Category: movies

Just say you’re going to an architecture film series.

If you’re in London this Father’s Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49′) of film and video works which “examine architecture’s complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states.” It will be shown at the Tate Modern, this Sunday at 15.00 (3:00 pm for the yanks). [via kultureflash]
Half of that time will be taken up by Jean Genet’s long-banned silent film, Un Chant d’Amour. It’s from 1950, the Eisenhower Era, when prison sex and erotic power-tripping guards was still considered an import, not an export, in the US.
It’s one of the landmarks of gay cinema [the DVD Times UK translates: “it contains possibly the earliest images of erect penises seen on a cinema screen.”]. The film influenced Derek Jarman, inspired Todd Haynes’ Poison, and lives on in every Calvin Klein perfume commercial you can think of.
Whether you take your father with you is none of my affair.

Michael and Ingar, from Louisiana, via tate.org.uk
And they look so innocent…Elmgreen (l) and Dragset (r)

Related: Press coverage and reviews of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibit at the Tate Modern through July 4th. They created a tiny animatronic sparrow which appears to be stunned and dying after flying into the window. Favorite stupid quote: “It took two artists to design the sparrow.”

Just say you’re going to an architecture film series.

If you’re in London this Father’s Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49′) of film and video works which “examine architecture’s complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states.” It will be shown at the Tate Modern, this Sunday at 15.00 (3:00 pm for the yanks). [via kultureflash]
Half of that time will be taken up by Jean Genet’s long-banned silent film, Un Chant d’Amour. It’s from 1950, the Eisenhower Era, when prison sex and erotic power-tripping guards was still considered an import, not an export, in the US.
It’s one of the landmarks of gay cinema [the DVD Times UK translates: “it contains possibly the earliest images of erect penises seen on a cinema screen.”]. The film influenced Derek Jarman, inspired Todd Haynes’ Poison, and lives on in every Calvin Klein perfume commercial you can think of.
Whether you take your father with you is none of my affair.

Michael and Ingar, from Louisiana, via tate.org.uk
And they look so innocent…Elmgreen (l) and Dragset (r)

Related: Press coverage and reviews of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibit at the Tate Modern through July 4th. They created a tiny animatronic sparrow which appears to be stunned and dying after flying into the window. Favorite stupid quote: “It took two artists to design the sparrow.”

Internet Losers Predict Box Office Winners

[via waxy] Box office performance prediction models are a business school professor’s best tool for drumming up consulting gigs in the entertainment industry they secretly wanted to get into in the first place. For a long time, my old Wharton professor, Jehoshua Eliashberg’s model was the state of the analytical art. Now, he’s got some competition.
According to Prof. Christopher Dellarocas and some other MIT quantjocks, including , the losers who rush home from the theater to post about the movie they just saw can accurately predict the film’s box office take.
We’re not talking about blogger-level losers, though, it has to be the down deepest dregs, the posters on Yahoo! Movies, for example, who best approximate the elusive “word of mouth” effect on a film’s performance.
So now studio suits will sic all their interns on the message boards to talk up a film during its opening weekend, right? While Dellarocas doesn’t make this false logical leap in the study itself , the NetworkWorld reporter gets him to wrongly conflate prediction and causation:

The study also highlights the potential for corporate mischief, given that these review-and-ranking sites are forums for what is essentially anonymous opining.
“Manipulation of forums will become some sort of arms race between studios,” said Dellarocas.

