Link the Fur poster is there
Director:
Steven Shainberg
Cast:
Nicole Kidman .......... Diane Arbus
Robert Downey Jr. .......... Lionel Sweeney
Ty Burrell .......... Allan Arbus
Jane Alexander .......... Gertrude Nemerov
Harris Yulin .......... David Nemerov
Nicole Kidman looks haggard, a camera hanging off her neck as she sits in front of a portly naked couple. A few seconds later, she is told that she must remove her clothes before being allowed to take the portrait.
The opening scene of Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus is just as strange as the rest of the movie. Strange as a descriptor, however, is not always a bad thing, and it isn’t in this case. Presented as the imaginary biography of Diane Arbus, one of the twentieth century’s most revered photographers, the audience is immediately informed that the biography is one of an imaginary nature, as the following text appears on the screen:
This is a film about DIANE ARBUS, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus, who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Certainly, her pictures changed the face of American photography forever.
What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.
Let’s begin with the fact that the movie is definitely not an actual depiction of Diane Arbus’ life. Married photographers do not fall for their neighbors, at least not when the neighbor is afflicted with a disease which makes them look more like Chewbacca than an actual person to borrow sugar from. And while this film is certainly not meant to be a work of science fiction, clearly a suspension of reality is required to aptly understand what director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson are going for.
Known for pushing the envelope, with his sexually-charged feature, The Secretary, Shainberg has said that the Arbus project is one that had a personal significance for him. His uncle was a friend of Arbus, and Shainberg grew up with her photos on his walls, which eventually led to him beginning his own collection of her photography. After approaching his Secretary colleague, Wilson, the pair decided that they would eschew the traditional biopic, choosing instead to blend fact with fiction and mix reality with the implausible, citing Arbus’ work of the same format as their muse.
The movie revolves around some actual facts about Arbus, including her privileged childhood in the family that owned Russek’s furrier store in New York, her marriage, and her work as an assistant to her photographer-husband. These are supplemented by forged experiences, including her entire relationship with the movie’s other lead character and Diane’s “neighbor” Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), and her obsession with seeing what 2006 audiences would call freak shows. By combining the two elements, an adequate balance is definitely achieved and it is this complicated scale where Shainberg’s mastery truly is prevalent.
The story follows Arbus as she initially approaches the strange masked neighbor who moves in upstairs. Her adventures with him lead her into a deep examination into her own sense of self and so in a twisted way, it is a coming-of-age story. Although Arbus is there to simply to take a photograph of him, Lionel helps Arbus to discover who she really is. While she is there to capture his life in a portrait, she finds herself attracted to the freedom that he enjoys. She doesn’t just photograph his existence, she lives it herself.
While the title of the movie clearly comes from the Arbus family business, it is also a reference to Lionel and one could even say that Arbus has to shed herself before she is truly free.
While there is a noticeable and admitted influence of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland,” on the story (considering it was one of Arbus’ favorite books), it is in this regard where the movie will either gauge or lose interest with its audience.
While employing a fictional character in an integral role is risky, the relationship between Arbus and Lionel is the heart of the movie. It is precisely this element of fantasy that will make the audience question Arbus’ complicated machinations, and while she is the heroine, she is rippled, much like the movie itself.
Obviously, the acting in the movie is strong. While Kidman did not physically resemble the character, she was Shainberg’s first choice because of her ability to capture emotion, and she plays the role well.
Robert Downey Jr. is phenomenal as Lionel. Despite the ridiculous appearance of his character at times, his eyes are completely believable. The highest compliment that can be paid to an actor is when they are cast in a role that is completely fictional, and are still able to convince the audience that there is a degree of legitimacy in what they are doing. Downey Jr. makes Lionel real, even if it is only for 122 minutes.
This is a movie that will spur debate and it is worth a look if only for that reason. If you are trying to write a paper on Diane Arbus and want to watch a movie instead of doing the research, this is not the movie for you.
If you want to see original filmmaking at its finest and a unique take on the traditional definition of biography, Fur is the ticket.
Full Version: Fur Review(s)
Kidman finds beauty in freakish, fantastic Fur
By Elizabeth Goetz
Friday, November 10th, 2006
Confession: When I took Media Aesthetics my first year, I was a little under-impressed by my experience with the class. The discussion wasn’t the best, and A Winter’s Tale was sub-par Shakespeare. But then came my Critical Perspectives English class this quarter, and my intrigue with the relationship between the signifier and the signified has been re-ignited. And then I saw Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Steven Shainberg’s newest film, and all I want to think about ever again is the process we use to look at other people and things.
This movie succeeds because it is an example of much of what it describes. In this slightly fictionalized recounting of the photographer Diane Arbus’ transition from prop assistant for her husband Allan (Ty Burrell) to a photographer in her own right, we are drawn from the beginning to the way she looks at things. The environment in which Diane (played by a fantastic Nicole Kidman) lives is portrayed in pastels, with her bedroom neutral in tans and grays (an obvious symbol of the conformist roles into which her sex life with Allan fits itself); the clothes, accessories, and living quarters of the beguiling people she observes are shot in more dramatic lighting as contrasting colors show us the allure they hold for her. Facial expressions between characters are perfectly tailored, even down to the crevices of their features.
Kidman quickly shows us that Diane is as worthy of our curiosity as her photographs themselves. She is beautiful, and we often see her as an object, framed by the foreground in accidental portraits, reminding us of her lack of agency over her own life as her husband’s assistant. But Shainberg wants us to know that she deserves to be an agent herself, and we see Diane full of wonder and willing to act on her goal.
This film focuses mostly on Diane’s growing artistic relationship with Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.), a man recently moved into the apartment upstairs and who is suffering from hypertrychosis, a disease that causes fur to grow from all parts of his body. He is the inspiration for Diane’s fascination with the freakish outcasts of society, and they form an odd sort of friendship.
Lionel plays the role of a child’s imaginary friend come to life for Diane: He lives in a neat-o apartment, he takes her on expeditions to strange new parts of New York, he presents an alternative point of view to that of her husband, just as a make-believe playfellow might do for a small child’s father. He shows Diane an alternative lifestyle, a surreal Wonderland of strange and unexplained circumstances where Diane is our Alice.
We see events through Diane’s voyeuristic eyes; the lens of a camera, and in some strange way the lens of the cinematographer’s cameras shooting this film, have become Diane’s own Rear Window through which she perceives the quotidian goings-on of her apartment building and the neighborhood around her.
Photography becomes a means through which Diane can experience a surprisingly un-trite awakening, and all we want is to watch her do so as she watches her neighbors out the window of her family’s apartment. This film’s stills could easily merit exhibition in any photo exhibit at the MCA; this is no quaintly touching Art Institute stuff, and Shainberg hopes that we will agree.
And like art at the MCA, you should see this film, if only to have an opinion on it, but ideally because you will agree that it is beautiful.
Link to review
By Elizabeth Goetz
Friday, November 10th, 2006
Confession: When I took Media Aesthetics my first year, I was a little under-impressed by my experience with the class. The discussion wasn’t the best, and A Winter’s Tale was sub-par Shakespeare. But then came my Critical Perspectives English class this quarter, and my intrigue with the relationship between the signifier and the signified has been re-ignited. And then I saw Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Steven Shainberg’s newest film, and all I want to think about ever again is the process we use to look at other people and things.
This movie succeeds because it is an example of much of what it describes. In this slightly fictionalized recounting of the photographer Diane Arbus’ transition from prop assistant for her husband Allan (Ty Burrell) to a photographer in her own right, we are drawn from the beginning to the way she looks at things. The environment in which Diane (played by a fantastic Nicole Kidman) lives is portrayed in pastels, with her bedroom neutral in tans and grays (an obvious symbol of the conformist roles into which her sex life with Allan fits itself); the clothes, accessories, and living quarters of the beguiling people she observes are shot in more dramatic lighting as contrasting colors show us the allure they hold for her. Facial expressions between characters are perfectly tailored, even down to the crevices of their features.
Kidman quickly shows us that Diane is as worthy of our curiosity as her photographs themselves. She is beautiful, and we often see her as an object, framed by the foreground in accidental portraits, reminding us of her lack of agency over her own life as her husband’s assistant. But Shainberg wants us to know that she deserves to be an agent herself, and we see Diane full of wonder and willing to act on her goal.
This film focuses mostly on Diane’s growing artistic relationship with Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.), a man recently moved into the apartment upstairs and who is suffering from hypertrychosis, a disease that causes fur to grow from all parts of his body. He is the inspiration for Diane’s fascination with the freakish outcasts of society, and they form an odd sort of friendship.
Lionel plays the role of a child’s imaginary friend come to life for Diane: He lives in a neat-o apartment, he takes her on expeditions to strange new parts of New York, he presents an alternative point of view to that of her husband, just as a make-believe playfellow might do for a small child’s father. He shows Diane an alternative lifestyle, a surreal Wonderland of strange and unexplained circumstances where Diane is our Alice.
We see events through Diane’s voyeuristic eyes; the lens of a camera, and in some strange way the lens of the cinematographer’s cameras shooting this film, have become Diane’s own Rear Window through which she perceives the quotidian goings-on of her apartment building and the neighborhood around her.
Photography becomes a means through which Diane can experience a surprisingly un-trite awakening, and all we want is to watch her do so as she watches her neighbors out the window of her family’s apartment. This film’s stills could easily merit exhibition in any photo exhibit at the MCA; this is no quaintly touching Art Institute stuff, and Shainberg hopes that we will agree.
And like art at the MCA, you should see this film, if only to have an opinion on it, but ideally because you will agree that it is beautiful.
Link to review
Nicole Kidman Elevates "Fur"
By Brian Orndorf
(AXcess News) Hollywood - A bored housewife and dutiful assistant to her photographer husband (Ty Burrell), Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is starting to feel trapped in her life. When an enigmatic man (Robert Downey Jr.) moves upstairs in her apartment building, Arbus's curiosity cannot be contained. She seeks out this stranger, almost aroused by the mystery of it all, but finds something somewhat horrifying, somewhat fantastic behind his door: a gentleman, named Lionel Sweeney, covered head to toe in hair.
Take special notice of the "Imaginary Portrait" section of the title. "Fur" doesn't span the life of Diane Arbus; heavens, it barely pays attention to her legendary photographic career. Instead, "Fur" wants to slip into the crawlspace of Arbus's mind where her frustrations turned into obsession, nurtured by a very peculiar fellow who understood the sensitive eccentricities that Airbus was impulsively drawn to.
"Fur" is directed by Steven Shainberg, who previously explored the darker side of control in "Secretary" (a cheat of a film if there ever was one). "Fur" covers the same terrain thematically: a young, eyes-wide-open woman granted indoctrination into her heart's desires by a furry man's unusual patience and attention. "Fur" travels a more glacial, icy bend, and the seduction of artistic and romantic desires found here is a lot more interesting and, well, even considering the outlandish and fairytale-like story here, believable than anything served up in "Secretary."
This is a very calculated movie. Shainberg loves to dwell in the moment, and his symmetrical style of filmmaking draws in the viewer, effectively illustrating the need of Arbus to reach out and touch, smell, and observe her subjects. Finding herself in freak show surroundings, Arbus at last finds her place of comfort; set free to explore the voyeuristic sensibilities that would eventually define her life's work.
While the cinematography of "Fur" (by Bill Pope) is outstanding, using crisp close-ups to better expand on the observing nature of the script, it's Nicole Kidman who turns in convincing work that elevates the story when Shainberg gets wedged in the details. Kidman guides the audience through this saga of self-discovery with pliable reserve and a communicative face. She climbs into Arbus portraying a woman on the eve of her greatness, but afraid to step outside her comfort zone.
Downey Jr. certainly has the more complicated role. Buried somewhere under layers of brown fur (think Chewbacca meets Teen Wolf), the actor has the great challenge of making Sweeney not only a human being with a poorly bandaged, humiliated past, but also a confidant and romantic partner to Arbus in her time of need. With hushed vocal tones and typical panache, Downey Jr. pulls off the role with ease.
No, you won't learn any Arbus history by watching "Fur." The picture is simply a fantastical hypothesis attempting to bridge the gap in Arbus's life when she made a choice to flee her responsibilities and pursue her vision. It's not the truth as the world knows it, but by taking the story to an extreme, it explains more about Arbus's artistic whims than most photographic historians could muster. I rate this film "B".
http://www.axcessnews.com/modules/wfsectio...articleid=11893
By Brian Orndorf
(AXcess News) Hollywood - A bored housewife and dutiful assistant to her photographer husband (Ty Burrell), Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is starting to feel trapped in her life. When an enigmatic man (Robert Downey Jr.) moves upstairs in her apartment building, Arbus's curiosity cannot be contained. She seeks out this stranger, almost aroused by the mystery of it all, but finds something somewhat horrifying, somewhat fantastic behind his door: a gentleman, named Lionel Sweeney, covered head to toe in hair.
Take special notice of the "Imaginary Portrait" section of the title. "Fur" doesn't span the life of Diane Arbus; heavens, it barely pays attention to her legendary photographic career. Instead, "Fur" wants to slip into the crawlspace of Arbus's mind where her frustrations turned into obsession, nurtured by a very peculiar fellow who understood the sensitive eccentricities that Airbus was impulsively drawn to.
"Fur" is directed by Steven Shainberg, who previously explored the darker side of control in "Secretary" (a cheat of a film if there ever was one). "Fur" covers the same terrain thematically: a young, eyes-wide-open woman granted indoctrination into her heart's desires by a furry man's unusual patience and attention. "Fur" travels a more glacial, icy bend, and the seduction of artistic and romantic desires found here is a lot more interesting and, well, even considering the outlandish and fairytale-like story here, believable than anything served up in "Secretary."
This is a very calculated movie. Shainberg loves to dwell in the moment, and his symmetrical style of filmmaking draws in the viewer, effectively illustrating the need of Arbus to reach out and touch, smell, and observe her subjects. Finding herself in freak show surroundings, Arbus at last finds her place of comfort; set free to explore the voyeuristic sensibilities that would eventually define her life's work.
While the cinematography of "Fur" (by Bill Pope) is outstanding, using crisp close-ups to better expand on the observing nature of the script, it's Nicole Kidman who turns in convincing work that elevates the story when Shainberg gets wedged in the details. Kidman guides the audience through this saga of self-discovery with pliable reserve and a communicative face. She climbs into Arbus portraying a woman on the eve of her greatness, but afraid to step outside her comfort zone.
Downey Jr. certainly has the more complicated role. Buried somewhere under layers of brown fur (think Chewbacca meets Teen Wolf), the actor has the great challenge of making Sweeney not only a human being with a poorly bandaged, humiliated past, but also a confidant and romantic partner to Arbus in her time of need. With hushed vocal tones and typical panache, Downey Jr. pulls off the role with ease.
No, you won't learn any Arbus history by watching "Fur." The picture is simply a fantastical hypothesis attempting to bridge the gap in Arbus's life when she made a choice to flee her responsibilities and pursue her vision. It's not the truth as the world knows it, but by taking the story to an extreme, it explains more about Arbus's artistic whims than most photographic historians could muster. I rate this film "B".
http://www.axcessnews.com/modules/wfsectio...articleid=11893
thank you sylvia 
thankyouuu soo much ffor them sylvia !
WOW! These are awesome reviews. 
