The Screengrab : new york

Where Are You Filming the Rest of Your Life? Moviemaker Magazine Has Some Suggestions

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Whether you see 2009 as a time for hope and optimism as we enter a new era or a time for misery and despair as jobs disappear and 401Ks vanish down the crapper, either interpretation makes it seem like an especially fine time to consider shucking it all and starting over in a new location. But why chuck darts at a map when you have the crack staff at Moviemaker magazine to help you weigh the pros and cons of your new home--especially if you're an independent moviemaker or aspiring filmmaker yourself? The magazine has run an annual survey on the ten best American cities for film people looking for a home base, and this year, in recognition of a nation-wide sea change, they've done it "a little differently — first, by opening up the playing field to 25 cities instead of 10 and, second, by focusing on those places that offer the perfect combination of employment opportunities, reasonable costs of living, strong quality of life, affordable home prices and, of course, financial incentives." The editors "arrived at the final list of 25 only after months of research, interviews and calculations which, in this fast-changing economy, were particularly challenging. We got there by using a formula into which we fed the following data: Cost of living, average salary, unemployment rate, job growth, median home price and crime rate. Next, we added in the number of film schools, festivals, movie-related vendors and local movie theaters. We then factored in the current production scene, i.e. production days, size of talent pool." The magazine also took into account cities' devotion to environmental issues and "financial incentives" offered to filmmakers; in these hard times, some cities are cutting back on the former, but Michigan made the list for the first time on the basis of its announcment of "the nation’s most aggressive incentive plan".

Here's how the list breaks down:

1. Chicago, IL

2. Atlanta, GA

3. New York, NY

4. Shreveport, LA

5. Albuquerque, NM

6. Boston, MA

7. Stamford, CT

8. Memphis, TN

9. Milwaukee, WI

10. Austin, TX

11. Detriot, MI

12. Miami, FL

13. Seattle, WA

14. Portland, OR

15. Philadelphia, PA

16. Sedona, AZ

17. Salt Lake City, UT

18. Wilmington, NC

19. Boise, ID

20. Denver, CO

21. Bozeman, MT

22. Wichita, KS

23. San Diego, CA

24. Richmond, VA

25. Des Moines, IA

Related Stories: Shreveport, La.: Your Family-Friendly One-Stop Film Location

Armond White Brings the Noise

Phil Nugent — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The movie American Gangster grew out of a profile of Frank Lucas that Mark Jacobson wrote for New York magazine, and now Jacobson is back at the same place with another troublemaker, Armond White, movie critic for the New York Press and newly elected chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. As Jacobson notes, White has the position "because he was the only one who wanted the generally thankless job." That's a clue both to how seriously White takes his job and also to the mixed feelings, to put it gently, that he arouses among many of his colleagues. White is a man of strong opinions, opinions that run against the main current of received opinion more often than not. (He panned the Dark Knight and thought the world of Torque.) The late, great Pauline Kael used to say that people who could agree to disagree with other people about politics and religion and whether their own kids belonged in rehab or on Death Row would lapse into seizures and hurl death threats at you if they found out that you disagreed with them about some stupid-ass movie. You might think that people who form and express opinions about movies for a living would be beyond this sort of thing, and boy, would you be wrong. But even in the the smaller-than-it-looks world of movie criticism, White is a contentious figure. He says that his father "taught us about the rights of the working man, and also that if you didn’t have anything to say, you should keep your mouth shut. But if you did have something on your mind, you should talk up, don’t keep it to yourself." There isn't much that White doesn't feel comfortable sharing when it comes to movies and writing about movies. There was a time when Kael and the self-styled "auteurist" critic Andrew Sarris had a rivalry that inspired younger critics to pick sides and keep old fights going, but when White spoke to Jacobson, he made a point of pledging allegiance to both critics, as a way of declaring his admiration and kinship with any good writer and sharp thinker who takes movies seriously. The reason so many other contemporary critics treat White as the enemy isn't that he provides an alternative to a chorus of mainstream voices but that when he goes after his colleagues in print, he isn't shy about suggesting, or even saying out right, that they're not as serious as they should be. This can even take the form of things such as White's decision, back during his previous tenure as head of the New York Film Critics Circle in 1994, to schedule the annual awards dinner "during the Sundance Film Festival, creating conflicts for some members. White defends this decision. 'The circle is the oldest and most legitimate film-critic group in the country. We’re not the Dallas Film Critics Circle. If people wanted to carry water for penny-ante shit like Sundance, that’s too fucking bad. The circle comes first.' ”

"If you cut me open," says White, "that’s what you’d find: the movies, Bible verses, and Motown lyrics.” He recalls growing up on movies as a kid, when “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope." And for all his vitriol, he sees himself as a positive force, claiming that "he has never knocked a film without suggesting a superior movie a viewer might more profitably spend his time watching. Instead of the usual ten-best list, White offers the 'Better-Than List,' in which he expounds on why one lesser-known or critically unfashionable movie is better than another highly touted but ultimately empty product." It sounds great in theory. In reality, you'd be surprised how few fans of The Dark Knight are soothed by hearing that while the movie they love is a piece of shit, they can redeem themselves by trading it in for Transporter 3. Meanwhile, some of the critics who respect his intelligence and faith in his own taste and who might be expected to have his back feel that he's showboating when he does what they call his "last honest, angry man" routine. His show of principles has also taken the form of writing a controversial piece a few years ago in which he castigated his fellow critics for accepting DVD screener copies of movies for review, thus ending the accepted idea, once taken as gospel among critics, that you haven't earned the right to claim to have really seen a movie unless it's been on a large screen in proper theater conditions. “I don’t say these things to call attention to myself or to get a rise out of people," White protests. "I say them because I believe them. We’re living in times when critics get fired if they don’t like enough movies. People don’t need to hear what mouthpieces for the movie industry tell them. They need to hear the truth.”

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Salting the Earth: Cloverfield II

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:56:00 GMT

When you make $80 million on a $30 million investment in less than two weeks, it’s understandable that you want to go back for seconds. As the ‘Grab pointed out earlier today, Paramount is already talking about making Cloverfield II: Field of Dreams with Matt Reeves.

Here’s why this is an exceptionally bad idea. Reeves already mentioned that a sequel might could focus on different perspectives of the same attack on New York. There’s logic there. There are undoubtedly other people filming the event on cell-phones and digital cameras. The problem is that the audience already knows what the monster does in New York. They know where it goes up until the climactic bombing. New York is, literally and metaphorically, done. The movie does tease that the monster survives but a sequential sequel doesn’t seem smart either. Watching the monster head upstate and start scarfing bed and breakfasts along the Hudson doesn’t sound too thrilling (maybe a little). Paramount and Reeves should sit down, savour their success, and consider how to intelligently explore what has the potential to be a lasting franchise.

Our two cents? Cloverfield is excellent genre deconstruction so there’s only one place you go next with the genre: GIANT MONSTER FIGHT! Have it fight some enormous yeti that comes out of a melting polar glacier. Or have the Statue of Liberty come to life Ghostbusters 2 style and seek out revenge. Both good ideas.