L.A. Officially Responsible For the Shittiest Film Ever Made

People often ask me the source of my deep loathing for Los Angeles. Really, it comes from a variety of sources: the Dodgers and Lakers; the sprawl; the aloofness; the psychosis of Hollywood; the fact that it is just not New York… the list goes on. And while I know we have our own repellent social hiccups in New York from time to time, “artist” Martin Creed’s latest film projects renew my earnest, eager prayers for an earthquake or plague or flood or whatever combination of quasi-biblical scourges might finally relieve this reeling nation of its most devastating cultural burden:

Former Turner Prize winner Martin Creed is putting the finishing touches to his Sick Film. For want of a gentler way of putting it, the project involves 19 separate takes of people vomiting to camera. …

Speaking from Los Angeles last week, the artist told the Guardian about his new work, the Shit Film. As the title suggests, this will involve footage of people defecating to camera. It will be shot on widescreen CinemaScope against the backdrop of an “infinity curve” – an apparently seamless background that gives the impression of there being no horizon line between the floor and the wall. It will get its first airing at the MC Gallery in Los Angeles early next month.

Despite the fact that it will be a closed set (even Creed will leave the studio for each take), he foresees more difficulties in trying to get people to perform this intensely personal act than in persuading people to throw up – although the inhabitants of LA have proved more than willing. “We haven’t long been advertising and have already secured 15 people. Perhaps that’s because LA represents the extreme edge of the world; it’s the ideal home for all the world’s drop-outs and all the world’s drop-ins.”

Indeed. Bring on the locusts.
(Photo: Martin Creed, Work No. 547)

The NYT Discovers Queens with Dito Montiel

David Carr appears to be revisiting his prolific Oscar-season standard this week, following up Monday’s Anna Wintour headscratcher with today’s pleasant walking tour of Astoria with writer/director/raconteur Dito Montiel. Some of this background appeared on The Reeler last January when Montiel headed off to Sundance to premiere his debut film, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, but what kind of jealous am I that Carr got veritable door-to-door histories of Montiel’s Queens locations:

“Give or take an ATM sign, this fruit store looks pretty much like it did when I grew up,” Mr. Montiel said. “You change the Korean to a Muslim and it’s the same.”

There is history, both personal and cinematic, every time we turn the corner.

At 32nd Street and 24th Avenue, Mr. Montiel looks up a hill.

“This is where they filmed that scene in Goodfellas where they shot the guy in the clubhouse,” he said, indicating a building partway up the slope. “One of my friends stole the lighting truck and smashed it up.”

“Great,” say Montiel’s distributors at First Look Pictures. “That’s coming out of our opening weekend grosses.”

Relatives, NYT Colleagues Call Scott a Peaceful Man

But just so we are clear: Terrorizing filmmakers, distributors and theater owners every Friday remains perfectly legal.
3 Held Overseas in Plan to Bomb New York Target (NYT)
Reviews by A.O Scott (NYT)

Devil, Details, Etc.: NYT Finesses Wintour with the David Carr Treatment

Lest The Gray Lady lose pace in the Devil Wears Prada Redundancy Orgy, Reeler legend David Carr today delivers the latest observation that “although the devil resides in the details, the broad strokes resonate” when it comes to the film’s thinly veiled treatment of Vogue editor Anna Wintour:

A funny thing happened on the way to Ms. Wintour’s cinematic impalement: she not only survives, but her place in the world is curiously ennobled. The movie, a more complex story than the book, tells a cautionary tale about the sacrifices that everyone — big and little, boss and worker — makes to get to or stay on top. But at its heart, the movie is paean to the transformative powers of fashion.

Anne Hathaway plays the schlubby assistant who succumbs to the allure of the fashion closet of the magazine, like Cinderella with a lot more slippers to choose from.

