Pecker 1998

Pecker is the story a modest boy who works at a sandwich join in the suburbs of Baltimore whose passion is photography. In an amateur manner, he begins to take his own photographs of everything around him and exhibits them in his fast food restaurant.

One day, an art expert from New York discovers his snapshots and is amazed by the freshness of his point of view, so she decides to take the young man to the Big Apple to start a new career as an artist and fulfill his dream. However, sometimes fame does not bring happiness and Pecker must decide between his life or his work. Success totally alters the life of the young man, whose family will be the focus of an unhealthy interest on the part of the pretentious intellectuals of New York. As fame begins to suffocate, his work will gradually lose the initial freshness.

At first glance, Pecker might look like a domesticated John Waters. This film starring an Edward Furlong who goes from being an amateur photographer of his friends and family in Baltimore to triumph in the most snobs artistic circles of New York is one of the best films of the last stage of the director of “Pink Flamingos”. He doesn't have the forced camp hooliganism of “Cecil D. Demented'” or the homemade black humor of “Serial Mom”. However, the director knows how to apply to his characters the same look with which the main photographer observes his loved ones: from the love of those who do not see the freak as someone different. So 'Pecker' works like an endearing comedy that claims that wonderful thing (of “art”) that is in the most unusual everyday people without any kind of caricaturist eagerness. Waters also season the film with some of his touches.

Pecker is an acid comedy about how the twisted circles dictated by artistic fashions can orchestrate the fame and subsequent decline of an artist. The irreverent director John Waters, responsible for other cynical and ironic visions of American society, this time had two young stars Edward Furlong ("Terminator 2" , “American History X”) and Christina Ricci (the macabre Wednesday of "The Addams Family" and “Buffalo 66”). The film is surrounded by the typical eccentric characters, but full of humanity, a redeeming quality in most of his films.

John Waters, the father of creatures as transgressive as the ones in Pink Flamingos or Polyester, however this particular film is one of his friendliest films in the late 1990s. Pecker, another rarity within his filmography full of bizarre examples, the film was received as the author's most mainstream work, a biased judgment because we are actually facing the most sincere and autobiographical of Waters’ movies. Lightened of the exaggerations 'brand of the house', but faithful to the bizarre spirit of its beginnings, Hairspray's father uses high doses of imagination and positive energy to tell us about the personal and artistic future of Pecker, a young photographer who captures his impromptu prints the crazy world around him. The protagonist, symbolic alter ego of Waters, knows success and failure as an artist almost at the same time, a premise that serves Waters to criticize the trends of cultural elites and public opinion, while defending the purity of 'neighborhood' life, devoid of the superficiality and cold sophistication attributed to the great New York. Pecker perhaps sins of a certain sense of being 'goody goody' and a narrative disorder, and at all times the feeling of being attending a private joke of very restrained repercussions weighs on it, but it is also a film with an almost contagious energy. To the usual interpreters of the Waters cinema, we must add a successful Edward Furlong and a grumpy Christina Ricci, at that time they were very popular faces and references of the American indie thanks to works such as American History X or Buffalo '66 respectively. Pecker is a sympathetic and counterculture film, so unique in its kind that it does not resemble any other. It is a harmless story in appearance, but with a lot of bad drool inside, a moral fable that surprises with its grim comedy but rejoicing with a positive spirit about existence.

Script and Direction: John waters

Music: Stewart Copeland

Photography: Robert Stevens

Cast: Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Mary Kay Place, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor, Bess Armstrong, Brendan Sexton III, Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst

The Rules of Attraction 2002

I have to confess I’m a huge fan of Brett Easton Ellis. His is not my favorite book but the movie is my second favorite after American Psycho.-----If we refer to physics, of course there are laws of attraction, you already know those that say that the opposite poles are attracted and the equal poles are rejected, but the laws of attraction that the story refers are the human ones. In full 2020, I think we have run out of these laws, I mean what does it take to like someone? Be beautiful? Have personality? Be intellectual? If you get someone who has a lot of money or is an influencer, no matter what else, it can attract you. Money is power, money is attraction. Men and women are governed by this absurd law, without discrimination. In human relations there are no laws, if you like someone, you will go for it, despite the lacking social statutes that bind us. The attraction is there and definitely does not need laws to exert its power.

The plot is told through the portrait of a young man who falls into the downward spiral, his relationships, his thoughts and the questions he will go through. The rules of attraction go beyond the understanding of a few people. The mythical American landscape is pure drugs, excesses, sex and alcohol.

