Film

The very first Minneapolis Film Festival, 1981

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Unearthed is a series of blog posts resulting from too much time spent rummaging around in the City Pages archives.

To celebrate the 26th Minneapolis Film Festival, with the kind assistance of the Internet, we've recreated the very first. The clips are old and the screen roughly 450 pixels wide, but you can't beat the ticket price.

In January, 1981, when The Minneapolis Star and The Minneapolis Tribune sponsored the first Minneapolis Film Festival, City Pages (then called Sweet Potato) put film reviewer Tom Baglien (who left Minneapolis that year for New York City) to the task of hyping the event.

We've recreated bits and pieces of the Festival here, matching the late Baglien's capsule reviews to vintage clips borrowed from the good people at YouTube.

We'll let Baglien set it up. Here's how he introduced the Festival in 1981:

Light up the kleigs! Roll out the red carpet! If you've ever questioned the position of Minneapolis as a vital film center, now is the time to put your doubts to rest, once and for all.

While we may not have the sun-drenched, publicity-mongering glitziness of Cannes or the laid-back sophisticated sheen of New York, Minneapolis nonetheless has the movies, which, of course, is what film festivals are supposed to be about anyway.International in scope, the Festival promises to be the biggest event of its kind in the United States, with nearly four times the amount of celluloid than even New York unreels each fall.

The Festival was overflowing with what is now the stuff of cinema history. New films by Jean-Luc Godard (Every Man for Himself), Igmar Bergman (Faro Document), and Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha, or, The Shadow Warrior).

Here are some of Baglien's short reviews, and the clips to match:

"...one of the Festival's most bizarre entries is a little horror thriller called Fade to Black. A first film by Zimmerman, it stars Dennis Christopher (from Breaking Away) as a psycho movie fan who likes to dress up as his favorite movie villains (Cagney, Lugosi, Lon Chaney) and knock off his tormentors. I suspect there's a buried message in this for all of us obsessive movie nuts."

"Kagemusha--The Shadow Warrior brings Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, The Seven Samurai) back to moviemaking in triumph. This stunningly beautiful epic adventure story focuses on the struggle for power between warring samurai clans in 16th-Century Japan. It puts Shogun to shame. Centering on a beggar-thief who's saved from crucifixion because of his resemblance to the ruling warlord, Kagemusha becomes a moving study in the discrepancy between identity and impersonation, reality and illusion as the beggar-thief is forced to act the part of the warlord after he's killed in battle ... Chances are you won't see a better epic movie this year."

"...Ken Russell's biological shocker, Altered States, closes the Festival ... based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States is a reported "mind-blower" that deals with a young man (William Hurt) who constructs a deprivation machine and then manages to travel backward in evolutionary time to a state of primitivism. Russell's outrageous hallucinatory imagery finds its perfect outlet here--or so we imagine since the movie has been popping up on various "10-Best of the Year" lists."

There were 50 films in the Festival, and Sweet Potato couldn't get to all of them. Here are a few more, with a brief description and details on the screening:

The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy

Varsity Theatre, 9:45 PM
Saturday, January 17, 1981

This film has been described as the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Filmed in Scotland, this clip is actually an outtake.

Wernor Herzog Eats His Shoe, a short film directed by Les Blank

Varsity Theatre, 7:30 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 1981

Infamous filmmaker Wernor Herzog made a bet with Errol Morris: If Morris could finish his first feature Gates of Heaven, Herzog would eat his shoe. It doesn't end there.

Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, another film by Les Blank

Varsity Theatre, 7:30 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 1981

A rather comprehensive tribute to garlic. Wonderful.

The Man Who Stole the Sun, directed by Hasegawa Kazuhiko

Campus Theater
Friday, January 23, 1981

Winner of the Tokyo Blue Ribbon Award for Best Film of the Year in 1980, this film is a satire on the nuclear insanity of the Cold War era.

Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at April 16, 2008 2:03 PM | Comments (0)

 

Art attacks the suburbs, making it cooler

One needs to look no further than the Norling Photos at the Minnesota Historical Society or the Worlds Away exhibit at the Walker to see that the suburbs can serve as a prolific creative muse. Those that venture out to the fair town of Roseville this Saturday night will be treated to a hip evening of culture when Grumpy’s (2801 Snelling Ave. N.) hosts “Art Attack on the Suburbs.”

A lot will be happening at this shindig, including a mural unveiling of two massive 18-foot tall stencil murals by John Grider, whose previous work includes a wide variety of rock show posters, as well as the Nomad World Pub mural pictured above. The subject of these dual pieces are described as the beer history of St. Paul and Minneapolis (Grain Belt will most likely be making an appearance in the Minneapolis mural). You can check out John Grider’s work here. Also on hand will be the super-popular artist, and Ox-Op Gallery regular, Shag. His playful and boldly-colored designs will be on display and on sale (in limited quantities). Check out his work here. Rounding out the night will be DJ host Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, and a screening of the HAZE-XXL and Dalek collaboration, Purge of Dissidents. Click here for more info on Purge. The event is free, and happens between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Posted by Jessica Armbruster at March 29, 2008 6:06 AM | Comments (0)

 

Diablo's Oscar Chances

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Now that Diablo Cody has been nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Juno, what are her odds of actually winning?

Slightly better than even.

Cody is pretty much in a two-horse race with Tony Gilroy of Michael Clayton. The rest of the field are worthy competitors but trailing badly out of the gate. Ratatouille is a bet to show, but it’s an animated film, a category easy to dismiss by voters. Lars and the Real Girl and The Savages are smaller films without the buzz of Juno.

There are two arguments against Cody winning. One, she’s the new girl on the block, running against a respected veteran, Gilroy, the writer of the popular Bourne films, among others. Two, there is a danger that Juno has been overhyped to the point that voters may feel that it’s already received all the attention—and then some—that it deserves. One might also argue that the academy is biased toward dramas over comedies, but that’s less true in the writing categories. In recent years, writers have won for Little Miss Sunshine, Sideways, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But there are several strong arguments in favor of her winning. The most potent: Juno received fairly surprising nominations in several big-time categories: Best Picture (beating out films like Into the Wild), a Best Director nod for Jason Reitman (over heavyweights like Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd and Joe Wright for Atonement), and a Best Actress nomination for Ellen Page (besting better-known contenders such as Keira Knightley for Atonement and Angelina Jolie for A Mighty Heart). That means Hollywood is seriously well-disposed toward the film--an excellent sign for Cody.

Another strong indicator: Cody has already won more screenwriting awards than Gilroy, including head-to-head matchups in the Broadcast Film Critics and Chicago Film Critics contests, plus a win from the prestigious National Board of Review. The Writers Guild Awards on February 9 will provide the most telling clue to the Oscars.

Argument No. 3: Gilroy is also nominated for Best Director. Voters who mark him down in that category may want to spread the wealth to Cody.

Finally, Academy members can be notoriously sentimental. Winning an Oscar would complete the Diablo Cody fairy tale, which might prove irresistible to voters in the business of knowing a good story when they see one. And no matter how accomplished Tony Gilroy may be, Diablo Cody is guaranteed to give the more entertaining acceptance speech. Who wouldn’t want to see that?

