Just let me program your whole Monday viewing schedule for you.
6:30 – MoMA curator Barbara London screening classic video art and talking about how to collect it. (email for details)
9:00 See Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Wittgenstein, at Passerby, the used-to-be-a-gallery/bar on WWW 15th St.
Then head to SoHo house for some kidney pie with Fammke Jensen or whoever. You’re welcome.
Author: greg
Ford Exploring
Tom Ford has signed with CAA agent (and longtime friend) Brian Lourd to find films to direct. The NYPost’s Suzanne Kapner pitches him a really edgy story:
Robert Evans called. He wants his schtick back…
“For his last Gucci menswear show, there were scantily clad dancers with big hair and heavy eye makeup gyrating around stripper poles and worldly gentlemen with tumblers of whiskey.
Keep an eye out for such images in a future film – perhaps a cross between Ocean’s Eleven and Showgirls?”
Suzanne, Brian’s not taking calls right now. Can I get your number, and I’ll pass it along?
Learning at Errol Morris’s Knee
Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Morris’s films are best known for the intensity of the interviews he conducts. He invented the Interrotron, a teleprompter setup that gets the interviewee to look and speak straight into the camera. I, in the mean time, didn’t have a digital recorder, so I decided to use a DV camera, the Sony VX-1000, to record our discussion. (Plus, that’d give me a chance to drop it off at the Sony Service Center downstairs to get the viewfinder fixed when I was done.)
I set the camera on the coffee table. Not only did I not get Morris looking directly into the camera, I ended up with an entire tapeful of Morris’s bouncing sneaker. Just as he did in The Fog of War, I structured our discussion around eleven lessons. [OK, fine. I went through the transcript and stuck eleven smartass lessons in as an editorial conceit. Close enough.]
Lesson One: Start an interview with an Academy Award-nominated director you’ve admired for fifteen years by sucking up. Big time.
Greg Allen: First congratulations on the film and the nomination. I should tell you, seeing Thin Blue Line in college was one of the reasons I wanted to become a filmmaker. It was so powerful and so not what you’d expect a documentary to be, especially at that time. So, thank you.
Errol Morris:
Thank you.
GA: With The Fog of War, a great deal of attention has been focused on the interview footage itself and what McNamara did or didn’t say, and was he going to take responsibility for the war or were you going to grill him about this or that. But your films have such a strong aesthetic and dramatic sense, which you achieve with other elements. I’d really like to hear more about how you go about making a film and what your process is for the putting those other elements together.
Lesson Two: I am a babbling sycophant.
2/23: Comparing, Contrasting, and Collecting Video Art, with MoMA’s Barbara London
Barbara London, Associate Curator of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, will screen some seminal works of video art and talk about the ins and outs of showing and collecting. Among the artists she’ll be showing: Nam June Paik, Bill Wegman, Joan Jonas, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Laurie Anderson, Wang Jianwei and others. Get this man a graphic designer. The LMDC has released scanned images of all 5,201 Memorial Competition submissions, browsable by country and state, or searchable by last name. New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als is doing the diary at Slate this week. So far it’s mostly a New-York-is-Hollywood fabulous account of his screenwriting projects, with Warren St. John wrote with some air of complaint about oblivious iPodders who clog our streets and queues while lost in their own musical worlds. This may be annoying, true, but it’s much better than the opposite situation: music that is piped into the street by retailers and/or Real Estate Experience developers. It’s particularly bad on faux-urban streetscapes, like the Market Commons at Clarendon, a “retail mecca” just outside DC. Nestled among the landscaped bushes are little mushroom-shaped speakers that pump out a chain-store-friendly soundtrack all day and night. It’s freakin’ annoying. Don’t know how I missed this. The Guardian/Observer‘s Damon Wise goes on a revealing to Filmbyen, or Film Town, a Danish hive of suburban movie production, founded by Lars Von Trier and his producing partner, Peter “The Eel” Jensen. (That nickname’ll be TMI in a minute, by the way.) Dogme95 co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg has also set up shop in “town.” In the NYTimes Book Review, historian/storyteller Joseph Ellis delivers a gushing review of “Washington’s Crossing,” David Hackett Fischer’s “truly riveting” book-length repositioning of the American rebel army crossing the Delaware and defeating Hessians at Trenton as a turning point in the War of Independence. For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment. More than any other book, ”Washington’s Crossing” provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both Patton and Saving Private Ryan‘ starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it’s all true. Of course, Fischer–and Ellis, whose credit line says is working on a biography of Washington–are two years too late, and they both must know it. In 2002, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, responding to the absence of a great film starring Washington, aka “the action hero of his time,” hired Steven Spielberg to produce a 15-minute film for an $85 million interactive museum program being built next to GW’s house. ” As Jim Rees, director of Mount Vernon told the Washington Post, “If it was as exciting and action-packed as Indiana Jones we would be thrilled.” What battery would Jesus use? Interstate, of course. It looks like even George Bush’s favorite philosopher is trying to reach the elusive NASCAR Dad this year.
