Video of the Day 2: A Look at Music Video Pioneer (and Now, Cannes Superstar) Anton Corbijn
5/21/2007 5:30:00 PM
Thanks to The Daily Reel’s Anthony Kaufman for offering us this brief, YouTube-enhanced rundown of the career of music video director Anton Corbijn, whose feature directorial debut, the Joy Division biopic Control, premiered at Cannes last week to some serious acclaim. Here are two clips Anthony brings to our attention. First, a Dutch TV piece on the making of Control:
Next, Corbijn’s video for Joy Division’s Atmosphere, itself something of a tribute, like Control, to the band’s late lead singer, Ian Curtis:
— Bilge Ebiri
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Persepolistacular!
5/21/2007 4:45:00 PM
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's outstanding series of graphic novels about growing up in Iran after the Islamic revolution have been in development for animated adaptation almost since she finished drawing them; the engaging storytelling and stark black-and-white illustration seem like a good match for a motion picture to begin with, and Satrapi's involvement (as co-writer and co-director) ensure that it will be as faithful to its source as possible. The finished film, which caused quite a stir outside of the usual comics-nerd circles when it was announced that film legends Catherine Deneuve and Gena Rowlands would be handling some of the voice chores, is set to debut before a wide audience at Cannes. (Mike D’Angelo will soon be reviewing this film — but don’t tell him, because it’s one of those Competition titles he’s trying to see tabula rasa.) And, in a bit of jus'-folks marketing borrowed from her beloved punk bands, Marjane Satrapi has arranged for a private screening of the film that you can sign up for (assuming you live in France) at her MySpace page.
— Leonard Pierce
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park
5/21/2007 4:00:00 PM
First, you need to know something: I hate Gus Van Sant's Elephant. I mean, I really hate it. As in fucking despise. It is without question my least favorite film, ever. I don't have time right now to explain why that is; if you're really interested, you can get a vague sense from the brief review I wrote at the time. Just about everybody I know thinks I'm nuts when it comes to that movie, which is fine. But understand that the conventional wisdom — namely, that Elephant, even if it tells us (by design) very little about Columbine, is nonetheless a lyrical and evocative portrait of contemporary adolescence — means zippo to me.
So it shouldn't necessarily mean much to you when I assert that Van Sant's new film, Paranoid Park, is precisely the lyrical and evocative portrait of contemporary adolescence that everybody mistakenly thought Elephant was. All the same, this brilliantly schizoid tale of Alex (sensational newcomer Gabe Nevins), a high school skate punk with a guilty conscience, digs into the teenage mindset with a clarity and eloquence that Elephant, with its distracting (and, to my mind, obscene) echoes of real-world tragedy, couldn't possibly achieve. Structured as Alex's fevered letter-cum-journal entry (which we sometimes hear in unobtrusive voiceover), Paranoid Park is ostensibly concerned with the question of his involvement in the accidental death of a security guard; since this act of involuntary manslaughter (briefly seen in gruesome detail) is wholly fictional, however, Van Sant's appropriation of it as an overarching metaphor for the furtive, free-floating sense of shame that accompanies puberty feels bold and incisive rather than deeply disrespectful. Meanwhile, his formal dexterity just grows more and more impressive; he sometimes rivals Resnais here with his conflation of editing and memory, skipping back and forth in time in a dissociative frenzy that has no use for conventional signposts or explanations. I could have done with a bit less emphasis on Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, perhaps, but the film's other musical choices, ranging from Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to snatches of Nino Rota's score for Juliet of the Spirits, is magnificently contrapuntal. This is still very much a mood piece, but Van Sant, after two consecutive films centered on sacrificial lambs, has made an overdue and welcome return to recognizable human beings.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Forgotten Films: REAL LIFE (dir. Albert Brooks, 1979)
5/21/2007 3:15:00 PM
Just prior to beginning work on his first feature film, Real Life, comedian Albert Brooks had been making short subjects for the show that would eventually become known as Saturday Night Live (or, as the bewildered Phoenix city councilman puts it when introducing Brooks in the film, “Good Night Saturday”). As reported by our own Phil Nugent in The High Hat, the shorts were often the best things about those early SNLs, and represented Brooks at a sort of salamander phase as a filmmaker, learning the tools of his trade in anticipation of his first chance at a full-length production. Real Life was that first chance, and as the purest, and in many ways most successful, distillation of the essence of his comic sensibility, it did not disappoint.
