Movie City Indie Archive for May, 2011

Teasing Mia Hansen-Løve’s UN AMOUR DE JEUNESSE (nudity)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HLhW39kE-4&feature=player_embedded

Christopher Borelli Profiles Cartoonist Ivan Brunetti

Chris Borelli writes a lot of swell profiles for the Chicago Tribune. I’m acquainted with cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, the subject of this piece. It’s very good, let’s start by saying that, and I’ll helicopter into the middle of an anecdote:

Ivan Brunetti is cringing.

He is a Chicago cartoonist and illustrator, swooned over by peers, beloved by his students at Columbia College, revered by a fervent cult of admirers, and coming into his own. At the moment, though, he’s cringing. He’s cringing at this story, at the picture, at what you think of him, at the nice things people say about him. He doesn’t think he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as his peers: His best friend is the celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware; another good friend is cartoonist Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”), who, like Brunetti, spent some formative years in Hyde Park. When I mention these guys, he cringes.

“Because I feel like a fraud most of the time,” he said. “I haven’t proven myself the way those guys have. I should feel lucky, right? I don’t. I’m constantly complaining. Most of my problems are caused by myself.”

One day I told him I wasn’t exactly certain when this profile would appear in the Tribune. “It’s a floater,” I said.

“Like a turd,” he replied quietly.”

Please read the rest.

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Orson Welles does a magic trick

Just. Because.

Martin Scorsese’s LETTER TO ELIA

Watch the full episode.

From an interview on the American Experience website:

Martin Scorsese: We were going to do interviews. And then it seemed like the right idea to go in a different direction.

Kent Jones: There’s a very good film to be made about Kazan as a person, as the man who started with the Group Theatre, who acted in Waiting for Lefty, who went on to revolutionize Broadway, then started the Actors’ Studio, then became a friendly witness before HUAC and suffered the consequences, then made a string of great films, changed the face of acting in theater and movies, suffered through the trauma of his first wife’s death, reinvented himself as a writer, and so on. It would be a real epic. But that felt like someone else’s idea.

Scorsese: The thing was to convey something about the relationship, and by that I mean my relationship to the films, and that meant going back to the way that I received them when I saw them as an adolescent.

Jones: And the distinction between your relationship with the films and your relationship with the man, and the way you saw the films when you were young and the way you see them now.

Scorsese: Right.

Jones: I thought that was really interesting, because it doesn’t have anything to do with film aesthetics or official history. Actually, in a sense, it does – it’s the way you receive films when you’re young and wide open to them.

Scorsese: Yes. You don’t know how it’s done or why, you just know that the picture is speaking to you and addressing something that can’t be addressed in your life, by anyone you know, because it’s private, embarrassing. You’re young and figuring out who you are in relation to everyone around you, the adult world around you, but you’re not on the adult wavelength yet.

Would Chaplin Have Sprung For Hans Zimmer? THE GREAT DICTATOR Revisited

[Via Mark Romanek and Alex Abramowicz.]

Mother… brother…

Testino On Rooney On Salander

To accompany Memorial Day weekend’s “hacked” trailer for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that mysteriously still has yet to be yanked, Lynn Hirchsberg’s February 2011 W magazine preview offers a fistful of Mario Testino photos of Mara Rooney as Über-hacker Lisbeth Salander. Article and images here.

Teasing Jackie Chan’s 100th Pic

“General director” Jackie Chan. Directed by Zhang Li.

Harto’s “Advice From the Hart”

@shelbyfero is funnier on the Twitter. But! Who’s comparing? Where did these two funny persons come from all of a sudden? Hart’s “My Drunk Kitchen” videos are something else: below, Brunch!
Read the full article »

Yeeeesh… The Return Of “Salad Fingers”

TGWTDT: “The Feel Bad Movie For Christmas”

Oh yes. Somewhere on the internet…

ADDED: Okay, if even Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly is embedding the clip, and YouTube hasn’t been asked to pull it down, here goes: a relatively high quality leak of the trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo… with suspiciously clear sound and steady image and still it’s up on YouTube hours later…

REVISED 1 JUNE 2011:

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Trailering Takashi Miike’s NINJA KIDS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4wHB9JWw5Q&feature=player_embedded

Or, “Nintama Rantoro.”

Terrence Malick Acts

“LINDSAY LOHAN – A RICHARD PHILLIPS FILM”

Bret Easton Ellis daydream. Painter turns to film. Bombastic music FTW. “What fascinates me about Lindsay are not her problems but the way she embodies an eminence on the level of a Bardot or an Ullmann,” Phillips said. “She’s a combination of the fantastic and the real, which is what makes her so magnetic. She can also bring forward an existential presence that speaks to the isolated self.” Both Persona and Contempt, he pointed out, examine those issues, and his brief psychological portrait of Lohan attempts to unite the irreconcilable differences in her divided personality.”

Sean Young’s BLADE RUNNER Polaroids




































Enhance 224 to 176.
Enhance.
Stop.
Move in, stop.
Pull out, track right, stop.
Center in, pull back.
Stop.
Track 45 right.
Stop.
Center and stop.
Enhance 34 to 36.
Pan right and pull back.
Stop.
Enhance 34 to 46.
Pull back.
Wait a minute, go right, stop.
Enhance 57 to 19.
Track 45 left.
Stop.
Enhance 15 to 23.

Give me a hard copy right there.

Here. [Via Richard Metzger.]

Movie City Indie

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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