Variety has an early review of There Will Be Blood — the forthcoming film matchup of Paul Thomas Anderson and Upton Sinclair. “Magnificently strange” is certainly a good sign. And the film appears to maintain the playful experimentation established in Anderson’s last film, Punch Drunk Love, kick-starting with “an electronic sound that soars to an almost unbearable pitch,” which throws the film’s first fifteen minutes into a narrative without dialogue. There’s also a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. I wasn’t really on the fence in terms of my curiosity, but now I’m extremely intrigued about what Anderson has concocted here.
Category / Film
Pain! Drama! Knife Licking!
And the runner-up is this Dunkin Donuts brawl. As for Riki-Oh, well let’s just say that his opponent needs better eyeball makeup. But attempting to choke your opponent with your own digestive tract is pretty inspired.
The Unusual Combination of Michael Jackson, Martin Scorsese, and Richard Price
Part One:
Part Two:
The video also features a young Wesley Snipes.
See also Weird Al Yankovich’s “Fat.”
(via Sarah)
Cronenberg, Carpenter & Landis — 1982
David Cronenberg: “If you want to take that as an absolutely blanket question, no, I don’t think there’s anything that should not be shown in films.” Also, rather presciently, Cronenberg predicts the PG-13 rating and points out the advantages of the American film ratings system over the Canadian one, where the filmmaker will go to jail if she projects the offending film clips.
The three directors are coming off, respectively, from Scanners, The Thing and An American Werewolf in London.
What’s also interesting here is that this roundtable discussion is hosted by Mick Garris, who would become a filmmaker only a few years later. Part 2 and Part 3 are here.
And for my money, the most brutal Carpenter moment is this scene from Assault on Precinct 13.
De Palma Fighting for Unredacted Film
John Patterson: A Pox Upon Cultural Journalism
So, John, I read your article and it seems that your number is up. Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas or things to write about. (In the Internet age? With all this interesting information around? Man, you must really be a dunce if telling Nicole Kidman to retire is the best story idea you can come up with.) I mean, here you are, making one of the most ridiculous arguments I think I’ve read in a while about a celebrity who, truth be told, I really don’t care all that much about. And you’ve devoted about 500 words to this and, good Christ, even collected a paycheck for this bullshit!
If only you’d retire. Because now would be the time. With all the fascinating subjects out there pertaining to film (the advantages of shooting in DV, the effects of YouTube and the efforts at control by Viacom, Hollywood people beginning to bankroll their own projects because the studios are being a bit more wary — to name just three lazy things that come to mind as I remain half-awake), this is the best thing you can come up with? Christ, you make Charlie Brooker look like fucking Updike writing about golf. Of all the mangy dogs hungering for freelancing scraps on Fleet Street, how did you of all people get this gig? Was the editor who assigned this so out of his gourd that he looked upon you, John, the rheumatic runt who nobody wanted, to write this feeble attack piece? Did you boff someone? I mean, there’s simply no rational reason I can fathom for the level of self-entitlement (why should a specific actress cater to you when there are countless others out there who you can enjoy?) and bullshit I get from your article. (If you’re going to write a rant, have a purpose, for fuck’s sake.) How long did it take for you to bang this out, Johnny? 45 minutes? (And can you even write? Isn’t “sweltering hot day” redundant? “AWOL” is capitalized, you dunce, because it’s an acronym. What kind of a lede is “It seems that rock’n’roll is no longer paying the bills for some people?” Why can’t you get your math right? You can’t be seriously suggesting that David Lean should be dethroned because Brief Encounter wasn’t prescient enough to reflect the changing sexual mores of the past sixty years, can you? You didn’t really quibble with Sean Connery’s depiction of Bond because he wore a hairpiece?)
That cultural journalism has declined so readily into this unsubstantiated claptrap and that it chooses to favor the John Pattersons of our world — bitter cranks who, in a just world, would be pumping petrol somewhere — is a sure sign that journalistic standards have fallen.
