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January 29, 2006

Leave in Silence, Flee in Terror: Sundance 2006 Calls it a Festival

From the back seat of a car on the way to the Salt Lake City Airport, I am picking up the pieces of my severe Sundance Day 10 wall-smack and placing them in the only context my devastated mind will allow: It is over. Saturday's awards ceremony lasted a relatively quick 90 minutes, mostly painless with the exception of a world cinema juror falling off the stage and Alexander Payne's Barbarino haircut.

In Between Days filmmakers So Yong Kim (L) and Bradley Rust Gray, caught on a screen grab from the press steerage-class quarters "anterior room" during Saturday's Sundance Awards Show (Photo: STV)

In fact, several New York filmmakers (all covered over the last few weeks by The Reeler, not quite coincidentally) enjoyed an impressive showing in the final tallies, with Hilary Brougher claiming the festival's screenwriting prize for her Stephanie Daley; Dito Montiel taking home a directing and ensemble cast award for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints ("I'm taking it back to New York for all of the kids," he told The Reeler after the awards, "But I'm still gonna keep it."); So Yong Kim winning the Independent Vision Award for her brilliant In Between Days ("Yeah, New Yorkers were great tonight," she told me, pumping her fist. "We rocked."); Carter Smith receiving the Shorts Jury Prize for Bugcrush; and, of course, Chris Quinn accepting both the Audience Award and Special Jury Prizes for his Sudanese Lost Boys documentary, God Grew Tired of Us. Along with dramatic competition winner Quinceanera, the two films were the first in festival history to win both top prizes in the same year.

Then Half Nelson got picked up by ThinkFilm, some asshole stole my scarf at last night's awards after-party and I decided that does it: I need a couple of days off. So congrats to all the New York filmmakers, crew and actors who crashed the Sundance party in 2006; after a month or eight of therapy, I should be ready to tackle the Class of 2007. Much sooner--say, Feb. 1--I will be back at Reeler HQ with an attempt to reclaim a working knowledge of what's happening around this city of ours. As always, thanks for reading, and I will catch you in a couple of days.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:29 PM | TrackBack

January 28, 2006

Sundance 2006: All Over But the Flying (and Maybe Some Hardware)

Well, that was fun. A four-film marathon closed out my Sundance viewing experience Friday, with Dito Montiel's uber-hyped A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints occupying The Reeler's closing-night slot. Festival staff outside the Library screening venue stopped handing out wait list placeholders around No. 200, and inside the theater itself, the Saints buzz bounced from seat to seat, aisle to aisle, wall to wall. Anyone who was not chatting about the film's sales potential was yammering about its front-running candidacy for a festival prize. All in all, even as the lights dimmed at 11:34 p.m., the Library may have been the only place in Park City where adrenaline seemed to have overtaken fatigue.

Of course, that has as much to do with the quality of Montiel's (above) quasi-coming-of-age film as the bloodrush associated with scoring a ticket to see it. Saints is a lightning bolt of a movie, brilliant in its kinetic vistas of Astoria, Queens, and smoldering aftermaths of violence and chaos. Granted, it is nothing you have not seen in one fashion or another before; Montiel leans unapologetically on the cinema of Scorsese, Lee, Cassavetes and (in one especially odd, derivative sequence) even P.T. Anderson. But in its hybrid of family drama and urban mystique, Saints inhabits a space wedged between total control and total inexperience. You know what you are watching, but nevertheless have no idea what is coming next.

No idea, that is, unless you know Montiel's life story, on which Saints is partly based and which The Reeler broached here a few weeks ago. In the post-screening Q&A, the filmmaker noted that finding that balance--as well as that between the past and present he breaks up with flashbacks--came down to a certain... well, flexibility. "Once we started filming, the script kind of went in the garbage can," Montiel said. "I'm not going to teach 15-year-olds how to curse, you know? So I'd just sort of go around and make sure the heart of the scenes would happen, and then it was like, 'Go crazy.' And they went crazy, and it just sort of worked in this weird way."

Some scenes' histrionics will no doubt be trimmed when--not if--the film gets its distribution deal. Saints lives and dies by its emotional ebbs and tides, which currently leave too little to the imagination--especially as young Dito (Shia LaBeouf) wrangles with his father's (Chazz Palminteri) desperate clinging. As present-day Dito, Robert Downey Jr. returns to Astoria for a series of tight-lipped interludes with old friends Nerf (Scott Michael Campbell), Antonio (Eric Roberts) and his ex, Laurie, whom Rosario Dawson imbues with a completely unexpected, heartbreaking honesty. Montiel said the film and its cast came together after Downey's early producing commitment--not that his attachment as a star totally reassured the director. "It terrified me to have him play the role because we didn't really have any idea if it was going to work," Montiel said in his usual mile-a-minute, hand-waving style. "I was never even really much of a fan of his, you know? I know him, and I love him in this movie, but I never saw Chaplin or all the movies that people go nuts for. I'd always be like, 'Oh. Breakfast Club.' And he'd be like, 'I wasn't in the fucking Breakfast Club.' "

Earlier in the day, I had the chance to catch Wristcutters: A Love Story at the Eccles Theatre. All 1,270 seats were filled to watch Goran Dukic's quirky tale of a young suicide (Patrick Fugit) who travels the afterlife (which looks an awful lot like the Mojave Desert) with two acquaintances in search of his lost love, who also killed herself. The resulting story features Tom Waits as a sort of God figure and a final scene that non-verbally says more about love in 60 seconds than Jeff Lipsky's offensive Flannel Pajamas conveys with two hours of dialogue. MCN's David Poland noted that Wristcutters is likely this year's Garden State or Napoleon Dynamite, a fairly appropriate analogy that might overlook the film's more inaccessible tendencies; the metaphysics of suicide (and Dukic's shrewd indictment of cults, cowards and its other, less idealized practitioners) and a muscular sense of irony do hijack the narrative from time to time. And though the film is also in the running for an audience or scriptwriting award, Wristcutters seems a more likely lock for DVD cult-classicdom than any sort of Earth-shattering theatrical surge.

Same goes for Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart, another New York indie that netted a domestic distribution deal with Films Psilos yesterday just before its early-evening screening at the Library. I had spoken with Bahrani about his film before heading to Sundance, but had been looking forward to seeing it since reading rave reviews following last year's Venice Film Festival. That Bahrani, actor Ahmad Razvi (both pictured at right) and Man's tight crew had reached the ultimate goal of their multi-year journey last night was some of the best news I had heard all day; that I finally discovered for myself that it deserves every accolade it received just added to the overall excitement. Unless Saints or Half Nelson wins big tonight and leaves town with a Fox Searchlight logo in front of its titles, Man Push Cart might actually be the New York story of this year's Sundance Film Festival.

And by "New York story," I mean a story genuinely about New York--about being in the city and making a life here for better or worse. Bahrani related the story to Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, but he reflected the hero's urban ordeal humorously as well. "Some of the horror parts, like where he's dragging the cart and he falls?" Bahrani said following the screening. "That's not scripted. The guy was about to get run over. Not only was he about to get run over by a taxi, but we made him run after the cart. We had no budget--we had no rights for that thing. (Cinematographer) Michael Simmonds always said we'd like to have a crew that's small enough that when the actors walk past us they don't realize it's the crew. The good thing about shooting from across the street is that magic stuff starts to happen. Like when he's selling pornos to that guy in the (delivery gate)? And that other guy says I get pornos really cheap in the Bronx? That guy has no idea we're filming. But now we know he can get two pornos for less on Fordham Road."

In his first-ever film role, Razvi labors in moving, prolonged silence as the tormented push-cart vendor Ahmad. "I was very nervous, but I had confidence in myself," Razvi said during the Q&A. "Ramin had a lot of confidence in me. In the beginning I was acting too much--I was doing Hollywood and Bollywood style--and he was like, 'Hey, calm down. This isn't a Brando movie.' I finally calmed down, and he helped me to be more silent and still and to give the same expression as if I would be speaking about it. ... There were a lot of things that were somewhat similar to my life and made me feel a little more about it, but in the beginning it was too much, and I had to slow it down."

Filmmaker Alan Berliner shuns the Sundance spotlight following a screening of his new documentary Wide Awake (Photos: STV)

Over at the Holiday Village, New York documentarian Alan Berliner accelerated his own self-referentiality with his latest film, Wide Awake. Not like that is anything new; the guy made his name with two decades of personal documentary filmmaking. But you really have to be into Alan Berliner to get the most out of Wide Awake, which deals with the director's perceptions of sleep and, more specifically, his lifelong battle with insomnia. Berliner's musings run from clever to cloying; his family interviews and too-cute archival orgy of sleep-related clips overwhelms his more revealing subjection to the science of how we sleep.

As a successfully converted early riser (the time of this post notwithstanding; the Western time zones always fuck me up), I lacked a certain sympathy for Berliner that I probably would have felt when I used to slam my head on the wall while attempting to write at 3 a.m. But I like Wide Awake in theory, especially in the terms Berliner used to describe it in his introduction. "My film is sort of like a Trojan Horse," he said. "You read something saying it's about insomnia, and that's why I guess you're here. Now that I've got you here, let me tell you that it's about insomnia, but it's also about a lot of other stuff, and that's the point. The film's about sleep and sleeplessness, of course, but it's also not about those things. I can't tell you all the things it's about, because I hope it's about more things than I'm even aware of or that I want it to be. But certainly, it's about how sleep functions in our lives in ways that we understand and ways we don't understand. It's about love and family and responsibility and filmmaking and choices that we make in life and contradiction, and somehow, an idea about making a film about insomnia led me to all that stuff.

"And to give the film a chance and stay with it, I hope the Trojan Horse concept works for you as the film kind of opens up, and all the weird things I just illustrated sort of march out and touch you with a warm shot of recognition. That, for me, is what this kind of personal filmmaking is all about."

Berliner also invoked cinema as a way of representing sleeplessness--a device in whose service the filmmaker utilizes those overbearing sound and clip montages as well as frequent digressions about his work habits. He obsessively bestows the gift of sleep on his infant son as though breaking a long cycle of abuse. He is either in front of his camera or speaking from behind it for virtually the entire film, which, like I said, can be a little Berliner overload if you do not buy his premise or predicament. But the film is both engaging and informative enough for viewers to overlook its self-indulgences; just try to avoid confusing it with Haskell Wexler's own pro-sleep documentary, Who Needs Sleep?, which somewhat brilliantly precedes Berliner's film alphabetically among this year's Sundance titles.

Even more genius is to see the films featured during a week when 45,000 people travel to Utah and get no sleep at all. Later, guys, we promise--especially if it turns out tonight's awards are anything worth writing about. Stay tuned.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 27, 2006

Neverending Story: Another Thursday at Sundance

I should have more to show for Thursday, I know, but this place is totally starting to depress me. There's just too much space and fewer and fewer people want to be here and my ghetto Internet hook-up at Reeler HQ West makes posting about as pleasurable an experience as circumcision. The parties become insufferable; the oily Hollywood douchebags scurry through the snow like rats. And when Jeff Lipsky's ham-fisted Flannel Pajamas turned out to be the only New York feature I could catch all day, my spirit crashed somewhat violently and I wound up having to watch two hours of C-Span just to help flush the immediate memory.

Commonly referred to as a contemporary stab at Scenes From a Marriage, Flannel Pajamas yields none of that film's insight or intensity. Lipsky (above) showcases a relationship from first date to last goodbye, but showcasing is all you get; the drama surrounding lovers Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) features tenderness and turmoil as clinical as integers on a number line. The film's raves--and there are plenty, including Roger Ebert's breathless outpouring of praise earlier this week--attribute an unblinking honesty to the couple's rise and fall, but there is nothing remotely honest about the events accelerating Stuart and Nicole's demise. With few exceptions (a powerful, long take of Nicholson standing self-consciously naked at a window overlooking Manhattan, for example), everything that happens in this film happens verbally; as opposed to real unraveling marriages, nobody shuts up long enough to convey any sense of alienation. Think of Liv Ullman's expressive close-ups in Scenes, or the space Bergman uses to convey Johan and Maria's fragmentation in that film. In the end, the viewer discovers, an indestructible love--not each other--is their burden.

Not so in Pajamas. From the lovers to their friends to their families and beyond, it is the individuals who dissolve this relationship. There eventually is no love, which does not automatically imply a dishonest portrayal (Pajamas is its own film, after all), but the execution leaves such an inauthentic, forced chronology that even the romance cranks along like a machine. For something that purports to be so real, the characters speak with an over-the-top, almost allegorical self-awareness that mirrors Lipsky's own clumsy direction. Worse yet, especially in light of the Bergman influence, Lipsky gives you no one to loathe. Stuart's younger brother's mad, tragic genius excuses his impetuousness, and the viewer cannot hold Nicole's mother's anti-Semitism against her because of its roots in some early stage of Alzheimer's disease. Infidelity is implied fleetingly, but we are denied even the implication's consequences for Stuart and Nicole. Nothing about this film is honest or complex or challenging. It is simply a bloodless, obvious Saturday-morning cartoon version of a landmark.

But as Lipsky noted when we talked a few weeks ago, Pajamas might be part exorcism as well. "Is it based on a true story?," Lipsky said during yesterday's post-screening Q&A. "The impetus for me to write this script was my own marriage in the late '80s/early '90s. I was involved in a mixed marriage--Irish Catholic wife and me, Jewish--and it was, to this day, still the most important relationship of my life. It lasted about as long as it did in the film. And it's not that I wanted to tell my story or tell her story, but I thought that if I used that as a foundation ... I thought I could create really interesting characters to support what I think are some of the most major themes that anybody in any country endures or encounters or goes though in their lives. I think that we have a story about two people who fall in love each other at two completely different times. I think they have two different reasons for getting married, and I think they both learn a great deal from the marriage."

That same didacticism confronts the audience throughout the film--all two hours of it, virtually shouting, "Relate! Relate! Relate!" But neither Stuart nor Nicole are relatable. They are annoying, humorless bourgeoisie lifers for whom you have neither sympathy nor antipathy. You just want them and their director to leave you alone.

Before Dawn director Bálint Kenyeres on the short circuit, flanked by NYC filmmakers Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa (left) and Madeleine Olnek (Photos: STV)

So after a trip to the festival headquarters, where I encountered another interlude of benign press office stonewalling (this time about Saturday's awards ceremony), I returned home for a sandwich and that C-Span lobotomy. I eventually summoned the motivation to check out Sundance's Shorts Program V, featuring Madeleine Olnek's Hold Up and Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa's La Muerte es Pequena--neither of which disappointed. Overall, it was a remarkably strong set; both funny (Hold Up, One Sung Hero) and poetic (Aruba, The Beginning of the End) while clearing room for the most profound film I have seen at the festival so far: Bálint Kenyeres's Before Dawn, a 12-minute, one-take wonder illustrating the breakdown of a human-smuggling operation in rural Hungary.

As dazzling in its logistics as in its blue-hued beauty, Kenyeres told the audience he had about 40 minutes of "magic hour" light each day for shooting--20 minutes at dawn and 20 minutes at dusk. He finished the film in four tries. The result is a masterpiece that recalls the climactic house-burning sequence at the end of Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice; about seven minutes in, you can barely believe what you are seeing, and you fall in love with the cinema all over again. I do not know what is with all these great shorts about human trafficking; I also remember the best film I saw at last year's New York Film Festival being Cary Fukunaga's tragic Victoria Para Chino (which also appeared in Sundance earlier in 2005). Anyway, you can (and must) view Before Dawn and dozens of Sundance's other shorts here on the festival's Web site.

Now I guess I should try to restore some faith in the feature-going process, assuming I can get into Wristcutters: A Love Story in the next hour or so. Wish me luck; with two days left, I need it big time.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:15 AM | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

Good 'God' and a Defense of 'Daley'

The Reeler had a fairly successful viewing tandem today, skipping from a packed screening of Christopher Quinn's documentary God Grew Tired of Us to an almost-packed screening of Hilary Brougher's drama Stephanie Daley. Both filmmakers came to Sundance from New York with films in competition and in search of distribution; audience and industry expectations surrounding their films seem to have only heightened as the festival inches to its conclusion.

God Grew Tired in partcular has earned some of this year's most consistent acclaim, with all of its screenings so far leaving stranded wait listers by the dozens. I barely snuck in to the Holiday Village this morning, but I was grateful to check out Quinn's four-years-in-the-making doc about the struggles of African refugees known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Quinn follows three of the Lost Boys as they join a government program that relocates them to new lives in Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Of course, their lives are new in only a proscribed cultural sense; a permanent and painful displacement impels them to add second and third jobs as a means of supporting the refugees left behind in a bleak Kenyan camp.

Following the screening, Quinn acknowledged that recent years' tumult in Rwanda and Sierra Leone inspired him to tell a story about the ongoing strife afflicting parts of Africa. Yet in bringing the Lost Boys to screen--and two of them, Daniel Abul Pach and Panther Bior (pictured above with Quinn), to Sundance--God Grew Tired skillfully reveals voices that eschew politics for a more dignified, humane commonness.

"When something happened to you, it will also happen to others," Abul Pach told the audience in the Q&A. "The reason we're letting people know is for the next generation to come. Number one is to survive in this world. The problems are not finished. In years to come, there might be problems, and this can help other people--not us. In this next generation to come, it will help people to survive. This is a difficult world to live (in), but the best way to do it is to know what this world is for and how to survive in it. ...

"I feel it," he continued. "When I look at it, I cry. I don’t want to watch it. At the time, when it was happening to me, I didn't know how I managed it. The way I was represented is that when something hurts you, in the beginning, you don't feel it. That it harms you. But after a while, you feel the pain. That's how I feel about it, you know. It's very tough. But I realize that God helps people through people, and that's why these people came and found us in the camps."

And now the film is moving beyond Sundance, with foreign distribution in place, three screenings this week for Salt Lake City high school students and another major screening Thursday night for 700 of the Salt Lake region's Sudanese community. The doc features some formidable star power as well, including narration by Nicole Kidman and co-producers like Brad Pitt and Dermot Mulroney. It is a wonder the film has not been picked up for the U.S. yet, but with continually sold-out screenings and its status at or near the top of the competition totem pole, do not expect Quinn to return to Brooklyn without a deal.

Brougher Hour: Stephanie Daley filmmaker Hilary Brougher has a word with her audience (Photos: STV)

Hilary Brougher, however, might not be so lucky. Do not blame her, though; Brougher's Stephanie Daley (profiled on The Reeler Jan. 17) is a dark, quiet drama whose challenging material has been alternately misread as pretentious, half-baked or both by festival critics. And before you slap my own judgement around for liking so much of what I've seen here, keep in mind that there is just not enough time in 10 days at Sundance to write at length about everything that I thought sucked (and I have seen some bad movies, from the Copeland-umentary Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out to the documentary musical Songbirds to the Crook Brothers' painfully disappointing Salvage, for which I harbored some of my highest hopes of the festival). Instead, I am way more interested in phenomena like Stephanie Daley, a flawed but honorable chronicle of a teenaged girl (Amber Tamblyn, playing the title role) accused of killing her baby and the psychologist (Tilda Swinton) who gauges her competency to stand trial.

I had heard mixed things at best about this film, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what is so objectionable. The performances are solid, Brougher's script and direction are both confident without being showy, the story mostly makes sense (although an infidelity issue between Swinton and husband Timothy Hutton seems to pile on a little more drama than necessary) and David Morrison's high-def cinematography looks great. So now, when I overhear this shit about a "hysterical" movie not suitable for the Lifetime Network, I feel my brain whirring with not only disagreement, but also irritation. There are critics out there dismissing Stephanie Daley as a bad women's film, as though the intensity of the movie's mother-daughter dynamic frustrates its quest for legitimacy (or at least for a wide, receptive audience). In comparison, the overwrought father-son dynamic that burdens portions of James Ponsoldt's Off the Black has been perceived as a simple dramatic weakness. Critics have allowed it to sputter and stall in the context of the film, not in some abstract social climate.

