Movie City Indie Archive for July, 2007
Ouroboros over easy: It ain't me, babe
Over at Spout, Karina Longworth has a take on a take on a take that’s no longer there: “Late last week, a clip from Todd Haynes’ experimental Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There appeared on YouTube, and some bloggers spent the weekend debating whether or not to post it on their own sites. It’s the first upload for YouTube user adin1978, but the clip, which depicts a run-in between Dylan (played in this scene by Cate Blanchett) and Allen Ginsberg, played by comedian David Cross, bears a timecode stamp at the bottom… [B]eing that this is the first real glimpse of the film we’ve seen, there’s a also a solid chance that the clip was leaked against the filmmakers’ wishes. Yesterday, Ray Pride posted on Movie City Indie about his decision not to embed the clip, but linked to a post… at the FILMMAKER blog which allegedly did contain the clip. “For all I know this is an early viral transmission intended to stoke interest in the movie by getting run on sites like this one. So, I’m embedding it below unless I hear otherwise,” [the Filmmaker blog entry read]. As of this morning, that blog post no longer exists.”
Wim Wenders dreams of Europe
As part of the “Soul for Europe” initiative, Wim Wenders offered this speech, 3,650 words of which are reprinted at New Statesman. [It’s also the twentieth anniversary of Wings of Desire; see the Japanese trailer at the jump.] “For most Europeans, Europe has become an abstract, alien entity,” 
Wenders argues. “They are no longer sure whether they should identify with it or dissociate themselves from it, whether they feel represented or repressed. As such, the image of Europe is a contradictory one. The word “image” is useful; Europe’s image is something quite different from the picture we have of our continent. An image is also a make, a brand, the product of a long series of past images, of stories, of tradition, of propaganda, of personal experience and reputation. Our feelings about Europe’s soul relate mainly to this image. Europe needs to regain its tarnished self-esteem, in order that it can recover its soul… [W]e know that today Europe is really the opposite: a haven of human rights; a realm of freedom such as history has never seen before. There is no more social entity anywhere else in the world, no more peaceful community of peoples, no more democratic tradition. It is a source of great personal pain to me to see so many young people who have given up on Europe. When I was a boy, the idea of Europe was the thing. The friendship between Germany and France, and the even more utopian vision of a United Europe, set my imagination soaring more than anything else – and yet Europe was still far away on the horizon. I would often cycle from the Ruhr region to Amsterdam to look at the pictures of Vermeer, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. My heart pounded each time I presented my German identity card at the Dutch border. European history in the first half of the 20th century was responsible for one feeling not exactly welcome, as a young German. A few years later, while I was hitchhiking in Brittany, a farmer tried to kill himself and me by crashing his Peugeot into a tree. I was the first German he had met since the war. All that seems as far away in the past as the war itself, during which I was conceived, but which was over by the time I was born. Today, you no longer have to show identity papers when travelling across Europe, and we use the same currency. When I was a boy, that was an absolutely unbelievable prospect. Now, that dream has become a reality, and no one is moved by it any more. It seems Europe is most desirable to those that don’t have it. In recent years, as I looked towards Europe from many other countries, especially in Africa, it warmed my heart to see the positively mythical status Europe enjoys there as an earthly paradise. From afar, our con tinent appears marvellous and resplendent, but close up, it is just business as usual, dull and strangely cool – what Berliners call “coffee gone cold”. What became of the dream? How did the whole idea disappear down the drain?” [Much more, including comparisons to “the American dream,” at the link.]
To post or not to post: the clip from Todd Haynes' I'm Not There
The clip, with timecode, that began to streak across the internet late Thursday, from Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, with Cate Blanchett and David Cross (as Alan Ginsberg!), is exceptionally promising… and of sufficient quality to suspect it could have been intentionally leaked. But does that mean it’s all right to post an unauthorized YouTube clip? (A recently YouTubed copy of the trailer for Lust, Caution was pulled after a complaint from Focus Features.) Is it the same as linking to a pirate source? Cool as the clip is, I made the call not to; producer-editor Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker magazine’s blog explores why he’s embedded it. “[T]he first clip from Todd Haynes’s radically conceived Bob Dylan film biography I’m Not There has leaked all over the internet. Now, I’m a big believer in the right of the artist to edit his film in peace and quiet and with dignity. So, normally I wouldn’t link to a bootleg scene… but, the scene, which features Cate Blanchett as Dylan, is great and the movie looks incredibly cool, and for all I know this is an early viral transmission intended to stoke interest in the movie by getting run on sites like this one. So, I’m embedding it below unless I hear otherwise.” [End of quote from Filmmaker post.] Wonder if we’ll be hearing about any Monday morning phone calls….
