Archive for December, 2006
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
The Golden Globes were announced today and the big news are the duel nominations given out to Clint Eastwood for Best Director (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima) and Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor (Drama) (The Departed, Blood Diamond). As always it would have been nice to see The Hollywood Foreign Press think outside the box and give nominations to say Ryan Gosling for Best Actor or Pedro Almodovar for Best Director instead of taking the safe route but I guess that would be asking too much. The Globes will take place on January 15 on NBC.
And the nominees are…
MOTION PICTURE
DRAMA
“Babel” – Anonymous Content Produc-tion/Una Producción De Zeta Film/Central Film Production; Paramount Pictures/Paramount Vantage
“Bobby” – Bold Films; The Weinstein Company
“The Departed” – Warner Bros. Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures
“Little Children” – New Line Cinema; New Line Cinema
“The Queen” – A Granada Production; Miramax Films
ACTRESS (DRAMA)
Penelope Cruz – “Volver”
Judi Dench – “Notes on a Scandal”
Maggie Gyllenhaal – “Sherrybaby”
Helen Mirren – “The Queen”
Kate Winslet – “Little Children”
ACTOR (DRAMA)
Leonardo DiCaprio – “Blood Diamond”
Leonardo DiCaprio – “The Departed”
Peter O’Toole – “Venus”
Will Smith – “The Pursuit of Happyness”
Forest Whitaker – “The Last King of Scotland”
MUSICAL OR COMEDY
“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” – One America; Twentieth Century Fox
“The Devil Wears Prada” – Twentieth Century Fox; Twentieth Century Fox
“Dreamgirls” – DreamWorks Pictures/Paramount Pictures; DreamWorks Pictures/Paramount Pictures
“Little Miss SUnshine” – Big Beach/Bonafide Productions; Fox Searchlight Pictures
“Thank You For Smoking” – Room 9 Entertainment/David O. Sacks Produc-tion/Content Film; Fox Searchlight Pictures
ACTRESS (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Annette Bening – “Running with Scissors”
Toni Collette – “Little Miss Sunshine”
Beyonce Knowles – “Dream-girls”
Meryl Streep – “The Devil Wears Prada”
Renee Zellweger – “Miss Potter”
ACTOR (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Sacha Baron Cohen – “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”
Johnny Depp – “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”
Aaron Eckhart – “Thank You for … Read the rest
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Screenwriter Annie Nocenti (she wrote Patriotville, directed by Talmage Cooley, which is currently in post-production) just returned from Baluchistan where she shot a documentary with partner Wendelin Johnson. She’s written a piece for The Brooklyn Rail discussing her trip which is a fascinating portrait of a “modern Sitting Bull”: the Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleiman Daud (pictured). A “chief of chiefs” in Baluchistan, one of Pakistan’s tribal provinces which also borders Iran and Afghanistan, Khan Suleiman is a Gucci shade-wearing, Hummer-driving statesman trying to unify the tribes towards an independent Baluchistan so that his people can stave off a “slow-motion genocide” and reap the benefits of the land’s natural resources.
From Nocenti’s piece:
But considering Khan Suleiman once took four AK47 bullets in the gut and chest in the tribal equivalent of a drive-by and lived, the bullet-resistant Hummer makes practical sense. Khan Suleiman’s survival of that shooting was considered so miraculous that there is a university doctor who teaches a class in the incident. As for all the guns and ammunition, Baluchistan is one of the tribal provinces of Pakistan, and in tribal regions, one needs protection. Especially the Khan of Kalat, which literally means King of the Fort, the chief of chiefs. But it’s not his own people he needs protection from.
Khan of Kalat Suleiman’s country is rich in resources that everyone wants to take and he doesn’t have the power to stop them. “We sit on a mountain of gold,” he says, “and the devil sits on us.” His people, the Baluch Nation, are being indiscriminately bombed, arrested, and kidnapped, and he’s powerless to stop it. Journalist Selig S. Harrison has called it a slow-motion genocide and Human Rights groups have called it an ethnic cleansing. “We have 700 miles of coast and oil and gas and gold,” says Khan Suleiman. “We try to do something to have rights to it, we get spanked. We resist every ten years and get spanked every ten years.” For the past few years, he has been in the middle of an unseen war that few beyond the
… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
When it comes to year-end lists, I tend to skip over all the critics lists and concentrate on those that summarize categories of filmmaking I don’t pay enough attention to. Music video, for example. So, here’s Pitchfork’s Top 25 Music Videos of 2006, with links to the clips. Check out work by Sophie Muller, Patrick Daughters, Chris Cunningham and others.… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
From an interview by Fox News commentator Cal Thomas of departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the differences between public support of World War 2 and public support of war in Iraq. One differing factor? The movies.
Here’s Rumsfeld from the interview:
Furthermore, the movie industry was mobilized to support the war. They (filmmakers) wanted us to win, which was an important factor. The situationtoday, the success that has been achieved in not having another attack onthis country in the last five years, has allowed the perception of a threatto diminish, even though the threat has clearly not diminished and, indeed,is real and lethal and dangerous to the safety of the American people.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
When we started Filmmaker, one of the key lines in our mission statement was that we were “demystifying” the process of feature film production. It’s still a key tenet of the magazine and the philosophy behind it has remained unchanged: by giving filmmakers the information on how films are financed, produced, sold and distributed, we’re helping enable newcomers to enter the filmmaking process and realize their visions.
