jean-luc godard Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In describing today's best directors, three terms are generally used (and overused): Maverick, Genius and Auteur. A "maverick" is now used to describe virtually anyone who makes a movie without using Hollywood money. An "auteur" is used to describe anyone who writes as well as directs. And "genius" is used to describe anyone who makes a halfway decent film. I'm taking these words back. In reality, a "maverick" should be a button-pusher. It's a filmmaker who is so radical and daring that even high-minded, forward-thinking critics sneer at their work, people like Vincent Gallo or Catherine Breillat. These people are so dangerous that they have trouble making and distributing films. Harmony Korine, director of Mister Lonely (5 screens) is very much a maverick. Korine has pushed many buttons and many envelopes over the years and though I love his work, he's someone I wouldn't want to invite to my house. (He scares me.)

Werner Herzog, director of Encounters at the End of the World (1 screen), is also a maverick (and, incidentally, a buddy of Korine's). His physically dangerous films have probably had insurance companies slamming the door in his face, and his co-workers have included people who might not be fit for polite society. (At the very least, most of them would turn heads.) Some of his actors have reportedly threatened to kill him. It cracks me up that, because Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man was such a hit, Herzog was allowed to make his new film for the Discovery Channel. I'd really love to have been in on that board meeting. Did they really know who they were dealing with? At the same time, Herzog is also an auteur: all of his films have the same roaming curiosity, fearlessly exploring man's tenuous connection to nature, from Aguirre navigating the Amazon looking for El Dorado, to Timothy Treadwell seeking to befriend the bears.

This past weekend kicked off the 12th annual Tel-Aviv International Student Film Festival, an event that was to feature master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard as one of its honorary guests. But this morning, it was announced that Godard has backed out due to "circumstances beyond his control." Those circumstances, according to someone close to the filmmaker's office, are related to political pressures brought about by a group called The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Godard received an open letter from the group last week urging him to cancel his trip to Israel, making comparisons between the Jewish state and South Africa during apartheid.

Considering the recent celebrations of Cannes 1968, which was partially shut down by protesting filmmakers, including Godard (who wanted the festival to continue, though without prizes awarded), it's interesting to see the Breathless filmmaker still boycotting festivals after all these years. Of course, politics aside, it's probably of great disappointment to the young future filmmakers who were looking forward to meeting the cinema legend.

Jean-Luc Godard, director of my favorite film of all time, Vivre sa vie, has come out of his self-imposed cocoon for an interview with German weekly Die Zeit. The highlight of the interview, which I haven't read, is apparently an admission by Godard that he stole money to finance his early classics. "I had no choice," the 76 year-old legend tells the paper. "Or at least it seemed that way to me. I even stole money from my family to give (fellow French director Jacques) Rivette for his first film. I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films." After that, Godard moves on to more typical utterances, like taking a whiz all over today's generation of filmmakers. "Three-quarters of the people who will receive prizes in Berlin only pick up the camera to feel alive," he says. "They do not use it to see things that you cannot see without a camera."

Godard has of course long since been written off by mainstream critics, with each new work he produces receiving only scorn. Roger Ebert, in particular, has turned on the great New Wave innovator by declaring him to be part of a category of filmmakers who hit their stride at a specific time and place, and then flame out. The opposite would be the Eastwoods and Scorseses, who keep it going decade after decade. I'm not really qualified to agree or disagree with Ebert since I've yet to see many of Godard's later works, but if Ebert is right, it wouldn't take anything away from his masterpieces.

In honor of the striking screenwriters, I wanted to write a list of my favorites, either contemporary or all-time. But I decided that it would be more respectful to not exclude any of them. Even the bad writers need recognition right now. I've tried writing screenplays, and I salute anyone who has had one produced, whether brilliant or not. Even if it weren't difficult to actually write a script, it's certainly tough to deal with the b.s. of Hollywood and the sad truth that your vision will likely not make it to the screen as devised. So, instead of concentrating on real writers, I figured I'd look at screenwriter characters, specifically those portraying the hardships of the job.

