Category: Uncategorized

How many times have you replayed the Richard Pryor movie, Brewster’s Millions, in your head and said, “I could spend $30 million in 30 days and have nothing to show for it, what’s the big deal?” Not counting P Diddy’s entire, hapless, yacht-renting existence, Howard Dean is the only person I can think of who’s actually done it. He’s a veritable Doctor of Spendology.

The 2-Tone ska band Madness skanked down Yohji Yamamoto’s runway during the Fall ’04 shows. British GQ has pictures of the entire collection, but no acknowledgement of the band at all; he just shoots the clothes. Clearly, a magazine for New Ro poseurs.
On the other hand, the Times has the full band, including frontman Suggs, but Cathy Horyn doesn’t even mention Yohji or Madness in her report. Poseur.
Buy Madness’s One Step Beyond or Ultravox’s The Collection (Poseur). [Obviously, I have them both.]

In addition to what I wrote on Gothamist,

1. Do these nominees follow the Zapf Zipf distribution? It seems like they’re either mega-blockbusters or tiny independent films. Granted, many so-called “indie” films are made by the studio-owned mini-majors, aka Dependents, but still.
2. I’m burning through like $10/day on Google ads for people who misspell Sofia Coppola. She’s now famous enough to have her name spelled correctly. I’m sure the kids from Spellbound would agree, if they weren’t all in some rehab program for washed up child stars.
3. Is Cold Mountain the first movie edited with Final Cut Pro to be nominated for Best Editing?

I would add a big 4. There is no Elephant is this room. That’s more than a Punch-Drunk Love-level snub. I think Gus Van Sant has completely replenished his indie cred. [1/31 update: The Observer‘s Philip French clearly doesn’t vote in the Academy; he calls Elephant “a chilling tour de force.”]

Sarah Hepola’s lawyer boyfriend won a radio contest and a trip to Sundance, and she tags along to shoot fish in a barrel see celebrities on Main Street in Park City. How’d she do? well, she sees Kyle McLachlan. And DMX, aka The Black Guy in Utah Who Doesn’t Play For The Jazz.
Read her minute-by-minute account at The Morning News.

Jeff Jarvis apparently doesn’t spend all his time watching Outkast over at The MTV.
He surfs over to the more demographically appropriate VH1 just long enough to post about the show weblog for Best Week Ever, The Mariah Network’s answer to The Daily Show.
From what I hear, the weblog’s the best part of the show. I have to go by secondhand information since I stopped watching any music channels since the quaintly homemade MuchMusic sold their Canadian souls.

London’s The Bureau has its own approach to making great short films: sponsor and produce shorts by established-to-famous directors. Directors, who, I guess, couldn’t be bothered to cough up the five figures or so for their own damn short film? Whatever, the results can be seen intermittently at Cinema Extreme: Extreme Cinema, The Bureau’s screening program for big-name shorts.
This Sunday, in fact, shorts by Francois Ozon, Hal Hartley, Benoit Mariage, and Nic Roeg will be followed by a Q&A with Roeg. [via Kultureflash] details: Jan 24, 11:30 AM (!!) at the Curzon Soho, London, En-guh-land] No fair, short films in the UK get all the best time slots…
Related: The best-edited sex scene in the movies, from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which Soderbergh improved on in Out of Sight
buy Don’t Look Now or X2000, the early short films of Francois Ozon at Amazon

Whatever Herbert Muschamp’s trying to say about the World Trade Center Memorial is now lost to me. My mind went blank and numb when I read the word, “metrotextual.”

Howard Berkes is doing a story on NPR right now about Mormon Cinema. It ranges from the all in-joke Singles Ward to soundbites from the self-proclaimed “Mormon Spielberg,” Richard Dutcher, to the promise of the festival-friendly ” Saints and Soldiers.
I’ve never seen any of these Mo-Mo Movies, but a friend bought the feature rights to an LDS-related documentary, and a novel I’m optioning has a Mormon angle. For my money, you can’t beat the doctrinal and educational films the Church itself produced in the 60’s and 70’s. I said as much in an onair discussion with Dutcher on KUER, the local Utah NPR affiliate. In that hour-long program last fall, the host managed to avoid any mention of the most critically acclaimed Mormon filmmaker, Neil LaBute, whose films show (to my religious eye) an awareness of the Mormon moral topography, but whose R-ratings keep more doctrinaire believers from ever seeing them.
Anyway, my gut tells me a movie has to be good before it’s Mormon; if Dutcher wants to be a Mormon Spielberg, more power to him, but that’s just aiming for the middle(brow).
The piece wraps up with a rock cover of Come, Come Ye Saints, a classic pioneer hymn, which, doesn’t have the power of the punk rock version of that Sunday school staple, Give Said The Little Stream. It was from the high school band that inspired the movie, SLC Punk (another film that goes unmentioned, btw).

We just switched DC apartments (Cleveland Park, because you can walk, but if you think that’s a subway…don’t get me started), but I figured anyone who’s moved before doesn’t need to read the tedia (2 or more tediums?) that entails. In addition to the headaches, like not having furniture, needing to repaint, being waitlisted for indoor parking, there’s the inevitable stomach ache that comes from having a 180-lb pile of locally produced candy in the corner, well within armslength. [For DC, I took that to mean Goetze’s Caramel Creams, which is technically from Baltimore.]
I’ve eaten so much today, it looks like a 130-lb pile. And to top it off, now I have to paint around it. Priorities, people. Priorities.