But is it really necessary for first-time filmmakers to know all about these things? By that I mean, isn’t a healthy amount of denial and willful ignorance essential to the process of getting a film made? From experience, I can say that it certainly is when it comes to no-budget production. When you make a film for no money, it’s helpful for the producers to not know that people are hired to do those things.
I know and have worked with directors who read the trades, analyze every deal and try to figure out where they sit on the crest of the market. And then I’ve worked with directors who remain, by either deliberate choice or a simple inability to grasp the bigger picture, clueless about the rhythms and rules of the marketplace. And while I don’t think it’s fruitful for a director to sit on either extreme, I’m also not sure what the best ratio of utopic optimism and reality-based pessimism is for a director. How much of each helps a director get a film made? And how much of either is needed to survive the process afterwards with ego and self-respect intact?… Read the rest
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
As part of its Oscar campaign for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Paramount is streaming online EPK material on the making of the film, including interviews with its production designer, d.p., sound team and more.… Read the rest
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
The Raw Word is a monthly New York screenplay reading series in which up-and-coming actors perform 10 pages of scripts by up-and-coming screenwriters. Sponsored by the IFP, the series features an industry host and is a networking opportunity for writers, actors and development folk.
The December event just passed, but you can submit “your most dynamic 10 pages in Microsoft Word or PDF format” for future readings by emailing them to: rawwordreadings@yahoo.com.… Read the rest
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
Over at her journal, author Susie Bright eulogizes Gary Graver, the d.p., director, and colleague of Orson Welles in his later years, by noting the breadth of his overlooked biography. In addition to crewing films like A Woman Under the Influence, working extensively with Roger Corman, directing many low-budget horror films, and even shooting Ron Howard’s first feature, Grand Theft Auto, Graver, pictured here with Welles, directed many adult movies which, while included on iMDB, have been omitted from his various industry obits.
Here’s Bright:
Graver was memorialized everywhere, acclaimed in every paper from New York to L.A. But nowhere is it mentioned that for twenty years, Gary Graver directed and shot more than 135 erotic, X-rated films— several of which are considered among the best “adult” movies ever made: 3 AM, Amanda By Night, and V:The Hot One. The man is an Adult Industry Hall-of-Famer….
Graver’s best porn work was from the era in the late 70s and early 80s when X-rated movies were still “allowed” to be heavy, to be dark. 3AM and V don’t have sunny endings. The level of emotion, and in both these cases, loss, is something you’d never see in the perky popcorn of today’s XXX. His cinematic style, the eroticism created by his camera and lighting, is unsurpassed. None of the contemporary young directors or actors in adult would even know how to pull it off. It’s practically a lost art at this point, just like Orson [Welles]‘s movie that is never going to be finished now.
Bright, who says she “studied his porn like it was D.H. Lawrence with a lens,” looked to Graver (who directed his adult work under the name Robert McCallum) and his work as an inspiration when she was hired to be the “lesbian sex consultant” to the Wachowski Brothers when they were filming their first feature, Bound.:
If you look at Bound, and then go watch McCallum’s 3AM shower scene between Georgina Spelvin and Judith Hamilton, you will see where I got all my thrills. Georgina was
… Read the rest
Friday, December 8th, 2006
From The Guardian, a piece on Mel Gibson in which he places his new Apocalypto within a line of bigger-budget movies that are forming a new breed of independent films:
Gibson has evidently chosen to turn his back on mainstream American cinema and take risks. “I’m getting to a place where I look at the future of cinema as independent film, through which there’s a hunger for a different kind of fare that simply isn’t being catered to by anyone, other than independent film-makers.” Not, he says, that he is deliberately shunning the mainstream studio system: “I really don’t think in those terms. I’ve just been financing the stuff myself because only a lunatic would do that,” he says. “There’s a gamble aspect to it, in that you could fall flat on your face, which is always a possibility, but at some point you’ve got to try and put your money where your mouth is and say: I can do this.”
… Read the rest
Friday, December 8th, 2006
The last time I linked to Tim Lucas and his excellent Video WatchBlog Lucas was dissecting the psychological motives and emotional pitfalls of DVD collecting. Now, in a post entitled “The Trouble with Blogging,” he is similarly ruminative about the film blogging rat race, realizing that his blogging compulsion has not left him enough time to dig into the new Thomas Pynchon novel.
At the very least, Lucas’s post makes me feel better about my semi-frequent blogging breaks and sometimes sloppy proofreading.
From the piece:
“The trouble with blogging is that, at some point, you discover that you have become a blogger. As with many things, I knew this from the beginning but only on the level of language; in time, however, one begins to know the meaning of these words on a more experiential level and they acquire a different, somewhat more oppressive, weight.”
And then, later:
“In a nutshell, then: Blogging means overwork, neurosis, depression, radiation. Plus, as I’ve griped before, there’s no money in it.”
Still, Lucas perserveres, as in this long post in which he discusses his evolution as a film critic.
An excerpt:
“The experience of being on a film set and gaining insights to the actual process of making films is invaluable to anyone who writes about films. Of course, the critic is writing about the end result, but it is important to know that (for example) performance often has less to do with what is accomplished on-set than shaped in the editing room, and the extent to which budget can restrict the fulfillment of what is on the page. Too many critics blame faults on the writer, director or actors that would be more correctly laid at the door of the producer, the editor, or even the cinematographer. (I won’t go into details, but I know of one occasion where I was less than impressed by a certain actress in a certain role, and I later realized that my response had more to do with the way she was photographed than her actual performance. I later heard gossip from the set about how
… Read the rest
