The Screengrab : the new york times

Screengrab Review: "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Nick Schager — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Guest of Cindy Sherman fixates on a peripheral nobody residing in the orbit of a somebody, a tack that allows for an intimate, unguarded view of said luminary while simultaneously casting into sharp relief the wrongheadedness of its focus. Beginning in 1993, Paul H-O made a very minor name for himself as the host of Gallery Beat, an off-the-cuff public access television program in which (as director and host) he attended premiere shows and interviewed artists with an enthusiasm and candor that helped deflate the scene’s air of self-importance. A devoted fan who nonetheless refused to simply act the sycophantic PR mouthpiece for those he covered, H-O hardly qualified as a journalist but nonetheless provided a modestly unfiltered view of the art world. His gig eventually brought him into contact with celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman, who, bucking her usual protocol, let down her media-shy guard for a series of interviews with H-O and, later still, became his girlfriend and the frequent subject of his incessant filming, of which this absorbing yet lacking doc is primarily comprised.

Guest of Cindy Sherman’s narcissistic opening tracks the rise of H-O and Gallery Beat, a trifling success story that’s propped up by H-O’s forthrightness even as it fails to register as anything more than a footnote – albeit a sometimes amusing one, as when a confrontational Julian Schnabel denigrates Gallery Beat and, in the process, makes himself the epitome of artistic pomposity. This early material, however, is mere prologue for H-O’s developing relationship with Sherman, whose illustrious photographs feature her embodying various female roles and disguises – a means of confronting, among other things, issues of female/gender power dynamics – and whose public persona is that of the mysterious recluse. H-O’s on-camera chats with Sherman for his program are thus somewhat revelatory, showing a charming, understated personality far different than one might have expected on the basis of her often-confrontational work. It’s that friction, as well as Sherman herself, that soon proves most transfixing, and considerably more intriguing than H-O’s career recap of his famous ex-girlfriend, which indulges in lazy, tossed-off family-history psychologizing and talking-head analysis (from colleagues, friends, and editors and critics of Artforum and The New York Times) that only manages to skim the surface of both the artist and her art.

Though it’s Sherman who clearly warrants an in-depth non-fiction portrait, Guest of Cindy Sherman remains diligently focused on H-O, whose own marginalization in the relationship (and the glamorous, ritzy life that Sherman leads) comes to dominate the proceedings, as well as lends the film its title. H-O’s struggle to exist in the shadow of Sherman’s spotlight is a losing battle. And moreover, it ultimately derails his doc, which quickly devolves into off-putting egomaniacal boo-hooing, with H-O – and the similarly ignored and/or disrespected husbands of Elton John and Molly Ringwald (?) – recounting their trivial woe-is-me anecdotes about being cropped out of red carpet photos and seated at remote dinner tables at galas. Shallowly attempting to cast these second fiddle-plights as case studies of the flawed male ego, Guest of Cindy Sherman instead simply reduces itself to a vain investigation of a former affair in which listening to H-O complain (on radio, or at a public speaking gig) about the disproportionate paparazzi love showered on his star girlfriend is to hear someone mistake themselves as far more engaging and noteworthy than their life story indicates.

Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

You know the players; you know the photos. Morris has secured interviews with five of the seven MPs who were indicted, including media scapegoat Lynndie England, and coaxed from them a disarmingly candid assessment of their behavior. Anybody who's read Philip Zimbardo's excellent The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will be familiar with the film's unstated thesis, which blames the persecution and degradation at Abu Ghraib not on the moral lapse of a few "bad apples" but on a poisonous atmosphere created and condoned by those much higher up the military food chain. Still, words on a page can't provide the odd amalgam of shame and defiance that permeates these interviews, nor the dispassionate intimacy of the Interrotron itself.

What gets short shrift, surprisingly, are the photographs themselves. Some have been critical of Morris' decision to commission flashy animated sequences from graphics whiz Kyle Cooper, finding the juxtaposition of the sordid and the high-tech to be somehow unseemly. Those people should chill. But what I really wanted from S.O.P. — especially given the terrific essays Morris has been writing on the nature of photography for the New York Times — was an in-depth exploration of the bizarre disjunction between what the disgraced MPs (persuasively) claim they were feeling and their demeanor in the pictures. Sabrina Harman, for example, wrote letters to her lover at the time that powerfully recount her disgust at what was going on — so why do we see her grinning like a lunatic and giving a big party-hearty thumbs-up beside an Iraqi corpse? Morris asks the question, but he doesn't really delve, being too busy indicting the U.S. military as a whole. Thing is, we don't need Errol Morris to do that. We rely on him to look past the patently obvious.

The Rep Report (December 13 - 24)

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Thursday, December 13, Film Society of Lincoln Center has an intriguing double bill: Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a new documentary directed by the critic Kent Jones, and produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, will be shown along with the classic Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie. Installed on the RKO lot and given his own production company and a bagful of nickels, Lewton developed horror films in his own distinctive house style, long on angled shadows, underpopulated sets, and the tingly dread that talented directors like Zombie's Jacques Tourneur could create out what remained unsaid and unseen. Jones will be on hand to talk about his own movie and introduce Zombie.