3 Comments »Are you ready for "Off-Bollywood"?
Outlook India defines their terms of Indian indie: “One reason why this creative crop is flourishing is because the space for small films is getting better defined in Bollywood. Not only are multiplexes offering a definite avenue of release, the films themselves, once experimental, often pretentious exercises, are establishing a better connect with the audience without necessarily compromising on their independent spirit. “Opportunities for us are increasing,” says Aditya Srivastava, seen recently as Badshah Khan, Tiger Memon’s henchman on the run in Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday. “It’s the best time we have had in 20 years. The days of B-grade Bollywood are over. Now it’s either superstars like the Khans or the alternate stars,” says actor-filmmaker Rajat Kapur.” [More arcana at the link.]
Critic proof: a French take on Tarantino's latest
From the latest Cahiers du Cinema, an appreciation of Death Proof, that may or may not be inexactly translated from the French: “First comes the decision to start over the same movie twice. One could serve as a model for the other, the other as the commentary for the former, 
as if repetition sufficed to suggest a relationship. Pure hypothesis. Then come the gaps and scratches that impact the 35mm, stemming from a desire to reproduce the poor quality typical of “grindhouse” film prints. We could choose to see only fetishistic nods in them. Preferably, we will recognize a superior truth: Death Proof‘s race is first and foremost that of film stock. Chatter may abound, tires may crease, but without the stock, the two films would go limp, cut short. Machine law has replaced rhetorical construction. To speak, to drive, to film, it’s all the same high-powered bachelor car, thrust blindly on death boulevard. It’s the famous tiger’s leap into the past: film sets out from scratch, far from the digital, tongue hanging and feet to the ground. In this regard, Tarantino is the worthy continuator of two masters: one of the voice, the other of the road. Jean Eustache, as prodigious as he is when it comes to infinite monologues and who enjoyed saying: “The camera rolls, cinema makes itself.” And Monte Hellman who, at the end of Two-Lane Blacktop, set the film stock aflame after one last flying start. A film that unites the two, burning lips at the same time as the asphalt, is devoted to countdown, to combustion. Pure loss expenditure. You will notice that the longest gap happens at the end of a lapdance executed by Arlene/Butterfly for Mike, hence depriving us of its climax: the film stock rolls out pleasure, and a bit of pleasure goes up in smoke each time a photogram is missing. Like an abduction, and like a thorn in one’s desire for what will follow. Tarantino makes no secret of it, he runs on this projection. Indeed, in the interview, he does not explain Mike’s obsession otherwise: bumping into girls with his death proof car (as per the title) is his own way of reaching orgasm.”
IFC FirstTake's $3.6 million first year
Variety offers up a rare, crisp take on what’s behind IFC First Take’s releasing strategy. More than “1 million digital cable subscribers throughout the country plunking down $5.95 to call up pay-per-view showings of relatively obscure movies such as Black Sheep, a horror satire from New Zealand, The Boss of It All,” from Lars Von Trier, and the Alain Resnais-directed French romantic drama Private Fears in Public Places while they’re in limited release theatrically.” IFC keeps 60 cents of every dollar, and it’s running ahead of the company’s business plan. “Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment, says First Take, which launched in March 2006 and schedules two fresh day/date movies a month, now reaches about 40 million homes through various cable operators and DirecTV.” The sexually explicit Exterminating Angels notched 60,000 buys. “Sehring makes it clear that First Take is an outlet only for movies that figure to have a hard time drawing people into the theaters.” A spokesman for NATO turns on the sneer, the article suggests, but does not offer this assertion in quotation marks: “Theatergoers may say to themselves: If this movie is any good, why is it also on TV? Sehring answers by saying that First Take allows people around the country to see movies that will never get to theaters in their cities.”
