I’m working on a couple of new features, or Features, interviews with some interesting filmmakers.
Greencine must know that, because they’re throwing up so many interesting filmmaking reads, including:
Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester’s Getting Away With It: Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw,
and Lawrence Grobel’s Above the Line: Conversations about the Movies
. Read an Austin Chronicle review for excerpts.
Author: greg
Euan’s baby announcement on Gawker
Congratulations to Euan and Lucy on their new baby, who’ll have a helluva time fitting his name into application forms for anything: Heathcliff Felix Alistair Euan Rellie.
As for the distinction of being the first baby reported on Gawker, well, that speaks for itself. To schedule a playdate with little Heathcliff, check out his Friendster account, or drop by the SoHo House nursery.
Santiago Calatrava to design WTC Station?? That Rocks.
In the NYT, Ed Wyatt reports that the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has been selected to design the train station at the World Train Center site. Now we’re gettin’ somewhere. [Finally, Herbert Muschamp weighs in, too, and favorably.]
I’ve been a huge fan of Calatrava’s sensual combination of organic form and hardcore engineering since seeing his competition-winning proposal for the Cathedral of St John The Divine in 1991, something of a departure from the train stations and bridges which have long been Calatrava’s specialties.
The bridges were an inspiration for my own impulsive Pentagon Memorial sketch. And the philosophy that led to his being selected to create the Times Capsule would be a welcome addition to the WTC rebuilding dialogue.
What began as an off-hand suggestion turned into an elaborate, thoughtful exploration of what should be preserved for a thousand years, and how, practically, to preserve it. Rather than bury it (and hope people will find it –and open it– on schedule, the capsule advisors suggested creating something attractive enough to draw people to it in any age. “Beauty might be its own defense,” they figured. Counting on at least some degree of continuity in human civilization over the next 1,000 years, the Times noted, “Ultimately, we are throwing in our lot with culture.” Sometimes, I wonder if that idea’s already ancient history.
Learn it, know it, live it.
Gigli is getting some The Postman– and Battlefield Earth-scale bad reviews. In the Times, for example, A.O. Scott compares it to a Project Greenlight production.
It’s directed by Martin Brest, whose last film was the glacial Meet Joe Black, (which I affectionately call Architectural Digest: The Movie). It was 20 years ago, but Brest did make Beverly Hills Cop, so go figure.
And, oddly, he’s in the morgue scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is on my DVD at this very moment. Of course, practically everyone was in that movie, as it turns out. Seriously. check out the cast.
Some thoughts after watching Fast Times for the first time in over a decade:
1. We haven’t–and I’m not saying this in a Judge Reinhold kind of way–we haven’t seen nearly enough of Phoebe Cates lately.
2. Fast Times, Dead Man Walking and The Thin Red Line. We’re No Angels, Shanghai Surprise and (the mawkish Ernest Borgnine chapter of) 11’09”01. Is Sean Penn really just a man?
3. At business school, I ordered pizza during a 4-hour marketing final one evening, a move which yielded me lasting, but dubious, acclaim.
The symmetry is too good to pass up
Why I Hate DC just turned up on Aaron’s site, and then David Ross just forwarded me I HATE New York City. Thanks to weblogs, I can now hate wherever I live, which is very convenient.
One thing I hate about DC: They take forever to tow a car, which means wrecked or abandoned cars line the roads, Mad Max-style.
New York, on the other hand, tows your car almost instantly, even if you just run into the post office for a few minutes. Bastards.
“Punch-Drunk Love is less a story than it is a poem”
How’d I miss this? GreenCine has a lyrical article/review about Punch-Drunk Love, PT Anderson, and Jeremy Blake, by Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run and Heaven.
Punch-Drunk Love is FINALLY available on DVD, by the way. And it includes Blossoms & Blood, a short Paul and Jeremy made with John Brion’s music, which was previously only available to friends and family. And people on Paul’s Valentine’s Day card list.
