Category: movies

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.”

It was just released today. Buy it or rent it now. There’s a commentary track by Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette, (author of The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni), but read J. Hoberman’s excellent contextual discussion of Blow-up in his latest book, The Dream Life instead.

Michael Musto points out an unexpected upside to Sofia Coppola’s winning the First American Woman To Be Nominated For Best Director: it rescues that historical recognition forever from Barbra Streisand’s French-manicured clutches.
You can celebrate this karmic retribution by buying Lost in Translation, out today on DVD (complete with a half-baked making-of documentary and no director’s commentary track. Where’s Carrot Top when you need him?). Or you could rent it. Mecha-Streisand was defeated by The Cure’s Robert Smith in the first season of South Park, which is also on DVD.
[While I’m on the subject of Oscar-nominated DVD’s, the Capturing the Friedmans DVD sounds like a real standard-setter: two discs of supplementary footage and commentary that are showing up in court as Jesse Friedman tries to get his conviction reversed.]

From Scott Evans, CEO of Outreach, Inc, retailer of evangelical swag via the (Godless and/or Anglican) Guardian:

Dear Pastor,
The release of The Passion of the Christ is the most exciting outreach opportunity I’ve seen in my lifetime… In fact, I see this opportunity as unprecedented since the day of Pentecost… Ask God: How will we as a church encourage people to experience this film? How can we build a bridge from the movie theatre to our church? I encourage you to carefully explore our website…

Evans says of the film itself, “It’s almost as if someone travelled through time with a video camera, captured the original crucifixion and returned to share it with our world today.” He may be thinking of Live From Golgotha, the The Passion-meets-The Butterfly Effect-meets-the bathtub scene from Spartacus novel by Gore Vidal, which has exactly that plot. Somehow I doubt it.
Brother Bob Berney, president of the film’s distributor, Newmarket Films, and a disinterested observer, notes that “People call and say, ‘I want 10,000 tickets.'” In sheer scale, selling tickets to 10,000 people at a pop dwarfs the largest recorded miracle in the New Testament, feeding loaves and fishes to 5,000 sermon-goers in Galilee.
The Passion Outreach.com [“Perhaps the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years!”]
Purchase Live from Golgotha from Amazon
Purchase 100 The Passion Evangelistic Booklets ™ from Outreach (“full color images from the movie!”)
Purchase a banner-ready “Ground Zero” logo from Outreach for use in your youth ministry.
Purchase a The Passion-themed PowerPoint template for use in your church, $6.95 from SermonCentral.com

But what can I do? It’s Kieslowski. The Decalogue is playing at the AFI Silver Theater in DC, starting tomorrow (through 1/22). The marathon back-to-back screening of all ten episodes on Saturday includes, inexplicably, the only screenings of episodes I-IV.
This was probably my last chance to see Decalogue uninterrupted in theaters for the next 15 years, give or take a month. And to think, I just found out about it. Well, maybe you should just watch them on DVD like me.
Salt in the wound: Sunday is a back-to-back showing of the Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, and Red, too.

First, Peggy Siegal, take a lesson from Pontecorvo’s publicist, who got such excellent blurbs from the Pentagon screening of The Battle of Algiers, who cares if the people giving them wouldn’t know credibility if it blew up underneath their Humvee:
“How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas!”
“Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range!
“Women plant bombs in cafes!”
“Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar!?”
But no, when it comes to the newly struck prints of The Battle of Algiers opening in cities this weekend, the The Nation‘s Stuart Klawans wants you to read it for the articles.
And what are the filmmaking lessons we can learn from BofA? Newsreel/documentary-style camerawork lends a sense of immediacy (which Klawans compares to Citizen Kane). Shooting on location makes for killer production design (look, the bulletholes are still fresh!) and saves money to boot. When a producer with money asks you to shoot his script, the proper response is, “I LOVE it!” even if you find it “”awful, and with a sickeningly propagandistic intention.” Then, after rewriting it beyond all recognition, cast your producer as your star. And finally, whenever possible, get Ennio Morricone to do your soundtrack.
Hmm. Replace Morricone with Theremin, and these could be The Lessons of Watching Ed Wood. Still, whether you’re with Rumsfeld, or with The Nation, go see The Battle of Algiers this weekend.
Update 1/12/04: I did see it, and it did rock, even if it has a rather fantasist ending. This Slate article has one more bit of life-imitates-art from the set. Apparently, when two factions of the FLN attacked each other in 1965, Algiers residents thought it was additional shooting for the film.

not that I’ve seen it yet, mind you, but the cinematographer is John Toll, who also shot Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line. On second thought, why not just rent or buy Thin Red Line?

