« Grand Theft: Stunning Streep and Tomlin Steal 'Prairie Home Companion' | Main | Screening Gotham Will Return Next Week »
June 09, 2006
The Year That Was: Life Lessons From The Reeler
Through kind of a backward set of circumstances, it occurred to me earlier this week that The Reeler is a year old. Now, I do not know about you, but I am a big fan of anniversaries. I tend to remember events by their years and dates as much as (if not more than, especially as I get older) their substance, and the consideration of specific moments that stand out for commemoration's sake has always felt like a sort of bittersweet mourning. As Johnny Thunders said, "You can't put your arms around a memory--don't try."
Well, fuck that, because if you have no future, you might as well embrace the past. So join me in looking back over some of the ass-bruising lessons that we have shared since The Reeler's debut on June 7, 2005:
--I owe everything to David Carr.
In what reads today like a fairly shrill bit of indignation, I first took to the blogosphere to protest David Carr's groaningly obvious May 12, 2005 Times piece about the New York film industry. While I must acknowledge now that Carr's "guidebook New York cinema" and "condescending bone-throw" was probably about as micro as Times readers would be willing to deal with, I nevertheless decided that New York filmgoers and filmmakers might appreciate a more specialized encampment in the new media landscape. Blogger was free and easy, so I set up an account, gave my notice at the Daily News and have been chained to this fucking computer pretty much non-stop since then.
I have since achieved an easygoing rapprochement with the Father of The Reeler, who undertook his own Carpetbagger blog last fall to lavish more edifying insights about the awards season blitz. His Monday columns continue to irk me in many ways, but you try staying mad at a Times culture writer who dares to actually hit the streets and who shares reporting duties with a guy named Mr. Spoon. It is not as easy as you think.
--There is no more benevolent force in New York cinema than Harvey Weinstein.
I remember exactly when I latched onto Harvey Weinstein: It was the moment he dropped by IFC Center's grand opening only to flee in terror from projectionists union picket line he briefly crossed with such adorable, pale-faced anguish. Mythology had taught me that the guy liked having it both ways (he admitted as much as to me as recently as last Sunday), but seeing him hedge in person just confirmed his legend.
And who can forget when he and brother Bob packed up the car and headed off to the new office on Hudson Street? Or when they picked up the drink tab for a few hundred sniffly, shitfaced staffers as the sun rose on The Weinstein Company? Or when they upstaged Vanity Fair's nude Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley with their own makeover at the hands of Tom Ford? Or when Harvey established himself as the law of the land--much like the Supreme Court did with its 1810 Marbury vs. Madison decision--when it came to whether or not Matt Damon would fuck Samantha Morton?
Indeed, The Reeler recognized early on that this guy's heart is bigger than his head--and I think we can agree that is a massive fucking heart.
--Nothing trumps the bloody-kitten defense.
That was the hard lesson Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter learned last summer after his magazine's stinging libel-trial loss to Roman Polanski. As you know, my scorecard reflected an easy victory for VF, but Mia Farrow and those damned bloody kittens are always interfering with justice.
The clear winner in all of this, of course, is Elaine Kaufman, the Upper East Side restaurateur whose legendary establishment can go back to being a garden-variety drunk-celeb hotspot without shouldering the burden of Polanski's testoster-rific sexual indiscretions. Now if only she could get the smell of Norman Mailer's vomit out of the men's room, life would be grand.
More reflections after the jump.
--IFC Center and The Reeler: Best Friends Forever
This blog enjoyed the uncanny luck of launching right around the same time as IFC Center, the sleek, carefully conceived theatrical endeavor that would tighten the IFC brand's synergy and bring obscure indie fare to a Village audience for which Film Forum, Cinema Village, Village East, the Pioneer and the Angelika were no longer cutting it. Or something.
At any rate, the IFC Center beat proved marvelously engaging from the start: I had James Toback scarfing hors d'oeuvres and Naomi Watts literally disappearing from the star-studded gala opening; Miranda July premiering Me and You and Everyone We Know to a befuddled crowd that scored free tickets from Nerve; free lunch on opening day; and a labor saga that metastasized from Sixth Avenue to Lower Manhattan and even Albany before it was all over.
