Cinema Now
Andrew Bailey
Ed. Paul Duncan
TASCHEN
CATE SHORTLAND
Born 10 August 1968 in Temora, Australia
Withe the lyrical coming-of-age drama Somersault (2004), which swept the Australian Film Institute Awards in 2004, winning thirteen prizes, writer-director Cate Shortland made an auspicious feature debut, eliciting breakthrough performances by Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington as anguished young paramours in a faded Australian ski town. As Heidi, a 16-year-old girl who skips out on her home life after making moves on her mother's boyfriend, Cornish intuits the psychological complexities of a young woman who means well but doesn't grasp the ramifications of her budding sexuality. Arriving off-season in the desolate resort town, Heidi finds work at a petrol station and a surrogate mother in the form of Irene, a lonely woman who gives Heidi longing. But she slips back into her self-destructive patterns of drinking and promiscuity after falling for the handsome but repressed son of a wealthy local farmer, whose own sexual awakening is just as messy. Shot with a handheld camera in and around the Lake George area of New South Wales, Somersault comes alive through director of photography Robert Humphreys' wintry, monochromatic images of Heidi rushing into the cold chill of adulthood, with its nuanced sexuality and frequent disappointments. Cornish, who was 20 when the film was shot, and the first to audition for the role of Heidi, delivers a revelatory performance; she seems to be discovering life's uncomfortable pull in tandem with the character she plays.
FILMS
2004 Somersault
Selected Awards
2004 Somersault: Best Film, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, Best Lead Actor, Best Lead Actress, Australian Film Institute Awards; best Feature Film, Best Direction, Best Script, Best Cinematography, best Actress, IF Awards Australia
2005 Somerasult: Special Mention (Best Dramatic Feature - World Cinema competition: Breakthrough Awards), Miami Film Festival
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Film
Cinema Now
TASCHEN
Robert Rodriguez
Born 20 June 1968 in San Antonio, USA
The self-professed "rebel without a crew" shot action and horror movies on video as a child before creating a daily comic strip during his adolescence followed by a first feature in his early twenties, the notorious El Mariachi (1992), made for $7,000, much of which was raised from Rodriguez's participation in medical research studies. A rousing hit at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and resulted in a studio distribution deal through Columbia Pictures, El Mariachi put the Austin, Texas-based one-man crew on the independent film map, where he was embraced by the same movie geek contingent that helped turned his friend and fellow B-movie obsessive, Quentin Tarantino, into a cause celebre. The two kindred spirits would go on to work together in various capacities over the years, culminating in the exploitation double-header Grindhouse (2007), to which Rodriguez contributed the zombie horror opus Planet Terror. After a string of studio projects, including the blockbuster Spy Kids trilogy (2001-2003) and two Mariachi sequels, Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), Rodriguez unleashed his most impressive feat to date, an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City (2005), featuring a rogue's gallery of villains and vixens, some of the most visceral screen violence in memory, and a digitally-enhanced veneer that gave the film a kinetic visual edge over countless comic-book competitors. A multi-hyphenate known for his "Mariachi-style" low-budget, no-nonsense, do-it-yourself method of film making, Rodriguez has worked (often all at once) as producer, director, writer, editor, camera operator, musical score composer, production designer and sound editor. His next two features are Sin City sequels.
Films -
1992 El Mariachi
1995 Desperado
1996 From Dusk Till Dawn
1998 The Faculty
2001 Spy Kids
2002 Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
2003 Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
2005 The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
2005 Sin City
2007 Grindhouse: Planet Terror
2007/08 Sin City 2
Selected Awards
1993 El Mariachi: Audience Award, Sundance Film Festival; Audience Award, Deauville Film Festival
1994 El Mariachi: Best First Feature, Independent Spirit Awards
1996 From Dusk Till Dawn; Silver Scream Award, Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival
1999 Berlinale Camera, Berlin International Film Festival
2005 Sin City; Technical Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival
TASCHEN
Robert Rodriguez
Born 20 June 1968 in San Antonio, USA
The self-professed "rebel without a crew" shot action and horror movies on video as a child before creating a daily comic strip during his adolescence followed by a first feature in his early twenties, the notorious El Mariachi (1992), made for $7,000, much of which was raised from Rodriguez's participation in medical research studies. A rousing hit at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and resulted in a studio distribution deal through Columbia Pictures, El Mariachi put the Austin, Texas-based one-man crew on the independent film map, where he was embraced by the same movie geek contingent that helped turned his friend and fellow B-movie obsessive, Quentin Tarantino, into a cause celebre. The two kindred spirits would go on to work together in various capacities over the years, culminating in the exploitation double-header Grindhouse (2007), to which Rodriguez contributed the zombie horror opus Planet Terror. After a string of studio projects, including the blockbuster Spy Kids trilogy (2001-2003) and two Mariachi sequels, Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), Rodriguez unleashed his most impressive feat to date, an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City (2005), featuring a rogue's gallery of villains and vixens, some of the most visceral screen violence in memory, and a digitally-enhanced veneer that gave the film a kinetic visual edge over countless comic-book competitors. A multi-hyphenate known for his "Mariachi-style" low-budget, no-nonsense, do-it-yourself method of film making, Rodriguez has worked (often all at once) as producer, director, writer, editor, camera operator, musical score composer, production designer and sound editor. His next two features are Sin City sequels.
Films -
1992 El Mariachi
1995 Desperado
1996 From Dusk Till Dawn
1998 The Faculty
2001 Spy Kids
2002 Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
2003 Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
2005 The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
2005 Sin City
2007 Grindhouse: Planet Terror
2007/08 Sin City 2
Selected Awards
1993 El Mariachi: Audience Award, Sundance Film Festival; Audience Award, Deauville Film Festival
1994 El Mariachi: Best First Feature, Independent Spirit Awards
1996 From Dusk Till Dawn; Silver Scream Award, Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival
1999 Berlinale Camera, Berlin International Film Festival
2005 Sin City; Technical Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival
Monday, May 24, 2010
TASCHEN
Cinema now
Andrew Bailey
Ed. Paul Duncan
TASCHEN
HONG KONG - KOLN - LONDON - LOS ANGELES - MADRID - PARIS - TOKYO
Preface
One of the great 'movie' movies of the last decade is Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San, 2003). A romantic rumination on the dying art of moviegoing, it is set on the closing night of a cavernous old Taipei movie palace where the 1966 King Hu swordplay classic Dragon Inn (Long men ke zhen) unspools to a smattering of patrons. Ghosts and the living alike prowl the aisles and restrooms in search of human connection. Hu's Dragon Inn remains immortal thanks to the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee, who have fetishized it for international audiences in the form of Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu zang long, 2000). These latter movies briefly enchanted audiences on multiplex screens, before quickly settling into permanent residency on cable and DVD, to be enjoyed anew in the digital home.
As for Tsai's haunting gem, finding an audience in this day and age isn't so simple. I was lucky to see Goodbye, Dragon Inn on a screen in the cavernous basement multiplex of a Pasadena shopping mall on the last day of its Los Angeles theatrical engagement, with a midweek matinee audience of myself and a pair of dowagers (who were asleep at the twenty-minute mark). I don't think I could have enjoyed it any more than I did, not that this bodes well for the future exhibition of Tsai's films in my country. One year later, Goodbye, Dragon Inn's North American distributor, Wellspring, shuttered its New York-based theatrical divisions, thus ending an era of art films in America.
The truth is that when it comes to territories and distribution rights, the only profitable outlet for a small company releasing foreign and art films lies in ancillary markets like DVD - which is how most people in the world will discover the majority of the works described in this book, including Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
The experience of seeing films on the home screen is not altogether a bad thing. It is easier to be intimate with a movie on one's own, like reading a book, which is why the emergence of the so-called "fourth screen," bringing together the once-separate worlds of movies, television and personal computers, is transforming the entertainment business. Today's affordable high-definition television sets with state-of-the-art surround sound mean picture quality at home is sharp and clear, and sound is often better because you are not disturbed by crunching popcorn, nattering patrons, and mobile phones.
