The nominees for the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards (one of the last film awards that really mean anything)

Funny story tonight... I was fucking around with my computers, and since I figured the problem with both of them was overheating, I downloaded a little program that tells you how hot the temperatures of your fan and processor are. Well, the laptop fan is completely dead and is no longer moving, because the program told me that the CPU no longer is aware that a fan is attached(!) and the laptop processor, which is supposed to be at a temp of about 123 degrees fahrenheit, was clocking in at over 200 degrees(!) so the processor is fried, because, obviously, the fan had stopped cooling the processor long ago, and once a processor gets that hot, it's over. So, I tried that program on the desktop, and both the processor and fan temperatures were also too high, meaning the fan wasn't doing its job either. Luckily, the processor wasn't so hot that it had fried yet, so I opened up the side of the computer case, and I have a little fan blowing in there, and now the program shows a normal CPU temperature... so I dunno. Maybe it will at least stay on a little longer than usual.

Well, Unaccompanied Minors bombed, opening at #7 last weekend, with $5.82 million... Told you so.

Most movies - good movies - have one great moment... if they're lucky. Just one. It might not be much more than a look, or the way a certain line was said, but most have at least one. This moment might make you laugh, or cry, or think about something in your life. Moments that you easily remember weeks, months, and years after you've seen them. Most movies have a couple. Magnolia has over two dozen, and I can name them off the top of my head: The opening prologue. The "wise-up" sequence. The Frogs. The music - every single note - and how it drives the story. Jason Robards' deathbed monologue. John C. Reilly after he's lost his gun. Donnie's speech in the bar. Frank Mackey's on-stage, double-meaning dialogue after he's found out his father is dying. The beautiful camerawork. Cruise's breakdown. Melora Walters - in basically every scene. The kid telling the father "you have to be nicer to me." Cruise walking down the hallway as the looping music plays. The subtext - all of it - the father/son stuff, the spiritual aspect, and most of all - hope. The frogs waking up Robards. The kid's speech on the gameshow. John C. in the car after asking for a date. John C. praying by himself in his bedroom. His date with Melora. Julianne Moore. The whole structure of the film itself. Aimee Mann's music. And I could go on and on. Rarely does someone have the audacity to attempt something like it, or, more importantly, the talent to ensure that not one note of performance or direction is off key. It's not really a movie, it's an experience. I once heard a story that when Darren Aronofsky watches Apocalypse Now (another great "experience" film) he gets the room completely black, going so far as to tape the cracks in the windows and doors and use black curtains. He then starts the movie from the beginning, and if for whatever reason he has to stop it, he can't continue, he has to start from the beginning again. He does this once a year - watching the movie like this. It sounds insane, but all of us film people have a movie that we treat like this. Before he goes to direct a new movie, Spielberg always watches Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Searchers, in that order, and without stopping. We all have one picture we treat like this. I guess mine's Magnolia. Yes, we're weird. But we're movie people.

Peter Boyle
1935-2006

The Gaslight District, Part 4

He continued looking out his window, down on the dark street below and the rows of brownstones that littered the block. The early-morning dog walkers started to emerge from their houses and sleepily made their way down the long flights of stairs leading to their doors. The street consisted of many of these old brownstone buildings – many of them hundreds of years old – and a single large apartment complex on the end. Each side of the street was lit with gaslights – a dozen on each side, leading all the way up to the other side of the street, to the chestnut tree on the other end. The street sat on a hill, enabling anyone at a high enough altitude and facing the west to look down upon the entire Gaslight District, and, further on in the distance, the rest of Boston.

As the old man stood staring out his window, he heard a sound from the kitchen. It seemed to be a slight rattling noise, although he could not pinpoint the source of it. At first he thought it might be an intruder, but he soon realized that was not the case, as his front door opened into his living room, and he would’ve heard someone enter the front door long before this. As he stepped into his kitchen, he spotted a mouse scurrying across the floor. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped in its tracks, and looked up at the old man, who continued walking into the kitchen. The mouse stood, frozen. Not one step. Not one hesitation. It was not out of fear – in fact, it stood there casually, making a chirping noise with its mouth. Even the mouse knew this man meant no harm.

