more news on mister lonely
http://www.harmony-korine.com/paper/main/news.html
Some "production photos" for Mister Lonely surfaced yesterday.
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From here: http://www.harmony-korine.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=805&start=150
god damn those are great photos, this is by far the film i look forward to seeing most in the next year or so
yeah nice photos, you should resize one and use it as your avatar, eward. :yabbse-lipsrsealed:
Quote from: Ginger on May 17, 2006, 05:55:35 PM(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi10.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa110%2FStonerSunRising%2FML004.jpg&hash=352219cb4db6ab62ed7f5148109266d75aef17c1)
"you've got a little something right here.. over more.."
is the dude in the wig david blaine?
Quote from: eward on May 19, 2006, 01:00:12 AM
is the dude in the wig david blaine?
A lot of people on the Korine forum think it is.
Quote from: Ginger on May 19, 2006, 09:04:03 AM
Quote from: eward on May 19, 2006, 01:00:12 AM
is the dude in the wig david blaine?
A lot of people on the Korine forum think it is.
i heard one person thought it and the rest agreed.
In brief: Korine finds harmony at last
Source: Guardian UK
Harmony Korine, director of Gummo and co-writer of Kids, is showing signs of calming down. His recent project Fight Harm was abandoned because he kept getting so badly injured ("A bouncer at a strip club broke both my ankles"), but his new film, Mr Lonely, seems to be going comparatively smoothly. The movie, starring Samantha Morton and Anita Pallenberg, is currently being filmed in Scotland. "Harmony was a dream," one crew member reports.
Dialogue: Harmony Korine
Source: Hollywood Reporter
In any complete indie film encyclopedia with a listing for "enfant terrible," Harmony Korine's photo should probably be there. At age 21, the streetwise New Yorker's screenplay for Larry Clark's nihilistic "Kids" hit the screen. His first two films, "Gummo" (featuring cat torture and a cast of freakish amateurs) and the equally disturbing schizophrenia drama "Julien Donkey-Boy" (each starring former girlfriend Chloe Sevigny) elicited mainly scathing reviews -- and acclaim among cineastes. After shooting the David Blaine TV docu "Above the Below," many reclusive dark years followed, including two reported stints in drug rehab. Korine speaks about his comeback film, "Mister Lonely," a tale of a celebrity impersonator retreat (with some skydiving nuns thrown in for good measure).
The Hollywood Reporter: Can you give me a synopsis of the movie?
Harmony Korine: That's the hardest thing for me. In broad terms, it's a movie about a Michael Jackson impersonator living in Paris who's down on his luck. He meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator at a commune where all these other impersonators live. They want to put on a show in hopes that the world will come see them perform. She convinces him to go to this place and things happen. At the same time, there's a story about nuns jumping out of airplanes.
THR: How much time is spent on the nuns?
Korine: I'd say like a quarter of the film. You could almost say it's really one story with this like secondary poetic punctuation.
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THR: What was your inspiration for all this?
Korine: There were certain things I'd been dreaming up for a long time -- nuns testing their faith by jumping out of airplanes without parachutes and surviving and all these things. I started to think about lives of impersonators and living your life as if you were another person. There were these two stories and I wasn't sure what the connection was. I sat down with my little brother and we started to see that there was an emotional or a thematic connection. It all deals with issues of faith and identity and change.
THR: In what way?
Korine: It's more a question of faith. That's kind of it. It deals with issues of faith and identity and change.
THR: Were you also making a comment on pop culture?
Korine: I think that's in there. I've never been a person that sets out to make a grand statement, (but) there's definitely some kind of statement on popular culture.
THR: What kind of statement -- for? against?
Korine: It's neither. I always think it's an injustice to tie something down, the author's intent. I'd rather leave up to the audience.
THR: What have you been doing for the past few years?
Korine: I kind of more or less disappeared for a while. I wasn't sure I really wanted to make movies starting seven or eight years ago, and I wasn't in the right spot. I'd been working since I was young. I felt like I needed some time to get lost for a little while. I felt a kind of disconnect from the world -- like it was leaving me, as much as anything.
THR: In what sense?