Ahh, that’s a better. Now I can endlessly praise the programming acumen of the MoMA Documentary Fortnight without it sounding like pure self-promotion.
Three of Amar Kanwar’s most recent works–including A Night of Prophecy, which I killed my Friday night in Miami for, and his unsurpassed A Season Outside, a poetic Cremaster-meets-nuclear-brinksmanship documentary which was one of the greatest finds at last year’s Documenta XI–will be shown as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight festival. Three films screen together on Sunday December 21. Be there.
Related:
Complete schedule for this year’s MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight
A slew of Amar Kanwar posts from Documenta.
A post about Souvenir November 2001‘s screening at last year’s MoMA DF

The Guardian tallies up the 40 best directors in the world today, complete with ratings in Zagat-style (or beauty pageant-style) categories: Substance/Look/Craft/Originality/Intelligence.
Setting aside the unavoidable grade inflation–seven critics rated them from 1-20 for each category, but the totals fall in a narrow range, from 89 (David Lynch at #1) to 73 (the Gus Van Sant “who didn’t make Good Will Hunting” at #40)– it’s a pretty safe, festival-y list. But it does have it’s share of Eurotrashing quirks (David Lynch is #1??? Michael Moore is on it at all????? ditto Samira Makhmalbaf, one of only two women).
All in all, though, I’m glad to see so many of my boys made the list Missing, though: Agnes Varda, Hirokazu Kore-eda (a stretch, maybe, but more deserving than Makhmalbaf), the Amy Heckerling who did Fast Times and Clueless, Marc Forster, oh, I don’t know.

still her first one-woman show, Without You I’m Nothing. It’s on Trio right now. Looks like I’ll be up for another hour to see the grand finale, her cabaret rendition of “Little Red Corvette.” (Complete with backup, it turns out, by Tori Amos)
For years it was extremely and annoyingly hard to find; it’s still not on DVD, but at least now you can buy it on VHS.

[STANDARD SPOILER ALERT] Despite what the global saturation ad campaign may imply, it’s better to approach My Architect as a spinoff–like a feature-length installment the Animatrix–not as a sequel. (That none of the actors from The Matrix films were in My Architect should’ve been my first clue.) Once I made this distinction, I was able to appreciate the movie much better; it turns out to be a moving, well-told story which happens to have an extremely misleading marketing strategy behind it. It’s the Shawshank Redemption of the Matrix Universe.
My Architect is set in the previous iteration of The Matrix, slotting into the Timeline somewhere between 1963 and 1974, although it includes trips backward and forward in time. The One here is a filmmaker named Nathaniel Kahn and is also called The Only Son. And the movie follows him on his quest to understand the Big Questions about his existence and his relationship to The Architect, who doesn’t look like Colonel Sanders in this film, but ressembles instead a somewhat homelier Danny Kaye, complete with big Architect glasses and a bowtie.
While some characters in the film react badly to the idea, there’s never any suspense about whether The Architect is The One’s father. For one thing (no pun intended), his name is Louis Kahn. Frankly, I couldn’t tell who is The Oracle. In a plotline taken straight from Star Wars, The One learns he has siblings, sisters–half-sisters, really–who also grew up thinking they were The One. It made for confusing family lives, and The Architect led a nomadic existence, hopping from house to office to building site to house, ultimately alone, even among his three “families.” Unlike Star Wars, though, The One doesn’t almost inadvertently hook up with his sister.
The Architect has uncompromising visions of a perfectly constructed world; the film tells many stories of his mighty battles with the forces of evil (called Clients, or in one case, Urban Renewal Planners). Ultimately, The Architect has to leave The Matrix itself, traveling to the then-new country of Bangladesh, where he harnesses the energy of the most un-plugged-in population on Earth to build his Capital. [This is a direct reference to the Animatrix episode about how the machines founded their country, 01, in a desolate corner of the Middle East.]
As we know from the movies, train stations figure prominently in the Matrix, and My Architect is no exception. The Architect dies of a heart attack in the men’s room at Penn Station. [This is not really a spoiler since the whole premise of the movie is The One’s search as an adult for The Architect/Father he barely knew as a child, his attempt to understand more about how The Architect spent his last moments, when, instead of being surrounded by at least one of his families, he collapsed alone in a bathroom.]
In a plotpoint that reminded me a bit too much of Kevin Smith‘s Dogma, where God goes temporarily AWOL because he (she, actually, since God is played there by Alannis Morrisette) went unrecognized in a hospital ICU, The Architect went unrecognized at the morgue for several days because he’s crossed the address off his passport. Nevertheless, both the enigma and emotional stakes faced by The One are touchingly conveyed, and this viewer found himself identifying freuqently with Nathaniel and his quest.
Did I say action scenes? Perhaps the most significant way in which My Architect varies from the Matrix formula is the utter and complete lack of action. Every time I thought, “here comes the big chase scene,” it was, “here comes another serene pan of a museum, library, and/or hall of parliament.” And while there were some tense moments, there weren’t any real fight scenes. Aunt Posie got pretty worked up, though, talking about her sister running off and having a baby like that. Just drives her up the wall.
Kudos, finally, to the set designers. The series has always been known for its production design, but the dreary technoworld of the previous movies is replaced here by a seemingly endless parade of luminous, inspiring spaces. Very Logan’s Run. I wonder who did them.
What Nathaniel learns–and what he teaches us, of course, even in the title of his film– is that the quest isn’t for The Architect, but for My Architect. While the other Matrix films seduce us with the threat of an insidious, all-pervasive, artificially constructed reality, Nathaniel shows how much more enmeshed we become in the reality we fabricate inside ourselves.
Nathaniel’s mother recognized the stigma of having a married man’s child as an externally imposed social construct, and she rejected it. Yet her survival hinged inextricably on her belief that Her Architect was always just a passport edit away from leaving his wife. By definition, Nathaniel the filmmaker traffics in constructed, edited reality. He’s aware of the wilfully childlike innocence of his objective (he included scenes of himself rollerblading around the Salk institute or chasing his paper yarmulke in the wind at the Wailing Wall, after all), and yet he spent five difficult, emotionally wrenching years pursuing it with his camera.
Why get all worked up about The Matrix when My Matrix is more revealing and engrossing?

Context isn’t everything, but it counts. We just got back from seeing Lost In Translation with a multi-generational crowd, in the movie theater around the corner from Holly Golightly’s brownstone. As they say, it’s the little differences:

“Gorgeous sheets.” –Woman of a certain age behind us, upon the cut to Bill Murray sitting on the Park Hyatt bed. [300-count egyptian cotton? Nice, but could be better, lady. Now pipe down.]

“hahahaha.” –me, laughing alone at the previously unrecognized 4:20 reference.

“nice soundtrack.” –me, wondering if the limited edition soundtrack is out yet.

“soundtrack’d be better if the idiot in front of us’d stop proclaiming Shinjuku landmarks to his mother/sugar mama. It ain’t no Harajuku, pal. Now pipe down.” – me.

“I loved it.” –adult children of the sheets woman, after it was over.

“I hated it.” –the sheets woman.

I’m reading and enjoying Steven Soderbergh’s book, Getting Away With It, where he intermixes his self-hating journal entries and deeply interested conversations with Richard Lester, the director credited with “launching” the British New Wave. (He did The Beatles movies, The Three Musketeers, and other stuff. Fascinating, funny guy, though.)
Soderbergh tries on an authorial style, with David Foster Wallace-style, self-conscious footnotes [DFW-lite], but basically, he plays a very well-informed fan. But now that he’s in production on the first episode of K Street (which airs Sunday on HBO, no pressure), these discussions with Lester about how they used to make TV shows and movies in the “old” days seem to be bearing fruit.
[The K Street site has an “online journal” totally spinning the party line, written, I think, by the Ari Fleischer character. It’d be interesting to see if they start leaking things as the show progresses.]
There are only three copies of the book on Amazon right now, and it’s ranked 58,458th. Why not buy it? Turn the high-pressure hose of e-commerce that is greg.org readership on it, and see if we can break 5,000?