Video of the Day 2: Did You Evah?
4/6/2007 6:15:00 PM
As anyone who's read Screengrab for a decent length of time knows, we're biiig fans of director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Walker). So it warms our hearts to know that he recently completed editing his new feature, Searchers 2.0. A good thing too, as he's been forced to be too quiet for too long. To celebrate, here's a music video that Alex directed of Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop covering Cole Porter's "Well Did you Evah?" for the Red, White & Blue Aids appeal in 1990.
Unlike many other charity records, this is quite a good song in its own right and doesn't hit on the guilt like any of Bob Geldof's atrocious Band Aid ditties (Check out this spoof from UK's Spitting Image, parodying the original appeals). Wait out your Friday whistling this
enjoyable track.
— Faisal Qureshi
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e10436#10436 |
ScreenGrab Q&A: Howard Zinn on Sacco & Vanzetti
4/6/2007 5:30:00 PM
Peter Miller’s documentary Sacco and Vanzetti, about the legendary Boston trial and execution of two Italian immigrants for a murder they did not commit in the 1920s, premiered in New York last week, and it opens in Los Angeles today. (Go here for Nerve’s review of the film.) One of the featured interviews in the film is renowned historian, playwright, social activist, and author Howard Zinn, whose own philosophy embraces elements of Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and non-violence. He spoke to us briefly about the infamous trial.
Was it somehow naïve of Sacco and Vanzetti to be surprised at having difficulty with the justice system after aligning themselves with an anarchist group and dodging the draft?
Well, I don’t think they were surprised. I think being anarchists, being radicals, I don’t think they were surprised at anything that the government would do. So, I don’t think it was naivete. They knew what they were doing. They weren’t surprised — of course, they were surprised that they were being charged with murder. But they certainly knew the record of the Justice Department, and had seen what the Justice Department had been doing. Anarchist friends of theirs had been rounded up and had died. I don’t think they had any illusions about what might happen to them — even though they couldn’t predict exactly how the hammer would fall. I don’t think they were naïve.
There is the parallel in the film of the modern treatment of Muslim immigrants and the Italian immigrants of the time. How should the government respond to a group that advocates violence? Is the government justified in deporting non-citizens?
If there’s a group whose theory includes violence, that’s not enough to act against that group. Even by the decisions of the Supreme Court, advocacy itself is not grounds for charging anybody with anything, or imprisoning them, or indicting them. Advocacy is an act of Free Speech. If the advocacy becomes a very immediate clear incitement to violence, then the government has the right to act. In fact, then anybody has the right to act — not only the government, but any ordinary person. You don’t kill somebody or do anything to anybody threatening you, unless the threat is an immediate one, unless there’s an imminent danger. If there’s an imminent danger, then the government can act. Merely belonging to an anarchist group, a group that in its ideology is willing to engage in violence, is not enough to act against that group.
As for deportation — well certainly, people who are non-citizens should not be deported unless their presence in this country creates an immediate danger to somebody. They should not be deported because they belong to some group the government doesn’t like. They should not be deported simply because they don’t have citizenship papers. They should not be deported just because they’re Italians or Jews or Muslims. You know, the government acts against people who it believes are threats to its power. Therefore all radical groups are in danger and anybody who is a member of a radical group, who is also not a citizen, is in special danger. But I think it’s the job of American citizens, and the job of people in this country, to protect the rights not only of citizens, but of non-citizens against authoritarian actions by the government.
In the film, Nunzio Pernicone makes the point that the bombings by the Galleanistis — the mailbombings — these were not indiscriminate acts. That these were targeting judges, heads of corporations. At the same time, I feel that the Galleanistis were ignoring the innocent (those they would have considered innocent) — the gardeners, the maids, the mail carriers. Although the justice system failed Sacco and Vanzetti, in aligning themselves with the Galleanistis, Sacco and Vanzetti on some level failed their brothers and sisters.
