Fora and Hollywood Visionaries
Here's a website that cinephiles should bookmark. This week marks the opening of the San Francisco Film Festival (an event I've never heard of), and to honour the occasion, Fora is posting eleven up-close pieces on eleven so-anointed Hollywood visionary filmmakers (http://fora.tv/series/hollywood_visionaries): Spike Lee, John Turturro, Tommy Lee Jones etc. The only ones I've sampled so far are Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets and Lies) and Shari Lansing, former head of 20th Century Fox & Paramount, who talks of why reviewers are so often off the mark, how people now use the Internet for reviews. Read the following squib, then watch the Lansing piece.
Hollywood, More Powerful than Ever
In Sunday's NYT, a piece in the business section (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/media/26scene.html? ref=business), argues that Hollywood Studios are more profitable and tyrannical than ever:
... an invisible web-work of unwritten rules and invisible understandings ... keep the big studios on message and in sync with one another. Over time, such professional courtesies help the big guys stay big. They also feed a self-fulfilling myth that says Hollywood really belongs to six giants, all of whom live behind studio walls. Their companies may change hands occasionally — bouncing from Matsushita to Vivendi to General Electric or whatever. But the studios, and their power, remain as eternal as the hills around which those gated lots are built. “We are a mini-monopoly,” summed up Robert Evans. (His coming project, an HBO miniseries about Sidney Korshak, the Hollywood kingpin lawyer, will have its own take on the myth.)
And will it ever change?
“Never,” he said.
Sin Nombre (Without a Name)
Sin Nombre is but one of five disturbing films I've screened over the past two weeks: The Hunger, Gomorra, The Soloist and Sugar being the four others. (I will be blogging The Soloist, our projected movie for next week tomorrow.) In the meantime, some words on Sin Nombre, yet another Redford Sundance-developed movie - no stars, great story.Sin Nombre is set within the shadow migratory world of risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, Central Americans, making their perilous migration north through an Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica to get across the American border. It's a profoundly disturbing film, and if you're up for it, well worth your trouble.
In May, 2003, Texas State troopers discovered an abandoned tractor trailer. Inside were 81 illegal Mexican immigrants, 17 of them of dead. That incident — the worst of its kind in U.S. history — served as the inspiration for Cary Fukunaga’s terrifying, masterful short, completed as his second-year project at NYU’s grad film program.. “At first I wanted to put the audience inside the truck for 10 minutes, to give them the idea of what it would be like to be in there with these people who were just trying to make a better life for themselves,” says Fukunaga. “But then I realized there was a lot more there — I wanted to show what happened before they got in the truck and what was going outside as it was happening. So it became a bigger film.” With only $5,000 for production, Fukunaga managed to get the film in the can. It has since gone on to win numerous prizes on the festival circuit and recently took home the silver medal at the Student Academy Awards.
The 27-year-old Fukunaga — of Japanese and Swedish heritage — grew up in California’s East Bay and attended U.C. Santa Cruz, before NYU grad school. Because Sin Nombre touches on so many thematics we've discussed with Gomorra, macho street-terrorizing gangs, children baptized in blood, criminality, grinding poverty, because Sin Nombre is so violent, we will probably not schedule Sin Nombre into my-pov.ca.
Which is not to say that my-pov.ca cinephiles should not see this remarkable movie and make up their own mind for themselves.
Baseball/Movies Is Life
In anticipation of our screening of this baseball movie, Sugar today, Bob Foster sends along a reminder that all manner of Best Baseball Movie website Lists exist. Which reminded me of my own nutty fixation about movies and baseball:
Certainly, movies have exploited baseball as an allegorical shorthand for abiding charms of all things American, a cultural coding, if you wish: cornball wisdom you can find all though baseball movie dialogs: Baseball's a metaphor for life, a game of inches; life is a game of inches, part of the American fabric. Right! It's a guy thing.
Or: I believe in the soul, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Of all sports, baseball and movies have the most natural affinity for one another. Their mostly male congregants invoke similar reverent hokum solemnity about themselves; they dawdle along indifferent to the fact they're decades behind their times; they nurture similar self-reverential spiritual religiosities and nostalgic feelings about themselves; they anoint countless saints from their ranks (only a select handful memorable); they abound in relics. And for me, best of all, you can disappear from worshipping both for minutes at a time and return, never having missed much.
.
So here's one guy with a website devoted solely to baseball movies: http://www.baseballmovie.com/best-baseball-movies.php.