Korine: I just wasn't right in the head. I wasn't in a place where I could be honest to make a film. I was emotionally drained. I didn't know if I was gonna make films again or what I was gonna do, so I just kind of traveled all over the world. I went to the Amazon and I also went to the jungle in Panama and lived there for a little bit.
THR: What did you do there?
Korine: Nothing. Actually, I went back to some of the places, and the film was shot in those same jungles. My parents had moved to the jungle, so I started to like it and I fished a lot and just kind of read books and lived life. I lived (in Paris) for a while. I only left my apartment twice. I just can't speak the language and so I was just eating the pastries, so my teeth were falling out, probably because of all the sugar. I had a certain level of paranoia when I was there.
THR: So were the Paris scenes in the film autobiographical?
Korine: Yeah, there are things that these characters do and places they've been that echo things that have happened to me. It's about being lost in a lot of these places and trying to find yourself.
THR: I was told that you had gone to rehab.
Korine: It wasn't so much anything like that. At that time, I didn't feel things were in a place where I could create. It was just because I was unhappy. It wasn't one thing that changed me or one thing that anybody did. I just needed to disappear for a little while.
THR: What made you come back?
Korine: At some point I started dreaming again, I guess. I had always had this thing where my mind gets filled up with images or fragments of people talking. I don't really know how to communicate that. The only way I can ever rid myself of images and sounds and things is with films and so, at a certain point, I started to feel good again. I started to feel again and started thinking that I was ready. It was a slow process. The other thing is I can't really do so great at other things. It's difficult to sustain a living as a fisherman or a bricklayer or something.
THR: Were you doing that at the time?
Korine: Sure. Of course.
THR: After what you've done in the past, that's an interesting path to take.
Korine: It wasn't really seeking out an alternate identity. I started making movies pretty much after high school. I needed that time to rebuild that obsessive nature it takes to make these types of films.
THR: How did you raise the financing for the movie?
Korine: It wasn't easy. I wanted to make a movie that was much more ambitious than the other films and film it in a way that I had never done (before). So, the budget was much bigger and the cast was much larger and we shot in four countries (Paris, Panama, Scotland and Spain), so the budget grew higher (to $8.2 million).
THR: Did any of the financiers put restrictions on you because you're such an experimental filmmaker?
Korine: No. I would just rather do something else if I couldn't make movies the way I wanted to make them. I would rather have half the money that was originally budgeted and have director's cut than have twice as much money and restrictions.
THR: What's your relationship with (fashion designer) Agnes B., and how is she a part of this?
Korine: Agnes and I started a company together right around the time of "Julien Donkey-Boy," seven or eight years ago, to put projects together not just for myself but for other people. We have a really nice venue. She's a good friend, someone I really like and admire.
THR: Where did you make the film?
Korine: (We shot it in) Panama, Paris, Scotland and shot the skydiving stuff in Spain, all the flying nuns. We found this castle in Scotland that fit the story perfectly. As far as the jungle in Panama, it was because my parents lived in the jungle and I was familiar with it.
THR: How as directing a cast of professional actors like Samantha Morton different from your previous experiences?
Korine: For me, directing actors and non-actors, I guess the big difference is that with actors, they're always aware of the camera. So I enjoy working
with them.
THR: What filmmakers influenced you on this project? Hearing about it, Fellini came to mind.
Korine: I purposely stopped watching films like six months before we started shooting. I wanted to clear my head. This film stylistically, aesthetically, it's much more classical than the other films I've done. In the other movies I was consciously trying to break down the beauty of certain images. With this one I wanted to create the most beautiful pictures I could within the context of the story, so you could almost say this movie had more to do with (Andrei) Tarkovsky and (John) Cassavetes but at the same time, I don't really know. I was watching John Ford films and ... I guess with the movies I love and the directors I love I always think they live with me. Those are the movies that really moved me and changed me. Films become part of you in some ways.
THR: How was your experience making this movie different than your previous ones?
Korine: I guess it was more thought out, more meticulous. I felt pretty calm. I enjoyed the process more than I had ever enjoyed before. To be honest, it took so long for me to get back to the place where I was making films again that I really appreciated being there. I felt like if I couldn't enjoy the shooting and editing process, then why I would even bother making films. Because the rest of it is such a miserable experience -- raising the finances and doing all the other bureaucratic stuff, meetings and agendas. But the end part is fun, giving it to the world.