Posted by Matt Smith at January 23, 2008 1:59 PM | Comments (3)

 

Cody Nabs Award Nomination

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Local girl made good Diablo Cody, a former City Pages contributor and current Hollywood hot property, has been nominated for a 2008 Independent Spirit Award for her screenplay for Juno, which opens in the Twin Cities December 14. The Best New Screenplay nomination confirms some of the early buzz about the film and Cody, who is already the subject of Oscar speculation. Juno also received three other Independent Spirit nominations: Best Feature, Best Director (Jason Reitman), and Best Female Lead (Ellen Page). The awards ceremony honors independent films with budgets under $20 million. It will be televised February 23 on the Independent Film Channel and AMC.

Posted by Matt Smith at November 27, 2007 4:46 PM | Comments (0)

 

Funeral Music

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Twin Cities cinephiles should be well acquainted with the work of Heddy Honigmann. The documentary filmmaker's work has often been showcased at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival and five years ago the Walker Art Center put together a retrospective of her films. Peter S. Scholtes wrote a swell appreciation of the Peruvian-born, Dutch-based director here.

Her latest film, Forever, is currently screening at Oak Street Cinema. The subject is Paris's Pere-Lachaise cemetery, the eternal home of such luminaries as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin and (perhaps most notoriously) Jim Morrison. Honigmann's approach seems to consist of simply hanging out by the tombstones and seeing who drops by. But what she uncovers is often remarkably moving.

A widower recounts atrocities witnessed during Franco's rule of Spain to explain her lack of faith in God. An Iranian ex-pat summarizes a story by Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat to explain why he left his native country. An embalmer reverently discusses the portraits of Modigliani and how they influence his own line of work. Honigmann elicits these tales from her subjects with gently probing questions.

The various threads are stitched together with the story of a Japanese classical pianist whose father died young. They shared a love of Chopin and she has moved to Paris to study the composer's work. As the young pianist deftly performs one of Chopin's pieces, Honigmann focuses tightly on her intense face to pungent affect.

The film is showing for just three more nights at Oak Street.

Posted by Paul Demko at November 13, 2007 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

 

Somali Horror Film Trailer

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Baraanbur -Curse Of The Demon

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Bored with Iranian cinema? Can't sit through another Russian vampire flick? Well, it's your lucky weekend, 'cause the first-ever Somali horror film is premiering at the Riverview Theatre. Buraanbur and the Curse of the Demon was produced by Liban D.J., the man who brought you Somali-sotan classics such as Flight 13 and Sportsman.45. From what I've heard, the plot revolves around a Somali man's worse nightmare--demonically possessed wives who turn homicidal on their hubbies. The movie screens both Friday and Saturday nights, at midnight.

Posted by Sarah Askari at October 11, 2007 12:27 PM | Comments (2)

 

Media Rescue Mission: The Movie

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"Everybody likes a break," exclaims the fledgling photographer in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), imagining that Life magazine might spring for his exclusive shots of a collapsed mine and the poor man trapped inside. "But we didn't make it happen."

No, perhaps we didn't. But, as timing is everything in the media, so tragedy equals opportunity. "And one day I'll be on CNN!" reads the photo caption for CP's review of Ace in the Hole in the July 25 issue. Who'd have thought then that events would bring the cable network's own ace reporter Greta Van Susteren to our fair city a week later?

As luck (both bad and good) would have it, the recently resuscitated Parkway Theater has been screening a fine 35mm print of Ace since before our town's own terrible collapse; tonight is the end of the two-week run (show times at 5:00, 7:15 and 9:30 p.m.). Opportunity abounds. Indeed, might the Parkway ship its print to a theater near Huntington, Utah?

Posted by Rob Nelson at August 9, 2007 4:25 PM | Comments (0)

 

How to be as big as John Travolta

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John Travolta wears one in the new movie Hairspray. Amy Sedaris wore one as a kid. So where can you get your own fat suit? Not many local costume shops carry them, it turns out. A call to Twin Cities Magic and Costume in St. Paul found only muscle suits and a beer belly in stock. But you can rent male and female fat suits for between $145 and $218 a weekend from the costume rentals shop of the Guthrie and the Children's Theatre; 612.375.8722. "They're their own foam structure," says rental stock clerk Kristy Haupt of the suits. "When you set them down, they stand-up." Haupt also confirms that "fat suit" is the accepted industry term: "I have yet to meet someone who was offended by it."

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 24, 2007 2:05 PM | Comments (1)

 

Oak Street Cinema closing "for the summer"

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Email from MN Film Arts: "Oak Street to Close for the Summer. Due to major construction on Oak Street and University Avenue, the Oak Street Cinema will close for the remainder of the summer as of Thurs., July 5. We will reopen after Labor Day. Special events already scheduled to run during the summer will occur as planned. These events include a screening of Sex Ed and the State, Tues., July 10, at 7 p.m. and the monthly Fearless Filmmakers screening on Wed., July 25, at 7:30 p.m. Check our website www.mnfilmarts.org in mid-August for a full fall schedule of the best art cinema in the Twin Cities." More background here and here.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at July 5, 2007 3:06 PM | Comments (2)

 

It's Only a Movie?

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Cutting to the Heart of Horror with Professor Adam Lowenstein

Speaking on behalf of decent society, a recent IMDB message-poster sketched the basic terms of the so-called torture porn debate in his Hostel Part II-inspired headline: "What is happening to us?"

As you may know, the latest Splat Pack sequel's many horrors include that of a geeky young woman being hung upside down naked and ritually tortured to death with long knives. Scary times, these. No surprise that the online moralist—who imagined karma catching up with writer-director Eli Roth—was severely beaten in a virtual torrent of fanboy deathblows.

Whatever is "happening to us," horror is unmistakably the genre du jour—this despite the fact that Part II's sixth-place showing at the box-office last weekend compelled commentators to proclaim, many with glee, the genre's violent demise. Hasty (and brutal) judgments abound, but horror scholar Adam Lowenstein, an associate professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh, prefers to take his time with this frenzied genre, arguing that it's "still too soon" to determine whether the Splat Pack films engage the "post-9/11 moment" as meaningfully as the classic American shockers of the '70s—The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, et al.—addressed the Vietnam War and other atrocities of their era.

On Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Lowenstein will join critics Nathan Lee, Maitland McDonagh, and Joshua Rothkopf in a panel discussion of horror, moderated by the museum's assistant curator Livia Bloom and held as part of "It's Only a Movie: Horror Films From the 1970s to Today." Organized by Bloom, this ingeniously timed and sprawling (or splattering?) retrospective includes some 30-odd shorts and features, beginning on Saturday with The American Nightmare, director Adam Simon's brilliant documentary about the blood ties of '70s horror and history, in which Lowenstein appears as a forceful talking head.

On the eve of the MoMI series and the release of the Hostel sequel, Lowenstein was gracious enough to talk at length about horror and the myriad issues it raises. By way of extending the discussion further, the professor and I welcome your comments—even, uh, the brutal ones.