"Joe Gillis" from Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder).

I imagine there's nothing scarier for a struggling screenwriter than the thought of ending up like poor Joe Gillis (William Holden). The opening shot of Wilder's classic shows the character floating face down in a swimming pool, and immediately he's labeled "an unsuccessful screenwriter." This sets up a hopelessness for the character, and for writers in general, as the film then flashes back to one of the greatest stories of Hollywood cynicism ever made. Gillis not only represents the difficulty of making it as a screenwriter, he also shares some juicy lines about how writers aren't recognized enough by the public ("Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."); about drastic alterations to his scripts ("The last one I wrote was about Okies in the dust bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.") and about the desperation that turns good writers into seemingly hack writers (replying to talk of his once promising talent, he says, "That was last year. This year I'm trying to make a living."). There were screenwriter characters before him, and plenty after, but Gillis will forever be the quintessential example.

Say what you will about David Fincher's work, but I've been with him the whole way. Yeah, I even liked Alien³, at least at the time. Okay, I have to admit a lot of my attraction to Fincher's movies is actually to the cinematography of Darius Khondji and Harris Savides (now that I look back, I'm surprised to see they only shot two Fincher titles each). But hey, at least the guy can pick a DP, right? Well, I do appreciate Fincher's directorial talents, as well, and regardless of how few films I've seen this year, I continue to consider his Zodiac to be the best of the year. Fincher recently wrapped his next feature, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, which reunites him with Brad Pitt. Now that that's done, he may choose to direct an adaptation of a French graphic novel titled Le Tueur (The Killer). According to Variety, Paramount has bought the rights to the comic, written by Matz and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, with Fincher in mind. Producer Allesandro Camon (American Psycho) is writing the screenplay, and Pitt's company, Plan B, and Alexandra Milchan (Chapter 27) are producing.

Despite the need for a title change, and the fact that we have too many hitman movies coming out these days, the graphic novel should make for an interesting adaptation. Publisher's Weekly compared it to the films of Godard and Melville and the illustrations of Darwyn Cooke and even addressed Jacamon's placement of the camera (maybe Fincher should recruit him to be the film's DP). So, it already sounds like a cinematic story. Unfortunately, PW also claims there's too much "self-consciously cool narration," which can really ruin this type of pic. Another opinion of The Killer, this one from The Comic Book Bin, relates the graphic novel to American Psycho (nice, then, for Camon's involvement) and Leone/Eastwood westerns. Dark antihero with a gun? We see them every day. But with Fincher at the helm, I have higher hopes than usual.

I saw Michael Moore's Sicko (1 screen) yesterday. But rather than talk about Moore's good points and bad points, or the nature of propaganda, or the broken health care system, or liberals vs. conservatives, I'd like to pick one small moment from the film and expand upon it. After surveying the French health care system and finding it good, Moore asks why the American government and American media want us to hate France so much. "Is it because they're afraid we'll like it?" he wonders?

He has a point. The anti-France sentiment of the last decade or so is based mostly on stupid insults and jokes about surrendering (see last year's brain-dead Flushed Away for an example). It's the type of stuff the class bully comes up with and everyone just goes along. But if we stop for a moment and use our common sense, the French have it pretty good. Aside from the free health care depicted in Sicko, and their apparent longevity (despite their taste for wine, cigarettes and fatty foods), they've got one of the most beautiful cities in the world, great food, landmarks, music, and some of the finest filmmakers in the world.

The UK's Times Online has an interesting piece up about great Hollywood director-muse partnerships, from John Wayne and John Ford, to George Cukor and Katherine Hepburn, to Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman. As the article's author Ian Johns notes, these kinds of filmmaker-actor partnerships are less common these days, as directors have a wider array of big-name stars to choose from. Yet, there are still some profitable and creative partnerships out there. Martin Scorsese appears to have moved on from this 1970s and '80s pairing with Robert DeNiro to his modern creative muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he has made Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and now The Departed, with a fourth partnership -- a film about Theodore Roosevelt -- reportedly in the works. Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott worked together first in The Gladiator, then most recently in this year's TIFF offering A Good Year, and they went straight from that into shooting American Gangster together.

