Author: greg

First, Movies in DC, now Making Movies in Miami

I see through fellow Best NY Blog nominee Lockhart Steele‘s feeble ruse to get me to post more non-NYC stuff. Even as I’m powerless to thwart it.
Tommy Ryk’s documentary, Work Sucks, I’m Going Skiing follows the antics of a New York hotel developer in South Beach. No story there, folks. Throw a rock in SoSoHo (as I called it in 1990, when then-friend Tony Goldman put me up in the Park Central) and you’ll hit a New York hotel developer.
No, Ryk’s film is about The Creek, a hostel-turned-hotel, full of wacky young artists, guests, and contractors. It opens at the Made in Miami Film Festival. According to this Herald article, Ryk was hired to shoot web video of artists redoing the guestrooms, but instead turned his cameras on guests who stayed on to help renovate; ersatz security guards auditioning for porn flicks, a cast of characters you could never write without sounding like Weekend at Bernie’s III.

This isn’t gonna help me win “Best NY Blog…”

But what can I do? It’s Kieslowski. The Decalogue is playing at the AFI Silver Theater in DC, starting tomorrow (through 1/22). The marathon back-to-back screening of all ten episodes on Saturday includes, inexplicably, the only screenings of episodes I-IV.
This was probably my last chance to see Decalogue uninterrupted in theaters for the next 15 years, give or take a month. And to think, I just found out about it. Well, maybe you should just watch them on DVD like me.
Salt in the wound: Sunday is a back-to-back showing of the Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, and Red, too.

NPR on Mormon Cinema: All is [Not] Well

Howard Berkes is doing a story on NPR right now about Mormon Cinema. It ranges from the all in-joke Singles Ward to soundbites from the self-proclaimed “Mormon Spielberg,” Richard Dutcher, to the promise of the festival-friendly ” Saints and Soldiers.
I’ve never seen any of these Mo-Mo Movies, but a friend bought the feature rights to an LDS-related documentary, and a novel I’m optioning has a Mormon angle. For my money, you can’t beat the doctrinal and educational films the Church itself produced in the 60’s and 70’s. I said as much in an onair discussion with Dutcher on KUER, the local Utah NPR affiliate. In that hour-long program last fall, the host managed to avoid any mention of the most critically acclaimed Mormon filmmaker, Neil LaBute, whose films show (to my religious eye) an awareness of the Mormon moral topography, but whose R-ratings keep more doctrinaire believers from ever seeing them.
Anyway, my gut tells me a movie has to be good before it’s Mormon; if Dutcher wants to be a Mormon Spielberg, more power to him, but that’s just aiming for the middle(brow).
The piece wraps up with a rock cover of Come, Come Ye Saints, a classic pioneer hymn, which, doesn’t have the power of the punk rock version of that Sunday school staple, Give Said The Little Stream. It was from the high school band that inspired the movie, SLC Punk (another film that goes unmentioned, btw).

Rethinking the Food Pyramid

a DC installation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' untitled (do it), made with 180 lbs of locally produced candy, image: greg.org
close-up of FG-T untitled (do it) in DC, 180 lbs of Goetze's Caramel Cremes, which are produced in Baltimore, image: greg.org

We just switched DC apartments (Cleveland Park, because you can walk, but if you think that’s a subway…don’t get me started), but I figured anyone who’s moved before doesn’t need to read the tedia (2 or more tediums?) that entails. In addition to the headaches, like not having furniture, needing to repaint, being waitlisted for indoor parking, there’s the inevitable stomach ache that comes from having a 180-lb pile of locally produced candy in the corner, well within armslength. [For DC, I took that to mean Goetze’s Caramel Creams, which is technically from Baltimore.]
I’ve eaten so much today, it looks like a 130-lb pile. And to top it off, now I have to paint around it. Priorities, people. Priorities.

John Cage Weekend at Barbican Centre

Score for John Cage's 4-33, image: guardian.co.uk[via Kultureflash] John Cage Uncaged is a weekend of performances, films and discussions (“and mushrooms!”) at Barbican Hall.
Cage symphony performances are rare enough to make them not-to-be-missed events. Highlights: Friday’s BBC Orchestra concert, “Cage in his American Context,” (which will include the first UK radio performance of Cage’s most famous work, 4’33”) and Saturday’s Musiccircus, a happening-within-a-happening which gets an annoyingly giddy description “Bassoons in the bars, flutes in the foyers and, who knows, you might even find a tuba in the toilet!”
You can buy tickets or a weekend pass, but for my money, I’m sticking to the radio. Here’s BBC3’s program schedule for Friday (that’s GMT, don’cha know):
19:25 John Cage Uncaged: Cage In His American context, Part One
20:20 Cage on Cage, interviews from the BBC Archives
20:40 John Cage Uncaged: Cage In His American context, Part Two
21:30 A discussion of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story
22:00 John Cage Piano (including works by Feldman, Wolff, Schoenberg)
12/16 update: The Guardian collects Cage-related recollections and discussions by composers and artists, including Martin Creed’s very Cage-y “I want what I want to say to go without saying.”

