Chad Taylor

Features fuse like shattered glass


Now I watch movies while saying over and over again, 'They could never make this now.' You couldn't be this clear and cold and dissolute; this adult. Literally: the teenage children of the couple would be enabled as the heroes, their wealth signified by product placement and a contemporary soundtrack. And the heroine would not be wetting the bed.

Reversal of Fortune: Directed by Barbet Schroeder (More, Maitresse). Written by Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range).

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?
-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

Slip-sliding away


Some people see a glass that is half-full and some people see a glass that is half-empty and others see a Glass That Could Fall And Break Into Shards And Take Someone's Eye Out What If It Was A Child You Would Never Get Over It* (*Celtic Edition). News of a national literary fellowship losing its sponsor puts me in mood (iii). It would be nice to think that private partnerships between the business and the arts community would flatter the former and permit the latter to survive or at least develop with some latitude but the challenge is one of time, not scale: most small businesses are created and die within the time it takes to write a novel, and lately the fortunes of the world economy can turn before a small painting would be able to dry. I benefitted from the Sargeson Fellowship and like to think that I paid it back in column space / visibility / reciprocal behaviours. But as a writer once remarked, the benefit of funding a novel is that at the end of the process, you have a novel.

QED, motherfucker.

Meanwhile, pictured: production art from the highly anticipated Marvel feature Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a movie that will star a raccoon with a gun.

While I am but a nascent fan of gun-wielding raccoon-based entertainment and believe, as a writer, that other writers should be permitted the freedom to express themselves, there comes a point when all you can see is the Third Option. We've all had a lot of fun with storytelling, and I'm the first to acknowledge that. But I think it's become time to stop this shit and go read a book.

Upfront


Looper is very good. I saw it on the recommendation of a colleague -- the trailer didn't attract me at all, and I wondered early on if I was going to like it (the irony of time travel is so much of it has been done before) but then it turned great and, perhaps even more importantly, stopped at just the right moment. I mostly enjoyed it for the things I've been writing about here: a minimum of special effects and a lot of talking for its own sake. And the editing: the memory flashbacks between present and past felt like an old-fashioned movie where the cuts told the story instead of chopping between multiple angles to smooth over preposterous or hard-to-get action.

I've seen a lot of movies with Emily Blunt in them now. Is it me or does she always dress the same?

Anyway... recommended. Can't say more. Will spoil it.

Good indie movies now are becoming what TV used to be: genre, low-budget, heavy on drama and dialogue. It's the new age of talkies.

On the same (4K digital) screen beforehand, a trailer for the Prometheus Blu-ray with spoilers and an additional scenes that made me hope it was going to be good all over again. Because that's what a movie theater has become: a first-look enticement to partake in the real viewing experience -- the high-def home theater drilldown into What You Missed. The deleted scenes on the Prometheus Blu-ray take apart the theatrical cut like it's Last Year At Marienbad. That's the experience audiences pay for now: a deconstruction. In a weird way, they're watching Godard movies.

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

The cost of living


Wynton Marsalis is playing in town tonight. I thought of going but balked at the price: €100 is too much to pay to hear the blues.

Artistic expression is not means-tested. You don't lose your right to make it above a certain pay rate. And the proposition that art becomes harder to make after one attains financial security is one I'd be glad to test. But speaking as an artiste, one reaches a point -- an age -- when how much the artist earns becomes a factor in what they say. On the day when Picasso could increase the value of a dollar bill by drawing on it, his painting became a whole new game.

Or as a friend of mine once put it: 'I don't need Hollywood to tell me how tough life is.'

An ad hominem argument, but a good one.

Money rarely gets in the way of novels because writers, on average, earn less. The bestseller's reward is Sisyphean: John Grisham has to keep churning out them lawyer thrillers; bonne chance, JK Rowling, with that adult novel. Writers are the writers they always were: sometimes in the moment, one can strike it rich.

