Earlier, I was writing on a new project, which reminded me of the Bohr story, which I posted. Then I found Wall Street on Bravo and kind of got into it for a bit. Then it got on my nerves, because they kept saying, “sure thing” and “easy money.” Even in what may be Oliver Stone‘s only truly good movie, he can’t resist beating the viewer over the head. Went swimming instead. Then came back to an incredible scene in a truly, truly good movie: the hookup scene in Out of Sight.
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but Steven Soderbergh and Anne Coates wove two intensely related scenes with Jennifer Lopez & George Clooney together: A) their slightly awkward small talk in the hotel bar, and B) their subsequent playful foreplay in Lopez’s room. The sound and dialogue throughout is from the bar, and the overlay of their mutual flirting with its payoff makes their lines doubly charged. Coates uses very brief freeze frames, too, and the combined scene closes on a still of the two actors just about to kiss. The whole scene plays with expectation, anticipation, fulfillment. We know these two stars are gonna hook up, so there’d be little suspense in their flirting. This way, both scenes–and the pacing of the movie–benefit. It’s been almost a month since I’ve had a paean to Soderbergh, and it’s overdue. Coates should get major props, too, though; after all, she won an Oscar for editing Lawrence of Arabia. Here’s an article on Coates from the Editor’s Guild.
Also found these helpful quotes from a this Guardian interview with Soderbergh:
“As soon as an actor takes their clothes off in a movie, you’re watching a documentary, not a feature film. I feel like it breaks the spell that you’ve created for the characters, that it’s not Karen taking her clothes off, it’s Jennifer Lopez. In a movie, I sort of check out when people start to slather on each other.” And on Coates: “I had to shut her up. If I had to hear one more David Lean story, I’d belt her.”
I usually find The Art Newspaper a little too smart for its own good, no doubt an attempt to appease/appeal to its too-smart target readers, who don’t need something as mundane as a newspaper to tell them anything about art, thank you very much. But this article about Documenta 11 (the current sub-theme of this site, apparently) is pretty good, despite its annoying “A is for Africa…Z is for Zero, Ground” conceit.
There’s something refreshing about a sudden downpour, especially when you’re not trapped in it. Thunderclaps that set off car alarms on your street, Flickers that–save for a surge protector–would fry your laptop. Suddenly bright sunlight (“the devil is kissing his wife”). This is, like, the third or fourth in the last few weeks, though (“The Storm of the Century of the Week”). Can it be a sign of global warming? Yes. Unless you’re a right-wing environmentalist group.
At first, I thought this guy was a weblog stalker, considering we’d been to several of the same exhibits and openings, but it turns out that the “reading over your shoulder,” “they’re right behind you!”character of Modern Art Notes is a benign sign of how small the DC art world is.
My favorite astrophysicist and I loved this great story from Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I found on kottke.org over the weekend:
Exporting gold from Denmark was “nearly a capital offense” under the Nazi occupation of 1940 on. Entrusted with the gold Nobel prize medals of Max von Laue and James Franck (two German Jewish physicists who had fled first to Copenhagen), George de Hevesy and Niels Bohr dissolved the medals in acid to avoid their confiscation (and any complications that would arise from sheltering Jewish refugees). The resulting solution, known as aqua regia, remained undetected in the Niels Bohr Institute and was delivered to the Swedish Academy in 1950 so that they could be recast. [A search for primary source material turned up this page on the Nobel site, which (unromantically and unfortunately) says the Academy decided to recreate the medals with new gold, not the carefully saved original metal. Still, it’s a great story.]
Favorite websearch from my referrer logs AND websearch most likely to become the title of an article or weblog posting: “Y tu MoMA Tambien” [capitalization added]
I was going to wait and post about Atanarjuat after I’d finally seen it, but I can’t resist. Atanarjuat, or Fast Runner, in English, is the Inuit-language movie that won the Camera d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. It has also challenged film critics–who write about movies for a living–to come up with suitable praise. To wit, J. Hoberman’s review in today’s Village Voice, titled “Let There Be Light.” The last paragraph:
The rhetoric of movie reviews is a debased currency. Is Spider-Man really an essential expression of American culture? Did Attack of the Clones signal the resurgence of our own pop “Ring Cycle”? Atanarjuat is so elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.
More than a few people were surprised by the movie’s reflectiveness/gravity/ sophistication (their words), either because they know me primarily as a superficial joker (my guess) or because my intro remarks for the very first screening were so apologetic and hedging they probably thought they were about to watch a home video of my nephew eating Cheerios or something. After that, my confidence was buoyed, frankly, and the genuine compliments, comments and questions of people whose taste and talent are superior to my own allowed me to relax a bit.
