Larry Does Montana

Okay, who's the better of the two actors: Larry David or Miley Cyrus?

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For Those Curious Few...

In less than a week Jamie Tanner has already raised more than $5,000 for the creation of his new comic book.

In light of my recent business proposal for Criterion to release a Rivette's L'amour fou, given the fan bases for both Criterion and Rivette, you would assume they could raise at least four times as much money in a week... certainly enough to pay for the restoration and creation of the DVD. And that would just be in one week!

Is there anyone at Criterion who's listening?

Another Facebook 'Yes'

Criterion confirms they will be releasing Godard's Week-End onto DVD.

Think of the Possibilities

The recent Criterion/Facebook/Rivette story is getting me thinking...

What if Criterion were to announce this on their website:

We would love to begin working on the restoration and release of Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou onto DVD, but we need your help. We would like to raise $10,000 by the end of the year in order to pay for the costs of such an endeavor. Those who donate $20 dollars will receive a free DVD of the film. Those who donate $50 will receive a copy of the DVD as well as a limited edition poster of the film. Those who donate $100 will receive a copy of the DVD autographed by Jacques Rivette....

They haven't, but would you consider donating for the cost? Given the current state of online bootlegging and the growing demand for 'free art' on the 'free internet', the current business model for art house distribution houses to release esoteric films onto DVD poses just too much of a risk. I can't blame Criterion for not releasing L'amour fou. However, are there other, unused business models that could allow for a company to make a profit off of the release of some of these holy grails of cinema?

I ask because author and illustrator Jamie Tanner is testing out such a business model, on a much smaller scale of course.

I am extremely intrigued by the prospects of this model, as I'm guessing it could also be applied to other types of artists as well. Instead of using the selling of the product to pay for your time to create it, sell your time to create it directly and give the product away for free. It's brilliant.

What do you think? Would you like to see more of your favorite artists distribute and pay for their work this way? Would you like to see Criterion try it?

Interests disclosed, Jamie Tanner is my brother-in-law, or Semi-Bro.

Breaking: Criterion Says They Will Release Out 1?

WHAT JUST HAPPENED ON FACEBOOK?!?

Covering the 2008 primaries in 2007, I saw a similar phenomenon with Ron Paul supporters, though I don't think you needed to officially cover the primary in order to have seen Paul's volume of support find little correlation to his level of support. Still, the event that was the 2008 Presidential Campaign of Ron Paul is nothing to balk at. Similarly, I would hope Criterion sees the shit-ton of support on Facebook for the release of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 on DVD as a serious challenge to their current business model. Maybe they should consider changing it:

The Criterion Collection: Wow, Kristina, look what you started! We're going to try to get this done, but everyone in this thread is going to have to buy about 100 copies for us to break even...

I can't tell if that's sarcasm, so maybe they already are.

Keep going -- One Million Strong for Out 1!

Criterion Ponders Out 1 on Facebook?

Yesterday on Criterion's Facebook Wall, someone asked if the company planned on releasing Rivette's Out 1. Today, Criterion responded with "Out 1 is definitely not out of the question. Anyone else want to chime in in favor?" Since saying that seven hours ago, forty people have responded with a resounding yes.

Do you want to boot your bootleg with a Criterion edition of Jacques Rivette's masterpiece? Then tell Criterion that you want it released!

One of the Creepiest Moments in Cinema History

The 'other guy' from Cabin in the Sky, "Takin' a Chance on Love" number:

Godard's King Lear DVD Info

According to a member of the .org forum, MGM's Italian DVD of Godard's King Lear is (no surprise here) a much better transfer than its previous incarnations on VHS. The Italian subtitles are removable (it also comes with an Italian dubbed option) and while the website claims the disc was Region 2, it looks like the disc is actually Region 0.

The catch? The aspect ratio crops the film to 1.85:1 as opposed to its intended ratio of 1.37:1.

Another One of Those Gifts from God

There's a reason why this is now everywhere on the internet (via .org).

First Review of Rivette's Around a Small Mountain

Dan Fainaru writes:

The latest from the French New Wave master, a short by his own standards, teams a desolate Jane Birkin with a mysterious Sergio Castellito - it starts with him fixing her car and ends with his mending her soul. Reworking once again his favorite theme of life versus art and indulging in his affection for long, elegant sequence shots and witty double-entendres, this will delight his fanbase as much as it will annoy his regular critics.