Money interferes with music all the time but we accept it, because the stadium experience is part of the aesthetic, and for every dollar Coldplay makes the record company makes 99, and were it not for the looming spectacle of Fat Elvis, what else, having seen a band once, would there be to watch? Led Zeppelin without the excess would be like a train without tracks.

But in film, in "Hollywood" -- money, that gets in the way.

Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie opens this week, and it's a grim tale. Gotham City has been modelled on Charles Dickens; the hero -- a billionaire -- is in crise; and the villain grew up in a prison with a shiv stashed in his teddy bear. It's layered.
Fascinated with architecture, the filmmaker describes the rises and falls of his characters as if they are elevation points of a blueprint plan...  He presents the trilogy almost as a tale of different levels — the heights of the city, the street level and the underground of caves and sewers. "Dark Knight Rises" presents a story where greed, hypocrisy and false justice bring down the city's bridges, stadium and the houses of government.

"We really wanted a cast of thousands, literally, and all of that for me is trying to represent the world in primarily visual and architectural terms," Nolan said. "So the thematic idea is that the superficial positivity is being eaten away from underneath; we tried to make that quite literal."

So much will be made of images of financial market abuse, politicians behaving badly, a terrorist attack at a professional football game and looting riots.
So much work and effort to make us feel down. A $250 million vision of hell; a comic book built behind 525-ton doors.
"I think my dad put it best when he visited and referred to it as the world's largest toy box," Nolan, back in Los Angeles, said last week with a rare relaxed chuckle.

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone...


EW reports that fans report that the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's 3D version of The Great Gatsby is misspelled. Specifically, the world famous typing error "The Ziegfeld Follies" is written as "The Zeigfeld Follies". Which is a terrible indictment on our times until you remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a famously bad speller. Which is very meta. Which is better than 3D, any day.

(Disclosure: Still not going to see it.)

Hooked on a feeling


A friend (gracias) scored me a ticket to hear Guillermo Arriaga speak as part of the 2011 BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series. The Mexican writer / director talked at length about following your heart and not a formula, ignoring the rules, not bothering with research, writing what you know, following a story without knowing how it will end and so on: music to the ears of the budding screenwriters in the audience.

Arriaga started out in partnership with a director, Alejandro González Inárritu, and compared their working relationship to that of the Coen Brothers. Since Babel the two have fallen out, acrimoniously. One got the impression that Arriaga's approach to screenwriting, with its interleaved storylines and non-sequential scenes, must have been an easier sell with a director attached. Still, a lot more fun than Robert McKee.

If I'm jaded about (hearing about) screenwriting it may be because the quality of writing for television is currently going through the roof. All I want to watch is Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Breaking Bad's creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan says he also writes without knowing where things are going, although he does admit to knowing how things will end, and surely that's a plan. Vince worked on a show called the X-Files, which was hot damn wonderful for about two-thirds of its run.

(Pic: Rolling Stone)

I have a code

Send assistance. In the meantime: The Bible according to Google Earth. Steve Martin's art forgeries. Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter talks about Twitter. The Tinnitus Research Initiative. Painting on the iPad. The I Ching online. A history of computer operating systems in the movies. John Carpenter talks about the fight scene in They Live. Author Nicholas Carr on the web and concentration.

Pic: Night Nurse (1931)

Depending how you see a thing

Movies may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo.
A. O. Scott on movies in the New York Times.

Your whole life is just a dream

A series of measurements with ground-penetrating radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed a massive deposit of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) — a Lake Superior's worth of dry ice — buried under a layer of ordinary ice near the Martian south pole. "We knew there was some CO2 at the pole," says Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a report on the discovery in the current issue of Science, "but there's about 30 times more than we thought.

And there's evidence from a number of Mars probes that the planet's atmospheric pressure has increased, even over the short time that we've been visiting. It's barely at the detectable level, says Phillips, "but it could be that we're seeing this effect."

All signs, in other words, point to the fact that Mars' atmosphere could be bulking up even now. Within a few tens of thousands of years, space colonists could be drawing water from Martian ponds — even as they're choking on Martian dust.
Get your ass to Mars.
"People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."
(From Wired.) Total Recall was co-written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon, who passed away in 2009, suffered painfully from Crohn's disease: among his inventions were the Mars rebellion leader Kuato, who grows from a man's stomach, and the chest burster in Alien.

