Mike DeMinico has just finished a rough cut of his film, Dee. 
The 5-minute film is an adaptation of the opening scene from the novel, my bad side. 
Click here to watch. And let us know what you think.
Category Archives: film
The Sexing Up of Oz
What the hell is going on in Oz? The makers of Oz, the Great and Powerful can be forgiven for James Franco’s atrocious Wizard, the ridiculous sidekick monkey and china doll and even making Emerald Square look a little too much like the Vatican, but not for making the wicked witch look like she’s going out clubbing. 
Thank God they didn’t have the rights to use Dorothy. Who knows what they would have done to that poor girl.
Paris as Dorothy
Fashion for the Apocalypse
I have to admit that my second book, Fashion for the Apocalypse (1990), is weighed down by excessively elocuted elocrubrations: To describe the beauty of the lake in winter was to strangle the infinite.
Ahmic Lake, Canada
True, the woods did whisper, the ice did blind, the moon did blaze, but these words did not suffice, could not transfer the moment to existence, would never contain the wonder of the silence of sliding feet, the crackle of skimming blades, the scream of a straining engine.
Ahmic Lake, Canada
The writing in Fashion for the Apocalypse is not all bad…or at least as bad:
“The Fear” first hit me was when I was six, watching “The Wizard of Oz” on a Sunday night. Everything seemed normal. My family had finished dinner and were just watching a movie. This was the third time I had seen the film. I loved it.
But this time, when the witch appeared in a cloud of orange smoke, a horrible feeling descended on me. I wasn’t afraid of the witch; it wasn’t anything like that. It was much more general. Everything seemed wrong, bad. I couldn’t sit still. I had to stand. I walked across the room – nobody in my family seemed to take any notice – and sat in a chair in the corner. I figured that if I didn’t watch the movie, the feeling would go away. It didn’t. I left the room and went down the hall and found a hard wooden chair in the dark. I waited there. I moved my legs and looked from one dark place to another, like I was trying to shake being drunk.
New York City
I waited. It eventually faded. I never directly associated the feeling with anything, but the movie certainly did seem to have brought it on and did not watch any more of the film that night. For the next few years I had two consistent nightmares. One where a witch lived in the basement and another where I would be sucked in between the walls and into the pipes by some sort of foreboding evil. I saw “The Wizard of Oz” again 15 years later. It was incredible; no horrible feelings. I laughed all the way through. It is, in my mind, one of the best films ever made.
The Academy’s Most Popular Award
Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is occasionally on the mark with their annual Best Picture – Casablanca (Curtiz, 1943), Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969), Annie Hall (Allen, 1977) & No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007). 
However these awards have more to do with Hollywood politics and marketing campaigns – such as Harvey Weinstein bullying on behalf of the dreadfully mediocre Shakespeare in Love (1998) – and much less to do with the art of film-making. 
As a consequence, the Best Pictures ends up consistently falling short. This isn’t just an issue with which film wins, but which are nominated and has been a problem right from the start of the Awards in 1927. The most apparent has been in the exclusion of most of the great foreign films in ages past, failing to nominate Passion of Joan of Arc (Dryer, 1928), M (Fritz Lang, 1931), La Regle de Jeu (Renoir, 1939), 
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957), Breathless (Godard, 1960), Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1973) and The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986) and City of God (Meirelles, 2003)…to mention only a fraction. 
The Academy is flawed at its core, responding to the topicality of the film – social movements above all – and less to the work itself. “Best Pictures” are often predicable and dull, lacking in both vision and inspiration…and this year is no different. Here’s my list of the Academy’s most glaring mistakes.
Not even nominated Winner (Soon to be Forgotten)
1933 Duck Soup (McCarey) Calvalcade (Lloyd)
1946 Gilda (Vidor) Best Years of Their Lives (Wyler)
1952 Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly) Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille)
1958 Vertigo (Hitchcock) Gigi (Minnelli)
1968 2001: Space Odyssey (Kubrick) Oliver! (Reed)
1979 Manhattan (Allen) Kramer vs. Kramer (Benton)
1982 Blade Runner (Scott) Gandhi (Attenborough)
1989 Do the Right Thing (Lee) Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford)
2003 Elephant (Van Sant) The Lord of the Rings (Jackson)
2013 The Master (Anderson) Argo (Affleck)
That’s Show Biz.
Bad News Hustlers: Sports in a Scene
Sporting moments can make for effective points in the narrative arc – both the highs and lows – and draw the audience in.
Bad News Bears
But most often they don’t. The team scores. Everybody cheers. So what?
The Natural
These moments are too grounded in winning; the immediacy is all that matters. Indeed, one of the weakest moments in my script, Sister Prometheus, is a game of badminton between the Adamantine sisters. Virginia and Willow are the younger siblings and have something to prove.
WILLOW serves the shuttlecock. VIRGINIA slams it back for a winner. WILLOW lobs to LOUISE who serves. DIANE volleys back. LOUISE volleys. 
WILLOW volleys. DIANE drops. WILLOW volleys. VIRGINIA volleys. WILLOW drops. DIANE volleys. LOUISE slams it for the winner.
Yes, it’s badminton; there’s lots of volleying. I’ve inserted the glares, exclamations, even a bit of profanity, but it’s still flat. And so I took them out again. It was too stuffed and pointless.
Caddyshack
The key in these sporting moments is in the stakes, as the script gurus say, making the winning proposition more than a game. Something real.
