With shades of theme park artificiality and cheeky, faux-nostalgic imagineering (I’d guess that the majority of young LES urbanites who make it here have never spent an evening at a drive-in theater), Grand Opening has installed a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible and a movie screen in its small Lower East Side space, and is charging $75 per private screening.

This is so awesome.

What you have to appreciate is how an atavistic expression of post-war, car-crazy rural Americana is incorporated into the knowing (and winking), urban belly of downtown Manhattan, and the way in which the private-in-public principle of the erstwhile drive-in itself (one in which the audience enjoyed the communal and outdoor spectacle of a movie while sitting inside their separate and insular aluminum cocoons) has been détourned once again; “public viewing” is really a private experience after all.

I can only hope that there’s a breeze machine and some glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

[via Racked]

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

The inaugural issue of Wholphin (McSweeney’s DVD media arm) includes a gem of a mini-doc of Al Gore in 1999, shot and directed by Spike Jonze. It’s a warm and intimate look at a day in the life of then-presidential candidate, chilling in Carthage, Tennessee, and at a vacation spot in North Carolina, with Tipper and his daughter Karenna.

The film was made for the Democratic Convention of 2000, but was never more widely released. The liner notes (which includes a short interview with Jonze) suggest the possibility that a larger airing of this short may have offset the media portrayal of Gore as a stiff and uncharismatic candidate. Indeed, watching this relaxed, witty and completely amiable man putz around the house with his family leaves you aching, knowing that he would soon lose to the privileged, unprincipled fratboy failure who has now occupied the White House for two craptastic terms. Little did Al Gore or Spike Jonze know that this tiny film would be viewed, in 2006, as a tragedy. Watching this film is a little like peering back through the looking glass to a brighter time and place, before we were all plunged into this collective nightmarish alternate reality …

View the 15-minute piece on the Wholphin site, or on Video Google.

[via BoingBoing]

*** 

Lastly, I leave you with this (rhetorical) question: why should we draft Al Gore?

We caught Exorcist randomly on the tele the other day and I’ve caught a horror movie bug because of it …

The still above is from the British film The Descent, which, in all honesty, scared the living shit out of me. While I can view most horror movies now critically and dispassionately, The Descent contains a premise which still exerts a visceral andrenal effect on me — the idea of being stuck in a dark, airless, cramped, potentially inescapable underground tunnel (of being buried alive, basically, which is probably my freakout button #1); and this is all before you realize that there are legions of feral, bloodthirsty mutant creatures down in the dark with you, picking your friends off one by one in horrifically brutal ways. Good times. The spelunking industry will probably be raging at this film’s release.

Appropriately timed enough, The Sunday Times Magazine published a highly enjoyable piece this weekend about the emerging international renaissance of horror moviemaking, written by John Hodgman (the mightily intelligent cultural correspondent for The Daily Show, and oh yes, he – in the role of the PC – of the recent obnoxious Apple ads).

 

Like a great many people have done recently, I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight and was shattered.

In it slow methodical science takes unusually persuasive and passionate form. It is truth-telling at its noblest and most highly effective. The enormous, planetary threat that Al Gore has been flogging since his college and congressional days (the latter of which was a 17-year tenure he began at age 27) go beyond the politicization that the right has tactically and instinctively — and predictably — resorted to in attacking the film; rather, global warming is, as Gore himself says, not a political issue, but an urgently moral one. That so many people have been packing seats to see it, and that the Republican counterargument is sounding more and more shrill and insane to more and more people by the minute signals, perhaps, that a tipping point in our collective consciousness has finally been reached. Whether or not we can make it past the next century still remains to be seen. If we don’t, will it perhaps be because we’ve reached the Rapture after all? A fossil-fuel-depleted, water-logged, carbon-soaked one albeit? Now that we seem to have eeked past 6/6/06, all bets are off …

I’ve said it before, but just to reiterate … Gore in 2008! We need you ever so desperately now … 

On a lighter, but nevertheless related tip, check out this ingenious and entertaining (and alas, depressing) animation called A Bad Case of the Humans …