THR: What do you expect the response to be?
Korine: I'm waiting for the circus. I put everything I know, as a filmmaker and a person, into this movie. I know for a fact my films are not films that everyone enjoys. I think that might be the case with this movie.
Quote from: MacGuffin on May 21, 2007, 01:40:00 PM
THR: What was your inspiration for all this?
Korine: There were certain things I'd been dreaming up for a long time -- nuns testing their faith by jumping out of airplanes without parachutes and surviving and all these things. I started to think about lives of impersonators and living your life as if you were another person. There were these two stories and I wasn't sure what the connection was. I sat down with my little brother and we started to see that there was an emotional or a thematic connection. It all deals with issues of faith and identity and change.
THR: In what way?
Korine: It's more a question of faith. That's kind of it. It deals with issues of faith and identity and change.
THR: Were you also making a comment on pop culture?
Korine: I think that's in there. I've never been a person that sets out to make a grand statement, (but) there's definitely some kind of statement on popular culture.
THR: What kind of statement -- for? against?
Korine: It's neither. I always think it's an injustice to tie something down, the author's intent. I'd rather leave up to the audience.
wtf? the hollywood reporter starts off the interview asking what the movie means, have they seen it? omg thr wtf?
didn't know about the nuns. i like what he's talking about. still one of blah blah blahh... (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=245.msg234162#msg234162)
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http://www.fest21.com/video/scenes_from_mister_lonely (http://www.fest21.com/video/scenes_from_mister_lonely)
looks a little more conventional in its approach than gummo or julien donkey boy. still, this and twbb are the only movies i'm dying to see.
Oh. Shit.
4/19 @ 7:00pm / SERIES: harmony korine
Mr. Lonely (sneak preview) & The Lonely
"Mister Lonely is easily his most accessible film to date. Which, uh, isn't to say our man Harmony is hewing to some newly boring path. In Paris, a Michael Jackson impersonator who's known only as, well, Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) meets a reasonably convincing Marilyn Monroe-alike (Samantha Morton), who tells him about her beloved home in the Scottish highlands--a commune for celebrity impersonators. Most of the movie takes place in this weirdly magical place, a castle where the sheep are herded by James Dean and Abraham Lincoln, and Buckwheat rides a Shetland pony. Marilyn's got problems with her hubby--Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant)--but Michael falls for her just the same. Considering all of this is very bizarre, the movie actually portrays the complexities of relationships with heartfelt realism."
—Cheryl Eddy, San Francisco Bay Guardian
The Cinefamily is proud to present Mr. Korine's first feature film in over a decade in this special sneak preview. To be followed by The Lonely, a one-hour documentary about the making of the film.
Harmony Korine will be in attendance for a Q&A.Dir. Harmony Korine, 2007, 35mm, 112 min.
Tickets - $10
Silent Movie Theater.
QuoteThank you, your order is complete!
Purchase Summary
2 Mr. Lonely (sneak preview special event w/ Korine in attendance) Saturday, Apr 19, 2008 7:30 PM PDT main theatre $10.00 Will Call $20.00
Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/premieres/7043715/standardformat/)
Wow Harminoff, im impressed... :bravo:
I totally fell madly in love with this movie.
This looks great! :yabbse-thumbup:
Quote from: Ghostboy on March 20, 2008, 12:38:14 AM
I totally fell madly in love with this movie.
Agreed.
so did you go see it or what?
Yeah I saw it with the Q&A. I feel like if you see the movie and you know me, or like have maybe read some of my posts here, you'll know I absolutely loved it.
Three things about the movie I really liked:
1a. Korine retains his visual intensity.
1b. Demonstrates emotional maturity.
1c. And is, actually, more imaginative.
2. The narrative is strong and vibrant, brave, mesmerizing, a little mysterious, and completely honest. There is a close connection between the narrative and the protagonist and it comes off as very authentic. I know there have been strong accusations of Korine being a filmmaker dilettante but if he once was he clearly isn't now. I don't think he ever was.
3. The scope of the characters. He's always been really good at this too. In a more traditional form this means an intimate look into a broad range of feeling.