Ahh, remember back in 2003, when turning up on someone’s blogroll elicited nothing but warm fuzzies? Leave it to the new I-bankin’ regime at New York Magazine to turn blogrolling into a competitive sport. Spiers is cackling with evil delight from the head of her table.
I’m afraid if there’s a weblog equivalent of Sweeps Week programming, I ain’t got it. At best, I’m IFC to Gawker‘s Fox; Sundance to Gothamist‘s NBC; Jon Favreau to Jarvis‘s Aaron Brown; James Lipton to Aaron‘s that guy from Full Frontal Fashion. I’d better start drafting my congratulations speech now.
Update: At Lowculture, Matt shows that even if I’m concept here, he’s execution. Check out their “if weblogs were cable channels.” There, now the loop is complete.

So this is what you get if you don’t buy New York magazine. On Monday, Elizabeth “The Kicker” Spiers plants a swift one right in Harvey Weinstein’s buttcheek. Fearing that Peter Biskind’s new book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, was not getting the attention it deserves*, Spiers posted excerpts where Wenstein went all Kurtz on a pair of NY Observer reporters in Nov. 2000. Apparently, Headlockee Andrew Goldman was so traumatized by the encounter he, um, went to work for Talk Magazine. The Horror, The Horror, indeed.
Well, Spiers needn’t have feared. D&D‘s getting decent attention; The Observer reviews it, but without mentioning their employee’s cameo appearance in a Weinsteinian headlock. And over at GreenCine, David puts the book–and Biskind’s career–in compelling context. He also points to IndieWIRE’s review, by Eugene Hernandez, who uncovers the essence of D&D by contrasting it with Biskind’s earlier history of the 70’s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

…Those familiar with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls will notice a different approach to this decade. It is not about the films, it is about the business of the movies, that’s the story that, according to Biskind, defined the 90s. “This is a distribution and marketing story.

Net net: buy it for the in-depth insight gleaned from hundreds of interviews, read it for the tawdry gossip.
* Update: Some crank named Frank Rich writes about Down and Dirty Pictures in the NYT A&L. And via GreenCine, Sean Means safely predicts that the book’ll be “prime topic of cocktail-party conversation at the [Sundance Film] Festival.” I think he means the coverage of the book.

[via BuzzMachine] Jason Calacanis (I can’t believe I just typed that) has launched three new film-related weblogs, or Weblogs, Inc’s: a Sundance-related blog, a documentary blog, and an independent film blog. So far, the operating premise seems to be, “We read IndieWIRE so you don’t have to,” but let’s give them a chance.

I rated 6 of the 15 finalists (and they still made it. cue rimshot) in the earlier phase, but the best are all ads I hadn’t seen before: Polygraph , In My Country. Army of One needs polishing, but it has the greatest potential to reach people currently beyond the sway of MoveOn.org, a more useful goal than simply stoking existing rage against the Bush machine. Actually, the ingenious Desktop should be the best, but it suffers from a fatal flaw: it’s an Apple desktop. When it comes to computers on TV, the bad guys always use a PC.
Buy a floor ticket for the final judging on Monday, you cheap monkeys. George Soros can’t carry this all himself, you know

David Edelstein’s hosting Slate’s Film Club, and it’s as entertaining as reading long emails could possibly be. While you could keep reading all week to see what new fabric these five critics can weave from the threads of last year’s films, I’m sticking around to see if the Voice‘s J. Hoberman gets picked to be on Martha Stewart’s jury. [I non-watched Runaway Jury on the plane back from LA. Dustin Hoffman, John Cusack, Gene Hackman, but I’d never heard a peep about it; when did it come out? A rhetorical question, because I so don’t care.]
Anyway, Vogue‘s Sarah Kerr coined a term for the huge crop of formulaic movies, including indies I’ve long since lost my sense of obligation to see, merely because they’re indies: Situation Tragedies. I like it. I mean, I hate it.

1. “A Past of Fear and Pain for First-Time Filmmaker”: Dear Vadim Perelman, if you really don’t want people to know about your pseudo-criminal past, don’t put it in your press kit and chat up The New York Times about it.
2. Ruth La Ferla’s favor-repaying article asks how hot the trend of men’s jewelry is. The answer? v.v.v. hot, if you ask the right people. Like, for example, men’s jewelry store owners, men’s jewelry designers, an industry newsletter, and the editors of two soon-to-launch men’s shopporn mags.
Still wonder if it’s just a phase? Well, how about the jewelry designer’s husband, “a dapper hedge fund manager who rarely leaves the house without his platinum wedding ring, wide as a cigar band.” [“Honey, I’m just going for a long walk, um, through the East Village without my wedding ring. Don’t wait up.”]
Subtext? “‘The word metrosexual is not going to appear in this article, is it?’ [the mercifully Google-proof] David Matthews asked, his voice rising warily. For good reason [since the Style Section outed you mets in the first place.]” See Gawker for Details recent metrosexual re-closeting.]