mise-en-scene

The Passenger (1975) aka Professione: Reporter

2011-07-18T18:44:00.000-07:00

Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

Hollywood Art Direction

2011-04-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

John De Cuir

Before they were films they were sketches

THE NAKED PREY (1966)

2010-10-23T16:51:00.001-07:00

Directed by Cornel Wilde

Photography by H.A.R. Thomson

The soundtrack features authentic South African tribal chants recorded by Cornel Wilde, and instrumental cues directed by ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey.

Insightful analysis of the film & background info on Wilde here , here and here.

Cinematographer JACK CARDIFF on Moving Pictures 1/2

2010-10-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

2010-10-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

Sketches of Ridley Scott's work inform his moviemaking

By Mike Snider, USA TODAY

Directors routinely offer a peek into the filmmaking process on the home video versions of their movies. Ridley Scott opens his sketchbook, too.

For the Blu-ray Disc edition of Robin Hood, in stores now, Scott offered hundreds of storyboards he sketched for the making-of-the-legend tale that stars Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett.

The director of Alien and Gladiator has drawn on his sketching talent for decades. A graduate in graphic design from the Royal College of Art in London, Scott began drawing storyboards as a director of commercials. "We'd have so much to do in a day that I had to order my thoughts," Scott said in an interview. "So I'd put things down on paper, which means drawings."

When working on a movie, he says, "I'm always driven everywhere. So I can sit in the back of an SUV and, literally, I'll be scribbling what I want to do that day."

The Director's Notebook, an extra on the Blu-ray edition, plays along with the film. (This edition also includes the unrated director's cut and the theatrical version of the film, as well as copies of the director's cut on DVD and digital download. It also is available in a two-disc $35 DVD with extras and a single $30 DVD.) At various points, the film shrinks to a smaller window and two others open up, one with Scott talking and other footage, and a smaller one that displays Scott's relevant storyboards.

It's not unusual for Scott's storyboard to perfectly match the finished shot. "I can draw really fast. I can do pages in an hour. Fairly good drawings, actually," Scott says. "What is interesting is it kind of helps you think."

His Robin Hood sketches cover the visceral fighting, as well as the spectacle-sized visions of the French invasion. "It's kind of keeping a distance from the canvas," he says. "If you are a painter, you've constantly got to be reminded to step back and take a look from a distance."

Now more than four months removed from the release of Robin Hood, Scott says he would still like to do a sequel. "We realized when we were making it that we are actually not making Robin Hood, we're actually making The Making of Robin Hood or the beginning of the legend," Scott says. "So the next one would be joining him in the forest with his so-called band, which would no longer be children but would be young men and fervently opposed to the oppression that would occur from (King) John and the Sheriff and the crown. You know, the rights of man, the rights of people, that's what Robin always stood for."

Scott is waiting on word from Universal about a sequel, and this film's home video success could be a factor. In its first week in stores, Robin Hood was No.1, according to Rentrak Corp. "It's done pretty good, actually," Scott says of the theatrical release. "We clocked about $300 million. It hasn't opened in Japan yet, so we're probably going to be over $350 (million)."

For now, he's turning his attention to a prequel to Alien, which begins filming in January or February, Scott says.

The events in the prequel occur 30 to 40 years before 1979's Alien. It covers the back story of "why would they invent such a thing as this terrible creature? Who invented it? Who was that? Who was the big guy in the chair who lay there with the burst chest when they entered the big alien craft? Who was the space jockey?"

Adds Scott: "I created the franchise, and I then watched them do what they had to do over the next 20 to 30-some years. I wasn't that happy. I always had this thought if you really wanted to renew the franchise, you could go backwards, and you can actually come up with something pretty interesting."

In doing so, Scott is sure to draw on his various talents.

