Halle Berry, Christopher Lee, Tsai Ming-Liang, Clint Eastwood: Various Quotes
by Andre Soares
"When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there’s no way you could be a good winner."
Halle Berry (Catwoman) and George W. Bush (Fahrenheit 9/11) have won the Razzies for Worst Actress and Worst Actor of 2004. Catwoman won three more awards, including Worst Film.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and pop singer Britney Spears were two other Fahrenheit 9/11 winners. Quote: Associated Press.
Berry showed up to pick up her award; Bush didn’t.
"It is possible that people have been a little bit tongue in cheek here, but they are also saying that Bush was very scary in Fahrenheit 9/11."
Matt Mueller, editor of Total Film magazine, explaining how U.S. president George W. Bush was chosen by the magazine’s readers as the most frightening film villain of 2004.
Bush beat some stiff competition, including Doctor Octopus of Spider-Man 2, the cannibalistic Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Gollum of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Quote: Associated Press.
"The body always plays an important role in my films. "You could say the body is the most beautiful thing we have or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies."
Malaysian-born director Tsai Ming-Liang. Set in an urban apartment house in the midst of a summertime drought, Tsai’s made-in-Taiwan (with additional French and Chinese state funding), sexually explicit The Wayward Cloud tells the story of a fledgling pornography star who encounters the woman he once loved. Graphic sexual scenes are interspersed with outrageous musical numbers, including one featuring a dancing penis.
The Wayward Cloud is up for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where in 2001 Patrice Chereau’s sexually explicit Intimacy won the top prize.
"I visited these children a number of times over the last couple of years and found out that almost all the children are now living even a worse life than they were in before Ms Briski began working with them."
The children’s despair has exacerbated because they’d hoped that with active involvement in Ms Briski’s camera project, there would be an opportunity for them to live a better life." Source: BBC.
Partha Banerjee, interpreter for the Bengali-speaking children and for English-speaking filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, whose documentary Born into Brothels has received numerous accolades and has won the best feature documentary Academy Award. In a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Banerjee also accuses the filmmakers of staging scenes for their documentary.
Kaufman has stated that he and his film partner have amassed nearly US$100,000 for the children’s education.
"If Mr. Eastwood is so convinced that his film is grounded in reality then perhaps he might wish to accompany me to the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland where there are 1,000 or so severely disabled soldiers from Iraq whose lives are changed forever, who were told they fought for Iraqi freedom and are now perhaps wondering, along with their families, who is going to fight for their freedom to live a full life here in America. As a paraplegic for three decades I can help them with that question."
Author and NBC News correspondent John Hockenberry, in an article at Fair.Org. In his text, Hockenberry states that the media have ignored the fact that the right-wingers currently bitching about Million Dollar Baby had previously come out against the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that Eastwood himself carried a "high-profile campaign against the American[s] [w]ith Disabilities [A]ct after he was sued for owning an inaccessible restaurant."
"Extremism is so easy. You’ve got your position, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right, you meet the same idiots coming around from the left."
Clint Eastwood, actor, director, producer, and Republican, referring to the controversy surrounding his latest opus, the critically well-received Million Dollar Baby. (As quoted in Time magazine.)
Right-wing commentators are furious because they see Eastwood’s boxing melodrama as pro-euthanasia propaganda.
Now, how come no one has been railing against the superior The Sea Inside, which is really all about euthanasia?
"I would like to protest in the strongest possible terms your decision to not allow ‘technical’ crafts on stage to receive their Oscars. To apply some kind of PMI (People magazine index) to the nominees and make this the criterion for whether they get to go onstage or not and speak to the Academy is disgraceful to the Academy and to all of the people who work in film, whether they are members of the Academy or not."
Academy Award-winning editor Walter Murch, in an e-mail to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in regard to recent changes announced by Oscar ceremony director Gilbert Cates. Some fear that the new method will reinforce the view that technicians are lesser contributors to the success of a film, while others have complained that Cates’s cosmetic changes, which includes having all nominees in a particular category present onstage, will make the Oscars look like a beauty pageant lineup.
Murch’s e-mail was quoted in The Hollywood Reporter.
"[The vote] raises very serious constitutional and free speech issues. This approach of increased government regulation and censorship is fundamentally misguided."
A statement by NBC, in regard to the U.S. House of Representatives’ 389-38 vote — with the blessing of the Bush White House — to approve a measure that would impose fines of up to US$500,000 to broadcasters and individuals who violate the Federal Communications Commission obscenity rules.
Recently, fears of such outrageous fines have kept the Academy Award-winning film Saving Private Ryan off TV screens in several communities.
Talk about democracy and freedom of speech is indeed cheap — and apparently meaningless. And whoever said that American right-wingers want the government out of people’s lives?
"I daresay the Oscars may have peaked, and that’s because they’re falling prey to their own hype."
That’s Oscar-winning producer David Puttnam – for Chariots of Fire — discussing the Oscars while interviewed by Raja Sen at Rediff.com.
"If people criticize Scottish cinema today, it’s for too much gritty realism. If you look at it from another perspective, how many of the characters we see are self-destructive in some way, people who unravel, are emotionally inarticulate, can’t express themselves? It’s more to do with the fact that the vast majority of directors are men. It’s not really acceptable that any art form is so completely made by one gender. We have one or two good screenwriters who are women but not nearly enough compared to some other countries, to France or Germany or Sweden or Iran."
Filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins, speaking on "The Future of Scottish Film" at the Edinburgh Lecture series, and ignoring the fact that Hollywood was thoroughly dominated by men during the studio era — and its movies were hardly what one would call a representation of "gritty realism."
Quote: The Scotsman
"The [NAFTA] treaty was used as a trade-off, I do not know what they were given, but I do not think it was worth it. It is incredible how the government has betrayed and abandoned its film industry, and condemned it to death."
That’s Academy-Award winning Spanish director Fernando Trueba (for Belle epoque) referring to the current state of the Mexican film industry.
Trueba also said that Hollywood productions are "made to sell hamburgers and war." The outspoken director shared his ideas at a panel discussion held in Mexico City.
Source: Prensa Latina.
Via The Scotsman:
"Johnny Depp, as far as I’m concerned, is number one. Of his generation, there’s no one who can touch him. Some performers today, it’s like looking at holes in the air."
That’s Christopher Lee, 82, discussing the new breed of film actors during an interview with the British magazine Total Film.
Lee added that he had wanted to play Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but "they" found him too old for the role. (Ian McKellen, 65, nabbed the part.) He also said that he is still at a loss as to why his character, the evil Saruman, was left out of the final episode of the trilogy.
Christopher Lee, by the way, plays opposite Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s upcoming remake of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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