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Interview with Stephen Frears about his film, The Queen. “Do you think, then, that some of the power of the monarchy derives from its privacy and secrecy, and that as it modernizes — as the people are demanding that it do — it will actually lose some of that power?”
One of my favorite actresses is Cate Blanchett, but I don’t know much about her. A profile of Blanchett from last week’s New Yorker (not online) filled in the blanks nicely:
What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much as anyone else,” she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged autobiographical questions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten my childhood.” These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-consciousness. “I’m not interested in the character I am in myself,” she told James Lipton on the television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” “Any connection I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious.”
Her approach to acting sounds similar to the idea of relaxed concentration in sports, like the practicing of free throw shooting until you can do it automatically without having to focus on shooting and can instead just focus on being focused while shooting. The author of Blanchett’s profile, John Lahr, wrote a piece on stage fright for the magazine a few months ago that deals with the same theme. British actor and comedian Stephen Fry describes how he seized up after reading a review of a performance in the Financial Times:
The impact of the review was, Fry says, “phenomenal.” He describes the sense of acute self-consciousness and loss of confidence that followed as “stage dread,” a sort of “paradigm shift.” He says, “It’s not ‘Look at me - I’m flying.’ It’s ‘Look at me - I might fall.’ It would be like playing a game of chess where you’re constantly regretting the moves you’ve already played rather than looking at the ones you’re going to play.” Fry could not mobilize his defenses; unable to shore himself up, he took himself away.
To me, the battle with the self is one of the most interesting aspects of watching performance, whether it’s sports, ballet, live music, movies, or someone giving a talk at a conference.
Count me among those that scoffed when I heard a movie was being made of the Miami Vice TV series. The lesson: don’t doubt Michael Mann. Not to mention Vice’s director of photography, Dion Beebe. The movie was gorgeous and had the most distinct and tight sense of style I’ve seen in quite some time. Wish I’d seen it on the big screen.
Teaser trailer for Oceans 13. Looks like #13 is Andy Garcia.
Some information on Errol Morris’ newest project, a film about Abu Ghraib:
Morris introduced us to his latest project about the Abu Ghraib, and the iconic images created from the prisoner torture. It’s his hypothesis that it’s a handful of those photos from that we’ll remember a hundred years from now about the Iraq War. He explained that this project began with the mystery of two photos by Roger Fenton described by Susan Sontag in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others. During the Crimean War, Fenton took photos of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Two are of the same road, one with cannonballs littering the road, one with the cannonballs in the ravine. The Mystery being which photo was taken first, which was staged?
This is an interesting topic for Morris considering he pioneered the use of “expressionistic reenactments” in documentary filmmaking with The Thin Blue Line.
Update: The film is called “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure”.
From what looks like an informative and insightful blog on film, two posts: one on planimetric composition or “mug-shot framing” in films (you may have seen Wes Anderson using it) and the other is an update on The Hobbit movie and Peter Jackson’s involvement (or lack thereof) with it. The Hobbit item is old news, but it fills in so many blanks left by traditional and typical online media coverage that it’s worth the read if you’re at all interested in the subject. (thx, ajit)
Andy Warhol would have loved this round-the-clock webcam view of the Empire State Building…it’s like a sequel to Empire that never ends. (via cyn-c)
A pair of fine sports-related headlines from The Onion: Confused Bill Simmons Picks The Departed To Win Super Bowl and Bears Lead Rex Grossman To Super Bowl. “All season long, the Bears have shown that they can win, even in the presence of Rex Grossman.”
Andy Baio has a report on Oscar nominated films showing up online. Out of the 34 films nominated in one form or another, 31 have been released online. “The average length of time between a film’s USA release and its first appearance online is 12 days.”
Two lists, both alike in dignity: the top 10 best best actress Oscar winners and the top 10 worst best actress Oscar winners. Anyone they missed?
The Oscar nominees have been announced. Compare with the top movies as determined by the film critics.
How to use Photoshop to make your car look like one of the characters in Pixar’s Cars.
Here’s the public’s first look at the newest Pixar film (after Ratatouille): Wall-E. Looks like it’s about robots and is directed by the guy who did Finding Nemo, in my estimation the best Pixar film to date. (via waxy)
Character actors who are trapped in a leading man’s body: Kevin Bacon, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Joseph Fiennes. (via quarterempty)
The rate of suicides off of the Golden Gate Bridge increased sharply in 2006, in part because of the local screening of The Bridge, a documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides. “The Bridge premiered locally in April. In May, four people jumped to their deaths and another 11 tried to commit suicide. Normally, no more than two people succeed per month, and an average of four others attempt to jump.”
A list of Reel Pop’s ten favorite dystopian films. Running Man, La Jetée, and Blade Runner all make the cut.
Singer Ben Gibbard, from The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, is playing a part in the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, to be directed by John Krasinski, who plays a character on the US version of The Office, which is based on the original UK version by Ricky Gervais. To sum up: indie rock book nerd tv junkie explosion!
A list of the hardest novels to film. Ulysses tops the list. How about The Mezzanine?
The original trailers for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and here’s a Return of the Jedi trailer.
I love this analysis of the original Star Wars movie based on the happenings in episodes I-III. “If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels.” Chewie and R2 are top Rebellion spies, Yoda and Obi-Wan keep in touch via Qui-Gon’s ghost, and Kenobi feigns indifference when he first meets R2 (I don’t remember owning any droids, wink, wink). Fascinating stuff.
David Denby had a great piece in the New Yorker last week about the present and future of movies. I was surprised to learn that Hollywood hates the movie theater-going experience as much or more than the rest of us:
Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been amplified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their “small” Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries-anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air-a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you’ve seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
If we want to see something badly enough, we go, of course, and once everyone settles down we can still enjoy ourselves. But we go amid murmurs of discontent, and the discontent will only get louder as the theatre complexes age. Many of them were randomly and cheaply built in response to what George Lucas conclusively demonstrated with “Star Wars,” in 1977: that a pop movie heavily advertised on national television could open simultaneously in theatres across the country and attract enormous opening-weekend audiences. As these theatres age, the gold leaf doesn’t slowly peel off fluted columns. They rot, like disused industrial spaces. They have become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture.
Denby also considers what happens to movies when the primary target audience (12-30 year-olds make up 50% of the movie-going population) may prefer to watch movies on DVD, their computers, or on iPods.
No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn’t exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel — Dickens’s novels, especially — were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what’s exhibited.
As a fan of watching movies on the big screen of a theater, I hope that sort of movie making doesn’t go away anytime soon.
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