Tag: Film

Reading Around on September 30th

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Some additional reading September 30th from 10:40 to 12:32:

  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: My Life and Times Archives – Roger Ebert is becoming more and more endearing to me1. A 21st CE man of the people… “One of my favoring pastimes, especially when I should be doing something else, is moseying around the blogs of my readers”

    I’ve never left a comment there, by the way, and probably wouldn’t – I tend to write responses to other’s posts in this space instead.

    MN King Corn.jpg

  • Total Dick-Head: The Church of Latter Day Dicks – “Why then, is the only going science-fiction author cult of personality devoted to — of all people — L Ron Hubbard?! If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I’d want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD’s work so mythic!”
  • http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4509&print=1 – Specifically, the Global Cities Index ranks cities’ metro areas according to 24 metrics across five dimensions. The first is business activity: including the value of its capital markets, the number of Fortune Global 500 firms headquartered there, and the volume of the goods that pass through the city. The second dimension measures human capital, or how well the city acts as a magnet for diverse groups of people and talent. This includes the size of a city’s immigrant population, the number of international schools, and the percentage of residents with university degrees. The third dimension is information exchange—how well news and information is dispersed about and to the rest of the world. The number of international news bureaus, the amount of international news in the leading local papers, and the number of broadband subscribers round out that dimension.
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Footnotes:
  1. if that’s the right word to use [↩]

Reading Around on September 29th

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Some additional reading September 29th from 11:32 to 20:54:

Reading Around on September 18th through September 21st

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A few interesting links collected September 18th through September 21st:

  • Back Issues : The New Yorker –

    “Today we launch Back Issues, formerly a department in our News Desk blog, as its own blog on newyorker.com. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll use this space to delve through more than eighty years of New Yorker history, with an eye to relating that history to the happenings of the day. Our chief goal will be to make this vast resource approachable and useful to our readers.”

    maybe its just my inner historian, but I love looking at news coverage from years before I was born

    Melrose Park Speakeasy.jpg

  • Chicagoans for Rio 2016 – It would be exciting to host the Olympics here in Chicago. But you know what would be even better? Rio De Janeiro. Just let Rio host the 2016 Olympics. We don’t mind. Honest.
  • In defense of ACORN | Salon –

    To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator. Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients — Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter — in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

    Indeed.

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  • freedarko.com: A Significant Bullet – From the press kit for Herzog’s new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: “I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.”

Michael Moore, Capitalism’s Little Tramp

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Slacker Uprising” (Michael Moore)

Despite his films’ faults, I still enjoy Michael Moore’s movies. Am looking forward to seeing his latest.

Bruce Headlam pens a back-handed review, full of constructions like:

In the United States Mr. Moore’s conservative critics may decry his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more popular outside the country, especially in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. In such places Mr. Moore has become a kind of anti-cultural ambassador — the prism through which a large part of the world views the United States.

But a film that flatly concludes that capitalism is evil is certain to put him at odds with most of the left wing in his own country, and even with President Obama, who gave a speech the next day on Wall Street on the need to reregulate, not replace the financial industry.

[Click to continue reading Film – Michael Moore, Capitalism’s Little Tramp – NYTimes.com]

Really? Most of the left wing is on the side of the bankers? And your evidence is? Have you ever actually talked to someone who calls themselves a Liberal, outside of your normal circles?

Anyway, the Liberal typing up this blog concurs with Mr. Moore: Capitalism unchecked is a beast that destroys us and our planet. Of course it also enables us to have a luxurious lifestyle, but criticism of an ideology is not the same as a hatred. Just ask the workers of the Republic Window company who held a sit-in not too long ago.

There are fewer of the trademark Moore stunts in “Capitalism,” a sprawling 126-minute film that tries to connect data points across the economy, including the bailout, financial deregulation, privatized juvenile detention centers, the collapse of the American auto business (again), “dead peasant” insurance policies, Goldman Sachs’s influence in Washington, the crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, the Florida condo market and an old-fashioned sit-in at a Chicago door-and-window factory.

