Daily Archives: April 7, 2007

Richard Gere Finds High Horse

Ephemera, Irritations, Musings

Richard Gere just had to do it, didn’t he? After my review of the roguish and spry, rooted-in-murky-truth caper flick The Hoax, in which I praise a nimble Gere that we haven’t seen in a long time, if at all, that old shamanistic earnestness kicked in during a Thursday appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Gere had to make sure that potential ticket buyers knew of the very serious underpinnings and parallels in the film, which tells the story of novelist Clifford Irving, who fakes an autobiography of billionaire Howard Hughes.

“This small lie connects to a much larger lie,” says Gere, slowly and pointedly, at the end of a long-ish monologue of narrative explication. “Which was the Vietnam War, Nixon, the Supreme Court, money laundering — it was all kinds of crazy stuff. To me what was interesting was the resonance between that time and that war and that president who lies, and this time and this president who lies and this war that didn’t have to happen.” At this point DeGeneres replies, blankly, “Yeah.”

However much one might agree with Gere about our current president being a serial molester of facts who led us into an awful and entirely unnecessary morass, the fact is that The Hoax, even in its more fanciful flights of speculative inclusion, has nothing to do with, and makes no claim on, the Vietnam War, and Gere’s attempt at linkage was pompous and maladroit — perfectly illustrative of why almost everybody outside of Hollywood looks at this guy as their buzzkill uncle.

Give credit where credit is due, however. Though her show was undeniably hijacked, and had the potential to plunge dourly and in headlong fashion into the next commercial break, DeGeneres showed why sunny aplomb is her greatest weapon of comedic return, gracing Gere with a TiVo, which was apparently part of some earlier referenced joke, inclusive of previous visit(s) to the show. And it was a 40-hour TiVo, just for those wondering…

Silver Lake Film Festival Plots Family Day

Ephemera, Screenings

For those on the West Coast and in the Southern
California area, the Silver Lake Film Festival, which kicks off
May 3 with director Hal Hartley’s Fay
Grim and runs through the following weekend, May 12, will present a day-long
Family Fest on Saturday, May 5.

Despite being home to the world’s major motion picture
studios, Los Angeles in general and
its Eastside communities in particular have been historically underserved by
venues that present motion pictures created outside of the Hollywood
commercial template. Thus was the inspiration born, half a dozen years ago, for
the Silver Lake Film Festival. Conceived as a multi-cultural, multi-arts event
with cinema as its unifying catalyst, the festival’s primary goal was and
remains to showcase the new work of the Los Angeles
independent film community as well as efforts of like-minded filmmakers around
the world.

Family Day will unfold at the new Rudolpho’s restaurant in Silver
Lake (2500
Riverside Drive), and offer free events for kids
of all ages in a warm, friendly environment. Live music from local group the Flypaper
Cartel, a DJ, dance, an art display, a recycled music workshop and free trees
all accompany a day of experimental and thought-provoking films selected from
countries around the world.

Highlighting a series of short, experimental, animated features
will be the British classic fairytale retelling Prince Cinders, Swedish film Linnea
in Monet’s Garden and the affecting, pained but lyrical Hiroshima No Pika,
narrated by Susan Sarandan, about a young girl and her family who live through
the horrific atomic bombing of Japan. Local filmmakers will be represented with
all sorts of “tween” tales, and fifth-graders from nearby Ivanhoe
Elementary School will also
premiere the short movies they’ve been working on as part of the AFI’s student-outreach
filmmaking program. For a full schedule of events and more information in
general, visit the festival’s eponymous web site by clicking here.

More Thoughts on Grindhouse

Film Reviews, Musings

Grindhouse’s classification. And yep, that description of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s cinematic experiment — a lovely, bloody “fuck you” of a pop diorama valentine in a very precious liberal arts school fine art class — just about covers all the
major bases. Yet the movie is also notable for the manner in which it coyly sidesteps (its faux trailers notably excepted) a certain staple of the grindhouse and exploitation genre: namely, leading lady nudity.

A love scene between McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez in Planet Terror is trimmed down and interrupted by a feigned missing reel, and a much discussed lap dance in Tarantino’s Death Proof is given the same treatment. One can call this subversion, certainly, but it also feels
like a bit of a cop-out, given that the same “joke” is effectively deployed
twice. Toss in the fact that Rodriguez allegedly had an indiscretion with McGowan on the set of Planet
Terror — an affair that resulted in the implosion of his marriage with wife
Elizabeth Avellán, also Grindhouse‘s producer — and it feels additionally
suspicious. And a bit disingenuous. Just a bit…

It’ll be interesting to see how the leering fanboy crowd reacts to this — if they’re too caught up in the respective stories to care, or it becomes wordlessly emblematic of a greater frustration with the movie(s). For what it’s worth, in my opinion the bit works much better in Planet Terror, not merely because that segment comes first, but also because it occurs later within that movie, and “at least” happens mid-coitus; Rodriguez sustains the grindhouse touchstones and blemishes better, and it thus feels like less of a gyp. In Death Proof, you can almost hear Tarantino’s stuttering, self-satisfied laugh, though there are rumors that the missing scene will pop up in longer international (and, by extension, DVD) cuts of the film. Meanwhile, for a full review pass at the movie, this time from FilmStew, click here.