Johns goes on to make mention of Pedro Almodóvar's ensemble cast in Volver, where the director featured his favorite muse of the moment, Penelope Cruz alongside Carmen Maura, whom he directed in the 1980s. He doesn't mention my favorite director/ensemble combo of the moment, Christopher Guest and his amazing repeat performers, including Eugene Levy (with whom Guest also co-writes), Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Bob Balaban, Michael McKean and Parker Posey, to name only a few. So pivotal are these actors to Guest's latest films that I can't imagine him making a film without them at this point. They work together with an incredible ease that makes the improvisational style of Guest's films really work.

The article does give props to one of my favorite director/actor pairings: François Truffaut and his on-screen alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. One of the greatest joys of watching movies in my cinematically geeky life has been watching Léaud grow from boy to man as Antoine Doinel, starting in 1959's The 400 Blows, the film that first earned Truffaut respect at Cannes, when Léaud was just 15, through 1979's Love on the Run -- a 20-year run of great filmmaking. Leaud worked with other directors as well, of course, including Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he made 10 films, including Week End in 1967 and, nearly 20 years later, Détective in 1985, but nothing ever quite matched the magic of Léaud with Truffaut.

Who are some of your favorite director-actor pairs? And who would you like to see work together more?

It's time for another round of Film Blog Group Hug, where we uncover all kinds of hidden goodies written by film bloggers all around the Web:

• The Lana Turner Blog-a-Thon took place last week. You can read a number of bloggers' thoughts on the actress and her film career, not to mention viewing some striking photos.
• Film Freak discusses the films of John Hughes during the writer-director's Eighties teen-movie heyday. I would disagree with the statement that "John Hughes was the Quentin Tarantino of his day," but I was never a big fan of his films, beyond a very slight, guilty fondness for Sixteen Candles. (I think I identified too much with the older sister in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)
• Peter at Alarm! shares his reaction to Jean-Luc Godard's film Band of Outsiders. He's nearly convinced me to see it myself, even though I normally have trouble watching Godard's movies.
• The House Next Door reminds those lucky New Yorkers about Film Forum's "Essential Wilder" series this month. The Cinecultist has already attended one of the screenings, A Foreign Affair. I love living in Austin, but did a single theater in town do anything to note Billy Wilder's 100th birthday? Nope. Boo.

This week's AFS@Dobie collaborative series entry is the film I Am a Sex Addict, playing throughout the week at Dobie. Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi will attend the 7:30 screenings on Friday and Saturday to introduce the film and hold a Q&A afterwards. Also at Dobie, actor Scott Mechlowicz will attend the 7 pm Friday night screening of Peaceful Warrior, in which he has a costarring role. Other limited-release films opening around Austin this week include Wordplay, Krrish, and the Sydney Pollack-directed documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry.

• The Paramount's Summer Movie Classics series is back on schedule this week. The musical Cabaret screens on Sunday. An Al Pacino double-feature on Sunday and Monday includes Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. And on Thursday and Friday, Marlon Brando takes over the screen in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.

It's cold and rainy here in blustery Seattle, so why not go catch a movie? Here's a roundup of some of the film offerings around the Emerald City:

UW Film Club 

UPCOMING:

Aaina: Southeast Asian Women Film Focus, March 24-26

Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival 2006, March 31-April 6 - The festival has some promising films lined up, including Sundance winner Iraq in Fragments.

Seattle Jewish Film Festival The festival winds up this weekend, but there's still time to catch some great films:

Thursday, March 16 - Ushpizin @ 6:30PM and Checking Out @ 8:50PM

Saturday, March 18 -  Campfire @ 7PM and Joy @ 9:10PM

Sunday, March 19 - Rashevski's Tango @ 11AM; Becoming Rachel @ 1PM; Awake Zion @ 3PM; Schwartz Dynasty @ 5PM; and Go for Zucker! @ 7:45pm

Check out the festival website for film descriptions.