Video of the Day: "What the Fuck are You Doing in the Dark?"
7/10/2007 4:00:00 PM
The sun is hot, water is wet and Peter Greenaway thinks that the linear storytelling mode of cinema is dead. If you like the man’s work, you’re likely to find this interview with Dutch TV (where he explains his recent veejaying activities; you can see his set-up and the results here and here) fascinating and compelling; if you don’t, you’re likely to find it pretentious and obnoxious. At any rate, you should watch it for no other reason than to learn the exact day and date that cinema died. — Leonard Pierce
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Bruce Dern's Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have
7/10/2007 3:00:00 PM
Over the course of an acting career that has spanned more than forty years, Bruce Dern has earned the image of a venerable, hard-working That Guy. (Having fathered Laura Dern with his ex-wife Diane Ladd, he's also the unlikely patriarch of a show business dynasty.) Now he's established a repository for all his Hollywood stories in a new book, Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have: An Unrepentant Memoir.
Dern was one of that select group of character actors (including Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton) who came up during the sixties, through small roles in A-pictures and slightly larger roles in B-pictures, before taking on old dependable status in the seventies. Early in hs career, he was murdered in Hitchcock's Marnie, decaptitated in Hush, Hush...Sweet Charlotte, and was the guest of honor at the motorcycle-gang equivalent of a Viking funeral in The Wild Angels. (He also advised Peter Fonda on the pros and, well, the other pros of hallucinogenic drugs in The Trip, presumably because Dennis Hopper had a prior engagement.) Later, giving as good as he got, he injured Charlton Heston in Will Penny, shot John Wayne in the back in The Cowboys, and attempted to blow up the Super Bowl in Black Sunday, all of which got him typed as a villain, much to Dern's frustration. For a while there he threatened to become a study in bitterness, angrily demanding that interviewers tell him just what Jack Nicholson had that he didn't have. (A longtime friend, Nicholson had directed Dern in one of his best performances, as a scarily intense college basketball coach in the little-seen 1971 Drive, He Said.) He slipped off the radar during the 1980s. But with his performances in such roles as the doomed low-life Uncle Bud in After Dark, My Sweet, James Woods's antagonist in Diggstown, and the old man in Walter Hill's Wild Bill who calls Hickok out while sitting in the street in a wheelchair, Dern served notice that he was back, intact, and ready to rock.
The new book is an as-told-to, whittled by the writers Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane from 1500 pages of transcripts based on "88 hours of talk." Some of the stories, such as the one about John Wayne cautioning Dern that killing him onscreen would not make him beloved, will be familiar to readers of Dern's interviews over the years, but anyone who has read a few of Dern's interviews will know that the ghosts are to be congratulated just for getting him to talk about something besides his jogging. And Dern isn't about to call himself a writer just because his name is on the book jacket. "I can't write," he says. "I can't type. I failed typing in high school." His modesty on that point may be a scource of amusement to some of the directors Dern has worked with, since there are plenty of stories about how he didn't think he needed to be a member of the Screen Directors Guild to tell them how to do their job. — Phil Nugent
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Chow-dah!
7/10/2007 2:00:00 PM
Speaking at a press conference in London, Matt Groening has promised film audiences the beauty of imperfection, calling The Simpsons Movie "a tribute to the art of hand-drawn animation" done in "the old-fashioned, clumsy, 'erase it if you don't do it right' way." There's more here, and Groening and Simpsons executive producer Al Jean are great talkers. But the best thing about it is that, because it's from the BBC, you get to see Groening described as speaking "with his tongue firmly in cheek."