The Hustler
It’s not the game that matters, but why they’re playing it.
VIRGINIA (Slumping over the shuttlecock): Fucking birdie.
Singin’ in the Rain: Innocence in Technicolor
We went to see Singin’ in the Rain this morning at Film Forum and found the theatre packed with film-buff kids and parents alike – including Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. We asked if this was a special event, a benefit perhaps, but it was just a screening for which we had just squeezed in. We settled into our second-row seats and cricked our necks for the opening short, a 1935 cartoon by Max Fleischer, Dancing on the Moon.
I wondered what it was that made a 1952 musical such a draw in 2013. The song and dance is certainly something to marvel at – even if I wasn’t that fond of musicals – especially Donald O’Connor’s Make ’em Laugh and Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’ amorous You Were Meant For Me. 
It is also a surprisingly thoughtful film, a tongue-in-cheek expose of the artifice of the stars and executives of the Hollywood system – ironically mirroring the behind-the-scenes story of Singin’ in the Rain itself. 
But most of all, the essence of the experience is in the underlying theme of integrity, celebrated in such wide-eyed innocence, where Hollywood stars drink milk at 1:30 in the morning, friends are always loyal and the worst of crimes is singing (and dancing) in the rain. 
And, yes, it is hard to find things like this these days. I guess that’s what sells out a theater on a cold Sunday morning in 2013, especially to such a hip crowd.
The images of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive”
“Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie, Little Fugitive.” 
This high praise comes from none other than Francois Truffaut himself, the noted director of early Nouveau Vague films, including 400 Blows. 
Film-goers owe a fundamental debt to Little Fugitive and the French New Wave. As much as these films may be artsy for many, in not entertaining with dynamic narrative, character and settings, they do offer a devotional to the image, revealing moments for meditation. It is films like these that relate to how we dream, that understand the stillness in how we remember. 
It is these films such as Little Fugitive that we need to see again and again.
Groundhog Day: Bill Murray’s Everyman Angst
Groundhog Day is a weird tradition to say the least. Cloudy skies on February 2 indicate a mild spring to come. Huh? The stupidity of it boggles. There is little wonder as to why Harold Remis chose it as the focal point for his film. 
Groundhog Day is that rare breed of comic film that digs into understanding the human experience: What would it be like to live the exact same day over and over again? Is this what it is to be immortal? Is this the true test of the human spirit? Is this the genesis of angst? Bill Murray delivers the performance of his life, an asinine everyman who is remarkably (and believably) humble in the end. 
As to the actual event itself of dragging out Punxsutawney Phil, I hope that the men in top hats might consider leaving him alone. 
Shadow or not, we don’t need a groundhog to tell us what we already know; we’ll be seeing a lot less of winter in the years to come.
New York Inspired V: Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors”
Ragnar Kjartansson’s new show The Visitors opened at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea last night. Hundreds of visitors – including Bjork, Antony, dozens of project participants, not to mention the artist himself – filled a space not made for such a crowd. And so it was hard to digest the work, a 53-film displayed on nine different screens, all of them surrounded. 
The title of the piece is derived from the 1981 album The Visitors by Abba, their final work together. 
The film opens with isolated people in different rooms – kitchen, living room, bathroom – connected to each other only by headphones, humming, strumming and singing lyrics from a poem by Ragnar’s former wife, Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir: Once again I fall into my feminine ways. 
The music is entrancing, the tone meditative, the desire to sing along hard to resist; it is at times ecstatic – Ragnar, in the bathtub, raising his guitar above his head, a wheel-less canon fired into the evening – and always inviting. Everyone eventually exits their disparate spaces to join together at the front porch of the house (Rokeby Farm), still singing, to walk down into the fields together.
I was tired when I arrived at the gallery, feeling the flu coming on, and the crowds didn’t help. I wanted to leave, come another time, but stayed and was, once again, enveloped by Kjartansson’s work. It was not only the music, but the hypnotic quiet, in spite of everything, my tired knees, the inability to see much of anything, missing screens, unable to move, the anxious pushing around me, the chic personages. Indeed, I was privileged in the end to meet and thank Kjartansson for his work and expect to return – a few times, I imagine – to see what it’s all really about. It’s Bliss all over again! 
New York Inspired II: D.A. Pennbaker’s “1 PM”
Film Forum’s current program New Yawk New Wave showcases director-centered New York films in the 1950s-70s, including D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 P.M. 
The genesis of the piece, as Pennebaker explained in his comments before the screening, arose from Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that the United States was on the brink of revolution. Pennebaker, esteemed for his work on Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars as well as The War Room, didn’t share Godard’s belief but saw an opportunity for something to unfold. 
The film centers on Godard directing various people in 10-minute unedited sequences, including political activist Tom Hayden, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, actor Rip Torn, The Jefferson Airplane in a rooftop performance, that identify the unnatural order of filmmaking and narrative construction. As heavy-handed and off the mark as Godard might have been about America’s revolution, this is a great film for filmmakers. It is a genuine attempt to merge form and content and also features many candid, almost heart-warming moments of Godard on camera.
A screening of Maidstone followed 1 P.M. Pennebaker confessed in his pre-screening comments that this film (directed by Norman Mailer) had bored him in the end…that is of course until the infamous scene in which Rip Torn attacks Mailer with a hammer. 
It takes a long time to get there, but we have Pennebaker to thank in the end for never letting go of the trigger.