• Glenn Kenny considers that “instant hit”, The Incredible Hulk. “If Edward Norton’s idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won’t play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody’s idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period?” He raises the issue to Norton himself, but ultimately comes closest to an answer via Jay-Z.
• “It’s not just that there were a lot of black and white movies last year — it’s that most of them were fucking awesome,” writes Rich at FourFour. “Among them: Perspolis, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!…Killer of Sheep (a 30+ year-old bit of brilliance that didn’t see official release till last year), I’m Not There, in part (and, my opinion, the b&w parts were the only ones worth watching), and Frank Darabont’s preferred cut of The Mist. But my favorite black-and-white flick of ‘07 and possibly of all time is Control.” What follows is a short treatise on that film’s humanity through black and white cinematography; there are a lot of screencaps.
• “When a filmmaker tells a story in such broads strokes, he or she does so because it allows certain ideas to be explored without exposition; when the scope of a story is already understood, already deeply seated in the audience’s understanding of narrative, those audiences are more perceptible to the details and nuances the filmmaker is able to explore and play with within that structure.” David Lowery considers Silent Light at /Hammer to Nail.

This is nothing like my top ten of 2007. I don’t not do top ten lists because I think they’re stupid, pointless or pretentious. I don’t do them because I never see enough films in the year to feel I’m adequately representing what is the best of the year. I don’t even feel I could represent my favorite of the year, since later on I’ll likely see some great films from this year that would qualify as my favorite(s). So, I’m just going to present some movies (or parts of movies) I really loved this year, and tell you what I loved about them. Because to me best of lists are merely a reminder of movies I still need to see, consider this a list only of things you might have missed and should definitely check out.

• Sunshine and The Last Winter - Two incredible science fiction stories that each ends rather disappointingly. Fortunately both are good enough until their denouements that they are completely recommendable to serious sci-fi fans and anybody else who wants to spark up some discussions about environmental issues and/or psychological implications of being out in the middle of nowhere.
• The Boss of It All - Not the most remarkable Von Trier film, but proof that he can make a simple comedy if that’s what he wants to do. I especially enjoyed it because I’ve had a passive boss who was exactly like the one in the film. Also, Ibn Hjejle has now been redeemed for her awful, out-of-place presence in High Fidelity.

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• I can’t quite get it up to care about The Golden Compass. Apparently people are worried that it’s going to create godless youth? I’m pretty sure There Will Be Blood has a better chance of doing that than just about anything else, but in any case, Vulture says we have nothing to worry about. Perhaps the five minute clip Anne Thompson’s linking to will help you make up your own mind.
• “Be warned: if you let your children see Alvin & The Chipmunks they will eat their own shit.” That, and three other Awful Things The New Alvin & The Chipmunks Movie Is Responsible For, courtesy of The Hater.
• “I am perhaps not the best person to write about Control, and what follows is not a review.” Natalie Curtis, daughter of Ian Curtis, writes about watching Anton Corbijn’s biopic about her dad. Via The Underwire.
• Film critic Annette Insdorf has allegedly been edged out of the National Board of Review, who are coincidentally announcing their annual awards this week. Jeff Wells explains why this matters.
• “Yeah, I’m a lesbian. You wanna make somethin’ of it, or do you want me to help you hotwire that getaway car? That’s what I thought. Now step aside, little lady.” On the eve of Queen Latifah’s apparent coming out party, Defamer remembers one of her finest on-screen moments.
• Filmdrunk has taken to calling Ben Kingsley “Special K.” I think that made me laugh a little bit harder than it probably should have.

• The Sundance Lineup: What does it all mean? The Hollywood Reporter’s story grumbles that a high percentage of filmmakers who got the call “seem to come out of nowhere”; you may call it a good day for independent film, but they seem to think it’s a red flag. Meanwhile, at Variety, noted blog skeptic Todd McCarthy doesn’t quote Geoff Gilmore directly on the matter, but says the Sundance director “suspects that the blogging phenomenon that has unleashed a torrent of personal opinion online may, in a way more metaphorical than literal, have influenced the filmmakers.”
• Anton Corbijn’s Control swept the British Independent Film Awards last night, taking five trophies, including Best British Independent Film. Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten took the doc prize.
• Woody Allen has had a falling out with Mediapro, the Catelan production company that was to shepherd three upcoming Allen films, including the already-shot Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There was a bit of controversy last summer during the filming of Vicky, when it was revealed in the local press that 10% of the movie’s budget had been paid by the city of Barcelona.

