the making of, by greg allen
American Dad sounds like The Family Guy newly converted to Atkins.
Making lemonade out of an assignment to review Fox’s lame-sounding new series, Alessandra Stanley decides to start throwing concussion grenades into the world of animated comedy she apparently knows nothing about, just to watch the nerds scramble out and attack:
Blair Erickson writes about his experience working with director Uwe Boll on an early treatment and script for the Tara Reid vehicle [sic] Alone In The Dark.
Even if it IS the Worst Movie Ever Of The Century Of The Week, it sure has generated a lot of ancillary entertainment opportunities.
Blair Erickson – Behind the Scenes: Uwe Boll and Uwe Boll’s “Alone In the Dark” [somethingawful.com]
Bad Review Revue: Alone in the Dark, funny funny funny [defectiveyeti.com]
The exhibition that Choire Sicha curated which inexplicably included me, Regarding Clementine, is closing this evening.
There’s a swanky beer bust [sic] from 6-8, a closing party, to which the less stalker-ish among you are definitely invited.
Clementine Gallery
526 W 26th St, Chelsea Arts Bldg, 2nd Floor
[note: For the more stalkerish, the address is 526 East 26th st, and it starts at midnight.]
After all, Eric Steel didn’t say he wasn’t going to film the jumpers off the Golden Gate Bridge when he applied for a permit to shoot the bridge all day, every day, for a year. According to the federal officials who issued him the permit, he described his project as, variously, “a day in the life” of the bridge or “a powerful and spectacular interaction between the monument and nature.”
Steel captured 19 jumpers on film, plus “hundreds” of unsuccessful attempts, including some that were thwarted by his crew’s alerts to authorities. Then he went to interview people affected.
If Tad Friend’s excellent, disturbing 2003 New Yorker piece is to be believed, bridge officials and politicians are rather warily pre-occupied with its reputation as a suicide spot. Which makes their protestations that they were shocked, shocked at the director’s “true intentions” ring a little hollow. Friend’s article is pretty damning of the bridge’s managing board, which adamantly opposes installing suicide-preventing fences.
When you tire of reading self-righteous condemnations from implicated public figures, there are plenty of snap judgments from utterly uninvolved people on Metafilter.
Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge; Angry officials say moviemaker misled them [sfgate.com]
Suicide Documentary Angers Golden Gate Bridge Officials [ktvu.com]
LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA/ Tad Friend/ Jumpers/ The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge/ Issue of 2003-10-13 [newyorker.com]
The GGB Suicide Documentary [mefi]
Related: Bureau of Inverse Technology’s conceptual(-only) art project, “Suicide Box,” which was shown at the Whitney Biennial [bureauit.org]
Update update: Just extrapolated this new definition from a Defective Yeti post about the horribly horrible X-box-game-turned-movie, Alone in The Dark:
Jar-Jar: vt. to oh-so-wrongly insert a performer or performance into a (exploitative of children? stultifyingly boring? crassly commercial? help me here) work, either through editing or the use of digital image manipulation and/or computer graphics techniques. [Jar-Jar into]
alt. To Be Jar-Jarred [Ex.: “And until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume that Ben Kingsley was digitally Jar-Jarred into this film without his permission.”]
Also, as Wayne Bremser might say: “VW Jar-Jarred a long-since-dead and once-revered Gene Kelly into a soulless euro techno music video disguised as an endearing homage advert.”
In theGuardian, Steven Brook puffs the Gene Kelly VW ad and provides a very little background, like that Kelly’s widow had to approve of the ad, as did Turner and EMI, who control the elements of the movie scene. [See, I guess at the heart of my idea of who’d decide this stuff for my dead self is that I don’t want only people with commerical interest in the outcome to make the decisions.]
Anyway, there’s an Access Hollywood-level description of the CG process, where they reshot the original scene and masked Kelly’s face over the dancer. Irrelevant press packet factoid: the ad was shot on the same Shepperton soundstage as Oliver! [what, it’s been mothballed for 40 years just waiting for a worthy freakin’ car ad to come along?]
Also, “an interactive version of the advert will launch in late February. Its content will include a video of the car, footage of the making of the ad, and the song.” Interactive? Does that mean we can all take the controls in our own version of Being Gene Kelly? Not bloody likely. “People will be able use the interactive advert to request a test drive of the car.”
Blingin’ In The Rain [guardian, via tmn]
“‘We’ve been given the mandate to compete on a more aggressive level,’ says [Paramount Classics co-pres David] Dinerstein, who also helped orchestrate the reported $2 million purchase of Mad Hot Ballroom, a Slamdance documentary widely described as Spellbound meets Strictly Ballroom.”
1) One of the odd, still-annoys-me things was that Strictly Ballroom was vaguely a documentary, too. The early scenes were all “talking-head-and-captions,” and then it just disappeared. Weird, edgy, or sloppy, whatever, it got him to Romeo+Juliet.
2) Every group with more than five adolescent dorks in it should get an agent, or at least look up “life rights” on Google before the cameras descend. Drill teamers, pep clubbers, band members, chess clubbers, debaters, science fair entrants, video gamers, D&D/RPG players, and incessant IM’ers, this means you.
Strictly Business [Village Voice]
Assuming they don’t close down all discussions of art, film, and culture before I get there, I’ll be in Rotterdam, participating in a couple of panel discussions around the upcoming Art Rotterdam fair.
In one debate on Feb. 25, Saskia Bos, director of De Appel in Amsterdam, will moderate as we discuss private and public funding for the arts, particularly for museums. [I’m there to discuss my work at MoMA with the Junior Associates.]
Also on the panel:
Claudia Rech, Head of development Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
Rainald Schumacher, Director Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany
Kees van Twist, Director Groninger Museum, Groningen, NL
Frank Lubbers, Vice-Director Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL
The other one is still gelling, but I hope it doesn’t involve Islamic fundamentalists. More details soon.
Art Rotterdam 2005
After the initial surge of self-righteous outrage-alin subsided in my veins, I decided that this British VW commercial that re-animates Gene Kelly in order to have him Breakdance In The Rain is, in fact, a rather brilliant tribute and an awesome piece of work.
Someday, we’ll all need to think about who makes decisions about who gets to decide how and when our content and likeness will be used after we’re dead. Kelly got lucky here; you wouldn’t (would you??) want heirs like Samuel Beckett’s, whose fundamentalist dictums foreclose any possible future innovations. Of course, you wouldn’t want Fred Astaire’s heirs, either, who sold him out to a freakin’ vacuum commercial, or MLK’s, who pimped one of the most important speeches of the 20th century to a phone company that probably doesn’t even exist anymore.
No, you’d want–ok, I’d want–to come up with a committee of sorts, a group that self-perpetuates, with a diverse enough membership that stays able to judge the current context, and position dead-me in it an innovative, relevant, and reputation/”brand”-enhancing way.
Who knows, the people I designate–and the types of people they’re replaced with; I wouldn’t want my committee to ossify or to get hijacked/blockaded by any one generation–might even make better career choices for me after I’m dead than I make while I’m still here. After all, Gene Kelly’s last dancing movie was the hapless Olivia Newton-John rollerdisco musical, Xanadu [here’s the DVD].
VW GTi, Gene Kelly – Singin’ In The Rain (60s) [DavidReviews.com via nathanpitman.com via waxy.org]
A generous and funny Xanadu synopsis [coolcinematrash.com]
Previously:
A Pile of Rubble Topped by Nudes. Now That’s a Musical!
[Update: Holy crap, Xanadu was the first feature film of Robert Greenwald, who directed Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War]
[On the other hand: Wayne Bremser–he of the Matthew Barney vs Donkey Kong fame–sends me to the showers thus:
I disagree with you, Greg. The first thing that stands out is that the music isn’t “breakdance” music at all – it’s bad generic euro dance music. They should have done a mash up of something, would have been more interesting and perhaps there is something related to “rain” that would have been more interesting.
While I don’t think this scene is sacred, I do think there is something perverse about manipulating Gene Kelly to look like a much worse dancer than he was. It’s not that bad at the end when the camera is not so close, and they don’t have to maintain the illusion of his head, but the rest of it, the way they have manipulated the head to always look at the camera, it looks like Jim Carrey doing a dance while trying to keep up a wacky face.
With the wealth of original homegrown media mashups online (i.e. Planet of Apes remixed as a Twlight Zone episode), a commercial like this seems amateur in concept and style (perhaps more polished, but certainly amateurs would use better music).
I DID totally call it on Xanadu, though. – g.o]
Philip Johnson called himself a whore, partly to diffuse critics who didn’t like his constantly changing style or his intense curiousity in pursuit of new architectural ideas.
Apparently, though, it didn’t save him from an eviscerating obituary in the Guardian at the hands of Andrew Saint. Unlike Homer Simpson–who likes his beer cold and his homosexuals flaming–this venal Cambridge architecture professor prefers his beer warm and his homosexuals safely confined to those four years of British public school, thank you very much. At least that’s what the whole obituary is about.
Saint’s acid conflation of the evils of gayness, inherited wealth, corporations, aesthetics, modernism and Nazism was enough to drive archinect’s Javier Arbona to the typewriter to call Saint to repentance.
