Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
With Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che films on deck at Cannes, Tribeca had the perfect appetizer with Chevolution. This impressive doc chronicles the unlikely journey this image of Che Guevara from the La Coubre explosion funeral march in 1960 evolved into a beacon of capitalism.
Directed by Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff, the doc, which is making its World Premiere at Tribeca, is produced through Netflix’s Red Envelope Entertainment.
Starting off with a brief history of how Ernesto Guevera became “Che,” the doc then examines the man who took the famous shot, Alberto Korda. A fashion photographer turned news photog during the revolution in Cuba, not until the ’90s was he recognized as the person who took it. Filing away the film negative after the newspaper didn’t run the shot, it stayed hidden from the world until the late ’60s when the shot appeared in a French magazine after Che fled into the Congo. Though the image wasn’t appropriate for a news piece at the time Korda shot it, his fashion photography background made the image perfect for reflection, especially for a man who after his death would become immortal.
Considered the most reproduced image in the history of photography, a major reason for that is because Korda never had a copyright on it. This lead the Che shot in public domain (until recently) and evolve through the decades from being on posters at rallies to sparking inspiration for artists like Jim Fitzpatrick to create pop art out of it (right) and inevitably used for corporate gain as it gets plastered on T-shirts, coffee mugs, cigarette packs, beer bottles and even bikinis.
Interviews in the film range from people who knew Che, like his motorcycle diaries mate Carlos Calica Ferrer, Korda’s daughter Diana, photographers who knew Korda, and Che historians. Rage Against The Machine‘s Tom Morello even tells how Diana’s lawyers went after the band for using the Che image on the cover of one of their singles.
But Lopez and Ziff don’t ignore the awfully large elephant in the room: Che’s controversial … Read the rest
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Here are a few noteworthy links from the last few days.
First, a must-read (or must-listen) is an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz on his blog, The House Next Door. (The hour-long talk is available as a transcript or as a download.) In the piece, Seitz discusses his decision to abandon print criticism and concentrate on both moviemaking and things other than movies. Here’s how he opens:
Well, the short of it is: I’m out of print criticism. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and for a variety of reasons. One of them is that I’ve been doing it for seventeen years now as of May of this year, and I’ve done it for a variety of different outlets in a variety of different forms. I’ve enjoyed it… I’ve always enjoyed it, but I just don’t want to do it anymore. Part of the reason for that is that I don’t write as quickly as I used to and I don’t have as much time to do it as I used to. But the more important thing is that, according to the actuarial tables, I’m probably about halfway through my life, if I’m lucky. And there’s a lot of things that I would like to do, and I haven’t done them yet. And I want to get started on it.
Scott Kirsner at his Cinematech blog lists and has commentary on five internet sites that help filmmakers raise funding for their films.
Over at FilmInFocus, the site has one of their periodic “Five in Focus” lists. This time, over the course of the next week five designers list their favorite feature films from the standpoint of design. First up: Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz.
A click away at the Filmmaker home page, we reprint David Gordon Green’s essay on Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake, which is included in the new Benten Films-released DVD. The essay is entitled “Outrage the Rooster: Words about this Film.”
Finally, there seems to be only one mainstream entertainment story today: the release of Rock Star Games’ Grand Theft Auto 4. The pre-sale … Read the rest
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
From Portishead’s excellent Third, “The Rip,” one of the album’s best songs performed live on Jools Holland’s U.K. tv show.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
The following essay by David Gordon Green on Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake accompanies the film’s DVD release from Benten Films out today.
I am plagued by two mothers of frustration:
1. POWER PROBLEMS: Who controls the switches? Who pushes the buttons? How do I get to be large and in charge like Arsenio Hall’s portly alter ego Chunky A?
2. LOST AND FOUND: Why did you leave? Where did you go? Or have I just forgotten where I put you?
Todd Rohal’s first feature length movie The Guatemalan Handshake revolves around these issues through a series of characters and events that result from a meltdown at a power plant in an anonymous city, USA. We meet people with funny names and see images that make us laugh and snap the elastic of our underpants, but the root of this film’s strength is the sad beauty of loneliness and loss that sneaks inside our heads when we lose our power. Goddamnit… this feels like a review.
Let me back up…
I saw a short film of Todd’s several years ago. It was called Hillbilly Robot. It presents a sideshow of people in the foreground pulling forth the background of landscape and industry that created them. It is laugh-out-loud funny, but with a sting of subtle cultural commentary that left me with as much meditation as amusement. A producer friend of mine, Nick Panagopolous, introduced me further to Todd’s work and told me with excitement of his collaboration on what would be Rohal’s first feature endeavor. I was as eager as an evening boner to see what would result from the guy whose work struck such a chord with me in its short form.
