Indieville
Pennan vs. Forks, towns made touristy by movies.
Fri, Nov 20 2009 1:55 PM
Today, innumerable thousands of shrieking tweens (and older counterparts who really should know better) will descend on the nation's multiplexes, baying for "New Moon" blood. The phenomenon isn't limited to theaters: Forks, Washington -- where Stephanie Meyer set her novel without ever visiting -- has seen tourism jump way up, from 18,000 visitors in 2008 to more than 64,000 this year alone. Twihards come in hoards, over 100 a day, desperate for a scrap of town memorabilia, stealing dropped library cards and offering cheerleaders cash for their uniforms. It's all very impressive and frightening, and undoubtedly good for a lumber town long suffering from the closure of mills and unemployment. Meanwhile, consider Pennan, Scotland. In 1983, Pennan achieved cult fame as the setting of Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero," the very definition of a sleeper hit that's retained a loyal following over the year. It's a sweet movie (a little too...
Fellini: The Ride.
Fri, Nov 20 2009 5:00 AM
Here in America, we have solid theme park rides based on movies that, for the most part, make sense, like Universal Studios' "E.T. Adventure," or the "Wayne's World" roller coaster "Hurler" (since sold and de-"Wayne"'d by Paramount, but still). But in Rome, they're building a ride based on the Fellini film "City of Women." Yes, in an effort to shore up tourism in the city, Cinecittà Studios is going to give us Cinecittà World -- 400 acres of themed fun for the whole family, based on the many movies that have shot at the legendary studios over the year. Since there's some 630 titles to choose from, there's certainly no shortage of inspiration. How about a "Cliffhanger" rock-climbing game? A "Gangs of New York" simulated gang-fight in virtual reality? An "Adventures of Baron Munchausen" ride where you rocket off to the moon? (Aren't all Terry Gilliam movies begging to be...
Jeanne-Claude, 1935-2009.
Thu, Nov 19 2009 6:00 PM
Jeanne-Claude -- Christo's collaborator and partner -- died today in Manhattan at the age of 74. It was fitting, in a way, not only because the artist pair have been residents of the city since 1964, but because their last big completed project was "The Gates," which turned Central Park's walkways into a series of orange vinyl doorways and drapes, portways of color livening up an especially dreary winter. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been shorthanded as the people who "wrap" things, which only goes so far. A bigger part of their projects was to rendering the familiar temporarily strange, whether by covering a bridge's familiar outlines in fabric or by transforming it into an ominous new bulk. Six times, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects have been documented by Albert Maysles ("Gimme Shelter," "Grey Gardens") and, before his death, his brother David. Besides capturing some memorable, deliberately ephemeral artwork in their wind-breathing...
Oscars Doc shortlist: same as it ever was.
Thu, Nov 19 2009 8:35 AM
Bemoaning the failures of the Oscars in the Best Documentary department has become an annual ritual, like spazzing about filing your income taxes or dusting off stale jokes about March Madness obsessions. So the news that this year's doc shortlist of 15 potential nominees is full of omissions and small obscurities is not a surprise. Many folks would've liked to have seen "Anvil! The Story Of Anvil," "Collapse," "Crude," "Tyson," "We Live In Public," "The September Issue" or "It Might Get Loud" on the list. So it goes. Some of those omissions are reasonable -- there's not much in "Tyson" you can't find on YouTube, and "Collapse" wasn't eligible -- others, not so much. But this category has a long history of leaving out prime picks. Not nominated in the past: "Grey Gardens," "Gimme Shelter," "Don't Look Back," "The Thin Blue Line," "Shoah," "Hoop Dreams," "Crumb." You know, the very...
The Werner Herzog, Jr. awards.
Thu, Nov 19 2009 5:00 AM
"The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" open Friday, Werner Herzog's supposed latest exercise in unhinged lunacy. But as a colleague observed after a screening, "If you didn't know going in Herzog had made it, would you be able to tell?" I'd say probably not: there's none of his trademark stunning footage that was clearly dangerous to get. It's understandable that at 67, Herzog hasn't really endangered himself of late. But who are the filmmakers willing to take up his mantle of unusually arduous and potentially hazardous shooting? Some nominees: Benjamin Gilmour ("Son of a Lion") Gilmour's "Son of a Lion" -- currently in limited UK release -- was made after Gilmour had visited Pakistan in August 2001 and was dismayed by post-9/11 Islamophobia. So he did what any reasonable person would do: went to Pakistan to film a movie with no government permission, growing a beard and operating...