City Pages: Your book Shocking Representation [published in 2005] ends in the aftermath of 9/11. Would you agree that, after 9/11, if not the 2000 presidential election, American horror fans were correct to have seen the new wave of horror coming?

Adam Lowenstein: If you look back over the entire history of horror, you find many examples of how horror breeds during times of social crisis, how it breeds in a particularly powerful way. The films of the Weimar era of German cinema, for example, can certainly be read as responses to World War I. But at the same time, I would never want to make the claim that it's only during these times of historical trauma that horror exists—because horror never really goes away. There are times when the genre is more under the radar or less under the radar, but horror itself, as a genre, is pretty much constant. It may well be that moments of social crisis act not just to induce films to get made, but to cause us to pay particular attention to the genre. I wouldn't want to make it a strict cause-and-effect relationship: "We need 9/11 in order to have a wave of horror films," that sort of thing. But there's certainly a powerful connection between the mood of the new films and the mood of the nation. And I think that kind of connection is one that only becomes crystal clear over the course of time. In a lot of ways, I think it's still too soon to evaluate comprehensively whether these films of the post-9/11 moment are digging into their context of social crisis as deeply as the films of the Vietnam War era did.

CP: I imagine you're looking at the new films. What do you make of them tentatively?

Lowenstein: I'm very intrigued by them. My general sense is that the new films may not strike us as being quite so powerfully tied to their historical moment as films like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Last House on the Left were tied to theirs. But the important thing to remember is that critics of the [late '60s and early '70s] didn't think those films were powerfully tied to their historical moment either.

CP: In Shocking Representation, you illustrate that point by looking at the initial reaction to Night of the Living Dead.

Lowenstein: Yes. I think of that film as a crucial benchmark in this kind of discussion. [Director George] Romero himself resisted for many years the idea of reading the film as any kind of social or political allegory, and of reading Ben, the African American protagonist, as a kind of stand-in for Martin Luther King. Romero had written, shot, and completed the film before King's assassination. But certainly the film gained critical attention after King's assassination, and after the film was paired in double-features with a slavery drama by Herbert Biberman called Slaves. It wasn't until two years after its initial release that Night of the Living Dead had gained the kind of critical reputation that we associate with the film today.

CP: Joe Dante [director of The Howling and Homecoming] doesn't hesitate to call the new films "Abu Ghraib movies."

Lowenstein: I wouldn't buy that right off the bat. But at the same time, I hold open the possibility that, 10 or 15 years from now, these movies absolutely will look like Abu Ghraib movies. I really am a firm believer in the notion that the meaning we make of films is a kind of negotiation between the intentions of the filmmaker, the interpretations of critics and audiences, and the influence of history. Reading Night of the Living Dead as a film that's powerfully related to its moment during the Vietnam War is an absolutely correct reading of the film. The fact that this reading wasn't available to the filmmakers or the audience during its initial release doesn't make that reading any less valid.

CP: It seems to me that the global market is one of the things that makes the new films very different from the '70s films. In a global context, Hostel, for example, becomes particularly rich—in commercial terms, certainly, but also in thematic terms, because of how it's interpreted differently abroad. Eli Roth says that in Slovakia, Hostel plays as a comedy, which makes sense: "Our" fear of "their" loathing would naturally play for laughs outside America. Here, the film seems to play more as horror—but of course it's the exact same movie. It's almost as though the new films are forced to take a broader, more inclusive view because of their commercial responsibility as exports, so that, in the best cases, like Hostel, they end up adopting these other layers of meaning as well.

Lowenstein: I think this is a really interesting angle to pursue. In addition to Hostel, you could look at the American remake of The Grudge, which defies the general trend of American remakes by retaining the original film's Japanese setting and using that setting very interestingly. I think a number of the new films suggest that the rest of the world doesn't appreciate America in the way that Americans had assumed—certainly not in the way that the American characters in the films assume when they go off to Europe and treat it as their playground until it turns out to be their torture chamber. The new films are plugged into a different sense in America of what is "safe" and "unsafe," of what counts as "home" and what counts as "abroad." They tap into the dawning sense that our place in the world is not as secure as we had hoped and assumed it would be. America, of course, is not the center of the world—and neither is America the center of horror. I'm happy to see that the [MoMI] series is including films from Italy and France and Japan and Korea. But the series does place the American films at the center of the map—and I think there are other ways to draw the map.

CP: What are some of the ways you'd draw it?

Lowenstein: Well, the explosion of horror in Asia is quite significant—more so than the series allows by including only The Host [from South Korea] and Ichi the Killer [from Japan]. The Host is interesting in relation to the SARS outbreak in Asia as well as the presence of U.S. forces in Korea over many decades, and what that presence has meant for democratization in that country. In terms of the Japanese films, I think it's unfortunate that Kiyoshi Kurosawa—one of the best directors working in any genre, in any country—doesn't have a film in the series. A single series can never cover everything, I guess. But Japan is important. There, the golden age of horror—with films such as The Ring, [Kurosawa's] Pulse, The Grudge, and Audition—came after a severe economic downturn in the early '90s, a period of great self-questioning in Japan, one not dissimilar from the Vietnam War and post-9/11 periods in America.

CP: And how about the export of the films? What do you make of that?

Lowenstein: I think The Ring is especially intriguing in that connection, because it's basically about a media virus—one that spreads from person to person and country to country through the media. Whether it's the Japanese Ring or the American remake, the film is not only about media virus, but, in a certain way, it is a virus!

CP: I don't know whether the extreme self-consciousness of the new American films makes them more valuable as exports, but it certainly sets them apart from the American films of the '70s. Where Romero, as you say, resisted a political reading of his film in '68, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie are calculating the reactions to their movies very carefully before they shoot a single frame. Do you see that as having a significant bearing on the films and what they mean?

Lowenstein: Sure, yes. Like any genre, horror has evolved. It has gotten leaner and meaner—and smarter, too, in some ways. What strikes me about the films of Eli Roth and Rob Zombie—and I'll say this with the caveat that they're both young directors and have a lot of films ahead of them, so it's a little premature to pass judgment right now—is that they're so confidently styled. With only a few films under their belt, these directors really know their way around the genre—and their way around film technique—in an impressive way. The question is: To what end? With Roth, I see a genuine progression from Cabin Fever [2003] to Hostel [2006]. I like both of those films, but Cabin Fever seems much more locked in certain ways—locked into a sort of winking, merely clever relationship to Last House and Texas Chain Saw—whereas Hostel seems more able to engage its own set of concerns. Rob Zombie's films, though, seem stuck in adoration.

CP: His new film is a remake of Halloween.

Lowenstein: Right—and that doesn't exactly fill me with excitement. Still, I think it's important not to rush to judgment and say that, for example, Rob Zombie is nothing like Wes Craven because Craven and other directors of the '70s were "originals." What people forget is that Night of the Living Dead is full of references to Hitchcock's The Birds and to Richard Matheson's [1954 novel] I Am Legend. You look at Texas Chain Saw and see its great dependence on Psycho—and you look at Psycho and see its dependence on Diabolique, you know?