Anyway, a year or so later I had the privilege to see The Guatemalan Handshake. It woke me up like an injection of creatine on a morning when I was dealing with my own professional frustrations. It reminded me of the courage and hunger it takes to get anything distinctive going these days. It was inspiring because it was simultaneously genius and idiotic and IT … Read the rest
Monday, April 28th, 2008
The BLDGBLOB has a great post entitled “Hotels in the Afterlife” that is very J.G. Ballard — a series of shots of abandoned hotel exteriors on the Sinai peninsula, “monuments to failed investment.” Based on a photography show that opened last week in Vienna by Sabine Haubitz and Stephanie Zoche.
From Geoff Manaugh’s blog post:
The hotels now look more like “architectonic sculptures” in the desert, the photographers claim, or derelict abstractions, as if some aging and half-crazed billionaire had constructed an eccentric sculpture park for himself amongst the dunes.
The billionaire goes for long walks at night alone amongst the ruins, sweeping dust from recent sandstorms off windowsills and open doorways.
At night, when the stars come out, different constellations are framed by unglazed windows, as if justifying these concrete forms from above with the poetic force of celestial geometry.
Or, for that matter, five years from now these deserted monuments simply disappear – but because they’ve been put to use, finally, enwrapped with drywall and plaster, fitted out with drapes and marble floors, and you can sleep inside them for $300 a night, never even dreaming that these hotels were once ruins, temporarily abandoned to the sand and only recently reclaimed.
The empty swimming pool is now full – and you dive into it, unaware that you’re more like a ghost than a tourist, haunting the afterlife of these sites in bleaching sunlight.
Make sure to read the great comment thread, in which various responders discuss the reasons for the abandonment of these structures as well as other similar spots around the world.… Read the rest
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
As Tribeca‘s first weekend passes, most talk has been on the admission by Errol Morris that he paid — or paid the expences of (depending on what story you read) — some of the prison guards interviewed in his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure. But Anthony Kaufman raises a much more pressing question in a story on indieWIRE: “Can Standard Operating Procedure Break the Political Doc Deadlock?“
Though it’s not just political docs that are in trouble, films that I and many others thought would take hold on audiences (My Kid Could Paint That, Zoo, Manda Bala) never took off, the political docs have taken the biggest hits.
An excerpt:
2008 duds include “Chicago 10″ ($156,000), “Taxi to the Dark Side” ($248,200) and “Body of War” ($32,000). Morgan Spurlock’s “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” opened in 102 theaters with a per-venue average of just $1,401 and dropped significantly this weekend. Compare that to the 41-theater debut of “Super Size Me,” which garnered a $12,601 average, one can see how different the landscape is nowadays.
“Everyone is uninterested,” said Roadside Attractions’ Howard Cohen, who worked on the release of “Super Size Me” as well as this year’s “Chicago 10.” Even in markets where Oscar-nominated director Brett Morgen’s super-energized retelling of the Chicago 1968 rabblerousers got four-star reviews, such as Washington D.C. (“the first great film of 2008,” wrote the Washington Post), audiences were “absolutely indifferent,” explained Cohen.
According to Variety, SOP grossed an estimated $14,916 from two theaters for a per screen average of $7,458.
There are a few more political docs in the pipeline over the summer, but what may get docs out of its funk are titles like Sundance favorites American Teen, which follows the senior year of a group of high school students in Indiana, and Man On Wire, which recounts tightrope walker Philippe Petit‘s illegal high-wire routine between the World Trade Center towers in the ’70s. Two superb docs without a hint of war.
Though I have been wrong before…… Read the rest
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Screening Times: Apr 27th, 8:30pm (Village East), Apr 29th, 3:30pm (AMC Village VII), Apr 30th, 1:30pm (19th St. AMC), May 4th, 7:45pm (19th St. AMC)
Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitan’s ghostly part memoir, part experimental doc Days In Sintra chronicles her return to Sintra, Portugal, where she once lived in exile with her husband, famed Brazilian director Glauber Rocha (1938-1981), a notable figure in Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1960′s.
Filmmaker: At what point following your husbands death did you begin to ruminate about this film?
