Archive for May, 2007
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Over at Cinematical Ryan Stewart rounds up some Darren Aronofsky news including word of his new script (Noah’s Ark) and a link to the director’s MySpace page where he blogs about his fight to release a bonus-packed DVD of The Fountain.
From the blog:
so the dvd came out.
happy that it is in the world.
hope more folks will get to see it.
as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.
everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn’t want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn’t help sales.
i didn’t have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.
so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we’re gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you’ll enjoy it.
It’s dispiriting when a director with the stature of Aronofsky can’t get his studio to agree to putting some coin into decent DVD extras. As a producer, I’ve been involved with a number of DVDs where the extras have been added solely at the producer or director’s expense. The studios just don’t seem to care about spending any extra money on a film that may not have been a big hit when it comes to DVD extras. I’m convinced, though, that DVD buyers look for these extras when they are shopping for a DVD.
Anyway, I do think downloadable commentary tracks that you can play along with the movie (kinda like playing Dark Side of the Moon alongside The Wizard of Oz) are the wave of the future.… Read the rest
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
In the interview I did with Judd Apatow yesterday we spoke about how he wrote Knocked Up for Seth Rogen, and I know that nobody else was ever considered for the role. All that makes this clip of Apatow “firing” Arrested Development‘s Michael Cera from the movie even funnier. As Gabe Wardell points out there’s more than a hint of David O. Russell to this…
Michael Cera gets fired from Knocked Up
It’s of course a clever little stunt to promote Knocked Up, and also Apatow’s next movie, Superbad, which Cera stars in. Apatow confided to me yesterday that “the secret we’re trying to keep from everyone is that Superbad is even funnier than Knocked Up.” While Knocked Up is out tomorrow, Superbad is only released August 17, but you can check out the film’s R-rated trailer for a taste of what’s to come.… Read the rest
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Today GreenCine links to a couple of articles discussing Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his legacy, and allegations that the Fassbinder Foundation and its director, Juliane Lorenz, have “systematically erased” (to quote d.p. Michael Ballhaus) important figures like composer Peer Raben and actress (and ex-wife) Ingrid Caven from the Fassbinder history.
The key document is a translation in Sign and Sight of a Die Zeit interview with Caven (pictured here). Caven’s attack on Lorenz and the Foundation is what’s getting all the press attention, but the interview is also striking for Caven’s memories of Fassbinder’s sex life, the early days of the New German Cinema, and the political goals contained within the films.
An excerpt:
Die Zeit: In 1981, Fassbinder said that of all the many people who had once lined up “to effect the realisable Utopia” only he, Peer Raben and you remained. What did this Utopia look like?
Caven: It was about fundamental structural changes in feeling and thinking. Even if we didn’t manage to pull it off. You know, I still think today that we failed to communicate something vital to the generation that followed us. Back then, in the sixties and seventies, there was a vehement need for all artists to confront the German past and also to intervene in everyday history. This attracted a lot of attention for us personally and for our own needs. And it forced us to confront power relations in love and in life. All this was essential for our survival as artists in post-war German society. At the same time it was always clear that if we wanted to analyse something, perhaps even destroy it, this could not happen at the cost of style. What remains of us is that we were wild and tempestuous and that somehow everything was rock ‘n’ roll. It was an enormously aggressive force which expressed itself through a style. Style and form – everything rested on this. No style without morals, no morals without style. But this also affects the way you live your life. It soon becomes clear that there’s no separation of artistic
… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
On the occasion of the Walter Reade’s 30th anniversary screening of Barry Lyndon (the last show is tonight at 7), Jamie Stuart contributes to The Reeler an interview with Kubrick actor and long-time associate Leon Vitali. Vitali, who most recently produced Todd Fields’s Little Children, is in town to intro tonight’s screening and he took a few moments to talk to Stuart, who also snapped the pic of the producer shown here.
From the interview:
Reeler: But other filmmakers I think of who have a great degree of control — modern filmmakers like say the Coen Brothers or somebody like David Fincher — they very much work from storyboards. They go into shooting their movies knowing exactly what they want, and they do it until they get exactly what they want. With Stanley, however, it seems like it was completely about the process.