Shot mostly in and around the city of Arras, not far from the location of his La Belle Noiseuse, Around A Small Mountain takes place in a circus as opposed to the theatre, but the space between stage and life is as precisely defined and meaningful as it ever was in his past work. Film festivals will certainly board this and art houses will follow, even though Rivette’s admirers concede that this doesn’t add much to his body of work.

The opening sequence shows Birkin standing helplessly next to her stranded car on a country road, the mountain of the title in background. Castellito sweeps by in his sports roadster, disappears down the road as if ignoring her, then returns, opens her car’s hood, taps left, taps right, and the engine comes back to life. All of this is conveyed in one single shot without a line of dialogue.

Similar visual exercises of equal concise precision follow as the audience learns how Kate (Birkin) has come back to a circus she had left 15 years earlier, after a fight with her late father, but she is still uncertain whether she wants to stay with it. Vittorio (Casteilito) is more mysterious; he is evidently fascinated by his new chance acquaintance and is equally interested in circus life.

Digging into Kate’s past, he finds out that her lover, Antoine, was killed performing a daring act on stage. Her father, who did not like him, kicked his daughter out and told her never to return, only because she insisted on mourning him.  Since then, she has retreated into a passive existence. But Vittorio is about to change all that, goading her back to the stage and forcing her to act - for ultimately, in Rivette-land, there is no life without art and vice versa.

Watching the maestro move his camera, throwing in references to still life paintings and mist-shrouded mountains, smoothly mixing theatre and film, is never less than pleasurable. The narrative, on the other hand, seems like an imposition, often solved through Birkin’s uncomfortable monologues revealing her character’s past and emotional troubles. Other characters also fill up the blanks in equally clumsy circumstances. Some scenes seem to be missing, whether planned and not shot, or shot and deleted later, but thanks to the scions of the Lubtchansky family, Irina at the camera and Nicole, the editor, these flaws are not over-worrying.

Another saving grace for the film is Castellito’s Italian charm and insouciance which make his intrusion into other people’s lives not only acceptable but welcome and sometimes delectable.

Awaiting more...

Moore's Capitalism "Made for Idiots"

Shane Danielsen explains:

Of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”, meanwhile, I barely feel qualified to write. Borderline incoherent, grossly-oversimplified, intermittantly powerful almost despite itself, it’s the usual barrage of cheap shots and rapid-fire arguments, with Moore displaying all the nuanced economic and political analysis he bought to Rage Against The Machine’s “Sleep Now In The Fire” video.

Nothing if not simplistic, his technique is also in danger of becoming over-familiar: those scenes of him trying (in vain, naturally) to gain entrance to GM’s corporate headquarters, or the Goldman Sachs building, “to make a citizen’s arrest,” are looking mighty tired, these days. But re-voicing footage of Christ from a Biblical epic to praise the glories of capitalism instead of God? Playing on the facile ironies of 1950s public service films? Is this honestly the best he can manage? (Other ironies, meanwhile, appear to escape Moore completely - notably, a Catholic priest expressing concern about capitalism’s use of “propaganda” to spread its message ... which is a little like Don Draper telling you not to smoke.)

And then there’s simple laziness. I happen to admire Wallace Shawn very much - “The Designated Mourner” is, to my mind, one of the finest plays of our time - but he wouldn’t exactly be the first person I turned to, were I looking for an informed commentary on the recent global financial crisis. (Moore hastens, however, to assure us that his buddy Wall did study some economics, way back when in college.)

But then, it’s typical of this filmmaker’s scattergun approach - picking up scraps of narrative only to drop them again moments later, packing the film with statistics that reek of John Pilger-style vagueness. At one point, we’re told that 6,500 minors were “unjustly” imprisoned thanks to the collusion between Luzerne County Court judge Mark Ciavarella and the operators of a private Pennsylvania youth-detention facility. Really? Was that the total number of teenagers convicted by the judge? And if so, how are we to determine which sentences were justified (for, say, murder) and which were not (for, say, writing unflattering things about your deputy headmaster on Myspace)? And what happened to Ciavarella, anyway? Was he bought down? Moore never says. He just offers up the figure, blank and unarguable, and sits back, waiting for our predictable outrage.