The idea behind Real Life — inspired by the then-groundbreaking PBS documentary An American Family — was simple: Brooks, playing himself, is placed at the helm of a big-budget documentary — financed by Hollywood and given scientific credibility by the cooperation of the Institute for Human Behavior — cataloguing the day-to-day life of a resolutely ordinary American family. After a series of elaborate psychological tests, the Yeagars of Phoenix, AZ are picked as the test subjects, and an array of high-tech film equipment is brought in to document their lives 24/7. But no amount of pricey gimmicks or good intentions are enough to save the project from its head, as Brooks plays his standard self-image as a shallow, fat-headed, self-centered minor celebrity to the absolute hilt. He moves in next door to the Yeagers, and the minute his own phony showbiz sensibilities begin to register that the family is lacking in big-screen punch, he responds by attempting to start an affair with the wife, showering the whole clan with elaborate gifts, and, ultimately, destroying the village in order to save it, burning the Yeagers’ house down in order to give “his” movie an appropriately dramatic ending.
While Real Life features some solid supporting performances (most notably, a typically smooth, understated turn by Charles Grodin as easily deflated veterinarian Warren Yeager and the underrated J.A. Preston as the only completely sane person involved in the project), Brooks, who’s in nearly every scene, is the center of the film, and much of its humor relies on his vicious self-portrayal as a clueless, egomaniacal jackass who can’t see more than a centimeter past his own nose. Brooks (with help from his talented co-writers Monica Johnson and the multi-talented Harry Shearer, who also appears in the film as a hapless cameraman) completely savages himself, and there are innumerable hilarious scenes that hinge on his uncanny ability to make everything about him: his hamhanded pass at Mrs. Yeager comes when he fears the film is slowing down after her grandmother’s death, and his only response to Grodin’s concern that he’s having a nervous breakdown is to munch on snack crackers and tell him not to “clam up”. From his constant reminders to everyone else in the film about how much he’s spent on buffets, decorating and big-screen TVs to his stunning ability to misinterpret metaphors, Brooks the director and Brooks the actor turn Brooks the character into one of the most unlikable yet compelling comic figures this side of Rupert Pupkin.
Indeed, while much is made of Real Life’s prescient foreshadowing of the reality TV craze — as it should be, given that it was made a good 20 years before every network discovered the inherent entertainment potential in sticking a bunch of nobodies in front of a camera and letting them have at each other — it’s even more astonishing in how keenly it predicted the coming, in the late 1990s and 2000s, of the comedy of discomfort, humiliation and embarrassment. Long before there was the showbiz phony Larry Sanders, there was the showbiz phony Albert Brooks, telling his Phoenician audience to “be yourselves” just prior to serenading them with a self-flattering big band musical number. Long before there was the inadvertently self-destructive Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, there was the inadvertently self-destructive Albert Brooks, sweet-talking Grodin’s character after he’s accidentally killed a prize show horse (with Brooks’ cameras capturing the whole thing). And long before there was the awkward, image-unconscious David Brent of The Office (or Michael Scott in its US equivalent), there was the awkward, image-unconscious Albert Brooks, interrupting a psychiatrist’s discussion of how his test family is undergoing a serious psychological breakdown to ask if she thinks he looks fat on camera. (Brooks even anticipates David Brent’s brief sidelong “did you notice how great I am?” glances at the camera.)
