March 09, 2005

• Don't you just hate false modesty? /sarcasm
• The movie sounds sort of interesting, though. (Also, I have a thing for Adrian Brody.) Has anyone seen it? Is it anywhere near as pretentious as the director?
• Oooookay. Come talk to me when you get 93% freshness, you hack.
• Now that I know the incomparable Tilda Swinton didn't want to be in it, I suspect it might not be as wonderful a film as the director describes.
• Saying that he hoped to make another American film in the future, Maybury did everything in his power to assure otherwise. Translation: "desperate nobody desperately tries to get himself noticed by the very Hollywood powers he pretends to hate with 'look what a rebel I am' schtick on obsure website" There are a lot of big names in Hollywood who suck really bad *ahem* Tarantino *ahem* but Charlie Kaufman is emphatically not one of them.
• Also, why is this jackass talking about "his" story when he's not one of the 3 credited writers and it's based on a Jack London book anyway?
• I like movies to be really long. I'm much more interested in seeing the Aviator now that I know it's a 3 hour movie. I can't think of a 3 hour I've seen that I didn't love.
• Why is Tilda Swinton attractive? She's odd looking, talks oddly, and doesn't blink often enough, which is quite odd. And yet...
• Sour. Grapes.
• This is not related, but I just wanted to say that Manohla Dargis can suck it for not appreciating in her review of Bride and Prejudice that Bollywood musicals are supposed to be high concept and rife with cliche.
• She was perfect in Orlando, but then, she wasn't suposed to do too much.
• 94% for Memento...
• Heh. Good fun. What the world needs is more pretentious arthouse directors laying into (their perception of) the mainstream. Nothing like it for making you think and giving you a giggle. I'm given to believe that The Jacket blows hard, but Maybury gets quite a bit of credit for being the man behind the video for Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. Look at her crying! That was you. You made Sinead cry.
• "All the very expensive CGI sequences I actually had shot on film and I gave them to an art student and got her to just copy Stan Brakhage, actually. We painted blood and bleach and stuff onto the electronic sequences to make them more trippy, more organic, more psychedelic, simply because Stan Brakhage is my favorite American film artist." CRITICISE HIM NOW, YOU BASTARDS, CRITICISE HIM NOW.
• He got an art student to Brakhage up his money shots? Boy, I bet Stan would be proud. Simply because you, Maybury, are a namedropping twat.
• I actually saw all of the movies on the fpp. I saw The Jacket this weekend. It was interesting in an I-don't-know-what-the-hell-is-going-on sort of way for a bit, but then it amazingly delivered a happy ending very neatly with no effort to explain the supernatural phenomenom that had been occurring. Anyway, I thought the movie was okay. But his comparisons to Memento (one of my favorite movies of all time) and Eternal Sunshine are delusional. The Jacket was okay. It was worth my money, but only because I like that X-files kind of crap. I would not recommend it to anyone who did not find Mothman to be anything less than compelling.
• And the name of my new band is now officially "Namedropping Twat."
• This post was good because it led me to look at The Jacket on rotten tomatoes and then I clicked on the NYTimes review and then at the end of the review, when giving the rating, it was rated R for this, that, and a time travel sex scene. Dude. Still cracking up, here.
• Monkeyfilter: I would not recommend it to anyone who did not find Mothman to be anything less than compelling.
• I haven't seen it, nor Spotless Mind, but in my book it wouldn't be hard to be better than Momento. Sorry, I found Momento to be a one trick pony that was vasty overhyped.
• Ahaha. I love the "she's my friend, so I can bash her" part. Dude, you've already demonstrated that you'll bash anything. I’ve been making films for 25 years, arty, pretentious nonsense in Europe that no one has ever seen. But this is my first chance to make a Hollywood film. I was very excited about being allowed inside this system, and being given access to movie stars and stuff. ...after whining about the Oscars being "too corporate." I'd find this guy irritating if he weren't so incoherent. He seems to have gotten it into his head that it's cool to hate things, but there's no discernible pattern behind any of it. It's like he's trying to be sarcastic, but he's not sure about what. I had been slightly intrigued (soft sf + Adrien Brody will do that), but eh. Although obnoxious director != obnoxious film, it doesn't make me terribly keen on bothering. Tons of fun.
• livii -- Glad that you found that. That was the purpose of the post. jccalhoun -- I liked it so much because I thought that it was more than a one-trick pony. I was disappointed that the dvd did not give the option to run the movie in reverse order. I think that the movie would hold up if all of the scenes were played backwards. Also, I found the characters (especially Joe Pantoliano's character) to be interesting in the ways that they dealt with, helped, or took advantage of Leonard's condition. I also liked seeing how Leonard dealt with it himself, and how the movie used the flashbacks to the insurance work to suggest that Leonard's condition may have been somewhat fraudulent. I think a one-trick pony would have just employed the backward scene presentation without exploring other issues. I thought it did a good job doing that.
• "Imagine if The Aviator had been 40 minutes shorter" - regardless of everything else he says, I agree with this. The second half could have been much shorter - and if it had been, and the film had built on itself towards the end people would have been more interested, it would have won far more awards. Another extremely interesting point he makes: "I’ve walked through towns and I’ve walked through cities and I’ve never seen statues built to committees." However, I am not sure what he's saying for most of the rest of the interview - or at least how it related to reality (and not cinema-reality).
• Who the heck is Stan Brakhage and why should I care? For that matter, who the heck is John Maybury? Sounds like an egotistical little tit, if you ask me.
• Heh. Y'all like twistin' your panties, dontcha? I'm gonna go see this movie just because he got all of you all up in arms, you sissies. First off, if you read the about.com longer version, he's not slagging to the extent that "he'll never work in Hollywood again," he's just taking the piss. He gets points for refering to his own movie as pretentious crap, and is pretty dead on with Memento and Eternal Sunshine (which would have been an infinitely better movie if they had bothered casting people who could act).
• Tilda Swinton is attractive because she's relatively symmetrical and has her height/weight relatively proportionate. Also, she doesn't represent the standard, cookie-cutter beauty model that many of the glamourpusses and celebrities exhibit, so her differences are seen as attributes. Aside from these purely (and arbitrary) physical evaluations, she's damned sexy because she presents, to me at least, a subtle, cerebral allure not at all common with the Hollywood crowd of either gender. She seems to choose her films wisely, acts well, and her timing and movements are indicative of a person who has a fully functioning brain. That, to me, is much more appealing than a quick flash of tits or some none-too-subtle swaddling of an augmented D-cup in a thin layer of spandex.
• Stan Brakhage is a great American filmmaker. That's why you should care.
• Would we (i.e. me, unwashed mass of illeducated non-art film goer) have heard of anything made by Brakhage?
• Um, probably not. It doesn't make him any less great, however.
• In a conceptually fascinating piece of misjudged grammar, the IMDb biography for Brakhage informs us that he "made nearly 380 films, each lasting between 9 seconds and 4 hours". Which presents the intriguing idea that they were all intended to be played at any speed within certain parameters, and would work equally as pieces of art regardless of how quickly or slowly they were viewed. But that's not actually true, sadly.
• Okay, just checking. Looking at the IMDB, I thought I recognised a title (Jesus Wept), but I was wrong. But maybe you can help me - I am remembering a short film I once saw, many faces, possibly many voices, fading in and out one at a time against a dark background (closeups), all either singing or possibly lipsynching? to a hymn, something like "Jesus' blood never failed me yet." This is very vague, and probably giving the wrong impression, but it is tickling my brain now.
• Nothing to do with Brakhage, but maybe something to do with this?