Movie City Indie Archive for June, 2011

Happy 71, Victor Erice

Trailering Spielberg’s WAR HORSE

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The Sound Of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (9’21”)

Picturing Rodman Flender

My favorite photograph in a long summer weekend of image research and writing: photographer-editor-director Rodman Flender as spy-on-the-wall for his doc, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. Casual geekdom and casual privilege align in a hotel room: photographer photographed. Team Fiji Water! (Do not ask what is wrapped in plastic.)

[Photo Credit: Aaron Bleyaert.]

Francis Coppola’s Twitter Icon

TRUSTED.

Peter Falk Über Berlin: From WINGS OF DESIRE

Review: GENERAL ORDERS No. 9


Robert Persons’ General Orders No. 9 is an essay film at least partly about the urbanization of rural Georgia, reminiscent of Patrick Keiller’s lovingly dyspeptic but visually striking London and Robinson in Space or Terence Davies’ brooding memory musical Distant Voices, Still Lives. It’s more in that school than Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, the convenient reference point in some reviews of its New York week-long run. (The free-floating character of the narration doesn’t distill itself to the many voices of so-similar inchoate spiritual yearning in the Malick film.) Haunted beauty, a majestic trance: it’s deeply invested in what Greil Marcus called “old, weird America.” Daniel James Scott interviews Persons at Filmmaker. Of overt influences, he tells Scott, “Gosh, I’m sort of all over the place. But there were certainly a lot of films that we used to reference—a lot of Tarkovsky films, Herzog films, Chris Marker, John Grierson docs, the British Film Unit, David Lynch and Harry [Everett] Smith. There were also a number of novels and books. One in particular was this bit of naturalist writing from the 18th century, William Bartram’s Travels. He was a Philadelphia naturalist who travelled through the southeast and was really the first to write about it while drawing pictures of plants and animals. His writing is very effusive, and has a lot of sense of wonder in it. I liked the idea of someone going around recording things. And I saw my film as an updating of that in a sense.”



R.I.P. Peter Falk

Mikey and Nicky.

“The last time I trusted a dame…”

A Woman Under The Influence.

“Serpentine! Serpentine!”

“For Chrissakes, get me a good hat here.” Wings of Desire.

From Jean Genet’s The Balcony.

What Came Before The Vancouver Kissing Picture? (1’30”)

NO REFUNDS ON AUTEUR CINEMA

From Stamford, Connecticut’s Avon Theatre.

[Via Jim Emerson @jeemerson and @nextprojection. The apparent original poster is here.]


The Further Adventures Of Hannah Hart

Playing dangerous drunken stunts in the confines of her kitchen, comedienne Hannah Hart just got noticed by TIME:

“Do you really get drunk in all of your videos, or are you faking it?
“I really do get that drunk. It takes about an hour to shoot each video, so I’m actually the drunkest after it’s over. For the ice cream one, I was with my sister and her husband, and I really just let myself go. I finished the video and I remember walking over the couch and lying down. I woke up hours later with a plate of chicken nuggets on my chest and my sister leaning over me going, ‘Eat these.’ The sun had already set and everything.”

[Earlier on indie.]

Previewing Robert Kramer’s Long-Unseen MILESTONES (5’30”)

“Icarus Films, a leading distributor of documentary films since 1978, is proud to have acquired two landmark films by the radical leftist filmmaker Robert Kramer. A founder of the storied 1960s Newsreel collective, Kramer (1939-1999) traveled through Latin America and Vietnam, and later lived for many years in France, where he enjoyed his greatest appreciation as a filmmaker. The subject of 2009 retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives and Harvard Film Archive, Kramer’s concerns about the intersection between the personal and political take viewers to the 1960s and 70s with vivid intimacy.”

MILESTONES (1975, color, 195 minutes, by Robert Kramer and John Douglas) is a lilting, free-associative masterpiece that follows dozens of characters–including hippies, farmers, immigrants, Native Americans, and political activists–as they try to reconcile their ideals with the realities of American life. In intimate discussions of subjects from communal living to parenting, pregnancy to family, Vietnam to Cuba, city life to country life, and the workplace to the bedroom, the film’s diverse protagonists negotiate jealousies, relationships, and the logistical challenges of their rapidly changing world. Shot in vivid color 16mm, using innovative layered sound design and editing techniques as well as slides and archival footage, Milestones tracks its subjects through scripted and unscripted moments. It follows them as they share their emotions and dreams, their idealism and disillusionments, their triumphs and defeats of the past, as well as the possibilities for the future.”

Trailering QUICK (퀵)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X36QkuVHCuc&feature=player_embedded

The Fast and the Over-reacting.

Scottish Summer Weather: Chance Of Heil

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LIVt9RFvE4&feature=player_embedded

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Trailering Fred Schepisi’s THE EYE OF THE STORM

It is about time. One of the undersung modern masters of widescreen composition and cutting has almost finished a new film. Let’s hope it’s a corker.

The non-embeddable trailer is here.

Plus: Schepisi on the characters from Patrick White’s epic Aussie novel, played by Geoffrey Rush, Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Colin Friels and Dustin Clare. The release down under is set for September 8.

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