BBC: “But the film-maker told Variety magazine that the new movie would be ‘compelling drama, not a polemic.’…Stone has called it ‘the least political film I’ve made.'”
Category / Film
Terry Gilliam Isn’t the Only One Hand Selling
Hollywood Reporter: “Director David Lynch has worked out a deal with French producer Studio Canal to self-distribute his three-hour digital video feature ‘Inland Empire’ in the U.S. and Canada. Producer Mary Sweeney said the plan will ‘explore a new model of distribution,’ which is expected to include theatrical, home video and online venues.”
Never Too Famed to Hand Sell
Terry Gilliam, sporting a cardboard sign reading “WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD,” showed up next to a line of people waiting for The Daily Show and began passing out handbills. You have to give props to the guy: he’s still determined to stick to his guns and promote his work in the streets, if need be.
This Week in Marie Antoinette News
You’d think I could simply ignore Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette like any ordinary populist, but, once again, Romancing the Tome steers me to this amusing piece of news. Apparently, the Marie Antoinette Association has blasted Coppola’s film. President Michele Lorin notes, “We’ve spent years trying to convince people that the queen was not just a libertine who told the starving to eat cake. What do you see on the trailer? You see Marie Antoinette eating cake. You see her lying naked on a chaise longue. I fear the film is going to set us back many years.”
No complaints on the egregious 1980s soundtrack? Or Coppola’s diffidence to include Marie’s death? If Marie Antoinette’s most ardent supporters are protesting this film, then heaven help the reactions of a mass audience.
RIP Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist has died. I’m more stunned about this than I thought I’d be. Nykvist was one of my favorite cinematographers of all time, up there with John Alton and Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez, producing gorgeous shadows and lush browns and…
Man, I’m really going to have to think about this when I have my head on straight.
I’ll see if I can turn up a tribute to the man later. But for the moment, do yourself a favor and check out Persona or Cries and Whispers or Crimes and Misdemeanors or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The man was good. And it will be years before we see anyone along the likes of Nykvist again.
Links:
- Images and complete filmography.
- Nykvist receiving ASC Lifetime Achievement Award
- Harvard Film Archive retrospective (2000)
- Flickr group devoted to “Sven Nykvist-ish photography.”
- A conversation with Sven Nykvist.
- Metroactive review of Light Keeps Me Company.
- David Hudson on Nykvist (with more links).
- Bright Lights Film Journal.
- Kodak’s Sven Nykvist Schoalrship.
Chris Columbus and the Temple of Dreck
I think nearly all cultural connoisseurs can agree that Chris (Nine Months, Young Sherlock Holmes) Columbus is a terrible screenwriter. But, amazingly, Columbus was enlisted to write Indiana Jones IV and thankfully never got beyond the first draft stage. Bad enough that the title is called Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, a title decidedly without the menace (Raiders of the Lost Ark) or mystery (Last Crusade) of the other three films. But Columbus is such an incompetent and tone-deaf writer that he introduces Indiana Jones not hanging off a rock face, not running away from bandits in the jungle, and certainly not in the middle of any kind of action. What does Columbus have Indy doing?
Fishing.
Yeah, real action potential there.
(via MeFi)
A Find of a Lifetime
American Heritage: “Through the flickering eloquence of silent film we see a people resilient beyond anyone’s imagining, visiting one another’s country homes, parading through downtown Muskogee in some two dozen Packards, crowding an enormous church in Tulsa not long after the riots, during a gathering of the National Baptist Convention.” (via MeFi)
What? No BIO ZOMBIE?
Blank Dahlia
If Dana Stevens hated Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, this does not bode well.
Cinematic Rorschach Test
Is the Tentpole Flick in Decline?
Variety: “Though only five films in 2006 passed $150 million vs. last summer’s nine, the season was still 6% ahead of 2005.”
Mike Judge: Too Hot to Handle?
Is Fox trying to bury Mike Judge’s Idiocracy?
This Week in Pot Kettle Black
BBC: “Director Oliver Stone has accused the Hollywood film industry of promoting the idea of the US at war.”
Kenneth Turan: “Even more puzzling is that Stone, usually viewed as the antichrist in conservative circles, has made a film that rightist commentators are falling all over themselves to applaud. Cal Thomas, in a much-quoted example, has called it ‘one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.’ This tribute comes in part because ‘World Trade Center’ makes an explicit connection between Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq that will make the Bush White House and the Republican National Committee eager to embrace it as their own.”