And in spite of what you see in the movies, Ms. Wintour has lots of friends. A brief call to Vogue about this column in the works brought a hail of phone calls from people with names like Harvey and Oscar. To a person, they say that she is nothing like the cartoon of an editor in the movie, that with Ms. Wintour, it is always about the work.

And to the third or fourth person, they say, “Man, where have I read this before?”

Lloyd Grove Exclusive: Universal Chairman Says 'Miami Vice' Does Not Suck

You know me: I am rarely inclined to allow the last word on all matters cinematic to anyone but Roger Friedman. When Fox’s gossiptard revealed word on the playground last month saying Michael Mann’s upcoming Miami Vice was “a dud, and a major one at that,” that was pretty much all the advice I needed to stay away.
Alas, there is one man in New York with the high-voltage veto power to supersede Friedman when the chips are down. Of course I am referring to film festival dessert victim and only-occasionally-credulous Daily News gossip Lloyd Grove, who writes today that Universal chairman Marc Shmuger (above) has at last gotten to “G” in his trip through the damage-contRolodex:

“All of us agree this is a brilliant movie from the first frame to the last — a great Michael Mann movie,” Shmuger bravely insisted. “It’s definitely opening on time, and we’ll be screening the final version all next week.” …

And Shmuger defended Mann’s maddening post-production “process” — screening the film at least once a day, then obsessively adding and subtracting dialogue, pauses and even frames, then redoing all the changes in what I hear is a desperate effort to fix the unfixable.

“Michael Mann’s process is exhausting, it is intense, and some people are not up to the challenge,” Shmuger said. “Either they keep up with him or they fall by the wayside. It creates some raw feelings along the way.”

And not least among Universal’s accountants, who are walking especially gingerly after an official budget overrun of what Shmuger pegs around $15 million (previous reports–including Friedman’s–had the original $120 million cost ballooning as high as $180 million). I should have known to count on Grove for the real front-office spin, and I only hope he can pass along some of the chatter between Shmuger and the next name on his cold-call list: Miami-based Ignore Magazine, which noted (via Nikki Finke) that “Miami’s citizens are being forced to gulp down his deplorable, unneeded revision. Sorry Michael Mann, nobody wants to see this movie,” before reimagining a cast headlining Johnny Knoxville and Marlon Wayans. At least Uni could cut the cost in half–maybe even by three-quarters if Shmuger could persuade Keenan to write and direct.

'Sherrybaby' Czechs Out With Karlovy Vary's Top Prize

Kudos to native New Jerseyan and NYU film school alum Laurie Collyer (right), whose tiny indie Sherrybaby claimed the top prize at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The Czech fest’s jury also awarded its best actress hardware to Collyer’s excellent star Maggie Gyllenhaal, who brandishes her tits and chops in virtually equal measure as a drug addict struggling to stay straight and win back her young daughter after being released from prison.
Variety reports that Sherrybaby is the first American film to win Karlovy Vary outright, while the BBC notes that Collyer’s Crystal Globe Award arrives with $20,000 cash stuffed in the base (“Fucking cheapskates,” Dawn Hudson snarled over her Blackberry while waiting in the check-out line Sunday at Target). IFC opens Sherrybaby in theaters Aug. 25 as part of a distribution arrangement with Netflix (which will release the film on DVD Nov. 7).
(Photo: Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary)

