My posts are a bit thin this week has have been busy cobbling together ‘The Film Talk Project X’ which Gareth and I have alluded to these last few weeks on the show, (ahhh…the mystery).  We’ll be unveiling it on the next episode so make sure to listen in – there are fabulous prizes to be won Dear Listener – I’m looking at them now…and it’s taking a massive amount of willpower not to claim these items for myself – but we’ll save them for you and for ‘Project X’.

In lieu of a in-depth post I give you a few movie tidbits this morn.  First thing of course is the fantastic news that our very own Belcourt Theatre here in Nashville will be hosting the Sundance Film Festival this coming January 28th as part of the Sundance Film Festival USA Program!  Click here for the story on IndieWire, and here to download the Sundance Press Release.  This is great news for a lot of reasons – one being that as an Recording Industry Town, (Music City USA), Nashville isn’t well know for its film culture – here’s to the USA Program helping to change that.

- – -

Next up is the news that, as reported here, The Film Talk is now on Facebook – yes, I resisted for so long,  anyhew have now succumbed.  Please join us there as I’ll be posting throughout the day as well as using the Facebook Event functionality to let you guys know when Gareth and myself will be hosting and cheering on various filmic events.

- – -

And finally via Metafilter:  a Flickr group I just can’t resist: bootleg DVD covers from around the world.  The thing is of course is these bootlegs all seem to promise a much more interesting time than what you’d get in original versions  – surely having Schwarzenegger in the Star Wars prequels would be an improvement – and who wouldn’t want to see Tom Cruise in ‘Pepe Likes Tacos’?

- – -

(Sundance 11 Theater Sign by longhorndave / Schwarzenegger in Star Wars by John Duffell / Pepe Likes Tacos by Mrs. Gemstone)

Yes – I’m glad to see my theory about John Cusack and 2012 is confirmed!:

In 2012 John Cusack Realizes He’s in a Comedy

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the The Film Talk neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that we often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it’s a pleasant surprise to see ‘Turning Green’, your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what’s wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

‘Turning Green’ was made four years ago – a runner up in the first season of ‘Project Greenlight’ – and is only now being released, with the absurdly misleading poster above.  To tell you the truth, it’s one of the strangest films I’ve seen – on the one hand trying to make a decent job of assessing Ireland’s paradox, or at least its paradox thirty years ago, when the film is set: the fecund literary culture and freedom narratives of Beckett, Joyce, and Heaney co-mingling with the obsessive puritanism enshrined by the State; on the other, it offers a series of cliches about ‘Oirishness’ – the angry priest, the aul fella who seems glued to the end of the bar, the visions of Mary turned into a kind of foreplay.  It doesn’t help that the movie seems unsure of its tone – is it a dramatic entertainment in the tradition of ‘The Quiet Man’, a comedy in the style of ‘Waking Ned’, or a gangster thriller that should have been re-titled ‘Mystic O’River’?  You get parts of all three here; with a shade or two of Tarantino, and a little Woody Allen neurotic cynicism in the voiceover.

Writer-directors John G Hoffman and Michael Aimette do enough to make this northern Irish writer laugh – sometimes; but also enough to make me feel condescended to, sometimes.  Ireland has been poor, sure; Ireland has been oppressive for some, absolutely; Ireland has a long string of little villages where everybody knows everybody else, of this there is no doubt.  But the lack of any empathetic characters in ‘Turning Green’ has the effect of suggesting there’s no reason to care; and for me, Ireland needs a vision of what we can be, rather than yet more dwelling on what’s wrong with us.

And yet, I found myself almost beguiled by the depiction of my home; and grateful that I wasn’t watching another ‘Troubles’ film or a ‘Ryan’s Daughter‘-style over-romanticisation – there’s a smart little film trying to escape from ‘Turning Green’, one in which the double standard of moral hypocrisy is the heart of the story.  It’s not a stretch to say that cultures that freak out over nudity while people are being killed in their name need a mirror; ‘Turning Green’ offers a very blunt one in an exchange of dialogue that, for me, was worth the weaknesses of the rest of the movie.  When an old man is having trouble describing the package he’s gone to pick up from the post office, the domineering priest in line behind our anti-hero James (played with appropriate detachment by Donal Gallery) huffs and puffs about how ridiculous it is to be wasting his time.  James responds with a line that one imagines was the writers’ intended motto for the whole film:

‘If these people aren’t bombing women and children or starving the homeless, they’re making small talk at the post office’.

