Vincent Gallo.... C/D?

I thought Buffalo 66 was great.

"Vincent Gallo's monumental folly has already become a defining moment in Cannes history. Awestruck future generations will ask: 'Were you there the night they screened The Brown Bunny?"' one of the magazine's critics wrote Friday. A clearly depressed Gallo said he had hardly been able to face his friends since Cannes critics, bored by what they say is a miserable harvest of films, started laying into his movie.

Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause.

There's your first clue.

based on the "essay" and the interview I read on the "writings" part of www.vincentgallo.com. says he "wouldn't go to Harlem for a million dollars" and how all of South America is "primitive," and he's so casual about "spics" and Italians and others who aren't, y'know, him, that you just wanna smack him all over again.

also does a number on "faggots" and "pussies" and both Harmony Korine (whom I also hate) and "boring Connecticut Chloe Sevigny". Kinda makes ya wonder if he did this whole movie just to get Chloe to blow him to piss off Harmony Korine.

also a huge George W. Bush fan, but that doesn't necessarily make him a racist.

Yes.

As long as he was able to spot that Brown Bunny was the was the worst in Cannes history, I'm sure his taste is just fine. That and because he's one of the few good film critics writing today.

My feelings on Gallo can be summed up by taking every mean thing written here so far, blending them together, and redoubling them.

I really don't find any of these supposed travesties of ennui and pretention damning at all, and you could make similar types of statements about isolated aspects of any number of the movies Ebert considers great, like "Last Year of Marienbad", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Blow Up" or "Dinner with Andre". "The Brown Bunny" might well suck big-time, but Ebert's particular illustration of its suckiness is not convincing at all.

The impression I get is that this is literally all that happens in the movie. Which is pretty goddamn pretentious, you have to admit, even if you're a Jim Jarmusch fan.

If this film is as big of a bomb as people say, there are going to be red faces at work - not mine - is all I'm saying. And in an even odder set of six degrees, my step-aunt used to date Ebert. Go figure.

I've got nothing against the guy's love and knowledge of movies, which are real, but he rarely offers insight that one couldn't find from the gallery of movie stars recruited to comment on every annual AFI list of "100 Years... 100 of the Same Movies Rearranged." If he's the best we've got, then maybe the rancid Stephen Hunter deserved his ludicrous Pulitzer.

Ebert also hates Kiarostami but loves Majidi, which is like hating Godard but loving Molinaro. As boutique as shit.

(Sorry!!)

I don't have strong feelings about Gallo one way or the other. I thought I should point out, though, that a number of films that had disastrous receptions at Cannes have gone on to become, if not unassailable classics, then important touchstones. Like Dreyer's Gertrud ("100 minutes of static shots of furniture," said one French critic at the time--sounds a bit like Ebert's synposis of The Brown Bunny).

Buffalo 66 seemed like an effective mood piece to me, not much more. The fairytale-esque conceits in the midst of the limpid upstate NY realism were actually a bit ahead of their time--they're all over indie films now. That doesn't mean I liked them. The film looked gorgeous though, I forget the particular method Gallo used to process his film stock but the results were distinctive.

As for "film critics in the English language," I can't pretend to know half of them. Ebert is a very good prose stylist, much more pleasant to read than Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum begins practically every long review with a screed about the Cultural Guardians not letting us see (x) film and force-feeding us Titanic or what have you. It's not that his complaints don't have a basis in fact, it's just that his need to see every foreign/art movie through this particular lens is limiting, tiresome, and v. possibly condescending. In interviews Kiarostami has lauded The Godfather and in Positif not long ago Chris Marker said anyone who condemned Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (which borrows its plot from Marker's The Pier) and thought they were doing him any favors were foolish. I wonder what Rosenbaum--whose outlook on Film culture is increasingly Manichean--thinks of that.

Ebert doesn't hate fun.

I think the distinction I make that puts critics like Rosenbaum and White (I mention these two particularly because of their tone, which many people insist is condescending and vengeful) above Ebert is that film criticism... or, at least, film criticism that aims to mean something other than to tell you whether or not you should see a movie (as a film prof once said to me: "every film is worth watching at least once") is usually more about the person reflecting and writing about the film in question as it is about that film. Purely objective "checklist criticism" (good cinematography, a stunning performance, clever jokes) means nothing to me. I'm not saying Ebert is a checklist critic, but he does more often than not seem to be striving for a very objective tone.

Different strokes, obviously, but I prefer reading a very personal opinion that I happen to disagree strongly with (most of A. White) than merely nodding along at a basic description of a given film's socio-cultural-zeitgeist position at the moment it opens (which is what I think Ebert excels at).

At least we both love Gertrud... am I right?

It's pretty difficult for me to trust anyone who decides that a film is or is not important -- and not even important for me, for the writer, but just for everyone. First and foremost, any standards of what is considered "good" in film need to be held in suspect if not outright contempt. Take the films of Brian De Palma, for example. Nothing he does could be considered in "good taste," as far as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' definition of "good" has developed. Is he important to me? Hell yes. Is he important to others? Not for me to say. The best I can do is suggest how perhaps the cultural barriers between good and bad films might be interfering with one's reading of his films....

But I suppose I could just as easily stop now, since you hate reading blog entries on movies. ;)

it's here:
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=7480

As for the curse on his colon, what I actually said was that I put an unremovable black magic curse on his prostate, which will enlarge into a large cancerous ball by the fall

Better sacrifice another goat, dude. Your last one sucked.

