HBO’s K Street is shot in DV and makes the most of the saturated blues (outdoor) or yellows (indoor) that come from shooting with available light. Even though the processes are very different, the photography is reminiscent of Traffic. That’s because director Steven Soderbergh used the same cinematographer–one Peter Andrews–on both projects.
On the Traffic DVD, Soderbergh criticizes Andrews’ work, wondering aloud why someone didn’t fire him. Still, Andrews is credited with the camera work on every Soderbergh film since then. Surprising? Hardly. Peter Andrews is Soderbergh. [FYI, Mary Ann Bernard, who edited of Solaris, is Soderbergh, too.]
This nameplaying is amusing but pales in comparison to Robert Rodriguez, who does (and credits himself with) seemingly every above- and below-the-line job on his films. But it takes on added significance for K Street. When Trent Lott warns ominously of “chaos if we have film crews setting up all over the place [aka Capitol Hill],” he’s essentially banning a man with a camera.
[The Times‘ Allessandra Stanley is unimpressed with the show. She tries to pre-spin it into irrelevance with a too-studied, too-jaded disdain for spin and fictionalizing that sounds about as believable as some of the show’s one-take, improvised dialogue.]
Author: greg
Alternate Side Parking just got easier
NEWS FLASH: At least it’s news to me. Just a few minutes ago, this guy changed the alternate side parking sign outside my window. Turns out the no parking period has been cut from three hours to 1.5, which, frankly, rocks.
According to 311, the Dept. of Sanitation is in charge of Street Cleaning Regulations, and last month, they started rolling out 90 minute streetcleaning. So now, they’re in place in Canarsie and the upper east side. Go figure.
“The Real World: Washington” hits a snag
Apparently, only real lobbyists have unfettered access to the halls of power.
TMN points to a Roll Call story that the Trent Lott, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee has deemed shooting of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s new HBO series K Street a “commercial or profit-making purpose” and banned them from using any Capitol locations.
One solution: get the crew–and the talent– some press passes and slap some CNN logos on those cameras. The show’s on-the-run, “shoot and air it” schedule is designed to make it an influential voice in the real world’s political debates. If things go according to HBO’s plan, DC’s power elite would start spending their Sundays parked with George Clooney instead of George Stephanopoulos.
Or maybe the solution’s so obvious, it takes the subtlety-free Lott to point it out. After all, K Street is about lobbying, that dark hotel bar of an industry* where “politics as usual” chats up “commercial and profit-making” before they head off to bed together.
K Street features cameos from real politicians, including–according to the report–John McCain, Hilary Clinton, and Orrin Hatch–senators who were, coincidentally, the #1, 2, and 5 recipients of cable TV industry campaign contributions in the 2000 election year. McCain and Clinton each got well over $100k, and continue to get mad money from cable. Lott was #9, with $20,500, and he hasn’t gotten a dime since. You do the math.
Rather than a challenge unique to shooting in Washington, Lott’s disruption tactics are business as usual. If anything, they’re similar to problems the LA film industry’s already familiar with: extortion artists who follow film crews around with leaf blowers, angling for a few hundred bucks to go away. How’d they address that problem? By getting the Calif. state senator from Warners and Disney Burbank to introduce a bill that bans the disruption of location filming. I have a feeling this’ll work out just fine.
* The seduction scene between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Soderbergh’s Out of Sight is one of the greatest sex scenes ever. Read my posts about it here and here.
Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero
Ground Zero, Ellsworth Kelly, 2003, collage. image:nytimes.com
The reconstructed text of a letter from Ellsworth Kelly to the Times‘ architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp:
“On October 19, 2001, I wrote a letter to you (that I never sent) in response to an article in The New York Times which discussed the controversy of what was to be planned for the `Ground Zero’ space, asking artists and others for their opinions. (Two artists, Joel Shapiro and John Baldessari urged that no building be erected at the site,and the architect Tadao Ando made a similar proposition.)
