Month: August 2007

I finally persuaded Phillip Scott Johnson, the enigmatic St. Louis-based creator of the widely admired movie-star montage called Women in Film, to give it up a little. I asked with two or three e-mails yesterday and he said very little, explaining toward the end that he doesn’t like talking about himself.

So I wrote back, “Oh, I get it….you’re looking to be the Silent Bob or Glenn Gould orCalvin Coolidge of internet YouTube maestros. The less you say, the more interesting you seem to certain people…right? I know that one. That works. It’s better than talking to everyone and being a blabbermouth, but you’re saying very, very little here. I mean, next to nothing.”

Nothing from Johnson yesterday but today he wrote back with the following:

“You nailed the thinking on not talking much. I’d rather be an enigma than a narcissist. I’m not as bad as I used to be though. Back in June when ‘Women In Art‘ was on fire I had no name, age, or location anywhere on the internet. I was completely anonymous. I was also completely insecure about being myself. A little success has eased those insecurities. I used to tell people [that] the more you know about me the less interesting I become.

“I’ve given two real interviews –one to ABC and one to the first blogger to figure out my name and location (i.e., a woman in Paris). Today I talked to ABC again. I believe they are going to feature Women In Film this Tuesday on a show called I-Caught. I gave them permission to use my real name this time. They briefly showed Women In Art on their first show two weeks ago but only called me Eggman.

“Nobody in St. Louis has spoken to me. So far, nobody here really knows who I am except friends and family. Only two of my co-workers even know I make videos. My boss doesn’t have a clue.

“I have been contacted by a lot of people all around the world but I generally either don’t respond or just say thank you. I’ve been contacted by television stations, print media, museums, film festivals, choreographers, universities… all sorts of people. Actually I was just contacted by CNN today and agreed to allow them to feature me on a show about user-generated internet content later this fall.

“My background: 40 years old, single, economics major with an MBA in finance. I work in corporate finance as a financial analyst/ database administrator. It’s boring, uncreative, and I generally don’t like it very much. I’ve been ‘artistic’ all my life. My mother is an artist. She does greeting cards, cartoons, and paints. I’ve dabbled in all sorts of things throughout my years — music, photography, art, videos — always as a hobby though. I actually used to make videos about 10 years ago with VHS technology and shared them with friends but it was hard to do given the limitations of the technology.

“While not a professionally trained artist or film-maker, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on both topics. I’m a big fan of history in general including art and film history. I feel that Women In Art and Women In Film reflect my knowledge of both topics.

“Last summer I bought my first modern computer and finally got internet access at home. In September I logged onto YouTube for the first time and became immediately obsessed with it. I started trying to create my own content. I also did daily research on the industry of on-line videos — particularly YouTube.

“I’ve probably created about 40 different videos since then. Tried all sorts of different things — anything I found mildly interesting, [and] most of which are generally not that exciting and didn’t catch much buzz. I took most of them down once Women In Art got big back in May because I had art critics trying to analyze everything I did. Most were simple videos I made on a Saturday afternoon just to try new stuff out. Three months ago I had 10 subscribers to my YouTube channel. Today I have over 3000.

“I created both these videos with morphing software that cost less than $100. This was the first software I ever purchased and the first software I made any serious attempt at learning. Both took about two weeks each to make. I made Women In Art in early April and the “first” Women in Film in early May.

“After one month on YouTube Women In Art had 800 views. On the night of May 24th, I put a link up on digg.com in an attempt to get it noticed. This is a site where people post links to their favorite news stories and videos. I gave it the title “Amazing — Watch 500 Years of Art in 3 Minutes!!!” When I went to sleep it had 3 diggs and I thought “Oh well, I tried…better luck next time” When I woke up on May 25th it was on the front page top spot. It literally caught fire from there. In the next three weeks it was viewed 3 million times and was the most blogged video in the world.

“A couple of days after Women In Art got big I realized that I had to take down Women In Film. It was getting a lot of hits also and some of the comments pointed out the obvious — it was all caucasian. I knew in my heart it was racist by exclusion so I took it off the internet. I felt bad and didn’t want to be labeled a racist artist. I thought that version was gone for good until I realized a couple of weeks ago that one person had saved the original and left it on the internet. On top of that, it had gone viral. That was the version you saw first. I was upset and asked the guy to remove it. He completely understood my concerns and took it down.

“At first I was just going to shelve Women In Film and never re-release it. After a month I decided to redo it. But even after redoing it, I knew it would still be controversial. But then I thought ‘is controversy really such a bad thing? After all, I’m just reflecting what Hollywood put out there at various points in time.’ Yes, it could still have far more diversity in it. For example, I wanted to include Diahann Carroll and Michelle Yeoh but I just couldn’t find good enough high-resolution pictures of them. At some point, you have to decide that this is the list and this is what I’m going with.

“The modern stars where the hardest. There are so many good ones I left out and a few that I put in that perhaps don’t rise to the level of the other actresses (I won’t name names).

