World Trade Center - trailer
 

The trailer is up for this new Oliver Stone film over at Apple.

link

Later this week or sometime next week a twenty minute reel of the film is being shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

After viewing this trailer, I have no interest in what look likes a cliched riddled film. That along with the many other topics already brought up and discussed by many of us in the thread for Flight 93.

This trailer also this made me wonder about Oliver Stone's career as of late in relation to quote I've come across before by multiple film directors. I wish I knew where the quote originated from, but it's late and I'm getting sleepy and I don't have the patience to filter through google search results or put on Martin Scorsese's A Personal Journey Through American Cinema, skipping around trying to find the quote.

The quote goes something like this: You make on for them, then you make one for yourself.

My mind wants to say Scorsese said this at some point while discussing the way films were made back in the hayday of the studio era pre and post WW2. That doesn't mean that this type of mentality and business practice doesn't still apply today. If anyone else knows more about the quote and it's origin, please feel free to correct me.

But my reason for bringing up the quote was to make an obvious point about Oliver Stone and his career. Prior to Alexander he hadn't film since Any Given Sunday, released in 1999. in the time between those two films he was with the documentary films(s) about Fidel Castro Comandante and Looking for Fidel, and another documentary about Israel/Palestine conflict, Persona Non Grata.

While Any Given Sunday was probably economically mixed to good in the studio's eyes, Alexander bombed hard and fast. Oliver is in need of a boost and what better way to do it than direct one of the first studio films about the events and people of 09.11.01. When Oliver Stone was announced as director of WTC I was disappointed. I was hoping that he would make a film about terrorism and the issues that have come up in the years since then that would be the opposite of everything this new film World Trade Center seems to be. (I was thinking of something in the vein of Syriana or Traffic that would show the various sides and complex relationships of countries, religion, violence, etc etc.)

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

the trailer. urgggggh.

"the world saw evil"

CUE THE VIOLINS!

i may feel sick

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

Just saw the trailer. Ever feel like your heart's being ripped out of you?

and to boot it's to be previewed during Davinci (think this is the first time I've spelled it right!), talk about fucking up one's high even before the party begins.

grady: Any Given Sunday 1999? Is that the same movie about motorcross racing? I thought that came out in the 70's or 80's.

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

i believe the one for them/one for me quote came from John Ford, who did indeed sparkle studio pictures in along with his more personal projects like The Quiet Man and How Green Was My Valley...

Unfortunately I don't think directors can still do this today. Ford was making like a movie every year straight for 30 years or whatever... Nowadays if you manage one every 2 years you're prolific... you can really only make more than that if you're spielberg or Rodriguez... But the "you're only as good as your last movie" thinking is still very much in place so I bet this is Stone's bid to sell out and get a little freedom back... Much Like Gilliam (unsuccessfully) did with the Brothers Grimm movie or Johnny Depp (very sucessfully) did with Pirates of the Caribbean... they were both coming off the spectacular mess of Quiote and made a conscious decision to do something that would make money... it's just unfortunate that in doing so they kill like 3 years of their time (moreso for directors than actors)... and if you only direct 12 movies in your career, 6 sell-out studio pictures is an awful lot... but then again I guess you only really need one great picture to be remembered forever... but still.

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

link

A film about the drama that occurs behind the scenes of a national football league. A pretty diverse cast that included: Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Jim Brown, Matthew Modine, and perhaps my favorite of the supporting characters, James Woods. (Woods was even better in True Crime, the film Clint Eastwood directed that year.) Of course you can't go without Al Pacino pacing the sidelines doing his best scream and look intense, angry, etc. etc. etc. Kind of the antithesis of his character in The Insider which also came out that year.

Any Given Sunday was a continuation of a theme Oliver Stone's worked at american culture and society of the late 20th century. At this point he'd focused on J.F.K, media violence and culture (Natural Born Killers), Vietnam (Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, and Heaven & Earth), 80's greed (Wallstreet), Richard Nixon (Nixon), music and drugs (The Doors)

One thing I do recall about seeing the film in the theater for the first time was that it had the Gladiator teaser trailer. It wasn't necessarily the teaser that was so cool to see at that point but that the teaser trailer's soundtrack was the main theme from Conan the Barbarian. For some reason it just made the teaser work. It was a short, taught, minute and a half of quick cuts and violence/action that really worked, for me at least because of the use of the Conan theme.

link to the teaser

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

To counter point this for a moment, I think about some of the british director's who seem to have a constant output, well, only oneis coming to mind at the moment and that one is Michael Winterbottom.

