Movie City Indie Archive for January, 2014

RIP Miklós Jancsó




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Teasing THE ROVER (1’24”)

Dutch WOLF OF WALL STREET indie Poster

WOLF copy

 

[By Clemens den Exter.] Click twice for largest size.

The Opening Of The First Televised Oscars (1953) 7’45”

Picturing Sundance 2014: 21 Images

Sleep is good. Seeing movies is better. Writing solid, thoughtful reviews instead of instant reactions longer than a well-wrought tweet: even better. Those will come later, but for the day, a few quick descriptions and some more glimpses of 10 days at Sundance. (All images © 2014 Ray Pride.)

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LOT

They don’t want you to park at the Library.

Abandon

Abandon Hope, All Ye…

Filmmaker Reception

At Riverhorse, Filmmaker-Journalist reception.

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Trailering 24 EXPOSURES (1’33”)

Trailer 2 for THE RAiD 2

Picturing Sundance 2014: 7 Looks

Ridge

Up the mountain from SLC and Salt Lake City toward Park City and Sundance…

Jam

Where the traffic lineup begins miles from home.

Shatter

On Main Street, one older building is now a hole in the ground, others are gutted to be rebuilt for new use, but the 2010 Banksy painting on the side of Java Cow remains, despite protective glass being shattered in the past couple of weeks.

Cooper-Waititi

Sundance Director John Cooper meets up with Taika Waititi at the Foreign Filmmakers’ lunch.

Need

And someone is always needing your ticket.
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Lance Bangs On HER As Love In The Modern Age (15’07”)

Sundance 2014 Review: Locke

Locke_still_72dpi     A man is on the run: from his life, toward his life, a mortal Locke. Writer-director Steven Knight’s second feature, demarcates one man’s pungent unwinding of notions of himself across a couple of dark hours. Coursing south on the M1 artery from Birmingham toward London, putting family and a multi-decamillion-pound concrete pour in his rearview mirror, Ivan Locke talks, Locke listens. Ivan Locke is a man of concrete who, this one day, has cracked. Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat, although the actors who play his wife, his boys, his boss, his conspirators, the lover he knew for only a night—Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Tom Holland, Bill Milner—provide urgent support. There’s fury under the calm of Hardy’s Locke. He’s a one-man Long Good Friday. (That Bob Hoskins-starring gangster classic culminates with one of the great long takes in the back seat of a car of all time.) Locke soothes down the line, you can see how he would be good at manhandling huge construction projects as he negotiates the terms of his self-orchestrated maelstrom of meltdown. He assures about traffic, about passage. “I’m in the car now, it’ll be no more than an hour-and-a-half if there’s no traffic.” (It can’t be: the film is only 85 minutes long.) As the voices punch at him in succession, perspective blurs and light sources eddy red, white, blue, yellow, guttering like phosphorescent tapers, streaks and flurries of headlamps, tail lights, red and white light elongating from opposite directions. It’s light as inchoate emotion, light as insensate commentary, a slow and persistent mood. Resemblances to the light show of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Michael Chapman’s Taxi Driver Manhattan, and a panoply of visual notions from experimental filmmakers like Jordan Belson could be amply catalogued. (Antiquated Panavision lenses add to the bloom and anamorphic splay of light sources in every shot.)

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Sundance 2014 Review: Stranger By The Lake

StrangerByTheLake_5_Christophe_Paou_Pierre_Deladonchamps.jpgClassically constructed, as rigid in its construction of suspense as any recent thriller, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac), is a masterful work, uncluttered yet lush, formally regimented, yet always surprising. (Call it full-frontal Hitchcock.) It also takes its location, its construction of sexuality, as commonplace. Guiraudie’s movie is assuredly part and parcel of queer cinema, but also of the cinema of the quotidian, of the everyday.

At a remote lakeside somewhere in France—which Guiraudie says is in the provinces of the South, where he grew up—men come each sunny summer day to sun, to cruise, to meet, the converse or to exchange gestures, and in one case, to murder. The scene is rustic, verdant, removed from the outside world. There is the sun and the sea, men in states of undress and arousal, the caress of wind on the water, the wind through the trees from rustle to rush, the gentle murmurs of those who move from shore to forest to realize their acquaintance. We could be near a city, far from care, or simply in an idealized utopia, at least until a man is drowned. (“My rural childhood surroundings undoubtedly influenced my character,” Guiraudie says.) The surroundings are the most accomplished of sinister landscaping since Martha Marcy May Marlene. He uses images of the water similarly: a shadow falls across its surface and dark green serrates atop lighter green, a thrilling geometric diagonal that represents its psychological moment perfectly.
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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