We are opening this at the Magnolia here in Dallas and we have a trailer for it playing before Baby Mama. I'm not sure how Harmony would feel about so much laughter occurring every time "Michael" spoke. I guess this won't be his crossover hit with sorority chicks and soccer moms...maybe next time.
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The Return (and Reform?) of Harmony Korine
By DENNIS LIM; New York Times
HARMONY KORINE catapulted to fame as an enfant terrible, and for a few years he played the part to perfection. He was the young skateboarder turned wunderkind screenwriter behind Larry Clark's 1995 sensation, "Kids." At 24 he directed "Gummo" (1997), about glue-sniffing, cat-killing teenagers in a Rust Belt backwater. Most critics hated its junkyard, freak-show aesthetic, but it spawned an instant cult, with devotees including Werner Herzog, who became a mentor and collaborator, and Gus Van Sant. Mr. Korine's next film, "Julien Donkey-Boy" (1999), inspired by his schizophrenic uncle, continued the gutter-punk provocations.
But after that he largely receded from public view. Now 35, having dug himself out of what he called "a black hole," he has finally made another film, "Mister Lonely," a sweetly cockeyed fantasia about a colony of celebrity doppelgängers and a troupe of sky-diving nuns. Over coffee during a recent trip to New York — he now lives in Nashville with his wife, Rachel, not far from his childhood home — this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.
"I could never live here again," he said. "Too many ghosts."
Those ghosts, and the process of exorcising them, account for the long silence between "Julien Donkey-Boy" and "Mister Lonely," which had its premiere at Cannes last year and screens at the Tribeca Film Festival this week before opening Friday. As he tells it now, the Harmony Korine of the '90s was not just a precocious upstart but also a thin-skinned kid.
"In my own distorted view of things I thought people would be championing me," he said. "Or I thought they'd say, 'At least he's not making the same films as everyone else.' "
He vividly remembers Janet Maslin's review of "Gummo" in The New York Times, which proclaimed it "the worst film of the year" in the first sentence: "I got a call from Herzog, who was like, 'This movie is now destined to live forever.' "
Even then, he said, he realized that it was partly his youthful hubris and pranksterish humor that made him such a tempting target. "It's one thing to understand it intellectually," he said, "but another to live through it."
Mr. Korine's stunts grew stranger and more brazen. His awkward appearances on "Late Show With David Letterman" bordered on performance art. (He was eventually banned from the program, reportedly for pushing Meryl Streep backstage.) He started work on a video project called "Fight Harm," which involved goading strangers into beating him senseless. That endeavor landed him in jail and in the hospital.
"I thought I was making the greatest comedy," he said. "At the time I really felt like that's what I was on earth to do — get beaten up."
The magician David Blaine, one of Mr. Korine's closest friends, said: "Harmony's a guy who seeks truth. For someone like that, when the world becomes artificial, you start to hide from it."
At some point, Mr. Korine said, "I lost interest, not just in films but in life. It was never the intention to become the center of attention. The people around me, the social stuff, the narcotics — it was just like, what the hell happened?" He seemed to be cheating death, and not just with drugs: he survived two house fires, first in Connecticut and then in Queens. "The first one I don't know what happened," he said. "The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking."
He moved to Paris, where his friend, the fashion designer and cinephile Agnès B., put him up in a studio apartment. But he didn't speak French, and the isolation was not conducive to recovery. "It was weird to be in a place like Paris that's so beautiful and be falling apart," he said. (His memory of that time made its way into "Mister Lonely," in which the character played by Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson impersonator adrift in Paris.)
He realized he had hit bottom, he said, when he was eating a gyro and bit into what he thought was a bone. Annoyed, he took it back to the vendor — who, he said, "was like, 'That's not a bone, it's your teeth.' I was rotting from the inside out."
Mr. Korine then spent some time with his nomadic parents, who now live in the jungles of Panama. During an interview in Cannes last May he recounted a turning point in his slow climb from the abyss:
In Panama, he befriended a cult of fishermen called the Malingerers, who were trying to find a fish with gold scales. After a few months he got into an argument with the cult leader — he thought they were living a lie — and as he was leaving, a fisherman's wife handed him a dog leash. "She said she was walking the dog. It was an invisible dog."