CP: Craven took Last House from The Virgin Spring by Ingmar Bergman and wasn't at all shy about admitting it.

Lowenstein: You can play this game all the way down the line with genre films, and that's because a crucial part of any genre film is its sense of belonging to a previous set of films. But I would agree with you that the new films seem to carry a very explicit sense of their relation to their predecessors—mostly in terms of mood, I would say. I see the new films—28 Weeks Later, Bug, [Zombie's] The Devil's Rejects, Hostel—as being principally attached to the mood of the '70s films: to a dark, nihilistic, pessimistic sense of what's out there in the world, of the possibilities of engaging the world and changing it. This is a very different mood, of course, from the mood of [Craven's] Scream, which is also very much aware of its predecessors, but in a way that's much more playful and sarcastic and ironic. The new films are allergic to irony. They're much more interested in really sticking it to their audiences, horrifying their audiences in as convincing a way as possible.

CP: You're saying that these interpretations take years to develop. Among popular critics, who respond within days or hours or even minutes of a screening of a new film, the chief concern seems to be with addressing the question of whether the films are going "too far"—whether they're in bad taste, whether they're dangerous. And the audience is certainly debating that question, too. I'll read one example—a post I found recently on the IMDB [titled "What is happening to us?"]: The writer says, "It disturbs me that people can find a way to defend these torture porn movies, which just make me very sad for where we've gone as a society." That sort of moral questioning of horror among viewers certainly isn't new, would you say?

Lowenstein: It's not new, no. And I do see that kind of reaction as being important and worth taking seriously. But the fact of the matter is that horror has always oscillated between what I think of as "quiet horror" and "loud horror," and those terms change over time. Take Hitchcock's Psycho. Today we think of that film as being subtle, psychological, non-graphic—disturbing, yes, but quiet. At the time of its release, though, Psycho was an extremely loud horror film, with graphic presentations of the body—and the bathroom—that had never been seen on American movie screens before. In 1960, the assault of that film was very much a visceral one—to the point where stories were written about the phenomenon of viewers being unable to take showers for weeks after seeing the film. So I think the [new] films that are so offensive to certain people today will not feel the same way to those people in time. Now, this is certainly not to say that we shouldn't care about the level of violence in films and about what it means, about what the films do to us. But my sense is that the most important thing is not to bemoan the relative level of violence in these films, but rather to think about whether we have the tools to analyze and historicize what this violence is all about. What I'm scared of is the sense that we're losing the ability to analyze what's happening in the films and in the culture.

CP: Which is partly a product of the new immediacy of communication?

Lowenstein: Absolutely. The environment in general is one in which there's so much more emphasis on the mobile, the instantaneous, and the easily digested, and so much less effort put into more long-term, thought-out, ambiguous, ambivalent discussions of things that don't have yes and no answers. That's really part of the core issue here. The [interpretive] work on these films is absolutely worth doing, but horror often gets short shrift in that regard. People say, "Well, it's just a monster movie, and we all know we don't really have to think about things like that." But of course we should.

CP: I'm reminded of your comments in The American Nightmare, where you talk about the experience of watching the key horror films as being one of constant vacillation between pleasure and disgust, between satisfaction and self-loathing. Why do I like this horror? What am I getting out of it?

Lowenstein: Yes. Every horror fan knows that experience, consciously or unconsciously—particularly any horror fan who has to answer to friends and relatives and spouses who say, "Why do you want to watch this stuff?" It's an eternal question. Part of the reason you want to watch is pleasure, and part of it is revulsion; part of it is the pleasure in the revulsion, and part of it is the revulsion in the pleasure. It's a really complicated set of responses, one that I think is not often appreciated.

CP: And not often reducible to thumb-pointing.

Lowenstein: No, not at all. And not reducible either to snap judgments of responsibility—"This is a film that handles violence responsibly" and "This is a film that handles violence irresponsibly." It's just not that easy. I wish it were that easy in certain ways, but it would make for bad, boring art. Perhaps it would make for a safer sense of the public sphere, but that sense would be illusory, too. If we don't wrestle with these ambiguities and ambivalences, both within the films and within our reactions to the films, then we risk losing our sensitivity to the world around us. I really believe that.

CP: I'm a horror fan, so this is a devil's advocate kind of question, but here it is: How do you make the case for horror to friends and family? When you're really forced to defend your fascination with this stuff, do you say, "Well, it's about the pleasure in the revulsion and the revulsion in the pleasure"?

Lowenstein: There are a couple of different ways I can go at it. One thing I like to do is to tell a story about David Cronenberg, who's one of my favorite filmmakers. Cronenberg's career has certainly changed a great deal since the '70s. But in the early days, a common thing that would happen to him is that interviewers would go to meet him, and the first thing they'd say to him is, "Wow, you're not at all what I expected." What they expected, of course, was based on the films: They expected a drooling psychopath, and instead they meet this very kind and thoughtful man—and so they experience this kind of disconnect. What Cronenberg would say is: "The movies look like that so I can look like this." I think there's something to that.

CP: That's funny.

Lowenstein: Another way of going at it: I just taught a horror film course to undergraduates this past semester, and it overlapped with the Virginia Tech massacre. My students were writing their final essays about films like Texas Chain Saw at the same time that they're hearing this horrifying news about students just like them. What came out of our discussions was a sense that engaging these films in an intellectual way had given them tools to deal with a real-life event that was inexplicable and overwhelming. That felt very hopeful to me. The reaction wasn't, "How dare you make me watch these horrible things [onscreen] when they're really happening in the world?" Instead, there seemed to be a sense that the tools gained by wrestling with these films are tools that can be used to wrestle with the tragic events in the world we live in.

CP: When I talked to Roth recently, he said he holds hope in the fact that soldiers in Iraq have thanked him for Hostel, for giving them "tools" in much the same way that you're talking about. A word like catharsis seems insufficient to describe the effect that you and Roth are talking about.

Lowenstein: I agree with you. I think that catharsis is among the least valuable assets that one could gain from a horror film. Because catharsis is really all about...

CP: Closure, right?

Lowenstein: Closure, yes. And forgetting—"getting over" something. What these horror films remind us, of course, is that the trauma is never really over—that we haven't remembered it enough before we can forget it. I think the real value of the horror film is to remind us that catharsis is too easy, too artificial, and too closed. We know from history that the events we think we've passed through and gotten over and understood come back to haunt us in all kinds of ways. Horror's dark gift is to remind us that the tragic events we think we've gotten over and understood always come back to haunt us. And that's an incredibly valuable gift. I share Eli Roth's sense about this. I find these films to be incredibly optimistic even in their darkest, cruelest moments. What the films share is a sense that it's still worth communicating with an audience: It's still worth getting a point across, still worth making someone feel a certain discomfort; it's worth having that kind of commitment and confidence. There's hope that comes with that—a hope that things can get better.

Posted by Rob Nelson at June 12, 2007 12:55 PM | Comments (3)

 

Michael Moore's Pre-Existing Condition

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Cannes, France—

Healthy and confident people are a lot harder to govern, says one of the talking heads in Michael Moore's Sicko. So is it any wonder why the U.S. health care system is woefully insufficient to meet our needs?