Thanks Sylvia.
Thanks Sylvia.
Thanks 
.
.
thanks! good to know there are critics out there who can appreciate something different . i've been frustrated by some especially when they say it doesn't say anything about diane arbus or her work or her life or her art ... the title says it all. and it seems to focus on the earliest stages of "diane's life" so that artistic drive they're looking for would obviously be absent ... it isn't traditional and those who are expecting it to be one might not as well review it. i do agree how she's so communicative with her face. i've always found her to be great in it and in being subtle. 
QUOTE(kiki @ Nov 11 2006, 07:57 PM)
thanks! good to know there are critics out there who can appreciate something different . i've been frustrated by some especially when they say it doesn't say anything about diane arbus or her work or her life or her art ... the title says it all. and it seems to focus on the earliest stages of "diane's life" so that artistic drive they're looking for would obviously be absent ... it isn't traditional and those who are expecting it to be one might not as well review it. i do agree how she's so communicative with her face. i've always found her to be great in it and in being subtle.
kiki, don't get me started. I said elsewhere that the reception will be like Birth's. I went googling about 2 days ago and people are still discussing Birth some 2 years later, what it means, how it made them feel, some sites even went and blamed critics for putting them off the movie
. I've watched that clip over and over, if this is what she and the actors do in the movie then I can't wait to see it . And the sound is something else, you can hear EVERYTHING.
^ i know what you mean ... after two years, birth is still in discussion whilst the other ones which were "praised" have vanished ... i also keep reading about this performance being compared to the one in birth and that if it is as good, she'll be nominated ... i thought her performance in birth was one of the best ever ...critics can be so harsh and pointless sometimes... sometimes, it takes someone with no obligation of profession to really see the beauty of a film.
QUOTE(kiki @ Nov 11 2006, 08:10 PM)
^ i know what you mean ... after two years, birth is still in discussion whilst the other ones which were "praised" have vanished ... i also keep reading about this performance being compared to the one in birth and that if it is as good, she'll be nominated ... i thought her performance in birth was one of the best ever ...critics can be so harsh and pointless sometimes... sometimes, it takes someone with no obligation of profession to really see the beauty of a film.
It is the lot of Nicole Kidman, I think. She got bulldozed when Portrait of a Lady happened and then some 6 years later, the same critics who dismissed her performance in the movie reversed and praised it, go figure, I guess they went and read the book after some time
.I think her chance of being nominated is very, very low. She wasn't nominated or featured during the award season that year apart from the Golden Globes but as we've both noticed, the works being discussed of the movies released that year isn't high perhaps Eternal Sunshine is another that gets discussed often! If members of AMPAS actually see the movie then perhaps but as we know, it is the people who start getting the critics awards that will probably get noms, if you are not included in the group or come out of the blue like Adrian Brody did in 2003 then there is little chance, the critical support is just not there.
^ true but in all honesty, i figure they don't know any better anyway. tons of great performances have gone unnoticed. i just take comfort, if i may say that, in the fact that at least nicole's secured her place and is admired for her courage in choosing roles i think most actresses cannot accomplish. by now, people already have an idea who's going to win that oscar.
QUOTE(kiki @ Nov 11 2006, 11:22 AM)
^ true but in all honesty, i figure they don't know any better anyway. tons of great performances have gone unnoticed. i just take comfort, if i may say that, in the fact that at least nicole's secured her place and is admired for her courage in choosing roles i think most actresses cannot accomplish. by now, people already have an idea who's going to win that oscar.
i don't expect much on the award side for Fur, it gets too little attention from the press and when it gets it mainly negative. the only thing I could perhaps imagine is a nomination at the golden globes, since the HFPA always liked her. I am not sure about the independent spirits awards, since they tend to ignore her... as for the oscar race this year, Helen Mirren ("The Queen") seems to be a frontrunner, together with *you know who* Cruz ("Volver"), Kate Winslet ("Little Children") and Meryl Streep ("The Devil wears Prada").
^ off topic (sort of) but you know who i'd love to see win as well or at least get recognized? naomi watts for the painted veil ... that's a movie i cannot wait to see as well ...
that's a movie i cannot wait to see as well ...
QUOTE(kiki @ Nov 11 2006, 11:36 AM)
^ off topic (sort of) but you know who i'd love to see win as well or at least get recognized? naomi watts for the painted veil ... that's a movie i cannot wait to see as well ...
that's a movie i cannot wait to see as well ...yeah, she certainly deserves it, too. but since the pic is not yet released, i guess no predictions
http://www.cinematical.com/2006/11/10/film...ng-artsy-films/
Film Clips: Fur, Perfume, and Promoting Artsy Films
by Kim Voynar
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Diane Arbus opens today in limited release, and I have to wonder how many people have even heard of it. I hadn't really planned on seeing Fur at Telluride; at least, it wasn't on my radar as a "must see" film. Then I heard so many people buzzing about it, I decided to add it to my schedule at the last minute. It was one of those polarizing films with very little middle ground: People were either very Pro-Fur or very Anti-Fur -- so I had to see it. About a third of the way into the film, I was thinking to myself, "This film is not going to play well to mainstream movie audiences, but I love it." Then again, I'm the sort of filmgoer who actually likes weird. I enjoy having my expectations turned on their ear, and Fur definitely does that.
Another upcoming artsy film that leans sharply toward the bizarre is Perfume: Story of a Murderer. I caught a screening of Perfume, helmed by Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer, the other night. Perfume opens in limited release at the end of December, with a wider release slated for January. Like Fur, Perfume is a dark, almost hallucinatory film with the air of a fable about it. I thought when I saw Fur that I'd seen the most curious film I was likely to see all year; Perfume managed to surpass it -- in a really good way.
Fur and Perfume are what Anne Thompson referred to as "smart house" films. They're in a class all to themselves, even among art house cinema; they make you think hard, both while you're watching, and for days later, as the aftermath of imagery and layers of meaning unfold in your head. The films are very different from each other, and yet, they should have a lot of cross-appeal; if you're intrigued by one, you're likely to also be intrigued by the other. Anne Thompson wrote the other day on her Risky Biz blog about the PR nightmare facing Picturehouse, Fur's distrib, noting that stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr, and even director Steven Shainberg (who did, at least, show up to intro the film at Telluride) haven't exactly been out pounding the pavement promoting the film.
This is a strange, brave, artsy film, and the talent ought to be out there endlessly promoting it if they want people to get out there to see it. Thompson notes that Kidman did attend the film's Rome premiere, but canceled other appearances after her husband, Keith Urban, went into rehab, so we can cut her some slack. But Downey, Jr, aside from a junket appearance, hasn't really made the circuit in support of the film, and Shainberg reportedly hasn't shown up for every PR opportunity either. Why is anyone's guess; they haven't, though, and because they haven't, the film's box office is bound to be affected.
Fur explores the imagined transition of Arbus from repressed 1950s housewife to independent artist (stopping well short of her tragic suicide at the age of 48), bravely taking on the challenge of exploring the psyche of a visual artist without being able to actually use any of Arbus' photography in the film. It's a challenging film to watch if you're used to getting your information spoon-fed to you; Shainberg gives you what he imagines as what might have been going on inside Arbus as she grew into being an artist, and asks you to suspend disbelief and use your own imagination as you go along for the ride with him. It's full of symbolism and imagery, and it's a tough sell without the benefit of its stars backing it up.
Perfume also delves inside a mind -- in this case, of a sociopathic young man, marginalized by society, who, being gifted with a remarkable nose, becomes addicted to amassing collection of scents. When he realizes that he himself has no personal scent, he becomes obsessed with capturing the scent of beautiful young women and creating the perfect scent that will make him feel fully human and able to feel emotion. It's a smart, clever, brilliantly constructed film that weaves visual imagery and symbolism, music and mood to draw the viewer in; the storyline is somewhat bleak and depressing, but Tykwer hasn't made a bleak or depressing film out of it. Rather, he's taken this shadowy tale and crafted a film from the perspective of the twisted protagonist that shows us the view of a sociopathic personality from the inside out better than any film I can think of in recent memory. I'll have a full review out around the film's release at the end of December, but suffice it for now to say: This is one film that art house cinema fans should be on the edges of their seats to see.
Audiences bemoan the lack of originality coming out of Hollywood, yet time and again, they don't support true creativity with their wallets at the box office. Outkast's Idlewild, which, while not a perfect film, definitely pushed the envelope of creativity in filmmaking, hasn't made back its $15 million budget yet. Fur, with it's estimated budget of almost $17 million, is going to have a hell of a time making that back if Picturehouse can't figure out how to successfully promote the film in the absence of support from its stars. If the enormously popular boys from Outkast haven't been able to rake in even $15 million to date with their huge fan base, it's hard to imagine Fur making back its bank without some serious PR to generate awareness of the film -- and "wow, that film was really ... bizarre" probably won't rate with the average filmgoer.
Perfume, on the other hand, will come out of the gate in the States with a huge box office advantage. It's based on a hugely popular German bestseller, and it's already opened in Europe and taken in an estimated $74.5 million over there. Whatever it makes in the US is gravy, but Tykwer has a pretty solid art house following, and the presence of Hoffman and Rickman -- both well-known to American audiences -- will likely draw people to see the film. If Tykwer, Hoffman and Rickman really promote the film well, it could play quite well here. Both films, though, deserve support from all those moviegoers who moan and wail about how Hollywood churns out dreck, because whatever else these films may be, unoriginal and boring they most assuredly are not.
Film Clips: Fur, Perfume, and Promoting Artsy Films
by Kim Voynar
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Diane Arbus opens today in limited release, and I have to wonder how many people have even heard of it. I hadn't really planned on seeing Fur at Telluride; at least, it wasn't on my radar as a "must see" film. Then I heard so many people buzzing about it, I decided to add it to my schedule at the last minute. It was one of those polarizing films with very little middle ground: People were either very Pro-Fur or very Anti-Fur -- so I had to see it. About a third of the way into the film, I was thinking to myself, "This film is not going to play well to mainstream movie audiences, but I love it." Then again, I'm the sort of filmgoer who actually likes weird. I enjoy having my expectations turned on their ear, and Fur definitely does that.
Another upcoming artsy film that leans sharply toward the bizarre is Perfume: Story of a Murderer. I caught a screening of Perfume, helmed by Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer, the other night. Perfume opens in limited release at the end of December, with a wider release slated for January. Like Fur, Perfume is a dark, almost hallucinatory film with the air of a fable about it. I thought when I saw Fur that I'd seen the most curious film I was likely to see all year; Perfume managed to surpass it -- in a really good way.
Fur and Perfume are what Anne Thompson referred to as "smart house" films. They're in a class all to themselves, even among art house cinema; they make you think hard, both while you're watching, and for days later, as the aftermath of imagery and layers of meaning unfold in your head. The films are very different from each other, and yet, they should have a lot of cross-appeal; if you're intrigued by one, you're likely to also be intrigued by the other. Anne Thompson wrote the other day on her Risky Biz blog about the PR nightmare facing Picturehouse, Fur's distrib, noting that stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr, and even director Steven Shainberg (who did, at least, show up to intro the film at Telluride) haven't exactly been out pounding the pavement promoting the film.
This is a strange, brave, artsy film, and the talent ought to be out there endlessly promoting it if they want people to get out there to see it. Thompson notes that Kidman did attend the film's Rome premiere, but canceled other appearances after her husband, Keith Urban, went into rehab, so we can cut her some slack. But Downey, Jr, aside from a junket appearance, hasn't really made the circuit in support of the film, and Shainberg reportedly hasn't shown up for every PR opportunity either. Why is anyone's guess; they haven't, though, and because they haven't, the film's box office is bound to be affected.
Fur explores the imagined transition of Arbus from repressed 1950s housewife to independent artist (stopping well short of her tragic suicide at the age of 48), bravely taking on the challenge of exploring the psyche of a visual artist without being able to actually use any of Arbus' photography in the film. It's a challenging film to watch if you're used to getting your information spoon-fed to you; Shainberg gives you what he imagines as what might have been going on inside Arbus as she grew into being an artist, and asks you to suspend disbelief and use your own imagination as you go along for the ride with him. It's full of symbolism and imagery, and it's a tough sell without the benefit of its stars backing it up.
Perfume also delves inside a mind -- in this case, of a sociopathic young man, marginalized by society, who, being gifted with a remarkable nose, becomes addicted to amassing collection of scents. When he realizes that he himself has no personal scent, he becomes obsessed with capturing the scent of beautiful young women and creating the perfect scent that will make him feel fully human and able to feel emotion. It's a smart, clever, brilliantly constructed film that weaves visual imagery and symbolism, music and mood to draw the viewer in; the storyline is somewhat bleak and depressing, but Tykwer hasn't made a bleak or depressing film out of it. Rather, he's taken this shadowy tale and crafted a film from the perspective of the twisted protagonist that shows us the view of a sociopathic personality from the inside out better than any film I can think of in recent memory. I'll have a full review out around the film's release at the end of December, but suffice it for now to say: This is one film that art house cinema fans should be on the edges of their seats to see.
Audiences bemoan the lack of originality coming out of Hollywood, yet time and again, they don't support true creativity with their wallets at the box office. Outkast's Idlewild, which, while not a perfect film, definitely pushed the envelope of creativity in filmmaking, hasn't made back its $15 million budget yet. Fur, with it's estimated budget of almost $17 million, is going to have a hell of a time making that back if Picturehouse can't figure out how to successfully promote the film in the absence of support from its stars. If the enormously popular boys from Outkast haven't been able to rake in even $15 million to date with their huge fan base, it's hard to imagine Fur making back its bank without some serious PR to generate awareness of the film -- and "wow, that film was really ... bizarre" probably won't rate with the average filmgoer.
Perfume, on the other hand, will come out of the gate in the States with a huge box office advantage. It's based on a hugely popular German bestseller, and it's already opened in Europe and taken in an estimated $74.5 million over there. Whatever it makes in the US is gravy, but Tykwer has a pretty solid art house following, and the presence of Hoffman and Rickman -- both well-known to American audiences -- will likely draw people to see the film. If Tykwer, Hoffman and Rickman really promote the film well, it could play quite well here. Both films, though, deserve support from all those moviegoers who moan and wail about how Hollywood churns out dreck, because whatever else these films may be, unoriginal and boring they most assuredly are not.
http://reporter.blogs.com/risky/2006/11/fur_pr_nightmar.html
Fur PR Nightmare
Poor Picturehouse. They're trying to promote their movie Fur. They backed the overtly arty Diane Arbus biopic—a daring script which confounds audiences expectations. But stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr. aren't available to fully support it, and director Steve Shainberg hasn't always turned up for every PR opportunity either, my sources tell me. Here, he sounds off on the movie's many critics. Shainberg is fortunate that he got to make his movie his way, and should bear up under any criticism with dignity (is he really surprised?) and do whatever PR Picturehouse asks him to do. And Kidman and Downey, who give terrific, brave performances in the movie, should also be promoting it. (UPDATE: Kidman went to the movie's debut in Rome, where she did a Vogue cover, and was planning to attend the New York premiere and junket when her new husband, Keith Urban, went into rehab, at which point she cancelled. She had done some print but no TV. Downey did the junket but no TV.)