Except, if the population of monkeys typing about The Day After Tomorrow is now only representative of the population of Los Feliz instead of the population of Los Estados Unidos, the forum’s predictive accuracy will drop, right Professor?
Professor? That’s Jake’s trailer, professor, I don’t think you’re allowed in there…

Movies I’ve Walked Out Of

I very rarely walk out of movies. If someone’s gone to the trouble of making a film–and I’ve gone so far as to decide to see it and pay for a ticket–I’ll usually sit it out. Unnervingly, I’ve walked out of 2/3 as many movies in the last two weeks as in the last 10 years. At this rate, by December, I’ll be walking out of more movies than I walk into.
Here are the exceptions (I might add to this list, but even after a 4-hour solo drive, I can’t remember any others):
Showgirls:
To be honest, I only went out for a few minutes, to chat with the old geezer at the concession stand and regain my composure. We went to opening night in East Hampton, and we were laughing so hard, it was offending the “serious” filmgoers. Can you imagine going to Showgirls and being more offended by something happening in the theater? You can? Then move to East Hampton.
Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil:
Kevin Spacey plays a queen with a thing for criminally minded hoodlums (there’s a stretch); John Cusack plays the invisible narrator, invisibly; and the court scene drags on for so long, you should’ve brought a book, or walk out. Hell, you should–and could–read the book in less time.
Dancer In The Dark
In an impulsive fit of slackness, I left a busy office for a noon showing. Within 15 minutes, I came to my senses, realizing I had a pile of stuff to do and didn’t have 3 hours to give over to Bjork and Lar von Trier at that moment. With empty hope, in my wallet, I still carry the emergency raincheck ticket the theater gave me upon my hurried exit. I’ve since seen this movie many times.
Hellboy
It was fine enough, but I just couldn’t care about the guy at all. And I had a splitting headache, a painfully empty stomach, and a harsh free-refill Diet Coke-induced caffeine/nutrasweet buzz going; I shouldn’t’ve gone in the first place.
Laws of Attraction
I know The Thomas Crown Affair. The Thomas Crown Affair was a friend of mine. (if only because I watched it on the plane every week when I was commuting to Paris for a deal). You, Laws of Attraction, are no The Thomas Crown Affair.
Actually, I saw this shameless chickflick for my other site, Daddy Types, at Reel Moms, a morning movie program with a thick-headed name for parents with babies. Parents who don’t care what movie they see, they just want to get out of the house.
[Update: I remembered another one. I left Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused early to make a NY Film Festival screening of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue. And because I was painfully Bored and Uninterested. Apparently, D&C became The Breakfast Club of its generation. Damn kids.]

Like vs. Love

I like Kill Bill vol. 2, but I’d like to see it together.
I LOVE George C. Scott’s warroom performance in Dr Strangelove. What comedy.

Miuccia, Silvio. Silvio, Miuccia.

Dan Flavin at the Prada Foundation, image: nytimes.comWTF? Herbert Muschamp in today’s NYT Magazine: “[Miuccia Prada] has made the world safe for people with overdeveloped inner lives. [I guess, by selling bagsful of $480 polo shirts to armies of style-free mooks and molls from Manhasset.
[And by commissioning some hapless fop to recreate–and gut of all meaning beyond hip association through sheer and empty aestheticization–an actually controversial and culture-changing documentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which had already just been remade a couple of years before by some Italian TV producer.]”

Continue reading “Miuccia, Silvio. Silvio, Miuccia.”

Colder Mountain

still from Lars von Trier's Dogville, image:dogville.co.uk

Actually, I was going to title this post “Nicole Kidman: Dogville’s bitch,” but that’s not how I was brought up. Besides, it sounded unnecessarily cruel. [Not in comparison to the movie itself, however, or to some of its reviews. David Edelstein’s Slate piece is bitterly well-done; he can make people who liked the movie hate it.]
Lars von Trier’s been called anti-American, which I don’t buy. [Come on, he stuck a “von” in his name; what’s more American than that?] When Grace (Kidman’s character) begs them for sanctuary, the Dogville-age people show her mercy and take her in. In no time, though, they turn on her, brutalizing her mercilessly, flagellate her and jeer after her as they nail her hands to a cross–ahem. Sorry, wrong grace/justice/sadism/mob violence movie. Actually, they town-rape her and chain her neck to a wagon wheel. At least von Trier didn’t make it a Jewish town.
What evil lurks in the hearts of (American) men (and women), von Trier asks. How could they turn so suddenly and heap black-hearted violence on this beautiful, selfless creature who appeared in their midst? Maybe they’d just seen Cold Mountain.

