Two Lovers - james Gray - should i stay or should i go?

o right

yeah that's a lovely piece. two lovers blows though.

The Immigrant, formerly Lowlife, has much to admire in it but is ultimately too artificial to move me. Cotillard as Falconetti, Phoenix as Brando, Jeremy Renner as Richard Basehart in La Strada.

Gray is a very funny guy in Q&A tho.

long interview:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/love-sincerity-a-conversation-with-james-gray

such a smart guy

btw unless my eyes deceived me, Lincoln Center digitally projected this even tho it was shot on 35mm.

"I have three young children, and I kind of stopped going to movies in 2006. I go to see some, but I'm a little bit out of touch, and I didn't know who Marion Cotillard was," said Gray. "I had become friendly with her boyfriend, and we went out to dinner in Paris and I met her, and she and I started arguing about an actor that she thought was overrated, and she threw a piece of bread at my head and she mentioned that she thought I was a jerk. I thought she had a great face, and not just physically beautiful because she is, but a haunted quality, almost like a silent film actress…"

]The Yards holds up. He should work with Phoenix and Wahlberg in perpetuity.

Really want The Lost City of Z to happen. http://dlvr.it/46P6fx

ooh Cumberbatch

new movie playing at Miami International Film Festival this afternoon.

he calls the scene in vertigo where kim novak is left alone in her apt and looks @ the camera the greatest moment in the history cinema

Interesting. My favorite thing about Two Lovers are the 2 separate-- but connected- moments in which a character (different character each time) fleetingly, piercingly, enigmatically looks into the camera. Those fourth-wall breaks were a surprise in an otherwise 'realist' film; I found them resonant and moving.

I think of Summer with Monika and, especially, Nights of Cabiria (that look into the camera is for me one of the greatest cinematic moments ever). But what I liked & found original about the 2 Lovers instances (IIRC) is how fleeting they are (one is so fleeting one might well not catch it), and that it's two moments (one midway, one at the end), two characters-- the film leaves one pondering the links and parallels between those two separate instances-- between those two particular moments as experienced by those two characters.

Spoiler: one look is given by Paltrow's character, during or after the clinch on the roof, IIRC as Phoenix is declaring his love to her; the other is given by Phoenix's character at the end, settled on the couch beside his loving new girlfriend.

I usually dislike Paltrow, but I've got to give her credit here, she was very good (especially in that moment/ look).

James Gay

watched the 1st ep of the sundance thing 'the red road' that he directed - it really painfully pales in comparison 2 true detective

obv that really had nothing to do w him

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/interview-james-gray-discusses-harvey-weinstein-his-cinematic-influences-his-career-much-more-20140515

whither Gray's The Immigrant at the box office?

http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-the-punishment-continues

I thought I started a thread on The Immigrant or if I stuck thoughts on the current movies thread.

essay kind of leaves promotion (or the lack thereof) out of the "whither" question. it's not like weinstein's putting much muscle behind the movie.

gratuitous swipe at Pitchfork's Soundgarden review too.

Traditionally, the hidden “cost” of releasing a film, beyond initial outlay of budget or acquisition, was Prints & Advertising (P & A), so one would think that the much-ballyhooed switch to DCP projection would reduce this overhead considerably, now that the cost of striking prints and shipping them in huge metal canisters that you could club a bull elephant to death with has been cut out of the equation, and movies are shipped on detachable hard drives or ZIP discs or Google Glass or whatever it is.

the key word is ADVERTISING in p&a, and the weinsteins are notoriously thrifty for films they're not planning to storm the oscars with

if someone's to be bitched out for this movie underwhelming at the box office it's not critics or audiences but the company that's supposed to tell audiences that THE CRITICS HAVE SPOKEN in big full-page ads, especially if they're going to put the movie out in may.

they def couldve prob gotten more buzz releasing it in dec or w/e and releasing it more broadly but idk its p flawed, its not gonna do great word of mouth imo; at least this time of year the elderly (~95% of the audience when i saw it) can get out of their assisted living complex w/o slipping on ice and breaking a hip

