the making of, by greg allen
I’m a bit crazy with an offline deadline, so I’ll just give you your assignment:
Starting with the prospect that wax does not, in fact, melt when submerged in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity by a wrathful God, please plot rank the following in order of sheer implausibility:
That whole “Canadian Flags On Backpacks” craze is so 2003.
If you’re gonna be all embarassed by American folly and all weary of explaining the Bush administration to every foreigner you meet, at least try to look like you’ve been doing it for a couple of years already.
Uh-oh, Canada: unpacking the CFOB phenomenon [feb. 2003]
Tom Ford and Matthew Barney on CFOB
When I saw this link the other day, I didn’t click on it. Execution couldn’t be any funnier than the concept, I figured. Boy, was I wrong.
Dubyamovie.com [via Jason, Andy, ]
The Gothamist Life Aquatic contest is over, and Congratulations! Everyone’s a winner. A few people won more than the rest, obviously. And G-mist and Cinecultist’s Karen–whose brainchild this publicity coup was–got the big prize, a phone interview with director Wes Anderson himself.
Eerily enough, it sounds like he’s right there with her at Lucky Strike.
Karen came to last night’s Reel Roundtable screening of After Life [thanks, Elizabeth!], by the way; and on Jan. 17, she’s starring in a Reel Roundtable screening of Kieron Walsh’s When Brendan Met Trudy, so clear your calendars.
Today is Wes Anderson Day! [cinecultist]
Wes Anderson: he knows where you are [Gothamist]
Reel Roundtable’s Film & Blogs Series [reelroundtable.com]
Bush has been haunted by the Ghost of Churchill before he went to Canada.
Seriously, though, is there some kind of running bet among the wireservice photographers, whoever discovers the exact shot Scott Sforza has designed for them first, wins a, a what? I have no idea.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants [wonkette, via MAN]
Bush speech at the Library of Congress Churchill Exhibit, with backdrops on loan from The White House Collection[whitehouse.gov]
So I’ve been writing a few pieces for The New York Times lately, which is great, but I can’t read them. Or almost any stories at the nytimes.com site, for that matter. Whenever I click on a NYT link, the login screen pops up, then refuses to log me in because my browser (Mozilla) doesn’t accept cookies.
The problem first popped up [sic] a few months ago when the Times hired a Utah research/survey firm to monitor user activity via their own cookies, which were rejected by my Moz “accept cookies only from the originating server” restrictions.
But lately, even after I thought I’d already laid back and thought of England, cookie-wise, I’ve still been rejected. Turns out that I still had the “cookies expire after 90 days” setting , and the Times wanted to place one 6-month, three 1-year, and one 10-year cookie in my browser.
To which I can only say, “Um, yes ma’am?”
In order to shoot interior scenes of Barry Lyndon entirely by candlelight, Stanley Kubrick had two extremely fast Zeiss photo lenses from NASA custom-adapted for a motion picture camera. There is a third Zeiss lens in existence, un-Kubricized, and Justin at Chromogenic would like it for Christmas, please. With a Nikon mount.
I don’t know if Justin has been naughty or nice, but he’s sure gotta be nicer than Vincent Gallo, who had–and tried to sell on ebay–another lens Kubrick had custom-built for Barry Lyndon, an Angenieux 20-to-1 zoom.
Speed Demon [Chromogenics.net, via Kottke]
Buy it and make something good with it [greg.org on gallo]
Two Special Lenses for “Barry Lyndon,” by Ed diGiulio (President, Cinema Products Corp.) [American Cinematographer, via Visual Memory]
Apologies for the scarce posts lately; I’ve been busy with offline writing and real work. Still, I don’t know how I missed this: The US Film Festival is now called the Sundance Film Festival?? I guess since they added two world cinema competitions for docs and narrative films, the USFF name just didn’t make sense anymore.
Here’s this year’s list of films [minus the shorts, set for release Monday] which all sorts of folks are unpacking. Meanwhile, David Hudson unpacks the unpackers at GreenCine.
First they ran a contest for Miramax’s Hero which had such obscure questions about Jet Li minutiae that not even his agent–or even Li-fanatic-from-birth Jen Chung–could answer, even with a lifetime subscription to IMDb Pro.
Now Gothamist gets all Disney publicity sock puppet on us again, this time with a contest for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, distributed by Touchstone.
The prize? Tickets to a 12/7 preview screening of the movie. The contest? Just fill out your name and email already. I guess Wes’s fans aren’t the kind who pay attention to nitpicky cinematic details. Oh, and this time, Gothamist employees aren’t eligible to enter. Jen, I guess you’ll have to go to a private screening.