The discussion will be Monday evening at 6:30 in midtown. It’s not open to the public, but
Shooting the Courier
I find Tom Vanderbilt’s Slate story about the State Department’s dropping Courier New 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14 as its official typeface timely for two reasons.
1) Courier’s appearance in The Fog of War is evidence of the font’s status as both “the herald of all stripes of dignified officialdom,” and FOIA-driven government conspiracy. [He credits Rob Poynor, of Design Observer. All of a sudden, these guys are everywhere.]
2) I just spent several hours last weekend researching the history and modern use of typewriter typefaces for a new website I’m working on. After growing tired of the clogged upX-files-style fonts that are an empty cliche of “edginess,” I turned to the mechano-corporate precision of the IBM Selectric-era fonts: serifs like Courier, Prestige Elite, and my favorites, the sleek sans-serif Letter Gothic and Script, the “handwriting” of the can-do-no-wrong IBM of the 60’s and 70’s.Che Sera
Doin’ it for the children of the revolution: Malick’s directing
another movie before these kids graduate from college.
Production is set for four months, starting in July–this July, 2004– for Terrence Malick’s next film, Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as the world’s most logo-friendly marxist. Malick’s writing and directing. Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh (I thought he was taking a year off?) will produce the $40 million picture, which comes–if you calculate by Malick-Time– almost 14 years ahead of schedule (i.e., six, not twenty years after his last movie, The Thin Red Line).
[a Guardian/ Variety story.]
Stop-Action Knitting
[via Fimoculous] Michel Gondry’s new video for Steriogram is all stop-action knitting. There’s a little too much Peter Gabriel going on, but the shots where the band’s watching a knitted movie are brilliant.
It reminded me of a piece at the Whitney’s “Into the Light” exhibit of American video art, Anthony McCall’s 1973 Line Describing A Cone, where a projected image of a circle created a cone of light in the smoke-filled gallery.
I just watched all Gondry’s videos, and I must say, they made me a little tired. The White Stripes Lego video is probably my favorite. The transposition of filmspace onto flat lego boards is pretty ingenious. There’s some of that, with knitting in perspective, etc., in the Steriogram video, too.
[update: it didn’t occur to me to add a link to buy the Steriogram CD until an hour later.]All 5,201 WTC Memorial Competition Submissions Online
Mark Wahlberg‘s proposal is here, and here is Ross Bleckner‘s. John Bennett‘s and Paul Myoda‘s separate proposals (they did the Tribute in Light). Mark Dion, Brian Tolle (he did the Irish Hunger Memorial in BPC).
Here’s Antoine Predock, Arquitectonica. Peter Walker (who got it anyway, just not with this proposal). Marc Quinn (whose show just closed at Mary Boone, and the last Englishman to hear of Olafur Eliasson).
Here are proposals by Valerie Atkisson, Kara Hammond, and Jeff Jarvis, original members of our competition charette last June. I’ll be surfing for a while, it seems.