Sean Bateman played by James Van Der Beek is a young man who lives in a sleepy state much of the time, when he wakes up he is not sure where he is. The only thing he cares about is his motorcycle, and being able to sell drugs to his rich acquaintances. The story is based on characters who fuck with everyone, who respect absolutely nothing, but who will hardly remember what they did the day before, be drowned in alcohol and feel nothing while having sex, but this is not exclusive to young Americans, but a faithful reflection of young people all over the world. The characters are quite American, a drug dealer, a homosexual, a girl who sleeps with everyone, an indecisive rich girl, and more that reflect what we have seen in a hundred books and movies. It is based on a book that serves as a reflection of a society that is still valid almost 30 years later.

The Rules of attraction, the second novel of the twentieth Bret Easton Ellis, after the famous Less than Zero, that was also made into a not very successful film. The story is an unusual document, elegant, ironic and stark, from the University of New Hampshire in the eighties. A gang of rich children revolves frantically in an obsessive round of sex, drugs and rock and roll, promiscuous and compulsive, trapped in a whirlwind and vertiginous whirlwind, in which hilarious moments are not lacking. It's the mocking story of A wants B, B wants C, C wants A; everyone ignores everyone's feelings, they give themselves to their persecutors and, closing their eyes, they dream of others. What are the laws of attraction to which these young people are subjected to? Is the desire of a body more intense than the desire to buy a designer suit? The kaleidoscopic narrative structure, in the form of monologues, it is bright and brutal, its style is surprisingly effective. The apathy, the despair and the anguish of living, the criticism of always divorced and absent parents, who just send money, the inability to communicate, except through music that sounds endless they barely camouflage themselves in the episodic mood and the consumption of drugs.

The writer-director is Roger Avary, who directed "Killing Zoe" and co-authored Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." (Whether he casted James Van Der Beek as his lead because he looks more like Tarantino than any other working actor, we cannot guess.) In all of his work, Avary is fond of free movement up and down the timeline, and here he uses an ingenious approach to tell the stories of three main characters who are involved in, I don’t know, five or six pairings. He begins with an "End of the World" party at Camden College, the ultimate party school, follows a story thread, then rewinds and follows another. He also uses fast-forward brilliantly to summarize a European vacation in a few hilarious minutes.

.Avary weaves his stories with zest and wicked energy, and finds a visual style that matches the emotional fragmentation. I have no complaints about the acting, and especially liked the way Sossamon kept a kind of impertinent distance from some of the excesses. But by the end, I felt a sad indifference. These characters are not from life and do not form into a useful fiction. Their excesses of sex and substance abuse are physically unwise, financially unlikely and emotionally impossible. I do not censor their behavior but lament the movie's fascination with it. They do not say and perhaps do not think anything interesting. The two other Bret Easton Ellis movies, "Less than Zero" and "American Psycho", offered characters who were considerably more intriguing. We had questions about them; they aroused our curiosity. The inhabitants of "The Rules of Attraction" are superficial and transparent. We know people like that, and hope they will get better.

Cast:

Shannyn Sossamon as Lauren

Ian Somerhalder as Paul

Jessica Biel as Lara

Kip Pardue as Victor

Kate Bosworth as Kelly

Written and Directed by Roger Avary

Based On The Novel by Bret Easton Ellis

Kicking and Screaming 1995

About Noah Baumbach:

Noah Baumbach is a screen writer and independent film director. Third of four brothers, he is the son of the novelist and literary critic Jonatan Baumbach and the Village Voice journalist Georgia Brown. He graduated from Midwood High School in 1987. For a season he worked as a messenger for The New Yorker magazine. His father is Jewish and his mother Protestant. Their divorce was a fact that marked him in his teens, as it is portrayed in his 2005 film “The Squid and the Whale”, a film for which he won two awards at Sundance, an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, six nominations for Independent Spirit Award, three for the Golden Globes, and several circles and associations voted him as the best script of the year.

Baumbach was married to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh from 2005 to 2010 and they have one child in common: Rohmer Emmanuel. He currently maintains a relationship with actress Greta Gerwig, who stars in his films Frances ha and Mistress America.

The Film:

Baumbach debuted as a screenwriter-director when he was 26, in 1995, with Kicking and Screaming.  I saw “Kicking and Screaming” in the theatre that year. I knew nothing about Noah Baumbach; he was new to all of us. The movie began with the opening notes of a Pixies song, “Cecilia Ann,” a phenomenon that shocked and thrilled me. A movie in a theatre was playing a Pixies song. This meant that my generation was making movies—taking what mattered to us and putting it onscreen, for all to see and hear and contemplate.

