THE EDISON CHEN SCANDAL

By Scott Macaulay

I try to keep up with celebrity scandal just as much as the next guy, so I was taken aback at the Spirit Award after party when a producer friend said, shocked, “You haven’t heard about Edison Chen?” No, actually, I hadn’t, but a few moments later, after he gave me an excited outline of the salient points, I had.

In short, while Western audiences have been crashing the New York magazine website to see the Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn shots, audiences in Hong Kong and throughout Asia have been riveted by an internet scandal featuring hardcore sex photos of a leading actor and a succession of comely — and equally famous — actresses.

In an article entitled “China riveted by stolen sex photos of Hong Kong stars,” The Guardian fills in the details.

From the article by Jonathan Watts:

An unlikely coalition of pop idols, communist censors, Hong Kong police and a Catholic bishop are fighting to stifle the biggest celebrity sex scandal in the history of the Chinese internet.

They are struggling to halt the spread of thousands of lurid digital photographs apparently showing one of Hong Kong’s most famous actors, Edison Chen, in bed with eight of the territory’s top actresses and singers.

The images – illegally copied from the star’s customised pink MacBook – have prompted a media frenzy here that has eclipsed the fixation about Britney Spears in the English-language web.

As well as crashing servers in celebrity-obsessed Hong Kong, the gossip has spread to the mainland, where one online discussion generated more than 25m page views and 140,000 comments.

Although the bulk of its article deals with the technological implications of the scandal, PC World offers an easier-to-understand synopsis of the affair for Western readers.

From PC World:

In late January, photos depicting Chen in the company of several famous Hong Kong actresses and singers began to surface on the Internet. Let me put this in context: Imagine photos of, say, Matthew McConaughey popping up on the Internet, showing him in various states of undress and sexual acts with, say, Alicia Keys,

… Read the rest

POST-GAMING THE SPIRIT AWARDS

By Scott Macaulay

The cinematic year of the pregnant woman continued as Juno won Best Picture, Best Actress (Ellen Page, pictured), and Best First Screenplay at the Film Independent Spirit Awards this weekend while nominee Angelina Jolie, clad in a tight-fitting black dress, made gossip page news by premiering her own baby bump at the event’s red carpet. The Spirits have always managed the tricky business of blending authentic Hollywood glamour, cheeky awards-show irreverence, and sincere salute to independent film, and this year was no exception. Winners spanned the range from mega-hits like Juno to no-budget indies like Chop Shop, and the crowd consisted of the usual indie scenesters as well as the impossibly glam Jolie/Pitt, nominees Cate Blanchett, Sienna Miller (appealingly game for the jokes Wilson threw at her), and Lust, Caution’s Tang Wei, and presenters who included Maggie Cheung, Matt Dillon, Eva Mendes, Kate Beckinsale and Dustin Hoffman. The tent on the Santa Monica beach may have sprung a few leaks (like the one over my table) during the afternoon’s light rain, but this was still a smoothly run and convivial event.

Rainn Wilson took over hosting duties this year from Sarah Silverman and while I went in doubting that he’d top her, he did a great job. A series of pre-taped pieces – one in which he “got indie” by being pimped out as a tranny hooker by Dennis Hopper and the other in which he ineptly auditioned for the lead roles in the various nominated Best Films – were hilarious. There was no Ally Sheedy on-stage winner meltdown this year, but a number of the nominees got off great lines. Best First Screenplay winner Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) quipped that “half the room” had passed on her script and that her first draft was so long that agent Bart Walker suggested pitching it to HBO as a mini-series, while Philip Seymour Hoffman, winning Best Actor for the same film, said that while he normally moves right on to the next job after finishing a film he felt he gained “two sisters” on this one … Read the rest

SPIRIT AWARD WINNERS

By Jason Guerrasio

Juno was the big winner of the Spirit Awards, which just wrapped up on a soggy afternoon in Santa Monica, CA. The film walked away with Best Feature, Best Female Lead for Ellen Page and Best First Screenplay for Diablo Cody. The complete list of winners is below.

BEST FEATURE
Juno

BEST DIRECTOR
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

BEST MALE LEAD
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Ellen Page, Juno

BEST SUPPORTING MALE
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Talk To Me

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There

BEST SCREENPLAY
Tamara Jenkins, The Savages

BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY
Diablo Cody, Juno

BEST DOCUMENTARY
Crazy Love, Director: Dan Klores

BEST FOREIGN FILM
Once, Director: John Carney

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

BEST FIRST FEATURE
The Lookout, Director: Scott Frank

JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD
August Evening, Writer-Director: Chris Eska

ROBERT ALTMAN AWARD
I’m Not There, Director: Todd Haynes
Casting Director: Laura Rosenthal
Ensemble Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw

IFC/ACURA SOMEONE TO WATCH AWARD
Ramin Bahrani, Chop Shop

TRUER THAT FICTION AWARDS
The Unforseen, Director: Laura Dunn

PIAGET PRODUCERS AWARD
Neil Kopp (Paranoid Park, Old Joy)… Read the rest

STEFAN RUZOWITZKY, “THE COUNTERFEITERS”

By Nick Dawson

AUGUST DIEHL, KARL MARKOVICS, VEIT STÜBNER AND AUGUST ZIRNER IN DIRECTOR STEFAN RUZOWITZKY’S THE COUNTERFEITERS. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS.

