Michael Winterbottom
58 connections found
Filmography
Code 46 2003 
Jude 1996 
A Mighty Heart 2007 
The Killer Inside Me 2010 
9 Songs 2004 
The Trip 2011 
24 Hour Party People 2002 
The Trip to Italy 2014 
Greed 2019 
The Claim 2000 
Welcome to Sarajevo 1997 
Wonderland 1999 
The Look of Love 2013 
The Trip to Greece 2020 
The Emperor's New Clothes 2015 
Everyday 2012 
A Cock and Bull Story 2005 
In This World 2003 
Trishna 2011 View:
Connections, in both directions
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced The Trip to Italy (2014)
Themes Visuals
La bella Italia, La Dolce Vita – it’s all on display in this glorious Grand Tour, full of good friends and good food and, most of all, full of laughter.
Brydon of course has his Godfather ’s, Coogan waxes fondly about Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (with the always hounded celeb reminding us that it’s the film where the term “paparazzi” was created), and then there is Coogan’s personal assistant Emme (Claire Keelan) who continuously references Roman Holiday , the ultimate Italian fantasy film for women as The Godfather is to men.
Among the many made-in-Italy films referenced in this movie (including William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” and Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”), the most pertinent is John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” – another lunatic comedy improvised on the go.
The scenes of driving in Rome invite chat about La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday.
But about two-thirds of the way through, someone notes that some people think La Dolce Vita is a celebration of Italian jet-set living, when actually, it's a scathing criticism of its ultimate emptiness.
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
Although Erich von Stroheim’s mauled 1924 masterpiece “Greed” is nearly 100 years old, it is sufficiently monumental that adopting its title can still seem like an attempted flex.
It was the character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street who argued: "Greed is good."
In Greed, Winterbottom goes after the rich and the decadent with satire, employing his usual muse Steve Coogan — once again at his obnoxious finest.
When reminded of The Godfather: Part II, he scoffs, laughing it off as an oft-cited exception to the rule.
When Brydon mentions The Godfather: Part II , Coogan drily notes that's the exception everyone cites.
The film addresses early on the frequently true notion that sequels are inferior to the originals, settling somewhat pedestrianly on The Godfather: Part II (1974) as the exception.
Elsewhere a candid admission that most sequels fail, with the exception of "The Godfather: Part II," leads Brydon to do Al Pacino, and Coogan to turn critic.
The Big Short (2015)
Directed by Adam McKay
influenced Greed (2019), 24 Hour Party People (2002)
Themes Visuals Plot
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
In detailing how the system works, “Greed” borrows a few pages (and a comic/furious tone) from “The Big Short.”
On the one hand, the film yearns to be a British version of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice , which use formal experimentation and humour to explain the financial crisis and the career of Dick Cheney.
In the production notes of “Greed,” Winterbottom says that when he was seeking financing for the movie, he told potential investors that the tone of “Greed” would be similar to “The Big Short,” writer/director Adam McKay’s 2015 Oscar-winning satire of Wall Street’s manipulation of the U.S. housing market.
Recent films such as The Big Short and The Laundromat have explored the division between the rich and the poor.
This is where Greed closely resembles The Big Short, a better film that also stopped its plot to teach its audience.
Killer Joe (2012)
Directed by William Friedkin
influenced by The Killer Inside Me (2010)
Characters Themes
To do the deed, they contact Joe Cooper, a black-hatted and black-gloved Dallas police detective who suggests a cowboy movie villain as imagined by Jim Thompson; he might be kin to Lou Ford, the maniac Texas sheriff protagonist of Thompson's novel, "The Killer Inside Me."
The finale is bruisingly bloody, as rough a moment as any I’ve seen since Casey Affleck pummeled Jessica Alba in “The Killer Inside Me.” Friedkin doesn’t pull any punches, no pun intended, in a scene that is horrifyingly specific without ever losing its drama.
Thompson’s Pop.1280 and The Killer Inside Me center, like Letts’s play, on a lethally-inclined police officer.
