Archive for June, 2006
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
Writing in Sight and Sound, Amy Taubin surveys the young Americans at Cannes — John Cameron Mitchell, Rick Linklater, and, finally, Richard Kelly:
“It’s about how a bunch of teenagers are dying because we don’t have an alternative fuel source,” said Richard Kelly of ‘Southland Tales’, his hallucinatory, media-saturated, apocalyptic, broken-hearted, future/present follow-up to ‘Donnie Darko’ – which has just a ghost of a chance of being shown theatrically in its two-hour 43-minute Cannes version. As oneiric and overwhelming as two memorial films of Cannes past – David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Dr.’ and Wong Kar-Wai’s ’2046′ – and a lot funnier, ‘Southland Tales’ attributes the war in Iraq and the devastation of the planet to the greed and increasing desperation of Big Oil and to the all-encompassing (at least in the US) media culture, of which the film is unabashedly a part. Kelly’s mash-up owes as much to ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’ as to ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ and the aforementioned Lynch Hollywood dystopia, as well as recalling two American underground film-makers – Ken Jacobs and Manuel De Landa – whose work Kelly has probably never seen.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
The lawyers at Paramount, who presumably are not fans of folks like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and other appropriation-based artists, have launched a federal lawsuit against artist Christopher Moukarbel, who we blogged about recently. They are charging copyright infringement with regards to a 12-minute film he created and put up online which is based, apparently, on a copy of the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (Filmmaker‘s blog is cited in the Paramount filing.)
The Smoking Gun has all the details, including links to screenplay excerpts, which have been filed as exhibits, as well as a side-by-side comparison of Stone’s script and Mourkabel’s work. Undoubtedly the Paramount action will draw many to check out the script for World Trade Center and make their own conclusions about the work a couple of months before the film opens.
The damages requested in the suit are unspecified, and the clip has been removed from the artist’s website “at the request of Paramount Pictures.”… Read the rest
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
Larry Clark’s Ken Park, from a script by Harmony Korine, is notoriously difficult to see in the States. According to Clark in this week’s Village Voice, that old nemesis, uncleared music rights, is the culprint. But for those who want to see the movie, Clark relays to writer Jessica Winter some consumer advice while he waits for the song situation to get worked out.
In the meantime, Clark directs interested parties to the Internet. “You can go on eBay and get the DVD. The Russian DVD is good, the French DVD is good, the Dutch DVD is good. But don’t get the Hong Kong DVD, because they pixelated all the nudity out.”
… Read the rest
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: David Lynch is selling ringtones. $3.99 a pop.… Read the rest
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
Pitchfork Media has just put up one of their mammoth surveys, this time 100 Awesome Music Videos, complete with mini-critiques and, for each one, a link to the video itself. It stretches back to the beginning days of music video and seems to have most of the major clips covered. Check it out.… Read the rest
Monday, June 19th, 2006
Many of the greatest directors — and many more of the not-so-great — aspire to create the cinematic equivalent of a great piece of music. DJ Danger Mouse, the brilliant 28-year-old composer/producer who just scored a huge in the U.K. with his Gnarls Barkley collaboration with Cee-Lo (the U.S. numbers are, not surprisingly, more modest) has found inspiration in the opposite direction: he wants to be a auteur.
In yesterday’s excellent New York Times Magazine profile, Danger Mouse, AKA Brian Burton, says that his musical identity began to materialize once he discovered the work of Woody Allen. “When I got to college, I saw Manhattan and Deconstructing Harry,” he tells Chuck Klosterman. “I thought to myself: Why do I relate so much to this white 60-year-old Jewish guy? Why do I understand his neurosis? So I just started watching all of his movies. And what I realized is that they worked because Woody Allen was an auteur: he did his Thing, and that particular Thing was completely his own. That’s what I decided to do with music. I want to create a director’s role within music, which is what I tried to do on this album.”… Read the rest
Friday, June 16th, 2006
With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki.
“Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White.
Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence at the box office. But because the movie pivots on one of Toback’s pet subjects — sexual exploration — it serves as a handy launching point for an overview of the director’s interesting, if inconsistent, career.