“At that time, my idea for the World Trade Center site was a large green mound of grass. (When I saw the aerial photograph of the site on the cover of the Aug. 31 Arts & Leisure section of the Times, [which accompanied art critic Michael Kimmelman’s article, not Muschamp’s. Go figure. -greg.org]) I was excited to see the site from this vantage point. I was inspired to make a collage of my idea for the space, which I am sending you.
“I feel strongly that what is needed is a ‘visual experience,’ not additional buildings, a museum, a list of names or proposals for a freedom monument. (These are) distractions from a spiritual vision for the site: a vision for the future.”
The collage will go on view at the Whitney, which has a show through November titled “Ellsworth Kelly: Red, Green, Blue,” of work from 1959-65.
Tadao Ando’s proposal, meanwhile, was inspired by a Japanese burial mound.
John Baldessari (via NYTimes, 9/30/01):
“I don’t think anything should be built. The site should be a park. It’s an insane idea because the site is going to be an office, because the business of America is business.”
I can’t find Joel Shapiro’s idea online, but this year, Joel Shapiro collaborated with Vinci Hamp Architects on a WTC Memorial proposal.
Gabriel Orozco on PBS
[via Modern Art Notes] Nice, too brief info about Gabriel Orozco on the site for PBS’ Art:21 series. Tyler said the program segment was “a little too languid,” which sounds just about perfect for Orozco’s work.
The New Yorker entranceth and the New Yorker pisseth one off. The latter came last July, via critic Peter Schjeldahl’s flaccid reading of Orozco’s clay pieces at Documenta. Art:21 has images of a beautiful follow-up show at Chantal Crousel’s gallery in Paris, and I’m still happily entranced, staring at an earlier terra cotta piece sitting on the shelf next to me.
New Yorker on the WTC memorial and rebuilding
I’m a Paul Goldberger fan, and mad praise for his dogged reporting, following Daniel Libeskind around the country, but I’m not getting anything new from the profile in this week’s New Yorker. When I schmoozed him last spring, Goldberger talked with great relish about digging in and laying out the powerful forces shaping the WTC rebuilding process. But this article comes too late to illuminate Libeskind’s POV on the Silverstein-Childs hubbub, and too early to capture his reaction to the alterations and “fixes” that the Memorial finalists will inevitably introduce.
Contrast that with Louis Menand’s excellent profile on Maya Lin from last July, which the New Yorker just put online. Menand interprets some of Lin’s sensibilities a bit broadly, but re-reading this article shows him to be very prescient about (and possibly influential on) her quietly authoritative role in the WTC memorial process.
[Related: Get Maya Lin’s book, Boundaries, where she revisits her own work and inspirations.]
More on HBO Directors
I’m reading and enjoying Steven Soderbergh’s book, Getting Away With It, where he intermixes his self-hating journal entries and deeply interested conversations with Richard Lester, the director credited with “launching” the British New Wave. (He did The Beatles movies, The Three Musketeers, and other stuff. Fascinating, funny guy, though.)
Soderbergh tries on an authorial style, with David Foster Wallace-style, self-conscious footnotes [DFW-lite], but basically, he plays a very well-informed fan. But now that he’s in production on the first episode of K Street (which airs Sunday on HBO, no pressure), these discussions with Lester about how they used to make TV shows and movies in the “old” days seem to be bearing fruit.
[The K Street site has an “online journal” totally spinning the party line, written, I think, by the Ari Fleischer character. It’d be interesting to see if they start leaking things as the show progresses.]
There are only three copies of the book on Amazon right now, and it’s ranked 58,458th. Why not buy it? Turn the high-pressure hose of e-commerce that is greg.org readership on it, and see if we can break 5,000?
Toronto Film Festival: the SportsCenter Version
The National Post has a nice highlights reel, with reports from the field (and locker rooms, apparently) at the Toronto Film Festival. Some of it’s like listening to cricket scores on the BBC, though; you can recognize the language as English, but you can’t understand WTF it means.