Not new news, but Wes Anderson recently directed a new AMEX commercial in the Wes Anderson-style. Which is to say, an au courant style of filmmaking that effuses such imprecise, mood-based adjectives as ‘whimsical’ or ‘charming’ or ‘eccentric’ or ‘quirky’ or ‘playful’ or ‘offbeat’ or ‘quixotic,’ you get the idea. Kind of Woody Allen-esque, where the neurosis is not hyper-articulated through dialogue or soliloquy, but folded upon itself, only burbling out through indirect, much more subdued means, in longing glances or in hip and tasteful (and just as often, deliberately inappropriate) retro clothing and musical selections. Most of the dialogue, in fact, does not serve the purpose of communication but is instead used to evoke the painful and sweetly awkard inability of these characters to connect with one other.

I didn’t even know that this sensibility, prevalent in the ‘X’ (now in their 30s) generation of American filmmakers comprised of Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppola, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, PT Anderson, and some would put French ex-pat Michel Gondry in this category, had a name, until I read this Slate article, which gave them one (as with all nomenclatures it is deadening and useful at the same time): ‘The American Eccentrics.’

The article criticizes the turgid pace of The Eccentrics’ output, brandishing the high-flying concept and lavish production costs of the AMEX commercial as, paradoxically, evidence of Wes Anderson’s ambitions and capabilities, as well as his laziness:

It seems that the Eccentrics’ own egotistical indolence has resulted in self-imposed limits to their skills—at the very least it deprives the world of more of their unique cultural prognostications. If they are ever to truly change film culture, their maneuvers have to increase. When Anderson casually pays for extra production expenses in the AmEx ad, he pokes mischief at the ’80s archetype of a hungry filmmaker using credit cards to see a film to completion. (The ad opens with typical Anderson piquancy: Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman onset in a new guise shouts, “François!” at the sight of an auto accident—a Day for Night in-joke as well as a mournful cry for Truffaut, who died in 1985.) But it’s not really the way Anderson works—he pretends to be making a gimmicky action movie such as he never really has. My Life, My Card is insistently money-conscious, but its charm comes from envisioning a paradise of art-making, where all problems are immediately solved and where instinct flies with nature. Indeed, while riding a floating crane, Anderson is attacked by a flock of Hitchcock’s birds. It bemuses him. (You have to be a real cinephile—perhaps own a certain Truffaut-authored interview book in your library—to appreciate such delicious free association.)

That Anderson came up with this fanciful new-millennium fabrication suggests that he, and the other Eccentrics, want to work more, and that they need a mythology to define their own filmmaking era. Anderson’s movie-within-a-commercial recalls the antic film parodies staged as prep-school pageants in Rushmore—a poignant act toward wish-fulfillment and self-realization. That’s the impulse the Eccentrics have in common: They want to be appreciated as whiz kids—the gifted children of the counterculture. This social development gains nuance and significance each time you see Anderson’s celebratory, confessional spot. Because My Life, My Card has the stylish breadth and the Crayola-bright look of Anderson’s previous films, it raises your hopes for the splendidly eccentric movies we’re thirsting for. But, as funny, lovely, and candid as this mini meta-movie is, given the paucity and slowness of the Eccentrics’ output, it’s just a mirage.

Whatever though, as our generation would be inclined to say. These movies don’t need to come out in pairs every year (Steven Solderbergh did the prolific thing for a while and his films got real shitty). Part of the charm is the anticipation, like a good, beneath-the-scab kind of itch.

***

Another useful description of the Eccentrics comes from this NYPress review of the David O. Russell joint I Heart Huckabees:

A friend calls this new breed the American Eccentrics, a good categorization since it distinguishes these upstarts from that last significant grouping of 70s filmmakers who were drawn to exploring American experience and pop tradition in order to understand their place in the world. The Eccentrics, formed by the fragmentation and solipsism of the 80s indie movement, are more interested in their personal idiosyncrasy. They don’t connect to life outside their own world but view it as absurd and different. Films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch-Drunk Love, Adaptation, Lost in Translation and Russell’s I Heart Huckabees reinforce a sense of boomers’ egotism; as with Payne’s About Schmidt, there is an insistence on braininess rather than connection with popular sentiment.

