Archive for March, 2006
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
One of my favorite science fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem, died yesterday of a heart ailment. The Polish writer’s work incorporated everything from Kafkaesque humor to political allegory to phiosophical inquiry in novels such as The Futurological Congress, Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Solaris, the latter of which was made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. (All of the above are highly recommended.)
Those who feel they’ve gotten their Lem through one of the two filmed versions of Solaris should pick up the late author’s novel, which is much less a romantic fable and much more a treatise on religion and the limitations of human awareness. Also, Lem himself was not a big fan of Tarkovsky’s film.
From a July 2004 interview:
Tarkovsky was crazy about the idea of filming “Solaris”… During those times he was told by a number of high-ranking members of the Soviet Communist Party that one should not film this book, because this work is ideologically flawed: idealistic, subjective and metaphysical. However he would not listen to them because Tarkovsky was entirely made up of this idealistic-metaphysical stuff mixed with a “Russian soul” – hence he was not a good addressee of such warnings. I have serious reservations regarding his film adaptation. Firstly, I would like to see the planet Solaris. Secondly, during one of our arguments I told Tarkovsky that he never made “Solaris” – but “Crime and Punishment” instead. From this film we gather that this horrible Kelvin-guy lead poor Harey to suicide and later had some remorse about it – while the latter was strengthened by her reappearance in strange and incomprehensible circumstances. What was just awful, was the introduction of Kelvin’s parents and an aunt. But his mother was the worst, since this was the Russian mat’, i.e. Rodina – the Mother Earth. This really angered me a lot. At that point we were like two horses dragging the same cart in different directions. Peoples’ lives, that we get to know at the station, are no existentialist anecdotes, but grand questions concerning the place of humans
… Read the rest
Monday, March 27th, 2006
The famed French film journal Cahiers du Cinema that launched the careers of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer is now available on line with selected articles translated into English. No need now to pull out your dog-eared Larousse to fathom the French take on contemporary cinema.… Read the rest
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
Over at Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Features 06, the group blog where he’s invited filmmakers premiering their films this year to post, director Deborah Scranton has joined the mix. Her doc, The War Tapes, premieres at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. Click on the film’s link to go to Scranton’s own site, where she’s posted clips of the film and maintains a running blog in which her own writing is complemented by others involved with her film. And here’s how she introduced herself at Indie Features 06:
I’m a film director, single mom, former competitive ski racer, New England farm girl, semiotics major, classics minor, military history neophyte, and — as of today — blogger.
February 12, 2004, I got an offer from the New Hampshire National Guard to embed as a filmmaker. I called the public affairs officer and asked if I could give cameras to the soldiers instead? He said yes…but it would be up to me to get soldiers to volunteer to work with the project.
Less than two weeks later I was on plane down to Fort Dix, NJ. I stepped out in front of those 180 men and told them of my vision. I was met with a hailstorm of questions.
Are you for the war,
Are you against the war,
What are your politics,
How are you going to take and twist our words,
What do you want us to film,
Why should we believe you….
At the heart of their questions was – why should we trust you with our experiences? My reply was, we would do this together. We would tell the story, their story, wherever it took us, no matter what.
… Read the rest
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
In The Observer, director Julien Temple describes his nervous breakdown to Simon Garfield when he felt “paralyzed by film” while making a documentary on the Glastonbury Film Festival. After shooting 250 hours of footage at the 2002 edition, Temple realized that there was so much more about the festival’s history that he wanted to capture. So, he put out a call to anyone who had any footage of any one of the Glastonbury festivals, and the envelopes starting pouring in:
‘These padded envelopes kept arriving and you thought, “Oh my God,”‘ Temple recalls in his converted editing barn near Bridgwater, where he is also working on a film about Strummer. ‘But after four hours of nonsense, jugglers or whatever, there was usually something that really demanded to be included.’
