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What’s a director to do when he realizes his latest production
is telling only one side of a story? If you’re Clint Eastwood, and you’re
making a movie about the Battle of Iwo Jima, the answer’s simple: you make two
movies. Flags of Our Fathers concentrates on the six American marines—forever
immortalized by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal—who raised the stars and stripes
on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. Lambs Before the Wind (a working title)
will revisit the battle from the Japanese perspective. The complementary films,
both co-written by Crash director Paul Haggis, will be released simultaneously
next fall.
David Cronenberg has abandoned his Painkillers project,
a story involving a future in which surgery is the new sex and pain the new pleasure.
Why? The idea was too dated. “It feels like it’s from another era,” the
director says. Instead, two other projects are in the works. The first is an
adaptation of Martin Amis’s London Fields. The second, in another
fine melding of grand auteur with formidable scribe, will see Cronenberg tackle
Bruce Wagner’s original screenplay, Maps to the Stars.
France’s ever provocative auteur terrible, Jean-Claude Brisseau,
has some dubious techniques for working with his young female actors. So dubious,
in fact, the director recently stood before a Parisian judge facing charges of
sexual assault. It seems Brisseau, who is sometimes credited with “discovering”
Johnny Depp’s sexpot wife Vanessa Paradis, has conducted screen-test auditions
in which the women were forced to masturbate on camera. One plaintiff claimed
she did 20 to 30 “tests” over a five-year period—including some without
a camera. “He
said his eye was replacing the camera,” said one of the four actresses who have
filed suit. Brisseau vehemently denies everything and maintains that his audition
methods are essential to his art.
“Hidden (Caché),
his latest and arguably most accomplished provocation,
revolves around central characters and a plot predicament
that—despite being set in an unnamed French city—feel
terrifyingly familiar. That’s
the operative word, terrifying.”
“Viewed as a whole, Fisher’s
films are like a service entrance hidden behind
the Hollywood sign, leading into corridors that
take us past the film labs, sound stages, and utility
closets of a vast movie empire. Viewed separately,
they are sly and nuanced conundrums that introduce
us to the unseen servants of an elaborate image-making
process. Together, the films converse with and
refer to one another in an intertextual cacophony
worthy of Borges.”
Distributor
Wanted: Mutual Appreciation
“I bet Andrew Bujalski is
sick of reading that he’s the voice of his generation,
when most of that neo-slacker demographic has never
had the opportunity to see his films. Bujalski’s
debut feature, Funny
Ha Ha, had a three-year festival wind-up
to a privately financed 35mm theatrical release this
past spring… Now it seems that the 26-year-old
filmmaker may have no choice but to reprise Funny
Ha Ha’s slow route to a theater not necessarily
near you with his similarly seductive second feature,
Mutual Appreciation.”
“Witherspoon’s bubbly twang
brings the brassy former child country star and future
Mrs. Cash into adorable reality, while Phoenix’s
scarily brooding Goth affect occasionally makes it
seem like he wandered in from a remake of In
Cold Blood. His obsidian stare recalls Eminem
in 8
Mile more than any
country figure, but you can’t say it doesn’t
fit the material.”
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