Moving and switching gears at work is hell on your free blogging time.
Read MoreElectric Shadow
Delays Ahead
I'm moving this weekend, so expect me to disappear for a few days. Back with reviews of Stop-Loss, They Killed Sister Dorothy, and Flying on One Engine at the very least, more if I can.
Read MoreSXSW08: Choke
SXSW08: Mongol
I saw Mongol in December at BNAT 9, and if you're here this week, I definitely recommend seeing it at SXSW. Even roughly 6-8 hours in to a 24-hour film festival, this one kept my wife and I rapt with attention for its 2 hour-plus runtime.
Read MoreSXSW08: Secrecy
I'm posting this in between some other catchups before I get ready for tonight's 9:30pm show of Choke. If I don't get this up now, it'll get lost in the shuffle, and I can't let that happen.
A couple hours ago I saw one of the more unsettling things I've seen since watching the first 20 minutes of The Poughkeepsie Tapes last December.
Secrecy was a roll of the dice pick for me on a morning when I knew it'd be completely up to me to see something I had no rep contact for or that Ashley wouldn't want to see, so I picked the one that had the most to do with politics and/or frightening "who watches the watchmen" kinds of questions. That kind of stuff unsettles her more than blood-and-gore horror any day of the week.
The doc primarily focuses on the US government's control, production, and obfuscation of information. Billions of dollars and millions of work hours go into the whole rocess. These days everyone seems to take for granted that the government hides things, rewrites history, and abuses its power on a regular basis. Only the most egregiously badly-handled coverups seem to even enter the American consciousness, let alone become front page news.
As in all bureaucracies, administrators cover up their screw ups that lead to people dying, whether one or a thousand. The directors collect an impressive and very effective set of interview subjects that run the gamut, but are all in some position to know how the beast works.
One of the more intimidating facets of those who had previously worked in the clandestine services was how readily they all seemed to agree that there are some things that the public should never know the truth about, regardless of the particular subject matter.
On the other hand, there are other things, like abuse of executive privelige, that have set so many dangerous precedents in the last eight years that are driving things that for the last century have been public knowledge behind an information blackout curtain.
The flick is really intriguing and definitely worth watching, I just don't know what means of distribution would serve it best.
For those still in town, Secrecy plays again Saturday 3/15, 2:30pm at Alamo South Lamar.
Read MoreSXSW08 Award Winners
In a Dream
Sister Dorothy
Read MoreStriking Out at SXSW08
As I do every year, I hit a point when the overwhelming wave of SXSW's first weekend knocks me over. I'm behind on writeups, interviews, panels, photos...everything. It seems to happen earlier every year.
Something relatively new keeps happening to me this year though: I can't get into anything at certain points in the day. Today and yesterday alone I completely struck out over and over, and when I went to the next closest option, that was full too. Is this karmic retribution for skipping 21 and Harold & Kumar 2? Couldn't be, if anything I should get bonus points for choosing stuff I can't see on 3000 screens soon.
The Missed List (so far):
Monday
Forgetting Sarah Marshall and #2 pick during the same slot Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (didn't get there in time running from downtown to South Lamar) as well as...
Dear Zachary set to start 90 minutes later, already full, and then...
Battle in Seattle: tried running back to downtown from S. Lamar with no luck
Tuesday
Nights & Weekends
Catching up on the last few days today...I'm taking the time I need to blow through my backlog.
Read MoreSXSW08: Bama Girl
I went to college in the southeast, so this doc focusing on the Homecoming Queen race at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa caught my eye early on. Alabama isn't really known for its progressive race relations attitudes, in case you didn't know (it's the internet, who knows where you're reading this from).
Jessica Joyce Thomas, a black undergrad, decided to take on an entity referred to as The Machine, which consisted of the most powerful, oldest, and white sororities and fraternities, who all compromise on one candidate to support every year, and in fact succeeded in passing voting reforms that made it easier for them to get what they want. Ostensibly this type of organization exists at all major universities in the US.
In particular, the southern universities I'm familiar with that have this type of group have the same organization and aims, which appears to promote keeping everything as crusty and white as possible in terms of not only people in power, but those in merely symbolic positions like Homecoming Queen.
Even though the position means very little to those anointed into them each year compared to others who run that have more passionate, progressive ideas of how to use the position, like Jessica.
In places in Bama Girl, you get to see the real-life people who were born into The Machine by virtue of who their parents are, but resist the trappings of what their great-grandparents decided the future should look like.
Jessica's quest for the crown is undeniably the focus of the film, but there are a few other candidates whose stories get some coverage, and that's what makes this a really compelling look at how primitively-minded many of the college kids put into places of leadership can be even in this enlightened age of information.
Bama Girl does not currently have a distribution deal, but certainly deserves to be seen by more people.
Read MoreSXSW08: In a Dream
Every year at SXSW, my list of must-see movies before the fest begins is usually pretty empty. I rely a great deal upon the SXSW Directory, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the vast expanse that is the Film portion of the conference. Thanks to that book and usually a good deal of word of mouth form those I trust, I am led to the particular undiscovered films that end up filling in most of my blanks on the dance card.
In a Dream director Jeremiah Zagar
Some of them are good enough, better than you or I could make, full of craft, but ultimately forgettable. There are others that I find detestable and unwatchable, which inevitably one friend of mine or another will love so much they refuse to relent blogging it to death or recommending it to people who will later hate them with the fire of a thousand suns for recommending they waste a couple hours of their life.