I applaud this movie, even though it takes a debatable sharp turn its third act. It resolves the issue of not being able to use Arbus's photos quite inventively. It's clear, though, that fall movies that don't move into the class of Oscar contenders are unduly slammed as outright failures. Fur may not be a crowd pleaser, but when it opens Friday it deserves some support from smart-house audiences who say they're tired of getting the same old same old. This is definitely not that. It's a feminist fable about a woman who makes the transition into being an artist.
Kidman's marquee value is an interesting question. Certain actors are compelling and brilliant but don't draw you in with warmth and sympathy. Jude Law also comes to mind in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering. They're beautiful and fun to watch (I just viewed Jonathan Glazer's Birth on DVD as well) but do we love and care about them? (I want to read David Thomson's unauthorized Kidman biography, even though it has a lousy 44 rating on Metacritic; the NYT called it a "weird and unseemly mash note.")
Fur PR Nightmare
Poor Picturehouse. They're trying to promote their movie Fur. They backed the overtly arty Diane Arbus biopic—a daring script which confounds audiences expectations. But stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr. aren't available to fully support it, and director Steve Shainberg hasn't always turned up for every PR opportunity either, my sources tell me. Here, he sounds off on the movie's many critics. Shainberg is fortunate that he got to make his movie his way, and should bear up under any criticism with dignity (is he really surprised?) and do whatever PR Picturehouse asks him to do. And Kidman and Downey, who give terrific, brave performances in the movie, should also be promoting it. (UPDATE: Kidman went to the movie's debut in Rome, where she did a Vogue cover, and was planning to attend the New York premiere and junket when her new husband, Keith Urban, went into rehab, at which point she cancelled. She had done some print but no TV. Downey did the junket but no TV.)
I applaud this movie, even though it takes a debatable sharp turn its third act. It resolves the issue of not being able to use Arbus's photos quite inventively. It's clear, though, that fall movies that don't move into the class of Oscar contenders are unduly slammed as outright failures. Fur may not be a crowd pleaser, but when it opens Friday it deserves some support from smart-house audiences who say they're tired of getting the same old same old. This is definitely not that. It's a feminist fable about a woman who makes the transition into being an artist.
Kidman's marquee value is an interesting question. Certain actors are compelling and brilliant but don't draw you in with warmth and sympathy. Jude Law also comes to mind in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering. They're beautiful and fun to watch (I just viewed Jonathan Glazer's Birth on DVD as well) but do we love and care about them? (I want to read David Thomson's unauthorized Kidman biography, even though it has a lousy 44 rating on Metacritic; the NYT called it a "weird and unseemly mash note.")
Thanks for that articles. Anne Thompson talking about the problems facing Fur, SHE certainly didn't go out of her way to help this movie, she was quoted by Tom O'Neil of Envelope i.e. LA Times that it wasn't Oscar-material or worthy, did she think that kind of talk would have helped the movie? Where is HER review of this movie she liked so much. Movies like this are rarely helped by promotion, film-writeups, spotlighting them actually help alot more. Brilliant, terrific and brave performances, such a unique movie but "oh, dear, not Oscar-worthy", yes Anne, that was a big help.
Thanx Sylvia and JanJan 4 da reviews 
~Viviana~
~Viviana~
'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
*Photographer Diane Arbus' life is seen through a filter that distorts her realities in favor of glossy fantasy and conjecture.
By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer
Creativity is one of life's true mysteries, but that hasn't stopped people from attempting to analyze and trivialize the source of the artistic impulse. Yet the mystery always triumphs, as it does in the simplistic but strangely poetic "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus."
"Fur" stars Nicole Kidman as Arbus, one of the 20th century's signature American photographers. "Her startling portraits of dwarfs, transvestites, freaks and nudists," wrote biographer Patricia Bosworth, "redefined people's notions of normal and abnormal."
Despite Bosworth's presence as a co-producer, "Fur" is not an attempt at a conventional biopic but what it calls "an imaginary portrait." Directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (the team that brought you the bondage-friendly "Secretary"), "Fur" has an unusual aim.
"What you are about to see," an opening title card reads, "is a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
Which is a fancy way of saying that "Fur" is on one level a facile cause-and-effect gloss on Arbus' life, a complete fantasy that reductively reduces the complex drives that go into the creation of an artist to a relationship with an unusual man. It's the cinematic equivalent of the questionable theory that El Greco painted the way he did because he had astigmatism and simply couldn't see the world any better.
Yet, and this is where the mystery comes in, the certainty Shainberg and Wilson bring to the project — and the sophisticated acting by Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. as that mysterious man — forces us to take this film more seriously than it otherwise deserves. It remains simultaneously too far-fetched and thesis-driven to be convincing and too feelingly done to be ignored.
"Fur" opens with Arbus fairly radiating happiness as she sits on a bus headed, it turns out, for a nudist-colony photo shoot. Smiling and confident, she looks over a list that reads "hunchbacks, slaughter houses, albinos." It's an inventory that wouldn't bring a grin to all faces, but that's the point: We are meant to recognize an artist discovering herself.
The bulk of "Fur," however, is spent, in a flashback that begins three months earlier, when the Arbus we see is so repressed and stifled that the first image shows her buttoning her buttons all the way up to the top.
This Arbus is a careful mother to her two children and a dutiful daughter to her overbearing, high-society parents, David and Gertrude Nemerov (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander), proprietors of the Fifth Avenue fur emporium called Russek's.
She is also wife and assistant to Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell of "Friends With Money"), a photographer who speaks up for his wife's camera dreams, though he himself does sterile commercial work.
Although "Fur" takes pains to paint Diane's husband as loving, concerned and decent, it's clear that working in this atmosphere has not done wonders for her. This constraint is signified, in typically unsubtle fashion, by a scene of Arbus standing on a balcony and unfastening all those carefully buttoned buttons.
But hark, salvation is at hand. A new tenant named Lionel (Downey) is moving into the Arbus' building, a man whose face is always masked and whom Diane feels unaccountably drawn to.
After a brief horror film-type buildup that emphasizes his strangeness, Diane goes up to Lionel's apartment, which looks like the lair of a fairy tale wizard, with the idea of discovering his secret and taking his photograph.
Lionel's secret is that every inch of him is covered in rich, luxurious hair (the veteran Stan Winston Studio gets credit for the remarkable design). He looks, in fact, quite similar to the Beast in Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," an admitted influence, and, like the beast, he turns out to be the most charming of men.
More than that, Lionel liberates Diane's hidden voyeur, becoming her tour guide to the universe of people who may look different but really are the nicest folks in the world. No Lionel, "Fur" insists, no great photographs.
Obviously, this is all supposed to be taken metaphorically, but "Fur" undercuts that aim with a series of all-too-literal maneuvers. For one thing, husband Allan, clearly threatened by Lionel's charisma, grows a thick beard. For another, those familiar with Arbus' work will notice that the people she meets tend to look exactly like the subjects of her most famous photographs. How convenient.
Most irritating of all, "Fur" falls back on a cop-out ending that undercuts its message about the unimportance of surface differences in favor of a glib finale that tries to have its cake and eat it too.
Yet whenever you get too irritated at "Fur's" pretensions, the remarkable acting of its two stars pulls you back in and keeps you watching.
Kidman, the most consistently daring of today's top stars, is exceptionally convincing as someone whose interior process plays out in front of us. And Downey, for the most part using only his soulful, yearning eyes and a silky, urbane voice, creates a man no one could resist. Separately and together, they make us believe the unbelievable.
kenneth.turan@latimes.com
'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
MPAA rating: R for graphic nudity, some sexuality and language
A Picturehouse release. Director Steven Shainberg. Screenplay Erin Cressida Wilson. Inspired by the book "Diane Arbus: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth. Producers William Pohlad, Laura Bickford, Bonnie Timmermann, Andrew Fierberg. Director of photography Bill Pope. Editor Keiko Deguchi. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.
Exclusively at Laemmle's Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; Playhouse, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; Monica, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811.
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-f...e-more-channels
*Photographer Diane Arbus' life is seen through a filter that distorts her realities in favor of glossy fantasy and conjecture.
By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer
Creativity is one of life's true mysteries, but that hasn't stopped people from attempting to analyze and trivialize the source of the artistic impulse. Yet the mystery always triumphs, as it does in the simplistic but strangely poetic "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus."
"Fur" stars Nicole Kidman as Arbus, one of the 20th century's signature American photographers. "Her startling portraits of dwarfs, transvestites, freaks and nudists," wrote biographer Patricia Bosworth, "redefined people's notions of normal and abnormal."
Despite Bosworth's presence as a co-producer, "Fur" is not an attempt at a conventional biopic but what it calls "an imaginary portrait." Directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (the team that brought you the bondage-friendly "Secretary"), "Fur" has an unusual aim.
"What you are about to see," an opening title card reads, "is a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
Which is a fancy way of saying that "Fur" is on one level a facile cause-and-effect gloss on Arbus' life, a complete fantasy that reductively reduces the complex drives that go into the creation of an artist to a relationship with an unusual man. It's the cinematic equivalent of the questionable theory that El Greco painted the way he did because he had astigmatism and simply couldn't see the world any better.
Yet, and this is where the mystery comes in, the certainty Shainberg and Wilson bring to the project — and the sophisticated acting by Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. as that mysterious man — forces us to take this film more seriously than it otherwise deserves. It remains simultaneously too far-fetched and thesis-driven to be convincing and too feelingly done to be ignored.
"Fur" opens with Arbus fairly radiating happiness as she sits on a bus headed, it turns out, for a nudist-colony photo shoot. Smiling and confident, she looks over a list that reads "hunchbacks, slaughter houses, albinos." It's an inventory that wouldn't bring a grin to all faces, but that's the point: We are meant to recognize an artist discovering herself.
The bulk of "Fur," however, is spent, in a flashback that begins three months earlier, when the Arbus we see is so repressed and stifled that the first image shows her buttoning her buttons all the way up to the top.
This Arbus is a careful mother to her two children and a dutiful daughter to her overbearing, high-society parents, David and Gertrude Nemerov (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander), proprietors of the Fifth Avenue fur emporium called Russek's.
She is also wife and assistant to Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell of "Friends With Money"), a photographer who speaks up for his wife's camera dreams, though he himself does sterile commercial work.
Although "Fur" takes pains to paint Diane's husband as loving, concerned and decent, it's clear that working in this atmosphere has not done wonders for her. This constraint is signified, in typically unsubtle fashion, by a scene of Arbus standing on a balcony and unfastening all those carefully buttoned buttons.
But hark, salvation is at hand. A new tenant named Lionel (Downey) is moving into the Arbus' building, a man whose face is always masked and whom Diane feels unaccountably drawn to.
After a brief horror film-type buildup that emphasizes his strangeness, Diane goes up to Lionel's apartment, which looks like the lair of a fairy tale wizard, with the idea of discovering his secret and taking his photograph.
Lionel's secret is that every inch of him is covered in rich, luxurious hair (the veteran Stan Winston Studio gets credit for the remarkable design). He looks, in fact, quite similar to the Beast in Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," an admitted influence, and, like the beast, he turns out to be the most charming of men.
More than that, Lionel liberates Diane's hidden voyeur, becoming her tour guide to the universe of people who may look different but really are the nicest folks in the world. No Lionel, "Fur" insists, no great photographs.
Obviously, this is all supposed to be taken metaphorically, but "Fur" undercuts that aim with a series of all-too-literal maneuvers. For one thing, husband Allan, clearly threatened by Lionel's charisma, grows a thick beard. For another, those familiar with Arbus' work will notice that the people she meets tend to look exactly like the subjects of her most famous photographs. How convenient.
Most irritating of all, "Fur" falls back on a cop-out ending that undercuts its message about the unimportance of surface differences in favor of a glib finale that tries to have its cake and eat it too.
Yet whenever you get too irritated at "Fur's" pretensions, the remarkable acting of its two stars pulls you back in and keeps you watching.
Kidman, the most consistently daring of today's top stars, is exceptionally convincing as someone whose interior process plays out in front of us. And Downey, for the most part using only his soulful, yearning eyes and a silky, urbane voice, creates a man no one could resist. Separately and together, they make us believe the unbelievable.
kenneth.turan@latimes.com
'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
MPAA rating: R for graphic nudity, some sexuality and language
A Picturehouse release. Director Steven Shainberg. Screenplay Erin Cressida Wilson. Inspired by the book "Diane Arbus: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth. Producers William Pohlad, Laura Bickford, Bonnie Timmermann, Andrew Fierberg. Director of photography Bill Pope. Editor Keiko Deguchi. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.
Exclusively at Laemmle's Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; Playhouse, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; Monica, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811.
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-f...e-more-channels
QUOTE(skankyoldwhore @ Nov 12 2006, 12:47 PM)
Yet whenever you get too irritated at "Fur's" pretensions, the remarkable acting of its two stars pulls you back in and keeps you watching.
Kidman, the most consistently daring of today's top stars, is exceptionally convincing as someone whose interior process plays out in front of us. And Downey, for the most part using only his soulful, yearning eyes and a silky, urbane voice, creates a man no one could resist. Separately and together, they make us believe the unbelievable.
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-f...e-more-channels
Kidman, the most consistently daring of today's top stars, is exceptionally convincing as someone whose interior process plays out in front of us. And Downey, for the most part using only his soulful, yearning eyes and a silky, urbane voice, creates a man no one could resist. Separately and together, they make us believe the unbelievable.
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-f...e-more-channels
i soo want to see this movie
btw here is a very small but nice review:
QUOTE
Our critics recommend...
Movies Opening This Week
These movies open Friday unless noted.
Casino Royale Daniel Craig debuts as the new, and blond, Bond. This outing looks back at Bond's rise in the ranks of the British secret service and his first assignment as a 007 agent.
Fast Food Nation Director Richard Linklater's fictionalized adaptation of Eric Schlosser's best-selling critique of the fast-food industry ties its subject to the post-war American lifestyle.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus This film, more fantasia than biopic about one of the 20th-century's most renowned photographers, stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.
Happy Feet Penguins! Tap dancing! Need we say more? This animated feature is set in Antarctica, where penguins find their mates through song - except for one young fellow who can't sing and tries to express himself through his feet.
Let's Go to Prison A con takes revenge on the judge who sentenced him by getting the judge's son incarcerated in the same cell as him. Dax Shepard and Will Arnett star.
Shut Up & Sing Documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, U.S.A.) goes behind the scenes with the Dixie Chicks, and looks at how an offhand remark criticizing President Bush impacted their career.
Excellent (****)
...
Movies Opening This Week
These movies open Friday unless noted.
Casino Royale Daniel Craig debuts as the new, and blond, Bond. This outing looks back at Bond's rise in the ranks of the British secret service and his first assignment as a 007 agent.
Fast Food Nation Director Richard Linklater's fictionalized adaptation of Eric Schlosser's best-selling critique of the fast-food industry ties its subject to the post-war American lifestyle.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus This film, more fantasia than biopic about one of the 20th-century's most renowned photographers, stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.
Happy Feet Penguins! Tap dancing! Need we say more? This animated feature is set in Antarctica, where penguins find their mates through song - except for one young fellow who can't sing and tries to express himself through his feet.
Let's Go to Prison A con takes revenge on the judge who sentenced him by getting the judge's son incarcerated in the same cell as him. Dax Shepard and Will Arnett star.