Taking It All In
Emily Gordon has found an avalanche of Pauline Kael reviews.
Blood Car: The Next Snakes on a Plane?
So I was playing a game of “Where are they now?” with my culturally obsessed friend and Anna Chulmsky’s name came up. We wondered what had happened to the girl from the My Girl movies. Well, it was only an IMDB movie listing away before we discovered a film called Blood Car. Here’s the tagline:
In the near future gas prices have reached astronomical highs nearing $40 a gallon. One man, Archie Andrews, an environmentalist elementary school teacher, is trying to discover an alternate fuel source. While experimenting with wheat grass, Archie accidentally stumbles upon a solution. That solution turns out to be blood. HUMAN BLOOD!
That is one deranged movie idea. But I’m a warped man and I would gladly pay $10 to see this movie.
There’s a trailer for the movie at the site, which seems to suggest that the titular car has a blade in the back trunk which chops people up and uses the blood for fuel. A tracking shot reveals gas prices at around $32 a gallon. The main character has the batty name of Archie Andrews. Is it pointed satire? Or just a cheeseball grindhouse flick? More importantly, is there anyone batshit crazy enough to distribute this film? Does a movie like Blood Car have any chance in today’s marketplace?
Small wonder how the filmmakers got the domain bloodcar.com. I don’t think there was much demand.
Even so, this interview suggests that director Alex Orr has the right influences: “I’m a big Sam Fuller fan and we were just talking about stuff we could rip out of the headlines and we’d been talking about doing a horror movie for a long time and we’d keep seeing these really awful horror movies. You go to Blockbuster and it’s the genre that been excused—you know it’s just “boobs and blood” and it’s not even the right exposures, or good sound. And these films get in the video stores. And we thought let’s make a feature that somebody will get to see. And with the really, really limited resources that we had, a horror [film] seemed the way to go, and we just hopped on the back of the little gas business. So yeah it was pretty much out of frustration. We wanted to make a movie and we heard another movie sold and we jumped up and down and cussed.”
So what of Blood Car‘s future? Storywise, I couldn’t see Hollywood thinking up this premise in a million years. Moneywise, I couldn’t see them backing this.
But Blood Car shows that there’s still quite a bit of cult movie innovation out there. Perhaps we’ll know the verdict once this film hits the festival circuit.
But On the Downside, This Also Means an End to Interesting Criticism Like Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Review of “Hollow Man”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer film critic William Arnold thinks that the studios cutting down on their advance screenings is a good thing. He writes, “So I salute you, New Line Cinema, and your innovative decision to keep ‘Snakes on a Plane’ from my sight until I can’t give it the publicity it so clearly doesn’t need. It surely wasn’t your intention, but I suspect you’ve done the world of movies an enormous service.”
[RELATED: Rosenbaum’s Hollow Man review.]
Reeling in the Fears
Steely Dan takes on Wes Anderson. My money’s on Steely Dan. (via Waxy)
Six of One, Whole a Nolan
Christopher Nolan is on board for the Prisoner movie, which is a far more reassuring choice than Simon (Con Air) West, who was set to helm it a few years ago. (via Ghost in the Machine)
With That Talent, I Hope They Don’t Screw It Up
Man of the Year trailer. Barry Levinson, Robin Williams, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Linney, Christopher Walken.
Confessions of a Junket Whore
Eric Snider: “I, on the other hand, don’t work for the paper and wouldn’t be representing them specifically on the junket. I’d be a freelancer, representing only myself. So the only thing stopping me from going was whether I, personally, had any ethical qualms about it. I do have such qualms, but I also have a curious nature and enjoy doing things that I have never done before. That’s why I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and that’s why I said yes to Paramount. This is the story of how I spent 24 hours as a junket whore.” (via The Hot Button)
Fragile Egos Have No Business Being in the Film Industry, Much Less Directing Shitty Movies
Dark Horizons: “‘Lady In The Water’ director M Night Shyamalan admits he considered taking his name off the credits for next film ‘Life Of Pi’ to stop negative reviews.” (via Romancing the Tome)
Further Proof That William Goldman’s Rule Holds True
Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center has a MySpace page. Presumably to tap into the youth market.
Okay, Jeffrey Wells Does Have a Point
All the King’s Men: DOA?
