Movie City Indie Archive for November, 2007

Dept. of Ouch: a festival's notice on a filmmaker

2054968274_d26aec4698_m.jpgOn Saturday at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the 48th edition, Diego Luna showed his directorial debut JC Chavez, a documentary about a Mexican boxer, and conducted an acting-directing-producing masterclass. After the departure of he and his producing partner (with Gael Garcia Bernal), Pablo Cruz, the festival issued a notice to journalists and also placed in public areas this notice, with bold red borders:
ANNOUNCEMENT:
CANCELLATION OF SCREENING OF THE FILM JC CHAVEZ, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH, 12.00, FRIDA LIAPPA
We regret to inform you that today’s (second) screening of the film JC CHAVEZ, directed by Diego Luna, is cancelled.
The responsibility for this regrettable decision lies with the film’s producer, Pablo Cruz, who attended this year’s Festival as a guest along with Diego Luna.
Mr. Cruz demanded to take the film print with him for a screening in London, despite the fact that he had been notified before the start of the Festival about the 2 screenings.
Despite the production company’s assurances that a BETA tape would be forwarded to us instead of the print, in order for the second screening to take place as programmed, the tape has not arrived in Thessaloniki at the moment of going to press. [Photo: Ray Pride.]

1966 interview with William Shatner on the set of "Star Trek"


Why is this so goddam charming?

Joe Swanberg talks DIY in Thessaloniki, Greece

Joe Swanberg

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Todd Haynes' back pages: Weinsteinco launches "liner notes" for I'm Not There

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Cool press release of the week: “INSPIRED BY BOB DYLAN’S FAMOUS LINER NOTES, AUDIENCES WILL RECEIVE “I’M NOT THERE: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE MOVIE” AT PARTICIPATING MOVIE THEATERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY
NEW YORK, NY (November 20, 2007) – The Weinstein Company is pleased to announce that participating movie theaters nationwide will distribute liner notes for the highly anticipated film “I’m Not There.” From acclaimed director Todd Haynes, “I’m Not There” is an unconventional journey into the life and times of Bob Dylan. Six actors portray Dylan as a series of shifting personae—from the public to the private to the fantastical—weaving together a rich and colorful portrait of this ever-elusive American icon. The film opens in select theaters across the country on Wednesday, November 21, 2007. The announcement was made today by Gary Faber, executive vice president of marketing for The Weinstein Company.
Inspired by Dylan’s famous liner notes for his classic albums, this information will provide audiences with a special introduction to Dylan. The liner notes include carefully selected excerpts of articles that will enhance the audiences’ experience of the man and his music, replicating the experience of listening to one of Dylan’s albums or seeing him in concert for the first time.
Gary Faber stated, “Preview audiences have enjoyed ‘I’m Not There’ so much that they leave the film eager to learn more about Dylan’s life and art. The articles selected for the notes will help audiences unlock some of the secrets in the film and enable them to enjoy it in a unique and special way.”

Indie is at a festival

CameramanMaybe some posting from Thessaloniki in a bit… but movies and masterclasses and interviews and the sunshine in northern Greece distract…

Serge Gainsbourg sounds like Monday morning to me

Redacted (2007, ***)

