Archive for August, 2005
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
The Film Society of Lincoln Center just announced that they’ll be hosting a “Talking About Tom Schiller” event at the Walter Reade on Sept. 6, and I am most definitely going. Schiller, son of the famous TV writer Bob Schiller (I Love Lucy, among many more), grew up in L.A. and made a documentary about Henry Miller before he was recruited by Lorne Michaels to be one of the original writers of Saturday Night Live. Along with creating some of the show’s best early sketches — most famously John Belushi’s samurai — and performing as a featured player. Schiller distinguished himself with a series of absurdist shorts that were shown on SNL, including the ingenious Dieter’s Dream (Marv Albert is the villain).
But perhaps Schiller’s greatest work is one which has never been seen: 1983′s Nothing Lost Forever, a science-fiction/social satire starring Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd which was dropped by its distributor, MGM, never to be seen again. The Walter Reade will be screening the film along with several of his shorts. I got to know Tom a little bit when his wife Jacque (pictured above) and I worked together at indieWIRE, and he may be the funniest person alive. Buy tickets here.… Read the rest
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
I have an informal ban on the word “Indiewood” in Filmmaker. It’s just too cutesy for me. But maybe I’ll pick up Bill Mechanic’s “Myopiawood,” coined in this opinion piece posted over at the Movie City News site. In “Welcome to Myopiawood,” the producer and former Fox head criticizes suggestions floating out there by folks like Mark Cuban that the various “windows” separating theatrical exhibition of films from their release on home video and pay television formats should be collapsed or even eliminated. And for those of you who think this is an esoteric argument, well, the folks at CNN don’t think so. Last night on CNN the network took a brief break from Rader and Aruba to poll viewers whether or not they thought movies should be released simultaneously in theaters and on DVD. 56% of you said no!
Here’s Mechanic:
“So, going day-and-date essentially wipes out a major window of opportunity for winning pictures. Yes, if a movie fails in theatrical, there are losses that have to be made up (if possible) out of the subsequent markets. Eliminate the theatrical window and the same pictures that don’t create a head of steam theatrically now will most likely fail to create a head of steam in video. And there will be no subsequent market to pick up the losses.
In the example of a film like Herbie: Fully Loaded, the marketing costs of $15 million in video would undoubtedly grow to the same level they now are in theatrical, so the costs can’t be projected against the present day release pattern. There is also no reason to believe Herbie would do the same business in video, since it would only have one shot to reach an audience, not the two it has today. The $40 million (a conservative estimate) in marketing spent against theatrical greatly, greatly enhances the $15 million spent in Home Entertainment marketing later.”
.… Read the rest
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
James Seo, whose Lossless Blog covers music, film, and, generally, all things Wong Kar-Wai, has created a new blog, Split Screen. It’s “dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images.”
Along with various art pieces, music videos (like ones from the Pixies and the B-52s), and links to clips from TV’s primary split-screen narrative, 24, the site highlights makers and projects like artist and designer Brendan Dawes and his Cinema Redux.
Some quotes from Dawes’s site:
“Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the Processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time… The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.”
Pictured above: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Large format versions of Dawes’s work can be purchased via The Art Surgery.
Dawes’s work is reminiscent of the “Frozen Film Frames” of filmmaker Paul Sharits, wherein the entire footage of a film is cut into strips and aligned serially between sheets of clear plexiglas (as seen in the image, right). Sharits’s films were designed in advance with this mode of display in mind, as evidenced by his “Study for Frozen Film Frame for Temporal Diagonality” (1975, colored ink on paper). His studies for “Frozen Film Frames” are essentially scripts for 16mm color “flicker films,” which Sharits projected as single screen films or multi-screen installations. Prints of these films were also struck specifically to be cut into strips, which were then mounted in plexiglas for exhibition in galleries. (One of these “Frozen Film Frames” is on permanent display in … Read the rest
Friday, August 19th, 2005
“If only Entourage hadn’t had that right-on episode set at Sundance,” writes Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times….
“If only Ricky Gervais hadn’t made The Office…
“If only the Sundance Channel weren’t now broadcasting Slings & Arrows, the poignant Canadian comedy about a Shakespeare theater festival…
“If only the This is Spinal Tap/Best in Show school hadn’t turned the tragicomic mockumentary into an art form…
“Then, and only then, and then only maybe, The Festival — the latest offering from IFC, which begins tonight — might be considered funny, or a decent effort, or something. A fake documentary about a Telluride-like convocation [called the Mountain United Film Festival, or M.U.F.F.], The Festival has its comic heart in the right place, but the six-part series is derivative in every aspect, and it’s not up to what have become the genre’s exceedingly high standards.”
If only The Festival had been produced by a major studio and had lowered its standards to compete with the summer’s other unfunny “laugh out loud” comedies, it may have been better received by critics with thumbs.
If only the series’ producers had opted to include a Greek chorus and to stage it Off Broadway. Together with Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy (a satire of Fatal Attraction starring Corey Feldman) and Silence! Silence of the Lambs: The Musical (featuring a chorus of lambs), The Festival might then have been hailed as a landmark in contemporary theater: the final installment in the first Greek trilogy since Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
If only The Festival were half as funny as Eowyn’s Secret — a video clip which purports to be an excerpt from Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King that was deemed “too explicit” to be included in the extended edition of the film — it could have truly earned its status as PARODY, the gold standard of cultural relevance today.
.… Read the rest
Friday, August 19th, 2005
There’s a fun piece in The Guardian today by John Patterson in which he lays out his ten films that made today’s cinema. It’s not a “ten best” list but instead a “ten most influential,” and not in a fussy, highbrow sort of way either.
For example, here’s Patterson on his numbers four and five:
“4. The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and 5. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Released within six months of each other, these were the first smart-ass stepchildren of the self-referential post-Pulp Fiction effect. The only refreshing way to rehash the blandly inoffensive 70s Bradys was to subvert it utterly. Scream took the haggard teen-horror genre and gave it a sprightly makeover by consciously referencing every last cliche of the 70s hack-n-slash boom. All this self-referentiality finally became tiresome, though it remains with us and, like it or not, it’s the way we live now. Without them, we wouldn’t have: Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Shaun of the Dead, the Scary Movie trilogy, The Blair Witch Project.
.… Read the rest
Thursday, August 18th, 2005
Our friends over at the essential GreenCine Daily linked to this 1995 interview between media programmer Chris Dercon and filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman, and that gives me a chance to link back to this blog I wrote a few weeks ago about Akerman’s current gallery installation at the Marian Goodman gallery.
At the time I posted it, there were no press images available of the exhibition, but now there’s one, posted here, which captures the double-screen setup onto which Akerman’s quite powerful family history is projected. And here’s Akerman from the interview:
“Anyway, I don’t really believe in the difference between documentary and fiction. Take for example a film with Marilyn Monroe. If you look at it 20 years later, it has become a documentary on Marilyn Monroe, the way she rolls her eyes, moves her arms. And of course it’s also a document of an era. The same goes for the material in which a film is made, the grain of the celluloid tells us just as much about the period or the breath of an actor. I hardly or don’t ever make a difference between documentary and fiction.”
.… Read the rest
Saturday, August 13th, 2005
In the current issue of Filmmaker, I have a pretty short piece on Werner Herzog’s new film, Grizzly Man. Editorial discretion — and our policy against straight-up reviewing outside the context of a festival report — prevented me from heaping extravagant, gushing praise on a single film, let alone using the “m” word. But that’s what blogs are for.
I simply can’t recommended this film highly enough. Herzog, whose extraordinary films of the ’70s I discovered in college, gave us one of the worst pictures ever made by a great director with Invincible a couple of years back. So to see him rediscover his brilliance with his recent foray into the non-fiction format is pretty amazing, and touching (an adjective Herzog has probably never used). Grizzly Man is the best film to be released this year and one of the best non-fiction films ever made. Its structure, which resembles an essay more than a narrative, is exquisite, as is Herzog’s ongoing dialog (via voiceover and in his role an investigator) with his flawed, obsessive hero. Herzog is the master when it comes to articulating the essence of tortured, driven souls, and Timothy Treadwell’s life presents him with an ideal canvas. Yes, it’s a masterpiece.
Other recent Herzog docs, all of them worth watching: The White Diamond (2004), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend (1999) and, if you can find it, Lessons of Darkness (1992).… Read the rest
Saturday, August 13th, 2005
Evan Rachel Wood, who I think will be the current teen star to have the most substantive film career, has the pretty terrible Pretty Persuasion opening this weekend, but if you’re a fan I’d head over to Crooks and Liars where they are hosting a Sammy Bayer/Green Day video, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. With classic Aerosmith and Nirvana videos, Bayer has made a career of glossily capturing the American teen experience. Here he does it again with Wood and Jamie Bell playing out a drama that is a new reality for many of today’s kids.
.… Read the rest
Friday, August 12th, 2005
Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.”
Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and films weren’t afraid to be funny and sad or pretty and ugly at the same time. You can’t go wrong with flicks like these.”
.… Read the rest
Thursday, August 11th, 2005
I’ve only recently glommed on to The Reeler, a new blog hosted by Indiewire, and I have enjoyed editor S.T. VanAirsdale’s (really!) funny and sometimes combative take on our industry.
So I was sorry not to bump into him at our Filmmaker “25 New Faces” launch party last week. In his blog he asks readers to email him if they actually spotted a real live filmmaker at the soiree since he didn’t see one there other than a few friends of his. Well, S.T., sorry you didn’t make it to the V.I.P. room, but I was back there chatting with Mary Scorsese, who dropped by after a day of shooting at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Darren Aronofsky screened an early cut of The Fountain off his laptop for anyone who was interested. And I tried to console Michael Bay, who was still bumming over the opening of The Island.
Um… seriously, though, I missed the party as I was up at the yearly Creative Capital retreat in Aurora, New York with a bunch of filmmakers — like two of our “25 New Faces,” Brent Green and Jake Mahaffy — and folks like Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez. But I’ll try to attend the next one — and yes, there will be a next one — with some real live filmmakers in tow for S.T. to meet.… Read the rest
