One Step Beyond.
Good, long profile by Alexsandar Hemon on the Wachowskis and their new movie Cloud Atlas in the New Yorker. I wasn’t riveted by the Matrix-and I think I only saw the first one–but I’m curious to see Cloud Atlas after reading this piece.
Here is a good piece on Sarah Burns whose documentary on the Central Park Five is making the rounds at the film festivals.
You can watch a full screen version here.
Here’s a nice long piece by Bryan Curtis on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over at Grantland:
It’s strange when two filmmakers can hardly stand to look at one of their movies. Especially when that film was as lucrative — and, for me, as beautifully sinister — as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So when I met George Lucas in December, in advance of the release of Red Tails, I asked why he and Steven Spielberg always seemed to be renouncing it.
“Oh, I’m not renouncing it,” Lucas said. Which is fair enough. Lucas mostly sounds sad when he talks about Temple of Doom. It’s Spielberg who recoils from its heart extraction, its human sacrifice, its monkey-brain buffet. He once told a journalist that Temple of Doom was “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific.”
“People say, ‘Why’s it so dark?'” Lucas said. Then he began to explain.
“I was going through a divorce,” Lucas said, “and I was in a really bad mood. So I really wanted to do dark. And Steve then broke up with his girlfriend, and so he was sort of into it, too. That’s where we were at that point in time.”
I always liked Temple of Doom–maybe not as much as P. Kael, who gave it an over-the-top rave (after she panned Raiders)–but I thought it was scary and tense.
Here is a blurb of her review:
In this follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg creates an atmosphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the stunts are, the funnier they are. Nobody has ever fused thrills and laughter in quite the way that he does here. Momentum has often been the true-even if not fully acknowledged-subject of movies. Here it’s not merely acknowledged, it’s gloried in. The picture has an exuberant, hurtling-along spirit. Spielberg starts off at full charge in the opening sequence and just keeps going, yet he seems relaxed, and he doesn’t push things to frighten us. The movie relates to Americans’ love of getting in the car and taking off-it’s a breeze. Harrison Ford is the archeologist-adventurer hero; Ke Huy Quan plays his child sidekick Short Round; and Kate Capshaw is the gold-digger heroine. The plot involves them with an odious boy maharajah and with Mola Ram (an anagram for Malomar), the high priest of a cult of Kali worshippers who come right out of the 1939 adventure comedy Gunga Din. This is one of the most sheerly pleasurable physical comedies ever made. A Lucasfilm Production, from a story idea by George Lucas, and a script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. The score by John Williams is too heavy for the tone of the film, and it’s too loud. With Amrish Puri as Mola Ram, and Dan Aykroyd in a half-second joke.
Curtis gets behind what was up for the filmmaker and why the movie was not beloved like the other Indy movies.
Over at 70mm, please check out this piece on the shooting of Lawrence of Arabia by my dear friend Mike Fox.
Via Slate, dig this clip of Stanley Kubrick’s one-point perspective:
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jaws is commonly regarded as the first summer blockbuster and as a result, the movie that lead to the death of the creative boom of “New Hollywood” in the late 60s and early 70s. Its influence on not just the movies that followed in its wake, but also the marketing, business and making of movies is incalculable. However, even among film fans who bemoan the changes that the massive success of Jaws brought on, it’s hard to find anyone who dislikes the movie itself. Unlike many sudden cinema phenomena, Jaws has had remarkable staying power, enchanting and scaring the wits out of audiences via cable TV and home video ever since owning the box-office in the summer of ’75.
What’s more is that instead of simply being a nostalgia trip that doesn’t really live up to the adoring affection of its hard core fans (I’m looking at you, Star Wars geeks), Jaws holds its own as a great movie. I know personally, the summer doesn’t feel complete without at least one evening spent watching Brody, Quint and Hooper aboard the Orca. All of this leads to the excitement surrounding the recent Blu-ray debut of Jaws earlier this month. The good news is that the movie hasn’t looked or sounded this good since the summer of ’75. (See the excellent review and screen capture comparisons here at the invaluable website, DVD Beaver.)
I recently read Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name for the first time, and I was eager to watch the movie again, comparing and contrasting what was kept, what was changed and what was completely eliminated for the screenplay, written largely by Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in the film as Meadows, the editor of the Amity town newspaper), with help from Benchley and uncredited work by playwright Howard Sackler, John Milius and Jaws co-star Robert Shaw. The novel Jaws was better than I’d expected it to be, but the screenplay and movie are a vast improvement.
It’s easy to jump on the obvious reasons the movie worked in ’75 and still works now – terrific performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton and especially Robert Shaw, John Williams’ memorable score, Spielberg’s taut direction. Other reasons the film became a classic are less obvious, but no less important. The technological limits of the mid 70s meant that we didn’t see much of the shark. There was no CGI, and the mechanical shark was rarely functioning properly during the shoot.
The happy result is that the moments when we do actually see the shark make a huge impact and still make people jump in their seats. Spielberg has said that if he’d made the movie 30 years later, he would have used new technology, we would have seen a lot more of the shark and the resulting movie, by his own admission wouldn’t have been nearly as good. The audience relies on Williams’ score, POV shots of swimmers and clever visual cues like the floating barrels to let us know that the shark has returned to wreak havoc.
Another element that keeps the movie from being a staid, formulaic monster movie is Spielberg’s insistence on shooting on Martha’s Vineyard and on the Atlantic Ocean instead of in Hollywood. The Jaws shoot took over the island for months and incorporated many locals into the cast, not only as extras, but in key speaking parts as well. The organic small-town America feel of Amity Island would have been lost on the Universal lot. The film plays upon primal human fears; not simply that there are beasts in the wild who can kill and maim us when we least expect it, but also more mundane fears about losing our businesses, losing our standing in a community or within our family. It’s also simply a hell of a lot of fun.
