I HATE HUCKABEES (REDUX)

By Admin

The David O. Russell / Lily Tomlin videos that leaked recently have become the indie world’s equivalent of the Paris Hilton sex tape – incendiary and illicitly thrilling. The blogosphere’s exposure of the clips prompted Tomlin to laugh off her conflict with Russell, and George Clooney – who famously clashed with Russell on Three Kings and is the rumored co-leaker of the clips, along with sound mixer Edward Tise – denies the charge and has offered $1m to anyone who can link him to the release of the clips.

Russell himself has been notably silent, yet this week there are reports that he is having problems with Vince Vaughn during pre-production on The H-Man Cometh, and there have been widespread snickers at the announcement yesterday that Russell’s subsequent project will be Sammy’s Hill, a political satire adapted from the book by Al Gore‘s daughter, Kristin. Quite how much ‘Lilygate’ has harmed him will only become clear after the dust has settled.

Interestingly enough, most people seem less interested in the tapes in the context of the decline (or otherwise) of Russell’s career, and have viewed them more as a cultural phenomenon to be enjoyed and subverted. Below I am embedding for your enjoyment a ‘remix’ from Youtuber Deadasoren…

…and Paul Rudd and Michael Showalter delightfully re-enacting the conflict for their – and our – enjoyment.

… Read the rest

AH-CHOO!

By Scott Macaulay

If you were in Times Square last weekend and thought of sitting down in one of those red sofas that signify a Kleenex ad, you might have found yourself in a Greenpeace campaign.

From Gothamist::

Perhaps you’ve seen the Kleenex commercials where an actor playing a therapist sits with a red couch in a busy public space, ready for people to share their thoughts and feelings – and maybe have a good cry. Well, the Kleenex “Let It Out” campaign was in Times Square over the weekend, where cameras were rolling for passers-by to add their experiences to the reel. Until Greenpeace came in.

Greenpeace activists infiltrated the filming by posing as people who wanted to share stories about loss, but capped it off by saying they were most upset that Kimberly-Clark, which manufactures Kleenex, doesn’t use recycled fiber in Kleenex and instead uses “virgin” fiber . Videographer Kelly Loudenberg filmed the protesters on the scene – check out the last part, where Greenpeace activists unfurl a sign behind someone getting emotional on the couch. Apparently filming shut down right after.

Here’s the Greenpeace site, Kleercut, that explains its problems with Kimberly-Clark. And here’s the Kleenex Let It Out campaign site.

Here’s the video of the action:

… Read the rest

SUSANNE BIER / AFTER THE WEDDING

AFTER THE WEDDING

The marriage ceremony in Danish director Susanne Bier’s haunting After the Wedding, penned by frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen and one of this year’s five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, greatly alters more lives than those of the young heiress bride, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and her betrothed. Indeed, the film could be entitled Before, During, and After the Wedding. Anna’s father, burly, big-bucks exec Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), invites Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an expat Dane whose energy is totally tied up with the orphanage for street children he works at in Bombay, but who is reluctantly in Copenhagen to solicit much-needed funding from the wealthy potential donor. What Jacob doesn’t know, and Anna’s post-ceremony toast reveals, is that Jorgen is not her biological father. Having seen that Jorgen’s wife is his own ex, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who had abandoned him in India 20 years before, Jacob realizes that Anna is the child he never knew he had.

Jorgen has stage-managed the reunion of Helene and Jacob, and the introduction of the latter to Anna. He recognizes his own mortality, and, in an act that melds selflessness with a Mabuse-like need to control those in his orbit, he wants to reconfigure a nuclear family to insure the future happiness of his wife and daughter. How does a rich industrialist manage to succeed in this? With money, naturally. He essentially blackmails the equally headstrong Jacob by creating a huge fund for the orphanage, with the caveat that Jacob must remain in Denmark and supervise its financing with Anna. That Jacob has an “adopted” son, Pramod ((Neeral Mulchandani), at the orphanage becomes almost beside the point. The eight-year-old boy becomes dispensable in the grand scheme of things.

A graduate of Denmark’s National Film School, the 46-year-old Bier has been making movies about familial rupture since her first feature, Freud Leaving Home (1991), the story of a Swedish Jewish family in which the mother’s dying of cancer precipitates dramatic acting out by her three children–particularly daughter Freud, the one who never managed to get away … Read the rest

YET MORE GRINDHOUSE

By Admin

It’s just one week until Grindhouse is upon us, but in the meantime here are some little tidbits to keep you going. Over at IESB there are behind the scenes clips of all five directors at work, you can see what happened at the Entertainment Weekly‘s covershoot for Grindhouse here and, if you feel the desire to kill five minutes at work, Time Out will help you pitch a grindhouse movie to Robert Rodriguez.… Read the rest

SCOTT FRANK, “THE LOOKOUT”

By Nick Dawson

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT AND JEFF DANIELS IN SCOTT FRANK’S THE LOOKOUT. COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS.

Scott Frank is one of Hollywood’s most respected scriptwriters, and now one of its most promising directors. Frank’s first produced script was high school comedy thriller Plain Clothes (1988), but his breakthrough came in 1991 when his original scripts for both Dead Again and Little Man Tate came to the screen. Since then, he has shown great talent at adapting novels: he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Out of Sight (1998), having already turned another Elmore Leonard novel, Get Shorty (1995), into a big hit. Frank also co-wrote Malice (1993) and adapted James Lee Burke’s Heaven’s Prisoners for his brother-in-law Phil Joanou, while his more recent credits include Minority Report (2002), The Flight of the Phoenix (2004) and The Interpreter (2005).

