Many critics will no doubt rip apart Robert Pattinson’s performance as Salvador Dali in Little Ashes this weekend, but the truth is that it’s a surprisingly good portrayal of the artist. That is to say that given our expectations, combined with Pattinson’s own celebrity, added to the fact that anyone would look ridiculous sporting Dali’s signature mustache (even Dali), the Twilight actor does as well in the role as is possible. Is the performance Oscar-worthy? Certainly not, but it is deserving of some level of praise.
Pattinson’s Dali follows a long tradition of surprisingly good portrayals of iconic figures. Movie stars are constantly cast as famous persons they barely resemble, and often it’s difficult to shake off our identification with the player in order to accept him/her as the depicted individual. Some of these performances are better than others, and most have been honored by the Academy, but each actor and actress listed below either initially seemed like a wrong choice for the respective part or he/she was at least understood to be taking on a difficult task in attempting to portray such a familiar personality. …Read more
Ray Pride points to a trailer for 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a DVD from Plexifilm featuring 13 of Warhol’s 16mm, single-shot portraits of his superstars and Factory drop-ins (including Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Nico), set to original songs composed by ex-Luna/Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham and his wife/bassist Britta Phillips. Plexifilm says it’s the “first ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol,” and in addition to the basic DVD, they’re also offering a $250 limited edition package, featuring “a deluxe gatefold LP-style package with an exclusive poster and booklet,” as well as an archival print from a frame from your choice of one of the screentests. Or you can just watch the pretty trailer over and over for free.
Andy Warhol is responsible for a multitude of things: pop art resurgence, making the “Edie Sedgwick” a hipster Halloween costume and paving the way for the Club Kids in 1980s New York.
And here he is interviewing Steven Spielberg in an undisclosed hotel room as–oddly enough–Bianca Jagger interjects every so often. It’s a brief, weird 1:55 clip, but during this time we learn that Spielberg is incredibly interested in radios, Warhol is adept at manipulating people on drugs and–oh yeah–there’s a high chance a few things got ingested before this begins. Either way, still doesn’t explain Steve’s love of Nazis or just what the hell set this thing up.
For city-dwelling adults without kids, Halloween can be truly frightening. With the pressure on to outdo ones friends, frenemies and total strangers with a costume that strikes the perfect balance between creative, alluring and topical, the average October 31st night out can be a lot like sixth grade, except with the added toxic influence of alcohol and biological clocks. Plus, this year the streets are expected to be full of Sexy and/or Ironic and/or Demonic Sarah Palins. Scary! So why not stay home and watch movies instead? If you’re gonna convince anyone to abandon their plans and spend the night on your couch instead, you’ve got to have a theme and a plan, so we’ve put together an outline for a full night of films, all of which are available on DVD and/or online, based around one of the ultimate icons of classic horror: Frankenstein. We lay it all out after the jump.
Finishing Heaven begins in a bodega. A tall, thin, older woman with fire engine red dyed hair and a drawn face saunters to a table in the back of the deli section to greet a shifty-looking mustachioed character with whom she is clearly very well acquainted. They kiss hello, and almost immediately fall into an argument about matters that date back nearly four decades. it’s a bizarre scene, for a lot of reasons, but initially, I couldn’t get beyond the setting: why are these two in a bodega? They didn’t come for the food––she walked in with a half-empty venti Frappucino, and a wide shot reveals that the deli’s heat lamp trays are empty, thus signifying that it’s either very early or very late. If you were to meet an old lover to argue about old Warhol superstars and reminisce about Max’s Kansas City, would you really do it in front of the soft drink case at your circumspect corner grocery?
Director Mark Mann presents us this scene with judiciously inserted explanatory on-screen titles, through which we learn that the man’s name is Robert Feinberg, and the woman’s is Ruby Lynn Reyner, and the two were a couple in the 70s and are now reuniting for the first time in over 30 years to talk about finally making some progress on Heaven, a film which he directed and she starred in but he never finished editing. In spite of this exposition, overall it feels like we’re being thrown into a fire, and it’s exciting––sometimes you see things happening in Manhattan that you can’t quite explain and simply must accept, and you come to understand that it’s just one of the ways that the city humbles you into acknowledging that you do not control the universe. But then we cut to an exterior shot of the deli’s incongruously sunny exterior, and a title slowly fades up at the bottom of the screen: “Formerly Max’s Kansas City.”
It’s a laugh line, but it’s also an object lesson in how the director will proceed to tell this story. He asks us to jump straight in to one aspect of his subjects’ lives, and just as we think we have a handle on what’s going on, he pulls out and unpacks another box, unveiling a further facet of who these people are and what their relationship is all about. It’s a film that, on the top level, is about two extreme personalities trying to finish a film, but on a deeper level, it’s about the way lives slip out of control, dreams slip out of reach, and the incredible way that massive egos can take repeated beatings and continually bounce back, worse for wear but still resillient.
At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.
That’s an excerpt from a long Manohla Dargis essay that appeared in the New York Times this weekend, in advance of the November 11 opening of a 33-title retrospective of Andy Warhol’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Whether or not you plan on attending the retrospective, the Dargis essay is a must read. Above that, you’ll find a fair illustration of what she’s talking about: a clip from Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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