Movie City Indie Archive for February, 2007
Ryan Gosling's Oscar nom: All that money and my ass on the line
“We needed to prove to the industry that we’re real” after a 2006 cash infusion, ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman tells Anne Thompson in the Reporter, “A lot of actors make indie movies for prestige, not just money, to prove their chops. What better way to communicate our efficacy as a desirable home for these films than by landing an Oscar nomination for a low-budget movie about a crack addict?” DVDs were sent out early. Critics in larger cities raved. ” Then came Urman’s worst fear. No Golden Globe nomination for Gosling, even with slots divided between the Globes’ comedy and drama best actor categories. “I took antacids for days,” Urman says… “The campaign was not about a crack addict,” Urman says, “or a failure of liberal ideals. It was all about an explosive brilliant young talent.” Urman’s talent for publicity and rep for directness were put to the test when Gosling was nominated on January 23. “It was surreal… It was what we’d been working toward for so long… When it happened, I realized what would have happened if it hadn’t happened. All that money and my ass on the line.”
Viewing: Emmanuel Lubezki's natural light for Children of Men
Emmanuel Lubezki’s got the American Society of Cinematographers nod for his inspired work on Children of Men: this promo clip offers several glimpses why.
Korine cinema: 'Mr. Lonely' is not going to be a Prozac film
An unofficial Harmony Korine website has posted the writer-director’s interview with Screen International’s Fionnuala Hannigan about his latest, possible Cannes-bound picture, Mr. Lonely. [PDF download]. Korine talks about how his “dark years” got him to his new, $8.2 million movie, produced by designer-cineaste agnes b. (with costume contributions as well), 
collaborating with DP Marcel Zyskin (a frequent colleague of Michael Winterbottom), rehab, burning down two houses, and becoming a British resident. “Shot in the jungles of Panama (where Korine’s parents live), Scotland and Paris, Mr. Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, who runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton). He winds up in a Scottish-based commune of impersonators, including Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple, [as well as] the Queen of England (Anita Pallenberg), the Pope (James Fox)… and Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange).” (The Panama portion stars David Blaine and Werner Herzog.) “I’d been making movies since I was virtually a kid,” Korine tells Hannigan, “and it had always come very easily. At a certain point after [julien donkey-boy, I started to have this general disconnect from things. I was really miserable with where I was. I began to lose sight of things and people started to become more and more distant. I was burned out, movies were what I always loved in life and I started to not care. I went deeper and deeper into a dark place and to be honest movies were the last thing I was thinking about—I didn’t know if I was going to be alive. My dream was to evaporate. I was unhealthy. Whatever happened during that time, and I won’t go into details, maybe it was somekthing I need to go through.” Of the finished product, the mind behind Gummo assures, “It’s not going to be a Prozac film.”
Not another human being has seen this film: Coppola's Youth Without Youth
Francis Ford Coppola put up about $20 million or so of his own dosh to shoot his new Youth Without Youth “with, for once, zero interference from studio executives and other finance types,” writes ChiTrib’s Marc Caro. “As he spoke on the phone 
Wednesday from his Napa Valley, Calif., home, he was about to view the movie with its sound mix in place for the first time. This week it will become “the totally finished movie.” He hasn’t shown it to anybody, and subsequently it has no distributor. “Part of the philosophy of this is that a movie is a different thing when it’s finished and has all of its elements.. so after the 22nd, we’ll start deciding the best people to deal with. But not another human being has seen the film.” [The feature’s site is here, including photos of Old Bucharest and a crew list consisting almost entirely of Romanians.]
Viewing: President's day: pre-Zapruder footage
The Sixth Floor Museum of Dallas chooses a tragically inappropriate date to release a newly found 8mm snippet of President John F. Kennedy before he was murdered. (In the MSNBC coverage inside the clip, the network anachronistically refers to the 1963-shot home movie as a “video.”) This is the museum’s description: “This newly-discovered home movie of the fateful Kennedy motorcade was recently donated to The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The photographer, George Jefferies, filmed President and Mrs. Kennedy on Main Street at Lamar in downtown Dallas less than 90 seconds before the assassination. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy, can be seen riding on the left rear bumper. The donor, Wayne Graham, is the son-in-law of Mr. Jefferies.”
Viewing: Robert Wilson's Brad Pitt venture
A blue-hued brick wall and Brad Pitt in a light rainfall bearing only white boxers and a pistol? VOOM HD Networks gave avant-garde imagist Robert Wilson the money and the motive to put several famed figures in motion; the use of movement is consistent with his intriguing body of work. Forthcoming portraits: Willem Dafoe, Marianne Faithfull, Jeanne Moreau, Steve Buscemia, Lucinda Childs, Peter Stormare, Dita von Teese, Mikhail Baryshnikov, “JT Leroy,” Juliette Binoche, Robert Downey Jr., Alan Cumming, Isabelle Huppert, Winona Ryder, Sumo world champion Byamba Ulambayar, a horned frog and a South American porcupine. [As seen on the cover of Vanity Fair!]
Viewing: Lukas Moodysson's latest—Snot falls, urine flows
Via Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay, a very odd glimpse of Container, the latest experimental film from Lukas Moodysson, director of Show Me Love; Terrorists: The Ones They Sent Down; and Lilja 4-Ever, narrated by Jena Malone. [A second, equally cruddy and enigmatic clip is below.]
Pantheon's labyrinth: Adrian Martin on responsiblity and the cricket
“[W]riting about film is always about capturing fugitive sensibilities as they form and die, at a very rapid rate, within the cultural sphere,” writes Aussie film cricket Adrian Martin in an email exchange on 
“Responsibility and Criticism” with Spanish magazine Mirades de cine as published by the Italian film mag Cinemascope. In the 14-page email exchange [PDF download], Martin also considers the future of film criticism as practiced on the internet, his own experiences with classical and contemporary cinephilia, musing on Abel Ferrara’s Mary, and a tidy but heartbreaking anecdote about seeing Rio Bravo in a movie palace in the suburbs of Melbourne when he was 20, “like a poignant scene from a Victor Erice film.” It’s the most lucid and bracing exploration I’ve read in some time about what ought to be going on before and after the lights go down on the professional film cricket. “[N]o film is truly old, or in the past! Every cinephile should have the experience of watching a silent film. I had this experience watching some Jean Epstein films recently—and suddenly feeling confronted with something that is still, today, newer and more modern than we ourselves are as spectators. There is a good, simple reason for this: the cinema is always a laboratory, a field of experimentation: experimentation with image, sound, performance, gesture, light, colour, music, rhythm, storytelling, etc. No experiment is ever exhausted, and no aesthetic or cultural problem is solved for all time. So, when we return to old films, we therefore see that they are completely contemporary to us and our concerns, if we are open to the traces of experimentation in them—there are always new ideas in old films. I do not regard the ‘cinema of the past’ as something neat, clean, classical, canonical. Cinema is always ‘at the crossroads’, at every moment of its existence, and so are we.
Waning Waxman: Bordwell revises writer's 1990s nostalgie
David Bordwell offers some cogent reservations against the “Rebels on the Backlot” author’s recent, undernourished assay of several slowed careers. “Why, asks Sharon Waxman in the New York Times, have the much-touted directors of the 1990s slowed their output so drastically? [Many] of their generation have, Waxman points out, “taken long hiatuses before stepping back up to the plate.” Immediately, exceptions spring to mind. Some filmmakers who built their careers in the 90s are pretty prolific. 
Soderbergh is the prime instance; he sometimes releases two movies a year. Christopher Nolan has given us several one-two punches: Memento in 2000 and Insomnia in 2002, Batman Begins in 2005 and The Prestige in 2006. James Mangold is now doing postproduction on 3:10 to Yuma, his seventh movie since 1995. Kent Jones reminds me that Richard Linklater has finished 12 features in under 16 years! … Waxman’s explanations, culled from interviews with Hollywood cognoscenti, intrigue me. Probably no one explanation will provide the answer, but it’s worth thinking about the many forces at work.” Bordwell’s analysis is well worth reading in full; he agrees with Waxman that “[f]ilmmakers undergo closer scrutiny and quicker judgments than at earlier times. Critics, audiences, and studios pounce on every failure,” citing the fury aimed toward M. Night Shyamalan after Lady in the Water. Of the idea that filmmakers are pressured to go commercial, Bordwell cites “a producer friend [who] commented… that a lot of indie filmmakers whom he meets sincerely want to direct big films. Bryan Singer, who admires Spielberg, hasn’t made a secret of his desire to be a mainstream filmmaker.” Of the supposed lack of a shared creative community, he writes, “Oddly enough, James Mottram’s book ‘The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood’ maintains that just this sort of community exists among several 90s directors. The book opens with a meeting of the Pizza Knights, a cadre of young filmmakers who gather every month to watch 70s classics. The group includes Fincher, Jonze, Anderson, Peirce, and Payne…—the very directors whom Waxman lists as surprisingly unproductive. They may not bond with older directors, but according to Mottram they constitute a pretty tight group.” Bordwell also cites a “Gen X’ lassitude;
[TRAILER] Two times: Hou remakes Red Balloon with Juliette Binoche
All right, this is perverse and it better be perversely beautiful: here’s the trailer for Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s French-language remake for the videogame era, of the classic The Red Balloon, starring Juliette Binoche. Plot: A 7-year-old boy has a new friend, a red balloon that follows him across Paris. The trailer’s accompanied by a poppy song, as you’d expect with Hou; the images feel vaguely Kieslowskian; and it looks serenely thrilling. Cannes, peut-être? Link or download here.
Laurel canyon: movie marketers cultivating kudzu
In the WaPo, Rachel Beckman has a consideration of the kudzu-like proliferation of laurels in movie promotions. When she was 16, she writes, “laurels helped me find my way. Those gold, leafy parentheses 
on VHS boxes and advertisements denoted that the film had competed at a festival, Cannes or Sundance, and would be arty, foreign, dark or weird. Just how I liked ’em… Laurel leaves have spread like weeds, growing most heartily during the run-up to the Oscar nominations. And in their ubiquity, laurels seem to have lost all meaning. Browse today’s movie ads and they’re found stamped on mainstream fare: Miss Potter, The Departed, Happy Feet.” Beckman counts 17 sets of laurels on ads for Babel. “The proliferation is pretty out of hand,” says Stephen Garrett, co-founder of Kinetic Trailerworks, responsible for tralers for Half Nelson, Maria Full of Grace and Spellbound, but says that he goes for “quantity over quality.” Picturehouse’s Bob Berney suggests the undergrowth “probably has something to do with Harvey Weinstein, as many innovations in independent film marketing do.” The Weinsteinco topper emails Beckman: “The art-house-going and upscale audiences know what the laurels mean… They understand the film festival circuit and know that awards from those festivals signify quality in film.” [More shoptalk at the link.]
Cinema holds more than one story: Tykwer on Berlin Alexanderplatz
Tom Tykwer offers an epic appreciation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Berlin Alexanderplatz upon its restoration by the Fassbinder Foundation, led by Juliane Lorenz, and its first showings ever in 35mm in Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, it’s a long piece, and only in German. Tykwer considers the bold masterpiece to be “an experimental narrative,” and not a TV movie at all. Among the comparisons the writer-director makes are to the theater work of Christoph Marthalers and Pina Bausch, films of Jacques Doillon and Bruno Dumont‘s shaggy, savage Twenty-nine Palms. The fifteen-hour opus, released in the US on VHS in the 1980s, is already available in a German DVD edition, without subtitles; a Criterion edition is in the offing.
Los Olvidados' lost boys: DBC Pierre considers
As a print of Los Olvidados (aka The Forgotten Ones; The Young and the Damned) opens in London for a month’s run in the National Film Theatre’s Buñuel retrospective, Booker Prize-winning novelist DBC Pierre, who grew up in Mexico City, considers its impact in the Observer: “I was raised behind walls in Mexico City, but still ran the streets like a rat part-time, a beady-eyed troll among big-eyed statuettes glazed in snot. Coming from an affluent place, it doesn’t take many street beggars to thrust you into a moral crisis trying to rationalise wealth. If a mother begging with a dead baby in her arms doesn’t do it, the knowledge that her kin might also borrow the body for begging will… Surrealist director Luis 
Buñuel was the instrument it took to publicly articulate the truth about poverty in that city, that absence of love. When he came to live in Mexico City in the late 1940s, it was nearly 20 years since he had filmed his scathing Land Without Bread, amid what he saw as the peasantry’s filth and stupidity in his native Spain. It was as if the energy behind his art, already frustrated by years in exile, even after an extravagant start alongside Salvador Dalí, took the collision with Mexico’s Federal District as a challenge to his very ethos. The result was an explosion captured in a masterpiece of cinema… Los Olvidados took barely three weeks to make in 1950 on a shoestring budget, but hit the world screen like a fist through plate glass. Mexican officials of the day were rabid, critics stunned, and the work won Buñuel the prize for best director at Cannes the following year.” A key insight: “Despite not being one of Buñuel’s surreal works, its framework provided a vehicle for some of his most striking visual effects. After all, where does a surrealist turn when the cruelty he wishes to depict has itself reached surreal depths? Realism. He simply screamed a truth.” [A closer reading at the link.]
Miramax's fit Brit: Battsek's biz
Daniel Battsek‘s Miramax gets the Brit brag in the Observer. The “refocusing” of the runamok previous incarnation is described by James Robinson. “For an ambitious studio executive, the prospect of stepping into Harvey Weinstein’s shoes must be a daunting one… But Daniel Battsek, the 
48-year-old Briton who runs Miramax, the Hollywood studio Weinstein founded, bears his newfound status as one of the most powerful Brits in the film industry with ease. Battsek, an industry executive for 20 years, is no novice, but he is everything the gregarious Weinstein isn’t: modest, polite and business-like. But, like Weinstein, he can be ruthless… which is why Disney, which bought Miramax in 1993, entrusted him with the studio after Weinstein and his brother Bob left under a cloud in 2005… Battsek reports to Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook but, as president of Miramax, he exercises considerable autonomy [and is] a purveyor of pictures on a smaller scale; films with an independent quality, if not an arthouse sensibility.” [More on Battsek’s background, a Miramax timeline, and the regal marketing of The Queen and other successes at the link.]
