Movie City Indie

Quote: Björk on Iceland's founding as Iceland flounders

In a terrifying Observer piece about the collapse of the Icelandic economy this week, a note from Björk. "Blame it on the Vikings. Icelanders like to hark back to their ancestors, the rebel Vikings who, as the nation's most revered daughter Björk once explained, 'couldn't deal with authority in Norway. So they flew off in this mad ocean in a wooden boat which is pretty hardcore, North Atlantic in the year 800. And they found this island full of snow ... yeeeah!'"

My bloody cellphone

Sometimes it's good to work with crayons. My Bloody Valentine's closing number, Aragon Theatre, Chicago, 27 September.

Someone else got a better camera into the house.

Good artists tend to be bad students

New Yorker senior art critic Peter Schjeldahl explains. The acute prose stylist's newest collected criticism, "Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker," is a blast. "Hydrogen Jukebox" belongs on the shelf as well.

"The Daisy" ad is back

Tony Schwartz's original ad, 44 years ago.

Fox on the Run

Micro Loup from Richard McGuire on Vimeo.

24 hours of world air traffic in 72 seconds and a day at the beach down under[UPDATED]

Looks best as high-quality version blown up to full screen size. Alternate title? "Pandemic flu vectors.html." A beautiful parallel project is here, by Aaron Koblin.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. Tamarama Beach in Sydney.

[Quote] Mike Leigh on "cinema"

Mike Leigh, talking Happy-Go-Lucky at the Los Angeles Times: "At any given moment around the world," he says, in a studied tone, "there are dozens if not hundreds of very good films being made. It's what we call world cinema. And a tiny slice of that is Hollywood. I love all kinds of movies that come out of Hollywood. Nevertheless, the fact is that I personally align myself with world cinema and I am Hollywood-resistant. The joy is to go to the States and share what we do on our terms and that's even the joy of being at the Oscars when it happens. It is great being there with this uncompromised foreign product."

Homer votes

A leaked snippet from the upcoming November 2 "Treehouse of Horrors" Halloween special.

The Biden-Palin debate instant musical

That was fast.

]]> [MG]
Miss caribou killa, black gold drilla
Watcha gonna do, hockey mom, to Pakistan?

[Palin]
Thats probably the only thing that theyre ever gonna agree on
But that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq

[MG]
Your response? (Oww!)

[Biden]
Pakistan
Thats where they live
Thats where they are

[MG]
Next question: Iraq
Are we ever gonna bring our homies back?

[Palin]
Were getting closer and closer to victory
And it would be a travesty
If we quit now in Iraq

[Biden]
We will end this war
John McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shias got along with each other
John McCain has been dead wrong

[MG]
Ooooh, blao!

[Palin]
Drill, baby, drill

[MG]
Aaaah, oh snap!
Everybody, now go straight for the kill
Oh!

[Palin]
F* Obama

[MG]
You gonna take that?

[Biden]
F* McCain

[MG]
Sticks and stones are so much softer than words

Now its time for the economy
Is main street gonna get a frontal lobotomy?

[Palin]
Joe six pack, hockey moms across the nation
I think we need to band together and say
Never again
Never will we be exploited and taken advantage a—again
By those who are managing our money

[Biden]
The middle class needs relief
Tax relief, they need it now
They need help now
The focus will change with Barack Obama
The governor did not answer the question about deregulation
Did not answer the question, defending John McCain
About not going going along with the—

[MG]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Wai—wait a minute
Go easy-way on the ightweight-lay

Chorus

Satire: The Lil' O'Reilly Factor

Ah! Teh internets!

Trailering Vancouver International: you are the audience

Vancouver International's identity shorts are always startlingly good. This year, a very bright taxonomy of the audience. What's sweet is how the bits prick discerningly, but aren't, as is often the case when japes are made at filmgoing, ill-observed. Directed by Chris Hutsul of Soft Citizen. Above, "Foreign Film."

"The Front Row."

"The Overexplainer." ("Mauve" is a funny word.)

"The Die Hard."

"The Seat Saver." ("Stink-eye" is funnier the more times you say it.)

And not least, "The First Question." [As linked in Turkey.]

Ballast (2008, *** 1/2)

Lance Hammer's Mississippi Delta-set study of the contemporary working class, isolation and ultimately hope, Ballast, is told in urgent and emphatic fashion, breathless yet hushed, with a level of filmmaking skill that makes the head spin from its first few cuts. Circumstances bring together a single mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs) her 12-year-old son James (Jimmyron Ross), and an emotionally devastated convenience store owner, Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.). Using non-professional actors, Hammer's narrative steadily moves these characters in hard-up Canton, Mississippi, toward understanding.

They're quietly beaten-down figures: James tries to escape into nature to avoid fighting with other teenagers. Marlee, fired from a menial job for bearing the visible bruises of an argument, says it shouldn't matter, "like the motherfuckers even know that I'm there! I'm invisible to them." Synopsis makes Ballast sound severe and tragic. Family rifts and blood disputes simmer, with little explained, and much emotion and history and melancholy inferred. Hurt is so much more than a passage of poorly-written purple prose.

Hammer's work is indisputably cinematic: his control of mood and portent is exceptional, the story felt through setting and imagery. About five minutes in, there are two shots of a freight train racketing through and past the rain-soaked fields: sound and image alike evoke all manner of melancholy, even apart from the just-begun story of misunderstood siblings and boys gone bad. A shot of black birds rustle into the sky to great cry and light-blotting number as a troubled child chases them: no literal meaning but evocative nonetheless. Cinematographer Lol Crowley, shooting almost entirely hand-held in 35mm widescreen, honors available light in practical locations as insistently as Terrence Malick. The effects are as rich and etched as plein air painting. The world is grayer, blue at best, sadder, wetter, and yet there is beauty in these stark patches of the Mississippi Delta, landscape damp, gorgeous, drear and oblivious to joy or fearfulness in the foreground. I'd go so far to say this is not a movie that's well-observed but one that is simply seen.

Comparisons to David Gordon Green are worthy in a shared willingness to describe the contemporary working class South (George Washington, All the Real Girls) and to stir the heart with sorrow brought on by mix-up or madness (Snow Angels). Yet I'd like to think Hammer, a refugee from years spent working on the production side of multimillion-dollar projects, has forged his style through vision and obstinacy. In interviews, he's spoken of the time he spent in the locations where the film was shot, and Hammer also controls the distribution, preserving birthright and authorship like a hard-won land claim. (One form of alienated labor produces a tale about another form.) While this is the kind of movie you make with a copy of Bresson's "Notes on Cinematography" rolled up in your pocket like the morning news, it's also the sort of idiosyncratic, intimate filmmaking that is strangely atypical in the contemporary independent scene. And forgiveness and the portrayal of redemption seldom get such loving attention in American movies at all. A vast country deserves intent artists.

A bird by any other name: the critical ornithology of Ballast

Movie reviewers are watchers, but who's the better birdwatcher? Writing in the New York Times today, Manohla Dargis lavishes attention on an early passage: "Shot on 35mm film by the British cinematographer Lol Crawley, it opens with a hand-held camera trailing after a boy of around 12, James (JimMyron Ross), looking and then walking toward—and soon running at—hundreds, thousands, of geese noisily taking flight into the blue winter sky. The boy doesn’t say a word as he watches this screeching mass, yet a feeling of loneliness, thick as a winter coat and every bit as palpable as those darkly swirling birds (surging like storm clouds, like waves), settles around him." Others made similar note, such as Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "A boy or young man in a down coat, seen from the rear, walks through the weeds into a flat, horizontal field, probably one where corn or cotton or soybeans are grown. From the coat and the light and the empty field, it appears to be winter, although part of the seductive power of Ballast is that elemental questions like where and when go unanswered. As the boy advances, a flock of scavenging birds— likely a murder of crows—explodes out of the field, and this almost painterly composition abruptly becomes a chaotic whirlwind." James Rocchi, at Cinematical, is less categorical. "It is winter in the Mississippi Delta, and the fields are fallow under dead skies and barren trees thrust up stark from the muck. If it were summer, the sky would be clear and the crops would be green and the soil would burn with life, but summer is far away. A boy moves across the mud and water, and he runs toward a flock of resting birds, making them jump to frightened flight tilting through the gray light, just to make them do it, just so something else knows he's alive." At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman has a different vision. "The film's opening shot is striking: a young black boy runs away towards a screaming flock of seagulls filling the sky. The eruption of noise and movement quickly gives way to silence and stillness and the title credit." The trailer, featuring the avian suspects in question, is above. [In comments, reader TLC suggests they're snow geese; details below.]

Indie is at a triple-feature.

[PR] Transformers 2 gets iMichael IMAX treatment

MICHAEL BAY TO SHOOT SELECT SCENES OF TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN WITH IMAX® CAMERAS

LOS ANGELES, CA, September 30, 2008 – IMAX Corporation (NASDAQ: IMAX; TSX: IMX), DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures today announced that director Michael Bay will shoot key sequences of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with IMAX® cameras. Bay will integrate the IMAX footage with state of the art CGI to create an unprecedented look and feel for the highly anticipated sequel to last year’s box office hit, Transformers. As previously announced, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be released to IMAX® theatres simultaneously with the movie’s wide release on June 26, 2009.

The movie sequences shot in traditional 35mm will be digitally re-mastered into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience® with IMAX DMR® (Digital Re-mastering) technology. The IMAX DMR scenes will appear in the traditional “letterbox” shape, while scenes shot with IMAX’s cameras will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen.

“The extraordinary level of detail and intensity captured by the IMAX camera creates many exciting possibilities for us with this film,” said Michael Bay, the film’s director. “IMAX’s all-encompassing format will take this story to a new level, and I am once again very excited to share The IMAX Experience with Transformers fans around the world.”

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“The addition of another amazing title from DreamWorks and Paramount, combined with more groundbreaking use of IMAX technology by Hollywood’s top filmmakers, are examples of how far we have come as a company and a distribution platform over the past several years,” said IMAX Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Richard L. Gelfond and Bradley J. Wechsler. “The growth of the IMAX theatre network, fueled by the economical benefits of the new IMAX digital system, is driving interest from virtually all of the top studios, which is resulting in more IMAX movies for audiences to enjoy.”

“Michael Bay’s innovative use of IMAX cameras will create a spectacular cinematic adventure for moviegoers next summer,” added Greg Foster, Chairman and President of IMAX Filmed Entertainment. “We’re very excited to be integrated as a core part of the Transformers production, and with the skilled marketing and distribution teams at DreamWorks and Paramount, the timing is ideal given our expanding global audience and network footprint.”

The IMAX release of this movie was previously mentioned in IMAX Corporation’s second quarter results press release on August 7.