Ridley Scott

2008-11-21T07:02:00.001-08:00

'THE LATE DEVELOPER' The Guardian, Wednesday November 7, 2007

Ridley Scott didn't start making films until he was 40, but he's been cranking out a hugely varied list of hits ever since, from Thelma and Louise to Gladiator. As his new film American Gangster is released on the eve of his 70th birthday, he tells Stephen Moss why he's far from done yet

Rudely, I wanted to begin by asking Ridley Scott about his age. He is 70 this month, but would pass for a gnarled, grizzled, folk-singerish fiftysomething. He emits a curious high-pitched sound when I remind him of the approaching milestone: "Ahhhheeeeeuuuuughhhhhh ..." Without making a song and dance about it, he doesn't think this is a great starting point.

"I'd rather not make too much of it," he says. "It's a youth-orientated business and I seem to be kicking butt more now than I ever was. I'll probably do three films now in 20 months, which is shocking. That's why I don't really want to talk about the milestone. Milestones don't really mean anything to me anyway."

Each of these three back-to-back projects is a massive undertaking - enough, taken together, to keep most directors busy for a decade. He has just completed American Gangster, which opened strongly in the US at the weekend and arrives here next week; he is currently shooting Body of Lies in Morocco "with Leo [DiCaprio] and Russell [Crowe]; a 90-day shoot would be usual, but I'll do it in about 76"; and he is planning Nottingham, a revisionist take on the Robin Hood story to be shot next year, with Crowe (who is becoming a Scott fixture) starring as the sheriff, upholding the law against a dubious bandit hiding out in the woods.

To keep those three multimillion-dollar plates spinning is a remarkable achievement, though Scott managed something similar in 2000-2002 when, outrageously, Gladiator, Hannibal and Black Hawk Down appeared in rapid succession. "I started late," says Scott, by way of explanation. "I didn't make my first movie until I was 40."

Scott has a reputation for grumpiness, but he displays none today, even though he has taken a day off from the Moroccan shoot to fly to London to do this interview. He has both increased his speed of work in the past 10 years - American Gangster is his ninth film since 1996, compared with eight in the previous 25 - and calmed down.

"There are a lot of egos in this business, and I think I've got my ego firmly in place," he says. "The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it." He is talking specifically about how to handle actors - "I'll always ask them if they want to do another take. They love that. I never say, 'Cut, darlings, new set-up' and all that bullshit" - but it applies more generally. He has survived as a film-maker for 30 years because he knows that good films are a volatile mix of art and diplomacy, vision and production nous, individual idiosyncrasy and studio savvy.

When he arrived in Hollywood to shoot Blade Runner in 1982, after making The Duellists and Alien in Britain, he was edgy and uncertain, he says, as well as ultra-competitive. The Blade Runner shoot was testy - the American crew gave the Limey newcomer a hard time, the studio panicked when the film previewed badly, and Scott allowed them to impose a disastrous voiceover. "There was an insidious deterioration into a platform of jelly," he says. "I got paranoid; I joined the club. It just shows you have to keep your head. That's experience. Now I have to sit and look at this thinking, 'This is not wrong, it's right. They're wrong and I'm right.'"

It has taken him a quarter of a century to get back to his original conception of Blade Runner - a "final cut" is being released on DVD this month to mark the film's 25th anniversary. But he had learned an important lesson which he applied when the less-than-uproarious ending of Thelma and Louise - his heroines plunge to their death in the Grand Canyon - came up for discussion. "Laddy [studio boss Alan Ladd junior] said, 'Can you think of another ending?'" says Scott. "I said, 'No, can you?' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Fine.' He said, 'But they drive off the cliff.' I said, 'Do you like it?' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'So what are you mucking about for?' He said, 'That car goes down, the hat comes off, it's really depressing.' I said, 'Tell you what, we'll freeze it.'"

A clever adjustment that kept everyone happy without, as on Blade Runner, damaging the film. It is trademark Scott, walking the line between artist and artisan. "I'm very interactive with studios," he says. "I think that's why I'm still there."

On American Gangster, the true-life story of the 70s Harlem drug baron Frank Lucas and the cop who nails him and at the same time cleans up New York's corrupt police department, there was again an issue with the ending. Preview audiences loved the film, but questionnaires showed they would have loved it even more if the ending had been more redemptive - there was an implication in the original that Lucas would offend again. Scott allowed a tweak - the ending is now more neutral - but only, he says, because the test scores "rang a bell" in his head and alerted him to a doubt he already had. On the DVD, he says, the original ending will be included in the extras, so the audience can trace the evolution of the thought. He assumes everyone is as buffish about film as he is.

Scott is a portrait of the artist as pragmatist. On the one hand, he says: "Studios don't put up $100m for me to go and have a good time. I'm going to absolutely bloody respect that, and not say, 'Don't cross that line.'" But he also makes a heartfelt plea for serious film-making to continue at a time when a lot of Hollywood movies increasingly resemble video games. "I try to make films, not movies," he says. "I've never liked the expression 'movie', but it sounds elitist to say that. In England, we used to call them films - or fil-ums where I was from [the north-east]. Movies came over with the GIs. Movies sounded cool, but now movies seem to have taken the place of what constitutes the worst form of ephemera, and that's where you can apply the term, 'It's only a movie'. A good film can sustain its own magic, like a good book, like a good piece of music."

Film can aspire to be art - Scott would make that claim for Blade Runner - but, equally, art must show awareness of its audience. "When a conductor stands in front of an orchestra, that's also entertainment," he says. Film critic David Thomson calls him a "crowd-pleaser", but Scott wants to be more than that. "The warhorses who are really running the Hollywood studios know what is good," he says, "but they also know that they have a bottom line, and they have to address the bottom line. They will, though, occasionally let someone like me go out and do [serious films], so I try to keep my head above water and keep the standard up. I mean it. That's serious. It's very important to me."

American Gangster, a film that grips unrelentingly across its 150-minute span, is far more than just Hollywood pap. Having been written off by some as a mere stylist earlier in his career, a creator of fabulous worlds, Scott is now dealing with this world. But while he says he hopes he is evolving as a director - "I like to think I'm moving, changing all the time, that's part of the job" - he doesn't want to draw a line between the two Scotts. "I can now take a normal world and make it epic," he says.

Scott's ego may now be held in check, but his drive and his obsession with film burn as brightly as ever. He has said he will carry on making films until he drops dead, and he tells me he can never go to sleep until he has watched a film. "I start at 11 and if I'm still watching at 1, that means it's a good film," he says.

Of the golden generation that emerged from the ad business in Britain in the 1970s, he has proved the most durable. "People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is," he says. "I do pretty big movies and you have to drive the bus - that's the job. A lot of people can't deal with all the personnel. My crews average anywhere between 400 and 500 people, but I never even think about it. It's like walking in to an army camp every morning. You have to go, 'Right' [he claps his hands], and everybody moves. You've got to embrace the manpower and embrace your department heads." He makes himself sound more like a CEO than a film director, pushing a large organisation forward while all the time thinking creatively.

He says he strives to make life in the camp exciting as well as strenuous. "If I'm excited, it tends to leak out. I think that's what I'm good at - I'm good at pushing the pace and suddenly everyone is running. It's very easy to do only 10 shots a day. On American Gangster, we were doing 50 set-ups a day. We wouldn't have got through it otherwise. I'd have to do two takes and say, 'That's it.' Denzel or Russell would go, 'One more,' and I'd say, 'OK, let's go.' It's faster to go again than talk about it. I was always fast. Now I'm really fast."

Scott is strangely inarticulate - or, rather, the articulacy comes and goes. He proceeds not through rounded sentences, but via shafts of verbal light. He is clearly a brilliant judge of a script, however - his key contribution to American Gangster was to beef up Crowe's part as the lummox of a cop in pursuit of Denzel Washington's pin-striped drugs baron - but he is not a writer-director. He is a realiser of other people's words and worlds, moving effortlessly between genres. What other director could have made Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal and Matchstick Men?

Scott is a throwback to the studio system in which directors such as Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz, working fast on projects they hadn't originated, could nevertheless produce terrific films. He is not an auteur, but he is far more than just a technician.

