YokoOno Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Just the other day, Eric Snider threw up a fan rant about Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the dismissive box office reports about the film. The flick pulled in $2.97 million and came in 10th in the weekend box office, which he notes makes it the third best opening ever for a documentary. Well, whatever cash was pulled in, some of it might be going right back out.

CNN reports that Yoko Ono is suing the producers of the film for using John Lennon's "Imagine" in it. The lawsuit notes that while she never gave permission, bloggers have begun calling her a sell-out for licensing the song. Us bloggers, always making trouble! The suit, which was filed on behalf of Ono, as well as Julian, Sean, and EMI Blackwood Music, is looking for the filmmakers to stop distributing/selling/promoting the film, and asks for financial damages. Meanwhile, the producers of Expelled say that they've used only "a very small portion of the song," and "Unbiased viewers of the film will see that the 'Imagine' clip was used as part of a social commentary in the exercise of free speech and freedom of inquiry."

I haven't seen the film yet, but for those of you that have -- what say you on this whole "Imagine" drama? Should it be expelled from the documentary?

At once a mainstream and experimental film, The Killing of John Lennon traps itself (and the audience) inside the warped psyche of culture-assassin Mark David Chapman, keeping the camera on him pretty much from start to credits. Only his on-the-record words are used as dialogue, as his aimless obsession with outing 'phoneys' and seeking notoriety leads him all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he will collide with history by blowing away John Lennon. Making Chapman interesting proves to be a tall order, since his murder of Lennon is generally accepted as having no political or other external motivation -- only the motivation derived from his own diseased mind. Is watching a crazy person rant and rave entertaining? Sure, it can be, but The Killing of John Lennon is only marginally entertaining, dragging on too long for its own good and continuing past the logical stopping point -- the killing -- and moving into Chapman's introduction to prison life, where his only joy will be playing pointless cat-and-mouse games with his analysts.

As played by newcomer Jonas Ball, Chapman is a highly functioning sociopath who see-saws back and forth between lucid, on-point observations and hateful, juvenile blather about feeling betrayed. Early on he says: "I don't think one should devote oneself to morbid self-attention. One should try to be a person like other people." Then, presumably with mental illness creeping in, he ignores his own advice and begins to vocalize a childish hatred of Lennon derived from a selective reading of his song lyrics. "He told us to imagine no possessions -- but he has yachts and country estates," he says, not bothering to take this internal debate any further before condemning Lennon to death. Chapman's mind eventually focuses on Salinger's infamous book The Catcher in the Rye, engaging with it almost like Jim Carrey in The Number 23 -- as if the book was written specifically with him in mind, and acting out its plot in the real world will somehow unlock some higher plane of reality. In other words, Chapman is a nut who wasn't diagnosed before he was allowed to act out.

After a Tribeca screening of The Killing of John Lennon at Pace University last week, director Andrew Piddington hung around to answer some questions from the crowd. The biggest question, which someone finally dared to ask, was how come when we see Mark David Chapman visiting New York City, it's unambiguously the New York City of 2007? We clearly see Chapman pass by Planet Hollywood, Toys R' Us and every other Times Square fixture you could possibly imagine. Piddington's answer? He needs more money to CGI that stuff away, and hasn't raised it yet. Other questions during the talk touched, of course, on Chapman's motivations, the whole conspiracy angle, the central performance of Jonas Ball, how Piddington went about casting Lennon and Ono, whether he actually met with Chapman and a number of other issues.


Crowd: Talk a little about the research and the casting process for the film.

AP: Considering research and casting, the gestation for this movie began four years ago -- it's taken four years to make. I first came across a book by Fenton Bresler called Who Killed John Lennon? This was a conspiracy book that set out to prove that Chapman was a Manchurian Candidate. There was a lot of evidence in it, but no proof. What it did have was a lot of depositions and transcripts, court information, all of which was public domain. And once I started to read the psychiatrist reports I became fascinated by the actual character. That was what drove me, and that's what started it. I then went onto the Internet and you can imagine the sort of stuff that's on the Internet. It's full of very difficult things to believe, and so therefore I then went to Ebay, and over the course of a year, I purchased nearly every single newspaper that was published during that four or five month period. That became my prime research material.

