She doesn't figure in this monstrosity (thank God!)
Love your avatar, Jon. It's the exact moment when Nico singing "These Days" (a song her 15 year-old boyfriend Jackson Browne wrote for her) comes on. I think Wes Anderson made The Royal Tenenbaums just to use that cut.
Antoine Doinel wrote:I don't think Hayden Christensen is a terrible actor so much as he chooses awful projects. Given a half decent script he can do the job - he was quite good in Shattered Glass.
That's true, Shattered Glass was a decent film. It was the script more than Christensen's performance that was at fault in Life As A House. I thought films were decades beyond portraying a teenager as moody and rebellious and assuming it would come as a revelation to their audiences. Not to mention the cringe inducing moment that tried to copy Mark Wahlberg's giving the handjob for cash scene from Boogie Nights.
Antoine Doinel wrote:Guy Pearce looks like he nailed Andy Warhol (though who can top David Bowie's take in I Shot Andy Warhol?) but it will be interesting to see what this turns out to be like given it's gone under some reshoots.
[cough]Basquiat![/cough]
I'm not very familiar with the whole Factory era, but these films raised a few questions for me. Why do many of these films (I Shot Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Factory Girl) focus on people surrounding Warhol rather than Warhol himself? Is it as Paul Morrissey said on the Flesh For Frankenstein commentary that "if you knew Andy, you knew he didn't have many ideas", so he is not a very cinematic character to show on film as opposed to 'real' artists such as Basquiat, or people with extreme reactions to failure or tragic ends who have stories that translate well to a filmic narrative?
Is keeping Warhol as a supporting character in these three films a way of keeping his myth going, when having a film dedicated to him or with him being the primary focus would expose a lot of the shallowness of the whole enterprise and maybe Warhol himself? Was having a number of these wild characters surrounding him a ploy in reality, as much as in the films later made about the Factory, to distract attention that would otherwise be brought to bear more harshly on his own work - human shields against criticism?
Is it as Paul Morrissey said on the Flesh For Frankenstein commentary that "if you knew Andy, you knew he didn't have many ideas", so he is not a very cinematic character to show on film as opposed to 'real' artists such as Basquiat, or people with extreme reactions to failure or tragic ends who have stories that translate well to a filmic narrative?
Andy had TONS of ideas. He always acted as if he didn't so he could find out what other people were thinking. Then he did precisely what he wanted.
Paul's a marvelous filmmaker (who I wish was working -- he has made a film since Spike of Bensonhurst ) but he doesn't understand Andy and never did.
Hickenlooper and company know nothing about Edie or Andy.
Sienna Miller tries her best but she's defeated by a simplistic script that paints the second most sophisticated fag-hag of the 60s (Dorothy Dean being the all-time champ) as a "poor little innocent" undone by the Big Bad Homosexual.
ie. "Everything but the hound dogs snappin' at her rear end."
Hmm...it seems the Times story contradicts earlier interviews by Hickenlooper in which he stated that budget contraints forced him to toss fifteen pages worth of script.
The real tragedy is that the truly great films Andy made with Edie ( Beauty # 2, Poor Little Rich Girl, Outer and Inner Space, and Kitchen) aren't available to the public outside of scattered museum showings. They should have been put on home video eons ago.
Sienna Miller's a good actress -- quite teriffic in Interview. But his disaster should be struck from her resume.
And it isn't deserving of anyone's serious attention.
Barmy (Feb. 20) wrote:I knew I would regret going to this, and did. But what the hell, it's just 90 minutes long. The script is dire, Guy Pearce thinks being lispy and fey is all you have to do to nail Warhol, and Hayden gives one of the most embarrassingly laughable bad performances in Hollywood history (his speciality, it seems). The audience laughed at his "sex" scene.
That being said, Sienna does a decent Edie.
Barmy (July 14) wrote:The sexiest, most provocative film of the year.
The Entertainment Weekly DVD review says the commentary is full of wacky rationalizations and hilariously over-the-top attacks on the film's critics -- it might almost be worth renting just for the comedy value.
A friend of mine was curious about it so we gave it a whirl last night and it was a trainwreck. Ehrenstein only gets one part of why this film is so bad when he says it's simplistic. The major crime of the film is that it's so dull. For all the time we spent in Warhol's Factory, when you leave the film the only thing you remember are bare breasts and some guys hugging a horse. Hickenlooper captures nothing about what made it important, exciting or relevant. Instead the script paints Warhol as the bad guy, Bob Dylan, or rather "the musician" and as a hypocrite and Edie as someone who was exploited. Unfortunately, Hickenlooper's script relies so much on taking down everyone else a few notches but we get none of Edie's motivations so in the context of the film, one can't help but scream at the movie "Why didn't you just leave and go back to your rich family?". As for Sienna Miller, it's just unfortunate to watch an actress try so hard when the entire film around her is failing on every conceivable level. The narrative starts being told in flashback by Warhol, but then cuts to being told by Edie and by the end of the film Hickenlooper can't seem to remember so he starts switching between b&w and color for no apparent reason. Then he ends the film about three about times (I couldn't believe that it kept going after we got the standard biopic text screen of what happened to Edie) which is absurd for a film that barely makes it over the ninety minute mark.
I had the misfortune to watch it on the second half of a double bill with the far superior I Shot Andy Warhol (I was cramming Warhol biopics as background for a review of the documentary A Walk Into The Sea), and pretty much agree with the consensus. I was very pleasantly surprised by Sienna Miller, of whom I had no expectations whatsoever, but she's the only conceivable reason for watching it.
Caught this last night and while, like most films ever made, it follows the pedestrian route of structural clichés, insignificant style, and predictable insight, it’s not as terrible as comments here suggest. As 90mins of film go, it's hardly the worst.
What bothers me on this thread is the fallacy that because the film is not an accurate portrayal of certain people in a certain environment it is consequently terrible.
There seems to be a tyranny of accuracy at the moment: actors impersonate real people as opposed to acting characters based on real people and, bizarrely, historians are dragged in to review art set in periods of their own expertise. Do our artists have to be historians and what ever happened to the notion of artistic licence?
Even terrible artists have that licence and so they should because for all the experts, historians, scientists, and people who were really there, there’s an obscurity of fact threshold that says you can give an impression of the past without re-creating it as it happened. Factory Girl is basically a tv-movie style morality tale: it's under no obligation to be accurate about the real Edie or leave the viewer with a rounded sense of pop-art's contextual significance.
Films are not courts of justice or channels of education.