Vitali: That’s right. He never used storyboards. Never used storyboards. That’s a wonderful feeling of freedom you have as an actor, and I’ve said several times that Stanley was the closest to a theater director that I ever worked with. That was the process you went through. It’s just that instead of taking six weeks to rehearse for a play scene by scene by scene, here we were taking hours and sometimes days to rehearse and shoot and rehearse and shoot. And all the time during rehearsals, he insisted: “Do it for real. Do what you think you will do.” Because the way he found his first shot, he used to walk around the set with an Arriflex tube and just change lenses, look around, down, up, move away, move around. Once he found his first shot, he knew he could build the scene from that point. But he said: “If you don’t do it properly, if you don’t do it for real, you could change the way I think about the scene. You could suddenly put a whole new accent on it.” You know, it’s such a refreshing way for an actor to work. It really is.
… Read the rest
Monday, May 28th, 2007
So the Palme d’Or went to 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days [pictured above], the account of a woman’s efforts to get an abortion in the waning days of Ceacescu, from Romanian Cristian Mungiu. Not a huge surprise, in truth, since the film, screened on the fest’s first full day, consistently lead in critics’ polls.
A mildly dissenting voice here. The continuing emergence of Romanian cinema is to be applauded, of course. And “4 Months” is a take-no-prisoners gut punch of of neo-realism. The tension is palpable, the temptation to preach resisted, the acting flawless, the heroine positively heroic.
And yet. The film lacks the transcendence of the Dardennes brothers; a great Tolstoyan epiphany – I’m thinking of Resurrection – in which the miscreant performs a back flip of the soul and finds redemption. In “4 Months” no one is held to account; the two women can only suck it up and soldier on. It’s claustrophobic, dreary – the farthest thing from entertainment. Who but the most die-hard art house folks will go for this? And then there’s that shot of the fetus lying on the floor, gazed upon steadily and long by the camera, inspiring a queasiness that would be fodder, paradoxically, for the right-to-lifers …
In general, the awards, presented all over the lot, appeared to reflect ample dissent among the jurors. More justified, in my view, was the special prize to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Festival de Cannes, which went to Gus Van Sant for Paranoid Park. Juror Toni Collette reportedly told the press, “We wanted to give the prize to someone whose film we admired in this particular fest and also [to someone] whose body of work was incredible.” “Paranoid Park” creates an exquisite layering of sound design upon image, while the fractured narrative conveys the disordered thoughts of an adolescent boy in denial about his role in a dreadful accident. True, some accuse Van Sant of retreating into an ever more hermetic preoccupation with lost boys. But “Paranoid” also taps into a nightmarish guilt and paralysis that many … Read the rest
Monday, May 28th, 2007
Director Chris Munch (The Hours and Times) sent the below comment in regarding Ted Hope’s post, below, on start-up online film distributor Jaman. While applauding the company’s goals and its economical price points, Munch wonders whether all the enthusiasm for digital film distribution means that we are being conditioned to accept lower image quality when it comes to viewing our favorite movies.
Will the price ever rocket, though? Will producers and filmmakers benefit if it does? Jaman seems like a good idea at a good price point. I’m astonished how “content delivery trend predictors” have been proven wrong time and again: while the public embraces and gobbles up low-fi, low-rez stuff online (even theatrically!), what I and others have been waiting for — HD DVD rollout — founders, and the quality of cable HD delivery only seems to worsen. Is this attributable to too much greed on the part of cable and satellite operators, trying to squeeze too much programming through their bandwidth? In any case, most of the audience doesn’t seem to care or they would demand something better. They don’t seem to care that what comes through their 50 inch plasma screens is of poorer quality than the analog cable broadcasts of 20 years ago. This country really fucked up broadcast HD in a big way, just like it fucked up by allowing its 70mm infrastructure in theatres to languish in disuse. But, alas, the days in which the latter can be lamented are numbered as affordable 4K capture via Red has become a reality, and the rollout of DCI continues to widen. Bottom line is we now live with the best and the worst of D-cinema and E-cinema and everything in between. And the best is truly something to reckon with.
… Read the rest
Friday, May 25th, 2007
Ted Hope sent the following thoughts on Jaman’s current trial offering of free online art-film rentals. Check out Hope’s comments and then, if you are so inclined, click over to Jaman to download the player and watch a movie.
The absolute hostility, at best, neglect, generally speaking, that the American Film Industry displays towards adventuresome work, and particularly such work done in a non-english language, has some nice byproducts.
When no market exists, salesman often resort to the time tested techniques of the drug pushers. Want to sample the product? Find nirvana for free? Here you go friend, feast away, for once there is a market, you’ll be hooked and the price will rocket. But for now, for you friend, special deal: free.
