Category: making movies

Documentary director Alison Chernick’s newest film, Matthew Barney: No Restraint, sounds like a must-see, and not just for the rare behind-the-scenes footage in includes from the set of the artist’s own latest production, Drawing Restraint 9. [That’s the new one. You know, the one with Bjork. The one shot on a Japanese whaling ship. The one that has people pretending sure, they knew what a flensing knife was before they read the production notes, didn’t you read Moby Dick or something? Same page here? Great, let’s move on.]
No, MB:NR offers some things even rarer in the Matthew Barney-verse: dialogue. explication. edits. time for dinner. [The docu runs an audience-friendly 70 minutes.] From the trailer, it looks like there are some thoroughly objective interviews with disinterested folks like Barney’s dealer, his curator, his Guggenheim director, and his employees. And the film is being distributed by Barney’s distributor, too, who must be considering this a kind of primer for Barney neophytes, a gateway drug, if you will, to vast vats of Vaseline.
But enough snark. I kid because I love, more or less. And I think MB:NR can provide some interesting insights into Barney’s process, if not exactly into his work. Which, given its sculptural, material, and experiential nature, is probably as close as you can get
expect to get.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint debuted at Berlin and in the US at Full Frame, and it’s continuing on the festival circuit. But The Walker Center is also screening the film next Thursday, May 25, at 8pm. See the WAC calendar for details and tickets.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint filmsite [matthewbarneynorestraint.com]
Previous Barneyana on greg.org

On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, John Anderson takes a look at the phenomenally large amount of work that Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put into making their seemingly artless, effortless films.
And he looks at the phenomenally small amount of money Palme d’Or winners seem to make from US theatrical distribution. [What he doesn’t look at, though, is how much films like this will be dependent on DVD sales and rentals to make their actual US money. I thought that DVD was the new Box Office for indie/foreign/specialty films.]
Cannes Gold Tarnishes in U.S. [nyt]

BBC3 produced and aired “Manchester Passion” Friday night, a live retelling of the Passion of Christ, that was set on the streets of Manchester and which featured music from local bands made good like Joy Division and Oasis.
The hype was definitely set: the Guardian published a lengthy article from the rehearsals. But I’ve heard precious little about how it actually turned out. Never mind finding any videos or torrents of the actual broadcast.
YouTube, is there anything you can’t do? So far, there are clips of Jesus singing “Love will tear us apart” at the Last Supper, and a Smiths/Morissey fest, Jesus singing “You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side”” and Judas singing “Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”
The production looks pretty raw and unplugged, a theater-on-the-fly mix of live event/procession and stage/set pieces. I cannot imagine in a million years that an American company would ever produce something like this. Instead, we get Mel Gibson.
Day that Jesus came to the Arndale Centre [guardian.co.uk]
Manchester Passion website at BBC3 [bbc.co.uk]
“Manchester Passion” on YouTube [youtube.com]

Iain Anderson’s Airport is an animated short film made entirely of AIGA-standard travel icons. Very cute.

Airport by Iain Anderson [funwithstuff.com via boingboing]

David’s a photographer–and the creator of the untouchably cool pre-pixellated logo clothing for reality TV contestants that burned through the blogs last week–who’s started a little series of 60-second [give or take] movies.
This one is of my favorite vista at Taniguchi’s MoMA, across the atrium to the floating staircase with the Matisse at the top and the Diebenkorn at the bottom. Very busy, that staircase.
60 Seconds in the Life of a Staircase [ironicsans.com]

Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear a guy talking about himself in a documentary and he utters the phrase, “Never in the history of advertising,” my BS detector goes haywire. Even if the rest of the sentence is, “has anyone thought to throw 250,000 balls down a San Francisco street.”
The Making Of minifeature for that Sony Bravia ad is interesting, but not as cool as the extended edit of the commercial itself, which isn’t as good as the 1min version. [crappy res on google video, lo- and hi-res on bravia-advert.com]
The making of was documented in realtime on flickr, seems like ages ago. [sepiatone at flickr]