Shut Up & Sing Documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, U.S.A.) goes behind the scenes with the Dixie Chicks, and looks at how an offhand remark criticizing President Bush impacted their career.
Excellent (****)
...
www.philly.com
Thanks for the Fur reviews ...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.
...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.
QUOTE(Wiggleurnose @ Nov 12 2006, 08:25 AM)
Thanks for the Fur reviews ...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.
...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.I agree wiggleurnose ! haha... i tend to like what the critics dont.... more of the independent films . if you know what i mean...
here is one of the est I've read so far (complete with oscar talk ):
www.freep.com
):QUOTE
Kidman rushes in where most stars fear to tread
November 17, 2006
No group of leading ladies has ever been more open to risky and unusual projects than the current crop of perennial Oscar contenders.
This exceedingly impressive lineup includes Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz, Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman -- who could all rely on their great beauty and consistent craftsmanship in their careers but none of whom do.
As Exhibit A, consider "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," a movie that draws an exceedingly thin line between invention and pretension, which then gets walked so skillfully and passionately by Kidman that it comes out on the right side. "Fur," as its subtitle suggests, is less a work of biography than fact-inspired fantasy. If the movie is highly unlikely to connect with all who see it, it will connect on a deep level to some who do, in no small part because of Kidman's committed, even daring performance.
Though Diane (pronounced Dee-ann) Arbus was one of the 20th Century's greatest and most original photographers, she is hardly a household name. Many people recognize her influential portraits of social outsiders. Their unadorned titles -- "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park" or "Identical Twins" -- are at defiant odds with the disturbing, haunting quality of the images. What is known of Arbus' troubled, emotionally complicated personal life is mostly derived from Patricia Bosworth's biography, which is credited with inspiring "Fur."
But director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson , who collaborated on the equally odd but engaging S&M romance "Secretary," have actually taken from Bosworth's book the underpinnings of what a titles card accurately describes as "a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
The film opens with a scene of a seemingly contented and secure Arbus riding a bus, one that deposits her near a nudist camp where she will take photographs of some ordinary-looking naked people.
It then takes us back to months before, where she is shown falling apart under the pressure of being a good wife and helpmate to her photographer husband Allan (Ty Burrell), a good mother to their two daughters and a dutiful daughter to her wealthy, critical parents (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander). Though they are attempting to throw some business to Alan by mounting a show of their new fall furs at Diane's apartment, with Diane modeling, the attention only makes Diane feel more inadequate and "apart."
So while any other women might be seriously concerned when a masked recluse moves into the apartment over hers and her plumbing becomes clogged with what seem to be the world's largest hairballs, Diane is so intrigued she schemes to photograph the new tenant. As it happens, her wildest projections aren't wild enough. Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) is a wig maker, but that doesn't begin to explain the hair. He turns out to be covered from head to toe in the stuff, the victim of a rare disease, resembling nothing more than the fairy-tale beast of "Beauty and the Beast."
It's an audacious place for a movie to go, but Shainberg and Wilson take it into an alternative Manhattan populated by people of whom her parents -- and even a caring husband -- would never approve. The film offers Diane's discovery of the world as the catalyst of her artistic vision, and if you can buy that, you will fall into the dream-like spell that "Fur" creates. The unique relationship between Diane and her subjects is represented by her relationship with the gentle, honest Lionel.
"Fur" is hardly without its split ends, most notably in the light glossing over it gives to the sexual nature of this story. It is far less bold in its exploration of perversity than "Secretary," perhaps because it is portraying an actual person, even if she has been placed in a dream world. The droll humor that was effective in "Secretary" doesn't always work in this context. It's like dropping a crass burlesque joke into a psychological interpretation of a Grimm fairy tale.
Yet when "Fur" focuses on the empathy between Arbus and Lionel and Kidman is convincingly conveying the personal and artistic courage that grows from her relationship with him and his world, the film floats through doors few films and few actors would even knock upon.
November 17, 2006
No group of leading ladies has ever been more open to risky and unusual projects than the current crop of perennial Oscar contenders.
This exceedingly impressive lineup includes Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz, Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman -- who could all rely on their great beauty and consistent craftsmanship in their careers but none of whom do.
As Exhibit A, consider "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," a movie that draws an exceedingly thin line between invention and pretension, which then gets walked so skillfully and passionately by Kidman that it comes out on the right side. "Fur," as its subtitle suggests, is less a work of biography than fact-inspired fantasy. If the movie is highly unlikely to connect with all who see it, it will connect on a deep level to some who do, in no small part because of Kidman's committed, even daring performance.
Though Diane (pronounced Dee-ann) Arbus was one of the 20th Century's greatest and most original photographers, she is hardly a household name. Many people recognize her influential portraits of social outsiders. Their unadorned titles -- "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park" or "Identical Twins" -- are at defiant odds with the disturbing, haunting quality of the images. What is known of Arbus' troubled, emotionally complicated personal life is mostly derived from Patricia Bosworth's biography, which is credited with inspiring "Fur."
But director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson , who collaborated on the equally odd but engaging S&M romance "Secretary," have actually taken from Bosworth's book the underpinnings of what a titles card accurately describes as "a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
The film opens with a scene of a seemingly contented and secure Arbus riding a bus, one that deposits her near a nudist camp where she will take photographs of some ordinary-looking naked people.
It then takes us back to months before, where she is shown falling apart under the pressure of being a good wife and helpmate to her photographer husband Allan (Ty Burrell), a good mother to their two daughters and a dutiful daughter to her wealthy, critical parents (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander). Though they are attempting to throw some business to Alan by mounting a show of their new fall furs at Diane's apartment, with Diane modeling, the attention only makes Diane feel more inadequate and "apart."
So while any other women might be seriously concerned when a masked recluse moves into the apartment over hers and her plumbing becomes clogged with what seem to be the world's largest hairballs, Diane is so intrigued she schemes to photograph the new tenant. As it happens, her wildest projections aren't wild enough. Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) is a wig maker, but that doesn't begin to explain the hair. He turns out to be covered from head to toe in the stuff, the victim of a rare disease, resembling nothing more than the fairy-tale beast of "Beauty and the Beast."
It's an audacious place for a movie to go, but Shainberg and Wilson take it into an alternative Manhattan populated by people of whom her parents -- and even a caring husband -- would never approve. The film offers Diane's discovery of the world as the catalyst of her artistic vision, and if you can buy that, you will fall into the dream-like spell that "Fur" creates. The unique relationship between Diane and her subjects is represented by her relationship with the gentle, honest Lionel.
"Fur" is hardly without its split ends, most notably in the light glossing over it gives to the sexual nature of this story. It is far less bold in its exploration of perversity than "Secretary," perhaps because it is portraying an actual person, even if she has been placed in a dream world. The droll humor that was effective in "Secretary" doesn't always work in this context. It's like dropping a crass burlesque joke into a psychological interpretation of a Grimm fairy tale.
Yet when "Fur" focuses on the empathy between Arbus and Lionel and Kidman is convincingly conveying the personal and artistic courage that grows from her relationship with him and his world, the film floats through doors few films and few actors would even knock upon.
www.freep.com
Thanks for the fur reviews.
QUOTE(Grace Margaret Mulligan @ Nov 17 2006, 08:04 AM)
Excellent, well-written and objective review, Grace, thank you for posting it.
Thanx Grace 4 da latest review
~Viviana~
~Viviana~
QUOTE(Wiggleurnose @ Nov 12 2006, 06:25 AM)
Thanks for the Fur reviews ...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.
...but for the first time I'm sort of avoiding reading too many. It's certainly a film that looks like it's going to divide many people and I get the feeling I'm going to enjoy it regardless of what critics think. I like wierd films and would probably watch it even if Nicole was not playing Diane Arbus.Exactly! I am tired of the same old same old - where I can figure out the movie plot by the title alone. I can hardly wait to see this one - even if I have to wait until it hits the video store; I fear it may not be shown near me but my fingers are crossed.
P.S. Saw Stranger than Fiction over the weekend; GREAT movie. Highly recommend it.
Here are a couple more that were posted just today or yesterday:
Chicago Tribune's review:
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Chicago Tribune's review:
QUOTE
Movie review: 'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
By Jessica Reaves
Tribune staff reporter
Nicole Kidman is at her best in roles that require a certain quiet, desperate intensity. Witness her turns as a ghostly mother in "The Others," as tortured writer Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," and now in "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus." Her restrained but raw delivery and expressive, searching eyes lend a weight to parts that might, in the hands of lesser actors, come across as brooding, or worse, boring.
In director Steven Shainberg's part-factual, part-fictional take on Arbus, the legendary and controversial photographer and pioneer of outsider art, Kidman again sinks her teeth into the life of a complex, deeply conflicted woman who is struggling to come to terms with her unusual view of the world, hemmed in by 1950s propriety and responsibility. The result is a revelatory, challenging and deeply affecting portrait, anchored by what may be Kidman's most profoundly moving performance to date.
Arbus was born into a world of privilege and its attendant expectations: She was supposed to marry, have children and help run her husband's business, which just happened to be a successful commercial photography studio. She did all of this, succeeding for the most part to tamp down a growing sense of disquiet, a need to expand her world beyond the walls of her safe, predictable New York City apartment.
When she sees a strange new neighbor moving into her building, his face covered in a mask, her curiosity is piqued, and she sets about discovering what she can about the mysterious man, whose presence creates unexplained occurrences, like clogged pipes and men traipsing up the stairs, bald heads bowed, and descending with their domes covered in brand new hair.
Arbus' eventual interaction with masked neighbor Lionel (Robert Downey Jr. in yet another superlative performance) is played out in scenes that would not be out of place in a thriller, suspense and surprise building to an unexpected resolution. To reveal much more about Arbus' and Lionel's relationship and its effect on her carefully choreographed life would be to spoil much of the pleasure to be found in its delicate unfurling.
Despite the movie's dependence on darkness and muted light to achieve a generally bleak tone, cinematographer Bill Pope makes wonderful use of color, juxtaposing Arbus' gray and brown apartment with the bold splashes of red, green and blue in Lionel's attic retreat. Kidman's wardrobe evolves alongside her character, moving from unassuming creams and grays into a bolder, more energetic palette.
Director Shainberg ("Secretary") guides his dreamlike film with a sure but trusting hand, smartly giving most of his gifted cast ample space to explore the complexities of their roles. The exceptions are Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander, fine actors forced into caricatures as Diane's overbearing, class-obsessed parents. The movie's other weakness is its periodic dependence on shock value, the perceived "freakishness" of peripheral but key characters -- a choice that undercuts the film's message that art, like beauty, can be found everywhere we look.
Downey and Kidman share a chemistry; they also share what may be the year's most erotic love scene. Downey, who is required here to act primarily with his eyes, succeeds in seducing not only Kidman's character but also his audience.
The supporting cast is also strong, most notably Ty Burrell as Arbus' physically diffident husband, Allan, whose desperation becomes more and more apparent as his wife's new life and new creativity takes precedence over his demands and those of their two young children. He's too late; Arbus has already made the leap from bourgeois safety into something far less comfortable and infinitely more rewarding. It's an apt allegory for the film.
***/****
----
'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
Directed by Steven Shainberg; screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, loosely based on the book "Diane Arbus: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth; photographed by Bill Pope; edited by Kristina Boden and Keiko Deguchi; music by Carter Burwell; production design by Amy Danger; produced by Laura Bickford, Patricia Bosworth, Andrew Fierberg, William Pohlad and Bonnie Timmermann A Picturehouse release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:52.
Diane Arbus -- Nicole Kidman
Lionel -- Robert Downey Jr.
Allan Arbus -- Ty Burrell
David -- Harris Yulin
By Jessica Reaves
Tribune staff reporter
Nicole Kidman is at her best in roles that require a certain quiet, desperate intensity. Witness her turns as a ghostly mother in "The Others," as tortured writer Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," and now in "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus." Her restrained but raw delivery and expressive, searching eyes lend a weight to parts that might, in the hands of lesser actors, come across as brooding, or worse, boring.
In director Steven Shainberg's part-factual, part-fictional take on Arbus, the legendary and controversial photographer and pioneer of outsider art, Kidman again sinks her teeth into the life of a complex, deeply conflicted woman who is struggling to come to terms with her unusual view of the world, hemmed in by 1950s propriety and responsibility. The result is a revelatory, challenging and deeply affecting portrait, anchored by what may be Kidman's most profoundly moving performance to date.
Arbus was born into a world of privilege and its attendant expectations: She was supposed to marry, have children and help run her husband's business, which just happened to be a successful commercial photography studio. She did all of this, succeeding for the most part to tamp down a growing sense of disquiet, a need to expand her world beyond the walls of her safe, predictable New York City apartment.
When she sees a strange new neighbor moving into her building, his face covered in a mask, her curiosity is piqued, and she sets about discovering what she can about the mysterious man, whose presence creates unexplained occurrences, like clogged pipes and men traipsing up the stairs, bald heads bowed, and descending with their domes covered in brand new hair.
Arbus' eventual interaction with masked neighbor Lionel (Robert Downey Jr. in yet another superlative performance) is played out in scenes that would not be out of place in a thriller, suspense and surprise building to an unexpected resolution. To reveal much more about Arbus' and Lionel's relationship and its effect on her carefully choreographed life would be to spoil much of the pleasure to be found in its delicate unfurling.
Despite the movie's dependence on darkness and muted light to achieve a generally bleak tone, cinematographer Bill Pope makes wonderful use of color, juxtaposing Arbus' gray and brown apartment with the bold splashes of red, green and blue in Lionel's attic retreat. Kidman's wardrobe evolves alongside her character, moving from unassuming creams and grays into a bolder, more energetic palette.
Director Shainberg ("Secretary") guides his dreamlike film with a sure but trusting hand, smartly giving most of his gifted cast ample space to explore the complexities of their roles. The exceptions are Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander, fine actors forced into caricatures as Diane's overbearing, class-obsessed parents. The movie's other weakness is its periodic dependence on shock value, the perceived "freakishness" of peripheral but key characters -- a choice that undercuts the film's message that art, like beauty, can be found everywhere we look.
Downey and Kidman share a chemistry; they also share what may be the year's most erotic love scene. Downey, who is required here to act primarily with his eyes, succeeds in seducing not only Kidman's character but also his audience.
The supporting cast is also strong, most notably Ty Burrell as Arbus' physically diffident husband, Allan, whose desperation becomes more and more apparent as his wife's new life and new creativity takes precedence over his demands and those of their two young children. He's too late; Arbus has already made the leap from bourgeois safety into something far less comfortable and infinitely more rewarding. It's an apt allegory for the film.
***/****
----
'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'
Directed by Steven Shainberg; screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, loosely based on the book "Diane Arbus: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth; photographed by Bill Pope; edited by Kristina Boden and Keiko Deguchi; music by Carter Burwell; production design by Amy Danger; produced by Laura Bickford, Patricia Bosworth, Andrew Fierberg, William Pohlad and Bonnie Timmermann A Picturehouse release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:52.
Diane Arbus -- Nicole Kidman
Lionel -- Robert Downey Jr.
Allan Arbus -- Ty Burrell
David -- Harris Yulin
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
QUOTE
'Fur' intrigues, but the mix of fact and fiction is disconcerting
By WILLIAM ARNOLD
P-I MOVIE CRITIC
Given how lightly most movie biographies regard the facts of their subject's lives, you have to admire the honesty of "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," a biopic of the photographer that tells us right in the title that it's full of beans.