Takeshi Kitano (several), Maroboshi (the first film by Afterlife‘s Koreada), Jia Zhang-ke’s first film Pickpocket, two by Tsai Ming-liang (including his first, Rebels of A Neon God). Not to mention the Dardenne brothers, Jacques Rivette, and Walter Salles.
All from the pleasure of your own home. Okay, it SUCKS that you are not going to see these projected, but that is but a dream world, and in reality it’s wonderful we have an opportunity to see these.
I believe fully, as the guys at Netflix have said to me that their business has proven, that the longer people have access to quality work at a reasonable price point, their appettite for the work of real auteurs increases, AND the more they are exposed to the good taste of others, the same phenomenon occurs.
So alert all you know and love to this great work and this fabulous opportunity to see it for free. I have no idea how long it will last, but thank you Dreammachine (which controls the rights to these films), thank you Jaman (the online site that offers these films at top internet quality), and thank you Anthony Kaufman (who tipped me via his blog to this great opportunity).
The only thing I can say negative though is what is with Jaman that they don’t list the director’s name in the
… Read the rest
Friday, May 25th, 2007
Writer-director Shonali Bose’s latest feature Amu begins its U.S. theatrical run today in New York City, with LA following in early June.
The tale of a young Indian-American woman’s search for the truth about her past, the film has already proven highly controversial in India, where it suffered several cuts and received the dreaded “A” rating, equivalent to an “R” here. This decision insured that a younger film-going audience would not see the film.
The film itself is a bold, honest story, told without a trace of heavy sentimentality or preachiness. Check it out and see what’s lacking in so many empty US productions.… Read the rest
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
I don’t particularly care much for anime save a handful such as Hayo Miyazaki and Mamoru Oshii, directors that really push the limits of how compelling animation can be. Satoshi Kon’s films fall into this category. In his movies you won’t find aliens invading high school locker rooms or gender ambiguous demi-gods trying to take over the universe 10,000 years in the future. Even though Kon’s latest film, Paprika, takes place predominantly in dreams, it’s still a world that’s intensely familiar. Kon debuted with the much acclaimed Perfect Blue back in 1997. The film had a major impact on directors including Darren Arronofsky who bought the remake rights so he could steal shots for Requiem for a Dream. His follow-ups Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers broadened Kon’s animation style which grew to incorporate a mix of hand drawn, computer generated, 2D and 3D animation. Paprika is Kon’s dream fugue, full of hallucinatory imagery and scintillating dreamscapes.
The protagonist, Dr. Atsuko Chiba, is a no-nonsense neuroscientist by day and a spunky, perky dream hunter by night. While diving into a detective’s dream to help him solve a murder case, the prototype device that allows her to enter people’s dreams is stolen. Lots of grand, beautiful chaos ensues as the lines between dreams and reality become broken to the point of catastrophe. The actualities of the plot, as is the case with most anime, becomes lost in a visual symphony of dream parades, giant dolls, talking frogs, demonic circuses all more colorful then anything Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz dreamed up. Tack on an incredible post-modern, synth soundtrack and the film begins to feel like ninety-minute amusement-park ride. I saw this with a friend who has an intense disdain for all forms of animation, but I could see as the film progressed he was captivated. When we left the screening room he said to me “Wow that just made me really happy.” Give it a shot, I think it’ll make you really happy too. Paprika opens this Friday.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007
Over at his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner receives an email from Dovetail CEO Jason Holloway about the current debate over just how content creators should be compensated for the online viewing of their work. Holloway discusses the pros and cons of the paid subscription model, the pay-per-download model, and the ad-supported model, and provides an opinion as to which types of content are most appropriate for each model.
I’m with Kirsner in believing that there is considerable untapped promise in the pay-per-download model (essentially, this is the model of the iTunes Store), but Holloway makes some points about the value of brand recognition that independent filmmakers should consider.
An excerpt:
Here’s the way I see it. For simplicity there are two segments: high end (stuff that people readily recognize on its own merit) and the rest. For the rest, my theory applies. People won’t pay to experiment, so you have to have ads or subscription (once the platform ITSELF is a brand worth recognizing, people will pay for the platform, even if they won’t pay for each piece of content). People wanting content free or [as] part of a subscription would apply to the high end stuff too, except that the high end stuff (“Darn, I missed Entourage last night”) commands more value and people aren’t experimenting with buying it, so consumers are willing to pay for it.
… Read the rest
