‘What is amazing is the idea of this generation
being responsible for creating a cultural icon—
like that we get to do that!’
—Elizabeth Berkley speaking, presumably, about Nomi at a fund-raiser for the New Globe Theater [in last week’s NYO]
Category: movies
Hello? Christian Marclay, Please. Speaking.
So the Oscars. Did I just miss their press release warning that they were going to inject off-off-Broadway wacky juice into the show? Because after being numbed into catatonia by years of Debbie Allen, Debbie Allen manques, and Gil Coates’ Hollywood-snake-eating-its-tail directing, a simple heads up that they were going all avant garde would’ve been nice.
Never mind that both Will Ferrell’s weird musical number and Tom Hanks’ speech made reference to alcoholism. Plus there was Ellen’s rolling papers joke at the end. That’s mainstream.
What threw me–after the very existence of the non-relevant Ferrell song, that is–was that choir of sound effects people. Cool, sure, but WTF? Their multi-channel video backdrop made me think they were doing a live cover version of Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet.
Obviously the biggest Marclay cover version was that iPhone commercial, though. I’d say I hope he got royalties, but then, I wonder how much he paid to license those clips. Exactly. The proper course of action would have been for Apple’s agency to hire Marclay to do the commercial. Or actually, to do other commercials.
And speaking of commercials, did anyone else think of that VW shadow hands commercial during the Pilobolus numbers? Also, Pilobolus???
update: [d’oh, I see kottke‘s already got people working on the Marclay iPhone thing.]
Frank’s & Bacon
When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a hopeless crush on a girl from Hawaii. She was really nice to me, and we eventually became friends. But I never had a chance because, unlike her boyfriend at the time, I had not been an extra in Footloose, and I had not been immortalized [sic] on film picking my nose, and wearing a powder blue tuxedo.
Footloose was filmed in the wide open grain and alfalfa fields of Lehi, Utah, just north of Provo. The Lehi Roller Mills where Kevin Bacon’s triumphant school dance was held, was Lehi’s only landmark, visible from the desolate stretch of highway leading to Salt Lake City–and civilization [sic again]. There used to be a rest stop near there.
Hang gliders would sometimes soar over the southern, Provo side of the Point of the Mountain, which separated Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley [or, as it’s also known, Happy Valley.] On the north side of the Point, above the prison where Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad, bikers’d stage a widowmaker hill climb [I don’t know, annually?] that’d carve deep ruts into the grass.
Tract houses have long since crept along the foothills and over the fields on both sides of the Point, but it’s always been an empty, rural place people pass by, around, through, on their way to the city. That’s the mental image, anyway, of folks who lived in or visited Utah more than ten years ago.
Next week, though, Brandt Andersen, a 29-year old software & real estate developer from Provo, who owns the local franchise for the NBA Development league, will unveil the plans for an 85-acre plot in Lehi, just south of the Point, and right across the freeway from Thanksgiving Point, a large entertainment/recreation development by the WordPerfect folks.
The mixed use project will contain ” a 12,000-seat arena, a five-star hotel, high-end shopping, restaurants, offices, a wakeboarding lake, and a massive residential community.” The architect for the project is Frank Gehry.
Said Gehry, whose other mixed-use urban center project, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, has met considerable opposition, he likes the absence of a “big city bureaucracy.” Says it’s nice to be able to just have lunch with the mayor when you need to. Gets things moving along.
For his part, Lehi Mayor Howard Johnson is “most excited about the project’s proposed lake, which Andersen has agreed to let Lehi use as a secondary irrigation reservoir. The city would be able to store water in the lake and use it when necessary. ‘That is of a rather sizable financial value to Lehi,’ Johnson said.”
For my part, I’m hoping Andersen will throw in a Gehry-designed church or two for all the Mormons moving into his massive residential project. Back in the day, before business school, when I was high on his architecture [just as the Weisman Museum opened in Minnesota, but long before Bilbao] and feeling low about the bland, utilitarian, sameness of contemporary Mormon buildings, I decided I was going to just commission Frank Gehry to design a chapel. Then I’d build it, and hand it over to the Church, fait accompli. I hadn’t thought to build the Mormon neighborhood required to go with it.
When he was introduced to such bigwigs are there are in Lehi at the moment, Gehry was self-effacing, and promised not to airdrop in some flashy, Bilbao-y blob. “We won’t build something that people won’t buy into. It’s subtle how culture translates into architecture. And there is a culture in Utah.” Amen to that.
Moroni, I know. But I’m just sayin’…
Lehi goes postmodern with Frank Gehry [harktheherald.com via archinect]
Legendary architect agrees to design a big Lehi project [deseretnews.com]
A n unofficial rendering of the massing plan [skyscraperpage.com]
Starring Steven Siegel As. Banacek.
