the making of, by greg allen
I should have mentioned it earlier–maybe when I asked for DVD rental suggestions–but HBO’s Band of Brothers is one of the best series I can think of. (Except that I can also think of Kieslowski’s Decalogue and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which are probably the #1 and #2 greatest “mini-series” of all time; that’s not the category we’re dealing with here. Decalogue has been re-released on DVD, by the way. Run, don’t walk.)
Last week, I watched Part 5, the one installment I missed on TV. It was pretty remarkable, easily bearing the strongest directorial stamp. “Crossroads” was what it sounds like, a transitional story, notable for lacking (until the end) any of the “gotta take that ridge” straightforwardness typical of a war film. Instead, the story focused on the challenges Winters faced off the front; incoming mortars replaced by barrages of mundane paperwork and meetings. Even so, a complex mix of recollections and revealing subplots were woven together in a fairly complex structure. It could have been confusing, but it wasn’t.
From the opening scene, the director let you know something was different. The handheld camerawork was unexpected, with an intensity that clearly referenced the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. And in a later battle scene, the handheld camera follows a soldier on a dead run (no pun) across a battlefield. The SPR allusion was no coincidence. Of course, Steven Spielberg was an executive producer of BoB, but Part 5 was the only episode directed by the other exec producer–and veteran of the D-Day scene–Tom Hanks.
The giddy pablum on HBO’s site, actors gushing about how great it was that Tom Hanks was directing them is exactly what “Crossroads” overcomes. Maybe it’s too directed, too edited to blend in with the more conventionally directed installments, but it feels like Hanks had something to prove, and for the most part, he did.
My DVD rental queue is down to dangerously low levels. GreenCine, by the way, not the big red DVD subscription service Gawker sold it’s soul to (I’m sure they used the money to buy an expanding T-Rex sponge. Chum…p).
Most recently in the machine:
How’d I miss this? GreenCine has a lyrical article/review about Punch-Drunk Love, PT Anderson, and Jeremy Blake, by Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run and Heaven.
Punch-Drunk Love is FINALLY available on DVD, by the way. And it includes Blossoms & Blood, a short Paul and Jeremy made with John Brion’s music, which was previously only available to friends and family. And people on Paul’s Valentine’s Day card list.
also via GreenCine: The indie mini-major studio Fox Searchlight Pictures has launched a weblog with the ambitious tagline, “All the independent and arthouse movie news that’s fit to blog.”
Fortunately for what still feels like a one-man operation, the first post narrows the spotlight to Searchlight and news of their release slate. It seems intended to supplement the studio site’s Weekend Read mailing list, where FS filmmakers write about their work.
Welcome to the phenomena, kids. Now all you need to do is to move to New York.
Thanks to the folks who’ve emailed suggestions for DVD’s to order up. Here’s a sample, along with recommendations from some other people:
Only a couple of weeks after Agent Smithing my brother’s early adopter, $10/month-for-life Netflix account, I’ve run out of movies I want to rent. Or more precisely, movies I want to rent that Netflix actually has. (Note: if you’re reading this from Netflix, my brother lives with us now. As do his wife and their two lovely children. Coincidentally, after tiring of Pooh’s various adventures, my four-year-old niece suddenly developed an interest in Ozu and Tarkovsky.)
So, please help me fill my Netflix queue with films I haven’t thought to rent.
And in the mean time, sign yourself up at GreenCine, the San Francisco Pink Dot to Netflix’s Kozmo. They have everything and a great film weblog. While you’re at it, read this fascinating analysis of Netflix’s DVD allocation system to see just how unprofitable my brother is for them.
[Update: thanks, Sacrifice is actually already in the mail, and Bottle Rocket‘s on the list. Paul Krugman recommends Wag the Dog. Here’s my rental queue: Koyaanisqatsi, Dancer in the Dark (finally. I walked out of the theater after 10 min.), The Manchurian Candidate, Rashomon, Sokurov’s Mother and Son. Watched and mailed back: Badlands (again), Hedwig & the Angry Inch, In the Bedroom. ]
[Unrelated: can anyone explain why I have the song, “Come on, be my baby tonight,” from idiot David on The Real World: New Orleans stuck in my head? Whitney, where are you when I need you?]
You know how Justin invented Shoutcast so he could listen to Loveline in Arizona? Well, if weblogs never existed, I’m sure they would’ve been invented yesterday as a way for everyone in the world to review Matrix Reloaded. [Warning: major spoilers and countless review links in Jason’s comments thread]. Until Nick and Meg figure out how to find me the good ones, though, I’m sticking with the pros. Like that Agent Smith of MR reviewers, David Edelstein, who first loves, then hates, the movie in Slate, The NY Times, and Fresh Air.
Sure, I could write how the rave reminds me of that annoying “let’s target the ‘urban’ demographic” Kahlua commercial a few years ago, or how I actually apologized to the people sitting next to me for laughing so hard at the Merovingian (who hangs around the corner at Bilboquet like all the time) how the unexpectedly Chicago-esque editing destroyed the lyricism of some of the fight scenes, or how righteous Trinity’s hack turns out to be.