Much of the delight of the completed film, which runs a little over two hours, is to be found in this collage of professional and amateur footage, the latter providing most of the loved-up, blissed-out intimacy. There is no easy narrative and no voice-over, but Temple’s concept of ‘a long weekend that lasts 35 years’ more than sustains interest. He compares the editing process to a bebop saxophone solo. ‘I think making the film mirrored the experience of going to the festival. The rules and role-playing that exist in normal life no longer hold; you’re thrown into this incredibly random and vibrant event and you sink or swim. There’s certainly an element of surviving Glastonbury as well as enjoying it.’
The film, Glastonbury, opens in the U.K. April 12 and The Observer calls it “one of the most absorbing and inspiring music films ever made.”… Read the rest
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
The guys who run the new music/MP3 blog Good Weather for Air Strikes have launched a new blog devoted solely to music video downloads called Videoteque. Named in homage to Radiohead, the site features no streaming video, just downloads, many in iPod-ready MP4 format. First up, yes, a bunch of Radiohead clips by such directors as Michel Gondry and Jamie Thraves.… Read the rest
Saturday, March 25th, 2006
Over at Movie City Indie,, Ray Pride posts all manner of thoughts and links regarding contemporary cinema. But over at Shark Forum, the Chicaco artists online group, he posts more personal stuff that might not make the general-interest cut of his other sites.
Like here’s a collection of photos Pride took following his various director interviews. He writes, “I consistently blank on any memory of shaking hands in greeting. After each of the interviews, usually at a luxury hotel on Michigan Avenue or River North, I’ve grabbed the first bold image to clear my head from a half hour or hour of sustained conversation about art.”
At right: “After interviewing Scott McGehee and David Siegel about their light-fixated Bee Season.”… Read the rest
Saturday, March 25th, 2006
Nerve has just put up their new film issue, and a centerpiece is Justin Clark’s portrait of businessman Philip Anschutz, the conservative theater chain owner and film financier (The Chronicles of Narnia, Ray). The article is an interesting look at Anschutz’s various business interests and how some of them intertwine with his conservative politics. Of the latter, Clark writes:
A heavy contributor to the Republican Party for decades, Anschutz helped fund Amendment 2, a ballot initiative to overturn a state law protecting gay rights, and helped stop another initiative promoting medical marijuana. More recently, he helped fund the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank that mounted a public relations campaign and financed “research” into intelligent design. He has also supported the Media Research Council, the group that generated nearly all the indecency complaints with the FCC in 2003. As a friend of his told Fortune, Anschutz “has a latent interest in doing something significant in American Christianity. He is working deliberately and diligently on it.”
Clark’s piece is not an expose, just a story discussing the various interminglings possible and already achieved between Anschutz’s personal philosophies and his business ones. The article discusses Anschutz’s dominance in various exhibition markets around the country, predicting the possibility that his influence could dissuade studios from making R-rated movies. Or, if they do, to perhaps provide alternate cuts:
In 2005, PG-rated films outperformed R-rated films in the theater for the first time in two decades. Conservatives have touted weak theater attendance as proof that the heartland isn’t interested in Hollywood’s licentiousness and liberal politics. The Dove Foundation, non-profit advocates of “wholesome family entertainment”, published a study showing that G-rated movies are eleven times more profitable than R-rated flicks. Indeed: as a co-producer and financial backer of Oscar contender Ray, Anschutz reportedly insisted on altering the details of subject Ray Charles’ life, downplaying his drug use and womanizing to obtain a PG-13 rating.
Although Hollywood didn’t heed the Dove Foundation’s advice in 2005 — the key Oscar nominations were all low-grossing films that are very political — studios have begun looking
… Read the rest
Saturday, March 25th, 2006
The Gothamist does some investigation into an urban mystery: the preponderance of Val Kilmer grafitti-heads plastered on buildings and billboards around town. Gothamist links to Fox News, which goes so far as to inquire with Kilmer’s reps as to whether the heads are part of a publicity campaign for the actor: “‘Val is against the defacement of any public property,’ said his publicist Michael Yanni, adding that while Kilmer won’t comment directly on the peculiar postings, he is aware of them and ‘definitely intrigued. He is wondering about the why and who of it all.’”
The why and who of it all may be explained by a poster who responded to the Gothamist piece, who links to this 2004 entry from a Toronto blog that appears to supply the answer. It has something to do a band called, yes, The Val Kilmer Tagging Caper.
The Val Kilmer Tagging Caper used to be known simply as Val Kilmer. The graffiti all over Toronto was really advertising for their band. After a while, their fans started getting into the act, and were writing Val Kilmer wherever and whenever. This went on during the months when they recorded The Val Kilmer Tagging Caper. It’s rumoured that the name came about when a couple of police officers came to one of Val Kilmer’s shows, and demanded the graffiti cease. Since the band was no longer responsible for most of the tags, they denied having anything to do with it, other than sharing the same name. The police officers left in a huff, unsatisfied for not figuring out who did it. As they left, Val Kilmer’s bassist, Simon Templar, jokingly taunted the officers, “Good luck solving the Val Kilmer tagging caper!”
The phrase caught on, and it was to become the name of the album they were recording. At some point just before release, they changed the name of their band to this new moniker. Says lead guitar and vocalist, Tom Kazanski, “We actually started using the name as a joke after being introduced at our shows. The fans loved it, so we
… Read the rest
Friday, March 24th, 2006
In the February 23, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Affair to Remember” praised the film Brokeback Mountain, while condemning its distributor Focus Features for closeting the film’s subject matter. (Did anyone not know that Brokeback was gay?] The recent issue of New York Review of Books offers an exchange between producer James Schamus and Mr. Mendelsohn on some of the ideas in Mendelsohn’s review. But the debate didn’t stop there. A futher letter from James Schamus, that won’t appear in NYRB, we have reprinted below.
Oy
James Schamus
19 March 2006
In his reply to the few corrections in my otherwise laudatory response to his review of Brokeback Mountain ['Brokeback Mountain': An Exchange, NYRB, April 6, 2006], Daniel Mendelsohn calls me, and my work as a producer of Brokeback and as the head of the studio that distributed the film, “discomfited,” “embarrassed,” “defensive,” “bluster[ing],” practicing “obfuscatory sophistries,” “actually falsifying [the movie’s] content,” arguing “with breathtaking disingenuousness” and “evasive coyness” my “heated but ultimately self-destructive protestations” against his charges that I and my colleagues have consistently sought to “closet” the film’s central gay themes in our marketing of it. Of course, our very success ($150 million in worldwide box office to date) is prima facie proof of the efficacy of our sinister methods “in so aggressively marketing this gay story to the ‘heart of America’”: how else could we have snookered so many millions of people into embracing such a gay film?
Mr. Mendelsohn was, as I so gently put it in my response, “unfair” in his original depiction of our marketing; he is viciously mendacious in his latest reply, and NYRB readers deserve at least a brief correction: it is important that, as gay subject matter continues to enter further into mainstream culture, parochial nay-sayers such as Mendelsohn are at least asked to maintain the minimum standards of honesty in discussions of such matters.
Mr. Mendelsohn hammers me for, among other things, claiming that the two wranglers quoted at length in the press kit are “clearly” identified as gay – … Read the rest
Friday, March 24th, 2006
Screenwriter and critic Larry Gross offers a deep reading of V for Vendettain Movie City News in which he claims that not only is the film’s masked figure “the gayest superhero of all time,” but that the film’s narrative uses “the gay political agenda” as a narrative force against a more generalized repressive order:
In any case, V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did. But I wonder if the gay community wants this kind of almost apocalyptic gesture any more than the Democratic party wants Feingold to push a censure motion against Bush, (despite the fact that support for it is in the 40 percentile, including 20% of Republicans polled?)
… Read the rest