This ’90s film is essentially about disaffected youths and over-clever post-grads too afraid to grow-up, the film was easily labeled with the indolent “Gen-Xer” tag, Baumbach and his friends were anything but slackers, as evinced by the ambitious director making the movie at the ripe old age of 24. And while that Gen-X/slacker label may have helped the film from a marketing angle (sort of), Baumbach says it annoyed him while it was happening.

It is very easy to enjoy the movie, perhaps because I could identify with the characters: I like people who talk interestingly, who have read books, who appreciate verbal wit, who look dubiously at establishment assumptions. I like people who know what is meant by "the establishment," because to know it is to suspect it. I liked it that one of the film's characters writes a short story and another character describes him as "the bastard child of Raymond Chandler," and everyone knew what that meant.

Movies are said to be a great influence on audiences, but in most cases that doesn't happen because audiences choose movies that agree with what they already think. If your idea of a great time is sitting on the floor of a used bookstore, you are likely to enjoy "Kicking and Screaming." What struck me about "Kicking and Screaming" is that it captures so accurately the fact, dimly sensed by undergraduates even at the time, that the college years are the happiest in their lives.

One spends four years talking about ideas, concepts, art, theory, history, ideology and sex. Then one goes into the world and works like a dog until retirement.

In "Kicking and Screaming," one of the students, played by Eric Stoltz, has been hanging around the campus for 10 years, reluctant to leave. He's "working on his dissertation" and has a job as a bartender. Other students define themselves by the bars they drink in ("Going back to our old undergraduate bar," one says, "would be like going on "Hollywood Squares"). One student, named Jane (Olivia d'Abo) actually does have plans: She has accepted a fellowship in Prague. Her boyfriend Grover (Josh Hamilton) wonders, "So how will that work if you're living with me in Brooklyn?" "It'll be the same," she says, "except I'll be in Prague. They're obsessed with pop culture (one character hesitates before leaving a room to watch the rest of a TV commercial - "Wait, I wanna see if they get this stain out". Childhood is not a distant memory. Jane wears braces, and takes out her retainer when she talks, revealing an appealing overbite. Grover's father, well-played by Elliott Gould, attempts to communicate his needs and dreams to his son, only to hear, "Dad, I'm really not ready to accept you as a human being yet; thinking of you with Mother is disgusting enough, but you with another woman . . ." "Kicking and Screaming" doesn't have much of a plot, but of course it wouldn't; this is a movie about characters waiting for their plots to begin. What it does have is a good eye and a terrific ear; the dialogue by writer-director Noah Baumbach is not simply accurate, which would be a bore, but a distillation of reality elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement.

The movie has an amazing cast that includes all the cool and hip actors of the 90's and classic actors like Elliot Gould.

Josh Hamilton as Grover

Olivia d'Abo as Jane

Chris Eigeman as Max

Parker Posey as Miami

Jason Wiles as Skippy

Cara Buono as Kate

Carlos Jacott as Otis

Elliott Gould as Grover's Dad

Eric Stoltz as Chet

Marissa Ribisi as Charlotte

Dean Cameron as Zach

Perrey Reeves as Amy

Noah Baumbach as Danny

Life Aquatic 2004

About Wes Anderson:

After studying at the St. John's High School in Houston, the young Wes Anderson obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas. Crazy about cinema, he made several short movies, filming with his Super 8 camera, which left him with an early learning of film editing.

After being denied entry to Columbia University to study film, he begins to write and make a small film of less than a quarter of an hour that will later become a feature film, that’s how Bottle Rocket (1996) is born, his first feature film, with Luke and Owen Wilson with whom Anderson is going to have an enduring relationship (Luke has acted in all his films, while Owen has also been his co-writer).

In 1998, his second film, Rushmore, co-written by Anderson and Owen, was well received by critics and its director was seen as one of the new hopes of American independent cinema. Starring Bill Murray, this film marks the debut of indie star Jason Schwartzman.

In 2001, Anderson made his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, with a luxury casting made up of Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004, he returns with his fetish actor, Bill Murray, turned into a sailor obsessed with capturing and killing a jaguar shark.

In his films, Anderson has established a point of view full of humor and at the same time deeply human about modern life and relationships. Each of his widely popular comedies has undertaken the recurring themes of aspirations, misfits, family, love and fatality. His fourth film takes these same themes to a whole new territory when Anderson simultaneously embarks on a marine adventure with abundant chases, shootings, lurking sharks and underwater wonders.

