Archive for February, 2005
Monday, February 28th, 2005
Composer Ben Neill and media artist Bill Jones will premiere a new interactive movie called Palladio at Symphony Space in NYC on March 4 and 5 as part of its Thalia Music series.
“Based on the 1998 novel Palladio by New York Times Magazine writer Jonathan Dee, Neill and Jones’s new media performance work tells the story of an unlikely romantic triangle set against the backdrop of the often conflicting worlds of music, art and advertising.
“Palladio‘s video component, projected onto a movie theater screen, includes commercial samples seamlessly merged with live-action footage as the lead characters played by [Mikel Rouse, a noted composer/performer], Zoe Lister-Jones, [a recent graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London], and Cort Garretson, [a New York-based actor] are digitally transported into an environment created from the ads portrayed in the story.
Ben Neill, who I know from the early ’90s when he was music curator at The Kitchen and I was media curator, is currently a partner (with producer Eric Calvi) in the New York commercial house Green Beet Productions.
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Sunday, February 27th, 2005
From an interesting article in Forbes.com:
“Later [today], when Clint Eastwood faces off against Martin Scorsese in the battle for the Academy Award for best director, they could be fighting over much more than a gold statue. Life itself could be at stake. A study by a University of Toronto physician suggests that winning an Oscar can extend a director’s life-span dramatically.
In fact, Oscar-winning directors live about two years longer than those who were just nominated, the result of a 24% decrease in the risk of death over their lifetimes. Those with multiple wins saw their average risk of death decrease 48% compared to those with only one statuette.
The results — a repeat of similar findings in actors — are thought to provide a powerful window into the ways that success is good for us. Donald Redelmeier, a researcher at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, saw in Oscar winners a perfect laboratory for helping to explain 20-year-old data that show that success has a powerful influence on a person’s health.”
There is an interesting anomaly in this research however:
“Redelmeier and hs colleagues tried the same technique with screenwriters, and what they found shocked them. ‘The screenwriters are a real anomaly,’ Redelmeier says. ‘Generally, they live shorter lives and their survival is not improved by winning an Oscar.’
In fact, statistically speaking, Oscar-winning writers actually die on average 3.6 years sooner their peers who are just nominated. Redelmeier offers two possible explanations. First, professional prestige has less of a direct impact on screenwriter’s careers than it does on actors and directors. After all, screenplays are read anonymously and who remembers who actually wrote Driving Miss Daisy? Another possible factor? Unhealthy lifestyles. Award-winning actors and directors wind up with entourages of personal trainers and nutritionists who make sure they take care of themselves. Writers don’t. Indeed, the financial security brought on by winning an Oscar may even allow them to indulge more deeply in their unhealthy habits.
‘It’s very difficult to sort out the writers because their lives are lived in such obscurity,’ he says.”
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Saturday, February 26th, 2005
The 2005 Independent Spirit Awards were announced this afternoon at the IFP Los Angeles’s annual ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica. For the major awards, it was a virtual sweep by Sideways — Alexander Payne’s smart comedy won six prizes. Other winners, listed below, include Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Mean Creek, the filmmaker Jem Cohen, the producer Gina Kwon, and doc filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman.
Here are the winners:
Best Picture
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Producer: Michael London
Best Director
Alexander Payne
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Best Screenplay
Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Best First Feature
Garden State (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Director: Zach Braff
Producers: Pamela Abdy, Gary Gilbert, Dan Halsted, Richard Klubeck
Best First Screenplay
Joshua Marston
Maria Full of Grace (HBO Films/Fine Line Features)
John Cassavetes Award
(For the Best Feature made for under $500,000)
Mean Creek (Paramount Classics)
Writer/Director: Jacob Aaron Estes
Producers: Susan Johnson, Rick Rosenthal, Hagai Shaham
Best Debut Performance*
Rodrigo de la Serna
The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features)
*Actors making their first appearance in a feature film
Best Supporting Female
Virginia Madsen
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Best Supporting Male
Thomas Haden Church
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Best Female Lead
Catalina Sandino Moreno
Maria Full of Grace (HBO Films/Fine Line Features)
Best Male Lead
Paul Giamatti
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Best Cinematography
Eric Gautier
The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features)
Best Foreign Film
The Sea Inside (Fine Line Features)
Director: Alejandro Amenabar
Best Documentary
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC Films)
Directors: Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky
Gina Kwon, producer of Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Motel, received the eighth annual Bravo/American Express Producers Award, which honors producers who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrate the creativity, tenacity, and vision required to produce quality independent films. The winner of the Producers Award received an unrestricted grant of $20,000 funded by Bravo and American Express.