In New York recently he offered further details. After he moved to Nashville, "I mounted this leash on the wall and I heard it bark," he said. "I swear to you. Something at that moment just felt right. I know it sounds weird."
It may be useful at this point to note that Mr. Korine's mythomania has always been central to his art. "I don't know if that story's true," Mr. Blaine said. But, he added cryptically, "The real story about Harmony and his life is more mind blowing than any story he could ever make up."
In Nashville, finally clean, Mr. Korine mowed lawns and did odd jobs. "I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life," he said. But eventually the images in his head returned. "The story always comes from pictures I want to see," he said, and this time they included nuns falling from planes and a Michael Jackson impersonator on a child's bike.
"Mister Lonely," which Mr. Korine wrote with his younger brother, Avi, shares with his other films a nonjudgmental fascination with outcasts. The impersonators, unwilling to face the world or themselves, exist in an illusory Neverland. "There's an inherent drama in people who create their own utopia," Mr. Korine said.
Mr. Luna prepared for his role by studying with a Michael Jackson impersonator in Mexico City. To test himself he performed outside the Notre-Dame museum in Paris. "I danced for two hours and made seven euros," he said. (He was convincing enough, he said, to fool Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams, who was staying at the same Paris hotel. "He came up to me and said, 'Hey Mikey, how ya doin'?' and was really annoyed that I wasn't Michael.")
"Mister Lonely," apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine, comes with a ready-made back story — the rehabilitated addict, the maturing artist — which should not be mistaken for a master narrative. "I definitely didn't want the film to have a bleak worldview," he said. But he isn't prepared to lose the bad-boy mantle.
"I think the next one will be more provocative," he said. "Otherwise life just gets too boring."
one of those movies that while watching it i wasn't sure if i liked it (unlike gummo, which i loved from the first frame). but i'm dying to see it again, so that means it's probably really good. it's actually a pretty heartbreaking film.
saw it at the international film festival of boston and the q&a was the most awkward q&a i've ever been to. even korine seemed to be a little weirded out.
Go see my movie at IFFB! Shorts block three!
i can't. finals. i'm shooting my new movie now and tomorrow i'm writing a paper on female sexuality in the fucking wicker man. remake.
...what time is it?
EDIT: yeah, it's playing at the theater a block away from me today and tomorrow. i'll try to make it.
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Harmony Korine's back with 'Mister Lonely'
Korine won't go into detail about his eight-year hiatus or about his new film, a far cry from his earlier work.
By Mark Olsen, Special to The Times
Harmony Korine burst onto the independent film scene in the late '90s as the twentysomething enfant terrible who wrote the screenplay to the controversial "Kids" and went on to direct the purposefully modulated provocations "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy." Then he seemed to vanish into a cloud of drug rumors, transient living and alleged projects.
It was as if he had come to destroy cinema, and in the process nearly killed himself.
After an eight-year absence, he's reemerged with a new film, "Mister Lonely," which last year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is set to open in New York on Friday and Los Angeles on May 9. Full of quiet grace and spiritual transcendence, "Mister Lonely" seems far removed from the carefully calibrated grotesqueries of Korine's earlier work.
He is, in many respects, a changed man, if not a more conventional filmmaker. Korine, 35, lives in Nashville, where he grew up, with his wife. In the last decade, he says that he's worked as a lifeguard and bricklayer, lived through two house fires and spent time in Paris and with a Haitian voodoo tap-dancer in Baton Rouge, La., and also with a cult of fishermen in Peru.
It sounds like some scruffy art-rock rendering of Mark Twain, but are his journeys fact or some allegorical reimagining of years of drug addiction and emotional malaise? "What's the difference?" he said. "Whether you believe me or whether it's the truth, what does it matter? Everything's just a story. It's all a story."
New direction
Onetime poster boy for New York's art-fashion-music-film nighttime demimonde, Korine couldn't help but have a chuckle at finding himself on a recent Sunday at a sun-dappled table poolside at a hotel in Beverly Hills, munching on French fries and gulping coffee.