Egoyan's internet Adoration
Atom Egoyan returns to fractured frames and shattered consciousness with Adoration, reports Playback. The C$5 million feature is set “in contemporary Toronto and to be shot on film, [an] ensemble piece [examining] how kids redefine themselves through the Internet. The drama centers on a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history. Egoyan has been doing a lot of his research in schools. “What’s interesting is that [the kids] have a different relationship to each other in a classroom than they do in this virtual stage,” he says.
“What excites me is that the script… is open enough that I can change and modify based on what we find out as we’re shooting it. That, to me, is the ideal kind of structure. That was a tricky thing, to be honest, with Where the Truth Lies. Because it’s a murder mystery, it was written in a very specific way. It was the first film I’ve ever made where the edited version of it is almost exactly the same as what the script is, because of the deployment of the narrative and the plot.”
Triad Election (2005, *** 1/2)
STEEPED IN MANY OF THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS OF THE DECADE IN HONG KONG SINCE THE 1997 HANDOVER of the former British colony, a supple parable of the absorption of Hong Kong and Macau into the Chinese dragon, the eyes-wide, visceral, fluent, violent Triad Election is one of director Johnny To’s most accomplished. (Comparisons to the French master Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influence on John Woo, are not misplaced here, either.) 
Framed by a crooked real estate deal in Guangzhou, across the border from the former colony, that resembles the erection of airport and Disneyland on Lantau Island, To fully exploits the remarkable, diverse, compacted topography of the teeming city-state in a gleaming fashion that requires no special knowledge to appreciate. The plot’s about honor, and the selection of a new gangland boss for a two-year term, and to what violent temptations the half-dozen or so characters will succumb. (Think the dogs of Abu Ghraib, bloodied currency, Pollock-spattered walls, floors, and a meat grinder.) Scenes unfold with quiet alacrity: the coldest of killers glugs from a half-pint in a sack as he circles a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse where inside, the radar of the coolest of killers is tipped as he begins to order food. (There is also a horrific image of a luxury car driving to the horizon as we can still see through the windows three passengers claw-hammering a fourth to certain death.) Once power is consolidated, the victor is ensconced in the back of a luxury vehicle: is it any chance that the newspaper he reads is fronted by a picture of Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (who retired in 2005 as this film was being shot)? The words “I believe in China” resound throughout with tremendous force, and the climactic meeting of the movie is cold and brilliant, almost as bold as the door slammed in Kay Corleone’s face. To is a genre technician of the highest order, and “Triad Election” boasts extremely fine widescreen work. [(Ray Pride.] (Now playing Chicago at the Music Box with Election; opens July 27 at Starz in Denver; August 1 at Austin’s Dobie.)
Joshua (2007, ***)
Documentarian George Ratliff’s fiction debut, Joshua, a variation on any number of bad seed-born-to-good-folk terrors, such as The Good Son and The Omen, does one thing very right in its cruel, clockwork machinations: the hiring of Benoit Debie as cinematographer. Debie’s work on Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004) and especially, Julia Loktev’s minimalist Day Night Day Night (currently in release), is stellar. While Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga do the so-simple-I-can’t-fool-a-kid turn to a whimpering T, and Jacob Kogan as the 9-year-old savant-of-slaughter and “weird son” by his own description, who boasts one of the scariest sets of bangs in recent movies and kittens up a lot against his gay, composer uncle (Dallas Roberts), and the pains inflicted on a newborn would never be allowed against a pet in an American movie, Debie’s light-flooded interiors, sly camera moves and inventively chosen focal lengths, convey moneyed Manhattan and privileged Brooklyn in a memorable mood of dread. (The editing is unpredictable as well, not in a jump-out-from-behind-the-door way, but in an unsettling one that’s a few frames sudden or elongated.) The ending is one of those rare ones that makes you reevaluate everything come before: when you realize one character’s motivation, the punchline to a song sung by a child (and written by Dave Matthews!), may make you first exclaim in surprise, and then perhaps, in frustration at the grotesquerie of the implications. Ratliff and co-writer David Gilbert have to know that the twist ending is much more than suggestive and will be more than noxious to a large percentage of its potential upscale audience. (Is this the movie’s selling point? The controversial ending you’re dying to give away?) Rockwell’s pretty terrific, despite his character’s stupidity, and Celia Weston is dreadfully good as fundamentalist grandma: she’s a fine enough actress not to mind playing a hateful character. (Much of the three-star rating I’ll attribute to Rockwell and to the look of the film.) [Ray Pride.]