McGee on music: How Vincent Gallo taught me to love Yes

The pop-culture polymath has used his spectacular tastes to introduce people to much-maligned musical genres. But if only he could get around to releasing his own recordings

Vincent Gallo is one of the few modern renaissance men. He boasts a long list of achievements and I can add another: Gallo is the only person who could persuade me to get into the prog-rock band Yes.

Every time I play Tales from Topographic Oceans, I have to laugh at myself and ask: "Am I really listening to Yes?" The band were a joke back in 1977, associated with creepy basement dwellers who read fantasy novels while watching VHS tapes of Rick Emerson stabbing his keyboard with Nazi daggers. I'd always sided with punk rock's reaction against 17-minute songs, so it took the musical wisdom of Gallo to show me the error of my ways. He's proved you can be both a Yes fan and a Ramones fan (kudos to Gallo for getting Johnny Ramone a film role in Stranded and for being godfather to Chris Squire's child).

Gallo's musical opinions are always spot on. For a start, he's gone on record to say he prefers Journey's Don't Stop Believing to Radiohead's OK Computer. Need more evidence? Just look at the tracklisting for the Brown Bunny soundtrack … it's genius! The critically misunderstood film shows Gallo as a man of spectacular musical tastes. Brown Bunny is the answer film to Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop and stars Gallo as anti-hero Bud Clay as he goes on an existential search through America to the sounds of Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson C Frank and John Frusciante. Amazing. On the soundtrack to his masterpiece Buffalo 66, Gallo repays his debt of influence to prog rock and includes great and original covers of King Crimson and Yes. I still remember being shocked at how much I enjoyed the soundtrack. Gallo vanquished my own musical prejudices towards the era of musical excess. I was curious enough to get Tales from Topographic Oceans, and had to admit he was right – it's a classic album.

The facts show that if something was happening in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, Gallo was at the epicentre of it. At 16 he moved there and started a no wave band with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gallo was heavily into the downtown art scene, playing with the Bush Tetras and Lydia Lunch, and was a regular at Manhattan's Mudd Club. Hip-hop? Gallo was there, starting his own rap act Trouble Deuce, and as Prince Vince he appeared on the shortlived, iconic and utterly street Graffiti Rock. Twenty years later and he's making appearances with Rick Rubin in Jay-Z's 99 Problems and rapping with RZA. The man is a pop-culture zeitgeist.

Despite all this, Gallo's own recorded musical output has been curiously limited. Sure, there are treats out there for people willing to spend outrageous amounts of money, but he has only had two wide releases on Warp: When, a cool number inflected with the spirit of Moondog, and Music for Films and Recordings, a compilation of Gallo's previous scores and cinematic offerings, twisted and bent into shape for general release. This is somewhat frustrating. Gallo is sitting on a mountain of unrecorded material; even in the mid 90s, when I heard talk of him signing to Sony and recording with Bunny member Lucas Haas, prog-rock producer Eddie Offord (producer of Tales from Topographic Oceans), Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz and DNA member Tim Wright, I was excited – but nothing happened. And again he recorded in 2005 with Sean Lennon and Jim O'Rourke, but has this project been released? No.

Gallo sparked my musical curiosity when he announced his new improvisational project RRIICCEE, featuring a rotating lineup (Eric Erlandsen of Hole was a founder member). The band's musical manifesto is to create tours only featuring improvisation, to dispense with the recording-industry model and be true to the music. Yet again, no records appear to be forthcoming. Is he refusing to release his recordings out of spite (as he did with his artwork)? Or is he too preoccupied with other projects? I don't know. But I'd like to hear more from the man who helped me understand the complicated and majestic beauty of Yes.

ugh

the man who helped me understand the complicated and majestic beauty of Yes.
hee hee, ugh is right. though i will admit that Buffalo 66 made me revisit Yes. Though I already owned Tales from Topographic Oceans ...

lol @ "Rick Emerson"

dude's touring on the west coast now

http://graveyardshiftshane.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/vincent-gallo-when.jpg
this is a very good album

I saw him on that RRIICCEE tour--I was probably one of a handful of folks there for the music, as the first 3 rows were packed with girls trying to catch his eye. He wore a long blonde wig and didn't say a word the entire show; at the end the girls gathered around the stage hoping he'd come back but he didn't, which made me chuckle. Now the music was tedious "improvisation" with his nasal-ly croon atop it periodically, which was a letdown for me given how much I like the album mentioned above...

The sheer amount of time and effort this man spends wheeling and dealing vintage bass guitar knobs on eBay (not to mention snatching up his own memorabilia whenever he can) almost undermines his place as one of popular culture's greatest self-mythologizers since Orson Welles. Almost.

Vincent Gallo is so great

no he isn't

newish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYyWo0JL62g

Would laugh when the AV Club would do it's yearly christmas catalog of unlikely and ludicrous items available over the internet and end with the same punchline: a vial of Vincent Gallo's seed he was selling on his website for $10,000 dollars, maybe more, for prospective mothers. Also, Gallo's refusal to sell to any females who weren't caucasian.

Vincent Gallo is so great
― puff pastry hangman (admrl), 14. Jaanuar 2011 16:35

[1 year passes...]

no he isn't
― am0n, neljapäev, 10. Mai 2012 23:15 (6 hours ago)

did enjoy reading this part of the discourse. really.

neljapäev, 10. Mai

everybody I know who's worked with this guy has nothing but awful things to say about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_leggenda_di_Kaspar_Hauser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnPh97aRRVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4YQGIuamnA