While some reactionary observers who haven’t seen Redacted have labeled Brian DePalma’s latest film with such calumnies as “arthouse snuff-porn,” there is at least the courage of his anger, which brings this rapid-fire, if indifferently written and acted, montage to a consistent boil. There are levels of staging and acting and phoniness and fear that work despite shortcomings. There are esthetic and moral qualms present in almost redacted_57894.jpgevery frame of DePalma’s fictional multimedia sketch of crimes committed in the American occupation of Iraq; his fury seethes. (It’s hard to believe a 67-year-old man—born on September 11!—who committed the dreary Black Dahlia to celluloid, made this.) The collage of elements in Redacted, like his earliest comic tracts, Greetings and Hi, Mom!, are meant to irritate; it’s ready blog-bait for those paid by conservative charities to blow hard. Yet the movie is not anti-American, it’s anti-simplification, anti-stupidity, anti-terror, anti-rape, anti-war. When his lumpen characters—admittedly caricatured—are faced with encroaching paranoia around them, their lives turn full metal Jekyll. They’re casualties of warmongering. Drawing on all manner of media he’d assembled—video diaries, European television documentaries, American TV coverage, websites, terror videos—DePalma discovered the legalities are too deep on the ground, and that he could only make his own representation of what he’d observed and collected—he couldn’t mix and match fact with fiction. This led to the spat with his financier-distributors involving a montage of photographs at the end, in which faces had to be blacked out—redacted, redux. Of course, he was also part of the 1960s generation inspired by faux-vérité like Jim McBride’s piss-take, The Diary of David Holzman (“The D.I. of David Holzman”?). There are many cross-references about the nature of representation, including the faux French documentary using slow zooms in and out with Kubrick-style classical accompaniment, a jab at the higher esthetic pretensions of the fictional crew. A character unwittingly paraphrases Godard, “24-7, the camera doesn’t lie.” (Godard observed, “Film is truth 24 frames a second.”) I’m not against some of the blunt elements either: a pacifist character named “Brix” or the most corpulent and corrupt of the characters being named “Rush”: DePalma’s satirical cards are on the table. This is the kind of fierce, focused fire-and-brimstone cacophony DePalma ought to have spent his late career making instead of the stately smear of Dahlia. Still, I’d be curious to read the reactions to Redacted of filmmakers who sweated bullets to make documentaries like War Tapes, Fragments of Iraq and Gunner Palace. I’m sure they can make their points about DePalma’s appropriation and retooling of the vocabulary of their nonfiction work as well, which would be far more telling ones than the pained groans of professional sob sisters like the too-prevalent Bill O’Reillys of the media.

Not "The Daily Show" walks the line

Another filmmaker who avoids the movies: Roy Andersson

dulevandeinne.jpgRoy Andersson, director of Songs from the Second Floor and the upcoming We, The Living is another filmmaker who shies away from movies. At CineEuropa: Do you think of the audience when you make a film? “That’s a delicate question, because you always want a large audience. But at the same time, you can’t speculate about what’s the average taste to reach the widest audience possible. I’m not fond of that. I hope that if I make a movie exactly the way I want it, even other people will like it.” Do you go to the cinemas?I make movies myself and don’t look at other films because I don’t want to have them in my head. When I was younger, I didn’t mind being inspired by others, but not nowadays. I prefer to be inspired by painting, poetry and music. I do read about other film-makers’ work and watch teasers…” We waited 25 years for Songs for the Second Floor and seven years for You, the Living. How long will we have to wait for your next project? “It will go quicker. I have so many festivals to attend and interviews to make. I will need at least a month to rest.”

Indie is in transit

50th

Phil Robinson's 4-minute history of the Writers Guild

Wag gets dogged: brucestrikes.com ceased and desisted

Vilanch ceasedanddesisted.jpgA completely convincing website got taken down today, with the pictured notice left in its stead. The content consisted of a photograph of awards-show gagster Bruce Vilanch holding a picket sign with a succession of strike slogans. (The utterly inappropriate Monica Lewinsky joke is what made the ruse so convincing.) Sample of what you’re missing: “Jane! Get me off this thing!”

DePalma on the future of now

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Over at Greencine, Sean Axmaker has an intriguing interview with Brian De Palma about Redacted. So it was constructed via the way you discovered [source material], through the video footage and video blogs you found in the Internet? “Yes, that presented the form to me. And I’m very technically savvy. I used to build computers when I was a kid and I’m very interested in the whole computer revolution. This’ll change in another couple of years. There wasn’t YouTube two or three years ago. There’s all kinds of new stuff and people are using it to express how they feel about things. They’re performers; they’re doing all kinds things and it’s interesting to see how it’s going to evolve. And I also think, certainly with digital storytelling, it’s a new way to tell narrative, to create narrative. I’ve made a lot of movies and most narrative forms have been pretty much exhausted now. They do them on television, they’ve recycled every plot and character you can imagine, so now there are whole new ways to deal with story forms that are emerging in these bits on the web.”

"Reno 911" on the picket line

[LOOK]: Woody Allen walks with the CBC through Manhattan in 1967

Movie City Indie

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon