Archive for November, 2005
Sunday, November 27th, 2005
The never-ending debate about the influence of film violence on the malleable minds of children recently took a new turn. The British paper The Guardian reported this weekend about a case in a French small town where a “teenage boy described by teachers and neighbours as ‘a little angel’ … confessed to a two-hour killing spree last year during which he waited calmly for each member of the family to return home before firing on them with his father’s shotgun. In between the shootings he sat on the sofa and watched a video of the film Shrek.”
Of course the crazy juxtaposition between a homicidal troubled teen and cuddly ogre again asks the question, “are we really what we watch?” What strikes me, however, is how this Hollywood ogre connects to another one, the one named in the title of French novelist Michel Tournier‘s The Ogre. The 1970 Prix Goncourt-winning story about a lost youth who ends up training other lost youths in an Nazi school inspired Volker Schlondorff to make a (rather unsuccessful) film adaptation in 1997. In a review in The Eye, Schlondorff repeats his response to people who questioned how he would depict the Nazis, “I said: ‘As though they were the most exciting people in the world to be around, of course!’ …That really is the way it has to be done. Because, let’s face it — if no one had found the Nazis attractive, at least on some level, the Second World War would never have happened.”… Read the rest
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
This Thanksgiving, I, like many of you, will be on the road, driving to see family and hoping to arrive at a socially acceptable interval before the turkey is carved.
SeeingJean Baudrillard’s imperious visage peering out from the Sunday Times Magazine this past weekend (“France is a byproduct of American culture,” he said. “We are all in this; we are globalized.”) and thinking about that long drive reminded me of an old essay of his in Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, which was kind of a po-mo bible during my college years. He writes about the automobile and the shift in our concept of driving from one of psychological projection to one of bio-mechanical symbiosis: “The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen.”
For the contemporary flaneur, the modern cityscape is also being transformed into a landscape of screens. Tom Vanderbilt has a great article in Artforum about the role of digital display screens in modern urban architecture. “As the glass-curtain wall was to modernism, the screen is becoming the iconic facade of the digital age,” he writes.
Vanderbilt’s essay references the ’80s futurism of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to describe what screens used to do in the futuristic city:
“The screen, along with the skyscraper, has for some time been one of the particular features of Asian modernity. The screen-centric vision of Los Angeles famously depicted by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1982) was, the director has noted, inspired by his time in 1960s Hong Kong, a paradoxical city whose pulsating electronic skyline overlooked a harbor, as Scott has described, filled with nineteenth-century fishing junks. But those screens were merely static vehicles for the transmission of commercial messages, mechanical upgrades of an older public-advertising tradition. What is most interesting about the screens I found in Seoul was that they were not merely architectural appendages broadcasting messages but architecture itself; not simply vehicles for delivering one-way information to a passive public but an active layer of the city’s matrices of networks. To stand on a street … Read the rest
Monday, November 21st, 2005
For those of you who turned down a lucrative job in the advertising game so that you could stay home and write the great American screenplay (or television show), well, you may be in for a big surprise. As reported on NPR’s “On the Media”, Writers Guild west president Patric Verrone bemoans the new state of product placement. Writers are being commanded not only to include products in their scripts, but to create dialogue that hawks them as well. For example, “Law and Order” might have a serial killer suddenly turn on the witness stand to testify how great Bounty is in soaking up the blood. In response, the WGA, west has issued a White Paper “Entertainment Guilds Call for Industry Code of Conduct or FCC Regulation for Product Integration in Programming and Film Guilds Issue White Paper Report on the Runaway Use of Stealth Advertising in Television and Film.” Of course the WGA, west is horrified by this insult to artistry. But their bottom line — and this is all about a bottom line — is that if writers are going to have write like ad men, then they should be paid like ad men. Well, one can still dream of writing the Great American Ad.… Read the rest
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
The ubiquitous but broke boyfriend-and-girlfriend filmmakers behind Four-Eyed Monsters get another jolt of publicity today as they become the poster children for Charles Lyons in his New York Times piece on the personal financial perils of indie-film financing.
From the piece:
“[Arin] Crumley and [Susan] Buice spoke about their 14-month ordeal making Four Eyed Monsters, which dramatizes how they met online, and in which they co-star. The movie was well received at its Slamdance Film Festival premiere in January and screened at 16 other festivals. But like so many independent labors of love, it has yet to attract a theatrical distributor.
‘If the result was going to be this,’ Mr. Crumley mused, ‘a film with no distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? That’s a tough question to answer.’ Ms. Buice added: ‘The answer is, no, it’s not O.K. for our film to have been mildly successful on the festival circuit. But otherwise, it was just a jaunt into the abyss and now we have financial hell to pay.’
The first-time filmmakers used their $10,000 in savings to begin production and borrowed $55,000 on seven credit cards to complete the film. Ms. Buice’s parents have contributed $20,000 more for film festival travel and living expenses.”
Lyons’ piece, which updates Doug Block’s 1991 doc The Heck with Hollywood, engages in some abbreviated handwringing over all the folks losing money in independent film.
But, as Susan Buice’s father points out in the film’s video podcast this week, “there are all kinds of investment and financial is just one of [them].” Staring at Crumley behind the camera, her mom, explaining why she wants to support Susan and her new boyfriend, cuts to the chase: “My hope is grandchildren.”… Read the rest
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
I flew back from London this weekend and, at the airport, picked up the new issue of the U.K. magazine Dazed and Confused. It’s typically full of interesting and very of-the-moment stuff, including a piece about photographer Nick Knight and his Showstudio, a website intending to bring the “‘tech hippie’ world of the internet into fashion,” according to the magazine’s Lauren Cochrane.
Through December Showstudio is presenting on its site “Moving Fashion,” a commissioned series of very short films — 30 seconds or so — by leading names in the fashion world. The films all incorporate items from the Autumn/Winter ’05/’06 collections, and the site also features a blog and forum in which the mostly fanciful and charmingly tossed-off shorts are discussed.
The shorts change each week; if you click today, you’ll see films by designer John Galliano, model and White Stripe wife Karen Elson, and Kate Moss, who dances — yes, topless — in her film to the Ramones’ “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.”
And re the title of this post… hey, gimme a break. One has to boost search engine traffic somehow.… Read the rest
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
I am very excited to see Steve Gaghan’s Syriana, which we tried to nab an early screening of for Matt Ross’s piece on George Clooney in the current issue of Filmmaker. But, they were editing down to the wire so we were simply intrigued and hopeful by the trailer like everyone else. Now, Todd McCarthy promisingly weighs in in the subscription-only Variety:
“Those complaining that Hollywood never turns out films of topical or political substance are likely to embrace Syriana, a weighty and deeply intriguing look at the many-tentacled beast that is the international oil industry. Wide-ranging and restlessly probing, Stephen Gaghan’s second directorial effort uses the same mosaic storytelling technique as in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Traffic to create a revealing portrait of diverse forces contributing to global tension, particularly concerning the Middle East. Terse, understated and sometimes confusing, this is the rare film that could actually benefit from being significantly longer. Warner Bros. release will become a must-see for thinking audiences and make inroads with the wider public thanks to star names and certain critical acclaim.”
Roger Friedman on the Fox News site has also registered his surprisingly positive thoughts. “A thriller for people who read the Financial Times,” he calls it. Put that on the poster, Warner Brothers!
Here’s Friedman: “Syriana is not always easy to follow. Sometimes I felt like I needed a study guide. But Gaghan has made such an engrossing film that you can actually suspend disbelief and just go with it. Once you’re in, you’re in, too. I don’t know if it will make money or be a Best Picture candidate, but Syriana is the most intelligent movie of 2005 so far, and incredibly satisfying.”… Read the rest
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
One of the most startling images in David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir!, a documentary about the G.I. anti-war movement during the Viet Nam era that Filmmaker selected as one of its “Best Films Not Playing in a Theater Near You” this year, is that of Jane Fonda. Sitting regally in the amber-hued foyer of her luxurious home, coiffed to perfection and expertly lit, Fonda’s sheer visual splendor is surprising within the context of the film — most of the film’s other interviewees still visibly bear the painful hurts of the period — as well as within today’s entertainment world. With so many stars either apolitical or calculatingly distant from the activism of their youth, it’s amazing to see Fonda so animated and proud when discussing her anti-war activism.
Fonda discusses the film along with two others in this Guardian piece entitled “Terror and Trauma.”
From the piece:
“The Bush administration’s failure to pull themselves out of their current military quagmire has apparently sparked renewed interest in the films that documented the conflict in Vietnam. Hearts and Minds – arguably one of the greatest documentaries ever made, composed largely of interviews with US soldiers and Vietnamese citizens – has been re-released in the UK after revisiting screens in the States. Likewise, Winter Soldier (1972) has hit US cinemas again after more than 30 years. Based on the three-day gathering of war veterans in 1971 that I helped fund, it was a film intended to document American war crimes in the conflict. A third film, Sir! No Sir!, details how GIs were converted to leading members of the peace movement and has recently won plaudits at several film festivals.… Read the rest
Saturday, November 19th, 2005
While at the Creative Capital retreat this summer I met the L.A.-based French artist Marie Sester, who does fascinating work dealing with technology and the interstice of the individual and the social.
From her website:
“I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible — such as signals, buildings, and cities — and intangible, such as the aspects of values, laws and culture.
My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. I employ archetypes and referents as starting points. For several years I have been committed to working with already-existing data or phenomena, in order to propose a connection between individuals and wider forces, or larger scales, or longer time-bases. And thus reconsider what a society or a community is engaged in, and therefore the individuals, in their everyday life.”
She recently sent an email announcing the opening on November 19 of her installation “Access,” which is a permanent installation at the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Sester writes, “ACCESS is a public art installation that applies web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear, exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility and celebrity.”
The web component of the installation invites you, gentle surfer, to participate in the installation by guiding the robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system. Visit the the Access Project for the “tracking hours” when online participation is allowed. Though “beware,” Sester warns. “Some individuals may not like the idea of being under surveillance.”… Read the rest
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Two films coming out this fall will no doubt confuse audiences as to who is who. Is that George Clooney played the diabolically clever Slovenian Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the biographical documentary Zizek? Or wait, did Zizek sneak onto the set of Syriana to play Mideast CIA operative Robert Baer? hmmm…… Read the rest
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
The MPAA has announced the films that have been shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. They are:
“After Innocence”
“The Boys of Baraka”
“Darwin’s Nightmare”
“The Devil and Daniel Johnston”
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”
“Favela Rising”
“Mad Hot Ballroom”
“March of the Penguins”
“Murderball”
“Occupation: Dreamland”
“On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report”
“Rize”
“Street Fight”
“39 Pounds of Love”
“Unknown White Male”
Eligible documentaries were screened by the Documentary Branch Screening Committee, made up of members of the branch who serve on a volunteer basis. The above films were chosen after a preliminary round of screenings.
The nominated films will be announced along with nominations in 24 other categories on Tuesday, January 31, at 5:30 a.m. PST.… Read the rest