Look: Realistically speaking, Tilda Swinton-Amber Tamblyn is not box-office catnip, and buyers and critics all know that. But that is not the point of the Sundance Film Festival; or maybe it is, and we should just face it and start calling it the Sundance Market in 2007. At risk of added stridency, I am fairly ashamed to even consider the salability of films like Stephanie Daley or the sublime In Between Days in the same intellectual breath that judges their aesthetic merits. That said, when did that proximity become an impediment to determining these films' values in either case? I mean, Stephanie Daley works--not brilliantly, but it works. And in winnowing down its market before considering how it can either be improved or just simply enjoyed, the festival-buzz apparatus seems to have backfired somewhat destructively.

None of this is to say that Stephanie Daley's critics all come equipped with Y chromosomes, or that the film does not have its basis in Brougher's own experience with pregnancy and motherhood. "It's not that it changed the story," Brougher said in the post-screening chat. "I think it changed the way the story felt. I don’t think I could have written this after having my kids. I would have wanted to immediately disassociate and forget about all of that fear once my kids were here safe. On the other side of that, having my kids here safe, it's been a period of tremendous blessings and joy for me."

Brougher added that she intended to scope out the "shadow and gray" of what it meant to be her title character, but also revisited the idea of fear, which seems universal enough. "It began with an interest in the idea of how you get the feeling that Stephanie has onscreen--of denial and lying. 'Maybe I'm not. Oh no, I'm not. Maybe I am.' That sort of highly sensitized looking for signs and meaning. How do you get all of that onscreen? It began with Stephanie; as I started working on her, I was looking around at dear friends who were going through pregnancy and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on.' A lot that's very hard to talk about, but is very profound: Coming up against the unknown, that which you can't control, loss and gaining and changing of self that happens when you're pregnant. I thought it was really interesting to see the adolescent experience of it--the frightened adolescent experience and the frightened grown-up experience--to see how they bounce off of each other."

Swinton, whose short answer for why she joined the film was, "I wanted to see it," also elaborated with her typically eloquent candor. "I think it just occurred to me how rare it was for anybody to make any work--particularly for the cinema--about how terrifying it is having babies," she said. "Just that really. That idea. ... It's completely terrifying, and that's part of the deal. In my experience, there's a strange conspiracy of silence amongst women about how terrifying it is."

Pregnancy's terror notwithstanding, Stephanie Daley makes sense to me, and there is a pretty wicked cynicism at play if Brougher's specific attempt to verbalize and/or visualize her themes attracts the pretentiousness card by default. That is the impression I get, anyway. Maybe it is the Sundance rookie in me, but shouldn't we try a little harder instead of inhaling six screenings a day? Or at least know better?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:20 PM | TrackBack

Breaking: IFC Films Picks Up 'Wordplay'

Breaking news from the Sundance trenches: Sources at Cinetic Media and IFC Films have confirmed that the distributor has picked up domestic distribution rights for Patrick Creadon's crossword documentary Wordplay. Not terribly shocking considering the sight of IFC reps at the film's premiere bolting for a cell signal and a quiet space the minute the screening ended, but exciting nonetheless.

Details are not presently being disclosed, but an IFC spokesperson told The Reeler a few minutes ago that Wordplay is set for a 2006 release. As always, more information is forthcoming, so drop by a little later for specifics and official comment from IFC Films.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:35 PM | TrackBack

Picturehouse: Come For the Pizza, Stay For the Seven-Figure Distribution Deal

Tuesday was a relatively slow day in Park City, with some parties scattered here and there and most of the festival's premieres winding down. There were the swamped Kodak and Sundance Channel gatherings that everyone was talking about, but The Reeler wound up checking into the Picturehouse event on Main Street to sniff out any Earth-shattering deals. Flannel Pajamas filmmaker Jeff Lipsky was a conspicuous early attendee, and (at right) Everyone Stares hack/ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland chatted up Picturehouse chief Bob Berney around the one-hour point.

But it was not until the entire Half Nelson contingent walked through the door that most guests' eyebrows spiked. A little asking around yielded no confirmation of a deal or even that the parties were negotiating, but Berney's a fan, and Ryan Fleck's film has stoked enough festival buzz to be off the market by the weekend. Or perhaps the gang was just in the neighborhood and heard the beer and pizza hors d'oeurves a Zoom were really good. Really, it could have been anything.

Anyway, I will try to have an update for you this afternoon following today's God Grew Tired of Us/Stephanie Daley double feature; stay tuned, and maybe start a dollar-per-square office pool for the date and time Half Nelson sells if you feel so inclined. Consider preparing one for Wordplay and Off the Black while you are at it.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

Reeler Rates at 'Rated' Fête

For a while there, I really did think the coolest thing that I was going to hear on Monday would be the voice of the outraged publicist who shrieked into a cell phone: "Eight Touaregs? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Someone needs to remind him he's Justin Timberlake." But then I wandered over to the party IFC and Netflix hosted for Kirby Dick's documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, where I finally had the opportunity to meet oft-discussed IFC TV boss Evan Shapiro (far left in the photo, with Dick, Rated producer Eddie Schmidt and Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos) in person. And when Shapiro introduced me to a friend as his "favorite blogger," well, you know. It is all downhill from here.

Favorite blogger or not, Shapiro was a true gentleman, and the party was a nice chance to catch up with some of IFC's New York contingent at the base of Main Street. Rated executive producer Alison Palmer Bourke and I toasted the film with my red wine and her Airborne, and IFC News stud Matt Singer recalled the great time he has had at Sundance despite not having seen any films. Efforts to organize a jailbreak on Singer's behalf failed when publicists staged the event's only photo op in the middle of our plot. Alas, Singer and crew will return to NYC Wednesday, well before the hotly anticipated 9:30 premiere of Rated.

With any luck, I should have a little more about the film and its late-night after-party Thursday. Wait a second--luck has nothing to do with it. I am Evan Shapiro's favorite blogger! Maybe I'll even wind up in that cool "reserved" section at the front of the Eccles. It is not like I am asking for eight Touaregs or anything.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:12 PM | TrackBack

Zwigoff, Clowes, Malkovich Declassify 'Confidential'

"Wow," Terry Zwigoff muttered from the stage at the Eccles Theater. "World premiere." I am sure that in his heart, however, the rumpled filmmaker was overjoyed to be introducing his latest, Art School Confidential, which has had some mixed-reaction press screenings around New York but played just fine in its Sundance opening Monday night.

Reuniting Zwigoff with his Ghost World collaborator Daniel Clowes, Confidential veers into the story of a idealistic art school freshman whose ambition collides with competition, love, a serial killer and other harsh, um, realities of the art world. And while I've never been a big fan of Zwigoff's previous narrative work, which always seemed kind of sterile and hammy, Confidential turns a bit of a corner with Clowes's semi-autobiographical script and a nicely balanced lead performance by Max Minghella. The climactic turn-for-the-worse is still vintage Zwigoff, as are the squirming interludes of unqualified cruelty and clinking one-liners. Nevertheless, Confidential works in the context of this fucked-up, ego-ravaged community (modeled after Brooklyn's Pratt Institute) where even the good guys can--and often do--lose their souls.

"Believe it or not those characters were not at all stereotypes," Clowes said in the post-screening Q&A. "Those are actually people I went to art school with." Their absurdity--like that of Minghella's sensitive, unraveling young Jerome--and questionable talent underscores the limitations preventing them from art careers. As one character explains early in Confidential, to be a great artist, you must be a great artist, and even that is no guarantee of success. "To me, it was about that sort of a following," Clowes added. "What you really want to do is what you love, but your own art mixes with commerce and other students influence each other and corrupt each other on both sides of the equation. So I thought (the story) would be more interesting conceptually in that regard."

As Jerome's frustrated professor, John Malkovich (above) makes one of his less eccentric, purely Malkovich-y turns in recent years. Audiences accustomed to seeing him in positions of quiet control instead have him lacking influence among his peers and gallery owners, as much a guiding hand to his worst students as he is a sycophant to his most talented. His character's cynicism is far more complex than the garden-variety misanthropy that threads Zwigoff's previous work (and even parts of Confidential); his failures here exist mostly as well-intended failures.

So, you know--if you like Zwigoff, you should probably like this just fine. If you do not like Zwigoff, expect a late-summer DVD release. But do try and see it, if only for the nude modeling at the beginning. You will thank me later. Or not so much. But still.

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Monday Night Live: Beastie Boys Party Overruns Sundance

Last things first, at least vis a vis Monday at Sundance. While an underachieving movie-viewing day left me with a single film under my belt (Art School Confidential, but more on that later), a few trips around town culminated in the Sundance party to end all Sundance parties: The Gen Art/MySpace.com event, during which the Beastie Boys played a full set for about 1,000 partygoers at the Park City Mountain Resort.

Picture if you will: The Beastie Boys tearing it up Monday night on the mountain (Photos: STV)

Not like they just showed up in Utah for a one-off or anything. The Beasties' Adam Yauch (aka rapper MCA, aka director Nathaniel Hornblower) is the man behind Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!, the trio's Sundance-entry concert film comprising video footage shot by audience members at a 2004 show at Madison Square Garden. Awesome enjoyed a pair of sold-out festival screenings Saturday and Sunday, and Monday's party resulted in another capacity turnout to celebrate both the film and all the Gen Art goodness (and genuine balls-out fun) we concertgoers could stand.

As you can see to the right, I dusted off my most dramatic dance moves just for this event, wowing the crowd and earning just enough tip money to pay my cab fare back down the mountain. OK, fine--that is not me. Rather, it is festival director Geoff Gilmore, letting the independent spirit move him as never before. OK, fine--that is not Geoff Gilmore. It is Michel Gondry, all stoked and shit at having pawned off his festival entry The Science of Sleep to Warner Independent. OK, fine--that is not Michel Gondry. It is gossip-tard Roger Friedman, whom the publicists forced to break dance for his party wristband. OK, fine--it is not Roger Friedman. It is just some dude who got wasted on free Stella Artois and jumped from the third floor landing. I told you this was a fucking party.

I shall return later today with additional, foggy Monday remembrances and maybe one or two Tuesday news flashes, assuming I can keep up. You know how that goes. The big buzz around Reeler HQ West is Korea's The Peter Pan Formula and the Crook Brothers' Salvage, both of which unspool late Tuesday. I vow to make the most of the time inbetween; I have been away from you sweet kids far, far too long.

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January 23, 2006

Why? Why Do They Hate Us?

A loyal reader outside the Racquet Club Theatre, Sunday afternoon.

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The Reeler's Sundance Sunday: Brunch, Films and Phair

The bad news about blogging Sundance is that you cannot blog Sundance. I mean, you probably can, but covering the festival in even the slightest depth requires a time and mobility that defies you to lug a computer around, let alone scratch together a series of entries of any real substance.

But the good news is that if your life is crazy enough that you cannot find those spare moments to blog, you are, in all likelihood, acquiring some fairly decent stories to tell eventually. To wit: This morning, I flailed at the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle with its editor, Will Shortz (right), hanging out about 10 feet away. As you read here Saturday, Shortz is the principal subject of Patrick Creadon's brilliant crossword doc Wordplay and something of an institution among puzzle solvers nationwide. But at the film's Sunday brunch event at 350 Main, he was more honorary ringleader than evil word genius. I would have asked Shortz for an extra clue or four (EX: 104 down, four letters, clue: "Gunks"), but my virtually empty grid made it seem kind of pointless.

So instead we talked about the movie. "Yeah, it's just great," Shortz told me. "I've seen it four times now, and every time, my heart still races at the end, and I'm sweating, and I know what's going to happen. I was there!" As far as being one of Sundance '06's unlikeliest stars, Shortz deferred to the puzzle itself and said he was just happy to be able to support it. When I asked if he thought he would continue promoting Wordplay on the road after the film receives distribution (and it will receive distribution), Shortz shrugged. "It was hard for me to get the time to be out here for this," he said. "I've got a full-time job and the (American Crossword Puzzle) Tournament coming up in March. But I'm going to do what I can."

At least Shortz was making the most of his time at Sundance, providing not only the inspiration for Wordplay but also more than a dozen of his puzzle books in a contest during brunch. Naturally, I lost, but the editor of the Park Record snapped a picture of me with the crossword guru that she promised to e-mail, so we'll see if that brief photographic instant yields some kind of vocab karma for me in the future. God knows I need it.

Half Nelson, Full House: Director Ryan Fleck (with mic) joins partner Anna Boden and partial cast and crew following their film's Racquet Club premiere (Photos: STV)

Speaking of the future, Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson is The King Shit among the dramatic competition films I have seen thus far. Yep--all three of them. Anyway, I was blessed to catch yesterday's premiere out at the Racquet Club, where Fleck and co-writer/producer Anna Boden joined a huge chunk of their cast (including 16-year-old Shareeka Epps, the star of Half Nelson's Jury Prize-winning short predecessor, Gowanus, Brooklyn) and crew for a post-screening Q&A. As we recently discovered, Fleck and Boden are exemplars of modesty, and their urge to let the film speak for itself did not shift too dramatically from last week to this week. And while I will have more about the actual film film tomorrow, today we have Fleck sourcing out the root of his and Boden's story.

"Four years ago," Fleck said, "Anna and I were just really frustrated with what was happening in the country, and we decided that we wanted to do something about it. So we were going to take up arms and start a revolution, but that seemed pretty dangerous. So we decided to write a script about a guy who is also frustrated and who decided to teach as a way to change the world. But that sounded really boring; nobody wanted to see that movie because we've seen that before? So we made him a drug addict. And we'd written the feature first, so we made the short, which is more about Shareeka's character and her process of seeing her teacher in this situation. That's basically the difference in the short. That and an hour and 20 minutes' difference."

I stuck around at the Racquet Club for another hour after Half Nelson, waiting for the premiere of So Yong Kim's feature debut In Between Days. Kim, a New Paltz resident who co-wrote the film with her partner Bradley Rust Gray, brings a thoroughly minimalist eye to her story of a Korean teenage girl (Jiseon Kim) who endures an encroaching isolation from her family, her crush (Taegu Andy Kang) and Western society as a whole.

In portraying her character Aimie's devastating loneliness against the film's frigid, anonymous urban landscape, newcomer Jiseon Kim (left) dominates Days from its first frame to its last. A non-professional whom the director discovered working at a cafeteria in New Jersey, Kim bolts from lost to found to virtually disappeared as the story unfolds. Her unrequited love is not so much a rebuke as much as it is a denial; losing her best male friend (indeed, her only friend) to sort of an Americanized analogue crystallizes her alienation pretty much forever.

In the end, when Kim's mildly aghast face reflects the choice she must make between her past and some abstract future, the viewer suddenly realizes how invested he or she is in young Aimie's decision. And even as she explained to the Sundance audience that she was initially put off by how "stupid" and "embarrassing" her character was, she clearly got the part. She understood it and inhabited it. In Between Days might wind up one of the festival's tougher sells, but anyone with eyes or a heart will latch onto Jiseon Kim. Her performance is guaranteed to be one of this year's most transcendent.

Then there was the party. No, no, no--not the All-Star Composers Jam Session Folk-Hack-Jerk-Off-A-Thon (right), but the Barclay Butera/Hollywood Life/Insert Sponsor Here party at a grossly overrun Gateway Center. This is the one honoring Sundance's "must-see dramas" like Flannel Pajamas, Steel City, The Proposition and others, except that producers from a few of those films were walking around muttering complaints like "Fucking bullshit" or "God, total clusterfuck" under their breath to me as they struggled to get their guests (and, in at least two cases, themselves) past the nylon stanchion.

Liz Phair (right): Now available for film festivals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate retreats...

In the end, The Reeler penetrated the handstamp armada, where folks like Nick Cave, Tim Hutton, Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro and--for a mintue or so--Nick Nolte braved the crowd gathered to hear headliner Liz Phair crank out some ditties with her shaggy underage boyfriend harmonic acoustic accompanist. I knew none of the songs, but the drunkest people in the room pretended to, so we inherited Phair's rock show sing-along vibe mostly intact. After Phair's set, however, the cool people wound up in an even more congested VIP are across the corridor, leaving my colleague Ray Pride and I stranded in the quickly restored Queer Lounge. The lipstick lesbians stopped kissing soon enough, however, and the next bus out of Main Street was our bus home.

And to think it all started innocently with a crossword puzzle and brunch. This place will corrupt anyone. Anyone!

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:40 AM | TrackBack

January 22, 2006

A Good 'Listener': Stettner Premieres Mystery with Collette, Maupin

This first weekend at Sundance is totally nuts, with anticipation levels surpassed only by the sheer volume of people squeezing into theaters and wait lines to catch dozens on dozens of premieres. Take Saturday night's Eccles Theater showing of The Night Listener, with about 1,300 filmgoers packed in for Patrick Stettner's tale of a late-night New York radio show host ensnared in a phone relationship with a mysterious young fan. Star Robin Williams was a no-show (Stettner passed along Williams's "crazy love" from the actor's location shoot in Canada), but co-star Toni Collette and writers Armistead Maupin and Terry Anderson made the trip and greeted their audience following the screening.

Toni Collette and Listeners (L-R) Patrick Stettner, Terry Anderson and Armistead Maupin (Photo: STV)

As the caretaker of Williams's ill phone friend--a 14-year-old who styles a gripping, soon-to-be-published abuse memoir of increasingly questionable veracity--Collette disappears into blindness, loneliness, clinginess and a general devastation that is as creepy as any of the dark revelations Williams discovers in his quest to track young Pete down. "The story was just so unbelievably intense," Collette said when asked how she prepared. "I think basically this woman is very needy and wants love, and I think it's a very basic need to take it to the nth degree. I feel sorry for her. And I don't know how I prepared for it."

Stettner jumped to the podium. "She's Toni Collette," he said. "She can do anything."

There you have it. I, on the other hand, am fairly limited in what I can disclose without giving the story away, although I can safely say that Lisa Rinzler's cinematography triumphs mightily in a gorgeous duel with underexposure, yielding a dark, saturated color palette you might have expected had Gordon Willis shot a Hitchcock film. And on a semi-related note for those of you Maupin fans reading from Park City, the ever-engaging storyteller will be signing books Monday morning at Dolly's Bookstore on Main Street. The fun starts at 11 a.m., and here is hoping your wait line moves a little more fluidly than those at the theaters. It is about time you got a break.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:44 PM | TrackBack

January 21, 2006

Creadon's Sundance Bow 'Wordplay' Revels in Hard Times

If you think the cult surrounding Will Shortz--the estimable editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle--is a mostly NYC phenomenon, filmmaker Patrick Creadon has news for you. Actually, he has a whole documentary: Wordplay, a brilliant crossword opus which premiered this morning to a packed house at Sundance's Prospector Square Theatre.

Wordplay director Patrick Creadon, enjoying his first screening of his first-ever Sundance Film Festival (Photo: STV)

In profiling Shortz--from his college degree in "enigmatology" (AKA puzzle-making) to his colorful fan mail--Creadon uses the editor as a hub to survey the impact and influence of the Times Crossword. When he is not checking in with a handful of competitive puzzlers around the country as they prepare for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the director hobnobs with the likes of Bill Clinton, a trash-talking Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls (who only semi-joke about their inclusion in one Times Crossword as the "highlight of our careers") and a very, very philosophical Ken Burns among others.