On the other hand, you also have to be a little leery of a movie that demands the privileges of fiction while dealing with a real and relatively recent cultural figure. If the story is imaginary, how do they get off calling the character Diane Arbus?
However you may stand on this more or less moral issue, the movie itself is certainly imaginative and intriguing, and -- even if she looks nothing like her -- Nicole Kidman gives a wonderfully fragile performance as the title character.
The movie picks up Arbus' story in 1958, when she's married to commercial photographer Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell), with two small daughters and their own New York studio, which has been financed by Diane's wealthy parents (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander).
Her husband is supportive of anything she wants to do, but Diane remains a meek, inhibited and unfulfilled '50s housewife until one day a mysterious, masked character moves into an upstairs apartment of their building and she finds herself inexplicably drawn to him.
This fellow (Robert Downey Jr.) turns out to be a former circus freak with an affliction that makes thick hair grow over every inch of his body, and her repeated trips to his surreal abode are portrayed in the film as an extended "Alice in Wonderland" allusion.
In time, the relationship becomes physical and the allusion segues into a "Beauty and the Beast" or "Phantom of the Opera" romantic parable that opens Diane to the world of deformity and alternate sexuality that will become her métier as a photographer.
The director is Steven Shainberg and, like his last film, "Secretary" -- which dealt in a sympathetic way with a sadomasochistic, master-slave relationship -- the movie sees a constructive, enlightening quality in a bond that society might find deviant and kinky.
Is any of this story true? It's hard to tell. The credits say the movie was "inspired" by a 1984 biography by Patricia Bosworth (who's also one of the film's co-producers) and the outline of her character and family relationships seem to be true to Arbus' life.
But Shainberg (whose uncle was a friend of Arbus in this period) says his movie is "a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
I'm still a little confused as to exactly what this means, but the movie has a certain fairy-tale charm, its evocation of the '50s rings true in every scene and Kidman brings her character to life with a fey, moth-to-the-flame enthrallment that's both touching and fascinating.
By WILLIAM ARNOLD
P-I MOVIE CRITIC
Given how lightly most movie biographies regard the facts of their subject's lives, you have to admire the honesty of "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," a biopic of the photographer that tells us right in the title that it's full of beans.
On the other hand, you also have to be a little leery of a movie that demands the privileges of fiction while dealing with a real and relatively recent cultural figure. If the story is imaginary, how do they get off calling the character Diane Arbus?
However you may stand on this more or less moral issue, the movie itself is certainly imaginative and intriguing, and -- even if she looks nothing like her -- Nicole Kidman gives a wonderfully fragile performance as the title character.
The movie picks up Arbus' story in 1958, when she's married to commercial photographer Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell), with two small daughters and their own New York studio, which has been financed by Diane's wealthy parents (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander).
Her husband is supportive of anything she wants to do, but Diane remains a meek, inhibited and unfulfilled '50s housewife until one day a mysterious, masked character moves into an upstairs apartment of their building and she finds herself inexplicably drawn to him.
This fellow (Robert Downey Jr.) turns out to be a former circus freak with an affliction that makes thick hair grow over every inch of his body, and her repeated trips to his surreal abode are portrayed in the film as an extended "Alice in Wonderland" allusion.
In time, the relationship becomes physical and the allusion segues into a "Beauty and the Beast" or "Phantom of the Opera" romantic parable that opens Diane to the world of deformity and alternate sexuality that will become her métier as a photographer.
The director is Steven Shainberg and, like his last film, "Secretary" -- which dealt in a sympathetic way with a sadomasochistic, master-slave relationship -- the movie sees a constructive, enlightening quality in a bond that society might find deviant and kinky.
Is any of this story true? It's hard to tell. The credits say the movie was "inspired" by a 1984 biography by Patricia Bosworth (who's also one of the film's co-producers) and the outline of her character and family relationships seem to be true to Arbus' life.
But Shainberg (whose uncle was a friend of Arbus in this period) says his movie is "a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path."
I'm still a little confused as to exactly what this means, but the movie has a certain fairy-tale charm, its evocation of the '50s rings true in every scene and Kidman brings her character to life with a fey, moth-to-the-flame enthrallment that's both touching and fascinating.
i saw this today. very few theaters are showing it so i had to go to a smaller theater (which i actually prefer since the setting's more intimate and i can focus on the film instead of someone coughing constantly ... which i experienced whilst watching marie antoinette). anyway, sorry for the rant, this movie is great. right from the beginning, you can tell nicole's definitely stepped into somebody else's shoes. i didn't for a second feel it was her, the movie star or the actress. it's actually not that weird. it's just that, i think, that the imaginary aspect isn't as dark as expected. it was surprisingly a bit light and has some slight "comedic" instances. nicole and robert's chemistry is palpable and the sexuality's not really very graphic (lots of nudity though). go see it if you have the chance. the last shot of her actually sticks with you. she's a different person and the change is gradual but also very subtle.
p.s.
and this is why i don't trust the critics. i feel that sometimes one can buy a good review or that each of these critics highly influence the other, a sort of popular opinion then emerges. all the same.
p.s.
and this is why i don't trust the critics. i feel that sometimes one can buy a good review or that each of these critics highly influence the other, a sort of popular opinion then emerges. all the same.
Thanks for sharing, Kiki. I look forward to watching this movie over the weekend.
I look forward to watching this movie over the weekend.
Thank you for the review kik! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed it.
And thank you Nicolefan for the review transcripts. I really respect Jennifer Reeves' (Chicago Tribune) decision not to give away much or the plot - unlike most reviewers who seem determined to rob the viewer of every possible surprise.
Why the reviewer for the Seattle paper is still confused puzzles me. Haven't we hashed and rehashed this for months? "An imaginary biography" that seems simple enough. Most bioflics in fact are full of imagined incidents etc (Kackie recently pointed out to me that Johnny Cash's father was nothing like the character portrayed in "Walk the Line", for instance); the difference is that this film is being honest about its inventions - and intentions.
And thank you Nicolefan for the review transcripts. I really respect Jennifer Reeves' (Chicago Tribune) decision not to give away much or the plot - unlike most reviewers who seem determined to rob the viewer of every possible surprise.
Why the reviewer for the Seattle paper is still confused puzzles me. Haven't we hashed and rehashed this for months? "An imaginary biography" that seems simple enough. Most bioflics in fact are full of imagined incidents etc (Kackie recently pointed out to me that Johnny Cash's father was nothing like the character portrayed in "Walk the Line", for instance); the difference is that this film is being honest about its inventions - and intentions.
^ i can't wait for you or skanky or other members to see it as you may have a more comprehensive insight on the film. i must say (and i don't like myself for forgetting) that this is one of the bravest performances and roles an actor has done. i cannot imagine, as much as i trust kate winslet or cate blanchett, anybody else doing justice to this. probably naomi watts. nicole is perfect for shainberg's imaginary portrait... i think one has to get past the imaginary part and look at her as a woman who's just awakening from her dormancy.
QUOTE(kiki @ Nov 18 2006, 03:37 AM)
and this is why i don't trust the critics. i feel that sometimes one can buy a good review or that each of these critics highly influence the other, a sort of popular opinion then emerges. all the same.
I too sometimes get the same impression.
ciao
p.s. I'm not getting e-mail notification of replies any more, am I the only one?
Thanks for your review, kiki . Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a release date for UK. We will most likely get it next year! I was all ready to go see it on Friday and started noticing that no publication is writing about it, checked the screening times and nada. I can't believe it 
.
. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a release date for UK. We will most likely get it next year! I was all ready to go see it on Friday and started noticing that no publication is writing about it, checked the screening times and nada. I can't believe it .
I think it may be opening in Jan / Feb 2007 in the UK...but can't remember where I saw this information.
a little bit of oscar buzz :
www.timesonline.co.uk
:QUOTE
The Sunday Times November 19, 2006
Heroine chic
The Oscar race will showcase a golden generation of actresses — in films that do their talents justice. What a refreshing change, says Christopher Goodwin
Every year at this time, a familiar lament can usually be heard in Hollywood: why are there so few good parts for women, especially for older actresses? This year, though, as the trade press begins to fill with ads touting the Oscar contenders, it’s becoming clear that an amazing number of actresses — many of them British, and many beyond the age when Hollywood normally puts them out to grass — will be in the running in January. The 2007 shortlist will highlight the richest array of female talent in more than a generation.
The roles are also incredibly varied: Helen Mirren as a dowdy but surprisingly sympathetic monarch in The Queen; Meryl Streep as the nightmarish editor in The Devil Wears Prada; *you know who* Cruz as a mother with a terrible family secret in Volver; Kate Winslet as an adulterous housewife in Little Children; Julie Christie as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away from Her; Sienna Miller as the drugged-out Warhol icon Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl; Beyoncé Knowles as a diva-esque 1960s soul singer in Dreamgirls; Nicole Kidman as the controversial photographer Diane Arbus in Fur; Renée Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter; Naomi Watts as a doctor’s wife coping with marriage and the tropics in The Painted Veil; Annette Bening as a mentally unstable mother in Running with Scissors; Ashley Judd as a thirtysomething single woman in Come Early Morning; Charlotte Rampling as a sex tourist in Heading South; Judi Dench as a nosy teacher in Notes on a Scandal; Cate Blanchett, in the same film, as a teacher having an affair with one of her students, and in The Good German as a woman attempting to escape her past; Brittany Murphy trying to control the downward spiral of her life in The Dead Girl; even Abigail Breslin, the delightful young star of Little Miss Sunshine, as Olive, who is so keen to appear in a beauty contest.
There are so many great leading parts for women this year that some of these actresses may end up competing in the best supporting category, where they could find Emma Thompson as a suicidal author in Stranger than Fiction; Frances de la Tour in The History Boys; Vera Farmiga as a mobster’s girlfriend in The Departed; Jennifer Hudson as a soul singer in Dreamgirls; Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee in Infamous; and Sharon Stone as a beautician in Bobby, about the day Robert F Kennedy was murdered. (Stone is in the unlikely position of also being the frontrunner for worst actress at the Razzie awards, for Basic Instinct 2.) Yet the vast majority of these films are made by independent companies. The perennial criticism of the major Hollywood studios — for not creating good parts for women, and for not making films that women (and I don’t mean teenage girls) want to see — is still valid. This year, for example, women were not the protagonists of any of the films nominated for best picture. Reese Witherspoon won best actress Oscar for playing June Carter Cash, the endlessly supportive wife of Walk the Line’s real subject, Johnny Cash. And the only actress over 50 to win an Oscar in either acting category in the past two decades is Judi Dench, best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love in 1999.
“It’s Hollywood’s fault,” says Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director of Volver, who knows a thing or two about creating great roles for women. “In other countries, we encourage diversity and want to tell stories about all kinds of women. In the past decade, you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have revolved around women. The studios have forgotten that women are fascinating, more than just mannequins.”
There was a time — really, up until the mid-1950s and the advent of television — when many of Hollywood’s biggest money-spinners were “women’s pictures”. Many of the top stars of those years were women: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn among them. Even a few years ago, the studios were still in the business of making films for women: the Meg Ryan comedies of the late 1980s and early 1990s; more recently, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Runaway Bride and Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts; and Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, starring Witherspoon. But in the past three or four years, even the romantic comedies that used to be made starring women, and with the female audience in mind, are now being made for men: witness Wedding Crashers and Meet the Fockers, where the women are little more than sexed-up ciphers.
“The major studios are going after what they call the ‘four quadrants’,” says Laura Bickford, the producer who made Traffic as a studio film and Fur with independent financing and distribution. “And they have made a business decision that for their $150m movies, they have to have the teenage male ‘quadrant’.” This model breaks the audience into four parts: men under 25, men over 25, women under 25 and women over 25. Because budgets are now so high, the studios calculate they need to hit as many of the quadrants as they can — all four, they hope. But their research shows that whereas women will go to see “guy” movies, men won’t be seen dead in the queue for a “chick flick” — hence the focus on teenage boys.
But there is a silver lining. Bickford believes that, lamentable as the studios’ neglect of the female audience is, it may be the main reason we are now seeing so many terrific films starring women. “As the studios have become more intensely focused on male-oriented blockbusters, it has opened up a huge area for the independents to exploit. Clearly, the studios have underestimated the potential buying power of the adult — non-teenage — female audience. These movies are showing that. Anybody who doesn’t like watching Bening or Streep or Mirren is blind. And the thing about the baby-boom female audience is that if the price is right, it is very lucrative.” The Devil Wears Prada, for instance, which was targeted strongly at older women, has taken $125m at the US box office, much the same as Mission: Impossible III, which cost five times as much to make. You do the maths.
It’s also becoming clear that the recent success on television of female-driven dramas and comedies such as Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City and Grey’s Anatomy has been a huge factor in spurring at least the independent companies in Hollywood to make films for the (mainly older) women who are watching them. “Television is showing that the audience is there for dramas that depict more complicated women — and by complicated, I mean anyone over 25,” Bickford says. “Blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean have a lot of parts for men, older men, as character actors,” she points out. “Where are the great women’s roles in those movies? But these actresses have to work, so they are almost forced to seek out more interesting and edgy roles, as this year’s films show.”
Daniel Battsek, the Brit who now runs Miramax, agrees. “There is this group of wonderful actresses — Mirren, Streep, Redgrave, Bening and Christie, to name just a few — who don’t stop being great just because they’ve reached a certain age. In fact, their performances are even richer because of their age and experience. This amazing pool really demands that movies be found that are appropriate to their talents.”
Mirren, who is 61 and the frontrunner for the best actress Oscar, is philosophical. “There are fewer roles,” she acknowledges, “but the roles get better as you get older. They become deeper, more complicated and more interesting. It’s those young roles that are tedious.”
Heroine chic
The Oscar race will showcase a golden generation of actresses — in films that do their talents justice. What a refreshing change, says Christopher Goodwin
Every year at this time, a familiar lament can usually be heard in Hollywood: why are there so few good parts for women, especially for older actresses? This year, though, as the trade press begins to fill with ads touting the Oscar contenders, it’s becoming clear that an amazing number of actresses — many of them British, and many beyond the age when Hollywood normally puts them out to grass — will be in the running in January. The 2007 shortlist will highlight the richest array of female talent in more than a generation.
The roles are also incredibly varied: Helen Mirren as a dowdy but surprisingly sympathetic monarch in The Queen; Meryl Streep as the nightmarish editor in The Devil Wears Prada; *you know who* Cruz as a mother with a terrible family secret in Volver; Kate Winslet as an adulterous housewife in Little Children; Julie Christie as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away from Her; Sienna Miller as the drugged-out Warhol icon Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl; Beyoncé Knowles as a diva-esque 1960s soul singer in Dreamgirls; Nicole Kidman as the controversial photographer Diane Arbus in Fur; Renée Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter; Naomi Watts as a doctor’s wife coping with marriage and the tropics in The Painted Veil; Annette Bening as a mentally unstable mother in Running with Scissors; Ashley Judd as a thirtysomething single woman in Come Early Morning; Charlotte Rampling as a sex tourist in Heading South; Judi Dench as a nosy teacher in Notes on a Scandal; Cate Blanchett, in the same film, as a teacher having an affair with one of her students, and in The Good German as a woman attempting to escape her past; Brittany Murphy trying to control the downward spiral of her life in The Dead Girl; even Abigail Breslin, the delightful young star of Little Miss Sunshine, as Olive, who is so keen to appear in a beauty contest.