With competition for discretionary income at its most frenzied, with Internet surfing, video games (increasingly cinematic and narrative-driven) and other media competing with theatrical motion pictures for the global attention span, with the online blogosphere diluting the value of film criticism via egalitarian prognostication by rank amateur critics, how does the discriminating cineaste determine whether or not a film is worth seeing?
Film culture has always promoted the beautiful and talented celebrity faces on the screen. But up until the mid-1970s the print media also gave space to the budding auteurs behind the camera - making mavericks like Terrence Malick and the late, great Robert Altman as celebrated as their films. Since then celebrity gossip, box office figures for the latest blockbuster film and awards-season prognostication have driven movie news, regardless of the quality of the films or their place in our society. The auteurs have had to find alternative means of promotion, embracing the digital data stream of the Internet, where the next wave of film culture thrives.
Some serious academic film magazines survive, including Cahiers du cinema, Sight and Sound and Film Comment. Each of these publications now routinely features major celebrities on its covers, while still pushing an art-house agenda. Youthful upstarts made in their image, like Canada's quarterly CinemaScope -- the print publication du jour that best represents the aims of the Cahiers generation -- struggle to compete with frequently updated movie blogs organized like magazines, containing in-depth features and late-breaking news within the same publication. Who wants to wait for a Cannes recap in Film Comment when you can get your information instantly?
More than ever (and for better or worse) it is Internet bloggers who drive the film culture, breaking new names and heralding hot titles months in advance of their film festival premieres or theatrical and DVD releases. Bloggers like Todd Brown, at his Twitch website, cultivate instant word of mouth for new films and filmmakers in every corner of the world. Twitch introduced Russian upstart Pavel Ruminov to film fanatics in their living rooms. Ruminov's brilliant internet marketing campaign for his baroque Russian horror film Dead Daughters (Myortvye docheri, 2006) includes a series of web-only teasers that created an eerie mythology for the film months before it entered post-production.
What today's cinephile requires is a filter system to help distill the valuable from the passable and the downright useless. In Cinema Now we present the recent works of international filmmakers we think are among the most exciting in the world today. Enamoured as we are of the art film and its contribution to film culture over the years, we've made a selection that speaks both to the general moviegoer and the discerning cinephile. We love a decent genre movie like Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) -- and The Descent is as artful as popular filmmaking gets -- as much as we admire the latest uncompromising work of an auteur working with Hollywood money, like Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze and David O. Russell, the heirs to the maverick filmmakers of the 1970s.
We also have a soft spot for the international underdog whose primary means of discovery remains film festival premieres and the DVD market, which is why we're pleased to include in Cinema Now a few names you've probably never heard of before, including Portugal's Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Hungary's Gyorgy Palfi, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the aforementioned Tsai Ming-liang, whose follow-ups to Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the outrageously inventive comedy-musical The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun, 2004/05) and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yan quan, 2006), were both criminally undistributed in many parts of the world, including North America.
One drawback in putting together a book like this is that no matter how many people you want to include, there are always another hundred or more terrific directors who we couldn't reach, or were too busy filming, or were separated from us by language barriers. If you think you belong in future editions of this book, e-mail us at cinemanow@taschen.com and we'll see if Mr. Taschen will be kind enough to let us do another volume.
Until then, dive in and enjoy the myriad works of sixty great directors working around the world right now.
Andrew Bailey
January 8, 2006, San Francisco, California
1:07pm
-m.
