life, the universe, and everything

The strangest version of all parallel universe proposals is one that emerged gradually over 30 years of theoretical studies on the quantum properties of black holes. The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.

Just wow. From here.

oregon, but not out of hope

We should probably be talking about Meek’s Cutoff, because that’s the latest film Kelly Reichardt has made and that’s the one getting all the raves, but it’s still hard to get over 2008’s Wendy and Lucy.

Born in and weaned on the slowly creeping dread of the global financial crisis, it has a stark, maudlin beauty, and a frankly astonishing performance from Michelle Williams in the lead role.

If Williams and Reichardt go on to be one of those actor-director couplings that crop up every now and again, we’ll all be much richer for it. There are moments in Wendy and Lucy when the shot is all dressed up and there are actors and acting going on, but Reichardt’s lens lingers on Williams’s Wendy – and it’s remarkable how you get so clear a sense of what is unfolding just by watching her face.

These films are heading to Melbourne as part of a Reichardt retrospective at ACMI, which will include Rivers of Grass, her rarely seen 1993 debut. She has made a name for herself operating with very small budgets, and has spoken about wanting to continue at that level.

When asked by a journalist if this was just a line filmmakers use and then abandon once they meet a certain level of success, Reichardt’s response was magnificent.

“Well, what’s your definition of success?” she asked. “I find that a f***ing annoying question, I have to say.”

While it would be fun to keep poking a bear with a stick, it is the very affable Jon Raymond who is handling press duties for Australia.

Raymond has a long history of collaboration with Reichardt – two of her films, Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy, are based on short stories of his, and Meek’s Cutoff was written specifically for her direction. The first question comes easily – what’s it like working with Reichardt?

“It’s actually incredibly fun,” Raymond says, chuckling. “Contrary to the vibes of the movies themselves, Kelly is one of the funniest people I know, and there’s a lot of jerking around, if you can believe it.

“Wendy and Lucy was shot a couple of blocks from my house. I went down to that set for a couple of days, but Kelly doesn’t like people looking over her shoulder. She’s a private person, and she likes to keep things as small as possible.”

Reichardt and Raymond met via independent filmmaker Todd Haynes, a fellow Oregon native. Reichardt spends so much time in that state that Raymond calls her an honorary citizen, and the three films Raymond has been involved in have been called an Oregon trilogy, an accurate if somewhat lazy appellation.

“We hope to find things that other people can relate to in our backyard. That’s the great hope. I hope that the location is in some ways just a costume for stories that really could happen almost anywhere,” Raymond says.

He has also said in the past that he feels a short story is the correct template for a film. You can understand why: instead of a screenwriter or filmmaker having to choose which bits to condense or leave out of longer source material, they have the much happier task of deciding what they want to emphasise. Or they can let the narrative remain sparse and allow the viewer to fill in the details themselves, as used to great effect with Wendy and Lucy.

Meek’s Cutoff, however, is a more desiccated and dedicated beast, one with a hint of political allegory in its heritage.

“To do something as a straight screenplay is a strange experience. Meek’s is a bigger story than I felt like I could have written as a piece of fiction – it would’ve had to have been a novel or something,” Raymond says.

“It’s not an accident that a story about a group of pioneers being led by a potentially idiotic leader seemed relevant to me at the time. But the hope is that it is more broadly applicable – the issue of how a group makes up its mind and how it is led astray is a perennial problem, and you can overlay a lot of different political eras on top of it.”

The blustery leader in question is Stephen Meek, played by an unrecognisable Bruce Greenwood. And while it’s tempting to say the meek rise up against Meek, it’s not like the women in this film are docile.

That isn’t really much of a spoiler, given that the poster shows a clearly unimpressed Michelle Williams brandishing a rifle. The role, in fact, was written specifically for her; Raymond says he is “quite amazed by what Michelle is able to do”.

“There was always this idea that it was going to be told through the women’s perspective,” he says.

“I hope that it’s not too heroic a description of that uprising. I think the kind of revolt that happens is based on pragmatic issues rather than big, romantic ones. There’s no question that it has that feminist DNA in there, but it’s mutated in some way.”

A lot of the Meek’s-related reportage has it pegged as a genre-defying Western, but what Raymond describes as pragmatism probably makes it truer to the genre. The film is gorgeous to look at – prints wouldn’t look out place on a wall, and the women’s bonnets are like oases of colour in that arid landscape – but it was hard work on the Oregon trail, difficult, bloody and often bloody scary.

An exceedingly impersonal recorded voice yells down the line that there’s just a few minutes left, so there’s only time for a couple more questions. The first of these is whether Raymond sees decisions made on screen that he wishes he had made on print.

“These collaborations with Kelly have been so organic that I haven’t felt a sense of violation. If anything, she’s improved on them – strangely, it hasn’t been that strange,” he says.

We then end up discussing how the Lucy of Wendy and Lucy was actually Kelly’s dog.

“Lucy is in Old Joy also – in fact, part of the whole genesis of Old Joy was that Kelly was looking for a story to adapt in which her dog plays some sort of role, because her dog can’t really be left alone in her apartment. Lucy would just destroy it.

“And that was one of the times; like, fuck, I wish I’d given them a dog in the actual story, because in the film the dog really plays a wonderful role. I think Lucy did so well that going into the next film we wanted to bump her up to a starring role.”

Raymond and Reichardt are working on a screenplay that will also be set in Oregon, with Raymond sounding almost rueful upon being reminded that the Oregon trilogy will soon be no more.

He’s been cheerful throughout the interview, quite the contrast from the maudlin notes his writing and screenwriting often hit. When asked about this, his first reaction is to laugh.

“I don’t know where the bummer vibes come from. Short stories, in some ways, are really designed for that sort of emotional tone. I don’t know why; I think the novels I write are certainly not as morose. But I know what you mean – these are particularly tough stories, and it’s not like that’s how I feel all the time.”

 

Originally here.

girls, dragons, tattoos: but not sucker punch

I haven’t read the book.

I haven’t seen the Swedish film.

But by the beard of Odin, this is how you cut a trailer.

It’s supposedly leaked from a European site, and it looks like a cam job, but then why does it have the MPAA red band at the start? I smell a canny marketing campaign.

Also that song is Karen O and Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, which is almost as cool as autumn in Melbourne.

kelly reichardt don’t give a shit

So ACMI is doing this Kelly Reichardt retrospective, and they’ve trotted out screenwriter and frequent collaborator Jon Raymond to hit the press trail. This may be because Reichardt is a magnificent, and magnificently difficult, interviewee. Here are some highlights.

Slant: You’ve talked before about wanting to continue working at these sensationally low-budget levels. Isn’t that something filmmakers tend to say and then disregard once they meet with a certain level of success?

KR: Well, what’s your definition of success? I find that to be a fucking annoying question, I have to say.

From here.

Apparently Reichardt doesn’t like people reading too much into her stories, either.

Where do you and Lucy stay when you are scouting for locations?
We stay in a lot of cruddy motels, the kind where you drive right up to the door. I may be getting too old for it, I realize.

Why not stay in B&B’s?
I can’t stand bed and breakfasts. I don’t want to have to have breakfast with people. I just stayed in a B&B in North Carolina, and I felt like I offended the owners because I went out and got my own coffee in the morning.

Well, that is a violation of B&B etiquette.
I didn’t know. I saw this diner I wanted to try. They said to the other people at the table: “Say goodbye to Kelly. She won’t be joining us. She’s going to the diner. She’s from New York!”

That’s a funny story, but doesn’t it suggest you tend to perpetuate the human separateness you bemoan in your new film?
I enjoy people most when I’m away from them.

Just killer. From here.

And here’s the ACMI listing of her films. Wendy and Lucy is brilliant, but be sure to check out Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff too.

anatomy of a disaster

The LA Times had this great article in 2007 about how movie budgets get as inflated as they do. This one is about the Matthew McConaughey vehicle Sahara.

ON an old studio lot outside London, a production crew began work on the movie “Sahara” in November 2003 by staging the crash of a vintage airplane. But when the film opened in theaters in April 2005, the sequence had been deleted. “In the context of the movie, it didn’t work,” said director Breck Eisner. The cost of the 46-second clip: more than $2 million.

And:

“Sahara,” an action-adventure based on the bestselling novel by Clive Cussler, has lost about $105 million to date, according to a finance executive assigned to the movie. But records show the film losing $78.3 million based on Hollywood accounting methods that count projected revenue ($202.9 million in this case) over a 10-year period.

More!

i love you phillip morris

Was it really so hard to sell a gay love story? Yes, that’s a bit of a minor spoiler, but the film’s poster and any subsequent review gives it away too. Plus, there are much bigger deceptions on offer, and if anyone spoils them then feel free to give them a case of the Schembris. For now, I Love You Phillip Morris is playing at the Nova in Carlton, in one of the nice new cinemas with the big armchairs and the fancy digital screens, and you should go and watch it. Please.

It has a lead character whom you would hate were he not so lovable, or, more accurately, were he not in love, and Jim Carrey plays the perfect anti-hero. Ewan McGregor has taken blandness to new depths, but here he channels it into something sweet and dopey, the kind of person you want to tell, again and again, that everything will be all right, and then go out and make it happen. Which is what Carrey’s character does, in increasingly inventive ways. The film is smart, with the kind of jokes that make you laugh, once, as you get a swift shot of a punchline, and then again as you process the implications. It tells its story with some economy, and manages a confronting sort of subtlety in its portrayal of the central relationship between Carrey and McGregor. And the best part? It’s all true. Here’s some further reading, but go and see the film first, because this really will spoil it for you.

hypothetical cat don’t give a shit

 

This is Minnie, sound asleep.

news of the week: honey badger

Quit Badgering Me Dept.

First of all, honey badger don’t give a shit. Possibly funnier without sound.

It’s A Bird No Really It’s A Bird Dept.

Indian Superman demonstrates the clash of cultures.

Drive With Both Hands On The Wheel Dept.

A guy in Brazil drives his car smack through a rather large amount of cyclists. Lots of injuries but miraculously no deaths. Also, I do not know the collective noun for cyclists.

Just Plain Why Dept.

And finally, Ubisoft’s new sex video game has received a rating that will allow kids to play it. Fun for the family, less fun for Australia’s ridiculous video game censorship laws.

illusions of intimacy

It’s a family problem. How do you tell a story about Martha Wainwright without mentioning her kin? It’s not that it can’t be done, but that the cost of omission is much colour and texture.

Calling from New York, Martha sounds chirpy but a little weary, the vocal equivalent of a smile that turns up the sparkle in her eyes without quite turning up the corners of her mouth. She salts her speech with the phrase “you know”, which is quite appropriate because, for the most part, we do.

Martha, 34, is the child of musician and sometime actor Loudon Wainwright III and the folk singer Katie McGarrigle. Her older brother is the flamboyant Rufus, arguably the most luminous of the constellation. They’ve performed as a family, they’ve been interviewed as a family, and they’re uncommonly open in speech and song. And having all these Wainwrights in the same story means you end up referring to them by their first name, further enhancing the aura of familiarity.

The result is a hefty novel’s worth of coverage, one that keeps expanding to more and more unwieldy lengths. If you want to know more, Google is your friend. Better, perhaps, to ask if Martha has ever wanted to be on the other end of the notebook or microphone, asking a journalist what their family is like, or what their relationship is with their brother?

“No, well, I’m not really interested,” she says, cracking up. “I don’t know why people are so interested in my family – we must be interesting. I guess we sort of stand out because we work together as a family as well, and there aren’t that many examples of the sort of dynastic thing that we have.”

It’s not just dynastic. Besides the luminaries that are blood relations, the family has a level of well-connectedness that borders on the ridiculous. Mention a gathering that includes Nick Cave, Emmylou Harris and Leonard Cohen and for most people that’s the beginning of a pretty decent festival. For the Wainwrights, that’s breakfast. And never mind dirty laundry, a phrase that always seems to indicate the revelation of irredeemable messes – this family uses music as their washing machine.

Case in point is a song by her father called I’d Rather Be Lonely, about a woman for whom Martha always felt sorry. Until the day he told an audience that it was about his daughter. Her response was the lovingly caustic Bloody Mother F—ing Asshole, which swoops and soars and has one of the best lines to ever open a song: “Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore.”

Read more.

listomania: the top 10 of 2010

First, two appetisers:

“Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)” – Zadie Smith

“…Hollywood film-making continues to worship at the altar of the 18 to 25-year-old male and his penis.” – Helen Mirren

And we’re off.