Indieville
July 2008 - Posts
Dan Rather chooses "The Candidate."
Thu, Jul 31 2008 4:57 PM
Film in Focus has been gathering lists of five favorite films about political campaigns or, in some cases, just politics or politicians, from an array of political journalists including Katha Pollitt (on "Election": "People who hated Hillary Clinton compared her to Tracy, but that just shows they don't remember the movie very well, because Tracy really was the best candidate."), Rick Perlstein (who offers the unexpected choice of Max Ophüls' "The Earrings de Madame de") and David Sirota. The latest to give his picks is none other than Dan Rather: 4. The Candidate The quintessential campaign movie (and one that may well appear on everyone's list). In focusing on the unseemly emphasis on image and money in modern political campaigns it was prescient in the 1970s and is as relevant as ever now. Much more than a message film, it managed to catch the behind-the-scenes feel of a political campaign...
Trailering: Bootleg "Che," "What Just Happened."
Thu, Jul 31 2008 4:25 PM
For those of you dying for even the slightest glimpse of Steven Soderbergh's "Che," JoBlo.com has surfaced a bootleg, flickery, unsubtitled Spanish-language trailer for "The Argentine," the first half of the four-hour film, here. The trailer, as trailers are wont to, siphons off only the most dramatic and actiony scenes, making the film look far more romantically revolutionary than it actually plays out. As Gregg Goldstein at the Hollywood Reporter wrote today, the $65 million film remains without a US distributor: Soderbergh wants to release the two-part, four-hour-plus film as one movie in limited December openings. He'd then like to release the first part in January and the second in February. Soderbergh has cut five to seven minutes from each half, but a potential distributor who suggested one three-hour cut was ruled out immediately. My review from Cannes is here. Also up, a trailer for Barry Levinson's "What Just Happened"...
"That's like saying Americans are gangsters because they like Michael Corleone in The Godfather."
Thu, Jul 31 2008 3:25 PM
Quotes from the interview circuit: "That's basically ridiculous. That's like saying Americans are gangsters because they like Michael Corleone in The Godfather. We don't take ourselves that seriously." --José Padilha, director of "Elite Squad" (I'm filled with urge to follow that title up with sound effects -- "Elite Squad: BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!") on why the success of his film doesn't indicate a nation-wide endorsement of vigilante justice, at the London Times. "I've been noticing that a lot of young people today don't want to grow up. Why is that? It's because, in their eyes, society has stopped advancing." --"Ghost in the Shell"'s Mamoru Oshii on his new, bleakish film "The Sky Crawlers," which will screen in competition at Venice this year, at the Daily Yomiuri. "It's more demanding for the viewer, but I'd become frustrated at sitting in a cinema and being able to predict the cuts back and forth...
"Being a vampire is definitely not this homoerotic..."
Thu, Jul 31 2008 2:09 PM
Because it's a draggy day today, here's Morgan Spurlock sending up his own "30 Days" series at Funny or Die -- "30 Days of Night." Almost related -- New York's Vulture blog has Jean Painlevé's strange and marvelous 1945 documentary short "The Vampire" up for online viewing here. + Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days of Night" (Funny or Die) + 'The Vampire': Some Animals Were Harmed in the Making of This Picture (New York)...
In the works: Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"?
Thu, Jul 31 2008 11:04 AM
In the works: A great bit of news from indirectly, Screen Daily: French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, of the acclaimed "Vertical Ray of the Sun" and "The Scent of Green Papaya," will next been working on a Japanese-language adaptation of Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood." The only work of Murakami's to be adapted to the screen so far have been two short stories -- "Tony Takitani," which was made into a minimalist feature by Jun Ichikawa, and "All God's Children Can Dance," which apparently yielded a short from Robert Logevall starring Joan Chen. Most of Murakami's work would seem impossible to adapt for the screen, save his recent "After Dark," which reads, unfortunately, like an annotated screenplay, and (hey!) "Norwegian Wood," one of his earlier and most straightforward novels, the chronicle of a college student during Tokyo's turbulent late 1960s who's involved with two different women. It's a favorite of mine,...
Palisades pledges to remain extremely Extreme.