Screening Gotham: July 7-9, 2006

A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–You can come at me 1,000 different ways with your World Cup hype and your dorky protestations about why soccer is sooooooo much better than baseball or any other sport where players actually score, but face it: When the tournament winds down this weekend and gets shoved back into America’s cultural attic for the next four years like a recurring white-elephant gift at Christmas, you’ll be glad to get back to normal life. Before you have to go cold turkey, however, you might as well check out Paul Crowder and John Dower’s Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, an admittedly breezy, entertaining glimpse at the soccer team that won the city’s heart (and a league championship) in 1977. I stand by my Tribeca endorsement (which you can read here), even if the game itself plunges me into catatonia.
–Not that her career ended after 1981–far from it, in fact–but nobody would dispute that Karen Allen scored the role of a lifetime as Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark. As Indiana Jones’s hard-charging ex, Allen stole more than a few scenes, including a drinking contest amounting to one of the best screen entrances of the ’80s. Now the Paris Theater has skedded a pair of Raiders screenings at 10 tonight and Saturday, and Allen will drop in for Q&A’s following both. Honestly, I would be more interested in knowing why she let James Toback squeeze her into such a small role in When Will I Be Loved, but that Paris crowd can get violent when you veer off-topic.
–I do not have a lot to say about this that you cannot just deduce from five words: The Ed Wood Film Festival. A color print of Plan 9 From Outer Space is the main event, with Plan 9 survivor Conrad Brooks in attendance. And it gets better–or something–from there: A rare shorts program includes Wood commercials and footage of the cross-dressing trash-film icon modeling his famous angora sweater and fishnet stockings. Whatever–I would take this terror over the World Cup any day.

'Kill Your Idols': Almost-There NYC Rock Doc Finally Lands Theatrical Run

Something interesting happened to filmmaker S.A. Crary on his way to distributing Kill Your Idols, his new documentary about the heritage of New York’s No Wave rock scene–namely, four years.

Idols then and now: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (featuring Lydia Lunch, center) and Liars frontman Angus Andrews (Photo left: Godlis; photo right: Benetta Cucci)
Begun in 2002 with a focus on the city’s Bands of the Moment (Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, A.R.E. Weapons, Black Dice et. al.), Crary soon expanded his scope to include the predecessors (Sonic Youth, Teenage Jesus, Swans et. al.) the younger artists had referenced almost unanimously. A do-it-yourself case study in every way (Crary produced, directed, shot and edited), Kill Your Idols eventually landed 20 festival berths, claiming the Best New York Documentary following its Tribeca premiere in 2004. More than two years later, the film arrives at Cinema Village like an artifact–not dissimilar to Amos Poe’s Blank Generation or Derek Burbidge’s Urgh! A Music War in its timelessness, but also, perhaps by defintition, in thrall to the same derived nostalgia that its contemporary subjects suffer for better or worse.
In the best cases, performance videos of Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs encapsulize the resurgence of full-throated clang and clamor that would disappear with each band’s eventual flights from New York (the former to Berlin, the latter to Los Angeles). Crary frames the scene as a moment, reflecting its fragility even as the brash, bitter A.R.E. Weapons and the idealistic Gogol Bordello all but take that moment and its attendant buzz for granted. Interviews with New York legends Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay, Michael Gira, Glenn Branca and Thurston Moore emphasize this brittleness to varying degrees. Lindsay’s droll acknowledgment that No Wavers “didn’t have a whole industry selling us back to ourselves” represents the most resonant truth to be had among an aging generation of musicians as inclined to express their influence as they are to dismiss the bands they touched. Lunch in particular cannot abide the thought of another angular New York rock ensemble finding mainstream success, but the only alternative she implies is an even less-inspired imitation of the No Wave ethos: Innovate on the fringe, burn out early and finally achieve wide acclaim 25 years after your prime.
Crary avoids challenging these philosophical ruptures, instead choosing a surprisingly distant objectivity that forgoes the insights of critics, record label executives or the potential fireworks of an old-NY/new-NY face-to-face debate. (The director is on the record as wanting to sidestep didacticism, but the cultural read feels incomplete without, say, Seymour Stein or that fucker Bob Christgau’s grains of salt.) Kill Your Idols also broaches the popularity of ‘zines among the No Wave crowd, but it notably omits any reference at all to the Internet culture that helped enable present-day New York bands to become phenomena in their own time. The film literally stops in spring 2003, with the MySpace/iTunes revolutions in their infancies and Rolling Stone somehow still perceived as the omniscient cultural tastemaker it hasn’t been since the early to mid-1980s.
But even if the film feels unfinished, it does retain fleeting senses of the here-and-now shellshock that followed early Liars and Black Dice performances–those explosive noise-dance interludes you knew you had heard before but which outmuscled your cynicism nevertheless. Kill Your Idols externalizes this duality without adequately exploring its dynamics. Still, as a primer, it exceeds what little documentation we had of early ’00s squawk, and God knows old news is better than unrecorded history.