Things have calmed down considerably since then, even to the point where theater boss John Vanco and I could share a halting, uneasy conversation on one early-morning bus ride at the Sundance Film Festival. But the programming is fine, and events like the doc series Stranger Than Fiction and video chats with directors Lars von Trier and Hou Hsiao-Hsien might yet carve out that neighborhood niche IFC had in mind. Or maybe, considering this weird fraternal-twin symbiosis of ours, I should hope the joint stays open.
--People love celebrities. People love lunchboxes. So give them celebrities and lunchboxes.
Really, this should surprise nobody.
--If Oscar season does not kill me, the Oscars themselves will.
I sensed the horror on the horizon last fall when Movie City News's Oscar handicapping survey, The Gurus o' Gold, started tallying Best Picture votes for films its participating critics had not even seen. Four months later, after making a few local awards-show concessions (the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, etc), I met my Oscar-night doom alongside some lady named Famke and a bunch of other anonymous revelers at a New York Magazine party in the West Village.
Following Crash's Best Picture victory, I sobbed pure streams of red wine all the way home, reminding myself from the cold steel of the subway tracks where I lay waiting for the train that, yes, yes, I had something to live for. That "something" only turned out to be this year's crop of Oscar live blogs, which actually drove me back to the subway tracks. But some other Oscar mourner had evidently offed himself downtown and the 4, 5 and 6 trains had stopped service in both directions. Just my luck.
--Every day in New York has a full moon.
I had hardly accepted indieWIRE's invitation to join its blog network in July when The Reeler got its first real taste of insanity. It came from Michael Isbell, the Ain't it Cool News "critic" (a k a Sheldrake) who went to Daily News gossip Joanna Molloy to bitch about losing his girlfriend to a French media mogul. One angry letter, one hallucination and one firing (and eventual reinstatement) later, Isbell was a permanent fixture in Reeler folklore. I hear he is rebounding nicely, occasionally hitting on women at press screenings and scoring a "Manologue" last winter that may propel him to off-off-off-off-off-Broadway stardom.
The blog hit its padded-room nadir in October, however, when a pair of anti-Hanson rants drew the wrath of the band's four or five dozen fans. Was I too hard on the boys? Maybe I am the one who is whacked out, or least physically impaired: "In my opinion (and you are also intitled [sic] to yours) there must be something wrong with your ears," one commenter wrote. Fuck. I knew it.
--New York is the best thing about the Sundance Film Festival.
Although technically, if we consider Quinceañera's jury and audience prizes this year, New York had an Achilles heel. That said, Brooklyn's Chris Quinn ran off with a pair of awards for his documentary God Grew Tired of Us, and fellow New Yorkers Carter Smith (Bugcrush), So Yong Kim (In Between Days), Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) and Hilary Brougher (Stephanie Daley) claimed hardware of their own. And last month, Sundance's NYC connection went bidirectional with its wildly successful 10-day takeover of BAM.
And while it is easy to hate on all the ads and swag and hype, I would not trade my experience covering the festival for anything. The bottom line is that the right films and filmmakers were recognized in 2006: Ours.
--Top 10 lists are as American as Mom and apple pie. That is, if your Mom is in a coma and the pie is overcooked.
Finally, I would not want anybody to think for a second that I do not cherish the value of critics' year-end top 10 lists. Like Bumfights or Jackass, their guilty pleasures yield near-limitless supplies of entertainment at negligible cost to readers. This was the premise behind The Reeler's Top 10 Lists of Top 10 Lists, which I compiled earlier this year after relocating to Movie City News and which earned me many new friends in the critical community. It was a great way to start 2006, as I hope these lessons represent a great way to start the second year of The Reeler. It is all downhill--more like driving off a cliff--from here.
Posted by stvanairsdale at June 9, 2006 11:37 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1117