Some Brokeback
Mountain fans are so outraged that Crashwon for Best Picture that they've spent $24,000 (I saw another piece that said it was as much as $26,000) on a full page ad.
Check out the last edition (this year, anyway) of David Carr's special Red Carpet video reports from Times Square (scroll down).
It's his "end of the awards season" report. My favorite line involves William
Shatner and a horse.
The recent nomination of Ron Silver to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace sparks a tense exchange between the actor and Deborah Solomon about his politics, Bush cronyism and the difficulties of being an outspoken Republican in Hollywood: "I think people in Hollywood are not thrilled with me. I have no direct
evidence that a crime has been committed against me. At best I can only
indict on perjury and obstruction of employment."
"I find that right now I'm totally sociopathic," Says Sundance co-programmer Caroline Libresco, one of the stars of John Clark's profile of the festival's process of weeding. "I can't talk to my
friends. With so many images coming in, I've been wanting someone to do
dream-type analysis on Geoff Gilmore's brain or Shari Frilot's brain."
Tony Scott tries to define mid-century modern as the hot new target for "period" filmmaking, via Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Walk the Line and others. "Watching these movies, with their painstaking detail and their trompe
l'oeil leading performances, we may also wonder how we got from there
to here, a line of inquiry that the pictures frustrate by means of
their elaborate visual fidelity. The difference between a period film
and a historical film, in other words, is that while a historical film
implies a continuity with the present, the period film, far more common
in Hollywood, seals the past in a celluloid vitrine, establishing a
safe distance between then and now."
Inspired by XBox 360 mania, John Leland asks, "Can games be something more than games? In other words, can they move
people emotionally or intellectually in the manner of great art?"
"If you're working hard at any job, you have to treat yourself. Nobody's
really taking care of you, so it's a good idea to buy yourself a piece
of jewelry or a cashmere blanket. It's like, I earned this. If you wait
around for someone to give you wonderful socks, you may miss out.
Shopping is a great way to pat yourself on the back when no one else
will." And with that, Scarlett Johansson inspires me to spend the afternoon at Bloomies ... or, at the very least, Crazy Loco 99¢.
David Carr, who writes a culture column for the Times' Business section, will begin his own version of The Envelope on Tuesday, called The Carpetbagger.
You may not be able to see their film in a multiplex, but with today's Sunday Times, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have hit some kind of big time – they, and Four Eyed Monsters, are Charles Lyon's local in for a piece on the dire state of indie distribution. "If the result was going to be this," Crumley says, "a film with no
distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond
those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? ... The answer is, 'no'." Lyon's also talks to Lloyd Kaufman (Troma), Emliy Morse (star of I Am a Sex Addict and director of See How They Run), and others.
Caryn James on this year's most popular awards bait stunt: playing gay. A great deal of her argument centers around the fact that we know just enough about, say, Heath Ledger's private life, to be able to simply appreciate his performance in Brokeback Mountain as Good Acting, and not a threat to the dominant paradigm: "Our awareness of these nonfiction roles makes it easier and maybe more
acceptable for middle-class heterosexual viewers - a group that does,
after all, include most of us in the audience - to embrace characters
whose sexual preferences we don't share."
Franz Linz files a long profile on Nick Goosen, whose Grandma's Boy – a stoner comedy about video game testers – is about to hit theaters. Goosen, the son of an LAPD detective who worked the Black Dahlia case, got his big break playing basketball with Adam Sandler.
Andrew Adam Newman reports on the International Dog Film Festival. No comment.
Michael Joseph Gross tracks Richard Linklater's attempt to shoot Fast Food Nation – I'm sorry, Coyote – in real locations on the low pro. Though one of the film's producers maintains that the fast food industry shouldn't be worried ("We're just using the fast food industry as a backdrop for a multitude
of characters. It's not a polemic. It's a character study,
set in the world of the fast food industry"), they apparently are. The president of the Colorado Restaurant Association frets: "If people are willing to lie about what they're doing, they can
probably talk their way into most anywhere, and that could be a
problem."