As I’d hoped when I started this project, New Yorkers all seem to have some fairly well-worked out ideas for what should happen at the WTC site, for how New York will need to cope/change as we continue to recover and rebuild. While the film doesn’t provide any definitive answers, it certainly seemed to work as a catalyst for people to discuss their ideas for the future, and the value of what can be learned from the past. Many people were happy with the lack of sentimentality/melodrama and the willingness to leave things open for them to decide. (Writing this, it feels like the Zagat’s of movie reviews.) And several people noted the music, much credit for which goes to Jonah, who consistently pressed for more subdued tracks.
After the last screening, there were several questions about the documentary aspects of the film. The first part of the film plays as more straightforward narrative, which then loosens/disintegrates into documentary style as the search progresses. While some of this can be traced to exigencies of shooting (ie., my taking over the lead role when the original actor suddenly got sent to Afghanistan), a lot of it was quite deliberate. Not for nothing are Agnes Varda and the Maysles Brothers strong influences on me. (One astute, generous friend likened my stepping into the role to the scene in Grey Gardens where Edie pulls Albert Maysles in front of the camera to dance.) Also, a low-impact DV crew and equipment is pretty fluent with the language of documentaries.
The relation of the script to the finished film was also brought up, something that probably wouldn’t happen if it werent’ for the realtime posting of drafts of the script online. While I’ve considered publishing a “revised” script that actually reflects the edited version of the movie, I’ve resisted. The script in this case served as a guide for me as a director, for completing shooting, and for devising the general arc of the story. But the characters in the script are certainly eclipsed by the real “characters” who portrayed themselves in the finished film. Someday, I hope I’ll be able to write characters who are as compelling and engaging as the people in the film, people who communicate rich personalities and stories in just a few lines.
Part of me, of course, remains very self-critical (or skeptical). I’m reminded of a scene in Unzipped, the Douglas Keeve docu about Isaac Mizrahi. He talks about a compliment he got from a powerful fashion editor: “She said, ‘But when Isaac does too short, it works.’ and I’m thinking, ‘what does she mean by thaaat?'” Fortunately, I don’t think I’m that insecure. Or at least if I am, I don’t have a camera following me around to capture it. All in all, what started as a hugely anxious evening turned out to be a huge rush. Thanks to everyone who helped and who came.
There’s a group of François Ozon movies on Sundance Channel this month, including See the Sea, his chilling and creepy first feature (technically, at 52 minutes, it wasn’t feature length. But it was released in the US with his award-winning short, Summer Dress). As IMDB shows, though, he’s made a TON of movies. He just keeps cranking them out. Ozon’s website is pretty comprehensive and up-to-date. [See the Sea is only on VHS. X2000 is his collected shorts and is on DVD.]
I tested out Shutterfly, which, on paper (or in a powerpoint presentation for VC funding), seems like a throwback to 1999, that wistful era when putting an e- in front of everything was all we needed to usher in world peace (or the United Federation of Planets, if you’re from the Bay Area). That’s a lot of cynicism for a company that’s still in business, and that sent me some very fine prints of the Souvenir November 2001 production stills. I was skeptical, because Shutterfly wouldn’t accept TIFF files, only JPEG, and I didn’t imagine the resolution would hold up. Not to worry. Even at 8×10, the resolution’s fine, just with progressive scan lines slightly visible (it’s a DV image, after all). There was also a bit of unannounced cropping (video aspect ratio is 1.33:1, where 8×10 is, well, 1.25:1, about 3/4″ narrower), and the 8×10 was like $10. Snapshot-sized prints were $0.50 or so, so go ahead and print up that memory stick full of spring break pix. For bigger prints, though, especially for a big pile of prints, Kinko’s ($2/print, color) still rules. Shutterfly should do well where there’s no Kinko’s, though. Wherever that is.
Met with Winy Maas last night, one of our architects, who is in town for like 36 hours (a veritable vacation for him). We talked about our project (which has been on our backburner for a few months b/c of the movie, frankly); police and policies in Amsterdam and New Amsterdam (although his firm, MVRDV, is in Rotterdam, I needed the symmetry more than the accuracy.); and mobility, moving, and movies. A video they produced as part of a research project, “Pig City,” was the subject of intense interest and debate last year in the Netherlands and was shown at The Oberhausen Int’l Short Film Festival a few weeks ago. Author gregPosted on Categories Uncategorized
Apropos of nothing, really: I just got home and am catching the last few minutes of Where Angels Fear To Tread, otherwise known as the E. M. Forster adaptation Merchant Ivory didn’t do (Although with the Italian setting, and the overlapping cast members from A Room With A View—Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham Carter–it could understandably be mistaken for their work). Nevertheless, it was Judy Davis‘s performance in Angels that continually blows my mind. The scene where she sets out into the Italian town, nearly paralyzed with fear of the “natives” and not understanding a word or gesture of Italian, is brilliant. A very small scene, all told, but remarkably played. Of course, she was also great in the other non-MI Forster adaptation, the brilliant-but-long A Passage to India.