Thu, Jul 31 2008 10:30 AM
Everyone's been eyeing Palisades Media since the company bought up the defunct Tartan's highly covetable UK and US film libraries and proclaimed they'd keep right on acquiring and distributing films (on DVD, with the possibility of occasional theatrical releases) in the Tartan tradition. Why would a print and advertising financing firm get into indie film distribution right around the time that everyone else is fleeing the industry like it's a loft party that's out of liquor? It seems, mostly, because they were Tartan's major US creditor and foreclosed on their assets. Grady Hendrix at Kaiju Shakedown tries to get clarification from Palisades CEO Vin Roberti on the company's plans for the future. A few highlights: Will you be keeping the Asian Extreme line? Will we be keeping it? We're looking to grow it to a 2000 title library by 2010. Are you worried about the state of the home video...
Odds: Untouchable Paris, leaves, Woody Allen's "blackish comedy."
Wed, Jul 30 2008 5:32 PM
Taking photos with Paris Hilton, who was at Comic-Con promoting "Repo: The Genetic Opera," two MTV News staffers found they displayed an identical and apparently instinctive reluctance to actually have to touch the heiress. [MTV] Maybe they'd just watched too much footage from the film, which is directed by "Saw II"-"IV"'s Darren Lynn Bousman, and which, like many a movie monster, looked infinitely better when it was half-imagined -- Defamer has a clip, The New York Times gets around to tackling the topic of self-distribution, with John Anderson starting with the upcoming "Bottle Shock" and moving on to smaller fare like "Ballast" and "Last Stop for Paul." Ridley Scott's "Nottingham" was postponed because of leaves, according to the Independent. Leaves... and the possibility of a SAG strike. The Woody Allen/Larry David movie? "Whatever Works," a "blackish comedy." [Big Screen Little Screen] The Guardian follows "Man on Wire"'s Philippe Petit to...
Explaining yourself.
Wed, Jul 30 2008 3:11 PM
At Ain't It Cool, "Mr. Beaks" corners director Frank Darabont for a discussion of "The Mist"'s, er, family unfriendly ending. Yes, there are spoilers. I've had a number of arguments over the conclusion, and interpretations tend to break down along political lines - though I do have a left leaning friend who read it as a conservative tract. Conservative!? Oh, no, baby! That's an outraged liberal tract! I agree. But she read your punishment of Thomas Jane's character as a swipe at defeatist liberal attitudes. (Pause) Wow! At his blog, John August responds to an observation about "Go"'s lack of cell phones by noting they weren't widely used in 1999 when the film came out, and then running down a list of changes that would need to be made if they were: "Looking at this list, I'm really glad there weren't a lot of cellphones when making Go. None of...
It's beginning to look like August.
Wed, Jul 30 2008 1:36 PM
"[D]id I mention the Abominable Snowmen, who help Rick, Evelyn and Alex combat Li's revived baddie and, after kicking one of the emperor's many minions over a Himalayan gateway, victoriously raise their arms like an NFL referee signaling that a field goal is good?" --Slant's Nick Schager on "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," "making the first two Mummy films seem like The Godfather I and II." "The blame...should rest at the feet of Paul W.S. Anderson. His direction is horrible, with the exception of a couple of admittedly stellar shots the car race scenes are actually kind of cluttered and boring, several normally solid bit players turn in career worst performances and the Anderson-written script is laughably, horribly bad. We like to joke about plot holes big enough to drive a truck through but this film has plot holes that people LITERALLY drive actual trucks through with nobody...
Huluing "Hoop Dreams."
Wed, Jul 30 2008 10:33 AM
"Hoop Dreams," Steve James' mighty, influential 1994 documentary following two inner-city Chicago teenagers over five years in frantic pursuit of the dream of becoming professional basketball players, is up on Hulu for free (with "limited commercial interruption" from sponsors) here. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar writes on the site's blog: In January 1997, I was walking curbside at Boston's Logan Airport. Waiting patiently in a line in the freezing temperatures was a guy named Steve James, the director of the documentary film Hoop Dreams. Steve was standing there by himself, minding his own business. I recognized him because he had just given a speech to a packed auditorium at a local university. I attended the speech, pressed up against the back wall due to the incredible response Hoop Dreams was getting in theaters at the time. When I saw him standing there on the curb, I walked up to him like...
Mike Mills votes "no" on "The Dark Knight."
