Movie City Indie Archive for February, 2007
Where credit is due: I Think I Love My Wife
Which of these things is not like the other things? The trailer for Chris Rock‘s next directorial venture is up, and the source material might not be what you expect from Mr. Rock and the mind behind Pootie Tang.
Porteños in a storm: Argentina has to compete with stories, emotions
The nascent auteurist renaissance in Argentina’s has hit a few obstacles, writes 
Variety’s Charles Newbery from down south: “Five years ago, Argentina’s film industry could have collapsed… Instead, film production doubled to an average of 60 features a year, [spurred] by an increase in financing from the state, international festivals, film funds and co-producers. The country offered low production costs, technical talent and fresh stories, visuals and performances as directors came to terms with economic and social chaos…Holy Girl, El Bonaerense, Lost Embrace, Minimal Stories, Red Bear and others won applause.” But today? “Foreign interest in Argentine films is drying up,” says Juan Jose Campanella, director of El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride), an Oscar-nominated comedy that packed theaters in Argentina and Spain. “It peaked before reaching a high enough peak.” … State credits, subsidies and prize money, the chief source of production coin, now only cover a quarter of the $650,000 budget for a debut feature as inflation erodes spending power. The box office, 80% dominated by Hollywood, offers little chance for profit. Most of the 74 domestic releases last year brought in fewer than 10,000 admissions each.” … “We have to give people a good reason to watch our films instead of the latest James Bond,” says helmer Daniel Burman (Family Law, pictured). “We don’t have a developed industry to compete hand to hand. We have to compete with stories, emotions.” Genre entries are one attempt to combat this problem: lots of details at the link. {Plus, Variety picks picks 10 new Argentine helmers to watch.]
Cricketing the crickets: A crowning achievement
From terse to worse, the week’s most critical comment, passed without further remark, from NYTimes Book Review: “To the Editor: Lee Siegel’s essay on Norman Mailer’s “Castle in the Forest” is the most addlepated review I have ever read. It is a naked display of idiocy, a crowning achievement of impenetrable nonsense. Marcella Jenkins, Danbury, Conn.”
8 1/2 Takeshis: Kitano's Banzai
There’s a new Takeshi Kitano pic in the mix, reports Variety’s Mark Schilling, called Kantoku Banzai, or Director Hooray. “After a two-year hiatus, Takeshi Kitano, helmer of the 1997 Venice Golden Lion winner Hana-bi has revealed that… a June release in Japan with the helmer’s own Office Kitano distributing… Though Kitano says the pic will be “non-violent,” [it’s] a mish-mash of genres (ninja, samurai swashbuckler, love story, Ozu-esque homage), with the main one being comedy. Kitano, under his stage name Beat Takeshi, will star as a tormented director, though any resemblance to 8 1/2 may be accidental.”
Complexicated Gondry
Michel Gondry is “complexicated,” he tells Xan Brooks in the Guardian. Gondry “claims to have developed the ability to “direct” his dreams, tweaking the sound levels and adjusting the focus. “I call it lucid dreaming… And when I have a lucid dream, I generally end up having sex with the first girl I can find.” What, when he wakes up? “No, no. In the dream. 
Because you realise nobody is watching. So I just spend my time finding girls to have sex with.” Three minutes in, the conversation has already taken a perplexing detour.” He doesn’t resent reviewers who think his movies are really Charlie Kaufman’s. “”People write these things in newspapers, so it’s obvious they gravitate towards the writer,” he shrugs. “Yet film is a visual language, not a written one. So when people say I can’t tell a story because I’m coming from videos, it’s very dismissive of what movies really are.” Of a failed date, he says, “I wish there was an easy answer,” he sighs. “It is very complexicated”.
VIDEO: Wave hands like Lynch: talking Inland Empire with Mark Kermode
Click here for the National Film Theatre convo about the omnipresent Inland Empire and the scrapbook that fell behind the chest-of-drawers in Spokane, Washington, when Mr. Lynch was age 5: “Where the title came from is another story. Later, in the middle of shooting, about a third through, [Laura Dern] was telling me that her husband was from the Inland Empire, which is an area east of LA that encompasses many towns. She went on talking but my mind stuck on those words. I’d heard them before but now they had a new meaning and I stopped her and I said, “That’s the title of this film.” Then, at the same time almost, my brother who was up in Montana, cleaning the basement of my parents’ log cabin, discovered this old scrapbook that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. He dusted it off and found that it was my scrapbook from when I lived in Spokane, Washington, aged five. He sent it to me. I get this, I open it up and the first picture is an aerial view of Spokane and underneath it says, “Inland Empire.” So I had the most beautiful feeling of a correct title.”