Apropos of all that, then: Watching A Room With A View was a formative movie-going experience for me. Having been an indifferent movie consumer before going to college, I inadvertently discovered foreign films on campus my freshman year. (The first one is another story, but that would be a meta-digression.) Still, I had been playing catch-up, seeing only those classics that showed on campus. ARWAV was the first “art film” I saw in a theater. A packed theater in Salt Lake, to be precise; it seemed to have opened in Utah well after building word of mouth around the country. Anyway, I went with fellow BYU rebels Robert and Tuki. I had no idea what to expect, but in the engagement party, when Daniel Day Lewis‘s Cecil said, “I have no profession. I daresay it’s a sign of my decadence.” we all busted out laughing. We were completely alone, though; the rest of the theater was dead silent. It was the first real realization that I was much smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else in the world. No. I was in college; I already knew that. I actually realized that movies could play on multiple levels. Here was something we liked that no one else (in the Utah theater, that is) noticed.
In this article in Prospect Magazine Mark Cousins provides a whirlwind history of film theory as he explores the question-turned-tagline: Should cinema tell the truth? ( Here is a list of Cousins’ other Prospect articles. He seems like a conservative romantic, but not in a necessarily bad way.) He wonders in print whether “cinema” should focus on its own formal characteristics, personal expression, or “reality” and “real issues.” Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes.
Why couldn’t we have it all? A three-ring circus of cinematic development? Have so-called auteurs address real topics, important topics. He suggests getting David Lynch or Baz Luhrman to edit a movie of Shoah survivor interviews. “Or ask Scorsese to make a film about Rwanda. Give Jane Campion free reign [sic] on 11th September. Chantal Akerman on Le Pen. And what about the Coen brothers on Ahmedabad?” I would probably point out that this type of cinema does, in fact, exist. Scorsese’s poetic Kundun was certainly more effective (or “valuable to our future,” to use Cousins’ criteria) than the feeble Seven Years in Tibet. And of course, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line was a gripping, formalistically innovative film actually helped overturn an innocent man’s conviction for murder. But whatever. Cousins’ argument doesn’t seem to really connect with how movies get made. (“Give Jane Campion free rein on 11th September?” If Abbas Kiarostami can jump in a van with a DV cam and make a compelling documentary about AIDS, and if a newbie can jump into a rental car wtih a DV cam and make a film about dealing with September 11 in a documentary style, what’s stopping her?) Cousins is just engaged in a the cinematic equivalent of Dr Seuss’ If I Ran the Circus. Post-script: After writing this I googled him, and he turns out to have been the director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, which I’m waiting to hear from. So I guess his ringmaster cred isn’t totally lacking. (Did I mention how much I love the circus??)
In Central Park, the only part of the Whitney Biennial I saw includes a very nice sculpture by Keith Edmier. Located on 60th Street, on a site usually programmed by The Public Art Fund (which collaborated in the Biennial’s Central Park presence), the sculpture consists of two 3/4-life size bronze statues of WWII soldiers in dress uniforms, standing on granite bases. They look for all the world like any public war memorial/monument. The names and information on the bases both help and don’t help; you’d guess they could have been worthy of a public monument, but you sure as heck don’t recognize their names. No news there. The figures turn out to be Edmier’s grandfathers, both of whom fought in WWII. One died an old man, and the other committed suicide while on active duty in the war. Personal history–and painful personal history at that–cross paths with public memory and commemoration. [Interestingly, WWII, Korea, and ANZAC/WWI rank 1,2,3 in that Google search.]
The parallels are quite enticing between Edmier’s work and my documentary on my own grandfather’s lives that kicked off this weblog. Not that there are any specific similarities between his grandfathers and mine; just that the subject, or the medium, if you will– grandfathers– is the same. When, in the course of talking about the movie, I’m asked, “Oh, and who are your grandfathers?” it’s basically the same question Edmier forefronts: who are these two men that they should have a bronze statue in Central Park? [I touched on this a little before.]
Thanks to my tablemate last night at MoMA’s annual Party in the Garden [generic link, sorry. MoMA’s a lot of things, but strong on the web isn’t one of them.] for the heads up on Edmier’s piece, which had previously only been shown in Europe (AFAIK). George Hamilton just walked by outside my window. He’s quite tan.
