August 5, 2003
[film] American Splendor Trailer — Quicktime Trailer for a film about comic-book writer Harvey Pekar … ‘Ordinary Life is pretty complex stuff!’ [Related: American Splendor Official Site]
August 1, 2003
[film] Shinto Daydreams — Nick Park on Hayao Miyazaki and ‘Spirited Away’ … ‘Miyazaki’s work is reminiscent of Tintin. His simple graphic style and attention to detail reveal great imagination: the smallest movement on the girl’s face conveys a whole series of emotions. When Tintin creator Hergé drew cars, ships or planes, you could see a love for the subject itself. You see that with Spirited Away. There is a love of the process of animation. Each shot is composed and looks gorgeous.’ [Related: Official Site, Spirited Away Trailer]
July 29, 2003
[comics] Batman: Dead End [Quicktime: Large File | Larger File] – a short Batman Movie …
[Related: Ain’t it Cool News backgrounder on the Film | Barbelith Comments]
[Related: Ain’t it Cool News backgrounder on the Film | Barbelith Comments]
June 27, 2003
[film] ‘After 100 takes, they asked me: What the hell are you doing?’ — interview with Ang Lee … ‘One of the rules that govern comic books is that each page is broken into panels, which enable the artists and writers to approximate in print the kinetic quality of film. Lee chose to break the screen into multiple images as his way of reversing the equation. Even the size of the screen alters from scene to scene; the frame expands to exaggerated widescreen for some portions. “I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you’re reading comic books to the big screen,” says Lee. “Not just lining things up with montage, but choreographing multi-images in the same space’
June 16, 2003
[film] Mescal and Madness — behind-the-scenes at the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … ‘The most moving moment of Kiselyak’s documentary comes from Bo Goldman, the film’s eventual screenwriter, who argues that, as in every great story, there are no choices as to what the outcome is. “If a man lives a good and honest life he’ll come out OK,” says Goldman, reflecting on the way McMurphy finally sacrifices himself. “Even if he loses his wife, or loses his children, or destroys his career, he’ll come out OK. Because he’s written the right script for himself.”‘
May 21, 2003
[film] An Auteur Packs His Bags to Venture Onto the Web — preview of Peter Greenaway’s New Project (which sounds interesting intriguing amazing) … ‘”The Moab Story” and the Web site are part of the first phase of what may become Mr. Greenaway’s magnum opus, “The Tulse Luper Suitcases.” The project is as unusual for its scale as for the Internet’s prominent role in it. As now conceived it would eventually include three to five films, a 16-part television series, a touring theater production, several books, DVD’s and Web sites and an online computer game. Mr. Greenaway acknowledged that the project’s scale was “megalomaniacal.”‘ [via Fimoculous]
April 30, 2003
[film] Strip Mining — the rivalry between DC and Marvel feature films … ‘Meanwhile [in 1996], DC was treading water. Insiders cite “temperamental” Batman producer Jon Peters as one source of strife. In charge of resurrecting a long-dormant Superman, he wanted to take the franchise in a darker direction. The ex-hairdresser reportedly infuriated scripter Kevin Smith, who worked on the abortive Superman Lives! incarnation, with seriously bizarre suggestions. He decided the film’s villain, Brainiac, needed a “gay R2D2” sidekick. Apparently colour-blind, he felt the man of steel’s traditional costume was “too pink”.’
March 11, 2003
[film] ‘You need the taste of blood in your mouth’ — interview with Paul Schrader … [Related: Auto Focus Trailer]
‘Inescapability is central to Schrader, as is emotional coldness: think of the slick hustler played by Richard Gere in American Gigolo – inhumanly cold, impenetrably opaque. It is Schrader’s one big commercial hit – and evidence that it’s not his subject matter so much as his treatment of the subject that puts him outside the mainstream. There is no trajectory in a Schrader film that leads to a happy ending or a neat solution. “I don’t believe life is about problems and solutions. I believe it is about dilemmas, and dilemmas don’t have solutions; they have resolutions, which then morph and lead you into future dilemmas.” So he takes his human dilemma, writes it large, abstracts it from the rituals of daily life – his people don’t function in a “normal” world, nobody is having breakfast with their kids, mowing the lawn, or meeting a friend for lunch – and plays out their inevitability.’