INT – NYC PROMOTIONAL MERCHANDISE SHOWROOM/COPY STORE, DAY
A bustling Manhattan mid-day. A female EVENTS PLANNER, 30 years old, shoulder-length brown hair, Barney’s Label sleeveless blouse and pantsuit, stands at a glass display counter. She shops for silkscreenable trinkets with which to reward attendees for an impending business conference. A mid-30’s SALES ASSOCIATE with not-so-recently applied blonde highlights makes smalltalk as she retrieves digital clocks and desk caddies for consideration.
SALES ASSOCIATE
Do you like your job?
EVENTS PLANNER
Wha–? Oh– sure.
It’s been so hectic lately.
SALES ASSOCIATE
What is your exact title?
EVENTS PLANNER
(hesitant, slightly confused) I plan special events.
SALES ASSOCIATE
Ah, so you’re not in actual public relations, then.
EVENTS PLANNER
(getting up to speed, but not jumping fully into the conversation) No, I only do special events.
This one’s been real tough. To get everything pulled together… And I worked through the weekend…
SALES ASSOCIATE
Oh, I know. I’ve had a rough few days, too.
I have breast cancer.
Ugh. It should be called “American Publishers Yawn at Foreign Fiction”
In the NYT, Stephen Kinzer easily pulls some horrible quotes from major publishers about how Americans don’t want to read books translated into English. From a marketing hack at Harcourt: “We [Americans] are into accessible information. We often look for the story, rather than the story within the story. We’d rather read lines than read between the lines.” And from a hack at Hyperion: “The hard fact is that given the reality of the world, we [Americans] simply don’t have to be concerned about Laos, but people there might well want to be or have to be concerned about America.”
Granted, it’s not literature, but if a webful of kids can translate Harry Potter in German in two weeks [read Kottke comments here], why can’t the world of people who don’t work for ridiculous publishers start bubbling these things to the top and translating them collaboratively? Just to see what sticks.
If I were Jeff Jarvis, I’d say this was a project for webloggers.
Familiar Stranger and Digital Patina
_small.jpg)
Anne Galloway‘s on a roll these days. Until this Fall, I can’t say exactly why I find her posts about Intel Research Lab Berkeley’s Eric Paulos’ work so highly relevant just now. I can say that it’s very heartening to find an affinity with someone so smart and forward-thinking.
What the hell am I talking about? First is the social phenomena of the Familar Stranger, the people that you (don’t) meet/ when you’re walking down the street/ the people that you (don’t) meet each day. Second is Paulos’ interest in what he calls a “digital patina,” a layer of information, laid over a physical space that communicates what/who has come before. Paulos suggests RFID technology might make this possible.
Dreamworks swears by CG, swears off hand-drawn animation
According to a NYTimes article on the recent poor performance of several expensive, hand-drawn animation films, and the success of such CG films as Pixar’s Finding Nemo, Dreamworks (with voice provided by animaster Jeffrey Katzenberg) is calling hand-drawn animation “a thing of the past.”
Another nugget of apparently accepted wisdom: as the poor box office of Sinbad, Treasure Planet, and Titan A.E. demonstrates, animated action films targeted at boys will fail. Hmm. Or else, these three films blew chunks. As Final Fantasy showed, you can make a bad action movie with CG, too.
The major studio solution, comedies and sequels (Shrek 2, anyone?), betrays the blockbuster mentality that’s ruining live action films, while ignoring the world where action and animation are thriving: anime. The gorgeously hand-animated, Oscar-winning Spirited Away cost only $12mm to produce and scored $10mm in US box office, $12mm in Europe, and like a hundred trillion dollars in Japan.
Animation can learn a lesson from both anime and indie producers. Danny Boyles’ horror/thriller 28 Days Later has earned $33 million in the US, performance which means failure for a $140m juggernaut like Treasure Planet. For a DV production with an $8 million budget, though, it signals wild success.
[update from Saturday’s NYT: animators Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt aren’t taking this studio lameness lying down. They’re touring The Animation Show around the country, setting out to drum up audience–and to make themselves the go-to guys–for indiemation.
And on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen basically gives you the audio version of this post.
Robert Rodriguez swears by HD video, swears off film
Wired interviews director/etc. Robert Rodriguez, a young master of the atypical production process, for the launch of his new film, Spy Kids 3-D. It’s less than a year since Spy Kids 2, when the NY Times‘ Rick Lyman looked at Rodriguez’s one-man-band approach to movies. (Director is only one of seventeen different credit categories in his imdb profile. More than almost any other director, a Rodriguez film is literally, a Rodriguez film.)
But yet he’s not really considered an auteur. Unlike more auteur-y directors (Steven Soderbergh comes to mind) who enjoy passionate followings among critics and film schoolers, Rodriguez’ vision is far less rarified. I mean, he sets out to make westerns, teen and kiddie movies. But he makes them well, he makes them profitably, and he makes major production innovations that should have a farther-reaching influence.
Here’s an early interview by John Connor, from just before El Mariachi‘s appearance at Sundance; not much has changed, it seems. Rebel Without a Crew, Rodriguez’s production diary from El Mariachi, is a modern, entertaining bible of the behind-the-indie-scenes genre.
[update: Maybe more like the bible than I intended. Making a feature for $7,000 is as tough to duplicate as feeding 5,000 with a fish. Indie filmmaker Felix suggests that anyone who reads Rebel Without A Crew should also read The Unkindest Cut, movie critic Joe Queenan’s hilarious failed attempt to replicate Rodriguez’s $7k feat.
Also, the Ed Park’s Voice review pegs Rodriguez for his “DIY monomania.” If his DVD commentaries are anything to go by, he may be to annoying to become a guru. ]
On Cows. No, Seriously. On Cows
[via WoosterCollective] Banksy, a prominent London street artist, has moved his work into a gallery for the weekend, and some people are pissed (in the American, not British, English sense of the word). Banksy tagged some live barnyard animals, and an animal rights protestor chained herself to the pen, temporarily leaving the foxes of England defenseless.
Meanwhile, in the US, when artist Nathan Banks painted words on the sides of cows and transcribed the poems they produced as they wandered the fields, no one raised an eyebrow.
For the calendar:
Souvenir January 2003: Euro remix
I’m off to the post office to launch a bundle of screener tapes of my second short, Souvenir January 2003, in the direction of festivals across the sea. This gives me a chance to see how my quiet meditation on ironing might go over with European audiences.
As it turns out, Steven Meisel, the king of the appropriationist school of fashion photography, has already ripped off my poignant little film and turned it into a rentboy-meets-La Jetee ad campaign for Versace. Combine this with the recent influx of beefcake on Gawker, and my mental shores are awash with waves of self-doubt about my (fully-clothed) original version. Should I have exposed more than my emotional self? Oh, and I need to go to the gym.
Meanwhile, in the land of Almodovar, on a new weblog, Republica de Catalombia, Mauricio writes intensely (and in Spanish) about his attempts to find ironing’s deeper meaning. “I have the smooth impression that if the Greeks, that wise civilization like no other, had had the superfluous whim to iron, the labor of Sisyphus would consist of starching perfectly and folding the Egyptian cotton tunics of the entire population of Mount Olympus, bought by Zeus from the Colossus of Rhodes.” [handcrafted Google translation]
Mauricio ends up going to the gym, too (Damn you, Steven Meisel!), starts ironing with abandon on a Sunday afternoon, and experiences a vision “as frightening as Vincent Price in a Corman film.”
Hmm. Rather than spend money on international postage, maybe I should splurge on the dry cleaners instead.
David Childs’ West Side Story
He’s the only architect listed on the Observer‘s Dec. 2000 list of Players in New York’s real estate game. Engineering a backroom takeover of the WTC rebuilding project may just be one step in David Childs’ larger plan: to 0wn the West Side of Manhattan. The site is in line–the Eighth Ave. subway, to be specific–with other major Childs’ projects in NYC:
33rd St: The New Penn Station, which has been widely praised. (image: pixelbypixel.com)
41st St: NYTimes Headquarters, a collaboration with Frank Gehry, who pulled out after creative disputes. (Daniel, are you reading this?) (image: guggenheim.org)
42nd St: 7 Times Square, good for spying on Conde Nast.
50th St: Worldwide Plaza (I bet the model looked great)
59th/Columbus Circle: AOLTW Center. ugh.
116th St: East Campus Towers at Columbia, which would’ve gone where the Law School now is.