You know that old chestnut they have in Hollywood? The one that goes something like, "Why make one TV movie about Amy Fisher, when you could just as easily make three?" It's definitely out there, I think. Hence, when Fisher's affair with Joey Buttafuoco exploded in the news in 1992, all three major networks saw fit to make their own movie about it, giving Alyssa Milano, Drew Barrymore, and Nöelle Parker each a chance to try their hand at playing America's favorite gun-wielding teenager.
The natural thing to do, then, is splice all this archival footage together into one Amy Fisher 20th anniversary super-movie, which is exactly what director Dan Kapelovitz has done with Triple Fisher: Lethal Lolitas of Long Island, screening tonight at Videology. We caught up with him before the East Coast Premiere of what is being billed by some as "the Rashomon of found footage cinema" to find out why now, why Amy.
The New York Post reports today that the Sundance people are in talks with the uh, Brooklyn people to possibly bring some incarnation — or maybe an entire new branch of — the festival to DUMBO. Organizers are said to be scouting a location under the Brooklyn Bridge as a possible headquarters for the event, which would be put on in conjunction with the Bloomberg-backed Independent Filmmaker Project. Since the talks are still "very early," it seems like these developers could use a nudge. So, in the interest of the future of film and of Brooklyn, here are 5 hastily assembled but foolproof arguments in our favor. You can't resist the pull, Robert Redford. Stop trying.
Gangster Squad: This movie was pushed back from a fall-programmer date (the weekend after Labor Day) to a winter-programmer date (the second weekend of the year) so Warner Brothers could take the time to cut out a movie-theater shooting scene and give the movie some space after the Aurora tragedy. While I understand that movie theater carnage in particular might have felt creepy so soon after Aurora, even after multiple additional horrible shooting tragedies, I can't say that real life popped into my head at all while watching Squad. Frankly, Jack Reacher has a shooting scene far more uncomfortable than anything in this movie, because as retro as Reacher is in many respects, it feels less like a comic book than Squad which, as I mention in my review, has more in common with Dick Tracy than its more serious and grounded mob-movie cousins. Whether this is a triumph of gangster movie escapism, an example of onscreen violence so glorified we barely notice it, a testament to the numbing effect of actual violence around us, or just evidence of my movie-addled obliviousness, I can't really say. But just for the record: Gangster Squad has as much resonance regarding real-life shootings as Lucky Charms have to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:10 AM
Ready to collect dust on mantles throughout Hollywood
A bunch of old people who live in California announced today their favorite movies, actors, directors and writers of last year—what is otherwise known as the "Academy Award nominations." And they were largely predictable: as expected, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Les Miserables all received copious nods. The surprises are in the details: the people and movies who probably won't win, but who mix-up the race in interesting ways. Here are some of the biggest.
You know, sometimes a story comes along on a sleepy, slow-news afternoon that just makes you feel alive again as a blogger and a human, makes you squirm a little in your seat and think, "anything is possible in this crazy world of ours, anything at all." Today, it's the story of an anonymous extra on the Magic Mike set who turned that dream job into even more of a dream job, simply by sneaking her finger into Matthew McConaughey's ass during a pivotal scene. See?
Sadly, Gothamist reports this morning that Sol Yurick, author of the 1965 book that served as the basis for The Warriors, passed away this week from complications with lung cancer. He was 88.
Promised Land: Gus Van Sant's productive career-toggles between indie bona fides and earnest studio projects recalls Steven Soderbergh, patron saint of one-for-me, one-for-them-that's-really-also-for-me genre-hopping — but if anything, Van Sant's needle jumps around far more wildly. His mid-aughts "death trilogy"—Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days—is pure-art experimentation, yet his most mainstream work, most famously Good Will Hunting, is squarer and more conventional than almost any Soderbergh movie outside Erin Brockovich. Matt Damon has bounced around with him, through Van Sant's mainstream breakthrough and his stunning wilderness-wandering — he even cowrote both of them! He cowrites and stars in Promised Land (out wider this weekend after a limited year-end release), too, with Office drone John Krasinski supporting on both counts, and it's an odd synthesis of those two Van Sants: the story, about a natural gas company with sights set on a small town in Pennsylvania, and filmmaking are straight ahead, almost Eastwoodian in their lack of fuss, but the subject matter (fracking) and scale (small) are Participant Media-style indie.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Fuck yeah
In case you missed it, Jack Klugman died on Christmas Eve at the age of 90. The actor was beloved for his high-profile television roles, but I always most adored Klugman as an archetypal New Yorker (even if he was born in Philadelphia, died in California, and filmed The Odd Couple in LA): there was something rumpled-hatted about him even when he was cleaned up; he looked like he'd had a few even when he was sober. He was the personification of "urban" in the old-fashioned sense—of rainy streets, fedoras, night clubs, loneliness. Klugman was like a character out of an Edward Hopper painting or a Frank Sinatra song. Here are some of his best roles that exemplify that.