At the Cannes Film Festival, the world's most successful nonfiction filmmaker—looking unusually dapper in a dark blazer (and no baseball cap)—told reporters that he had made a conscious decision with his latest work not to include a scene of him marching into the offices of United Healthcare or Blue Cross to embarrass executives or pressure them into approving treatment of a client in need. With Sicko, Moore's goal is to treat the disease rather than the symptom. That is: He wants to inspire us to be healthy and confident.

"I don't want the audience thinking, 'Oh, as long as Mike goes and beats up the executive of the corporation, we can [just] sit here and cheer him on,'" says Moore. "Or 'Wow, that's great that he confronted that congressman and asked him if he was going to send his son to Iraq.'

After [Fahrenheit 9/11], I started thinking about the whole conceit of the audience living vicariously through someone on the screen—in this case, me—and about how we're never going to have real change in the United States if the public doesn't see that it'll only happen when they rise up out of the theater seats and do something about it. And so [Sicko] is a call to action. The film is meant not for Michael Moore to [act], but for the American people to do it."

To this end, Sicko makes ample use of humor, as usual for a Moore movie, while also including a number of undeniably infuriating case histories. There's the car accident victim whose coverage is partially denied because her ambulance ride to the hospital wasn't approved in advance. There's the woman whose $7,000 surgery is refused for coverage by Blue Cross after she is found to have had a yeast infection. And, most strikingly, there are the 9/11 rescue workers with respiratory illnesses who were denied healthcare because they weren't on the government payroll when they were offering their services at Ground Zero; these are the people whom Moore drives by boat to the general vicinity of Guantanamo Bay ("They don't want any more [care] than you're giving Al Qaeda!") and then to Cuba. (Clearly, Moore has made one exception to his new rule of withholding direct assistance.)

These are extreme cases, but Sicko hardly fails to hit the most general point about the inevitable effect of privatized health care under capitalism. "Let me say a word in [insurance companies'] favor," offers Moore. "They are legally required to maximize the profits of their shareholders. Right? They have a fiduciary responsibility—that's what the law says—to maximize profits for their shareholders. If they don't do that, their executives could be in huge trouble for violating the law. So how do they maximize profits? The way to maximize profits is to give as little care as possible to the patients. And that to me is immoral.

We're the last country in the Western industrialized world that has this situation, and it needs to change. We need a [presidential] candidate who's willing to have the courage to say, 'Private health insurance companies have to go. [Health insurance] needs to be nonprofit and it needs to be managed by our government—for the people, of the people, by the people.'"

Show of hands: Who's feeling healthy and confident?

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 29, 2007 5:20 PM | Comments (6)

 

Cannes and Abel

Filed under: Film

Cannes, France—

"Whaddya love about it so much?"

Abel Ferrara—director of the strip-club-set Go Go Tales, my favorite film at Cannes—is interviewing the interviewer.

Well, I say, it's consistent with the Ferrara oeuvre—King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, et cetera—in that it's about performance, about struggling to make one's mark on the world, about having a philosophy and wanting to express it with flamboyance, but being reined in by the conservative demands of society at large. It's a portrait of the artist—Lotto-addicted club owner and emcee Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe)—as...practically a pimp.

Then it occurs to me to ask: Is this film an allegory, Abel? I mean, what's the difference between Hollywood and a strip club?

He laughs. "You know, I actually forgot how much that club in the film reminds me of Cannes."

Ferrara certainly did his best to fashion le festival in the image of Paradise, his New York Go Go joint. For his mid-afternoon festival press conference, the auteur smuggled in a bottle of Bud, along with a dais-busting line of exotic-dancing actresses. (One of these—Shanyn Leigh, who plays Dolly—he proudly introduced as the "love of my life.") His party at Villa Babylone, complete with lap dances and a sudsy pool, earned a three-and-a-half-martini rating (out of four) from The Hollywood Reporter (whose humorless critic deemed the film itself "scuzzy").

So, too, the Bronx-born director created his "New York" from the ground up in Rome (where he's now based), on a soundstage of the legendary Italian studio Cinecitta. "We built our own club and it was the best in town," Ferrara says of the location, impersonating 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Still, for Ferrara, the major virtue of shooting in Europe is that he doesn't have to worry as much about the American film industry, wherein his work has always been underestimated. "As tough as the Italian film business is right now, it's nothing like Hollywood. I mean, in Europe, final cut [for the director] is a law. The work is sacrosanct."

Where other veteran film iconoclasts have naturally switched to digital as a way of maintaining autonomy, Ferrara continues to shoot 35mm. "Fabio Cianchetti is a brilliant cinematographer; his work deserves to be on 35. I gotta give Kodak credit, too—they're not giving up the fight. I'm dying to do a digital film, but I want to do it on the Internet—a modern-day version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Willem and [Matthew] Modine—and put it out in 10-minute increments. I know that watching films on computer is the future—it's a direct connection to the audience. But for now we're still doing our own thing."

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 27, 2007 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

 

Prognosticating the Palme

Filed under: Film

Cannes, France—

As sent yesterday to www.davekehr.com (with minor additions in brackets):

Hey Dave:

As per [Cannois cineaste Pierre] Rissient, I certainly don't know anything [about who'll win the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or], either—but I'm here (waiting for the late night bus to my outta town hotel), for whatever that's worth. As you may know, [Russian director Alexander] Sokurov cancelled his press conference with a day's notice—due to ever-worsening health problems, it's been said—so, in combination with the fact that his film Alexandra has been reasonably well-received (I'm seeing it tomorrow), we shouldn't discount him as a contender, the scale tipped, perhaps, by what they call the "sympathy vote." Seems only a small handful of us find fault with the Coen brothers film (or the Coens), but I would hope the jury would maintain some measure of the advocacy principle as regards the fact that the pair already has one Palme—unless they figure that there should be one for each brother or whatever.

If this is a jury that deems past winners ineligible (as it should?), then the field is narrowed considerably. Further narrowing would occur if we consider that, much as Wong [Kar-wai] might deserve a prize for great work of the past, there's no one in town who'd make a case for the worthiness of My Blueberry Nights. (Only reason I accept his "American sell-out movie" is because it shows his newly healthy willingness to tolerate something (far) less than a masterpiece. Straining for a triumph can be tiring—and the emotional content of the films would take a toll as well. Nights shows that he's not in love anymore—and, on that count, I'm genuinely happy for him.)

Of the three competition films left to screen, two—Une vielle maitresse and The Mourning Forest—are by women (Catherine Breillat and Naomi Kawase, respectively). The Chacun son cinema parade here [with 30 beloved auteurs climbing the red steps for their contributions to an omnibus film] reminded us that only one woman—Jane Campion in 1993—has won the Palme in the festival's entire history. Does [Cannes jury president and film director] Stephen Frears like women?

Best,

Rob.

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 25, 2007 8:56 AM | Comments (0)

 

Cannes Bloggin': 'Thirteen' the Easy Way

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Cannes, France—

'Thirteen' is the magic number! It's fun! Stylish! Matt Damon is magnifique!

