Video of the Day 2: Henry Fool, by Hal Hartley
5/15/2007 5:15:00 PM
Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim, a sequel to his brilliant, bewildering, and epic Henry Fool (1998), opens this weekend. How do I convey the genius of Henry Fool to someone who hasn’t seen it? The film’s impact is a cumulative one, more so than most other films. Is there one scene that can encapsulate the experience of watching it? This might just be the editor in me speaking, but if I had to pick, I’d choose this one, in which Henry expounds upon the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”
— Bilge Ebiri
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The Rep Report: May 18-27, 2007
5/15/2007 4:30:00 PM
NEW YORK:
- In the 1970s, Werner Herzog was often described as the most visionary director of the German New Wave, but by the end of the 1980s, his new movies were beginning to have trouble finding audiences or even distribution, and were often cited as evidence that his fire (and maybe his pilot light) had gone out. Despite sporadic returns to working with actors and scripts (as in his recent Rescue Dawn, which keeps seeing its release date moved), for close to twenty years now., Herzog has mainly been a documentarian, and in that role he's done some of the best work of his career. On Friday, May 18, the Film Forum begins "Herzog [Non] Fiction", a three-week series that includes virtually all of the director's documentary films, including a program of early shorts, the eighties double header Huie's Sermon and God's Angry Man (the latter starring the deceased late-night-cable-TV mainstay Dr.Gene Scott), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (which serves as the basis for Rescue Dawn), the Klaus Kinski memorial My Best Fiend, and Herzog's biggest recent hit, Grizzly Man. There are also some weird experimental mash-ups such as the "science-fiction" films Lessons of Darkness (which marries stunningly beautiful, apocalyptic footage of oil fires burning during the first Gulf War) and The Wild Blue Yonder (which intercuts footage from NASA with Brad Dourif delivering an improvised rant in the character of a failed extraterrestrial. Rich as this stuff is, the program also clarifies Herzog's concept of nonfiction filmmaking by including works he admires by other directors, including work by Chris Marker (Sans Soleil), Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida), Hubert Sauper's lacerating Darwin's Nightmare, and, of course, the two films Les Blank has made starring Herzog, Burden of Dreams (which covers the making of Fitzcarraldo) and the short with the self-explanatory title Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Herzog will appear in person at a few of the screenings.
LOS ANGELES:
- Of the legendary Hollywood cinematographers, the name Burnett Guffey may not be the first to come to mind, but you may get a sense of his range from the two films for which he won Oscars, the hard-edged, black and white From Here to Eternity and the bright Pop Art coloring and fast-moving camerawork of Bonnie & Clyde. For two weeks beginning May 18, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents "Lonely America: The Noir Cinematography of Burnett Guffey." The two movies I just mentioned didn't make it into the package; instead, the program roots around in the darker corners of the man's career, showcasing his gift for ""flat," grayish lighting that lent a new realism" to a dangerous world of "empty streets and claustrophobic interiors." The schedule does include two Bogart films with avid cult followings, the Hollywood noir In a Lonely Place and the boxing expose The Harder They Fall, as well as a couple of films that, in recent years, have been honored with inferior remakes, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men and Max Ophuls's The Reckless Moment.
CHICAGO:
- "Jacques Rivette: Cinema as Adventure", consisting of nine of Rivette's features and Claire
Denis's 1990 documentary about the director, has begun at the Gene Siskel Film Center and will continue through June 20. The really big news is that the program includes Rivette's seldom-seen 1971 Out 1, which runs twelve hours and twenty-six minutes. The movie, which uses a Balzac novel as a taking-off point for a study the '60s counterculture and the nature of theater and acting, only received its American premiere last fall in New York; that was an event, but given the scale and scarcity of the thing, there still ought to be plenty of buzz to go around. The Film Center will be playing Out 1 once, spread across two days, Saturday, May 26 and Sunday, May 27, with a dinner break both days. (Box lunches are available for ten dollars.) The schedule also includes (on June 9) Out 1: Spectre, which boils the original down to five hours and forty-five minutes.
— Phil Nugent
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo’s Wack Experiment
5/15/2007 3:45:00 PM
Much as he did with his Cannes blogs in the past, Mike D’Angelo will be reporting in regularly from the Croisette for Screengrab this year. But don’t expect any celeb-gazing and uninformed speculation; Mike is using this year’s festival for a crazy experiment best explained in his own words. Read on, and check back regularly to see how it plays out. — BE
 | | My Blueberry Nights |
Greetings from Cannes. I'm here to see some movies. For the most part, I have no idea which ones.