It is the natural desire of critics to put films and their directors into neat categorizations, and yet there are some directors, such as Stefan Ruzowitzky, whose work simply cannot be summed up in a simple all-encompassing description. Born in Vienna, Austria, on Christmas Day 1961, Ruzowitzky stayed in his home city to study film, theater and history before pursuing a career in directing television shows, commercials, and pop promos for bands such as The Scorpions and Nsync. In 1996 he began an amazingly diverse career in features with the hip urban slice of life Tempo. He followed up with The Inheritors (1997), an acclaimed family drama about Austrian farmers in the 1930s, which was Austria’s selection for the Academy Awards. From restrained pastoral he segued into populist horror, helming two highly successful German medical gorefests Anatomie (2000) and Anatomie 2 (2003). In between, he directed All the Queen’s Men (2001), a WW2 dramedy about crossdressing spies starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard.

Ruzowitzky returns to the subject of World War II with The Counterfeiters, though this time there are few laughs to be had. The movie, based on a remarkable true story, revolves around master counterfeiter Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) whose decadent, immoral life in Berlin is shattered when the Nazis begin rounding up Jews and sending them off to concentration camps. In order to survive, he paints the wardens’ portraits, and then agrees to lead “Operation Bernhardt,” the Nazi’s plot to flood the market with fake American dollars. The Counterfeiters is not a Holocaust movie, but rather an immensely compelling real-life adventure set against the backdrop of WW2 and concentration camps. It does not, however, sidestep the inherent issues of the Holocaust, as the film’s central problem — personal survival vs collective survival — is inextricably linked to the horror of what happened in the camps. Grippingly written and directed by Ruzowitsky and featuring a standout performance by Markovics, The Counterfeiters is one of the … Read the rest

DVDs STILL WAY TO GO

By Jason Guerrasio

On the heels of Toshiba’s announcement this past weekend that it will fall on its sword in the long-winded battle for hi-def DVD supremacy making Blu-ray the victor (guess I backed the wrong horse, anybody want Goodfellas on HD DVD?), David Pogue writes in the New York Times today that even though there’s more options to watch movies online, in the immediate future, DVDs are still your best choice as he gives a report card on the Internet movie boxes (Apple TV, TiVo/Amazon Unbox, Xbox 360 and Vudu).

Pogue also makes a good point about the absent-minded thinking of the companies. An excerpt:

“Finally, today’s movie-download services bear the greasy policy fingerprints of the movie studio executives — and when it comes to the new age of digital movies, these people are not, ahem, known for their vision.

For example, no matter which movie-download service you choose, you’ll find yourself facing the same confusing, ridiculous time limits for viewing. You have to start watching the movie you’ve rented within 30 days, and once you start, you have to finish it within 24 hours.

Where’s the logic? They’ve got your money, so why should they care if you start watching on the 30th day or the 31st?

Then there is the 24-hour limit. Suppose you typically do not start a movie until 7:30 p.m., after dinner and the homework have been put away. If you do not have time to finish the movie in one sitting, you cannot resume at 7:30 tomorrow night; at that point, the download will have self-destructed.

What would the studios lose by offering a 27-hour rental period? Or three days, or even a week? Nothing. In fact, they’d attract millions more customers. (At the very least, instead of just deleting itself, the movie should say: “Would you like another 24-hour period for an additional $1?”)”

… Read the rest

“PAYDAY”

By Admin

Every once in a while you remember an old film and wonder if you actually saw it or just had this amazing dream of an incredible movie. And every once in a while an old film is mercifully released on DVD for a new generation to discover.

Today’s dream DVD release is Payday (1973), starring the overboard Rip Torn as an overboard country singer on a three-day binge of life on the road. Torn is incredible and very believable as he rolls through various towns balancing shows, ladies after him, band member disputes and criminal acts. Every inch of Don Carpenter‘s script feels real, from the internal band issues – they are friends one day and hate each other the next because of a pet dispute – to the heavy pressure felt by radio DJs the singer depends on for popularity. Torn had a run of extreme method performances alongside this gem, including Coming Apart (1969), Maidstone (1970) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Director Daryl Duke has another great lost film in The Silent Partner (1978).

Musician bio-pics are always fun, but they are even better when they go beyond realism. Original tagline: “If you can’t smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it… forget it.”

See larger image

List Price:
$5.97 USD

New From:
$3.78 In Stock

Used from:
$3.57 In Stock

Release date January 8, 2008.

… Read the rest

WORK STUDY

By Scott Macaulay

Interesting trend article by Dan Frost in the New York Times about “co-working,” in which various freelancers all share a common office space while still doing their own projects.

From the piece:

While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.

“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”…

The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space.