On Sunday the 16th, Lincoln Center has another double bill, this time starring the face that launched a thousand bathtub-gin parties: the iconic flapper heroine of the silent era, Clara Bow. The Film Society, with a little help from the Library of Congress, will be showing Helen's Babies, a 1924 comedy starring Edward Everett Horton, and James P. Hogan's newly restored melodrama Capital Punishment. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by pianist Donald Sosin.

The period of Woody Allen's career when he seemed to be the New York Times' officially selected poet laureate of the Upper East Side may have peaked with the 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters, a sprawling (for Woody) family comedy-drama that includes one of Allen's finest performances as Woody Allen, given a few years before he started to look a little too old for the part. Film Forum brings it back for an eleven-day run starting December 14. On the 14th, the 7:40 P.M. screening will be introduced by Eric Lax, author of the new Conversations with Woody Allen. — Phil Nugent

This Kid's Got IT!

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

If you like heart-warming show-biz success stories, you need to check out this account of how Gabourney Sidibe, a twenty-four-year-old sometime performer too level-headed to pursue an acting career full-time at the expense of a steady paycheck, won the leading role in the movie version of the poet-novelist Sapphire's Push at an open audition; it has everything but a big star breaking her leg just before the curtain goes up and Warner Baxter telling Ms. Sidibe that if she doesn't go out there and become a star, the finance company will repossess the prop man's daughter's braces. It's all the more resonant because Ms. Sidibe is a plus-sized African-American woman, which is to say that she's not someone who could have stormed Hollywood confident that there would at least be a surplus of available roles for which casting directors might deem her appropriate. "When she was younger," reporter Jake Mooney writes in The New York Times, "she was teased about her appearance. More recently, when she hung out with her theater friends, some other girl, taller or skinnier, always got all the attention. 'I was comic relief,' she said. 'The best friend.'" For hope and inspiration, she would turn to the example of Mo'Nique, "the plus-size actress and comedian. . . and pray to be like her." In Push, which will be directed by Lee Daniels (Shadowboxing), Mo'Nique will be playing Ms. Sidibe's mother. — Phil Nugent

007: Oscar Bait?

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The next James Bond film (which is being called Bond 22 until someone comes up with an even more meaningless title to stick on it) certainly doesn’t read like a James Bond film. In fact, it reads like a movie designed to make the Academy sit up and take notice: its director, Marc Forster, helmed two films (Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland) that won Oscars and just completed a third, The Kite Runner, that may receive similar acclaim. Its screenwriter, Paul Haggis, has been nominated for five Oscars, has won two, and is generating huge amounts of Academy Award talk for In the Valley of Elah. And no less a source than Max von Sydow claims that the role of perennial Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld will be played by Mathieu Amalric, who’s currently wowing the critics in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. With Forster telling the New York Times that his vision of the character is dark and tormented, and pontificating that "the most interesting place for a James Bond movie to go is inward — deeper into Bond himself," will Bond 22 be the first 007 film to court critical respectability? Or is Forster just vaporing to defend the giant paycheck he’s going to get? — Leonard Pierce

Ion Fiscuteanu, 1937-2007

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

It takes a special kind of actor to dominate the screen in a role that requires him to remain physically prone and grow increasingly comatose over the course of a two-hour, thirty-three-minute movie. Ion Fiscuteanu pulled that feat off as the title character of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the 2005 black comedy that stormed the festival circuit, heralded the resurgence of the Romanian film industry, and won Mr. Fiscuteanu the Best Actor prizes at festivals in Copenhagen and his native Transylvania. Now Fiscuteanu has died, at the age of seventy, reportedly after a bout with colon cancer, which was one of the hundred or so ailments that the clueless, distracted doctors in the movie tried to ascribe to his character in the movie. Fiscuteanu was best known for his theater work, but also appeared in a handful of other movies, most notably the 1992 The Oak. But he will probably be best remembered for his unlikely starring role as the luckless Lazarescu, a modern image of man's impotence in the face of bureaucratic indifference and neglect, barely mustering the strength to raise a middle finger in protest as he's wheeled through the exit door. — Phil Nugent

Sayles Speaks

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The contemporary American independent filmmaking scene as we know it was born some thirty-five to forty years ago, and John Sayles has as much right as anybody to claim midwife status. Any aspiring filmmaker whose films aren't designed for mainstream success would do well to consider the Sayles business model, whereby the director saved the funds he got from writing TV-movies and Roger Corman genre flicks and plowed them into his own low-budget productions. Now, as John Anderson reports in The New York Times, Sayles and other indie directors of his generation are facing a new problem: moving towards their sixties while continuing to work outside the industry and courting an audience that thinks of "indie film" as a young person's game. (In the new documentary Lynch, the sixty-one-year-old director of Blue Velvet can be seen courting an Internet audience, renouncing film for digital video and, with respect to getting funding, declaring his eternal gratitude to the French.)

