I first caught wind of the news from Stu over at Defamer, and seeing as how his post features a montage of Brooksfilm clips that excludes Solarbabies (for which he apologizes), I present you with a clip from the film here. Isn’t it great to know that breakdance and beatboxing is still cool in the waterless post-apocalyptic future? Another thing that would be cool in the future: a Broadway adaptation of Solarbabies. Hopefully Brooks will forget about that Blazing Saddlesmusical that’s rumored to be in the works and concentrate on bringing one of his non-classics to the stage. It’d be kinda like Starlight Express meets Urinetown. If Xanaducan be a hit and Young Frankensteincan’t, I say this idea should at least be explored.
Who was the “major U.S. critic” who allegedly “stormed away from a mobbed, delayed 10:30 p.m. Cannes press screening of Two Lovers declaring she’s ‘not going to wait an hour for f—–g [director] James Gray’”? After allowing the blogosphere to stew on it for a week and a half, EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum uses the Pop Watch blog to come clean. “Dear reader, the storming, cursing critic in this international incident was me.”
Midday, May 27, 2008. I was on the edge of East NY, Brooklyn, looking for a shop that sold $10 Boost phone cards. Not the $20 ones– what am I, Trump?
Somebody told me to go over to Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, across the L train tracks. Once there, I stumbled across a great commotion at the Vad Dyke Houses housing project. Crowds were gathered and men with walkie talkies darted about. A crime scene. No, a movie shoot. I went up to a short black woman with dreads, a headset and a hardware store full of items hanging from her cargo pants.
“What’s shooting?” I asked. “Brooklyn’s Finest, a movie,” she said. “Cop stuff, huh?” “Well, sorta. It’s the director who did Training Day, Antoine Fuqua.” “Ah, Fuqua,” I said, remembering how much I love that director’s tactile widescreen compositions but mostly loathe his vision of humanity.
Never mind. I had my digital recorder on me, so I whipped it out and decided to play Film Journalist with the cute P.A. “Can I interview you?”
I feel like in order to talk about Sex and the City in any depth more than I already have, I have to tell you a little something about my personal worldview, to explicate how it’s possible that a pushing-30 single gal living in New York could not only not identify with but actually feel hostile towards, as Susie Bright put it in an excellent piece in Salon, the “racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.”
Fortunately for all of us, talking about my personal life on this blog is the last thing in the world I want to do. So, instead, I combed the panoply of reviews of and writings about film that have come online over the last week, in order to cull five different commonly-cited grounds for why this film is a toxic scourge on the entirety of the human race. Or maybe just not the best possible way to spend 2.5 hours.
Representative Pullquote: “The most human character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her 20s and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature…Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.” — Ebert.
Who Says it Best: Lane, who hasn’t produced a review to gain this much traction in the blogosphere since his legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith. Still, it’s not so much what Lane says (he makes fun of not just the ladies’ thirst for expensive outfits but the outfits themselves, complaining that all four are “little better than also-rans” compared to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face) as the illustration the New Yorker saw fit to attach to his review. A masterpiece of grotesque caricature, it’s the only piece of critique of the film that this self-professed third (or is it fourth?) wave feminist considers to be truly, maliciously misogynist.
A new R-rated trailer for the Coens’ Burn After Readingshowed up online this week, and though it reminds me of a lot of Coen favorites, particularly Raising Arizonaand The Big Lebowski, it initially made me think of Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede. I don’t know if you could classify Brad Pitt’s hairstyle in Burn After Reading a pompadour, but that first shot of him in the trailer called to mind his tall greaser ‘do in the 1991 cult classic.
So, here’s a few clips from the earlier film (for the Burn After Reading trailer, go here) in which the title character (Pitt) encounters Freak Storm (Nick Cave, who would later appear in and score Pitt-starrer The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Note the conversation Freak has in the bar. It in turn reminded me of the Coens, who always seem to have a variation of “I need my money” or “where’s the money” or something like that. It’s too bad DiCillo never rose to the Coens’ status or talent, despite working with Coen Bros. regulars like Steve Buscemi and John Turturro.
This review originally appeared, in a slightly different form, during Sundance 2008. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* opens on six screens today.
A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and competition in contemporary American culture. The voice of the film, delivered via Bell’s constant narration, can be hackneyed and a bit too reliant on a faux-naivete which belies some of its stronger conclusions, but on the whole Bell mounts a surprisingly sophisticated argument––surprising because he’s a first time feature-maker, surprising because it’s clearly on Bell’s agenda to please his crowd, surprising because this is a film that relies on footage from Rocky 4 to explicate its thesis argument––that steroid criminalization amounts to hating the player whilst willfully ignoring the dynamics of the game.
Although each clip has its nice moments of intertexual collage (I especially like the way the same footage from Royal Wedding is recycled to different ends: in “Billy Jean,” set to the line, “The kid is not my son,” it’s a contemplation of paternity; in “Brings SexyBack,” it’s a placeholder for seduction) “Smooth Criminal” really draws attention to this way this method of mashup makes the entirety of filmed dance history seem less like a timeline than a series of arrows pointing back to the same point. For all of their ability to tap into and inspire the zeitgeist of their respective heydays, dancers like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake resemble Astaire more than anything else in their contemporary cultures. For whatever reason, the iconography of the solo male dancer is always looking back, as if there’s nothing new do with the male body set to music that Fred Astaire hadn’t thought of.