Then there are the few that transcend the ordinary cinematic experience, the ones you leave shaken loose from the mundane and little closer to heaven for a few hours afterward. To encapsulate these movies in a synopsis proves a difficult task indeed.
Last night I saw one of those films, one that (schedule permitting) I plan to see again before the end of the week, a rarity for a week when it's nearly impossible to see everything.
Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream could have been a very different film, and I'm very glad this is what it turned out to be.
The director's father, Isaiah Zagar, spends sometimes 14-16 hours a day working on the mosaic murals for which he has become legendary in Philadelphia, the city his family has called home for the last three decades or so. To just pick up a camera and point it at the prolific genius of his father's work would have been "doing the job", but
Jeremiah has instead set himself on making the masterpiece possible with the tools and resources he had available.
We have seen the "genius in my family everyone arbitrarily calls crazy" documentary.
We have seen the "deep, wounding family-rending trauma" documentary.
We have seen the "exposing vulnerabilities no one else is brave enough to" documentary.
We have seen them all in various iterations, these themes. Wondrously, Jeremiah has followed the majestic work of his father and broken these media into shards and chunks, carefully plastering them together in a provocative and fascinating mosaic of a his father's life.
Isaiah's work comes out unfiltered in his murals, spilling from his heart through the work of his hands all across these monuments he's built. The pictures and images are not always pleasant or easy to look at, but in doing so, I find myself relaxing my aversion to expressing my own vulnerability.
Jeremiah's film charts his family history beginning with his father's relationship with his mother Julia, proceeding to pick up characters as we go and constantly touching back on the past and completing the detail work around the whole picture. The symbiotic joys and pressures of maintaining the family Isaiah and Julia built frame the film, always centered around the destructive elements of their life together repairing and reconstructing it through all the crises they face. The film picks up in real-time at a decisive moment when that capacity to rebuild comes into question.
Other writers would summarize the vast majority of the "plot points" of the film, but I respect it too much to do that. In a Dream will have you question whether everyone's a little "crazy" in varying degress, rather than simply "crazy" or "sane." The movie will also help you reassess (as my wife and I did) how "difficult" your life really is at the end of the day. I came away feeling that, at least in this country, we've all got it pretty good.
Anyone and everyone who is in Austin this week should see this film if they are able to get in. It screens again Tuesday at 1:30pm and Thursday at 4pm, both days at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar.
An aside: Saturday morning, Isaiah and his team of muralists installed a series of murals on the fence outside Austin landmark Stubbs'. According to what I was told last night, someone has already stolen a portion of it. I took pictures that morning of the almost-finished product, pre-theft, in this post. A damn shame.
Read MoreIn a Dream director Jeremiah Zagar
SXSW08: Super High Me
I first met Michael Blieden five years ago when he came to SXSW 2003 with a wonderful film he wrote that Bob Odenkirk directed called Melvin Goes to Dinner. He returned a couple years later to SXSW 2005 with his own directorial debut, a doc called The Comedians of Comedy that followed Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, and Zach Galifianakis on a different kind of comedy tour than the plethora of other docs that end with "of Comedy". Both projects involved a select number of people talking about things that are important to them, why they're important, and why it matters in the grand scheme of things.
The moment I became aware of Super High Me's existence, my first thought was "I remember some kid making a joke about how he should do Super Size Me but for pot and he'd get paid to get high" coming out of the Super Size Me screening at SXSW 2004. Then I found out Doug Benson was the subject of the movie.
Then I found out Blieden directed it and I decided I had to see it, completely blind.
As I prefaced a review of an Obama documentary last week, I have to add a disclaimer here too: I don't smoke pot and think it should be decriminalized, but at the same time, I don't want people lighting a joint in public. Of course, I don't think we should have people just strolling the streets blowing tobacco smoke around either.
Economically speaking, legalizing and regulating the sale of marijuana would do wonders for the flagging US economy, as well as transform the paper industry, since non-"drug" hemp is a lot faster to renew than the wood pulp used for most paper these days. If people want the US to really "go green" it must start with how and what resources we use. Where the US goes, the world will follow.
People should be free to do whatever they please with their lungs and mental state, but it's my air just as much as it is yours. If you want to complain about where you can and can't smoke your dried leaf product of choice and enjoy another activity, like drink or watch a movie or eat dinner, that's the beauty of a market economy: somebody will build a business model around it.
The other thing I can't always get behind pot docs about is to some extent promoting the idea that getting stoned all the time isn't a major detriment to leading a productive life. The great thing to teach people is an ok way of living life just like any perpetual, anti-productive behavior...notice I said nothing about addiction.
Liking Blieden's previous work got me interested in seeing it past my personal barrier of it being "another pot doc" that says the same stuff, but...like, different, you know?
The bet pays off in spades, because Blieden and Benson do more with the material than just Super Size Me with marijuana, really digging in to some of the capitalist hypocrisy of ongoing US domestic policy with regard to pot. Highly recommended, no pun intended.
Read MoreSXSW08: The Wild Horse Redemption
The Wild Horse Redemption is one of the few instances of a documentary made about convicts that I enjoy. Most, along the lines of the filler content on MSNBC these days, make you feel trapped "on the inside" with them. This one frees you instead of trapping you. It's uplifting
I've been doing SXSW with my wife for the last two years, and whereas there are spots in the schedule where I say "you pick" and she invariably chooses something I'm not terribly interested in but then end up enjoying, I circled this one immediately after reading the synopsis of my own accord.