Mike Mills, How did you get your f*&%ing awesome job?

[via TMN] Considering the number Google searches I still get for Mike Mills, two years after I posted about his Jack Spade-sponsored documentary, Paperboys, and considering how tight Spike, Sofia, Roman and I have become since then, I should be sitting down with Mills myself.
In the mean time, check out Readymade’s interview with Mills, whose feature debut, Thumbsucker, is based on the novel by the less-Mormon-than-I-am-but-more-Mormon-than-you-are Walter Kirn.
Paperboys is now on DVD, but I like my VHS copy in its Spade-y little box.

Revised WTC Memorial design leaked a day early

Slightly unauthorized rendering of the WTC Memorial, image: lmdc, nytimes.comAfter a German press agency forgot to attach an embargo notice to them, the NY Times published images of the heavily revised Arad/Walker design for the World Trade Center Memorial a day early. There are quite a few changes.
Perhaps the most significant is the addition of a large (60-100,00SF, 1.5-2.5x the tower footprints themselves) underground space to house artifacts from the attacks.
But that’s not all: Access to the 30′ high space is via a ramp along the exposed slurry wall. From within the space, visitors can look down 40′ to the foundations of the towers. That puts the newly treed park at street-level. Most of Libeskind’s original cultural buildings have either been eliminated or relocated. And it’s not finished yet; jurors describe this design as but “one more stage of memory.”
It’s worth waiting to examine the design in detail, but it feels like it’s trying to accommodate almost every criticism that arose during the guideline and selection process. Which may be why the jury picked Arad’s design in the first place: only the most pared down concept could support all the additions they foresaw. Nice idea, but can it work?

The Leonard Riggio Spiral Jetty Visitor’s Center, Valet parking to the right

Well, not yet. But after years of drought, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is so visible (and walkable), it’s getting so many visitors, the Dia Center is thinking: upgrades. Making the bone-jarring road more accessible; maybe adding some rocks here and there; getting it up out of the water so those pesky salt crystals don’t form on it anymore. As Michael Govan, the Dia’s director, notes, “The spiral is not as dramatic as when it was first built. The Jetty is being submerged in a sea of salt.”
“What we’re conceiving is an exciting, interactive, immersive Spiral Jetty experience. It’ll be educational, and entertaining. With the lake’s salt level where it is right now, you just float. You can’t actually immerse. We’re talking to some of the governor’s economic development folks about fixing that, though. They’re in Salt Lake. And IMAX. Can you imagine Smithson’s movie in IMAX? Oh, and we gotta fix that fence over there.”
Okay, I made that last paragraph up. Basically, all that’s happening is, they’ve surveyed the site, and they realize the Jetty won’t survive if 2,000 people walk across it every year. One potential benefit of rebuilding Spiral Jetty: Journalists might stop pretending it’s missing.
Related: Dia, the Baedeker for the Contemporary Art Grand Tour [bonus non sequitur: post includes the sole remaining excerpts from Plum Sykes’ outline for Bergdorf Blondes]
Update: check out John Perrault’s commentary at ArtsJournal In 25-words or less: “I knew Smithson. Smithson was kinda a friend of mine. A reconstituted Jetty, sir, is no Robert Smithson.”

It’s an honor to be nominated, or NYMag debuts “Survivor: The Blogroll Edition”

Ahh, remember back in 2003, when turning up on someone’s blogroll elicited nothing but warm fuzzies? Leave it to the new I-bankin’ regime at New York Magazine to turn blogrolling into a competitive sport. Spiers is cackling with evil delight from the head of her table.
I’m afraid if there’s a weblog equivalent of Sweeps Week programming, I ain’t got it. At best, I’m IFC to Gawker‘s Fox; Sundance to Gothamist‘s NBC; Jon Favreau to Jarvis‘s Aaron Brown; James Lipton to Aaron‘s that guy from Full Frontal Fashion. I’d better start drafting my congratulations speech now.
Update: At Lowculture, Matt shows that even if I’m concept here, he’s execution. Check out their “if weblogs were cable channels.” There, now the loop is complete.

