Go to The Museum of the Moving Image website to buy tickets for a September 13th screening at the DGA theater on W. 57th Street. David Cronenberg will be in attendance.
Popularity: 5% [?]
I know the city is getting swallowed up by Mumble Mania right now but as far as I can tell other films are still being shown throughout our fine metropolis. I told you about attending the ACE Film Festival on Sunday. There was an excellent film there called Little Chenier directed by Bethany Ashton Wolf that takes place on the pre-Katrina Bayou. It’s a moving piece with authentic Cajun flavor down to its local dialect. In a Q&A Wolf explained how a month after the wrap every single location was destroyed. Luckily it exists on film which you will be able to see soon, it just got picked up for distribution by Radio London Films. Also worth mentioning: (all shorts) The Doorstep, Villains and Aesop’s Diner.
A few words on the festival itself – it’s not easy being the new kid on the block but like Woody Allen says, “80 percent of success is just showing up.” While attending my one day at the first American Cinematic Experience Film Festival I saw signs that the two runners of the festival, Tom O’Malley and Luke Szczygielski, got a lot right with their first run. ACE flags on the street corners (The Tribeca Film Festival makes this kind of announcement downtown – these guys did their homework.) Well put together printed materials. A premium venue located in Manhattan for the screenings. Unfortunately that venue proved to not be the most optimal place to show a film. The space itself is full of old New York grandeur but my biggest complaint was that the echo from the high ceilings plagued every single film. While some films I didn’t mind that I wasn’t privy to what the actors were saying, the dialogue was lost in others and it was frustrating. With a little tweaking, some lessons learned and a new place to screen films I think this can grow to be a serious festival in the future. I wish them all the best.
Tuesday I checked out a double feature of Born To Win and Klute, part of the Film Forum’s NYC Noir series. This is my element, I have arrived. The early bird special crowd, cinemaniacs and film freaks (myself included in the latter that is although I am forty now so eating at 5:00 is getting more and more appealing.)
I always found a likability in George Segal and that hasn’t changed with Born To Win as he plays a strung out ex-hairdresser looking to score. Yeah, sure, some of the slang is dated but it’s slang that I heard growing up. Freehole. My uncle would have gotten a kick out of that one. Keep an eye out for a pre-Johnny Boy/Mean Streets DeNiro if you rent this. Next was Alan J. Pakula’s Klute. Always on the “to see” list but never seen, I can’t believe I let this one slip by. What can I say other than I am now proclaiming Gordon Willis the greatest cinematographer on earth. Damn, does he know how to compose a shot. I think this film, for better or worse, is the template for a lot of modern crime/drama/thrillers1 and an excellent character study. You can read the screenplay I found online from this PDF I created.
Yesterday I checked out The Panic in Needle Park. I guess a lot of the same people were showing up to see the whole noir series because I saw some familiar faces from Tuesday. The crowd is half the fun. This is no multiplex crowd, hell no. I almost thought for a moment I might have to go toe to toe with this 85 plus year old man because he wouldn’t stop ripping into his wife about what time they were going to get out after the second film of the double feature. A couple of guys behind me were shooting the shit and one wondered why they didn’t program Born To Win and Panic on the same day. Now I know why. It would have been too much. Both films deal with drug addiction in a very honest way. A lot of the nuances of each film overlap each other2 . It was the drug culture in the city circa 1971. Brutal, gritty and very real. Jerry Schatzberg’s film based on a screenplay written by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion from John Mills’ book is harrowing. It’s probably one of the first films to deal with this subject in this way by chronicling the minutia of day to day junkie life.
So as I wait for my New York Film Festival tickets3 to arrive I’ll bide my time with one more. The French Connection concludes the NYC noir series at the Film Forum playing for a week. C’mon ya gotta go, it’s New York State law.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Abel Ferrara gets some high marks for his new film Go Go Tales and the buzz over Bad Lieutenant, ‘08?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Stu at The Reeler discusses Miranda rights and anal fisting with William Friedkin.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I’ve been wanting to check this film out since I heard about the riot it almost caused at SXSW. IFC Center September 5th, one screening only! Be there.
Popularity: 5% [?]
I’ll be attending tomorrow’s closing night of this brand new film festival that I reported on back in February. This weekend marks its ambitious inauguration into the vast film festival arena. A festival’s first year is crucial for its survival and this one looks promising so if you are around this weekend check it out. Tickets are still on sale. Here is the recent New York Times article.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Look at this poster1, amazing.
Remakes are nothing new. They’re hardly worth commenting on because of their diluted nature and lack of adaptability to the modern world. They usually suffer from a studio’s feeble attempt to cash in on some hot young tv actor’s “hotness” and introduce a new generation to uh, something. I could care less. Just heap it onto the junk pile.
Invasion shares the same DNA of a fantastical story that can be told over and over again, generation after generation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at its core dealt with the paranoia of one loosing one’s soul to the masses, mob rule’s style. The original was directed by Don Siegel, with a script co-written by Daniel Mainwaring and (uncredited) Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel “The Body Snatchers” (aka “Sleep No More”) by Jack Finney. Whether it was subversive in nature and Siegel was really commenting on Communism or McCarthyism it’s hard to say. Counting the current incarnation it has been remade three times.
In a game of connect the dots I’ll clumsily segue into the current abomination that is in the planning stages as we speak. The recent news of Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has officially sent me over the top. It’s not so much the news of a remake, I most likely won’t be seeing it because I hold the original in such high regard. Peckinpah’s craftily twisted film plays on the audiences perceptions of their own moral code. He took shit for it but he challenged the audience. I know that’s not the job of every single director out there, to challenge an audience, but he did, unapologetically. I guess what really gets to me and many who find the original version a great piece of American cinema is Lurie’s attitude towards it.
It’s an interesting film, isn’t it? But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she’s not going to be smiling in the rape in my film.
If you aren’t acquainted with the the 1971 film it stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger. The scene is a much debated one. The rapist is an ex-boyfriend of the wife and at one point in this horrific event Susan George gives a half-smile2 associating this rape with pleasure. At face value you can read this as the character asked for it and the bitch got what she deserved, that’s if you can pick your knuckles up off the ground long enough to scratch your head. Peckinpah turns an obvious playing-it-straight-to-the-audience moment into a layered, psychotically ambiguous deviation where the woman is manipulating the rapist to get herself out of this heinous situation intact. And that’s only one interpretation! The scene turns everything upside-down, my head exploded the first time I saw it. That’s art baby! Don’t misunderstand my issues with this remake. This isn’t about tampering with the precious work of some revered director, we all know nothing is sacred. This is about just getting it wrong so Rod Lurie, good luck with that. Maybe you should just decide for yourself.3
How long do you think it will be before some genius wants to make an American version of a Bergman or Antonioni film using it as a bargaining chip with an audience to gain some sort of respectability? Good luck with that too.
[...]
Related: Rod Lurie clarifies, sort of. Mr. Lurie, the stage is yours.
Popularity: 9% [?]
When I'm not hiding in my cave as I am known to do I can be found wandering the streets of Brooklyn mumbling to myself. Read more about William Speruzzi.
RSS
