The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006)
- Dylan
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:28 pm
I didn't find any existing threads on this, so I figured I'd go ahead and start one on one of my five most eagerly awaited 2006 films, Michel Gondry's "The Science of Sleep." Warner Independent just picked it up at Sundance, and I hope it gets released soon.
From Sky Hirschkron's report at Sundance:
Now The Science of Sleep, I wasn't expecting: the first screenplay penned by Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry, it's a thematic recapitulation of the latter, which now, unbelievably, looks restrained and conventional by comparison. To even approach the level of giddy inventiveness going on here, imagine early Godard re-interpreted by a pre-schooler on acid who just watched 8 ½. Gondry sublimates our childhood daydreams and finds daunting significance in them, almost to the detriment of human interest: anything can metaphysically happen here, and when blue cellophane began pouring from a sink, I burst into euphoric, convulsive laughter, mentally going: “have I ever been this happy watching a film?â€
From Sky Hirschkron's report at Sundance:
Now The Science of Sleep, I wasn't expecting: the first screenplay penned by Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry, it's a thematic recapitulation of the latter, which now, unbelievably, looks restrained and conventional by comparison. To even approach the level of giddy inventiveness going on here, imagine early Godard re-interpreted by a pre-schooler on acid who just watched 8 ½. Gondry sublimates our childhood daydreams and finds daunting significance in them, almost to the detriment of human interest: anything can metaphysically happen here, and when blue cellophane began pouring from a sink, I burst into euphoric, convulsive laughter, mentally going: “have I ever been this happy watching a film?â€
- Dylan
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:28 pm
Oh wow! =D>
Let me reafirm what I just watched: Gael-Garcia Bernal dreaming that he's the God of the universe, his arms spread out and jumping while controlling a stop-motion toy wonderland, releasing a grudge he carries against his co-workers and bosses? Just giddily wonderful...I loved it! Way to go Michel!
August can't come soon enough.
Let me reafirm what I just watched: Gael-Garcia Bernal dreaming that he's the God of the universe, his arms spread out and jumping while controlling a stop-motion toy wonderland, releasing a grudge he carries against his co-workers and bosses? Just giddily wonderful...I loved it! Way to go Michel!
August can't come soon enough.
- Fletch F. Fletch
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:54 pm
- Location: Provo, Utah
I really dig the use of The White Stripes in this clip. Can't wait for this one either.Dylan wrote:Oh wow! =D>
Let me reafirm what I just watched: Gael-Garcia Bernal dreaming that he's the God of the universe, his arms spread out and jumping while controlling a stop-motion toy wonderland, releasing a grudge he carries against his co-workers and bosses? Just giddily wonderful...I loved it! Way to go Michel!
- ltfontaine
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 3:34 pm
imagine early Godard re-interpreted by a pre-schooler on acid
The use of the expression "on acid" as a breathless shorthand descriptor for every instance of formal extremity in art, real or imagined, cited primarily by people who have never taken LSD, should be permanently retired. There is much art that has been created under the influence and it rarely resembles the mostly tired stuff that is touted as deriving from an encounter with hallucinogenics.
- Fletch F. Fletch
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:54 pm
- Location: Provo, Utah
- Antoine Doinel
- Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
- Location: Montreal, Quebec
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Gondry is already planning a b-movie cut for the DVD release.
As an aside, Dave Chappelle's Block Party is one of my favorites of the year.
Oh thanks. Yeah, I worked with my friend Jeff Buchanan, he brought so much to it, and it was such a nightmare. We had nine hours of concert with nine cameras and the rest of the day we had one or two cameras. I hope they are going to release a long version in September, an extended DVD. It's going to be every song, maybe 40 minutes more. On Science of Sleep I'm going to do a B version of the movie on the DVD that's made up entirely of the deleted scenes, it will be 45 minutes long.
- Antoine Doinel
- Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
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Two trailers here
- Antoine Doinel
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Lots of clips here
- King of Kong
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- King of Kong
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Saw it - an absolute delight of a film - several reviewers have been calling it a "confection" and that's exactly what it is. It's the kind of film Jean-Pierre Jeunet would give his eye-teeth to make - creative, stylish, whimsical (but not twee), touching, funny as hell. I recommend it to any and everyone.
- Antoine Doinel
- Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
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Be Kind Rewind sounds awesome.The Reeler wrote:Dream Big: Gondry Chat Draws Hundreds in SoHo
Hate to say I told you so about getting to SoHo early for last night's Michel Gondry appearance: A few hundred fans had packed the Apple Store's second-floor theater by around 6:30 (for a chat that started at 7), but seats were gone well before that and the queue winding onto Wooster Street was little fun in the rain. With nothing to left of the decimal point in The Reeler's bribe budget, I blew the usher to let me sneak up to the front, where the filmmaker joined indieWIRE boss Eugene Hernandez for a comprehensive clip-show conversation and Q&A sprawling from his early years in music video to his superb new feature, The Science of Sleep, which opens Sept. 22.