Well, you know, I think even revolutionary groups that commit acts of violence, they should not be engaging in acts of violence that endanger ordinary people. I think that should not be tolerated. I don’t believe in violence against human beings, even if those human beings are themselves evil. Even if those human beings are themselves repressive attorney generals or a war-making president. I’m talking now about my beliefs — and certainly I don’t believe, even though there is such a thing as revolutionary violence, but I don’t think it should be directed against human beings. Violence against property is one thing, violence against people is another.
In the film, Turturro/Shalhoub reads from Vanzetti’s letters. In one he states, “I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.” What do you think of that? Does that feel true for the 21st century?
Yeah, it does, actually. We are in pre-history. The human race has not yet gotten out of this big long swamp that it has been in; the swamp of economic exploitation, of racism, of war. We are still struggling in pre-history, I agree. And our big problem is to get out of this and to truly start the history of the human race — that is, a history in which we’ll have a world at peace and which the resources of the earth will be equitably distributed among its people, so I think Vanzetti was exactly right.
In your book A People’s History of the United States- you end a chapter entitled, “War is the Health of the State” with the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Why did you choose to do that?
Well, I ended it because the chapter was about World War I. And because I felt that the Sacco and Vanzetti case was a direct outcome of the war atmosphere. That it was connected with the super-patriotism that filled the air during and right after World War I. The persecution of radicals always is intensified in times of war or war hysteria. In fact, as the Sacco and Vanzetti trial was taking place, the remains of GIs were still coming back from Europe and the papers were full of patriotic declamations about the war — and of course, part of the evidence against them in the trial, was that they had avoided the draft and left the country; they had not participated in the war effort, they had opposed the war. So their case was very directly connected with war and with the atmosphere of war.
— Pazit Cahlon
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The World According to Quentin Tarantino
4/6/2007 4:45:00 PM
 | | Hey, who''s the guy on the left? |
Quentin Tarantino is a one-man promotional machine. Sure, Grindhouse is a double-feature film made by both QT and his bud Robert Rodriguez. But even though Rodriguez has done his share of promotion, the Publicity-Industrial Complex’s love affair with Tarantino throughout the build-up has betrayed where the public’s real sympathy and curiosity lies. Poor Rodriguez even cheated on his wife with Rose McGowan, and still only barely got a fraction of the ink QT has gotten. The press is addicted to Tarantino. And Tarantino is addicted to himself.
And really, neither can be blamed. For example, check out the GQ interview (which, alas, is not online, go here for the magazine’s table of contents) where QT says whatever comes into his head — however seemingly arrogant, ridiculous, or self-serving. Somehow it works for him. Thus we learn that he is at the center of three or four female "posses," that Tarantino has jerked off to scenes in movies (including his own?), that he used to spar with Bob Dylan in the musician's heretofore unknown private boxing club, that Tarantino is one of "God's favorites" (at least according to a palm reading girl from Trinidad he dated), that he believes he might have been Shakespeare as well as an African-American slave in past lives, and that his sexual fixation on female feet is, as he told Tyra Banks on her show, a black male thing, and "black male things and me tend to go hand in hand."
And let’s not forget some of the choice quotes from Tarantino’s episode of the Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts show, in which he was interviewed by Fiona Apple (who was once the girlfriend of his friendly rival Paul Thomas Anderson). The recent British appearance of the show was highlighted by the London Times, which created an online "article" by Tarantino, culled from his remarks on the episode. Here’s a sampling:
"One of my favourite scenes of all time is the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Matador: the guy getting off on slasher films. That is a touched-by-God, genius moment. I remember talking to some of the guys I worked with at the Video Archives store and saying, 'Man, I’d love to do an opening to a movie like that.' And someone said: 'Yeah, they wouldn’t let you.' People have said little things like that all my life. But who’s 'they'? I’ve given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything — I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission. There is no 'they.'"
"Violence is one of the most cinematic things you can do with film. It’s almost as if Edison and the Lumiere brothers invented the camera for filming violence."
"Here’s the thing I had in my life: I never had to worry that I was gonna die before I made a movie. God had put me on earth to do this thing — he’s not going to take me out before I can do it."