But forget the movie; what interests me, is, well, me. What does the Matrix mean for my Animated Musical, my Terminator-meets-West Side Story? There were a couple of “great minds think alike” points that made me cringe at first, until a bit of satisfaction kicked in, at my occasional avant la lettre similarity to the Wachowskis’ script. On others, I got what they missed. Eat my dust, Wachowskis. I mean– I mean, let’s have breakfast.
Basically, then, I was fine about it, at least until I came home and read Joyce Wadler’s opening party pitch to Joel Silver for Matrix: The Musical. I’m typing this in the fetal position, btw.
Good movie. Nice bones tossed to the comic book readers. Just a suggestion: maybe if their hair wasn’t so uniformly weird, people wouldn’t hate the mutants as much.
DVD Talk‘s Gil Jawetz takes a great, informative look at the development of the opening credits for Panic Room. David Fincher‘s credits are almost always events in themselves, and apparently Panic Room is no different. Jawetz makes the connection to Saul Bass’s North by Northwest credits, to which I’d add Bass’s opening for West Side Story, another tour de force montage of NYC skylines.
You can buy Panic Room on DVD, but only if you’ve already bought Fight Club. It’s one of the first mega-DVD’s, stuffed with real, not astroturfy extra content. Of course, there’s also the single-disc edition. Also, Fincher fans should already be flocking to screenwriter/director Roger Avary’s weblog. Avary gives near-daily reports from the lunchtable as he works on the script for Lords of Dogtown. [thanks, hella amusing Gothamist]
Insanely great article by Steve Silberman in Wired on John Gaeta and the CG–no, virtual cinematography–they developed for the Wachowskis’ Matrix sequels.
They created ESC, a “CG skunkworks company” for (at least) one fight scene, where Neo kung fu wire-dance fights with 100+ Agent Smiths. To shoot it, they created the world’s largest motion capture studio, ran the flying wire fighters through “hundreds of takes” per day, scanned Keanu and Hugo‘s heads with 5 HD cameras capturing 1Gb/sec of raw image data (400k/frame? Sounds reasonable, come to think of it…), and mapped the real world onto laser-measured wireframes. Short explanation: they created the Matrix. Oh, and they did it all in secret, using The Burly Man (taken from Barton Fink‘s doomed wrestling picture script)as their working title.
What this means for moviemaking is that once a scene is captured, filmmakers can fly the virtual camera through thousands of “takes” of the original performance – and from any angle they want, zooming in for a close-up, dollying back for the wide shot, or launching into the sky. Virtual cinematography.
I want one. I want one for my Animated Musical, where an intricately choreographed dance number could be viewed in one continuous, Fred Astaire-style take, and/or edited, with views from multiple animation-world “cameras.” It’d be great for editing, and you could make your own versions with the DVD.
Some related postings:
Matrix, The, video game/film convergence and
CDDb: Carson Daly Database
Gerry, the video game-like movie
Chicago sucked, and Moulin Rouge-y editing can’t help
Machinima and the (d)evolution of dazzling Steadicam
my tech/low-tech dilemma and an inadvertent slam on Gaeta, via his What Dreams May Come
[Thanks, Boingboing. Image: Warner bros, via wired.com ]
In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones talks with Aleksandr Sokurov about his latest film, Russian Ark, and he retraces the path of the single 96-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage with the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. I’ve written about this before, but what comes through here is a double view of serious passion for art.
The Hermitage dominates the lives of those who work there: It “has its own school where children can learn archaeology and art history from the age of five, preselected for curatorial lives like gymnasts or violinists.” Piotrovsky appears as himself in the film, talking with his deceased father, who was also director.
And for Sokurov, encountering art, not just seeing or presenting it, was a central goal of the film. “Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections – as they do – obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible.” One encounter Sokurov provides is Rembrandt: “When you meet the real painting, you meet a real creature. Rembrandt left part of his physical being in his painting – every time you come up to a painting, you feel part of this energy, this sense of something being alive.”
Sokurov dismisses modern works—the museum’s famous Matisses don’t make the film’s, um, final cut–saying “the main criterion in art is time. It seems to me that those artists who are considered modern classics are to be tested by time yet.” And the director chides film for utterly lacking historical awareness (“due to the lack of cinema museums,” he claims) even as Jones points out the contrast of the unedited Russian Ark and its Russian Avant Garde antecedents–like Eisenstein, who also filmed in the Hermitage–whose “great modernist aesthetic” of editing became the foundation of our entire visual language.
So, Sokurov, what’s a better way to spend four hours today, watching my Criterion Collection Andrei Rublev DVD (aka, the cinema museum?) or standing in line at the Met for the last day of daVinci? “Museums make culture stable,” Sokurov notes, and they perform an invaluable conservative function, that is, conserving the “real creatures” of our collective past. As Sokurov would no doubt agree, in contemporary art, the artist leaves no part of his physical being in his work: he leaves his thoughts, his mind, his idea. And when I encounter a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string, fabricated with parts off the hardware store shelf, I still have a sense of something being alive.
Eh. Who needs to watch the Oscars, with their self-serious, press conference-addicted producer, Gil Cates, and their Chicago faits accomplis. The IFP Spirit Awards are like a hundred times better. It’s on Bravo right now (and it repeats, uncensored, on IFC, again and again). Some highlights:
