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Film
Video Killed the Internet Star
11/10/2009 11:14 AM
Why Are You Weird? might just be the best VHS feature film to be made in 2009. Zach Shipko and Tucker Bennett's lo-fi exploration of San Francisco art school reality, told through the eyes of an awkward video art/performance art major named Curtis Jackson, also sets a high bar in the world of straight-to-YouTube features.
Using the lowest fidelity equipment outside of pixelvision, the directors achieve a scuzzed-out, VHS bargain-bin aesthetic with a nostalgia that offers a compelling alternative to other low-budget filmmaking options. If you can watch an entire Hollywood film on YouTube, who's to say you can't watch something that objectively looks much worse, with a lot more style? Throw in a bunch of turn of the century pop hits (Thong Song, KC + JoJo) turned into Midi songs and count me in.
From art class critiques to apartment parties, to openings and outdoor music fests, every location is the perfect setting for an awkward encounter between Curtis (played by Shipko) and some girl he's interested in. Admittedly, several of the amateur performers are pretty terrible, but even the worst moments are often redeemed by Shipko's transparent anxiety and awkward fibbing. There are absurd revelations, drug-induced conversations, art-school satires, trips to buy organic food, letters from mom, and an attention to detail that makes even the slower paced scenes comical in their astute observation of reality in the 2000s.
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11/09/2009 02:30 PM
Images of ponytailed angels patrolling a library, reading the thoughts of scholars; Rilke-inspired interior monologues; Henri Alekan's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography; a glorious score, rich with cellos and angsty choral music–Wim Wenders mixed these ingredients together for Wings of Desire, his 1987 arthouse classic about heavenly creatures keeping grim watch over late-communist-era Berlin. (PHOTO: BRUNO GANZ; COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION)
Wenders made it after an eight-year stint in America, during which he'd scored a hit with Paris, Texas. "I had to rediscover this country of mine through the city of Berlin," he explains in a 2003 documentary that is one of the extras on the new Criterion Blu-Ray edition.
Wenders wanted the main characters to be people who traveled around the city on a daily basis. He considered mailmen and firefighters before settling on the more poetic idea of angels. Watching the film, you get the sense that Cassiel (Bruno Ganz) and Damiel (Otto Sander) are being punished as they watch over Berlin, and the prologue Wenders wrote in his original script treatment–reprinted in the Blu-Ray notes–confirms this:
"When God, endlessly disappointed, finally prepared to turn his back on the world forever, it happened that some of his angels disagreed with him and took the side of man, saying he deserved to be given a second chance. Angry at being crossed, God banished them to what was then the most terrible place on earth: Berlin."
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A Mirage? The Tribeca Film Festival in Doha
11/05/2009 10:36 AM
Amidst lavish hype and grandiose statements of intent, eastern and western movie stars, and industry bigwigs, a reputed 4000-strong audience of locals congregated waterside for the inauguration of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival last weekend.
Launched by Robert de Niro in depressed post-9/11 Lower Manhattan in 2002, Tribeca came to Doha largely thanks to the daughter of Qatar's Emir, Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, who interned for Festival director Jane Rosenthal at the Tribeca offices in New York three years ago. She put the idea of a satellite event to Rosenthal, who recognized the benefits of bringing the Tribeca brand to the culturally-aspiring state. Dubai, the city-state on the coast, has presented an international film festival annually since 2004, and hosts galleries, theatres and two major art fairs. Neighboring Abu Dhabi, the staid elder brother to Dubai, launched its own film festival two years ago, and is debuting its own major art fair within weeks—not to mention the prospects of franchises of the Louvre and the Guggenheim. (PHOTO: MICHAEL BUCKNER; THE MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART)
At a luncheon Thursday afternoon saw downplay any cynical mutterings of store-bought big Western brand names. "We wanted to incorporate Qataris in the festival so nobody here would think we're simply imposing a festival," she said, going on to detail an extensive schedule of panel discussions, debates, cinema masterclasses, competitions, and 32 feature, documentary and short movies too, over four days.
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11/03/2009 02:05 PM
Consummating a two and half year restoration process lead by Robert Gitt and assisted by Barbara Whitehead of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes debuted, so to speak, in all its Technicolor brilliance at this year's Cannes. Presenting the revived version was Martin Scorsese, who'd seen the film as a child, and who has described the experience as being formative, recalling the prismatic whorl of colors "burning" into his mind and fostering his passion for film and for art. (PHOTO: ITV GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT)
The story is that of a promising dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), pushed to choose between her romance with a young composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and her lead part in a prominent ballet company. The film is an exploration of the artist's implicit plight: to create art is to live. When company head Lermontov asks Page "Why do you want to dance?" her response appears bold at first, but also invokes a fatal and unyielding pledge to one's passion. She replies, "Why do you want to live?"
The giddy elements of ballet–backstage camaraderie, the fellowship of a crew, the orchestra’s tweaking, tuning sounds in the pit, the comically disgruntled ballet master, the riot of students racing up the Royal Opera stairs to secure their seats before the show–are further enlivened through the framing of the film. Saturated in color, each frame of the 1948 British classic has been restored with immense care and precision, with a dreamy look that amplifies Jack Cardiff's original photography. Shearer's ashy skin, unmistakably freckled and glass-like, and her cherry-copper hair, lend surreal elements to her performance. In the film's famous seventeen minute ballet of The Red Shoes, a Hans Christian Andersen story about a woman who cannot stop dancing, Cardiff's optical tricks with light and motion transform the stage into a hallucinatory nightmare, where the darker recesses of artistic obsession and devotion lay claim. Culminating in a moment of unbridled craze–eyes gaping, brow sparkling with sweat–Shearer's charge is evident. In this newly restored print, her performance appears more possessed and tortured than ever.
The Red Shoes plays at Film Forum November 6-19. Film Forum is located at 209 W. Houston Street in New York.
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11/02/2009 04:15 PM
Precious, which opens at the end of this week, redefines "crowd-pleaser." The only film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto, it's about a Harlem teenager who's so deep in the gutter–poor, illiterate, obese, sexually abused, pregnant, and then some–that it's almost impossible to imagine her crawling out. "When she's in the red carpet fantasies, that's her," director Lee Daniels said of newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the film's title character, after a screening at last month's New York Film Festival. (PHOTO: MARIAH CAREY AND GABOUREY SIDIBE IN PRECIOUS)
Though he was skeptical at first, Daniels let casting director Billy Hopkins persuade him to reach out to some big names for the supporting roles: "He said, you're doing a movie about a 300-pound black girl! Anything's game," Daniels recalled. And since Daniels "didn't even bother to start going to studios" for funding, getting Carey, Kravitz, and (in an astoundingly thankless and demanding role) Mo'Nique involved undoubtedly made it easier for him to sell the film to Lionsgate.
Daniels' past credits include Monster's Ball, which he co-produced, and, less successfully, Shadowboxer, which he co-produced and directed. His latest is a fusion of arthouse texture and mainstream uplift. "I brought that world I knew into the world of urban," he said, adding, "I'm proud that we were able to marry those worlds, and show black art in a new way."
In the process, Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher made a few highbrow tweaks to Push, the brutal, best-selling novel on which their film was based. One horrendous domestic scene evaporates into an imaginary feast inspired by Vittorio de Sica's classic Two Women, which Precious and her mother have been watching on TV. A fanciful connection, perhaps, but Daniels defends it. "If we staged it in the reality, as the book does, it would have been X-rated. And I found that when bad things happened to me [as a child] I would pretend to be somewhere else," he said. "The argument on set was, would these women be watching Two Women? Well, I am the women, so shut up."
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