First Chris and then Sharla get terrific beatings, Ansel learns he’s even a bigger fool than he or anyone else ever thought and Killer Joe (modeled somewhat after Jim Thompson’s protagonist in the unthinkably dark “The Killer Inside Me”) acts as if no matter what he does or whom he attacks no one on the Dallas police force will go after him.
It throbs with echoes everything from Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me to Elia Kazan's Baby Doll to Little Miss Marker, and trust me, you're going to want to take a scalding hot shower with a steel-wool loofa after its ecstatically nihilistic final sequence.
Upfront recalling the Jekyll/Hyde center of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (filmed by Michael Winterbottom in 2010), Joe also wears black from hat to boot.
But, in what could be intended as an homage to Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” the movie is overstuffed with supporting characters, subplots and non-chronological timelines within timelines.
Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) follows a similar tune as Love (a man looks back on a lost love) but dragged at 69 minutes long.
Arthouse fare featuring copious unsimulated sex and little else is hardly extraordinary any longer and Love actually belongs to the abortive tradition of such films as Michael Winterbottom’s equally ineffectual 9 Songs.
Other directors (Michael Winterbottom in 9 Songs, John Cameron Mitchell in Shortbus) have dragged real sex away from the realm of porn, though never at quite this . . .
In recent memory, films as diverse as Lars von Trier’s Idioterne (1998), Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000), Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004), John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour have all variously attempted to bridge the divide between art and pornography (or, as it is more quaintly known, “erotica”).
Noe's reputation as an in-your-face provocateur of the cinema is cemented here, and he rejoins a growing number of respected directors delving into the once-taboo realm of the sexual senses, among them Michael Winterbottom ("9 Songs"), Lars von Trier ("Nymphomaniac") and Virginie Despentes ("Baise-Moi").
Hardly the would-be anonymous and impersonal entanglement envisioned by Brandos complex Paul in Last Tango in Paris, 9 Songs is a mere wannabe slice of something-or-other.
When Bertolucci made Last Tango in Paris in 1972, it was almost a revolutionary idea that sex could be portrayed as an expression of rage, or grief, or estrangement, and Brando, in his last great phase as an actor, seemed to wrench all those moods out of his own soul.
American Psycho (2000)
Directed by Mary Harron
influenced The Killer Inside Me (2010)
Characters Themes
He is close in spirit to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who looked in the mirror and declared that he is “not there.”
Not unlike Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or American Psycho , The Killer Inside Me is a violent film because it’s about a violent person.
Since the character's mocking of his fellow citizens of Central City with deadpan aphorisms like "Haste makes waste"—bullshitting the rubes—could endear him to some indie-film viewers on the coasts, a more distanced rendering of his crimes could result in one more cool American Psycho–style antihero.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced The Killer Inside Me (2010)
Visuals Characters Themes
No insight, no irony and no echoes of Peckinpah, De Palma or Tarantino whistle across these Texas plains; "No Country for Old Men" brutal artistry either.
I found it hard not to think of No Country for Old Men - and surely that film's success helped to goose the Thompson adaptation out of its decade-long stay in Development Hell - where the Coen brothers found a way to visually depict the particularly apocalyptic, almost mythological quality of Cormac McCarthy's writing; Winterbottom literalises Thompson, but does not capture his essence, does not make the film as grueling and intense an experience as the man's writing was.
In The Killer Inside Me, Casey Affleck secures himself a place in the annals of menacing, memorable celluloid bad guys, giving Hannibal Lecter and No Country for Old Men’s cattle stun gun toting Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a run for their money.
It is best described as a ‘country noir,’ resembling films like Lone Star and especially No Country For Old Men for its brutal existentialism.
As a determined attempt to make a psychopath the least bit interesting, it's in a league with "No Country for Old Men," which for all its popularity and Oscar glory, was still monotonously cruel and shallow.
You might argue that he’s a fan of chaos, like The Dark Knight’s Joker or No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, but even that theory is iffy.
If you crave science fiction like GATTACA and Until the End of the World, then you must must must see Code 46.
A sci-fi mood piece about memory, passion, and pseudo-Oedipal longing, Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 – akin to THX 1138-via-Gattaca – is long on atmosphere but short on substance.
As the opening titles intimate, Code 46's point of departure is fear of incest, brought on by genetic engineering (recalling questions raised by Gattaca [1997]), with extra anxieties ignited by cloning.
Winterbottom’s screenplay has pretty obviously been inspired by Orson Welles’ great “Citizen Kane.”
Borrowing from French literary history (see roman à clef), the term applies to a film that is a thinly veiled portrait, often satirical, of a real-life figure; think of John Travolta’s version of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors, Orson Welles doing an loose approximation of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, or even Meryl Streep’s glacial take on Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada.
Structured a bit like Citizen Kane hot-glued to the front of an Altman ensemble shamble, it's a wobbly but amusing pic that only really raises eyebrows at the end, when it briefly behaves like a cry for global economic justice.
It was the character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street who argued: "Greed is good."
Likewise, if one says, "Greed is good," it's not difficult to picture Michael Douglas playing the slick corporate raider Gordon Gekko in 1987's "Wall Street."
Simmering or open class warfare has been a rich trope for sci-fi futurecasting as far back as Fritz Lang ’s 1927 “Metropolis” and as recently as “In Time,” “ Total Recall ” and Michael Winterbottom’s fine, underseen “Code 46.” Lang’s influence is particularly evident in “Elysium’s” army of industrious worker bees slaving away on the factory floor of the Armadyne corporation, whose slithery CEO, Carlyle ( William Fichtner ), developed Elysium and all the technology that makes it run.
But unlike the dour and impersonal graphic sex in French films, such as Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus or Catherine Breillat's Romance, here the connection is intimate, and in at least one scene, clearly enjoyable - at least for Matt.
Previous attempts at incorporating unsimulated sex into fictional film (such as Catherine Breillat's "Romance") have been largely unsuccessful, coming off as exploitative and voyeuristic.
Though Winterbottom doesn't say so, this realism in sex has been a European art film trend for several years, mostly with French directors like Patrice Chereau ("Intimacy") and Catherine Breillat ("Romance"), though American Vincent Gallo did his bit for the cause with "The Brown Bunny."
Boyhood (2014)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced Everyday (2012), Greed (2019)
Plot Visuals Themes
His 2012 Everyday, the story of an average family coping when the dad is sent to prison, was filmed over the course of five years with the same actors, beating Richard Linklater’s similar Boyhood to the screen by 2 years: it’s one of the most moving films I’ve seen in this century.
It’s a more consistent and impressive feat than Michael Winterbottom‘s otherwise involving Everyday (similarly shot over a half-decade, it gained and lost five different DOPs and suffered a host of technical issues).
The movie is being hailed for its novel production, though in fact British director Michael Winterbottom beat Linklater to the punch with his superb, little-noticed Everyday (2012), chronicling a working-class family over five years.
(Michael Winterbottom’s 2012 film Everyday tried the same trick over five years – what a lightweight!)
Meanwhile, Michael Winterbottom spent five years filming with the key cast of Everyday in order to portray the effect of a father's imprisonment upon a growing family, while Lars von Trier began and then abandoned his now-defunct Dimension project, for which he had originally planned to shoot three minutes a year from 1991 until 2024.
The Up documentary series and Michael Winterbottom's Everyday (filmed over a five-year stretch) have tackled the passing of time on screen, but Boyhood is something of a different proposition.
Not since John Belushi went to a frat party in Animal House have so many people on screen been making merry in togas.
Si le splendide Code 46 de Michael Winterbottom dressait un portrait effrayant d’une civilisation qui a tout simplement appris à vivre avec une nouvelle réalité mise sens dessus dessous par les conséquences dramatiques des réchauffements climatiques, l’adaptation du roman de P.D. James ne donne pas un tel sursis à la race humaine, laquelle doit désormais composer avec sa propre extinction.
He throws himself a decadent, "Gladiator"-themed 60th birthday bash on Mykonos (inspired by the Ridley Scott movie), complete with a pre-fab Colosseum and a massive lion waiting in the wings for his close-up — or maybe his dinner.
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)
Directed by Akiva Schaffer
influenced Greed (2019)
Characters
Some parts of it reminded me of Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and the way that movie portrayed its protagonist.