I live in LA and talk to my dog all day: Catching up with the art of Mike Mills
“I like LA ’cause it’s sort of blank, I’m not super-influenced by eight million cool things happening around me like I would be in New York. It’s quieter so I can figure out what I’m thinking. Weirdly, LA helps me do more personal work,” Thumbsucker director and graphic artist Mike Mills tells Blankscreenmedia in a brief, comic Q&A. “I love time travel, do it often. I most like going back to just after World War I in Europe, visiting the Dadaists and the beginnings of what would become the Bauhuas scene. I’m not so interested in re-design[ing] anything, but I’d love to see and feel what it was like when those people were making those things, I think the art world really has developed little since all those strategies began. But what do I know about such things, I live in LA after all, and talk to my dog all day.”
There went in two by two unto Steve: iPhone's opening night
WALKING DOWN MICHIGAN AVENUE, THE CROWD AT HURON IS MOTLEY, but up close to the Apple store, lines are roped off to east and south, security guards are parsing 10 customers at a time: who gets to drop five, six hundred dollars in the pursuit of gadget-lust in the half hour to come? The primary line snakes along Huron where horse-drawn carriages stand; as always on this corner, the smell of shit lingers. Amid the flickers of passerby, something stands out: the rails of the planter in front of Apple are lower and brushed silver,
unlike the uniform black along Boul Mich, chiming with the Apple Store’s sleek facing. Black paper covers the front windows until the hour. A half-dozen bicycle cops watch from their steeds. The one in charge wears tedium well, fiddling with the bike helmet haphazard atop his cap. A kid hands out margherita pizza baked like garlic bread. Starbucks has a tent. Three microwave relays are extended skyward. Fox News, Telemundo and a Korean network reporter are at work. A CLTV reporter in purple striped shirt and purpler tie flubs a stand-up. A pair of Obama ’08 volunteers work the line with clipboards, with the best hair of the scene; baseball caps on middle-aged guys is the style du jour. Inside, sales are tiered: upstairs, the 8GB; downstairs, the 4GB. You activate the thing yourself at home, so it’s only a few seconds to swipe a card. Massed employees in black iPhone T-shirts line the balcony, cheering and applauding the tech Sherpas as they ascend, descend the glass-lined staircase. There is a special bag for the iPhone, and most buyers are taking the limit of two. Turn the bag in the falling light and the coated paper gleams.
At the top of the stairs, an Apple employee mans a tripod, taping every customer’s entrance. On the sidewalk, a young geek has climbed atop a small box to offer interviews to cable access reporters about how he’s keeping the plastic wrap on his iPhone carton, “It’s going straight to eBay!” A kibitzer offers “A Chapstick and some lint!” A line security guy sing-songs, almost an auction yodel, “Ap-pullline ends here. Ap-pull line ends here.” Tourists complain about the knot in German and Swedish and a woman exclaims in a Castilian accent, “Un cuadro extremo!” A woman camera tech says the security’s nothing compared to Dick Cheney’s earlier in the day. A cop says they’d planned for 1,500, and estimates 400 people have gone by in the first half hour. A man in khakis and pricey eyewear pauses at the “don’t walk” light. “Yes, and I bought you the eight gig one.” He’s grinning, two compact gleaming totebags at his side as chats on his OldPhone. [A suite of photos after the jump.]
Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (2007, ** 1/2)
A SPOOKY SMALL GIRL WITH WIDE, UNBLINKING, ALMOST PROTUBERANT EYES POINTS A WAND IN SPACE AND CONJURES A SPECTRAL HARE, wild and bounding, that energetically clatters and crashes across a hallowed space: more of this, please. In Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, functional as narrative passageway from the things of youth to the damaging disappointments of adulthood and responsibility for its young charges, there is much motoring of plot 
for the readers and viewers who find J. K. Rowling’s multi-billion-dollar enterprise worthy of deeper, greater and longer concentration. (An uncommonly obsessed Potterphile accompanied me to the screening, and the blanks she filled in later only reinforced the idea that this movie is not at all intended as a coherent, standalone picture for those who do not read children’s lit.)
The small girl is Evanna Lynch, an Irish nonprofessional, who, as the lore insists, badgered Rowling herself as to how ideal she would be as young “Loony” Luna Lovegood. Here is a performer who has only to lift her chin slightly to suggest not just an old soul, but an old soul that’s been stoned for eons on the finest of fumes and dandelion wine. Bonnie Wright, who has almost nothing to do as Ginny Weasley, is also a striking casting choice, but reportedly has much on her hands in the book-movie-heated conversations to come. And of course, there is the matter of Daniel Radcliiffe’s cheekbones, a weapon in their own right. Lynch’s delivery of the line “You’re just as sane as I am” approaches profundity, while “I hope there’s pudding” gathers both a child’s hope of satiety and a genial otherworldliness. Blissed out, seemingly stoned to highest heaven, her smile is bliss. (Every shot she’s in beats any frame of Helena Bonham’s ineffectual and Carter’s dispatched madwoman murderer, done in wild-maned polecat getup that resembles her husband, Tim Burton, on a day without caffeine.)
Macbeth (2006, 1/2 *)
Cheesy, flimsy Bardsploitation, Geoffrey Wright’s on-the-cheap Macbeth is a Melbourne-set modernization of the Shakespeare play, is almost laughable at how inaptly his 
actors render the verse, but there’s enough imagery and outright savagery to elevate this post-Lurhmannist enterprise above Aussie-inflected word salad. (It’s not quite the Scarface-like “Tony Macbeth” Wright seems to be aiming for, lacking time, money or talent to pull it off.) Wright doesn’t attain the energy of earlier work like Romper Stomper, but this Macbeth still splashes and slashes and writhes in lovingly superfluous fuck scenes and shoot-‘em-ups. (A four-minute newsreel from Orson Welles’ theatrical “Macbeth”; a minute-long clip of Welles’ likely reaction if he’d seen this version of the Scottish play (“Ahhhhhh…. The French champagne!”); and an interview from SBS’s “The Movie Show” with Wright at the jump.) [Ray Pride.]
"In that uncertain moment": Talking Nice Bombs with filmmaker Usama Alshaibi
NICE BOMBS IS CHICAGO FILMMAKER USAMA ALSHAIBI’S DIARY-STYLE DOCUMENTARY about the first visit he and his father and his American wife made a journey back to their native Iraq after the American occupation had begun. The last footage was shot for the film in 2004, when the conditions in Baghdad and Iraq at large were not as dangerous. The Siskel Film Center’s Barbara Scharres writes, “After an 
absence of 24 years, Chicago-based director Alshaibi, now a U.S. citizen, returns to his native Iraq with his father and his wife to make a film. American-occupied Baghdad is in part a time warp (his childhood slide is still in the yard), but the daily fear of bombs and random gunfire casts a chill over the family reunion. This remarkable inside story movingly explicates the confusion, anger, and stoicism of ordinary Iraqi citizens caught in a living hell as hope for freedom from fear rapidly wanes.” While the movie begins in a straightforward fashion, it gradually turns toward the more impressionistic style of his earlier work, culminating in a phone conversation set against a brilliant Chicago sunset with subtitles scattering around the frame. One particularly striking scene, showing a lack of sentimentality involving a dying cat, makes sophisticated critique of misplaced audience empathies. Alshaibi has been a prolific maker of shorts and videos on the Chicago scene, and has made experimental features as well, such as 2002’s Soak. Nice Bombs won a best documentary prize after opening the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival.
