January 15, 2010
Career-long collaborators share Martin Scorsese memories
Today, nobody thinks twice about film school as a path to directing, but Jay Cocks remembers a time when the very idea of teaching such a trade seemed preposterous, even risible. Back in those days, Cocks was working as a reporter for Time magazine, where his editor assigned him to look into the phenomenon, a hunt that led him to a motor-mouthed movie buff -- and recent NYU grad -- named Martin Scorsese.
"We immediately became friends because of the holy communion of movies," Cocks says. "I found in him someone who loved movies even more than I did and had seen even more than I had -- and I thought I'd seen a lot."
Scorsese's career-long editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was similarly impressed when she met the director a few years earlier. She had responded to an ad in the paper for a six-week summer course at NYU, where Scorsese was putting the finishing touches on his first short, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"
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Posted by Peter Debruge on January 15, 10 at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2010
On the debt District 9 (and other '09 releases) owe reality TV
Remember the mockumentary genre? Classics such as This Is Spinal Tap and A Hard Day's Night seem almost quaint by comparison with the narrative tricks featured in such 2009 films as The Hurt Locker, District 9, In the Loop and Bruno, all of which use docu-style tactics to immerse us in the action -- or comedy, as the case may be.
Had those four films been released a decade earlier, moviegoers almost surely would have scratched their heads in confusion. What is Bruno exactly (or Borat before it), with its unique mix of scripted material and Candid Camera-style stunts? But the Hollywood aesthetic has changed radically in the 10 years since The Blair Witch Project -- a span that saw the rise of reality television, a boom in theatrical documentary attendance and the advent of YouTube -- and audiences are savvier for it.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on January 14, 10 at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2009
Observations on 61 Years of Oscar Foreign Language Winners
Two years ago, midway through a mostly uneventful Oscar ceremony, the Academy featured a montage celebrating 50 years of Oscar foreign-language winners. It was a stunning interlude, edited by director Giuseppe Tornatore with the same care he paid the kissing montage at the end of "Cinema Paradiso" and presented without a single word of dialogue — not so much an ironic choice as one that demonstrated the common language of cinema.
I was floored. What were these films? Of the 61 winners to date (counting the eight pics honored before the category was officially introduced in 1956), I'd seen maybe 15. There were landmark films by the likes of Fellini (a four-time winner), Bergman (three), Kurosawa (two) and Truffaut (one), whose titles I knew, yet never managed to see. And what about such unfamiliar and enigmatic-sounding winners as "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" (1970) and "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980)?
Surely this was a sign. I vowed to track down and watch every Oscar foreign-language winner (no easy feat, as many are unavailable on DVD). My project began in earnest the first week of 2009 with Vittorio De Sica's "Shoe-Shine" (1947) and proceeded in more or less chronological order at a pace of roughly a film a week for the entire year, culminating Dec. 1 with a special Academy-facilitated screening of that most elusive title, 1982's "Volver a empezar."
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 7, 09 at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2008
Clint Eastwood's Imperfect World
In 1993, coming off Unforgiven's Oscar win, Clint Eastwood made a little movie called A Perfect World in which he played a lawman who dreams of apprehending a kidnapper without firing a single shot — a far cry from the director's trigger-happy Dirty Harry days.
But that perfect world, Eastwood would probably be the first to tell you, simply doesn't exist (as was the unfortunate case in the titular film). Where Eastwood lives, laws have their limits, rules are seldom adequate and justice tends to be subjective. But the notion that forgiveness, for the first time in his career, wasn't entirely out of the question marked a significant change for Eastwood (just think how different Million Dollar Baby might be if his character spent the rest of the movie getting even).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 15, 08 at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2008
Young Film Critics Insist the Sky Is Not Falling
Now is probably not the right time to enter the world of film criticism, but don't tell that to aspiring pundits. Even as the professional ranks implode, young writers are expressing their passion by any means necessary.
Keith Uhlich, 31, runs a blog called the House Next Door. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" will probably make his top 10 list but not "The Dark Knight," which he dissed in 1,500 words earlier this year. Like many of the writers who contribute to the site, Uhlich would like nothing more than to make a living reviewing movies.
"I want to be a critic," he says, "but more important, I am one already. A lot of people get hung up on the monetary issue, and I understand why. If you're looking at this as a (paying) profession, at this point it seems untenable."
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 12, 08 at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2006
Star Trek Fan Films
The front rooms haven't changed much since 28-year-old "Star Trek" fan Rob Caves inherited his grandmother's house in Altadena, Calif. Curio cabinets and '70s-style furniture give the impression that an old lady lives here.
But in the back, it's the 24th century.
There Caves has assembled a makeshift studio for his "Star Trek" Web-only spinoff series "Hidden Frontier." A hand-painted greenscreen covers one wall, against which two actors dressed in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" uniforms discuss their same-sex relationship.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on July 19, 06 at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2006
Color Cards
When Maysoon Zayid walks out onstage, she always opens with the same line: "I'm a Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy from New Jersey."