This review is short, but please do not read into that length a statement on the doc's quality. Anthropologically, the individual convicts the film focuses on have interesting personal stories that lead to a very interesting case study overall, especially parallel to the wild mustangs they help train. A guy who just can't get his act together, a guy whose life is irrevocably improved by the program, and an African American guy just starting his journey with it are the ones that stood out the most for me.
The only thing I could have done without were a lot of the music choices that took me out of the experience, but honestly it could be due to spending my life thus far hating the living daylights out of the twangy inspirational/semi-spiritual western music that make up the majority of the cues they use. That in and of itself isn't a reason to avoid seeing it though.
The Wild Horse Redemption plays on Sundance this May and later this year on Animal Planet.
Read MoreSXSW08: Dreams With Sharp Teeth
I skipped another major studio picture (Harold & Kumar 2)this evening to see something I've been looking forward to for some time, a biographical film about Harlan Ellison. I have not anticipated Dreams With Sharp Teeth for the same reason many others would, since I have never knowingly read any of his fiction, and have only seen The City on the Edge of Forever once all the way through, at last December's Butt Numb a Thon 9. There are those who would say that my Geek Card should be revoked on a charge of Lack of Sci-Fi Credibility. There are holes in everyone's lists of things to watch, as well as listen to and especially read (these days).
The above admitted deficiency does not extend to any sort of ignorance regarding who Mr. Ellison is in a general sense, nor how important he has been to Speculative Fiction as both a medium and his movement to keep people both reading and writing it.
All writers have blinks of hesitation before starting in on a piece of work. In agreement with a belief Harlan has held for a very long time, I know writing is fundamentally a job that involves hard work like any other. To write well, the process and ethic driving it must reflect it as just as worthwhile an "honest living" as setting girders into place or working on an assembly line. My personal experience is that it is a fear-driven enterprise where the more you do, the easier the going gets progressively, but you still find yourself doubting your capabilities, hence the concept of writer's block. I had only two true fears going in to writing this piece: 1) would the result meet the lofty expectations of seasoned writers like Harlan, and 2) I find myself fearing the approval of someone else. The second scares the hell out of me. When you start caring, you start writing to appease someone, and then it all goes downhill.
This portrait of the man/myth/monster (depending on perspective) that is Harlan Ellison is equal parts touching and sardonically hilarious. Every year at SXSW, I seem to find a "bio-doc" that I love very much, and this is probably it, plain and simple, just two days into the festival.
I enjoyed the excerpts of Harlan's writing (narrated by Ellison himself) interspersed throughout, and though not intended as advertisement for his work, I found myself urged more than ever to find every volume of his work I could and infuriate my wife with more books sitting on the shelf and taking up space I wasn't reading all at once.
One of the things that endears me to Harlan so much is that as pugnacious and confrontational as his reputation may paint him in your mind, he really has all the best of intentions. One of my favorite moments in Dreams With Sharp Teeth occurs when Harlan adamantly resolves that people do not have a right to just any opinion, but specifically to an informed opinion.
Hope that this movie arrives in some form where you reading this can see this truly fascinating portrait of one of the last passionate activist writers I believe we have left. Unlike most of the "giants" of the craft, it feels like he isn't just homogenizing themes, stories, or himself, and he never will.
Read MoreSXSW08: Crawford
I skipped the opening night movie (21) because it would be coming out soon and I had some things to take care of (aside from the fact it didn't seem like it'd set me on fire), so I've only just been able to see my first film at South by Southwest 2008, and if this is any indication, it's going to be another great year.
David Modigliani's Crawford is a about much more than the major change felt initially when George W. Bush first moved there in 2000 a few months before the election. It's more than you get out of a trailer or a quote from a friend. In fact, Crawford, Texas itself is a lot more than it may seem like at first.
This movie is more than a chronicle of events, humorous anecdotes, or an examination of what direction small-town America went in during these last eight long Bush Years. This is a movie about the future, and the film's relevance is even greater considering the pivotal role of the recent Texas Primary and the still uncertain picture regarding the Democratic nominee.
The intellectual elite (high-thread-counters, in the Hollywood Elsewhere parlance) may have it stuck in their heads that small towns across the country are full of ignorant, tobacco-chewing pro-Bush morons, a complacent idiocracy. Many saw the 2004 election map as straight up red and blue thanks to the arcane effect of the Electoral College on our voting system. Crawford as presented in the documentary by pro-Bushies and anti-Bush residents alike is that it's definitely a purple town, and you'd be surprised how often this is true in what are considered "rural" communities.
Those particular locals include a woman who owns a Bush merchandise shop and a Baptist preacher who prays for the day Bush will visit his church, expected types you'd see in "Bush Country". They also count among them anti-war activists who founded a Peace House and kids who completely defy the stereotype of their small town by not "chewing grass and wearing boots".
There are good ol' boys who as "good ol'" as they come but don't fall in line with the crap others buy on Fox News each night. They know Bush only gets outside with a chainsaw to get at some cedar trees when there are cameras on him and they wish he'd pick up more of his trash.
Plenty of people dislike the Bush regime and are aware of how disingenuous the "Crawford Good Ol' Boy" image is, but the more important examination, which Modigliani wisely chooses to focus on, is the tragic rise and fall evinced in the 74 minutes that the film runs. I watching it, the movie feels longer and richer than its runtime suggests.