For all its prescience, though, Real Life didn’t make much of an impact when it was released. It did mediocre box office business in a limited release, and while it showed up in semi-regular TV rotation due to Brooks’ later fame, it remained a comic obscurity seen by too few people and understood by even fewer. While it’s extremely relevant today in light of the reality TV explosion, for many years, it seemed like a gimmicky flight of fancy. And ironically, given the running gag about the documentary’s Hollywood producer who constantly suggests replacing Dr. Yeager with James Caan or Neil Diamond, the film’s lack of starpower undoubtedly hurt its survival chances; Charles Grodin was the biggest thing the movie had to a name actor (and probably still is). Its 2001 DVD release was the very definition of perfunctory, a bare-bones affair that offered almost nothing in the way of extras for such a well-crafted, hilarious movie that seems so meaningful in today’s media climate.
Still, Real Life isn’t, in the end, a movie that you seek out because you want to be reminded of Albert Brooks’ prescience, or because you want to hear him vaporing about how ahead of his time he was; it’s a movie you seek out because it’s so damn funny. The great scenes, hilarious lines and amazing moments in Real Life are so plentiful that naming them all would be tantamount to just writing a scene-by-scene depiction of the film. Some of the highlights: Brooks being confronted by Preston over his extreme awkwardness around blacks (Brooks: “Look, I know better than anyone you people are going to take over the world. You’re faster, you use heat better — Africa’s seething, BOOM! There it goes!”); his furious showdown with an equally clueless local news team looking for a puff piece on the documentary; his monthly planning meetings with the studio and the Institute, culminating in his engaging, at the end of the film, in a drop-dead funny screaming match with the producer — or, rather, with the producer’s voice coming through an intercom, since he couldn’t be bothered to show up; a paralyzingly uncomfortable and hilarious scene where he fails to pick up on an obvious analogy and flatters himself in the limpest way imaginable; the terrible, wonderful scene were Grodin kills the horse, and his hapless response to the news of his own mistake; and any number of scenes where Brooks shows himself to be a self-centered dick (“I always thought if I’d studied harder, and been graded more fairly, I would have become a doctor, or a scientist of some sort”). Scene for scene and moment for moment, it’s probably the funniest movie Brooks has ever made, and one of my favorite comedies of the ‘70s period.
Albert Brooks isn’t an extremely accomplished filmmaker; he’s not a tremendously technically gifted one, and he’s not one of especially diverse talents. The few times he’s incorporated drama into his films, the results have usually been slightly embarrassing. But as a comic filmmaker, he’s adventurous, restless, and willing to try anything. He doesn’t mind taking a piss on his own reputation, he’s willing to sacrifice almost anything for a good joke, and his movies, from the nasty yuppie satire Lost in America to the brave if misguided Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, are risky endeavors that are more often than not unappreciated in their time. If you want a look at the place where one of American comedy’s most satisfying careers got started, or if you just want to laugh your ass off, Real Life is well worth tracking down.
