Archive for August, 2006
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
The album of the year — Scott Walker’s The Drift — now has an amazing, sepulchral music video to go along with it. It’s late, I’m tired, so I’m just going to quote from Pitchfork:
Animator/Tomato-associate Graham Wood has assembled an appropriately eerie, nightmarish mindfuck of a video for Scott Walker’s “Jesse”, from this year’s Best New Music’d The Drift. The piece, which recalls both Stanley Donwood’s work with Radiohead circa OK Computer and the storied 4AD aesthetic, features familiar symbols and pictograms (smiley face, generic man and woman, cross) a-Drift in a kaleidoscope of dissolving lines, patterns, and textures. Might not sound so unsettling on paper, but trust me here– this shit haunts.
… Read the rest
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
The fourth Tuesday of every month Nicole Rafter, author of Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, contributes a column on crime films to the Oxford University Press blog. In her latest column she takes on my favorite whipping boy from one of my favorite directors, this summer’s Miami Vice:
It may be that crime films in general are running out of gas today after the revival and boom of the late 20th-century that began in 1967 with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and went into high gear in 1971, when Dirty Harry introduced the new genre of cop action. More likely, we are seeing the specific genre of cop-action winding down its cycle. Or so Miami Vice suggests. This film has nothing new to say about buddy cops, policing, the hunt for criminals, or the nature of crime. It illustrates nothing more clearly than cop-action’s loss of energy since the golden days of the Die Hards and Lethal Weapons.
Pierre Marmiesse writes an opinionated blog on the French film industry, in English, titled Forgive my French Films. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post on Claude Chabrol.:
Chabrol enjoys a great love-hate relationship with his subject matter: he loathes his bourgeoisie as much as he laughs at them and, sometimes, may be with them; they fascinate, irritate, disgust, entertain him and, through him, us.
For nearly half a century, Chabrol and bourgeoisie have been an odd couple of partners in success; their conflict is among the great rivalries in French filmmaking: a Connors-McEnroe feud extended over the length of five tennis careers.
Chabrol’s French provincial bourgeois are both a sociological fact and a filmmaker’s fantasy, if not a personal obsession: nearly, but never, too good -i.e. bad, mean, evil, conniving, greedy, criminal…- to be true.
Chabrol’s movies should be compulsory screening material for all sociology, home and fashion design students alike. Any admirer of French art de vivre should rush to watch them.
Finally, the filmmaker St. Clair Bourne has been blogging for a little while now. Here, he writes about his … Read the rest
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride tips this L.A. Times piece by James Ellroy in which the noir author ruminates on his flight from and return to Los Angeles, the city that has inspired so many of his novels. With Brian DePalma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia (pictured) just a few weeks away, Ellroy sketches the psychic landscape of the city while discussing emotional and mental breakdowns, literary mania, and general sleeplessness.
From the piece:
L.A. bids pundits to spin epigrams. W.H. Auden called L.A. “The Great Wrong Place.” I’ll ascribe intent. Auden saw L.A. as a lodestone for opportunists and psychically maimed misfits. I sense this because I fall into both categories. Auden couched L.A. in a film-noir construction. Losers migrated here to start over and become someone else. L.A. was a magnet for lives in desperate duress. The sheer indifference of the place consumed the migrants and drove them mad. They succumbed to madness in a sexy locale. The place itself provided solace and recompense. They had the comfort of other arriviste losers. They entered the L.A. spiritus mundi. They handed out their head shots. They joined that unique L.A. casting call.
For picaresque grifters, dollar-driven D.A.s, well-hung gigolos, hollow-eyed strumpets, hophead jazz musicians, pervert cops, alcoholic private eyes, sadistic studio heads, laudanum-lapping layabouts, homosexual informants, religious quacks and an uncategorizable array of stupes with indefinable psychopathic mandates and plain inconsolable despair.
… Read the rest
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells thinks that the trailer for Todd Field’s Little Children is the best trailer of the year. As he explains in the story linked to above, Fields didn’t want the trailer to have “music, dialogue or story.” The trailer New Line, Field and the trailer company came up with uses prominent sound design — a foreboding train horn — and shots of the actors to succinctly capture the film’s marital implosions.