 

Popular feeling is distrusted; that’s what the Eccentrics intuit about modern film culture. These post-hipsters are too smart to go for the empty, stylish attitudes of Todd Haynes or Guy Maddin. Rather than submit to the common emotion of Spider-Man 2 (with its attendant juvenilia), or Spielberg and Demme’s humbling universality, these clever Dicks show their estrangement from the collective experience in preference for private feeling.

 

I don’t know if its due to the way art is taught in school these days, or the elimination of lead-based paint, but artists nowadays are so damn articulate. Gone is van Gogh-style torment. No more Pollockian infantile rage. Warholian inscrutability has evaporated like morning mist … Star artists know how to sell shit, smooth-talk and sound good in art magazine interviews. Anything less polished and operatic toes the line of faggy pretension.

The last time Matthew Barney was in the news was in 2003, when his retrospective (along with the premiere of Cremaster 3) arrived at the Guggenheim. While I had run across the Cremaster series in various settings in the past (usually at random exhibitions, playing in the background, perplexing passers by with scenes of — omg is that funky satyr sex??) I had never, before the Guggenheim, sat down and watched any of the films end to end. Following these close viewings I became convinced Barney was from outer space. And if he was not extra-terrestrial, then he was certainly extra-temporal — i.e., from another time, some halcyon era, when there was no such thing as self-consciousness and no one knew how to play ironic, under-the-table shinkicking games. Before arty became farty … Creations of such anti-semantic insanity such as Cremaster — the name of the muscle which controls scrotal contraction, for chrissake – defied explication; in fact, explication would be so dreary and unseductive. Better to be a Believer.

Barney is back in the news with the release of Drawing Restraint, his new film starring himself and his odder-half Björk. I was looking forward to tumbling into Barney’s super-viscous exegesis. But then I came across an interview he gave with New York Magazine in which he actually sounded sensical, and I have to admit a measurable quotient of the Barney mythology seeped out of my balloon.

A terrific article in Slate comparing Brazil and V for Vendetta, which opens today.

The writer, Matt Feeney, describes Brazil as the pinnacle of Terry Gilliam’s oeuvre, ripe with playful and baroque details, driven by a mad, romantic momentum. As Feeney says, ‘for much of the film, the atmosphere of frustration and thwarted longing is so pervasive, and so perfectly evoked, as to be almost unbearable.’ Anyone who’s seen the movie knows it to be true; Sam getting together with Jill is the white light, the true salvation. The film progresses through growing states of expectant suspension (powered by Sam’s longing for Jill, shown in trippy, Gilliam-trademarked dream sequences), until they finally get their one night together, their first and their last. Although it’s not happily ever after (their one night may even have been merely a drug-induced hallucination) it’s ok somehow — a connection has been made, there has been closure.

On the other hand, V for Vendetta, Feeney argues, is ideologically monolithic and provides no nuance, chance or accident. Its dogmatic sincerity and lack of self-consciousness sucks out all the air and reduces its characters to lifeless, expository automatons, in service of plot movements rather than their own believable motivations. Anyone who’s read an Ayn Rand novel* knows what Feeney’s talking about here. Or for that matter, seen The Matrix, the previous Wachowski Bros. joint. As characters go, Howard Roark and Morpheus are about as dimensioned and flavorful as gypsum wallboard.

I haven’t seen V, but I recently read the book (which, by the way, wasn’t nearly as good as Alan Moore’s exceptional From Hell). I remember thinking that the book was too goofy, too pop-1984, too comic booky, to work well as a film, unless it was treated by a scriptwriter with exceptional nimbleness and perhaps a sense of irony to cut through the occasional philoso-cheese. With the Wachowskis on screenplay detail, however, I can only imagine the script given shape via their worst instincts, i.e. towards Manichean conflict and pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that will somehow ‘inform’ the spectacularly stagey kung fu / knife fights and explosions — the last of which will no doubt be, at the end of the day, the most compelling feature of the film. It’s no wonder Alan Moore has disowned cinematic adaptions of his comic book work.

* Just a sidenote, speaking as an erstwhile architect: if you ever meet an architect at a social function, or saddle up to one at the bar, PLEASE DO NOT ask him/her if he/she ever read The Fountainhead, and if that goddamned book ‘inspired’ them to go into architecture. That is grounds for immediate dismissal, no matter how cute you may or may not be.

Some recent scrapes from Newstoday … 

 

Partizan, the French production company of music videos and television spots, recently launched a new site. Its motion graphics sister company, Partizan Lab, has done likewise. You can view videos and animations from Partizan’s extensive roster of artist / directors. You may have to set aside a spare afternoon to do it with, though …

 

The FWA has conveniently listed its Top Twenty list of photography websites since 2000. When cold-browsing flickr doesn’t cut it … Sometimes you need a sexy interface to get you in the mood.

 

The new campaign to get people to drink the cow includes two fun and outrageous flash sites, based on the notion of extraterrestrial civilizations running low on milk, and suspiciously, the corresponding phenomenon of cow abductions here on earth. This is a positive development for the dairy folks, if only because their erstwhile Got Milk? milk-on-upper-lip was a little disturbing and off-putting, at least me. After all, if you really think about it, drinking milk (I’m not talking about eating ice cream or cheese, but drinking milk) is a fairly revolting act. Better to market liquid animal product by wrapping some high-flying concepts and flashy interactivity at it, rather than emphasizing the physical consumption of it.

Attik launched a new portfolio site documenting their thoroughly beautiful body of work. The site is a little annoying to navigate, and the copy is client-directed and adver-speaky (then again, who reads these kinds of sites anymore?), but nuggets of goodness can be found throughout. Perhaps my favorite feature is the context-appropriate wallpapers, a smart and uncommon idea, and which are gorgeously rendered.

I generally try to avoid reading movie reviews before I see the movie in question, but anticipation of the release of Block Party, a documentary involving two of my favorite artist/entertainers, comedian Dave Chappelle and director Michel Gondry, became overwhelming, and so I indulged in a little bit of pregnostication.

I first read Stephanie Zacharek’s piece in Salon, and it seemed to me a little overcooked. A sample quote:

While the rest of us are busy carving up the country — red state, blue state; urban, suburban; sophisticated, rustic; them, us — in ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,’ there’s room for only one America, but it’s one big enough to include everybody.

While I love Salon, and have nothing but disdain and contempt for the state of our politics in 2006, I have been somewhat saddened by the heavily politicized air the webzine has taken on since its more genteel, arts and literary editorial origins in the late 90s. Salon is fighting the good fight, but I miss the frivolous decadence of, say, its ’Masterpiece’ series, one of which elaborated on Seinfeld as ’one of the most complex and troubling art works of our time.’ Sigh …

The mention of the insidious and tired red state / blue state trope in Zacharek’s review seemed unwelcome, jarring, limp-wristed, a little too simplistically and cloyingly topical. But it’s a sign of how the malady of the times has infected and desensitized us all that I only became simpatico with Zacharek while watching the film, thinking: Jesus, what a lovely, beautiful, joyous, exuberant movie … With belated clarity came the realization that it wasn’t that Zacharek was placing the film within a ‘red/blue’ framework (the mention of which must have triggered some kind of involuntary gag response in me), but that she was arguing precisely the opposite; that historicized frames simply cannot contain the bursting spirit and abundant soulfulness of this film.

 

I was nervous when Michel Gondry said he was pursuing a solo project — aka, sans Charles Kauffman as his screenwriter – after the symbiotic genius of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Gondry is a certified master of visual sleight-of-hand, but could he manage to tell a coherent story without Kauffman’s narrative compass?

Apparently he’s recruited graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, of Eightball and Ghost World fame, to write a screen adaptation of the Rudy Rucker novel Master of Space and Time. So instead of Kauffman’s dense, narrative conceits, we can probably expect something a lot more linear and subdued (I am judging from having read much of Clowes’, but none of Rucker’s, work — ok, Master of Space and Time is now in my Amazon shopping cart). Suffice it to say, I am fairly tweaked about this development.

[from SuicideGirls (interview with Gondry forthcoming), via BoingBoing]