Then, abruptly, the room went dark. He looked out his window, and noticed that one of the gaslights had gone out. Now all that remained was the moonlight. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the faint lighting in the room, he squinted behind his thick glasses and staggered over to the kitchen table, where he sat down at the rickety old chair near the window. He looked through the aged, scratched window glass and observed the stars fading one by one, and then the first rays of sunshine struggling to penetrate the thick morning fog. As he watched a young city worker trying to fix the broken gaslight outside, he turned his attention back inside, where he noticed his little rodent friend was how sitting on the table next to him. Years ago, he would have chased the little animal away, broom in hand, all around the apartment – as if he was reenacting some lost comic image from an old Charlie Chaplin film. But age had gotten to him – in more ways than one – and now he slowly raised himself from his chair and made his way to the cupboard. He rummaged through the boxes and cans, and victoriously arrived at a box of crackers, which he opened up and brought back to the table. He took one out of the box, breaking a piece of it off and carefully placing it down on the table. The mouse’s first instinct was to snatch it up as quickly as possible with its little paws and run back to its hiding place, but this was a different situation, and it knew this fact very well. It confidently strolled over to the cracker and ate it in that very spot, mere inches from the man’s hand. After it was done, the man broke off another small piece and placed it in the palm of his hand, laying the back side of his hand flat against the table. The mouse hesitated this time, but its little feet began to creep forward, until he was next to – and then in – the palm of his hand. Just then, a loud sound outside made the man jump, and the mouse went scurrying off into a corner. Looking outside the window, he noticed the worker who was fixing the gaslight had dropped his toolbox, which had sent dozens of wrenches and hammers onto the street and scattered across the sidewalk. The old man turned his attention back inside and began to look for the mouse.

The Gaslight District, Part 1
The Gaslight District, Part 2
The Gaslight District, Part 3

Oliver Stone talks about Bush (Edinburgh Film Festival 2003)

Dr. John - To Hell With Love

Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham (1969)

Two people who are definitely on opposite ends of the religious spectrum...
Interesting conversation.

Part 1


Part 2

Man, YouTube sucks now. It's too popular and too many people know about it now. All of the studios are freaking out about even just clips of movies and stuff being up there. My account got deleted... I can easily make another one, but why bother?

I was thinking about it, and it just hit me this morning: This has been a shitty year for movies. Sure, there's been a few decent ones, and one flat-out masterpiece (United 93), but I guess nothing could really compare to last year, and I don't think anything will for quite some time. Last year really was a terrific year for movies. I mean, just think about it: Brokeback Mountain. The Squid and the Whale. Syriana. Capote. Murderball. Cinderella Man. Good Night, and Good Luck. Broken Flowers. Match Point. Saraband. A History of Violence. The New World. Walk the Line. Grizzly Man. And that's not even everything. Last year will probably go down in history as one of the best, right down there with '94 (The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Quiz Show, Ed Wood, etc.) and '95 (Apollo 13, Leaving Las Vegas, Dead Man Walking, Casino, The Usual Suspects, etc.) and only a handful of other years. Good times.

Claude Jade
1948-2006

Well, Paul Feig is back. The creator of Freaks and Geeks has a new movie coming out, Unaccompanied Minors. However, I fear he has a flop on his hands. The problem? The title. A terrible title. It's being called Grounded over in the UK, and it's obvious somebody over there has a little more brains. Warner Brothers (right now the last-place studio...with hair-brained decisions like this it's not hard to see why) has been marketing the movie towards small children, but they've given the movie a title that they can't even pronounce or understand. And I don't think they're playing up the cast enough, especially with the large fanbase that Wilmer Valderrama (That 70's Show) has. Even worse for Feig, I fear that there might actually be a good movie hidden under all of the marketing bullshit. It's based on a true story, which essayist Susan Burton recounted on NPR's "This American Life" a few years back, and the cast is great. Sadly, it looks like another flop for Feig, whose 2003 film I Am David bombed, grossing just $284,000 on a $25 million budget. Since then, he's gone back to TV-land, directing episodes of The Office and Arrested Development, which was a good fit for him and is probably where he should stay. Of course, we wouldn't even be having this conversation if Warners would just call the movie Grounded.

Kind of interesting stuff today: I got a cease-and-desist order from Vincent Gallo himself, requesting I take a clip down off of YouTube (the photo booth scene from Buffalo '66). I've gotten these before, but it's sort of odd that it came in the form of an e-mail from the actual guy instead of an e-mail from YouTube saying that a studio had requested it. Strange. Anyway, I took it down of course, but it's kind of fun to know that Gallo was strolling through the internet today and ended up e-mailing me for one reason or another.

