The
history of filmmakers using New
York City as a location for films. I don't really buy the idea that NYC is a "city without character."
Sure, times have changed, but I think that it's up to the filmmakers to make the city (or any city) a part of a
film.
OK, so we're
giving you all the Tribeca Film Festival coverage that you could possibly need, but that doesn't mean you can't read Caryn James' reports too!
In an audio slide show,
Catherine Keener and Nicole Holofcener discuss their movie Friends With Money.
So let me get this straight: Hairspray, the movie, is released in 1988. Then they make a musical from
it in 2002. And now New Line is again going to make a movie of it, this time with a budget of $50
million? Jeez, I know they say Hollywood is out of ideas, but this is ridiculous.
The paper reviews some of the more weird horror
flicks coming out from overseas, including Pray, about a punk teen and his druggie girlfriend who kidnap a
girl, only to find out she's been dead for a year (Oooooooo!); Una Bianca, a long Italian TV movie about two
cops tracking down a group of vicious crooks; and Don't Deliver Us From Evil, which is about two young girls
who worship Satan and start killing males in their neighborhood. And in one of the more unintentionally funny segues,
the Times then says, "Also out today ...Fun With Dick And Jane."
The "Times Pulse" says that Basic Instinct 2 is the most popular movie among New York Times readers. That's
probably why it came in 10th in the box office this weekend. Its opening weekend.
I had no idea that Mary Harron, who directed American Psycho, also directed the new flick The
Notorious Bettie Page, with Gretchen Mol as the famous 50s pinup icon.
The new baseball season started yesterday, and the paper gives a
rundown of the twelve baseball movies being celebrated at MoMA. But it's woefully incomplete. I mean, no mention of
good flicks like Rookie of the Year, Little Big League, or Fever Pitch? Any of those movies
are better than Cobb.
In 1970, Marlon Brando hooked up with Donald Cammel, the co-director of Performance, to turn a film treatment into a novel. Fan-Tan has recently been rediscovered. "Like Brando at the time he wrote it, [the hero] is overweight, mischievous, sensual and attracted to Asian women." And Sonny Mehta loves it.
Claude Chabrol's Betty "lingers in the imagination for a long time with its dreamy, deliberate
pacing, end-of-the-world atmosphere and haunting metaphorical images,
including the world's most ominous fish tank." Dave Kehr does his weekly DVD roundup.
George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luckwill open the New York Film Festival.
Royston Tan: somewhere between Kryzsztof Kieslowski and Hype Williams.
"One Internet site full of our supporters raised money to buy eggs to feed people at the midnight screening." Mark Russell investigates the long road towards Korean film festival RealFanta.
GQ has pimped stars from Dukes of Hazzard
on its cover for two consecutive months. I'd try to be snarky about
this, but the fact is, I simply enjoy looking at Johnny Knoxville way
too much to craft an intelligible critique.
"If my world view is increasingly being defined in reaction to a kind of
religious right wing," says Phil Morrison, director of Junebug, "this movie was the littlest, teeniest
effort to explore the possibility that there is fundamentalist
secularism, too - and that it is nihilism."
Yeah, NBC might acquire Dreamworks - or maybe Ron Meyer and David Geffen are just two old buddies playing catch-up.
Maya Cinemas wants to offer options for Spanish-speaking patrons: first run new releases alongside Spanish-language imports; plus churros at the concession stand and hospitality services for families. Altruism? Maybe ... or the fact that Latinos go to the movies twice as much as any other group might have something to do with it.
Laura M. Holson predicts an imminent announcement from the studios regarding a major push into the world of digital projection. But don't hold your breath - the studios and theater owners haven't yet figured out who's going to pay for it.
"People don't care about format; they just want good work. Celluloid
fetishists and those video artists who still believe in the
revolutionary promise of their medium may care about format, but such
fussiness seems quaint and generally beside the point." Manohla Dargis can't figure out why Scanners, formerly known as the New York Festival of Video, still needs to exist, but she's not inherently offended by it.
"It's one thousand times more difficult to make a film than to write a book," says Dai Sijie, who turned to novel writing as his film career sagged, and is now making the movie version of that book.
According to Stephen Holden, The 3 Rooms of Melancholia is "one of the saddest films ever made."
"[I]f we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our
sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means
covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise." Nicholas D. Kristoff points fingers at his peers' appetite for celebrity coverage.
Robert Berkvist on Anne Bancroft: "Graced with a sultry voice and expressive mouth, Ms. Bancroft could
appear both tough and vulnerable, and she eagerly sought out nearly
every kind of role, maturing effortlessly over the decades."
Glenn Collins visits Steiner Studios, the new filmmaking complex on the Brooklyn banks of the East River. He quotes Bancroft's widower, Mel Brooks, on why it makes sense to shoot there: "Without the tax benefits, the horrible truth is, this movie would
probably be made in Kabul, or you know, wherever it's the cheapest
place in the world for us to shoot."
"The challenge in creating loser-heroes is to keep viewers emotionally
invested, and to make the characters' cringe-inducing failures palatable". Caryn James examines another specious trend.
Stephen Holden reviewsPaternal Instinct, a documentary about two gay men, a surrogate and a baby.
Two men were arrested over the weekend for trying to sell a copy of the new Harry Potter book to a journalist for $90,000. (What? It might as well be a screenplay.)
Bradley Beesley, director of The Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks, is "far too close to his subject to offer a critical perspective, but he
achieves a level of intimacy with the band members that most rock
documentary directors can only dream of."
Caryn James explains what's wrong with the New Documentary Wave: "Even as the genre leaps out of its niche, it is suffering from a tyranny of substance over style." There's also an Audio Slide Show.
"I'm fed up with having to defend my right to live in this country," says the French-born, ethnically-Moroccan comedian Jamel Debbouze. So fed up that he his first serious film about it.
"[I]t isn't the future being shown, and it isn't really history either.
It's something like a history of the future, or a history of ideas
about the future" Edward Rothstein tours the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.
"There is nothing more fun than blowing up tired traditions to create
better business models and better customer experiences," says Mark Cuban, talking to David Carr about 2929 Productions.
From last Thursday's paper: David B. Halbfinger on the tug-of-war across the blogosphere over the liminal political subtext of the Lucasphere.
Vincent Canby reviewed A New Hope, and called R2D2 and C-3PO "the year's best comedy team" - but Jedi "doesn't soo much end the trilogy as bring it to a dead stop."
Janet Maslin says that Empire is "seldom as much fun" as its predecessor. Meanwhile, The Phantom Menace is "only a movie", and Attack of the Clones has Tony Scott "tempted to quote an evergreen Public Enemy song: don't believe the hype."
Playwright 
In 1970, Marlon Brando hooked up with Donald Cammel, the co-director of Performance, to turn a film treatment into a novel. Fan-Tan has recently been rediscovered. "Like Brando at the time he wrote it, [the hero] is overweight, mischievous, sensual and attracted to Asian women." And 
GQ has 
Laura M. Holson
Robert Berkvist
Bradley Beesley
This week, Star Wars knocks Cannes out of the extra-special online Arts & Leisure feature slot. Included in this package:
