MCN Columnists

Pride

DVD Interview: Ang Lee On Water

“I think nature is a great tool to visualize internal feelings, I am dramatically trained, not visually trained. All of these images come from what I need to express how the characters feel. It all came from there, hardly anything is purely visual [in a way] that I cannot explain why it came to me. It’s not like that. Because you feel peaceful, so you have this, it feels loss, so he has that. In turmoil, so you have the storm. It’s all about something. I admire people who just envision something, like the pen takes their hand to draw. My older son is like that, just drawing, I don’t know how people do that. To just draw. I am not like that, I am drama.”

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DVD Interview: Benh Zeitlin on Water

“There’s a real humility that comes from this sort of feeling when you are there, that New Orleans is very close to death in this way. It’s a presence in a way that I have never experienced anywhere else before, and it is all about… Every time it rains, water has this reminder of what it can do, and that your existence is this precarious thing that can be taken anyway at any moment by the water. Then at the same time it’s also where all the best food comes from! It’s an endlessly fascinating relationship and when I started making this film, I saw this. You look at a map, and you see this place where the water and the land are sewn together, where there is no clear border. And I wanted to explore what was at the frontlines of that place. So I would drive as far as I could go out into the marsh on all these different roads, and at the end of one of these roads was the town that became the film.”

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2012 = 10 + 23

With Zero Dark Thirty going wide only just this weekend and other films opening after Thursday’s Oscar nominations announcement, 2012′s not dead, it’s not even past. A top 10, plus twenty-three more movies, lightly annotated, with a documentary survey to come.

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Quote Unquotesee all »

“I don’t really think, Sean, that you need to know about my various sexual liaisons. Or that anyone else needs to. I did write about them. I filled a hundred pages of Moleskine notebooks with my one-night stands, my affairs. But I decided they didn’t belong in a professional memoir. First of all, these are real people we’re talking about. Many of them were enjoyable. Some were abject failures. My wife said to me when she read the pages, ‘Of what purpose is this in a memoir? Of what purpose is this other than to titillate?’ The point is, I never see them. It’s because I have nothing in common with them, frankly. And probably didn’t at the time. I could not provide a sensible reason why I married these women. The thing is, in the case of my marriages, it takes two people to fuck up a marriage. It wasn’t simply the fault of these women that I lost interest in them and realised they were insignificant relationships. Which is how I look at them right now–as being insignificant. I see them as blips.”
~ William Friedkin On Cutting Interviewers Off At The Sass

“I have to imagine from Mr. Spielberg’s point of view, the paradigm shift in the 1970s was just the new “normal,” a “halcyon era” from which we are straying in the 21st century–because theatrical exhibition is tenuous (as it has been since the 1940s), the home video market has dried up and people are watching pirated movies on their phone. Spielberg’s coming-of-age era was for him the halcyon period that the 21st century “implosion” will cause to go “crashing into the ground.” But he is wrong. The market for movies is actually diverse and highly segmented–although from the top-down movie industry vantage point and media punditry you would not think this to be true.  Would we really mourn for Mr. Spielberg or ourselves if Lincoln would have been made for cable or had played on public television?  Is it bad for humanity that cable television is creating wonderful, resonant stories in long-form series that people want to watch at home on TV (or streamed onto their computer)? I don’t think so, but it is a paradigm shift and it might affect people’s theatrical moviegoing habits. Televisions in people’s homes have had that effect for seven decades–it is not a new phenomenon. As Art House cinema impresarios we need to focus on what WE can do at our theaters and in our communities. It is not productive for us to fret over what pundits say or about what well-meaning filmmakers like the Stevens–Spielberg and Soderbergh–say. We should fret about what we can do in our communities. What we can do to support filmmakers.”
~ From A Response By Russ Collins, CEO, Michigan Theater–Ann Arbor And Director, Art House Convergence, To Mr. Spielberg