My instinct was always to cross-check three times and if the same information came through, then for me that was valid, and that's how I built up the screenplay. The screenplay took a while to write, and the film took four years to make. Jonas Ball, who I believe gives a magnificent performance in this film, the fascinating thing about Jonas Ball is that he is very young -- he hasn't done a great deal, but everything up there is very real and very solid and very mature. The great thing about any movie actor is the ability to hold the camera -- to have this relationship with the lens -- it's a cliche, but it's true -- and Jonas Ball has that. If an actor can carry a big close-up and give you the emotion that you require, that's a marvelous tool to have, and it's great for a director to use that tool. So I think he's gonna do really well. It's his first film, and he can't be here tonight because he's working, so that's good.

If you don't live in a big city or attend a big film school, the availability of most art films to you is next to nothing. And when I say art films, I don't mean Little Miss Sunshine; I mean Man Ray's Emak-Bakia and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film. Okay, so those might show up at your local museum, but what about avante garde films by John Lennon and Yoko Ono? Stan Brakhage? Joris Ivens? William S. Burroughs? Rather than trying to rent these experimental films from Netflix or buying whole collections from Amazon, you can go the digital route and watch them on your computer for free. Cinematical's sister-site DV Guru has discovered UbuWeb, which features around 100 different artists, each with one or more films available to download. So, if you haven't seen Ballet Méchanique or, God forbid, Un Chien Andalou, now you have no more excuses.

For less high-brow material, you can also always go to Jonhs.net, which streams (no time-consuming downloads) films that have fallen out of copyright, or for some other reason are available for free. There you can watch everything from silent films by Buster Keaton, classics like It's a Wonderful Life, recent films like Steal this Movie, cheap B-movies, training videos, undistributed documentaries, and more. If you don't see anything you like now (how is that possible?), keep going back, as the site is constantly getting new stuff in daily. And sometimes what is there today may be gone tomorrow. I just watched Death of a President on the site Tuesday, and now it has been removed.

Be warned: you might not leave your computer for awhile.

John Lennon may have believed in the idea of peace, but he wasn't exactly a peaceful man. He had a stormy temperament and was famously quick to boil. One of the most revealing moments in the new documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon is a replay of the Montreal bed-in confrontation between Lennon and New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson. She pushes past the flowery, junket-like atmosphere and takes aim, accusing him of being more or less a stooge of the anti-war movement. Lennon's gut response is to turn nasty. His small eyes become fixed and feral, his shoulders hunch over, as if he's preparing for a roll in the Liverpool dust of his youth. It's the kind of scene that would be at home in a truly critical look at the man behind the music. Unfortunately, the makers of this film had something different in mind. Directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld have clearly cut a devil's bargain here, accepting a 'Yoko-approved' stamp on every frame of their film in exchange for unfettered usage of the Lennon catalog.

The trade-off has some benefits. Even if you're turned off by the hagiographic nature of the doc, which makes hero-worshipping hay out of some Watergate-era chicanery to get Lennon's U.S. visa revoked -- surely the least of the Nixon's regime's misdeeds -- you can still sit back and relax to a generous sampling of Lennon's post-Beatles hits. Instead of interviews with family members, old band mates and friends, the filmmakers have assembled a collage of notable radicals from the 1960s. Some are dead, and some are living. There's Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers founder who encouraged his minions to use food money to buy "a gun a week." He seems to have spent the last 30 years near a McDonald's drive-in. Famed burglar G. Gordon Liddy is on hand, along with his mustache, to contribute his two cents on the Lennon mystique. The saga of activist Fred Hampton is revisited; Noam Chomsky makes a brief appearance to accuse the F.B.I. of having murdered him. You get the idea.

The problem with so many documentaries is a lack of cohesive focus, the result of too many ideas and intentions -- linked but incongruent -- for any certain purpose to be conveyed. Such an identity crisis can ruin the most well-meant film, but it almost seems appropriate to the homosexual and transsexual issues fumbling around in Katherine Linton's Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwig.

In 2003, record producer Chris Slusarenko put together a tribute album called Wig in a Box that featured popular artists such as The Breeders, They Might Be Giants, The Polyphonic Spree, Spoon and Sleater-Kinney covering the songs of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a rock musical about a transsexual that was also made into a cult film. The proceeds from the sales of the album went toward funding for New York City's Harvey Milk School in its transformation from a youth center for gay, bisexual and transgender students into an accredited public high school.