"Everyone in this room ought to be in the business of making entertainment," Scott once told an audience at Bafta. But his emphasis has shifted. "I'm uneasy about the word 'auteur'," he says now, "but I do wonder why film-making isn't as legitimate [an artform] as painting. I used to say, 'It's just a movie,' but actually it's not really. A lot of artistic decisions have gone into it."

Scott, who also paints, knows his art. Born in the north-east of England - his accent fuses Geordie with west coast America - he studied graphic design at West Hartlepool College of Art and then the Royal College of Art before joining the BBC as a set designer. "I knew I wanted to be a director when I was about eight," he says, "but I didn't know how on earth I'd get there. Where did they come from? Did they land from Mars? I figured that by getting to be an art director I was halfway along the route, and once I became one I was staring at the reality of these insecure, four-packs-a-day, jugs-of-water-and-beer guys called 'director'. Not all of them were very good, but one or two of them were brilliant."

He bullied the BBC into letting him do a director's course, and was let loose on Z Cars, Softly Softly, The Informer and Adam Adamant, but says he shot himself in the foot at an interview for a director's job on BBC2 by admitting he knew nothing about Shakespeare. The BBC, he implies, was still very Oxbridge and theatre-oriented. Blocked at the Beeb and irritated to be earning only £75 a week, he switched to advertising - "commercials were my film school" - building Ridley Scott Associates into a global player and marrying Hovis to Dvorak with award-winning results.

Ridley Scott shoots a commercial for Chanel on the French Riviera.

The glittering commercials career delayed the move into features, but meant that once he did arrive he was technically fully formed. He still trumpets his first film, The Duellists - "I knew it was a good film. It was criticised for being too pretty, but I didn't really give a shit" - and his second, Alien, was a monster hit that propelled him into the arms of Hollywood. There have been ups and downs since, but he's never gone away. "Life's a river," he says. "It has its bends and overflows; it comes back and shrinks. If you enjoy doing what you're doing, you've just got to keep doing it."

The downs have included several critical and/or commercial failures. Legend, starring Tom Cruise, proved an epic disaster in 1985, but as with Blade Runner, Scott has breathed DVD-inspired life into it by issuing a director's cut and releasing a version with the original score, which had been junked when it tested badly. "People said Legend didn't work," he says, "but I think it does work. I think it's kind of beautiful and spectacular. I just made it 25 years too soon. Now all these films which go under the banner of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter [are like Legend]. I've gone away from that and I thought, 'Damn, I should have made that now.'"

Scott hit another rough patch after the success in 1991 of Thelma and Louise, which won him one of his three best-director Oscar nominations. His other three movies in that decade - 1492: Conquest of Paradise, White Squall and GI Jane - all under-performed. Some suggested that he was on the slide, but the monumental success in 2000 of Gladiator, which won the Oscar for best picture, changed his fortunes, restored the confidence of the studios, and made possible the startling film-a-year run he has enjoyed during this decade.

Gladiator also established his fruitful relationship with Crowe, though the pair got a mauling last year when they essayed the romantic comedy A Good Year. "We had some fun on A Good Year, and even though we got beaten up for it, I still think it's a good movie and I think Russell was excellent in it," says Scott. "He's one of the best, and we seem to know exactly what to do without much exchange now. The waltz is over. The waltz was on Gladiator. We've got the measure of each other now."

Personally, too, the river has not always flowed smoothly for Scott, with two marriages ending in divorce. He had two sons with his first wife and a daughter with his second; all three of his children - Jake, Luke and Jordan - are directors. He is now married to the Costa Rican actress Giannina Facio, who played Mrs Maximus in Gladiator. She doesn't crop up in our conversation, but his younger brother Tony does, on several occasions. Tony, who is six years younger than Ridley, followed his big brother into commercials and then to Hollywood, breaking through with Top Gun in 1986. Tony is "still flying", according to Ridley, who is part admiring, part protective. It is an interesting relationship: highly competitive - "I'm kept on my toes because of Tony, and I know I'm competition for him. He's thinking, 'Holy shit, Ridley's doing another film in March'" - but also very close. They are partners in the film production company Scott Free, and Ridley has in the past described his brother as his first and best critic.