Most coworkers say they were drawn to the spaces for the same reasons that inspired Mr. Neuberg: they like working independently, but they are less effective when sitting home alone.

… Read the rest

THOUGHTS ON THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE OSCAR

By Admin

I’ve just posted an interview with Stefan Ruzowitzky, the director of The Counterfeiters, one of the films up for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars on Sunday. For a while I’ve been meaning to write something about this particular category of the Academy Awards, as it has taken a lot of flak this year.

Firstly, there was the controversy surrounding the disqualification of The Band’s Visit, something which generated a huge number of column inches. There was much anger aimed at the producers of Beaufort — who were the people who first pointed out to the Israeli Academy that The Band’s Visit had over 50% English and was therefore not eligible — especially when Beaufort replaced it as Israel’s selection. This grievance was understandable, but what I did not agree with was the criticism that was aimed at AMPAS, the body that runs the Academy Awards. They were slammed for disqualifying The Band’s Visit because their rules state that for a film to be eligible it must contain no more than 50% English dialogue. Despite people regularly calling this award “Best Foreign Film,” it is in fact called the Best Foreign Language Film and all that happened was that the rules were adhered to. People seemed to overlook this nuance, and felt because The Band’s Visit was such a good film that this made its disqualification particularly unjust. Unfortunately, a film’s merits do not affect straightforward regulations. (Interestingly, there was no such uproar when Alvin and the Chipmunks was similarly disqualified from Oscar’s animated category for being 70% live action and only 30% cartoon…)

When AMPAS announced the shortlist of nine foreign language films from which the five nominees would be chosen, there was once again widespread unrest. In this case, it was because films like Persepolis, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and The Orphanage had not been selected. And this is where my feelings on AMPAS diverge from the majority. As I see it, the foreign language category is the most democratic of them all on Oscar night — and … Read the rest

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET, 1922- 2008

By Scott Macaulay

The French writer and film director Alain Robbe-Grillet died on Monday in Normandy at the age of 85. GreenCine has a round-up of various news reports and commentary here.

Robbe-Grillet was best known for his literary manifesto “For a New Novel,” his screenplay for Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and his various novels — The Erasers, Jealousy, The Voyeur — that formed part of the Nouveau Roman movement. As a director, his films include L’Immortelle and Trans-Europe Express. La Belle Captive was recently released in the States by Koch Lorber.

When I was in college, Robbe-Grillet’s early novels and the essays that comprised “For a New Novel” were, for all their severity, extremely seductive texts. Robbe-Grillet’s works were ostensibly anti-psychological and opposed to conventional notions of character and metaphor. His books were concerned not with feelings or “the inside” but rather surfaces and exteriors, and his essays comprised a dismissive broadside against what we believed then to still be the corrosive sway of the bourgois novel. There was something thrilling about encountering Jealousy for the first time and hitting that famous sequence in which the narrator, whose wife may be cheating on him, obsessively counts every tree in a banana forest for page after page.

At the time I first read his work, Robbe-Grillet was a visiting professor at NYU, and wile he was in New York the Mudd Club devoted a special evening to him. We showed up at the club and were blindfolded and led onto a bus which took us to what later became the East Village nightclub The World. When we arrived it was decorated like on the decaying mansions that might be found in one of his films. In the upstairs space both L’Immortelle and Last Year at Marienbad screened. I met Robbe-Grillet briefly that night and later with a friend interviewed him for the Columbia literary magazine. He claimed not to speak English so my friend, who was a French major, asked all the questions. She found him quite intimidating, though, and at one point tripped over her words. … Read the rest

“FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO”

By Jason Guerrasio

With more eye-catching docs coming out of Sundance in 2007 (Manda Bala (Send A Bullet), Crazy Love, My Kid Could Paint That, No End In Sight, War Dance, Zoo, ect.), Daniel Karslake‘s For The Bible Tells Me So was lost in the flurry, but this interesting look at how decades of religious anti-gay bias is based almost solely upon the misinterpretation of the Bible, the film should certainly be in the conversation as one of the best docs that came out of Sundance ’07. Hailed at festivals around the country and getting an impressive release through First Run Features, this traditional doc brings clarity to an issue that’s been covered numerous times and unveils a film that’s as informative as it is touching.

Known mostly for his work as a producer on the Gay and Lesbian newsmagazine In the Life on PBS, in his debut feature Karslake examines how one section in the Bible, Leviticus 18:22, has been the end game to the issue of homosexuality for most Christians — “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.” But with interviews by respected religious figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard‘s Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech, we learn that sometimes the words in the Bible should not be taken at face value.

While the film debunks myths, it also highlights five families, all from different lifestyles but all believing that homosexuality is an abomination, until one of their children tell them they are Gay. One family highlighted is that of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (his family’s on the cover) whose daughter is a lesbian and how she helped in his run for the presidency in 2004.

If there’s one thing you come away with, it’s that the words of the Bible are so powerful to some that it will blind them from common sense and as it has with women and African-Americans in the past, alienates a group of people. And sadly … Read the rest