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 24, 2007 9:58 AM | Comments (0)

 

A Killer in Cannes

Filed under: Film

Cannes, France—

The Cannes Film Festival is chiefly revered as a showcase for prolific, careerist auteurs, so the appearance of Savage Grace, the first feature in 15 years by New Queer Cinema co-instigator Tom Kalin (Swoon), was certainly striking—not that a film in which Julianne Moore stars as a woman who's fucked and then killed by her gay son would lack for distinguishing features anywhere.

"I like to joke that I'm Norma Desmond in my castle with my monkey, and this is my comeback film," says the eye-batting Kalin, 45 and clearly ready for his close-up. More seriously, Kalin, having kept busy with experimental videomaking as well as teaching and political activism, says that the '90s were difficult enough for a "gay man of a certain age," that he's "thrilled to have come out the other side, being able to make the film that I wanted to make."

Like Swoon's gothic-romantic account of the Leopold and Loeb murders, Savage Grace's fact-based tale of taboo sex and violent death seeks sympathy for those whom most filmmakers would consider undeserving of it. Moore plays Bakelite plastics queen Barbara Baekeland, a volatile class-climber whose loveless marriage helps push her deeper into a codependent, ultimately incestuous relationship with her enigmatic son (Eddie Redmayne).

"No one agreed," says Kalin of the real Barbara's acquaintances, though he could also be referring to viewers of Savage Grace, which boldly refuses to clarify its intentions or reduce the Baekelands' wild pathology to psychobabble. Halfway through the fest, it's the most provocative American film in Cannes—Sicko withstanding.

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 21, 2007 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

 

Rock & Roll & Cannes '07

Filed under: Film

Cannes, France—

By the numbers: Day three of the 60th Cannes Film Festival, 8:00 a.m., after four-and-a-half hours' sleep, I'm feeling two cans shy of a sixer for having chosen not only to be conscious right now, but watching, of all things, U23D, a comin' at ya concert movie that, cranked to 11, is loud enough to wake the dead—and somehow enough to keep the tired critic from nodding off. I wouldn't have even considered giving Bono the chance to shout "Vertigo!" in my ear—and to stick his mic stand in my face—except that "Until the End of the World" had mysteriously issued forth from the nether regions of my iPod on the plane ride over, it sounded great, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. I needed to reckon with the boys from Dublin.

Digitally projected (and shot in a new high-tech, whoa-inducing process), U23D looks—forgive the colloquialism—really cool: clean, vivid, and with none of that eyestraining jitter from the '80s (let alone the '50s). As a way of combating the threat of home theater, which exhibitors would likely say is more of an assault at this point, digital 3D probably does represent the future of cinema, for better and worse. (Tech gods James Cameron and George Lucas will surely help see to that.)

As for U2, they were wise not to exploit their third dimension unduly: Except when Bono extends his hand while singing "Wipe your tears away" (during "Sunday Bloody Sunday"), making me wish he'd go a step further and shave my stubbly face during the screening (who besides the stars has time for grooming here?), the effects are subtle. What you notice is how even, say, spot-lit stage fog seems to exist on its own spatial plane, midway between the sea of pumping fists in the foreground and Larry Mullen Jr.'s awesome drum kit in the back. Martin Scorsese, in Cannes shopping his new 2D Stones doc for distribution, might see this and wish he had sprung for the extra D. For my money (and I got in for free!), U23D isn't like being in the front row—it's actually better, or at least until they decide to add Odorama. (Oh, and a note to U2 disciples: Don't bother e-mailing to ask for my special Bonovision glasses. Heeding Leo DiCaprio's Cannes call for earth-friendliness at the 11th hour, I put 'em in the recycling bin.)

So far there's only one other rock film at Cannes; alas, it's not Todd Haynes's purportedly unreleasable (i.e., brilliant) Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There, which is, like I said, not here. Instead it's the Ian Curtis biopic Control by first-time director Anton Corbijn, who spent 20-some years photographing U2 and therefore had more than enough clout and connections to secure clearance rights to the late Curtis's post-punk dirges for Joy Division. This, plus the close participation of Curtis's widow Debbie (and shimmering black and white widescreen cinematography), is what chiefly distinguishes Control from the Kurt Cobain movie Last Days: It's more conventional, in other words. Here, clinically depressed and profoundly isolated boy shoe-gazes, listens to Bowie in his bedroom, starts a band, falls in love, gets married, falls in love again (with a fan), waffles between women, pays dearly in emotional terms, writes and performs some amazing songs (e.g., "Love Will Tear Us Apart"), burns out, and fades away. The tortured-artist story was a terrible cliché even back when Curtis was living it—which, of course, is part of the tragedy.

Indelibly acted, particularly by relative newcomer Sam Riley as the ghost-like Curtis, Control can't begin to match Last Days for punk-style biographical opacity. But, careful not to diagnose an unknowable condition, Corbijn suggests that it wasn't necessarily Curtis's failure to take his meds that put him over the edge—that maybe it was the meds themselves.

Speaking of sickos and their suppliers: Coming soon to a computer screen near you—Michael Moore and me!

Posted by Rob Nelson at May 18, 2007 3:45 PM | Comments (0)

 

The race is on

Filed under: Film

Local filmmakers: Today is your last chance to register for the Minneapolis Film Race, a 12-hour sprint to create the best four-minute masterpiece your mini-DV can muster. The gun fires on Saturday; read more about it here. The best of the crop will screen at the Oak Street Cinema next Thursday.

And to see what you're up against, go here to view the winners of the Boston and New York film races. I recommend "Eggsistence."

Posted by Chuck Terhark at May 17, 2007 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

 

Weekend Junior Cinefiles Club

Filed under: Film

If this is your weekend with your kids, why not catch a few of the best offerings for the under-ages set from the International Film Fest? The following movies screen at the Oak Street Cinema as part of the Childish Film Festival. All ages: Flights of Fancy, a collection of 7 animated shorts from the US and Sweden, Saturday at 11. For ages 7 and up: Spoon, a Dutch movie about a boy who hides out in a department store after his parents disappear in a hot air balloon, Saturday at 2:30. For teenagers: Boy Called Twist, a South African re-telling of Dickens classic Oliver Twist, Sunday at 11.

Posted by Sarah Askari at April 27, 2007 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

 

Talking Turkey

Filed under: Film

With less than two weeks to go before the start of Minnesota Film Arts' latest Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (April 19 to April 29 at five area theaters), travel arrangements are firming up for filmmakers, celebrities, and other invited guests.

Danny Glover, coproducer of Mali master Abderrahmane Sissako's anti-globalization drama Bamako, is expected to be at the Riverview Theater on opening night to introduce the screening.

"We have a hotel room for him," says M-SPIFF publicist Vince Muzik. "We do think he'll be here."

Muzik has also confirmed the appearance of Texas-based documentarian Erik McCowan, whose film Ruby's Town, receiving its world premiere at the fest, profiles the annual turkey race between competing birds from Cuero, Texas, and our own Worthington, Minnesota.

Has Muzik made arrangements for Paycheck, the Worthington turkey, who is also "expected" to attend?