Philip Johnson: Flamboyant postmodern architect whose career was marred by a flirtation with nazism [Guardian]
A response to Andrew Saint, by Javier Arbona [archinect]
[update: In a NYT op-ed, Mark Stevens says basically the same thing as Saint, but with more quotes and less gay.]
The writer-director Noah Baumbach, 35, based the film on his own experience of his parents’ divorce. He said that he had struggled for years to find his voice as a filmmaker after making Kicking and Screaming in 1995 but had an epiphany at a screening of the Louis Malle classic Murmur of the Heart, organized by his friend Wes Anderson (a Squid producer).
“I thought I should deal with this moment in my life,” he said after an early morning screening on Wednesday. “But it’s why it took me a long time to get it done. There was a censor in me, not in a literal way, more in general, wondering what people might think and who would care – it’s only my story. Letting go of that censor was really important; personally, it was a breakthrough.”
Mr. Baumbach’s mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for The Village Voice, and his father, Jonathan, is a film critic and novelist who teaches at Brooklyn College. Neither parent, as portrayed in the film, is particularly sympathetic. Mr. Baumbach said it was all right with his real-life parents “because they’re writers.”
The director had [Jeff] Daniels borrow some of Jonathan Baumbach’s clothes for his wardrobe. “I liked to use things that connected me to that time, in a Proustian way,” he said. [nice. -g.o]
Discussion of an actual film, buried in Tony Scott’s nerdy “Sundance is all about scamming free stuff” article.
Chain, was directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jem Cohen. The movie tells the story of a pair of women seemingly stranded in an instantly familiar, parking lot-filled landscape of big box retail stores, fast food restaurants and malls. It looks like it could have been made in one pass through AnySuburbanTown, USA, but it was actually shot in 11 states and seven countries over seven years.
Don’t miss the unintentional National Security subplot.
Chain, dir. by Jem Cohen, is screening at the Curzon Soho in London on Feb. 8. It showed at MoMA Gramercy in a 3-screen format last year.
All the world’s a car park [Guardian, via archinect]
Wendy Mitchell on Jem Cohen’s Chain Times Three at MoMA [IndieWIRE]
What with all the access preserving, the source stroking and the advertiser cultivating going on, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the utter lack of real context or actual reporting when it comes to fashion.
Stories about Helmut Lang’s split with Prada dutifully transcribe Patrizio Bertelli’s party line about how unprofitable Lang’s line had become, thanks to his “reputation for being stubborn, refusing to work with fabrics or techniques he deemed inferior even if lower costs would help the bottom line.” Meanwhile, Bertelli, who has clashes with any designer not his wife, is “an intense and uncompromising businessman dedicated to improving the performance of the brands Prada acquired.”
The magic formula, of course, was–and still supposedly is–high-margin accessories and fragrances. Um, yeah, but that’s the same story Prada was telling when they bought control of Helmut Lang’s business six years ago. And didn’t I buy Helmut Lang fragrances several times in a Helmut Lang Fragrance Store across Greene St from the original boutique?
These multi-luxury brand companies are managed like portfolios, with their different brands positioned to complement and offset each other. Problems arise when these brands are highly correllated, and they end up competing instead. That can throw a portfolio’s performance out of whack.
By buying Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, Bertelli wasn’t just expanding the reach of Prada’s empire; he was co-opting any potential rivals for Miuccia’s own throne. If Lang’s sales suffered under Prada management, maybe it’s because they forced his brand down market and out of direct competition with Prada both on price and quality. After the 1999 deal, Lang’s clothes dropped 20-30% in price, but the quality easily dropped in half, especially on the menswear side. I tried for a couple of seasons to keep buying his suits, but they just sucked. Lang had been transformed into basically a Prada bridge line, Prada University Club. The kicker, of course, was that even though it cost more, Prada’s menswear also sucked, thanks to Bertelli’s commitment to the bottom line.]
Given Bertelli’s evident management biases and track record, is it any wonder about why Prada has such a hard time going public? Damn, but that company pisses me off.
Helmut Lang to split from Prada [IHT]
Question for Prada: Now What? [NYT]
“There’s a certain enjoyment in facing death, periodically.”
– actor Robert Blake discussing–no, but good guess–discussing his appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as quoted in a 1978 New Yorker profile by Kenneth Turan. [Day-um. Turan kept a Carson Watching Journal in 1976 that uses words–in his JOURNAL–like ‘exordium’? It’s like College Bowl meets Television Without Pity.]
Bonus celebrity murderer mention: O.J. Simpson