There are so many great leading parts for women this year that some of these actresses may end up competing in the best supporting category, where they could find Emma Thompson as a suicidal author in Stranger than Fiction; Frances de la Tour in The History Boys; Vera Farmiga as a mobster’s girlfriend in The Departed; Jennifer Hudson as a soul singer in Dreamgirls; Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee in Infamous; and Sharon Stone as a beautician in Bobby, about the day Robert F Kennedy was murdered. (Stone is in the unlikely position of also being the frontrunner for worst actress at the Razzie awards, for Basic Instinct 2.) Yet the vast majority of these films are made by independent companies. The perennial criticism of the major Hollywood studios — for not creating good parts for women, and for not making films that women (and I don’t mean teenage girls) want to see — is still valid. This year, for example, women were not the protagonists of any of the films nominated for best picture. Reese Witherspoon won best actress Oscar for playing June Carter Cash, the endlessly supportive wife of Walk the Line’s real subject, Johnny Cash. And the only actress over 50 to win an Oscar in either acting category in the past two decades is Judi Dench, best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love in 1999.
“It’s Hollywood’s fault,” says Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director of Volver, who knows a thing or two about creating great roles for women. “In other countries, we encourage diversity and want to tell stories about all kinds of women. In the past decade, you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have revolved around women. The studios have forgotten that women are fascinating, more than just mannequins.”
There was a time — really, up until the mid-1950s and the advent of television — when many of Hollywood’s biggest money-spinners were “women’s pictures”. Many of the top stars of those years were women: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn among them. Even a few years ago, the studios were still in the business of making films for women: the Meg Ryan comedies of the late 1980s and early 1990s; more recently, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Runaway Bride and Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts; and Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama, starring Witherspoon. But in the past three or four years, even the romantic comedies that used to be made starring women, and with the female audience in mind, are now being made for men: witness Wedding Crashers and Meet the Fockers, where the women are little more than sexed-up ciphers.
“The major studios are going after what they call the ‘four quadrants’,” says Laura Bickford, the producer who made Traffic as a studio film and Fur with independent financing and distribution. “And they have made a business decision that for their $150m movies, they have to have the teenage male ‘quadrant’.” This model breaks the audience into four parts: men under 25, men over 25, women under 25 and women over 25. Because budgets are now so high, the studios calculate they need to hit as many of the quadrants as they can — all four, they hope. But their research shows that whereas women will go to see “guy” movies, men won’t be seen dead in the queue for a “chick flick” — hence the focus on teenage boys.
But there is a silver lining. Bickford believes that, lamentable as the studios’ neglect of the female audience is, it may be the main reason we are now seeing so many terrific films starring women. “As the studios have become more intensely focused on male-oriented blockbusters, it has opened up a huge area for the independents to exploit. Clearly, the studios have underestimated the potential buying power of the adult — non-teenage — female audience. These movies are showing that. Anybody who doesn’t like watching Bening or Streep or Mirren is blind. And the thing about the baby-boom female audience is that if the price is right, it is very lucrative.” The Devil Wears Prada, for instance, which was targeted strongly at older women, has taken $125m at the US box office, much the same as Mission: Impossible III, which cost five times as much to make. You do the maths.
It’s also becoming clear that the recent success on television of female-driven dramas and comedies such as Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City and Grey’s Anatomy has been a huge factor in spurring at least the independent companies in Hollywood to make films for the (mainly older) women who are watching them. “Television is showing that the audience is there for dramas that depict more complicated women — and by complicated, I mean anyone over 25,” Bickford says. “Blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean have a lot of parts for men, older men, as character actors,” she points out. “Where are the great women’s roles in those movies? But these actresses have to work, so they are almost forced to seek out more interesting and edgy roles, as this year’s films show.”
Daniel Battsek, the Brit who now runs Miramax, agrees. “There is this group of wonderful actresses — Mirren, Streep, Redgrave, Bening and Christie, to name just a few — who don’t stop being great just because they’ve reached a certain age. In fact, their performances are even richer because of their age and experience. This amazing pool really demands that movies be found that are appropriate to their talents.”
Mirren, who is 61 and the frontrunner for the best actress Oscar, is philosophical. “There are fewer roles,” she acknowledges, “but the roles get better as you get older. They become deeper, more complicated and more interesting. It’s those young roles that are tedious.”
www.timesonline.co.uk
FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS
Rated:R
For movie details, please click here.
She was not the first artist fascinated by the bizarre. Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel created grotesque fantasy paintings in the 15th and 16th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci went out of his way to find ugly physical specimens in the marketplace of Florence, paying the freaks of his day to model for him as if to drive home the point that extreme asymmetry was as aesthetically important as perfect symmetry. The value of the bizarre as a legitimate subject for photography was Diane Arbus' signature. Indeed, before the end of Fur we begin to question our notions of what is bizarre and what is not, as the film forces its audience to travel a visual and emotional journey very close to the one that Arbus herself must have experienced.
Not a conventional biography, Fur takes us from the time in 1958 when Arbus (Nicole Kidman) did her best to live the conventional life of a dutiful wife and daughter to the point when she struck out on her own singular artistic mission. Director Steven Shainberg (Secretary) skillfully recreates the painful social and emotional restrictions endured by women of the period. Arbus was anything but a rebel, her husband Allan (Ty Burrell) was anything but a tyrant, but her life under the overbearing interference of her wealthy mother (Jane Alexander) and father (Harris Yulin), as well as the constant demands of her two daughters (Emmy Clarke and Genevieve McCarthy), gave her no time for self-expression. She was simply a cog in the wheel of marital harmony, and the moment when she has to answer the question, "What do you do?" is as painful as it is telling.
Into her ever-frustrating existence comes a stranger, Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.), a mysterious man wearing a mask over his head, who moves into the highest apartment in her building. The two seem drawn to each other immediately. His mystery not only intrigues Diane, but fascinates her. The more she learns about Lionel, an apparent circus freak with exquisite manners whose body is covered by hair from head to foot, the more she falls under his spell. Lionel takes her on expeditions to his own circle of friends, all of whom offer lifestyles foreign to her expectations. Yet they are warm, loving, open individuals. It is a milieu she cannot resist, one that always surprises, and it is only a matter of time before she acknowledges to herself that she is more at home in the world of the grotesque than she is in the society to which she was born. Her explorations are punctuated with powerfully erotic scenes that expose the sexual starvation beneath her tranquil facade.
Although subtitled "An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," much of the film adheres closely to basic facts of Arbus' life: her wealthy parents, her tolerant husband, and the city, New York, which offered her an infinite number of people to explore. Biographer/co-producer Patricia Bosworth has helped ensure that every element of this film is true to Arbus' spirit, if not her actual experience. From its opening comic scene in which Diane visits a nudist colony, Fur is permeated with a constant tension that evokes the mystery of Arbus' awakening vision of humanity. Kidman's performance is her best to date, filled with a kind of reluctant heroism that is as unexpected as it is courageous. Downey gives a remarkably restrained performance, totally unlike any other in his often manic career.
It is a testament to Arbus' vision and influence that much of what was shocking in 1958 has become accessible as well as acceptable in 2006. Amy Danger's production design and Shainberg's powerful evocation of Arbus' life and sensibility give us compelling portraits of the world she changed forever.
Critic: Bruce Feld
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/rev...t_id=1003379982
Rated:R
For movie details, please click here.
She was not the first artist fascinated by the bizarre. Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel created grotesque fantasy paintings in the 15th and 16th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci went out of his way to find ugly physical specimens in the marketplace of Florence, paying the freaks of his day to model for him as if to drive home the point that extreme asymmetry was as aesthetically important as perfect symmetry. The value of the bizarre as a legitimate subject for photography was Diane Arbus' signature. Indeed, before the end of Fur we begin to question our notions of what is bizarre and what is not, as the film forces its audience to travel a visual and emotional journey very close to the one that Arbus herself must have experienced.
Not a conventional biography, Fur takes us from the time in 1958 when Arbus (Nicole Kidman) did her best to live the conventional life of a dutiful wife and daughter to the point when she struck out on her own singular artistic mission. Director Steven Shainberg (Secretary) skillfully recreates the painful social and emotional restrictions endured by women of the period. Arbus was anything but a rebel, her husband Allan (Ty Burrell) was anything but a tyrant, but her life under the overbearing interference of her wealthy mother (Jane Alexander) and father (Harris Yulin), as well as the constant demands of her two daughters (Emmy Clarke and Genevieve McCarthy), gave her no time for self-expression. She was simply a cog in the wheel of marital harmony, and the moment when she has to answer the question, "What do you do?" is as painful as it is telling.
Into her ever-frustrating existence comes a stranger, Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.), a mysterious man wearing a mask over his head, who moves into the highest apartment in her building. The two seem drawn to each other immediately. His mystery not only intrigues Diane, but fascinates her. The more she learns about Lionel, an apparent circus freak with exquisite manners whose body is covered by hair from head to foot, the more she falls under his spell. Lionel takes her on expeditions to his own circle of friends, all of whom offer lifestyles foreign to her expectations. Yet they are warm, loving, open individuals. It is a milieu she cannot resist, one that always surprises, and it is only a matter of time before she acknowledges to herself that she is more at home in the world of the grotesque than she is in the society to which she was born. Her explorations are punctuated with powerfully erotic scenes that expose the sexual starvation beneath her tranquil facade.
Although subtitled "An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," much of the film adheres closely to basic facts of Arbus' life: her wealthy parents, her tolerant husband, and the city, New York, which offered her an infinite number of people to explore. Biographer/co-producer Patricia Bosworth has helped ensure that every element of this film is true to Arbus' spirit, if not her actual experience. From its opening comic scene in which Diane visits a nudist colony, Fur is permeated with a constant tension that evokes the mystery of Arbus' awakening vision of humanity. Kidman's performance is her best to date, filled with a kind of reluctant heroism that is as unexpected as it is courageous. Downey gives a remarkably restrained performance, totally unlike any other in his often manic career.
It is a testament to Arbus' vision and influence that much of what was shocking in 1958 has become accessible as well as acceptable in 2006. Amy Danger's production design and Shainberg's powerful evocation of Arbus' life and sensibility give us compelling portraits of the world she changed forever.
Critic: Bruce Feld
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/rev...t_id=1003379982
QUOTE
Kidman's performance is her best to date, filled with a kind of reluctant heroism that is as unexpected as it is courageous. Downey gives a remarkably restrained performance, totally unlike any other in his often manic career.
What an awesome review.
Thanks Skanky for the link.
thnx
what an extraordinary review. it is certainly one of the most favourable i have red so far. i totally agree with the author on the "What do you do?" scene that really makes you feel uncomfortable because it is so realistic. it is certainly one of the most, perhaps even the most important scenes of the whole movie.
what an extraordinary review. it is certainly one of the most favourable i have red so far. i totally agree with the author on the "What do you do?" scene that really makes you feel uncomfortable because it is so realistic. it is certainly one of the most, perhaps even the most important scenes of the whole movie.
I was fortunate to see Fur yesterday. (I'm in San Antonio, TX, so I'm glad Fur is shown in more than a few really large metro areas.)
I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. I thought it was very beautifully crafted to reflect what Diane Arbus's work was really about. Most critics missed a major concept of the movie (as they weren't willing to "think outside the box").
As all great art does, Arbus' venture into the "unknown" portrays the "secrets within secrets" of humanity. You can't seek out the "secrets" of what we as humans are without being brave enough to explore unique, unmasked aspects of the human race, even though it's very frightening (traumatic) at times. As portrayed in Fur (a scene also from Bosworth's bio of Arbus), when Arbus was a little girl she stepped out of her apartment home high above New York City onto a building ledge and repeated as she looked out over the city "I must be brave..I must be brave" which I think probably was Arbus' mantra to explore what frightened her and which nevertheless led her to discover many secrets within secrets through her photographs. This theme of "secrets" is carried out through the movie even to Arbus' last words before Fur ends..."Tell me a secret..."
I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. I thought it was very beautifully crafted to reflect what Diane Arbus's work was really about. Most critics missed a major concept of the movie (as they weren't willing to "think outside the box").
As all great art does, Arbus' venture into the "unknown" portrays the "secrets within secrets" of humanity. You can't seek out the "secrets" of what we as humans are without being brave enough to explore unique, unmasked aspects of the human race, even though it's very frightening (traumatic) at times. As portrayed in Fur (a scene also from Bosworth's bio of Arbus), when Arbus was a little girl she stepped out of her apartment home high above New York City onto a building ledge and repeated as she looked out over the city "I must be brave..I must be brave" which I think probably was Arbus' mantra to explore what frightened her and which nevertheless led her to discover many secrets within secrets through her photographs. This theme of "secrets" is carried out through the movie even to Arbus' last words before Fur ends..."Tell me a secret..."
QUOTE(gracie @ Dec 3 2006, 09:51 AM)
I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. I thought it was very beautifully crafted to reflect what Diane Arbus's work was really about. Most critics missed a major concept of the movie (as they weren't willing to "think outside the box").
I agree gracie.
here is a very intereting article about steven shainberg with some very good comments on fur:
www.sun-sentinel.com
QUOTE
Taking Arbus to the next level
Filmmaker develops a portrait of the photographer by imagining her muse.
By Jennifer Frey
The Washington Post
Posted December 3 2006
Filmmaker Steven Shainberg's voice is rising in expletive-riddled excitement, drawing warning glances from the guards at a photography exhibition at the National Gallery's West Building, and even an occasional shush.
Forgive Shainberg, but, at a moment like this, shush isn't his style. A Robert Frank photograph? He worked for the man his first year out of college and can describe and explain every single one of his photographs. Helen Levitt? Oh, she was friends with his mom, used to come out with the family to Cape Cod to summer. Look at that Walker Evans -- did you know that legendary photographer Diane Arbus was so terrified of him that upon arriving at his apartment, she refused to get out of the car?
Ah, Arbus. The reason Shainberg is in Washington, D.C., for an interview, responding to the photographs in "The Streets of New York: American Photographs From the Collection, 1938-1958" like a hyperactive kid with the insight and intellect of a top photography critic. His experimental take on Arbus' life -- Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (starring Nicole Kidman in the title role) -- has just opened, to much buzz and some controversy over that whole "imaginary" part.
Before he sits down to explain that decision, though, he works his way methodically and eagerly through the exhibition, eventually landing in front of one of two Arbus photographs being shown, Female Impersonator With Jewels, from 1958.
"When I look at this picture," he says, "I feel like I've gone two doors down the hallway further." Huh? He tries to explain, gesturing to the photographs that had come before. "Arbus said, `You guys went this far, I'm going to go two doors further.'"
And that's exactly what Shainberg set out to do with the film.
Photos and stories
Shainberg grew up with Arbus photographs on his walls, and stories from his uncle, author Lawrence Shainberg, who was one of Arbus' close friends until her death, by suicide, in 1971. He's had a lifetime fascination with her, with Arbus' gift for capturing the unusual and eccentric -- dwarfs, giants, transvestites -- with an authenticity that haunts some and horrifies others. The logical and safe and predictable thing for her would have been to continue her life as wife and mother and assistant to her fashion-photographer husband, Allan Arbus. Only she didn't.
