ANIMAL » Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry Sweded ‘Taxi Driver’

Marina Galperina — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:20:43 +0000

Watch as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director and sweding enthusiast Michel Gondry reshoots Scorsese’s gritty NYC thriller as a psychotically adorable short. Heads will explode… with paint driblets.

Remember when Lars Von Trier almost remade Taxi Driver, probably into something languid, gorgeously overwhelming and nihilistic? This is exactly the opposite of that.

This is lo-fi, very rabid goodness sans all that kid rape stuff, plus ice cream and projectile rainbow-pigment vomiting. Oh, and there are some brief, mind-tickling surrealist mini-scenes with taxi cab mirrors and bathroom reflections, plus a true gem of a pan over bloody Bickle’s stand-off finale tribute, complete with a paper set masacre, tiny writhing plastic soldier stuntmen and more. I’ll say no more. Watch.

Michel Gondry’s Latest Project Set on a Bronx School Bus

Marina Galperina — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:04:50 +0000

With doc A Thorn in the Heart about his quirky aunt playing at SXSW, The Green Hornet in post production, and mid scheming for an IMAX 3D scientific musical à la Björk, Michel Gondry is also working on another doc-style project called The We and the I. Gondry plans to film kids from a Bronx school.

The director elaborates:

It’s to explore the phenomenon of people, how different they are in groups and large numbers, and how they become more interesting and complex when they are in smaller groups. As they leave the school and do the journey to the last stop, the kids go off the bus gradually. You’ve got 35 and they end up with two. You feel the dynamic changing.

Michel “Next-Cute-Girlfriend-Pending” Gondry also admitted:

I was kind of a loner when I was at school, I was hanging with the girls mostly, not the boys. I couldn’t understand why the boys were so stupid when they were in groups and why they would allow themselves to be so mean to each other. This movie is talking about that.

If only we all could manifest our childhood “issues” into successful weirdness. |CinemaBlend|

Williamsburg Residents Not Happy With ‘Eternal’ Crackhouse

ANIMAL — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:49:06 +0000

“Squatters, junkies, and prostitutes have turned the vacant building at 59 Orient Ave.—which served as Kate Winslet’s apartment in Michel Gondry’s artsy 2004 flick—into a crackhouse, and residents of the tree-lined block say their safety is at risk,” reports the Brooklyn Paper. Drug users reportedly use the house at their own discretion. “It’s scary. We have people walking across our property to go in there to do drugs at all hours of the night,” said next door neighbor Adam Kehr. Although the owners have installed a “rickety plywood fence” and boarded up the windows, “druggies” either knock sections down or use the fence to their advantage by hiding behind it. However, these neighborhood junkies might have to find a new abandoned building, with the owners “planning to demolish the crackhouse to make room for a 20-unit condo.” Once that goes up, neighbors will probably be begging for the good ‘ol crackhead days. |BrooklynPaper|