In part the stunts are harder to pull off for a famous, rabble-rousing filmmaker. But at the movie’s heart is the original footage Mr. Moore’s shooters made of workers inside the occupied factory in Chicago (his was the only crew let in during the five-day strike) and of homeowners being evicted. Mr. Moore retains an ear for ordinary speech that is uninflected by the exigencies of morning talk shows or “SportsCenter” clichés.

because, as the Chicago Tribune noted, unchecked capitalism encourages greed, and theft:

After Republic Windows and Doors abruptly shuttered its North Side plant last winter, some of the 200 union workers who lost their jobs peacefully refused to leave for several days, demanding wages they’d earned and becoming a national symbol of the economic crisis.

On Thursday Cook County prosecutors made a startling allegation: The sudden plant closing was all part of a monthslong plot by the head of Republic Windows to loot the business, steal key manufacturing equipment and set up a new operation in Iowa.

After a judge hit former chief executive officer Richard Gillman with a whopping $10 million bail, he was led away to Cook County Jail while wearing a pin-striped suit, white collared-shirt and a dazed expression.

Prosecutors laid out their case in an unusually detailed 56-page filing. Gillman and two other undisclosed executives abandoned Republic Windows’ crushing debt, stole its assets and secretly trucked the equipment from the plant to the new operation in Red Oak, Iowa, the charges alleged.

But that operation failed, too, just a month and a half after it started, leaving hundreds of employees from both Chicago and Iowa out of work and devastated.

All told, Gillman and the others defrauded company creditors who were owed at least $10 million and stole more than $200,000 cash from Republic Windows, prosecutors alleged.

[Click to continue reading Republic Windows CEO charged in plot to loot the company — chicagotribune.com]

Werner Herzog Interviewed by Rocco Castoro

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“Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo” (Werner Herzog)


“Herzog on Herzog” (Werner Herzog)

As always, Werner Herzog has interesting things to say. And this makes me laugh, since whenever I watch a Herzog film1 I turn on the Director’s Commentary. Sometimes, if the film is a little slow, the commentary is much more enjoyable, and his accent is fun to emulate.

RC: In Grizzly Man, like most of your documentary films, you provide the narration.

I grew into this somehow. In the old days I had the feeling that, yes, I should do it, because I wouldn’t know of anyone who would be as credible as my own voice.

RC: It does seem like the best person to narrate a documentary would be its maker.
It’s a question of credibility, and I don’t care how bad my German accent is. I make myself understood anyway.

[Click to continue reading WERNER HERZOG – Vice Magazine]

Indeed you do, Mr. Herzog, indeed you do.

Also, he is allegedly starting his own film school.

I will be starting my film school very soon, and I will make a point about a sense of literature for young people who want to step into filmmaking. One of the prerequisites will be that those who apply have to read this, this, and this.

RC: It’s amazing that you’re starting a film school. Can you give me a sampling of what will be on your syllabus?
 For example, Virgil’s Georgics. They don’t have to read it in Latin, but there are some good translations around.

Oh, and of course, Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call

There’s been quite a bit of controversy around that film and no one’s even seen it yet. Abel Ferrara, the director of the original Bad Lieutenant, was outraged that you were doing what he considered to be a remake. But you steadfastly deny that it’s a remake and claim to have never even seen the original.
I don’t need to see the film that was made sometime in the 90s. Mine has a completely different story and a completely different setup. Basically what happened is that one of the people who had produced the first Bad Lieutenant held rights to the title, and they were hoping to establish some sort of a franchise. I don’t mind, I can live with the title, but I always felt it had to be something else. I tried to call it Port of Call New Orleans, but I couldn’t prevail. So now it’s Bad Lieutenant and then it has the subtitle of Port of Call New Orleans.

Footnotes:
  1. I’ve seen about a third of his films, but will eventually see most [↩]

Netflixed: Idiocracy

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“Idiocracy” (Mike Judge)

A fun idea, that society is becoming dumber since the lower classes are having more children than the educated classes, but poorly executed. Would have worked better as a sketch comedy or something. Not sustainable for an entire 84 minutes.