The logical and safe entrance into the story of Arbus' life would have been through Door No.1: the Hollywood biopic. Not for Shainberg. Not for the guy whose breakout film, Secretary, a sadomasochistic love story (starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal), is about the healing power of a good spanking over the boss' desk.
He wanted to make a movie "true to her spirit and true to what my connection to her is," Shainberg says. The result, Fur, creates a fictional relationship between Arbus (whose first name is pronounced DE-ann) and a mysterious man, Lionel, who lives in the apartment above hers. Lionel, played by Robert Downey Jr., serves as her guide as she ventures into the darker sides of society that will eventually become the focus of her photography. He is, in fact, presented as the first portrait she takes.
In other words, Shainberg went straight to Door No.3, and stepped into a world of fairy-tale noir, one inhabited by a fictional man-muse covered entirely in fur.
Which door to pick?
Spend two hours listening to Shainberg talk -- about his life, his art, his motivations and especially about his sense of fellowship with Arbus -- and somehow it hardly seems fair to render his life entirely through Door No.1, aka the traditional narrative.
To wit:
Door No. 1 -- a brief biographical sketch of Steven Shainberg, age 43. He grew up on the upper east side of Manhattan with a father, David, who was a psychoanalyst, and a mother, Diane, a psychiatrist who became a Buddhist nun. (They divorced when he was 14.) He has a sister and a half brother. His family was, as he puts it, "unbelievably literate." He went to private schools, then Yale, and studied at the American Film Institute for three years in his mid-20s. He made some successful short films, did some work for MTV, got into commercials. His first movie, Hit Me, came out in 1996. He hates L.A.; loves New York, where he lives with his wife, documentary filmmaker Rachel Boynton.
Then there's Door No. 3 -- Shainberg on what drew him to the Mary Gaitskill short story that was the basis for Secretary.
"I'm almost exclusively interested in what happens behind closed doors, between people," Shainberg says. "The removal of their public face. ... Those two people in the story I just found incredibly touching. Like, who's this senator who just got nabbed?"
You mean former congressman Mark Foley?
"I found Foley, like, so touching. It's so amazing. The need and -- it's not even desperation, because that's almost pejorative -- but the energy is undeniable. It's fantastic. And beautiful. And everybody knows about that, in one form or another. Not necessarily teenage boys. But everybody has a connection to that desire and to that pain and to that conflict. And I find it really touching that people go through it."
`Artistic blind date'
Secretary was a collaborative project between Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson, who also scripted Fur. A mutual friend set up Shainberg and Wilson on what she refers to as an "artistic blind date" years ago because, she says, the two seemed to have "similar sensibilities."
As in?
"Sense of humor," she says. "Sense of power relationships. Sense of what is erotic and sensual and dirty and fun. Sense of what is most emotionally moving about seemingly creepy subject matter. These are all things we share, along with a political incorrectness. The bottom line is, we're both committed to dealing with typically dark subjects ... and revealing the beauty and vulnerability of that which seems scary and horrible."
To going two more doors down the hallway, as Arbus did.
"After Secretary, I was wanting very badly to find something to make that I really cared about," says Shainberg. The rights to Arbus' story -- specifically Diane Arbus: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth -- were always owned by someone else, though no scripts ever made their way into production.
Then one day the producers currently in possession of the film rights -- Edward Pressman and Bonnie Timmerman -- called him, Shainberg says, and asked, "Do you know who Diane Arbus is?"
Shainberg widens his eyes to emphasize his shock. He and Wilson signed on.
Fairy-tale muse
So what happened when they told the producers that their vision of the film involved a fictional guy who lived in an apartment upstairs from the Arbus family ... and happened to be covered in fur?
"It was hysterical because no one knew what to say," Shainberg says.
But everyone bought in, including Downey, who had to undergo three hours a day of "makeup" -- getting fur glued on -- before shooting.
Downey's character is designed to represent the two biggest influences on Arbus' professional life -- photographer Lisette Model and painter Marvin Israel -- as well as the eccentric characters who were the hallmark of her work.
"He is at once her subject, her object of desire, he is her imagination, her muse, and he's also her mentor," Wilson says. "I needed him to be otherworldly. I needed him to be from a fairy-tale world."
Shainberg goes on to explain: Arbus felt that "in going out into the world to make pictures that she was having an Alice in Wonderland experience," he says. "So that idea of the myth and that idea of the fairy tale wasn't something that I imposed upon her life. It came from things she said. And it also comes from her work. Her work has all the qualities of a fairy tale -- giants and dwarfs and transvestites. It is a kind of in-the-rabbit-hole world."
The gamble now is whether viewers are willing to go down the rabbit hole and embrace what's behind Door No.3. Not that the risk would ever have stopped Shainberg.
"I like," he says, "to keep going further and further down the hall."
Filmmaker develops a portrait of the photographer by imagining her muse.
By Jennifer Frey
The Washington Post
Posted December 3 2006
Filmmaker Steven Shainberg's voice is rising in expletive-riddled excitement, drawing warning glances from the guards at a photography exhibition at the National Gallery's West Building, and even an occasional shush.
Forgive Shainberg, but, at a moment like this, shush isn't his style. A Robert Frank photograph? He worked for the man his first year out of college and can describe and explain every single one of his photographs. Helen Levitt? Oh, she was friends with his mom, used to come out with the family to Cape Cod to summer. Look at that Walker Evans -- did you know that legendary photographer Diane Arbus was so terrified of him that upon arriving at his apartment, she refused to get out of the car?
Ah, Arbus. The reason Shainberg is in Washington, D.C., for an interview, responding to the photographs in "The Streets of New York: American Photographs From the Collection, 1938-1958" like a hyperactive kid with the insight and intellect of a top photography critic. His experimental take on Arbus' life -- Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (starring Nicole Kidman in the title role) -- has just opened, to much buzz and some controversy over that whole "imaginary" part.
Before he sits down to explain that decision, though, he works his way methodically and eagerly through the exhibition, eventually landing in front of one of two Arbus photographs being shown, Female Impersonator With Jewels, from 1958.
"When I look at this picture," he says, "I feel like I've gone two doors down the hallway further." Huh? He tries to explain, gesturing to the photographs that had come before. "Arbus said, `You guys went this far, I'm going to go two doors further.'"
And that's exactly what Shainberg set out to do with the film.
Photos and stories
Shainberg grew up with Arbus photographs on his walls, and stories from his uncle, author Lawrence Shainberg, who was one of Arbus' close friends until her death, by suicide, in 1971. He's had a lifetime fascination with her, with Arbus' gift for capturing the unusual and eccentric -- dwarfs, giants, transvestites -- with an authenticity that haunts some and horrifies others. The logical and safe and predictable thing for her would have been to continue her life as wife and mother and assistant to her fashion-photographer husband, Allan Arbus. Only she didn't.
The logical and safe entrance into the story of Arbus' life would have been through Door No.1: the Hollywood biopic. Not for Shainberg. Not for the guy whose breakout film, Secretary, a sadomasochistic love story (starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal), is about the healing power of a good spanking over the boss' desk.
He wanted to make a movie "true to her spirit and true to what my connection to her is," Shainberg says. The result, Fur, creates a fictional relationship between Arbus (whose first name is pronounced DE-ann) and a mysterious man, Lionel, who lives in the apartment above hers. Lionel, played by Robert Downey Jr., serves as her guide as she ventures into the darker sides of society that will eventually become the focus of her photography. He is, in fact, presented as the first portrait she takes.
In other words, Shainberg went straight to Door No.3, and stepped into a world of fairy-tale noir, one inhabited by a fictional man-muse covered entirely in fur.
Which door to pick?
Spend two hours listening to Shainberg talk -- about his life, his art, his motivations and especially about his sense of fellowship with Arbus -- and somehow it hardly seems fair to render his life entirely through Door No.1, aka the traditional narrative.
To wit:
Door No. 1 -- a brief biographical sketch of Steven Shainberg, age 43. He grew up on the upper east side of Manhattan with a father, David, who was a psychoanalyst, and a mother, Diane, a psychiatrist who became a Buddhist nun. (They divorced when he was 14.) He has a sister and a half brother. His family was, as he puts it, "unbelievably literate." He went to private schools, then Yale, and studied at the American Film Institute for three years in his mid-20s. He made some successful short films, did some work for MTV, got into commercials. His first movie, Hit Me, came out in 1996. He hates L.A.; loves New York, where he lives with his wife, documentary filmmaker Rachel Boynton.
Then there's Door No. 3 -- Shainberg on what drew him to the Mary Gaitskill short story that was the basis for Secretary.
"I'm almost exclusively interested in what happens behind closed doors, between people," Shainberg says. "The removal of their public face. ... Those two people in the story I just found incredibly touching. Like, who's this senator who just got nabbed?"
You mean former congressman Mark Foley?
"I found Foley, like, so touching. It's so amazing. The need and -- it's not even desperation, because that's almost pejorative -- but the energy is undeniable. It's fantastic. And beautiful. And everybody knows about that, in one form or another. Not necessarily teenage boys. But everybody has a connection to that desire and to that pain and to that conflict. And I find it really touching that people go through it."
`Artistic blind date'
Secretary was a collaborative project between Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson, who also scripted Fur. A mutual friend set up Shainberg and Wilson on what she refers to as an "artistic blind date" years ago because, she says, the two seemed to have "similar sensibilities."
As in?
"Sense of humor," she says. "Sense of power relationships. Sense of what is erotic and sensual and dirty and fun. Sense of what is most emotionally moving about seemingly creepy subject matter. These are all things we share, along with a political incorrectness. The bottom line is, we're both committed to dealing with typically dark subjects ... and revealing the beauty and vulnerability of that which seems scary and horrible."
To going two more doors down the hallway, as Arbus did.
"After Secretary, I was wanting very badly to find something to make that I really cared about," says Shainberg. The rights to Arbus' story -- specifically Diane Arbus: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth -- were always owned by someone else, though no scripts ever made their way into production.
Then one day the producers currently in possession of the film rights -- Edward Pressman and Bonnie Timmerman -- called him, Shainberg says, and asked, "Do you know who Diane Arbus is?"
Shainberg widens his eyes to emphasize his shock. He and Wilson signed on.
Fairy-tale muse
So what happened when they told the producers that their vision of the film involved a fictional guy who lived in an apartment upstairs from the Arbus family ... and happened to be covered in fur?
"It was hysterical because no one knew what to say," Shainberg says.
But everyone bought in, including Downey, who had to undergo three hours a day of "makeup" -- getting fur glued on -- before shooting.
Downey's character is designed to represent the two biggest influences on Arbus' professional life -- photographer Lisette Model and painter Marvin Israel -- as well as the eccentric characters who were the hallmark of her work.
"He is at once her subject, her object of desire, he is her imagination, her muse, and he's also her mentor," Wilson says. "I needed him to be otherworldly. I needed him to be from a fairy-tale world."
Shainberg goes on to explain: Arbus felt that "in going out into the world to make pictures that she was having an Alice in Wonderland experience," he says. "So that idea of the myth and that idea of the fairy tale wasn't something that I imposed upon her life. It came from things she said. And it also comes from her work. Her work has all the qualities of a fairy tale -- giants and dwarfs and transvestites. It is a kind of in-the-rabbit-hole world."
The gamble now is whether viewers are willing to go down the rabbit hole and embrace what's behind Door No.3. Not that the risk would ever have stopped Shainberg.
"I like," he says, "to keep going further and further down the hall."
www.sun-sentinel.com
QUOTE(Grace Margaret Mulligan @ Dec 3 2006, 08:41 PM)
here is a very intereting article about steven shainberg with some very good comments on fur:
www.sun-sentinel.com
www.sun-sentinel.com
Grace, I love that interview with Shainberg...critics and movie goers might have modified their first reaction to Fur if they'd had a chance to read about where the director was coming from!
Thanks very much for sharing the interview!
Love's fur real
NICOLE Kidman and Robert Downer Jr star in Fur, a fictional account of (real) photographer Diane Arbus, and a love affair which inspired her to embrace the strange and unusual in her pictures.
Kidman plays Arbus at a time in her life when she is happily married in a wealthy New York family. But she unexpectedly falls in love with a new neighbour, Lionel Sweeney (Downey Jr), who has hypertrichosis. This is the condition sometimes referred to as Werewolf Syndrome, leaving those affected by it extremely hairy all over. Downey Jr is said to resemble Chewbaca from the Star Wars films in his role.
The made up love affair introduces Arbus to the kind of world she comes to capture and share with the world in her remarkable career.
An interesting mix of fact and, mostly, fiction make up this portrait of one of the iconic photographers of the 20th century.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, certificate 15, on general release from Friday March 16.
source: http://www.bromleytimes.co.uk
NICOLE Kidman and Robert Downer Jr star in Fur, a fictional account of (real) photographer Diane Arbus, and a love affair which inspired her to embrace the strange and unusual in her pictures.
Kidman plays Arbus at a time in her life when she is happily married in a wealthy New York family. But she unexpectedly falls in love with a new neighbour, Lionel Sweeney (Downey Jr), who has hypertrichosis. This is the condition sometimes referred to as Werewolf Syndrome, leaving those affected by it extremely hairy all over. Downey Jr is said to resemble Chewbaca from the Star Wars films in his role.
The made up love affair introduces Arbus to the kind of world she comes to capture and share with the world in her remarkable career.
An interesting mix of fact and, mostly, fiction make up this portrait of one of the iconic photographers of the 20th century.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, certificate 15, on general release from Friday March 16.
source: http://www.bromleytimes.co.uk
From The Times
March 14, 2007
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
James Christopher
15, 121 mins
4 out of 5 stars
The clever spin that Steven Shainberg applies to Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is not to treat the material like a biopic at all. In fact it would be difficult to attribute a single frame of this quirky fantasy to Patricia Bosworth’s earnest biography if it wasn’t for the title credits. This is a genuinely novel way to explore a life that has famously eluded any conventional covers. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it is the male director of Secretary who has painted this almost feminist fairytale of Arbus.
Nicole Kidman is the pinched and lonely wife, Diane (pronounced Dee-Anne). Her sensible husband makes a living by photographing kitsch adverts for catalogues. Diane’s rich and stifling parents provide the biggest contracts via the fur trade. “I take light-readings and iron clothes,” explains Diane to a studio full of bored clients. You could choke on the tedium.
The arrival of a mysterious masked stranger in the large apartment above sparks a bizarre and touching fable. It rapidly transpires that Robert Downey Jr has retired as the main attraction from a freak show. He is carpeted from head to foot in hair; a genetic accident has made him capable of winning Crufts.
The beautiful Diane is mesmerised by this beast. A sharp, almost sexual, desire to photograph him opens a metaphorical door. Downey’s huge brown eyes and sophisticated manners are the disarming tools. His freakery empowers Diane. His life on the fringe (with weird and misshapen friends to match) is a terrific source of visual drama. Nothing needs to be spelled out. What Shainberg captures on film is as familiar as the Brothers Grimm, and yet as strange as David Lynch. Diane’s art is to make it feel normal. It drives her loyal husband (Ty Burrell) and her two confused young daughters to a distraction bordering on despair.