The trailer is good, and it’s all the more striking for its avoidance of today’s typical trailer cliches and conventions. It was cut by Mark Woolen at Mark Woolen and Associates, and you can see it at the film’s website, here.… Read the rest
Saturday, August 26th, 2006
I’ve been a fan of New Zealand stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton for a little while now, and I just came across this lovely music video for Toni Collette. (Yes, Toni Collette sings.) It takes a little while for one of Edgerton’s twists to arrive, but the one-take video is quite gorgeous and worth checking out.
For more of Edgerton’s work, check out his website. I’m sure he’ll be moving into features very soon.… Read the rest
Saturday, August 26th, 2006
If you want to read some great and diverse film writing, I really recommend you check out Stu Van Airsdale’s The Reeler this week. While Stu travels to L.A., he’s asked a great group of New York film people to guest-blog, and so far, each writer has really risen to the challenge.
Check out Stu’s blog and read: Andrew Wagner posting from the editing room of his new feature; James Ponsoldt on MOMA’s Dada show and the art movement’s relationship to contemporary comedy; author Lauren Wissot on Roman Polanski’s foot fetish; AMMI curator David Schwartz on Jacques Rivette; Eric Kohn on Jonathan Rosenbaum; Cinecultist Karen Wilson on fall movies; Lewis Beale on the resurgence of hot Jewish babes; Cinekink’s Lisa Vandever on the connection between sex and narrative; and a lot, lot more. (Apologies to all the great people I didn’t list above.)
You’ve only got a few more days before Stu returns with his own great writing, so check out the replacements while they are still fresh.… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
Snakes on a Plane may have fallen short of box office expectations but the Samuel L. Jackson publicity machine shows no sign of stopping. Already the internet is abuzz over the sultry, retro posters for his next flick, Black Snake Moan. Hustle & Flow’s Craig Brewer directs the southern tale of a blues musician (Jackson) who takes it upon himself to help cure a young woman (Christina Ricci) of her sexual addiction. Jackson and Ricci are each depicted in a seperate poster wrapped in chains next to the film’s provocative slogan, “Everything is Hotter Down South”.
Make your own hilarious Samuel L. Jackson voice message on
Snakes on a Plane’s official website. Harry Knowles talks a little about the film and also provides the poster featuring Ricci over at aintitcoolnews.com… Read the rest
Friday, August 18th, 2006
Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed the recently released Brick, has helmed a music video for Mountain Goats, which you can see below.
… Read the rest
Friday, August 18th, 2006
The Sundance Institute, which will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, has the announced this year’s winners of the Annenberg Film Fellowship. The prize includes a $10,000 initial grant plus additional financial and creative support for the two years. You may remember a number of the class of 2006 from the previous issues of Filmmaker. They are:
Kit Hui (writer-director), A Breath Away
Cruz Angeles (co-writer-director) & Maria Topete (co-writer), Don’t Let Me Drown
Jake Mahaffy (writer-director), Free In Deed
Andrew Dosunmu (director) & Darci Picoult (writer), Mother Of George
Kirsten Johnson (writer-director), My Habibi
So Yong Kim (writer-director), Treeless Mountain
Milford Thomas (co-writer-director), Uncloudy Day… Read the rest
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
In this media-saturated world it’s more than a little difficult to get yourself noticed. But after six years of hard work and some good timing, Rod Perth and Stanely Hubbard have managed to get their new breed of movie channel eaten up by DirecTV and EchoStar’s Dish Network. According to Perth, this means that the September 27th debut of ReelzChannel will be “the biggest launch in the history of a cable and satellite network.” Talk about one monumental baby-step.
The channel, that claims to love movies as much as you do, has set itself apart from other movie channels such as Showtime, HBO, and Starz, by its programming. It is a movie channel that doesn’t show movies but shows about movies and everything movie related. Movie news, movie trivia, movie interviews and exposes–these are the types of shows in the fall line-up; the programs poised to make ReelzChannel into the ESPN of movies. And it just might work. Based off preliminary descriptions from their website, the shows look like they’ll appeal to a whole gambit of film lovers: from art and indie to the cult and blockbuster. But will they catch? We’ll have to wait one month ’til kick-off.… Read the rest