Sweet Keanu, Scowling Hawke: 'Scanner Darkly' Takes Lincoln Center

The Reeler visited the Walter Reade Theater last night to see what there was to see before a special screening of Richard Linklater’s animated sci-fi yak-a-thon A Scanner Darkly. The fanboys were out in force–or at least in the stand-by line (“I dunno,” said the video game player to the guy in the University of Texas shirt, discussing previous Philip K. Dick screen adaptations. “They screwed up all the other ones!”)–and the Julliard summer camp crowd summoned a chorus of shrieks to announce the arrival Scanner star Keanu Reeves. Perhaps practicing an act of karma to compensate for Ethan Hawke’s own glowering entrance, Reeves dutifully did his press and sweetly joined the kids for an impromptu autograph and photo session.

Clearly over The Lake House, Keanu Reeves’ adoring fans meet their hero Wednesday evening at the Walter Reade Theater (Photos: STV)
On the depressing side of things, Robert Downey Jr.’s appearance elicited more than one “Who?” among the Tiger Beat set, and Linklater himself was a no-show, apparently having experienced a delayed flight out of Austin. I was informed he would be on hand for the post-screening Q&A–a fairly inconvenient circumstance considering A) I did not have a ticket for the screening, and B) you could not pay me to sit through Scanner again (or at least the 20 minutes I endured before walking out the first time) anyway. My heart ached at the reality of hard questions that would forever remain unasked and unanswered, but a Frappucino and a pleasant walk home pretty much assuaged all that.
So thus passes The Reeler’s triumphant coverage of A Scanner Darkly‘s incursion into New York. I could not be prouder.

Macy's Day Parade: One For Them, Two For Him

Coming Soon’s Ed Douglas is hitting the William H. Macy beat kind of hard today, ostensibly touching base about Edmond, the actor’s aggro plunge into the New York underworld and his latest collaboration with David Mamet. I will eventually bring you my own impressions of that, but Douglas also features a few pre-IMDB scoops about Macy’s intriguing hyphenate future:

“This coming fall, I’m going to direct a film called ‘Keep Coming Back,'” he told us to our amazement when asked if there’s anything he hadn’t done that he’d like to do. “It stars Salma Hayek, but she’s the only name I can name. I’ve got more probably cast, but I can’t say it. So that’s my directorial feature debut. I directed a little film for HBO about 100 years ago, but that was shorter with about a million-dollar budget. This is a real movie, it’s an indie.” …

He also was just as excited about the fact that he is producing his first movie. “It’s not a done deal yet, but we’ve raised a whole bunch of money,” he told us. “It’s the first one I’ve ever produced myself, along with [director] Steven Schachter, he and I wrote it, it’s called ‘The Deal,’ and it’s a romantic comedy with me and Lisa Kudrow, based on Peter Lefcourt’s book, a very funny book, it’s just hysterical. I produced that and that’s a big new step in my career.”

I know what you are thinking: What deal did Macy and Satan consummate that his new babies might thrive? It is a Disney movie called Wild Hogs, co-starring John Travolta, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence as midlife-crisis-afflicted Harley riders entangled with an insidious biker gang. “Hilarity ensues,” Macy actually tells Douglas, all but wincing a hole through the telephone diaphragm. Taking one for the team clearly has never been more painful.