Here's a website that cinephiles should bookmark. This week marks the opening of the San Francisco Film Festival (an event I've never heard of), and to honour the occasion, Fora is posting eleven up-close pieces on eleven so-anointed Hollywood visionary filmmakers (http://fora.tv/series/hollywood_visionaries): Spike Lee, John Turturro, Tommy Lee Jones etc. The only ones I've sampled so far are Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets and Lies) and Shari Lansing, former head of 20th Century Fox & Paramount, who talks of why reviewers are so often off the mark, how people now use the Internet for reviews. Read the following squib, then watch the Lansing piece.
Hollywood, More Powerful than Ever
In Sunday's NYT, a piece in the business section (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/business/media/26scene.html? ref=business), argues that Hollywood Studios are more profitable and tyrannical than ever:
... an invisible web-work of unwritten rules and invisible understandings ... keep the big studios on message and in sync with one another. Over time, such professional courtesies help the big guys stay big. They also feed a self-fulfilling myth that says Hollywood really belongs to six giants, all of whom live behind studio walls. Their companies may change hands occasionally — bouncing from Matsushita to Vivendi to General Electric or whatever. But the studios, and their power, remain as eternal as the hills around which those gated lots are built. “We are a mini-monopoly,” summed up Robert Evans. (His coming project, an HBO miniseries about Sidney Korshak, the Hollywood kingpin lawyer, will have its own take on the myth.)
And will it ever change?
“Never,” he said.
Sin Nombre (Without a Name)
Sin Nombre is but one of five disturbing films I've screened over the past two weeks: The Hunger, Gomorra, The Soloist and Sugar being the four others. (I will be blogging The Soloist, our projected movie for next week tomorrow.) In the meantime, some words on Sin Nombre, yet another Redford Sundance-developed movie - no stars, great story.Sin Nombre is set within the shadow migratory world of risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, Central Americans, making their perilous migration north through an Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica to get across the American border. It's a profoundly disturbing film, and if you're up for it, well worth your trouble.
In May, 2003, Texas State troopers discovered an abandoned tractor trailer. Inside were 81 illegal Mexican immigrants, 17 of them of dead. That incident — the worst of its kind in U.S. history — served as the inspiration for Cary Fukunaga’s terrifying, masterful short, completed as his second-year project at NYU’s grad film program.. “At first I wanted to put the audience inside the truck for 10 minutes, to give them the idea of what it would be like to be in there with these people who were just trying to make a better life for themselves,” says Fukunaga. “But then I realized there was a lot more there — I wanted to show what happened before they got in the truck and what was going outside as it was happening. So it became a bigger film.” With only $5,000 for production, Fukunaga managed to get the film in the can. It has since gone on to win numerous prizes on the festival circuit and recently took home the silver medal at the Student Academy Awards.
The 27-year-old Fukunaga — of Japanese and Swedish heritage — grew up in California’s East Bay and attended U.C. Santa Cruz, before NYU grad school. Because Sin Nombre touches on so many thematics we've discussed with Gomorra, macho street-terrorizing gangs, children baptized in blood, criminality, grinding poverty, because Sin Nombre is so violent, we will probably not schedule Sin Nombre into my-pov.ca.
Which is not to say that my-pov.ca cinephiles should not see this remarkable movie and make up their own mind for themselves.
Baseball/Movies Is Life
In anticipation of our screening of this baseball movie, Sugar today, Bob Foster sends along a reminder that all manner of Best Baseball Movie website Lists exist. Which reminded me of my own nutty fixation about movies and baseball:
Certainly, movies have exploited baseball as an allegorical shorthand for abiding charms of all things American, a cultural coding, if you wish: cornball wisdom you can find all though baseball movie dialogs: Baseball's a metaphor for life, a game of inches; life is a game of inches, part of the American fabric. Right! It's a guy thing.
Or: I believe in the soul, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Of all sports, baseball and movies have the most natural affinity for one another. Their mostly male congregants invoke similar reverent hokum solemnity about themselves; they dawdle along indifferent to the fact they're decades behind their times; they nurture similar self-reverential spiritual religiosities and nostalgic feelings about themselves; they anoint countless saints from their ranks (only a select handful memorable); they abound in relics. And for me, best of all, you can disappear from worshipping both for minutes at a time and return, never having missed much.
.
So here's one guy with a website devoted solely to baseball movies: http://www.baseballmovie.com/best-baseball-movies.php.
Next Monday: The Soloist @ 17:15 (5:15 p.m.)
this French version had quite a lot of people to come and laugh...was just like we were...
ReplyDeleteThis message comes from a babyboomer...and it was refreshing to go back to our own adolescence and that's exactly how we were...specially for the long french kissing, with nothing else...nah!
good job..god actors...good music...light and funny...
thanks for bringing these gifs to us...