All Hail Gloria Grahame
Superman II: The Donner Cut
Richard Donner is reviving his aborted version of Superman II, which apparently will be released on DVD. Clips from some of the scrapped scenes here, including Christopher Reeve whacked into the Statue of Liberty torch in Donner’s version of the fight over Metropolis.
Be Still My Dwindling Checking Account
“Black Dahlia” Trailer
De Palma + Ellroy. Genius or chaos? You make the call.
Guess the Movie
I scored 21 out of 28. (via MeFi)
Clerks II
I am not certain what it is about manboy slacker books and films that attracts me, aside from the fact that my 32nd birthday’s coming up and I remain very much an adolescent, albeit one with a few irons in the fire of maturation. Irrespective of my personal standing, I am sad to report that Kevin Smith’s Clerks II is mostly a dud, a graceless return to territory that Smith himself has long outgrown. It is not so much that, aside from a very funny donkey show interlude, the jokes here are clunkers. (What can one say about a film whose funniest gag is an homage to Silence of the Lambs?) I suspect that Smith doesn’t trust his instincts as a writer, or perhaps lacks the discipline to whack down the melodramatic monologues he relies upon to maintain momentum. Say what you like about Jersey Girl (and I will go on record as saying that I enjoyed that film’s unexpected sweetness), but Smith’s heart is more attuned to sincere human behavior. But like his hero John Hughes, he’s reached a point in his career where he doesn’t know how to commingle the comedy with the sap and the results feel incongruous and rushed. (Part of me wonders if Smith writes a script over a weekend like Hughes.)
Take, for example, a scene between Dante (played again by Brian O’Halloran) and the manager he may be in love with (Roasrio Dawson, the only cast member here not mugging to the camera) on the rooftop of Mooby’s, the fast food joint where Dante and Randal now find themselves employed ten years later after their beloved Quik Stop has burned to the ground. The manager, inspired by the Jackson 5’s “ABC,” is teaching Dante how to dance for his upcoming wedding. It’s a moment in which O’Halloran’s eyes light up with wonder and we expect there to be any number of virulent emotions running under the surface: perhaps a lower brow raised in deference to Linklater’s Before Sunset. But Smith opts instead for cross-cutting to various people dancing inside Mooby’s, followed by an elaborate dance number with everyone toe-tapping outside the restaurant. The scene is a remarkable letdown, relying upon a hokey artifice that feels more at home in a 1986 episode of Moonlighting than a 2006 film.
It is Smith’s inability to pursue the import he clearly wants to depict that cripples his film. He certainly acknowledges his debts, giving Randal a David Wooderson-like panache for bedding seventeen year old girls. (Richard Linklater’s second film was Dazed and Confused.) There is an interesting twist on James Mason painting Lolita’s toes in an early scene where O’Halloran paints Dawson’s toes, implying that the two might be overgrown children in search of meaningful lives. But the cinematic riffs and the wry allusions stop there. The film feels tired. Jason Mewes, as Jay, lacks the hangdog stoner look of Smith’s first four films. There are clumsy references to blogs, indolently written comedy (Smith desperately tries to mine a gag involving Randal confusing Helen Keller with Anne Frank and it feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch gone five minutes too long), and the expected cultural fixations (this time, the Lord of the Rings trilogy).
The film is littered with MacGuffins. Jay and Silent Bob serve no purpose, other than as a deus ex machina. A nineteen year old Christian co-worker (Trevor Fehrman) is played for easy laughs. (He’s a Transformers geek, has a cell phone that he uses to call his mother in emergencies, and has a closeted side that is about as predictable as Smith once again employing static framing.) And in an act of nepotism as catastrophic as Ben Stiller casting his wife Christine Taylor in Zoolander, Smith has cast his own wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, as Dante’s fiancee. She’s left to offer doe-eyed entropy when not making out with O’Halloran. It doesn’t help that she wears a T-shirt reading, “Mrs. Hicks,” which further highlights her thespic incompetence.
It has been reported that Jeff Anderson returned to the role of Randal with reluctance. The performance shows. Anderson’s energy was one of the high points of the first Clerks film: a rush of staccato snark that formed a contrapuntal buttress to Dante’s neuroses. Here, Anderson lacks the vim to pull off the balance. There is the suggestion of a dark edge to Randal, but both Smith and Anderson are wary to pursue it.
Clerks II is a desperate retread and a colossal step backwards for Smith. The View Askew universe may have been fun for Smith once, but it’s clear with this film that the cash cow moos just as loudly as the door at Mooby’s.