"The idea was always really to learn more about Will Shortz, to find out who he is and how he does what he does," Creadon told the crowd following the screening. "We kind of thought that the film was just going to be about the New York Times Crossword, but as we got to know more about Will--he's devoted his entire life to this, he has this annual tournament that he runs, he's on NPR every Sunday--we knew we had to tell those stories too. And then we also really thought it would be fun to sort of find out more about the puzzle throught the eyes of people who are fans of the puzzle."

And while Wordplay will inevitably be construed by cynics as a feature-length Times commercial, Creadon sustains a tension that makes its climactic crossword sequence feel like one of Murderball's wheelchair rugby clashes. Moreover, his diversion into the construction and editing of crosswords is classically rich, inventive documentary fodder. Creadon never condescends to his subjects, even as they hold forth on matters like the power of the letter Q ("I'd just like to say for the record that I don't go around generally talking about my favorite and least favorite letters of the alphabet," former tournament champ Trip Payne announed after the film). He allows the perfect amount of breathing room and context for the film to grab its viewers, even as he could probably trim one or two interview segments to shape a leaner, stronger narrative.

Either way, the film made me smile, which is no small feat considering the high ratio of crap I've been seeing over the last few days (Police fans will be disappointed to know that the movement to ceremonially burn the Sundance print of Stewart Copeland's documentary/home movie Everybody Stares gathers steam every hour). The Reeler will return to the Wordplay beat Sunday morning when Shortz, Creadon and the film's gaggle of puzzle solvers gather for breakfast and a stab at the Sunday Times Crossword. Knowing my own puzzle luck, I hope they bring along plenty of erasers.

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January 20, 2006

Ponsoldt, Nolte and Co. Paint the Eccles 'Black'

After all that nuts-and-bolts talk this week about finishing his film on time, Brooklynite James Ponsoldt's feature debut Off the Black enjoyed its world premiere this afternoon at Sundance. After a turbulent period waiting for admission outside the Eccles Theater--with none other than Reeler MVP Roger Friedman stomping through the cold, loudly asking anyone who would listen "where are the fucking tickets"--everybody found a seat and settled in for Ponsoldt's story of a lonely high school baseball umpire's who befriends a troubled young pitcher.

Black magicians (L-R) Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Trevor Morgan (over Hutton's shoulder), Rosemarie DeWitt, Sonia Feigelson and filmmaker James Ponsoldt onstage at the Eccles (Photo: STV)

Shot in upstate New York, Black features a sublime lead performance from Nick Nolte, whose fearless tear through umpire Ray Cook's slow, alcoholic disintegration will no doubt condemn him to at least a few more months of "playing against type" jokes. In reality, Nolte offers his least self-conscious work in years. Opposite Trevor Morgan, Nolte loses himself in a swamp of good intentions and suffers an outgrown paternal despair that recalls his filial anguish in Paul Schrader's Affliction. His line-straddling between humanity and sociopathy--especially in Black's second act--ties with Tim Orr's typically gorgeous lens work as the film's most rewarding commodity.

And after he joined Ponsoldt and about 90 percent of Black's other cast and crew onstage for a post-screening discussion, Nolte credited the young filmmaker with writing the type of meaty, natural part he had been looking for. And he discredited any reservations about working with a rookie like Ponsoldt. "I don't put much stock in that 'first-time director' thing," Nolte told the crowd. "Usually, when you meet these people--the 'first-time directors'--they're not first-time directors. They've done shorts, they've done film, they've been shooting and shooting. They just haven't done a major feature. And usually they come with such passion and such great ideas because they've thought it through so well. ... I've worked with many, and it's always been a good experience."

For his part, Ponsoldt shared the backstory behind writing Off the Black. Part of his inspiration had come from a trip to see the Atlanta Braves in spring training, but he noted a more striking influence stemming from a long-lost school chum in his hometwon of Athens, Ga. "When we got to hgh school," Ponsoldt said, "he ran into some trouble with drugs and he dropped out of school. When I went off to college, I remember coming home for Christmas break and I ran into his father at a grocery store. His father was a high school baseball umpire. And his father was so excited to see me; he was asking me how life was up north, was I making short films, all these such things. And nowhere in the conversation did we talk about his son, who was addicted to crack cocaine. And later on I felt awful--like a complete coward--for not asking this guy about this son.

"The guy kept being an umpire. I thought about how he would go to games every day for other people's children, and no one would know really his own private life and love and pain. And it sort of inspired me to start writing."

Which he said he did in while locked away in a cabin near Asheville, N.C., finishing the script in about one week. And now look at him, putting the Eccles back in Ecclesiastes: Maybe the race is always to the swift.

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Van Peebles's 'Watermelon'-Flavored Weekend at Film Forum

To hear him tell it, Melvin Van Peebles had Joe Angio totally fooled. "Originally, I think, in his mind, Joe had me in amber already," he said, recalling the early stages of Angio's new film about Van Peebles's life and career, How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). "He came over and said, 'What are you doing now?' Of course, I had 95 things on the agenda. I said, 'I've got my little group and we'll be playing... ' He said, 'You've got a group?' I said, 'Yeah, man, we'll be playing soon.' He said, 'No shit?' So Joe wanted to get that. He said, 'Boy, that was great. What are you doing now?' I said, 'I'm getting ready to shoot a film in France.' 'What? What?' Gotta have that in the movie."

Sweetback in the day: Melvin Van Peebles in 1971 (Photos: Breakfast at NoHo/Film Forum)

Indeed, Angio got to have that and decades more of the legendary filmmaker's personal history in his documentary, which opens this weekend as part of a six-film Van Peebles retrospective at Film Forum. An engaging survey of a relatively mellow guy whose incendiery output polarizes audiences to this day, Watermelon functions as one part biography and one part diagram of how revolutionaries are made. The delineations are pretty much all here: Van Peebles's awkward upbringing on Chicago's South Side; his turn as an Air Force pilot (flying with an atomic bomb, no less); his unceremonious dismissal from a cable car operator's job in San Francisco; and the subsequent European sojourn during which he found his calling as a writer/director/novelist/journalist/artist/musician/you name it.

All of which, of course, culminated in one of the great independent film coups in cinema history: 1971's groundbreaking, haymaking classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The movie's myth is nothing you have not seen or heard elucidated a thousand times before (even by Van Peebles's own son Mario, whose Baadasssss! will screen with the documentary Jan. 23), with its love-or-hate status often (and unfairly) overriding its ageless quality as black culture's raw, stoic and defining call to arms.

Angio's own first viewing of Sweetback transcended judgment, he said; it was more of an experience--one influential enough to fuel an exhaustive pursuit of Van Peebles's legacy. Working by day as Vibe Magazine's managing editor, Angio had already compiled stacks of research ("an FBI file," he said, "like I was stalking him or something") on his subject when he met his friend Michael Solomon for lunch in 1996. "I was really dying to make a film at that point," Angio told The Reeler. "It had been like four years, and I had been following this magazine track. There was this other film I was going to work on. He said, 'Are you going to try to revive that one?' I said, 'No. The film I really want to make is about Melvin Van Peebles.' And Michael says, 'Joe, I know Melvin really well.' "

A noted indie stalwart himself, Solomon arranged a meeting between the filmmakers and eventually signed on as the producer for Angio's 10-year journey. Van Peebles granted Angio and Solomon full access--on one condition. "That was the caveat," Van Peebles said. " 'OK, guys, do what you want to, but just leave me alone. I'll tell you who, but I don't want to become involved in the bricks and mortar of the thing.' And I didn't want to. The major reason--the only reason--is that I'm a lazy piece of shit."

Obviously, Van Peebles was being facetious, and Watermelon shows why. Angio portrays his subject as a tireless dervish of work, with his self-financed endeavors each possessing tumuluous histories of struggle. As an expatriate in Paris in the '60s, Van Peebles taught himself French as a means of breaking into the city's film scene; his grasp of the language developed so thoroughly he managed a handful of French novels and even some scoops for Paris newspapers. His musical career--specifically as the rap prototype Brer Soul--flourished around the time of Sweetback's release, even with Van Peebles composing all of his songs in a self-invented numeric notation.

And after breaking into Hollywood with his 1970's racial satire Watermelon Man, Van Peebles has spent virtually every year since financing his own films. As such, he "own(s) it all. I have no partners. I own every fucking thing." His business acumen was not limited to film, either; he famously landed on the floor of the American Stock Exchange as a trader in the late 1980s, and Angio features an illuminating aside on how Van Peebles natural talent for dealmaking provided the momentum for his long career.

Watermelon comprises a virtually endless supply of archival footage and interviews, much of which Angio culled from Van Peebles's own library. "In his home, he has a tape of everything he's ever been in or done," Angio said. "It was a couple of years into it, and I said, 'Melvin, can I just go through this stuff?' 'Yeah, OK.' I meticulously marked everything, because he has stuff in the bedroom, stuff in the bedroom closet, stuff in the hallway closet, and I was like, 'OK, this came from the third row of the... .' I wanted to put everything back where I found it." It was not until midway through production that Angio discovered a video of a one-man show that Van Peebles had performed at the Henry Street Settlement circa 1997. "It's basically his life story. I was like, 'Melvin, were you planning on telling me you had this?' "

If Watermelon has an information vacuum, it concerns Melvin Van Peebles as a father. Interviews with his three adult children--Mario, Max and Megan--reveal little about the impact Van Peebles's itinerant-playboy-workaholic lifestyle had on their family, and Van Peebles himself offers little to no insight on fatherhood or how his career influenced his kids professionally and personally. "It wasn't so much that we wanted to leave it out," Angio told me when I asked about the omission. "We asked about it, but it's just that the answers were so matter-of-fact, you know? It wasn't like there was anyoine going toward any kernel of a great, unknown truth. I felt like you get at it through Megan's comment about [Van Peebles's girlfriends], which is just sort of like, 'This is him, we know this is him. We know he loves us, but we have to accept him on his terms. This is not going to be a traditional father figure for us.' ...

"Every time we kind of played with it, it just took us down a path that was hard to come back from--to get back into the narrative flow of the piece. And I felt that ultimately, it wasn't all that illuminating. I felt like you could infer how he was as dad through what we do say. And kind of by what wasn't said."

But as a pop culture artifact and even something of a guerilla-filmmaking tutorial, Watermelon hits its mark. Angio handles his story's racial dynamic tastefully, threading symbols of Van Peebles's social influence throughout the film without resorting to the didactic tricks of some of his own subject's most grating work (face it: Watermelon Man has aged pretty brutally). Mostly, though, Angio manages an elaborate, loving piece of fan mail without patronizing or over-romanticizing its addressee. Van Peebles may be brilliant, Angio says, but he achieved what he has through the lack of any real alternative. And while Van Peebles acknowledges a helping of luck here or timing there, in the end, he makes the films he has to make the only way he can--by himself.

"My modus operandi is the follwing," said Van Peebles, referring to his past work as much as his current project, the brilliantly Memories of an Ex-Dufus Mother. "I go and I try to get people come in with me on a situation--a movie or a this or that. And nobody ever will. And so after a certain tiem, I say, 'Ah, what the hell. I'll just do it myself. That's why I own Sweetback. Same with the Broadway show or the other things. And then there is this situation again. People say, 'Mel, what are you doing?' And then when I say what I'm doing, they say, 'Yeah, but if you did such-and-such...' No--this is what I'm doing. It's quite amazing that with my successful track record that just have to do it the old-fashioned way."

"But..." Van Peebles laughs, sighs. "So what?"

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:43 PM | TrackBack

Redford, Sundance Press on For Opening Day

Traveling from New York to Park City may have taken 14 hours, and establishing a functioning Internet connection may have taken 24 hours, but through it all, you have to have known you could not get rid of me that easily.

And so begins the 2006 Sundance Film Festival--breathtakingly immense, ball-shrinkingly cold and exploding today with more than three dozen screenings across eight area venues. Then there are the parties, panels, performances, celebrity jurors (Terrence Howard, making his triumphant return a year after Hustle & Flow) and, of course, an opening day press conference with festival godfather Robert Redford, holding forth on Sundance's evolution as its namesake institute celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Geoffrey Gilmore and Robert Redford wistfully recall the old days as shared by Friends With Money filmmaker Nicole Holofcener (Photo: STV)

"Your perception of the festival depends on where you sit," said Redford, meaning philosophically and not in a 25-degree bus shelter across the steeet from the Library Theater. "If you get away from the main heart of the programming, which is basically programming for new voices in film and new filmmakers, it's about discovery. It's about discovering the filmmakers by creating the opportunity for them. That's our focus. So we program this thing as a festival, which means we don't program it according to partiality. We don't make that choice. I wouldn't want that on my shoulders anyway."

Redford's remarks--touting the growth of international and documentary cinema in particular--followed an introduction by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who managed to score the day's Sundance-keyword-quota of "work" and "independent" within seconds of sitting down. The pair was joined onstage by Nicole Holofcener, the Sundance alum from way back whose latest film, Friends With Money, opened the festival Thursday night. She led the gathering on a nostalgia trip to the early '90s, when she emerged from the institute's writing and directing labs with her clever, assured debut feature, Walking and Talking.

"I was born at Sundance," Holofcener said. "I have a really bad memory, but I remember panicking because I forgot how to talk to actors. Or I realized I never knew how to talk to actors. And I had these actors looking at me--one liked to rehearse, one didn't like to rehearse. One was in a bad mood, one was insecure. And there I was, and I think that they sometimes thought I was supposed to know what I was doing, and I kept telling them, 'No, I was told this was for practice. I was told it's OK if I don't know what I'm doing.' "

It was at that point that Holofcener said she leaned on her Sundance advisors for the luxury of advice. "I've got to just do it my way and not the way I think it might sound 'intelligent' or sound like a director," she said she learned. "It'll sound like me, and in a way that will get them to do what I want on film. I think that was the most valuable thing in the directing labs, I think--being able to run to these people that I respected and have have them look at me like, 'You can do this.' And they're not my Mom."

Ah, Sundance. Selective, independent and nurturing. No wonder we put up with all of this fucking snow.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:46 AM | TrackBack

Jareck-ing Ball: The Cruel Brilliance of 'Why We Fight'

In describing Eugene Jarecki's extraordinary documentary, Why We Fight, it is not enough to say that the filmmaker did his homework. Nor is it enough to say that Jarecki simply "gets it" or "understands" or "knows what he's talking about," all impressions that linger resonantly enough when you view his film or listen to the director elaborate on its thematic trinity of war, economics and imperialism.

Rather, Jarecki sort of absorbed his homework, so much so that Why We Fight virtually revels in a cold, burnished knowledge that possesses all of the answers while--despite its pedigree (Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary) and authority (interviews with Sen. John McCain, William Kristol, Gore Vidal, exhaustive research, etc.)--having none. After all, the film implies, we fight because fighting is necessary.

Ike has a complex in Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)

Or is it? "One of the things that happens is that a viewer comes into Why We Fight, and sees that tremendous amount of effort to think reflectively about the question of the title, which is so desperately important to all of us," Jarecki told The Reeler. "I think that if a viewer walked out and felt that the film thought it knew the answer, or that Eugene's voice was too clear and ringing out too loudly, they would be terribly disappointed. It would act as though a question as far reaching and as complex as why we fight is just simple to answer. If it were simple to answer, then it it would simple to stop fighting. The point is that we keep fighting, and we fight for reasons. We fight because we are victims as human beings--we are victims of forces far larger and more complex than we were led to believe.

"And so the only consistent answer in Why We Fight is that though there is no one answer why we fight the current war or why we have fought past wars, what is true of all the wars is that there is a terrible and tragic gap between what the public is told and what turns out later to truly have been going on behind closed doors. So we are never really fighting for the reason at the beginning, and we find ourselves all too often as we are now: Deep in the quicksand of the war, scratching our heads wondering, 'How did we get here again?' "

Though Why We Fight takes its name (and some images) from Frank Capra's series of World War II-era propaganda films, it draws its thesis from President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address. Probably the quintessential American war hero of the 20th century, Eisenhower nevertheless presaged the evolution of a "military-industrial complex" that threatened to hijack American foreign policy in its quest for empire. Eisenhower coined the phrase; it has since entropied into a pitch-black abstraction through which the United States embroils itself in one armed conflict after another.

Jarecki stumbled on the footage four years ago while researching his last documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The idea that an Army man of Eisenhower's stature would invoke something as sinister as a "military-industrial complex" on his way out of two ostensibly successful White House terms captivated the filmmaker. "It was absolutely jaw-dropping,"he said. "I don't think before or since an American president has spoken that candidly to the American public. On any subject, let alone one of such life-and-death significance. And let alone one that was so dear to the president, having been a general himself."

The potential for change was central to Jarecki's conception of Eisenhower, and it became Why We Fight's leitmotif as well. In particular, between the intransigent neoconservative prattle of Richard Perle (right) and the reactive rhetoric of Dan Rather, Jarecki featured parts of his chat with a retired New York police officer named Wilton Sekzer, whose son Jason died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Bereft, outraged and resolute, Sekzer backed President Bush's plan to avenge America's losses in Iraq--the country to which the president and his Cabinet had established connections to al-Qaida and 9/11. Such was Sekzer's thirst for payback that he sought out military personnel who would write Jason's name on a bomb meant for Iraq; it symbolized a contemporary twist on the tactics loved ones would request in Sekzer's days as door gunner in Vietnam.

Not long after the Air Force granted Sekzer's wish over Baghdad (with photographic proof, no less), the president distanced himself from his previous Iraq-9/11 link. Nearly three years on, Sekzer remains incredulous. "We're fighting an enemy that isn't responsible for what we're fighting for," he said last week. "And I'm a hawk. I'm a person who wants to believe that my president walks on water. I want to believe that the leadership of this country can do no wrong. That when he says something, it's something you can depend upon. He's the president. ... And when your government lies to you, it's a punch in the heart, you know? It's really, like, 'What the hell's going on?' "

And while Sekzer claims a new understanding of the Iraq War, its foundation in personal change and national uncertainty provides the mine for Why We Fight's richest material. "We" alone confers a unity undergirding the legends of America's great military triumphs. The "we" of Frank Capra's own Why We Fight series was not limited to the Allied forces Eisenhower commandeered through Europe, nor their counterparts in the Pacific. In 1944, "we" meant "everybody"--war projected as a civil contract binding its populace to duty, obeisance or both.

Of course, America was threatened. But in the grand post-WWII hegemonic days, Jarecki's revisionist "we" spotlights one nation under defense contractors, fueled by the Pentagon, immune to conscience. It also manages the miracle of irony without being even slightly cynical. Traveling around 30 states to ask his subjects why "we" fight, Jarecki said, he talked with regular citizens whose initial impulse often was to answer, "We fight for freedom." But the conversations continued, and Jarecki would eventually ask a second time. "Suddenly," Jarecki said, "a 9-year-old girl would know the word 'Halliburton.' " Another, older interviewee answered more generally, "We fight for ideals--at least I hope so." Consideration and thought--not pressure or ideology--motivated further change.

And Jarecki, who does not hesitate to deconstruct modern foreign policy by citing chapter-and-verse from other Eisenhower speeches, is a model of considerate, thoughtful, painstaking brilliance. James Wolcott's breathless comparisons of Why We Fight to the later oeuvre of Michael Moore in February's Vanity Fair in fact do a disservice to Jarecki; they may share politics (no matter how neutrally Jarecki purports to have approached Why We Fight), but where Moore tilts at windmills, Jarecki is dying to learn the source of Quixote's dysfunction. Not that Jarecki would ever admit it.

