I was walking my dog this morning when I noticed an orange van with strange equipment on its roof: an array of cameras pointing in all directions. As it passed, I read “TeleAtlas: We’re mapping your world!” on the side.
The company is partners with Google, so I have a hunch I may be showing up on Street View before too long. (Los Angeles doesn’t have Street View yet, but they’re no doubt working on it.)
As Peter noted in his weekend indie box office report, Michael Moore's SICKO is having a healthy run at the box office. I know Moore's been busy promoting the film and going after CNN and Wolf Blitzer, but I know I'm not alone in wondering what Moore's going to do next.
Blog You Like a Hurricane (one of the best-named blogs ever, but thanks a LOT for getting that godawful Scorpion song stuck in my head) has been mulling this question over, and wants Moore to do a movie tackling the mainstream media. He's even encouraging people to send Moore an email asking him to go after the media in his next film. Heck, the way Moore was going after Blitzer, you gotta think he's already got tons of material to outline the basic structure of the film on a cocktail napkin right now.
I'd like to see Moore go after the mainstream media folks, but there are other topics he could hit on as well. He's already hit on corporate greed (Roger & Me), gun control (Bowling for Columbine), the war on terror (Fahrenheit 9/11), and now health care with SICKO. I'd like to see Moore tackle some other issues ... how about Wal-Mart's takeover of the American shopping experience? The crap they feed our kids in school lunches? Pharmaceutical companies and access to medicine by Third World countries -- and the poor in this country? The entire US education system, starting with Bush's "no child left behind" and our schools focusing more on teaching to test scores rather than actual learning? Youth sports -- kids in elite athletics and the impact that has on them? I'd really love to see Moore go after James Dobson and Focus on the Family sometime, too -- or televangelists in general with a nice expose of people living the high life by profiting off religion. I suppose Moore could also join Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio on the environmental stuff, but they're doing pretty well with that already, so maybe it's better for Moore to leave that alone and go after other topics.
What -- or who -- do you want to see Moore turn his lens to for his next film?Permalink | Email this | Comments
No Country For Old Men - Trailer Based on the acclaimed novel by Pulitzer Prize winning American master Cormac McCarthy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug- runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (BROLIN) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law - in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (JONES) - can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers - in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (BARDEM) - the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. Directed by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin
Wow. The film that was supposed to serve as the 'alternative programming' to the Harry Potter onslaught this weekend barely opened at all. All the free press and marketing in the world, a popular young starlet, an Oscar-nominated director, and all the rest of it barely lifted Captivityto an absurd 12th place finish for the weekend, topping out at an estimated $1.5 million. Assuming these estimates hold up on Monday morning, the film did less business than Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ocean's Thirteen and several other films that have been around for weeks and weeks. It did just a tad more business than Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which has been kicking around for months. In fact, it did only marginally better than Evening, the small-budget weepie featuring Claire Danes and Meryl Streep that creeped into theaters two weeks ago on a very limited platform and had practically no marketing push whatsoever. How is that even possible?
Anyway you slice it, this disasterous showing will have huge consequences for the horror genre going forward. Horror films of the 'torture porn' variety will probably not disappear from theatrical release all-together, but I bet that, going forward, the more gruesome elements of these films will be completely hidden by the marketing gurus rather than promoted. Also, films currently in production that could fall into the torture porn category, like the remake of the Wes Craven film The Last House on the Left will become a seriously tough sell. As for R-rated horror in general, the next test will be Rob Zombie's Halloween in late August. If that does well, expect the heat to cool off a bit, but in all seriousness, what is wrong with the American movie-going public? Aren't there any horror fans still out there? Am I the only one left?
Mentally, I’m still floating somewhere over Dakar. The potent combination of jetlag and unprocessed emotion is making it very difficult to commit to that last leap over the Atlantic. I was only gone two weeks, but it felt like months. Like an alternate timeline, with extra days slipped between seconds.
Like Narnia, but with smoke, orphans, and red dirt.
It’s not that time dragged. Every minute was full, from the dark blue hour before sunrise when the overachieving rooster would start his business, to the hour after dinner, when a casual conversation with the program founder would reveal an unexpected, mind-blowing twist. For the first time in 15 years, I wore a watch, only to look at it in amazement as I went to bed at 7:30, exhausted.
At least twice each day, as Ryan and I were painting a mud brick wall Bermuda blue, we would look to each other and say, “Hey, do you remember when…”
Inevitably, we were referring to something that had happened just the day before.
Like all great trips, so much had happened so fast that it became difficult to keep events straight. More than that, the Now was so overwhelming, so emotionally dangerous, that there wasn’t an opportunity to process. I’ve never kept a journal, but for the first time I found myself making bullet points of the day’s events, just to clear them off my mental blotter. Like a to-do list in reverse.
I’m working to get photos up on Flickr, but in the meantime, I’ll offer one short video clip. No single example is going to sum up the whole experience, but this gives some sense of why I’m still somewhat stuck in Malawi.