On “In What Language,” a Different Kind of Airport Music

I’m listening to the composer Vijay Iyer and poet/rapper Mike Ladd discuss their collaborative song cycle, “In What Language,” on WNYC’s Soundcheck. It explores the inner lives and thoughts of people in international airports, and it rocks.
Iyer and Ladd composed the multi-layered, improvisational music/vocal suite in response to the experience of an Iranian filmmaker who was detained, harassed and deported at JFK a couple of years ago.
The first scene of my first short, Souvenir (November 2001), is in Charles deGaulle, where the new security rules spur the story into action (such as there is). Clearly, I’m pre-wired to like “In What Language,” which was first performed in May at the Asia Society, and is out on CD, the launch of which is being celebrated at Joe’s Pub Jan. 20.

Fake Documentary-making in The Court of The 5th Baron of Saling-in-Essex

Christopher Guest talks at length with the Guardian‘s Richard Grant about the incredible levels of authenticity required for making fake documentaries.
Hilarious anecdotes from This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind ensue. If Grant’s right when he calls it “the funniest film ever made,” the DVD of Spinal Tap is twice that funny; the outtakes and deleted scenes are easily as long and as good as the original version. A Mighty Wind opens next week in the UK.
Oh, and Jamie Lee Curtis says she gets better dinner reservations when she calls herself Baroness Haden-Guest. I’m sorry, but is that something you actually call yourself? Isn’t that why you employ a herald? I need to check with some titled friends on that and get back to you.

will delete post for multi-picture deal

So this is what you get if you don’t buy New York magazine. On Monday, Elizabeth “The Kicker” Spiers plants a swift one right in Harvey Weinstein’s buttcheek. Fearing that Peter Biskind’s new book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, was not getting the attention it deserves*, Spiers posted excerpts where Wenstein went all Kurtz on a pair of NY Observer reporters in Nov. 2000. Apparently, Headlockee Andrew Goldman was so traumatized by the encounter he, um, went to work for Talk Magazine. The Horror, The Horror, indeed.
Well, Spiers needn’t have feared. D&D‘s getting decent attention; The Observer reviews it, but without mentioning their employee’s cameo appearance in a Weinsteinian headlock. And over at GreenCine, David puts the book–and Biskind’s career–in compelling context. He also points to IndieWIRE’s review, by Eugene Hernandez, who uncovers the essence of D&D by contrasting it with Biskind’s earlier history of the 70’s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

…Those familiar with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls will notice a different approach to this decade. It is not about the films, it is about the business of the movies, that’s the story that, according to Biskind, defined the 90s. “This is a distribution and marketing story.

Net net: buy it for the in-depth insight gleaned from hundreds of interviews, read it for the tawdry gossip.
* Update: Some crank named Frank Rich writes about Down and Dirty Pictures in the NYT A&L. And via GreenCine, Sean Means safely predicts that the book’ll be “prime topic of cocktail-party conversation at the [Sundance Film] Festival.” I think he means the coverage of the book.

Yet Another “Largest Film Ever Edited on Final Cut Pro”

On another site, the headline would read, “Walter Murch edits Cold Mountain, but on MacCentral, the headline is “Final Cut Pro used to edit Cold Mountain.”
Posthouse DigitalFilmTree set Murch up on four full FCP stations and several PowerBook-based “satellite stations, ” which they used when there was massive amounts of footage. DVD Studio Pro was used to burn and distribute the dailies to everyone, and special effects went back and forth for review via Quicktime.
Apple, thankfully, lets Murch–who is an editing legend, if for no other reason than surviving the year-long torture that was editing Apocalypse Now–do most of the talking. If you like that interview, you should definitely read his book, In the Blink of An Eye, which recounts some Apocalypse Now tales while exploring the theory of why editing works in the first place.
Related: Murch also praised FCP for enabling him to give his assistants experience editing professionally shot material. In a sidebar on Apple.com and an article at Post Magazine, he explains how he’d create tutorials with dailie and his notes, and let the kids have a go at it. Nice work if you can get it.
And if that’s not enough for you, check out Millimeter’s detailed article on Cold Mountain‘s workflow, including putting 600,000 feet of film into the shared storage/access system; creating change lists and synching FCP with post-production sound tools (both challenges which the new FCP4.0 addresses handily. time to upgrade, I guess); and color-correcting. After all that, you, too will be able to finish a $130 million Romanian epic. But by the time you raise the money, the whole process’ll be available on a laptop.