the making of, by greg allen
The NY Times profiles Peter Walker, the dean of modernist US landscape design (and ex-dean of Harvard and Berkeley arch. schools). Not a lot of news, but he does cite Donald Judd and Carl Andre as artistic inspirations. 2 pts for taste, but the problem with Arad’s original plaza was its unremitting Andre-ness. His own firm’s memorial proposal was “a glassy wall with the victims’ and heroes’ names etched within.”
With daily reports from the frontlines filling the Festival site, IndieWIRE, Movie City News, the Times, the trades, , Sundance needs weblogging about as much as Bush’s march to war did.
Naturally, that’s not stopping anyone. If you still think you should’ve gone, check out reports from the standby lines, bathroom lines, and coke lines as well: Weblogs, Inc. [portally]; Eric Snider [Utah-funny]; Dan Webster [Pf’ingH?]; Alastik [lots of waiting]; Peter Vonder Haar [lots of pics so far]; I’ll keep adding them as they cross my path [thanks? GreenCine, Gawker, and email]
Filmmaker Magazine’s weblog, to their great credit, actually includes posts from the filmworld beyond the steamed-up windows of Park City.
For an artist who’s only shown a couple of times and whose most well-known work –a 22-minute, reconceived-for-network-TV version of Cremaster 4–has only been seen by a handful of people, Jon Routson sure gets a lot of press. Baltimore City Paper’s Bret McCabe gives Routson the full feature treatment this week, a 5,000-word cover story, complete with inflammatory comments by [at least one] wannabe playah with a weblog.
With pleasant symmetry, another Baltimore artist, the indie filmgod John Waters, opens an exhibition of his work–thematic collages of images cribbed from 60’s and 70’s movies–at the New Museum Feb. 7. Read Artnet’s recent interview with Waters.
Related: my previous post about Routson, and my NYT article on bootlegging video art
Filmmaker reports that in the face of religious boycotts, the missionary-meets-boy tale, Latter Day, was dumped by its Salt Lake venue, Madstone Theaters. Actually, this is good news; it means they might be open to dumping Mel Gibson’s controversy-baiting The Passion of Christ, which is scheduled to open Feb. 25.
In the Village Voice, Ed Halter hears the good news about Mormon Cinema. [O me of little faith…] I think I may have been friends with one of the silly Mormon comedy producers. If not, I’m sure gonna be friends with them soon.
Other things I just posted about that turned up in the Voice [Choire’s making money for this, too. Note to self…]: Independent film’s dead! Long live independent film!, and John Cage festivities, this time at Anthology Film Archive (tomorrow night, tickets available until after the films start, from the sound of things).
Issue of 2004-01-26
Posted 2004-01-19
The Talk of The Town
COMMENT/ TAXING/ John Cassidy on Paul O?Neill?s deficit message.
HAUNTS/ ECTOPLASM!/ Ben McGrath on a ghost, perhaps, at the Maritime Hotel.
HEY, PAL DEPT./ OLD HACK/ David Owen hails a taxi historian.
GOOD WORKS/ BARELY SHAVERS/ Field Maloney on a group that?s growing mustaches for charity.
THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ BIG SPACE/ James Surowiecki on the billions behind Bush?s space program.
ANNALS OF MEDICINE/ Jerome Groopman/ The Grief Industry/ Does crisis counselling really work?
SHOUTS & MURMURS/ Frank Gannon/ Aristotle on Relationships
FICTION/ Antonya Nelson/ “Eminent Domain”
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENT CINEMA/ David Denby/ Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Monster
THE THEATRE/ Hilton Als/ King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!
BOOKS/ John Updike/ MIND/BODY PROBLEMS/ New novels by Andrew Sean Greer and Hanif Kureishi.
THE BACK PAGE/ “And the Winner Is . . .”
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
The NYT’s Glenn Collins and David Dunlap have a transfixing and revelatory article about details of the WTC Memorial Jury’s deliberations and process for the first time. Twelve of the thirteen jurors spoke with the reporters.
It turns out even the jurors were underwhelmed by the revised designs their finalists came up with. And Martin Puryear’s dismissal of Michael Kimmelman’s call for elitism to save us is right on.
Of course, Felix Salmon’s analysis is also right on, that it was essentially the jury that designed–and continues to design–the Memorial, and that Arad’s design was picked because it was the most amenable to their impending directives.
Gotta run, but before I do, the fine fine folks at Filmmaker Magazine timed the launch of their weblog to the opening of the under-the-radar Sundance Film Festival. Sundance is not, as its name suggests, held in a warm, sunny place, but in Park City, in the state of Utah. It may not be of any interest to you, but if it is, the festival has a little website.
Also at Filmmaker this month, the makings of a great short film, tips from a festival programmer. [via GreenCine]
[via IFP] New York Women in Film and Television is sponsoring a panel titled The Art of Adaptation on Jan. 28 in New York, thank you. In fact, it’s at the Alliance Francaise/French Institute, East 60th St, so even I can stumble out of bed and wander on over by, um, the 6:30 start time.
IFP members and others get $5 off the $20 registration fee. NYWIFTies get in for a mere $10.
Related: Jason Kottke made a sweet weblog for Susan Orlean’s view of Adaptation.
This panel may be payback for the last adaptation panel I attended, a misogyny-tinged but hilarious and enlighteneing discussion sponsored by Harper’s Magazine. At the New School, a lone woman, Susan Minot, squared off against David O. Russell, David Foster Wallace, Todd Solondz and Dale Peck. Editor/moderator Lewis Lapham complained about Leonard [sic] DiCaprio, while everyone else discussed James Cameron at length.
Alas, with no known tape or transcript, this panel only lives on in our hearts. And in this funny weird/funny haha DFW-centric account from some delusional DFW groupie chick (“He’s trying so hard to be everyman, when we all know he’s uberman… poor Dave.”). Quelle surprise, it’s written in the overly footnoted style of the uberman himself.
Just a quick Sforzian note of these two Reuters photos, which were side by side on a Yahoo News page this morning:
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.”
I see through fellow Best NY Blog nominee Lockhart Steele‘s feeble ruse to get me to post more non-NYC stuff. Even as I’m powerless to thwart it.
Tommy Ryk’s documentary, Work Sucks, I’m Going Skiing follows the antics of a New York hotel developer in South Beach. No story there, folks. Throw a rock in SoSoHo (as I called it in 1990, when then-friend Tony Goldman put me up in the Park Central) and you’ll hit a New York hotel developer.
No, Ryk’s film is about The Creek, a hostel-turned-hotel, full of wacky young artists, guests, and contractors. It opens at the Made in Miami Film Festival. According to this Herald article, Ryk was hired to shoot web video of artists redoing the guestrooms, but instead turned his cameras on guests who stayed on to help renovate; ersatz security guards auditioning for porn flicks, a cast of characters you could never write without sounding like Weekend at Bernie’s III.
But what can I do? It’s Kieslowski. The Decalogue is playing at the AFI Silver Theater in DC, starting tomorrow (through 1/22). The marathon back-to-back screening of all ten episodes on Saturday includes, inexplicably, the only screenings of episodes I-IV.
This was probably my last chance to see Decalogue uninterrupted in theaters for the next 15 years, give or take a month. And to think, I just found out about it. Well, maybe you should just watch them on DVD like me.
Salt in the wound: Sunday is a back-to-back showing of the Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, and Red, too.
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).