Bjork Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The seemingly unkillable Norman Mailer is dead of renal failure. He was 84. As well they should do, most obituaries are noting Mailer's nigh-Nobel worthy body of work--his supreme novel of World War II, for instance, The Naked and the Dead, filmed in a heavily bowdlerized version by Raoul Walsh. Mailer's less known work as an actor and director needs to be memorialized separately. As a larger than life personality, given to public brawls, with his noble battered oversized profile worthy of any senator or any prize-fighter, Mailer was made for cinema. Milos Forman used that big silhouette of Mailer's to play the architect Stanford White in Ragtime. Paralyzingly boring avant garde director Matthew Barney co-starred Mailer as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2. (1999). The TV film version of Mailer's famous bio of murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song made Tommy Lee Jones a star. So Barney, last seen on screen filleting Bjork with Japanese whale-flensing knives, seems to have hired Mailer as an allusion to Gilmore's belief that he was a descendant of the famed magician.

Some of the longer obits mention the kind of Mailer misbehavior that broke out, whenever there was a camera near. Most infamous is Mailer's chomping on Rip Torn's ear on the set of his 1970 film Maidstone, after Torn came at him with a hammer. Here's the footage of that famous bout, complete with swanky French subtitles. We're hearing less about Wild 90, where Mailer got into the face of a Doberman Pinscher and outbarked him. I think he was the first actor to have done this, but it's something you see frequently on screen today, whenever some actor wants to show that he's tougher than a dog. Pauline Kael later summed up by saying that on film Mailer "tried to will a work of art into existence, without going through the steps of making it."

Less seen, even, than Mailer's directoral efforts is the 1979 Hegedus/Pennybaker Town Bloody Hall, a documentary version of Mailer's stark bollocky crazy book-lengh essay Prisoner of Sex, in which Mailer clashes antlers with a tag-team of feminist all-stars, including Germaine Greer, Village Voice poet Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag. Also obscure is the English version of Mailer's An American Dream, risibly AKA'd as See You in Hell Darling with Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh and Aug 1966 Playmate of the Month Susan Denberg as Ruta the German maid. Some of these films were shown at The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, which played at Lincoln Center in NYC this summer; here's Michael Chaiken's interview with Mailer about his films. And perhaps A.O. Scott's positive review of the retrospective gave the old self-promoter some pleasure.

• So let me get this straight: Hairspray, the movie, is released in 1988. Then they make a musical from it in 2002. And now New Line is again going to make a movie of it, this time with a budget of $50 million? Jeez, I know they say Hollywood is out of ideas, but this is ridiculous.
• The paper reviews some of the more weird horror flicks coming out from overseas, including Pray, about a punk teen and his druggie girlfriend who kidnap a girl, only to find out she's been dead for a year (Oooooooo!); Una Bianca, a long Italian TV movie about two cops tracking down a group of vicious crooks; and Don't Deliver Us From Evil, which is about two young girls who worship Satan and start killing males in their neighborhood. And in one of the more unintentionally funny segues, the Times then says, "Also out today ...Fun With Dick And Jane."

In what will most likely turn out to be the rights-acquisition equivalent of throwing money down a hole, the ever-optimistic people at IFC Films recently picked up the American theatrical rights to artist Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9. Doesn't ring a bell? Come on, you remember - it's the movie on a boat, with the tub of Vaseline on its deck in which Björk and her boyfriend Barney hang out, turning into whales! Yeah, that one. And now, thanks to IFC, we'll all get to experience the film's magic for ourselves, starting at the end of March. Thank goodness.

Look, I know Barney has a fair number of fans, as does Björk - but in what world could this be a useful acquisition for IFC? I mean, very few people are going to spend a lazy afternoon watching this one just out of curiosity. How could the cost of buying the rights possibly be covered by the profits? It just seems completely impossible.

Just kidding. As Robert pointed out, trying to explain a Matthew Barney film is a thankless task - so imagine trying to review one of them. Consider this:  along with Bjork, the movie (Drawing Restraint 9) stars a massive vat of Vaseline. Since Vaseline hardens if it just sits around without a lid, the vat congeals as the film progresses. Called "The Field" (also the name, incidentally, of a deeply depressing, Vaseline-free movie starring Sean Bean), the vat "is moulded, poured, bisected and reformed on the ship over the course of the film." With me so far? Good. Keep in mind, now, that this flick is over two hours long, with almost no dialogue. Still think you wanna be a movie reviewer?

According to Hugh Davies of The Telegraph, even making it through the screening was a chore. While others fell asleep, he finally gave up about 120 minutes in and tragically missed the denouement in which Bjork and Matthew Barney (identified in the film as "The Guests") a) breathe out of blowholes in the back of their necks, b) slice away one another's legs and feet, and c) discover traces of whale tails in the flayed flesh. Whoa.

No one seems to have been aggressively bitter about having to see the film, however. Instead, most were simply confused, lost, and a bit tired. One Italian journalist, however, was rhapsodic, proclaiming that she'd like to watch the film "over and over again." This may come as a shock to you, dear readers, but I will never, ever be that sophisticated.