for Netflix after… I had a big late fee for Apollo 13 It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette. It was all my fault. I didn;t want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, I’m going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee? Later, on my way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted.”

Monkey Warfare: I don't make bombs, I make films

“Revolutionary” imagery infects the marketing for Vancouver native, editor-director stalwart Reg Harkema‘s Don McKellar-starring flawed-radical satire Monkey Warfare, writes Globe & Mail’s Guy Dixon. “Last September, posters appeared around Toronto on letterboxes and lampposts bearing the face of Canadian actress Nadia Litz, Che Guevara style, and [“I Fuck the Man”] in bold letters… The whole thing was a publicist’s idea. Litz, a petite young woman originally from Winnipeg, wasn’t so crazy about it. … But the tuned-in crowd knew that the posters were… a come-on for the indie film Monkey Warfare, one of the hippest… Canadian films at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.” Three months after TIFF, ” Litz sits in a Toronto coffee shop with co-stars Don McKellar and Tracy Wright [and] it’s not the film’s politics that animates the three actors, but the faux-radical posters. Litz’s character in the film is a pot dealer flirting with radicalism… In real life, Litz shudders thinking about the posters. “I’m a little girl, and I’m always alone walking down the street [when I see them],” she says… “Oh, grow up!” McKellar jokingly chastises her over tea. McKellar and Wright, a couple in the film and in real life, play characters rooted in an anonymous existence in Toronto’s lower-income Parkdale, harbouring their radical ways while hiding away from the authorities and from their neighbourhood’s creeping gentrification… “The characters, although they may be trying to sound cool, are always exposed for not being so. They never get away with being kick-ass,” McKellar says… Before Monkey Warfare, his third feature, the 39-year-old director co-wrote a script, which he tried to pitch to distributors at the Toronto festival years ago, about a woman who ends up suicide-bombing Toronto’s Molson Indy race. The pitch session with the distributor was the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. It had been originally scheduled for Sept. 11.” Harkema then made the doc Better Off in Bed on Vancouver’s New Pornographers, fronted by Neko Case. “Harkema dug so deeply into the band’s personal lives and relationships… that lawyers for New Pornographers singer Neko Case wouldn’t consent to the film’s release… “I think the Pornographers were a little uncomfortable about just how vérité the documentary ended up becoming.” Harkema quotes the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder epigram on making films about radicals, “I don’t make bombs, I make films.” However, there is a post-credits scene shown at Monkey Warfare‘s Toronto preem which has been shorn for theatrical release, “in which Vancouver filmmaker and actor Flick Harrison demonstrates how to make a Molotov cocktail, speaking in badly accented French… “The purely technical reason why it’s not going to appear is that our lawyers don’t want to sign off on it, because there’s some one-in-a-million chance someone will see it and actually be inspired to throw a Molotov cocktail,” Harkema says, laughing. “I can’t figure it out. Apparently there are far more explicit and worse things going on in the latest Bond film. I mean, lawyers are the real editors of films today.” The poster (pictured, with McKellar, rather than Litz) and other clips are at the film’s Myspace page, FlowerPowerIsDead, including the scissored “Molotov Cocktail safety video”.

Zoom with a view: Dolby's new look and sound

Weinsteinco speaks: we've taken periodic odysseys

“People who see us say we look happier and younger,” Harvey Weinstein a’s to Jeffrey Ressner‘s q’s at Time, puttingsmiley emoticons all over the prospects for the Weinsteinco forge. “We feel good that we can do all the cool things we want to do…. In one week, we had a party in New York where the Eagles performed to celebrate Wal-Mart’s commitment to environmental sustainability, then we opened Bobby with a star-studded premiere in Hollywood.” Weinstein’s idioms are his very own: “We’ve taken periodic odysseys across America and internationally to build partnerships with RAI Television in Italy and TF1 in France and ARD in Germany. We’re laying down an infrastructure.” Lots about their severed ties with the lot of Mouse, some asides from Bob, and Harvey be nimble, be quick: “We snagged the most sought-after title at the American Film Market, which was the Wong Kar Wei movie starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and Norah Jones. That showed nimbleness. At Toronto, between Penelope and the Vince Vaughn movie, we were right there where he had to be.”