If you haven’t seen it in years, or if you’re like me and can quote random lines from the movie at will, or if for some strange quirk of fate you’ve never seen Jaws, the new Blu-ray edition comes highly recommended.
You talk about penance and you send this through the door.
From Michael Sragow, here’s Robert Towne on The 39 Steps:
“I think it’s interesting,” he said, “Because most ‘pure’ movie thrillers, especially when you think of Hitchcock, are either fantasies fulfilled or anxieties purged. ‘The 39 Steps’ is one of the few, if not the only one, that does both at the same time. He puts you into this paranoid fantasy of being accused of murder and being shackled to a beautiful girl—of escaping from all kinds of harm, and at the same time trying to save your country, really. A Hitchcock film like ‘Psycho’ is strictly an anxiety purge. ‘The 39 Steps’ gives you that and the fantasy fulfilled. It’s kind of a neat trick, really.”
A new DVD set of “The Gold Rush” has just been released. It includes a 1942 sound cut of the movie. Cool.
[Photo Credit: Sid Avery]
I’m not much of a fan of Spike Lee as a movie director though his first three movies were events in my life. Watching those movies in the theater–“She’s Got to Have It” at the Quad, “School Daze” and “Do The Right Thing” in Times Square–are experiences I’ll never forget. There was much to recommend in Lee’s early work. Those movies had vitality and humor.
But I haven’t liked one of his feature films in years (his best work has come in the documentary form).
His new one, however, looks promising:
Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.
I like this part:
AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.
BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.
Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.
Head on over to the New York Times and check out Joel Lovell’s fascinating profile of Kennth Lonergan’s thwarted masterpiece:
Think back on the last time you saw Kenneth Lonergan’s 2000 film, “You Can Count On Me.” Do you remember how good it was? The intellectual and emotional complexity of the script? Those remarkable performances by Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney? That scene — to choose one among many — between Terry (Ruffalo) and his 8-year-old nephew, Rudy (Rory Culkin), in which the drunk Terry sits next to Rudy’s bed late at night, smoking a cigarette and telling Rudy why his dad is such a jerk and why the town he lives in sucks so much? (“Fortunately for you, though, your mom is like, the greatest. So you had some bad luck, and you had some good luck.”) It was a modest story of a brother and sister whose parents die when they’re kids and whose lives are blown in different directions and who, years later, come to some almost-peace about what they can and can’t be for each other. But there was such intense realness about it, the way people really talk, the way lives are actually lived, that was unlike anything else on screen, radical almost, in its attention to the genuine messiness of human lives.
You may have wondered why Lonergan never made another movie. Or you may know that he did: a film called “Margaret,” which might be even better than “You Can Count On Me.” The cast included Anna Paquin and Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick. Among its several credited producers were a couple highly respected Hollywood veterans: Scott Rudin and Sydney Pollack. So when Lonergan began shooting the film in 2005, after taking two years to write the screenplay, “Margaret” had a lot going for it. When it was finally released six years later, in late 2011 — after a brutal and bitter editing process; a failed attempt by no less a cinematic eminence than Martin Scorsese to save the project; and the filing of three lawsuits — several serious film people called it a masterpiece. And almost no one saw it.
Beyond the matter of who breached what agreements, though, the question that has loomed over the film is what happened to Lonergan. How did the guy who wrote and directed “You Can Count On Me” — and who, moreover, has been arguably the most important American playwright of the last 20 years — get so lost in the forest of his own film? And if the process was as acrimonious as it is said to have been, what did that do to him, personally and creatively? How does an artist recover from that? Does he recover at all?
I have not seen “Margaret” but loved “You Can Count on Me.” I plan to watch the director’s cut DVD of “Margaret” this summer.
Check out this piece of inspiration from the Swedish artist, Anders Ramsell:
Stanley Speaks!
Via Open Culture.
“Drugstore Cowboy” came out shortly after “Sex, Lies and Videotape” in the summer of 1989. It was a strong year for movies. Scorsese’s short, “Life Lessons” was released that spring. Later came “Do the Right Thing,” and “Casualties of War,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “Sea of Love,” “Glory,” and “Enemies: A Love Story” to name just a few.
“Drugstore Cowboy” was the first movie I saw at the newly-opened Angelica movie house on Houston Street. I saw it again uptown and the movie gripped me. I saw it again on TV last year. It holds up.
I think it’s Matt Dillon’s finest performance. Kelly Lynch is fantastic as well.
Here’s P. Kael’s blurb for the New Yorker:
Nihilistic humor rarely bubbles up in a movie as freely as it does here. Set in Portland, Oregon, in 1971, the story is about two couples who live together and travel around the Pacific Northwest robbing hospitals and pharmacies, grabbing fistfuls of pills and capsules. They’re like a junkie version of Clyde Barrow’s gang. The director, Gus Van Sant, takes us inside a lot of underground attitudes: the druggies are monomaniacal about leading an aimless existence-they see themselves as romantic figures. They’re comic, but they’re not put down for being comic. The picture keeps you laughing because it’s so nonjudgmental. Van Sant is half in and half out of the desire of adolescents to remain kids forever. As the gang’s 26-year-old leader, Matt Dillon brings the role a light self-mockery that helps set the tone of the film, and Kelly Lynch is strikingly effective as his wife.
Phillip Kaufman has a new movie out–on HBO. Allen Barra profiled Kaufman, one of our finest directors, for the Wall Street Journal last week. And Barra reviewed the movie for the Daily Beast here.