To test its top secret Human Hibernation Project, the Pentagon picks the most average Americans it can find — an Army private (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute (Maya Rudolph) — and sends them to the year 2505 after a series of freak events. But when they arrive, they find a civilization so dumbed-down that they’re the smartest people around. Mike Judge and Etan Cohen (“Beavis and Butthead”) reteamed for this futuristic farce. [Netflix: Idiocracy]

We did sit through the whole film, so it isn’t utter shite, but Idiocracy is not something I’d care to see again in five years, much less five hundred years.


“C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary” (Mark Rich)

Apparently based, loosely, on a short short published in 1951 by C.M. Kornbluth.


“His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth” (C. M. Kornbluth)

Netflixed: Woman in the Dunes

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“Three Films By Hiroshi Teshigahara (Pitfall / Woman In The Dunes / The Face Of Another) (Criterion Collection)” (Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Don’t believe I’ve ever seen this film, though do remember discussing it in a film class, possibly with clips. Sounds odd and intriguing.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s award-winning drama centers on a bug expert (Eiji Okada) conducting research who’s captured by locals. Held captive in a sandpit with a young widow, he struggles with his imprisonment — and his growing attraction to the woman (Kyôko Kishida). Based on Kobo Abe’s novel, the provocatively erotic allegorical film earned the Cannes Special Jury Prize and two Oscar nominations.

[Click to continue reading Netflix: Woman in the Dunes]

Ebert liked the film enough to add it to his Great Movies database:

More than almost any other film I can think of, “Woman in the Dunes” uses visuals to create a tangible texture–of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature. It is not so much that the woman is seductive as that you sense, as you look at her, exactly how it would feel to touch her skin. The film’s sexuality is part of its overall reality: In this pit, life is reduced to work, sleep, food and sex, and when the woman wishes for a radio, “so we could keep up with the news,” she only underlines how meaningless that would be.

The screenplay is by Kobo Abe, based on his own novel, and it reveals the enormity of the situation slowly and deliberately–not rushing to announce the man’s dilemma, but revealing it in little hints and insights, while establishing the daily rhythm of life in the dunes. The pit-dwellers are serviced by villagers from above, who use pulleys to lower water and supplies, and haul up the sand. It is never clear whether the woman willingly descended into her pit or was placed there by the village; certainly she has accepted her fate, and would not escape if she could. She participates in the capture of the man because she must: Alone, she cannot shovel enough sand to stay ahead of the drifts, and her survival–her food and water–depend on her work. Besides, her husband and daughter were buried in a sandstorm, she tells the man, and “the bones are buried here.” So they are both captives–one accepting fate, the other trying to escape it.

The man tries everything he can to climb from the pit, and there is one shot, a wall of sand raining down, that is so smooth and sudden the heart leaps. As a naturalist, he grows interested in his situation, in the birds and insects that are visitors. He devises a trap to catch a crow, and catches no crows, but does discover by accident how to extract water from the sand, and this discovery may be the one tangible, useful, unchallenged accomplishment of his life. Everything else, as a narrative voice (his?) tells us, is contracts, licenses, deeds, ID cards– “paperwork to reassure one another.”

[Click to continue reading Woman in the Dunes :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

Reading Around on August 14th through August 15th

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A few interesting links collected August 14th through August 15th:

The El Capitan stopping at the train station in Chicago 1939.jpg

  • Atm Skimmers: ATM Skimmer Ring Hits Chicago Suburbs – Reader Kellie reports being the victim of an ATM skimming scam in the Chicago area. Mostly, she was amazed that the thefts weren’t reported in the local media, and she asked bank employees why. Here’s what they told her
  • PRESS NOTES: GODARD X 2 (OR 3) – From the Current – Two of Godard’s most breathlessly awaited sixties classics—Made in U.S.A and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her—are now available on Criterion DVD, and for the New York Press’s Armond White, it’s not a moment too soon. “They provide a refresher course in movie aesthetics: something desperately needed this summer,” writes White. “Both these widescreen spectacles can help remind moviegoers how important it is to appreciate movies as a visual art form that represents the world and the imagination with creativity and integrity.” In Black Book, Edmund Mullins also can’t quite contain his excitement: “If you don’t think this is cause for celebration, you haven’t seen the films… [T]hey collectively represent one of the more thrilling moments in Godard’s constantly evolving canon.”