February 26, 2003
[film] In Your Dreams — interview with Steven Soderbergh … ‘My theory is that he has never figured out what it is in his movies that works – what it is that his audience looks for when they come to a Soderbergh film. I don’t mean technically. Clearly, he has a visual sense that never flags, and any director who could orchestrate Traffic, shot in nine cities largely by himself with a hand-held camera and combining 110 principal parts, has to be something of a technical maestro. But what is his personal component?’
February 25, 2003
[film] Being Charlie Kaufman — Tilda Swinton profiles Charlie Kaufman … ‘Charlie Kaufman writes about identity. About escapology. About mortality. About monkeys. About the possibility of ‘facing inadequacy as a chimp’. About minds, refracted, inhabited, spotless and dangerous. About loneliness and its relationship to love. About the dance of despair and disillusionment. About what incarnation might actually be. About, as he puts it, the fact that ‘art always tells the truth even when it’s lying’. And above all about our incapacity to know the answers to any of our questions.’ [via I Love Everything]
February 15, 2003
[film] Green Party — Entertainment Weekly asks: “Is the Hulk ready for his close-up?” …’the real test of the movie Hulk will come not in the scenes of him smashing tanks, but in his quieter interactions with flesh-and-blood characters. ”In the commercial, we don’t get a sense of whether the Hulk will emote at all,” Knowles says. Given the past work of director Lee (”Sense and Sensibility,” ”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), some sensitive Hulk moments seem inevitable, and such scenes could show up when a full-length trailer hits theaters Feb. 14 with prints of ”Daredevil.” But even without them, one expert already sees the beast’s softer side. Says Ferrigno: ”I think he’s cute.”’ [Related: Hulk Trailer]
February 14, 2003
[film] Let’s Make a Meta-Movie — more on the movie Adaptation … ‘”I guess it documents my failure to do my job,” Kaufman says. The real Kaufman, that is. The real Kaufman is neither balding or sweaty. He is, instead, a wiry man in his mid-40s, hunched inside a black suit, with a tangle of brown curls on top of his head and a faceful of beard. He wears the polite grimace of someone for who all social contact is inherently painful, the only variant how much. “Although it’s not something I’m good at being snappy and quotable about.”‘
February 9, 2003
[film] Who’s the proper Charlie? — nice profile of Jonze and Kaufman’s new film Adaptation … ‘…little is revealed about Kaufman beyond what we suspected in the first few minutes; that he is effortlessly neurotic, terminally self-conscious, and spectacularly ill-suited to the latte-sipping, air-kissing, back-stabbing, social snake pit that is contemporary Hollywood. What’s more, the sweating, pacing, fretting Kaufman we see on screen, barely articulate in an interview with an executive, could well be an exaggeration, even a caricature, of the real one. Or, indeed, a complete fabrication.’ [Related: the film trailer, and Kottke’s Adaptation Blog]
February 5, 2003
[films] UK Film Release Dates — very useful. [via Sashinka]
January 27, 2003
[film] Young and Breathless — profile of Paul Thomas Anderson … ‘Anderson’s main characters talk in just the same way — Boogie Nights’ porn star Dirk Diggler; Magnolia’s earnest LAPD cop, Jim Kurring; Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan, a sex-line-ringing, occasionally violent entrepreneur. These men might seem slow at first glance — even gormless — but all prove remarkable: superheroes whose special power is innocence.’
January 23, 2003
[blogs] Tagline: ‘So Gangs of New York. Hey, from what I saw: the street fights, the spaceships, the elephant, the Transformers cameo, the ornate facial hair; it looked great, you should check it out.’