Roadtrip/no roadtrip.
Wed, Nov 18 2009 1:50 PM
Nothing says 1969 like "Easy Rider," the bad-trip Altamont to the ebullient celebration of the next year's "Woodstock." While the hippies were partying down, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson were discovering there was no place for them in America, either old or new. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Keith Phipps retraced the road trip taken by the gang. The week-long series is halfway done on Slate, and it's a good read, tracing what's the same and what's different. The biggest difference, though, is the gap between the "Easy Rider" trio and Phipps, whose mode of travel is a "rented PT Cruiser -- a far cry from Wyatt and Billy's choppers" and who knows he's going home after he reaches New Orleans. I dig the articles, but I kind of hate "Easy Rider." As Mike D'Angelo once put it, that "ain't my favorite film, man, and that's...
Italian cinema on American shores.
Wed, Nov 18 2009 1:41 PM
There's never been a better time to indulge in a little Italian cinema, at least if you live on the coasts. For New Yorkers, that's meant classics from the likes of Visconti, Rossellini and Pietro Germi at the Italian Neo-Realism series at the Lincoln Center, and a new 35mm print of Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. If you live on the west coast, mid-November means Cinema Italian Style in Los Angeles and New Italian Cinema in San Francisco, where contemporary crime thrillers and comedies straight from Sicily have been the order of the day. For some of these film, the latter two series will be the only times they'll screen in the U.S. I still remember seeing Michele Placido's spellbinding mafia saga "Romanzo Criminale" in 2006 and having to buy a crummy region-free, pan-and-scan Thai DVD for repeat viewings. So rare are the screenings...
In defense of John Woo's American period.
Wed, Nov 18 2009 9:00 AM
Friday sees the release of an abridged version of John Woo's new film, "Red Cliff," a two-part, five-hour epic condensed for American audiences into what's still an admittedly pretty entertaining regular-length feature. As Glenn Kenny notes at The Auteurs while comparing the two versions, what's gone is a lot of character detail and poetic flourishes. What's left is one ridiculously over-the-top battle scene after another, which is definitely fun if you want to see, say, something called the "Turtle formation." It is, however, inescapably silly, and I enjoyed it much the same way I enjoyed "Mission: Impossible II" and "Paycheck." The decade-plus Woo spent in Hollywood had its ups and downs. The ups included the peak violence of "Face/Off"; the downs, according to conventional wisdom, included practically everything else. "Hard Target" is fine for connoisseurs of Van Damme cheese (I dig it), but was not a dignified start to Woo's...
Chris Columbus, protector of children.
Tue, Nov 17 2009 2:25 PM
Some directors are automatic punchlines, their names synonyms for lousy. There's Adam Sandler cohort Steve Brill ("Without A Paddle," "Drillbit Taylor"), Eddie Murphy's favorite Brian Robbins ("Norbit," "Meet Dave") and of course Shawn Levy ("A Night At The Museum," "The Pink Panther," "Cheaper By The Dozen"), who pays the bills as perfunctorily as possible. The godfather of them all may well be Chris Columbus, a man so prone to alternating equally leaden bathos and comedy it's amazing he once had it together enough to write "Gremlins." His resume is one of shame: the first two "Home Alone"s (they're terrible, get over it), "Bicentennial Man," this year's ghastly "I Love You, Beth Cooper"... the list stretches on. But even the hackiest director has redeeming qualities, though they might not be visible onscreen; as Geoff Boucher points out at the LA Times' "Hero Complex" blog, Columbus is good at launching and protecting...
Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" sequel bites the dust.
Tue, Nov 17 2009 10:00 AM
"Dazed and Confused" is effectively beloved by everyone who's seen it -- including me -- so I got uber-excited about the prospect of Richard Linklater making a "spiritual sequel." And now it's dead on the ground. It was apparently called "That's What I'm Talking About," in honor -- we presume -- of the kind of stoned logic of the original, where that phrase was the highest form of praise you could offer. But Linklater couldn't raise the $14 million necessary to get the project off the ground, at least not without casting already completed. Now it goes on the backburner, to be filed away for possible future re-excavation. In terms of how a "Dazed" sequel might work, it doesn't make that much of a difference if it'll be resurrected now or later: 1980 is 1980 no matter when you film it, and no one from the original cast would be...
The Catholic horror genre.
Mon, Nov 16 2009 5:09 PM
Being unreasonably easy to scare, I'm a soft touch when it comes to horror movies and basically refuse to have anything to do with them at this point, but "The Exorcist" is one movie that's never bugged me. But it has scared the hell (heh) out of every Catholic I know; it's the rare horror movie (theoretically) deriving its scares from the potential of blasphemy instead of either creepy atmosphere or sudden jolts. So it's bemusing that William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin may go back to the well once more, rejiggering the original "Exorcist" as a miniseries. This seems silly and pointless -- the "Exorcist" franchise has been revisited a ridiculous amount of times already, and pretty much every installment beside the original was a flop. The franchise returned $459 million on a total investment of $450 million. It's hard to see why a miniseries would make more sense....
Five reasons "Pirate Radio" flopped.
Mon, Nov 16 2009 7:54 AM
As you're doubtless aware, the weekend saw "Precious" making $6.1 million from a measly 174 screens, doing well on its probable journey towards Best Picture; "Fantastic Mr. Fox" did well too, pulling roughly the same per-theater average as "The Darjeeling Limited" in its first weekend, which means Wes Anderson may or may not still be too cool for the mainstream. Less remarked upon was the crash-and-burn failure of "Pirate Radio," Richard Curtis' tepidly-awaited follow-up to "Love Actually." Considering the latter is a dorm-room staple of deluded pseudo-romantic girls everywhere, why might this be? And no, "bad reviews" is not an acceptable answer -- the Metacritic score for "Pirate Radio" is actually slightly higher than that for "Love Actually". Here are five reasons for the film's failure, both conceptual and lifted from the terrible trailer: 1. No one cares about Richard Curtis in the US. Richard Curtis did time on "BlackAdder"...
If you Tweeted #indiefilmcliche, #killurself.
Fri, Nov 13 2009 2:27 PM
I work at home, so I love Twitter: it's a great way to break up the monotony of one room, one laptop and eight hours. If you're a user, you know that on the right-hand side of the page there's a list of "Trending Topics" -- frequently used phrases, frequently marked with a hash-tag -- that changes depending on how often they're used. Last night, #indiefilmcliche reared its ugly little head, with lots of comments about whiny youth, quirky families and vintage clothing. Twitter-friendly filmmakers got in on the act: Jason Reitman weighed in with "Adorable soundtrack that begins to drive you crazy," which I hope and pray was a self-mocking reference to "Juno"; Richard Kelly blew the whole thing up with "Menacing rabbit figure haunts disturbed teen." Har har. I'm just going to state the obvious here: to the extent that the vast American public is aware of the...
Brother vs. brother: Zucker fight.
Fri, Nov 13 2009 11:24 AM
Greenpeace is a good organization that's kind of itchily annoying, the same way a college activist getting you to sign a worthy petition is -- a point driven home quite literally when Bruce Willis was whacking activists with golf balls from his oil rig in "Armageddon." That image might be a good one to keep in mind when reading the news that arch-hack Jon Turteltaub ("National Treasure," "Phenomenon," "Cool Runnings," "3 Ninjas" -- a résumé to set your heart a-flutter) is all set to go on a biopic of the nascent Greenpeace movement of the '70s and early '80s: get ready for heart-pounding hilarity and adventure as seal and whale hunters meet their match in a scrappy, ragtag team of "pacifists, ecologists, musicians, teachers, sailors, and scientists." Wacky! More notable, though, is who's producing: Jerry Zucker and wife Janet. Zucker is, of course, part of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team that was...
The brothers who brought you "Bad Lieutenant."
Fri, Nov 13 2009 6:00 AM
Alan Polsky wanted to tell me a story about how Werner Herzog held a gun to his head and shattered his brother Gabe's eye socket with the butt of the pistol in the middle of shooting "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," but that was just wishful thinking. "We wanted things to go crazy so that we could tell great on-set stories like [the ones] in Herzog's history," Alan said. "But unfortunately, we don't have any ones like that." If true, the actual production would be the dullest part of "Bad Lieutenant," one of the weirdest and most indelible films of the year. (My review from Toronto is here.) And the smooth sailing would be a tribute to the Polsky brothers, two first-time producers in their 30s who saw the potential in updating Abel Ferrara's 1992 cult classic into a surreal and shockingly funny character study with Nicolas Cage...
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