Mick Garris makes a strange analogy to explain the genesis of the Masters of Horror anthology that premiered last night on Showtime: "Whenever our paths would cross at horror conventions and screenings, we
would always talk about getting together for dinner, but no one made a
move. After a few years of this, I decided to play Dorothy Parker and organize the Algonquin Round Table West."
Are Asian countries – Japan and Korea, in particular – "breeding a new generation of cinematic sadists"? Park Chanwook doesn't think so, but as he admits to Dave Kehr, "I don't want the viewer to stop at the mental or the intellectual. I
want them to feel my work physically. And because that is one of my
goals, the title 'exploitative' will probably follow me around for a
while."
Bruce Weiss is planning to produce a series of DV remakes, to be directed by actors Bob Balaban, Stanley Tucci, and Steve Buscemi, of films made by Theo Van Gogh, the controversial Dutch artist who was assassinated by a disgruntled moviegoer earlier this year. Christian Moerk reports, "They are movies that aim to tap the all-around rambunctiousness that
made van Gogh what Mr. Weiss calls "an equal-opportunity offender."
A.O. Scott uses Wim Wenders and Cameron Crowe's latest efforts as an "in" to talk about road trip movies. "If nothing else, these movies serve to remind us that we inhabit an
endlessly photogenic nation. But they also acknowledge the anxious
distance that the film industry perceives between itself and the rest
of the country. The movie road trip is at once an acknowledgment of the
artificiality of movies and an imaginary antidote to it."
It looks like Spike Jonze will be the man to bring Where the Wild Things Are to the big screen. The Adaptation director has written a script with Dave Eggers, and both "exotic locations" and animatronics (presumably equally exotic) are under negotiation. But don't hold your breath just yet – as Charles Fleming reminds us, "To date, the film has done a very good job of not getting made."
Campbell Robertson dines at Bette with Dita Von Teese, world-famous burlesque dancer and Marilyn Manson's fiancee. "Everybody asks me, 'Can I wear black?' " Ms. Von Teese said. "I said:
'Of course you can wear black. Whose wedding do you think you're going
to?'"
Mary Gaitskill, the author of the short-story on which Secretary was based, has written a new novel called Veronica, and it sounds awesome. "One of the great ancillary pleasures of Veronica is its portrait of
what's happened to the participants of Manhattan's downtown arts scene
of the 1980's, the first generation to come of age in an era of AIDS -
a kind of "where are they now" for the Nan Goldin crew." Meghan O'Rourke has more.
Sharon Waxman reports from the set of Paul Weitz' latest, American Dreamz, a Bush administration satire starring Dennis Quaid and Marcia Gay Harden. As usual, Waxy's "expose" isn't exactly as earthshattering as it seems to think it is, but there's some interesting political stuff here, particularly if you can make it to the third page. Also: details on Hugh Grant's midlife crisis.
A feature on the rise of the Slavic gitterati in New York City has a blurb on (but, sadly, no quote from) Eugene Hutz, star of Everything is Illuminated and Gogol Bordello.
Fiona Ng profiles the Beijing Film Academy, the largest school of its kind in Asia, and alma mater of Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke.
Noel Lawrence, one of the driving forces behind San Francisco's Other Cinema, is going around trying to ressurect the lost work of a guy named J.X Williams, an "RKO mail-room flunky, closet Communist, abortive House Un-American
Activities Committee witness, Mafia gofer, pioneer of mobbed-up stag
loops, ghostwriter of some of the blacklist era's greatest films and
incidental avatar of experimental cinema." The only problem is, some people are having a hard time believing that Williams ever existed.
"I am - and always will be - the biggest fanboy. I write from a fanboy place." On the eve of the Serenity premiere, creator Joss Whedon explains how he got Universal to help him turn a cancelled TV series into a $45 million sci-fi epic.
Another Canadian tax break miracle: Arjun Sablok's Neal n' Nikki is the first singing/dancing Bollywood extravaganza to be shot entirely outside of India.
"While Just Like Heaven is content with a vague, ecumenical
supernaturalism, Emily Rose wants to tell you, like the old Louvin
Brothers song, that Satan is real." A.O. Scott examines the recent rise of religious conservatism in unlikely Hollywood places.
