Author: greg

Note to self: Feuillade, Richie, Gonzalez, Falluja

Just what’s been on my mind:

  • Louis Feuillade was the French anti-Griffith, whose crime serials and mystery, Les Vampires embraced elusiveness over narrative primacy; they were met with disdain from French critics. The director in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep was trying to remake Les Vampires with Maggie Cheung. BFI’s Sight & Sound has an article on him. [via mefi]
  • Donald Richie is the self-appointed chief gaijin. If he’s Paul Bowles, Tokyo is his Tangiers. His The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 are discussed at Metropolis. [via mefi]
  • Alberto Gonzalez is probably the single least likely person in Washington to empower an independent investigation or special prosecutor.
  • In his second term, Clinton cynically and deftly supported extensive testing of the missile defense system to avoid an unwanted fight with ongressional Republicans over it. Likewise, Congress’s loud but conflicted action on the 9/11 Commission recommendations enabled Bush to demand action, so he can sign something, even as all the Republicans knew nothing would actually be done.
    In this way, well-publicized planning for the invasion of Fallujah innoculated GWB against mid-election criticism of the administration’s failures in confronting the Iraqi insurgency.
    Now that the election’s over and the invasion has begun, Fallujah is exactly the kind of operation that the US military can succeed at, will “succeed” at. This could change the tenor of coverage of the war, even if it does not actually improve stability. Leaders on the ground were extremely critical of the entirely political/Washington-driven Fallujah invasion and pullback last Spring. Who knows if we’ll find out about this one?

    • MoMA Free Passes Update

    Thanks for the response so far. I should say that while I think Kurt Andersen’s idea for the federal government to pay for all the country’s museum entry fees is a good one, I see two problems with it:
    1) the problem in the White House, and
    2) it’s Kurt Andersen’s idea, so if you’d like me to send him the passes…
    Related:
    Free Museums for All [Studio 360, 7/28/2001]
    My diatribe supporting Billionaires For MoMA which, if you make it to the end, has an offer for free passes.

    First, BMWFilms, now Amazon Theater

    From the team who ruined BMWFilms.com comes a new collection of dependent shorts, just in time for the holidays. Amazon Theater is a series of five short films “featur[ing] products you can purchase at Amazon.”
    Someone’s not getting it in a very deep way. On paper, Amazon Theater should be an ad/film/shoppertainment convergence dream-come-true:

  • “Definitely available” actors, Minnie Driver, Daryl Hannah, Chris Noth, and Blair Underwood (now rebranded as “Amazon Theater celebrities”)
  • A database of every product every one of your customers has looked at or bought over the last eight years
  • Credit card financing [very indie, especially for shorts]
  • Unlimited bandwidth
    …and a whole mess of directors named Scott: Ridley, Tony, Jordan, Jake.
    The films include clickable shopping credits, both for featured and “celebrity products,” but it only goes so far. Whether that makes it half-ass, or just ass, I can’t say.
    Take the first short, “Portrait,” an at-once vapid and cynical Heathers-meets-Shallow Hal “fable” which finally answers the best-forgotten question, what did Amanda’s agency on Melrose Place actually create? You can buy the skinny villainess’s corporate bitchwear, but for the cruelly written loser fatchick’s blouse, you’ll have to go to QVC. Annd there’s no link to the dinnerplates she’s constantly eating off of–at work, in her boss’s office–even though they’re on sale, 47% off, for $79.99. Once you unpack it, the story turns on a snide conversation about reading spam, which includes a mention of “bayesian filters”, but there’s no “Spam for Dummies” tie-in. And while they offer Sephora makeup “used in the film,” they ignore the mall-makeover studio, Glamourshots which is the story’s manipulative McGuffin.
    Seriously, Amazon Theater is to short films what a hole is to a donut. Or what a donut is to a diabetic. Or what a brain is to the marketing exec who greenlighted this thing. Can’t wait to see how the Chris Noth one turns out.
    Shopporrifying links:
    “Enjoy the exclusive films in Amazon Theater, our holiday gift to you.”
    Buy this Fiestaware Periwinkle 16-piece Dinnerware set for your pathological office binges!
    Beauty pageant makeup can reveal your inner worth! Shop at Sephora, or go to the portrait studio at the mall!
    [via fimoculous]