You’re making a short story about a couple of gay, white trash shepherds into a movie. The story’s been optioned but undevelopable since it came out [sic]. In 2003-4, it looks like you might pull it together as “a low-budget, art house film, with no prospect of making any money,” but only if you can pull in some actual star power, which, considering the subject matter, is no small feat.
After all, only the bravest, most talented actors are willing to risk being typecast. Only artists of the utmost integrity would put their booming careers and hard-won status as a ladies’ man in jeopardy. What if, the reasoning goes, just because you play one in a couple of scenes, people assume you’re a selfish, mean-spirited, homophobic prick and never want to work with you again?
Deeply committed to their craft such an actor makes sacrifices, working tirelessly for weeks on end–OK, maybe a week of shooting, plus some foley time–for “economically unfavorable art film terms.” That means–unless his agent just stepped off the farm, too–that he takes deferrals and points on the backend instead of his typical eight-figure fees.
The movie gets made. It’s a critical darling and a surprise financial success. Everyone involved in the project basks in the glow of an important job well done, and they are gracious in public and private as their careers move to even greater heights.
At least that’s the way it goes with gay shepherd movies. For gay cowboy movies, some washed up bit player makes a lame-ass joke at the Golden Globes that falls completely flat, then he up and sues the producers of “movie laundering” by obtaining his oh-so-valuable services on the cheap by pretending to make a non-commercial film. The damages sought: $10 million-plus.
The moral of this story: nobody–but nobody–messes with Randy Quaid.

Randy Quaid Sues Over ‘Brokeback’ [tmz.com]

“I suddenly realized that exporting virtual items through the Internet is the same as transmitting Chinese labor to America.” That’s how the owner of a “gold farming” company in China explains his business in Chinese Farmers In Gamedom, a documentary-in-progress by
UCSD PhD candidate Ge Jin. The companies employ people to play video games all day in order to accumulate in-game gold or to build in-game equipment, which is then sold to American gamers for real money.
One entrepreneur talks about having to close his company down when complications with his borrowed Paypal account left him unable to sell his products on ebay.
Ge hears the gamers talk about work satisfaction and real vs. virtual worlds, but a stronger theme seems to be percieved hierarchy and exploitation. It turns out Chinese gamers find it insulting when thier American customers call them “farmers.” One company owner explains how his is, in fact, a service business. Ge splits the difference by calling the companies “computer workshops” in his captions.
Ge has posted a 6 min preview of Chinese Farmers In The Gamedom on YouTube. [youtube via wmmna]
Terra Nova has some excellent comments, including some from the filmmaker himself. [terranova]

JG Ballard writes in the Guardian about turning his childhood experiences and memories into Empire of the Sun, and then watching as Spielberg and co. turned his novel into a movie, and then watching as the movie and the book and the memories intermingle years later:Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live – and it’s now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp – the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg’s film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it’s all only a movie.

Look back at Empire [guardian.co.uk]

The trailer for A Scanner Darkly is up, and while it looks good–the rotoscope animation style is much tighter, and it coheres with a lot of the scenes and the vibe of the story–it’s clearly a chatty Linklater joint.
Plus, it looks like Robert Downey, Jr. figured that internalizing Henry Thomas, Jr.’s performance in Solaris was a good way to get this gig. And what can you say, but that he got it?
Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater [Warner Bros via boingboing]

Michael Winterbottom’s A Road To Guantanamo was produced for Channel 4, but they’re opening it like a film, too. Like a Soderbergh film called Bubble, to be specific. A simultaneous DVD, Theater, and–hold on–online release next month.
The film is a fantastical, unrealistic tale of some guys en route to a wedding who get swept up and dumped in Gitmo for two years, no questions asked. Then they’re released. How implausible is that?? Oh, wait. [via kultureflash]

It Happened Here is a 1966 documentary-style account of a Nazi occupation of Britain, made over the course of eight years of weekends by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. They were 18 and 16, respectively, when they started production.
All the accounts of the film describe the production design as fanatically authentic, and praise the evocation of its 1940 setting through a combination of montage, attention to mundane detail, and damningly plausible British political accommodation of fascism.
The movie is now out on Region 2 DVD, and Brownlow’s book, How It Happened Here, about the production and the controversy that swirled around the film, was reissued last year.

DVD’s of the week: It Happened Here [telegraph.co.uk via metafilter]

I will quote goldenfiddle in full on this one, and just say that, Francesco, I was wrong. You were right. Fake trailers to non-existent films are an art form after all:

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are teaming up to produce a bunch of fake trailers to non-existant kung-fu and sexploitation flicks, and maybe two short films that will suck to everybody except the directors themselves.

New “Grind” update [darkhorizons.com]
Previously: greg.org on Francesco Vezzoli and his Venice Biennale trailer for a non-existent remake of Caligula

Granted, I haven’t seen it yet, but isn’t that in the spirit of Winterbottom’s adaptation? Based on Tony Scott’s review, I’d say this one is a classic.