January 20, 2003
[film] The Two Jacks — profile of Jack Nicholson … ‘Nicholson has often said that his films are “one long autobiography” – the reason he has no plans to write a memoir. With a little poetic – or comic – licence, you can well imagine many lines from his movies being written about the actor himself. In Five Easy Pieces, his character is criticised for abandoning his pregnant girlfriend: “I can’t say much for someone who’d leave a woman in a situation like that and feel easy about it.” “I don’t think he’s overly psychotic,” a psychiatrist says of his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “but I still think he’s quite sick.”‘
December 20, 2002
[2002] The sheer class of 2002 — John Patterson reviews the best of 2002 …
‘The performance of the year, it turned out, was on TV, not at the movies. In the fourth season of The Sopranos, Edie Falco proved that there’s almost no one out there fit to compare with her. Thwarted in love, insulted, wounded, and finally rising up in rage and anguish against her entire existence, her Carmella Soprano was the richest and most thoroughly conceived performance of the year by man or woman. The season finale was more like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage than conventional American TV drama, with Falco working every level of her incredible range, from emotional catatonia to screaming fury and back, without a false note.’
December 18, 2002
[film] Orchid Fever — article from the New Yorker which was the initial inspiration for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation … [via lukelog]
‘Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness. If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are nearly twenty thousand named species of orchids — it is the largest flowering-plant family on earth. New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.’
December 13, 2002
[film] Menace to Society — profile / interview with David Cronenberg … ‘[He worked on] an abortive sequel to Basic Instinct which, after months in pre-production, finally collapsed amid byzantine legal wrangling. A lucky escape? Cronenberg’s not so sure. “I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly think it could have been…surprisingly good. That’s what I wanted, something that would creep up on people, a truly perverse, erotic thriller. And the script was great, it really was. So the frustration is not knowing. Because certainly logic might point toward it going horribly wrong, but…you can never quite tell.”‘
December 10, 2002
[film] Being Charlie Kaufman — preview of Adaptation… ‘”Do I have an original thought in my bald head?” Spike Jonze’s follow-up to Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, opens with this rhetorical question from its lead character, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’ [Related: Regarding: Adapatation]
December 3, 2002
[film] The space between us — interesting Solaris preview … ‘[Solaris] is based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, which was also filmed, in an entirely different manner, by the late Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. Tarkovsky made his version, he said, in reaction to the “inhumanity” of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. It was three hours long and rich in the rhetorical indulgences that Tarkovsky was wont to permit himself. Lem was not its most militant admirer. At 96 minutes, Steven Soderbergh’s version is so wilfully serene that you fear for the patience and sanity of George Clooney’s core demographic.’ [Related: Solaris Trailer and Official Site]
November 30, 2002
[film] Truly, a class act. Not a lot of people know that — profile of Michael Caine … ‘There’s a crack in the Caine façade, I think, and you see it in that very cool comic line he couldn’t deny himself. When someone remonstrated with him about having made Jaws: The Revenge, he answered, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Now, that is a knock-out line, and characteristic of Caine’s wit (more or less impromptu) at awards evenings. But it is very much the kind of thing that Alfie, or Harry Palmer (from the Ipcress films) or even Carter might have uttered: cynical, knowing, an outsider’s jab at the system, its hypocrisy and foolishness.’
November 28, 2002
[film] Solaris, Rediscovered — backgrounder on Stanislaw Lem and Solaris … ‘…this is the source of Lem’s uneasy relationship with American science fiction, and of his inevitable misalliance with Hollywood. Lem’s stories are about humanity in general. Movies – at least popular ones – are about characters. Moreover, when confronted with a beautiful woman who may be a phantom, an alien, or some kind of machine, Hollywood is more or less required to put one question ahead of all others: Can you have sex with it? This is what Soderbergh refers to when he says the movie will be a cross between 2001 and Last Tango in Paris.’
