Film Comment News Digest: 4/22/14
The Yes Men
Item of the Week: shooting in nine countries over the course of four years, media hoaxers Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, aka The Yes Men, are back! In The Yes Men Are Revolting they take on the issue of climate change and their targets include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. and Canadian government, Shell Oil and Russia’s Gazprom. After 20 years of sticking it to our corporate overlords, the duo are grappling with middle age and how to keep going while working day jobs—plus, they almost break up while trying to save the planet through a series of satirical exposés. They’ve been in postproduction forever, but are now back shooting a super-secret addition to their material, all the while being wrangled by producer/co-director Laura Nix …
Peter Greenaway in Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'Accuse
He was the toast of the town 25 years ago, but Peter Greenaway hasn’t had a film released in the U.S. since 1999. His Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy and more recent opuses such as Goltzius and the Pelican Company and Nightwatching remain without distribution stateside, except for a week-long special run of Rembrandt's J'Accuse. Moreover in 2012 he announced that he would commit suicide on his 80th birthday. (The explanation? “I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80. One or two late prints by Picasso. One or two late paintings by Titian.”) Poor guy. While this sounds like a cry for help (or perhaps someone desperate for publicity), Greenaway remains admirably undaunted. With just eight years left, he’s underway on Walking to Paris, a road movie, if you will, detailing the adventures of the young Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi during a month-long trek across Europe in 1903, in a series of events and a battle for survival that would influence his subsequent work …
Kim's Video
HBO’s favorite director, Jay Roach (Game Change and Recount), is making a biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, to be played by Bryan Cranston. Imaginatively entitled Trumbo, it details the writer’s tangling with HUAC, which resulted in his being sent to prison. He went on to win two Academy Awards while blacklisted (The Brave One in 1956 and Roman Holiday in 1953), and eventually made the cult antiwar movie Johnny Got His Gun. The film may reteam Cranston with his Love Ranch co-star Helen Mirren … In local news, a sad and sudden development for us New Yorkers: it looks like the final outpost of the venerable Kim’s Video empire is about to close. A sign in the window of its store at 124 1st Ave. declares a going-out-of-business sale. Proprietor Yongman Kim fought the good fight for many years, and we can only hope he’ll reopen again someplace else in the East Village. Now there’s no dedicated retail outlet for DVDs and Blu-rays that I know of—but email us if you know of one …
Takashi Miike in Hostel
The tireless Benoît Jacquot is planning a new adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel Diary of a Chambermaid to star, but of course, Léa Seydoux (and Vincent Lindon) … This sounds too good to be true, but Takashi Miike is currently shooting a vampire yakuza movie entitled Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld. Having completed Over Your Dead Body, his reworking of the classic horror film Kaidan, the filmmaker announced: “Against everyone’s wishes, I’m going back to my roots on this one, and plan to go on a real rampage. I hope my cast and crew, and even myself make it out alive.” … And in perhaps even more exciting news from the land of the Rising Sun, fans of Tetsuya Nakashima, director of the remarkable Memories of Matsuko and Confessions, have been long awaiting his next film. Well, wait no longer—he’s just completed postproduction on The World of Kanako, which once again revisits the world of high school students. Koji Yakusho plays a cop searching for his missing honors student daughter and realizing that she has many secrets …
Cristi Puiu in Aurora
Getting into the film-history documentary racket, Bertrand Tavernier is making Voyage à travers le cinéma français (“A Journey Across French Cinema”). Sounds like a winner for the festival circuit … While the upcoming issue of FILM COMMENT reports on Sierra Nevada, the new project by Cristi Puiu, we’re glad to report that his closest New Romanian Cinema peers aren’t resting on their laurels meanwhile. Cristian Mungiu is preparing a film cryptically titled RMN, and Corneliu Porumboiu is working on a film called The Treasure—so in 2015 look out for a windfall of whatever it is those talented young Romanians do so well … Robert Guédiguian is hard at work on Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, a drama set in 1981 about an Armenian youth who attempts to assassinate the Turkish ambassador to France but succeeds only in seriously wounding a passing cyclist, and then flees to Beirut at the height of the civil war to join the Armenian Liberation Army. Terrorist and victim eventually become fixated on each other, with the former’s family caught in the middle. Who can say if this will be a thriller, a psychodrama, a warm and fuzzy humanist story of reconciliation, or a mix of all three? But rest assured, the director’s wife and muse Ariane Ascaride is inevitably in the mix …
Mrs. Doubtfire
Oh, and superfluous remake of the week? That looks to be Michael Bay’s reboot of the Friday the 13th franchise. Many of you may remember the glorious antics of the loveable, machete-wielding Jason Voorhees over the course of, what, 10 installments? Well, he’s back and… hang on, the originals weren’t exactly masterpieces were they? And since this is being helmed by V/H/S director David Bruckner, there’s a slight chance of things turning out well … But FILM COMMENT readers have something else to look forward to—yes, our prayers have finally been answered, and the sequel to Mrs. Doubtfire is a go, and those two geniuses, Robin Williams and Chris Columbus, will once again recapture the magic that made the original one of the true pinnacles of Nineties Hollywood cinema.
