|
|
Guy Maddin’s Keyhole tells the story of a gangster who returns to his home and embarks on an odyssey through the house, one room at a time, whatever that means…
Maddin’s last few films have been a bit much for me, hopefully this one’s good, i like the tagline ‘I’m only a ghost…but a ghost isn’t nothing’.
David Foster Wallace on David Lynch’s Dune
1984’s Dune is unquestionably the worst movie of Lynch’s career, and it’s pretty darn bad. In some ways it seems that Lynch was miscast as its director: Eraserhead had been one of those sell-your-own-plasma-to-buy-the-film-stock masterpieces, with a tiny and largely unpaid cast and crew. Dune, on the other hand, had one of the biggest budgets in Hollywood history, and its production staff was the size of a small Caribbean nation, and the movie involved lavish and cutting-edge special effects (half the fourteen-month shooting schedule was given over to miniatures and stop-action). Plus Herbert’s novel itself is incredibly long and complex, and so besides all the headaches of a major commercial production financed by men in Ray-Bans Lynch also had trouble making cinematic sense of the plot, which even in the novel is convoluted to the point of pain. In short, Dune’s direction called for a combination technician and administrator, and Lynch, though as good a technician as anyone in film, is more like the type of bright child you sometimes see who’s ingenious at structuring fantasies and gets totally immersed in them but will let other kids take part in them only if he retains complete imaginative control over the game and its rules and appurtenances—in short very definitely not an administrator.
Watching Dune again on video you can see that some of its defects are clearly Lynch’s responsibility, e.g. casting the nerdy and potato-faced Kyle MacLachlan as an epic hero and the Police’s resoundingly unthespian Sting as a psycho villain, or—worse—trying to provide plot exposition by having characters’ thoughts audibilized (w/ that slight thinking-out-loud reverb) on the soundtrack while the camera zooms in on the character making a thinking-face, a cheesy old device that Saturday Night Live had already been parodying for years when Dune came out. The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a flop as there is, and Dune was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoherent flop. But a good part of the incoherence is the responsibility of De Laurentiis’s producers, who cut thousands of feet of film out of Lynch’s final print right before the movie’s release, apparently already smelling disaster and wanting to get the movie down to more like a normal theatrical running-time. Even on video, it’s not hard to see where a lot of these cuts were made; the movie looks gutted, unintentionally surreal.
In a strange way, though, Dune actually ended up being Lynch’s “big break” as a filmmaker. The version of Dune that finally appeared in the theaters was by all reliable reports heartbreaking for him, the kind of debacle that in myths about Innocent, Idealistic Artists In The Maw Of The Hollywood Process signals the violent end of the artist’s Innocence—seduced, overwhelmed, fucked over, left to take the public heat and the mogul’s wrath. The experience could easily have turned Lynch into an embittered hack (though probably a rich hack), doing f/x-intensive gorefests for commercial studios. Or it could have sent him scurrying to the safety of academe, making obscure plotless l6mm.’s for the pipe-and-beret crowd. The experience did neither. Lynch both hung in and, on some level, gave up. Dune convinced him of something that all the really interesting independent filmmakers—Campion, the Coens, Jarmusch, Jaglom—seem to steer by. “The experience taught me a valuable lesson,” he told an interviewer years later. “I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”
—From “David Lynch Keeps His Head” by David Foster Wallace; collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
(Source:Bibliokept)
“When I started, I knew I was no actor and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate a projection as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror.”
- John Wayne
Artist Series/Design Matters: Lawrence Weiner
Earthquake-Weather: A really cool video portrait of the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner by the late great Hilman Curtis from his Artists series. I love this style, the exposing of the filmmaking, seeing the dolly tracks on the ground and the reflections in the mirror. Awesome stuff, and Weiner himself is an amazing and thoughtful subject.
A brilliant scene from Woody Allen’s underrated Deconstructing Harry.
Just having a massive glass of tequila in hell exchanging sex stories with the devil.
I cannot believe Predator is 25 years old. I still remember watching it on VHS at David Burnett’s house in Gooseberry Hill in 1989. I didn’t want to fast forward the ads because I was so terrified. Ads like this:
The Playlist has a list of five things you didn’t know about the film.
5. It’s More Subversive Than You’d Think
While Predator is often labeled a “macho” movie, thanks largely to the Herculean presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger, all those guns, and the similarity of the film’s title to the previous Arnold/Joel Silver action movie, Commando. But McTiernan is a thoughtful, sneakily subversive director (even his worst film, the remake of Rollerball, is full of barbed satire), who was able (even at that point in his career) to make sure that progressiveness was present in Predator. The biggest example of this is a sequence, almost an hour into the film, where the soldiers unload their guns into the jungle, searching for the killer Predator but hitting nothing. The sequence was born out of McTiernan’s alarm at the ” a pornographic desire to market images of gunfire,” and ““I didn’t want to advertise to little kids how wonderful guns were.” The filmmaker slyly set about “to delicately ridicule the desire to see guns firing.” And he knew just how to take all the thrill out of large men shooting large weapons. “In order to do that I had to set up a situation where there are no beings in front of the guns,” McTiernan explained. He added: ”The whole point is the impotence of all the guns.” (McTiernan staged a similar sequence in Die Hard – the scene where the bad guys are shooting the glass windows out.) Later, McTiernan says, a certain producer on the film (who is very obviously Joel Silver) took that idea and instead of hitting nothing he lined bodies up in front of the gunfire. In the commentary track on the DVD he said gravely: “And they wonder why Columbine happened.”
The making of documentary is online, the two best bits are 8.05 about Sonny Landham and 21.00 about the original Predator suit.
Here’s the second trailer for Seth MacFarlane’s debut feature, Ted.
I love the shot of Ted behind the wheel.
Be sure to check out Ted’s Blog, TedsFuzzyThoughts.com, it’s pretty funny.
(Source:SethMacFarlane)
Here’s Americano, written, directed by and starring Mathieu Demy, Agnes Varda’s son. The memory scenes of Martin’s childhood in LA are derived from Varda’s 1981 film Documenteur in which Demy appeared as a child.
World Cinema, a 2007 short film by the Coen Brothers from the To Each His Own Cinema compilation.
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 Next »