"I don’t want to be a professional. I’m not in the Directors Guild; I don’t want to be. I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job. I even asked: “Would I die for Jackie Brown?” I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm’s way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit."
 |
To what extent are we supposed to find this egomania charming? Perhaps we are supposed to surmise that it covers a deeper insecurity that showbiz necessitates remain hidden. Or perhaps it is all an act, for Tarantino's beginnings are so humble that but for a mother's love there is no external cause for such full-blown braggadocio. Or perhaps the floodgates are unleashed only when Tarantino is talking to the print media, where his words, denuded of their physical source, just read eccentric. Perhaps that's the reason that Tarantino's interview in the new industry-oriented Creative Screenwriting (also not online) comes across so charmingly — it's not yet another foray into self-defined genius.
Interviewed by Ain't It Cool News' Mr. Beaks, Tarantino has a auditor at least as movie obsessed as himself, so the geekdom flows a little bit — but not much, because it is still a magazine with a highly focused target market. Still, Tarantino manages to offer in passing an interesting critique of Robert Zemeckis. The Psycho-derived Death Proof, which Tarantino acknowledges as his first original screenplay since the 1990s when he came up with Kill Bill, benefits from the detail creation story that Tarantino offers the reader. There's lots of good information in the interview. In a sidebar, Tarantino offers his advice for writers who want to direct, the first of which is take acting lessons. He also discusses the difficult leadership qualities that a director requires and that a film is "never as good as the dallies and never as bad as the first cut."
Truth be told, whatever one may think of him, once the Grindhouse hype dies down and QT’s done doing press on the film, it’ll all feel kind of empty around here.
— DK Holm
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Don’t Bava to Knock
4/6/2007 4:15:00 PM
Sean Axmaker has a stirring tribute up at the GreenCine blog to Italian horror master Mario Bava the man who had the vision to look at the transcendentally beautiful face of the English actress Barbara Steele and see that what it needed to complete it was a close encounter with an iron maiden. If you somehow missed Black Sunday, Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve, or the pop art caper film Danger: Diabolik (which inspired a Beastie Boys video and also had the honor of serving as the last movie featured on “Mystery Science Theater 3000"), any one of them should ease you through the pain of withdrawal after the theater usher finally ejects you from the day's final screening of Grindhouse.
— Phil Nugent
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e10419#10419 |
Connecting Orson’s Dots
4/6/2007 3:30:00 PM
As was reported here earlier this week, a shadowy cabal that includes Peter Bogdanovich and the Showtime cable network may be on the verge of completing a version of The Other Side of the Wind, arguably the best-known of the many busted projects from Orson Welles's post-Hollywood period. The film, which Welles worked on from 1972 to 1976 before it became ensnarled in various legal difficulties, starred John Huston as a famous movie director with career problems. (Bogdanovich himself was also in the cast, which included appearances by such fellow directors and actor-directors as Paul Mazursky, Claude Chabrol, Dennis Hopper and Henry Jaglom, recent White House Correspondents Dinner headliner Rich Little, and Welles's late-life companion Oja Kodar.) At one point before getting sandbagged, Welles claimed that filming on the project was "96% complete." What remains to be seen is how well Bogdanovich and company will be able to put the footage together in a way that approximates whatever visual plan Welles may have had in his head.
You can get a taste of how important editing was to Welles at that stage of his career by checking out the Criterion Collection DVD of what turned out to be his last completed and distributed feature, 1974's F for Fake. Denied the financial support and other benefits of studio backing that he needed, he tried to compensate with the razzle-dazzle of his cutting. The Criterion DVD includes a scene from The Other Side of the Wind as Welles had pieced it together; out of context, it's hard to tell what was really there, but the few minutes of film are wittily put together and the sequence moves like a shot. F for Fake itself is both a meditation on the principle of making art out of nothing and an attempted demonstration of it. Much of the movie actually consists of BBC documentary footage of the infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory, footage that had somehow fallen into Welles's lap. He threaded it together with his own footage of himself and the unthreading of an elaborate anecdote involving Oja Kodar and Pablo Picasso and laid his own narration over the whole thing to hold it together. Also appearing in the footage that Welles had gotten ahold of from the BBC film is de Hory's biographer, Clifford Irving, who by that time was better known for his 1972 attempt to forge Howard Hughes's "autobiography.”