"I don't know about the turkey," says Muzik. "We're not paying for his travel fare. He'll have to get here himself."

Posted by Rob Nelson at April 10, 2007 9:00 AM | Comments (1)

 

Demon Lover

Filed under: Film

Photo by Mike Etoll

"Today we spilled about four gallons of blood," says Minnesota horror filmmaker Jon Springer ("Living Dead Girl") of The Hagstone Demon, currently shooting in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. "We stained the painted concrete in the building, splashed some on the walls. I just got my ass reamed out for half an hour by the landlord."

Most of Springer's film, his eighth to date, takes place in a brownstone apartment building whose caretaker (played by American Movie's legendary horror auteur Mark Borchardt) is being "dragged to hell" by a distaff demon in a suicide's body (Nadine Gross). Next week the director will move cast and crew to a secret East Bank location, where they'll stage an authentic Black Mass scene.

Sounding exhausted from four long days of shooting, Springer still can't help giggling over the phone as he describes the movie. But, like all of this devout Catholic's spiritually themed cinema, The Hagstone Demon is dead serious, too. "The caretaker is a man who participated in the failed ritual of a Satanic cult—so he's literally haunted by the demons of his past," says the director. "Because it's a story about Satanism, the style of the film seems honest. It's a bloody movie, and it's graphic."

Bloody and graphic? Like sexually graphic?

"Um, yeah."

Is Springer praying sufficiently?

"I'm purging stuff," he says. "And certainly the film relates to my own beliefs. Mainly I want to portray Satanism as it is—not a Hollywood version, but the way it exists in the modern world. I haven't seen too many filmmakers tackle that without falling into clichés."

Another potential hazard is budgetary catastrophe, which Springer knows not first-hand, thank God, but through repeated viewings of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary about Terry Gilliam's almost supernatural failure to film Don Quixote. "Even on a big-budget film, things can go wrong—and we're on a low budget with no backup funds," Springer says. "There's that clause in the contract called force majeure, like in La Mancha. God always has the last word."

Posted by Rob Nelson at April 2, 2007 8:52 AM | Comments (2)

 

Regret to Inform

Filed under: Film

It seems odd that a movie about the need to educate people would be urged not to find an audience—by its own publicist, yet.

"He'd really sort of rather not have it be advertised or promoted in any big way," says Riverview Theater owner and manager Loren Williams of White Light/Black Rain, a documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II in 1945. "But he does want it to appear on our schedule."

Williams screened the film, which premiered at Sundance in January, six times over the course of three days last week, as per the publicist's request. "He needs seven three-day runs in cities across the country, minimum of two shows per day," says Williams, "in order to qualify for an Oscar nomination."

The Riverview has similarly obliged this publicist before, screening Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib three days last month; this week it's doing likewise for To Die in Jerusalem. Both of these docs, like White Light/Black Rain, are represented by HBO.

Last Thursday about a dozen ticket buyers turned up for each showing of White Light/Black Rain, which begins with interviews of young people on the streets of Hiroshima, the filmmaker quizzing them on what major event took place on August 6, 1945. Shockingly, not one of the kids can answer correctly.

Perhaps more Minneapolitans will be enlightened to the film's depiction of the horrors of nuclear war—but not until August 6, 2007. "He isn't interested in attendance numbers," says Williams of the publicist. "He wants to make sure that the big splash is made when the movie airs on HBO."

Why we fight, indeed. Only in America would an atomic blast be subsumed by a big splash.

Posted by Rob Nelson at March 19, 2007 9:33 AM | Comments (0)

 

Hot as the Devil

Filed under: Film

Accidental e-mail can be such a gas. Owing to a publicist's computer brain-fart, City Pages has unexpectedly learned that its own Diablo Cody—the paper's TV critic and the writer of Juno, a major motion picture now shooting in Vancouver—has finally turned the temperature that her hellish penname has implied. She's "hot"—by association at least.

E-tweaking a Juno press release for the approval of a half-dozen colleagues, including the film's director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), the aforementioned flak suggested inserting the word hot before the name of the knocked-up title character's teenage buddy, played by new cast member Olivia Thirlby.

Hot? Why not? Officially ripe at age 19, Thirlby (United 93) has a full quintet of movies coming down the pike, Juno included. Besides, no less a film critic than IMDB message board-poster "boofansa" has deemed her "an orgasmic actress." (Maybe it's not too late to sneak that scorcher into the PR?)

Even jailbait knows that juvenilia rules in Hollywood. Daniel Dubiecki, Reitman's third eye at the production company they call Hard C, swung into the chat room with a pertinent correction for Mr. Hot Publicist. "Jason's quote as he originally wrote it was: 'This is a movie about teenage girls who grow up too fast and thirty-year-old men who refuse to grow up. I can't think of anything more appropriate for the times.'"

I can't either.

Posted by Rob Nelson at March 15, 2007 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

 

M-SPIFF dates, opening-night film announced

Filed under: Film

Last week, City Pages confirmed that Minnesota Film Arts had listed its Oak Street Cinema for sale despite recent box offices successes, and despite previous offers to take over the theater. Now that the organization has at last announced dates for its upcoming, scaled-down 25th Annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (to take place April 19-29 at the Oak Street, the Bell Auditorium, St. Anthony Main, and the Riverview Theater)--with the Danny Glover-produced African IMF drama Bamako screening opening night and Glover himself set to appear--many local film lovers might wonder how to express concern over the Oak Street short of boycotting a potentially great festival. The simple answer: comment cards. For each of the 80 films (from 45 countries), cards will passed out letting patrons evaluate pictures and offer feedback. Whatever else you write is up to you.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at March 14, 2007 10:18 PM | Comments (3)

 

Live blogging the Oscars: Nikki Finke in Hollywood, Nathan Lee in New York

Filed under: Film

Village Voice Media coastal cousins, Nathan Lee of Runnin' Scared and Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood Daily, will both be live-blogging the Oscar telecast this Sunday night, February 25th. Nikki's already been leaking like the bloated corpse of a drugged-up Hollywood starlet: Will Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas present the Best Director award together? Will host Ellen DeGeneres be dancing with the Happy Feet penguins? Check out more of Nikki's Oscar spoilers here. And log on Sunday night to read Nathan and Nikki's live updates.

Posted by Corey Anderson at February 23, 2007 5:59 PM | Comments (0)

 

Billy Bob Thornton intends to film Peace Like a River adaptation in MN

Filed under: Film

The Associated Press is reporting actor/writer/director Billy Bob Thornton, while in Edina to promote his latest movie, The Astronaut Farmer, has stated he wishes to film the movie adaptation of Leif Enger's novel, Peace Like a River, in Minnesota. "I hope we can shoot it there," Thornton said. "I love to shoot movies where they take place, but the studios will have you do it in different places because of the money." Thornton shot another film adapted from a novel, A Simple Plan (1998), directed by Sam Raimi, in Minnesota. "I love that movie, I love it," he said. "That's one of those characters I didn't want to have to stop playing." Peace Like a River, published in 2001 by Atlantic Monthly Press, recounts the struggles of a 1960s rural Minnesota family through the eyes of 11-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land. The author, Leif Enger, was born in Osakis and was a long-time reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio.