Well, maybe a little.

"Every documentary maker today walking the planet at one pont or another gets the question about Michael Moore," he told me. "In the wake of Michael Moore, there has been kind of a rising tide that has lifted all boats, and documentaries are being seen now in a new light. We hear all the time that there's kind of a renaissance in documentaries. But much larger forces, I think, are at work that Michael Moore or any other single person. I think that what's happening is that the documentary is being looked to increasingly to fill a void left by a collapse of public trust in mainstream journalism. And that basically the journalist is a person just like myself: Somebody who set out to uphold the ideals of an open society, and they got caught in a matrix just beyond their control where the same forces that Eisenhower warned us about--sort of runaway corporatism in America--are poisoning the fountainhead of free thinking that is supposed to be American journalism."

Then Jarecki really got rolling. "I think there's another interesting side component," he said. "There was just kind of a coincidence in the past couple of years, which is that right when the world was becoming far more complicated and the public was sensing that needed to understand it that much more clearly--right at that time, thanks to the forces of corporatism in media, there was a collapse of trust in the source we usually turn to. So all of the sudden, people need to get their information from somehwere else. So we've seen the rise of the blogosphere. We see the rise of peer to peer communications on the Internet, and we see the rise of documentaries because the public has spoken. The public has made clear that contrary to what we were told--that girls just wanna have fun--people have an appetite for truth. And truth is often more interesting than fiction, it can be stranger than fiction, and at this point in human history, it may be far more necessary than fiction."

But here is the thing: How do you reconcile the search for facts that you cannot find in mainstream media with the pursuit of nuance or "texture," to borrow the word Jarecki has used in previous interviews? The answer, Why We Fight seems to say, is that nuance and texture are the closest living relatives to the truth. They are all we have, and neither liberals' nor conservatives' adherences to black and white ideologies are any longer tenable. More profoundly, Why We Fight not only illuminates the murky, necessary gradations from left to right, but also the vertical threads interweaving class, economics and politics. As proof, Jarecki offers Sekzer—the film's symbol of the shellshocked American for whom the tragedy of 9/11 was revealed to be the ultimate cause and effect.

And the film's struggle with real answers symbolizes the vacuum that Michael Moore and his stylistic heirs fill with a hybrid of introspection and bullshit. Why We Fight is pure introspection: the insight and humility of its director; the maddening complexity of American ethics; and the sharp, terrifying pain that the fight brings to its practitioners. Which is to say: All of us.

"I'm telling you," Sekzer said, recalling his Vietnam service. "You cannot believe how terrible war is. You cannot believe it. You cannot believe how fragile the human body is. You can't believe what a bullet or grenade or bomb will do to a human body--someone you were just talking to. So wouldn't it be great if somehow or another, we could never go to war, we could force opposite groups to sit down at a table and discuss what's wrong and hopefully come to a solution?

"Gee," he adds, pausing with resignation. "Wouldn't that be the greatest thing in the world?"

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:15 AM | TrackBack

January 18, 2006

From NYC to Sundance: Carter Smith, 'Bugcrush'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

"The moment I read the short story the very first time, it was like being hit by a bus," Carter Smith said, waiting in a Dallas airport for a changeover flight to Salt Lake City. "I was like, 'This is the film that I can make better than anybody else. This is the film I have to make.' It just sort of clobbered me over the head."

Indeed, Smith made Bugcrush, an adaptation of Scott Treleaven's story about the "sinister" fallout from a relationship between two high-school boys. An in-demand fashion photographer by day, Smith had directed only a few commercials and small TV projects before diving into his 35-minute film debut last May.

Sundance, however, was not among Smith's immediate goals for the short. "Really, I wasn't thinking about anything other than getting it made," he told me. "As we were sort of going along in the finishing process--editing through the summer--it sort of presented itself and it became prtety obvious that the Sundance deadline would be tight--a complete stretch to get it done by then, but it almost fit with our timetable."

Smith cut post-production so close that he was still burning Bugcrush's rough cut to DVD 30 mintues before Federal Express's last New York pick-up to make the festival's submission deadline. He had, however, color timed and sound mixed what he sent--a work-in-progress impressive enough for Sundance shorts programmer Roberta Munroe to eventually send an e-mail asking Smith how it was coming along.

"I was sort of ecstatic that someone had even watched it," Smith said of Munroe's note. He called her back to assure her that Bugcrush was still on track and would not be too much shorter or longer than the relatively epic short she and fellow programmer Mike Plante had just watched. "You know," Smith continued, "The rough cut might be great, but all the doubt and indecision that can happen in the finishing stages can get the better of you, and you can completely fuck it up in the time between the rough cut and the final cut."

In the end, Smith not only did not fuck it up, but he was invited to participate in the Screenwriters Lab leading up to Sundance. The ebullient filmmaker said the 2006 event is his first "full-on festival experience anywhere ever."

"I'm a total newbie," he said. "I've been here or there to a screening, but I've never actually gone to a destination for a film festival to be there the whole time. This is definitely a first, and I guess don't really know what to expect. I've been picking the brains of everyone I can."

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From NYC to Sundance: Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa, 'La Muerte es Pequeña'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa does things the hard way. At least, that is sort of how it sounds while talking to him about his sexy, intense Sundance short La Muerte es Pequeña. For starters, the native Brazilian adapted his source material--a Sergio Sant'Anna short story--from Portuguese to Spanish, and then cast Latino actors for whom neither tongue was their first language.

"Basically, I had no real reason to do this in Spanish other than the fact that I wanted to set a very specific tone," Gamarano Barbosa told The Reeler. "What drew me to the story was the tone it was trying to hit, which was a sort of melodrama. The actors are acting; they don't hide the fact that they're acting."

At least the guy knows what he wants and how to get it, a trait that likely played no small role in his 17-minute, $300 student exercise earning one of 73 coveted spots in this year's shorts program. The story addresses the strange and sudden coupling of a man and woman viewing the same vacant apartment. She is just out of a relationship with a younger man, he is a paranoid journalist who observes her devastation up close. "It's like a dance between those two," Gamarano Barbosa said, "very much like Last Tango in Paris with a warm, almost Almodovar kind of touch. That was totally where I was coming from."

After shooting Muerte, Gamarano Barbosa won a James Bridges Fellowship at Columbia's film school in recognition of his strong work with actors. The award provided him a chunk of money he used to shoot his thesis film in South America, but on his way out of New York, he decided on a whim to submit Muerte to Sundance. He said he had no intention of actually being admitted, and he shot in such a remote location outside Brazil that he did not receive the festival's e-mailed acceptance note until he returned to Rio de Janeiro--the day before the line-ups were announced.

Having snuck in at the last minute, Gamarano Barbosa started planning. He printed a set of business cards ("I've never made them before in my life, so I think that's already some kind of accomplishment.") and prepared a feature treatment with Muerte's co-writer Ken Kristensen, just in case. But amid all the other little things, Gamarano Barbosa is more or less determined to relish the experience. "This is the first festival I am attending with a film that I made," he said. "I'm going to have a blast there. That's all I can tell you."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:22 AM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: James Ponsoldt and Scott Macaulay, 'Off the Black'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

Off the Black was almost done. Almost. What its veteran producer Scott Macaulay sort of shruggingly referred to it as a "photo finish," its writer-director James Ponsoldt laughed off a little more nervously.

"I think we were probably in the last batch of films to submit to Sundance," Ponsoldt said last weekend. "We shot really late. So we were doing the sound mix this past week at Sound One, and we finished that late Friday, and we're doing our Dolby imprint Monday. We saw our first answer print Friday, and then we're going to have the second print Tuesday or Wednesday. We're doing titles as we speak; I think those are probably going to be done Tuesday. And our first screening is Friday."

And then there were all "the weird things about emulsion." Nevertheless, the irrepresible Ponsoldt--a first-time feature director whose shorts have screened in dozens of festivals around the world--was virtually counting down the days to Off the Black's Eccles Theatre premiere. And why not? The Brooklyn resident will travel to Sundance with one of the festival's most anticipated titles, starring Nick Nolte as a lonely, washed-up high school baseball umpire who strikes up a bizarre relationship with a young pitcher (Trevor Morgan) he catches vandalizing his house.

"It was fantastic," Ponsoldt said of working with Nolte. "Obviously, a lot of people have an idea of what Nick Nolte is like as a personality, but he's such a sweet guy. If he has an ego, I didn't notice it. He was kind and awesome to everybody on set, and he really committed himself to do it."

But, dude--Nick Nolte. On your first feature. "He read it and said he wanted to meet me," Ponsoldt said. "So I went out to L.A. to meet him. I guess he wanted just make sure I wasn't a fucking idiot or a jerk or whatever, because once he said he would do it, from that point on, he was willing to do anything, and he was the easiest actor to work with."

As a world premiere, Off the Black naturally travels to Sundance without a distribution deal in place. Macaulay has plenty of experience with the feeding frenzy that can result from this, but he and co-producer Robin O'Hara are not letting the extra work and pressure overwhelm them. "We're excited about Sundance because we think it's the perfect festival to launch this film," he said. "And at the same time, as a producer, you sort of have to take the long view on everything."

Ponsoldt is equally philosophical. "I had somebody once tell me that when you're making features, there are two distinct parts," he said. "The making of the film, and the selling of the film. And don't corrupt the former with the latter, or you'll probably compromise anything that's meaningful to you. So I guess the big difference is the selling part of it."

Not that he is preoccupying himself too much with that before the titles are even done, or with so many other movies finding their ways to his schedule--especially some of those by his film school colleagues from Columbia.

"I don't think Sundance is the ideal place to see films you want to see, especially if you have a film there," he said. "It's kind of a gross mob scene. I don't really like going to parties. But I'm going to be there for pretty much the whole festival, and what I'm resolute in doing is seeing my friends' films. ... I just want to see the films that sound wonderful."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

From NYC to Sundance: Dito Montiel, 'A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

If and when you run into model/boxer/punk/memoirist/New Yorker/first-time filmmaker Dito Montiel around Park City, then here is my advice to you: Just let him do the talking. Especially about the teeming, steaming city portrayed in his high-profile Sundance breakthrough, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

"The biggest thing was, I'm from Astoria, Queens, and I definitely wanted to make (Saints) here, because, you know, it would just be fun," Montiel told The Reeler. "The idea of trying to make the movie anywhere else and fake it is impossible. I see movies (shot) in Canada all the time, and it takes about five minutes before it feels like Westworld--something feels sterile, you know? You know what I mean? It's too clean, something's not right, and then it's like that's what it is. It's not New York. So it was really important to make it in New York, and particularly in Astoria, Queens, because that's where the story takes place.

"As far as it being a story about New York, I never felt like that," he continued. "I just happened to be in New York and it was nice to make it here because I knew the street names. I never wanted it to be this 'yo Vinny' New York movie. It was just about some kids who, I'm sure, if you're from Ames, Iowa, you knew in your version of it. I read the oneliner things about the film, where it's quintessential New York movie. I certainly didn't set out to do that. I love New York, but to me it's not a New York story. It's just a story about a bunch of kids and they live in New York. That was a really important for me to stay away from that sort of thing."

I could (and probably should) go on all day with Montiel, whose spellbinding intensity fueled the coming-of-age memoir on which Saints is based, which in turn earned him the high-profile fan club that encouraged his screen adaptation. He had exactly zero filmmaking experience, but that represented something of a plus for admirers like Robert Downey Jr., Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting), Chazz Palminteri and others.

Montiel wound up at the 2004 Sundance Screenwriters and Filmmakers Labs, where he developed Saints from its wiry, kinetic source into its wiry, kinetic script. It was the latest facet of many that shaped its author's renaissance-man reputation: from a kid expelled from high school for fighting to an amateur boxing career; from a male model to a punk rocker who famously scored a $1 million record deal for his hardcore band Gutterboy; from running with Allen Ginsberg to directing Rosario Dawson; from so on to so forth.

It was all mildly unbelievable and, for Montiel, totally fucking insane. "I was just talking to my friend Jake (Pushinski), who's editing with me," Montiel said. "He's never edited a film before, ever. He learned Avid while we were making the movie. The luck of it was that I had producers with guts--Trudie Styler and Robert Downey. But the guts to literally let someone..." He takes a breath. "I'm not saying this for press or because it sounds good, but I had no idea what I was doing. For real."

In addition to writing and directing, Moniel also played casting director for the kids who populate his film. "My goal, really, was to get a bunch of kids off the street," he told me. "I did five auditions. I put fliers up at Coney Island and did an open call there. I put fliers up in Astoria, Queens, and did an open call in a music rehearsal studio. I just literally walked the streets of New York to find kids that just looked interesting and had something special, and the movie's full of them--kids roaming around past their bedtimes."

But for better or worse, what catches eyes at Sundance are the names: An A-lister here, an Oscar-winner (Dianne Wiest) there. Montiel said he was initially against casting stars, but he eventually acquiesced once he knew he had found the "right famous people." "Life gets a little easier when you have them around," he acknowledged. "It was going to get made regardless, but two things were a blessing--one, that they were famous enough to make me care, and two, they were good enough to make me better."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Hilary Brougher, 'Stephanie Daley'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

I remember reading about Hilary Brougher's drama Stephanie Daley last summer in The Times; I think it was something about a growing number of indie productions shooting upstate. Starring Amber Tamblyn as the title character--a young woman accused of killing her baby--and Tilda Swinton as the psychologist who evaluates her competency to stand trial, the film had indie cred to spare and Sundance written all over it.

At least that was my impression at the time, and evidently, Brougher thought so, too--even if the clock was against her. "We were really hopeful we could make the festival," she told me over the weekend. "It was kind of a mad dash because we shot in the summer, we did winter pickups and we submitted with a rough cut. And we just finished sound mixing like a day ago."

Brougher chuckled, then laughed as though absorbing the absurdity of it all. Of course, deadlines are hardly an unusual challenge facing premieres like Stephanie Daley. But less than a week before her Sundance debut (her previous film, The Sticky Fingers of Time, screened at the 1997 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals), Brougher's attitude seems to defy the fatigue and stress standards commonly accompanying those deadlines. Her initial relief and happiness at cracking the competition line-up gave way to an even more concentrated resolution.

"Somewhere after relief, it’s a sense a panic," she said. "And then you just kind of do what you have to do. I'm a big believer in efficiency. This happened for a reason--I really think the film came into its own and happened just the way it should. I think the the lack of time itself sort of offset with a really positive momentum and excitement that keeps you going, just from the energy. You find yourself saying, 'I have to do this, I have a reason to do this and we can do this."

Expressing her "hope in the marketplace," Brougher also plans to avoid the distribution pressures likely to follow Stephanie Daley's festival run. Instead, she said, she views Sundance as her just-finished film's unofficial wrap party. "In my heart, I really just want to enjoy some of these people I've worked with before we all disperse," Brougher told me. "That's what I'm thankful to focus on. I know that there's going to be lot going on, and it's going to be very new for me and not like anything I know. But I'm not going to worry about it. So far the film's been a lot of fun and the center of a lot of growth, so I'm just going to try and have a good time and stay positive and be near the people that I love and trust."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:06 PM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Jeffrey and Joshua Crook, 'Salvage'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

Full disclosure: I was in an awful horror-film rut when I interviewed Jeffrey Crook, one-half of the Crook Brothers team that made what sounds like it could be 2006's most terrifying Sundance entry, Salvage. The story of a woman (Lauren Currie Lewis, right) who suffers a brutal murder only to relive the incident again and again (and, naturally, to try solving the mystery of why it happens), Salvage is the horror film I am counting on to wash Hostel's and Wolf Creek's bad tastes out of my mouth.

Like the Crooks need that tiny, added pressure with their movie a week away from its world premiere in Sundance's Midnight program. But so far, so good, to hear Jeffrey Crook tell it.

"What I see missing in things is that there's no mystery," Crook said, patiently reacting to my anti-Hostel broadside. "There's none of that supernatural side in a lot of the slasher type stuff. Ours is sort of a mystery wrapped in a horror shell, and there are a lot of kind of supernatural hints at things that are going on. I think the overall feel of it is a little more mysterious than just thing where somebody's getting chased around for the entire movie with a chainsaw. And our approach to it was that we wanted to have scary stuff--we wanted to have her going down dark staircases and into basements and creeping around and things like that, because that stuff just wotks as scary scenes. But we also wanted to drop all these creepy hints. The Ring was so successful because it's just mysterious. You don't know what the hell's going on through it, you know?"

Sure, I know, and it actually pisses me off even more that I have to wait another days before I can check it out. But that is not the Crooks' problem. In fact, it does not sound like the Brooklyn natives and current Sunnyside residents have many problems at all when it comes to Salvage. Shot in the small town of Marietta, Ohio, where Joshua Crook attended college and met his future wife, the film is the brothers' fourth film in as many years. It follows the the buzz-packing tradition of their previous indies, which landed distribution with Artisan, Lionsgate and most recently, in the case of their dark comendy The Fittest, won best picture at the 2004 Valley Film Festival.

Of course, this is Sundance, and while Crook tells me he is thrilled to be making his first trip, he adds that he and Joshua have no idea what to expect. "It's kind of overwhelming for us in that it gets you so much attention you didn't otherwise have," he told The Reeler. "We've been in guerilla filmmaker land out here for years. It really gets you connected to a lot of people in the industry and bumps you up another level. We're sort of taking other people's advice on what we should do."

But with a film this promising--and producer's rep like Washington Square's Christopher Pizzo and (as of last week) the Gersh Agency on their sides--it is likely some solid advice. Well, a lot better than Hostel, anyway.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:40 AM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Christian Ryan, 'Sólo Dios Sabe'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

As far as scenic routes to Sundance go, Sólo Dios Sabe executive producer Christian Ryan followed one of the more unconventional ones. A former management consultant and high school physics teacher, Ryan had dabbled in writing and producing when he received a telephone call from an old business school friend in San Francisco.

"We hadn't been in touch," Ryan explained. "But he called me up and said, 'Hey, a script just crossed my desk.' He works in private wealth management, and that world of high net- wealth money management kind of intersects with the independent film world. That's people with money, and independent filmmakers are always looking FOR money. There's some connection there--not always a natural fit, but sometimes."

The script was Carlos Bolado and Diane Weipert's Sólo Dios Sabe, and for Ryan, the fit was pretty much perfect. The film was already in an advanced stage of development, with Diego Luna and Alice Braga cast as the story's star-crossed lovers and the screenplay on its ninth draft, but the funding had yet to be locked down. Bolado, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker with an Oscar-nominated documentary and Mexican Ariel award-winning feature to his credit, flew from San Francisco to New York in 2003 to meet with Ryan.

The neophyte producer leveled with the director right away. "I said, 'Hey, you know, I don’t have experience in independent film that I can bring to the project,' " Ryan told The Reeler. "But I know how to run Excel, and I can make PowerPoint presentations if we need those. I don't know anything about cameras or anything like that, but I'm totally happy to learn."

That was enough for Bolado and fellow producers Sara Silveira and Yissel Ibarra. Ryan made his first trip to Sundance in 2004, relentlessly networking and familiarizing himself with the festival dynamics. Sólo Dios Sabe, meanwhile, took shape as a genuinely international production. The filmmakers took advantage of incentives in Mexico and Brazil (indeed, Ryan informed me, Sólo Dios Sabe is the first-ever co-production between the two countries), while Ryan scrambled to keep up with conference calls that often comprised participants in four time zones.

"The sort of things I've been helping to do are raising money and negotiating deals we've cut along the way," Ryan said. "Basically, after talking to other people who've had the title of executive producer, I think that on any independent film it means any and all things. It's pitching in on almost every aspect of the film down to, as one of the other producers and I put it, sometimes mopping up the coffee."

But it primarily means that when Ryan attends his third Sundance Film Festival this week, he will officially be there as a New York filmmaker. "It's kind of funny that here I am in New York involved with this thing," he said. "I guess it sort of points out the international nature of independent film now or something. And hopefully, it becomes a launching pad."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:35 AM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, 'Half Nelson'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson (right) had just begun production last summer when pedigree and background made it a fairly tough film not to see coming at this year's festival. In an intriguingly cosmic (if not necessarily new) style of adaptation, Fleck and creative partner Anna Boden attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab to flesh out their 2004 jury prize-winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn into a feature-length screenplay. Except that the feature was written well before the short, and Gowanus was an adaptation of that. Got it? Great.

Anyway, now that the concept has come full-circle, with their story of an unlikely friendship between a junior-high school student and her drug-addicted teacher expanded as a feature with Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie and Gowanus's young star Shareeka Epps (reprising her role as Drey), it makes sense that the filmmakers' closure would sort of interlace with the festival's. Pretty much everybody wants to see how this thing is going to end.

Of course, anticipation is just one part of the features game played in Park City. "It's definitely different," Boden said. "We've been to Sundance with two shorts (Gowanus and 2002's Struggle) now, but I imagine it's going to be a really different experience there. There are different expectations when you have a pretty good deal of someone else's money at stake. There is a lot more pressure to find a distributor for the film. It was just really fun having a short there, and we just saw lots of really good movies and met other filmmakers. There was very little pressure."

Fleck agreed. "We have a publicist for the first time," he said, "which is a strange thing, but great because we would never know how to arrange any of this stuff on our own. It's a new kind of experience."

Half Nelson is even a risky project, to some degree, if only because its celebrated bloodline confers a higher level of expectations than most feature debuts contend with. I asked the filmmakers about the advantage--or possible disadvantage--of reimagining a story that audiences so took to heart in 2004.

"I don't think it's an advantage," Fleck told me. "I think the only thing that could be perceived as an advantage is that anybody who saw and liked the short will go see this. I think in terms of getting people into the theaters--whether it's a distributor or general audience or press or whoever--not a lot of people saw the short, but anyone who did and liked it, they'll go see it again and I think they'll like this. It's just different enough to make you think you're not watching the same thing. But you know the characters in some way, and hopefully liked the characters in the short. I think in that sense it's an advantage.

"But in terms of selling the film, or winning any prizes?" he asked. "I really can't see any kind of advantage to having a short. I don't think the jurors are going to be aware of that. You still have to make a good movie to impress distributors. I don't think it matters."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 16, 2006

From NYC to Sundance: Jeff Lipsky, 'Flannel Pajamas'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

While a lot of Sundance competition features will likely find distribution in one form or another, only a handful go into the festival every year assured of not only distribution, but probably a bidding war. And if you had to place wagers on which film might manage the most spirited negotiation in 2006, you may as well go with the one written and directed by one of fathers of modern independent film distribution itself.

But do not bet on Jeff Lipsky's relationship drama Flannel Pajamas just because he is hyper-connected from the days he released indies with John Cassavetes, New Yorker Films and his own companies October Films and Lot 47 Films. Bet on Pajamas because Lipsky really loves it.

"It's very funny," he told The Reeler last week. "Our production has hired a publicist. Our production has engaged the services of a sales representative, and I have been instructed in no uncertain terms to attend the festival and have a good time. This is the first time I will be attending the festival in absense of inhuman pressures that I always felt as a distributor. If I was not proud of my film, that would be another story. But I'm confident, not even so much in the film, but this really was a collaborative effort. I've got actors in this movie that are revelations. And they're going to be there with me, and at the very least and my greatest pride will come for the recognition these people get. That might sound a little altruistic, but it's absolutely true."

Of course, nobody has actually seen this movie yet ("I swear to you on a stack of bibles," Lipsky told me after I claimed this disadvantage in writing about it. "I will be carrying the first 35mm print to Sundance under my arm. I thought I would never have to do that, but that's the truth."), but that hasn't stopped the buzz citing the film as an American heir to Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage. As 30-something lovers in New York, Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) fall hard for each other and supposedly fall harder in their ensuing relationship. A native New Yorker himself, Lipsky attributed parts of the story to autobiography; other parts he attributed to that old, nagging "human condition."

Somewhat miraculously, despite being one of Sundance's quintessential grizzled veterans, his first festival "filmmaker" badge seemed to infuse Lipsky with a reborn, almost giddy burst of enthusiasm. "I'm trying not to sound too Pollyanna-ish, but it's a completely new experience," he said. "I truly am in the best sense of the word dazed and astounded at the attentiveness and the organization from the newset volunteer at the festival to the top organizers. I mean, it gives you real insight that this festival really is not just about the discovery of new filmmakers, but the nurturing of new filmmakers. Trying to lend as much inspiration on every level at every step of the process that they can. And as I say, you feel that not just from (festival bosses) Geoff Gilmore and John Cooper--you get it from everybody."

Oh, Jesus--brownnosing from the top down. I'll see your $10 million distribution deal and raise you a Grand Jury Prize. This must be Lipsky's year.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:55 PM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Madeleine Olnek, 'Hold-Up'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

You might call it luck: A rookie filmmaker gets her seven-minute short accepted to Sundance on her first try. Or you could say she earned it, just through summoning the will to tackle the arduous application process alone.

"I'm not good with any device with buttons," said Madeleine Olnek, a way-Off Broadway playwright, director and Columbia film student whose comedy Hold-Up nabbed a slot among this year's festival shorts. "Sundance had an online application, and it actually took me a long time. I swear I typed an essay that disappeared. It retained all this other information, but when I went back to work on the essay, like Brigadoon, it was all gone."

In the end, her facility with a camera--not to mention that harsh mistress comedy--was all Olnek really needed. Hold-Up won the Short Film Audience Award at New York's New Festival for its tale of a woman who persuades her fiance to join her in convenience store robbery. Of course, as with all successful short films, nothing is ever that simple, and friends like indie producer George LaVoo (Real Women Have Curves) found the twists suitably hilarious enough to encourage Olnek to send it around.

"That was the first I thought of it," she told The Reeler. "I mean, honestly, when you're making anything--plays, movies--you should send them out. Even to the best places, however slight your chances are. You just have to put things in the mail."

Besides shopping for warmer socks and checking the Sundance alumni tip sheet for other useful suggestions (EX: Allow for a period of altitude sickness by arriving a day early), Olnek said she was preparing for Sundance mostly by maintaining a sense of perspective. "It's different for the feature filmmakers than it is for the shorts, even though the shorts people feel a lot of pressure because they think it's their big chance," she said. "But you know what's hard? I think because so often when you're involved in a creative field, you're outside the normal 9-to-5 thing. There's less of a sort of structure for a filmmaker's career. So when these successful moments come along, you can really be destablized by them. And put a lot of pressure on them and think that this is it. 'This is my chance.' You know? You have to take advantage of the opoortuntity but at the same time, not decide it's going to be the last thing that ever happens to you."

As such, Olnek plans to take advantage of the standard mix of networking, panels and screenings without running herself too ragged, but instead savoring the opportunity. "All anyone wants is to get into Sundance," she said. "Any filmmaker. It's a kind of encouragement that you just really need to keep going--how inspiring it is to be chosen for an honor like this, you know? It really means a lot."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:36 PM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Ramin Bahrani, 'Man Push Cart'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]

I first spotted Ramin Bahrani's name last summer, when the strength of his feature debut Man Push Cart scored the filmmaker a rave from Variety and prime screening spots in festivals from Venice to Marrakech. The 30-year-old Bahrani had reputedly made a shoestring yet sterling New York film about a Pakistani immigrant whose daily grind as a pushcart vendor anchors him through a swirl of loss and lament.

Six months later, as Bahrani reestablished himself in the city, enjoyed another glimmering write-up in New York Magazine and prepared Man Push Cart for its Sundance bow, we finally managed to catch up. "In North America," he said, outlining his film's route to Park City, "You think about Sundance. And we had contacted (Sundance programming director) John Cooper with the hopes that he could see the film in Venice on the big screen with an audience, but he arrived just after our film had already shown. So we really just mailed the DVD, and that's it. Most (feature) films in Sundance are world premieres, and we're one of the very few films that is not. So we feel very lucky and honored that they selected us."

Bahrani, a North Carolina native who moved to New York to study film theory at Columbia University, made a student film during a spell in Iran and a handful of shorts upon returning to New York. Man Push Cart came about after he got to know his actor, Ahmad Razvi, at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. One screenplay and a few screen tests later, Razvi was a leading man.

Working closely with cinematographer Michael Simmonds, Bahrani sought a visual style that estblished the city as both a setting and a character. I asked how he refined his conception of a New York aesthetic, and what it meant in relation to films that came before it "It's the fact that it feels like the city in the film--not a backdrop," Bahrani said. "That's really important to us. Edison was putting the camera in New York 110 years ago, and in conceiving the screenplay, I really wanted to show things that nobody had seen before. In all that time, we had never seen a movie about a pushcart vendor, so we really wanted to show locations and characters and take on the city that had not been seen before." That included taking cues from Taxi Driver ("the greatest New York film ever made," in Bahrani's estimation) and John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie--an L.A. film, but still. "We were especially looking for nighttime films; our film is about 85 percent at night," he explained.

And though the 2006 event represents Bahrani's first trip to Sundance, he says his previous festival experience has him feeling prepared--almost as if he is supporting his second film. He recalled his and Simmonds's immunity to the nerves that nagged other local filmmakers at a recent Sundance orientation in midtown. He acknowledges that he would love to sell Man Push Cart in Park City (the film already has a March 22 release date in Paris), but is equally preoccupied with viewing other films and meeting potential creative collaborators from New York. Simmonds, Razvi and Cart's producers plan to join him.

"I'm kind of keeping my expectations minimal," Bahrani said. "I've had the great pleasure to see the reaction to the film in various countires, so now I'm curious what an American audience is going to think."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:58 AM | TrackBack

From NYC to Sundance: Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, 'American Hardcore'

[Ed. Note: For the next few days, The Reeler will present a series of profiles of some of the New York-based filmmakers with movies at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The subjects worked on various aspects of this year's shorts, documentaries and features; their Sundance experience ranges from that of rookies to seasoned veterans to prize-winning alumni. Starting Jan. 19, The Reeler's Sundance coverage will continue from Park City, Utah. -- STV]

Paul Rachman had a feeling. The director had spent more than four years adapting writer Steven Blush's 2000 punk survey American Hardcore as a documentary, and after submitting a rough cut for consideration in this year's Sundance Film Festival, he found himself doing what thousands of other Sundance hopefuls do every fall: He waited.

And waited.

"Neither one of us really thought is was going to get into Sundance," Rachman told The Reeler last week. "You know, you hear the rumors about people getting in; they hear weeks before the final, final deadline. They already know, but you haven't heard, so you're not in. I heard nothing from them. ... You've got politics matched with a documentary about a subculture. I didn't know if they were going to get it."

Then Rachman received a voicemail last Novemeber while vacationing in the Dominican Republic: American Hardcore was set to screen in the documentary competition.

"What we figured out is that it's almost a new chapter to the book almost--an addendum," Blush said. "It's like a counterpart. A book, in its essence, is delving into certain particular facts and the like. The film is an overview on the subculture. So while the basic premise that this was a tribal, regional, underground, early '80s movement is consistent throughout, everything else is different. There are different interviews, there are some different people, and of course, there's the visual element. So it's a very different experience. But I'm very pleased with it; they should be a little different."

Of Rachman's three previous Sundance submissions, Hardcore is the first to make the cut. Not that he is any stranger to the event's dynamic; as a founding filmmaker of the Slamdance Film Festival in 1995, Rachman helped to build Park City's underground, strictly indie alternative to the burgeoning Sundance hype machine. As he wound down work on American Hardcore, which looked at the legacies of pioneering bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, D.O.A. and Black Flag, he knew it would be easy enough to screen it at Slamdance.

Of course, Rachman knew that would somewhat defeat both Hardcore's and Slamdance's purposes. "The mission there is first-time filmmakers, films without a distributor and that discovery of talent," Rachman said. "And while Slamdance might be the expected audience, Sundance is the less-expected audience. And that's more challenging. And, you know, by not going to Slamdance, it really frees up the screening slot to a first-time filmmaker who deserves that slot."

Judging from the film's succession of sold-out screening dates, the challenge seems to have made its impact. "I'm just looking forward to having the opportunity to play this beyond the underground," said Blush, a longtime musicologist making his film writing debut. "Bringing this to a larger audience--people who might not even know what this movement is. That's what excites me--the chance to do that."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:06 AM | TrackBack

January 13, 2006

Screening Gotham: Jan. 13-15, 2006

A few of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--We can argue forever about which NYC theater programs the best midnight movies. But this weekend, every other cinema in town can kiss the Sunshine's ass as The Muppet Movie takes a packed house of adoring viewers into the wee hours. Is it a kids film? Is it a cult classic? A musical muddle of kitsch, cameos and talking socks with eyes? It is all of these and much more--a classic '70s archetype as enduring (and endearing) as The Godfather, Jaws or Shaft. Plus it features Orson Welles. This debate is over.

--This just in from Craigslist:

Howdy neighbors,

Have you seen March of the Peguins? [sic]

Well, have you seen it on the Inwood Hill Nature Center's 42" Plasma T.V?!

Bring the kiddies to the Inwood NC's first movie night.

Saturday, January 14th at 4p.m. at the Inwood Hill Nature Center (218th/Indian Rd.-Inside the Park)

March of the Peguins [sic]

Movie goodies provided!

Free!
Free?
FREE!

Bill, the Inwood Hill Nature Center Coordinator

Radical! Thank you, Bill.

--I know, I know: "So, Stu, why are you shilling again for the Pioneer Theater?" Because it fucking rocks is why. I could get all righteous about "underground filmmaker"-this and "independent cinema"-that, but its eclectic, egalitarian, NYC-centric calendar speaks for itself. This weekend alone, you have the DIY enterprise Threat, the 9/11 documentary Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero and the especially intriguing collection Cine-Poetry on the Web: A Year of ScratchVideo.TV, which Pioneer programmer Ray Privett describes as "my favorite vlog":

Every couple weeks, videomaker Charlene Rule posts a new little episode, dealing with some eccentric event in her life. In Dearest Geraldine, Rule engages in a conversation with someone who had telephoned her by mistake. ... The episodes are almost always disjunctively edited, suggesting an endlessly curious videomaker whose consciousness darts about the world around her seeking insight and beauty. Fortunately, she is willing to share.

Or, hey, I don't know--you can always go burn $11 to watch Hostel. Your call.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:48 PM | TrackBack

W.K. and McDowell Fuel Manic Week at the Pioneer

Late word from the Pioneer Theater promises a dynamic duo of subversion crashing the room in February. First up is Andrew W.K., who will be introducing two late-night screenings of his new concert film, Who Knows?, Feb. 3 and 4. Bring the party and make sex! Or something.

Mere days later (Feb. 6, specifically), the one and only Malcolm McDowell will grace the Pioneer for a screening of his cheery, true-crime horror film Evilenko. McDowell portrays the title character, a notorious Soviet serial killer who, according to the theater's blog, "mutilated and devoured more than 50 children" while resolving to "live, die and kill as a communist." That is all fine and good, but The Reeler will buy the first two rounds for the ballsy bastard who can get the old Droog to join him or her afterward for drinks up Avenue A at Korova Milk Bar.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

TGIF @ NYP: A Rich Helping of Cinematic Tabloid Goodness

Friday always represents a special day for the New York Post--the one day of the week when the tabloid's big entertainment and gossip guns really blast together at full strength. But some Fridays--today in particular--resonate a little more powerfully than others.

It is not just Liz Smith's putative inside track to this year's Oscar nominations, which she claims to have extracted from someone "fresh from Hollywood, sitting down with (people) such as Steven Spielberg, etc." Nor is it Cindy Adams's dispatch from Wednesday night's Bruckerrific Glory Road premiere, to which she "schlepped" through the rain to schmooze with Josh Lucas, Mehcad Brooks and "another gorgeous black guy," Derek Luke. Nor is it Page Six bounding between lukewarm AVN award plants and Chuck Norris jokes (which, in fairness, are sort of funny). Nor is it Vinnie Musetto's verrrrrrrry cautious non-review of the new gay-giography, That Man: Peter Berlin. Nor is it the Post bumping Lou Lumenick's Last Holiday pan--headlined "DONE TO DEATH"--up against Paramount's skyscraper ad for the same film.

Nope. Today's greatest hit has to be this single determination in summing up a potential fistfight between Lindsay Lohan and Scarlett Johansson:

The cause: Maybe it's because Scarlett gets all the critically-acclaimed roles, like Match Point and Lost in Translation, and Lindsay's last movie was about a talking car. Or, Lohan's still sour that she's bedding Jared Leto, Scarlett's sloppy seconds.

Granted, the authors predict a victory for Lohan. But I have to ask: If the New York Post drops the "sloppy seconds" bomb on you (in your name, at that!), can you ever really be a winner? Can even a three-day weekend be enough time to rebound from that kind of ignominy?

I guess it could always be worse: Caryn James of all people could show up in The Times telling you how to re-edit your movie. I am sure a shamefaced Terrence Malick is booking an Avid suite as we speak.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 03:06 PM | TrackBack

Dual Purpose: Blanchett and Weaving's Inexorable NYC March

Unless you count Ruth Vitale's use of a contract, today's news that First Look Pictures landed U.S. distribution rights to the Australian hit Little Fish (right) reveals nothing especially out of the ordinary. Director Rowan Woods's junkie-crime flick has scored big on the awards scene down under, and you could make far riskier wagers than betting on anything featuring typically brilliant work from Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving.

But there is an even more brilliant parallel here in New York, where Little Fish's March release date coincides with Blanchett and Weaving's stage pairing in BAM's Hedda Gabler. Their production is, in fact, another Australian export, having flummoxed Sydney Theatre Company audiences in 2004. And as of right now, a sort of unofficial, intra-Gotham, Gabler/Fish double feature might not be out of the question--BAM reps confirmed this morning that tickets are still available to some of the 28 performances scheduled at the Harvey Theater from March 1-26.

So, anyway, coincidence or not, this kind of star-crossed convenience does not happen everyday. You might consider clearing a little space in your calendar right about now.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:40 AM | TrackBack

'Grizzly Bear Man': The Best Film Herzog Never Made

While I really liked about 80 percent of Grizzly Man, it is the other 20 percent--particularly director Werner Herzog's own narrative and historical liberties ("Destroy this tape," for example)--that first leap to mind when I think about the film. Evidently, I am not the only one: Spoof geniuses Travis and Jonathan have detonated their classic parody Grizzly Bear Man on the Web like a dirty bomb, showcasing the fundamental lunacy of Herzog's transgressions and daring to look under the only rock the great filmmaker left unturned. To wit: Treadwell, another batshit adventurer in thrall to his dreams, actually out-Herzogs Herzog by dying for his art. And in Grizzly Man, Herzog shows up to collect.

But damn if Grizzly Bear Man does not do the best job yet of exposing the whole thing as not some complex, man-versus-nature riddle, but a full-on cosmic joke--and a very absurd, funny one at that. Check it out here.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:53 AM | TrackBack

January 12, 2006

Reeler Link Dump: Failure to Multitask Edition

Believe me: Jan. 12 will go down in my personal history as one of my most productive days ever. Just not... here.