November 25, 2002
[conspiracy] Conspiracy Weary — the problem with conspiracy theories … Neil Burger: ‘The Kennedy assassination is this unsolved, confounding mystery of American history. You delve into it because you can’t believe that this public event has so many unanswered questions. There isn’t any definitive, conclusive evidence on anything. You follow these trails of evidence. They are so tantalising, but you never have the answer. It’s enough to keep you looking for more. It’s enough to drive you insane.’ [Related: Interview with the Assasin Trailer and Official Site]
November 11, 2002
[movies] Focus Puller — interview with Paul Schrader about his film Auto Focus … Schrader: ‘With Raging Bull, the fights were accurate, but the arguments between the brothers were completely imagined. Of course, Jake LaMotta liked those scenes so much that he started believing they actually happened. My intent with Auto Focus is not to be true or definitive. People’s actual lives are not really that interesting. And with [Bob] Crane I wanted to get at something meaty. Otherwise, who cares?’ [Related: Auto Focus Trailer]
October 28, 2002
[redrum] All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy … ‘All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy’
- All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy
- All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy
- All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy
- All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy
- All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy
October 21, 2002
[books] The Rules of Adaption — Brett Easton Ellis interviewed regarding the Rules of Attaction film …
‘One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It’s like Kubrick directing a college film. I really thought there was going to be much more of an emotional pull toward the end, and there wasn’t. This is not a movie to bring your Kleenex to. But I think Roger captured that lack of feeling among college kids as accurate. During that age, you’re becoming an adult, and in that process you realize, “Okay, the world works this way, and it’s hurtful,” and you pretend it doesn’t hurt you, and you pose a lot.’ [via Anglepoised]
‘One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It’s like Kubrick directing a college film. I really thought there was going to be much more of an emotional pull toward the end, and there wasn’t. This is not a movie to bring your Kleenex to. But I think Roger captured that lack of feeling among college kids as accurate. During that age, you’re becoming an adult, and in that process you realize, “Okay, the world works this way, and it’s hurtful,” and you pretend it doesn’t hurt you, and you pose a lot.’ [via Anglepoised]
October 20, 2002
[film] ‘It seems like exactly the wrong film to make’ — Salon interview with Roger Avery … ‘For Avary it was about capturing Ellis’ Faulknerian storytelling mode, not plot or dialogue. “I worked with multiple narratives on ‘Pulp Fiction,'” says Avary. “And Bret’s novel is composed of multiple first-person narratives, each a chapter told by a different person. And they’re all talking about various events, sometimes the same event with completely different perceptions of reality. “It’s an impossible structure to turn into normal, narrative form. But to strip away Bret’s structure is to rob yourself of what makes him so unique. I wanted that literary device. And if you’re doing multiple perceptions of the same moment and you just cut, the way we did in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ then you sever the characters both in their timeline and psychology. The key isn’t to cut, but to play out the scene and pull back to another part of the room. That way you’re actually uniting the timelines as one and making sure everybody is connected.”‘ [via Sore Eyes]
October 19, 2002
[film] The Soiling of Van Der Beek (scroll down page) — brief mention of Roger Avery’s new film The Rules of Attaction … ‘My notes for The Rules of Attraction include capitalised mentions of all the naughty stuff his drugs-vacuuming collegian gets up to: “Dawson deals coke and crack!”, “Dawson has an eye-popping wank!”, “Dawson shags another bloke!” Sadly, he’s not the character who pukes on an unconscious Shannyn Sossamon’s back, at which point the film runs backwards, showing the vomit flying into its owner’s mouth. If that had been Van Der Beek’s up-chuck, the deal would have been sealed: Dawson is Horrid – Official!’
October 10, 2002
[distraction] Joe Pesci Soundboard [via LukeLog]
October 8, 2002
[film] Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Shooting Script … [via Kookymojo]
‘CAMERON (grim monotone): 1958 Ferrari 250 GTS California. Less than a hundred were made. It has a market value of $265,000. My father spent three years restoring it. It is joy, it is his love, it is his passion.
