Festive

No Comments

• Haice says:

  April 16, 2010 at 1:07 pm

  Ingmar Bergman & Elliot Gould gets my vote for clas­sic match-up with Ingmar Bergman and David Carradine a close second.

• Discman says:

  April 16, 2010 at 1:58 pm

  Glenn, I just pos­ted at my blog about my own little – very little – corner of the festival-going world, lament­ing that I’ve had to sit through three (and count­ing) unan­nounced DVD pro­jec­tions, rather than film pro­jec­tions, at my most recent fest­iv­al screenings.
  Have you ever suffered this indig­nity, or are reg­u­lar festival-goers more able to over­look this switch­eroo, which for me has, all three times, been a major shock to the system?

• colinr says:

  April 16, 2010 at 7:08 pm

  Perhaps the prob­lem people have is that last years Cannes had a num­ber of big name and/or con­tro­ver­sial films that seemed to be per­fectly suited to both the art­house and to the gen­er­al audi­ence. This years’ line up at first glance seems a little more muted – maybe even more so than 2008, which had a num­ber of fas­cin­at­ing films even if they did­n’t exactly break through into a wider pub­lic’s conscious.
  The Kiarostami sounds inter­est­ing but seem­ingly a little more con­ven­tion­al after the more art installation-style pieces of recent times. The Kitano could be prom­ising to as a return to yak­uza ter­rit­ory, but again it seems also that it might simply be more con­ven­tion­al after Takeshis’, Glory To The Filmmaker and Achilles And The Tortoise. And is The Housemaid the first remake at Cannes? Is Burnt By The Sun 2 going to be as bland a retread as the title sug­gests? However, although these films don’t exactly thrill me, I’m of course open to them being excit­ing and sur­pris­ing – and of course for the films that I know noth­ing about by film­makers I’ve nev­er heard of, to be the big break­through of the festival.
  For me the pro­spect of new Lodge Kerrigan, Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira and Hong Sang-soo films in the Un Certain Regard sec­tion is where the excite­ment is so far! (I’m also curi­ous about the new Wang Xiaoshuai film and war­ily inter­ested in the new Hideo Nakata too)

• lazarus says:

  April 16, 2010 at 10:01 pm

  I still don’t think any­thing can top Vic Tayback and Raoul Ruiz, esp. con­sid­er­ing how the former­’s resume does­n’t really include any­thing note­worthy in terms of film work. I mean, was Ruiz an American TV junkie in the 70’s?

• Glenn Kenny says:

  April 16, 2010 at 10:16 pm

  @ Lazarus: Yeah, that’s a good one. Given this, like “Lear,” was a Golan-Globus con­coc­tion, I pre­sume that Tayback was their idea. What’s really cool, if I recall cor­rectly, is that Tayback does­n’t phone in his performance—he’s inves­ted and cred­ible. Martin Landau’s in it too, well before his “Ed Wood” reviv­al. And he’s fine as well. Such a trippy movie; real “see it to believe it” stuff.
  Ruiz would go on to direct…Billy “William” Baldwin in “Shattered Image,” which plays rather like a made-for-video, de-intellectualized, erotic-thriller ver­sion of a Ruiz film, which was weird, because it WAS a Ruiz fim.

• IV says:

  April 17, 2010 at 10:22 am

  And Billy Baldwin sup­posedly agreed to do the movie based on a review of THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH he’d read in a news­pa­per (he had not actu­ally seen a Ruiz film).

• IV says:

  April 17, 2010 at 10:59 am

  Discman,
  As a one­time head of print traffic (the depart­ment that deals with the acquis­i­tion, ship­ping, pro­jec­tion and tech­nic­al logist­ics of prints) at a large film fest­iv­al, I can tell you that these sorts of mis­haps hap­pen all the time, and that they are not always the fault of the festival.
  Screening, say, 150 films involves 300 ship­ments, and a cer­tain mar­gin of error is to be expec­ted. This is even truer at smal­ler fest­ivals like the ones you write about attend­ing, because they have to con­tend with the pri­or­ity dis­trib­ut­ors often give to big­ger fest­ivals (and hav­ing seen the prob­lems that crop up an a large, estab­lished and well-funded one, I can only ima­gine the sort of shit they have to put up with). Double-booking, etc. and oth­er errors of schedul­ing hap­pen, and they often don’t make them­selves obvi­ous until the print fails to arrive.
  Though it was our policy to announce whenev­er sub­sti­tu­tions would occur, there are still a lot of factors to con­sider, and often the reas­on a DVD sub­sti­tu­tion is not obvi­ous or announced until the screen­ing starts is because the staff is still work­ing on oth­er options (I’ve had to race from air freight depots to the theat­er sev­er­al times) or because a prob­lem is not found until right before the screen­ings. Sometimes there is a dis­crep­ancy between the tech­nic­al inform­a­tion provided about the film and its actu­al tech­nic­al require­ments, and some­times it’s some­thing strange that isn’t notice­able to the pro­jec­tion­ists build­ing up the prints (I’ve seen sev­er­al cases of unsub­titled prints arriv­ing, and of prints arriv­ing sub­titled in the wrong lan­guage; in one case we were sent an unsub­titled print, poin­ted out the mis­take, and were sent anoth­er unsub­titled print – all by a US-based distributor).
  I should also add that there is a great vari­ance in qual­ity when it comes to digit­al formats, and I’ve heard “why did you screen a DVD?” com­plaints about things that wer­en’t screened from DVD. It’s often dif­fi­cult to tell home video apart from DigiBeta, and low budget films and doc­u­ment­ar­ies shot on MiniDV (more of a viable format when I was doing print traffic, now cer­tainly replaced by HD) aren’t gonna look much bet­ter than a DVD in any format.
  Festivals require a lot of fast and last minute work. Though the tech­nic­al issues and schedul­ing are largely worked out a few months to a few weeks in advance, some­times you dis­cov­er that the inform­a­tion provided was more spec­u­la­tion than real­ity; some­times dis­trib­ut­ors expect to have a print struck and then don’t, or some­times a ship­ment (the usu­al policy is that fest­ivals pay for out­go­ing ship­ments) turns out to be more expens­ive than they either want to or can pay. As silly as it sounds, when I worked at a fest­iv­al, we had exchanges where dis­trib­ut­ors were try­ing to con­vince us to screen a DVD at the last minute because they did­n’t have enough prints / cop­ies or they could­n’t handle their ship­ping costs (which, for prints at an inter­na­tion­al fest­iv­al dur­ing a major fest­iv­al sea­son – when films are going from one con­tin­ent to anoth­er every few days – usu­ally run sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars each way).

• lazarus says:

  April 18, 2010 at 8:34 pm

  Shattered Image could have been worse, and to be fair it DOES pre-date Femme Fatale by a few years, so maybe we can add Ruiz’s name to the list of people De Palma has ripped off.

• Jake says:

  April 21, 2010 at 12:18 am

  High on my list of strange match-ups: the UFO-themed Miami Vice epis­ode “Missing Hours,” scrip­ted by the late great science-fiction writer Thomas M. Disch, dir­ec­ted by Ate de Jong (Drop Dead Fred), and guest star­ring both James Brown and…Chris Rock. In his first TV role.
  It’s not quite the same thing, but I nev­er cease to be tickled that William Saroyan’s cous­in was the cre­at­or of Alvin and the Chipmunks. And they wrote “Come On‑A My House” together!

• Brandon says:

  April 21, 2010 at 9:03 pm

  I’ve nev­er seen Godard’s King Lear, but I always remem­ber in my use of some early Microsoft Cinema data­base on CD-ROM (circa 1996?) that Quentin Tarantino was lis­ted as an act­or in the film, because he appar­ently put this on his resume assum­ing no one would watch it to check.…and appar­ently, like myself, Microsoft did­n’t either.…