— Leonard Pierce
Previous Forgotten Films Columns:
April 23, 2007 -- DARK OF THE SUN (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1968)
- April 16, 2007 -- THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (dir. William Peter Blatty, 1980)
- April 2, 2007 -- PRIVILEGE (dir. Peter Watkins, 1967)
- January 16, 2007 -- GONE TO EARTH (dir. Michael Powell, 1950)
- December 26, 2006 -- SHOCKPROOF (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1949)
- December 11, 2006 -- THE DION BROTHERS (aka The Gravy Train) (dir. Jack Starrett, 1974)
- November 28, 2006 -- RACHEL, RACHEL (dir. Paul Newman, 1968)
- November 15, 2006 -- LEO THE LAST (dir. John Boorman, 1970)
- October 30, 2006 -- 7 WOMEN (dir. John Ford, 1966)
- October 16, 2006 -- REIGN OF TERROR (aka The Black Book) (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949)
- October 3, 2006 -- MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1989)
- August 18, 2006 -- LUNA (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)
- August 28, 2006 -- OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE (dir. Jack Clayton, 1967)
- August 14, 2006 -- THE CHOCOLATE WAR (dir. Keith Gordon, 1988)
- July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967)
- July 17, 2006 -- WALKER (dir. Alex Cox, 1987)
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Cranky Old Men: Bitter Auteurs Speculate on the State of the Art
5/21/2007 2:30:00 PM
Okay, so maybe they aren't all old, but there certainly seems to be a lot of crankiness in the air at Cannes — indeed, as the Los Angeles Times reports, at a press conference after the screening of Chacun Son Cinéma, some of the industry's brightest directors seemed a bit, well, out of sorts. Atom Egoyan, perhaps irritated at his inability to continue copping feels off of strangers the way he claims to have done as a young man at The Sting, complained about the lack of intimacy in today's movie theatres; Guillermo del Toro, who apparently has been studying at the feet of bad standup comics of the 1980s, beefed about "crying children, bad popcorn and terrible sound"; and, best of all, Roman Polanski got so fed up with the "poor questions, such empty questions" of the press that he declared a premature lunch hour. A look at any film magazine from the 1930s will indicate that stupid questions from movie journalists are hardly a new phenomenon, but Polanski blames it all on us: "I think it's really the computer which has brought you down to this level." Hey, who knows? Maybe it was Harry Knowles who was asking him questions.
— Leonard Pierce
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Quote of the Day: Cinema du Luc
5/21/2007 1:45:00 PM
”Perhaps things would be different if he had gone to La Fémis, the French National Film School. But as Mr. Besson tells it, when he was 18, in 1977, he applied, and in a preliminary interview, an administrator asked him which directors he most admired. Mr. Besson named Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Milos Forman, before the interviewer cut him off, saying: ‘That’s enough. I don’t think you belong here.’”
- The New York Times profiles Angel-A director Luc Besson.
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Tough Guys Do Remember: Resurrecting Mailer’s Movie Flop
5/21/2007 1:00:00 PM
It's been twenty years since Norman Mailer directed Tough Guys Don't Dance. You can be forgiven for having failed to mark that on your calendar in red ink. The movie — not the first that Mailer ever signed his name to but, in a break from the improvisational efforts he arranged and starred in the sixties (Wild 90, Beyond the Law, Maidstone), the only one he ever directed from an actual script — was a surreal mess of hothouse exposition, obscurely motivated violence, and funhouse turns by the likes of Wings Hauser, John Bedford Lloyd, Penn Gillete, and Lawrence Tierney.
Apparently, some of the people who worked on it have decided that means that it deserves credit for anticipating Quentin Tarantino. The main thing that comes through in this report of the anniversary reunion of the cast and crew is that it was a blast to make and that everyone who worked on it was eager to see the old skipper again. "Ninety per cent of the people we called told us they wanted to come," says production coordinator turned reunion organizer Caroline Baron. "There was only one actor we weren't able to find. Ryan O'Neal. Whereabouts unknown."
— Phil Nugent
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Video of the Day 1: John Rambo, the Trailer
5/21/2007 12:15:00 PM
They’re dubbing it a teaser, but it actually appears to be a lot more than that — more likely a market trailer of some sort, for Cannes. Anyway, here’s our first look at John Rambo, Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revive his second-best-known franchise. It starts off fairly staid, with the usual I’m-done-fighting-my-wars-just-leave-me-alone stuff, then gets religious, but…holy shit did he just take that dude’s head off with his FIST??!?
Okay, this movie’s gonna be insanely stupid, but this trailer is kinda worth seeing, if only for the ridiculous amounts of gore.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo reviews Silent Light, Deems Wack Experiment a Success
5/21/2007 11:30:00 AM
When I launched this year's wack experiment, I was hopeful that at least one Competition film by a well-known (at least to cinephiles) director would forego any sort of possessive credit at the outset, so that I could watch the entire movie without knowing who made it. Thus far, we've had several, but only by relatively or completely unknown filmmakers: Cristian Mungiu, Raphael Nadjari, Christophe Honoré (who's made several films, but I'd only seen his debut previously). Today, however, brought the film I'd been waiting for, along with confirmation that I know my auteurs when I see 'em.
