Author: greg

greg.org housekeeping with kinja

The Japanese word for neighborhood is kinjo, which transliterates as “place nearby.” Did Nick and Meg and co. have this in mind when they launched Kinja? Who knows?
I’m trying out Kinja Digests as maps to online neighborhoods where my site and my attentions can be found: film and filmmaking weblogs and the mutually admiring community of (mostly New York) weblogs who introduce me to much of my news.

Seven Wives’ Granola

It is well known that polygamists were big fans of healthful eating. Thus, this recipe from the Seven Wives’ Inn in St. George, Utah* for the most excellent granola I’ve ever had:
8 c. old fashioned oats
1.5 c brown sugar
1 c almonds (or more, to taste)
1 c raw cashews (or more, to taste)
1 c coconut
1 c sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, or a mixture of both
1.5 c wheatgerm
0.5 c water
0.5 c vegetable oil
0.5 c honey
0.5 c creamy peanut butter
2 t vanilla
1-1.5 c raisins or craisins (optional)
Directions: Stir to blend: oats, sugar, nuts, seeds, coconut, wheatgerm. Combine water, oil, honey and pb in saucepan; bring to boil, stirring until pb is dissolved. Pour over oat mixture, stir to coat thoroughly. Place in a single layer on 2- sprayed 10×15 pans. Bake at 200F for 60-70 min. Cool. Stir in vanilla and raisins. Store in airtight container or freeze for longer term storage (e.g. Second Coming, Apocalypse, etc.).
* In southern Utah, locals call the readily identifiable polygamists on the street or in the store by the vaguely pejorative “polygs.”

Reading Quentin, my New Bestest Friend

After a night of hanging out with The Man, and sipping from the firehose of his conversation (hey, whatever it takes to get the movie made, right? ahem.), it’s no surprise at all that there are fansites dedicated to picking apart the film references in Quentin Tarantino’s own movies. Now there’s a festival, too: The Kill Bill Connection at London’s ICA.
The Guardian‘s Steve Rose is at first fascinated, then typically put off by QT’s virtuosic-bordering-on-pathologic quoting, but his look at Kill Bill-ism makes for interesting reading nonetheless.
[update: With barely any overlap–and a lot less judgmentalism–David Kehr charts some of Tarantino’s references in the NYT, in case you can’t fit reading a UK newspaper into your shedule (sic). ]

Blessed are the Filmmakers

Crucifixion set from The Passion, image: sassiweb.it

OK, one more post about Mel’s mammon from heaven, The Passion:
The Guardian reports on the miracle of Matera: Gibson raised the Italian hilltop town from the economic dead when he chose it as the main location for filming.
And Blessed are The Extras, for they shall obtain EU60-90/day
Not only were 600 of “the swarthiest” locals picked as extras in the film, but the town has been born again as a Christian tourist site. Antonio Foschino documents the local production of The Passion on his website, Sassiweb.it–The gregorio.org of Matera, he provides a Passion Package Tour; book early.
At least until high season starts, the town’s hotel maid won’t charge you a euro to tell about helping Gibson convert the minibar in his suite into a prayer altar. But at the site of the crucifixion scene [above], enterprising craftsmen are already stockpiling hand-carved Matera/Golgotha paperweights, the perfect complement to those Nativity Stone crosses you bought from Ricardo Montalban. [While supplies last. Supplies of rocks in Italy.]
Did Gibson’s inspiration for shooting in Matera come from Richard Gere, who made King David there, or from the last Christ movie to be shot in town, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s [ who the Guardian gleefully calls “a gay, Communist atheist,”] Gospel According to Matthew? Who knows? But Mel did describe his reaction the town had on him: “The first time I saw it,” he said, “I just went crazy, because it was so perfect.”
Amen, brother.

More from An Evening With Sofia Coppola

Screen captures from the baptism/murder sequence of The Godfather, dir. F. F. Coppola

Production Diary
I grabbed an image from each of 35 massacre cuts in The Godfather‘s baptism/massacre sequence to use as reference for shooting. Given the conditions, however, and the fact that I was also a co-host, with a speech to give, and I had major ass to kiss, this served as only the roughest guide.
I needed at least one shot of me, though, and so when my co-host Hilary and I went up to the podium, I gave my running camera to the nearest pair of hands I could find–Bill Murray.
Murray played along, and in fact, started filming Hilary’s dress, chest, earrings, and hair, which cracked everybody up. Anyway, by the end of the night, I think I got enough footage that formally references Coppola’s original, but is, of course, completely different.
Gossip
When another speech (the intro went too long for the taste of at least one big cheese producer) said how MoMA was interested in great films, “not just films from India or Senegal or someplace,” several stunned people turned to look for a reaction from the rather great Indian filmmaker Mira Nair–who was sitting right behind me. She didn’t flinch.
Quentin–who was sitting next to me–was a rockstar, and we talked endlessly about making and remaking movies. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was, he said, his favorite movie of 1998, and he had non-stop praise for Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb, and Chris Strompolos, the three teenagers who spent seven years making their shot-for-shot adapation of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
My wife couldn’t come at the last minute, so I turned her seat back in, not knowing who I’d get as my seatmate. Just before the lights went down, a very genial and genteel-looking older lady was escorted in. Somebody’s mother, I figured; did they plan to leave her at the hotel if they couldn’t score her a ticket? Turns out her name was Lillian Ross. She’s a writer or something. Didn’t get the details. Very nice. She borrowed my cell phone to call her son, who I met later at dinner. Also very nice. But not related to any of the filmmakers there, as far as I could figure.
Anywho…the gossip, the first blind item on greg.org, blind because not stupid; I’d still take their meeting:
A very recent Oscar winner told me, at the party, about meeting a fellow nominee, i.e., one of the losers–who actually had two films nominated–so technically, a double loser. Upon being introduced–by the Mayor of New York City, no less–the loser replied, “I can’t believe you won; your film was so boring!”
I’ll leave the comments open for a while this one.