The setting does seem a far cry from the underworld phantasmagoria he explored in his earlier films -- out-of- control teenagers in "Kids," Rust Belt glue-sniffers in "Gummo" and the boundaries of mental illness in "Julien Donkey-Boy."
Taking a different tack, the Paris-set "Mister Lonely" follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who is befriended by a woman who dresses as Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton). She invites him to live among a commune of celebrity impersonators in the Scottish Highlands.
In an unconnected parallel story, nuns in Panama discover they can skydive without parachutes and land unharmed.
Korine has referred to the relationship between the two narratives as "poetic punctuation," and he has no interest in explaining his films. Rather, he prefers the disjunctions and dissonance that come from not knowing, like a punch line with no joke attached, what he has called "a perfect non-sense."
"Everyone always takes so much time trying to explain things and set things up," Korine said. "But I like the idea of just feeling things, letting it go through you. I don't understand why everything has to be explained or why everything has to make sense, or everything has to say something, because it doesn't."
Slowing down
It is easy, though, to read "Mister Lonely" as a symbolic autobiography of Korine's lost years and his struggle to rebuild himself with a healthier identity and self-image.
"I try not to get into so much detail," he said of his time away from filmmaking. "A lot of it's kind of blurry anyway. Obviously there's things I'm not really going to talk about, but for the most part in those years it wasn't much more than I had a desire to just leave, to turn my back on everything and lead a different kind of life.
"I enjoyed narcotics, but that was nothing more than the fact I just liked slowing down time," he continued. "At that point in my life, with so much going on around me, it was nice to be able to slow down the voices and the noise. But there were a lot of other things around it."
Korine's father, Sol Korine, is a documentary filmmaker who once chronicled the Deep South, following moonshiners and folk musicians in projects made for PBS. (Sol Korine also worked on "Mister Lonely," as did Harmony Korine's mother, brother and wife.)
Harmony Korine recalled with delight how, following his father on trips as a boy, he met goldfish-swallowers and fire-breathers and spent summers traveling with carnivals and circuses. The impressions went deep, informing the very root of his own storytelling.
"There was an energy," Korine recalled, "a chaos and a strangeness that I understood innately; it felt like I was home. And in some ways everything I do now is to try to get back to that sort of feeling. I always liked that part of America the most, that crazy America where things are seething, everything is incongruous, it seems anything can happen.
"There's magic under that tent."
thanks, mac. i hadn't really been considering seeing this until i read this.
There's a certain moment with Herzog that I won't describe in detail, but Korine says that when the moment was happening he was away doing something else and he turned around to see Herzog doing this thing and he wondered what was going on. Herzog said to him "Something magical is happening. Get the camera on me quick."
In case anyone else needed further incentive to see the film. There's also unexpectedly exciting and intense aerial cinematography.
yeah it really is a special movie. here is one that i had anticipated for a really long time, so, like bon, i wasn't sure what to make of it at first. in some ways it was exactly what i expected and in other ways not at all. but it hasn't left me alone since i saw it a few weeks ago, the kind of thing that stops meaning something the minute you try and explain it. i won't. i'll also refrain from saying that this is a huge leap forward for korine in fear of doing a disservice to gummo and julien donkey boy, both of which i saw again in theaters recently and realized how much i loved. he definitely does things here that he wouldn't have done then, but maturity seems like too easy a word. i'm just really grateful to have him around. one of the best of the year for sure.
I saw it. some moments in the middle dragged for me. some of the images didn't seem particularly odd or truthful, aside from the fact that people were doing things in weird costumes. It felt like Korine milked too much of the premise without developing much emotion to go with it. the scene with the eggs was great though. very very moving.
simple in the most dubious way. some beautiful imagery/moments, the music is lovely, and that "moment" with herzog is pretty spectacular, but for the most part the film's unbearably flat and unnerving in its "innocence"--it seems to be more the result of retardation than a genuinely expressed outlook. i will thank korine though for putting samantha morton and denis lavant in the same film.
I'm pretty sure Buckwheat washing The Pope made my brain explode. It did drag in places but overall it was nice to see something that didn't insult my intelligence during these lean summer months.
"The Pope stinks."
