Quotes

Kent Jones On The Bling Ring

“Unlike Spring Breakers, with which the film will inevitably be compared (alongside Schrader’s The Canyons), The Bling Ring goes about its business quietly but with a tremendous purity of focus. The film casts such a lovely spell that its full force may hit only after the lights come up.”
~ Kent Jones On The Bling Ring

Anne T. Donahue On Reaction To Angelina Jolie’s Op-Ed

“Sexist men. Not some men, and certainly not all men. Sexist ones. The ones who believe a woman’s body somehow owes them something. The ones who consider breasts their turf. The ones who feel they’ve earned the right to ogle Angelina — or worse, that Brad Pitt slums amongst them, and will somehow see Angelina as less of a woman because … why? She wanted to save her life so she could spend more time with herself and the children? What actual kind of fuckery is this.”
~ Anne T. Donahue On Reaction To Angelina Jolie’s Op-Ed

Rocchi With Numbers A-blazing

“One of the biggest conversations we’ve been having lately is about guns. After Newtown, after Aurora, after Columbine, and so on and so on, there’s a palpable desire to talk about America and guns. Some want to talk about how empowering responsible individuals to go armed, as outlined in the 2nd Amendment, would keep us safer, and that the actions of lunatics shouldn’t be used against responsible people exercising and enjoying a protected right. Other want to talk about how better regulating guns—background checks, or constraints on ammo type or magazine capacity—might fill out the 28 words of the Second Amendment with more nuanced and complex responses to advances in technology and circumstance.  (As a side note I used to be very, very pro gun control, but I’ve changed my opinions and beliefs; now, I think the best we could do as a country is, say, treat guns like we do cars — as an important part of the social contract where rights are balanced with responsibilities and where individual desires are balanced with a common-sense desire for a greater good.) But the one conversation that always comes up in the wake of gun violence is about our media, specifically movies, and if violent American media causes violent American action. And while you can’t really ever say that one opinion is wrong, or that one opinion is right, there are facts. Nate Silver’s 538.com didn’t guess who would win the 2012 election; it looked at data. And while I’m not a policy-maker, a criminologist, or a sociologist, I love movies; I’ve been thinking about movies for a long time; and I can do math… Let’s look at a fact—in 2010, 92.7% of Canada’s box-office revenue was American-made films. By and large, Canadians consume the exact culture as Americans, with the exceptions in the occasional screening of “Starbuck” or “Continuum” or listening to Sloan.  So if American culture is having an effect on Americans, it should be having that specific similar effect on Canadians, as well. Putting aside that Canada has a tenth of the U.S.’s population, let’s just look at per-capita rates.  In America, there were 10.20 deaths-by-firearm per 100,000 people in 2011, as reported in a United Nations study.  In Canada, during the same year and according to the same study, it was 2.13 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people. Same culture; significantly different death-by-gun rate. And even if you were to argue that Canadians, whose firearms regulations are more strident than ours, are equally compelled by violent media to kill but instead have to do so with brick, knife, or curling stone … well, that isn’t supported, either. America had a intentional homicide rate of 4.8 murders per 100,000 in 2012, again from a United Nations study; Canada, meanwhile — with the same violent media — had 1.6. So maybe Canadians are just smarter about media, or less impressionable. But the 2012 death-by-firearm rates in England,  Australia and Germany, all avid consumers of American media, and all democracies,  were .25 per 100,000 in England;  1.05 in Australia; 1.0 in Germany.”
~ Rocchi With Numbers A-blazing

Jazzing With William Friedkin

“It works similarly to the way jazz works. When you hear great jazz improvisation—let’s say from Miles Davis or John Coltrane or Ahmad Jamal—when you hear their recordings, they are basically improvised. But they are improvised from a storehouse of knowledge about music and their own approach to it. Plus, they put their lives into their music. The great jazz musicians are playing this stuff not with notes on a page, but from the depths of their own feelings and emotions. And that’s what happens when you direct a film. God knows, I didn’t know the inner workings of New York’s police department, or the narcotics bureau, during the time of The French Connection case. I had to immerse myself in that. By the time I was done, I knew how to reinvent that for cinema in the same way that a jazz musician is able to reach into those very solid sources and play something that reflects his feelings at the time.”
~ Jazzing With William Friedkin

Eli Roth at The Credits

“The movie that was the most shocking to me was The Exorcist, which I saw when I was six. I thought it was real. I thought I was going to get possessed by the devil, and my mom was like, ‘Don’t worry, we’re Jewish, we don’t believe in the devil.’ But I was like, ‘I’ll be the Jew that the devil makes an example out of.’ That movie freaked me the fuck out, and I threw up after I saw it. I was so traumatized. I used to have a problem barfing whenever I saw a scary movie. And it’s probably why I make them now—to pay that forward.”
~ Eli Roth at The Credits

Soderbergh On Sea Changes

“I’ve seen a shift in why people go to the movies. They’re moving toward an attitude of: I want it all spelled out and tied up at the end… It’s like getting angry about the weather. My saying, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ isn’t going to help. What I need to do if I want to go back to work is go somewhere where my approach isn’t a problem [but] where it’s a plus. That would seem to be stuff other than wide-release movies. You know, whether it’s television or it’s theatre. I don’t want to stop making things.”
~ Soderbergh On Sea Changes

