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by Jeremiah Kipp on January 6th, 2012 at 1:26 pm in DVD
The original Planet of the Apes series was an unsubtle yet striking response to the turbulent times from which the films were made. In its own way, Rise of the Planet of the Apes seems to be branching off from a kind of apolitical unrest, not sure what it's fighting against but mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore. While the human characters are presented with mild sympathy (particularly the attractive lead actors, James Franco and Frida Pinto), the audience is clearly intended to side with the apes. Maybe because the culture watching this film is generally dissatisfied, yearning for more, and not necessarily articulate about how they want to make it better, but it sure feels good to see the old system torn down.
Let's jump right to the most enticing part of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is the final act where the apes have acquired a stunning level of self-awareness and storm the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though these beasts are obviously CGI, a post-production magic trick that's occasionally distracting in its obviousness, their spectacle of mayhem feels oddly vindicating. Who would have thought that an anarchic, cartoon-realized "dawn of the apocalypse" could pack such a crowd-pleasing jolt? Continue Reading »
Tags: Andy Serkis, Frida Pinto, James Franco, John Lithgow, King Kong, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, Planet of the Apes, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 28th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Sixteen & Seventeen
My God, just when you feel like you've got a hold of something, or you're moving forward at a good steady clip and sense that karma is on your side, things can rapidly take a turn for the nightmarish. Day sixteen is easily, without a doubt, the worst and most painful day of shooting on God's Land. After a week of scheduling with the actors and striking out with his location scouts, our fearless director Preston Miller suggests we just go into a famous department store chain, head straight to the grocery section, and proceed to steal shots there without benefit of insurance, paperwork, clearance or permits. I'm no coward when it comes to this stuff, but it's an insane proposition when you're stealing shots involving over a half dozen actors, most of them Asian-Americans dressed in white cowboy hats, hoodies and sweatpants—and involving three pages of solid, crucial dialogue—and involving child actors—and involving said child actors crashing shopping carts together for fun. Trying to shoot something like this is just madness—maybe even stupidity. Maybe we could have done it another way; but we decided to go for it to get those scenes completed and behind us. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Blakeley, Alex Gavin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Super Mario Brothers
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 27th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the seventh in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Nine & Ten
The heart of the film is in the domestic scenes between the husband and wife. While I feel the point of view of God's Land is from the child, Ollie (Matthew Chiu), it's the conflict between the parents that sets everything in motion. The father, Hou (Shing Ka), was a successful doctor and gave everything away to join this cult—which has relocated its members to suburban Garland, Texas—and his wife, Xiu (Jodi Lin), is a non-believer. The key scenes we are shooting over the weekend involve testing the marriage. One of the scenes involves the two of them in bed: The husband is trying to sleep, the wife wants to speak with him about the past, how they met, the time Hou met her father and felt so uncomfortable because he didn't know what to say, and also to get him to talk about how she was the most beautiful woman in school, a beautiful flower in a sea of "frumpy bespectacled weeds." It's one of the scenes we used for the auditions, and I always found it to be incredibly poetic and beautiful, as well as tense—not to mention familiar. I think guys have a habit of rolling over and going to sleep when women want to talk. "Just go to sleep," Hou mutters, "or at least let me sleep!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 26th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the fifth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Day Six: An Interview with Wayne Chang
We are approaching the middle of our shooting schedule, and finally making some headway. But as the weekends push on with God's Land, the balancing act of juggling a dozen actors' schedules is starting to wear on the production. Our lead actress, Jodi Lin, who is in almost every single scene, got paid work for the following weekend and we have to figure out how to shoot around that. Preston will have to operate the camera instead of Arsenio Assin, our director of photography, because he had a last minute schedule change. There would seem to be no romance and glory in making films at this no-budget level. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amy Chiang, Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Wayne Chang
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 24th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the first in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
[Photo Credits: Shing Ka (all, except logo); Leif Fortlouis (logo).]
Day One
The 8-year-old boy, Matthew, is clutching his mother's sleeve tight and holding her hand. He looks very pale. As the director of photography, Arsenio Assin, sits on a nearby couch inspecting the Hi-Def camera, which is state of the art and still has that "new car smell," and the filmmaker, Preston, assembles the costumes, which are, to say the least, quite bizarre (a white cowboy hat, white zip-up hoodies, white sweatpants and Texarcana cowboy boots), the boy seems to wonder just what he got himself into here. We load up the passenger van and drive out to the shopping mall, where we will proceed to shoot these actors in these strange costumes moving through this consumer-driven space. Matthew barely says a word to us; he is going through something completely interior—and completely personal. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, Béla Tarr, Fandor, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Lin, Jones, Leif Fortlouis, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 20th, 2011 at 4:30 pm in Film
A man meets a woman, and we're not even five minutes into the running time of Andrzej Zulawski's Szamanka before they are having sex on the floor of her rented apartment. Immediately thereafter, this man is revealed as an anthropology professor excited by the discovery of a mummified shaman. The primal act of sex and the mysticism of the strange religious-historical find are the engines that drive this strange, often hilarious, frequently brutal genre film. It's an art film about sex and sweat, one that seems to have emerged from the guts as opposed to intellectual game-playing, or in the bleakly absurd streets of mid-1990s post-Communist Poland. It's fast, frenetic and seems to have been made either by a young man bursting with fresh energy or an old man who films every moment as if he might never get another chance to work.
As it happens, both are kind of true. Zulawski was, in fact, middle aged and soon to cut his directorial career short in favor of writing books. He had not made a film in his native Poland since his work was banned in 1976, and he vowed never to work again under the Communist regime. Szamanka was an independently funded production outside of the state. Most noted in America for his "video nasty" horror project Possession, starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani as a married couple descending into a hellish spiral of rage and carnal despair (and that's before the monster shows up), Zulawski's work is often about the painful relations between men and women. Continue Reading »
Tags: Andrzej Zulawski, Boguslaw Linda, Bruce Willis, Crash, Daniel Bird, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Isabelle Adjani, Iwona Petry, Lost Highway, Mel Gibson, Mondo-Vision, Possession, Sam Neill, Szamanka
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Shade Rupe's Dark Stars Rising is a collection of interviews with first class weirdos in the world of cinema and performance. What makes it a special read for connoisseurs of this sort of bizarre entertainment is Rupe's earnest, non-ironic, deeply curious set of questions, which bring out a candor and trust in his subjects. Told entirely in Q&A format, there's a shortage of editorializing, and Rupe allows his superstars to speak for themselves.
For example, the spectacularly large drag queen Divine, best known for appearing in such John Waters classics as Pink Flamingos and Polyester, opens up about various inherent vulnerabilities and interests. Perhaps it's because Rupe's very first question isn't a question—he simply states, "Those are great shoes." Divine's response is, "I always say I look normal from my neck to my ankles, and the head and the shoes are always, as I say, fucked up." Rupe's follow-up question wonders if Divine gets bugged a lot for looking "normal" and already we're set up for a little more to the discussion than, "Did you really eat the dog turd in that movie?"
Transgressive bad-boy filmmakers like Gaspar Noe (I Stand Alone) and Richard Kern (You Killed Me First) delve into their work, and how they have evolved over the years. Kern's deadpan sense of humor about living in his fantasies is summed up when he says, "[When I was making] all that violent stuff, I was in that phase. Now I'm in the pervert phase. I don't have to hide anymore." Noe explains how his projects became fueled by personal anger at being rejected by financiers, or observing his friends make movies while his hands were tied. "Then you start hating the person who refused your script," he says, "[to the point where] you kill her in your own dreams…and [when you finally make the film] it all comes out in the movie!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Books, Brother Theodore, Buddy Giovinazzo, Combat Shock, Crispin Glover, Dark Stars Rising, Dennis Cooper, Divine, Dust Devil, Floria Sigismondi, Gaspar Noé, Gus Van Sant, Hermann Nitsch, I Stand Alone, Jim Van Bebber, Johanna Went, John Waters, Lars von Trier, Medea, Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Richard Kern, Richard Stanley, Shade Rupe, The Manson Family, Udo Kier, You Killed Me First, Zamora the Torture King
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Filmmaker Harmony Korine's latest experiment is called Trash Humpers, and feels like a home movie made by anarchist youths who wear old age make-up and seem to be living like the mutants out of The Hills Have Eyes. Shot on VHS camcorders, complete with tape glitches and tracking lines, the project seems more like a found object than a movie, or a series of amateur vaudeville sketches that lead to murder. Shot in Nashville and released theatrically last year in a limited art-house run, the project re-emerged as a traveling art show where stills from the movie were sketched and painted over by Hungarian-American artist Rita Ackermann in their show "Shadow Fux" and accompanied by footage from the movie. Korine's latest work seems more specifically geared for being projected on the sides of walls. Few people will see it, but I'll take Korine's mad, Herzog-esque DIY aesthetic over mumblecore any day of the week. You don't "like" a movie like Trash Humpers, but I'm very happy such films exist. Korine touched base over the phone about his latest endeavor, sometimes taking the conversation seriously, other times veering into delightful hyperbole. Continue Reading »
Tags: Gummo, Harmony Korine, Mister Lonely, The Hills Have Eyes, Trash Humpers
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The suspense of the opening sequence of Nathan Wrann's grim no-budget experimental revenge movie Burning Inside is all about how long we're willing to sustain our interest in a completely inactive picture. A nurse sits next to a comatose man in bed, and the moment draws on for several minutes—the pacing is somnambulant, and it's a big moment when the man finally sits up. Strange that a brooding, intense and ultimately violent revenge movie should open this way, but in doing so Wrann makes an announcement that he is a filmmaker marching to the beat of his own drummer.
The central character who becomes labeled "John Doe" (played by Michael Wrann) slowly rebuilds a life for himself, but running through his everyday existence are nightmare visions which may or may not represent a terrifying incident from his past. The art-house audience able to handle the aesthetic challenges—namely, long, slow takes in high contrast black-and-white, obscure storytelling with minimalist dialogue and images that seem degraded and dug up from some at the bottom of some time capsule from yesteryear—will find that ultimately Burning Inside is a tale of repressed violence, which asks questions about how we respond to brutality ourselves, and the various ways we are affected.
Re-imagine Death Wish as if Charles Bronson were unable to connect with rational thought: You'd have a very American fable of rage and retribution told via the techniques of DIY-filmmaking, with inevitable links to German expressionism simply because the movie is meant to be experienced and felt. It's sensory and tactile—the kind of movie that's meant to seep into you, and leave you with an uneasy feeling. If it's meant to inspire thought, it's the thoughts you have after a particularly unusual bad dream that you might not want to figure out right away, since it taps into those personal gray zones of manhood, morality and empathy.
Being distributed this spring by James Felix McKenney's new distribution company Channel Midnight, and having its world premiere at the Connecticut Film Festival this May, Burning Inside will surely find a loyal cult audience willing to tap into its rigorous midnight movie sensibility. After grappling with the content of his film, I touched base with the filmmaker to discuss his work, and found him erudite, thoughtful and equally willing to wrestle with his movie's heavy, disconcerting themes. Continue Reading »
Tags: Burning Inside, Hunting Season, Kristina Powis, Michael Wrann, Nathan Wrann
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by Jeremiah Kipp on December 9th, 2009 at 1:55 pm in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
[L'amour braque is available on DVD from Mondo Vision. Click here for more details.]
The mid-1980s were a time of stylistic excess, with loud pastel colors and big hairdos and neon-tinged nightlife, and even if Paris didn't quite resemble the hyperrealist pastiche Andrzej Zulawski constructs in L'amour braque, certainly the world onscreen feels oddly familiar. The Reagan era of American politics, the glossy sheen of TV shows such as Miami Vice, the dawn of the MTV generation: these are my frames of reference for Zulawski's film, shot in 1984 and released one year later, and for the French pop cinema of that era when pulp entertainment vaguely resembled high-end fashion advertisements with some haute pretensions of grandeur. Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva and Luc Besson's Subway were frivolous rushes of action-sex-sensation, seemingly fueled by cocaine and club music. What then to make of L'amour braque, shot within this plastic cultural landscape by an exiled, brashly ironic, intellectually provocative and emotionally explosive Polish film director from his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's epic-sized, violent and philosophically scattershot Christian parable The Idiot? Continue Reading »
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[Editor's Note: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Part I: Days Eighteen & Nineteen (Jeremiah Kipp)
The final days of principal photography are upon us. God's Land has been a long haul, exhausting but ultimately rewarding—it reminds me of when I used to run marathons. At a certain point in the middle of the run, the mind concentrates only on moving forward; as the finish line nears, there's a surge of renewed energy.
Preston and I enjoy our location scouting in New Jersey, where we stumble across the perfect location for our hotel scenes. The King's Inn has an outside décor that resembles a pyramid converted into a NASA space shuttle by way of 1950s Americana kitsch. In other words, we took one look at it and knew it was Preston's cup of tea. The hotel owners were reasonable and supportive of low budget independent cinema, though they did enjoy telling long anecdotes about how MTV shot there, and the abundance of trucks and lights and personnel. Preston smiles, acknowledges the grandeur, and tries to make it clear that our mom and pop operation is nothing like that. We're small potatoes! Continue Reading »
Tags: Carrie Kiamesha, Geeta Citygirl, Gloria Diaz, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Nancy Eng, Ostaro, Ranjit Chowdhry, Sharon Spiak, Shing Ka
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By Jeremiah Kipp
"This movie is more like an artifact, it's like something found somewhere and unearthed—an old VHS tape that was in some attic or buried in some ditch."—Harmony Korine
Yes, it's fun to imagine Trash Humpers being shot on some outdated, stolen camcorder, used by some suburban mutants who seem to have slinked out of a rest home populated by the cast of The Hills Have Eyes. Director Harmony Korine's trash aesthetic is handheld, muddy, and purposefully marred by auto-tracking issues, tape glitches and heavy duty wear and tear. The people recording are a small, motley group of prune-faced geriatrics with young people's skinny, lithe bodies who spend their time in parking lots and back alleys hurling cinder blocks at beaten-up TV sets, smashing fluorescent bulbs and dancing on the scattered remnants, and, as the title suggests, hurrying over to the nearest garbage receptacle and humping away. Continue Reading »
Tags: Film Society of Lincoln Center, Harmony Korine, New York Film Festival, Trash Humpers
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by Jeremiah Kipp on September 29th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
There's a more adept portrayal of human suffering in Rob Zombie's Halloween II than in all the lollygagging throughout John Krasinski's timid adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Sally Potter's iPhone-destined, fashion world monologue-a-thon Rage. Throughout Zombie's slasher yarn, there's inevitably a close-up, as the killer comes crashing down upon his prey, where the victims' eyes drift heavenward and a brief, unspoken plea for mercy passes between them and monster. As they meet their doom, Zombie dwells on the mayhem in real time, each brutal pulverizing blow given resonance. You would think this example of pulpy shock cinema couldn't hope to compare with the more supposedly contemplative American independent cinema, much less surpass the emotional, cinematic, and humanistic impact of a world where academic characters and fashion moguls gaze into the heart of darkness within their navels. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Halloween II, John Krasinski, Movie Reviews, Rage, Rob Zombie, Sally Potter
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By Jeremiah Kipp
[Antichrist screens on October 2nd at 9pm and October 3rd at 1pm as part of the 2009 New York Film Festival. Click here to purchase tickets.]
We see a husband and wife in the shower—they are played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Everything is in beautiful slow-motion black-and-white. The water cascades down onto their beautifully sculptured faces. Flakes of snow gently blow through the open window of their bedroom. It's all ethereal, meditative, with classical music playing, and as the couple drift into sex, their little child, barely more than an infant, bobbles across the floor towards the wide open window, happily makes his way up and over, and plummers to the street below. Thus we have the opening of Antichrist, which is both beautiful and pretentious and sexually charged and a little nasty. Continue Reading »
Tags: Antichrist, Lars von Trier, Movie Reviews, New York Film Festival
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by Jeremiah Kipp on August 18th, 2009 at 8:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Sixteen & Seventeen
My God, just when you feel like you've got a hold of something, or you're moving forward at a good steady clip and sense that karma is on your side, things can rapidly take a turn for the nightmarish. Day sixteen is easily, without a doubt, the worst and most painful day of shooting on God's Land. After a week of scheduling with the actors and striking out with his location scouts, our fearless director Preston Miller suggests we just go into a famous department store chain, head straight to the grocery section, and proceed to steal shots there without benefit of insurance, paperwork, clearance or permits. I'm no coward when it comes to this stuff, but it's an insane proposition when you're stealing shots involving over a half dozen actors, most of them Asian-Americans dressed in white cowboy hats, hoodies and sweatpants—and involving three pages of solid, crucial dialogue—and involving child actors—and involving said child actors crashing shopping carts together for fun. Trying to shoot something like this is just madness—maybe even stupidity. Maybe we could have done it another way; but we decided to go for it to get those scenes completed and behind us. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Blakeley, Alex Gavin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Super Mario Brothers
1 Comment »
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