Archive for July, 2006
Monday, July 31st, 2006
I woke up this morning wondering if I was too harsh on the look of Miami Vice, so I’m going to kick up these comments from Jamie Stuart that are posted below. Stuart disagrees with my pan of the film’s visuals and finds its rough-hewn textures compelling, and he makes the point that by choosing to shoot the film on a Viper instead of a camera like Panavision’s Genesis, they were deliberately striving for the look they got. (He also makes some comments about my quotation of internet movie reviewer Chuck O’Leary, but I wasn’t holding him out as any kind of authority; rather, I just found it odd that the only negative comment I could find about the film’s cinematography was from a fairly obscure reviewer while most of the mainstream critics used the same generic phrases to discuss what was certainly a debatable look.)
Here’s Stuart:
I thought the digital grain was gorgeous. As I always believed it would be when used within the context of tight professional cinematography. I think too many people have become accustomed to flat, clean TV images and forget how grainy and degraded movies used to be. It was the influence of commercial requirements that led Kodak to develop the tight T grain. And its adoption coincided with the rise of digital home entertainment. Ever watch a DVD of an old movie and complain about the picture grain and wish they’d cleaned the image up? It’s cause we became accustomed to TV — where we watch far more moving images on a regular basis than at the movies.
Unfortunately, for now at least, most people associate digital grain with technical amateurishness — they inherently associate that look with home video footage. Which is exactly the comparison O’Leary made. It works from time to time, like with I Like Killing Flies, because the audience accepts that it was shot on consumer equipment.
But for me, Miami Vice, on a purely visual level, was the most significant mainstream use of digital photography, in terms of defining the medium’s aesthetic, since 28 Days
… Read the rest
Monday, July 31st, 2006
Last year I ran a new program from the IFP called the Rough Cut Lab. Over a three-day seminar held during the IFP Market, I lectured along with a group of industry consultants on the process of finishing a feature film and bringing it to market or a festival. The lab covered everything from locking picture with a solid cut of a film, negotiating affordable music rights, festival strategy, creating publicity and marketing materials, selling a movie, and delivering a film to a distributor. Folks like music supervisor Tracy McKnight, composer George S. Clinton, BMI’s Doreeen Ringer-Ross, editor Alan Oxman, publicist Reid Roosevelt, post-production supervisor Rob Lyons and the Film Sales Company’s Andrew Herwitz all spoke to our small group which comprised of directors, their producers, and in some cases their editors.
In addition to the three day series of meetings and lectures we also tried to keep up with the filmmakers as the year went on, offering advice on festival and sales and even making introductions for the films to different programmers and buyers. And after just one year, I felt the program had several real successes. For example, Eunhee Cho’s Inner Circle Line premiered in Rotterdam and won an award at SXSW in addition to finding its finishing money at the Lab when Cho hooked up with an attending producer. Todd Rohal’s The Guatamalan Handshake was another film in the lab, and it went on to win a prize at Slamdance. Kat Candler and her producers from Jumping off Bridges travelled from Texas for the lab and went on to finish their film and premiere at SXSW.
Anyway, I’m gearing up to do the program again, and the IFP has told me that applications will be accepted for another week or so. So, if you are a first-time filmmaker with a wholly independent production that has finished principal photography and has made it to a rough cut stage and you think this kind of program would be helpful, click on the Rough Cut link above. The Lab runs September 14 – 16 in New York, and I … Read the rest
Monday, July 31st, 2006
Excerpts from the summer 2006 issue of Filmmaker, which hits stands this week, have been posted online. Along with our annual “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list, we’ve put up the cover story on Half Nelson, an extensive analysis of MySpace Film and online marketing, a diary by filmmaker Richard Press about his experience attending the market at Cannes, and a handful of other pieces. And that’s just a fraction of what’s in the full print edition, so go out and buy a copy (if you’re not a subscriber already)! Enjoy.… Read the rest
Sunday, July 30th, 2006
I just got back from Miami Vice, and as a huge fan of Michael Mann’s work (including the show on which the movie was based), I was pretty disappointed. The first thirty minutes is fairly strong as Mann throws you smack into the middle of an undercover operation and shoots the various night-time clashes and assignations with a purposefully grainy and quite bold visual style — rooftop meetings against purple night skies, outrageous wheel mounts hovering inches above the Miami causeways, and the grain signifying a dirty reality miles removed from the TV show’s pastel-hued romantic nihilism.
And indeed, while reviews of the film are mixed to negative, many of them praise the film’s look. There’s Ray Pride, below, and how about this A.O. Scott quote:
Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.
The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.
Well, there are many things I liked about Miami Vice‘s visuals (and I should note that the film was shot by Dion Beebe, one of my favorite d.p.’s), but by the end of the film’s two-hour-plus running time, I thought its hi-def cinematography ultimately a failed experiment. When the story simmers down from its overheated opening and starts reeling in the visual tropes of not just … Read the rest
Saturday, July 29th, 2006
The folks over at Filmcritic.com have compiled a highly debatable but still fun list: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. Of course, it’s a calvacade of spoilers, but if you’re reasonably film literate you’ll have seen most of these and can see if your take on movie clilmaxes syncs up with the site’s editors.