VH1 is claiming Elijah Kelley will play Sammy Davis Jr. in an upcoming biopic, although they might be jumping the gun. Last month, he let it slip that he was in talks to play the iconic Rat Packer, but now he's allowed to get at least a little chatty. Kelley told VH1: "It's going pretty well... Something is definitely in the works to be done on that project, and that's a dream project for me. I feel like that would open so many avenues and so many doors." If he can pull off this performance, he's probably right, but those are some big shoes to fill. Kelley went on to say: "I want to capture what actually made him what he was. He got really commercialized as he got older, [but] I just want to show everybody, along with the producers, how he came to be the way he was." That being said, there will be some cameos by Sammy's rat-pack cohorts later in the film.
Dealing with the performer's youth should help the project stand up against its competitors, also fighting for the Davis Jr. spotlight -- Denzel Washington and Brian Grazer are producing Black and White, and there's another one out there, Sammy and Kim, that details his relationship with actress Kim Novak. While there is bound to be overlap -- Washington's project seems to be the all-encompassing feature to the specific bits of time for the other two -- it'll be nice to get detailed pieces of his life, rather than dueling biopics that cover the same material, like the recent Capote features. Kelley says of the competition: "I'm keeping my fingers crossed, and keeping my prayers up. You know what? It's like this: I just want to make the project a quality project. Regardless of whether there's 25 of them out, [I want to make] the one that's supposed to be seen, and supposed to be heard, and supposed to be felt." Now we've just got to wait for the project to gear up and see what they make of it.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.
That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be too complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.
Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), America is rooting for them both to stay beautiful and keep us distracted.
The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.
That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be to complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.
Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), we're rooting for them both to stay beautiful distractions and teach their new neighbors how to relax.
In all of cinema, there aren't many filmmakers who would complete a feature-length film and, for whatever reason, scrap the end product and start over. The desire to get films seen, to have the satisfaction of the work resulting in something, often causes us to overlook the fact that some things are better served as educational failures, tucked away on a shelf somewhere far from the public. Some films are better utilized chopped into guitar picks and not all publicity is good publicity. Few artists realize that sometimes you just have to destroy your work before it destroys you.
Fewer still are able to fix it.
Which brings us to Confusions of an Unmarried Couple, the latest brew from the Butler Brothers, two Canadian brothers whose previous efforts include the unseen-by-me Alive and Lubricated (2005) and Bums (2006).
As you may have guessed, this is not their first attempt at Confusions of an Unmarried Couple. The first, shot two years prior on Hi-8, survives as a video diary inter-cut with new footage (shot over one weekend on a Panasonic AG-DVX 100 in 24p for the cost of tapes and, I assume, food). As a result, we see two characters at slightly different ages, as there's no question time has passed between the confessional and the here and now. It's a pretty good unintentional effect, and might even have been a great one with slightly better execution.
The story is this: Dan and Lisa, the titular unmarried couple, find their relationship shattered when Dan discovers Lisa cheating with another woman. Several months later, Dan returns to their apartment to reclaim some of his things. The confessional footage takes place somewhere between the breakup and the rest of the film, which takes place over the course of a few hours. Only the confessional footage is older than that. The characters have aged too much for the timeline to hold up. It's a tiny thing, for sure, and few audience members will even notice, but it's worth mentioning, nonetheless.
The premise is a nice one — simple and direct with echoes of Bergman, and the script is either not quite polished enough or just a little too polished, I'm not quite sure which one. But the film hinges on Butler's performance. Imagine if you will, someone who's a cross between the Hanson brothers from Slap Shot (1977) and Mark Borchardt from American Movie (1999) with black-rimmed glasses, shoulder-length hair, a long goatee, and an orange mesh baseball hat flipped backwards. He speaks excitedly in a thick Canadian accent, rattling off profanities, and operates almost completely by his own single-minded ethos. As an actor, he's serviceable, but as a screen presence, as a character, he's a delight to watch.
Consider his confessional of why cheating with someone so similar to who you're with is pointless, and his list of the types of women he might theoretically like to be with for a change of pace. Clearly this is something he's previously considered in great detail. Or, take the fact that the first item he attempts to take out of the apartment is none other than the mattress, even though Lisa is in the other room. Where the film suffers, where it lags, Butler keeps it going by the sheer force of his charisma. He's easily the best part of the film.
As for the look of the film, it's awfully hard to fault a film shot this quickly, but in a perfect world, we'd lose some of the repetitive set-ups, as at times there's a feeling that visually we're looking at the same scene several times over, just with different words and in different rooms. A bit of variety from the camera could do wonders, but, in a production moving so fast, the need to get the story trumps elaborate visuals, so call it more of a wish than a critique.
Really, though, the important thing is that Confusions of an Unmarried Couple, while far from perfect, is one hell of an enjoyable 73 minutes, and you can't really ask for much more than that.
Starring: Brett Butler and Naomi M. Johnson Cinematography by: Jason Butler Written by: Brett Butler Directed by: Brett Butler and Jason Butler CAD 500/73 min/Toronto, Canada
You can check out Confusions of an Unmarried Couple on IMDB, MySpace, or the official web page, where you can check out this and other Butler Brothers Brews.
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Lucas McNelly runs the film collective d press Productions. Both his films and his writings about film are enjoyed by audiences worldwide.
As Peter noted in his 
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Wow. The film that was supposed to serve as the 'alternative programming' to the Harry Potter onslaught this weekend barely opened at all. All the free press and marketing in the world, a popular young starlet, an Oscar-nominated director, and all the rest of it barely lifted 
VH1 is claiming 