    Michael Atkinson singles out Made in U.S.A in a review for IFC.com, calling the film “one of the fifteen essential rockets Godard launched that made the decade his and his alone.”


  • “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Criterion Collection)” (Jean-Luc Godard)


    “Made in U.S.A. (Criterion Collection)” (Jean-Luc Godard)

  • Chaihanna | Suburbs Northwest | Polish/Russian/Eastern European | Chicago Reader – Chaihanna, often spelled choyhona, means “teahouse,” and in Uzbekistan the teahouse is the center of social interaction…

    Along with the majority Uzbeks, minority Russians, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Tatars have overshadowed smaller but significant groups of Bukharan Jews (who emigrated en masse after the fall of the USSR) and even Koreans who were forcibly settled there by Stalin in the 30s. . The cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes aren’t predominantly spiced by chiles, though they’re heavily impregnated with other flavors–cumin, clove, garlic, dill

Reading Around on August 1st through August 3rd

swanksalot3 Comments

A few interesting links collected August 1st through August 3rd:

  • The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles – Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA’s greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer’s weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the ’60s and early ’70s, while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic ’60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. And if you map the novel against Pynchon’s life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.
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  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: Archives The Greatest Movies Ever Made – But to quibble with specific titles, as I said, is a waste of time. We look at these lists for what we find on them, not what we don’t find. That’s why my Great Movies have never been a ranking, but a Collection, assembled in no particular order.

    Any list of great films helps breaks the hammer-lock of box office performance that grips too many American moviegoers. I can’t tell you how many people responded to my attack on “Transformers” by telling me how much money the movie was grossing, as if that had the slightest relevance. A great movie acts like a window in our box of space and time, opening us to other times and other lands. The more windows we open, the better.

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  • If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image Friday #1:Frames Within the Frame (Part One) – some great images here. Cinematography is an art form worth celebrating

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

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“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (Bob Dylan)


“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Two-Disc Special Edition)” (Sam Peckinpah)

Finally got a chance to see this film a year or so ago. Watchable, not spectacular. The story behind the movie sounds more interesting. [Netflix / Wikipedia / IMDb

When Bob Dylan learned that Rudy Wurlitzer was penning a script focusing on the Bonney-Garrett legend, he tracked the writer down and requested a meeting.

“The script was already written when Bob came to see me in my apartment on the Lower East Side of New York,” Wurlitzer recalled earlier this month from his getaway home, a cabin in his beloved Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. “He said that he had always related to Billy the Kid as if he was some kind of reincarnation; it was clear that he was obsessed with the Billy the Kid myth,” a notion that was validated 34 years later in Todd Haynes’ multi-persona Dylan movie biography I’m Not There (2007). In the film Richard Gere assumes the Dylan shape-shifting persona of Billy, a bespectacled, enigmatic outlaw.

Initially, Wurlitzer suspected that the elusive singer wanted to contribute an original tune to the score of the film but Dylan had other plans – he wanted to be in the movie, despite having no acting experience whatsoever.

Wurlitzer continues: “I called the producer (Gordon Carroll) who was thrilled that Bob wanted to be in the movie and then I wrote the part for Bob off the cuff in New York. We flew down to Durango, Mexico, to see Peckinpah – who had no idea what was up – and we found him in his house, drunk and half-naked, shooting at an image of himself in the mirror. When I told him I had written a part for Bob Dylan and ‘here he is’, Peckinpah turned and after a long pause, said to Bob, ‘I’m a big Roger Miller fan myself’.”

From that moment on, the author remembers, “Dylan followed Sam around like he was one of the last real outlaws, which, who knows, he probably was, at least in my partial experience.”

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

Making the film was a long, drawn out process:

In a 1982 feature for Rocky Mountain Magazine titled Last of the Desperadoes: Dueling with Sam Peckinpah, journalist and Elle magazine advice columnist (Ask E. Jean) E. Jean Carroll summed up the experience in a colorful and breathless single adrenaline-rushed paragraph that reads like a passage from a later Peckinpah film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:
Peckinpah wants to shoot in New Mexico for authenticity. Metro wants Mexico to cut costs. He loses. Peckinpah wants a Panavision repairman in Durango, Mexico, to fix the cameras. The studio says nothing doing. The first footage is sent to L.A. to be processed. The lab calls Peckinpah. Says the film’s out of focus. Panic in Durango.