Mr. Scott then takes us through an Audio Slide Show on highlights of this year's New York Film Festival, which is happening now.
Director Bennett Miller, screenwriter Dan Futterman, and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman discuss the birthing process behind their NYFF entry, Capote. "Before he'd written one word," says Miller, "[Futterman] described a scene where Capote is on
an airplane, going back from Kansas knowing he'll never write another
book. And I thought, I like that."
"Is there any director more entitled than [David] Cronenberg to put his feet up
and make a few bucks directing a nice popcorn movie for a change?" Jonathan Dee on Cronenberg's best.
Allyson
Hollingsworth's art is featured prominently in Steve Martin's Shopgirl; her life is featured prominently in the novella on which it was based. In this profile, she frustratingly refuses to dish on her real-life relationship with Martin, but she talks about pretty much everything else.
"[George] Clooney seems to be the one Big Star, give or take a Bono, who has managed to have his cake and credibility, too." David Carr talks to the triple-threat on the eve of Good Night, and Good Luck's premiere at the New York Film Festival.
"This is the best thing I ever did," says Joaquin Phoenix, explaining his decidedly non-anonymous participation in AA. "It takes a lot of courage to look at yourself in a rigorously honest way. And I like rigor.''
Joe Queenan calls Marlon Brando's Fan-Tan a "thrilling example" of the curious genre of celebrity art side-projects: "Ultimately, the question of whether these oddities cut the mustard
becomes irrelevant. The only thing worth asking is: "Gee willikers!
What occasioned this?"
Reese Witherspoon didn't want to do her own vocals in Walk the Line,
so much so that she reportedly whined to director James Mangold, "Can't
you just hire someone who sounds good?" She eventually relented.
A.O. Scott wonders if movies have moved too far away from the real concerns of their audience: "Perhaps this summer's much-discussed box-office slump is a sign that
American audiences are becoming as disengaged from the movies as the
movies are from us. Are we beginning to look elsewhere not only for
amusement, but also for the significance - the dreams, the insights,
the challenges, the utopian projections - that movies used to provide?"
Manohla Dargis looks at the trend of films about Americans - "Ordinary, smiling, guilty Americans" - made by non-American directors.
Proof, a movie about a second-generation genius trying to break out of her father's shadow, stars two second-generation Hollywood stars. Coincidence? Gwyneth Paltrow ignores her crying baby long enough to give a few evasive answers.
Five performances to watch: Tom Hollander in Pride and Prejudice, Damian Lewis in Keane, Robert Patrick in Walk the Line, Emily Mortimer in Match Point, Dina Korzun in 40 Shades of Blue.
The standard line about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? "She gave him sex, he gave her class." Sure, writes John Rockwell, but Ginger was also a fine actress who "brought [Astaire] emotion and romance."
Takeshis, the "are-you-kidding-me?" new film by Takeshi Kitano, "looks like a serial nightmare, the kind of potent stuff that holds you in thrall with dreadful repetition."Joan Dupont talks to the sometime Beat Takeshi about comedy, nightmares, and tap dancing.
"If Ang Lee and Jane Austen aren't precisely soul mates, they have in
common a keen, assessing eye for the tension between human behavior and
the conventions, mores and taboos that are meant to keep it in check." Karen Durbin talks to the director on the eve of the Venice Film Festival premiere of his latest, the gay cowboy saga Brokeback Mountain.
New York is about to be inundated with Japanese film. Dave Kehr, with the help of Donald Richie, takes you through the various programs.
Garry Marshall, the man who brought us Pretty Woman, a social issue film directed as if it were a screwball comedy, is now directing a French opera as if it were a sitcom. At least M. G. Lord gets the joke: "Mr. Marshall is far from the first entertainment industry veteran to try his hand at
opera, though he may be the first Mork and Mindy writer to do so."
Judging by the trailer, the original cast members who reprise roles in Chris Columbus' Rent appear horribly old for their roles. Catherine Billey takes a look at what each has been doing in the intervening decade since the initial Broadway smash.
Anything that can be done to Ray Charles, James Brown thinks he can do better. "I don't know
why it's taken so long to make a movie of my life," the singer tells Craig Modderno. "Hollywood needs to tell my story real, tell it calmly. I want it to
send out the message to give the underdog some kind of chance."