Here’s one I very much agree with (although Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant might have made my list too):
King of New York (1990) – After facing the last (and oldest) cop of the four that stalked him, crime lord Christopher Walken sits in a cab, letting the bullet in his gut take its final resting place. Abel Ferrara’s crime sonata ends the idea of the great overblown gangster ending, seeing Scarface as an aging villain who can’t say anything else, feeling the only thing left for him to do is silently drift off to death amongst the dazzle of the city he loves.
… Read the rest
Saturday, July 29th, 2006
I’ll probably see it tomorrow, but to tide me over, here’s Ray Pride’s unexpected summing up of the film:
…The HD process is exploited mostly for a painterly scumble of vivid digital grain in the hardly illuminated night, but in simple summary, Miami Vice is Mann’s foreseeable triangulation of Friedrich Nietzsche, linen-edge designers like Ozwald Boateng and distinguished painters of geometric abstraction, like the great Richard Diebenkorn.
Also, Green Cine asked Pride one of their summertime questions: “If you hadn’t become a film critic, what would you have done instead?”
Here’s an excerpt from his response:
“One night, young, I saw both Nashville on a big screen and The 400 Blows, uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late night TV. And that was it. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way. Many movies followed. Many places followed. Jobs with stories all their own, waiting to be retold. Stories – movies – still hold weight for me in the smaller, smallest details.”
… Read the rest
Saturday, July 29th, 2006
Here’s a look at the work of one of three sets of brothers who appear in our upcoming Filmmaker “25 New Faces” feature. Matt Ross wrote about the Neistat Brothers, who are currently in the (Fox) News for punking the network and causing the on-air reporter to flip out.
Guys, next time, work on the blood effects and make the reaction a bit more convincing.… Read the rest
Thursday, July 27th, 2006
I’m really excited about Brian De Palma’s upcoming adaptation of James Ellroy’s classic noir novel The Black Dahlia. I remember discovering Ellroy for the first time with this book, and the read was like a dark fever dream. If De Palma is truly on form, he stands a chance of getting some of Ellroy’s obsessional memory piece on screen with its perversities intact.
It’s hard to tell from the trailer, but I have my hopes up.… Read the rest
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
Sharon Waxman in The New York Times has a piece up on another conflict arising about the film Crash — its lack of payments so far to its profit participants. As anyone who works in the film business knows, this is almost par for the course, but in the Crash case, the system’s inequities are highlighted by the film’s extraordinary success. In addition to winning the Academy Award, the $7.5 million film has “taken in” $180 million around the world.
The movie’s co-writer and director, Paul Haggis, has so far made less than $300,000 on the film, a pittance by Hollywood standards. The eight principal actors in “Crash,” including Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle, have been expecting large checks for months, after deferring their usual fees in exchange for a percentage of the film’s profits. Recently, their representatives say, they each received checks for $19,000.
Documents show, and the principals’ representatives say, that so far none of the profit participants has received more than a low six-figure sum for their work. Moreover, Mr. Haggis and Mr. Moresco were both in dire financial straits when they made the movie in 2004, but deferred their salaries — about $94,000 and $47,000, respectively — to gain approval to move ahead on the film. The deferred salaries were paid in the middle of 2005, after the film broke even, and the money made its way through the accounting system….
There’s more, and anyone who is owed money for working on a movie — or considering investing in one — should check it out.… Read the rest
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
Now that Caveh Zahedi’s I am a Sex Addict is out of New York, I need to keep reminding myself to continue to go to Zahedi’s blog, which he is keeping up with great posts on any number of topics. Here he is at the Wellington Film festival recounting his thoughts following a meeting with the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi:
We are exactly the same age. His English isn’t very good, and my Persian is even worse, so we communicated by means of a translator (note to self: learn Persian). But it was fascinating to hear him talk about the difficulties Iranian directors have in trying to get their films past the censors, and it made me appreciate the straightforwardness of the American system in which the rules are at least democratic and clear: only films that are commercially viable will be greenlit. In Iran, the rules are much more nebulous, and open to the vagaries and whims of bureaucrats and clerics.
The irony here is that the international interest in films from Iran (and especially banned ones) translates into a kind of commercial viability, whereas independent American films that eschew blatant commercialism are invariably relegated to a lower rung on the hierarchical ladder of cinematic esteem. Panahi, a director of international repute, was arguably the Wellington Film Festival’s most famous guest, and his films are profitable enough to allow him to finance them himself, despite the fact that his last three films have all been banned in his own country. I couldn’t help wishing that my films had been banned as well.
Earlier he posts on one of my pet peeves — when you but a DVD because it’s a great art movie that you want in your collection and everytime you see it you have to suffer through a bunch of trailers from crummy films before you get to the menu. It’s the home video equivalent of commercials in front of the movies in theaters, except that with trailers in front of the DVD menu, you have to suffer through the same crummy clips over and over … Read the rest
