Category: making movies

The debut live performance of Pierre Huyghe’s puppet opera was last week at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier’s only building in the US.
While it’s not quite a review, Ann Wilson Lloyd’s report in the Times gives more details of the production/exhibition, which runs through April 2005.
The synopsis: it’s Team America: World Police meets Adaptation meets My Architect.
Says Huyghe,

“I found myself in the same position as Le Corbusier,” he said recently, “of someone invited to do a project and formalize it in a specific context. I felt overwhelmed by the conditions of this predefined context. Then I found this book by Sekler and Curtis, and I realized it was a parallel situation. The difficulty in coming up with an idea became the idea.”

A Puppet Opera at Harvard Channels Le Corbusier [NYT]
Previously: Team France Harvard Opera Police

Jason’s got some discussion/speculation about Wes Anderson’s so-far monogamous relationship with Futura in his films, which continues into The Life Aquatic.
Futura and Wes Anderson [kottke.org]
Related:
new The Life Aquatic trailers at Apple.com
Talk about control: Anderson’s next project is stop-action animation (what, no puppets?)

Sorry, your entire Sunday morning isn’t enough. Now the NYT Arts & Leisure section wants your whole weekend. Jan 7-9, 2005, to be precise, far enough in advance that you can’t pretend you have something else planned.
Some program highlights:
Sat (1/8), 6:00-7:15 p.m.
“Bigger Roles, Smaller Films” Patricia Clarkson and Hilary Swank tell rockstar editor Jodi Kantor what it’s like to work with Katie Holmes, [“that Oscar-nom-less little scene-stealer.”]
Sunday (1/9), 4:00-5:15 p.m.
“The Prophet of a New Modern Architecture”
Nicolai “Herbie Who?” Ouroussoff interviews Rem Koolhaas. Doesn’t say who they’re talking about. Huh.

Is it a Hollywood perk trend, or just a by-product of working at The Directors Bureau? Whichever, director/artist Mike Mills is the latest auteur to attain that most incongruous of filmmaking achievements: his own blindingly trendy store in Tokyo.
Humans by Mike Mills, located in Harajuku, right by the massive Roppongi Hills comples, is actually a “store cum gallery” [eww. there goes my Net Nanny rating…] and “more a conceptual experience than a shopping trip,” according to Casa BRUTUS, one of a million Paper-like magazines in Japan.
From the limited Japanese writeups I’m finding, that means t-shirts, cd’s, and window installations by the likes of Susan Cianciolo and her Japanese doppelgangers.
From Mills’s Humans Manifesto: “I don’t trust people who are very articulate. The only way to be sane is to embrace your insanity. When you feel guilty about being sad, remember Walt Disney was a manic depressive. Everything I said could be totally wrong.”
Yep, sounds great, now get back to work.
Humans by Mike Mills near-empty official site, Casa BRUTUS mention, and 06/2004 launch week info (in Japanese)
The Directors Bureau
Coincidence? Fellow TDB’er Sofia Coppola’s Japanese fashion line, Milk Fed
Related Mike Mills posts on greg.org

Now! From television’s acknowledged experts in adultery, profanity, lying, and covetousness!
According to Variety, FX SVP Gerard Bocaccio dreamed up the concept for ‘The Ten Commandments,’ a series of 10 one-hour TV movies which will “explore the spiritual and moral issues faced by modern America.”
Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Section Eight will exec produce, and the two will be joined by eight other “A-list directors [sic, Clooney’s A-list? how about ‘up-and-coming’? Seriously, people],” and each will tackle a commandment.
I wonder who gets “Thou shalt not steal?”
Related:
FX gets serious about Bible study [Variety, via Yahoo, thanks to GreenCine]
Read like a million posts about Kieslowski’s Decalogue, a ten-hour made-for-TV exploration of the spiritual and moral issues faced by modern America Poland.

“Artists from Abbas Kiarostami to Shirin Neshat to Ousmane Sembene have confronted the misogyny of conservative Islam in ways that are at once more damning and less willfully profane.”
Still, just because it was at once outrageously incendiary and a lackluster piece of filmmaking, it’s still chilling and despicable that Van Gogh was killed for Submission.