“Recently I bought some professional video software and want to try some new things with it. I don’t want to be labeled a one-trick pony so I want to move beyond the morph. Like I said before, I don’t want to get too caught up on looking back at what I’ve already done. It’s fun to be praised but it’s is also distracting and keeps me from focusing on creating new things. I need to use this as a stepping stone towards future success. We shall see. I figure the worst thing I could do is to not try at all. I’ve already come up with something that people seem to like. Surely, with some effort, there are other things out there waiting to be created.

“And that’s my story….”

Okay, let’s make that eight (as opposed to the previous count of seven) Iraq movies with the addition of Lionsgate’s The Return, a road movie about three Iraq War veterans (played by Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena) from director and co-writer Neil Burger (The Illusionist). It only finished filming in late June, and a Lionsgate publicist just told me it’s not on the company’s upcoming release slate. Figure sometime in ’08 but forget December ’07, as the IMDB has it.

Written by Burger and Dirk Wittenborn, the story allegedly” revolves around three soldiers — Collee (McAdams), T.K. (Pena) and Cheever (Robbins) — who return from the Iraq War after suffering injuries and learn that life has moved on without them. They end up on an unexpected road trip across the U.S., with Collee on a mission to bring her boyfriend’s guitar back to his family because he saved her life, T.K. seeking confidence to face his wife after a shrapnel injury that threatens his sexual function and middle-aged Cheever planning to hit the casinos in a desperate effort to pay for his son’s college tuition.”

So the total Iraq-Afghanistan count is now twelve — eight Iraqs (The Return, In The Valley of Elah, Redacted, Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Grace is Gone and Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha), two Afghanis (Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson’s War) plus The Kingdom (Universal, 9.28.07) and Rendition (New Line, 10.12.07).

There’s a fighting-in-Fallujah project that I haven’t yet included in HE’s ever-growing list of Iraq-Afghanistan movies (now up to eleven) called No True Glory: Battle for Fallujah. It’s off the roster because it appears to be, for now, a Harrison Ford development project because there’s no director attached.

Nonetheless, a 5.13.07 L.A. Times piece by Dorzou Daragahi that was mainly about Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha said that No True Glory is “set for 2008 release.”

The Ford Fallujah project is based on Bing West‘s 2006 book of the same name, with a screenplay by Robert Munic. The two Fallujah battles, in April and October of ’03, represented the largest sustained U.S. military engagement since the Battle of Hue over thirty years earlier in Vietnam. Ford would play General James Mattis, a name that presumably signifies “valor” with some, but which does not yet ring a bell on this end.

The tally of eleven, one more time — two Afghanis (Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson’s War), seven Iraqs (In The Valley of Elah, Redacted, Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Grace is Gone and Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha), plus the Riyahd shoot-em-up thriller that is Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom plus Gavin Hood‘s Rendition (New Line, 10.12.07), which is about U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

As I wrote earlier, “My understanding is that Marc Foster‘s The Kite Runner is more or less on its own nativist Afghani plane and therefore not really part of the club.”

3:10 to Yuma “is a tense, rugged redo of a film that was pretty good the first time around,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in an 8.16 posting. “Reinforced by a strong central premise, alert performances, a realistic view of the developing Old West and a satisfying dimensionality in its shadings of good and evil, James Mangold‘s remake walks a fine line in retaining many of the original’s qualities while smartly shaking things up a bit.

“A Western these days needs to be more than a solid, unfussy programmer to break out of the pack commercially, but this Lionsgate release should be able to generate moderately good theatrical returns prior to a solid home entertainment life, where casual viewer curiosity will be well rewarded.”

So Mangold has kept the solid cool stuff from the 1957 version and pizazzed it up in a smart and engaging way for today’s audiences…cool. McCarthy’s is a thumbs-up review, but the terms “pretty good” and “moderately good” in the first graph don’t exactly convey cartwheeling enthusiasm. I’m reminded of that old Dean Martin joke in which he said he’s cut back on the carousing and only drinks moderately — “I have a case of Moderately in the trunk of my car.”

It’s no secret that Nick Broomfield‘s Battle for Haditha, slated to show at the Toronto Film Festival, is a dramatization of an actual event — the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005, by four U.S. Marines in retaliation for the death of a U.S. Marine killed by a roadside bomb — and not a documentary, but it can’t hurt to point this out again.

The Haditha killings were apparently payback for an attack on a convoy of United States Marines with an improvised explosive device IED) that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.

The My Lai-type story was broken by Time‘s Tim McGirk on 3.19.06. Pennsyl- vania Congressman John Murtha raised hell about it starting in May ’06. (“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” Murtha said that month on This Week on ABC. “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”)

There’s some uncertain mucky-muck involving the provable prosecutions of those involved, or whether or not certain soldiers were unfairly dragged into this. The right-wing nutters (including Sean Hannity) are portraying McGirk and Murtha in very negative ways — one has even compared the prosecution of the guys who took part in the shootings to the situation in Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory. (Which seems ridiculous to me.)

The movie apparently follows the story from the point of view of the Marines of Kilo Company, one or two Iraqi families, some female non-combatants, and the insurgents who plant the roadside bomb. As such The Battle for Haditha is certain to be compared to Brian DePalma‘s Redacted — another varied-points-of-view look at a single Iraq War incident — after they’re both seen in Toronto.

HanWay Films is listed on the IMDB as the distributor, but right now there’s no release date — it might be out before the year, depending on the Toronto reaction, and to go by the trailer I’m thinking it should be.

I tried to reach Broomfield this morning and the clock is ticking. He apparently shot Haditha (pronounced “Ha-dee-tha”) without a hard script — he worked from an outline of each scene and where the story was going, and then the actors would then improvise their way through it.

“Long and lanky, Michael Cera moves like one of those teenagers whose body hasn’t yet fully caught up to his newly reached height. With his wide-open face and smile, he looks absolutely amazed by what he can see from a higher elevation (the world!). But of course he looks surprised: he’s the top half of the exclamation point to the spherical Jonah Hill‘s rolling big dot.” — from Manohla Dargis‘s N.Y. Times review of Superbad.

Greg Mottola‘s comedy has an 89% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating and a 75% positive from Metacritic. The best capsule description I’ve read so far is from Reelviews’ James Berardinelli, to wit: “What if Quentin Tarantino collaborated with John Hughes on a teen comedy? Superbad is a decent approximation of what the result might be.”

It was obvious from the get-go that Balls of Fury — the Chinese Chris Walken ping-pong comedy — wouldn’t be providing much in the way of wit, drollness or sophistication. It’s from the Reno 911 guys, and appears to be aping Shaolin Soccer and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. It’s tracking pretty well, though — a lot of people obviously snap-judging in its favor.

Not me, though. I’ll see anything with Walken, but I suspect from the trailer I won’t be able to handle Dan Fogler (School for Scoundrels), the guy with the massive pot belly and the man-beard and matted curly-squiggly hair who overacts like there’s a gun to his head. Clearly coming from a much more coarse and immoderate place than Jonah Hill. No offense, but no thanks.

The big eyeball-to-eyeball on 9.7 will be between two serious “guy” films — 3:10 to Yuma vs. Shoot “Em Up. One will surely prevail at the expense of the other, perhaps by a small margin, perhaps not. There’s no telling from today’s first tracking on these titles what will happen — it’s way too early, and the ad campaigns haven’t really started, much less kicked in — although a rudimentary spitball reading would give a slight edge to Shoot ‘Em Up. The Michael Davis-Don Murphy-Clive Owen actioner from New Line has a 27% general interest, a 29% definite interest and a 2% first choice while the James Mangold-Russell Crowe-Christian Bale western from Lionsgate is at 21, 16 and 1.

The gay-appealing metrosexual ad campaign for 3:10 to Yuma has apparently been shown the door. This is indicated, at least, by the new macho one-sheet. No bent legs or Bob Fosse posturings, no $850 leather Bloomingdale jackets…this new poster art is squarely aimed at baseball-game-attending, beer-swilling, flannel-shirt-wearing straight guys who liked Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Christian Bale in Batman Begins. (Cinematical‘s Kim Voynar alerted me to their exclusive link.)

I posted a link to this now-famous “Women in Film” montage earlier this month (around August 4th or 5th), and then the link went bad and then everyone ran the You Tube link which made me feel left out so here it is again….no harm in reacquainting.

The forward-step element is finally knowing that the auteur is some St.Louis guy named Phillip Scott Johnson (a.k.a. “eggman”), who describes himself on his My Space page as a “corporate nobody by day…artistic dreamer by night.” I tried calling him but there are eight “Phillip Johnson” listings in St. Louis. Vanity Fair or someone should track this guy down and do a profile of him.

I’d like to at least speak with the guy and see if he’s gotten any job offers (with some high-powered production company or ad agency, perhaps?) that might save him from “corporate nobody” status, or at least get him girls.

“I try not to put myself in the position of advocating on behalf of a film’s commercial prospects,” Pop Machine’s Mark Caro writes, “but I remember saying [at last January’s Sundance Film Festival] that I couldn’t believe that no distributor had yet bought Once”

“‘But how do you market it?’ one of the distributor’s acquisitions guys responded.

“‘As a movie that everyone loves,’ I said. ‘It’s a music movie, it’s a love story…’

“‘But music movies don’t sell,’ he said. Plus, the stars were unknown, and, you know, their everyday faces weren’t going to sell tickets.

“‘But everyone loves the movie,’ I insisted. ‘People are moved by it. It’ll have great word-of-mouth.’

“His response was an indulgent smile. Ah, naïve writer… thinking you can sell a movie on the basis of people loving it. Quaint.

“Well, sometimes naïve wins.”