clobbersaurus
Dec 14, 2003, 8:27 PM
Hopefully, this is just the start of many more movies to be filmed here. And hopefully those movies will have more cityscape images.
text (http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/movie_reviews/article/0,1426,MCA_569_2495262,00.html)
Focus on Memphis
'21 Grams' draws attention to city as site for film production
By John Beifuss
Contact
December 14, 2003
The producers of "21 Grams," the Focus Features release with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro that was shot mainly in Memphis earlier this year, couldn't have written a better review themselves than the one in The New York Times.
"Be prepared for it," critic Elvis Mitchell warned moviegoers on Oct. 18, the day before the movie's screening at the New York Film Festival. "You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that '21 Grams' is tantamount to the discovery of a new country."
Advertisement
Mid-Southerners have been hearing about "21 Grams" since October 2002, when producers announced they had chosen Memphis as the film's primary location.
After that, many Memphians participated as extras, crew members or rubbernecking gawkers during the production's stay here, which ended Feb. 3 after 46 shooting days and $3.4 million in expenditures to Tennessee companies and individuals.
After screening at festivals in Venice, Toronto and New York, the movie - which uses jittery hand-held cameras and a chronologically fragmented narrative to investigate the lives of three people linked by a tragic auto accident - opened Nov. 21 in New York and Los Angeles. Many reviewers other than Mitchell were ecstatic.
"Uncommonly exhilarating in its honesty," wrote Claudia Puig in her four-star review in USA Today. "A searing meditation on life and death," declared Entertainment Weekly.
There were naysayers. David Denby in The New Yorker called the film "an arrogant failure," while David Edelstein in Slate.com disdained it as "grueling" and "worthy of contempt."
Memphians will get their first chance to evaluate the movie at 7 p.m. Tuesday, when the film premieres locally at Malco's Paradiso cinema. The movie begins its regular run at The Paradiso on Dec. 26.
The hope in the local film community is that "21 Grams" - which is considered a top contender for several major Oscar nominations - will cause moviemakers to realize that Memphis is a viable production location for stories that don't have any connection to the blues, Elvis or John Grisham.
"Currently we have more interest in Memphis than we've had in years," said Linn Sitler, Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commissioner.
"The movie has a lot of buzz, and filmmakers who make it their business to know these things know that the location is primarily Memphis," Sitler said. "The fact that they were able to make such a wonderful movie here, and they're all spouting off about the magic of Memphis and the mystique of Memphis at every junket and every film festival premiere, I think that has helped increase interest in Memphis as a filming site."
Sitler said it was too early to discuss specifics of possible upcoming projects - in part because advance publicity can sometimes kill movie deals. "All marketing to creative people is indirect - creative people don't like the hard sell," she said. "But when they see that people like Alejandro came to Memphis, that does put Memphis in their mind."
Of the cast, Del Toro - a Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winner for Traffic - seemed to have been bitten hardest by the Memphis bug.
"It's a great little place," said Del Toro, 36, in an interview prior to the movie's New York premier. "I spent most of my time going to Sun Records and listening to Elvis and the songs he did with that little band that he had. There was something very special, driving around, listening to that album - it was like being in a time warp."
Del Toro said the movie company paid for his wheels while he was in town, so he drove a Cadillac - "Cadillacin' through Memphis," he recalled, almost wistfully.
Of course, some of the film's actors already knew Memphis, intimately. Jerry Chipman, vice president of public relations and communications at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and a longtime fixture in local theater, landed the small but important role of Naomi Watts's father. As such, he's onscreen during some of the film's most gut-wrenching scenes of emotional breakdown.
"I was crazy about the people I worked with, both Alejandro and Naomi," Chipman said. "There was certainly a feeling of caring from everyone about what they were doing. I didn't feel there was anything frivolous about the filmmaking. They were all intensely committed to producing an excellent product."
"21 Grams" - which earned a Best Actor Jury Award for Penn at the Venice Film Festival - is the second feature from Mexican director Inarritu, whose debut film, the Spanish-language "Amores Perros," was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001.
The success of "Amores Perros" enabled Inarritu - reteamed with writer Guillermo Arriaga and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto - to attract a top cast for his first English-language film.
Penn plays a mathematics professor in need of a heart transplant; Watts is an upper-middle-class mother and recovering drug addict whose life is shattered by tragedy; Del Toro plays a petty criminal who gives his life to Jesus in an attempt to go straight.
As in "Amores Perros," the characters in "21 Grams" are connected by a car crash. Also as in the earlier movie, the story is presented in chronologically shuffled fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle that the audience must piece together. The film's title refers to the weight a body allegedly loses at the moment of death.
"It's a risky thing, but I think the audience is very smart," Inarritu, 40, said during an interview in New York prior to the film festival screening. "The film makes a deal with the audience: You will not be a passive mass of flesh- and bone-eating popcorn, you will be a part of this story."
