Showing posts with label spalding gray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spalding gray. Show all posts

10 March 2015

DVD Review - Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

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Genre:
Comedy, Drama
Distributor:
Simply Media
Release Date:
16th March 2015 (uk)
Rating; 18
Director:
Jonathan Demme
Cast:
Spalding Gray, Sam Waterston, Ira Wheeler
Buy:Swimming To Cambodia [DVD]

Jonathan Demme, like so many directors of his generation, came through the Roger Corman film school. After “graduating” he struggled throughout the later 70s, making stuff like Last Embrace which he has expressed disappointment with. However, he had a chance to come back with the more idiosyncratic Melvin and Howard which was a big critical success, and made him a director to look out for.

The 80s is really where the case can be made that Demme was one of the finest directors around at the time. He would make great comedies like Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Simultaneously, he made performance films like the classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. His fame, of course, reached it’s height with the release of The Silence of the Lambs, yet since then it’s been very hit and miss, with, for the most part, more misses than hits. He made the awful remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and vowed to only make documentaries and small-scale dramas from then on.

One of the early performance films he made was Swimming to Cambodia. Demme has made many performance films over the years and this one is probably the most similar to Stop Making Sense in style. It’s however not a music film, but a filmed monologue by actor Spalding Gray, talking about his experiences making the film The Killing Fields.

Gray only acted in a few films (and only a few worth seeing) in his career including a couple of pornos! His real love was doing these surreal monologues about his life experiences, often at the off-Broadway venue the Performance Garage in New York City. Swimming to Cambodia was filmed there and was the first of 5 theatrically filmed versions of his monologues.

Demme and his great cinematographer John Bailey film it like a normal film. It’s expertly lit; there is background of a sea, which is to symbolize the South China Sea. Spalding only has two props, which are two maps he points to at different times during the proceedings. Spalding tells the extraordinary story of how he got the part, the filming and the his relationship with his girlfriend (who later became his wife) and everything in-between.

It’s almost plays like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, which despite being a narrative film is basically a conversation. Funnily enough Demme’s new film, A Master Builder reunites the stars from that film.Grey is a captivating speaker, and very funny and frank about his experiences before, during and after the filming. It does now have a level of melancholy because Gray years later would commit suicide after years of suffering with mental and physical illnesses. It’s an 80s cult oddity that seems to be have been forgotten and should be rediscovered and cherished.

★★★★
Ian Schultz


5 December 2010

Trailer For Steven Soderbergh's AND EVERYTHINGS GOING FINE Documentary on Spalding Gray

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source Apple
IFC Films have debuted online the trailer for the Steven Soderbergh documentary AND EVERYTHINGS GOING FINE a movie focused on the actor Spalding Gray who died in 2004. To be honest I dont really know much about the man apart from his part in The Killing Fields, obvivously Soderbergh who is a character driven filmmaker did see alot in Spaldings life and he beleved his story must be told and the movie is his outcome.
The Doc consists mostly of recorded footage & interviews of Gray compiled into to making the movie which had already played the likes of Edinburgh & Sxsw festivals to positive reviews. The movie is due a cinematic release in USA on 10th December as for UK no date has been confirmed.


Synopsis

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE, an incisive and entertaining portrait of Spalding Gray by director Steven Soderbergh provides an intimate look at the master monologist as described by his most critical, irreverent and insightful biographer: Spalding Gray. Soderbergh distills 25 years of rare and revealing footage to construct a riveting final monologue. An official selection of the SXSW, True/False and Edinburgh film festivals, this inspired one-man show is a bittersweet display of the writer-performer's playful and embattled intelligence, and his gift for tracking universal truths by looking himself squarely in the eye.
trailer after the break....