The Weinsteins have done it before with far worse movies (and I think it's close to a great movie, big flaw notwithstanding).

honestly was surprised this was a weinstein release, considering how badly they screwed gray on the yards (at least this got a big opening week in new-york-old-folks-land and wasn't held on the shelf for two years). this film is so aggressively a potential best actress contender, harv & co must have zero faith in it if they're putting it out now, with like an eighth of the hype they're giving Once 2: Electric Ruffalo.

this is true, it seems v unlikely weinstein dislikes jim gray more than he likes oscar noms but idk

they prob just have movies they see getting them closer to said noms - there's like two keira knightley things and a tim burton biopic of a painter and maybe they'll still put out nicole kidman's princess grace horseshit...

there's also an irony in a critic doing a "sigh, what can we do" thinkpiece about an indie that's been out for less than a month. Like, gee, maybe continue to tell people to see it, and not drink the kool-aid about this shit being decided even for art films in the first three weeks?

not sure what the budget was, but.. this shit is decided before 'art films' open. Americans don't go and the screens aren't there for the most part.

weinsteins are exactly the kind of company that would re-release a film come oscar season if the drums kept beating and some of their other contenders fizzled.

but again, my point is just that its absurd to write a piece about critics and audiences and art films and leave out the distributor

Yeah. If Weinstein and co. gave this thing The King's Speech treatment in December they might've had a decent ROI and maybe Oscar buzz for Cotillard and Phoenix (the dude's on a roll).

this movie is nowhere near dumb enough to benefit from such treatment

Dumb's got nothing to do with it and you know it

The Immigrant finally out on Blu & DVD last week

James Gray on The Cinephiliacs: http://www.thecinephiliacs.net/2015/07/episode-61-james-gray-nights-of-cabiria.html

he is always so good in interviews

Lengthy profile/feature in new Film Comment on his imminent The Lost City of Z (April 14, US). Shot on 35mm, hoping I get to see it that way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWba-ZuXlkY

David Ehrlich last fall:

If not for the ineffably modern hollowness of Charlie Hunnam’s speaking voice, or the distinct rind of 21st century celebrity that still clings to co-star Robert Pattinson like the dying traces of yesterday’s cologne, someone could easily be fooled into thinking that “The Lost City of Z” was shot 40 years ago. In fact, that might be the greatest compliment a viewer could pay writer-director James Gray (“The Immigrant”), a man who seems increasingly determined to revive the glory days of our national cinema, when movies were pictures and auteurs were mavericks. Gray pulls from the past as liberally as Quentin Tarantino, but without the ego — he doesn’t try to process his influences through the slaughterhouse of his own fetishes, he simply wants to Make American Movies Great Again.

http://www.indiewire.com/2016/10/the-lost-city-of-z-review-robert-pattinson-james-gray-nyff-2016-1201737045/

oh hey, 35mm sneak in NYC, JG attending (Apr 12)

http://metrograph.com/series/series/81/james-gray

The film is opening the MSPIFF, and I'm torqued.

shd prob start a general Gray thread

NYC "event" tix for Lost City 35mm now on sale

http://metrograph.com/events/

I liked this one pretty well, maybe second to Two Lovers or even better -- very different films. He suggested he was trying to make a 'woke' David Lean film, and he succeeded at least partly. My chief gripe might be i couldn't understand 20-30% of what Hunnam and Pattinson were saying. Has one of the best WWI trench warfare sequences i can recall, at least since Kubrick.

Gray was characteristically hilarious in the Q&A, doing impressions of everyone from Darius Khondji to stars-that got-away Cumberbatch and Pitt (the latter: "Jimmy Jam! I can't wait anymore") to a woman on the MPAA appeal panel ("This REEEalistic violence worries us as PEERents").

https://thefilmstage.com/features/james-gray-on-ad-astra-cannes-woes-harvey-weinstein-and-the-only-way-cinema-can-be-reinvented/

He seems like a nice fellow. I like his refusal to state the merits of his own movies.