Although Memphians may recognize such locations as Anderton's restaurant, the North End, the Bartlett Recreation Center and the downtown YMCA, Memphis is never mentioned by name in the $20 million film. The city was chosen over such contenders as Phoenix and Atlanta for its range of neighborhoods, its poverty as well as its affluence, its somewhat worn appearance, and its aura of history and what Inarritu called "melancholy."
"There's a mood there that I like," he said. "There's a sense of reality. There's a strong personality."
At the same time, "The people in Memphis were so nice," he said. "I knew we could knock on anybody's door and they would be nice. In some cities, the relations start with doubting each other. In Memphis, it's more like a personal thing, a trust."
Arriaga, a novelist whose books have yet to be translated into English in America, said he accompanied Inarritu on scouting trips to Memphis. "I think it's one of the most interesting cities I have ever seen," he said. "It's a city full of textures and contradictions. It's very contradictory because you see all these religious things, and then you go into that store (Schwab's on Beale Street) and see voodoo - so black magic interacts with Christianity. You can feel a struggle there, which the Civil Rights Museum is attesting to - a profound struggle."
In 1989, Memphis played host to dueling music-influenced movies, the flop Jerry Lee Lewis major-studio biopic, "Great Balls of Fire!," and the hit independent film from Jim Jarmusch, "Mystery Train." Since then, a major film production has come to town every couple of years, bringing such filmmakers and stars as Tom Cruise ("The Firm"), Milos Forman ("The People vs. Larry Flynt"), Francis Ford Coppola ("The Rainmaker"), Robert Altman ("Cookie's Fortune") and Tom Hanks ("Cast Away").
Most of these stories had a Memphis or Delta connection that made it logical for the filmmakers to at least consider shooting here. In other cases, the filmmakers already had established a Memphis connection, as when Michael Hausman, executive producer of "The Firm," returned here for "Larry Flynt."
And although some of these movies were hits and some received good reviews, none of them have proved to have much lasting significance. In fact, the most highly regarded of the made-in-Memphis movies of the 20 years is the one that was produced outside the mainstream, "Mystery Train."
"21 Grams," it is hoped, will combine both these worlds. It's a film that could earn major establishment kudos in the form of Oscar nominations and other awards while also maintaining its integrity as a challenging, personal work of art.
"The Bartlett rec ladies and I, we're going to get together some time after the holidays and view it together," said Denise Lynch, 41, whose water aerobics class was used during two days of shooting at the Bartlett Recreation Center swimming pool with Watts and actress Clea DuVall. "It was a lot of fun. We were in the water several hours, and the nice thing was Naomi Watts had requested the temperature be raised to 92, which we all appreciated."
- John Beifuss: 529-2394
text (http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/movie_reviews/article/0,1426,MCA_569_2495262,00.html)
Focus on Memphis
'21 Grams' draws attention to city as site for film production
By John Beifuss
Contact
December 14, 2003
The producers of "21 Grams," the Focus Features release with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro that was shot mainly in Memphis earlier this year, couldn't have written a better review themselves than the one in The New York Times.
"Be prepared for it," critic Elvis Mitchell warned moviegoers on Oct. 18, the day before the movie's screening at the New York Film Festival. "You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that '21 Grams' is tantamount to the discovery of a new country."
Advertisement
Mid-Southerners have been hearing about "21 Grams" since October 2002, when producers announced they had chosen Memphis as the film's primary location.
After that, many Memphians participated as extras, crew members or rubbernecking gawkers during the production's stay here, which ended Feb. 3 after 46 shooting days and $3.4 million in expenditures to Tennessee companies and individuals.
After screening at festivals in Venice, Toronto and New York, the movie - which uses jittery hand-held cameras and a chronologically fragmented narrative to investigate the lives of three people linked by a tragic auto accident - opened Nov. 21 in New York and Los Angeles. Many reviewers other than Mitchell were ecstatic.
"Uncommonly exhilarating in its honesty," wrote Claudia Puig in her four-star review in USA Today. "A searing meditation on life and death," declared Entertainment Weekly.
There were naysayers. David Denby in The New Yorker called the film "an arrogant failure," while David Edelstein in Slate.com disdained it as "grueling" and "worthy of contempt."
Memphians will get their first chance to evaluate the movie at 7 p.m. Tuesday, when the film premieres locally at Malco's Paradiso cinema. The movie begins its regular run at The Paradiso on Dec. 26.
The hope in the local film community is that "21 Grams" - which is considered a top contender for several major Oscar nominations - will cause moviemakers to realize that Memphis is a viable production location for stories that don't have any connection to the blues, Elvis or John Grisham.
"Currently we have more interest in Memphis than we've had in years," said Linn Sitler, Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commissioner.
"The movie has a lot of buzz, and filmmakers who make it their business to know these things know that the location is primarily Memphis," Sitler said. "The fact that they were able to make such a wonderful movie here, and they're all spouting off about the magic of Memphis and the mystique of Memphis at every junket and every film festival premiere, I think that has helped increase interest in Memphis as a filming site."