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There's a certain world-weariness about Harmony Korine as he presses firmly against the urinal. I introduce myself and tell him we'll have the interview out in the garden since the Soho Grand's lounge feels like a proofing oven. He straightens himself up, says, "Fine, man, whatever." The fact that I just caught America's most imaginative filmmaker in the lavatory carries with it sobering implications, which I might come back to later. Life for Korine had been a kind of giant toilet after Julien Donkey-boy came out in 1999. He had a slow-motion meltdown, spiritually moved away from filmmaking and traveled around Europe before ending up in Paris. And now he's back big time. His new film Mister Lonely, which he wrote with his brother Avi, is pure bliss: Fellini, Wim Wenders and Matthew Barney all come to mind. Yes, American cinema hasn't looked this strongly in a long time. Diego Luna plays a Michael Jackson for-hire impersonator who ekes out a living in Paris--a foreigner in a strange town who impersonates Michael Jackson, how ironic. In a strangely predictable way Michael meets a Marilyn impersonator (Samantha Morton) who takes him to a commune where folks of the same ilk are putting together their own variety show.
Korine's early opus (Kids, Gummo, Julien Donkey-boy) about folks living on the river's edge (the wrong one) were his cri de guerre. With Mister Lonely, Korine turns antithetical—repression is out. Although Diego Luna's character suffers from bouts of melancholy, the commune of impersonators he joins has a definite lust for life and a jones for showbiz. Michael Jackson (Luna) was the missing link; once he shows up, everyone works on putting a nightly show on for the town with a renewed sense of purpose. Korine talked with SG about his tribulations, his faith and his corruptible younger brother Avi...
Cedric Waslow: You totally disappeared after Julien Donkey-boy. What happened to you?
Harmony Korine: I went traveling and ended up in France after I burnt out all my other countries. I started falling apart, I wanted to live a life that was separate, I didn't want to have anything to do with movies, anymore. I ran out of money, I ran out of friends, and I ran out of hope.
CW:How long did you spend in France? Do you even speak French?
HK:[Smiles] No. I wasn't listening. I spent just under a year there. During that time I only left my apartment four times, I think.
CW:So the inspiration for Mister Lonely came in part from your experience there? How did you enlist your brother Avi's help in writing the screenplay?
HK:Yes, partly. Avi was living in Philadelphia in someone's attic. He was only eating chicken McNuggets and watching boxing matches. It'd been long since I had written anything and I figured I liked the stuff that he had written, especially the less pornographic stuff. So I asked him if he wanted to come down and do this with me. His only special condition was that I find him the special honey that had been discontinued from McDonalds. So I tracked down this farm and got a bunch, and he came down and we just sat in a room for three months and came up with the concept.
CW:Are you very close to your brother?
HK:We hadn't been so close physically because he's so much younger and I was out of the house a lot when he was growing up. But we have a lot in common--we share the same kind of humor, find the same characters interesting.
CW:So what was the dynamic like between you two?
HK:I had images and ideas and specific characters, and we started riffing, talking about different things, what about this idea, etc. Usually, if we'd both laugh at it, then it's good to keep. It took about a month of talking about it and writing our little notes, and then another month of actual writing.
CW:Are you very picky when it comes to the finished screenplay?
HK:I usually write just one draft. As soon as the script is finished, I'll reread it and clean up the dialogue a little. I don't know what a perfect script is. I don't ever spend too much time to get a script perfect, I just don't really care if it seems OK.
CW:There are two plots in Mister Lonely. The impersonators and the flying nuns. And although everything made sense to me, somehow, some people might have a hard time connecting the nuns to the others. What can you say to them?
HK:They're not there just randomly. The nuns represent a different way of saying, "Look at this estranged group of people." I felt like that even though the stories didn't intersect in a concrete way they spoke to the same idea, it was allegory showing how the characters paralleled each other. They were both groups of marginalized, displaced dreamers that were living outside of the system. And in a way the nuns have this hope that if you believe strongly enough in something you can survive. You can ride bicycles in the clouds and do tricks and land and survive.
CW:A little like these impersonators believed they could become the greatest stars the world has ever known!
HK:Right, just like that, just like these impersonators believed that you could be someone else. There's an emotional sense in there, but I never really cared about making perfect sense, I've always wanted to make movies that were nonsense.