One thing I do understand, though is the mention of met-on-the-set couple, Christina Ricci and Adam Goldberg, who are premiering their film I Love Your Work, which was co-produced by Josh & Co at Cyan Pictures. Josh and ILYW are getting some good buzz and press; and they’re posting festival updates on their production company weblog, cyanpictures.com.
Also, from BoingBoing, comes a Festival groupblog from the FilmNerds. Public screenings (and an enthusiastic, thoughtful audience base) are one of Toronto’s greatest strengths, and these four guys apparently have over six years of festival experience…between them. Hmm. If you’re looking for reviews with a sweeping historical context, I suggest not running those numbers. These are fresh, unjaded–and Canadian–perspectives. You’ve been warned.
Ozu in New York
I know Venice is barely over and Toronto’s just getting started, but I’m already getting pumped for the New York Film Festival in October. Is “pumped” the right reaction for an Ozu centennial retrospective? All 36 films by the greatest Japanese filmmaker ever will screen at Lincoln Center.
Also on the schedule: A 2-day symposium on Ozu’s work and influence (Oct. 11 and 12) and, batting cleanup, Wim Wenders’ 1985 Tokyo Picture, his filmed diary exploring Ozu’s world.
On the Directors of HBO Series
I should have mentioned it earlier–maybe when I asked for DVD rental suggestions–but HBO’s Band of Brothers is one of the best series I can think of. (Except that I can also think of Kieslowski’s Decalogue and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which are probably the #1 and #2 greatest “mini-series” of all time; that’s not the category we’re dealing with here. Decalogue has been re-released on DVD, by the way. Run, don’t walk.)
Last week, I watched Part 5, the one installment I missed on TV. It was pretty remarkable, easily bearing the strongest directorial stamp. “Crossroads” was what it sounds like, a transitional story, notable for lacking (until the end) any of the “gotta take that ridge” straightforwardness typical of a war film. Instead, the story focused on the challenges Winters faced off the front; incoming mortars replaced by barrages of mundane paperwork and meetings. Even so, a complex mix of recollections and revealing subplots were woven together in a fairly complex structure. It could have been confusing, but it wasn’t.
From the opening scene, the director let you know something was different. The handheld camerawork was unexpected, with an intensity that clearly referenced the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. And in a later battle scene, the handheld camera follows a soldier on a dead run (no pun) across a battlefield. The SPR allusion was no coincidence. Of course, Steven Spielberg was an executive producer of BoB, but Part 5 was the only episode directed by the other exec producer–and veteran of the D-Day scene–Tom Hanks.
The giddy pablum on HBO’s site, actors gushing about how great it was that Tom Hanks was directing them is exactly what “Crossroads” overcomes. Maybe it’s too directed, too edited to blend in with the more conventionally directed installments, but it feels like Hanks had something to prove, and for the most part, he did.
Movie Passions Betrayed
[via GreenCine] Wim Wenders’ official 4h45m version of Until the End of the World will be released on DVD next spring. David’s excellent, slightly ecstatic discussion of the release annoucement betrays a diehard fan’s passion about this almost-mythical cut of the film. (For the rest of the world: Wenders’ epic-to-be was subjected to drastic and problematic guts/cuts that rendered it a disappointing and confusing, both in terms of story and box office. Wenders and his editor spent a year of their own time, after the film was released, “finishing” his version, which has been seen only rarely. Until next spring, anyway.)
[via my site logs] Greg.org’s first TypePad referrer links come from Persistence of Vision, a smart new weblog about independent film, evidently created by a fellow New Yorker who doesn’t explain much about him/herself onsite, but betrays an obvious passion and familiarity with the film world. Welcome (and thanks for the link).