In 1997 O'Bannon discussed the development of the movie Alien to Martin Anderson of Den Of Geek:
... In the movie, the Earth men discover a wrecked, derelict spacecraft. Actually no, that's not correct. In the movie, the men discover a wrecked construction of non-human manufacture and inside of it they find eggs of the monster. In the original script the men find a crashed derelict spacecraft and they enter it; they discover that the alien crew are all dead. They return to their own ship to contemplate what may have killed the alien crew and then they discover a pyramid on the planet which appears to be indigenous and primitive. They enter the pyramid and there they find the eggs. They combined these two elements, they squeezes them together into one sort of uneasy entity.

FF: The idea behind that, I would assume that the dangerous aliens were coming back to spawn or something?

O' Bannon: No, they were two different races. In my script, it was a space going race that landed on the planet and had been wiped out by whatever was there. And now the Earth men come and they endanger themselves in the same way. In the new version it's just sort of a surrealist mystery.

FF: And what ever they find there in the alien construct is the alien menace?

O' Bannon: Yes. So they combined, and they did dome things...and there were some changes that were better. There were some improvements made.

FF: In what direction?

O' Bannon: I think they made some of the characters cuter than they were. Some of the dialogue is definitely snappier than it was in the original draft. I think a lot of the designs that Ridley supervised differed because his visual hand is very strong over the surface of the picture. I think may things like that changed. You asked if it was my film. And i said no. And you said, can you name one of the things that disturbs you, well not every way in which it is different disturbs me.

FF: A lot of them okay?

O' Bannon: Ridley has this lavish, sensual visual style; and I think that Ridley is one of the 'good guys.' I really think that he is – was the final pivot point responsible for the picture coming out good. And so a lot of the visual design and a lot of the mood elements inherent in the camerawork, while they're not what i planned, are great. They're just different. Also, it's not 100% Ridley either. It's Ridley superimposing his vision over the cumulative vision of others, you see. Now this could be such a strong director's picture because Ridley's directorial and visual hand is so strong. There will probably be tendency among critics to refer to it as Ridley Scott's vision of the future. And he did have a vision of the future. But it was everybody else that came before, that's what his vision is.
Ridley Scott's Alien prequel / remake is Prometheus.

BTW


Watching Margot at the Wedding: basically a movie about actors meeting a real person. Is Jennifer Jason Leigh the Nick Nolte of her generation? She can do drama, action, SF, anything.

The pic is from David Cronenberg's Existenz - the best thing he's done, I think, better even than Crash. He talked to Shivers #65 about Leigh's character Geller:
I wanted to have the lead character be an artist, but I didn't want to make her a film-maker because that leads to a whole other level of discussion. I wanted some distance, and I wanted some inventiveness, but I still use it as a platform for comment about the artistic process and, to some extent, the film-making process.
So, when Jennifer gets up on stage at the beginning and says: the games world is in a kind of a trance, people are programmed to accept so little, but the possibilities are so great - I'm really talking about film. I'm talking about Hollywood. People's expectations are shaped by Hollywood now and it's almost as if they can't relate to any other kind of film-making. Which is a terrifying thing for me as it means that my possibilities are therefore very limited and I might be losing an audience that can actually understand me at all.

Forget that I'm fifty 'cause you just got paid

It is a dark moment in life when you find yourself in agreement with Fran O'Sullivan. New Zealand is hardly the only nation to screw up (Private Eye jokes about Boris Johnson saying the Delhi Olympics have set the standard London must aim for) but reading the Hobbit news is depressing - and I don't even like Tolkien. On the union side is an actor (no comment), an Australian (oh, clever) and a New Zealander who was involved in a previous legal dispute with one of the producers*. On the other side is one of the most expensive and precarious movies ever proposed: $500 million on sticks to make lightning strike a fourth (/fifth) time after years of rights wrangles during a financial recession. No studio needs to make The Hobbit: Twilight Eclipse cost $60 million and made $689 million, and its key sequence was three teenagers talking inside a tent. If you had asked your brain to pick a production to boycott it would have said "not that Tolkien one." Now in a world where movie budgets are never what they seem, the fate of millions rests in the hands of... the tax man.