Like much of his best work, Frank’s directorial debut The Lookout uses many of the components of the thriller genre but is much more driven by character than by plot. The hero of The Lookout is Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a high school sports star whose world implodes when he causes a traffic accident which kills two of his friends, and leaves him with severe brain damage. He ends up working at a small-town bank in the Kansas wastes, where he is noticed by Gary (Matthew Goode), someone from his old school who is planning to rob the bank Chris works in. The film’s dialogue — particularly from Chris’ blind roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels) — is deliciously sharp, and from the film’s memorable opening sequence, Frank shows himself to be a confident and assured director.

Filmmaker spoke to Scott Frank about his roots in the film industry, the challenges of screenwriting in Hollywood, and The Lookout’s long road from page to screen.

SCOTT FRANK DIRECTING JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT AND MATTHEW GOODE IN THE LOOKOUT. COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS.

Filmmaker : I believe you got your start in the business working on documentaries.

Frank: Yeah, I worked for Alan Landsburg Productions right out of college for about six months. Alan’s wife, Linda … Read the rest

FRANK AND BIER

By Scott Macaulay

On the main page: Nick Dawson’s interview with The Lookout‘s Scott Frank and Howard Feinstein’s talk with Susanne Bier, director of After the Wedding. Both films open today.… Read the rest

VLOG THEORY

By Admin

Chuck Tyron at The Chutry Experiment spotlights a special “New Writing for New Media” issue of the journal Post-Identity, as well as his own article in it. Most of the essays — from Will Luers’ “Cinema Without Show Business: a Poetics of Vlogging” to Matthew Clayfield’s “A Certain Tendency in Videoblogging and Rethinking the Rebirth of the Author” — employ the discourse and resources of film theory to examine this technological moment. But the journal also uses new technology with one interactive article: Adrian Miles’ “That Moment Might Do: Videoblogs and the Any-Instant-Whatever.”… Read the rest

ROCK AND ROVE

By Admin

There on YouTube, a blurry clip of Karl Rove getting down at the Radio-Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It’s one of those the cultural moments so rich in contradictions and creepiness, that one hardly knows what to say. That the man responsible for emptying social programs decides to steal one more thing – the cultural history of rap? That there is nothing more queasy than Rove leaning back and giving himself a homeboy hug? Or more importantly, that the clip’s appearance on YouTube and hundreds of other sites may not be a moment of digital democratic critique, but rather the final stage in another well-tuned media campaign spun by Rove –– I mean, MC Rove –– himself.

… Read the rest

KILLER OF SHEEP LIVES

By Scott Macaulay

Today in New York at the IFC Center Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep receives its U.S. theatrical premiere… 30 years after its completion in 1977. Made as the writer/director’s UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep went on to win awards at the Berlin Film Festival and Sundance, and it was declared a “national treasure” by the Library of Congress. The story of a slaughterhouse worker, an insomniac, struggling to raise his family in ’70s Watts, the film blended the work of non-actors and poetic visuals with a deeply humane sensibility that contrasted sharply with the blaxploitation films that appeared in theaters at the time.

Because Burnett made the feature as, essentially, a student film, he didn’t clear his music rights, and those clearances have prevented the film from a proper release. Now, Milestone, with help from Steven Soderbergh, is releasing the film at the IFC Center in New York, with, presumably, further bookings to come. We’re working on the Spring issue of Filmmaker now, and it includes writer/director James Ponsoldt’s interview with Burnett. But since the film is opening today, I thought I’d run an excerpt:

Filmmaker: How do you think the film relates to the world in 2007 versus the world in 1977?

Burnett: I think you can see the seeds of some of the future in the film. The Watts riots were in ’65, and we filmed in the early 70’s, and you can see that little was done to help the community. In a way, you look back and it’s even worse now, in many ways. Then, to some degree, you could get a job doing manual labor, of course there’s always been a job crisis, but now everything is so technical. Then you could at least pick up a trade from your family who were carpenters, or plumbers, and now you have to go to school for it. In the film there’s an anti-southern thing—like the son calling his mother “My dear,” which is like a country code-word, and she tells him not to say that—and there’s a rejection of certain values, and you sort of

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PHILIP HAAS: THE NEW MICHAEL BAY?

By Admin

Over at SF360, there’s an interview with director Philip Haas in which he talks about his new movie, The Situation, which deals with the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Haas explains why, as a former documentarian, he believes fiction films have a greater impact than documentaries:

A fiction film could go deeper than a documentary because somehow reportage, whether it’s in a newspaper a magazine or a documentary, particularly with this involvement which we are keeping at a distance, the audience become anesthetized to it. I thought if we had a story with flesh-and-blood characters in a narrative arc, people would become emotionally involved. …I wanted something now, where the weight of history would be on our shoulders now, not years later. …[Soon] the studios, of course, will be doing films about the battle of Fallujah with Harrison Ford or the incident on the bridge with Tom Cruise playing the major – well, not Tom Cruise because it would have to be more sympathetic. Anyway, it struck me that doing something in the [present] could be powerful and meaningful. And I’m sort of interested in a balance between politics and art.

Haas later sheepishly admits that he

loved doing the action sequences. My mission now is to become the Michael Bay of the art world. I could go in the direction of action films. I could do the Axis of Evil trilogy.

The Situation is currently on release – go here to find out where it is playing near you.… Read the rest