Day: April 24, 2013

George Stevens Jr. recently granted an interview (published today) to N.Y. Post critic/columnist Lou Lumenick about the Shane and Giant restorations, both of which will be screened at the TCM Classic Film Festival (4.25 to 4.28). Lumenick naturally asked for a comment about the Shane aspect ratio hoo-hah, but Stevens declined to discuss it. But he offered a few Shane recollections. Here are the pertinent portions:

It was “always [Stevens’] intention to have the true version of Shane released on video,” eh? And there was “never a capitulation” on this point? Then why did Stevens write me the following in an email?

After two and a half days, the Give Forward online fundraising drive to help Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas fight Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia has raised $38,467.00 (as of 6 pm Pacific).

In a statement released today, Douglas thanked everyone and explained his situation. “I spoke with the doctors today and they have a diagnosis with plans to start chemotherapy tomorrow morning,” he wrote. “Basically I have Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, which is fairly rare. Of the 12 or 13 people currently in the unit at The James in Columbus, I’m the only one on the floor with this specific version of leukemia. But this is one of the top three leukemia-specializing hospitals in the country and I was super lucky to get into it.

“Those who found out about the fundraiser (on their own, I might add) were as shocked as I was. I’m just so lucky to have such great support, not only from all of you but also my family (my mother and sister are local), my amazing brother who flew to Vegas to get me, and my great friends, especially Mike Sampson, Mike Ryan and Jordan Hoffman who organized the fundraiser.

“Knowing that there’s a cushion of money has definitely helped ease my mind so I can just focus on getting better and getting back to NYC as soon as humanly possible.”

Here’s the re-design that’s been giving me so much grief over the last 36 hours. Grief from others and my own nagging doubts. Here’s the link to the whole thing. The FLASHBOX is one of those bullet-point come-ons providing links to the hottest stories and items of the last few days. DISCRIMINATOR is one of those “this is hot but that’s not” charts — always changing, a scroll bar, six or seven items at a time. The arrows on the DISCRIMINATOR box will be smaller. A friend wants me to kill the second 72 8 x 90 ad. Another says the Twitter box is unnecessary but I kinda like it.

Amy Seimetz has been kicking around as an indie-level director-writer-actress for a good seven or eight years, but before seeing Upstream Color at last January’s Sundance Film Festival I hadn’t paid much attention, to be honest. Seimetz says very little in Shane Carruth‘s film, but sometimes (or should I say often?) a certain mystique arises when an actor holds back and just settles in and the camera just stares. On top of which Seimetz looks a bit like Juliette Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is a roundabout way of saying she’s obliquely hot.

Amy Seimetz in Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color.

So naturally I wanted to speak with her about Sun Don’t Shine, a dark-toned drama she wrote and directed. It opens on 4.26. Here’s the mp3. I had this idea of Seimetz being a kind of reflection of her Upstream Color character, someone a little vague and imprecise, a woman of few words, etc. So it was a slight surprise to speak with this friendly, fully confessional, almost bubbly-sounding voice on the other end.

Seimetz mentioned that she was going through some “really rough” personal struggles during the shooting of Upstream Color and that maybe some of that came through.

The clip below was shot by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson during the 2013 South by Southwest Festival. I’m having trouble paying attention to what’s being said because I’m so fascinated by that construction-site backround. A covered chain-link fence, tractors, tools. Where the hell are they doing this interview, in someone’s back yard in some nondescript Austin neighborhood?

From the Sun Don’t Shine press notes: “[The film] follows Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) on a tense and mysterious road trip through the desolate yet hauntingly beautiful landscape of central Florida. From the outset, the purpose of their journey is unclear, and the motivations behind their heated altercations and shady errands are hazy, but sporadic moments of tenderness illuminate the loving bond between the two that exists underneath their overt tensions.

“As the couple travels up the Gulf Coast past an endless panorama of mangrove fields, trailer parks, and cookie-cutter housing developments, the disturbing details of their excursion gradually begin to emerge, revealing Crystal’s sinister past and the couple’s troubling future.”

I spoke last Sunday with Mary and Martha director Phillip Noyce. We went on for a half-hour — here’s the mp3. The nominal subject of Mary and Martha is the ravages of malaria, so tomorrow is an especially fitting day to catch it. But the film is really about much more, and not just in terms of content. It’s a personal film for Noyce as well as a spiritual retreat of sorts.

Mary and Martha director Phillip Noyce.

Noyce’s motive in directing a politically-tinged HBO character drama, he says, was to downshift from his experience as the director of Salt, a hugely successful Angelina Jolie action thriller that required dealing with as many political elements as creative ones. Noyce equates the experience to working in a “washing machine.”

Mary and Martha is about two moms (Hilary Swank, Brenda Blethyn) “coping with the malaria-caused deaths of their sons in Africa, and about the social and political activism these tragedies bring about,” I wrote three days ago. “But it’s clean and direct and earnest as far as the story allows it to go, which is farther than you might expect,”night, and it hit me all over again (and in a sense a bit more this time) how well made it is, how carefully finessed, how exactly right it all feels.

Noyce is primarily known for directing big expensive action thrillers and potboilers (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, Dead Calm) as well as somewhat smaller-scaled humanistic dramas (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Catch A Fire, The Quiet American) — this is obviously one of the latter.

“The material might be a little on-the-nose, but Noyce knows exactly what he’s doing, and there’s just this sense of convergence — a team of clearly talented people have been told to contribute in just the right way. It’s so well acted by not only Swank and Blethyn but every last costar and bit player (Frank Grillo, James Woods, Lux Honey-Jardine, Sam Claflin, Sean O’Bryan, Ian Redford) and written with such clarity and finesse that it moves along and just sinks right in without a hint of huffing or puffing…it just happens.”

Noyce’s next project is a kind of futuristic Hunger Games-meets-Phillip K. Dick film with Jeff Bridges and yet-to-be-cast costar. It will shoot in South Africa. The Weinstein Co. is producing.

Is a vague but persistent sense of dread just part of being 40-plus, or do teens and 20somethings feel it also? In 1967 the Troggs sang that “love is all around” but not today, baby. Today it’s dread, foreboding, negative anticipation — an uh-oh climate of “I don’t know what’s coming but nothing all that good, I fear…another bombing, another financial crisis, another mass slaughter by some wackjob, my Siamese cat will be run over…something.”

It’s not just the existential climate of 2013. You know Edvard Munch and Franz Kafka felt this. Kant, Rilke and Heidegger too. Cary Grant dealt with this throughout his entire life. It’s the weight of the world, man. But if you want to make it go away, all you have to do is pop a Tylenol. Seriously.

A 4.19 piece by Time‘s Maia Szalavitz acknowledges that Tylenol “isn’t the most obvious remedy for dread. Unlike, say, heroin or a stiff drink, it isn’t known to provide the emotional escape that fear of dying might require.” But a recent clinical study indicates that Tylenol seemed to make a difference among some Vancouver-residing subjects who were asked to contemplate death…”[it] somehow reduced anxious compensation.”

Daniel Randles, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, tells Szalavitz that the results of the limited study “don’t prove that Tylenol can treat existential despair.” But I am nonetheless now thinking about buying some Tylenol and seeing how I feel after a few days. All I know is that I sense the tingling presence and the threat of death, doom and financial ruin everywhere, and it might not be so bad to have some of that feeling medicated away.

With the 66th Cannes Film Festival jury being chaired, as previously announced, by director, producer and swaggering industry heavyweight Steven Spielberg, the following were announced last night as jury members: Nicole Kidman, French actor Daniel Auteuil, director Ang Lee, Indian actress Vidya Balan (who?), director Lynne Ramsay (“Hey, Lynne, you’ve just quit Jane Got A Gun in a traumatic and headline-making way…want something to do that’ll put the spring back in your step?”), director Cristian Mungiu and two-time Academy Award winner Christoph (called “Christopher” in the Cannes press release) Waltz.