A Tale of Two Lousy Scripts
Two recent films — both with problematic scripts — reveal just how a director can rise and fall in relation to his material. Neil Jordan’s The Brave One was a greater treat than I expected: a slightly satirical and strangely sincere chronicle of revenge, guilt, and empathy in the post-9/11 age. (If this interpretation seems a bit of a stretch, consider the moment in which Jodie Foster is sitting in the waiting room after the cops have coldly told her that they’ll get right back at her with her case. Not only is an American flag mounted on an adjacent pole, but the wall behind Foster is composed of an American flag. Jordan’s concern with the horizontal axis continues with a fixed shot of cops arguing about who the vigilante killer might be, with yellow police tape representing the new flag of what America has become, as well as the manner in which Erica kills one of her victims in a bodega.)
Jordan, as I recently suggested to a friend, is the Irish Brian De Palma. He is wildly inconsistent. For every gem like Mona Lisa or The Good Thief, there’s a turd like In Dreams or High Spirits. But when Jordan is on, and he certainly is in command of his faculties in The Brave One, he offers stunning visuals, symbolism both explicit and nuanced, and the kind of cinematic experience presenting the kind of behavioral subtext reminiscent of a D.H. Lawrence story. Neil Jordan is that rarest of contemporary filmmakers: a man who presents literary tropes within an entertainment. And I suspect this is one of the reasons why The Brave One has been underappreciated.
Pay no attention to the script, which offers an unpardonable finale and even a gratuitous flashback to the early days of a woman’s engagement with a doctor (complete with the doctor playing guitar!). Let us instead consider the sneaky things that Jordan does. This is a vigilante movie and there is talk of Erica (the woman in question) crossing the line. So what does Jordan do right before the regrettable events that cause her love David’s death? Visually, he does indeed cross the line. We see Erica and David in the park where the violence happens — the aptly named Stranger’s Gate. Suddenly, Jordan breaks the 180 rule and we see the happy couple from the other side. When Erica’s horrible injuries are being attended to, Jordan intercuts between the happy couple making love and the doctors operating on Erica, with cross-cutting of identical body positions. Jordan is also wise enough to throw Erica into hard focus, with the background often soft around her. He tracks inside Erica’s apartment, with gauze and curtains often occluding our view of her. The line is likewise vertical, as Jordan sways his camera daringly from left to right in a disorienting state as Erica is attempting to wrestle with her new existence.
If The Brave One is a mere exploitation film, how can we deny these visual flourishes? What also of Foster’s convincing performance as a tormented victim?
By contrast, James Mangold is not, I suspect, a literary man, if his cheap homage to Sam Fuller (hardy har; one of the men recruited is named so) is any indication. 3:10 to Yuma has received the kind of praise suggesting that it is this decade’s answer to The Unforgiven, but I found its Western atmosphere too clean, very Hollywood, and mostly unconvincing. I pined for more dirt and blood, and even convincing makeup when a bullet is removed from Peter Fonda’s corpus. I longed for the Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Token depictions of the Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad are of help, as is Ben Foster’s excellent performance as Russell Crowe’s head henchmen. But Mangold would rather rip off images from Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (the horsemen in the distance, the train station, et al.) and have his composer Marco Beltrami replace Morricone’s choir with synthesized nonsense. The film’s plodding first half is redeemed by a so-so gunfight near the end. But the chief problem with this film is Russell Crowe, who cannot enter a shot without mugging for the camera and seems to be under the mistaken impression that he is Henry Fonda’s Frank. The character of Ben Wade required an actor who carries both the charisma of someone who could convince his underlings to perform despicable deeds and the heartless manner of a cold-blooded villain. Crowe fails on both counts.
Christian Bale is wasted. Peter Fonda is the token Grand Old Actor. In an era in which Deadwood has recently graced television screens, 3:10 to Yuma lacks the multi-dimensional qualities that I feel are necessary to the Western. Doc Potter may as well be some throwaway single-episode supporting character from an old Bonanza episode. Gretchen Mol is, as always, very beautiful, but her character is merely a Puritanical cliche.
