Marilyn Monroe "just sitting around"

The copyright to a home movie of Marilyn Monroe “just sitting around” with friends will be offered through an online auction this week, according to a man who found the film while researching the actress’ death.A short clip of the four-minute, silent 16 mm film provided to CNN to shows Monroe puffing on a cigarette, laughing and drinking wine on a couch.An FBI agent involved in the investigation of Monroe’s death on August 5, 1962 — which was ruled a suicide by drug overdose — tipped off collector Keya Morgan to the film’s existence.Morgan was interviewing the agent for a documentary titled “Marilyn Monroe: Murder at 5th Helena Drive,” he said.The documentary, due out next year, examines the theory that Monroe was killed by government agents because of her affair with President John F. Kennedy.Morgan said he paid $275,000 for the faded color film because it is “very rare” to find images of the actress’ private moments.”It’s a side of Marilyn that no one has ever seen before,” he said. “You see the private Norma Jeane, the girl. You don’t see Marilyn Monroe, the movie star.” Monroe changed her name from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe early in her acting and modeling career.(cnn)

'The Road'the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.

“The Road” is a road you’ll wish hadn’t been taken. Not because anything’s been badly done, but because there’s a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.Given that it’s based on Cormac McCarthy’s somber novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a devastating report from the end of the world witnessed by a man who’s been there, it’s no surprise that the film is for the most part profoundly depressing.What is disappointing is that despite numerous strong areas, including fine acting by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee as father-and-son survivors of an unnamed apocalypse, what we’ve been given is no more than a reasonable facsimile, an honorable attempt at filming an unfilmable book.

As adapted by British playwright Joe Penhall and directed by John Hillcoat, best known for the slickly violent “The Proposition,” “The Road” turns out to be good at shocking and upsetting us, but it lacks the compensating emotional heft that would make absorbing those shocks worth our while.For while Chris Kennedy’s formidable production design places us in an uncomfortably real space, absent McCarthy’s haunting language, “The Road” for the most part is not so good at transcendence, at making us feel, as the book definitely does, that there is reason for us to endure its pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in “Heart of Darkness” as “the horror, the horror.”What Conrad was likely talking about, and what “The Road” devotes considerable time to on the screen and on the page, is the terrors that humans inflict on each other. One of the provocative questions this story asks is whether staying alive is worth the savagely inhuman actions necessary to make survival possible.

Unwilling to begin on a totally downbeat note, “The Road” opens with what turns out to be a dream flashback to a time just before the unspecified catastrophe happens, a time when Mortensen’s unnamed man is married to Charlize Theron’s unnamed woman and their first child is on the way.Ten years into the post-apocalypse, the mother is gone, the unborn child is a young boy (Australian actor Smit-McPhee) and the world has changed. It’s a blasted, blighted, ashen and slowly dying Earth, shaken by quakes, lighted by out-of-control fires and filled with dead cars, empty buildings, deserted bridges and very few people.To stay alive in this world, you have to keep moving, wearing the most utilitarian rags you can find (Margot Wilson did the excellent costume design) and pushing the shopping cart that contains all your possessions. It’s a vision of a world largely without us that completely chills the soul.

The casting of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee is one of the film’s strengths. With straggly hair and a great wild look, Mortensen is convincing as a harried survivor, and the rapport he has with the more innocent and soulful child played by Smit-McPhee is excellent.”I’ve never had a better acting partner,” Mortensen has said, “someone I knew had my back, and he knew I had his.”One of the great fears of those few survivors is cannibalism, something the strong inflict on the weak, and scenes that hint at that are among “The Road’s” hardest to take.The man’s greatest fear is that he will die before his son is old enough to protect himself, and the son’s greatest fear, paradoxically, is that he and his father will somehow lose the essence of their humanity in the drive to stay alive. “Are we still the good guys?” he asks his father plaintively. “Are we carrying the fire?”