Several years ago, not long after I started traveling the festival circuit on a regular basis, a fairly goofy but nonetheless extremely alluring idea occurred to me. Faithful Nerve readers may dimly recall this idea from my final dispatch at Cannes 2006, in which I vowed to set my absurd plan in motion the following year, which is to say now. The idea was this: I would arrive at some major festival — most likely Cannes, which has the highest signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to international auteurs — without knowing any information about the films in advance, and proceed to see them all completely cold. Friends would tell me where and when to show up; beyond that, I'd be utterly ignorant. Preconceptions would have no opportunity to take hold. In extreme cases, I might not even know who wrote and/or directed the picture until it was over — high-profile films these days frequently open with just a simple title card, reserving everything else for the closing credits. (Examples from last year: The Departed, United 93, The Prestige.)
What initially appealed to me about this idea was the element of surprise. I found it thrilling — still do, frankly — to imagine hotly anticipated films by world-class directors simply appearing in front of me, sans the weeks, months, or (in some cases) years of anticipation and speculation that usually precede them. As I mulled it over, however, it began to take on the contours of a grand, quixotic experiment. So much information is now available to the net-connected cinephile that the act of watching a movie can seem almost like an afterthought. I have friends whose reading is so extensive and omnivorous that they often know virtually every detail of a film long before they actually see it. What would it be like, I wondered, to go to the opposite extreme — to know absolutely nothing? Would I respond more openly to movies by filmmakers who've underwhelmed me in the past? Would I recognize the artistic signature of longtime favorites? Would my interaction with the work in front of me be more pure, more genuine, in the absence of whatever conscious and/or unconscious assumptions I'd usually tote in with me?
I still don't know, but I aim to find out. Several months ago, I went cold turkey on all the movie-info sites I used to browse daily, Screengrab included. Of course, it was already too late, really — to do this properly, I'd need to enter my plastic bubble a good two to three years before the fest in question, to avoid hearing about E-ticket projects as they first take shape. (I don't know, to give you one example, whether Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is here, but I first heard about it maybe two years ago.) Even I'm not quite that obsessive. Still, while I'm aware of the existence of several pictures that might be in the lineup, it's safe to say that most of them will be arriving out of the blue. Or more accurately, out of the black: My roommate Michael Giltz, who's here writing for The Advocate, just Sharpied the hell out of my press screening schedule, concealing title and director info while leaving theater, time and running time. Now all I need to do is spend two weeks looking directly at the ground (to avoid the barrage of posters and billboards that festoon the Croisette) and listening to loud music on my iPod (to avoid accidentally overhearing conversations about upcoming films).
Disclaimer the first: I'm only seeing the Competition slate tabula rasa. That's 22 films this year, which seems like more than enough for the purposes of this wack experiment. Most of the movies in the festival's other sections (including Un Certain Regard and the Directors' Fortnight) were helmed by relative unknowns; what's more, I can't possibly see all of them, so I need the freedom to be selective and follow the buzz. On the plus side, a couple of the films I'd heard about in advance — namely, Michael Moore's Sicko and Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate — are screening Out of Competition, which increases the odds that the movies I see blind will be totally unfamiliar to me.
Disclaimer the second: I asked friends to inform me about any Competition films that had already opened commercially in the U.S., so I know about Zodiac (which I've seen twice and don't plan to see again) and the expanded version of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (which I've seen twice in its Grindhouse incarnation and can't wait to see again).
Disclaimer the third: Sadly, due to my "circumstances beyond my control" (= I read something I didn't imagine would contain any Cannes info, and was proved wrong), I also now know that Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut, My Blueberry Nights, is opening the festival tomorrow. That isn't a huge letdown, since Wong's movies almost invariably premiere at Cannes; frankly, I would have been a little shocked had it been absent. But it does mean that the true craziness will have to wait for Film #2, which appears to be Name Obliterated's 113 Minutes Long And Screening At The Salle Debussy At 7pm Tomorrow Night. After that, we're talking two revelations per day on average, plus all manner of retrospective should've knowns and couldn't have foreseens. It may be the most ridiculous cinematic adventure ever attempted. I hope you'll join me.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Red Facts and Blue Facts: Sayles Speaks
5/15/2007 3:00:00 PM
The London Independent last week brought out a short feature, accompanied by an entertaining interview, with John Sayles. Sayles (hard as work as always — though he's only directed one film since 2004's Silver City, he's remained busy as a writer, with six films he's penned coming out between now and summer of 2008), dubbed by the Independent "a saint of US indie cinema", talks about his debt to Roger Corman, his working-class background, his fierce leftist politics, and how the films of the 1970s have shaped the modern notion of big-screen heroes, as well as how he's managed to keep going in an unforgiving industry: "Almost every outing," he admits, "you have to reinvent how you finance the film and how you distribute it. But we've survived so far. We're at least that good." The interview is timed to coincide with the UK-only DVD release of The John Sayles Collection, a prestige box set containing Lianna, Return of the Secaucus 7, and The Brother from Another Planet; unfortunately, no US edition of the collection has yet been announced.