Modernartnotes walks into WSJ art trap

Ever the arts enthusiast in search of a common man constituency, Tyler Green wrote an op-ed for the WSJ that gamely proposes to take the Whitney Biennial on the road, to the people–in the “hinterlands.”
And what could be wrong with that? Besides going to bat for the perennially controversial-at-best biennial? Besides coming off as populist and condescending toward your biennial’s flyover audience?
Well, there’s playing right into the middle of the WSJ‘s own FoxNews-like editorial slant, for one. Tyler shouldn’t be surprised when the comments he received were at odds with the crusty, Moral Majority-form letters the Journal itself published. Tyler lobbed one over the net, and the Journal‘s know-nothing niche shot it down like the pigeon his editors knew it would be.

Kubrick-a-brac

From the Stanley Kubrick project at the Deutsches Filmmuseum, image:stanleykubrick.de From the painstakingly organized files of Mr Stanley E. Kubrick:
Stanley Kubrick filled his St Albans estate with over 400 fileboxes (specially manufactured to his own design) of notes, photographs, correspondence, drafts, props, and much, much more. The first authorized exhibition drawn from the estate opens today at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt. In fact, Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan are speaking in the cafe at 2030h, less than 5 hrs from now.
[Seeing as how you missed that, though, you can pre-order the exhibition catalog in English from the museum. It’s a more in-depth collection of essays by filmmakers and historians, different from The Stanley Kubrick Archives due any day now from Taschen.]
Journalist Jon Ronson writes in the Guardian about what he found in his repeated vists to the archive, including an exhaustive day-by-day timeline of the goings-on in Napoleon’s court; Kubrick’s favorite font; a sniper’s severed head, and a reference to “A Bill Murray Line!” [Also, a link to Kubrick’s script for Napoleon, deemed authentic by Ronson.]
From a 1975 telex correspondence with a Warner Bros. publicity man re Barry Lyndon:

[Publicity man:] “Received additional material. Is there any material with humour or zaniness that you could send?”
Kubrick replies, clearly through gritted teeth: “The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany.”

[via TMN. And my post title came from a 1977 French animated short I found on IMDb.]

A 4 week-old baby reviews the Whitney Biennial

She slept through the almost the whole thing*. Until we walked into the Cecily Brown gallery, when she started screaming at the top of her lungs. On this advice, we cut our visit short, leaving via the elevator so as not to disrupt the Julianne Swartz sound installation in the stairway.)
* Truthfully, she also shattered the misty calm of the Gran Canaria forest in Craigie Horsfeld’s video room with a post-bottle burp worthy of a trucker.

Souvenir Series, Sofia, and me

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We’ll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it’s out of the order I’d planned to shoot them, but the opportunity and idea presented themselves so clearly, I’ve decided to at least get it shot, then see where to take it.
Long story short, it’s a reconceiving of the baptism/massacre sequence from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The scene is a classic, not only of storytelling and dramatic contrast, but of editing as well.
While it has the immediate feel of intercutting–jumping back and forth between simultaneous events–as this Yale film analysis site where you can watch (most of) the sequence points out, it’s unlikely that all the other mafia dons in NYC were actually assassinated at the same instant. They call it montage.
Frankly, I always thought they were concurrent events. The baptism scene provides a sense of linear time that is utterly absent from, say, Jennifer Beals’ rehearsal/welding scenes in Flashdance. (Gimme a break, she was on The Daily Show last night.)
Anyway, Seeing as how the baby in that scene was a weeks-old Sofia Coppola, and seeing as how I have a weeks-old baby myself now, and seeing as how I’m gonna be hanging out with the Coppolas tonight at a MoMA Film Department benefit, I thought I’d better start shooting.

ND/NF: Captive by Gaston Biraben

Gaston Biraben's Captive, image: filmlinc.comI saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it’s a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy.
Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged story of, “You’re adopted…And then some.” A 15-year old Buenos Aires girl’s life is turned upsidedown when she learns her real parents were among The Disappeared, the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped, tortured and killed by the country’s military dictatorship in the 70’s. On top of dealing with a new family of strangers, the girl has to confront the chilling circumstances of her birth and her adoptive parents’ possible complicity in the systematic crimes of the junta.
By keeping a restrained, naturalistic focus on a the experience of one girl, the film tackles the third rail of the Argentine psyche–accountability for The Disappeared–with tremendous skill, and without devolving into political agitprop. Biraben coaxed a highly effective, intuitive performance from his star, Barbara Lombardo, which holds the film together.
Almost the entire audience stayed for the Q&A. Sensing, perhaps, Captive‘s potential for making great political waves, many questions were about where the film has shown and what was the reaction. It turns out ND/NF is one of the first screenings for Captive, so the impact is still to come. [The film was also at Palm Springs and San Sebastian, where it won the Horizontes award for Latin American films.]
This all serves as setup for the improbably story of Biraben’s getting the film made in the first place, and how he scored a cameo that elicited surprised howls of recognition from the New York audience. I spoke with Gaston and his co-producer/editor Tammis Chandler after the Q&A.

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