Downtime. The camera is fixed and the paranoia sets in. The actors get sick. The crew gets sick. Peckinpah is puking every day. They fall behind schedule. James Aubrey, president of MGM, wants to save time and forbids Peckinpah to shoot a raft scene. Peckinpah shoots it. The scenarist, Rudy Wurlitzer, starts complaining. Says Peckinpah is rewriting the picture with the help of his old TV scripts. Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s music composer can’t work with Bob Dylan and quits.

Dylan’s unhappy. Kris Kristofferson (the Kid) says Rudy’s dialogue is corny. Rita Coolidge (Maria, the Kid’s lover) says all that remains of her role thanks to MGM is that of “a groupie.” James Coburn (Garrett) says Peckinpah is a creative paranoid who generates tension to give everyone the same experience to feed on during the film. A fight breaks out one Saturday night.

Two guys. One is on the phone ordering a couple of gunmen to Durango. Wants the other guy killed for threatening Peckinpah’s life. Whitey Hughes, Peckinpah’s stunt man, says they always have a good time, but on this film they aren’t having a good time. The hit is canceled at Peckinpah’s insistence. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is brought in 20 days over schedule and $1.5 million over budget.

MGM’s building a hotel in Vegas and needs cash. The studio moves the release date up and gives Peckinpah only two and a half months to edit. On the sly MGM duplicates the work print and employs another cutter. Peckinpah’s version runs between 122 and 126 minutes. The studio’s runs 106. The producer, Gordon Carroll, negotiates day and night. Gets nothing restored. The picture’s released. Peckinpah sues for $1.5 million. Orders all the cuts put back or his name taken off. Nada. Nada. Nada.

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

And of course, the Bob Dylan song, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door becomes a big hit, and is oft covered by others, including Dylan1. Now that I think about it, I saw the original studio version of Pat Garrett, not the so-called Special Edition. Maybe I’ll watch it again, sometime.

The soundtrack was also haphazardly recorded:

As Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid neared completion, Dylan held a recording session on January 20 at Columbia’s recording studio in Mexico City. Filming had been so difficult, both of the film’s stars and Wurlitzer accompanied Dylan out of Durango. Wurlitzer said at the time, “Sam knows he’s losing to Dylan…but I don’t care, man. I’ve got to get away.”

Backed by local Mexican musicians and members of Kris Kristofferson’s band, Dylan had difficulty recording a satisfactory take of “Billy.” Eventually, he began paring down the arrangement, and by the last take, he was backed only by bassist Terry Paul. This final take was used for the film and later included on the soundtrack album as “Billy 4.” A brief instrumental, “Billy Surrenders,” would also be featured in the film. The session would continue until 4 a.m., but it would not produce anything else that would be considered usable.

Meanwhile, Peckinpah hired Jerry Fielding to advise Dylan on his work. Fielding was experienced in film scoring, but he held very conservative views regarding popular music. Dylan was fully aware of Fielding’s opinions regarding his work (“a lot of nonsense which is strictly for teenyboppers”), but he did not resist Fielding’s recommendations on how to score the film.

On Fielding’s advice, Dylan sang “a relevant verse” of the “Billy” ballad “as it fit the story at [four] separate points throughout the picture.” Fielding had also heard Dylan’s new composition, “Goodbye Holly,” which was written for an important scene involving the character, Holly. Fielding recommended dropping this song and writing a new one for a scene involving the death of Sheriff Baker.

“I set up two dubbing sessions,” recalls Fielding. “Dylan had this song [‘Billy’] he’d written for which he had a limitless number of verses that he would sing in random order…So I had to tape Dylan’s song, because he had nothing written down, and have it transcribed…At the same time I asked that he write at least one other piece of music because you cannot possibly hope to deal with an entire picture on the basis of that one ballad. So finally he brought to the dubbing session another piece of music – ‘Knock-Knock-Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ Everybody loved it. It was shit. That was the end for me.”