Gaitan: 25 years later. I have realized many films and documentaries before carrying out Days in Sintra. I thought it was important to have this distance from the historical moment so that it could become reminiscence, forgetfulness, poetry, art.
Filmmaker: What initially provoked you to return to Portugal?
Gaitan: The possibility to create a movie with new perceptions and to see in what way the emotions would transit through the labyrinths of the unconscious.
Filmmaker: Have your children seen the film? What do they think of it?
Gaitan: They have just seen the film after it was ready, in an opening session of the Rio de Janeiro’s Festival, with five hundred people in the room. They got visibly moved, as the whole audience did… it was a special night.
Filmmaker: What, if anything, surprised you about the film as you constructed the movie in the editing room?
Gaitan: This film is a film of composition, of language construction in the edition room, and also a kind of craftwork film, as if it was being weaving images, ideas. I did the photography in super 8, in 1981, and also in my returning to Portugal in 2007. The composition was happening slowly, in an impressionist way, by associations of ideas, composition of memory layers, involuntary memory. It was a discovery of a memory’s topography.
Filmmaker: How has the film been received in Brazil? Como o filme foi recebido no Brazil?
Gaitan: It was not commercially launched yet, but will happen yet in this year. In … Read the rest
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Screening Times: Apr 25th, 8:30pm (19th St. AMC), Apr 27th, 5:00pm (Village East), Apr 29th, 4:30pm (AMC Village VII), May 1st, 7:15pm (Village East), May 3rd, 4:45pm (Village East)
Based on Eugene O’Brien’s play, Reck’s lauded Irish relationship dramedy centers on the run up to the 10th wedding anniversary of working class couple Billy and Brenda (Aiden Kelly, Eileen Walsh). Bound by devotion to their pair of children long after their marriage has grown stale, they desperately cling to selfish fantasies that have more to do with their own vanity than the well being of their partner. Eden is a grown up look a whose needs and desires have grown in vastly different directions than their partners.
Filmmaker: Tell us alittle bit about your background in filmmaking.
Recks: I studied film at what is now the National Film School in Ireland. I left there in 1989, and at that time there was no Film industry to speak of in the country. The Irish Film Board had been disbanded and Irish broadcasters weren’t making drama. But I was lucky enough that my graduation film Big Swinger won a number of awards and was screened as support to films in London’s West End and I got a film into development in England with the producers of one of my favorite films Gregory’s Girl. Unfortunately after about four years of almost getting into production the project stalled. That was pretty devastating, but I learned a lot from the experience. I formed a production company with a friend of mine from college and we managed to get some shorts of the ground and eventually produced a few Feature films. But I really wanted to concentrate on directing. So about seven years ago I started to direct series TV in Ireland and eventually packed in the company and have been pretty much directing TV drama non stop, all the while developing film projects at the same time.
Filmmaker: How the script for Eden come about?
Recks: I was in LA in late 2000 at a festival of … Read the rest
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
The artist Cindy Sherman has made a statement disavowing a documentary, Paul H-O’s Guest of Cindy Sherman, in which she is featured that is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Mike Jones has the story in Variety, and he reprints her statement, posted below:
As my name is in the title and my work and self are so abundantly represented, I would like to counter any assumption that I am or wish to be personally associated with it. I am not a participant in any events related to the film’s screenings in this festival or future presentations.
I apologize to all those who participated, thinking they were doing me a favor in giving interviews and otherwise assisting in the fabrication of this film.
Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at it’s inception.
Cindy Sherman
… Read the rest
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
Two stalwarts of the New York indie scene, producers Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, are the hosts of a program on PlumTV entitled “Very Independent Producers.” Five episodes have already been produced, and all are viewable online at the link I just posted.
Here’s how PlumTV describes the program:
On “Very Independent Producers,” Ted and Christine get a chance to share their wit and hard-earned wisdom as they kick back with friends and colleagues from all corners of the film world. Ted, Christine, and their impressive roster of guests share their film experiences past and present and discuss the inner workings of the industry. Wooing financiers, establishing creative control, marketing provocative films, reveling at international festivals – all this and much more makes it way into these candid conversations. Joined by their love for film and their seasoned insight, Ted and Christine give us a humorous, insider look at what really goes into producing independent films.
So far the series includes segments with guests like director Mitchell Lichtenstein, Cinetic Media Founder and attorney John Sloss (discussing “power and control”), THINKfilm prez Mark Urman, Sundance Director of Programming John Cooper, and Noah Cowan, Co-Director of the Toronto Film Festival. Check it out.… Read the rest