Andrew Bailey
Ed. Paul Duncan
TASCHEN
HONG KONG - KOLN - LONDON - LOS ANGELES - MADRID - PARIS - TOKYO
Preface
One of the great 'movie' movies of the last decade is Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San, 2003). A romantic rumination on the dying art of moviegoing, it is set on the closing night of a cavernous old Taipei movie palace where the 1966 King Hu swordplay classic Dragon Inn (Long men ke zhen) unspools to a smattering of patrons. Ghosts and the living alike prowl the aisles and restrooms in search of human connection. Hu's Dragon Inn remains immortal thanks to the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee, who have fetishized it for international audiences in the form of Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu zang long, 2000). These latter movies briefly enchanted audiences on multiplex screens, before quickly settling into permanent residency on cable and DVD, to be enjoyed anew in the digital home.
As for Tsai's haunting gem, finding an audience in this day and age isn't so simple. I was lucky to see Goodbye, Dragon Inn on a screen in the cavernous basement multiplex of a Pasadena shopping mall on the last day of its Los Angeles theatrical engagement, with a midweek matinee audience of myself and a pair of dowagers (who were asleep at the twenty-minute mark). I don't think I could have enjoyed it any more than I did, not that this bodes well for the future exhibition of Tsai's films in my country. One year later, Goodbye, Dragon Inn's North American distributor, Wellspring, shuttered its New York-based theatrical divisions, thus ending an era of art films in America.
The truth is that when it comes to territories and distribution rights, the only profitable outlet for a small company releasing foreign and art films lies in ancillary markets like DVD - which is how most people in the world will discover the majority of the works described in this book, including Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
The experience of seeing films on the home screen is not altogether a bad thing. It is easier to be intimate with a movie on one's own, like reading a book, which is why the emergence of the so-called "fourth screen," bringing together the once-separate worlds of movies, television and personal computers, is transforming the entertainment business. Today's affordable high-definition television sets with state-of-the-art surround sound mean picture quality at home is sharp and clear, and sound is often better because you are not disturbed by crunching popcorn, nattering patrons, and mobile phones.
With competition for discretionary income at its most frenzied, with Internet surfing, video games (increasingly cinematic and narrative-driven) and other media competing with theatrical motion pictures for the global attention span, with the online blogosphere diluting the value of film criticism via egalitarian prognostication by rank amateur critics, how does the discriminating cineaste determine whether or not a film is worth seeing?
Film culture has always promoted the beautiful and talented celebrity faces on the screen. But up until the mid-1970s the print media also gave space to the budding auteurs behind the camera - making mavericks like Terrence Malick and the late, great Robert Altman as celebrated as their films. Since then celebrity gossip, box office figures for the latest blockbuster film and awards-season prognostication have driven movie news, regardless of the quality of the films or their place in our society. The auteurs have had to find alternative means of promotion, embracing the digital data stream of the Internet, where the next wave of film culture thrives.
Some serious academic film magazines survive, including Cahiers du cinema, Sight and Sound and Film Comment. Each of these publications now routinely features major celebrities on its covers, while still pushing an art-house agenda. Youthful upstarts made in their image, like Canada's quarterly CinemaScope -- the print publication du jour that best represents the aims of the Cahiers generation -- struggle to compete with frequently updated movie blogs organized like magazines, containing in-depth features and late-breaking news within the same publication. Who wants to wait for a Cannes recap in Film Comment when you can get your information instantly?
More than ever (and for better or worse) it is Internet bloggers who drive the film culture, breaking new names and heralding hot titles months in advance of their film festival premieres or theatrical and DVD releases. Bloggers like Todd Brown, at his Twitch website, cultivate instant word of mouth for new films and filmmakers in every corner of the world. Twitch introduced Russian upstart Pavel Ruminov to film fanatics in their living rooms. Ruminov's brilliant internet marketing campaign for his baroque Russian horror film Dead Daughters (Myortvye docheri, 2006) includes a series of web-only teasers that created an eerie mythology for the film months before it entered post-production.