My time is almost up and the Universal publicist keeps coming in trying to call cut. I have managed about two dozen of the hundred or so questions I had drawn up, so I never do get to ask him if seeing Citizen Kane when he was six was his Rosebud moment, whether the Harrison Ford character in Blade Runner really is a replicant, or if the Queen showed any knowledge of his work when she knighted him in 2003. I had planned to make a four-hour masterpiece, but the studio want it brought in at well under an hour and a half. Nothing changes. I console myself with the thought that I will be able to catch Scott again on his 80th birthday, when, no doubt, he will be plugging another half a dozen movies. Sorry, fil-ums.

Basil of Baker St.

2008-10-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

All images copyright the Walt Disney company.

Across The Universe

2008-09-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

Cannes 2008

2008-05-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

BLINDNESS
In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is...the narrator. Danny Glover's eye-patch wearing sage leads us by the arm through Fernando Mereilles' arresting & stylish studio pic.
If you can buy into the high concept 'world gone blind' premise then there's much in the flick to enjoy, although Julianne Moore's immunity to the blindness virus is harder to swallow.

Mereilles confines most of the action to an isolation hospital with nameless characters who rapidly devolve into basic human archetypes according to their moral standpoints. It's especially satisfying to see Gael Garcia Bernal play a villain for a change.

The human degradation & coarse poiltics are brutally depicted, often shocking but exquisitely photographed by César Charlone. He sets up unforgiving tableau reminiscent of Lucian Freud's paintings in their 'warts & all', flesh & filth depiction. Special photgraphic processes are used throughout masterfully to induce blindness in us the viewing audience. This is supported by stellar sound editing work & a moving & original score by Marco Antônio Guimarães.

What could have been a generic B-movie disaster pic in the hands of a lesser director BLINDNESS is elevated to A status by Mereilles & his technical team & also an oustanding cast. Mereilles chose wisely character actors such as Ruffalo, Moore, Bernal, Glover whose impeccable performances are the true standouts of the film. Expect award nominations for at least Julianne Moore.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

It's encouraging to see another adult oriented animated project in competition after last years' 'PERSEPOLIS'. Contrary to Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical memoir of being raised amid Middle Eastern conflict, it's an account Ari Folman's quest to remember what happened to him during his days in the Israeli army.

Folman has said he chose animation as his medium because he had no other option-it would have been just talking heads if in live action & there is little video footage of the Lebanon war from this period. Instead he illustrates the war-time experiences of his comrades as they relate their memories in voice-over. Stylistically the artwork is just as bold & graphic as Persepolis but more realistic, similar to Linklater's 'WAKING LIFE' or 'A SCANNER DARKLY' but not rotoscoped.
A talented team of artists evoke the surreal horror of war expertly & often poetically.
It's a moving & gripping account of one man's desire to understand how he came to be part of one of the worst massacres of the Israeli/Palestine conflict.

Folman plans to use animation for his next project-an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1971 sci-fi novel 'The Futurological Congress'.

LEONERA

Two hours spent in an Argentinian womens prison feels like a life sentence in Pablo Trapero's 'LEONERA'. A ballsy central performance from Martina Gusman sustains interest but the bleak tone is wearisome.

KUNG FU PANDA

Despite a plot as thin as rice paper 'Kung Fu Panda' still kicks ass! Dreamworks strings together several bravura action sequences interspersed with numerous comic moments to create a satisfying if shallow picture. Jack Black is miscast as a voice performer-his physical appearance seems to have won him the role & the Furious Five animal martial arts experts seem to exist purely for merchandising & toy potential. Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu & Seth Rogen are wasted in their roles. However Dustin Hoffman, Randall Duk Kim & James Hong are inspired casting & bring gravitas & originality to their characters. One can see how their vocal performances inspired the animators.
Technical achievements set new benchmark for Dreamworks Animation with luscious visuals, appealing character designs & a particularly stylish opening credit sequence produced in 2-D animation. Magnificently orchestrated action sequences dazzle with the 'prison escape' the most impressive & the dumpling duel' a comic highlight.