Dylan recorded the final version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at a session in February, this time on Warner Bros. Records’ soundstage in Burbank, California. “It was very early in the morning,” recalls drummer Jim Keltner. “I think the session was 10 a.m. and again it all fell into place…There weren’t any overdubs on that, the singers were singing live, little pump organ, Roger McGuinn I think played [guitar]. This was for a particular scene in the movie when Slim Pickens is dying and that’s the first time I ever cried while I played. It was the combination of the words, Bob’s voice, the actual music itself, the changes, and seeing the screen…In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, [with] the scene…running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take.”

The sessions at Burbank lasted several days. Though they were much more relaxed and amiable than the Mexico City session, the process was still irritating to Dylan. At one point, he told producer Gordon Carroll that “this is the last time I work for anyone in a movie on the music. I’ll stick to acting.” Though Dylan would produce his own films and later contribute songs to other soundtracks, he would never take sole responsibility for an entire soundtrack again.[Click to continue reading Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Though of course, Dylan won an Oscar decades later for Things Have Changed. [YouTube of his acceptance speech]

Footnotes:
  1. when Dylan sings out of his vast songbook, he usually “covers” himself, i.e., makes new interpretations of the original song. Sometimes similar, more often radically different [↩]

My Dinner With Andre

Seth Anderson0 comment


“My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection)” (Louis Malle)

Saw this last week for the first time in ages, what a great film. It had been unavailable for quite some time before the Criterion Collection geniuses put out a new 2 disc edition

Wally and I would get quite upset because wherever we went people were saying, “It’s one of my favorite movies.” It’s one of Barack Obama’s favorite movies. He says he’s seen it eight times. So there was something very sad about the fact that it had disappeared.

[From ‘Andre’ inspires talk almost 3 decades later]

On the surface, sounds like a boring film, two guys yammering at dinner, but it isn’t.

Roger Ebert added it to his Great Films collection:

Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, “My Dinner With Andre.” Now I have seen the movie again; a restored print is going into release around the country, and I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.

The title serves as a synopsis. We meet the playwright Wallace Shawn, on his way to have dinner with “a man I’d been avoiding, literally, for a matter of years.” The man is Andre Gregory, a well-known New York theater director. Gregory had dropped out of sight, Shawn tells us, and there were reports that he was “traveling.” Then one evening recently, a friend had come across him in Manhattan, leaning against a building and weeping. Gregory had just come from an Ingmar Bergman movie, and was shattered by this dialogue: “I could always live in my art, but not in my life

…

Like many great movies, “My Dinner With Andre” is almost impossible to nail down. “Two men talk and eat (in real time) at a fancy New York restaurant,” writes CineBooks. Wrong, and wrong. Not in real time but filmed with exquisite attention to the smallest details by director Louis Malle over a period of weeks. And not in a New York restaurant but on a studio set. The conversation that flows so spontaneously between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn was carefully scripted. “They taped their conversations two or three times a week for three months,” Pauline Kael writes, “and then Shawn worked for a year shaping the material into a script, in which they play comic distillations of aspects of themselves.”

Comic? Yes. Although the conversation is often despairing (Gregory speculates that the 1960s were “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished”), the material is given a slight sly rotation toward the satirical. There is a lot to think about in the torrent of ideas, but also a saving humor. Gregory plays a man besotted by the ideas of the new age; he almost glows when he tells Shawn about an agricultural commune in Britain where instead of using insecticides, “they will talk to the insects, make an agreement, set aside one vegetable patch just for the insects.”

[Click to continue reading My Dinner With Andre :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

Luckily, you can rent the film from Netflix, or purchase your own copy. It is one of those films that rewards multiple viewings, so owning your own version is not a bad idea.

At The Criterion Collection’s website, Amy Taubin writes, in part:

The idea for My Dinner with André originated with Shawn. For several weeks, he and Gregory recorded their conversations about the strange extended episode in the latter’s life when he went in search of the miraculous. The script made its way to Malle, whose enthusiasm for the project might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience. That is to say, it was a perfect fit for a seriously eclectic career. As much as Steven Soderbergh today, Malle seemed determined to try something new with every film.