Not Siskel and Ebert… when you pay off the first baseman every month
“Well, let’s see, we have on the bags, Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third… I say Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.”
CONSIDERATION: Two to tango: Marty's Departed mash-up
When you watch The Departed, Howard Shore’s tango-inflected score doesn’t announce itself as pastiche, but the primary musical refrain is tracked as “The Departed Tango” (credited: Shore, Marc Ribot, Larry Saltzman). I’d listened to the score for a few weeks without revisiting the movie and when a friend who’d just seen the film a second time was describing her take on the thematic doublings in the story, 
I realized that Scorsese had made one more informed musical choice in a career chockablock with them. Consider: The Departed is based on a script (by William Monahan) derived from the HK pic Infernal Affairs. Scorsese said he didn’t watch the prior film, relying instead on Monahan’s marvelous words. But Hong Kong movies owe a debt to dynamic American directors like Scorsese (and also in the case of the Infernal Affairs series, Michael Mann). It can’t be helped: even without seeing that specific film, Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker accelerated their cutting (at least compared to the tempo of Goodfellas) after the fashion of their Asian successors. Also: Hong Kong directors often score films in a more emotional or operatic fashion, including the common use of overpoweringly sickly (if often charming) Canto-pop songs that sound like what Hello Kitty would listen to while gobbling gummy bears. Wong Kar-wai’s use of Western songs, such as the incessant repetition of Nat King Cole in In the Mood for Love are part of his project, which would also include the use of tango in the Buenos Aires-set Happy Together.) To simplify brutally, the tango began as a dance between men: a ritualized, sexualized knife fight of dance between pimps in Buenos Aires. And so the dance: the doppelgangered Damon and DiCaprio; Scorsese’s American cinema and Hong Kong cinema. The choice to steep The Departed in tango keenly mimics the dance between two eras, two schools, two cultures of filmmaking, a ritualizing of the vitality two cinemas have in common, and reciprocate in unexpected fashion. [The Departed is on Region 1 DVD on February 13.]
Who's the UK's Luc Besson? Bring the Love
That would be Nick Love, writes Adam Dawtrey of the UK’s hardcore, high-profit indie filmmaker: “The writer-director of The Football Factory, The Business and the upcoming vigilante drama Outlaw, he’s far from being the country’s best known 
or most acclaimed filmmaker. But it’s hard to think of one who has a more bankable following. With his unique brand of violent, working-class actioners, he has carved himself a lucrative niche as the voice of a certain unfashionable—some might say unsavory—breed of young British male.” 2004’s The Football Factory is scrappy and vital, but Love’s film aren’t about esthetics: “Within the British film biz, Love is something of a renegade whose scripts have been routinely rejected by public financiers such as the U.K. Film Council, BBC Films and Film4. But the sheer weight of his DVD sales means he’s gradually being embraced by pragmatic distribs with a eye on the bottom line. “He’s the U.K.’s answer to Luc Besson,” claims Rupert Preston of Vertigo Films, the production outfit in which Love is a partner… Football Factory, about soccer hooligans, was Love’s breakthrough. Privately financed by Vertigo, it cost less than $1 million and grossed a modest $1.3 million at the box office, but it has sold a staggering 970,000 units on DVD, comparable to a Hollywood blockbuster.” [More facts and figures at the link; here’s a 2004 Beeb Q&A about Factory.]