Independence Day: Motherfucker Doc Wraps at Last

The Reeler spent the wee hours of Independence Day at Eugene, where New York’s infamous Motherfucker party left a few thousand club kids deafened, drunken and debauched as the sun rose July 4th. Not a big clubgoer myself, the prospect of attending Motherfucker terrified me: I am fashion illiterate, more than a bit claustrophobic and I dance like DMX drives. But knowing that Monday would be my last shot to catch filmmaker David Casey and his crew at work on their upcoming Motherfucker documentary, I shook off my dread and, for once, joined the crowd. Literally.

Motherfucker: A Movie director David Casey (left) grills party icons Miranda Moondust and Amanda Lepore at Monday’s party (Photos: STV)
“I went to my first Motherfucker in years on Labor Day (2005), just to feel it out,” said Casey, who had more regularly haunted the holiday-centric party when it launched in 2000. “It was like, ‘This makes so much sense.’ I can talk about everything in New York right now: We can talk about post-9/11 music; this party itself; we can talk about the nightlife industry and how it’s kind of under attack right now; we can talk about all of the relevant bands that have played and the fact that the four producers who put this on are literally tastemakers. They always choose the right acts.”
By “the four producers,” Casey means Johnny T, Justine D, Michael T and Georgie Seville–an intrepid New York society supergroup whose rock-and-roll enterprise has showcased the New York Dolls, The Rapture, !!! and Bloc Party among others. The surprise act Monday night was The Futureheads, another “right act” that Casey said represents an evolved and closely observed symbioses between band and listener, DJ and dancer, host and guest.
The director noted the phenomena early in the production phase of what was supposed to be a multi-tentacled doc about the current NYC rock scene. It left such an impression that he scrapped the other stories and approached the organizers about shifting the focus exclusively to Motherfucker. Casey had their blessings after a few meetings, and he launched production with an eight-person crew during the New Year’s 2006 event at the Avalon.

Read the full article »

Harris Brings Doc Trilogy to BAM with NYC Premiere of 'Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela'

Do not quote me on this, but I am pretty sure that the Bronx’s Paulding Avenue is the first New York street to have a cinematic trilogy named after it. Credit filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, the native New Yorker whose Vintage: Families of Value, That’s My Face and latest work Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela explore his personal and family history during journeys to four continents–experiences centered in the Bronx household where he grew up in the ’70s alongside a thriving community of pan-African revolutionaries. Comprising Super 8 and video footage as well as photographs culled from generations’ worth of archives, the films this week screen together for the first time at BAM.

Tshepo Clement Madibeng portrays South African exile (and the filmmaker’s stepfather) B. Pule Leinaeng in Thomas Allen Harris’s latest film, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (Photo: Chimpanzee Productions)
The trilogy is anchored mostly in the documentary format, with the conspicuous experimental dashes of Vintage (about a trio of black families with gay siblings, including Harris and his brother Lyle) and That’s My Face (Harris’s endlessly fascinating quest to reconcile spirituality and black cultural identity) finally giving way to the exquisite dramatic sequences interlacing Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela. The latter film examines Harris’s relationship with his stepfather Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, who fled the South African village of Bloemfontein with 11 colleagues in 1960 to generate momentum for the fledgling anti-apartheid movement. Exile brought Leinaeng to New York, where he met and eventually married Harris’s mother (and perhaps his favorite interview subject) Rudean. In keeping with the personal narratives of his earlier films, Harris takes the occasion of Leinaeng’s death to examine his ambivalence about their tumultuous relationship.
But it is the carefully cultivated fusion of flashbacks and interviews featuring the surviving “disciples” that signals the director’s most accomplished creative triumph to date. “With each of my films, I kind of see them as an art project that are designed to activate a community in the course of the making of the film,” Harris told The Reeler. “What I really wanted to with this film Twelve Disciples was not just make it a historical documentary, but I also really wanted to activate a young community in Bloemfontein that had no idea who these guys were. So I basically got these non-actors and I brought them in touch with these older guys, and we set on this journey together. I think that’s part of why they come across; these young people who are in the film, you ask them when the struggle began in South Africa, and they say 1976.* And here these guys were neighbors with some of the older disciples. So I think it was a real transformational period for them as well.”
The archival footage and pictures threading Harris’s previous films reappear in Twelve Disciples, provoking viewers of the trilogy to reimagine the moments and what they reveal about the people and places in the frame. As such, the grainy cutaways represent a sort of interactive discovery process. The third time viewing a photograph of Rudean Leinaeng and her sons or the the third glimpse at a Paulding Avenue birthday party is not messy overlap; rather, it is Harris’s entreaty to join him in reconsidering what he knows.
“Twelve Disciples didn’t really start until (Leinaeng’s) funeral,” Harris said. “And at that point, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I saw him for the first time as an adult. But at that time, the other two films were kind of done, and I feel like I grew so much in the making of Twelve Disciples that it allowed me to see the footage in a whole different way. Everything is seen differently; it’s used differently. I’m a different filmmaker each time I aproach that material.”
As such, screening the trilogy together is more than a smart move on BAM’s part–it is sort of essential That’s My Face had screened there previously in 2001, after Harris premiered the film to accolades at the Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin and Toronto film festivals. Twelve Disciples has made the festival rounds itself since last fall, and Harris, who is now based upstate, will drop in tonight for a Q&A following the 6:50 screening.
Meanwhile, the experience of narrative filmmaking in Twelve Disciples has Harris developing a handful of new scripts. But he is not ruling out a Paulding Avenue Quartet. “Everywhere I’ve been showing the film, they keep telling me I need to make a film about my mom,” he told me. “I think the other films would be different if I continued making films about my family, which I intend to do–maybe as something between the narrative projects. I just feel like when you’re working with narative you’re thinking about the marketplace so much. You can’t avoid it. But these other films, they’re so pure, you know? I like to take as long as I need to take to finish them, and they aren’t corrupted. They’re documents–testaments and memoirs in a way, but more visual, poetic memoirs.”
* In Soweto in 1976, a series of protests and riots against the apartheid regime of South Africa left hundreds dead and galvanized the anti-apartheid movement around the world.

Screening Gotham–'Yay Independence!' Edition: July 3-4, 2006

A few of New York’s worthwhile cinematic happenings celebrating freedom, booze and sulfurous, sparkling conflagrations over the next 36 hours:
—Rooftop Films plans its annual Fourth of July extravaganza in Manhattan this year, with the Fun with the Founding Fathers program promising all the subversive yuks you can stand (along with a little more grave documentary short, Night Visions), live music by The Double and Woodpecker, and a view of East River fireworks at 9 p.m. Check Rooftop’s site for the relatively arcane attendance specifics (“All audience members must be at the venue by 5PM. The matter is out of our control, and if you are late, the NYPD will not let you past their barricade.”), and bring an umbrella–organizers pledge that no midsummer monsoon will derail this show. And with short classics like Washington (above) and Preacher with an Unknown God unspooling, you cannot blame them.
–The always-pleasing Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series follows up its puppet-film mini-festival tonight with a doc double feature: the NYC premiere of music biography Billy Childish is Dead and the East Coast premiere of the Hunter-Thompson’s-ashes-getting-blown-out-of-a-cannon chronicle When I Die. Does it get more American than that? Well… probably. But that is not the point.
–If suffocating heat and humidity is your thing, try tonight’s outdoor screening of Robert Altman’s Korean War laffer M*A*S*H in Bryant Park. Assuming you survive, catch me back here Wednesday with a preview of Thomas Allen Harris’s Paulding Avenue Trilogy engagement at BAM and (God willing) a surprise or two from the holiday party scene. Until then, be safe and have fun, preferably at the same time.