CW:Could Diego Luna and Samantha Morton's characters (Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe, respectively) thrive in the real world?
HK:Well, all the characters are show people and they really come alive when they perform. Performance is everything. And dreamers that they are, they hope that the whole world will come to see the show.
CW:But they're in for a tough surprise...
HK:Right, reality always has a way of intruding on dreams and the truth of their situation becomes obvious. There they are, living in a remote commune in the Scottish Highlands. They are delusional but I think they had a beautiful dream, a pure dream and sometimes the purest dreams are the ones that get hurt the most.
CW:Upon seeing Werner Herzog in priest habit admonishing the laborer who cheats on his wife, I thought what an astonishing scene. You and Herzog have been friends for a while?
HK:Yes, right after Gummo came out I got a phone call from him. We have a good relationship.
CW:Do you believe in God?
HK:Belief is an important part of my life. I won't say too much about this, but I need to believe in something to get through the day. But that's my own thing.
CW:Do you believe in Agnes B, then?
HK:[Laughs] Well, I have a production company with Agnes B. She had been waiting for me to get my act together. When I was ready, I called her up and told her I had a script, let's go. That's where it came together.
CW:Agnes B. is the unofficial matriarch of the New York arts.
HK:Yes, she's great.
CW:Now that you live in Nashville, do you miss New York City?
HK:Not really, no. That's part of the past. My life in Nashville is great. Moving there was my saving grace. That and meeting my wife Rachel [she plays Little Red Riding Hood in the movie]. It's been terrific. When I get off the airplane my heartrate goes down, you know you're in the right place. I can just drive around in my car and dream up scenarios.
CW:You're not a prolific filmmaker. Are we going to have to wait a decade for your next movie?
HK:I hope to God it won't take me a decade until the next film. I've already written another one. My mind is in a better place. I won't be so precious about things. I'd like to make a movie by the end of the year.
This film is a big hit with a certain portion of the audience. I know this because I work at a video store and it's have been permanently loaned for a month and a half. I finally stole it to check it out by myself and it is impressive, although it does drags a little in the middle, and Diego Luna's performance might be the weakest in what is a very colorful cast of actors, characters and performances. Samantha Morton as usual, is brilliant. And really pretty much everyone else, with a special mention to James Fox who is hilarious...
The "innocence" of the film also bugged me a little, specially the character at the end and beggining who helps out Michael and tells him all that pretentious stuff about not knowing who he is, etc...I felt it wasn't necessary to hammer all that shit down on us...
The Herzog/Nuns storyline is fantastic, and that moment everyone's been mentioning, I think is one of the highlights of the film, appart from pretty much any scene with Samantha Morton. She has an astounding gift for making everything seem believable, honest and heartfelt, a tremendous actress really. I'm always in awe of her, to think of her body of work is just this uninterrupted line of great choices in every respect.
The very first shot of the film with the song really is a true graber, at least for me, I felt it was beautiful. There are not many films like these around so it's always a gift to get them. 2008 sucked balls and although this one is techically an 07 film, I would say is one of 08's best.
I watched this recently as well and I was going to post, but was threatened that I better have something good to say before I updated a topic that was ..old. I decided that stating 'Korine is the little nutcase who could', wasn't worth it. and yeah, ditto on the nuns/Herzog part
Quote from: Bethie on January 25, 2009, 01:16:22 AM
I watched this recently as well and I was going to post, but was threatened that I better have something good to say before I updated a topic that was ..old. I decided that stating 'Korine is the little nutcase who could', wasn't worth it. and yeah, ditto on the nuns/Herzog part
yeah it's weird: "dont waste our precious time unless you really have something interesting to say, god forbid we have some new posts about movies"...that's what computers do...
I don't have any breathtaking analysis of the film, but I will say that it is hands down, my favorite comedy of last year. As a huge fan of Korine, especially when he's not completely jacking around, I felt like he'd finally channeled his completely unique sense of humor into a movie that could showcase it for people who might have been a little put off by some of his youthful diversions.
The "I love chickens" scene is in my top ten of all time. I laughed until my toes hurt.
did you laugh throughout the movie?
I did. There were certainly moments where I wasn't in stitches, but I'd say every five minutes or so there was a bit that got me tickled.