But all is not lost! For example:

--Manderlay director Lars von Trier will discuss his latest film--via iChat--with viewers at IFC Center at the end of the month. Think of it like Web porn, only he is fucking you. Again. (via indieWIRE)

--Lindsay Lohan released a statement saying Vanity Fair "misused and misconstrued" quotes provided for a profile in its February issue. Rumor has it that while preparing her libel lawsuit, Lohan called Roman Polanski asking if she could borrow a certain bloody kitten. (via Teen People)

--On the bright side, Lohan found a true friend in past VF cover girl Kate Moss. Scarlett Johansson, not so much. (via Gawker)

--Queen Latifah returned home to Newark, N.J., Wednesday night to premiere her new film, Last Holiday. As the AP reports, " As she walked along a red carpet laid in the middle of a parking lot Latifah said she was happy to be back in Newark." However, the story does not say if Latifah ever located her car. (via Yahoo!)

--Just when you thought David Carr had the ultimate NBR awards coverage, Rush and Molloy reveal the true scope of the drunkenness at hand. I stopped reading at the part where Philip Seymour Hoffman crawled on all fours. (via NY Daily News)

--The 2006 NYC Horror Film Festival is offically welcoming submissions. Hurry up, though: The deadline is only eight months away. (via Fangoria)

--Iraq war documentary (and Oscar short-lister) Occupation: Dreamland takes another spin tonight at the Steinhardt Center. Directors Garrett Scott and Ian Olds will join former soldier Joseph Wood--perhaps their film's most memorable subject--for a post-screening discussion. (via 92Y Blog)

--A few major NYC news outlets out author JT Leroy as a fake composite, and all of the sudden he disappears from Gen Art's Starbucks Salon online roster at Sundance. Do not worry, though: Anthony Rapp is still slated to attend. Insert relieved sigh here. (via Variety, Gen Art)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:05 PM | TrackBack

Theron on 'Ice' with Berney, Picturehouse

Things just get more and more proletarian for Charlize Theron, who today's Variety reports is signed on to play "a heroin addict and the single mother of a mixed-race child" in the screen adaptation of Mark Richard's short story, The Ice at the Bottom of the World. Perhaps more notably, Theron will co-produce with Picturehouse guru Bob Berney; the pair's last partnership (at Newmarket Films) yielded distribution for Theron's Oscar-winning serial-killer turn in Monster.

OK, OK--North Country notwithstanding, "proletarian" might be understating things a bit:

Just as Theron was a hands-on participant in that project, she has been similarly enterprising on Ice. The film is set up to be bank-financed through New Line and handled as a negative pickup. In the deal orchestrated by One Entertainment and her attorney Steve Warren, Theron will wind up owning the negative.

To which I say: Great. It is about time Aeon Flux paid off for somebody.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:23 AM | TrackBack

Sundance Swag Cannot Cripple Kaufman's Conscience

I caught up on some overdue Sundance reading this morning, from my colleague Ray Pride's carefully cultivated list of film trailers to Jonathan Bing's foray into the merciless corporate culture ensnaring the festival in its web. This latter point was reinforced yesterday by NYC film writer Anthony Kaufman, whose blog elaborated on last year's well-documented woe with an even more earnest indictment for 2006:

Crass commercialism is a way of American life, but no where is the situation more egregious than the run-up to the Sundance Film Festival. ... (H)ere are a few of my favorite gross, materialistic marketing tactics that continue to chip away at the integrity of the films at the festival. Those crimes perpetrated by the Sundance Film Festival itself are marked with an asterisk. And this year, I thought, why not avoid giving them any more publicity than they richly don't deserve. Comments in [italics] are mine. ...

-- This year celebrities will indulge in the most decadent lounge in Park City. Celebrities and select press will enjoy an open bar while being pampered by famed skin care specialist XXXX XXXXXXX with oxygen facials and services. Then get lavished with over $25,000 in high-end gifts from XXXXXX, XXX, XXXXX, XXXX & XXXX, XXX XXXX and much more. [Now, why, please tell me, do celebrities need $25,000 in high-end gifts? Why not give $25,000 in gifts to some of the 94,000 children living in poverty in the state of Utah?] ...

* XXXXXX Canine Cuisine, one of Masterfoods USA's leading brands, announces the first ever XXXX Spa at the Sundance Film Festival taking place in Utah this January. In the XXXXX Spa, small dogs and their celebrity owners will get pampered and primped for the Sundance premieres, parties and entertainment. ... [My God, is this what we've come to as a culture?]

Short answer, Anthony: Yes. But do not despair. You have an ally in me, who had planned to take along an empty suitcase just to fill with free swag from my first trip to Sundance. But after a change of heart, I have decided instead to pack up one of Utah's 92,000 impoverished children for the return to New York. I know I will probably have to check a bag that size at the airport, but whatever--for once, I am doing the right thing, and it never felt better. Thanks for the inspiration.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:21 AM | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

Andrew Sarris Now Officially Repeating Himself

In the interest of preemption, I just want to say that I am not the type of lazy, bloodless blogger inclined to construct posts entirely out of other people's quotes. The Reeler is far from perfect, but at least it tries to approach its beat with some intact sense of imagination.

Which brings me to Andrew Sarris, the quintessential old-school critic whose influence I totally understand but have never really felt. And while I think Pauline Kael had him pegged right as a bit of a "list queen," even his lists now appear positively vibrant compared to the critical brain death that precedes them in this week's Observer:

While I was trying to decide how I would introduce my customary list of the past year’s achievements and non-achievements, I consulted what I wrote last year—and I was struck by how applicable it was to this year. So simply by changing a few numerals, I can repeat last year’s introduction, secure in the knowledge that 2005’s releases were neither appreciably better nor appreciably worse than 2004’s.

Ha ha, Mr. Sarris. Really, though, what can you say about 2005? Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Cache, History of Violence... There are some pretty good, challenging films out--wait. What was that? You were serious?

From the Jan. 10, 2005, New York Observer (via LexisNexis):

As far as I can determine, 2004 seems to be neither the best nor the worst year for movies, at least as far as the proportion of good (low, as always) to bad (high, as always) is concerned. Of course, the technology keeps changing -- often to the consternation of the Luddites among us -- and there's also that mindless nostalgia for an idyllic past, in which all the bad movies have been mercifully expunged from memory. After all, I've been in the year-end 10-best business since 1958, when Jonas Mekas graciously allowed me to share his "Movie Journal" column in The Village Voice with my 10-best list, which I'm now ashamed to remember failed to include both Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. But that was 46 years ago, and I very much doubt that I will be around 46 years from now to second-guess my Top 10 lists for 2004. So with little fear of afterthought and without further ado, here are my considered preferences for the year past(.)

And then this from the current, Jan. 16, 2006, issue:

As far as I can determine, 2005 seems to have been neither the best nor the worst year for movies, at least as far as the proportion of good (low as always) to bad (high as always) is concerned. Of course, the technology keeps changing—often to the consternation of the Luddites among us—and there’s also that mindless nostalgia for an idyllic past, in which all the bad movies have been mercifully expunged from memory. After all, I’ve been in the year-end 10-best business since 1958, when Jonas Mekas graciously allowed me to share his “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice with my own 10-best list, which I’m now ashamed to remember failed to include both Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil--but that was 48 years ago [sic], and I very much doubt that I will be around 47 years from now to second-guess my top-10 lists for 2005. So, with little fear of afterthought, and without further ado, here are my considered preferences for the past year, which, by my count at least, accounted for 480 releases in New York theaters(.)

Well, at least Sarris was able to cobble that "480 releases" kicker together. But maybe we should give him a break; after all, the guy has been doing this for almost five decades. You try coming up with an original introduction for a piece you have written 50 times. I told you these Top-10 circle jerks could get exhausting.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Hoffman Driving 'Capote' Steamroller to the Upper East Side

FLASH! Paper alerts readers to Philip Seymour Hoffman's latest Oscar campaign stop New York awards-week appearance tonight at the 92nd St. Y, where the trophy-circuit butterfly will be discussing both his character and his work following a screening of Capote. Added bonus for literary wonks to whom allusion is the ultimate aphrodisiac:

(G)et this fated freakiness: Kauffman Concert Hall is also where Truman Capote did his first public reading of In Cold Blood. Whaaaa? And, Capote depicts that very reading. Whaaaa whaaa? Okay, maybe it’s not that huge of a coincidence. No, wait. Yes it is. We’re not backing down on this one. Our minds our blown.

Mine too--so much so that I cannot even muster the strength to carry my weary body six blocks from Reeler HQ to the front door of the Y. Or maybe that is just my Kryptonite-like, withering Heath Ledger/Damian Lewis/Cillian Murphy loyalty. Anyway, I am more than happy to run a recap tomorrow from any lucky ticketholders who make the trip; I am all about equal opportunity as long as I do not have to endure Capote a second time.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:44 PM | TrackBack

Whacks On: Clooney's NBR Heroism Never Ends

Not that this will scuff too much of David Carr's National Board of Review luster or anything, but The Reeler's scandalous red-carpet allies at Open All Night just filled in the gaps around the remainder of George Clooney's acceptance speech:

George Clooney brought up Good Night, and Good Luck co-writer Grant Heslov, and then made his own detour. "I don’t want to do any damage to the (Samuel) Alito nomination, but Grant and I were at a midnight screening of Brokeback Mountain last night. Judge Alito was there. He had been there since, like, 3 o’clock, I think. Wearing chaps. A big cowboy hat, chaps and that funny bolo tie thing."

No. He. Didn't.

Anyway, George, there is no way that could have been him. Everybody knows Alito is a Cruising guy.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:41 PM | TrackBack

'Night' Owls: Phoenix and Gray Re-team For NYC Crime Drama

Production Weekly (via Cinematical) confirms today that Joaquin Phoenix and director James Grey--who last collaborated on 2000's dodgy Queens-noir The Yards--are set to reunite in February for Gray's follow-up, We Own the Night.

Gray (right) had sort of casually mentioned the new film last month while talking up his re-cut Yards DVD, noting that Night would be the last of the unofficial "crime trilogy" begun in 1995 with the acclaimed Little Odessa. Indeed, We Own the Night will revisit his debut's Russian mafia themes, featuring Phoenix as a nightclub owner trying to save his father and brother (both cops) from a narcotics gang hit squad in the '80s. Robert Duvall and Eva Mendes co-star; shooting starts here in town Feb. 20, probably squaring up for a Toronto/NY Film Festival push and a little Oscar-season love in 2007.

Whoa--wait a second. Did I just invoke Oscar '07? Jesus Christ--it must be the contact high.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:53 PM | TrackBack

Carr Crashes National Board of Review Awards, Lives to Tell

As you have probably heard, the National Board of Review hosted its annual awards dinner last night at Central Park's Tavern on the Green. But while the event's rigorous security mechanism (in short: three hansom cabs, a publicity intern and Radioman) effectively thwarted my gatecrashing attempt, I lost no sleep over any of it.

Why? David Fucking Carr, that's why!

The National Board of Review did the awards watusi last night at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. As celebrity events go, it was a nice hang. Open bar for the duration, good food and the A-List was abundant and accessible, so much so that even a blind pig like the Bagger found a nut or two. Because the winners were already determined, it was like a modern day kindergarten, where everyone was a winner and the mean kids were forced to imitate human beings or go to a corner. No frozen smiles from the losers, just crowned victors clutching Lucite plaques. ...

Today the Bagger is going all NBR all the time, not because it will have a profound effect on the Oscar race but because he went so you didn’t have to.

I think this is what my great-grandmother meant when she used to say, "Everything happens for a reason." To wit: I got to split and go check out an advance of the brilliant, Nick Cave-scripted The Proposition, and the Carpetbagger packed knee-high rubber boots lest the bullshit ruin his tux:

We'd like to forget...

...Jane Fonda, the Career Achiever who wasn’t doing press as long as the reporter’s last name ended in The New York Times. And the PMK bodyguard who made sure it stayed that way.

...Stephen Gaghan, who won for best adapted screenplay, for trotting out the same jokes he has used in screenings, which include a tick-tock of the number of locations, languages, and continents he shot on. Writer, heal thyself with some new jokes.

More treasures from Carr's choice dispatch (including a way, way too mellow Weinstein sighting) lurk after the jump.

--On George Clooney: Actor, writer, director, producer, and at the NBR awards show, action figure. Earlier in the evening, Terrence Howard went up to the podium to accept his breakthrough actor award and tried to adjust a Good Night poster behind the podium that had been listing to port a bit. After Howard walked off, the crowd mock-gasped as the poster began to give way and swing out across the stage. Suddenly, some guy — he was handsome, he was obviously decisive, he was George Clooney — jumped up and simply ripped it down. Mr. Clooney, who once played Batman, is a man who knows how to take action when a poster threatens the peaceable people of Gotham City.

--Normally, the entrance of Harvey Weinstein to an awards event around this time of year is preceded by the music that plays in Jaws just before the shark chomps into somebody. But not this year – Harvey has a limited number of contenders and is too busy building a new company to add to the dynamism and expense of the awards season. With the pressure off, and the star of his Transamerica getting best actress from the NBR, Harvey was serene – no smoking, level blood sugar, filling the room with love. ... He offered an infomercial on behalf of the NBR – "It’s a fantastic night, in part because the Board of Review champions films that otherwise might not get noticed" – and said he did not miss being in the scrum – "I am very much enjoying my new role."

--(Kudos to) Philip Seymour Hoffman, for not going with a canned, careful speech even though he is auditioning as the prohibitive favorite for best actor Oscar. He talked about his mom, not in that starlet sort of way – newbie Q-Orianka Kilcher a k a Pocahontas choked up when she hit the mom button, but what is she, 16? – but in a very Seymour Hoffman kind of way; he suggested that mom, along with his girlfriend and his buddy Eric Bogosian, who introduced him, and a host of others, were the people he thought of when he tried to ready himself for a scene.

--(Terrence) Howard went moonbeam, in a nice way, when he got there. "This room is full of so many beautiful celestial beings who have been lifting up this world for decades with their work." The Bagger knew in his heart that he was not one of those people, but felt enrolled nonetheless. Mr. Howard had the Bagger at "celestial," but sealed the deal when he made it a point to say, "I have seen some people here I have worked with when I have been a monster and I wanted to say I was sorry about that." The Bagger would love it if all stars apologized for their past diva moments, but then, the awards would have lasted even longer than the three and a half hours they clocked in at.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:22 PM | TrackBack

15th New York Jewish Film Festival Settles in at Lincoln Center

Festival season is officially back in swing in the city, where the New York Jewish Film Festival fires up tonight at Lincoln Center. For 2006, the event's programmers have locked up two world premieres, five U.S. premieres and 16 New York premieres from more than a dozen countries--not bad for a festival that started 15 years ago screening eight films over the course of a week.

"I'm really excited about this year's program," festival director Aviva Weintraub told The Reeler in a conversation late last week. "I mean, it feels extremely international--which it always is--but we've got some entires from countries that we don't often have represented. We have a terrific short from Mexico (Jai), and our opening film, Live and Become (above), is beautiful. The director, Radu Mihaileanu, was born in Romania, but the film is a French-Israeli co-production, and it's about an Ethiopian boy who's sent to Israel. It's a very moving drama."

Adding to the international mix are the festival's two world premieres, both documentaries looking at the Iranian Jewish experience. Love Iranian-American Style follows good-humored filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian around New York and "Irangeles" as her family pushes her toward marriage, while Ramin Farahani’s Jews of Iran looks closer at the lives of Persian Jews who stayed in Iran after 1979's Islamic Revolution. Farahani's presentation of his film will mark the first-ever appearance by an Iranian filmmaker at the festival.

Among the New York documentary premieres are Erik Greenberg Anjou’s A Cantor’s Tale--about a Brooklynite who inherits the celebrated cantorial tradition of Eastern Europe--and Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn's follow up to their 1988 New York Film Festival entry Golub. The duo's latest, Golub: Late Works Are the Catastrophes, chronicles the last months of the trailblazing artist's life in 2004. Another notable New York doc, Ira Wohl's Best Sister, returns to the family thread Wohl followed through his Oscar-winning Best Boy and Best Man.

In conjunction with the Jewish Museum's Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama exhibiton, festival organizers also programmed a pair of little-seen Bernhardt films from 1912 (Queen Elizabeth and Lady of the Camelias). But even the rare Bernhardt pictures have likely been viewed more frequently than some of the festival's more contemporary selections. "We try to show as many premieres as possible," Weintraub said. "Any film that's had a theatrical release, we don't show in the festival. Our emphasis is always on bringing new films to New York, and some of them do go on after the festival to have theatrical releases. For some of them, we turn out to be the only venue to have presented them."

Aditional screenings branch out into the Jewish Museum and Makor as well, so get your running shoes on and plan ahead--you have 16 days to take advantage, and it goes fast. And you know it is never too early to get back in shape for that long festival grind. At least not in this town.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:26 AM | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

Current TV: Gore's Guerilla Film School Introduces New Faculty

Current's DIY filmmaking tutorial, featuring Sean Penn and Jonathan Caouette

For all the shit Al Gore takes for the myth saying he claimed responsibility for the Internet, he actually did help create the Current TV network last year. Blending broadband technology with a user-generated content free-for-all, Current is not quite yet what you would call totally watchable. However, the AP reports that Gore and Co. have gone off and recruited some fairly heavy cultural hitters to motivate your ass:

To help would-be contributors, the network has just produced a "survival guide" that it is making available online that includes advice on journalism and storytelling from (Robert) Redford and (Sean) Penn, along with academics, authors and filmmakers.

"We, and by we I mean everyone from a Hollywood director like me to a teenager in rural Texas, can all tell stories about our hopes and fears," said Catherine Hardwicke, writer-director of the movie Thirteen.

"Every day I'm intrigued and sometimes outraged by things that no one talks about," Hardwicke said. "Current is a chance to be heard, and send think-bombs out into the world."

Right. That is "think-bombs," as opposed to just plain old "bombs" like The Lords of Dogtown or... well, never mind. The point is that when you get past the grave platitudes of guys like Sean Penn, there are actually a few interesting tidbits from NYC faves Sarah Vowell, Jonathan Caouette and graffiti laureate Bonz Malone, the latter of whom equates Current's open submission policy with the "white train" of his spray-painting dreams.

Elsewhere on Current's Web site, novice filmmakers can find tutorials on editing, sound, framing and a dozen or so other Film School 101 lessons. So, to paraphrase Caouette's segment, there really is no excuse not to know the basics and get your story out there. Getting viewers, of course, is another question. But look at it this way--Gore is surely inventing them as fast as he can.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Porn to Run: The Times Visits the AVN Awards

After all of last weekend's highbrow preening--from the South American cinema dispatches of Larry Rohter and Alan Riding to Dennis Lim's profile of the woefully underappreciated Andrew Bujalski--today's New York Times succumbs to the silicon-and-spotlight bloodrush of the 2006 AVN Awards.

In other words, the Gray Lady does porn:

The 23rd AVN awards presentation here was a campy mix of Hollywood cliché and X-rated clips watched with 3,000 of your closest friends and industry insiders. The acceptance speeches tended to be brief, befitting a film industry with little emphasis on dialogue. ...

Saturday night ... was an unapologetic, hearty celebration, with a flashbulb-drenched red carpet entrance and awards presented in 104 categories, including best performances in a wide range of explicit acts and sexual positions. The more conventional were for best director, supporting actor and actress, screenplay and the most anticipated award of the evening: best feature.

