Category: movies

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.

Piss Off Barbra: Buy Lost in Translation on DVD

mecha-streisand, from southparkstudios.comMichael 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.]

when Word of Mouth meets Speaking in Tongues

The Passion guide/souvenir program, image: OutreachMarketing.com

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

This isn’t gonna help me win “Best NY Blog…”

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.

On Learning from The Battle of Algiers

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.

Amar Kanwar at MoMA Documentary Fortnight

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 World’s 40 Best Directors

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.