    • Dutch Oven

    Scott MacMillan has a wide-ranging, disturbing roundup of the violent aftermath of Theo Van Gogh’s murder and public cremation, including the 5-hour standoff–complete with gunfire and grenades–with militant terrorist suspects in The Hague.
    [Slate] Holland in Flames
    Religious violence and terror arrests stun the Netherlands in the aftermath of filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder.

    Free MoMA?? Try F(*#%-ing Expensive MoMA

    [Update: I would point out this is my own opinion; I do volunteer work for MoMA, but I don’t speak for the Museum or any of its officers. I wrote this in direct reaction to FreeMoMA.org, which makes a lot of assertions about MoMA that, in my experience, don’t ring true at all.]
    And that’s why it’s $20. When the MoMA’s Film curator presented the story of the new building, as told through a series of silent movie title cards and film clips, three scenes got way bigger laughs than the rest:

    Glenn Lowry discusses the building with the curatorial staff was the scene from Babe where docile sheep, doing exactly as they’re told, march in formation.
    What those curatorial meetings were really like was a shot from Twelve Angry Men where the jurors confront Henry Fonda and tell him why he’s wrong.
    But Mike Margitich quickly meets his goal for the capital campaign brought down the house. A 1930’s tuxedo’ed man locks the door, walks over to an elegantly dressed woman, grabs her by the shoulders, and shakes her violently until a wallet drops on the floor. He picks it up, and the two sit down to dinner.

    People obviously related. After all, they were at the MoMA Founders dinner Monday night, 200 or so people who had given $1-50+ million each towards the museum’s $858 million capital campaign. Also there: us, Danny Meyer, and the folks from Target who decided to underwrite four years of free Friday evenings at the museum.

    Continue reading “Free MoMA?? Try F(*#%-ing Expensive MoMA”

    Theo Van Gogh Live Cremation Webcast

    If the last cremation you watched was in Diamonds Are Forever, now’s your chance to get up to speed and stick it to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism at the same time.
    In the event one of the many death threats he received over Submission, his short film decrying abuse of Muslim women, panned out, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh said he wanted a public cremation. Unfortunately, he’s getting his wish today at 1700h Amsterdam Time, CET, (or 1100 EST).
    The Nederland 2 TV network is carrying the event live online, starting at 1650h, which is in like an hour.
    Related [??] [Montgomery Advertiser, via Defamer]: “Hagman has stipulated that upon his death, he wants his body to be ground in a wood chipper and scattered in a field, where wheat is to be harvested for a cake to be eaten by his friends and family one year later….” [and if that’s not enough to make you want to live forever, read on…]

    Because you can?

    Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990, Image: moma.org

    Why else would you exhibit the same work in two different places?
    The Museum of Modern Art has this stack, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in two galleries–the Prints Galleries and the Contemporary Gallery. I’m trying to think of any other artist whose work could be shown in two places at once.
    Meanwhile, the new building is literally awe-inspiring. My biggest fear was that the gargantuan galleries would dwarf the art. It’s not even close.
    I remember during the OK trial, when Margaret Cho ran into Johnny Cochrane at the Mondrian, she gushed, “I love your show!” The only reason I didn’t use that line with Mike Ovitz was because his case wasn’t on TV. Still, we had a good time trading war stories from our days workin’ for the Mouse.
    Oh, wait, I think I dropped something.