— Leonard Pierce
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We’re Still Branded by Brand Upon the Brain!
5/15/2007 2:00:00 PM
 | | Guy Maddin |
I wouldn't dissaude anyone from seeing Guy Maddin's new silent feature Brand Upon the Brain!, a thrilling story of family warfare, gender confusion, and first love (with just a dash of cannibalism to add flavor) in the "regular" self-contained format that it will play in its regular engagements, but the movie really blooms in its limited-engagement form, as a partly live, multi-media spectacle. The performance I saw (at New York's Village East Cinema, which will be hosting performances through this Thursday) featured a live performance of Jason Staczek's original score by eleven musicians, conducted by David Hattner and with vocal contributions by Dov Houle, with Laurie Anderson, sitting in a little cubbyhole high above the stage, delivering the film's narration. Other guest narrators during the New York engagement have included Lou Reed, John Ashbery, and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, as well as Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Crispin Glover, and Isabella Rossellini (who supplies the narration on the recorded soundtrack that will play during the film's regular engagements). Love and respect to all of them, but I kind of doubt that anyone will meld so perfectly with the movie as Anderson. If I hadn't already heard the same lines spoken by Rossellini, I'd be sure that Anderson must have added such Big Sciencey sentiments as "Mother uses suicide threats as her primary teaching device" and the immortal "What's a suicide attempt without a funeral?" But no doubt every one of the narrators will find some piece of the project that they can make their own. Even Anderson can't touch Isabella Rossellini when it comes to passionately repeating, "Rumania...Rumania..."
Still, it's the live sound work provided by the crack team of Foley All-Stars that makes the evening so memorable. The night I saw it, the on-stage crew consisted of Caoimhe Doyle, Stefan Fraticelli, and Marilee Yorston, and I could no more overpraise their contribution than I could spell their names correctly without the program in front of my face. The sight of these three skilled workers in lab coats and headsets deploying their unlikely props and displaying their unerrring sense of timing as they perform their tricks in perfect sync with the images on the screen behind makes for an altogether remarkable night at the theater. To reach the climax of Maddin's movie and then notice that one of the Foley artists has a watermelon at the ready is to have your definition of suspense thoroughly turned inside out. Seriously, kids: don't try this at home.
— Phil Nugent
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Video of the Day 1: Funniest Fight Scene Ever
5/15/2007 1:00:00 PM
I’m not quite sure it earns that particular title — I mean, what scene could, in a world where this scene continues to exist — but it comes pretty damn close. Also that little dude I’m pretty sure is Rajnikanth, the same little dude who won the hearts of YouTubers all over the world with this scene of him dancing. Either way: Thank you, Kollywood. (That’s right, I said Kollywood.)
— Bilge Ebiri
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300 and the BirthDeath of Civilization
5/15/2007 12:01:00 PM
If you're feeling nostalgic for those thrilling, madcap days of three or four weeks ago when we were all taking turns weighing in on 300, good news: Daniel Mendelsohn's in the neighborhood, and he's keen to tell the readers of the New York Review of Books all about it. The piece isn't available online, but suffice to say that, in his search for a fresh angle, he's downgraded the political element in favor of an historically-minded analysis of how the movie's success just might mean the end of dramatic art itself. (Bear with the longish quote; it’s a good’un)
"There is a long-standing tradition that when Xerxes abandoned his forces and returned to Susa, he left behind his opulent tent, which was among the spoils taken from his general, Mardonius, when the Greeks finally vanquished the invaders at Plataea in 479. According to some sources, this fabulous trophy came to be used as the backdrop in the theater of Dionysus at Athens; the Greek word skênê, from which we derive the word "scene," means "tent." ...The presence of Xerxes' tent on the Greek tragic stage — a visible (if eventually fraying) trophy snatched from a hubristic imperial overlord — would have constituted a remarkable material symbol of the interweaving of history, politics, and art...This is merely a way of saying that it's quite possible that the battle that inspired Frank Miller's comic book, and now Zack Snyder's movie version of the same, was intimately tied to the origins of the Western theater itself...
"To better serve its themes of spectacular rises and terrible falls, the tragedians honed and perfected the array of elements and techniques that became the cultural inheritance of the Western theater: The organically coherent plot, which suggests that endings are the logical and necessary outcomes of beginnings; character development as expressed in both monologue and dialogue; the meaningful dynamics of entrances and exits, visual spectacle counterpointed by lyric rapture...
