Roger, I loved your piece on this new film technology–you write about the subject with infectious excitement. And you got to go to San Luis Obispo! But I wondered why you didn’t dwell in that piece on what, for me, is the most salient fact of digital filmmaking–not so much the means of exhibition as the means of production. As you’ve pointed out in your entry above, what thrills filmmakers is that shooting on digital video is, like, a thousand times cheaper than shooting on 35 mm. (or even 16 mm.). We all know that in low-budget films, it’s not the actors that are your greatest expense, it’s the film stock. (David O. Russell made his great Spanking The Monkey on “short ends” snatched up by his wife, Janet Grillo, then a New Line executive.) Digital will be the great equalizer. You shoot as much footage as you like and you don’t have to convert it all to “telecines”–it’s computer-ready. Any fancy effect you do in the editing–wipes, dissolves, superimpositions–won’t have to be transferred to film (which is what costs a fortune). The kind of arduous catch-as-catch-can process that Mark Borchardt goes through in American Movie will be a thing of the past. Most filmmakers don’t care if digital projection looks better than celluloid; they’d be thrilled if it looked as good.
As to the question of perception, it’s fascinating–mind-blowing. In Michael Almereyda’s Sundance documentary of a few years back, Atom Egoyan ruminates on the distinctions between film and video–on the fact that film goes at 24 frames a second and that a lot of what you’re looking at is blank space and flicker. There’s a distinct difference in his films between the video state and the film state. Can video approximate the effect of film? Maybe not–but if there’s a way to simulate a digital equivalent, George Lucas will finance it. One more question: What is the distinction is between “hypnosis” and “reverie”? It sounds like mystical poetry to me.
I think it’s great that anyone will be able to do what Harmony Korine does, since what he does he does so badly. We really disagree on Julien Donkey-Boy. It can be exciting when directors and actors are willing to put themselves on the line like that, but Korine just pummels you with the same idea over and over. He isn’t trying to capture reality, he’s trying to rub your nose in it. And underneath, he has the same huckster’s mentality as Roger Corman or even H.G. Lewis: He throws in a bloody dead baby to get your attention. As for the idea that the movie mimics the perceptions of a delusional schizophrenic, it’s hardly in the other the other the other shut up I say shut up. Not not not the loser of the egg that’s not a mountain–you fool!--that’s a hill my screen my screen is flashes on and off and on and off and yarrrggghhhhh!
See? I can do it, too.
Magnolia is Six Actors in Search of an Oscar. Make that Twelve Actors. Any bit could be taken out of context and shown at the Academy Awards. The whole movie is actors with their backs against the wall emotionally–actors peaking. They start peaking at the end of Hour 1; I didn’t see how they could get any bigger. But it’s like the Spinal Tap amplifiers. They go to 11. They go to 12. When it’s time to go to 13 something very strange happens. That strange thing isn’t thematically unpredictable. It has the same logic as the earthquake at the end of Altman’s Short Cuts, except there it was short and brutal and here it’s a full-scale, surreal black-comedy routine. I thought it was terrific–I think the movie is terrific. I don’t care what Paul Thomas Anderson is smoking–what matters is that he loves actors. I think Tom Cruise is (I can’t believe I’m writing this) brilliant. I think John C. Reilly is brilliant. I think Julianne Moore is–well, sorry, gotta go to “11” here–whee!--our Vanessa Redgrave. At a screening the other day, I had the pleasure of listening to Joel Siegel make fun of the movie behind me and John Simon (in a separate conversation) make fun of the movie in front of me. That clinches it–it’s one of the year’s best movies!
Which might be a good segue for talking about the year’s great performances, of which there are so many. Sarah, you’re right–the actors are keeping pace with the filmmakers, daring to leave dreary realism (and other misapplications of the Method) behind. I don’t care if they’e rocket scientists in life or not–on screen they seem so smart. A performance like Reese Witherspoon’s in Election isn’t realistic; it only seems that way, because she’s making imaginative leaps that are so psychologically credible. Chloë Sevigny pulls off some uncanny transitions in Boys Don’t Cry, and they’re all subterranean: Great as Hilary Swank is, it’s Sevigny’s performance that really captures the mystery at that movie’s core. (In Julien Donkey-Boy, she looks like a dumb actress stuck in an improv that won’t end.)
