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

listening to the we own the night commentary -- gray seems awesome & intelligent, references visconti, bertolucci, does great little pleasant impersonations of a lot of the actors

Yeah, I said elsewhere (the 2009 detrius thread?) that he's impressively literate for an American director.

word, hes talking abt post-structuralism & louis althusser now

Does he say anything about White Nights?

nah, talked abt the leopard & just his general use of light, etc

http://boxofficemojo.com/images/whitenights_column.jpg

Shame, I figured with the Visconti link he'd have to say something about why he chose to adapt the Dostoevsky story the way he did.

i was just googling around for interviews, check this he mentions white nights here, not too in depth tho - http://www.indiewire.com/article/director_james_gray_on_two_lovers/

i can see why the yards was a flop, it's pretty bureaucratic & ive read quotes from james gray calling it an "anti-movie", which is interesting. he lets on in the commentary that it kinda taught him 2 make more (or some) concessions 2 the audience

the dvd extras are great -- roundtable discussion w/ gray, wahlberg, theron & caan, 2 commentaries, 1 a conversation btwn gray & soderbergh, & deleted scenes w/ commentary -- all of which were recorded like 5-6 yrs later i think

he also mentions that he did nearly 70 takes on some scenes

i bought this thing http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/jg-233.jpg

it's lovely. maybe ill post some interesting tidbits he sez cuz i doubt many other ppl have or will buy this

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

im finally reading this - it's dope

sez he had coppolas "step outline" from the godfather when he made 'little odessa' (i didnt realize he was 23 when he made it)

sez harvey weinstein "made it his business" for him not to get work after 'the yards' tanked

sez 'i had to mace someone who was charging at me on angel dust' when he went on police ridealongs w/ nypd

what is it??

the book in the above post my man

interviewing him was awesome

but what is the book? memoirs, essays...?

oh i didnt look hard enough ahha

is it bilingue?

it is indeed en français et anglais

interviews mostly - w/ him & other ppl involved in each movie

So I guess this is the James Gray thread indeed. So:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/intimate-impressions-a-look-at-the-first-book-on-james-gray

Only finally clicked about this guy in my brain this year so I need to investigate.

james gray made a cognac ad

http://blog.cognac-expert.com/james-gray-rise-above-commercial-cognac-martell-xo/

Not the first in memoriam profile of Ric Menello, Gray's co-writer on Two Lovers and the upcoming film, but maybe the most amazing. Gray:

Well, what happened was… It’s sort of a sad story, actually. What happened was, he was very reliant on his mother. And she died. And I would talk to him and he would say things like, [in Menello’s voice] “I have macular degeneration. I’m going blind.” I said, “Menello, you’re going blind?” “Yes, I look at the Amsler Grid on the Internet.” I was like, “What are you talking about? The Amsler Grid? What is that?” “I looked at it and I’m going blind!” So I would say, “Menello, you know, you’re not going blind.” I had a car come get him and take him to the ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist called me and said, “Mr. Gray, his eyes are completely fine.” He obviously was having a kind of mental breakdown, and then it became sort of official that he had this mental breakdown after his mother’s death, and he was institutionalized for a while.

And then, Rick Rubin and, I believe, Owen Wilson, and I sort of split three ways his rent for a year—and this guy, Adam Dubin, who was also very helpful, from N.Y.U. We split his rent and moved him into an apartment in Brooklyn after he was released from the hospital. And I felt that I needed to do something to help him. So when I started doing “Two Lovers,” I found myself calling him and just reading him scenes. And he would make suggestions, and sometimes I didn’t like them but sometimes I did, and then I would say, “Well, what movie is this like?” and he would say, “I saw this once in a movie.” Or, better yet, if he’d say “I’ve never seen it in a movie,” you knew you were doing really well.

And I thought, at the end of the process, Well, if I put this guy on as the co-writer, he gets half the money and he gets into the W.G.A. and he gets health benefits, which would really help him, because he was in bad shape. So I did that, and he got half the money, and the benefits, and the residuals, and all that stuff. So when the new movie that I did, “Lowlife,” came around, for me it was a no-brainer to split the credit and to keep the health benefits rolling, and he was very helpful. I’d read him stuff over the phone and he would comment, and, again, direct me to other movies I should look at and works of art that I should know about.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/03/in-memory-of-ric-menello.html

!

And he said, “Do you remember when I first saw Two Lovers and I said I thought it came out way better than I thought, I really was proud of it?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “This grinds it into the dust. If I ever get remembered for one thing, I'd be happy if it was this. It was great. It looks like an epic, it moves, everything works. I'm so happy about it.”

re: lowlife

now apparently retitled The Immigrant

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

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.