Today marks the opening of a new movie called The Hoax, dealing with l'affaire Hughes and starring Richard Gere as Irving. The F for Fake DVD includes among its extras film of the press conference at which an unseen Hughes rebutted Irving's story by conference call, as well as the pre-exposure "60 Minutes" interview in which Irving snowed Mike Wallace. For those who've seen it, the pressing question about the new movie may be whether Gere can play Irving as impressively as Irving played Irving in that interview. Irving himself has his doubts: in a talk with Scott Foundas he calls Gere's performance "terrific", only to add that "the character that he plays is not me. If I was that guy, I'd shoot myself."
— Phil Nugent
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TAKE FIVE: Rappers Turned Actors
4/6/2007 2:45:00 PM
There's a great moment in an episode of the Adult Swim cartoon Boondocks where a gangsta-rap poseur (played by the remarkably adept Mos Def) explains that he patterned his whole persona after Ice Cube — to which a bewildered eight-year-old responds "You mean the guy from all those family movies?" As hard as it is to believe given last year's trying-too-hard solo album Laugh Now, Cry Later and this Friday's Mr.-Blandings-buys-a-throwback-jersey comedy Are We There Yet, Cube was once considered the most dangerous man in America, and even dropped a verse on Public Enemy's classic joint "Burn Hollywood Burn" excoriating the very films he would later star in. The movies Ice Cube has appeared in have made him a millionaire at the cost of his reputation — but when you look at the case of some other rappers who have appeared on the big screen, maybe he was kinda lucky.
The Fat Boys in DISORDERLIES (1987)
Comedian Andy Kindler has a great bit about why women don't tend to like the Three Stooges: "Because they're not funny," he says. I couldn't agree more, but the Stooges are the second coming of the Marx Brothers compared to the hip-hop novelty act the Fat Boys, who attempted to become an overweight urban version of Larry, Moe and Curly in this horribly misguided crash-'n'-bash comedy. The Fat Boys were underrated as rappers, but you could say they were worse than every trio of comic actors since the Ritz Brothers and still be giving them too much credit. To give you an idea of how awful this movie is: it actually makes you feel sorry for Helen Reddy, who has to play the dowdy matron role in one painful scene.
Rick Rubin and Run-D.M.C. in TOUGHER THAN LEATHER (1988)
One of the most bizarre stabs at becoming an auteur in film history occurred in 1988, when Def Jam records co-founder and hip-hop producer extraordinaire Rick Rubin decided he would direct, produce, write, and co-star in a updated rapspoitation flick starring his prize performers, Run-D.M.C. Playing like a bargain-basement Tarantino flick a decade before its time, Tougher Than Leather ably demonstrates that Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels should have left acting off their résumés, but even more fun is Rubin hamming it up beyond belief as the supervillainous Vic Ferrante. Notable for being banned in South Africa for showing the rappers romantically involved with white women. That's progress!
Vanilla Ice in COOL AS ICE (1991)
Not content to be a universal laughingstock as the biggest, most successful, and most critically reviled white rapper in hip-hop history, Vanilla Ice decided that he was going to be a multimedia superstar, and made his bid for big-screen stardom in Cool As Ice, a ludicrous comedy-drama that aimed to bring Rebel without a Cause to a new generation. Unfortunately for all involved, director David Kellogg was no Nicholas Ray, Deezer D was no Sal Mineo, and Vanilla Ice was closer to Jimmy Dean than to James Dean. His career fell apart soon after this was released, and now he no doubt sits in his efficiency apartment, looking at the box office numbers for TMNT and thinking of what might have been.