The beginning of the Bush years in Crawford begins a local economic boom: every storefront on the main street is rented, and the town's former glory many recall comes back. As the years wear on, we approach the point where the country began to implode, and once it does, it's kind of surprising how bad things turn out until you remind yourself that George W. Bush invaded Crawford before Afghanistan or Iraq.
For me, the most pivotal story and relationship present in the film is shared by Misti Turbeville (a progressive, liberal history teacher), and a young man who became one of her pupils during those years named Tom Warlick. Tom went from believing everything he was told to searching out his own truth and standing up for it.
Tom goes through years of being picked on and emotionally crucified just for having his beliefs. One day he went to school wearing a homemade t-shirt that read "America Your Hands Are Bloody" listing the military casualties of most of the U.S.'s major wars. I grew up in north Texas, and I didn't make one of those shirts, but I know what just having that opinion is like, and it isn't pleasant.
In the film, Tom Warlick leads what I consider to be the epitome of the young "examined life": the kid who does like Walt Whitman urged and tore the pages out of the book of life that offended logic, reason, and decency and blazed his own path. Teachers like Mrs. Turbeville are the reason guys like him make it through the bullying and the intimidation. During Q&A after the screening, Misti remarked she thought Crawford "has matured like the nation has matured," which I took to mean that whether or not everyone is more open to the idea of thinking about and doing things differently, they know it's time for the new direction toward progress that Tom represents.
I'll say that you should take care reading other reviews that may ruin seeing the movie yourself. This is a movie that should not be spoiled for anyone. It really says something about where "red America" is at this point in time.
Read MoreSXSW08: In a Dream preview
Playing tomorrow night at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar (6:30pm) is In a Dream, a documentary focusing on Isaiah Zagar, a man whose amazing creative vision overlays dysfunction. He's a legendary mosaic muralist, who's managed to cover more of Philadelphia with his murals than teenagers have with graffiti. I'll be there tomorrow even though it also plays twice more. This morning, Zagar and his son (who directed the film) were outside the also legendary Stubb's Barbeque installing a set of his signature murals along the fence that surround the stage. I hope they stay permanently.
Read More
Senator Obama Goes to Africa
To get something out of the way right here up front, I'm a staunch supporter of Barack Obama's and have been since he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Where I may differ from a great number of Democrats out there is that when a whole lot more people were supporting John Kerry, John Edwards, or whoever else in 2004, I was campaigning for a former Republican, General Wes Clark (who could make an outstanding VP for Obama). Don't get me wrong, I'm a full-on Yellow Dog Democrat (rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican), but I think the things that separate the parties most fundamentally in the US isn't ideology, it's populist doctrine. The Republicans for a long, long time have represented the interests of big business and ignored the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.
The argument frequently used against Barack Obama's candidacy is that he isn't experienced enough to lead the US in the more and more complicated arena of foreign policy. The only documentary I've found out there gives the American public a better chance to look at Obama's character and capabilities as a diplomat abroad.
Bob Hercules and Keith Walker's Senator Obama Goes to Africa runs right around an hour, but don't let that discourage you from giving it a look. This film was made in 2006, before Obama had formally declared his candidacy for President, and if anything, I think it could very well have been an influential trip in that respect. The most nutritious part of Senator Obama for me was the relatively unvarnished look at the candidate, unlike any of the advertisements or video clips being circulated by Obama's campaign and supporters or that of his primary opponents up to this point.
Obama presents the erudite, energizing intellectual option, the truly enlightened American who doesn't have the historical baggage of Gore, Hillary, and others. I only hope the new generation of Democratic candidates don't just latch on to his coattails, but emerge from similar circumstances as Obama: not independently wealthy, but well-educated.
The wonder of the film is that it allows you to follow along and get a sense of how much "the real deal" Obama is as someone who can go overseas and command the respect of the world on top of understanding the issues affecting all of us, third world up to the superpowers.
Similarly to when I wrote about Al Franken's transformation during the runtime of All Franken: God Spoke, from entertainer to junior statesman, Obama makes a transformation here. Different from Franken's transformation, Obama as a junior Senator realized on this trip the great need his country and the world had for him at this point in the course of human events. It was this trip, I'm convinced, when Obama realized that the alleged "cult of personality" was a charge made in jealousy by others and that he would run a campaign like no one has, possibly ever.
I imagine we won't see as clean an observational portrait of Obama until after the election in November. Everything is going to be quite blatantly slanted, whether for or against. I like docs that really dig in and make an ideological statement, but I'm glad this one didn't. Instead, the filmmakers decided to sit back and observe, a much wiser choice, and it makes this film stand out amongst all the advertising that's out there.
First Run Features is the exclusive distributor of Senator Obama Goes to Africa and it is currently available from their website. First Run also put out One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, which Jeff liked a lot. This thing would make a lot of scratch if it were available through on-demand download services people are using to put video on all manner of digital devices, especially after he wins the nomination.
Read MoreFactory Girl DVD
This standout from The Weinstein Company is among the best single-disc releases of the year thus far, featuring not only the much more fleshed-out Unrated Cut of the film, but supplemental materials that aren't just there to fill space like so many other DVDs.
I really detest the SEXY UNRATED UNCUT marketing design on the cover and spine, but that's the only qualm I have with the whole thing. I thought the theatrical poster would've made a great cover, and having SEXY UNRATED UNCUT on the spine makes it look like it's glorified softcore porn to a guest who sees it on my shelf.
