THE RULE OF THE MOB

By Scott Macaulay

Despite the subject matter, it was always going to be a little dicey premiering Sofia Coppola’s deliberately stylish, English-language, Yank-directed and anachronistically scored Marie Antoinette in Competition at Cannes, where, even on a normal day, audiences can resemble an angry lynch mob. And, from a business point-of-view, distributor Pathe’s opening of the film in France simultaneous with the Cannes premiere creates an interesting situation for U.S. distrib Sony Pictures who will have to either springboard off the film’s European performance or else actively ignore it when it debuts the film here in the fall.

This morning the Drudge Report linked to a wire report on the premiere: “But, despite sumptuous sets and costumes and a rollicking rock’n’roll soundtrack, the film is a disappointing and unconvincing story that prompted sniggers at points, and boos which drowned out the scattered applause at the end.”

But the reviews that are breaking this morning are a little more complex in their take on the film and make me want to see it. Jeffrey Welles slams it as “the shallowest and dullest historical biopic of all time,” focusing on the film’s decision not to dramatize many of the key historical points in Antoinette’s life, before giving the film a kind of backhanded respect:

In a way I almost admire the gutsiness of Coppola’s decision to make this into a wafer-thin movie. You might hate Marie Antoinette, as I did, but at least Coppola developed a thematic approach and then shot it that way and stuck to her guns. She deserves a kind of credit for this.

Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter way more positive:

In the revisionist Marie Antoinette, writer-director Sofia Coppola and actress Kirsten Dunst take a remote and no doubt misunderstood historical figure, the controversial and often despised Queen of France at the time of the French Revolution, and brings her into sharp focus as a living, breathing human being with flaws, foibles, passions, intelligence and warm affections. The movie slices through the cobwebs of history to seek the heart of the young Austrian princess whom 18th century political diplomacy thrust

… Read the rest

WHAT GOES ON IN VEGAS…

By Scott Macaulay

CineVegas has announced its very interesting line-up. Check out the website for the films, news of the panel discussions and tributes, and trailers for a bunch of the titles. The fest takes place June 9 – 17th at the Palms Casino Resort.… Read the rest

STICKING UP FOR SUNDANCE

By Scott Macaulay

The Reeler checks in on the Sunday afternoon panel, “Four Independents who Turned the Tide,” over at BAM as part of the recent Sundance series there and transcribes some great quotes. The panel was moderated by Janet Maslin and featured Hal Hartley, Alison Anders, David O. Russell and John Waters.

From the piece:

“I wanna really stick up for Sundance,” Waters said. “I don’t understand today when people say it’s often too commercial. What is the problem if you’re a kid and you go there and someone overpays for your movie? You’re bitching about that?”

“I think it’s the free iPods,” Maslin said.

“That’s ludicrous,” Waters said, nodding. “The people who give away gift bags and free stuff treated me this year the way the governemt should treat Katrina victims.”

And later:

Anders later chimed in about Sundance’s lingering influence over her work as both a filmmaker and one of the Sundance Institute’s regular lab advisors. “There’s a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that you can’t turn down an AA request because AA got you sober,” Anders said, briefly sucking the air out of the room. “It gave you your life and the more you give, the more you learn. And so I’ve had that with Sundance, too. I never turn down a Sundance request. I really feel like they gave me my career, and so I do a lot of work at the Institute as an advisor. I just always have the best time. I love working with the new filmmakers; they’re excited, because often they’re going to the festival after the labs, and it’s always exciting to see their expectations. And of course it flashes back to me and my first experience there.”

… Read the rest

MORE FILMS ABOUT BUILDINGS

By Admin

Jonathan Glancey in his article ”Tomorrow’s Worlds in The Guardian uses the occasion of an upcoming show “Future City: Experiment and Utopia 1956-2006” at the Barbican in London to riff on the relation between movies and buildings. He uses two great city movies – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner — to argue that if you want to see the future of urban space, go to the movies. For Glancey, “cinema remains the best place to experience the architectural imagination at full flight.” A nice companion piece is Adam Pincus’s “L.A. Architecture in Film” in the last issue of FilmMaker [sorry, not online], as well as Thom Andersen’s excellent documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself.… Read the rest

JAMES THE FIRST

By Admin

The Los Angeles Times ran a profile on Focus president James Schamus. While the The LA Times’s article gives James – a friend of the magazine as well as just a friend — a glowing report as he ascends to take over the helm of Focus Features all by himself, it omitted one important detail. James was instrumental in starting this magazine when it was called The Off-Hollywood Report. Good luck, James.… Read the rest

TOWERING BABEL?