This pair have their affecting moments, as does Robert Duvall as a kind of barely alive human lump, but absent McCarthy’s transformative prose, which has a power even images can’t improve on, what we are left with is more endurance test than anything more elevated.If it is to do more than horrify and depress us, “The Road” is in need of a finer sensibility, and that is simply not on offer.

http://www.youtube.com/v/i4aNZGniOG4&rel=0&fs=1

Movies Come Back to St. Marks Place

Next week, Theater 80 will fire up its film projectors for the first time in 15 years, when comic caper film The Brooklyn Heist begins its two-week run at the famed revival house. We asked The Brooklyn Heist director Julian Mark Kheel about how this unique booking came about, and why Theater 80 is the perfect venue for his satiric tale of three very different sets of New Yorkers all plotting to rob the same pawnshop owner…on the same night.

Sometimes small problems lead you to great solutions.  A few months ago, we were looking for a theater just to hold a private screening of The Brooklyn Heist for our New York cast and crew who hadn’t had a chance to see the film yet. Our producer Michael Cecchi was looking at theaters, but most movie theaters in New York have no character—they’re too big and commercial and impersonal.  We knew we wanted somewhere special to debut this film, not just a giant multiplex.

One day, Mike was walking by Theater 80, which he knew very well from their time with the Pearl Theatre Company, and decides on a whim to stop in and see what they’re up to with the space.  That’s when we first found out that Lorcan [Otway], who is the son of the original owners of Theater 80, was considering turning Theater 80 back into a movie house. He had begun researching the high definition projection system that would be needed, but it was an expensive endeavor. But once Lorcan saw the trailer for The Brooklyn Heist, he loved it, the projection system was ordered, and suddenly we were booked not just for a cast and crew screening but an entire run of the film.

Co-writer Brett Halsey and I both spent our post-college years living in New York, writing together and struggling as artists, and one of the greatest things we discovered about the city is the huge variety of people from all walks of life who live here.  Since The Brooklyn Heist is all about people from different worlds colliding, it seemed only logical that New York—and specifically Brooklyn—would be the place they’d all be.

When we decided to write a caper film, one of our big inspirations was Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 film directed by Sidney Lumet.  It feels like the robbery in that film is an event that could only happen in New York, from the characters played by Al Pacino and John Cazale to the mobs of people witnessing the hold-up from outside the bank.I feel the same way about The Brooklyn Heist—a heist like this one with characters like these could only happen in New York.

Caper and heist films are such an established part of the history of cinema.  Filmmakers have been making them forever and audiences have been watching them forever, probably because they’re fun to make and fun to watch.  So when we wanted to “play” with a genre and explore long established stereotypes for laughs, we knew that a heist film would give us a ton of material to work with.

I love the old cliché about filmmaking that it’s like trying to eat an elephant a spoonful at a time. That rings very true to me because the toughest part of directing is being able to see the ‘big picture’ while you’re working on just one specific shot, maybe even one specific moment.  In a short film that task is easier because the “big picture” is only 10 minutes long, but in a feature, seeing the whole thing in your mind while still staying in the moment is a much bigger challenge.  And because of the different genres within The Brooklyn Heist, making this film was like trying to eat five elephants of varying colors, shapes, and sizes, and keeping track of which elephant you were supposed to be eating on any given day and how it would mix together with the other elephants.  So this feature presented its own special mix of problems, as well.

The other difference between making a feature versus a short is simply time, and by that I mean time on the set.  The pressure to get everything done on time is much more intense on a feature.  On a short film you’re usually working with a cast and crew who is donating their time, or at least providing it at a very low cost for one or two days.  But of course no one can afford to donate their time for weeks and weeks on end—everyone’s gotta eat somehow.  So on a feature it quickly becomes apparent that every minute on set is costing a lot of money and you’ve got to stay on track, especially on an independent film where’s there’s no studio to cover the costs if you go over budget.  But at the same time, you can’t let the costs distract you from the artistic side of the endeavor.  So it’s a balancing act that changes every day.