Sitler said it was too early to discuss specifics of possible upcoming projects - in part because advance publicity can sometimes kill movie deals. "All marketing to creative people is indirect - creative people don't like the hard sell," she said. "But when they see that people like Alejandro came to Memphis, that does put Memphis in their mind."
Of the cast, Del Toro - a Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winner for Traffic - seemed to have been bitten hardest by the Memphis bug.
"It's a great little place," said Del Toro, 36, in an interview prior to the movie's New York premier. "I spent most of my time going to Sun Records and listening to Elvis and the songs he did with that little band that he had. There was something very special, driving around, listening to that album - it was like being in a time warp."
Del Toro said the movie company paid for his wheels while he was in town, so he drove a Cadillac - "Cadillacin' through Memphis," he recalled, almost wistfully.
Of course, some of the film's actors already knew Memphis, intimately. Jerry Chipman, vice president of public relations and communications at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and a longtime fixture in local theater, landed the small but important role of Naomi Watts's father. As such, he's onscreen during some of the film's most gut-wrenching scenes of emotional breakdown.
"I was crazy about the people I worked with, both Alejandro and Naomi," Chipman said. "There was certainly a feeling of caring from everyone about what they were doing. I didn't feel there was anything frivolous about the filmmaking. They were all intensely committed to producing an excellent product."
"21 Grams" - which earned a Best Actor Jury Award for Penn at the Venice Film Festival - is the second feature from Mexican director Inarritu, whose debut film, the Spanish-language "Amores Perros," was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001.
The success of "Amores Perros" enabled Inarritu - reteamed with writer Guillermo Arriaga and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto - to attract a top cast for his first English-language film.
Penn plays a mathematics professor in need of a heart transplant; Watts is an upper-middle-class mother and recovering drug addict whose life is shattered by tragedy; Del Toro plays a petty criminal who gives his life to Jesus in an attempt to go straight.
As in "Amores Perros," the characters in "21 Grams" are connected by a car crash. Also as in the earlier movie, the story is presented in chronologically shuffled fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle that the audience must piece together. The film's title refers to the weight a body allegedly loses at the moment of death.
"It's a risky thing, but I think the audience is very smart," Inarritu, 40, said during an interview in New York prior to the film festival screening. "The film makes a deal with the audience: You will not be a passive mass of flesh- and bone-eating popcorn, you will be a part of this story."
Although Memphians may recognize such locations as Anderton's restaurant, the North End, the Bartlett Recreation Center and the downtown YMCA, Memphis is never mentioned by name in the $20 million film. The city was chosen over such contenders as Phoenix and Atlanta for its range of neighborhoods, its poverty as well as its affluence, its somewhat worn appearance, and its aura of history and what Inarritu called "melancholy."
"There's a mood there that I like," he said. "There's a sense of reality. There's a strong personality."
At the same time, "The people in Memphis were so nice," he said. "I knew we could knock on anybody's door and they would be nice. In some cities, the relations start with doubting each other. In Memphis, it's more like a personal thing, a trust."
Arriaga, a novelist whose books have yet to be translated into English in America, said he accompanied Inarritu on scouting trips to Memphis. "I think it's one of the most interesting cities I have ever seen," he said. "It's a city full of textures and contradictions. It's very contradictory because you see all these religious things, and then you go into that store (Schwab's on Beale Street) and see voodoo - so black magic interacts with Christianity. You can feel a struggle there, which the Civil Rights Museum is attesting to - a profound struggle."
In 1989, Memphis played host to dueling music-influenced movies, the flop Jerry Lee Lewis major-studio biopic, "Great Balls of Fire!," and the hit independent film from Jim Jarmusch, "Mystery Train." Since then, a major film production has come to town every couple of years, bringing such filmmakers and stars as Tom Cruise ("The Firm"), Milos Forman ("The People vs. Larry Flynt"), Francis Ford Coppola ("The Rainmaker"), Robert Altman ("Cookie's Fortune") and Tom Hanks ("Cast Away").
Most of these stories had a Memphis or Delta connection that made it logical for the filmmakers to at least consider shooting here. In other cases, the filmmakers already had established a Memphis connection, as when Michael Hausman, executive producer of "The Firm," returned here for "Larry Flynt."
And although some of these movies were hits and some received good reviews, none of them have proved to have much lasting significance. In fact, the most highly regarded of the made-in-Memphis movies of the 20 years is the one that was produced outside the mainstream, "Mystery Train."
"21 Grams," it is hoped, will combine both these worlds. It's a film that could earn major establishment kudos in the form of Oscar nominations and other awards while also maintaining its integrity as a challenging, personal work of art.
"The Bartlett rec ladies and I, we're going to get together some time after the holidays and view it together," said Denise Lynch, 41, whose water aerobics class was used during two days of shooting at the Bartlett Recreation Center swimming pool with Watts and actress Clea DuVall. "It was a lot of fun. We were in the water several hours, and the nice thing was Naomi Watts had requested the temperature be raised to 92, which we all appreciated."
- John Beifuss: 529-2394