Harmony Korine On The Uses Of Confusion

“Well, confusion or dissonance are things that sometimes work in opposing ways but they kind of set the story straight. Sometimes the most interesting thing to watch is the way things dance with each other or connect with each other in ways that you would never expect. I’ve always felt more attracted to things that were more emotionally complicated. I had these experiences as a kid, I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away. I remember watching girls fight in tenth grade, and these girls are just beating the shit out of each other, ripping each other’s clothes off, and I remember watching these girls fighting in a hallway with all these lockers around, and hundreds of kids shouting and one of the girl’s shirts came off and she had these big boobs and I remember while she was in a headlock some dude went up and started feeling on her boobs. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, because it was such extreme violence and you had all this energy around the periphery with all these people screaming and you had some dude in the middle who was completely turned on by it and had no shame and just went for it. And I didn’t even know how to compute all of those things happening at one time. And at the same time, it was interesting to me because it was like a play or some kind of strange theater. There was something obviously horrifying about it, but at the same time it was oddly compelling in a kind of theatrical way. And so that was always something interesting, you know, when people talk about morality or right and wrong, sometimes it’s hard to tell which way is up and which way is down, and sometimes those situations are the most dramatic and interesting.”
~ Harmony Korine On The Uses Of Confusion

Armond White Chaws His Bite Of Michael Bay

“Pain & Gain measures the distance our culture has travelled toward ruthlessness and inanity. Belonging to that vain, delirious culture, Bay’s style precisely satirizes it. Being American his exaltation doesn’t misrepresent as his ad-man predecessors Britons Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Adrian Lyne did when corrupting popular film (and Americans’ view of themselves) with over-hyped narrative tropes in the 1980s. None of their cartoonishly inauthentic protagonists from Flashdance to Top Gun, Thelma and Louise to Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal struck the true notes that Bay catches in Pain & Gain. Bay’s hype advances the advert style in visionary ways; his images go Pop with Lichtenstein formality but his photographic palette can be lustrous, a comment on nature and real-life perception. Pain & Gain’s colors recall the explosion of bourgeois materialism at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie’s Point [sic]. If you think that’s reaching, you don’t get half the pleasure of Bay’s art; his ability to make disposable genres excitingly vivid. Bay may be modern cinema’s least “sensitive” auteur—never sadistic like Haneke or Tarantino and yet not pious for a second. As a millennial master, Bay’s hype machine is a funhouse mirror.”
~ Armond White Chaws His Bite Of Michael Bay

Kyle Smith Would Like To Know More High School

 ”As the kids paint each other naked, do drugs, dash off to Italy and dance around the campfire, the film has nothing new to say about these bourgeois Marxists.”
~ Kyle Smith Would Like To Know More High School Revolutionaries, Msr. Assayas

Assayas On Films Within Films Within The Frame

“The Seventies are either ridiculed or romanticized and both are wrong. It’s easy to make fun of for its excesses, with, like, the Cheech & Chong stuff, you know? But at the same time, it’s wrong to romanticize it because the politics of the time were suffocating. They were so cut off from any reality; they believed so much in revolution that at some point they were living in a world that was not actually happening and they were reading ‘signs’ in society or in the world that were a complete abstraction, like a religious abstraction. There was something disastrous going on and you could not be blind to that. To me, surviving the 1970s was thanks to the cinema, to the movies. I had no notion of what the movies were about. Yes, I grew up in a family where my father wrote movies, but they were movies from another era. His friends were older guys. So, I knew I wanted to make movies, but I had no idea how movies were made and I didn’t want to make films the way my father’s friends made them; they belonged to another world. I was attracted to anything having to do with films that was obtainable in my world; some of it was international radical movies, anything was good enough. I would grab it just to make sense of it, but I didn’t know what my path was in cinema, how I could obtain a similar satisfaction that I had with painting and drawing. I leave the character of Gilles at the end of the film when he finally understands what art is about and what cinema is. Maybe he will do something with it, maybe he won’t, but at least he understands that art is about resurrection, about bringing back to life what is lost, what has disappeared. It’s also the first time in the film when I show another movie in full frame; all of a sudden, he is in the film. He finally realizes that this is what he has been looking for.”
~ Assayas On Films Within Films Within The Frame

Sara Vizcarrondo On Soderbergh’s Cinema Entreaty

“There’s a built in irony to Soderbergh offering the ‘State of the Cinema’ address. He knows the score, hates it and yet isn’t quick to judge anyone for wanting two pieces of the shat-in chocolate pie. Despite the fact the industry is crippled by obvious infrastructure problems and a built in fear of obsolescence, “it’s the only industry where trickle-down economics work: if the studios are flush, they spend more to make more…So maybe everything is just fine.” He reports admissions are up regardless of Hollywood’s internal crises, so then why is morale so abysmal?”
~ Sara Vizcarrondo On Soderbergh’s Cinema Entreaty