    Personal Islands Off Manhattan: The Smithson Edition

    smithson_floating_island.jpg

    This is better than pirates. Modernartnotes reports that the Whitney is preparing to realize Robert Smithson’s work, Floating Island, a landscaped barge which will be tugged around New York Harbor.
    I’ve been waiting for this since Spring 1997, when Brian Conley and Joe Amrhein talked about doing it after their successful recreation of Smithson’s Dead Tree at Pierogi 2000.
    Related:
    Whitney gossip at Modern Art Notes
    Artforum reviews Dead Tree at Pierogi 2000, May ’97
    Dead Tree and Floating Island at RobertSmithson.com
    Man claims Governors Island for several minutes with pirate flag

    Manzanar Machinima at Margaret Mead

    beyond-manzanar.gifHuh, what’re the odds? I just finished a piece for an offline publication about machinima, and the first thing I see at this year’s Margaret Mead Documentary Festival is Beyond Manzanar, a video game-based exploration of the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and political attitudes toward Iranian Americans during the 1979-80 hostage crisis. It was created by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.
    Fortunately, America has moved beyond the dark era of racially based policies, into the crystal clear dawn of religion- and nationality-based detention and discrimination. Why not celebrate our progress this Saturday?

    Beyond Manzanar, presented somehow at 4:15, Sat. 11/13 at the AMNH
    Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, Nov. 11-14 and 20-21, at the American Museum of Natural History
    Beyond Manzanar‘s site
    Ansel Adams’ photographs of Manzanar and its internees

    Team France Harvard Opera Police

    phuyghe_puppet.jpgAfter the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all…], puppet projects are breaking out all over.
    At Harvard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is staging a puppet meta-opera that tells the stories of Le Corbusier’s design for building and Huyghe’s production of the opera. [That’s the “meta-” part. And yes, the puppets have puppets.]
    The performance is November 18th at 6pm; a filmed version will screen in a blobular theater attachment until April 17.
    Huyghe & Corbusier: Harvard Project [VES, Harvard]
    NYT story with rehearsal stills

    IC Moving downtown: Bart Walker jumps to CAA

    ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
    Related:
    Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
    Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

    IC Moving downtown: Bart Walker jumps to CAA

    ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
    Related:
    Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
    Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

    More Arrests in Van Gogh Killing; Big Funeral Planned

    In addition to the shooter/stabber, Dutch police and intelligence officials have arrested eight other men ages 19-26 in connection with the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Several of them had been detained before in terrorism-related investigations.
    Meanwhile, the man caught at the scene is being questioned for terrorist ties; he reportedly had a testament with him, “indicating he anticipated being killed in the attack.”
    Both politicians and the Dutch public are agitated over what may be the country’s first incident of Islamic terrorism. The AP reports a public cremation is being planned Tuesday for Van Gogh, which seems like a pretty showy sendoff. Should placate the Hindus, though. [According to Dutch news, he talked widely about having a big funeral party in case any of his numerous death threats panned out.]
    See the map of Linnaeusstraat in eastern Amsterdam where Van Gogh was killed. [nu.nl]
    Police Arrest 8 Tied to Suspect in Killing of Dutch Filmmaker [NYT]
    Radical Questioned in Filmmaker’s Death [AP/NYT, ‘Radical’? How about ‘Suspect’?]
    Van Gogh bereidde weken geleden eigen uitvaart voor [nu.nl]

    Iceland: The Next Canada

    No, that doesn’t mean they’re now recruiting Bush dodgers. It means they’re promoting the country as an up-and-coming alternative location for film production. Here’s a partial list of benefits to shooting in Iceland:

  • At least four months a year, you don’t have to shoot “day for night”.
  • Another four months, there’s 18 hours of sunlight.
  • You remember how Tribeca was just starting out, and you’d always see Bobby taking meetings at Tribeca Grill? Reykjavik’s like that, except that it’s Sigurjon Sighvatssonn.
  • On the weekend, the whole place parties like rockstars.
  • Fewer Bjork sightings than shooting in Brooklyn.
  • You can scout a location one day, and when you go to shoot the next, it’s gone. Something about the weather. [wtf?]
  • Whatever. Iceland will rebate 12% of your in-country production costs, and without demanding a part for their new wife.
    In Iceland, Freeze Frame Takes on New Meaning [NYT]
    There it is in black & white at The Invest in Iceland Agency.