The Times's Matt Richtel delivers most of the standard adult-film industry factoids you would expect--a record $4.3 billion in sales in '05, porn audiences are tired of the pizza-man-tipped-with-blowjob cliché, etc. However, click on the multimedia links to the left of his story for a more revelatory, almost hypnotic video piece about the growth of porn-on-demand and other developing technologies.

It is all quite amazing stuff, although Richtel leaves out the essential point that jacking off on one's video iPod indeed voids its warranty. Just trust me on this one, gang.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:02 PM | TrackBack

One Day Closer to the Apocalypse: Lionsgate Plans 'Hostel' Sequel

Killing me: Eli Roth (right) and a brainwashed Takashi Miike on the set of Hostel (Photo: Lionsgate)

To be honest, nothing about Eli Roth's Hostel scared me quite as much as the inevitability of a sequel, and Variety's Pamela McClintock sends word this morning that my dull, throbbing fear will soon enough be realized:

After an opening weekend proving the multiplex is anything but a hostile environment, Screen Gems and Lionsgate are planning a sequel to Hostel, with writer-director Eli Roth in talks to return and steer the second installment.

Sadist-loving horror film bowed No. 1 at the box office, taking in $20.1 million.

Lionsgate and Screen Gems intend to release the sequel in a year, mimicking Lionsgate's successful quick turnaround of Saw and Saw II. ... It's not clear whether Hostel exec producer Quentin Tarantino will be back.

Now, I have burned thousands of calories over the past few days summoning the will to write about Hostel, the most offensively patronizing, boring and unscary "horror" picture since, well, ever. A lot of my aversion to covering Roth's latest stems from considering how much you already know about it. To wit:

--You know Hostel is the beneficiary of some fairly severe overexposure, from Roth's sloppy 69 with executive producer Quentin Tarantino in last week's New York Magazine to a P.R. campaign invoking the viewers who fainted at a festival screning last year in Toronto;

--You know that Lionsgate and Roth himself have hyped Hostel's unblinking depictions of violence and torture, as though horror meritocracy has realigned itself based on those qualities and not by mass-producing shitty exploitation flicks at school-musical budgets (indeed, Hostel raked in four times its production budget in its first week of release; its sequel, probably featuring Saw II-quality Z-listers working for scale, will cost even less);

--You know about Roth's repeated efforts to legitimize Hostel by namechecking (and even casting) Japanese influences like Takashi Miike, whose even more graphically rendered films like Audition and Ichi the Killer work because they inhabit a complex moral universe that Roth somehow mistakes for unqualified sadism;

--Finally, you know that the media have pretty much fallen for the whole goddamned thing--in some cases even attributing contemporary horror films' "return to their grisly, low-budget ’70s roots" in no small part to Hostel's pseudo-grindhouse spirit.

I guess I should say that most of the media have fallen for it. David Poland stole my thunder with last week's scatching write-up on The Hot Blog, in which he also raises what--with any luck--will emerge as the main hurdle facing Son of Hostel:

Really, this movie is so nothing that it could hurt Tarantino’s rep and it could really damage Lionsgate’s ability to market future Horror Porn, because the sales job makes it look so scary and the movie barely scratches the surface. Saw II may not have been great, but it wasn’t a lie. This film’s marketing is so misleading it makes David Manning look like a Pulitzer candidate.

That is being kind. But judging by Hostel's success, it appears that Lionsgate will get over again. This is the real triumph of cynicism: A company backed so far into its niche that it can only thrive on its customers' low expectations (and even stupidity, in the case of the Hostel franchise) to keep itself awash in revenue. And do not tell me about Crash--it is the same prevaricating, exploitative shit splattered instead with Paul Haggis's name and an ensemble cast.

This is me, sighing. Some antistudios never fucking change.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:21 AM | TrackBack

January 09, 2006

Allen Trivia Not the Worst Way to Pretend You Are Still Working

I cannot quite decide what I find more unnerving about The Guardian's new Woody Allen career quiz--whether it is the reality that I did not know Allen's personal favorite among his 36 films, or if it was the writer's reference to Allen as "Brooklyn's own Ingmar Bergman." I mean, can Brooklyn even have an Ingmar Bergman? The whole Jew vs. Lutheran thing alone seems to trip me up. But then there are the sweaters, the mistresses, the atheism, the Sven Nykvist links... Fine. I suppose it will pass.

Speaking of "pass," this quiz is more bar trivia than Bar Exam. For example:

6. The girl who played Woody Allen's teenage girlfriend in Manhattan is the granddaughter of which great American writer?

Eugene O'Neill
Ernest Hemingway
F Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner

But, hey, face it--5 p.m. is still a half-hour away. How the hell else do you plan to kill another four minutes of your work day?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Blockbuster Bitchslap Nets $140K For New Jersey

It is nice to know that in a state with as poisonous a history of corruption as New Jersey, the good guys can still win. Take N.J. Attorney General Peter Harvey, for example, who today cracked the Blockbuster monolith that had bullied the Garden State's movie-renting community out of its hard-earned nickels and dimes:

The vidtailer has agreed to reimburse a total of $140,000 to the state of New Jersey and to Blockbuster customers for fine-print charges it levied. ... Harvey alleged Blockbuster's "restocking" fees amounted to a late fee, rendering its promise of no late fees misleading.

The company's policy was to convert rentals kept longer than one week to a sale, which Harvey alleged it did not sufficiently disclose. And while it reversed the sale charge if the rental was returned, it also charged consumers a $1.25 "restocking fee" if the film was 30 days or more overdue, which Harvey said it also did not make clear.

Variety's Steven Zeitchik goes on to report that $90,000 of the reimbursement will go toward correcting the affected accounts, while the remaining $50,000 will wind up in a parties-and-patronage slush fund somewhere in the Trenton State House covering New Jersey's legal fees. And just like that, Blockbuster's Jersey customers are free to hog Clerks until they have saved up enough for that next eighth. Justice is a beautiful thing.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Proud Miller, Lusty Doyle and Others Celebrate New York Film Critics Circle Awards

Sure, the winners had been announced long beforehand, and the evening's only suspense hinged on whether or not the History of Violence contingent would rise up in a bloody coup and take back Best Picture from Brokeback Mountain. But those long odds alone made it worthwhile for me to drop by Cipriani Sunday night, where the New York Film Critics Circle had gathered with for its 71st annual awards dinner.

I guess the trip was worth it--Reese Witherspoon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ang Lee and not just a few other A-list awards season regulars dropped by to accept or present the evening's hardware. And though I did not enjoy the privilege of sticking around for the event itself (I was thisclose to snatching Picturehouse boss Bob Berney's unclaimed table card, but I had already eaten, you know?), I managed to grab a word or two with folks like Walk the Line director James Mangold, who was presenting his film's star Witherspoon with the night's Best Actress prize.

Director James Mangold (top) and Reese Witherspoon, ahem, walk the line Sunday at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (Photos: STV)

I asked Mangold, a New York native, what kind of weight accolades from notoriously prickly New York critics carry for him. He turned the question around in his famous actor's-director tradition. "I couldn't be prouder of Reese," Mangold said. "I mean, the honor tonight is for her, and I think that it's kind of a career-changing, hugely transcendent performance in which she reached really courageously to places where..." He paused, thought for a moment. "Look, when you have an actress who already has a kind of incredible notoriety, incredible celebrity, incredible reputation, and you ask her to expand what she can do for an audience that is already loyal and thriled with that, you're asking her to risk a lot. And Reese took it all on and mastered it. Sometimes when you talk about movie stars, it makes it seem like it's their destiny, or that God is with them. And it almost diminishes the work. That woman worked her head off, and that's why I'm thrilled tonight is just to honor her and incredible achievement in this movie."

Whoa. OK, well, thankfully, Witherspoon's head was set firmly back in place in time for the event, although she diappeared before half of the press on hand could chat with her. I did, however, track down Capote director Bennett Miller, another New York guy who was collecting the evening's Best First Film honor from Capote's star (and his old pal) Hoffman. But in talking about New York audiences' positive reaction to his film, we got a little off-track from the plaudits at hand--going way, waaayyyy back to Capote's awards-season kick-start at the New York Film Festival.

"I grew up going to the New York Film Festival," Miller (right) told me. "It was a dream to have a film at the New York Film Festival. Maybe some people fantasize about this award or that award, but for me it was gettting a film into the New York Film Festival. Being in that room with that crowd, you know? Projecting the movie on that screen was really the experience of a lifetime. And everything that's happened since then has been sort of an extension."

But it's a long extension--a five-month marathon from Lincoln Center through events like tonight's (Capote also claimed the National Society of Film Critics best picture award Sunday) and then eventually onto the Oscars. I guess it's a nice problem to have, but how are you withstanding the grind?

"It's fun," he said. "This is the easy part. Getting up at four in the morning and schlepping out into the prairie is the hard part."

If you say so, Bennett. If you say so. Newsday critic Gene Seymour--a Reeler Top 10 Top 10 fave and current NYFCC chairman--was also floating around; having resigned myself to the coup's unlikelihood after seeing Armond White arrive in a suit and tie, I asked Seymour if there were any films that he thought disappointingly flew under the other critics' radar. "My 10-best list included The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Seymour reminded me, thankfully avoiding rehashing the "shopping-center-suburban-nerd universe"/"American dream life" meditation he stabbed at in his list.

"Why not?" he continued. "It was funny, it was well-made. But people don't think of comedies--especially summer comedies--as being in that vein. They figure it somehow falls short of kind of a classical perfection. I've got news for you: Comedies never fall into a classical perfection. Like The Bank Dick. W.C. Fields. Nobody would call that a perfect movie. Yet for more than 70 years, it makes people laugh their heads off. So who knows? I'm betting that 20 years from now, people will see The 40-Year-Old Virgin and still find something funny about it."

Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus (left) and History of Violence award-winner Maria Bello, almost to their tables

I will get back to Seymour about the idea of "classically perfect" comedies (what is Preston Sturges?), but either way, what will it take for critics to stand up for films like Virgin, or anything for that matter that is cursed with a release date before, say, November 1?

"I don't think they're forgotten," Seymour replied. "There are plenty of people out there who bring this stuff up. I just think a lot of us should personally work a lot harder to sort of keep these movies in mind and to make leaps of the imagination once in a while. To say that it isn'r always the things that look more glossy that are more prestigious. There's some fun stuff out there that will probably be around 20 or 30 years from now."

OK, well--next year, right?

He nodded. "Next year."

Finally, I managed to visit again with Christopher Doyle--the coolest damn D.P. in the world and the recipient of both the NYFCC's and National Society of Film Critics' best cinematography award for his 2046 collaboration with Lai Yiu-Fai and Kwan Pun-Leung. "Thanks, but what do you say?" he asked in reference to the NSFC award announcement earlier in the day. "You say these critics are not critical enough? Actually, it reminds me to be more critical. This is the great pleasure of collaborating with someone now, which I'd never done in my whole life until the last six months. It actually makes you more critical. If you settle back into an armchair of complacency, so fucking what, you know? If your next film is not your best film, what are you here for? So I hope it's given me a bit of kick in the bum. I have this thing: 'Hey, wake up. Don't take it too seriously, thanks for what you've done, but we expect more.' I hope so."

Yeah, well, so do I. And speaking of Doyle's next film, there was a rumor going around the last time he and I talked that he might be working with Anton Corbijn on the Ian Curtis/Joy Division biopic Control. Is that indeed the film the two had planned?

"No, no, no, no... yeah, yeah," Doyle said. "Yeah! We even went to the U2 concert together."

Great. So, um, where is that one at?

"I don't know at the moment," he told me. "Anton is a very discreet person, to put it mildly. I think that there's some... I don't know. You work with someone like me and we just talk about everything. I think that people need a certain... what's the word? Reticence about their form to make it purer to them, and I think that's what Anton is like. He has to step back to find out where he's standing, whereas someone like me--or any cinematographer--we just step in and make a mess and work it out from there. You know. We're slightly different personalities, which I hope will work." He uncorked his trademark, mischievous laugh. "It will happen."

OK, but what about Wong Kar-Wai? He was hanging around Cipriani somewhere, and I know Doyle had mentioned in the past that 2046--their seventh collaboration--would likely be their last film together. But tonight was the night for his change of heart, right? In which he and Wong would join hands and pledge each other loyalty for the rest of their careers? That estrangement talk was all bullshit, right?

"We'll see," Doyle said, laughing again. "I feel that tonight is going to be the Brokeback Mountain of critical awards. Should I lick my hand first? What do you want me to do? I think you're right. This is... What can I say? I am where I am because of Wong Kar-Wai. There's no question about it. We will go further, and we do care."

So there you have it. Gene Seymour will go to war for the summer comedy, Control will get made and Chris Doyle will once more stem the rose with Wong Kar-Wai. I think I can die now.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:20 AM | TrackBack

January 07, 2006

Top 10 Top 10: The Meta Strikes Back

For those of you who found The Reeler's Top 10 of Top 10 Lists of 2005 distasteful or worse, Jim Emerson offers sort of a pleasing antidote over on RogerEbert.com. Mostly a paean to The Voice's Take That Poll, Emerson's note also tips a hat to MCN and the Web's neurotic capital of listmania, Critics Top 10. So that is nice.

And for all zero of you for whom the jury is is still out, Kelefa Sanneh chimed in on a semi-related, fully-backhanded note in yesterday's Times. "(N)o doubt some blog has already posted a 10-best list of 10-best lists," Sanneh wrote about the glut of lists afflicting the music press at year's end, nevertheless adding:

Lists are often presented as a way for consumers to evaluate the past year's music, but it seems unlikely that record stores are overwhelmed with excited readers, lists clutched in sweaty hands, eager to own some magazine's entire Top 20. More often, lists are a way for consumers to evaluate whoever made them, a handy way to pass judgment on the people who pass judgment for a living. (Really? Someone thinks Foo Fighters' latest album is better than Mariah Carey's?)

That is not as "apples and oranges" as it sounds, either--everybody knows Trapped in the Closet Vol. 1-12 is a crossover "Best of" must for any critic worth a damn.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:53 PM | TrackBack

January 06, 2006

Screening Gotham: Jan. 6-8, 2006

A few of this weekend's worthwile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Despite today's opening of Hostel-- a truly repellent film I want to eventually write about if my blood pressure can withstand the boost--not all hope is lost among New York's new releases. Take Fateless, Lajos Koltai's gorgeous adaptation of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel. In tracing the path of 14-year-old Gyuri Koves (portrayed with wide-eyed, poetic gravity by Marcell Nagy) from the idyll of Budapest to the wastelands of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, first-time director Koltai trains his legendary cinematographer's eye on the cold light framing the very nature of survival. Gyuri faces the prospect of death--"the simple secret of my universe," he narrates with the faintest hint of a grin--as matter-of-factly as he learns how to bargain to stay alive. Yet somehow, Kertész's narrative of suffering transcends tragedy; Gyuri does not lose hope so much as he comes to recognize its irrelevance. And by the end of Fateless's first reel, when you realize Koltai, Kertesz and Nagy have somehow made Gyuri's epiphany your own, it becomes virtually impossible not to know you are viewing something profound.

--Yesterday on MCN, Robert Kohler offered an interesting, fringe-eye twist on the myth of the box office slump:

A passivity is overtaking filmgoing everywhere, and it must be stopped. I mean by this a thinking that expects only a film world that exists in advertising and promotion, and assumes the non-existence of any world beyond advertising.

Which is kind of the long way around for me to say that the Museum of the Moving Image kicks off its seventh annual New York Film Critics Circle Series tomorrow in Astoria. Not that MMI is one of those way-off-the-map venues whose slow, imminent deaths Kohler seems to be dreading (and with good reason), but it also is not the multiplex, and God knows you are not going to be able to catch guys like Matt Zoller Seitz anywhere else introducing tomorrow's opening film, Hiroshima Mon Amour. More than a dozen other critics will be dropping by to introduce their own contributions for this year's "Foreign Affairs" theme, including Stuart Klawans (Naked Lunch), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Genghis Blues) and, naturally, Armond White (No Greater Glory).

Oh, and incidentally, I hear director Bennett Miller will also be hanging around MMI following Saturday's 6:30 screening of Capote. So take a deep breath, Kohler--at least one museum around here seems to have its shit together.

--The Times Arts and Leisure Weekend "TimesTalk" speaker series pretty much sold out weeks ago, but if you are anything like me, you have no reason not to just crash the CUNY Graduate Center to hear from folks like Viggo Mortensen, Robert Redford and "the Women of The Sopranos"--Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco, Aida Turturro and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (interviewed by Caryn James!). Tickets are still available for Jim Jarmusch's chat with Dinitia Smith on Sunday afternoon, but again, as far as the rest of these talks go--nothing is ever really sold out, is it?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:08 PM | TrackBack

Sleeping Through New Year's With James Toback

The Reeler's long tradition of James Toback enthrallment continues this morning after a glimpse at The New York Observer's Web site, where the filmmaker was one of 20 New Yorkers who recounted their New Year's Eve revelry to writer Jessica Bruder.

Not that there was much to recount but a typically Tobackian story of existential crisis:

“This year, I fell asleep at 10:30 and woke up at 4, so I was about as far away from consciousness as I could get short of being dead,” said Mr. Toback, who is 61 years old and hasn’t celebrated New Year’s Eve since he was 12.

What ruinous rupture wrecked his holiday so many years ago? Mr. Toback explained that he had accompanied some older—but perhaps less mature—friends to a party. Then he watched them get plastered.

They were, he recalled, “vomiting a lot, laughing at things that weren’t funny, slurring words, repeating themselves so that a 3-year-old would have been bored. One guy, who I regarded as a great wit, kept repeating the same joke and getting the words out of sequence. And I kept thinking: ‘What has brought him to this depth?’”

O innocence, diminished with each passing year! For Mr. Toback, the loss hit early, hard and in a cinematic style.

“There’s that scene in Splendor in the Grass?” he suggested. “Where Pat Hingel is completely demythologized in front of his son by falling apart at this party.”

I totally sympathize. Like this year, there was that scene on TV? Where stroke victim Dick Clark was completely demythologized in front of a national viewing audience by deferring to Ryan Seacrest every 15 seconds. Talk about your haunting New Year's. I will celebrate no more forever.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 05, 2006

David Carr Does NOT Want to Thank the Academy

Well, David Carr cannot say I did not warn him. As recounted today in a breezily digressive (read: rambling) post on The Carpetbagger, the bereft Father of The Reeler proves once and for all that even a respected Times veteran can plummet to steerage class when he starts a blog:

Word came yesterday from Steve Pond of the Los Angeles Times’s TheEnvelope.com that the Academy’s diaspora in search of a host for its March festivities had finally ended at the steps of the “The Daily Show.” The Bagger could smile and wear beige, wanly admiring Mr. Pond’s scoop, except he happened to be on the phone yesterday with Sid Ganis, president of the Academy board, and failed to elicit the fact that Jon Stewart was going to host the awards.

Mr. Ganis, who seems like the kind of guy the Bagger would love to split a large tub of popcorn with at an afternoon matinee, sandbagged the Bagger. “Hang in there,” he said. “We’re getting there.” No kidding. Perhaps the Bagger’s skills as a inquisitor were impaired by that day’s dental work, or maybe he should have brandished that pliers that Dr. Mengele used so effectively, but it would have been hard over the phone.

So I guess the important question here is that if The Times shutters its nurse's office, then who will treat Carr's burns? I mean, sure, a blogger still got the scoop. But Jesus Christ--Carr was on the phone with Sid Ganis. Pliers should be about fifth or sixth on the torture depth chart here, should they not?

Speaking of Jon Stewart's Oscar duties, call me a cynic, but I sympathize with Gawker's observation: "If last year’s host Chris Rock couldn’t raise an eyebrow after the first 10 minutes, we doubt poor Stewart will be able to support your heavy eyelids."