Ed Leibowitz uses the Reinerization of Rumor Has It as an excuse to talk about other famous director replacements, from the two infamous Victor Fleming sandwiches (he replaced other directors and was himself replaced on both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, but assumed final credit on both) to Terry Gilliam's assumption of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from punk virtuoso Alex Cox.
For the first fifteen minutes of Michael Almereyda's documentary on photographer William Eggleston, "we are watching a man just looking at things - but looking with such
intensity and concentration that this aimless-seeming activity becomes
terrifically dramatic." Terrence Rafferty has lunch with the director.
Ben Kingsley and Roman Polanski worked hard on stripping the character of Fagin from its usual effeminate airs, in their new adaptation of Oliver Twist: "We've lived long enough to know that certain things should be done for
certain reasons. Without analyzing it. Which would be embarrassing, you
know?"
No one has ever made a great movie out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, but now that David Fincher is giving The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a shot, Steve Chagollan takes a look at some past attempts.
"I suppose I grew up wishing I was an American Jew for the comedy and the one-liners." Ricky Gervais discusses his new series, which co-stars Kate Winslet as an "actress who does a Holocaust movie because, as she explains, it's a surefire way to finally win an Oscar."
"You can readily imagine the happy night when IFC veterans of the
festival circuit came up with phony indie film titles, including "Love
Vigilantes," "The Meaning of Velocity" and "The Unreasonable Truth of
Butterflies." You can hear them sending up, among themselves, the
feeble or pompous types who turn up in knit caps at the festivals: the
distributors and sponsors and actors and, of course, filmmakers. It
must have been fun for them." Virginia Heffernan looks at IFC's new indie film scene mocumentary, The Festival.
The King Kong hype train is rolling along -- two biographies on Merian C. Cooper, the creator of the Fay Wray original, are coming out this week.
Hollywood is "an abominal place," says Terry Gilliam, who has two films coming out this fall. "If there was an Old Testamental God, he would do his job and wipe the
place out. The only bad thing is that some really good restaurants
would go up as well."
The puppet stars of Tim Burton's upcoming The Corpse Bride are apparently "so expressive" that "they may change people's thinking about the possibilities of stop-motion animation."
"With Ms. Love thrashing around, it can be hard to remember that it is Ms. Anderson's night." Virginia Heffernan watches Pamela Anderson's Comedy Central Roast -- and catalogues each and every way sometime movie star Courtney Love embarrasses herself -- so that you don't have to.
Will the onslaught of profanity that makes The AristocratsThe Aristocrats make any inroads in making the f-word more acceptable? If the experts that Michael Brick talked to know anything about it, probably not
There are two different Daniel Pearl projects in the pipeline - but Warner Brothers' might get derailed by the biggest celebrity divorce of hte year.
"Picture the Osbournes in an episode of Survivor produced by the Sundance Channel." David Hochman talks to John Pierson about Reel Paradise, the film documenting the year Pierson and his family spent in Fiji, running a free cinema for the island locals.
It's hard to have a smart-sounding opinion on dumb blondes when you essentially are one.
Mike Hale on why the 3,000 screen wide opening sometimes doesn't work.
Is Jon Stewart ready for hosting the
Oscars
The recent nomination of Ron Silver to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace sparks a tense exchange between the actor and 
You may not be able to see their film in a multiplex, but with today's Sunday Times, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have hit some kind of big time – they, and Four Eyed Monsters, are 
Michael Joseph Gross
A.O. Scott
Sharon Waxman
"I am - and always will be - the biggest fanboy. I write from a fanboy place." On the eve of the Serenity premiere, creator 
"Is there any director more entitled than [David] Cronenberg to put his feet up
and make a few bucks directing a nice popcorn movie for a change?" Jonathan Dee on 
Reese Witherspoon
The standard line about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? "She gave him sex, he gave her class." Sure, writes 
Anything that can be done to Ray Charles, James Brown thinks he can do better. "I don't know
why it's taken so long to make a movie of my life," the singer tells 
Ben Kingsley and Roman Polanski
The King Kong hype train
