The Screengrab : darling

Paris Hilton Pulls the Bullshit Train to Toronto

Phil Nugent — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In the long-awaited follow-up to her last film triumph The Hottie and the Nottie, Paris Hilton stars as herself in Paris, Not France, described as a sociological-themed documentary about what "the Paris phenomenon" says about "this moment in culture." The director, Adria Petty, seems to enjoy likening her movie to Darling, the 1965 John Schlesinger film Darling, which was a non-documentary, and also non-good, character study of a shallow, beautiful actress (Julie Christie) whose shrill emptiness and jet-set lifestyle were once thought to have said just reams about their moment in culture. (The movie won Christie an Academy Award for her willingness to behave unpleasantly, so maybe the idea is that Paris, Not France will win some kind of meaningful artistic credibility for Hilton' creepy, dead-eyed smirk. One of several points at which the comparison breaks down: Christie's character, being a movie star, was actually famous for something.) Petty (who, being the daughter of Tom Petty, can be assumed to know something about the joys and hazards of being born into dynastic celebrity), who also shot the film, is about to enjoy a break that many first-time directors would sell out their grandmothers for: on Tuesday, she'll get to see her baby screened at the Toronto Film Festival, arguably the best-loved of all big-name international festivals, and the one with the best reputation for its focus on serving the interests of filmmakers and film lovers instead of providing one more circus of hype and celebrity sleaze. So it's leaving a bad taste in some mouths that Paris, Not France has turned out to be the center in what may be a cynical publicity stunt and bid for another fifteen minutes of the the attention of a jaded world.

The problems began last week, when word hit the papers Hilton had waved her lawyers at the Festival organizers and forced them to scale back their plans to award the movie three public screenings as well as a showing for the press. The implication was that the movie is so hot and critical of the talentless heiress that Hilton wants it suppressed, and if your first thought is to wonder what the hell could be in the movie that would embarrass the star of The Simple Life, not to mention her own homemade bedroom calisthenics tape, that's clearly the point. Thom Powers, who programmed the documentary arm of the festival, seemed to be taking credit for a coup when he told blogger Katrina Longworth, "From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings. But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.” Presumably he's seen the film, and if he thinks that showing it at all is a good option, we'll trust his judgement for now. Longworth herself, though, speaks for the crowd when she writes that she's "got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. On the surface, you’ve got a rich, fame-hungry girl who allows a filmmaker to document her for publicity purposes as she tries to legitimize her outsized fame by recording an album. A couple of years later, that album is universally considered a joke, and those publicity materials have been expanded into a stand-alone film about Hilton’s relationship to her own celebrity. Paris has obviously lost control, and she’s obviously siccing Daddy’s lawyers on Petty et al in an effort to take that control back...but Paris has made a career out of managing the release of imagery that she supposedly didn’t want us to see. From the sex tape which she first sued over and then transformed into both a cash cow and a career platform, to the prison stay that turned into a week-long, weepy melodrama and dominated the news cycle all the way up to Paris’ march out of the county jail and into her mother’s waiting getaway vehicle, all of Hilton’s career high points have involved the transformation of humiliation into triumph. It’s not that her reputation is “based on shamelessness”––it’s that she continually turns events that should be shameful into products for public consumption. I don’t think we’re dealing with anything different here, and I don’t think we should be surprised."

As Longworth points out, the really odd thing about this fiasco is the announcement that Hilton had somehow "pressured" the festival to cancel all screenings of the film but one." "It would be one thing," she writes, "if the Hilton camp has insisted that the film be removed from the festival completely––I don’t know the laws, but this is something I assume they would have the right to do, considering that Petty’s footage came from her contract to produce publicity materials for a DVD and is now going towards personal use––but they didn’t. Instead, they’ve made tickets to Paris‘ single TIFF screening a hot commodity." Now the New York Post's "Page Six" is explicitly reporting that Hilton " "has craftily manipulated the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival in an attempt to gain more publicity for a new documentary about herself." Hilton's flak even issued a statement acknowledging, "We wanted to create more buzz - create some hype . . . We felt the impact would be more extreme if we had one screening." Hilton, described as "a partner with the documentary", will attend the Tuesday screening. (The flak declined comment on whether or not Hilton has a financial interest in what's being advertised as her own takedown documentary.) To the people who care about the people whose activities are covered on Page Six, manipulating the programming of a serious film festival and robbing real movies by struggling artists of a little time in the spotlight in order to get more attention paid to your little home movie is the kind of thing you brag about.

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.