|
|
On PAGE 30of this issue, we feature one of this autumn’s real sleepers - Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, a film which you can’t really say came from nowhere (Paramount being pretty much the diametrical opposite of nowhere), but which did one of those all-too-rare jobs of providing gratifying proof that quality will out, and that audiences will respond to something new, different and (dare we say it?) good.
Of necessity, we treated the movie as a star launch-pad for Jack Black, who plays - nay, glories in - the lead role. So now, let’s just take a moment to look at it in the way our French colleagues might - as un film de, in this case un film de Richard Linklater, the Austin auteur who has now proved he can please crowds, having long since proved he could delight devotees.
The movies the devotees love (and I speak as one) are the two high-school flicks Linklater made in and about Austin: Slacker and Dazed and Confused, especially the latter. Well, now Dazed is due for a sequel, as yet untitled, about what happens when the graduates, whose last high-school days were chronicled in the earlier film, move on to college. The film will be set, as is only right, in the eighties, at a Texas college presumably not too far removed from the one that Linklater (pictured right on the set of School of Rock) himself attended.
The film will reunite the director with producers Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks of Alphaville, who produced Dazed, and will take him back under the wing of Paramount, where School of Rock was made.
Interestingly enough, however, the project was formally announced in early September, some four weeks before the Jack Black movie opened. Clearly, someone knew what they’d got.
|
 |
Frank Perry , who died some eight years ago, in 1995, was one of those mavericks who came to the fore in the sixties, when directors - and especially writer/directors - finally got the chance to make the films the old production line of the studio system had never let through the gate.
Perry made his directorial debut in 1962 with David and Lisa, a very unusual love story featuring an affair between the two title characters, who are in a mental institution. It predated all those trendy films about romanticised mental patients by a good five years, and bestowed a reputation on Perry that was stronger outside the US than in.
A few years later, in 1968, Perry made The Swimmer, a movie with a major Hollywood star, Burt Lancaster. But it turned out to be even odder than David and Lisa. Co-directed by Sydney Pollack, it was the story of a man who decides to swim his way through a suburban community, going from pool to pool and talking to people along the way. As a metaphor in a John Cheever short story (which is where it started out), it was striking; as the plot-line of a Hollywood studio movie, it was downright odd.
What is striking about the planned remake is that it doesn’t stem from the fevered brain of a rising young director, but has been acquired by a producer-actor team: Ed Pressman and Alec Baldwin - who, incidentally, is almost 10 years younger than Lancaster was when he made the film, (memorable for the way in which the then 58-year-old star made no attempt to hide his middle-aged - though still very trim - outline).
|
|
    
|