The FBI said Monday that it has recovered a 1778 painting by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya that was stolen as it was being taken to an exhibition earlier this month.
“Children with a Cart,” which disappeared en route from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and was valued at about $1.1 million, appeared to be unharmed, said Les Wiser, agent in charge of the Newark FBI office.
Steven Siegel, a spokesman for the FBI, said the bureau recovered the painting Saturday in New Jersey, but would not be more specific about where or how it was located.
FBI Recovers Stolen Goya Painting [ap/seattle p-i via artforum]
Powers Of Tan
The Dutch Sunbather On Google Earth, a Powers of Ten-like zoom-in video. Here’s the spot on GoogleMaps, if anyone cares to find out who it is.
Half Nelson: Vision Dreams Of Passion
A week after finally seeing it, I’m having a hard time starting to write about Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s wonderfully crafted, intelligent, slice-of-basehead-life feature, Half Nelson. One thing’s for sure, though: I won’t be able to sustain the same insouciant, faux-decadent abandon in my dance floor renditions of “White Lines” anymore.
In fact, the movie’s warping my whole funk karaoke world. After the groggy, solitary silence of the opening scene, where he finds himself right where he blacked out– on the floor of his dingy living room, in front of his glasstop coffee table—Dan Dunne’s first words are Pointer Sisters lyrics.
Not coincidentally, they’re probably everyone Child of Television’s first Pointer Sisters lyrics, too: “Onetwothree four. five. sixseveneight nine. ten. eleven. twelve.” In an incisive, throwaway performance sung into the rearview mirror, these vintage Sesame Street lyrics, which have also been remixed into a minor underground techno hit, ground the main character, date the filmmakers, and implicate a large segment of the audience in equal parts.
But despite the presence of an over-educated White Man in The Ghetto, Half Nelson is no more a glib Williamsburg hipster parable than it is a treacly Stand And Deliver homily. Ryan Gosling’s performance is as nuanced and assured as Fleck’s direction and his and Boden’s screenplay. And the whole film feels as real and raw as a documentary, but with a narrative that unfolds–Boden is credited with editing–with offhand meticulousness
Andrij Parekh keeps his jittery handheld camera close, impossibly intrusive for a verite doc, but intrusively perfect for a verite doc style, and the actors’ gestures, expressions, and reactions almost always deliver. [Or just as likely, Boden finds the exact instinctive or unconscious elements of their performances to fit together.] Shareeka Epps has been scoring a lot of great reviews for her performance as Drey, the thoughtful, conflicted student torn between her two surrogate father figures, but the more I think back, the more impressed I am with Anthony Mackie’s Frank, who has more emotional and intellectual complexity than any movie drug dealer I can think of.
As I watched Dunne’s entirely plausible addiction unspool, I began to warily question if I should care. Is he an unredeemable loser? Should I go ahead and invest my sympathy, only to be duped, manipulated or let down later? Was I going to be confronted with some formulaic rationalization for his addiction, one that’s not afforded the black characters whose susceptibility to the lure of drugs–poverty, no opportunity, no education, The Man, etc.–are so thoroughly played out in movies and TV?
It was an oblique-then-devastating trip, but Fleck and Boden anticipated and delivered on this backstory, too, and in a way that telescopes Half Nelson into a non-didactic, intergenerational historical/political critique. But it works, because the filmmakers never lose touch with their film’s emotional core, which is Dunne’s development.
This is such a well-realized film, I’m tempted to say it’s hard to believe it’s a first film. But then, I can’t really imagine this thoroughly conceived-yet-modest film coming from anyone BUT a young filmmaker. If it’s like anyone at all, it’s a more restrained Cassavetes. And Boden and Fleck’s multiple, shared credits seem to belie a Cassavetian work method.
There’s a great making of story to be told, though; this small, micro-budget film has twelve producers [including a friend, Hunter Gray]. It seems like just yesterday when I wrote about and spoke with the two Ryans about Gowanus, Brooklyn, their Sundance-winning short film version of Dunne’s story, and the script was apparently workshopped at Sundance’s summer Lab before that. If it weren’t such a rare success, I’d say Half Nelson was a throwback/textbook example of indie film production. Whatever it is, though, it’s definitely worth a trip to the theater.
Half Nelson opened in wider release this past weekend [halfnelsonthefilm.com]
And The Company That’ll Bring It To You: Braniff Airways
No more walking, watch three movies at once, and “You don’t have to carry a passport, because a friendly computer already knows more about you than you do.”
RiffTrax Road House
So you can play Dark Side Of The Moon while watching The Wizard Of Oz, or you can play an mp3 commentary by Mystery Science Theater 3000 star/writer Mike Nelson while watching–Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze’s well-oiled rack.
Check out RiffTrax, Nelson’s new funny commentary site. Then check it out again when he’s got more than one movie on there. [via robotwisdom]
John Cassavettes Punching Ronald Reagan
Wow, can you imagine Ronald Reagan as a bad guy? Here he is in The Killers getting punched by one of his henchmen, played by John Cassavettes. I– wow.