He had made his mark, as part of the French New Wave, with an anxiety-ridden, noirish quartet of character studies—Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its smoldering Miles Davis score; The Lovers (1958), which established Jeanne Moreau’s reputation as the thinking person’s sex symbol; the borderline nihilistic The Fire Within (1963); and Le voleur (1967), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in what could be viewed as a rejoinder to Godard’s Breathless. He punctuated these walks on the dark side with the dazzling proto-pop-art ode to the city of Paris Zazie dans le metro (1960) and the somewhat less successful romp Viva Maria! (1965), which teamed Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Despite his great talent for directing actors, Malle then undertook, as his filmmaking second act, a series of documentaries, notably the epic Phantom India (1969) and its devastating spin-off, Calcutta (1969). Malle’s third act took place largely in the United States, where he tried his hand at studio movies. In the strongest of them, Atlantic City (1980), Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster give performances that are both emotionally true and larger-than-life. But the American films that embody Malle’s understated mastery of cinematic pace and rhythm and his skeptical humanism are his two collaborations with Gregory and Shawn, My Dinner with André and, thirteen years later and just a year before his death, Vanya on 42nd Street.

In addition to the challenge of making a film that was literally all talk and no action, Malle must have been excited by the mix of fact and fiction in My Dinner with André (that’s true of Vanya as well), and by André’s descriptions of his far-flung journeys, which echoed aspects of Malle’s own travels in India. And there is also the matter of the Holocaust, the nightmare that haunts André’s quest for enlightenment. Wally is clearly embarrassed by these references—perhaps he thinks André is being excessive or flip when he says that sometimes he feels he should be “caught and tried like Albert Speer,” or that he imagines an SS officer identifying with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, a book that has great significance for him. The references are so casual that you can’t quite believe you’ve heard them, but they gather as the film goes on to become a dark subtext and suggest something that André never articulates: that in his travels, he was fleeing the horror of the past as much as he was pursuing the pure light of cosmic consciousness. Shawn and Gregory come from families of Jewish descent. Malle does not, but his traumatic childhood in France under the occupation became the subject of two of his most painful and personal films, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987).

[Click to continue reading My Dinner with André:Long, Strange Trips – From the Current]

Until I watched the new edition, I didn’t realize who Louis Malle was, even though I really enjoyed Elevator to the Gallows [also available via Netflix]. I just added a bunch more of his films to my over-stuffed queue.

Soul Power Sounds Spectacular

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I can’t wait to see this film, sounds spectacular.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the director of the new documentary “Soul Power,” was a film editor in 1995 for “When We Were Kings,” the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast about the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight world championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now Congo).


“When We Were Kings” (Leon Gast)

That fight had a huge sideshow: Zaire ’74, a three-day music festival of American soul alongside African music, headlined by James Brown and filmed by the same crew that was in Zaire for the fight. “Soul Power” presents that festival from its precarious beginnings to the finale of a shirtless, sweating James Brown singing to an African audience, “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

The festival was a striking sociocultural moment. African-American and Latin musicians were being introduced to Africa and African musicians amid Mr. Ali’s black-power politics and a hodgepodge of visiting music, sports and literary figures. “There was a lot of deeper meaning about why people went there and what it evoked for them,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said.

Brown and other headliners, including B. B. King, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, the Spinners and Bill Withers, performed at their peak, flaunting bright-colored, sharp-collared, bell-bottomed 1970s outfits that are a fashion show themselves. Americans shared the lineup with African musicians, like the South African singer Miriam Makeba and the top Zairean groups T.P.O.K. Jazz (featuring the guitarist Franco) and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

[From ‘Soul Power,’ Documentary on the Zaire ’74 Music Festival – NYTimes.com]

but who knows when the film will ever be released:

His plan was to put out concert DVDs of the festival’s performances, a fairly straightforward process. Then “I committed the original sin of filmmaking,” he said. “I fell in love with the material instead of following this rational business path.

It cost about half a million dollars, including licensing the music, to make “Soul Power.” So far there’s no deal for a soundtrack album. The DVDs will be assembled “as soon as humanly possible,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said, though that may well be next year.

“The vast majority of the material has still not been used,” he added. “There may be a whole other movie in there.”


