My wife and daughter and son-in-law are on the road again, this time on Dauphin Island, one of the barrier islands off of the Alabama Gulf coast.  There’s a real Low Country vibe here: I almost expect Jimmy Buffet to descend upon us with a ravening horde of parrotheads.  It’s scary that way.

It’s bayou country down here, and in fact we’re just a few miles from Bayou La Batre, a place that’s had a weird, sideways, film-related history.  In the movie Forrest Gump — named as one of the 20 most overrated films by Premiere magazine — Bayou La Batre was the home of Forrest’s buddy Bubba Blue, and later the Bubba Gump shrimp company.  Not that it was actually filmed there, you understand: Forrest Gump was filmed in nine states plus the District of Columbia, but apparently none of them were Alabama.

The other film-related happening in Bayou La Batre was the building in 2005 of the Black Pearl, Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship in the sequels to Pirates of the Carribean. The Bayou is a center for ship-building, and Disney needed themselves a pirate ship, so they contracted with Steiner Shipyard to build the jet-black boat in secret, then sailed it to the Caribbean to shoot the films.  Actually, the Pearl is just a prop, a shell built over a 96-foot utility boat.

So there you go.   The state of film-making in Bayou La Batre.  A location that never was, and a ship that was but wasn’t, if you get what I’m trying to say.  Movie magic at its best, and all right here — or not here, as the case may be — in South Alabama.

I hope everybody has a happy Fourth of July, and eats a lot of hotdogs and drinks a lot of beer!

This man has more money than you.

Ok, I’ve not seen Transformers the Second, nor have I seen Transformers pere. Nor do I intend to.  But, looking at all the blogging in blog-land, all the critical fulminating and foaming-at-the-mouth — some of which is by bloggers and critics I consider to be friends — all I can say is CHILL OUT, for God’s sake.  It’s like, don’t go see the damn thing if you’re not going to like it, and I assure you: you’re not going to like it.

It’s like clockwork.  Like the return of the swans, or swallows, or whatever they are, to Capistrano.  It’s predictable as hell, Michael Bay is going to make a piece of sh*t movie, it’s going to make a ton of money, and critics are going to whine about it in multitudinous articles, filling up column-inches or column-pixels, telling us that it’s the end of movies as we know it when, in reality, it’s just another piece of sh*t Michael Bay movie.

And Bay just eggs  ‘em on.  Here’s what he said in the Los Angeles Times:

“I think they reviewed the wrong movie. They just don’t understand the movie and its audience. It’s silly fun,” Bay said over the weekend of the many “Transformers” critical detractors. “I am convinced that they are born with the anti-fun gene. The reviews are just so vicious. A lot of them are more personal than anything else.”

What it really is, of course, is a big fat circle jerk, where everybody gets something from the affair.  Bay gets press for his latest abortion, the critics and bloggers and associated blatherers get something to fulminate about, Bay gets press for his latest abortion, the critics and bloggers and associated blatherers get something to fulminate about, and round and round it goes.

Ah, those lazy,  hazy, crazy days of Summer.

I had intended to write something for Flickhead’s Claude Chabrol Blogathon, but it took me a long time to get around to it, and I am a day late and a dollar short.  Part of it was strictly time: it’s been crazy at Chez Olson, and particularly at the office.  But another part of it was my reluctance to write about a subject I know little about.  I know, I know:  that hasn’t stopped me before.  But Chabrol is different:  a certified grand master of filmmaking, he’s been directing films since the late fifties, about as long as anyone I know of, even longer than Godard.  As a result, there’s a tremendous amount of material out there, and I’ve seen just a tiny fraction of it.

The Flower of Evil is, in fact, only the second Chabrol I’ve seen.  It is a psychological thriller set among the bourgeois denizens of Bordeaux.  In the opening scene, the camera floats up the staircase of a large house, past a huddled woman, and comes to rest upon a corpse in a darkened room.  Then cut to the airport, where François Vasseur (Benoît Magimel) is coming home after four years in the States.  His father Gérard (Bernard Le Coq) picks him up at the airport; much thinly-veiled U.S. bashing ensues as he is incredulous that his son enjoyed his time there.  It’s hard to be sure, but Gérard sure looks like the corpse in the bedroom.

Continue reading Thoughts on La Fleur du mal (The Flower of Evil)

I suppose it’s inevitable that this film be compared to 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction, but it’s really not the same kind of beast.  It’s true that the central conceit of both is the same: a fictional creation becomes self-aware, taking on a life of its own, but that’s where the similarities end.  Fiction is at heart a Will Ferrell vehicle and, while amusing enough, is contained by those modest ambitions.  Lovely By Surprise sets its sights higher, as an exploration of loss and grief and through them, the process of literary creation.

In Fiction, the tale is told from Ferrell’s character’s point of view, thus limiting the ambiguity of the tale.  We see Ferrell, we hear the voice of the narrator in his head, and we know from pretty near the outset that he is not crazy, that indeed he is a character in another person’s novel.  Lovely is told from a rather more interesting place, from the author’s point of view, and we don’t know whether she’s imagining things or not, whether her belief that one of her characters is aware that he’s being written is true, or whether it’s the product of a troubled mind.

Carrie Preston is Marian, a writer in the throes of creating a first novel.  As the film opens, she is relating the plot to her teacher Jackson (Austin Pendleton), and as she introduces her characters, we are introduced to them too:  Mopekey (Dallas Roberts) and Humkin (Michael Chernus) are brothers living on a houseboat in the middle of a barren field.  They survive on cereal and milk, and have no first-hand knowledge of the outside world.  Mopekey has no curiousity, no desire to find out what’s beyond the bounds of their little world.  Humkin, on the other hand, does: he yearns to be free of the house-boat bounds, and sets about planning to leave.

Continue reading Lovely By Surprise

Didn’t John Carpenter do this with James Woods and one of those Baldwin brothers?  (Oh yeah … that was with vampires.)

While I’m working on a Chabrol . . . thang . . . for Flickhead, here are a few turns around the cine-blog-o-sphere that caught my eye:

In a reversal of the usual way of the world, a property is actually moving from West to East, rather than the other way around.  After American remake after American remake of Asian films — Ringu becomes The Ring, Ju-on becomes  The Grudge, Infernal Affairs becomes Marty’s Oscar — finally one is moving the other way.  And wouldn’t you know that it’d be from the Coens?  Zhang Yimou, director of Raise the Red Lantern, To Live and Hero, is remaking Blood Simple, the film that put the brothers on the map.  According to the Hollywood Reporter,

Filming on the Chinese film “San Qiang Pai An Jing Qi” — which roughly translates as “The Stunning Case of the Three Gun Shots” — kicked off June 9, Ping Xue, a publicist at Zhang’s Beijing New Picture Film Co. said in a phone interview from Beijing.

Zhang, who hasn’t directed a film since 2006’s The Curse of the Golden Flower, is perhaps best known to the general public for mounting the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics.  Apparently, he’s made a break from wuxia, and it’s about time.  But the Coens?  We’ll see . . .

You know a movie’s bad when Roger Ebert gives it one star.  He’s done it for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, one of this Summer’’s big tent poles.  I can’t remember the last time he did that.  Well, actually,  he did it last week in his review of Year One. It must be some kind of Summer low point with two one-star Ebert reviews in a row.  Here’s an excerpt of the Transformers review:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

And that’s only the first paragraph.  David Hudson has more fallout over at his blog.

And Now for some Incredibly Bad Ideas

• Variety reports that “Adam Sandler, Cher, Jon Favreau, Sylvester Stallone and Judd Apatow will provide voices for the animals in MGM’s live-action comedy ‘The Zookeeper,’ starring Kevin James and Rosario Dawson.”
• The 2010 Oscars will have ten nominees for Best Picture.  Steven Zeitchik claims there’s a downside.  Who’d have guessed?
• Despite two flops in a row, and not having made a funny movie since 48 Hours, studios keep hiring Eddie Murphy.  Brooks Barnes explains why in The Times.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le salaire de la peur, 1953) is well-known among cinephiles on several fronts.  First, once its second half kicks into gear, and its protagonists are hurtling through the countryside in nitro-laden trucks, it is one of the most nail-biting exercises on film.  Wages – along with Les Diaboliques — helped establish Clouzot as major director in international circles.   He was at one time considered on a par with Hitchcock as a director of thrillers, and Hitch is said to have felt that his title as “Master of Suspense” was in danger.

In 1977, William Friedkin — following up his massive hit The Exorcist — remade the film as Sorcerer, with an international cast and a massive (at the time) budget.  For various reasons — not the least of which was its opening concurrently with a little film called Star Wars — it became one of the infamous box-office failures of the ’70s, and took much of the polish off Friedkin’s boy-wonder image.

By the 70s, the country was in a post-Watergate mood; it had become fashionable to critique American foreign influence.  In that climate, the story’s criticism of American corporate dealings wasn’t a big deal.  This was not the case in the mid-fifties: Wages was released in the United States with significant cuts, designed to placate American audiences who would not take kindly to its heavy-handed treatment of American involvement in Latin American.

Continue reading The Wages of Henri-Georges Clouzot

It’s the day after TOERIFC, and I feel like I spent all of the previous day blogging. Which I did, of course: blogging is more than just writing posts, it’s participating in the conversation, which our club is specifically designed to foster.  On a TOERIFC day, I get the same blog-fatigue I get after I’ve written a particularly taxing post which,  given my obsessive proclivities, a lot of them are.  I have trouble writing off-the-cuff posts, even though (as a lot of people have discovered) they are often the ones that get the most traffic.  I’m getting better at that, I think:  to paraphrase Stan Laurel, I used to be unimaginative, but I’m better now.

Speaking of Stan Laurel, it seems to me you don’t hear a lot about him and his partner Oliver Hardy anymore.  Laurel and Hardy were staples for me and my Dad when I was growing up.  There was a show, I think it may have been syndicated, called “Laurel and Hardy Theater,” on every Saturday afternoon, which we never missed.  I want to say it showed all their shorts, but I might be misremembering.

The boys first appeared as a bone-fide comedy team in The Second Hundred Years, a comedy short for Hal Roach studios.  Over the next few years, they successfully made the transition from silents to sound — their voices actually enhanced their persona’s rather than harmed them, as it did for so many other silent stars.  In fact, I can’t picture Stan without his reedy English accent or Ollie without that pompous Southern twang.

Continue reading Son of the Sons of the Desert

Today, at Flickhead’s!  Come join the discussion!

Man Push Cart is definitely a Movie That’s Good for You: it shows us a slice of city life that we know is there, but often do not know much about.  Further, in many cases, we don’t want to know about it, because our lives of convenience and ease are built upon people like Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the man who is pushing a cart, struggling to eke out marginal existences between the pinnacles of gleaming steel.

Ahmad is an immigrant, a former Pakistani rock star who, through circumstances not entirely clear, has ended up operating one of those ubiquitous Manhattan push carts.   Every morning, beginning at 3:30 am, he struggles to push his stainless-steel coffee cart through the New York traffic to its appointed spot.  There, harried Manhattan office workers buy coffee and bagels to jump start their day.  In the afternoon, he reverses his route, struggling to return the cart back to it’s rented spot.

Ahmad is purchasing the cart on credit from a man who is a cart-pusher himself, and who is also in the business of financing and selling the contraptions to his countrymen.  Ahmad has a son, living with his dead wife’s parents, with whom he dreams of being reunited.  His in-laws blame him for their daughter’s death — the nature of which is also unclear — and will hardly let him see the child.

Continue reading Man Push Cart