Independent filmmaking is a much more crowded field than it was when Sayles and his longtime co-producer and life-partner Maggie Renzi made The Return of the Secaucus Seven, and while distributors and the entertainment media pay lip service to the aging established names, what they really want is a piece of the hot young newcomer whose debut inspired some buzz at Sundance. Reflecting on the difference between then and now, Sayles told Anderson, "The good thing, is it's a lot easier to make a movie than it is used to be. When we started, there was no high-def video, for instance. We made our movie and nobody had ever heard of that: 'You just made a movie? How can anyone just make a movie?' If your film simply had sprocket holes, the four companies that were not studios — there were four at the time — would come and look. . . Now, Sundance gets 5,000 feature films every year, and there are 5,000 filmmakers from the last year who are still trying to make films. Every distributor in America could show a different movie every day for a year, and there are only so many screens that show non-Hollywood stuff, and only fifty-two weeks a year, so. . . there's a huge amount of competition." Sayles's new film, Honeydripper, is set in a blues bar circa 1950 and features a predominately African-American cast — which is to say that it won't make Harvey Weinstein's mouth water. But Sayles and Renzi remain adamantly grass-roots in their approach; their plan is to attract word-of-mouth business by pitching to blues fans and black churchgoers. Renzi believes that the audience for their picture is out there: "They just need to be invited back into the theaters. . . My challenge to . . . [the distributors] is, 'Can you come up to the new mark?' Because the old mark isn’t working anymore." — Phil Nugent

A Pirate's Life For Me

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

As the WGA strike drags on, America is perhaps more aware than ever of the issue of compensation for web-based content. With piracy an everyday fact of life for the studios and more internet content being produced every day, opinions on web issues are coming fast and furious from every corner: Jaron Lanier, an internet content provider (and former author of the manifesto "Piracy is Your Friend") has become an internet apostate and now sides with the striking writers who demand to be paid for web work, as his editorial in the New York Times makes clear. At Bit-Tech, however, indie producer Eric Wilkinson admits that his film, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth, is getting as much attention as it is largely due to its having been widely pirated by Bittorrent sites. Perhaps our favorite take on the piracy issue comes from The Office writer/actress Mindy Kaling (who's currently on strike). Addressing movie theater PSAs that compare pirating films to stealing a car, she says, "You know what? I would steal a car, if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then thirty seconds later, I owned the car. . . and if, by stealing the car, the person who owned the car, they got to keep the car." — Leonard Pierce

Strike Four?

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Labor on the march! The Writer's Guild of America strike is a month old, and Hollywood is starting to feel the effects — a number of shows are set to start showing reruns and clip shows, while 'replacement programming' is about to rear its ugly head. Greg Saunders, writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog, discovers some sneaky anti-writer reporting on CNBC and shows us how to lie with statistics; news writers for CBS — who have been working without a contract for over two years — join the strike; and Michael Eisner, who doesn’t exactly have a rich history of supporting workers, tells the New York Times that the striking writers are "stupid" and "foolish" and that "there’s not a crumb to spare" for them in the digital media. Eisner’s salary, bonuses and stock options in his final year at Disney totaled over $100 million — barely a fifth of his peak earnings! — and you didn’t see him go on strike, did you? — Leonard Pierce

Schnabel Speaks

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with the 1996 biopic Basquiat, the art critic Robert Hughes called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s, made by the second worst. (Because Schnabel cast it from the ranks of all his fashionable New York character actor friends, he also made it possible for The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to describe it as the kind of movie in which "Christopher Walken passes for normal.") Rather surprisingly, Schnabel has kept at it, and now, seven years after his remarkable second film Before Night Falls, he's back with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby.

The movie, like the book, recounts Bauby's struggle with near-total physical paralysis after he had suffered a massive stroke. Bauby wrote the book by "dictating" it, one letter at a time, by blinking his left eye. He died, at forty-five, days after the book was published. In the movie, he is played by Mathieu Amalric, of Munich and Kings and Queen, widely known among U.S. audiences as "that guy who looks like Roman Polanski's nicer brother."

This Times article tells the story: the producer Kathleen Kennedy had originally bought the rights to the book and was set to make it with Johnny Depp in the lead, and Depp, another celebrity friend of Schnabel's, brought him in to direct it before being forced to abandon it himself, due to his commitment to what Schabel calls "that pirate thing." Kennedy stuck with Schnabel, though, even after he insisted on making the film with a mostly French cast, and in French, which the studio probably thought was a hell of a consolation prize for not getting to make it with Johnny Depp. It all seems to have turned out all right; Schnabel won the best director prize at Cannes, and the movie's glittery trailer looks beautiful and even, in a strange way, kind of joyful. The only problem is that Schnabel, who is stubbornly atached to his identity a painter, is now becoming known to some, much to his dismay, as a movie maker. The good news is that he tries not to hold it against them. "I don’t think that people know too much about painting. I don’t think that they really understand what it is. I mean, I don’t want to put anybody down. I just think more people understand the language of movies than of paintings." Sadly, the question of whether he thinks Robert Hughes might be one of those people either never comes up in his interviews or has yet to yield a printable response. — Phil Nugent