This theory does give short shrift to Gene Kelly, who had a distinct style and presence that was not chiefly Astairean, but for whatever reason, the evidence suggests he’s been less influential on pop stars of the future. Maybe it’s because, compared to someone like Timberlake, he was built like a boxer, and with the exception of Singin’ in the Rain, his characters were often (gasp!) working class, or at least certainly not the blinged-out party crashers that Astaire tended to play, which make his images so compatible with lines like “VIP, drinks on me,” never mind lyrics that equate seduction to some kind of surreptitious crime. Does Gene Kelly have an analgous modern pop star? And if so, where’s that mashup?
Hellboy producer Mike Richardson is bringing the saga of Emily the Strange––the sad little black haired cat girl who you might remember from t-shirts and stickers with you were a teenager in the 90s––to the big screen. Terrible timing––this is the role Christina Ricci was born to play, but not only is she probably too old by now, but after Speed Racer she probably wouldn’t be able to get the job.
David Gordon Green will directYour Highness, a fantasy comedy written y Danny McBride and Ben Best, the stars/co-writers of The Foot Fist Way.
“Best-case scenario would be for Sex and the City to wind up with same kind of numbers as The Devil Wears Prada, with $200 million internationally,” predicts Variety. The trade doesn’t mention that tracking currently has the film pegged at a $30 million opening weekend, far below the $50 million that Variety claims the Indiana Jones sequel could take in in its second week.
Would a second place opening weekend dim SatC director Michael Patrick King’s confidence? Upon landing a first-lookdeal with Dreamworks on the eve of his directorial debut’s release, he coyly hinted at the possibility of a sequel. “The actresses are great, and if the gods smile and people are still interested, why not?” he told Variety. Sex, excess, and pantheism––it’s ancient Rome all over again.
Interview with Chris Bell who made Bigger, Stronger, Faster–opening tonight. A doc going way beyond body building into the essence of an unspoken American pastime: Cheating. Karina reports back on Cannes and everything the media missed that it shouldn’t have: Tyson,Frontier of Dawn and Everything is Fine.
FilmCouch #72 - Karina on Cannes, Kevin on steroids [31:03m]: Play Now | Download
Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled They didn’t build their sales model for you. Much of the piece is given over to a description of the dire state of distribution affairs for truly independent filmmakers. Marlow, who acquires films for GreenCine’s DVD-by-mail main site, essentially argues that filmmakers should put less weight on dreams of theatrical distribution and concentrate on the many new media options. I didn’t comment on this story earlier because, well, my reaction was pretty much the same as Agnes Varnum’s: “It reads to me as a good summary of where things have been for last couple of years in film sales, so my question is what’s the news? Do people really not know this information?”
Tom Hall also weighs in on the Marlow piece, from a festival programmer’s perspective: “Let me begin by taking exception to Marlow’s straw man, one that I have seen being built over and over again on panels and in discussions among filmmakers and programmers over the past few years; Film festivals are not, in fact, an ersatz distribution system for films.”
If you live in New York and/or read the blogs of people who do, chances are you’re aware of The Emily Gould Fiasco. Funnily enough, Juan and Victor Piñeiro, brothers as well as director and producer of Second Skin, have bared witness to several smaller-scale Emily Gould fiascos over the past decade and a half.
Finally, Paul Scheer explains why, although no one will admit to wanting it, Beverly Hills Cop 4 will make back twice its budget in its first weekend: “I’m like an abused sequel wife, I keep going back to theaters time and time again to get mercilessly kicked in the cinematic balls for having faith that a sequel can actually be good as it’s predecessors.”
First of all, I don’t know what kind of girl out there thinks it’s a good idea to drag their boyfriend to see Sex and the City. If you have no female friends to accompany you on such a journey, chances are you’re not the type of broad who’s really going to get anything out of it anyway; if you STILL feel like you have to see it, are you really so insecure that you can’t go to a movie by yourself? Really, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re thinking, please take this advice: there are things you and your boyfriend just don’t need to share. Give him the night off.
Of course, there will be women out there who don’t heed such advice, and for the poor boyfriends caught up in their careless webs, at least there’s something of an outplan. We got a press release at Spout HQ this afternoon about a promotion spearhead by Geek Squad––yeah, as in the orange shirts from Best Buy––designed to “save” the young men of America from a weekend full of “torture” outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva Convention. Sounds noble, right? Or at least, as noble as any totally opportunistic marketing scheme could be. Details after the jump.
Congratulations to Jordan Gray, creator of the above image and winner of our Presidential Zombie Photoshop Contest. Jordan, please contact us at karina AT spout.com with your mailing information so we can get you your prize. Many thanks to all who entered, and check back because we’ll be doing more contests in the near future.
As you read this post, I am sitting on a college campus wearing a maroon cap and gown as I attend my graduation commencement. Yes, 13 years after I first went off to film school, 11 years after I dropped out, and 2 years after I returned to finally finish my undergrad, I’m getting my bachelor’s in film studies. So, to celebrate the occasion, I figured I’d take a look at some of the film characters who are in my mind as I walk toward the stage to pick up my diploma.
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate - This one’s obvious, so let me start with him and get it over with. I do wonder, though: if he were just graduating today, what would be the substitute for that famous one word of advice, “plastics”? Would it be “blogging”? It sure wouldn’t be “film criticism.” And not just because that’s actually two words. …Read more
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore,Lost in Translationand Broken Flowers, has been animated by a kind of communal, revisionist nostalgia. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola were teenagers during Murray’s first brush with fame in the early 80s, which would have made them extremely susceptible to the prototypical Murray character of the day, which hit its zenith with Ghostbusters.
Who was the “major U.S. critic” who allegedly “stormed away from a mobbed, delayed 10:30 p.m. Cannes press screening of 
Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled 
Bill Murray’s indie film career resurgence over the past decade, through which the sometime “funny man” has taken melancholic serio-comic roles in films like Rushmore, 