(*I assume it's her. Unless - scarily - there are three of them.)

Postscript: In 2009, Simon Whipp complained to the Australian Courier Mail about the possibility of an American taking on the role of Mad Max:
"Performers have long held the view that traditional Australian characters should be played by Australian performers and immigration regulations reflect that," said assistant federal secretary Simon Whipp... "If the producers cast other than an Australian performer, it would be very disappointing."
In 2003 Whipp said Australia's media and cultural industries must be protected from foreign interference:
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance attracted a crowd of more than 250 to the Sydney Opera House on 6 October to draw attention to the threat to our culture and media industries if the government does not secure a cultural carve-out in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.

"It really is crunch time," said Simon Whipp of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, who fears the government's previous support for the exclusion of Australian media and cultural industries from the free trade agreement may be jeopardised if it surrenders its right to control future kinds of screen and cultural forms.

"A proposal which does not protect the right of governments to react to these changes as, and when, they happen will mean that future governments are not able to support and promote Australian culture as governments have to date," said Whipp.
That's the great thing about nationalism: one country is all you need.

Bellissimo

Saw Bernardo Bertolucci talk at the BFI last night. He was on good form. He was cheerful and gentle but gave his interviewer a little slap at the beginning just to let everyone know who was boss. He flattered and coped with the different egos in the room at question time, and told some very funny stories. The funniest was about Godard, natch, giving his producer an actual slap onstage at a premiere of One Plus One and then demanding that the audience return their tickets and forward the refund to the Black Panthers (nobody moved). Bertolucci also talked about filming Brando Last Tango In Paris (he never knew when Brando was making things up or quoting from memory) and working with Sergio Leone on the script for Once Upon a Time in the West. (In his interview for the script job Bertolucci told Leone how he admired the way the director filmed the horses' buttocks, like John Ford.) He talked a lot about the power and influence of movies in the 1960s and wondered if today's young audiences found films as "menacing."

Bertolucci said he loved "contamination", by which he meant the way reality intrudes on the process of filmmaking no matter how carefully it was planned. He said he always "leaves a door open" on the set for change to happen; at the same time, one of the filmmakers he admired was Kubrick "who built a wall across where the door was" and tried to control everything. Bertolucci also said he loved the digital revolution: the speed and ease of modern filmmaking and the "very acid colours" which digital processes could bring to film. The final clip of the night, the bal-musette scene from the restored print of The Conformist, possessed a brilliance I didn't recall: bright blue windows, bright red trim, golden floor. Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli remained the colour of milk.

As I lay there in the darkness with a pistol by my side

I can't remember much about The Maid but Resident Evil: Afterlife is memorable, if only because I've seen everything in it before. John Carpenter invented most of the action sequences, from the plane landing on the skyscraper (Escape from New York) to the killer darting across the camera foreground (Halloween) to the dog that splits into a set of jaws (The Thing). Paul WS Anderson moves things forward by landing a plane on a skyscraper surrounded by millions of zombies, or the the killer darting across the camera foreground underwater, or the dog that splits apart into a set of jaws with another set of jaws inside that, dude. You can count the movies inside this movie like Russian dolls but rather than being trapped it's somehow entertaining, mainly because of its innate sense of fair play - it is based on a game, after all. Milla Jovovovovich's (sp) physique almost justifies 3-D. Costumes are by David Cronenburg's sister Denise, video diary aesthetic by William Gibson, there's Crouching Tiger Hidden Bullet Time and the tanker from Waterworld and the staggering-into-the-sunlight kids in white from Logan's Run / THX 1138 / The Island... Oh, the list goes on. Cheap, cheerful and unpretentious. Hard not to like.