Archive for May, 2008
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven is a fierce, generous melodrama of boundaries and passions, of blood and yearning, the second of a trilogy about émigré culture patterned after Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, Veronika Voss) of post World War II German history. His fiery prior feature, Head-On, is the “love” component, with Edge comprising “death” (with “evil” on the way). Comparisons can be drawn to other work by the late German director, especially with his inclusion of Fassbinder stalwart Hanna Schygulla in a major, moving role. Akin seems to have found his métier after working in several styles, from the Scorseseian buddy film A Short, Sharp Shock(1998) to the giddy, sweethearted road romance Im Juli (2000) to his documentary on Turkish music, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005). Crossing the Bridge came after Head-On (2004), Akin’s best-known film, a devastating, sexually perfervid cross-cultural romance.
The dovetailing storylines begin with a retired widower who meets Yeter (Nursel Kose) a prostitute whom he offers to pay to live with him. His son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a college professor, disapproves, but becomes close to her until her accidental death, which leads him to Istanbul in search of Yeter’s missing daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilçay). While taking over a German bookstore as its owner returns to Germany, Nejat is unaware Ayten, a political activist, is in Germany where she meets a university student (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who admires her politics and brings her to bed in the house of her mother (Schygulla). The journeys between Germany and Turkey are marked by more than just the crossing of borders. Unexpected intersections lead to tragic, but ultimately hopeful results,
Scholar of German film, Thomas Elsaesser’s valuable essay in the May Film Comment holds this trenchant observation: “Not for Akin the Romeo and Juliet melodramas of multicultural star-crossed lovers or the comedies of mistaken ethnic or national stereotypes found in the ‘Greek wedding’ genre. In both cases, the hyphenation of ethnic or religious identities joins too comfortably or separates too neatly what in reality … Read the rest
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Cannes fashion report: This year European women are doing black tights and doing them all wrong. Tights are of a piece with long-legged American athleticism, and the dance/gym/fitness lifestyle — so Old Europe should leave them alone, and just stick with those weird potions to fight cellulite. And what’s with all the French women of a certain age sighted on the Rue d’Antibes, who dress like modish teen-agers? Or what the French call “les fashion victimes”?
Cannes quality-of-life report: This village wasn’t built for such crowds and simply implodes. Cars and assorted vehicles come so close to walkers, the fenders graze your thighs. At every intersection you get to play chicken with kamikazis hunched over the wheel. Civility bit the dust during the stampede to enter the screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by Steven Spielberg, with reports of journos shouting and shoving to get in. Add to that, rumors at large of an Air France strike. I mean, I’m 100% behind the workers, only not when I’m trying to go home, please!
Well, you know where the sympathies of the Dardenne brothers would lie. Lorna’s Silence (pictured) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne opened to fewer cheers than previous efforts, and from the trades only qualified praise. Yet despite a rather long, complicated exposition, this impeccably composed film offers a moving portrait of a woman torn apart by the need to survive. Hoping to open a snack bar with her boyfriend, Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, becomes embroiled in a scheme to make money by organizing sham marriges with foreigners. When she unexpectedly forms a passionate bond with her junkie Belgian “husband,” she’s forced to choose between her original dream and the need for redemption.
In focusing on the plight of illegal aliens, Lorna’s Silence marks a return to the Dardennes’ 1996 La Promesse. In a scene similiar to the earlier film (remember Olivier Gourmet trying to jolly up son Jeremie Renier, who has just witnessed the quasi-murder of an African immigrant?), Lorna blithely searches for snack bar locations, briefly … Read the rest
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Variety’s Mike Jones has posted this funny video about the pronunciation of Charlie Kaufman’s latest, due to screen in Cannes on Friday.
For the record, and from Wikipedia:
Synecdoche (pronounced /s??n?kd?k?/) is a figure of speech in which:
a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or
a term denoting a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, or
a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.
Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing); indeed, synecdoche is often considered a subclass of metonymy. It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
Saul Hansell in The New York Times explains “Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution.”
An excerpt:
The future of video is Internet streaming to the television.
This is a bold statement, but I think the Netflix Player proves all the essential concepts. If a TV, with a handful of extra chips, can provide an experience as satisfying as the Netflix Player can, why do we need any other form of video distribution?
… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, doesn’t premiere in Cannes until Friday, but there are some clips online that I think make it look very promising. Check them out.
Flashback: Here’s my interview with Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman about Being John Malkovich from 1999.… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
The best film news podcast, KCRW’s The Business, hosted by Claude Brodesser-Akner, has as its guests this week Killer Films president and producer Christine Vachon and Cinetic Media founder and sales rep John Sloss. The program is titled “Indie Film Shake-Up,”, and in it the two discuss the indie market in the wake of Rainbow Media’s purchase of the Sundance Channel and the shuttering of Picturehouse and Warner Independent by Warner Brothers.