Snoop Dogg, Big Pun and Fat Joe in URBAN MENACE (1999)
Those who think that Hollywood doesn't produce movies on the sheer level of delusional badness attained by Ed Wood need only to look at the oeuvre of Albert Pyun. A last-resort hack who makes Uwe Boll look like Stanley Kubrick, Pyun's crowning achievement may be Urban Menace, a barely-conscious horror-in-the-hood affair starring Snoop Doggy Dogg (and his highly unconvincing body double) glowering haphazardly through a series of identical empty warehouses in pursuit of villainous drug dealers portrayed by fellow rappers Big Punisher and Fat Joe, who distinguish themselves by mumbling inaudibly to the degree that you can't understand a word they're saying without having the closed-captioning turned on. Not that it helps the abysmal dialogue.
Ice-T in LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD (2000)
Another once-credible gangsta rapper (if you ignore his godawful speed metal band, Bodycount) who caught the acting bug, Ice-T is actually a pretty decent thespian when he finds a decent role, but his rap sheet — which includes films like Frankenpenis, Who's the Man, and more direct-to-video releases than you can count — indicates that he's really only in it for the money. For every Tank Girl or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on his résumé, there's a dozen like this abomination, which is exactly as good as you would expect a horror movie called Leprechaun in the Hood to be. Special "Rappers R.N. Dainja" bonus: Ice-T was the narrator of Urban Menace!
— Leonard Pierce
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Video of the Day 1: Bootleg Sean Connery Footage
4/6/2007 2:05:00 PM
With the announcement from George Lucas that they're still trying to get Sean Connery to appear in the fourth Indiana Jones movie, here's some surreptitiously shot phone video footage of Indy's father at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival. The surreptitious bit is a little misleading, of course: it’s not like he’s going to do a Paris Hilton with his kilt or anything. Instead, the man is quite respectful and enjoying his retirement. A pity he won't appear in a final film that could be more agreeable than the terrible League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Battle of the Hot Asian Daniels — Everyone Wins!
4/6/2007 1:30:00 PM
 | | Daniel Henney (left) and Daniel Dae Kim (right) |
My friend is on the internet. She sighs a dreamy sigh.
“Daniel Dae Kim,” she explains.
“Oh yeah! Wait, no,” I say.
“Do you watch Lost? Korean-American guy.”
“Yeah! No. Wait. I don’t watch Lost.”
I check out his picture — hot indeed. Then I borrow the computer for a second and introduce her to the other Daniel. The other Korean-American Daniel. Daniel Henney of flirty commercials with Gwyneth Paltrow for the clothing company Beanpole:
“Ooooh,” my friend says. “Yeah…”
And there we both are, thanking the creator for allowing not one, but TWO Korean-American Daniels to hit the mainstream, thus doubling the dose of Korean-American hotness on the North American radar.
For some extra Daniel Dae Kim action — he does politics, too! — check this out:
— Pazit Cahlon
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“The Last Crazy Artist”: Alejandro Jodorowsky Links
4/6/2007 12:45:00 PM
Imagine Alejandro Jodorowosky doing Naked Lunch? Or Dune? Or Heavy Metal? Jodorowosky is a real talent, and I first heard about him on the Jonathan Ross Channel 4 documentary, The Incredibly Strange Film Show.
Though he's made fewer films than Stanley Kubrick, Jodorowsky’s small handful of works made a significant impact to solidify his reputation. The extremely strange hippie western El Topo, followed by the hilariously surreal The Holy Mountain (which will be screening at New York’s IFC Center the week of April 18th) made for quite a one-two punch. Both films featured stunning imagery, were quite plotless and had a tongue-in-cheek humour that overcame their narrative limitations. I thought Jodorowosky would have made an interesting version of Naked Lunch… well, at least it would have been funnier then what we ultimately received.
