Photo: Matthew C. Wright

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead.

FUCK.

W., un film de Oliver Stone

 

If this trailer (for Oliver Stone's W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We'll see what happens with the movie.

Music Video: Stars/"Bitches in Tokyo"
"This is what you're worried about: something called The New York Dolls."

 

Music Video: Vampire Weekend/"Oxford Comma"
It's probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.



Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division

Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it's a doozy. Bottle Rocket. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man. The Man Who Fell to Earth. And The Last Emperor. Five solid selections from five great directors -- and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.

It's not exactly the hip neighborhood, but working out of Deep Focus World Headquarters in Sleepy Hollow, NY, has its advantages. One of them is the proximity of the Jacob Burns Film Center, an arthouse triplex in nearby Pleasantville that's several times more comfy than any similar venue in Manhattan. (Well, with the possible exception of the fairly posh Sunshine Cinemas downtown. And the similarly appointed IFC Center, also downtown. But you get my meaning.) Tonight, the Burns center hosted Werner Herzog for a screening of his documentary about Antarctic research stations and the scientists who inhabit them, Encounters at the End of the World. In the course of a highly entertaining Q&A, he held forth on his Bad Lieutenant remake, described his rescue of Joaquin Phoenix in early 2006, and told the audience what he really thinks about film theory.

I can only hope that reports of Mike D'Angelo's death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D'Angelo himself.

Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.




Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.

Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.

When I first heard that Funny Games was being remade for the U.S. multiplex, I couldn't imagine a more unlikely crossover between extreme European cinema and the American mainstream. But now this. Gosh. I know HBO is reputedly starving for new, edgy content. But really, what the hell is going on?

04.01.08 | HBO COMMISSIONS FUNNY GAMES, COMEDY-DRAMA SERIES BASED ON MICHAEL HANEKE’S FILMS, TO BEGIN AIRING THIS FALL

LOS ANGELES, April 1, 2024 – HBO, in conjunction with Halcyon Pictures and Tartan Films, is set to begin production on the 12-episode first season of the new HBO comedy-drama series FUNNY GAMES, it was announced today by Nicki Brand, executive vice president, HBO Entertainment. Michael Pitt (“The Dreamers,” “Last Days”) and Brady Corbett (“Thirteen,” “24”) will star in the series, reprising their roles from the recent Warner Independent Pictures feature film.

Slated to debut October 31, FUNNY GAMES is executive produced by Michael Haneke (“Cache”) and Ron Howard (“The Da Vinci Code”). Based on the 1997 film directed by Haneke, the show looks at a different ordinary American family each week as they cope with the arrival of the white-clad Peter and Paul, two unwelcome guests who enjoy sinister “funny games” that turn their hosts’ lives upside down.

“FUNNY GAMES is an intense, thought-provoking series that’s unlike anything else HBO has presented before,” said Brand. “The show undermines the creature comforts of the bourgeoisie and mocks the American television audience through telling moments of sadism and brutality in a way that broadcast TV can’t do.”

“We’re definitely going to push the envelope,” said Howard. “Michael’s brilliant films never found the audience they deserved, but I’m incredibly excited to think that, every week, the HBO viewing audience will have the opportunity to rethink its relationship to the thoughtlessly violent entertainment spectacles it craves.”

The show will also introduce a groundbreaking interactive component. Midway through each episode, viewers will vote via 900 number or text message on whether or not the family in that week’s installment should be allowed to survive. But, in a soul-shattering twist that underscores the relation between cinematic spectatorship and sadism, each installment will nonetheless end with the casual murder of each family member, as well as any pets.

“Since I first conceived it in the mid 1990s, FUNNY GAMES has always been my intelligent, passionate reaction to stupidly violent American cinema and the audience of shabby, knuckle-dragging cretins that thoughtlessly consumes this kind of naïve, morally destitute entertainment,” said Haneke. “Fuck you,” he added.

I hadn't realized that music-video director extraordinaire Mark Romanek was attached to helm Universal's big-deal remake of The Wolf Man. But, well, not any more .... Hey, remember that Utah-based cottage industry built around editing violent and salacious bits from DVDs in order to protect the sensibilities of family-minded locals? One of its mini-moguls has been arrested for allegedly paying to get blow jobs from 14-year-olds (original reports said this guy was one of the founders of the core Clean Flicks operation, but apparently he's just a second-stringer and the famous original Clean Flicks is now apparently suing him over the misunderstanding) .... In other decency news, the FCC (citing a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue) has just declared your butt a sex organ .... Also, You Suck at Photoshop .... And, finally, enjoy words from Ghostface Killah and Harlan Ellison (not at the same time or in the same room, mind) on getting paid.

Ghostface


Harlan

With the arrival of this new R-rated promo-clip montage, it becomes obvious that Warner Independent is still trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Michael Haneke's sure-to-be-unpleasant Funny Games remake.

Well, the writers' strike is on. And as tempting as it is to pontificate on the role of the director as the real authorial voice in filmmaking, or to suggest various roads to amiable compromise, I have to say go writers. That screenwriters are still being compensated for video sales at a compromise rate agreed to when home-video was still a rental market seems unjust to me, given the profitability of DVD sales — and demands for royalties on Internet-distributed content that outpace what they originally got for VHS are morally defensible from a won't-get-fooled-again standpoint if nothing else. It seems disingenuous to suggest that the content industry won't be able to monetize the freaking Internet. (See Jon Stewart, above.) Big Corporate versus Organized Labor — this is how the system is supposed to work.

For a long time I was resistant to the idea of making a point of reading novels that were being made into films. If a noted filmmaker's reading list intersects your own, then fine -- but I'm generally more interested in the film qua film than I am in its relationship with the source material, unless said source material is uncommonly fine. I found complaints about changes made by Peter Jackson to the Tolkien mythology to be tediously petty, especially since the films turned out so well (and also because the books bored my pants off as a youngster), and although I suppose I'm grateful when a talented critic nutshells the vagaries of a particular book-to-film adaptation, I seldom feel the need to do the kind of homework required to elucidate that process myself. At the end of the screening, after all, the film needs to stand on its own.

The death of a great artist is easier to take, for obvious reasons, when that artist's body of work is more or less complete. Robert Altman, for instance, died after making a pretty good musical and before he could start work on a new, off-the-wall project. But Ingmar Bergman more or less retired back in 1982, upon the release of Fanny and Alexander, his lengthy but highly entertaining account of two very eventful childhoods. It's not that I'm less sorry to see him go, exactly, but that the body of work left behind feels intact — like a journey that's reached an at-least-somewhat-satisfactory destination — rather than simply incomplete.

Well, I'll be damned. It looks like Kirby Dick's little movie on the ratings system may have done some good.

I like to keep these environs hype-free as a general rule, but I really like the posters that have come over the transom for "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof," the segments directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, respectively, for the April release of Grindhouse. (Click each image for a larger version.)

Bill Chambers was kind enough to send me word earlier in the summer of an impending exhaustive, four-disc (!) version of Dust Devil coming from Subversive Cinema. (I wrote about this and its predecessor, Hardware, at Cinemarati in December.) You might think the last thing the world needs is a fuggin' four-DVD version of what amounts to a solid B horror movie, cult following or no. But it looks definitive -- sure, it's got the two versions of the film, with audio commentary and a "featurette." But it's also got several unrelated documentaries by director Richard Stanley, on the subjects of Afghanistan, Haitian voodoo, and the search for the Holy Grail. Of course it's possible they all suck. But maybe not. And it can't help but be a big upgrade from the German DVD I picked up at Mondo Kim's on St. Mark's last year. For $29.95, I think I'll take the chance. Scarecrow Video has it listed as a 9/26 release and is taking pre-orders.

Because I'm a big ol' geek, the best news I got all week is that The Double Life of Véronique — the first Krzysztof Kieslowski movie I ever saw (and, probably not coincidentally, my favorite) — is coming to DVD through the auspices of The Criterion Collection. It will have a boatload of extras. My heart leaped into my throat when I saw that someone at Criterionforum.org (second post on this page) had posted a frame grab from an existing (European) Véronique DVD put out by MK2 that had the color all wrong. (I saw it three times on its original theatrical release, and at no point was the image out-and-out green as it seems to be on the MK2 disc.) But I trust Criterion has got it right. (Thanks, Criterion! Usually, I have to break down and buy an import version of a favorite movie before you'll announce its domestic release.)