Posted by Corey Anderson at February 21, 2007 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

 

3Qs with Terry Gilliam

Filed under: Film

If you're not angry, they say, you're not paying attention. Mad hatter Terry Gilliam has been accused of a lot of things--directorial self-indulgence (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), professional self-sabotage (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), creative accounting (Brazil). But one could never blame the Monty Python alum and native Minnesotan for failing to reckon with the cruel world. The cinematic equivalent of a well-timed hissy fit, Gilliam's new movie Tideland hurls every size and shape of living nightmare at its preteen heroine (Jodelle Ferland), who's left alone in the middle of nowhere (Minnesota?) following the ugly overdoses of her junkie parents. Still, like Gilliam after getting cut up by Bob and Harvey Scissorhands (The Brothers Grimm), the kid stays in the picture. Attentive as always, Gilliam says he's "not interested in opinions of people [who] don't pay to see the film." But he gamely e-mailed answers to our idle questions anyway.

City Pages: You're often described as a fabulist, but isn't Tideland a political movie for the No More Mr. Nice Guy age?

Terry Gilliam: Have people forgotten I made Brazil? George W. [Bush], [Dick] Cheney, and company haven't. I'm thinking of suing them for the illegal and unauthorized remake of Brazil.

CP: When you watch Tideland, what does it make you feel, personally speaking?

Gilliam: I think it's one of the best films I've made. It fills my heart with joy.

CP: You were born in Minnesota. You think Minneapolis might be a better city than most to live in once the apocalypse hits?

Gilliam: What apocalypse? Are there some problems in the world that I am unaware of that might lead to it? Gosh, now you've got me worried.

Tideland is playing now at Lagoon Cinema, 1320 Lagoon Ave., Minneapolis; 612.825.6006.

--Rob Nelson

Posted by Chuck Terhark at November 6, 2006 5:00 AM | Comments (0)

 

Gordon Parks, 1912-2006

Filed under: Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film , Film

Gordon Parks "once took a ride tailed by the cops with some young L.A. [Black] Panthers with guns in their laps," writes Greg Tate in today's Village Voice obituary. "One asked him if he would still choose the camera over the gun, as he'd declared in his 1967 memoir, A Choice of Weapons. Parks reiterated his belief. Two weeks later the Panther was dead." Parks, who was the first black staff photographer at Life in the '50s and the first ever to direct a studio film (The Learning Tree, in 1969), lived life alongside his subjects, from blacks in the Twin Cities to Malcolm X. Born in Kansas in 1912, the future writer, jazz musician, poet, painter, choreographer, and composer moved to St. Paul as a stunned teenager after the death of his mother, according to his autobiography Voices in the Mirror, and was promptly thrown out into the subzero weather by his brother-in-law. He spent a week homeless, "bouncing between Jim Williams's pool hall during the day and the trolley cars at night," writes Michael Tortorello in a 1998 City Pages appreciation. "One morning, hungry and broke, Parks drew a knife on one of the conductors, and then, in shame, offered to sell it to him in exchange for breakfast"...

Parks played piano in a local brothel, bused tables at the Minneapolis Club, and reluctantly dropped out of St. Paul Central High School before moving to Chicago, New York, and back again. He was working as a porter on the North Coast Limited in the '30s when he became inspired by the great Depression-era documentary photographers, whose pictures he found in train magazines. Parks invested in a used camera, what he would call "his weapon against poverty and racism," and began taking photographs for the Minneapolis Spokesman/St. Paul Recorder. 50 years of work in a half-dozen mediums followed, though he's still best known for directing Shaft--he once told City Pages it was "nowhere near blaxploitation." (Parks's film biographer, Craig Rice, says he applied to film school the day after seeing the movie.)

"I don't make my poetry or my music just for people in Harlem or Kansas or any one place in between," Parks told Rob Nelson in a 1996 City Pages interview. "I think it's about reaching as many kinds of people as you can." He stayed prolific to the end, publishing two books on Atria in 2005: A Hungry Heart : A Memoir and Eyes with Winged Thoughts: Poems and Photographs. He died last Tuesday at age 93 in New York. (Read the New York Times obituary and the one in the Kansas City Star.)

In an interview with the Spokesman-Recorder last year, Parks said: "I let my heart persuade me toward whatever I needed at the moment; that's where I went. That's why I was successful, or why I failed."

(View a video at MNStories.com, a discussion at MNSpeak.com, and more Parks photography here, here, and here.)

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at March 13, 2006 5:35 PM | Comments (1)

 

The day after Oscar: "Download day"

Filed under: Film

Being nominated for a Best Picture Oscar not only increases the film's popularity at the thater and the DVD store, it now insures that it will be downloaded like never before. A website called Torrentfreak, devoted to the super-popular file-sharing program BitTorrent, refers to the day after the Academy Awards show as "Oscar winner download day." Some in the d/l'ing community believe that the Oscar-inspired downloads are a sure way to get caught precisely because of their known popularity. (Maybe now's the time to snag those episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. instead.) Ironic note: currently, the most downloaded video related to the Oscars is the award ceremony itself.

Posted by Steve Monaco at March 7, 2006 2:29 PM | Comments (0)

 

A triple-feature just for Oscar night

Filed under: Film

After spending hours watching tonight's Academy Awards, what could be better than ending the evening with a triple feature devoted to the event?

1) The Oscar (1966), starring Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett. One of the best bad movies ever made, which is only fitting. Stephen Boyd seems in on the joke as he plays a scum-sucking, back-stabbing actor hellbent on winning the big prize, and he's a riot. The rest of the cast is funny for other reasons. It's written by Harlan Ellison, and does it ever show-- listen to this beautifully awful Ellisonian speech that was forced into Tony Bennett's mouth (his first and last film appearance). "I was twitchin', just like a spastic!"

2) A Star is Born (1954), starring James Mason and Judy Garland. Doesn't everyone really watch The Oscars hoping for a moment like this movie's most famous scene, where Mason drunkenly crashes his young bride's spotlight moment and roughs her up? And Mrs. Jon Stewart really missed her chance last night.

3) I'll Do Anything (1994), starring Nick Nolte and Albert Brooks. James L. Brooks' follow-up to Broadcast News about what happens to an actor who doesn't get the award. It was also a movie about striving for artistic integrity in Hollywood that allowed all eight musical numbers by Prince to be completely cut after they were panned at screenings.

Posted by Steve Monaco at March 5, 2006 9:44 PM | Comments (0)

 

Altman and "A Prairie Home Companion" the hit of Berlin

Filed under: Film

A Prairie Home Companion, the new film written by Garrison Keillor (who also stars) and directed by Robert Altman, was a crowd-pleaser at The Berlin International Film Festival, and is considered a strong contender to win its Golden Bear award. (The winner will be announced Saturday the 18th.) In the movie, Keillor does his last show (if only!), with an all-star, Altman ensemble cast that includes Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Tommy Lee Jones. As everyone knows, it was filmed at Fitzgerald Theater, making it the second Twin C