FERRIS: It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage.
CAMERON: Ferris, my father loves this car more than life itself. We can’t take it out.
FERRIS: A man with priorities so far out of whack doesn’t deserve such a fine automobile.’
September 23, 2002
[film] Back With A Vengeance — update on Tarantino and Kill Bill …
‘Yohei Taneda, the production designer for the film’s Asian sequences, tried to explain the look of the film and the experience of working with Tarantino. “There is a reality to Kill Bill, but it is not the reality of the world,” he says. “It is the reality of Quentin’s world, and that is a somewhat different place. We are in Tokyo, we are in Okinawa, we are in a Chinese temple, but at all times, really we are in the world of Quentin.”‘
‘Yohei Taneda, the production designer for the film’s Asian sequences, tried to explain the look of the film and the experience of working with Tarantino. “There is a reality to Kill Bill, but it is not the reality of the world,” he says. “It is the reality of Quentin’s world, and that is a somewhat different place. We are in Tokyo, we are in Okinawa, we are in a Chinese temple, but at all times, really we are in the world of Quentin.”‘
[director] Triumphs that cannot Soothe a Troubled Soul — profile of Sam Mendes … ‘ Can it be coincidence, for example, that the then-bachelor Mendes, emerging from a series of broken relationships in his early thirties and hung up about marriage, chose five years ago to direct the Sondheim musical Company, which is about, er, a bachelor in his early thirties emerging from a series of broken relationships and who is hung up about marriage?’
September 22, 2002
[film] This Much I Know – Robert Evans … ‘It’s irreverence that makes things sizzle. It’s irreverence that gives you a shot at touching magic.’
September 12, 2002
[books] Warren Ellis on James Bond … ‘In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers. He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.’
September 4, 2002
[blogs] Lying Motherfucker — various famous authors blog, kinda … Frederick Forsythe: ‘Oh, how different it had all been in the glory days, back when Maggie held firmly the reins of a nation and men weren’t afraid to knock a Big Issue vendor into the gutter where it belonged. When the fuzzy-wuzzies knew their place and everyone stopped for a roast dinner on Sunday. Henry fingered the limp white collar of his shirt. A gentleman couldn’t even get a dependable starch anymore. It all went downhill with the Labour government, when they forced the coolie laundries to stop using child labor.’ [Related: Scott McCloud explains LyingMoFo]
September 1, 2002
[film] Along Came A Spider — article on the 12 Film Certificate and comic book movies … ‘For the beleaguered film censors, the problem with films based on comic books is –the comic books. Comics have always been controversial, with their mix of cartoon violence, vivid villains and perverse characters; always accused of glorifying the crime or drug use that their clean-cut superheroes exist to combat.’
August 3, 2002
[film] The Flesh Ripping, Bullet Spraying Ballet Master — profile / interview of director John Woo …
‘The Killer was elemental Woo, the template that has relentlessly infused much of his subsequent work. A super-abundance of picturesque violence props up the usual conflict of good and evil, in which we are invited to observe not so much the clash of black and white, but the shades of grey that lie between the protagonists. Hero and villain become interchangeable; creatures of the same culture, victims of the amorphous pressures put upon them by a wicked world, equally beset by guilt, shame and regret, similarly capable of acts of selfless nobility, brothers under the skin. The hitman and the cop are two fingers on the same hand. In other words, it is a buddy movie. Add to that the love interest: the girl is a veritable apotheosis of anorak sexual longing – she is beautiful, lonely, isolated and, best of all, she is blind. No button is left unpushed. You get the car ‘n’ speedboat chases, innocent kiddies caught in the crossfire, a spectacular gun battle in God’s House with His statuettes exploding all over the shop, a close-up euthanasia shot (very matey) and a grande finale of Woo’s special trademark, white doves fluttering over the carnage. Phew.’
July 26, 2002
[film] Postive review of Austin Powers in Goldmember … ‘Who else but Myers can deliver this kind of exuberant, ambitious, mainstream screen comedy? Adam Sandler? Chris Rock? They are simply not in his league. In the course of an interview to promote this movie, Michael Caine has again unburdened himself of his view that Britain is a nation of losers and that he is not appreciated here. A baffling view, considering that he has been knighted, honoured and otherwise idolised. But I wonder if his chronic discontent may have been reawakened by this film: the fact that it takes a Canadian working in Hollywood to satirise a British icon so persuasively, so affectionately, and with such mouth-watering box-office results? Isn’t that what we should be doing with our industry?’ [Related: Trailer]
July 23, 2002
[comics] Yahoo’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Movie preview page — ‘…I guess what we have to do is cross our fingers, hold our breaths, and hope that the film itself somehow captures some wink of the magic of Moore’s writing. Maybe. Can Stephen Norrington do it? His first film went direct-to-video, his third has yet to be picked up for distribution, which leaves us with Blade. Blade is a bloody, violent romp of a vampire movie, and while I did enjoy it for exactly what it was, I don’t get anything from it that yells to me “this guy would rock as the director of LoEG”.’ [via Cheesedip]
July 17, 2002
[film] Chronicle of a Death Foretold — Greil Marcus on the Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer and the Kennedy Assasinations … Frankenheimer: ‘I can see Bobby’s face on a big television monitor in the ballroom and I can see his back for real. As I stood there a figure went by me and it was as if there was electricity coming out of his body. I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. Of course it was Sirhan Sirhan.’
July 16, 2002
[film] Last Typhoon Cimino Is Back — off-beat profile / interview of movie director Michael Cimino. ‘…the trauma of Heaven’s Gate and its aftermath may not have left Mr. Cimino entirely unchanged. Or so Gore Vidal wondered a while back when he called his former collaborator, for whom he did an uncredited polish on the script for The Sicilian.”Michael,” Mr. Vidal said, “I just read in the newspaper that you had a sex change.” At 62, Mr. Cimino looks like a cross between a cowboy hipster and your great-aunt Bessie.’
July 15, 2002
[film] Why Does Everyone Want To Get Into Bed With Him? — profile of Mike Myers … ‘The Austin Powers films do contain some fine things. The opening sequence of the first film, in which Myers, resplendent in frilly collar, jives through a blatantly fake swingin’ London, pursued by crowds of adoring females, is pure delight; and if nothing else, he deserves credit for pulling off the unlikely feat of turning Liz Hurley into a plausible representative of sexual puritanism and female equality. But there is little quality control; Powers picking up a stool sample in mistake for a coffee pot and saying ‘This coffee smells like shit’? gives a new significance to the fact that he listed Some Mothers Do’ Ave’ Em and On the Buses as great British comedies.’
July 11, 2002
[advert] Wheels Within Wheels — brief commentary on the Mercedes car advert …
‘…the Mercedes branding of Lucky Star is subtle, verging on imperceptible. Those who watch the trailer and are eager to find out more will unearth not a high-octane thriller, but an invitation to their nearest Mercedes showroom. Whether Mann’s glacé camerawork will then be enough to sustain that interest once they notice the car’s £92,000 price tag is moot. For Mercedes, it is evidently a risk worth taking. The prize, after all, is precious indeed: the neutering of our scepticism when confronted with advertising.’
‘…the Mercedes branding of Lucky Star is subtle, verging on imperceptible. Those who watch the trailer and are eager to find out more will unearth not a high-octane thriller, but an invitation to their nearest Mercedes showroom. Whether Mann’s glacé camerawork will then be enough to sustain that interest once they notice the car’s £92,000 price tag is moot. For Mercedes, it is evidently a risk worth taking. The prize, after all, is precious indeed: the neutering of our scepticism when confronted with advertising.’
July 1, 2002
[films] TV Picks of the Week — brief reviews of films on TV this week… Bullitt: ‘Steve McQueen’s laconic San Francisco cop, Frank Bullitt, was a role model for many a detective to come, and so cool he makes Clint’s Dirty Harry look hysterical. But McQueen also makes the character believable; a committed man who feels genuine anger at the corrupt politician (Robert Vaughn) he doggedly trails, while embroiled in a realistically shaky relationship with girlfriend Jacqueline Bisset. The celebrated car chase, up and over the hilly Frisco streets, was another first of its kind, much imitated but rarely beaten.’
June 27, 2002
[tv] The Diamond Geezer — profile of Ray Winstone. ‘…it is Winstone’s ability to invest such characters with ordinariness that makes him such a fascinating performer. At the risk of inciting some “poncy” analysis of his acting style, I invite him to explain how he does it. “I dunno. How do you research being a child-molester, a wife-basher? Do you go and do it? In Sexy Beast, Ben Kingsley played a really nasty gangster, and I thought ‘hang on a minute, this is Gandhi’. But he said to me, ‘This is part of me. There’s a dark side within all of us.'” This is about as poncy as Winstone gets.’
June 23, 2002
[film] ‘Who’s Tony Blair? he’s the US’s publicist’ — interview with Tom Sizemore … ‘I shared my life with a lot of drugs and bad girls. I was interested in fucking pretty girls whether or not they were nice people or read novels or knew who Winston Churchill was. If they had a good ass and did a bit of blow, that was good enough.’ [via Feeling Listless]
June 21, 2002
[comics] Spidey and the Curse of the Comic-Book Movie … a look at the what happened to Brandon Lee, Christopher Reeve and Richard Pryor after starring in Comic-Book movies … ‘The curse is also judged to have claimed Margot Kidder, the acclaimed actress who played Lois Lane in the film series of the late 70s and early 80s. In 1990 Kidder was injured in a car accident, suffered through two years of convalescence during which she was unable to work, and was finally declared bankrupt. Four years later she showed up “in a distressed state” in someone’s back garden, having cut off her own hair with a razor blade. She was placed in psychiatric care. Since then her recuperative career has encompassed such films as Shadow Zone: My Teacher Ate My Homework.’
June 13, 2002
[film] A couple of interviews with Willem Dafoe …
Webbed feat … On his Green Goblin Action Figures: ‘Yeah. How about that? Now that I’ve made this movie, there’s a little bit of a, “What have I done?” thing. I’ve never made movies that kids could see, and now I’m ruing the day some little kid in the grocery store freaks out, “Mommy, it’s the Green Goblin!”‘
Dafoe’s Role as Green Goblin Isn’t the Stretch It Might Seem … On Comics: ‘”Growing up, I was aware of the Marvel superheroes, but I wasn’t much of comic-book reader,” concedes Dafoe. . “It wasn’t as if I was against reading them, it’s just that I wasn’t doing it. My introduction to comic books was through Zap Comix and Zippy the Pinhead. Those are the images I’d see when I visited my older brothers and sisters at the University of Wisconsin.”‘
Webbed feat … On his Green Goblin Action Figures: ‘Yeah. How about that? Now that I’ve made this movie, there’s a little bit of a, “What have I done?” thing. I’ve never made movies that kids could see, and now I’m ruing the day some little kid in the grocery store freaks out, “Mommy, it’s the Green Goblin!”‘
Dafoe’s Role as Green Goblin Isn’t the Stretch It Might Seem … On Comics: ‘”Growing up, I was aware of the Marvel superheroes, but I wasn’t much of comic-book reader,” concedes Dafoe. . “It wasn’t as if I was against reading them, it’s just that I wasn’t doing it. My introduction to comic books was through Zap Comix and Zippy the Pinhead. Those are the images I’d see when I visited my older brothers and sisters at the University of Wisconsin.”‘