This is a Western made by filmmakers who know very little about how the Western demands moral arguments, along the lines of The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, and even Rio Bravo. What we get instead is a garden-variety tale of redemption. But if the cinematic Western is to make a resurgence, and I certainly hope that it will, then the films hoping to reinvent the form need to be something more than disposable entertainments.
O Lucky DVD!
While poking around Alan Price’s site, I have learned that one of my twenty-five favorite films of all time, Lindsay Anderson’s frequently misunderstood masterpiece, O Lucky Man!, will at long last be released on DVD on October 23, 2007. I understand that Malcolm McDowell recorded a commentary track.
If you have not seen this great picaresque film, which, in three hours, savages more institutions and ideologies than almost any other film I know of, you must check this out. Then again, despite talking with many film geeks over the years, I seem to be the only American to dig this flick.
In the meantime, whet your appetite with Lindsay Anderson’s satirical documentary, Is That All There Is?, which can be found, rather miraculously, on YouTube: [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four] [Part Five] [Part Six]
This was his final film. And for those who have clocked in numerous hours viewing documentaries, the film is an unexpectedly touching and often hilarious portrait of Anderson in his autumn years. As if responding to every known documentary cliche available, Anderson intercuts footage of starving children while shopping in a supermarket, inserts television clips of current events that have absolutely nothing to do with Anderson’s life, stages needlessly contentious conflicts, and even includes a closing musical number with Alan Price.
Lindsay Anderson is arguably one of the most misunderstood British filmmakers of the past fifty years (indeed, he spent the last of his days searching for money to make more of his surrealistic and anarchistic films) and I’m glad that Warner has seen fit to take a gamble with the release of O Lucky Man! on DVD.
Bring Out Your “Dead”
An early report for Romero’s Diary of the Dead: a mixed review, but it appears that the Weinstein Co. has acquired distribution rights for the States.
Most Unintentionally Hilarious Trailer of the Year
“I’m going to kidnap him. I’m going to kidnap the President of the United States.”
Alas, how far Mr. Cage has fallen.
When Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix Stood Still
Variety: “Twentieth Century Fox has set Keanu Reeves to star in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ its re-imagining of the 1951 Robert Wise-directed sci-fi classic. Reeves committed over the weekend to play Klaatu, a humanoid alien who arrives on Earth accompanied by an indestructible, heavily armed robot and a warning to world leaders that their continued aggression will lead to annihilation by species watching from afar.”
To consider why this is such a blasphemy against the great 1951 film, watch the film in its entirety here. Reeves is clearly no Michael Rennie.
In the meantime, Return of the Reluctant has intercepted an excerpt from the revised script.
HILDA: How dare you write on that blackboard! Do you realize the Professor has been working on that problem for weeks?
KLAATU: Dude, chill. I am Klaatu. Suddenly, I’m responsible for the entire fucking world, if…if my head doesn’t blow up first.
HILDA: I am not a dude! How did you get in here? And what do you want?
KLAATU: We came to see Professor Barnhardt. There is no spoon.
HILDA: He’s not here. I think you better leave now.
KLAATU: Whoa! Here’s like something the prof could use.
HILDA: A guitar pick?
KLAATU: Mick Jagger gave it to me. I want him to have it.
HILDA: What does a guitar pick have to do with the professor’s formula?
KLAATU: Had a summer job breaking and entering. I think the professor will want to get in touch with me.
HILDA: What business does an intellect like Professor Barnhardt have with a surfer mentality like yours?
KLAATU: There’s a piece of silicon in the back of my brain. I want a full restoration! I want it all back! Whoa!
Contentious Critical Clips
The Siskel & Ebert balcony archives have opened. Witness Roger Ebert dismissing Full Metal Jacket as “too little and too late” and lesser than Platoon. And recycled basic training scenes? Not visually exciting? WTF? (And here they are on Blue Velvet.) (via Hollywood Elsewhere)
Thumb Your Nose Up at Genre at Your Own Peril
As Josh Glenn observes, it would appear that Anthony Lane does not know his science fiction film history, presumably because such knowledge would get in the way of additional quips.
Bergman Bursts Our Bubble
Slate critic Dana Stevens has discovered that Bergman helmed soap commercials to make ends met. (via Cinetrix)
Night Train
RIP Michelangelo Antonioni
“Bergman still lives!” What a horrible two days for cinema.