Climates control: Ceylan's Turkish delight
Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, writes Jonathan Romney in the Independent, has always put a lot of himself into his films, right down to his flat, his car and his Puffa jacket.” The hero of Distant (Uzak), one of 2006’s stellar releases, “wears Ceylan’s jacket, drives his Smart car and lives in a flat which was Ceylan’s at the time (it’s still his office). Perhaps these are just canny ways to reduce the props budget, but you can’t help raising a sceptical eyebrow when Ceylan insists that his heroes shouldn’t be mistaken for him. Things are even closer to home in the extraordinary Climates [shot in high definition video]… This time, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (pronounced “Bil-geh” and “Jey-lan”) steps in front of the camera, together with his wife Ebru Ceylan, as an unmarried couple who separate after an explosive falling-out on holiday. At times, the Ceylans’ presence together on screen leaves you feeling almost intrusive: a dinner scene early on, full of barely muted rancour, is guaranteed to make you grind your teeth (probably because you’ve been there yourself at least once). It’s fiction, but you can’t help wondering whether there’s some domestic acting-out going on between the Ceylans: when Bahar and Isa worry about their age difference, there’s no disguising the fact that Nuri really is 47, Ebru a decade younger. But ask the director whether the Ceylans are in any way portraying themselves, and you get much the same answer that most film-makers give: “Woody Allen acts in his films,” he shrugs. “Maybe everybody thinks Woody Allen is really like that.” (Oh, but everyone does.)” [More sturdy appreciation at the link; the photo is from Ceylan’s brilliant portfolio, Turkish Cinemascope. The lovely trailer, a wrenching short film in its own right, is below.] 1 Comment »
Pulp infliction: marketing Weinsteinco's $100m Grindhouse
Pseudo-retro costs the big bucks, reports Variety’s Steven Zeitchik of Weinsteinco’s big bet, Grindhouse. “[T]he pic’s fate could play a big role in the company’s future,” avers the scribe of the April 6 release, “directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin 
Tarantino, which runs 2½ hours and costs a rumored $100 million. The project is a study in contradictions: an ode to low-budget exploitation films that will be marketed as a mainstream tentpole, opening on some 2,500 screens.” While the trailers for non-existent pics by Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and Rob Zombie kept to plan, as one would expect of a Tarantino-involved project, his and Rodriguez’s 60-minute pics “grew in length and the budget ballooned due to shooting delays. Now Bob and Harvey Weinstein find themselves back in the big-budget territory of Cold Mountain, one of the last biggies in their Miramax days.” Grindhouse, ” in post, [was] originally slated for a September release, but wrapped late, mainly due to… Rodriguez’s personal life. The helmer… separated from his wife, who had co-produced several pics with him.” A new trailer drops on February 16; the still is from Mr. Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS.
Ken Russell's A Kitten for Hitler
Debuting London Times columnist Ken Russell ponders a kerfuffle over the UK DVD release of a sexually explicit portmanteau pic in light of his 
own experiences: “The Church of England is getting all hot under the dog collar about censorship again. The DVD release… of the erotic compilation Destricted, which includes work by Sam Taylor Wood, is apparently responsible. Presumably the C of E Synod, which plans to debate the issue of censorship in general, wants it banned… Censorship has bugged me from my very first feature film French Dressing in 1964. This innocuous seaside comedy featured the opening of a nudist beach, which only escaped the censors as it took place in a torrential rain-storm in extreme longshot… The chief censor began to haunt me. His name was John Trevelyan, and I have to say he wasn’t all bad… But with The Devils in 1971 Trevelyan did a cruel volte face. Masturbating nuns just freaked him out — and he wasn’t the only one. I was attacked on all sides, by everyone from film critics to weird religious groups and even by Warner Brothers—the very company that financed the film. Ted Ashley, CEO of the the studio, decreed that every offensive Technicolor pubic hair be cut out of the movie… You should have seen the cutting-room floor—it was knee-deep in celluloid.” Russell says Melvyn Bragg challenged him to come up with a project that simply could never be made. “I obliged. Melvyn’s verdict: “If you were to make this film, Ken, not only would it horrify the entire world, but your life would be in danger. They’d be out to hang you.” “But it’s a comedy,” I protested. To this day I’m still looking for finance. The script is called ‘A Kitten For Hitler.’ Any takers?”
The First One: NYTimes gets into the Paltrow biz
As part of their annual Oscar-themed blowout, the NYTimes Magazine is getting into the Paltrow biz, or maybe just the film biz, with Jake Paltrow directing a nine-minute black-and-white short in which he shines bright lights in the eyes of actors Cate Blanchett, Ken Watanabe, Brad Pitt, Leonard Dicaprio, Helen Mirren and Abbie Cornish on the subject of the first film that caught their fancy.
Dave's Big Cup o' Caffeine™
Does he ever sleep? Yes, David Lynch is a busy man, but not so busy he couldn’t introduce at his site the DL Signature Cup of coffee, just in time for Valentine’s Day; “A portion of the proceeds will go to the David Lynch Scholarship Fund at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies.” 12 ounces, whole bean or ground, of the organic house roast goes for $16.27, including its own tin; refill bags cost less. New mantra to replace the one you lost: Yummmmmmm.