Cunning lingo: Borat's Hebrew secret

The fact that much of Borat‘s “Kazakh” language is actually Hebrew has been mentioned here and there, but AP’s Aron Heller reports from Israel, where the film has an added layer for locals. “They actually understand much of what the anti-Semitic, misogynist Kazakh journalist is saying. Few realize that… Borat Sagdiyev is not speaking Kazakh or even gibberish, but rather mostly Hebrew, the biblical language of the Jewish people. [Baron Cohen] He is an observant Jew, his mother was born in Israel and his grandmother still lives in Haifa. In high school, he belonged to a Zionist Jewish youth group, Habonim Dror, and upon graduation, spent a year working and studying on a kibbutz, or collective farm, in northern Israel. He has since returned for several visits, his Hebrew is excellent and his understanding of Israeli culture superb. The irony of a Hebrew-speaking anti-Semite is not lost on the admiring Israeli audience, which has made the movie a huge hit here.” Says Gaby Goldman, 33, of Tel Aviv. ”It’s not just the Hebrew but also the way he speaks. He sounds almost Israeli, he sounds like one of us.” … The film is peppered with Hebrew expressions and Israeli slang, inside jokes only Israelis could truly appreciate. In one scene, Borat sings the lyrics of the legendary Hebrew folk song ”Koom Bachur Atzel,” meaning ”get up, lazy boy.” … Even Borat’s signature catchphrase—”Wa wa wee wa,” an expression for “wow”—is derived from a skit on a popular Israeli comedy show.”

Thrown for a Hickenlooper: Factory Girl's heart of darkness

Hearts of Darkness is one of the great documentaries about filmmaking gone awry, so it’s darkly ironic that its director, George Hickenlooper, is in the midst (or, according to sketchy reports, shunted to the side) of production hell with Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl. NY Post’s Page Six has led the parade of Harvey-haters chronicling the reshoots and slow-motion tumble of the Weinsteinco production toward a Los Angeles opening date before the end of 2006 to qualify for Oscar consideration. Today’s note: Bob Dylan‘s pissed. Mr. Zimmerman’s solicitors believe that the movie “falsely suggests he was responsible for the Andy Warhol ingenue’s suicide.” A letter’s been dispatched to producers Bob Yari and Holly Wiersma, and screenwriter Aaron Richard Golub, “demanding the [moive] not be released—or even screened—until they see it to determine if Dylan, who they say has “deep concerns,” has been defamed… The original screenplay depicted the alleged relationship [with Sedgwick] using Dylan’s name, and suggested he dumped Sedgwick – which led to “her tragic decline into heroin addiction and eventual suicide,” Dylan’s lawyer, Orin Snyder, writes… “Until we are given an opportunity to view the film, we hereby demand that all distribution and screenings . . . immediately be ceased.” Weinsteinco, discovering they’d missed the deadlines for several NY crickets groups, it’s reported, has cancelled all its Manhattan screenings.

Scold in your stocking: Finke-ing on Black Christmas

Even more Weinsteinco for the horror-days: LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke objects strenuously to Weinsteinco’s historically successful Christmas counterprogramming to young audiences, ranging from the release of the Scream series to Bad Santa to 2002’s dreadful Darkness. Bob Weinstein‘s simple insight in slating holiday horrors is that after a few hours with the family, if you’re too young to legally drink, a few drops of blood can be just as calming. (And it also dilutes the red ink in the distribbery game.) “Shame, shame, shame on The Weinstein Company, launched by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and their distributor, MGM, headed by chairman/CEO Harry Sloan,” writes Finke, “for opening a holiday-themed slasher movie on Christmas Day… In show-biz marketing parlance and psychology, scheduling horror pics around Christmastime is savvy counterprogramming. But releasing them on Christmas Day breaks new (and unholy) ground. Just how many disturbed human beings do The Weinstein Company and MGM think actually want to go see a gory movie on December 25… ?” Inveighs Finke in closing, “Investors in The Weinstein Company and MGM need to protest this deplorable decision.”

Better Santa: Zwigoff sez

Terry Zwigoff describes his final, finally, cut of Bad Santa to Jeffrey M. Anderson at GreenCine: enabled by the ascension of Daniel Battsek to Miramax after the exit of the snip-happy Weinsteins. It’s three minutes shorter than the first theatrical release, but Zwigoff tells Anderson, “There are over a thousand changes… A lot of them are very small, but the cumulative effect is large, and a lot them have to do with shaping the characters. Comedy’s tricky… It’s quite difficult to pull off. Even if you’re working with great comic actors, it’s more than just being a traffic cop. There are a million choices you make and they’re all important. You have to make sure the characters are emotionally grounded in some sort of truth. If not… all you’ll be left with is a series of gags instead of a film.” … [C]heaper digital technology has allowed Zwigoff to complete his cut; no actual film print exists. For Roger Ebert’s 2006 Overlooked Film Festival this past April, the film was shown [in] HDcam, which Zwigoff says “looks great.” … “It was really going through those test screenings for Crumb years ago that made it easier this time for me stick to my convictions… Everyone said to take out Charles Crumb, but I felt I was right to keep him in. I drew on that experience. In retrospect, I know they were wrong. In any case, you can’t please everyone, so you might as well try and please yourself. I was right then and perhaps I’m right now.” Additions and deletions are delineated at the link, including that B. Bob Thornton’s “Willie can now be seen smoking while on the job and even inhaling amyl nitrate at one point, two vices extremely difficult to get away with in movies today.”