RIP Ingmar Bergman
My first Bergman experience involved seeing a 16mm print of Persona as a teenager and becoming thoroughly lost in its dreamlike world, my heart fully pulverized by the great pain and sorrow, my mind recoiling at the fragmentary images that I didn’t quite understand, and the other Sacramento kids around me simply not understanding that they were in the presence of a master.
I wondered then if Bergman was cinema’s great manic depressive and sought out his other films. The rolling tank in The Silence, the daring colors and blood of Cries and Whispers, the constant concern with death. I was surprised by the great humanism of Wild Strawberries and Max von Sydow’s knight in The Seventh Seal defiantly standing against the grim reaper. I began playing chess with friends on the beach, trying to look as cool as von Sydow.
Bergman was as literary a filmmaker as you could get — the likes of which we won’t see again for some time. It is as if Ibsen or Strindberg has died. And his absence leaves a staggering void that not even twenty filmmakers could fill.
New George Romero Zombie Movie in the Can
The IMDB reports that Diary of the Dead, written and directed by George A. Romero, has been completed and has European distributors lined up. The film was shot last year and has a budget of around $10 million — a tad less than the $15 million Romero had for Land of the Dead. Here’s an audio interview with Romero about the new zombie film, which reveals the following: Diary goes back to the first night when the zombies rose. Some college kids are filming a horror movie, only to run into rising zombies.
Apparently, the film is told from the perspective of multiple cameras that are found by others, which might just serve as an intriguing creative limitation for the horror master. We’ll see.
Interestingly, Romero is not using any music for this film. So will this be the zombie movie’s answer to The China Syndrome? Or does Romero have something vaguely postmodernist up his sleeve?
But Will Barnabas End Up Being a Gay Keith Richards?
Variety: “Johnny Depp is getting in touch with his inner vampire. Warner Bros. is teaming with Depp’s Infinitum-Nihil and Graham King’s GK Films to develop a feature based on the ’60s daytime supernatural sudser ‘Dark Shadows.’ Depp has said in interviews that he has always been obsessed with ‘Dark Shadows’ and had, as a child, wanted to be Barnabas Collins, the vampire patriarch of the series. The role was originated by Jonathan Frid.”
Next Up for Disney: Covering Up Goofy’s Drinking Problem
Hollywood Reporter: “Mickey Mouse went cold turkey Wednesday when the Walt Disney Co. told influential Congressman Ed Markey that it will ban smoking from the films it releases.”
I’m sure that Uncle Walt, a man quite fond of cigarettes, would approve of Disney’s move towards presenting humans in a foolishly flawless and unrealistic light.
Apostasy to Chicago?
Radar: “According to the Chicago Film Critics Association, 20th Century Fox has instituted a policy of favoritism in the Windy City, providing special treatment to select film reviewers. Others, it is charged, are not given adequate time to craft stories between seeing a movie and its release—or are shut out of screenings entirely.”
The Best Possible Incentive for More European Films
More Than Meets the Eye
Anthony Lane: “Long ago, when the impact of ‘Star Wars’ was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts, and, decades later, we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of that rivalry: rather than spin the toys off from the movie, why not build the movie from the toys? ‘Transformers’ is not the first effort in this direction; I distinctly remember finding a couchful of children enraptured by a DVD of ‘Barbie of Swan Lake’ and realizing that Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’ had not, after all, signalled the final disintegration of human personality. Bay’s movie, however—as befits the bringer of ‘The Rock,’ ‘Armageddon,’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’—is the grandest proof so far that, when it comes to movie characterization, flesh and blood have had their chance. From here on, it’s up to metal and plastic.” (via Brockman)
A Brief History of Errol Morris
RELATED: Clips from Wernor Herzog Eats His Shoe.
