The Screengrab : julian schanbel

Trailer Review: Hunger

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Steve McQueen’s debut feature has been getting raves ever since it first premiered at Cannes last year, where it took home the Camera d’Or. Since then, the film has built up sizable word of mouth among serious critical types, not only for its unflinching portrayal of the 1981 hunger strike by imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (which would surely explain why Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions is distributing), but also for the artistic rigor which McQueen brings to the film. Visual-artists-turned-directors have a somewhat spotty record, but word is that McQueen’s work is closer, quality-wise, to Julian Schnabel than, say, David Salle. Overall, I’m pretty taken with this trailer, not only for its imagery but likewise for its minimalist score, perhaps the best example I’ve seen since Eyes Wide Shut. I’ll finally have the chance to see the film later this spring, but this trailer has racheted up my anticipation for the movie itself.

Stupid Little Bastard Makes Film

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In what may or may not be a testament to the state of the French film industry today, some of the most interesting movies out of France in recent years have been directed not by veteran filmmakers, but by movie neophytes taking their first shot at standing behind the camera after experiencing great success in other artistic media. Last year's highly praised The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was helmed by Julian Schnabel, generally known as a visual artist, and if The Possibility of an Island, the directorial debut of controversial novelist Michel Houllebecq turns out not to be one of the best movies of the year, it will at least be one of the most talked about.

The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept: it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction -- a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure. Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind. The Guardian's Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker. "Maybe it is a superficial motivation," he says of filming many of the movie's scenes in Andalucian Spain, "but I always go to the locations when I write a novel. In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came frm that...I enjoyed the preparation of the movie. I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details. When you create the world."

Whether or not the world he created is one that critics or moviegoers will want to see remains a different affair. It's received a somewhat frosty reception in France, and no critic of Houllebecq's work has been harsher than his own mother. Lucie Ceccaldi, who abandoned Houllebecq when he was young, is involved in a big, ugly (and somewhat one-sided) feud with the novelist, calling him a fraud, a pornographer and a "stupid little bastard". For his part, Houllebecq is loath to discuss her, and tends to avoid press -- bad or good -- altogether: "It needs discipline not to look at the internet," says the author (he's telling us!); "It is human temptation to read what is said about you, but you have to resist."

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Lou Reed's Berlin"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin, a song cycle about the abusive love affair between an American junkie and his "German queen" Caroline, has always been regarded as one of the legendary moments from the first ten or twelve uneven, often confused years of Reed's post-Velvets solo career. For a long time, the common consensus was that the record was legendary in the same way as the final flight of the Hindenburg; reviews from the time it was first released tended to rate it as something between an embarrassment and a war crime. But Berlin, whose reputation has improved markedly in recent years, has always spoken to a few of us lost souls, and Reed's great fan and baiter, Lester Bangs, was delighted when his hero told him, in the mid-1970s, that of all his solo releases, the only ones of which he was proud were Berlin and the famously unlistenable Metal Machine Music. What with one thing and another, the busy Reed never got around to performing the whole of Berlin live in concert until December 2006, when the first of several performances of the material was staged in New York City at St. Ann's Warehouse, with Reed's mother in attendance. (Maybe Reed put off doing it so long because he was waiting for his mother to become too deaf to hear what he was singing.)

Lou Reed's Berlin is a concert film directed by Julian Schnabel, who also designed the sets. Jonathan Demme demonstrated the perfect way to make a concert movie more than twenty-five years ago: take the cap off the lens and point the camera at the people on stage, preferably after making sure that they will be well lit. The only thing more mystifying than why nobody thought of it before is why anyone has chosen to do things any differently since. Schnabel, who had images projected on a screen behind Reed during the show (including "home movies" featuring Emmanuelle Seigner, who appeared in Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as Caroline), sometimes lets these take over the movie for seconds at a time. To my surprise, I didn't mind this so much, maybe because it seemed almost like an homage to the cornball theatrics that the producer Bob Ezrin resorted to on the album, where they actually served to balance and undercut the sogginess of Reed's despair in its more callow moments. (Ezrin himself is in the movie, on stage with the musicians, wearing a smock with the word "BERLIN" stenciled on the back and "conducting" the band, and generally looking like a mad scientist on his day off.) I do wish that he hadn't fiddled with some of the shots of the performance itself. But the band-- which includes the invaluable and time-tested Fernando Saunders on bass, and Tony "Thunder" Smith, who during "Caroline Says (I)" looks so excited about what he's a part of that he's in danger of exploding and leaving a small mushroom cloud behind his drum kit--is in fiery top shape, and at some point early on the driving force of the music renders the movie undeniable. (There's just one conspicuous disappointment in the music itself: Reed almost wrecks one of Berlin's finest tunes--"Caroline Says (II)", as lovely a song as ever included the line, "You can hit me all you want/ But I don't love you anymore"), by trying to act it instead of just singing it.) The assembled back-up singers include young women from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, dressed in green choral robes. I feel inclined to believe that if you can watch their shining, fresh-scrubbed faces as they sing Reed's nasty words while bobbing their heads happily to the music and not feel thrilled to death, you should probably consider relocating to another, duller planet.