I noted here what outtakes I could before giving up on the translating game; Gondry is funny, spirited and exceedingly smart, but fuck if I could not make out every third or fourth sentence. What I could decipher, though--well, I don't know. It mostly makes sense:
ON SURVIVING HUMAN NATURE: "I was really depressed after Human Nature because critics weren't so nice to me, so I took a notebook, and I wrote everything that was mean, and I tried to figure out why it was bothering me. The reason it was bothering me was that there was some truth in it, and I had to find out how I could make it develop. So I had this 40-page book that's become my, um... It was pretty awful. But it really helped me when I did Eternal Sunshine. Everyday when I would go to the shooting, it would help not to forget the goal I had set for myself. Every time I would go in that book with the lists, it was a good thing."
Hernandez: "So there's 40 pages just from Human Nature?"
Gondry: "Yeah. But I've lost it now. It was too bad."
ON THE IMPACT OF DREAMS ON HIS CREATIVE PROCESS: Sometimes I write them down, or I do drawings. I have a lot of paper; it's not like I have a book. I don't think I can do something that's so organized. But I have a very bad sleeping pattern. I sleep very little, but from what I read in some books, if you skip a night of sleep, the next night, you REM sleep doubles. So particularly what it said was that if even if you sleep a little, the amount of dreamng is consistent. In my case, I sleep very bad and terrible, so the few times I sleep I keep dreaming. ... And I wake up with very strong feelings that the dream was real. And I screened this for some therapists who are working on dreams, and we talked about what could happen to provoke that. I have sleep apnea, which is a problem. Maybe my brain has a lack of oxygen, but I work in a different way from other people when I wake up, and sometimes I have a hard time telling the difference from sleepy time. Maybe my brain wakes up in a different way. Basically I wrote this experience and this tradition; I thought it would be interesting to experiment."
ON HIS FIRST MUSIC VIDEO: "The first video I made was for a girl who was six feet tall. She had a huge nose and big feet; I dressed her like a princess and she looked like a drag queen. I completely failed. And on top of that, her partner in the video--I dressed him like a drag queen because it was the song. It was a complete horror, this video. I remember when I showed it to my family, I had spent two months during the post-production, and they didn't say a word. I knew they were horrified. They couldn't look me straight in the eyes. It took me a long time to understand that I really had to fix this problem."
ON HIS NEW FILM: "It's called Be Kind Rewind. It's a comedy with Jack Black and Mos Def, Mia Farow and Danny Glover, and it's a story about theese two guys who work in a video store run by Danny Glover, and when he's away for a week... Jack Black becomes magnetized and erases all the tapes by mistake. So they don't want to disappoint their boss, and the only way they can think of to cover their mistake is to start to reshoot the films one after the other. The first movie is going to be Ghostbusters. They go out and take their camera and shoot the film in two hours, like playing all the parts and stuff. [Customers] realize they are not the real movies, but it is actually pretty funny because it's Jack Black and Mos Def. And so they become a big hit in town, and little by little they reshoot the originals. ... We're in this little town, Passaic, New Jersey, where we found all of our locations. In fact, one of the mechanics who worked on Eternal Sunshine has his shop there, and so I went to visit him with the idea. His shop is next to a power plant, so he always complains he's having headaches and stuff."
The event wound down with a sneak preview of a new Beck video for the song "Cell Phone's Dead," a one-room, black-and-white exercise featuring the plaid-suited singer morphing into a hulking figure of cardboard boxes, wood blocks and, I think, a bedroom dresser. Or maybe he just climbed into it. I have got to take better notes. At any rate, give Gondry a shout if you happen to be traveling through Passaic (he starts shooting today) and get some Sleep later next month.
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- Antoine Doinel
- Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
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- Antoine Doinel
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- dadaistnun
- Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 8:31 am
Hoberman's review.
If this doesn't put asses in seats
If this doesn't put asses in seats
nothing will.The rest is more like Romper Room Resnais or a cross between David Cronenberg's Spider and Pee Wee's Playhouse.
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- davebert
- Joined: Fri May 05, 2006 4:00 pm
- Location: NY
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I saw Science of Sleep this afternoon and really enjoyed it, although after the film I heard a few sixty-somethings grumbling behind me that they had fall asleep (let the jokes fly!), or didn't understand what was going on, or just otherwise hated it.
But for me, the use of all the stop-motion animation and pre-CGI tricks are what I wish more movies were. It is prone to going on extended dream sequences that have nothing to do with the actual plot, which is actually very straightforward, so I don't see why anyone would complain that we're missing that. Not that the story itself isn't a well-told mix of fun and sadness, but this is clearly a vehicle for Gondry visual fantasies. And a good one at that.
But for me, the use of all the stop-motion animation and pre-CGI tricks are what I wish more movies were. It is prone to going on extended dream sequences that have nothing to do with the actual plot, which is actually very straightforward, so I don't see why anyone would complain that we're missing that. Not that the story itself isn't a well-told mix of fun and sadness, but this is clearly a vehicle for Gondry visual fantasies. And a good one at that.
- Antoine Doinel
- Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
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