RIP Joel Siegel
The film critic Joel Siegel died on Friday. Roger Ebert has a valiant tribute to him, pointing out how Siegel persevered as a critic for ten years despite being diagnosed with colon cancer and that he was a better writer than his television appearances gave him credit for. One of the last times Siegel made it into the headlines was when he walked out of a screening of Clerks II, causing the filmmaker Kevin Smith to don him “a dick with a mustache” and go into over-the-top histrionics on a radio show, cutting Siegel no slack whatsoever. Smith’s most recent entry on his blog has him urging you to see Live Free or Die Hard. But there is no mention of Siegel’s passing.
I always felt Siegel to be far more effusive about mediocre movies than he needed to be. But given the choice between a film critic who maintained his cool when a hypersensitive filmmaker tried to sandbag him on a radio show and that same hypersensitive filmmaker urging his audience to fill up Hollywood’s coffers, I’ll choose the former, if only because Siegel kept mostly silent about his personal hangups and had no personal stake in what he did other than expressing his enthusiasm.
[UPDATE: This afternoon, Smith has updated his blog, where he calls out one “George Prager,” who left multiple comments on this Hollywood Elsewhere thread, and writes the following: “More than that, I don’t know what was expected of me: Joel and I had a blow-up, it went away, a year later, he died. No reason to write a blog about it, really; I tend to eulogize relatives only.”]
Physics Was Never Wes Craven’s Specialty
Yippie Kayee
Andy Warhol Film as Political Campaign Commercial?
RELATED: IMDB User Comments for “Empire” “Empire has got to be considered one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. 485 minutes, with every one of them keeping you on the edge of your seat, seemingly impossible for an eight-hour movie to accomplish. The scene changes are so subtle and quick, they barely seem to happen, making you feel as if the story hasn’t changed, all setting up each individual shock. The acting is fantastic, each character so stoic and emotionless, as if they aren’t in the scenes in the first place. Warhol does a fantastic job at threading each scene together, to make it appear as if it is just one ongoing one. Absolutely ridiculous that the AFI refused to include it in its 100 thrills list. See it, and prepare to have your imagination and sense of reality warped.”
Apocalyptic Sunday
Some YouTube links from Metafilter and casual Googling:
The War Game (1965): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
When the Wind Blows (1986): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8]
Miracle Mile (1988) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10]
The Survivors: Start here.
And if you really want to be depressed:
Threads (full movie). Ten times bleaker than The Day After.
Self-Absorbed Monsters
I made it through fifteen minutes of this film and I had enough. There wasn’t one moment of humility. Not one moment of self-deprecation. Not one moment where the “artistic” worth of the two main subjects was questioned. In fact, the damn thing was a selfish and humorless affair. I felt like I was stuck in a DUMBO hipster hellhole.
The level of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-entitlement contained in Four Eyed Monsters appalled me. Do these two kids not know anything of humility? I understand that this film was a hit at Slamdance. But is this the best that the emerging generation of Internet filmmakers can offer us? Begging for money for their precious pretentious nonsense as if they are entitled to it? Fawning in such a self-absorbed show for the cameras and failing to give us one goddam whit of humanity about the growing development of online relationships? Jean-Luc Godard did this kind of documentary many times before and, compared to these kids, he’s the humblest filmmaker now working in cinema. That’s saying something.
Maybe I’m becoming that grumpy old bastard shouting at the kids to get off my lawn, but, as much as I look out and try to support work by new artists, Four Eyed Monsters is about the most solipsistic cinema I’ve had the misfortune to sit a quarter of the way through. Imagine 70 minutes of lolcats in cinematic form. Sure, it’s cute for the first minute. But can you really sit there and take it for 70 minutes?
Nobody’s going to say it. Because these kids have amassed a tremendous credit card debt. Nobody’s going to say it. Because it’s the dream that everybody wants: to be a self-sufficient artist.
It’s impossible to create after working a nine-to-five job? What a bunch of bullshit.
Glam rock is back, boys and girls. But it’s worse than it was in the 1970s. Because where the glam rock artists realized that their stage presence was a pretense and that there was compartmentalization between this presence and the real life, these new glam rock amateurs, in the form of Arin and Susan, do not.
And the hell of it is that they will be rewarded for their crass irresponsibilities, both fiscal and artistic.