“20th Anniversaire, Vol. 2” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)


“1972/1973/1974” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)

Reading Around on June 29th through June 30th

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A few interesting links collected June 29th through June 30th:

  • Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – On giving Goldman a chance – True/Slant – I intentionally put a lot of yes/no questions on that list. If the underlying thinking behind any of those questions was faulty, it would have been easy enough for them to say so and to educate us as to the truth. Instead, here is the response that we got:

    “Your questions are couched in such a way that presupposes the conclusions and suggests the people you spoke with have an agenda or do not fully understand the issues.”
    …That this is a non-denial denial is obvious, but what’s more notable here is that they didn’t stop with just a flat “no comment,” which they easily could have done. No, they had to go a little further than that and — and this is pure Goldman, just outstanding stuff — make it clear that both I and my sources are simply not as smart as they are and don’t understand what we’re talking about. So the rough translation here is, “No comment, but if you were as smart as us, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.”

  • Dean W. Armstrong: The intersection of the online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography – The issues are completely muddy and complex–as a photographer, for instance, I feel I should be compensated for my work. Websites like say Chicagoist or Treehugger use flickr CC shared images to illustrate their stories. In the traditional media, the photographer would be compensated for their work, either by being employed or by a fee. This is not being done at all for most of the non-traditional sites on the internet. It is also a truth that these sites probably couldn't afford the going rate for photographs. Getting your image out for people to see for a photographer is a very important thing, but is it driving the image creation business out of a profession and into the hands of casual photographers? (The latin term amateur is perfect for here but misused–these photographers love what they do and are often just as good as a pro, but the amateurs are not paid).
  • My Dinner With Andre :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies – Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, “My Dinner With Andre.'' …impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.…
    We listen with Wally as Andre tells of trips to Tibet, the Sahara and a mystical farm in England. Of being buried alive and conducting theatrical rituals by moonlight in Poland. Of being in church when “a huge creature appeared with violets growing out of its eyelids, and poppies growing out of its toenails.'' After this last statement, Wally desperately tries to find a conversational segue and seizes on the violets. “Did you ever see that play `Violets Are Blue'?'' he asks. “About people being strangled on submarines?''

    Like many great movies, “My Dinner With Andre'' is almost impossible to nail down.

Reading Around on June 23rd through June 24th

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A few interesting links collected June 23rd through June 24th:

  • Governor Sanford’s Disturbingly Adult E-Mails – "As naughty erotic missives go, Mark Sanford’s exchanges with “Maria” read like what your passionless 11th grade English teacher wrote in his half-completed novel. At some point, the lovers have an hours-long coffee where they talk about Thoreau while it rains outside. "

    including:
    "I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details"

  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

    The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

  • Daley's Nephew Brings More Questions of Clout – Chicagoist – "The city pays the most per square foot for a branch library in Chinatown — more even than it pays for downtown office space.
    The city has three leases with landlords who are clients of the insurance brokerage run by the mayor's brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley.
    Two of the city's landlords have hired the law firm of Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) — in one case to win a cut in their real estate taxes on property leased to the city."

Flavin triangle

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Flavin triangle
Flavin triangle, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

From a 2005 Dan Flavin exhibit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Flavin at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Not supposed to take photos (for some blasted reason), but somehow a few dozen photos managed to make it onto my camera.

Steamboat Films, a French documentary film company, is planning to use this image in a documentary they are working on about Dan Flavin. Hope I eventually get to see the film, but international documentaries are sometimes hard to get a copy of. Anyway, more details as I know them (name of the film, release dates, etc.).

Serge Bromberg, C.E.O. of LOBSTER FILMS, a well-known, 22-year-old film restoration and stockshot sales company, created STEAMBOAT FILMS in November 2006.

STEAMBOAT FILMS is an independent film production company, which handles all of Serge Bromberg’s production activity. The company is currently producing documentaries and developing magazines, shorts and feature films.

Serge Bromberg and Marianne Lère oversee operational direction on the company. Claire Gadéa act as production manager on the various on-going productions. Pauline Pasquier and Flavie David joined the team in November 2007 as Production Assistants.

Currently playing in iTunes: Slow And Low by Beastie Boys