The Day I Became a Martyr: Islam Protest Brings Fatal Fatwa [Village Voice]
Related: greg.org entries for Theo Van Gogh

Fimoculous has an excellent collection of articles, interviews [including Rex’s own], and links for the premiere last week of Chuck Olsen’s film/site/project Blogumentary . Check it out.
Blogumentary [mitochondria at fimoculous]
Blogumentary production blog

From the team who ruined BMWFilms.com comes a new collection of dependent shorts, just in time for the holidays. Amazon Theater is a series of five short films “featur[ing] products you can purchase at Amazon.”
Someone’s not getting it in a very deep way. On paper, Amazon Theater should be an ad/film/shoppertainment convergence dream-come-true:

“Definitely available” actors, Minnie Driver, Daryl Hannah, Chris Noth, and Blair Underwood (now rebranded as “Amazon Theater celebrities”)

A database of every product every one of your customers has looked at or bought over the last eight years

Credit card financing [very indie, especially for shorts]

Unlimited bandwidth
…and a whole mess of directors named Scott: Ridley, Tony, Jordan, Jake.
The films include clickable shopping credits, both for featured and “celebrity products,” but it only goes so far. Whether that makes it half-ass, or just ass, I can’t say.
Take the first short, “Portrait,” an at-once vapid and cynical Heathers-meets-Shallow Hal “fable” which finally answers the best-forgotten question, what did Amanda’s agency on Melrose Place actually create? You can buy the skinny villainess’s corporate bitchwear, but for the cruelly written loser fatchick’s blouse, you’ll have to go to QVC. Annd there’s no link to the dinnerplates she’s constantly eating off of–at work, in her boss’s office–even though they’re on sale, 47% off, for $79.99. Once you unpack it, the story turns on a snide conversation about reading spam, which includes a mention of “bayesian filters”, but there’s no “Spam for Dummies” tie-in. And while they offer Sephora makeup “used in the film,” they ignore the mall-makeover studio, Glamourshots which is the story’s manipulative McGuffin.
Seriously, Amazon Theater is to short films what a hole is to a donut. Or what a donut is to a diabetic. Or what a brain is to the marketing exec who greenlighted this thing. Can’t wait to see how the Chris Noth one turns out.
Shopporrifying links:
“Enjoy the exclusive films in Amazon Theater, our holiday gift to you.”
Buy this Fiestaware Periwinkle 16-piece Dinnerware set for your pathological office binges!
Beauty pageant makeup can reveal your inner worth! Shop at Sephora, or go to the portrait studio at the mall!
[via fimoculous]

Scott MacMillan has a wide-ranging, disturbing roundup of the violent aftermath of Theo Van Gogh’s murder and public cremation, including the 5-hour standoff–complete with gunfire and grenades–with militant terrorist suspects in The Hague.
[Slate] Holland in Flames
Religious violence and terror arrests stun the Netherlands in the aftermath of filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder.

Huh, what’re the odds? I just finished a piece for an offline publication about machinima, and the first thing I see at this year’s Margaret Mead Documentary Festival is Beyond Manzanar, a video game-based exploration of the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and political attitudes toward Iranian Americans during the 1979-80 hostage crisis. It was created by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.
Fortunately, America has moved beyond the dark era of racially based policies, into the crystal clear dawn of religion- and nationality-based detention and discrimination. Why not celebrate our progress this Saturday?

Beyond Manzanar, presented somehow at 4:15, Sat. 11/13 at the AMNH
Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, Nov. 11-14 and 20-21, at the American Museum of Natural History
Beyond Manzanar‘s site
Ansel Adams’ photographs of Manzanar and its internees

ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
Related:
Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
Related:
Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

No, that doesn’t mean they’re now recruiting Bush dodgers. It means they’re promoting the country as an up-and-coming alternative location for film production. Here’s a partial list of benefits to shooting in Iceland:

At least four months a year, you don’t have to shoot “day for night”.

Another four months, there’s 18 hours of sunlight.

You remember how Tribeca was just starting out, and you’d always see Bobby taking meetings at Tribeca Grill? Reykjavik’s like that, except that it’s Sigurjon Sighvatssonn.

On the weekend, the whole place parties like rockstars.

Fewer Bjork sightings than shooting in Brooklyn.

You can scout a location one day, and when you go to shoot the next, it’s gone. Something about the weather. [wtf?]

Whatever. Iceland will rebate 12% of your in-country production costs, and without demanding a part for their new wife.
In Iceland, Freeze Frame Takes on New Meaning [NYT]
There it is in black & white at The Invest in Iceland Agency.