"To various degrees, these elements have provided the underpinnings for every kind of theatrical entertainment ever since, from Venetian opera to soap opera, from Shakespeare to Star Wars. That Zack Snyder's flatly stylized 300 — which invokes the dramatic history of the Persian Wars but which has no quality of drama, no serious interest in history whatsoever — has packed some of the largest audiences in movie history into our theaters suggests that the tradition that began at Thermopylae may well have ended there, too."
Ouch. Also in the current New York Review of Books: Timothy Garton Ash brings his own experience of German life before the fall of the Wall to bear on seeing The Lives of Others.
— Phil Nugent
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The Critic Wars, Part 986
5/15/2007 11:00:00 AM
Sean P. Means, a movie reviewer at the Salt Lake City Tribune joins the "future of movie reviewing" debate with a column in Monday's issue. After listing the now-familiar causalities (Jami Bernard, Kevin Thomas, Philip Wuntch of the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, a 30 year vet), before concluding that "movie critics, along with my colleagues in music and TV and art, can serve as translators and explainers of pop culture — which is fast becoming the one common language Americans have left. "
Mr. Means argues that, "A movie critic is a luxury for a newspaper. Papers can't live without police reporters or copy editors, but many get by without an in-house writer opining about Spider-Man 3," and adds that another argument against staffing movie reviewers is that "people can go online and glut themselves on movie criticism from entertainment-specific Web sites and bloggers. True, but quantity doesn't mean quality. Not everyone with a laptop and an opinion can write a cogent, or even coherent, movie review — and a reader must wade through a lot of stupidity, self-absorption, studio bootlicking and fanboy drooling to get to the good stuff." He also maintains that "fewer movie critics may lead to homogenized movie criticism. Most of the movie critics for the major wire services and national publications live in New York and Los Angeles."
It's true that there are hundreds of critics listed at Rotten Tomatoes, and that in addition there are thousands of amateur movie bloggers of varying degrees of expertise. But I fear that Mr. Means is straying into Richard Schickel Country with his sweeping dismissal of the majority of bloggers and WWW writers. To give only one example of hundreds, without the Internet I wouldn't have David Bordwell's occasional — and free — musings on movie matters and new movie books.
It's not the bloggers and web writers who are bringing down movie criticism. It is the daily reviewers. These are the hacks who usually don't know anything about film, offer "homogenized" views, and grovel before publicists for the gravy train of the junket. Personally, I have little sentimentality for those bloated, self-satisfied institutional reviewers, such as one writing for the morning daily in my own hometown who served his readers ever so poorly for something like 25 years by arriving late to screenings, then promptly falling asleep, later constructing his plot-summary heavy reviews from press kits.
If someone wants to write film reviews, or if these dismissed "journalists" want to keep on sharing their views on film, the wide world of the web is open to them. It's getting paid to write that is the problem, and that's what separates the dedicated movie buff from the khaki-clad office hack who probably slipped into the reviewing gig by fiat anyway.
— DK Holm
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Morning Deal Report: Tintin! Sly! Leo! Bodhi!
5/15/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are teaming up to produce and direct three 3-D computer animated Tintin pictures, with each of them directing one of the films.
- Sly has pled guilty to trying to bring in banned Human Growth Hormone (HGH) into Australia.
- Leonardo DiCaprio’s neighbor is suing him for building a basketball court in his backyard and messing with the neighbor’s plants and hedges. Not very green of him, is it?
- Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic The Red Balloon will be getting a retrospective screening at Cannes, complete with a restored print. Just in time for Hou Hsiao Hsien’s take on the classic tale, Flight of the Red Balloon, which will open the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the festival.
- Black & White, Fingers, and Two Girls and a Guy director James Toback will make a documentary about the career and downfall of his friend and occasional actor Mike Tyson. Tyson will also produce what is being promised as a pull-no-punches look at his self-destruction.
- You know you’ve been waiting for this. Three words: Point. Break. Two.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Video of the Day 2: Richard Pryor, We Hardly Knew Ye
5/14/2007 5:30:00 PM
Check out this interview with a young Richard Pryor on the set of Stir Crazy. Apparently recorded after the first interview was ruined due to bad sound recording, Pryor, a man who’s not relaxed with just giving a second take, provides a hilarious rant about what he thinks of Gene Wilder, the arts of editing, his family history and what he thinks is the secret of his success.
Then compare that little outburst with this retrospective account of shooting Stir Crazy, as part of his live show.
— Faisal Qureshi
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