Category: making movies

It’s Not Just Derek Jarman’s Blue

From Peter Wollen’s essay on Jarman’s Blue, recently published in Paris/Manhattan and quoted at length on In Search of The Miraculous, one of Brian Sholis’s millions of projects:

However, there were more specific reasons for Jarman’s growing fascination with Klein. Jarman always had an ambivalent relationship with film and particularly, as we have seen, with television. Towards the end of his life he made it clear that he was only interested in films which were deeply personal, which were about the film-maker’s own life. Blue is just such an autobiographical film, dealing with Aids directly as an experience lived by its maker. Blue was the colour Jarman saw when eye-drops were put in his eyes in the hope of alleviating his blindness. Paradoxically, blindness allowed Jarman to see, beyond the distraction of images, directly into the realm of colour, as Yves Klein had wished. Aids was too important to Jarman for it to be represented by images.

Peter Wollen on Derek Jarman’s Blue [In Search of The Miraculous]
Buy Paris/Manhattan in paperback or hardcover [Amazon]
Buy the soundtrack to Blue and stare at VIDEO 2 on your TV. [Amazon]
How odd. I wrote about Blue almost this exact day two years ago.

Where’s the When NBA Fans Attack DVD?

“Brilliant! Best PowerPoint of The Year!” -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.
The Indianapolis Star has a play-by-play account of the investigation into the Pacers-fans brawl during the Detroit Pistons game Nov. 19. To announce charges against both fans and players, the prosecutor’s office in Pontiac, MI created an elaborate PowerPoint presentation full of witness quotes, video clips, and a breakdown of the incident.

My staff worked countless hours, and many nights past midnight,” Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca said. “I don’t know how much it cost, other than it being a helluva lot.”

Dude, you put all that on the DVD, along with the game footage of the shot itself, and even 0.001% of the Sportscenter commentary, and you’ll recoup your production costs in NO TIME.
Elaborate PowerPoint presentation culminated extensive brawl probe [IndyStar.com, via fimoculous]

All I Want For Christmas Is Stanley Kubrick’s Lens

In order to shoot interior scenes of Barry Lyndon entirely by candlelight, Stanley Kubrick had two extremely fast Zeiss photo lenses from NASA custom-adapted for a motion picture camera. There is a third Zeiss lens in existence, un-Kubricized, and Justin at Chromogenic would like it for Christmas, please. With a Nikon mount.
I don’t know if Justin has been naughty or nice, but he’s sure gotta be nicer than Vincent Gallo, who had–and tried to sell on ebay–another lens Kubrick had custom-built for Barry Lyndon, an Angenieux 20-to-1 zoom.
Speed Demon [Chromogenics.net, via Kottke]
Buy it and make something good with it [greg.org on gallo]
Two Special Lenses for “Barry Lyndon,” by Ed diGiulio (President, Cinema Products Corp.) [American Cinematographer, via Visual Memory]

Maxi Geil tonight at Joe’s Pub

maxigeil.gifUnlike that otherart rock band, Fischerspooner, Maxi Geil & PlayColt are actually still around. Also unlike FS, you might actually like hearing them play. [Other ways they differ from that flash in the 2002 pan: they’re smart, but not in a stupid way; knowing, but not in an annoying way; they actually perform, and not in a lipsynchy way; and they’re not tired; oh, and they don’t blowwww.]
Anyway, they’ve got a date coming up at their old haunt, Joe’s Pub, November 29th, so mark your calendars. WTH? That’s TONIGHT. [thanks for the heads up, Beck.] Screw your calendars, just go stand in line.
Maxi Geil & PlayColt site
[Oh, this is under “making movies” because, although she probably denies it now, MG&PC singer Rebecca Chamberlain was in my first film.]

Matthew Barney Gets A Brazilian

barney_lamina.jpg

For those who wondered how Matthew Barney was planning to top his five-part Cremaster Cycle…
For those who wondered, after watching The Cremaster Cycle, if Matthew Barney was really a top…
For those who want to top Matthew Barney yourself…
Have I got a site for you: CremasterFanatic.com
While there’s plenty of Cremaster-related material, including fan photos and videos [!!], I like the news section the best. It’s got reports on Barney’s latest film, de Lama Lamina, which opened last month at the Sao Paolo Biennial.
de Lama Lamina was shot documentary-style during this year’s Carnaval in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, on a Barney-created float surrounded by 1,000 Barney-clad samba dancers. Two actors representing deities from the local Candomble religion rode the float, a mud-covered clearcutting tractor hauling a torn up tree trunk.
Did someone say trunk? Since one role involved an “auto-erotic scene filmed under a slow-moving vehicle in an extremely confined set,” Barney’s people ran an ad, hoping to cast someone from local “porn/stuntman” stock. Yow, documentary-style indeed.
Links:
CremasterFanatic.com
Local Male Pornstars Wanted [AIN]

Working Title: Le Corbusier via Pierre Huyghe at Harvard

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

The NYT A&L Hegemony Continues

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.

Forget The Trailer; I Want A Japanese Retail Cult

humans_mike_mills.jpgIs 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

Fox Presents: Bocaccio’s Decalogue

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.

Dennis Lim Reviews Van Gogh’s Submission

“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

First, BMWFilms, now Amazon Theater

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]

    • Dutch Oven

    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.