“His prose may often rest on a banality (“we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that we’re not superior”) but his inner turmoil over such bland ideas, expressed with a post-adolescent intensity, is disarming.”
Ron Slate reviews the new book from actor, playwright and filmmaker Wallace Shawn, Essays. (Several months ago, we wrote about one of these essays, “Writing About Sex”.)
Total Film has published an installment of their regular feature “Movie by Movie,” about each one of Terry Gilliam’s films: “The Trials, the Tribulations, The Triumphs.” From Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky on to Time Bandits – about which there is an amazing story:
Gilliam was having a big argument with the studio about the ending, where the parents are blown up. The studio didn’t want exploding parents at the end of a movie. So he agreed to have a test screening in Fresno, with parents. But there was something wrong with the print, the sound was garbled, and it died altogether about a third of the way through. The test audience left, writing on their feedback cards that the one thing they liked most, was the ending — that is, they were relieved it was over! But the studio never found out the screening got botched, and so Gilliam got to keep his exploding parents.
Similar stories are given for Brazil, Baron von Munchausen, the Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing, the Brothers Grimm, Tideland, and Doctor Parnassus.
Ed Ruscha, photographer of twenty-six affectless Standard gas stations in LA, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and painter of words floating in space, with or without a setting, is the subject of a retrospective at London’s Hayward gallery, and the Times of London decided to ask David Lynch what he thinks of it. (Who better to ask, really?) Bottom line: “I like to think the California sun has burnt out all unnecessary elements in his work.” Read more »
Synth Britannia is a documentary about the emergence of British synth pop (trailer here), from the “sinister” 1971 Moog score for A Clockwork Orange to Depeche Mode, and the Telegraph has published an interesting review of the film.
First key quote: ” ‘We thought we were avant-garde,’ says Andy McCluskey of OMD, ‘but we were the future of pop.’ ”
Second key quote: “Today, electronic sounds dominate the charts. But we’ve domesticated the electricity that once sounded so exciting and packed it into little white computers. As Human League founder Martyn Ware says, the element of risk has gone and watching even the pioneering Kraftwerk on their last tour ‘was like watching four old guys checking their email’.”
For the next three days you can watch it over on the BBC4 website.
The Rumpus just published my review of Abel Ferrara’s documentary about the Hotel Chelsea in decline, Chelsea on the Rocks:
The Hotel Chelsea is legendary, with its century and more of history as New York City’s shelter for artists, actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, dancers, and other eccentrics who have trouble paying their bills on time. More than legendary — the Chelsea is mythic. So much so, it’s almost hard to believe the place is not some novelist’s invention, some kind of exemplary fable about living the artist’s life in America: residents arrive too late and leave too soon (or the other way around), they fail, or maybe succeed, and they drink too much, and have sex with all the wrong people, and get addicted to drugs, and romances start and fizzle out and hearts are broken, and death, murder, and suicide haunt the corridors; but every day, they work on their art, whatever it be, and though most are destined for obscurity, the list of famous residents is long and awe-inspiring.
Recently I bought a copy of Farber on Film, and I’ve been flipping through it, sporadically reading here and there; last week I happened across his famous piece on Sunset Boulevard (1950). These lines and observations are fairly well-known, but they still hold up to re-reading. Check it out: Read more »
The Believer just published an interview by Sheila Heti with Agnès Varda, whose first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), is sometimes thought of as the first breaker in the nouvelle vague. Criterion just released a box set collecting 4 of Varda’s most influential films.
Contrary to what Heti writes, neither Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (aka the Gleaners and I) nor Deux ans après are included in that set. But they’re a wonderful pair of documentaries about scavengers and scavenging that I recommend you see. They were released in 2002 as a single DVD.
Early on in the first section, Varda talks about her motivations in 1954 for trying to make a strikingly different kind of film from what had gone before: Read more »
There’s an interview with Rudy Wurlitzer over at Chuck Palahniuk’s site; we recently reviewed his first novel, Nog. Although the introduction features some questionable vocab (Wurlitzer is said to be “imminently” readable, which I guess means he’s always about to be readable), the interview itself is interesting and worth checking out.
At one point Wurlitzer dismisses decades of reviews that peg Nog as a record of a drug trip — based upon no evidence whatsoever, I might add, apart from sales copy — and he describes his artistic aims really well. I recommend that bit of the interview.
But that’s not the part I want to quote. The part I’m going to present you is his story of introducing Bob Dylan to Sam Peckinpah. It involves semi-nudity, gunfire, and tequila. (Like many good stories in life.) Check it after the jump.
Read more »
Last week I was reading a review by Arvan Reese of two films, Hot & Bothered and Bill & Desiree, on a website called SexGenderBody. I found the review via @TonyComstock, who made the latter film — which I’m sure is great! — but I want to quote from the review of the first film, which is a documentary about feminist pornography. Reese talks about the “question of how feminism and pornography intersect, coexist and define each other,” and goes on:
“In considering it myself I figured if women are choosing, then feminism is present. The presence of sex is really a non-issue, because it’s their work. It is important but if we were talking about women as carpenters or accountants, would we still be struggling to reconcile their jobs with feminism?
I think that because it is sex, societal norms give people permission to assume that their negative judgment has greater value and must be taken seriously.”
Link.
The Rumpus just published my long interview with Tamim Ansary about Afghanistan and the TV show Afghan Star. Excerpt:
I thought it’d be interesting to sit down with Tamim and subject my naive reactions to his expertise. The result was a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation nominally about the film, but really about Afghanistan in general, touching upon music, the country’s ethnic diversity, the status of women, democracy, the pariah status of artistic truth-tellers like Khaled Hosseini, the successive waves of modernization and backlash that have convulsed the country since 1918, “old men with beards saying horrible things,” and — as a weird bonus — a popular but creepy overweight singer who, in his heyday, walked upon women’s hair on his way to the stage.