Meanwhile, the city of Springfield, Massachusetts is lobbying to host the stateside premiere of The Simpsons Movie, and have taken their campaign online with a promotional video featuring Ted Kennedy. There are a dozen other Springfields spread across the map that are vying for the honor, but Kennedy is the Massacusetts town's designated "ace in the hole"; in the video, he extends a personal invitation to "all the Simpsons — Homer, Marge, Bart, old 'Diamond' Joe Quimby, Lisa, Maggie and Abe." For those of you who dozed off at some point there, the joke is the out-of-left-field mention of Simpsons Mayor Joe Quimby, who talks with a Bawston accent, has a history of partying heartily, and is related by marriage to a muscle-bound movie star of Austrian extraction. It'll be interesting to see what the rival Springfields come up with to match that. Maybe one of them will propose deliberately infecting the entire population with jaundice. — Phil Nugent
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Michael Moore Blasts CNN, Wolf Blitzer and Giuliani
7/10/2007 1:00:00 PM
Michael Moore's Sicko continues to hold a spot in the box office Top 10, and Michael Moore continues his relentless attack on what he feels are the half-truths of corporate-sponsored mainstream media. Moore barely touches on the subject of his film here. Instead he uses the opportunity to unload on Wolf Blitzer, their on-air doctor and CNN itself. This is worth watching if only to see Wolf squirming to try and maintain some kind of control over the interview. Oh, and also as a quick reminder of what a jackass Rudy Giuliani is. — Bryan Whitefield
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Two Cyber Cultures? Ronald Bergan on American Unexceptionalism
7/10/2007 12:00:00 PM
It's the most irritating film article in eons. Written by a grumpy-looking hack named Ronald Bergan for the Guardian's film blog and titled "Dumb Hollywood is forever in debt to Europe" , the piece argues that "greatest movies" lists, such as the Guardian's own "1,000 Films To See Before You Die," are tilted heavily toward American film. This is bad, because "American cinema," he writes, is "the most hyped on earth" while also being "the most predictable, conformist and derivative." He goes on to say that, "By the highest standards of cinema, American films fall short. There are no living American directors who can compete in innovation and depth with the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Manoel de Oliveira, Alexander Sokurov, Jia Zhang Ke or Tsai Ming-liang." Sounds like the editorial platform of Cinema Scope. He's on shakier ground when he says that "hardly any technical or stylistic innovation came from America." (Animation? Noir?) Bergan makes no blatant factual errors, but like a prosecutor's brief, the diatribe is shaded toward his aggressive thesis. Still, I'm sympathetic with Bergan's attempt to segregate web-dominant fanboys from the sectarian, little-represented esthetes, who have among them, what, five websites to visit? — D. K. Holm
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Morning Deal Report: So I'll Just Give You Some Money and You Give Me Those Boots
7/10/2007 11:00:00 AM
Jonah Hill — don't ask me why, but this guy just makes me laugh. So I'm glad he's in a half-dozen more movies this year, including Pure Imagination, a Judd Apatow produced comedy about a traumatized guy who's not sure if his girlfriend is imaginary. According to Cinematical, "Hill [says] the goal is to mix their brand of down-to-earth relatable humor with some of the more extravagant (in terms of visuals) stuff you'll find in a Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry film." Now you've really got my attention.
Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock will star in a buddy-cop movie, except they say their characters are not actually buddies. But it's called Badge Buddies, so the message is a little confused.
Anthony Michael Hall is (reportedly) the Riddler in the new Batman. You know, I just saw The Caveman's Valentine the other day (a whole other story), and I gotta say, Anthony Michael Hall's got some chops. So far, so good on The Dark Knight.
Alex Baldwin, already in some trouble regarding an eleven-year-old, now has additional trouble with a six-year-old — Shortcut to Happiness, an adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster he directed and starred in in 2001. The thing's been on the shelf ever since and Baldwin's warning people to avoid it. Here's a trailer.
— Peter Smith
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"A Shopping Cart Filled with Dead Mackerels"
7/10/2007 10:00:00 AM
The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a too-brief and "far from official" but enthusiastic oral history of midnight movies in the Bay Area, from back in those golden days when the Cockettes used to scramble onstage and shake their moneymakers at the audience, defying whatever movie was going to follow them to be half as big a trip. Of no small nostalgic interest for anyone who ever thought that the five most beautiful words in the English language were "Saturday at midnight! Basket Case!"