Anderson's scripts always arise from an intimate personal experience and in the center of Aquatic Life there is another character very dear to Anderson: Steve Zissou, a world famous oceanographer who is both comically familiar and totally unique.

For a long time fascinated by aquatic films and underwater life in general, Anderson had always wanted to make a film staged on a ship in the world of film adventures. "This is a movie I've been thinking about for fourteen years," he says. "I was always fascinated by this strange and amazing character that creates a kind of eccentric family in the middle of the sea"

Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is an oceanographer and documentary filmmaker whose films about the aquatic world had some success in the past, but have now lost popularity, plunging Sizzou into a serious depression. However, the death of a close friend between the jaws of the mythical "Jaguar Shark", gives new strength to Sizzou, who decides to mount a final expedition to locate and destroy the jaguar shark, and in this way avenging the death of his friend. And so, aboard the ship "Belafonte", he embarks on the adventure along with his strange crew, which includes Jane (Cate Blanchett), a bitter reporter, and Ned (Owen Wilson), who could be Zissou's son. On the way, of course, strange adventures await them, ranging from a pirate attack to the rescue of an eternal rival and perhaps a confrontation with the fierce jaguar shark.

Wes Anderson is such a rare guy - as well as his cinema - that he really requires a certain and positive mood. In this particular film I understood once and for all his sense of humor. That inhuman coldness with which his characters face the majority of the absurd situations of the plot, something that brutally enhances those very few moments in which the shell is removed and reveals their emotions. I have laughed openly with Bill Murray facing shots with the most bungling pirates that I remember seeing on the screen with the diver's helmet and built-in music. I love the wonderful character of Willem Dafoe with some simply different and hilarious gags ("the scientific motive to kill the animal?"; "... revenge").

Bill Murray is perfect in his role. Again, it's Bill Murray. Only he can do this. The ensemble cast is, in addition to varied, very rich: the confident and imposing Anjelica Houston, that dawned Jeff Goldblum, the sporadic but priceless Michael Gambon or a Cate Blanchett that transmits all the nervous fragility of her character in a very precise way. It is also one of the few characters that never hide their emotions, and this brings the audience closer.

Visually I love the look Anderson gets; from their usual camera sweeps, fast and accurate, to their arrogant colors, going through those sea creatures as artificial as they are delicious, who find their climax in the beautiful final sequence, with the commented jaguar shark.

Everything is happening along the way, including the death of Wilson's character, filmed in a way as different and surprising as effective. It is, first and foremost, something new, such a different way of explaining what is happening through images.

Finally, Anderson has conquered me. I already liked The Tenenbaums, although I was not as excited. But Life aquatic goes further; It is freer, has more flight, and is totally irreverent.

Note: One of my favorite moments of the film is when Zissou ask his intern:

Zissou: Intern give me a Campari.

Intern: On the rocks?

Zissou makes the hand gesture you see on the image above.

About the Production

In the script by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Steve Zissou's ship, the Belafonte, essentially becomes another character in the film. From its colorful laboratory and equipped kitchen, to its research library, edition room and dream “observation bubble”, the ship seems to reflect the original spirit of the whole day. Production began looking for a boat with an original shape and style. "It was almost like a cast selection," says production designer Mark Friedberg. “The search for the ship was an adventure. Wes was very specific about the type of ship he wanted — it had to be from the time of World War II, it had to be a minesweeper, it had to be 50 meters long, and to some extent, it had to remind us of Cousteau's “Calypso."

After months of tracking the seas, the production found a 50-year-old minesweeper in South Africa, which with lots of difficulty took the production from Capetown to Rome. That ship remained intact for many of the outdoor sequences but was equipped to turn it into an oceanographic research ship, complete with towers, an observation deck and a very bright paint. Meanwhile, a very similar second ship was acquired to be dismantled and used to dress the stage.

"As for the interior of the ship, we wanted it to reflect Zissou, an insecure man about the direction of his life at this time, so that everything in this world is built and merged," says Friedberg. “When we started, we were wondering, if this story is about a real man facing his son or is it a fable, a cheerful comedy — and the answer was that it is all this, and it had to be reflected in the design.

From the beginning, Anderson knew that he wanted the public to see the Belafonte for the first time with the view of a cross section of a model, open to reveal all its program inside. So the design team built half a ship longitudinally so that the camera and the technical team could move in a straight line from room to room.

"Since the real ship is built of metal, we couldn't move walls easily, so we rebuilt what we saw inside the ship on stage," Friedberg explains. “Wes wanted to film the ship in its entirety simply by moving a crane around the first room for the first scene the ship is introduced. He wanted to use only real stages and very little of digital compounds or effects. There is a great sense of humor and fluidity, and Wes had everything planned with great precision.”