Zero Dark Thirty: It was striking to watch The Hurt Locker after months of hype to find that its alleged edge-of-seat qualities had more to do with psychology than storytelling. The Hurt Locker isn't a thriller, or even a drama, really: it's a character study that comes to some disturbing if obvious conclusions. Zero Dark Thirty, which reteams Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, arrives at an even more obvious ending: it's about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and climaxes, unsurprisingly, with the famous but secrecy-shrouded raid on his compound in Pakistan. Like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty looks at our recent overseas entanglements through the laser-focused eyes of its central character, but Thirty's CIA analyst Maya (Jessica Chastain), driven and single-minded as she is, is also more tightly hinged than Jeremy Renner's Hurt Locker daredevil. She needs to stay in control; terrorist hunting has an awful lot of hurry-up-and-wait.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 12:10 PM
Williamsburg Cinemas is set to open today, making it the fifth (or, sixth) movie theater on the southside of a neighborhood that just a few years ago had none. Each serves a particular niche, so if you need to know which one is right for you, it depends on what you're looking for.
Posted
by The Editors
on Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:00 AM
Does any image better express "Movies in 2012"?
I used to take the creation of Top 10 lists very seriously. I still do, but I no longer try to impress unborn generations with my definitive record of the year's personal-cultural-critical consensus. That just makes for predictable lists. Instead, now I use them to tell readers about all the awesome, crazy, and amazing movies I saw that year, ones maybe they didn't know a lot about, or hadn't considered seriously. You know you should see The Master; you don't need me to tell you that. (Right?)
As the new editor of The L's film section, I hope that ethos somewhat carries into our Fourth Annual Film Poll—that this won't just be a list of the usual suspects (although you will find The Master and Moonrise Kingdom here; hey, it was a strong year for established auteurs!) but will also include surprises, confounding choices, movies you never heard of, and movies you wish you hadn't heard of—movies that reflect the particular and often peculiar tastes of our writers.
You should watch more movies. Here's a bunch of awesome ones. Henry Stewart
Abendland Nikolaus Geyrhalter The Austrian chronicler gives us an addictive, HD nightscape of Europe at work, from security guards to mental-health hotline operators to Webcam porn actors to protesters and their riot police. A portrait emerges of a cordial, ever-fascinating civilization catered to and controlled to within an inch of its life—think Richard Scarry meets Harun Farocki.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 12:45 PM
Caveh Zahedi's documentary The Sheik and I, about his efforts to circumvent censorship while making a movie in the United Arab Emirates, opened on Friday amid controversy: a week ago, the director released online an eight-minute video called "I Was Blacklisted by Thom Powers," who is a powerful programmer of documentaries. Zahedi, who lives in Carroll Gardens, had sent Powers his film, looking for feedback, and Powers had a reaction similar to mine: "I... found it deeply troubling for its breach of filmmaking ethics and reckless behavior toward people who put their faith in you," Powers wrote in an email to Zahedi. "The film is framed as championing artistic freedom, but rather than bearing the brunt of risk yourself, you put the greater risk on others—including minors—who could risk deportation, loss of livelihood and potentially worse."
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Imagine a movie theater here
Though the business model—a movie theater that serves food and drinks to your seat!—has already arrived in Brooklyn thanks to Williamsburg's Nitehawk Cinema, the brand most closely associated with it is following right behind: the Alamo Drafthouse will open a location in Downtown Brooklyn as part of the City Point development on the old Dekalb Market site, Eater NY reports. The seven-screen theater plans to open in 2015, the year after a planned Upper West Side location, making it the third Alamo in the metropolitan region. (There's also one slated for Yonkers.)
Killing Them Softly: I loved Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, so I couldn't be more excited for his reteaming with Brad Pitt (who gave his best-pre-Tree of Life performance in Jesse James), unless it also costarred Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider, Casey Affleck, and Zooey Deschanel, and it doesn't, so just prepare yourselves now. The Weinsteins appear to be following my general why-not-just-release-this-movie-wide-and-see-what-happens distribution strategy, and, ok, seeing it in action, realizing that a talky crime drama from the Jesse James team is going out on 2,000 screens, maybe I'm starting to see why people don't just do this for whatever projects whatever movie stars have in the pipeline. Then again, Killing Them Softly is one of only two wide releases this weekend, and next weekend general audiences only get access to some Gerard Butler movie, so maybe consider the Killing Them Softly option a courtesy, albeit one that audiences will probably roundly ignore.