The film in question is called Silent Light, though I didn't find that out until the end. And perhaps a minute into the stunning opening shot, during which the camera pivots and tracks, with infinite patience and delicacy, from the starry night sky into a magnificent sunrise on the horizon, I found myself wondering whether this might be the latest by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose two previous films, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were formally grandiose in a similar way. [Go here to read Nerve’s interview with Reygadas.] But then the characters were introduced - a Mennonite farm family - and they all spoke German, which made me doubt my initial impression. What's more, this new film was exquisitely simple and tender, with no sign of the overweening pretension and juvenile fascination with unsightly bodies (withered or corpulent) that marred the Reygadas films I'd seen, both of which I'd fairly hated. Still, no other name ever came to mind, and when the closing credits revealed that it was indeed Reygadas' work, I wanted to shout in triumph.
But I couldn't, because I'd just seen something very close to a masterpiece, and I didn't dare disturb the reverential hush that I assumed we in the Salle Bazin were sharing. (Applause was little more than polite, so I may well be alone in my awe — we'll see.) Much like The Banishment, which screened a few days ago to near-universal disdain, Silent Light is an unadorned tale of marital infidelity, with no real plot to speak of and an intense fascination with landscape and the contours of the human face. But it's tone and judgment that matters in miniature epics like these, and Reygadas, for whom this film represents a massive leap in maturity, understands the difference between sullen brooding and quiet anguish. There's no way to convey the power of Silent Light without describing each individual shot, and even then you'd be overlooking their cumulative power; I can only tell you that I was rapt from start to finish, despite being the sort of Neanderthal film buff who generally prefers traditional narratives to beatific tone poems. Because of the (deeply moving) ending, a certain Danish classic is sure to get name-checked in other reviews; I mention it here solely because I don't want to look ignorant, and I'll only add that I think the comparison wholly earned. This is the first film I've seen here since Dogville, four years ago, that genuinely and fully deserves the honor of the Palme d'Or.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Next, He’ll Be Claiming He’s Danni Lynn’s Father
5/21/2007 10:45:00 AM
He has journeyed into the Amazon, gazed on apocalyptic scenes of suffering and ecological devastation, experimented with hypnosis and other means of altering human consciousness, listened to the sounds of a man being killed by a bear, and hung out with Klaus Kinski. Now, Werner Herzog is ready to talk about reality TV: "I've watched Anna Nicole Smith's show. The poet must not avert his eyes." Yes, he really said that. And there’s more, in this interview with the New York Sun’s Bruce Bennett, timed to coincide with New York's Film Forum beginning a three-week program devoted to documentaries made or selected by Herzog.
— Phil Nugent
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Morning Deal Report: Joker Revealed, Sony Owns the Night, Julia Does a Sigourney
5/21/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Heath Ledger’s Joker makeup for the upcoming Batman flick The Dark Knight has finally been revealed And, uh, it’s really fucking creepy.
- Sony-Columbia just spent a boatload of money to buy the rights to James Gray’s Cannes film We Own the Night, starring Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, and Eva Mendes.
- Julia Roberts will produce and star in a film based on the life of “wildlife conservationist Joan Root, who was murdered in her Kenyan home earlier this year,” after trying to save Lake Naivasha “from the ecologically damaging flower farm industry.” Sort of like Gorillas in the Mist, but with a lake.
- Joel Silver is resurrecting plans for a new film version of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
- Goldie Hawn is turning towards directing. She announced at Cannes that she will direct and star in the comedy Ashes to Ashes, which “centers on a woman who travels through India to Kathmandu to bury her husband's ashes but loses them along the way. “ Kurt Russell will also star in the film.
- Well, it was about time we checked back in with Pee Wee Herman.
— Bilge Ebiri
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