Seriously--the Oscars are Eunuch City, USA. I hope I am wrong, but something tells me that like David Carr's phone calls, this can only end in tears.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:36 PM | TrackBack

Redford and BAM Bringing Sundance to Brooklyn

The Reeler today made a rare afternoon trip to Brooklyn, where Sundance kingpin Robert Redford was in town to announce a new partnership between his Institute and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And the only things better than the timing--catching the press a couple of weeks before his bustling festival drives us all to nervous exhaustion--were the terms.

Running from May 11-20, 2006, the Creative Latitude: Sundance Institute at BAM series will bring upwards of 12 narrative and documentary features and six short films to be chosen from this month's festival. Throw in a script reading or two, a live director's commentary from a Sundance alum, panel discussions and a concert featuring work from the Institute's film music program, and you could almost have Park City East.

Steve Buscemi and Robert Redford plot world conquest from Sundance's new encampment at BAM (Photo: STV)

Or maybe Park City and the Institute itself is something akin to Brooklyn West, as Redford hinted to The Reeler after the event. "It all started there, from the very first day," he said. "The bulk of the artists who have come there have been from New York and Brooklyn, and it's been that way all through the 25 years. You get some from San Francisco and a few from L.A., but most of the people from L.A. started in New York anyway."

Wow. So I guess I will be a little busy out there covering New York film in a few weeks?

Reford paused, then nodded. "You're going to be very busy."

To hear him explain his inclination toward Brooklyn itself was equal parts cryptic and revealing--a sort of semi-spiritual odyssey he had followed well before launching his career here in the 1950s. "Even though I was born in Los Angeles, my love of Brooklyn goes a little bit beyond just being interested in the Brooklyn Academy of Music," he told the gathering in attendance during his announcement. As a kid I was enormously influenced by the mythology of Brooklyn. I don't know why; it might have to do with Irving Shaw, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe. Whatever it was, the literature coming out of Brooklyn enchanted me. And ever since that time, I've had this fantasy about Brooklyn, which included the Brooklyn Dodgers. So obviously there was a seed sown a long time ago with this fascination about Brooklyn that might lead to where we are today."

Which is kind of odd, because I totally relate in my cultural perception of Manhattan, right down to the Giants' old home at the Polo Grounds. But I digress, and at Steve Buscemi's expense!

"It looks like they’re going to be doing development too, which is great," Buscemi told me when I asked what a program as influential as Sundance's could mean to the New York film community. "One of the best times I ever had at Sundance was at the Filmmakers Lab in 1990 or '91. I was there with Reservoir Dogs. It was just Quentin and me and--I think--a local actor. We were just workshopping the scenes, we shot them on video and then Quentin would be critiqued by Terry Gilliam and Ulu Grosbard and Monte Hellman. It was just such a relaxed atmosphere--it's a great atmosphere for everybody to do their best wortk. If that could happen here, that would be be very exciting."

Indeed. Meanwhile, if the thought of traveling west of the Hudson petrifies you (I've already zapped my therapy budget for '06), clear some calendar space in May and cheer the folks at BAM (president Karen Brooks Hopkins and executive producer Joseph Melillo in particular) for helping bring Sundance to you. At least you will not need to pack a parka.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:20 PM | TrackBack

'Bling' Filmmaker Edouard Has a Word with Gothamist

Gothamist's Jen Chung features a brief interview today with Kareem Edouard, the Queens-based filmmaker whose short documentary Bling: Consequences and Repercussions (right) has attracted growing buzz for its closer look at Africa's brutal conflict diamond trade. Narrated by Chuck D and set for a feature-length expansion later this year, Bling views the hip-hop community's diamond obsession through the prism of a bloody Sierra Leone rebellion battling for control of that country's diamond mines.

Edouard also offers an unblinking bit of perspective on the plight of minority documentary filmmakers:

The problem that we run into is that non minorities often tackle subject matters such as hip-hop, civil rights and minority sports figures. Subjects specifically dealing with minorities. Much of the time non-minorities have the access to the tools and financing to get projects off the ground. Another problem facing minority filmmakers is when they are pigeon holed into dealing with only certain subject matters. Some of the top DVD's tend to deal with the negative aspects of our culture.

Right now I feel that the industry is more about using minority agents to export their own culture. I want to take a critical look at some of the issues that make us who we are.

He is off to a solid start with Bling--have a look when you get a chance (there is even a video podcast available for download, so no excuses, vloggers).

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:36 AM | TrackBack

Underdogs Conquer New York in Bond-Alike Contest

Speaking of slow news days, The Reeler also crashed yesterday's Bond-Alike event at the New York National Boat Show just to see what kind of James Bond enthusiasm the city could summon on a Wednesday night. Answer: More than you might think.

And while I admit a mild interest in viewing the tiny stunt boat from that insane chase sequence in The World is Not Enough, the rest of the "Boats of Bond" exhibit I told you about last week cowered tremulously in the shadow of the event's hyper-competitive Bond freaks. Or perhaps "freaks" is overstating it; at least one convention-goer simply joined in (and won best Bond villain!) after happening by the Bond kiosk during registration. The remaining six entrants in two categories--best Bond and best Bond beauty--evidently took it a little more seriously, cobbling together their character get-ups and bad English accents just in time for judging.

No, really: Your Bond-Alike 2006 winners are (L-R) Bond villain Chris Greco, Bond beauty George Ann Muller and Bond himself, Dan McCruden (Photo: STV)

"I figured I should go with what's simple to make and what impresses the most," said Bond winner Dan McCruden, who acknowledged to the judges that his Long Island roots may have hindered his "Bond. James Bond." impression. But he did put in the extra effort with his Bond outfit, ripped semi-authentically from World. "You know," he reminded The Reeler. "After Bond sleeps with Elektra at her villa, he sneaks out and he catches a ride in the back of Davidov's car? As soon as they get to the airfield, Bond shoots him and he takes on his identity? They fly to Kazakhstan, and he puts on this uniform? He's impersonating Davidov, and Davidov was supposed to have been impersonating a member of the Russian Atomic Energy Department."

Oh, that's right. Of course. McCruden's custom-made uniform patch and eBay-scored Bond ID badge likely put him over the top (earning him a $700 Tourneau watch), the same way victorious Bond beauty George Ann Muller's makeshift crossbow and veil ultimately recalled For Your Eyes Only's Melina Havelock. "This is what she looked like when we first see her," Muller told me. "Remember?"

Absolutely, Ms. Havelock. Absolutely. Congrats again, and be careful with that crossbow.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:21 AM | TrackBack

Stern's Wack Pack Dooms 2006 with 'Supertwink' Premiere

How do you know when it is a slow movie week in New York? It pretty much comes down to the moment you realize the only premiere in town is a Howard Stern-produced, gay superhero epic called Supertwink.

Pink carpets. $700 production budgets. Relentless ball-busting. Indeed, that was the scene Wednesday at the Pioneer Theater, where The Reeler and a good-sized chunk of Stern's Wack Pack dropped by for a viewing of Supertwink and an apparent lack of anything better to do. I mean, of course filmmakers Richard Christy and Sal "The Stockbroker" Governale have much to be proud of (it is not every day Richard Roeper reviews a film by shouting the question, "What the fuck were you thinking?"), but by the time J.D. Harmeyer's title character has killed his archenemy Dr. Hetero with an 18-inch strap-on and a stuffed gerbil has been sacrificed for an emotionally scarring (if not somewhat genuine) laugh, a viewer could be forgiven for wondering where his or her life went so, so wrong.

"Oh, I don't know. I thought it turned out great," Stern stalwart High-Pitch Eric told me afterward in his typically scrotum-pinched fashion. Eric, one of God-knows-how-many fat, fearless Wack Packers to appear onscreen in a G-string and body glitter, portrayed Supertwink's "evil" Dr. Hetero. Roeper called his work the "worst performance in movie history," but just before I could solicit Eric's defense, the omnipresent Stern on Demand camera crew yanked him away (Supertwink launches on the new cable channel this week).

Obviously, my story never quite recovered--I fled the scene in terror not long afterward, hands in pockets, lamenting the things we do to cover cinema in early January. Nevertheless, it could have been worse; I figure Lionsgate still owes me 95 minutes of my life (plus interest) for sitting through Hostel.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

Ecko's Fledgling Graffiti Epic Prowls For Dick (and Others)

As if Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure video game was not megahyped enough, MTV Films stoked the bonfire a month or so ago when it announced a partnership to adapt the graffiti-culture game to the big screen. And today, the Hollywood Reporter's John Gaudiosi shatters the rest of the Earth with the latest on Ecko's pre-production approach:

The narrative throughline of the movie is akin to the game, wherein players are armed only with a spray can to deliver a message of free speech and revolution. Ecko says Getting Up's central drama requires players to get in, get up and get out without being caught by the police, who consider graf artists public enemies.

"Unlike conventional platform games, you behave like you would if you were a graf writer in the real world, experiencing the adrenaline rush of hanging from a bridge while getting your piece up or the sense of peril when a rival crew is breathing down your neck," Ecko says.

He enlisted help from celebrity friends to bring their voices to the game. But whether Talib Kweli, Diddy, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, George Hamilton, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam West, Andy Dick, Charlie Murphy, Michael Berrin and Wu-Tang Clan's the RZA also will chime in for the movie remains to be seen.

Frankly, without Adam West and George Hamilton, MTV may as well put this thing in turnaround. And God only knows what kind of half-assed "message of free speech and revolution" the producers are going to try and pawn off without Brittany Murphy's beacon-like star power. Personally, I would recommend having a look at Doug Pray's stellar upcoming graffiti doc Infamy to see how to get the whole thing done without stars--"real world" and all. Except... goddamn. No Andy Dick would absolutely be a dealbreaker. You had better keep this thing in your prayers, kids.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Murray, Clinton and Weinstein For Sale, at Least for a Few More Minutes

Eek! Hurry! You have less than an hour to throw up your online prebid in the New York Times's Auction For the Arts, proceeds from which benefit the Actor's Fund of America. You know you have wanted to hit the links and do lunch with Bill Murray for, like, ever, and you know that you have been saving up for a leather jacket handed down from President Clinton and autographed by Lou Reed.

But most of all, you know you have prayed to God daily that you would soon be able to spend a beautiful spring evening with the Prince of Hudson Street:

Lot 113: V.I.P. Premiere of New Film from The Weinstein Company

Description
Two tickets to the New York City premiere and afterparty of a spring 2006 film release from The Weinstein Company (exact title TBD and dependent upon film schedules & NYC premiere dates, which are not yet final for spring).

Restrictions
Travel and lodging not included.

Donor
The Weinstein Company

Value
Unparalleled

Rumor has it that if you are particularly generous with your bid, you may even be allowed to choose your own new release from the Weinsteins' extensive film cellar. Regrettably, The Promise has already been moved out, but there are probably close to three or four dozen more mouldering negatives where that came from. So quit tarrying, big spenders, and get that bid up posthaste--this has "opportunity of a lifetime" written all over it.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

NYC Distributor and Co. Bring Rock Chaos to East Village

Omnitalented Magnolia Pictures boss Eamonn Bowles celebrated his 50th birthday in loud, live fashion Tuesday night, taking the stage at Lakeside Lounge with his band, the Martinets. It was a true rock-out-with-your-cock-out extravaganza, with several dozen of Bowles's New York film colleagues coming thisclose to completely burning the place down. For what seemed like hours, a torrent of panties rained down on the stage, with the Martinets finishing their encore and loading out just before the cops arrived to restore a fragile peace to the East Village.

Eamonn Bowles is a man for you, baby (yes he is for you, baby) (Photo: STV)

Actually, the whole thing was pretty reserved, even as lead guitarist Daniel Rey's shredding licks fueled a tireless, hyperkinetic fury in the birthday boy. "We may already have a 50 Cent," Bowles told the crowd after a comparatively tame rendition of "Happy Birthday." "But I'm 50 Dollar." He then lit his guitar on fire, made a wish and blew the instrument out. A consummate showman, right there. Happy 50th.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Independent Film Outlook: New Year, New Crises?

The last few days have seen some especially interesting indie-front newsgathering, led by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir in New York. In looking back at 2005, O'Hehir offers not only a coherent Top 10, but also a healthy dose of insight from local film gurus like IFC's Ryan Werner, Zeitgeist's Nancy Gerstman and Magnolia's Eamonn Bowles. Perhaps most tellingly (or at least amusingly), in evaluating the concept of upcoming day-and-date releases like Steven Soderbergh's Bubble, O'Hehir bitch-slaps all the theoreticians into submission with a fairly muscular reality check:

Where does all this fascinating business news leave the art form of cinema, if that hasn't become an embarrassing expression? I have no idea. Can some new distribution model, where you can watch Tarantino's next film at home with a group of friends over gnarly rounds of bong hits, restore the lost sense of "cultural imperative," the aura of aesthetic and cultural definition that independent movies once possessed?

I don't think so, and it's probably not even the right question. New movies, even when they're as good as the 10 or 20 I'm about to list for you, have to compete not only with each other but with a vastly expanded entertainment universe. Are you really going to haul your ass off the couch and go pay 10 bucks to see an uncategorizable French film by an unknown director (like Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen) when you could stay home and watch anything and everything by Scorsese or Tarkovsky or Hitchcock or Dario Argento? How does one choose between Pirjo Honkasalo's demanding documentary about the Chechen war, 3 Rooms of Melancholia, and the fifth uproarious night in a row of viewing Bubba Ho-Tep?

My sentiments exactly, even though it takes a lot more that a bong hit for me to sit through a Tarantino film anymore. But one thing O'Hehir leaves out of his equation is the x-factor invoked in today's Hollywood Reporter: Has an unofficial star system created a disappearing indie-film middle class?

It looks that way, according to HR's Gregg Goldstein:

Industry estimates vary, but at an American Film Market panel in November, Matthew Greenfield, associate director of the feature film program at the Sundance Institute and a producer of Chuck & Buck, said, "It's very hard to get more than $500,000-$700,000 (in funding) without a name actor."

Other indie filmmakers say raising a $1 million-$2 million budget requires at least one star. And because many agents are reluctant to take 10% of wages when their clients are bent on making a small-scale pet project, the bottom line is that many talented, first-time filmmakers without connections are simply priced out of the marketplace. As a result, the occasional success of homegrown films like Miranda July's offbeat Me and You and Everyone We Know are more of an anomaly.

Goldstein also offers a few perspectives from NYC filmmakers Chris Terrio and John Cameron Mitchell, the latter of whom, as we know, circumvented the whole A-list problem by making pornography. Nevertheless, it looks like we can look forward to another joyous year of wondering if the system is broken, evolving or possibly limping along in some hybrid form of both. Personally, I say, "Yay, evolution." Call me an optimist. Or maybe I just really want to see Bubble become this year's March of the Penguins--I predict a $10 million opening in West Virginia alone.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:04 AM | TrackBack

Ain't It Uncool, Reprise: Isbell Gets a "Manologue"

I know a lot of you have been wondering whatever happened to Michael Isbell, aka Sheldrake--the off-and-on Ain't It Cool News critic who faced stalking charges last year, went to the gossips about his ex-girlfriend and promptly melted down about the whole thing right here on this blog. After all of that, you asked, could the guy ever rehabilitate his crippled ego and ride that can-do, self-promotional spirit of his back into the New York spotlight?

Well, naturally, if his recent mass e-mail is any indication:

From: michael isbell
Date: Dec 31, 2005 1:19 AM
Subject: I've been cast in a play, strangely enough.

I’m not an actor, not since I acted in college and in my VERY early days in NYC.

30 years?

So, anyway, my buddy Ted Angelus, Robert Downey Jr.’s cousin and a producer, put on a play about six months ago called MANOLOGUES, a masculine counterpoint to the VAGINA MONOLOGUES. The production is rolling on and they need more actors. He asked me to audition. I thought, well, why not?

Showed up, there were a buncha real actors there. I gave it a whirl anyway.

Got the part. Shrug.

So, there ya go. Should be a hoot.

M

Um, yes. "Shrug" is about right. At any rate, congrats to Isbell on restoring his class-act status just in time for 2006. I only hope he gets the chance to cobble together his own "manologue" from the best of last year's e-mail correspondence; between that "freaky and scary" ex of his and their hot Vivendi love triangle, this thing virtually drips box office gold.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:25 AM | TrackBack

Times Classic Takes New Films at Face Value

Speaking of The Times, the paper's Movies section entered a particularly successful holiday weekend with a range of stories I really could not get enough of. Sure, there was the week's default "Christians and movies" piece (the latest in an unofficial series, this one evidently counters the "scientists and movies" piece from a few months back), and Larry David was too cute by half in tweaking the homo-hype around Brokeback Mountain. But when it comes to pointing out wayward typefaces in contemporary cinema, nobody--and I mean nobody--gets over on the Gray Lady.

Or at least nobody gets over on reporter Peter Edidin:

Mark Simonson, a type designer in St. Paul, Minn., maintains a Web site (www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html) that exposes cinematic typographical inaccuracies to the withering light of day. Take the 2000 film Chocolat. Though the film takes place in 1950's France, in a close-up shot of a public notice, the headline is set in ITC Benguiat, which he said made its debut in 1978 and was popular mainly in the 80's. "I almost laughed," Mr. Simonson writes.

Then there is L.A. Confidential, set in 1950's Los Angeles. It was "tightly written, well acted, beautifully filmed," Mr. Simonson writes, "but pretty mediocre in its use of type."

Worse than any of these, to (designer Michael) Bierut, is Titanic. The dials on the pressure gauges, he said, are in Helvetica, though the ship went down in 1912. "To me, that's like taking out a Palm Pilot on the deck of the Titanic," he said.

Fascinating. There is nothing quite like setting the story bar so impassably high on New Year's Day. Caryn James must be preparing her resignation as we speak.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:40 AM | TrackBack

Paul Greengrass: New Year, New Bullshit

As noted here last summer, director Paul Greengrass had done some deep, deep thinking before deciding to shoot his thriller-drama Flight 93--a real-time reconstruction of the struggle that doomed that hijacked flight's passengers and crew on Sept. 11, 2001. And after all my work to repress the reality that Greengrass was actually making this film, The New York Times reported Sunday that not only is Flight 93 in production, but Greengrass is still working the "pretentious asshole" angle somewhat relentlessly:

"Forty ordinary people had 30 minutes to confront the reality of the way that we're living now, decide on the best course of action and act," he said. The passengers were the "first people to inhabit the post 9/11 world," he continued. "They had to choose because they were in that airplane. Their choices are our choices, and their debate is our debate."

Look, I was not there, and I would hate to take Greengrass too literally, but come on: Can somebody in the Universal publicity apparatus please stop this guy from weaving abstractions like "post 9/11 world" into the events that brought down Flight 93? I mean, it was bad enough when the president co-opted "Let's roll" for political ends, and now we have a filmmaker--Paul Greengrass, no less--telling us we share "choices" and a "debate" with 40 people who knowingly sacrificed themselves that morning. I have to assume that Greengrass's intentions are better than equating the dynamics on a hijacked plane to, say, the moral calculus of the War on Terror, but this is the second time that reading about Flight 93 has made me want to reach into the newspaper and slap him.

Hell, maybe I have it all wrong--after all, producer Louis Levin tells The Times that shooting in lengthy takes is "like asking actors to perform the end of Long Day's Journey Into Night, over and over again." So even if the Big Idea implodes at the end of it all, at least we have Big Drama to carry the gimmick into wide release. I, for one, can hardly wait.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:02 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack