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By Jeremiah Kipp
If I had to choose the most important films of the 1990s, within the top three would probably be Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. Not since Martin Scorsese bared his faith in The Last Temptation of Christ did a film so aggressively contemplate the horror of grappling with body and soul. Shot in the raw, gritty style of the Italian neorealists, with a handheld camera roving the streets of New York City and film stock bubbling over with grit and grain, much of the film's first half rubs our noses in the life of the title character (Harvey Keitel), and you'd be hard-pressed to find an individual laid more to self-indulgent waste. The lieutenant (we never learn his name) is first seen bellowing at his children while driving them to school, saying that if their auntie is taking too long in the fucking bathroom then they should call him over and he'll throw her ass outta there, and after the children kiss him goodbye (his non-response to affection speaking volumes), he takes abundant snorts of cocaine while parked in the schoolyard, with rosary beads and a cross in the foreground dangling from the rearview mirror of his car.
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To read the rest of the review at Slant Magazine, click here.
Tags: Jeremiah Kipp, Movie Reviews, Slant Magazine
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by Jeremiah Kipp on August 5th, 2009 at 5:00 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the eighth 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 Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen & Fifteen
We are over halfway through shooting God's Land now—and seeing light at the end of the tunnel for some of our principal actors. All of the heavy domestic scenes involving the family inside their new Texas home have been completed, most of the cult scenes are also in the can. The biggest one remaining is a dialogue scene between Teacher Chen (Jackson Ning) and Xiu (Jodi Lin) with the other members in the background. There's a series of scenes coming up involving a hotel that will be a little tricky. But this weekend, we're doing a series of small catch-ups—an assembly line of tiny moments within the film. Continue Reading »
Tags: Gloria Diaz, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Lee Ka, Nancy Eng, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on July 29th, 2009 at 8:20 am in Film
[Editor's Note: 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 July 14th, 2009 at 12:10 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the sixth 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 Seven & Eight
The kid is standing there punching my hand over and over again, monitoring his breath. Matthew Chiu, age eight, who has never acted in a feature film before, is working himself up for a scene where he has to attack another child actor, Brandon Suen (who plays the role of "Jesus," the spoiled son of the cult leader—his sister Caitlyn plays "Buddha"). He has to endure a scene where he is nearly tied up to a tree and humiliated by bullies, then in a burst of rage lashes out against his oppressors. He has to knock Brandon to the ground and assault him, slapping him in the face, saying, "I'm not bad! I'm good! I'm good!" It would be a trying scene for any actor, and Matthew is just a boy. So there we are, with this child actor punching the palm of my hand over and over again, doing deep breathing exercises, in order to prepare for this scene and find the necessary level of exhaustion, frustration and energy to get through the scene. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brandon Suen, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on June 24th, 2009 at 9:10 am in Film
[Editor's Note: 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 June 14th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
[Editor's Note: "Summer of '84" is a co-production of The House Next Door and the Blog Talk Radio shows Back by Midnight (hosted by the initiator of this project, Aaron Aradillas) and Movie Geeks United! (hosted by Jerry Dennis and Jamey DuVall). Click the links above to access this series' corresponding podcasts.]
MONGOL GENERAL: "Conan, what is best in life?"
CONAN: "Crush your enemies—see them driven before you—and hear the lamentation of the women!"
MONGOL GENERAL: "Yes! That is good!"
Such is the philosophy of Conan the Barbarian, the 1982 adaptation of Robert E. Howard's pulp tales of swords & sorcery, which is sweaty, primal, violent and mean. Memorable images include Arnold Schwarzenegger impaled on the "Tree of Woe" and defending himself against a prowling vulture with his bare teeth; Arnold screwing a she-witch in her tent before hurling her into a fireplace; Arnold decapitating a gigantic snake-beastie as well as an arch-nemesis (and, as a punctuation mark, throwing the villain's head down a flight of stairs into the gaping crowd below); Arnold punching out a homosexual priest who is foolish enough to attempt seducing him; Arnold saying a pagan prayer to the Earth God, Crom, which he wraps up with, "If you don't answer, then to hell with you!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Back By Midnight, Jeremiah Kipp, Movie Geeks United, Summer of '84, Summer of 84: Conan the Destroyer
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by Jeremiah Kipp on June 8th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the fourth 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 Five
I was away from God's Land for a few weeks, producing an independent feature in Sarasota, FL. It was a rigorous experience, and while we are not supposed to talk about "project mayhem," I can say that we were chased by alligators in a rubber raft, I saw armadillo and wild boar in the wetlands, shot on planes and speedboats over the Gulf of Mexico, filmed an elaborate and risque magic show, and set up car rig shots on designer cars that, when fitted, seemed like vehicles from Mad Max. Ah, yes, "project mayhem" was an intense and enjoyable time, but when I come back to NYC, I'm dog tired and it's hard to settle back into the rhythm of God's Land, which is slow, meditative, put together by a handful of loyal crew members, and hangs together by what feels like cardboard boxes and chewing gum, and the will of director Preston Miller. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Cox, Alex Gavin, Arsenio Assin, David Groman, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Gregory Crewdson, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Repo Man, Shing Ka, Wayne Chang
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by Jeremiah Kipp on May 26th, 2009 at 10:30 pm in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
Vin Diesel was offered the lead role in 2 Fast 2 Furious but turned it down. For this he earned the label "difficult actor" and a stigma of ingratitude followed him around for years (as well as a couple of box office flops). But watching this sequel, perhaps he was correct in simply walking away. One would perhaps admire this seeming integrity more if he hadn't shown up for the fourth Furious film in a desperate act of career resuscitation—a colleague recently referred to him as "the Gretchen Mol of action movie stars" in that he never quite lived up to the hype. Continue Reading »
Tags: 2 Fast 2 Furious, Jeremiah Kipp, Movie Reviews
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by Jeremiah Kipp on May 26th, 2009 at 9:10 am in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
With its title lifted from a Roger Corman cheapie, The Fast and the Furious would be the perfect film for the drive-in. Cars, girls and a hot rod "break the rules" cop hero versus anti-hero adrenaline junkie racing thieves—all the ingredients are present and accounted for, in a narrative pared down to simplicity itself (good guy has to infiltrate the bad guys, befriends them, then decides if he wants to bust them or join them). Young hotshot Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) takes part in a race on the streets of Los Angeles—and words like "turbo-charged" and "nitro-boosted" take on a macho, sexual allure as muscle cars line up on the streets that are as colorful and distinctive as an array of butterflies, or the wings of exotic peacocks. As he takes part in his first race, what would amount to twenty seconds of real time are expanded into a two minute aria of fuel injection, spinning wheels, and, most important, the headlong rush of speed as a car defies physics and takes on a quality director Rob Cohen described as "science fiction." Anyone stupid enough to drive 110mph down the road as a teenager will understand the feeling, and anyone who hasn't might glean some of the energy and excitement of such a moment all the same. Continue Reading »
Tags: Jeremiah Kipp, Movie Reviews, The Fast and the Furious
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By Jeremiah Kipp
[Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! streets today on DVD. Click here for more information.]
When Jim Jarmusch met hard-boiled, irreverent Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, they spent an entire evening hanging out. At first, Suzuki was very polite in his statements about Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, but after a few drinks he opened up about the things he didn't like so much. "I like the atmosphere very much, [but] it takes him too long to go and kill everyone! I would get him there, kill 'em all. I don't have time for all this." Best known for his ultraviolent 1967 film Branded to Kill, it's a Yakuza film that seems filtered through Alice in Wonderland, with logical plotting thrown out the window in favor of absurd mayhem. He got through being blacklisted and most of his later work feels like impressionistic dreamscapes filtered through hard-nosed, B-movie genre trappings, even when the movies are about painters and poets. Something about Suzuki's early work as a contract player, churning out one Yakuza gangster film after another, instilled in him a basic, primal desire to keep the movie entertaining, even if that entertainment were in utter defiance of film grammar or common sense. Continue Reading »
Tags: Jeremiah Kipp, Seijun Suzuki
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By Jeremiah Kipp
Though the premise might sound like something out of Jacob's Ladder, filmmaker Bart Mastronardi's psychological horror film Vindication owes more to the complex mythologies of Clive Barker novels. When troubled young man Nicolas Bertram (Keith Fraser) attempts suicide by cutting his wrists, some larger force won't allow him to die—and mysterious benefactors in the form of ghostly shades and blind seers lead him towards his destiny—which takes a turn towards the monstrous. Unlike films where the protagonist discovers he's a ghost, or has a flash-memory at the moment of his death, Vindication has a prevailing interest in life's bounty, told in the form of a birth story. In this case, it's the birth of a monster, with the idea of "monster" standing in for whatever you choose to read into it: something other, something superhuman, something magical, or something uniquely alone in the universe.
Made over the course of three years, Vindication is a labor of love project that reshuffles the traditional ideas of the horror film. Mastronardi's influences range from Greek tragedy to 1980s slasher flicks, but he never treats the film as a highbrow/lowbrow pastiche. There's a genuine interest in the horrors drawn from classical texts and the epic qualities found in low-budget gore films. His painterly visual sensibility, composing images with bold impressionistic color schemes and unfamiliar angles, gives a poetic touch to a film made for almost no money in a genre most audiences don't look to for substance, only shock. That said, the horror audience has embraced Vindication because its emotion-driven terror hasn't been seen a million times before—making it reminiscent of Don Coscarelli's Phantasm, which was made under similar circumstances and whose bizarre, otherworldly and borderline surreal imaginative qualities spawned a loyal cult audience. Continue Reading »
Tags: Bart Mastronardi, Interviews, Jeremiah Kipp, Vindication
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by Jeremiah Kipp on May 4th, 2009 at 5:45 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the second 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: Wayne Chang (all, except logo); Leif Fortlouis (logo)]
Day Two
Our director Preston Miller had a clever idea—we have scenes involving the Asian cult giving a press conference for journalists, and Preston thought it would be meta to cast several film critics (many of whom were supportive of his first feature, Jones) including House Next Door editor Keith Uhlich and contributors Dan Callahan, Kevin B. Lee and Vadim Rizov. In my email blast to my colleagues, I mentioned there would be free beer and BBQ, that Preston created a lively and fun atmosphere of good will, and that it would be a pretty easy day. Little did I know almost everything I said in these statements would be a lie, but at least the most important ingredient remained in place, namely, the free beer… Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, Dan Callahan, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Lin, Jones, Keith Uhlich, Kevin B. Lee, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Vadim Rizov, Wayne Chang
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by Jeremiah Kipp on April 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am in Film
By Jeremiah Kipp
[The Limits of Control opens tomorrow at Angelika 6 in New York City, The Landmark in Los Angeles and ArcLight Cinemas 14 in Hollywood. Click venue names for screening information.]
If you were listening to a piece of groovy music and were responsive to it, you wouldn't mind following its vibe, nodding at refrains, enjoying the use of instruments, tempo, rhythm—so why is it audiences get impatient when movies attempt to do the same thing? Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control feels both formally rigorous and genuinely spontaneous, the way good musical improvisations allow for freedom within selected confines. And I'd argue it's enough to create a movie about an actor with a very strong presence (in this case, Isaach De Bankolé) moving through spaces (in this case, various locations in Spain) and allowing the images to convey a sense of mood, tension, atmosphere, whatever you want to call that feeling we get from watching moving pictures on the screen. The narrative is pared down to a man purposefully going forward, occasionally stopping for Tai Chi or two separate cups of espresso. Continue Reading »
Tags: Jeremiah Kipp, Jim Jarmusch, Movie Reviews, New Releases (Theater), The Limits of Control
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By Jeremiah Kipp
[Editor's and Author's Note: Special thanks to Vadim Rizov for his help editing the interview.]
One doesn't need to dig deep into his body of work to see that the late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace had sincere ambivalence about mass media—his much-heralded 1,079-page novel, Infinite Jest, features a science fiction conceit where a lethal videotape known as "The Entertainment" is so addictive, its viewers lose interest in anything other than endless repeat viewings of the film.
But his fascination with pop culture extended beyond a critique of hyper-consumption, and always found its way back toward what it means to be a real human being despite our grotesquely materialistic culture. And his work was often incredibly funny. The three pieces Wallace wrote for Premiere Magazine in the mid-to-late 1990s, about subjects as diverse as David Lynch, Terminator 2, and the Adult Video News Awards, offer wide-ranging commentaries on their subjects. Within the notorious high word count is a mosaic of diverging thoughts and feelings, and an attempt to reconcile them.
The editor for all three pieces was Glenn Kenny, who had what he describes as a "generally positive and indeed collegial working relationship" during their first line edit. Some of the Wallace pieces sparked internal controversy at Premiere for a variety of reasons, and Kenny is able to provide a firsthand account of what happened. He and Wallace had mutual interests in film and literature, and Kenny was given the opportunity to not only have a back-and-forth on the shaping of each piece for the magazine, but also went into the field with Wallace to do research during the A.V.N. Awards.
Even after he vowed never to write for Premiere ever again, Wallace and Kenny maintained a friendship and correspondence until Wallace's suicide on September 12, 2008. Now that some time has passed, I asked Kenny if he would be interested in sharing some memories of Wallace. He spent a fair amount of time laughing, since Wallace was an incredibly funny guy, though he still feels stunned by this sudden loss of one of the great writers of our generation. Continue Reading »
Tags: David Foster Wallace, Glenn Kenny, Jeremiah Kipp
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by Jeremiah Kipp on March 25th, 2009 at 4:45 am in Film
[Editor's Note: 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, 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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If I had to choose the most important films of the 1990s, within the top three would probably be Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. Not since Martin Scorsese bared his faith in The Last Temptation of Christ did a film so aggressively contemplate the horror of grappling with body and soul. Shot in the raw, gritty style of the Italian neorealists, with a handheld camera roving the streets of New York City and film stock bubbling over with grit and grain, much of the film's first half rubs our noses in the life of the title character (Harvey Keitel), and you'd be hard-pressed to find an individual laid more to self-indulgent waste. The lieutenant (we never learn his name) is first seen bellowing at his children while driving them to school, saying that if their auntie is taking too long in the fucking bathroom then they should call him over and he'll throw her ass outta there, and after the children kiss him goodbye (his non-response to affection speaking volumes), he takes abundant snorts of cocaine while parked in the schoolyard, with rosary beads and a cross in the foreground dangling from the rearview mirror of his car.
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