Wed, Jul 30 2008 9:50 AM
Everyone's got an opinion on Batman. From Aaron Hillis' interview with director/artist Mike Mills, who's featured in the documentary "Beautiful Losers," opening next week ("Dark Knight" spoilers ahead): Do you feel the weight of the waning indie film economy, or have you witnessed anything in the art scene that mirrors that? It's absolutely having a collapse, I'm totally feeling it. I think it's been coming for five years, at least. When I did "Thumbsucker" in 2005, it felt like it was collapsing then, and more so now. It feels like we're living in the '50s, like, the films that are huge, you know? I'm sorry, but I think ["The Dark Knight"] is one of the most regressive movies I've seen in a long time, and that it's supposed to be "the smart man's action movie" is an indicator of what a weird time we're in. It's all macho-man, very simple,...
Odds: Von Trier's "Antichrist," the Coens' collaborator.
Tue, Jul 29 2008 6:00 PM
Lars von Trier's English-language horror flick "Antichrist" is a go, reports Variety -- funding's in place and casting will be announced soon. The film's apparently "about a couple who move to an isolated cabin after the death of their son, only to find sinister forces at play." Those cabins, always trouble. Von Trier claimed depression was preventing him from working on new projects last year, but has, one would guess, since bounced back to his usual ebullient self. Stu VanAirsdale at the Village Voice writes on the occasion of MoMA's "Collaborations in the Collection": Barry Sonnenfeld is known to tell the story of that day in Texas 25 years ago when he walked onto the set of Blood Simple--the Coen Brothers' debut and his first feature film as a cinematographer--and couldn't turn on the camera. Things seemed to work out OK over the next month and a half--and over the...
Duality.
Tue, Jul 29 2008 4:27 PM
According to /Film, IMDb was hacked last night, leaving "The Dark Knight" briefly but ever so profoundly displayed as both the #1 best and worst film of all time. Good and evil! Batman is Bush! He isn't! This comes after speculation from the same site that fans of the film have been deliberately voting down "The Godfather" in order to boost "The Dark Knight" to the top of the charts, providing reassurance that no matter how many hours you lose to hangovers and "Law & Order" marathons, there will always be others out there doing far sillier things with their time. But, since we're on the Man Bat, Dennis Lim at Slate has a great video slide show on the evolution of the fight scene and how it is shot and edited, inspired by "The Dark Knight"'s debatedly murky combat sequences. And, quickly, elsewhere in the continuing turmoil: Our own...
Ingloriously yours, possibly even by Cannes 2009.
Tue, Jul 29 2008 3:27 PM
"Universal Lands Tarantino's 'Inglorious Bastards' Despite Hatred Of Harvey" headlines Nikke Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily. And that's all she's got as I'm posting this. Still, yay....? Over at the New York Sun, Grady Hendrix compares Enzo Castellari's 1978 film with Tarantino's proposed remake, writing: Mr. Tarantino is said to be courting Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio to play the leads in his film about a group of Jewish soldiers who parachute into occupied France in order to bomb a Parisian movie theater where Goebbels's latest propaganda film is slated to screen. With characters named "the Bear Jew" and "the Jew Hunter," one gets the feeling that Mr. Tarantino wants to do for Jews what "Reservoir Dogs" did for AM radio hits of the 1970s. But his plot bears little resemblance to Mr. Castellari's original, which has finally been released in a three-disc, restored DVD edition by Severin Films. [Photo:...
Venice 2008 lines up.
Tue, Jul 29 2008 10:29 AM
The 65th Venice Film Festival announced its line-up today -- among the juicy offerings are the new Darren Aronofsky film "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke playing Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a retired pro wrestler struggling to get back into the ring; Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq drama "The Hurt Locker"; Takeshi Kitano's comedy "Achilles and the Tortoise"; the new Miyazaki movie "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea," which is already in theaters in Japan; Jia Zhang-ke cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai's São Paulo-set multi-ethnic thriller "Plastic City"; and Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married," in which Anne Hathaway plays a girl fresh out of rehab. Premiering out of competition, as already announced, will be the Coen brothers "Burn After Reading," along with Claire Denis' "35 Rhums," Abbas Kiarostami's "Shirin" and Agnés Varda's documentary "Les Plages d'Agnès." "Chop Shop" director Ramin Bahrani's "Goodbye Solo" and Ross McElwee's "In Paraguay" will play in the sidebar....
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