Life of Pi: When I went to see Wreck-It Ralph in Orlando, Florida (yep), I saw a pre-trailers featurette explaining why you should be psyched for Life of Pi because of its use of 3D technology. Regal theaters have one explaining why you should be psyched for Les Miserables because of its recorded-live singing; I realize it's a bit opportunistic but it is sort of neat to see movies hype themselves for technical reasons rather than just saying: Kaboom! Tom Cruise! Sideboob! (Actually, I would probably love a trailer that actually said those things.) Anyway, no less an authority than James Cameron goes all-in for this non-trailer, calling Life of Pi a masterpiece (that happens to be made using the 3D technology he developed). I'm psyched for any movie based on an unfilmable book, although I have to say, in the actual Life of Pi trailer, a lot of the digital stuff looks terrible. The water looks congealed, the tiger has that fussed-over slightly-too-mobile appearance common to CG creatures, and that glowing whale is half awe-inspiring, half shrouded in digital muck. I'm not anti-digital effects by any means; I just wonder if this will be a case of a great volume of effects overtaking great quality. Then again, Ang Lee's last effects-laden movie was the supposed misfire but actually pretty cool Hulk movie, and, more to the point, Lee never seems to make the same movie twice (I don't remember enough of Lust, Caution to make a joke about how it's actually exactly like Hulk, so feel free to make your own, Lust, Caution fans!).
It could have been lost forever, buried under layers of grime and rust with the nondescript title Twin Sisters. Instead, Leslie Anne Lewis of the National Film Preservation Foundation (described as a "nitrate sleuth"—whatever that is!) took note of two remarkable stills as they passed over her light table: a close-up of a hand of cards, and a portrait-like shot of a woman framed by smoke. Struck by the artistry of the two frames, Lewis began an investigation into the remaining reels. Knowing the names of the two stars, Betty Compson and Clive Brook, and Selznick, the American distributor, was enough information to deduce what she had: 1924's The White Shadow—one of the first films bearing the name of Alfred Hitchcock.
Breaking Dawn Part Two: It's times like these, when typing out the title of the sequel to the adaptation of the fourth book in the Twilight series, that I am grateful for the concise, near-mercenary honesty of a title like Fast Five. Because let's be real: this is Twilight 5, for a story that has no more business expanding beyond two or three parts than any number of low-rent horror franchises. I held out hope that perhaps the comparably incident-packed Breaking Dawn Part One, directed by the reasonably decent Bill Condon, might inject some life into movies that generally play like a few boring mid-season episodes of a creatively stalled TV show, just as I hoped that maybe 30 Days of Night's David Slade would give the third one a bit more horror-movie style. It didn't. It didn't. It never does. The best Twilight movie is still the first one, because at least that one had an excuse to look low-budget and vaguely amateurish. Maybe the fourth one would've been more fun with the contents of this movie, which apparently include Vampire Kristen Stewart and more low-rent vampire skirmishes, were allowed to stay with it; then again, a vampire-human wedding, vampire-human honeymoon boning, a pregnancy via vampire that should be impossible, a vampire-assisted cesarean section for a human-vampire hybrid birth, and a werewolf falling in love with a baby weren't enough to gin up some energy in Breaking Dawn Part One. So: once more into the Twilight breach, expecting some giggles and enthusiastically half-embarrassed audience reactions, hoping for a movie that is better than semi-terrible.
Posted
by Zachary Gomes
on Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Writer-director-star Patrick Wang’s debut In the Family follows Tennessee local Joey Williams as he is drawn into a battle for custody of his son, Chip, following the untimely death of his partner, Cody. This Friday, roughly a year after its original New York release, In the Family will reopen at Cinema Village. In the time since its initial release, the film has received praise from Roger Ebert and the New York Times and The L Magazine, been nominated for Best Debut Film at the Independent Spirit Awards, and will be screening in Sao Paolo and Taiwan. We spoke to Wang about how the movie keeps winning over audiences, why he shows the back of the main character's head so much, and what family is.
The story of the movie’s progress is pretty interesting. It had a pretty rough start, didn’t it? It was a really rough start. It kind of landed with a thud to begin with. You know festivals, distributors and even some of my collaborators weren’t that thrilled about the movie, and so it was a lonely time for about six months. Then the story changed, and it keeps changing. It’s unpredictable, and you never know if it’s going to change again over the next couple of weeks. The progress it’s made has been slow and I don’t know if we’ve had enough time that it’s going to pay off even more now that we’re back in New York. We’re returning to some other cities, too—San Francisco is one I’m very excited about.
