Fantastical (fantastic + whimsical) is the best word I can come up with to describe the output of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Tim Burton, and sometimes Sophia Coppola.
Their playful, artful films mine the world of daydreams and childhood. I’ve noticed that the fans of these filmmakers are on average decades younger than the usual art-house crowd.
Anderson has been out in full-throttle Fox publicity-tour-mode for “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” I caught him with his regular star, Jason Schwartzman yesterday evening at the cool café/performance space, 92Y Tribeca, where the two were so hilarious I didn’t mind that the film was not screened at the event. I can’t wait to see it, though— it looks like a barrel of monkeys.
Here’s a tiny glimpse of the audience Q&A, my favorite questions and answers, paraphrased from memory:
Q: What movie would you like to remake?
A: Schwartzman- I’d love to see many filmmakers make the same film, like musicians covering the same song.
Q: Could you talk about the use of Futura in all your films?
A: Anderson- A font question! Stanley Kubrick used it, too, and it’s very possible I may have noticed that.
The pair seemed comfortable riffing with each other and giving odd and surprising answers to the usual boilerplate questions asked at these events.
09-21-09: Ferrara after the screening of his personal, freewheeling Chelsea on the Rocks
Ferrara walked into the screening lounge of the Jane as the closing credits were rolling on his loose history of the famed Chelsea Hotel, featuring Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Robert Crumb and many, many others.
“You don’t look like a group with any questions….where’s the party?” he said to the motley crew of rock musicians, artists and various other residents and fans of the Chelsea, in lieu of a Q&A.
09-21-09: Jude Law in Rage via iPhone held by writer/director Sally Potter
“I can’t think of a worse way to watch a movie than on a cell phone,” commented a reader on a “Thompson on Hollywood” blog post announcing Rage.
But here’s the thing—this film was made to be watched on a phone. Maybe it should have been called a series of webisodes. Of course, that might have scared people from buying the DVD. If you watch the DVD, as I did, you will see that its natural home is the hand-held device, seen in daily sections over the course of a week, as the story progresses during Fashion Week. Internet viewing is another option.
Potter wrote the dramatic thriller as a conventional script ten years ago, and only after having her own blog and website did she “unlock the form for the film,” using close-ups exclusively because, she told me, “the close-up is the language of MySpace and Facebook.”
“This isn’t about shoving a movie into a cell phone,” she said. “Everything in this film could have been made by a child with a cell phone in their bedroom.”
“I needed to make it very graphic, very pure, very simple…with no cutaways, no locations, no sets, and a green screen. The dynamic had to be in the performances,” she said. She cast Jude Law, Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi, John Leguizamo, Lily Cole and others to play recurring characters in brief shots, reminiscent of screen tests.
The eye-popping background colors were copied digitally from somewhere on the actor’s face, body, or clothing.
Filmmakers and adventurous audiences should see this beautifully crafted and acted humorous film, as it presents a new direction for entertainment.
The documentaries that really work for me are those that transcend their topic, ones in which the directors follow their muse, and “allow” the story to come, often in cinéma vérité.
Films such as Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost 1 and 2, Metallica, and some of the Sundance channel episodes of Iconoclasts, directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, fit into this category. They are not what they appear to be on the surface. Aspects of human nature are revealed through divining, not hunting down a story. There are themes and moments in this body of work that I consider life changing.
Earlier this month, at the Radical Media production company, it didn’t surprise me when Joe Berlinger said he had originally resisted the invitation to film the story for Crude, a legal battle against Chevron related to oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon that resulted in environmental and human rights violations. It wasn’t exactly a muse-following project. “I thought it was more like a ‘60 Minutes’ piece,” he said, “The films I’m known for are ambiguous human portraits.”
He finally agreed to the request, offered by the American legal advisor for the Ecuadorians, on the condition that the film take a neutral position on the lawsuit, which had been going on for sixteen years, with no end in sight.
The film is in theaters now and there is still no end in sight. Crude is not a feel good movie. We don’t get to see justice served as we have come to expect in a David and Goliath set up like this—indigenous people versus a multinational corporation.
Chevron may not even be guilty in the strictest sense of the law, but one can’t help but feel some culpability lurking in the shadows of those corporate corridors. Berlinger said he was openly surveilled there, with a Chevron camera crew standing behind him, documenting his filming.
So instead of the story of little guys versus big guys, Berlinger allowed another theme to take its place, an inquiry into “the moral responsibility of handling human rights catastrophes” as well as “the inadequacy of solving these issues through lawsuits.”
And there’s more to the story when you read between the lines of the film. “It’s a comment on the nature of celebrities and political activism,” he said. Trudie Styler and Sting participate with support and fundraising through their Rainforest Foundation, but their privileged lives are a stark contrast to the native people of the rainforest that their organization nobly aids.
“Will there be a sequel?” I asked Berlinger. “We’ve been following the case for Paradise Lost, and we’re working on number 3 now, but no, this film took too great a toll on me emotionally and physically,” he said.
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