Jodorwosky's career was somewhat derailed in the late seventies by the extensive pre-production and then collapse of his adaptation of Dune. He later directed the virtually unseen Tusk and I managed to catch his last feature, The Rainbow Thief in Cuba, which deserves to remain in obscurity. A brief blip was the serial killer melodrama, Santa Sangre, whose UK poster was infamous for having positive and negative reviews on it to try and get the punters in. (Let it be noted here that it remains one of Screengrab editor Bilge Ebiri’s favorite films.)
 | | The Holy Mountain |
Unfortunately El Topo and The Holy Mountain were difficult to find for years as Beatles manager Allan Klein managed to buy the rights for the first film and financed the second. A row between Klein and Jodorowosky led to the withdrawal of the films, and the only place you could get them was either bootleg VHS tapes of TV broadcasts or Japanese laserdiscs (my copy of The Holy Mountain is a Film Four broadcast from a censored laserdisc where all penis shots have been obscured by bright yellow blobs).
Jodorowosky moved on to do comic books with his old mate, Jean Giraud (aka Mobeius, who was also the storyboard artist on the aborted Dune project). To celebrate the limited cinema re-release of his best known films as well as the upcoming DVD, Xan Brooks at the Guardian managed to get a pretty entertaining interview with the man. Check it out here.
Or check this collection of video interviews with the mystic, which were recorded in Hollywood in July 2003. And if you’re still hungry for more, check out his official site here, and a very informative fan site on the man can be found here.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Fanfare for the Common Director: An Extended Bob Clark Obituary
4/6/2007 12:01:00 PM
If, in the words of Noah Cross, channeling Mark Twain, ugly buildings, politicians, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough, then so too do directors. Bob Clark lasted almost long enough to get respectable. If he hadn't died in a career-truncating car accident, which also killed his 22-year-old son, on Wednesday, April 4, at the age of 67, in Pacific Palisades, California, he would no doubt be the recipient of rejuvenating public celebrations or the odd film-survey book designed to rehabilitate his career.
It's true that Clark's filmography does not appear promising. His films range from the execrable casting stunt of Rhinestone (1984) to the embarrassing mishap of Loose Cannons (1990). Yet he was also the director of Black Christmas (1974), a genre-defining slasher film that, looking back on it now, has focus and subtlety, and an appealing classicism that is the result of traditional, if sometimes ineptly used, commercial cinema conventions. Clark has directed one of the most hated movies in cinema history (Porky's from 1982) and one of the most beloved (A Christmas Story from 1983). That he should do them within a year of each other is further evidence of a career that continually confounds easy categorization.
Holidays seemed to vex Clark. In Black Christmas, also known as Silent Night, Evil Night, he took our most emotional holiday, one he was later to celebrate in A Christmas Story, and turned it into a killing field. I used to assume that Clark was a Canadian but now I learn that he was born in New Orleans, in 1941. Thus he was both a Southerner and a child of war, raised with no living memory of a time without combat and deprivation. This background must have informed the surface of films like Porky's despite his best efforts to be an anonymous, personality-free craftsman. As a commercial director, Clark couldn't resist the sequel if he stumbled upon a hit. In consequence we have SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004), Porky's II: The Next Day (1983), and the Christmas-Story-defacing It Runs in the Family (1994).
But a man can't helm 32 feature films without occasionally doing something of interest, even if by accident or collaboration. Murder by Decree (aka, Sherlock Holmes and Saucy Jack, from 1979) is one of the more interesting Sherlock Holmes films during a spate of renewed interest in the detective, and its Jack the Ripper theory anticipates Alan Moore's From Hell. The Judd Nelson vehicle From the Hip (1987) is of sociological interest as a dissection of yuppiedom. Breaking Point (1976) is a not discreditable Bo Svenson vehicle in the "ordinary man against the mob" mode already done a million times elsewhere. But notice the way I have to couch these recommendations. "Not discreditable," "one of," "of sociological interest." Clark's career was the kind in which a demand for apologia was built in. And that's because the tyranny of the "well made film" and the bias against genre (if not pleasure itself) still prevails in some circles. Bob Clark left behind at least two films that will live on with viewers forever — and of how many washed up '70s and '80s has-beens can that be said?
— DK Holm
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Today at the Film Lounge: All Pauls Day
4/6/2007 11:30:00 AM
- All sorts of good stuff up at the Nerve Film Lounge today. Don’t forget to check them out.