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Our Last AFI-Related Post for a While (We Hope)
7/9/2007 4:00:00 PM
Another AFI infomercial televised list show has come and gone, and with it no small amount of armchair quarterbacking from all corners of the Internet. But if the AFI's blinkered view of American film history doesn't cut it for you, you can finally do something about it. The folks over at Daily Film Dose are spearheading an alternative list, to be voted on by Web-based movie lovers like you. Yes, you! The ballot, which can be downloaded here, includes the 400 semifinalists for the AFI list, but voters are encouraged to submit write-in candidates as well, a good idea since the AFI folks don’t seem to be familiar with such little-known classics as In a Lonely Place, Bride of Frankenstein and Point Blank, to say nothing of obscure filmmakers like Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller. Hurry though — voting will be cut off at 1,500 ballots (the same sized pool as the actual AFI poll) or in six weeks, whichever comes first. — Paul Clark
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Factory Girl on DVD
7/9/2007 3:00:00 PM
Charles Taylor reports on the tangle of problems, including questionable business partners and a steady stream of bad buzz, that scuttled Factory Girl, the Edie Sedgwick biopic starring Sienna Miller and directed by documentary specialist George Hickenlooper. The movie was originally financed by LIFT Productions, a New Orleans-based outfit that has since come under federal investigation for alleged abuses of Louisiana's tax incentives for filmmakers. Amazingly, considering this was a movie about a New York socialite famous for her connection to the Andy Warhol scene in the 1960s, LIFT seems to have believed that they could make the movie without any shooting in New York City.
Taylor doesn't dredge up one of the movie's other well-publicized problems: the threat of legal action by Bob Dylan, who believed that the movie portrayed him as culpable in Sedgwick's death. Dylan's wrath was one factor in the release date changing from late last year to this past February; ultimately the character said to represent him (and played by Hayden Christensen) was renamed, simply, "The Musician." Everyone agrees that the movie doesn't do Warhol, played by Guy Pearce, any favors, either. The script also brought out the movie critic in Lou Reed, who was moved to describe it as "one of the most disgusting, foul things I've seen — by any illiterate retard — in a long time."
In any case, Hickenlooper's preferred edit of the movie is now coming out on DVD (sadly without a commentary track by Lou Reed), so anyone who's interested can finally see just what the filmmakers were originally trying to get at. One problem remains that may prove insurmountable: Hickenlooper himself tells Taylor that though he was won over by the screenplay, he didn't want to do it at first because he didn't find Edie Sedgwick all that interesting. He speaks for a lot of us there. — Phil Nugent
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You Can Look It Up: Turner Classic Movies Database
7/9/2007 2:00:00 PM
Thanks in part to Dave Kehr's blog the movie blogosphere at large is slowly coming to the realization that there is an alternative to the IMDB. In a June 26th entry Kehr writes about the Turner Classic Movies Database, or TCMDB, the new encyclopedic arm of the TCM empire. This new Turner site demands only that the eye stray occasionally onto ads for Turner Classic Movies-related shows and DVDs. Currently the home page is a simple affair designed to conform with the TCM "look," but toward the bottom are some interesting statistics, plus easy access to movies by decade, and a list of films voted most wanted on DVD. Archival material featured when I visited included twenty-four pictures I'd never seen before of Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita, a boon to Lyon fetishists. As someone who visits the IMDB about forty times a day, I think that Turner's site will take some getting used to, but Kehr is already an enthusiast, called the old IMDB "error-plagued." Kehr points out that the TCMDB has "as its core the unsurpassable AFI Catalog of American Feature Films, previously accessible only with a $50 AFI membership (or through certain libraries)." I've flipped through those fat orange AFI catalogs in the library, and they are enormously helpful, but also amusing: zealously comprehensive, the AFI writers often found themselves summarizing X-rated movies that taxed their capacity for euphemism. I remember one summary from the 1960s volume recounting, with the academic equivalent of a straight face, the orgiastic shenanigans of a cast consisting of various dwarfs and one-legged people. Unfortunately, TCM seems to have been selective in adapting the AFI volumes. (Well, it is a family website, I guess.) An alternative to the alternative, so to speak, is the more-churlish nine-volume Motion Picture Guide, with annual supplements at least through 1996. This set's detailed plot summaries (often wrong in small details) and trivia-filled recaps are also online via the TV Guide website, which I've only ever been able to access through. . . the IMDB. — D. K. Holm
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