Video of the Day 2: Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
4/12/2007 5:00:00 PM
John Hough’s 1974 gearhead classic gets namechecked multiple times during Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse. For many years, it wasn’t an easy film to see, although it’s now available on DVD. Here’s a taste.
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Give Me Your Huddled Masses, Yearning to Direct
4/12/2007 4:00:00 PM
I’m not a big fan of filmmaking movements with cute names, and I’m not a fan of “interactive” films, whatever that actually means. Put ‘em together and you’ve got something ominous sounding called “Open Source Cinema.” The idea began to get some ink during the production of Snakes on a Plane, where the film’s title, its dialogue, and even some new scenes were determined or influenced by fan feedback on the Web. Now, some people are seeing this as some kind of new movement. Says the Daily Telegraph:
“Open source cinema occurs when a film is made available online for anyone to edit. Take Stray Cinema. Founded by New Zealander Michelle Hughes last year, it allows people to download and edit footage from a short film she shot in London. Anyone is free to make a new version of her film and give it alternative scenes and endings.”
There are even some open-source features: “Cactuses, a drama about youth culture in southern California, and Boy Who Never Slept, a comedy about online dating.” One enterprising lawyer in San Francisco has started the Digital Tipping Point, “an open source filmmaking project designed to teach people about the genre.” He “believes that, instead of sitting passively through the latest blockbuster, audiences will one day prefer to download the open source version.”
Generally, it’s a decent rule of thumb to assume that the more people that get involved in the creative decision-making on a film, the worse it tends to be. And the success or failure of ideas like open source filmmaking will ultimately depend on the quality of the work produced. But I also suspect that, if any of the stuff produced is any good, those responsible for it will start hunting down copyrights and agenting up pretty fast. For the time being, I’ll try to keep an open mind.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Quote of the Day: Troma Founder Sanguine about Cultural Resurgence of Z-Grade Schlock
4/12/2007 3:15:00 PM
”I’ve had major media calling me up all week, and you’ll see that this stuff is coming out in The New York Times and on television. The major media had no interest in Lloyd Kaufman when Troma had its 30th anniversary, a milestone in the history of cinema. The Times and the NY media have totally ignored the fact that we own a building in NY, that we’ve got a payroll in NY of people who’d be on welfare, for sure, if they weren’t working for Troma. They’ve ignored that we discovered Samuel Jackson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Kevin Costner, Toxic Avenger. The only thing the media might cover is if I blew my brains out in the middle of 9th Avenue. Now, as an excuse to do a piece on Grindhouse, the media comes to contact me, and therefore I will now be part of the Kool-Aid that brings the zombies into the theater.”
- Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman talks to the New York Press about what real grindhouse movies are like. Also, he keeps qualifying his comments by noting how much he actually likes “Tarantino and that other guy.” (Hat tip: Movie City News)
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The Movie Moment: LOLITA (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)
4/12/2007 2:30:00 PM
Of all the great filmmakers in movie history, Stanley Kubrick was, obviously, one of the most revered. Many of his films are considered to be essential classics, and rightly so. Yet amidst all the attention for Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange, some other great films haven’t gotten the same amount of love, even from Kubrick fans. The Shining is as despised by some fans of the book as it is revered by movie lovers, and Eyes Wide Shut remains a point of contention for many people. Yet perhaps the most overlooked great film Kubrick made was his version of Lolita.
Like The Shining, Lolita had a lot to live up to. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was a controversial bestseller in its day, and even today it’s ranked as one of the twentieth century’s great works of fiction. But Kubrick had an even more formidable problem in adapting Nabokov — its storyline. Lolita, for the few of you who don’t know already, is about a middle-aged man who lusts after a young teenage girl. Humbert Humbert, played by James Mason, is a British college professor who comes to America to take a teaching position, and after seeing young Dolores Haze (nicknamed “Lolita” and played by Sue Lyon) he moves in with and eventually marries her mother Charlotte, just to be close to the young nymphet.
This storyline would be an edgy one for Hollywood even today, but consider that Lolita was made while the Production Code, though not the power it once was, was still in force. “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” blared the ads for Kubrick’s film, echoing the thoughts of practically every moviegoer of the time. Kubrick had to be careful in bringing the book to the screen, satisfying the censors while doing justice to what made the original book a masterpiece.
While Kubrick made some key directorial decisions to get past the Code, like deliberately casting the role with an older girl than the book called for, he largely accomplished his task through the film’s tone. Some of Nabokov’s more risqué moments never made it to the screen, but Kubrick wisely recognized that the genius of the novel — what made Lolita work — was its dry and twisted wit. Many great filmmakers made an art of using laughs to run iffy material around the Production Code — Preston Sturges pretty much made a career of it — and Kubrick pulled off something even trickier with Lolita, foiling the censors not through gags and punchlines, but with a filmmaking style that subverted the seamy nature of the material.
My favorite example of this comes after Charlotte (Shelley Winters) has discovered her husband’s obsession with her daughter. Tossing aside the incriminating journal, she lashes out at him and then locks herself in her bedroom. At this point she breaks down and cries out to her first husband, dead seven years:
“Harold, look what happened. I was disloyal to you. I couldn’t help it though… seven years is a long time… if you hadn’t died all this wouldn’t have happened. Oh darling, forgive me. Forgive me, forgive me. You were the soul of integrity. How did we produce such a little beast? I promise, I promise, I promise I’ll know better next time. Next time it’s gonna be someone you’ll be very proud of.”
So far, a perfectly serviceable dramatic soliloquy, the stuff Oscar clips are made of. But then Kubrick does a funny thing. As Charlotte sobs, clutches the urn holding Harold’s ashes and collapses on the rug, the camera cranes downstairs to the kitchen, where Humbert, playing the obliging husband, offers to make Charlotte a drink to calm her down. With this one move, Kubrick subverts the drama taking place in Charlotte’s bedroom, emphasizing in a definitive way that this isn’t her story, but Humbert’s. He coolly offers up a half-assed excuse for the diary — “these notes you found were fragments of a novel I’m writing!” — but his tone suggests that he’s less concerned about losing Charlotte than he is about losing Lolita.
A more conventional filmmaker might have stayed with Charlotte, inviting the audience to empathize with her predicament, and then to be overcome with emotion as she charged out of the house and into the street, only to be killed by an oncoming car. But Kubrick knew better. He keeps the camera with Humbert as he pours a drink, only to be interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. As the person on the other end of the line tells him about the accident, he interprets the call as a gag. He can’t help but laugh at the strange suddenness of the call, and even calls upstairs, a broad smile on his face: “Charlotte? There’s a man on the line who says you’ve been hit by a car!” It’s only when Humbert notices the front door open in a rainstorm and goes to close it that he sees that the call was no prank.
Nabokov’s boldest move was to tell the entire story from Humbert’s point of view by having him narrate. It’s also, not coincidentally, why the book is funny rather than tragic. Humbert Humbert is a man so singularly obsessed with Lolita that he is blind to almost everything else. What makes this scene so brilliant is how captures this in cinematic terms, without falling back on voiceover narration or subjective camera angles. By placing Humbert, wonderfully played by Mason, at the center of the scene, Kubrick downplays the tragedy swirling around him, this conveying Humbert’s mindset perfectly.
When Adrian Lyne directed a new adaptation of Lolita in 1997, he claimed to be making a version that was truer to the original novel. But while he was able to retain more of Nabokov’s original storyline and the controversial sexuality that came with it, his version retained almost none of the author’s chilly sense of humor. Kubrick didn’t make that mistake, and while his adaptation is hardly a letter-perfect one, it’s a pretty amazing movie in its own right. As long as you don’t approach Kubrick’s Lolita as cinematic Cliff’s Notes, it works extremely well, and deserves to be mentioned as one of its director’s many classics.
— Paul Clark
Previous Movie Moment columns:
- April 5, 2007 -- Bus 174
- March 29, 2007 -- Belle de Jour
- March 22, 2007 –- Nashville
- March 15, 2007 -- A Fish Called Wanda
- March 8, 2007 -- 8 Women
- February 22, 2007 -- The Girl Can’t Help It
- March 1, 2007 -- Tree of Wooden Clogs
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The Highest of High Arts: Cinema Scope Issue No. 30
4/12/2007 1:45:00 PM
What kind of geek reads Cinema Scope? If Film Comment appeals to the plugged in New Yorker with a taste for jaunty if opaque prose, and Sight and Sound to the somber academic, then Cinema Scope, a magazine whose obscurity places it slightly below Film Quarterly but above Scarlet Street in general familiarity, is the magazine for the angry enthusiast of outsider art. One senses, reading the magazine, that the writers are both outraged and a tad pleased that they must champion filmmakers, such as Pedro Costa, John Cook, and Joaquím Jordà, of whom the masses are unaware. One guesses that there is chagrin around the editorial office over the fact that Manoel de Oliveira has, in recent decades, become "known."
Cinema Scope has reached something of a milestone with the publication of its 30th issue, portions of which are on line . It was a print magazine through issue 18, and has had a strong web presence since then. The journal also has a knack for publishing interviews or career surveys with exactly the people you're about to be interested in. Does Paul Verhoeven have a new movie? Well, here is a fine interview with the irascible director about Black Book . Is Bong Joon-ho the latest Korean flavor of the month, thanks to The Host? Here is a Q&A with him. It's mix of timeliness and crankily defended obscurities makes Cinema Scope a must read.
The rest of the current issue features an interview with Robinson Devor about Zoo, lengthy and detailed essays on Johnnie To , Jacques Rivette, David Lynch's Elephant Man, Phil Soloman, and William A. Wellman , and reviews of The Lives of Others (negative: "Finding a silver lining in the Stasi’s sordid legacy is not easy, but for commercial rather than political reasons The Lives of Others embraces a highly problematic, albeit crowd-pleasing, brand of inspirational humanism"), Belle toujours (de Oliveira's sequel to Belle de Jour), Flags of Our Fathers with Letters from Iwo Jima (positive), and
Zodiac (positive). A highlight is Jessica Winter's review of the DVD of Idiocracy.
In addition, there are festival surveys of Sundance and Berlin by editor Mark Peranson, Sundance by Scott Foundas, and Rotterdam by Jason Sanders. The tone of a magazine is set by its editor, of course, and Peranson's irritation evokes memories of the early Movie, which adopted an embittered pose, one which bleeds into the other columns. I enjoy it but worry about how other readers are taking it. Andréa Picard's essay on the future role of film festivals in curating installation film art, in which she mentions in passing "great novelist" Antonio Tabucchi and installation artist Marcel Bloodthaers, continues the theme of forcing the reader to Wikipedia. The continual reach for the highest of high art is maintained in Olaf Mõller book review column which focuses on thick mostly untranslated tomes about Catalan filmmakers. Though this columns are educational it's almost a relief to reach Jonathan Rosenbaum's DVD column where he features such mundanities s as Mouchette, Pandora's Box, The Innocents, and Dick Cavett. Another highlight is "Canadiana: The Year in Canadian Film," an excellent survey by Steve Gravestock.
— DK Holm
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Video of the Day 1: Shirley Clarke’s Bullfight
4/12/2007 1:00:00 PM
Shirley Clarke, who made two of the most seminal American films of the 1960s, The Connection and The Cool World, has been namechecked as an influence by some of our greatest directors, including Martin Scorsese. Despite that, she is one of those filmmakers who really, really needs to be better known. (An American DVD release of The Cool World would be a friggin’ start, at least.) Here’s an ultra-rare short of hers from 1955.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Frankly, My Dear, I Do Give A Damn: Looking for Good Civil War Flicks
4/12/2007 12:15:00 PM
Today, April 12th, is the anniversary of the first day of the American Civil War, when shots were fired at Fort Sumter. I’m Canadian. I never studied this particular war, but that’s what the Internet is for, isn’t it? I’m not proud of my ignorance — and I’m not too proud to ask for help in the form of cinematic education. (You’re just lucky you can’t hear my bad fake Southern accent.)
The only Civil War film I’ve seen is Glory — a great film, too. But that’s it. I haven’t even seen Gone With the Wind! So please, in the name of liberty, cinema, and all that is brilliant about America (I’m lookin’ at you, IHOP), help out this ignorant dame from the Colonies out, with suggestions for the Best Civil War Films.
— Pazit Cahlon
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Defending David: Russell’s Buds Stick Up for Their Man
4/12/2007 11:30:00 AM
David O. Russell’s friends have come out of the woodwork for a Los Angeles Times article, to defend his now-infamous I (Heart) Huckabee’s tirade against Lily Tomlin. Producer Greg Goodman says the clip is “taken out of context” and that the director “is an individual” (as opposed, presumably, to the rest of us, who are merely shiny pools of bacteria). And cinematographer Peter Deming adds that the leaked fight is not representative of Russell: “It's like someone selling naked pictures of Madonna. Things happen during your life, and someone captures it and exploits it." Because, after all, those naked pictures of Madonna were like so totally unrepresentative of her persona.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Vonnegut and Adaptation
4/12/2007 10:45:00 AM
Plenty more eloquent people have already written about Kurt Vonnegut’s death, and plenty more certainly will. And despite the fact that the author had been a household name for decades, it’s interesting to note that Vonnegut’s work only rarely translated well to the big screen.
Slaughterhouse Five was adapted into a flawed but interesting film by George Roy Hill, and Slapstick was an unfortunate embarrassment. Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions wasn’t exactly a masterpiece either. But there were a couple of great ones in there, too — the TV-movie adaptation of Harrison Bergeron (starring Sean Astin in the lead role) and later, Mother Night, adapted by Robert Weide and directed by Keith Gordon.
The latter book dug deep into the psychological desperation of a double agent, an area that John Le Carre would later mine for A Perfect Spy. Director Gordon had earlier met Vonnegut when both of them played supporting roles in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School. (Did you ever seriously expect to see the words “Rodney Dangerfield” in a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. obit?)
So, two clips for you. First, is the awesome trailer for Mother Night, which Vonnegut himself felt was one of the best adaptations of his work.
The second clip is a pretty fascinating Charlie Rose Show segment featuring authors Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Dan Wakefield all talking about movie adaptations of their work.
— Bilge Ebiri and Faisal Qureshi
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Morning Deal Report: Gotham Loves Grindhouse, Bond Scribes Tackle Barbarella
4/12/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Hey, not so fast on those “What went wrong with Grindhouse?” navelgazers. Turns out the financially-maligned, critically-acclaimed film is killing in New York, at least. And by “killing,” we mean, “making terrific money in ticket sales”.
- The guys who wrote the screenplay for Casino Royale are going to be writing the screenplay for the new Barbarella. And if they can pull that off, it might be time for them to tackle a big-studio remake of Emmanuelle.
- We'll have a longer post about it in a bit, but for now, rest in peace, Kurt Vonnegut.
- Giovanni Ribisi is going to play Einstein in a film for Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, director of the perverted Nazis classic The Night Porter. Sounds like something that would make a great double feature with I.Q..
- Forrest Whitaker has joined the cast of Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, “which chronicles the true story of professor Melvin B. Tolson (Washington), who formed a debate team at a small black college in the 1930s. The team went on to beat Harvard in the national debate championships. Whitaker will play the father of one of the debaters and a rival to Washington's character.”
- They’re making a film about the creation of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1911, and of the first Indianapolis 500. Sort of like Talladega Nights meets Seabiscuit.
- In case anyone was wondering, that lawsuit involving the adaptation of Clive Cussler’s Sahara is still going on, and director Breck Eisner recently testified.
- Really, when you read the headline ”Lights, camera, homemade porn…” in a student newspaper, is it even possible to not read it?
— Bilge Ebiri
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