Gothamist The Life Aquatic Contest [Gothamist.com]
Related: Matt goes all Milton Glaser and Dylan on the Life Aquatic poster. [lowculture]
Unlike that otherart rock band, Fischerspooner, Maxi Geil & PlayColt are actually still around. Also unlike FS, you might actually like hearing them play. [Other ways they differ from that flash in the 2002 pan: they’re smart, but not in a stupid way; knowing, but not in an annoying way; they actually perform, and not in a lipsynchy way; and they’re not tired; oh, and they don’t blowwww.]
Anyway, they’ve got a date coming up at their old haunt, Joe’s Pub, November 29th, so mark your calendars. WTH? That’s TONIGHT. [thanks for the heads up, Beck.] Screw your calendars, just go stand in line.
Maxi Geil & PlayColt site
[Oh, this is under “making movies” because, although she probably denies it now, MG&PC singer Rebecca Chamberlain was in my first film.]
For those who wondered how Matthew Barney was planning to top his five-part Cremaster Cycle…
For those who wondered, after watching The Cremaster Cycle, if Matthew Barney was really a top…
For those who want to top Matthew Barney yourself…
Have I got a site for you: CremasterFanatic.com
While there’s plenty of Cremaster-related material, including fan photos and videos [!!], I like the news section the best. It’s got reports on Barney’s latest film, de Lama Lamina, which opened last month at the Sao Paolo Biennial.
de Lama Lamina was shot documentary-style during this year’s Carnaval in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, on a Barney-created float surrounded by 1,000 Barney-clad samba dancers. Two actors representing deities from the local Candomble religion rode the float, a mud-covered clearcutting tractor hauling a torn up tree trunk.
Did someone say trunk? Since one role involved an “auto-erotic scene filmed under a slow-moving vehicle in an extremely confined set,” Barney’s people ran an ad, hoping to cast someone from local “porn/stuntman” stock. Yow, documentary-style indeed.
Links:
CremasterFanatic.com
Local Male Pornstars Wanted [AIN]
I’ve admired Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films since seeing Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films in 1995. His 2000 film, After Life and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I were what finally stoked the fire under me to get me finally start making movies myself.
Of course, After Life‘s got much more recommending it than inspiring my ersatz film forays. It shows the development of Kore-eda’s highly evocative documentary approach to narrative fiction, for example, a technique he refined in the understated–and underdistributed–Distance.
This, combined with his expert direction of non-professional actors, resulted in the masterful–and Cannes-winning–performances by his child actors in Nobody Knows, which will be released in the US in January.
Anyway, it’s all reason enough for The Reel Roundtable to invite me to introduce a screening of After Life on Monday, December 6th, at the Millenium Theater. It’s part of the Roundtable’s Blogs and Film series, which is organized by the incisive and intrepid Elizabeth Carmody.
When: Mon., December 6, @7:30pm
Where: Millenium Theater (66 E. 4th St, betw. Second and Bowery)
How Much: $5
More Info: Reel Roundtable [Reelroundtable.com]
Who’s Crazy Enough To Ask My Opinion: Elizabeth’s blog at IndieWIRE
Related links:
Midnight Eye’s interview with Kore-eda.
Kore-eda’s official site.
The debut live performance of Pierre Huyghe’s puppet opera was last week at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier’s only building in the US.
While it’s not quite a review, Ann Wilson Lloyd’s report in the Times gives more details of the production/exhibition, which runs through April 2005.
The synopsis: it’s Team America: World Police meets Adaptation meets My Architect.
Says Huyghe,
“I found myself in the same position as Le Corbusier,” he said recently, “of someone invited to do a project and formalize it in a specific context. I felt overwhelmed by the conditions of this predefined context. Then I found this book by Sekler and Curtis, and I realized it was a parallel situation. The difficulty in coming up with an idea became the idea.”
A Puppet Opera at Harvard Channels Le Corbusier [NYT]
Previously: Team France Harvard Opera Police
Jason’s got some discussion/speculation about Wes Anderson’s so-far monogamous relationship with Futura in his films, which continues into The Life Aquatic.
Futura and Wes Anderson [kottke.org]
Related:
new The Life Aquatic trailers at Apple.com
Talk about control: Anderson’s next project is stop-action animation (what, no puppets?)
Sorry, your entire Sunday morning isn’t enough. Now the NYT Arts & Leisure section wants your whole weekend. Jan 7-9, 2005, to be precise, far enough in advance that you can’t pretend you have something else planned.
Some program highlights:
Sat (1/8), 6:00-7:15 p.m.
“Bigger Roles, Smaller Films” Patricia Clarkson and Hilary Swank tell rockstar editor Jodi Kantor what it’s like to work with Katie Holmes, [“that Oscar-nom-less little scene-stealer.”]
Sunday (1/9), 4:00-5:15 p.m.
“The Prophet of a New Modern Architecture”
Nicolai “Herbie Who?” Ouroussoff interviews Rem Koolhaas. Doesn’t say who they’re talking about. Huh.