Dreamworks are expecting a massive hit with this & it should give Pixar's 'WALL-E' a run for its money this summer. (I predict a round 2 face-off come Xmas between KUNG FU PANDA toys & radio controlled Wall-E's!) The studio is hoping for another franchise property in PANDA but how they can squeeze another flick out of such a meagre premise is down to Hollywood's black belt script masters.

--- TYSON

Highly watchable documentary of the rise & fall of arguably the greatest boxer of all time. Tyson addresses the camera with honesty & emotion, confiding in his offscreen confidante & director James Toback. A self confessed 'extreme personality' Tyson is entirely forthcoming on all aspects of his life & career. The pic is entirely subjective but fascinating to hear Tyson's version of events-we come to learn about the man behind the animal. He gives his version of controversial episodes such as the ear-biting & the rape conviction. Although denouncing Desiree Washington as 'that wretched swine of a woman' & admitting he 'took advantage of other women but not her' is weak justification & illicits little sympathy in the viewer. Laughs are found in his opinion of manager Don King & the film is most touching when Tyson laments the loss of his early mentor & guardian Cus D'Amato. This father figure managed to stabilise Tyson's personal volatility & instilled in him the ruthlessness & discipline to become 'a God in the ring' as Tyson aggrandizes. One wonders if D'Amato had lived longer whether Tyson's life would have proved so tumultuous.
A terrific documentary & a great sports film, this would have been a strong contender in the main Competition category.

SOI COWBOY

A fat Danish man wakes up in his Bangkok apartment next to his Thai Bride, they getup, shower, make breakfast. He goes out to the shops. He comes back. They go away for the weekend to visit a temple. . . This black & white film starts off slowly & builds to a relentlessly slow pace. Half the audience I saw it with were exasperated & walked out! But they missed the 3rd act switch to colour & the surreal Blue Velvet like dénoument.
The slow pace is oddly engaging & even played for laughs in one scene lingering on an old lady with a walker for an interminable duration.
Tough going but intriguing, Thomas Clay's film is for arthouse movie fans & even then may struggle to find an audience with sufficient patience.

GOMORRA

A contemporary mafia movie done the Italian way. Based on a best selling novel Matteo Garrone's multi-stranded mob pic switches between 4 young boys & two middle-aged men on the fringes of the mob & their resistance or attraction to the criminal life.
Based on the infamous Neapolitan Camorra families who exert a stranglehold on not only Italian interests but worldwide too-final subtitles reveal even the World Trade Center renovation has Camorra investment.
More an Italian 'Goodfellas' than 'The Godfather' it traces the mis/fortunes of the lower ranks-foot soldiers, money runners, teenage wannabes, crooked toxic waste disposal contractors.
The myriad strands & characters & their relationship to each other is often difficult to keep track of but fans of Roberto Saviano's source novel will no doubt get more out of it.

INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

After almost 20 years you would think they could come up with something better than quicksand, ants & waterfalls . . .and gophers! What's with the bloody gophers!
Sure these perilous obstacles (except the gophers) were staples of the classic serials that originally inspired the series. However even the pre-digital fx original films offered much more inventive cliffhangers & set-pieces. For all of Spielberg's insistence that digital fx were used sparingly SKULL plays more like a film in the MUMMY series with its nuclear explosion & ant-swarms, even those Indy influenced films restrained from using a stretchy rubber snake as a rope! Skull is a parody of the Indy series- & not even a good one. The jokes aren't funny, the new characters are under-developed, there's no suspense. They should have made this 10 years ago when everyone involved still had some fire in them. Apparently Lucas stubbornly insisted on the 'skull civilisation' macguffin & rejected all other scenarios. I would love to read Frank Darabont's draft on which he worked for a year & was reportedly a cracker. The story Lucas preferred is more like one of those lightweight supernatural Indy novellas that have been published in the intervening years.
Even with his considerable cinematic genius Spielberg couldn't save this-it's arguably his worst film. Towards the finale someone laments 'so much of human life is lost in waiting' with which after 19 years, 2 hours in a queue & 2 hours viewing I regretfully agree.