Jem Cohen, director of Chain, won the eleventh annual Turning Leaf Someone To Watch Award, a $20,000 grant created to honor a director of singular vision who … Read the rest
Friday, February 25th, 2005
A new European spot for Volkswagen’s Golf GTI begins with one of the most cherished sequences in film history: Gene Kelly’s song-and-dance performance of the title song in his and Stanley Donen’s 1952 masterpiece Singin’ in the Rain. Then, thanks to some astonishing CGI work, Kelly updates his routine. It’s not the first time digitally-aided dancing has been shown off in spots — Spike Jonze did it a few years ago with a Levi’s commercial and there are several others currently in rotation on the networks — but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone “remix” a classic. I still can’t decide if I love it or hate it, but I’ve watched it countless times. Check it out here.
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Friday, February 25th, 2005
“When it comes to truthful depictions of sex and relationships, where are progressive moviemakers going?”
Nerve.com addresses this question in a special Film Issue, online through March 7.
Included in the issue are the following articles/essays:
Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks, or Sex in Movies for People Who Have Sex
by Jonathan Lethem
A manifesto for the new adult cinema.
“I’m calling for filmic moments that lure and confuse me the way sex can, at its best. I don’t want to choose between scrupulous, grainy, documentary realism (or the new and unsavory hi-definition nudity I’ve been warned about) and fantasy, imagination, exaggeration, cartoons — I want them both…C’mon, show me something the mention of which will make my head turn at a dinner party thirty years from now.”
Lights, Camera, Lots of Action
by Harriette Yahr
A report from this year’s sex-obsessed Sundance Film Festival.
“The same week a SpongeBob video was castigated as gay propaganda and PBS pulled a children’s program featuring a lesbian couple selling maple syrup, the Sundance Film Festival unspooled a slate of films that showed no fear.”
Suppressed Desires
by Bruce LaBruce
Five lost films that addressed taboos — and paid the price.
A reconsideration of Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Luna; Pasolini’s Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom, from a script by Roland Barthes and Sergio Citti; Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains; Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie; and Paul Morrissey’s Forty Deuce.
.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
I attend the Rotterdam Film Festival every year, and I’ve taken that step many times… up a few inches from the street to the plaza that the Pathe theater complex is on. And now this architectural fillip is celebrated at MOMA and reviewed in the New York Times.
From the review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the exhibition “Groundswell,” an architectural survey of “two decades of landscape design”:
“…the most innovative may be the Schouwburgplein (1996) in Rotterdam, a plaza by West 8 Urban Design and Landscape that draws inspiration from the eeriness of the city’s industrial waterfront. The plaza’s surface, raised slightly above the surrounding streets, is paved in a pattern of wood slats, perforated metal and heavy-duty rubber. A row of mechanical “light masts,” inspired by the massive cranes along Rotterdam’s piers, line the project’s northern edge, their muscular steel arms gliding up and down like oil pumps.
By raising the plaza just above street level, the designers enabled light to filter down into levels of parking underneath the plaza — a further reminder that you are not on solid ground. But the plaza is also a stage for reflecting on Rotterdam’s gritty history. A major port in World War II, the city was blasted by British and American bombers during the German occupation. Its industrial piers, modern housing blocks and generic shopping strips are emblematic of the postwar city.”
.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
Q Television, the subscription cable net “run by and programmed for an audience that identifies it[self] as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and … straight,” has come aboard as a majority financier in John Cameron Mitchell’s (Hedwig & the Angry Inch) controversial new feature Shortbus, reports Variety.
Previously known as the Sex Film Project, Shortbus is described as “‘an exploration of sexuality, art and music’ [that] follows seven characters as they navigate sex and love in modern-day Gotham.” The film starts production May 9 with Howard Gertler and Tim Perell producing through their NY-based company Process Productions.
“The movie takes place after 9/11, in a city haunted by terrorism and too expensive for artists anymore. ‘Escorting is the new temp job,’ Mr. Mitchell said.
“The film takes its name from the ‘salon where the characters meet to give readings and performances, and sometimes to have public sex…’ The story features a dominatrix who lives in a ministorage unit because she can’t afford an apartment, a sex therapist who can’t have an orgasm and a gay man who feels trapped in his relationship. They attend the salon ‘to find redemption’.”
Mitchell calls the film “a love letter to New York.”
According to Variety, Q Television “will use Shortbus to brand itself as a cutting-edge, risk-taking entity.”
Fortissimo Films, which has an equity stake in the film, is selling international rights to the film, which has yet to secure distribution Stateside.
.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
The folks at Cinemaminima pointed to this fascinating clip on Errol Morris’s website. It’s from one of Morris’s “aborted projects,” series or films that for whatever reason didn’t make it off the ground. In the Quicktime stream, Donald Trump discusses Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, riffing on the lessons the film has to impart on wealth, accumulation and happiness. As Morris does, Trump becomes a poignant, contradictory and very human ambassador from the director’s now readily identifiable universe of oddball dreamers and schemers. Check out the clip for some fascinating viewing, and click back to the page in the future. Morris will soon post a clip of Mikhail Gorbachev discussing Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove!
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Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005
Kira Muratova’s The Aesthenic Syndrome
A few years ago at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, looking to kill some time, I wandered into a film by the Ukraine-based filmmaker Kira Muratova entitled Chekhov’s Motives (or, as the fest catalogue loosely translated it, Chekhov’s Motifs). When the film ended two hours later I staggered from the theater, utterly exasperated but profoundly transformed by the experience. This was immersive cinema of a kind I had not encountered before.
During the first half of the film — which is structured in two very long set pieces — a peasant woman and her son plead with the boy’s obstinate father over dinner to lend him money (for a new sweater, I think) for school. Over and over, the woman and son repeatedly berate the father, as a daughter and a baby look on. The family, seated “Last Supper”-style around a table, face the camera theatrically; the audience, in effect, fills the facing seat, silent witnesses to the plaintive nagging — for almost 45 minutes!
When the baby begins to nod out in real time at the table, finally falling asleep while struggling to keep its head upright, the audience howls with laughter, but the wife and son’s nagging don’t let up until the father is finally worn down and he loans the son money to buy the sweater.
Next, on his way to school, the young son hitches a ride from a man who offers to take him to town if he doesn’t mind making a quick pit stop at a relative’s wedding.
Quick pit stop? The second half of the film is the entire Russian Orthodox wedding, which goes on for so long — over an hour! — that, one by one, the wedding guests begin to fall asleep — mirroring much of the film’s audience, which struggles to remain awake.
In both halves of the film — loosely based on two Chekhov works, the play Tatiana Repina and the short story Difficult People — fascination gives way to exasperation and finally, tedium, but there are more than … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005
If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you’ll know that I’m really looking forward to Rick Linklater’s adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick’s best books, A Scanner Darkly. The folks at Ain’t It Cool News (which, frankly, kicked all of our asses when it comes to online coverage of Sundance) have some exclusive pics from the movie up, and now ifilm has posted a seriously cool trailer as well. To top it off, a simple Google search revealed this interesting “making of” A Scanner Darkly blog which seems to contain posts from various people involved in the movie, including Wiley Wiggins.
And with the news via Indiewire that Warner Independent has picked up Paradise Now out of Berlin, it seems that the newest of the mini-majors has some uncommonly exciting product in its pipeline.
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