Among the discussions are Vachon’s looking back at how successful indie films like Poison and Go Fish seemed to her when they grossed over $1 million. Now, the studio specialty distributors wouldn’t be interested in such low-grossing acquisitions, she says. When it came to IFC and Sundance, Sloss seemed less concerned that one channel would fold into the other, noting that both pay very small license fees. He then brought up one of the pressing issues for indies these day: how to create economic models for new forms of distribution which have not yet reached maturity. He talked about the IFC’s theatrical-and-VOD day-and-date releasing system and how filmmakers still don’t really have a way of estimating for themselves how successful these distribution efforts are or will be when they ink their deals.
Here’s an excerpt of Sloss’s comments:
“I think IFC is doing bang up business — I’m still waiting to get accounting statements from them on the myriad films that we licensed to them. In sheer volume, they are our biggest buyer, our biggest customer, and they’re doing deals with theatrical distribution [which] are really driven by VOD. There’s a revenue split on the VOD which they are whispering in the filmmakers’ ears is going to be significant, and I have no doubt that it can be, but we’re still waiting to see the results.”
You can listen to the podcast at the link above, but you really should just subscribe to “The Business” via iTunes if you are not already a regular listener.… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
In the U.S. the prosperity of your local Starbucks has been viewed as an economic indicator, so why not at Cannes? Producer Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films sent the following email answering the question of whether or not there are fewer people on the Croissette this year.
Everyone is talking about how quiet it is this year. Sales are slow according to most of the sellers I’ve met with but the best arbiter of whether the crowds are down was relayed to me by a sales agent with a stand in the market. He said he was having a coffee at the market coffee bar and talking to the barista who said there were fewer people this year. When asked how he knew he pointed out that in a typical year, on a typical day, he serves 400-500 coffees. This year he hasn’t served more than 300 on any day.
… Read the rest
Monday, May 19th, 2008
Brooks Barnes has a funny article in The New York Times about Sanjay Sanghoee, a novelist, hedge-fund employee, and would-be writer/director/producer, who is out there in the wilds of film finance trying to make an adaptation of his book Merger. Let’s just say that a rolodex full of multi-millionaire contacts can’t buy happiness — or an independent feature.
An excerpt recounting Sanhoee’s arrival in L.A. to pitch his movie:
Mr. Sanghoee landed in a boomtown. More than $12 billion was in the midst of flowing into 150 movies, according to trade estimates. Hedge funds, awash in cash, were eager to write checks. At the restaurant Spago, “I’m raising some capital” became the new, “Don’t you know who I am?”
Ramius ultimately decided to take its toe out of the water — too risky — but Mr. Sanghoee saw an opening. With a novel and, now, a Rolodex full of hedge fund and Hollywood contacts, he would make a movie himself.
“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he said recently.
… Read the rest
Monday, May 19th, 2008
Correction: I was wrong about a thinner crowd at this year’s Cannes. At yesterday’s screening of a pretentious, portentous bit of mystification titled Afterschool by Antonio Campos (Un Certain Reqard), not a seat went unclaimed in the commodious Debussy theater. I was installed so far left, I effectively saw only half a film throughout. By the end, my eyes had migrated to the left of my face like in a Picasso portrait from his Cubist period … i’m afraid it’s mostly the Yanks who are in shorter supply this year. How I miss those heated confabs with other American journos in front of the mailboxes after the morning Competition screening.
So far no one has fallen in love here, and I’d be hard put to flag a Palmes d’Or contender. Maybe they’re saving the best for last. Estimable, is how I’d descrbe the better films, such as Un Conte de Noel (pictured) by Arnaud Desplechin (nabbed by IFC). Toplined by Catherine Deneuve and the ubiquitous Mathieu Almaric — plus a who’s who of French actors — film follows the chaotic holiday gathering of a family more fractured than most (the word dysfunctional has yet to penetrate the French lexicon). The death of a cherished first-born son forty years back has marked this group with festering scars. One high-strung sister despises her black sheep brother (Almaric), and has effectively banished him from the family after paying off his debts. Meanwhile her son is certifiable. A second brother seems never to have grown up and winks at his wife’s affair with a family hanger-on.
The fractious bunch swirl around a mother (Deneuve) who is stricken with the same disease that carried off her first-born. The only possible remedy is a dangerous bone transplant from a compatible famiy member — a medical detail with obvious wider resonance.
Un Conte de Noel feels long and windy at first, especially since Desplechin must set up so much backstory and entrenched hostility. But the longer you sit, the more you get roped in. The depressive sister is the only one seen consulting a shrink, but you … Read the rest
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
Film Detail has a truly exhaustive list of links about not only Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but all the other Indiana Jones movies as well as other Spielberg-related stuff. One great find: this YouTube excerpt of Wim Wenders’s Chambre 666, 1982 film in which the director asked a group of colleagues, including Spielberg and, also in this clip, Antonioni, to comment on the future of cinema while sitting in a Cannes hotel room. Spielberg’s there with E.T., and, remembered today, his thoughts about budgets, schedules, the money people and the future of cinema seem almost wistfully ironic.
… Read the rest