Continue reading “Colder Mountain”

The Wages of Dying for Our Sins

[via Anil] Martin Grove looks at all the Caesars being rendered unto Mel Gibson as a result of his owning The Passion of The Christ. The money’s enough to make believers out of more than a few Hollywood types, that’s for sure. Hallelujah, indeed.
So what exactly is Gibson’s reward for flogging his movie so relentlessly and for suffering so much at the hands of imaginary critics? Well, if Grove is right, it’s about $600 million net, including profits from domestic and international distribution and DVD sales. That translates into at least a tenfold return on his $60mm (half production, half p&a) investment. Compared to the Bible’s second-most famous sufferer, Job, Gibson’s making [self-]righteous bank; for all his troubles, the Lord only gave Job twice what he’d started with.
Of course, the Good Book promises even more reward, the positively heavenly return of “a hundredfold,” just for “forsak[ing] houses, or brethren, or sisters… or father.” Hmm.

Anarchist guerilla cinema in Morocco

The Guardian has excerpts from the expat Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo’s Cinema Eden: Essays from the Muslim Mediterranean. In a memory straight out of the seedy phase of Cinema Paradiso, Goytisolo writes about packing into “fleapit” theaters in Barcelona, Tangier, and Marrakech, to watch kung fu movies with raucous crowds of semi-literate cinema junkies.
One film he remembers stands out: The Dialectic Can Break Stones, a Taiwanese chop’em up given the What’s Up, Tiger Lily? treatment by ’68-ist activists. Supposedly, some Maoist cinephiles acquired the (Moroccan?) rights to the film, replaced the subtitles with their own revolutionary storyline, and showed in to unsuspecting immigrant audiences. While pummeling his way through a roomful of evil bureaucrats, the hero would cry out, “Now you’ll find out about the muscle-power of a pupil of Nietzsche and Lou Andrea Salome!”
Hey, sounds more plausible than The Dreamers.

The Hollywood Gospel According to John Lesher

While the NYT‘s Sharon Waxman finds plenty of righteous indignance among (anonymous) studio executives over ever working with Mel Gibson again, the scales have fallen from Endeavor agent John Lesher’s eyes. As a result, he wins the award for best Passion-related quote of the week:
“People here will work with the anti-Christ if he’ll put butts in seats.”

Chasing Shadows

Title still from Cassavetes' Shadows, image: Ray Carney, cassavetes.comBU professor Ray Carney tells about his maniacal decades-long search for a copy of the “original version” of John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows, in a riveting, suspenseful, and enlightening Guardian article. It feels like he doesn’t leave out a single twist or turn (i.e., it’s both entertaining and long).
Here’s the trailer: Cassavetes was so displeased with audience reaction to late 1958 screenings of Shadows, he re-shot much of the footage in early 1959 and re-edited it with some “original” footage to make the version we know today, aka the “second version.”
With little more than a passing mention of a single, existing print of the “original version” to go on, Carney embarked on an increasingly ridiculous search for “the holy grail of Independent Cinema.” When that wore thin, he took to reconstructing the original “from the inside” by interviewing all the cast, crew, and audience members he could find, and by scouring the second version for minute forensic evidence–including, literally, comparing the length of shadows in each shot to determine the time of day–of Cassavetes’ shooting and editing choices. The result: Carney’s now the go-to guy for Cassavettes’ process, and at least he published a book in 2001 with BFI.
Whatever of the outcome; the article makes for great reading.
Buy Shadows–the second version–on DVD. Check out Carney’s acadamn fine fan site, cassavetes.com.

Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein Monday at 9PM

Just let me program your whole Monday viewing schedule for you.
6:30 – MoMA curator Barbara London screening classic video art and talking about how to collect it. (email for details)
9:00 See Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Wittgenstein, at Passerby, the used-to-be-a-gallery/bar on WWW 15th St.
Then head to SoHo house for some kidney pie with Fammke Jensen or whoever. You’re welcome.