Ronald Reagan John Cassavetes Duel [youtube via wmfublog via rw]
The Killers [imdb.com]
Zelda And Battle Of “The Hair-Brained Scheme”
In August 2001, video gamers protested the cartoony feel of the new version of Zelda because “it would be nigh impossible to introduce a serious and epic plot and epic characters” into such a “childish environment.”
It’s not unlike that time, fellow old-school Zelda fan Jordan Barry, replied, when Robert Reed sent a memo to Sherwood Schwartz, expanding on his refusal to appear in episode 116 of The Brady Bunch:
There is a fundamental difference in theatre between:
1.Melodrama
2.Drama
3.Comedy
4.Farce
5.Slapstick
6.Satire &
7.Fantasy
They require not only a difference in terms of construction, but also in presentation and, most explicitly, styles of acting. Their dramatis peronsae are noninterchangable. For example, Hamlet, archetypical of the dramatic character, could not be written into Midsummer Night’s Dream and still retain his identity. Ophelia could not play a scene with Titania; Richard II could not be found in Twelfth Night. In other words, a character indigenous to one style of the theatre cannot function in any of the other styles. Obviously, the precept holds true for any period. Andy Hardy could not suddenly appear in Citizen Kane, or even closer in style, Andy Hardy could not appear in a Laurel and Hardy film. Andy Hardy is a “comedic” character, Laurel and Hardy are of the purest slapstick. The boundaries are rigid, and within the confines of one theatric piece the style must remain constant.
…
Teevision falls under exactly the same principle. What the networks in their oversimplification call “sitcoms” actually are quite diverse styles except where bastardized by carless writing or performing. For instance:
M*A*S*H….comedy
The Paul Lynde Show….Farce
Beverly Hillbillies…..Slapstick
Batman……Satire
I dream of Jeannie….Fantasy
Episode 116, by the way, was titled “The Hair-Brained Scheme.” Here’s a synopsis:
In the final episode, Bobby’s hair tonic turns Greg’s hair orange on graduation day. Robert Reed refused to appear in this episode. Oliver speaks the last dialogue of the series. And the word “sex” is used for the only time in the series.
Wow, protesting the last episode? That’s really standing up for your Craft. Meanwhile, how’d Zelda turn out?
The Odyssey of Hyrule – Letter of the Month – August 200190- [via tmn]
Or Maybe The Machines Just Don’t Need Human Batteries Anymore
To watch McQueen and the other cars motor along the film’s highways and byways without running into or over a single creature is to realize that, in his cheerful way, Mr. Lasseter has done Mr. Cameron [director of The Terminator] one better: instead of blowing the living world into smithereens, these machines have just gassed it with carbon monoxide.
Meanwhile, Brett Ratner’s Going, “Dude, I Could SO Kick Michael Bay’s Ass.”
I already added X3 to the pile of sequel-sequels that I won’t see [lessee, there’s Matrix 3, Star Wars 3, Godfather 3, Police Academy 3…], but that doesn’t mean I don’t love reading the reviews.
Take Walter Chaw’s review, for example, at Film Freak Central: “…an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates…
…It’s Michael Bay’s Schindler’s List…”
X-Men: The Last Stand review by Walter Chaw [filmfreakcentral.net via goldenfiddle]
Krzysztof Kieslowski Revisited Started Two Days Ago
Considering that the Decalogue is at least partly to blame for me deciding to become a filmmaker, and that it’s partly an inspiration for my Souvenir Series, I can’t let a Kieslowski festival go without genuflecting.
The National Film Theatre is running an in-depth program of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films and his influences/inspirations. It started on Thursday, but you haven’t missed anything so far, “just” The 400 Blows and La Strada. [of course, what I meant was, they’ll both be screened again.] Decalogue screenings start next weekend, and Three Colours screenings the weekend after that.
The NFT site is comprehensive, but hard to peruse, while the Kultureflash overview is deliciously easy, as always. How DO they do it?
Krzysztof Kieslowski Revisited [bfi.org.uk]
previous kieslowski adulation and influencing on greg.org
Or On Par With The First Time Seeing “Hungry Like The Wolf”?
“When I originally posted the video on the site I likened watching it to a life-changing experience ‘on par with losing your virginity or seeing Garden State for the first time‘…” [emphasis added]
That’s part of Derek’s description of #1, “Glosoli,” a Sigur Ros video, which is pretty gorgeous. Obviously, it might be that I’m just waaay too old and outside the demo anymore, but if Beck’s boring-ass breakdancing robot video is #47, I guess there really aren’t 65 good music videos made each year.
M3 Online: Top 65 Music Videos Of 2005 [gwfa via robotwisdom]