Kidman delivers another standout performance, transparent and magnetic. Burrell is no match for Downey’s hypnotic beast. The hairy romantic chemistry with Kidman is electric, the context inspired.
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March 14, 2007
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
James Christopher
15, 121 mins
4 out of 5 stars
The clever spin that Steven Shainberg applies to Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is not to treat the material like a biopic at all. In fact it would be difficult to attribute a single frame of this quirky fantasy to Patricia Bosworth’s earnest biography if it wasn’t for the title credits. This is a genuinely novel way to explore a life that has famously eluded any conventional covers. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it is the male director of Secretary who has painted this almost feminist fairytale of Arbus.
Nicole Kidman is the pinched and lonely wife, Diane (pronounced Dee-Anne). Her sensible husband makes a living by photographing kitsch adverts for catalogues. Diane’s rich and stifling parents provide the biggest contracts via the fur trade. “I take light-readings and iron clothes,” explains Diane to a studio full of bored clients. You could choke on the tedium.
The arrival of a mysterious masked stranger in the large apartment above sparks a bizarre and touching fable. It rapidly transpires that Robert Downey Jr has retired as the main attraction from a freak show. He is carpeted from head to foot in hair; a genetic accident has made him capable of winning Crufts.
The beautiful Diane is mesmerised by this beast. A sharp, almost sexual, desire to photograph him opens a metaphorical door. Downey’s huge brown eyes and sophisticated manners are the disarming tools. His freakery empowers Diane. His life on the fringe (with weird and misshapen friends to match) is a terrific source of visual drama. Nothing needs to be spelled out. What Shainberg captures on film is as familiar as the Brothers Grimm, and yet as strange as David Lynch. Diane’s art is to make it feel normal. It drives her loyal husband (Ty Burrell) and her two confused young daughters to a distraction bordering on despair.
Kidman delivers another standout performance, transparent and magnetic. Burrell is no match for Downey’s hypnotic beast. The hairy romantic chemistry with Kidman is electric, the context inspired.
Contact our advertising teamfor advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times visit the Syndication website. © Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle1515886.ece
Fur (15)
Fur
Plot
A biopic of the life and times of American photographer Diane Arbus, who began in the fashion industry and ended up building her portfolio with photos of 'freaks and misfits'.
Empire Review
With its subtitle, “An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus”, this tribute to the celebrated and controversial photographer Diane Arbus confesses that it is not a conventional biography, but a fantasy expressing her inner experience. Well, alright then! Most biopics of artists make it all up anyway, but it’s good of them to say so.
Still, art lovers’ hackles may rise as it offers a simplistic, if bizarro, vision of Arbus’ artistic awakening. Diane here is devoted wife, mother and assistant to her fashion-photographer husband Allan (Ty Burrell). Her vulnerability is explained by meeting her wealthy, overbearing parents. She’s stifled. We know this because she sneaks outside to unbutton her prim dress and breathe. All she needed, apparently, was to meet a man — admittedly an unusual one — to teach her that oddity is the real beauty. We know this before she ever snaps her camera because all his chums are lookalikes of Arbus’ ’60s photographic subjects: dwarves, a woman without arms, transvestites, twins.
Give it up for Nicole Kidman. She seems to have an affinity with frustrated artists who committed suicide. It’s another adventurous choice of hers to work with the director (Steven Shainberg) and screenwriter (Erin Cressida Wilson) of the bold Secretary. And she’s well matched in the acting stakes by Robert Downey Jr., whose Lionel, circus freak turned reclusive wigmaker, turns his top-floor flat into what looks like the tower in an enchanted castle. Unmasked, every inch of him is covered with luxuriant hair; he’s a dead ringer for the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête. There are also obvious allusions to Alice In Wonderland and a humorous delight in some far-fetched elements, although other notions teeter towards silliness (check out jealous husband Allan’s sprouting beard).
Downey Jr. is not just his usual great value; he is spellbinding. Those dark eyes penetrate through his pelt, exerting a supernatural charm that makes a memorably erotic love scene believable and affecting. Kidman, exposed without the assistance of any physical peculiarities, meets the singular challenge of conveying an artist’s inner journey with a quiet, subtle, passionate intelligence. More likeable, some might feel, than the real Arbus or her provocative images.
Verdict
Far-out touches and liberal application of metaphor are compensated for by intensity and two mesmerising performances.
3 out of 5 stars
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/Review...e.asp?FID=11013
Fur
Plot
A biopic of the life and times of American photographer Diane Arbus, who began in the fashion industry and ended up building her portfolio with photos of 'freaks and misfits'.
Empire Review
With its subtitle, “An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus”, this tribute to the celebrated and controversial photographer Diane Arbus confesses that it is not a conventional biography, but a fantasy expressing her inner experience. Well, alright then! Most biopics of artists make it all up anyway, but it’s good of them to say so.
Still, art lovers’ hackles may rise as it offers a simplistic, if bizarro, vision of Arbus’ artistic awakening. Diane here is devoted wife, mother and assistant to her fashion-photographer husband Allan (Ty Burrell). Her vulnerability is explained by meeting her wealthy, overbearing parents. She’s stifled. We know this because she sneaks outside to unbutton her prim dress and breathe. All she needed, apparently, was to meet a man — admittedly an unusual one — to teach her that oddity is the real beauty. We know this before she ever snaps her camera because all his chums are lookalikes of Arbus’ ’60s photographic subjects: dwarves, a woman without arms, transvestites, twins.
Give it up for Nicole Kidman. She seems to have an affinity with frustrated artists who committed suicide. It’s another adventurous choice of hers to work with the director (Steven Shainberg) and screenwriter (Erin Cressida Wilson) of the bold Secretary. And she’s well matched in the acting stakes by Robert Downey Jr., whose Lionel, circus freak turned reclusive wigmaker, turns his top-floor flat into what looks like the tower in an enchanted castle. Unmasked, every inch of him is covered with luxuriant hair; he’s a dead ringer for the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête. There are also obvious allusions to Alice In Wonderland and a humorous delight in some far-fetched elements, although other notions teeter towards silliness (check out jealous husband Allan’s sprouting beard).
Downey Jr. is not just his usual great value; he is spellbinding. Those dark eyes penetrate through his pelt, exerting a supernatural charm that makes a memorably erotic love scene believable and affecting. Kidman, exposed without the assistance of any physical peculiarities, meets the singular challenge of conveying an artist’s inner journey with a quiet, subtle, passionate intelligence. More likeable, some might feel, than the real Arbus or her provocative images.
Verdict
Far-out touches and liberal application of metaphor are compensated for by intensity and two mesmerising performances.
3 out of 5 stars
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/Review...e.asp?FID=11013
FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS (15)
THE STARS: Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Junior, Ty Burrell.
THE STORY: Diane Arbus (Kidman) turns her back on her wealthy family, and is introduced by the enigmatic Lionel Sweeney (Downey Jr) to the people who live on the fringes of society. Her photographs of them bring her great acclaim.
WHAT'S GOOD? This surreal re-imagining of the life of photographer Diane Arbus is a real exercise in creative film-making as director Steven Shainberg's film treads a delicate path between oddly charming and downright daft.
Kidman is suitably stylish as Arbus with Downey Jr a hairy-faced freak who looks like a charming Chewbacca.
WHAT'S BAD? It takes a real leap of faith to take this story at face value and, while thoughtful, beautiful and intriguing, its appeal may be limited.
HOW LONG IS IT? A freakish 122 minutes.
FINAL VERDICT: Wonderfully weird, with Kidman also strangely charming.
Opens Friday, March 16
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/showbiz/movies/#story3
THE STARS: Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Junior, Ty Burrell.
THE STORY: Diane Arbus (Kidman) turns her back on her wealthy family, and is introduced by the enigmatic Lionel Sweeney (Downey Jr) to the people who live on the fringes of society. Her photographs of them bring her great acclaim.
WHAT'S GOOD? This surreal re-imagining of the life of photographer Diane Arbus is a real exercise in creative film-making as director Steven Shainberg's film treads a delicate path between oddly charming and downright daft.
Kidman is suitably stylish as Arbus with Downey Jr a hairy-faced freak who looks like a charming Chewbacca.
WHAT'S BAD? It takes a real leap of faith to take this story at face value and, while thoughtful, beautiful and intriguing, its appeal may be limited.
HOW LONG IS IT? A freakish 122 minutes.
FINAL VERDICT: Wonderfully weird, with Kidman also strangely charming.
Opens Friday, March 16
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/showbiz/movies/#story3
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
The title spells it out: this is not a conventional biopic about the New York photographer whose obsession with circus ‘freaks’, transvestites and mental patients inspired her cruel, disturbing pictures of marginalised human ‘beauty’. Rather, it is a fantastical speculation about Diane Arbus’ metamorphosis from dutiful housewife, mother and assistant to her fashion photographer husband into fully-fledged artist in her own right. Superficially, ‘Secretary’ director Steven Shainberg’s film is conceptually bold; but it is also hermetically sealed off from reality. Anyone familiar with the facts of Arbus’ life will wonder why neither they nor her images feature anywhere; those unfamiliar with her life and work will leave the film none the wiser.
The conceit of a ‘Through the Looking Glass’-style meeting between Arbus (Nicole Kidman) and her secretive new neighbour – hirsute ‘Wolf Man’ Lionel (Robert Downey Jr) – is a striking one. But the story of a 1950s housewife struggling to escape her stifling, middle-class life and give expression to her burgeoning artistic vision could not be more conventional. Although absurdly miscast as the fragile, bird-like Arbus, the statuesque Kidman exudes a fluttery, neurotic excitement. As the seductive Lionel, Downey Jr bristles with confidence: at ease with his hairy self, he is also loved and supported by his circle of oddball friends. The neurotic beauty to Lionel’s sexy beast, Arbus trembles on the edge of self-discovery as she crosses into her neighbour’s strange, enticing world.
Shainberg plays fast and loose with the facts, which might have been justified had it led to some profound artistic or psychological insights. As it stands, his film illuminates Arbus’ artistically brilliant, emotionally unstable life for no longer than the popping of a flash bulb.
http://www.timeout.com/film/84006.html
The title spells it out: this is not a conventional biopic about the New York photographer whose obsession with circus ‘freaks’, transvestites and mental patients inspired her cruel, disturbing pictures of marginalised human ‘beauty’. Rather, it is a fantastical speculation about Diane Arbus’ metamorphosis from dutiful housewife, mother and assistant to her fashion photographer husband into fully-fledged artist in her own right. Superficially, ‘Secretary’ director Steven Shainberg’s film is conceptually bold; but it is also hermetically sealed off from reality. Anyone familiar with the facts of Arbus’ life will wonder why neither they nor her images feature anywhere; those unfamiliar with her life and work will leave the film none the wiser.
The conceit of a ‘Through the Looking Glass’-style meeting between Arbus (Nicole Kidman) and her secretive new neighbour – hirsute ‘Wolf Man’ Lionel (Robert Downey Jr) – is a striking one. But the story of a 1950s housewife struggling to escape her stifling, middle-class life and give expression to her burgeoning artistic vision could not be more conventional. Although absurdly miscast as the fragile, bird-like Arbus, the statuesque Kidman exudes a fluttery, neurotic excitement. As the seductive Lionel, Downey Jr bristles with confidence: at ease with his hairy self, he is also loved and supported by his circle of oddball friends. The neurotic beauty to Lionel’s sexy beast, Arbus trembles on the edge of self-discovery as she crosses into her neighbour’s strange, enticing world.
Shainberg plays fast and loose with the facts, which might have been justified had it led to some profound artistic or psychological insights. As it stands, his film illuminates Arbus’ artistically brilliant, emotionally unstable life for no longer than the popping of a flash bulb.
http://www.timeout.com/film/84006.html
QUOTE(skankyoldwhore @ Mar 15 2007, 12:14 PM)
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
The title spells it out: this is not a conventional biopic about the New York photographer whose obsession with circus ‘freaks’, transvestites and mental patients inspired her cruel, disturbing pictures of marginalised human ‘beauty’. Rather, it is a fantastical speculation about Diane Arbus’ metamorphosis from dutiful housewife, mother and assistant to her fashion photographer husband into fully-fledged artist in her own right. Superficially, ‘Secretary’ director Steven Shainberg’s film is conceptually bold; but it is also hermetically sealed off from reality. Anyone familiar with the facts of Arbus’ life will wonder why neither they nor her images feature anywhere; those unfamiliar with her life and work will leave the film none the wiser.
The conceit of a ‘Through the Looking Glass’-style meeting between Arbus (Nicole Kidman) and her secretive new neighbour – hirsute ‘Wolf Man’ Lionel (Robert Downey Jr) – is a striking one. But the story of a 1950s housewife struggling to escape her stifling, middle-class life and give expression to her burgeoning artistic vision could not be more conventional. Although absurdly miscast as the fragile, bird-like Arbus, the statuesque Kidman exudes a fluttery, neurotic excitement. As the seductive Lionel, Downey Jr bristles with confidence: at ease with his hairy self, he is also loved and supported by his circle of oddball friends. The neurotic beauty to Lionel’s sexy beast, Arbus trembles on the edge of self-discovery as she crosses into her neighbour’s strange, enticing world.
Shainberg plays fast and loose with the facts, which might have been justified had it led to some profound artistic or psychological insights. As it stands, his film illuminates Arbus’ artistically brilliant, emotionally unstable life for no longer than the popping of a flash bulb.
http://www.timeout.com/film/84006.html
The title spells it out: this is not a conventional biopic about the New York photographer whose obsession with circus ‘freaks’, transvestites and mental patients inspired her cruel, disturbing pictures of marginalised human ‘beauty’. Rather, it is a fantastical speculation about Diane Arbus’ metamorphosis from dutiful housewife, mother and assistant to her fashion photographer husband into fully-fledged artist in her own right. Superficially, ‘Secretary’ director Steven Shainberg’s film is conceptually bold; but it is also hermetically sealed off from reality. Anyone familiar with the facts of Arbus’ life will wonder why neither they nor her images feature anywhere; those unfamiliar with her life and work will leave the film none the wiser.
The conceit of a ‘Through the Looking Glass’-style meeting between Arbus (Nicole Kidman) and her secretive new neighbour – hirsute ‘Wolf Man’ Lionel (Robert Downey Jr) – is a striking one. But the story of a 1950s housewife struggling to escape her stifling, middle-class life and give expression to her burgeoning artistic vision could not be more conventional. Although absurdly miscast as the fragile, bird-like Arbus, the statuesque Kidman exudes a fluttery, neurotic excitement. As the seductive Lionel, Downey Jr bristles with confidence: at ease with his hairy self, he is also loved and supported by his circle of oddball friends. The neurotic beauty to Lionel’s sexy beast, Arbus trembles on the edge of self-discovery as she crosses into her neighbour’s strange, enticing world.
Shainberg plays fast and loose with the facts, which might have been justified had it led to some profound artistic or psychological insights. As it stands, his film illuminates Arbus’ artistically brilliant, emotionally unstable life for no longer than the popping of a flash bulb.
http://www.timeout.com/film/84006.html
It's funny this reviewer says Nicole is miscast and then uses words to describe Arbus that have been used to describe Nicole. Go figure.
Thanks for all the reviews by the way.
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