William S. Burroughs : A Man Within

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within investigates the life of the legendary beat author and American icon. Born the heir of the Burroughs Adding Machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems, and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned the 1966 decision, ruling that the book had important social value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century.

The film features never-before-seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, Wayne Propst, Diane DiPrima, Dean Ripa (the world's largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller, and soundtrack by Sonic Youth.

William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. But his friends were left wondering if he had ever found contentment or happiness. This extremely personal documentary pierces the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

Yony Leyser is a 25-year-old filmmaker living in Chicago, Illinois. He has directed several short films. After being kicked out of film school, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and began shooting William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, his first feature film.

Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008)

Short, majestically coiffed, with hooded eyes, an orange-tinted tan and the peevish impatience of an absolute monarch: that is Valentino Garavani, the Italian couturier known simply as Valentino, as he appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary portrait, “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and Champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realize you’ve consumed far too much.

STEPHEN HOLDEN

'sex kitten' holds her own

The Radiant Child

"What's with art anyway, that / We give it such precedence?" (Source available.) Most basic is the common respect, the popular respect for living off one's vision. My experience has shown me that the artist is a person much respected by the poor because they have circumvented the need to exert the body, even of time, to live off what appears to be the simplest bodily act. This is an honest way to rise out of the slum, using one's sheer self as the medium, the money earned rather a proof pure and simple of the value of that individual, The Artist. This is a basic class distinction in the perception of art where a picture your son did in jail hangs on your wall as a proof that beauty is possible even in the most wretched; that someone who can make a beautiful thing can't be all bad; and that beauty has an ability to lift people as a Vermeer copy done in a tenement is surely the same as the greatest mural by some MFA. An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is much a different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God's gift to enslave that you have used God's gift to be free."

excerpt from The Radiant Child by Rene Ricard

ARTFORUM Magazine :: Volume XX No. 4, December 1981. p.35-43

DO THE RIGHT THING - watch it online

All art is erotic.

Portrait of a Ladies’ Man

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying cold, obsessive aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. And in “Klimt,” Raúl Ruiz’s lavish biographical fantasia, his depiction of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt adds another Mephistophelean figure to his gallery of elegant monsters.

The painter, who died in 1918 at 55, joins Proust’s Baron de Charlus in Mr. Ruiz’s “Time Regained,” the silent film director F. W. Murnau in “Shadow of the Vampire,” Gilbert Osmond in “The Portrait of a Lady” and Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons” in the roster of sinister Malkovich eccentrics, all more or less interchangeable beneath their elaborate period get-ups.

The actor’s chilly stare, attenuated speech and attitude of towering hauteur define a mannered acting style that is a technique unto itself. These imperious alter egos have little feeling for others, who are depicted as helpless objects in the laboratory of a mad scientist.

I have not seen the 130-minute director’s cut of “Klimt” that was shown at the 2006 Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, but I imagine it was structurally more sound than the 97-minute blur of a movie that opens today in New York. It’s not that Mr. Ruiz, a Chilean-born surrealist based in Paris since 1973, is the most accessible of filmmakers to begin with. The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.

“Klimt” can be appreciated as a voluptuous wallow in high-style fin-de-siècle “decadence,” to use a word bandied about in the film as a synonym for evil. The overstuffed salons of upper-class Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire are so cluttered with expensive ornaments that moving around feels like navigating inside a giant wedding cake.

The salon guests prattle endlessly about art. What is beauty? Can a portrait be an allegory? Blah blah blah. When the subject isn’t aesthetics, it is gossip and scandal. Half the men in Vienna suffer from syphilis, muses a doctor who is giving Klimt mercury treatments for that very disease.

The possibility of contagion doesn’t stop Klimt from continuing his sexual rampage. His studio is crowded with beautiful nude models, many of whom he beds, and rumors fly that he has sired 30 illegitimate children. In one phantasmagoric scene, he and a friend visit a brothel in which they don gorilla masks to cavort in a cage with women wearing paste-on mustaches.

The movie is more interested in observing Klimt carousing than making art, and works like his most famous painting, “The Kiss,” are not shown. The screenplay refers to the Vienna Secession, the school of painting he led, without explaining it.

What unfolds on the screen is a fever dream that begins in a hospital where Klimt lies nearly comatose. He died of pneumonia shortly after suffering a stroke that paralyzed his right side. The life that passes before his eyes is the cinematic analogue to his paintings and drawings, with images glimpsed in mirrors, through camera lenses, microscopes and one-way glass. The angular visual distortions suggest the world reflected in shards of a shattered mirror that may be a metaphor for the crumbling Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I. Eventually Klimt’s memories give way to hallucinations.

Klimt was deeply influenced by the turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès (Gunther Gillian), whom he meets in the 1900 Paris Expo where Klimt is awarded a gold medal for his work “Philosophy.” Méliès shows him a film clip of the dancer Lea de Castro (Saffron Burrows), who becomes Klimt’s muse and possibly his lover. Hovering throughout much of the movie is an unanswered question about the woman introduced to him as Lea. Is she really Lea or her double?