What today's cinephile requires is a filter system to help distill the valuable from the passable and the downright useless. In Cinema Now we present the recent works of international filmmakers we think are among the most exciting in the world today. Enamoured as we are of the art film and its contribution to film culture over the years, we've made a selection that speaks both to the general moviegoer and the discerning cinephile. We love a decent genre movie like Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) -- and The Descent is as artful as popular filmmaking gets -- as much as we admire the latest uncompromising work of an auteur working with Hollywood money, like Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze and David O. Russell, the heirs to the maverick filmmakers of the 1970s.
We also have a soft spot for the international underdog whose primary means of discovery remains film festival premieres and the DVD market, which is why we're pleased to include in Cinema Now a few names you've probably never heard of before, including Portugal's Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Hungary's Gyorgy Palfi, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the aforementioned Tsai Ming-liang, whose follow-ups to Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the outrageously inventive comedy-musical The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun, 2004/05) and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yan quan, 2006), were both criminally undistributed in many parts of the world, including North America.
One drawback in putting together a book like this is that no matter how many people you want to include, there are always another hundred or more terrific directors who we couldn't reach, or were too busy filming, or were separated from us by language barriers. If you think you belong in future editions of this book, e-mail us at cinemanow@taschen.com and we'll see if Mr. Taschen will be kind enough to let us do another volume.
Until then, dive in and enjoy the myriad works of sixty great directors working around the world right now.
Andrew Bailey
January 8, 2006, San Francisco, California
1:07pm
-m.
TASCHEN
Cinema now
Andrew Bailey
Ed. Paul Duncan
TASCHEN
Cinema Now examines the work and key themes of 60 filmmakers working around the world today, from the cream of the crop of young Hollywood to the new wave of Asian mavericks and the burgeoning auteurs from Europe and Latin America.
Watch Pedro Almodovar at work. Immerse yourself in the stunning imagery of Wong Kar-wai. Feel the emotional impact of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Carlos Reygadas. Experience the strange worlds of Guy Maddin, Mathew Barney and Tsai Ming-liang. Cinema Now is packed with stunning full-color photos and exclusive on-set snapshots supplied by the filmmakers, and even comes with a supplementary DVD containing exclusive short films, extracts, trailers, and much more.
The author: Andrew Bailey is a freelance writer and cinephile based in San Francisco whose articles on film and filmmakers have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His favorite works include The Last Picture Show (1971), Vertigo (1958), Les Enfants du paradis (1943-45), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and 3 Women (1977); his cinematic heroes range from Hitchcock, Lang, and Bergman to Lynch, Haneke, and Denis. His idea of unadulterated movie bliss is the moment that Ann Savage turns vituperative on Tom Neal in the front seat of his car in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945).
The editor: Paul Duncan edits film books for TASCHEN and wrote Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in the Film series.
Andrew Bailey
Ed. Paul Duncan
TASCHEN
Cinema Now examines the work and key themes of 60 filmmakers working around the world today, from the cream of the crop of young Hollywood to the new wave of Asian mavericks and the burgeoning auteurs from Europe and Latin America.
Watch Pedro Almodovar at work. Immerse yourself in the stunning imagery of Wong Kar-wai. Feel the emotional impact of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Carlos Reygadas. Experience the strange worlds of Guy Maddin, Mathew Barney and Tsai Ming-liang. Cinema Now is packed with stunning full-color photos and exclusive on-set snapshots supplied by the filmmakers, and even comes with a supplementary DVD containing exclusive short films, extracts, trailers, and much more.
The author: Andrew Bailey is a freelance writer and cinephile based in San Francisco whose articles on film and filmmakers have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His favorite works include The Last Picture Show (1971), Vertigo (1958), Les Enfants du paradis (1943-45), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and 3 Women (1977); his cinematic heroes range from Hitchcock, Lang, and Bergman to Lynch, Haneke, and Denis. His idea of unadulterated movie bliss is the moment that Ann Savage turns vituperative on Tom Neal in the front seat of his car in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945).
The editor: Paul Duncan edits film books for TASCHEN and wrote Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in the Film series.
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