Lost in Transition
[via Travelers Diagram] At the Guardian, Jonathan Jones stages a virtual exhibition (we used to call them “articles”) of great lost, stolen, or missing art. Included in the list: the Gardner Museum’s Vermeer, the recently stolen Scottish Leonardo, and Ryoei Saito’s van Gogh Portrait of Dr. Gachet. The latter is probably lost like the Ark of The Covenant is lost: it’s in some crate in some bankrupt Japanese company’s warehouse somewhere.
But Jones ends, inexplicably, with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty: “Since its construction it has vanished underwater as the level of the lake has risen. Films have been made, stories told about attempts to rediscover it (the British artist Tacita Dean is one of those who have gone looking). Recently, it is fabled, the spiral has started to resurface.”
A FABLE?? Don’t get me started, Jonathan. I don’t know why, but September is the month for Spiral Jetty deniers. Last year, I took Artforum‘s Nico Israel to task for pretending the Jetty was unfindable, even though we’d just visited it.
This year, the lake level is so low, I was told (and I saw the pictures, JJ), you’re able to walk the entire length of the Jetty. WMD’s are a fable, Jonathan. Spiral Jetty is real.
IndieWIRE, who loves ya, baby
[via GreenCine] IndieWIRE surveys 20 acquisition executives from indie and mini-major studios to see what gets them out of bed in the morning (and to see what gets you into bed with them). Great stuff.
OY! Recommend me some movies! [update: the Mob has spoken]
My DVD rental queue is down to dangerously low levels. GreenCine, by the way, not the big red DVD subscription service Gawker sold it’s soul to (I’m sure they used the money to buy an expanding T-Rex sponge. Chum…p).
Most recently in the machine:
- Punch-Drunk Love (Ouch. I had to stop, finally. Maybe my stereo settings were wrong, but it was so assaultive… the Bonus Disc is on the way, though.)
- Soderbergh’s Solaris (underappreciated. re James Cameron’s commentary:he’s deeply, annoyingly, and predictably shallow. ).
- Ghost World (Didn’t need to watch it since I didn’t end up interviewing Scarlett Johannson),
- Virgin Suicides (Did need to watch it, because I did end up… wait, I’m getting ahead of my self. But I will say, it’s a little weird to have your mom shoot your Making Of video.)
- Funeral, Juzo Itami’s dark comedy. (About as subtle as Japanese overacting gets, but the camerawork is bizarrely tight, and the DVD transfer absolutely sucks.)
- Thirteen Conversations about Something or Other (If you’re gonna make a feature that interweaves several independent episodes together, you probably should watch one, right?)
Update: Yow, thanks. I should be asking for stuff more often. The results–minus the ones that aren’t available on DVD–like Hearts of Darkness (also shot by Sofia Coppola’s mom) and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho–ones that weren’t available on DVD–like GVS’s first feature, Mala Noche–and a couple of obviously dumb ideas–Everyone’s seen Pearl Harbor, duh–are below.
Also, I put them all in an Amazon List, “movies greg.org readers told me to watch #1,” if you feel like watching along. Thanks again, and keep’em coming. - Before Night Falls
- Dog Day Afternoon
- Dogtown & Z Boys (Avary‘s working on the feature remake with David Fincher)
- Double Indemnity (a staple)
- e-dreams (ahh, Kozmo.com)
- Office Space (always good)
- Kundun (already on the list, actually)
- Last Temptation of Christ (how timely)
- Goncharov (1973) (Scorsese’s complicated but most under-appreciated work)
- Lumiere
- One-Hour Photo (someone watched the the VMA, or the Johnny Cash video)
- Raging Bull (ok, enough with the Scorsese)
- Secretary
- The Wind Will Carry Us (actually, the rec. was Abbas Kiarostami, so I picked this one about extremely rural Iran, which led me to…)
- Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, a remarkable-sounding 1924 silent film about shepherds in rural Iran, which led me to…
- The Saltmen of Tibet, and all on my own, I had the idea of rewatching Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap & Out of Control