Throughout, Klimt is shadowed by a character called the Secretary (Stephen Dillane), a puritanical censor and investigator into his murky finances, who declares late in the movie that too little beauty is preferable to too much. In Paris Klimt’s intensely erotic paintings are viewed as deliciously naughty; in Vienna they are scandalous. Klimt’s blasé attitude toward all this high-flown nonsense is expressed in a frequently iterated expletive.

The director’s vision of the artist as a monster at large in high society belongs to the genre popularized by Ken Russell that rejects the sentimental Hollywood depiction of the artist as bleeding-heart martyr. That doesn’t mean that its attitude toward art is any less romanticized. Saint or devil, Klimt is still larger than life.

KLIMT

Written and directed by Raúl Ruiz; director of photography, Ricardo Aronovich; edited by Valéria Sarmiento; music by Jorge Arriagada; production designers, Rudi Czettel and Katharina Wöppermann; produced by Dieter Pochlatko, Arno Ortmair, Matthew Justice and Andreas Schmid; released by Outsider Pictures. Running time: 97 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: John Malkovich (Klimt), Veronica Ferres (Midi), Stephen Dillane (Secretary), Saffron Burrows (Lea de Castro), Nikolai Kinski (Egon Schiele), Joachim Bissmeier (Hugo Moritz) and Georges Méliès (Gunther Gillian).

Love and Other Disasters

Emily Jackson lives a fast-paced life. Always on the go, able to talk around the clock, with a sensitive soul she loves playing matchmaker for her friends. It's Emily's gay roommate and frequent companion Peter, who becomes again the subject matchmaking skills when handsome new photographer assistant Paolo arrives at the Vogue offices, where Emily works. She makes it her mission to bring the two men together. Unfortunately for her, she is so busy arranging a love connection between Peter and Paolo that she remains completely blind to the one suitor who longs to provide her with the loving companionship that she so cheerfully arranges for others. And so it does make sense that Peter, a screenwriter in the making, starts telling the story from his own point of view. Written by kerrsmith2306

SPUN

Spoof. Dope. Crank. Creep. Bomb. Spank. Shit. Bang. Zip. Tweak. Chard. Call it what you will. It's all methamphetamine. That's what I'm here for.

How do I look?

Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

Control

"I wish I were a Warhol silk screen hanging on the wall. Or little Joe or maybe Lou. I'd love to be them all. All New York's broken hearts and secrets would be mine. I'd put you on a movie reel, and that would be just fine."

A woman is like a teabag...

Lindsay Lohan Fired from New Film for Not Being 'Bankable'; Movie Called The Other Side

By Ryan Christopher DeVault

Lindsay Lohan was fired from the new movie The Other Side according to TMZ. The reason to fire Lindsay Lohan seems to have stemmed from their belief that Lohan is no longer a "bankable" movie star. It's definitely a plausible argument, and with all of the negative press that Lohan has been bringing herself lately, it's also nothing that any new film would want to associate with. It's been quite a while since Lohan was involved with anything that could be considered a success, with her last success considered to be Herbie Fully Loaded. That film only made $66 million in theaters though, coming from a script that the studio had been hoping would easily pass the $100 million threshold.
The recent years for Lindsay Lohan in Hollywood have just seemed to be a long line of bad decisions, both in film as well as in her personal life. She was paid $7.5 million to star in 2006's Just My Luck, but the film only made $17.3 million in U.S. box office receipts. Then there was I Know Who Killed Me, which only made $7.23 million in the U.S. She also failed to bring a strong audience to Georgia Rule, which brought in $18.9 million, and ran her total to just under $44 million combined in box office totals for her last three major films. It's not a great number with the rising cost of putting together a Hollywood picture, and had to be a strong consideration behind dropping her from this new film. The Other Sidehas quite a few recognizable names associated with the film already, including Woody Harrelson, Jason Lee, and Anjelica Houston. Billed as an adventure comedy, the film seems like one banking on a supporting cast that could work well together. The pitfalls of including someone in that mixture that is having legal problems can kill the bottom line for a film, and it seems that the producers no longer wanted to hitch their trailer to Lindsay Lohan. If she can't hold down a supporting role like this, it could quite possibly lead to the end of her acting career in movies. She had seemed to be the next big thing five years ago, but this could be the flame out that people were predicting.

Precious

"Some folks has a lot of things around them that shines for other peoples. I think that maybe some of them was in tunnels. And in that tunnel, the only light they had, was inside of them. And then long after they escape that tunnel, they sitll be shining for everybody else."

CASHBACK

Synopsis

Ben, an aspiring artist, develops insomnia after a painful breakup with his girlfriend, Suzy. To take his mind off of Suzy and to deal with the extra hours he has recently gained, Ben begins working at a local Sainsbury's supermarket, where he meets colourful co-workers. Among them is his colleague Sharon, on whom he quickly develops a crush.