The Feature
My interview & writeup on the movie's history to the present can be found here.
George Hickenlooper's new cut of the film has additions and re-edits littered throughout (all noted painstakingly in the commentary track). The extra detail strokes lent to Edie and (moreso) Andy make this a definitively better version of the film. More scenes of Bridget and Andy together lets you see him interpersonally communicating with someone other than Edie, and that (among other additions) makes all the difference in painting him as a more empathetic character, squashing critical nitpicks of how "detatched" and "cold" he came off in the Theatrical Cut. Yes, he's both of those things at certain points, but that how it should be. This version just frames it all better.
Sienna Miller should never be underestimated, and since I first saw her in Alfie, I knew there was a lot more behind the pretty young woman on screen: a thoughtful, reactive talent who only needs good material to play with. You never see a blank "I'm an actor in a movie" stare, she's always present and thinking actively as the character. When other actresses of her generation are nominated for Academy Awards, it's a shame and a crime she wasn't up for one this past year, or the film been held for contention in the coming year. I think she could have won if people had seen this movie and not been barraged by tabloid trashing.
It's trite to say someone "disappeared into" a role, so I'll say Guy Pearce just plain is Andy Warhol for every second he's on-screen. There's no Willy Wonka caricature of the artist, just who he was as a vulnerable human being. He must be one of the hardest working people in the business to make it all look so effortless and fluid. He imbues Andy with a sensitivity and authenticity that I have yet to see applied to the character on-screen, and doubt I'll see again anytime soon.
Hickenlooper's supporting cast, including Jimmy Fallon and Hayden Christiansen, break from typing forced on them by the studios and what they're known for. No one sticks out like a sore thumb (quite the contrary), and the atmosphere they engender feels just right. Jump over to the interview for more on them.
Supplemental Materials
All the extras are worth watching, even the trailer, which you probably didn't see in theatres or on TV in the first place.
Feature Commentary w/ George Hickenlooper
George covers a lot of ground, pointing out new scenes, new edits, talking through the timeline of events the picture went through from beginning to end, and relating stories like the day Sienna auditioned (good cold reading is an auditioning actor's best weapon). He gives due credit to Harvey Weinstein for making the finished picture possible. He acknowledges a fair amount of give and take, saying this is as close to a director's cut as he could get, but makes it clear there was no Harvey Scissorhands of old present.
Deleted Scene with or without Director's Commentary
This one scene between Andy and Edie is a great example of many scenes improvised in-character based on documented conversations, recorded phone calls and the like. A great example of a deleted scene that gives an added perspective to the final film.
Featurette: The Real Edie
A succinct set of interviews with people seen in the closing credits talking more in-depth about Edie and who she was, including Factory veterans, George Plympton, and Edie's brother.
Featurette: Making Factory Girl
This making-of fills in some of the few gaps in George's feature commentary with contributions from the cast. Much more worthy of viewing than the EPK garbage on most discs.
Guy Pearce's Video Diary
This was my favorite part of the supplementals. Guy Pearce carried a camcorder around throughout filming, from the initial shooting through the reshoots in late 2006. You see Sienna cutting up before takes and Jimmy Fallon and others engaging in the kind of camaraderie behind the scenes that indicates why the film turned out well in the end: everyone had fun and liked working with each other. Everyone made scale, they weren't doing it for the money.
You can hear the concern in his voice when the camera fades up on the start of additional shooting. Insightful for those interested in the process behind making movies and enjoyable for anyone who has worked as a part of an artistic ensemble.
Sienna Miller Audition Tape
George relates in the commentary that Sienna saw her audition sides for the first time the moment she walked in the door. This is the audition tape she made after rushing in due to a flight delay without a shred of the amount of preparation she expected to have. Watch this after listening to the comment track and it'll be yet more interesting.
Buy it
Read MoreAssembling Factory Girl
In 1965, Edie Sedgwick left school in Cambridge and went to New York City. While there, she met Andy Warhol, became a cultural icon, and quickly succumbed to the temptations of fame and the indulgent excess that goes with it. The story of the film's production is almost as fascinating as the period of Edie's life it portrays.
"Even before we started shooting, the tabloid buzz had already killed us."
-director George Hickenlooper
I spoke with director George Hickenlooper last week about the film and the DVD coming out this Tuesday, which features a thoroughly reworked and enhanced cut of the movie. We talked about portions of the movie's history covered in various places, from the rumors and speculation to the final perspective he can now offer on the film in retrospect. There are mild to major spoilers throughout, so the short version is: go buy the DVD. A review of that will follow shortly. I would have included it here, but it's long as it stands.
The journey of Factory Girl was plagued by setback after setback, starting with the casting of the lead. When George first met Sienna Miller, he had no idea who she was.
GH: "All of a sudden, everyone's saying 'oh, you cast Jude Law's girlfriend because she's Jude Law's girlfriend?', which wasn't the case at all. I didn't know she was Jude Law's girlfriend when I auditioned her. I just knew was that she was this fun, talented actress from Keen Eddie.
"I didn't even read the tabloids until we got into making this movie, when I ended up in them. So, that's where it started and then Sienna had to drop out because of this play and then I cast Katie Holmes, and then a week after I cast her, she started dating Tom Cruise... I thought, 'wow, this is a great added bonus!' and then a week later (laughs) she drops out of the movie 'well, I guess not!' (laughs). Then I went back to Sienna, basically begging her 'hey, when your play's up, can you do this again?' and she was like 'sure!'
MC: "One of the things I think the film does and does well, I think, is put actors in roles, regardless of the size, that we don't often see them in, like Jimmy Fallon. I don't know if many people even caught Don Novello (Father Guido Sarducci) playing Hayden's character's manager. I mean Hayden himself, people know as the guy from the new Star Wars movies and that's it.
GH: "It's far more interesting to me to see people when they are... you know, a little bit broken and that goes for actors too, and I think that can really work into how you play a character. And I think there's no film it's more appropriate to do so in than Factory Girl, which is partly about how Andy Warhol worshipped the iconography of famous people. So, that's why I wanted to sort of pepper it with these faces that you knew but you hadn't seen them in this context, and I think you just have to go in there without that prejudice. Take Saturday Night Live out of your mind, take Star Wars out of your mind and look at these performances in a vacuum.
MC: "Hayden is a really fine actor, and I wish people would judge him on a more objective basis.
GH: "You know Star Wars is that huge monkey on his back. He didn't really have a director on that movie. I mean, George Lucas is a genius, but he's not really an auteur. He's not really an actor's director, that's not his strength. Hayden's a great actor, but he needs that direction like any other actor...I mean, Natalie Portman isn't even good in Star Wars.
MC: "A lot of people don't come off as good as they really are in those movies. Going back to Jimmy for a second, I particularly liked what you did with him in this picture because I thought when I saw him in Almost Famous, that was going to be the only time I'd get to see him do something other than what he was "typed" for.
GH: "He's a very good dramatic actor, he's a very good comedic actor, he's very versatile. I'm about to do this other picture, it's a thriller, and I'm hoping to cast him in that. It'd really be against type, he'd be the bad guy.
MC: "Please do. When he turns on Edie, it's vicious and cold. Completely unexpected based on what you've seen him do elsewhere.
GH: He's in this picture for Holly Wiersma (producer on Factory Girl) called Rocket and apparently he's quite good in it.
MC: "So before you started shooting you were set back just in casting Sienna, but then did you get pushed further back to work around her theatre schedule?
GH: "Well, we delayed the shooting initially because we still didn't have all of the money together. That was a long, long, ongoing process that is unfortunately what led us to Louisiana, because no one else was going to finance the movie.
Read MoreThe Grind
GH: "There was a gentleman's agreement that I would have a few days in New York to shoot, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. My producer, Holly Wiersma, never really trusted them from the beginning, and one of the reasons she brought Harvey into the picture was they weren't keeping their word on a lot of things, and they basically just kind of hid from everyone. They hid from me, they hid from Holly, they hid from Harvey for three months during the summer. "I was getting furious, because we were trying to get this film out before the end of the year, since we all thought Sienna deserved Oscar consideration. So I kind of took the bull by the horns and showed the picture to Jeff last August, under the condition that if he didn't like it he wouldn't write about it, and he really liked it and wrote that piece called "Derby Girl". That got everybody's attention. That's what suddenly got Harvey, but Harvey didn't have the negative, they hadn't finished turning the negative over to him yet...all kinds of details that I'm really not privy to...finally after a few weeks, LIFT started talking to Harvey again. "By then I was saying "look, we've gotta get this thing done. We've gotta start shooting again in the next two weeks, because I'm not gonna have enough time in the cutting room to get this thing ready for a December qualifying run. [LIFT] were like "yeah, yeah, you don't know what you're talking about"-- MC: "They obviously didn't have any concept of the timeline movies are made on.... GH: "They had no idea what the process was like, and sure enough, I didn't wrap until December 11th. I had about four days to cut all this material. I literally should have taken all the dailies and put them in a blender and say, "okay, this is Factory Girl". MC: "Which would've made it look like an actual Warhol film at that point. (laughs) It'd be six hours long... GH: (laughs) "I mean, I had 30 new pages of material I shot and 35 pages transcribed of documentary footage I shot...over an hour, hour and a half of new material I had to cut in to a movie that was already 90 minutes long. Then balance it, and massage it, let it evolve...The Big Push
The pressure was to get the movie out the door so they could meet the awards deadlines, but each day brought further and further diminishing returns. MC: "So at the point it was screening.... GH: "BAFTA saw a different cut than the Hollywood Foreign Press saw, than what the National Board of Review saw, than the Academy saw...then even after we made the Academy cut ...this is something no one really knows, even after we were making the Academy screeners, we were still making changes. We knew if we had gotten nominated, we would be disqualifying ourselves. I've never actually told anyone that because we knew knew the film wasn't finished and you know...at some point it was just "pencils up", you know, this film has to be in theatres in two weeks, and...there's really nothing more you can do. The Academy screenings that happened, the run was projected on video with a temp mix. I mean, it was just crazy." "Everybody saw radically different cuts....the rumors started compounding, because it was like "well this person's seen it, and I haven't seen it". When we had the L.A. Critics' screening, it was one version, and when it was time to show the N.Y. Critics, we pulled it. We didn't want to show them the same thing we showed the L.A. Critics, because we had another 48 hours to make it that much better. We were saying it was incrementally 'just so' much better based on the number of hours we had to work on it. MC: "So you could fly back and forth to each coasts to see the editing process on the movie... GH: "It's the closest I've ever been to live television."Death and Rebirth
With screenings being pulled left and right, and the film's continued editing after most contenders had long since locked final cuts, Factory Girl looked more and more like a trainwreck to be avoided or ignored. Many critics would not see past the controversy swirling around it and used the words "troubled" and "rough" in their reviews, relying on the instinct to pounce at any sign of weakness. The movie opened and made few waves, and come nomination time, Sienna had been out of the running for weeks thanks to the negative buzz. She recently appeared on Letterman in conjunction with promoting Interview with Steve Buscemi. Referring to playing Edie while showing a tattoo, I could swear I detected a hint of disappointment: most people in the audience didn't know what she was talking about. She gave one of the great performances of her or anyone's lifetime, and she looked resigned that no one would ever see it (we'l see about that). I loved so many parts of the movie, I assumed I would have to wait years to see a director's cut where George had the time to breathe in composing the final film. I first got in touch with George thanks to Jeff Wells, who I'd asked about finding a way to see the "Derby Girl Cut", wondering what else was out there. After an introduction, George agreed to let me see what came before the mad rush of 2006. There were new chunks of scenes and longer takes that were nowhere in the then-final cut. Shortly thereafter, he let me know he would soon have big news. GH: "Then what happened was in March, Harvey called me up...I had no idea why. I thought he was going to grumble about the movie not performing well, and he basically said 'hey look we just didn't have the time to get this right, why don't you go back in the cutting room' and he hooked me up with Kevin Tent who had been one of the editors, up in New York. Kevin, you may know, cut Sideways, About Schmidt...basically everything Alexander Payne's done. We spent about a week in a cutting room here in L.A. just massaging the film, and basically...it's not exactly a director's cut, but it's basically what I would have done if I'd had another month in the cutting room. MC: "Given the footage you had-- GH: "Yeah, and I liked a lot of the footage we had, I really did, and it's pretty close to what the movie would have been, because the cut you saw didn't even take into consideration a lot of New York footage, because we hadn't shot it yet by the time I put that one together [in August]. MC: "There were little bits...for example, Mary-Kate Olsen's brief appearance wasn't in the theatrical cut. GH: "It is restored in the new cut. In fact, you're going to see a lot of what we did in that cut on the DVD, and then you're gonna see a lot of stuff you've never seen at all. MC: "Among the many things Page Six and others took to the bank, the sex scene bears mentioning. Between the Derby Cut and the Theatrical Cut, one of the major differences I saw was there in particular. GH: "What happened there was in the original version I was shooting, Hayden didn't want to take his clothes off. I mean, it was January, it was freezing outside. He was like "look, it's obvious it's cold outside, you can see our breath...we're not gonna fuck with all our clothes off outside, it doesn't make sense". He and Sienna felt they did it in a way that was convincing and real in the context of the weather conditions, and I totally signed off on it. There was a sweetness to it and an innocence to it. "Then Harvey's view was that the scene needed to be much more intimate and much more sexual, and I can see that. I like the sex scene as it stands now. I like the old one too, but they happen at different points in the film now. The first one happened right after the conversation on the pier. the much more intimate one happens later after they've gone into the cabin. I think what's nice about the new sex scene is that it happens after her monologue about Minty and Bobby dying while they're sitting near the fireplace, and it serves as a kind of healing process after the loss of her brothers, whereas before it was more of a throwaway. MC: "Something I really liked was her delivery in the new cut... it didn't feel actor-ly, it was just spilling out of her head and she was letting herself become really vulnerable with this guy. GH: "I agree completely."The Love Story
MC: "Another thing I wanted to get into was how Edie and Andy interact, and whether there's more in there." GH: "There is." MC: "I felt like the theatrical cut...well, he could have come off to some as cold and unsympathetic." GH: "Yeah, I could go off for an hour on that. I can say that...I never thought of Andy Warhol in iconic terms. There are two ways to go in making a biopic: if you approach your subjects iconically, you come at it from the outside in, or, you try to dig down underneath the iconography to the human being below. I was most interested in making a very visceral film that looked at a concentrated period in Andy's life, this point where he was very vulnerable to a woman. "A gay man who would put himself on the line for his love of this straight woman. The gay man who is completely beaten up by his mother emotionally about getting married to a woman and having children, and finally the man who became so bitterly angry and viciously jealous when this woman turned to another man and being abandoned. I mean, he was in love with her, it was the one heterosexual relationship that he had, but he couldn't consummate because that wasn't his sexuality. "I wanted the film to feel like you were present...that you were there at that moment in Warhol's life where he wasn't looked up to and was still seen as a very minor artist. He was extremely petty and small-minded, and Edie elevated his career and lent a public persona to him. "A lot of critics beat me up over that, but a lot of critics don't do their homework and just know Andy Warhol as the second most important artist of the 20th Century, and when they see this petulant child, it doesn't measure up. They're not looking at him contextually at that point in his life. It's almost like critics were expecting this cookie cutter presentation of "look at me, I'm Andy Warhol, the second-most important artist of the 20th Century". "I mean, if you look at I Shot Andy Warhol or Basquiat ...those performances are good, but the characters are written like caricatures. I didn't want Warhol to be a caricature. I knew it'd be controversial and I knew I'd get beaten up over it, and I did. You know, fuck 'em. They're wrong. you can quote me on that MC: "I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in regards to the casting: either you go the way everyone says you should do it, or you do it the best way for the material. What I couldn't agree with in the reviews I was reading was how all these people were seeing Andy as so cold. I can certainly wrap my head around how they wold perceive him as this detached character the way the theatrical cut portrayed him, but maybe there was some more stuff you didn't get in on the first pass, I dunno--- GH: "No, no, you're right on the money, totally, and Guy Pearce would love you for saying that, because you know, Warhol wasn't cold and mean, he was hurt. He was very vunerable, and what he did was detach himself because he didn't know how to reconcile his feelings. The New York Times said I put it in Freudian terms, and I do." MC: "That was the relationship." GH: "Freud was right. Andy was abandoned by his mother, she didn't accept him on his sexual terms, he had problems with intimacy because of that, and when he got hurt, he just removed itself. It's very clear at the end Andy did feel remorse for Edie. Bridget Berlin played a phone call for me that she recorded between her and Andy around 1969 when Edie was wandering around New York strung out on heroin, and Bridget said "you should do something" and Andy said "she was so beautiful, why would someone so beautiful want to do that to themself?" We took that phone call, and it became the second confessional. "And it's funny, now I'm remembering, that earlier cut I showed Jeff, the one you saw, Guy and I were worried Andy was coming off cold, and he wasn't being represented the way we intended and that's why we shot that second confessional scene there at the end, which does humanize him, and it's based on a real phone call." MC: "The scene where Andy brings Edie home to mom, that's what sympathizes him for me, where this woman has mentally blocked herself from seeing anything other than this girl being who Andy's going to marry." GH: "Edie lived in such fear of abandonment, that it was important to her for everyone to get along. That was part of her naivete, that she thought everybody could just be together and get along. I've been in that situation myself, as the child of divorced parents. That's how Edie and Andy could connect, they were this sort of yin and yang. "They both had different relationships with their parents, but they fit perfectly as opposites because they were both searching for the same thing. then again, they were destined to abandon each other because that's how the cycle works, it's what they're used to on a primal level."The Final Product
GH: "You know that additional stuff with the psychiatrist? Sienna read all of that off cue cards. It was the last day of shooting...we were so under the gun. I had been up for 24 hours writing new material. She literally sat down in makeup watching the assistant director write her lines on cue cards because she didn't have time to memorize any of it." Watching the movie, you have no trouble believing she could do something like that. Sienna Miller is no mere starlet, she's here to stay. For that matter, Guy Pearce is the real definition of a leading man: the guy who does his job better than everyone else but doesn't rub it in their faces. We did the interview contained in this piece before I'd seen the new cut, and after seeing it, I feel like I've seen the whole thing for the first time. Whether you're a moviegoer who saw the film in its theatrical run or a critic who saw one of myriad awards season cuts, this is another animal entirely. Many portions of the film exist in whichever version you've seen, but this is how they fit together properly. The only version on DVD is the new Unrated Cut. The Theatrical Cut is nowhere to be found, and if it were my first time watching the film I'd prefer to not know it existed in the first place. There are a couple small things I still miss from old versions of the film, but the other changes more than make up for them. It isn't often that the best "extra feature" on a DVD is the film itself, but that's certainly the case here. Don't get me wrong, the extras are excellent, rounding out a disc that is worth buying day-and-date at full price. The reason I've been following this movie & story in particular over the last four months (while uprooting my life in the process) is that even though I recommend countless movies each year to friends and acquiantances, there aren't many that capture this much of my attention. I think this is an Important Film as a learning tool for aspiring directors and actors, and as a sterling example of How to Do a Biopic Right, among other things. I didn't pursue this because Jeff Wells wrote about liking it and he runs the site, or because I'm friends with anyone involved in making the film (I'm no one). I went after what I knew deep down was a good movie waiting for the right time to be seen. Four months ago I thought I'd get a sort of anthropological look at how the film fell apart and what it might have been, and I'm glad to have been wrong. What has emerged at the end of nearly two years of on-again, off-again shooting, rewriting, and re-editing is one of the best films of 2007, regardless of how many versions there have been or how it was painted, cornered, and killed by TV, online, and printed press. If you believe in real cinematic art, this will be one of the few movies that does it right this year.Moliere
Trailers like the one for Moliere are made by the studio, but now feel like they're a joke when we hear that "The Shining Revisited" voice. Romain Duris from The Beat That My Heart Skipped plays the French Bard.
Read MoreBlue Collar Saddles
Thanks to my compulsive Upcoming DVD-watching, I see that this week saw the release of a Blue Collar Comedy Tour/Blazing Saddles two-pack. The latter they like for all the wrong reasons, primarily that it's a movie where people still get to hate on black people with "those words". The most redneck two-pack...ever.
Read MoreDirector's Cut Lost & Found
Have directors lost all their power? Will or can DVD save the auteur?
Julie Taymor's Across the Universe is who-knows-where in editing limbo prior to release. Alec Baldwin's Shortcut to Happiness, formerly The Devil & Daniel Webster is seeing release in no major cities and then probably showing up on pay-cable, re-cut and re-titled, with Baldwin's name removed.
We've heard the reasons given by studios or executives to directors for not just pushing minor cuts, but slicing gaping wounds in movies over the years:
"It's just too long"
"It's not commercial"
"It won't win any awards"
"Audiences won't get this"
DVD has provided a reprieve for some that have received this backward handling from the studio machine. The most prominent DVD Director's Complete Version to date is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, lavishly treated to a 3-disc collector's edition by the Criterion Collection. DVD has more frequently over time given a new life to films formerly crippled by studio slashing and burning, most recently for Payback as well as Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.
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