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The surfing documentary films of Bruce Brown are the stuff of legend. I only have to say "Endless Summer" and my point is made. He started in 1957 with 8mm. Soon he would find funding and would move up to 16mm. His film "Slippery When Wet" features "Freddy Pfhaler", Kembra's dad. (Her parents were known at the time by their surf names : Phird the Third and Rude Judy). Now all Brown's early films are available on video. Rent them soon.
Abuse Your Illusion
by Michael Atkinson
Village Voice, July 18 - 24, 2001
An exploding plastic inevitable, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within dares you to be amazed by its soulless mimeograph of humanity. In a dystopian future, this is the only type of movie we'd get to see: manufactured by hard-wiring, stamped from market-proven narrative templates, ostensibly distracting in the sheer bulk of its preprogrammed mayhem. All digital, all the time, Final Fantasy is not a cartoon, but rather a simulacrum of live-action Bruckheimer-ness so factory-pressed it should have an I'm-recyclable triangle embossed on every frame.
Think photo-realism without purpose, ironic or otherwise—and painted by nanotechnology. The movie's conspicuous artillery of faux details is its only Power Point, but today digital imaging is so ubiquitous that the achievement is authentically redundant. (Indeed, the masterfully imitated landscapes evoke the similar wonk-craft of "serious" live-action epics like Gladiator, The Messenger, and Contact.) It is said that a full third of the film's budget was spent on making the heroine's wispy hair convincingly wispy; how many heads of organic hair they could've bought is apparently irrelevant. The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.
Actually, it's a product of the same Japanese codeheads for whom the eponymous game series has been a spurting cash cow. The story itself is reheated Arthur C. Clarke: As giant alien "phantoms" (resembling microscopically photographed mosquitoes) besiege the earth, Identikit humans rally. There's a digital Ben Affleck (with Alec Baldwin's voice), a digital Neve Campbell (with Ming-Na's voice), a digital Jason Priestley (with Steve Buscemi's voice), etc. In this New Age, everything is helpfully color-coded: Silvery blue is good Gaia, leathery red is bad Gaia. For all of the monumental attention paid to visual fidelity (even a few lens flares and moments of handheld shakiness), the techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes—it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.
The ultimate justification for Final Fantasy, it seems, is the wholesale subtraction of people from the entertainment equation; the games triumphed without the wetware, didn't they? But of course, they didn't: First-person electronic gaming revolves around and happens to a very human player, and without him/her, it's just machine love.
Quentin Tarantino's analysis of Top Gun from the film Sleep With Me.
"You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun."
'Weird' Brando, 77, acts the fool
Ageing, overweight film star calls director 'Miss Piggy' and appears
on set half-naked
Edward Helmore in New York
Thursday July 12, 2001
The Guardian
Five years since Marlon Brando's last major film role, and five
decades since he revolutionised acting in On the Waterfront and A
Street Car Named Desire, the legendary actor is making a rare
appearance in a film opening in the US tomorrow.
But by some accounts, the 77-year-old's efforts on the set of The
Score, a crime caper starring Brando's method acting acolytes, Robert
De Niro and Edward Norton, were as bizarre as Brando watchers have
come to expect.
Brando, who plays an elderly homosexual crook about to pull off the
biggest job of his career, received about £2m for just three weeks'
work of which all but a few minutes ended up on the cutting room
floor.
Accounts of the filming of The Score suggest that he clashed with the
director, the former Muppet Show puppeteer Frank Oz, and refused to go
on the set when Oz was present. The bizarre outcome, according to one
report, was that De Niro was forced to direct while Oz, off set,
directed De Niro through an assistant.
When not regaling Oz with four-letter words, Brando took to calling
him Miss Piggy and has been reported as saying: "I bet you wish I was
a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what
you want."
The actor, who alarmed The Score's makers on the first day of filming
when he ate two enormous steaks in one sitting, turned up to the set
naked from the waist down - a ploy, apparently, to ensure Oz could not
film him below the shoulders and reveal the full measure of his
corpulence.
"He was kind of monstrous," reported a source on the set. "At first I
thought that the guy might be senile and had simply forgotten to get
dressed, but it was part of this weird tactic. Nobody knew where to
look."
But co-star Norton played down Brando's nudity, saying it was hot on
the set so the actor put on shorts instead of suit trousers. "It was
the most practical thing to do," Norton explained.
Brando, the once beautiful champion of the Stanislavskian acting
revolution who is regularly named the greatest actor of the past
century, has followed a strange and haphazard course, often
denigrating the acting profession and his own achievements.
"A movie star is nothing important," he once said. "Freud, Gandhi,
Marx - these people are important. Movie acting is just dull, boring,
childish work. Everybody acts - when we want something."
In the 1970s, on the set of Apocalypse Now, he turned up without
learning his lines and famously messed around during production of The
Island of Dr Moreau, five years ago. But as far back as A Streetcar
Named Desire in 1951 Brando was marked as a mercurial character.
The film's director, Elia Kazan, loved his performance because of the
way he "challenges the whole system of politeness and good nature and
good ethics and everything else". Kazan found in the man-boy "a soft,
yearning, girlish side... and a dissatisfaction that can be
dangerous". There's "a hell of a lot of turmoil there", he warned.
Brando lives by himself in Los Angeles. He reportedly has three young
children by his former housekeeper, Christina Ruiz.
A forthcoming biography by Patricia Bosworth suggests that he is
practically a recluse. He sometimes shares a Chinese takeaway with
Johnny Depp but his main contact with the outside world is via
email. He communicates with people anonymously, occasionally
correcting mistakes on Marlon Brando websites.
"I'm going to live to be one hundred, and then I plan to clone myself,
with all my talent and none of my neuroses," he recently told a
friend.
Brando still struggles with his diet. Periodically, he will telephone
Oprah Winfrey to discuss their weight gains and losses. He keeps the
fridge padlocked to prevent him bingeing on ice cream or eating an
entire brie.
Still, as America gets to see its legendary screen son once more this
weekend, his reputation as the grandest, most disordered personality
will again overshadow anything he may do.
Asked by Newsday whether Miss Piggy or Brando was more difficult to
direct, Oz tactfully replied: "He's a very sweet, gracious - childlike
in some ways - very, very humane, very complex person. I can't say
that we got along all the time. And it wasn't because he was
difficult. He felt one way, quite sincerely and earnestly, and I felt
the other... and Marlon did come around to my side."