Jacques Tati

“It makes me sound old-fashioned, but I think I am an anarchist. Great things were done by the historic anarchists… The students of May 1968 seemed very good at the beginning. But when they came to the workers at Renault, the workers say, what do you propose? They say, we have fought for years to have a bigger apartment. You see, revolution has always come from intellectuals, but it has to have a popular impulse. I would like to make films for everybody, though this doesn’t mean that every film I make is alike. In the Hulot films or Playtime there is not a shot I have made that I can put in another picture. A film is like a person. Picasso has nothing to do with Renoir or Michel St. Denis, and students want to see what is personal. They mostly don’t like to live in a society where manufacturers make money by distributing electric guitars. This is true capitalist society. I am on the side of the students, I have to say. I feel sad for them that they weren’t as successful in ’68 as they are in taking dope. You can’t have a good talk with a man who lies down and goes to sleep in the middle of a sentence. Finished. On the whole, though, as I said, I salute the students. They have proved that girls often have silly make-up. If they don’t want to wear shoes, fine.”
~ Jacques Tati

Lumenick Won’t Be Invited To Next Big Wedding

“Robin Williams is the wacky priest who presides over the wedding ceremony—but even he can’t wring any laughs out of what’s probably the first-ever montage set in a church confessional (De Niro cracks a joke about Oscar Wilde “making whoopee with altar boys”) Does De Niro’s character fall off the wagon? Will he and Keaton end up in bed together? Does Heigl’s character, who in one scene throws up on De Niro, have an announcement of her own?  No points for guessing the right answer. ‘I’d rather gouge my eyes out with hot spoons!’’ De Niro exclaims at one point. I’m not sure exactly what he was talking about, but I’d like to think it referred to the prospect of being forced to watch The Big Wedding.”
~ Zero-Star Lumenick Won’t Be Invited To Next Big Wedding

Glenn Kenny On Pain & Gain

“Contrary to pre-release hype, Pain & Gain is not a particularly “quirky” or “character-driven” movie. Although director Michael Bay, he of the Transformers pop monstrosities, made the movie for a fraction of what those cinematic mammoths cost, it does not really represent him “going low-budget.” Nor, as some have suggested, does this effort represent some kind of attempt on Bay’s part to “atone for his sins.” If anything, Pain & Gain, which twists the facts of an appalling 1995 Florida kidnapping and murder case until its story achieves the dimensions of a grotesque, multiple-billboard-size cartoon, adds a whole roster of sins to Bay’s CV. But in doing its unwholesome work the movie manages to be devilishly entertaining, and, perhaps inadvertently, to achieve the status of genuine satire, even against itself.”
~ Glenn Kenny On Pain & Gain

Paul Schrader In The Here And Now

“At the moment, I still use a mouse, but pretty soon I’ll just be able to talk to my computer and say “Would you bring up the opening of Touch Of Evil for me?” And the computer will do it! Event cinema is a growth industry, just like concerts and theatre. Event cinema is a kind of analogue-ey thing. It’s a performance, and a social event–what’s really dead is the multiplex. You walk in there, it feels like you’re going to a funeral home.”
~ Paul Schrader In The Here And Now

Abbas Kiarostami’s Having A Late-Life Crisis

“Your question is very relevant these days because, as I try to approach many of the stories I have in my drawers, I find they are all rejecting me. I feel reluctant about all of them. This is quite a new phenomenon of my life, so if you had asked me the question at other stages of my career, I would have a different response. But now I would say nothing is drawing me back. I guess it’s a crisis. In the last six months I’ve gone back to six different screenplays and started working on them and I stopped. I dropped them. This is something quite unheard of for me, but no film for me is worth being made now. Maybe from the distance that we are one from the other, we don’t see each other and we don’t hear each other either, you find it hard to believe what I’m saying. So maybe you can’t imagine how sincere and how honest this answer is. But I can tell you, now, I’m just breathing. I feel better because I feel that for once somebody asked me this question, so there’s one person who I’ve talked to about the state that I’m going through these days. But it might be temporary. I hope it’s temporary.”
~ Abbas Kiarostami’s Having A Late-Life Crisis

Luhrmann On Gatsby

RICHARD T. KELLY: In their famous interview Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut agreed there was a problem about turning great books into films because the books were already masterpieces, made out of words, which pictures couldn’t emulate. Clearly, having made ‘Romeo + Juliet’ you’re happy to work with classic texts. But do you feel there is something about ‘Gatsby’ that you have to try to be ‘faithful’ to, to satisfy the book’s admirers? Or are you content to say to audiences, ‘This is the way I see it…’

BAZ LUHRMANN: Of course I hear that perspective. But there have been some pretty good cinematic goes made of some great books… There may be people out there with large pieces of wood counting down the days until the movie is out so they can come and hit me… ‘How dare you?’ And I understand that, and I don’t take it lightly. Nonetheless – I love the book too. And I always think great literature is there to be interpreted in many different ways, in different times and by different people – for example, I look forward to the next person who does a ‘Romeo + Juliet’ movie different to mine. To me, what defines greatness in literature, culture, of any kind, is that it’s able to move through time and geography, it can play in any country and continues to play in any era. And that’s true of ‘The Great Gatsby.’
~ Luhrmann On Gatsby