Candles on Bay Street, a TV-movie, premieres tonight. Set in Maine, but was filmed (like almost everything else these days) in Canada. Boo...!
(Does this mean I spend too much time reading about random shit? Answer: yes)

Robert Altman
1925-2006

Art School Confidential - terrible goddamn movie... what happened to Terry Zwigoff?

The Gaslight District, part 3

As the day continued on, he retired to his bedroom, watching the sun’s descent on his ceiling. The bright white light of afternoon quickly turned orange, and then the dark amber hue of evening filled his window. He walked across the room and looked down on the street below. The last lingering signs of life remained: Several kids – remnants of the evening’s hide-and-seek game – hid behind cars and underneath bushes, desperate to escape the clutch of that night’s seeker; the old women – seated outside on their front stoops in lawn chairs – had given up on their afternoon sunshine, and instead headed inside to actually face their husbands for the night.

He lived across the street from a bar, and as the many groups of people entered on this Friday night, he made – as he often did – a little bet with himself as to which one of them would be the last to stumble out onto the sidewalk in a drunken stupor, waking him up from his deep sleep and signaling the arrival of the misty morning fog. As he drifted off to sleep, his thoughts quickly veered from the exploits across the street back to matters of more importance. The beach. The sand. The night. That long-lost memory, all those years ago. It was so clear and vivid in his mind, it could have happened yesterday: The crashing of waves against the shore; the distant sound of a cargo ship in the darkness; the faint scent of saltwater on his clothes the next morning. Fuck this. He hurriedly summoned up all of his energy and attempted to focus on something else. Something much less emotionally...brutal.

As he frantically searched his mind for a comforting image with which to numb his brain into submission, his thoughts wandered back to the little girl and the chestnut tree, and he quickly fell asleep. He was awoken by a loud crash, and he sleepily shuffled over to the window to locate the cause of the disturbance. He spotted Seymour, the 60-year-old town drunk, stumbling around outside. He had wandered outside – or, more likely, was kicked out – and tripped over a large metal trashcan, sending it tumbling into he street, and he along with it. As the owner of the bar retrieved him from the pavement and tried to silence the babbling, intoxicated old man, Seymour picked himself up, brushed himself off, and strolled into the early morning light. He stopped in front of the corner chestnut tree, picked a few of them up off the ground, and put them in his pocket. As several kids groggily walked to the bus stop, he handed a chestnut to a little girl, and kept on walking.

The Gaslight District, part 2

He struggled to open the heavy oak door, and once inside, he began his trek up the dimly-lit hallway. The old stairs creaked and groaned under his weight as he made his daily trek up to his fourth floor apartment. He had promised himself for years that he’d move into another building on the other side of town, where the then-new building codes required that there be an elevator, but years later, he remained in the same place. He walked through the quiet hallway, down to the end of the hall, and stopped in front of apartment 8A. He turned the key in the doorknob, and forced open his frequently-stuck door. I need to fix that. He knew he never would, of course, but it made him feel like he was accomplishing something by noticing that it needed to be done.

He walked over to his television, and retrieved the picture of his wife that was sitting on top of it. As part of his ritual, he kissed the picture, set it back down, and walked to his kitchen table. He looked out his window, over all of Beacon Hill, and watched the gaslights slowly being exterminated. Even the city had not yet adjusted to the autumn season. He turned his attention back inside his apartment. His hands searched the cluttered kitchen table for his journal. He found it and opened it, its old leather cover stretching and straining upon opening. He started writing, his rambling prose detailing all of the sights and scenes of the day. He wrote of how the young family had reminded him of himself when he was younger – minus the child, of course – for that little detail was never to occur. He wrote of the fluttering leaves and the busy waitress and the half-asleep assembly line of customers, and anything else that happened to enter his brain at that particular moment.

A cloud formed overhead, and the light inside his small apartment slowly began to dim. He walked across the room and switched on the light, and the overhead fluorescent bulbs flickered and buzzed as the room quickly brightened. Hours had passed, and he returned to the window, now watching the children returning home after their day at school. He watched as the fleet of yellow schoolbuses rolled over the hills, winding in and out of the streets, and marvelled at the ballet of little feet splashing in puddles and picking up fallen leaves in the street. A little girl paused and examined a chestnut tree, and upon obtaining some of its riches that were deposited on the ground, promptly skipped on down the street, making sure to jump in each and every puddle along the way. The cloud became thicker and more pronounced in the sky, and he was sure a storm was coming. Whether it would be rain or snow, he could not be sure. It was that time of year.