If you’ve watched his movies, then to an extent you know Toback. His script for The Gambler, the 1974 film that starred James Caan as a gambling-addicted professor, famously grew out of Toback’s compulsive betting. The Pick-up Artist(1987) and Two Girls and a Guy (1997) are, on certain levels, replications of his checkered relationships with women. Harvard Man (2001) is a fictionalized version of his LSD-taking college days. And like almost all of his films since, Fingers is fascinated with sexual transgression and liberation.
Toback has always chosen to tell personal stories and accept the smaller audiences that come with them. There might not be a more proudly autobiographical filmmaker working today — a point Jarecki makes in dozens of interviews with people such as Robert Downey Jr., Barry Levinson, Woody Allen, Mike Tyson, Harvey Keitel, Roger Ebert, Brooke Shields, Robert Towne and Jim Brown, the football legend and longtime Toback friend.
The Outsider (Outsidermovie.com) opens Fri., June 16 at Cinema Village (Cinemavillage.com) in Manhattan.
Filmmaker: Nicholas, one of the techniques you use in the movie is to ask people, “Who is James Toback?” So let me ask you that.
Jarecki: James Toback is a fusion of two distinct personalities, one a refined, highly educated, highly intelligent … Read the rest
Friday, June 16th, 2006
The director of Head-On investigates the rich musical culture of his homeland.
DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN.
The soundtrack and score of the critically acclaimed, adrenaline fueled doomed romance Head-On was a fusion of punk, European electronica, hip-hop, British new wave and traditional Turkish laments, so it’s no great surprise that the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new movie is a documentary about the vibrant and diverse music community in Istanbul. It’s the city where Head-On music composer Alexander Hacke, better known as a member of the avant-garde band Einstuezende Neubauten, recorded a few songs for Head-On — and became fascinated by the diverse musical styles and how they are representative of a city bursting at the seams with vitality, originality and the delight of “East meets West,” creating something new. In other words, Crossing the Bridge is about that bridge between cultures, which is to say, it’s about Istanbul.
The documentary’s structure is decidedly shambolic, with a mostly handheld camera following fast on the heels of the long-haired, bearded, intense-looking Hacke as he ventures from one district to another, hauling along a portable recording studio on his computer and a case full of microphones. Their journey begins with a neo-psychedelic band called Baba Zula indulging in a jam session aboard a boat — and since their bass player dropped out at the last minute, Hacke is more than happy to jump in. A half-dozen bands later, ranging from intellectual experimentalists in a pastel-colored basement to Turkish rappers who frown on the idea of “gangsta rap” and imbue their fast lyrics with historical and philosophical heft, Crossing the Bridge detours into the poverty row world of gypsy performers in a Bohemian beer garden and folklore street performers and break-dancers who inhabit the public square of Istanbul, proposing musical development as an alternative to drug culture.
This fast-moving trip into the musical heart of a city doesn’t take breaks to reorient the viewer, other than a few cursory insights from Hacke on where they are and an overview of the performers on hand. What’s more vital is the spirited enthusiasm and excitement of each … Read the rest
Monday, June 12th, 2006
Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, Zahedi is talking about teaching at the European Graduate School in the Swiss Alps where he’s hanging out with and listening in on classes taught by Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, D.J. Spooky, the Quay Brothers and others.… Read the rest
Monday, June 12th, 2006
Over at Suicide Girls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews the great horror director Stuart Gordon and talks about the reissue of the fantastic 80s horror film From Beyond as well as an upcoming project — another episode in the Re-Animator series:
DRE: I read that House of Re-Animator is going to set in the White House.
SG: Yeah, we’re excited about that. We’re in the process of writing it, so that’s a little ways off.
DRE: Are you definitely directing it?
SG: Yes, we hope to start at the beginning of next year.
DRE: What has brought you back to Re-Animator?
SG: It was when George W. Bush became president, I want to say got elected but he really didn’t. I actually believed that Donald Rumsfeld had died. I couldn’t believe he was still around. Suddenly I had this idea that this was a reanimated Cabinet. I got very excited about the idea. I’ve actually been pestering Brian [Yuzna] to do this House of Re-Animator idea for awhile. It wasn’t until Bush started his second term that Brian had finally said, “Okay. I think we should do it.” I think he was afraid of the idea originally.
Meanwhile, the New York Times writes about Gordon’s newest film, an adaptation of David Mamet’s fantastic play Edmond.… Read the rest