And it comes. Of course it does: there’s no shortage of material here to inspire fury for anyone on the Left. (Which, for the record, includes this writer. I am mostly in sympathy with Moore’s politics, though his personal hypocrisy, coupled with his fast-and-loose way with facts, often makes me ashamed to be on the same team as he.) And there are some undeniably affecting moments here: in particular, a successful sit-in by sacked Chicago factory workers, demanding back-payment of their wages from the Bank of America; and the footage of citizens - and African-Americans in particular - weeping with relief and joy when Obama’s election victory was announced in November. No one but the most selfish of souls could help but be moved by these sequences. But they’re all but lost in the disjointed argument Moore advances.

But the film is not made for me - not made, really, for anyone outside the US ... though I imagine it’s gratifying to Moore’s not-considerable ego to hear the cheers of European festival audiences whenever his name appears onscreen. It’s not made for anyone who has read a broadsheet newspaper with any degree of regularity or careful attention (or Harper’s, or The New Yorker, or The Economist); or even watched “The Daily Show”; or who has travelled enough to know something of the world outside the 48 continental States; or read a book that’s not by Dan Brown. It’s made for idiots. Which is to say, unfortunately, the majority of Americans. And that’s not me speaking: Moore admitted as much during his onstage talk with ex-Variety editor Peter Bart, just before the screening, citing the “functional illiteracy” of much of his domestic audience.

Call me old-fashioned, but the Left I believe in accords people the basic respect to address them as equals, not as inferiors. It is a belief apparently not shared by Michael Moore.

Lars von Trier's The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part 1 on DVD?

Technically only written by Lars von Trier based upon his experiences at film school (von Trier protégé Jacob Thuesen of Riget did the directing), 2007's The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part 1 is currently the one film von Trier fans should know the most about but instead know the least about.

You can watch the trailer (sans subs) here, and oddly, you can now buy a bootleg of the film (DVD-R so I'm guessing at the term 'bootleg' when I say this) from amazon.com for a little over ten bucks.

Anyone with money to spend feel like letting us know about the disc's/film's quality?

The Whipped Cream August 2009

Top 5 of the Month

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let it Be

Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux

Claude Chabrol's L'oeil du malin

Costa-Gavras's Z

ALL FIRST-TIME SCREENINGS
The Cardinal (1963, Otto Preminger)
The Chinese Feast (1995, Tsui Hark)
District 9 (2009, Neill Blomkamp)
Enemies: A Love Story (1989, Paul Mazursky)
The Familiar Shadow (1958, Maurice Pialat)
Funny People (2009, Judd Apatow)
Gaugin (1950, Alain Resnais)
Les godelureaux (1961, Claude Chabrol)
Graduate First (1979, Maurice Pialat)
In The Loop (2009, Armando Iannucci)
Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
Julie & Julia (2009, Nora Ephron)
The Kiss of Death (1977, Mike Leigh)
Let It Be (1970, Michael Lindsay-Hogg)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Charlie Chaplin)
Observe and Report (2009, Jody Hill)
L'oeil du malin (1962, Claude Chabrol)
Outside Providence (1999, Michael Corrente)
The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford)
The Rain People (1969, Francis Ford Coppola)
Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995, Eric Rohmer)
Say Anything... (1989, Cameron Crowe)
A Star is Born (1954, George Cukor)
Super High Me (2007, Michael Blieden)
Tokyo! (2008, Various)
Vantage Point (2008, Pete Travis)
What Just Happened? (2008, Barry Levinson)
Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)

Will be back in December with more Whipped Cream.

"A moth goes into a pediatrist's office..."

Criterion's IFC Titles

Here you go:
Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale
Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah
Steven Soderbergh’s Che
Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien
Christopher Nolan’s Following
Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments
Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours
Steve McQueen’s Hunger
Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking
Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain

Let's hope Criterion's Focus titles will be listed soon enough.

Rivette's Noroît on R1 DVD??

This just popped up on my radar:

Claiming to be NTSC/Region 1 with English subtitles, It's most likely a bootleg of sorts, but if it's a subbed boot of the unsubbed French disc, I'd say it's worth your time to test buy.