By Scott Macaulay

I took a pass on Cannes this year, so I’m here Stateside just like you guys — checking the internet sites a few times a day to see what’s hot. And it appears as if Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel may be the film to beat for the Palme’ d’Or.

Here’s Jeffrey Welles: “It’s an incredibly shrewd and brilliant film about all of us…about frailty, interconnectedness, aloneness and particularly parents and children. It exudes compassion and acute precision with every frame, shot, edit and line of dialogue. I fucking loved it.”

And here’s Ray Bennett in The Hollywood Reporter:

“Tense, relentless and difficult to watch at times, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel is an emotionally shattering drama in which a simple act of kindness leads to events that pierce our veneer of civilization and bring on the white noise of terror.

Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga involve six families, most of them not known to one another, in four countries on three continents in their story of random fate and the perils of being unable to communicate.

Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal give committed ensemble performances alongside seasoned character performers and non-actors as the story ranges from Morocco to San Diego to Tokyo.

The film, which also features exceptional work by director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Brigitte Broch, editors Stephen Mirrione and Douglas Crise, and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, is headed for major prizes and large, appreciative audiences.

And, finally, here’s Todd McCarthy in Variety:

Effectively building dread and emotional tension as tragic incidents triggered by human stupidity and carelessness steadily multiply, this film, like 21 Grams in particular, employs a deterministically grim mindset in the cause of its philosophical aspirations, but is gripping nearly all the way. Critical reactions will no doubt range fully across the map, much as they did with Crash, which Paramount Vantage should be able to stir to its advantage in creating significant curiosity among American auds craving serious fare, and strong points of identification create real cross-over potential. International prospects are similarly promising.

… Read the rest

INDECENT PROPOSAL

By Scott Macaulay

Below I posted about the new fines for “indecency” being levied by the FCC against broadcasters for “unnecessary” content. In today’s Variety, William Triplett reports on a related story: the Senate’s passing of a bill that will increase indecency fines for broadcasters by a multiple of ten, to $325,000 per infraction.

The bill was jammed through the Senate by assumed presidential candidate and Majority Leader Bill Frist, who engaged in the rare parliamentary practice of “hotlining” the bill, quickly pulling the bill from committee review and putting it before the Senate for objection. If no Senator objects, the bill passes without a formal vote. That’s what happened, and now the bill, sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback, must be reconciled with a competing House version which, actually, is even worse as it also provides for the revoking of broadcast licenses and the penalization of performers.

Of course, this is all happening in the run-up to the ’06 elections, but Triplett makes a very smart connection at the end of his piece to the FCC’s release, also this week, of its “indecency complaint” statistics, which seemingly skyrocketed in February:

Separately on Friday, the FCC released the total number of indecency complaints it received in the first quarter of this year. The agency logged 141,868 complaints January through March, more than three times the number logged in fourth quarter of 2005, when 44,109 came in.

However, the vast majority of 2006 complaints came in during the month of February, which accounted for more than 138,500 complaints. January saw only 1,740, March 1,602. The February complaints involved an episode of NBC’s Las Vegas airing that month (Daily Variety, March 14), and the majority were generated by a social conservative group’s email campaign to members urging them to complain.

… Read the rest

EROS AS PATRIOTISM

By Scott Macaulay

Gregg Goldstein in The Hollywood Reporter has an interview up with John Cameron Mitchell about his new film, Shortbus, which premiered in Cannes this weekend. The film is Cameron Mitchell’s much-awaited follow-up to Hedwig, and it’s that rare dramatic film that uses (a lot) of explicit hardcore sex to tell its story.

Here’s Cameron Mitchell from the piece:

I wanted to create something through improvisation with the actors and explore sex as a cinematic language in a way that I hadn’t seen, where it wasn’t trying to be erotic or horrifying or negative or dreary. The experience has taught everybody involved how it is to connect, and, as I suspected, sex is just one way of describing that desire. It’s also a love letter to New York and a small act of resistance against Bush and the America we live in because it’s trying to remind people of good things about America and New York, i.e. a refuge for those who aren’t accepted elsewhere, a place of personal expression, not just tolerance but acceptance of diversity, individual freedom and different ways of dealing with conflict than just brute force. After the last election that I worked on in Ohio, there was a great deal of disillusionment, and all I could think to do was put it in my work. For me, it’s a very patriotic and political film even though it’s not overtly so. It’s much more personal.

… Read the rest

MOUTH TO MOUTH OPENS IN NEW YORK

By Scott Macaulay

Alison Murray’s feature Mouth to Mouth opened this weekend in New York at the Village East. I met Alison three or so years ago at the Rotterdam Cinemart and the IFP No Borders Lab where she was raising money for the feature, liked the script and her tough vision and tried to help her attach some American actors to the movie. In the end, Alison made the film in Europe with her own hand-picked cast of up-and-coming actors, one of whom, Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X3) is already a rising star.

The film tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young girl who runs away from home to join a youth cult. But just as she’s entangled with the group’s slippery leader as well as some of its more charismatic young members, her mother arrives not to take her home but to join the cult as well.

Here’s what the film’s executive producer, Atom Egoyan, has to say about the movie:

“This is a truly adventurous and original film. Alison Murray makes extraordinary shorts which combine her choreographic skills with a finely tuned sense of camera gesture and play. In her first feature, Murray extends this unique vision in a compelling story of a young woman’s experience with a modern cult. Mouth to Mouth urgently conveys the complex dynamics of an individual against the tribe, compassionately revealing both the seductions and the horrors of indoctrination and liberty. “

I remember when I read the script, I wondered if the film’s three short choreographic sequences would work, and when I saw the finished film, I thought Alison had totally pulled them off, that these sequences effectively plumb underneath the skins of the characters to reveal their unguarded yearnings for human contact. I really think some of the daily reviewers missed the point of these sequences — or, rather, didn’t even bother to properly think about them. In any case, the film is slated to play a week at the Village East, 2nd Avenue and 11th St., and I think it’s worth checking out.

Check out the trailer here.… Read the rest

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

By Admin

Since this past January, more than 200 filmmakers from 23 countries have submitted 240 short films to Getty Images, all hoping to be a part of “The Next Big Idea,” a peer-juried online short film competition. The pool of contestants was narrowed from more than 213 to 10, each of whom will have their short film premiered around the world in the coming days.

The catch? The competition asked filmmakers to produce a film between 30 and 60 seconds in length, with at least half of the content originating from Getty Images’ vast online collection of digital film and still imagery. Getty Images offers over 70,000 archival images and clips, available to registered members.

The Big Idea films premiered in 2004 after Getty Images collaborated with seven filmmakers, as well as several media companies, to create seven short films and their accompanying making-of documentaries. According to Getty:

“As new ways of working online deliver new ways of communicating, Getty Images investigated the impact of new methods on the eternal quest for great filmmaking concepts. We partnered with seven innovative directors to capture The Big Idea, working from brainstorming to completion via thousands of digital clip downloads to deliver groundbreaking films through a revolutionary workflow.

“We traveled the globe to interview each contributor and found that the search for The Big Idea is a desire to understand the world and yourself and images, and to play as a child and to play god, to play as if you know exactly what you are doing and enjoying the buzz of only finding out after you’ve done it.

“Our brief is simple: make a film about The Big Idea. Yes, The Big Idea. Whatever that means to you. It could be a narrative. It could be a hallucinatory sensory experience set to music. It could be abstract. It could put forth an argument, it could tell a joke, it could make us laugh or move us to act. It could be something else…something original that you care about and that we can’t predict.”

The Big Idea has now spawned “The Next Big Idea,” … Read the rest