Despite the fact that the film doesn’t hang together, glimpses of this coruscating raised eyebrow can be seen throughout; ‘Turning Green’ seems not be a complete work, but it has signs of moving in the right direction.  And it’s a better film than I’d make right now.  (For what it’s worth, ‘Turning Green’ pales in comparison to another film that carries similar themes – the far superior ‘Garage’, Lenny Abrahamson’s Tarkovskian/Rohmeresque film about an Irish petrol station attendant and the encroachment of the Celtic Tiger.)

Meantime, in other Irish news, ‘Prods and Pom-Poms‘, the lovely short documentary about Sandy Row cheerleaders will get its local TV debut for Northern Ireland viewers tomorrow night – you can see it on UTV at 10.35pm, Friday 6th November; and if you’re outside the reach of northern Irish television transmitters, DVDs are still available from its makers.

Ok, so Gareth got all webby with his post yesterday:

The Tuesday Top Five: Anthropomorphic Animals in the Cinema Zoo

I say ‘webby’ cause it’s well known that having posts containing numbered lists, such as a Top 5, or ones tied to days of the week, such as Twitter’s Follow Friday, are a quick way to Internet Gold.

So jealous am I of Gareth, not just his fine baritone and pleasant demeanor, but now his Internet Gold – that I am forced to follow with my own gimmicky post.  So here it is:

Worthwhile Web Wednesdays, (or WWW – get it? sigh…).

In which I present to you Dear Listener interesting little film stories I’ve found over the interwebs these last few days.  Ok, are you sitting comfortably?  Then let’s begin:

Wow, ‘Alien’ Artist H.R. Giger was asked to design the Batmobile? See the results:

Diesel Online Shorts Competition

- – -

If you’re a fan of the brilliant Wings of Desire – it’s now available on DVD and Bluray, (worth it for ‘The Falk’ alone, fans of the film will know what I mean):

Rooftop Films – Underground Movies Outdoors

- – -

And last, but not least of course, the always reliable Terry Gilliam on The Power of Imagination:

Terry Gilliam and the Power of Imagination

- – -

Ok, that’s it for now – by the way, there is no truth to the rumour that I didn’t have time to write a post this morning due to an emergency haircut and so assembled the above links from yesterday’s ‘TFT Facebook Page’ while I waited for a the stylist.  No truth at all.

- – -

Wait a minute – now that I think of it – I should do these posts on Fridays. Then they can be ‘Jett Loe’s Patented Facebook Fridays’.

Ahhh, Internet Gold.  I can practically see your shiny glint already.

Chaos Indeed

One of the questionable delights of Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’, which we still haven’t seen at The Film Talk due to those oh-so-frustrating regional distribution patterns, is the appearance of a demonic fox who enlightens the audience with the motto: ‘Chaos Reigns’.  And so it does, in Trier’s universe, this time round (you never can tell with Lars whether he’s joking or serious; whether he believes in the world of ‘Breaking the Waves‘ which endorses eternal life and the healing of all wounds; or ‘Dogville’, where even grace gives up).  Speaking of dogs, and foxes, the ominous vulpe inspired a rumination on the cinema’s tendency to turn animals into representations of ourselves.  Hence Tuesday’s Top Five List - which, if you, dear reader, like it enough may become a sporadically regular feature of TFT.

The Top Five Anthropomorphised Movie Animals (and What They Represent)

5 (tie): The Dog in ‘Short Cuts’ (1993), the Cat in ‘The Long Goodbye’ (1973)

Tim Robbins’ stressed cop character in Altman’s sprawling Los Angeles slice-of-postmodern-angst is the existential opposite of Elliot Gould’s private detective and Lebowski antecedent.  Robbins spends most of the movie trying to lose the yapping puppy, one more responsibility for a married father who doesn’t want the weight of being a parent or monogamous; his treatment of the dog is a mirror of how he feels about everything – including himself: disposable.  On the other hand, Marlowe’s cat might just be the only thing in the film that he treats like a human; or at least the character he treats with the most kindness; in his feline roommate, you see the projection of Marlowe’s own psyche – as the cat emotes, so does he: ‘It’s OK with me’

(click here for our interview with Mr. Elliot Gould himself)

4: The object of our violence, the projected enemy that justifies our behaviour, the derivative of ancient Babylonian myth, the poor guy who was just looking for something to eat but couldn’t fin it because we humans have abused nature by over-fishing in the deep sea, yes, it’s Bruce from Massachussetts. Perhaps you could say that he needs some training in non-violent conflict resolution; but don’t we all?

3: In his (or her – can anyone tell me the right gender?) first on-screen appearance, Babe was known for little more than apeing his canine colleagues by herding sheep; by the time the (hugely under-rated; no less than the late Gene Siskel called it his favorite film of the year) sequel was released, so much metaphorical resonance was being thrown onto the porker that it wasn’t entirely clear whether director George Miller intended the character as a stand in for Jesus or Eve; maybe both; maybe the pig is supposed to exegete the dual nature of being human – landing as we do somewhere between sacred and profane.  Whatever’s going on here, ‘Pig in the City’ is a much more thoughtful film than its marketing or audience suggested; even with the slapstick Mickey Rooney scary clown bits.

2: Youk and Bart the bears in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s ‘The Bear‘.  What an incredible film – my own sense of wonder placed on the screen in the form of ursa minor – the cutest man-killer you’ve ever seen in a fully-rounded story of the life cycle; one that makes you want to be nicer to other people because its central character – a bear for goodness’ sake – is already kinder than you are.

1: Now, given that on Tuesdays we only have room for a Top Five, there wasn’t space for me to include other favorite cinematic animal-as-representation-of-the-human-psyche moments, such as Jiminy Cricket as the conscience of a whole generation of American children, Balloo the Bear as the fun uncle we’re all trying to be, Moby-Dick as the superego of a guy too big for his boots, Doug the Dog in ‘Up’ as the expression of what we’d all like our dogs to really be thinking, or the horses in ‘Andrei Rublev’ as a reason to stay alive when cataclysmically depressed: they are, in short, beauty itself.

But for our purposes, and this is probably no surprise to regular readers, the prize has got to go to a mildly neurotic amphibian, for whom holding it together for everyone else is a life’s work, whom we first saw on television, but gets more of a chance to shine in his movies.  If every stage show, political party or, dare I say it, film podcast had a Kermit behind the scenes to figure out how to manage being alive, maybe we’d be making music as good as Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem too.  More than that: he may be a frog, but HE CAN GO PLACES FAST.

So – anyone got a suggestion for a wiser anthropomorphised movie animal than Kermit?

Jul 24, 1999 – CNET News Story – Pixar and Disney Collaborating on a new Tron film:

Pixar Studios to remake Disney’s Tron?

It set the scene for a generation of hi-tech sci-fi movies and, arguably, inspired some of the best films of the genre. Tron, the legendary Disney movie loved by the thirty-something generation, is rumored to be in the re-make room with some very serious backers, including Steve Jobs.

Jobs, on stage this week with the iBook, also has another day job, running Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq:PIXR), maker of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” According to one source, Pixar may be working on a remake of the classic ’80s sci-fi film.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said Pixar is trying to decide whether to remake the original or create a sequel. It will begin work on the project once Toy Story II hits the theaters November 24. John Lasseter, Toy Story’s director, will head the production.

November 1st, 2009 – The ‘Tron’ sequel never sees the light of day – we don’t know why.  But now comes word that work on the film was far further along than anyone suspected.  A soundtrack was commissioned.  Now, 10 years after conception, that soundtrack has been released, free for all in multiple formats:

Tron Rise of the Virals

In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.

“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.

My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.

- – -

I don’t know how much, if any, of the above quote is true.  But what does it matter?  What is meaningful here is the music.  It’s being pitched as the soundtrack for a lost film – and as such while listening one cannot separate oneself from the sense of the elegiac; from a sense of nostalgia for a future that never was.  A world of the future from 1999 – in which we’d strap in/plug in to a virtual reality that promised…what?  Now, instead of escaping into a virtual world, the virtual world has seeped into real life.  We’re beginning to craft a virtual world around us using the hive mind technologies of Twitterbook and the like.

So are we, in fact, moving into the ‘inverse future’ of what would have been promised by ‘Rise of the Virals’?  And, if it had been made, how would it have changed how we use and view technology today?  We can’t know – but listen to the music.  You can just about feel it – as if you had a fleeting, hazy glimpse of a some parallel universe that just might be around us, all the time.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we can’t reach that parallel world – maybe in memory an unfinished film can become more present to us than it ever would have been if it had been completed.  If ‘Rise of the Virals’ had been made we’d have digital copies of it in whatever format we wanted at any time we wanted.  But how can digital be something real, real to us as analog creatures; how could it be something remembered?  Digital copies are exact – there is no change in the information, 1 is always 1, forever – this isn’t memory – memory degrades – digital is something else.

Memory is analog – memory moves and resculpts and disappears.

Strange ramblings I know on a late Sunday night this November 1st – but that’s what the ‘Viral’s’ soundtrack stirs in me.  It’s the future we never had.

In this week’s action-packed, adrenaline-fueled thrill-ride of an episode I give 10 Reasons why ‘Paranormal Activity’ is so good, Gareth and I delve into the Michael Jackson tribute pic ‘This is It’, (in which I change my mind mid-review!), ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’ gives us hope and we both give our Halloween viewing recommendations:

Get TFT delivered weekly via iTunes

Subscribe to our podcast

Subscribe to our blog

Follow us on Twitter

Sure it’s a gimmick by the folks over at ‘Me and Orson Welles’ – but I’m a big fan of gimmicks, and Orson Welles.

Streaming online, on the same date/time as the original broadcast, will be Orson Welle’s magnificent ‘War of the Worlds’:

Orson Welle’s ‘War of the Worlds’ – Live 8PM Eastern, October 30th

If you’ve never heard it, you should.  The ‘dead air’ as Welles creates the illusion of technical problems from the alien landing site is still shocking – amazingly, even after 70 years the production feels fresh and daring.

As I’ve just written, listen if you can.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” Shirley Jackson, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’

Yes, yes I know. Everyone always includes Robert Wise’s 1963 scarefest ‘The Haunting’ as one of the films to see on Halloween.  And now ‘everyone’ includes Martin Scorsese:

11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time  by Martin Scorsese

But you know what?

Everyone, and now Marty, are right.

It is scary.  In fact it will scare the be**********s out of you.  Don’t believe me?  Then I dare you watch the first few minutes of the pic – presented after the break:

What’d I tell you?  Scary.

If I wasn’t off to watch ‘Scream Blacula Scream’ tonight I’d stay at home watching ‘The Haunting’.  Really I would.

It’s that time of year again – you know, when Clint Eastwood releases a trailer for a movie that looks fascinating and completely different from the last thing he did, and your triple reactions run something like this: 1: Hmmm, Clint’s got a movie coming out – didn’t we just see ‘Gran Torino’ five minutes ago?; 2: Hmmm, it’s got Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela in it – how come no one ever thought of that before?; 3: Hmmm, it’s a movie about the 1995 Rugby World Cup - how come no one ever thought of that before?  Well, no one ever thought of making a gripping film out of the ancient ‘old racist bloke in Detroit has his heart melted by a Hmong family and saves the world through non-violent atonement metaphor before singing a jazz song over the early end credits’ plot either.  So I’m rather excited about ‘Invictus’ – biopics are always a risky proposition, but there’s an implication in the trailer that this one might do more than retread what we already know or think we know.

Mandela has rightly become an unimpeachable moral figure, but it’s par for the course to ignore what he actually stood for – our Mandela is more than a mascot, though our culture might prefer him that way; he actually has things to say.  Icons of moral authority who act toward the common good are often treated this way: I was astonished yesterday to see the digital wall montage that Glenn Beck uses to underline the gravity of what he’s saying – accompanied by the invocation ‘Speak Without Fear’, an image of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr appeared, leading into Beck denouncing (yet again) concerns about climate change, and announcing his willingness to go to prison for the right to eat steak.  We might imagine Dr King would agree that particular cause doesn’t exactly warrant a new letter from a Birmingham jail.

In fact, we might also imagine that a reading of Dr King’s actual thoughts about the actual world would surprise Glenn Beck and his audience.  In fact, and let me not be misunderstood: it’s kind of obscene for a man who recently imagined aloud his fantasy to poison Nancy Pelosi and joked about President Obama setting the people on fire to attempt to inveigle his way into the legacy of non-violence enacted by a man who, there can be little doubt, Beck would be denouncing if he were alive today.  But if his audience were being exposed to what he actually said about the world, I’d tune in every day.  Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea – maybe we could organise a TFT-inspired campaign to encourage talk show hosts only to use images of moral leaders if they’re going to spend two minutes every show actually quoting what they actually said.  Beck could begin with some reference to Dr King’s ‘Giant Triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’; maybe he could just agree to read a paragraph a day from his ‘Beyond Vietnam‘ speech…

Lest I get ahead of myself, let’s get back to the movies – I’m hopeful that the Eastwood/Freeman Mandela is more than a cliche, and resists the urge to laze in platitudes.  Clint’s last movie showed something about quiet authority, and portrayed a radical idea: that justice or peace sometimes costs its proponents a very great deal; it did this without barnstorming speeches or spelling it out; it gets better in the memory every time I think about it.  Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski in ‘Gran Torino’ felt like the culmination of every iconic character Clint has played – a man with no name/Dirty Harry all grown up and full of regret for past mistakes, who makes a choice to invert it all, and live beyond the narrow circle of selfishness.  Mandela made that choice a long time ago – who knows what Clint’s vision of a moment in his life might bring?  We might be about to see a film about an iconic figure that transcends the typical mistakes of making him unreachable to the rest of us; we might actually see a portrayal of Mandela that tells us something about leadership rather than merely represents him as a kind of political pop star.