Stone Steals Show From Waxman in NYT's Weekend Movie Binge

While I admit Sharon Waxman is kind of hot when she indulges her lifestyle-reporting fetish (especially twice in four days), nothing is really sexier than one of her good old-fashioned Today-In-Box-Office-Calamity stories. And in today’s long-overdue Summer ’06 survey, the mood is upbeat and the figures are encouraging: Revenues and attendance exceed levels achieved by this time last year, reflecting a develeopment and marketing atmospshere in which “Hollywood is trying harder.”
Perhaps reflecting the success of blockbuster sequels and franchise revivals, Waxman indicates a studio climate equally devoted to rehashing last year’s stale, obvious platitudes:

With young men becoming less reliable, finding a broader audience is necessary, some say in Hollywood. Jeff Blake, vice chairman for Sony Pictures Entertainment, said: “I think for a long while everyone was dining on the fact that young males were pretty much available every single weekend. It’s a matter of which film they choose.

“It was almost as if we lived in a world where this group would go to the multiplex every week and choose what they see. Now they don’t necessarily go to the multiplex every week, and we have to convince them we have something exciting for them to see.”

Mr. Blake pointed out that excitement among moviegoers was “infectious,” as people drawn to theaters by one film are often snared by an attractive trailer for another.

“When you make movies people want to see, they flock to them,” said Bruce Snyder, president for distribution for Fox. “And you have to speak about one movie at a time. That’s so key.”

So key. Give that man a bonus. And Waxman, too, while you are at it.
Anyhow, do not fret: The Times featured actual news yesterday as well. Take David Halbfinger’s piece exploring the dynamics of Oliver Stone’s upcoming World Trade Center–a sober, not-patronizing glimpse behind the scenes that reveals the first inkling (to me, anyhow) of a big-budget 9/11 film that might be worth viewing:

There are many people of course who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Mr. Stone’s more controversial films, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon chief among them. But in several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive, Mr. Stone spoke as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him.

“I stopped,” he says simply. “I stopped.”

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on Sept. 11. “It seems to me that the event was mythologized by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain,” he says. “And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.”

“We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them,” he continues. “How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could’ve fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out.”

Halbfinger also has a brief insight into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s continued involvement after last year’s Tribeca meltdown, a closer look at the Hollywood-style indignities screenwriter Andrea Berloff sought to avoid (despite their roots in stranger-than-fiction factuality) and, finally, a self-effacing kicker that even I, a tried-and-true skeptic, have a hard time disbelieving:

“It’s not about the World Trade Center, really. It’s about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive,” Mr. Stone says. “I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.

“I hope the movie does well,” he adds, “even if they say ‘in spite of Oliver Stone.’ “

Oh, all right, Ollie. Just for leaving out “the DNA of our times,” I’ll go.
(Photo: Francois Duhamel/Paramount Pictures)

'Anne Hathaway Fucking': The Joys of Discovering The Reeler, Part II

In the spirit of malaise ceremony attending this build-up to Independence Day, I thought it might be worth once again exploring the strange, innovative ways people find The Reeler. This is the second installment in an ongoing series reveling in the magic of Google and the sheer, perverse depravity of my readers.
As always, heavy on the sic:
–free film footage of anne hathaway fucking
–is actress julianne margulies jewish
–song because his dad is gone somwhere smoking crack down in and out of lockdown
–short bus the sex
–armond white lisa schwarzbaum cunt
–how the peguins will be affected by the climate change
–harry callahan grandma
–dumping association erase close errata literature glass water pink
–how to get diarah smell out of carpet
–the de vinci code is shit
–shitty cruises
–bounty hunter handcuffs her have to gag your pretty mouth
–Celebrities Who’ve Porked Up
–with more trailers around than there are starbucks any locals complaining you be your metrocard
–Heath Ledger interview he did in 1999
–1955 drum majorette photo
–Chelsea Clinton nude
–top 10 things you can’t say since brokeback mountain
–top ten hand lotions
–guy fucking himself
–have lunch
–Keira Knightly a transexual
I have said it before, but can only repeat it: You cannot–and would not even want to–make this stuff up.
RELATED: ‘Famke Janssen Fucking’: The Joys of Discovering The Reeler, Part I (June 1, 2006)