But I digress.

Back to the point. It seems that the Gilliam/Depp analogy is quite apt for the current state of director's output vs. their success within successful studio films.

They're flukes/odd balls to this theory though. Steven Soderbergh made a reversal of sorts going and making something very small, Schizopolis, and then taking a chance with a studio picture, Out of Sight. The foresight that it would have produced such for results for him is unknowable at the time, but then he went on a consistent streak of films with the occassional sidestep or digression with Full Frontal, Bubble,and some might add Solaris, but I saw that instance as Soderbergh continuning to meddle with his small films and big studio films.

Bringing this all back to a point though with Soderbergh and his film Bubble, and what he and Mark Cuban hope to achieve with their experimental system of distrubition and Soderbergh's output of films in that partnership, mixed with his mainstream studio output like the forth coming studio film, The Good German, should be interesting to watch. For the most part Bubble seems to have come and gone without much notice or ripple effect throughout the industry. I might be wrong on this, but I wonder if the experiment Cuban and Soderbergh have begun ends up becoming successful other director's might follow a similar model of production and distribution.

It could be a somewhat alternate version of the studio's the directors of the seventies envisioned and Coppola attempted wtih American Zoetrope. But it seems that the big studios have counteracted this with sort of botique side arm of the big studios (read. Fox Searchlight, Focus, Paramount Vantage etc. etc. etc.). Even the smaller parts of the studio that were seen as models loosely based on that of Miramax back in the pre-disney days have the restraints and conditions of a major studio with the budgets of independent films with multiple financers and backers.

So we end up back where we started, 2-3 years per a film. One for you, one or two for them. Thats 6-8 years. Plus the many false starts of projects going into production and then having the rug pulled out from under one's feet via a backer pulling out, an actor doing another project, legal issues concerning music rights etc etc and that puts you back at 9-10 years of your life and perhaps only 1-3 films.

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

yeah good points... Soderbergh does seem to be following the one for them/one for me roadmap... but again, he's making a movie nearly every year. most american directors, for whatever reason, just can't do that. Actually, I'd like to know how he does do that...

I blame Bret Rattner....


actually I don't think he has anything to do with it. i'm just gearing up for the hate next week.

about the hdnet mark cuban thing... i think the real test of that strategy will be when an actual honest-to-goodness good movie comes out. Bubble was awesome compared to One Last Thing and I thought Bubble was pretty lackluster... I still wouldn't make any connection between Cuban and Zoetrope though :)

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

Yeah Soderbergh is a machine of output, not always on par, but his cranking them out. I'm waiting for him to do SchiZopolis 2 as he said he would jokingly around the time of Erin Brockovich's US release just to force people to have to seek out and see Schizopolis.(It really is worth a viewing or two. There is a great Criterion DVD that was released a couple years back.)



HERE HERE!!!!

I SAY WE BURN HIM!!!

(In the angry mob Simpsons style. Just imagine Moe saying, "I SAY WE BURN HIM!!!")

Well, there's not really a literal connection dude, just, you know, like hypothetical. But I see your point regarding Cuban.

I just wonder how many filmmakers it would take to get something together other than the ever infamous "Pizza Knights" screenings and maybe put the ego's aside and figure out a way to make really personal films, but also, have a consistent output....or we could just all watch movies and eat and drink.

Re: World Trade Center - trailer
 

personally, I don't think this will ever happen. it seems like people have been trying since the earliest days of hollywood and it's still never worked for more than a few movies (I guess United Artists was the most successfull stab at it, but if i remember my film history class correctly, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith were all out in like 5 years). Zoetrope though, and whatever Bogdanovich, Friedkin, and cant-remember-third-guy's company was called and Soderbergh's thing... it just seems like it's always a good idea and it always implodes for whatever reason.

I'm sure they all had awesome tables though