A number of films that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are either opening or expanding this weekend:

Across the Universe: Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical has grossed almost $9 million over the last month in limited release, mainly drawing (as I predicted) repeat crowds of young women. The weekend, it expands to just under 1,000 screens. I’m not personally much of a fan, but I figure every generation of teenage stoners-cum-theater brats need a Hair, and I can’t begrudge them that. Read my Toronto coverage here.

Control: I was a big fan of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic at Toronto. In hindsight, I do wonder if the film will fall flatter for those who don’t go in with an emotional attachment to Joy Division’s music. But it’s still a fascinating character study, and of course, the cinematography is tremendously satisfying. Read my Toronto review here.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Destined to become some kind of camp classic, this sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth is artless at concealing its Freudian metaphors in a way that only truly miscalculated films can be. At Toronto, I wrote: “The Golden Age plays out in a very binary, comic-book reminiscent universe, in which Spain isn’t merely a sovereign nation pursing interests in conflict to that of Britain–the country as a whole is a supernatural embodiment of evil…The Queen is able to bounce from emotional devastation to patriotic warmongering with a flick of a switch; for the rest of us, the transition may not be as easy.”

The Darjeeling Limited: Another shot of crack for fans of Wes Anderson’s visual style, but with a stronger emphasis on character than some of his recent outings. If the idea of a film revolving around a set of limited-edition Marc Jacobs luggage sounds really annoying, this may not be the film for you. But watch the short-film prequel, Hotel Chevalier, on iTunes, read my coverage from NYFF, and if your Anderson allergy hasn’t yet flared up, go see the movie.

I’m way too tired (three film festivals in as many weeks will do that to you) and far too far removed from academia to make a coherent argument on this right now, but in trying to make a dent in my backed-up feed reader I came across some fascinating, British Marxist rumination on Joy Division. I think some of this writing might help me reconcile the two portraits of the band/singer Ian Curtis that I saw in Toronto: Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division (which I have not yet had time to write about) and Anton Corbijn’s nominal Curtis biopic, Control (which I reviewed rather rapturously here).

Of specific concern: Gee’s provocative but not exactly fully realised thesis, that the story of Joy Division is synonymous with the story of the band’s home town of Manchester; and the philosophical concept of hauntology. You can find workable definitions of hauntology here and here, but both skew towards Derrida on one end, and music theory on the other. In relation to these two films, I think it’s more useful to simply think of hauntology as a tool with which to posit Ian Curtis as spectral presence in Control, and Joy Division as the ghost haunting Manchester in Joy Division.

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Do edgy American filmmakers of yesteryear go soft after living in Hollywood for a few decades? We look at Neil Jordan’s new film The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, and ask how it measures up to her grittier predecessor, Taxi Driver. Also, Karina shares her picks from the Toronto Film Festival, including the much-buzzed western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control, and two fresh Iraq-umentaries, Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Operation Filmmaker.

 

 FilmCouch #37 [23:36m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch #37

The Brave One, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Operation Filmmaker

ReelerTV is back with another episode from Toronto. This time around, Stu talks to Anton Corbijn, director of the amazing Control, and Karina offers up her thoughts on the film.Previous installments:

Episode 2: Scott Hicks, Love Songs and Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Episode 1: Neil Jordan and Terrance Howard talk The Brave One; Karina on Juno and Margot and the Wedding

The two films that have hit me the hardest here in Toronto are Control, which I wrote about here, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Both films, based on real-life characters and incidents, are simultaneously technically superlative and heartbreaking. With one day left to go in my Toronto 2007 tenure, I find myself nursing heartache for two, studio-backed movies which I’ll soon be able to pay $11 American to see again at will. And sitting here in my hotel room, listening to Joy Division and New Order and thinking about Sam Riley’s performance in Control and Brad Pitt and Paul Schneider’s in Jesse James, there is no such thing as soon enough.

Two weeks ago, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford was the film Warner Brothers had “no idea what to do with.” As of this writing, it’s the most gushed-over title at the Toronto Film Festival, and word has hit the wires that star Brad Pitt has won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. If the folks at WB still havn’t figured out what to do with Andrew Dominik’s masterful, Malickean tragedy of celebrity envy, they probably don’t deserve to have their name on it.

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Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is about 18. He lives with his parents in Macclesfield, England, in a massive suburban housing complex with rounded safety windows that look like 1960s TV screens. He goes to school, but sits through his classes in a near fugue state. One day he brings home a vinyl copy of Aladdin Sane, which he listens to whilst wearing a fur coat over his bare chest, and simultaneously smoking and applying eyeliner. In the middle of this ritual, a friend comes over with a girl. The girl and Ian lock eyes in Ian’s bedroom mirror while she’s making out with his friend. After the girl and the friend leave, Ian sings along with David Bowie and plots stardom, imagining himself the toast of New York’s Warhol-centric counterculture. A star is born … and doomed.

Anton Corbijn’s Control smashes the music biopic mold by portraying the star at its center not as a mythological creature, but as a real-life, fucked-up kid in over his head. The Joy Division frontman’s talent doesn’t drop out of the sky; it’s something he keeps to himself until, after enough practice in front of the mirror, he’s sure he’s got it right. Likewise, his tragedies are almost entirely of his own doing, born from a borderline pathological desire to seize control of himself and the world around him, and exacerbated by his immature inability to do so. Particularly in the balance it finds between transcendence and dread in suburban family life, Control has a lot more in common with the British realism of the films of Mike Leigh than it does with even the recent wave of rock-star-as-antihero pics like Walk the Line. Corbijn’s actors, particularly Riley, hauntingly recreate the band’s image and sound, but the director is really only concerned with the milestones of the band’s career in so far as they give him an opportunity to talk about Curtis’ personal struggles.

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In anticipation of seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control at Toronto next week (FYI, that film took a couple of prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this past weekend), I’ve been watching some of Corbijn’s music videos on YouTube and iFilm. In the late 80s/early 90s, Corbijn was to go-to guy for Euro-bands looking for something grainy and either black-and-white or in washed-out color, in which they could sulk bitterly whilst stalking around either city or countryside, surrounded with what looked like low-rent Helmut Newton girls in various 80s costumes, and eventually resolve some of the underlying tension and hostility in some suggestion of light S & M.

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Several of our favorite blogs have noted the passing of British music impresario Tony Wilson. Manchester tastemaker Wilson (who was played by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People) founded Factory Records, and is generally considered at least partially responsible for launching the careers of The Fall, OMD and Joy Division (and later New Order).

Wilson is portrayed by Craig Parkinson in Anton Corbijn’s upcoming Joy Division film Control, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in the States in October. This gives me the excuse I’ve been waiting for to make the Control trailer our Clip of the Day. It’s embedded above.

I just left the Telluride tribute to the master editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, The English Patient). So much wonderful filmmaking knowledge came from his lips. If it were not prohibited to record these sessions, I would have podcast the Q&A. But I’ll share the highlights I found most meaningful.

As an editor, the hardest thing to do is to remember the emotional resonance of a scene after viewing it day after day. To maintain that emotion, when Murch first sees the shots he’ll be working with, he writes in free association anything he thinks or feels while watching. He then keeps those notes open as he goes into the process of editing those shots over and over again into various scenes.

Murch is always looking for the visceral moment. He shared a quote about how if the novelist is smarter than the novel, they should move on to another profession. The work should always be beyond the reach of intellect. One way of identifying these visceral moments is to watch a shot and stop it at a moment he strongly reacts to. He then marks the time code and watches the shot again. If he hits stop again and it’s at the exact same spot in the time code, he knows there’s something there to be included in the film.

As any good editor, Murch’s thinking wanders back and forth between the technical and the creative. The result of one study he’s done across many films shows an average action sequence having a minimum of fourteen different camera angles, while dialogue scenes have about four. Four camera angles in an action sequence is too slow, and fourteen angles during dialogue would distract from what anybody’s saying.

In speaking about the various modes of viewing film now (from theater to video iPod), Murch defined the “cinematic experience.” At home, the viewer is king and the television is a jester coming into the room; if the king doesn’t like what he sees, off with the jester’s head. However, the cinematic experience is uncontrollable. The film starts when it starts and ends when it ends and the viewer has no control. It’s also collaborative viewing where one person’s laughter in one corner of the theater can infect the experience of everyone else. In short, the cinematic experience, Murch said, fulfills an innate human desire to open one’s mind to the uncontrollable.

A good film must also have its own unique “grammar.” It can’t feel like anything seen before. Although Murch may have opinions regarding a scene, he’s very careful not to pass judgment until he’s intimate with the work as a whole and has learned the language of that particular film.

Finally, in a serendipitous moment, Murch screened the scene in The Godfather when Woltz awakes to the severed horse head in his bed. This has always been my favorite blend of film and score, which I’ve attributed in the past to the composer, Nino Rota. However, the music in that scene was originally much too over the top and gave away the horror too early. So Murch took a solo trumpet piece Rota had written for elsewhere in the film, and blended it with the original music Rota intended for the scene. That’s the piece that’s in the film as we know it. Who knew?