In like a lion: teaching MGM at UCLA

The history of MGM and United Artists are the subject of a new course starting in January at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; the subject area follows, which, sadly, does not seem to include an inside look at the remarkable, almost four-decade run of deals that financier Kirk Kerkorian has parlayed to keep the entity in various states of play. “Taught by veteran film historian and archivist Dr. Jan- Christopher Horak, this multi-faceted, multi-year program will be available as a touring course for universities around the country after its initial run at UCLA,” pr’s MGM. “The course will consider both the creative achievements and contributions to American culture of this definitive Golden Age movie studio, whose existence spans the entire history of American film.” Horak says, “The history of MGM is paradigmatic for the history of Hollywood, from the halcyon days of the giant studios to the present system of distributor-financed independent production. Through MGM, students will begin to understand that historical trajectory.” MGM touts their twenty films to come in 2007 after a “storied history” in the press release, curiously omitting mention of titles or even current diadems like Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj.

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Peter Boyle: Puttin' on the Ritz

Apocalypto (2006, ***)

A FOOTRACE AGAINST THE FORCES OF TIME, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto runs with Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young Mayan with wife, child, and child on the way, who must run, for over two hours, away from becoming a human sacrifice. Gibson, like George Lucas, is the most independent of filmmakers, self-financing to the tune of “it’s my dime, give me your dollars.” (This may be part of why Disney, while cautious, isn’t panicking in the face of Gibson’s “Sugar-tits” drunk-driving, racial-ranting fiasco earlier this year.) As a director of action, his borrowings and variations begin with The Most Dangerous Game’s man-hunts-man archetype. Sending his protagonist speeding through the jungle, Gibson spends his millions more ingeniously than the man from Marin County, including a 2001 reference that works twice. Apocalypto and its trailer begin with a quotation from Will Durant, co-author of “The Story of Civilization” whose reign (with partner Ariel) on the shelves of Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers would have coincided with Gibson’s formative years. “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within,” the epigraph reads. Movies cannot help but be parables and history is ever analogous to the present day. Is Gibson concerned with the godless Western world? The Arab world? America? Tactfully, Apocalypto, in subtitled Mayan tongues, largely pursues what Gibson again proves is his imaginative strength: the depiction of excruciatingly vibrant violence, in the service of power’s barbaric actions to hold onto authority. The elaborate and diffuse brutality, more disparate than the mere homoerotic sadism of shredding the blooded body of Christ, often takes the breath away.

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Louder than crickets: the Inland Empire trailer

Indie returns Tuesday

Losing focus: InDigEnt's shallow grave

As his megadecamillion dollar Charlotte’s Web prepares to open to throngs of Strunk & White-clutching kidlit purists on every corner of the Upper East Side, director-producer Gary Winick sez his underfinanced production entity InDigEnt is no more, reports Reuters’ Larry Fine. It’ll “shut down in January, bringing an end to the high-profile production outfit that championed low-cost, independent and digital movie making,” as Fine kindly describes the enterprise. “I couldn’t keep it together. As of January we’re biting the dust after six years,” Winick said. “I kind of think we had our moment in time. Unfortunately there is no million-dollar film any more that actually gets in the market place and makes some money because the studios want the Capotes and the Sideways [sic]… they want the $8-million film to make a $100 million instead of the $1-million to make $10 (million). That’s the problem,” he said.” InDigEnt notably used consumer-level cameras to make professional features, with visually disappointing results, including a non-metaphorical lack of consistent focus. Reuters’ Fine remains gullible about the potential of the medium: “In recent years, however, even independent films have become more expensive to produce as more and more stars work in them. And as the movies’ box office has improved, money from the specialty divisions of major studios has raised the stakes.” Winick, like a seer from a past century, sums it up this way, compounding his interest in money: “I think the good news is that the Internet, it’s not there yet, but it’s going to shift something to get independent film back where it will become lucrative again.” Ah, the Internets. Use the Google and become rich in your spare time at home!

Great Zeitgeist's Ghost!: documentary's completion issues

In NY Times, Paul Vandecarr samples the deep fount of unfinished docs that might as well not exist, dwelling upon “unrealized visions [that] linger like ghosts in the minds of their originators, whose lives are often consumed by a strenuous cycle of fund-raising, filming, dreaming, more fund-raising, editing, cajoling, resting and returning to one’s muse.” Melodramatic verbal venture of the day: “Once you’re bitten by the idea of a story, you can’t shake it, and you get all carried away, and you start to perspire, and you can’t sleep,” said Richard Saiz, director of programming at the Independent Television Service, a major financ[i]er of documentary film. “It just takes you over.” … Albert Maysles, the filmmaker who with his brother David has made such acclaimed documentaries as Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, has had one such unfinanced work in mind for some 50 years. The project, which he plans to call “In Transit,” would chronicle a series of long-distance train trips in different countries, in which passengers — soldiers, orphans, lovers, former prisoners and others — would be tracked as they travel toward whatever experience awaits them at their destination. “It could be the great adventure of my life,” Mr. Maysles, 80, said by telephone from New York. “And [I hope] the viewer would find it an adventure as well.”