She wants to get the fact that she has cerebral palsy out of the way — otherwise, auds would mistake her shaking for nervousness — and she does it by burying the detail among other hot-button elements of her identity.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on July 17, 06 at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2006
The Films of Michael Haneke
Expect spoilers. It’s pointless to discuss the films of Michael Haneke without addressing the ruthless twists he includes in each of his movies. Like that final shot in Caché, in which Haneke reveals the film’s two sons conversing on the front steps of the school (in such a way that only the most observant viewers will even detect the characters in the scene), certain moments have the capacity to unravel all that has come before and suggest the director’s true intentions.
Caché, of course, was the film that put Haneke on the radar of American audiences. And yet the 64-year-old director has been systematically provoking viewers for more than three decades, first in Austrian television and only later in features no doubt dismissed as too austere and depressing to support a commercial release in the United States — until now. Thanks to Kino, audiences now have access to the full range of the director’s career (the only feature since 1989 not yet available on DVD is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and yet the very choice of material is telling of the director’s ongoing preoccupations: the impersonality of modern society, the impact of media on our daily lives, and the deconstruction of storytelling itself).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on July 5, 06 at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
Poseidon story
The original Poseidon Adventure was high concept before the phrase even existed.
The remake, says producer Akiva Goldsman, "maintains the essential foundations of the original movie: big boat, cast of several, bigger wave, how do we get out?"
But by bringing a brand-name director to the table, the Poseidon producers manage to go higher concept still. This is The Poseidon Adventure as retold by Wolfgang Petersen.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on April 27, 06 at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
James Cameron talks digital, 3-D
"There isn't a film that I've got in my queue — and I'm four deep right now in projects that I've got scripted and want to shoot — that I wouldn't want to make in 3-D," James Cameron says. "I'm betting the frickin' farm on this."
When "the King of the World" sets his sights on tomorrow's technology, the rest of the industry takes note. And Cameron is making a commitment to digital.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on April 21, 06 at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2006
The Art of 'Cars'
It's easy enough with toys, monsters, even fish, but how do you assign a personality to a car? That's a challenge that faces not only Pixar, but the designers who work for the auto industry as well, says Ford chief creative officer J Mays, who headed up the redesign of two classic automotive icons: the Volkswagen Beetle and the Ford Mustang.
When Cars director John Lasseter first approached Ford about helping him prepare for his upcoming film, it was Mays who led the Pixar exec into the automaker's inner sanctum. In Lasseter, Mays found a kindred spirit who brings creativity to what sometimes seems like a very technical field.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on March 14, 06 at 10:52 AM | Comments (1)
November 11, 2005
Pride & Prejudice feature
The opening chapters of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice read uncannily like a screenplay. Ripe with colorful characters and composed almost entirely in dialogue, these early pages set the stage for one of the greatest romances in the English language, as if the popular Regency-era writer had a suspicion Hollywood might one day want to make a movie -- or six or seven -- of her most celebrated work.
After Shakespeare, Austen is perhaps the most frequently adapted writer in the English language, and though her favorite novel has indirectly inspired a number of loose spin-offs (including Bridget Jones's Diary and the Bollywood-themed Bride & Prejudice), it's been a full 65 years since the book was last translated faithfully to the big screen.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on November 11, 05 at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
Nick Park interview
What kind of man names his dog Gromit? (The word itself -- ''grommet'' -- describes the rubber thingamahoo that lines a whatzit to keep electrical wires from fraying.) It's certainly not the kind of name your ordinary, run-of-the-mill pet owner would dream up, but then that's hardly the way to describe British animator and three-time Oscar winner Nick Park, whose Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens in theaters today. As it turns out, the man responsible for creating Britain's most lovable clay canine has never owned a dog.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on October 7, 05 at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2004
Clint Eastwood interview
Clint Eastwood has defended scrappy frontier towns and hunted down San Francisco's dirtiest criminals. He's even taken a bullet for the president, but he's never had to face anything as difficult as the decision he must make in Million Dollar Baby. In an exclusive sit-down interview with Moviefone.com, Eastwood discusses the challenges of his latest film.
Clint Eastwood: It wasn't hard to make, but it was just hard to get the studio interested. It seems nowadays everyone's so interested in sequels, remakes, et cetera, it's hard to do dramas, character studies or anything. They just don't get them off the paper.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 11, 04 at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2004
Spalding Gray, in memoriam
I'll be the first to admit it: The first time I saw My Dinner with Andre, the movie bored me to sleep. The prospect of two men talking for two hours does not a movie make. Or so I thought. Imagine my surprise a few months later when I found myself riveted by Gray's Anatomy, an even unlikelier setup for a movie: a one-man monologue about eyeballs by a middle-aged white guy I'd never heard of. But then, one-sided conversation was one of Spalding Gray's greatest gifts (missing since January, Gray's body was discovered in New York's East River on March 7), and I'll always remember him as the man who showed me that compelling content, not razzle-dazzle pyrotechnics is the thing that makes movies great.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on March 8, 04 at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)