[update: In Friday’s NYT, David Dunlap talks to jurors about revealing all the submissions.]Antonioni’s Blow-Up now on DVD
It was just released today. Buy it or rent it now. There’s a commentary track by Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette, (author of The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni), but read J. Hoberman’s excellent contextual discussion of Blow-up in his latest book, The Dream Life instead.
New Yorker Stalking: Hilton Als’ Slate Diary
a little a lot of stroking. On Monday, while despairing reading Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, Als laments, “I feel as if I’ve lived through the Miramax years without ever taking a meeting with Harvey.” But by today, he’s gushing about dinner with Tilda Swinton at Odeon. (Hilton! You’re still livin’em, honey!)
Related: Passerby has started showing films by Derek Jarman (an early Swinton collaborator) on Monday nights at 9PM. Screenings in March and April may include appearances by other Jarmanites, so stay tuned for details.
Weird triangulation: the bartender/partner once wrote a Slate journal about a “Mormon art collector’s wedding party” at Passerby.On a Soundtrack for the Street
Our (Film) Town, or Pale-Cheeked Pinkos
At the agressively but unsurprisingly unconventional Filmbyen, VT and The Eel insist on various musical and flag-raising rituals and on keeping alive whatever of their communist ideals they can. We’re talking actual, card-carrying communists here, not Fox News slash-and-burn invective-style communists.
And on public nudity. Wise has a hard time maintaining eye contact: “Like ourselves and the rest of the pool’s other patrons Vinterberg is wearing a swimming costume, but Jensen and Von Trier just whip off their clothes and dive in. Jensen’s genitalia are on full display and we escape with just a glimpse of Von Trier’s pallid bottom.” What follows is a discussion Von Trier’s long, hard, sweaty…process of writing, working with actors, and making his latest film, Dogville.
[Dogville opened this weekend in London (and which comes to the US in early April). See Philip French’s dazed Observer review, or the official Dogville UK site.]
While I have nothing to add about communist genitalia, I have seen Dogville and will write about it soon.Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Film Forum
Ever since 1992, when I stumbled, completely ignorant and unprepared, into a screening of the restored version introduced by Agnes Varda (“she does documentaries or something, right?” was all I had in my head), I’ve been transfixed and fascinated by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
It’s an unabashed-yet-triste story of young love, set in a color-saturated fantasy French town, about a girl left pregnant and alone when her mechanic boyfriend gets shipped off to the war in Algeria. And the whole thing is sung, to music by Michel Legrand. Cherbourg made Catherine Deneuve a star, even though her voice was dubbed. What the hell is this thing? I still don’t know, but I love it.
Go to Film Forum by Thursday to find out. Zeitgeist Films has struck a new 35mm print for the movie’s 40th anniversary. You could buy the old DVD, or wait until April for a new release, but seriously, go see it in the theater. Read Jessica Winter’s tribute to the film.
General Washington and the Trenton of Doom
Hey, I give it points for being the first book in ten years not to have a paragraph-long subtitle that tries to sound like a movie pitch. And what is Ellis’s highest praise?
Shoppertainment links:
Buy Washington’s Crossing before they put out the movie tie-in edition, with Mel Gibson as Washington.
Oh, wait. They already made that movie.
Then buy Band of Brothers(a Spielberg joint), and imagine Bastogne as Trenton, which it probably is. The Trenton of Belgium, anyway.
[update: for those who lack the patriotism to invest $89.99 for the BoB DVD, you can also rent it. Except that GreenCine doesn’t ship to Canada. Pinko.]WBWJU?
James Caviezel, who plays the Gibsonian version of Jesus Christ, broke The Master’s injunction about keeping the Sabbath Day holy by flacking unto the NASCAR masses for The Passion It was more Event in The Press Tent than Sermon on The Mount; there was a The Passion baseball cap where a crown of thorns should be.
The real miracle of Daytona Sunday, though, comes from the Good Book of indie film marketing: Gibson rendered some serious Caesars unto Bobby Labonte’s Interstate Battery team and got The Passion logo on the hood of his Chevy.