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is, according to one columnist, “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.” The New York Times on Paramount's outreach campaign to conservatives. In a nutshell: Paramount recruited the guys who brought you the John Kerry Swift Boat campaign to promote WTC. It's not being aggressively pitched to liberals, according to the Times, because Paramount figured "the entertainment press had covered that base." Heh.

Cardinal rule of movie-going: shut your fucking mouth while the movie’s playing.

Kevin Smith takes Joel Siegel to task for walking out midway through a screening of Clerks II. Smith manages to get Siegel on the phone, on the radio, and rips into him. (There's a link to an MP3, which is uncomfortable enough to make the whole hubbub a little bit interesting, at the bottom of the post linked above.) God only knows why Siegel stays on the line -- stammering out a half-hearted defense of his apparently noisy departure -- once it dawns on him exactly what's happening.

Station Manager Ken is tracking World Cup-related deaths from the world over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog. One man died after a night of excessive World Cup drinking, six died in Haiti after a gang fight over a generator to power TV sets running World Cup games, and in Somalia, two World Cup fans were shot dead -- just for watching the games. And there's more. Check it out.

Also of interest (maybe -- the one with the dog being beheaded I don't think I'd watch on a dare) are the five titles Ken picked when polled on his top films of all time. The Grizzly Man parody is amusing and the Westboro Baptist Church video (from the folks who brought you godhatesfags.com), which argues that New York City got exactly what was coming to it (from the hand of God!) on 9/11, is among the most aggressively offensive things I've ever seen. (In the same ballpark: the sanctimoniously creepy Diary of an Unborn Child (MP3 link), recorded by "Lil Markie", is one of the most disturbing things I've ever heard -- it scares the hell out of me.)

Hold on to your wigs, keys, and inverted William Shatner masks, everyone -- word has just come down that Bob Weinstein has hired Rob Zombie to defibrillate the Halloween franchise. No details on what Zombie plans to do, but the studio promises an "entirely new take" that will appeal "not only ... to horror fans, but to a wider moviegoing audience as well." Hope they plan to keep Zombie on a very short leash in that case, since his features to date have been specialty movies if ever such a thing existed. That's not a dis, by the way. I'm very glad The Devil's Rejects exists, and if someone has to make a new Halloween movie, it may as well be someone with a personality.

OK, this is one of the more interesting collections of footage I've seen recently. It looks like that madman with a movie camera, Robert Rodriguez, has decided to do a visually faithful film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City series of comic books. Some of the results are on display

here. Warning: this is a big chunk of video.

This footage was apparently debuted at the San Diego ComicCon, which has become as important as a venue for film marketing as for the comic book industry. It looks like Rodriguez is shooting for hard-boiled, but he needs to keep his rating in mind, too; it's unlikely that what we see on screen will be quite as violent as the comics, or as saturated with mostly-nude women. (Jessica Alba, on the evidence here, seems to be playing a stripper who doesn't take her clothes off.)

Whatever. What's fascinating is that Rodriguez has managed to find a rough cinematic analogue to the stark black-and-white drawing style Miller employed for this series, aping Miller's compositions with extreme camera angles. Not only is it a pretty distinct match for the comics, but it also looks to be as close to truly expressionist film noir camerawork as anything I've seen in years. Will it hold together as a filmed narrative? Who knows? But I'm looking forward to finding out.

According to Billboard, Madonna's next film role (following hubby Guy Ritchie's stab at a remake of Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) will be in Peter Greenaway's forthcoming The Tulse Luper Suitcase. Also slated to appear, per a page dedicated to the multi-media project at petergreenaway.co.uk, are Debbie Harry, Vincent Gallo, Don Johnson, Isabella Rossellini, Fairuza Balk, Ewan McGregor, Franka Potente and fucking Molly Ringwald. (No word yet on how many of them will be naked.) How can you not want to see this?