JOHNNY MAD DOG

After the turgid 4th Indy film creaking under the weight of it's overblown nonsensical script it was an utter relief to be blown away by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's 'JOHNNY MAD DOG'. A 'platoon' of young soldier kids roam the Liberian countryside killing, raping & terrorizing villagers before besieging an un-named city. The brutality of their atrocities is outweighed by their apathy & callousness. Their adult general has brainwashed them to think of their guns as their parents & any sign of parental longing results in execution. They have been stripped of their childhoods & their humanity allowing them to act without empathy or guilt.
The camera-work is frenetic & intense, the soundtrack blisteringly loud, the young cast totally convincing. It will be hailed as this year's 'CITY OF GOD'.

CHE
I want a T-shirt that states I survived the marathon that is Steven Soderbergh's 'CHE'. Screened as a work in progress at Cannes the 4 hour 28 min. version we saw will ultimately play as two seperate movies- 'The Argentine' and 'The Guerilla'. The Cannes version was thankfully split in two by an intermission, dividing Che Guevara's life into two basic acts; the successful Cuban revolution & the failed Bolivian revolution. The film is meandering & could certainly be tightened significantly in the edit suite-it's more intimate than epic-probably due to budgetary restrictions. Throughout the sprawling narrative there are many moments of brilliance (Che addressing the UN) & Del Toro's performance is subdued but powerful. It will be interesting to see if Soderbergh takes the critical response constructively & fashions a new version-maybe a single film around the 3 hour mark-intercutting the colourful brilliance of the first half with the muted tones of the second Bolivian set section.
I hope this project doesn't suffer the same fate as Richard Kelly's 'Southland Tales' that screened in Cannes to derisive boos only to resurface a year later in a re-cut but just as poor version.

SYNECDOCHE,New York

I love the films made from Kaufman's scripts thus far but didn't warm to 'Synecdoche'. Kaufman makes an auspicious debut as a director-it's visually inventive & he seems able to draw strong performances from his cast. However the characters aren't very sympathetic especially Seymour Hoffmann's naval gazing playwrite. The aging & 'multiple actor characters' soon becomes tiresome. The neurotic introspection is lightened on several occasions-notably Hoffman 'salivating' before chewing his food!

DELTA

An incestuous relationship between a longlost brother & sister in a remote Hungarian river delta. Slow moving but enthralling-music & sound building the tension until the brutal climax. Director Kornel Mundruczo takes advantage of the stunning Danube backdrop & has stated it was this landscape that inspired the film.
The brother & sister build a house in the middle of the river as a refuge from their abusive family & the narrow minded villagers. A bumper harvest of fish encourages them to invite everyone to a party hoping to temper the villagers' prejudices but it turns into tragedy. The primordial setting & human passion is almost Biblical in tone with the lead actress' harrowing performance supporting the picture.

O' HORTEN

Odd Horten is about to retire from his job driving the high speed trains that cross the snow bound Norwegian countryside.
Picture follows his him on his first night of retirement where he inadvertently gets caught up in successive surreal encounters.
Gentle Norwegian humour plays like a nordic 'After Hours'. Odd is a passive but charming character. Early scenes aboard the train passing through tunnels & the white wilderness are visually arresting.

Production Design

2008-03-17T03:18:00.002-07:00

Visions of Light

2008-03-15T08:34:00.001-07:00

2008-03-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

Beowulf & Grendel

2008-03-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
Cinematography by Jan Kiesser
Production Design by Árni Páll Jóhannsson
Costume Design by Debra Hanson

Storyboards by Robert J. Lewis

2008-02-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

2008-02-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Scrooge, 1970

2008-01-25T05:44:00.001-08:00

Directed by Ronald Neame
Photographed by Ossie Morris
Production Design by Terry Marsh
Titles by Ronald Searle

Schrader on Bresson

2008-01-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

2008-01-02T08:31:00.002-08:00

2007-12-20T09:49:00.001-08:00

2007-12-20T05:03:00.002-08:00

2007-12-20T05:03:00.001-08:00

2007-12-19T10:09:00.000-08:00