“Filming the scene was a lot of fun,” says Anderson. “We had all the actors walking around like a colony of ants and the lights are changing and the cameras are moving, and it was very exciting because none of us had done something similar. The stage was more like a museum piece than a recording stage— people continually went to see it. ”

The stage in the middle of the Belafonte, three stories high, it was built, like most stages, on the lot of the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Italy, with its famous artists and craftsmen. “We chose Italy because it had everything we were looking for — it is on the water, it has Cinecitta where all the Fellini films have been made, and it is the Mediterranean, so it has that island sensibility,” says Friedberg.

Barry Mendel adds: "Filming in Italy has a very specific flavor, and I think that some of that European sensitivity of handmade crafts has become part of the unique structure of the film."

The stages were one thing, but the cast and the technical team took a lot of getting used to the real ship used as the Belafonte. For many, the day of its presentation came on a one-day visit in which Wes Anderson hoped to film some scenes from the Team Zissou documentary. “We went to this small volcanic island, and the sea was very rough and almost everyone got dizzy - and we still had a great time,” he recalls. “We had the opportunity to meet each other, and when you are on a ship like that, it becomes very intimate. There are no barriers anymore. And what I find very interesting is that people become very emotional about the Belafonte, they feel a great loyalty. ”

The production designer also created Zissou's house on Pescespada Island in Italy, complete with a 12th-century castle, a pool with a killer whale (the whale is added through a rear projection), a landing platform for the seaplane and a very important ping pong table. "The theme for the Zissou enclosure was that we should have a feeling of 'I don't want to grow up,'" says Friedberg. “Pescespada Island was an extraordinary setting, very different from everything I've ever seen,” summarizes Mendel.

Meanwhile, in contrast to the Belafonte is Hennessey's ship, the super rival of Steve Zissou, forged as one of the most modern research ships in the world, in which no expense has been repaired. For this ship, the production used a NATO research ship, The Elite, which proved to be the antithesis of the Belafonte. “It was totally the opposite of what we created for Steve Zissou — extremely clean, very structured and high-tech,” says Mark Friedberg. "It was a totally different world."

Another key element of the Belafonte is the concept of submersible Deep Search — previously having received the name of one of Steve Zissou's former loves — in which the team finally heads to the depths of the sea in search of the jaguar shark. The mini submarine was built of iron and fiberglass by an Italian team, with propellers and lights that actually worked.

“The taking of the submarine was really an incredible scene of filming because we had the entire cast, with the exception of Owen, locked in the back of this tiny stage. It was designed so that they could enter quickly and could not leave, which really sets the mood for the scene, says Anderson. "There was a terrifying feeling of going into the unknown."

Best Films of 2019

1. Parasites

1. Parasites

The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho recovers the talented narrative pulse of his beginnings with an extraordinary black comedy. Loaded with tension, surprises and violence, it catches and does not take a breath until the end, supported by a murky and extreme portrait of social differences. It is a lesson in film making. The brand new winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival is, in fact, the best film of the year. Not surprisingly, it is signed by South Korean Bong Joon-ho, author of films like Snowpiercer or Okja, with this film, Parasites, he shares a look at the class struggle and social inequality. A rich family and a poor family will unite their ties in the most delusional way possible until the secrets explode through the air and all that remains is the certainty that this is one of the most lucid and vindictive filmmakers of today.

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2. Marriage Story

2. Marriage Story

I have to confess I have a very soft spot for Baumbach’s films, I love his work!! This film comes to prove that he is reaching his best years he is delivering this masterpiece.

Inspired “The Meyerowitz Stories”, Baumbach returns to Netflix with one of the best movies of the year. The story of a divorce, of a love tragedy, with that tone between drama and comedy that characterizes the film maker, with a combination of great direction and a great script we learn how to digest such a really raw movie. The movie is a contemporary version of films like Kramer vs. Kramer. He stresses the elegant staging but above all, again, his skillful direction of actors. The two stars, Johansson and Driver, take advantage of the space that Baumbach gives them to show off and confirm their great talent. This film represents American author cinema at its best. Noah Baumbach creates his most adult film yet that gradually crumble between lawyers and bureaucracy.

 This movie is absolutely heartbreaking and real, with great performances and moments that will remain recorded for a long time (from her monologue in front of the lawyer to the Sondheim song that he sings, and from there to a final sublime and subtle scene). This is an essential film.

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta ...