A Steady Diet of Film

I'm sensing a theme in today's posts

Theater owners around the country find a new ally in... Wal-Mart?

posted by Erin @ Sunday, October 30, 2005 0 comments

The SF Chronicle recently published an estimation of how many and where suicides have taken place on the Golden Gate bridge since its creation in 1937. Article also mentions Jenni Olson's documentary Joy of Life.

posted by Erin @ Sunday, October 30, 2005 0 comments

Robert Greenwald's new film has Wal-Mart very scared:

"We've got a lot of things planned," said Bob McAdam, vice president of corporate affairs. "Anything is possible."

Five days before the movie's scheduled premiere in New York on Tuesday, Wal-Mart released a 10-page press release criticizing it as "propaganda video." The missive dusted off three pages of negative reviews of Greenwald's nonpolitical films, including a 25-year-old Newsweek thumbs-down for the Newton-John dud "Xanadu," which said, "Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work."

"When you look at who is funding this (campaign), it's no great surprise," McAdam said. "That coalition (of labor unions and environmentalists) has worked together in the past."

M. Night Shyamalan predicts the end of moviehouses, and lovingly lays blame on Steven Soderbergh and cryptically threatens to quit directing all together if Hollywood Reporter "has their way". Yanno M., we've heard this promise bfore from Vincent Gallo. And yet Brown Bunny continues.

posted by Erin @ Sunday, October 30, 2005 0 comments

There goes the sequel to Jackass

The NY Times reports that finally, a market research firm has found a way to tell the Hollywood studio system what the rest of us have known for years. Crappy movies + higher ticket prices = NO ONE CARES. And because all the world loves a chart:



In keeping with that story, Jessica Alba defends Fantastic Four (who cares?) and hedges on an American re-make of the Korean super-Rom Com, My Sassy Girl. via MovieBlog

If you haven't by now, run don't walk to see the Shining trailer reworked as a delicate coming of age/family comedy. via indieWIRE

posted by Erin @ Monday, October 10, 2005 0 comments

You should see this movie.

From Salon.com:

"The 3 Rooms of Melancholia": Insert cliché about children and war here -- then abandon

Pirjo Honkasalo's devastating war documentary "The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" is one of those films you have to allow yourself to surrender to, bit by bit, without worrying too much where it's taking you or why. Most of what goes under the name of documentary film these days, as I constantly complain, is just second-rate TV journalism. Finnish filmmaker Honkasalo is an entirely different animal, an artist with a piercing eye, tremendous patience and a rigorous formal technique.
This isn't what you'd call an undemanding film (check out that title!), and I don't think I absorbed it all in one viewing by any means. But "The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" is a prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children. It was also a daring cinematic enterprise; while the Western media had trouble getting any independent footage from Chechnya, this Finnish art-film director took a film crew there and captured the breathtaking devastation. The audience for this kind of thing is necessarily pretty small, but if anything I've just said sounds intriguing, put this on your must-see list.

Honkasalo, who's best known for the feature "Fire-Eater" and the documentaries making up her "Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic," is a festival fave who has never made the least impression on the marketplace. But at some future date when historians look back at the grim (and poorly understood) story of the Chechen rebellion and/or civil war, they'll find two telling works of art. One is Andrei Konchalovsky's ignored masterpiece "House of Fools," and this is the other.

Honkasalo starts a long way from Chechnya, on the fortress island of Kronstadt outside St. Petersburg. Site of an important anti-Bolshevik uprising in 1921, Kronstadt now hosts an elite military academy founded by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The boys here are mostly orphans or kids from profoundly damaged families, and as we absorb the details of their routinized lives, Honkasalo silently enforces the point that the long tentacles of the terrible Chechen conflict have touched almost every one of them. There's almost no narration and less judgment; as cheerless as it is, Kronstadt is better than the streets for most of these boys. What lies ahead for them, as Russia's officer corps of the future, is a troublesome question.

The remaining two "rooms" of the film take us to Grozny, the all but flattened capital of Chechnya, and then to nearby Ingushetia, where many Chechen refugees live. Honkasalo follows a Chechen woman named Hadizhat as she tries to rescue abandoned, abused and starving children in Grozny -- some don't even know where they came from, or who and where their parents are -- and takes them across the border to an unofficial Islamic orphanage.

Watching a group of three kids age 5 and under say goodbye, probably forever, to their desperately ill mother in a bombed-out building might not be your idea of a good time at the movies. In fact, it might be the most painful scene I've ever seen in a film. But Honkasalo isn't twisting our heartstrings to no purpose; she's challenging us to confront such an awful moment and face its consequences, and also to ask why it had to happen and whether -- whoever and wherever we are in the world -- we might have done anything to stop it. The answers to such questions are never comfortable, but the profundity and humanity of "3 Rooms of Melancholia" provide their own kind of hope.

"The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" opens July 27 at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements, and a DVD release, may follow.

Cathy's note: I watched a bootleg version of this the other day. SEE IT! xo

posted by Cathy @ Monday, October 03, 2005 1 comments

We are not dead.

Well, for those of you unsure, this blog is run by a few people. Three of us just started grad school, one of us is out of the country working on their film and the other is a busy busy bee. We all love film, two of us our getting our MFA's in Filmmaking right now and one of us works for a very cool film-related company.

ANYWAY, I tell you this so you don't think we at FilmLight have abandoned you OR EACH OTHER.

Here's the dish from my neck of the woods (Southern but-not-L.A. California):

1. Mike Mills is my crushworthy director of the month. THUMBSUCKER is not only better than I expected, but actually a pretty good film. There is a lot of love in that film. Here's the URL to Mike's blog!
http://www.sonyclassics.com/thumbsucker/blog/

2. I saw Miranda July's film ME YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW multiple times and in different states even. Apparently July wrote a film that her boyfriend directed. Here's what Film Threat has to say about Miguel Arteta's (Chuck and Buck) new short film:

ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYBODY?
by Jeremy Mathews
(2005-01-31)

2004, Un-rated, 4 Minutes,

Are You the Favorite Person of Anbody? is a clever four minutes of odd fun directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Miranda July, who wrote and directed one of the best features at Sundance 2005, “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” In addition to her talent for long titles, July has a gift for semi-surreal but compelling events. In the black-and-white HD movie, John C. Reilly plays a man standing on a neighborhood street, asking people the titular survey. July, regular Arteta collaborator Mike White and Chuy ChÃvez play the interviewees, who all offer different answers and receive different responses (Would you like an orange?).

3. Did anyone catch those dazzling performances in Gregg Araki's MYSTERIOUS SKIN? The kid from Third Rock from the Sun! Bill Sage as a pedophile! Brilliant.

4. I keep trying to figure out why I still haven't seen Lucrecia Martel's THE HOLY GIRL/La Nina Santa. It's gotten a second wind via promotion campaign now that it's DVD on dvd. It was the first film I've ever seen a trailer for its DVD release at a movie theater. So much better than those Stella Artois ads.

More later!

xo

posted by Cathy @ Monday, October 03, 2005 1 comments