- An interview with Paul Giamatti, in which he notes that he didn’t have to do a lot of research for his new film The Hawk is Dying, and that he actually really liked Lady in the Water.
- An interview with Paul Verhoeven, in which he admits American cinema has given him newfound “respect for the rules of dramaturgy,” and that he believes that one day even Showgirls “will be seen in the right light.”
- An interview with Paul Auster, about his new film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, in which he admits that he was indulging in a bit of fantasy by starting his story with a beautiful French philosophy student waking up in his protagonist’s bed.
- A review of Grindhouse: The Rodriguez episode is John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13 with the hungry undead in lieu of pissed-off gangbangers,” and Tarantino “remains some kind of weirdly stunted prodigy” behind the camera. Indeed, Death Proof may be his finest film since Pulp Fiction.
- A review of The Reaping: “Energetically filmed, with a real sense of narrative panache.” Nope, it’s not as bad as it looks.
- A review of Race You to the Bottom: Indeed.
- A review of the new DVD box set Early Bergman: Great, valuable set of films, but ironically enough, the best one here is the one that was not directed by Ingmar Bergman.
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High Definition: Too Close for Comfort?
4/6/2007 10:45:00 AM
When special effects visionary and director Douglas Trumbull's defunct Showscan format was first unveiled back in the mid 1980s, a reviewer complained that the resolution of the image was so great that new make-up techniques would have to be developed to cope with the extra visual details. Showscan sadly went before it could fully hit Europe, and so any further development in make-up and production design was slowed down. Well, at least for cinema. But for television it was a different issue. When the BBC shot Christopher Hampton's adaptation of The Ginger Tree in 1989, it was the first show to be fully shot and completed on HD. Even then, designers and make-up artists realized that the level of detail visible meant they would have do their job to a level comparable to a 35mm feature, instead as for a regular video signal.
Now it appears that with the advent of HD, this will regularly be the situation that many TV make-up artists will have to deal with, as this article in the Times points out. Given how35mm film still has more visual details than regular HD, one wonders what point the writer is trying to make at the end of her otherwise informative article, when she notes that how an actor looks on the HD format specifically may become an important consideration on whether they would ultimately get the gig.
— Faisal Qureshi
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e10406#10406 |
Morning Deal Report: Cannes Clips, Jesus Drinks, a Gore Gala, and More Jurassic Park
4/6/2007 10:00:00 AM
- The Cannes Film Festival has put a massive archive of footage from the festival’s history online — 300 hours of footage packaged in 1,500 excerpts dating back to the festival's beginning in 1946— at a new site created by the festival and France's INA national television archive. Highlights: Lots of footage from Brigitte Bardot’s many Cannes appearances, and Under the Sun of Satan director Maurice Pialat “responding to boos from the crowd with a defiant ‘I don't like you either.’”
- An Italian film called Seven Kilometers from Jerusalem, about “an advertising executive suffering a mid-life crisis when he meets a man who appears to be Jesus,” is in hot water with the Coca Cola Company, because of a scene where “Jesus drinks a can of Coke, and the ad man exclaims: ‘God, what a great endorsement!’” Now Coke wants the scene cut, and the film may miss its release day.
- Al Gore will host the April 25th opening night gala at the Tribeca Film festival, which will open with “seven short films engaging the hot topic of global warming,” from directors such as Abel Ferrara, Amy Berg, and Jonathan Glazer.
- Laura Dern says Jurassic Park IV is indeed happening, and that she will be in it. As for Sam Neill, she’s not so sure.
- You can start breathing again. Larry the Cable Guy’s next film is a go. It will begin shooting in Chicago next month, and it’s called Witless Protection.
- We all think the idea of old episodes of TV shows being online is great, but has this trend inadvertently killed the rerun, “a bedrock of the network TV business model”?
- They haven’t remade Prom Night yet? How in the heck did that slip through the cracks? Either way, it’s finally on the way.
— Bilge Ebiri
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