Category: Uncategorized

What with this excellent batch of folks joining Persistence of Vision (whose August 2003 posts earn her the Irving Thalberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in Blogging), Typepad is fast becoming the go-to URL for film-related weblogs:

Out of Focus

Cinetrix’s Pullquote

Filmbrain

The deceptive losers of last weekend’s national elections in Spain are now threatening to sue Pedro freakin’ Almodovar for “slander and calumny.” Apparently, Almodovar told a movie audience that, yes, he’d heard the rumors flying around the country’s mobile phones that Pres. Aznar might stage a coup if he lost.
Related: Deceptive loser Richard Perle finally backs down from his threat to sue Sy Hersh for slander, climbs back into his spiderhole even though it might generate publicity for his book. [look it up yourself. I’m not going to link to it. Psycho.]

Finally, a conflation of religion and commerce I can believe in: St. Eric of Blacktable’s The Cult of Diet Coke.
A glorious bit of Good News, indeed, but it’s an incomplete testament. Sure, they mention those voices crying in the Diet Coke-ist wilderness, the “fine folks at AspartameKills.com.” But Blacktable insidiously omits any mention of the Great Satan of Aspartame, the CEO of pharma-giant Searle who lobbied for FDA approval of the WMD we now worship as Nutrasweet, Donald Rumsfeld. All hail our new Aspartame overlords.
On a more personal note, Diet Coke (in the less patriotic, French form known as Coca Lite) played the role of comic relief in my first film, Souvenir (November 2001). [pause that refreshes] The protagonist’s search for a WWI memorial runs parallel to his search for Coca Light in the countryside of northern France.

Paige West, a diehard collector and longtime champion of emerging artists has a weblog named, accurately enough, Art Addict.
Of course, Paige’s other site, Mixed Greens, has “we sell art” as its subtitle.
I guess she wants to reassure readers that she’s not just a pusher but a user, too. So find a vein and jack right in. [via MAN]

According to GreenCine, who reads the trades for you, Terrence Malick’s Che has been shelved “for a year.” The timing makes me wonder if the recent announcement about Malick and Che wasn’t an attempt by the project people to head off his departure. Of course, Malick years are like dog years, so if it’s Che you want, you may have to be satisfied with the three other Che films about to take to the streets.
If it’s Malick you want, however, he’s now working on a Pocahontas bio starring Colin Farrell (as John Smith, not Pocahontas). No IMDb entry yet for this film, scheduled to start shooting in July, titled The New World. That’s actually from Aladdin, not Pocahontas, yo. [C’mon, I was working for The Mouse at the time. I have to know these things.]
Related: Dress your little revolutionary in Che Guevara logo merchandise.

Spalding Gray spoke about Monster in a Box on WNYC, and about preferring to gather his material fly-on-the-wall-style. When Gray went to Los Angeles, his assistant/driver Kao didn’t speak to him the whole trip. A friend told him later she just didn’t want to end up in a monologue. “And here, I just thought she was stupid. No matter what, you’re going to be in it.”
Interviews with Spalding Gray:
WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, from 1990
SG on Fresh Air talking about his monologue, “It’s a Slippery Slope” in 1996
SG on Fresh Air talking about his book, “Morning, Noon & Night” in 1999
Rebroadcast today of a 2001 interview with WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi
Spalding Gray DVD’s:
Amazon for Gray’s Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh
Ebay for Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme.

Use an only-in-LA pickup line on the Observer‘s Alexandra Jacobs and be prepared to read about yourself after she gets back to NYC. That is, of course, if you even read a paper anymore, which you don’t.
In L.A. Mating Cry: IMDb Me!, Jacobs does her best George Gurley, and gets people to unload their most unwittingly unflattering selves to the media.

A reader is looking for a transcript of Sofia Coppola’s Oscar acceptance speech. Any ideas? Does anyone still have that snoozer of a show on Tivo? Is it even possible to capture the ephemeral essence that is Sofia with mere words?
I remember her thanking Antonioni, and her father, “for telling me never to use video taps,” but I confess, I stopped transcribing her last fall.
Email me at greg at greg dot org with your suggestions. Thanks.

[Update: sheesh, that was fast. The transcript, minus the advice about video taps, is at the Oscars website. Since it’s about as long as her script for LIT, I post it here in its entirety:

Thank you. I can’t believe I’m standing here. Thank you. Thank you to the Academy for giving me this honor. Thank you to my dad for everything he taught me. Thank you to my brother Roman and all my friends who were there for me when I was stuck at 12 pages and encouraged me to keep writing. And the filmmakers whose movies — I have to breathe. The filmmakers whose movies inspired me when I was writing this script, Antonioni and Wong Kar-Wai and Bob Fosse and Godard and all the others. And every writer needs a muse. Mine was Bill Murray. Thanks to my mom for always encouraging us to try to make art, and thank you to Bart and Ross for helping make my script into a movie. And thank you to everyone at Focus. Thank you.

And thanks to my dad for telling me never to use video taps. Ahem.

David F. Gallagher has moved his base of operations for his excellent photo-centric weblog, lightningfield.com, to Paris for a while. He thinks this’ll mean “fewer pictures of trash,” which is cute.

What a post to follow Vincent Gallo. I just started a two-week guestblogging stint at Times and Seasons, a multifaceted group weblog about Mormon doctrine, living, culture and politics. Check it out, brothers and sisters.

After screening at Documenta XI, Chicago’s Renaissance Society, Miami Art Basel, and MoMA Gramercy, Amar Kanwar’s excellent 1997 video, A Season Outside, gets its New York gallery debut–and a review by Jerry Saltz.

Guy Maddin takes his own sweet time publishing Part II of his production diary for The Saddest Music in the World, which opens at MoMA Gramercy on March 4. Tomorrow! Like with Jersey Girls, Full Frontal, and I Love Your Work, when production diaries go up against Hollywood publicists trying to control info in a film, the publicists still win. [Where’s Jeff Jarvis when you need him?]

It’s like ur-machinima. The Citizen Kane of 8-bit filmmaking. Little movies set in Marioland, but made in Flash, that combine classic cinematic devices like flashbacks, dramatic pullbacks and closeups with authentic 8-bit graphics. Oh, and a melodramatic score that incorporates game sounds. And atmospheric perspective. And DVD-esque chapter menus.
The 3-part story (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) is by AlexanderLeon.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. And if you play it in the same room with a sleeping baby, she’ll cry. [via boingboing]
Related from May 2003: Buddy Icon Cinema, and comparing Donkey Kong to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3.
Related links: NY artist Cory Arcangel‘s 80’s video-game-inspired works at Filmmaker Magazine’s blog and at the upcoming Whitney Biennial [shabby website, Whit]

Lynda Obst gives Slate‘s David Edelstein a juicy piece of Lost in Translation gossip, that Sofia’s father gave her three pages of notes on the film, which she stuffed. Edelstein calls the movie “Chekhovian,” which is high praise in his book. Sofia, you’ve come a long way, baby. Good luck.
Meanwhile, at Edelstein’s other gig, Fresh Air, Terry Gross ran a 1999 interview with LIT star Bill Murray, while the site promises an upcoming interview with Ms Coppola herself.
March 30 or so, MoMA’s Film Department is giving Sofia Coppola its Work In Progress Award. They called it early last year, by the way, no dogpiling there. Stay tuned for more greg.org coverage.
My favorite Bill Murray story goes like this: when somebody recognized him on the street in NYC, Murray walked up to him and popped him on the forehead. Then he bent over to the stunned man and whispered, “no one’ll ever believe you,” and walked away. Maybe that’s what happened to Scarlett Johansson’s character at the end of LIT.
At this house Saturday, we’ll be watching the IFP Independent Spirit Awards, which are a lot more fun. Assuming we’re not sacked out from exhaustion, that is. Oh, and no sooner did I post about Cassavetes’ Shadows, that it turned up in my mailbox, a forgotten gift to myself from my DVD rental queue.
related: my interview with Sofia. My hanging with Alexander Payne and David O. Russell, previous MoMA honorees. My own Edelstein-inspired Chekhov reference. Me me me me me.

Barbara London, Associate Curator of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, will screen some seminal works of video art and talk about the ins and outs of showing and collecting. Among the artists she’ll be showing: Nam June Paik, Bill Wegman, Joan Jonas, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Laurie Anderson, Wang Jianwei and others.
The discussion will be Monday evening at 6:30 in midtown. It’s not open to the public, but Author gregPosted on February 20, 2004Categories Uncategorized