BY JONATHAN VALANIA Back in the 60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory, his studio-cum-playpen situated in a brick-walled walk-up on 47st street in Manhattan, was the epicenter of all things edgy, artsy and, ultimately, profoundly influential. Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nico, and The Velvet Underground all came and went, and most sat for one of Warhol’s screen tests — a three-minute black and white stare-down between the camera and subject. There are some 500 of them in the Warhol archives. Recently the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh commissioned ex-Galaxie 500/Luna mainman Dean Wareham — whose cred as a modern […]
THIS JUST IN: Patrick Swayze Dead At 57
CBS NEWS: Patrick Swayze has died after a nearly two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Swayze’s publicist Annett Wolf says the 57-year-old “Dirty Dancing” actor died Monday with family at his side. He came forward about his illness last spring, but continued working as he underwent treatments. It was 1987 when Swayze became a star with his performance in “Dirty Dancing,” a coming-of-age story set in a Catskills resort. The 1990 film “Ghost” cemented his status as a screen favorite. MORE NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Swayze’s cancer was diagnosed in January 2008. Six months after that, he had already outlived his […]
RIP: Basketball Diaries Author Jim Carroll Dead At 59
NEW YORK TIMES: Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife. As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during […]
WORTH REPEATING: Being Spike Jonze
NEW YORK TIMES: Although there were plenty of factors that contributed to the movie’s endless delays, what caused Jonze the most grief with the studio seems to have been his insistence on shunning a more traditional narrative in favor of directly conveying, through moments and images, those raw, untamed feelings. The blogs that reported on Jonze’s disagreement with Robinov and other Warner executives tended to frame the dispute in familiar terms, as a conflict between Hollywood’s love of all things light and an auteur’s “dark” vision. Really, though, the quarrel was about something more unusual in Hollywood than darkness versus […]
CINEMA: The Nutcracker
EXTRACT (2009, directed by Mike Judge, 91 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Something does indeed seem to have been extracted from satiric director Mike Judge: Was it his guts, his heart, his balls? Enough name calling: what’s really missing from this, the third of Judge’s American satires, is the anti-corporate stance that set apart his previous cult comedies, Office Space and Idiocracy. Office Space perfectly captured the happy business speak taught at management seminars to sociopathic bosses while Idiocracy looked at a corporate-controlled future society dumbed-down to neanderthal-levels by the crass equations of the mass media. Idiocracy took […]
SNEAK PREVIEW: The New Wes Anderson
Movie Trailers – Movies Blog MTV: As we can see from the recent trailer, the stop-motion animated film (in theaters November 13) is a unique mix of kiddie-fare breeziness (it’s based on a classic Roald Dahl children’s book), indie-minded filmmaking (“Rushmore” writer/director Wes Anderson is in charge) and star-powered vocal chops (including Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman). As our weeklong Fall Movie Preview continues, Jason Schwartzman pays us a visit to explain why “Mr. Fox” makes him want to cry. MORE
CINEMA: All You Need Is Love
TAKING WOODSTOCK (2009, directed by Ang Lee, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The legacy of the Woodstock concert continues to be a point of contention 40 years later. The counter-cultural revolution embodied by the Three Days of Peace & Music has become conservative shorthand for “the excesses of the 60s” (a phrase even Obama has been known to use), a point-of-view perhaps best exemplified cinematically by the film Forrest Gump, where all the characters who seek self-knowledge in the sixties and seventies are struck down by insanity and disease. The new film by director Ang […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Writer and director Quentin Tarantino discusses his new film, Inglourious Basterds, which blends elements of the spaghetti western with those of World War II films. Tarantino’s other films include Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 We devote the hour to the life and work of Senator Edward Kennedy. Our guests include historians ROBERT DALLEK and JULIAN ZELLIZER. Then, Washington Post political reporter DAN BALZ joins us to talk about the Kennedy’s influence in politics and in the Congress. Hour 2 Vogue has set the standard for fashion and fashion magazines for […]
THANK YOU DOM PILEGGI: Harrisburg Budget Impasse Chases Shyamalan Movie Shoot To Toronto
INQUIRER: With uncertainty about whether Pennsylvania’s film tax credit will be authorized in the state budget — now in Day 56 of limbo — the [new M. Night Shyamalan] supernatural thriller [Devil] has relocated production to Toronto. Though the filmmaker has shot eight of his nine features in the Philadelphia region — for an estimated economic impact of $375 million, according to the local film office — his backers couldn’t wait any longer for legislators to approve the incentive that brings filmmaking and jobs to the state. “Last week, at the 11th hour, Devil withdrew its application for credits because […]
CINEMA: A Little Of The Old Ultra-Violence
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009, directed by Quentin Tarantino, 153 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Inglourious Basterds is everything we’ve come to expect from a Quentin Tarantino film: Violent, talky and cartoonish. But shorn of English dialogue, taken out of its contemporary time frame, and re-routed across the Atlantic, away from American pop culture, Tarantino has found a way to recast his various obsessions to create his most assured work in a decade. It’s a welcome reminder that despite his often self-conscious smart-alecky aesthetic hijinks, at his best few directors can compete with Tarantino’s pure cinematic mastery. The advance word […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Writer-director Robert Siegel wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 2008 film The Wrestler; Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comic and actor, starred in CBS’s The King of Queens and provided the voice for Remy, the main character in Pixar’s food romance Ratatouille. Now the two have collaborated on a new film — a drama, not a comedy — called Big Fan, about an obsessive 35-year-old New York Giants fan. Oswalt’s character, Paul, works as a parking-garage attendant, lives with his mom, and finds an outlet for his passion — and a minor kind of celebrity — as a frequent […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Day That Will Live In Infamy
Look for Dan Buskirk’s review, coming to a Phawker near you on Friday. RELATED: Vanity Fair Photo Spread RELATED: Watch The Trailer PREVIOUSLY: Meet Lieutenant Aldo Raine, Nazi-Hunting Hillbilly Jew & Dead Ringer For Brad Pitt PREVIOUSLY: NY Mag Has The New Tarantino Script NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we’d imagine Tarantino is hoping to land […]
CINEMA: Pretty Pretty Ponyo
PONYO (Dir. by Hayao Miyazaki, 100 min., Japan, 2008) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The tenth feature film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki is no radical departure from what we’ve seen from him before, it’s more feisty heroines, more strange morphing creatures and more warnings of nature out-of-balance. But it is also predictable that the 68-year-old Japanese national treasure evokes feelings of awe that no other animator currently working can. Ponyo contains most of the master’s pet themes, in a gentler package than any of his films since Totoro yet at his advancing age one should savor its ingenuity for […]