As his personal means to escape the boredom inherent in the night shift, Ben lets his imagination run wild. In particular, he imagines that he can stop time so that he can walk around in a world that is "frozen" like the pause of a film. He imagines female patrons of the supermarket stopped in time, allowing him to undress and draw them. Keeley Hazell is one of the patrons Ben is able to imagine naked. Finally the ability to stop time becomes real, or at least Ben believes so.

DEAD MAN

Some are born to sweet delight,
some are born to endless night
- William Blake.

La musique fait toute la différence

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The strange thing about television is that it doesn't *tell* you everything. It *shows* you everything about life for nothing, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it's in the nature of television. Just waves in space.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a 1976 British science fiction film directed by Nicolas Roeg, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, about an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth seeking a way to ship water to his planet, which is suffering from a severe drought. The film maintains a strong cult status for its use of surreal imagery and its performances by David Bowie (in his first starring film role), Candy Clark, and Hollywood veteran Rip Torn. The same novel was later remade as a less-successful 1987 television adaptation.

...sometimes the missing ingredient is love.

The Ramen Girl

Also Known As : Râmen gâru (Japan)

Abby(Brittany Murphy) four years out of college, an aimless child of privilege, comes to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend, who promptly leaves for Osaka. She wants to stay in Tokyo in hopes he'll come back to her, but she's miserable: she speaks little Japanese and has a dull job as a law-firm gopher. She stumbles into the neighborhood ramen shop operated by the aging master chef Maezumi and his wife Reiko. His soup cheers Abby, so she decides to apprentice herself to him. He's uninterested, she's insistent, so he shouts at her and gives her all the cleaning to do. Weeks go by; she's persistent. Will he ever actually teach her to cook? And if he does, will she bring the requisite spirit to the job? Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

George Clooney...like totally.

Up in the Air is a 2009 American comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and co-written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner. It is a film adaptation of the 2001 novel Up in the Air, written by Walter Kirn. The story is about a corporate downsizer and his travels. It follows his isolated life and philosophies along with the people that he meets along the way.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who makes his living traveling to workplaces around the country and conducting employee layoffs for bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. Walter Kirn stated in the film's press notes: "Ryan is like a masseur who comes in and sort of rubs your shoulders while rolling your desk chair into the elevator." Ryan also delivers motivational speeches, using the analogy "What's In Your Backpack?" to extoll the virtues of a life free of relationships with people and things. He relishes the comfort of anonymity during his perpetual travels. Ryan's personal goal for his life is to achieve 10 million frequent flyer miles. While traveling, he meets another frequent flyer named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and they begin a casual relationship.

Out of Sight is a 1998 Academy Award-nominated movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and based on the novel of the same name byElmore Leonard. It was the first of several collaborations between Soderbergh and star George Clooney. The film was released on June 26, 1998. It was nominated for two Academy Awards (adapted screenplay and editing). It won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best screenplayand the National Society of Film Critics awards for best film, screenplay, and director. It led to a spinoff TV series, Karen Sisco.

The story revolves around the relationship between a career bank robber, Jack Foley (George Clooney), and a U.S. Marshal, Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). They are forced to share her car trunk during Foley's escape from a Florida prison. After he completes his getaway, Sisco chases Foley while he and his friends - his right-hand man, Buddy (Ving Rhames) and Glenn (Steve Zahn) - work their way north toBloomfield Hills, a wealthy northern suburb of Detroit. There they plan to pay a visit to shady businessman Ripley (Albert Brooks), who foolishly bragged to them years before about a diamond stash at his mansion. But a vicious criminal (Don Cheadle) who also spent time in jail with Jack and Ripley, is planning on hitting up Ripley's mansion with his crew (consisting of Keith Loneker and Isaiah Washington) as well. The question of whether Sisco is really pursuing Foley to arrest him or for love adds to "the fun" Foley claims they are having.

Avatāra

I am as free as nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

-John Dryden

What's the rumpus?

Miller's Crossing (1990)

Director: Joel Coen

From Time Out Film Guide

Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, this works both as a crime thriller and as an ironic commentary on that genre. With fast, sharp, witty dialogue and Byzantine plotting, it charts the gang war between Leo (Finney) and Caspar (Polito) in an American city during Prohibition. Tom (Byrne), Leo's loyal right-hand man, is the lover of Leo's mistress (Harden), whose brother (Turturro) Caspar wants killed. Exactly how this and other complications are sorted out forms the hugely inventive, enjoyable narrative core of the film. But it is also a tribute to the crime literature (notably Hammett) and movies of the '30s, artfully poised between 'realism' and a subtle acknowledgment of its own artifice. And there's yet another level, since it is composed - visually, verbally and structurally - as a series of variations on the themes of 'Friendship, character, ethics'. At times the criss-crossing of abstract motifs recalls the formal complexity of a Greenaway film. It's arguably the US mainstream's first art movie since Days of Heaven; and quite wonderful.

Author: GA

Time Out Film Guide